Time Saved This Week: 15 Hours, 3 Minutes

​

NEW Premium Notes

​

​​AMA #14: 2023 Philanthropy, Evening Routine, Light Therapy, Health Metrics & More | Huberman Lab ​​

Check out a special full length version of Andrew Huberman’s AMA, typically only available to premium subscribers. In this special episode, Huberman answers questions related to 2023 scientific research contributions, evening and light routines, annual health and fitness metrics, strength training protocols for women, and more.

​How to Build to Sell | Sieva Kozinsky on The Nick Huber Show​

Are you thinking about leaving the 9-5 behind and taking the leap as an entrepreneur? Well, before you invest big in your groundbreaking idea, you'll want to check out this masterclass on building, managing, and selling successful businesses. Start turning your dreams into reality by becoming a Podcast Notes Premium Member today!

​Investing Lessons From Charles Darwin — What I Learned About Investing From Darwin with Kyle Grieve | TIP597​

Good investors study the market, great investors study human nature and evolution. Join us as we dive deep into essential lessons on investing from Darwin himself. You'll learn major mistakes to avoid, what stocks to never own, how to find robust businesses, the Grant-Kurten Principle of Investing and much more.

​Mastering The Art of Sales | The Game with Alex Hormozi Ep. 652​

Alex Hormozi discusses how to master the art of sales, the philosophy of advertising, the power of lead-getters, the optimal sales cycle, the ACA framework, the CLOSER framework, and other invaluable sales strategies that he used to makes hundreds of millions.

---

Top Takeaways Of The Week

---

​AMA #14: 2023 Philanthropy, Evening Routine, Light Therapy, Health Metrics & More | Huberman Lab ​

​How To Grow Your aMCC: look for the challenge of leaning into friction; something safe but not your favorite to do – anything from a rigorous exercise to hard conversation

​Ideal Evening Routine:​

• Dim the lights or try red lights (red bulbs in the room you spend time in in the evening) to reduce cortisol; this also helps offset the impact of blue lights
• If you’re on your screen, eliminate all the blue – this is different than just putting it on night or dark settings

​Sunlight > Red Lights: A red light will not exactly mimic direct sunlight in the morning – it’s still better to go outside if you can or turn on bright overhead light (10,000 lux light)

​Training Schedules:​

• Weekly cardio breakdown: 3 sessions – 1 long 60-90 minutes, 1 medium length 35 minutes run/jog, 1 fast VO2 max 12-minute effort
• Resistance training breakdown: 3 sessions – 1 day of legs, 1 day of torso and upper body, 1 day of accessory body parts

​Metrics: Make sure you’re sleeping well and maintaining a reasonable appetite; take morning resting pulse rate and back off or lean in accordingly; take a rest day and skip if you are under the weather; don’t exceed the program
​
​Bloodwork: Ideally get bloodwork done every 6 months

​Three Tools For Middle of the Night Insomnia:​

• Long, slow breathing
• ​Reverie, app for self-directed hypnosis; get into a regular practice of non-sleep deep rest/yoga Nidra during the day – relaxing is a skill
• Don’t look at the time if you can avoid it when you wake up in the middle of the night

​To Avoid Waking Up at Night: Avoid fluids a few hours before sleep; don’t go to bed with a full stomach; if behavioral things don’t work – check out the Huberman sleep stack from Momentous (use code PODCASTNOTES for 15% off)

​​​

​How to Build to Sell | Sieva Kozinsky ​

​2 Key Lessons from The Founder of Fedex: Find a way to make money while you sleep. In traditional jobs, the day you stop working is the day you stop getting paid.

• Every year, Paul would take a consecutive three-week vacation. Knowing you’ll step away from your business forces you to develop other leaders in your business.

​3 Essential Tools to Build as an Entrepreneur:​

• Personal capital or cash flow
• Network of potential employees or investors
• Operational knowledge (managing, hiring, delegating)

​Competitive Moats: A competitive moat is your competitive advantage that captures demand and deters competitors from entering the market

​Who to Talk to to Find the Best Businesses: Talk to investment bankers, industry leaders, suppliers/distributors, and customers

• Bankers know what industry is hot
• Industry leaders know what events you can go to for networking
• Suppliers/distributors know which businesses are winning on the margins
• Customers tell you why they made their purchase decision

​Keep It Focused: “If try to give an employee more than five or six things to do, they’re going to do all of them poorly” – Nick Huber

​It's All Sales: 99% of entrepreneurship is sales

• “You’re selling your employees on trusting you with their livelihood and doing what you want them to do” – Nick Huber
• You’re also selling to your customers for business, investors for money, family for time, etc.

​Hiring the Best Means You Have to Hunt Them Down: At any given time, 10% of the workforce is unemployed and looking. Another 10% is perfectly content with their job. Which leaves 80% who are working but open to opportunities. These people don’t come to you. Rather you have to find them.

​Master Key to Networking: “My networking ability 100’xed when I started to understand that every single person in this world is selfish” – Nick Huber

​Tolerate Mediocrity and You'll Have it Everywhere: “The general competence at your entire company will fall to the level that you tolerate” – Nick Huber

​

​Investing Lessons From Charles Darwin ​

​3-Step Process for Beating the Market: Simple steps, hard to implement​

• #1. Avoid big risks
• #2. Buy high-quality at a fair price
• #3. Don’t be lazy, be very lazy

​5 Traits of Good Investments:​

• The business’s profits are very likely to continue into the future
• It has an effective competitive moat
• The business can easily pay off its interest payments
• It does not require debt (or requires minimal use of debt) to operate
• High-quality leadership team

​Type 1 vs. Type 2 Errors: While committing a type I error destroys your capital, committing a type II error just causes you to shake your head in disbelief at how rich you would have gotten had you not made the error

​6 Ways to Avoid Major Mistakes:​

• Be wary of criminals, crooks, and cheats
• Do not align with unaligned owners
• Avoid fast-changing industries
• Ignore M&A junkies
• Avoid turnarounds
• Detest debt

​Never Invest In These 3 Types of Companies:​

• Government-run businesses
• Listed subsidiaries of global giants
• Indian conglomerates

​Traits of a Robust Business:​

• Delivered a high Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) over time
• Fragmented customer base
• No debt
• Excess cash
• Built high competitive barriers
• Fragmented supplier base
• Stable management team
• In an industry that is slowly changing

​Traits of a Non-Robust Business​

• Operating losses are common throughout its history
• Highly dependent on very few customers
• Highly leveraged
• Cannot keep competition away
• Dependant on very few suppliers
• Management turnover is high
• Exists in an industry that is evolving very fast

​ 3 Key Ingredients of Natural Selection: ​

• #1. Random variation among the progeny of an organism
• #2. Differential fitness between the variants of an organism so that the poor variations will be rejected and favorable variations will be preserved for future generations
• #3. The favorable traits must be able to be passed on to the next generation

​Stop Trying to Predict the Future: Natural selection, like investing, is a historical discipline. Natural selection does not require looking to the future to try and decide if some sort of life will be alive in that future

​Dishonest Signals of Fitness: Press releases, management interviews in the media, investor conferences, investor roadshows, earnings guidance, and face-to-face meetings with management

​Honest Signals of Fitness: Past operating and financial performance and a positive reputation with employees, customers, and suppliers

​The Grant-Kurten Principle of Investing (GKPI): If you identify top-notch businesses that maintains their core qualities over time, you should use the short-term ups and downs in their fundamental performance to buy instead of sell

​Hands Off The Wheel: Monitor the fundamentals of the business to ensure that it remains exceptional, then do as little as possible
​

​Mastering The Art of Sales ​

​All Advertising Is Ultimately One of These 4:​

• #1. One-to-one communication with a person who knows you (warm outreach)
• #2. One-to-one communication with a person who does not know you (cold outreach)
• #3. One-to-many communication with your friends (posting content)
• #4. One-to-many communication with people who do not know you (paid ads)

​Advertising: The process of making information known

​The 4 Types of Lead-Getters:​

• #1. Customers
• #2. Affiliates (another business that refers their customers to you)
• #3. Agencies
• #4. Employees

​The ACA Framework for Sales Outreach:​

• Acknowledge whatever they said
• Compliment them
• Ask the next question

​The “CLOSER” framework to make the final sale:​

• Clarify why they are there (they are there to solve a problem)
• Label them a problem (clearly define the problem)
• Overview of their past experiences (discuss their previous pain cycle)
• Sell the vacation (sell the vacation, not the plane flight)
• Explain away their concerns
• Reinforce their decision
• Protip: The C-L-O part of the framework may need to be completed several times ​

​Take the W and Run: Stop selling as soon as they say “yes”

​​
​The Dark Side of Big Pharma, LLMs in Medicine, Compounding Peptides, Stem Cell Therapy & More | the Joe Rogan Experience ​

Peptides, Banned for Being Cheap and Working: FDA recently decided to ban 17 sorts of peptides by re-categorizing them as “dangerous” but there’s no true evidence to support that claim

• Buhler views it as the FDA helping Big Pharma to patent certain peptides and compounds by classifying them as dangerous so that pharmaceutical companies can go through clinical trials “and do it the right way”

Medical Devices are the Wild West: “I stood in surgeries from dusk till dawn watching products that have never had human safety trials go into the body.” – Brigham Buhler

• Over 90% of products in the operating room have never been fully tested as safe for humans

AI Is the Future of Health: Large language models are AI-based models for assessing big data and making predictions – “They are the future of personalized medicine.” – Brigham Buhler

The Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) are the Real Criminals in Drug Pricing: The biggest “fraud” in health care and insurance system is the process of pricing the drug

• The profit margins are essentially decided by pharmacy benefit managers who decide on tier pricing

Bayer's Crimes: In the 1980s, Bayer (a German pharma company) inadvertently developed a hemophilia medicine with HIV-infected protein

• Did they withdraw the drug? They distributed it to the markets in Asia and Latin America which resulted in over 20,000 infections
• The safer version of the drug was sold in the West

Compounding Pharmacies, Unsung Heroes: “The half of stuff on the crash cart system in hospitals is made by mom and pop compounding pharmacies.” – Brigham Buhler

The Truth About Drug Tiers, Money Not Health: Tier 1 drug is presented as the best drug while tier 4 is supposed to be a drug of the least quality

• “The truth is, the tier 4 drug is less profitable because there’s less of a rebate.” – Brigham Buhler

​

​Based Beff Jezos/Guillaume Verdon: e/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI​

Tranhumanism: Augmenting ourselves with machines is the path forward

• Augmenting our ability to predict and control our world with machines is the path forward

The Universe Wants Entropy: By having life go on and grow, the universe becomes more optimal at producing entropy because it will seek out pockets of free energy and burn it for its sustenance and further growth

• “Thermodynamics rules the mesoscales.” – Guillaume Verdon

If You Believe It, It Is More Likely: The “doomer mindset” is hyperstitious: if you believe in it, you are increasing the likelihood of it happening

• If you believe the future will be better, and that you have the agency to make it happen, then you are increasing the likelihood of that better future happenings

e/acc: The adaptation of the system is what has gotten us to this point in time; this process is good, and we should keep it going. The e/acc movement is a viral community of people who are optimistic about the future and who are doing the hard things that are necessary for us to scale up our civilization Stagnation and slowing down are not options; fundamentally, life and our civilization want to grow

Decel/Degrowth Failures: The degrowth movement in Germany caused the country to shut down its nuclear power plants, thereby increasing the country’s reliance on Russian oil

• Decel and degrowth narratives serve our adversaries more than those narratives serve us
• Instilling fear in people is an effective way to get those people to give up more control

Merge or Die: Whatever configuration of matter or information leads to maximal growth is where humans and AI will converge; we can either align ourselves with this trajectory or get left behind by trying to decelerate

p(doom): To speculate on the probability of doom, stochastic path integrals are required through the space of all possible futures, not just the futures that your brain naturally steers towards

Fear Is the Mind Killer: We are wired to deem the unknown to be dangerous because it is a good heuristic for survival; however, so much can be lost to fear

The Kardashev Scale: Continuing to climb up the Kardashev scale is the great challenge of our time

• Kardashev Type I: capable of controlling the entire energy from its planet
• Kardashev Type II: capable of controlling the entire energy of its host star and travels through the solar system
• Kardashev Type III: capable of controlling the energy at the scale of its entire galaxy

Learning Hack: You can learn a lot faster if you convince yourself to care about what you are learning

Advice for Young People: Learn math, physics, and engineering

​​
​David Goggins: How to Build Immense Inner Strength | Huberman Lab ​

“Everything I do in life, it sucks.” – David Goggins

“Before you know it, I’m crazy. But if I’m so f*cking crazy, why am I so successful?” – David Goggins

Friction is Growth: “The barbaric life that I live, that you have to live, the almost obsession that you must have to be great, you can’t put that sh*t in a f*cking book, bro.” – David Goggins

• Every second of the day he is trying to extract more of something. He’s constantly thinking, disciplined, and never going off the path.

Why Goggins Hates Social Media: He resents being judged by those who haven’t experienced similar struggles and personal battles

• “I’m misunderstood by people who have plenty of time on their hands to misunderstand me because they are exactly where I once was, which is a low-life, lazy piece of sh*t.” – David Goggins

Just DO: Motivation, passion, discipline-All those words are overused. They are bullsh*t

• How do you want to live?
• How do you want to die?
• How do you want to be remembered?
• That's it

You Already Know What to Do: “I go to all these conventions, speak all the time, and look in the audience. And these people sign up every year, go to a convention, thinking they’re going to learn something different. No, you’re lazy. You know exactly what to do.” – David Goggins

• People will not see the truth. They will see what they want to see, which often boils down to, “I don’t want to live like that.”

Are You Happy? He never really thought about it or cared about it

Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (aMCC): When you do something you don’t want to do, this brain area gets biggera

• MCC is smaller in obese people, it gets bigger when they diet
• It’s especially large or grows larger in people who see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenge
• aMCC is potentially the “seat” of willpower and will to live
• All the data points that we can build this area up, but as quickly we build it up, if we don’t continue to invest in things we don’t want to do (key part) the cortex shrinks again

“If I could teach anybody anything, it just f-ing sucks and it’s going to continue to suck.” – David Goggins

Just F-Ing Do It: You don’t need a training partner. You don’t need that accountability coach. It’s what we’ve trained ourselves to believe that we need

• “Your brain is amazing. Once you feed it the right conversation, the right mental nutrients, the right mental supplements, the right internal dialogue at the right time with the right hit, with the right proof of what you’ve done in the past, and you send that right to the right circuit, dude, you’re a f-ing beast.” – David Goggins

What if Goggins Can't Run Anymore: He doesn’t care, it was never about running. He hates running more than anything, hence the willpower

No-One Teaches You How to Fail: “I never talked about winning because I knew the path to winning was going to be years of failing first. So I taught myself how to fail properly.” – David Goggins

​​
​George Mack — The Game of Life ​

The Value of Video Games: Video game psychology is massively neglected by society because people look at video games as a “waste of time”; however, there is much to learn from video game psychology

• Are gamers lazy, or is reality just a poorly designed-video game?
• “Money” is one of the best video games ever designed: it is multiplayer, consists of a single number that is easily trackable and comparable, etc.

How To Spot High Agency People: Resourcefulness

• Has more than just a high IQ or good work ethic
• Can think quickly on their feet and have a high locus of control
• Tend to have “weird” teenage hobbies
• It is hard to guess the opinions of these people because they have a unique filter for information processing

How To Increase Your Agency: Believing that genetics is the only factor will likely make you lower agency

• Consume as much niche content as possible
• Surround yourself with as many high-agency people as possible
• Viewing life as a video game
• For most people, optimism is requisite for agency

Optimism: “Pessimists sound smart, but optimists make money.” – Jim O’Shaughnessy

The Key to Finding Alpha: The alpha is in all the things that the media ignores, but historians will study

Are You An NPC: If a person can extract all of your opinions based on just one of your opinions, then you might be a non-player character (NPC)

• Be open to the idea that the vast majority of your beliefs may be wrong

Reddit Before Twitter/X Before Facebook: If you learn something on Reddit, you are probably ahead of the trend. If you learn about something on Facebook, you are definitely behind the trend

​

​The Science of Training Your Attention ​

Peak Mind: A “peak mind” is a mind that has access to its full attentional awareness

• Steps for fostering a peak mind: focus, notice, redirect

Meta-Awareness: Meta-awareness consists of having an awareness of the current contents and processes at play in your mind at a particular moment

• You must develop an awareness of the current state of your mind so that you can negotiate what is best to do next, based on that awareness

All You Need is 12 Minutes: The data suggests that the advertised benefits of meditation can be achieved with about 12 minutes of meditation per day, done 4-5 days per week

• The goal of meditation is not to end mind-wandering, but to create a different relationship with it

Multi-Tasking is Self Delusion: When you think you are multitasking, you are just task-switching

Confirmation Bias: You highlight to yourself the aspects of the story that are consistent with whatever you hold to be true

​
​

ALL THE NOTES:

• ​2023 Huberman Handbook​​
• ​AMA #14: 2023 Philanthropy, Evening Routine, Light Therapy, Health Metrics & More | Huberman Lab​​
• ​How to Build to Sell | Sieva Kozinsky on The Nick Huber Show​​
• ​Investing Lessons From Charles Darwin — What I Learned About Investing From Darwin with Kyle Grieve | TIP597​​
• ​Mastering The Art of Sales | The Game with Alex Hormozi Ep. 652​​
• ​Brigham Buhler: The Dark Side of Big Pharma, LLMs in Medicine, Compounding Peptides, Stem Cell Therapy & More | the Joe Rogan Experience (#2079)​​
• ​Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, e/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #407​​
• ​David Goggins: How to Build Immense Inner Strength | Huberman Lab​​
• ​George Mack — The Game of Life | Infinite Loops with Jim O’Shaughnessy Ep. 195​​
• ​The Science of Training Your Attention with Dr. Amishi Jha | Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris​​​

​