Friday, October 2nd, 2026
First Friday of Q4. Let's start there.
This week's theme wasn't subtle, and I'm not going to pretend it was. The book is literally called an operating manual. The podcast is the same author, same month, summing up everything he knows in one sitting. Two of the articles push back hard on the whole idea of running yourself like a machine, and one argues that the first hour of your day is how you actually run a company.
Then there's the song and the show, which have nothing to do with protocols and everything to do with what protocols can't handle. A song about two people who are fine alone, until they aren't. A show about a family that has rules for everything and is coming apart anyway.
Same question underneath all of it. What's worth systematizing, what isn't, and how do you tell the difference before you've turned your whole life into a checklist?
Grab a drink. Let's get into it.
Book of the Week
I'll tell you how I'm reading this, because it's the only way I'd recommend reading it.
Not cover to cover. It came out in the middle of September and it runs about 540 pages. I'm using it the way it's built to be used, which is as a reference. You go to the section for the problem you actually have, you take the tool, and you close the book.
It's organized into seven areas. Sleep, exercise, stress control, nutrition, light, focus, motivation and learning, and personal growth. Inside each one, Huberman splits things into two layers. Foundational behaviors, the daily basics everything else sits on. And specific tools, the targeted protocols you pull out when you've got a particular problem to fix or a higher level you're trying to reach.
That split is the smartest thing about the book, and it's the part most people will skip past.
Because the foundational layer is almost boring. Get light in your eyes early. Keep your wake time steady. Move your body. Manage caffeine timing. Dim things down at night. You've heard all of it. The reason it's in there, and the reason it comes first, is that the specific tools don't work if the foundation is a mess. You can't breathwork your way out of four hours of sleep.
Where I'd push back, and I'll give you a sharper version of this in the articles below, is volume. If you try to adopt everything in this book you'll end up with a morning that takes ninety minutes and a list of daily tasks longer than your actual work. That's not an operating manual. That's a second job.
So here's how I'd use it. Pick the one area where you're genuinely struggling right now. For me it's sleep consistency, because I'm training for something in a week and I can feel it when I don't hold the line. Read that section. Take two tools. Run them for three weeks. Then come back.
Two tools from 540 pages is a win. Most people get zero from books like this because they try to take all of them.
Read it as a smart person's reference, not as scripture. That's how I read everything, including this newsletter.
Get it here: Protocols on Amazon
Three Articles Worth Your Time This Week
Article 1: Andrew Huberman's Book, Protocols, Is 540 Pages. I Read the Whole Thing.
Source: Slate
I put this directly next to the book on purpose. If you're going to read the manual, read the teardown too.
The reviewer did what I didn't. Read all 540 pages, took notes, and tried to actually live by it. And the most useful thing in the piece isn't a criticism of any single protocol. It's the checklist.
By the time she'd gone through the sections and written down every daily recommendation, before she'd even gotten to the nutrition and exercise chapters, she was at fifteen things to do every single day. Sixteen ounces of water on waking. A specific amount of water by 2pm. Morning sunlight. A midday rest practice. An evening sunlight walk. A mobility routine. An eye movement pattern to help you fall asleep. And on.
Fifteen items. Before food and training.
Her point is that the collective weight of the advice creates its own kind of stress, and that for some people the list will cause more anxiety than improvement. I think that's exactly right, and it's the thing nobody who sells optimization wants to say out loud. Every individual recommendation can be reasonable and the sum of them can still be unreasonable.
She also goes after the product recommendations, many from companies that sponsor the podcast or that Huberman has a financial interest in, and the habit of leaning on small studies or anecdotes and then adding a note that larger studies are needed. Those are fair hits and you should know about them going in.
But she doesn't dismiss the book either. Her read is that for someone making incremental changes, it could serve as a sturdy reference. Which is the same conclusion I came to, from the opposite direction.
Read the book. Read this. Take two things.
Article 2: A Morning Routine: More Than a Cliché, It's How to Actually Run a Business
Source: Forbes, Jonathan Weeks
This is the counterweight from the other side, and it's the most practical thing in this roundup.
Jonathan Weeks runs a global media agency called ByAtlas, and his piece isn't about cold plunges or supplements. It's about the one thing a morning routine is actually for if you run a company, which is thinking before the day starts thinking for you.
The line that got me: the day has an agenda of its own, and it doesn't care about yours. From the moment the first message lands, you're already reacting.
That's the whole problem in two sentences. Most owners don't lose the day at 3pm. They lose it at 7:12am when they open Slack in bed.
His routine is three questions, every morning, before anything comes in.
What commercial matters need my attention today?
What does the team need from me to succeed?
What one or two things genuinely require only me today?
That third question is the one that matters. The honest answer most days is one or two things, and the rest of the calendar could have been done by someone else, or not at all.
His bigger argument is the old in the business versus on the business distinction, and that the founder who handles everything personally becomes the bottleneck that stops the company from growing. You've heard that before. What makes this piece worth reading is that he gives you the specific mechanism to catch yourself doing it, every single morning, in about five minutes.
This is the version of a protocol I actually believe in. Three questions. No equipment. No app.
Article 3: The Over-Optimization Backlash
Source: Global Wellness Summit, Jessica Smith
This one's from earlier in the year, and I'm sending it now because it's the best frame I've found for the tension running through this whole week.
It comes out of the Global Wellness Summit's trend work, and the argument is that wellness has gotten so obsessed with measurement that it's started to backfire. Steps, sleep scores, biological age, readiness numbers. The body turned into a dashboard.
The sentence that stopped me: wellbeing has shifted from something we feel to something we perform correctly. It treats the body as a system to hack rather than a state to inhabit.
A system to hack rather than a state to inhabit.
I've done that, more than once, and I'll come back to it tomorrow because it hit closer to home than I wanted it to.
What the piece says is replacing optimization is interesting, and some of it's a little much for me. Crying clubs and scream circles are not going on my calendar. But the principle underneath it is solid. Regulation over results. Sensation over scores. Slow running clubs where people leave the watch at home. Saunas as a social thing instead of an endurance test.
The phrase they use is a pleasure deficit, and I think a lot of operators have one. We've gotten very good at doing the right things and very bad at enjoying any of them.
Here's why it belongs next to the book. The goal of any protocol should be to get you to a place where you don't need to think about it anymore. The moment the tracking becomes the point, you've swapped one kind of stress for another and called it health.
Read it here: The Over-Optimization Backlash
Podcast of the Week
"This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know," Dr Andrew Huberman, Modern Wisdom #1150
Yes, it's the same guy as the book. Yes, it's back on Modern Wisdom after I rotated off last week. I thought about splitting them up and decided the pairing was the point. If you won't read 540 pages, this is the fastest way into the same material, and Chris Williamson asks better follow up questions than most.
It dropped September 14th, right before the book, and it runs through six areas. Sleep and circadian rhythm, learning and focus, emotional regulation and stress, personal development, physical training, and supplements.
Three things I actually took from it.
The first is about cortisol, and it's simpler than it sounds. You want it high early in the day and low at night. Bright light early, water, caffeine, movement in the morning. Dim lights, fewer screens, and no hard training late in the day. That's the whole principle, and most of the sleep advice in the book grows out of it.
The second is the section on focus, and it's the one I'd listen to if you only have twenty minutes. His point is that good focus isn't a frantic, jacked up state. It's calm alertness. And he talks about focus bouts running roughly ninety minutes before they need a break. That fits what I found when I tracked my own energy. My good thinking doesn't spread across the day. It shows up in one tight window, which is why Tuesday's letter was built around protecting it.
The third is what he calls micro disciplines, and I love the idea. Small, mildly uncomfortable things you do on purpose every day to strengthen your ability to override impulse. Not big heroic efforts. Little ones. The cold end of a shower. Doing the annoying task first. The logic is that self control works more like a muscle you train in small reps than a trait you either have or don't.
Go in with the same filter as the book. Take two things. Leave the rest.
Track on Repeat
The Moon And The Wolf, Jackson Dean featuring Laci Kaye Booth
This came out September 2nd and it's been on more than anything else this month, which is not where I expected a slow country ballad to land.
It was written by Luke Dick, Jessie Jo Dillon, and Chris Tompkins, and it's off Jackson Dean's upcoming album, Magnolia Sage (In Full Bloom), which lands October 9th. The day before I'll be crawling through mud at a Spartan race in Orlando, so I've got that release date circled for a reason nobody at his label would guess.
The song is sparse on purpose. Dry electric guitar, a pulse underneath it that sounds almost like a heartbeat, a lot of empty space, and a strange synth bridge that shows up out of nowhere and works. Then there's the howl. A long "ahhwooo" that could have been corny and instead lands like the release the whole song has been building toward.
Here's why it's on repeat. It's about two people who are both built to be alone. The moon and the wolf. Independent, a little wild, used to their own company. They meet for a moment on a bluff, and the song never tells you whether it lasts. It just sits in the moment where two self sufficient people let each other in for a minute.
Dean's voice sounds like somebody used to wandering alone. Booth's floats just out of his reach. They don't harmonize so much as circle each other.
It fits this week because it's everything a protocol can't do. You can optimize your sleep, your light, your mornings. There is no protocol for the moment somebody gets past your defenses. That part you just have to let happen, and for people like the two in this song, and people like me, letting it happen is the hard part.
Put it on late.
Listen here: The Moon And The Wolf on Spotify
Show of the Week
MobLand, season two, on Paramount+
Season two premiered September 18th with new episodes every Friday through November 20th. Ten episodes. It's already been renewed for a third season, which tells you how the first one did.
If you missed season one, the setup is simple. Tom Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, the fixer for the Harrigans, a London crime family run by Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren. Harry's the guy who cleans up everybody's messes and holds the whole operation together, mostly by being the calmest person in any room. Guy Ritchie's fingerprints are all over it, and this season critics are saying he's matured as a storyteller. It opened with a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes off the first batch of reviews, up from 77 percent for season one.
Season two picks up with the family trying to hold together while rivals close in, and one character puts it bluntly: this family is in a death spiral. Johnny Flynn and Ophelia Lovibond join the cast.
Here's why it's in a week about operating manuals.
The Harrigans have rules for everything. Who you talk to. Who you don't. What loyalty means and what happens when you break it. It's an operating system, and a pretty sophisticated one. And the whole show is about what happens when the system meets things it wasn't built for. Grief, jealousy, ambition, marriages under strain, a next generation with its own ideas.
And Harry is the only person who seems to understand that the rules only work because somebody is quietly handling everything the rules don't cover. That's his actual job. Not following the protocol. Covering the gaps in it.
Every business has a Harry. A lot of you are the Harry. The one who makes the system look like it works because you're absorbing everything that falls outside it.
It's violent and darkly funny, and Helen Mirren is terrifying at a dinner table.
Watch it here: MobLand on Paramount+
Resources Section
Podcast: This Is The Culmination Of Everything I Know, Dr Andrew Huberman, Modern Wisdom #1150 (Spotify)
One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman
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