LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Chicago Theatre
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event at the Chicago Theater in Chicago, Illinois.
The event consisted of a lecture entitled The Brain-Body Contract, followed by a question-and-answer session.
We wanted to make sure that the question-and-answer session was available to everybody, regardless of who could attend in person.
I also want to make sure to thank the sponsors of that event, which were AG1 and 8sleep.
8sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature
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And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually
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And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually
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With Eight Sleep, you can program the temperature
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AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
I've been taking AG1 since 2012,
so I'm delighted that they sponsored the live event.
The reason I started taking AG1
and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day
is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs.
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And now, without further ado, the question and answer session from our live event at the Chicago Theater in Chicago, Illinois.
I turn 70 soon. What is your best advice to keep my brain healthy in old age?
terrific question. The advice I would give to you as somebody about to reach 70 is the same advice
I give to anybody, which is that essentially all of the things that improve cardiovascular health
and perfusion of your bodily tissues are going to improve functionality of the brain. Because,
of course the brain as a rich consumer of fuel requires very good portals to deliver those fuels
and that capillaries, micro capillaries and arteries and so forth need to be clean and clear.
That's the big one. This is why I think the prescription now is generally accepted and here
I'm borrowing from my friend Peter Attia but about 150 or maybe as much as 200 minutes of
so-called zone two cardio per week movement that you can just barely carry out a conversation
is going to be very useful. One thing that's often not discussed is that load-bearing exercise of
some sort is going to be better provided your body can tolerate it, but you should do something that
you can do consistently over those long durations without injuring yourself. But there's a very
interesting literature about how load-bearing movements actually generate the release of
hormones, yes, hormones from bone that actually cross the blood-brain barrier and may influence
health of neurons in brain areas such as the hippocampus. And there I'm extending from
preclinical data in animals to humans, but there's some human data starting to emerge that that's true.
It's also true, and there's a wonderful paper out just today or yesterday from Dr. Andy Galpin's
lab and collaborators talking about how if you look at cognitive health, it's highly correlated
with things that relate to strength.
And that is not to say that you should just do strength training exercise,
but we know that all people, truly all people,
should be doing some sort of resistance training two or three times per week.
And we know that grip strength and increasing asymmetry in grip strength
between the two hands is one of the indicators of deficits in control
from the brain out to the periphery, and it's correlated with cognitive decline.
There's also some interesting data about how when the feet become floppy and kind of flaccid or the lack of ability to extend one's toes.
I'm still working.
I've been wearing this toe spreader thing.
Has anyone tried those?
Those hurt.
Those hurt.
I broke this foot a bunch of times.
But I'll tell you, when you get better at spreading your toes, it's really exciting.
And it's really exciting for several reasons.
It's really exciting because there's more stability in your feet.
You can run and move and do things better without pain.
But in addition to that, believe it or not, just as one of the first things that they're going to do when you come into this world is scrape the bottom of your foot and look for the Babinski reflex, which is a neural transmission reflex, as all reflexes are.
But it's testing essentially the health of the nervous system that over time, you know, again, there are many correlates of dementia, many, many correlates of dementia.
But an inability to finely control the extremities is certainly one of them.
So strength training, cardiovascular training, these are kind of stereotyped answers for your question, and yet those are really the prime movers against cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.
And then, of course, there's, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't throw in something that was a little bit more edgy, because that's what I do.
You know, there are interesting data about the use of drugs to increase acetylcholine transmission, right?
I mean, I was visiting a Nobel Prize winner at Columbia to learn about his incredible work some years ago
and saw that he chewed no fewer than five pieces of Nicorette gum, something I don't recommend during this short meeting.
And I said, what is this all about?
He said, well, you know, I don't smoke anymore because I don't want lung cancer.
But, you know, he said nicotine is, you know, protective against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
I was like, how can that be?
And he said, well, you know, it decreases in neuromodulation.
Dopamine and acetylcholine correlated with cognitive decline, keeping your brain sharp, and so on and so forth.
So I'm not encouraging people to take nicotine.
It increases blood pressure, vasoconstriction.
But it's an interesting consideration.
You know, some of the emerging cholinergic and dopaminergic drugs or ways to increase acetylcholine and dopamine are certainly intriguing.
And I won't tell you who that person is, but his name is Richard Axel.
Next question.
Yeah.
How can I optimize sleep while working 24-hour shifts as a firefighter, 24 hours on, 48 hours off?
Okay.
And this probably also pertains to new parents.
And it probably also pertains to anyone that's going through a particularly stressful time
where you're micro-waking throughout the night, so not just firefighters.
So what do we know?
We know, based on really good data, that shift work is bad for us.
It's just bad.
We're a diurnal species.
We're not nocturnal.
But thank you, thank you, thank you, shift workers, because you essentially keep us all safe and make the world go round.
And so we need you and we want you healthy.
So one of the main things is that you can make sure that you stay on the same sleep-wake schedule for at least two weeks.
It's the swing shift that's really the worst.
You can tell your boss I said that.
and if they won't agree and you're doing this 24 hour on 24 hour off there are a couple of things
that are really important first of all the main way to wake up your nervous system even though it
might not feel like a triple espresso is going to be that light exposure to the eyes and if you can't
get it from sunlight is going to be from any bright artificial light I'm not a huge proponent of the
daylight simulators. They're very expensive. You can simply buy a 900 lux LED far more inexpensively.
I don't have any relationship to any company that sells these, but you can find them on
Amazon or wherever you happen to prefer to purchase things. Or you can just get really
close to a bright light anytime you're trying to wake up, even if you don't feel that it helps you
wake up very much, mostly for the melatonin suppression, because bright light will very
acutely suppress melatonin. And then the real question from shift workers always seems to be,
Should I catch up on sleep or is that going to be problematic?
Should I just stay up into the next cycle?
And the answer there is a little bit nuanced, but the best answer I can give across the
board is if this is a pattern that you're going to be in regularly over, say, months
or years, then get whatever sleep you can.
Get whatever sleep you can.
If it's something that you're doing somewhat acutely, like you're traveling to Europe and
you're just going to force yourself to stay up a day and a half, then in that case, I
would say no need to to get the maximum amount of sleep just try and stay with the local schedule
we have an entire episode about shift work that somehow um maybe didn't get as much recognition
as it should have um for shift workers and we'll try and get it out in better form we don't always
succeed in you know top carding things in a way that gets them out to the most people uh one thing
i will say is an opportunity to announce that our website hubermanlab.com is completely revamped so
it's highly searchable. It'll take you to exact timestamps and is and now you can segregate out
timestamps from newsletters from all this stuff. So thanks to a lot of effort by my amazing team,
you can now navigate that site with a with real precision. So if you want to say ADHD, Adderall,
kids, yes, no, for instance, it will take you to precise timestamps that will address those issues.
Next question, please.
How does hypnosis therapy work?
Well, this is a very interesting topic to me
because my colleague,
Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, David Spiegel,
is a world expert in hypnosis
and its neural underpinnings
and its use for clinical applications.
His father was a hypnotist, also a psychiatrist.
And when people hear hypnotism,
they think of stage hypnotism
and being up on stage and doing things you don't want to in front of other people.
But really, when we're talking about clinical applications or wellness applications of hypnosis,
we're talking about self-directed hypnosis.
I really wish there was a better name because I don't think hypnosis is going to advance very far as a field, frankly,
because everyone thinks hypnosis.
And it would be like if psychedelics were just called drugs, right?
We were taught in the 80s that drugs are bad and that your brain on drugs looks like an omelet.
and that's bad. And if you like omelets, they're still bad. And drugs of abuse are bad. And actually,
I hope we can talk briefly about psychedelics at some point, because I do think there's a little
bit of a runaway train around the topic of psychedelics now. I think we need to be very
careful how we approach that entire landscape. But hypnosis essentially works by allowing someone
to place their own brain into this very unique state. Earlier, we were talking about neuroplasticity,
And we talked about the fact that neuroplasticity involves intense focus followed by deep rest in the form of deep sleep or non-sleep deep rest, maybe even Rick Rubin-ing it and just kind of like laying there.
Hypnosis is different because hypnosis is in a state in which your focus is very narrow, the context is very narrow, but you're very, very relaxed.
So maybe the Rubin example of being brain active and body very still is a bit more like hypnosis, to be fair.
Why would it be the case that David Spiegel and his dad have literally a tool that is approved by the major American Psychiatric Association,
where they can figure out how hypnotizable you are by having you look up and try and close your eyelids while continuing to look up?
The so-called Spiegel eye roll test.
Sounds pretty wacky, right?
This is like TikTok level wacky.
Well, the reason is you have cranial nerves,
so they sit more or less near your neck,
that allow you to direct your focus, your eyes upward.
And then you have cranial nerves that have your eyes go down.
And the cranial nerves that drive your eyes up
are associated with alertness and eyes open, no surprise.
And the cranial nerves that are associated with pointing your eyes down
and closing your eyelids are associated with what?
With drowsiness, sleep, and lack of alertness.
There's sort of a push-pull in the autonomic nervous system.
And Spiegel, Spiegel's daddy and him, figured out, because they're geniuses,
that if somebody can maintain upward gaze while closing their eyelids, two things happen.
One, you'll see the whites of their eyes, and it's pretty creepy.
Two, that means they're highly hypnotizable,
because that is a reflection of the probability that they can enter a brain state
in which they are both very awake and very relaxed.
Pretty cool.
Now, if that sounds kind of wacky because you're just looking at the periphery,
§02Transcript — part 2
keep in mind that one of the primary entry points for diagnosing concussion
is to shine a light in one eye and have that pupil constrict
and then see whether or not the other pupil constricts,
the so-called consensual pupillary reflex.
Although technically, and I've been bothered by this from day one,
it should be called the non-consensual pupil reflex
because the other eye doesn't have a choice if everything's working.
In any case, if you have a hard hit to the head, you'll see that you shine light in one eye, the pupil constricts in the other one, stays really dilated and then you go, okay, get this person in the emergency room.
Because there's been a severing of the connections between the two sides of the brain.
So looking in the eyes and trying to deduce what might be happening more centrally within the caverns of the skull and the brain is not a new thing.
It is a primary diagnostic tool in neurology.
It's also how your parents knew that you were taking drugs when you came in the door because your pupils were like that big.
And that reflects a difference in autonomic arousal.
Basically, stimulants, those people dilate their pupils.
This is also why the story about belladonna, people intentionally dilating their pupils to trick people into thinking that they were attracted to them.
I thought about this one a lot, too.
It's like not a precursor to good relationship.
like someone's using their physiology to pretend that they're attracted so the other person thinks
that they're attracted so that they might become attracted. Anyway, it's a recipe for failure,
almost as bad as most of the dating apps. Oh, I would know I'm not on them, but from what I hear.
Okay, so where were we? Hypnosis. When you are in a state of elevated attention but very relaxed,
guess what? Neuroplasticity occurs much faster because you're essentially marrying the two states
that are normally divorced, which are heightened levels of attention first and then deep rest.
You're essentially putting the nervous system into a more, I wouldn't call it hyperplastic state,
but a more plastic state. And for people that are highly hypnotizable, the success rates at,
for instance, smoking cessation, pain relief are pretty impressive. Spiegel Lab has published a
number of these. So I think self-hypnosis is a very interesting tool. I just hope that they rename it
so that it stands a chance of getting off the ground.
I mean, one of the things that you learn as a public-facing educator
is that what things are called has a great impact on whether or not
they achieve any kind of use in the world.
Hence why I decided to swallow the difficult pill of partially renaming Yoga Nidra
as non-sleep deep rest.
I don't like to do that.
Yoga Nidra has more than a thousand-year history.
but it's when people hear yoga nidra unless they are very open-minded they hear magic carpet
they hear levitation and it's unfortunate and that's not how i feel but for years i talked
about yoga nidra it's so cool it's like sleep state but it's like yeah i'm like yoga nidra
okay and but if you come from a culture where that's discussed they're all about it and so
non-sleep deep rest you know i felt like all right leave my name out of it you know i'll be
dead eventually i mean i'm in this line of advisors right i'm like approaching 50 i'm like
I'm winning in my lineage, but should I be fortunate enough to live past bullet cancer or car crash far enough,
then NSDR hopefully will persist, and I don't need a piece of it.
It's just the hope is that people will learn to put themselves into brain states that can be adaptive for them.
So it'd be nice if someone could come up with something other than hypnosis.
I think Spiegel would agree.
Super interested in psychedelics as medicine, to be done with somebody with experience.
worried about unlocking mental health conditions. Yeah, you should be. What does the research say
and what are your thoughts? Okay. Barbed wire question. We like that.
Psychedelics. Well, let's just back up a little bit and acknowledge one thing that's more important
than psychedelics or anything else when it comes to rewiring the brain, which is that ultimately
rewiring of the brain is about shifts in neuromodulators. Dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine,
norepinephrine, acetylcholine. And it's no coincidence that, you know, SSRIs, selective
serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have been one of the major entry points for attempts to treat
things like depression over the last 20, 30 years or more. When I was in college, there was,
that's when the book Listening to Prozac came out. But prior to that, there's a long history of
drugs, prescription drugs in that case, to change levels of neuromodulators like serotonin or
acetylcholine or dopamine in an attempt to cure or treat a disease. But keep in mind, despite the
varied success of SSRIs, a topic unto itself, that there's a strong belief, and there has been for a
long time, that if SSRIs worked, it wasn't because the depressed brain is deficient in serotonin,
but rather because increasing serotonin offered the opportunity to increase neuroplasticity.
So there's a different way of thinking about it.
And that's a segue for saying that when you say psychedelics, that's a broad category of drugs.
Nowadays, people even lump ketamine into that, although technically it's not a psychedelic.
But the sort of classic, if you will, psychedelics are LSD, lysergic acid, diethylamide, and psilocybin,
aka mushrooms, although it comes in other sources as well.
The major effect of psilocybin is to stimulate a particular serotonin receptor, which has elevated density in particular brain areas.
And indeed, there are many recent clinical trials, many, let's just say 12 to 20 good-sized clinical trials done in diverse locations on the planet,
many at Johns Hopkins and UCSF, some in Switzerland, showing you that enhancing,
and here you notice I'm using the mechanistic language, enhancing the transmission of the
release of serotonin and activating particular serotonin receptors leads to an opportunity for
more what? Neuroplasticity. Now, I say it that way, not to add a bunch of word soup, but because
Because the real question is whether or not the experience that one has while under the
influence of psychedelics is critical to the clinical outcome.
Or a growing idea, just as a hypothesis, I think is equally interesting is that it's
the serotonin itself and that the things you see, the things you hear, the things you experience
are not relevant.
Now, I have some experience with psychedelics.
I had a bad time on psychedelics as a teenager.
I was also pretty wayward youth, but I've had a bad trip on LSD.
For years, I was scared that people were going to dose me with LSD after that.
It was so bad.
I think across the board, we can say kids doing psychedelics just seems like a bad idea.
Their brains are already hyperplastic.
If you have a predisposition to bipolar type issues or schizophrenia, it can exacerbate those issues.
And certainly, certainly, certainly if you don't have adequate support in the form of somebody that can guide you through the sessions as well as the pre-sessions, which are not done with psychedelics, as well as the so-called integration afterwards, it can be a really slippery slope.
I know examples of people really suffering in the aftermath of psychedelic journeys.
Now, there are a few interesting points as well, and it wouldn't be fair if I didn't say that several, if not many, individuals who have had so-called treatment-resistant depression, at least in these clinical trials, have reported feeling far better after psilocybin therapy.
But that psilocybin therapy was done with several pre-sessions, then the psychedelic sessions, then several after sessions, and it's not always the case that things turn out well.
So I think it's early days. What is interesting and I think important is to recognize that psilocybin and the structure of psilocybin is very similar to serotonin itself. Very similar. But it activates particular receptors. A lot of people don't realize how similar to serotonin it is.
And that microdosing psilocybin, I should say the data on microdosing psilocybin, something that's increasingly popular, is not particularly compelling.
It's not clear what it does. It's not clear if it's of any use.
And I think the danger here is that we end up in a situation as we did with, frankly, with cannabis.
And by the way, I'm not somebody who demonizes cannabis.
I think it has its uses for certain people.
but very high THC concentration cannabis can be a problem, especially with people that have a
predisposition of psychosis. And anyone that tells you that cannabis isn't addictive, just say, great,
like, don't smoke weed for a week. Let's see how you do. Yeah. And let's go on a plane trip together.
All right. And how are you sleeping? And, you know, so I think the chronic cannabis users are starting
to take note of some of the issues it causes. But again, there are some clinical applications.
Now, when it comes to the sort of the high-speed trained psychedelics like DMT, that's far less data available there.
And then MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of PTSD, they're the data I think are more robust.
And I think we're likely to see legalization or at least decriminalization in the next few years.
But keep in mind that MDMA is methylene-dioxymethamphetamine.
So for people that like dopaminergic states, it's a particularly compelling state to be in, so much so that they could overindulge in MDMA.
And then there's the issues of purity, and I could do a five-hour podcast on this right now.
So I think the important point is approach with caution.
Kids, absolutely not.
And I think it's an exciting landscape, very exciting.
And whereas a discussion like the one we just had would have gotten me fired a few years ago.
I mean, Stanford has big programs now, a lot of philanthropy, federal grants, and many laboratories focused on the study of psychedelics.
So, you know, I would say stay tuned, but keep in mind that increasing neuromodulator levels very acutely,
whether or not it's with a prescription drug or whether or not it's with psychedelics,
is really what lies at the heart of the recovery, the potential recovery, I should say,
or the negative effects that happen to occur in anyone that embarks on the psychedelic journey.
Do people who meditate need less sleep than people who don't?
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, we know that from a study by Wendy Suzuki, who I believe, if NYU made the right choice,
and I think they did, is now the Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU.
She ran a memory lab for a long time.
She has data showing that even 10, I think it's 13, but as little as 10 minutes of meditation,
so it'll be sitting still, breathing, focusing on your breathing, directing one's attention to third eye center, etc.
We don't have a third eye.
The pineal is thought to be the third eye, but I don't know why.
It's a light-sensitive tissue deep in the brain, but maybe that's why they call it the third eye.
But in any case, that type of practice has been shown to increase memory focus, a.k.a. learning.
But there's some interesting footnotes in those papers, which point to the fact that when people meditate too close to bedtime, oftentimes they have trouble sleeping because basically meditation is a focusing exercise.
It's a perceptual exercise. I don't think meditation is anything mystical. It's a self-directed shift in your perception to what? To your interoception, to your internal state, as opposed to anything beyond the confines of your skin.
There's nothing mystical about that. And then in that state your brain starts to
generate patterns of activity that are distinct from when you're sharing your attention between what's going on internally and what's going out
What's happening out in the world, right?
I think we need to demystify what people have cloaked as mystical and when I say cloaked
I don't think that the people that meditate for thousands of years thought that there was anything
mystical about it, but sometimes what we experience there can feel mystical
So if you have trouble sleeping, I recommend doing some sort of non-sleep deep rest practice like NSDR, aka Yoga Nidra, although those are different.
NSDR generally lacks the intention piece.
and the ones that I put into the world,
we've stripped away the intentions
and we've stripped away any kind of language
that would make you think that there was some sort of,
let's just say, like cultural aspect to it,
which again is admittedly a bit unfair
to the origin practice of Yoga Nidra,
but the problem again is that in Yoga Nidra
you're going to be doing intentions and hearing language
that for some people, not all,
might divorce you from the wish to do it.
in any case non-sleep deep rest done at any time of day but especially if you fall asleep in the
middle of the night is going to be useful for helping you fall back asleep whereas meditation
again is going to enhance your level of focus so I don't think it's a good practice if you're if
you have trouble sleeping now to finally answer your question if you meditate can you afford to
sleep less my friend Matt Walker would say no however many of us can't sleep as much as we want
to. And many of us are not like Matt, where we can wake up without an alarm clock. I'll just keep
sleeping and sleeping, unless I went to bed at like eight o'clock. This is actually interesting.
There's an asymmetry to your sleep needs. If you go to bed, remember that old adage, you know,
every hour before midnight is worth two after. Well, it turns out that for people that are meant
to be early risers, going to bed at eight, you'll wake up at three or four feeling great. You go to
bed at 11, you feel groggy, and there are good reasons to explain that. But Matt would say that
you need your sleep, period. I'm more of the camp based on my read of the data. And yes,
we are allowed to disagree and still be friends. It's allowed. In fact, Matt's going to do a series
on sleep with our podcast, even though he has a terrific podcast of his own, where we maybe
debate a little bit of this, that there are ways that you can at least replace the feeling of
wakefulness that you would have lost if you don't sleep enough. And for me, really, that's why NSDR
became such an attractive tool to do for 10 or 30 minutes each morning if I didn't sleep enough
the night before. I first learned about yoga nidra actually at an addiction recovery center,
trauma recovery center in Florida in 2017. I have a friend, a super talented trauma therapist who
also treats addiction that I've sent many, many people to, and he has this kind of seemingly,
wizard ability to get people who have been addicts to not be addicts. And one of the tools he uses
is yoga nidra every morning for 30 minutes and eventually an hour, which seems like a lot. But
then he also has these people wake up very early, maybe an hour before they would normally wake up
and go into that liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. Now, my experience is that 10 to 20
minutes of NSDR yoga nidra is sufficient to offset some sleep loss and allow at least me to function
and many people report the same we have a study going with the sleep laboratory at Stanford to
explore this in more depth and what I can tell you because I'm involved in some of this work is that
there are several military units because they have no opportunity to get sleep because they're working
that have to rely on tools like this in order to be able to function at their highest level
and I'm sure they will tell you as I will that they prefer to get eight to ten hours of sleep
but guess what they can't and so I think that's an important takeaway is that we don't get to pick
how much we sleep unless you're going to be completely neurotic about your sleep hygiene
which makes you kind of a less interesting person in life is what I'm told you know going to bed at
eight is great like some or most of the time but you got to stay up every once in a while I mean
after they released Chimp Empire on Netflix, I discovered that NSDR is a very valuable tool
because, and by the way, Chimp Empire and Succession have a lot of parallels. And if you watch one,
I sort of, I interleave Chimp Empire Succession, Chimp Empire Succession, and you start to realize
like, whoa, like we're pretty similar. And then you look at the world differently, I promise.
Your podcast has positively changed the lives of so many people, including me. How has it changed
your life? Okay. I wasn't expecting that one. Thank you, Samantha. Well, first of all, I mean,
as this little 11-year-old told me, I mean, this is essentially what I've done my whole life.
I'm a fairly private person. Believe it or not, I'm pretty introverted. I spend a lot of time alone,
and I think that's required for me to, you know, I basically have four modes,
four modes one I'm either readying myself through sleep
and NSDR to do one of the other three modes maybe there's a fifth mode or I'm in one of
these other three modes which is I'm either foraging for information organizing that information or
dispersing that information or getting ready to do it all over again and then there's this
relaxation vacation thing that they keep telling me about but then I went to Italy and then like
Rick and I like just like hung out there and um and it didn't feel like work I also discovered
some really great podcasts I don't know I think one of the coolest podcasts out there if you like
rock and roll which I love is a history of 500 songs by Andrew Hickey's podcast on rock and roll
I like the nerdy podcast it's like a graduate or an education in rock and roll it's so cool
um and you'll learn a lot about music and history and the mobs involved and all that stuff and from
§03Transcript — part 3
when I was told like Al Capone used to sit there, right? His exit was there, you know, so it was
weird, right? Yeah. And then he died of syphilis. And like, so I don't know how I feel about all
that. Um, but they told me that. Um, so I think the podcast has been wonderful, um, as an opportunity
to share things that I love. Um, if I had my way, it would be more like this, although more of a
dialogue, frankly. It's changed my understanding of what the world is like. I certainly get
critique, and that's good. But again, I was raised by iconoclasts, in particular, my postdoc
advisor, Ben Barres, who unfortunately, as I mentioned, is dead because I worked for him.
and but you know he was he really encouraged all of us in his lab and and and often we were very
close friends I spent the last year of his life recording interview with him there's actually a
documentary coming out about Ben and then I'm going to release the audio interviews with Ben
which he approved by the way and you'll get to realize that the history of what you see is often
not what the dead person really did or said it's going to be fun so I can't wait till they release
this documentary and then Ben gets to have his voice infused and it'll be a
cool documentary but as some of you know that like what appears to be and what
was in the historical narrative is not necessarily what it what really happened
but that's just life so I suppose the short answer is that you know I feel
very honored with the opportunity very very honored and you know it's a
challenge at times I suppose that the major challenges are when things are
taken out of context, like little clips and things of that sort. Being misunderstood doesn't feel
good, but look, at the end of the day, I feel like the luckiest person in the world because I get to
spend my time learning. So it's either, you know, I'm foraging, I'm organizing, or I'm dispersing
information that I also want and that I find incredibly useful, or if not that, then certainly
informative and at times enchanting as well. So I try and focus on the positive and I have a number
of practices that help me do that. And I am somebody who engages on social media. I'm not a
post and ghost kind of person. I want to understand. I think that, you know, cuttlefish are super
interesting, but human beings are super interesting too. And I have a strong drive for mastery, but
also I do have a strong sense of justice and that can be problematic at times. I define justice as
feeling like there's something for us to do about something. Like seeing something that upsets us
or that excites us is great but then if you have a strong sense of justice you feel like there's
something you need to do about it and not everybody feels that. And then of course a desire to
understand and I think for reasons very personal to me that relate mostly to just having a kind of
incredible array of experiences in life, many of which were like shocking, disturbing, exciting,
enchanting that I want to understand. And so, you know, it's changed things, but you know, it's like,
I don't know, I got one truck, one watch. I, you know, it's not to say that I don't care about
having things. There are a few things I really love, but like mostly like I'm just thinking about
the podcast we got to record on Monday, which is about willpower and tenacity. And if I don't stop
myself, I'll give it right now. So what do you feel is the next big thing to come to the forefront
in the health space? Thanks for this question. One is non-protein amino acids. I love these
debates online because I know that there's something there. It's so cool because I grew up
and seeing these debates and you know there's something interesting there because people are
debating about it, but the debate isn't what's interesting. It's almost always the thing that
people aren't talking about that's sure to surface at some point. And you know, right now there's this
obsession with like seed oils. It's like seed oil, seed oils. And I can't demonize seed oils. All the
data say that if you separate out their caloric load, there's nothing inherently bad about seed
oils and et cetera. I don't know. It's still in emerging literature, but there was a scientist at
Stanford, Ed Rubinstein, who passed away at a ripe old age, a brilliant scientist who talked about,
and I had a lot of discussions with when I was a postdoc about non-protein amino acids.
Turns out his son is a neuroscientist at UCSF.
His other son's a physician at UCSF.
So it's another one of these low-performing families.
And all wonderful people.
And, you know, Ed had data that, you know, unlike a lot of animals like birds,
there are certain amino acids which are non-protein amino acids that exist in fairly
high density in seeds and nuts which is not to say that seeds and nuts are bad right i had almonds
this evening okay so please um but non-protein amino acids are similar enough to mammalian
protein amino acids that if they are consumed in abundance and perhaps especially in liquid
form that they may, again may, because this is about the future, this isn't about what we know,
this is about where I think there's an interest in growing interest, they may be able to incorporate
into certain proteins of our tissues of our body that potentially, Ed thought, could lead to
misfolding of those proteins and may explain certain forms of neurodegeneration and other
neurocognitive challenges. So I think non-protein amino acids are going to be an important
discussion. Now, there are lots of non-protein amino acids that don't come from foods, but I
think the discussion around non-protein amino acids from foods is going to be very interesting.
So that's one area. The other area, and perhaps you picked up on this a little bit tonight, is that
I like the nuts and boltsy stuff around stress, neuroplasticity, but the high-level stuff.
you know I think you know the relationship between you know structured
thought abstract thought I'm not interested in the free will discussion I
just feel like that's a career ender I'm friends with Robert Sapolsky and he's
got a great book coming out about this called Determined so he obviously
doesn't believe in free will but he's far smarter than I ever could be and it
just feels like I don't know that there's an endpoint with that one but
If anyone could find it, it would be Robert.
He's oh so smart.
But I think that the higher level stuff,
creativity, abstract reasoning and thought,
defining and better understanding the different states
that we can go into in waking.
And I confess, without a hint of sheepishness about it,
that I also think the notion of spirituality
and the belief in things that are beyond our current and conscious understanding is super
interesting. I think that, you know, as a species, we are, we've been challenged and conflicted from
go, at least that's what the historical scripture tells us, and that it's sort of inherent to our
experience that life is challenging and perplexing and also wonderful. And so I think a better
understanding of how to navigate all that. I mean this like this stuff in our
skulls, except for the eyes which by the way are your two pieces of brain that
are not in your skull, the retinas, I have to point that out. You know it's
it's tricky and we're trying to use that very tissue to understand it and so I'm
intrigued by the possibility that there are certain aspects of self that maybe
We are not intended to be explored because they are not really of us, right?
Brains interacting with one another is an interesting area, certainly for scientific
exploration, but I'm fascinated by and excited about the possibility that at some point our
species will both understand the mechanics of our emotions, mechanics of our thought
process, creativity, and so on, but that we will also allow room for the stuff that we
We can't explain with science and to allow room for that in our life experience because
I also believe that can be powerful.
And while understanding things in great detail and putting mechanism and utility around that
and applying that is wonderful, it's the stuff of my life, which is obvious, I also think
that there's great value in not trying to control and understand everything and enjoying
the mystery of things that are clearly greater than us.
How do you balance having fun with having such a rich
knowledge and passion in neuroscience and optimization?
Fun.
People ask me, like, what do you do for fun?
I think people think I do all the protocols.
It's like, sure, I get my sunlight, I drink my water,
I do them, but fun.
I like learning.
I like learning.
I do enjoy physical movement.
I like learning.
You know, for me, okay, so for me, it's the little things.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm weird.
Certainly, I've been told that.
Like the other day, there was a frog in my swimming pool, and he was just like sitting there like,
and and I just like spend some time looking at him back and forth and and then I had all sorts
of ideas about like like what's he doing and what's he thinking and then I was thinking how
Oliver Sacks used to spend time imagining experience experiencing life as a bat through
only echolocation he talked about this and I thought and why would he do that right is that
and that's kind of cute he's like delightful old man right he had a 600 pound free weight squat won
the state California of squatting championship but like also like pretending he was a bat.
He's a weird dude. Did methamphetamines, raced motorcycles, you know, like hung out with movie
stars but then also was like a recluse and liked rocks. Okay, that's a weird scientist. I've been
around a lot of those but you know in discussions with people that knew him I mean that exercise of
and like seeing something he thought was cool like a bat you know allowed him to also use theory of
mind to kind of think, what would it be like to have locked in syndrome and only be able to
like blink your eyes to communicate and gave him an incredible compassion and sensitivity for other
people that then he transmuted into the form of like these wonderful books. So for me, fun is
really about doing the things that I do systematically each day. But then when something
excites me, I know that feeling. I know it physically in my body. And to just follow that
trail like a weirdo right like a weirdo just like Barres was a weird and barbara chapman was weird
and like like i think everybody's a little weird if you allow yourself to just see the things that
you think are really cool and there are a bunch of things that i think are really cool that enchant
me that a bunch of other people love too and i know that because it like i see we're all watching
that video or something like that um but i think for me fun is is in the the practice of trying to
stay open to the like the little things um the little things that kids say are always delightful
because they're not filtering through all the bullshit that we filter our self our life
experience through but also just um yeah i like reading and learning exercising i mean i like to
think i'm not a very wooden person but at the same time um i mean i didn't see the barbie movie um
no disrespect to Barbie, I go to movies, I do that kind of thing. I don't know what else is
there to do at some point, you know, what else is there to do? Anyway, I mean, I delight in
certain things, as you now know far too much about, but fun is a relative term.
That was a hard question.
Thank you. Thanks for the pass.
Do you believe time changes due to daylight savings time is worth a potential loss of productivity?
Look, daylight saving times is anti-health. Okay, this is where I'll get like, it's just dumb.
It's just dumb. It's just so dumb. It makes no sense. I mean, the director of the chronobiology
unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health, my good friend, long-time friend, and brilliant
and brilliant scientist, Samer Hattar, will tell you it's a stupid idea. It's anti-biology,
and increased car crashes, increased heart attacks, increased depression. It's just, it's like kids
don't like to wake up early anyway. Parents don't like to wake up early, especially with kids that
don't like to wake up early. It makes no sense. And then there's all these arguments about,
you know, is it really about trying to truncate the late, you know, you want more light in the
evening so there's less crime. Like that's totally unsubstantiated, like it's completely
unsubstantiated. So the daylight savings thing is just stupid. Basically, try and get as much light
in your eyes, ideally from sunlight early in the day. And by the way, if you're worried about
cataract, that's a serious concern. After all, I have an appointment in ophthalmology. You know,
cataract, macular degeneration. But guess what? The chair of ophthalmology from Stanford when he
came on the podcast verified this. When the sun is low in the sky, you're not really at risk of that.
Right? So when the sun is overhead and you're like, you're beaming your eyes, like trying to,
yeah, it's a problem. But we're talking about viewing low solar angle sunlight in the morning
and in the evening. And if there's clouds, do it anyway. In fact, do it longer. And if you can't do
that, look at some artificial light inside. Daylight savings is just stupid.
What happens here is as the night goes on, the amount of GABA in my brain starts to diminish,
and then I just kind of go to short form. We've thought about podcasting in the middle of the
night. That's why when I went on Lex's podcast recently, the more recent one, he did it at
eight o'clock at night and he cried. He made me cry. He didn't cry. He made me cry. I was so tired
and I can't think and then he asked me about my dog and I'm talking about the dog. So you know,
his goal was to get me to cry. We have this friendship, you know. No, he's delightful.
What should I as a 19-year-old college student be doing to maximize the years of neuroplasticity I
have left? I get this question. I'm like, oh man, it's such a great question. Reese, well, I don't,
I'm assuming, yeah, I don't know who you are, Reese, or what you're doing, but you're 19,
so the cool thing is your brain is hyperplastic. Life is a psychedelic experience without psychedelics.
Gosh, people always say, like, if you could go back to your 19-year-old self, what would you do?
And that's a tricky one. There are movies about that, right?
You know, I would definitely worry less. Yeah, I would worry less. I would have more fun.
I would certainly, I started latching on to practices and the understanding of science as a way,
for me it was kind of like my world felt very unstable and for me it brought stability,
but you want to avoid rigidity. So, you know, do you want to be the one 19 year old who's like,
oh, got to get to sleep, you know, got to go back to bed at 8 30 at night. Enjoy life, but I would say
when you're 19, learn how you learn. Learn how to focus. Learn how to rest. Basically,
you can stress and focus as much as you want as long as you can still fall asleep at night and
sleep well and fall back asleep if you wake up. You know, we hear stress is bad, stress is good.
Stress is bad, stress is good. Stress is bad unless you're getting enough sleep, in which case
stress is called learning in life. Now, obviously, don't do anything dangerous. Avoid
psychological and physical danger. But I think as a 19 year old, I mean, my direct advice would be
have some cardiovascular activity you like, have some resistance training activity you like,
develop some sort of self-awareness practice like journaling, could be meditation,
surround yourself with people that you like, avoid people you don't like. I mean, it sounds
so straightforward, but then we can all look into our personal histories and be like, well,
I spent all this time trying to resolve this thing that like clearly you didn't like them.
It's simple.
You didn't like them.
They weren't into cuttlefish or ferrets.
You didn't like them.
Wasn't your kind of person.
Right.
And that's not a box you can check on the dating apps.
They tell me.
Right.
§04Transcript — part 4
The ferret thing.
I think it'd be very, very small subset of people.
I think, you know, the know thyself thing is huge.
Learn to tap into that early feeling of like this feels right.
This doesn't feel right.
Learn to be a bit of a rudder for yourself.
And journal.
I still have stacks of things that I wrote across the years.
Most of it is terrible.
But you will find if you go back that you kind of knew better all along,
even if you didn't do better all along.
That voice in your head, don't do that, do that.
This person's like, everyone else is crazy about this person, but not me.
But this is like, you know, like I don't want to sound sentimental,
but you have to find your heart, right?
Or at least not lose it.
You have to make sure that you're in touch
with that piece of yourself that wasn't judging
and just felt good.
And as long as it's not something that's self-destructive,
I think that's the most important thing.
And then, yeah, have tools and practices in place
because they work.
And when you're 19 and your neuroplasticity
is through the roof,
you can do a lot less and get a lot more.
But don't worry about hitting 25 and it all being over.
Certainly that's not the case.
But you can cram in a lot early on.
I still regret not learning an instrument.
The data on people that learn an instrument even later in life,
but certainly at 19, is that it greatly increases your ability to learn all sorts of things.
So learn an instrument.
How can we transform the American education system to be more effective?
Oh.
So in 10 seconds...
So when I'm in charge...
No, I'm just kidding.
A little while back, I did an interview with a major media outlet, and they were very gracious.
And then they said, like, what's next?
And I was like, I'm going to run for office.
I was just like, you know, I was sort of a, look, it's not out of the question, but frankly, I think that I'm so poorly suited for that.
It's obvious.
I'm so poorly suited for that.
So it wasn't a joke, but it was, you know, I think as I spent some time afterwards, like, oh, I should really go talk to people who do that for a living.
And but I am very interested in potentially informing policy.
If I were to ever be asked, I'd certainly respond.
And my stance on this is, you know, much in the same vein as the podcast, because keep in mind the podcast.
Yes, Lex suggested I start one, but it was really during the the those days of the the deep 2020, 2021 pandemic where, by the way, I wasn't allowed to talk about vaccines.
And so I didn't. And also, I don't have any expertise in it. So I was not well suited to do it.
But I also decided it's a topic that enough people are talking about.
So my response in life and in general, when people say, what about something is I like, well, I've got a lot of opinions about that, but this isn't the venue.
OK. But during the pandemic, I realized there was a lot of circadian disruption, anxiety, stress, a bunch of things happening with visual systems and biological systems that I felt there were tools that that people could.
perhaps benefit from. So I just started putting that information into the world and I was really
surprised, really surprised that people that I knew from the neuroscience community, for instance,
at NIMH or in government positions weren't talking about this stuff. So I just kept doing it.
And I think that it made clear to me that the education system is not one thing. It's tough,
especially when talking about kids, like what to do is a tricky thing, but that the education system,
in my mind, should at least involve some sort of discussion early on about this thing called a brain,
this thing called a body, how they work, how you can do certain things to modulate your stress
level, your sleep, the importance of, not just the importance of sleep and nutrition and avoiding
social isolation and all these important things, but giving people some levers and knobs to
maneuver within themselves and zero-cost tools as a way to do that, that transcend socioeconomic
boundaries, ideally transcend language as well, because we're not just talking about the United
States. And of course, within the United States, there are many different cultures speaking
different languages. And maybe AI will soon allow us to put out the podcast into a bunch of different
languages I think it will. So I think that the education system should start in my
opinion with it with teaching kids how to understand themselves, what to do in
difficult scenarios that's really anchored in in the real pillars of
biology and and psychology and trying to take some of the mystery out of trying
to navigate the tough business of growing up. I mean if you think it's tough being
an adult, which it can be. Certainly, it's really tough growing up, as we all know. And I think that
more tools, more tools, more protocols, more tools, more tools, more protocols, more tools.
But that's obviously a biased opinion. And no one's ever asked me, like, hey,
what should we be teaching kids? But if they ask, you can tell, like, I'm not going to shut up.
So I think that was our last question. Thank you all for coming tonight. I want to
forgive me for going long.
I do want to say
thank you, sincere thank you
for making your way out here,
especially on a weekday night.
Thanks for your hospitality.
My incredible team, I want to thank them.
And certainly, last but not least,
thank you for your interest in science.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you.