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- [00:01]
Chris Williamson
Most people think about cortisol as a bad thing that you want less of. Is that the right way to think about it?
- [00:07]
Andrew Huberman
Not at all. Cortisol has been labeled a stress hormone and it is involved in stress. You have a bout of stress, you get a spike of cortisol, so to speak. Cortisol, like other steroid hormones, is bound to things. And there's a free form of cortisol that's the active one. Um, you don't want your free unbound cortisol to be chronically high, but we need to really think about why it was called a stress hormone in the first place. And the main reason is cortisol's job is to deploy energy sources for your brain and body to be able to react to things, think, and move. So cortisol naturally goes up a bit during stress and it comes back again, provided you don't ruminate on that stress too much on the stressor that is. The big eye opener for me was when I actually went into the modern textbooks on cortisol, not the ones that most medical students learn from, but what the endocrinologists, the specialists really learn from and what the circadian and sleep biologists now understand, which is the reason you wake up every single morning, even if you have an alarm clock, is because of something called the cortisol awakening response. So if we just step back from a typical healthy 24 hours, it looks something like this. A couple hours before sleep, your cortisol is low, your heart rate's low, you're calm, hopefully it's dim in the room, you go to sleep, your cortisol is then at its absolute lowest levels for the entire 24 hours. And by the way, this is the same time when melatonin, the sleepy hormone, is at its highest levels after about four or five hours of sleep. And typically in that first four or five hours of sleep is when you get your most deep sleep, slow wave sleep, non REM sleep. Many people experience a transition into the sort of last third of their sleep for the night, and they tend to wake up around that time. And often they use the restroom, go back to sleep. Why did they wake up? Well, it turns out that your cortisol is starting to rise about 2/3 of the way through the night. I mean, it's really creeping up throughout the entire night, but it's gone from this nadir to it's starting to climb. And then at some point, let's assume you get back to sleep or you slept through the night at some point, maybe 6am, maybe 8am Depends on who you are and what your schedule is. You wake up, maybe your alarm clock goes off, you wake up. You wake up because the cortisol level reached a certain threshold is literally the cortisol awakening response. It is healthy, it is good. And if I were to measure your cortisol at that moment and compare it to what nor people, people might call like a stress episode in the afternoon, you would say it's much higher than what stress induced. Okay, so then your cortisol continues to rise and there's this unique opportunity in the first hour, maybe 90 minutes, but in the first hour after waking, where viewing bright light can increase your morning cortisol spike, as I'll refer to it, by up to 50%. Bright light can come from sunlight, ideally, or from a bright artificial light like a 10,000 lux artificial light, or even a very bright indoor artificial, LED or incandescent light. Okay, why is this important? Well, we could explore all the biology of cortisol and we can summarize it by saying you have this hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that sets off cortisol, self regulates negative feedback loop, et cetera, et cetera. That's the normal regulation of cortisol, which basically can be summarized as, it never allows you to have your cortisol too high for too long. It feeds back on itself and shuts it down. However, in the first hour after waking up, your brain circadian clock has a unique privileged pathway that is separate from the HPA axis where it can amplify cortisol only in that first hour. So you say, why would that be? This is nature's evolutionarily hardwired mechanism for giving you the opportunity to boost your cortisol so that you have energy to lean into the activities of your day. And when I say energy, I'm not saying, you know, it's not like we happen to be in California at the moment. But not energy. Energy. I'm talking about glucose mobilization. If you're on a low carbohydrate diet, you're gonna, you're gonna mobilize other energy. Your brain and body wakes up because of cortisol. You have the opportunity to boost that wakefulness even further by viewing bright light. Yes, you could exercise, yes, you could drink caffeine. Turns out caffeine, if you're a chronic caffeine user, such as me, such as you, doesn't actually increase cortisol that much. You could jump in a 40 degree Fahrenheit cold plunge, doesn't actually Increase your cortisol. All this nonsense going around the Internet about, you know, women shouldn't do cold plunge, and if they do, not as cold, okay, maybe, but it's always attributed to increases in cortisol. Cold plunge reduces your cortisol levels. You can look at the data. The data show that it goes down, adrenaline goes up, dopamine goes up, norepinephrine go up. So cortisol makes you alert, it makes you focused. And here's the key thing. Spiking your cortisol in that first hour after waking is so, so important because that negative feedback loop mechanism kicks in about three hours after you've been awake. And that's why your cortisol then starts to drop the late morning, early afternoon, later afternoon. And in the afternoon, if you have a bout of stress, no problem, you just have a little bit of cortisol bump, adrenaline bump, and it goes back down. If you don't spike your morning cortisol, what ends up happening is your cortisol system. Essentially the HPA axis is primed for stress events to give you big lasting increases in cortisol later, which make it hard to fall asleep, which make it hard to stay asleep, which are part of the reason why people have afternoon anxiety, all sorts of things. So you're actually supposed to feel a little stressed first thing in the morning. This is normal, this is healthy, and it sets you up for being more calm in the afternoon. Now none of this is tied to whether or not you wake up at 8am, 6am, 4am or 11am this is not about chronotype. This is simply about the first hour after waking. But after about 90 minutes post waking, that opportunity to spike your cortisol goes away. So if you can't view bright light in the form of sunlight, get it from artificial light, you would do well to compound that with hydration, which, by the way, for reasons that still aren't entirely understood, probably has to do with some electrolyte balance, et cetera. First thing in the day will also burst your cortisol if you can't get in exercise right away. Even just some skipping rope, jumping jacks, this kind of thing, getting the body into a high cortisol state early sets you up for being in a low cortisol state in the afternoon and evening. And any cortisol that you might trigger through a stress event will quickly subside unless you, what's called, flatten your cortisol curve by not spiking in the morning. And, and by the way, the, the curve that I'm describing high in the morning, lower into the afternoon, low, low, low as you get into the first hours of sleep. This is the healthy cortisol curve for men, women, kids, pregnant women, postmenopausal women. It tends to flatten out a bit and they need to do additional things to, to get that spike earlier. So this is when I hear all this stuff about don't cold plunge. It increases cortisol, it doesn't increase cortisol. And also this notion that we're supposed to avoid stress entirely. Not true, you and I both generally agree on that. But how you time your stress is important. And the last point I'll make is that if you were to do, say, an a very intense workout in the late afternoon, evening, it's been demonstrated that will triple or quadruple your baseline cortisol levels for a few hours. Not a problem. You can take a hot shower afterwards, do some slow breathing and calm down. Provided you didn't, you know, fill up with caffeine prior, you could probably fall asleep just fine. But because you spiked your cortisol late day, what you find is that the next day cortisol is lower, which is one of the, not the only reason, but one of the reasons why you're a bit more sluggish the next morning. So, and this is why people's. If they exercise too late in the day, their rhythm starts to shift. When we talk about your circadian rhythm shifting in response to light, it's the cortisol peak that's shifting or flattening, which in turn adjusts your melatonin peak and trough.
- [07:56]
Chris Williamson
But cortisol is the, the trigger.
- [07:58]
Andrew Huberman
Cortisol. Think of it like the. Think about this morning cortisol spike as the first domino in establishing essentially all the rhythms that you're interested in. If you want daytime mood, focus, alertness, nighttime sleep. And so these are things I've talked about for years and that we've talked about for years, but only recently has it become clear exactly why cortisol is that first domino in the chain. And we hear so often about dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, all of which are important, all downstream of cortisol. So chronically high cortisol, cushing's disease, the things that give people moon face, that cause memory deficits, all these sorts of things. That's when the cortisol curve is too flat for too long, meaning too high in the afternoon and evening. But there is, I won't say there's no upper limit to how high cortisol can be in the morning. There are people who have pathologically high levels of cortisol in the first hours of the day. Most people, even people with Cushing's, have pathologically low cortisol early in the day, pathologically high cortisol late in the day.
- [08:52]
Chris Williamson
They've inverted that.
- [08:53]
Andrew Huberman
That's right. And getting this curve right is so critical. It predicts longevity. It predicts recovery from everything from chemotherapy to pain relief. You know, it's one of the things that I'm. You seem to be doing all the right things, plus these sort of outrageous, outrageously ambitious health protocols as well. Although I will commend you, if you're going to clean anything, including your blood, I do suggest doing in Austria or Switzerland because those are very clean.
- [09:19]
Chris Williamson
Wonderful place to go in the.
- [09:20]
Andrew Huberman
Well, they're very clean countries. Yeah.
- [09:23]
Chris Williamson
What about the relationship between cortisol and burnout? You know, you've talked about sustained, chronically elevated cortisol, but I've also heard you talk about burnout is basically being wrongly timed cortisol over time.
- [09:36]
Andrew Huberman
That's right.
- [09:36]
Chris Williamson
Stretched out. Well, what have you come to learn about handling burnout? Somebody feels that sense, or I feel like I'm sort of close to that. What's going on, and how can they try to intervene in that?
- [09:48]
Andrew Huberman
So there seem to be two general forms of burnout. One is the I'm exhausted in the morning and I just can't get into gear. And then it's like caffeine, caffeine, caffeine, exhausted. And then late day, okay, finally, you know, the. I caught the wavefront, and then I'm having trouble sleeping, and then the whole thing repeats. But tired, wired, but tired. The other form of burnout is where people just. It's like their cortisol is like a square wave function. It's just up in the morning and all day long. It's sort of how I would describe my graduate school years. Probably undergraduate, graduate school years, postdoctoral. I think I hit a wall during my postdoc year. So that was, you know, that would be, you know, 30 or 35. And then at some point, you realize you just can't keep this going. And I think most entrepreneurs feel that way. At some point, you're just like, I can't do this. I mean, even the David Goggins and the Cam Haines, they do sleep, right? They get sleep eventually. So I think the main way to think about burnout and exhaustion is to ask oneself, okay, if I had total control, when would I naturally wake up? When would I naturally go to sleep? What would be my preferred times to do that? And then whatever your wake up time is to really treat that first three to six hours of your day as go time and to do the things bright light, hydration, exercise, caffeine, et cetera that really push you into the day, but then really essentially doing all the opposite things that you do in the morning, in the last, ideally four, but most people won't do that. Last two hours of your day, dim the lights, caffeine, forget it. It should have halted that probably eight hours before sleep. Limit your hydration, right? Unless you're dehydrated, limit your hydration. You know, long exhale breathing, anything that can bring your cortisol levels down and bring your melatonin levels up. Which is why we, we're so bullish about dimming the lights later in the day. And you know, we were talking about the red lens glasses to block out short wavelength light, which by the way, a lot of people have said, well, you know, the study is showing that scre disrupt sleep, very variable between people. People have different levels of retinal sensitivity, so how, how much screen light will disrupt their sleep. But it's not just about sleep. There's a beautiful study published in Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences that showed that people who sleep in a room with an overhead light of 100 lux, which is extremely dim, show abnormally elevated morning glucose levels. Makes perfect sense. Cortisol mobilizes glucose. And this is through closed eyelids. Okay, so you have to get the light down to maybe 1 to 3 lux. And you say 1 to 3 lux. It's basically dark, dark, dark. A candlelight very, is very low. A bright full moon where you say, oh, it's so bright out, is actually only about 1 to 5 lux. So we think of these sources as very bright. But nature set us up to have bright mornings and dim dark nights. And some people will say, well, there's no light where I live. You know, like, listen, you don't need to see the sun as a delineated object. If you compare how bright it is, let's just say even in the dead of winter in the UK at 9am, walking in a place with no artificial lighting outside, no street lamps, versus midnight the night before in the same location, you'd say you can navigate in the one case without any artificial lighting, without what we call flashlight, you call a torch. But in any case, the idea is that there are a lot of photons coming through and you want all of that early in the day, and you just want to do the inverse in the last part of the day. So I think to avoid overwhelming people, because people have so much to do and think about. Get the first hour of your day right, get the last hour of your day right, and you'll greatly improve this morning cortisol peak, late day cortisol reduction, which is what you want. And you'll get your natural clearing out of any melatonin that happens to be in your system. Because bright light quashes melatonin through a different pathway, but that also originates with the eyes, goes through the suprachiasmatic nucleus and a couple other relays to your pineal, shuts down melatonin production. And then late in the day, you just make it dimmer, darker, darker, darker. And you bring up your melatonin, you bring down your cortisol. But if you think about what's happened with screens, that it's stimulating. I think. Late last night I made the mistake of I watched a extended 60 Minutes interview. I actually fell asleep to it.
- [13:54]
Chris Williamson
Is it the Petro T1?
- [13:56]
Andrew Huberman
No, it was the Trump one.
- [13:57]
Chris Williamson
Okay.
- [13:57]
Andrew Huberman
I was curious. I hadn't heard an interview with him for a long time and it was. And it was sort of combative, but it was an interesting one and I was curious to see how that would go. And I fell asleep in about the last 15 minutes, but that. I wouldn't recommend doing that normally. It would be screens off in the last hour. I just, you know, I got a. I got a little loose with my protocols.
- [14:16]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, we've been. I've seen you talking about daylight savings time changes and stuff like that. This has been nearly a decade now since Matthew Walker was first on Rogan. I think it was nearly, almost 10 years ago. And I was still a club promoter at the time. And up until then I just assumed that sleep was. It's just like this thing that got in the way of me working. It was just this bullshit.
- [14:37]
Andrew Huberman
And Honestly, when you're 20s, that's kind of true.
- [14:39]
Chris Williamson
You're made of rubber and magic, dude. You know what I mean? Caffeine and big dreams and Sellotape and cable ties. You're just fucking like strung together with this stuff. Anyway, he came on and basically did the scare them straight equivalent. Do you ever have that in school? Scare them straight?
- [14:54]
Andrew Huberman
No.
- [14:54]
Chris Williamson
So they bring a prison officer in and he tells you about how horrible life is in prison. But all of the horror stories.
- [15:00]
Andrew Huberman
How old are you?
- [15:01]
Chris Williamson
Like 12, 13. And. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's saying, you know, they put boiling water into a cup and mix loads of sugar in it and it's syrup. And they throw it on people. And then they have batteries and they put them in socks. And I remember he hit this sock filled with batteries down on the table and it made me jump. I was like, fuck. Like, I really don't want to go to. Honestly, it worked for me. My particular psychological makeup, that thing. Absolutely. I don't think I was the sort of person that was probably going to go to jail anyway. But, yeah, I learn sleep is okay. Really, really important. You've been talking about daylight savings. The more that I learn about it, the effects of sleep deprivation are just terrifying. It's just everything gets broken.
- [15:44]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I mean, sleep is the ultimate reset. We could talk about some of the newer data that point to exactly why. I will say, just for people's peace of mind, if you don't spike your cortisol for a couple days in a row, you get one poor night's sleep for a couple days in a row, you're going to be fine. The human body and brain evolved under conditions that were extreme. Right. New parents will tell you how difficult sleep can be. I mean, you can pull it off. The thing that we call chronic stress is frankly, when that cortisol curve gets disrupted in any number of ways. But typically it's late day cortisol spikes that don't come back down afterwards for three, four, five days in a row. Your hippocampus, this memory center in the brain, is chock, a block full of cortisol receptors. And cortisol, unlike adrenaline, can pass through the blood brain barrier. All right, so it has a number of docking sites that allow it to engage the memory system with stress will engage your memory system, but that over time will start to deteriorate these structures. So if somebody hasn't been sleeping well, I'm not just saying this to make them feel better. You don't want to send them into a panic. And all of these systems can be recovered. You know, when Matt went on Rogan, I think it was an important, like truly important.
- [16:58]
Chris Williamson
It was fucking. I'll say it was seminal. Like, he is saved. That one episode has probably saved thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands of years of combined human life.
- [17:08]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Oh, I agree. I mean, I think that the, the challenge, and I think that Matt would say this, I'm sort of borrowing his words, is that he sufficiently scared everybody. There were fewer things to offer to do to promote good sleep at that time, and there were more of a lot of like, here's what happens if you don't sleep.
- [17:27]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. The stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. That like over optimizer obsessor thing.
- [17:33]
Andrew Huberman
And you want to give people a sense of real agency, right? Yeah. Dimming the lights if you're light sensitive in particular and you know, limiting caffeine. I mean all the things that are sort of obvious to us now, the morning sunlight thing. I think most people don't tether to their sleep because it's not obvious how doing something in the first hour of your, your day to be more alert and spike cortisol creates a situation 14 hours later where you are a better sleeper. So over time Matt's started to adopt that. I mean, I think he also pointed out the detriments of alcohol and cannabis on sleep, which I echo. I think also if you think just back even six years, seven years, we weren't aware of the number of over the counter compounds that can be helpful for sleep. People were still thinking about drugs, prescription drugs for sleep, which you know, have their place for certain people. But most people hadn't considered Mag 3 and 8 theanine, chamomile. Now I would add to that saffron tart cherry we know can increase apigenin. Apigenin and chamomile extract. Yeah.
- [18:38]
Chris Williamson
Similar Lemon balm.
- [18:40]
Andrew Huberman
Lemon balm. Skull cap. You know it sounds kind of crazy, right? It sounds like we're behind the counter at some like medicine shop.
- [18:46]
Chris Williamson
Right. Eye of newts and a wizard tail.
- [18:50]
Andrew Huberman
Right, right. I mean I didn't come here to do an AGZ plug, but I basically I've. I've played around with a number of different non supplement things for sleep over the years because I'm an experimenter in and out of the lab. And I mean I can tell you a wild story from high school where the girl sitting behind me, I remember her name, it was Aaron Kernard. Her, her mom had some tablets, some Chinese medicine tablets and I took one. She's. Because I was having some issues sleeping and she gave me one and I. The whole night I was wide awake hearing music blaring from behind my head. And I think I was in a pseudo sleep state. Thought I was away. I was like, that's really scary. But I was like, wow, there are compounds that really work for sleep. And then there are things like the peptide pinealin I experimented with a bit. Not a lot of human studies at all. Some interesting rodent studies may regenerate the pinealocytes in the Pineal. It gives me two hours a night of REM sleep. But I will say having completely halt at Pineal and I did a short run experiment with it, I will say that the the formulation that's in AGZ has me sleeping with double the amount of REM sleep and at least a third more slow wave deep sleep every night. And I can only drink about 2/3 of that stuff before it. It's almost like too much. Not because it's too much volume but because my anymore in my dreams are just too elaborate. And you know what's magic about it? I think it's that it has a bunch of different things in it. So again I didn't come here to plug agz but I think that they really nailed it in the sense that in the last 10 years the scientific community, the health and wellness community has really come to the conclusion that there are things that can nudge your sleep in the right direction. So just being told like if you don't sleep you're going to die of dementia is scary. You want to give people agency.
- [20:35]
Chris Williamson
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- [22:16]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, well, one thing that I think is really important is that if somebody's very health conscious and a hard charger, they're very likely eating pretty clean. And one of the challenges for many people, not all to falling asleep, is that their starchy carbohydrate intake is just not high enough. You know, if you, if you go on a very low starch diet, like let's say you just go, you know, meat, fruit, vegetables, or you go pure keto, you'll have a lot more energy. Some people who follow that kind of regimen can sleep well. Some people, like myself, find that unless I have some rice or oatmeal at some point during the day, especially if I'm doing resistance training, it's actually very hard to fall and stay deeply asleep. And if I just add, you know, I guess you call it porridge, we call it oatmeal, but you have a, a small amount of starch in the form of whatever starch. Starch is fine for you. I, I eat starches. I realize this is heretical in the, in the, in the health and wellness space, but, you know, I have some rice or some homemade pasta or some sourdough bread or, you know, or oatmeal or something. If you're having trouble falling asleep, take a look at how much starch you're having. I don't recommend gorging yourself with starch late in the day, but having some starchy carbohydrates in your final meal, which probably comes what, two, three hours before sleep or something like that, can certainly help a number of people fall and stay asleep. I've heard that many times.
- [23:35]
Chris Williamson
I certainly know I meat and fruit as a part of trying to fix my health because brain inflammation was really high. I was getting a lot of brain fog, memory loss. One of the things that I found that could counteract that a little bit was going very, very low carb. But that also impacted my sleep. And I felt wired but tired. Very adrenaline all the time. Sure. Like sort of always on as if I'd. And my caffeine was limited as well. Cause I was trying to limit stimulants and I always felt on edge, sort of ambient anxiety thing. And it impacted my sleep. Fragmentation was fucking horrend. And like, well, can I Have a rice cake or like two rice cakes an hour before I go to bed to try and sort of kink me into this a little bit and experimented with a bunch of that. But yeah, it's. If you are carnivore meat and fruits, keto. I wonder what the net effect is when you account for what's happening to sleep. And I'm sure that many people can sleep well on low carb of different stripes, but I, I for one, couldn't. And then I'm like, having to weigh this up, like, how, how many, how much carbs can I have before brain inflammation makes me feel a little bit more sluggish and more tired and, well, I need to have some in order to make me. So that was a. Yeah, it becomes.
- [24:54]
Andrew Huberman
A little bit of a. Of a devil's dance. I mean, if we return to our discussion about cortisol from earlier. Cortisol's job is to deploy energy into the body. And for the brain under conditions of stress or just getting up in the morning, I mean, the transition from sleep to awake is a massive state shift. It's a normal, healthy one, but it's a massive state shift in terms of mobilization requirements and thought requirements and just the ability to linear your thought, which is nerd speak for the ability to think, not dream. Right. Or be unconscious, essentially. So when you have low circulating glucose or energy stores, cortisol's job is to mobilize glucose. So when you're on a low carbohydrate diet, your baseline cortisol is a little bit higher. This actually has been examined. Okay, so here's the deal. If you're on a low carbohydrate diet for a period of time, I think in this case it was three weeks or more, your cortisol curve, that high in the morning, low in the afternoon and evening kind of normalizes a bit. It's still a little bit higher at every point than it normally would be. But if you suddenly switch from eating carbohydrates, when I say carbohydrates, I mean starchy carbohydrates. Okay, well, let's leave aside sugar and fructose, et cetera, which of course is a form of sugar, but if you shift from a sort of standard macronutrient distribution, you know, 40, 30, 30, or whatever it is where you're eating starches, to a low carbohydrate diet, your cortisol levels go up significantly. This has been explored over time. They normalize. So I think the important thing for people to remember is when we talk about comfort foods, people have taken that, that phrase to mean junk foods, pizza, ice cream. Those aren't the comfort foods that were originally described as comfort foods. The comfort foods that were coined, comfort foods are starchy, warm foods which, guess what, suppress cortisol. Because when those foods are available, your, your brain and essentially your adrenals know that you don't have to mobilize from stored sources. It's already circulating, so it makes perfect sense. So I mean, this is just one kind of you asked for, like what people could do.
- [26:56]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [26:56]
Andrew Huberman
I say take a look at your nutrition. Are you exercising too late in the day? Can you move that to the morning? Can you want to tell people, reduce the intensity? Because frankly, you know, as Dorian Yates has been saying, so beautifully late lately, like reps in reserve are results in reserve. You know, we could talk about that. But you know, I think most people are probably not pushing hard enough, but some people are just pushing way too hard in the gym, way too late, and then their cortisol levels are elevated. Makes perfect sense why you couldn't sleep. So I would say look at, look at your diet, make sure you're getting enough starches at some point throughout the day, maybe even taking in a few starches in the couple of hours before sleep. And just see how your sleep does. There's some interesting data, although you're people should talk to their doctor about taking very low dose 1 milligram lithium. I think it's the orotate form in order to encourage the ability to fall asleep and get more deep sleep. But of course we're talking about lithium here. So people need to definitely talk to your doctor. There's some other things too. Look at your lighting environment, of course. But I think for a lot of people, the major issue with falling asleep is that they can't forget about the position of their body. And this is where the data becomes super interesting. There are some technologies that are being spun up right now, some of which I've had the opportunity to dabble with and I have no financial relationship to, but I sure wish I did because it is so cool. Imagine a sleep mask that could put you to sleep.
- [28:17]
Chris Williamson
Okay. Okay.
- [28:18]
Andrew Huberman
How would it do that? Well, it turns out that eye movements are not just present during rapid eye movement sleep, but one of the prerequisites for falling asleep is that you forget about your body position. You're not like, oh, this is uncomfortable, that doesn't belong there. You shut down what's called proprioception, your awareness of body position. So there's actually some interesting data and here I'm kludging from a few places. I want to be fair because what I'm about to say sounds kind of kooky, but this works for many, many people who are having trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep. You can try this tonight. I do this often. It works for me. You keep your eyes closed or you close your eyes. You move your eyes relatively slowly to one side, then the other side, one side, then the other side. Then you move your eyes in a counterclockwise circle and then a clockwise circle, then up, then down. And then you sort of do a kind of faux cross eyed attempt. You sort of look down towards the bridge of your nose and you exhale, which is going to slow your heart rate down. Now, what is all this nonsense about eye movements? Did I just do this as a joke to see if you would do it? The truth is, if you do this when you're trying to fall asleep, your vestibular system, which is essentially working in concert with your eyes for reasons we could talk about, but your cerebellum and your vestibular system are essentially transitioning from where you need to be very aware of your body position and make adjustments all the time to one in which you're forgetting about body position. And we know, and there are great data showing that a very slow rocking of a bed will help put you to sleep. When you rock back and forth, your body doesn't have like a little metronome in it that says I'm rocking it. It's your eye movements that compensate in the opposite direction which tell your cerebellum, hey, we're rocking. This is why if you're on a boat and this and the horizon's going like this, you get seasick because you can't orient to kind of dead zero for, you know, pitch, yaw and roll. And so anyway, I don't want to get too technical here, but if you have trouble sleeping, try what I just described a few times. Many people find that it helps them fall asleep because you stop thinking about your body position. And of course, bed coolness, room coolness all can help. But what I just described can be very, very helpful for a number of people whose minds are racing. Because if their mind is racing, you also need to give people something to do with their mind. You can't just say like, don't think about it or stop thinking or just go to sleep. That doesn't work. You can say just wake up, but you can't say just go to sleep. There's a weird asymmetry built into our autonomic nervous system that way.
- [30:50]
Chris Williamson
It's so funny. Two things that I found because wide but tired has been kind of the fucking summary to the last 18 months for me. Fighting with the health stuff. One from Matt, which is a mind walk. Do you take note of this?
- [31:05]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. You go through a walk that you're very familiar with.
- [31:07]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [31:08]
Andrew Huberman
Has that been helpful?
- [31:09]
Chris Williamson
Wonderful.
- [31:09]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, great.
- [31:10]
Chris Williamson
One of the things that I found by doing that, so for the people that didn't listen to the episode, they can go back and listen to the one I did with Matt a few months ago. Brilliant. Basically, you can imagine that you are going for a walk somewhere that you know unbelievably well and try and do it with as much resolution as possible. So I go to the cupboard. I open the cupboard doors. I've got my shoes in there. I take them out, my right hand that reaches in and put them on the floor. I get the shoehorn. Everyone needs a shoehorn. Left foot in, right foot in. I get the key. I know the sound of the key. I close the doors, I turn around, I go toward the door, I put it in, I turn it. Like, that's the feeling of the door. I get outside, I feel the brush. Like. Like all of that stuff, at least what I found is when I'm falling asleep, the sort of, I'm on a journey, this is an adventure thing is like reading fiction. And the I have problems to solve. This is executive function, is like reading nonfiction. And for me, the former helps me fall asleep way more than the latter. So that's the first thing. The second thing is resonance breathing. I think this. If I was to pick, if I was to flick a little bit of money onto the roulette table of the next five years of health, I think HRV resonance breathing is gonna be fucking huge. And there's a couple of products, one in particular that I'm super, super excited about. It's this cool lamp. So imagine a bedside lamp, and on the top of it is a little divot, like a little pocket, and that's got a stone in it. You take the stone out, the stone's got an FDA HRV sensor. You just hold the stone in your hand and you can either turn the light of the lamp on or off and sounds and all the rest of the stuff. But it does 3, 6, 9, 12 minute sessions with like a super high fidelity sensor. And it means if you're struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime, you can just sort of grab it, put it in your hand, do the breathing based on like a tactile vibration coming from the stone too. So it can all be silent. So if your partner's in the bed next to you, you can do that. And it knows when you hit resonance as well. When you get into that maximum vagal tone and then you just pop it back on the top. And the top of it is an induction charger for the stone. I was like, this is the fucking sickest.
- [33:17]
Andrew Huberman
Who makes this?
- [33:18]
Chris Williamson
It's a company called Ohm. O h m. It's currently, currently in dark mode, I think. Ohm Health.
- [33:23]
Andrew Huberman
Not anymore.
- [33:23]
Chris Williamson
Well yeah, you just told the world that's true. I don't even know if you can buy. I don't think you can buy them. So. But yeah, Jay Wiles, who's my sleep coach from Absolute Rest, he's Andy Galpin's guy. Jay's a part of it and I think I'm the first person outside of the company to have got one. And I was like this fucking rules because HRV resonance breathing is great and makes you feel really good. But if you're gonna use Elite HRV and you've gotta put the like strap thing around your arm or your wrist and then you gotta press it and you gotta connect the Bluetooth and it's gotta be up to it and you got your phone in front of you and all the rest. There's no just standalone pick it up and go of this and the fact that it's a lamp. It looks really beautiful. The unbox, all the rest of the shit anyway, I've been using that. So between those two, the mindwalk thing for me was very, very powerful. But some days you need a more physiological intervention. And the resonance breathing, those two things for me I think if I'm struggling to fall asleep on a nighttime. But the eye movement stuff I think has got a lot of legs. So stack all of those together. I'm going to be cross eyed imagining that I'm going for a walk holding a stone in my hand.
- [34:29]
Andrew Huberman
Not excessively cross eyed, it's just more like you sort of look at. It's like you're sort of looking down and you know there are these nuclei in the brain stem that literally control levels of wakefulness. When you look up, it's essentially activating the arm of your autonomic nervous system which makes you more alert as well. And eyelids open. It's really interesting. And when you look down and when. And bring your eyelids down, you're actually pedaling on the circuits that promote sleepiness. Or at least that are more parasympathetic. I mean, it makes good sense.
- [35:01]
Chris Williamson
In other news, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now. Dude, you tried to fastball me that. That was down the plate. And I've just. Shohei Otani did. I've been drinking AG1 for as long as I can remember. It is the best all in one drink that I've ever found. And that's why I'm such a fan of them and that's why I partnered with them as well. I have got my mum to start taking it, my dad to start taking it, and all of my friends as well. And if I found anything better, I would switch, but I haven't. Why do you keep throwing it at the mic? Stop throwing at the mic. See? Anyway, over 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food source ingredients. It's got probiotics and prebiotics. It's also NSF certified, meaning that even Olympians can use it. And in the throat. In the throat. How dare you. I hit the. I hit the. Ah. Ah. This isn't even an ad read anymore. It's just a war zone. Oh, okay, okay. Anyway, if you too want something to throw at your friends or a tasty blend of 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients designed to drink first thing in the morning in one scoop, it's here. Good@drinkag1.com ModernWisdom for stuff. Thank you. Talk to me about this raised head for glymphatic clearance thing because I've, if you, if anyone's got an eight sleep with the mattress raising functionality, one of the things it does for sleep is it actually raises your head a little bit. Is that related to what we're talking about here? You want head above feet?
- [36:39]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I think they designed that for snoring, but it has other benefits. So without doing an entire lecture on the lymphatic system, because we did a solo on that recently in my podcast. I mean, I'll just say the lymph methotic system is amazing. It's amazing. And I, I liken it to the microbiome where 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you talked about the microbiome, people are like, that's just crazy. Like fermented low sugar foods. Like this is like health food lunacy now. I mean they're probably close to a, you know, maybe 500 million or a billion dollars, even in federal grants, certainly in the US and around the world. Looking at the microbiome, it's important for everything. Mental health, physical. We just know this, right. The gut is so important. The lymphatic system I think is going to follow a similar tra. And all the stuff that we hear about rebounding, you know, bouncing on a trampoline or skipping rope and all of that stuff turns out to be absolutely true. Or lymphatic massage, which is essentially a way of clearing.
- [37:30]
Chris Williamson
I love lymphatic massage.
- [37:31]
Andrew Huberman
You know, it's interesting because lymphatic massage for those that are accustomed to deep.
- [37:36]
Chris Williamson
Tissue feels like nothing.
- [37:37]
Andrew Huberman
It feels like nothing. But the lymphatic, the lymphatic vessels run so superficially that if you press on them too hard you actually, you, you, you cinch them off.
- [37:44]
Chris Williamson
It feels like you're being stroked by somebody.
- [37:46]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. So I think they talk about a light brushing and then that, you know, maybe a little bit more motion. There are deeper lymphatic vessels that can take more pressure who are trained to do this, do it right. And there's some tutorials online that there's a, A, a great account. I don't know the guy but he was referred to me by Kelly Starrett tells me the, the stop chasing pain guy. He has this big six. I don't want to describe them here because I'll get them wrong but he has a number of videos on Instagram and YouTube. The Big Six describes ways that you can encourage lymphatic massage. I always thought that the, the tapping here was kind of silly. It's actually because the, the lymphatic ducts drain back into the. Essentially dump all the lymph that's been surveilled by your immune system etc back into the, the vascular system just below buckles and as another point then we'll get to glymphatic clearance. I gave a shout out to someone I've never met. Don't have any association with, you know, business wise or anything. This Anastasia beauty fascia is this woman, I think of Middle Eastern. Excuse me, is this woman of Eastern European. She's certainly not Middle Eastern. Appearing of Eastern European origin. Talking about non surgical, non Botox interventions for facial augmentation, you know, for, for you know, higher cheekbones and clearing away puffy puffiness underneath the eyes. For men and for women. But mostly what you see there are women. But what you find is that the before and afters that these people list off and they insist that. I think they take an oath or something that they're not doing any injectables or Surgeries are striking. And it's lymphatic drainage from the face and from the scalp and from around the jaw. And you go, this is, I mean, it is unbelievable. Okay, so in any case, the glymphatic system is.
- [39:27]
Chris Williamson
Is glymphatic, lymphatic, Is it the same thing?
- [39:29]
Andrew Huberman
So they're analogous. So for many, many years it was thought that there was no lymphatic, lymphatic system in the brain. It was thought that it was. Actually for many years we thought that the brain was immune privileged. Turns out that's not true. You have all sorts of immune genes and proteins in the brain. But it turns out, and this was discovered some years ago, 2012, it was actually discovered prior, but as science goes, was kind of suppressed. And then it was finally discovered that during sleep, in particular deep sleep, the story goes, the spaces around the vasculature of the brain get bigger. Okay, you have these little cell types in the brain called astrocytes that are among the different types of glia and they have these little end feet and they literally push the brain tissue out and away from the arteries and vessels and capillaries, allowing more cerebral spinal fluid which is circulating in your brain all day long and collecting the was from your cells. And mind you, there's a lot of waste from your brain cells because your brain is the most metabolically active organ. And then that needs to get washed out and actually goes out near the surface of your brain underneath what's called the meninges, and then it flows down and then, and then drains into the vascular system. If people can remember nothing else about lymphatic drains, remember this muscular movement clears lymph in the body. Okay, so you need to walk low level muscular contraction. It, you know, essentially moves the, the lymph up because it's fighting gravity. These are one way valves it bring from your limbs and it essentially dumps it back eventually into the blood supply. Inactivity of the body is what drives glymphatic clearance in the brain now. And so it's when you're essentially immobilized during sleep that you get the maximum amount of glymphatic clearance. Sleeping on your side, right or left side, doesn't seem to matter. With the head slightly tilted, does seem to be the preferable position. So all you back sleepers like me, you know, some people, you're a back sleeper. I have been a back.
- [41:21]
Chris Williamson
With that neck, huh? With that neck.
- [41:24]
Andrew Huberman
Unless I'm spooning, I'm a black. Okay, yeah, yeah, Back Sleeper.
- [41:27]
Chris Williamson
Okay.
- [41:28]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, my back sleeper. So. But I've been working on sleeping on my side and I heard actually maybe Andy Galbin's involved in some studies where subjects wear a fanny pack so that they can't sleep on their back, they have to sleep on their side.
- [41:39]
Chris Williamson
He sent me from absolute rest this huge fuck off roll thing which looks like soft furnishing.
- [41:47]
Andrew Huberman
That's probably what it is.
- [41:48]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Well, I mean, this was. It's a big roll that goes down the middle of your back, so there's no way that you can be on your back at all.
- [41:56]
Andrew Huberman
Okay. So that's much more.
- [41:58]
Chris Williamson
Calling it a fanny pack or a bum bag is a wild disservice to how like colossal this thing is. It's a.
- [42:07]
Andrew Huberman
You're just gonna have to hire somebody to spoon you, Chris. It just means that you'll have to give in to.
- [42:11]
Chris Williamson
Well, I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned that you sleep well on your side because your own hu. Sleep doll.
- [42:19]
Andrew Huberman
I like sleeping on my side and it does feel good to hold somebody. I suppose if you're a back sleeper. I do use the nasal strips to open up my breathing.
- [42:30]
Chris Williamson
Have you tried intake? What do you use?
- [42:32]
Andrew Huberman
I just. I order some nose strips that online. I.
- [42:35]
Chris Williamson
Let me. Allow me to fucking fix your nose strip problem. Everyone has a nose strip problem if they're not using it. So these guys, they've got patents on it. Instead of it being a flexible disposable thing, this is a hard 3D printed piece of plastic that's got magnets attached on both sides. And then you put two magnet patches on the skin of your nose and then you.
- [42:57]
Andrew Huberman
But no magnets up my nose.
- [42:58]
Chris Williamson
No, it's all on the outside. So two patches on the outside and then you snap this non disposable thing on and it's. I'm not kidding, it must be three times, four times, five times stronger than the normal ones. And that's like. Great.
- [43:10]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, because I have pretty good respiration through my nose. But years ago I. Stupid accident actually, in a lab and I cracked a sinus, stood up, hit a freezer door and it was a. There's a whole story there sometime when you talk about over. Not beers, since neither of us drink.
- [43:25]
Chris Williamson
Do you drink? Intermittently. When did I have. I had beers recently. When did I have beers? After the show. After the show. Thank you.
- [43:34]
Andrew Huberman
No, no shame in that. I. I haven't had alcohol in a long time, but. But we could talk about some of the, you know, injury stories are Always fun offline. But yeah, I think that for glymphatic clearance that the data are very clear that you want to. If you can sleep on your side, you're still going to get glymphatic clearance. If you sleep on your back, have your head slightly elevated, not too much, but keep in mind that you know your body is fighting the lymphatic clearance in your legs, is fighting gravity. So in theory, you want to be, if you want to be super, a little bit bold, but not too much right now what we do know is that if you sleep in a chair, these studies have been done in various sleep labs. If you sleep in a chair, like on a flight or something like that, you would think, well, you must get a lot more glymphatic clearance. And you probably do, but you probably get a lot more lack of lymphatic drainage from the body. So there's some really nice pictures in these studies. Every mammal, it seems, puts its head down to sleep. I think giraffes actually just kind of like drop their forehead onto the ground. But there are no mammals that. And someone will probably tell me I'm wrong here and they'll. I'd love to see, see the examples because I love animals. But the argument that's been made in these, in these papers is that every mammal puts its head down to sleep. And if you think about take a picture of yourself sometime before sleep and after sleep, or worse, take a picture of yourself after one really terrible night's sleep, just look at your face. A couple of things become clear. You look blo. You'll look bloated. The bags under people's eyes, that's buildup of limp lymph. Okay, it's, you know, a couple hours.
- [45:08]
Chris Williamson
That's what that is.
- [45:09]
Andrew Huberman
That's what that is. It's buildup of lymph. Which is why this Anastasia Beauty fascia thing is about learning to kind of increase the portals for lymphatic drainage. And it has a lot to do with the fascia because they run so closely together. They core the vessels, of course, at different depths relative to the fascia. But so that's a lot of what lymphatic drainage for, for aesthetics is. But look at yourself after, after sleep, your brain fog, the brain fog you feel after lack of sleep. The buildup of crap is within the cerebral spinal fluid. It's all the ammonia, the carbon dioxide, all the. Some protein fragments that have built up during the day. And the more active you are with your brain, the more they build up and the more they need to be cleared out at night. And then what's equally impressive if you ask me, is take a look at that picture of yourself. Sleep deprived, you get a good night's sleep the next night. Take a picture of yourself the next morning. You look like a completely different person, including the brightness of the eyes. So it turns out around the iris of your eye, that black dot in the middle, and around it you can actually see when people haven't slept well. There's actually a change in color of the eyes that has to do with the accumulation of lymph in the anterior chamber of the eye and the posterior chamber of the eye, which is where the light sensing tissue is. The retina actually shares the same glymphatic clearance system as your brain. And by the way, everything I'm talking about for brain, for glymphatic clearance is true for spinal cord too. So for all this stuff about motor learning and people are so concerned about their spinal cord, all the athletes are thinking, yes, need a brain, but mostly in your spinal cord. Just kidding. But you need both. But the idea here is that when people look tired, the eyes look tired. It's not just in the eyelids being hooded. The eyes look glassy, they don't look quite right. And then they, they sleep well and their life comes back in the eyes. It's because they cleared the lymph from their eyes.
- [46:53]
Chris Williamson
Who knew that the ultimate looks maxing solution was to just get a better night's sleep and raise your head a bit.
- [46:59]
Andrew Huberman
Right.
- [46:59]
Chris Williamson
Well, I think is a pillow enough or.
- [47:02]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, yeah. You don't have to. It's not too much. What you don't want is your head tilted back. And that's also, of course a risk for apne. Right. I mean, this is as you know, why all the bodybuilders and big guys drop dead in their sleep, you know, often is because they just basically asphyxiating themselves. So I do think fixing snoring is important. The nose strips sound great. These nose magnets.
- [47:21]
Chris Williamson
I'm about to try a mandibular device, you know, like a special mouth guard to try and adjust.
- [47:29]
Andrew Huberman
Do you have apnea?
- [47:30]
Chris Williamson
A little, yeah. It's REM induced apnea, so it only happens in rem.
- [47:33]
Andrew Huberman
You and I should take a trip up to Stanford together. Seriously, that. There's a couple up there. Paul Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb many years ago. I think he would say it probably didn't pan out, but. And, and Sandra Khan, who's I think is in craniofacial surgery or orthodontics or something. They were the ones that wrote the book Jaws, not the Jaws with Forward by Robert Sapolsky. Jared Diamond, I think, wrote, wrote the introduction. These are heavy hitter, serious science academics, and they were the ones that talked about, about the, you know, the transition to, to soft foods, to packet based foods, to baby food has created this kind of massive explosion in the industry for orthodontics.
- [48:15]
Chris Williamson
And was Nestor's work downstream from them? James Nestor's?
- [48:19]
Andrew Huberman
Yes. Yeah, yeah, Nestor's kind of the, his book was kind of the modern iteration. A lot of what they were saying, but, you know, they are. I think they're coming out with another book that's really pushing this thing that the nasal breathing is real. The ability to. I, I can't quite do this, but can you close your mouth and put your entire tongue on the roof of your mouth without having to kind of curl it back behind your teeth? Is there space for your tongue on the roof?
- [48:41]
Chris Williamson
A little. My pallet, I could do with a bit of expansion because I had six teeth removed as a kid, like four from the top and two from the bottom. I think so. I mean, Max, who isn't here, my videographer had really. He's going through two or three really serious dental procedures, and with one of them, he was trying to do it through Invisalign, and it was a slow pallet expander. Invisalign. Do a pallet expander. Now he's like, dude, this is going to take like three years for me to do this. But they can do it a little bit more aggressively.
- [49:16]
Andrew Huberman
Sounds like he's a kind of extreme case because Khan and Ehrlich have this association with, you know, the mewing guy.
- [49:23]
Chris Williamson
You know, Is that true? Is that real?
- [49:26]
Andrew Huberman
Well, the mewing thing is, is it plays into this notion of, of getting your nasal breathing right. It's like, you know, close your, you know, like, like close your mouth. Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth. And then can you swallow while, you know, pushing the. I'm describing this, you know, coarsely. You know, the problem is, you know, anytime you get a figure like dad, and I've never met him, I think his name is Mike. Mew. Right, Mew. Anytime you get somebody who's extreme off of the, the normal thrust of a one branch of medicine, medicine, that person is either going to be ostracized or they're going to have to go through some serious gymnastics to get acceptance. Look, my colleague David Spiegel, vice chair of psychiatry At Stanford. Right. Very serious scientist, clinician. His father and him developed hypnosis as a tool for pain management, smoking cessation, anxiety, even people going through chemotherapy. And the data are beautiful.
- [50:22]
Chris Williamson
They had brain cancer. 25% of people that do hypnosis for smoking cessation have it in one session for life.
- [50:29]
Andrew Huberman
It's amazing. I mean, it's a brain plasticity accelerator. But had it not been David, right, who's very thoughtful in how he approaches these discussions, how he frames it with science, how he explains what's going on and just his like. And I'm not saying mew isn't, isn't this way. I don't know him, haven't, haven't met him, although I've read some of his work, you know. But David has a special gift of the ability to frame what for many people would be like hypnosis. Are you kidding me? As a, a brain plasticity accelerator.
- [50:57]
Chris Williamson
Gentle, convincing demeanor in David.
- [51:01]
Andrew Huberman
Yes. And also broad training in all of psychiatry and in acceptance of other branches of medicine. He's not saying this is the way and this is the only way. And there's this problem with my limited tribalism. I'm here to fix the field. No, he's, he's saying, here, here's one tool in the toolkit and there are other tools in the toolkit. He's also, and again, I'm not saying anything about mu in tacitly here. David Spiegel is, is exceedingly smart. Like, he's, he's on a whole other level of intellect, and yet he doesn't talk over anybody. He's extremely kind. So, you know, bedside manner and how you bring your stuff forward is very.
- [51:35]
Chris Williamson
Key, especially if you're going to be a revolutionary or somebody that's at the sort of cutting edge, cutting frontier of this stuff. No, I, I, I agree. I, I've been thinking about this a lot this year. What do we need to know about the neuroscience of making habit setting more easy? I imagine that there must be some really interesting.
- [51:55]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, man. I just had James Clear on the podcast and it's so interesting when you sit down with somebody who's like the habits guy and you compare it against the neuroscience. And so there's sort of two ways into this. And James has done a magnificent job of explaining things that people can do to, to improve their habits and reduce bad habits. The reason I'm so bullish about people understanding a little bit of mechanism behind the checklist of things to do is that I do think that when people understand Mechanism. It gives them flexibility over the so called protocols. And I think it also allows them to customize those things for themselves. Let's face it, if you want to go online now and just say, what are the top 10 things I can do to improve my sleep? And you get a list and you put those on your refrigerator, put em next to your bed. Why doesn't everyone just do that? It's because the, the way that people go about learning information strongly drives whether or not they apply that information. Okay, so in fairness to James and the incredible work that he's done, I'm going to just kind of look at this a little bit through the lens of neuroscience and I'm really glad that we're talking about this because one of the things that he said that I think is so, so true is that the thoughts, and by extension the emotions, but really the thoughts that you have right now, your ability to focus right now is strongly driven by the inputs you received in the preceding hours and even days. So one of the things that's really interesting about focus and attention and a lot of habits have to do with, I don't want to procrastinate, I want to do this. We can talk about exercise, but let's talk about cognitive stuff. It's very, very clear that, that if you have a hard time getting into a bout of work or even staying focused, there's a, there's a very good chance, I believe, that your breaks be between work and what you were doing before. Work was too stimulating. I'm a big advocator for boring breaks and I'm a big advocator for silence before and after bouts of work for a couple of reasons. Let's think about it on the back end. Let's say you're trying to learn something or read a book or just do something that you're not reflexively doing. You want to create this habit. It's very clear that neuroplasticity, yes, requires alertness, requires focus. You need sleep later that night. I've been beating that drum for a number of years. It's also clear that reflection on what you were doing at some later time, just kind of like post learning, reflection, walk into your car, sitting on the plane for a second, thinking about a podcast you did earlier or something you heard or a discussion, strongly reinforces the memories and the ability to work with the memories of new information. And this is something that we've given up largely because of our smartphones. You're constantly bringing in new sensory information. All the data I did an episode on how to best study and learn. I went to the data to find out because I have my methods. But that doesn't mean they're the best. Best methods, reading, rereading, note taking, highlighting, it's all fine. But it turns out the biggest lever is to self test at some point away from the material. So, so testing is not just something for evaluation of others. It's a way that we should think, you know.
- [55:11]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [55:12]
Andrew Huberman
How much can I remember about that conversation? What was tricky? Okay, I don't remember that piece. I'm going to go back and look it up. All learning is. And this will sound like a giant duh, but all learning is anti forgetting. How do we know this? Because if you have people read a passage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times versus one time and they self test one time and self testing significantly better.
- [55:33]
Chris Williamson
Have you ever had Peter C. Brown on the show?
- [55:35]
Andrew Huberman
No.
- [55:35]
Chris Williamson
Author of make it Stand Stick?
- [55:36]
Andrew Huberman
No, But I like the, the title.
- [55:38]
Chris Williamson
You need to bring Peter on. Peter was episode, I would guess like 30 on Modern Wisdom. You'll be 10:30. And the best synopsis that I got from him, learning how to learn was learning is repeated recall, not repeated exposure.
- [55:57]
Andrew Huberman
Yes. Beautiful, right?
- [55:59]
Chris Williamson
Money.
- [56:00]
Andrew Huberman
Exactly.
- [56:00]
Chris Williamson
And that's, that's the.
- [56:01]
Andrew Huberman
Exactly.
- [56:02]
Chris Williamson
And, and this is the Ebbing House forgetting curve.
- [56:04]
Andrew Huberman
That's guys like him, guys like James. Clear that they. When I say unconscious genius, I mean clearly they put thought into and structure into what they teach. But the neuroscience supports everything you just said, which is what he just said. And reflecting on what you were trying to do or learn or solve, even if you don't remember, even if you're still puzzled by it, is so vitally important to the anti forgetting process. Okay, now in terms of actually being able to focus, actually being able to do what work, it's so clear that thoughts, and this is the beautiful statements and work of a woman named Jenny Grow, who's spelled G R O H at Duke University, who's a neuroscientist, been studying sensory, sensory integration for a long time. You know, I, I've long thought about, and I think we now understand as a field what sensations are. So sensations are the physical stimuli in the environment, photons of light, mechanical pressure, odor, volatile odorants in the environment that lead to, you know, sight, touch, smell, et cetera. How that gets converted into chemical and electrical signals in the brain. We understand as a field, we understand sensation, we understand perception. Perception is which of those sensations you happen to be paying attention to. Okay. We understand emotions now more As a subset of something that we think of more broadly as states that are set by your autonomic nervous system, how alert you are, how not alert you are. And then emotions are kind of layered on top of that.
- [57:30]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [57:30]
Andrew Huberman
Lisa Feldman Barrett has beautiful descriptions of these and so on. And there's some debate about what emotions really are. But we, we know what they are neurobiologically and psychologically. And behaviors. We know what they are. Right? It's a behavior. And then there's the don't go behaviors, the suppression of behavior. And then there are memories. Right? But for the longest time it's been unclear what are thoughts? Like, what are they? Are they just like spontaneous geysering up of. Of memories or like what's going on there. And Jenny grow, I think has the absolute best description of these. If and. And this is based on experimentation. If we seed some idea. So let's say. I say to you, let's not talk about cats because I'm a dog person. But I say, okay, okay, Chris. And this isn't a trick question, I promise because it's always weird when people start doing this. I'm not Oz Pearlman or something. I'm not going to like tell you your pin. PIN code. Think the thing about a dog. Okay, what kind of dog is it?
- [58:25]
Chris Williamson
Golden retriever.
- [58:26]
Andrew Huberman
Golden retriever. Okay, so as you think about the golden retriever, like what other things come to mind about the golden retriever?
- [58:35]
Chris Williamson
It's got a little neckerchief on. Okay, red neckerchief. Great.
- [58:38]
Andrew Huberman
Red neckerchief. Like what else about golden retriever?
- [58:41]
Chris Williamson
Fluffy.
- [58:42]
Andrew Huberman
Fluffy. Okay, so there's a tactile thing. Okay, anything else about golden retrievers? This is very specific to you.
- [58:50]
Chris Williamson
Bouncing up and down, rolling on its back, smells a little bit, but I like it.
- [58:55]
Andrew Huberman
Great. Okay, so there's a. I like it. You like the. Okay, so Jenny grows and others data point to the fact that thoughts basically start with some seed element, some noun, some pronoun, some thing, some event. And then what the brain does is it is essentially starts to call on more and more sensations and starts layering those in more and more. More prior sensory events. It's red handkerchief. Okay. It's fluffy. There's a tactile. And that thoughts really are the layering on of more and more sensory memories. And thoughts are really a layering of the senses in. In abstract thought space. Now, this is not meant to, you know, make something from nothing, but it's so important that we understand this because you think, what is the ability to think. Well, the ability to think is, is constrained by the number of different senses I'm trying to place on a bunch of different things. And so that's what, that's how we navigate through environments, which is what Jenny Grow's main work is about how you find yourself in space. I can't look at everything in this garage. I have to focus on certain things. Find the Phillips head screwdriver, go over there, and you're discarding all the other information. Now, when you think about sitting down to do work or to learn something or prepare a podcast, it is so important that you limit the number of sensory inputs coming in, in, not just during that event, but before, because the sensory stimulus that kind of sets off this cascade of layering in more and more sensory memories and understanding is begun before you sit down to read your book. This is why you read a portion of a book and then like, oh, wait, I, I, I wasn't even paying attention. You, your brain is still working with the sensory inputs from before. It's not thinking about them consciously. So this is vitally important. If you go back and you look at the history of a 10 and thinking, and I have, you can find these incredible pictures that they would give kids who had trouble, probably had ADHD or just kind of rambunctious boys in most cases. And they literally gave them helmets with two eye holes so they couldn't look at anything else. I couldn't hear anyone else. Right. Used to be, you know, kid with the hoodie on and the cap. And you'd write, now what have we done? The challenge is that we've brought an infinite number of sensory experiences into the thing that you're looking at.
- [61:03]
Chris Williamson
Oh, wow.
- [61:03]
Andrew Huberman
So we brought all the sensory input inputs through the device that you're holding.
- [61:09]
Chris Williamson
So the narrowing of your perspective hasn't helped you to narrow the distractions.
- [61:14]
Andrew Huberman
That's right. Cognitive space is still infinite, even though your spatial, the spatial limitation of where you're placing your attention is very restricted. So the fact that you have so many competing thoughts has everything to do with that, and it also has everything to do with what you were doing in the 10 or 15 minutes before you sat down to try to work. Now, in China, they're doing some very interesting experiments of having kids stare literally at a, at a focal point on the wall for a number of minutes before beginning their work. Sounds a little extreme, a little military. But one thing that I've been doing before I prepare to do any writing, any podcasting, any work is I, I try and make myself as bored as possible. I try and remove as much sensory input as possible. I might think about my breathing because it's hard to not think about anything. But I really have started to limit the amount of sensory information coming into my space. I have an entire floor of where I live now. I live in kind of an odd structure now, but the entire bottom floor. Floor is a no phone zone. Once or twice I brought my phone down there, but it's a no phone zone. I'm going down the stairs. There are no phones in there. I'm trying to figure out how I can have no Internet there. I have this little tent sauna that I use now with incandescent lights because I couldn't use my barrel sauna where I was at. I think it's sauna space makes these incredible. I like them because they get hot right away and it's got the red light. I go in there, it's in a. In a. It's grounded and there's no WI fi in there. The phone goes dead the moment you go in there.
- [62:35]
Chris Williamson
You're in a mini Faraday cake. Yeah.
- [62:36]
Andrew Huberman
And I don't like bringing the phone into the cell.
- [62:37]
Chris Williamson
Your same place that I went to or is this a new one now?
- [62:39]
Andrew Huberman
No. So I actually converted a art gallery into a living space. I've always wanted to do this. So now I have my. No, it's not the same space. I have my gym. I've got an upstairs loft where I live. And then the downstairs is a. Is a workspace. I have. I have an octopus now I have a tank with an octopus in it. Although it's a bit shy, so I'm probably going to.
- [62:57]
Chris Williamson
You're becoming increasingly esoteric.
- [63:00]
Andrew Huberman
Anyway, and I have my discus fish and my gym and my doing all the illustrations for my books. I spent a lot of time drawing down in the basement. I mean, I've always wanted to do this. At some point I was like, yeah, you have to live in an art gallery at some point if you're able, you know, And. Okay, so. But that's my unique kind of weird space. But doesn't matter if you're in an empty box. If you are not good at clearing the slate before you try and focus, you're going to have a very hard time. For understandable reasons. In fact, I'm amazed that anyone can think of at all. I'm amazed that anyone can focus at all. I don't believe everyone has adhd. I think we've just not understood what thoughts are built up from and Once you understand, you go, oh, yeah, it makes perfect sense. Am I supposed to walk around with my eyes closed and not take in any sensory input? No, but am I supposed to take in an infinite number of novel items through this device? In fact, Mike Easter, the author of the Comfort Crisis, told me something super scary when he came on the podcast. He said that the person who developed, developed these algorithm, the people, excuse me, who developed the algorithms for social media, borrowed heavily from the casinos. And I didn't realize that some years ago, slot machines were like a small fraction of the total casino income, maybe like 10, 20%. Now it's 80%. And it was one guy who watched his kid playing video games who realized that the kids would play video games for hours and hours and hours. And what they were playing for was novelty. And so they switched the slot machines and casinos, casinos on his suggestion to instead of just spooling numbers and fruit or whatever it was, because they're now electronic, you can get a near infinite number of combinations of novel items and people will play while losing for novelty and think they're winning. The brain is tricked into thinking that it's winning. And so at some level, like, I love social media, teach on social media, I partake in it as a consumer and a creator that there. But I think we need to really scruff ourselves and go, okay, I need to read this book, I need to write this chapter. I need to do this drawing. And you'll notice once you drop into that trench, the brain has these attractor states. It's like a ball bearing on a flat surface. As you get more into a thought trench or activity trench, it's like that ball bearing drops into what's essentially a deep valley, and it's actually hard to leave. You'll notice you're walking out, and unless you pick up your phone, you'll still be thinking about that. And this is how the brain works. The brain is not working in step functions. The brain. None of us are supposed to do the same thing all day long, and none of us are supposed to be able to think and focus easily. You just have to ride that sort of layering on of thoughts, going from bored to sensory input to deeper and deeper, and then work for bouts of 90 minutes or a couple of hours, and then give yourself a little bit time, pause, reflect. And it doesn't mean you can't have a conversation, but people are like texting in between. It's. It's unbelievable what we've done to hamstring ourselves against being able to think. The Good news is, as Goggins would say, nowadays it's very easy to be spectacularly good in pretty much any field.
- [66:04]
Chris Williamson
Bar is you just have to do.
- [66:05]
Andrew Huberman
What no one else is doing. Now he's an extreme case and I, I have immense admiration for David. I mean he's just so David, you know, but, but if you want to be the best in your class at anything, best in class at pretty much anything. It's to become so much easier now. You just have to not constantly be projecting things out to the world or paying attention to what other people are.
- [66:26]
Chris Williamson
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- [67:34]
Andrew Huberman
It's so sad and yet it's an exciting opportunity for people.
- [67:37]
Chris Williamson
Dude, I get it. Like the rampant fragility that seems to be destroying your classroom or your country or the world with constant distraction and people not being able to focus or deal with a little bit of discomfort or resilience is not great. But from a selfish perspective, that widespread fragility is your competitive advantage. And if you're one of the people, you're not going to be able to change the world. Certainly not before you've changed yourself. And that means that the first step is huh? This is an opportunity for me. I can step into this. So you mentioned that you Sort of touched on some of the bad habits that distract people. I've always been interested in this from a neuroscientific perspective. Is it truly possible to deprogram bad habits? Or once those neural pathways are down, is that locked in for life, are you just creating deeper fissures somewhere else else in order to replace those ones? How do you think about getting rid of bad habits, the process of overcoming those?
- [68:37]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I think if we look at the data on neuroplasticity, it's much easier to reactivate a pathway that was laid down early in life, even if it's been suppressed. There's a beautiful data of a guy named Eric Knudsen, who was actually my next door neighbor in my lab before he retired at Stanford, showing that once learning takes place, those maps are forever the there. You can unveil those maps again later. They kind of like never forget to ride a bike kind of thing. But when you're talking about bad habits and then you get into sort of contingencies like rewards and punishments, you know, these days, because of my own interests and trajectory, you know, I think a lot about, you know, the seven deadly sins and the virtues. Right. I mean, if you look at any of the sins, okay, they're all very hypothalamic in nature. Right. They're the extremes of hypothalamic function. In fact, fact, you could probably map the seven deadly sins onto the hypothalamus and say that nucleus, the ventromedial hypothalamus, those neurons are responsible for rage, for unbridled rage. Okay. Those neurons are responsible for unbridled sexual activity. I'm not talking about merged with violence. I'm just saying independent of that, those are consummatory behaviors. So eating, hyperphagia. These are anorexia.
- [69:49]
Chris Williamson
I have a question on that. Because envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel. Feel good.
- [69:54]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. So you.
- [69:56]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [69:56]
Andrew Huberman
And I hadn't thought about that. But you. Envy is probably not easily mapped to a hypothalamic nucleus.
- [70:03]
Chris Williamson
Isn't that an interesting insight? And he's the only one of the seven deadly sins that isn't something that can be enjoyable at low or high dose.
- [70:10]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Our good friend Paul Conti talks often about how much of the ills of the world are based on people's envy. When people don't have. When they have an uncomfortable feeling, they. Most people will turn that into self destruction or destruction of others. And people who are successful in life transmute those uncomfortable feelings into self Support and creating things and supporting others. Same feelings, divergent paths and envy. Paul has said many times, is the enemy of all of all personal development. Right. You see something you. I always noticed, you know, coming up in science, if, if something bad happens to somebody, we, we most of the time, unless we really dislike them. But even then you kind of go, oh, that sucks. You know, like really feel bad. But if something good happens for somebody, you know, immediately how you feel about that person. Are you happy for them? Or, or is there that feeling of like fuck? Yeah, exactly. You know, immediately how you take.
- [71:12]
Chris Williamson
That's such a good litmus test. Test. Yeah. How do you feel when this other person wins and when somebody else loses? I guess even with that, it's an interesting one. Like, is there a weird sense of satisfaction or are you like. Like, I wish that person was okay or whatever it might be. Okay. Bad habits.
- [71:27]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. So with bad habits, I mean, so I think about the, you know, the sins and bad habits mapping to hypothalamic nuclei because I'm me and that's my nerdy perspective. But then you also think about the virtues, right? And overcoming bad habits or the virtues. They. I mean, I believe that most people are inherently good. I do. I. It may be true. Young may be right that we have all things inside of us, but I think most people are inherently good. I think there are a subset of people that given the opportunity to do things and not get caught, they would do really bad things. But I don't think that's most people. Okay. Or most dogs. By example, cats. I'm still on the, on the fence about cats. Can, sorry, cat people. I know some of the nice ones. But, but in all seriousness, I think that the, the bad habits thing involves breaking bad habits, involves a lot of top down control prefrontal cortex suppressing the activity of these hypothalamic and other subcortical neurons. And how do we know this? Well, we. If you want to summarize how the prefrontal cortex works, you'd say it's the sh. Structure in the brain. It's that. No, don't reach for that cookie. It's that. No, don't say that thing. It's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus don't do the thing. It's the don't do the thing that your hypothalamus and other structures are creating some internal activation of the autonomic nervous system. That kind of vibration of. You want to do it. It smells so good. It tastes so good. You just want to, I don't know why I did it this kind of thing so that top down control can be learned. And the beautiful thing, and this answers your question more directly, the beautiful thing is that at some point that top down control is not required anymore. Unless you do the thing you're not supposed to do. And then it requires top down control again. Now the reason I'm so interested these days, one of the reasons I'm so interested in spirituality, notions of God, et cetera, is that the virtues also, I believe, can start to arrive through things that are outside of us. Now I realize that sounds very unscientific, but if you look at the science around religious belief or belief in higher power, or the notion that humans don't have all the answers, not even the collective consciousness, what you find is that for everything from recovery from addiction, addiction to recovery from immense, immense loss. I mean the kinds of losses that go way beyond, you know, a death of a family member, although that's intense, you know, death of all one's children, for instance, horrible things that people have been put through almost without fail, moving through that with any kind of sense of self preservation and not engaging in just self destruction, which is what most people do, almost always involves some notion of top down control from outside, you know, being, being encouraged or even instructed to do the right thing. Feeling as if something is coming through oneself. Now we often hear about this in the creative process. People like Rick Rubin, and I'm a big twyletharp fan, the choreographer will talk about, you know, it's. Most creatives will talk about sort of downloading things from outside of them. It kind of moves through them as opposed to arising purely within them because of all that sensory experience. But they can get into kind of these higher realms of spirituality. But when we're talking about breaking bad habits, overcoming immensely difficult scenarios that normally would throw people into complete self destruction or just giving up, which is a bad habit in its own right. It's as if the top down control is so immense, like the going against oneself that's required is so immense that when people hand that over to God, not it's Christ, or whether or not some other form of God that they, that they are, you know, that they're attached to, you know, it seems as if they get some relief from the process. And yet it's very effective. And you can't deny this right just as a phenomenon. I mean, let's take off our hats as scientists and people kind of parse things like how could it be that the, the thing that's hardest for humans to do for themselves becomes far easier, easier when they stop trying to do it for themselves. It's, it's a, it's a wild mind bend that neuroscience doesn't really understand. But, but you know what we're really talking about, let's say this were alcohol and I'm not an alcoholic, fortunately, but let's say I had immense difficulty in refraining from alcohol and this would be the precise environment and where this would, where alcohol would be attractive. The amount of top down control that's required is immense for somebody who's recently sober. They have to, you know, hopefully they're in 12 step, they have to call their sponsor, they're. It's, it can be jarring anxiety, that anxiety eventually subsides. I mean alcoholics eventually can hang out in bars and not have a drink, but there's a long period of time where they can and many never will be able to do that. But the notion of a higher power is central to almost every alcoholic, at least who goes through AA getting sober. It's almost a prerequisite and in some sense it is a prerequisite and it's so brilliant that it is because it takes away the need for constant top down control. You give that over to something else. This notion of a higher power. For some people that's God. For some people, it's Christ. For some people it's, you know, just general higher power. Because 12 step is very agnostic as to, you know, what people consider higher power. But I think it is not a coincidence that the Bible writes in these kinds of things about sins and virtues and the need not just good works, but avoiding sin. And acknowledges in some sense that, that it's in some cases near impossible for people to do on their own. And yes, community can help and yes, reward processes can help and yes, punishment can help. These all work. We know this. You can see this in animal learning studies where humans are different is that they can. As far as we know, humans are unique in their ability to give this top down restriction process over to some other entity. And it makes it easier, not harder. And it makes it more concrete somehow, not more abstract. The only abstract piece of it is that, you know, you can't shake this entity's hand, at least not in the standard sense.
- [77:32]
Chris Williamson
What do you think's going on?
- [77:33]
Andrew Huberman
I, you know, as usual, you always ask the question, which is why I, I'm stomped, right? I mean it's, I mean I'm trying to parse what could be going on. But it always lands me back in neural circuits and neural structures. I mean, I'm excited by some of the data that are starting to look at how, how consciousness might involve things from outside the brain and maybe multiple brains. And all I know is that having spent nearly three decades thinking about and researching and talking about neuroscience, that we know a great deal about how sensations, perceptions, thoughts, memories, emotions and behaviors are constructed, what we do. And yet we don't know how this piece comes about. But this piece is been central to the human historical perspective and human experience. And I don't think we're any longer in a place where we can even talk about human evolution without this. Right. I think humans evolved in the context of this and that's why I don't see them as mutually exclusive.
- [78:34]
Chris Williamson
Much more a part of our history than the anterior mid singular cortexes.
- [78:39]
Andrew Huberman
Yes. In fact, no one needed to know that the anterior mid singulate cortex existed to know that there's this thing called tenacity and willpower. I think that the fun twist is that, that it's a highly plastic structure that we can engage and grow and, and that reinforces the, the sets of behaviors that are, that are involved and I think adaptive. Right. But I, I absolutely think there's something real there. And I say that completely as a scientist. Right. I mean, I'm used to immunostaining for proteins and running westerns and you know, like recording from neurons. And you're looking at neural circuits using any number of labeling techniques. I mean, I'm a man of science, but there's just no doubt in my mind that this process of giving over to the understanding there's something much greater than us and that we are not in total control, at least not in total control. That feels very comforting to me because of the way it's. I've seen it help so many people and you know, I don't, I won't be shy about it. It's helped me tremendously. I mean, I'm. I'm in a very serious prayer practice daily now, every night before I go to sleep without fail. I'm going on a couple years now where I've not missed a single night. I'll get out of bed. If I fall asleep and do that, it's like. And then also just prayer is a thing. Let's say it's just purely neurobiological. Let's say there's nothing outside of us that in the real sense, I don't believe that. But let's just assume For a moment. Well then my neurobiology seems to be responding to all this very, very well. And I don't think I'm alone with that. In fact, I think there are too many burdens in life, life for anyone to be able to navigate life extremely well without these notions of higher power. I, I don't think people can do it. And if, and you could show me the most successful wealthiest people in the world and I would say yeah, but they are highly deficient in this area. Not because I'm judging them. Right. We all deficient in some area. But it must be, it has to be because there's this huge gap in the, in, in the knowledge.
- [80:40]
Chris Williamson
I've never thought that, I've never thought of that paradox. The fact that for a lot of people, billions of people relinquishing control, the exact opposite of what it is that for most of the habits that, okay, we're going to suppress the anterior mid singular cortex, we're going to use our cognition to limit our distraction, we're going to narrow our focus. All the rest of it, it's intention, it's lean in, it's agency, it's taking control. And then there's this other bit that literally billions of people and up until a hundred years ago, almost everybody did assume was the seat of where their motivations and their discipline and for a while with the bicameral mind, maybe even the voice inside the head came from, that was the thing that was real, that was the source of this.
- [81:33]
Andrew Huberman
We evolved in that context. Yeah, the brain independently.
- [81:36]
Chris Williamson
Right. This was convergent evolution From a like 50 million different corners of the universe.
- [81:41]
Andrew Huberman
Absolutely. And, and, and you know, it's my, you know, I love teaching science. I love learning and teaching science. I hope that's obvious to people. I, but it's my one wish for, for people that at some point in their life they at least explore the possibility and, and get morning sunlight. But the, but, but you know, be.
- [82:01]
Chris Williamson
Open to faith and get morning sunlight.
- [82:03]
Andrew Huberman
Like I just hit 50 recently. And, and I will say if I look back on my life, I, I sure I wish I had done certain things differently. I mean who, who doesn't? Right? This notion of like no regrets, like, yeah, I wish I had made certain decisions, not others. But by and large I'm very, very happy with the decisions I made, by and large. And I was happy to discover resistance training and running and neuroscience and, and you know, cuttlefish and ferrets. I had a pet ferret and I don't recommend bulldogs and I have an amazing relationship to family and friends. And I'm very blessed in my personal life and my romantic life is feeling awesome these days. And it's just like, it's overwhelmingly positive despite a lot of strain and hardship. But the one thing that I wish that I had done earlier was to stop resisting the voice in my head that said, you know, I think there's a God and I'm going to pray. I kept pushing that away. It was like incompatible with my notion of what it meant to be a scientist. It was just incompatible with things I just kept pushing down and yet at the same time wishing for it. And recently on my 50th birthday, I had to give an uncomfortable toast because believe it or not, I'm somewhat introverted, especially in large groups. I'm happy to talk science and talk like this with you. And I said it then and I'll say it again now. Like, I'm 50 and for the first time in my life, my entire life, life, I've experienced sustained times of real deep peace. Like just peace, like, just the, like, everything's okay, everything is as it should be. Not just some little mantra that you say when you're on the big circos. Like, and why? I think it's because I stopped fighting so hard to try and control everything inside me and in my life. And as a consequence everything's become much easier. It's still challenging, but much, much easier. And it's 100% because of giving over to notion of higher power. I'm very direct about it. God, higher power for me, right. Reading the Bible, this kind of thing, prayer, I mean these are practices. This isn't just I believe in God, these are practices. Those are faith based practices. And, and it's become a source of immense intellectual stimulation for me and also just relaxation. And it's really, it's my wish for anyone that's like struggling or doing well because I'm certain that it holds so much power. And again, even if it turns out, and I'll never know, but even if it turns out that it's all filtered through standard neurobiological mechanisms, um, okay, I'm good with that. But in the meantime, like I'm going to keep praying like, and you can look at examples all around and all through history where people have said similar things in circumstances far more challenging than mine and they'll always point to the same thing. I mean people are pretty, can be pretty erratic, rational, but at the same time humans are also pretty miraculous in what they're able to build and develop. And this whole thing of, you know, God and religion has not been discarded. If anything, it's growing. Right. I mean, you know the data on that better than I. So anyway, I don't have a whole lot more to say about that.
- [85:28]
Chris Williamson
You said something to me over three years ago. Now you said it's all internal tunnel. Can we revisit that?
- [85:36]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I guess. Now I would say it's all internal except for the stuff that's coming from outside the human awareness. Yeah, but it's all internal in the sense that. Good on you for remembering that. It's all internal in the sense that. I think that the big mistake that I made for a number of years was trying to find the thing that comes from outside that's going to change that things. And, you know, Lord knows I love caffeine and I love doing certain activities and learning. But at some point you realize that the ability to, like, withhold, like, reflect reflexes that you don't want to have, like, you know, getting your temper sparked or something. You know, people who say no one can make you feel anything. And I said, that's crazy. People can make you feel things all the time. You know, the ability to. To not speak from your first thought, but your second or your third. You know, you hear these kind of cliches, right. But all of that ability comes from inside. It's from doing internal work. And it's kind of amazing how much we can accomplish. And I'm certainly not the first to say this, how much we can accomplish by just stopping and listening and going, wow, like, my brain's crazy. It's like all these thoughts, all this stuff. Oh, too much input coming into this. Like, I've got to shut down this thought path. Also realizing that, you know, because these thoughts layer on themselves, our sensory. Sensory memories layer on top and can feed. We feed our thoughts. I mean, Jenny Grow's description of how thinking works makes you think that. Yeah, like, if you're ruminating on something that really bothers you, you probably do want to distract yourself. Unless you're really going to work on that thing that you really can feed thoughts like embers and a fire. And it's important to not do that if it's not adaptive.
- [87:27]
Chris Williamson
A quick aside. If you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus, and your performance. But most people have no idea where theirs are or what to do if something's off. Which is why I partnered with Function, because I Wanted a smarter, more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year they run lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers and their team of expert physicians analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. Seeing your testosterone levels and tons of other biomarkers charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. And unfortunately, getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this usually costs thousands. But with function, it's just $499 and you can get an additional hundred dollars off, bringing it down to 399 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save a hundred bucks by going to the link in the description below or heading to function. Health.commodernwisdom that's functionhealth.com ModernWisdom well, also, as you said when we first spoke, if you finish a marathon in first place, nobody is coming along and dripping dopamine into the back of your brain.
- [88:38]
Andrew Huberman
That's right. It's all internal.
- [88:40]
Chris Williamson
This is self generated stuff. The satisfaction that you get for finishing a hard workout, the love that you feel from being with, with the people that you care about, the peace that you have for lying in a hammock in a, you know, sunny spring afternoon or whatever. At no point are you being sort of flicked different neurochemicals and sensations like this is a part of your system.
- [89:03]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. And if you hit the system hard, like, you know, like the thing I absolutely suggest people never do is, you know, something like methamphetamines. Right. And is going to what, a thousandfold increase in dopamine within moments. I mean, I.
- [89:16]
Chris Williamson
Is that what that is?
- [89:17]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. As compared to, or even more as compared to cocaine, which I think is like 200, you know, like a 200x and I mean it's. Or maybe a doubling. I mean, I forget the exact numbers, but there's this chart that on LMQ will often put up and methamphetamine is going to, you're, you're basically going to dump as much dopamine as you ever could in that moment. And then the trough is obviously proportional to that. It's kind of fun too to think about how because of conversations from me and you and others and Matt Walker or like the world kind of understands dopamine now, they understand the nuance of every little bit of every one of the four different pathways and there's probably five, et cetera. No, but that's okay. Do people understand everything about cortisol? No. But I think the world is now armed with a lot better knowledge of their own physiology and psychology and how those merge. I also think that we're starting to understand actually on the way over here, my producer and close friend Rob was talking about this, that, that, you know, everything now is gambling. Social media is a form of essentially gambling for dopamine. You know, likes and follows, you know, markets, you know, I mean my team, their team, the politics. I mean, a good friend has said, you know, that all addiction is gambling. You know, all addictions maybe are gambling in different forms. I would say it all boils down to the same neural circuits of anticipation and reward anticipation. And the scariest thing was I have a good friend, Ryan Suave, who works with addicts and he's trauma therapist as well. Incredibly talented guy. And he said that the scary thing is he's known many gambling addicts that get addicted to the shame from losing. And we said that at the time.
- [90:59]
Chris Williamson
You'Re not like you're chasing the wins anymore, you're chasing the losses and the way that you feel about yourself after you've lost.
- [91:03]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, it's almost like the wins were not big enough and so they're just chasing the self shame and the hatred and the. It's really sad. Gambling addicts struggle big time.
- [91:12]
Chris Williamson
Coffeezilla just did a huge new video about gambling and sort of how endemic it is. And there's banking apps that allow you to gamble inside of the app now. And he's done. I learned an awful lot about gambling from watching a bunch of the videos he's done in the past. And it really is kind of wild to me that it's legal and the only way that I can, I'm sure, like you, we've been offered like an unlimited number of gambling sports betting partnerships and stuff like that.
- [91:49]
Andrew Huberman
I like gambling actually a little bit, but I don't have a problem with it.
- [91:52]
Chris Williamson
I don't have a problem either, which is exactly why it's, we should go Vegas. But it's kind of, it's kind of mad to me that, that those, that this is legal and you know, fucking don't hate the player. You know, the game is much bigger than any individual person that's contributing to it, like fair play. But it's, it is really fucking destructive for, for some people, but then so is alcohol. So driving fast cars on motorbikes or.
- [92:20]
Andrew Huberman
The hypothalamus isn't going anywhere, right? I mean everyone's got one and so you got to find the things that allow you to be adaptive and functional in life, not crater things you've created. And also to feel like you're in the hunt. I mean, the hunt was the original gamble, right? Hunting for animals, hunting for food, hunting for mates.
- [92:39]
Chris Williamson
Seeing that thing grow closer on the horizon, working out the anticipation of it coming towards you. I'm getting closer. I'm getting closer and getting closer.
- [92:46]
Andrew Huberman
Surviving a storm probably felt like a big win at some point. I mean, you know, like the number of women who used to die in childbirth. And then they were, you know, and then someone solved that puzzle, Right? It was a hand washing, I think had a lot to do with it. Right. I don't know if this story is true, but story goes that there used to be a ton of death in childbirth. And some of the same physicians who were trying to figure out why were handling and dissecting the cadavers of these poor women who died in childbirth and then delivering babies the same afternoon without hand washing in between. Because we didn't understand bacteria, we didn't understand the importance of hand washing. I don't know if that's true. That's what's been reported. But once they started washing their hands, because between essentially doing autopsy and delivering babies, rates of death in childbirth went down.
- [93:38]
Chris Williamson
Here it is. So I wrote this article about the Cassandra Complex. Do you know the Cassandra Complex?
- [93:44]
Andrew Huberman
No.
- [93:45]
Chris Williamson
Oh, dude, this is so.
- [93:45]
Andrew Huberman
And I don't know anyone named Cassandra.
- [93:47]
Chris Williamson
Ah, well, let me. Maybe you do. Allow me to teach you about the Cassandra Complex. There are a few feelings worse in this life than being right. But early. You correctly predict a future catastrophe, trend, opportunity for growth or important area of focus, only to be castigated for how short sighted, xenophobic, judgmental, out of touch, left wing, right wing, or alarmist you are. The Cassandra Complex is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth, but no one believes them and they're often dismissed, ignored or even ridiculed. It's named after Cassandra, a figure in Greek mythology. The God Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but after she rejected his advice advances, he cursed her so that no one would ever believe her warnings. She foresaw the fall of Troy, warned everyone and was met with scorn. The city burned anyway. Rachel Carson, in her book 1962 Silent Spring, warned about the environmental damage caused by pesticides. She was mocked by chemical companies and even some scientists. But her work eventually led to the environmental movement and the banning of DDT. Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s realized that doctors were transmitting childbed fever from autopsies to mothers by not washing their hands. He begged his colleagues to adopt hats. Hand washing. They laughed at him. He died in an asylum decades later. Germ theory proved him right. Wow. Let me give you this. I'm gonna. The one, the best example of the Cassandra Complex I love is the comparison between Copernicus and Galileo. So, obviously, people that are right but early get marked, castigated, you know, pushed to one side, which is incentive for someone to not speak up if they feel like they are telling the truth, but that the world is not going to be sufficiently receptive to it. And Copernicus and Galileo, like so great as an example of this. Copernicus in the early 1500s, quietly proposed something radical. The Earth orbits the Sun. Humans, once the unmoving center of God's design, were now spinning through space on a planet, among many. But Copernicus hesitated. He delayed publishing his heliocentric model for decades. His grand, great work, De La Revolutionibus came out only as he lay on his deathbed, likely to avoid the wrath of the Church and academia. His truth was too disruptive, and so for most of his life, it went unheard. Galileo, a century later, took that same Copernican spark and shouted it from the rooftops. He saw the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the imperfections of the moon's surface, all evidence that the heavens were not as fixed or divine as taught. The Church responded with fear. Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition, forced to recant under threat of torture, and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. In retrospect, it is not surprising that Copernicus kept his mouth shut, given how Galileo was treated. This is a core truth of the Cassandra Complex. Being right isn't enough, and being early can feel like being wrong.
- [96:41]
Andrew Huberman
Wow. Yeah. I mean, much lesser example than what you just described, but, you know, the Glymphatic system was discovered many years earlier by a woman at nih. Oh, excuse me, me. At University of Maryland, a larger, more powerful scientific group tried to repeat the experiments, made a methodological flaw, couldn't repeat it. Everyone believed them. There's no lymphatic system in the brain. Fortunately, she became an NIH program officer, which is somebody who has some degree of control over where funding gets directed, and funded the work that later verified her findings. But it was purely by virtue of the fact that the power structure was arranged in a certain way. This happens a lot in science. I think you'd enjoy, Chris. Everyone thinks of Darwin and natural selection. But there was another guy, Alfred Russel Wallace, who essentially discovered all of it in parallel and should have been elected to the Royal Academy. And all of this stuff as, as well like Darwin, but was not in the club, in the in club. And Darwin knew it and actually was very con, from what I understand, very conflicted about not sharing the credit.
- [97:54]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. It was only because of that rivalry that Darwin ended up pushing his study out, his work out. Right. I think he'd, he had it, he sat on it for a while, he wanted to work on it more. He had a little bit of sort of hyper vigilant uncertainty and insecurity about himself itself. And then finally upon hearing, oh, I might not, I might be beaten to the punch. Published, Is that right?
- [98:16]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Nobody associates Alfred Russell Wallace with the theory of evolution, natural selection. I mean, most people don't even know who it is. I mean, because my dad's a physicist and because I grew up in science, I know a lot of these stories. I mean, I know a story of. I'll keep this intentionally vague. There's a very, very famous and accomplished physicist that probably should have won a Nobel Prize, but he made one error, which is that he stole the girlfriend of one of his graduate students. Married her. That graduate student did reasonably well. It must be very uncomfortable to work in the lab where your girlfriend is now sleeping with your boss. Went on, he went on to marry a Swedish woman. And let's just say that guy that stole the girlfriend never won a Nobel Prize. The Swedish community is very close knit, you know, So I mean, I mean the number of stories I could tell you, story after story after story like that, but I try and avoid those stories, even though they're true. I'd much rather tell stories about the great scientific discoveries. That stuff goes right, that's when stuff goes right. Because, you know, that stuff's very enticing. It's the drama that we are drawn to as humans just naturally we have a proclivity for that. But I think that there's so many stories of people making incredible discoveries through serendipity and hard work and things like that, that. So, I mean, that's the good stuff. And, and so I always try, and if I mention a story like that, I like to balance that out and remind people that I do think that most scientists are well intentioned. I do think most physicians are well intentioned. I just had a guest on the podcast, David Fagenbaum, who's a physician at UPenn and scientist and you know, he was a football player, big dude. Jack, he's like 6, 3 Jack, he's playing football, he's in medical school and he gets this Castleman disease, which is a cancer like disease of the lymphatic system. He's told that he's going to die. He basically was near dead. And then he decided to just start trying all these already approved prescription drugs that nobody thought had anything to do with Castleman's or cancer. And he's alive now 11 years later and he's developed this not for profit called every cure where is completely not for profit. And his lab focuses on taking all the diseases that we have like 14,000 diseases we have no treatments for and taking existing approved drugs that basically stand to make companies very little money because they're in generic form now and using AI and doing these things in combination. They've saved kids from non verbal forms of brain illness. They've saved people, adults and children from, from cancers. Turns out that women who have breast cancer surgery that involves lidocaine as a local anesthetic have a 30, 30% less, less chance of getting a, you know, of having aurance. Different uses for aspirin for colon cancer. I mean, you know, and so his.
- [101:03]
Chris Williamson
Belief, repurposing old drugs for exactly current unanswered.
- [101:08]
Andrew Huberman
So his belief as a physician, as a, as a card carrying member of that community is that the field of medicine has many cures in hand and excellent treatments in hand combined for the things that people are struggling with. You know, so then when I hear this stuff about well, low dose lithium, everyone, you know, maybe pinging that once a year for offsetting, offsetting the potential for Alzheimer's or now we're hearing a lot about the particulate and certain air pollution, you know, might be one of the primary players in causing dementia. You know, when I hear this stuff it's like we need to be testing existing medications. So the field of medicine, the fields of science, you know, as having been in this field of science for a long time, although now I'm in public education still faculty member at Stanford. The key thing thing to understand is that is it is a business of people. It's. There's a sociology to the business just like there's a sociology of podcasting in media, which you know, is a discussion to itself. But this is actually what really made me understand Rogan a lot better. I remember at one point some years back I asked him, I'm like where, where does your kind of like belief or skepticism in certain things come from? And he Just looked me dead in the eye, and he just said, because I know people.
- [102:18]
Chris Williamson
People.
- [102:19]
Andrew Huberman
And he. Anyone that knows Rogan knows he has a lot of different kinds of friends, and he interacts with a lot of different types of people. He's not narrow. He's extremely broad in his interactions, not just on his podcast. And I realized in that moment, I was like, okay, got it. He cast this really wide net, but he has a very selective filter about what he integrates. And it's because he understands people. The. The, you know, good and bad aspects of people.
- [102:46]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [102:47]
Andrew Huberman
And. And I think that's the kind of acumen that is only developed through life experience. And if you're a scientist or you're a physician and you're very entrenched in your field, you can be the best oncologist, the best ophthalmologist, the best neurologist, and if you're considered the best because of your knowledge within that silo or even multiple silos, but you don't have life experience and know people from different areas of. Of life, I guarantee you are not the physician I want to be treated by or that I want a family member treated by.
- [103:17]
Chris Williamson
Yep.
- [103:18]
Andrew Huberman
Because you have to understand not just the information and the source of the information in terms of paper and rigor and laboratory, you have to understand the motivations and almost the personality types of the people behind that work.
- [103:29]
Chris Williamson
It's so true. I mean, this was the beautiful baptism of running nightclubs for so long. I met a million people in person.
- [103:39]
Andrew Huberman
And their inhibitions are down because they're.
- [103:40]
Chris Williamson
They're drinking, and some things are tuned up, you know, aggression or. Or. Or openness or their humor or, you know, whatever it is that they're trying to do. It really reveals and kind of, I guess exaggerates the who people are. But, like, you become really, really good at judging people and really, really good at assessing this person's motivations. How. How sort of real is this? It's been a couple of times on the POD where I've sat down with someone and I'm like, I don't know what I think about this person. And after I've sat down with them, like, I know and I know in one of a couple of directions, I'm like, that was good or whatever. But, like, I. When I.
- [104:22]
Andrew Huberman
When you didn't believe what they were.
- [104:23]
Chris Williamson
Saying, we're not going to go. We're not going to go.
- [104:25]
Andrew Huberman
I've had that experience. I won't mention. I guess, obviously, I would say, you know, 95% of 98 of our guests. I've felt that way. There was. There's only one or two instances that. That I got any kind of inkling that, like, they weren't as sure as they sounded or something of that sort. But. But I think that that's the. That's the good thing about podcasting is that it's not just an interview. Right? Like, you can ping people for ideas, and you can ping people around those ideas. You're not trying to. You're not trying to catch them in anything, but you really. I mean, it's funny because we're sitting across the. From. It's. It's like how you would get to know anybody. You would sit across from them and you would talk to them.
- [105:00]
Chris Williamson
It's in the smallest. I use this example of watching musicians on stage. So one of the things that I find coolest about anybody that does. Does anything a lot is not them doing the main thing, it's their transition activities within the thing. So, for instance, I spent a long time at university. If you put a pen in my hand, it just immediately starts moving through my fingers. I can't.
- [105:25]
Andrew Huberman
You're one of those. My students. If I look out, I kind of blur my vision. I. I'm not teaching in the classroom much these days, although soon I will again. And it's like. It's like watching a bunch of propellers.
- [105:35]
Chris Williamson
A Mexican wave of pen twirling. Yeah, I can't. I just. Because I did, I put a pen in my hand and I do that. One of my friends, Zach, the way that he takes. If he Bing. If one of his guitar picks goes while he's playing, he's warming up for me on tour. If one of his guitar picks goes, like, the way that he fucking, like, just. Just seamlessly snags another one, like, that's what's fucking cool. Because that is. This moment of unconscious betrayal of pattern would be a way to think about it. A drummer that, like, snaps a stick and you'll just see. And he'll switch seamlessly. Or he'll be playing. He was playing the hi hat with his right hand, and his right drumstick goes. So he'll switch, and you'll see him move with his left, and then. And then it's back out, and you're like, dude, that's so fucking cool. I love seeing people that are the. The way that the guys will set up their cameras. Like, I'll see the guys taking a shot, and they'll need to change something. And I'm like, you just did Six things in two seconds.
- [106:31]
Andrew Huberman
It's like hyper proficiency.
- [106:32]
Chris Williamson
It's so fucking cool. Right? I think that's so sick. I want to touch on what you said before which was sort of the, the fixation that people have groups, different groups have on stuff. What do you make of the attempt of legacy media to turn get more high quality protein into a political issue? I think this has been one of the most interesting patterns to see that like protein has become politically coded somehow and obviously this is kind of for the health and wellness industry kind of old hat now to talk about like protein is prioritizing. Protein is something that you probably should consider or at least be aware of. But yeah, what, what do you make of that? The fact that protein consumption has become.
- [107:15]
Andrew Huberman
Politicized and resistance training for a little while, although I think the wave caught to stimulate the idea that everybody, men, women, young and old should be resistance training so you can no longer like kind of bro science resistance training. Although I, I, I have to say even though I have respect for certain elements of bodybuilding, I do think that, that this, the body, the, the bodybuilding culture I think has kind of distracted from what's possible with resistance training as a positive health stimulus. A lot of people are still averse.
- [107:47]
Chris Williamson
To it because you look at people who are bodybuilders and don't exactly see the picture of health.
- [107:51]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. And I think it's also the, the way that bodybuilding changes the entire relationship to food in general and to life in general and it, and, and any, look, anything that's so, look, I, I, I think Darian Yates is an amazing athlete. Right. I can think of him as an athlete and what he did and the way he did it. And I knew Mike Mentzer and he was the one that.
- [108:10]
Chris Williamson
You knew Mike Men.
- [108:10]
Andrew Huberman
I knew Men.
- [108:11]
Chris Williamson
No way.
- [108:12]
Andrew Huberman
He was, he sold me my first training program by phone. I can tell you the story. I'll, I'll tell you that in a moment. New Men. I write about him in my, my book that comes out later this later next year. New Mener had a lot of conversations about mentor, not just about resistance training but also about school and philosophy. He was one of the people that really encouraged me to get serious about my academics.
- [108:33]
Chris Williamson
Mike Men was part of your origin story.
- [108:35]
Andrew Huberman
Mike Mener, who I'll just, I, I'll, I'll get back to the, the trad media thing. But yes, I signed up for a program. He, he's the reason why still to this day, you know, since I was 16, 50 now as I mentioned still train three, maybe four days a week. Not one set to failure, but, you know, keeping set volume low. One thing that isn't advertised a lot Mike didn't talk about in his seminars is that a lot of what determines total set number is how well you. You can really direct the effort toward the muscle you're trying to target. So some people are exceptionally good at that. I think Darian was. Other people, no matter how hard they try and curl with just their biceps and forearms and anterior delts, it's going everywhere. And so a lot of it is.
- [109:18]
Chris Williamson
About being able to muscle connection.
- [109:20]
Andrew Huberman
One thing he was very clear about is that as you get better at training, the neural component of contracting the muscles that you're trying to contract, you actually can get by with fewer sets because you're able to direct more intensity to those muscle groups. So over time, I found, yeah, I. I probably do somewhere between six and eight sets per muscle group. But with two, I can not slaughter the muscle, but I can. I can get where I need to go. But I like training, so sometimes I'll do more. But, yeah, mentor was great. I signed up for this program. My mother was like. I was 16 or maybe even 15 years old. And she was like, why is this grown man calling the house? Because back then you do, like a phone consultation. And Mike didn't talk. Mike didn't barked. He'd be like, listen. And the only thing, you know. And he would say, he's like, and the number one thing is you don't want to listen to anyone else besides me. He told me, he said. He said most people in gyms are explicative morons. He said, they're morons. He kept saying, these people have the intelligence of a toad. And he would just like, yell and yell. And then he'd recommend these six sales call, and then he'd recommend these anoran books. And then the. I even had some sleep issues when I was in college because my dorm was really loud. You know what? You know the advice he gave me, this is so wild. And I have a friend from college who's now a fertility doctor doc here in, In. In la. And he remembered the story. Mener. This is terrible advice. He said, get a jug of white wine and just have like a half mug of white wine. If you wake up in the middle of night, you'll fall back asleep. First of all, it doesn't work at all.
- [110:43]
Chris Williamson
Okay, so, like, hit and miss.
- [110:44]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, I listen. Mike was an extreme guy, but. But he gave. He actually said. He said, stay away from Anabolics. Which I did. He said, said, enjoy learning to train hard. Enjoy your training hard. He said, even though he wasn't a fan of cardio, like get out and live life. And he said, and read really good books. And we gave him his book list and, and what a sick time to that day. I still follow the same. Yeah, Mike was amazing. And then when he died, I heard later I was very, it was very sad. I mean we'd been touched a little bit because I was in Santa Barbara and he was down in LA at that time. Okay, so mener protein politicization.
- [111:20]
Chris Williamson
What's going on?
- [111:21]
Andrew Huberman
Well, traditional media is like will take anything at this point as an attempt to gulp for air because they're, they're really struggling, right? I mean there are some decent journalists in traditional media, right? There are. I think that they. But they'll not just by quote unquote politicizing something gives them something to say about it. Right? 1 gram of protein per pound of lean or desired body mass is kind of the, the standard thing now. Some people less, some people a little bit more. Okay, fine, fine. I think we all get that. That's the goal. If you get a little less, you're probably fine. If you get a little more, you're probably fine. If you get tons more, you're probably not fine. You get tons less, probably not fine. Animal proteins clearly superior as a, as a pro quality protein to calorie ratio, right? You give me an 8 ounce piece of steak or you have to eat half a jar of peanut butter, which is not protein, it's a bunch of fat with a little bit of protein in it. Okay, so why do they politicize it? Well, well, because they're struggling. They're struggling big time in terms of how to generate revenues. I mean people expect to get their news. Two things have certainly happened. I believe Ezra Klein on this, that people are no longer digesting their news as local news as much. It's more national level news and international level news. And look, putting your name in a title or Rogan's name in a title or you know, is going to generate clicks. And if you. And saying great things about people, kind things about generally doesn't.
- [112:48]
Chris Williamson
He's such a nice guy.
- [112:49]
Andrew Huberman
Doesn't. Yeah, I mean, listen, I've had a few nice articles written and some of the health magazines will pull protocols and things and I love it and, and you know, I would say things in the health section of the New York Times very often parrot what I've covered and other people have Covered. And they do it differently. But you can often predict what they're going to cover by looking at the various health podcasts, Peter's, et cetera. Peter was just on 60 Minutes. Peter Atia.
- [113:10]
Chris Williamson
So I text him. I text him about it and he said. Said. Has he said. Nice to see. Nice to see traditional media not accusing me of something unspeakable for once.
- [113:20]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. I mean, they seem to focus a bit much on, like, how much he charges his clients and this kind of thing as.
- [113:26]
Chris Williamson
I mean, the fact that he said that that was a sort of clean and fair interview, despite the fact that there is some.
- [113:35]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [113:36]
Chris Williamson
Going on in there.
- [113:36]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [113:37]
Chris Williamson
It just goes to. I.
- [113:38]
Andrew Huberman
Well, listen, they're lo. They've. To say they're losing power is an understatement. They've lost power. They. To some degree, there's still some trust there from a number of people. And to some degree, you know, every topic, health topic in particular, seems to go through the same arc. It's like nobody knows about it except in niche cultures. Let's just take the glymphatic system. Nobody knew about it. This one woman discovered it. It was not suppressed, but it was kind of knocked back. Then it came out as all the rage. Then 2020, a few years ago, there's study. Not as much glymphatic clearance as we thought. And, you know, occasionally someone said, oh, it's not a. Not a real thing. One mouse study. One mouse study. Didn't see it. Right. And I know the history of the glymphatic research, so it's very clear it's there. Okay, so then the. The arc is. Okay. Exciting, exciting, exciting. Take dopamine. Dopamine Nation, Anna Lemke's beautiful work. Then about 18 months later, it's. Well, it's not, you know, it's just in my devalue. Listen, creatine next. Like, you can guarantee that in eight weeks or six months or whenever it is, it's going to be creatine. Not as important as we thought. For. There's just the natural arc.
- [114:47]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [114:47]
Andrew Huberman
And then it's the. Yes. The things that work still work and the things that don't. Don't. It's very rare for anything to sort of capture and then just get. Get completely obliterated. Like, I was talking about delaying caffeine by, you know, 90 minutes or so. If you crash in the afternoon, it's a great thing to try. Then there was. So it was. Got a lot of positive attention. Then there was the pushback show Me, the clinical trial, show me the benefits. It's like, no, it's. Show me whether or not you crash in the afternoon. Try it if you want or don't. Like, hey, easy. It's a suggestion. It's grounded in mechanistic science. But even the, Even the coffee accounts on YouTube were pissed off about this. Listen, the big thing that I guess the direct answer to your question is you're taking their paycheck. Do you know how much these reporters make? You're taking their paycheck. The irony of it is if you look at some of the advertisements in traditional media, it's like Fendi bags and like all these, like, fancy things and in some cases, dietary supplements. So they are our competitors. But, and this is the critical caveat, they're competing with us. I never think about what they're doing. I never. Look, I don't care if somebody says, I'm like, okay, I'm never going to modify my content on the basis of what any of these traditional media houses are doing. They are in the chase position now, 100%. Now, does that mean that we will always be, you know, leaders in this space? No one has to be very careful to not assume that, right, there's some kid, some guy or gal someplace who's going to take my lunch someday. That's the way, you know, And I'm not a kick out the ladder from you. I'll give. I'll hop on Instagram live and give people 100 suggestions about how to get their content out more broadly from. Based on what, what I know. I'm just not that way. I was weaned in a culture of science where you train people. My students are now on the job market or have labs, et cetera. That's the way it's done. But traditional media are competitors of podcasts. That's why they've started podcasts. You and I are very fortunate that we started podcasts in the. In. I wouldn't say the first wave, but, like, if we were making analog second wave punk. I mean, listen, when did yours launch? 2021.
- [116:51]
Chris Williamson
Did it really?
- [116:52]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, January 2021.
- [116:53]
Chris Williamson
Fucking hell. I thought it was before that.
- [116:55]
Andrew Huberman
In 2020, I was going on a lot of podcasts. I went on like £30 podcasts. And prior to that, I was starting to teach a little bit on Instagram and that kind of thing. But, I mean, podcasting is growing like crazy. I mean, I. I want to encourage people to make content, but the content that I think is most important is not content about content. This Is the, this is the really dangerous hook for people. Content, about content. And also you'll find that the people who have very successful podcasts tend to be people who are successful in something else first. You certainly have that. Lex, Me, Rogan, Rick Rubin, I mean, Theo, Whitney, it goes on and on. I mean, Tim Dillon, et cetera. Like, and there's a bridge. There's a natural overlap between what people were trained to do and what they're doing in their podcast. But there are very few podcasts. I mean, I'm sure there, there are some that are just like someone decides like, I'm a podcaster. So the, the person who wants to be influential, for lack of a better phrase in media, they want to teach, they want to teach science, they want to encourage thinking and make a living doing it, Encourage health practices, make a living doing it. I would encourage them to go do something else first that they really enjoy because that, the structure of that and, and that very thing is going to inform their content. Very few people are going to like if they start giving out degrees in, in, in media, social media. I don't think it's going to be very useful.
- [118:18]
Chris Williamson
Whitney Cummings got the best take on this. She says in order for art to imitate life, you have to learn, live a life so good. And it's one of the challenges you get is people become more successful that their ability to generate new ideas decreases because their life is increasingly out of touch. It's the comedian who only talks about dinners, shows and airports and hotels on stage because that's the entirety of their life experience.
- [118:45]
Andrew Huberman
Or their craft. Or sorry, gingerbread, but. Or their craft. I mean, you said I'm leading an increasingly eccentric life. I mean, the reason I have a pet octopus is I always wanted one. I had cuttlefish. I love aquarium. I have this art project with someone who's a kind of.
- [118:57]
Chris Williamson
Are you going to try and justify buying an octopus as like, inspiration for.
- [119:03]
Andrew Huberman
I'm going to teach an octopus how to use an iPad.
- [119:05]
Chris Williamson
Okay.
- [119:06]
Andrew Huberman
And I'm going to decode what the camouflage patterns of the octopus mean for thinking.
- [119:11]
Chris Williamson
Is it a mimic octopus? What is it?
- [119:12]
Andrew Huberman
No. Well, right now I have a, I have an Indonesian octopus that's not very interactive. I want a Pacific 2 spot. This is a whole thing. It's kind of to open up some, some trauma for me. But no, I just came on. I'm getting a new, new octopus soon. Caribbean Day octopus is, is probably on the way. But, but the, the, the idea is actually to use AI to try and deconvolve what the octopus is thinking and maybe even communicate with the octopus. They are very smart. I had 40 cuttlefish in my lab in San Diego. They are so smart. And they're also cephalopods, cousins of the octopus. So. But the reason I'm doing that, the reason I have my art projects, the reason I extended my book for a year to add more studies, because I like learning. And I, as my. A friend of mine said, he's very intelligent guy. He's a tattooer, among other things. He's an exceptional artist. And he said people with interests are interesting. You know what's not interesting? Other people's failures, Other people's minor wins. Like, there's nothing more boring than. Than that. But it hooks in the short term. So social media, I think of as a very. We should go up to Clouds Rest sometime and hike Clouds Rest in Yosemite. It's beautiful, but there's this very narrow rock bridge out to the top, and on either side, it's slide to your death. Slide to your death. And so I'm always doing. I don't get down on all fours, but it's. It's. It's precarious, but it's beautiful. When you get to the top and it opens up into a big, flat spoon, you're above Half Dome. It's gorgeous. I go there as often as I can, but on either side, you fall to your death. And I always think of the Internet and much of life like this. On one side is the fall to your death that is numbing out by going online. And the other one is drama. Like, who's. I mean, I don't want to name names because I don't want to give it any. Like, recently there was an online drama in the fitness community. And I was like, I unfollowed a bunch of accounts. I was like, this is the most boring, stupid thing I've ever seen in my entire life. And this seeding my thoughts. Yeah, this is seeding my ability. And, like, I gotta go back to reading good books. I'm going into my basement, you know, so you're allowed to unfollow accounts that you're not learning from or that are pulling you into either numbing out or drama. The drama piece is very serious because it gives the illusion that there's something meaningful there. But you realize this is just like, it's. It's nothingness.
- [121:28]
Chris Williamson
And it is. That's a fascinating way to look at it. It is kind of the empty calories of the content world that you leave this having been given the sort of simulacrum of learning something. But if somebody said, okay, after watching this 10 minute, half hour, one hour expose or deconstruction, what do you know that you didn't know at the start? You go, well, I know about what this person and this person said to each other, about each other and how the interplay and look, deconstructing someone's psychological profile, understanding how human motivations work. I'm fascinated by the way that sort of social interaction, hierarchy, status games, all of that stuff. But I'm not learning that. I'm not reading the Status Game by Will Storr.
- [122:17]
Andrew Huberman
Well, you're a thinker. I mean, so when I mentioned this rock bridge, I mean, it's the visual I keep in mind when I'm trying to get into solid work or solid thinking or going on social media. Like there's a narrow band of very useful things to learn and produce, participate in.
- [122:31]
Chris Williamson
I think that infinity of that, you.
- [122:33]
Andrew Huberman
Know, numbing out or drama on either side, the fall to the death, little by little. But what I, what I think is that because you are somebody who thinks deeply about human nature. I mean, I listened to your episode with Scott Galloway and I'm not just saying this, what they call glazing on it. I, we used to just call it kissing somebody's ass. So I'm not trying to kiss your ass because. But like this is, there's an awesome episode and your command of statistics and data and understanding, your ability to frame it and remember these, it's world class.
- [122:58]
Chris Williamson
Thank you.
- [122:58]
Andrew Huberman
And you do that through hard work, but also through life experience. So I do think that living life in a way where you're collecting data, so to speak, and you're understanding things is wonderful. But I guess what turned me off to this one particular drama in such a strong way was it's yet another example of something I've seen thousands of times before. There was no new learning for me there, except that humans are just being humans. And so at some level, like there's at some point the novelty of life, the excitement of life, the enriching parts of, of life are about new experiences. Sometimes it's about experiencing the same thing. And go, oh yeah, this is a general theme of me or of them or of life and understanding human nature. But at some point you're like, this is just yet another drama on the schoolyard. This is just, this is, reminds me of. And it sometimes useful to make the parallels. This is like in junior high school when so and so said something about so and so and so you go, there's no new data. This would be like running, you know, I publish it some papers. I don't want to do those expressions experiments again because if, especially if I get the exact same result right now, if I get a different result, that's different, but I was seeing the same thing again. And so I think in order to develop a healthy relationship to social media, which is really a big slice of life now for many people of all.
- [124:15]
Chris Williamson
Ages and a skill that's only been around for 10 years, right.
- [124:18]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, I think you have to be extremely conscious of, of like when it got you and why, you know, I mean, you had a nightclub, you couldn't. You might have to respond to a catastrophe or something happening, but like you can enjoy yourself there too. But you were there to work. You were able to navigate that chaotic environment and get things done.
- [124:38]
Chris Williamson
Well, a good example of this, you know, post nut clarity after copulation, the devil's laughter can be heard. I think Schopenhauer said that an equivalent is post content clarity. So after you've finished consuming a thing, how do you feel? Do you feel enlightened, hopeful, peaceful? Do you want to ring your mum and say that you miss her? Do you want to talk to your friends? Or do you feel like the world's out to get you and that there's less than is needed for everybody and you shouldn't really trust people and you're a bit sort of tight and tense and your shoulders are up and there's a ringing in your ears.
- [125:11]
Andrew Huberman
Well, here's my litmus test. After I spend a bit of time on social media, I ask myself lately, later, do I remember anything from being on there? You know, the reflection, Was there any learning? Did I learn anything? Listen, I learned some things from your discussion with Scott. I still got a little bit more to go in the discussion, so don't quiz me on it just yet, but I intend to think about it. In fact, this morning I went out for a run. I listened to a podcast of somebody that I'm not particularly big fan of, but I wanted to get their perspective and I thought a bit about some of the things that you and Scott had discussed.
- [125:43]
Chris Williamson
Dust.
- [125:44]
Andrew Huberman
And I was reflecting on it, right, because it's a. That's learning and that's the anti forgetting process. I can't recall something I saw on social media yesterday that was very stimulating, but I watched that 60 Minutes episode and it gave me some ideas and insights about what's going on in the world or what might not be going on in the world. And you know, thinking about your experiences is so critical to placing value on them, making them meaningful for you. What I'm not interested in is just an endless deluge of sensory. An input that goes nowhere, especially if it impedes other things. So a little bit more reflection. 10 minutes, 1 minute, 5 seconds of just asking did I remember anything?
- [126:26]
Chris Williamson
Do I want to do that again? As opposed to just the infinite will you mentioned, I think this a fucking great take. The arc of something new gets introduced. There is excitement, there is reaction, there is criticism and then usually acceptance. Presuming that this thing is like true or valid or whatever.
- [126:44]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, like creatine. Right. It's been around forever. I was laughing so hard.
- [126:47]
Chris Williamson
That's what I want to talk about. So what do you think is the next frontier for public acceptance? Because I would say vitamin D3 was.
- [126:57]
Andrew Huberman
Check.
- [126:57]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, that. That's already done.
- [126:59]
Andrew Huberman
It's. It's gone through the cycle.
- [127:01]
Chris Williamson
Correct. It's out.
- [127:01]
Andrew Huberman
We should actually plot this out. Be fun to do a post. We should do a post together which is by the way public careers follow the same trajectory. You show up, people are like who's this person? Then it's like oh, you're very excited that then there's always up here's the flaw. And then. And then there's a very simple equation as to whether or not that they are going to continue and continue to have popularity. Very simple equation. Was the sort of event more useful or interesting than what they contribute? And if the answer is yeah, that was actually more exciting than any one thing they'd ever said in terms of usefulness, they then they're gone.
- [127:35]
Chris Williamson
Yeah that owned by.
- [127:36]
Andrew Huberman
They fade out at different rates. Their half life and disappears. But if what you're providing is useful, if the person is. If they still. People still want you around, so to speak. It outlives that. I mean this recent drama, I don't want to dance around it too much but this recent drama, I was like this. Nothing could be more trivial or stupid but I realize the reason it's probably. I'm not portending this and I don't wish ill on anyone but it's probably going to pseudo end the career of this online person is because it was much more interesting in its drama than any value add that they were they had given.
- [128:07]
Chris Williamson
Oh, that's interesting.
- [128:08]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. And. And they. And they projected a fair amount of arrogance in their delivery of content and things. And if you do that you're setting yourself Up. Right. That's a very, that's a big attractor early on.
- [128:16]
Chris Williamson
People, people like a sort of deserved downfall of the person who's out of touch. 100.
- [128:21]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. There's no coming back from that in a real way.
- [128:24]
Chris Williamson
Okay, so vitamin D3.
- [128:25]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, vitamin D3.
- [128:26]
Chris Williamson
The cycle. Creatine is in the cycle, right? Creatine is protein.
- [128:30]
Andrew Huberman
So is it vitamin. I would say vitamin D came first, then protein. Right, protein. And the protein thing is politicized a little bit too because there's something about meat that's considered. Right.
- [128:39]
Chris Williamson
Coated.
- [128:39]
Andrew Huberman
Which is. And then creatine.
- [128:42]
Chris Williamson
You know, the reason that creatine I don't think is going to get politically coded is it's been so heavily pushed by women for women. Rhonda Patrick, a lot of like Kelly Levesque, if you know her super hardcore female led audience. It's important for women. Despite the fact you're probably going to gain, you know, three pounds of weight.
- [129:04]
Andrew Huberman
Water. Water weight.
- [129:05]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, weight. You're gonna, your scale's gonna be heavy, maybe you're gonna look a little bit fluffier, but you can get rid of it by stopping it. Right. It's, you know, it's like having a scale that's off. It's like as soon as you curves are in. Yeah.
- [129:16]
Andrew Huberman
It's the one way in which things are not mimicking the 90s when everything was super, super wavy. I mean I came up in the 90s when it was like the, the expectation on women was really extreme.
- [129:24]
Chris Williamson
You know, the environmental security hypothesis. Sit back, let me give you this one. So there is evidence to suggest that men prefer thicker women during times of economic downturn and thinner women during times of economic uplift. So if the study, original study was done on students that were in halls of residence and they were in eating at, you know like dinner time together, where it would be provided by the halls of residence. And they showed men images of women of varying sizes before they ate and after they ate. Multiple iterations, all over the place. Before men ate, they preferred the bigger women. After men ate, they preferred the thinner women. And you can track the.
- [130:06]
Andrew Huberman
There's an alternative interpretation.
- [130:08]
Chris Williamson
Yes, yes, yes, yes. You can track the sort of, of public popularity of body size, not shape. Waist to hip ratio always remains the same typically but of body size overall to how the economy's doing. And it's called the environmental security hypothesis. Basically the human behavioral ecology stuff. MC and Murphy taught me about this University of Melbourne. He's brilliant. He's out with Candice Blake's Lab. And what it seems is happening is if you feel secure in your environment, you are not queuing through a mate or. Well, she can survive a tough time of a famine because times aren't that tough. Resources are abundant. Therefore, I don't need a woman who can signal that she can get extra calories and is more sort of metabolically well reserved. You might be able to say the opposite is also true. And this tracks the economy tracks with the preference of body size. Wild. Wild.
- [131:01]
Andrew Huberman
I love it. How I love your command of this literature. It's awesome. I mean, I just remember the 90s being a time of very like, wafy model. And because I was. Came up through the skateboarding thing when I departed from biology, before I went back to it, they had models like Kate Moss who are extremely thin. And actually in friends of ours who were skateboarders in New York in Washington Square park, our friend Peter B.C. was kind of discovered in New York and ended up in Calvin Klein ads. Skinny skateboarder, right. I mean, he became a firefighter. So now he's like. He's. Jack appears still around a super good guy, but. And. And really into his health now and stuff. But we can kind of chuckle about the fact that like in the 90s, like, that was the look. It was the Kurt Cobain look. And as that whole thing.
- [131:46]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [131:46]
Andrew Huberman
And the larger guys are like, you know, it was. It wasn't Mark Wahlberg back then. It was Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Remember? And he was in the Calvin Klein ads with Kate Moss.
- [131:54]
Chris Williamson
Look at the size now.
- [131:55]
Andrew Huberman
And he was. Well, he was pretty built then by. By those standards. So. But now compared to the sort of tip. Typical sort of expectation of. Of muscularity in.
- [132:03]
Chris Williamson
In men, that big inflation thing is huge. You watch bigger, stronger, faster. Mark Bell's thing.
- [132:06]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, yeah. It's a great movie.
- [132:07]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [132:08]
Andrew Huberman
Watch it some time ago.
- [132:08]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. It's 22,007, I think, anyway, so. D3.
- [132:13]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [132:13]
Chris Williamson
Protein, right. Creatine. Creatine's in it.
- [132:16]
Andrew Huberman
Creatine's made the cut. Although I think because it's a powder and they're trying to put in gummies and they. The flavored versions are really. The flavored momentous version, by the way, is awesome. It's like I always had a heart a bit.
- [132:26]
Chris Williamson
Little pastel thing. Right. It's like a chewable.
- [132:29]
Andrew Huberman
Tastes like sweet tarts. It. They taste too good.
- [132:32]
Chris Williamson
They've just.
- [132:33]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [132:34]
Chris Williamson
Jeff sent me.
- [132:35]
Andrew Huberman
In fact, I had the candy with creatine.
- [132:37]
Chris Williamson
Right. With one gram of like a one.
- [132:40]
Andrew Huberman
Gram Problem is I. So I. I've been taking creatine since I was probably 15, 16. I do a. I actually do the loading thing where I'll take like 30, 40 grams a day for a week and then cut back to 10 grams a day. And then I do a washout every 16 weeks or so where I stop taking it completely. I know this is very unconventional for a week and you drop some weight. It's actually interesting to see how much strength you hold on to in that week.
- [133:03]
Chris Williamson
This is what I am without the assistance of 10 grams of creatine.
- [133:06]
Andrew Huberman
I just do it for me. I. I don't.
- [133:08]
Chris Williamson
Well, look, you're talking to the school of Mike Mensi. You're.
- [133:10]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [133:11]
Chris Williamson
Okay, what's. What's next? What do you think?
- [133:13]
Andrew Huberman
Magnesium.
- [133:14]
Chris Williamson
Okay.
- [133:14]
Andrew Huberman
Magnesium, threonator, bis glycinate. I know there are multiple forms, you know, you. Malate for soreness, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Citrate is laxative. You know, I was say. But b. Bis glycinate. And. And 3 and 8 cross the blood brain barrier more readily. I would say pre sleep, you know, 30, 60 minutes before sleep. But, you know, I had our chair of autolaryngology, head and neck surgery at Stanford. Okay. Came on my podcast, obviously studies the hearing system and she said that magnesium is protective against hearing loss. First of all, hearing loss, low level hearing loss is associated with dementia. Less sensory input. Okay. Deaf people can be obviously very cognitively strong, but they're. They have other ways of bringing in sensory input. But partial hearing loss strongly correlated with dementia. Hearing loss, very common after concerts in industrial workers. Things like that. Magnesium protects against hearing loss. Why? The endolymph in which the hair cells that vibrate in response to sound. That endolymph is like a thick kind of fluid, viscous fluid is. Magnesium is a prominent feature of that endolymph. And it gets depleted by very loud sound to some extent, but encouraging. More magnesium in the endolymph is protective against hair. Hair cell loss, which is hearing loss, which is permanent. Even though it's low level, it accumulates over time. So magnesium, magnesium for cognition, magnesium for sleep. The whole argument that there's less magnesium in the soil nowadays because of the way farming is done, it's just been depleted. So you can get less of the.
- [134:42]
Chris Williamson
Virome and the virus.
- [134:43]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Your kale of yesterday is not your kale of today, so to speak. So I think magnesium supplementation is going to go through a wave of like. Ah, they're just talking about that like Chris and Andrew are talking about that on podcast. This is Rose. Then it's going to show up. Oh wow. Like, you know, we've got the, you know, chair of autolaryngology, head and neck surgery at Stanford talking about magnesium supplementation to offset things like tinnitus, maybe a bit, but also protect against hearing loss, et cetera, et cetera. And then it's going to be like magnesium, everyone should be taking magnesium. And then, you know, what do I'll happen, You know, it's only an 11% difference in this population, etc. Etc. I think this is one moment where revisiting just very briefly, the data on alcohol is worthwhile. It's been so many years of alcohol isn't a problem. Then alcohol is actually good for you. One or two drinks a night, as long as it's red wine, then it's bad for you. And then recently it was, no, it's actually not that bad for you. And then now finally Stanford, Keith Humphries and, and colleagues at Stanford did an analysis, analysis of all those previous papers and essentially found that the control groups in those studies that concluded moderate drinking is good for you were completely off. They were, they were comparing sick people to less sick people in one case. And it turns out that when you, when you normalize for the con, for proper controls and you look at all the studies you do the meta analyses, without fail, zero is better than any one or two per week, you're probably fine, still do all the things that you're supposed to to promote your health. Moderate drinking is bad for you in terms of elevating cancer or risk, certainly disrupting sleep and microbiome and a bunch of other things that aren't good if you want to drink, drink. But we are now landed squarely in zero is better than any. And those aren't my data. Those are data from the best people for analyzing the large scale studies, the smaller studies across the board. And that I can refer you to the, the, the analysis of the analysis.
- [136:31]
Chris Williamson
Dude, the fucking quite solid that Lancet article, that Lancet study from what, 2016, 17. So I the reason that in the UK is called Six Months Sober Limited is because the first thing that I ever did before I even launched the podcast was I was like elective sobriety. As somebody who didn't have a drinking problem was so beneficial to me as a productivity strategy as a guy in his 20s that because northeast of the UK club promoter, stopping drinking was revolutionary decade ago. Like what he'd oh my God, like he's Crazy. It's like the, you know, Brian Johnson fucking penis injection. Like the Ben Greenfield.
- [137:14]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [137:14]
Chris Williamson
Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, my God, like, why are you doing this thing now? You know, low and no is very sort of common. And I was like, I want to get other people to do this. I think that would be cool. And I was like, if I can teach people to go sober for six months, that'll be fucking sick. And instead of registering it as, like, modern wisdom limited, before I did my modern wisdom, I was like, I'll do. I'll do six months sober and, like, I'll teach people that this is, like, real good for them. And I was. I, one to one, coached four people through, I think, six months of it to, like, test whether or not my approach had done. It was daily coaching and people would follow this course and do all the rest of it. But, yeah, that Lancet thing was like, the. My foundational scientific justification. But it's like, okay, these are all of the reasons that the outcome is good, as you said. It's like, just do the thing and see if you feel better. Like, do push your caffeine by 90 minutes and tell me if you don't have a crash later that day, like, easy experiment. I don't need to explain to you the mechanism. If you can get the outcome that you're looking for. The same thing as I learned from you. What is it? A locomotion with lateral eye movement on a morning walk down regulates anxiety big time.
- [138:17]
Andrew Huberman
Not if you're looking at your phone.
- [138:19]
Chris Williamson
I'd been doing that. I'd been doing morning walk thing from maybe Mark Bell's, like, postprandial thing for as long as I can remember. Right.
- [138:26]
Andrew Huberman
Like, fan efforting's been big.
- [138:27]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. My total, like, obsessive bro era when I had this ridiculously calm, convoluted morning routine, which, like, escape velocity me out of being the adult infant. I was as a club promoter and, like, I'll do meditation and loads of gratitude and all the rest of. And I was like, if I wake up and I'm on the wrong side of the bed and I go for a walk and I come back like, huh, doesn't feel as hard as it did before. So I didn't need you to tell me that. It's because of the locomotion and the passage of stuff moving past you as your focal point stays the same and the lateral eye movement downright. I'm like, I didn't. It's great that I now know the mechanism as you said earlier on because it sort of justifies the buy in. I have this sort of odd kind of investment and I'm almost more. The fact that I found it myself then it gets justified by the science. I'm like, yes, like I.
- [139:09]
Andrew Huberman
Well, I think there's an interaction there. Look, I, I mean the placebo effect is very real. The mechanism underlying what you're describing, also very real, independent of placebo effect. I think that what I'm referring to is the buy in of people understanding a bit of underlying mechanism for the things that clearly work. Like, do you need to understand that there are three forms of, of a stimulus for hypertrophy? You know, damage to the muscle, hyperplasia.
- [139:29]
Chris Williamson
Hypertrophy. Yeah.
- [139:30]
Andrew Huberman
Do you need to. Do you. No. But can it inform better choices about training? Yes. Do you need to understand what those are in order to grow a particular muscle group? No, but if you understand a bit of what's likely happening under the hood, it affords you tremendous flexibility. It's also. Look, I also believe that knowledge and gaining knowledge, not only learning, but learning and doing, is what humans thrive on. I believe in the pursuit of knowledge, in learning. I mean a lot of my podcast content, like I'd love to tell you the protocol for this, but it's actually just really effing cool. And if you don't think it's cool, that's okay.
- [140:10]
Chris Williamson
Which is why you do your, you do your essentials thing right, which is kind of the stripped back protocols only.
- [140:16]
Andrew Huberman
Hyper diluted, critical science protocols only. But what you'll find is that people who do the buy in of learning a little bit about how something works, hopefully they learn something about cortisol and sunlight and these of kind kinds of things. It starts to make sense as to why you actually feel better when you, you feel more energized. It's not, it's not a placebo effect. What you're explaining is why it's not a placebo effect.
- [140:38]
Chris Williamson
That's a good. So yeah, so you get more buy in. What I think is for me is cool, and you said it earlier on, is if you know why this thing works, you can be a little bit more robust and flexible with how your strategy goes. You're not just do this thing if you don't know why you do the thing or what the mechanism is. Even at a very basic level, as soon as you don't do that precise thing, you have no fucking idea what.
- [141:04]
Andrew Huberman
You'Re doing or when things don't seem to go so. Right. So for instance, if you exercise late in the. Late in the day, and then the next morning you're like, I'm feeling sluggish. Like, is there something. No, actually, you had a cortisol bump last night. It's a negative feedback loop. Your cortisol is naturally suppressed. Get a bit more sunlight. The mechanisms. Excuse me. The. The protocols start to bridge together what to do in case A, B, C or D. Because you. You understand. Understand the. The principle below it, which is cortisol at one time impacts cortisol at another time through this thing called the negative feedback loop. Well, Josh Waitzkin, the great Josh Wait. Skin of.
- [141:33]
Chris Williamson
You know, I love that episode between. Dude, I.
- [141:35]
Andrew Huberman
You guys should sit down and have a conversation.
- [141:37]
Chris Williamson
I had to text you about it. I was like, this guy, me and George, my housemate, like, have obsessed over Josh the Art of Learning.
- [141:46]
Andrew Huberman
He's got another book in. In progress. I. I'm going to connect you guys because you guys would hit it off.
- [141:51]
Chris Williamson
I love it.
- [141:51]
Andrew Huberman
So. Well, he comes to the States pretty often. He lives out of Costa Rica. Yeah. He moved down to the jungle at one point. But he talks about knowing, like, the principles below the principles.
- [142:00]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [142:00]
Andrew Huberman
Or underneath the principles. So the principles. Underneath the principles. Then being a practitioner as well of some of those principles. Right. And then being connected to people in your field and related fields that deeply understand a stack of principles as well. That's what expertise really is. And this is why. And I'm not taking a dig at doctors, but this is why. Listen, recently I had a weird medical thing. I took a new prescription drug because somebody said. Said. Then I had what I thought was a vestibular thing. Turns out it was low blood pressure. Was diagnosed in one moment by a superb physician. By that afternoon, I was fine, but I could have just chased. Gone down the rabbit hole. I was getting all sorts of crazy suggestions about what to do. Look, just like they say in music, sport, I'll say it for podcasting, and in medicine and science, there are levels to this. Some people are way, way better because they have principles understood. And underneath, those principles are understood underneath, they understand how they connect up and connect down. And they know people that it's. It's one thing for a physician to say, this will handle your cholesterol, but more often than not, what a physician in one siloed aspect of medicine will suggest will create a side effect that will create a job someday for another physician in a different silo. And it's just the way the training. Training is done. And Fagenbaum would say this is also the way that drugs are categorized. You know, this drug is for this, this and this, and therefore nothing else. And you say, wait, no, that drug could potentially cure or treat many other things. And so he's exploring that in a serious way. And so and, and getting results, curing disease, literally. So I think it's not to say that people with degrees are idiots. It's that, let's hope not, right? I spent a lot of time getting degrees. It's that just having degrees in some cases not always are necessary but not sufficient. But most what is absolutely necessary and sufficient is to understand the major principles, the principles below those and how those connect and then to be able to contact people and to talk to people and to be a practitioner. Like I. It's very clear to me that your training as a nightclub owner informed you so strongly about human nature, also about biology, not just because you were staying up late and sleeping into the day.
- [144:13]
Chris Williamson
But.
- [144:15]
Andrew Huberman
The themes of what you experienced and learned are carried forward in the themes of every discussion that you have. And that's what being a real expert is. This is why Derek from More Plates, More dates, love him. The first time I saw it was like, what's these guys credentials? The guy's credentials are he's an actual expert, a true intellectual and a true expert Practitioner understands something at every level of granularity. And Derek is a really good example.
- [144:41]
Chris Williamson
Great example of like sufficient, necessary but not sufficient, given that he's outside of academia. Like he's not doing.
- [144:53]
Andrew Huberman
The academics are now going to him.
- [144:54]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [144:55]
Andrew Huberman
I watch Peter aa, who's a physician trained at Stanford and Johns Hopkins, asking.
- [144:59]
Chris Williamson
Derek about hormone each other, holding each other.
- [145:02]
Andrew Huberman
Peter is a super smart guy and he has his expertise. And so what you saw there was people who have different stacks of principles connecting.
- [145:08]
Chris Williamson
So cool, right? I. All right, I. I got to ask you this. You mentioned protein. Kind of the.
- [145:14]
Andrew Huberman
Or at least it's vitamin D, creatine. Vitamin D, protein, creatine. I think it's going to be magnesium.
- [145:20]
Chris Williamson
But what about diet? And if I was to put my little bet down from what I'm the whispers, as Rick Rubin would say, that I'm hearing fiber, I think, like the push toward fiber because it's kind of been the forgotten element of diet. I think that, that I'm beginning to hear an awful lot more about that.
- [145:39]
Andrew Huberman
I think in a nuanced way, I hope, because here's the deal. I had Mike Snyder, our former chair, or maybe still current chair of genetics at Stanford. He talked about blood sugar Regulation. Incredibly smart guy. He's really into biomarkers and he's almost 80. You got to look at it. He looks like he's like 55. Incredible, incredible health. And he and I were discussing that fiber. Certain forms of. Of fiber cause inflammation in some people. Why? A lot of people say they can't eat a lot of vegetables and this kind of thing. Some fibers inflame the gut and body of certain people. Other fibers do the opposite. Justin Sonnenberg and Christopher Gardner ran a study looking at low sugar fermented foods versus fiber effect on the gut microbiome. The outcome was very clear. Eating low sugar fermented foods decreases the so called inflation. Lamatome they call it, as opposed to genome, et cetera. Proteome. Okay. So reduces inflammation body wide. So eat low sugar fermented foods. Sauerkraut, the brine, kimchi, beer doesn't quite count. What's that? Kefir. These sorts of things. Yeah. So people can pick their favorite ones. I'm not a big kimchi fan. Only because it's. It's cut too coarse. If they would shred it, I would like it. But it's like I have a hard time chewing it.
- [146:52]
Chris Williamson
Dude. Kefir is the hack for this.
- [146:54]
Andrew Huberman
Kefir is great. I love the full fat Bulgarian yogurt. I listen, I love Greek food, but Bulgarian yogurt makes. Makes.
- [147:01]
Chris Williamson
You're a Bulgarian supremacist when it comes to the yogurt world.
- [147:04]
Andrew Huberman
Careful. You call me a Bulgarian supremacist. The Bulgarian people seem like very nice people. Have known a few, but the point was that it. Low sugar fermented foods reduce inflammation. They support the gut microbiome in a major way. The fiber group was divided. Some people who intentionally ingested more fiber had reduced so called inflammatome markers inflammation. And they looked at a lot of markers. The other half had greatly increased inflammation. This is why I think people like Paul Saladino and Forgive me. What was the. The original carnivore MD Big guy. Forgive me. Oh, darn it. He's been on Rogan. He's. He's big Jack back.
- [147:49]
Chris Williamson
Dude, he could be anybody.
- [147:50]
Andrew Huberman
He's just always eating a steak.
- [147:51]
Chris Williamson
Okay.
- [147:52]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, forgive me. I.
- [147:54]
Chris Williamson
Okay, okay.
- [147:55]
Andrew Huberman
Anyway. Shout out to him. I think, I think Dr. Sean Baker.
- [147:59]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [147:59]
Andrew Huberman
Will they talk about vegetables causing inflammation? Right? I think some people do experience inflammation from vegetables. I think so. I think fiber is going to make a big comeback, but we're going to have to discern between what. And Mike Snider really understands this best. Certain types of fiber are going to help people, people and harm others. Harm in the gentle sense, you know, increase inflammation, which could be severe for some people, autoimmune conditions, etc. Other forms of fiber are going to be beneficial. I don't think there are any, I don't think there are any specific forms of fiber that everyone is going to tolerate well. So this is going to be an issue if fiber is the next thing. I do think fiber is critical. I eat sauerkraut every day. I drink the brine off the sauerkraut. I actually drink the brine, then I put water back in it, add some salt, put it back in the fridge. Because I just like that after I go for a run or workout, is just delicious, right? It's delicious. And also if you go buy these fermented brines as a, as a product, they're outrageously expensive. And you're supposed to have like this much. Okay, I'm a grown man. I'm not going to have this much of anything. Okay. Certainly not food or drink. I'm going to have like a thimbles full of brine. It's like, no, I want to drink the whole thing. Like, come on. Okay. So, you know, and it, it greatly supports the gut and the healthy bacteria thrive in that environment. So, yes, I think this is the way it's going to go. If I were to say, okay, like what other other things? You know, melatonin. We didn't talk about melatonin, which I'm not a huge fan of, as you know, but melatonin had a run a long time ago. It was like a hormone in a supplement form and people were just downing this stuff. It's amazing it ever broke through.
- [149:31]
Chris Williamson
And you can get 50 milligram, 20 milligrams.
- [149:34]
Andrew Huberman
It's crazy. And it's.
- [149:35]
Chris Williamson
It.
- [149:35]
Andrew Huberman
And people will fight me all day on this and I'll fight right back until they quit. Because they're amazing. Animal data showing that it can suppress the, the hypothalamic gonad axis.
- [149:45]
Chris Williamson
Like, doesn't it delay puberty in adolescence?
- [149:48]
Andrew Huberman
Yes. And, and it's also true that there's melatonin in all the cells of your body that are not light, that are not suppressed by light, but rather stimulated by light, acts as an antioxidant. You don't want to be taking large amounts of melatonin in supplement form. Maybe a tiny bit every once in a while.
- [150:01]
Chris Williamson
I was told, not a little recently, that after a flight, a 5 milligram dose of melatonin was good. And I was like, what? Yeah, it's fucking tons. Because one Melanie milligram is like pretty much bottom of the U of effectiveness. Right. And then you get over into more like going on. And I'm like 5 milligrams. Why? And that was the reason? Oh, well, you've been exposed when you're flying. Typically you've been in a little bit of a dangerous environment. Inflammation and like antioxidant. I'm like, but is melatonin like the tip of the spear of the antioxidant world?
- [150:35]
Andrew Huberman
I mean it's a. It's a player. I mean, as long as we're on this, I think that something that's not a supplement, but there's likely going to. And hopefully going to be in the mainframe of discussion is that it's clear that long wavelength light, red light from sunlight, infrared, near infrared light is beneficial for us. Right. It's low energy, but it can pass into our body. It does support mitochondrial health. It sort of charges the mitochondria. I recently learned that the water surrounding the mitochondria actually absorb the red light the same way the ocean absorbs red light. And that's why the ocean appears blue.
- [151:04]
Chris Williamson
Reflects like little mini oceans.
- [151:06]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. And you know that mitochondria were essentially got in their back. Originated as bacteria that got into eukaryotic cells.
- [151:15]
Chris Williamson
No way.
- [151:16]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. They have their own little genome. Yeah. They were initially not part of us. It's some distant version of us.
- [151:21]
Chris Williamson
I got to inject. You just hold like keep that in your mind.
- [151:24]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [151:24]
Chris Williamson
Do you know how you inherit mitochondria through.
- [151:27]
Andrew Huberman
Through Mom.
- [151:28]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah. She's the most. How wild is that?
- [151:30]
Andrew Huberman
Well, you want to know what you like. The. You seem to. I can.
- [151:34]
Chris Williamson
Sex difference.
- [151:35]
Andrew Huberman
You seem to like sex difference. And you're hyper focused on mating and reproduction.
- [151:38]
Chris Williamson
So.
- [151:38]
Andrew Huberman
Let me. You should have kids, man.
- [151:41]
Chris Williamson
I can't wait. I'm ready.
- [151:41]
Andrew Huberman
Kids are. Well, you know, the two things. One, One of the. The only challenges I have with having you as a friend is that I have to constantly tell women in my direct messages that I'm not going to relay messages to you. Coming here today, I had several people. Not the most. Anyway, a lot of women try to get to you through me. Okay. The. The second thing is in terms of. Of sex differences, what were we talking about here?
- [152:08]
Chris Williamson
That your mitochondria comes.
- [152:12]
Andrew Huberman
Yes. Sorry. Different. Different brain circuit turned on there. There's something now happening in England. Okay. This has been approved for mitochondrial diseases. So there are people who have mitochondrial diseases and they want to have children, right. And so they, you know, they don't want to pass along these mitochondrial diseases. The, when the egg is fertilized, the sort of splitting of of the egg into, you know, multiple cell types that forms the blastocyst, which just means of cells, which is the early embryo etc. The mitochondrial DNA are intensely important for the physical pulling apart the spindles and things that pull those apart. They come from mom. Okay, so it's actually been solved that you can do three parent IVF to bypass.
- [152:54]
Chris Williamson
No way. So you can.
- [152:55]
Andrew Huberman
But this is now being done. So think about it. As women age, right. And their ovarian reserve declines, right? So does is the, the quote unquote quality of the eggs? We talk about quality of sperm because this is a. Definitely plays a role in terms of what are called Day 3 crashes. You know, when the embryo doesn't get, doesn't even become a blastocyst, it doesn't get past day three. It's typically attributed to the sperm. But a lot of the process is coming from the spindle and therefore the mitochondrial DNA of mom.
- [153:22]
Chris Williamson
So there's now a process where you.
- [153:24]
Andrew Huberman
Get two parents and let's say the woman has, let's say she has a mitochondrial issue, genetic issue, she doesn't want to pass pass on. Or let's say that she's, you know, in her late 40s or early 50s or maybe even mid-50s. They can take eggs presumably, presumably she still makes eggs. Take the nuclear DNA, put it into the. Essentially an egg that's had its nuclear DNA taken out but maintains its mitochondrial DNA and then fertilize with the sperm, obviously with the sperm from the, from the father. You end up with a child that has the nuclear DNA of the intended mom and has essentially surrogate mitochondrial DNA in the cytoplasm.
- [154:06]
Chris Williamson
Dude, this is.
- [154:06]
Andrew Huberman
So that's actually being done. Okay, that's. That was being done actually fairly often in from what I understand in Ukraine prior to the war, there were people in the United States traveling there. It's not legal here. They do it I believe in, in some places in the Middle east, in Mexico and certainly in England for, for mitochondrial disease. So this has been done. It works. But it brings up all sorts of interesting ethical considerations.
- [154:29]
Chris Williamson
Who is this child?
- [154:31]
Andrew Huberman
Well, the child has the nuclear DNA of one mom and the mitochondrial DNA of a different mom.
- [154:35]
Chris Williamson
Dude, this is so sick. Yeah, I only learned about the mitochondrial only comes from mum thing like three months ago and I kind of not really been able to Stop thinking about it. The reason is when you look at somebody and I'm going to use Kanye west as my example for this. Didn't think I was going to go there.
- [154:52]
Andrew Huberman
You really want this podcast flag? We might as well invite Lex and Kanye in.
- [154:56]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I know. Sit down. What I think about and this I total like the most bro. Science that we've done today is if you have a person who has the mitochondrial function of a V12 engine in a garage. Mitochondrial function of a V12 12 engine, but the psychological chassis of a Honda Civic. You have this sort of crazy out there energy, but you don't necessarily have the handling to be able to sort of direct it.
- [155:28]
Andrew Huberman
You described a lot of. Of teenagers and early 20s males.
- [155:33]
Chris Williamson
Well, yeah, of course.
- [155:33]
Andrew Huberman
Especially where I went to school in Santa Barbara.
- [155:35]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. With the testosterone pumping. But I just, I thought about that when you go, okay, well, you've got this combining of psychological profile, but this almost uniheritability when it comes to mitochondria, apparently it's like 99 point something percent is that. And I don't know if the other percent comes from the father or if it's like some weird like mut. I don't understand. What was it? Mito something. I did a mitochondrial test, so I've sent off a bunch of cheek swabs which will be cool. I'll get to see those when I come back home. Anyway, I just thought about Mum could be like this powerhouse or the opposite. You, you could have quite a low mitochondrial function, however that presents energy disposition, all the rest of it, but kind of the psychological predisposition of somebody that's like a fucking hard charging go getter. Lots of conscientiousness, industrious, highly disagreeable, low politeness, all this stuff. I thought, I just thought it was real interesting about how those combine.
- [156:28]
Andrew Huberman
Well, you're still gonna get. Absolutely. You're still gonna get genomic DNA from mom, right? You know those 23 chromosomes, I mean, you're gonna get genomic DNA from mom and from dad. What a mind bend, no pun intended, is. There's a woman whose laboratory is at Harvard named Catherine Dulac, who's a luminary in the field of neuroscience, who did some beautiful experiments showing that different brain areas are genetically identical to mom or to dad. Even in you and me, you have entire brain areas that are 100% the genes from dad. It's not. It's a myth that every cell is a, is a 50, 50 mix of genes from mom. Wow. Independent of the Mitochondrial DNA piece. Right. We're talking about genomic DNA. In fact, they did some marking studies and you could actually. Well, you see this two ways you can do it. If you mark the cells and you know, blue ones are mom and you know, et cetera, they do those kinds of studies. The more convincing studies, of course, are where you have genes that are passed specifically, specifically through the Y chromosome. Right. And you can actually either post mortem or in terms of the requirements of having a gene present in a given brain structure, you can realize that you have brains where a given brain area carries the disease mutation and another brain area doesn't. And even though it all came through dad on the Y chromosome, it should be everywhere, but it's not because there you have some structures that are essentially purely xx.
- [157:59]
Chris Williamson
It's these little territories, domains, and they.
- [158:02]
Andrew Huberman
Correspond to entire brain structures that drive of all things, hypothalamic fat function. There's, there's a condition of hyperphagia of, of like very obese kids. They can't stop eating. This kind of thing comes through. I forget if it's mom or dad. So these things show up in the human genetics. I mean, human genetics is often more complicated than we think about. In terms of Mendelian genetics, you can get hypomorphs where you have kind of reduced gene expression as opposed to just lacking a gene completely. This exists and we could talk about this for hours. But so when people say see an attribute and they say, oh, that you clearly got that from your mom or from your dad, that's actually could be true. Right. That they're much more like their dad in certain ways and much like more like their mom in certain ways based. Because we're never going to know.
- [158:46]
Chris Williamson
But their brain is entirely, actually separated out.
- [158:48]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, very well. Could be. It's going to be fun when your kids play with my kids and we can, you know, Lex, that's you, that's. Well, Lex and I have this. Well, we're not going to have kids together. I don't want to give people the wrong impression. What I was referring to is the fact that Lex and I always have this discussion about timing the, the delivery of our independently generated kids so that.
- [159:08]
Chris Williamson
They can grow up together.
- [159:09]
Andrew Huberman
Well, he wants my, he wants his kids to beat up my kids in jiu jitsu.
- [159:13]
Chris Williamson
Okay.
- [159:14]
Andrew Huberman
I, I have more a theory about enrichment of sort of the engineering offspring versus the nursing.
- [159:22]
Chris Williamson
You're much more pro social than him. He's very competitive. Competitive in this regard.
- [159:26]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. I, I mean I'm competitive In certain things.
- [159:28]
Chris Williamson
But.
- [159:28]
Andrew Huberman
But mostly my trying to compensate for Lex. My interests are so. You are so like, sometimes I don't really find many people looking at my collection of interests in an overlapping way.
- [159:42]
Chris Williamson
I'm going to beat him at octopus. Octopus training or whatever it is.
- [159:45]
Andrew Huberman
Well, the octopus raising community is a little. People are a little guarded. But so. So as a. As a. It's a whole thing, man. It's a whole different podcast whole thing thing. But I did want to ask you something. I want to make sure. So you put out this video about your health journey, or I guess it's your sickness journey and seek in search of it. You seem really good. Can I wager a hypothesis? Because I've experienced this myself at one point. Do you think that at some point sounds like I'm leading the witness, but that it's possible to like that in pursuit. Pursuit of recovering one's health. That along the way, because I've done this, you do something or take something that layers in another health thing that makes the direction increasingly confusing. I took this on the suggestion of some conventional doc recently. I decided to try and knock down my apob a bit. It's a little high and it created a whole set of cascade of gallbladder issues. For a couple days. I stopped taking it. I feel fine again, and I probably don't need to take it in the first place. So I believe medications work. I think they can be very useful. I also think that some of them work so well that they can drive the system in directions we don't want to go. And so when I hear about these blood cleansing methods or I hear, you know, I worry as your friend, I worry a little bit that, listen, I don't want you to struggle with the symptoms of Lymes, but I do worry a little bit because these things are really extreme.
- [161:15]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Okay. So the health documentary that we put out, which is, you know, episode one, the reason that I did that was I'd assumed at the start of last year, the day that I got the diagnosis, I knew that something was up. I knew that I was tired all the time. I knew that I wasn't recovered no matter how long I slept. I knew that I had brain fog, and I knew that my mood was low. I'm like, you know, maybe this is just getting older. Maybe it's something, whatever. And the day that I started filming with my business radiographer was the day that I got a. Hey, we've done an Eko test on your stool. And it turns out that there's a Lyme. We don't know if it's igg or ign. We don't know how prevalent it is when you got it. Don't know if it's Boreala. But basically, because it could have been.
- [161:53]
Andrew Huberman
Way back when you got ticked by.
- [161:55]
Chris Williamson
Some animal, it almost certainly was vestigial. All of the stuff, all of the basic shit that wasn't exciting. I did, right? I did doxycycline. Yeah, doxycycline, minocycline. Like all of the usual treatments. This was not me jumping straight to going to Tijuana to have an intra jug line put in and me live in a hospital. Wasn't me going straight to Vienna to get a fucking hypothermia treatment. Like teaser about what the next episode is. It wasn't me going straight to those. I'd gone through all of the standard pro. It's Gabrielle Lyon that's looking after me. It's a team. And she is as like, great person, great physician, Western by the book as you're gonna get, but she's just a bit more, like, integrative than most people would be. So we're trying to make changes to diet and we're trying to make changes to. Well, my training had to get backed off from like 10 out 10 of. Of 10 to 6 out of 10 for a while and. Oh, well, maybe we need to do. And then I had a. A migraine with aura that I thought was a stroke. I thought it was having a stroke. So. Have you ever had a migraine with aura? No.
- [162:55]
Andrew Huberman
Okay.
- [162:55]
Chris Williamson
You know what they are?
- [162:56]
Andrew Huberman
It's like a ring.
- [162:57]
Chris Williamson
So some people get it visually, but other people get it olfactory and I get it olfactory. So I'm on an assault bike doing Norwegian 4x4. Rhonda, Patrick and I. My heart rate's coming back down. It's been 165, 165, something like that. And it's coming back down and like, it was as if someone shoved a piece of burning toast under my nose. Like, that was all I could smell.
- [163:18]
Andrew Huberman
That worries me because normally when somebody gets the sort of phantom smell of burning toast, we worry about temporal lobe seizures and. And so immediately I go.
- [163:27]
Chris Williamson
Immediately strokes. That's why I thought I'm like, this is how I die. I die on an assault bike in on it Gym, Austin, Texas.
- [163:33]
Andrew Huberman
Kind of bad.
- [163:33]
Chris Williamson
This is how I got here. Yeah, But I just didn't know.
- [163:35]
Andrew Huberman
It's not super badass, but it's something to me.
- [163:38]
Chris Williamson
Is that how I get? I get Taken.
- [163:40]
Andrew Huberman
You weren't just, like, on social media.
- [163:41]
Chris Williamson
That's true. So anyway, I immediately go and get a CT scan. No, it's not. I go in to get a. What is it? A transient ischemic attack tia. Yeah. I'm like. We go and do another one with contrast. So now I've got gadolinium in me and I'm going to have to, like, detox the Galileo.
- [163:56]
Andrew Huberman
You're getting people creatine after TIAs now?
- [163:58]
Chris Williamson
It doesn't surprise me. It's neuroprotective. Anyway, so, like, the amount of that wasn't included in that vlog that I went through, like, hundreds of sauna sessions with cholestyramine or, like, charcoal body wash as a binder to try and, like, get the mold out of me.
- [164:13]
Andrew Huberman
And so what, you had mold and lime.
- [164:15]
Chris Williamson
Oh, the litany of things. Mold.
- [164:17]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, I saw that in the video, but the mold was confirmed.
- [164:20]
Chris Williamson
Mold. Mold was through the roof. I've done. Who does Total Tox? Can't remember who does the test. Anybody that's got it. Total Tox is kind of the gold standard test.
- [164:28]
Andrew Huberman
We're going to need to chelate our metals after being in this garage.
- [164:31]
Chris Williamson
That's true.
- [164:31]
Andrew Huberman
Smells like bumper in here.
- [164:32]
Chris Williamson
Heavy metals were in there beating. But I mean, the. The. The problem is. And I said this in the. In the doc, if you do a huge battery of tests, loads of shit's going to come back and be out of whack. But if you don't feel bad, it doesn't matter. Yeah.
- [164:46]
Andrew Huberman
If you have antibodies to chocolate or strawberries or you probably develop those as a kid. And I love dark chocolate and strawberries, but I'm sure I make antibodies to them. That doesn't mean I have a food allergy.
- [164:56]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. So you. If you do a lot of tests, stuff's going to come back and what you're doing is you're basically like a guess who Sherlock Holmesing your way through a list of potential suspects for why you don't feel good. And one of the problems that I found and have found since the doc came out, even though lots of people, especially people from, like, the M. ME CFS community, chronic fatigue syndrome stuff. I had tinnitus for a long while like that. That community was like, fuck. Like somebody is talking about this and they're saying it's kind of a silent, like, suffering that nobody really appreciates. And this was met at least in large part by people going, chris looks fine. This is all psychosomatic. It's in his head. It's because he's pushing himself too hard. It's because of blah, blah, blah.
- [165:38]
Andrew Huberman
That makes it worse. Right. And, and I'm certainly not suggesting that. I mean, I think you're doing an important public health service by talking about these things. You know, I think I'm hearing more and more lately from people, young men who took drugs for, to avoid, avoid hair loss, post finasteride syndrome. You know, the medical community, the standard medical community thinks it's, it's nonsense. But you talk to these guys that are having serious and at least till now permanent, hopefully some of this stuff can be reversed. Sexual, sexual health issues, psychological issues. I mean it's cratered the lives of a lot of young guys. And there's actually a scientist out at a scientist physician out in Florida who I may end up posting on the podcast. There needs to be more discussion about these things. I always thought that you could kill Lyme with high dose or just long last long duration doxycycline treatment and you found it helped or didn't help.
- [166:31]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it helped. But it's just when you start to get deep into these things called fish tests. You do a fish test for it. And I'm working with like Dr.
- [166:41]
Andrew Huberman
It's like fluorescent in situ hybridization.
- [166:43]
Chris Williamson
There's this Dr. Carsten who is German guy who's like the number one on the planet. Matt Cook out of San Francisco, San Jose is the guy that's leading this like more forward thinking. He does like, he does a lot of stuff forward thinking sports medicine doc who's now doing peptide stuff and just not quite right and not quite fixed. All of that is to be said, I got inverse pretty privilege which is you look fine on the outside, you're in good condition, you're a young dude that seems to still be performing at an okay level, but it's kind of the same as saying to Usain Bolt, oh, you ran Stage a sub 10, you must be great. It's like, yeah, but I should be running like nine, nine five fours or nine fives. And I know where I'm supposed to be at and I know where I want to be at. And I don't want to like surrender to entropy in this way and just accept a lower standard of living for myself. And that was the, the main thing I wanted to people to people to take away was like there are so many people who don't have the inclination, the time or the resources like I do to be able to text you or a tear or Rhonda or whoever I want or, or, or Matt Cook or fly to take time off to go to Mexico, do all of this bullshit that are just like, this is life now. This is my life now. Yeah, I'm just a bit more forgetful. I don't think I used to be that forgetful. Yeah, I fall asleep at 8pm I don't think I used to fall asleep at 8pm yeah, like my mood's a little bit low, but maybe it's just because of. And it's explained away and explained away and explained away by lifestyle, environment, psychological disposition, aging, something. And you're like, oh no, you. There are chronic underlying infections that you've got and to treat them is so fucking complex and so expensive. But the mold was the COVID and mold were the two things that really pushed me over the edge. And then when you get into autoimmune, all you need for autoimmune is genetic predisposition, permeable gut lining and environmental stressor. And if you live in a house with mold for two years, like I challenge anybody that's got those two to do the third and not get fucked.
- [168:42]
Andrew Huberman
Is it true that that mold is a prominent issue in Austin? I hear this.
- [168:46]
Chris Williamson
It's one of the highest. Texas is one of the highest states for. In the country.
- [168:51]
Andrew Huberman
Is it the, the, you know, hot, humid days, subtropical.
- [168:55]
Chris Williamson
And for some reason this country decides, your country decides that it's going to build houses out of wood. It's an organic material, but while it's being built out of wood, it's exposed to the elements. So it gets wet and hot and wet and hot and wet and hot. And now the skeleton of the thing that you live in is, has been wet and hot and now it gets covered in cladding while it's being wet and hot. And sometimes it's wet as it gets covered.
- [169:16]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I mean, home design is something I think a lot about from the lighting perspective. We didn't get into it, but like, you know, we hear so much about the benefits of red light, but you know, long wavelength light can really offset some of the toxicity of, of blue light. It's not just about sleep, but, but going back to what you were just describing, do me a favor. I'd love for you to talk to David Fagenbaum, who cured his own Castleman through an intelligent approach of taking these already approved drugs to treat Castleman's. I mean, he cured himself. He's alive 11 years now. He's got kids, he's married with kids. He was gonna die like dead, but he has this not for profit every cure where they use AI and hardcore scientific methods basically. I mean not to sound loose about what exactly they do, but he's a serious scientist and physician to try and decode different diseases and, and try different existing drugs to. To cure them. So I think it'd be worth talking to him. He's very open minded and he understands the medical profession and he understands that if the solution hasn't been handed to you yet, it's because people aren't aware of it. But it's very likely that it does exist.
- [170:24]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [170:25]
Andrew Huberman
So I think it'd be a good conversation for you.
- [170:27]
Chris Williamson
I like it. I mean look, if, if I was to track my journey, we would were here in this location, although we're at a different angle about 14 months ago or so, I think. And just after that September of last year and sort of spring of this year were the two worst times for health. Brain was so slippery. I was so forgetful. It was insane. It was like trying to think through mud. I love the agility of my own thoughts and the fact that that was taken from me through, you know, no fault of me, my own. Like fucking hell. Oh God. You were too hard charging. I focus on sleep. I'm in bed for like.
- [171:03]
Andrew Huberman
At least you're a vigorous guy. I don't buy the like you're just pushing too hard. I mean there are, there are ways in which people push too hard. But you're like you said, you're. You have a, you know, 12 cylinder engine. That's you. You built yourself to that and you came into the world presumably with some forward center of mass. I'm feeling like you were born, started nursing, finished nursing and got into the world and started doing stuff of.
- [171:24]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, so but that period, the last time that we were here, you can even go back and watch the vlog from after we've recorded. And I think I finish up with Eric and I'm outside and I'm like half asleep, falling asleep on this couch. And it was if, if I two and a half years ago were a 10, if that was Chris at where he's supposed to be 14 months ago I was at a 4 or 5. A 5. And then the start of this year and for much of the start of this year I was like a three or a four. I would say I'm up to now I swing between 7 and an 8. And the fact that I was able to do the live shows in New York and Toronto last week and I've got LA coming up and then Boston, Denver, Boston, Chicago, Nashville. And like, it feels like this color back in the world because it felt very grayscale for time. A long, long time. I mean, there's a. It's. I say it in the dark, but there was a day when I forgot how to tie my shoes. Like, I looked down at my feet and there were laces that were undone and I didn't know the combination to tie my laces in to be able to get them to be in a bow anymore. And I'm like, I've gone from that, which was like a 3 out of 10, to now I feel okay, and there's some color in the world and I can have fun with my friends and I can fucking send it, like. And I can stay out after 11 o' clock without fearing that the next day is going to be ruined. Not drinking. I'm 37. Should I be. Should I be treating myself with that much fragility? No, I don't think so.
- [172:54]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, it's, it's. I mean, it's almost like you're describing a kind of having a sort of dementia. For a while it felt like.
- [173:00]
Chris Williamson
Have you ever taken an anticholinergic?
- [173:02]
Andrew Huberman
No.
- [173:02]
Chris Williamson
So I took one. This is funny. During.
- [173:05]
Andrew Huberman
I like to stimulate the cholinergic system.
- [173:07]
Chris Williamson
Well, you should do.
- [173:07]
Andrew Huberman
But if I'm not a big nicotine guy. But every once in a while, if.
- [173:11]
Chris Williamson
You have overactive blood bladder syndrome, which I and a lot of men developed during COVID because we were right next to our bathroom and we had nothing else to do. So we were drinking fluid and going to the bathroom and drinking fluid and going to the bathroom. And I was like. I found myself urinating more frequently when I didn't need to. And I'm like, prostate problem. Like, this is going to the doctor, I tell him. And he laughs. In the UK in like 2020. Laughs I was like, is this funny to you or what? And he was like, you would not believe how many men I've seen over the last couple of months that have come in with this problem. My business partner at the time, in the nightclub stuff, Darren comes around. We have a meeting. It's the first meeting we've had in ages after I ruptured my Achilles. So my foot's up on this thing. And while we're having this meeting, he drinks half a glass of water. And it's still in the back of my mind, right, Because I've just gone to see my doctor that week. During the meeting, an hour and a half, he goes to the bathroom three Times I'm like, mate, are you. Are you finding yourself urinating more. More frequently?
- [174:07]
Andrew Huberman
It's not just from sitting too much because certainly during the pandemic there was.
- [174:11]
Chris Williamson
A lot of sitting at a standing desk. Oh yeah. Anyway, you've de. Trained the little muscle in between the bladder and the urethra to be like the sensitivity that you're supposed to be at, which is a podcaster. Right. It's one of the primary things you need to develop beyond your working memory is your bladder.
- [174:26]
Andrew Huberman
If you're going to be a podcaster or a touring musician, you got to learn how to. You gotta. You learn how to hold your piss.
- [174:31]
Chris Williamson
So one of the things that they give you is an antiquity cholinergic, which gets that little sense of thing.
- [174:37]
Andrew Huberman
Then you probably feel like you're floating. It's horrible what they used to give. I mean, this was the whole thing of witches, you know, like that to give them the. They would take it to give themselves the sensation of flying. This taps into the muscarinic cholinergic system, different than the nicotine cholinergic system. So nicotine cholinergic system stuff of muscle movement and contraction and focus and all the reason people take nicotine, the muscarinic stuff is what you took. Muscarinic agonists are going to give you a sensation that you're floating. It's going to make your. Depersonalize your pupils about this big, but you're relaxed. Normally if your pupils are big, you're more alert. You're going to feel dissociated. This is. This was actually recreational witch drug use, dude.
- [175:18]
Chris Williamson
It sucks. Yeah, you can't remember. Anyway, it felt like that. And I remember I was talking to Michaela Peterson at the time and I was like, I'm being forgetful and I've got this thing. And obviously she was experienced from doing dealing with her dad and she was like taking any new medications recently. And I was like, yeah, like I've taken 10 milligrams a day of this anticolonate. She was like, rings me immediately. She's like, stop taking that stuff right now.
- [175:38]
Andrew Huberman
Prescription drugs work very well to. To hit the mechanisms they're supposed to hit, which is why they didn't blast radio. They often listen. Some of them are great, some of them create real problems. I mean, I'm man.
- [175:50]
Chris Williamson
Anyway, so it sounds like things were.
- [175:52]
Andrew Huberman
Just getting layered in and layered in.
- [175:53]
Chris Williamson
And you're fighting through this stuff and yeah, you're right. As you try to treat one thing, maybe something else is comes up. Like if there was H. Pylori, candida, sibo leg.
- [176:01]
Andrew Huberman
The H. Pylori treatment.
- [176:03]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [176:03]
Andrew Huberman
That's like four different antibiotics.
- [176:05]
Chris Williamson
Correct. Ruthless. All timed with different sequence, sequence, sequence, sequence, sequence.
- [176:09]
Andrew Huberman
And you're a hard driving guy. So the thing about autoimmune stuff is like a lot of men, women too, but a lot of men who tell me like, oh, I'm like got this weird skin thing or these like, you know, and they freak out. It's cuz if you're the kind of person who can push and not get sick too often, oftentimes it means that your immune system can really ramp up in parallel with your kind of levels of drive and activity. The I don't get sick people who always end up getting sick sooner or later. But the just push, push, push, push, push. You get high levels of interleukins and things that you end up, you know, essentially deploying so, so much cortisol but also anti inflammatory molecules. Right. It's not just cortisol that you can start, you know, getting skin conditions because your knife from that people get lichen planus. You really want to get scared. Look up lichen planus is some scary.
- [176:55]
Chris Williamson
It's like a moss.
- [176:56]
Andrew Huberman
Well, they're like, you're right. But it's, it's an autoimmune condition where the immune system because of stress, in excessively long days, et cetera, excessive caffeine, push, push, push. People will get, it's almost like looks like bruising on the wrists. They can get them on their genitals, on the tops of their feet. People get very, very scared and it's actually just they're pushing themselves too hard. Some relaxation. Look, I think humans can tolerate a ton of stress, provide they get enough sleep at night and sleep well.
- [177:23]
Chris Williamson
Let me give you this.
- [177:24]
Andrew Huberman
But, but what you're telling me is you, you're looking down at your shoes, shoelaces, you don't recognize them as shoelaces even. This is how I know I'm too sleep deprived. When I used to pull all nighters and I'd work on grants and papers really late, I'd look at the word the and I go, that's misspelled. That has to be misspelled. I'm like, it's time to go to sleep. That was my, I mean just to show you how unhealthy perhaps I was is that was my redlining. When I, when the word the looked looked like. I'm not sure if that's spelled correctly. I'm like, I'm sleep Deprived.
- [177:53]
Chris Williamson
I think. I think I'm going too far. But yeah, dude, I. I have come to believe that there is basically no such thing as being overworked, only under arrested. And I was resting, I was going to bed. I mean, I can even show you my fucking whoop data. And Andy's got it all. The team have got it in terms of that. I was. Dude, I was in bed. I'm not kidding you. I was in bed from 7pm Till 7am for like weeks, months at a time. I'm like, I'm dedicating, so. And I'd wake up having been asleep for all this time and I'm like, I'm so drained and. And it's not. Anyway, I'm now moving between, like, if it's a really bad one, like a six up to a seven and sometimes up to an eight. And dude, when it's an eight, like today's probably a seven and a half. I woke up this morning, I'm at the W in West Hollywood. I'm like surrounded by. I saw a homeless guy literally pissing into a wine bottle this morning. And I'm like, hey, what's going on? The sun's shining.
- [178:47]
Andrew Huberman
Sun's always shining.
- [178:48]
Chris Williamson
Go to a Dunkin Donuts, we have.
- [178:50]
Andrew Huberman
A serious homeless slash mental health slash addiction, addicted people.
- [178:55]
Chris Williamson
The world just felt like color. I'm like, this is so good.
- [178:59]
Andrew Huberman
It's back in Technicolor.
- [179:00]
Chris Williamson
It honestly feels a little bit like I. Like, I kind of got a second. It feels like I died a bit. Feels like me, who I am, kind of died and. And now I've been so gentle with myself this year. I've gone to bed early and I've restricted my diet and I haven't had any fun and I haven't really adventured and I've worked and I haven't got to do new stuff. I've just tried to hold on, you know, my. I used to have this. I still do this really long end of year review. I had two goals for this year. Usually it'd be a light. I mean, meditation, practice, training, muscle gaming, straight, all this stuff. Two goals for this year. Fix my health. Don't let the show drop. That was it. If I got to the end of the year and I hadn't fucked the show and my health was fixed, I'm like, that would be. And as I come into land, you know, we've got a few months left in the year. I'm like, I think we might just sort of bring this into land there. So it's been a real. It's been a real sort of adventure that I wouldn't wish on anybody. Especially the hopelessness, having hope, expectation, that being dashed. That really. That really sucks. Like, that's the hardest part, that you think that things are going to change or be improved, and then they don't. And then you have to deal with the expectation and then the. The disappointment. And the disappointment was the worst thing. But if nothing else, in kind of. Brian Johnson's on the show later this week. Brian. Very few people want to be Brian but appreciate some of the things that he's learned by the stuff that he's done. I'm like, dude, if I can tell you 20 different modalities that I think didn't move the needle, and two, that did, at least there's a bit of silver lining on the fact. And now, obviously, I'm hopefully on the trajectory of being back to being better.
- [180:36]
Andrew Huberman
Seems like. Sounds like it. I'm being hopeful.
- [180:39]
Chris Williamson
It feels like that to me. And, you know, I did. To sort of round it out, I did Piers Morgan show a couple of weeks ago, and Michaela came on and was talking about dad, and Jordan's having a really fucking rough time.
- [180:50]
Andrew Huberman
Just ask how he's doing.
- [180:51]
Chris Williamson
Super rough. Like, just not good. The answer is not good. And she finished up with like. So we think it's because of mold, and we think it's maybe because of this and autoimmune, but then we also think that it might be because of demons. And, like, that was what she left the comic conversation with. And then Piers turns to me and is like, chris, you're ill. Think it's the work of the devil. And I'm like, why do I have to clean up this? Like, this is her claim.
- [181:16]
Andrew Huberman
She just said, yes.
- [181:17]
Chris Williamson
Well, look, my point is, I understand why. Because it feels so fucking cosmically unfair after a while that you're like, this has to be a fucking curse. Like, this feels so much bigger and greater and more painful than it should be. Should be. I can only attribute this to, like, some karmic retribution that is owed to me for some past slight, some something. And that's when you start to ask.
- [181:43]
Andrew Huberman
Yourself, being excessively hard on. I mean, whatever the reasons. Let me ask you a question. I mean, we're on a podcast, but in all sincerity, how can I and your other friends support you? And since we're doing this as a podcast, I'll also say, how can you. Can the people who listen support you? I mean, like. But really, I mean, do you want Them. I mean, I'll be praying for you. I decide that. Do you want people to pray for you? Do you want. They will be, but do you want people to send you suggestions? Do you want people to not send you. You know, oftentimes when. When somebody's struggling, like, my or anyone's impulses be like, I'm like, talk to Fagan, mom, do this.
- [182:24]
Chris Williamson
Let me fix it.
- [182:24]
Andrew Huberman
You know, we. We all want to do that. But. But I hear you. It's. It's clear that this is like, you know, what started as Lyme. It's opening up all sorts of doors and cupboards and stuff in there. And, I mean, I. As your friend, I caution you against exploring whether or not you did something in a past life or did. I think my understanding of you is that you're sufficiently in touch with your mistakes and your good choices.
- [182:49]
Chris Williamson
Overly in touch with you.
- [182:50]
Andrew Huberman
No, no, I don't think overly. I think you're an introspective person and flagellating yourself is certainly not going to help, but. Yeah. How can I support you?
- [183:04]
Chris Williamson
You do already, man. You know, I had a close run in over this weekend, which we'll see. Whether or not that ends up surfacing, perhaps relevant to our conversation about what's going on with mainstream media and how they are garnering momentum by attaching themselves to industries and platforms that have momentum. Very interesting that it never happens before. There's any status associated with trying to unearth. Imagine that something you are, dude, like, I really cherish our friendship. Like, the fact that I can take you're one text away from, like, giving me a fucking essay. You even sent me. This is to break the fourth wall. How good of a friend you are. You knew that I was, like, sad and worried this weekend. So not only did you give me a ton of different bits of advice, you then decided to peel off to give me, like, a miniature novel about a black ferret who repopulated an entire, like, female colony of ferrets and this entire living.
- [183:58]
Andrew Huberman
Save the species.
- [183:59]
Chris Williamson
Save the.
- [183:59]
Andrew Huberman
And I'm like, you're like Scarface. You're gonna save the species.
- [184:02]
Chris Williamson
I appreciate you. I appreciate all of the stuff that you do for me.
- [184:05]
Andrew Huberman
That.
- [184:05]
Chris Williamson
That. That's it. I really do. I really cherish our friendship.
- [184:10]
Andrew Huberman
Likewise.
- [184:10]
Chris Williamson
When does the book come out? People want to know.
- [184:12]
Andrew Huberman
September 2026.
- [184:14]
Chris Williamson
Let's fucking go, dude. 12 months later, we're gonna be back here. I can't wait.
- [184:17]
Andrew Huberman
Would love to. Yeah, I delayed it to add some things, change some things, and do some illustrations And I apologize in a real way for the delay, but I, I'll make it worth people's while. And thanks for the kind words. You're an amazing friend. You know, I mean, I've been so fortunate to be part of this colleague set that we called, you know, podcasters and the more or less same vintage of podcasters. Although you got into it before me, I will be praying for you and I also will do everything I can in terms of my connections and resources in the medical and scientific community to try and out figure, figure out what's going on. I do think you're on the, on the recovery slope now and, and I'll be praying that, that, that continues and do anything to support you. You're.
- [185:06]
Chris Williamson
I appreciate you, man.
- [185:07]
Andrew Huberman
You're a equally if not more amazing friend. How to quantify these things. Right? And it's such a pleasure to be in the same field to call you a friend. And you're going to beat this thing, no doubt.
- [185:19]
Chris Williamson
Thank you man. Until next time, thank you very much for tuning in and congratulations for not being so t brained that you switched off partway through an episode. If you enjoyed that with Huberman, you will love this one with Rhonda. Patrick. Come on. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best, best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found, fiction and non fiction and there's real life stories and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.