Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Andrew Huberman, (IG: @hubermanlab), a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman Lab. Andrew is the author of Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body and the host of the Huberman Lab podcast, which became, and remains, the most popular health and science podcast in the world.

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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Tim Ferriss: Well, why don’t we just do a quick call back, The Dark Wizard. This sounds like an Ozzy Osbourne album, but it’s not.

Andrew Huberman: It’s not.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a documentary, and we were chatting about it before we started recording since it’s top of mind. Why don’t you just describe what that’s about because this involves a character that I tracked for a super long time.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Dean Potter.

Tim Ferriss: Dean Potter. So what is The Dark Wizard? Why has it struck you so?

Andrew Huberman: So I learned about this movie from Andy Stumpf, who’s a former retired Navy SEAL, tier one operator who then set two world records with the Red Bull high performance team doing wing suiting. BASE jumping, wing suiting, whatever you want to call it, the squirrel suits.

Tim Ferriss: Squirrel suits.

Andrew Huberman: And he told me about this movie, The Dark Wizard, which is about Dean Potter, who started off as a climber and then became, people can watch the documentary, and then got into parachuting and then what he called free basing, which was climbing and then jumping off a rock and parachuting and then eventually wing suiting. I won’t give away anymore, but it’s a really interesting four-part series that gets into his mental health challenges, how he was able to funnel, let’s just call them the high dopamine more manic states into incredible feats of performance and then how he balanced out the lows. But the most interesting part about it to me is at the level of something I think about a lot these days, which is energy. We’re born into this world with a certain amount of energy and we think about it as time and longevity, but there are people that seem to, I don’t want to give anything away here about the movie, but there are people that seem to have more of this thing that we call energy and when they’re able to focus it, they take performance to just outrageously high levels.

And you see how the energy folds back on him and almost destroys him at times, and also times when he’s somehow able to harness it and put it to these incredible feats. 

But the most important thing about the film is he talks about and he demonstrates through the activities I talked about before, wing suiting, et cetera, he demonstrates how when you are in competition with other people, it’s a misuse of the energy that can harm you, but when you are seeking, what he calls just seeking beauty, like really trying to chase the feeling, the pure experience of taking that energy and putting it into something that you love, that’s when the really impressive feats land and they move you forward.

So there does seem to be something almost spiritual about whether or not we’re funneling energy into things that really reflect us at our best, what he calls funneling into beauty, versus competition and competition it turns out is what destroys people. And everyone will say, “No, no, no. It’s actually what allows you to reach a higher and higher bar.” But if you watch all four episodes, you realize, no, that’s an illusion. And when you get caught in that, you’re limiting your output. You’re limiting your performance. It also has multiple cameos by the great Alex Honnold, and their competition is extremely interesting. I’ll leave it at that. It’s a long teaser, but it’s a real insight into human psychology and energy, which is something, again, I’m just obsessed with because ultimately it’s where we place our efforts.

Tim Ferriss: Foundational.

Andrew Huberman: That’s all we’ve got. That’s all we’ve got.

Tim Ferriss: And Dean Potter, also, fascinating character. I’m going to watch this and if people have enjoyed slack lining, he helped popularize slack lining, certainly as cross-training for climbing, but overall, and I can’t help but mention the incredible Laird Hamilton also because we’re sitting here in Malibu. So if anybody’s ever done standup paddleboarding, eFoiling. Fewer people have done tow-in surfing certainly, but people should watch, I think it’s Riding Giants about their early chapters of Laird. Standup paddleboarding goes way back, probably thousands of years, but he certainly helped to repopularize it. 

We are going to talk about all sorts of frontier topics. We’re going to talk about perhaps some revisions. Updates maybe a better way to put it. And I’m just going to hop into this very long list that we will almost certainly not complete, but let’s hop into one that is of personal interest to me and I want to hear how this experience informed your training.

Dorian Yates. So I have interviewed Dorian, but I’ve never met him. You had the chance to train with Dorian. He is multiple time Mr. Olympia.

Andrew Huberman: Six, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Six times. He was legendary not only for his accomplishments in bodybuilding, but also for, in the eyes of many, the bizarreness of his training methods, which in contrast to many were pretty minimalist in certain respects. So could you just speak to the experience of training with Dorian and what you took away from that in terms of application to your own training?

Andrew Huberman: I’ve had the honor and pleasure and pain of training with Dorian Yates once here in Los Angeles. We did a back workout, back and rear delts workout. And then I just came back from Marbella, Spain, where we trained legs together, and it’s the sorest I’ve ever been. And I should say the science caught up to Dorian. What Dorian did to train for Mr. Olympia and what Mike Mentzer, who I’ll explain in a moment, were proponents of is now very well-supported by the peer-reviewed data. And a bunch of physio folks are probably jumping out of their seats going, “No, no, you don’t have to go to failure beyond failure, and you actually need more sets.” But if you look at their training, which was essentially a couple of warmups, a light set to just familiarize yourself with a movement, a medium set, maybe like 50% of what you would use on your work set, work set somewhere between five and 12 repetitions typically, and then maybe a third warmup for just a couple of reps, kind of practice sets.

And then Mentzer, Mike Mentzer, was a big proponent of one all outset to failure. Okay. Turns out that’s probably not enough for most people to stimulate hypertrophy and strength increases because it demands so much focus, intensity, and effort. There’s a kind of a systemic neural fatigue to it and a lot of people just can’t contract the muscles with enough focus and intensity for one set to absolute failure to work. Dorian basically is more proponent of two sets per exercise, maybe two or three exercises per major body part, major body part being quads, not legs, right? So training with Dorian essentially consists of what I just described, a couple of warmups, two all out sets to failure, or one set and then some assisted reps or a drop set or a rest pause where you rest after failure and then do a couple more reps.

Now, what’s unique about that training is you feel very tired at the end of a workout, but a couple hours later you’re fine. And indeed, if you do it right, you get stronger every single workout with the caveat, and Dorian made this clear to me, that about every six or eight weeks or so you need to come off the gas pedal a bit and just stay out of the gym for a week or you do a kind of more moderate week. Now, what Mentzer, and let’s just stick with what Dorian said, because let’s call it low-ish volume, high intensity. What he’s a proponent of was heresy back in the day. Certainly the opposite extreme would be like the Schwarzenegger two hours, twice a day type workouts. And then people will say, “Well, Dorian was using loads of steroids and growth hormone, et cetera.” The scientist in me will, in no attempt to defend him, will just accurately say, “What’s the one thing that he was doing differently?”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That was par for the course, right? 

Andrew Huberman: That’s the key. Everyone was and is taking some testosterone and other anabolics and androgenics and some were taking growth hormone. But the point is, and at the top level, all of those guys have incredible genetics, long muscle bellies. What makes Dorian, even now at 65, he carries a ton of muscle mass. He’s doing a lot of biking, he’s doing functional training, he’s doing a lot of other things, but just the sheer density of muscle that he carries speaks to his genetics and the amount of training.

What I’ve been doing for years is the same split. Three days a week, one day legs including calves, rest a day or two, train chest and back, rest a day, shoulders and arms, and also some neck training because I didn’t wrestle, and neck is important to train, especially for guys, otherwise it looks like the wrong head is on the body. And also as the upper spine, it’s important for shoulder stability, et cetera.

But that split, most people say, “Well, that doesn’t square with the science. What does the science say?”

The science says, and this is Brad Schoenfeld’s work and other people’s work, which is fantastic, which is when you stimulate a muscle to grow, you have about 48 to 72 hours in which there’s protein synthesis after the training. So the logic says, well, logically speaking, you would say, “Okay, well, then train every muscle group three times a week or twice a week.” The problem is that when you do that, you’re not taking into account the other things that you might be doing. Like I run three times a week, one long slow run for about 60 minutes, one high intensity interval type training, like sprint for 30 seconds on the assault bike, rest for 30 seconds, then just repeat that six to eight times, right? Kind of a max heart rate training and then maybe one moderate session of like 20 or 30 minutes of running or biking.

If you’re doing those other things, you have to take that into account. And so what ends up happening if you do this split of training your legs, taking a day off, then the next day doing some sort of chest back workout, the next day running for 30 minutes. Now your legs, if you train them properly, are still probably a little bit sore.

Okay, well, it’s not going to stimulate hypertrophy, but if then you do a Airdyne bike high intensity workout, you’re getting some stimulus to your legs. It’s enough to carry you to the next week. So in reality, this arrangement of three times per week of resistance training, three times a week of cardio, you’re training everything directly once a week and indirectly a second time and you’re getting a lot of cardio.

Because all these studies have hypertrophy and strength training, it’s on a background typically of not doing any cardio.

And so when I look at what the science says, of course people are saying, “Oh, anywhere from 10 to 20 work sets per week,” that to maximize hypertrophy. Okay, 10 sets of quads per week distributed into two or three different sessions, plus I’m supposed to sprint outside or on the Airdyne bike, plus I’m supposed to do a long run? All of a sudden you run into, you have collisions all over the place. So turns out that for years I was doing this split, and then when I talked to Dorian, he’s like, “Yeah, that’s more or less what I did when—” He split things up into a four-day split, wasn’t doing quite as much cardio. He’s like, “Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Once directly high intensity, low-ish volume. Once indirectly.” Like when you train your chest and back, you’re hitting your arms and then you train your arms directly, so it’s twice a week. When you do the Airdyne bike, there’s some stimulus of like your lats and pushing and pulling. Again, it’s not for hypertrophy, but it gets you to the next week.

And what I’ve found from training with Dorian is you think you’re training to failure, you’re not training to failure. And this is the other piece. People will say, “Oh, the data say two or three sets taken like one or two reps in reserve.” Yeah, it’s true. You can get a lot of hypertrophy and strength increases doing that. Maybe it’s less taxing on the nervous system. But what is failure? Like if somebody really put a gun to your head and said, “Curl that bar one more time or I’m going to kill your family,” you’d curl the bar. Now it’s not pleasant nor is it appropriate to think that way in the gym and there are probably some guys thinking that way in the gym. It’s just impossible to generate that kind of mental intensity. So you go, “All right.”

If you just step back, the way Dorian is training now, the way he basically trained for the Olympia, six Olympia wins, is you train each body part directly once per week, it gets hit indirectly a second time per week, you give it plenty of rest, you’re doing four to eight sets per body part, two to three exercises per body part, so you’re splitting up those work sets. Yeah, it all kind of works out. And so this is the big revision for me is if you just look at the science, you’d say, “Okay, 10 to 20 sets, more volume of these sets almost to failure or even to failure is maximizing hypertrophy.” Yet if you’re doing curls and leg extensions for a study, but what about all the other stuff?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. So that’s the gist of it.

Tim Ferriss: If you want to look back at this approach to training, I mean, there are a lot of examples, but you can go back to Arthur Jones, then Mike Mentzer, and then of course you have Dorian, Blood and Guts. I remember having that black and white book that describes some of the training. And for those who may doubt the efficacy of this type of, let’s just call it short duration, because you can do what Dorian recommended. The workouts can be quite a bit shorter, and in some cases—

Andrew Huberman: And with the warmup, it ends up being, you do a couple minutes on the bike, you do your warm up sets. By the time you get to the second or third exercise for a given body part, you’re only doing one warmup.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And what I would say is you can look at, now this is somewhat of a complicated case study, but like Casey Viator with Arthur Jones, crazy example. There’s some sort of muscle memory, which we won’t get into right now, that enabled a lot of those gains. But suffice to say this type of minimalist training can be applied in a lot of places and I think according to many competitive powerlifters, the best powerlifter of all time, Ed Coan, also pretty similar recovery schedule, right? And very interestingly similar in terms of overlap with Dorian Yates. So what does your split look like now?

Andrew Huberman: So the split I follow now is essentially the same one I’ve always followed and it is—I want to be clear why I’m saying Monday or Tuesday, because there needs to be flexibility in one schedule, too. This is important. So Monday or Tuesday, I train my legs. Calves, hamstrings, quads, maybe some direct glute training, but probably not. A couple warmups, two to three, maybe, but usually just two hard sets to failure. If I have a training partner, there may be some assisted reps. So quads would be two working sets of leg extensions. I’ll leave out the warmups. Two to three, because I need a bit more there, lying hamstring curls to failure. Then belt squat, my favorite movement. I actually bought a belt squat machine because you don’t have to load the shoulders.

Tim Ferriss: Which machine do you like?

Andrew Huberman: I use the Pit Shark.

And Rogue’s got now one that’s kind of more of a fan based one and there are a bunch of—it’s a lot of fun to go on Instagram and some of the gym equipment assessment accounts is a whole world. Sorinex has one. There are all sorts of great ones out there. I bought the Pit Shark. 

Tim Ferriss: I’ll reinforce the belt squat.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Love the belt squat. It takes a little bit getting used to because some people feel as if it’s like jamming into their hips or something. You can put a towel there if you need to. I mean, all the Westside Barbell guys would talk about belt squat. They would load it up. You can actually march with it to build all sorts of stabilizing muscles. I mean, that’s an incredible cardio workout. You just put a couple plates on each side and you just march, lifting your knees, and after like a minute you’re like, “There’s no way I can continue.” That’s a great workout. But I end up doing leg extensions, leg curls, then belt squat, and then I may throw in a couple work sets of hack squat and that’s it. And that’s Monday or Tuesday. The day after legs is always a rest day.

If you train legs properly, the next day should be a rest day. You should need it. Ideally, I would do sauna and cold that day. These days I haven’t had time.

Systemically, you have to ask yourself, am I systemically exhausted? Did my nervous system take enough of an ass beating on that Monday or Tuesday that I need two days off after legs? And if it was very, very intense, then I’ll do some sort of 20- or 30-minute cardio. Typically, it’s a run, not an all out run, not a jog, just somewhere in between. Probably in the zone, let’s just call it zone three-ish, zone three, four. Okay? You’re not sucking for air, but it’s not a sprint workout. It’s not zone two. And then I’ll do a push pull. I’ll do chest and back workout and neck.

Tim Ferriss: What do you use for neck?

Andrew Huberman: I have a 4-way neck machine.

Tim Ferriss: You do?

Andrew Huberman: I do.

Tim Ferriss: Which brand do you use?

Andrew Huberman: Hammer Strength.

Tim Ferriss: Hammer Strength.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And again, the reason I’m asking this guys is not to plug particular manufacturers. It’s because the physics and the geometry and so on really matters.

Andrew Huberman: It really matters.

Tim Ferriss: Especially in my experience with something that has injury potential, I have a 4-way neck machine also.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, cool.

Tim Ferriss: I do it very, very slowly myself. Don’t overdo it. If you’ve never trained neck, do not rush into high velocity stuff. But that’s why I was asking.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Neck is very important. I’ll talk about specifically what I’ll do if I don’t have access to that. But some people will be like, “Chest and back same day, and rear delts?” Yeah. I think of it as like a torso workout because I’m not a bodybuilder. I’m interested in posture. I’m interested in strength, and I essentially do some sort of pushing movement like a low incline press and then some sort of fly type movement. Although sometimes I’ll just do low incline bench press for, so couple warmups, two or three warmups, two or three work sets, in the failing somewhere between five and 12 repetitions. And then dips, weighted dips. Big believer in these. I think it’s like an upper body squat, whatever that means. Weighted dips typically with a weight vest and it looks ridiculous, but the chains are great if you can throw those on, because you can toss one off and then keep going if you want to keep going.

Whereas if you got a weight hanging between your legs, which always just feels weird to me anyway, you’re like waddling around the gym, it’s clanking into your ankles. I’ll do some sort of dip and then I’ll do some sort of row for the back, typically like a low row or a dumbbell row, one arm dumbbell row and then some sort of chinning movement. Although I put the chins first because we’ve all got this thing of how many can I do. And I recently bought a Nautilus pullover machine based on the training with Dorian and it’s from 1976 and it’s one of only two that still exist and there’s a whole, it’s kind of like some guys like muscle cars, I like old school strength training equipment.

Tim Ferriss: Dorian loves his pullovers. Just like Arthur Jones.

Andrew Huberman: And by the way, if you’re rowing heavy and you’re doing these things, you’re getting some forearm training, but then I’ll do the neck training and I’ll either use the 4-way neck machine or I’ll do—Jeff Cavaliere from Athlean-X has a great video on how to train with a plate. You wrap it in—a trained neck with a plate and a bench so you could do that anywhere. You wrap it in a towel, you lie on your side and you’re just—you have to be careful about closing the chain so you’ve got one leg down and you’ve got a hand down on the ground. The video describes it, and maybe we could put a link to it.

One thing that’s very important I learned about training neck is you need to nasal breathe the whole time, have your tongue on the roof of your mouth and make sure that you’re not sticking your chin out at any point while you’re bending it to the side because then you start getting clicking in your jaw and my spinal surgeon friends tell me that it’s a great way to slip a disc in your neck.

The neck aesthetically, it’s always weird when dudes are talking about aesthetics, but these days because of the looks maxing thing and all that, it seems to be like more—but there’s something actually very important in neck training—

Tim Ferriss: You’re not hammering your cheekbones?

Andrew Huberman: No, I’m definitely not hammering my cheekbones.

Tim Ferriss: Come on, Andrew.

Andrew Huberman: Nope, not hammering my cheekbones, not taking—I mean, that is such a wild thing. Yeah. No, no, no. But there is something interesting. So from a strength and stability standpoint, training one’s neck is really important because it’s the upper spine, and I do think it’s one of the reasons I’ve never had any shoulder issues and I’ve got long arms and everything points to the fact that I should have rotator cuff issues. I don’t do any direct rotator cuff work. I think it’s because I started training my neck a long time ago and aesthetically, like you have this, this is a great opportunity to point out just how perfectly constructed you are, Tim Ferriss.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, thank you.

Andrew Huberman: You train your neck. Really, if you look head on at a male face, if the neck sort of arrives right at the sort of like outer, right more or less, right, plus or minus a few, whatever, millimeters, and more or less at the outer jaw, the outermost point of the jaw, like below the ears, like touching there, you’ll notice like it looks kind of right. When somebody is really wide and their neck is not at that point, it looks like the wrong head was placed on a body.

Then you see Laird Hamilton and you realize like this dude just has a really big neck, but it’s appropriate for his body structure.

Then after the neck, I’ll do, I don’t know, three sets or two work sets per side, although you don’t train neck the same way, like to forced reps and all that.

And then I’ll do some core work. The core work that I’m a big fan of, because you also get some forearm work in, is I’ll hang from a bar and I’ll do some L sits, and if I’ve been doing them a lot lately, I’ll do some pikes. Five sets of five, piking my ankles up to my hands, and then slow on the descent and then into an L sit if I can, and I’ll do maybe three or five sets depending, and then lower back work. I have a 45 degree ankle hyperextension and I’m not taking that to failure. The low back thing is really important. I’ve found that and there are a lot of data out there that if you can strengthen the spinal erectors, your posture is better, you’re more injury resistant. But that whole workout takes an hour tops. The next day is the high intensity cardio day, just max heart rate. These days I get on an Airdyne bike. I would say for this for people, it’s whatever you can do without getting hurt.

Tim Ferriss: So question for you on the Airdyne.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I guess probably an AssaultBike.

Andrew Huberman: AssaultBike.

Tim Ferriss: This is a digression so I won’t indulge just too far, but to figure out why the AssaultBike worked and caught on where the Airdyne did not, right? You can look at footage from Dan Gable, legendary wrestler working out on Airdyne, but it never really spread until the AssaultBike reformatted it, improved it, in some ways. My question for you on that real quick, for people who don’t know, you’re using your arms on these isolateral, movable handles that power this fan. So you can pedal and use your arms, one or the other or both. And I find that my upper body fatigues a lot faster than my lower body. If I’m trying to do, let’s say like a Norwegian 4×4 or something like that, like four minutes on, three minutes off or four minutes on, four minutes off.

Do you find that not to be the case for yourself or how do you approach it? Because I’ve wanted to use the AssaultBike. It’s now easier to find an AssaultBike in say a hotel gym for me than a stationary bike that fits well otherwise. How do you approach that?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Well, the naming piece is interesting and maybe we get into this at some point deeper in the discussion, but naming is very important and it’s not just important in health and fitness and this kind of thing. It’s actually very important in science. And I’m a student of science as a field, not just the field of neuroscience in terms of the facts, but also you look at the culture of a scientific field. Oftentimes, the naming is what carries a field forward very quickly. And you go, “How can that be? Aren’t these scientists? Shouldn’t they just be focused on the data?” Nomenclature is important because if more people are doing something because they can talk about it to more people using the same language, it tends to accelerate a field.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Andrew Huberman: So also AssaultBike sounds cool. Stationary bike feels like you’re just peddling. The AssaultBike is interesting because I also, I get like a lot of lat work from it. Keep in mind, the day before I trained my chest and back.

Tim Ferriss: No, exactly. That’s why I’m asking.

Andrew Huberman: So it ends up being a second stimulus. It’s not a hypertrophy workout, but you end up feeling like almost like a pump type thing if you do it right. I can’t do more than 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off without experiencing what you experienced, which is that my legs just have all this gas and my arms, they can just keep going. It all transfers to the upper body. So Norwegian 4×4 on the AssaultBike just sounds like torture to me. This workout, if I can, I’ll get outside and sprint. And you could do it on a rower, you could sprint. I think it’s just important because it’s a near all out or all out workout, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, or maybe you jog a couple laps and then you do a couple—you do a 400 on the track and then walk a lap and then do a 400.

Whatever you do for this workout, you can come up with any number of different variations. It’s got to be something where you can apply max effort and not get hurt.

And then the next day is shoulders arms. You do some sort of pressing. I’m not big on lateral raises. Some sort of press for the shoulders, couple work sets of bicep curls, couple incline curls, some hammer curls of overhead tricep extension for the long head, couple work sets, some bench dips.

And there you go, like bench dips again. So now you’re getting a little bit of other stuff working even though it’s not an all out chest and back workout. 

And then the next day, which is typically on a Sunday, I’ll do some long, slow movement ideally outside.

Maybe it’s a walk and a hike with my girlfriend. Maybe it’s I’m rucking and listening to a podcast if I’m alone. Maybe I’m jogging in the sand. It could be a long bike ride. Just something like—there’s something so nice to starting the week.

Tim Ferriss: Jogging in the sand sounds miserable—

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it’s slow. It’s a slow plod. You’re a mule. I like to think of like you’re kind of a mule or I’m a mule.

Tim Ferriss: That’s going to be my clip for the teaser.

Andrew Huberman: You’re the mule?

Tim Ferriss: I’m a mule. No, I’m kidding.

Andrew Huberman: Cool. No, that works. That works for me. And the real hard part about that workout is not going faster. It’s pretty easy to jog and then walk, jog and then walk. It’s probably beneficial. But that workout is as much for the mental stimulation, but it’s also, there’s something so nice about going into the work week. Maybe it lands on a Monday. I don’t know. But typically for me, it lands on a Sunday because there’s something so nice about going to the work week, having spent as much time as possible moving outdoors the day before.

But I do this and it ends up being six workouts a week, but some are very, very short. None of the resistance training stuff is terribly long. You’re done in an hour or so unless you’re waiting for equipment. At 50, I’m continuing to get stronger, I’m not—outrageously so. And it just works. It just works and it’s worked for everyone that I know. Now one key thing and a lot of people will, what I call they’ll kind of geek this and they won’t do compound movements. You can’t do lateral raises and I do some rear delt flys on the whatever, one or the other either chest and back day or the shoulders and arms day. You need that for shoulder posturally, aesthetically, et cetera. But people will think, “Oh, I can do leg extensions, leg curls to failure once a week.” No, you’re also hack squatting and belt squatting or hack squatting and front squatting to failure for a couple sets.

Where that’s intense and you need to do the compound movements. There’s no world where you can just do isolation movements this way. And that’s the thing that sometimes gets forgotten in the Yates-style training. He was doing a lot of compound movements and he’s still a proponent of that. 

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s hop around and we may come back to training. We spoke some time ago about psychedelics with a focus on MDMA and it seems like you may have some revised views, maybe a few caveats. I would be interested to hear your current thinking. 

Andrew Huberman: So this is an area you’ve spoken about and thought about pretty extensively, or as I’m more of a newbie. As we talked about last time in case people didn’t hear that conversation, growing up, I made the mistake. It was truly a mistake of taking some psychedelics at a very young age, “Recreationally.” LSD, psilocybin, not giving any thought to what the long-term consequences might be. Fortunately, I didn’t feel any long-term consequences, but I had enough bad trips, meaning one, Robin Carhart-Harris would say, “You can’t have a bad trip.” You can have a bad trip, Robin. I’ve had one. It sucks. You’re in the pit for hours and hours. There’s no guide there if you’re doing it recreationally as a teen. The brain is hyperplastic. It made me very, very cautious, almost paranoid about psychedelics for many, many years. Then also the last time we spoke, I talked about how in an effort to resolve what I felt were some longstanding psychological traumas. I did clinically-supported MDMA. Standard MAPS protocol, right? I forget the milligram dosage, maybe take like—

Tim Ferriss: Probably 125, something like that.

Andrew Huberman: Sometimes there’s a booster about 90 minutes in, you have someone there, you’re doing talk therapy before, during, and after tremendously helpful to be able to feel my feelings, to be able to recognize what a whole body feeling was about. I mean, there was never the experience for me of wanting to dance or have sex while I was on it. It was like, no, there was some shaking. There was a little bit of that, but it was a very—it’s an empathogen. I think as you know, it’s not a psychedelic, it’s technically empathogen and raises both dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, which is very unusual for any compound to do and raises oxytocin quite dramatically. The data actually say the empathogenic effect of MDMA is not due to oxytocin through a kind of good control where you just give oxytocin and you don’t get the same clinical effects, but you could argue the cocktail effect, the synergy might be important.

So I did that a few times. I think it was a total of four times separated by a number of months or a year, clinically supported.

In any event, after a period of doing that, I took a break and on the suggestion of the same clinical group decided to partake in a psilocybin experiment and it was high dose psilocybin.

Now, psilocybin, as you know, leads to, I think in the words of our friend, Paul Conti, it almost recedes the waterline on the unconscious mind. So what I found in psilocybin was because my brain often thinks in analogies, it’s just how I structure my thinking, it’s reflexive for me off psilocybin. Almost everything that came to me in those sessions was out of symbolic representation analogies. For somebody else who represents their world not that way, maybe musically or through somatic experience, it’s likely that, from my understanding, that they will experience insights through those same kind of representations. 

What I found from psilocybin work was it was exquisite at revealing to me the structure of my thinking and the ways that some of the patterns in my life that were not serving me well, how they were structured. It was like, oh, coming out of it there’s a like, wow, like there’s this form of self-seduction that I do, which takes actually eight forms, which look the following way in my life.

I can be seduced by the enchantment of some sort of promise of a future outcome that’s not realistic. And you can see that. I’m just kind of giving one example. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it. And that for me was an incredible experience. I do think it was important to keep a journal afterwards, to take notes while off the drug. And for me, that was very, very helpful at allowing me to understand the structure of my thinking, both for things that serve me and don’t serve me. I will say, and this is getting a little—well, as long as people are doing like live streams of taking psychedelics, I feel on very solid ground, but who knows?

Tim Ferriss: Well, just wait until the second half of this conversation.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don’t want anyone to run out and take these things without clinical support. There are a number of people who shouldn’t be taking them and all the usual caveats apply, young people, et cetera, but the real, whoa, on session type rewiring, which was the hardest work I’ve ever done, having done lots and lots of therapy, but the hardest work I’ve ever done was to take MDMA and then a couple hours later, take a high dose of psilocybin. And I’ve only done that twice. Now, the reason it was such—by the way, if I ever try and run for public office, any mistakes I make, they’ll attribute to this. By the way, I’ve seen that publicly, but I’m going to make it very clear right now. Not only am I not going to run for office, I’m running from office. There’s been some speculation. But the interesting thing was no two days later drop, which you do experience with MDMA. I just did not experience that if I took psilocybin with it.

Remarkable. Had some of my best workouts, work weeks, et cetera. I was like, “Oh, wow, that can be avoided through this thing.” But what was remarkable is on MDMA as an empathogen, you feel very good about most anything you focus on. You can find the piece in it. You can find the love in it. It could be this yerba mate, which I happen to love, but you would really love—that’s the danger, right? You can get pulled into these force fields of thinking something’s really important that might not be that important when the session is over. That’s why I think it’s very important to have a trained guide with you, but there’s the drop. 

Psilocybin for me was a very dark and harrowing experience, a lot of purging, a lot of vomiting about halfway through. These weren’t enormous doses. They weren’t small either. It was four to five grams, but this—

Tim Ferriss: Just to be clear for folks, of dried, Psilocybe mushrooms.

Andrew Huberman: So for me, it was terrifying to be on psilocybin alone. It was extremely difficult and the combination of the two, it was like having my really good friend Rob Mohr in there with me going, “You can do this.” Now, Rob wasn’t in there, so I’m just half joking because he’s here in the room with us now, but it was like, I can do this. I can lean into the hardest work. I’m going to give an example so it’s not too vague. 

I’d spent a fair amount of time thinking about some of the harder things that had happened in my childhood, in my life, some of which were self-inflicted, some of which were not self-inflicted. And I’d come to peace about those through the work I described, standard psychotherapy, a lot of journaling, time, some MDMA, psilocybin, those separately. Taking them together, I had this voice in my head that was like, “It’s time to do the real work.” And I was like, “Oh, goodness.”

And I said out loud, “I thought we’re just going to listen to Grateful Dead today.” And the person helping me was like, “No, that’s not how this works. You know that.” And I’m thinking, “I don’t want to do this.” And I don’t even know what this is. I just know there’s something there that’s important.

Tim Ferriss: Something foreboding.

Andrew Huberman: And I’m like, “Oh, shit.” And I think it is important for people to understand this because it can be very, very scary and you feel it coming at you like a storm and you can push it away. I could have spent the entire time listening to The Grateful Dead, not a huge Grateful Dead fan, but people have encouraged me to listen to it. So I’ve been doing it and I like it, but I could have done that, but I didn’t. Instead, I was like, okay, with those two compounds in me, I was like, “I can do this. I’ve got myself held. I’m my own friend. That’s the empathogen. I can do this.” It wasn’t this like, “All right, let’s go. Let’s fight.” And that session took me through a brutally hard voyage of thinking about all the things that didn’t happen, all the things that I would wish had happened.

That I was in no position to make happen for myself. Heavy, gnarly. And coming through it, it was the perfect thing because I was like, “Those are the things I know I can create now.” There is no way, and this is why I feel it’s important to talk about these compounds. There is no way whatsoever that a therapist was going to sit down and go, “Hey, what’s ever on your mind today? Let’s talk about what didn’t happen.” No one’s ever done that for me. And if they had, there’s no way that I would have been in the full emotional experience of the lack.

Tim Ferriss: Or necessarily had access to it.

Andrew Huberman: Or had access to it.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Andrew Huberman: So I give that as an example. It’s certainly not what everyone would experience, but I’d never thought about the problem of what hadn’t happened as a viable option to explore. It’s so obvious now, but then the outcome of this brutally hard session was beautiful. No additional drug, nothing for—and it stayed with me. This was well over a year ago and I thought, “This is awesome. I can create these things. I know exactly what to aim for.” And I started to make steps in my life steering the ship in those directions and not surprisingly it’s like, “Yeah, I can do this. I can do these things. I need some practice.” And so I think that the medicines as we think of them are immensely powerful, immensely precarious. You need the support. I’ve been told in these sessions, “Hey, maybe we don’t go there. You don’t go there.”

That feels like a repeat. You need someone to help guide you. These are not to be used recreationally in my opinion, at least not for folks like me. I’m just not interested in that. 

Andrew Huberman: But the lessons I learned is the following. Neuroplasticity is the goal directed toward something that oftentimes we can’t identify through standard therapy. Like you would say, “Oh, I’m trying to resolve my traumas.” That’s a sentence. If you can’t know exactly what the thing was, or even if you can, or the things that happened, what about the things that didn’t happen? It just never would’ve occurred to me. So it revealed both the thing that needed work and allowed me to do a lot of the work in real time and spit me out at the other end, which is how it felt. I wasn’t cratered coming out the other end. I was like, “Ooh, that was an ass-kicking of a whole other level.” And with a clear mission in mind of what to do in my daily life that has served me very, very well.

It also reminded me that we seem to have this one compound type view and I’m not suggesting that polypharmacology is the way, but it turned out in this case, was the appropriate tool for me. And it’s also a reminder that combined pharmacology with brain machine interface and stimulation. Combining ketamine therapy with TMS. I’ve not done ketamine nor TMS, but I think we are entering a really exciting new time where we’re going to be able to amplify the effects of machines and drugs, let’s call them what they are. It’s pharmacology, but drugs, that they can synergize in ways that are more directed, but ultimately that the directives in life are what matter. Do I feel better? What am I doing on a daily basis that’s serving me? If the anterior mid-cingulate cortex or the posterior insula gets 10% thicker, great. But if you’re not making better decisions, frankly, who gives a shit?

Tim Ferriss: Right, right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: So ultimately, the everyday outcomes, the clinical outcomes and everyday outcomes are what really matter. Brain imaging is important too, of course. So the experience with these compounds, I will also say left me in a place where I’m like, “I’m feeling pretty good right now.” I feel really good in fact. I don’t feel “called” to it again right now. Maybe I will at some point. I have not, for instance, I’ve never done ayahuasca. There seems to be this resurgence of the one shot theory in Silicon Valley, that there are these CEOs or company founders rather who will take ayahuasca and then quit the company or something. And I made the argument to Marc Andreessen like, “Well, maybe they’re happier.” And he made the argument quite astutely as pretty much everything Marc says is he said, “Yeah, but as an investor, that’s not what I’m looking for.” And I go, “Well, sure.”

Tim Ferriss: For sure. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: But from a life satisfaction point, maybe yes. I think it depends on what your incentive structure is. And so I am very excited about plasticity tools, whether or not it’s talk therapy combined with a brain stimulation device that’s invasive or noninvasive or a vagal stimulation device. Those are getting better and better all the time. Whether or not it’s an empathogen and psilocybin high dose with therapeutic support or it’s daily microdosing for seven days with an undetectable subjective effect where you’re just like, “I feel fine. I feel normal.” But you’re doing a bunch of hard things and suddenly your brain is shifting more quickly. I think this is where the field needs to go enough with it “opens plasticity.” That’s a general statement, not about psychedelics, but includes psychedelics.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me chime in here. This is good terrain. So I would say a couple of things that might be helpful for folks or interesting just to bat around. So the first I would say is that when you induce plasticity, let’s just explore that within the context of psychedelics and I’m going to use some pretty primitive analogies here, but if you’re heating up the clay, that doesn’t immediately mean that in that window of plasticity or after that, you’re going to turn out better than you were before. You have to be very cautious about how you reshape the clay once you induce that plasticity.

Andrew Huberman: Well put. Totally agree.

Tim Ferriss: And I’d suggest people check out Gül Dölen. She’s at UC Berkeley. She’s looked at critical periods and the reopening of critical periods after psychedelics. She’s focused a lot on MDMA but also is exploring ibogaine among other things. And that’s part of the reason why historically if you talk to facilitators who have literally supervised thousands of sessions, more common in like the neo-shamanic kind of Northern California context for simplicity than the indigenous, but the two to three weeks following has always been viewed as this golden window for reformatting your behavior and your patterns.

And it turns out that modern science, Gul’s research being one good example of it reinforces this. So it’s not just taking the medicine in the form of a pill, a potion, whatever it might be. It’s actually, that is a catalyst that opens a period of time during which the work needs to be done. So that’s part number one. I would say that your experience also with the hippie flipping, so the MDMA plus psilocybin, or in this case, Psilocybe mushrooms, I would say blunting or eliminating the, let’s just call it energetic hangover MDMA, super typical. I don’t generally—well, not that I’m doing this at all, obviously for legal purposes, but let’s just say hypothetically, that’s part of the reason why some people will format say a weekend where you have breathwork, let’s just say as a lead in, then empathogen, and then the next day, something that is more, and this term is controversial, but the classical psychedelic. Again for simplicity, let’s just call it like psilocybin, LSD, whatever it might be, also tends to reduce that potential for the energetic hangover, right?

So that’s pretty common. People can check out also Transcend Therapeutics that just got acquired or at least the majority was purchased who have been commercializing methylone, which is a very, very interesting compound. It’s like the shorter acting softer cousin of MDMA, much less body load, very, very interesting compound. And what they did, which was very smart and I’m not saying MAPS/Lykos, whatever the current name is, wasn’t smart, but one of the problems that MDMA ran into is that it was coupled with psychotherapy and the FDA does not know how to regulate psychotherapy, that they don’t know how to standardize or think of as standardized. And so what Transcend did is they just completely separated the two and actually removed the psychotherapy completely and said, “How do people do with methylone, period?” That’s it. And they’ve done incredibly well, which is reflected in the acquisition. Really interesting compound, methylone like—

Andrew Huberman: Methylone.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Interesting. I wasn’t aware of it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I think these are very interesting compounds and I used to have this view like, “Oh, psychedelic—” You’re increasing neuro modulators. SSRIs will do that too, differently and clearly a different experience. Actually, I’ve not taken SSRIs. I’m trying to think, have I ever taken an SSRI?

Tim Ferriss: Have you ever taken Trazodone? It’s not technically an SSRI.

Andrew Huberman: No, no. No, I haven’t. I think there’s so much important work to be done here and I will say, huge hat tip to you. You’ve been ushering this forward.

Tim Ferriss: [inaudible 01:11:42].

Andrew Huberman: It’s amazing we can even have this conversation with things that have happened.

Tim Ferriss: Things have changed.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: My conclusion after all of that and lots of personal flight time with lots of things is that to state the obvious, it’s not a panacea. It’s for most people, not going to be one and done where the potion pill plant medicine does all the heavy lifting for you. The way I think about it now is it’s like very complicated knee reconstructive surgery. It’s like you’re going to want to pick the doctor very carefully, you’re going to want to know how to do your due diligence. You have the surgery and then guess what? The next, let’s even, could be like both shoulders, both knees. Boy, do you have a lot of rehab to do. And that’s the way that I myself think about it.

And also, it’s contraindicated for a lot of people, at least as of right now. There are exclusionary criteria for these clinical trials and I don’t think all of them will hold water long term. But if you have bipolar, if you have a family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, it is generally not a good idea. And coming back to the polypharma, do not underestimate the risk of cannabis when taken with or in proximity to these drugs. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble.

And then I would say to deliver on the brain stimulation side, that one of the most interesting things to me right now is the one-day protocol that’s been refined by Dr. Jonathan Downar at University of Toronto and others, but using an agent, in this case an antibiotic to induce neuroplasticity called d-cycloserine. So you take, in this case, it’s just a coincidence, but I think the most common dose that’s been used is a 125 milligrams, like an oral troche and you dissolve it an hour before your stimulation. And again, I’m pulling this from memory so people can read up on the literature, but you take that five day protocol that had been compressed by Nolan and team down from three to six months, they had compressed it down to five days, but people are still having to take five days off of work because you’re getting stimulated 10 times a day, right? Every hour on the hour, there are variable protocols, but that’s roughly it.

Very few people can take a week off of work and pay out of pocket, incredibly expensive. So this one day is pre-loading with the d-cycloserine and you take those five days and you compress it into one day. And I’ve had experiences with this one day protocol and full disclosure, I’m involved with this company, Ampa Health, which is co-founded by Jonathan Downar. So there’s that. But I experienced all this before any of these conversations and from that, I’ve been able to get like a 90% reduction in my generalized anxiety disorder and OCD for three to four months at a time. Some people get much longer durability.

Andrew Huberman: Wow, that’s impressive.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve met people who’ve had 18 months of durability with major depressive disorder one day and the side effect profile and there are other hardware providers and so on that you can look into, but having this accelerated TMS protocol enhanced by the neuroplasticity of this d-cycloserine, DCS for short, it’s been a real focus is trying to look at neuromodulation writ large as opposed to just psychedelics, right? Because if the only tool you have is hammer, and this is not my expression, right? A lot of things start to look like nails and psychedelics are not useful for everything. They just are not.

And if you look at any historical use of these compounds, having thousands and millions of people taking psychedelics is a brand-new experiment. If you look at most indigenous cultures who consume, whether it’s Psilocybe mushrooms or ayahuasca or something else, it is a very, very, very, very small percentage of the population, typically reserved for who you might consider the ethnobotanist/pharmacist/medicine man or woman. And pre-Columbian contact for instance with like in the case of ayahuasca, two things. Number one, the patients seldom drank. “The patients” because two of the principal uses of ayahuasca were for warfare and hunting. So this idea of like we just put LSD or whatever the psychedelic du jour is in the water and we have world peace, it ain’t a real thing, guys.

Andrew Huberman: No. It could be the opposite.

Tim Ferriss: Go to any psychedelic conference and look at the obscene infighting for any proof of that. It’s the worst. It’s so, so bad. What they do, coming back to your point, and alongside the d-cycloserine and many other compounds, is they induce neuroplasticity, which affords you a window of opportunity within which you can do some pretty cool stuff.

Andrew Huberman: I’m totally on board. It’s interesting because as we’re moving through exercise and psychedelics, which is really a conversation about neuroplasticity and mental health, perhaps physical health as well, it’s very clear that all the stuff about exercise, increasing brain derived neurotrophic factor—

Tim Ferriss: It’s all tied together.

Andrew Huberman: It’s all tied together. And then you think, “Well, why is my brain sharper after I exercise?” There’s an alertness thing, you’re using your own chemistry to wake you up, some BDNF, but then people sort of assume you just have to do the exercise part. You actually have to go try and learn something to get the plasticity. It doesn’t matter. You could quadruple the amount of circulating BDNF in your brain. Nothing’s going to change. I know this for a fact because for years, I studied neuroplasticity. You need precisely timed neural firing pre and post synaptically. You can do this with sensory input. We’re talking about reading, math, learning to vibe code, is that what they call it now, right? Which Rick Rubin invented. No, I’m kidding. He didn’t. He’s going to kill me for saying that, but the memes would make you think so.

Whatever it is that you want to rewire, you have to go do that hard work. Just getting the chemicals increased doesn’t do it. You need alertness, you need these chemicals circulating. It helps to have an emotional rise if it’s for certain kinds of work and perhaps not for others, more analytic work requiring probably less of an emotional rise. But the directed part is that that’s the next step and I think about that a lot. Having sat down as you have with so many guests now who are experts in psychiatry and psychology and self-help, for lack of a better way to put it, it’s reassuring to me that as with exercise, as with nutrition, as with psychedelics, some themes are starting to fall out. We’re starting to almost get to principles.

There’s this wonderful book in the field of neuroscience called Principles of Neural Science. Almost everyone gets it. It’s a big old thing.

Tim Ferriss: I think I have that textbook. It’s old, right?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Used to be Kandel, Jessell, and Schwartz, and then one of those folks got canceled and then passed away and so it’s got a different author line there, but that was the original one, Kandel, Jessell, and Schwartz. And the idea is principles of neural science. Yes, it’s filled with facts about receptors and neurotransmitters and tons of beautiful details of all these discoveries, but what you learn as a graduate student and a postdoc, and then when you eventually become a professor, you want to teach the students is what are the principles of how a nervous system builds itself? Attractants and repellents. What are the principles by which neural circuits change? Oh, you need coordinated firing. You can actually unwire things if they’re mismatched firing.

How do you build a memory and then move it someplace else so that you don’t have to fill the memory making area to its capacity? The principles are what eventually emerge and that’s very useful. In the fields, if you will, of health and wellness, which umbrellas, all the things we’ve been talking about and a lot more, we’re finally getting to that. This is the reason why I throw out exhale emphasized breathing slows you down, calms you down and inhale emphasized breathing wakes you up. Resistance training to or near or past failure, that kind of scales the number of sets.

We are finally at a place where because of social media, thank goodness, because of podcasts. Again, huge hat tip to you. Yours was the first podcast I ever listened to, still listen to. We are finally at this place where people are starting to hear like, “Yeah, I get it. The sunlight thing.” You go, “You get it? Okay, cool.” Ironically, the things that people have heard many, many times are often things they need to do every day and be reminded of many, many times. But it’s not about getting morning sunlight for X number of minutes, et cetera. It’s about understanding what is it in this morning sunlight thing.

I’ll tell you right now, the big eye-opener for me, no pun intended this last year was I did an episode on cortisol, the “stress hormone.” No, cortisol is involved with stress. Yes, that’s true. But cortisol mobilizes glucose from the liver and elsewhere into the body. It’s an energy deploying hormone. When you wake up in the morning, it’s because of a rise in cortisol. The cortisol awakening response. Adenosine is very low, melatonin is dropping, cortisol goes up, you wake up. If your alarm goes off, it spikes even more. Viewing bright light, ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning increases that morning cortisol spike by about 50%. Okay, and on and on, and I could say, and also cold water and caffeine and exercise. Exercise, by the way, will triple or quadruple your baseline cortisol levels at any time of the 24-hour cycle.

So you go, “Okay, that’s a bunch more facts.” Ah, but the principle is if your morning cortisol is high and you can make it higher doing any number of the things I just described, it ensures that your evening and nighttime cortisol is low and that’s what sets you up for an increase in melatonin. It’s what helps ensure a great night’s sleep. And so you go, okay, so the real principle here is you want to bookend the day with high cortisol in the morning whenever your morning happens to be. It doesn’t matter if it’s 6:00 AM or 10:00 AM, bright light, caffeine, hydration, exercise. A little stress too probably will help and you want the end of your day to be low cortisol, high melatonin, high adenosine. 

The more movement you get during the day, the better off you are and all of a sudden it doesn’t really matter if you have access or the time to do all of the things I just described. It’s not about morning sunlight per se. It just turns out that morning sunlight in your eyes is the best way to ramp up that morning peak and that ramped up morning peak is the best way to make sure that it’s low at night and if you experience any stress in the evening at night, it’s a quick blip in cortisol and that’s reduced. Otherwise, it’s a blip on top of a high baseline.

You look at cancer treatment outcomes, you look at anxiety, you look at—and by the way, what I just described is true for kids, pregnant women, perimenopausal, menopausal, and men. You want high morning, low evening and nighttime cortisol. Aim for that, that principle, whatever you have available to do that, if you’re on a plane, it looks different. If you’re in California, it looks different than if you’re in Scandinavia, different times of year. Whatever you do to try and ensure that book ending, high and low cortisol respectively morning and night, you won. You won the day and the night. And so it doesn’t really matter what the individual protocols are. And this to me is like the most important and exciting thing about where the “field” of health and wellness and public discourse about health has taken us, which is we finally have some principles to work with.

And then if people go, “Well, I don’t like the cold shower.” Okay, fine. “But I don’t like resistance training. I want to do pila—” Okay, fine.

Choose a different tool, but the principles are what count. And to me, that’s super exciting. That’s not boring.

Tim Ferriss: All right Andrew, I want to ask you about peptides. All the rage, you look at Google trends, everybody and their brother has a peptide startup, but there seems to maybe be something there. I don’t know if there’s a there there. For people who have heard the word, don’t know exactly what folks are talking about. I get texted every week multiple times from people asking about various peptides and I’d say half the time, depending on what they’re trying to do, I’m like, “Can’t you just be a grownup and inject testosterone or HGH instead if you’re trying to get there directly.” But I would be very interested to hear, I know there’s a broad spectrum of stuff that people are experimenting with. What are these things and what’s your current thinking?

Andrew Huberman: I also don’t completely disagree with you about just be a grown up and take cypionate and HGH if you want to maintain fertility, take some HCG as well. I’m being facetious, of course. I think there are risks to all of those, but it is the appropriate opening joke/reality because if you’re expecting cypionate HGH type results from peptides, you ain’t going to get them, at least not with respect to anabolic growth, feelings of wellbeing.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Insulin’s a peptide, et cetera. I cannot take credit for what I’m about to say next, but it’s a very, very important principle. I think this is kind of the theme today, I suppose.

Abud Bakri, who’s an MD, came on the podcast, talked about peptides and he said, “Look, for many, many hundreds, if not thousands of years, but certainly hundreds of years in the context of pharma, people have been searching for medicines in plants, isolating medicines from plants. Pharma companies still do this. Now people are starting to look for medicines within the body and peptides are a great example of that.” GLP, for instance, the drugs that increase GLP do so to thousandfold levels over the levels of circulating GLP that you would have and they result in, as we all know, robust weight loss. So that’s one category. I think we need to think about categories of peptides, but understand that peptides are all over, they’re made in your brain and body. Some of them may have benefits when made synthetically and delivered at very, very high doses, such as with these GLP agonists, Ozempic, Mounjaro. Retatrutide is one that we should talk about made by Lilly. It’s coming out soon. It impacts the GLP system, but also the GIP and the glucagon system.

Tim Ferriss: Careful with that one, kiddos.

Andrew Huberman: A lot of people are going to be microdosing it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: A lot of people are finding that microdoses can have similar effects and that’s an important kind of cost risk analysis.

Okay. So stepping back, peptides are made in your body. At high concentrations made synthetically, they may provide benefits that make them medicines. So we can think of the weight loss peptides, the GLPs being the most prominent example. The GLP drugs that increased levels of GLP hundredfold were used to treat diabetes for a while, still are, but they didn’t induce much weight loss. The ones that raised GLP levels thousandfold or more, those lead to robust weight loss, including muscle loss. And so that’s part of the controversy. Also, there’s discussion about maybe increasing some apathy. They reduced craving for alcohol and perhaps cravings more generally. At the recommended dosages in some people, they can create nausea, which is why some people are taking less of them and still getting the weight loss benefits, but less nausea. There’s a lot of stuff going on there.

But to stay on the GLPs and weight loss peptides specifically. Lilly developed retatrutide, which hits the GLP, GIP and glucagon system, leads to the most robust weight loss, seems to spare some muscle perhaps. People should always resistance train anyway to offset that. But it’s the most effective of those weight loss, let’s just call it, GLPs, even though it hits these other systems.

The gray market is the “for research purposes only” stuff that you can buy online. It’s perfectly legal to sell for research purposes only, not for animal or human use. And I joked on X a while ago like, “Wow, all these home labs, everyone’s buying this.”

Of course people are injecting them. The concern is about contamination with things like lipopolysaccharide or you’re not getting what you think you’re getting.

So many people are already taking retatrutide even though it hasn’t been formally released because it’s pretty easy to synthesize. And so, it’s being sold on the gray market, people are taking it.

There’s a second category, and then I’ll return to the gray market issue. 

The second category would be things to increase growth hormone. So-called growth hormone secretagogues, things like Sermorelin, Ipamorelin, Tesamorelin. These are all variants on the theme of get the brain neurons that project down to the pituitary to stimulate release of growth hormone at night. Typically, you don’t eat a couple hours before sleep is the idea. Probably good for sleep anyway. It is good for sleep anyway. Then you inject this stuff. Typically, it leads to maybe a three to eightfold increase in growth hormone, IGF-1. Some stimulate appetite quite a bit like MK677, some don’t.

I’ve tried sermorelin very briefly. Dramatically increased my slow wave deep sleep, nuked my REM sleep. This is a common theme. Spiked my prostate specific antigen. I’ve never had any problems with PSA. I came off it. PSA went back to normal. No one’s been able to give me a mechanistic explanation for that. I’m not about to run the experiment again. I didn’t find that I got much fat loss from it, but I didn’t use it very long. I didn’t find that I got stronger. Just didn’t seem worth it to me, given the PSA thing. A lot of people take these thinking they’re going to get these really dramatic increases in growth hormone. They sound dramatic, three to eightfold, but whether or not they’re meaningful in terms of fat loss, it doesn’t really seem they’re that robust, especially given that you have all the GLPs now.

So the growth hormone secretagogues also include things like CJC, and there’s some variants on these which can lead to some insulin resistance, but maybe it spikes GH a bit more. I don’t know. None of those to me really seem worth it personally, just given the effects aren’t that great. If someone can afford it and they can get a script for it, probably better to just take pharma grade somatropin or omnitrope growth hormone. And the bodybuilders would take 8 IUs a day or something crazy like that. But in the trials that have been done with metformin and GH, typically it’s people are taking 1 to 2 IUs five nights per week. That will dramatically increase deep sleep and probably sleep overall, and the effects on fat loss and just tissue repair healings and feelings of wellbeing and just cognitive function.

Anecdotally and subjectively people say, “Wow, I just feel so great.” This is the getting up in the morning and being like, “Wow, my joints feel good.” And just being ready to go, go, go. It’s not anabolic as much as something like testosterone, et cetera. But I’m not telling people to run out and do GH, but if you could get a good script, a script for real GH and take a low dose versus taking a bunch of unknown secretagogue peptides, that seems like an obvious one for me.

Then there’s a category of things like BPC-157, Body Protection Compound 157, which is an amino acid chain that is in gastric juice, but it’s this isolated amino acid chain that seems to be the one that’s most popular. And at the same time, it’s the one for which most people probably are taking it for all the wrong reasons. I’ve tried it. I definitely feel like after a pain or strain, the recovery is faster, but I can’t do the control experiment because it goes systemic. So it’s not like you could—let’s say you hurt both biceps. You can’t inject into one bicep and not the other and assume that it’s just acting locally. It’s going to go systemically.

There are capsule forms of BPC that people claim are just as good. I don’t know. Do you have to inject locally close to the injury? It seems that might be helpful. The animal data on BPC are really impressive. Cartilage regrowth, fibroblast migration, angiogenesis, nerve regrowth. It’s a literature I’ve spent a lot of time with. There’s not a single published human trial. Where I think the most interesting use of it perhaps is, is I know someone recently she wrote to me and she said that her dog had a spinal injury and she said, “Does BPC work in animals?”

I go, “Actually, pretty much all the data are in animals.”

So if my dog, God forbid, had an injury, I’d be willing to give him or her BPC. You have to work out the appropriate dosage.

Tim Ferriss: How would you source that, hypothetically?

Andrew Huberman: So you can get it from compounding pharmacies now, so you need a doctor to write that script. Depending on your risk tolerance, you could go to the gray market for research purposes only. I wouldn’t do that. Peptide Sciences shuttered their doors, windows, whatever. They closed a few months back. They sensed the he at coming on and they’re like, “We’re out.” They took their money and they’re out. Smart move Peptide Sciences.

So nowadays, you can find doctors that will prescribe it. There’s also pentadecapeptide, which is just a different form of BPC, seems to have same function. It’s easier to find. And getting it from a compounding pharmacy, of course, compounding pharmacies vary in stringency, but is going to be cleaner than the gray market sourcing, of course. But I have no relationship to these pharmacies. But for instance, Tailor Made, Upstate, Revive Pharmacy, these are kind of the better known and trusted compounding pharmacies.

Compounding pharmacies were allowed to compound drugs that are still under patent during shortages and can compound generic drugs. They’ll also truly compound peptides. You can get BPC with another one, the TB500, the so-called Wolverine Stack. I don’t know. I’ve never tried TB500. I keep some BPC-157 in the fridge. If I have a strain, I’ll inject it.

Tim Ferriss: Can I hop in for a second?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: The challenge with so much of this stuff is you can’t do the control.

Andrew Huberman: Can’t do the control.

Tim Ferriss: Because I took the Wolverine Stack after I had elbow surgery and I’m like, “Did it help?”

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I have no idea. Frankly, I have no idea.

Andrew Huberman: I will say this, I’ve used it a few times, very short runs of it. I’m not interested in using it as a general recovery tool or every day or any—I don’t have any gut issues. So people have used high doses of BPC to resolve gut issues. That was the original use. In this clinical trial, they did BPC enemas at very high dosages.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds like an Austin party.

Andrew Huberman: And supposedly, I learned this from Abud, Pavlov actually had a side gig. He was a health influencer. He would give people gastric juices to try and resolve ulcers and things like that. And we know gastric juices contain a number of beneficial peptides, but I don’t recommend that.

Tim Ferriss: How did they down those or how did they get them in there?

Andrew Huberman: How’d they down them and how’d they get them?

Tim Ferriss: Shot glass of gastric juices?

Andrew Huberman: I mean, maybe he had a cabinet of people with the—they’re tapping them. Yeah, rough.

So people say, “Should I take BPC-157?”

No, you shouldn’t unless you have an injury or maybe in that case you get clean, compounded pharmacy BPC and you inject it locally, or you take it systemically. You try it, see if it helps. But why would you take it ongoing? That just doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t make any sense to me, frankly. And again, you go back to your sort of half joke at the beginning, you really want to recover quickly from exercise, take an IU or 2 IUs of GH every night before sleep, and you’ll recover magnificently well. For the Enhanced Games, the swimmer, the massive lats guy, he recently put—

Tim Ferriss: His regimen.

Andrew Huberman: —his stack out. And I think it was 200 milligrams of cypionate per week. So that’s 1 cc of standard cypionate. That’s a lot. I have to say, most people I know, and we can talk about this—and I’ve talked about my cypionate use from the beginning and the experiment much, much lower. I believe in microdosing that, if at all. He’s taking 200, plus I think he’s doing 2 IUs of growth hormone per night or five nights per week. And he’s taking EPO. They can only take FDA approved drugs. It’s enhanced, but—

Tim Ferriss: I mean were they testing at all to verify if they’re FDA approved versus—

Andrew Huberman: I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: —FDA non-approved? That would be a complicated test to run.

Andrew Huberman: It’s kind of interesting to ask, was there any rule breaking in the steroid Olympics?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Maybe it was a sink test, you’ve heard this, right? Like urine sample and they just pour it in the sink. Passed.

Andrew Huberman: Some of the powerlifters like Thor were very open about the fact that they were not allowed to use the things they would normally use because they weren’t FDA approved. So it’s kind of interesting. It seemed like they were running the middle of the road, but—

Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot of juice. I think he was also, if I’m thinking of the same Australian swimmer—

Andrew Huberman: I think so, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure. But yeah, he was also quoted, this was many months before the actual competition, but he’s like, “I am going to juice to the gills.” So those would be—

Andrew Huberman: Well, it looks like he almost grew gills, because his lats were like, not Yates size, but he’s a very tall guy. 

A few Olympics ago, I think it wasn’t the last one. It was the one before that. This female runner got popped for Deca, and she claimed it came from a burrito that she ate, the Deca burrito. And I’m a track and field fan, and so are some other folks around the studio.

Tim Ferriss: That’s Deca-Durabolin for people that don’t know.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I might be mispronouncing it.

Andrew Huberman: No, yeah, that’s correct.

Tim Ferriss: Nandrolone.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Non-aromatizing, doesn’t convert to estrogen as far as we know. People use it for joint healing and things of that sort. I’ve never tried it. But someone in our studio said this, and I think they’re spot on. They hope she used it. Because if she didn’t and she got nailed for it from a burrito or some other source, that sucks. Because there’s a huge stigma that goes with that. She goes, she can’t compete. And you never really shake that reputation. So my hope is that she actually took it and got caught as opposed to didn’t take it and got caught for something she didn’t do.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, the burrito—the burrito alibi is pretty flimsy. Last time I checked, you can’t just nibble on Deca and have it do much for you.

Andrew Huberman: Well, and Canelo Alvarez got popped for Clenbuterol, and he claimed it came from some food he ate in Mexico, the Clen cow hypothesis.

Tim Ferriss: Right, Clen cow. Do you remember back when, I think, modafinil was fair game if it were prescribed. And it was something like the majority, if not all of the finalists in some of the track and field events, were all diagnosed narcoleptics. They were all—

Andrew Huberman: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: What are the chances that these mutants would all be narcoleptics?

Andrew Huberman: Totally. BPC would be very hard to detect because your body makes it naturally. As with the GLPs, again, they stimulate such a massive increase in action at those receptors that you probably detect it.

So those are the kind of the healing ones, the tissue repair ones, TB-500, BPC, there are others, but those are the main ones. And then there’s the miscellaneous category, things like epitalon, which actually comes from the pineal, which is weird, because there’s also a peptide called pinealon, which doesn’t come from the pineal.

Tim Ferriss: That is confusing.

Andrew Huberman: Epitalon is thought to allow for preservation of histone and DNA structure. It’s very vague. There are some decent data on visual repair for animal models of retinitis pigmentosa, maybe more robust circadian setting when you travel. I may have tried this recently, a capsule form of epitalon combined with some sunlight in the morning for the first two days, did seem to shift my clock more quickly, but I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: For jet lag.

Andrew Huberman: For jet lag.

Tim Ferriss: You know what tip I got?

Andrew Huberman: Maybe, but I’m not going to do it again because I don’t know.

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know if there’s a there there, but I was chatting with this friend of mine. She’s a frequent traveler from Japan to the US. She lives in Japan. She’s constantly going back and forth. And she’ll come for just a few days and then head back. The possibility for getting brutalized is high, just hopping so many time zones. And she gave me a tip and I tried it, and it could be placebo. Who knows? She was just like, just fast. She’s like, “On the long flights, I just fast.”

And I tried that going to Asia is always a little bit easier than coming back. I was totally fine. I couldn’t believe it, because I had to do a very short trip for reasons I won’t bore people with. Don’t know what the mechanism would be, but I was like, “Oh, maybe there’s something there.” I don’t know.

Andrew Huberman: Well, we have our central circadian clock, SCN. Most people have heard of that now. The eyes connect to it directly, which is why sunlight and other forms of light are so efficient at shifting our clock. But we have a lot of peripheral clocks, liver clocks, gut clocks, and those are usually the last to shift, which is why a lot of people have kind of a feeling like their stomach is off, digestion is off when they travel. Maybe not traveler’s diarrhea, but they just sort of feel like waking up in the middle of the night, they’re hungry, they’re on the previous location’s meal schedule. Fasting may allow for shifting of those clocks. Mealtimes are a very robust thing in terms of raising our levels of arousal. There’s you eat every day at noon. A couple minutes before you get that arousal, the well time systems. So that’s not totally surprising.

Pinealon is one I’ve experimented with and is very interesting and I have to say there are very few things that increase REM sleep. Most things deplete REM sleep. In fact, I always joke if somebody needs a PhD quick and nothing’s working, have them do a study of sleep and give any drug, and it disrupts REM sleep. I don’t study sleep, but that’s a kind of a well-known joke in labs.

Tim Ferriss: How do you spell Pinealon?

Andrew Huberman: P-I-N-E-A-L-O-N.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, they really wanted to be as confusing as possible.

Andrew Huberman: And it does not come from the pineal. The nomenclature sucks in this area. And we don’t even have names for these different bins.

Tim Ferriss: Some half-baked postdoc is like, “You know what would be really funny?”

Andrew Huberman: To call the stuff of the pineal, epitalon, spelled two different ways, by the way, out there, Epithalon and epitalon. And Pinealon, and then swap them. Pinealon comes from the cortex. It’s made in the cortex, neocortex.

And I will say there are a couple things that will increase REM. With no pharmacology, you can heat up your sleeping environment in the final two hours of your sleep. You’ll get much more REM. Thank you, Matt Walker for that trick. It’s awesome. So cool at the beginning of the night, cold in the middle of the night and warm toward morning. Or throw on a heated blanket or whatever, a weighted blanket or some socks and a wool cap if you wake up about two-thirds of the through your sleep, use the bathroom. You’ll be surprised how much better your REM is.

The other thing is, and this is a nice one if you want to work out late in the day, you don’t want to take caffeine because you still want to sleep that night. If you take alpha GPC, 900 mg of alpha GPC, alpha GPC, which as you know, increases—it’s like choline donor, acetylcholine, that system. You can still sleep that night and it will increase your REM sleep. And it is true. Remember we said high cortisol morning, low cortisol at night. That’s the optimal setup that we should aim for. If you exercise after work, and you do, let’s say, a high intensity session of any kind, the resistance training we were talking about earlier, for instance, you will triple or quadruple your cortisol levels.

I should also earmark that as all this stuff online, which seems mainly directed towards women like, “Oh, cold showers and baths, ice baths are going to spike your cortisol. That’s terrible.”

The increase in cortisol from deliberate cold exposure is trivial compared to what working out with weights will do. So late day cortisol spikes are no problem if it comes up and down, but you also wouldn’t want to take caffeine on top of that and disrupt your sleep. So if you have a late day workout and you need a bit of a stimulant, alpha GPC is a good tool, and you’ll likely get more REM sleep. So it’s a nice one. And then, pinealon, I will use every once in a while.

Tim Ferriss: For what reason?

Andrew Huberman: You get three hours of REM if you’re me. Three hours. And it doesn’t disrupt your slow wave deep sleep. It is wild. And here’s the cool part. It works that night and it seems to work all the nights after.

Tim Ferriss: There’s some carryover.

Andrew Huberman: There’s carryover, and it seems the hypothesis based on the animal data is that it can help “regenerate the pineal,” which is a dangerous term because you don’t want cells proliferating either. So who knows what it’s doing, but I’ll use it every once in a while.

Tim Ferriss: Always a good place to start.

Andrew Huberman: Now Abud likes it in the daytime. He’ll take it in the daytime. People use it for cognitive enhancement. He claims there’s a founder of a major company that has all his employees on it for daytime work. I know someone that takes it during the daytime because—

Tim Ferriss: Don’t tell HR.

Andrew Huberman: Because he’s a songwriter, a very talented songwriter, and he likes the hypnotic state it puts him in. I’m interested in sleeping at night and being alert during the day. Great tool for occasional use.

Tim Ferriss: Is that subcutaneous injection or what is that?

Andrew Huberman: They also have oral forms. I’ve only tried the subcutaneous injection. And you do need to find a doctor that can prescribe it and get it from a compounding pharmacy. I think pinealon’s a very interesting compound. And I’ve been monitoring my blood work the whole time doing this. So tried sermorelin, stopped using it. I’ve never used a GLP. I’m kind of curious because a lot of people are talking about low dose tirzepatide or retatrutide, like a 10th of the prescribed dose for not just weight loss but for just cognitive wellbeing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, neuroprotective effects.

Andrew Huberman: Neuroprotective effects, maybe other things.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I’m interested in that stuff. I’m so curious, and maybe there’s literature out there. I haven’t read it. But if it’s a direct—if the mechanism of action is separate from the metabolic effects.

Andrew Huberman: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Right? Because if you take someone who has insulin resistance or is on the path to insulin resistance and you correct for that, then that in and of itself on some level should be neuroprotective, right? Especially if you’re looking at vascular dementia or any number of things.

Andrew Huberman: Glaucoma, there’s some interesting data that tirzepatide may reduce eye pressure, so that’s interesting. BPC-157 has this asterisk next to it. It will cause angiogenesis. So people are saying you don’t want to vascularize a tumor, obviously, accelerate cancers, that kind of thing. You don’t want to supply more blood nutrients to a tumor. It’ll gobble them up and grow. But it is not mutagenic. So it’s not carcinogenic mutagenic per se. And that’s important.

Here’s something interesting, too. There’s the kind of sociology behind all of these. There are a couple more we can touch on, but the GLPs, the prescription GLPs and the massive growth of that area is guilty of making the general public comfortable with injections. So it’s kind of interesting, the battles online are between—

Tim Ferriss: Here we go.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. It’s like, you created this problem. Most people don’t talk about this, but the traditional media and medicine like to couch the peptide thing as a bunch of gym bros. Mm-mm. Massive market in women.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Andrew Huberman: Most people taking these peptides are not gym-going guys. It’s women who want to take a low-dose reta, but reta’s not out yet. Or they want to take low-dose tirzepatide cocktailed with NAD, with some GHK-Cu or GHK copper, which is for—there’s some studies that show that in combination with red light therapy or some sun exposure just enough might remove wrinkles. The biggest market is women. And I’m not trying to defend the bro science guy, but it’s kind of funny that the target has been like these guys on X who are selling peptides. That’s not where to place—

Tim Ferriss: It’s an easier target, right.

Andrew Huberman: There’s also this very interesting sociology around natty or not stuff.

Tim Ferriss: What the hell does that mean?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. If someone takes GLPs, are they now—

Tim Ferriss: Oh, not natural? Okay.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. But for men, that’s kind of the thing. Does someone get called out or not? My recommendation, this is what I’ve always done, is always just talk about everything you’ve taken or are taking or not taking.

Tim Ferriss: Well, also, can I pause for a second just to say, I think I’m getting the name of the doc right? Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which has Mark Bell and Chris Bell, I think it was, who directed and made the film. Great film to watch. It’s older. But at some point, they’re talking about this. And they put up, I want to say, it’s a four point quadrant, I mean by definition, and they’re like, “Okay, so you can inject EPO to increase red blood cell count and like oxygen carrying capacity.” And they’re like, “Or you can live at altitude, or you can have an altitude simulation tent.” And they’re like, “Are any of these natural?”

Andrew Huberman: Right. You get an infusion of your own blood.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Huberman: Testosterone cypionate will increase red blood cell count.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, for sure.

Andrew Huberman: And people don’t talk about—it’s not EPO like, but certainly, cardio gets better. So even without the addition of muscle, recovery gets better.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I’ll tell you, I mean, personally, and I’ve written about this, which is funny just to maybe air a grievance, right? I talked at length in The 4-Hour Body about post-surgical anabolic use, and then online it’s like, “Tim Ferriss admits—”

And I’m like, “Admit? I fucking wrote about it at length.”

Andrew Huberman: Totally.

Tim Ferriss: Just the wording is such a weasel word, I admitted.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, yeah. Well, somehow, even though five years ago I said, “Oh, yeah, I decided to run an experiment where I tried cypionate with HCG.” Keep sperm production online, and just low dose, and just see what’s the minimal effective dose. I’m not competing in any sports. I don’t think it makes that big of a difference except in terms of recovery. I didn’t change my training before or after I went off and on again. I do think that, okay, so that’s within the male community.

And the women and peptides, there’s this other piece which is like who’s getting plastic surgery and who’s not, who’s getting—nowadays, the dermatologists certainly in Los Angeles, but in Northern California too, recommend some amount of laser resurfacing to reduce cancer risk, but it also reduces wrinkles. So what are people doing? None of it is particularly natural. I think for competitive sports is where it becomes an important issue. But I think that the pharma grade GLP world made sticking little tiny needles, 31 gauge or 30 gauge needles into one’s skin to inject something just kind of like, “Okay, no biggie.”

And I’ll tell you the first person to sell pharma grade, maybe compounded pharmacy peptide pens where you just dial it in, it’s not a syringe. People are much more comfortable with pens than they are with syringes. They’re going to make a killing.

So then there are a bunch of other things like Melanotan, makes people tan, but it can make you way too tan. It can cause priapism like permanent erection or dangerously long erection, greatly increase libido. But keep in mind Vyleesi is a FDA approved drug for female hyposexuality. Lowers orgasmic threshold, stimulates libido. It also works in men. I’ve never tried it, but it also works in men.

Tim Ferriss: Not sure most men want that.

Andrew Huberman: So I asked someone at Stanford who’s in the department of urology.

Tim Ferriss: I never do this.

Andrew Huberman: In the department of urology—actually, there are a lot of interesting drugs that are pro-libido for men, but they’ll never get marketed. Because the idea of more men wanting more sex is just not something that society seems to want.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Although with the shift in kind of self-hatred, and one could argue diminished aspects of mental and physical health in men, maybe some people would really benefit from it. But Melanotan is yet another example.

Andrew Huberman: My view on the peptides thing is this, you do you, whoever you are, you decide what your risk thresholds are, but just be logical about it. Why would you take BPC if you don’t have an injury? It’s not going to accelerate your recovery that much. Certainly not as much as getting better sleep. So maybe you would think of pinealon, but get your relationship to light correct, get your relationship to caffeine correct. And I have to say, I’ve gotten great benefit from the Mag, Threonate, Apigenin, Theanine stack. I don’t think you need pinealon until you’ve tried everything else and then maybe try a supplement stack or even just one of those things. And then if you still need it, then pinealon makes sense. But just leaping to pinealon doesn’t make sense given how little data there are. But there are some interesting drugs out there, too, like the DORAs.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. I’m taking Belsomra, mostly because of the Alzheimer’s it runs in my family.

Andrew Huberman: Interesting.

Tim Ferriss: Super prevalent.

Andrew Huberman: Does it help your sleep?

Tim Ferriss: It does. I can end up feeling a bit groggy in the morning, but you could explain. I ended up chatting with, as probably you did at some point, Matt Walker about this, very knowledgeable. It’s still preliminary, but pretty interesting mechanistically in terms of clearance of various goodies that you do not want in your brain, at least as far as we know now. So, we’ll see. It does help with sleep. The daytime sort of morning grogginess can be a bit of a hassle. So I’ve been cycling on and off of it.

Andrew Huberman: I tried Quviviq once, which is one of the DORAs. I got zombie sleep. I woke up in the same position I fell asleep in. I didn’t feel rested even though I had slept through the night. I’ve just not gone to prescription tools for it. But some people seem to like prescription tools. I think incidentally, there’s a really nice paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA showing that short meditations can increase lymphatic clearance in the daytime. This is very interesting, I think.

Tim Ferriss: That’s cool.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, very cool. When you go into this meditative state, long exhales, focusing on breathing, meditation of—more clearance of waste products on the brain during the meditation and in sleep that night, it seems increased, which is really interesting. Many people care about their nighttime HRV. Best way to increase nighttime HRV. So as long as you don’t have apnea or some other issue is to do some exhale emphasized breathing practice during the day. Even just a few deliberate exhales during the day can increase nighttime HRV. So there seems to be this daytime, nighttime relationship that’s pretty cool.

Tim Ferriss: Interestingly, something for future research, but I’ve seen HRV changes post TMS.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, interesting. Yeah, that makes sense.

Tim Ferriss: Pretty fascinating to check out, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Post TMS, sorry, for a moment I heard TM because I was like—I think Tim Ferriss, TM I think.

Tim Ferriss: Well, probably both, right?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So yeah, the glymphatic stuff also is very intertwined with a lot of psychedelic science. Not to bring us back to that, but the glymphatic clearance is really fascinating. So I’d love to check out that. We’ll put it in the show notes, so I’ll get that from you.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Yeah, very cool paper. The author sent it to me before it came out. I think it’s just a really important finding. I go into a little bit in my book, but it was a recent finding so didn’t have time to go into it too much. But if ever you needed another incentive to meditate for a few minutes, that’s one. The peptide thing, it’s funny, I feel like people feel safe enough to try them because they’re enough like supplements, enough like drugs that they feel comfortable doing it. And cypionate sounds so scary. It’s like, okay. Or GH sounds so scary, but there’s a lot more data and they’re pharma grade. And small dosages are always going to be better than big dosages. And the fertility thing on anything that increases testosterone is very real. They’ve talked about inhalants and oral forms that don’t disrupt fertility, but anyone that wants to maintain fertility is going to have to take HCG while taking that, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or Post-Cycle Therapy with Clomid or something, but yeah.

Andrew Huberman: Right. Yeah. So I think that the peptide thing is very interesting. I get excited anytime the general public is thinking about biology and this—I love Abud’s framework of people are now mining the body for medicines. And maybe that’s why people feel like you’ll see these criticisms. And they’re understandable like, oh, all these people that wouldn’t take a prescription drug will take these peptides. I think that when people hear that something’s of the body, even if it’s a synthetic form of something of the body, they’re more likely to take it. And I can’t quite relate to that psychology, but I sort of get it. I sort of get it. It’s not some like stardust thing. At the same time, you’re not going to see huge effects from any of these things except perhaps pinealon and that’s still anecdotal, and the GLPs from retatrutide. Those have really robust effects.

Everything else, BPC can have its potential role in healing for some people but there are no trials. And by the way, no one’s going to do a trial and no one’s going to do it properly. I keep hearing, oh, there’s going to be a hamstring injury trial. There’s going to be—no one wants to put the time and effort. And having run a clinical trial and having done experiments in preclinical animal format for launch, it’s a lot of work to do properly. You need to know what the endpoints are. [inaudible].

Tim Ferriss: It’s expensive. Who’s going to pay for it also?

Andrew Huberman: Right. And I just don’t see it happening. I think people are just going to take this stuff. I think the big win for someone out there, someone with an entrepreneurial spirit is going to be American made clean peptides with verified sourcing and all that so people can trust what they’re getting.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’ve seen, as you might imagine, like a thousand different startups trying to produce their own peptides, whatever it might be. I don’t think I can talk about it yet, but the only one I backed is actually going to be verifying supply chain and all of that. It’s just a stamp of this is what it says that’s on the box, basically.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And it’s interesting that unlike anabolic steroids, which in the ’80s and in the ’90s, and to some extent still today but really in the ’80s and ’90s where there were these outrageous adverse events, right? People committing murders, massive acne, dying, brain tumors and all, which is the consequence of probably a bunch of things, GH and steroids. To my knowledge, there has not been a reported adverse event that can be tacked back to one of these non-FDA approved peptides. I’m not saying that means they’re safe, but it’s interesting that there are a lot of women taking them. There are a lot of men taking them, but there are a lot of women taking GHK copper in cream form or injectable form. If they’re having terrible adverse—well, adverse, terrible, that’s redundant, adverse events, they’re not reporting.

Tim Ferriss: So this is super important. I think there’s a book called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, who’s an MD from the UK. There are a number of chapters that are not relevant to US audience, but it’s a helpful book for teaching yourself to think in a structured way, scientifically about medicine. I think what you said is really important in the sense that—well, let me use an analogy. Let’s say we’ve got Honda Civic, tons of Honda Civics. Man, they’ve been around a long time, or just to say a cars. Okay, you’ve got all this data on all these horrible accidents, you’ve got vehicular manslaughter, you’ve got all this stuff, right? Pretty bad report card, right? Lots of deaths. And then you’re like, “But we’ve got this brand new Tron motorcycle fresh off the press, right? No documented deaths, therefore it must be safe.” And you’re like, wait a second.

Andrew Huberman: Yep.

Tim Ferriss: That thing has not had a lot of mileage on it. Only one person has used it. And I’m using a bit of an exaggerated example because this absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. And this is true also, again, not to sound like a broken record, but whether it is gray market reta or DIY for research purposes only peptide use or psychedelics, which still remain illegal in most places, there’s no real reporting mechanism. It’s like if you have a doctor and they prescribe you something and they ask you, “How’s it going?” And you’re like, “I’m growing horns. I’ve got hemorrhoids, whatever the side effects might be. I’m feeling really anxious.” There is some means by which the feedback makes it back into the system, right? And certainly with clinical trials and so on, you would hope that to be the case. So for me, it’s like when I’m looking at these things, I’m like, “All right, they might be great, but I feel some degree of reassurance.” I haven’t taken any anabolics in forever. 

Maybe if I were trying to have six kids, I’d be like, “Yeah, let’s do HCG,” which does seem to have a pretty, for me at least, profound impact on libido which is sometimes nice.

Andrew Huberman: HCG.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman: That’s probably due to the fact just an opportunity to throw in perhaps something useful is the old lore was guys want high testosterone, low estrogen. You want your estrogen as high as you can without getting side effects for libido purposes, for endothelial health, for brain health—

Tim Ferriss: Cardioprotective for reasons.

Andrew Huberman: Cardioprotective.

Tim Ferriss: Bone density also.

Andrew Huberman: Guys that quash their—they take tamoxifen or anastrozole to quash their estrogen levels, that is a mistake. They often find that they have reduced libido. They are sort of dry out so to speak. They get more vulnerability to injuries. Hardly anybody nowadays does testosterone replacement therapy with an anastrozole. Almost every person goes like, “I just feel better when I don’t take it.” Now, guys are getting gyno and all sorts of things they need to be careful. But for brain health, for libido, for all those things, HCG is going to increase both testosterone and estrogen. And even for just skin vitality look, not something men talk about too often, but if testosterone’s too high and estrogen’s low, skin doesn’t look good. It just doesn’t look good. It’s the chicken skin. It’s like the thin chicken skin thing.

Tim Ferriss: Heavy anabolic users, not known for their pretty skin.

Andrew Huberman: Not known for their pretty skin. I think it’s just really interesting that the peptide thing is all the rage. To my knowledge, not a lot of adverse events that can be separated out from—I always hear infected injection site. Okay, so use an alcohol swab, pin yourself carefully, don’t—

Tim Ferriss: Well, I just want to double click on that for a second because when people get cavalier with injections, it’s like speaking to someone who from a professional ended up getting a staph infection in the elbow.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, yeah, that’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Take your hygiene seriously when it comes to injections, right?

Andrew Huberman: Oh, my God. I’m just looking—

Tim Ferriss: Don’t run and gun and like you’re—

Andrew Huberman: This is a running joke around here.

Tim Ferriss: —behind the dumpster at the Denny’s with no alcohol swab. Don’t do that.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, don’t do that. Don’t reuse needles. Don’t dip back into the vial with a needle because you didn’t get enough because you can contaminate the vial. Use good practices. But a lot of people think that moving to creams or to capsules is going to sell more peptides. Very interesting observation I think is that people want the injectables. It feels more real. Capsules feel more like supplements, which are a mixed bag. It’s interesting, right? If I told you, okay, BPC and capsule form, same as injectable. Yeah, but if I inject the injury site, it just feels more is going on. This is where placebo effect may actually be real. Or it may be that the capsule forms are not as good.

Tim Ferriss: Well, also we’re getting in the weeds here, but just because something is oral also doesn’t mean it’s safer than injectable, right?

Andrew Huberman: Definitely.

Tim Ferriss: Because you look at Anadrol 50 versus injectable t-cypionate, it’s like if you are smashing your liver, you can do a lot of damage.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, absolutely. I don’t think people should run around doing anabolics by all means. Certainly, the number of guys in their 20s, 30s and even 40s that think that they need it. It’s not necessarily so. One thing that I think would be wonderful, I’m very excited about this, but it would be wonderful for the overall field but for supplementation in particular. Blood work has gotten relatively inexpensive now. The number of companies… they brought the cost of blood testing way down. People are now comfortable having someone take their blood and sending them their blood work. So there’s a sociology to this. There’s a shift. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get your blood work done? And then I envision a 3D printed blister pack with your morning and your afternoon or your morning and nighttime supplements that are tailored to your blood work.

Three months later, you do your blood work again and you get to see whether or not markers are moving into range better, update the 3D printing. Ideally pharma grade, that’s how supplementation should be done. And I’m excited for that possibility and that’s much more my focus now, at least in terms of this stuff. I have a lot of different foci, but in terms of injectables and pills and things like that, then thinking about what’s happening with peptides, because the legislation is changing constantly. Next administration could come in, whoever that happens to be, it could all get revamped. It’s not a Wild West, but it’s just not a well-defined field yet.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I think it’s pretty Wild West. It’s just my two cents. I mean—

Andrew Huberman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m very conservative with this stuff these days. Maybe I’m just getting old and boring. I don’t know.I think as I’ve gotten older, whether it’s through the literature or maybe being on the receiving ends of a lot of anecdotal reports of adverse events for various things, I’m just like, man, there’s such a typical lack of reporting in wide population adverse events that I’m like, man, you just got to measure twice and cut once.”

Andrew Huberman: Definitely.

Tim Ferriss: And if I can pick something that has 50 or 100 years of research where I know with some certainty what the adverse events are and the probability of those adverse events versus the latest and greatest thing where it’s like, “Yeah, fly down to Honduras and have this gene therapy and hope it goes well.” I’m like, “Ah.”

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, the gene therapy thing is not ready in my opinion. We have a colleague in the health field who got an injection of stem cells into his spine and ended up with paralysis and almost died.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, terrible.

Andrew Huberman: And grateful to the neurosurgeons at UCSF, shout out to Chair of Neurosurgery, Eddie Chang, who didn’t do the surgery but one of his surgeons in his department did, and that injected with stem cells person is now mobile and healthy and strong, but it was a really close call. I know I actually got a call during the surgery about how it was going. This was a really good example of how even with attempted best practices and stem cell injections, there’s always the potential for local infection and rejection.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let me give you one more. Not to be like the old guy who can’t deal with the young whippersnappers, but—

Andrew Huberman: Well, the goal nowadays is to be the old guy.

Tim Ferriss: Well, here’s the thing. Also, there’s mechanical risk in the sense that I’ve had stem cell injections from like the most vetted at every step of the process stem cells. And from young donors, I won’t go into all the details, but like very, very well vetted and involving US doctors,. And the doctor happened to have, I don’t know if he was busy, preoccupied, distracted, but a little sloppy technique on trying to give me stem cells around the medial collateral ligament and injected my fat pad in the knee and made a bunch of structural damage. And my knee was fucked, and like still, like this is a year or two later, have residual pain in my knee. That is from physical damage with the needle.

Andrew Huberman: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: So it’s like depending on what you’re doing, if it’s intraarticular or you’re getting in there, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it’s going to be a smooth ride. And this is someone with thousands of injections, like they have the mileage. And this is as far as I can tell talking to other orthos and people who do similar injections, like it’s a routine injection. The path of injection is very well established. Nonetheless, off day, smash, blew up to the size of volleyball the next day.

Andrew Huberman: Helen Blau lab at Stanford School of Medicine had a beautiful paper where they had mouse data and human data inhibiting a specific molecule. I don’t recall which, and you could regrow cartilage in the knee. That’s clearly headed off to clinical trials in pharma, but the effects that were demonstrated were incredible. There’s an active inhibitor of cartilage regrowth and apparently you can inhibit the inhibitor and bring back cartilage. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Again, mining the body for its own “Medicines.” I mean, none of this stuff was supposed to happen naturally. And so we’ve been pushing and prodding from the outside, taking things, plant derivatives that mimic neurotransmitters. Psilocybin is just one example, but all these drug companies, bioprospect from plants, learned that from Chris McCurdy, the expert on Kratom.

And it’s cool, it’s really cool. I think medicine’s on the fast track, and I’m super excited about AI as a tool for self-directed medical exploration. Not necessarily for deciding which peptides to take, but maybe. But in terms of people trying to figure out like, “Hey, am I taking anything that might make my autoimmune condition worse?” I have a friend who’s got MS and takes a bunch of things, eats a bunch of things, turns out certain forms of mustard can flare up MS. Not everybody, but—AI can look at your food intake, look at your habits, look at supplementation, make recommendations, and that’s super powerful. And I just feel like AI is going to be an incredible medical tool, not just in terms of its ability to outperform physicians or aid physicians, but for people to really understand their blood work and understand the trajectories of their sleep scores and all this stuff. Like I’m very, very excited. Then again, I’m born and raised in Silicon Valley. So I’m not thinking about the dystopian view of AI robots or robots taking over. I’m thinking about people having more information and agency.

Tim Ferriss: Coming right up, for me right now, the most interesting application of the LLMs is for health purposes. I mean, it’s remarkable. I have friends who have the best doctors you can imagine, the most expensive folks you can conceive of and they have still caught stuff because no one’s going to take your health as seriously as you are. Nor will, even if they take it seriously, will they have the time that you will dedicate to it. And they’ve uploaded their genomes, added in the various bits and bobs from wearables and taken PDFs of labs and thrown them in and found very, very material insights that had not surfaced earlier in decades.

And it’s not one person, it’s not two people, this is at least four or five people I can think of who have all the means, all the time, all the interest. And yet it took these LLMs as a data dump and the ability of those LLMs to mine everything and to look for interrelated components to surface these, in their cases, actionable insights and it’s early. This is top of the first, right? It’s early for these things. So it’s just going to get better.

Andrew Huberman: It is just going to get better. And one thing that Eddie Chang, this incredible neurosurgeon who studies speech and language at UCSF, again, I’ve known him since I was seven and he’s just this phenom. What he pointed out to me is that all the LLMs, they’re all trained on the internet. Right now, AI is trained on the internet. It’s not like trained on human brain activity. The next big step is recording your brain activity non-invasively ideally and building some AI tools from your brain activity. Like what’s going on when you’re in your most focused mode? What does that look like? What does it look like if you take a hundred milligrams of a given stimulant? What’s your brain activity look like? Are there ways that you could modify your pharmacology and behavior and sleep and all that to really get your brain activity working the way you want?

And so the real holy grail of AI, he tells me, is AI built on neural activity, not based on the internet which is the output of our neural activity. Of course that occurred to me, but it hadn’t occurred to me in that form. And he and others are developing these ways of reading from the nervous system. You mentioned wearables, whether it’s a WHOOP or it’s an Oura, it’s your Eight Sleep, it’s measuring heart rate and body motion mainly. Accelerometers, HRV. By the way, the HRV is the reflection of how often that descending branch of the vagus slows your heart rate down. That’s what it is. So every time you’re increasing HRV, you’re slowing your heart rate down, that’s the vagal reflection in your WHOOP score, in your sleep score from your Oura. The HRV is that.

Well, that’s great. That’s not a direct readout of your autonomic nervous system. That’s heart rate. Okay. Well, that’s a start, but what about direct read of the autonomic nervous system? What about a little sticker that can record non-invasively the number of nerve impulses traveling up a branch of the vagus? A lot of them travel really superficially, behind the ears. What about a non-invasive brain stimulator that looks like a baseball cap? A few years ago, there were things like Halo, which were designed to ramp up neural activity, accelerate plasticity. I don’t know how good or bad the data were, but it didn’t really stick to be honest.

Writing to the nervous system, writing to the body, that’s where it’s at. And I think everyone who’s thinking about AI seems to also be thinking about that. The not so well-kept secret among the big AI companies. If you notice like a lot of them are starting to acquire biotech companies. There’s an interest in biotech. I don’t think it’s about advanced search engines per se. I think it’s about how are we going to control our own neural activity in brain states and bodily states? I’m certain that’s where it’s all headed. So what’s going to be the first thing to break through? There have been a number of things that have commercial vagal stimulators to try and calm people down. They haven’t worked that well. I’m going to piss some people off there, but they’re weak sauce.

Tim Ferriss: Most of them are garbage.

Andrew Huberman: Most of them are.

Tim Ferriss: They don’t actually stimulate the vagus nerve, most of them.

Andrew Huberman: Right. Or do it specifically enough or robustly. Totally agree. I think a really interesting place is if we look at sleep, like sleep states and measuring sleep states has gotten really good even with just heart rate and body motion. And now like with something like Eight Sleep, using AI, it’s making temperature adjustments for you. This would be amazing to have for waking states. Let’s just say during the course of this conversation, the room was dynamically changing in temperature. The seat was changing a little bit. I don’t know, maybe my vagus was being stimulated a little bit just to keep me in whatever zone was optimal for this. It would just figure it out. AI would just figure it out. 

I think that the big first use of writing to the nervous system is going to be for sleep. And I’ll just give you three examples.

First, there is a study where they looked at a rocking of a bed, a mechanical slow rocking of a bed and how that improves sleep, and it’s remarkable. How much it accelerates the transition into sleep, how deep people’s sleep gets, et cetera. They also did that study, how fast people need to walk back and forth while rocking their baby. Turns out a certain number of paces. There’s a paper I can send you the reference in Cell Reports. Turns out parents figure out the ideal pace and I forget how many hertz it is, but it very closely mimics what the bedrocking needs to be. So you go, “Okay, what is all this? Okay, we were born in water.” No, yeah, that’s not what it’s about. That’s from a sound ceremony. No disrespect to the sound ceremony. It’s been just some pretty cool sound ceremony. The thing about this is in order to fall asleep, you need to forget your body position.

Huge important step in falling asleep. And it turns out that there’s a way to do this. There’s this crazy eye movement thing that was published in Reader’s Digest some time ago and went viral, even though viral wasn’t around then. Where they told people to make themselves fall asleep by closing their eyes and slowly moving their eyes to one side, then the other side, then counterclockwise, then clockwise, then crossing their eyes and looking at their nose and then doing a long exhale. What in the world is this? I’ve tried this. Yes, you generally find yourself waking up the next morning. It’s wild, but the really cool thing happened when there are a couple of guys at MIT reached out and they’re like, “Hey, we’ve got this sleep mask. We’d love for you to try it.” It measures REM directly by looking at eye movements, and it can induce sleep in under six minutes. Like how? They’re like, “Oh, it creates with stimulation behind the ears, it can stimulate eye movements and you forget your body position, you fall asleep.”

Tim Ferriss: So it’s affecting the vestibular system.

Andrew Huberman: Right. So the eyes are linked to the vestibular system through to control retinal slip. There’s this whole thing like pitch, yaw, and roll. As you move through space, you need to stabilize images in the retina. So your cerebellum in your vestibular ocular pathways, there’s a couple synapses in between. I’m very familiar with this because this is what my lab used to work on for a significant portion of time. I figure out which retinal cells and which targets in the brainstem and on and on. Anyway, flocculus of the cerebellum, but this eye mask is really cool, you put it on. I have no relationship to this company. I think they sort of approached me, but I didn’t do anything with them, but I think it’s just really, really cool. You put the eye mask on and you feel a little twitch behind your ear, you adjust it down so you don’t feel it anymore. And what’s wild is your eyes just start moving.

Tim Ferriss: I feel like that would keep me up. I guess maybe you get used to it after a night or two.

Andrew Huberman: And it makes you feel very sleepy. So there’s also a relationship between certain eye movements and overall arousal state. Now, this stuff, I don’t want to call it crude, but this is the first foray into writing to the nervous system to induce a brain state. And what I love about it is it’s so objective. Again, I’m not selling this thing, but if you were to try this thing, you’re like, “This didn’t really help me. I want my money back guarantee.” You’re good. Whereas a lot of the stuff for plasticity, for focus, it’s subjective. And it’s subject to the placebo effect. I think sleep have been the first place where reading from the nervous system has been really prominent with Ouras and WHOOPs and Eight Sleeps and things of that sort. I think sleep is also going to be the place where writing to the nervous system is going to happen first.

Tim Ferriss: Well, let’s talk about writing in a different way. You are a podcast native, and yet the author of the upcoming book, Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. What should people expect in the book?

Andrew Huberman: So an introduction that defines how to use the book. I’ve always liked those, how to use this book. And my backstory and the energetic drive, the spiritual drive behind wanting to do a book that teaches science and is about health and wellbeing and performance. People can skip it or they can read it. It doesn’t really matter to me.

The first chapter is all about sleep. So you’re going to learn the science of sleep. And you’ll learn the various protocols from most important, most effective, to still effective but lesser important protocols for sleep. And most importantly, why they work based on the science you just learned.

Then a chapter on exercise, defines the program we talked about. Also a section on mobility. A lot of people talk about walking in steps, but really identifies what’s needed there, what the science actually says. A section on cardiovascular exercise and how to structure that.

Again, the goal being, yes, I think that program will work exceptionally well for anybody, but the principles to fall out of it are not, you need to do this class or that class. Once a week, get your heart rate as close to maxed out as you can in a controlled, safe way. Once a week, do this. Okay. And why and what the benefits are, what the science says.

The part about resistance training was also a lot of fun to really dig into the now excellent science that’s been done about what actually triggers hypertrophy and strength. Turns out you can do anywhere from five to 30 repetitions as long as you take them to failure and still get the same hypertrophy results.

But then you have to be practical. You step back and go like, “Am I going to do 30 reps of bicep curls? Maybe. But am I going to do 30 reps of squats to failure?” Well, those first 20, people don’t often acknowledge that.

Tim Ferriss: If you haven’t tried that, have fun.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, exactly. And it’s very hard to keep perfect form with high repetitions. It’s actually easier to do with moderate to heavy weights, heavy for the individual that is.

Third chapter is about stress and stress mitigation. That was a fun one because that was an active area of my lab for a long time. The next chapter is about light, talking about how LEDs are not necessarily a problem. Can’t get incandescents anymore. But if you’re not getting enough long wavelength light, how that’s problematic for a number of things related to mitochondrial health, retinal health.

Tim Ferriss: Is long wave light a decent way to think of natural light? Or?

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So the sun is full spectrum. Everything from UV all the way up to red, near infrared, and infrared. The heat from the sun being infrared. When the sun is low in the sky, you’re going to glean more of the long wavelength light and less UV because of something called Rayleigh scattering. That’s why the sun appears more yellow or orange when it’s low in the sky.

The goal really is to get as much long wavelength light. It’s the high quality protein of light without getting too much UV. You need some UV. The challenge is in the middle of the day when the sun is overhead, you’re going to get full spectrum light, but you’re going to get too much, many people will get too much UV.

Now this is controversial. People are like, “Oh, sunlight. The more sunlight you get, the longer you live.” Time of day that you get your sunlight is important, not just for setting of circadian clocks, but for other things.

I also talk about how long wavelength light can actually penetrate through a t-shirt like yours, go all the way through your body. And because long wavelength light is absorbed by water, it actually is absorbed in the portions of your cells that enhance movement on the electron chain in mitochondria.

This notion that we are batteries is kind of true. If you ever go snorkeling, you’ll notice after about 10 feet or so, the red fish disappear. They didn’t disappear. The red was absorbed in the top meters of water. And actually a lot of animals and fish will come up to the surface because there’s a lot of interesting nutrients happening.

Long wavelength light bounces off greenery. If you were to put infrared goggles on during the daytime, the greenery is just reflecting long wavelength light like crazy. Which is weird because it’s green, which means it should be absorbing the long wavelength light. I talk a little bit about light and electromagnetic energy in a way that should be accessible to people.

So that chapter was like, I was like, “This is so much fun.” I haven’t thought about the sun that way in a long time, but the goal is for people to understand the difference between red light therapy. If you’re under a lot of LED lights or in front of screens at night, why it’s important to try and get some sunlight during the day to offset some of that.

Not just because of the sleep effects, but what you don’t want is a lot of short wave LED light without long wavelength light in your 24-hour cycle or daylight cycle. It can lead to myopia, lengthening of the eyeball, which means the image focuses to the front of the retina, so why people wear corrective lenses. And a few other things about the relationship between light on the skin and hormone production and why that’s helpful in longevity.

Okay, that’s five. All right. Then chapter six is about neuroplasticity, learning and ways to increase alertness and I go through it all. All the behavioral tools, the pharmacology, I talk about Adderall, Sunosi. I talk about how throughout history people have, since they discovered it, have found ways to get caffeine and nicotine into their system. They will not quit doing this.

I talked about the relative benefits and risks of these different things, delivery mechanisms. And I talk about the real science of neuroplasticity and that of course is an old love of mine and wheelhouse of mine. So to really talk about what it takes to do, I call them learning belts. If you’re going to sit down and do something hard, I mean, I think that’s what the writing of the book was for me is the way I described it. Is the need to experience that internal friction and how important that is, not just for the relief of when it’s over, but how important that is for brain longevity.

And I really hope people will take it upon themselves to learn something new. I know this was a active area for you. Learning tango, learning kickboxing, learning so many things. To cook. And just the incredible value of that for life enrichment, but also for brain health and longevity.

Tim Ferriss: For sure. Even multilingualism is correlated, to be clear, correlated to longer health span.

Andrew Huberman: That’s cool.

Tim Ferriss: There’s some really interesting stuff out there. So yeah, keep learning.

Andrew Huberman: There’s an Instagram page. I’ll find it. I discovered it in the wee hours of travel. I got to find this kid’s name. And all he does is he takes three days to learn things from complete beginner to extreme performer of one thing, like the hardest clarinet song.

And you see him start at the beginning, he’s all, “Excuse me, I’m spitting everywhere.” But that’s what he did too. And then at the end, he’s playing this clarinet. He’s like, “Yes.” Or can he do juggling a soccer ball? Can you do that for 100 kicks and then kick it into the basket and swish it?

He just shows how if you just completely pour yourself into things, you can learn this stuff. But the range of things that he’s doing is totally outrageous. I don’t know him, but if he had faked one of them, you might be able to detect it. I don’t think he did, but he’s just music, sport, all sorts of cool, cool stuff.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Give us the handle.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I’ll find it.

Tim Ferriss: We’ll put it in the show notes.

Andrew Huberman: It’s really, really cool. This kid is so—he’s got that energy. It reminds me a lot of your experiments in neuroplasticity. When you’re like, “I’m going to play a drum solo in front of a ton of people.” Put the pressure on and it’s just so cool.

And then the last chapter, I had a hard time titling because it’s not about relationships. I thought about calling it relationship to self. It’s really about personal development, like how to structure all the information that’s out there. And it has a number of things.

It has a section on how to navigate grief based on the science and practices of navigating grief. Which those practices, just even the understanding of what grief is, this remapping of our understanding of what’s actionable and what’s not. I mean, it really is an activation of the reward circuitry that can’t be fulfilled. It’s like as if I was dying of thirst and I’m trying to reach for this and I can’t get it. That’s what grief really is.

Occasionally I’ll get a call from my graduate advisor who passed and I was very close with, from her daughter. She uses her phone number and it still comes up as her mom’s name. And there’s this moment where I’m like—and I’m like, “Oh.” And you feel this sink. I love talking to her daughter. She actually became a neuroscientist.

But grief is this perpetual feeling of like, “Oh, I can’t smell the person or the thing.” There are their glasses and I can’t do anything. There’s this yearning piece and how that needs to remap. And the kind of work that we can actually do to, in a healthy way, remap that grief circuitry. And then how the notion of somebody that we lost, or a pet perhaps, gets reframed in our mind as an not actionable now, but we still have a relationship with kind of concept. And to me, that was an important thing to include.

But the big one for me was there seems to be this contradiction in the self-help literature and psychology. Which is about half of the stuff you see is like, “Get after it.” Like, “Suck it up, fulfill your roles in life. Don’t be a lazy piece of shit. Exercise, do all—” And then the other half is like, “Don’t just do and drift from yourself, your true self, your core self, your essential self.”

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So I think many years ago I could have really used this chapter. That was basically it. It was like I could have used all the chapters. I had sleep issues, so I could have used that chapter. I could have used the stress chapter, all of it. A lot of the science wasn’t known, so this book would have been impossible.

But when Jim Hollis, this incredible Jungian psychoanalyst came on the podcast and he was 84 years old then, and 86 now. And I expected him to talk about essential self and heart’s desire. He wrote Under Saturn’s Shadow on the healing and trauma of men. He also wrote The Eden Project about relationships and the struggle of relationships and romantic relationships.

I expected him to give me all this kind of high level stuff, deep heartfelt stuff. And he basically nailed it. He was like, “You have to shut up, suit up, and show up.” And I go, “Okay, that sounds like kind of boomer advice.” He goes, “No, but it’s not what you think.” He’s like, “Stop complaining. Somebody’s definitely suffering more than you.” That one’s about gratitude.

So it’s not exactly shut up. It’s be grateful for something, you’re alive. You have to get to that level when you’re suffering. It’s like, “Cool.” And it ratchets up from there. There’s a lot of data on gratitude as we know.

Then there’s suit up. We have to be prepared. We need to learn to prepare ourselves, prepare. It’s not just about clean your room. I mean that too, but it’s about like we have to prepare ourselves to show up. We have to get into a head space. We have to develop processes that allow us to show up in our different roles.

And then we need to show up for those roles. We need to fulfill roles. And I’d done a lot of role fulfillment in my life, as you have too, and it’s super important. If somebody’s adrift, we have to do this. And he explains how critical this is to our psyche, how critical it is to our feelings of self-worth.

And then he also has this other thing about how critically important it is to ideally once a day, but at least a few times a week, to get out of the stimulus and response that is shut up, suit up, show up. And really touch into what’s true for you, like what he calls your heart’s desires.

This was more of the Hollis that I expected. And how just quieting the mind, not feeling like you have to do anything in that moment, allows things to come up from your unconscious that lets you really ask yourself. And he used these examples like, “Is the 40-year marriage I’ve been in really the one I want to be in?”

Because I made the example of like, “How beautiful is that?” And he’s like, “Yeah, but there are a lot of people who end life after these long marriages.” And then they’re like, “I didn’t really want to be in it.” The tragedy of that, right? And how much better it would have been that people can identify who they really are, what they really want, like really touch into what’s important to them. And I was like, “Shit, this sounds so simple and yet that’s hard work.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, simple, not easy.

Andrew Huberman: Simple, not easy. And how important it is to do both. And I thought, well, this chapter might be boringly simple, but that’s the important work. And you could take any number of different self-help books and kind of bend them into those, or different chapters into those.

Tim Ferriss: So the book, again, Protocols, easy to remember. Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. The pub date?

Andrew Huberman: September 15th.

Tim Ferriss: September 15. And I think most people will know at this point, but where should people find more about Dr. Huberman online?

Andrew Huberman: Oh, thanks. If you put Huberman Lab into the internet, you’ll probably see some stuff that’s not true and you’ll probably also find a website called Huberman Lab, where we have AI links to episodes. And the book is going to be wherever standard stuff.

Tim Ferriss: You’ll find it.

Andrew Huberman: You can find the book. And the Huberman Lab site is actually, I have to say, the team has done a great job with that. It’ll take you to specific timestamps. If you want to know about dopamine and exercise, it’ll take you to those specific timestamps.

I’m really proud of the team, they put up with me while writing this book and all the rest. And yeah, I mean, I’m out there. And I also am really excited about the young upstarts who are coming for our jobs.

Tim Ferriss: You can have mine. Andrew’s going to fight it out with you guys.

Andrew Huberman: I’m not going to fight it out. When you watch the Dean Potter movie, you will realize why it is a bad idea to try and prevent the person coming up the ladder. Don’t kick out the rungs behind you. And in his case, especially if that person is Alex Honnold, you’re going to lose.

Tim Ferriss: Andrew, great to see you, as always.

Andrew Huberman: Great to see you, man.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks for taking the time, man.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you. I have tremendous respect and admiration for you. I don’t think I’d be podcasting or here at all were it not for you. I’m a fan. I consider you a friend. I’m very, very, very grateful to you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, man.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you for everything you’re doing.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. We should break bread at some point.

Andrew Huberman: Let’s do it.

Tim Ferriss: While I’m in this neck of the planet. And for everybody watching, as always, tim.blog/podcast, Huberman, just look for the most recent. You’ll be able to find all the links. We will have a lot of links to studies, to MIT eye masks, we’re going to have, if they exist. I’m not even sure they’re online.

Andrew Huberman: They do, actually. I think they’re a small company, but yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. So we’ll link to everything. You can find it there. And as per usual, until next time, be a bit kinder than as necessary to others. Dramatic flourish with the eyeglasses back on, but also to yourself. And until next time. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time.

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