Andrew Huberman: Become Mentally Dangerous With These Daily Habits | FO556 Raj Shamani
Two hours and forty seven minutes on one brief: take a 25 year old and make them mentally dangerous in ten years. Andrew Huberman answers with the sentence he says he has never put on his own podcast, high morning cortisol and low nighttime cortisol, then gives the full operating detail. Bright light within the first 30 to 60 minutes of waking for a peak up to 50 percent higher, the 10,000 lux fallback, five extended exhales a day for HRV, the eye movement trick for the 2 a.m. wake up, ashwagandha doses and the timing rule that makes or breaks them. Then a three stage career model, the neuroscience of choking, clutch states rather than flow, and losing all three of his scientific mentors.
Published Sep 1, 20262:46:56 video148 min readAdded Sep 9, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
Raj Shamani hands Andrew Huberman a single brief and lets him run with it for two hours and forty seven minutes: take a 25 year old today and make them mentally dangerous in ten years. Dangerous is defined in the room as unbreakable under pressure, able to pick a target and actually hit it, and immune to the Monday excitement that has evaporated by Thursday. Huberman's answer starts somewhere almost disappointingly small, at the shape of one hormone curve across 24 hours, and then builds outward from it into sleep, breathing, work capacity, career staging, courage, grief and identity.
The physiological spine is one sentence he says he has never put on his own podcast: if he only had five minutes with someone, he would tell them to get high morning cortisol and low nighttime cortisol, because that single rhythm underwrites daytime energy, focus, learning, stress recovery, deep and REM sleep, and immune function. Everything else in the first forty minutes is the operating detail on that one curve: bright light in the eyes within the first 30 to 60 minutes of waking, hydration and caffeine stacked into that window, exercise six days out of seven, a 10,000 lux lamp when the sun is not available, dim light in the final hour, and long exhale breathing to pull the heart rate and the cortisol down before sleep.
The psychological half is where the conversation gets less predictable. Huberman argues that the person who can turn the engine off will beat the equally driven person who cannot, inside five to ten years, and he means that as a bet he would place money on. He gives a three stage model of a career (years one to three all gas pedal, years four to six learning to dynamically regulate, years seven onward operating as a professional), a hard number on how much real work a day can hold, a neuroscience account of choking that inverts the usual explanation, a distinction between flow states and something he had learned the day before called clutch states, and a set of resilience drills built around walls rather than timers.
The last hour turns personal and stays there. He talks about losing all three of his scientific mentors, one to suicide and two to cancer, and calls himself an academic orphan. He talks about the collapse of his parents' marriage, the skateboarding career that did not happen, the years he describes as bad, the relationship he poured himself into that was the wrong one, and what it cost. He closes on what he says the cost of being Andrew Huberman actually is, and it is not what the question usually gets.
Who Andrew Huberman is, in his own two sentences (0:02:53)
Shamani asks him to introduce himself for someone who has never heard of him, and Huberman gives a compressed version of the resume.
He is 50 years old. He spent nearly three decades as a neuroscientist and is still a tenured professor at Stanford School of Medicine, where he now teaches neuroscience to medical students. Until very recently he ran a research laboratory, and that was his life from roughly age 19 until quite recently: studying how the brain wires up during development, how it can change (so called neuroplasticity) and learning, with additional interest in neural regeneration and diseases of the eye and nervous system. That is his academic grounding.
Alongside it runs a long standing personal interest in health and fitness: running, resistance training, a bit of martial arts, a number of other things, consistently for 35 years. He is careful to say he is not a certified trainer, but he thinks he has tried most of the things that do and do not work, and he has views both on the science around them and on what has worked for him.
In 2021 he started the Huberman Lab podcast, which he notes shared a name with the Huberman Lab at Stanford. A few guys put cameras in front of him and he started talking about how the brain wires up, how you can change it, how sleep works, how to optimize it, mental health, and modern treatments for everything from depression to OCD to anorexia. He covers the scientific literature and then offers what he calls protocols, which he defines as scripted ways to improve or optimize something or reduce a pain point, built from behavioral tools, meaning some things you do and some things you avoid. The show also covers nutrition, supplementation and prescription drugs, and he says he is happy to talk about peptides of both the conventional and unconventional kind, and about hormone therapies.
Most episodes are solo lectures in what he calls university lecture style, but he also hosts expert guests, because his network of scientists and medical doctors is vast and he knows some of the best in the world. He says his real love in life is learning and teaching things he believes can be useful to people. Shamani's reply: that makes two of us.
The brief: make a 25 year old mentally dangerous in ten years (0:06:16)
Shamani sets up the actual question with a confession about his own generation. Young people watch someone like Huberman, understand and learn everything, get excited on Monday, and by Thursday it is gone. Nothing works out. Lives do not change easily. So: given a 25 year old today, and ten years, where would you begin?
Huberman warns that his answer is going to sound basic at first, and then makes a point he says should be carried into any discussion of health or performance. There will always be many protocols. Do this, do it this way, do it then, do not do it that way, do not do it then. The real question is what principles are anchoring those statements. New protocols will come along, new peptides will come along, new podcasters will come along. What matters is being able to place what you hear into a framework: either there is a mechanism that supports it, or there is no known mechanism but it is safe enough to try and see.
Then the answer. The most important thing for this hypothetical 25 year old is to understand that there are a few non negotiables in their physiology and psychology, directly linked to each other, that they have to obey as often as possible. He is deliberate about the phrasing. Not every single day. As often as possible.
High morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol
The first non negotiable is to take simple steps to amplify cortisol in the first hour or two of the day, and to make sure that in the last hour or so of the day, most days, cortisol is low.
He immediately attacks the framing that cortisol is the stress hormone. It is involved in stress, but that is only one of its jobs. Its main job is to deploy glucose and lipids from areas of the body that give you energy. It is an energy deploying hormone.
If you were building a human machine, and you wanted to build a happy, quote unquote dangerous machine, you would say: get that morning cortisol peak as high as you can, and get the last hour before sleep as low as you can. What that buys, in his list:
Vastly higher daytime energy
Focus
Ability to learn
Resilience to stress when stress arrives
Ease in falling asleep
Deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep
Those last two are where repair of the body and repair of the mind happen, along with consolidating learning and removing the emotional load of the previous day's difficult experiences, so the person can show up again tomorrow for their family, their work and their health. He adds that this same pattern, high morning and low nighttime cortisol, is the pattern that men, women and people of all ages should have to optimize immune system function. Meaning: getting sick less.
Then the line that frames the whole video:
I've never really discussed this on the podcast, but if I only had five minutes to talk to somebody, I would say, look, this is the best thing you can do for your health and well being and performance. High morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol.
The melatonin coupling
Before explaining how, he adds one fact he says most people miss. Everyone has heard of melatonin, the hormone secreted at night in darkness that light suppresses, which helps us fall and stay asleep. What most people do not realize is that getting sufficient melatonin release requires limited light exposure to the eyes. That is why it is worth dimming the lights down. You also want core body temperature falling, because core body temperature going down is what brings melatonin up.
Cortisol and melatonin run on opposite cycles. High cortisol inhibits melatonin indirectly, but it does inhibit it. So if morning cortisol is high, the melatonin left over from the night before will be lower, which means more alertness. If nighttime cortisol is low, the melatonin peak can go higher. Under those conditions, he says, many issues around falling and staying asleep become trivial. They just kind of disappear.
Morning is not a clock time
He is precise about a word people usually get wrong. When he says morning, he does not mean 6:00 a.m.
Some people genuinely do best waking between 8 and 10 a.m. and going to sleep later. Some do best waking between 5 and 7 a.m. and going to bed earlier. Some are somewhere in the middle. He asks Shamani what time he would go to sleep if he controlled everything, and Shamani says 1 or 2 a.m., waking at 9 or 10. Huberman's response is worth quoting for the tone of the whole conversation:
Let's call 10. 10 a.m. is your morning. 6:30 a.m. is my morning. That doesn't make me a better or worse person. Doesn't make you a better or worse person. We're just different.
So morning means within the first hour or two of waking, not a number on a clock.
Why start with the morning and not the night before
Shamani asks a good question: why begin with the morning rather than the night before it? Because, Huberman says, the cortisol peak sits on a negative feedback loop. It inhibits itself. Once you create that peak, it ensures the afternoon and evening cortisol are low. Getting that morning peak going is like a wavefront that starts the 24 hour cycle.
Then the physiology of waking up. Assume you slept six to eight hours. In deep sleep, two or three hours in, cortisol is at its very lowest, naturally. Then it starts to climb intrinsically, with no input from the world, slowly at first and then faster and faster. Divide sleep into three blocks, and in the last third cortisol is rising very fast, and so is body temperature. Then at some point you wake up, whether by alarm or naturally. That rise is literally called the cortisol awakening response, and it is the reason you wake up.
So when people say cortisol is a stress hormone and you do not want it high, that is true for the evening and night. It is not true for the morning. You want cortisol spiking first thing.
The light protocol, with the numbers
This is the part the whole video hangs on, and the parameters matter more than the instruction.
Get bright light in your eyes within the first 30 to 60 minutes of your day. He says you have a unique opportunity in that window to spike cortisol up to 50 percent.
There are two ways to do it, and the best is to go outside. Take off any brimmed hat and any sunglasses. Eyeglasses and contacts are fine. Look in the direction of the sun. If the sun is just coming across the horizon, as it is when he wakes, that is great. If it is higher in the sky, that is fine too. Never look at the sun in any way that makes it too bright to look at. You blink to protect your eyes. You can squint. You can look a little off and away from the sun. The point is that sunlight is full spectrum, meaning it contains the short, medium and long wavelengths that are optimal for producing the cortisol peak.
Do that and you get a big cortisol peak within 5 to 10 minutes.
On cloudy and overcast days it is especially important, and his reason is behavioral rather than photonic: on overcast days you are likely to spend more time indoors, so the deficit compounds. The dose is the same, ideally 5 or 10 minutes.
Three things stack into the same window because they also raise cortisol, and because they are things you were going to do anyway:
Hydration. Drinking water in that window boosts cortisol.
Caffeine. Morning tea or coffee further boosts cortisol.
Movement. If you can exercise in that first hour, great. He acknowledges most people do not jump straight into exercise, so a walk, some jumping jacks, something light.
He also names the anti protocol: try not to look at your phone during this time, and do not stay in bed and look at your phone. He points out that the light routine has a useful side effect of being a forcing function against certain other behaviors.
The payoff is not just today's peak. Doing it establishes the relationship between cortisol, melatonin and the circadian clock, so that the next day your morning cortisol starts to rise in anticipation of the peak. That is what he means by entrained.
If sunlight is not available, most people would do well to buy a 10,000 lux artificial light. He owns one about the size of a tablet that he travels with, and describes himself as the guy on the plane looking at that light for a few minutes each morning. He has one at home even though he does go outside: one in the bathroom for when he wakes and uses it, one in the kitchen for while he makes coffee or tea. He is getting blasted with bright light early in the day. Sunlight is still better because it is full spectrum.
And then the release valve, which matters as much as the protocol:
If you wake up on a plane and you don't happen to have this 10,000 lux light, open the window. If you can't do that, you're going to be fine. You'll live a day. So do the other things. Hydrate, drink some caffeine. You don't want to burn extra energy on the neuroticism of trying to get everything right.
That neuroticism, he says, is what makes you weak.
Figure 1. The one curve the first forty minutes of the conversation is about. Cortisol bottoms out two to three hours into sleep, climbs through the final third of the night as the cortisol awakening response, and is amplified by bright light in the first 30 to 60 minutes of waking. The dashed line is what Huberman calls the flattening of the cortisol curve: no real morning peak, a mid level baseline carried into the evening. He attributes the disrupted blood glucose regulation and the other harms of so called chronic stress to that dashed line, not to cortisol itself.
The other half of the dial: the evening
Once that morning peak is established, the day takes care of itself for a while. Cortisol starts to drop gradually around four or five hours after waking. It just drops. If a disturbing text arrives, or a deadline lands, cortisol gets deployed, but the peak will be very brief. Heading into the evening, probably still working, maybe under bright lights you cannot control, you are now buffered against some of that. Protected.
Then the final hour before sleep, and the instructions get specific again:
Dim the lights.
Avoid caffeine in the final 8 hours before sleep. He notes that he is drinking a little caffeine late in the day during this recording because he got up very early, and flags it as him, not a rule for everyone. Some people cannot do that.
Do not drink too many fluids, because you will wake up. If you are a little thirsty, drink some. No big deal.
Long exhale breathing if you find yourself too stressed and getting ready for bed.
Why the long exhale works: respiratory sinus arrhythmia and HRV (0:17:37)
Huberman pauses here to encapsulate all of breathwork in one mechanism, and prefaces it with an acknowledgment: long before it came to the United States in scientific form, people in India had been doing breathwork of various kinds.
On the inhale, especially a vigorous or extended one, your heart rate speeds up. Why: the diaphragm moves down, the heart gets a little bigger in volume, blood within the heart moves a little more slowly, and the nervous system sends a signal to speed the heart rate up.
On the exhale, especially a deliberately extended one, your heart rate slows down. Why: the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little more compact, blood in there moves more quickly in that smaller volume, and the vagus nerve, which connects body and brain in both directions, sends a signal to the heart to slow down.
He anticipates the obvious objection. Why would you want your heart rate variable rather than nice and even? Because the variability reflects the pumping of the brake on the stress system.
And then the protocol, which is almost absurdly cheap:
If you want a higher HRV, you can exercise. Another great way to increase your HRV: do five extended exhales during your day. Just anytime. You're slowing your heart rate down. In your sleep your heart rate, your HRV will be higher. Most people don't realize it. Significantly higher. You're teaching your nervous system to slow your heart rate down just by five exhales in a day.
Or three. Or one long one before sleep. A deliberate extended exhale slows the heart rate, lowers cortisol (he notes it takes a few minutes to lower cortisol) and calms you down. The inverse is also true and is what most people are doing by default: when you hold your breath, or move through your day inhaling more vigorously than you exhale, your heart rate climbs.
Figure 2. The mechanism Huberman uses to compress all of breathwork into one idea. Note that the intervention is not a breathing session. It is five individual extended exhales scattered through an ordinary day, which he says raises HRV significantly during that night's sleep.
The eye circuit, and why dimming actually matters
He closes the light loop with the anatomy. Light hits a specialized set of neurons in the eye called the intrinsically photosensitive melanopsinretinal ganglion cells. Those cells connect directly to a little region over the hypothalamus that is your circadian clock, which connects to another nucleus in the hypothalamus, and so on, and ultimately inhibits the release of melatonin from the pineal gland.
His own simplification: viewing bright light, ideally sunlight, in the first hour of the day spikes cortisol through a similar circuit with a little twist, and in the evening bright light inhibits melatonin. Bright mornings and days, dim or dark nights. That is the ideal situation.
He does add one domestic aside about the evening. He generally does not use candlelight, because he worries about burning things down if he falls asleep with candles lit. Everything is just dimmed way, way down.
Figure 3. The circuit Huberman names on air, redrawn. Both lanes use the same three components. The only variable he asks you to control is how much light reaches the melanopsin cells, and when.
## Learning to turn the mind off (0:24:01)
Huberman calls this the key to long term resilience and to becoming, in Shamani's word, dangerous. And then he turns it into a bet, because he says that will get people going.
Give me two people. Both can work very, very hard, both extremely committed to their goals, and both have perfect circumstances in terms of access to food and exercise and all the things. The person that can turn their mind off in the final hour of their day and get the better, deeper sleep, I'm going to put all my money on that person within 5 to 10 years, far surpassing the other.
Shamani presses on the practical version of that. What about someone hyper competitive, already feeling they have lost because the internet has convinced them they have, who simply does not know how to turn off?
Two options at the airport, and never a hybrid
Huberman answers with what had happened to him the day before. He had far less sleep than he normally gets. He wanted to watch his best childhood friend, a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, perform a neurosurgery, and be there for it. He also recorded that day. He very much wanted to be in the room with Shamani, which meant flying. The flight was delayed.
Instead of getting angry about the delay, he says he always asks himself one of two questions:
Do I completely relax, or do I continue to work? What I don't do is any in between.
Complete relaxation is permitted and specified. Let yourself scroll social media for a short period. Let yourself watch a movie. Socialize. Text with friends. Call your mother, and he adds a joke on his own behalf about mothers wanting more calls. The forbidden thing is the hybrid of the two. Either genuinely rest or genuinely focus and get work done.
At the airport he decided he had had a long day and that the next day would be long but exciting, so he chose complete rest. He took a brief nap on the flight into San Francisco, got to the hotel, got things settled, and then felt his mind starting to go toward tomorrow. His check on that: what good does that do?
The left column and the right column
That check has a formal version he learned from Andy Stumpf, a former tier one SEAL team operator who hosts the Cleared Hot podcast and went on to break two world records doing other difficult and dangerous things. Huberman first read about the exercise in Stumpf's book Drownproof, and then Stumpf described it to him directly. Two corrections worth flagging, since the audio and the captions both get them slightly wrong: the surname is Stumpf, not Stump, and the book is Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water, not Drown.
The exercise, done about once a month:
Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns.
In the left column write everything that concerns you. What people think of me. Everything you worry about. All of it.
In the right column write everything you can actually control. Exercise. Hydrate. Sleep. Practice turning your brain off. Call your mother.
What you realize is that you have no real control over anything in the left column.
We all know that already, he says, which is precisely why the exercise is valuable: for the month afterwards, you notice in real time which column a thought belongs to. The night before this interview he caught himself thinking that someone might set off a fire alarm, or be loud in the hotel, and he would get even less sleep. Can I control that? No. And you notice how crazy the mind is with concerns, and how few of them you can actually affect.
It has become vocabulary around his podcast studio and among his friends. That's a left column issue. He raises the open question of whether talking about a worry expunges it or builds it, and lands on his own view: talking about it builds it. Stay in the right column.
Then the reframe that runs through the whole conversation:
Every opportunity to stress is an opportunity to practice stress resilience. These opportunities come all day long. You don't have to be David Goggins to be in the pressure test all day long. We are all in the pressure test.
How you actually move a thought
The mechanic for getting back into the right column is not abstract. Think about literal actions. Get extremely present. He does it live, out loud: I can take a sip of water. I can smell what the air is like in here. It is quiet in here, and I like the background quiet of this place. I have enjoyed meeting you. I already learned about some new neurotechnology from the devices on your temple.
Underneath that is a piece of his neuroscience training. The brain works in what are called dynamic attractor states, and he insists the term is not there to sound academic.
Think of your thoughts and your emotions as a ball bearing on a flat surface. As you think more about something, that surface starts to become concave. And as you learn more about it and you go into it and you think about it, it becomes a trench. And now that ball bearing is locked in that trench.
Getting out usually takes something robust. A friend calling and asking what you are doing. A good night's sleep. Exercise. Some great event to knock the ball bearing back onto the flat surface. But, he says, you are in charge of your mind, and then makes an admission with a specific age attached to it:
At 50 years old, I finally realized that it's possible to control one's thoughts. It really is. You can learn to steer your thoughts. You can't eliminate thoughts, but you can take your mind to where it needs to go.
And there are opportunities to practice all day long.
The prayer, before every episode
He offers one of his own as an example, unprompted, and it is more personal than the surrounding material. Right before he came into this room, he went into the bathroom, and he has a practice of prayer before any podcast. He asks for clarity. He asks for the opportunity to share knowledge that he hopes will be useful to people. He offers up the opportunity for new unexpected things to come through. He does it every single time, because he takes the host and the format seriously. People are giving him their time. He is not a person who neurotically controls every aspect of his life, but he takes every opportunity he can to make his life better, because in this case a richer conversation benefits more people.
The summary line: the more stress, the more opportunity. You are getting micro reps all day long.
Yoga nidra, and the eye movement trick (0:31:02)
To fall asleep at night the ingredients are already listed: high morning cortisol, no caffeine too late, exercise at some point (ideally in the first half of the day, but the evening if that is what is available). Then Huberman names the practice he rates highest after the cortisol rhythm itself.
He is a huge believer in, practitioner of and fan of yoga nidra, a practice that originated in India. In his mind, alongside the high morning and low nighttime cortisol, it is the most powerful tool we can cultivate, because it teaches you to turn off thinking and planning and to get into pure sensation.
He knows how that sounds, and answers the obvious alternative directly:
It sounds so squishy, but I'll tell you, no drug will do this, at least not in a healthy way. Any drug that takes you out of thinking and planning and just into pure sensation, that drug is going to rebound you into a rough place when you come out of it.
On renaming it, and the criticism he took for it
He raises the NSDR controversy himself and treats the interview as the place to answer it. A few years back he started calling the practice non sleep deep rest, and some people were critical of that decision.
His reason: he wanted people to understand the real value of the practice, and he says he always makes the effort to credit yoga nidra as its origin. He takes no credit for the practice. But in what he calls, with an audible eye roll, the west, there is an assumption that hearing the word yoga means movement, and a lot of people then decide they do not want to do yoga. Which is, he says, their own limitation, but it is a real barrier.
What the practice actually involves: lying or sitting down, long exhale breathing, deliberately slowing the heart rate, and then noticing that the mind is in a mode of thinking and doing and planning, and moving it into pure sensation. Just focus on what you hear and what you feel.
This is the first and most basic step in what I call turning your mind off. It's turning off planning and thinking and doing. And it's a skill.
The dose: 10, 20 or 30 minutes, one, three or seven days a week, and across a couple of years you get very good at it. He started in 2017 and thought it was remarkable: he could fall asleep more easily, and if he woke in the middle of the night he knew how to turn his mind off. Do it again for 10 minutes.
The eye movement trick, step by step
Then the technique that opens the video, which he introduces as something wacky.
He sets it up with two published findings. There is a paper from a few years ago describing a giant bed that rocks back and forth, in which people fall asleep very quickly. And there is a paper in what he calls a really fine journal showing that there is a particular rate of walking and swaying that parents naturally find that puts their baby to sleep, and it matches the same rocking speed: a very slow back and forth.
You would think the effect is the physical sensation, and in some sense it is. But it turns out the mechanism is something else, and it is the basis of some new eye mask technologies that induce sleep, which he says he is not part of but has had the opportunity to try.
The protocol, with eyes closed:
Slowly move your eyes to one side, then to the other side. Left or right first does not matter. Do it again if you want.
Move your eyes counterclockwise, then clockwise.
Look toward the tip of your nose, or toward your midline. You are not crossing your eyes.
Exhale.
The mechanism he gives: there is a relationship between the eyes and the cerebellum, the primitive area of the brain that controls balance. Doing this disrupts the proprioceptive circuits. Proprioception is the knowledge of where your limbs are in space, and:
To fall asleep you need to forget your body position. This is the first critical step in falling asleep that nobody talks about.
He notes there is now interesting technology stimulating and inhibiting the brain areas that control proprioception, which makes people sleepy and puts them to sleep.
The honest limits on it: if you drank four cups of coffee and you are ruminating over something, it will not override that. Where it works is the middle of the night case. You woke up, you went to the restroom, someone made a noise, you are back in bed. Close your eyes, run the sequence, exhale, forget body position. Many people he has taught it to write to him to say they cannot believe it. He did it on the flight to this interview and was out.
He adds the part that makes it worth practicing rather than just trying once. The circuits accessed in yoga nidra, of self directed relaxation and of turning off proprioception, are amenable to plasticity. They get stronger in response to these behaviors over time. You get better at it.
He draws the analogy to ramping up, which everyone already knows how to do. You sit down for something you do not want to do, and you know how to get in gear: maybe you watch a video, maybe you turn on music, maybe you tell yourself off, maybe you call someone. And you are in.
You know how to ramp up, but do you know how to turn it off? Do you know how to ramp down? The best athletes know how to do this. That's a skill you learn.
The video game on X, and passing people by what you do not do
Back to the hypothetical 25 year old. Huberman tells him he is at the peak of the opportunity to still rewire his brain in the right ways, and that this includes get after it culture. But the question is how he is going to turn the brain off to restore, reset and dump the data that is not significant from the day before: the conflict you had, the thing you saw online that was an attempt to steal your focus, your energy and your sleep.
When I go on X, it's literally warfare. I'm a benevolent player there, but you're not going to take my energy. I have a shield up. Somebody says something about me, I know what they're trying to do. They're losing energy by doing it. But I'm not going to let them take mine. It's a video game. And you win by taking as many of those attentional resources and putting them into your health, your well being. This includes how you treat other people.
The person who can be in high focus and then switch it off is what he calls a mental, career, financial and physical athlete. That is the dangerous person. And then the competitive line:
I don't worry about the person who can just get after it and drink 12 cups of coffee, pop an Adderall and outwork everybody. So the next morning they're outworking everybody. Okay, see you on Thursday. I'm going to blast past you.
He learned that early in neuroscience, and the anecdote is specific. He never liked drinking alcohol, partly because he does not like the way people act when they drink. He allows the exception honestly: there were a few weddings and parties with friends he really knew where a few drinks produced a bonding feeling, and it was great. But at scientific meetings he mostly noticed people being sloppy and stupid, saying dumb things, getting themselves in trouble. He was there to build a career, so he told himself maybe in twenty years, when he was a tenured professor, he would do that.
So he went to bed early on night one. By night two the established guys were dragging. By day three they were falling asleep in the meetings, mouths open, drooling, and a bunch of students too, including athletes who had thought it was too easy. He was still front row taking notes, getting his workouts in, and on the last night he might have a good time.
I'm going to pass up the next person by what I don't do as much as what I do.
His diagnosis for why nobody says this: it is hard to put into a 90 second clip on social media. So what circulates instead is get after it, take this peptide, take this stimulant. He is careful to add that he loves caffeine and that there is a place for those tools. Getting in gear is the easy part. Doing it day in and day out consistently is the hard part.
The reset day
One day per week he does not exercise. He tries to spend as much time as he can in fresh air, sunshine and relaxation, but if he cannot, he might just veg all day. Do nothing for half a day, watch a movie with his girlfriend, relax, kick back.
He jokes that it is their zero cortisol day, and immediately corrects the joke: there is no such thing as a zero cortisol day. He still gets the sunlight in the morning and the cortisol peak.
Cortisol, ashwagandha, nicotine and what the supplements actually do (0:36:46)
Here he returns to something he says he did not emphasize enough, and it is the strongest single argument for the whole morning routine. He cites his own book, Protocols, and flags that he is not there to plug it.
If you had a high morning cortisol peak, the return to baseline after a stressor is much faster. Any stress that comes, you can deal with it.
The worst situation is what is called a flattening of the cortisol curve across the day: no big morning peak, just a mid range baseline that carries into the evening. Now any stress that arrives is riding on a higher baseline, and it carries into the night. It is shown to disrupt all sorts of things, blood glucose regulation among them. And then the reframe that the dashed line in Figure 1 exists to make:
All the negative effects of cortisol, so called chronic stress, are really about afternoon and nighttime high cortisol. We're never told this.
Ashwagandha: the timing is the whole point
Which sets up the supplement advice, and it is a timing argument rather than a yes or no. If you use ashwagandha to suppress cortisol, that should definitely be done in the final hours of the day, not in the morning. Small amounts in the early part of the day are fine. Later in the day, good. Morning, not good, because you want that morning peak.
His numbers, given with the hedge attached: it potently reduces cortisol, and by one study, depending on the amount, 600 milligrams twice or so can reduce cortisol significantly, by about 30 percent.
His usage rules:
High doses: limit to about two weeks on, then two weeks off.
Moderate doses, 300 up to 600 milligrams: probably fine to take consistently, but in the second half of the day.
Overall he does not recommend taking ashwagandha for long periods of time.
The sleep stack, and its honest ceiling
For falling asleep he says magnesium, theanine, apigenin (which is chamomile tea) and ashwagandha can help. And then the ceiling on all of them:
If you're not doing all the right behaviors, it's going to make a trivial impact.
He also names a more unusual one and hedges it heavily. He has been somewhat bullish on experimenting with pinealon, a peptide that can help increase REM sleep, but only every once in a while. He does not think it is good to rely on pharmacology to induce sleep too often, partly for a reason that is not about the drug at all: you are short circuiting your own ability to turn your mind off.
Stimulants, and the nicotine conversation
On the other side of the day he likes stimulants early. Caffeine is his main one. He also names Alpha GPC and things of that sort, and energy drinks.
Then he asks Shamani whether he uses nicotine, and on hearing no, says he might be the one male under 40 he has met who does not. The assessment that follows is a genuine two sided one:
What it does: nicotine creates an alert but calm state, which he calls a very coveted state and hard to get.
What it costs: it increases blood pressure and it is very, very habit forming.
The pattern he has watched: guys start with one 3 milligram pouch, then a 6 milligram pouch, and pretty soon it is five pouches a day.
I love competing with those guys, because in a few years they're going to have other issues.
Which lands him on his father's advice, delivered long ago by a scientist to his son:
Listen, you've got to learn to be a long distance runner. This is a long game. You want to win the long game. You want to win the short and the medium game too, but you want to win the long game.
Anyone can push hard in the short term. You are just going to see people start dropping out.
Compound
What he says it does
Dose and timing he gives
His caveat, verbatim in substance
Caffeine
His main stimulant. Boosts cortisol, which is why it belongs in the morning window.
Morning, stacked with light and hydration. Avoid in the final 8 hours before sleep.
personal He was drinking some late in the day during this recording because he woke very early, and says some people could not do that.
Alpha GPC
Named alongside caffeine as an early day stimulant.
Early in the day. No dose given on air.
no dose given Mentioned in passing only.
Energy drinks
Named in the same early day stimulant group.
Early in the day.
no detail
Nicotine
Creates an alert but calm state, which he calls very coveted and hard to reach.
No dose recommended. He describes what users do: 3 mg pouch, then 6 mg, then five pouches a day.
warning Increases blood pressure, very habit forming. He says he likes competing with heavy users because in a few years they will have other issues.
Ashwagandha
Potently reduces cortisol.
600 mg twice or so, about a 30% reduction in one study. Second half of the day only. High dose: two weeks on, two weeks off. Moderate 300 to 600 mg probably fine consistently.
timing critical Never in the morning, because it flattens the peak you are trying to build. He does not recommend long term use.
Magnesium, theanine, apigenin
Can help with falling asleep. Apigenin is chamomile tea.
Evening. No doses given on air.
ceiling If the behaviors are not in place, the impact is trivial.
Pinealon
A peptide that can help increase REM sleep.
Only every once in a while.
experimental He calls himself somewhat bullish on experimenting with it, and warns that relying on pharmacology to induce sleep short circuits your own ability to turn your mind off.
Figure 4. Everything Huberman names by compound in this episode, with the parameters he actually states and the hedge he attaches to each. Where he gave no number, this table says so rather than supplying one.
Yoga nidra as a recovery protocol, not just a sleep aid
He closes the loop on the practice with the practical logistics. Scripts run 10, 20 or 30 minutes. There are tons of them on YouTube, and some on the Huberman Lab web page. They are all zero cost. It just depends on what you like.
Two placements, and they are different jobs:
First thing on waking, after a short night. If you did not get enough sleep, he highly recommends doing it immediately on waking to recover the sleep you did not get. He calls it very potent at recovering mental and physical vigor.
The afternoon dip. He always has a bit of a dip around 2 p.m. If he did not sleep enough the night before, he religiously does a yoga nidra between 2 and 3 p.m., maybe even 10 minutes, ideally 20 or 30. Come out of it, hydrate, maybe a little caffeine. Boom, you are right back.
The evidence he cites for why it is not just lying down: there is now data showing that pockets of the brain go into deep sleep, and maybe even REM sleep, while you do nidra. So it is genuinely restorative. And then, twice for emphasis:
There is no pill that will do this. There's no pill that will do this.
Shamani asks whether he does it at night before sleeping. He generally does not, because he does not have trouble falling asleep. His actual problem, over the years, is a different one: falling asleep and then waking at 2, 3 or 4 in the morning and not being able to go back. The eye movement trick plus doing nidra during the daytime is what gave him the ability to turn his mind off and go back to sleep.
Shamani offers his own version of the same discovery. About three years ago he was pushing through on three or four hours of sleep, doing three podcasts a day. He found Huberman's NSDR audios, ten and twenty minutes long, and started using the thirty minute gaps between guests. His team could not find him. He was under the table, asleep. Those ten or fifteen minutes gave him more energy than coffee did.
Huberman's reading of that story is that the mind needs to go into idle. He mentions the default mode network and immediately hedges it, because people get confused: the default mode network is associated with depression if it is too high. But you cannot push the engine that is your brain and nervous system all the time. You can, is the problem. You can do it for a while.
Protocol
When
The parameters he actually gives
Mechanism he attributes it to
Morning sunlight
Within the first 30 to 60 minutes of waking, where morning means after waking, not a clock time
5 to 10 minutes. Outside, no brimmed hat, no sunglasses. Glasses and contacts fine. Look toward the sun, never so bright you cannot look, squinting and looking slightly off is fine. Peak arrives within 5 to 10 minutes. Especially important on overcast days.
Full spectrum light reaches melanopsin ipRGCs, which drive the circadian clock. Spikes the cortisol awakening response by up to 50% and entrains the next day's rise.
10,000 lux lamp
Same window, when sunlight is unavailable
Tablet sized unit for travel. He keeps one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen. A few minutes.
Same circuit. Sunlight is still better because it is full spectrum.
Hydration
Same window
Water on waking.
Hydration boosts cortisol.
Morning caffeine
Same window
Tea or coffee.
Caffeine further boosts cortisol.
Exercise
Ideally the first hour, otherwise the first half of the day
Six days a week, cardiovascular or resistance, one or the other. One full rest day.
Adds to the morning cortisol peak. Blood flow to the brain, sleep quality, brain plasticity.
Phone avoidance
The same first hour
Do not look at it. Do not stay in bed looking at it.
Named as a forcing function against the behaviors that steal the window.
Caffeine cutoff
Evening
None in the final 8 hours before sleep.
Protects the low nighttime cortisol half of the rhythm.
Dim lights
Final hour before sleep
Everything dimmed way down. He avoids candles for fire safety.
Less ipRGC drive lets the pineal gland release melatonin. Falling core body temperature brings melatonin up.
Long exhale breathing
Final hour, or scattered through any day
Five extended exhales across a day. Or three. Or one long one before sleep.
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Diaphragm up, heart more compact, vagus nerve slows the heart. Raises HRV and lowers cortisol over a few minutes.
Yoga nidra / NSDR
On waking after a short night, or the 2 to 3 p.m. dip
10, 20 or 30 minutes, one to seven days a week. Free scripts. Come out of it, hydrate, small caffeine.
Trains the shift from thinking and planning into pure sensation. Data he cites shows pockets of the brain entering deep and possibly REM sleep.
Eye movement trick
Falling asleep, or waking at 2 to 4 a.m.
Eyes closed: side to side, counterclockwise, clockwise, look toward the tip of the nose without crossing, then exhale.
Disrupts proprioceptive circuits through the eye to cerebellum link. You must forget body position to fall asleep.
Deliberate cold
Any time, as resilience training
Cold shower. Never longer than 3 minutes. Count walls, not seconds: about five of them, each one a moment you really want to get out and stay one moment longer.
Reliable fast adrenaline release, prefrontal activity drops for the first 20 to 30 seconds, then adrenaline subsides. Trains riding out waves rather than clock time.
Ten breath meditation
Before getting out of bed
Ten breaths. Set an alarm, because long exhales can put you back to sleep. Sometimes he only reaches six.
His stated test: if you cannot concentrate for ten breaths, how are you going to go about your day.
Figure 5. Every behavioral protocol in the episode with the parameter attached. The column that matters is the third one. Huberman's own argument is that a protocol without its parameters is not a protocol, and that the principle in the fourth column is what lets you evaluate the next protocol somebody sells you.
## Know thyself, and taking yourself seriously (0:44:37)
Huberman says the real key to becoming dangerous, ultra resilient, antifragile, whatever language you want, sits underneath everything already discussed. It is learning to recognize what state you are in.
The oracle said it first, but know thyself. You have to know where you're at. Am I in a good state? Am I in a vulnerable state? If I go on social media now and I see something that upsets me, am I just going to go down that rabbit hole?
The comparison he uses is mechanical. We all like to think we can just blaze through life, but knowing where you are at is like checking the engine, checking the machine, asking whether the steering is aligned. When he does not sleep as much as he needs, or has stressors in his life, his steering is not aligned, and he has to do other things to keep himself in check. The resilience he is describing includes flexibility, and he flags that people hear resilience and think rigidity.
By this point in the conversation the framework has three legs, and he lists them: know thyself, learn how to turn your mind off (meaning turn off thinking and planning, not turn off thoughts), and get the morning cortisol high while keeping it low at night so melatonin can be high.
Then he adds the fourth, and it is the one that changes the tone of the rest of the video.
Take yourself seriously
Taking yourself seriously means both hitting the gas pedal and knowing how to come off the gas pedal so you can come back and do it again. He praises Shamani's under the table naps as exactly that: the equivalent of a professional athlete, or somebody studying for their neurosurgery boards.
Take yourself seriously. Now, people hear that and they think more rigidity, no fun, no laughter. No, laughter is great. Having a great time with your team is great. But the people who become leaders, the people who win in their fields, the people that do it consistently over time and enjoy the process and have healthy lives internally and externally, they know how to switch it off and they take themselves seriously.
He goes back to the scientific meetings for evidence. He used to wonder how people could be so serious about their careers and still party through a conference, and eventually realized that many of them were genuinely brilliant, so they could get away with it. And then the punchline:
None of those people are around anymore. They're not in the field anymore.
Natural proclivities and genetic gifts will carry you pretty far, he says. But people with gifts, proclivities and circumstantial advantages who also take themselves seriously are the ones who excel. Most of us have some advantages. Some people have none. For all three categories, the only route to long term excellence is the same.
The failure mode if you do not, and it is a sharp piece of social physics:
If you don't take these things seriously, what ends up happening is you default to the mean, the dominant culture that you're surrounded with. So if you're around people that like to work hard, play hard, okay, cool. But pretty soon you're playing as hard as you're working, and that doesn't look so good over time. Or you're around people that have given up, or they're getting depressed, and now you're not the person that can be there to really support them. You're one of them.
Nobody is made of steel. We are not robots. But the mistake he thinks people have been taught is that taking yourself seriously means never coming off the gas pedal.
Shamani supplies the analogy that lands it: a Formula 1 driver knows it is not just pit stops. The car needs care. It needs love. It needs rest. Huberman's addition: when you rest and how you rest is absolutely key.
There is no such thing as eliminating toxicity
The trickier piece, he says, is which people belong in your life and which do not, and it starts to sound rigid fast. His answer is not the usual one.
When I hear people say I eliminate all toxicity from my life, there's no such thing. Toxicity comes through the phone. There are going to be people who have challenges and they're not handling them well. Are you going to be in a position where you can help lead them and guide them and be the calm in their storm, so that they can hopefully, if you need it, be the calm in your storm? That's how it works.
And a permission slip attached to the whole protocol stack, which is the most useful sentence in this stretch. If one day you decide to scroll Instagram instead of doing nidra, fine, as long as you reset. What you do not want is to scroll Instagram while thinking you should be doing yoga nidra.
When our mind is split between two places, that's the most taxing thing. When we're trying to focus but we can't. When we're trying to sleep but we can't. The mind thrives on unitary states, but those are hard to get into. We need to train ourselves to get into them. And sadly, the mind defaults to unitary states like anger and frustration very easily. And most of the algorithmic stuff, not all of it but a lot of it, is designed to get you into those states very quickly, so you're not doing anything else.
Shamani says the biggest lie he personally believed was that you do not need an off button. He has been the hustle poster boy in his family and among his friends, and only very recently started consciously practicing the off switch.
The biggest lie about mental toughness, and how much real work fits in a day (0:51:45)
Asked for the biggest lie the world tells about mental toughness and elite performance, Huberman gives one he calls weird.
Put simply, it's that the goal is to just build a bigger and bigger capacity.
The counterintuitive part: the better you get at something, the more of an inroad into your energy it creates. When you are first learning something it takes a lot of energy. Then you get fluid with it. He can sit down and podcast under almost any conditions, as long as there is enough oxygen in the room, and jokes that maybe even without. But to really drop into your craft, whether it is podcasting or finance or sport or medicine, creates a deeper inroad into your energy than being unskilled at it does, because you are engaging more and more focus.
Find your edge, then stay away from it
The early part of any career runs counter to everything else he has said, and he says so. You are trying to figure out how little sleep you can exist on. He knows his: he breaks at two nights of no sleep, and he can do one.
The recent proof point: last week he did a 30 hour work stretch with his business partner. He had not done that in a long time. It hurt. They did it. They carried each other, and he could tell when his own mind was getting wobbly, and his partner would step in. They had to do it, and it felt good, and he does not want to do it again for a long while.
That capacity was built over many years, and you build it by finding your edge. Not by dying, injuring yourself or becoming mentally sick, but by getting to the edge and then staying away from it. So in the first year or two of doing something, go for it. Go all in. Reset only as needed, and keep coming back.
At some point you hit a wall, and you want it to be a non lethal wall: I am exhausted, I need a week off, I cannot afford a week off, okay, that is my limit. Then the question becomes what you can do every day consistently over time, and you work around that average, plus or minus about two hours.
The number
For himself, and depending on the work:
I can probably do anywhere from 5 to 10 hours of real work per day. Real work. That's not including the lunch break. It's not including the walk. Five is doable. Six to seven is doable, hurts a bit more. Ten hurts. The next day I'm not doing ten. I'm borrowing from the next day, where I can only do five.
He had to find that number. You build it the same way you build strength, and the resistance training parallel is exact.
Everyone knows the basic loop: sets and reps, take the reps to failure or close to failure, allow recovery time, the muscle gets stronger, come back. But an old principle from resistance training that is still true is that as you get better at it, you know how to really cramp the muscle hard. You know when the harder reps are coming. You get better at inducing the stimulus, the stress that causes the adaptation.
You need fewer sets after resistance training for 10, 15 years. People say, oh no no, you need to do more. No, you need to pour more into fewer sets.
Somebody who has just started cannot generate that kind of focused intensity. Which is why the equation runs in the direction it does: the more focused intensity you can bring to something, and the more volume of it, the more rest you need to offset that.
The three stage career framework (0:54:12)
This is the structural spine of the second half of the conversation, and Huberman comes back to it twice, once here and once as a deliberate recap at 1:16:44 after they have wandered through fame and self belief.
Years one, two and three: all gas pedal. Just all gas pedal. Work, work, work. Learn, learn, learn. Do it. The only rule is do not damage your health to the extreme and do not do anything crazy.
The goal is just don't die, but just go all in.
Years four, five and six: learn to dynamically regulate it. You are learning to create some balance and be more effective. You are trying to stay out of chronic illness and out of autoimmune conditions. And he names the tells, because this is where people who do not make the transition start to break:
Hair starts falling out
Skin issues appear
The nervous system is under stress
His mechanistic reading of all of it: the nighttime cortisol is too high. The rhythm is off. You are not resetting the nervous system, therefore not resetting the endocrine system, therefore not the immune system. Some people break at that point.
He then splits the driven population in two, and puts himself and Shamani in the more dangerous half. People who are very driven and high wired tend to have a certain physical stature, tend to be go go go, electric, and they know that electric feeling feels good. They veer toward autoimmune conditions, because they can push and push and the cortisol just keeps coming and they keep going. Other people go into chronic fatigue and simply crash.
My problem, your problem, is we don't crash. We keep going, but our baseline is dropping.
Years seven, eight, nine, ten and beyond: you are a pro. You know when you are stressed. You know when you are feeling extra good. You know when you need to do a nidra. You know when you need to get off your phone and go do a specific thing, and you know what that thing is.
The important qualifier he attaches: this does not mean you need ten years to get good at something. You can get real far real fast in three years. You just cannot keep that pace up.
And the scoping rule that makes the whole thing operable:
The unit of analysis, the unit of time to focus on, is the day. What can I do today? This is another big part of shutting your brain off. I'm not thinking about tomorrow as its own thing. I know it's coming, I know I've got stuff to do, but what can I do today to get the most done, and know that I'm coming back tomorrow and I've got to do it again. I want to do it again.
Being a pro also changes how you lead. You can start guiding your team with the same vocabulary: hey, that is a left column issue, clip it. Go turn it off. He delivers a line he clearly uses on people: you are inhaling too much oxygen for this problem.
And he admits to needing hardware for it himself. He has a lock box for his phone that he still sometimes uses, though not as much these days. He needed it at some point, because there was just too much incoming. That, he says, is what becoming a mental athlete actually looks like.
Years 1 to 3All gas pedal. Work, learn, go all in. Reset only as needed, then keep coming back. The only rule is do not damage your health to the extreme. The goal is don't die. He says he has never seen this fail, and that it holds across cultures. He also says you cannot know how far something can go until you have given it about three years of effort bordering on extreme.
Years 4 to 6Learn to dynamically regulate. Create balance and become more effective. This is where people who do not make the switch break: hair falling out, skin issues, autoimmune conditions. His mechanism for all of it is nighttime cortisol too high, so the nervous system never resets, so the endocrine and immune systems never reset. The driven and high wired do not crash, which is the trap. Their baseline just drops.
Years 7 and beyondYou are a pro. You know when you are stressed, when you are feeling extra good, when you need a nidra, when to get off the phone and what to go do instead. Fine tune it, savor it, and start guiding your team with the same language. He notes you can get very far in three years, you just cannot hold that pace.
Every dayThe unit of analysis is the day. Not tomorrow. What can I do today, knowing I come back tomorrow and do it again. He rates 5 to 10 hours of real work as his own sustainable band, with ten hurting and borrowing from the next day's five.
Figure 6. The staging model Huberman builds live and then names again an hour later as the thing he did not intend to arrive at but strongly believes. The years are years in a pursuit, not years of age.
His actual training week
Asked nothing in particular, he lays out the schedule he has run for 35 years, and the specifics are worth having in one place.
Once a week, for nervous system reset rather than fitness, he needs a long slow endurance session: a jog, run, cycle or swim, about an hour, really slow, typically on Sundays, ideally outdoors, sometimes social, usually with podcasts or books playing. Last Sunday it was a slow jog, out and back, 45 minutes.
The whole work of the thing is to not go any faster and just do it.
That takes him into the week.
Day
Session
Structure he specifies
Sunday
Long slow endurance
About an hour. Jog, run, cycle or swim. Really slow, and the discipline is not going faster. Outdoors, often social, podcasts or audiobooks.
Monday
Hard legs
About an hour, brief. A couple of warm up sets and a couple of hard work sets per muscle group. Belt squats or leg presses, hamstring curls, taken to failure. Two or three sets. Not to exhaustion, because it is Monday and the week is long.
Tuesday
Rest
No exercise. He still walks in the morning and gets his sunlight.
Wednesday
Easy cardio
About 30 minutes. Sometimes resistance training instead, depending on how he feels. Nothing excessive. The stated purpose is blood flow to the brain and better sleep.
Thursday
Push and pull
Chest pressing, overhead pressing, a chin up type movement, a rowing type movement, abdominals. General torso work. Couple of warm up sets, couple of hard work sets to failure per exercise. Done in an hour.
Friday
VO2 max intervals
Once a week, very brief. Aerodyne bike, warm up one minute, then hard for 20 to 30 seconds, rest 20 seconds, six rounds. Heart rate maxed by the end. He says you feel like you want to die, and then the rest of the day is easy.
Figure 7. The week Huberman describes, in the order he gives it. His claim for the pattern is all around fitness rather than a peak in any one direction: strong, enduring, able to sprint, good posture. He is 50 and says he has trained this way for 35 years, and that anyone can do it regardless of sex, age or hormone status. The caveat he attaches: you still have to find your own walls, and then decide whether you are going to push past them.
His summary of what the pattern buys: you will get strong, you will have endurance, you will have the ability to sprint and go fast. You are not going to be the fastest or the strongest, but you will have all around fitness and your posture will be good.
And the point of doing any of it, which he keeps returning to:
The real joy is in trying to share tools with people, the morning cortisol stuff, the low nighttime cortisol stuff, so that they can set themselves up to be in the best position to succeed over time. Because if you don't get that right, you're not going to succeed over time.
Follow people, not inspiration (1:02:30)
Shamani notes that there are many things you can take for energy and many books you can read for inspiration. Huberman's response is a small heresy for a man whose show is stacked with tools:
I don't even think about inspiration anymore.
What he does instead is look for themes in the world where he gets to interact with people who are genuinely in their element. Shamani is one. His friend Eddie Chang, whom he had watched perform neurosurgery that morning, is another. There is a vibe that comes off people operating at that level, and over time you find you are simply surrounded by people like that.
It's like a bunch of tributaries come together.
He is careful not to make it exclusionary. He encounters people during the day who are struggling and ask for advice, and of course he stops and gives them his time. But as you keep doing well and taking care of yourself, your whole world ends up made of people who are really positive, and you do not have to worry so much about the downer stuff.
Then the caveat about where that stops working:
When you go online, you're in the open waters of everything from very healthy to really just mentally ill. We have to remember that on the internet a lot of people are not well, and they're stressed and they're tired, and you can send them love, but do not let any of that erode your well being.
On criticism, and the joint family
Huberman became a public figure at 45 and is 50 now, and asks Shamani how he handles it. Shamani says, plainly, that it does not affect him at all. Huberman's immediate diagnosis: healthy upbringing, your parents must have done something well.
Shamani's own system is that he reads every negative comment. Some he treats as constructive feedback pointing at a blind spot he missed. The rest is somebody's opinion, and he laughs it off.
Huberman builds a theory on top of it:
It all starts with knowing that you're fundamentally a good person. Good parenting starts with children feeling loved, and that they are born into and are of goodness. People who don't feel that way are very susceptible to criticism, because it gets at this question, am I bad? If you know that fundamentally you have a good heart, you're human, you make mistakes, but you have a good heart, you're 90% of the way there.
And on the people writing the comments, with an explicit disclaimer that he is not being smug about it:
Think for a second of what it takes to go on the internet and take the time to post a cruel comment about somebody. Just think of how broken somebody has to be inside. I wouldn't in a million years think to do that for amusement, for pleasure. It's net negative for everybody.
His response to seeing it is to send them love and wish them good luck.
Shamani then explains the structure he credits for all of it. He grew up in a joint family, which he has to define for the American audience: ten people in one house. Mother and father, brother, uncle, aunt, grandmother, grandfather, all under one roof, as against the nuclear family of mum, dad and kids. Every weekend the cousins came, and there would be thirty people in the house.
Two things came out of it. The first is self belief, which he says his parents, brother and family gave him and which he is simply grateful for. The second is funnier and sharper:
When you're born with so many people all around, you get immune to criticism, because since childhood you've been constantly compared. You're compared to your cousin, you're compared to your brother, you're compared to the five people in the family. You've been shouted at, you've been verbally abused about certain things. So you get so immune that by the time you're an adult, the outside world doesn't affect you at all.
Huberman says he did not know the structure existed and that most Americans will not either, and then finds his own parallels. Early in life he joined sports and other things where he was in a big pack of young guys, and you take a lot of what Americans call ribbing: joking, hazing, people being rough on each other verbally. You learn that it is an expression of love, sometimes real criticism, and either way it makes you resilient.
Then science did the rest:
In science you are constantly being told, that's not good enough, change the paper. It's non stop. No, not good enough. Finally, okay, do it again. So I've never, I assume criticism is part of the process.
Including the embarrassing mistakes you have to live with, feel shame about, and recover from while knowing that you are still loved, or that you love yourself.
He also puts his own family history on the table without dressing it up. His parents divorced and both remarried. He was very young. It was very disruptive, very disruptive to his whole psychology. But it worked out, and he loved them all.
Shamani adds that his current level of success has not changed his family's attitude toward him one bit. They are the same people, and they would put him to the ground and leave no opportunity to thrash him. Huberman: that is good too, and it is a way of love.
Stanford, and knowing your level
The reason Huberman says he is relieved to hear it is that he worries about people who become very successful very young. He was an aspiring kid, then had some rough years, then the scientific career went very well through very hard work.
But at Stanford School of Medicine, you look left and right and everybody is doing awesome stuff, and some of them are on another plane entirely.
I've got colleagues that will win Nobel prizes, have won Nobel prizes. That wasn't me. I was a good scientist. I think I am a good scientist, but I also knew my level, my place. I do feel I deserved and deserve to be there. But when you're surrounded by people that are like the Michael Jordans of their field, the LeBrons... Eddie Chang, he's on a whole other level. So your standard is very high.
His protective factor was timing. He became public facing at 45, so his personality was already crystallized, for better or worse, and he was not going to change much. And his friends still treat him the same.
Which brings him to a rule he attributes to Jocko Willink, flagged as very male oriented:
Your really good male friends will give you the hardest time to your face, but they will never talk badly about you behind your back.
That, he says, is the critical test. They should be able to say anything to you in the room, and there is no gossip when you are out of it. He rates knowing that rule at roughly 30 percent of how to be a dude.
Why fame destroys performers (1:11:27)
Asked what specifically worries him about young success, Huberman answers from observation rather than theory. He has known people who got very popular, famous and rich from athletics and then soared in business, in tech, in the culinary world, and so many of them crash and burn.
His model is pharmacological:
Attention is a drug if it's misused. Attention recycled into creative pursuit, into intellectual pursuit, and then giving back more, that's a beautiful thing. But you look at all these performing artists, musicians and so forth, they implode.
He compares it to opioids and, especially, amphetamines. If someone lacks the solid family grounding and solid internal structure, they experience these peaks of attention and money where they are the focus, and most people never go through life being the focus. Then comes the traumatic dip afterwards, and the need to get back, and if they cannot they start using substances, or spending money on what they think will be salvation.
He offers an explanation for a pattern he says is common in the United States:
There's a reason why so many famous people eventually turn to some notion of God. It's because they realize that's a loving relationship that will never leave them if they don't leave it. And in principle it never leaves them anyway.
The scary realization underneath it is that people may love you only because of the position you are in. Certain roles get treated a certain way, and the moment somebody is out of the role, it changes. Nobody cares about the ex president, he says, and then immediately complicates his own example, because the politics of the moment make it messy.
The recap, and the question of being built different (1:16:44)
Here Huberman stops and names the framework he says he did not intend to arrive at but strongly believes: years one, two and three, gas pedal. Four, five, six, learn to dynamically regulate. Seven, eight, nine and forward, now the good stuff, where you can fine tune it and savor it. Sit back once in a while and say, man, I did that. You built something real because you took the risk.
His scope claim for it: everything they are describing is accessible. Take care of your physical body and your biological rhythms. If you cannot get all the exercise every week, get some. Lean into a mission with a payoff. Avoid the excesses. Do not get into extremes of work and partying, or extremes of anything, except possibly the first three years where you go all in.
I've never seen it fail, and that's true across cultures.
He does exempt people living under genuinely oppressive regimes who cannot move, and says that is not what he is talking about.
Shamani asks whether some people are simply built different. Huberman splits the answer in two.
On the physical side, yes, and he is unsentimental about it. There are exceptions like Spud Webb winning the slam dunk competition without the height. But hang around NBA players and most of them are very, very tall. That is genetic: the amount of IGF-1 and growth hormone pumped out of their pituitary, largely inherited.
On the mindset side, he finds it more interesting and is more careful. He believes some people simply have more energy, and that it is not necessarily physical or mental energy, although it often is. It is more a sense of self. Some people report believing from birth that they are fated to do something.
It's like they have this level of vibration in their nervous system that they need to take someplace and do something with. And when you give them something to bite down on, they just go. And hopefully they bite down into something that's generative and healthy.
He reaches for animals, because he has spent a lot of time thinking about other nervous systems for scientific reasons. Some species have a lot of energy and others are very loafed and occasionally do something. People are like that too.
Then a passage he is careful with, and says explicitly he is not saying to be politically correct: some people are just more relaxed and less driven, and they are still fundamentally important to society. We need people who tend to certain things day in and day out at a very consistent level, who are not trying to break out of their current circumstances and do not feel friction with them.
He attaches a mechanism, hedged: he thinks this is strongly related to the dopamine system. Some people feel the friction of where they are at, and it is never enough. Which is tricky, because you want people to savor what they have and continue to strive. You do not want people always dismayed.
He points at the failure mode he sees on X, where there is an observable competitiveness about children, money, marriages, cars:
When people are attached to any one thing as being the answer, it's very clear where that's headed. They're headed for dismay.
And then the flip side, stated fairly:
Many disagreeable people go on to do great things because they look at the world and they say it can be so much better.
For him personally, that friction is the belief that there is deep value in people understanding some basic science of how they work, plus things from ancient practices like yoga nidra, and that if you tell it to people in the form of physiology, maybe they will get it.
The two decisions, one taken and one not
He gives two examples from his own life that sit either side of the line.
In high school he talked to friends about getting a wholesale license and building a company. He thinks they probably should have done it and that it would have done very well. They did not. His verdict on why: I listened too much, and we did not do it.
The second one he took. He was tenured at Stanford, running his lab, publishing in Nature, and told his dad he was going to start a podcast. His dad's reaction was that he did not know Stanford was going to like that. Huberman's answer:
I don't care. I'm doing this.
To his father's credit, he says, he is great about it now and has been a guest on the podcast. And the feeling that drives that kind of decision is specific:
It involves a certain amount of no other option type feeling in your body. You feel pulled towards it.
The hard part for people wired that way is the valleys. He has now been podcasting about six years, and he notes that the YouTube algorithm changes a little, things shift, and part of being a pro is tolerating dips in one area while other areas are going great, and then suddenly you are on a rocket ship again. That comes with maturity.
Quitting was never an option. Never an option.
For people who do quit, he says he would ask them with kindness: do you really want it, or are you in the wrong domain? And the time constant he attaches:
Until you've given something three years of really solid effort, bordering on extreme effort, you don't know where it can go. You don't really know.
The neuroscience of choking, and why it is the opposite of what you think (1:24:26)
Shamani makes the question concrete. Two people want to do something risky. One sees the risk and jumps. The other thinks about it, plans it, is about to jump, and freezes. What is happening in the brain of the one who freezes?
Huberman says we can put science to it, and cites a paper on the neuroscience of choking. He is specific that he means choking in the performance sense, not the airway sense, meaning the stakes get really high and you blow it. He calls it a beautiful experiment, and the finding is the inversion:
When you have the opportunity to do something and get a little reward, you rarely choke. When the rewards go up and up and up, and you start thinking about what you stand to gain, not what you stand to lose, the brain over recruits neurons in motor cortex, and very skilled people miss.
He notes it carries over to finance and all sorts of other domains. And the psychological reading follows from it:
The freezing comes from thinking too much about how good it could go, how well it could turn out. It becomes overwhelming. The stakes are so high.
Most people, he says, assume the frozen person is imagining disaster. They are not. What causes the choke is: so much is at stake, and if I cannot do this, I cannot do anything. They are psyching themselves out.
The fix: lower the stakes and pull the horizon in
So the intervention is to lower the stakes in your own mind, and he gives a worked example from his own recent life.
His podcast was doing very well, and simultaneously he had a book to finish. Protocols runs almost 650 pages, which he describes as seven books collapsed into one, deliberately, so somebody could read 100 pages on sleep and have their sleep worked out, or 100 on stress, or on exercise. He says he does not expect anyone to read it all the way through, jokes that you would fall asleep, and then follows the joke through: so, cure insomnia.
Doing the book in parallel with the podcast was a lot. His mindset for it was a phrase:
Chop wood, carry water. Which just means some days you don't think about why. You just chop wood, carry water. This is how you keep a village going. And I said, I'm doing this simply because I said I would.
Resentments came up. Why did I do this. I can get out of this. He pushed them aside. It took much longer than he thought, and he got there. And his own analysis of what the phrase was actually doing:
It was just lowering the stakes. Just do it today. Just today. One more day.
Which generalizes into his advice for anyone frozen at the edge of a decision:
Go all in for three days and then quit. Talk to me after three days. If you survive three days, you can survive three more days. You survive those three days, you can do another three days. And just keep going. Bring the time horizon in. That's the way to do it.
And the other failure mode: the excesses
He is equally clear that the person who just jumps is not automatically right. We love and admire those people, but the timing has to be right. You cannot be reckless or haphazard, because that is how you get yourself killed in physical endeavors and how you lose everything in financial ones.
He reaches for a saying he attributes to Warren Buffett about the three things that kill men in finance: liquor, ladies and leverage, the last one meaning taking on too much risk.
The first two matter too, he says, because he has studied many stories of success in the creative arts, in science and now to some extent in podcasting, and the pattern repeats. The excesses people bring about when they start to do really well are often what take them down. Overspending. Drugs. He names the Conor McGregor situation in the news at the time, with the honest disclaimer that he does not know the specifics of that case: a man at the pinnacle, too much money, too many resources, not enough people around to keep him in check.
Substance abuse and behavioral dysregulation are easy to spot. But the subtler version is excess of ego:
People think, oh, I won the last one, I built 10 companies, I can build 10 more. How about one more, better than all the other 10?
The counterexample he offers, with the disclaimer attached, is Elon Musk: like him or hate him, particularly impressive because he goes for big things but he knows himself and can manage all of it.
What power does to a brain
Shamani brings a study he had read recently, quoting it as best he can remember. Twenty years of research on power, and the finding as he states it: what power does to your brain is somewhat equivalent to trauma. Given power, the brain literally changes as it does under trauma. You get more impulsive. You start losing a real sense of reality. Decisions get worse and worse, and the more powerful you get, the more of it happens.
Huberman does not dispute it and adds an image from having been a camp counselor. Adolescents constantly test the edges, but deep down they want you to keep them safe. Small children do the same: they go to the edge of a thing and then look back at their parents. Are you looking out for me? As we get more power and more freedom, we sometimes test it in the same way. But life, he says, has its own way of correcting these things.
He does not want the takeaway to be that success means sitting in your chair and just working. And then a rule about motivation that he treats as load bearing:
For some people the reward is the work. And I think it is important to make the work a significant fraction of the reward. Otherwise you can't keep it up. You can't just do something just for money.
He allows the exception honestly. He knows investors who will say outright that they love money, and he does not know why. Maybe they grew up poor. Maybe they just love investing, and winning, and earning it. And they like earning it more than spending it, which makes it a game, like a video game.
For him it is learning and teaching. Learning and teaching, that is the process. Anything that comes of it, recognition or financial returns, is icing. Multiple incentives are fine, but:
We have to stay attached to the core thing.
The committee method (1:32:35)
If you are doing really well, he does not want you to assume it is all about to come crashing down. You can make really good decisions, and one of the best ways to do it is to have a committee of people.
You should not be making all the decisions about your life in the confines of your skull. You need people that you respect, not for every decision, but certain people for certain decisions, that you can bounce things off of.
The constraint on it is as important as the idea. You do not let them make the decisions. You use them to pressure test, because we can delude ourselves.
And there is an expiry date on the committee:
There also comes a time when you just say, I'm going to ignore everybody, I'm going to do this. And if it doesn't work out, you got your lesson. And if it does work out, which often it does, now you're what we call a leader. You have knowledge and experience that they don't have. And that's a great place to find yourself.
Is your brain built for survival or for success? (1:34:53)
Shamani asks whether all this striving fights the brain's design, since the brain is built to keep us alive rather than to make us thrive.
Huberman's answer is that humans are different. We were given all the brain areas for survival, and an expanded prefrontal cortex that lets us set strategy, build things, imagine technologies, and take experiences, traumatic or loving, and build something beautiful out of them. That, he says, is the story of human history. We are not just about survival.
Then the claim that gives the section its edge:
The moment our basic needs are met, we have two options. We either can get anxious and dissolve into a puddle of our own anxious thoughts, or we can take those anxieties and funnel them into doing something which advances us. This is a binary choice. There is no in between.
Most people bounce back and forth a little, naturally, at two or three in the morning when they wake. Everyone does it. But on average you want to be veering into that right lane.
And the reframe of anxiety itself, which he qualifies carefully as often but not always, and probably the majority of the time:
The anxiety is not because we have this impending bad thing that's going to happen. It's because we're fed, we're rested, we're watered, we have enough social connection, and now we need to do something with this additional energy.
So you have to grab hold of your mind and your body and take it someplace regimented. And it is hard.
Clutch states, learned the day before
This is where he introduces something he flags twice as brand new to him. The day before this recording he had a conversation on his own podcast about flow states, and his guest stopped him: no, in the world of high performance we now talk about clutch states.
Huberman had never heard the term, and says so as a neuroscientist. The definition he was given:
Clutch states are the states of forcing oneself to do something at that edge of friction and effort that most athletes, investors, high performers and business people live in 90% of their waking hours.
His reaction was that somebody had finally described his life. He points out that the conversation they are having in that moment is one, and that it is not a meandering philosophical chat. Both of them are enforcing something.
His argument for why clutch beats flow as a concept:
Flow comes around occasionally in years seven, eight, nine and beyond, once you have already achieved mastery.
The ladder he gives is unskilled, skilled, mastery, virtuosity. Everyone wants virtuosity.
But virtuosity is built on years upon years of basics of clutch state, clutch state, clutch state.
Flow is the expression of something that you can already do. It has nothing to do with learning.
He credits the term to Tommy Wood, an MD PhD at the University of Washington who studies high performance and neuroplasticity, and jokes that the two of them are probably among the ten people on the planet who have heard the term. Then he explicitly releases it:
No one owns that term. Send it far and wide. I don't own it. He doesn't own it. Send it far and wide. Get yourself into a clutch state, folks, and build something.
How to actually learn from podcasts and books (1:38:00)
The clutch idea drops him straight into the neuroscience of learning, and the principle is stated as a hard rule.
A fundamental principle of neuroplasticity is that if your nervous system can do something, there's no plasticity. There's no rewiring.
What creates rewiring is the gap between your desired performance and your current performance. That gap creates adrenaline in the body, norepinephrine in the brain, and other neurochemicals that produce the internal chemical milieu in which neural circuits can rewire. And crucially:
The errors are what drive that. Your nervous system goes, I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it. You go to sleep. A few days later you're doing it a bit more, and pretty soon you've got it.
Which yields a protocol for the medium he and Shamani both work in, and it is almost embarrassingly simple:
The best way to reinforce anything that you've learned is to self test. We know this from neuroscience and psychology experiments. Once you listen to a podcast, once you listen to a book, the best thing you can do is take a walk, or just a few moments, and just think: what did I learn? Okay, clutch. Do I know what that is? Just a few things here and there. And where you go, I don't remember. Great. Go look it up. You'll never forget it.
The learning process, he says, is about recognizing what you do and do not know. It is those errors that are so key.
When wellness becomes the problem (1:41:46)
Shamani admits that from the outside Huberman looks like a 50,000 protocol guy, and asks whether that is what his life is.
Huberman does not deny that the day is regimented. He lists it out: supplements, sunlight, hydration, workouts, yoga nidra, dimming the lights, journaling, a ten breath meditation. He does the big ones every single day and every single night, unless he cannot, in which case he does as many as he can.
But then the correction, and it is the most useful thing in this stretch:
Sometimes people forget that I, like them, have large periods of my day where I have to be in laser focus to podcast. I have to prepare podcasts for guests and solo podcasts. Some of the solo podcasts are 100 hours or more of preparation. It's like doing a master's thesis. And I have to tend to the rest of my life too. I do all the stuff, but I'm not a robot.
And the framing that separates him from the genre he helped create:
None of this is a closed loop. I don't do the wellness stuff to just keep doing the wellness stuff. It's always been a way to support the rest of my life. I'm fortunate that I like exercise, I like yoga nidra, I like morning sunlight. But I do all those things to raise up the level that I can do all the other things.
He adds that the notion of health influencers has become a bit of a thing where that is all people do, and that this is not realistic for most.
Can you build courage? (1:43:19)
Shamani goes back to something Huberman said earlier and asks the direct question. The answer is immediate and repeated.
Can you build courage? Absolutely. Absolutely. Incremental. You get people to their edge of agitation and you let them just live there.
Cold exposure, counted in walls rather than seconds
He concedes the cliché and then explains why it survives the cliché. Cold water builds mental resilience because, provided you do not make it too cold and just take a cold shower, it reliably and consistently causes a fast release of adrenaline.
That matters because all anxiety and stress involves this same deployment of adrenaline that makes us feel agitated. During it, prefrontal cortex activity is lowered for the first 20 or 30 seconds. It is harder to strategize. We just want to go anywhere except where we are. The resilience training is learning to ride out that first 20 to 30 seconds, after which the adrenaline starts to subside.
Then the part where his protocol departs from the standard one, and it is the most interesting design decision in the episode:
The way that I suggest people do deliberate cold exposure is different than most. I think people should pick a certain number of what I call walls. So maybe five walls. Maybe the first wall to go over is just getting in the cold shower. Then, instead of counting or going for time, you sense when you really want to get out. That's another wall. You stay in just one more. Then you can kind of get comfortable. Then you wait until you really want to get out again. You go over that wall again.
What you notice, he says, is that those are waves of adrenaline, which is much more realistic. It is much more like the real world, where you are doing public speaking and are not going for time. You are not trying to relax for three minutes. You are trying to deal with whatever comes your way. So you learn to be resilient to your own physiology.
The safety bounds, stated plainly: provided it is not an ice cold bath, and you do not want to become hypothermic, do not stay in longer than three minutes. A cold shower is fine.
Turning the heat up instead of the air conditioning on
The same principle transferred to a workout, and this is the story he clearly enjoys most.
The other day he was training in his gym and it was really warm. He was about to walk over and turn on the air conditioning, and instead thought: no, let us make it hotter. Turn on the heat.
Two more sets. Best sets I had in ages. Little resilience training. I'm not a masochist. Let's just not always go for comfort. Let's just make it a little hot, harder, not easier. And then I showered. I swear the rest of my day was so much better.
He immediately balances it. Some days it is the opposite and he needs air conditioning. It depends. He also notes, for his host's audience, that it gets very hot and humid in parts of India, so he would not always do that.
A related piece of workout craft: occasionally he will warm up with music on, then decide on silence so he can focus as hard as humanly possible on every repetition. After three or four sets of that he wants the music back. And a safety observation attached to it: the tail end of a workout, and the front end, are typically when people get hurt, because you are distracted. So he turns the music off for the tail end and really focuses. There is, he says, an art to doing a great workout. Some days you just drink your energy drink and go all out.
The hardest rep of all: not talking
The same drill applied socially, and he is candid about how badly it went.
He was in a difficult conversation the other day and decided he would resist the urge to say anything. He would be the guy who just nods.
It was so hard. Because I have a lot of thoughts and opinions, especially about what was being said. And I just got to the end. And then I said what I needed to say, and I'm so glad I did it. But it was work. And it wasn't because I was being personally attacked. I was just fighting that impulse.
He generalizes it into leadership, with a self assessment attached:
Learning to fight our impulsivity. This is the stuff of great leadership that I'm not super skilled at, but I'm trying to build up. Because when you're the main guy, most things fall in around you. It's about you being dialed in, and it can make people in positions of leadership impatient. We're used to things happening at a certain pace.
So the next time something is slow, treat it as the practice. It is hard to stay there. Nobody is striving for perfection. Pick a short time scale and try to get something better out of it.
Mindless resets, and the cave
The counterweight he insists on, and he is very clear about it: have some mindless ways to reset. He likes watching documentaries. He loves hanging out with his girlfriend and the dog, and they have a name for it.
We call it, we cave to love. There's these moments where we're just like, no more work, no more dishes, no more doing anything. We're just going to completely relax, the three of us. And after 10, 15 minutes we move back into our time.
Give yourself permission, in a healthy way, to be a child every once in a while, and then get back in it. Posture up and get serious again. Because otherwise you are grinding the gears all the time, and that is just no fun.
And the destination, which he says he knows from observing people in tech, medicine, the arts, podcasting and finance:
The real top layer is the ultra discipline, super focused, but with an element of playfulness, because they're so secure. They can now just have that fun. They won the game, and so now they can just have fun, and all this incredible stuff comes out of that. That's the peace, that's the joy that comes with it. But don't expect that in the first couple of years. No way, no chance. You're going after wins and you're building your confidence.
Top three mental games to build resilience (1:50:08)
Shamani asks for three things people can start immediately. Huberman gives four, and then confesses to failing at a fifth.
1. Ten breath meditation before you get out of bed
He starts by admitting that on the morning of this recording he did not want to get out of bed, was super tired, and had not slept enough. He does this every morning anyway, before getting out of bed.
If I can't concentrate for ten breaths, how in the world am I going to go about my day?
The honest detail: sometimes he only gets to number six. You drift. And a warning attached to the protocol, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes it real: you have to set an alarm, because you can easily go back to sleep, especially with long exhales.
2. Make the hard sets harder
Not the warm ups. The work sets. The goal is to make those as hard as possible, not as easy as possible. As focused as you can possibly be, and when it really is tough, you do everything you can to make it even harder: try to contract the muscle even harder using that same weight.
3. Dilate the gaze
This is the one with the most neuroscience behind it and the widest applicability. For any challenging interaction, whether with the internet, with a person, or with too many incoming texts, the move is to take your gaze and extend it into the entire room or space you are in.
The reason: we get very narrow focus. There is real neuroscience to it. We get tunnel vision, and something feels overwhelming because it is almost like drinking from a fire hose. Dial the gaze out, and the autonomic nervous system adjusts, and you go from overwhelmed to I can do this, and then you start picking things off one by one.
He notes he and Jocko Willink arrived at this independently, Willink through his military career. Huberman uses it live while podcasting, when he feels they are really in the tunnel: he dials out and thinks, let's invite in some novelty here, to make sure they have not gone too far down one road.
Mechanically, nobody would even detect you doing it. You simply start viewing the ceiling and the floor and the things around you. Seeing yourself in context takes you out of it, releases some of the stress in the mind, and lets novel approaches appear.
His evidence for it is a friend who works as a performance coach for a professional basketball team, not the head coach. When players move down court they are often so focused that they do not see opportunities and do not see defenders who can thwart them. What they need to do is dilate their gaze, and they start seeing things in new ways. His summary: the brain affords more resources when you do that.
4. Keep one memory of a win, and use it
The fourth one is about memory, and it is a deliberate correction of a default.
Normally people's memory of the past is about things that didn't work out. I think everyone should have something that worked out, and you return to that. You survived the hard thing. You're still here. You're still breathing. Sometimes it's that basic.
Or, in Shamani's case, you built that. Which simply means you can build another thing, and build on this. You have that in you. And the part he emphasizes hardest:
To really acknowledge your own agency in that. You didn't do it alone, but you did that. You took it from nothing. Had you not decided, and then done the things, it would not exist. You need to internalize that, because you really recognize your own capacity and you can bring that forward.
The one he fails at
He admits that throughout the day there are many opportunities to do the slightly harder thing, another idea he credits to Andy Stump. You see a little piece of something on the ground: do you pick it up, or do you walk past? You do it because it is hard.
I confess I'm not that good at that. I hate folding and putting away my clothes. I absolutely hate it. I would pay any amount of money to have somebody else do it, but occasionally I just throw them. It's like my vice. Sounds so trivial, right? So I let myself sometimes leave some clothes out. I'm human.
He finds it genuinely funny that for all the other hard things he can do, he cannot seem to fold a shirt properly and put it away. Would it be better if he did? Yes. His rule from it: pick your masochism, but be thoughtful about it.
And the reason he is telling the story at all:
If someone were to watch my podcast, or your podcast, and watch Goggins and all these people, it could feel overwhelming. Like, oh my goodness, is my life supposed to be all right angles? No. We're human.
He also notes, in passing, that Shamani at 29 has more plasticity available than he does at 50.
The most important trick: it is an adventure and you write it
You have to see your life as an adventure. You get to write your own story.
He then tells the story that makes the claim credible, and prefaces it by saying that for whoever is listening, this is not about him or Shamani. It is about them, wondering if they could do it.
I will tell you right now, I was that guy. I was in my lab listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast and other podcasts, reading books, hearing about people long before there were podcasts. I wanted to be like these people who built things and strived and did creative things and did things that were outside the box.
And then the detail he calls dorky three separate times: he kept a little list of names. Some artists, some musicians, some scientists, some other people he wanted to be like in certain ways. Some he has now met. Many he never will, because they have passed. He still has the list. He has met a few of them and some of them were really cool, with no disappointments there.
For lack of a better word, I manifested that. But I didn't manifest it by just sitting in a chair and thinking about it. I went for it.
His practical advice attached to it: do not let the amount of information out there overwhelm you. Just pick your stuff and go, and do not try to do it all.
And do not build a copy
The last piece of that answer is a warning against the obvious move. He says the best work is non competitive, and attributes the point to his friend Rick Rubin about the creative arts. He had recently watched a documentary about rock climbing, and he is not a rock climber, but the lesson generalized: competition can motivate you from time to time, but it is not going to bring about your most creative work.
What you want is an individual, unique vision of something. It can look a lot like a lot of other things. It might even look the same to other people. But it is yours. You can borrow and trade the things you think are cool and discard the things you do not, but build your own life story.
They don't want another one of you or another one of me or another Steven Bartlett or Tim Ferriss or Rogan or Lex Fridman. Those guys are those guys and we're us. Build out the new thing. It can still be a podcast or whatever, but build your own beautiful painting of your vision.
What would make him happier than anything: somebody writing to say, I heard that, and I went for it. And every time someone says yeah but it is hard, there are a lot of podcasts already, that should be the answer. And just keep going.
Turning other people's energy into motivation (1:59:19)
Shamani frames the split: some people are addicted to comfort, others are addicted to challenge. Why?
Huberman gives two answers and openly says he does not know which is true.
The rigid one: maybe people simply have different mental and physical pain thresholds. He is quick to say he does not seek out physical pain. When he stubs his toe it hurts, and then it stops hurting.
The other one: maybe the human species divides into builders and sustainers. He explicitly rejects the builder and taker framing, saying there are some takers in the world but most people are trying to be good people. And maybe, he suggests, some people have simply never conceptualized themselves inside a life adventure builder framework at all.
Then he offers a test that is sharper than either explanation:
A big test of it is whether or not, when somebody sees somebody else striving and doing well, does it make you feel good or does it make you feel overwhelmed? When I see somebody striving and doing well, I'm like, yeah. I don't want to take from them. I can feed off that energy. It feeds me. That's the right language. It feeds me.
He gives the day's own examples. Watching Eddie Chang that morning, at the frontier of science, discovering new brain areas with the most modern technologies including AI, and a bioengineer on top of it, made Huberman say: wow, I am inspired to do better. And the conversation he is currently in, he says, fundamentally changed the way he thinks about things going forward.
He is also fair to the other response, and does not treat it as a failing:
Maybe some people, and this is perfectly fine, will hear or see things like that and go, cool. Like I just love watching a great soccer game as a spectator and I'm not inspired to go do anything with it. I just want to see my team win. And that's cool too. That's not me, but that's cool. But I see Messi and I think, what's he doing? How does he do that?
His closing position on talent, which sits under a lot of the episode:
I don't think there's anything that special about any one person in history or currently. I just think some people have gifts, sure, and opportunities, but I think they just channel their efforts. We all have the opportunity to build beautiful things in our lives at whatever scale, and that's humans at their best.
Losing three mentors, and what grief actually is (2:03:35)
Shamani turns it toward identity. All of this depends on how you see yourself, he says, but somebody listening right now is feeling like a loser. How does that person change their identity?
Huberman's first move is grammatical: it is a verb, an action. His second is to put his own hardship on the table so the advice does not arrive from nowhere. Less than some, more than others, he says, but the collapse of his family early in life was very disruptive to him.
He is unusually honest about what hearing Shamani's joint family story did to him in real time:
I'm super happy for you, I'm delighted. But there's a little bit of like, man, that would have been awesome. Some small fraction of that. I had some of that in certain forms for a certain amount of time. And then you just go. And I was born into a healthy body. Let's go. We've got work to do, Huberman. So you can't live there.
Then the losses. For someone who was not in the military and did not grow up in the inner city, he says, he has lost a lot. All three of his scientific mentors died young: suicide, cancer, cancer. He was very close with all of them. And you learn to keep going, take those losses, and keep cycling forward.
The grief protocol
Which is where he corrects one of the most widely repeated ideas in popular psychology. There is a protocol for grief in Protocols, he says, because most people think grief is anger, denial, acceptance, and then eventually peace.
That's not how grief works at all.
His account:
Grief is about the nervous system thinking there's an action to take around somebody and not being able to complete the call or see them. Your nervous system thinks they're still there and they're not. It's an unfulfilled expectation. It's like reaching for food when you're very hungry and it's coming towards your mouth and it disappears. That's what grief is like.
So you have to go through certain science supported things to allow that circuit to shift into a different framework, where the relationship is really about the past, while your nervous system is still trying to complete the action. He notes he still deals with some of it.
Winners and losers, defined as verbs (2:06:04)
Before answering the loser question, Huberman disarms the comparison it rests on. The person feeling that way is comparing themselves to somebody's end state of having, in quotation marks, won. He is speaking from his position now, but there were years when he had very little money. As an academic in the Bay Area he was not in absolute poverty, but it was really a struggle at times, alongside all sorts of challenges of loss. There were some dark days in there for sure.
Then the formulation he says he was told rather than invented, and that ran through his head year after year for decades:
Losers take things that happened to them, and sometimes those are things they could not control, or missteps or errors or losses, and they ruminate on it, and they turn those thoughts and those emotions into things that harm themselves or others.
Winners take the things that happen to them, good or bad, and they transmute that, sometimes through very hard work that involves talking to oneself, reminding oneself, journaling things out, forcing oneself to make better decisions. And they take those hard things and turn them into actions that are supportive and indeed generative for them and for others in the world. Period. End of story.
He immediately calls that just words, and moves to the mechanics. The first thing to acknowledge is that both losers and winners have hard thoughts, hard emotions and feelings of despair. The shift is not deciding to be a winner and think good thoughts.
No, you literally have to force that on yourself over and over and over. Sometimes multiple times per hour, or every five minutes. But you cannot let yourself self attack or attack others. You cannot do it.
Sometimes, he says, the best thing to do is nothing. If you cannot get into a generative state, just feel the feelings but do not do anything. Do not get up out of your chair. Then eventually you get up out of your chair and you do.
The list of what he means by harm is specific and unflinching. It can be with words. It can be physical. It can be not going to work, not going to school, smoking weed and playing video games, indulging in porn, saying horrible things to yourself, giving up on the world. That is the default for many people.
The rung on the ladder
Once you ratchet yourself toward the other side, he says, you realize all the control is in your own mind, and that nothing outside you is actually going to teach you that process. Which produces the sharpest caveat he offers about his own industry:
This is the one danger of anything inspirational: it comes from the outside, and it can be very useful, like a rung on a ladder that we can pull ourselves forward on. But ultimately you pulled yourself forward, and that's the thing to focus on. It was your action that brought you forward. So then you learn how to do it when the rung isn't there. You set a mental rung.
The example of a mental rung: okay, I am going to do nothing for five minutes, because everything I want to do is destructive. I made it five minutes. I am in the driver's seat, at least a little bit.
And then the conditions under which it is hardest, which he names precisely: between the hours of 1 and 5 a.m. when you are underslept. Very hard when you have had alcohol in your system. Very hard during a breakup or a loss, and when you have multiple stressors at once.
He is careful about the vocabulary itself:
It's not calling people loser. Think verbs. What am I doing that's promoting a loser mentality? What am I doing that's promoting winner mentality? And you've got to dig yourself out of that hole, and no one can do it for you. And help will come when you're headed in the right direction.
To the objection that nobody helped when they tried, his answer is gentle and unyielding at once: maybe you need to go a little bit further. He says he empathizes and sympathizes with people who feel they are on their own, and then: in that case there is only one way out, and that is out.
His starter set, in order of difficulty:
Learn to meditate for ten breaths. Fight the agitation.
Learn to stay in a cold shower for three minutes.
Learn to turn off your thoughts with yoga nidra, which he says is a lot harder than the other two.
And the claim he backs it with, plus the pre emptive answer to the objection:
I know with certainty it can all be done because I did it. And people say, well, you had certain things available to you. Listen, they didn't hand me a PhD. I had to work for it. They didn't hand me a podcast. I had to work for it. My life's been easier, way easier than it has been for others, and way harder than it has been for others. It's all what you make of it.
What to do when you hit rock bottom (2:12:06)
Shamani asks whether stripping everything back to the basics is the right move when someone is truly at the bottom, with no connection and nobody to hold their hand.
Huberman starts there and is honest about the limits of it. Break it down to the absolutes. You are here. You are breathing. You are doing better than a lot of people. And then, immediately:
It's not going to feel that good though. That alone isn't going to be like, oh great, I'm breathing. Some people will even think, sadly, that they wish they weren't. Okay. Well, you're here.
He flags the next part as possibly sounding loaded and says it anyway. If you are really at the bottom of your pit, you obviously need to seek help. And then:
Ask whatever you believe in. I believe in God. But whatever you believe in, just acknowledge out loud, alone, or in your head if you don't want anyone to hear you: I'm at my end. I can't do this on my own anymore. Just help me get through the next hour. Just go another hour. Just help me do that.
He knows this contradicts what he said fifteen minutes earlier about pulling yourself back to the right response, and says so explicitly. But if you truly cannot do that, then it is time to give it over and stop trying to control every aspect of it in your mind. He suggests having a good laugh out loud about it, because it is hard to be human sometimes.
We're a weird species. We've got this amazing prefrontal cortex and we can do amazing things with it. But sometimes it loops back on us and it flagellates us, and we're like, I can't break out of this. That's when it's time to say, okay, I can't. So I'm going to give this over. Just help me go another hour.
And then the most carefully bounded statement he makes all episode. He guarantees you will get there. He has his own thoughts about why it might work, and:
None of them fall within the realm of science. So it's not really worth me going into, because it's not my expertise. But I've never seen this fail.
Once you are back on slightly solid ground, the work resumes, because on his account the universe, or God, or whatever you believe in, only rewards effort, or the effort to engage in effort. We have been gifted life. We can relax and enjoy it. We do not get to waste it.
He says he believes this strongly because he has been at the bottom of that pit himself, wondering what in the world. The good news he offers is a compounding one: if you hit the bottom and get out a few times, the next time you go in, you know you will get out. Some of those times will feel longer than the last. You still get out.
Then a passage he explicitly labels as beyond his understanding:
There's this weird law of the universe that I don't quite understand. Maybe it's a dopaminergic thing, but the depth of that pit oftentimes is the mirror image of the height of the thing that you're going to accomplish. I don't know how that works, but later you're going to find yourself at a peak, and you should remember and go, yeah, got out, got out, went back in, went back in, got out. Now I'm here, and I'm going to savor it a little bit more.
Because that, he thinks, is also us being tested. Are you going to savor it? Appreciate it? Share it? If so, we can build on it. If not, you may not end up in the pit again, but you drift back down. Take good care and you can stay at a high level for a long time.
Why immigrants and their children develop extraordinary drive (2:16:49)
Shamani asks whether he has studied immigrants. Huberman has not studied them specifically, but notes that his father is a first generation immigrant to the United States. When Shamani observes that immigrants consistently outperform, Huberman adds the sharper version: especially their children.
His explanation is perceptual rather than genetic.
I think it's because they look around and they see opportunity where everybody else sees neutral or negative. It's this fighter mentality. There's something here that people who've been here a long time don't appreciate. There's stuff wide open.
The example he gives is a real person from his own life. His high school girlfriend's father had roughly a seventh grade education, had been a taxi driver and a few other things, and had worked from a young age because he was very poor. He moved to the Bay Area. And then the detail that makes the story:
He carried hundreds of keys on his key ring, because early on he bought properties in the South Bay when no one was interested in these areas, and he did all the maintenance himself.
Then a thing called Silicon Valley happened, property became extremely valuable, and next thing you know his daughters had horses. Huberman's reading of the man's logic: why would he pay anyone to do the maintenance? First of all he probably could not afford it at first, but he also had the skills. He ended up owning huge swathes of land and property in the South Bay through sheer sweat.
The underlying mechanism he names is a general property of nervous systems:
There are resources that others aren't taking, because they think it's every day. What good is that place? What good is this school? It's around you. We attenuate to things around us.
He balances it with the reverse case, and does not overclaim: it is not always true, but many times in multigenerational wealthy families you get kids who do not do well. Too many resources can be tough too.
Which produces the prescription, and it is the intellectual core of this whole section:
This is a weird thing about the human brain. We habituate to a certain level of caloric intake, to a certain level of freedom and ease and peace. So this is why self imposed friction is very valuable, especially if you come from a family where there is not a lot of hardship.
He tells Shamani it is impressive that he has self imposed hardship through a vision of himself and what he can create. Many people cannot do that. They feel ease.
And then the observation that gives the argument its teeth, delivered about his own peer group:
Some of the most unhappy people I know are people that never strived for anything. In fact, the most unhappy people I know of my peer group were the ones whose parents gave them just enough money so that they never really had to push themselves. And they're the ones with a lot of depression, a lot of issues of self worth.
He closes the point with an image and then immediately defuses it: it is good to have your head held under water for a short while so you can appreciate oxygen when you come up. So to speak. He says twice that he is not being literal.
Can hardship rewire your brain? (2:20:53)
Shamani asks whether going through hardship actually changes the chemistry. Huberman says absolutely, and gives a reason that reframes what learning even is.
What's so important for people to understand about the brain is that as much as it learns facts, it learns algorithms. It learns friction. I got out of friction. Or, in some cases, friction crushed me. So now you need to teach it a new contingency. You need to teach a new algorithm.
Which is exactly why he keeps saying shorten the horizon. You need small wins so the system can learn what a win looks like. I made it an hour.
He turns the objection into evidence:
People who are dealing with something are thinking, ah, I can't get out of this mindset. Well, you got out of it long enough to say that sentence.
Shorten the horizon and they can hold it a little longer, and a little longer. That is why the cold water thing, the exercise thing, and constructing your days the way they have been discussing all work: you start doing those things and you realize you are in more control than you think.
The punishing inner voice, and the Goggins case
Then the exception he takes seriously. Some people are plagued by a very punishing, destructive inner voice, and that is a tough one. You have to learn to turn it off, or take the other route.
He describes what he calls the Goggins approach: he listens to criticism of himself while he runs, and has learned to channel it into a kind of FU response. Huberman's verdict on it is personal and immediate: I don't want to live there.
He has known David Goggins a long time, and met him for the first time in 2016, before Goggins had a book or anything else, and says he was always super driven. Knowing his story a bit, Huberman's read is that Goggins had to figure out a way because the voice in his head was so destructive:
He had to turn it into a different version of himself. Acknowledge that it came from the outside and create this whole new version of himself. He has multiple people in there. All him. He's very psychologically healthy, I do believe that. But he has to do the no, no, no to these certain voices, and the only voice I'm going to listen to is the one that's going to pull me forward. And that's a battle I don't think any of us would want to live in.
His reading of what Goggins is actually telling people: they can do it too, but they have to change their frame. They cannot expect those voices to turn off.
Huberman is scrupulous about not claiming to be inside anyone else's head, saying he stays out of people's heads and is speculating. But on his own account he is clear:
I don't live with a punishing voice in my head. And that's got to be very hard. So I want to acknowledge that's got to be hard. But you've got to turn the volume down on that one, or crank it up to 10 and fight it the whole way through. But you learn the algorithm of how to do it.
AI, social media and screen time: his honest take (2:23:53)
Shamani puts a pattern to him. Every technology made one part of life harder. Memory got harder once we had phones. Navigation got harder once we had Google Maps. And now thinking may get harder because of AI.
Huberman agrees with the trade and reframes it as one:
We trade skills for convenience. We don't cook because we can order DoorDash. Love DoorDash. A few years ago I didn't order food much, but now it's clearly the more efficient and even economical way to go much of the time. But I know how to cook if I need to.
His rule for thinking is the same rule applied honestly to himself: he does not eat junk food delivery every day, and he also cooks some meals. And he names a use of AI he genuinely endorses, which is the same protocol he gave earlier for learning:
I use ChatGPT to self test myself on material. Generate a self test about this. It's a great way to self test.
On the bigger question he is optimistic and marks his own bias:
I think AI is going to really positively transform the world. I really do. But I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, and I've seen the way that people get fear of job replacement. It happens a bit. A few years ago it was the learn to code thing, and now you don't really need to know how to code. I think there's still some value in knowing how to code, but you get the point.
His general law about technologies: they point out our most vulnerable and our most generative sides, and we just have to be careful.
The lock box, and the second phone
The phone protocol is concrete and slightly ridiculous, which he clearly enjoys.
Practice putting it into a lock box, or a drawer, for a few hours, and do some focused work, then come back to it. Just practice it.
If you can't do that, you have what's called a problem. Do it and you'll feel better. You might be anxious when you're away from it, but learn to ride that out.
The lever he uses to make it appealing is not discipline but pride:
Part of it is that humans don't like to be controlled. Deep down we don't like to be controlled. So if you recognize you're being controlled, now you stand a chance to fight back. Humans fighting back is the story of human evolution. Humans being too cold and fighting back against being cold is what gave them fire, electricity. Being too warm gave them air conditioning and ice and refrigerators.
Which lands on the theme he says has been coming up again and again all day: you have to get right up to that friction point. You wasted three hours on social media doing nothing. He is fair about it, saying you can learn on social media and you can be entertained. But three hours, and now you really feel bad about yourself. That is the friction point. Great. Set a rule. You get an hour.
His own arrangement:
I have social media on a separate phone. An older phone that has Instagram and X. That phone is either with me, or if it's becoming a problem for me, it goes into a Supermax prison lock box. You can buy one for like 15 bucks. Program it in. You cannot open it. So when I go in for a workout, I know the hardest part is not hopping on my phone during the rest periods. So I lock it in there for two hours. I can't even get it out.
The principle: you have to self enforce.
Stop being a consumer, become the producer (2:25:56)
The good news, which he attributes to Goggins as well, is that it has never been easier to get ahead, precisely because of how few people do the ordinary things:
You read a book, nobody does that. You read a book, it's still enriching. You listen to a book, you listen to a podcast start to finish, you have a good relationship to your phone and social media, you're moving into the winner category just by virtue of what you're not doing.
It is still hard. It has never been easier. And he adds a moral note about the framing:
To me it doesn't feel good to move ahead because others are dropping behind. I'm not that guy.
He thinks the opportunities to build businesses and lives are greater than ever, and that a lot of it comes down to not being purely a consumer. His question, which is the one line most likely to survive out of this whole section:
Am I a consumer or a creator in this moment? Spend some time being a creator every day and you're going to be okay. If you're purely a consumer every day, it's tough.
He picks an example that is deliberately gentle rather than scolding. People get really excited about the World Cup, and he gets it. His own dad is Argentine and is not into soccer. But if you set aside your entire life to consume, you end up spent out. You have to fight some of these internal reflexes.
Shamani gives him a formulation he has been using for six or seven years, and it is the one thing in the episode Huberman visibly takes rather than gives:
Become the producer of the thing that you consume the most. That's the easiest way for you to start working on something.
Huberman's response is immediate: yes, perfect, I love that. And he runs his own career through it. As a scientist: I love these papers, I want to do research in this area, I am going to do science and publish papers in that area. As a podcaster: I love these podcasts, I love these themes, I am going to do my own version of something like that, but different, and create it.
Then a piece of news delivered in passing:
I'm probably on the second act of my career. I don't know what the third act will be, but I'm going to do something else. It'll be related to what I'm doing. I truly have no idea.
Asked about entrepreneurship, he says he could see himself doing that. Or maybe something in the creative arts, although he has no musical talent and can only draw somewhat. It will come to him. He has called it in, and something will happen where he naturally veers that way.
Why love is difficult to understand (2:30:00)
Shamani points out the gap: Huberman studies the brain and has answers for almost everything about it, and yet has said publicly that he struggled with romantic relationships.
Huberman confirms it. Things are good now. It took some time.
He first calibrates how much he actually knows, and it is a genuinely useful distinction:
To be fair, I would say I know a lot, because I've spent a lot of time studying it and researching it directly. There's nothing fundamentally different from just learning something in a textbook to actually putting your hands in brains, cutting brains, staining brains, recording neurons electrically. So I wouldn't by any stretch say I understand everything that's known about the brain. I know a lot. And we certainly don't know everything as a field about the brain. There's still tons to discover.
Then the correction to the premise, and it is precise:
When I said I've struggled with relationships, I didn't struggle with the love part. I struggled with not always making the best choices about romantic partners. It's not putting the blame on them. Just being caught up in the feelings, and then being disappointed, and the let down.
His conclusion about the feeling itself is two sided rather than cynical:
Love can be a bit of a drug. I don't want to take away from it, because it's also a beautiful feature of life that is not drug like, and it can be very sustaining.
What he found odd was the asymmetry. Friendships, career, relationship to his biological family, his pets, all flourishing. Romantic relationships not working out in the long run as well as he had hoped. What is going on?
The fix he arrived at, flagged carefully as just for me:
Slow down. Really focus on the friendship component first, and really take the time to get to know someone, and build the friendship.
He notes that he stayed friends with people he had dated and they were on good terms, but it is different. And he diagnoses why slowing down is hard for people wired the way he is: for people who feel love in a big way, it is so easy, and there's a whole script that comes from that. You do that, and then you move in together, and then.
Which prompts a genuine question to his host. Do they still do arranged marriages in India? Shamani says yes, still very common, though the numbers are reducing significantly. Huberman's response, and he catches himself using clinical vocabulary:
As I understand, the outcomes in terms of long term, I want to say prognosis, sounds like a disease, long term success is very high. Right. So maybe we're just going about it all wrong in the west.
On his own history he is warm rather than bitter. He has fallen really in love with people and still has wonderful feelings about them. Not all of them. He has had some challenging relationships and some better ones. He is on great terms with a lot of his exes, some married and some not, still thinks about them and communicates from time to time with tremendous kindness.
And then the reason he thinks the slowing down actually matters, which is the closest thing to a thesis on love in the episode:
You are in some sense trusting this person with your life. It's a little bit of an extreme statement, but there's no other, perhaps besides children, level of investment like that, where this person can really hurt you by virtue of what they say, what they do. And so you're handing them a very powerful, I don't want to say a weapon because it sounds so cynical. You're giving them a lot of power.
When he has felt the most powerless (2:34:22)
Shamani asks the question he had flagged in the cold open. Huberman calls it a great question, says you ask hard questions, my friend, and then answers it three times.
One: the family collapse, and the skateboarding that did not happen
The first was when his parents split. What is striking is where his attention actually was:
My whole focus at that time was not on that. It was on wanting to make it in this skateboarding career, and I kept getting hurt and I wasn't very good.
He calls this the not so secret secret, and says he is always clear to point out that he was never going to be one of the guys who turned pro. He had friends turning pro. His body was not mature enough yet. He did not have the spring and the strength, and you need a lot of that. Later he got stronger, but by then he had moved on to other things.
I felt really alone. Like what's going to happen with my life? Because my home life was a mess, and school. And then I just started spiraling, and that's when things got really bad, and I got myself into all sorts of bad situations for a long time. And then dug myself out.
Two: the three advisers, and becoming an academic orphan
The second was the sequence of deaths. His undergraduate adviser killed himself in a very dramatic way, at a time that was really hard. Then his graduate adviser died, and she was very much like a mother to him, very maternal. He anticipates the objection and answers it:
I know that sounds a little bit like, well, she was just your graduate adviser. But I really loved and trusted her. I knew her family. I know her daughter, one of them is a neuroscientist now. I remember when she was pregnant with her daughters. I was friends with her husband. They were like family to me.
And then his third adviser died, and he thought: I'm cursed. He explains why the loss lands harder in his field than it might sound. In science, your advisers do a lot for you and help you a lot, but they are also pillars of stability that you can call and talk to.
You have this family history, biological family history, and now my academic parents. I'm like an academic orphan, literally.
The turn out of it is the origin story of the Huberman Lab podcast, and it is a much darker origin than the usual telling:
But then I realized I can do whatever I want. But this time, unlike when I was younger, I'm not going to take that I can do whatever I want and be self destructive. I'm going to start this podcast thing. And I don't have an adviser to tell me, hey, this isn't a good idea. I'm the adult now. Unlike when I was 14, I'm the adult in my life.
He notes he was in his 40s by then, and that in science there is a decades long relationship where advisers help their underlings, and it is a big thing. So: I do not have anyone. This is not rebellion, but I'm totally free. Totally free. I am going to look into my heart. What do I want to do? I am going to build something that is about science, but also health and wellness.
He got a lot of support, and a lot of people were probably thinking, what is that thing. Some have come around since, some have not. His position on it now: honestly, I don't care. I just hope they're happy doing what they're doing. That was the second time, and he says he transmuted it into goodness.
Three: the wrong relationship, and being misunderstood
The third was a few years back. He had poured his heart and soul into a relationship, and it was the wrong relationship, but he really did pour his heart and soul into it. When he realized there were serious issues that he could not resolve for them, he had to move on. It was a very messy thing.
And the specific thing that hurt is not the one you would predict:
Being misunderstood about that is really hard. Because look, I think they were doing the best they could. I was doing the best I could with what we had at that time. And I think that's the hardest part. Earlier we were talking about public life and criticism. I don't mind that. But being misunderstood is very challenging.
He did some real soul searching, and then noticed the shape of his own life around the problem: the podcast, an amazing podcast team, a great relationship with his parents who are in their 80s and healthy, his sister whom he loves, his niece whom he loves, his friends, a new relationship, opportunities.
All of a sudden I realized I'm sitting in the promised land, and I'm thinking about this thing and how it relates to these old things that didn't work out.
The resolution is abrupt and physical:
It was time to just flick it off like a piece of lint. I'm done with all that. Let's go. And ever since then, everything's been healthy and great.
Sometimes, he says, it really is as easy as shutting the door. The burn the boats mentality: I am just not going to allow myself to spiral. He hopes that was the last one, and adds that he is human, so it will probably come again.
Bracing for his parents
He then volunteers something he says he has been thinking about a lot lately. He is bracing himself for his parents passing, even though hopefully it is a long time away and by all accounts they seem healthy. It is going to be hard not to be able to call them. And he lands the sentence with a joke on himself: his mom will probably say, well, you do not call enough as it is.
That's life, and you can't live braced in fear of what's to come, or what could happen. Then you're that person we were trying to talk to earlier. You've just got to protect your heart but move forward and live life.
And the settled position he says he means:
If God forbid I were to drop dead walking out of this podcast, I'm good. I'm good. I've done my will. That wasn't actually a very good exercise for me. It's strange to think about mortality. We don't like to think about it. To go: I could die. What would I want to make sure happened for people? What do I want to make sure people knew about how I felt about them?
Every podcast is an opportunity to learn and to teach, and every time he can perhaps help somebody. He does not want to die, but he is okay. Every time he hits turbulence on a plane, he says the same thing to himself:
I've tried to take myself to the edge, but not off the edge, my entire life. And it's a great place to live, because whether or not I die at 50 or 90 or 110 or somewhere in there, I'm good. I really am. I've made my peace with it.
The cost of being Andrew Huberman (2:41:28)
Shamani closes with the one line question the show asks every guest. Huberman's first answer is a deflection and he knows it: oh man, it is all love, it is all upside these days, which is not to say he does not have difficulties. Then he stops himself.
Okay. I'll actually answer your question.
And the answer is a description of two things held at once:
I experience emotions very intensely. I think I got that from my mother. And I'm also very ambitious. And I have a vision of the world that I want to help contribute to creating. And holding those two things inside can be challenging, and sometimes can be downright agony, because I want to help every single person. I want to drop into every single emotion, but I can't, because I've got work to do. I've got to keep the bigger picture in mind.
What the hard work consists of now has changed, and he marks the change carefully:
Thankfully these days it's not about staying out of the deep trenches. I've moved past that. It's about trying to stay in a mode of action and striving, but also peace. And for me that just comes from gratitude, a relationship to God, and prayer. And sometimes it's really hard. Like everybody, I sometimes feel like I'm trying to run fast with my shoelaces tied. But I'm going to keep going. That's all I can do. It's all I've ever done.
Shamani restates it back to him: the cost is that because you are so ambitious, you cannot help every loved one around you even though you feel very intensely about them. Huberman agrees, and then gives the detail that makes it real. His girlfriend knows this about him. If someone stops him on the street and says they like his podcast, he asks their name, because he actually wants to know their name. What do you do?
I'm not playing a role when I do my podcast. They just popped a microphone in front of me. I've always been that way. And yet I can't have the deep dive conversation with everybody. So that's why I podcast, to get out to as many people as possible. So sometimes the pain is that I can't shake every hand and meet every person truly. I know it sounds like some sort of PR line, but it's true.
And then the sentence that is either the softest or the strangest thing in the episode, depending on your disposition:
I think everybody has a light inside, and I can feel that when I meet them. I don't think I'm looking for it. It just shows up. Sometimes it's different or brighter, a different contour, but I can feel it, and I want to connect with people.
As a public person behind a microphone or on a stage, you are connecting outward and it is coming back, and he says he just has to appreciate that. Sometimes that is a bit of work. He feels very, very blessed to have the opportunity.
He then turns the conversation around and spends the last minutes on his host, which is not what the format usually produces. He says he gets a very good sense of people, that he can feel somebody's genuine heart and mind across the table, and that Shamani has a sharp mind and real drive but is not doing this for kicks or for money.
You're doing this because you love it, and your heart really comes through in it, and your mind, and you're throwing everything you've got into it. I love that. You're all in. And you've made me feel very comfortable as a guest in a way that is not easy to do.
The episode ends with the two of them agreeing they are colleagues and hopefully will become friends, and with Huberman saying he would someday like to visit India, that he will buy his own ticket, and that he has always been intrigued. Shamani offers to host him and design the whole trip, and tells him he is going to lose his mind. Huberman: done. I am excited. You should do it.
Shamani signs off with his standard line: keep figuring out.
Key takeaways
The single lever is one hormone curve. High morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol. It is the one thing Huberman would say if he had five minutes, and he says he has never put it that way on his own show. Everything else in the first forty minutes is the operating detail on it.
Bright light in the eyes within the first 30 to 60 minutes of waking, for 5 to 10 minutes, outside where possible, no sunglasses or brimmed hat, boosts the morning cortisol peak by up to 50 percent and entrains tomorrow's rise. Overcast days matter more, not less. A 10,000 lux lamp is the substitute.
Morning is not a clock time. It means within the first hour or two of waking, whether you wake at 6:30 or 10.
The harms attributed to chronic stress are, on his account, afternoon and nighttime cortisol, not cortisol as such. The failure mode is a flattened curve with no morning peak and an elevated evening.
Five extended exhales scattered through a day measurably raises HRV in that night's sleep, through respiratory sinus arrhythmia and the vagus nerve. Cost: nothing.
He would bet money on the person who can switch off. Two equally driven people with equal circumstances, five to ten years, and the one who can shut the mind down in the final hour wins by a distance.
The eye movement trick for the 2 a.m. wake up. Eyes closed, side to side, counterclockwise, clockwise, look toward the tip of the nose, exhale. It works by disrupting proprioception, because you have to forget your body position to fall asleep. It will not beat four coffees and rumination.
Ashwagandha is a timing question, not a yes or no. Second half of the day only, because in the morning it flattens the peak you want. Roughly 600 mg twice cuts cortisol about 30 percent in one study. High doses two weeks on, two weeks off.
The career runs in three stages. Years one to three all gas pedal. Years four to six learn to dynamically regulate, which is where the hair, skin and autoimmune failures show up. Years seven onward you are a pro. The unit of analysis is the day.
Five to ten hours of real work per day is his own band. Ten hurts and borrows from tomorrow's five.
Choking is caused by imagining how good it could go, not how bad. Over recruitment in motor cortex when the stakes rise. The fix is to lower the stakes and shrink the horizon to three days, or to today.
Clutch states, not flow states. Flow is the expression of what you can already do and has nothing to do with learning. Clutch is the edge of friction where high performers spend 90 percent of their waking hours, and it is what builds virtuosity.
Errors are the mechanism of plasticity. If your nervous system can already do it, nothing rewires. The best way to keep what you heard is to self test on a walk afterwards, and look up whatever you cannot recall.
Cold exposure in walls, not seconds. Around five walls, each one a moment you really want out and stay in one longer. Never past three minutes. It trains you for waves of adrenaline, which is what real life delivers.
Winners and losers are verbs. Both feel despair. The difference is transmuting it rather than turning it into harm, forced on yourself repeatedly, sometimes every five minutes.
The danger of inspiration is that it comes from outside. It is a rung on a ladder, useful, but you did the pulling, and eventually you have to set your own rung.
Self imposed friction is the antidote to habituation. We habituate to calories, freedom, ease and peace, which is why the immigrant sees opportunity where the native sees background, and why the unhappiest people he knows were given just enough money never to have to push.
Am I a consumer or a creator in this moment. Spend part of every day as a creator. Shamani's sharper version: become the producer of the thing you consume the most.
Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
0:02:53 Who Is Andrew Huberman?
0:06:16 The Morning Cortisol Hack
0:17:37 How HRV Works & the Power of Breathwork
0:24:01 The Simple Trick to Stop Overthinking
0:31:02 Yoga Nidra, Sleep & How to Fall Asleep Faster
0:36:46 Sleep, Ashwagandha, Nicotine & Cortisol: The Truth
0:44:37 "Know Thyself": The Key to Reaching Your Potential
0:51:45 How Much Real Work Can You Sustain Every Day?
0:54:12 The 3-Stage Career Framework: Grind, Regulate & Master
1:02:30 Why Great Performers Follow People, Not Inspiration
1:11:27 Why Fame Can Destroy Performers
1:16:44 The "Gas Pedal" Framework: Push Hard Without Burning Out
1:24:26 The Neuroscience of Choking Under Pressure
1:32:35 The "Committee" Method for Better Life Decisions
1:34:53 Is Your Brain Built for Survival or Success?
1:38:00 How to Actually Learn From Podcasts & Books
1:41:46 When Wellness Becomes the Problem
1:43:19 Can People Build Courage?
1:50:08 Top 3 Mental Games to Build Resilience
1:59:19 How to Turn Other People's Energy Into Motivation
2:03:35 Losing Three Mentors: How He Processes Grief
2:06:04 Winners vs. Losers: How You Respond to Life
2:12:06 What to Do When You Hit Rock Bottom
2:16:49 Why Immigrants & Their Children Often Develop Extraordinary Drive
2:20:53 Can Hardship Actually Rewire Your Brain?
2:23:53 AI, Social Media & Screen Time: His Honest Take
2:25:56 Stop Being a Consumer: Become the Producer
2:30:00 Why Is Love Difficult to Understand?
2:34:22 When Has He Felt the Most Powerless?
2:41:28 The Cost of Being Andrew Huberman
2:46:17 Outro
Notable quotes
I've never really discussed this on the podcast, but if I only had five minutes to talk to somebody, I would say, look, this is the best thing you can do for your health and well being and performance. High morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol.
Andrew Huberman, 0:06:16
10 a.m. is your morning. 6:30 a.m. is my morning. That doesn't make me a better or worse person. Doesn't make you a better or worse person. We're just different.
Andrew Huberman, 0:06:16
Cortisol's main job is not to deal with stress. That's just one of its jobs. Its main job is to deploy glucose and lipids from areas in your body that give you energy. It's an energy deploying hormone.
Andrew Huberman, 0:06:16
You want a higher HRV? Do five extended exhales during your day. Just anytime. You're teaching your nervous system to slow your heart rate down just by five exhales in a day.
Andrew Huberman, 0:17:37
The person that can turn their mind off in the final hour of their day and get the better, deeper sleep, I'm going to put all my money on that person within 5 to 10 years, far surpassing the other.
Andrew Huberman, 0:24:01
Every opportunity to stress is an opportunity to practice stress resilience. You don't have to be David Goggins to be in the pressure test all day long. We are all in the pressure test.
Andrew Huberman, 0:24:01
At 50 years old, I finally realized that it's possible to control one's thoughts. You can learn to steer your thoughts. You can't eliminate thoughts, but you can take your mind to where it needs to go.
Andrew Huberman, 0:24:01
To fall asleep you need to forget your body position. This is the first critical step in falling asleep that nobody talks about.
Andrew Huberman, 0:31:02
I'm going to pass up the next person by what I don't do as much as what I do.
Andrew Huberman, 0:31:02
All the negative effects of cortisol, so called chronic stress, are really about afternoon and nighttime high cortisol. We're never told this.
Andrew Huberman, 0:36:46
If you're not doing all the right behaviors, it's going to make a trivial impact.
Andrew Huberman, on sleep supplements, 0:36:46
If you don't take these things seriously, what ends up happening is you default to the mean, the dominant culture that you're surrounded with.
Andrew Huberman, 0:44:37
When our mind is split between two places, that's the most taxing thing. The mind thrives on unitary states, but those are hard to get into. And sadly, the mind defaults to unitary states like anger and frustration very easily.
Andrew Huberman, 0:44:37
You need fewer sets after resistance training for 10, 15 years. People say, no no, you need to do more. No. You need to pour more into fewer sets.
Andrew Huberman, 0:51:45
My problem, your problem, is we don't crash. We keep going, but our baseline is dropping.
Andrew Huberman, 0:54:12
I don't even think about inspiration anymore.
Andrew Huberman, 1:02:30
Your really good male friends will give you the hardest time to your face, but they will never talk badly about you behind your back.
Andrew Huberman, quoting Jocko Willink, 1:02:30
Attention is a drug if it's misused. Attention recycled into creative pursuit, into intellectual pursuit, and then giving back more, that's a beautiful thing.
Andrew Huberman, 1:11:27
When people are attached to any one thing as being the answer, it's very clear where that's headed. They're headed for dismay.
Andrew Huberman, 1:16:44
They're imagining how great it could go. We think they're imagining how terrible it could go. But what causes us to choke is, oh my goodness, so much is at stake. If I can't do this, I can't do anything.
Andrew Huberman, 1:24:26
You should not be making all the decisions about your life in the confines of your skull.
Andrew Huberman, 1:32:35
Flow is the expression of something that you can already do. It has nothing to do with learning.
Andrew Huberman, 1:34:53
A fundamental principle of neuroplasticity is that if your nervous system can do something, there's no plasticity. It's the gap between your desired performance and your current performance that creates the rewiring.
Andrew Huberman, 1:38:00
None of this is a closed loop. I don't do the wellness stuff to just keep doing the wellness stuff. It's always been a way to support the rest of my life.
Andrew Huberman, 1:41:46
No, let's make it hotter. Turn on the heat. Two more sets. Best sets I had in ages. I'm not a masochist. Let's just not always go for comfort.
Andrew Huberman, 1:43:19
If I can't concentrate for ten breaths, how in the world am I going to go about my day?
Andrew Huberman, 1:50:08
I confess I'm not that good at that. I hate folding and putting away my clothes. I would pay any amount of money to have somebody else do it.
Andrew Huberman, 1:50:08
I don't want to take from them. I can feed off that energy. It feeds me. That's the right language. It feeds me.
Andrew Huberman, 1:59:19
Grief is about the nervous system thinking there's an action to take around somebody and not being able to complete the call or see them. It's an unfulfilled expectation.
Andrew Huberman, 2:03:35
This is the one danger of anything inspirational: it comes from the outside. It can be like a rung on a ladder that we can pull ourselves forward on. But ultimately you pulled yourself forward.
Andrew Huberman, 2:06:04
I'm at my end. I can't do this on my own anymore. Just help me get through the next hour.
Andrew Huberman, 2:12:06
There's this weird law of the universe that I don't quite understand. Maybe it's a dopaminergic thing, but the depth of that pit oftentimes is the mirror image of the height of the thing that you're going to accomplish.
Andrew Huberman, 2:12:06
We habituate to a certain level of caloric intake, to a certain level of freedom and ease and peace. So this is why self imposed friction is very valuable.
Andrew Huberman, 2:16:49
People are thinking, ah, I can't get out of this mindset. Well, you got out of it long enough to say that sentence.
Andrew Huberman, 2:20:53
Practice putting it into a lock box, or a drawer, for a few hours. If you can't do that, you have what's called a problem.
Andrew Huberman, on phones, 2:23:53
The simple question you should ask yourself: am I a consumer or a creator in this moment?
Andrew Huberman, 2:25:56
Become the producer of the thing that you consume the most. That's the easiest way for you to start working on something.
Raj Shamani, 2:25:56
When I said I've struggled with relationships, I didn't struggle with the love part. I struggled with not always making the best choices about romantic partners.
Andrew Huberman, 2:30:00
You have this family history, biological family history, and now my academic parents. I'm like an academic orphan, literally.
Andrew Huberman, 2:34:22
It was time to just flick it off like a piece of lint. I'm done with all that. Let's go.
Andrew Huberman, 2:34:22
I've tried to take myself to the edge, but not off the edge, my entire life.
Andrew Huberman, 2:34:22
Sometimes it's really hard. I'm like everybody. I sometimes feel like I'm trying to run fast with my shoelaces tied. But I'm going to keep going. That's all I can do. It's all I've ever done.
Andrew Huberman, 2:41:28
Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body, his roughly 650 page book, described on air as seven books collapsed into one, and the source of both the cortisol curve data and the grief protocol he cites
Silicon Valley and the South Bay, where his high school girlfriend's father bought property nobody wanted
The FIFA World Cup, his example of pure consumption, with a note that his father is Argentine and not into soccer
What is settled here, what is his own practice, and what he flags as unknown
This is a protocol episode, so it is worth separating the layers, particularly because Huberman does most of this separation himself on air and it is easy to miss at speed.
Well established, and not controversial in the field. The light to circadian pathway is textbook: melanopsin containing retinal ganglion cells drive the circadian clock, and light exposure suppresses melatonin. The cortisol awakening response is a real, named, well studied phenomenon. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia and vagal braking of heart rate are basic physiology. The role of prediction error in driving plasticity is mainstream neuroscience. Nothing in those four is a stretch.
Where the number is thinner than the claim sounds. The specific figure that morning light can raise the cortisol peak by up to 50 percent is stated as fact and is the single most load bearing number in the episode. He does not cite the study on air. The same is true of the 5 to 10 minute dose, the 30 to 60 minute window, and the claim that pockets of the brain enter deep and possibly REM sleep during yoga nidra. These are all presented as settled. A listener who wants to check them has no reference to follow from this conversation.
Studies described but not named. Four of them: the neuroscience of choking paper with motor cortex over recruitment, the rocking bed study, the infant rocking rate study in what he calls a really fine journal, and the ashwagandha study behind the 30 percent figure. The power and trauma research is not his at all. It is Shamani's recollection of something he read, offered with the explicit caveat that he cannot remember the specifics.
Explicitly his own practice, not a recommendation. He is careful about this more often than the clip culture around him would suggest. The training week is his. The 5 to 10 hours of real work is his own measured band, arrived at by finding his own edge. The late day caffeine on the day of recording is flagged as him, not a rule. The prayer before every episode, the reset day, the documentaries and the cave with his girlfriend and the dog are all offered as what he does.
Where he says outright that he does not know. Three moments stand out, and they are the most intellectually honest passages in the episode. On why asking for help gets people through the next hour, he says his thoughts about it do not fall within the realm of science, that it is not his expertise, and that he will therefore not go into it. On the relationship between the depth of a low period and the height of a later achievement, he calls it a weird law of the universe he does not understand and offers maybe it's a dopaminergic thing as a guess. On why some people are addicted to comfort and others to challenge, he gives two competing explanations and says plainly that he does not know which is true. He also states he is speculating about Goggins and that he stays out of other people's heads.
Where a careful reader should slow down. The nicotine passage describes a genuinely appealing subjective state before the costs, which is the order in which it will circulate as a clip. Deliberate cold exposure carries a real hypothermia risk that he names, with a three minute ceiling. Ashwagandha has interactions and contraindications, including for thyroid conditions and in pregnancy, that this conversation does not cover at all, and his own advice against long term use should be read as part of the protocol rather than as an aside. Pinealon is a research peptide, and he treats it as an experiment rather than a recommendation.
None of that undercuts the episode. It is a fair description of what a two hour and forty seven minute conversation can and cannot deliver, and Huberman spends more of it marking his own uncertainty than most people in his position do.
Full transcript
========================================
the person that can turn their mind off
in the final hour of their day and get
the better, deeper sleep, I'm going to
put all my money on that person.
>> How turn off.
>> The next time you have trouble asleep or
getting back to sleep, keeping your eyes
closed, slowly move your eyes to one
side, then to the other side. Then
you're going to move your eyes
counterclockwise, then clockwise. Then
kind of look towards the tip of your
nose. You're not crossing your eyes, and
then exhale. Now, when you do that, you
disrupt the propriceptive circuits.
Propriception is the knowledge of where
your limbs are in space. To fall asleep,
you need to forget your body position.
This is the first critical step in
falling asleep that nobody talks about.
>> That really works.
>> It really works. Andrew Huberman,
professor and neuroscientists at
Stanford and host of Hubberman Lab, one
of the biggest and most influential
science podcasts in the world. This is a
masterclass in training your brain to
become sharper, stronger, and harder to
stop. If I give you a 25year-old
someone, how can they have this
unbreakable, unshakable mindset, like an
elite performer mindset that they will
never collapse under pressure?
>> I've never really discussed this on the
podcast. If I only had 5 minutes to talk
to somebody, [music] I would say, look,
this is the best thing you can do for
your health and wellbeing and
performance. High morning cortisol, low
nighttime cortisol. Cortisol's main job
is to deploy glucose and lipids from
areas in your body that give you energy.
It's an energy deploying hormone.
[music] So, how do we do this? The best
way to spike that morning cortisol is to
get bright light in your eyes within the
first 30 to 60 minutes of your day.
Let's keep in mind, you can drink some
water during this [music] time. You can
drink your morning tea or coffee if you
like. If you can exercise in that first
hour, [music] great. But this simple
behavior is going to boost your morning
cortisol levels. This is the key to
long-term resilience and becoming, as
you call it, dangerous. If there are two
people, one sees that risk and jumps.
The another thinks about it but then
freezes. What happens in the brain of
that person who's freezing and not
taking the risk? They're imagining how
great it could go. We think they're
imagining how terrible it could go. But
what causes us to choke is so much is at
stake. If I can't do this, I can't do
anything.
>> Can you build courage?
>> Absolutely. [music] Absolutely.
Incremental. You get people to their
edge of agitation and you let them just
live there.
>> When have you felt the most powerless in
your life?
Well, that's a great question. You ask
hard questions, my friend. Um,
>> I have a small favor to ask you. I need
you to subscribe to our channel. The
more subscribers we have, the better and
bigger guests we can bring and provide
you more value through these
conversations. And also, the full audio
experience of the show is available on
Spotify where you can follow us and
stream and listen to all our episodes.
Welcome on our show, Andrew Hooperman.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> Thank you. It's it's an honor to have
you here.
>> Oh, wow. Thank you. Well, delighted to
be here.
>> So, tell me further, if someone's
watching you for the first time and they
have never heard or seen you or they
have no clue who you are, how would you
explain them what you do and why they
should watch this podcast?
>> Okay. Uh, two sentences of history. Uh
just to orient people, I'm 50 year old
50 years old. Um I spent nearly three
decades as a neuroscientist. Um I'm
still a tenure professor at Stanford
School of Medicine. I now teach uh
neuroscience um to medical students and
um do some other teaching as well. Until
very recently, I ran a research
laboratory. So that was really my life
from about age 19 until fairly recently.
Um, so studying how the brain wires up
during development, how it can change
so-called neuroplasticity and learning,
also some interest in neural
regeneration and diseases of the eye and
of the nervous system. Um, so that's my
my academic grounding and my hands-on
experience.
>> Um, I've had a long-standing interest in
health and fitness. um both running,
resistance training, bit of martial
arts, a number of different things um
that I've been very consistent with for
the last 35 years. So, while I'm not a
certified expert trainer or anything of
that sort, I've I like to think I've
tried many of the things that do and
don't work. And um I have thoughts both
about the science around those and what
I've found works best for me and that I
think could be of value to people. In
2021, I decided to start a podcast
called Huberman Lab. Turns out I also
had Huberman Lab at Stanford School of
Medicine, but Huberman Lab podcast,
which is myself and a few other guys um
who uh put cameras in front of me and I
started talking about how the brain
wires up, how you can change it, how
sleep works, how you can optimize it. um
mental health uh modern treatments for
mental health issues, everything from
depression to OCD to uh anorexia,
covering the scientific literature and
offering what I call protocols um which
are um scripted ways to improve
something or optimize something or
reduce a pain point. Um using behavioral
tools, some things you do, behavioral
tools, some things you avoid. Um, we do
talk about nutrition, supplementation,
and prescription drugs as well. So, I
cover all of it. So, I'm happy to talk
about peptides, both of the conventional
and unconventional kind. I'm happy to
talk about hormone therapies. I'm happy
to talk about behavioral tools. So, the
podcast encompasses all of that. And
I've largely done solos where I talk
about these things sort of university
lecture style. Um, but I also host
expert guests in these areas because my
network of science and um medical doctor
scientists, excuse me, and medical
doctors is pretty vast and I know some
of the the best in the world. I don't
know all of them, but I I'm very blessed
to know uh many of them and they have
incredible knowledge that I feel the the
world should have. So, I think that's
probably how you found me. That's why
I'm here. And and my real love in life
is learning and teaching
>> things that I believe can be useful to
people.
>> Perfect. That makes two of us.
[laughter]
>> Yeah, we share a kinship in that.
Absolutely.
>> So based on everything that you've
learned, experimented, watch it fail, uh
you know, acquired knowledge from other
people on and your own experiments and
everything, right? I I want to know if I
give you a 25 year old someone, okay,
right now today, and your only job is to
make them mentally dangerous in next 10
years. mentally dangerous.
>> Dangerous. Like
>> could you define dangerous?
>> Like how do you how can they have this
unbreakable, unshakable mindset like an
elite performer mindset that they can
they will never collapse under pressure
like someone who can handle everything
in their life and they can choose and
pinpoint what to do and then be able to
do that. Because here's the problem.
What I feel
a lot of young people like me, we watch
uh people like you, we understand and
learn everything from you. And then half
of the things we are like Monday we're
excited when we watch you and then by
Thursday we're done. Like nothing works
out. We don't change our lives very
easily, right? A lot of people don't do
that. So if I give you someone like this
20-year-old right now and your job is to
make them me mentally extraordinary or
mentally dangerous in next 10 years
where would you begin?
>> It's a great question. Um so my answer
is at first going to sound a little um
basic
>> but I think it's very important to
understand the principles behind what
I'm going to say as opposed to just the
specifics. In fact, this is a broader
theme I believe people should take to
any discussion about health or
performance, which is there going to be
many many protocols. Do this, do it this
way, do it then, don't do it that way,
don't do it then. But the real question
is what are the principles that are
anchoring those statements? Why do I say
this? Well, because ultimately new
protocols will come along, new peptides
will come along, new podcasters will
come along. And the most important
thing, the most important thing is to be
able to place what you hear into a
framework of, okay, that makes sense.
There's a mechanism to support that or
look, we don't have any knowledge of how
that would work, but I'll try it and see
if it works, provided it's safe, and so
on.
The most important thing for this
25-year-old hypothetical person to do is
to understand that there are a few
non-negotiables in their physiology and
psychology that are directly linked that
they have to obey as often as possible.
Notice I didn't say every single day,
but as often as possible in order to get
the most out of their life.
>> What What are those? Well, as weird as
it may sound, the most important thing
to do is to ensure, and there are ways
to do that we can talk about in a
moment, to ensure that you have high
morning cortisol levels,
>> the so-called stress hormone, which is
not a stress hormone. We'll talk about
why it's involved in stress, but
cortisol is involved in much, much more.
You want to take steps, simple steps
that I'll describe to amplify your
morning cortisol in the first hour or
two of your day. and to make sure that
in the last hour or so of your day, most
days, your cortisol is low. Now, why?
What? What? What in the world? Like,
okay, but if you were going to build a
human machine, okay, and I'm not talking
about psychology now, but you wanted to
build a human machine. And actually,
let's make it a happy
>> quote unquote dangerous machine, you
would say, get that morning cortisol
peak as as high as you can. Get your
nighttime, last hour before sleep
cortisol level as low as you can. Why?
When you do that, it sets this person up
to have vastly higher levels of daytime
energy, focus, ability to learn,
resilience to stress when stress comes
along,
and
ease in falling to sleep, deep sleep,
rapid eye movement sleep. These are the
things of repair of the body, repair of
the mind, consolidating learning,
removing the emotional load of previous
day experiences that might have been,
you know, difficult or stressful, taking
off the emotional load so they can go
into the next day and they can continue
to show up for their family, their work,
their health, and so on and so forth. It
also turns out this pattern of high
morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol
is the pattern that men, women, people
of all ages should have to optimize
their immune system function. So, we're
talking about getting sick less and on
and on and on. In fact, I've never
really discussed this on the podcast,
but if I only had 5 minutes to talk to
somebody, I would say, "Look, this is
the best thing you can do for your
health and well-being and performance."
high morning cortisol, low nighttime
cortisol. So, how how did we do this?
People are probably immediately
wondering. Um, before I answer, I'll
just add one additional fact. Most
people have heard of melatonin, this
hormone that we secrete at night in
darkness that light suppresses. It helps
us fall and stay asleep.
Most people don't realize that in order
to get sufficient melatonin release, you
need limited light exposure to your
eyes. So, that's why it's good to dim
dim dim the lights. You also want your
body temperature cooling. Your core body
temperature going down is what brings
melatonin up. Cortisol and melatonin are
on opposite cycles.
>> High cortisol inhibits melatonin
indirectly, but it does it. So, if your
morning cortisol is high, your morning
melatonin from the night before will be
lower, more alertness. If your nighttime
cortisol is low, your melatonin peak can
go higher. many issues related to
falling and staying asleep become
trivial under those conditions. They
just kind of disappear. So, we should
ask ourselves, what are the things to do
to boost our morning cortisol levels?
And notice I'm saying morning, I'm not
saying 6:00 a.m. because one thing that
is very important is given the
flexibility, some people really do best
waking up between 8 and 10:00 a.m. and
going to sleep later. Some people do
best waking up between 5 and 7 a.m. and
going to bed earlier. And some people
are kind of someplace in the middle.
Like for you for instance, what is your
if you could control everything about
your sleepwake schedule, what time would
you go to sleep?
>> Like two,
>> right? Yeah.
>> Like 1 or 2.
>> And what time would you wake up?
>> 9 10.
>> Great. So let's call 10. 10 a.m. is your
morning. 6:30 a.m. is my morning. That
doesn't make me a better or worse
person. Doesn't make you a better or
worse person. We're just different. But
when I say morning, I'm not giving a
clock time. I'm giving a within the
first hour or two of waking. Okay. All
right. How do you boost your morning
cortisol? We're building this ultra
dangerous person.
>> Okay.
>> Great.
>> But be before we actually build this,
why did you start with morning and not
the night before?
>> It's a good question, but the answer is
that this peak in cortisol cause because
it's on a what's called a negative
feedback loop. it actually inhibits
itself so that once you create that
peak, it ensures that the afternoon and
evening cortisol is low. And I'll
explain why that is in in a few minutes
if that's okay. Um, so getting that
morning peak going, it's like a
wavefront that starts the 24-hour cycle.
>> Okay. Okay. So, let's assume you go to
sleep anywhere from 6 to 8 hours the
night before.
>> Okay. Um when you are in your deep deep
sleep, so two or three hours into your
sleep, your cortisol is at its very
lowest just naturally. Okay,
your cortisol intrinsically with no
input from the world starts to climb in
the hours afterwards slowly slowly and
then faster and faster and faster. So
that in the third uh phase of your
sleep, if we just divide your sleep into
three blocks, in that last third, your
cortisol is rising very fast and so is
your body temperature and then at some
point you wake up. Now it could be
because of an alarm clock. It could be
because you wake up naturally. That is
literally called the cortisol awakening
response and it is the reason you wake
up. So when people say cortisol is a
stress hormone, you don't want your
cortisol too high. That's true for the
evening and night time. It's not true
for your morning. You want your cortisol
basically spiking first thing in the
morning. So you get up, cortisol is now
elevated. Cortisol's main job is not to
deal with stress. That's just one of its
jobs. Its main job is to deploy glucose
and lipids from areas in your body that
give you energy. It's an energy
deploying hormone.
>> Okay. So that cortisol peak is rising
very very fast. The best way to spike
that morning cortisol is to get bright
light in your eyes within the first 30
to 60 minutes of your day. In fact, you
have a unique opportunity at that time
to spike your cortisol up to 50% 50.
Now, there's two ways to do it. The best
way to do it is to go outside, take off
any brimmed hat you might have or
sunglasses.
Eyeglasses and contacts are fine. Look
in the direction of the sun. Now, you
wake up later than I do. So, when I wake
up, the sun is just coming across the
horizon. That's great. If it's higher in
the sky, that's fine, too. Never look at
the sun um in any way that that makes it
too bright to look out. You blink, in
other words, to protect your eyes. But
you can squint. You can look a little
bit off and away from the sun. But that
bright light from the sun is full
spectrum. It includes the short
wavelength, medium wavelengths, and long
wavelengths that are optimal for getting
this cortisol peak.
In fact, if you do that, you'll get a
big peak in cortisol within 5 to 10
minutes. On cloudy days, on overcast
days, it's especially important to do
that because you're going to likely be
spending more time indoors on overcast
days. Okay? Ideally, 5 minutes or 10
minutes. Keep in mind, you can drink
some water during this time. You can
like. You can do other things that,
believe it or not, hydration boosts
cortisol. Caffeine further boosts
cortisol. If you can exercise in that
first hour, great. Most people don't
jump right into exercise, but this
simple behavior is going to boost your
morning cortisol levels.
That essentially establishes the the
relationship between cortisol,
melatonin, and your circadian clock. So
the next day, your morning cortisol will
start to rise in anticipation of this
peak. It's becomes what we call
entrained. So I'm listing off some
protocols. Morning sunlight, but it
takes 5 10 minutes. and you hydrate and
you drink some caffeine, maybe you move
your body a little bit, take a walk,
some jumping jacks or something light
like that. You can bring uh your spouse
or your kids or whatever and you can
just enjoy that time. Try not to look at
your phone during this time. Do not stay
in bed and look at your phone. Okay,
this has also a forcing function on not
doing certain things.
Now, if you are able to get some
physical exercise in this hypothetical
situation, I'd take this 25-year-old and
I'd say, "Listen, I know you don't like
to work out first thing in the morning,
but you're going to either do some
cardiovascular training or some
resistance training, [snorts] one or the
other for six days a week. One day a
week, you can get complete rest. Okay?
And I can explain later what the optimal
protocol for uh for excuse me for
exercise I believe is for the typical
person wanting to be strong and have
endurance and and build resilience as
well brain plasticity and so on. Okay.
The long and short of this is if
somebody were to do that in the first
hour to two hours of the day
the cortisol then starts to drop
gradually around let's say about four or
five hours after they've been awake.
drops drop just naturally it just drops.
Now let's say you get a disturbing text
a you've got a deadline you're stressed
cortisol will get deployed but the peak
in cortisol will be very brief. Okay.
Now, as that person heads into the
evening, probably still working. We'll
talk about this. Maybe some bright
lights. You can't control the
environment. You you are now buffered
against some of that. You're protected.
And then at night, in the final hour
before sleep, it's dim the lights.
Obviously, avoid caffeine in the final 8
hours before sleep. Most days, I'm
drinking a little caffeine now cuz I got
up very early today and it's late in the
day now, but I can have a little bit.
That's me. Some people might not be able
to. You want to really emphasize
lowering your cortisol. Long exhale
breathing is great if you find yourself
too stressed and you're kind of getting
ready for bed. Why long exhale
breathing? There's so much has been made
of breath work and meditation. But just
to encapsulate all of breath work which
you know I long before it came to the
United States in scientific form people
in India have been doing breath work of
various forms. So I want to acknowledge
that. But there's something called
respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is
just a fancy term for when you inhale
with vigor and you extend your inhales,
it speeds your heart rate up. Why?
Because the diaphragm moves down, the
heart gets a little bit bigger in
volume. Blood within the heart moves a
little more slowly and the nervous
system sends a signal to speed the heart
rate up every inhale. When you exhale,
especially if you deliberately extend
the exhale, because the diaphragm moves
up, the heart gets a little bit more
compact or smaller in volume. Blood in
there moves more quickly in that smaller
volume. And the vagus nerve, which
connects the body and brain in both
direction, sends a signal to the heart
to slow your heart rate down. This is
the basis of so-called HRV, heart rate
variability. for people wearing an Aura
or a Whoop or using an eightlee or any
other device and you say high HRV is
good, right? What is high HRV? High HRV
is your parasympathetic nervous system,
this relaxing arm of the of your
autonomic nervous system hitting the
brakes on your heart rate. [sighs]
If you want a higher HRV, you can
exercise. You know, another great way to
increase your HRV, do five extended
exhales during your day. Just anytime
you just
You're slowing your heart rate down in
your sleep. Your heart rate, your HIV
will be HRV will be higher. Most people
don't realize it. Significantly higher.
You're teaching your nervous system to
slow your heart rate down just by five
exhales in a day
>> or three or one long one before sleep.
[sighs]
When you do an extended deliberate
exhale, you slow your heart rate down.
You lower your cortisol levels. Takes a
few minutes to lower your cortisol
levels. and you calm yourself down. When
you hold your breath or you move about
your day and you're inhaling [snorts] a
lot and you're on average you're
inhaling more vigorously than your
exhales, your heart rate's going to be
climbing up. So throughout the day your
heart rate's doing this, it's doing
this. HRV, if you think, well, that's
weird. Why would we want our heart rate
variable? Shouldn't we want it nice and
even? No, no, no, no. Because the HRV
reflects the pumping of the brake on
your on your stress system. Okay? So in
that final hour, you are ideally you're
not drinking too many fluids cuz you'll
wake up. But if you're a little thirsty,
drink some fluids. No big deal. You're
avoiding caffeine. You're dimming the
lights. Why dimming the lights? Because
light hits a specialized set of neurons
in the eye called the intrinsically
photosensitive melanops and retinal
ganglion cells. Okay? Those cells
connect directly to a little region over
your hypothalamus which is your
circadian clock which then connects to
another nucleus in your hypo
hypothalamus and so on and so forth and
then inhibits the release of melatonin
from your pineal gland. All this can be
made very simple viewing bright light
ideally from sunlight in the first hour
of the day spikes your cortisol through
a similar mechanis circuit with a little
twist and in the evening bright light
will inhibit melatonin.
So, bright mornings and days, dim nights
or dark nights, that's the ideal
situation. And we can really flush this
out even more. But I should say if you
don't have access to sunlight for some
reason, you would do well to um most
people do well to purchase a 10,000 lux
artificial light. I have one when I
travel that's about the size of a
tablet. Um it looks a bit like the
lights in this room. That very bright
light is sufficient to boost your
morning cortisol. Sunlight is better
because it's full spectrum, but
sometimes I don't have access to one.
But I'm the guy on the plane looking at
that light for a few minutes each
morning. I have one in my home even
though I do go outside. So when I wake
up and use the bathroom, I have one in
my bathroom. I have one in the kitchen.
So I'm making my morning coffee or tea.
I have it there. And so I'm getting
blasted with bright light early in the
day. And then at night, I'm either in
dim light or I generally don't use
candle light because I worry about
burning things down, you know, if I fall
asleep with a candles down. But I
everything's dimmed way way down. Okay,
now this sounds extreme,
>> but we're really talking about 5 to 10
minutes in the morning, things you would
do anyway,
>> right? Hydrate, caffeine, most likely,
>> exercise, ideally that takes a bit
longer. And then at night, things that
you need to turn off the lights at some
point.
>> You need to bring your level of
activation down. Learning to turn your
mind off. This is the key to long-term
resilience and becoming, as you call it,
dangerous. If you are somebody who can
push, push push on the gas pedal, but
you don't know how to turn your mind
off.
Let's make it competitive. This will get
people going. Give me two people.
>> Both can work very very hard, vote, both
extremely committed to their goals and
both have perfect circumstances in terms
of access to to food and exercise and
all the things. The person that can turn
their mind off in the final hour of
their day and get the better, deeper
sleep, I'm gonna put all my money on
that person within 5 to 10 years, far
surpassing the other. How to turn off if
someone super competitive is already
feeling like they've lost in some way
because the internet has made them
believe that they've lost it already,
right? So, they're in the hyper
competitive mode. They just don't know
how to turn off. M
>> how can somebody turn off and be
>> and feel less restless?
>> Yeah, this is a great question and and
it's going to take us a little bit in
the in the uh direction of psychology.
>> Um so I just want to make sure before we
move on that I've closed the hatch on
boost your morning cortisol by sunlight
or 10,000 lux artificial light.
>> Hydrate. Listen, do this every morning.
But if you wake up on a plane and you
don't happen to have this 10,000 lux
light, open the window. If you can't do
that, you're you're going to be fine.
You'll you'll live a day, you know.
You'll live a day. You'll, you know, so
do the other things. Hydrate, drink some
caffeine. Like I don't you don't want to
burn extra energy on the neuroticism of
trying to get everything right.
>> That's making you weak, right? You need
and I look at every opportunity
to build resilience. This like like I we
were saying before we started recording,
I you know, yesterday I had far less
sleep than I normally get. I feel great
today. I have a practice for that which
I can talk about recovering mental and
physical vigor. But I really wanted to
see my best childhood friend who's a
neurosurgeon and neuroscientist do a
neurosurgery and be there and also
recorded yesterday and I very much
wanted to be here and it meant flying
yesterday and the flight was delayed. So
instead of getting angry about the
flight being delayed, I always ask
myself one of two questions. Do I
completely relax or do I continue to
work? What I don't do is any in between.
I am perfectly fine just sitting there
completely relaxing. Yes, let yourself
scroll social media for a short period
of time. Let yourself watch a movie,
socialize, text with friends, call your
mother. You know, I'm on my mother, so
call me more. So, but don't do a hybrid
of the two or really focus in and get
some work done. At the airport
yesterday, I decided I'd had a long day.
I knew that today was going to be a long
but exciting one. Decided to just get
complete rest. on the flight into San
Francisco. I took a brief nap, got to my
hotel, got things settled, and I could
feel my my mind going towards h I'm
going to be tomorrow is going to what
good does that do? And you always should
be asking the question,
is this in the left column or the right
column? And I'll explain what that
means. A guy named Andy Stump, he's a a
former what we call tier one SEAL team
operator. He has a podcast called
Clearing Hot. Um he's super impressive
guy from his work in the SEAL teams and
he went on to break two world records
doing other difficult dangerous things
but he has this exercise that he shared
with me which I do which is you take out
a sheet of paper you do this about once
a month and you write down in the left
column all the things that concern you
what people think of me the what I see
I'm worries everything you put all that
in the left column in the right column
you put all the things that you can
actually control what can you do
exercise, hydrate, sleep, practice
turning your brain off, call your
mother, you know, all the things that
and what you realize is that you really
don't have any control over the things
in the left column. And we all know
this, but this exercise,
it's so valuable. I'm so glad Andy
taught it to me. He I read it about it
first in his book Drown, which is an
excellent book, but then he described it
to me directly
for the month afterwards. You notice
when things are in the left column or
the right column. So last night I was
thinking, oh god, like if I even thought
because this is the way the mind goes. H
someone sets off a fire alarm or
someone's loud in the hotel, I'm going
to get even le. I'm like, can I control
that? No, I can't control it. You notice
how crazy the mind is with all these
concerns and how few of those concerns
you can actually impact. So that's the
main way you do it. And every
opportunity to stress is an opportunity
to practice stress resilience. Every
opportunity uh to stress is an
opportunity to let go of some component.
These opportunities come all day long.
You know, you don't have to be David
Gogggins to be in the pressure test all
day long. We are all in the pressure
test. And even just keeping your mind in
that right column. So I actually around
our podcast studio and with my friends
we we're sort of have this saying now
like that's a left column issue like
don't like and and so it becomes this
question I think it varies culturally do
you talk about it or does that build it
>> maybe talking about things allows you to
expune it to delete it I think it builds
it stay in the right column and when
your mind starts drifting into the left
column great that's a great opportunity
to practice getting your mind back over
into the right hand column how do you do
that you Think about literal actions.
You get extremely present. I can take a
sip of water. Might sound trivial. I can
smell what the air is like in here.
Feels good. It's so quiet in here. I
really like the background quiet of this
place. I've enjoyed meeting you. I
learned about some new neuroch already
based on the the devices on your temple.
Like you can really get present and
suddenly because of this is comes from
my training as a neuroscientist. The
brain works in what are called dynamic
attractor states which I is not a way of
trying to sound academic or fancy. Think
of your thoughts and your emotions as a
ball bearing on a flat surface. But as
you think more about something, that
surface starts to become concave. And as
you learn more about it and you go into
it and you think about it, it becomes a
trench. And now that ball bearing is
locked in that trench. And typically it
takes something very robust like
calling a friend and them saying, "What
are you doing?" or getting a good
night's sleep or exercise or some great
event to knock that ball bearing back
onto its flat surface again. But you are
in charge of your mind. And you know, at
50 years old, I finally realized that
it's possible to control one's thoughts.
It it really is. You can you can learn
to steer your thoughts. You can't
eliminate thoughts, but you can take
your mind to where it needs to go. And
there opportunities all day long to
practice this. Right before I came in
here, I went in the bathroom. Yes, I use
the bathroom. And I have a practice of
prayer. Right before I do or go on any
podcast, I ask for clarity. I ask for
the opportunity to share knowledge that
I hope will be useful to people. I offer
up the opportunity for new unexpected
things to come through. I did I did
that. I do it every single time because
I take you and I take this very
seriously, right? People are giving us
their time. I'm not a person who
neurotically, you know, controls every
aspect of of my life, but I take every
opportunity I can to make my life better
because in this case, I like to think
that us having a a richer conversation
will benefit people more. So, learn to
turn it off. But that comes from
practice and you're getting micro reps
all day long. The more stress, the more
opportunity. The more stress, the more
opportunity. Now, in order to learn to
fall asleep at night, high morning
cortisol. Don't drink caffeine too late
in the day. Get exercise at some point,
ideally in the first half of your day,
but if you have to do it in the evening,
do it in the evening. But I am a huge
huge believer, practitioner and fan of a
practice that originated in India, which
is called yoga nidra. This, in addition
to the morning high and nighttime low
cortisol, is in my mind the most
powerful tool that we can cultivate
because it teaches you to turn off
thinking and planning and allows you to
learn how to get into pure sensation. It
sounds so squishy, but I'll tell you, no
drug will do this, at least not in a
healthy way. Any drug that takes you out
of thinking and planning and just into
pure sensation, that drug is going to
rebound you into a rough place when you
come out of it. Yoga nidra and in
fairness I you know I a few years back I
started calling it non-sleep deep rest
that was not this is a great opportunity
to talk to your audience uh who may know
that you know some people were critical
of that decision. The reason for that is
I wanted people to understand the real
value of this practice and I always make
the effort to credit yoga nidra as the
the origin of it. I take no credit for
this practice but in quote unquote the
west such a silly term right but in the
west there's there's this assumption
people hear yoga and they think movement
and then a lot of people who they think
I don't want to do yoga I don't which is
just their own limitation but yoga nidra
involves what it involves lying or
sitting down you know this I'm sure long
exhale breathing slowing the heart rate
down deliberately
noticing My mind is in a mode of
thinking and doing and planning. I'm
going to move it into pure sensation.
Just focus on what I hear, what I feel.
This is so critical. This is the first
and most basic step in what I call
turning your mind off. It's turning off
planning and thinking and doing. And
it's a skill. You do this for 10, 20, or
30 minutes one, three, or seven days a
week. And across a couple of years, you
get very good at it. So, I started it in
2017 and I thought to myself, this is
remarkable. I can fall asleep more
easily if I wake up in the middle of the
night. I know how to turn my mind off.
>> Do that again.
>> I do it again for 10 minutes. There's
also an eye movement trick that you can
do. You want to hear something really
wacky? So, there's a paper published a
few years ago where they developed this
giant bed that rocks back and forth and
people fall asleep very quickly. Hm.
Okay. Well, I don't have a rocking bed.
You don't have a rocking bed. it's not
very practical. There's also a paper
published in um a really fine journal
showing that there's a particular rate
of walking and swaying that parents
naturally find that puts their baby to
sleep and it matches the same rocking
speed, right? It's a very slow back and
forth rocking. Say, okay, this is
age-old wisdom, but what does this do?
You would think it was the physical
sensation and in some sense it is but
turns out and this is the basis of some
new technologies that I'm not a part of
but I've had the opportunity to try of
eye masks that can induce sleep. The
next time you have trouble falling
asleep or getting back to sleep. Keeping
your eyes closed slowly move your eyes
to one side then to the other side.
Then you're going to move your eyes
counterclockwise. I told you it would be
kind of crazy. Then clockwise. Then kind
of look towards the tip of your nose.
You're not crossing your eyes. and then
exhale. Now when you do that because
there is a relationship between the eyes
and your cerebellum this area of your
brain that is primitive area of your
brain that controls balance
you disrupt the what we call
proprioceptive circuits. Proprioception
is the knowledge of where your limbs are
in space. To fall asleep you need to
forget your body position. This is the
first critical step in falling asleep
that nobody talks about. And so now
there's some really interesting
technology stimulating and inhibiting
certain brain areas that control
propriception and it makes people sleepy
and they fall asleep. So as crazy as
this sounds,
>> this really works.
>> It really works. It really works. Now if
you're if you drink four cups of coffee
and you're ruminating over something,
it's not going to override that. But if
you wake up in the middle of the night,
you go to the restroom, for instance,
you I woke up, I go back, maybe it's
noisy, someone made a noise. Close your
eyes and with your eyes closed you're
gonna move your eyes to doesn't matter
to the left or right first you go one
side then the other side maybe do it
again if you want then counterclockwise
clockwise then you kind of point your
eyes toward your midline or your your
nose and then you exhale and you forget
body position many many people who I've
taught this to write to me and say I
can't believe it but I then wake up the
next morning it's wild I did it on the
plane ride here I was out also these
circuits that we access in yoga nidra of
self-directed relaxation or of turning
off propriception, our knowledge of our
body position. They are amendable to
plasticity, which is simply to say that
they get stronger in response to these
behaviors over time. The plasticity of
these behaviors is really critical. You
get better at it. The same way that I'm
sure you know, you sit down and you're
really excited about something, you're
in immediate focus. But I'm guessing at
some point in your school career, your
career career, you have something you're
like, I don't want to do this. But you
know how to get in gear. You think,
okay, what do I have to do? Maybe you
watch a YouTube video. Maybe you don't.
You turn on some music. You tell
yourself, what's wrong with me? Like,
all right, let's get this. You call
someone. Let's do it. And you're in.
>> Yeah,
>> you know how to ramp up, but do you know
how to turn it off? Do you know how to
ramp down? And you know, the best
athletes know how to do this. That's a
skill you learn. you and so this
25-year-old person I would say great you
are in the peak of the opportunity to
still rewire your brain in the right
ways that includes get after it culture
but how are you going to turn off your
brain to restore reset dump the data
that's not significant from the day
before the the conflict you had some the
thing you saw online is an attempt to
steal your focus and energy and sleep
>> when I go on X I'm literally it's
warfare I'm I'm a benevolent player
there, but you're not going to take my
energy. I think about this. You're I
have I have a shield up. You're not
going to take my Somebody says something
about me. You're I know what they're
trying to do. They're losing energy by
But I'm not going to let them take It's
It's a video game. And you win by taking
as many of those attentional resources
and putting them into your health, your
well-being. This includes how you treat
other people. You think you're a high,
can you be a like a high focus driven
person and switch it off?
>> That's a mental, career, financial,
whatever you want to call it, physical
athlete. That that's the that's the
dangerous person. I don't worry about
the person who can just get after it and
drink 12 cups of coffee, pop an
Adderall, and and just outwork
everybody. So the next morning they're
they're outworking everybody. Okay, see
you on Thursday. I'm going to I'm going
to blast past you. And I actually
learned this when I was first starting
off in neuroscience. I would go to
meetings. I never liked drinking
alcohol. First of all, I don't like the
way people act when they drink alcohol.
I never felt like I There might have
been a few weddings or parties in my my
life where like I'm with friends I
really know and we have a few drinks and
like there's that bonding feeling. It
was great. Let's be honest, it was
great. But most of the time at
scientific meetings, I just noticed
people being sloppy and stupid, saying
dumb things, getting themselves in
trouble. Also, I was there to build my
career. So I thought, well, maybe in 20
years when I'm a tenure professor, I'll
do that. But now I'm going to bed early
on night one. And on night two, those
guys who are really established, like
they're kind of dragging. By day three,
they're falling asleep and like they're
with their mouth open and drooling in
the in the meetings and a bunch of
students do too. These were athletes
that'd be like, "This is too easy. I'm
still there front row taking notes,
getting my workouts in, and on the last
night I might have a good time."
So, it's not that I don't have a good
time, but I from day one, I I'm going to
pass you, not you, but you get the idea.
I'm going to pass up the next person by
what I don't do as much as what I do.
>> And we don't hear about this cuz it's a
little bit hard to put all this into a
90-cond clip on social media. So, a lot
of get after itself. Take this peptide,
take this stimulant. And listen, I love
caffeine and I think there's a place for
these tools, but it's much easier to get
in gear. How do you do that day in day
out consistently? Have a reset day. One
day per week I don't exercise. I try and
spend as much time in fresh air,
sunshine, and relaxation as I can, but
if I can't, I might just veg all day.
>> Like do nothing half a day, watch a
movie with my girlfriend, relax, just
kick back, hang out, be I call it I I
sort of joke it's it's our zero cortisol
day. No such thing as a zero c. I still
get the sunlight in the morning at that
cortisol peak. You know, I didn't
emphasize this enough before, but I'll
just return to the if you have a high
morning cortisol peak. Any stress that
comes, you'll be able to deal with it.
There's actually really good data on
this. I I'm not here to plug my book,
but I have this book, Protocols, which
discusses this, that the return to
baseline of of cortisol after a stressor
is much faster if you had high morning
cortisol. The worst situation is a
what's called flattening of the morning
of the cortisol curve across the day
where it's not a big peak in the
morning. It's kind of high midish
baseline into the evening. Any stress
that comes is riding on an higher
baseline. Now it's carrying into the
evening. It disrupt it's shown to
disrupt all sorts of things. Blood
glucose regulation, all the negative
effects of cortisol, so-called chronic
stress are really about afternoon and
nighttime high cortisol. We're never
told this. Also, if you're somebody who
uses, for instance, ashwagandha to
suppress cortisol, that should
definitely be done in the final hours of
the day, not in the morning. Small
amounts in the early part of the day,
fine. later in the day not so good. I
don't recommend people take ashwagandha
for long periods of time maybe for
>> two for well
it potently reduces cortisol you know by
one study depending on the amount but
600 milligrams you know twice you know
or so um can reduce cortisol
significantly by about 30%. You want
high morning cortisol. So you want in
the afternoon. I would say if you're
going to reduce cortisol using
ashwagandha at high doses, you want to
limit that to about two weeks without
taking and then take two weeks off. In
moderate doses, you know, 300 up to 600
milligrams is probably fine to take
consistently, but in the second half of
the day, um, some people take things to
fall asleep. I I I think things like
magnesium, theine, apagenine, which is
chamomile tea, or things like
ashwagandha, can help. But if you're not
doing all the right behaviors, it's
going to make a trivial impact. And I
have been somewhat um you know bullish
on experimenting with things like
pinealon which is a peptide that can
help increase REM sleep, but only every
once in a while. I don't think it's good
to rely on pharmarmacology to induce
sleep too often. Also because you're
shortcircuiting your ability to turn
your mind on
>> but I do like stimulants early in the
day. In particular, caffeine. That's the
my main stimulant. Alpha GPC and things
of that sort. Energy drinks. Do you use
nicotine? It seems like everyone uses
nicotine now. Go. Good for you. You
might be the one male under 40 I've met
that doesn't take nicotine. You know,
nicotine creates an alert but calm
state, which is a very coveted state.
It's hard to get that state, but it does
increase blood pressure and it's very,
very habit forming. I mean, you see
these guys who they start with one 3
milligram pouch and a six milligram
pouch. Pretty soon it's five pouches a
day. I love competing with those guys
because in a few years they're going to
have other issues.
>> So like I'm my dad who's a scientist
taught taught me this long ago. He said,
"Listen, you got to learn to be a
long-distance runner. This is a long
game. [snorts] You want to win the long
game. You want to win the short and the
medium game, too, but you want to win
the long game." And anyone can push hard
in the short term, but they're just and
you're going to see you're just going to
see people start dropping out. So take
care of those final hours of the day.
Learn to turn it off. You can also
practice yoga nidra with a 10, 20 or 30
minute script. They're all there, you
know, tons of them on YouTube. We have
some on our web page. They're all zero
cost. They're all it just depends on
what you like. You could do the practice
that in the day. If you don't get enough
sleep, for instance, I highly recommend
doing it first thing when you wake up in
the morning to recover the sleep you
didn't get. It's very potent at
recovering mental and physical vigor. If
you can't do it, then in the afternoon,
I always have a little bit of a dip
around 2 PM. If I didn't sleep enough
the night before, I religiously do a a
yoga nidra between 2 and 3 p.m., maybe
even 10 minutes, ideally 20 or 30. Come
out of that, hydrate, maybe a little bit
of caffeine. Boom, you're right back.
There's now data showing that pockets of
the of your sleep of your brain go into
deep sleep and maybe even REM sleep
while you do Nidra. So, it's very
restorative. There is no pill that will
do this. There's no pill that will do
this.
>> And you don't do that at night
>> yoga nidra
>> before sleeping.
>> I generally don't because I don't have
trouble falling asleep. The challenge
I've had over the years is falling
asleep and then waking up at 2 or 3 or 4
in the morning and not being able to go
back to sleep. The eye movement trick
plus doing nijra during the daytime has
I have the ability to turn my mind off
and go back to sleep. Well, the real key
to becoming what you call dangerous and
ultra resilient or antifragile, whatever
language you want to use, is you learn
to recognize what state you're in. This
is this is the piece actually that sits
even deeper than all the rest. You know,
the oracle said it first, but know
thyself. You have to know where you're
at. Am I in a good state? Am I in a
vulnerable state? If I go on social
media now and I see something that
upsets me, am I just going to go down
that rabbit hole? We all like to think
we can just blaze through life, but
knowing where you're at is like checking
the checking the engine, checking the
machine, is like the steering aligned.
And I don't sleep as much as I need to
or I have stressors in my life. My
steering is not aligned. So, I have to
do other things to keep myself in check.
>> Um, you don't.
>> Yeah. So, it's about building in a
resilience that includes flexibility.
>> And I think people hear like they think
rigidity, but it's not that. You know,
I'm working really hard on having a turn
off button.
>> That's the hard one, right?
>> It's really, really hard. And there was
about like 3 years ago, there was a
phase of my life where I was just like
pushing through, pushing through really
like
>> Yeah, I get the sense you're that kind
of guy.
>> 3 hours, 4 hours sleep. And that's when
I discovered NSDR yoga nitra from you.
And they were like audios 10 minutes, 20
minutes. And I was doing like three
podcasts a day, like you know, just 3
three hours. And then what I started
doing, my team started noticing like in
middle of one guest would leave and then
I would have like a 30 minute break
before the next guest comes right and I
would put in the NSDR audio by you
>> and I would just lay down and I would
fall asleep like like a baby and they
were like where did Raj go? Awesome.
>> Like where is he? And I'm like under the
table sleeping and but those 10 minutes
15 minutes gave me so much energy which
probably even a coffee didn't give me
>> right
>> that was like so good like those 10 20
minutes now
>> your mind needs to turn off you need to
go into this some people call default
mode network which is associate people
get confused because the the default
mode network is associated with
depression if it's too high but you need
to go into idle you can't just push this
engine that is your brain and nervous
system all the time. I mean, you can do
it. The problem is you can do it for a
while, but what I love about what you
just described is, and this is another
piece, so I'd say know thyself.
Learn how to turn your mind off, meaning
learn how to turn off thinking and
planning. I'm not saying turn thoughts
off. You can still learn how to go into
pure sensation and relax. Boost your
morning cortisol, keep it low at night,
which allow your melatonin to be high.
So, these are we're sort of building out
a framework here.
And then the other one is take yourself
seriously.
And taking yourself seriously is both
hitting the gas pedal and knowing how to
do that and knowing how to come off the
gas pedal so that you can come back and
do it again. You gave a really great
example. What I heard, what I thought as
you told me that story is awesome.
You're taking yourself seriously. You're
you're the equivalent of a professional
athlete or somebody who's studying for
their boards for neurosurgery for
medical school, whatever. somebody's
doing
15 years old, 20 years old, 25 years
old. Take yourself seriously. Now,
people hear that and they think, uh,
more rigidity, no fun, no laughter. No,
laughter is great. Having a great time
with your team is great, but the people
who become leaders, the people who win
in their fields, the people that do it
consistently over time and enjoy the
process and have healthy lives
internally and externally,
they know how to switch it off and they
take themselves seriously. And you know
it was um I think it probably comes from
my dad's side you know that I I would go
to these scientific meetings and I was
like how could these people be like so
serious about their careers but then
they sort of like are like partying
through the meeting and I realized oh
many of them are actually just really
brilliant so they can do this. None of
those people are around anymore. They're
not in the field anymore. like natural
proclivities and and genetic gifts,
they'll carry you pretty far. But the
people with genetic gifts and natural
proclivities and circumstantial gifts
[snorts] that take themselves really
seriously, they we know they they excel.
Okay, most of us have some opportunities
and advantages afforded to us. Some
people have none. The only way for all
these people, all three categories of
people to excel in the long term is you
have to take yourself seriously. And
people will hear this and they'll think
uh like Huberman, he's just like take
it. Yeah, take it. You've been gifted
this life, right? It doesn't mean you
don't smile, smile, experience joy, take
a day and just completely relax. You you
want to be present to people. But if you
don't take these things seriously, what
ends up happening is you default to the
mean, the dominant culture that you're
surrounded with. So if you're around
people that like to work hard, play
hard, okay, cool. But pretty soon you're
playing as hard as you're working and
that doesn't look so good over time.
Okay? Or you're around people that have
given up or they're getting depressed
and now you're not the person that can
be there to really support them. You're
one of them.
So, nobody is made of steel, right?
We're not robots. But take yourself
seriously. Take your life seriously. And
I know your listeners do that. But I
think that perhaps they've been taught
or they've they've convinced themselves
that to take oneself seriously is to
never come off the gas pedal.
>> You know, Formula 1 driver knows like
that it's not just pit stops. The car
needs care. It needs love. It needs
rest. But when you rest and how you rest
is absolutely key. And the other piece
of it is, you know, that becomes tricky
is, you know, which people belong in
your life, which people don't. And
that's a tough one because it starts to
sound rigid. You know, when I hear about
people's like, I eliminate all toxicity
from my life. There's no such thing.
Toxicity comes through the phone.
There's no such thing. They're going to
be people who have challenges and
they're not handling them well. Are you
going to be in a position where you can
help lead them and guide them and uh and
be the calm in their storm so that they
can hopefully if you need it be the calm
in your storm. That's how it works. So I
love that you do nidra in between. And
if listen if one day you decide you know
every once in a while you just scroll
Instagram instead cool if you reset.
[snorts] What you don't want to do is
scroll Instagram thinking I should be
doing yoga nidra or I should be doing
the other thing. When our mind is split
between two places, that's the most
taxing thing. When we're trying to
focus, but we can't. When we're trying
to sleep, but we can't. The mind thrives
on kind of unitary states, but those are
hard to get into. We need to train
ourselves to get into them. And sadly,
the mind defaults to unitary states like
anger and frustration very easily. And
most of the algorithmic stuff that not
all of it but a lot of it is designed to
get you into those states very quickly
so you're not doing anything else.
>> Yeah.
>> So yeah,
>> you know this used to be one of the
biggest lies that I used to believe in
that you don't need an off button. And
I've I've been this hustle hustle hustle
work work be obsessed. I' I've been like
a kind of a poster boy for a lot of my
life just like that in my family and
friends and I've been there and I've
realized in last couple of years like
not not even couple of like very
recently that you need to take a break
you need to actually have an off button
and now I'm very consciously practicing
that trying to take an off right
>> what has been what do you think like
what's the biggest lie you know which is
which we hear in the world about mental
toughness or about elite performance.
>> Yeah, great question. I think put
simply, it's that the goal is to just
build a bigger and bigger capacity.
>> What we don't acknowledge and people
need to understand is that the better
you get at something, this is a it's a
weird one. The better you get at
something,
the more of an inroad into your energy
it creates. Now, this is weird, right?
Because when you're first learning
something, it takes a lot of energy.
Then you get
>> you get fluid with it. You can sit down
and podcast. I can sit down and podcast
under most any conditions, right? As
long as there's enough oxygen in the
room. And maybe even if there's not, you
and I can have a great podcast. We just
know how to do it. But to really drop
into your craft and I don't care if it's
podcasting or finance or sport or
medicine,
it creates an inroad into your energy
and it is greater than when you're not
very skilled at something because you're
you're engaging more and more and more
focus. So I think there's two things.
The early part of any career, you have
to find your edge. Okay, so this runs a
little bit countercurrent to everything
I've said, but you're trying to figure
out, yeah, how how little sleep can I
exist on? Okay, I break at two nights no
sleep. Okay, I break. I can do one
night. In fact, I did it last week.
30-hour work stretch with my business
partner. Haven't done that in a long
time. We did it. It hurt. We did it. We
carried each other. I was like, I could
tell when my mind was getting wobbly. He
would step in. We would do things. And
we did it. We had to do it. Feels good.
I don't really want to do that again for
a long while. Um but I built that
capacity over many years. Okay, you
build that capacity by finding your
edge. Now you don't want to die or
injure yourself or become mentally sick
but you get to that edge and then you
stay away from that edge and then so I
would say in the first year or two of
doing something go for it. Just go all
in.
Reset only
as needed to just keep coming back. Keep
coming back. Keep coming back. But at
some point you're going to hit a wall.
You want that wall to be a non-lethal
wall. Okay, you want that wall to be I'm
exhausted. I need a week off. I can't
afford a week off. Okay, I hit my wall.
That's my limit. What can I do every day
at this point consistently over time and
work around that average? It's going to
balance around that average plus or
minus 2 hours or so. So, for me, I like
you, I have a a pretty large capacity.
If I do the right things in between, on
the way here, I cleared my mind. On the
flight in, I slept. I know how to clear
my mind and reset, but I can probably do
anywhere from
depends on the work. Um, anywhere from
5 to 10 hours of real work per day, real
work. Okay, that's not including the
lunch break. It's not including the
walk. So, like
>> five is doable.
>> 6 to 7 is doable. Hurts a bit more. 10
hurts. The next day, I'm not doing 10.
I'm borrowing from the next day where I
can only do five, right? Okay. And you
know this, but I had to find that. I had
to establish that you build that up the
same way you build up strength. You
know, there's a beautiful parallel to
resistance training. Everyone knows,
okay, you you do your sets and reps, you
take the reps to failure or close to
failure, you allow some period of time,
the muscle gets stronger, you come back.
But an old principle from resistance
training that's still very true is as
you get better at it, you know how to
really cramp the muscle hard. you know
how to really push. You know when the
when the harder reps are coming, you get
better at inducing the stimulus, the
stress stimulus that causes the the
adaptation of growth and and strength
increase.
You need fewer sets after resistance
training for 10, 15 years. People say,
"Oh, no, no, you need to do more." No,
you need to pour more into fewer sets.
You have the ability to do that. Now,
when somebody first starts resistance
training, they can't generate that kind
of focused intensity. So the more
focused intensity you can bring to
something, the more volume and focused
intensity, the more rest you need to
offset that. So what ends up happening
is at your stage when you're, you know,
I would say like the first year 1, two,
and three, I think you can go on all gas
pedal in anything. Just all gas pedal.
Work, work, work, learn, learn, learn,
learn, learn. Do it. Don't die. The goal
is just don't die, but just go all in.
Okay? Then in years four, five or so,
you're learning how to create some
balance and be more effective. You're
trying to stay out of chronic illness.
You're trying to stay out of autoimmune
conditions. You're you know, this is
typically if people don't do this is
when their hair starts falling out. They
start getting skin issues. The nervous
system is
>> is under stress. It's just you're that
nighttime cortisol is too high. If we
really want to break it down, that's
what's happening. The rhythm is off. The
nighttime cortisol is too high. you're
not resetting the nervous system and
therefore the endocrine system and
therefore all the immune system and so
on. And some people break at that point.
>> Um, you know, I do think that there's
variability. People who are very driven,
who are kind of highwired. I'm of that
sort. Um, you might be of that sort.
They tend to have a certain physical
stature. Um, they're kind of go go go.
They're kind of electric and they know
that electric ant feels really good,
right? They tend to veer more towards
towards autoimmune conditions because
they can push push push push push and
the the cortisol just keeps coming and
they can keep going. Some people just go
into like a chronic fatigue. Boom.
[clears throat] They just crash. They
just crash. My problem your problem is
we don't crash. We keep going but we're
our baseline is dropping.
>> So the key is around years I would say
four, five, six, you're learning to
bring the balance in. Now by years 6 7
there's some overlap there obviously 6 7
8 9 10 you're a pro. Now you're a pro.
You know when you're stressed. You know
when you're feeling extra good. You know
when you need to nidra. You know when
you need to get off your phone and go do
this thing and you know what to go do.
So it doesn't mean you need 10 years to
get good at something. You can get real
far real fast in three years. But you
can't keep that pace up.
>> You have to learn to dynamically
regulate it. And the unit of of
analysis, like the the unit of time to
focus on is the day. What can I do
today? This is another big part of
shutting your brain off. I'm not
thinking about tomorrow as its own
thing. I know it's coming. I know I've
got stuff to do, but what can I do today
to get the most done, but know that I'm
coming back tomorrow and I got to do it
again. I want to do it again. So, years
1, 2, and three, go for it. years four,
five, six, learn to dynamically regulate
it. Beyond that, you're a pro
>> and now you you really can start to
integrate the principles of what you're
and you'll and that's when you also can
start guiding your team better. Hey,
listen, that's a left column issue.
>> Clip it.
>> You know, here go do yoga. I don't want
to do yoga like you're you're inhaling
too much oxygen for this problem. Go
turn it off. You know, I have a lock box
for my phone that I still sometimes use,
but I don't need it quite as much these
days. But I needed that at some point
because there was just too much
incoming. And this is what you're really
becoming a mental athlete, right? And
then in terms of physical well-being, I
do think that there's certain physical
activities that can help reset the
nervous system. People are different,
but for me, once a week I need to go on
a long jog or run or cycle or swim. So,
it's an hour slow, really slow. I do
that typically on Sundays. I like to do
it out ofdoors. I might do it socially
uh with someone else or other people,
but it's a it's an endurance thing. I'll
listen to podcasts or books and I'll
just like, go, this last Sunday I just
went for a slow jog, you know, out and
back 45 minutes. The whole work of the
thing is to not go any faster and just
do it. That takes me into the week. I
start my week with a hard leg workout.
That's how I like to do it, but it's
brief. It's only about an hour. Two a
couple warm-up sets and a couple hard
work sets for each muscle group. So that
means some belt squats or some leg
presses or some, you know, and some
hamstring curls and taken to failure.
Two or three sets. This is important.
You want to keep the body strong,
especially the lower body. You get that
out of the way early in the week. But I
don't push to exhaustion because it's
Monday and I have a long week ahead.
Next day, rest. I didn't do any exercise
today. I try and walk in the morning. I
get my sunlight. I do these things, but
take that day off after the leg day. A
day later, depending on how I feel, I
might do some resistance training again,
but typically I will do some sort of
easier cardio, only about 30 minutes,
just keep the cardiovascular system
going, blood flow to the brain. These
things really help improve brain
function, blood flow, uh, improve sleep
and so on, but nothing excessive. The
next day, I'll do some sort of pushing
and pulling. So, some pressing movements
for the chest, some pressing movements
overhead, some chin-up type movement,
and some rowing type movement, some
abdominals. So, it's just kind of like
general torso stuff. Same principle, a
couple warm-up sets, couple hard work
sets to failure of each exercise. You're
done in an hour. And then the next day,
I do some sort of cardio, very brief, to
get my heart rate way, way up. V2 max
type training, just once a week. Get on
the aerodine bike, warm up for a minute,
and then pedal hard hard for 20, 30
seconds. Rest 20 seconds, and then
repeat hard, hard, hard, um, something
like that for six rounds. By the end,
your heart rate is maxed out. You feel
like you want to die, but then the rest
of the day is pretty easy.
>> This rhythm works very well because
you'll get strong, you'll have
endurance, you'll have the ability to
sprint and go fast. You're not going to
be the fastest or the or the best
runner. You're not going to be the
strongest, but you're going to have
all-around fitness. Your posture will be
good. I'm 50 years old. I've been
training this way for 35 years, and I
can tell you, uh, anyone can do this.
Male, female, whatever age or hormone
status, you can do this. But you need to
find your walls. You need to find your
limits. And then you need to decide if
if you're going to push past them. And
and I think for me the the real joy is
in trying to share tools with people
like the morning cortisol stuff, the low
nighttime cortisol stuff, and the many
other protocols we cover in a so that
they can set themselves up to be in the
best position to succeed over time. Cuz
if you don't get that right, you're not
going to succeed over time.
>> You know, there are many things you can
take to give you energy. There are many
books you can read for inspiration. I
don't even think about inspiration
anymore. what
>> I just don't I I think um I try and look
for themes in the world where I like to
interact with people
like you, like my friend Eddie that I
saw do neurosurgery this morning who are
like really in their element cuz there's
a vibe that comes from that and and over
time you just find that you're just
surrounded by people like that.
>> Agreed.
>> Right. you just it's like it's like a
it's like a bunch of tributaries come
together and then like
>> I'll encounter people during the day
that are struggling and they'll say,
"Hey, do you have any advice?" And of
course, I'll stop and give them my time.
But as you continue to do well and and
take care of yourself, you just notice
your whole world is made up of people
that are like really positive and then
you don't have to worry so much about
all the like the the downer stuff. It's
also important to keep in mind that when
you go online, you're in the you're in
the open waters of of everything from
very healthy to really just like
mentally ill. Like we have to remember
that on the internet a lot of people are
not well and they're stressed and
they're tired and they're um and you can
send them love, but do not let any of
that erode your well-being. You cannot I
mean, you're a public figure. Uh I I
became a public figure at 45 and I'm 50
now. Um I like what do you do? I mean
that's it that takes a lot of strength
of mind in order to not because I'm sure
people say many many kind things but
occasionally people try and puncture
your balloon by just being unkind
because they're they're
>> they're kind of semi-broken people.
>> So how do you deal with that? Like what
is your what is your tool?
>> I don't it doesn't affect me. I don't
know why. Like it just
>> Oh yeah. Healthy upbringing. Your
parents must have done something well.
>> I absolutely thank them. Yes.
>> For sure. It it doesn't affect me at
all.
>> Uhhuh.
>> Like things and I have a similar thing
which
>> and we're not just saying that for the
cameras. It really does.
>> Like you can ask my team or like they
will tell you and I can tell you
everything.
>> I mean it's my show. I can cut the wrong
stuff as to be honest with you.
>> No, but I really I think it's it's
interesting that um because I think a
lot of public figures and non-public
figures they struggle with that. Like I
don't I've never
>> I've never I don't doubt myself at all.
>> Like just
>> great.
>> Just say what you want to.
>> I I know what I'm
>> what I'm going to do. I see every hate
or every negative comment that I get.
>> I see it either it's a constructive
feedback which I probably have missed
and it's a blind spot and I see it as
>> perhaps perhaps not always. Yeah. No,
not like like some of them I see it as a
constructive feedback that oh maybe I
missed this
>> and some I'm like
>> I don't care. That's your opinion. Like
it doesn't even affect me. I just laugh
it off.
>> Yeah. I mean I think it's
>> I mean it's interesting because I think
it all starts with knowing that you're a
fun that one talking about themselves is
is a fundamentally good person. You
know, I think good parenting starts with
um children feeling loved and that they
are, you know, born into and are of
goodness, right? Because I think that
people who don't feel that way um are
very susceptible to to criticism, right?
Because it gets at this question like,
"Am I bad? Am I this?" Like, it gets to
those things. If you if you know that
fundamentally you have a you have a good
heart, you you're human. You make
mistakes, but you have a good heart,
you're 90% of the way there, right? So
keep that keeping that in mind. And then
there's this peculiarity of of human
nature that humans like I mean think
about what it takes just think for a
second of what it takes to go on the
internet and take the time to send a or
post a cruel comment about somebody.
Just think of like how broken somebody
has to be inside. And they're probably
hearing this and thinking no you're the
one that's you know but no like just
think about that. And I I don't say this
with any smuggness or pleasure. It's
like, wow. Like, I wouldn't in a million
years think to do that for amusement,
for pleasure, for like it's net negative
for everybody. You're down
>> wired that way.
>> What's that?
>> You're not wired that way.
>> I don't get it. I really don't get it.
And and so if people are feeling um
aggravated by content they see online
about themselves or others, they should
really keep in mind what it takes to um
to to kind of like how how broken and
sad somebody must be inside in order to
do that. So I if I see something I like,
I try and I send them love.
>> I just try and send them love. Good
luck. Good, you know, love like you
know, but it's um it's great that you
don't you don't suffer from that. Like I
I think we don't talk about it often but
my parents and my brother like my family
in particular they did an incredible
job. I grew up in a joint family
>> and one thing which they gave what is
joined family?
>> Join it's like we were 10 people in one
house.
>> So join family is when you
>> uh like your mom and dad, you your
brother, my uncle, aunt, my grandma,
grandfather, everybody lived in one
>> Oh, how cool. Yeah.
>> Yeah. We don't typically have that here.
That's awesome.
>> So we call it joint family and nuclear
family. Nuclear is when the way you guys
live here like mom, dad, kids.
>> Yeah. Well, that's the best of
circumstances. Typically nowadays
there's I mean divorce is rampant here,
right? My parents divorced. They both
got remarried. I was very young. It was
very disruptive. Very disruptive to my
whole psychology. But um but it worked
out and I loved them all and you know
but we certainly didn't all live under
one roof. So that's cool. So you would
wake up in the morning, how many people
would you see in your kitchen? 10 people
just like [laughter]
>> amazing
>> and every weekend I would have like
cousins over so we would be like 30
people in one house.
>> So I've I've born and brought up in that
and I think one incredible thing it's
a they did a great job because they they
gave me so much self-belief which I'm
just grateful. I don't know why they did
that and how they they did that but they
did that very beautifully. Even today my
brother, my cousins, my everybody just
believes so much. So that's an
incredible thing. The other is also when
you're born with so many people all
around. You get immune to criticism
>> because you're since childhood, you've
been constantly compared [laughter]
>> like you're compared to your cousin,
you're compared to your brother, you're
compared to the five people in family
>> and you've been like you've been shout
at, you've been abused on like just
verbally about certain things. So, you
get so immune that by the time you're an
adult, the outside world doesn't affect
you at all.
>> That's so interesting. Um,
>> like it make you
>> I didn't know this existed, by the way.
And I think most Americans won't know
this this uh joint family joint family
structure. But I have to say, you know,
early on in life, I um I joined some
sports and some other things where I was
in a just a big pack of young guys.
>> And you take a lot of we call it here
ribbing, right? You take a lot of like
joking and hazing and I mean people are
rough on each other verbally and you
learn that it's an expression of love.
>> Sometimes it's an expression of real
criticism but it makes you resilient.
And when I went into science listen in
science you are constantly being told
that's not good enough change the paper.
That's not good enough for I mean it's
non-stop no not good enough. Finally
okay do it again. So I've never
um I assume crit criticism is part of
the the process. So similarly so
different it came from my friendship in
my my work community but it was constant
barrage of critique critique critique
critique including some like you make
some embarrassing mistakes and you have
to live with that shame and recover from
it and know that you're still loved or
that you love yourself. So there are
some parallels but I think the fact that
you had that at home from such a young
age and now when you go home how like
when you visit is it it's a huge group.
>> Oh yeah that's beautiful.
>> Now they're very proud. Of course they
don't criticize me anymore but
>> but you're you're now you're becoming a
leader of the family, right? An example.
>> And you're and you're fine with that
pressure. It sound I I get the sense
that you feel calm in that pressure.
>> That's great.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm okay with that. Yeah,
it's wonderful. No, I think it's
wonderful. I'm learning from you. I
think I I don't think you see that
mindset in uh American households that
much.
>> But you know, in like
my current state of reality has not
changed their attitude towards me at
>> Mhm.
>> Like does it make sense?
>> That helps. Yeah. Keeps you humble.
>> They just
>> they're the same people and they would
>> put me to ground and they would leave no
opportunity to thrash me whenever they
get
>> Well, that's that's good, too. Yeah. And
it's a way of love.
>> Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's
very very important. I mean, I am
relieved to hear it because I I worry
about people that become very successful
very young. You know, I was reasonably
well I was a very aspiring kid. Then I
had some rough years. Then I would been
you know the scientific the I my
scientific career went very well. I had
to work very very hard but it went very
very well. Um but I was surrounded you
know at Stanford School of Medicine. and
you look to your left, you look to your
right, everybody's doing awesome stuff.
And some of them are doing I mean, I've
got colleagues that will win Nobel
prizes, have won Nobel prizes. That that
wasn't me. I knew that like I it was a
good scientist. I think I am a good
scientist, but I also know knew my
level, my place. Um I do feel I deserved
and deserve to be there. But when you're
surrounded by people that are like the
Michael Jordans of their field, the
LeBrons of their of you go like Eddie
Chang, my I mean like he's on a whole
other level, a whole other level. And
he'll be like no no like yes, completely
different as a clinician, as a
scientist. So it raises you your
standard is very high. But I think that
one thing that's great is that I became
public facing at a time when I was 45
years old. So my personality and my, you
know, for better or worse, was already
crystallized. I was not going to change
that much. Um,
but my friends still treat me the same.
And I think that the the encouragement I
heard a good one. This was actually uh I
think it was Jaco Willing that said
this. He said, um, you know, your really
good friends will, and this is very like
maleoriented,
really good male friends, they'll give
you the hardest time to your face, but
they will never talk badly about you
behind your back.
>> Bang on.
>> Yeah. So, that's like that's the
critical test. Like, they should be able
to say anything and they will give you a
really hard time to your face, but if
you're out of the room, they're not
getting into any kind of gossipy stuff
about you when you're out of the room
and you about them. That's kind of like,
you know, 30% of like how to be a dude.
[laughter] Know that rule. Know that
rule. Take and give some some flak, you
know, when when your friend is in the
room, when you're in the room together,
but when you're out of the room, like
there's just no there's no bad talking
when people are out of the room.
>> I think that's it's like a family of
sorts. So anyway, I I appreciate you
sharing a bit because um I get a sense
of that your confidence is is very is
very real. Um, and that doesn't arrive
on accident. So, yeah.
>> You said it worries you when somebody
young gets super successful. Yeah.
>> Why?
>> What worries you the most?
>> I mean,
>> what have you seen personally?
>> Oh my goodness. So, I've known people
who got very popular, famous,
and rich from athletics who really
soared in their business pursuits.
everything from tech to people in the
you know world of you know culinary and
things like that and [snorts] so many
crash and burn. I mean attention is a
drug if [snorts] it's misused.
Attention recycled into creative pursuit
into intellectual pursuit and then
giving back more. That's a beautiful
thing. But you look at all these
performing artists, you know, musicians
and so forth that like they [snorts]
they implode. Um, and I think it's
because
um, like empmphetamines, like opioids,
um, but especially like empmphetamines
that you know the the some people if
they don't have that solid family
grounding, that solid internal structure
and psychology,
hopefully they have the family too, but
if they don't have that, they experience
these peaks of attention and money where
they're the focus. Most people don't go
through life where like they're the
focus and then they experience this
traumatic dip afterwards and they need
to get back and if they can't they start
using substances or they start spending
it money in ways that they think that's
going to be the the um the quote unquote
salvation you know I mean I think
there's a reason why at least in the
United States so many um famous people
eventually turn to some notion of God
right is because they realize that
that's a a loving relationship that will
never leave them if they don't leave it.
And and and in principle, it never
leaves them anyway. Because
when people realize, oh, you know,
people love them only because of the
position they're in. That's that's a
scary thing. There are certain things
that are immune to this. But if you
think about it, like um there's certain
roles that like they're only when
they're in when somebody's in the role,
everyone [snorts] like treats them a
certain way and does something the
moment they're out like that like like
no one cares about the the ex president,
right? They kind of do, but they're no
longer the person other people treat.
Well, now it's complicated because it's
so politically divided, but you get the
idea. But I think we've come up with
something today that I didn't intend to
sort of arrive at, but I do strongly
believe. Yours 1, two, and three. Gas
pedal.
>> Gas pedal. Just do it. Don't damage your
health to the extreme. Like don't do any
crazy dang anything crazy. Don't die,
but like just gas pedal.
Four, five, six. Learn to dynamically
regulate it. 7 8 9 and forward. All
right. Now you're Now the good stuff.
Now you can really just fine-tune and
really and savor it, you know, like
savor it, like really sit back every
once in a while and be like, you know,
like in your case, you can be like, man,
I did that. You built something real
because you took the risk. And that's
what we want. I know, I can tell even
though we don't know each other very
well, like that's what you want for your
audience. That's what I want for people.
I want people to realize, yes, you may
have an autoimmune condition. You may be
suffering from a mental health issue.
You need to tend to those things in very
direct ways but get these basic things
right. You will be amazed how much
better your life is.
>> Are some people built different?
>> In what sense?
>> In any sense like you know when you look
at somebody who's like just on a winning
streak. You look at them and be like you
know that beast is built different.
Well, certainly um
while there are exceptions of people who
are very genetically disadvantaged,
overcoming that and doing tremendously
well in sport, the example that's always
given is like Spud Webb won the slam
dunk competition. He's not a tall guy
kind of thing. Okay, but hang around
some NBA players, you realize most of
them are very very tall, right?
>> That's a genetic thing. This amount of
IGF-1 and growth hormone pumped out of
their pituitary. So, you know, um
largely inherited. So,
>> but from a mindset perspective,
>> from a mindset, this is a fascinating
issue to me. I I do believe that some
people have more energy and it's not
necessarily physical or mental energy,
although it often is. It's more a sense
of self. Like some people report this,
they believe when they're born that
they're like faded to do something
something. It's like they have this kind
of vi like level of vibration in their
nervous system that they need to like
take it someplace and like do something
with this. And when you give them
something to bite down on and they just
go and hopefully they bite down into
something that's generative and healthy.
>> You know, I I uh I humans are a unique
animal, but I spend a lot of time
thinking about the nervous systems of
other animals too for reasons related to
my scientific career. Some species of of
animals have a lot of energy and others
are very like loafed and then they
occasionally do something right. People
are kind of like that too. You know, I
do think that some people are just more
relaxed. They they not as driven. I
think they are still fundamentally
important to society. And I don't say
that just to, you know, be politically
correct. I think that they we need
people who are just going to tend to
certain things day in day out on a very
um consistent level and they're not
trying to break out of their current
circumstances. They're not they don't
feel this friction with their current
circum they're not I do think that this
is strongly related to the dopamine
system. I think some people they feel
the friction of where they're at. It's
never enough which is tricky because you
want people to savor what they have and
continue to strive. You don't want
people to be always dismayed. It's not
enough. That's not good, right? And you
see that when people start to think, oh,
more cars, more money, more marriages,
in some cases more children, you know,
like it's interesting on X, you know, I
I spend a fair amount of time on X.
>> It's interesting. You can learn things
there. But there seems to be this sort
of like competitiveness that you can
observe and certain people like about
kids. Great. Children are wonderful.
They're joyful. I I love kids, right?
But
when people are attached to any one
thing as being the answer, it's very
clear where that's headed. They're not
they're headed for dismay. You know,
they're headed for for trouble, whether
it's money or it's fame or anything
else. But I do think that having a
little bit of internal friction and
agitation or a lot. I mean, let's be
fair, like
many kind of disagreeable
uh people go on to do great things
because they look at the world and they
say it can be so much better.
>> We just have to build this, you know,
trillion dollar company or it can be so
much better. We just have to talk about
all these things we know that nobody's
willing to talk about. Like in my case,
I really believe that there's deep value
in people understanding some basic
science of how they work and also some
interesting things from health and
wellness and things from ancient really
ancient practices like yoga nidra that
if we can just tell it to them in the
form of physiology like maybe they'll
get it like that most people just I
would say a lot of people look at the
world and they go h like I'm just trying
to get by. Um are they lazy? No. Are
they worse? No, it's just I do think
that people who like to build things
[sighs] have to build things.
>> But when I was in high school and I was
involved in certain things, I was
talking to my friends about like, let's
get a wholesale license and build this
company. We probably should have done
it. It would have done very well. We
didn't. I listened too much and we
didn't do it. But then I went in the
direction of another thing. And then
when I was running my lab, I'm tenured.
I'm at Stanford. Everything's going
great. We're publishing articles in
Nature. It was a premier journal. I told
my dad I'm going to start a podcast and
he was like [sighs] to his credit he's
great about it now he's been a guest on
my podcast but he's like I don't know
that Stanford is going to like that like
how are you going to and I'm like I
don't care I'm doing this it's like
you're on a you have this feeling this
landscape of health science wellness
whatever it is it you just know it could
be so much better for everybody I'm
going
>> and I think that's a unique trait and I
think it involves a certain amount
amount of of um no other option type
feeling in your body. It's like you you
feel pulled towards it. And I think the
hard part for people who are in this
category are when they feel these
valleys of I'm not as driven or like
things are not going as well. And I can
tell you having been in a long
scientific career now podcasting for you
know six years or so. How long have you
been podcasting?
>> This is 50th.
>> Great. So we're colleagues,
peers and colleagues. You know, there's
natural cycles. You know, the YouTube
algorithm changes a little bit. The
pause Bob I know has video like things
change. Experts like and it goes and
it's being a part of being a pro is
being able to tolerate those dips in one
area where other areas are going great
and then all of a sudden you're on a
rocket ship again.
>> And that just comes with maturity. Um
but quitting was never an option. Never
an option. But see, you don't get that
quitting as an option because you're
wired that way, right? Same as with me.
But there are some people who quit.
>> And I would ask them with kindness,
do you really want it
or is this or are you in the wrong
domain? Maybe you want it, but you need
to think about what it is
>> like. And it's tough because in years
that years one, two, and three, it does
take an extreme output to see how far
you can go. But until you've given
something, you know, three years of
really solid effort, like bordering on
extreme effort, you don't know where it
can go.
>> True.
>> You don't really know. Um, and it's
tough because not everyone can do that.
you know, suddenly they find themselves
with a new child at home and then the
certain although many people made it
work anyway.
>> Let me be specific and you explain me
what's going on in the brain because you
used a while ago you used the word
risk-taking. Some people are like that
they just go at it and then we were
talking about another situation where a
lot of people have dreams to do certain
things, right? So let me be very
specific that if there are two people
and they want to do something risky in
their life. Okay. One sees that risk and
jumps and then goes and does it anyway.
The another thinks about it, plans about
it and just about to take a jump but
then freezes and does not take the risk.
What happens in the brain of that person
who's freezing and not taking the risk?
>> Yeah, it's a great question. Well, we
can put science to it. Um
there's a really nice paper about the
neuroscience of choking, but not choking
choking. Um meaning when the stakes get
really high and you blow it. And it's a
beautiful experiment and it shows that
when
you have the opportunity to do something
and get a little reward, you rarely
choke. When the rewards go up and up and
up and you start thinking about what you
stand to gain, not what you stand to
lose, you over the brain overrecruits
neurons in motor cortex and very skilled
people miss.
>> It's fascinating and this carries over
to people in the world of finance and
all sorts of things. So it's not that
they're so at a neurological level,
maybe even at a cognitive level.
The freezing comes from thinking too
much about how good it could go,
[snorts] how well it could turn out, it
becomes overwhelming. The stakes are so
high.
>> So lower the stakes. Lower the stakes in
your mind. This is why, you know, I
love, you know, some of these phrases
are just cliches, but there have been
times in my career like I my podcast is
doing very well, but then I had this
book I needed to finish. It's a long
book. It's almost 650 pages. It's like
seven books collapsed into one.
>> Yeah. So that people could read 100
pages on sleep and have their sleep
worked out or stress or exercise. They
don't I don't expect anyone to read it
all the way through, right? You'd fall
asleep. So cure insomnia. But but doing
that in parallel with the podcast was a
lot. And so the mindset in my mind was
chop wood, carry water, which is a
phrase which just means some days you
don't think about why. You just chop
wood, carry water. This is how you keep
a village going, right? Chop wood, carry
water. And I said, I'm doing this simply
because I said I would chop wood, carry
water. Resentments would come up. Why' I
do this?
I can get out of this. Push that aside.
Chop wood, carry water. Took time. Took
much longer than I thought, but you get
there. What was I doing? It was just
lowering the stakes. Just do it today.
Just today. One more day. One more day.
I think when people get to that place
where they could do something and they
freeze, they're imagining how great it
could go. We think they're imagining how
terrible it could go. But what causes us
to choke is, oh my goodness, like so
much is at stake. If I can't do this, I
can't do anything. So they're psyching
themselves out. So lower the stakes.
Give it go all in instead of for three
years. Go all in for three days and then
quit. Talk to me after three days. If
you survive three days, you can survive
three more days. You survive those three
days, you can another three days. And
just keep going. Lower the like bring
the horizon in. Bring the time horizon
in. That's the way to do it. Now, the
person who just jumps, we love and
admire those people. You did it. I did
it. But the timing has to be right, too.
You can't be reckless. You can't be
halfhazard. We know this, right? That's
how you get yourself killed in physical
endeavors. And that's how you lose
everything in financial endeavors,
right? You know, um what is it? I think
it's like the Warren Buffett saying
like, you know, there, you know, three
things kill men in in finance. Like it's
like a liquor, you know. Um ladies, if
they, you know, they're not faithful,
they pick, you know, they have crazy,
you know, dating life and this kind of
thing. Um and leverage, they overlever
like you, I mean, you can be take on too
much risk and lose, right? and the other
two the the first two there it's worth
mentioning I've studied many stories of
success in the creative arts in science
in and and to some extent even in
podcasting now the excesses that people
bring about when they start to do really
well are often what take them down
overspending
drugs you know I mean like we've watched
this recent Conor McGregor thing this
guy was at the pinnacle right and I
don't know what his specific issues were
but too much money, too many resources,
not enough people around you to keep you
in check and somebody can collapse. It's
very easy to see and to recognize when
somebody has a substance abuse issue or
if they have a behavioral regulation
issue and they're like getting in fights
in bars or things like that, you know,
which sadly um happened to a number of
people who are like pro aletes.
But the excesses are also excesses of
ego where people think, "Oh, like I won
the last I built 10 companies. I can
build 10 more.
>> How about one more better than all the
other 10?" Right? This is where I do
think like him or hate him, I think Elon
is particularly impressive because he
goes for big things, but he knows
himself. He can manage all this stuff.
>> You know, you you said about people who
get it. It's about their ego and then
power and then they kind of because they
have all excessive things they start
losing it right
>> and attention
>> and and attention so I was reading a
research very recently
>> and I'm quoting it it was about power
>> people who get so much power
what power does to your brain is
equivalent to somewhat of trauma like 20
years of research they did I I can't
remember the specifics But if you're
given power, your brain literally
changes as if it changes in trauma.
>> Interesting.
>> Like you get more impulsive. You start
losing real sense of reality. All of
these things starting to happen. Your
decisions start getting worse and worse.
And the the more and more powerful you
get, all of these things start happening
to you.
>> Yeah. Well, the world uh enforces us. I
it it makes me think, you know, when
when kids are young and especially with
adolescence, like many years ago, I was
like a camp counselor and you see this
thing with adolescence is they're
constantly taking things to the they're
like testing the edges, right? But deep
down they want you and you need to keep
them safe and small kids are like this.
They'll sort of go to an edge of a thing
and they'll look to their parents like,
"Are you looking out for me?" Right? I
mean as we get more power, more freedom,
we sometimes like we test it. But yeah,
life has its own way of of correcting
these things. Um it's tricky because I
don't want people to feel like as they
gain success that they should, you know,
just sit in their chair and keep
working. For some people, the the reward
is the work. And I think it is important
to make the work a significant fraction
of the reward. Otherwise, you can't keep
it up. You can't just do something just
for money. Unless you Listen, I know
some investors. They will say it. They
love money. Why do they Why do they love
money? I don't know. Maybe they grew up
poor. Maybe they just love money. They
like investing. They like winning. But
they like earning it. They don't like
they like earning it more than they like
spending it. It's so cool. It's like a
game. It's like a video game for them.
For me, I love learning and I love
teaching. So for me, learning and
teaching, learning and teaching, that's
the process. and anything that comes of
that whether or not it's recognition or
any financial returns are just icing
but people naturally start to focus on
oh well if I do this thing that's a good
business decision this will be good for
me and my family I mean we can have m
multiple incentives and motivations but
as but we have to stay attached to the
core thing
>> the core thing like the the the work of
it the essence the learning and the
teaching for me like I'm constantly
looking for new information I think
could be of use this conversation is
stimulating thought I mean I I am very
intrigued by this family model. I think
it's really beautiful but it has I'm
going to think about that more what it
means what what could be adopted for
people who don't have the access to that
what components might be useful or rep
replicable um and other things you said
like I I I think because for me learning
and thinking and teaching is what it's
about. I do think
if somebody's doing really well, you
would hate for them to think, "Oh, well,
now it's all going to just, you know,
like come crashing down." No, you can
make really good decisions. And one of
the best ways to do that is to have a
committee of people. You should not be
making all the decisions about your life
in the confines of your skull. You need
people that you respect, not for every
decision, but certain people for certain
decisions that you can bounce things off
of. and you don't let them make the
decisions, but you need to pressure test
because we can delude ourselves, right?
But there also comes a time when you
just say, "I'm going to ignore
everybody. I'm going to do this." And if
it doesn't work out, you got your
lesson. And if it does work out, which
often it does, you go, okay, now you're
what we call a leader. You're you have
knowledge and experience that they don't
have. And that's a great place to find
yourself. And I as we I describe this,
I'm thinking there's probably some
people who are not even started to build
their business or build their life.
Everything we're talking about is
accessible. It truly is accessible. You
take care of your physical body and your
biological rhythms. You if you can't get
all the exercise every week, you get
some. You you lean into some mission,
some adventure that stands to have a
payoff. You avoid the excesses. You
don't get into extremes of work and
partying. you don't get into extremes of
anything except maybe in that first
three years you go all in. I've never
seen it fail and that's true across
cultures. Now there are some areas of
the world that are very like where
people just cannot move because of like
very oppressive regimes and things like
that but that's not what we're talking
about. Um
and I think people should spend a bit of
time thinking about what's really true
for them and what they want to pursue.
It's also just good to go after
something in the short term. just get
really good at something and then it
allows you to pivot into the next thing
because the process is the same.
>> But do you think we have to try doing
this constantly
in order to achieve something like all
these protocols trying to win, trying to
do something? Because isn't our brain
designed to just keep us alive, not make
us thrive in life?
>> I think humans are different. I think
humans were afforded all the areas of
the brain for survival. But we have this
expanded prefrontal cortex that allows
us to set strategy and build things,
imagine technologies, take our
experiences that are hard for people
with traumas, build something beautiful
out of that. Take our experiences that
were loving and supportive and afforded
us incredible opportunities. Build
something beautiful out of it. I mean,
this is the story of of human uh human
history. We are different. We are not
just about survival. The moment our
basic needs are met, we have two
options. We either can get anxious and
dissolve into a puddle of our own
anxious thoughts or we can take those
anxieties [snorts] and funnel them into
doing something which advances us. This
is a binary choice. There is no in
between. Most people bounce back and
forth a little bit naturally at 2 or 3
in the morning when they wake up.
Everyone does it. But on average, you
want to be veering into that right lane
of doing something. The anxiety
oftentimes,
not always, but oftentimes, I would even
say the majority of the time, is not
because we have this impending thing
that's bad that's going to happen. It's
because we're fed, we're we're rested,
we're watered, we uh we have enough
social connection and now we need to do
something with this additional energy.
And so you we have to grab a hold of our
mind, grab a hold of our bodies and take
it someplace regimented. And it's hard.
You know, yesterday I had a conversation
with someone on the podcast. We were
talking about flow states. Such a
compelling thing. Go into flow. And he
said, "No, no, no. In the world of of
high performance, we now talk about
clutch states." I'd never heard of this.
I said, "What's clutch state? I'm a
neuroscientist. I've heard of flow
states."
>> Yeah. to clutch states are the states of
forcing oneself to do something at that
kind of edge of friction and effort that
most athletes, investors,
high performers, business people live in
90% of their waking hours. And I was
like, finally, someone defi described my
life right now. Right now in this, I'm
enjoying this, but I, you know, I can
tell a little bit the way that your mind
works is like you're also trying to
enforce certain things. is like we're
not just like having a meandering
conversation, right? This is not
philosophy, okay? The the clutch state
is where you have to take our energy and
our anxiety and funnel ourselves into
it. Um, and I think that it's such a
beautiful concept because flow is like,
okay, that comes every once in a while
in years 7, 8, 9, and beyond when you
already achieved mastery because you can
be unskilled, skilled, mastery, and
virtuosity. The virtuosity, everyone
wants that. Everyone wants that, but
it's built on years upon years of basics
of clutch state, clutch state, clutch
state. That's the state to get yourself
into
>> and then turn your mind off and relax
and just keep going. So I don't think
our the I do think the purpose of humans
well there many but one of our major
purposes is to take this extra mental
real estate that we have the extra
neural real estate which is our
prefrontal cortex which can think and
plan and come up with ideas and error
correct and try things and listen to
podcasts and books and then go and
implement and um think about what we
regret. take the lesson, move forward,
try and cut with our losses, all of
that. That's what brought us out of mud
huts and you know, and where we were the
prey and now we're the curators of the
earth and we're building rocket ships to
take us potentially to other planets and
we've got AI and we've got podcasts and
like I I think we're here for a lot more
than than just to get by. And if
[snorts] people just want to get by.
Okay. Well, in certain societies, they
can do that and you work, you handle
your stuff, great. Like that's fine. But
h humanity is all our species has always
advanced on largely on the shoulders of
I mean everyone's important. Clearly,
everyone's of value, but has the big
advancements have always come through
people who are like, I've got a lot of
internal agitation and I'm going to
funnel it into something. And so now we
have this concept of clutch states.
Beautiful concept.
>> Not relaxed. I love it.
>> Yeah, I love it, too. When I heard it, I
was like, "Thank you. You've given me a
new phrase." So, you and I and this guy,
his name is Tommy Wood. He's a MD PhD up
at University of Washington. He studies
high performance and neuroplasticity.
Uh, we're probably the the among the
like 10 people on the planet who've
heard this term. So, now many more
people will hear about it thanks to
[laughter] thanks to your podcast. So,
um, and and you know, no one owns that
term. Send it far and wide like this. I
don't own it. He doesn't own it. Send it
far and wide. This is get yourself into
a clutch state, folks, and and build
something.
>> And this one's so much better than flow
state.
>> Yeah. The the flow state thing is the
expression of something that's all that
you can already do. Has nothing to do
with learning.
>> Has nothing to do with learning.
>> Learning is when you're making errors.
You know, a fundamental principle of
neuroplasticity
>> is that if your nervous system can do
something, there's no plasticity.
There's no rewiring. It's the gap
between your desired performance and
your current performance that creates
adrenaline. It creates in your body
norepinephrine in your brain and some
other neurochemicals that creates a a an
internal chemical uh millu that allows
neural circuits to rewire. But the
errors are what drive that. Your nervous
system goes, "Oh, I can't do it. I can't
do it. I can't do it." You go to sleep.
Few days later, you're doing it a bit
more and then pretty soon you've got it.
And by the way, the best way to
reinforce anything that you've learned
is to self- test. We know this from
neuroscience and psychology experiments.
Reading once you listen to a podcast,
once you listen to a book, the best
thing that you can do is to take a walk
or just a few moments and just think,
what did I learn? Okay, clutch. Do I
know what that is? Just a few things
here and there. And where you go, I
don't remember. Great. Go look it up.
You'll never forget it. The the learning
process is about recognizing what you do
and don't know. that it's those errors
that are so key.
>> Yeah. So, um, so I've never talked about
those before because I just learned
about them yesterday and I love the
concept.
>> Nice. I love it that we are learning
something new now.
>> Yeah, [laughter] definitely. Yeah,
clutch states are new. I think that the
and and this whole framework of like 0
to 3 years, you know, four to six years,
the seven and beyond. Um, because I
don't think it's really been broken
down. I think a lot of people like, "Oh,
you get up and you run like David
Gogggins and then you you do it at 4:30
in the morning like Choco and then you
you do, you know, 50,000 protocols, you
know." No, no, no, no, no, no. That's
not that's not how it works. You know,
>> I love it. Like, you know, you because
I've only heard few things from you and
you always seemed like you're this
50,000 protocol kind of guy or
>> Well, my day is pretty regimented. I
take my supplements. I get my sunlight.
I do my hydration. I do my workouts. I
do my yoga nidra. I dim the lights. I I
do my journaling. I did my 10 breath
meditation. I get my I I do I do them. I
do the the big ones every single day,
every single night, unless I can't in
which case I do as many as I can. But I
also have you I think sometimes people
forget that I like them have large
periods of my day where I have to be in
laser focus to podcast. I have to prep
prepare podcasts for guests and solo
podcasts. You know, some of the solo
podcasts are 100 hours or more of
preparation. It's like doing like a
master's thesis and that's it's tough
and and I you know and I have to tend to
the rest of my life too. So it's um
>> I do the stuff I do all the stuff but
I'm not a robot
>> and none of this is a is a closed loop.
I don't do the wellness stuff to just
keep doing the wellness stuff. It's
always been a way to support the rest of
my life. I'm fortunate that I like
exercise. I like yoga nudra. I like
morning sunlight. But I do all those
things to raise up the level that I can
do all the other things
>> nice
>> and I integrate them. Um, you know, and
I think this notion of health
influencers has become a little bit of a
a thing where that's all people do.
Um, but that's not realistic for most
>> Yeah. Coming back to our previous
discussion, I had this question. Can you
build courage?
>> Can you build courage? Absolutely.
>> Absolutely. Yeah. Incremental. You get
people to their to their edge of
agitation and you let them just live
their life.
>> Like someone who's not courageous, can
they do something today or maybe start
doing something from today which will
help them become courageous
>> if they want to if they want to become
courageous. I mean as cliche as it
sounds the cold water thing is it builds
mental resilience and the reason is that
it is a very reliable and provided you
don't make it too cold you just do cold
shower it really does consistently
reliably cause a fast release of
adrenaline and all of anxiety and stress
involves this like deployment of
adrenaline in the body that makes us
feel agitated our prefrontal cortex is
lowered in activity for the first 20 or
30 seconds it's harder to strategize we
just want to go anywhere except where
we're at. And the goal, the the
resilience training is to learn to just
ride out that first 20, 30 seconds. Then
adrenaline starts to subside. But the
way that I suggest people do deliberate
cold exposure is different than most. I
think people should pick a certain
number of what I call walls. So maybe
like five walls. And maybe the first
wall to go over is just getting in the
cold shower. Then it's you instead of
counting or going for time, you sense
when you really want to get out. That's
another wall. You stay in just one more.
Then you can kind of get comfortable.
Then you wait until you really want to
get out again. You go over that wall
again. And what you'll notice is those
are waves of adrenaline, which is much
more realistic. It's much more like the
real world where you're doing public
speaking where you're not going for
time. You're not trying to relax for 3
minutes. You're trying to [snorts]
deal with whatever comes your way. And
so you can learn to be resilient to your
own physiology.
And again, provided it's not an ice ice
cold bath and you don't want to become
hypothermic. Don't stay in longer than 3
minutes. Cold shower is fine. But you
can build in a lot of resilience.
Earlier we were talking about workouts,
but you could do this with anything.
Like the other day I was doing a workout
in my gym and it was it was warm. It was
really warm and I was about to walk over
and turn on the AC and I'm like, "No,
let's make it hotter. Turn on the heat.
Dude, two more sets. Best sets I had in
ages. Little resilience training. Like,
just make I'm not a massochist. Let's
just make it Let's not always go for
comfort. Let's just make it a little
hot, harder, not easier. And then I
showered. I swear the rest of my day was
so much better. You know, some days it's
the opposite. I just like I I need air
conditioning. You know, some days, you
know, it depends. I mean, I know it can
get very hot and humid in certain parts
of India. So, you know, so I don't
always do that. Um, but occasionally
during the workout, I'll warm up. I'll
listen to music. I'm working out or
listening to and then I go, you know
what? Silence. I just want to focus as
much as humanly possible on every
repetition. But after three, four sets
of that, I want to go back to listening
to some music. And then I know the tail
end of a workout is typically when
people get hurt, uh, front end and tail
end because you're kind of distracted.
So, I turned off the music and I'm just
going to go for just really focus. It's
like great. That was like a There's an
art of doing a a great workout. And some
days you just drink your energy drink
and just go go all out. But it was good.
It was a It was a The same way, you
know, I was in a difficult conversation
the other day and I thought, I'm going
to just resist the urge to say anything.
I'm just going to like be the guy that
just nods.
It was so hard.
>> So hard because I I have a lot of
thoughts and opinions, especially about
what was being said. And I just got to
the end. I was like, "Okay." And then I
said what I need to say and I'm so glad
I did it. Right. But it was it was work.
>> It was work. And it wasn't because I was
being personally attacked. I just
fighting that impulse. So I think
learning to fight our impulsivity.
Listen, this is this stuff of great
leadership that I don't, you know, I'm
not super skilled at, but I'm trying to
build up, right? Because when you're the
main guy, this is one thing that comes
with success. when you're the main guy,
most things fall in around you.
>> You, you know, like you're dialed
everything, you know, it's about you
being dialed in, you know, and it can
make um us, it can make people in
positions of leadership um we can become
impatient. We're used to things
happening on a certain pace, you know,
it can make us impatient. So, you know,
next time something's slow, it's like,
all right, I'm going to like this is a
good practice, but it's hard to stay
there. you know, we're not no one's
striving for perfection. I think pick a
short time scale and try and get
something better out of it, you know,
and I have to be very very clear about
that. Have some mindless ways to reset.
I have them. I like watching
documentaries. [snorts] Um I love
hanging out with uh my girlfriend and
the dog and we just like we you know, we
call it uh you know like we cave to
love. Like there's these moments where
we're just like no more work, no more
dishes, no more doing anything. We're
just going to like the we're just going
to relax the three of we're just going
to completely relax and after 10 15
minutes we move back into our time like
learning how to just completely
and I cover it. I'm like I'm exhausted
and then you get back in business. Let's
go.
>> And I that and it's a very that's one of
the most powerful things I think um to
just give yourself permission to just in
a healthy way be a child every once in a
while and just go and then back in it.
let's go posture up and like let's get
serious again, you know, because
otherwise if you're grinding the gears
all the time,
>> that's just no fun. Yeah. Also, there's
a once you and you you're there now,
right? But people can anticipate this
soon if they're they're not and they're
staying in this trajectory.
the real
the real top layer and I know this from
observing people in other fields, tech
and medicine and the arts and um and
then in podcasting too and finances that
the top top layer is the ultra
discipline superfocused
but an element of playfulness cuz ne cuz
they're just so secure. they can now
just like have that fun and they're not
try they just cuz they they won they won
the game and so now they can just have
fun and that all this incredible stuff
comes out of that and so that's that's
the thing that like you know the that we
should all aspire to that's the peace
that's the peace the joy that comes with
it and but don't expect that in in the
first couple years no way no chance um
wins you're going after wins and you're
building your confidence That's how you
do it. But uh it that's there for for
you.
>> You know, you you mentioned a couple of
games right now like what you do with
the turn on the heat and do certain
things in order to build resilience like
let's make it more
>> uh something that people can follow
immediately. Give me
>> give me like top three mental games that
people can play
>> to build resilience.
>> All right. I woke up this morning. I did
not want to get out of bed. I was super
tired and did not get enough sleep. And
I do before I get out of bed, I do this
every morning. I do 10 breath
meditation. If I can't concentrate, I
tell myself, if I can't concentrate for
10 breaths, how in the world am I going
to go about my day? [snorts] Sometimes I
have to get to number six. You drift.
You have to set an alarm because you can
easily go back to sleep, especially with
long exhales. 10 breath meditation
before you let yourself get out of bed
in the morning, especially on the
mornings where you really have to get up
and use the bathroom.
>> Now, even harder. Okay,
in your workouts, not in your warm-ups,
but in your work sets, your goal is to
make those as hard as possible, not as
easy as possible. So,
as focused as you can possibly be, when
it really is tough, you're going to do
everything you can to make it even
harder. You're going to try and contract
the muscle even harder using using that
weight. That's another one. with respect
to any challenging interaction whether
it's with the internet or with someone
else or it's like too many texts
incoming you're feeling overwhelmed the
whole business of it is to just it's
this detach thing that is about taking
your gaze and getting it extended into
the entire room or space that you're in
because we get very narrow focus there's
a real neuroscience to this we get this
tunnel vision and something feels
overwhelming because it's almost like
drinking from a fire hose Then you kind
of like dial it out and you go and
that's where you get the your autonomic
nervous system adjusts and you're like I
can do this and now you just start
picking things off one by one. This is
actually a tool that um Jaco Willink and
I talked about him and from his military
career that we arrived at independently
but I'll occasionally do it while
podcasting where I feel like we're
really in the tunnel. We're there and I
just to sort of like dial out and I just
in my mind I think let's invite in some
novelty here. I don't know what it is,
but just kind of like let's make sure
that we're not too far down some some
road, right? So, that's a good one. But
if you're feeling overwhelmed, this is
very good. You just simply they you
simply it's you wouldn't even detect it.
You just start viewing the the ceiling
and the floor and the things that you
see ourselves in this context kind of
takes you out of it. Gives you it
releases some of the stress in your mind
that allows you to come up with novel
ways. New abilities come from that. I
have a friend, he's a um a coach for
professional basketball team. He's not
the head coach, but he's a performance
coach. And oftentimes when guys are
moving down court, they're so focused
that they don't see opportunities and
they don't see defenders that can, you
know, thwart their efforts. And so what
they need to do is dilate their gaze and
they start seeing things in new ways and
you can see new opportunities. So it's
the same thing the brain afford you
afford resource more brain resources
when you do that. Um, and then the the
last one is I think there's a very
useful way to use memory that normally
people their memory of the past is about
things that didn't work out. I think
everyone should have some thing that
worked out and you return to that. You
survived the hard thing. You're still
here. You're still breathing. Sometimes
it's that basic or you know your case or
someone else like you built that. You
built that which simply means you can
build another thing and build you can
build on this. You can like you have
that in you. It was you that did that
and to really acknowledge your own
agency in that you didn't do it alone
but that you did that. You took it from
nothing. Had you not decided and done
the things had you not decided to and
then done the things it would not exist.
You need to internalize that because you
really recognize your own capacity and
you can bring that forward. But I admit
that uh throughout the day there are
many opportunities um that I try to take
of like doing the slightly harder thing.
This is something that Andy Stump also
talks about the slightly harder thing.
Like you see that little piece of thing
on the ground. Do you pick it up or do
you go like you do it? You do it because
it's hard. I confess I'm not that good
at that. I hate folding and putting away
my clothes. I absolutely hate it. I was
I would pay any amount of money to have
somebody else do it, but occasionally I
just like throw and I I don't know what
it is. It's my it's like my vice. Sounds
so trivial, right? Um so I let myself
sometimes leave some clothes out. Like
I'm human. I'm I'm like in the
playfulness of that and and how
hilarious it is that I for all the other
things that I'm able to do that are hard
can't seem to just fold a shirt properly
and put it away.
Okay. You know, like Okay. Like would it
be better if I did it? Yeah. But and and
also like so I that that again is that
thing of pick your pick your masochism
but have but but be thoughtful about it.
I do think that if someone were to watch
my podcast or to watch your podcast and
watch Gogggins and all these people it
could feel overwhelming like oh my
goodness is my life supposed to be all
right angles and no no we're human. Yeah
I you know I like to think that we're
both human. I I know I am. So
>> I am way more human.
>> Yeah. Well, but you also are are 29
years old. I'm 50 years old. So you have
more plasticity available.
And I think the the mental trick that I
think is the most important one is you
have to see your life as as an
adventure. You get to write your own
story.
>> True. I like I I really I I believe that
um somebody's listening to this and that
for them it's not about you or me. It's
like it's about them and they're out
there and they're thinking like could I
do it? I don't know if I could do it. I
will tell you right now I was that guy.
I was in my lab listening to Tim Ferrris
podcast and other podcasts. I'm thinking
like reading books, hearing about people
long before there were podcasts and like
I was like I wanted to be like these
people who built things and strived and
did creative things and did things that
were outside the box. And I actually had
this dorky little list of names is so
silly of some artists, some musicians,
people that some I've met but many
[clears throat] of whom I'll never meet
cuz they've passed some scientists and
some other people that I wanted to be
like in certain ways. So dorky, right?
But I still have that list. And I was
like, and now I've actually met a few of
the people and some of them were really
cool. No disappointments there. And I'm
like, "Oh, that's wild." Like it I for
lack of a better word, I manifested
that. But I didn't manifest it by just
sitting in a chair and thinking about
it. I went for it. [snorts] But I was
the person going like, I don't know. I'm
like a professor in a lab, but I have
these other interests and, you know, but
I can't seem to stop seeking out this
knowledge and sharing it with people.
and I had no concept of having a
podcast. So if you're that person out
there, like go for it because I was that
person and you were that person.
>> Absolutely that person.
>> And don't let the amount of information
out there overwhelm you. Just pick your
stuff and go and don't try and do it
all. just pick and you I guarantee I
[snorts] look forward to the day that
someone or or several people are sitting
down saying we heard this conversation
>> and we're like okay I can be part I can
be colleagues with these guys or I can
pass them who knows maybe they're going
to come try and take what we've got but
you have to work pretty hard if you're
going to but I know you can do it or try
um and [snorts] they're going to they're
going to have their thing hopefully
something different hopefully because I
do think that the best work is is
non-competitive. This is actually
important point. My friend Rick Rubin
points this out about the creative arts.
I was watching this documentary recently
about rock climbing and um I'm not a
rock climber, but competition can
motivate you from time to time, but it's
not going to bring about your most
creative work. You want a a an
individual unique unique vision of
something. And it can look a lot like a
lot of other things. It might even look
the same to other people, but that's
your vision. And if you start comparing
it to other people, sure you can borrow
and trade things that you think are
cool. Discard things you don't think are
cool, but like build your your life
story. I'm a neuroscientist turned
podcaster, still neuroscience professor,
whatever, whatever. You have your story.
Everyone has a unique story, and that's
that's what the world wants. They don't
want another one of you or another one
of me or another, you know, Steven
Bartlett or Tim Ferris or Rogan or Lex
Freeman. Like that there, those guys are
those guys and we're us. And build out
the new thing. It can look a lot like it
can still be a podcast or whatever, but
build your own beautiful painting of
your of your vision. That's that would
make me happier than anything if someday
somebody wrote and was like, I heard
that. I went for it. And every time
someone says, "Well, yeah, but it's
hard, but there's a lot of podcasts like
like that should be your answer or and
just keep going." I you know, you you're
like this. You get excited. You get
excited by looking at other people. You
also get excited by challenges as much
as I can hear,
>> right? There are so many people,
>> they're addicted to comfort. And then
there are people like you who are
addicted to challenge. why some people
are addicted to comfort and why some
people are addicted to challenge.
>> Yeah, you know
two answers. One is very kind of rigid
and I don't know which one is true. Um
one is maybe people have just different
mental and physical pain thresholds.
>> Um I I know when I stub my toe it hurts
and then it stops hurting. [laughter] So
um I don't seek out pain, physical pain.
Um
but
I don't know. So m maybe you know maybe
our human species is divided into
builders and sustainers. I don't want to
say like people who are just I don't
like the builder taker thing. There's
some takers in the world but most people
I think are trying to be good people.
most people um
but maybe people have not ever
conceptualized themselves in in the kind
of life adventure builder
frame framework. Um I think a big test
of it is whether or not when they see
some when somebody sees somebody else
striving and doing well, does it make
you feel good or does it make you feel
overwhelmed? When I see somebody
striving and doing well, I'm like,
"Yeah, like I can take some of I don't
want to take from them. I can feed off
that energy. It feeds me. That's the
right language. It feeds me. They're
going. I'm getting I'm like, "Yes." I
mean, it's so cool. Like, this thing I
observed this morning and this
conversation fundamentally change the
way that I think about things going
forward. Um, all of which is generative.
What can I learn from you? And I've
already learned from you. So, I'm
grateful. Really, I'm not just saying
that as a formality or to, you know, to
be kind. It was It's just true. you it's
clear especially for someone at 29 like
you have a very um you have a big
picture perspective that certainly I
didn't have at 29 [laughter]
and um and that uh and great leadership
qualities to you know yeah really I mean
you're the host but you have like sort
of a there's a calm in you and a and a
kindness but also a drive clearly that
um that fosters uh
real feelings of safety I can say that
as your guest cuz I've been on a number
of podcasts where you kind of feel like
some someone's trying to pull something.
I don't get any of that. So, appreciate
that. Something I I work to cultivate on
my own podcast and I don't know cuz I've
only been the host, not the guest, but
that I I I'm going to think about some
of this more. Um certainly. And then my
friend seeing him do this, you know,
incredible act of medicine and science
and um just like,
you know, he's at the edge. He's at the
frontier of science discovering new
brain areas using the most modern
technologies, AI. He's also a
bioengineer because he's like a phenom.
And I see that and I go, "Wow, like I'm
inspired to do better." Um, and and
maybe some people are like, and this is
perfectly fine, will hear or see things
like that and and and go, "Cool." Like,
I just love watching a great soccer game
as a spectator
>> and I'm not inspired to go do anything
with it. I just want to see my team win.
And that's cool, too. That's not me, but
that's cool. And uh, but I see Mezzi and
I think like, [snorts] what's he doing?
Like, how does he like what's he doing?
And uh and how can I
I don't think there's anything that
special about any one person in history
or currently. I just think some people
are just have
some have gifts. Sure. And
opportunities, but I think they just
channel their efforts and
>> interesting.
>> Yeah. I I I think we I really think we
are, you know, it sounds cliche, but I
think that we we all have the
opportunity to build beautiful things in
our lives at whatever scale and um and
that's, you know, humans at their best.
>> But, you know, this is this this has a
lot to do with your identity, how you
see yourself. And because you see you
think this about yourself, you look at
other people as well and you look at
other human beings and you think they
can do beautiful things as well, right?
But someone out there is listening to
you and is feeling like a loser right
now.
>> How can that person change his or her
identity to start feeling like a winner
or start feeling like they can do some
of the beautiful things which you just
described?
>> Yeah. Well, it's it's a verb action. So,
and I want to be clear, I've had
hardship. I mean, less than some, more
than others, but you know, the the
collapse of my family early on in life
was very disruptive to me. and um in
ways that
I mean I've moved through, but it was
it's just very like I hear about your
family and I'll I'll be very honest and
there's a bit of like a I I'm super
happy for you. I I I'm delighted. Um but
there's a little bit of like I I get a
little bit of like man like
that would have been awesome. Some small
fraction of that now, but I had some of
that in certain forms for a certain
amount of time and then you just go and
I was born into a healthy body. Let's
go. We got we got work to do. Huberman,
you know, so you can't you can't live
there, right? But so I've had some
hardships certainly lost for for someone
who was not in the military or didn't
grow up in the inner city. I've lost a
all three of my scientific colleagues
died young. My my mentors, suicide,
cancer, cancer. I was very close with
all of them. In particular, the second
one had a lot of friends die. And you
learn to just kind of keep going and
take those at losses and keep cycling
forward. In fact, there's a protocol for
grief, you know, in my book to deal with
grief because most people think it's
just anger, acceptance, and then what is
it like? There's anger, acceptance,
denial, and then eventually you find
peace or that's not how grief works at
all. Grief is about
the nervous system thinking there's an
action to take around somebody and not
being able to complete the call or see
them. It's this like impulse to oh, like
your nervous system thinks they're still
there and they're not. And there's so
it's an unfulfilled expectation. It's
like reaching for food when you're very
hungry and it's coming towards your
mouth and it disappears. That's what
grief is like. And so you have to go
through certain science supported things
in order to allow that that circuit to
shift into a different framework where
it's really about the past but your
nervous system is still trying to do
this. So you know I still deal with some
of these things but the person who
is like hears this and is like oh I feel
like a loser. Well, you're comparing to
the end state of having quote unquote
won. I'm talking from my position now,
but there were years where I was had
very little money. You know, as an
academic, I living in the Bay Area,
okay, I wasn't in absolute poverty, but
it was really a struggle. It was really
a struggle at times. Um, all sorts of
challenges of loss and things of that
sort. So, there were some dark days in
there for sure. I I think it boils down
to
something that I was told and I never
articulated it myself, but this is what
was going through my head for year after
year after year for decades, which is
losers
take things that happened to them and
indeed sometimes that is are things that
happened to them that they could not
control
or missteps or errors or losses. is and
they ruminate on it and they turn those
thoughts and those emotions into things
that harm themselves
or others. Winners take the things that
happen to them, good or bad, and
they transmute that sometimes through
very hard work that involves talking to
oneself, reminding oneself, journaling
things out, forcing oneself to make
better decisions. and they take those
hard things and they turn them into
actions that are supportive and indeed
generative for them and for others in
the world. Period. End of story. Now
those are just words. So the question is
how? Well, the first thing is to
acknowledge that both losers and winners
have hard thoughts and emotions and
feelings of despair. Okay. [gasps]
The shift is not one of, oh, I'm just
going to be a winner. I'm going to take
all the hard stuff and just think good
thoughts and do good things. No, you
literally have to force that on yourself
over and over and over. Sometimes
multiple times per hour or every 5
minutes. But you cannot let yourself
attack, selfattack or attack others. You
cannot do it. Whatever you So sometimes
the best thing to do is nothing. You
can't get into a generative state.
You're focusing on something really
hard. Okay? Just feel the feelings, but
don't do anything. Don't get up out of
your chair. But then eventually, you get
up out of your chair and you do
What you don't do is self harm or harm
others. That could be with words. It
could be physically. It could be by not
going to work, not going to school,
just, you know, smoking weed and playing
video games, indulging in porn, saying,
you know, horrible things to yourself,
giving up on the world. That's the
default for many people. So, you have to
ratchet yourself over towards that other
side. But once you do that, you realize,
oh, all of the control is in my mind,
and there's nothing outside of me that's
actually going to teach me that process.
I mean this is the one danger of
anything inspirational is that it comes
from the outside and it can be very
useful. It can be like a rung on a
ladder that we can pull ourselves
forward on. But ultimately you pulled
that yourself forward and that's the
thing to focus on. It was your action
that brought you forward. So then you
learn how to do it when the rung isn't
there. You set a mental rung. Okay, I'm
going to do nothing for 5 minutes
because everything I want to do is just
destructive.
I made it 5 minutes. I'm in the driver's
seat at least a little bit and you just
go. Now, this is especially hard to do
between the hours of 1 and 5:00 a.m.
when you're underslept. Very hard to do
when you had alcohol in your system.
Very hard to do when you um are going
through a breakup or a loss and when you
have multiple stressors. So, that's
where the tools of
learning to turn your mind off. Look in
it costs nothing but time. That's where
you try it the first time, you can't do
it, try it again, keep doing it, you get
better. It's a skill like lifting
weights or running or writing or playing
an instrument.
That divergence of,
you know, loser mentality, winner
mentality. It's not calling people
loser. It's a think verbs. What what am
I doing that's promoting a this like
loser mentality? What am I doing that's
promoting winner mentality? And you got
to dig yourself out of that hole and no
one can do it for you. And help will
come when you're headed in the right
direction. And people say, "Well, when I
did that, no one helped me." All right,
maybe you need to go a little bit
further. I, you know, I I I do empathize
and and sympathize with people that feel
like there's they're on their own and
there's no one there to help them. But
in that case, there's only one there's
only one way out and that's out, you
know. And um the M and just acknowledge
that the mind is crazy. It goes crazy
places and it and it wants to, you know,
drag us down sometimes and you just
don't don't throw more dirt on top of
yourself by by like giving into that.
Like I think we're talking about being a
dreamer, being inspired, but like be a
fighter, too. Like learn to be a
fighter. Like learn to learn to fight
yourself. That when they say like the
the the hardest fight is in in your own
mind. Absolutely. So start with the
basic things. Learn to meditate for 10
breaths. Fight the agitation. Learn to
stay in a cold shower for three minutes.
Learn to turn off your thoughts with
yoga nidra. That's a lot harder than the
other two things.
>> So, this can all be done. I know with
with certainty it can all be done
because I did it. And people say, "Well,
you had certain things available to
you." Listen, I didn't they didn't hand
me a PhD. I had to work for it. They
didn't hand me a podcast. I had to work
for it. And um yeah, like my life's been
easier, way easier than it has been for
others and way harder than it has been
for others. It's all what you make of
it. It's all what you make of it.
>> True. You know, do you think at this
time when somebody's feeling like this
absolute they are low, there's no
connection, there no people, there's no
one to hold their hand and like, you
know, hold their hand and get them out
of the right? Do you think what we
were talking about earlier that you
should strip away everything? Do you
think it's the right time to do it?
Should people strip away everything when
they are
>> strip away everything meaning
>> like you would
>> just give up control you you were saying
in the beginning that you know sometimes
it's good to just strip away everything
just have oxygen just a place to sleep
and you were saying something and I we
started to talk
>> yeah break it down to to the the
absolute basics. You're here. You're
breathing. Awesome. You're doing better
than a lot of people. Um it's not going
to feel that good though. that that
alone isn't going to be like, "Oh,
great. I'm breathing." Okay. Some people
will even think sadly that they wish
they weren't. Okay. [snorts] Well,
you're here. So, I would advise, and I
realize this might sound a little bit
loaded, but I would advise if you are
really at the bottom of your pit,
obviously that you need to seek help,
ask whatever you believe in. Okay? I
believe in God. But whatever you believe
in,
just acknowledge out loud alone or in
your head if you don't want anyone to
hear you.
I'm at my end. I can't do this on my own
anymore. Just help me get through the
next hour.
Just go another hour. Just help me do
that. Just help me. What? Ask if you
want to ask God, do it. if you want to
ask the universe, whatever it is, you
know,
and just stop trying to control every
aspect in your mind. Now, I just got
through saying that you have to like
pull yourself back over to the right
response,
but if you truly can't do that, then
it's time to
give it over and just acknowledge, you
know, have a good laugh out loud. It's
hard to be human sometimes.
>> It's beautiful. It's great, but it can
be really hard to be human.
>> it can be really tough. We're a weird
species. We got this amazing prefrontal
cortex and we can do amazing things with
it. But sometimes it loops back on us
and it we just like we're it
flagagillates us and we can't and we're
like ah I can't break out of this.
That's when it's time to say okay I
can't. So, I'm going to give this
process just like help me go another
hour
and I I guarantee you'll get there. And
I have my thoughts about why that might
work. None of them fall within the realm
of science. So, it's not really worth me
going into because it's not my
expertise, but I've never seen this
fail. But once you're back on slightly
solid ground, now you got to get to work
because the universe only, whatever,
God, the universe, whatever you believe
in, only rewards
effort or the effort to engage in
effort. You don't, we've been gifted
life. We can relax. We can enjoy, but we
don't get to uh we don't get to waste
it.
>> And we really we we're here. I mean,
maybe that's what the acknowledging that
we're alive and breathing piece is
about. like like don't take it for
granted. Like I I do think that we're
rewarded for any amount of effort that
we we put in. Any amount maybe not in
getting the thing we thought we were
going to get, but in the recognition
that we can we can pursue things. So I I
believe in this very strongly because
I've been at the bottom of that pit and
wondering what in the world. But the
good news is if you hit the bottom of
that pit and you get out a few times,
the next time you hit it, you go, "I'll
get out the next time."
>> Yeah. And then you go, "Well, this feels
a little longer than the last time or a
lot longer." You will get out. You do.
People have suffered incredible
challenges.
>> And they got out and created amazing
things. And there's this weird law of
the universe that I don't quite
understand. Maybe it's a dopamineergic
thing, but the depth of that pit oftent
times is the mirror image of the height
of the thing that you're going to
accomplish. I don't know how that works,
but you later you're going to find
yourself at a peak and you should
remember and go,
"Yeah, got out, got out, went back in,
went back in, got out. Now I'm here, and
I'm going to savor it a little bit
more." Because that's I think also us
being tested. Are you going to savor it?
You're going to appreciate it? You're
going to share it? Because then we can
build on it. But otherwise you might not
end up in the pit but you kind of drop
back down again. You know it's um but if
you take good care you can stay at a
high level for a long time.
>> You know I have I want to change a gear
a little bit and just talk about two
three last things.
>> Sure.
>> Which is one is have you ever studied
immigrants by any chance?
>> Well my father is a first generation
immigrant to the United States. So I
haven't studied them specifically but um
you know
>> like immigrants consistently seem to
outperform
the you know native people in anywhere
any part of the world right.
>> Oh yeah especially their the children of
native people.
>> Exactly. Like and in America every day
we hear about stories of immigrants who
are just killing it everywhere you look
at the top position they're just
immigrants or the kids of immigrants
right? Why and how?
>> Great question. And I think it's because
they look around and they see
opportunity. Everywhere else somebody
sees neutral or negative. I think it's
this fighter mentality. It's a there's
there's some there's something here that
people who've been here a long time
don't appreciate or they do, but there's
stuff wide open. You know, my high
school girlfriend, her father had a um
like a I think he had like a seventh
grade education. He'd been a taxi driver
and a few things. He had worked from a
young age cuz he was very poor. He moved
to the Bay Area and he carried hundreds
of keys on his key ring because he early
on
bought uh properties in the South Bay
Bay Area when no one was interested in
these areas and he did all the
maintenance himself
>> and they did very well for themselves
because then this thing called Silicon
Valley happened and then property became
very useful and then next thing you know
his his daughters had horses and you
know all this stuff and but he was a
hardworking guy and first generation
immigrant. I think he saw opportunity.
He was like, I could I think to his
mind, why would he pay anyone to do the
maintenance? First of all, I don't think
he could afford it at first, but he had
the skills. Next thing you know, he's
the guy owning huge swaths of land and
property in in the South Bay area,
Silicon Valley, which is extremely
lucrative. But he did it through sheer
sweat.
>> Sheer sweat. So, I think there's just a
this idea like there's something here
that there's resources that others
aren't taking because they think it it's
every day. It's like what what good is
that place? What good is this school?
What is like it's around you? We
attenuate to things around us.
>> And I think that and you also can see
this isn't always true, but many times
multigenerational
families where there's a lot of wealth,
you know, you have kids that don't do
well or you kids that just, you know,
too many resources can be tough, too.
>> It's a it's a tricky balance. So I think
that the immigrant mentality is one of
seeing opportunity and taking
opportunity and it's on a backdrop of
people who are not
looking at that environment in the same
way. They they attenuate. I mean this is
a weird thing about the human brain is
we we habituate to a certain level of
caloric intake to a certain level of of
freedom and ease and peace. So this is
why self-imposed friction is very
valuable, especially if you are come
from a a family where there is not a lot
of hardship. I mean it's impressive
you've self-imposed hardship through a
vision of yourself and what you can
create for the world. Um many people
can't do that that too. They feel ease,
>> you know. I mean, look, everyone loves a
good foot rub and a big meal and a the
great night's sleep and all the rest,
but um
some of the most unhappy people I know
are people that never strived for
anything. In fact, the most unhappy
people I know of my peer group were the
ones whose parents gave them just enough
money so that they never really had to
push themselves.
And they're the ones with a lot of
depression, a lot of issues of
self-worth, a lot of um yeah, you got
you gota it's good to have your head
held under water for a short while so
you can appreciate oxygen when you come
up, you [laughter] know, so to speak. So
to speak, that's a that's a I'm I'm not
being literal there. [laughter] Um yeah,
you go.
>> Do you think that
>> But do you think that changes your brain
from the inside? Like does it wire
something that does the the neurology or
like the chemistry inside my brain
changes if I go through certain
hardships in my life?
>> Absolutely. Because
what's so important for people to
understand about the brain is that it as
much as it learns facts.
It learns algorithms. It learns
friction. I got out of friction
>> or in some cases friction, it crushed
me. So now you need to teach it a new a
new contingency. You need to teach a new
algorithm. So you need those. That's why
I said like shorten the horizon. You
need some small wins so we can learn, oh
that's what a win looks like. I made it
an hour. But people who have who are
dealing with something are thinking like
ah I can't get out of this mindset.
Well, you got out of it long enough to
say that sentence. If you shorten the
horizon, then they can do it a little
longer and a little longer and a little
longer. This is why the cold water
thing, the exercise thing, um
constructing your days the way that
we're talking about, you start doing
those things and you realize that you
are in more control than you think. But
some people are very plagued by a very
um punishing, destructive inner voice.
And that it's a tough one. But you got
to learn to turn that one off. Or
you know the Gogggins approach. He
listens to criticism of himself while he
runs. He's learned to channel it into
this kind of FU response. You know, I
don't want to live there. But
>> me neither.
>> But I I known David a long time
actually. I I I met him first time in
2016 before he had a book or anything
else. He was always super driven. And
knowing his story a bit, I think he had
to figure out a way because the voice in
his head was so destructive. He had to
turn it into a different version of
himself. Acknowledge that it came from
the outside and create this whole new
version of himself. He has multiple
people in there. All him. He's very, you
know, psychologically healthy. I do
believe that. Um, but he has to do the
like no, no, no to these certain voices
and like the only voice I'm going to
listen to is the one that's going to
pull me forward. And that's a that's a
battle I don't think any of us would
want to live in. But, uh, David is
special because of what he's done. But
what he's trying to tell people, I do
believe, is that they can do it too, but
they have to change their frame. They
can't expect those voices to turn off. I
think you and I are pro if I I don't
know. I've never been in your head. I
don't I stay out of people's heads, but
um speculating about David, but I I I
don't live with that voice in my head.
>> Me neither.
>> I don't live with universal. You're
perfect. You're loving. You're all this
stuff. You're loved. I I
but I don't live with a punishing voice
in my head. And that's got to be very
hard. So, I want to acknowledge that's
got to be hard. But you got to turn the
volume down on that one. or crank it up
to 10 and fight it the whole way through
and but you learn the algorithm of how
to do it.
>> You know all of these things which we
talked about regulation in in terms in
particular terms it's going to get
harder because of technology.
>> Do you think so?
>> Like you know every technology if I have
to make it specific like how
>> they made one part of our life more
difficult. Yeah,
>> let's say memory became more difficult
since we had phones.
>> Navigation became difficult since we had
>> Google maps.
>> And now maybe thinking is going to be
difficult because of AI.
>> We trade it. Yes, I agree that we trade
um skills for convenience. You know, we
don't cook cuz we can order Door Dash.
Love Door Dash. like food like you know
few years ago I didn't order food much
but now it's clearly the much more
efficient and even economical way to go
um much of the time but I know how to
cook if I need to [gasps]
with thinking I think we need to be just
be careful right I don't eat junk food
door dash every day I also cook some
meals right I think um like I use chat
GPT to self- test myself on material
generate a self- test about this it's a
great way to self- past. Um, I think AI
is going to really positively transform
the world. I really do. But I born and
raised in Silicon Valley and I've seen
the way that people get fear of job
replacement. It happens a bit. You know,
few years ago was the learn to code
thing and then now you don't really need
to know how to code. I think there's
still some value in knowing how to code,
but you get the point. Um,
I think all technologies do this. They
point out our most vulnerable and our
most generative sides and we just have
to be very careful. I think with the
phone,
practice putting it into a lock box or
if you don't need a lock box into a
drawer for a few hours and doing some
focused work per day and coming back to
it. Just practice it. If you can't do
that, you have a what's called a
problem. Do it and you'll feel better.
You might be anxious when you are away
from it, but learn to ride that out. And
don't I I think part of it is that
humans don't like to be controlled. Deep
down we don't like to be controlled. So
if you recognize you're being controlled
now you stand a chance to fight back. I
mean humans fighting back is the story
of human evolution. Humans being too
cold and fighting back against being
cold is what allowed them to you know
fire, electricity and so forth. Being
too warm has allowed them to build air
conditioning and ice and refrigerators.
So, you know, wanting to get places more
quickly to see like telephones that pick
any example. The the friction point is
where and this is a theme that seems to
be coming up again and again today. You
have to get right up to that friction
point. Oh, you wasted 3 hours on social
media doing nothing. I think you can
learn on social media and you can be
entertained, but 3 hours. Okay, now you
really feel bad about yourself. That's a
friction point. Great. Set a rule.
You get an hour
>> 20. I have social media on a separate
phone. So I have an older phone has
Instagram and X. That phone is either
with me or if it's becoming a problem
for me, it goes into a Supermax prison
lock box. You can buy one for like 15
bucks. Program it in. You cannot open
it. You cannot open it. And just leave
it in there for like when I go in for a
workout, I know the hardest part is not
hopping on my phone during the rest
periods. So I lock it in there for two
hours. I can't even get it out.
>> You just have to enfor you you have to
self- enforce. Now the good news for
people who are striving is that now more
than ever GoGan says this, it's easier
to get ahead. You read a book, nobody
does that. Do you read a book, it's
still enriching. You listen to a book,
you listen to a podcast start to finish,
you uh you have good relationship to
your phone and social media, you're like
moving into the winner category just by
virtue of what you're not doing. Yeah,
>> it's still hard, but it never it's never
been easier to move ahead. Now, to me,
it doesn't feel good to move ahead
because others are dropping behind. I'm
not that guy, but I'm going to continue
to go and your generation is going to
continue to build things. I think the
the opportunities are greater than ever
uh for people to build businesses and
lives. The I think a lot of it does have
to do with not being purely consumer.
And I think the simple question you
should ask yourself, am I a consumer or
a creator in this moment? Spend some
time being a creator every day, you're
going to be you're going to be okay. If
you're purely a consumer every day, it's
tough. I mean, if you put aside your
entire life to watch World Cup, like I
see people getting really excited, but I
get it. You know, my dad's Argentine.
he's not into soccer. Like if people
love World Cup and they're not that into
their jobs sometimes and they they you
know, but if you're going to be purely a
consumer, you're going to end up in a
place where you are spent out. So you
you have to you have to fight some of
these internal reflexes to just be a
consumer.
>> Yeah. I I used to say this and I've been
saying this I think six, seven years
now. Become the producer of the thing
that you consume the most. That's like
the easiest way for you to start working
on something.
>> Yes. Yes. I love that. I I that perfect.
Yes. As a scientist, I was like, I love
these papers. I want to do research in
this area. I'm going to do science and
publish papers in that area. Podcast. I
love these podcasts. I love these
themes. I'm going to do my own version
of something like that, but different
and create it. And I'm probably on the
second act of my career. I don't know
what the third act will be, but I'm
going to do something else. It'll be
related to what I'm doing. I don't know
what it is. I truly have no idea. Will
you get into entrepreneurship, building
something?
>> Yeah. Yeah, I could see myself doing
that. Um, I don't know. Or maybe
something really in the creative arts or
something like that, but I don't have
any musical talent. I I can draw
somewhat, but I don't know. It'll come
to me. I've called it in like
something's going to happen where I'll
naturally veer that way. But for the
time being,
>> we're waiting for we're waiting for it.
>> Yeah, it'll come. It'll come in in time.
>> You know, you have you studied brain.
You study brain. You have almost answers
for like everything, right? you know at
least everything about what goes on in
the brain. But I was listening to one of
your one of your podcast or one of the
clips that I saw that you struggled with
romantic relationship. Right.
>> I have. [clears throat] Things are good
>> Yeah. Now the answer are good but you
>> it took some time. Yeah.
>> Right. So you you struggle with it.
What's about love
>> that all the information in the world
about neuroscience also cannot
understand.
>> Oh so much. My goodness. Um, I would say
I know a to be fair, I I would say I
know a lot because I've spent a lot of
time studying it and researching it
directly. Like there's nothing
fundamentally
[snorts] different from just like
learning something in a textbook to like
actually putting your hands in brains,
cutting brains, staining brains,
recording neurons electrically. And you,
you know, spending a lot of time in that
landscape. So I I wouldn't by no stretch
do I think I understand everything
that's known about the brain. I know a
lot understand a lot of it. Um, and we
certainly don't know everything as a
field about the brain. There's still
tons to discover. So, just to be clear,
I mean, romantic love is one of those
things where
when I said I've struggled with
relationships, um, I didn't struggle
with the love part. [laughter]
I struggled with the, um,
not making [clears throat]
always the best choices about romantic
partners. um it's not putting the blame
on them just and being caught up in the
feelings and then being disappointed
and the let down. And I think that what
I've learned is um love is can be a bit
of a drug. I don't want to take away
from it because it's also a beautiful
feature of life that is not drug-like,
right? And it can be very sustaining,
you know. Um it was odd for me to see
that there were certain areas of my life
like my romantic relationships where
things did were not working out in the
long run as well as I had hoped and
whereas my friendships my career my
relationship to my biological family my
pets you know all that just flourishing
and flourishing like what what's going
on like you know and I think for me
the real key this was just for me was to
just slow down to really focus on the
friendship component first and really
take the time to get to know um to
really take the time to get to know
someone and to really build the
friendship because I would remain
friends with people that I had dated and
we were on good terms but it's different
I think that um
for people that feel
love in a big way it's so easy there's a
whole script that comes from that okay
so So you do that and then you move in
together and then you or or maybe you
don't. Do do they still do arranged
marriages in India?
>> Yeah. Is common?
>> Is it less common now?
>> Is it's still very common but the
numbers is significantly reducing but
still very common
>> and as I understand the outcomes in
terms of long-term uh like I want to say
prognosis sounds like a disease
long-term um success is very high.
Right. Yeah. So maybe we're just going
about it all wrong in the west, you
know, but I I found that I was like, ah,
like I' I've fallen really in love with
people and I still have wonderful
feelings about them and not all of them.
I've had some challenging relationships
and some better ones, but I'm on great
terms with with a lot of my exes and
they're married and in some cases not
and um still think about them and
communicate from time to time, you know,
uh with tremendous um kindness and and
it's great. I think it's just a matter
of slowing things down and building that
real deep trust that this could because
you are in some sense trusting this
person with your life.
>> Right. I mean, it's a little bit of an
extreme statement, but there's no other
perhaps besides children um level of
investment like that where you know this
person can really hurt you
by virtue of what they say, what they
do. And so you're you're handing them a
very powerful um I don't want to say a
weapon because it sounds so cynical.
You're giving them a lot of power.
>> Well, that's a great question. You ask
three times.
The first time was when my parents split
and my whole focus at that time was not
on that. It was on wanting to make it in
this like skateboarding career and I
kept getting hurt and I wasn't very
good. This is kind of like the not so
secret secret. I I I talk a lot about
that time and I'm always clear to point
out like I was not going to be one of
the like guys that turned pro. I had
friends turning pro. I just I don't know
my body wasn't mature enough yet. I
didn't have the spring and the strength
yet. You really need a lot of that and I
didn't have that then. Later I got
stronger but I moved on to other things.
Um, I felt really alone like what's
going to happen with my life because my
home life was like blah and that was a
mess and school and and then I just
started spiraling and that's when things
got really bad and got myself into all
sorts of bad situations for a long time
and then dug myself out. So that was one
time. The second time was when my um
graduate adviser died because we were so
close and my undergraduate adviser had
killed himself in a very dramatic
way at a particular time that was really
hard. Um and when my graduate adviser
when she died, she was very much like a
mother to me, very maternal. I know that
sounds a little bit like, well, you were
she was just your graduate adviser, but
I really loved and trusted her. I knew
her family. I know her daughter, one of
them is a neuroscientist now. I I
remember when she was pregnant with her
daughters, I was friends with her
husband. They were like family to me. I
remember feeling like [snorts] like what
is this? And then when my third adviser
died, I thought like I'm cursed. Like
what is this? Because in science, your
scientific adviserss do a lot for you.
They help you a lot, but they're also
just a pillars of stability that you can
call and talk to. So I thought you have
this family history, biological family
history, and now my academic parents.
I'm like an academic orphan, literally.
But then I realized
I can do whatever I want. But this time,
unlike when I was younger, I'm not going
to take that I can do whatever I want
because my parents are out of like back
then they weren't dead, but out of the
picture. I'm not going to be
self-destructive. I'm going to start
this podcast thing. And I don't have an
adviser to tell me, "Hey, this isn't a
good idea. I'm the adult now." Unlike
when I was 14, I'm like, I'm the adult
in my life. Now granted, I was in my
40s, but I didn't in science, there's
this long-term, decadesl long thing
where advisers help their their
underlings.
It's a big thing. So I was like, I don't
have anyone. This is not rebellion, but
I'm totally free. Totally free. I'm
going to look into my heart. What do I
want to do? I'm going to build something
that is about science, but also health
and wellness. And I got a lot of
support, but a lot of people probably
thinking like, what is that thing? And a
lot of people now, you know, some have
come around, some haven't. Honestly, I
don't care. Like, I just hope they're
happy doing what they're doing. So, that
was the second time, and I transmuted
that into goodness. This was the first
time I really my life got really choppy
early on, really bad. And then the third
time was, you know, I think a few years
back I had uh I had poured my heart and
soul into a relationship and it was the
wrong relationship, but I really did
pour my heart and soul into it. And then
when I realized that there were se
serious issues that I just couldn't
resolve for them, I um I had to move on.
And it was a very it was a messy messy
thing. And I remember thinking, gosh,
being misunderstood about that is is
really hard because look, I think they
were doing the best they could. I was
doing the best I could with what we had
at that time. And I think that's the
hardest part. You know, earlier we were
talking about public life and criticism.
I don't mind it either. It's being but
being misunderstood is very challenging.
>> Yeah. And I had to do some real
soulsearching and I and then I realized
that I was having all these challenging
thoughts. But then all around me was
this amazing thing. I've got this
podcast. I've got an amazing podcast
team. I'm a great relationship with my
parents who are in their 80s and are
healthy. Thank God. My sister who I
love, my niece who I love, my friends. I
have a, you know, a relationship came
into my life and like amazing friends
and opportunities and all of a sudden I
realized I'm like I'm sitting in the
promised land and I'm thinking about
like this thing and how it relates to
these old things that didn't work out
and I thought
and I'm just like that's it. It was the
time it was I had to think about certain
things but then it was also time to just
like flick it off like a piece of lint.
I'm done with all that. Let's go. And
ever since then, everything's been
healthy and great. And so, I do think
there's sometimes when it's as easy as
that where you just you shut the door.
You know, the whole burn the boats
mentality like I'm just not going to
allow myself to to spiral.
So, u and I hope that was the last one,
but but I'm human, so it probably come
again. Listen, I lately I think a lot. I
mean, it sounds like you're close with
your parents, too. I Yeah. I as
challenging as it's been in the past, I
I um I'm bracing myself
for my parents passing, even though
hopefully it's a long time from now. By
all accounts, they seem healthy, but
it's going to be hard to live like not
be able to call them.
>> And my mom probably will say, "Well, you
don't call enough as it is." But but I
think about her a lot and uh and I we do
talk and um but that's life and you
can't live braced in fear of what's to
come or what could happen that then
you're like that person that we were
trying to talk to earlier. You just got
to [sighs]
protect your heart but move forward and
just and and live life. And and I do
believe I do say this and I mean it. If
God forbid I were to drop dead walking
out of this podcast like I'm good. I'm
good. I have my I've done my will. You
know, that wasn't actually a very good
exercise for me. It's a kind of strange,
right, to think about mortality. We
don't like to think about it to go I
could die. What would I want to make
sure happened for people? What do I want
to make sure people knew about how I
felt about them? This p every podcast I
go on is opportunity to learn and to
teach. Every time I can perhaps help
somebody, like I don't want to die, but
I'm I'm okay. I'm okay. Every time I hit
turbulence, I go I'm I I've tried to
take myself to the edge, but not off the
edge my entire life. And it's a great
place to live because whether or not I
die at 50 or 90 or 110 or somewhere in
there, like I'm I'm good. I really am. I
I really I've made my peace with it. And
so, um, in part because I get these
amazing opportunities like to connect to
your audience and and to you.
>> Thank you. We glad you did this. Thank
you so much. Here's the last oneline
question that we ask every day.
>> Yeah. It's
>> what's the cost of being Andrew
Huberman?
>> The cost.
>> Oh man, it's all love that it's all
upside these days. Which is not to say I
don't have difficulties.
Um,
okay. I'll actually answer your
question.
I experience emotions very intensely. I
think I got that from my mother. And I'm
also very ambitious. And I have a vision
of the world that I want to help
contribute to creating.
And holding those two things
inside can be
challenging and sometimes can be
downright agony because I want to help
every single person. I want to drop into
every single emotion, but I can't cuz
I've got work to do. I've got to keep
the bigger picture in mind. And the hard
work is thankfully these days it's not
about staying out of the deep trenches.
I've moved past that. It's about
trying to stay in a mode of action and
striving but also peace. And so for me
um that just comes from gratitude, a
relationship to God and and prayer. And
sometimes it's really hard. I'm like,
everybody, I sometimes I feel like I'm
trying to run fast with my shoelaces
tied and uh
but I'm gonna keep going. That's that's
all I can do. It's all I've ever done.
>> So, the cost is because you're so
ambitious,
you can't help every loved one around
you, even though you feel very intensely
about them.
>> Yeah. You know, it's funny. My my
girlfriend knows this about me. If I if
someone stops me on the street, for
instance, it's like, "Oh, like I like
your podcast." Like I go, "What's your
name?" like I actually want to know
their name. What do you do? Like ah like
they'll ask me a question like I I'm not
playing a role when I do my podcast. I'm
they just popped a microphone in front
of me. I've always been that way
[snorts] and um and yet I can't have the
deep dive conversation with everybody.
So that's why I podcast to get out to as
many people as possible. So sometimes
the pain is that um that I can't shake
every hand and meet every person truly.
I know it sounds like a some sort of PR
line, but it's true. Um, I
[clears throat] think everybody has a
light inside and I can feel that when I
meet them. I can like feel it. I don't
think I'm looking for it. I just shows
up. Sometimes it's different or brighter
to different contour, but I can like
feel and and I would I want to connect
with people. So, as a public person
behind a microphone or on a stage, you
realize this that you're connecting kind
of out like this and it's coming back
and um I just have to appreciate that.
And sometimes that's a bit of work, but
I feel very very blessed, very very
blessed to have this opportunity. You're
a special individual. I I have to say I
can I get a very good sense of people
and um certain domains of life I wasn't
so good at that. in the professional
realm and certainly across the table in
podcasting, I can like I'm sure I know
you have this skill too. You can like
feel somebody's genuine heart and their
mind. Clearly, you have a a very sharp
mind and you're very driven, but um
you're like, you're not doing this for
kicks and you're not doing this for
money. You're doing this cuz you love it
and uh your heart really comes through
in it and your mind and you're throwing
everything you've got into it. I love
that. like you're all in and uh you've
made me feel very comfortable as a guest
in a way that um is not easy to do and
and that I wasn't resisting but um
really want to say thank you. You you've
created a wonderful thing and I I feel
very lucky to have this opportunity.
>> Thank you so much. It means a lot that
this is coming out of you like it means
a lot. Thank you so much.
>> Thank you.
>> I appreciate your time and everything
and I'm
>> Thank you for doing this on a very busy
day.
>> Oh well, right back at you. uh we are
colleagues and uh hopefully we'll become
friends.
>> Absolutely. Do many more conversations
on podcast and off podcast.
>> I'd also someday like to visit India.
I'll I'll buy my own ticket there but I
I I've always been intrigued.
>> You tell me when. Let me host you.
>> You we will
>> you're going to lose your mind. I'm
going to Okay, perfect. Done. You just
you tell me what are your dates. Let me
design everything for you and you'll
love it.
>> Let us do it.
>> All right. You're on.
>> Done. Okay,
>> I'm excited. You should do it.
>> Thank you so much for watching this
episode till the end. We would love to
know what you liked or disliked about
this episode and which guest you would
like to see again on this show or which
are the new guests that you want to see.
Let us know in the comments. Your
feedback helps us improve and make every
episode a little better. I'll see you
the next time. Until then, keep figuring
out.
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>> [music]
