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 last year. It was going to be a top 10, but I couldn't choose. So it's 11, 11 favorite moments.
Expect to learn Andrew Cubanman's best advice on how to become a morning person, why Oliver Berkman thinks you should stop trying to control your life. The reason Eric Weinstein believes more young men are becoming right wing. Dr. Mike Israel tells 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 has been insane and tough and beautiful and all of the things. And if you haven't done your end of your review yet, you can go to chriswillx.com slash review.
It's a free annual review template that helps you to reflect on lessons from last year and plan what you want to get done next year to the exact template that I use and I updated it. 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 missed. And perhaps there is something that you forgot that you wish that you hadn't. And anyway, I'll stop talking. We can get into it.
Happy New Year. 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?
That'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. Well, that's one of these mill room 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 and 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, with 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.
Basically, not blank slates, but self-assembling computers. And 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.
And 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? 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.
OK, let's ask how many trans kids got manufactured by this DEI movement versus how many would occur naturally. And 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, 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 who his paper on ROGD, rapid on-site 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 hid their left handedness. Yeah.
I think about 12%, maybe if 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 now that we have released the lid on the pressure cooker that was tamping down people's natural trans or gay preclivities 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 sources.
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. And I had gay friends in college who it's not a choice.
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 conservative. I don't think it's unnatural. I think it's part of the design of humans.
We haven't quite figured out why it's there. I don't disagree. But I think the left handedness 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 it. I have no doubt that there were some people who had transgendered brains who were closeted transvestites and that it closets somewhere in the basement where they got to be their true selves. No question that that exists.
The issue is you created an enormous amount of like 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. And why have you made that decision? I completely agreed with you.
Like I won't say there are only two genders. Why? Because it's not true. And humans?
Yeah. Two genders are two sexes. Well, first of all, the 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 believed in the 1950s.
It was played to try and buy for tickets. Yeah, but you can make an argument that you need a term. I don't think the gender should be purposed for that. But you can make an argument that just like abstracting male and female into top and bottom had some utility.
Right. 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 the chromosome something. So yes, there are two intended sexes or gen.
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 eularian 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. Your female on the inside.
Does that person produce both sperm and eggs? No, right. But surely that's the definition. That is the line in the ground around male and female, large gametes.
Yeah, but sorry. The gentleman who goes into his doctor and 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 in her infinite wisdom. I want him or her, however that person conceives of stuff 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. 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 category? The edge case.
No one's producing both. So there are none. 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 that the clitoris maps to the penile shaft and the labia majora map to the testicles. What you're doing is you're taking a common female template, I believe, and you're treating it through the SRY 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 is that 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 the stuff, but I believe that that's true. If you ever have the opportunity to interview Deidre McCloskey, who used to be, I think, Dennis McCloskey, very famous economist. I had the pleasure of speaking with her a while back and 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? 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 and 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 accept it in 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 re-litigate 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. Now we're going to re-fight this over trans where no, 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 a 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. It 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. 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.
It's all 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. 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. 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 is going to have to fucking 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 the last time. The best, most powerful idea I think that we came up with. If you see there basically being no shortcuts to what getting the thing that you want, there are ways to be more and less efficient. There are ways to do things with more and less of a positive disposition which can actually make the journey feel a 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 massive wall that you need to get over and you go, wow, fuck, I'm so glad that I've got over that wall. And think about how many people are going to be selected out. It's like a hunger game.
You know, think about how many other people are going to fall at that wall there. 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. 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 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 it is 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 requires to start doing something is way more than the energy required to continue doing the thing. And 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 that there's a stat that Spotify told us 85% of the listeners of the show found us in 2023.
Right. 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 500, 500, 600 episodes deep.
Like I've got it. I've done the thing. Like this is me doing, this isn't fucking doing the thing. I moved to Austin, Texas.
I've got a one visa. I've got like all the rest of this stuff. Do you want to pay the spin on twice? You've been on.
And yet the what everything up until that point is two months of growth. Yeah. I mean, we made more money just from a revenue perspective. We made more money in 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. You want the things that you need to ensure. I've had this idea about protect your passion at all costs because if you, 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 over trajectory, if you've completely killed any passion or desire to do the work in the early stages, because you've, 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, not celebrating when you hit milestones. All of the things that actually help to keep you going, being a character. By the time 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, like the passion equation, 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 that it's the lowest when you're 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 the dragons are going to slam are 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 in 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 resources 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, no one can learn it for you. It's like there's a lot of things that we care about a lot. 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 look around to see who can help you and you're like, fuck, it's me again. And I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things, kind of like Slum Dog Millionaire, if you've seen that movie where I'll give you the TLDR, he goes through his entire life of randomness and he gets on who wants to be a millionaire version in India.
And it 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 transform 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, remembering 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 nightlife or in the podcast or doing whatever. And I think there's like a degree of nobility to it, but functionally that's kind of it's nothing like what is the way that it was an ability.
But I think the reason that you can feel noble about it and the reason that it gives you 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 and 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 talky thing, which is fundamentally what we're here for.
And we created this entire new industry of like cinematic podcasting, which was recognized by as far as I'm aware, like the best cinematic, it's called film lights. I feel like people can go and see on Instagram, like the best decoder and analyzer of cinematography. And two years ago, when we started, I remember thinking, fuck, like, I love the way that they've broken down what happens in Ad Astra. Oh my God, the whole thing was shot on 35 milli.
Each different scenes got two pairings of colors and stuff like that. And then, 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 probably put you it. 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's 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 thing that I've always used is, sure, you can have the external ones of like, I like thinking about my first videos, I'd 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 rooms of 13 and that was fine.
And so thinking about 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 so some of the biggest reinforces I've had in my life has 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, I didn't have enough money for two rents. And I was like, I will fucking tell this story. And when I lost everything for the first time, I have the screenshot of the bank account.
Like when I show up, there's that thing, but they forget that there was a person who screenshot it to be like, this won't fucking happen again. And I think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going, one, gives you the vision of where you're 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 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. Like, okay, you were born to a billionaire. Is there a story there? Yeah.
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 the story someday. Have you heard Rogan talk about the be the hero of your own story thing?
Oh, dude, it's as old now. I think this is maybe even 10 years old, 10 years old. And he's a one of his 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.
Yeah. What would that guy do? Yeah. What would that guy do right now?
Yeah. Because you are. I just got into business. So actually, just me, the investment in school.
And I was talking to Sam, the founder and I said, what? Sam. What's Sam? What's Sam?
That's why he says something. Oh, yeah. And I was talking to him, 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-grandizing, but that's genuinely my razor for even making this like the big decisions about, okay, I'm going to sell Jim launch. I'm going to marry Leila. I'm going to slum it and live at the gym. I'm going to fly around and do turn around.
So 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 this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave.
Because I always thought it was like, I wish that Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and all these guys would have liked it on 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 it. I have to win right now.
And then every one of them is just dropping a kernel or a bread come for future meets refer back to. And I'm going to get one of the most common questions that you can ask. What exercises do I need to be doing? Yeah, all of them, bro.
Right. That's it. And then I just walk away and they're like, wow, like I supposed to be smart or something like that. But then they see the back of my very shiny head and it makes them happy.
Which exercises? So there is a lot to say about it. But you could 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 then 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 hacksquads, they'll look at liposits, 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 airlines like really the one I should be taking?
They're like, 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 are P and our P called 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 crap load of stretching 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 feeling the chest on 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 of 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 need to expose you, but of course you could just be making better choices when 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 upsets when you start feeling the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the target muscle. So the chest fly analogy, if you're doing high rep pect flies and at the end of that set, your pects are burning. Okay, 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 pects don't really feel much, are you getting a stimulus in that exercise? 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 plus exercise for you and make it an A plus 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 pect flies and after a couple of sets, you know, a girl walks by and you look, she's like, oh my God, she runs away.
I guess that's good. Even though she ran away, but she ran away in a way that she obviously respected your pect size, which is all point of the gym. But if you do a bunch of sets of something, let's say you're doing pect flies, your shoulders are pumped, your biceps are pumped, even your forearms look more vaney. But if you cannot honestly say your chest has changed any visible or palpable way, no doubt, still change your pects, 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 pectar sizes and 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 packet.
Like, oh my God, a really good example is if you try to walk downstairs after you hit quads, yep. If you think you hit quads, but you really hit glutes and adductors, you could hop, skip downstairs and I'll fucking drop them. Are we allowed to swear in here? Is that not a good example?
Where's if you're doing this on the handrail? Yes, like desperately clean for your life and your legs are shaky. Another thing with perturbation is crampy. None of this is required.
But if your chest cramps hard when you're trying to pose after a few sets of whatever you're doing, whatever you're doing, absolutely hit your chest, you know, thing is weakness, too. So if I tell you, hey, this is mega-peck workout, what's your best bench? And you're like, well, it's like, you know, 200 pounds for a set of 10. And I take you through a mega-peck workout.
If you can barely do a push-up after a chest workout, oh shit, something happened to your pecks, 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'm saying another one, again, not a huge deal, but a good little additive to the mix is do you feel any kind of weakness or soreness that persists for hours a day 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 will get to technique or just the exercise itself, it says quads, 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. 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, 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 a peck fly machine, some people to dumbbells, some people to cable, some people to something in between. Whatever exercise checks those boxes for you really well, that's 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 and a weird house over the far side. Yeah. Have you got any stories that fit this environment? I do.
I do. So back in the 1970s, you were familiar with movie sequel definitely. Looking back, that's, you know, about the story that I mentioned, how you guys would stand on El Facadio more than approx Officerfeet for me, and then I heard a few people's stories saying, you know, I'd find that, I think, that you know, I think, you know, that I'm familiar with the game, I'm not familiar with it. They both kind of intuitively noticed it and the guy towards the end of the day to when it's kind of like, okay, time to wrap things up now.
He decided to take a chance. He figured, what's what's the worst that can happen? I already can tell this isn't going anywhere. And he says to the two state, he says, no, don't 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 taking a action. Okay, what do you want to do? And he's like, well, I oftentimes go for walks out in Provo Canyon.
This beautiful canyon that's not here. It'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, you know, 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.
It'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. Take it out.
And now there really is there. 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, 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 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 states suddenly become 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're walking in. But they don't know each other. They just, 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 inside. I feel uncomfortable. Instead, they just kept their mouth 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're just feeling that way. And so they're walking on this trail against surrounded by trees. There's nobody else out there. And it's pretty dark.
They don't have flashlight. And as they're basically speed walking at this point in silence, 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. Didn't even look down. They didn't know what's going on.
It was like they both knew. Let's get the fuck 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're kind of getting laughing about it like, yeah, I wonder what that was. I stepped on something out there. I don't know something moving around.
It was a big animal. I don't know. But that was it. That was the whole date.
And actually they wound up getting married because this date was like this kind of amazing thing. 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 a date line 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 what he did. And at some point, the journalist asked 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.
And so it turned out the guy or where 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. That's great. So they got their first tape that's running into Ted Bundy. Wow.
Oh my God. And actually, if you're interested, there's 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 those VW Beetle. There's something in the VW Beetle.
I forget what it was. Unfortunately, I don't remember all of 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 day 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's actively killing all these women. But for some reason, he just had this normal, 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. 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 that call them polymorphisms that make some people night owls. They feel best psychologically and physically going to sleep at about 1, 2, or 3 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 p.m. or 9 p.m. 10 p.m.
will be late for them and they feel great waking up at 4, 5, or 6 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, 8 a.m. Okay. So those are three bins of 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, a.k.a. 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 shacks, you skip some rope or you can 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 a 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, three hours after waking or 11 hours after waking up. 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 go optimize your energy levels for exercise, typically people will notice that it 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, essentially wake you up earlier.
And then the fourth one is a social rhythm. If you're interacting with other people, you are going to entrain your clock to that as well. So there's a social component to circadian entrainment. Now, the pathways for these are from the eye, in the case of you in light to the circadian clock, the supracizomatic 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. Big, it's super high way of neuronal connections. Then so called in trains or 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.
Sunlight, exercise, caffeine and eating and social interactions, bring your circadian clock into alignment with all of those zeit gabers. 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 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. 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. Then 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. It's phase advanced, as we say. Your circadian clock in transit 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 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 now it is 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 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, 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 and 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 five minutes or so, could be late afternoon, could be sunset, take off your sunglasses, look in the direction of the suns. And 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. It reduces the melatonin, suppressive effects by about 50% or offsets those. So I think of this afternoon viewing as, well, first of all, 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 sunset. 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 Netflix, and it's not going to disrupt your sleep as much, but it will still disrupt your sleep somewhat.
You know, unless 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, I'm guessing he also sees the sunset in the evening. He's very attached for good scientific reasons to the sunlight thing. But these are little things that take just moments, right?
They're essentially zero cost. They 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 4pm and 10pm, and then you will face delay or face 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 just think 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, social interaction, moving around, and then caffeine if you do, or if you don't want it. If you have a dog that likes to run, you're even better off because it'll force you to run. You're going to have to chase up. If you have an English bulldog, like I did, you'd be lucky if you get out of the content.
Yeah, you're in the eyes are droopy. They don't like to move. But it is the case that dogs will naturally orient toward the sun. And people always ask, do dogs have the same mechanisms?
Absolutely. Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells. The one that project to the clock and carry all of this thing about circadian entrainments. The sunlight are present as far as we know.
In every extent, mammalian species. Every mammalian species that's alive today. And 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 that'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. There's 24-hour fluctuation in energy and focus. Some people require less sleep, but we're all more or less a slave to these mechanisms.
And it's a good thing that we are because it forces us to rest, neuroplasticity occurs during sleep, then push down a denticing. We're going to process through these natural ebbs and cycles of cognition. I'm obsessed by the idea that in sleep, the conscious mind obviously is not in control. The unconscious mind can geyser up 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 trains. 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 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 about sleep when I'm dead is a really dumb mindset. And my team at the human lab podcast, we sometimes joke that we win by sleeping.
When we're in the peak of things, we all encourage each other to get rest. 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 kind to where things go badly?
Just smiling. I like me. I like me. I would buy me a drink.
I look at me now and I see all the words. 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 words 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 but I like me. So I'm gonna give me some grace. And it's as simple as that. I would buy me a cigar.
I wonder how many men can say that? Not as many as should. And 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. About 50%. The likelihood of your dog completing it is 95%.
So we're literally capable of caring for a pet. Really double as well as we can for ourselves. Remembering that if you die, no one can look after the pet. So in an odd roundabout way, serving yourself and serving others from a cup which overflows around your own, or the saucer that sits around your cup is important.