Science Vs - Andrew Huberman on Supplements, the Covid Lab Leak Theory and more

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Andrew Huberman is a skate punk turned neuroscientist, and he hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the U.S.: The Huberman Lab. Today, we talk to him about his unlikely path to becoming a scientist, his fascinating research into regrowing neurons, the Covid-19 lab leak theory, and some of the criticism he's gotten for promoting certain supplements. Coronavirus: Was It Made In a Lab? https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/dvheexn  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsHuberman  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Chapter 1: Andrew Huberman: Skater Kid to Scientist (10:35) Chapter 2: Huberman's favorite study: Regrowing neurons (16:38) Chapter 3: Learning to Optimize (21:59) Chapter 4: Covid Lab Leak Theory (26:45) Chapter 5: Criticism for Promoting Certain Supplements  (35:06) Chapter 6: Huberman's favorite TV show: Love Island (jking) (36:33) Chapter 7: Life Advice This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman and Joel Werner, with help from Rose Rimler, Nick DelRose, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we have a very special episode for you. It's our interview with Professor Andrew Huberman. He's a skate punk turned neuroscientist. Andrew is a professor at Stanford who's published in the top journals on a wide range of topics from regenerating neurons to breathwork. You might know him as the host of the smash hit podcast, The Huberman Lab. In today's episode, you'll hear about his very unlikely path to becoming a fancy pants professor. I'm 19 years old. I'm getting in fights. I was so

scared of my life going nowhere. We nerd out about neurons and how cool the brain is. It never ceases to amaze me. So it's wild. It's absolutely wild. And we dive into some of the heat that he's gotten for promoting certain supplements. We postulated on the COVID lab leak theory. I think it's fair to say that this conversation went in directions that surprised both of us. I'll be very honest and say, you know, that it's not often that I have conversations like this.

My chat with Professor Andrew Huberman is coming up just after the break. What do Mattel, Banana Republic, ButcherBox, and Glossier all have in common? They power their businesses with Shopify. Shopify is the most innovative and scaled commerce platform on the planet that also happens to have the best converting checkout on the planet. And that's no industry secret. That's Shopify. Learn more at shopify.com slash enterprise. It's really not important to me to have a lot of things to show off, fancy cars, you know, a giant home. Those things are just not part of who I am, but I've been coached

and I've learned through my advisor that it's not one size fits all. Everyone has their own preferences. Everything that I do with Edward Jones is tailored to who I am. Edward Jones. We do money differently. Visit edwardjones.ca slash different. Welcome to the show, Professor Andrew Huberman. Great to be here. Do you have any nicknames, by the way? Because I've only ever heard Professor Huberman and Andrew. Because if you were in Australia, you would be Huberts, for sure. Yeah, when I was a little kid, I had the same voice I have now.

And so they called me Froggy after that kid Froggy and the little rascal. So you're like a little kid, Andrew, but like with this deep, deep voice. Yeah. So they called me that till I grew into it. And then every once in a while, someone on social media will call me Hubes. And that kind of picked up. Okay. Okay.

Don't worry. I won't call you Froggy. Although I might slip into it because it's real fun. Yeah, no worries. You know, I grew up in a big pack of kids, mostly boys. And then I was weaned in academia. So there's very little people can say to me that is going to trigger me. You develop a thick skin in those cultures. You know, you grow up how I grew up. It takes a lot. So feel free. I'm not trying to like push you on the edge, but like, it's good to know Froggy won't do that. So I do want to ask you a little bit about your childhood because you have a pretty unconventional path to academia. I think you've used the word

like wayward. You had a wayward childhood, teenagehood really, I guess. Can you tell us a little more about you as a teenager? So my dad's a scientist. My mom writes children's books. And I had a pretty conventional childhood up until about age 13. We ate dinner together as a family, went on a sabbatical overseas. And from a young age, I was interested in biology. I've always loved animals and studying animals and foraging for information. It's a big part of my youth. I've heard you tell this story where you would get all these facts in your head

and try and tell anyone about like cool marsupials. Oh, yeah. Yeah, don't get me going on marsupials. I love animals and strange animals. To us, Australian animals are strange. My Australian friends come here and they see a squirrel and they freak out. Tree squirrel.

Also, you guys have opossums, which when I saw one in New York, I thought it was a pig. Yeah. The only animals that think that opossums are attractive are other opossums. But I love and still love learning and sharing what I learn. You know, I just sort of can't help myself. So I would do a lot of that. And then when I was 13, maybe 14, pretty high conflict divorce in my family. And the time I was getting into skateboarding as my main sport, those were my main friendships.

And because of the disruption at home and the lack of any kind of oversight, I pretty much stopped going to school. What was it about school at that time that made you go, nah, I don't want to? Yeah, I think I was struggling with the disruption in my home life, to be honest. I mean, it was so dramatic. Things were really cohesive. And then there was essentially no one there. So I was pretty much left to my own devices and was going to school. I'd go there to see my friends skateboard, but I think I was probably pretty stressed. At the time, there wasn't a lot of discussion about how to navigate those kinds of stressful circumstances. So skateboarding and my friends were where I turned to, and a girlfriend at the time, and started spending time with them.

And then I started taking the bus to San Francisco, skateboarding, and hanging out at the now famous, infamous Embarcadero EMB, which was this plaza down at the end of Market Street, where this collection of kids anywhere from a couple dozen to a couple hundred kids would aggregate. And these were city kids. So I quickly learned that a lot of them weren't going to school. They were truant too. So I just started hanging out there. I would stay at people's houses. But I was learning pretty quickly how to fight. A bunch of those kids were into stealing. I wasn't really into stealing. And, you know, what eventually happened was I got yanked out of school.

I was put into youth detention for a couple months. That was a pretty awful experience on the one hand. But it was also a really good experience for me because some of the counselors in there really helped me out. And, you know, they sort out that, like, this wasn't all my fault. I mean, I believe in personal responsibility, but there was a lot going on in my world. What do you remember from that youth detention? Oh, I remember everything. I have a very good memory and always have. And I could tell you the color of the carpet. I could tell you my roommate looked like Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. I thought he was going to kill me or rape me in my sleep.

I was terrified. He turned out to be a really nice guy. So what I remember is that I didn't want to do the program. They want you to do the program. And then... What's the program? What would it involve? Oh, I mean, you know, 5 a.m. exercise. You eat when they say, you do what they say.

Right. Real like kind of military style. Well, there was also group therapy, right? I mean, there was also, you had to talk about your stuff and you had to listen and someone smarter than me clued me into, you know, if you work with the program, you stand a good chance of getting something out of it and getting out.

Otherwise you're gonna be in there a long time. And, you know, the other thing is that as a condition for being let back in high school, I had to start seeing a weekly counselor. So I started doing that, a therapist, right? And he was extremely skilled and understood. We didn't start talking about feelings right off the bat. He said, listen, you're going to have to start taking some control over your life.

And you seem like a pretty physical guy, but you keep hurting yourself. Maybe you should pick something else. So I started running. I got into weightlifting. I started doing some Thai boxing. I started feeling some control over my physicality because I kept hurting myself. And then so went back to school, but didn't really get serious about high school. I felt like it was a real struggle. It was hard. I was still grappling with a lot. My girlfriend went off to college,

and I really missed her. She was like my family. I spent pretty much all my time with her. And, you know, at some point I realized I should probably take the college entrance exam, the so-called SAT. Somehow, I don't know, divine intervention or something. I ended up getting into college, went. And after the first year, which was a disaster, barely went to class, got into a lot of fights, was getting into still a lot of mischief. And then it was July 4th, 1994. Yeah, I want to ask you a little bit about this because I heard you talk about how July 4th, 1994

was this kind of pivotal moment for you. So to kind of set the scene, I looked up the top hit songs that were playing in July 4th, 1994. It was I Swear by All For One, you know, and I swear. Don't know it. Okay. This was one of my questions. It was like, what were you listening to? Oh, that's easy.

Oh, you know what you're listening to? So what were you listening to at the time? Yeah, no, I mean, listen, from 1989 forward, it was Stiff Little Fingers, Crimson Shine, Operation Ivy. Operation Ivy is a precursor to Rancid. Yeah, right. I'm a huge Rancid fan. You know, I can tell you every lyric off every song. So let's go back to July 4th, 1994. Basically what happened is on that day, a bunch of friends were going to a barbecue. And when we were coming back to the house, it was clear that some guys were robbing us.

And basically, you know, I got into a fight with the guys that were robbing the house. You know, in the end, you know, you could say, quote unquote, I won, but I didn't win in the sense that, you know, yeah, beat those guys up. Police showed up, big melee in the street. And then basically after the fight, you know, everyone thinks you win a fight and you feel great. And I'll tell you, you don't. If you have half a cortex, you feel terrible. I never liked violence. And I ended up going back to the place where I was staying by myself.

That summer, I was delivering bagels, living with my pet ferret. The girlfriend was gone. And I just realized, I'm officially a loser, right? I'm 19 years old. I'm getting in fights. I got into college somehow, but failed the first year. I got thrown out of the dorms for fighting too.

And I basically just kind of sat there for a couple hours. Remember, no phone, no iPhone at that point, no smartphones. I just realized I was like, this is it. Like, this is it. Like, you just got to flip the switch. And so I moved home and went to community college for two quarters and completely dedicated myself to studies of psychology and biology. I felt like my memory was good. I liked biology. I liked psychology. I liked learning, took Greek mythology, took art history.

And I just became kind of a beast of learning. And basically, my goal was like when they put the grade distributions out, I don't know if they do that anymore, but they'd post them outside the classroom. I just had one commitment, which was that I was going to be the point way out on the far right compared to everybody. And I didn't care if I had to die trying. I was just going to do it.

So I would read my textbooks, underline my textbooks, memorize my textbooks. I was so scared of my life going nowhere. And I was so driven. And I loved what I was learning. So I'd probably spend anywhere from 12 to 14 hours a day studying. And then four years later, if you work hard at something, you get better at it.

I was working in a laboratory. I published a first author manuscript. I graduated with honors. I got into Princeton and Berkeley. And then fast forward to today and now you're a professor at Stanford. I done my postdoc at Stanford. I was born in Stanford Hospital. So I'll probably die at Stanford, but hopefully a long time from now. So you've done all kinds of research from using VR to simulate swimming with great white sharks,

studying the circadian rhythms of hamsters. I know you're not supposed to have a favorite child, but do you have a favorite study, one that you are really proud of or that still gets you excited today? One of my favorite papers is a paper that was published in Nature Neuroscience, which was exploring how to potentially encourage neurons

in the central nervous system to regenerate after injury. So one of the sad truths about the human nervous system is that the peripheral nervous system, which is outside the brain and spinal cord, can regenerate and does so very readily. But that the central nervous system, meaning the brain and the optic nerves that connect the eyes to the brain, don't regenerate. Spinal cord doesn't regenerate. There's a small amount of neurogenesis as adults, but when there's a loss of function through ischemic stroke, things like glaucoma, things of that sort, people go blind, they don't get their vision back. So this is one of the great puzzles of neuroscience and has been for over 100 years. And what's interesting is that other species, salamanders, lizards,

can readily regenerate their spinal cord and optic nerves. In fact, there's wonderful work done that have shown that they completely sever the optic nerve of a lizard. I know it sounds kind of brutal, but this is done in the most humane way possible. It regenerates full capacity. Wow. So we know it's biologically possible. Absolutely. It's like a clue. Absolutely. And we know that in the peripheral nervous system, if you cut a human nerve or it gets severed, that it will grow back at a rate of about a millimeter per day. In fact, so much so that your neurologist or neurosurgeon will tell you the day in which you'll get back, for instance, finger movement if you have damage to a peripheral nerve.

And that's because we know that rate of regrowth so precisely. Exactly. So we have the capacity, just like with salamanders, there's beautiful work showing that if you sever a limb, I know it sounds brutal, but there's a small population of stem cells at the site of sever that then regenerate the entire limb. Whereas if you cut off my arm as an adult, it ain't growing back. But if you did it when I was a fetus, it would. We know this based on, sadly, fetal injuries. And in very young children who get a finger, we call that digit, nerd speak of digits,

you get a pinky that's cut as, say, a one-year-old in an accident or something, or a four-month-old, there's substantial regrowth compared to what happens in adulthood. Okay. Circa 2014 or so, we started to explore why during development, when nerves are growing out, there's this very strict requirement for neural activity, electrical activity of neurons. The presence of electrical activity in the nervous system early in development is absolutely critical for the wiring of the nervous system. So what Albert Lim in my laboratory did is he took a mouse model, he severed the optic nerves of these mice. What Albert found was that electrical stimulation of the correct pattern and type and duration combined with a gene therapy could get these neurons in the eye to grow back into the brain and reconnect to their targets

enough to replace vision that had been lost, but not completely. Oh, interesting. And so tell us a little bit more about the molecular trickery that you used. It involved this molecule, right, called mTOR? Yeah. Now, mTOR is a molecule that's expressed very highly in the nervous system early in development, and then it drops off substantially. It's a molecule associated with growth of all

cells. Why? Well, think about development. Development is one of the most rapid periods of aging in your entire life. Think about a kid when they're two years old and then six years old. That kid aged a lot biologically. We don't like to think about it because they're still young, but think about the difference between a 30-year-old and a 36-year-old, very little mTOR around. They're not aging nearly as fast. Their cells are not aging as fast. Okay, so we put in mTOR, which is pro-growth, into these neurons and basically tricked them into thinking they were baby neurons again.

But we did it in an adult animal. Oh, wow. And so those neurons, I think it was the axons in the neurons, they grew. They grew. They grew back into the brain. A small subset, but grew a long distance, an unprecedented distance. No one's really seen that distance of regeneration and specificity of rewiring. The neurons remembered where to connect in the brain.

And we were able to see that they went to the correct place, which is very reassuring. Because nowadays, in part because of Albert's paper, but because of a lot of other papers that came along at the same time, now humans who get a spinal cord injury or humans who have a visual system injury, not always, but in certain clinics will get electrical stimulation. And so what we're learning, and I find it so cool,

is that you can recreate development, not fully, but to some extent. Yeah, it's really cool. The hope for the future of what this means for medicine is really cool. And then from a nerdy level, it's also just really cool that there's something in these neurons that remembers. They remember. And you just need to awaken it. I mean, it's like getting a neuron to watch Bluey or something, and then it's like, oh, I remember this. It's so wild. It's like wild. It's wild. You know, we don't want to spin off into a full discussion of brain development,

but I can tell you from working on neural wiring of the developing nervous system for many years, that most of the precise wiring of the nervous system is by virtue of signals for neurons to not grow a certain place, repellent signals. Like don't, you can't grow, you'll see an axon beautifully come up to a, like the midline of the spinal cord and then bam, make a right angle turn. And it's not because it said make a right angle turn. It's because it was not permitted to grow any further. And neuron, it's just so wild. Even after all these years, it never ceases to amaze me. So it's wild. It's absolutely wild and in the most beautiful sense of the word. Now you've, you're quite focused, or at least your online persona would suggest that you're quite focused on optimizing your life using science. When did you start thinking like, oh, I could use science

to make my personal life better? Yeah. Well, first of all, yeah, the word optimization, I totally agree with what you said. But I just want to clarify that the word optimization to a lot of people implies that there's a perfect state that one's trying to attain. It's really about trying to get the best out of each day. You're trying to optimize for the current conditions. It's not about trying to achieve some superhuman state ever. You know, I've always been interested from the time when I, you know, realize, okay, I keep injuring myself. As the kids say nowadays, kept getting broke off, you know, like what's going on here? How do I make my body stronger? How do I make my body stronger? How do I make my mind

stronger? I started meditating when I was 16 years old, morning 10 minute meditation. Keep in mind that at that time, okay, so this is early 90s. You know, there were people literally losing their jobs for suggesting that mindfulness and meditation might be a valid line of pursuit. Okay, breathwork followed many years later. It was considered really like hocus pocus, magic carpet kind of stuff. Now it's the stuff of grants and federal funding and peer-reviewed clinical trials. And psychedelics, up until about five years ago, was the stuff of losing your job. And now, I mean, we have an entire initiative at Stanford. Johns Hopkins has one too. UCSF has one too. This is a major source of philanthropy, federal funding, and clinical trials. But it became

clear to me pretty quickly when I was younger that most people that were talking about health didn't look that healthy. Your options when you were that young was your football coach, who for me, they looked really big. I was a tall, skinny kid. Or we're like the aerobics class people that look like they had the strength of Woody Allen and the neuroticism to go with it. So it's sort of like these extremes, right? Yeah. And back then, now keep in mind that in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, this was also, you know, everything was like a John Hughes film, like The Breakfast Club. I was just going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. These stereotypes. I hated that. I hated that. Yeah.

Yeah. I always had a lot of different kinds of friends, even though in those years that were pretty wayward, I was friends with skateboarders, punk rockers, jocks, nerds. I always had a lot of different kinds of friends. And what I started to realize as the years went on was that, you know, hey, like some of my favorite musicians who are really good musicians, they're sober. You know, like people would assume they did drugs and drank, but they're sober for whatever reason. They lift weights. They're strong. They're strong minds. They meditate. I heard an interview with Iggy Pop. He's into Qigong. Okay. So he's breathing. Why? Well, because it keeps his diaphragm strong. Yeah. And he's been sober for a long time. So

what I started to realize pretty young was that if you start thinking that doing this X behavior defines you as a person, you're hosed. So I've never really paid attention to what the masses have done. I don't really care. I knew from go when I first saw skateboarding, that's a cool culture. They dress the way they want to dress, they act the way they want to dress, and they go where they want to go. I felt that way about punk rock music. I felt that way about science. My scientific mentors have all been iconoclasts within science and all of them did phenomenally well. You know, my postdoc advisor, Ben Barris, was the first transgender member of the National

Academy of Sciences. Total misfit. He was one of my closest friends. He was different. He knew he was different, but the way he was different is so cool. Ben realized that most people in science, he used to say 98% of people in science work on 1% of the problems. He said, you need to work on something different. So what I started realizing was if I could understand

physiology, if I could understand how the human body works, if I could understand a little bit about how the brain works, well, then I could look at a practice like meditation and realize, you know, meditation is just a perceptual exercise. You're closing your eyes, you're shutting down the major source of sensory input, which then opens up the opportunity for unique patterns of cognition, right? That's just nerd speak for meditation, but mindfulness implies something mystical about it. Consciousness implies something mystical about it. There's nothing mystical about it. Likewise, as I started getting into understanding muscle physiology and nerve to muscle communication, I started reading about, well, how does a muscle

get stronger? How does a limb get more range of motion? What's that really about? Keep in mind, neuroscience was divorced from psychology and immunology when I started. The great Carla Schatz, who coined the phrase fire together, wire together, a colleague and friend of mine, she was one of the first people to start working on immune molecules in the brain. But prior, get this, prior to the early 2000s, the brain was considered an immune privileged organ. That's right. That we thought, but yes, for those who don't know, that we thought the brain barrier was so, it was like a brick wall that, you know, nothing could get into it.

And so. Yeah. Nowadays, things are finally starting to flow together. There's a confluence of interests, immune system and gut microbiome. I mean, 15 years ago, if you said that you could do a fecal transplant to get a change in the brain,

people would laugh you out of the room and they certainly wouldn't fund your work. After the break, Andrew and I dig into the COVID lab leak theory and things get a little heated when I talk to him about some of the flack that he's gotten for promoting supplements. Coming up. What do Mattel, Banana Republic, ButcherBox, and Glossier all have in common? They power their businesses with Shopify.

Shopify is the most innovative and scaled commerce platform on the planet that also happens to have the best converting checkout on the planet. And that's no industry secret. That's Shopify. Learn more at shopify.com slash enterprise. Welcome back. Today on the show, we're talking to Professor Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist at the Stanford School of Medicine.

And so in 2021, Andrew entered the wild world of podcasting, creating his own show, The Huberman Lab, which has been an absolute smash hit, one of the top podcasts in the United States. And it dives into the science on lots of topics, particularly around our health and the human body. But Andrew tries to avoid talking about COVID and the vaccines. And this is partly because he says he's not an expert in that. Still though, Andrew and I did get to talking about how the pandemic has changed how some people feel about science.

So let's jump back in. Here's Andrew. I'm actually really of the mind now, you can tell me if you agree or disagree, that we have now created, because of the pro-vaccine discourse and the anti-vaccine discourse, I think the gulf has gotten much wider. You now have people that think that

it's like one or the other for every disease, right? It got even worse. Gain of function, right? This thing, gain of function research. Every lab does gain of function research. It does genetics, you know? It's like, I was like, oh no, like there goes another phrase. Like my lab does, I've done gain of functions

when you add a gene, right? Loss of function. I know, I know. Can I just give some background knowledge just to the people in the audience who may not be deep in this world. So gain of function has now become this kind of red flag for this idea that the COVID virus was cooked up in a lab because scientists like you, Andrew, do these gain of function

experiments, which is where researchers can tweak the genetics of a virus so that you can get it to do something new. Yeah, so there are three, we'll set this in context, because there are three ideas around the origins of the coronavirus, the recent one, right? One is that, these are people's ideas, I want to cite, this is not me saying this. One is that it came from the animal market in Wuhan, a pangolin variant, it was zoonoonotic meant it could infect humans. So that's

one theory. The other theory is that a lab designed it. Yes, we did a whole episode on this idea of it getting cooked up in a lab, which I think there is very little evidence for. Right. I agree with you. The third possibility, I think, now appears to be at least a possibility, which is that it perhaps escaped the laboratory inadvertently, but there was no intended design of this coronavirus. Look, my laboratory has worked with rabies virus, adenoviruses, among others. Careful technique means pipetting, sterilizing, bleaching, keeping things careful, but human error is human error. And all it takes is, you know, one set of pipette stuff, discarded virus going in. It doesn't sink all the way into the bleach. Then someone throws it away.

Evening night staff puts it in a biohazard bag, throws it away. That person's on the phone. I'm not blaming anybody. I think there's a high probability it's human error. Where I stand on this issue, because it's funny, since we published that episode, which was really mainly about the evidence of like, when you look, when you zoom in on the DNA, what do you see? Do you see fingerprints of humans being like, beep, beep, beep, we put it together. And we were like, we don't see that. I doubt, I doubt someone was designing a super nasty. I mean, you'd make something different. It doesn't make any sense. Like, but like, you want to make something more dangerous. You'd make it like a smallpox. You want to like, it just doesn't matter anyway. But listen, there was also people, there were also people saying that 5g was amplifying the,

the, the virus or something. It was, it was like crazy. There was like craziness, right? But I will say, I don't think we'll ever know whether it came straight from an animal, a non-human animal to a human versus it came, it was animal then studied in the lab, and then got out. I mean, the reason at the time we thought that was unlikely was because this lab hadn't published any papers on the COVID virus. And as you know, you find a new virus, that's really cool. You want to publish papers on it. And they hadn't published any papers. So what might have happened is they just discovered

it. They were about to publish papers on it. And then one of them gets sick, a human error, and it gets out. And then they're like, let's like delete all the stuff that we have on it. But I don't know, like, that seems kind of unlikely to me. But the truth is, like, I don't think we'll ever know, right? I don't think we're gonna know. I mean, I think that it means that we have to just be so much smarter in the future, so much better organized around how to communicate countrywide or, God forbid, worldwide health crises, right? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So I did want to ask you about something that you've gotten a little bit of heat for, which is your take on supplements. You want to know which ones to take? I can send

you. That was a very good joke, Andrew. I don't recommend starting with supplements. I recommend behaviors first, always. But you have been criticized for overselling the research on supplements. And I guess like just as an example is let's talk about this sleep cocktail that you recommend. So it has magnesium threonate, apigenin, and theanine. And you have said that it's, quote, based on really good, solid peer-reviewed science and that there seems to be some sort of synergistic effect. But as far as we could tell, there have actually been no clinical trials testing this cocktail in people. And so I wanted to ask you, how can you be so confident that this

sleep cocktail works if it's never been tested in people? Yeah. The good data, the solid data that I'm referring to, right, is a combination of a couple of things. Certainly, let's take MAG3 and 8. There was an R because they're still published. One was retracted, but it was related to Alzheimer's. But there are some good data on MAG3 and 8 in terms of its mechanisms, how it would potentially, I'll be very careful with my language here, how it would potentially lower anxiety, maybe even serve as a cognitive booster. So those preclinical data. Preclinical, like in rodents, in mice.

Preclinical, typically rodents, rats. Yeah. Preclinical means in animal models. Plus the human studies that have looked at magnesium deficiency, right? In terms of mood, things like insomnia or including insomnia, depression, anxiety. But then what I'm doing is I'm looking at the aggregate of preclinical data, so animal models. And I can point you to, there's a study in particular that shows that roughly a 15% to 20% reduction in sleep latency. So time to fall

asleep is decreased with Mag3. And that's the major effect that I'm kind of hanging my hat on and saying, hey, there are good data there. However, that very same study concludes the final line of the abstract, in fact, says we need more randomized controlled trials on this before we can conclude its total effects on sleep. And by the way, the margins of safety on magnesium 3 and 8, they're not infinite, but they're quite big. It's very hard to harm or kill yourself on mag-3 unless you have a pre-existing magnesium issue. And I should mention just apigenin and theanine. The reason I said synergy between these three is that indeed, there isn't a clinical trial that it says these are synergistic when taken together.

But the synergy arrives, so it's a logical argument based on the fact that apigenin and theanine operate through very different mechanisms than the mag3 mechanism. Right, yeah. So what I do is I offer a mechanistic explanation for things and then essentially set out a buffet that people can decide based on their thresholds for action or inaction, whether or not they want to take supplement A or B or not take supplement A or B. Do you think it's funny? I guess maybe our threshold on our show is maybe a little, it's definitely different to yours because I don't think there's no way if there wasn't

some kind of clinical trial in people that we would say there's really good solid peer-reviewed science on something. Yeah. And that's the good news about podcasts. People can choose which podcast they want to listen to. Touché. Touché. Yeah. No, no. No, no. It's not a dig. I mean, I think ultimately people can decide. Listen, people have the option to listen to me, listen to you, listen to all of us, not listen to any of us. I mean, I don't think there's the idea that... I mean, it's not a public health mandate, right? We put out the information in the best form that we can so that people can make the choice they want. People have different thresholds for what they consider willing to try, right?

For some people, that's 20 years of randomized controlled trials. For some people, it's a mouse study. For some people, it's the guy at the gym or the gal at the gym told me it works. And for other people, it's just tell me what you do, right? So when we present evidence of or suggestions of things that possibly could work for people, it's based on, you know, it could be based on any number of different combinations of those, right? And when you start getting into the realm of supplements, there's a much bigger problem, actually, than the one that you highlight, which is that you would be hard-pressed to find good,

randomized, controlled trials about pretty much any supplement. Most of the data for most supplements, whether or not it's ashwagandha, MAG3 and 8, they are mostly relying on preclinical data, so animal models, and then large sums of sort of what I call anecdata people, right? And then occasionally there are human studies. You know, when I make a recommendation that people might want to try something, it's not go do this or buy this. It's really centered around whether or not there's, as we say, a center of mass of data pointing in the direction that this mechanistically makes sense. You look at the human clinical data, it's minimal, but the anecdotal data, very strong. Now, could it be placebo? I suppose it could, right? Yeah. I think we're just so clear on our

show when, because we talk about, we don't just crap on everything. Because as you know, there's a flaw to every single study. You have to look at the body of research. You have to have some hope when you look at studies and science. But I think, as you know, there's just so many animal studies that have ended up in the dust. And so that when we then check it out in humans, it doesn't turn out. We're just really cautious on the show when, if there's just like a study that's been done on a petri dish or on a rodent study,

we're really careful to be like, it's just a rodent. It's just a mouse. If this pans out in humans, then maybe this is what it means. And then we kind of leave it there. And I think perhaps you're, you're in just a slightly, you're in a different place where you're like, this is the mechanism. I think, you know, I've been around the game of science long enough to know that we can only talk about what we know now. There's this backdrop to our conversation, which is fun. And frankly, it's more important than MAG3 and 8, this bigger theme of like, who can we trust? So I think it's sort of like,

I think you've got your people out there and I don't think it's just biohackers and athletes. And I think the world has changed. And I think the pandemic had a big effect on this. Personal responsibility in health is clearly becoming a real thing. I think that now because of YouTube, because of podcasts like yours and like mine

and others, people are saying, wait, who do I trust? Am I all about pharma? Am I all about supplements? Am I going to go back to ancestral living? Right? Okay. That's my stance. It's like the longevity field and what I call the skin, hair, and nails field. Those fields are wildly aggressive in terms of their leaps from the literature to practical things. I'm not going to try and make myself look better by making others look bad. But like, I look at that field

and I look at what we're talking about, the supplementation for sleep. And I was like, hey now, like, you know, like you can come at me all you want. Like I'll respond as best I can. But like, are we ignoring the 900-pound gorilla in the room? There was a group called the Heaven's Gate Cult that castrated themselves in an effort to live longer. Why? Because sex hormones, testosterone, and estrogen cause puberty. What is puberty?

Puberty is very rapid aging. It's other things too. So crazy, right? This was based on- It always makes me wonder, you're going to live longer and what are you going to do? Exactly. You're not going to have any fun. Exactly. You're going to castrate yourself. You're going to sing forever. You're going to have

a beautiful singing voice forever. So my... Not me. I'll never have a good singing voice. Yeah. And I know, if the risk is low, if these supplements are safe to take...

As far as we know, yeah. Then it changes the game. It does change the game of how comfortable... of how much we need to be sure of benefit. Right. One of the reasons my podcast is so long that I always joke, if nothing else, my podcast will cure insomnia because the episodes are so long. Okay. So, Froggy, our last question. Our absolute last question. Real quick one. As we've talked about, you're all about optimization, but in interviews,

I have heard that you have some vices, like you eat croissants, just like the rest of us. Not often, but yeah, but I like them. They're delicious. Are you ever like, f*** this,

I'm just going to watch 10 hours of Love Island? No. No, I value my, I don't get a dopamine or like, or sedative rush, if there is such a thing as a sedative rush, a sedative effect from that stuff. I mean, look, one of the things that I benefited from greatly growing up was I had too many

people close to me dead early, all three of my scientific advisors, right? Suicide, cancer, cancer. I've seen a third of my friends dead or in jail. I've seen a lot of misfortune and or in jail. I've seen a lot of misfortune and a lot of wonderful things in my life. And I'm just not going to waste my time watching something like that. But I do watch Chimp Empire.

I mean, I have a personal life that fortunately for me is a very rich and wonderful personal life. So I spend time with people and animals and that's very important to me. So I do things other than science, but ice cream, pizza, croissants, all have their place, you know? But 10 hours of Love Island is too much Love Island.

I don't even know what Love Island is, but it sounds horrible. Like the truth is I've actually, I've never watched it. I looked up the stupidest name for a show that I could possibly find. And that was it. Thank you so much, Andrew.

Sure. I really, I really Thank you so much, Andrew. Sure. I really appreciate all your time. So thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. I think people are smart. I adhere to Max Delbruck's statement, you know, assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence.

I love this line. I love this line. Yeah, people figure it out and people will discern as to whether or not, you know, they are making best choices for themselves or not. I really believe that. I think the human animal is a lot smarter than we give it credit for.

And then in the end, it's just like high school, right? That's one of Ben Barris' things. Ben Barris said before he died, I said, any advice, any additional advice? And he said two things. He said, don't let the flame go out. The world tries to blow out your flame. Don't let it blow out your flame. Push back. He was a fighter. And then the other one was, he said, you know, you have to be true to yourself. You just have to be who you are. And then people will, will decide for themselves if they, if they like it or not. You know, but he said, it's just like high school and you just

have to put the blinders on and go skateboarding and study. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. That was my interview with Professor Andrew Huberman. If you want to see some clips of Andrew and I chatting, head to my TikTok. It's at Wendy Zuckerman or our Instagram, which is science underscore VS. If you want to know more about the science of whether the COVID virus was cooked up in a lab or not, I kind of did a bit of a spoiler alert, but the science itself is fascinating.

Go check out our episode, Coronavirus, Was It Made in a Lab? We won a fancy prize for it. We're going to put a link to it in the show notes. And while you're in the show notes, you'll also see the credits of everyone who helped make this episode. Next week, we are tackling UFOs. There's been some big new developments. Does the science hold up?

I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.