#876: Dr. Andrew Huberman — Peptides, Performance, and Protocols

0:00 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where I dig into the fringes, the edges to find out what people have discovered, what they're using, and what you can use. My guest today is the one and only Andrew Huberman PhD. A lot of you will know who he is. We cover things like lessons from Dorian Yates. His current training regimen, psychedelics. Peptides, he's used a lot of them. So this is pretty broad ranging coverage of peptides, AI and health, and much more. For those of you who do not know Andrew, he is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the departments of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman lab. His research spans brain development. Visual perception and repair from blinding diseases The Neuroscience of Stress and Resilience and Neuroplasticity. He has published more than 75 peer reviewed articles.

0:51 in journals including some very well known. Journals like Nature Cell. science and neuron and his honors include the Cogan Award, the McKnight Neuroscience Scholar Award, and the Pew Biomedical Scholar Award. In twenty twenty one, he launched the Huberman Lab podcast, which became and remains the most popular health and science podcast in the world. Dr. Huberman is the co-founder of Psycom Media, the company behind the podcast Huberman Lab. Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin and David Senra. He's the author of the forthcoming book, and we cover this in some length, Protocols.

1:22 Subtitle. and operating manual for the human body. You can find all things Andrew Huberman at Huberman Lab. Dot com. And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging and very tactical conversation. With Yes, you guessed it.

1:37 Doctor. Andrew Schuberman. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

1:47 Now we're just seeing it. cybernetic organism living tissue over metal metal skeleton No Well, you know what, why don't we just Do a quick callback, The Dark Wizard. This sounds like an Ozzy Osborne album, but it's not.

2:11 It's a documentary. And we were chatting about it before we started recording, since it's top of mind. Why don't you just describe what that's about because this involves a character that I tracked for a super long time. Yeah. So Teen Potter. So what is the Dark Wizard? Why has it struck you so Okay. So I learned about this movie from Andy Stumpf. He's uh retired Navy SEAL tier one operator who then set two world records with the Red Bull high performance team. Doing Wing shooting.

2:39 Base jumping, wing suiting, whatever you want to call the squirrel suit. Squirrel suit. Movie. The Dark Wizard, which is about Dean Potter, who started off as a climber. And then became people can watch the documentary and then got into

2:53 Parachuting and then what he called freebasing, which was You know, climbing and then jumping off a rock and Parachuting and then eventually uh wing suiting, and I won't give away any more, but it's a really interesting four part series. That Gets into his

3:07 Mental health challenges. How he was able to funnel Let's just call them the high dopamine More manic states. into incredible feats of performance.

3:17 And then how we balanced out the low, but The most interesting part about it to me. is at the level of something I think about a lot these days, which is Energy. Like we're

3:27 born into this world with a certain amount of energy and we think about it as time and longevity. But There are people that seem to I don't wanna give anything away here.

3:38 There are people that seem to have More of this thing that we call energy. And when they're able to focus it, they Take performance to outrageously high levels. And

3:49 You see how the energy folds back on him and almost destroys him at times. And Also times when he's somehow able to harness it and put it to these incredible feats. But The most important thing about the film.

4:01 Is He talks about and he Demonstrates. through the activities I talked about before. Wing suiting, etc.

4:11 He Demonstrates how when you are in competition with other people. It's A misuse of the energy.

4:19 that can harm you. But when you are seeking what he calls just seeking beauty, like really trying to chase the feeling, the pure Experience of taking that energy and putting it into something that you love. That's when the

4:33 Really impressive feats land. And that move you forward. So there does seem to be something almost spiritual about. Whether or not We're funneling energy into Things that

4:44 Really reflect us at Our best? What he calls funneling into beauty versus competition and Competition is, it turns out, is what destroys people. And everyone will say, No, no, no, it's actually what allows you to reach a higher and higher bar. But if you watch all four episodes you realize no.

5:01 That's an illusion. And when you get caught in that, you're limiting your output, you're limiting your performance. It also has multiple cameos by the great Alex Honnell? And Their competition is extremely interesting.

5:15 So I'll leave it at that. It's a long teaser, but it's a real insight into human psychology And energy. Which is something again I'm just obsessed with because Ultimately it's

5:25 where we place our efforts at foundation. That's all we've got. That's all we've got. And Dean Potter also Fascinating character. I'm gonna watch this. And if people have enjoyed Slacklining, he helped popularize Slacklining, certainly as cross-training for climbing, but overall, and I can't help but mention the incredible Laird Hamilton also, because we're sitting here in Malibu. So if anybody's ever done

5:49 Stand up paddle boarding. E foiling. fewer people will have done toe end surfing, certainly, but People should watch, I think it's Riding Giants about the early chapters of Laird. And stand up paddle boarding goes way back, probably thousands of years, but he certainly helped to repopulari it. We're gonna talk about

6:06 All sorts of frontier topics we're gonna talk about. Perhaps some revisions. Updates, maybe a better way to put it. Yep. And I'm just gonna hop into this very long list that we will almost certainly not complete, but let's hop into one that is of personal interest to me.

6:23 And I wanna hear how this experience informed your training. Doraniates. So I have interviewed Dorian, but I've never met him. You had the chance to train with Dorian. He is multiple time Mr. Olympia. Six six times.

6:38 He was legendary not only for his accomplishments in bodybuilding, but also for In the eyes of many the bizarreness of his training methods. Which in contrast to many were pretty minimalist in certain respects. So could you just speak to the experience of training with Dorian and

6:57 what you took away from that in terms of Application to your own. training. Uh I've had the Honor and pleasure and pain.

7:05 Of training with Dorian Yeats once here. In Los Angeles. We did a back workout. back in rear delts work out. And then I just came back from Marbella, Spain, where we train legs together.

7:16 The sorest I've ever been. And I should say The science caught up to Dorian. What Dorian did to train for Mr. Olympia.

7:27 And What Mike Mencer, I'll explain in a moment. we're proponents of is now very well supported by the peer review data. And a bunch of physio folks are probably jumping out of their seat going, No, no, you don't have to go to failure beyond failure and you actually need more sets and all ah. But if you look at their training, which was essentially A couple of warm ups.

7:46 A light set. She's Familiarize yourself with a movement. A medium set, maybe fifty percent of what you would use on your work set.

7:54 Works out somewhere between, you know, five and twelve repetitions typically. And then maybe a third warm up. For just a couple of reps. And practice set. And then

8:04 Mencer, Mike Mencer. was a big proponent of one all out set to failure. Okay. Turns out that's probably not enough for most people. To stimulate hypertrophy and strength increases.

8:15 because it demands so much focus, intensity and effort. There's a kind of a systemic neural fatigue to it. And A lot of people just can't contract the muscles with enough focus and intensity for one set. So absolute failure to work. Dorian basically.

8:29 More proponent of Two sets. per exercise, maybe two or three exercises per major body part. Major body part being quads, not legs, right? So Training with Dorian essentially consists of what I just described, a couple of warm ups.

8:43 two all out sets to failure or one set and then some assisted reps. Or a drop set or a rest pause where you, you know, rest after failure and then do a couple more reps. What's unique about that training is You feel very tired at the end of a workout. But

9:00 Couple hours later you're fine. And indeed, if you do it right. You get stronger. Every single workout. With the caveat.

9:09 And Dorian made this clear. To me. That about every six or eight weeks or so. You need to come off the gas pedal a bit and just stay out of the gym for a week. Or

9:18 Can't do it. kind of more moderate week. Now What Mencer and let's just stick with what Dorian said,'cause it's let's call it lowish volume, high intensity with

9:28 He's a proponent of was heresy back in the day. Certainly the opposite extreme will be like the Schwarzenegger two hours. twice a day type workouts. And then people will say, Well, Dorian was using loads of steroids and growth hormone, et cetera. The scientist in me will

9:43 In no attempt to defend him, we'll just accurately say, What's the one thing that he was doing differently? Yeah. That was that was part of the force of the time. Like everyone was everyone was in his taking some testosterone and other anabolics and androgenics and some were taking growth hormone. But the point is And at the top level, all of those guys have incredible genetics, long muscle bellies. What makes Dorian Even now at sixty five, he carries a ton of muscle mass. He's doing a lot of biking, he's doing functional training, he's doing a lot of other things, but just the sheer density of muscle that he carries. Speaks to his genetics and the amount of training.

10:15 What I've been doing for years is the same split. Three days a week. Legs including calves, rest a day or two.

10:24 Train chest and back. Rest a day, shoulders and arms, and also some neck training because I didn't wrestle. And you know, neck is important to train, especially for guys. Otherwise it looks like the wrong head is on a on the body. And also as the upper spine it's important for shoulder stability, et cetera. That split, most people say, Well that's That doesn't square with the science. What does the science say? The science says, and this is

10:44 Brad Schoenfield's work and other people's work, which is fantastic. Which is When you stimulate a muscle to grow. You Have about forty eight to seventy two hours in which there's protein synthesis after the training.

10:57 So the logic says Well Logically speaking, you would say, Okay, well then train every muscle group three times a week. Or twice a week. The problem is

11:08 That When you do that, you're not taking into account the other things that you might be doing. Like I run three times a week. One long, slow run for about Sixty minutes. one high intensity interval type training, you know, like sprint for thirty seconds on the

11:20 Assault bike. Rest for thirty seconds and just repeat that six to eight times. Right, kind of a max heart rate training and then maybe one moderate. session of like twenty or thirty minutes of running or biking. If you're doing those other things, you have to take that into account.

11:32 And so what ends up happening if you do this split of training your legs. Taking a day off. Then the next day doing some sort of Chest back workout. The next day.

11:42 Running for thirty minutes. Now your legs, if you train them properly, are still probably a little bit sore. You know, okay, well, it's not gonna stimulate hypertrophy. But If

11:52 Then you do wait. Air dyne bike. high intensity workout. You're getting some Stimulus to your legs. It's enough to carry you to the next week. So, in reality, this arrangement of three times per week of resistance training, three times a week of cardio.

12:07 You're training everything directly once a week and indirectly. A second time. And you're getting a lot of cardio. So because all these studies of a hypertrophy and strength training. It's on a background typically of not doing any cardio. And so when I look at like kind of what the science says.

12:21 Of course it's people are saying oh anywhere from ten to twenty Work sets per week. That to maximize hypertrophy. Okay, ten sets of quads. per week distributed into two or three different sessions.

12:33 Plus I'm supposed to sprint? outside or on the on the air dine bike. Plus I'm supposed to do a long run. All of a sudden you run into you have a collisions all over the place. So

12:43 Turns out that For years I was doing this split. And then when I talked to Dorian, he's like he split things up into a four day split, wasn't doing quite as much cardio. He's like, Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Once directly high intensity. lowish volume. Once indirectly, like when you train your chest and back, you're hitting your arms, then you train your arms directly. So it's twice a week.

13:02 When you do the airdond bike, there's some stimulus of like your lats and pushing and pulling. Again, it's not for hypertrophy, but it gets you to the next week. And what I found. From training with Dorian is You think you're training to failure. You're not training to failure. And this is the other piece. People will say, Oh, the data say Two or three sets.

13:20 Taken Two. One or two reps in reserve. Yeah, it's true. Like you can get a lot of hypertrophy and strength increases doing that. Maybe it's less taxing on the nervous system. But

13:29 What is failure? Like if somebody really put a gun to your head and said, curl that bar one more time. Or I'm gonna kill your family, you'd curl the bar. Now it's not pleasant, nor is it appropriate to think that way in the gym, and there are probably some guys thinking that way in the gym. It's just impossible to generate that kind of mental intensity. You go all right. If you just step back the way Dorian is training now, the way he basically trained for the Olympia. Six.

13:53 Olympia wins. Is You train each body part directly once per week. It gets hit indirectly. A second time per week. You give it plenty of rest.

14:01 You're doing Four to eight sets. Her body part. Two to three exercises. Per body part, so you're splitting up those work sets.

14:09 You know, yeah, it all kind of works out. And so this is the big revision for me. Is If you just look at the signs, you'd say, Okay, ten to twenty sets, more volume of these sets almost a failure. Or even to failure.

14:23 Is maximizing hypertrophy, yeah. If you're doing curls and leg extensions for a study. But what about all the other stuff? Okay, so that's the gist of it. Okay. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Midnight Lux mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite.

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17:13 If you wanna look back at this approach to training, I mean there are a lot of examples, but you can go back to Arthur Jones, then Mike Menstner. Yep. And then of course you have Dorian Blood and Guts. I remember having that black and white book that describes some of the training. And For those who may doubt the efficacy of this type of let's just call it short duration, because You can do a Dorian recommended. The workouts can be quite a bit shorter and in some. With the warm up, it's like it ends up being you do a couple of minutes on the bike, you do your warm up sets. By the time you get to the second or third exercise for

17:49 a given body part, you're only doing one warm up. Yeah. Yeah. And What I would say is you can look at now this is a somewhat of a complicated case study, but like Casey Vieater with Arthur Jones crazy example. There's some sort of muscle memory, which we we won't get into right now, that enabled a lot of those gains, but Suffice to say, like

18:09 This type of minimalist training can be applied in a lot of places and the I think According to many competitive powerlifters, the best power lifter of all time, Ed Cohn, also pretty similar recovery schedule. Right. And Very

18:25 Interestingly. similar in terms of overlap with During it. So what does your split look like now? So the split I follow now is essentially the same one I've always followed, and it is And I wanna be clear why I'm saying Monday or Tuesday, because there needs to be flexibility in one schedule too. This is important.

18:44 So Monday or Tuesday, I train my legs. Calves. Hamstrings. Quads.

18:50 maybe some direct like glute training, but probably not. Couple warm ups. Two to three. Maybe, but usually just two hard sets to failure. I have a training partner, there may be some assisted reps. So quads would be

19:03 two working sets of leg extensions. I'll leave out the warm-ups. two to three, because I'm, you know, need a bit more there. Lying hamstring curls. to failure. Then

19:13 Belt squat. My favorite movement. I actually bought bought a belt squat machine'cause you don't have to load the shoulders. Do you like I use the pit shark. And Rogue's got now one that's kind of more of a fan based one and there are a bunch of It's a lot of fun to go on Instagram and some of the the gym equipment assessment accounts as a whole world. Sorin X has one, there are all sorts of great ones out there. I bought the pit shark.

19:33 I'll reinforce the belt squat. Yeah. Love the belt squat. It takes a little bit getting used to because some people feel as if you know, it's like jamming into their hips or something. You can put a towel there if you need to. I mean all the Westside barbell guys would talk about belt squat, they would load it up, and you can actually march with it to build all sorts of stabilizing muscles. I mean, that's an incredible cardio workout.

19:52 You just put a couple of plates on each side and you and you just march lifting your knees. And like after like a minute, you're like, This is no way I can continue. This is a great workout. But I end up doing Leg extensions, leg curls, then belt squat. And then I may throw in a hack a couple work sets of hack squat. That's it. And that's Monday or Tuesday. The day after legs is always a rest day. Like if you train legs properly, the next day should be a rest day. You should need it.

20:17 Ideally I would do sauna and cold that day. These days I haven't had time. A day later, I pick, I think. Systemically. You have to ask yourself, Am I systemically exhausted? Did my nervous system take enough of an ass beating on

20:31 that Monday or Tuesday that I need two days off after legs. And if it was very, very intense, then I'll do some sort of twenty or thirty minute cardio. Typically it's a run. Not an all out run, not a jog just somewhere in between. Probably in the zone. Let's just call it

20:46 zone three ish. Zone three four. Okay, so um you're not sucking for air, but it's not a sprint workout. It's not zone two. And then I'll do a push pull. I'll do chest and back workout and neck.

21:00 What do you use for neck? I have a four-y neck machine. You do. I do. Which brand do you use? Uh Hammer Strength. Hammer strength. Yeah. And again, the reason I'm asking this guys is not to plug particular manufacturers, it's because the physics and the geometry and so on really matters. It really matters. Especially in my experience with something that has entry potential. I have a four weight neck machine also. Oh cool. I do it very, very slowly myself. Like don't overdo it. If you've never trained neck, do not rush into like high velocity stuff. But that's what I was asking. Yeah, neck is very important. I'll talk about specifically what I'll do if I don't have access to that. Some people be like just in back, same day and rear delt, and yeah.

21:35 I think of it as like a torso workout. 'Cause I'm not a bodybuilder. I'm interested in posture, I'm interested in strength. I essentially do Some sort of Pushing movement like a low incline. Press.

21:45 And then some sort of fly type movement. Although sometimes I'll just do Lowe Klein. Bench press for so a couple warm ups. Two or three warm ups, two or three work sets.

21:54 In the failing somewhere between five and twelve repetitions. And then dips, weighted dips. Big believer in these, like I think it's like an upper body squat, whatever that means. Weighted dips, typically with a weight vest and It looks ridiculous, but the chains are great.

22:09 You can throw those on'cause you can like toss one off and then keep going if you want to keep going. Whereas if you got a weight hanging between your legs, which always just feels weird to me anyway. You're like waddling around the gym, it's clanking into your ankles. I'll do some sort of dip. And then I'll do some sort of row for the back.

22:24 Typically like a low row or a dumbbell row, one arm dumbbell row, and then Sort of chinning movement. Although I put the chins first'cause we've all got this thing of how many can I do and And I recently bought a Nautilus pullover machine based on the training with Dorian and it's from nineteen seventy six and it's one of

22:41 Only two that still exist and It's kinda like some guys like muscle cars. I like Old school. Strength training equipment. Dorian loves his pull overs just like Arthur Johns. And by the way, if you're rowing heavy and you're doing these things, you're getting some forearm training.

22:53 But then I'll do the neck training. And I'll either use the four way neck machine. Or I'll do uh Jeff Cavalier has a great from Athlenex has a great video on how to train with a plate. You wrap it in a a train neck with a plate and a bench. So you could do that anywhere. You wrap it in a towel, you lie on your side and you're just You have to be

23:10 Careful buttons Closing the chain so you you know, you got one leg down and you got a hand down on the ground. The video describes it maybe we could put a link to it. One thing that's very important I learned about training neck is y you need to Nasal breathe the whole time.

23:23 Have your tongue on the roof of your mouth. and make sure that you're not sticking your chin out at any point while you're bending it to the side, because then you start getting clicking in your jaw. And My spinal surgeon friends tell me that's a great way to slip a disc in your neck. The

23:38 Neck aesthetically like It's always weird when like dudes are talking about aesthetics. But these days because of the looks maxing thing and all that, like it's it seems to be like more of But there's something actually very important to You're not hammering your cheekbones? No hammering. Come on, Andrew. Nope, not Henry with Cheekbones, not T and You know, that is such a wild thing. Yeah. No. No, no, no.

23:59 But there is something interesting. So from a strength and stability standpoint. Training one's neck is really important because it's the upper spine. I do think it's one of the reasons I've never had any shoulder issues. And I've got long arms and everything points to the fact that I should have rotator cuff issues. I don't do any

24:15 direct rotator cuff work. I think it's because I Started training my neck a long time ago. And Aesthetically, like you have this. This is a great opportunity to Point out just how uh perfectly constructed you are, Tim Ferriss.

24:28 Really, if you Look ahead on at a male face. If the net sort of arrives right at it the sort of like More or less plus or minus a few whatever millimeters and more or less at the outer jaw. the outermost point of the jaw, like below the ears.

24:42 You'll notice like it you look kinda right. When somebody is really wide and their neck is not at that point, it looks like the wrong head was placed on it. Then you see Laird Hamilton and you realize like this dude just has a Really big neck, but it's appropriate for his Body structure. And then after the next

24:59 I'll do I don't know, three sets or two work sets. per side, although you don't train neck the same way like to like four straps and all that. And then I'll do some core work. And the core work that I'm Big fan of

25:10 'Cause you also get some forearm work in is I'll hang from a bar. And I'll do some. Elsets. And if I've been doing them a lot lately, I'll I'll do some pikes, you know, five sets of five. Ankles up to my hands.

25:20 And then slow on the descent and then into an L sit if I can. And I'll do maybe three or five sets depending. And then lower back work. And I have a forty five degree angle hyper extension and I'm not taking that to failure. The low back thing is really important. And there are a lot of data out there that if you can strengthen the spinal erectors. Your posture is better, you're more injury resistant.

25:41 But that whole workout takes And our tops. The next day is the high intensity cardio day, just max heart rate. These days I get get on an airdine bike. And I would say for this for people, it's whatever you can do without getting hurt. So question for you on the air dine. Yeah. Well, I guess.

25:58 Assault bike. Assault bike. This is a a digression, so I won't indulges too far, but to figure out why the assault bike worked and caught on where the aerodyne did not, right? You can look at footage from Dan Gable, legendary wrestler, working out on an aerodyne, but it never really spread until the assault bike reformatted it, improved it in some ways. My question for you on that real quick, for people who don't know. You're using your arms on these sort of isolated movable

26:28 handles that power this fan that so you can pedal and use your arms. One or the other or both. And I find that my upper body fatigues a lot. faster than my lower body. If I'm trying to do let's say like a Norwegian four by four or something like that, like four minutes on, three minutes off, or four minutes on, four minutes off. Do you find that not to be the case for yourself or how do you approach it?'Cause I've wanted to use the assault bike. It's now easier to find an assault bike in, say, a hotel gym for me than a stationary bike that fits well otherwise. Yep.

26:59 How do you approach that? Well, the naming piece is interesting and maybe we get into this at some point deeper in the discussion, but naming is very important. It's not just important in health and fitness and this kind of thing. It's It's actually very important in science and I'm a A student of science as a field, not just

27:16 field of neuroscience in terms of the the facts, but also you look at the culture a scientific field. Oftentimes the naming is what carries a field forward very quickly. And you go, how can that be? Aren't these scientists shouldn't they just be focused on the data? Nomenclature is important because If more people are doing something

27:34 Because they Can talk about it to more people using the same language, it tends to accelerate a field. Also, assault bike sounds Cool. Stationary bike feels like shh, you're just peddling. The assault bike is interesting because I also I get like a lot of lat work from it. Keep in mind I the day before I trained my chest and back. No, exactly. That's why I'm asking. So it ends up being a second kind of stimulus. Not a hypertrophy workout, but you sort of end up feeling like a almost like a pump. Type thing.

27:59 If you do it right, I can't do more than thirty seconds on, thirty seconds off without experiencing what you experienced that, which is that my legs just have all this gas in my My arms they can just keep going. It all transfers to the upper body. So Norwegian four by four. on the assault bite just sounds like torture to me. This workout If I can I'll get outside and sprint.

28:19 And You could do it on a rower. You could sprint. You know, I think it's just important Because it's a near all out or all out workout, thirty seconds on, thirty seconds off, or maybe you

28:29 jog a couple laps and then You know, you do a four hundred on the track and then walk a lap and then do a four hundred. Whatever you do for this workout, you know. You can come up with any number of different variations. It's gotta be something where you can apply max effort and not. Get hurt.

28:44 And then the next day is a shoulders arms. You do some sort of pressing. I'm not big on lateral raises. Some sort of press for the shoulders. couple s work sets of bicep curls, couple incline curls, some hammer curls, some Overhead tricep extension for the long head, couple work sets.

28:59 Some bench tips and there you go, like bench tips again. So now you're getting a little bit of Other stuff working, even though it's not of all out chest and back workout. And then the next day, which is typically on a Sunday I'll do some long slow movement ideally outside.

29:14 Maybe it's a walk and a hike with my girlfriend. Maybe it's I'm rucking and listening to a podcast if I'm alone. Maybe I'm jogging in the sand, like it could be a long bike ride. Just something like There's something so nice just starting the week. Jogging in the sand sounds miserable. Yeah. It's a slow quad. It's a you know, you're you're a mule. I like to think of like you're kind of a mule or I'm a mule. That's gonna be my clip for the teaser. I'm a mule. No, I'm kidding. No, that works. That works. That works for me. And you know, the real hard part about that workout is not going faster. It's pretty easy to jog and then walk, jog and then walk. It's probably beneficial. That workout is as much for the mental stimulation, but it's also there's something so nice about going into the work week.

29:53 Maybe it lands on a Monday. I don't know, but typically for me it lands on a Sunday'cause There's something so nice about going to the work we having spent as much time as possible moving outdoors the day before. But I do this and it ends up being six workouts a week. But Some are very, very short.

30:09 None of the resistance training stuff is terribly long. You're done in an hour or so unless you're waiting for equipment. And you know, at fifty I'm continuing to Get stronger. I'm not You know, outrageously so. And it just works. It just works and it's worked for everyone that I know. Now one key thing, and a lot of people will what I call the kind of geek this and they won't.

30:29 Do compound movements. And I do some rear delt flies on the whatever, either chest and back day or the shoulders and arms day. You need that For shoulder. posturally, aesthetically, et cetera. But

30:41 People think that oh I can do leg extensions, leg curls to failure once a week. No, you're also hack squatting and belt squatting or hat squatting and front squatting. to fail your for couple sets. That's intense. You know, you need to do the compound movements. There's no world Where you can just

30:58 you know, do isolation movements this way. And that's the thing that sometimes gets forgotten in the Yates. style training. He was doing a lot of compound movements and he's still a proponent of that. Mm-hmm. Let's hop around. Then we may come back to training.

31:13 We spoke some time ago. about psychedelics with a focus on M DMA. And It seems like you may have some revised views.

31:22 Maybe a few caveats. I would be interested to hear your Current thinking. So This is an area you've spoken about and and thought about pretty extensively. And whereas I'm more of a newbie, as we talked about last time, in case people didn't hear that conversation, you know, growing up, I

31:36 Made the mistake. It was a truly a mistake of Taking some psychedelics at a very young age. quote unquote recreationally. L S D. Sil Simon.

31:45 not giving any thought to like what the long term consequences might be. Fortunately, I didn't feel any long term consequences. But I had it. Enough. Bad trips meaning one. Robin Carter Harris would say, You can't have a bad trip. There's no you can have a bad trip, Robin. I've had one. It sucks. You're in the pit for hours and hours.

32:02 There's no guide there if you're doing it recreationally as a teen, the brain is hyperplastic. It made me very, very cautious, almost paranoid about. psychedelics for many, many years. Then also the last time we spoke, I talked about how

32:14 In an effort to resolve what I felt were some longstanding psychological traumas. I Did Clinically supported MDMA. Standard kind of maps protocol, right?

32:25 Take a forget the milligram dosage, maybe take like probably hundred and twenty five, something like that. Yeah. And then it and sometimes there's a booster about ninety minutes in, you have someone there, you're doing talk therapy before, during, and after. Tremendously helpful. To be able to feel my feelings, to be able to recognize what a whole body feeling was about. I mean there was never the

32:46 experience for me of wanting to dance or have sex while I was on it was like no. There was some shaking, there was some a little bit of that, but it was a very, you know, it's an empathogen. I think yeah, as you know it's not a psychedelic technically an empathogen and raises both dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, which is very unusual for any compound to do. And raises oxytocin quite dramatically. The data actually say the empathogenic effect of MDMA is not due to oxytocin.

33:12 Through a kind of sort of good control where you just give oxytocin and you don't get the same effect. Clinical effects. But you could argue the cocktail effect, the synergy might be important. So I did that. Uh few times.

33:25 I think it was total of Four times. separated by a number of months or a year. Clinically supported. In any event. After or

33:34 Uh period of doing that. I took a break. And On the suggestion of the same clinical group. decided to partake in a psilocybin. Experiment.

33:45 And it was high dose psilocybin. Now, psilocybin, as you know, leads to I think in the words of my our friend Paul Conti, it almost like recedes the waterline on the on the unconscious mind. So What I found in psilocybin was

34:00 Because my brain often thinks in analogies. Like this just how I structure my thinking. It's reflexive for me. Of psilocybin. Almost everything that came to me in those Sessions was

34:11 symbolic representation analogies. For somebody else who represents their world Not that way, maybe musically or Through somatic experience. It's likely that

34:22 From my understanding that they will experience insights. Through those same Kind of. representations. What I found from psilocybin

34:31 Work. Was It was exquisite. Revealing to me the structure. Of my thinking and the ways that

34:40 Some of the patterns in my life that were Not serving me well. how they were structured. So like oh Coming out of it, there's this form of self-seduction that I do.

34:50 Which takes actually eight forms. Which Look. The following way in my life. I can be seduced by The uh enchantment of

35:00 Some sort of promise of a future outcome that's not realistic. And you can see that. I'm just kind of giving one example. And once you see that, you can't unsee it. А на промігу. I do think it was important to keep a journal afterwards to take notes while off. The drug. And for me

35:17 That was very, very helpful. Allowing me to understand the structure of My thinking. Both for things that serve me and don't serve me. I will say, and this is getting a little

35:27 As long as people are doing like live streams of taking psychedelics, I feel I'm very solid ground, but who knows? Well just wait until the second half of this conversation. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I don't want anyone to run out and take these things without clinical support, there are a number of people who shouldn't be taking them and all the usual caveats apply. Young people, et cetera. But The real

35:46 Like Wow. One Session type. rewiring which was the hardest work I've ever done.

35:53 I mean done lots and lots of therapy, but the hardest work Ever done. was to take MDMA. And then

36:01 couple hours later take a high dose of psilocybin. Now I've only done that twice. Now the reason it was such By the way, if I ever try and run for public office, any mistakes I make, they'll attribute to this, by the way, I've seen that publicly. But I'm gonna make it very clear right now, not only am I not gonna run For office. I'm running from office, so you know, there's been some speculation, but The interesting thing was No

36:24 two days later drop, which you would do experience with MDMA. I just did not experience that if I took psilocybin with it. Remarkable had some of my best workouts, work weeks, et cetera. Like Oh wow. That can be avoided through this thing.

36:38 But what was remarkable is on MDMA as an empathogen, you feel Very good about most anything you focus on. You can find the peace in it. You can find the love in it. Could be this Yerba Mate, which I happen to love, but you like or would really love that's the danger, right? You can get pulled into these force fields of Thinking something's really important.

36:57 It might not be that important when the session is over. That's why I think it's very important to have a trained guide with you. But there's the drop. One name that has come up on this podcast.

37:10 More than once is Dr. Valter Longo, USC professor with decades of peer reviewed research on fasting, nutrition, and aging. And as some of you long term listeners know Or readers, I regularly fast. I've done a lot of experimentations with fasting over more than a decade, including intermittent fasting. extended water only fasts up to ten days, and I've looked at the before and after. Frankly The fasting has been one of the most incredible unlocks. that I have found the before and after looking at glucose control, oral glucose tolerance tests, hemoglobin A1C, et cetera, all these things that really do matter for the long term, for mental health, for physical health.

37:48 have had dramatic dramatic shift. And I've talked about that before, but the sad truth, the truth about fasting is that it can be really hard. And that is why Walter is interesting. He's best known for something called the fasting mimicking diet, FMD, which is essentially a way of eating that produces many of the benefits of fasting. While still allowing you to eat. Food. So

38:11 If we look at that a little more closely. He took what he learned in these randomized control trials and so on and packaged it into a five day program called Pro Lon, P R O L O N. It's five days. So for five days. You restrict your food a bit. And What Prolon does is makes it

38:28 Idiot proof. Everything is laid out, there's no guesswork, you just follow the packages. And in scientific studies, five day cycles of the fast anxious diet, improved markers tied to metabolic health and aging. Help people drop fat while holding on to lean muscle and even associated with measurable drops in biological age. And to put some numbers to it with glycemic management, blood sugar management. We were able to see in one R C T improvements in fifty three percent of FMD participants versus eight percent of controls. So

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40:57 Eat sleep. Dot com slash Tim. psilocybin for me was a very dark and Harrowing experience.

41:09 Lot of purging, a lot of vomiting. About halfway through. These weren't enormous doses. They weren't small either. It was four to five grams, but Just to be clear for folks. Yeah, of dried celosity mushrooms. So for me

41:22 It was terrifying to be on psilocybin alone. It was extremely difficult, and the combination of the two. It was sorta like having Like my really good friend Rob Moore in there with me going, You can do this. No, Rob wasn't in there. So I'm just sort of half joking because he's here in the room with us now. But It was like I can do this, I can lean into the hardest work. I'm gonna give an example so it's not too vague.

41:46 I'd spent a fair amount of time thinking about some of the harder things that had happened in my childhood, in my life. Some of which were self inflicted, some of which We're not self inflicted. And I'd come to peace.

41:59 about those through the work I Describe. Standard psychotherapy, a lot of journaling, time, some MDMA So in those separately. Taking them together, I had this

42:11 Voice in my head. that was like, it's time to do the real work. And I was like, Oh goodness. And I said out loud, like, I thought we're just gonna like listen to Grateful Dead today. And you know, the person helping me was like no That's not how this works, you know that.

42:25 I'm thinking I don't want to do this. And I don't even know what this is. I just know there's something there that's a forboding. And I'm like Oh shit. And I think it is important for people to understand this because it can be very, very scary and you feel it sort of coming at you like a storm and you can push it away. I could have spent the entire time listening to The Grateful Dead.

42:42 Not a huge Grateful Dead fan, but You know. People have encouraged me to listen to it. So I've been doing it. I like it. But I could have done that, but I didn't. Instead I was like Okay.

42:52 With those two compounds in me, I was like, I can do this. I've got myself held, like I'm on like I'm my own friend. That's the empathogen. I can do this. It wasn't just like all right, let's go. Like let's fight.

43:05 And that session took me through A brutally hard Voyage. Of Thinking about all the things that didn't happen.

43:16 All the things that I would Wish it happened. That I was in no position to make happen for myself. Heavy. Gnarly.

43:25 And Coming through it. It was the perfect thing. Because I was like, those are the things I know I can create now. There is no way, and this is why I feel it's important to talk about these compounds. There is no way whatsoever that a

43:42 Therapist was gonna sit down and go. Hey. What's ever on your mind today? Let's talk about what didn't happen. No one's ever done that for me. And if they had, there's no way that I would have been in the full emotional experience of the lack. Or necessarily had access to or had access to it. Right. So I give that as an example. It's certainly not what everyone would experience, but I'd never thought about the problem of what hadn't happened.

44:04 As a viable option to explore it so obvious now. But then the outcome Of this brutally hard session was beautiful. No additional drug, nothing. And it stayed with me. This was over well over a year ago.

44:18 I thought. This is awesome. I can create these things. I know exactly what to aim for. And have started to make steps in my life. steering the ship in those directions.

44:27 And Not surprisingly, it's like yeah, I can do this. I can do these things, I need some practice and and so I think that The medicines as we think of them are Immensely powerful.

44:38 immensely precarious. You need the support. I've been told in these sessions, hey, maybe we don't go there. You don't go there. That feels like a repeat of you know, you need someone to help guide you. These are not To be used recreationally, in my opinion. Um, at least not for folks like me.

44:53 You know, I'm just not interested in that. The lessons I learned Is the following. Neuroplasticity is the goal. Mm-hmm.

45:01 Toward Something that Oftentimes we can't Identify Through standard therapy, like you could say, Oh, I'm trying to resolve my traumas. That's a sentence.

45:11 If you can't know exactly what the thing was, and or even if you can or the things that happened What about the things that didn't happen? It just never would have occurred to me. So it revealed both the thing that needed work And allowed me to do a lot of the work in real time. And spit me out the other end, which is how it felt. You know, I wasn't cratered coming out the other and I was like, Oh, that was an ass kicking of a whole other level.

45:31 And With a clean in mind of what to do in my daily life that has served me very, very well. It also reminded me that. We seem to have this one compound type view. And I'm not suggesting that polypharmacology is the way. But it turned out

45:47 In this case was the appropriate tool. For me. And it's also a reminder that Combined

45:54 Pharmacology with Brain machine interface and stimulation, combining ketamine therapy with TMS. I've not done ketamine nor TMS, but I think we are entering a really exciting new time. Where We're going to be able to amplify

46:08 the effects of machines And drugs. Let's call them what they are. It's pharmacology, but drugs that they can synergize in ways that are more directed. But ultimately the directives in life are what matter. Like do I feel better? What am I doing on a daily basis that's serving me? If the intermedcillate cortex or the posterior insula gets ten percent thicker, great. But if you're not making better decisions like

46:33 Frankly, who gives a shit, right? You know? So ultimately the everyday outcomes, the clinical outcomes and everyday outcomes are what really matter. Brain imaging's important too, of course. So the experience with these compounds I will also say left me in a place where I'm like I'm feeling pretty good right now. I I feel really good, in fact. I don't feel quote unquote called to it again right now. Maybe I will at some point. I have not

46:54 You know, for instance I've never Done. Ayahuasca, there seems to be this resurgence of the one shot. theory in Silicon Valley that there are these like CEOs who You know.

47:04 Or company founders rather, who will take ayahuasca and then like quit the company or something. And I made the argument to Mark Andreess and like, Well, maybe they're happier. And he made the argument. Quite astutely, as Pretty much everything Mark says is Yeah, but as an investor, that's not what I'm looking for. And I go, Well, sure, but from a life satisfaction point Maybe yes. I think it depends on what your incentive structure is.

47:24 And so I am very excited about plasticity tools. Whether or not it's Talk therapy combined with

47:32 A brain stimulation device that's invasive or non invasive, or a vagal stimulation device. Those are getting better and better all the time. Whether or not it's And in pathogen and psilocybin. High dose with therapeutic support or it's daily microdosing for seven days with an undetectable like subjective effect where you're just like, I feel fine, I feel normal, but you're doing a bunch of hard things and suddenly your brain is shifting more quickly. I mean I think

47:56 This is Where the field needs to go. Enough with it quote unquote opens plasticity. That's a general statement not about psychedelics, but includes psychedelics. Yeah. Let me chime in here. This is good terrain. So I would say a couple of things that might

48:12 So the first I would say is that When you induce plasticity, let's just s explore that with in the context of psychedelics. And I'm gonna use some pretty primitive analogies here, but if you're heating up the clay That doesn't immediately

48:30 Mean. That in that window of plasticity, or after that, you're gonna turn out better than you were before. You have to be very cautious about how you Reshape the clay. Once you induce that plasticity. And I'd suggest people check out Google Dolan. She's at UC Berkeley. She's looked at critical periods and the reopening of critical periods after psychedelics. She's focused a lot on MDMA, but also is exploring I have again, among other things.

48:56 And That's part of the reason why Historically, if you talk to facilitators who have literally supervised thousands of sessions more common in like the neo shamanic kind of Northern California. context for simplicity than the indigenous, but the two to three weeks following

49:14 has always been viewed as this golden window for reformatting your behavior and your patterns. And it turns out that modern science Google's research being one good example of it reinforces this. So it's not just

49:30 Taking the medicine in the form of A pill A potion, whatever it might be. It's actually that that is a catalyst that opens a period of time during which the work needs to be done. Right. So that's that's part number one. I would say that your experience also with the Hippie flipping, so the MDMA plus

49:49 Yeah. Silocybin or in this case Slossive mushrooms. I would say blunting or eliminating the Let's just call it energetic hangover MDMA. Super typical. I don't generally well, not that I'm doing this at all, obviously for legal purposes, but let's just say Hypothetically.

50:04 That's part of the reason why Some people will format, say, a weekend where you have breath work. Let's just say as a lead in, then in pathogen, and then the next day something that is more And this term is Controversial, but the classical psychedelic. Again, for simplicity, let's just call it

50:22 Silzabin. LSD, whatever it might be. also tends to reduce that potential for like the energetic hangover. That's pretty common. People can check out also transcend therapeutics that just got acquired, or at least the majority was purchased. who have been commercializing methylone, which is a very, very interesting compound. It's like the shorter acting

50:44 softer cousin of MDMA, much less body load. very, very interesting compound and what they did, which was very smart, and I'm not saying Maps slash Lycos, whatever the current name is, wasn't smart, but One of the problems that MDMA ran into is that it was coupled with psychotherapy and the FDA does not know how to regulate psychotherapy that they don't know how to standardize or think of as standardized.

51:08 And so what transcended is they just completely separated the two and actually removed the psychotherapy completely and said, How do people do? With methylone. Period. That's it. And they've done incredibly well, which is reflected in the acquisition. Really interesting compound. Methylone. Yeah. Interesting. I had I wasn't aware of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think these are very Interesting compounds and I used to have this view like

51:33 You're increasing neuromodulators. SSRIs will do that too. Differently. And Clearly a

51:40 Different experience. Actually I've not taken SSRIs. Trying to think, have I ever taken an SSRI? You've ever taken Trazodone? It's not technically an S R. No, I haven't. So it

51:51 I think there's so much important work to be done here and I We'll say, you know, huge hat tip to you. Um, you've been ushering this forward. It's amazing we can even have this conversation. Yeah, things that have happened. My conclusion after all that and lots of personal flight time with lots of things is that To state the obvious, it's not a panacea. It's

52:12 For most people not gonna be one and done. Where the Potion pill. Plant medicine does all the heavy lifting for you. The way I

52:22 Think about it now as it's like very complicated. knee reconstructive surgery. It's like you're gonna wanna pick the doctor very carefully. You're gonna wanna know how to do your due diligence. You have the surgery and then guess what?

52:36 The next let's even could be like both shoulders, both knees. Boy, do you have a lot of rehab to do. And that's the way that I myself think about it, and also it's contraindicated for a lot of people, at least as of right now. There are exclusionary criteria for these clinical trials. And I don't think all of them will hold water long term, but if you have bipolar, if you have a family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, it is generally not a good idea. And coming back to the polypharma.

53:06 Do not underestimate the risk. Of Cannabis? when taken with or in proximity to these drugs, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble. And then I would say

53:19 To deliver on the brain stimulation side. That One of the most interesting things to me right now is the one day protocol that's been refined by Dr. Jonathan Downer at University of Toronto and others.

53:31 But using uh An agent, in this case an antibiotic. to induce neuroplasticity called decyclocerine. So you take In this case, it's just a coincidence, but

53:43 I think the most common dose that's been used is a hundred and twenty five milligrams. I got oral Like Trokey. You dissolve it an hour before your stimulation. And again, I'm pulling this from memory, so people can read up on the literature, but you take that five day protocol that had been compressed by Nolan and team down from Three to six months. They'd compress it down to five days, but people are still having to take five days off of work because you're getting stimulated 10 times a day, every hour on the hour. They're variable protocols, but that's roughly it. Very few people can take a week off of work and pay out of pocket. Incredibly expensive.

54:16 So this one day Is preloading with the decyclosarine and you take those five days and you compress it into one day. And I've had experiences with this one day protocol.

54:28 And full disclosure, I'm involved with this company, Ampa Health, which is co-founded by Jonathan Downer, so there's that. But I experienced all this before. Any of these conversations. And From that

54:40 I've been able to get a ninety percent reduction in my generalized anxiety disorder and O C D for three to four months at a time. Some people get Much longer durability. That's impressive. I've met people who have had 18 months of durability with major depressive disorder, one day. And The side effect profile

55:00 And there are other hardware providers and so on that you can look into, but having this accelerated TMS protocol enhanced by the neuroplasticity of this Dcyclosarine D C S. For short.

55:15 It's been a real focus is trying to look at neuromodulation writ large as opposed to just psychedelics, right? Because if the only tool you have is a hammer and this is not my expression, right? A lot of things start to look like nails. And psychedelics are not Useful for everything. They just are not. And if you look at Any historical use of these compounds.

55:37 Having thousands and millions of people taking psychedelics is a brand new experiment. If you look at most indigenous cultures who consume Whether it's Silosabe mushrooms or ayahuasca or something else, it is a very, very, very, very small percentage of the population. Typically reserved. For

55:55 who you might consider the ethnobotanist, slash pharmacist, slash medicine man or woman. And Pre Columbian contact, for instance, with like in the case of ayahuasca. Two things. Number one, the patients

56:08 Seldom drink. the patients in quotation marks, because two of the principal uses of ayahuasca were for warfare and hunting. So this idea of like we just put LSD or whatever the psychedelic dure is in the water and we have world peace. It ain't a real thing, guys. It could be the opposite. Go to any psychedelic conference and look at the obscene infighting for any proof of that. It's the worst. It's so, so bad.

56:34 What they do, coming back to your point. Right. And alongside the decyclosarine and many other compounds is they Induce Neuroplasticity, which affords you a window.

56:46 of opportunity within which you can do some pretty cool stuff. I'm totally on board. I mean It's interesting because as we're sort of moving through exercise and psychedelics and which is really a conversation about neuroplasticity and mental health.

57:00 Perhaps physical health as well. It's very clear that like All the stuff about exercise, increasing brain derived nootrophic value. It's all tied together. And then you think, Well, why is my brain Sharper after I exercise. There's an alertness thing, you're using your own chemistry.

57:15 To wake you up. But then People sort of assume you just have to do the exercise part. You actually have to go try and learn something to get the plasticity. Doesn't matter. You could quadruple the amount of circulating BDNF in your brain. Nothing's gonna change. I know this for a fact because for years I studied neuroplasticity. You need

57:33 Precisely time. Neural firing pre and post synaptically. You can do this with sensory input. We're talking about reading, math. Learning The vibe code, is that what they call it now, right? That um which Rick Rubin invented. No, I'm kidding. He didn't. Um he's gonna kill me for saying that.

57:48 But the memes would make you think so. Whatever it is that you want to rewire, you have to go do that hard work. Just getting the chemicals increase doesn't do it. You need alertness, you need these cr chemicals circulating. It helps to have an emotional rise if it's for, you know, certain kinds of work and perhaps not for others, more analytic work requiring. Probably less of an emotional rise, but

58:09 The directed part. Is that that's the next step. And I think about that a lot. I mean Having sat down as you have with so many guests now who are experts

58:20 In psychiatry and psychology and self help, for lack of a better way to put it. It's reassuring to me that As with exercise, as with nutrition. As with psychedelics, some

58:31 Them are starting to fall out. We're starting to almost get to principles. There's this wonderful book in the field of neuroscience called Principles of Neural Science. Almost everyone Get it. It's a big old thing. I had that textbook. It's all used to be Kendall Jesselin Schwartz and then one of those Folks got

58:48 canceled and then passed away. And so that it's got a different author line there, but that was the original one, Kendall, Jessel and Schwartz. And The idea is Principles of neural science. Yes, it's filled with facts about receptors and neurotransmitters and tons of beautiful details of all these discoveries. But what you learn as a graduate student in a postdoc and then what you eventually

59:07 What are the principles by which Neural circuits change. Oh, you need coordinated firing. You know, you can actually unwire things.

59:21 If they're mismatched firing, like How do you build a memory and then move it someplace else so that you don't have to fill the memory making area. to its capacity you know these are the principles are what eventually emerge And that's

59:35 Very useful. In the fields, if you will, of health and wellness. Umbrellas, all the things we've been talking about and a lot more.

59:44 We're finally getting to that. This is the reason why I throw out like Exhale, emphasize breathing. Slows you down, calms you down, and inhale emphasized breathing, wakes you up. Resistance training

59:54 To or near or past failure, that kind of scales the number of sets. We are finally at a place where Because of social media, thank goodness, because of podcasts. Again, huge hat tip to you. Yours was the first podcast ever listened to, still listen to. We are finally at this place where people are starting to hear like Yeah, I get it. Sunlight You go, you get it? Okay, cool.

1:00:14 Ironically, the the things that people have heard many many times are often things they need to do every day and be reminded of many many times. But It's not about getting morning sunlight for X number of minutes, et cetera. It's about understanding What is it in this morning sunlight thing? I'll tell you right now, the big eye opener for me, no pun intended, this last year.

1:00:32 was I did an episode on cortisol. The quote unquote stress hormone. No. Cortisol is involved with stress, yes, that's true, but cortisol mobilizes glucose from the liver. And elsewhere into the body, it's an energy deploying hormone. When you wake up in the morning it's'cause of a rising cortisol.

1:00:49 Cortisol awakening response. Denosine is very low, melatonin is dropping, cortisol goes up, you wake up. If your alarm goes off. Spikes even more. Viewing bright light, ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning, increases that morning cortisol spike by about 50%.

1:01:04 Okay, and on and on, and I could say and also cold water and caffeine and exercise. Exercise, by the way, will triple or quadruple your baseline cortisol levels at any time of the twenty four hour cycle. So you go, Okay, that's a bunch more facts. Uh. But the principle is if your morning cortisol is high and you can make it higher doing any number of the things I just described. It ensures that your evening and nighttime cortisol is low. And that's what sets you up for an increase in melatonin. It's

1:01:31 What? helps ensure a great night's sleep. And so you go, Okay, so the real principle here is you want to bookend the day with high cortisol in the morning. Whenever your morning happens to be. It doesn't matter if it's six AM or ten AM. Bright light, caffeine, hydration.

1:01:46 Exercise. A little stress too probably will help. And you want the end of your day to be low cortisol, high Melatonin. High adenosine, you know, the more movement you get during the day, better off you are.

1:01:58 And all of a sudden, it doesn't really matter if you have access or the time to do all of the things I just described. It's not about morning sunlight per se. Just turns out that morning sunlight in your eyes is the best way to ramp up that morning peak and that Ramped up morning peak is the best way to To make sure that it's low at night and if you experience any stress in the evening at night, it's a quick blip in cortisol. Otherwise it's a blip on top of A high baseline.

1:02:22 You look at Cancer treatment outcomes. You look at anxiety, you look at And by the way, what I just described is true for kids, pregnant women, perimenopausal, menopausal, and men. You want high morning, low, evening, and nighttime cortisol. Aim for that, that principle.

1:02:37 Whatever you have available to do that. If you're on a plane it looks different. If you're in California it looks different than if you're in Scandinavia different times of Year Whatever you do to try and ensure that bookending. High and low cortisol respectively.

1:02:50 Morning and night. You won. You won the day and the night. And so it doesn't really matter what the individual protocols are. And this to me is like the most important and exciting thing about where the quote unquote field of health and wellness in public discourse about Health.

1:03:05 Has taken us Which is we finally have some Principals to work with. And then If people go, Well, I don't like the cold shower, Okay, fine.

1:03:14 Like I don't I don't like resistance training. I wanna do plot Okay, fine. Choose a different tool. But the principles are what count. And to me That's super exciting. That's not boring.

1:03:26 All right, Andrew, I want to ask you about peptides. All the rage. We look at Google Trends. Everybody and their brother has a peptide startup. But there seems to maybe be something there. I don't know if there's a there there.

1:03:39 For people who I have heard the word. don't know exactly what folks are talking about. I get texted Every week multiple times from people asking about various peptides. Yeah.

1:03:50 And I'd say half the time, depending on what they're trying to do. I'm like, can't you just be a grown up and inject testosterone or HGH instead? If you're trying to get there directly. But I would be very interested to hear. I know there's a broad spectrum of stuff that people are experimenting with. What are these things? And what's your current thinking? I also don't completely disagree with you about like just be a grown up and take Sypianate and HCH. If you want to maintain fertility, take some H G G as well. Yeah. I'm being facetious, of course. I think there are risks to all of those, but It is the appropriate

1:04:22 Opening joke. slash reality because if you're expecting Scipionate H G H. Type results from peptides. You ain't gonna get'em.

1:04:31 At least not with respect to Anabolic growth. feelings of well being. Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Insulin's a peptide, et cetera.

1:04:42 I cannot take credit for what I'm about to say next, but it's a very, very important principle. The theme today, I suppose. About Bakri, who's an M D. Came on the podcast talked about Peptides and he said look.

1:04:54 For many, many. hundreds, if not thousands of years, but certainly hundreds of years in the context of pharma. People have been searching for medicines in plants. Isolating medicines from plants. Pharma companies still do this.

1:05:09 Now people are starting to look for medicines within the body. And peptides are a great example of that. GLP, for instance. The drugs That Increase GLP, do so to thousandfold levels over the levels of circulating

1:05:24 GLP that you would have. And they result in as we all know. Robust weight loss. So that's one category. I think we need to think about categories of peptides, but Understand that they're made in your brain and body.

1:05:36 Some of them may have benefits when made synthetically and delivered at very, very high doses. Such as with these GLP agents. O Zempic Monjaro. Red a true tide is one that we should talk about.

1:05:50 Made by Lily. It's coming out soon. It impacts the GLP system, but also the GIP and the glucagon system. Careful with that one, kiddos. A lot of people are going to be microdosing it. Yeah. A lot of people are finding that microdoses can have similar effects, and that's an important kind of cost risk analysis. Okay, so stepping back.

1:06:09 Peptides are made in your body. High concentrations made synthetically. They may provide benefits that are Make them medicines.

1:06:18 So we can think of the weight loss peptides. The GLPs being the most prominent example. the GLP drugs that increased levels of GLP hundredfold were used to treat diabetes. For a while. Still are.

1:06:33 But they didn't induce much weight loss. The ones that Raise GOP levels thousandfold. Or more. Those lead to robust weight loss.

1:06:43 including muscle loss. And so that's part of the controversy. Also, there's discussion about maybe increasing some apathy. They reduce craving for alcohol and perhaps Cravings more generally. at the recommended dosages and some people they can create nausea, which is why some people are taking less of them and still getting the weight loss benefits, but less nausea. There's a lot of stuff going on there, but to stay on the GLPs and weight loss peptides.

1:07:06 Specifically. Lily developed retitrutide, which hits the GLP, GIP, and glucagon system, leads to the most robust weight loss, seems to spare some muscle, perhaps. People should always resistance train anyway. to have offset that. But

1:07:21 It's the most effective of those Weight loss. Let's just call it GLPs, even though it hits these other systems. The gray market. Is

1:07:29 the quote unquote for research purposes only stuff that you can buy online. It's perfectly legal to sell. for research purposes only, not for animal or human use. And I joked on X a while ago, like wow, all these home labs, everyone's buying this, of course people are injecting them. The concern is about contamination with things like lipid polysaccharide. Or you're not getting what you think you're getting. So Many people are already taking Reddit True Tide even though it hasn't been formally released.

1:07:55 Because it's pretty easy to synthesize. And so it's being sold on the gray market, people are taking it. There's a second category and then I'll return to the kind of Gray market issue. The second category would be things to increase growth hormone.

1:08:06 So called growth hormone secretogs, things like Surmarelin, Ipromarellin, Tesumerelin. These are all variants on the theme of Get the brain neurons that project down to the pituitary to stimulate release of growth hormone at night. Typically you don't eat a couple hours before sleep is the idea. Probably good for sleep anyway, it is good for sleep anyway. Then you inject this stuff typically it

1:08:27 Three to eightfold. Increase in Growth hormone IGF one. Some stimulate appetite quite a bit, like MK six seven seven, some don't.

1:08:37 I've tried Surmarelin very briefly. Dramatically increased my slow wave deep sleep, nuked my REM sleep. This is a common theme. Spike my prostate specific antigen. I've never had any problems with PSA. I came off it, PSA went back to normal. No one's been able to give me a mechanistic explanation for that. I'm not about to run the experiment again.

1:08:56 I didn't find that I got much fat loss from it, but I didn't use it very long. I didn't find I got stronger. You know, just Didn't seem worth it to me. Given the PSA thing.

1:09:05 A lot of people take these things and they're gonna get these. Really. Dramatic increases in growth hormone. They sound dramatic, three to eightfold, but whether or not they're meaningful in terms of fat loss, it doesn't really seem they're that robust, especially given that you have all the GLPs now. So

1:09:21 The growth hormone secreted cogs also include. Things like C J C And there's some variants on these which can Lead to some insulin resistance, but maybe Spikes GH a bit. More than

1:09:32 I don't know. None of those to me really seem Worth it. Personally. Just given The effects aren't that great.

1:09:39 You know. If someone can afford it and they can get a script for it. Probably better to just take pharma grade. Some atrope or omnitro. Growth hormone.

1:09:47 And you know, the bodybuilders would take like eight. I use a day or something crazy like that. But in the trials that have been done with Metformin and GH. Typically it's people are taking One to two I use five nights per week. That will dramatically increase

1:10:03 deep sleep and probably sleep overall and the effects on fat loss and just Tissue repair healing. and feelings of well being and just cognitive function. Anecdotally, people and subjectively people say, like, wow, I just feel so great. This is the getting up in the morning and be like, wow, my joints feel good and just being ready to like go, go, go. It's not anabolic as much as something like testosterone, et cetera, but

1:10:25 I'm not telling people to run out and do GH, but If you could Get a good script. A script for real G H and take a low dose versus taking a bunch of like unknown secretogog peptides, that seems like a

1:10:36 Obvious one for me. Then there's a category of things like BPC one five seven. Body protection compound one five seven, which is Yeah.

1:10:46 Amino acid chain that is in gastric juice, but it's this isolated amino acid chain that seems to be the one that's most popular. And at the same time it's the one for which most people Probably taking it for all the wrong reasons. I've tried it. I definitely feel like after a pain or strain

1:11:03 The recovery is faster. But I can't do the control experiment because it goes systemic. Let's say you hurt both biceps. You can't inject into one bicep and not the other and assume that it's just acting locally. It's just gonna go systemically. There are capsule forms of BPC that people claim. Just as good. I don't know. Do you have to inject locally?

1:11:20 close to the injury, it seems that might be helpful. The animal data on BPC are really impressive. cartilage regrowth, fibroblast migration, angiogenesis, nerve regrowth. The literature I've spent a lot of time with. There's not a single published human trial. Where I think the most interesting Use of it perhaps is?

1:11:38 is I know someone recently she wrote to me and she said that her dog had a spinal injury and she said, Does B P C work in animals? I go Actually pretty much all the data are in animals. So if My dog, God forbid, had an injury. I be

1:11:51 Willing to give. Him or her BPC. You have to work out the appropriate dosage. How would you source that? Hypothetically. So you can get it from compounding pharmacies now, so you need a doctor to write that script. Depending on your risk tolerance, you could go to the gray market for research purposes only. I wouldn't do that. Peptide sciences shuttered.

1:12:09 They're Doors, windows, whatever. They closed. A few months back, they sensed the heat coming on and they're like, We're out. They took their money and they're out. Smart move, peptide sciences. So Nowadays you can

1:12:20 Find doctors that will prescribe it. There's also Pentadecaptide, which is just a different form of B P C seems to have Same function. It's easier to find.

1:12:32 And Getting it from a compounding pharmacy, of course, compounding pharmacies vary in stringency. But is going to be Cleaner than the grey market sourcing, of course. Well.

1:12:42 I have no relationship to these pharmacies, but For instance. Tailor made. Upstate Revive Pharmacy, these are kind of the better Known and trusted.

1:12:52 compounding pharmacies. Compounding pharmacies were allowed. to compound drugs that are still under patent during shortages. And Can compound generic drugs.

1:13:01 They'll also truly compound peptides if you get BPC with another one, the TB five hundred. So called Wolverine stack. I don't know. I never tried TB five hundred. I keep some BPC one five seven in the fridge if I have a A strain all in general. So much this stuff is you can't do the control.

1:13:20 'Cause I took the Wolverine stack after I had elbow surgery and I'm like Did it help? I have no idea. Frankly. I have no idea. I will say this, I've used it a few times, very short runs of it. I'm not interested in using it as a general recovery tool. Or every day or any I don't have any gut issues, like so People have used high doses.

1:13:38 That was the original Use. You know, in this clinical trial they did BPC enemas. at very high dosages. Sounds an Austin party. And supposedly I learned this from Abud Pavlov. actually had a side gig. He was a

1:13:54 Health influencer. You give people gastric juices. To try and resolve Ulcers and things like that. And we know gastric juices contain a number of beneficial peptides. So it's but I don't recommend How did they down those? How did they get them in there? How they down them and how'd they get them? Gastric juices. I mean, maybe he had a cabinet of people with the you know, they're telling them. Yeah, so rough.

1:14:14 So you know, people say, Should I take BPC one five? No, you shouldn't, unless you have an injury, or maybe in that case you get clean compounded pharmacy BPC. And you inject it locally. Or you take it systemically, you try it, see if it helps. But why would you take it? Ongoing. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

1:14:30 It doesn't make any sense to me, frankly. And again, you go back to your sort of half joke at the beginning. You really wanna recover quickly from exercise? Take an IU or two IUs of G H every night before sleep. And you will recover.

1:14:43 Magnificently well. For the enhanced games The swimmer, yeah, with the the massive lats guy. He recently put his stack out and I think it was Two hundred milligrams of Of sipionate for weeks. That's one CC of standard sipionate. That's a lot. Most people I know, and we can talk about this. And I've talked about my SPINA use.

1:15:01 From the beginning and the experiment up much, much lower. I believe in microdosing that, if at all. He's taking two hundred plus I think he's doing two IUs of. growth hormone per night or five nights per week. And he's taking EPO. They can only take FDA approved Drugs. So it's it's like it's but but yeah. Were they testing at all to verify if they're F D approved versus I don't know. FDA non approved? I mean, that would be a complicated test to run. It's kind of interesting to ask, like, was there any rule breaking in the steroid Olympics? Yeah. Maybe maybe it was a sync test you've heard this, right? Like a urine sample and they're just portless.

1:15:37 Yes. I mean, some of the power lifters like Thor were very open about the fact that they were not allowed to use the things they would normally use because they weren't FDA approved. That's kind of interesting. It seemed like they were kind of running the the middle of the road, but And that's a lot of juice. I think he was also if I'm thinking of the same Australian swimmer. I'm not sure, but yeah, he was also quoted This is many months before the actual competition, but he's like, I am gonna juice to the gills. So Yeah. It looks like he almost grew Gills because his lats were like

1:16:06 Not Yates size, but he's a very tall guy and Yeah, a few Olympics ago, I think it was wasn't the last one, it was the one before that. This a female runner got popped for Decca. And she claimed it came from a burrito that she ate. And the Deca Burrito. And you know. I'm a track and field fan and so are some other folks around this. Might be mispronouncing. Nand correct. Nandra Nandralan. Yeah, non

1:16:30 Aromatizing doesn't convert estrogen as far as we know. People use it for Joint healing and things of that sort. I've never tried it, but Someone in our studio said this and I think they're spot on. They hope she used it.

1:16:42 Because if she didn't and she got nailed for it from a burrito or some other source, that sucks because there's a huge stigma that goes with that. She gets, you know, she can't compete and you never really shake that reputation. So my hope is that she actually took it and got caught. As opposed to didn't take it and got caught for some of the things that we're going to do. I mean the burrito Yeah. The burrito alibi is pretty flimsy. Well last time I checked you can't just nibble on Decca and have it do much for you. Well, and Canelo Alvarez got popped for climbuterol and he claimed it came from some food he ate in Mexico, you know, the clen cow you know hypothesis. Um

1:17:17 Uh huh. You know back when you I think Medaphano was fair game. If it were prescribed and It was something like

1:17:28 the majority, if not all, of the finalists in some of the track and field events were all diagnosed narcolepics. They were all the chances that these mutants would all be narcoleptic. Totally. B P C would be very hard to detect because your body makes it naturally, as with With the GLPs again, they they stimulate such a massive increase in action at those receptors that you probably detect it. So those are the kind of the the healing ones, you know, the the tissue repair ones, TB five hundred, BPC. There are others, but those are the main ones. And then there's the Kind of miscellaneous category. Things like epi challenge.

1:18:00 Which actually comes from the pineal. Mm. Which is weird because there's also a peptide called pinealon, which doesn't come from the pineal. That is confusing. Epitellent is thought to Allow for

1:18:11 you know, preservation of like histone and DNA Structure it's very vague. There's some decent data and Visual repair for animal models of retinitis pigmentosa, maybe more robust circadian setting when you travel. I may have tried this recently, a capsule form of epitalin combined with some sunlight in the morning for the first two days did seem to shift my clock more quickly.

1:18:33 For jet lag. For jet lag. You know a tip I got? Maybe, but I'm not gonna do it again because I don't I don't know. I don't know if there's a there there, but I was chatting with this friend of mine. She's frequent traveler from Japan to the US. She lives in Japan. She's constantly going back and forth. And she'll come for just a few days and then head back. So just get the possibility for getting brutalized is high. Just hopping so many time zones. And she gave me a tip and I tried it and could be a placebo, who knows? She was just like just fast. She's like I on the long flights, I just fast. And I tried that going, uh Two Asia is always a little bit easier than coming back.

1:19:10 I was totally fine. I couldn't believe it'cause I had to do short trip for reasons I won't bore people with. Don't know what the mechanism would be, but I was like huh. Maybe there's something there. We have our central circadian clock, S C N. Most people have heard of that now. The eyes connect to it directly.

1:19:25 Which is why. sunlight and other forms of light are so efficient at shifting our clock. But we have a lot of peripheral clocks, liver clocks, gut clocks. And those are usually the last to shift. Which is why a lot of people have kind of feeling like their stomach is off, digestion is off when they travel.

1:19:41 Maybe not travelers' diarrhea, but they just sort of feel like Waking up in the middle of the night, they're hungry, they're on the previous locations, meal schedule. Fasting may allow for shifting in those clocks. Meal times are very

1:19:54 robust thing in terms of raising our levels of arousal. You know, there's kind of like you eat every day at noon, like a couple minutes before you get that arouse all these the well time systems. So that's not totally surprising. Pinelon is one I've experimented with and is very interesting, and I have to say There are

1:20:10 very few things that increase REM sleep. Most things deplete Ram sleep. In fact, I was joke, if somebody needs a PhD quick and nothing's working, have them do a study of sleep. And give any drug. And it disrupts Ram sleep.

1:20:22 You know, I don't study sleep, but That's a kind of a well known joke. How do you spell Pine? P-I-N. E A L O N Oh they really want it to be as confusing as possible. And it does not come from the pineal. So it's very the nomenclature sucks in this area. And we don't even have names for these different bins. To call the the stuff of the pineal epitalon. Spelled two different ways, by the way, out there, epithalin and epitalon. And Pinelon and then swap them. Right. Pineelin comes from the cortex.

1:20:53 It's made in the cortex. Neocortex and I will say there are a couple of things that will increase Rem. With no pharmacology, you can heat up your sleeping environment in the final two hours of your sleep.

1:21:03 you'll get much more RAM. Thank you, Matt Walker, for that trick. It's awesome. So cool at the beginning of the night, cold in the middle of the night, and warm toward morning, or throw on a Heated blanket or whatever, a weighted or some socks and And it will cap as you if you wake up about two thirds of the way through your sleep, use the bathroom, you'll be surprised how much better

1:21:21 Your REM is. The other thing. Is and this is a nice one if you want to work out late in the day. You don't want to take caffeine. Because he would still want to sleep that night.

1:21:30 If you take Alpha G P C Yeah, nine hundred Makes of Alpha G P C Alpha G P C which as you know is

1:21:36 Increases uh it's like calling donors, you know, calling that system. You can still sleep that night and it will increase your REM sleep. And it is true, remember we said High quarters all morning, low quarter is all at night, that's the optimal setup. that we should aim for.

1:21:50 If you exercise after work And you do a let's say a high intensity session of any kind, the resistance training we were talking about earlier, for instance, you will triple or quadruple your cortisol levels. I should also earmark that as All this stuff online, which seems mainly directed towards women, like oh cold showers and baths. You know, ice baths are gonna spike your cortisol. That's terrible.

1:22:11 The increase in cortisol from deliberate cold exposure is trivial compared to what Working out with weights. We'll do. So late day cortisol spikes are no problem if it comes up and down. But you also wouldn't want to take caffeine on top of that and disrupt your sleep. So if you have a late day workout and you need a bit of a stimulant, alpha GPC is a good tool, and you'll likely get more REM sleep.

1:22:31 That's a nice one. And then Pinelon. I will use every once in a while. For what reason? You get three hours of Rem if you're me. Three hours.

1:22:43 And it doesn't disrupt your Slow wave deep sleep. It is Wild. And here's the cool part. It works that night.

1:22:50 And it seems to work. All the nights after. There's carry over and it seems the hypothesis based on the animal data is that it can help quote unquote regenerate the pineal, which is a dangerous term because you don't want cells proliferating either.

1:23:04 So who knows what it's doing? But I'll use it every once in a while. Always a good place to stay. Now a boo likes it in the daytime. He'll take it in the daytime. People use it for cognitive enhancement. He claims there's a founder of a major company that has all his employees on it for daytime work. I know someone that takes it during the daytime. Don't tell HR. They're uh he's a songwriter, very talented songwriter, and he likes the kind of hypnotic state it puts him in. I'm interested in sleeping at night and being alert during the day. Great tool. For occasional use.

1:23:32 Is that subcutaneous injection or what is that? They also have oral forms. I've only tried the subcutaneous injection. And you do need to find a doctor that can Prescribe it. get it from a compounding pharmacy. I think pineal is a very interesting compound. And I've been monitoring my blood work the whole time doing this. So Tried.

1:23:49 Shamarelling. stopped using. I've never used a GLP. I'm kind of curious because a lot of people are talking about low dose trzebatite. Or ready true tide. Like a tent of the Prescribed dose.

1:24:00 for not just weight loss, but for just cognitive well being. But neuroprotective effects protective effects, maybe Yeah, I'm interested in that stuff. I mean I'm so curious, and maybe there's literature out there, I haven't read it, but if the mechanism of action is separate from the metabolic effects. Right.

1:24:19 Because if you take someone who has insulin resistance or is on the path to insulin resistance and you correct for that, then that in and of itself on some level should be neuroprotective, right? Especially if you're looking at vascular dementia or Any number of things. Glaucoma, there's some interesting data that may

1:24:37 High pressure. That's interesting. BPC one five seven has this asterisk next to it, it will cause angiogenesis. So people were saying you don't want to vascularize a tumor.

1:24:49 Obviously. supply more blood, nutrients to a tumor. But it is not mutagenic.

1:24:58 So it's not carcinogenic, mutagenic. Per se. And that's important. Here's something interesting too. There's the kind of sociology behind all of these. There are a couple more we can touch on, but

1:25:08 The GLPs, the prescription GLPs. And the Massive growth of that. Area. is guilty of making the general public comfortable with

1:25:20 Injections. So you know, it's kind of interesting the battles online are better. Here we go. Yeah. You know, it's like you created this problem, you know, most People don't talk about this, but the traditional media And medicine like to couch the peptide thing is a bunch of Jim bros. Mm mm.

1:25:36 Massive market. In women. Sure. People taking these peptides are not Chim going guys.

1:25:45 It's women who Wanna take A low dose Retta, but Retta's not out yet. Or they wanna take low dose trzepatide. Cocktailed with NAD.

1:25:54 With some GHK copper, which is for there's some studies that show that in combination with red light therapy or some sun exposure, just enough might remove wrinkles. The biggest market is women. I'm not like trying to defend the bro science guy, but it's kinda funny. The Yeah.

1:26:09 Target has been like these guys on X who are selling cuptides. That's not where to place it's an easier target. Yeah. There's also this very interesting sociology around kind of natty or not stuff and You know, for what the hell does that mean? Yeah, exactly. I mean, if someone takes GLPs, are they now uh not natural? Okay, yeah. But for men, that's kind of the thing. Like are you does someone get called out or not? my recommendation, this is what I've always done is always just talk about everything you've taken or are taking or not taking. Also, can I pause for a second just to say I I think I'm getting the name of the doc right. Bigger, faster, stronger. Oh yeah. Just Mark Bell and Chris Bellethy was who directed and and made the film. Great film to watch. It's older. But at some point

1:26:53 They're talking about this. Yeah. And they put up I wanna say it's a four point quadrant, I mean, by definition. And they're like, okay. So you can inject EPO. Right, to increase red blood cell count and like oxygen carry capacity. Okay, and they're like, or you can live at altitude.

1:27:09 Or you can have a altitude simulation tent. Or and they're like, Are any of these natural? Right. Right. And infusion of your own blood. Yeah. Testosterone sipionate will increase red blood cell count. And people don't talk about that was It's not EPO like, but you certainly

1:27:27 Cardio gets better. So even without the addition of muscle, recovery gets better. Well, I'll tell you, I mean, personally, and I've written about this, which is funny just to Air grievance. Right. I remember like I talked at length in the four hour body about post surgical anabolic use. And then like online, it's like Tim Terrus admits, and I'm like, Admit? I fucking wrote about it at length. Totally. Just the wording is such a such a weasel word, I admit it. Oh yeah. Somehow even though five years ago I said Oh yeah, like I decided to run an experiment where I'm Tried Scipionate with H C Gee sperm production online and just

1:28:01 Low dose and just see what's the minimal effective dose. Yeah. I'm not competing in any sports. Like I I don't think it makes that big of a difference, except in terms of recovery. I didn't change my training before after I went off and on again. Like Okay, so that's within the the male community in the women and peptides there's this other piece which is like who's getting plastic surgery and who's not. Nowadays the dermatologists

1:28:24 certainly in Los Angeles, but in Northern California too, recommend some amount of laser resurfacing to reduce cancer risk, but it also reduces wrinkle. So You know, like what are people doing? None of it is particularly natural. I think for competitive sports is where it becomes a an important issue. But I think that The

1:28:42 Pharma Grade GLP world. Made Sticking little tiny needles, thirty one gauge or thirty gauge needles into one skin to inject something just kind of like okay, no biggie. And I'll tell you the first person to

1:28:56 So Form a grade. Maybe compounded pharmacy. Peptide pens? where you just dial it in, it's not a syringe. People are much more comfortable with pens than they are with syringes.

1:29:06 They're gonna make a killing. So then there's like there are a bunch of other things like melanotan. Makes people tan, but it can make you way too tan, can cause prepism like permanent erection, which dangerously long erection, greatly increase. Libido. But keep in mind Vilecy is a FDA approved drug.

1:29:24 For Female hyposexuality. Lowers orgasmic threshold, stimulates libido. It also works in men. I've never tried it, but it also works in men. Sure. And I asked yeah, so I asked our uh as someone at uh at Stanford who's in Department of Urology. In Department of Urology, it's actually There are a lot of interesting drugs that are pro libido in

1:29:47 For men, but they'll never get marketed. Yeah. Because the idea of more men wanting more sex is just not something that society seems to want. Yeah. Yeah, although with the shift in kind of, you know, self hatred and you know One could argue kind of Diminish. Aspects of Mental and physical health. And then maybe some people would

1:30:05 really benefit from it. But Melanitan is yet another example. My view on the peptides thing is this. You do you, whoever you are, you decide what your risk thresholds are. But Just be logical about it. Why would you take BPC if you don't have an injury? It's not going to accelerate your recovery that much.

1:30:21 Certainly not as much as getting better sleep. So maybe you would think oh pineal, but Get your Relationship to light, correct? Get your relationship to caffeine correct. And

1:30:31 I have to say I've gotten great benefit from the Mag3Nate apigen and theanine stack. I don't think you need Pineal on until you've tried everything else and then Maybe try a supplement stack. Or even just one of those things.

1:30:46 And then if you still need it, then pinelin makes sense, but just leaping to pineal doesn't make sense given how little data there are. But there are some interesting drugs out there, too, like the Doras. Oh yeah. I'm taking Balsamer. Okay. Mostly because of the Alzheimer's it runs in my family. Super prevalent. Does it help your sleep? It does. I can end up feeling a bit groggy in the morning, but you could explain. I mean, I ended up

1:31:06 You know, chatting with as probably you did at some point, Matt Walker about this very knowledgeable It's still preliminary, but pretty Interesting. Like mechanistically. Yeah. In terms of clearance of Various

1:31:18 Goodies that you do not want in your brand. Yeah. At least as far as we know now. So Yeah, it's help with sleep. the daytime sort of morning grogginess can be a bit of a hassle. So I've been cycling on and off of it. I tried Quivivik once, which is one of the Dora's. got zombie sleep. I woke up in the same position I fell asleep in. I didn't feel rested even though I had slept through the night.

1:31:39 I'm just not gone to prescription tools for it, but Some people Seem to like prescription tools.

1:31:46 I think Incidentally there's a really nice Paper publishing Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. USA.

1:31:53 Showing that. Short meditations can increase glymphatic clearance in the daytime. This is very interesting, I think. That's cool. Yeah. Very cool. Like when you go into this. Meditative state, long exhales focusing on breathing, you know, meditation. More clearance of waste products from the brain during the meditation. And

1:32:10 increased, which is really interesting. So many people are care about their nighttime HR V. Best way to increase nighttime HRV. unless you don't have apnea or some other issue. Is to do some

1:32:22 Exhale, emphasize breathing practice during the day. Even just a few deliberate exhales during the day can increase nighttime HRV. So there seems to be this daytime, nighttime relationship, that's pretty cool. Interestingly, something for future research, but I've seen HRV changes post TMS. Oh interesting. Yeah, that makes it pretty fascinating to to check out. Yeah.

1:32:42 T M S. Sorry. I th I thought you were for a moment I heard TM because that was like I think I think Tim Ferris T M, I think to you know T well to probably both, right? Yeah. So yeah, the glimphatic stuff also is very intertwined with a lot of psychedelic science, not to bring us back to that, but like the gymphatic clearance is really fascinating. So I'd I'd love to check out that. We'll put it in the show notes so I'll get that from you. Yeah, very cool paper. The author sent it to me before it came out and I think it's just a really important finding. I go into a little bit in my book, but I it was a recent finding, so didn't have time to go into it too much. But

1:33:14 If everyone You needed another incentive to meditate. For a few minutes, that that's one. No, for the the peptide thing You know what's funny, I feel like

1:33:24 People feel safe enough to try them because they're enough like supplements. enough like drugs that they feel comfortable doing it. And you know, Sypionate sounds so scary. It's like okay, or GH sounds so scary, but There's a lot more data. And They're farm grade.

1:33:40 And Small dosages are always gonna be better than big dosages. And the fertility thing on anything that increases testosterone is very real. They've talked about inhalants and oral forms that don't disrupt fertility, but Anyone that wants To maintain fertility is gonna have to take H C

1:33:57 Well Taking that. Yeah. Post cycle therapy with clomet or something. But yeah. Yeah. So I think that The peptid thing is very interesting.

1:34:06 I get excited anytime the general public is thinking about biology and this I love a buds framework of You know, people are now mining the body for medicines. And maybe that's why People feel Like you'll see this.

1:34:19 criticisms and I and they're Understandable. Like oh all these people that wouldn't take a Prescription Drug. Will take these peptides. But I think that when people hear that something's of the body, even if it's a synthetic form of something of the body, they're more likely to take it.

1:34:34 Mm-hmm. And I can't quite relate to that psychology, but I sort of get it. I sort of get it. It's not some like Stardust thing. At the same time, you're not gonna see huge effects from any of these things except Perhaps

1:34:47 Pine on. That's still anecdotal. And the GLPs. Red true tight. Those have really robust effects. Everything else. B V C can have its potential role in healing for some people, but there are no trials. And by the way.

1:35:00 No one's gonna do a trial. And no one's gonna do it properly. I keep hearing, oh, there's gonna be a hamstring injury trial, there's gonna be No one wants to put the time and effort. And having run a clinical trial and having Done experiments and

1:35:12 Preclinical animal format for launch. It's a lot of work to do properly. You need to know what the endpoints are. So expensive. Who's gonna pay for it? Right. I just don't see it happening. I I think people are just gonna take the stuff. I think the big win for someone out there, someone With an entrepreneurial spirit is gonna be American made. Clean peptides with verified sourcing and all that. So people can trust what they're getting. Yeah. I've seen, as you might imagine, like a thousand different startups.

1:35:38 Trying to Producer on peptides or whatever it might be. The only one, I don't think I can talk about it yet, but the only one I backed is actually gonna be verifying supply chain and all of that. It's just a stamp of this is what it says it is on the box, basically. And it's interesting that Unlike anabolic steroids, which in the eighties and and in the nineties, and to some extent still today, but really in the eighties and nineties, where there were these Kind of outrageous adverse events.

1:36:03 People committing murders, massive acne, dying, you know, brain tumors and all which is The consequence of probably a bunch of things, G H and Show it. To my knowledge. There has not been

1:36:16 A reported adverse event that can be tacked back to One of these. Non FTA approved. Peptide.

1:36:24 And I'm not saying that means they're safe. But it's interesting that there are a lot of women. Taking them. There are a lot of men taking them. But there are a lot of women taking G H K copper. In cream form or injectable form.

1:36:36 If they're having adverse events. They're not reporting. So this is super important. I mean I think Yeah, there's a There's a book called Bad Science by Ben Goldaker, who's an MD from the UK. There are a number of chapters that are not relevant to US audience, but it's a helpful book for

1:36:53 Teaching yourself to think In a structured way, right, scientifically about Medicine? And I think what you said is really important in the sense that

1:37:04 Well let me use an analogy. Let's say we've got Honda Civic. Tons of Honda Civics. Man, they've been around a long time. Just to say cars. Okay, you got all this data on all these horrible accidents. You've got vehicular manslaughter, you've got all this stuff.

1:37:17 Pretty bad. Report card. Lots of deaths. And then you're like, but we've got this brand new Tron motorcycle. Fresh off the press.

1:37:25 Right. No documentated deaths. Right. Therefore it must be safe. And you're like, wait a second. Yep. Yep. That thing has not had a lot of mileage on it. Only one person has used it and um using a bit of an exaggerated example because, you know, this absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. And this is true also, again, not to sound like a broken record, but whether it's Grey market.

1:37:49 Retta. Or D I Y For research purposes only, peptide use or psychedelics, which still remain illegal in most places. There's no real reporting mechanism.

1:38:01 It's like if you have a doctor and they prescribe you something and they ask you, How's it going? And you're like I'm growing horns. Got hemorrhoids, whatever the side effects might be. I'm feeling really anxious. There is some means by which the feedback makes it back into the system. Right. And certainly with clinical trials and so on, you would hope that to be the case. So for me, it's like when I'm looking at these things, I'm like, all right, well They might be great.

1:38:25 But I feel some degree of reassurance and I'm not I haven't taken any anabolics in forever. Yeah, maybe if I were trying to have six kids, I'd be like, Yeah, let's do H C G Which does seem to have a pretty for me at least profound impact on libido, which is sometimes nice. H C Oh yeah. That's probably due to the fact just an opportunity to throw in perhaps something useful is the old lore was you Guys want high testosterone, low estrogen. You want your estrogen As high

1:38:50 as you can without getting side effects. For libido purposes. For And Ethelial Health. Cardio protective. Uh bone density. Guys that quash their they take

1:39:02 Tamoxifin or An astrazol that to quash their Estrogen levels? That is a mistake. They often find that they have reduced Libido.

1:39:11 They are sort of dry out. So to speak, they get more a vulnerability to injuries. Hardly anybody nowadays. Does testosterone replacement therapy with anastrazole.

1:39:21 Almost every person goes like I just feel better when I don't take it. Now guys are getting like gyno and like all sorts of things that you need to be careful, but For brain health, for libido, for all those things, H C G is gonna increase both of both testosterone and estrogen. And even for just sort of skin vitality look, you know, not something men talk about too often, but

1:39:40 If testosterone is too high and estrogen is low Skin doesn't look good. It d it just doesn't look good. It's it's the chicken skin. It's like a thin chicken skin. Heavy anabolic users, not known for their pretty skin. Not known for the pretty skin and

1:39:52 I think it's just really interesting that the Peptide thing. Is all the rage. To my knowledge, not a lot of adverse events that can be separated out from You know, I always hear like infected injection site. Okay, so use an alcohol swab, pin yourself carefully.

1:40:08 I just wanna Double click on that for a second because When people get cavalier with injections, it's like speaking to someone who from a professional ended up getting a staph infection in the elbow. Oh yeah, that's right. Take your hygiene seriously.

1:40:24 When it comes to injections. Don't I'm just looking at Don't run and gun and like behind the dumpster at the Denny's with no alcohol swap. Don't do that. Yeah, don't do that. Don't reuse needles. Don't dip back into the vial with a needle because you didn't get enough'cause it can contaminate the vial, like Use good practices. But You know, a lot of people think that moving to creams or to capsules is going to

1:40:48 Sell more peptides. Very interesting observation, I think, is that People want the injectables. It feels more real. Capsules feel more like supplements which are

1:41:00 A mixed bag. It's interesting, right? If I told you, okay, BPC and capsule form same as injectable. Yeah, yeah, but if I inject the injury side, it just kinda feels like more is going on. This is where placebo effect may Actually be real or It may be that the capsule forms are not as good.

1:41:15 Also I mean, we're getting in the weeds here, but Just because something is oral also doesn't mean it's safer than injectable. Right. Because you look at like anadrol fifty versus injectable test sipionate. It's like if you're smashing your liver. Right. You can do a lot of damage. Oh, absolutely. So I don't think people should run around doing anabolics. I by all means. I certainly the number of guys in their like twenties, thirties, and even forties that think that they need it. It's not necessarily so one thing that I think Would be wonderful. I'm very excited about this.

1:41:45 It would be wonderful for the overall field, but for supplementation in particular. Blood work has gotten relatively inexpensive now. Number companies. They brought the cost of blood testing way down. People are now comfortable having someone take their blood and sending them

1:41:59 The blood work. So there's a sociology to this, there's a a shift. Wouldn't it be wonderful? To get your blood work done.

1:42:06 And then I envision like a three D printed blister pack with your morning and your afternoon or your morning and nighttime supplements that are Tailored to your blood work. Three months later

1:42:17 You take you do your blood work again. And you get to see whether or not markers are moving into range. Better. Update. The three D printing.

1:42:24 ideally pharma grade that's how supplementation should be done. And I'm excited for that possibility, and that's much more my focus now. At least in terms of this kind of stuff. A lot of different foci. But in terms of

1:42:39 injectables and pills and things like that, then thinking about what's happening with peptides because the the legislation is changing constantly. you know, next administration could come in, whoever that happens to be, it could all get revamped. It's not a wild west, but it it's just not a well defined field yet. Oh, I think it's pretty wild. That's just my my two cents. Yeah. I'm very conservative with this stuff these days. Maybe I'm just getting old and boring. I don't know.

1:43:02 I think as I've gotten older, I have just Whether it's through the literature or Maybe being on the receiving ends of a lot of anecdotal reports of adverse events for various things, I'm just like, man, there's such a Typical lack of reporting. Mm-hmm. In

1:43:20 wide population adverse events. Yep. That I'm like, man. You just gotta measure twice and cut once, indefinitely. And if I can pick something it has fifty or a hundred years of research where I know with some certainty what the adverse events R and the probability of those adverse events.

1:43:37 Versus the latest and greatest thing where it's like, Yeah, I fly down to Honduras and have this Gene therapy and hope it goes well. I'm like ah Yeah, the gene therapy thing is not ready, in my opinion. You know, we have a colleague in the health who got an injection of stem cells into his spine and ended up with paralysis and almost died. Yeah, terrible. And grateful to the neurosurgeons at UCSF. Shout out to

1:44:00 Share of nerve surgery. Eddie, who didn't do the surgery, but one of his surgeons in his department did, and that injected with stem cells person is now mobile and healthy and strong, but it was a really close call. I know I actually got a call during the surgery about how it was going. This was a

1:44:16 Really good example of how Even with Attempted best practices and stem cell injections, there's always the potential for Local infection and rejection. Let me give it one more. Not to be like the old guy who's can't deal with the young weapersnappers, but Well the goal nowadays is to be the old guy. Well here's the thing. Also there's mechanical risk in the sense that

1:44:36 I've had stem cell injections from like the most Vetted at every step of the process. Stem cells. from young donors. I won't go into all the details, but like Very, very well vetted.

1:44:49 And involving US doctors. And uh The doctor happened to have, well, I don't know if he was busy, preoccupied, distracted, but a little sloppy technique on trying to give me stem cells around the medial collateral ligament. and injected my fat pad in the knee and made a bunch of structural damage and my knee was fucked. And like still

1:45:11 Like this is A year or two later. have residual pain in my knee. That is from physical damage with the needle. So it's like depending on what you're doing, if it's intraarticular or you're getting in there. It's not a foregone conclusion that

1:45:25 It's gonna be a smooth ride. And this is someone with thousands of injections. Like they have the mileage. And this is, as far as I can tell, talking to other orthos and people who do similar injections, like it's a routine injection, like the path of injection is very well established. None the less. Off day.

1:45:41 Smash. blew up to the size of a volleyball the next day. Helen Blau's lab at Stanford. School medicine had a beautiful paper. Where they have mouse data and human data.

1:45:52 Inhibiting a specific molecule, I don't recall which and you could regrow cartilage in the knee. That's clearly headed off. to clinical trials and Pharma. But the effects that were demonstrated were incredible.

1:46:06 There's an active inhibitor of cartilage regrowth and apparently you can inhibit the inhibitor and Bring cartilage. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Again, mining the body. Or its own.

1:46:15 quote unquote medicines. I mean none of this stuff was supposed to happen naturally. And so we've been kind of pushing and prodding from the outside. Taking things. plant derivatives that mimic neurotransmitters. You know, Silcide is just one example, but All these drug company is

1:46:30 Bioprospect from plants. Learn that from Chris McCurdy, the expert on Kratum. And It's Cool. It's really cool. I think I think medicine's On the fast track. And I'm

1:46:39 Super excited about AI as a tool for Self directed. Medical exploration, not necessarily for Deciding which peptides to take, but maybe. But in terms of people

1:46:51 Trying to figure out like Hey, am I taking anything that might make my autoimmune condition worse? You know, I have a friend, he's got MS and Takes a bunch of things, eats a bunch of things. You know. Turns out certain forms of mustard can

1:47:04 Flare up. M S. Not everybody, but yeah. AI can Look at your food intake, look at your habits, look at

1:47:12 supplementation, make recommendations and That's super powerful. And I just feel like AI is is gonna be an incredible medical tool, not just in terms of its ability to outperform physicians or aid physicians.

1:47:27 But for people to really understand their blood work and understand the trajectories of their Sleep scores and all this stuff like I'm Very, very exciting. Then again, I'm born and raised in Silicon Valley.

1:47:38 So I'm not thinking about the dystopian view of AI robots. you know, a robot's taking over. I'm thinking about People having more information and agency. I mean right now for me right now the most interesting application of the LMs is for health purposes. I mean it's remarkable. I have friends who

1:47:54 have the best doctors you can imagine, the most expensive folks you can conceive of, and they've still caught stuff because no one's gonna take your health as seriously as you are. Normal, even if they take it seriously, will they have the time that you will dedicate to it. And they've uploaded their genomes, added in the various bits and bobs from wearables and taking PDFs of labs and throwing them in and found very, very Material. insights that had not surfaced earlier.

1:48:25 In decades. It's not one person. It's not two people. This is at least four or five people I can think of. who have all the means, all the time, all the interest in, yet it took these LLMs as a data dump. And the ability to

1:48:39 of those LMs to mine everything and to look for interrelated components. to surface these In their case is actionable insights. And it's early. This is Top of the first, right? It's early for these things. So they're just gonna get better.

1:48:54 It is just gonna get better. And one thing that Eddie Chang. This incredible neurosurgeon who studies speech and language at uh U C SF. Yeah, and I've known him since I was seven, and he's just this phenom. What he pointed out to me is like you know, all the

1:49:09 L L Ms, they're all trained on the internet. Like right now AI is trained on the internet. It's not like trained on human brain activity. The next big step is Recording your brain activity non invasively, ideally. And

1:49:22 Building some AI tools from your brain activity. Like what's going on when you're in your most focused mode? What does that look like? What does it look like if you take uh hundred milligrams of a given stimulant? What's your brain activity look like? Are there ways that you could Modify your pharmacology and behavior and sleep and All that too.

1:49:39 Really Get your brain activity. working the way you want. And so the real holy grail of AI, he tells me, is AI built on neural.

1:49:49 Activity. not based on the internet, which is just it's the output of our neural activity. And I of course that occurred to me, but it hadn't occurred to me in that form. And He and others are developing these ways of

1:50:01 reading from the nervous system, you know. Right now, you mentioned wearables. Whether it's a whoop or it's an aura, it's your eight sleep, it's Measuring heart rate. and body motion mainly.

1:50:11 accelerometers, HR V. By the way, the HR V is They reflection of how often that descending branch of the Vegas slows your heart rate down. That's what it is.

1:50:22 So every time you You know, you're increasing HR V, you're slowing your That's the Vagal reflection. In your

1:50:30 Whoop score in your Sleep score from your aura. HRV is bat. While that's great, that's not a direct readout of your autonomic nervous system. That's heart rate.

1:50:40 Okay. Well That's a start. But what about direct read of the autonomic nervous system? Wow. What about a little sticker that can record non invasively?

1:50:51 the number of nerve impulses traveling up a branch of the vagus. Lot of them travel really superficially behind the ears. What about a non invasive Brain stimulator that looks like a baseball cap. You know, a few years ago there were things like Halo, which were designed to ramp up neural activity, accelerate plasticity. I don't know how good or bad the data were, but It didn't really stick.

1:51:10 To be honest. Writing to the nervous system, writing to the body. That's where it's at. And I think everyone who's thinking about AI seems to be also be thinking about that. the not so well kept secret.

1:51:23 Among the big AI companies, if you notice, like a lot of them are starting to acquire biotech companies. There's an interest in biotech. I don't think it's about Advanced search engines. Per se I think it's about how are we gonna control our own neural activity and brain states and bodily states.

1:51:39 I'm certain that's where it's all headed. So what's gonna be the first thing to break through? There have been a number of things that have commercial vagal stimulators to try and calm people down. They haven't worked that well.

1:51:50 I'm gonna piss some people off there, but like they're kinda weak sauce. Most most of them are garbage. Yeah, most of them are garbage. They don't actually stimulate The Vegas nerve, most of them. Right. Or to do it specifically enough or robustly, totally agree. I think a really interesting place is if we look at sleep. Sleep states and measuring sleep states has gotten really good. Even with just heart rate and body motion.

1:52:12 And now like with something like H Sleep. Using AI, it's making temperature adjustments for you. This would be amazing to have for waking states. Like let's just say during the course of this conversation, the room was dynamically changing in temperature, the seat was changing a little bit. I don't know, maybe my Vegas was being stimulated a little bit just to keep me in whatever zone was optimal for this. It would just figure it out. AI would just figure it out. I think that

1:52:36 The big first use of writing to the nervous system is going to be For sleep. And I'll just Give you a

1:52:43 Three examples. First are is a study where They looked at rocking of a bed, a mechanical slow rocking of a bed, and how that improves sleep, and it's remarkable. How much it accelerates the transition into sleep, how deep people's Sleep gets, et cetera.

1:52:58 They also did that study. How fast people need to walk back and forth while rocking their baby. Turns out a certain number of paces. There's a paper I can send you the reference in in cell reports. Turns out Karen's figure out the ideal pace. And I forget how many hurts it is, you know, it it very closely mimics what the the bedrocking needs to be.

1:53:16 So you go, Okay, what is all this? Like is okay, we were born in water. No. Yeah, then that's not what it's about. That's from a sound ceremony. No disrespect to the sound ceremonies. Been to some pretty cool sound ceremonies. Thing About this is in order to fall asleep. You need to forget your body position.

1:53:34 Huge. Important step in falling asleep. And it turns out That there's a way to do this. There's this crazy eye movement thing that was published in Readers Digest some time ago.

1:53:45 And went kind of viral, even though viral wasn't. Around then? Where they told people to fall make themselves fall asleep by Closing their eyes and slowly moving their eyes to one side. than the other side.

1:53:56 Then Counterclockwise and clockwise. Then kind of crossing their eyes and looking at their nose and then doing a long exhale. What in the world is this? I've tried this. Yes, you generally find yourself waking up the next morning. It's wild.

1:54:12 But the really cool thing happened when there are a couple of guys at MIT reached out and they're like, Hey, we've got this sleep mask. We'd love for you to try it. It measures REM directly by looking at eye movements. And it can induce sleep in under six minutes. How? Like oh it creates With stimulation behind the ears.

1:54:30 It can stimulate eye movements. And you forget your body position, you fall asleep. So the eyes are linked to the vestibular system. Through to control retinal slip. There's this whole thing like, you know, like pitch, yaw, and roll. Do you move through space, you need to stabilize images on the retina, so your cerebellum and your

1:54:46 Vestibular ocular. Pathways there's a couple of synapses in between. I'm very familiar with this because this is like what my lab used to work on. F significant portion of time. We like figuring out figure out which retinal cells and which targets in the brain stem and on and on. Anyway flocculus of the cerebellum, but this

1:55:02 I'm asking is really cool. You put it on. I have no relationship to this company. I think they they sort of approached me, but I didn't do anything with them. But I think it's just really, really cool. Put the eye mask on and You feel a little twitch behind your ear, you adjust it down so you don't feel it anymore. What's wild is your eyes just start moving. Oh I feel like that would keep me up. I guess maybe you get used to it after night or take it makes you feel very sick.

1:55:25 So there's also a relationship between certain eye movements and overall arousal state. This stuff I don't want to call it crude. But this is the first foray into writing to the nervous system to induce a brain state. And what I love about it is it's so objective. Like if you try this thing, I again I'm not selling this thing, but if you were to try this thing, you're like, This didn't really help me.

1:55:45 Yeah, I want my money back guarantee. You're good. Whereas Алада стаффор пластиці, фокус. Kinda subjective. And it's subject to the placebo effect.

1:55:55 So I think sleep I've been the first place where reading from the nervous system has been really prominent with auras and whoops and eight sleeps and things of that sort. I think Sleep is also gonna going to be the place where writing to the nervous system is gonna happen first.

1:56:09 Let's talk about writing in a different way. You are a podcast native. And yeah. the author of the upcoming book. Protocols an operating manual for the human body. What should people expect?

1:56:23 In the book. Yeah. So an introduction that defines how to use the book. I've always liked those how to use this book. My backstory. And The

1:56:33 energetic drive, the spiritual drive behind wanting to do a book. that teaches science and is about health and well being and performance. People can skip it or they can read it. Doesn't really matter. To me. The first chapter is all about sleep. So you're gonna learn the science of sleep and you'll learn

1:56:49 The various protocols from most important, most effective Two still effective, but lesser. Important Protocols for sleep and Most importantly, why they work.

1:57:00 Based on the science you just learned. Then a chapter on exercise defines the program we talked about, also a section on mobility. Um A lot of people talk about walking in steps but kind of really identifies what's needed there, what the science actually says.

1:57:14 a section on cardiovascular exercise and how to structure that. Again, the goal being Yes, I think that program will work exceptionally well for anybody. But the principles to fall out of it are not

1:57:26 You need to do this class or that class. Once a week get your heart rate as close to maxed out as you can in a controlled, safe way. Once a week, do this. Okay. And why and what the benefits are, what the science says. The part about resistance training was also a lot of fun to really dig into the Now excellent science that's been done about What actually triggers hypertrophy and strain? Turns out you can do anywhere from five to 30 repetitions as long as you take them to failure and still get the same hypertrophy results. But then you have to be practical.

1:57:51 Step back and go like am I gonna do 30 reps of bicep curls? Maybe, but I'm I'm gonna do thirty reps of squats to failure. Well, those first 20. You know, people don't often acknowledge that if you haven't tried that, have fun. Yeah, exactly. And it's very hard to keep perfect form with high repetitions. It's actually easier to do with moderate to heavy weights. Heavy for The individual that is. Third chapter is about stress and stress mitigation. That was a fun one because that's

1:58:15 was an active area of my lab. For a long time. The next chapter is about light. Talking about how LEDs are not necessarily a problem.

1:58:25 Can't get incandescence anymore, but if you're not getting enough long wavelength light, Now that's problematic for a number of things related to mitochondrial health. Retinal health. Is long wave light. A decent way to think of. Natural light.

1:58:37 The sun is full spectrum, everything from UV all the way up to red. Near infrared. And infrared. The heat from the sun being infrared. When the sun is low in the sky, you're gonna glean more of the long wavelength light and less UV.

1:58:51 Because of something called relay scattering, that's why the sun appears more yellow or orange when it's low in the sky. The goal really is to get as much long wavelength light. It's the high quality protein of light. without getting too much UV. You need some UV. The challenge is in the middle of the day when the sun is overhead, you're gonna get full spectrum light, but you're gonna get too much many people get too much UV.

1:59:11 Now there's the controversial people like oh, you know The more sunlight you get, the longer you live. Time of day that you get your sunlight is important, not just for setting of circadian clocks, but for other things. I also talk about how long wavelength light can actually penetrate through your a t shirt like yours, go all the way through your body. And Because long wavelength I

1:59:29 is absorbed by water. It actually is absorbed in the portions of your cells That enhance Movement. On the electron chain. in mitochondria.

1:59:39 This notion that we are batteries is Kinda true. If you ever go snorkeling, you'll notice after about Ten feet or so. The red fish disappear.

1:59:47 They didn't disappear, right? The red was absorbed in the top. meters of water. And actually a lot of animals and fish will come up to the surface because there's a lot of Interesting nutrients happening. Long wavelength light bounces off greenery.

2:00:00 If you were to put infrared goggles on during the daytime, you'd just the greenery's just reflecting long wavelength like like crazy. Which is weird because it's green, which means it should be absorbing the long wavelength light. I talk a little bit about light and electromagnetic energy. in a way that should be accessible to people. So that chapter was like a thr like the so much fun. I kn haven't thought about the sun that way in a long time. But the goal is for people to understand the difference between red light therapy

2:00:25 If you're under a lot of You know, LED lights are in front of screens at night, why it's important to try and get some sunlight during the day to offset some of that, not just because of the sleep effects. But what you don't want is a lot of shortwave LED light. without long wavelength like

2:00:41 in your twenty four hour cycle. Daylight cycle. Can lead to myopia. Lengthening the eyeball, which means the image focuses to the front of the retina. So why people wear corrective lenses.

2:00:51 And a few other things about the relationship between light on the skin and hormone production and why that's helpful and longevity. Okay. Then chapter six. is about neuroplasticity learning and ways to increase alertness and I go through it all. All the behavioral tools.

2:01:08 The pharmacology, I talk about Adderall Sinosi, I talk about how throughout history people have, since they discovered it, have found ways to get caffeine and nicotine into their system. They will not quit doing this. I talked about the relative benefits and risks of these different things, delivery mechanisms. And I talk about The real science of neuroplasticity. And That of course is an old

2:01:29 Love of mine and wheelhouse of mine. So to really Talk about what it takes to do I call learning belt. Like if you're gonna sit down and do something hard. I mean I think that's what the writing of the book was for me is the way I described it is The need to experience that internal friction. And how important that is not just for the relief of when it's over.

2:01:47 But how important that is for brain longevity. And I really hope people will take it upon themselves to learn something new. I know you this was a active area for you, you know, learning tango, learning kickboxing, learning So many things to cook and Just the the incredible value of that for

2:02:02 Life enrichment, but also for brain health and longevity. Even multilingualism is correlated, to be clear. Correlated. to longer health span. There's some really interesting stuff out there.

2:02:13 So yeah, keep learning. There's an Instagram page, I'll find it. I Discovered it in the wee hours of Travel. I gotta find this kid's name. All he does is he

2:02:23 Takes three days to learn things from complete beginner. to extreme performer of like one thing, like the hardest clarinet song, and then you see him start at the beginning, he's all Excuse me, I'm spitting every over. That's what he did too. And then at the end, he's like playing this clarinet. So he's like, Yes. Or Can he do like juggling a soccer ball? Can you do that for like a hundred kicks and then kick it into the bass, like and like swish it. And like he just shows how if you just completely pour yourself into things, you can learn this stuff.

2:02:49 But the range of things that he's doing is like totally outrageous. And he's not I don't know him, but If he had faked one of them, I might music, sport All sorts of like cool cool stuff. Yeah, give us the handle. Yeah, this kid is so he's just

2:03:06 He's got that energy. It reminds me a lot of your experiments in neuroplasticity you're like I'm gonna play a drum solo in front of a ton of people like put the pressure on and I it's just so cool. And then the last chapter. had a hard time titling because it's not about

2:03:20 relationships. I thought about calling it relationship to self. It's really about personal development, like how to structure all the information that's out there and it and I It has a number of things. It has a section on how to navigate grief based on the science and practices of navigating grief, which those practices Just even the understanding of what grief is, this remapping.

2:03:40 Of our understanding of what's actionable and what's not. It really is an activation of the reward circuitry that can't be fulfilled. It's like as if I was dying of thirst and I'm trying to reach for this and I can't get it. That's what grief really is. It's the Occasionally I'll get a call from my graduate advisor.

2:03:56 who passed, was very close to it from her daughter, she uses her phone number and it still comes up as her mom's name. And there's this moment where I'm like, Oh and you feel this sink. I love talking to her daughter. She actually became a neuroscientist. But Grief is this.

2:04:09 perpetual feeling of like, oh like I can't smell the person or the thing, like I can't There are their glasses, and I can't do any this is this yearning piece. and how that needs to remap and that the kind of work that we can actually do. To

2:04:25 in a healthy way remap that grief circuitry and then How The notion of somebody that we lost or a pet, perhaps. Gets reframed in our mind as an not. actionable now, but we still have a relationship with

2:04:37 And concept and it's a To me that was an important thing to include. But the big one for me was There seems to be this. contradiction in the self help literature and psychology, which is about half of the stuff you see.

2:04:49 is like get after it, like suck it up, fulfill your roles in life. Don't be a lazy piece of shit. Exercise. And then the other half is like Don't Just do and drift from yourself, your true self, your core self, your essential self.

2:05:03 Many years ago I could have really used This chapter. That was basically it. It was like I could have used all the chapters. I had sleep issues, so I Could've used that chapter, I could have used the stress chapter. All of it. A lot of the science wasn't known to this book would have been impossible.

2:05:17 But When Jim Hollis, this incredible Jungian psychoanalyst, came on the podcast, and he was eighty four years old then, eighty-six now, and I expected him to talk about Essential self and heart's desire, he wrote Under Saturn shadow on the

2:05:33 Healing and trauma of men. He also wrote The Eden Project about relationships and the struggle of relationships. And Romantic relationships and I expected him to give me the all this kind of high level stuff, deep heartfelt. So and he basically nailed it.

2:05:47 He said you have to Shut up. Suit up. And show up. And I go, Okay, that sounds like kind of boomer advice. He goes, No, but it's not what you think.

2:05:56 He's like Stop complaining, somebody's definitely suffering more than you. That one's about gratitude. So it's not Exactly shut up. It's Be grateful for something.

2:06:07 You're alive. You have to get to that level when you're suffering. Cool. It ratchets out from there. There's a lot of data on gratitude as we know. Then there's suit up. We have to be prepared.

2:06:19 Like we need to learn to prepare ourselves. It's not just about clean your room. I mean that too, but But like we have to prepare ourselves to show up. We have to get into a headspace. We have to develop processes that allow us to show up in our different roles. And then we need to show up for those roles. We need to fulfill roles. You know, I done a lot of role fulfillment in my life, you know, as you have too. And

2:06:37 Super important like if somebody is adrift, like we have to do this. And he explains how critical this is to our psyche, how critical it is to our feelings of self worth. And then he also has this other thing about How? critically important it is to ideally once a day.

2:06:52 But at least a few times a week. to get out of the stimulus and response that is you know, shut up, suit up, show up. And really touch into What's true for you, like what he calls your heart's desires. This was more of the Hollis that I expected.

2:07:06 And How just quieting the mind. not feeling like you have to do anything in that moment. allows things to come up from your unconscious that lets you really ask yourself. And he used these examples like Is the forty year marriage I've been in really the one I want to be in?

2:07:22 I made the example of like how beautiful is that? People say And he's like Yeah, but there are a lot of people who And life after these long marriages and then like I don't really want to be in it. The the tragedy of that, right? And

2:07:34 how much better it would have been that people can identify who they really are, what they really want, like really touch into what's important to them. It's like shit. This sounds so simple and yet That's hard work.

2:07:46 Yeah. Simple, not easy. Simple, not easy, and how important it is to do both. And I thought, well, this chapter might be boringly simple. But That's the important work and You could take any number of different self-help books and kind of bin them into those or different chapters into those.

2:08:04 So the book. Again, protocols. Easy to remember. Protocols and operating manual for the human body. The Update. September fifteen. September fifteenth.

2:08:13 And I think most people will know at this point, but where should people find More about Doctor Huberman. Oh thanks. If you put Huberman Lab into the internet.

2:08:24 You'll probably see some stuff that's not true, and you'll probably also find a website called Huberman Lab, where we have AI links to episodes. And You know, the book is gonna be wherever You know scale or stuff. You can find the book. And um the human lab site is actually I have to say the team has done a great job with that.

2:08:41 It'll take you to specific time stamps. If you want to know about like Dopamine an exercise will take you to those specific time stamps. I'm I'm really proud of the team. They put up with me while writing this book and all the rest and

2:08:53 Yeah, I mean I'm I'm out there and I also m Really excited about the young upstarts who are Coming for our jobs and You can have mine. Andrew's gonna fight it out with you guys. I'm not gonna fight it out. I saw what when you watch the Dean Potter movie, you will realize why it is a bad idea.

2:09:09 To try and Prevent the Person coming up the ladder, don't kick out the rungs behind you. And in his case, especially if that person is Alex Honald, you're gonna lose. Andrew, great to see you as always. Thanks for taking the time, man. Thank you. I have tremendous respect and admiration for you. I

2:09:26 Don't think I'd be podcasting or here at all were it not for you and I'm a fan. I consider you a friend. I'm very, very, very grateful to you. Thank you for everything you're doing. Yeah, we should break bread at some point while I'm in this neck of the planet. And for everybody watching. Ha ha As always, Tim.blog slash podcast, Cuberman, just look for the most recent. You'll be able to find all the links. We will have a lot of links to studies to MIT I masks we're gonna have, if they exist. I'm not even sure. They do, actually. I think they're a small company, but yeah. For sure. So we'll link to everything. You can find it there. And as per usual.

2:10:00 Until next time. Be a bit kinder. Then is necessary. Two others. Dramatic flourish with the eyeglasses back on, but also to yourself.

2:10:08 And until next time. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps gadgets gizmas all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short

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