The Best Moments Of Modern Wisdom (2024)

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show!

2024 is nearly over, so I decided to put together a compilation of some of my favorite moments from the show over the last year. It was going to be a top 10, but I couldn't choose, so it's 11 favorite moments!

Expect to learn:

- Andrew Huberman's best advice on how to become a morning person.

- Why Oliver Burkeman thinks you should stop trying to control your life.

- The reason Eric Weinstein believes more young men are becoming right-wing.

- Dr. Mike Israetel's most important advice for choosing muscle-building exercises.

- Alex Hormozi's advice on why everything worth doing is hard, and much more.

I appreciate all of you. This show has been insane, tough, and beautiful—uh, and all of the things. If you haven't done your end-of-year review yet, you can go to ChrisWillLLX.com/review. It's a free annual review template that helps you reflect on lessons from last year and plan what you want to get done next year. It's the exact template that I use, and I updated it from last year to this year, so there's tons in there.

It's so cool getting to revisit these old episodes. A lot of stuff that aren't just the biggest moments from the biggest episodes, but underground clips and sections—10, 15 minutes—that maybe you missed. Perhaps there is something that you forgot that you wish you hadn't.

Anyway, I'll stop talking; we can get into it. Happy New Year!

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Have you seen the data showing the movement of teenage boys politically to the right?

You've been looking at this? Where else are they going to go?

It's a good question. I mean, I had a teenage boy—I still have one, but he's 18 now—and I watched them be pushed farther and farther right by their schools.

"You suck! All of your instincts are bad! These girls are amazing! Look at you, you're pathetic! Be less masculine and more attractive!" You're just barking at them constantly. They're not moving right; they're moving out of your stupid way.

You've given them what? Nothing. Nothing.

One of my son's friends died recently by his own hand, and I don't know what kind of pressures he was put under, but I watched those kids go through this pressure cooker created by this crazy, parasitized left-wing educational movement.

Get away from our sons! Get away from our daughters! Get away from our sons and away from our daughters!

It's not left or right. I don't have a Republican bone in my body. Get the crazy people who do not understand human development away from our children. Stop giving our daughters terrible life advice.

But like, um, that's one of these MGRM questions. What am I supposed to say?

Let me speak abstractly so we don't get distracted with stupid stuff. Gender is about reproduction, and it's paired. There's nothing you're going to do that's as good as the male-female pairing that produces families.

Yes, there's a ton of problems with it. There's a ton of problems with traditional femininity and traditional masculinity. I actually believe that toxic masculinity used to mean something before it meant nothing.

Right now, we are allowing our children to be parented by people who should be nowhere close to a child because development for humans is different. We're not like wildebeests, where you come out with programming where you can walk on day one. We're basically not blank slates but self-assembling computers.

What you put into a developing mind—what normal child trying to figure out gender identity does not go through a process trying to figure out, "Oh, I like that dress. Do I want to marry somebody who's wearing it, or do I want to wear it myself?" That's a normal process that you go through in development.

If a parent hears that, they usually try to guide natural gender identity. Now, what happens when an administrator says, "Oh, he said he wanted to wear a dress; he's a girl. Everybody respect his choice!" You're thinking, "Wait, wait, wait! What? You took a moment that happens in every boy's life, and you turned it into a trans affirmation moment?"

And then you tried to, like, freeze it in. And let me guess, you really just want to protect something, which is great. Some people want to protect trans kids. Trans kids exist; they have life very hard on them.

Okay, let's ask: how many trans kids got manufactured by this DEI movement versus how many would occur naturally? You have type one and type two error. You have a trans kid who was always going to be a trans kid that wasn't properly treated—that's terrible; I agree with the DEI people about that.

You have another collection—a huge collection—of normal kids who are never going to be trans, and you push them towards this.

I had J. Michael Bailey on the show, whose paper on ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) was pulled. Very, very rare that this happens.

And I learned during my research for that about the left-handedness argument for both gay and transsexual people.

So in the Middle Ages, it was seen as being a mark of witchcraft or being touched by the devil that you were left-handed, which meant that people who were left-handed hid their left-handedness.

I think about 12% maybe of the population is left-handed—something like that. But during the Middle Ages, it was significantly less. The ceiling gets released, and people are free to be their true left-handed selves, and more people become left-handed.

I can now fully manifest that forward, and that is an argument that gets put forward a lot for, "Well, now that we have released the lid on the pressure cooker that was tamping down people's natural trans or gay proclivities or whatever, they're now free to be themselves."

But that doesn't explain why gender dysphoria appears to occur in clumps. It's not evenly distributed across all.

You linked two things that I think have to be unlinked. We are fighting the last war because we got male homosexuality wrong. I'm old enough to remember when it was a lifestyle choice.

Right, and I had gay friends in college who said, "It's not a choice!" You know, it's like a quiet, "I didn't choose this."

We're lumping a bunch of stuff together. I don't think male homosexuality has almost anything to do with female homosexuality. I think calling them both homosexuality is very confusing.

There's something that seems much more obligate about male homosexuality. It's highly conserved. I don't think it's unnatural; I think it's part of the design of humans, and we haven't quite figured out why it's there.

I don't disagree, but I think the left-handed argument makes sense when it comes to homosexuality, but not when it comes to the trans issue.

No, it makes sense in both, but the size of the effect is the problem. You're claiming—I have no doubt that there were some people who had transgendered brains who were closeted, you know, transvestites, and they had a closet somewhere in the basement where they got to be their true selves. No question that that exists.

The issue is that you created an enormous amount of type two error so you could go after a much smaller amount of type one error. You created all sorts of negative stuff by not balancing type one and type two, and that's unforgivable.

You're not actually the defender you think you are; you're somebody who's destroying some lives to privilege others. Why have you made that decision?

I completely agree with you. Like, I won't say there are only two genders. You know why? Because it's not true in humans.

Yeah, two genders or two sexes. Well, first of all, gender and sex used to be largely synonymous before we decided that one was in some sense obligate biological and the other was software programming.

Well, that was a lexical game that was played in the 1950s to try and bait them.

Yeah, but you can make an argument that you need a term. I don't think gender should be purposed for that, but you could make an argument that just like abstracting male and female into top and bottom had some utility, right?

Okay, so what do you mean when you talk about that?

Intersex is a really important category to me. I know people who are intersex, and they're screwed. They were screwed because our society had no way of dealing with them.

The gender binary is so strong that somebody, through zero fault of anybody, is born with ambiguity in their genitalia and their chromosomes.

So yes, there are two intended sexes or genders, but nature isn't good enough to hit that mark all the time. And those are human beings; those are souls.

And the sloppy right-wing thing, which is to find the shelling point where you just sit there and say there are only two sexes and two genders, I understand why you're doing it. You're trying to stop this crazy conversation that's taken off.

So it's not like I don't have sympathies with why you're saying that, but when I bring up, you know, my favorite example is persistent Müllerian duct syndrome, where somebody goes into their doctor having trouble having a kid, and it's like, "Well, you have twigs and berries, but you've also got a uterus. You're female."

Does that person produce both sperm and eggs? No, right? Actually, that's the definition; that is the line in the ground around male and female—large gametes.

But sorry, the gentleman who goes into his doctor to find out that he's got a uterus—who is he if he wants to be male?

I understand why he wants to be male. If he wants to be able to talk about the fact that he got handed some very strange cards by the Creator and her infinite wisdom, I want him or her, however that person conceives of self, to be—that's a soul to me.

And I don't like the energy of saying there are only two sexes and two genders, and that's it. It's like, I get it. I understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to say that there are two intended sexes and genders; it's reproductive; it's nature.

I get it. It depends on how we're going to define sex because if it comes down to gamete size, that is binary.

Sure, okay, but what do you do about the edge case?

But no one's producing both.

I don't know that nobody's producing both; maybe that's a fact.

You know, usually the issue is that you have this list of homologues, right? So the clitoris maps to the penile shaft, and the labium majora maps to the testicles.

What you're doing is you're taking a common female template, I believe, and you're treating it through the SR cascade differently during development so that the default is female.

But you also have this ability, through this one protein, to create a cascade that creates male out of female.

Okay, that doesn't always work out. Now you've got an ambiguous situation, and you've got a culture that basically can't think in ambiguities.

That's where a lot of this frustration with the gender binary comes from. You know, somebody in this category where they're not really one thing or the other at a hardware level.

I believe that beyond that, there's also a software level. There are people with male brains and female bodies, and conversely, I don't understand this stuff, but I believe that that's true.

If you ever have the opportunity to interview Deirdre McCloskey, who used to be, I think, Dennis McCloskey, a very famous economist, I had the pleasure of speaking with her a while back.

One of the things that she said was that she wasn't doing this to be hotsy-totsy; she wanted to die an old lady, not an old man. It wasn't a sex thing; it was just the fact that she'd been uncomfortable in a male body her whole life.

So I'm using the term "her." Do I have to use the term "him"?

No, no, I could use the term "him" or "his," but why would you do that? Don't you have enough compassion that somebody ruined their family life and went through hell in public because it was so painful to be in the wrong body?

I get it.

Okay, now you have that compassion, and how many lives are you going to ruin over that? How many lives are you going to ruin pretending that this is an enormous cohort?

So to the extent that I have a slogan—and I basically never speak about trans—my slogan is "Make trans accepted and rare."

Make it rare means use the developmental environment in order to give good coaching about male strategies and female strategies for life.

Don't relitigate the fact that we screwed up male homosexuality. Just take your lumps; we screwed it up. It's a part of the human condition; it's never going to go away.

It's different from female homosexuality, almost certainly. We don't exactly know why it's here. We've been blessed with untold riches, particularly in the mimetic realm from male homosexuals. It is what it is.

And now we're going to refight this over trans, where I think you have tremendous opportunities through development to assign behaviors.

Is the skirt a female object? No, the lungi in South Asia is a skirt; men wear it. I have a lungi.

It's like telling a Scottish person that he's cross-dressing. What are you, an idiot? You ever dealt with a Scotsman? You do not want to make that mistake; they will let you know very quickly who they are.

We're out of our minds. We're out of our minds. We're creating so much misery for these young men and young girls, and you know, it just makes me upset because we don't love our children enough.

We don't love our children enough to tell these teachers, "Hands off my kids! Go work out your weird stuff! I get it, but get away from our children!"

You're going to lose sleep; you'll doubt whether it'll work; you'll stress to make ends meet; you won't finish your to-do list; you'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for yours.

This is what hard feels like, and that's okay. Everything worth doing is hard, and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is. The greater the payoff, the greater the hardship.

If it's hard, good! It means no one else will do it. More for you.

I think a lot of entrepreneurship and even personal growth is training yourself on how you respond to hard. Because in the early days, hard was, "Ooh, stop! This isn't good! I should—this is a warning sign! This is a red flag! I should slow down, or I should stop! You know, I should pivot."

But the more I think about it as a competitive landscape, as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like, and these rocks and these dragons are things that I'm going to have to slay along the way to get the princess or get the treasure, I get happier about the harder it is.

Because I know that no one else will follow. It's a selection effect.

And I think if you can shift from "This is hard" to "No one else will be able to do this," then it flips from being this thing that you're like, "Oh, poor me," to "Oh, poor everyone else who's going to have to try."

And I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance.

Yeah, that's awesome. I was thinking a lot about the lonely chapter that we talked about last time. That was the best, most powerful idea I think that we came up with.

And if you see there basically being no shortcuts toward getting the thing that you want, there are ways to be more and less efficient, and there are ways to do things with more and less of a positive disposition, which can actually make the journey feel an awful lot easier.

But ultimately, if you assume that largely everyone needs to go through the same challenges that you're going through, every single difficult thing that you do is kind of like a mass wall that you need to get over.

And you go, "Wow, I'm so glad that I've gotten over that wall!"

And think about how many people are going to be selected out. It's like the Hunger Games. You know, think about how many other people are going to fall that wall.

People only root for people who don't need it. Like, the amount of times when I was on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with—that's when you want people to root for you.

That's when you want people to support you. Once you've already won, people are like, "He's amazing! He's so good!" But like, that's the time when you need it the least.

And so you always have to be the person who roots for you before everyone else does. And it's usually a single clap in the auditorium for a very long period of time.

It is a slow clap; that's just you rooting for you.

And that visual, I think, is one that you can kind of take because people struggle to do things alone.

And the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people.

And rather than fighting that or bemoaning it, see it as an indicator that you're on the right path. Because if everyone else were cheering you on, then it means you're not in the right place.

Because it means you're just like everyone else, and that's not where you want to be.

It's an interesting paradox that the energy it requires to start doing something is way more than the energy required to continue doing the thing.

And that the beginning of doing anything results in the lowest amount of reward, both internal and external, than when you've been doing it for ages.

So I think about this a lot with the show. There was this stat that Spotify told us: 85% of the listeners of this show found this in 2023.

And I thought at the end of 2022, remembering at that point I'd been on Rogan, we were at like 650k. We've got, you know, we've been doing 550, 600 episodes deep.

Yeah, like I'm—I've got it! I've done the thing! Like, this is me doing—if this isn't doing the thing, I've moved to Austin, Texas. I've got an O-1 visa. I've got like all the rest of the stuff. Jordan Peterson's been on twice; you've been on.

And yet, everything up until that point is two months of growth.

Yeah, I mean, we made more money from a revenue perspective; we made more money and more subs in one month, December of last year, than we did in the entire first three and a half years of the show.

So it's this odd paradox.

And one of the things that you need to ensure—I've had this idea about protecting your passion at all costs. Because if you begin to hate the thing that you do, you negatively change your trajectory.

And that means that at the time when you can benefit the most by every single unit of work—which is the later that you go, presuming that you continue to hit that upper trajectory—if you've completely killed any passion or desire to do the work in the early stages because you've not protected it appropriately, that can be by focusing on the wrong things, by not rewarding yourself, by not building it with people that care about you, by, you know, just not celebrating when you hit milestones—all of the things that actually help to keep you going.

Being a character, by the time that you get to the stage where each unit of effort allows you to gain a thousand or a million of each of the things that it would have done at the very beginning, you've inverted the passion equation.

It takes way more energy to start a thing than to continue doing a thing, and yet in the beginning, the rewards are way lower than they are at the end.

But if you don't protect your passion, your motivation is at its lowest when you are at your highest amount of efficiency in terms of returning your time put in.

I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder.

Like, this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill.

It's not that the things that you're—the dragons you're going to slay aren't going to get bigger; they are.

But you become so much more equipped to slay them back, and you have so many more allies. You have people on the stands cheering for you; you have the audience; you have all of these other things that are behind you.

But in the beginning, it's just you with a stick against a bear.

And arguably, that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you.

And so it's not even like the size of the hardship; it's just also the resource and how few of them you have.

And how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have, which is time, because you have no leverage.

You don't have the money to pay other people to help you; you don't have the resources to go get someone to—you know, no one can learn it for you.

It's like there's a lot of the things that we care about a lot—like no one can work out for you. It doesn't matter how much money you have; no one can learn skills for you.

And so in the early days, it feels so painful because you're like—you look around to see who can help you, and then you're like, "It's me again."

And I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things, kind of like Slumdog Millionaire—if you've seen that movie, where he—I'll give you the TL;DR.

He goes through his entire life of randomness, and he gets on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire version in India and has 12 questions to make a million dollars.

And from only 12 random experiences in his life that seemed meaningless at the time, was he able to answer all of the questions and then ultimately win.

The skills that you develop along the way, like Steve Jobs learning calligraphy that then became Apple fonts that transformed how we type—those early days, that little trench, winning in the weeds oftentimes gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else.

And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it, remember that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons.

And so expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is.

I've always loved earning my stripes with the things that I've done, whether it was with NTI or running the podcast or doing whatever.

And I think there's like a degree of nobility to it, but functionally, that's kind of just like—it's a nothing.

Like, where do the—is the nobility?

But I think the reason that you can feel noble about it and the reason that it gives you a positive reward is you know that you understand every single inch of the things.

And that if you want to hold a conversation—we went out for dinner with our new CFO and accounts people on Saturday. They said, "You ask a lot of questions; most people don't ask very many questions."

And I also don't care at all about accounts, really. Like, I'm not doing this for money.

But they said, "You ask a lot of questions." I said, "Well, I don't ever really want to walk into a room and not be able to hold my own, at least just competently, if it's to do with something that I care about."

The same thing goes for this.

I started to learn about focal lengths and frame rates and negative fill, reverse contrast lighting, and then sure enough, two years after we started doing it, a bunch of different—I sent you the Instagram thing—like this really awesome film Instagram that I've been following for ages picked us up for what we were doing and gave us props independent of the talkie thing, which is fundamentally what we're here for.

And we created this entire new industry of cinematic podcasting, which was recognized by, as far as I'm aware, like the best cinematic—it's called Film Light. People can go and see it on Instagram—like the best decoder and analyzer of cinematography.

And two years ago when we started, I remember thinking, "Oh my God, I love the way that they've broken down what happens in Ad Astra."

Oh my God, the whole thing was shot on 35mm; each different scene's got two pairings of colors and stuff like that.

But the reason that we were able to get there, at least in some part, is I can have a conversation with people.

So each of the things that you do when you not only win in the weeds but live in the weeds then allows you downstream from that to see the things that other people aren't seeing.

There's a quote that I love from Dr. Cash; I'll probably butcher it, but experts have more ways to win than beginners do.

And so if an expert goes into any setting that they're expert in, they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the ultimate outcome.

So if you're a master video editor, there are so many things that you can do that while editing, you make one change, and then it looks right.

You have a positive feedback loop.

And so I think when you're on the start path, you can't look at the outcome as the only positive because you will never make it.

And so the positive frame that I've always used is, sure, you can have the external ones of like, "I like thinking about my first videos had like 13 views."

And I'm like, "Well, if I had an audience of 13 people, I used to spend years pitching, you know, weight loss stuff to rims of 13, and that was fine."

And so thinking about it that way was helpful, but the most helpful frame was thinking about who I was becoming as the asset that I was building.

So in real time, whenever I finished a long day's work, I was becoming more like the type of person who could work for five years without reward, and that would be part of the story I would someday tell.

And some of the biggest reinforcers I've had in my life have been future-casting the story that I would tell about the shitty period that I was in.

Like, I remember when I was sleeping on the floor at my gym because I didn't have enough money for two rents, and I was like, "I will tell this story."

And when I lost everything for the first time, I have the screenshot of the bank account.

When I show it, people are like, "Oh, look, there's that thing." But they forget that there was a person who screenshotted it to be like, "This won't happen again."

And I think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going gives you the vision of where you're like—the ru—like knows where he's going, but it allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way, the hard things that you have to overcome, to feed into the larger narrative of who—of the story that you'll someday tell.

And so like, no one ever tells stories about the hero who made it all happen immediately and had no hardships.

No one cares, right? Like, okay, you were born to a billionaire. Is there a story there? Not really.

But everyone loves the story because we can see ourselves in the character and how much we hope to be like them.

And it's the being like them, not the having what they have, that we usually like.

And so reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what really got me through that.

And thinking, "I will tell this story someday."

Have you heard Rogan talk about the "be the hero of your own story" thing?

Oh dude, it's old now. I think this is maybe even 10 years old—maybe 10 years old.

And he's in one of his old, old—he's in the LA podcast studio, and he says, "Imagine that you're in a movie, and imagine the movie begins now, and you're the hero of the movie. What would that guy do? What would that guy do right now?"

Yeah, because you are.

I just got into business.

So actually, I just made the investment in school, and I was talking to Sam, the founder, and I said, "Well, what—Sam? Sam? What's Sam?"

That's the way he says his—oh yeah.

And I was talking to him, and I said, "I want to give you the single easiest razor to predict my behavior."

And I said, "Whatever will be the most epic story is the thing that I will most likely do."

And so oftentimes, the most epic story is not the shortest outcome to victory; it's the long saga that results in this big thing later eventually.

And I was like, "If you ever want to know if you're like, 'I'm not sure what he's going to do in this situation,' just wonder what the most epic story to tell would be."

And that's usually what I will do.

And I don't know if that's self-aggrandizing, but that's genuinely my razor for even making the big decisions about, "Okay, I'm going to sell Gym Launch. I'm going to marry Lila. I'm going to slum it and live at the gym. I'm going to fly around and do turnarounds. I'm going to start this whole idea of a media company that just gives exclusively—like, how do I put all these together?"

It's like, "Well, what would be the most epic story?"

And I thought of this idea of just like when I think about who that story I want to tell is, is this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave—because I always thought, "I wish that Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and all these guys would have—like, and Jeff Bezos—like, would have just—like, I would love to have seen 1997 Amazon content."

And a lot of the content in terms of like, it's getting five views—it's like, it's okay because when we make it, they're going to come back and watch this.

So I don't need them to watch it today; I want them to know that it's here when I do.

And I think that got me out of the loop of, "I have to win right now."

And then every one of them is just dropping a kernel or a breadcrumb for future me to refer back to.

One of the first places that people are going to go to—and I'm going to guess one of the most common questions that you get asked: "What exercises do I need to be doing?"

Yeah, all of them, bro.

Right? Yep, that's it.

And then I just walk away, and they're like, "Wow, that guy's supposed to be smart or something like that."

But then they see the back of my very shiny head, and it makes them happy.

Yes, okay, which exercises?

So there is a lot to say about it, but you can start with the supposition that it's whatever exercise nominally targets the muscle you want to grow.

So if you want bigger biceps, you know, some variation of doing this is probably good.

And to be honest, that's maybe 80% of the answer.

So if a lot of people—here's why I'm saying that—a lot of people will look at, let's say for quads, they'll look at hack squats, they'll look at leg presses, they'll look at lunges, and they'll look at regular high-bar squats, and they'll vex themselves infinitely over the question of which one of these is superior, which is kind of like asking, "You know, I need to get to Austin, Texas in two days. Which airline should I take?"

Like, you ask someone who works at the airport, "Which airline's really the one I should be taking?" They're like, "I mean, I don't know; all of them really get you there."

There are subtle differences, but at least make sure the ticket says Austin, Texas.

So if the exercise hits that muscle, then you're good to go.

Now, there are ways of seeing which exercises hit the target muscle that you want.

A couple of what we at RP call proxies for stimulus—so this is something like tension, the perception of a lot of tension generated or exposed in that muscle.

So if you're doing chest flies and you feel a crapload of stretch and pulling in the chest, that's probably good.

If you're doing what you think is a chest fly, but you misread the machine's instruction thing, and you feel a ton of tension in your biceps or your forearms or your shoulders, but you don't really honestly feel anything in the chest, on a just pure physics perspective, because of the mechanics of the movement, your chest has to be getting some exposure.

But maybe you could be doing better by actually doing the exercise in a way or picking an exercise that really you feel some tension off.

Another clue to if you're stimulating the muscle properly is the burn.

And that's seen in a medical context when people don't wear proper protection.

I know that resonates with you personally because of the conversation we had right before this.

I don't mean to expose you, but Chris, you could just be making better choices, is what I'm trying to say.

All theoretical; I've never been with a woman, as everyone who watches our YouTube knows.

But on a serious note, the burn is in especially higher rep sets when you start feeling the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the target muscle.

So the chest fly analogy: if you're doing high-rep pec flies, and at the end of that set your pecs are burning, hey, that's probably good; you're probably getting a good stimulus there.

On the other hand, if it's just your biceps that are burning but your pecs don't really feel much, are you getting a stimulus in that exercise?

Oh yeah, sure. Is it guaranteed to be a really robust, really good stimulus? Probably not, because you should be feeling some combination of tension and burn.

And then also there's pump.

Again, none of these are mandatory, but together they're kind of like puzzle pieces that take what could be a C+ exercise for you and make it an A+ exercise if you're getting all the feelings right on this.

So another one is pump—how much after several sets of the workout or of the exercise how filled with fluid is your target muscle?

So if you're doing pec flies and after a couple of sets, you know, a girl walks by and you're like—and she's like, "Oh my God!" and she runs away—uh, I guess that's good, even though she ran away.

But she ran away in a way that she obviously respected your pec size, which is the whole point of the gym.

But if you do a bunch of sets of something, let's say you're doing pec flies, your shoulders are pumped, your biceps are pumped, even your forearms look more veiny, but we can honestly say your chest has changed in any visible or palpable way—no doubt, still train your pecs, but maybe not that great.

Another one is perturbation, which kind of presents itself in two forms.

One is, is that target muscle feeling really weak?

So let's say you do a few pec exercises you think they're for the chest, and then you try to push yourself into your car, like push off your steering wheel, and you feel like a profound weakness in that pec.

You're like, "Oh my God!"

And a really good example is if you're trying to walk downstairs after you hit quads.

If you think you hit quads but you really hit glutes and adductors, you can hop skip down the stairs—no problem.

Are we allowed to swear in here? Is that not a good idea?

Sweet.

Whereas if you're doing this on the handrail, yes, like desperately clinging for dear life, and your legs are shaky—uh, another thing with perturbation is crampy.

None of this is ironclad, but if your chest cramps hard when you're trying to pose after a few sets of whatever you're doing, that whatever you're doing absolutely hit your chest.

The other thing is weakness too.

So if I tell you, "Hey, this mega pec workout, what's your best bench?" and you're like, "Well, it's like, you know, 200 lbs for a set of 10," and I take you through a mega pec workout, after that, if we put 200 lbs on there, if you bench it for any close to 10, your pecs never got very fatigued, which almost certainly means they never got very stimulated.

So you should see a pretty big repetition strength drop-off.

If you can barely do a push-up after a chest workout, oh, something happened to your pecs for sure, especially if you feel like your chest is the kind of onus of weakness in that movement.

So those are all ways to kind of proxy that.

And I would say another one—again, not a huge deal, not the deal, but a good little additive to the mix—is do you feel any kind of weakness or soreness that persists for hours or days after?

So for example, if you do some kind of new quad machine at your gym, and two days later your inner thighs are sore, your glutes are physically sore, your quads aren't either the way you did it, which I'm sure we'll get to technique, or just the exercise itself.

It says quads on it, but it's really not quads.

Maybe it is to some extent, but you would expect if you had a novel stimulus to feel some kind of soreness.

But if you did something that says quads on it, and then the day later you can barely walk and you're sore to the touch, man, you know you have to have stimulated your quads.

There is no alternative.

So all those things are in the plus-side category, and any exercise that hits a bunch of those check marks for you, man, that's a good exercise for you.

And we're all different, so some people respond better to pec fly machines, some people to dumbbells, some people to cables, some people to something in between.

Whatever exercise checks those boxes for you really well is probably a good exercise for you, at least for the time being.

---

We're here in a spooky field with a car on fire and a full moon in a weird house over the far side.

Yeah, have you got any stories that fit this environment?

I do! I do! I have a really good one from out in Utah in the 1970s.

We don't have the names of the people involved; I'm going to call them a man and a woman. But you know, this is every bit their story; we just don't use their names.

I think they actually didn't want their names used; that's what I recall.

So back in the 1970s, there was this young guy and young girl who are the main characters of the story, and they, I think, met in college.

And they go out on this first date. They go to a restaurant, a diner, and they got along fine, but there wasn't any magic.

It was, you know, kind of a nothing date that they both kind of instinctively knew that this was likely not going to go anywhere beyond this first date.

There was no chemistry.

However, they both kind of intuitively noticed it, and the guy, towards the end of the date, when it's kind of like, "Okay, time to wrap things up now," he decided to take a chance.

He figured, "What's the worst that can happen? I already can tell this isn't going anywhere."

And he says to the girl, "You know, do you want to do something kind of unexpected? You want to like go do something kind of crazy with me right now?"

And the girl was actually like kind of taken aback. She said, "Okay, what do you want to do?"

And he's like, "Well, I often go for walks out in Provo Canyon, this beautiful canyon that's nearby. It's got this amazing trail; it brings you out to this overlook with this incredible view of the stars. Like, it's a really cool spot, and I go there later in the day, and no one's there, and it's pretty cool."

But it's, you know, we're hiking in the woods in the middle of the night, you know what I mean?

And she's like, "Okay, let's do it!"

You know, it's like suddenly the date went from going nowhere to it's kind of exciting.

And so now there's chemistry; that's like they're going into the unknown together.

And so they quickly leave the diner, they hop in his car, and it's a short drive over to the parking lot where Provo Canyon is.

You know, he pulls into the spot; there's nobody there. They get out, and now there really is—they're getting along; they're kind of laughing, telling jokes, they're holding hands.

And they walk right from the parking lot onto this paved trail that goes right into the forest.

And so it's nighttime, you know, just a very—this is a well-used trail; this is not some goat trail in the middle of nowhere.

This is a well-used trail.

And so they start walking into the forest, and after a while—and this is something they would say after the fact, but we know this is what was happening as they were walking—the feel, the vibe of the night really changed as soon as they got into the woods.

You know, they're excited; the date suddenly became exciting.

And then they get into the forest; they're on the trail; they're holding hands; they're walking, and both of them began feeling this really intense dread as they were walking.

But they don't know each other; this is their first date. They don't have the background of a relationship to begin touching on something that's hard to point out.

You know, neither of them turned to the other and said, "I feel uncomfortable."

Instead, they just kept their mouths shut and thought, "Okay, I'll just keep on going."

So they stopped talking; they begin walking faster out of this kind of nervous energy they have.

Now they're holding hands, and they're just walking through this trail because they're trying to get to this overlook, basically get it out of the way and come on back.

But it's all unspoken; they haven't said, "Boy, this is anxious."

They just—they're feeling that way.

And so they're walking on this trail, again surrounded by trees; there's nobody else out there, and it's pretty dark.

They don't have a flashlight, and at some point, they hear a rustling sound kind of off to the side.

And at the exact same time, the guy steps on something that he described as being soft.

And he stepped on it, and he has no idea what he's stepping on—no clue.

It's something soft, and he's heard this rustling sound, and they're feeling anxious, and he immediately stops because he stepped on something.

And the girl, she's sensing, "Okay, what's going on here?"

And without any communication, they turned and walked out.

They didn't even look down; they didn't—they have no idea what's going on.

It was like they both knew, "Let's get the f*** out of here!"

I don't know what's going on out here, and they practically ran back to their car—totally safe.

They get in their car, and now that they're in the safety of their car, they kind of begin laughing about it.

Like, "Yeah, I wonder what that was. I stepped on something out there. I don't know, something moving around. Maybe there's a big animal; I don't know."

But that was it; it was just—that was the whole date.

And actually, they wound up getting married because this date was like this kind of amazing thing where they bonded over the fear of being in this forest.

And so they get married, and 10 years later, they're at home, and the TV is on.

It's tuned to like a Dateline type of show, like a true crime show, and neither of them are really watching.

But an interview comes on, and it's a journalist talking to a death row inmate—it's a very famous death row inmate, and he's very near his execution date.

And he's giving this kind of full-blown interview about, you know, what he did.

And at some point, the journalist asks him, "Was there ever a time that you almost got caught before you got caught?"

And the serial killer is like, "Yeah, there was a time I was out in Provo Canyon, and I just killed a girl, and I was trying to dispose of her body, and I dragged her across the trail.

And this young couple comes turning around the corner, and they stepped on the body, and I was maybe a foot away holding her, looking up at them in the darkness, waiting to see what they were going to do.

But for some reason, the couple didn't look down; they didn't look around; they just turned and left."

And so that was it; that was the time I was caught.

So it would turn out the guy—or they had come in contact with Ted Bundy, like one of the most infamous serial killers of all time, who effectively said had he investigated, he would have had to kill the couple.

It's great! So their first date was running into Ted Bundy.

Wow!

Yeah, oh my God!

And actually, if you're interested, there are several other close calls with Ted Bundy that if you Google "close calls with Ted Bundy," he came close to killing people several times.

And it's like—I don't have the VWB till—there was something with the VWB; I forget what it was.

Unfortunately, I don't remember all the anecdotes, but there's quite a few that are—that one is the most startling because it's so visceral what happened.

But the others were, you know, this girl who almost went on a date with Ted Bundy but then got a bad feeling about it and canceled.

And like the date later, he gets arrested for being Ted Bundy.

Stuff like—or one person who Ted Bundy randomly befriended, this woman, and I think they were dating for a while, and he was very close with her child.

And it was—I mean, he's like in their family while he's killing other people at the same time.

And then he just broke up with her and moved on.

Like, he didn't do anything to her or her family while he was actively killing all these women.

But there, for some reason, he just had this normal family, happy, wholesome relationship with this girl for like a year.

And she would find out after he was executed that she was actively dating a serial killer.

So it's just—Ted Bundy had all these weird interactions with people that have been documented, but that one, to me, is the most startling.

---

How can people become a morning person or learn to get up early more easily and more regularly?

Yeah, um, three days of pain; the rest is easy.

So it takes about three days to shift the biological mechanisms to make you a morning person.

Now, if you are a very strongly genetically determined night owl, that's a thing.

That's a thing.

So there are genetic mutations they call them polymorphisms that make some people night owls.

They feel best psychologically and physically going to sleep at about 1, 2, or 3:00 a.m. and waking up somewhere around, you know, 10, 11 a.m. or noon.

That exists not just during development or teen years, but that exists not just for social reasons.

Other people are true morning people; they feel absolutely best going to sleep around 8:00 p.m. or 9:00 p.m.

10 p.m. would be late for them, and they feel great waking up at 4:00, 5:00, or 6:00 a.m.

Okay, most people feel best going to sleep somewhere between 10 and midnight and waking up somewhere between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. or so—maybe 5:30 to 8 a.m.

Okay, so those are three bins: the night owl, the morning person, and then the more typical schedule, but it's heavily weighted toward that typical schedule if you look at the general population.

So if somebody wants to get up earlier, you need to stack the four primary what are called zeitgebers or timekeepers.

So named because some of the early chronobiologists that discovered this stuff and the underlying mechanisms were German, as it were.

So the number one zeitgeber, the number one way to shift your circadian clock, which is this cluster of neurons that sits a few centimeters above the roof of your mouth, is to view bright light at a time when you want to be awake—aka the morning.

Okay, so that's why I say get outside, look at the sun—toward the sun.

Don't force yourself to stare at it; don't damage your eyes; blink as needed.

No sunglasses; eyeglasses, corrective lenses, and contacts are absolutely fine, even if they have UV protection.

Okay, however, if you combine that with another zeitgeber—the second most powerful zeitgeber is exercise or movement.

So if you do some jumping jacks, you skip some rope, or even just take a walk while facing the sun, now you're starting to stack different zeitgebers.

And I'll explain the mechanisms in a moment.

If you then also add caffeine—now this spits in the face a little bit of what I said a few minutes ago—but if you were to add caffeine, you can entrain, as it's called, the circadian clock to be alert at that time a bit more.

And I'll be honest; if I'm going to exercise first thing in the morning, I need caffeine.

I can't wait that 60 to 90 minutes.

If I need to jump right into exercise, I find it's easiest for me to do 30 minutes after waking, 3 hours after waking, or 11 hours after waking.

And a lot of people find that the same, but of course, exercise when you can because it's that important.

But if you want to "optimize" your energy levels for exercise, typically people will notice that has to do with your temperature rhythm.

Okay, so we've got sunlight; we've got exercise or movement of any kind—it could be jumping jacks, could be walking—you don't have to do a full workout.

And then caffeine, and in some cases, food.

I'm not big on eating first thing in the morning; I don't like to eat until 11 a.m. or noon.

That's when my first meal arrives for me, just naturally; that's when I get hungry.

It's all caffeine and hydration prior to that.

But if you were to eat something first thing in the morning, that's part of the way you entrain your circadian clock to wake up—to essentially wake you up earlier.

And then the fourth one is a social rhythm.

If you're interacting with other people, you're going to entrain your clock to that as well.

No way!

Yes! So there's a social component to circadian entrainment.

Now, the pathways for these are—from the eye in the case of viewing light to the circadian clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus—in the case of caffeine, it's more general.

In the case of exercise, there's literally a brain stem to circadian clock connection—a big superhighway of neuronal connections that then so-called entrains your circadian clock.

Remember, your circadian clock generates an intrinsic 24-hour rhythm such that if we put you into constant dark or constant light, you would still sleep for a given bout and then be alert for a given bout with a little bit of a nap.

It just is what we call free run; it would drift a little later each day.

This is what happens when you go to Vegas; this is what happens when you're in an environment without a lot of cues about the day—the sunlight rising and setting cycle.

MH sunlight, exercise, caffeine, and eating and social interactions bring your circadian clock into alignment with all of those zeitgebers.

So when I said it takes three days, if tomorrow you want to start beginning the process of becoming an early riser, you'd set your alarm for 5:00 a.m.

No matter what time you went to sleep the night before, you're going to get up, and you're going to do the four things that I described.

Maybe leave out food if you don't want to eat; maybe leave out caffeine if you want to delay by 90 minutes.

It's going to hurt, and then by the early afternoon, you'll be dragging a bit.

And you just have to be careful to not overindulge in caffeine, which will then cause you to fall asleep later than you want.

You want to go to sleep at your now naturally slightly earlier sleep time the next day.

You'll notice it'll be a little bit easier to do the morning routine I just described, and by the third day, you ought to be waking up with or before the alarm by a few minutes or moments because your circadian clock has phase-shifted.

Okay, it's phase-advanced, as we say.

Your circadian clock, intrinsic to you, generates a 24.2 or a 24.3-hour rhythm.

It's not perfectly 24 hours, and that we believe—we don't know—but the just-so story is that it's such that you're able to then shift that clock in one or the other direction.

You can phase advance so you wake up earlier and go to sleep earlier; you can phase delay.

How do you phase delay?

Well, you're probably doing this already. Everyone nowadays pretty much qualifies as a shift worker by the strict and not-so-strict criteria of shift work, which is: are you doing any kind of cognitive activity after 9:00 p.m.?

Are you viewing any kind of bright lights after 9:30 p.m.?

Most people would say yes.

So the diabolical thing about the circadian timing system is that it requires a lot of bright light, ideally from sunlight, but a lot of bright light early in the day to make you a morning and daytime person.

But it requires just a little bit of bright light, even from an artificial source, after the hours of about 9:30 p.m. till 4 a.m. to quash your melatonin, make it difficult to sleep, or if you sleep, to make that sleep not as effective.

There's a simple remedy, however, which is—and this is a beautiful study published in Science Reports in 2022—if you view sunlight in the afternoon, even for 5 minutes or so, it could be late afternoon, could be sunset.

Take off your sunglasses; look in the direction of the sun.

So now looking west, you adjust the sensitivity of your retina, the neurons in the back of your eye, such that bright light later at night doesn't have quite as much effect to suppress melatonin, and it reduces the melatonin-suppressive effects by about 50% or offsets those.

So I think of this afternoon viewing as—well, first of all, it's nice to look at a sunset.

If you're indoors in an environment like this, even if there are bright lights on, get outside for a few minutes before the sun sets.

This is especially important in winter.

Even if you can't see the sun as an object, get some sunlight in your eyes, and that will at least partially offset the effects of bright light in your eyes at night—partially.

And I refer to this more or less as your Netflix inoculation.

So that night, you can be on your phone or watch your Netflix, and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much.

But it will still disrupt your sleep somewhat.

But let's—you know, unless like Rick Rubin's very diligent about wearing the red lens glasses, I've started doing that as well.

But if you don't do that, well, I'm guessing he also sees the sunset in the evening.

He's very attached to, for good scientific reasons, to the sunlight thing.

But these are little things that take just moments, right? They're essentially zero cost that can really improve your sleep.

But that's how you become a morning person.

If you want to become a night person, you do the opposite.

You view bright light between the hours of 4 p.m. and 10 p.m., and then you will phase delay or phase shift in a delayed way your circadian clock, making you want to wake up later the next morning.

I wonder if dogs count as social interaction.

Absolutely! And they have all of the same mechanisms we just described.

So I was just thinking, how can we stack that?

Everything first thing in the morning—morning walk!

Yeah, if you're in a place that's not Iceland or somewhere that's super high north—dog!

Yep, social interaction, moving around, and then caffeine if you do or if you don't.

If you don't, but if you have a dog that likes to run, you're even better off because it'll force you to run.

If you have an English bulldog like I did, you'd be lucky if you get out of bed by bit.

Yeah, you're in their eyes; they're droopy; they don't—and they don't like to move.

But it is the case that dogs will naturally orient toward the sun, you know?

And people always ask, "Do dogs have the same mechanisms?"

Absolutely! Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells—the ones that project to the clock and carry all of this thing about circadian entrainment to sunlight—are present, as far as we know, in every extant mammal species, every mammal species that's alive today.

And you know, this is a system that evolved from bacteria that's very similar to the opsins, the light-absorbing molecules that are in the insect eye.

It's a very primordial system; it's organized very differently anatomically in the retina.

And to me, it's actually one of the more beautiful systems in all of us.

In fact, the one thing that no one can seem to defeat—you’re never going to biohack away—is circadian biology.

This, you know, fluctuating 24-hour fluctuation in energy and focus.

You know, some people require less sleep, but we're all more or less a slave to these mechanisms.

And you know, it's a good thing that we are because it forces us to rest.

Neuroplasticity occurs during sleep; it pushes down adenosine.

You know, it takes us through these natural cycles of cognition.

I'm obsessed by the idea that in sleep, you know, the conscious mind obviously is not in control; the unconscious mind can geyser thoughts.

The brain is organizing things more in terms of symbols.

Time and space are very organized very differently in dreams, and there's a lot of information to be gleaned from dreams.

It's just that we don't yet understand what the symbols mean.

The kind of classic Freudian, Jungian interpretations are certainly not going to be complete.

But you know, I'm so grateful that we get this thing called sleep.

And I think thanks to the great Matt Walker, we now understand that the whole thing of "I'll sleep when I'm dead" is a really dumb mindset.

And you know, my team at the Huberman Lab podcast, we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping.

You know, when we're in the peak of things, we all encourage each other to like get rest.

You know, get rest! Like, we really prioritize sleep; it's so essential.

---

How have you learned to have a better relationship with yourself, the voice inside of your head, to be kinder if things go badly?

Just smiling.

I like me; I like me.

Um, I would buy me a drink.

I look at me now, and I see all the warts.

Okay, I see all the negatives more than anybody else does.

I see the positives, and over the whole balance of stuff, I like me.

And I can give myself the same grace if you and I were friends.

I can give myself the same grace I can give you because I like me.

I like me in spite of my understanding and the reality of my weaknesses and my warts and my scars and everything.

But you know, all in all, I'm a pretty good dude.

And man, you got to get to that point outside of arrogance.

Arrogance is pride mixed with ignorance.

All right? That's the definition of arrogance.

I'm not talking arrogance; I'm talking about, look, as a human being, I've failed at this; I've succeeded at that; I've wrecked this, but I've built that.

And all in all, you know, I've tried, and uh, but I like me, so I'm going to give me some grace.

And as simple as that, I would buy me a cigar.

I wonder how many men can say that.

Not as many as should.

And I wonder how many people can say that.

How many people say, "I like me"?

They would give more grace, more care, more attention, more love to somebody else than themselves.

There's a statistic around—I think on average, the likelihood that you are going to complete a course of antibiotics yourself is about 50%.

Right? The likelihood of your dog completing it is 95%.

Yeah, so we're literally capable of caring for a pet, right? Nearly double as well as we can for ourselves.

Remembering that if you die, no one can after the pet, right?

So in an odd roundabout way, serving yourself and serving others from a cup which overflows around your own, right?

Or the saucer that sits around your cup is important.

Without—and again, this sort of tension between being self-serving, being narcissistic, being egotistical, being self-centered—yeah, but not meaning that, right?

It's this delicate balance, and this is what comes with growing up.

And I think this is why one-size-fits-all flaming sword advice seems to die away as people get a little older.

Yeah, you listen to a Joe Rogan, and a lot of what he's saying is hedged in some regard; it's caveated.

It's, you know, "This is what worked for me," right? Not, "This is how everybody should do it."

Right, and yeah, there's a humility that comes with age.

Right, right, because if you turn around and look back with open eyes at your life, you see all this scars.

You know, I mean, you can't—the only way you cannot be humble in old age is when you refuse to look at the reality of your life up to today.

I—you know, that's the only way because nobody's skating through it perfectly.

But this is what drives—this is what drives my—and it sounds ludicrous in my ears, but my business endeavors today, this is the core of what drives me.

Okay, there is no business out there that I can take on; there is no monetary endeavor that I can take on that is worth the gamble of me losing me.

It took me years of a lot of grief and pain and work to get to be who I am today in spite of who I was, and I don't want to lose that.

I don't want to lose myself in business; I don't want to lose myself in trying to earn a better living, in trying to get a name, and trying to do this.

It's like I have turned down—I have turned down so much because I've looked at it, and I've asked myself, "Who's this going to make me be? Who's this going to turn me into, even a little bit?"

And it's like, "It's just not worth it."

It's just not worth it.

And so I'm right now trying to find the balance in undertaking something that's not going to alter me, that I'm not going to lose myself, and then not succeeding at something because I was too afraid to try it, which has never been an issue with me before.

I've never been afraid of failure before, but now I've got something I don't want to lose, and that's myself—that I like, a me that I actually like.

Um, does that make any sense?

You 100% okay.

The person that you have to spend the most time talking to in your life is yourself.

Try not to lose their respect.

Right, right.

And I think, you know, this was a lesson that I realized toward the end of my 20s where I had accumulated a lot of success and status in maybe the way that modern society tells a young man that he should—with freedom and notoriety and women and stuff like that.

And that was cool, and like to look back on, fun.

But it was beginning to get to the stage where I didn't like me all that much.

Well, I hadn't done anything bad, but I just felt like there was—I was built from more; I was built for different, built for something else, right?

And I realized I wasn't keeping promises to myself.

Right? That if I said I was going to wake up at a certain time, the snooze button would be hit three times.

Right? If I said that I was going to stick to my diet or go to the gym or do this thing, maybe it would happen, but it wouldn't happen quite the way that I'd meant it to.

And there would be some negotiating and some cajoling and some falling short.

So imagine that you had a friend, and every time that you invited this friend out for lunch, they showed up an hour late or they didn't show up at all.

After a while, you stop trusting them and stop inviting them out at all, right?

Well, you are that friend to yourself.

Yeah.

You know, how can you have faith that you're going to go and do all of the things that you want in life when you can't not hit the snooze button?

Right? Or you can't not cheat on your diet; you can't not do—you know, you are constructed by the tiny decisions that you make every single day.

And even if you think that nobody else is watching, and even if no one is, it's this little ticker in the back of your mind when you go to bed.

You know, you were gentle with yourself when you got agitated, right? Good.

Yeah, you were kind with the lady that looked like she was tired at Walmart. You said something peaceful and encouraging to her.

Good.

But you did these things, right?

Did something that makes you feel not so proud about yourself, right?

And you know, in some ways, it's a great correcting mechanism because there is no hiding from it.

And right, people turn to alcohol and distraction and aggression and depersonalization in order to deal with the fact that they don't like themselves, right?

But ultimately, you need to live with the decisions that you make.

You need to live with you.

And right, there is this set of scales inside of your mind that's just balancing things all the time.

And if it—you know, you know.

Yeah.

People—and people don't know how to like themselves.

I mean, people don't know how to like themselves, but it's not complicated.

Tell me how you like yourself.

Find somebody that you like, that you genuinely like, and figure out what it is about them you like.

I like that—that's something I like.

That person is—they're understanding; they're gentle; they're hardworking; they're honest.

This is what I like about that.

And incorporate that stuff into your own life.

If that's the stuff you like, then incorporate that stuff into who you are, and then you like yourself.

It's not rocket science, you know?

There are things that you like as a person that wouldn't mean anything to me.

There are things that you like in another person that wouldn't mean anything to me.

There are things that I like in another person just because of how I'm wired, and it wouldn't mean anything to you.

All right? So that is what I like in a person.

So if I work at taking on those attributes, it helps me become a person that I like.

---

Lots of benefits of improving VO2 max.

What are—take us through the Norwegian 4x4 again, and then what else is in there?

If there was a protocol or a number of protocols you were going to design, here's a program that you can take away today into your gym and do that will help to improve your VO2 max.

What would you tell people?

I would say the Norwegian 4x4 is by far the best, and you're going to get the—if for the people that are really determined and committed, that would be it.

That would be the four minutes of the exercise intensity as hard as you can go and maintain it for that entire four minutes.

So obviously, just dig into that.

What do you mean, "as hard as you can go and maintain it"? What does that mean?

It means you don't want to go like fall out—like 95% of your max heart rate, because then you can only last for like a minute, you know?

And so then you're going to go down; you're going to slow down, right?

So what it means is like you want to go—you know, it might for some people, it might be like 75% max heart rate, right?

So some people might be 80%, but you want to go as hard as you can for the four minutes without like really slowing down.

So you kind of have to pace yourself a little bit, but you don't want to go too slow, right?

Like, you definitely can't be talking; like you should not be able to talk for sure when you're doing it.

So it's hard enough that you just absolutely can't talk, but it's not all out.

So four minutes, four minutes, and then three minutes of totally light—like you're going all the way.

This is like, you know, you're like back to like zone one, if you want to call it something.

If your heart can come down, your heart can come down, yeah.

And you're doing that for three minutes because you want to give your—you want to recover so that you can do it again.

And it—and you repeat it.

It's a four—it's a four-time protocol.

So you do it once, and then you repeat it three times, or you just call it the 4x4.

I think that's probably one of the best protocols to improve VO2 max.

Now, Dr. Martin Gabala—I've had him on my podcast; he's a real expert on these high-intensity interval training protocols.

He does a lot of research on it at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

And he also says you—there's evidence that a one-minute protocol, so like just even doing like an interval, like one-minute interval, and then doing that like, you know, a few times also can improve VO2 max.

So that's a little easier.

And also, it's easier.

Like, I do one-minute intervals.

I'm trying to now incorporate the 4x4 into my routine, which is coaches help with that.

So, but I imagine it's a motivation thing, which is probably one of the biggest hurdles to get over.

That just—if you've got any program in front of you that isn't the Norwegian 4x4 for the day, you go, "Ah, maybe it's back and biceps."

So, "Maybe I'll just go for a little jog."

It's like, "Mañana, mañana, mañana."

Yeah, it is.

But again, like I said, you do have to do—you try to make it consistent.

So frequency per week—well, the Norwegian 4x4 would be like one time a week.

Oh, okay.

And that's the hard day.

That's less—it's less of a hard day.

It is, okay.

Is there any benefit to going twice per week?

Probably, yeah.

But it would have been so much better if he said, "Yeah, these 50-year-olds did it one time a week for two years, and they reversed their cardiac structure aging by 20 years."

Of course, they were also doing other vigorous intensity exercise.

It wasn't the torturous Norwegian 4x4.

Yep, you know, like so if Norwegian 4x4 is the gold standard at the moment for improving VO2 max, what would be some examples of other vigorous exercise workouts?

What else is in that bucket?

Well, people can do what they enjoy doing.

So you can go for a run.

Like, I often go for a run, and you know, I'm doing 75, 80% of my max heart rate.

Usually, it's like a 20-minute run that I do that, you know, so like as intense as you can maintain for 20 minutes.

Like, that's what you want to do.

You want to kind of get that—you get a feeling for that.

So if you like runs, because there's a lot of benefits to running, you're out in nature—well, I guess some people do it on a treadmill.

I'm not so big on treadmills.

Like, I'll do them like when I go to a gym or something traveling, but I like running out in nature.

I think there's—there's lots of benefits to doing that.

Some people like to get on their bike and cycle.

So like you can just get on your bike and do a 20 to 30-minute, uh, 75, 80% max heart rate cycle, right?

So what we're aiming for here is 75 to 80% max heart rate for around about 20-minute exposure.

You can—or you can do like a high-intensity interval training.

So, um, so high-intensity interval training would be you're going to—you're going to go more than 85, 80%, right?

You might go—you're going to do like more like a sub-maximal, perhaps even a maximal interval.

So you can go up to 90, 95% max heart rate.

So that would be—I mean, obviously, you can only maintain that for like so long, right?

Some people might be 30-second pushes style.

I do a lot of Tabatas as well.

Um, oftentimes, I like to do something every day—most days of the week.

And it's funny; I kind of adopted this routine when I was—I was kind of trying to do a little bit like Joe Rogan's Sober October, but it was like every day October.

I was trying to work out every day, and I noticed I was like, "I could do this! I'm doing it for like one month!"

And I don't—I wasn't going as hard as like the guys doing the Sober October where they were like competition.

It was like they were just in the—if you do something every—do something every day.

So sometimes I'll do like a 10-minute Tabata where I get on there and I just go hard for 10 minutes.

It's 20—you know, it's most of the time I'll do a 45-second on, 15-second off.

So it's a 3 to 1 ratio; I really like that one.

But sometimes I'll do 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off.

So it's like I do both, but like even just 10 minutes—again, I time it around like, "I've got—I'm going to go do work. I want to feel motivated; I want to feel better; I want to be more focused and all my game."

And I just get on there for the bike for 10 minutes and do it.

You know, there's studies out there—these sort of exercise snacks.

Now, 10 minutes is longer than an exercise snack, but there's studies out there where people are wearing these like wearable devices, right?

And so you can track their heart rate; you can track how the heart rate's going up.

And so there's large, large studies; they're called the vigorous intensity lifestyle activity.

And most people are taking

Some burpees and high knees I'll do every hour. I think every couple of hours I've been starting to time them around my meals. So that's another thing. I think being aware of the postprandial glucose response and how it affects my cognitive function, my mood, and also just knowing that it's healthier.

It's so easy to do; you can just do like two or three minutes of pre-food. You can do it pre or post food. Both trying to do burpees post food might be difficult. You can do it up to like an hour after, right?

So, one of the things that Dr. Stu Migel, the number one back pain specialist on the planet, taught me about forever ago, and then Mark Bell also popularized this, is the 10-minute walk, 50-minute walk post eating because of insulin sensitivity. This helps to readjust glucose levels within the blood.

Also, the muscles of the hips and the arms cross across the stomach, so it actually helps with digestion of food a little bit as well. If you had a really big meal and all you want to do is lie down, actually, probably one of the best things that you can do to make yourself feel better is maybe go for a walk.

What would you say? Here we've got the post-meal walking crowd and the post-meal burpees crowd. Is there something that you're missing from one of those, or are you happy with either?

Well, I don't know about the whole arms movement aiding in digestion thing. All that I do know is that the more vigorous intensity, when you're actually going to start feeling that burn, right when you start to get up to that point where you're making some lactate, that's what's actually increasing the glucose transporters.

GL, they're called GLUT4; they're in your muscle, and they have to move their way up to the top. GLCT is what signals them to do that. So when I'm just thinking about glucose and improving blood glucose levels, vigorous is better.

You're actually chasing that burn. There have been studies that have compared walkers to interval walkers. These are people that are just walking versus those who pick up the pace while they're walking. Now, they're not running, but they're just interval walking.

It's been shown that interval walking improves a variety of metabolic parameters more than just walking. Again, it makes sense because when you're picking up the pace, you're working harder, you're making lactate, and that's one of the big signals for these glucose transporters to come up to the top of the muscle and let the glucose in.

So, I do think from a mechanistic understanding and also data showing walking versus interval walking, interval walking is better. When you can pick up the pace, when you can go a little bit more intense, it's better.

Alright, what about becoming muscled for longevity? That's what I'm working on. You probably don't see me as all jacked up, but that's been my new goal, particularly of late. For the past year, I've become more aware of it. I've spent more time focusing on it. I now have a coach who's great and coming with me to focus on that.

I feel, you know, I'll tell you when it really hit me. I had someone on the podcast, Dr. Mark Matson, and I have admired his work for years. He's like the intermittent fasting king. I've known of his research since he was in his 20s. He's also done a lot of work on hormesis, and I've followed his work for so much of my scientific career.

So, it was very cool to have him on the podcast and talk to him. We were talking all about everything under the sun with respect to fasting and hormesis, and we started talking about training. He has been a track runner forever, a big endurance athlete, mountain biking, everything.

He told me, he said, "You know, the one thing that I really regret in my life is that I didn't spend more time building muscle mass." He had a mountain biking accident and basically couldn't walk around and use his muscles for quite a period of time. He said it really hit him hard.

That was my first kind of like, "Oh wow, like this." I've always focused on endurance; I never thought I really needed to focus much on muscle. I'm not a bro; I didn't have that incentive to build the muscle. I knew it was important, but I didn't really dive in deep enough and convince myself that it was as important.

That was the first sort of eye-opener for me. Then I had Stuart Phillips on, who does a lot of research on resistance training. He's the one that helped identify that the RDA for protein intake is likely too low. He has a really good way of explaining muscle mass and what's called a disability threshold.

This is what I think everyone that has an older parent or grandparent has seen in action. They get older and experience that time where they're out for a couple of weeks, and then all of a sudden, of course, they can't gain their muscle back. Then it happens again, and again, and all of a sudden, it's just downhill, and they can't walk. The trajectory just plummets.

In order to not let that disability threshold be so devastating, you really have to build up your muscle mass earlier in life. Actually, it's never too late, but if you can do it earlier in life, it's better.

Training-wise, I now used to do, I mean really, it was like 30 minutes a week or so of resistance training, you know, where I'm just doing dumbbells or something. Now I'm doing two hours a week, maybe a little bit more.

You say, "The world opens up when you realize you're never going to sort your life out." What do you mean?

I'm glad you brought this up because I think that is, in some ways, the governing example for a lot of people, maybe just kind of neurotic people like me. I don't know, but it's the way in which we try to attain a kind of control over our lives that is not actually open to us as humans.

That sense of control takes different forms, right? It could be, "I'm going to get completely organized. I'm going to get so productive that I never need to drop a single ball or fail to meet a demand." Or it could be, "I'm so talented at what I'm doing that I really feel the confidence of knowing what's going on in work, in relationships, in parenting."

There's one that you never feel like you've got a handle on. I think I'm sort of saying that if you pursue life with this idea that you're going to get to the point where it's all sorted out, you're sort of constantly postponing the meaning of life into the future.

You actually end up doing less because there are all sorts of things you feel that you can't really fully get involved in until the point at which you've sorted life out. In some ways, this new book I wrote is kind of like a manifesto for, "Okay, what happens if we just accept that you're never going to get life sorted out?"

Other people might say, "The news, the world, there are too many crises. It's just a really anxious time in the headlines. I want to wait until that's all calmed down."

What would happen if you abandoned all that and said, "No, it has to be now. It has to be now that you do interesting, meaningful, and important stuff because this future point of smooth sailing and control is never coming."

That's got me thinking about sort of two types of people. There are many types of people, but here's a little taxonomy: one being the people who have not an external locus of control, but the restrictions on why they can't do things are because of something happening out there.

"How can I sort myself while the climate is still such a mess? Or while there are these global conflicts going on? Or while we've got this person in power I don't like, or this person trying to get in power that I don't like?"

Then there's another version of a person who does the exact same thing, but all of their restrictions are inside of themselves. "How can I start doing my life while my to-do list is still all over the place? How can I begin to do that when I'm still at 17, 18% body fat and I don't know what diet I'm going to follow? How can I do this before I..."

It's the same psychology that many people that listen to this show and are fans of your work probably chastise others for—the externalized locus of control. It's like you have an internalized externalized locus of control.

Absolutely, and that's really well put. If you're waiting, there's something sort of fundamentally absurd for any finite human to wait to really show up in life—whatever that means to you—until a point at which you have greater control, that you're in the driving seat of the situation.

Just to put examples on it, one of the things that I get from one portion of people who engage in a very friendly way but slightly critically with things I write sometimes or talk about is, "Well, it's all very well giving this advice about how to handle too many emails, but the problem is that we live in an economy and a society that puts people in these impossible work situations."

You can't just choose to ignore your emails because you have to pay the rent. That's sort of true, but also you've still got to make decisions about what you're going to show up for as a finite human. That might involve neglecting some emails.

On the other side of the equation, it's like people who are very, very in love with that idea that through any manner of philosophies or personal disciplines or the perfect daily routine, they're going to master life on their own and for themselves.

This feels like a more independent way of living. It feels like you're much less indentured to what political party is in power and at what stage late capitalism is at. But actually, it's still sort of giving all the power to future you, who's going to be so great once you've developed all these habits you're going to develop and put in place all the systems and achieve the financial independence and all the rest of it.

There's a Sartre quote where he says, "I have led a toothless life. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on, and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone."

Amazing! I've never come across that line. It's exactly the point. Ginda Bogle has a similar idea about deferred happiness syndrome. It's so common. I remember I used to think this when I spent the summers in between school. I played cricket growing up, like a good British boy.

The season obviously really ramps up as soon as you get into summertime, especially as a youth cricket player. I always remember that I would think, "Well, summer hasn't really started yet." It would be half a week in, and then it would be a week and a half in. I'd think, "Well, summer really hasn't started yet."

Before I knew it, I was getting ready to go back to school, and I was thinking, "But summer hadn't really started yet." I think that is a microcosm for how we see our life. It's this common feeling that your life hasn't yet begun and that the reality you're in at the moment is some sort of prelude to an idyllic future.

It's totally right. Obviously, I'm writing about stuff and talking about stuff that I am a sort of archetypal sufferer of; otherwise, it wouldn't be interesting to me.

I think one other point, just to get a bit self-referential and meta about it, is that it is also possible to hear all this, and there are a few books and gurus who talk along these lines, and actually become a sort of different kind of perfectionistic about seizing the moment and being present.

What we're talking about here, this feeling that real life hasn't quite begun yet, is in some sense almost universal and very, very natural. It's a protective mechanism against doing all the feeling and all the realizing that comes from being a human sort of born on the river of time on route to death.

It's terrifying, and I don't think anyone necessarily is fully reconciled to it. So, it's not that you can snap your fingers and decide, "Okay, now I'm just going to show up for my life right now."

It's more a question, in my experience anyway, of getting better and better at seeing what you're up to. Seeing what's happening when you get really, really invested in some new habit change project or some new goal-setting technique or something—not that any of these things are bad—but if what you're doing is really investing in them because you're on route to the time when life is really going to matter, I think that is a problem.

There's a life cycle thing to this too, right? It's a lot easier and more reasonable to think that most of life is coming later when you're 19, and kind of a little bit absurd when you're in your 40s. That's what midlife does to a lot of people.

At a certain point, you can't carry on claiming that real life is going to be... I mean, I'm in mid-August; I can't say that summer hasn't started yet.

One of the other things, for better or worse, that we're both familiar with is low mood. What are the things that you do to pull yourself out of a funk, or how would you advise people to better deal with depression and anxiety?

I really think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure with this. So, I try to prophylactically have routines in place that seem to decrease the likelihood, including cold exposure, which for a long time was prescribed for melancholy. This is not new; in medieval times, like 100 or 200 years ago, it was prescribed cold baths for melancholy, aka depression.

So, what is old is now new again. But certainly, cold exposure, I would say without a doubt, having a consistent exercise routine, and something is better than nothing. The difference between zero and one—between no movement and some movement—is black and white.

So even if it is just going for a 20-minute walk twice a day, if you have a very packed day, schedule your calls around your walks.

Social time with friends, which is where I disagree with some of the very strong denouncements of, say, alcohol. In the sense that even one drink is terrible for you, that may be true from a strictly biochemical perspective. I'm not advising you to go out and get shitfaced five nights a week, but for instance, if one night a week I pre-schedule a group dinner on a Friday and I'm going to cook with friends, and that means we drink wine while we're cooking, if that alcohol acts as a social lubricant and helps me connect with my friends, I think there's something to it.

There are social effects, not just biochemical effects. I don't drink very much, but the group interactions and scheduling those in advance are very important for me.

Again, not obsessing on the daily routine, but thinking about the weekly, which we've discussed, and thinking about the annual. So, I block out multiple weeks every year to take trips with family and friends. I have two that I'm organizing right now.

These are week-long trips; there will be, let's call it, 6 to 10 people in each group. Some will be slightly smaller for wilderness adventures, and those are blocked out for the year in advance. This is really critical for a few reasons.

It's not just about the experience; you have all of the group threads and excitement and training and prep and fantasizing and, you know, stupid meme jokes that guys swap or whatever in the WhatsApp groups that lead up to the trip. Then you have the trip, and then you have all the memories and the shared experiences and the misadventures and the mishaps.

You get so much juice out of these things, and those act for me as psychological safety nets. You always have something to look forward to. If you have three or four of these a year, that's a big part of the podcast for me.

I think we're both kind of the same with this: the external accountability of someone being there. There is a time on the calendar; someone is expecting you to be there. They are a guest; you probably respect them. You probably care about what they think about you. You probably want to perform well for them and also put them in a great light and be a springboard for them and their message because you're interested in what they've got to do.

All of those things mean you're not not showing up. I've never once canceled a podcast in 750 episodes, six and a half years, due to low mood. No matter how low the mood is, because there's excitement to go and do the thing.

The same thing is true with a holiday, and the same thing is true with dinner with a friend. It's the same reason why a training partner just makes so much sense.

Every Saturday, for instance, in Austin, I do the same session with Progressive Overload, the same exercises with the same guy. We've done this for two years. It's one of my favorite days of the week—Saturday morning. I'm full of caffeine, shoulders, biceps, and triceps, starting with calves. Best day of the week, and I love it.

Every single Saturday, no matter how bad the week's gone, no matter how bad I'm feeling, if we're available and we're both in the city, we both go and do it.

Let me build on that and say another piece of managing or mitigating or preventing low mood for me is having some identity diversification. This means you're not just doing one thing.

If you have your podcast, your startup, your job as the sole barometer of your self-worth, there are so many factors outside of your control or your investment portfolio, whatever it might be. If you are solely fixated on one thing, you're too vulnerable to Black Swan events or simply ups and downs due to variables that are outside of your control.

In contrast, if you have your Saturday workout, or you have your deadlift, you have rock climbing, you have archery, you have whatever it might be, in addition to your primary work, in addition to drawing, in addition to the relationship you're trying to cultivate and deepen, if any one of those things is down, just like in a stock portfolio, if they are somewhat uncorrelated, you can still have a good week.

If you have a terrible week but then you hit a PR on your Saturday workout, we did it, baby! We did it!

Yeah, you're hedging your identity; you're hedging your sort of existential investment. That is very, very important to me—that I have multiple tracks running at the same time so that if one hits a roadblock, it's not just an existential spiral.

Do you have a "break glass in case of impending low mood" protocol? Something you just start to see the early warning signs? Is there an "Okay, I need to pull the pen with these things?"

Yeah, I would say one. I'll give some that are perhaps more easily within reach of most people and easier to recommend. Honestly, group dinners—three to four friends, group dinners, long group dinners.

No alcohol. If I see low mood coming, then no alcohol because of the next day. You're borrowing happiness from tomorrow. There isn't going to be much.

Someone put it to me that if you compromise your sleep, for me, generally, low mood—if we want to call it depression—does not actually, it's not a first cause for me. I would say it's typically some type of anxious rumination, worrying about something.

I compromise my sleep because I have onset insomnia, then I consume too much caffeine, which further compromises my sleep. After three or four days, that's when the low mood slash depressive symptoms show up.

Anything that compromises sleep, I try to avoid in that period. For all of me saying that, people struggle to connect with their emotions. A lot of people listening to this show will be familiar with the cerebral horsepower, praying at the sort of altar of cognition thing.

But there's also still a bunch of emotions that are just kind of less exciting and more dull that everybody is familiar with: anxiety, this sort of ambient sense of a little bit of fear that's going on. It's not full fear; it's not gripping you, but it's anxiety, worry, concern, insufficiency, shame.

So, we're connecting with some emotions. One subset of them is there a way—are you thinking about how they get alchemized or moved around? Is there a way that you think about this?

Yeah, so if I think about emotional development, the end of emotional—not end, but kind of like the more mature areas of emotional development is that those feelings become hard to distinguish between the two.

Another interesting piece is that a lot of what's happening is repressed emotions. Somebody has chronic anxiety—like I've worked with people, say, with OCD—and oftentimes there's an event that started the OCD where they felt deeply out of control over a situation and unsupported.

If they can go and feel, and they couldn't feel it at the time, it was not possible to feel because mom was dying, dad was dying, blah blah blah, something, the parents were violent, whatever. There was some way they could not feel.

If we can go back and feel that emotion that didn't get felt, that OCD starts dissipating. As an example, I know people who are oftentimes super depressed—not super, like not depressed where they're having visions, but like a dysphoria level of depression where the negative self-talk is through the roof.

If they really can feel the anger that they weren't allowed to feel as kids, that all went inwards towards themselves, that depression starts subsiding. Oftentimes, the emotional little emotions that we're living with every day that aren't joy are because an emotion is stuck.

There's an emotion that wasn't welcome, and so joy can't hang out there. When all the emotions are welcome, if we can go back and feel those feelings that we're not allowed to feel, and we can welcome them, then the patterns change, and we can feel the joy.

That joy can be scary. I have not seen one person when that joy first shows up that it's not scary for them because it's just alien. It's big. Joy is just big. We know ourselves by our contrast; we know ourselves by what we compare ourselves to.

When joy really comes in, the comparison, the contrast starts going away. You become like a speck of dust in a notion of joy when it's really deep levels of joy.

Yeah, it sounds great. People can use their intellect and rationality, as I am right now, to go, "Sounds fantastic, feel feelings, yep, understood, go back and hear the thing." But what does it look like? What does integrating emotions, embracing them, feeling feelings—what does the process of going from cerebral, performative artist to actual fully integrated human look like?

Yeah, so there are different levels depending on where exactly it got stuck. We have a tool called emotional inquiry, which is basically like you think about if you're a little kid and you pick up a frog and you're like, "What the hell is going on here?" You're kind of really investigating it.

You're investigating your emotional experience with that same level of wonder. So, it's just this guided audio that we have, and we have a course in the decisions course because it's all about emotional understanding because that's what clarifies decision-making.

We ask people to do that once or twice a day. The transformation is like, "What can people go if they want to pick up this course?"

Well, the course is called Art of Accomplishment. I think we have a site for you called view.lifeodwisdom, but it'll be in the links. I'll find it, I'll get it off you, and I'll put it in the link.

Yeah, but it's called the Great Decisions Course. What that emotional inquiry thing we have for free—you can look it up on our podcast, and it tells you how to use it, and then you can go and download it. So that's all free.

With emotional inquiry, expression is really, really good and very critical to actually express your emotions. For instance, when people think about expressing anger, it's such a weird thing. They're so scared of it that whenever we're scared, we think about things in a binary way.

It's like, "I'm either going to hold my anger back, or I'm going to get angry at somebody." They never think, "Oh, I can just get angry and not at anybody." I can just move my anger and not get angry at anybody and not do it at somebody, meaning that you're getting angry at somebody, but they're not in the room.

They don't have to know about it. You can actually just express the emotions that you have. If you can't figure out how to express them, then you can fake it till you make it. It's a very slow way to do it.

We have things in our courses that take you through it, but we can't get for free because we want to make sure we're monitoring people as they go through it.

That's another thing that it looks like. The other thing that it looks like is there's this thing that happens where your gut tightens. You're like, "I don't want to feel that," and you push it away.

My example of this is like we got kicked out of a house at some point when our second was very young. Every time I drove by the house, which I had to do on a weekly basis, I would feel this punch in my gut. I was like, "Oh."

So I started driving by the house, and I'd sit there, and I'd just feel the feeling. "What is that? What's going on?"

There's that other thing when you feel that thing. Our immediate movement is like, "Oh, let me move away from that." It's like, "No, let's actually attend to that. Let's actually feel what that is."

Just talk to me. I think that's a really lovely cue that people can probably quite quickly pick up on. Just take me through that step by step.

If someone has just the echo of a sensation that continues to come up when they see a person or whatever situation they're in, just walk me through it. You feel that tension in your... What are you looking for in the body and the mind?

What fantastic! So everybody will do it a little differently. I was so cerebral when I started doing this. I noticed the mental reactions to fear before I actually knew what it felt like in the body.

But there's some great research that actually shows through heat maps that there are very similar physical experiences we have with different emotions. Generally, the way that I think about it is—or the way that I talk about it—is that emotions are held in the muscles.

If I look at somebody, I can tell you pretty quickly. When I coach people, people go, "How do you do that?" It's because just by looking at somebody's face or whatever, I can tell what emotions are being held.

"Oh, that's the critical parent hunch," or "That's the repressed anger line in the eye," or whatever it is. You can see how people are holding their emotional experience.

It's all held in the muscles, so there's a physical sensation that comes along with an emotional experience. The job is to get really curious about it. Why am I avoiding that?

If you're lifting weights and you feel that burn and you try to avoid it, you're not going to lift weights for as long as if you're like, "Oh, how do I really get into that burn?" It's the exact same experience.

You get that cue, and you go, "Okay, how big is that? How round is it? How thick is that? How dense is it? How is it moving? What's going on here?"

You just put your attention on the somatic experience of the emotion that's happening. That's the most basic way to start getting into it.

At some point, the expression is really necessary because you can't unhold the emotion. The musculature holding can't happen until you've actually done some expression.

We do this week-long workshop. It's off record; it's very hard to get in. We only do like 36 people a year, and it's in groups of 12. People feel like they've had a facelift.

You can take shots before and after, and their face looks different because the emotional holding has changed. I only coach people who've been through that experience because when they've been through that experience, I don't have to justify emotional awareness. They know it; they know the benefits of it. They've seen the other side of it.

That's another thing, but expression is really important at some point. If you're expressing fear, it's really important to have that with loving attention, to not do that alone.

When you talk about expressing, what do you mean?

So, anger expresses usually with a lot of yelling, anger moving particularly from the chest. The held anger is held in shame, and so the opening of the chest is a really important part of the expression of it.

Similarly, fear is done with shaking. If you look at a deer that just has been captured by a mountain lion and then escapes, they do this shake-off thing. You can notice that horses are kind of doing it, dogs are kind of doing it consistently. They're getting that low-level anxiety off of their system on a regular basis.

Shrieking and shaking is a big part of the fear release process. Sadness and grief are different. Sadness is tears with a lot of gut shaking, but grief can usually flow from all three.

If you're in a full grief release, I was in this funeral, for instance, with my friend who had passed. Everybody was sad, and you could just feel like the energy was stagnant. It was like he wasn't actually fully being grieved.

I was like, "I'm pissed," and I got really angry. Other people got angry, and you could see so much move. So much of the grief moved.

If you look at those kind of indigenous grief rituals, anger is often a part of it. It's not just sobbing; it's like, "Ah!" It's like hitting the wall. There's another part of it.

Grief is like some sadness with some fear and some anger. But this is expressing it. It doesn't necessarily need to be to a person. If you're angry, does it need to be to the person that you're angry at?

No, definitely not. I would highly recommend not getting angry at somebody else. It's emotional abuse. It's saying, "I'm going to try to control you with my anger." It's horrible.

Unless you have permission. There would be moments, like with Taran, where I'm like, "I really would like to express some anger," and she'll give me permission or not.

But with the kids, as an example, when I'm making my Sunday pancakes, the kids know, "Oh, this is the time when Dad is most focused, so we're going to ask him 20 questions and get in a fight."

The whole thing. I'm like, "H!" It's perfect timing. I stop everything, I jump up and down, and I'm like, "I'm angry! I'm angry! I'm angry! I'm angry!"

My eight-year-old looks at me, and she goes, "That was some pretty good anger, Dad," because she knew that I wasn't angry at her. I was angry, but I didn't need to put it on her. I can just move that anger and then get back to being a good parent.

She wasn't scared of it. It wasn't like I was the 200-pound man who was yelling at a two-foot-tall kid or three-foot-tall kid or whatever.

How do you think about this sort of relationship between brain and emotions and body and sort of moving out of and between those? Is there a hierarchy? Is there an interplay? Are they all part of the same system?

I make the distinction between head, heart, and gut in transformation just because it's a good way to figure out if you're holistically achieving it or not.

I haven't found anything that makes it so that it's better to do one than the other first or anything like that. What I notice is that people who are more one way are going to start there.

I was more head-related. I thought everything in my head because of the emotional abuse. I was high in my head, and so that's where I started.

People who are like dancers, who are deeply in their body, the somatic work is usually the first thing that they're going to go to, but they're going to believe their stories for a lot longer than I did.

It's just like it's where your inclination is. People play to their strengths almost, or typically, yeah, and it's where they get the most bang for the buck.

But it's usually, as you said, you're going from 100 to 101 as opposed to zero to one.

Yeah, exactly. The closest thing is luxury beliefs. A friend, Rob Henderson, popularized this. It's not his original invention, but he says luxury beliefs are beliefs held by the upper classes that bestow status on them but incur costs on people of lower classes.

That's good. Yeah, so "defund the police" is a perfect example of this. Another one that's kind of obvious is "two-parent households have no advantage," or "getting married has no advantage for raising a child."

You look at the number of college graduates and people in the upper echelons of society. Almost all of them are married in monogamous relationships with a classic nuclear family setup, and the lower classes that may believe this particular narrative that's pushed by them are the ones that suffer.

In the same way as you, behind your gated community, tweeting, "Yeah, we really need to, you know, these police are..." and we don't, they shouldn't be there.

It's like, "Yeah, but you're not a black guy from inner-city Chicago."

Yeah, exactly. I know, and it looks good on paper. Like, I saw in California they're doing a thing where they're lowering test standards for black kids because they're having trouble in school.

I'm like, "I guess that's nice because moral pass, but you're [ __ ] them in the future."

There's a huge problem in Illinois at the moment in the schooling system. Some huge percentage of kids can't read at grade level, and then they finish high school and they get out, and it's just, there's nothing there.

They finish K through 12, and their math ability is way behind where they should be. Reading comprehension is way behind where they should be. You think, "What are you learning?"

I know! What are you doing?

It's scary. Are you following Roland Fryer?

No.

Oh, this is right up your alley, baby! This is Chris all day long. I don't want to get too much into it, but he's a Harvard guy, Harvard professor, very like the youngest black professor at Harvard to get tenure or whatever you call it.

I don't know. Brilliant guy from the hood, black guy made it to Harvard, did it, wrote a bunch of books, esteemed, everybody loves him. He started doing studies on police and black crime and all that, and he came out with a study that there's actually way less black death from police than we think.

They're not actually going after black people as much as we think they are. This is his study. He couldn't believe the numbers because of what we've been hearing for years and years.

So he did it for a year with eight interns working under him. He couldn't believe the numbers, so he said, "Let's do another year and do it again with eight different people just to make sure we got it."

It came out the same way, and everybody at Harvard's like, "Don't put this out; it'll ruin you," which goes back to what I was saying about how I'm okay with the [ __ ] but at least let me acknowledge it.

They don't even want you to acknowledge it. So he's like, "I'm putting this out; this is data; it's facts." They're like, "It doesn't look good; don't put it out."

They tried to get him fired; they tried to ruin him; they tried to #MeToo him; they tried all these things. He beat everything, and he put it out, and now he has an armed guard with him all day long because he's getting death threats.

So he's got his kid at the grocery store with a [ __ ] security guard. The irony of like, "Hey, I'm just saying it's not as bad out there for black people as we think," to saying that to now needing protection from a cop.

I mean, the whole thing's wacky. I'm not saying he's right or wrong, folks; don't come after me. I'm just saying this is happening in America right now, and it's fascinating.

That's wild! I've got a friend, Carol Hooven, who wrote a book about testosterone. When she did Rogan's show, she cried, I think, four times. When she did my show, she cried at least three times.

We went for breakfast in Austin, and I think she cried twice at breakfast. She's just a very emotional lady, and it's in joy and sadness and stuff too.

She'll talk, and she'll start talking about her son and immediately start welling up. She just loves her son. Anyway, she talks about biological differences between men and women—spicy!

She was at Harvard; I think it was one of the most popular courses for undergraduates in psychology. I think it was like some insane number; it might have been 500 people that attended this particular course that she did.

Really interesting course. After she did the Rogan thing and then the book came out, and then she maybe posted a couple of things as well, none of her teaching assistants were prepared to work with her.

These are postgrads usually doing a PhD or something, and they'll be part of some lab, but you need your TAs. You need the teaching assistants to help you because it's a huge class, marking work, and they kind of assist during the lecturing.

I've got a few friends in Austin here that work as TAs for their professors, the head of their labs, and [ __ ]—and that's like soft cancel. She was being pushed out because how can you do your course if no one will work with you?

Of course! And then there wasn't backup from the dean, and there wasn't the rest of it, and she's out now. She was being pushed out. I'm pretty sure she had tenure, which is supposed to be the protection that you need.

Then she was part of this Bill Maher thing, you know, where he called out Claudine Gay a couple of months ago. But the weird thing there—and I spoke to her about this—she was basically used as a very fortunate political football to be kicked around.

See how perfect this is? It shows that the woke mob are trying to push people out that say things that aren't egregious, and no one considered what she wanted as a part of this.

So she's already lost her job. Good point! But she's a very—same with Shane. Shane strikes me as a large, ruddy, robust guy.

Using him as an example of somebody who went through difficulty with SNL to then sort of come out the other side of it, I don't feel that he's taking that as, "Oh, you know, you re-trigger my PTSD from this awful incident that occurred to me five years ago."

He didn't strike me, but the woman that cried five times on a podcast maybe does, right? This is, you know, again, do we care about people's feelings or not?

Yes! It just comes back to trying to give people a bit more grace. Yes, there you go!

We shouldn't be boiled down to this one tweet or one thing we said or one joke we made or one thing this lady did, you know? But that's what we do.

I think we have negativity bias, so we go, "This is the thing; [ __ ] you!" And you're like, "What about all the good I did?" And they're like, "Ah, forget about that."

Forget about it! Shane actually has a great sketch on a—oh, the [ __ ] lounge. It's horrible food!

So, Shane has a great sketch where he's a fireman. He saved a bunch of people's lives, and the guy's like, "Wow, did you just save that whole burning building? You know, the babies, the women, everything?"

"Yeah, yeah, that was me." And he goes, "Looks like I found some tweets from last year, and it says this, this, and that."

And you know, it's gay and whatever. And he's like, "Oh, yeah? Why are you pulling that up?" He's like, "Dude, what are you doing to me?"

It's a nice, it's kind of a nice microcosm of what's going on. Like, this gotcha [ __ ]! But the guy just saved a building full of people.

So, not good enough! Sorry, not good enough!

Yeah, but I feel like, are we talking about this too much? I'm worried that—

No, not at all!

So, I've got something I want to teach you about. Women are loving men who embrace the baby girl vibe and ditch toxic masculinity.

Delving into the new trend of baby girl following Jacob Elordi, Timothy Chalamet, Pedro Pascal, and more. This includes men carrying purses, wearing shorts and sequins, and embracing the traditionally feminine aspect.

A man who is a baby girl comes across as sweet, charming, a bit bashful, and seemingly in touch with their feminine side, ready to talk about their feelings or carry a purse to brunch.

At any point, heterosexual women, especially Gen Z, are rusting, which means romanticizing and lusting. I thought rusting might mean something else after men that they consider to be baby girl.

This trend signals a sharp departure from the uber-masculine sex symbols of previous generations. A lady explained to the Post that men outside the limelight are taking note.

Think the definition of what is masculine is changing? The director of a matchmaking service told the Post, "Some traditional masculine norms are shifting. Masculinity today is not about being a tough guy, but about being honest, respectful, protective, and emotionally expressive."

About 31% of American men have actively changed their behavior to become more vulnerable and open with people they are dating, according to Bumble's 2024 dating trends report.

Well, I think this is nothing new. You know, like Mick Jagger, David Bowie—they all went through this. What do you call that when you're kind of feminine and masculine?

Androgynous!

Androgynous! I think this is, you know, in the '60s, guys grew their hair long, and every dad was like, "You [ __ ] homo! Look at these! Get a haircut, [ __ ]!"

I think that was crazy then, you know? Having long hair or tight pants or whatever. So I think this is just another swing of this, and masculinity is the norm, so we got to go against the norm.

Eventually, baby girl whatever will be the norm, and then being masculine will be weird. So that'll be in. I think it just flips. Everyone's attracted by whatever looks novel.

Yes! Hey, that's a better way to say it!

I've been, me and my housemate have been thinking a lot about things that are [ __ ] that you don't realize are [ __ ].

So trying to pick up a moving ping pong ball—

Oh, that's a great one!

Very [ __ ]. Starting a stopped bicycle.

Oh yeah, that kind of awkward!

I got one! You know when you close the door and it doesn't close? The car door doesn't latch all the way, and you got to give her that booty bump?

I hate the booty bump!

But you got to do it!

These are great! This could be like a TikTok running series.

Wearing, as a man, wearing a towel wrapped around your upper chest rather than wrapped around your waist.

Oh, I got another one! You standing like this is very masculine, but if you just rotate it like that, it's so much gayer!

What is that?

Why? It's just the same hand, same hip, but if you flip it, you look so much more feminine doing that!

When you wash your hands, you know the interlace of the fingers from behind? That's pretty [ __ ].

Turning—he has one—which is turning around. If you walk past the entrance to somewhere, you're going around the block and coming back in because if you go and then turn around, like that's pretty [ __ ].

He had one at dinner the other evening, which we were sat outside, and the receipt blew off the front of the table. We've been talking about things that are [ __ ] that you don't realize are [ __ ] for six months now.

This is gold! We've accumulated this huge big long list of—I could go for the rest of the podcast!

I was watching that, and we hadn't come up with chasing a receipt blown in the wind. I was watching it happen, and sure enough, the wind picked up, and he sort of, you know, you bend over and you that, and then it goes away again.

He came back over, and he went, "This is adding; this is being added to the list, isn't it?"

That's a great one!

It's getting added to the list!

I would say applying chapstick can be pretty bad.

Eating a banana!

Banana classic!

Oh, a heavy door! You ever have a door where you're like, "Oh, it takes all the manly confidence out of you when the door's too heavy?"

Sleeping in a blanket with your arms all the way under as opposed to having your arms out.

Oh, interesting! I think that's pretty [ __ ].

Holding a coffee mug with both hands.

Yes, that's a great one! Massively [Laughter].

My wife, she says if I see a guy with flip-flops, the vagina is just sewn up!

Like the ones, the tongue? It's the idea of that thing between the toe that really freaks her out.

She's like, "It's slides; I'll do a slide, but the tongue is what gets you!"

Which is interesting because Crocs are obviously the most sexually arousing type of footwear that are available.

You know what my favorite thing about Crocs are? That flap, that little ankle holder. If you put that up, it's called sport mode.

Why?

Which to me is like, "What are we kidding?"

No, that's SP! This is that look! I just sport! What are you going to do, run a mile with that? You going to play football?

Someone's there is a Croc Marathon!

Come on!

Record?

Really?

Yep! There's a Croc Mile, and there's a Croc Marathon record. People can go and look this up online!

I will!

Yeah, I'm sure it's elite athletes!

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