Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #111 Dr Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

I traveled to Stanford University to visit Neuroscientist and Professor of Neurobiology Dr. Andrew Huberman where I was the test subject in his lab. We did some experiments dealing with anxiety and  fear and Dr Huberman gives us some background on his current research. We also get into hypnosis, breathwork and meditation.   Connect with Dr. Andrew Huberman: Website | http://www.hubermanlab.com/ Instagram | https://bit.ly/2YKUPr9   Check out Vital Farms pasture raised ghee | https://vitalfarms.com/ghee/   Get 10% off all foods and supplements at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/kyle/   Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk    Subscribe to the Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Itunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY IHeartRadio | https://ihr.fm/2Ib3HCg Google Play Music | https://bit.ly/2HPdhKY   Show Notes  Micheal Sealy Hypnosis | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrY_b_teSX8 Dr Huberman's first episode | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw2D_l2pf_M&t=8s      

Hey friends, today's guest is my man, Dr. Andrew Huberman from the Huberman Lab in Stanford. We made a special trip out to Stanford to see his lab and for me to be a fucking guinea pig and do some really cool shit. He's working with VR, hypnosis, and a ton of other things, things that help people with anxiety and sleep. And those are absolutely critical in today's age. How can we better our experience on this planet without the use of pharmaceuticals? And these are the things that he's looking into

that are really helping people. I noticed a huge shift. It's a lot of testing. I'll be quite honest. It might be worth it for you to stop this right now. Well, of course, after I get through this intro and then go to the YouTube to see exactly what we do. We have videos of what I see in VR versus what I'm doing. It shows my vital signs the whole time as I go through some typically something that would be scary for somebody who's a little on edge. I didn't I don't think I was too fearful. So maybe I passed with flying colors. I'm not sure. But check out the video for sure. It's a short one. It's a sweet one. Andrew Huberman, who was on the show before, will link to the first podcast we did together. Really gives a lot of bullet point details

on how to effectively change the way you feel and operate during the day through breath work and other techniques. He's a wealth of knowledge. I'm definitely gonna have him on the show again. Check this one out. Let us know what you think. Leave us a five-star rating.

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and i look forward to this show hit us up on twitter and instagram to let us know what you think okay so we're standing in the virtual reality component of the huuberman Lab here at Stanford University School of Medicine. And next to me is Malise Yilmaz, who's a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard, who's now a postdoctoral researcher in the Huberman Lab. And this box, this room that Kyle and we are standing in was built specifically for the kinds of experiments we're going to talk about today, which are to understand really what the physiology underlying the stress response is, to really understand how breathing heart rate changes in the visual system, how those come about.

And the goal of this project is really straightforward. You know, whether that we're not trying to scare people, what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand what's going on in inside the body and in the brain as people experience different things and their subjective reports of yes that's scarier no that's not are very interesting to us but we're really trying to figure out how their subjective reports and their physiology match because um a lot of people that come through here um have regular levels of anxiety and then we also

look at people who have so-called generalized anxiety that suffer from an inability to regulate their internal state. And so today Kyle's going to go through a couple of the different what we call stimuli which are virtual experiences which is the best way that we can bring real life experiences to the lab. And we're also going to explore some of the so-called interventions. Things like hypnosis and breath work and so on as a means to try and allow people to modulate their internal state better than they

did before that they show up here we're not a clinical lab this is a research lab but it has very you know real clinical implications and we hope to move some of this to clinical trials in the next couple years um melissa has a very specific interest in addition to that, which is to really create some objective measures of mental health. So maybe you want to just talk about that for a moment or two. Sure. Yeah. So I think what makes this project unique is that we're able to measure real behavior. So people actually move and we actually look around, as opposed to, you know, filling out a survey or a test or watching, you know, an unrealistic image. And so we using those real measurements of physiology and behavior, the goal of my research is to create objective biomarkers of anxiety.

So we recruit people with anxiety and also healthy individuals, and then we use statistical techniques and other techniques to see what is it that is different in these two groups, in their behavior and physiology, and also now we're adding neural responses, combining neural responses with the virtual reality experiences yes so when we says neural responses we've got a collection of patients at UCSF as well as at Stanford

and through collaborations with neurosurgery we're able to do the equivalent types of experiments that you're gonna see today that Kyle's doing but in individuals that have electrodes lowered down below their skulls they've've had a neurosurgery. There's a piece of their skull has been removed. You've got electrodes down there chronically. So the electrodes are in there all the time to measure things like seizures, but it's allowed us, I should really say it's allowed Melissa, because she's the one who's been doing these experiments, to do what we believe are the first recordings from the human brain in VR, while people are in VR. So she's recorded from the human amygdala, the so-called fear center of the human brain in VR while people are in VR. So she's recorded from

the human amygdala, the so-called fear center of the human brain, as well as the frontal cortex, the insula, all these areas that you hear about and there's a lot of discussion about. And the reason for doing those electrode recordings is that when you use EEG, no knock on EEG, it has its utility, but that's just the first centimeter of the outside of the brain. And a lot of the stuff related to the sorts of things that go on in anxiety are happening really deep. So it's like trying to understand the currents of the ocean by just looking at the white caps on the waves.

EEG is kind of at that level, and then deep electrode recordings are much more invasive. So Mollis has been taking essentially the equivalent of this laboratory up to UCSF, often several times a week to work on these patients. And we're really excited about where those data are going. We'll talk more about it later. For now, I think we should talk about today's research subject.

Definitely one of the larger and more fit subjects we've had in our lab, although we've had some athletes here before. So Kyle is standing inside the virtual reality chamber, if you will. This is an exact duplicate made for humans of some of the work that Melissa had been doing in mice during her PhD at Harvard. So giving mice these stimuli to scare them to see whether or not they run or they hide or they fight. And when she came to the lab, she said to me, I want to work on these topics, but I want to do it in humans. And so here we are. This is, as far as we know, the first laboratory of this sort.

The walls are padded just because occasionally people walk into them, although I don't think that will happen today. Kyle's been in small enclosed spaces with a lot of action before, so we're not too concerned about his safety. So she'll give him instructions, and we're going to take him through some of the experiences that both healthy and people with anxiety experience when they come to the lab. I should mention the VR that we put together is unique in that some of it is done with computer-generated images, but this is, as far as we know, one of the earliest is as far as we know one of the earliest

um phases where we've been taking one of the first examples where we've taken real world images 360 video and then stitch those together melissa stitch those together with programmers to create real world environments because it's very different than looking at cartoon images um so the vr experiences um that we're going use today, we'll talk about as we go along. But that was a, that took about a year and a half of going out and diving with great white sharks, sending tree climbers up in trees and doing all that. I can provide you some of those images if you like of the real world and trying to bring that back to the lab. Because as Melissa pointed out, having someone fill out a questionnaire or look at

pictures of skulls, that's just not very realistic you know and so now 2019 heading to 2020 you know we're able to do things that are far more realistic in the lab so we've got kyle kingsbury in the lab today in an experiment that we do with um so-called healthy people and people with generalized anxiety and so he's down in the hallway right now in hypnosis. So on the last podcast, we talked about so-called interventions or tools that people can use to modulate their internal state, whether or not that's because they are high anxious or whether or not that's because they're high performing and they want to perform even better, or whether or not they understand the value and power of sleep, but they're having trouble sleeping. And so my lab's involved in a number of things, but one of the things that we really want to do is create new protocols,

new tools that people can use to improve their ability to get into sleep, to calm their internal state, or to ramp up their internal state if that's where they perform best. Because Kyle and I were just talking about his experience of one of his best wing fights where, you know, his anxiety heading into the cage was very high. And the moment he got there, in the moment of a task, everything got quiet and calm. And he, you know, ended with a terrific win for himself. So that's a really good example of the fact that in some cases and for some people, the higher states of arousal, so-called autonomic arousal, might actually be more powerful in terms of performance. So the three so-called, we call them interventions, but really the three tools that we've been looking at, these are just physiological tools to change internal state, to perform better or to relax more, are hypnosis. And this is a form of medical hypnosis.

I'll explain what that is. Respiration physiology, breath work, as well as something that most people would consider sort of like a meditative script that combines some breath work as well. So first of all, hypnosis. So Kyle's down the hall right now. He's in hypnosis. He's listening to a script that has his thoughts and the context of his thinking directed in a particular way. And I talked a little bit about this on the last podcast, but if you missed it, I'll just kind of summarize real quick. Hypnosis involves narrowing the context of your focus so that you are not self-conscious about some of the things that you might do or say. This is manipulated in stage

hypnosis, but we're not doing that right now. This is a form of self-hypnosis where he's hearing a script that allows him to direct his thinking toward the notion of self-internal control. Control over his breathing, control over his heart rate, control over his mental state. Now, there aren't a ton of data out there on hypnosis, but there's some that are starting. David Spiegel, who's in the Department of Psychiatry here at Stanford, has used hypnosis for things like smoking cessation, anxiety. So this script is very much like the sort that David uses. And one thing that people could consider would be the use of a hypnosis script to direct their thinking and their behavior in the way they want to go. Now, what am I really saying? What I'm saying is that, you know, many of your listeners, many of you, the listeners, exercise. You believe in cardiovascular exercise,

strength training exercise, mobility exercise, flexibility exercise. We don't have a lot of formal clarity on what exercises are good for the brain. But hypnosis, there are pretty impressive data, even though it's a limited number of studies, that it can improve one's ability to control their internal state. I mentioned some of the scripts from Michael Seeley that are available free on YouTube. Again, no business or other relationship to Michael Seeley, never met him, but those are the ones that I happen to use. We have some that we're working on in our lab, and then we're evaluating what content in the hypnosis is really key so right now Kyle is using an experimental hypnosis paradigm just a new a new hypnosis script where we're measuring things like how important is

the cadence of the voice the level of the voice that you hear the duration of the hypnosis I personally use a hypnotic script one of the Sealy scripts that lasts about 10 to 30 minutes. He's using a 20 minute script right now. What we're trying to do is find those kind of minimal duration, minimal parameters, so maximum effective dose for changing your neurology simply through listening, through hearing something in a script. So this is in Wu. There's no notions of mindfulness or kind of mysticism in this. This is purely using the sensory input, auditory input, sometimes visual as well, to modulate one's own internal state after you get out of the hypnosis. Okay, so hypnosis is one.

If you come to my lab and you're a subject in an experiment, we can also provide you the hypnosis script um when you when you leave we do hope once we would we do plan i should say once the um the data are published then we can distribute this as widely one of the things that's really great about hypnosis and these other kinds of interventions is they're essentially free you know that they're not costly um the second so-called intervention is respiration work or breath work now here know, at risk of sparking a lot of controversy, I, you know, I don't think we yet know at all what the best patterns of respiration are for performance and for limiting anxiety. One thing that is becoming clear, however, is that long duration exhales, okay, blowing off a lot of CO2 can be a powerful way to rapidly down-regulate

the stress response. So when people say, you know, you get stressed, take a deep breath, that's actually the opposite advice. You should say, take a long exhale, give a long exhale. The breathing quickens when you're stressed and taking in more oxygen is probably going to bump up your arousal state. So if there's any kind of simple thing that I think we can all trust, although now I'm, you know, just by saying that I'm sure I'll invite some fire, but that's okay. Bring it. You know, I'm tougher than I look, you know, so, you know, especially when it comes to ideas in neuroscience, we can debate this. I would enjoy a healthy debate about this, but a long exhale can be very powerful for rapid down regulation. Okay. there's

a lot of debate now about nasal versus mouth breathing. I'm going to probably upset a few people by saying this, but I don't think we know yet which one is better under which conditions. I think we really need to do the experiments. Now, there are real world experiments too that people in the performance community are doing. I think that's terrific and I applaud those. I'm not saying we need to do all the experiments in the confines of the university. However, my lab is looking at how long duration exhales impact the anxiety state, not just when you're doing the breath work, but afterward when you're engaged in say a virtual environment, a real world environment, and that stress hits and you want to down regulate. Okay. So we're testing the hypothesis that long-duration exhales are

what are important. In my lab, we're not paying particular attention right now to nose versus mouth, but we have some other experiments in which we soon will. Again, once the data are published, and that should be within the next year, maybe sooner, we intend to, you know, reveal how different patterns of breath work, mouth long duration exhale longer or you know proportionally more inhaling impact even these the the amygdala the fear centers in the brain as well as cognition the ability to do cognitive tasks kind of like some of the simple ones that kyle was doing today simple not because um he couldn't do more sophisticated tasks but because we sort of limited what we can do in the laboratory for all people so we just kind of do we kind of go

to common tasks very simple spatial tasks but it is powerful for allowing us to tap into cognitive state. So what patterns of breathing are most useful? That's a key question. So, you know, a takeaway would be one, check out hypnosis on YouTube. Very interesting. They, as well as some of the scripts that are going to start being released from the medical community. They can be powerful for a number of people Breathwork or long duration exhales seem to down regulate people's level of autonomic arousal pretty quickly Again nose mouth interesting debate. There's something, you know, I saw an interesting video of the late Charles Poliquin Where he talked about something that I'd love to test in the laboratory We don't have data on this

yet, but he talked about how closing the left nasal passage and breathing through the right nasal passage would increase levels of alertness and autonomic arousal. Whereas doing the opposite, closing the right nasal passage and breathing through the left nasal passage would decrease autonomic arousal. I tried it. So just subjectively in my own experience, this isn't in my lab, I would say that there might very well be something to it. I kind of did experience a kind of lift from the breathing through my right nostril and a kind of more calming through the left nostril. But I may have been biased because that's the way he said it would go.

But I do think it's a powerful and interesting one because there's been so much in the yoga communities about closing one nostril and hemispheric breathing and this kind of thing. So interesting. And then the last one is this kind of meditative script that we use for people with generalized anxiety that looks a lot like the so-called yoga nidra, N-I-D-R-A, or sometimes spelled N-I-D-R-E, that I talked about in the last podcast that you can find on YouTube.

Just a note about that. So in my lab, we're not looking at yoga nidra. What we do is we have someone come in, they go through these experiences of the sort you saw today, and then we give them this deep relaxation protocol where they're hearing a voice, which tells them to relax their muscles, to relax their gaze if their eyes are open, maybe to close their eyes and to focus their attention at the surface of the body, further away from the body to sounds in the room, then back into the body. So they're learning how to move their attention out of their own physiological experience to outside external stimuli. That alone can be very powerful.

Learning how to deliberately shift your attention and not have your attention yanked around for you while doing different patterns of breathing. So things like long exhale breathing is our characteristic of Nidra now some of this i realize is a repeat of what was in the last podcast i wanted to just kind of put those three tools out there because it was a long one and you know i just if you take nothing else away from this would be that you know hypnosis may have some utility and power uh for you the different types of hypnosis can be very tailored so it it's not just, oh, relaxation or increase the level of alertness. They've got ones for smoking cessation, for combating procrastination. There are a lot

of things, whether or not they work or not for you, you'll have to just be your own scientist there. But in terms of essentially zero cost, except for the time involved, protocols and things to try, they seem essentially safe know, essentially safe, although obviously, you know, talk to your doctor. I'm not a physician. I always say, you know, I'm not a medical doctor. I don't prescribe anything. I'm a professor. So I profess lots of things, but you know, your medical care is your business, not mine. The other thing, you know, in terms of thinking about respiration is right now there's a ton out there on hyperventilation where you're breathing in a lot breathing a lot cycling you're breathing a lot and getting into these kind of amped up states i think those actually could be quite powerful for

certain kind of levels of mental and physical performance but right now there's no science that i'm aware of and so that's one thing that we're very interested in i'm working with various groups here and off campus to try and understand what the best protocols would be for high performance in the hyper aroused or hyper oxygenated states. So that's where we're headed. Hopefully those takeaways will be useful to you. I personally have benefited a lot from doing a long exhale breathing protocol once a day for about five minutes. There's actually a different way to go about getting these long exhale breaths through the day that I just wanted to propose. And this is just something I do in my own life. We haven't brought it to the lab yet. And it's something I just call it clock breathing,

which is every time I look at the time, whether or not it's on my phone or watch or a wall clock, if it's one o'clock or anywhere between one and two o'clock a.m. or p.m., I'm rarely up at one a.m., but I do one deliberate conscious long exhale breath if it's between 2 and 3 I do 2 if it's between 3 and 4 and so on and so throughout the day because I tend to look at the clock a lot there's times when I'm actually stopping and doing 12 full breaths and this is a way of distributing it averages out if you do the math to you know more than a hundred conscious long exhale breaths throughout the day and this may seem kind of you

know kind of hokey but it's one way of doing breath work without having to sit in a chair and say okay you know I'm gonna do breath work for five minutes or ten minutes which seems you know incredibly simple and like anybody should be able to do it but a lot of people in our experience you know in the lab setting in the clinical setting and just out in the community the general public, people don't follow through with these things very consistently. And so it's kind of nice, actually, if you look at the clock, I'm sometimes like, oh, nice, I only have to do three breaths,

which is kind of, you know, I should want to do more, but you know, I'm human. So I'll do three, I'll just pause and do three, doesn't matter where I am, long exhale breaths. Typically, I'll do them pure nasal, but that's because I I'm that's what works for me but you can do that at any point now if you don't look at the clock between four and five does it matter no you know you can look at between five and six and do the breath work again this isn't to say that this is the most powerful form of breath work at all it's just to say that your breath work doesn't have to be done in one sitting it can be spread throughout your activities and that you know I happen to run a very long very busy schedule from morning until night and so there's a way in which I can

introduce a respiration physiology conscious respiration physiology throughout the day which is really what I want because I want to be able to think well perform well and all domains of my life as I'm moving through the day and so I'm constantly in touch with that aspect of my nervous system through this, what I'm calling clock breathing, which is not a trademarked or commercialized thing at all. It's just that it's the simplest way that I could describe it. So a good example of clock breathing would be, okay, I think right now it's somewhere between 12 and one o'clock.

So I'm not going to 12 breaths on camera, camera because it would take up too much of your time. But what I would do then is if I look at the clock and it's 12.38, I would pause and do 12 inhales. And then proportionally longer duration exhales. So an inhale and a long exhale would be one, and I would do that 12 times. So it would be between 12 and 1 o'clock. If I didn't look at the clock between 12 and one o'clock, I would do, I would not do it at all. But then between one and two, I would just do one. Now, is there some sort of important math to this? No, it's a way of using a natural, a natural gauge, a natural calibration

point, which is the time of day as a way to have me doing Conscious breath work throughout the day and that could be while I'm running could be while I'm training in the gym could be while I'm Teaching it doesn't matter right the important thing is that you are doing some sort of work to train your nervous system To down regulate or at least to stay in a plane that you control through respiration physiology through breathwork and it doesn't require I don't believe that breathwork has to be done by sitting certainly not by lying down or closing the eyes or doing anything sort of symbolic or ceremonial although it can if that's if that's what you like to do but it can just be spread throughout the day and this is actually something that we're encouraging people

to do and we're going to be exploring it as an experiment for people who are, say, in graduate school, in medical school, running high-demand athletic lives, athletes at various levels, students, and then just anybody, really. Because doing a breathwork practice takes kind of an allotted amount of time. And even though 10 minutes doesn't seem like much, it's the whole process of setting aside time and moving into that space, which seems to act as a natural barrier for people. So we're really just trying to lower the barriers for accessing these conscious breathing protocols. And so that's the way I would go about it. I think it's interesting that, you know, for 20, 30 plus years, people have been taking a supplement or drinking a cup of coffee and then going to a workout to get a better workout and then consuming things afterwards to recover better. But in a lot of ways, we still think about things like meditation and hypnosis as separate from anything you might ingest.

But there and I guess this is sparked in part by the whole psychedelic movement, like what should your mental state be when you're doing things to modulate your physical state? And what should your physical state be when you're doing things to modulate your mental state? So like one thing that I think would be really interesting, my lab's not doing this yet, but I would love in the future to explore would be for instance, like how some of the GABA analogs might improve people's ability to relax and go into deeper meditative states or more efficient hypnosis states. I think that's going to be a really exciting

next generation area. Students, I don't necessarily condone this, but people do various things in order to study better, right down to some pretty dangerous practices, which obviously I don't condone. But I think that it's kind of interesting to think about how supplementation and behavioral practice might eventually be combined. Yeah, you got me thinking about this ketamine nasal spray that my doctor has me on. You're doing that now? Yeah. And, you know, ketamine has been completely legal. And obviously there's different treatment centers. And the range is wide, you know, intravenous or intramuscular injections, a whole different

animal. And I have experience with that. But the nasal spray is, you know, there's levels to it as with anything else. And you can scale it. But I'm able to meditate so deeply on just the spray and I've done a float tanks combined with it and I've been just gone in the float. And then-

So you feel like you get more out of those practices. Just so much deeper, yeah. So it'd be really cool to take a deeper look at that and actually see like, is it just a feeling that I have or is it actually changing the neurochemistry and altering things in a way where I am dropping in significantly deeper? Yeah, because we have this idea

that you have to do things every day. Like you gotta meditate every day or you gotta do your breath work every day. A couple minutes ago, I was talking about, I just spread my breath work throughout the day. I just do it by using the clock as a way to tell me how many breaths I should take. It's just a simple way of doing breath work

without having to set aside some time specifically for that at one moment. I think that it'd be really interesting. I'm curious though, what's the subjective experience of ketamine like? I've never tried it, and I'm wondering, do you feel calm? What does it make you feel? Yeah. I mean, in the lighter doses, there's definitely a euphoria. You feel good. At higher doses, my buddy jokingly calls it forget a mean, because you might be mid sentence telling a story and just be total blank, you know, but um, and then at heavier doses, whether you're snorting powder, like street K or snorting the ketamine spray, that's prescription, you

can get to a psychedelic space, the injections are purely psychedelic. And I've had, from a visionary standpoint, I've relived like, pretty significant memories, good ones too. You know, like the first time I did ketamine in college at ASU, it was off the dryer in my washer and dryer room with all my buddies waiting to see what was going to happen. Just to be clear, I am, I, Andrew Huberman, am not condoning doing any, any illegal or street drugs. It's all on the up and up now. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it is out there as a therapeutic tool.

I mean, I think we really are in the midst of an incredible tide change where universities are studying these kinds of things. Clinically, they're tools. We were just talking about how context is really important. And I guess kind of just going back to this idea that how to get the most out of a meditation session, how to get the most out of respiration physiology, how to get the most out of hypnosis. There's, you know, there's the idea, do it six days a week and with a day off on the weekend, kind of like the old school weight training protocols were. And then now people realize,

hey, you know, you can actually do you can actually do shorter duration, high intensity. I think all of the same kind of parameters or variables that people have explored in the physical training space can work as a kind of a template for exploring the mental augmentation space. And certainly supplementation and various substances are being used in combination with performance.

We know that that's a big thing and they work and are appropriate in some contexts and not in others. And it's going to be really interesting to see what science can provide. I guess one thing that I posted this video on Instagram the other day of an Evan MRI. It was actually done here of the brainstem kind of like morphing as somebody breathes. I saw that. Yeah. And it got, you know, I don't have a super high volume Instagram site, but we have enough people coming our way. But it was, you know, a huge peak in terms of the number of people that, you know, saw it and commented and it made the rounds. And it was like intrigued, like people love the idea that the brain is changing in real time in response to something like respiration physiology. And it is,

it's thrilling. I'll never forget the first time I saw it. I was like, wow. And so I guess, you know, then I got a couple of comments that were interesting. I take the comments seriously sometimes because they are a window into the general public that normally I don't have here. We're on a university campus now, we're in school of medicine. I don't get a lot of access to the outside world, so to speak, unless I read those. And so, and someone said, you know, we don't need science to tell us what yoga and it's known for a long time. And I agree, but the role of science, I should be really specific that the reason for doing scientific experiments is that we, if we understand

Mechanism like really how nasal versus mouth breathing or right nostril versus left nostril breathing is impacting the brain and body Then we can create new protocols that neither scientists nor Physicians nor Yogi's nor anyone has ever thought about once you understand what the pieces are what the kind of macronutrients are Then you can start creating new protocols. And so I feel like the discussions, I feel very grateful that you've brought me on twice now, because I really feel like there are people like yourself who are offering a bridge to the real world for science to do better, not just for the real world to be like, oh, science, great, but for science to do better and provide people more of what they really need.

So- I, you know, I wanna, I definitely, I couldn't agree more and thank you. And I'll have you back again and again. You're doing great work here. No, it's great, thank you. But there, you know, a comment like that, I just makes me, I was chuckling to myself

thinking of that, because it's like, obviously they're down with yoga and some of these practices that have changed their lives. And the thought process is, we don't need you to tell us that it works because we know it fucking works. Right. I could have the same thought process around psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca, but a smarter person will understand there's an entire population of people that only like they are in the science

of religion or the religion of science. Right. And they're, they're completely tied to that and where that goes like uh even you know even the knock against some western medicine is that it takes 30 years to implement something that's that's just recently come out in science like it's just the fact that there's a slow slow change right admittedly slow so why not take a look at these things and understand it better and then say hey like turns out tryptamines don't fry your brain and they actually can help increase neuroplasticity and many other things. I think it's very cool that we're starting to see that now at different

universities and people, really smart people, some of the best people in the world are taking a look at it. I think it's going to help a lot of people. Yeah. It's it's interesting because the, the collaborate what I, you know, the collaborations that are happening between science scientists, but also science and the actual world, the real world. Because as you saw today, even with the state-of-the-art VR, the best VR that we can possibly come up with, real footage, video footage, not computer-generated images, physiological measures. We even put people, like I said before, we're recording deep in the brain. Even with that, it's not real life in the same way.

And so to get tools that are really valuable for real life, we have to pour all that at it and we need the discussion to go both ways. I was saying that my PhD advisor always said that I try and keep in mind, because I'm a human too, which is that tolerance has to go both ways, right? Scientists need to be more open to the general public and the general public needs to understand that not all physicians and scientists are really like tied in deep with the pharmaceutical industry.

And not all of the pharmaceutical industry is evil and bad. You know, at the point where something becomes really clear that it's a valuable, it's got to scale. As you know, you run a supplement company in addition to doing other things, which is you got to bottle and sell things to get them out there. Otherwise, it stays niche, it stays pocketed. So I think the more conversations, the more like, you know, skeptical conversations are good. The more like, you know, arguing is good. I'm in a field where I look 90% of the time scientists are telling other scientists they're wrong. So I got a pretty thick skin, you know, people tell

me like, you're an idiot, you don't know anything. I'm like, that's great. It just means I got to work harder and push, you know, and push back when I need to. So I think we need the conversation to go both ways. And it's super exciting. I, you know, again, like on the last podcast, I'll say, I'm not going to take any particular stance on what people should do or not do in terms of their healthcare. They, that's up to them. But I do think it's extremely exciting to see the kind of things that people are doing with diet and exercise, thinking about longevity,

thinking about mental state. I don't think it's just in the more sort of, you know, affluent or progressive areas, if you will. I think the whole world now is saying, look, you know, we need to take control of this organ in our heads. This thing that houses inside of our skulls can either make us miserable, make us feel amazing, or across the course of a day, both. We got to do something about it. Anyway, I think that there's tremendous power in supplements. As I mentioned last time, I'm a huge fan of the idea of taking for myself, again, reasonably researched and

thought out tools to augment mental state makes all the sense in the world to me. And, you know, drinking 10 cups of coffee does not make sense to me. Some of the better nootropics that are out there are really interesting and we need more controlled studies. Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't agree more. Dude, it's been so fun coming here to the lab and getting to explore some of this stuff. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you for coming out here today and taking the trouble to let us wire you in, make you the, you're definitely one of the people in this community that I was referring to that I really, you the, you're definitely one of the, the, the people in this community that I was referring to that I really, the hand that you're extending out of the community you're in to the community that I'm in, I I'm certain it's going to lead to really important places.

Thanks so much. We'll do it again. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you guys for listening to the show. Remember, all you got to do is go to the YouTube channel. If you want to see some of the wacky shit that I did with Dr. Andrew Huberman, he's phenomenal. He's at Huberman lab on Instagram. Hit us up there at Kingsbu. Go to kingsbu.com into your email. I won't bombard you with bullshit. A monthly newsletter is all you'll get from me and every supplement that I take that I find to be the most transformative there. Check those out. Thank you guys for tuning in and I look forward to hearing from you online.