The Tucker Carlson Show - September 08, 2026


The Megyn Kelly Show: Andrew Huberman on Practical Wellness Tips, the Danger of "If Only" Thinking, and "Protocols" For Life


Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 6 minutes

Words per minute

189.91

Word count

24,050

Sentence count

1,115

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

18

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends over at the Tucker Carlson show. Great to talk to you all. It's me, Megan Kelly.
00:00:05.280 And today we are bringing you an interview that I just did with Andrew Huberman. We did it on
00:00:11.040 the Megan Kelly show. It was a fascinating conversation about how to improve your sleep,
00:00:16.140 your health, your stress levels. We even cover nicotine, a favorite of Tucker's and maybe some
00:00:21.900 of yours and so many tips on how to live a better life. If you want to check out more, head on over
00:00:27.020 to The Megyn Kelly Show podcast feed and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts for free. There
00:00:32.660 you'll find our daily coverage of news, politics, true crime, legal issues, cultural stories,
00:00:37.720 and more. And enjoy, for now, this conversation with Andrew Huberman.
00:00:43.760 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We've got a first-time guest
00:00:48.560 on the show today, Dr. Andrew Huberman. He's a neuroscientist, Stanford professor,
00:00:54.340 and host of the hugely popular Huberman Lab podcast.
00:00:58.240 He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles
00:01:00.980 in top scientific journals
00:01:02.280 and delivered more than 100 invited research
00:01:04.880 and keynote seminars around the world.
00:01:07.400 He's had a fascinating life
00:01:08.600 and provided guidance on how to live better
00:01:11.200 to millions of fans and followers,
00:01:13.800 but he's never written a book until now.
00:01:16.900 His new book is called Protocols,
00:01:19.480 an Operating Manual for the Human Body,
00:01:21.960 And it's available right now for pre-order. It's out later this month. And it is a guide
00:01:27.600 to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimizing bodily health and physical
00:01:33.920 performance, and rewiring your nervous system to learn new skills and behaviors even that could
00:01:39.680 positively transform your life. Don't miss a moment. Subscribe to this show on YouTube and
00:01:47.520 follow me on Insta, Facebook, and X. Our sponsor, the Electronic Payments Coalition, says Washington
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00:01:59.280 They say your credit card and the security it offers are under attack and that Senators Dick
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00:02:34.840 at guardyourcard.com and consider telling Congress to guard your card. Andrew, welcome to the show.
00:02:41.520 Thanks so much for having me. Great. Great to finally meet you. I'll be here virtually.
00:02:47.100 Yeah, same. It's a pleasure. I'm a big fan and I've learned a lot from you over the years,
00:02:51.580 just from clips and from your show. So this is a thrill. And I'm loving the chance to get to talk
00:02:57.500 to you about you before we kick off the health and other advice. So you're a California boy.
00:03:04.720 I am.
00:03:05.180 Right. Grew up in California. And it, it seems like from the book, you, you had sort of an
00:03:12.900 idyllic first 14 years and the family had dinner together every night. And that's so important to
00:03:18.640 one's mental health and wellbeing. And then something happened in your family that gets
00:03:23.780 downplayed by a lot of people is really not that relevant to a child's mental health,
00:03:28.540 but it is relevant and it was life-changing for you. And that was your parents' divorce.
00:03:33.340 yeah i did have a quite idyllic life my dad's a scientist um my mom's a writer and uh you know
00:03:41.720 and along with my sister we had dinner together every night i in my home there wasn't a lot of
00:03:46.920 discussion about sports but i certainly got to hear a lot about the luminaries of science and
00:03:51.320 ideas from my dad we always shared that my mom has a real love of literature obviously and
00:03:57.960 I have a close relationship with my sister and everything was pretty fantastic and um and then
00:04:03.720 you know I was born in 1975 so divorce wasn't as common uh back when but when I about at age 14 uh
00:04:11.440 they separated and got divorced so this happens a lot nowadays as we know unfortunately um look I
00:04:17.960 love my parents uh everyone did the best they could with what they had and um uh but it was a
00:04:23.060 high conflict situation. And, you know, as, as things played out, I found myself, um, disengaging
00:04:30.520 from academics, disengaging from, um, kind of standard, uh, social milieu of school. I went to
00:04:37.160 a very, very, very good public school, uh, in South Palo Alto. Uh, keep in mind at this time,
00:04:42.260 uh, Palo Alto wasn't the Palo Alto that is now, you know, of.com and tech fame, but most of the
00:04:47.420 kids there were the children of academics or engineers or something like that. And, uh, we
00:04:51.660 were we were well enough off i wouldn't say we were like at the high end of the wealth scale or
00:04:56.740 low end we were you know uh the focus on in our house was on love and ideas and but what happened
00:05:02.200 was in response to that and i regret this and i encourage all kids of divorced parents uh high or
00:05:08.500 low conflict situations to you know keep keep studying keep doing your homework and stay engaged
00:05:13.000 in school sports and activities like what happened for me was i i um ended up organizing my life
00:05:20.740 around basically skateboarding and hanging out with skateboarders because back in the late 80s
00:05:24.960 and early 90s, that's where all the feral kids went. And I talk about this a little bit at the
00:05:31.380 beginning of the book, even though it's not the main focus of the book. What was really great was
00:05:35.360 in that community, there were a bunch of kids whose parents were not engaged in their lives
00:05:40.180 much, right? That was the unifying theme. That's why we skateboarded because you didn't need your
00:05:44.060 parents to come to baseball or soccer practice. But there's a ton of creativity. A lot of those
00:05:49.480 people went on to create big brands like DC. I knew those kids that started DC, that started all
00:05:55.220 these big brands. And some kids got sponsored and turned pro, others got really into drugs and
00:06:01.400 alcohol and destroyed their lives. And so, you know, it was a very interesting time for me being
00:06:06.180 completely free, getting exposed to a lot of things way too early, in my opinion, looking back,
00:06:12.280 a lot of exposure to violence, drugs and sex that frankly, as a 14 year old, you know, I shouldn't
00:06:18.480 been exposed to but i was witness to a ton of great skateboarding i unfortunately was not a
00:06:22.800 great skateboarder but fortunately by virtue of getting injured a lot i started foraging for other
00:06:28.000 things to do and eventually mainly because of a high school girlfriend who went off to college
00:06:32.480 and i didn't want to be away from her i found my way back to academics and somewhere in along the
00:06:39.280 way i took a course in neuroscience at the time there wasn't a field of neuroscience but it was
00:06:44.960 one truly amazing teacher his name was harry carlisle who taught me about brain function and
00:06:50.800 taught me about these neurochemicals in the brain that control things like anxiety uh depression
00:06:56.000 addiction and i'd witnessed a lot of that and i thought to myself this is the coolest thing ever
00:07:02.560 especially when i learned about neuroplasticity which is you know this organ that we have in our
00:07:06.560 head is unlike all the other organs of the the body in that it can deliberately change itself
00:07:11.360 we can learn new things we can have a new emotional relationship to things and so as my life went on i
00:07:17.760 pursued a career in science eventually became a a tenured professor at stanford ran a research lab
00:07:22.560 for a long time i still teach at stanford um and fell in love with all of that but it was really
00:07:28.320 this kind of merge of the hard things that i had seen and experienced plus the understanding that
00:07:34.080 there's this incredible organ in our brains that we don't really understand that much about at least
00:07:38.240 not back then but now we understand enough to make really great choices including to you know
00:07:44.460 i i think you know even though the discussion about things like psychedelics and things of
00:07:49.060 that sort are very interesting uh for therapeutic purposes that i think because the young brain is
00:07:54.640 so plastic that all kids would benefit from frankly staying away from that this isn't a you
00:08:00.520 know anti-drug campaign that i'm on but you know that the the developing brain is so fragile and
00:08:06.080 so susceptible to um it's both chemical and environmental inputs and i i will stand on firm
00:08:12.740 ground and say that uh while i understand that in some cases it may be necessary that uh you know
00:08:19.420 having two parents at home and and them getting along uh and working through things together i
00:08:26.040 love my parents i don't hold any grudge whatsoever but i i think it's it's clear now from the data
00:08:31.460 that's enormously helpful to a child's development.
00:08:35.560 So no regrets.
00:08:36.360 It all worked out for me.
00:08:37.580 But there was a high friction road along the way.
00:08:40.140 And I thank science, an amazing teacher, and then others who came along,
00:08:45.120 plus the love of science and a care for the world that my father and mother put into me.
00:08:51.240 So I'm grateful to them, too.
00:08:52.420 I love them, pray for them and with them, and life is good.
00:08:58.060 So I only look back with fondness, but it was it was rocky.
00:09:03.760 Yeah, I mean, I my own take on it and having read the book is I don't think you'd be doing what you're doing if you hadn't gone through that trauma, that traumatic period and been exposed to as many stressors as you were.
00:09:15.580 Clearly, it lit something inside of you that needed addressing, needed healing, needed some sort of attention.
00:09:21.740 And like most people who have had some trauma in their past, whether you've made progress on it or not, I think most of us spend the rest of our lives in some way trying to solve it, address it, heal it, or make it better for others who we can see coming up behind us who have similar issues.
00:09:39.980 So, I mean, I would argue that this book, Protocols, is a direct result of all that you went through.
00:09:47.320 And thank you.
00:09:48.240 And thanks to your parents, in a way, because as a result, we have such good advice in here.
00:09:52.780 I do want to spend one minute on this was such a sad thing.
00:09:56.600 So you mentioned Professor Carlisle, who became such a mentor to you.
00:10:01.260 And this is an important person in your life.
00:10:03.680 And ultimately, he dies by suicide?
00:10:07.020 side yeah so I I you know I don't give people the impression that the that the book is entirely dark
00:10:13.260 it's a story about lightness and what you can do to better your your your abilities in sleep and
00:10:19.380 stress mitigation all these things but I touch on the the science of grief and and how to get through
00:10:25.080 things in a healthy way and mental health um and you know along my path what I saw was the following
00:10:33.240 A lot of the kids I grew up with and with this amazing community of skateboarders, I saw some flourish.
00:10:40.400 I saw others succumb to addiction.
00:10:43.320 I saw some succumb to mental health issues.
00:10:46.400 And as I went into science, I incorrectly thought, oh, you know, what's going to happen is that scientists are all going to be super healthy.
00:10:54.840 Right. These are people who understand the brain.
00:10:57.700 And as a consequence of understanding the brain and biology, I naively thought that they would be immune to a lot of the problems that this other community had.
00:11:09.140 And I found quite the opposite.
00:11:10.880 So there were three things that happened along the way for me that really motivated me further to write the book Protocols, to have a podcast where we talk about health, where I teach about what we do and don't know about the brain and how people can benefit.
00:11:24.200 it. And the first one really was these childhood, these observations from my teen years. The next
00:11:31.520 observation was that this guy, Harry Carlyle, who understood mental health, depression, disease,
00:11:38.220 suicidality as chemical issues, for whatever reason, I eventually, you know, was able to fill
00:11:45.580 in some of the pieces, took his own life in a pretty dramatic fashion. And that told me something,
00:11:51.000 I was close friends with his wife and I knew his family. It told me that knowledge alone
00:11:57.320 doesn't save us. Knowledge is important. It's, as we say in science, necessary, but not sufficient.
00:12:03.820 You know, and then what happened was I went off to graduate school and had an amazing time in
00:12:09.060 graduate school. Everyone says, oh, you know, you finished graduate school and you're aged and
00:12:13.360 you're tired. I was so full of life in graduate school. And after I loved my graduate advisor,
00:12:18.320 She was like a mother to me. Her name was Barbara Chapman. I know her family and kids. Her daughter
00:12:24.820 is a neuroscientist now. She died of cancer at 50. I thought, oh my goodness, she had the BRCA
00:12:31.940 mutation. She had a genetic susceptibility. I thought, my goodness. Then I became a postdoc 0.96
00:12:37.380 at Stanford. My postdoc advisor, the first day of my faculty appointment, had a heart attack
00:12:44.180 across the table from me at dinner. He survived that. It turns out he had pancreatic cancer. He
00:12:48.500 was dead roughly a year later. I ended up writing his obituary for nature. We were very, very close.
00:12:53.940 And I thought to myself, this is crazy, right? Like either the joke in my field, the kind of
00:12:59.600 morbid joke is you don't want me to work for you, obviously, because the odds are, you know,
00:13:03.480 it didn't work out so well for these people. But the serious aspect of it is at one point,
00:13:10.180 I thought, what's going on here? What's going on? And I also noticed in my field of neuroscience,
00:13:16.720 people doing tremendously well. I know Nobel prize winners, members of the national academy.
00:13:20.820 My closest childhood friend is now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He's doing phenomenally
00:13:25.100 well in life and including family. And I thought to myself, what's happening here? And I realized,
00:13:31.100 especially at the beginning of the pandemic, scientists, doctors, parents, kids, nobody knows
00:13:37.880 the manual the rule book for how to control their stress nobody knows the the the playbook for how
00:13:43.980 to take care of their health and and we're supposed to be all about health and we're supposed to eat
00:13:48.080 right sleep right etc but like i'm watching my colleagues get sick i'm seeing them they look
00:13:53.000 badly out of shape and i understand they're time limited but they're talking about back pain they're
00:13:57.680 talking about their kid has anxiety there's a colleague became addicted this very famous person
00:14:02.740 in my field became addicted to painkillers and then eventually died no one talked about it
00:14:06.900 And I'm thinking to myself, we're not talking about this stuff.
00:14:10.200 We need to talk about it.
00:14:11.040 In fact, this last year, one of the luminaries in our field, it still gets me, who was a
00:14:16.760 real pioneer in transcranial magnetic stimulation therapies for depression and also psychedelic
00:14:23.460 therapies, the studies of these, took his own life.
00:14:26.900 My dear friend and colleague, Nolan Williams, who has helped the veterans community tremendously.
00:14:31.600 So I realized at some point, people don't know how to take care of themselves. They don't even
00:14:38.000 know what self-care is. It sounds very selfish and in some versions of it, it can be. So what
00:14:43.500 are we supposed to do? So in 2020, with the world on lockdown and everyone kind of been battling
00:14:50.160 each other, I thought, look, I'm not a virologist. I'm just going to stay out of that whole thing.
00:14:54.560 It's a hornet's nest for an academic like me, but here's what I will do. I'm going to go online
00:14:59.580 and I'm going to start talking about ways to improve your sleep. My lab had worked on a number
00:15:03.900 of things, including eye diseases and trying to cure blindness, glaucoma. We'd worked on brain
00:15:09.360 development and I'd worked on stress mitigation in humans. And I knew that there were simple tools
00:15:14.720 that people could apply to learn to shut their brain off at the end of the day and get great
00:15:18.860 sleep, to have more energy, elevated mood and focus throughout the day. I knew the literature
00:15:25.180 quite well, because I teach it, and I've done research on it and published on some of it,
00:15:29.480 on how you can modify your brain in adaptive ways, and how you can start to unpeel some of
00:15:34.980 the emotional load of traumatic experiences. And I thought, the world needs this. So I'm
00:15:40.360 going to just start blabbing about it into the camera. And I teamed up. Interestingly,
00:15:45.720 I teamed up with a guy who had a little bit of a background in media. His name is Rob Moore.
00:15:50.440 And we started this little production company in my closet with my bulldog,
00:15:53.440 costello snoring in the background and i grabbed some skateboarders my friend mike blayback is now
00:15:59.220 a famous action sport photographer he came up through skateboarding had his own challenges
00:16:03.940 with alcohol and drugs got clean got lean and healthy he's a family man he's got two kids he's
00:16:10.900 doing great i grabbed two skateboard filmers because skateboarders mind you the ones that
00:16:15.840 made it through the shoot of all the troubling stuff they are the original do-it-yourself filmer
00:16:21.400 editors. We all carried around cameras when we were kids, long before smartphones. And they are
00:16:25.820 phenomenal at making movies. So we're a small pack of guys. And we did it the same way you'd
00:16:31.240 start a skateboarding company, find a space, film people doing what they love, put it out into the
00:16:37.160 world. And I just start giving away tools to the world on sleep, on stress mitigation, on
00:16:42.100 neuroplasticity, on personal development. And I would have guests on, but I would also do these
00:16:47.540 solo episodes where I would explain here, here's what the real story on dopamine is. It's not about
00:16:51.940 pleasure. It's about motivation. Here's how you can leverage that to your advantage to stay
00:16:56.660 motivated, but not burn out and so on. And then eventually I realized that the world needed that
00:17:01.780 information in a different form so that the book is sort of a lookup table. It tells a story. You
00:17:06.840 could go linearly through it, but it's kind of a lookup table. You can go any chapter you want.
00:17:11.180 So you can just navigate straight to it. You can go to that chapter and so on.
00:17:13.500 So that's really the purpose behind what I do.
00:17:16.860 Yeah.
00:17:18.560 Again, the book is called Protocols by Andrew Huberman, available for pre-order right now.
00:17:24.980 Let's spend some time on sleep because I've seen so many clips of you talking about sleep.
00:17:30.440 And I can tell you, this is definitely an issue for me and a lot of my viewers of a
00:17:35.620 certain age, women in particular, but a lot of guys out there too, got a lot of truckers
00:17:39.860 who listen to this show on SiriusXM who are not well-rested and are not getting the appropriate
00:17:46.060 amount of sleep. And I have to say, the more time you spend talking about how you need to sleep,
00:17:52.200 the harder it can be to sleep because then you're in your bed at night like,
00:17:55.420 I'm supposed to be asleep, but I can't fall asleep. And it's amazing to me that
00:18:01.400 you argue that it begins when you wake up. Your good night's sleep begins the moment
00:18:08.300 you wake up and whenever i hear this next part because i've heard you say this over the years
00:18:12.660 i think andrew huberman is not from the northeast and does not live in the northeast and now
00:18:20.520 understanding that you're a california boy it's starting to come into full focus for me
00:18:24.300 because you want us to get up go outside within the first first 30 minutes or so and stare at the
00:18:31.020 sun for you know 10 minutes maybe and now we do mean like at the sun or like right next to the sun
00:18:37.940 not like the fully bright sun, but you say that's not really the sun you're getting in the morning
00:18:42.420 when it first rises anyway. But explain why this is important and explain how this is supposed to
00:18:47.820 work for those of us in places like Connecticut when it's minus 15 and awful when you wake up.
00:18:54.460 Fair play. I've largely lived west of Interstate 5, which cuts down through the center of
00:19:02.100 california so uh all fair so here's the thing uh i'm gonna try we too we also want to live right
00:19:09.520 the rest of the country the people of minnesota yes the people in washington yeah you guys are
00:19:14.360 are having a couple other other advantages that we can talk about so it all it all evens out
00:19:19.700 here's the deal to really master your sleep and get great sleep but also to have elevated daytime
00:19:28.200 mood, focus, et cetera, you really want to master the first hour of your day and the last hour of
00:19:34.420 your day. And fortunately, I'm not going to tell you that you need to do a bunch of things
00:19:38.080 in each of those hours that require finances or require a lot of energy. Here's the theme,
00:19:45.880 which is we know is conducive to better mental health and physical health and longevity.
00:19:51.280 You want bright mornings and days and dark nights. Now, if you're going to tell me, well,
00:19:57.280 there's not a lot of sunlight out here, but here's the deal. When you wake up in the morning,
00:20:02.380 you wake up because of a rise in a hormone called cortisol and because of a rise in body temperature.
00:20:07.780 Most people think of cortisol as a stress hormone and they think, oh, that's bad. I don't want high
00:20:11.880 cortisol. You want your morning cortisol high. I'll repeat that. You want your morning cortisol
00:20:16.640 high. It is not a stress hormone. It is the hormone of energy and to mobilize energy in
00:20:21.820 your body and get you moving into the day. If you get your morning cortisol high, it helps ensure
00:20:27.580 that your nighttime cortisol is low. When your nighttime cortisol is low, it's easy to fall and
00:20:32.940 stay asleep and you get great sleep. Your metabolic health will be better. The hormone melatonin goes
00:20:37.800 up, which makes you sleepy. You want morning cortisol high, nighttime cortisol low.
00:20:43.060 The best way to kind of book ... Think about bookending your days. I don't care what time
00:20:48.260 you wake up, if it's 4 a.m. or it's 10 a.m. We can talk about what to do if the sun isn't out yet.
00:20:53.960 But within the first hour of waking up, ideally within the first 30 minutes, you're going to get
00:20:59.060 up. Most people use the restroom. I suggest you hydrate, drink a little bit of water. And if the
00:21:04.680 sun is up, and by the way, you don't need to be able to see the sun. It can be completely overcast.
00:21:09.600 But if there's daylight coming through the clouds, which there is even in the depths of winter
00:21:14.200 in boston it's much brighter at 7 a.m for instance in boston in the middle of winter than it was at
00:21:19.740 midnight the night before there's a lot of what we call photons or light energy coming through
00:21:23.820 those clouds you go outside you could even stand on a balcony best not to do it through a window
00:21:29.000 but if you have to you go out on a balcony or outside you look in the direction of the sun
00:21:34.000 if you can't see the sun because there's a building in the way that's fine take off any
00:21:38.140 hat you might be wearing because the sun's coming in from the top you want to get to your eyes
00:21:42.240 and don't wear sunglasses at this time eyeglasses and contacts are fine and you can have your coffee
00:21:50.000 there you can do your morning prayer or meditation there you can bring your dog you can bring a
00:21:54.860 friend you can be completely alone and even if you just grab a one minute of daylight it's going
00:22:00.620 to benefit you why because there's this critical window within the first hour of waking where
00:22:04.880 if you get bright light in your eyes from daylight from sunlight it amplifies that cortisol peak
00:22:11.360 which makes it much lower before sleep, which makes it far easier to fall asleep at night.
00:22:17.240 In addition, most people want less stress in their life, not more. If you spike your cortisol that
00:22:23.440 way first thing in the morning, any stress you have during the day will lead to a more transient,
00:22:30.340 a briefer increase in stress hormones. You are better at dealing with stress when you do this.
00:22:36.380 And there are a number of biochemical reasons for this. These are not psychological phenomena.
00:22:40.080 these are pure physiology this isn't about mindset this is just can you just explain
00:22:44.400 what am i looking you know because they say you're not supposed to look directly into the sun but am
00:22:49.240 i supposed to be looking directly into the sun at this great question so as somebody who worked on
00:22:53.100 blinding the diseases of the eye for many years i want to encourage people you can look in the
00:22:57.440 direction of the sun but blink as needed to protect your eyes if it's really bright for you and you're
00:23:01.280 blinking great the blink reflex is there to protect your eyes never force yourself to look at any
00:23:05.980 light sunlight or otherwise that's painful to look at so you can just look in the direction of
00:23:10.920 the sun you could even keep your eyes closed believe it or not the photon energy goes through
00:23:15.140 your eyelids but you look kind of off to the side of the sun if it's in the middle of winter the sun
00:23:20.440 is easy to look at because it's behind so many clouds when the sun is low in the sky such around
00:23:26.340 sunrise or sunset and keep in mind i'm not saying you need to see the sun cross the horizon if you
00:23:31.160 wake up at 9 a.m. and the sun's already up, you miss sunrise. It's rising. But when it's low in
00:23:36.220 the sky, you'll notice something about the sun if it's not a cloudy day, which is it looks a bit
00:23:41.000 more yellow, orange, red than at other times. Now, of course, the light coming from the sun
00:23:45.480 is the same all times of day. But when the sun is low in the sky, there's an atmospheric
00:23:50.440 phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering where the UV, which are damaging rays for the most part,
00:23:56.700 are get scattered. And so those aren't reaching your eyes. So you see the, what are called the
00:24:00.820 longer wavelengths of light. It looks a bit more like candlelight and bright, but more like
00:24:05.320 candlelight. So when the sun is low in the sky, you don't have to worry about UV damage to your
00:24:09.760 skin. You don't have to worry about damage to your eyes or getting cataract. When the sun is
00:24:14.060 overhead, that's when you really need to be careful about too much UV exposure. We know
00:24:18.880 that UV exposure. So in the perfect, in the perfect Huberman protocol, I'm out, I'm looking
00:24:25.500 up. I'm maybe just to the right of the sun, not directly into the sun. I don't have sunglasses on
00:24:31.660 and how, and, and how long do I need to stand there looking? And, um, is it non, do I need
00:24:38.860 to be looking nonstop or can I like look around at the dogs and the, you know, look around those,
00:24:43.600 how does those photons are bouncing off of, of surfaces. They're getting reflected. Um, take,
00:24:49.140 if you take a walk, if there's any green space around, see, this is where the East coast,
00:24:52.580 you have an advantage, you know, except in some cities, you often have a lot more green because
00:24:56.640 you get a lot more rain, right? The Oregonians really benefit here too. The really beneficial
00:25:03.020 wavelengths of light are bouncing off greenery. You know, if you were to, that long wavelength
00:25:07.880 light that bounces off greenery is tremendously good for our mitochondria. It actually can go
00:25:12.720 into and through our body. This is a separate story that I cover in the book. It can actually
00:25:16.940 lower blood glucose. Believe it or not, your sugar, blood sugar management is much better
00:25:21.820 when you're out in daylight than when you eat indoors this was shown by my colleague glenn
00:25:25.820 jeffrey at university college london you shot they shined a red light which approximates sunlight
00:25:31.440 on people's backs while they did a glucose tolerance test it blunts glucose levels by
00:25:36.380 nearly it's somewhere between 20 and 30 percent which is remarkable how could that be the light
00:25:42.220 actually goes into the body through the body and the mitochondria the energy factories in our cells
00:25:48.720 actually start using more atp metabolism goes up which is remarkable now here's the interest just
00:25:55.760 so i'm clear you have to be exposing your skin in that moment like it doesn't count when you know
00:26:00.320 you're skiing and you're completely covered head to toe with that that's that the light needs to
00:26:05.040 hit your actual body skin a t-shirt they've shown it can go through a t-shirt or even a shirt like
00:26:09.600 the one i'm wearing you know a thin enough shirt a thick jacket it won't go through so you get
00:26:15.340 outside, you take any brimmed hat off, you look in the direction of the sun. Yes, if you need to
00:26:20.120 text someone, that's fine. You walk, you take a call, you talk to somebody. It's especially nice
00:26:26.180 to get five minutes or so. I suggest doing a 10 breath meditation, just focusing on 10 breaths
00:26:31.580 or do your morning prayers. That's a big practice for me. And then get into the day and you've done
00:26:37.300 it. You've spiked that cortisol. Look, even better would be if you can get some exercise in the first
00:26:42.680 hours of the day because you know everyone's so afraid of cortisol but everyone's told to exercise
00:26:47.000 a moderate to high intensity exercise session cardiovascular training or resistance training
00:26:52.180 will triple your cortisol level but transiently that's a great thing early in the day and it
00:26:58.240 sets you up for great sleep at night if you have to exercise later in the day that's fine and we
00:27:02.500 can talk about that but in that case you'd want to one of the things that really leads to better
00:27:06.920 sleep as long as we're here we might as well just kind of throw in a few things that lead to better
00:27:10.460 sleep. If you're having a hard time calming your system down at the end of the day, two things
00:27:15.200 really help. One, you need to lower your core body temperature. That's actually how you fall asleep.
00:27:20.680 The one excellent way to do that is to take a hot shower or bath. You say, wait, I'm heating up my
00:27:25.160 skin. How is that going to make me cooler? Well, your brain has a little thermostat region called
00:27:29.800 the medial preoptic nucleus. And when just like a thermostat, when the surface of the skin heats up,
00:27:35.480 the the brain says oh we need to lower a core body temperature and your body temperature starts
00:27:40.460 falling when you get out of that shower or bath if you don't have access to a shower bath even a
00:27:44.700 warm compress to the face will accomplish this very easy essentially costs nothing and it will
00:27:51.160 facilitate the transition to sleep the other thing that is just and this is probably a bigger thing
00:27:56.120 but i'll let you finish your point but can you after this talk about staying asleep yes yeah so
00:28:03.120 one of the key things to falling asleep and to stress mitigation, you'll notice I'm trying to
00:28:08.580 fire hose tools at people that they can use anytime, right? These are all, and I'll just
00:28:13.080 point out, like I didn't discover these tools. I've published on some of them as tools in my
00:28:19.100 laboratory, but I want to really point out something important in the backdrop here is
00:28:23.980 these mechanisms are hardwired into all of us. We're born with them. We're going to die with
00:28:29.600 them. So there's no real learning except how to activate these circuits. Hence a user manual for
00:28:36.540 the brain and body, right? An operating manual. So the idea here is you have these cells in your
00:28:42.040 eye. They're called melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. That's
00:28:45.700 just nerd speak for the cells in your eye that actually know that morning sunlight is hitting
00:28:53.160 them. It's different than other forms of light. Your phone won't do it. A computer won't do it.
00:28:57.480 an indoor light, unless it's a 10,000 lux artificial light, we'll talk about that in a
00:29:02.120 minute, won't accomplish this. We have these cells for the very purpose of waking us up in the
00:29:08.360 morning, for telling the brain and body it's morning. That circuit gets activated, boom,
00:29:13.160 you just go into your day. You don't have to think about it anymore. There's another feature to the
00:29:18.020 way that we are hardwired, which is we have a little collection of neurons in our brain that
00:29:23.180 communicate with our body in the following way. When you are feeling too alert, could be stress,
00:29:29.660 could be panic, could be public speaking, could be a hard conversation, could be anticipation of a
00:29:34.660 medical outcome, or you're having trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep.
00:29:39.700 What you need to do is do a long, deliberate exhale.
00:29:47.080 Just like that. If you want to make it even more effective, you do two inhales through your nose
00:29:51.720 to maximally inflate your lungs and then you exhale what am i talking about here this is not
00:29:56.620 breath work this is a collection of specific neurons that were discovered by my friend and
00:30:01.280 colleague jack feldman at ucla that lead to a slowing of heart rate in a good way you're everyone's
00:30:09.840 heard of the vagus nerve now it's this nerve nerves in the body collect sensory information
00:30:14.160 from the body telling the brain what's going on in the body we're not even thinking about it
00:30:17.700 But there's another part of the vagus nerve, which goes from brain to the sinoatrial node
00:30:23.160 of the heart, and it controls something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which sounds bad.
00:30:27.540 People hear arrhythmia and that sounds bad. But when you do a deliberate exhale,
00:30:32.260 your heart rate slows down. So if you want to calm down really fast, the fastest way to do that
00:30:39.360 is not self-talk. It's not meditation because you don't have time to run off and meditate.
00:30:43.560 it's not a drink even that will take longer we can talk about alcohol later it is to do a deliberate
00:30:50.820 exhale you're too amped up you want to calm down long deliberate exhale there's a specific pathway
00:31:00.100 that slows the heart rate down these days in the fitness circles you're hearing more about heart
00:31:04.140 rate variability a stress monitor like a whoop band or anything that measures hrv it's measuring
00:31:11.220 how often your brain sends this break signal to your heart rate. That's what HRV is. In fact,
00:31:19.900 if you do a few deliberate exhales during the day, just a few times, you're walking out of the
00:31:24.660 restroom, going back to work, you're sitting down to your desk, whatever, you're driving,
00:31:28.560 you're picking up the kids, you do one long deliberate exhale, your HRV gets higher at night
00:31:33.360 in sleep, which is great for you. And during the day, you want high HRV. It shows that your nervous
00:31:39.100 system can calm your heart rate down, slow it down. And this is a well, you know, I could get
00:31:44.140 into the mechanism, the diaphragm, you know, moves up, the heart gets a little smaller, blood moves
00:31:49.100 faster, the brain says, oh, blood's moving faster through that smaller volume of the heart, slow
00:31:54.240 heart rate down. When we inhale, heart rate speeds up. And everyone's told, oh, you're stressed,
00:32:00.480 take a deep breath. That increases your heart rate. So, you know, circa 2019, 2020, I'm thinking
00:32:07.080 myself. Everyone's stressed. Everyone's saying, take a deep breath. That's not going to work.
00:32:11.740 That's going to send you in the opposite direction. Okay. Humans inhale actively and passively exhale.
00:32:18.820 We do this all day long. We let the air fall out. When we actively exhale, it activates this circuit
00:32:26.160 that's just sitting there waiting for you to calm yourself down and you actively exhale. The reason
00:32:31.480 exercise increases HRV is has a lot to do with how much exhaling you do during exercise. So in that
00:32:38.180 last hour of the day, here's what I'd love for people to do. I understand people watch Netflix,
00:32:43.340 they're listening to podcasts, they're watching TV, they want to know the verdict on this new
00:32:46.980 case. I get it. I totally get it. I'm human to just do this for me. Try and make the first hour
00:32:51.780 of your day as bright as possible that day. If all you can do is flip on all the lights in your
00:32:56.360 house first thing in the morning, that's it. Can't get outside. It's too cold. You don't want to do
00:33:00.040 but fine. Just make it bright. Make as bright as you can. Even better for people in the Northeast
00:33:04.400 would be to get, and I don't have any relationship to the companies that sell these, but for about
00:33:08.800 a hundred dollars, you can get a 10,000 lux artificial light. It looks like a TV screen.
00:33:12.840 You put it in the kitchen or the bathroom, you flip it on, go about your morning. You don't
00:33:16.880 have to stare at it or you get outside, get some light in your eyes, do that. And if you can,
00:33:22.880 we can talk about exercise in the early part of the day. Great. First three hours or so.
00:33:27.060 And then in the last hour of your day, think, I'm going to try and heat up the surface of my body to cool down internally so I can fall asleep better.
00:33:35.340 So hot compress to the face for 10 seconds, maybe a hot shower, hot bath, okay, if you have time.
00:33:42.820 Dim the lights.
00:33:43.720 If you can't dim the lights, try and not use overhead lights because the eyes, the cells in the eyes that carry this information about waking up to the brain, they view the upper visual field.
00:33:53.900 That's how they're placed so they can see the sky.
00:33:57.060 So do like the Scandinavians and use desk lamps or a floor lamp, okay? 0.95
00:34:02.380 Dim those lights, dim your screen.
00:34:04.860 And if you're still feeling too ramped up and you can't sleep, do some long exhales, just a few long exhales.
00:34:11.340 This whole thing will have an outsized positive effect on people's sleep, daytime mood focus and alertness.
00:34:17.400 And there's a beautiful study out of the UK Biobank of more than 80,000 subjects,
00:34:22.140 which shows that even if people just make their nights darker, for instance, maybe an eye mask
00:34:28.440 while you sleep, don't have an eye mask, grab a soft t-shirt, throw it over your eyes. And when
00:34:32.500 you go to sleep, even just making your sleep environment darker has a significant positive
00:34:38.980 effect on reducing symptoms of depression, OCD, mania, dementia, and on and on. Better to make
00:34:46.180 mornings bright and dark nights. But if you look at the way humans have been trending for the last
00:34:51.740 few years, we have days that are too dim and nights that are too bright. And if you think,
00:34:58.080 well, no, actually my work environment's pretty bright. Just putting people near a window or
00:35:03.820 having people look out a window a few times during the daytime has significant improvements
00:35:09.100 on metabolic health, longevity, mood. It's not that we should be living out of doors. No one's
00:35:17.400 going to do that, right? People want, we've evolved all these ways to live indoors and they're great,
00:35:22.700 frankly, but brighter mornings, darker nights, even in these subtle ways will help tremendously.
00:35:29.400 Now there are some people for whom all of that, they'll do all of that and they'll say, I still
00:35:33.860 wake up at two or three in the morning and I can't get back to sleep. And for that, I'm going to
00:35:38.220 offer you a really weird trick, but the reason I'm willing to do this, even as a scientist is A,
00:35:43.460 there's a scientific basis for it and B it works. And it's the following.
00:35:48.540 We know this one, this is a wild trick, but this will get you back to sleep.
00:35:52.980 It's why I know it's really wild. Well, three, I saw you do it.
00:35:57.120 I have tried it a few times.
00:35:58.460 I know it looks crazy, but you'll think you'll thank me later, folks.
00:36:01.680 I promise. And also what's fun about these things is like, these were,
00:36:06.740 these are in you, right? This isn't something you have to go purchase, right?
00:36:09.900 um you know i'll be happy if people purchase the book but frankly the reason i go on podcasts like
00:36:14.800 this is all the time and it's because i just want people to have these tools i mean i wish i had
00:36:21.160 known as a kid as an adult i can calm myself down fast for a tense moment just doing a deliberate
00:36:28.700 exhale or even better a double inhale long exhale i can get better sleep because i had sleep issues
00:36:34.180 starting basically in high school in college i would wake i'd fall asleep i'd wake up in the
00:36:38.420 middle of the night. I mean, when we're sleeping well, life is so much better. Getting over traumas,
00:36:45.040 recovery from addiction, dealing with difficult circumstances, but also our ability to do all the
00:36:51.160 things that we know we're supposed to do, like exercise and earn a living and do all those
00:36:55.100 things that we're striving, all our strivings get so much easier. So these are the tools I wish I
00:37:00.380 had, but they weren't out there. So the thing that you can do to fall back asleep, I'll just give you
00:37:06.800 the science very briefly. First, anyone that's ever had a kid or held a kid knows that if you
00:37:11.600 rock the kid back and forth and you walk, they fall asleep. Turns out there's a scientific study
00:37:17.320 of the exact rate of rocking and walking that's ideal for putting babies to sleep. Turns out in
00:37:24.120 adults, believe it or not, scientists are so weird. They did a study using a slow rocking bed
00:37:29.020 and it puts people to sleep. Okay. I want one. I know. I'm like, I want one too. But for most
00:37:36.540 people, it's not practical. And then there was this woman who actually was in, she wasn't at
00:37:41.880 Stanford, but Francine Shapiro, who developed this thing called EMDR, which is a trauma treatment
00:37:47.180 where people recount a story while moving their eyes from side to side. Sounded pretty wacky.
00:37:52.480 People made up silly theories that, oh, that's mimicking rapid eye movement sleep. No, nothing
00:37:57.680 of the sort. Turns out based on now three or four really solid publications that when the eyes are
00:38:03.600 moving from side to side, for whatever reason, it quiets the activity of this brain region called
00:38:09.000 the amygdala, which is involved in stress, threat detection, and fear, as it's commonly referred to,
00:38:14.640 the fear center. The critical thing for falling asleep is that you be not stressed, but also
00:38:22.800 that you forget about your body position. So it turns out that this rocking motion or the movement
00:38:29.440 of the eyes both suppresses areas of the brain that are involved in threat detection and anxiety
00:38:34.880 and stress, but they also help you forget what's called proprioception, your knowledge of where
00:38:40.920 your limbs are. And that is a requirement for falling asleep. So there are two things that
00:38:47.160 happened in the following year. First of all, a group of brilliant scientists at MIT came up with
00:38:51.960 a sleep mask that they're developing now. I have no relationship to this company, but I've tried
00:38:55.560 this mask that creates a very specific eye movement pattern by low-level electrical stimulation
00:39:01.520 that causes you to fall asleep. And I've done it. You fall asleep almost immediately.
00:39:07.000 But the eye movement pattern is something that you can create yourself. So you close your eyes,
00:39:12.420 you're in bed, you're wide awake. This happened to me last night. I woke up,
00:39:15.380 went to sleep around 10 o'clock, woke up at 3.30, boom, wide awake. I was having some intense dream
00:39:21.280 about some meaningless thing, like so many dreams. And I thought, I'm wide awake. What do I do?
00:39:26.860 Keep my eyes closed. So under the eyelids, you move your eyes slowly to the left, then to the
00:39:32.480 right, then up, then down. Try and move them counterclockwise, clockwise. I know it sounds
00:39:40.740 crazy. Still with eyes closed, kind of point them towards your nose. It's not really crossing your
00:39:45.920 eyes, and then you do a long exhale. When people do this, the typical reaction I get because people
00:39:54.620 write to me is, next thing I know, it was morning. I know that sounds wild. And listen, I wouldn't
00:40:01.160 put this out into the world at this scale if I wasn't confident that doing that one to three
00:40:05.500 times for most people is sufficient for them to get back to sleep. Now, if you're intensely
00:40:10.700 ruminating on something really troubling, you're going to need to do something else. But
00:40:14.260 very, very often that will do the trick. And these eye masks that are now being developed
00:40:20.720 are just trying to recapitulate that eye movement pattern.
00:40:25.300 That's crazy. All I can think of is the movie, The Jerk, you know, where he puts the sunglasses
00:40:29.340 on or the eyeglasses and they've got something. And next thing you know, everybody who tries them
00:40:32.780 is cross-eyed. I hope the masks don't have any weird side effects.
00:40:36.280 That's not going to do this. But what I just described is entirely safe. Why does it shut
00:40:40.960 down your proprioception your knowledge of body position i can't help myself but tell people why
00:40:48.180 that the mechanism is important here because otherwise it becomes a hack right and a hack is
00:40:52.660 something that's designed to overcome a problem like if these glasses break and i put a paper
00:40:57.320 clip in the corner to fix them that's a hack it's not what the paper clip was designed for it's not
00:41:02.520 it's not a really good solution it's a temporary solution the reason this is not a hack this is
00:41:07.740 grounded in your physiology. Your eyes have many connections to the brain. Some are designed to
00:41:13.160 tell your brain when it's daytime. Others are designed to let you see colors and shapes and
00:41:18.460 movement of objects like cars. But there's another circuit that goes from your eyes to deep brain
00:41:24.580 structures that then connects to what's called your mini brain, a little brain in the back of
00:41:29.740 your brain, literally. It looks like another brain called the cerebellum. Most people think of the
00:41:34.520 cerebellum as a balance structure. It's critical for balance. It's also critical for learning,
00:41:39.820 but the cerebellum is also critical for taking your eye movements, understanding where your
00:41:47.380 eyes are and adjusting your body position accordingly. When you walk through any
00:41:52.300 environment, office, outdoors, whatever, you don't experience the world as blurry.
00:41:57.680 But if I took a picture on my phone and moved my phone, it would be blurry. How is that? The
00:42:02.160 cerebellum takes your eye position and sends the eyes a message to offset any slip in the visual
00:42:08.440 world. So you see the world as stable as you move your head around. Amazing. When you move your eyes
00:42:14.920 the way I described under the eyelids, it confuses the cerebellum. There's a map of your body in the
00:42:20.840 cerebellum and the cerebellum doesn't know how to deal with these weird eye movements of side to
00:42:26.180 side, round and up and down. And all of a sudden that proprioceptive mechanism is shut down. And
00:42:32.340 that's the second step in being able to fall asleep. So this is a, so lowering your core
00:42:37.940 body temperature, keeping the room cool helps to some long exhale breathing before sleep. If you
00:42:43.100 wake up in the middle of the night, keep the room dark. Yes. Get up and use the restroom if you need
00:42:47.220 to. I highly recommend you not look at your phone if you can avoid it, but when you're ready to go
00:42:52.080 back to sleep, do these eye movements, you will find almost certainly that you'll fall back asleep
00:42:57.920 much more easily. And I get thousands of notes every day. Let me hit you with a couple of
00:43:03.140 quick ones, a couple of quick ones. When you say double inhale, can you show us what that is?
00:43:10.200 Is that regular inhales or is something else? The two inhales through the nose, the second
00:43:15.000 inhale will be shorter because your lungs are already mostly full. And then the exhale through
00:43:18.920 the mouth. This is the fastest way to bring your heart rate down and de-stress in real time. Okay.
00:43:23.660 So unless you're underwater, I can't see a circumstance where you couldn't do this.
00:43:27.240 So you, you do it the following way until lungs are empty. So it was a long inhale filling your
00:43:40.020 lungs. Then one, one extra when you don't think you have extra room, you do, you do one extra
00:43:46.100 and then a long and then a slow exhale through the mouth inhale through the nose exhale through
00:43:50.480 the mouth the reason for that second inhale is important your lungs are not just two big bags
00:43:55.640 of air they have hundreds of millions of little sacks that actually fill with air and those little
00:44:02.260 sacks are are kind of moist in the in the middle and like if you're ever trying to blow up a balloon
00:44:06.940 at a kid's party sometimes it's easy to blow up the balloon but if they're those little water
00:44:10.880 balloons sometimes what you find is you know if you want to put air into a water balloon so you
00:44:15.680 can tie it right because you filled it too much you have to get sometimes two two pushes two
00:44:21.160 exhales right so in order to maximally inflate those little sacks you get that big first inhale
00:44:27.320 and that'll inflate most of them but then there are a bunch of them they're collapsed and kind
00:44:30.900 of sticking together from surface tension you do that second inhale they open up they don't burst
00:44:36.100 but they open up great now you can offload more air on the exhale and by and there's a story here
00:44:42.220 also about oxygen coming in and you're offloading carbon dioxide a lot of our stress is about too
00:44:49.100 much carbon dioxide in the blood you know the brain has a set of neurons again this neuroscience thing
00:44:56.620 is incredible right it's like you have a set of neurons that don't tell you when to breathe
00:45:01.340 because you need more oxygen they tell you when to breathe when carbon dioxide gets too high
00:45:06.220 many people have what's called sleep apnea they're not getting enough oxygen during sleep
00:45:11.020 or they have daytime apnea and so they're not getting enough oxygen and they're and there's
00:45:17.020 carbon dioxide levels are too high there are three reasons why you want to offload carbon dioxide
00:45:21.800 you need it but you don't want too much of it building up in your system first of all
00:45:25.920 sleep apnea snoring etc severe cardiovascular and basically brain health issues come from that
00:45:35.120 get your snoring fixed. Get that deviated septum fixed. Get the CPAP if you have to.
00:45:42.860 Well, I had friends who had their uvulas cut out and it stopped their snoring.
00:45:45.960 Oh my goodness.
00:45:46.500 But they said it was very painful.
00:45:47.900 That's, yeah.
00:45:48.800 I don't know how that works.
00:45:50.160 If that's what it takes, provided it's done by a good surgeon, you know, do that. For some people
00:45:54.860 that are overweight or even the guys who like to lift weights and they have these giant necks,
00:45:58.800 that's actually can create sleep apnea. You don't want to be overly muscled or too much body, 0.71
00:46:03.500 You don't want overly anything really, but apnea is bad because of the buildup of carbon
00:46:09.140 dioxide in sleep can, it won't cause dementia, but it certainly predisposes you to it and
00:46:15.200 to heart attack and so forth.
00:46:16.440 But a lot of people during the daytime, they're walking around mouth breathing as much as
00:46:21.440 you can only breathe through your mouth when eating or speaking.
00:46:25.520 Now, if you're exercising hard, great to breathe through your mouth.
00:46:28.280 That's fine.
00:46:29.360 But do you like the mouth tape that people are using?
00:46:31.980 I don't because I have this mustache beard thing and it never stays on.
00:46:35.660 So what I do is when I do my low level cardiovascular exercise, like walking, unless I'm on a call
00:46:43.020 or if I'm doing an easy cardiovascular exercise, I restrict myself to nasal breathing.
00:46:48.860 It actually sets you up to be a nasal breather in sleep.
00:46:52.240 You kind of start defaulting to nasal breathing.
00:46:54.180 But if I'm running harder or exercising harder, I definitely breathe through my mouth.
00:46:58.200 the the the carbon dioxide thing is real in the sense that when you're stressed there's a buildup
00:47:05.160 of carbon dioxide which is that's what stimulates the gas reflex that's what makes you feel anxious
00:47:10.560 and you can't shut your thoughts down if you've ever been swimming and you know when kids can be
00:47:15.800 so cruel right you're swimming i grew up with a pack of wild heathens and they were just so they
00:47:21.100 were good kids but you know occasionally you'd be swimming learned about some of them exactly and
00:47:24.660 you and you try and by the way it's called protocols by dr andrew huberman you can pre-order
00:47:29.740 yours now go ahead thank you yeah you know you're coming up out of the water and that that mean kid
00:47:35.060 holds your head right as you're trying to come up listen you had enough air a moment before that
00:47:39.340 but that split second is terrifying because you i can't your brain knows it needs oxygen so
00:47:45.600 you have a gas reflex that's looking for oxygen there's an oxygen hunger a breath hunger when you
00:47:52.260 do this double inhale, long exhale, you reset the carbon dioxide oxygen ratios. And it's a
00:47:58.620 wonderful state to be in because you're alert, but calm. So let's say you're studying, you're just
00:48:04.020 maybe a good thing to do at any point during the day, like while you're just sitting there,
00:48:07.100 you're listening to this program, you could be doing a few, just a couple, you know, one,
00:48:09.780 even just deliberate long exhale or the double inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth.
00:48:14.080 The beauty of this again, is your HRV increases. You become more of a nasal breather in sleep.
00:48:19.560 your sleep is deeper you have less apnea you'll kind of notice that today a lot of the things we
00:48:24.780 move from cortisol to light to breathing a lot of these things are about being alert when you want
00:48:31.180 to be alert but not too alert and being asleep when you want to be asleep in fact i would argue
00:48:35.440 that as a human if you can master the ability to be alert but calm by using these tools long
00:48:42.800 exhales if you need them bright light to be more alert if you can learn to turn your brain off and
00:48:48.560 go to sleep, you're going to be a very effective professional parent, partner, friend, and 0.99
00:48:56.960 your relationship to yourself gets way better because so many of the woes of the world have
00:49:01.620 to do with an inability to self-regulate in order to get sleep.
00:49:05.500 Then self-regulation becomes even harder or I'm a big caffeine drinker.
00:49:09.860 Let me just continue my, my, my couple questions on this because, um, number of hours people
00:49:15.420 obsessed seven or eight. A lot of people can't get that. What, what, what's the bare minimum per
00:49:20.140 night? Like people really should be striving for. Okay. So new parents, caretakers, and people who
00:49:25.680 are in very stressful times in their life. I will tell you this, I'm not recommending it, but
00:49:31.520 if you can get that first four hours of sleep, that's you, ideally you'd get more, but you will
00:49:38.280 get some growth hormone release, some bodily repair. You can carry on for better, worse for
00:49:43.000 quite a long while with four to five hours, but you're not setting yourself up for health in the
00:49:47.600 long run. But I say this because I want to be sensitive to the fact that some people are taking
00:49:52.320 care of a sick relative. Some people are in a very stressful life situation where they're raising
00:49:57.800 young kids. You will survive. I know. And then you're like, you're going to get dementia. You'll
00:50:02.640 survive. You're going to survive. Unfortunate. You'll survive. Once the kids are sleeping better,
00:50:08.300 you'll sleep better. Like you will survive. You can, you'll be okay. You don't want to do this
00:50:12.880 for decades on end or even for, you know, five years on end, but you will be okay. For most
00:50:19.040 people, they need somewhere between seven and eight. I feel pretty darn good at six. Developing
00:50:25.200 kids probably need eight or nine. When you're battling an illness, nine or 10 is not abnormal
00:50:30.140 and is healthy. But if you only need six hours and you feel great on six, God bless you. Keep
00:50:37.420 going with don't stress do not stress that you need to get more sleep than you need one thing
00:50:42.280 that's critical however is if you are having trouble with sleep and you're napping in the
00:50:47.400 daytime you need to stop napping when you get sleepy because of the buildup of a molecule called
00:50:52.920 adenosine and when you nap you shave off some of that adenosine from your brain and body which is
00:50:59.280 good you come out more alert but at night you want to create the the real fatigue at the end of your
00:51:05.820 day so that you're tired. That's why exercise is great. That's why napping in the daytime is bad
00:51:12.060 for people who have trouble sleeping. If I have a whole section in the book, believe it or not,
00:51:16.700 on napping, it seems at one point I thought to myself, I'm teaching people how to nap. This is
00:51:20.860 crazy. But if you need a nap, 20 minutes should really be the limit so that you don't cause sleep
00:51:28.180 inertia, which is the tiredness coming out of the nap, but also that you're not eroding your
00:51:31.580 nighttime sleep. There's also, and I put some reference to this in the book, even just sitting
00:51:38.140 down and quietly doing a few exhales and just closing your eyes, not looking at your phone for,
00:51:44.200 believe it or not, make it 60 seconds, three minutes. You'll come out of that feeling some
00:51:49.680 renewed vigor. The problem is nowadays, I'm a big consumer of media. I love media. But
00:51:55.860 But every moment is filled with more information coming in.
00:52:00.880 So I'm talking about things that take on the order of minutes across the entire day.
00:52:05.300 Costs nothing.
00:52:06.000 Thank you.
00:52:36.000 your support. We may not always agree on positions, but as you know, I'm very open-minded
00:52:40.640 to people who disagree with me. That's how I learn. So thanks. And thanks for trusting us
00:52:46.220 to always talk about it openly, honestly, and with provocative conversations.
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00:54:03.480 That's Q-U-O dot com slash M-K.
00:54:07.440 I take it from this discussion you are against falling asleep to an audio book or a podcast.
00:54:14.760 Yes and no.
00:54:15.600 So after now, you know, six years of doing public health science education, I've come to the place where I, you know, I was a years ago, I took kids backpacking in Yosemite.
00:54:28.600 That was my summer job.
00:54:30.000 And you learn something working with teenagers, which is be a channel, not a dam.
00:54:35.500 And it turns out that you want to do the same with adults.
00:54:39.780 If listening to a podcast or having the news on helps you fall asleep, I actually suggest you keep doing it.
00:54:47.240 I do.
00:54:48.320 Okay.
00:54:48.780 But if you're waking up four hours later and having a hard time getting back to sleep, you might want to think about how the light from the screen or that noise might be impacting you.
00:54:58.600 You know, this whole thing of listening to stuff out of interest is one thing.
00:55:01.820 But when we're listening to podcasts while we sleep or we are leaving the TV on, I think
00:55:06.780 it reflects a much bigger.
00:55:08.380 I always ask myself as a scientist, why are people doing this?
00:55:11.380 And I think they're doing it because it's hard to turn our thoughts off.
00:55:14.740 You know, one of the practices I talk about and I'm happy to share now, I talk about in
00:55:19.720 the book, I'm happy to share now is this practice of non-sleep deep rest, which sounds like
00:55:24.320 meditation, sounds like a nap, but it's not.
00:55:27.320 You know, one of the great super skills in life that I wish I had had years ago is the
00:55:33.700 following.
00:55:34.580 Some people have what can really, we call it low activation energy, meaning they have
00:55:39.160 a lot of get up and go.
00:55:40.080 You say, let's do this.
00:55:40.800 They get up and do it.
00:55:41.520 They go, go.
00:55:42.140 They're ambitious.
00:55:42.800 They're doing sports.
00:55:43.540 They're doing this.
00:55:44.440 Those people tend to be the same people that have a hard time turning their mind off.
00:55:49.460 Other people have the motivation issue.
00:55:51.720 I don't have an issue with sleep.
00:55:53.040 I have an issue with motivation.
00:55:54.980 procrastination is an issue right that's what they say people who are getting after it they're
00:56:00.340 exercising etc they're thinking about business family they want to man they the woes of the
00:56:05.040 world or even just the small things are you know circulating in their head need to learn to get
00:56:10.600 the mind out of thinking and doing and planning and spend a few minutes in order to fall asleep
00:56:17.600 in just pure sensation and there's a practice that was actually developed in india thousands
00:56:22.500 of years ago called yoga nidra which means yoga sleep it involves no movement where you do this
00:56:28.240 won't come as a surprise now i call it non-sleep deep rest but you take a few minutes during the
00:56:32.860 day and you could do it sitting or lying down and you close your eyes you do a few long exhales to
00:56:40.020 slow your heart rate down and instead of meditating by trying to maintain focus on you know between
00:56:44.900 your forehead or instead of trying to clear your mind this that's almost impossible to do right
00:56:49.640 clear your mind? No, impossible. It's like the don't think of the elephant. You know,
00:56:54.600 you can't not think of it. Instead, you migrate your thoughts like a spotlight around your body,
00:57:01.140 your feet, the other foot, your knee, the other knee, your heart, your body. And what you're
00:57:06.540 doing there is you're occupying just enough of the brain's attention that it makes it very easy
00:57:11.120 to do. You're not trying to turn off your thoughts, but what ends up happening is you stop
00:57:16.040 thinking and planning, and you start just going into pure sensation. And when you do that,
00:57:23.080 the brain goes into, we now know from really good science, goes into this kind of liminal state
00:57:27.420 between asleep and awake, and little pockets of the brain start mimicking sleep. Three things
00:57:33.200 happen when you come out of this practice, and it could be five minutes, could be 10 minutes,
00:57:36.800 could be 20. There are a lot of these non-sleep deep breaths scripts out on the internet now,
00:57:41.140 some with my voice, some with much more pleasant voices, and so on. They're all zero cost.
00:57:47.360 And you emerge from it feeling mentally and physically restored. That's interesting.
00:57:52.840 Learning of physical information, cognitive information is enhanced in people that do this.
00:57:59.800 You could do this once a week, three times a week, or daily. It takes very little time.
00:58:03.920 And people's ability to fall asleep gets better. People recover from traumatic experiences better.
00:58:09.100 what's going on here what is going on what's going on is threefold first of all we now know
00:58:15.340 that in these states of deep relaxation that are not meditation and are not a nap there's a clear
00:58:22.660 out of debris from the brain this is called glymphatic clearance uh we don't have time to
00:58:27.780 go into the mechanisms but there's a clearance of the of all the stuff of of cellular metabolism in
00:58:32.560 the brain ammonia carbon dioxide like cellular debris the ability to clear that stuff out has
00:58:40.100 been shown to offset the development of dementia reduces the likelihood of dementia helps you
00:58:45.400 maintain brain function in addition and some people will just i usually find that people this
00:58:52.020 is the one that really gets people if you've ever had a poor night's sleep you know those bags under
00:58:55.960 your eyes not yours but i'm speaking metaphorically here um you certainly don't have this uh whatever
00:59:01.400 you're doing you're doing all the right things clearly but when we've all had if i do we have
00:59:05.560 the wrong lighting in here well it i don't believe that but in any case the if you've ever had one
00:59:10.200 poor night's sleep you look in the mirror and you go oh my god what is that have you ever wondered
00:59:14.760 why then two days later after you've slept well you're back to great what happened turns out it's
00:59:20.720 the buildup of glymph this lymphatic fluid under the eyes and in the eyes you can even see in
00:59:26.640 somebody that hasn't slept well their eyes don't quite look right there's actually lymphatic
00:59:31.040 glymphatic clearance from the eyes. So these practices of deep relaxation, as well as sleep,
00:59:37.180 where the majority of this clearance of this waste product and the glymphatic clearance occurs,
00:59:42.820 you can build in these micro practices throughout the day, or just one minute or five minutes of
00:59:48.600 doing this. And you're offsetting dementia. You come out of it mentally and physically restored.
00:59:53.560 You don't have the sleep inertia, the grogginess of a nap. And we're finding that people learn
00:59:58.860 faster. It's great for stress mitigation. I mean, the myriad benefits again, which is called
01:00:05.320 protocols. You, you write about, you can listen to a scripted NSDR session, um, non-sleep deep
01:00:12.360 rest scripted. So where, where can we find that? What's that? Is that like on YouTube?
01:00:16.840 Yeah, you can find these on YouTube, Apple, Spotify. You can download them for completely
01:00:21.360 free, download them to your phone. So you don't even have a wifi connection. You can be on the
01:00:24.700 plane or wherever. I put a bunch of them that I really like. You go to hubermanlab.com slash
01:00:29.940 NSDR, or you could simply do a web search and just put NSDR. For a really pleasant woman's
01:00:37.080 voice, my friend Kelly Boyes, B-O-Y-S, does wonderful NSDRs. She's in the Waking Up app
01:00:43.000 also. There's some with my voice. You can find some. There's a guy named Liam Gillen,
01:00:47.960 who has this. My sister really likes his Irish voice. I think she has a bit of a crush on him,
01:00:52.660 if I'm honest. I'm sorry to my sister, but she loves his voice. She's like, he has the best
01:00:57.600 voice. She does Liam's. And these are so simple. They cost nothing. And by the way, the reason I
01:01:05.780 renamed Yoga Nidra NSDR and put these scripts out into the world is I intentionally took away all
01:01:12.720 the intentions, the mysticism. I want to acknowledge the people that initially developed
01:01:18.240 Yoga Nidra, but when people hear Yoga Nidra and then they hear they have to do intentions,
01:01:23.380 that takes it i'm not sure my truckers are into it exactly that takes away from the practice
01:01:28.020 and it's it's sort of like the word hypnosis i have a colleague at stanford who does
01:01:33.300 medical hypnosis incredible success rates at a smoking cessation pain modulation even can't even
01:01:40.740 outcomes from cancer treatment but i always tell him this you need to rebrand this thing because
01:01:45.860 in his hands hypnosis is rapid brain plasticity rewiring of the brain but people hear hypnosis
01:01:52.020 and they think stage hypnosis and people squawking like chickens.
01:01:55.460 So what I'm talking about here, whether it's cortisol or darkness, light, breathing, exhales,
01:02:02.880 non-sleep, deep rest, I really want to emphasize what I'm talking about is taking your God-given
01:02:08.440 physiology, okay, the cells and circuits in your brain and body that you are endowed with
01:02:14.340 and just putting them to their best use for your health.
01:02:17.300 That's the whole story.
01:02:18.740 in the book i get in i do talk about supplements and pharmaceuticals i talk about nicotine both
01:02:24.660 benefits and risks i talk about how one can if you like to have a drink or two how you can do
01:02:29.960 that and not disrupt your sleep or health as much at least eight to ten hours before you go to bed
01:02:34.900 ten hours you're in favor of the darty is basically what we're learning this is the college term for 0.98
01:02:39.640 the day part i think you got to keep that shit well away from the time it's go you go to bed 0.92
01:02:44.780 i don't drink i did in my past i don't drink now but i understand people like there are people like 0.97
01:02:50.180 alcohol have your glass of wine but then do a couple of things simple things like i just
01:02:55.480 described to get your sleep to keep your sleep good or great that we actually don't know whether
01:03:01.680 the the negative effects of alcohol i'm talking about low amounts of alcohol could very well be
01:03:06.920 due to the disruption that alcohol has on sleep so do a few other things and look if you go out
01:03:12.740 and have a bunch of drinks with your friends and you're safe about it, you're non-alcoholic
01:03:17.020 and you're of age, like you're going to be okay.
01:03:19.860 You're going to be okay.
01:03:20.580 I think that some people have taken my podcast and my book to mean that like everything has
01:03:24.580 to be very rigid.
01:03:25.540 I start off the book by saying, listen, true optimization is about accepting who you are
01:03:31.620 and what you are and are not going to do.
01:03:33.220 And then trying to get the most vigor and enjoyment out of life and most life while
01:03:38.800 Also, having the occasional sleepless night, sometimes due to crisis, sometimes due to
01:03:43.360 celebration.
01:03:44.320 That's life.
01:03:45.560 This is reminding me something recently happened on X.
01:03:47.760 You may have seen it.
01:03:48.460 You know, Brian Johnson, the don't die guy who has been on this show, he he posted and
01:03:54.840 he knows he's going to get hit for these things.
01:03:56.460 So I kind of admire his honesty.
01:03:57.900 But he posted last night I had dinner at a restaurant.
01:04:04.040 I asked for caffeine free coffee.
01:04:07.240 I'm convinced they brought me caffeinated.
01:04:09.640 The sleep protocol was off.
01:04:11.120 I could not do my morning dunk session, which I think is related to basketball.
01:04:14.580 I think it means actual dunking, although I don't know with Brian Johnson.
01:04:17.020 You never know.
01:04:17.760 They had to cancel it because my whole evening and day were disrupted.
01:04:22.120 And the responses were so funny.
01:04:24.480 One of them was basically Michael Jordan once had 10 beers and then played a game in which he scored 50 points.
01:04:33.700 And then went on to do a round of golf at which he was like X under par.
01:04:38.680 It's like, we have weakened ourselves.
01:04:41.360 And especially this is a man to man situation to the point beyond shame.
01:04:46.620 You should be able to have one night of a cup of coffee and not post about it.
01:04:53.440 And the whole next day's activities are off.
01:04:55.640 Like, come on.
01:04:56.600 We actually are somewhat resilient.
01:04:59.220 Yes.
01:04:59.540 So a couple of brief points about that.
01:05:01.840 Um, I, I know Brian. Um, so yes, X is an environment, um, where you don't want to show
01:05:11.040 weakness. Um, you, uh, most certainly if you're going to make exercise claims, you need to put
01:05:16.700 videos. And if you put videos, um, don't confuse, uh, you know, you have to, you have to use proper
01:05:22.780 form and full, full range of motion or the guys are going to hammer you, right? Like it's a very,
01:05:27.480 There should be a third party in your life, someone who doesn't love or work for you,
01:05:32.280 who approves of said video before it gets posted.
01:05:34.920 So Brian's, you know, when Brian put that out there, I think there's three phenomenon
01:05:37.840 going on.
01:05:38.740 One is, you know, I look at Brian's content, I think he's mostly generating entertainment
01:05:47.060 content for people.
01:05:48.280 I mean, his takeaways about sleep, I think are very valid, but it's more of a caricature
01:05:53.080 of longevity, in my opinion, if I'm honest.
01:05:55.880 I think that, you know, most people are not going to do all the things he's doing.
01:05:59.640 And then he has this chronic chronic disease, which kind of undercut the story.
01:06:03.060 But anyway, listen, I think it's great that he's out there, just like I think it's great that Matt Kaberline's out there and Eric Topol.
01:06:09.740 You need this is one thing that people really need to understand about health and longevity in the online communities.
01:06:15.700 In science, in medicine, and I observed this in the in the world of skateboarding and action sports.
01:06:22.840 you need a community that represent the sort of different extremes right in skateboarding we have
01:06:28.520 our tony hawk we had our my friend danny way who jumped the great wall of china you need the variety
01:06:33.700 of characters right and in science you see this too i don't have time to go into it now but i grew
01:06:39.700 up in science and you get a lot of characters and you need the battles you need all that but at the
01:06:45.240 end of the day people are after truth and some things end up being more for entertainment purposes
01:06:49.420 and the take up, and that's fine.
01:06:51.800 And if it gets people paying attention to the space,
01:06:53.780 so be it.
01:06:54.220 Right, right.
01:06:54.620 Okay, let me keep it going.
01:06:56.080 I have a question for you as a neuroscientist about OCD
01:06:59.880 because maybe it's just my anecdotal impression,
01:07:03.260 but I feel like it's growing.
01:07:04.360 I feel like I don't know a mom or a dad
01:07:06.060 that doesn't have a kid with this
01:07:07.220 or that isn't doing it themselves.
01:07:09.780 I've got a little bit of this in my own life,
01:07:11.760 not like hand-washing,
01:07:12.900 but just like repetitive movements
01:07:14.800 or counting in my own head.
01:07:16.820 And yet I don't think of myself as an anxious person.
01:07:19.160 I don't feel any active anxiety pretty much ever, but I do have a tinge of this. So is that a
01:07:26.280 neuroscientist thing? And might some of these techniques, because you're big into stress
01:07:31.120 management in the book, there are tons of tools for stress management. And I don't know how you'd
01:07:35.480 classify that. Is that stress? What is that? Yeah, great question. So whether we're talking
01:07:41.980 about adhd or ocd uh we need to separate the the sort of the semblance of those things that many
01:07:49.420 many many people have and is normal versus the the full-blown pathology so the clinical definition
01:07:55.240 of ocd is when the compulsion the behavior actually doesn't suppress the obsession it makes
01:08:03.200 it worse so people who have true ocd they feel like they need to wash their hands they wash their
01:08:08.280 hands and then they feel like they need to do it more. They feel like they need to count,
01:08:12.240 they count, then they feel like they need to do it more. And it's maddening. They are stricken
01:08:18.740 and they'll do it till their hands are raw. There's the hair pulling version of it. There's
01:08:24.760 some very, very severe manifestations of this. But OCD in that form is just an extreme version
01:08:31.100 of something that many, many people have. Just like, I'll give another example. If you go to a
01:08:35.760 bridge and you think, oh my gosh, like what's keeping me from jumping off? Or people have
01:08:40.260 thoughts and they go, oh my goodness, like why did I have that thought? That's actually a healthy
01:08:44.320 reflection of your ability to suppress action and thoughts, right? You're not going to act on those
01:08:49.280 things. It's perfectly normal. Now, when we're tired, when we are stressed, symptoms of OCD and
01:08:57.020 people that don't have full-blown clinical OCD can worsen. Now, I know these days for understandable
01:09:02.620 reason there's a lot of concern about ssris and i agree that when you look at the data it's clear
01:09:08.020 that many many too many adults and children were medicated with with ssris but i will say in
01:09:14.720 fairness to the scientific literature ssris have greatly helped people with severe ocd
01:09:21.280 ocd we know is associated with an overgrowth of a particular brain area in what's called a circuit
01:09:27.240 called the basal ganglia it's involved in action and suppressing action and a brilliant scientist
01:09:32.060 at nih named judith rapaport discovered this years ago remember prior to the 90s like when i started
01:09:37.660 learning about neuroscience i claim no discovery here but it was thought that this was all
01:09:42.220 psychological or like bad parenting or you know or trauma-based of which it can be but we know
01:09:49.020 this is a brain issue so those drugs in the proper hands and proper dosages can really help people
01:09:54.700 as can behavioral treatments okay in people like you i'm assuming you don't have full-blown clinical
01:09:59.740 OCD based on what you told me, or people who say, I can't be a 10.
01:10:03.300 I just like when I, well, I noticed like when I was practicing law, where I was working
01:10:08.080 all the time and not getting a lot of sleep, whenever I was walking on the streets of New
01:10:12.320 York, I was counting my steps or when I'd go up or down a staircase, I would count the
01:10:17.540 number of stairs.
01:10:18.440 It like little things were just pop up here and there in your day where you're, then you're
01:10:21.700 like, why am I counting?
01:10:23.180 What am I doing?
01:10:23.840 Right.
01:10:24.200 Something like that.
01:10:24.980 It's a great question.
01:10:25.600 So, uh, and then, you know, in some cultures they worry beads, right.
01:10:29.120 Where people are constantly moving the beads in their hands to sort of dispel some of the
01:10:33.360 energy.
01:10:34.300 I will venture a guess here, an educated guess, that you have a lot of energy.
01:10:40.140 You're a focused person.
01:10:41.620 You're always looking for ways that you can do better and be better and so on.
01:10:46.700 And people like that, when there's not a task right in front of them, tend to have a lot
01:10:51.560 of energy pouring into the system.
01:10:53.260 The same way that I've always had Bulldog Mastiff mutts.
01:10:56.240 And they love to run. 0.95
01:10:58.340 then they're lazy. But if you don't give them enough exercise, they start gnawing on their
01:11:03.460 paw. They need to chew. We all have our chew, right? A bulldog needs to gnaw, a retriever
01:11:10.380 needs to retrieve, a rat terrier needs to look for things. And as humans, we have these tendencies
01:11:17.400 where our brain circuits become, thankfully, asymmetric towards learning, teaching, communicating.
01:11:23.380 Look, you're in front of the public eye virtually every single day, and it's high stakes, right?
01:11:31.000 And so your system learns to relax in that.
01:11:33.860 You are a high-level professional athlete, thinker, communicator, learner, doer.
01:11:38.820 And so when you're walking down the street, it's hard to just switch brain modes to, oh, I'm just walking down the street.
01:11:44.720 Now I'm just going to be in my most chill form.
01:11:46.820 And so the brain starts looking for things to do, count, think about things.
01:11:51.160 sometimes listening to a podcast or a book can help. It's very hard to turn the brain off. And
01:11:57.720 it's actually not advantageous for you to walk out of a meeting or this podcast,
01:12:03.180 walk to lunch. And during that walk to lunch, you're just completely decompressed. And then
01:12:07.080 you eat your lunch and then you come back and you snap back on. The brain doesn't work in what we
01:12:10.800 call step wave function, in square wave functions. You don't go from asleep, awake, awake to asleep.
01:12:17.320 They're these transition states.
01:12:18.620 So when you're walking down the street and you're thinking, I'm kind of obsessing about
01:12:22.400 that, why?
01:12:22.960 Well, there's some carryover from the previous thing.
01:12:25.340 Just like if you were, you know, waking up, you don't immediately feel wide awake and
01:12:29.600 ready to go about your day.
01:12:30.700 There's some, you know, there's some shifting of circuits.
01:12:33.400 And actually in the final chapter of the book, I talk about tools for tasks switching.
01:12:39.300 You know, many people find that they can't focus, but actually their challenge is in
01:12:43.220 dropping the mindset from the previous thing to be able to focus. For you and me who do public
01:12:49.040 facing work, it's a requirement, right? Our phones aren't out. You know, we have to be locked in,
01:12:55.740 but I bet within 10 minutes of ending this, like one of us will pick up our phone most likely.
01:13:01.360 And so that's normal. It's healthy, but don't expect your brain to shut off completely. And
01:13:05.540 I'll just weave one other thing in here. Many people are having attention issues these days.
01:13:10.080 there's a study that was done recently that shows that if your phone is upside down on the table in
01:13:14.840 front of you or it's in your bag under your chair completely turned off you have a harder time
01:13:21.980 focusing compared to if it's in a different room but it turns out you can focus if it's on the
01:13:27.960 table or it's underneath your chair the problem is it takes more mental resources and you give up
01:13:32.600 what is essentially intelligence cognitive flexibility and creativity so there's a cost
01:13:38.540 But more importantly, if you're used to looking at your phone every three minutes or so, when your phone is not there every three minutes or so or less, your brain gets distracted with no distraction.
01:13:51.300 The brain learns these rhythms of the sun comes up in the morning.
01:13:55.400 It goes down at night.
01:13:56.840 I'm alert in the morning because I got my morning sunlight or one of these 10,000 lux lights.
01:14:01.860 I dim the lights.
01:14:03.300 This is something we call entrainment.
01:14:05.020 And the beauty of this is that if you take everything we've talked about and you do it for a couple of days, the bright lights and the bright mornings, darker nights, you try and limit your phone for just fight the impulse just every other time to reach for just for an extra 10 seconds.
01:14:21.580 What happens is you naturally start to feel more alert when you wake up in the morning, even before you got the light in your eyes.
01:14:29.200 I always get the question, how come I wake up one minute before my alarm clock?
01:14:33.560 Guess why? Because that rise in cortisol is what wakes you up. And that is entrained to your alarm
01:14:39.600 clock. Now you can entrain it to sunlight also. And guess what? On the day when you miss it,
01:14:44.960 because it's really dreary out in the Northeast, you'll still feel plenty alert. And at night-
01:14:50.140 I'm going to start texting you pictures of me in January outside in the snow saying, 0.99
01:14:56.520 damn that Andrew Huberman. Listen, I will be happy to gift you a 10,000 lux artificial light. I send 0.97
01:15:01.760 to people who say i'm just not going to go outside i'm just not going to i'm not going to go outside
01:15:06.320 i'm not going to do it just and flip on all the screens uh some some music or just wake yourself
01:15:11.600 up you will find that bookending your day in this way and just understanding a bit about my brain is
01:15:16.640 doing something normal and healthy here i'm counting things i i have a little bit of a
01:15:20.720 superstitious streak i get it um and it's our brain's attempt to have some control but also
01:15:27.760 just to take this attention this energy that we have and put it someplace and dogs need it humans
01:15:34.400 need it we need more focus and we need deeper sleep and brighter days and all of that but i also
01:15:41.440 want to emphasize we need to be human you need to enjoy your life right i think i think people saw
01:15:46.640 that the brian thing and they i i think he did do it more for entertainment purposes and we said
01:15:51.120 said we're out and it's like look most people sleep to prepare for the next day clearly he's
01:15:57.240 he spends his days preparing to sleep it's just an inversion of the of the life design but most
01:16:03.340 people are not going to do that he's going to live forever for what yeah that's not living thank god
01:16:07.280 at least he has a girlfriend now the girl who's been helping him do his uh online posts so that's
01:16:11.980 that's a plus for brian um let me ask you a question about on the question of light
01:16:15.640 the issue of light expose your skin and eyes to long wavelength light and you say it can be
01:16:23.960 red light near infrared and infrared now i i feel like i've i've heard you talk about this but i
01:16:30.820 can't remember these specifics because red light is becoming more and more popular like women are
01:16:37.700 doing it red light therapy on their face for you know even skin tone and so on some men are doing
01:16:44.120 infrared or, you know, saunas. What is the story with your eyes, exposing your eyes
01:16:52.260 to red light or infrared light? Yeah. So the best zero cost, but perfect source of long
01:17:01.800 wavelength light, meaning red light and infrared light. Infrared light is the warmth from the sun
01:17:07.120 is sunlight, right? God built us the perfect light device for our mitochondria, for our skin,
01:17:14.920 for our hormone health, et cetera. There's only one problem. You can't do it on your schedule.
01:17:20.320 You have to do it on the sun schedule because what you want is the long wavelength light. So
01:17:25.080 these are the yellows, oranges, reds, and then out past red is infrared, right? We can't see it,
01:17:30.180 but we can feel it. That's the stuff that's great for our mitochondria and that my colleague,
01:17:35.680 glenn jeffrey university college london i've known him for decades did these studies as i mentioned
01:17:40.600 earlier shine you get that light on your skin or even through a t-shirt or light shirt and
01:17:45.880 your metabolism is improved but it also turns out that if you're 40 or older if you get this long
01:17:54.520 wavelength light on your skin or ideally in your eyes you can do that from the morning sunlight
01:17:59.500 viewing or afternoon sunlight viewing sunset viewing you help repair the the cells in the back
01:18:07.340 of the eyes called the photoreceptors these are the cells that take photons of light convert them
01:18:11.660 into electrical energy that allows you to see and pete and you can offset what he showed in that
01:18:17.660 study was that you can offset some of the age-related vision loss you also offset myopia
01:18:24.140 which is nearsightedness now i had to start wearing readers recently because of writing this book
01:18:28.540 because i was spending so much time up close to a screen when you look at things too close up for
01:18:33.980 and you don't see horizons very much you're not looking at a distance very much the eyeball
01:18:38.460 lengthens and the visual image lands in front of the light sensing portion of the eye not on it
01:18:44.700 that's what corrective lenses do they bring the the the light point point of focus onto the right
01:18:49.820 location. There is a true epidemic of myopia, of nearsightedness. And the data on kids and their
01:18:58.880 data emerging on adults too, is that if kids just take their tablets, computers outside,
01:19:03.880 if you get outside more, you offset this. So the long wavelength light turns out to be the key.
01:19:10.260 Sunlight is full spectrum. You have UV, short wavelength, medium, and long wavelength. And
01:19:14.380 the balance is key. You don't want too much UV because it can indeed damage your skin.
01:19:18.200 there's a lot of debate nowadays about how much sunlight you need some uv for vitamin d production
01:19:22.720 and for mood and health but you don't want to get a sunburn and indeed it can cause accelerated
01:19:28.780 aging in the skin if you're getting too much uv we could talk about that if you like but getting
01:19:34.620 some long wavelength light from sunlight or and or i would say you could get a red light like a red
01:19:40.740 light led device you could use a red incandescent light uh we don't have a lot of farmers out put
01:19:45.880 goggles on you could put so uh so in the evening i will put on short wavelength blocking glasses
01:19:51.860 they look red tinted but that's to block the short wavelengths but when you're out during the day
01:19:57.040 you're getting a lot of long wavelength light penetrating the skin it's benefiting you and
01:20:02.300 it's benefiting your eyes but this study showed this offset of age-related vision loss is when
01:20:08.000 people get enough long wavelength light and if you're indoors he's in england so that study was
01:20:12.960 done where people are spending a lot of time indoors they're under led lights which we all
01:20:17.720 use now because they're more energy efficient candle light will do it so if you like candles
01:20:23.080 in the evening or if you um or if you have a fire in the fireplace or here's a here's a cool trick
01:20:29.540 the farmers taught me this they have a cheap an inexpensive solution to all this you get it what
01:20:34.720 they call it a pig light it's a red incandescent bulb and it supplies long wavelength light farmers
01:20:40.180 knew this it's very interesting actually as i've written this book so you don't have to stare at
01:20:44.180 the bulb you just have to be it fills the room and the beauty of long wavelength light is that
01:20:48.740 it bounces off surfaces all over so you don't have to be looking right at it if you can get outside
01:20:54.100 in a green space if i were to give you infrared glass goggles like the special operators where
01:21:01.060 you would notice that everything green was glowing white and that's because the long wavelength
01:21:06.660 light is bouncing off it it's getting reflected down on you there's wonderful work showing that
01:21:12.180 recovery from surgery recovery from illness staving off illness including upper respiratory
01:21:17.780 infections skin health eye health longevity is get that long wavelength light the key is to not get
01:21:24.500 too much uv because that can be damaging so that's why sunlight can be like the red light bed
01:21:31.220 yeah but infrared saunas are great um if you can afford one an infrared incandescent light
01:21:36.500 is great. An led panel, they tend to be pretty expensive. Um, but the incandescent lights are
01:21:42.280 not terribly expensive. And as I've talked to more and more farmers, they laugh, right? They're
01:21:47.840 like, I get up with the sun. I go outside, I'm carrying stuff. I'm doing work. I'm drinking my
01:21:53.740 coffee. Then I have breakfast afterwards. I might catch a quick nap in the afternoon, but I have to
01:21:59.320 go out in the evening, take the animals in, take care of things. I'm not suggesting we go back to
01:22:03.520 living that way, but they nailed it. They nailed it. It wasn't so bad. They nailed all the light.
01:22:08.620 It's funny though, when you mentioned the candlelight in law school, we had to sit
01:22:12.320 alphabetically. So the guy next to me on the one side was named Andy Kelly and Andy Kelly was
01:22:17.740 starting to lose his closeup vision, you know, he, from all the reading in law school and so on.
01:22:22.240 And he told me at the time that he reversed it by staring at candlelight. And I remember being like,
01:22:29.760 really? Is that even possible? And he swore it was possible. And here I am sitting across from
01:22:34.400 Huberman and hearing, yeah, it's possible. I mean, I think the highly processed foods
01:22:39.500 conversation for the next two years, you're going to hear two things I anticipate will be really big
01:22:44.440 in the health space. Cortisol will no longer be seen as this stress hormone. It will be seen as
01:22:49.060 the thing to leverage high morning, low at night. I hope to play a role in that. The other thing
01:22:54.640 that you're going to hear quite a lot about is how all these led lights which are incredibly
01:22:59.280 energy efficient i mean how often do you have to change a light bulb nowadays hardly ever
01:23:02.740 the problem is they're short wavelength shifted it's not the blue light it's that there isn't
01:23:07.620 enough long wavelength light so we're going to hear about supplementing with long wavelength
01:23:12.080 light that does not mean you have to buy a red light panel candlelight fireplace get outside when
01:23:17.880 the sun is low in the sky either near sunrise or near sunset get that long wavelength light
01:23:23.380 immensely beneficial also for mental health and for physical health it's so interesting that so
01:23:28.960 many of the things we're talking about in health are about undoing the damage from the lifestyle
01:23:33.900 and technologies that we've built but there's also just a lot of you know this notion that oh we used
01:23:40.200 to be scared of saber-toothed tigers and that's why we stress no i mean 10 000 years ago i guarantee
01:23:45.840 that people were concerned about their loved ones when they went off to hunt or gather
01:23:49.280 relationships had issues kids got sick stress has always been a part of life the key is
01:23:55.800 to teach yourself how to de-stress to get great sleep turn your mind off get focused and alert
01:24:02.980 and i'm a consumer of caffeine and you know if you want we could talk about nicotine but
01:24:07.000 these are just skills that take minutes if that to learn because they work the first time and
01:24:13.920 every time you notice there's no learning curve in anything i'm saying i'm not saying listen if
01:24:17.680 You go outside for three days in a row.
01:24:19.560 Then these cells will learn it's morning.
01:24:21.620 No, the first time you do it, it works.
01:24:24.020 And it works the first time and every time.
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01:26:36.540 The book spends a fair amount of time focusing or talking about focus, motivation, and learning.
01:26:41.240 Chapter six, you go deep on that.
01:26:43.220 So if you need better focus in your life, if you need motivation.
01:26:46.560 But the learning thing was interesting to me.
01:26:50.520 Protocol three I wanted to talk about, embrace errors.
01:26:54.520 There's a whole long bit in the book about embracing errors, saying they embrace the fact that errors are an essential trigger for learning.
01:27:03.820 Errors that come from genuine attempts to learn something are the signal for plasticity to occur.
01:27:09.540 This is true for all forms of skill development, cognitive, motor, musical, mathematical, et cetera.
01:27:17.240 So whether you're learning a sport, a musical instrument, or history, or news for that matter,
01:27:26.640 making errors in the process of learning is critical.
01:27:30.920 So can you expand on that?
01:27:32.000 Yes. So if I could put a banner across the sky, I would want people to understand the following message. The agitation you feel from not being able to do something through a genuine attempt, so not throwaway errors, that agitation is the reflection of the release of certain molecules.
01:27:54.940 we call them neuromodulators in the brain and body that tell your nervous system you need to
01:28:00.580 change to close the gap between what you're trying to do and what you currently can do
01:28:04.500 okay we don't tell kids this we don't tell adults this and so we think the friction that comes from
01:28:12.500 the attempt to learn that that somehow is signaling that we're in the wrong place
01:28:16.600 no if you if you think about it logically if your nervous system could do something if your brain
01:28:22.240 could do it if your body could do it why would it change it wouldn't and we've been so captivated
01:28:27.840 by this concept of flow which is a beautiful concept but this idea of you know forgetting
01:28:32.880 ourselves and just being able to do the skill i mean this is unfortunately the consequence of
01:28:38.860 science fiction and movies where somebody gets the sword they drink the drink they are wake up and 0.93
01:28:46.260 you know they get hit by lightning and now they have superpowers like damn that harry potter right 0.91
01:28:50.760 You know, like, no, that's not how it works. That's this thing called fantasy. The way it works is that you know nothing. You go from unskilled to skilled, skill to mastery, mastery to virtuosity. How do you do that? You make genuine attempts to do something. In order to do that, you have to be alert and focused. So you have to learn to focus. And I talk about that in that chapter. 0.97
01:29:14.000 then you can't do it that's the signal your nervous system needs to change you get some rest
01:29:19.740 from sleep or non-sleep deep rest ideally both and you come back a day or two later and you can
01:29:26.760 sort of do the thing huh amazing we all know this to be true but it turns out the errors are the
01:29:33.280 signal to your nervous system that needs to change but your nervous system doesn't know error it
01:29:37.780 knows that it's your nervous system speaks to the neurons speak to each other in electricity and
01:29:43.640 chemicals. So agitation and, and that low level stress. So alert, but calm, but a little bit
01:29:49.660 stressed that signals it's time to change. Here's the best way to think about it. If you've ever
01:29:54.800 played that game, hot hands, where, you know, your hands are on top of someone else's hands
01:29:59.820 and the person underneath is going to flip their hands over and hit your hands. That's the level
01:30:03.880 of attention and kind of alertness that you need to learn. That just to me describes it perfectly.
01:30:10.160 So you're not stressed, but you're not too relaxed either.
01:30:13.720 So you have to be wrapped with attention and looking for something, ready for something,
01:30:18.760 trying to throw the dart to the bullseye, trying to, you know, hit the, you know, sink
01:30:23.220 the ball, trying to learn the language.
01:30:26.060 So you have to pay attention.
01:30:27.200 There's only so much you can do in a given learning.
01:30:29.480 I call them learning bouts because it should feel like a fight with yourself.
01:30:33.400 And if you're too stressed, you can't do it.
01:30:35.200 Now, there's even studies that show that if you take a drug like propranolol, beta blocker, conventional beta blocker, after you try to learn something, you don't learn it because the adrenaline in your body and norepinephrine in your brain are two of the key neuromodulators for learning.
01:30:55.960 This is why, unfortunately, traumatic experiences and fortunately are one trial learning, right?
01:31:02.800 If you step off the curb and a car almost hits you, okay, you can probably go about your day okay, but you have a changed relationship to that location, okay?
01:31:15.360 And what happened was there was a lot of adrenaline and trauma comes about when there's so much adrenaline that it grabs memories that are unassociated with the event.
01:31:25.400 so now the sound of cars just gets you ramped up doesn't matter if the car is driving away from you
01:31:30.440 the walking out on the street gets you ramped up and then the process is of also of plasticity
01:31:35.860 where you have to now we call it trigger you have to unlearn the emotion so now we every form of
01:31:40.860 trauma therapy whether it's you know uh you know emdr or it's talk therapy is about getting you
01:31:47.440 into a calmer emotional state while recounting the event you're not going to forget the thing
01:31:51.380 it's about peeling off the emotional load so when you want to learn something what i call
01:31:56.140 self-directed adaptive plasticity it's a bunch of words but to distinguish it from bad plasticity
01:32:02.240 because brain damage is a form of plasticity but it's not one you want but when you're trying to
01:32:06.180 learn something you have to be alert so you can be focused i talk about ways to do that should you
01:32:10.600 or should you not use caffeine or nicotine should you or should you not uh take a cold shower first
01:32:15.540 well the best way to get alert is to have a good night's sleep the night before but caffeine helps
01:32:19.700 too. Hydration helps too. And if you really care about something that helps too, right? Even kids
01:32:26.240 with severe ADHD can concentrate on their favorite video game. We know this. They don't have a focus
01:32:31.320 issue. They have a focus on things they don't like issue. Adults as well. This is important.
01:32:37.240 And then you focus and then you have to try and do something. I'm trying, I'm trying. And people,
01:32:41.720 I hear it all the time. I'm not good at that. I'm not good at that. Why? I don't know. It stresses
01:32:47.080 me out. Great. Now's the opportunity to learn. One of the reasons why exercise helps your brain,
01:32:53.460 I mean, there are many reasons, helps with better oxygenation of the brain, better sleep,
01:32:57.160 et cetera. But one of the reasons that you learn so much better in the four or five hours after
01:33:01.680 exercise is that it makes you more alert because you have epinephrine and norepinephrine circulating
01:33:06.400 in your brain and body. So a lot of the positive effects of exercise are, it's true, I should say
01:33:13.760 that yes, exercise makes your brain better, but it really, it should be exercise gives you the
01:33:19.040 opportunity to learn. You don't get smarter by exercising. Anyone that's known like a pure jock
01:33:24.440 can attest to that. That's a joke against my jock friends, but the, but anyone that just exercises
01:33:30.620 isn't getting smarter. That's not true. It gives you the opportunity to learn because you come out
01:33:36.240 of that exercise, provided you didn't exhaust yourself. We're not talking two hours of squats
01:33:40.940 or something, you come out of that exercise and you feel different. Why? What is that? Dopamine,
01:33:47.280 epinephrine, norepinephrine, the so-called catecholamines, that cocktail of neurochemicals
01:33:51.660 primes you for learning. So 2026, 27, come out of exercise. Maybe you read for a moment. Maybe
01:34:00.120 you sit and do some emotional learning. Some people are trying to be a better spouse. They're
01:34:06.020 trying to be better to themselves. And this sounds so silly, right? But to sit there and think, 0.93
01:34:10.640 I'm going to try and be a little bit kinder to myself today or to other people. It sounds really
01:34:15.360 squishy, right? But if you're in a certain state of mind, it actually works. It carries over.
01:34:23.000 But just telling yourself, I'm going to be a nicer person is like saying, I'm going to be
01:34:27.160 kinder to myself. That's about as effective as telling yourself, I'm going to learn
01:34:31.060 fluent Japanese by saying, I'm going to learn fluent Japanese. No, it's the state that you're
01:34:36.240 in when you set that intention to learn. It's the state that you're in when you arrive at the
01:34:42.440 learning. And so we can all learn new things. It's just a function of being alert, being focused,
01:34:49.760 and getting into that agitation, and then going and doing something else. And you'll come back
01:34:54.220 better. You will master that skill over time. Well, you write about personal growth in the
01:35:01.900 book. And I was actually just talking about this with my audience. I've mentioned it many times.
01:35:04.840 people generally know it, but I was saying, and this is in your book as well, you like the less,
01:35:12.440 in my view, the less time spent thinking about the past, the better. Um, I just, I've, I try to
01:35:19.700 stay away from it and I've had a great life. I, it's not because I had a ton of trauma. I had
01:35:23.700 some things, but I definitely don't ruminate on them. And when I start going to them, I try to
01:35:29.060 get myself off of them and I can pretty quickly. I just find no good comes from it. And I'm trying
01:35:32.760 to teach my kids that same skill. Like there's really no point in just ruminating or going back
01:35:38.320 or reliving some unfortunate moment. The less time spent thinking about it, the better.
01:35:43.080 And kind of the same about the future. Like some, some planning is required to exist on this earth
01:35:50.040 and make something out of yourself. You know, you have to figure out if you want to take a big
01:35:53.640 vacation in June and it's December, you might need to buy an airline ticket and so on. But
01:35:57.500 the best thing for for happiness is to be in the present and they say that all the time now
01:36:02.780 and it is harder it's easier said than done but you've got some tips in the book which i thought
01:36:09.680 were quite clever again the book is called protocols by andrew huberman right here you
01:36:15.480 can get it on pre-order right now it's coming out soon um and i thought these were clever like
01:36:21.060 questions that you can ask about your environment that will bring you right right into the room on
01:36:27.380 unavoidably yeah the past um okay two most dangerous words in the english language are
01:36:32.960 if only uh i stand by that i didn't say that someone once said that to me you you cannot live
01:36:39.080 in if only that that that that is death that that is spiritual death that's uh so that i'll just
01:36:47.300 leave there as a to me a hard truth i will say i'll put it a different way as my as my dear friend 0.96
01:36:53.920 always says the past is like your ass behind you so um being the data that's a good one the the 0.86
01:37:02.880 the data definitely say large-scale data sets definitely say that being present um correlates 0.98
01:37:10.160 with happiness and that's true even if you're in unpleasant present circumstances so you're with
01:37:18.940 someone who's sick in the hospital interesting try not to distract yourself but you need to sleep
01:37:23.820 to be a great caretaker. I'm going to put two caveats and then total agreement. The first
01:37:30.280 caveat is there's a section in the book where I talk about data from this guy named James Pennebaker
01:37:34.460 who developed a tool called expressive writing, where if there's something in the back of your
01:37:41.260 mind that you can't shake, an experience you cannot shake, a time when you experience shame
01:37:46.560 or a trauma. There are now tens of thousands of quality studies showing that if you take 15
01:37:54.260 minutes, but just 15, not more, and you write about that four days in a row, by the end of
01:38:03.540 the fourth day, you will have significantly offloaded a lot of the emotional load of that
01:38:08.860 thing. So I want to be fair to that. So if there's something that like I use the term sometimes that,
01:38:14.060 you know, there are these past experiences that are kind of like barbed wire. Like we,
01:38:17.120 they're painful to get off and they're painful to stay on. I mean, you know, so
01:38:21.100 that Pennebaker exercise costs nothing. You can tear up the paper afterwards. Actually,
01:38:26.660 I suggest you do, but you do it four days in a row. You will feel significantly better. Say the
01:38:31.560 data. Pretty incredible. Writing does seem to be important. The handwriting it out, set a timer,
01:38:38.480 do it. You will come out of that first session, not feeling great, but you'll move about your day.
01:38:43.140 symptoms of health immune system function improves they've done all the measures of
01:38:48.360 biology and psychology that one would want to see and it's really impressive okay so that that aside
01:38:54.140 the other thing is i'll just mention a saying i didn't come up with but i that i love is
01:38:59.440 and it's harsh but the difference between winners and losers is the following losers take things
01:39:06.800 that happened to them, happened to them, or that they did, that they wish they hadn't done,
01:39:12.920 and they take the negative feelings around those things and they use it for self or outward
01:39:19.420 destruction. Winners, I think we would all agree, take the hard things that happen to them,
01:39:26.300 as well as the gifts they've been given, they think about them as much as they need to,
01:39:31.580 but then they transmute that those experiences maybe years of experience into things that are
01:39:37.660 good for them and for the world period end of story i know it's harsh winners and losers but
01:39:43.580 let's face it most of the bad stuff in the world is because people are taking bad stuff that
01:39:47.900 happened to them and doing bad stuff they feel justified in doing it there's some full-blown
01:39:52.320 psychosis type stuff but let me just let me just interject quickly um last week we watched the
01:39:58.340 novak djokovic documentary um the wolf of winter he's impressive which is i think on netflix right
01:40:03.340 now and of course he's like he's the goat and it's that's saying something in the world of tennis
01:40:07.560 because there are others who are just right there with him but he's got the most uh wins when it
01:40:13.180 comes to grand slams which is how they measure it so the the the movie it's two hours long is
01:40:17.920 very good but djokovic is a controversial guy or was very controversial when he started in the
01:40:23.580 tennis world because he was less mature. He did some mocking of other players. He suddenly got
01:40:29.700 injured in mass matches that he was losing when he was younger. And this turned a lot of people
01:40:34.340 on him. And for years he was booed. He was never the favorite. They created a rivalry in tennis
01:40:41.160 between Federer and Nadal. Djokovic wasn't part of it, even though he was up and coming and then
01:40:46.720 very much was in it with those two, but would be the lesser than. He has a line in his documentary,
01:40:52.360 table for three, please. But they weren't giving this to him because he was never the favorite.
01:40:58.820 And what Djokovic talked about was there's something in Serbian culture called in it that
01:41:04.400 makes you thrive on that. And people who aren't Serbian or don't have that natural mindset
01:41:10.860 couldn't understand that all those boos and treating him like a second class citizen and
01:41:15.560 making him feel like odd man out, even when he was number one in the world, only fueled him
01:41:21.840 to win more. And in fact, he's somebody who kind of needs it in order to win. So all of his
01:41:27.800 detractors were inadvertently helping him. Now he's, it's changed. He's beloved and he's matured
01:41:34.560 and he's totally likable in this documentary entirely. But in any event, when you talk about
01:41:38.460 that, that's what I'm thinking of. Somebody who takes what could be traumatizing for someone
01:41:43.120 else, being openly booed by the entire stadium at the Australian Open, which you've won something
01:41:51.380 like 16 times and where you should be a King because you leave after getting seriously hurt.
01:41:57.600 This is later in his career, openly booed. What you could, you could be talking about that as
01:42:02.440 your trauma on a self-help show. Yeah. Instead he it's fuel for him and it's a positive. So
01:42:09.420 this is what you're talking about. I look, I, it goes back to the beginning of our conversation,
01:42:14.840 the biggest mistake I made in life, the biggest mistake, and I own it completely,
01:42:20.460 even though I was only 14 was taking the circumstances of my family life at the time
01:42:26.360 and not continuing to apply myself in certain areas of life. I should have, you know, you could
01:42:33.040 say, well, you're only 14. Okay, fine. And it all worked out, but it was a moment. And I talk about
01:42:39.020 this in the book. It was, you know, a moment, it was a physical altercation when I was, you know,
01:42:43.400 first year away at school that made me realize if I don't take the hard things that have happened,
01:42:50.460 and do something with my life, no, no one's going to care. And I won't have any self-respect
01:42:56.860 that the story of a, of a hard childhood is something that we can all like, we feel compassion 0.73
01:43:02.580 for, but I realized I was like, I'm going to be a, like a genuine loser. I was like, I'm going to be
01:43:07.400 a genuine loser. It doesn't matter what else I do. Unless I, I actually turned my life into 0.98
01:43:13.720 something worthwhile. And I started developing agency. I started running, I started exercising,
01:43:17.800 i started studying and i had to fasten myself to a chair with a timer i had to i mean i i will say
01:43:26.040 and i know people work i worked like a maniac and i still work very very hard and so i have
01:43:33.480 great respect for anyone that can take hardship or shame and i've had other things like my advisors
01:43:37.480 dying and mistakes i've made and there's this transmutation we call it you take the negative
01:43:43.400 energy. And you have to like pretzel twisted into this expression that is good for you and for the
01:43:49.540 world, or at least not destructive. I mean, I think this is why Djokovic or like, or David Goggins,
01:43:56.720 you know, we love these people because they're doing it. We can, we can feel David's pain.
01:44:03.160 I mean, I've sat down with David. I knew him before he had a book and got famous and he was
01:44:06.640 the exact same guy. We actually were at a meeting in San Jose. This is a wild story. And we finished
01:44:11.620 up this meeting his private meeting wasn't being recorded and he said i'm going to run to the
01:44:15.620 airport he meant run to the airport he put on his back he ran like 16 miles to san jose airport
01:44:22.820 no book no fame no nothing no cameras and i was like luggage he just like rocked his backpack it
01:44:30.420 was incredible and i thought oh my that's where our you know i don't see him that much but you
01:44:35.140 know because he's off on his own running but i've got a bunch of goggins stories from before he got
01:44:39.140 famous and he was the same guy he's in a battle with himself the self-hate voice he came on my 0.99
01:44:43.920 podcast every day he hears you're a piece of garbage you're that came from the outside but 0.99
01:44:49.240 eventually he internalized and when you realize that it's all in your head you realize that you 1.00
01:44:54.680 can and need to flip the script flip the script and there's nothing more beautiful about humans
01:45:02.680 is than our ability to do this and for people who don't have intense hardship what because a lot of
01:45:07.760 times now kids will come to me and be like, I don't have the trauma story. I'm like, great.
01:45:11.500 Well, don't get soft. You know, like you didn't have that, you know, and a lot of wealthy parents
01:45:17.320 approach me. What do I do? My kid is like a total loser. They don't, or my kid doesn't want to work
01:45:22.200 because they got all this dopamine. They got everything they wanted with no effort,
01:45:26.080 dopamine and rewards without effort. First destroy a human. It just destroys a human. 0.98
01:45:32.580 It's like giving your dog a treat just for being cute. You get a, you get an unhealthy
01:45:36.440 dog that dies early. Fact. The dogs have, we all have this, sometimes it's more latent in others
01:45:44.280 than in others, but we have this desire to work. We want that friction and overcome that. That's
01:45:49.600 what makes us feel so alive and that we have capacity. And then of course, peace and joy and
01:45:55.140 meaning. It doesn't have to all be about the grind, but everyone will tell you that the peace
01:46:00.740 and meaning and love and connection.
01:46:02.480 That's all much better on a backdrop of hard work.
01:46:06.260 I, you know, end of story.
01:46:08.500 So I don't believe in focusing on the past,
01:46:11.080 but I do believe in transmuting your past
01:46:13.280 into goodness for you and for others.
01:46:15.360 And I believe that if something,
01:46:18.140 if you're really stuck,
01:46:19.660 you're really stuck,
01:46:21.460 you need to get off the barbed wire.
01:46:23.320 And that Pennebaker writing exercise costs nothing,
01:46:25.800 has been shown to be very effective.
01:46:27.740 And the idea is that you do it and then you move on.
01:46:30.120 It's not that you do it every day.
01:46:31.660 You do it and then you move on.
01:46:33.680 The other piece, oh, I'm sorry.
01:46:36.980 I just want to raise what you wrote in chapter seven
01:46:40.120 because you give people this actual tool,
01:46:43.300 writing, if your thoughts are elsewhere,
01:46:45.740 retether them to the present.
01:46:47.960 Ask questions anchored in your current surroundings.
01:46:51.520 This is such a good tool.
01:46:52.980 Like I've never heard somebody do this before
01:46:54.460 because they just say, be in the present,
01:46:56.720 be in the present, be in the moment,
01:46:58.080 which is very hard for somebody who's a worrier or an obsessor about the past.
01:47:03.440 And you suggest, ask questions like, how cold or warm is it in this room?
01:47:09.740 What does it smell like?
01:47:11.340 How many people in line in front of me are on their phone, et cetera.
01:47:15.000 But something you say, I realize this is trivial,
01:47:17.220 but it returns your perceptions to the present
01:47:20.380 because they can only be answered right here and now.
01:47:24.780 I love this.
01:47:25.900 yeah so that came about because you know somewhere around 2015 um i look i was about to get tenure at
01:47:34.300 stanford my life was great but i noticed i had accumulated a lot of stress and i started studying
01:47:39.240 stress and stress mitigation and i found no one could give me a real-time tool for de-stressing
01:47:44.460 fast then i discovered the physiological sigh it had been around since the 30s but i was hearing
01:47:50.380 all about grit resilience and mental toughness and no one was telling me how just all these amazing
01:47:54.920 stories of people being gritty i'm like how do you do it i'm a scientist i want to know about
01:47:58.480 cells circuits mechanisms and protocols so then it would i was seeing you know the bumper stickers
01:48:04.640 be here now beautiful quote from ram das where you hear your your life is what your thoughts make it
01:48:11.480 which by the way came first from the bible but then you find in every philosopher said that but
01:48:16.120 then like how do you do that be present i mean there's nothing squishier to me than be present
01:48:20.620 how great tell me how and and you can tell i get a little irritated by i don't i really don't like
01:48:26.860 um hippie wellness i have friends that listen to grateful dead and you know i like a few of
01:48:32.240 their songs but i'm not like beating up on on hippies i just i don't like these terms like
01:48:36.980 calm down or you know or uh just take a deep breath no it turns out it's all wrong so the
01:48:43.780 be present thing i thought i'm a neuroscientist what do i know for sure i know that we can be
01:48:49.720 planning a lot of the brain's function is to predict things thank goodness we can remember
01:48:55.820 things great unless we're focused on negative things from the past as you pointed out that are
01:48:59.600 keeping us from moving forward in life or self-damaging or harming others that's not good
01:49:04.320 also focusing on your trauma all the time is not solving it it's amplifying those circuits so you
01:49:09.820 need to move past it and then i started exploring the neuroscience of perception and what brings the
01:49:16.740 brain from a state of thinking and planning and remembering things of past. So stuck in the past
01:49:21.960 or the future to being right in the present. And it turns out you have to just get into sensation
01:49:26.180 and you need to get into perceptions and asking questions. The brain loves questions. Questions
01:49:32.380 help shift the brain from one state to another. So if I could just look at the data and I looked
01:49:38.740 at the data on how to get present, it turns out you have people pay attention to seemingly trivial
01:49:44.420 things like, how cold am I? What does it feel like? The contact of my legs to the chair I'm
01:49:49.580 sitting on, something I wasn't thinking about. All of a sudden, it's not about what you're
01:49:54.220 focusing on. It's now what you're not focusing on. And once you're in the present, then the brain
01:49:59.060 can more easily shift to the positive things that you can do to have some agency over your
01:50:04.020 current conditions. We hear a lot about agency. This is so good. This is very helpful. Yeah. So
01:50:08.820 when you're feeling like you don't have control of your life, you can go online and watch something
01:50:12.820 says if you're on x it's all about agency right it's kind of like it's all about agency on instagram
01:50:17.780 not anymore but it's about more entertainment and and victim stuff who's the victim i'm the victim
01:50:25.580 they're the victim who's the victim no he's the he's the aggressive mine is on cute hair tricks
01:50:30.140 but or that like i i like the bulldog stuff and and there's other stuff too but i'm sort of i'm
01:50:35.460 kind of uh talking at the extremes but yeah how do you have agency well you have to get present
01:50:41.480 because you can't have agency over the past you sure can't have agency over the future unless you
01:50:46.260 take care of the right now how do you do that and it's interesting because kids learn this very fast
01:50:51.880 if you teach them i've taught many kids the physiological sigh and when they're stressed
01:50:56.780 to just focus on what's around them and they learn it so fast but as adults we have these
01:51:02.540 these well-charted um reflexes to gosh i'm thinking about that thing again i can't stop
01:51:08.480 thinking about that thing and then people think that they're ruminating and indeed they're
01:51:12.100 ruminating then they wonder if it's trauma and it might be i mean there are real traumas that
01:51:16.400 need to be overcome i talk about that in the book but just the simple thing of saying you know how
01:51:21.440 cold or warm is this thing i'm holding that shifts the brain in the direction you want to go that's
01:51:27.520 not where you want to stop but it brings you back to the present so you can continue forward in the
01:51:32.440 present this is and so there's a lot of discussion there about 17 years you really don't want to
01:51:37.240 stop on what does it smell like in here right right so that's really about brains that will
01:51:41.060 bring you right into the exactly right so it's about brain states it's about understanding that
01:51:45.720 the brain doesn't go from sleep to awake from stress to calm it's that you need to do things
01:51:50.640 to bridge these states to get from one state to another and you have that power in your mind and
01:51:56.060 body and so i try and provide tools that represent the the fastest and most seamless path to those
01:52:02.720 that doesn't require any learning and all you can learn how to do them but there's no it's not like
01:52:09.280 you you need to master the skill you have the skill you just haven't exercised it before
01:52:13.960 yeah you probably weren't asking the right questions now because you've mentioned a couple
01:52:18.880 times can you tell us about the physiological sigh the physiological side that so that's the
01:52:23.620 double inhale long exhale so that's the and then the exhale through the mouth okay and our study
01:52:34.320 on that a few years back we had people do that repeatedly showed that if you were to repeat that
01:52:39.440 and compare to say a meditation practice or to box breathing which is inhale hold exhale hold
01:52:46.300 or to a meditation practice what you would find is they all have some benefit but the physiological
01:52:50.900 Psy allows you to calm down the fastest and it improves your sleep. It improves your mood
01:52:56.680 and it improves resting heart rate, heart rate variability. It just has so many positive effects
01:53:02.860 and it's so simple and it costs nothing. And if you don't remember to do it every day,
01:53:08.280 you just do it every once in a while. And I know it. I know, no, no. I have neurosurgeon
01:53:13.240 friends who use it. I have tier one operator friends who use it. I know eight-year-old kids
01:53:20.060 who use it. Moms, you know, like even my dog does it, but they do it reflexively. If you watch your
01:53:25.760 dog before they go down to sleep, they do a double inhale, long exhale, and it's to balance
01:53:31.820 their carbon dioxide oxygen ratios. Dogs are so smart because they don't, they don't worry about
01:53:36.800 stuff. Not mine, but most. Yeah. It's, it's wonderful to see that others have that in their
01:53:41.940 pets. Um, let's talk about nicotine and caffeine because especially nicotine is all the rage right
01:53:48.320 now, the little packs that people put in their mouths. Um, what's the story with nicotine?
01:53:53.560 Okay. Well, 90% of the world uses caffeine every single day and they're not going to quit. And I
01:53:59.300 love caffeine. The data say it can offset dementia. Um, if you don't like caffeine
01:54:03.600 and you say to take it before exercise or drink it, whatever, which is what I like,
01:54:09.100 or coffee I like as well. People have different caffeine tolerances. I will say, if you don't
01:54:14.040 like caffeine, don't go drink it to try and offset dementia. You'll be fine. But if you do like
01:54:19.700 caffeine, you don't have to worry. I don't recommend drinking caffeine too late in the day
01:54:23.560 because it can mess up your sleep, but I love a 2 p.m. espresso. I love it, I have to say.
01:54:29.740 And I drink it and I sleep fine. Nicotine is a special one because humans throughout history,
01:54:38.280 ever since they discovered nicotine, have found a way to get it into their systems. Then they
01:54:41.800 discover it causes cancer, they find a new way. They create vaping. Then they find out that vaping
01:54:46.260 isn't good for you. Not as bad as smoking, but it's still terrible, causes all sorts of lung
01:54:51.460 issues. So then now oral nicotine is all the rage. Here's the deal. I'll tell you the positive first.
01:54:59.560 Nicotine, there is some evidence, some evidence that it may help offset Parkinson's and dementia
01:55:06.400 before it forms. Okay. Why? It increases acetylcholine, which is one of the major
01:55:13.160 neuromodulators that's depleted in many forms of dementia, and it increases dopamine and movement
01:55:20.680 and Parkinson's and dopamine. That whole story is about loss of dopaminergic neurons. Most
01:55:25.300 treatments for Parkinson's are about increasing dopamine. So the problem is that nicotine is
01:55:32.640 extremely habit forming slash addicting. Okay. It's an amazing stimulant because it makes you
01:55:39.100 alert, but it also makes you feel calm. It puts you in that perfect state for learning and for
01:55:44.220 most daytime activities, but it also raises blood pressure, which in particular for men
01:55:50.340 can cause cardiovascular issues and sexual health issues because it's a blood flow inhibitor,
01:55:55.600 right? So nicotine can cause problems if taken in excess. But the big problem is that now people
01:56:02.240 take one, you know, let's say a three to six or even eight milligram pouch of nicotine
01:56:07.600 and they feel great. And then they're doing two a day, then three a day. And then pretty soon you
01:56:14.400 need an entire canister every few days just to be normal. Same thing with caffeine. Most people
01:56:21.380 are drinking caffeine and using nicotine just to be at their normal level of alertness. So if you
01:56:25.200 really want to use nicotine as a cognitive enhancer, as a healthy person, you use it very
01:56:30.780 occasionally three to six milligrams maybe two to three times a week maximum one pouch but most
01:56:37.700 people don't do that they're quickly into multiple pouches per day so it's sort of when i say it's a
01:56:42.800 cognitive enhancer that's with occasional use and the same goes for caffeine you need to be alert to
01:56:48.520 get focused most people need caffeine just to be alert so you don't get any learning benefit or
01:56:53.820 cognitive benefit from caffeine you're just getting yourself into that plane of alertness that allows
01:56:59.380 you to function. But I love caffeine so much. I love yerba mate. I love coffee. And you're not
01:57:06.020 going to take it away from me. And I just love it. And so I like to acknowledge that some people
01:57:12.260 really like their nicotine. But if you're going to use nicotine, make sure you check your blood
01:57:15.920 pressure. And ideally, you're exercising too. I will say a lot of the guys that I know, it does
01:57:21.000 seem to be mostly guys. I went out to, I won't mention which, but a big military school on the
01:57:27.020 East Coast. And I did an informal poll of how many of the 4,000 students use nicotine and about two
01:57:32.800 thirds of the hands in the room went up. And then when I spoke to the sports teams, it was like
01:57:36.580 almost all of them are using nicotine. But they're athletes, they're young, they're running around.
01:57:42.840 Do I suggest it? Not really. But if you're doing that as opposed to smoking cigarettes or vaping,
01:57:48.120 great, definitely be safer for you than alcohol. And I'm not a big fan of cannabis. Some people
01:57:53.800 can do it without issues but it does predispose to psychosis in some people it's a whole story
01:57:58.680 into itself this gets very political i'm happy to talk about it but what i i did a podcast showing
01:58:03.740 that there are strong data showing that thc especially in young males can predispose them
01:58:08.620 to permanent psychosis these very strong thc products not all but a lot of them and i got
01:58:15.000 vehemently attacked by the left they were like misinformation what are you doing i'm like listen
01:58:20.780 And I, I gave the balanced picture.
01:58:22.820 I don't tell people what to do, but know what you're doing.
01:58:25.000 Heard from many parents and people like my kid is schizophrenic because of, and this
01:58:30.380 is real, right?
01:58:31.820 Then there were some movements on the right.
01:58:34.920 The administration was trying to actually make some of the laws around cannabis a little
01:58:39.320 bit more liberal.
01:58:40.080 And then all of a sudden the left started attacking cannabis.
01:58:43.080 And so I started realizing, like, I don't get political, but I realized, okay, most
01:58:48.900 media, I know you don't do this, but most media, they actually are not reporting the issue from a
01:58:54.020 place of heart and understanding of data. They're just kind of going, it's like my team, your team
01:58:58.080 stuff. So the data are this. Some people can use cannabis, no problem. It nukes your deep or your
01:59:04.980 rapid eye movement sleep. That's not good. But some people can do it, no problem. The edible is
01:59:09.340 not a problem for them. Other people, it causes apathy, psychotic issues, one or the other, or in
01:59:16.120 some cases both. And so you just need to be very careful. And I will tell you, I've only had the
01:59:20.900 experience of being male, and I will tell you, young males should not use cannabis. You want
01:59:26.300 to develop your life. You want to be ambitious, as ambitious as you can while being a kind person
01:59:32.700 and taking care of yourself. Cannabis, except for extremely talented creatives, is a motivation
01:59:40.340 success inhibitor. I don't know the data for females as well, because we don't have a lot 1.00
01:59:46.300 of female specific data on it. So that's why I just sort of mentioned that. But I will tell you 0.98
01:59:51.280 when young guys are like, how do you feel about THC? I'm like, I love it when my competitors take
01:59:55.980 THC in anything. You better hope that all your competitors take THC because it's a complete
02:00:02.220 killer. I think many of mine do. And then I will say someone will come along every once in a while
02:00:07.780 and they'll say, I know this athlete who uses cannabis
02:00:11.040 and they're a super athlete.
02:00:12.480 Or my grandfather smoked and drank every day
02:00:16.120 and lived to be 102.
02:00:18.260 To those stories, I always say, yeah, well, you know,
02:00:21.100 yesterday, and this is a true story,
02:00:22.480 I sat down with somebody whose dad did everything right
02:00:25.140 and got a glioma and died.
02:00:28.700 So you're always gonna have these margin cases
02:00:31.100 at the extremes where someone does everything right
02:00:33.400 and still gets sick and dies.
02:00:35.020 And someone does everything wrong
02:00:36.460 and still lives a long healthy life but most people are not at those extremes and so if you're
02:00:42.240 going to use the excuse like i'm going to do everything wrong and be okay forget it the data
02:00:47.040 say that's very unlikely or if you say i'm going to do everything right and i'm certain that i'm
02:00:52.600 going to live to be 150 well that's not true either the that's not true either and so what
02:00:58.680 you want to do is most things right most of the time and avoid the pitfalls of that could cause
02:01:04.520 psychosis or drunk driving. I mean, we sort of know this, it's logic, but the health messaging
02:01:09.920 has gotten very contaminated by the political sphere in a way that I think has hurt a lot of
02:01:15.420 people. I just want people to have the information. No, I laugh because my Nana, God love her, my
02:01:21.380 mom's mom lived to be 101 and she ate at least in the last 30 years of her life. She ate nothing
02:01:27.600 but processed foods. She never saw exercise in any way, shape or form. She walked a little bit
02:01:32.900 around her senior citizens complex that she lived in,
02:01:35.560 lived on her own until she was a hundred and a half.
02:01:38.400 This is your grandmother?
02:01:39.560 And yeah, my Nana, she was stressed out,
02:01:42.500 all the things that we're not supposed to do.
02:01:44.500 But that's of course the exception, not the rule.
02:01:47.280 We can't go by that.
02:01:48.140 I thought the exercise and the eating advice in the book
02:01:52.280 was very sound and it was right along the lines
02:01:54.540 of what you're saying.
02:01:55.660 Nothing extreme, you know, a normal sort of natural foods diet,
02:02:01.100 less processed the better and exercise yes weight training cardiovascular as well as walking um you
02:02:08.760 know a few times a week in addition to like cardio cardiovascular training all all good
02:02:12.800 but we only have a couple minutes left can you just hit so if for the quick for the quick learners
02:02:18.820 or the people who just want to get like a quick highlight what are the top three things you want
02:02:23.740 them to take away when it comes to their wellness what they can learn from your experience
02:02:29.660 bright mornings that involve light ideally from sunlight or artificial lights some movement some
02:02:39.560 hydration i'm a big you know i'm a big proponent of prayer meditation things that orient you to
02:02:45.960 what's really important for me that's prayer in the morning and before going to sleep at night
02:02:50.020 these things have an outsized positive effect on your health and your mood and your ability to
02:02:55.500 focus all day long. The second thing would be do a long exhale or ideally two inhales through your
02:03:03.480 nose, a long exhale through your mouth. Anytime you feel stressed or even a couple times throughout
02:03:07.440 the day, you'll improve your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate. You'll
02:03:12.240 find that you actually can handle stress very well. You'll lower your baseline levels of stress
02:03:17.500 and you'll feel more control over your mind and body in a way that carries over to everything.
02:03:23.420 that tool works anywhere and everywhere unless you're underwater and then darken your sleeping
02:03:29.040 environment cool it down and do some long exhale breathing before sleep and those three things
02:03:35.880 and of course you still need to do some exercise try and walk a bunch and lift some heavy objects
02:03:40.520 now and again heavy for you get your heart rate up doing some exercise don't eat too much process
02:03:45.440 food this kind of thing the things we all know but if you do those three things you will find
02:03:50.840 that everything gets better right away. Daytime energy, ability to mitigate stress, learning
02:03:58.120 presence with emotional presence and physical presence with people you love,
02:04:03.580 your ability to just enjoy life a bit more, to pivot your brain state and to reset in that
02:04:10.720 magical phase of our 24-hour cycle sleep that no one seems to get away with outdoing for very long.
02:04:17.080 those things you'll look better you'll feel better you will be healthier you will live longer
02:04:21.820 and it sounds like good old-fashioned advice because i'm saying sleep right exercise don't
02:04:27.000 stress social connection but what no one i i will you know you know with humility aside and and and
02:04:34.520 humbly i'll say also no one ever told us how it's like we're told what not to do so i'm not going to
02:04:41.580 bark at you to not drink or not do this or not i'm going to tell you do those things and also
02:04:46.360 learn to enjoy them they're for you and they're so you can show up better for yourself and other
02:04:50.860 people in life learn to enjoy them they're your god-given circuits and molecules like we all have
02:04:56.380 them and put them to use and if you miss a couple days no big deal get get right back on it they
02:05:01.040 take seconds to minutes they cost nothing they're available to you in some form every single day
02:05:06.500 and the i mean there's over 1200 references in the book that support what i'm saying i'm not
02:05:12.260 coming up with this stuff. I'm not naming it after me. These are not the Huberman protocols.
02:05:16.520 This is your body, your physiology, your brain, your mind, and you deserve to get the best from
02:05:21.780 them. And that's my, my deep, deep wish for people. I've seen it. I've experienced how they
02:05:26.900 can help. I've seen how it can help others. I just want those for, for the world. I really,
02:05:31.720 really do. You got to get the book now it's going to sell out. It's called protocols by Andrew
02:05:38.820 Huberman, an operating manual for the human body. Don't wait. It's going to hit the stores soon,
02:05:45.360 but you want to get it now because it'll sell out and then you won't have it. It's a pleasure.
02:05:50.340 Thank you so much for coming on. I hope I get to talk to you again.
02:05:53.000 Thanks so much for hosting me. Forgive me that in my excitement, various times I
02:05:57.280 inadvertently spoke over you. I'm a big fan and I really appreciate the opportunity to
02:06:03.240 connect to your audience and really enjoyed your questions. Indeed, I learned a lot during
02:06:07.460 this conversation. So thank you. Oh, the pleasure is ours. All the best to you and good luck with
02:06:11.720 the book. Thank you very much. Bye for now. Wow. What a guy. So interesting. The book is big,
02:06:19.700 but it's an easy read and you can go, you know, chapter to chapter, like he was saying,
02:06:23.180 just pick the one on whatever, sleep, nutrition, et cetera, whatever interests you. And actually
02:06:27.500 really genuinely will make a great gift as we go, oh my God, into the Christmas season. I mean,
02:06:31.320 that's what's next here as we say goodbye to the 80 degree days. Thank you all so much for
02:06:35.620 listening. Don't forget to go out and buy protocols today.