Rick Rubin has low heart rate variability. So he looked up everything that raises it, picked one technique, and started doing it every day. It worked. The technique: coherence breathing. 10 to 20 minutes a day, at least once, sometimes twice. Now he and @hubermanlab do it together on camera so you can follow along:

Huberman’s NSDR isn’t meditation with better branding. Meditation asks your prefrontal cortex to work. NSDR asks you to listen to a script and drop — restore focus and motor readiness without sleep inertia. 10–30 minutes. YouTube NSDR / yoga nidra / Reveri. The skill that compounds is how fast you can shift state on purpose.

“The best part is no part.” Senra distilled 60+ hours in the Isaacson bio into one question: how does Elon work? Delete → simplify → speed → automate — in that order. Plus the manager rules (20% hands-on time, skip levels to the person doing the work). Full Founders note: podcastnotes.org/founders-po…

Senra / Isaacson on how Elon actually works: 1) Question every requirement (name the person who made it) 2) Delete any part or process you can 3) Only then simplify 4) Only then accelerate 5) Only then automate Most teams jump to step 5 on something that should have been deleted at step 2. The best part is no part.

Two burnout patterns look opposite: Wired at dawn / dead by afternoon. Or dead at dawn / wired at midnight. Same hormone, wrong timing. Morning light, delay caffeine 60–90 min, NSDR when the morning slope is too steep, dim overheads at night. Full cortisol-rhythm toolkit: podcastnotes.org/huberman-la…

Reposting these notes (from 2022) on just how evil "Effective Altruists" are. It's just communism with tech oligarch characteristics. "Effective altruism wants to arbitrage all the extra happiness away and fairly distribute it amongst the global population" "Not only should you not have the birthday party for your son, but you’re morally obligated to spend less time with your son so you can work more and send more money to help solve the malaria crisis in Africa" These lunatics should be nowhere near power and be allowed to decide what is "aligned" for AI. By aligned, they mean pathological. cc @erikphoel podcastnotes.org/econtalk/er…

Cortisol is not “the stress hormone.” It’s an energy-deploy hormone. You want it high in the first hour after waking and low before sleep. Huberman’s free lever: outdoor light in your eyes within ~30–60 minutes of waking (no sunglasses; cloudy days need longer). Phone light doesn’t count for the morning spike. Miss a day → roughly double duration the next. Stack that, and evenings get easier.

Dom D’Agostino’s “sardine fast” isn’t a meme diet. 1–2 cans/day for a week: enough omega-3s and micronutrients to avoid water-fast muscle loss, protein low enough to keep autophagy online. He runs it when brain fog hits, travel hits, or he feels a flare coming. Ketones, metabolic psychiatry, and the short essential-supplement list: podcastnotes.org/tim-ferris-…

Naval’s cleanest definition of desire: It’s a contract you sign with yourself to be unhappy until you get the thing. You suffer on the way. You get it. You revert to baseline. Then you sign another contract. Happiness isn’t collecting wins. It’s noticing which contracts you never needed to sign.

Start with the missing raw material, not the supplement stack. Gary Brecka’s JRE frame: test bloodwork before adding a pile of supplements. The example is methylation — if your body lacks the raw materials, the “protocol” is pointed at the wrong problem. The full note covers folate, blood pressure, sleep, and what to test first: podcastnotes.org/joe-rogan-e…

Huberman on goals: stop only visualizing the win. The literature shows near-doubling of goal follow-through when you routinely foreshadow failure — how bad it gets if you do nothing, how disappointed you’ll feel, what specifically breaks. Your brain is better at moving away from a concrete fear than toward a vague dream. Write the failure scene. Then act.

Exactly

We are all John Henry now. Learn how to use the Steam Shovel or get poor

This is insane.

Huberman fertility part 1 — the unsexy levers that matter: Men ~90 days out: skip hot tubs / saunas / seat warmers / laptop-on-lap (testes need cooler than core). Track ovulation; sperm lasts 3–5 days in the tract; egg ~24 hours. New sperm ~60 days — drinking, smoking, cannabis hit the fluid. Full part-1 note: podcastnotes.org/huberman-la…

Ten years of experience can mean ten years of learning. It can also mean one year repeated ten times, with increasingly strong opinions. Naval’s useful distinction: count iterations, not hours. What have you actually changed since the last attempt?

“Claude, evaluate vittorio’s masterpiece. Create an America-focused version. Make no mistakes.” Opus 5.5 is a little bit insane

Hearing loss isn’t only an “old person” problem. Stankovic (Huberman Lab): safe-sound math (80 dB / 8h; +3 dB → halve time), magnesium before loud concerts, why regular NSAIDs raise risk. Protect the input before you need the hearing aid: podcastnotes.org/huberman-la…

Great advice contradicts itself on purpose. “Follow your passion” and “mastery precedes passion.” “Ignore the critics” and “your customers are always right.” “Move fast” and “slow is smooth.” The skill isn’t picking a slogan. It’s knowing which game you’re in today.

Software ate the world. Then institutions got slower at building anything physical. Andreessen on Invest Like the Best: why “it’s time to build,” how a16z thinks about frontier vs consolidation capital, and what stalls production: podcastnotes.org/investors-f…

Write down why you’re making the decision — before you know how it turns out. Otherwise your future self will explain, with perfect confidence, that you knew it all along. Lux records decisions and revisits them. Your memory shouldn’t grade its own exam.