Hey, Andrew, welcome to the Never State podcast.
What I, you know, love about your show.
I mean, you and I actually have fairly similar backgrounds in
some ways where we're both, you know, Stan, at least I was at
Stanford for almost 10 years, right?
From 97 to 2007, actually more than 10 years as first
undergrad, then PhD, then, you know, basically postdoctoral
faculty. And I taught CS and stats and
genomics at Stanford. And then I left and found a
genomics company and sold that, gone to Tech.
And then you were a faculty member and you also, in a sense,
in a different way, you became a creator, right?
And you're still a faculty member there.
Am I wrong or? Not Yeah.
Yeah. Still tenured.
I got a meeting with my Dean in about a week and 1/2 for lunch.
It's a friendly conversation. Not OK, great.
Not an exit conversation. Yeah.
I taught up until very recently. I ran a fairly big lab and then
taper that off during the pandemic.
My last postdoc is now a faculty member.
So I I, you know, moved all my students and postdocs on to
their next steps. But yeah, I'm, I'm still a
tenure member of neurobiology and ophthalmology, have a split
appointment. And I was born at Stanford
Hospital. I did my oh, is that right
training at Stanford? Yeah.
I worked in the in the sleep lab for a summer during university.
And so, you know, I, it's and Stanford's my backyard.
I grew up in South Palo Alto, so.
OK, well, I think, you know, it's funny because we're both,
you know, that soil is a very, it's very interesting things, a
bridge between, in my view, the old world and the new, because
in different ways, we sort of made our careers on the Internet
from there. And obviously it's a weird thing
because on the one hand, obviously Stanford is known for
having a lot of people who get into tech or in your case, get
into becoming creators out of there.
On the other hand, the university isn't really as
friendly towards that as people might think from the outside.
Like in the sense of when, when I was doing it in the 2000s, it
was not. And now it's being changed.
Some entrepreneurship become more common in the 20 tens and
so on. But it's like VC was sort of
over the hedgerows. It was not something that was
like on campus in that way. And moreover, you know, those
posters that say like bench to bedside that they would have
translational medicine. You know, when you actually did
go, when I did go and start a genomics company, suddenly you
went from being an infant that everybody kind of liked to then,
oh, you're doing something for profit that's bad.
And then they didn't want to talk to you until you became
really, really big because it'd be a conflict of interest in
academia to talk to a for profit company.
There's like a weird thing there where there's like an air gap
between, you know, Stanford and then the actual tech stuff or
creator stuff that comes out of it.
I don't know if you experienced that at all or you saw that.
Well, my experience has been quite different and I'm not
saying this to you. Sure.
Yeah. So I agree that once one makes
it big, the the tone always shifts.
So I mean this is kind of true across the board.
I heard a joke some time ago that I think is quite apartment
about Stanford, which is there only two kinds of Stanford
faculty, Stanford faculty with companies and Stanford faculty
with successful companies. That's funny.
Now it is like, you know, former chair of genetics Mike Snyder on
our podcast. Mike, he's great.
He's very pragmatic, yeah. Yeah, he's got, I think, 11 or
more companies. You know, I think the backbone
of Stanford is largely within the engineering school.
I mean, of course they have humanities and everything else.
So the engineering of devices at Stanford is such a major theme,
right? And someone who's trained both
at Stanford and at Harvard Medical School explained to me
that, you know, that the lineage was such that Harvard tended to
be more grounded in development of pharmaceuticals and Stanford
really engineering the Gamma Knife and and on and on.
So I always experienced Stanford as a place where academia and an
industry were somewhat merged. But I came into it a bit later,
right? I started my postdoc in 2005.
At that time people were founding companies based out of
discoveries and Biosciences. My downstairs neighbor was then
and is still now Roger Kornberg, whose father Noble Prize for
RNA. And then Arthur, excuse me,
Robert got the structure of RNA and he has a company.
Actually he's on the OR was on the Advisory Board.
I think he is still of true Nyogen.
So the whole NRNMNNAD thing, you know, there is Roger, Nobel
Prize winner at Stanford, you know, holding a bottle of NR.
Like I take NR, you know, and I thought to myself that was
somewhere around 2016 and I thought things are changing,
right? Yes, yeah.
So I think things have changed somewhat in the.
I mean, I could talk about my own experience with the podcast.
I think people didn't really expect that from me.
And I just I did it during the pandemic, start going on podcast
and launched the podcast in 2021.
And I think people sort of stood back and were like, OK, what's
going to happen here Initially? I got a lot of great, saw you on
Rogan. Awesome.
And then from faculty, and then as Rogan became a bit more
controversial in light of the vaccine mandates, it was a
little bit more like, oh, but then colleagues like Anna Lemke,
who focuses on addiction and dopamine went on Rogan.
Sapolsky's been on there. And so podcast became really one
of the major thrusts within the media landscape, if not the
major thrust in the media landscape.
And then everyone seemed to just kind of relax around things.
So I think it's more friendly now, I think, you know, there
are these stains, right? There's the Theranos stain.
There's some other stains we could talk about.
But then there are all these successes.
Yeah. Of, you know, like Lubert
Stryer, who recently passed away, was in my department,
founded AFFA Matrix right there and then, you know, but he had
closed his lab. So I'll tell you, you know, to
be quite direct about this. I mean, money is a big part of
it, right? I mean, if Stanford has a
partial investment role or, or equity role, if some of these
people, including myself, I do philanthropy directly through
pay for our podcast is free, but through a, a premium channel of
our podcast, we have donor matches, we do philanthropy.
So we support labs at Stanford and elsewhere.
And, you know, as you know, I mean, you know, money taking
money and if money is coming in, you know, the tone is different.
But that came after the podcast succeeded.
So I would say for me the experience has been very
positive. That's cool.
I'm glad it is. I think one thing that's
interesting is I think you did this post tenure and so that
meant that you didn't have to be scored against the, you know, is
this in a peer reviewed publication?
And so and so clearly you're having a lot of impact on global
health, I think in a positive way by telling people about
these publications and so on. No, I think really I, you know,
like there's a lot of people, you know, I'm a I'm a big human
defender. I mean, you have a lot of fans
obviously, right. But popularizing the work and
getting it out there and turning into actionable things like look
at the sun before looking at your phone, like all these
little hacks and heuristics that distill like a big complicated
thing into memorable things is really, really valuable.
And so, you know, there's a few things I want to talk to you
about. You actually got in touch with
me a few years ago when I'd been on the Lex podcast and I talked
about the FDA. And I think one thing that you
may remember about this is I think I was able to give the
Steel Man case for why the FDA exists and then critique it from
the lens of FDA 2.0, right? In the sense of you do want a
regulated marketplace, in the sense of bands of bad actors and
star reviews. Like, you know, you don't want
to have just like Amazon, for example, has star reviews of
books and it has bands of, you know, scammers or you know, the
App Store has star reviews and it has bands of malware in the
same way you want from a drug marketplace reviews and bands of
bad actors. But the FTA doesn't need to be
the only one doing those reviews.
It could be a competitive marketplace.
It could be multiple jurisdictions, for example, the
EU and India and China and you know, or within the US, Texas
and California and so on, all competing with each other.
And then if you get a thumbs up from any of them, you actually
have competition between reviewers in the same way that
you don't have like a single movie reviewer for everything,
right? You don't have a single critic,
right? So I'd love your thoughts on
that because I mean, maybe we can go piece by piece through
the US medical system and why are a lot of the Huberman
studies? Why, why aren't we all, you
know, super? I mean, we're starting to get
there maybe with the zembic and so and so why aren't we all
super jacked and living forever? I think a big part of it is the
US medical system, insurance system, reimbursement system,
regulatory system, holding back the innovations that people are
discovering. But I'd like to hear your
thoughts if we can go from there.
Yeah, sure. Well, just to close the Hatch on
an on something you mentioned, you said thanks for being a
Huberman lab defender. Sure.
I think, you know, there are various critiques as is always
the case when you're public facing.
But you know, I would say that the response in the academic
community and in the medical community just based on emails
and conversations is sort of divided into thirds.
I think about 1/3 understand what I'm trying to do, which is
trying to give people actionable advice that can make them
healthier and they support that. Even though they understand that
there's going to be some dilution of the specifics or
that I'm going to be pooling things.
And and you know, make an effort to be clear about what the
sources of information are. That the middle third are sort
of silent, sort of agnostic about it.
And then the remaining third either are, I would say,
probably divided such that they're either critical because
they don't like the specific information.
They sort of feel like it's not cast the way they would cast it,
or in many cases, I have to be honest.
They're envious. They're not happy because
someone else is talking about their work.
Frank Yeah, exactly. And my my point is always I'd
love to invite you on the podcast.
I had a cannabis episode. He was criticized.
I invited the guy on so just to but it's AI think a good segue
to the next piece, which is, you know, what do we consider
actionable knowledge? And that's really the one of the
major important roles of the FDA, of course.
And I think this is becoming more salient in the context of
things like peptides and psychedelics, right?
These are the kind of the high salience issues right now.
Here's my feeling, the reason that we don't get more direct
recommendations about behavioral changes to support one's health
is because there really just isn't an organized voice for
that. I mean, one of my hopes was that
Maha was going to do that. But you know, if you really look
at what they did and you know, I'm trying to get in their ear
about this, that they're like, oh, 100 push ups, 100 pull ups
or something, which is kind of an unreasonable goal for in one
workout, which is kind of an unreasonable or maybe 100.
Pull ups a lot. That's a lot of pull ups.
I mean, it's an unreasonable kind of thing for most people.
And and yet, you know, the New York Times health section will
run things like, you know, 5 in apartment squat workouts you can
do. None of that stuff works.
No, none of that stuff changes behavior.
I think for me, what seems to be the case is that what changes
people's behavior is when they can experience a positive shift
the first time and every time, which is why we push morning
sunlight. Why we been encouraging
resistance training, et cetera. I think the big chasm in
healthcare and here we could lump kind of traditional science
and medical community and FDA and NIH, right?
I have many friends in there and to some extent I still consider
myself part of that community. And then we think about the the
podcast sphere, everything ranging from me to Brian Johnson
to fitness channels and the running community.
Is that the general population feels like they don't know where
to start. And during the pandemic and
because of the the debate about vaccine mandates, etcetera, and
lockdowns and masks, what ended up happening was we have no
authoritative figure or panel. I am a big believer that we
don't want individuals. We saw this during the pandemic,
one guy telling people what to do, updating the information.
Now people hate them or they love them, whatever.
You know. There's Fouchy, obviously,
right? But what I always thought, you
know, we need panels, we need panels of people that are that
we know based on the data that people will change their
behavior, listen to their doctor if their doctor looks like them,
talks like them. There's so much data on that.
So we need, we need some authoritative body.
And I think that Maha's interest in reducing food dyes and then
people doing push ups and pull ups, it's sort of like a general
step in the right direction, but it's pretty micro.
And I think it's frankly, I think it's, it's off center from
where it needs to be. So what you know, so, so that's
a big, a big part of it. I think also in the United
States, my dad's Argentine, OK, He.
Oh, interesting. OK, Yeah, yeah, he's so.
That's why you get Bitcoin. Yeah, exactly.
That's why I drink and that's why I drink matte in the
morning. So.
OK, great. You know, since I was a kid.
So my dad's Argentine. He's a scientist.
He a theoretical physicist. He actually came on the podcast,
you know, and from the time I was very little, he said, you
know, the reason people are overweight is they eat too much.
And then, you know, like we debated this for a very long
time. And, and in Europe and in
Argentina and elsewhere, I think there's this idea that if you
want to be healthier, you walk more, you move more, you eat
less, done, end of story. You want to sleep better, there
are things you can do there, too.
I think that in the United States, two things are very
true. First of all, this the United
States has never been a country where healthy cuisine has been
celebrated. Think about the American
cuisine. It's like hamburgers, hot dogs,
French fries, milkshakes, apple pie.
We've never really celebrated healthy eating.
It was always abundant. Abundance and taste.
Mostly abundance. Calories, calories per dollar.
You know that before the Super size?
Candy bars. Yeah, like you think about 4th
of July where, you know, OK, now it's great to celebrate things,
but, you know, you spend a little bit of time in Europe and
you realize people walk a lot more and the traditional food,
including sweets, but desserts are eaten as desserts.
But the traditional food is a focus on quality, on the source,
on the tradition. None of that exists in the
United States. I mean, there's the hunting
community that think about where they get their meat.
And I think that's great. I'm a big supporter of that.
But it's never been the case that Americans eat well ever.
And it's always been the case that Americans like drugs.
They like drugs. I mean, I've studied the weight
loss phenomenon and, and you know, amphetamine was a big
thing. Now it's sort of coming back,
believe it or not, Ozempic. Ozempic proved that people are
eating too much relative to their to their metabolic needs.
So the simple statement is Americans like drugs and they
don't like to do physical, don't like to eat nutritious food and
they generally don't like to do physical labor.
Except, and this is a key caveat, is that Americans love
to work hard. We're a heart, you know,
traditionally been a hard working community of people, but
within the context of getting a paycheck for our work as opposed
to doing things to better our bodies, right?
We're unique in that way. And I hear now that Wellness is
becoming really big in China, you know, that notion of morning
exercise and sunlight. I mean, they're picking up on a
lot of protocols that I and others have have promoted.
But being really healthy has never really been the American
thing. But we love celebrating sports
stars. I mean, we love our basketball
stars, our football stars, baseball.
It's not that we don't celebrate sport.
We celebrate sport. And we like to eat really
unhealthy food while we watch other people.
Exert. It's a culture of extremes,
right? Yeah.
So extremely unhealthy or extremely hardworking and
unhealthy from that. Right And I'm trying to change
that. I'm I'm trying to change that
and I'm trying to demystify it. I'm trying to anchor in science
where possible. I'm trying to give people tools
that work very quickly so they can get, you know, hooked by
taking good care of themselves and feel the benefits of that.
I'm trying to make most of what I promote behavioral tools for
change. I do strongly believe in the
role of nutrition, which I put under behaviors but also
honestly, supplements and peptides.
What are the human? Invaluable.
What are the top? What are the top five you know?
Because off the top of your head, what do you think are the
most important things people should do?
Behavioral Tools. Just, I don't know, like the
overall like of all your pods or the top five things people
should do. Yeah, I think there's only one
thing that if people knew they'd be 10 times healthier, and
that's to understand that you want your cortisol high within
the first hours after waking. I don't care when you wake up,
but you want your cortisol high in the first hours after waking
and you want your cortisol low in the evening.
This brings together all of Brian's messaging, Matt Walker's
messaging, my messaging. Here's the deal.
You wake up in the morning because of an inflection in
cortisol that occurs during sleep.
Eventually, it's a threshold. You wake up in the first two
hours, but especially the first hour after waking.
There's a whole set of mechanisms that are engaged that
allow you to boost that cortisol even higher.
We hear about cortisol as a stress hormone.
It's not a stress hormone, cortisol, it's designed to
deploy energy to your brain and body so that you can respond to
stressors and life, work, focus, etcetera.
It sets in motion a cascade of all the things you want,
dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, the so-called
catecholamines. It sets a wavefront for the rest
of the day. And but here's the really
important thing, the higher that morning cortisol peak, the more
energy and focus and your ability to learn things and do
things you have during the day and the lower your cortisol will
be at night because the cortisol is on a what's called negative
feedback loop where when its levels get too high, it starts
self regulating and bringing its levels back down.
So get your cortisol high in the morning.
I'll list off some things. Viewing bright light will
amplify your morning cortisol, especially in the first hour
after waking. Can be a 10,000 lux artificial
light or can be sunlight, cloudy days.
It works just fine. People would say there's no
sunlight where I live. Look, it's so much brighter at
8:00 AM on a cloudy day, even in Scandinavia in winter than it
was at midnight the night before.
So photons are coming through 10,000 lux.
Artificial light can help bright light exercise even if you don't
feel like it. We'll start to set a rhythm
where your morning cortisol is in kind of anticipatory and is
even higher anticipating that exercise.
Hydration, believe it or not, things like caffeine and cold
exposure surprisingly don't increase cortisol.
They just prolong that peak a little bit.
OK. The other thing is if you really
want to boost your morning cortisol and you don't have a
medical condition that prevents this, believe it or not,
licorice root, which contains something called glycerizing, is
a very potent tool for increasing morning cortisol.
In fact, people that are kind of finding that caffeine doesn't do
it for them anymore, you take, you need to get licorice root
capsules that contain glycerizin.
Often times they'll remove it because it can increase
cortisol. And you take that with your
morning coffee and you'll notice you have a lot more energy
through the morning. It's it's a huge effect, so much
so that it's contraindicated with a lot of prescription drugs
that are stimulants. So just.
Keep it in mind on the topic of energy.
Yeah. I think about that more as I get
older and quantifying that I think is important because, you
know, for example, we can quantify weight, we can quantify
height. You can quantify many other
biochemical covariates like, you know, as you know, cortisol
levels, testosterone levels, other kinds of things, right?
But energy level is often, you know, lots of people have high
that we know have high intelligence, but they have low
or variable energy, famously Jeb Bush, low energy, you know,
Trump, you know, but but a lot of in tech in particular, one of
the things that distinguishes really high performers that I
can see is just. You know, they can just put in,
they're tireless. It's not even I mean, some of
them are very smart, but the tirelessness and the consistency
is a big part of it. And that's right.
So, so maybe you have some thoughts on that.
Go ahead. I would say, look, I am very
hopeful that soon I'm not developing one there, there'll
be a real time cortisol sensor just like we have real time
glucose sensors. I can't, you know, I don't want
to make too much of it, but it's hard to be hyperbolic around
this, getting that morning cortisol peak as high as it can
be. And some days you can't get
sunlight and some days you can't exercise.
And it's a, but do as many things as you can to boost your
morning cortisol and then get into your day.
And then I should just say just to make for completion's sake in
the evening or when it comes time for your bedtime, because I
realize people wake up at different times.
You want to do everything to lower your cortisol, long exhale
breathing to lower your heart rate.
You want to reduce the amount of bright screen light.
So maybe you wear blue blockers, maybe you don't, maybe you just
dim the lights, maybe you don't. If you're going to exercise in
the evening, it's been shown exercise in the evening because
your baseline cortisol is already pretty low, will triple
or quadruple your baseline levels of cortisol.
And, and the consequence of that because of this negative
feedback loop that I was referring to is that the next
morning, your morning cortisol levels are lower than they
normally would be. And so people feel kind of
groggy. So it's fine to exercise later
in the day, but you need to protect your evening cortisol.
Make sure that it comes back down.
This is a lot of what Brian and I and other people are talking
about, but not talking about. We don't talk about it in this
frame. So just think about your waking
and your your first two hours of your day and your last two hours
of the day. Set up everything and the
simplest thing to say, you asked for three or a small batch.
I'm saying get your morning cortisol high.
Get your evening and nighttime cortisol or pre bedtime cortisol
low. And you look at Brian's post,
he's like, you know, read instead of being online or do
some breathing. It all fits into this framework.
I'm saying again, exercise. Yeah.
So it simplifies a lot. And I just want to point out for
longevity sake, a so-called flattening of the cortisol
curve, meaning in the afternoon cortisol levels are not
dropping, but they're relatively stable or they're dropping too
slowly is correlated with poor longevity outcomes, poor cancer
outcomes. Poor people tend who tend to be
anxious or have middle of the night waking and then they can't
get back to sleep. It's because their cortisol is
too high. The whole notion that if you
sleep with lights on in the room, even relatively dim
lights, morning glucose is elevated, makes perfect sense
with through the lens of what cortisol does, which is to
deploy glucose. So I think what we've seen in
the last few years, look, I love technology.
I'm from the South Bay, so I embrace technology.
But I think what people are doing is they're boosting their
evening cortisol too much. That's setting up issues the
next morning. And then it took us several
years for this to cascade, right?
And so if people want to get back on track and you have to
push everything into this framework of high morning
cortisol, low pre bed cortisol, you get that right?
Like 80% of things fall into place.
Figure out when you can exercise, do the post exercise,
you know, sauna or hot shower to bring things down, you know, all
avoid obviously caffeine in the evening of if you're going to
take something like ashwagandha to like reduce your cortisol,
which is pretty potent at reducing cortisol, make sure
you're doing that in the evening, not in the morning.
All of this kind of stuff really adds up.
And you asked what you know, you said people who are really hard
driving and do, yeah, I've seen some scientists like this.
I'm like, this is incredible. They work 15 hour days, seven
days a week. How do they do it?
I think it's very important for everybody to figure out what
they can do consistently in terms of work hours over the
next five years because it does change over time.
But I turn 50 in two weeks. Honestly, I have more energy and
I feel better than I did in my 30s.
And I felt awesome in my 30s. And it's because I put the work
in, you know, I've just been doing it consistently.
I mean, it's like, it's like investing, you know, it's like
it's just, you just compound, you compound gains, right?
And so, and it's small at 1st and then over time you're like,
this is crazy. My friends who are 50 are kind
of turning into melted candles or they're trying to recover
themselves. And I feel great.
And it's not because I'm gifted genetically or anything.
You just invest time and you invest energy in a number of
things. And it took me to the point of
understanding cortisol. That was like, oh, pretty much
everything centers around this. You do some mindfulness
meditation, you could do it in the morning, sure, but in the
evening it would be very beneficial.
If you in the afternoon, you say, well, what's going on
there? Most of us are getting the bulk
of our quality work done during about a 2 to 4 hour period.
And then there are these phenoms like Elon, I think is a good
example, seems to be able to just go, go, go, go, go.
I hope his body holds up. I mean, that's really the the
the. Issue he really is end of 1.
I I just think he violates every single rule that we have for
founders in terms of like focus on one company at a time.
And so like he just shatters, shatters all of those rules.
But yeah. Yeah, he's he's a tricky 1 to to
generalize. Yeah, I mean, some of my I won't
name names, but some of my friends who ended up making
billions of dollars through, let's just say online sales
platforms and things in the 2000s have asked me many times,
like, what do you think allows Elon to do what what he does?
And I, you know, and I think I think some of it is that he's
learned to funnel stress into output.
He's very, you know, as far as go and no go circuits.
He seems to be able to take whatever adrenaline is in his
system and turn it into very funneled go.
I doubt he does a ton of of whatever ambivalence he may have
he he masks it very well. I mean, some of it is software,
some of it is hardware in the sense of his genetics and so on
and so forth. But on, I mean, the reason is I
know a lot of you and I both know a lot of billionaires, a
lot of found people, but they were recently successful
ourselves. And everybody feels Elon just
playing a completely different sport.
Like he's just so far out there. Like even, you know, Larry Page
or Jensen Huang, who are obviously very, very, very
competent people have said something along those lines.
Maybe just coming back. OK.
So one of the things that we're doing at network school is we're
building startup societies. And so you're familiar with
like, you know, startup society, network state as a concept, you
know. Yeah, maybe just summarize it
for me. And when before we we started, I
saw a video that gives me a sense of kind of the the culture
and landscape there. But I but I'd like to understand
more fully what you're doing. Sure.
So think of us as the third kind of thing.
So there's Internet companies, you know, there's Internet
currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and now there's
Internet communities. So, you know, people might say,
hey, what kind of startup company do you want to found?
Or more recently, I'm doing a new coin.
We're having a third kind of thing, which is I want to start
a new community based on X, right?
So for example, if Andrew Huberman was to start a new
community to take everything you're saying right, and you
could engineer the environment, OK, as like a small example, you
wake up and there's like a glowing footpath that points you
towards the treadmill and weights and the cold water is
right there and the windows open at that right time, you know,
with IoT curtains to have the sunlight come in.
You know what I mean? If you could edit the
environment from the home to the, you know, like the
neighborhood to the superstructure, you know, for
example, a walkable community, for example, like what kinds of
food is there and so and so forth, what is the ideal human
community? Because I actually think we can
build it. Awesome.
I mean, I think, you know, I think a lot nowadays about how 8
sleep, you know, has really established itself as the
leader, right? I think they're more or less
peerless in the sense of being able to engineer the sleep
environment. We understand the different
states of mind and body one wants to enter.
You want to be cooler to false. If you want your deep sleep, you
want to get your rapid I've movement sleep.
It turns out here's a fun one. If you can find a way to heat
your sleep environment in the last two hours of sleep, you'll
get a lot more REM sleep. So this kind of pan rule like,
oh, colder is better for sleep. That's great for falling asleep
and getting deep sleep in the middle of the night, but not so
great at the for REM sleep. For REM sleep, you can get
another 30 minutes of REM sleep by making the last hours of your
sleep warm environment. So, so for instance, they've
done that right And you get data and you can update in now it's
using AI to update your what you need.
And if you a woman has a menopause, you know it's
updating there too. And we need to do the same thing
for the waking environment, right?
So little has been discussed about waking brain states.
And then a few years back it was all like alpha waves, beta
waves, beta waves. We never hear about that
anymore. We talk about focus, creativity.
I mean, we're going to look back in 10 years and go, that's
crazy. That's like saying like jogging
is all cardio or, you know, or bodybuilding is all resistance.
Or I mean, you can train for strength, you can train for
power. You can train.
I mean, we need to subdivide the waking day and states of mind
according to what people want when they, when they want to be
present for their family, when the, when they want to be locked
in to a given meeting. And right now it's all done very
haphazardly. People like, oh, well, I drink
caffeine, I hydrate and you know, and I try and get some
exercise. And I mean, we've approached
sleep the right way finally. And the technologies with sleep
are getting even better because of during sleep eye trackers.
And we can go down this rabbit hole, but we won't.
But here's a little teaser that maybe we talk about next year.
There's a lot of technology coming out that links the
vestibular system and sleep such that there will soon be
technologies that will allow you to force your body and brain
into sleep. You'll put on a device or your
sleep environment will change and you will be asleep within
minutes. And you could and and we need
that for waking states, this idea that we're just supposed to
kind of stumble through our life trying to figure out how to be
the optimal self. It's it's all it frankly, it's
where psychology and neuroscience initially branched
off was talking about ideas versus finding mechanisms.
And then the two fields came together again.
And so we could say, OK, like Elon representing the extreme,
someone with ADHD and kind of failure to launch kid at home
and his, you know, watching YouTube or, you know, just
flailing as the kind of opposite extreme.
But we should we have protocols for how to get muscles stronger,
how to get leaner, how to eat, how to improve blood lipids.
I mean, we have protocols for all this stuff, but we have
essentially no really grounded mechanistic technology tools to
direct brain states in the in the waking day.
It's like, oh, put, put on a mask and maybe get into like a
Theta. It's like, it's crazy.
It's it's like we're in the infancy.
So an environment of the sort that you're talking about is in
is an incredible idea because people need to know what to do
when in order to set the foundation of alertness and
focus that then they can lean into at the right times.
But then within that, that framework of sitting down and
coding or sitting down and having a whatever therapy
session, whatever the person is doing, maybe they're the
therapist, maybe they're the patient, doesn't matter.
Maybe they're doing surgery to have tools that are constantly
providing feedback to the brain so that it's in the the right
end body. So it's in the right state for
those activities. And AI can do this, as you know,
I mean, this is it's, it's not a big reach to accomplish this,
but we really need to define what it is we're trying to
accomplish. And I think for most
entrepreneurs and most people who want a better life, it's
really about understanding. OK, like what are the three or
four blocks of waking states I want to, you know, accomplish
today. What am I going to place into
those blocks? And then getting as much
assistance as they possibly can. And sure, some will come from
pharmacology, but I think most of it is going to come from
directives. I love this idea of like the
the, the floor lighting up, sending you in the right
direction, adjusting for the movement of the sun.
Right now there are these apps that tell you, well, the sun is
rising over here or not there. I mean, it's cool, but it's
super crude. To think about it.
So there's there's so much room for technology development here.
I'd like to see a real time cortisol sensor.
I'd like to see that cortisol sensor have AI based feedback
with one's activities so that you can.
It will essentially tell you what to do and when to make
things better, including your sleep.
We have access to the sleep data.
I mean soon all of this will be integrated.
My question is where will it be integrated?
I love the idea of an online community.
I think also it should be the case that I just have like a
little sticker sensor. I imagine this as a the military
uses this. There are little sticker sensors
that use, you know, it's on Bluetooth, you know, 12 hour
battery or something. And it can measure everything
through cavitation, heart rate, breathing rate, could get
cortisol levels. It can.
And this is used in the military in the context of kind of
monitoring soldiers out on the field from an iPad.
They can tell if someone got a bullet wound, that's a through
and through, if they're dead, if they, you know, they can triage
from a distance. I mean, that's an extreme case,
but we should be able to do this.
We should be able to like, oh, you know, like I believe a
little more jazzed up right now than I need to be if I want to,
you know, focus in a couple of hours and, and it but over time,
it's just going to naturally bring us into the states we want
to be in as opposed to, you know, these like subtle
electronic taps on the shoulder all the time.
It's it's going to probably provide feedback to our Vegas
and basically control our respiration rate and pretty soon
will be as optimized as could possibly be without any invasive
technology. I don't think of a sticker as
invasive. Yeah, in fact, actually there's
there's ones that don't break the skin that actually can can
transmit quite a lot of information like the sort of non
invasive patches, right or this non skin breaking, you know.
So, OK, so the Huberman, the ideal Huberman startup society,
OK, if we were to take everything you've done because
you have a bunch of edits, let me give you an example.
Suppose that we had the self driving car society.
You take existing laws and you just change those laws that and
you basically say, for example, this zone, only self driving
cars are allowed, no humans. OK, that actually changed a lot
because for example, all the cars are parked on the edges and
cars are parked in like tunnels underneath the the city.
And, you know, people hit a button and the car goes and
parks itself, and you've got a walkable center and the entire
shape of driveways changes, and you don't have lots of parking
like that one change actually has enormous ripple effects
downstream, right? So, for example, are there any
legal changes to permit something or ban something or
both that you would propose that would start making the Huberman
special economic zone or Huberman Health zone?
Oh yes, I mean, I really believe that if you get this cortisol
thing right and you get your circadian rhythm right, you get
your circadian rhythm right, everything else becomes 10 times
if not 1000 times easier in terms of getting exercise,
eating correctly, mental health. I mean, there are a ton of data
on this now that the brighter your mornings and days,
literally, and the darker your nights in an additive way, the
better your mentor mental health, Even if you're in a gym,
even if you're in a dim environment all day long, which
I don't recommend, if you make your night time environment very
dark, mental health improves. If you make your mornings
brighter and your days brighter, mental health improves.
Now there have been a few companies that have attempted to
create lighting that's bright enough during the day and it and
create conditions that are dark at night and it really hasn't
gone anywhere. I mean, what I would like to
see. So you said like in terms of
regulations, I think buildings should get either by natural
light or by artificial light, should ensure that there's
enough bright light early in the day and throughout the day and
it's dimmer and darker at night. I mean, I wish that were a law.
I mean, Americans don't like to be told what to do.
But right, first of all, it would save on.
Energy. What if it's not America?
Assume it can be done somewhere in the world.
Great. Where those people are OK with.
Great. You know something as long as it
works. Go ahead.
Yeah. And even though, you know,
climate change is a controversial thing, you'd also
be doing a tremendous service to birds and to insects and to the
ecosystem of non human animals. Because the truth is that light
pollution is really screwing things up in terms of like
songbirds are singing longer now they're mating song and everyone
goes, oh, that's cool, they're mating longer.
Actually, it's screwing up all sorts of things within the
ecosystem because of light pollution.
But what are you going to tell people?
Oh, you got to turn off your lights?
I mean, we're we're a hard driving species.
We want to build stuff. You know, you turn off the
lights, but there are ways to modify light cycles, still allow
for night shifts, greatly improve health and as a
byproduct of that to improve the the climate and the ecosystem
for insects, birds and every other animal.
In the same way that sound pollution in the oceans is
causing major issues for migration of animals and things
like that. I don't that's not my main
focus. But the more I realize that you
know this, we're not going to only wake up with the sun and go
to sleep with the sun. That's a great way to reset your
mental health. By the way, there's some really
beautiful studies by Kenneth Wright out of University of
Colorado that shows people are depressed, people have anxiety
issues. They go camping for a weekend.
They actually did this experiment, wake up with the
sun, go to sleep with the sun. And even though they're using
flashlights at night and stuff, they're not shining the
flashlights into their own eyes, right?
And so, and their circadian rhythms reset and their mental
health improves tremendously. It's just over and over again.
So I would make, I would enforce if if I were in charge, and I'm
certainly not. Let me put it differently.
If I had a magic wand, I would create light cycles that are
collaborative with human health. Now you do have your your Marc
Andreessen's he's, you know, he's always poking fun at me
about the Marc and I he's. It's self deprecating.
He's self deprecating. Mark and I are friends and
there's a yeah, of course, maybe I should reveal this.
But like, it's, it's, it's a game we're playing.
It's a lot of fun. But Mark makes a very good
point, which is like, he likes to stay up late and be online
and he can crash out after four hours of bright light in the and
get up in the morning. And you know, Mark is also a bit
of an end of one too, right? I mean, if you really think
about it, I mean, so I would enforce bright light during the
morning and daytime and dark evenings.
I would encourage more walking and more movement.
We all know about steps that should be scripted into the
day's activities in a way. You can't just take away
escalators, but there should be something where we're not
counting steps, where we have feedback on how much movement
we're getting. I think glasses that can read
out how much light has been delivered to the eyes.
Did you get your photon quota for the day?
All this stuff is so easy to do. The problem is it always gets
productized as in silo fashion. Exactly so the integrated, you
know, so it's useful like one thing's with mid journey and so
on now is we can think about what the Huberman Health Village
would look like just magic wand like if you take everything you
know, and like what does the store serve in terms of food and
what do the units look like and how are they arranged and
where's the gym and how is that set up and what machines are
there? And also like, you know, just
mentioned the light cycles, for example.
I'll mention something, maybe you're aware of this, Like
Xinhua in China and a few other places will actually turn off
the Internet, I think at like. 11:00 PM or something like that.
And only allow, yeah, so that the kids don't play video games
all night. Amazing.
OK, So now that is something that people might not want
imposed on them. But I think a deep point is you
can opt in to constraints like in the same way like if somebody
joins the military, they're signing up for like the Uniform
Code of Military Justice, you know, or what have you, they're
opting in to constraints, you know, So you, it's like signing
a contract, you're consensually signing a contract that then
constrains you afterwards for mutual benefit, right?
So if you opt into constraints, A constrained society gives you
in a sense, willpower as a service, right?
So another example of this, one of the things we're rolling out
in every school phone lockers so that everybody can give the
speaker their full attention or a dinner their full attention.
So you know, like the phone lockers at gyms where you can
put a phone in a lock, go, beep, beep, beep like this, right?
So we actually make heavier use of those phone lockers.
So this way people have sort of this way, they aren't like, oh,
looking down at their phone, whether it's a break in the
conversation and everybody there that's like a phone free zone.
Or like another example is a Faraday cage zone where it's
just pencil and paper. It's offline time and the
Internet is sort of blocked. You know, you go into an
elevator and the Internet is like blocked.
So imagine that some fraction of buildings are offline offices,
right? They're Faraday free zones
basically, right? Fantastic.
The reason I think about that is I think that's like, you know,
walkability, you know, we, we obviously cars are, I think cars
are good, but we advanced cars, we went to electric cars and
self driving cars and even flying cars in China.
We also subtracted cars where we had walkable communities, right?
And the same way the Internet I think has a lot of good to it.
We can advance that with AI and so on and so forth.
But you can also subtract it. And maybe the answer is like 12
hours a day minimum offline, like 8 hours.
Go ahead. I converted an art gallery into
a living space recently. I'm in that space now.
I knew I wanted, I like fish tanks, obviously.
So I wanted, you know, fish tank's actually the one right
next to me. It's not complete yet, but
there'll be an octopus there. I'm actually trying to get an
octopus to use an iPad, you know, so.
So not. Oh really?
Oh wow, so they're smart. Actually, I'm very interested in
in merging cephalopods and AI. This is a pet project of mine,
literally. So we'll talk about that some
other time. I used to work on auto fish.
OK, OK. To my left is a gym with the
equipment that I want with skylights below that.
I turned the basement, which used to be a video editing
studio for another, the previous owners into a space.
There's no I don't allow any phones down there or Internet.
I draw down there because I do anatomical drawings for my book
and for other things. I read journal articles, I read
books, textbooks, and there is I do not bring my phone down there
and I don't even. Yeah, we both seem to use
spatial memory. Like I have a little library
nook that is just purely offline and I just use pencil and paper.
And if I want something intranet, I will print it out
and I'll bring it there and I'll mark it up longhand because
we're both kind of born in the 80s or 90s or maybe you in the
late 70s and so on and so forth. And so remember the offline era
and it's actually good to focus offline, then you can operate
online. Do you agree with that?
100% and I think that the people who want to have a strong online
presence need to understand that you build the things to bring
online, offline. Exactly.
The moment you're, I've come to realize that the moment I'm
online, especially in social media, which I love, I really
enjoy social media. I am a merged consumer creator
and I think he was the investor, Chris Sacca, that said you're
either, you know, a creator or a manager now.
I think you're a consumer creator and in order to bring
really good material forward, you have to get offline.
You have, yes. I just spent a week as I as I do
every summer with name dropping everyone, My good friend Rick
Rubin, we're close and I would go and I'd spend time with him
in Europe and, and most of that time we were spending discussing
ideas and, and the way Rick has created his life is all around
being able to maximize the creative energy.
He's big on sunlight. He takes great care of himself.
He's he's awesome health now and some years back he he switched
to kind of eating more meat and he got much leaner and all this.
But his whole life is around connecting with his family and
connecting with his work. And he puts real work into it.
Meditation every morning, listening to music, focusing his
energy. I mean, he, there's nothing
haphazard about Rick or his life.
People, I think see him as this like, you know, really mellow
dude. And but there's an intensity
there that's all funneled into incredible work and observing
that and being able to participate in those kinds of
environments, it's been immensely beneficial.
And I try and create my home environment that way.
Now it gets trickier with kids and family and all this stuff
and there, but there are ways to navigate that.
There absolutely are, you know, and the key is really, I think
as you point out, to segment spaces or or segment times
during the day, but it's very hard to say, OK, except perhaps
at night, like I'm going to just stay offline, right?
I think that segmenting spaces helps a lot, a lot.
And. You push something else, Yeah,
which is, I think you and I also do this.
And I find a lot of people don't do this because it's not the
default. But I turn off all notifications
on just about everything, definitely.
And I just go and it's almost like a farmer harvesting.
Yes. When I want to, I go and I
respond to all my messages, but otherwise, I turn off.
I mute everything. I turn off all notifications.
I never want pings appearing on screen.
It's do not disturb to the absolute Max and all the
settings and so on and so forth. Do you do the same?
Yeah. So the model for all of this
actually I gleaned for myself, I gleaned from academia where I
realized that the raw material, there are two things that
mattered most in progressing as a scientist.
One is collecting data and the other, well, three things
really. So collecting and publishing
data and and raising money grants, yeah, right.
But then there were all these other things like teaching,
mentoring students. They're all very important and
part of being an academic. But I had to put I've had on my
whiteboard in my office as a junior professor before I got
tenure, I said papers, grants. And so I made it.
I had to just remind myself to spend 80% of my time, my waking
time focusing on that because otherwise there's committee
work, there's colleagues dropping by, there's the guy
that that just got tenure and they want to come by and hang
out. They want to have a coffee.
And you will fail as an academic if you are not a bit selfish and
self-directed in, in grants and papers.
And it's actually what you owe your laboratory.
It's what you owe your students in postdocs, because nothing
stresses out a lab more than the question of will we get this
grant? It's stresses.
It's like telling your kids like, listen, I don't know if
I'm going to get a paycheck. I don't know if we're going to
eat. And they're like, Oh my God, you
it's, it's, it's actually cruel. It's, it's cruel to do so.
I, I realized as an academic and I caught some Flack for this,
that I didn't have to go to every seminar.
And if I went to a seminar and it wasn't very good, guess what?
I stood up and walked out because I value my time and I
care about my students and post docs more than I care about the
social constraints around this. And you know, I, I did catch
some Flack. I had a couple of like, oh, we
don't see you at seminars. I was like, well, your tenure,
dear Howard Hughes investigator. How about we we talk in five
years when and you know, I'll have a bit more time for this,
you know, so it's the culture often breeds a distribution of
of people's attention and kind of buy into people's attention
in a way that's not considerate of of the the real goals.
OK, and I love seminars, but if it's a shitty seminar, I'm
walking out. I'm sorry.
Yes, I agree with that. So I do the same thing in my
personal life and in my my work life, which is not everything
can be optimized, but I try and set things up so that I can be
more present for family and friends by virtue of the fact
that I'm less present for them when I'm working.
And, you know, and, and I also think that there soon will be a
literature because I know there's experiments are
happening where, you know, the brain we know is plastic.
We train ourselves for different modes of attention.
And if you're allowing your attention to be broken every,
you know, 3 to 7 minutes or even more frequently by other devices
and other activities, other communications, you, you're
training your brain to, you know, to be the squirrel that
everyone jokes about with like, you know, the, the squirrel, you
know that you're becoming the squirrel.
And it's, you know, squirrels probably have a better
attentional mechanism than a lot of people nowadays.
So I think it took us about 10 years to get here where we're
starting to realize, oh, you know, our behaviors, feedback on
our brain circuitry and and now we're starting to try and think
about how to recover that. Setting up unique spaces where
you just don't do certain things also helps other people respect
those boundaries because if it's by virtue of time, they're like,
oh, I text you. If I don't text you before 10
AM, you know, it's I can't get to you.
Or after 10:00 PM. We tend to respect people's
sleep boundaries where you say, you know, you don't expect a
text back after 9:00 PM for most people.
OK, but space boundaries are great because people that know
me know when I'm down in that basement, I'm not going to
respond to anything. I don't care what time of day it
is. So if I say I was in my
basement, they're like, oh, they're not offended.
And this stuff matters because in order to make a community
work, it not just as a siloed, it looked like Huberman
community or or Johnson community or Balaji community,
that eventually there's going to be cross talk between these
communities. Of course, of course and.
So understanding that when people are offline, it's for a
critical reason often just sends the message in the same way
that, you know, former Dean of our medical school, Phil Pizzo,
everyone knew that guy ran every morning from 4:30 to 5:30 AM and
then ran the medical school and you go, he's a badass and kind
of, and you'd go, oh, like, maybe I should do something like
that. That's a little early to the
Jocko. That that's a little early
because you're waking up before the sun, but it is, you know, a
certain kind of guy who likes to do that.
Tim Cook also gets up and does his bike and or.
What have you? Yeah.
And the results obviously speak for them, OK.
Yeah, so now. All right, so slightly switching
gear. So that was good.
That's like the human health zone for a living.
OK, let's do it. What about let's do it?
I want to do it. Let's.
Do it. I mean, I have it here in my own
spot, but let's do it, yeah. Send me photos if you want and
then I'll see if we can mock up something over here.
OK. Now related to that on on like
sort of the other end of it is there's a lot of biotech that is
not either biotech, biomedicine, genetics, you know, the whole
whole shebang. Basically biomedicine as a, as a
whole thing where it is difficult to do in the US
medical system because it can't easily get reimbursed or it
can't get a so-called CPT code, current procedural terminology
or FDA doesn't allow it through or blocks it for many years.
Whether it's a drug or a device or, you know, there's, there's
also like CLIA, like you know, it, it, you know, it is, there's
many different kinds of regulators and regulatory
blocks. Another one is something called
CPOM, corporate practice of medicine, where in theory, why,
why don't you see too many hospital start-ups because a non
physician can't employ A physician by law because of
so-called corporate practice of medicine doctrine and so on.
And there's various workarounds for this, but they're all pain
in the ass workarounds. So given all that, what does the
human health zone look like for the developers of these
technologies? So we just talked about kind of
the consumer, right? Like, you know, the blinds and
the sunlight and all that kind of stuff.
You know, the offline time, the patches, the glasses, right?
You mentioned all these things and that's amazing.
What about on the producer side? What kinds of things you know do
you see as being held back by the system, or what kinds of
things you just develop? You mean in terms of drug and
other types of technologies? I'd like to see more be more
ubiquitous. I'll give a concrete example.
So have you heard of Mini Circle in Prospera?
No. OK, so mini circle is so first,
what is Prospera? Prospera is a startup society in
Honduras. The law got changed years ago to
allow for new special economic zones.
And one of the things they had there was a biotech free zone
where you could pick regulations from 33 different countries.
So you basically pick and choose.
So this way you have regulatory competition like I was talking
about earlier and mini circle set up there.
And there's a bunch of people who are investors, Sam Alton's
investor, I'm an investor, bunch of other people are investors.
And what this did is it basically had an experimental
treatment to give you plasmids that would essentially increase
your muscle mass, among other things, OK.
And so it's experimental treatment.
And one of my friends took it and he said he felt absolutely.
Now there's there's studies on why this looked like they
weren't doing it until they're blind, OK, they'll show you
somebody. This looked interesting.
He said he felt absolutely amazing afterwards, like 10
years younger. Like it was like a blood
transfusion. And he's posting about how he
looked super jacked afterwards. And it was like a different
mechanism of action. And then Bezos followed him,
Jeff Bezos, because this is something money can't buy, like
a genuinely new medical treatment.
And that showed, you know, one of the reasons I'm into startup
societies in network states is because we can actually get
biotech free zones where it's willing, you know, patient,
willing doctor, Right. And there's various
controversies around this because people are like, Oh my
God, you shouldn't be free to, you know, I believe in your
body, your choice. I do believe that you should be
free to. Yeah, that's right.
And so that that extends to medical sovereignty, right?
Like if you want to take a treatment and their guy wants to
give it to you and you're like of, you know, of age, whether
it's 21 or whatever it is in your jurisdiction that says post
21 years old, you're walking in clear eyed.
You've got informed consent, whatever forms we need, OK,
whatever procedures, you should be able to be medically
sovereign in the same way that you should be able to opt out of
the SEC's guidelines and actually go, you know, the SEC
didn't want to let anybody other than quote accredited investors
invest in something which would have, it meant everybody who
wasn't already wealthy would not have been able to invest in
crypto and so they wouldn't have become wealthy, right?
So the FDA often doesn't want people to have large effect size
drugs. They want small side effect size
drugs, which are different, right?
Like large effect size means you have a huge effect and it's like
Ozempic, it's like a like a big change in your life.
Small side effect size means FDA doesn't get any negative press.
And those are very different in terms of whether it's beneficial
to the to the end user or not. Like the entire system in the
20th century is set up to minimize side effect size as
opposed to maximizing effect size.
Anyway, the reason I'm just saying all that is that's an
example of a special economic zone, a biotech free zone that
allowed one of these treatments. Because you always see papers
that have these amazing things happening in academia or on
mouse experiments, but they never make it to humans because
it's like this long 10 year tunnel maybe to get through,
right? So let's not.
Use it. I mean, it's kind of amazing to
me that right now it's like the creatine craze creatine's been
around. I started taking creatine when I
was 18 and and that's like and it works, right?
Right Right now I'm not taking. It makes you smarter too.
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
And if you're sleep deprived, I recommend people doubling or
tripling the dose for a few days.
You'll get a little bit more, you'll head to the bathroom a
few more times, but you'll notice a significant offset of
the sleep deprivation effect. I wouldn't do that over long
periods of time. But yeah, the data on creatine
are great. It works.
I, I do a washout every few months where I like right now, I
just stopped taking it and you urinate out a lot of water and
it's kind of fun to see how strong you are without the
creatine and then get back on it kind of build.
It's, it's a psychological thing.
You get kind of build back. It's but you'd be surprised how
much of what what you earned on creatine in terms of strength.
You, you keep even off creatine. In any case, everyone's crazy
about creatine right now, right? It took forever for that to hit.
You know, first it was vitamin D3, now it seems to be creatine.
I think magnesium's our next because turns out I just had an
expert chair of autoliology from Stanford come on and say, you
know, taking magnesium before sleep or just once a day can
offset hearing loss. We know hearing loss is related
to dementia. You know, just a standard dose
of mag three in eight or mag bis glycinate is, you know, protects
hearing for understood reasons. But you're not going to hear
that right? You're going to hear we can go
dig up the mouse papers, but there won't be a clinical trial
on humans for treatment of tinnitus or anything with
magnesium. And also go out there and say,
Hey, people should take magnesium.
And then I get a bunch of MD's going like, oh, you're a
supplement, chill. And I'm like, all right, well,
let's see who as they are hearing, look at me and look at
you now. And in 10 years, like I hate to
do that because it's kind of a Dick thing to do, but I just go
all right, like I'm not the fastest or the strong, but I'm
feel like I'm doing really well. My dad has always been very
moderate about drinking, careful not to eat too much, not he's
not obsessive exercises, but not too much focused on his sleep
work, consistent hours. My dad's 82 and he's firing on 8
cylinders. It's incredible.
Like he's still going strong. He's got little things here and
there deals with him, you know, and it's I again, it's
cumulative. So for me, the, the FDA piece, I
think you, you pointed out very, very correctly, they're trying
to minimize side effect size. The I think the key with opting
in and informed consent is that people need to be aware of the
realistic risks. I'll give an example.
So I'm going to kind of push back on this, even though I
agree with you, which is stem cells, OK, stem cell therapies
were allowed in the United States.
They were sort of let allowed to happen in kind of a duck to the
FDA radar. Stem cells sounds great, right?
Like you want cells that can become other cells to replace
connective tissue, brain and etcetera.
But you know, stem cells are a big part of the reasons why
tumors proliferate too. There was a company down in
Florida marketing stem cells for macular degeneration and other
forms of blindness. People who were losing their
vision are concerned about that got injections of stem cells
into their eye and they went blind very quickly, which shut
down any advertising for stem cells on Google.
You can't just say I you have a stem cell company now it's kind
of merged with other things. It's kind of cryptic what it is.
Look stem cells injected into your shoulder might be one thing
or your knee. I know a very prominent
physician in the Wellness space who got an injection of stem
cells down in Mexico into his back kept up with his sauna
protocols. So it's unclear what actually
causes and ended up with an egg sized infection sepsis issue
that almost made him paralyzed. I know because the the repair
surgery was done in a clinic I'm very familiar with by a very
qualified neurosurgeon and they said this guys super lucky.
Why are you and your friends you're, you know, messing around
with stem cells? It's not FDA approved, et
cetera. So the informed consent has to
be done in a way that people understand that the realistic
risks, not just in a hey, sign this form with all the terrible
stuff that can happen. Tell me.
Right.
I will accept a stem cell injection perhaps.
I've never had them, but into maybe into my shoulder or my
knee. I don't want it anywhere near my
nervous system. I don't want it in the central
nervous system, not in my spinal cord, not in my brain, not in my
eye, thank you very much. It's just that that tissue is
too precious, impossible to replace, and the data just
aren't there. That said, I think there are a
lot of things like for instance, people struggle with sleep.
I think even if you're already doing all the best things for
sleep, there's a an outsized benefit to getting a bit more
REM sleep each night. Sure, you can heat your bed, but
turns out there's a peptide called pinealin which helps
regenerate the pinealocytes of the pineal gland, which secrets
melatonin. And you can pulse with pinealin
every third night or so and see dramatic improvements in REM
sleep consistently on every night.
Really impressive. Not FDA approved, but not banned
either. I think as soon as people
realize how powerful Pinealin is as a sleep aid, it's going to be
not as big as Ozempic, but it's going to be headed in that
direction. OK, you can ask Brian, I
believe. I don't want to speak for him,
but I'm pretty sure we've had conversations where he's either
experimented with or uses pineal and I don't know if he does
things like SS31A peptide to improve mitochondrial health.
Sure. Red light from the sun, red
light from a red light bed or a unit will improve mitochondrial
health. SS31 improves mitochondrial.
Is it safe? Well, we're still finding out,
seems to be pretty safe. These things will never get FDA
approval unless they become like Ozempic where the effect size is
huge and the market is huge. So I'm very excited about what
you're saying where there are going to be markets for things
that people are not aware of or it's being sold on Gray market
right now where it's not clear what you're getting.
And I think fortunately the current administration seems to
want peptides to be a semi regulated space as opposed to an
unregulated space. But for peptides to be available
because the pharma community would love to shut down the
peptide and compounding farm pharmacy industry.
Look, most people can get by taking 110th of the amount of of
Ozempic or Ozempic like drug for, for reduction of body
weight with far fewer side effects.
But 110th means the drug companies are making 110th the
profit. So a lot of people are now going
to compounding pharmacies for their Ozempic Monjaro and
similar and getting awesome effects, awesome effects.
I don't take it, I never have. But if I ever need to lose some
weight, I certainly will and I'll go that route.
So I, I think it's, it's very, I would love to see a kind of a
merge between better oversight of quality of products and
messaging around, more thorough messaging around those products
as opposed to just being kind of the Wild West online.
You can go online and buy peptides.
There needs to be something in between strict FDA regulations
and just kind of Wild West Gray market.
We really need that. And I don't know if that could
be established in Singapore, if it could be established
elsewhere, but I think the current administration in the
United States has made room for that, is going to continue to
make room for that the same way we have for supplements.
They're not unregulated. You have NSF, you know, tested
for sport. There are regulations and
guidelines that allow people to make better informed choices.
We all know what those brands are.
They're they're like 5 or 6 big brands and supplementation you
can trust. OK, This is third party tested
NSF certified for sport. If you're a state, if you're a
mom or a dad or a whatever, an academic or a programmer, you're
an AI founder. You feel better taking something
that has a few of those stamps, period.
So. I I agree with a lot of that.
I want to give a slight push back on the push back and then
just get, you know, OK. Yeah.
So my view is no plane crashes, no planes, no train crashes, no
trains, right? Like that, say if somebody
wasn't first on, let's say, an open heart surgery or a brain
transplant, we'd never know that those things worked.
And, you know, like somebody might be OK, but they're kind of
failing and they take the risk of literally dying to get a
heart transplant, and then they're better, right?
So they take extreme downside risk for upside potentially,
right. And so I agree with you on the
disclosure and on the information there.
There's ways you can do it with registries and so on and so
forth potentially, right talk to previous patients and and so on.
There's two other things that can be done more than two, but
at least 2. So one of them is, you know,
farm GKB, Russ Altman's. I've heard of it, but I'm not
familiar with the details. OK.
So farm GKB is because you're on you're maybe more on the neuro
side of things and I'm more on the diagnostics like genomic
side of things, right, so far, I mean obviously we know a little
bit of both, but that's just kind of my background.
So farm GKB has been around for more than 20 years and it's a
database of all kinds of genetic slash drug interactions, right.
So if I have VKR C1 variance and Cy P2A9, then what is my
warfarin response, right? And how does it relate to like
vitamin K intake and so and so forth?
And sometimes you could have a little old lady that needs a
huge warfarin dose and a big football player that you know,
bleeds out from a much smaller dose.
And you don't know that until you know the genetics of it.
So in theory, before you take some of these treatments, if
everybody had their personal genome, we could partially
forecast the result of that treatment for a large number of
treatments, right? And then a whole body MRI, for
instance, something that gets knocked a lot.
I think it's fantastic not just as a, you know, tumor detection
tool, but as something like a structural detection tool and
understanding where people could, could benefit, where
people might truly be at risk. I think absolutely, absolutely.
And have you, have you heard? You may have heard like
organoids. Yeah, I had Sergio Pasca on the
podcast recently. He's one of the leaders in that
space. OK, great.
From Stanford. Yeah, we were post docs
together, building assembloids and organoids to test neurons
and other responses in a dish, basically.
That's right. So in theory, you could have a
patient derived organoid that is mini Huberman in a Petri dish or
mini biology in a Petri dish. And then I could, you know, it's
amazing how much that cell culture will sort of predict
about your own physiological response.
But it's only the thing in the Petri dish that is taking the
hit like an allergic response. It's not 100% of course, but
it's like a proxy for you in the same way that like the
pharmacogenomic lookup is like a proxy before your main body
takes it. Just like you're saying,
injected in my knee, injected in my arm, but not like the main
stuff, right? Like, so this is less precious
tissue that can kind of, you know, be a proxy for yourself,
the organoid before it goes into.
I love that. I'll tell you, you know, I mean,
if you it may, it brought to mind a kind of a chuckle in my
head where, you know, it's so crazy if someone goes in for an
allergen test, right? They like rub the, the thing on
them. It's like, I mean, it's, it's
OK, it's low level, but it's it's kind of tedious and it
doesn't allow you to implement over time.
Like if some new allergen comes on or some new detection test,
you want all that run, you don't want to go in.
I mean, we're finally getting to the point where you don't have
to like go to an office quite as much.
People, you know, they remote phlebotomist.
I wonder what your thoughts are and why this space tends to
stumble and stagger along for so long.
And then like we get these so-called breakthroughs, right?
I mean, Ozempic, Monjaro, the GLP peptides have been known
about for a very long time. We're in the niche communities
of bodybuilding and fitness and all that.
And then it broke through. There are other things.
I think Pinealin is going to be very important.
I think for people who want to increase testosterone, rather
than taking testosterone, people will be taking thing peptides
like Gunadarellin, which support the hypothalamic pituitary
access more generally don't shut down hormone production.
I mean, it's just wild how we feel like the kit is basically,
you know, like pharmaceuticals which don't give you much
control over in space and time, but existing pharmaceuticals are
they'll get you someplace. I think of this kind of like my
buddy Peter Attia, right? He because he's comes from
medicine and he was trained at Stanford.
Like he has more of a, he'll use some supplements and talk about
them a little bit. He's really a behaviors and
drugs guy, right? Like if you really like, if you
look away, say like, yeah, it's just his training is in
prescription drugs. He always says, you know, it's
been tested BPC 157 for, for joints and recovery.
Anyone that's taken it either got a very strong placebo effect
or can just tell you somehow it works.
Maybe it's placebo, maybe it's not.
But Peter is like, I don't know, I don't know about BBC 157.
It's not FDA, like there's no trials on it.
I feel comfortable taking it, trying it.
So how do we bridge this space so that it becomes formalized?
Because I, I think that there's a huge opportunity here, but
someone's got to take it and run with it.
And I don't know anyone that's like the, that's really doing
that in. And I what's that?
OK, say what you're going. To say and I'll say something.
Yeah, I mean, I like to see when people build structures.
So I not to go off on too long of a riff here, but you know, I
started talking about health practices during the pandemic.
Then I started my podcast and I was like, but there's a lot of
information you can glean from science that can you can use to
benefit yourself. But.
And I'm writing this book, they'll be out next year, not
this September, but next September because I want to
formalize that into the the protocols.
But I have to say, like what Brian was doing with Blueprint
or what people are doing with function health or what or what
Peter Attia is starting to do in these different people are
trying to bring it together under single platforms so that
you don't have to do so much. People don't have to do so much
work running around trying to figure out what to do.
But it's still very piece meal. It feels to me like there should
be a go front gate where you go in, they take blood, they take a
skin sample, they build an organoid, you get a couple
devices and then you just live life for a little while.
You get feedback update, live life update.
You know, I, I don't think we're even close to there because.
We could get there. We absolutely could get there.
And I just want to know what's the next step when, let's say
the next six months, 12 months year to get to that platform
because I'm excited about what you're saying.
But I agree that we're just going to go adrift as a as a
health field. OK, so here is what I propose.
So first is we write the spec for like literally it.
Let's say it's an AI prompt, OK, For everything that the ideal
human health zone would have. So let me just enumerate some of
the things you mentioned. There's the patches, there's the
glasses, there's the opening of the curtains and the cortisol
spike in the morning, cold water, workout and then shut
down dark nights at night. There's also the diet.
It's not hamburgers and stuff like that.
It's, you know, like like healthier foods.
There is the other kinds of devices, whether it's like, you
know, watches for like fit, you know, like like step tracking.
And so there's a zillion quantified self gizmos.
There's peptides like Manjaro and the GLPS, there's
supplements, so there's creatine, vitamin D, magnesium.
There's there's a bunch of other stuff that we mentioned, but
that that covers that covers several pieces.
Of that right and goal directed and the psychology piece would
be sort of where where people would identify one or two pain
points either work focus pain points, relational pain points
and you'd have real experts that could handle that quickly.
I mean, there's a whole conversation to be had about the
kind of the, the psychedelic space like, you know, which
either seems to rescue entrepreneurs and founders or
collapse. Them or yeah, collapse.
Them yeah, collapse. Them you have to acknowledge one
shot you can do too much. Too many psychedelics, and for
some people, too many psychedelics, means one journey.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a hybrid and some people
benefit from them tremendously. You know, on the podcast today
I've that's. That's where the.
Yeah, sorry, it was the consciousness guy.
And he talks about his experiences on DMT fundamentally
shifting how he thinks about consciousness and evolving his
work. But he's the guy who did it once
and is still thinking about that five years later and updating
his research. I mean, Christophe is one of the
leaders in the research on consciousness for over 30 years.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of people collapse themselves with
psychedelics, so I'm not suggesting that.
But where people have pain points and hang ups and
psychological hang ups, they need to not have to go to a
retreat and be able to work on that.
I mean, I think that that would be integrated into the space as
well. Yes.
So by the pharmacogenomic point could be helpful there as well,
because you might be able to predict which people would have
a bad reaction versus which could tolerate it for
psychologist for all kinds of things.
But so so my thought is here's here's a possible line of
attack. A let's figure out what the
ideal is like the magic wand kind of thing, right?
You have, you know, you've been elected president of this
network state, OK, in a tech, what I call a techno democratic
election, meaning you have on chain votes that are recorded.
So you have 1010 thousand people they've recorded.
You have authority to do OK, fine.
So you can or, or you just building community from scratch.
You look at real estate development or some combination.
All right, so you've laid out everything and So what does it
look like? And so service, we have all
that. Then we make a video like a just
a short of what a day in the life looks like.
And we pause and freeze frame. And when you see a patch kind of
thing, for example, on someone's neck or below someone's shirt,
we pause and we show citation, citation, citation, citation,
citation, citation. Because you and I both, you
know, it's, it's a, it's hard sci-fi.
This is not impossible stuff. It's just system integration of
things where in many cases you point out they've been around
for some time. Creatine's been around for some
time. Obviously the GLPS have been
around for some time. The patches more than 10 years
ago, I had seen the non invasive patches and it's just kind of
being hard to get them out into the public for various
regulatory reasons. So we take all this stuff, you
know, for example, there's treatments to reverse aging in
mice that, you know, there's, there's amazing phenotypes where
like you've got old bald, you know, mice over here and then
like a sleek mouse and they're both 2 years old.
And, and you know, there's cancer drugs that show like
reversing graying of hair, right?
So we, we take all, we freeze frame and we show sight, sight,
sight, sight, sight like pops out, you know, like this, right?
So it's like suspension disbelief.
Then like the movie kind of continues and then we basically
have something which says to a regulator in the UAE, in lots of
small countries, By the way, this is the secret, I think, to
the thesis. Antithesis, synthesis, OK, FDA
holds back a lot of things, but the antithesis is you want some
form of regulation, some form of quality control, right?
The synthesis I think is lots of small sovereigns which are still
States and legitimately can enforce rules, could set up
their own biotech free zones and have people like you or Peter
Tia or Brian Johnson, plus traditional MD's or what have
you as a panel, as you were mentioning earlier, that just
reviews stuff for that sovereign.
And then they have a trade off between, OK, maybe they'll get
some Flack, but maybe this is a really promising new treatment.
Maybe it's like like stool transplants for example.
Sound weird but they are good. Oh, the data are really
impressive, as are, you know, transfusions of young to old
blood. Parabiosis.
Oh, a former postdoc of mine went to go work for my my
colleague Tony Weiss, Corey's company, which was Tony, was the
first person to, you know, talk about transfusions, you know,
the baby blood stuff and parabiosing animals.
And it's remarkable. They're now looking at this for
improvement of vision, you know, reversing blinding diseases.
I mean, the data are still incoming, but it's spectacular.
What what it the the mouse data are spectacular.
The human data are promising and you know, it's it's I love this.
I mean, I if, if you tell me how to implement this, I'm game,
right, I'm all right. I think you're going to tell me
that this is going to be linked to, to the crypto community,
right at some level? Here's why.
The reason is crypto is risk
capital, but there's billions and billions and billions of
dollars in crypto. I mean, I think there's a deep
similarity here, which is it is, I've heard of Desai Des.
Yeah, right. So that's like crypto funding
science outside the system, right?
So it's like still technical people, but they're willing to
go and add up all the numbers outside the academic masthead,
for example. And just like crypto has built
billions, trillions of dollars of value outside Wall Street,
right? In a way that's open to
everyone, not just those people in I mean, it's still something
which impresses the best people on Wall Street, especially
today. So similarly with Desai, you
know, a few things that I think are coming, but like the crypto
plus science movement, one is turning people from patients
into active participants in their own health.
They're not just like, Amen to that.
I absolutely love that. I mean, the, the, you know,
hospitals are depressing places, even for the physicians that
work there. I mean, it's just like there's
some beautiful hospitals like Stanford has built this
incredible hospital. Actually, Mark and and Laura.
The. The emergency Children's
Hospital, right? They, they created that.
I mean, they made that possible. Beautiful hospitals exist, but
no one, no one wants to go to a hospital.
People care about their health and there's nothing in between.
And this is sounding kind of, you know, cliche nowadays, but
to say it, but between, you know, sickness care and and not
seeing your doctor, there's not a lot of pro health care.
And you get those silly posters like, you know, here are the
food groups and like, here's how do you move?
Like none of that stuff works. That's none of it works.
Exactly it will that's the thing.
That's why I like what you and I mean in a sense, you know, 10
years ago I remember realizing that fitness and beauty were the
back door to health and and medicine.
And the reason is people will actually pay cash out of pocket
for fitness and beauty to get better.
And then in that you can sneak in all of the medical and health
lessons and so on to like improve from their baseline as
opposed to waiting till something is broke and then
fixing it, which is the traditional medical system.
And it does very little for you after, you know, like like
something. I mean it can maybe get you back
to normal but then has no interest in making you better
than normal. Right.
Well, have you noticed that the if you look historically like
there are these three main very disparate communities from which
every new health technology besides standard drug discovery?
Let me guess, bro science? OK, what are the other ones that
you guessed Let's? Was that one of them?
Yeah, well, yeah, I was going to say, you know, no one wants to
admit this, but it's like bodybuilding, plastic, plastic
surgery and and academic science.
Those 3 communities couldn't be more different from one another,
right? And yet the bodybuilders learn
to use nutrition and hormone augmentation and training, let's
say training nutrition and augmentation, right?
And they took it to the extremes.
But then and then the aesthetic, whatever community, Korea, My
goal is to be the last person in Los Angeles, where I currently
live now that hasn't gotten Botox or anything.
I'm, I'm graying and like I, I chose to not do that.
I don't. Just you're you're a
distinguished Gray, I think. I don't, you know, I just sort
of, I don't dye my hair. I just decided, you know, to see
what you know, I can't say I never will embrace that
community, but I have a friend, Jason Diamond, who's like, he's
one of the like premier plastic surgeons.
And, and, and it's interesting because that community is, does
all this stuff of like moving fat from here to there and a
little bit of this and a little bit of the nip tuck thing, as
they say. And then the academic community
is a is embraces real mechanisms and discovery.
But I had to see a lot of my colleagues get sick and some die
and many look getting what we call the tenured look where
they're like five years after they start.
You're like, what happened to you?
A lot of founders experience this too, because it's intense.
But in all kidding aside, the people in the sleep.
Science community at Stanford were the ones that back in the
midnight, I would like demand. And the guy named Emmanuel
Mignon, who discovered the genes and mechanisms of narcolepsy.
Every day, the laboratory would migrate outside to get sunlight
before going back in for the late latter half of the day's
work. And I was like, what are you
doing? He's like, you're setting your
circadian rhythm. This will give you energy the
next morning. And this is an MDPHD.
He was a Howard Hughes investigator at one point.
I'm thinking like, these are interest.
These are smart people, right? And I'm like, why don't we know
this stuff? He's like, oh, all the data are
in mice. You can't get people to do this
stuff consistently. And I thought, this is crazy.
These are some of the most powerful mechanisms.
Circadian biology is one of the most powerful aspects to our
daily living. No one escapes circadian
biology. It shapes our health.
It shapes our illness, and we can work with it.
And I thought to myself, gosh, somebody needs to bridge these
things. I always enjoyed resistance
training and running. I'd like to run.
I'm not a great runner, but I'm an avid runner, as they say.
And, and so I realized that what we're trying to do and what the
podcast community is trying to do, what a Tia's trying to do,
what I'm trying to do, what Matt Walker's trying to do, what
Brian's doing. And clearly what you're trying
to do is create this 4th category that respects the, the
view that some of that stuff is pretty extreme, but that it's
not very, you can't implement it.
Like bodybuilding is not applicable to most people, but
certain pieces of it are. Extreme endurance training
isn't, but certain pieces of it are.
The aesthetic thing is, is not, but certain pieces are.
And academic science is applicable, not all of it, but
certain pieces are. And that's where I was like, OK,
I bridge two of these three silos.
I'm going to get out there and start messaging about it.
And I love the idea of, of establishing a community.
Here's my one concern that I I would love for you to explain
how we get our heads around. The moment you get a person in
charge of a community, they're called a guru or a cult leader.
Unless they're president. So I've got actually go ahead
finished your saying and I've. Got yeah.
And so, you know, I'm only half kidding here, but you know, like
sometimes the messaging can get contorted from the outside in a
way that's very that pulls the thing down from below.
I'm not sure what what people say.
I'm worried about people not receiving the critical messaging
or having the opportunity to implement this stuff because the
moment it's under the rubric of of someone's name, typically it
becomes we get these like cult images, right?
Totally, totally, totally. So I've got I've got a few
thoughts on that. So first is the same technology
that you can use to send one Bitcoin on chain, you can
actually use to record one vote. It's like a, it's like a the
debit and credit and in such a way that it's cryptographically
provable that they made the vote, who did it when they did
it, which wallet they did it from, who they voted for and so
on and so forth. Basically you can, I can get
into details, but a high level you can see how that's true,
right? Cool.
So what we can do is we can actually have binding on chain
plebiscites in the same way we have binding on chain
transactions. And the amazing thing about
cryptocurrency is it transacts across borders like that, Say a
Japanese person can pay a Brazilian who can pay a
Frenchman and so on and so forth.
And that just works. It's all Internet.
And the fact that they have three different national
currencies doesn't matter with techno democracy.
And I can, I can share that video with you afterwards.
We extend that so that you can now basically hold an election,
a genuine election on chain and a Japanese person or Brazilian
and a Frenchman can all vote for you as Andrew Huberman,
president of a startup society. And that vote is what I call the
social smart contract. They're literally signing a
smart contract that is also a social contract.
And it says you're basically collecting a thumbs up from a
bunch of crypto wallets. But a crypto wallet is a much
more powerful thing than people realize because today it's
upstream of like funds and you know, like your like money and
messaging like it's upstream of like access to a discord or to A
to a crypto wallet, which is money that's real.
But tomorrow it's upstream of drones or, or doors like like
crypto wallets can open doors like because they're keys, they
can turn locks, they can turn on machines, they can turn on
sequencing devices, they can unlock data stores.
Crypto wallets can do a lot of things.
They're basically just very powerful data structures, right?
And so if you have hundreds or thousands or millions of crypto
wallets that are all voting for something that's like the
formation of a digital state, it is crowdfunding basically,
right? You can do a lot with that.
It's a very, very general concept.
And the formation of it can be shown to be a million consensual
actions uncoerced of people's own free will, right?
It's like a streaming vote because they can all come in one
at a time, and you can build up that following over time, right?
OK. So because of that, that's a
mechanism to come president legitimately president of a
network state because you're actually winning a vote of their
own free will there, right. And so we take the same concepts
of democracy, just like, you know, sort of the Internet
reclaimed free speech, you know, is in touch and go and they
pulled it, kind of pulled it back and we kind of reclaimed
free speech. We can reclaim democracy.
So that's one big piece. OK.
And the second piece is I agree with you.
Like, you know, one of the things about network state
startup societies is you want to be minimal necessary individual.
So you you publish a blueprint. And I know Brian has actually
used the term blueprint, right? So call it blueprint in the
small B sense. OK, you publish A blueprint and
you're just doing the first one to show that it works.
You're doing a template and you publish a template.
Why? Because I know and you know, we
don't have all the answers and then let other people copy and
fork it just like an open source kind of blueprint.
We actually have the architectural diagrams there and
the, you know, all the kind of stuff, right?
So I think that is my answer to obviating or, or addressing
those two correct points that you mentioned, which are A, we
have legitimacy because it's provable and B, we have
decentralization. So it's not personal.
Great. I love it.
It helps me envision a number of ways that we could try and scale
the protocols as we refer to them.
Yes, because that's ultimately what I want to do.
You know, is we're half kidding. You know, I decided to write a
book called Protocols, right, a user manual for the human brain
and body, and was going to release it this month and then
decided, well, I want to put illustration so that people can
really put this stuff into a framework.
Visuals make a big, but if you think about how clunky, I know
it's so clunky, it's so old school when you really think
about the approach. And yet books and podcasts and
social media are largely the the best tools that we have at this
point. Traditional media has a partial
but diminishing role in this, right?
Although I will say it's kind of interesting.
I went on Bill Maher a few weeks ago.
We had discussion about public health and health practices,
alcohol, sunlight, etcetera. And it's interesting to see some
of these media channels that I think bills kind of sits
somewhere in the middle between extreme right and extreme left,
basically right. I mean, folks, the Democrats and
Republicans and you know, the the surge in in new in new
audience from that was tremendous.
And so I think there's AI anticipate at least in the next
24 months, a growing role for new forms of traditional media,
if you will, people who are not like not CNN, New York Times
versus Fox, right, but things in between, even if they're linked
to some of those networks. Maybe the new?
Barry Weiss maybe the the Free Press is a great example of
that. I think we're going to see more
of that. And yet if you OK, so if you add
that in plus books, plus podcasts, plus social media,
that the integrated implementation of all of this
requires what you're describing. So I'm super excited about.
Yeah. So I'm super excited about what
I'm hearing. I'm learning during this
podcast, which is awesome. You got it.
And just exactly, so we have all of these Internet innovations
and we want to package them together in the physical world.
And so you just need like a relatively small piece of real
estate to actually do that and a bunch of people who will opt in.
So for example, you know, my friends at Coinbase just set up
something they call Basecamp, which is a pop up, like a pop up
village where you can use Coinbase technologies to pay and
do contracts and stuff like. That good?
I purchased Bitcoin on Coinbase this morning.
Great. OK.
That's the only place where I purchased my crypto so.
OK, well, but, but bring it locally or you get get get it to
your local wallet and so on. So I love Coinbase, but they'll
also tell you that. So the so Coinbase has basecamp.
This this is a term we call a pop up, right?
Because doing like a full real estate build out like we've done
in network school is like a significant commitment.
But we could have the Huberman Health Village pop up here at
network school if you want to do that.
And we just have whatever, 1000 square feet or 10s of thousands
of square feet. And we go through a bunch of
your old podcasts and we just have a clip of you saying
something and boom, we immediately cut to the
implementation of that in the physical world, right?
Like the, the IoT curtains or something like that, right?
Or you say magnesium and we've got the shelves with magnesium
supplements in every room. Just like imagine 50 clips like
that where you're basically projecting all your concepts
system integrated into the physical world.
And the same way like an iPhone integrates a camera and it
integrates a, you know, an accelerometer and the whole is
greater than some of the parts, right?
And, and the reason for this is you have a formula and you have
managed to probably get an N of 1 implementation of that that
works for you. But with some thought, you can
probably scale that for others because they're not going to be
as skilled and balancing it and setting it all up in such a way.
I mean, that's what your book is.
It's trying to explain to people what they can do and order of
descending importance. That's right.
But but like for just a small example, bulk orders of
magnesium or creatine, they're not that expensive, but you
could, you know, you can get bulk discounts on many different
kinds of things, right? So a bunch of people doing them
together. And what's cool about this is
then people, you know, they come in and you know, 30 days later,
after the human health zone, right, or whatever you want to
call it, their, their skin is glowing, their eyes are light.
They've, you know, you show the sleep tracker.
Actually, you know what we could even do like a traditional
academic study where we, you know, we show their metrics and
stuff beforehand and then we show everything improving 30 or
60 days in. And you, and ideally it's like
large effect size where it's just, you don't even have to do
stats on it. It's just like, you know, boom,
square wave, right? And certain kinds of things are
like that, like, you know, the the diabetes prevention program,
the DPP, are you familiar with that?
Right? That has like a very large
effect size because they basically make everybody work
out and eat vegetables and and so and so like.
Glucose regulation gets better. Yes, exactly.
They lose like 10% of body weight or some, some some
significant amount, which is a lot for a lot, right.
So I think also this is something where once it's done
on a small scale like that and and we videotape the whole thing
and that's content for the pod, right Then like governments are
like, whoa, this is awesome. I want to modify my city or a
real estate developer says I want to build a new real estate
on this basis. So we built something which is
both a cool experiment and demonstration in its own right,
but it's meant to be a prototype and template for like, Healthy
Huberman living around the world.
Listen, I'm all for it. Let's do it.
It sounds like Sounds like Singapore is the place to do it.
A great place, yes. US would be would be very
complicated. California would be especially
complicated. I mean, regulations here are
like absurd. And I say that as a lifetime
Californian who lived through the fires, multiple earthquakes,
including the 89. I mean, the, the, the way that
things are constrained here. Actually, I read the book or
listened to the book Abundance, You know, Ezra Klein, this is
quite good in, in explaining why it's so hard to get things done
in California. Singapore sounds like the place
to do it. I love this because we also need
reflections and data and feedback from not just males,
but we need women kids. A lot of my friends who are able
are homeschooling their kids or in small collect.
They have like other kids over and they like group homeschool
their kids and they're creating these environments of kids are
wearing, you know, red lens Roca glasses in the evening, they're
off devices at night. They're it's very controlled.
They're eating really good food, getting their proteins that are
essential fatty acids. They're getting sunlight.
They're, you know, this is what you're trying to recreate.
It sounds like 1 is trying to recreate, excuse me, something
like from the 70s and 80s and 90s.
But actually it's taking the best of that, integrating it
with devices and with modern nutrition and supplementation.
Traditional. Yeah, it's not, it's not trying
to go back to the wonder years. Only a few people will get that
reference, you know, but it's trying to integrate that era of,
of growing up as a teen or a young kid with what we now know
from modern science, which is clearly going to extend life
lifespan, clearly going to improve brain development,
clearly going to set those kids apart in ways that none of us
can predict. And it's not just, and of course
they use their devices, they love their device.
All these kids are into like roadblocks and all the other
stuff that other kids are into. But it's, it's a controlled
environment. And they come to learn that that
environment of different things at different times of day, other
things not at certain times of day or night, is normal.
It's better for. Them it's normal, right?
Yes, that's right. Exactly.
And you know, there's two or three other parts of this that
we touched on that I wanted to, you know, say 1 is everybody
there is a, is an active participant in their own health
rather than just a passive row in a table, you know, right.
And so, you know, you know, the concept of adaptive clinical
trials, right? Like where basically you don't
have to, you know, the entire, you know, what's funny is I
actually think we need to do case control studies on case
control studies. We need to regulatory science on
regulators. And what I mean by that is like
many things, I mean most things in software and hardware, I mean
SpaceX was not developed via case control studies.
Those are only for teasing out a small effect size that's not
obvious to the visible eye. And iteration is, you know, for
example, when you try and find a software bug, you have a thesis
on it and you do iteration or you do get bisect.
There's other mechanisms to try to find, like what piece of code
had the effect on the outcome, right.
And so a case control study and case control studies means, for
example, you have one jurisdiction that only uses that
method to try to find new medical discoveries.
And if another one that actually uses the older method, you don't
like Banting and best from like the 1920s.
So the way they discovered that insulin worked, I mean, they won
a Nobel Prize and the way they did it was say first day of the
theory. Then they, they, they tested on
dogs, then they tested on themselves, then they tested on
volunteers. And then, you know, they had
patients just like literally jump out of bed, like true bench
to bedside, like they walk over with the bubbling beaker, you
know, and that was something where from 1921 they had the
idea about 1923 scale production by Eli Lilly for the entire
North American continent and they won the Nobel Prize.
That was when pharma moved at the speed of software because
they could iterate. Also they could change
formulation, you know, all this kind of stuff that requires
crazy FDA review to go from, you know, like injectable to oral to
patch to this, that they could just that that's like, you know,
mobile client, desktop client, you know, command line client.
They could just edit the formulation, edit the dosage,
titrate this, then they'll just look and see if it works.
And they do it by feel because the effect size was large enough
that they could see it, right? That was when, of course, there
were patent medicines and scams and so on and so forth.
But that was also when lots of the wonder drugs were developed,
which is why, which the FDA has acknowledged by grandfathering
all kinds of drugs before the modern era.
And in many ways, I think we're going back to that time, right?
So we'll be more down South. There will be more things that
don't work. There'll be a lot more
miraculous things that really, really work on on balance, these
things scale because they get replicated billions of times and
the failures happen usually once, right.
So that is kind of the vision for what these health zones
would be. And you know, obviously you can,
you don't have, no one's going to force you to take a
treatment, but you could go in and you could be the first one,
the first ten, the first hundred, the first thousand.
Also, one thing I think is those people who are very early
adopters, we should give them the equivalent of the
Presidential Medal of Freedom because people go and they die
in the military, they die bungee jumping, they die skydiving,
they die in sort of foolhardy things.
They take risks that don't benefit anybody.
But those people who are like the first to try some treatment
that could benefit a lot of people should be honored.
And, you know, like, even if it doesn't work out for them, all
their bills are paid and so on and so forth because, you know,
it's a it's like a thing they're doing for humanity, you know
what I mean? Like, we have to change.
Like we can make movies on this. Go ahead.
I totally agree. I and you know, hopefully no one
will die, but sure it's fair that you some people will come
to rather late. You know, I've had people reach
out who came to some of the protocols in the podcast that I
covered on the podcast and elsewhere in their 80s.
Oh, wow. And and feel now some of them
were already exercising, some were doing better.
That's the other category that I forgot to mention earlier, that
of people in the academic community who will reach out and
say, Hey, listen, you know, the sunlight thing or the, you know,
rarely it's the creatine thing, but the, you know, exercise
thing has, has been transformative.
What we forget sometimes is that if people are, if you can get
people to sleep better, like basically you have a, a friend
for life, right? If people can lose weight where
they haven't been able to lose weight previously or feel more
vigor, I think that creates a buy in of the very best kind,
right? Because they own the tools
inside them at that point. I love the idea of building this
community. I would really like to discuss
further, presumably offline, how we how we start to implement
that because and I love the overlap with the with the crypto
community. I mean, I know very little about
crypto, but I've started to invest in crypto more in the
last year or so, although I had started back in 2020.
Crypto loves Schuberman by a crypto will fund all kinds of
huberman and huberman grad student human disciple type
things has risk capital that loves your style.
Great. Well, Huberman loves crypto
because it's, you know, early on a very, very smart, I shouldn't
name him, a very successful entrepreneur from the Bay Area
of Stanford grad told me to start investing whatever in some
percentage of my investable income in crypto.
And that was back in 2017. I didn't listen until 2020, but
look, it's clear that that this is here to stay in the same way
I feel it has a lot of semblance to like what we saw like these
bro science bodybuilding community.
Yeah, all this exactly. I mean, you know, if we had a
dollar for every woman, let's just say women who have no
interest in lifting weights, who is now injecting Ozempic or
Manjaro asking about peptides, we'd be extremely wealthy.
So it these things, the whatever's crazy now is going to
be in the mainframe in in 5 to 10 years maybe.
Absolutely breath work made the cut.
They just had to call it respiration Physiology.
We and others published some some clinical trials.
OK, meditation. Now everyone knows if you
actually take the time to meditate like has benefits.
You know, it took so long and people were attacked, viciously
attacked Mystics, counterculture kicked.
I mean the whole and sometimes it's because of the merge of
these things with kind of like drugs and sex and.
Other things that can cause some like scandals and issues, but or
deaths, right? But I think if we really step
back, we put on our rational minds for a moment, people
realize like there's, there's great things to be pulled from
these different communities, including academic science, but
that we've hit a, we've hit a roadblock.
Now we're, we're really at a, at a place where we need the sorts
of communities that you're talking about.
We need high fluency, high throughput mechanisms to fund
and try things and and iterate and I love it.
I I'm all on board. I didn't expect this is where
the conversation was going to go, but I'm super excited.
Amazing. Great.
And we can take your men into the physical world.
You know, I'll ask one last thing.
This is just maybe you're already on this and I haven't
seen the pods on it and so on. I do think it might be
interesting for you to look at traditional Chinese medicine and
traditional Indian medicine like Ayurveda and so on.
So like acupuncture, Ayurveda, yoga, meditation and so and so
forth. The reason I say that is, for
example, with acupuncture, you know, I wasn't like a believer
in acupuncture because I was like an allopathic, you know,
western, whatever kind of good. And then, you know, I had some
like, you know, like wrist issue, like my wrist was sore
for, you know, because like from an old lacrosse injury or what
have you. And this is many, many years ago
like, and then I, I got some acupuncture and what was
remarkable was the needles were like in like my leg or something
like that. And amazingly I moved my like
right arm or like right wrist like this.
And I could see that needle twitch.
But if I move my left wrist, it didn't twitch.
So there was something to this concept of like the meridians or
what have you. There is like a wiring diagram
for the body. They are on to something, you
know, And I was like, wow, that's kind of interesting,
right? And so I feel like there's with
the rise of China, the rise of India, there's that seems like
an interesting set of topics that I bet would expand your
audience and people might be interested in looking at that.
It's something to think about. Yeah, so we've touched on it,
but it probably too lightly and we should go, you know, full on
into it. And one of the interesting
things about being a public health educator who's also a
scientist at a university like Stanford is I've had to be
thoughtful about which topics I embrace when to establish.
You know, it's less about it's credibility, but it's more to
give people a sense of how I approach something.
So for instance, so just a couple of of things within the,
the area that you're talking about.
I'm in 2017, I started a practice called yoga Nidra where
you lie down, you do long exhale breathing.
This was developed in, in India or thousands of years ago.
It literally translates to yoga sleep.
And the state of mind you're trying to accomplish and that
you soon learn to accomplish is 1 in which your brain is awake,
but your body is very relaxed. There's only one other state of
being that that approximate that and that's REM sleep when the
brain is very active and the body is essentially paralyzed.
It's now been shown in a lot of studies to improve learning and
memory, improve, basically reduce the latency to fall
asleep or fall back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the
night. Even if you do this during the
daytime, it's been shown to improve outcomes for, you know,
trauma, etcetera. I modified it and called it
something called non sleep deep rest or NSDRI, removed the
intentions. I removed any kind of mention of
anything Mystic or, or the chakras, etcetera.
And I caught some heat from the traditional yoga nidra
community. Understandably so.
But the goal was when you call it non sleep deep rest, you
immediately know what it is. Look, it's not a nap because
here's the thing, naps will disrupt your nighttime sleep.
They create sleep inertia. Non sleep deep breaths and yoga
nidra improve your sleep at night.
Meditation is designed to relax you, NSDR non sleep deep breaths
is designed to replenish your mental and physical vigor and
hypnosis is designed to modify your brain in a certain way.
This is just just designed to let you self direct your own
relaxation while being awake has profound positive effects on
cognition, sleep and everything else.
But if I called it yoga nidra, people go like, all right, that
sounds kind of crazy. Does it require meditation?
OK, acupuncture, right? Acupuncture.
For many years acupuncture was considered kind of like medicine
by in the West. Chufu Ma's lab at Harvard
Medical School. Chufu is a is a very serious
neurobiologist, trained and published beautiful papers in
science, nature, etcetera on the nociceptive pain system.
And as his name suggests, he's Chinese.
So at some point he decided to explore what insertion of these
different needles at different locations in the body would do
for things like cytokine release, inflammation,
norepinephrine, dopamine and other catecholamines.
What he found was that different combinations of of entry sites
of these needles create very different outputs from the
different glands of the body, but that there's a systematic
map and so and some of these have been.
Published. I realize it's been published.
Yeah, in science, and these were mouse studies, but they're
starting to move into other areas and they use Electro
acupuncture, so they'll do some stimulation of the nerves at
those locations. But you know, we know from
experimental neuroscience that pressure can activate nerve
pathways. So I absolutely believe that one
of the, the most important things for modern medicine to do
is to take the maps of the, the body from Eastern medicine to
take the maps even like this notion of the chakras, this idea
that, you know, from our neck down to about our pelvis, we
have our sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic chain
ganglia, chains of neurons that activate glands and other
features in our body, organs in our body through the deployment
of different transmitters. And we know that at different
locations along the sympathetic chain ganglia, they innervate
different organs. And here are the acupuncturists
and those that talk about chakras been talking for a long
time about opening up. They call them in yoga, the
bandas that they're essentially sphincters.
You know, you don't just have a sphincter in your, your butt and
your mouth, right? You have them in your throat.
You have them all along your digestive type.
We're a tube. And So what labs like Chufu's
are starting to do is starting to say, like what is the
conglomerate of nerve and gland and and vascular features at
different locations along the sympathetic chain ganglia?
How do those relate to activation of different releases
of different hormones? And again, there's a lot of work
that needs to be done to unpack this.
But I think we can safely say that Ayurveda and Eastern
medicine have figured out systematic maps.
They don't know the mechanisms by which insertions of needles
at this site and that site create, on average, a particular
outcome. Now you get people, and I won't
even name them because they're so obnoxious.
You get certain people, especially on acts in the
traditional medical community, who love to throw shade, as the
kids say, on things like Ayurveda, because and they'll
cite some instances in which, you know, some herbal like like
lead contaminated turmeric killed a patient.
And like, that's the wrong case. We should always be asking, you
know, at the one end of of of brain plasticity, meaning you
have curiosity is brain plasticity.
That's the the window to brain plasticity.
At the other end, you have cynicism when you get, you know,
if the more cynical you are, the less plasticity you have.
So if I hear a cynical Dr., I tune out What I am absolutely
convinced of based on the Chu fuma data and the experience
with yoga nidra which non sleep depressed and now the clinical
trials in the US that are being done there.
Everything we know about meditation, breath work, AKA
respiration, Physiology is now becoming a big thing, even if
it's just about sleep apnea, is that we have to look at these
systematic maps through the lens of what we understand about
mechanism. And we are going to find a, it's
already a treasure trove of actionable advice that is very
likely to be mostly behavioral in nature.
But also the Chinese herbal thing is incredible in terms of
the sleep science, what they have access to in terms of, of
the acupuncturist understand about ways to improve sleep,
spectacular, so and on and on and on.
So I'm totally on board, but we need really good scientists
unpacking this stuff. That's right.
So basically now that we've got a lot of people of Indian or
Chinese descent that are also trained in Western medicine that
can be like cheap food. Exactly.
That's right. And I my view on this is also
just as you said, like imagine somebody who was making a potion
in the Middle Ages and they had ten ingredients and the potion
worked. And now from today's vantage
point, we would know that, OK, this one was the active
ingredient. The other nine were just like
the superstitious part or what have you, right?
But the potion did work, right? And so that's sort of how I
think about a lot of this stuff where if it survived through the
ages, there's like some underlying physics or biology or
biochemistry or what have you, neurophysiology, whatever you
want to call it. That probably means the thing
works. And then you might be able to
abstract out what the active ingredient is.
For example, you mentioned Electro acupuncture.
Electro acupuncture, this is actually some of the most
exciting work in the realm of psychedelics.
There's a laboratory of a UC Davis trying to remove the
psychedelic experience from psychedelics.
There is this theory that what they do is they open brain
plasticity in the weeks following the experience.
And there's this question whether or not the actual
experience that you have on a psychedelic is necessary to
activate the plasticity window and the neuroplasticity inducing
effects of psychedelics without the psychedelic journey, right?
So these are, these are plasticity drugs without the
Mystic psychedelic experience. Now the, the people who are kind
of anchored to the history of psychedelics will say, no, you
need the journey, you need the anxiety.
You have to like embrace the and you can say, OK, fine, but like,
what about kids? You're not going to send them
into that. What about people who have a
predisposition of psychosis or bipolar disorder?
You're not going to send them off to do psychedelics.
That would be completely irresponsible.
So we're starting to see like ketamine broke through.
Ketamine works very similarly to PCP.
It's a dissociative anesthetic, works on the NMDA receptor.
But when it was PCP, everyone was like terrified.
Ketamine is different, but similar enough.
So, you know, it's sort of like Monjaro bodybuilding peptides.
It's like, you know, acupuncture, like where the, the
naming is critical. It's funny, even the addition of
Electro to acupuncture makes it a completely different beast to
a lot of people Just, yeah, biased towards like devices in
the West. So yeah, I mean, once again,
apology. I would just say you're, you're
definitely peering into the future on this.
And I love that you're parting the veil on it and inviting
people in. I'm totally on board.
Totally. And I don't say that lightly
because a lot of things where people like let's build a
device, I'm like, and it's just like one more piece.
It's not the thing that's really going to move everybody forward.
So I'm because you're talking about changing the whole
community framework around medicine and healthcare.
So I'm totally on board. Amazing.
Great. And I'm looking forward to
working with you. Let's discuss further offline
and I'll put together. A spec and thanks for coming on
the podcast. Great, I can't wait to
eventually meet in person. Come here.
You're invited here anytime to check out my my.
You know, Huberman Lab, This is the other Huberman lab.
There's the one at Stanford. There's the one at.
On that is the. Podcast.
And then there's the one I'm sitting in right now.
Yeah, amazing.