The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Keys to Healthy Living — with Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford University, and host of The Huberman Lab Podcast, joins Scott to discuss the most important things we need to know about our physiological health. We also learn about testosterone replacement therapy. Follow Dr. Huberman, @hubermanlab.  Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 313. 313 is the area code covering detroit michigan in 1913 the first drive of gas station opened and the u.s post office began parcel post deliveries true story i like to be supportive of the post office and i'm constantly paying male escorts that's good go, go! I just slip in a pivot yesterday, and it was still August. And I'm like, what's the point of Scott Free August if you have Scott? It's kind of the key to a luxury brand, which I am not, but it's scarcity. And also the key to living past whatever I'm going to live past today is taking a lot of vacation. Let's bring this to me.

Let's bring this to me. I have basically from the age of 27 to 47 pretty much didn't do anything but work. Cost me my hair, cost me my marriage, and it was worth it. It was worth it. Okay, anyways, still on holiday, so in place of our regular scheduled program, we have a real treat for you. One of the top podcasters in the world, and sort of talk about having a moment. Here with us today in the podcast studio is Andrew Huberman. We discuss with Andrew common misconceptions surrounding health, nutrition, and exercise, and also ask a lot of questions about testosterone replacement therapy, asking for a friend. So with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with the founder and host of the Huberman Lab,

Andrew Huberman. Professor Huberman, where does this podcast find you? I am currently in Los Angeles. Where are you? I'm in London, but I was telling the team here, I was asked if there was anyone in the world I wanted to have on this podcast, who would it be? And of course, I said Barack Obama, but you were number two.

We've been trying to figure this out for six months, so we really are excited to have you here. Let's bust right into it. We'd love it if you could start us off with two or three insights regarding sort of slang conventional thinking about our physiological health. What are some things that we think we know that we don't about our health, our nutrition, exercise? Go wherever you want. Sure. Well, the first one I think will be surprising only to some, but I think nonetheless is really important to start off with, which is that there is so much evidence, both real world experience as well as now just fantastic science to support the fact that sleep is the foundation of our mental health and physical health. And of course,

by extension, performance in any endeavor, right? Academic, cognitive, musical, mathematical, sports, et cetera. Why do I say this? Well, let's just take the mental health piece. There's a beautiful study published not long ago looking at over 80,000 subjects where they essentially looked at these people's relationship to light during the daytime, exposure to sunlight, exposure to artificial light, as well as exposure to light at night, something that we know disrupts things like melatonin production, melatonin being important for making us sleepy, and a bunch of other things too. And essentially what they found was that there are two separable components to light, our sleep patterns and our mental health. And the basic takeaway is the following. People who strive to get ample amounts of light, especially sunlight in their eyes early in the day, as well as people who just have bright lights on and get outside for a walk every once in a while, look outside a window, step onto a balcony during the day, have far

superior mental health than people that don't. In addition, people that suffer from, and they looked at a huge number of different mental health conditions, depression, anxiety, PTSD, manic bipolar disorder, those people experience diminished symptoms of all those conditions. Okay, so that itself is very important. And it's also important to point out that screen light rarely is bright enough. And indoor lights rarely are bright enough. If you're lucky enough to work in an environment with a lot of big windows, floor to ceiling windows, and get a few walks during the day, you're doing great. But most people are in relatively dark environments during the day as it relates to this mental health thing. The second thing that's really important

is that darkness at night is a separable but also important component. And I don't think this gets as much attention and that it really deserves attention. For instance, in this study, they showed that people that get nighttime light exposure suffer far worse symptoms of all mental health conditions than people that don't. And this is separate and different

from daytime light exposure. This is what's important to understand. In addition, people that really strive to darken their nighttime environment, dim the lights towards sleep, keep the sleep environment dark, enjoy many, many physical and mental health benefits. In fact, there was a study published in the Pursuings of the National Academy of Sciences not long ago that showed that even a fairly low intensity light in the room as one sleeps with eyes closed, presumably, unless they have an eye mask on,

will disrupt morning glucose levels. It's a dramatic effect. And so what is this telling us? Does this mean we have to be in pitch black at night and we have to be in bright, you know, sunlight all day long? No. What this means is that we should all strive to get some sunlight in our eyes early in the day to brighten our work environment, maybe include if you suffer from, you know, kind of lack of energy or diminished mood, whatever time of year, not just in Scandinavia in the depths of winter, but, you know, maybe invest a small amount of money.

And by the way, I don't have any relationship to these companies. You know, a small amount of money into a 10,000 lux LED. You know, these run, you know, $100 or less. You can even use a ring light that's designed for selfies. You know, these run, you know, a hundred dollars or less. You can even use a ring light that's designed for selfies. You know, you're getting more photons, more light energy. We know that this improves mental health and physical health focus and energy in dramatic ways, sunlight being the best. And if people are concerned about excessive sunlight because of sunburn, we can just quickly say that when the sun is low in the sky, low solar

angle sunlight, as it's called, the UV index is very low. So getting outside and getting some sunlight in your eyes early in the day is a absolutely important thing to do for our mental health and physical health. And then at night, making some attempt to dim the lights. If you have to be on a screen, dim the screen. There are other things one could do, but dimming the lights and trying to make that sleep environment dark, the most inexpensive way to do that is with a comfortable eye mask or something of that sort. You know, this seems like simple things, but what we're really talking about here is a primordial mechanism that is in all of us, whereby photons, light energy, arriving at the eye and then passing through the lens of the eye to

the retina, which is essentially a piece of your brain, believe it or not. You have two pieces of brain lining the back of your eyes like pie crust, activates a specialized set of neurons, they're called intrinsically photosensitive melanopsin ganglion cells, but the name doesn't matter. And then they transmit an electrical signal to an area of your brain that sits right above the roof of your mouth called the suprachiasmatic nucleus that sets in motion an enormous number of things within your brain and body. The release of certain hormones, the release of certain neurotransmitters, things like dopamine, serotonin, certain peptides, that essentially if you do that in the early part of the day and a few times throughout the day,

that light exposure, you're going to be more awake, feel better physically and mentally throughout the day, and you will have an easier time falling asleep at night. Now, the tricky thing is that light exposure in the evening and at night, it doesn't take very much in order to disrupt, for instance, your melatonin activity. There's a wonderful laboratory at Harvard Medical School, Charles Eisler's lab, that has shown that even 12 seconds of very bright light in the middle of the night will quash your melatonin levels. Now, if that happens every once in a while, no big deal. But if you're somebody who is in a bright light environment at 10 p.m. and having trouble staying asleep, you know, you go to sleep at midnight, 1230, and then you are waking up at three in the morning,

chances are your evening and nighttime light exposure has something to do with that. There could be other things too, right? Too much caffeine late in the day, et cetera. And this is a big part of what I believe is related to the, you know, the mental health crisis that we're seeing, not just in young people, but in adults as well, where people are waking up in the middle of the night, they're looking at their phone, you know, then in the morning, they're not feeling rested. Then they're, you know, overindulging in caffeine. And by the way, I love caffeine. I'm a heavy user of caffeine.

I'll admit that. Overindulging in caffeine, but they're staying indoors and putting on sunglasses, driving to work. They're in an environment that's well lit enough for them to carry out their duties, but they're never getting this strong circadian signal. And we know that basically every mental health condition is made worse by this type of behavior. And that every mental health condition that we're aware of is made better through these simple zero-cost adjustments to our interactions with light. So, Andrew, now do exercise, and then I'm going to ask you to do the same thing for nutrition. So, with respect to exercise, it's very clear.

Moving our body, okay, exercise is essential for immediate and long-term health. And I don't have to list off the reasons. Cardiovascular health, which of course relates to brain health. As a neuroscientist, people ask me, what's the best thing I can do for my brain, keep my memory, et cetera, as I age and be healthier mentally. And it's simple, get great sleep every night. And then I explain one of the ways to do that. And if you don't get great sleep for a night, have some things in place that we can talk about to adjust for that. So sleep is the foundation of that. But then it's exercise. We need to move. What does the literature tell us? The literature tells us that we should all

walk a lot. Why? Well, walking is, if you're doing it briskly, is that kind of zone two cardio that we hear a lot about these days. That's great for everything from metabolic health, so managing blood glucose, insulin, and mitochondrial health, et cetera, et cetera. But we can break things down into a simple formula that I've been fortunate enough to followed for the last 30 plus years. I got into this when I was about 16, 48 now. And it's the following. If you do three sessions of cardiovascular exercise per week, in any format, I would say that you can do without injuring yourself. So for me, I like to run. But actually if I cycle, I end up with some back stuff. And so I run, I like to run or swim.

It's a little hard to get access to a pool sometimes. So I mainly run. If you do three sessions per week, one longer session, you know, say 45 to 60 minutes, long, slow distance, kind of just, you know, just barely able to have a conversation, maybe a little bit faster. One session that's a little bit quicker, maybe 30 minutes where you're pushing a bit harder, you know, where it's hard to hold a conversation, but you're not sprinting all out. And then one session that is very brief, maybe just 10, 15 minutes where, you know, you do some sort of sprinting, not all out, but you know, 10, 15, maybe 20 seconds, then rest 30 seconds to a minute and then repeat anywhere from five to eight times.

We know that if you do that, you're hitting a number of important metrics for health. First of all, you're creating that kind of base of aerobic activity. You know, this is not going to prepare you to be a marathoner, of course, but you're getting that zone two-ish cardio that's good for so many things. The faster clip exercise, which is slightly anaerobic, but still mostly aerobic, where you get your heart rate up, that's going to do a number of different things in terms of your conditioning and your ability to tolerate these kind of more stressful cardiovascular sessions, not just in these sessions, but in life. And I'll talk about that. And then the shorter

bout of exercise one day per week is essentially giving you access to your VO2 max, right? It's improving your VO2 max, which is your ability to bring more oxygen into your system overall for any number of reasons, this is great. Okay, let's just translate why all that is great. Well, first of all, life involves sometimes taking a long walk, hopefully with loved ones or a hike, or you maybe carry a kid or a backpack or a picnic basket some distance. It sometimes involves sprinting for the flight that's going to take off. It sometimes involves doing some,

you know, hard work in the yard or moving stuff or, you know, helping people with suitcases or helping a friend move. These transfer to real life conditions. And I think the best exercise regimen has this translation into real world activities. Now it's also vital, and we know this for men and for women, that we do some sort of resistance training. That resistance training can be done probably two or three days per week and can be very effective, done as whole body workouts, keeping three sets per major muscle group, three sets for quadriceps, three sets for hamstrings, three sets for biceps, triceps, back, chest, shoulders, three times per week, maybe two times per week if somebody doesn't have more time than that. Totaling a session of about an hour. Or you

could split things up, which is I've opted to do one day a week. I, you know, train my legs because that's very important. These are large muscle groups to keep strength in the legs. One day a week, I train the torso, you know, some pushing and some pulling, you know, some dips. One could do push-ups. This is also important that resistance training doesn't necessarily mean going to a gym. You could have stuff at home or you could just use body weight can be very effective if you're doing it correctly. And then one day a week, you know, your sort of biceps, triceps, calves, maybe some additional abdominal work. Some people like me are big fans of training the neck just for stability and postural purposes. It's not about having a big neck. In fact, you know, I don't think I have a particularly big neck

relative to my head size. You know, it's just, it's about posture, which is so important, especially nowadays with all the texting. Three days per week takes about an hour per session. Of course, there are, and most people focus on the aesthetic consequences of this, right? Because training with resistance is one of these rare instances in life where you actually get a window into what the results will look like. People, I should just say, people who are concerned about

getting too big, keep this in mind. You will never get any bigger than you appear at any moment in the gym from a workout. But resistance training is peculiar in the sense that, you know, like if you do a set of curls, the biceps get bigger, but that's transient, but you're getting a visual window and a, you know, a sensory window into what it's going to look and feel like if you do a set of curls, the biceps get bigger, but that's transient, but you're getting a visual window and a, and a, you know, a sensory window into what it's going to look and feel like. Should you give it proper rest and nutrition to recover? That said, I should caution. I think that the male audience mainly oftentimes will get very excited about getting stronger and will throw their bodies out of proportion and will also make themselves subject to injury. This is the guy with the big upper body, no legs, or who is always complaining

because they insist on squatting heavy every time or benching heavy or whatever. But the point here is that resistance training is not just about aesthetic changes. It's about keeping your muscle healthy as an organ, which is vital for longevity. It's about the nerve-to-muscle communication remaining healthy, which is vital to brain health.

In fact, many of the tests for things like Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia involve looking, for instance, at changes in distal muscle size. So atrophy of the calves as people age is associated with age-related cognitive decline. Now, these things are correlated, not causal, but we know that people that resistance train in a way that includes the distal portions of the limbs, so that the calves, the legs, et cetera, and not just doing some, you know, pressing while seated, you know, kind of simple stuff, but more elaborate compound exercises, being able to jump down off a block, even if it's a small block, maintain cognitive function far further into life than people who don't. And that has to do with the fact that, you know, nerve transmission from what we call the upper motor neurons, the neurons in the brain that control the lower motor neurons and the spinal cord that control the muscles, that whole pathway is vital for essentially,

you know, brain to body communication. And there's feedback in a way that, you know, it's not going to reverse Alzheimer's, but it can certainly adjust the slope of age-related cognitive decline, which everyone experiences, you know experiences in the correct direction, the direction you want. So there's that reason. The other reason is when you have muscle and you're exercising your muscles, even if you don't have a lot of muscle, you are improving your metabolic health. You can eat more comfortably and know that especially protein foods are going to be metabolized and not converted into body fat stores. You're staving off different kinds of insulin resistance. So what we're basically talking about is three days a week of cardiovascular training. It might sound like a lot, but it's one one-hour session, a 30-minute session,

and a 15-minute session. And then we're talking about two or three hours per week of resistance training. And that might sound like a lot, but it goes by pretty quickly. And there are a lot of different routines for this out there. You don need to purchase one actually at our podcast website we put a foundational um fitness program that's zero cost to access you don't even need to sign up if you want to sign up for a newsletter you can but you just go to humanlab.com go to newsletter um and just see the foundational fitness protocol sets and wraps alternatives for different exercise choice it is very important And this is among the more important points about exercise that I don't hear often enough. One of the best ways to get and stay in excellent shape is to make sure that you do not get injured. And this is super important. It means ease into all

of this slowly over the course of a month or two, if you're not trained up. Pick exercises, both for cardiovascular training and for physical training that you can do consistently without hurting yourself. And ways that people get hurt, and I hear this over and over again, is a friend invites you to try a workout. And even if you're not a competitive person, someone says, hey, let's go try this thing. And you take a class, taking a new class. There's always this new class, new workout, or a friend invited me to do something. And then you hear about it. My back thing is out or my shoulder. You can really throw off your entire health program with a nagging injury. So avoid those injuries as much as possible. And this is true for the young folks

and the older folks. You really, really want to guard your physical health. Unless you're a competitive athlete, your goal is to train five to six times per week and get a full day of rest once per week your whole life. I hate to say it. You can take a week off every once in a while. Usually for me, that's if I get cold or a flu or travel or something, or you're not sleeping well because of life stress, but not getting hurt is so key. So pick exercises that allow you to train hard enough and not get hurt. And then the last point about this is I think about 85 to 90% of workouts should be at about 85 to 90% of what you could do. So for instance, not every set to failure, not every run needs to end with a sprint. If that sprint is something in you and you want to do it,

don't go all out. And then I would say the remaining workouts could be at a slightly higher intensity, but don't worry about keeping some gas in the tank. Also for people that aren't athletes, keep in mind, if you do a hard resistance training workout in the morning, you'll have more energy, but in the afternoon, you'll tend to be tired. And that has to do with oxygen uptake. You can kind of divert it away from the brain. So there's exercise, I think, in a nutshell. Nutrition? Yeah. So this is a fun one because never in any scientific or health community have I seen more fighting about anything. It's almost amusing how much fighting occurs around this.

And I think at the same time, there's a key principle that emerges from all of it that everyone seems to agree on, which is that it is going to be best to get the majority, meaning 75 to 100 if you're really strict, but 75% or more of your food intake from non-processed or minimally processed foods. Now, is it the case that processed foods are terrible? Well, they can be, but the reason getting the majority of one's food intake from non-processed or minimally processed foods, so this would be if it's in your nutrition plan, things like meat, fish, eggs, chicken, fruits, vegetables, rice, oatmeal, pastas, things like that, is that it sets you up to eat foods that have macronutrients, of course, protein, fat, and carbohydrates,

but also micronutrients that you need and that generally tend to be pretty filling compared to more processed versions of those things, packaged version. Now, does that mean that rice, because it comes in a package, is a processed food? Well, sort of. That's how you say minimally. But when you produce a sort of single-ingredient of course you can put other things in it, right? Butter, olive oil, nuts in low quantity seem to be healthy for us. Nuts and seeds in low quantity, they're very calorie dense. And then of course, it's up to you or all of us to decide, do you want to be a vegan, a vegetarian, an omnivore, which I happen to be, or there are these carnivore folks. So you could be in any one of those categories. And the first thing I said would still be true.

The other thing that we know is immensely important is to support the gut microbiome because it has relationship to brain health, immune system health, cognitive function. And of course we have microbiomes in our nose, in our urethra, on our eyes, but the gut microbiome is so vital. And the best way to support the gut microbiome is to consume one to four servings of low sugar fermented food per day. These exist in all cultures. So things like kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, Greek yogurt, again, low sugar versions of these, low sugar kombucha, you know, it is not necessary to take pill form probiotics. It's not, if you're doing this. It's also important to get enough prebiotic and probiotic fiber, which you'll

get if you're consuming fruits and vegetables. And we all know dark leafy vegetables, fruit with colorations of berries, although berries can be kind of expensive, but if you can afford them, some berries, you know, oranges, you know, the kind of rainbow of fruits. Those also include, of course, fiber. And of course, we know that excess sugar isn't good. Now, people who really understand nutrition will say, well, it's calories in, calories out. It's the laws of thermodynamics. So yes, you can lose weight on a hamburger and milkshake diet if it's less calories than you burn each day. But you're going to lack micronutrients. You're not going to get enough fiber. Your gut microbiome will suffer. And so by eating mostly

whole foods and minimally processed foods and thinking a bit about the gut microbiome with respect to fiber, prebiotic and probiotic fiber, so fruits and vegetables, as well as ingesting some low sugar fermented food each day, you're going to feel significantly better. Your weight management, if that's your thing, is going to be far easier. There's also something that is starting to emerge in the literature, and Kevin Hall at NIH is doing work in this area, but people in this general space are starting to talk about, which is when you eat foods close to their whole or minimally processed state, the brain can make the correlation. It's a subconscious correlation between kind of food taste, volume,

macronutrient content. So like if you eat, for instance, a steak or let's say an orange, in either case, you're tasting that. There are also amino acids from the steak going to your gut. Your gut is actually signaling your brain unconsciously about how much more to eat and signal satiety centers. And there's this whole learning. It's a system, a neural system and a hormonal system that's very prone to learning so that you start to associate your appetite with how much you need to eat in order to get the proper amount of amino acids, which is largely why we eat. I'm going to talk about this, the amino acid foraging idea, plus essential fatty acids. And we tend to get better at not overeating for what we need, right? We tend to get enough of what we need, but not

eat too much. Now, when you eat foods in combination, like a sandwich, that's not a bad thing. I love a really good sandwich, but it's harder to ascertain what you're getting from each component. And people often will overeat foods in combination. So it doesn't mean you have to eat every ingredient separately, but there's a lot of learning that takes place when one moves more towards whole foods or minimally processed foods. And this is, I believe, and this is just a hypothesis. This is one of the reasons why when people go on an elimination diet, like they decide to just eat meat or become vegan and really focus on healthy fruits and vegetables, that they feel so much better and often lose a lot of weight.

They must still be obeying the calories in and calories out laws of thermodynamics in order to lose weight, burning more than they consume, that is. But there's a learning there at the level of the brain and the body of, oh, when I eat this, it's very satisfying, feels nutritious. When we're eating highly processed foods, there's a tendency to bring, and we know this by beautiful paper published a few years ago, people tend to over-consume food. They don't register their satiety as well. So this would be like macaroni and cheese and muffins and things like that. Things that could survive on the shelf a very long time,

even in their final ready to eat form. And when people eat those foods, I don't think it's just a disruption of sort of metabolic health, which we know occurs over time, but also a disruption of the brain toto-body communication around what we need, what's satisfying, and what's enough. So this business of how the brain and body learn to associate experience with nutrition, with what's healthy for us and what's unhealthy for us, is both cognitive and conscious, as well as unconscious. And it relates to the fact that we are largely amino acid foraging and fatty acid foraging. It is true there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate, but most people, including myself, enjoy carbohydrates, and they do provide fuel for certain forms of exercise.

And in my experience, I can think better when I have eaten some carbohydrates, at least in the previous few days. We'll be right back. So I'm trying. I'm 59. I look at my health holistically. Good on sleep. Okay on nutrition. What kills me is travel and alcohol.

And I want to break this down. I'm trying to reduce. I just drink a shit ton of alcohol. I believe what Winston Churchill said. I've got more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me. I'm good at it. Not an addictive personality. I'd really enjoy it. But as I get older, I realized my 59-year-old liver just can't process things the way a 29-year-old liver can process. So I'm purposely trying to wind it down. At the same time, just being very transparent, I love to be high.

And I love the feeling of being under the influence of substances. And so I have- Which substances are your... Well, I don't really do a lot of stuff. What I've done is I've tried to dial back alcohol, and I'm doing edibles now. And I do edibles two, three times a week. They help me sleep. I enjoy them. I realize there's no free lunch here.

But if it's realistically, if a lot of people you speak to who like to think of themselves as high-performing people but also enjoy, the right term is, I need a more optimistic term than getting fucked up or partying or whatever, but recognize they need to reduce their alcohol intake. to do THC or something else, is there something that on a risk-adjusted basis has the highest ROI in terms of feeling good to minimum damage on your body? Let's assume I am never going to be Andrew Huberman, right? I'm just not going to be fully optimized. I want to run at 80 to 90%, but also, quite frankly, give in to a lot of the guilty pleasures around substances, what is the old navy of substance abuse where I get 80% of the high for 50% of the damage? Great questions. And I should say, you know, optimization is, you know, something that we have to think about on a day-to-day basis. So it is true I did rounds of sauna and cold this morning. know i i did i did i got up really early a friend came over i haven't seen a while ago earlier than i would have liked and did sauna and cold um and i did train

yesterday but there are days you know i miss days you know and it happens and you know life so i don't want to give the impression that you you know, my entire life is, is geared around protocols to the point where I don't do other things. I went out to dinner with friends last night. You know, I experienced stress in life. We could talk about that, uh, like anyone else. So I would say this, um, figure out the minimum amount of alcohol that you're happy to drink it. That makes you feel, you know, like, like you're living life. So maybe that's a drink a night, maybe that's two a week, maybe that's stacking a few more toward the weekend, whatever's going to work there. And provided that your sleep is good, meaning we know it's going to disrupt your sleep architecture somewhat, but provided that you don't have excessive daytime sleepiness, provided that

you are not getting an increased frequency of colds and flus, you're accomplishing your work, I would say you're doing great, especially since you're visibly fit. If you can do the three cardiovascular training sessions and the two or three training sessions that I just described without dissolving into a pile of cells on the floor afterwards, even when you're doing an 80, 95% of intensity or let's say 85% intensity of what you could do, you're doing it right. You're doing great. Now with respect to alcohol, you know, the stress lowering properties and the fact that it is often associated with social events and the fact that this is related to stress somewhat, but it also takes our mind off of things we probably don't want to think about. You know,

it marks a transition point for a lot of people at the end of the day. You know, it's hard to dump thoughts, you know, so like, okay, they have a drink and then they're like into the evening and the next morning they're up and at it again. That's a perfectly healthy and understandable thing. Now with respect to cannabis, so this is interesting. I just did a four-hour interview. It hasn't been released yet with a researcher who works on cannabis. I've done a solo episode about cannabis. And this interview was actually sparked by a clip that we had put on Twitter on X.

And then he jumped at it. You know, he insisted certain things in it were wrong. Then he came in and we had a discussion. And it turns out we've realized far more things than we disagree about. Let's put it this way. There is some evidence, some, that high potency, meaning high THC cannabis use, may exacerbate or be correlated with serious mental health issues, psychosis in some people. But obviously that's not happening for

you. Here's what I learned from him, which is very interesting. We hear so much about how today's cannabis isn't yesterday's cannabis. You know, that weed in the 70s was so much milder than weed today. And indeed that's true. It's being engineered, grown to have much higher concentrations of thc or varying levels of thc so one can select what they like in smoked form or vaped form this is what i learned people are remarkably good at adjusting their let's just call it like the depth and number of tokes um in order to achieve a fairly consistent blood level of THC. So if they happen to get higher concentration on cannabis, and by the way, I also learned, and I'll just pass this along for folks,

because as I learn, I like to pass things along. There are reasons why you're not supposed to call it marijuana anymore. There's a whole story there that's laid to cultural issues and some issues potentially related to racism. It's very, it's a, so just, um, as they say, uh, look it up, you know, or look at it anyway, right? That it's interesting. So that's why I'm calling it cannabis. Okay.

Um, cannabis or weed. So in smoked form, people seem to be very good at regulating their intake to achieve a kind of a, a fairly consistent, um, level of THC in the blood from one intake session to the next. Edibles, however, it's far more difficult to regulate the blood level because one can eat a whole cookie or eat an edible or eat half a cookie. And so unless you're using the same source, this is where people sometimes find themselves in a very different mental state than they intended. Now, is there tolerance? Is it addictive? These things are still heavily debated.

I would argue, and this is not based on randomized controlled trial, that people who are heavy cannabis users, when they don't have their cannabis, they get pretty cranky because a lot of people use it to manage anxiety. And there's some interesting studies taking place about looking at genetic polymorphisms and tendency for anxiety in people who really prefer cannabis to other drugs because it does seem to be, for them, a way to adjust their anxiety. I will say that taking cannabis before sleep may help you fall asleep. It is definitely, and Dr. Matt Walker talks about this, the world expert on sleep, really, it's dramatically reducing the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that you're getting. So if you are in a stage or a phase of life where things are particularly stressful,

keep in mind that rapid eye movement sleep is when neuroplasticity and learning occur, but also where we learn to uncouple the emotional load of daily experiences, largely through the experience of vivid dreams. And this is why when people come off of cannabis, they oftentimes get very, very intense dreams because there's a REM rebound. So just keep that in mind. But if your life is in order and you're not experiencing excessive stress, and like you, you don't have an addictive personality and you like an edible every now and again, you know, I never tell people what

to do as long as you know what you're doing. I don't think there's any evidence that it's bad for other aspects of health. Is it going to make you better at remembering things? Probably not if you're high while you're trying to learn things. And there's a whole literature there that people often misunderstand where they hear, well, if you're going to learn under the influence of a given drug, that you should then get tested while under the influence of a given drug. And that's not true. It just turns out that people who use a drug like alcohol or cannabis consistently while studying for their bar exam just get better at cognitively performing while under the influence. But that's not a reason to do more of it. So I would say it sounds like you're in a really healthy range and like i said you're visibly fit your life presumably is more or less how you want it and so edible a couple days a week at the appropriate

dose where you know you're not going to get past that threshold um so don't let someone give you an edible and say hey this is this is great and go you know cookie for cookie with what you normally take that's that's you's a cautionary note. I went to this event called Summit, and it's sort of the way I describe it as Learning Man. It's a cross between TED and Burning Man. I actually can totally see you there speaking. I'm sure they've asked you to speak there.

And I really enjoyed it. It was on a cruise ship, on this Virgin Cruises ship. And I went up to grab a drink at the bar, and he said, oh my God, someone ordering alcohol. And I said, what do you mean by that? And he said, none of these kids, you know, they're all in their 30s, high-performing, very successful people in the tech industry.

And within about 30 minutes, someone came up to me and offered me mushroom chocolates. And what I figured out is there's this movement among aspirational, high-achieving young people to substantially reduce their alcohol intake, but they still want to be high. And they're doing mushroom chocolates and a mix of all kinds of other shit that I couldn't even figure out or remember all the acronyms. But they basically have decided, and I think in general, wealthy people want to believe they always have a better mousetrap, but they had decided, I'm going to nurse one drink and then I'm going to do my

mushroom chocolates or something else. Can you give me a sense for, A, that trend and B, what you think, is there an upside to it? Or is this, again, wealthy people liking to think that they've found something better? I don't think it's just wealthy people. I think we're seeing this trend away from alcohol, although there's still a lot of this country and the rest of the world that consume alcohol on a regular basis, and in some sense in a healthy way, right?

Like a shot of liquor, you know. I mean, I love Russian banyas. Because I love sauna and cold. And so if you go to a proper Russian banya, it's not just going to be sauna and cold. The Russians there are going to have a couple shots of alcohol also. So they know how to do it for them. So here's what I feel obligated to say. First of all, the clinical trial data on psilocybin mushrooms for the

treatment of major depression is very impressive, but it's still illegal. And those are high dose sessions. So those are people ingesting anywhere from two and a half to, in some cases, what's called a heroic dose, you know, five grams of psilocybin mushroom, you know, five grams of psilocybin. You're what a colleague of mine who works on this calls behind the circuit board. You're not doing, I mean, it's a very, it's an experience. Not necessarily one I recommend. People can get very scared in there. You know, you'd have to work with a clinician. Still illegal, but there are trials. The studies of higher doses have shown some very interesting clinical efficacy, but it has not yet passed FDA approval. Likewise with MDMA, ecstasy

treatment for PTSD. Right now, that's a big issue because the FDA is soon going to decide, but the early recommendation to them was to not approve. We could talk all about that. But microdosing, taking lower dosages of psilocybin mushroom, which by the way, just activates a serotonin receptor that seems to lead to more communication, broadly speaking. More communication, sort of like resting network activity, is broader to brain areas that normally we're talking to each other very little or talking to each other more kind of in the default mode. That's what some of Robin Carnett Harris' work at ucsf and others have shown and it very likely

enhances the capacity for neural plasticity for rewiring of neurons now a lot of people confuse this and think oh well if they just take psilocybin they'll quote-unquote get plasticity but we have to remember that plasticity is a designed to be a directed process. You touch a hot stove, you get one trial learning by way of neural plasticity that hot stoves are bad to touch. Okay. That's directed plasticity. It's adaptive. When you learn a new language, you sit there and you have to absorb the information, make errors, adjust for those errors, and you get plasticity over time. When you, quote unquote, just take a drug that opens up plasticity, in air quotes,

that's not necessarily a good thing because you're making the brain vulnerable to rewiring in a very nonspecific way. So this is why traditional forms and these modern forms of clinical trials using psychedelics of any kind, MDMA, which is more or less a psychedelic, or considered one nowadays, as well as psilocybin, LSD, et cetera, which is more or less a psychedelic or considered one nowadays,

as well as psilocybin, LSD, et cetera, they're talking to the person, they do rounds of therapy with that person off the drug before and after the person's working through something or things. So it's directed. Whereas when you just take something and go experience life, it's non-specific opportunity for non-specific rewiring. Now, there is zero evidence, to my knowledge, there's zero evidence that microdosing can improve mental state as it relates to depression or mood, but people report this quite a lot. And that makes a little bit of sense because it augments serotonin pathways in the brain through one receptor in particular. And if you think about the major treatments for depression, these are very controversial now, but the SSRIs,

selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the net effect is to increase the amount of serotonin at the synapse, the availability of serotonin. And we know that other antidepressants, which rely more on dopamine or epinephrine, et cetera, that relief from depression, whether or not it's through cognitive behavioral therapy alone or drug therapy or combination, is a neuroplasticity phenomena. It's about reorienting the person's thinking about who they are, about what's possible in the world, about what happened or what's likely to happen. It's about creating more optimism. So it's less about serotonin per se than the opportunity to rewire the brain and one's cognitive and emotional status. So when these people are saying, okay, I'm going to not drink alcohol and instead I'm

going to take some psilocybin, they're boosting their serotonin a bit. Presumably they're also doing this because the day after drinking is always a bit of a withdrawal. There's the anxiety some people refer to. There's the puffiness. A lot of it might be for aesthetic reasons. You can't sleep very well often and the sleep isn't of high quality. Let's also face it, a lot of people make mistakes on alcohol. And whether or not they make mistakes on psilocybin, I don't know. I'm sure there's an opportunity for that, right? Jumping off the ship would be a bad idea. People have done stupid things on psychedelics, but if you look at the lethal dose of

something like psilocybin, it's unbelievably high relative to like the lethal dose of alcohol. If you look at deaths and problems created by alcohol, including bad decision-making, yeah, I mean, these are astronomical rates of bad errors at every level, professional, interpersonal, life-damaging, life-ending, etc. So it kind of makes sense to me why people would be orienting towards things that have less of the danger and more, still some, but more of the kind of state-shifting, being able to relate to people differently in that elevated serotonin state, they're very likely to at least think or experience a kind of more empathic engagement. And we're seeing a lot of this. The episode that we did about alcohol in the Huberman Lab podcast,

humility aside, that was the most listened to podcast episode for like two years running out of all podcasts, like all podcasts. And I was surprised because as somebody who doesn't really indulge in alcohol much, I thought, well, we should probably just do an episode about alcohol. Enough people drink and let people know what they're doing. But I'm not anti-alcohol. And I noticed it unveiled three things. One, the people who really love alcohol were pissed off that they had that knowledge. They're like, ugh, now I know how bad it is for me.

I know. I've tried to ignore it. There's no ignoring the two of you. But second is that people who didn't like drinking, maybe if they have less alcohol dehydrogenase genetically, maybe they just didn't like it. They finally felt validated to say, hey, I don't want to drink it terrible for me. And then, and that was a big category of people. And then I think the third category is the larger group, which is, you know, the people who like alcohol, but they also want to take care of their health and they want to be able to live life, including maybe have a drink for a very large number of years. And they realize that, you know, throttling back a little bit and savoring

it. Maybe this is Peter's thing, maybe focusing on a higher quality alcohol, or you asked what alcohols are going to be best or worst. Low sugar alcohols in general, not because of the sugar per se, but because of the hangover. So like brandies and things like that. Cognacs are generally not as good for you in terms of the hangover component as a clear vodka. If I drink, I like a white tequila, soda, and wine. That's it. That's like my thing. Especially with Mexican food on a clear vodka. If I drink, I like a white tequila, soda, and wine. That's it. That's like my thing.

You know, especially with Mexican food on a hot day. That's like nothing better. Coming up after the break. In my mind, there's no reason to do TRT. And a lot of kids, because of social media, they see the muscles, they see the vasculature, and they also, if they try it, they realize that it makes effort feel good, and it does increase libido, vigor, etc. But it will shut down your sperm production, and it has effects on the brain. Stay with us. What are your thoughts on testosterone replacement therapy?

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this. So I'm 48 years old. I'm very open about this. I always have been. I did not touch any hormone augmentation of any kind. But then at 45, I decided to run an experiment taking a very low dose of testosterone cypionate, but also something called HCG,

human chorionic adadotropin, which allows you to maintain sperm production because, well, I intend on children and I don't want to kill my sperm. And basically when you take testosterone exogenously, you shut down your sperm production. Maybe not entirely, but it can be problematic. So first things first, and I'm assuming we're talking about men here because women are now doing testosterone replacement therapy in low doses for libido and for vigor and other things. And women make testosterone too. But as long as we're talking about men, I can't emphasize this enough.

Young guys, meaning if you're younger, I just don't see how unless somebody has a hypogonadal condition, which you can be tested for, why males younger than 35 and probably 40, if you're doing things to take care of yourself with sleep, with exercise, nutrition, managing your stress, keeping your body composition, you don't have to be 5% body fat. That's probably bad for testosterone for most people, unless you're naturally like that, but keeping your body fat percentage somewhere between 10 and 15% or something. In my mind, there's no reason to do TRT. And a lot of kids, because of social media, they see the muscles, they see the vasculature,

and they also, if they try it, they realize that it makes effort feel good and it does increase laminate vigor, et cetera, but it will shut down your sperm production and it has effects on the brain. So here's my stance on this. And I'll just, again, be very open about what I do. I personally find that the recommended dose for most people that's kind of just out the gate that these clinics do is they'll say 200 milligrams, typically of testosterone, Cipionate per week. So that's one CC, one ML. That for me would be like catastrophically too high. I'm very sensitive to this stuff. So what I highly recommend is people go and get their testosterone checked and free testosterone. So the range, the reference range in the U.S. is somewhere between 300 and 900. In other countries, I think it goes up to 1,200.

But keep in mind, there are some people who have testosterone levels of 500 or 350 even or 400 who feel great. Their libido is strong. Their recovery from exercise is strong. They feel great. There are a number of other hormones that impact this. Don't look strictly at the numbers. So if you're a young person and you're interested in or you're curious about testosterone therapy, please go get your

blood levels checked. And it is true that unless you are below 300 nanograms per deciliter, technically you don't need replacement. Now, if you happen to be 500 and you feel like garbage, please also get your free testosterone checked. Okay? Because if that's too low, that means the testosterone you're making isn't available. And if your estrogen is too high or too low, this is important. Well, then that could be an issue, meaning this is a complex scenario. But what's happening is people are just going and getting on TRT and saying, oh, 900 is best. Now, if someone does decide to explore testosterone replacement therapy, there are a couple of things to know. First of all, get your blood levels checked before, during, and should you decide to come off after.

Very open about this. I was sitting, I was doing all the behaviors right as best I could. Also taking a few supplements that we know can slightly improve testosterone, not in a major way. Things like Tonga Dali, Fadojo, for me, increased my testosterone significantly. I was sitting around 750, but I was feeling some afternoon fatigue that felt unusual for me and decided to run an experiment of taking basically three 30 milligram dosages of injectable testosterone cipionate per week. And I eventually converged on something a little bit similar to that, spacing it out a bit more, but essentially 100 milligrams per week, I feel fantastic. It definitely makes effort feel great. Okay. Now,

the problem is that's a consequence of a bit more what we call sympathetic drive, which has nothing to do with sympathy, emotional sympathy. It makes you kind of more forward center of mass in general. It's a higher level of stress. You have to be careful you're still managing to get great sleep. I also, as I mentioned, take HCG. And if people want children at any point in the future, and you're going to take testosterone at any, exogenously at any level, you have to offset that with HCG, which is more or less like luteinizing hormone, which stimulates the testes to continue making their own testosterone and therefore spare sperm production. Or you could go bank sperm, although I would strongly recommend maintaining your sperm production. And there are now at-home kits that allow you to discern if you're still maintaining sperm production. Here's how I feel

about this. Get the behaviors right. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management. Explore healthy supplementation. And I would say the things for supplementation that make sense for most people who can afford it are a quality fish oil, so quality omega-3s. Get above a gram per day of the EPA form, maybe two grams for a variety of reasons. Get some form of probiotic, prebiotic. You could supplement this. People know and often associate with AG1. You could do it that way, or you could eat more fruits and vegetables. I mean, there are a number of things in additional to AG1 that is why I think it's good for me. But again, this is not a sales pitch for AG1. This is to say, make sure your foundational nutrition is

good. Take a multivitamin is basically what I'm saying for if you can't afford that. And then I do think that many people can get what they want without going on TRT by making sure that you're training hard, but not more than an hour per session. If you're going to do TRT, yes, it's true. You can probably get a bit less sleep and still recover because normally sleep deprivation over time would diminish your testosterone levels. When you're taking it, it's always tapped off. But that's not good either because you're challenging the heart

in ways that normally wouldn't be challenged. So this could be a whole discussion, but I really think that people need to pay attention to the fertility piece. And then to really take the minimal effect, if they decide that TRT is right for them to take the minimal effective dose, many people think testosterone good, estrogen bad, if you're male. That is patently false. If you crush your estrogen levels, unless you need to reduce your estrogen levels,

you will have poor memory. Your cardiovascular health will suffer because you're going to have less sort of pliability of the capillaries and vessels that innervate your brain and body. And in addition to that, estrogen is critical for libido. And so a lot of people who take testosterone, get high levels of testosterone, then crush their cortisol and or estrogen levels using pharmacology, high doses of anastrozole. They might be better off taking low doses of anastrozole, which is an aromatase inhibitor. Aromatase is converted to testosterone to estrogen, or not at all, and letting their estrogen float up a bit, but be in the proper ratio with that now elevated testosterone. And this is so critical. Maybe it's because I'm male. Presumably, I hear a lot from young guys. They're like, hey, should I get on TRT? I think that's a big no. Don't do it until you're doing everything

else right. And I'll also say I've gone off, did an experiment when I went off it, and continued to do things right. And you do feel kind of achier after exercise and a little bit lousy, but you can come off these things. You need to continue to take HCG to make sure that you continue to make your own testosterone. You can reactivate things. But I think it was the right decision for me at 45. All my other health metrics, LDLs and suffering in place. And I will say this, that it can provide the opportunity to do more work, both cognitive

and physical work. And I'll also say that it did not create a big change in my body composition because I had always been eating well sleeping well to begin with and I didn't change the way that I trained that much and I've gone off and just kind of maintained and so I think it is definitely something people are paying more attention to and trying but they need to be extremely thoughtful what do you think of creatine creatine is great creatine has a ton of literature for creatine, mostly for sake of cognitive enhancement. The conditions of cognitive enhancement

are sort of unique in those studies, often like cognitive enhancement while at altitude or cognitive enhancement after sleep deprivation, these kinds of things. But five to 10 grams, and I say that because people are of different body size, so I'm 100 kilograms, so I take 10 grams of creatine per day. I've been doing

that since I was 16 or 18. I'll take breaks every once in a while. You'll gain five to 10 pounds of water weight within your muscles, mostly within the muscles when you take creatine, and then you'll urinate that out if you come off it. I mentioned that because a lot of women don't want to take creatine because they don't want that extra weight, but it's mostly muscle weight. And a lot of women can really benefit from more muscle and strength for all the reasons we talked about before. But there's excellent data for creatine. Keep in mind on a blood test, your blood creatinine levels will be increased if you're supplementing creatine, so don't be alarmed. But it's very hard to get that five to 10 grams per day from food sources because a big steak,

a big ribeye steak probably only has a couple grams or three grams of creatine. How many of those are you really going to eat without causing other issues? What are your thoughts on TRT? I started doing it two or three years ago. I do 80 milliliters. Is it a week injection? Wait, just because people will get 80 milligrams, I guess, which is a very low dose. Yeah. And the way I would describe it is I started doing it three or four years ago, lost the strength in the gym, gym lost some muscle mass not the same virility or whatever you would call it um and i just thought and my trainer said uh you're fine you have what you should have at 56 but why wouldn't you take it back to 45 and i took it and the way i would describe it andrew is i would say it kind of makes you three

to five years younger. I just, weird things. Like I felt like my skin was a little bit different, just a little stronger in the gym. Well, I feel better at 48 than I did at 25. And I think that's because I take better care of myself with respect to sleep. I used to work a hundred hours a week. I would literally, my, my, my ex-girlfriend Keegan was still jokes about this from time to time. Like we went on so many vacations where I would like collapse into the laptop meant the end. Like I was working on grants or I was working as a junior professor, you know, before I got tenure. I mean, you're familiar with this. I would literally work until I would collapse and that's not healthy. And in my thirties too. And I had a lot of vigor, but I would say TRT can definitely bring that forward.

I think based on conversations with my colleague, Robert Sapolsky, it's clear that it makes you more like yourself. So if you're a slightly obsessive person, it's going to make you more obsessive. If you're a very competitive person, it'll make you more competitive. If you're very altruistic and empathically tuned, it will likely exacerbate that. I feel like it raises the tide kind of on everything. It makes you what I call forward center of mass. So I figure on anything, we can either be back on our heels, flat footed or forward

center of mass. And so if it's work, you're forward center of mass. If it's kindness, you're forward center of mass. You feel like you have more to give. And that's that elevated sympathetic drive that we talked about earlier. That's literally the best ad I've ever heard for testosterone. So two quick questions. You've been very generous with your time. The first is around exercise. The second one's a professional question. My dad, this is one of the nicer moments for my father. My father was in the Royal Navy and he had this thing called the Royal Navy Fitness Handbook. And

it was burpees, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups. And we used to do that together from a very young age. And it really stuck with me. And I've been working, like you, I've been working on my whole life. And I've started doing it with my boys, 13 and 16. I call my boy on FaceTime, who's at boarding school. And I put them through like a eight to 12 minute kind of multi-dimensional, you know, push-ups, some Arnold presses with a weight, assisted pull-ups, cash out with some burpees. Do you have any thoughts on or advice for dads who are trying to get their teenage boys into working out in terms of kind of the right way to work out your teenage sons? Yeah. Well, just to make sure I close the hatch on that TRT conversation, because you said it's an advertisement for it, there are some

health risks of blood pressure, blood profiles, and people need to think about that and work with a really qualified physician and but some cancers right like prostate cancer if you don't monitor it is that right there is the belief among urologists is that it does not cause prostate cancer if you have a pre-existing prostate cancer it might exacerbate it when people have prostate cancers, they often put them on antiandrogens. But it's also heart and brain protective, isn't it, of what I've read? Is that true? properly, not quashing them, nor letting them get out of hand. You're taking the fertility thing into consideration. I think that it can be very beneficial because it allows you to do the work you need to do. Cognitive work, the cardiovascular work. I mean, if you're running more as a consequence of taking TRT and also able to do all the other things in your life, then you're net better off, right? But people who take it and then get lazy about things, you are net worse off.

Okay. Now in terms of exercise, I mean, I was fortunate that when I turned, I was always very physical, soccer, skateboarding, swimming, et cetera. I was never particularly excellent at any of those sports, just good enough to kind of hang in there. You know, I got a girlfriend when I was 16, she was a year older than I was. And I heard their former boyfriend was like a football player or something. And I was like this skinny skateboard kid. So I started doing my pushups and my pull-ups and I will say that, uh, so it was the, you know, first girlfriend effect. Um, and I, and then I found like, whoa, I really like exercise.

I feel like there's a kind of direct relationship between effort and outcome. And I always ran also. I loved, and I still love running. So I would say that for young people and encouraging young people to exercise, find out what physical activities they really enjoy. For me, it was running and I do like, I did like weightlifting. So encourage them to play sports because of the social dynamics and to be physical. With respect to, you know, just fitness and thinking about fitness, I think what you described is excellent, you know, 10 to 15 minutes daily, even because they're young, right. They can recover of body weight type stuff. So dips, pull-ups, et cetera. One of the best

pieces of advice I heard recently in mindset advice, she comes from a physician by the name of Gabrielle Lyon, L-Y-O-N, who's a medical doctor. And she knows a ton about nutrition and training for men and women. And her husband happens to be in the SEAL teams. I have a number of friends in the community. And she said, you know, goals aren't really the way to think about things. Standards are the way to think about things. So this is very much borrowed from the military community to think, as you mentioned, Navy a few minutes ago. When you have a standard for yourself that you should be able to do five sets of five pull-ups, for instance, on your birthday, every year, no matter what, or that you should be able to do three sets of 25

full push-ups. I remember the Presidential Fitness Awards. It was like I used to train, one year I had a growth spurt. I couldn't do the seven pull-ups. I didn't get the number four. And I spent the whole year trying to figure out how to get back to seven pull-ups. Right. And so when you have goals, it's very easy to reach a goal and then lapse, you know? But when you have a standard, you're always staying above that line and you have the opportunity to exceed that standard by a lot, but you never let yourself drop below that standard. It sets kind of an alarm on the low end that's also very high. And I love this concept because it's like you have a standard for yourself. You have a standard of behavior. You have a standard of fitness that translates to certain activities so that you never are unable to

meet that standard. And if your standard, and this is a very Jocko Willink-ish, but if your standard is you're going to train every morning at 4.30, no matter what, except those rare occasions where travel or something inhibits it, well, then you're doing it no matter what. Whereas if your goal is to get up at 4.30 and train,

it only sets this high bar. I'm sure there's a natural psychology to this, right? You know, that you need to achieve that thing and then you check that box. Whereas the standard sets, a standard means a low end critical threshold that you stay above, but there's really no upper end either. And I think the best situation is kind of like the one that sounds like happened for you and certainly happened for me where I discovered I love to run. I mean, the only thing I'm upset about, about training my legs yesterday is that I generally take a day off after training legs to recover. And I want to

train again today. And that just feels great. Right? So I would suggest that they do mainly body weight resistance training. I know that there's a shift now toward allowing kids to do resistance training, but here's my feeling about being a young person, which I was once, which is that the more variety of movement and sports that you do, the better off you are in life and fitness. All the people I know who are hyper-specialized in some sport don't seem to stay with that sport a long time. They get injured. They're not fit.

I mean, the gymnasts are the exception because they seem to do all the different dynamic movements. They're strong. They have speed. They have agility. But I think it's great fun to try a bunch of different sports. And then if you're an athlete, sure, focus on one. But with respect to fitness, I'm not a huge fan of really young people lifting heavyights in the gym. And I, I'm going to get a lot of flack for this because Olympic lifting is a sport in its own right. But I didn't really start lifting heavy until I was in my twenties. And that for me was like, I've never gone below three repetitions of anything. So I've never done a single rep max of anything. And people always go, there's no way that's true. And it's absolutely true. I'm interested in using it as a tool to accomplish something,

strengthen, in some cases, hypertrophy. And staying healthy is my main focus now. And I will say this. I got laughed at, teased in college because I'd be out for a run on mornings where everyone else was doing their kind of Sunday, fun day drinking. I got teased for studying when other people were kicking back. When I was a professor and I would go to meetings, I would sneak off to the gym at lunch hour because I couldn't sit all day without losing my mind.

And one day I was in the gym at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in New York. This is where people go for meetings. It's kind of science summer camp. And one of the most successful biologists in the world still came into the gym. And I was like, oh, and I was sort of embarrassed. Like I'd been caught doing something. And I said, wait a second, this is your meeting. And he said, yeah, you know, I can't be in these meetings all day. It drives me crazy. And I looked at him, I'm like, okay, this guy has great posture. He's fit. He was in his mid-60s then. He's still that way now, I thought to myself, okay, here I've been like guiltily running off to exercise to take care of myself. The culture has changed a little bit now, but if you're in a, whatever dominant culture is around you, beware. That's what I always say. Even if you're hanging out with rebels, beware, right? You know, it's good sometimes to rebel against the rebels, right?

It's not just about independence of thought. It's that develop habits that you know are good for you. And when the dominant culture is, you know, dude, why are you working out or why are you studying? Like, trust me, and you can tell your sons this. I know you know this for yourself. In five, 10 years, people are going to be coming to you for advice because they're the ones carrying 40 pounds of extra weight or 20 pounds of extra weight, or their libido is shot, or they're wondering why they hate their job or their relationship. And I'm not saying that I had all the answers, but I've noticed that the people who are willing to take really good care of themselves, and not in a vain way, this isn't about vanity, it's taking care of yourself so that you can do more in the world for other people,

especially, but also for yourself, like be the strong one who can help other people. And once your sons, I think, realize that they're going to be the best version of themselves for themselves, but also they're going to be the go-to person that can help everybody in whatever domain they happen to be in. I think that feedback loop is so powerful because you feel like, wow, I understand what self-care is. I can refill the gas tank just through these behaviors. Last question. At the end of, in the 40s, after World War II, physicists became celebrities. Einstein, Teller, Oppenheimer. I feel like we're having a little bit of that moment where neuroscientists, I think of you and

Sam Harris, are becoming famous. And Sam more on the philosophical side, you more on the optimization of almost like how to live a better life through fitness or just optimizing and being thoughtful about your nutrition, your sleep, your fitness. I don't know if you get these calls. I get these calls from other faculty at other universities, and they, in as polite a way possible, try to say to me, my research and domain expertise has so much more heft and depth than yours, yet you're so much more successful than me. Can you advise me on what I need to do? You've got to be one of the most famous and successful neuro-influential, you know, creating great economic security for you and your family. Can you give any advice around what were some, if there are any hacks or best practices? We've

talked a lot about optimizing for fitness. Talk about now optimizing for someone who is credentialed, who has expertise, but wants to be Andrew Huberman. What are the two or three hacks, platforms, best practices that took you from a neuroscientist to someone who has really remarkable influence? Thanks for the question. So my dad's a physicist, and so I grew up hearing about the golden age of physics and Feynman and like Gell-Mann and all that. And I think the interest in physics is, you know, physics is everywhere, right? And so it's universal. And explained correctly is really enchanting. The brain and neuroscience is everything, right? It's sadness, it's grief,

it's happiness, it's depression, it's addiction, it's fitness, it's all of that. And so it's universal. And I would say that we're now also entering the age of where math and AI are going to become really important for public discourse. So I would say the following, and as a fellow academic, you know that when one sticks their neck out there um, so I would say the following and, and, and as a fellow academic, you know, that, you know, when one sticks their neck out there publicly, like I understand there are going to be people in the academic community who are happy about that. And Stanford has been immensely supportive, immensely supportive. And I'm very grateful for that. There will be people who are critical around specific points or the general idea of somebody doing what I do or what

you do. There will be people who feel that or what you do. There will be people who feel that way because of jealousy. There will be people who feel that way because they genuinely feel like it's not being packaged or delivered in the way that they would prefer. And that's all fine and good. I would say point number one is if you're going to be public facing, as you know, you're not going to satisfy all those people. You're just not. At the same time, I think people can feel intention. You know, I think people sometimes focus, there's kind of a gravitational pull around like cold plunges and supplements and weightlifting that I think sometimes interesting topics that I really enjoy. And then each one has

an interesting science and then discussion around it, which I thoroughly enjoy. But I think sometimes they overlook the fact that like 90% of what I talk about on the podcast is about neural mechanisms, endocrine mechanisms. I've worked on cold physiology and to try and teach biology and it packaged in sort of protocols for health and then teach protocols for health in a way to people who are interested in that and then also get them in a bit enchanted, hopefully about biology. The, the,

the number one takeaway for people that want to do some public facing work or to, um, allow people to appreciate what they do is they, I can't emphasize this enough. If I could like put this on a billboard in time square, I would, except no one looks at billboards anymore.

You have to be the pure version of yourself. And this is why not everyone does this. So I'm going to sound like a name dropper, but I'm very fortunate to be close friends, very close friends. We communicate daily with Rick Rubin, like the Rick Rubin from NYU, right? If I started a record label,

it worked out well at NYU. And Rick understands this, that there's a certain energy that people have when they're really engaging in things in its pure form. They're not thinking, are people going to like this song? Is it going to be top chart song like the last one? Are people going to like this podcast? It's just like, I'm a very curious person and I've lived a life of adventure. One of my heroes, I have several, Joe Strummer being one of them, and the great Oliver Sacks being another. A neurologist, public-facing author, who was also ridiculed, by the way, for doing what he did until he became famous enough that

then he got appointments at multiple universities. They kind of came back for it. Very interesting story. And Oliver was a very curious person. They once said, uh, it's in this book. It says, you know, Oliver will go far provided he doesn't go too far. He was a methamphetamine addict. He was interested in bodybuilding. He was also a closet homosexual. And that came out at the end when he,

you know, and he had a bunch of things about his personal life that explained sort of, um, you know, not just that, but explained who he was in a big way. But up until then, he was just Oliver being Oliver. He up until then, he was just Oliver being

Oliver. He loved sea creatures. He was always talking about the things he loves. I'm a very curious person and I love adventure. And I grew up basically because of my family structure changing in a big pack of guys, some female friends as well. That's kind of driven my life. And I've interacted with people at the kind of extremes of adventure and extremes of career in fitness and health and science. And so what I bring forward is my, it feels innate desire to learn, organize, and disperse information that I find very useful for mental health, physical health, and performance along those adventures that are just simply my life. So I'm just being andrew huberman and i'll come right out and say you know people say all sorts of things they've said all sorts

of things about me good and bad and everything in between but what i just said it like really describes who i am at my essence and if somebody is a like an entomologist or you know in one or works on um i don't know like lipid signaling in the gut or whatever people study, if they can tap into like the essence of why they do that and then teach it from that pure place, they will be at potentially the biggest podcast in the world, the bestselling book in the world. So it's not so much the subject matter as the energy that one brings to it, but that energy, as Rick has pointed out over and over again, and this is why he's so successful, cannot be manufactured. Whatever it is that makes you, you, your relationship with

your father, your interest in fitness, your, your appreciation for what young people are now going through and the challenges they face, the desire to like, you're just being Scott in the world. And that's why people orient toward you. And so these colleagues that are like, wait, why is it that Huberman and Galloway and Harris are like, well, because Sam's just being Sam. So I think you just, it's, it's the enthusiasm and energy that one brings to it. And if there's a universal quality to that, then sure, it will have bigger reach. But ultimately, like, this is kind of how all public-facing intellectuals, scientists, health, you And if being them is sitting in their office and kind of like grinding away on why someone else has something and they don't, well then guess what? They're exactly where they belong. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology and by courtesy, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine. His laboratory's most recent

work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on brain states such as fear and high attention focus and developing rapid and effective tools for mitigating stress, improving sleep, and other physiological metrics. Andrew's popular podcast, the Huberman Lab Podcast, is often ranked in the global top 10 and frequently listed as the number one show in science, education, and health and fitness. He joins us from Los Angeles. Andrew, there's a lot of big podcasts that are having a lot of influence. I think having an impact around people's physical fitness and feeling good about themselves and feeling strong and feeling attractive and feeling healthy, I really think what you're doing is profound. So it's just great to see your ascent and the influence. I think you're doing really good work, and it feels like you are exactly what you said.

It's so rewarding to see someone doing exactly what they should be doing, and I think you're doing that. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you. I've really enjoyed that conversation. I hope we can further it on or off mic in the future. And I think of you as somebody who's posing those conversations in a way that has an optimism to it. Like there are solutions, and I'm an optimist too, so that resonates.

So thanks so much for hosting me. I really enjoyed it. It's our pleasure, Andrew. Thanks, brother. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. It's our pleasure, Andrew. Thanks, brother.