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"Coming back to the discussion about alcohol, which is one that you tried to interject with Bert on, I think your episode that you released last year, back end of last summer, I think that really opened a lot of people's eyes to some of the risks of alcohol. I've been kind of flying the flag of it as a tool for productivity for quite a while. To avoid alcohol. Yeah, I think when you- Entirely, or do you drink at all? I've brought it back into my life now, but I did six months sober, three times, and then a thousand days without alcohol too. But yeah, I'm seeing right now a huge pushback against unseen, unintentional drinking. And I think that, yeah, your episode last year opened a lot of people's eyes to it. Thanks. I mean, again, I don't tell people what to do. I give them the facts so they can make the best decisions for them. I mean, it's very clear that unless you're an alcoholic and provided you're an adult, that two drinks per week maximum is about the upper threshold beyond which you're going to start getting some health detriment. That's called a warmup to a warmup in England. Yeah, so I've never been a big drinker. I don't drink. I'm lucky that it's not something that's a strong draw for me. Me too. I have friends that are recovered alcoholics and their lives are so much better as a function of being sober. But for non-alcoholics, I mean, I think everyone should just know the health risks, especially women where the risks for breast cancer and other types of cancers are elevated so very much. And what was interesting to me about the response to that episode is that I think many people took it, the impression I got was that many people took it as permission to finally stop drinking or drink less because they didn't enjoy drinking. And as you so beautifully put out on social media, drinking is one of the few activities that if you don't partake, people assume or accuse you of having a problem. And it's just wild. I mean, like, why would that be? And I think that, I think it also make, once actually I was out to dinner with a colleague years ago and I declined drinking that evening. I was just talking to the visiting speaker and she said, God, that's so boring. And I, well, first of all, I don't have a problem saying what's on my mind without alcohol, right? I don't have an excessive GABAergic inhibition. So I'll say what I want to say as best I can. But I think drinkers don't like people who don't drink because it takes the fun out of it for them. Because there's this idea that's prolific on college campuses. Like if everyone's drunk, that somehow like the entire vibe of the party is going to take on a new flavor. And frankly, I went to a college, UC Santa Barbara, where at the time people drank a ton, a ton, discovered alcoholics. And I used to go to parties sometimes and I'd look around and I'm thinking like, everyone here is just blasted. Like if anything happened- Were you drinking? Did you drink in college? Yeah, I drank in college, but not that often. I had a habit and I don't recommend this. I had a habit of going out about once a month and I would tie one on, absolutely. Infrequent, but binge. Yeah, I never, you know, my tolerance to alcohol was always such that I would get drunk quickly and then sober up really fast. So I was drinking late into the night, but then I'd sober up really fast. Now, of course, we know the sleep you get after even one drink is vastly diminished. Every single person that's got an aura or a whoop strap or something is feeling you right now. And I think that alcohol to me never felt good. I never liked it. And it was a recipe for, you know, there was a lot of fights. There was a lot of, you know, there were a lot of bad stuff happens when people are drinking too much. Dude, I've run- Drunk driving to say nothing of poor decision-making. To me, it just feels like there's so many better ways to have a good time that alcohol isn't necessary. But I do understand that it's a big part of many cultures. And I do understand that for many people, it's so part and parcel with relaxing and with festivities and with feeling comfortable and with drawing a boundary between the normal day and the rest of the day. That's interesting. There's a ritualistic aspect to it. Yeah, there's this sort of, it divides the day in an interesting way. So I'm not judgmental of it. But for me, I mean, I'll go to a party where people are drinking and just hang out. I'm perfectly good. Dude, I've stood on the door of a thousand club nights in my career, right, as a club promoter. And I can promise you for the people that are thinking, I like the sound of this justification, this excuse that I don't need to drink anymore. Dr. Huberman has said that, you know, maybe it's not for you. Maybe it's not as enjoyable. Nothing good happens in nightclubs after one in the morning. I am patient zero. I am the doctor of late night parties, okay? Like that's one of my expertise. Nothing good happens in a nightclub. It's this sort of messy, sloppy fights and kissing people you shouldn't and stumbling all over the place and stuff. If you go out and you don't drink and you go home at one in the morning, I think you probably get to capture about 80% of the enjoyment of the event that you would have done had you have drank pre-drinks, gone out, done the whole thing. And I got a bit of push. I got quite a bit of pushback from a sobriety community a few years ago. I did this Thousand Days Sober as a club promoter, which was, I guess, like a kind of a big deal in some regards for like pushing the sobriety community forward. But I was never doing it because I had a problem. I was doing it because it gave me more consistency and more time and more money to spend on things that I cared about. So it was a productivity tool, like the Pomodoro technique, right? Or going to bed on time or something. And they had a little bit of a problem. They had a big problem with the fact that I said, there is something to the enjoyment of drinking on a night out. I think anybody that says alcohol has no role in improving the quality of a night out ever just hasn't been on enough good nights out, right? There are ways that it can improve, kind of loosens people up. It can reduce their inhibitions. If you wanna go and dance, you know, you're dancing at a rave or at a festival, which I think there's one going on quite close to here. If you're there, it's really great. But if alcohol wasn't so widely distributed, I think people would ask a lot more questions. It's like, you can't see the wood for the trees, right? You don't question it. It's such a, it's baked into the fabric of just human life. Every single time that I take a, like a macro dose, but low of psilocybin, one where I can still function. What is, what is? 0.75, 0.75 to one gram. So that's about, it's a little less than half of the macro therapeutic dose for intractable depression, which is something like 2.2 grams or so. So you can still hold a conversation depending on what strain you've got. But every single time that I do it without fail, a thought comes into my mind, which is why does anyone drink alcohol? Why does anybody do it? Because I'll go to bed, my HRV, my recovery's fine. The next day, maybe I'm a little bit tired. Like I've had a lot of like activation. I've been super energetic, very little hangover. On the evening, I don't do stupid things. It makes me want to say nice things to all of my friends. My thoughts are sharper than they were before. Sometimes they're silly, but they're sharper. And then you compare it with alcohol and it's this kind of sloppy, muddy, very unagile. It's just, I totally get what you mean when you've taken a little bit of time away from it and you look at it in the harsh light of day, the effects that alcohol gives you just aren't that enjoyable. And it's been folded into people's lives through tradition and through just anchoring bias and continuation. Yeah, and marketing. The idea that like someone can quote, unquote, hold their liquor is such like a, it's been made synonymous with masculine ideals. It's like, I mean, it's kind of crazy because we know it also crushes testosterone levels. What's interesting is that, I forget who said this, but there's a very different picture of a young drunk versus an old drunk. Someone who's been just drinking for too many years, it's not a pretty picture. They become infantile. They become really infantile. And again, I'm not the anti-alcohol crusader. I did that episode not expecting much of a response actually, but that shows just how out of touch sometimes I can be. I think just to reiterate it, man, I think it gave people the excuse. What you did is you gave people the justification. You legitimized them. It's like the best books tell you something that you already know. It was like everyone always, a lot of people always had an idea. I probably shouldn't be drinking. Maybe I don't enjoy it that much. Maybe these aren't my friends. They're just my drinking partners. Maybe I don't like the way that I feel the next day. Maybe my life could be better if I stopped drinking. There's the justification. Well, I'm happy to hear that for those folks, so you know that the information is out there. I was accused several times on Twitter slash X of taking all the fun out of parties, at least in the Bay Area. But I'll tell you, I grew up in the Bay Area. The good parties ended a long time ago, but they still exist. You know, I mean, I think they're, you know, and when I say other ways to have fun, I don't mean like, oh, everyone should sit around and do math or read neuroscience. Although for me, that's fun. You know, I think in a broader sense, I think there's a shift nowadays that people really think about how to engage socially in ways that are interesting. I mean, perhaps it's a, again, a sampling bias because of the topics that I cover and who talks to me, but like in the Bay Area, there are these Russian banyas in New York. There's Spy 88. By the way, they don't pay me to say this, but I like to go this Russian banya down in Wall Street. You go there and, you know, get hot saunas and cold plunge and people are, you know, young people are there enjoying themselves. And they actually serve alcohol. So they'll have, sometimes they'll do like little gimlets of vodka or something there. And so, you know, people sometimes, that's part of the tradition. The most Russian thing that I can think of, shot of vodka whilst hot. Right, so that, and, you know, and they've got theories as to how that can help. And listen, I think some of those traditions can really be wonderful, but, you know, people are starting to combine socializing with health promoting protocols and, you know, going out and eating good food together, like eating really wonderful food with the social component. You know, I'll go into the grave talking about getting morning sunlight, something that maybe we should talk a little bit more about. And as people like roll their eyes, I'll just say there's this incredible study now just out in nature, mental health published about 80, that has 85,000, 85,000 subjects showing that the ratio of getting a lot of sunlight during the day to getting minimal artificial light exposure at night, it really sets the tone of your overall system and is associated with brain and body that is, and is associated with better mental health outcomes across the board. And the inverse, right? If you're getting too much artificial light at night or not enough sunlight or both is associated with everything bad, elevate depression, anxiety, et cetera. Now I do believe people should get out and have a good time. Don't avoid the bright lights of a city or a club. Have a great time, like dancing, socializing. Those are great reasons to stay up too late and get minimal sleep or sleep in the next day. Great reasons. So every once in a while, sure, in 20% of your life, you're going to do that. And you're probably some percentage of time is also going to be raising kids. So you're up because you have to, to keep them alive, which is important to our species. So thank you. But I think people, you know, forget that, yes, you can go outside and get morning sunlight and which I highly recommend people do that as most people know. But I mean, so many benefits on mood and mental health and improved sleep that just, and it's completely zero cost, you know. But I often get accused of, okay, well, but what if you have kids? Like, how do you do this? Well, you take the kids with you because guess what? They need it too. You take them outside, you eat breakfast outside or at least facing a window indoors. It's not going to be as good as having the window open or being outdoors. But even if the sun's on the other side of your apartment building, I mean, these things have an outsized positive effect on health. And I'll wager both upper limbs anyway, that many, many, many of the mental health issues that we see nowadays in young people and in adults is the consequence of disrupted circadian rhythms because of a lot of time in a two-dimensional screen space, which I'm not condemning. I spend time on and put out most of my content on social media and YouTube, Apple, Spotify, right? And in addition to that, the lights are too bright at night and they're not getting enough sunlight during the day. And an important thing to understand about our circadian slash health, you know, circadian system and health is that in the morning and throughout the day, your eyes are less sensitive to light and you need more of it in order to get what you need, okay, broadly speaking. And at night, your eyes are far more sensitive to artificial lighting and you need far less of it in order to disrupt your circadian system in bad ways, disrupt your mental health. Now, does that mean you have to walk around with sunglasses at night and dim all the lights in your house? Well, no, but you could afford to dim them a little bit. You could afford to switch to the red light function on your phone. There's actually a triple click red light function on every phone that maybe I'll pass the throughput of what to do to your phone. It's which allows you to- Accessibility functions on iPhone. I think mine goes to gray scale when I do that. Yeah, so you can have it switched to gray scale or to purely red, you know, eliminate the blues, a trick that my friend, Rick Rubin taught me. I was like, oh, this is great. You don't necessarily have to purchase blue blocker glasses or anything like that. We'll get back to talking to Andrew in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. AG1 is a product that I've been using every single day for over three years now. Dr. Huberman himself is a massive fan because it is the most comprehensive foundational daily nutrition supplement on the market. My digestion is so much better since I've started using AG1 and I genuinely can't remember what life used to be like, but when I stop using it, I do not like the way that my body feels. Since 2010, AG1 has led the foundational nutrition revolution, continually refining their formula to create better, smarter ways to elevate your health. AG1 is the supplement I trust to provide the support that my body needs every single day and that's why they've been a partner for so long. If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. You can get all of this with your first purchase, a free year's supply of vitamin D, five free travel packs, free pots, shakers, and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash wisdom. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that clip with Dr. Huberman, you will love the three hour episode that you can watch right here. Go on, press it."