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- [00:00]
A
Hey, Andrew, welcome to the Network State podcast. What I, you know, love about your show, I mean, you and I actually have fairly similar backgrounds in some ways where we're both, you know, Stanford at least. I was at stanford for almost 10 years, right. From 97 to 2007. Actually more than 10 years as first undergrad, then PhD, then, you know, basically postdoctoral faculty. And I taught CS and stats and genomics at Stanford. And then I left and founded Joe McSlamy. Sold that, gone to tech. And then you were a faculty member. And you also, in a sense, in a different way, you became a creator. Right. And you're still a faculty member there. Am I wrong or not?
- [00:40]
B
Yeah, yeah, still tenured. I got a meeting with my dean in about a week and a half for lunch. It's a friendly conversation.
- [00:46]
A
Okay, great.
- [00:46]
B
Not an exit conversation. Yeah, I taught up until very recently. I ran a fairly big lab and then tapered that off during the pandemic. My last postdoc is now a faculty member, so I moved all my students and postdocs onto their next steps. But, yeah, I'm still a tenure member of neurobiology and ophthalmology. I have a split appointment and I was born at Stanford Hospital. I did my.
- [01:09]
A
Oh, is that right?
- [01:11]
B
Yeah, I worked in the sleep lab for a summer during university. And so, you know, it's. And Stanford's my backyard. I grew up in South Palo Alto, so.
- [01:20]
A
Oh, okay. Well, I think, you know, it's funny because we're both, you know, that soil is very. It's a very interesting thing because a bridge between, in my view, the old world and the new. Because in different ways, we sort of made our careers on the Internet from there. And obviously it's a weird thing because on the one hand, obviously, Stanford is known for having a lot of people who get into tech, or in your case, get into becoming creators out of there. On the other hand, the university isn't really as friendly towards that as people might think from the outside. Like in the sense of when. When I was doing it in the 2000s, it was not announced me changed. Some entrepreneurship become more common in the 2010s and so on. But it was like VC was sort of over the hedgerows. It was not something that was like on campus in that way. And moreover, you. You know those posters that say, like, bench to bedside, that they would have translational medicine. You know, when you actually did go. When I did go and start a genomics company, suddenly you went from being an infant that everybody kind of liked to then, oh, you're doing something for profit, that's bad. And then they didn't want to talk to you until you became really, really big. Because it'd be a conflict of interest in academia to talk to a for profit company. There's like a weird thing there where there's like an air gap between, you know, Stanford and then the actual tech stuff or creator stuff that comes out. I don't know if you experienced that at all or you saw that.
- [02:47]
B
Well, my experience has been quite different. And I'm not saying this.
- [02:50]
A
Okay, sure, yeah.
- [02:52]
B
So I agree that once one makes it big, the. The tone always shifts.
- [03:01]
A
Sure.
- [03:01]
B
So I mean, this is kind of true across the board. I heard a joke some time ago that I think is quite apt about Stanford, which is there are only two kinds of Stanford faculty. Stanford faculty with companies and Stanford faculty with success. Successful companies.
- [03:16]
A
That's funny.
- [03:17]
B
Nowadays, like, you know, former chair of genetics, Mike Snyder on our podcast. Mike Snyder, he's great.
- [03:24]
A
He's very pragmatic. Yeah, yeah.
- [03:25]
B
He's got, I think, 11 or more companies. You know, I think the backbone of Stanford is largely within the engineering school. I mean, of course they have humanities and everything else. So the engineering of devices at Stanford is such a major theme. Right. And someone who's trained both at Stanford and at Harvard Medical School explained to me that, you know, the lineage was such that Harvard tended to be more grounded in development of pharmaceuticals and Stanford really engineering the gamma knife and on and on. So I always experienced Stanford as a place where academia and industry were somewhat merged. But I came into it a bit later. Right. I started my postdoc in 2005. At that time, people were founding companies based out of discoveries in biosciences. Most, my downstairs neighbor was then and is still now Roger Kornberg, whose father Arthur won a Nobel Prize for rna. And then Arthur, excuse me, Robert, got the structure of RNA and he has a company, actually he's on the. Or was on the advisory board. I think he is still of true Niagen. So the whole NR nmn nad thing, you know, there is Roger, Nobel Prize winner at Stanford, you know, holding a bottle of NR. Like I take NR. And I thought to myself, that was somewhere around 2016. And I thought, so things are changing, right?
- [04:40]
A
Yes.
- [04:41]
B
Yeah. So I think things have changed somewhat. I mean, I could talk about my own experience with the podcast. I think people didn't really expect that from me. And I just, I did it during the pandemic, started going on podcast and launched the podcast in 2021. And I think people sort of stood back and were like, okay, what's going to happen here? Initially, I got a lot of great, saw you on Rogan. Awesome. And then from faculty and. And then as Rogan became a bit more controversial in light of the vaccine mandates, it was a little bit more like, oh. But then colleagues like Anna Lemke, who focuses on addiction and dopamine, went on Rogan. Sapolsky's been on there. And so podcasts became really one of the major thrusts within the media landscape, if not the major thrust in the media landscape. And then everyone seemed to just kind of relax around things, so. So I think it's more friendly now. I think, you know, there are these stains, right. There's the Theranos stain, there's some other stains we could talk about. But then there are all these successes.
- [05:37]
A
Yeah.
- [05:37]
B
Of, you know, like Lubert Strier, who recently passed away, was in my department, founded Affymatrix. Right.
- [05:44]
A
Affy. Gene Chip. Gene chip, Yep.
- [05:46]
B
And then, you know, but he had closed his lab. So I'll tell you, you know, to be quite direct about this, I mean, money is a big part of it, right? I mean, if Stanford has a partial investment role or equity role, if some of these people, including myself, I do philanthropy directly through pay for. Our podcast is free, but through a premium channel of our podcast, we have donor matches, we do philanthropy. So we support labs at Stanford and elsewhere. And you know, as, you know, I mean, you know, research and if money's coming in, you know, the tone is different, but that came after the podcast succeed. So I would say for me, the experience has been very positive.
- [06:26]
A
Well, that's cool. I'm glad it is. I think one thing that's interesting is I think you did this post tenure and so that meant that you didn't have to be scored against the, you know, is this in a peer reviewed publication and so on and so forth. Clearly you're having a lot of impact on global health, I think, in a positive way by telling people about these publications and so on. No, I think really there's a lot of people. I'm a big human defender. I mean, you have a lot of fans, obviously, right? But popularizing the work and getting it out there and turning into actionable things, like look at the sun before looking at your phone. Like all these little hacks and heuristics that distill like a big complicated thing into memorable things is really, really valuable. And so you, you know, there's a few things I want to talk to you about. You actually got in touch with me a few years ago when I had been on the Lex podcast and I talked about the fda. And I think one thing that you may remember about this is I think I was able to give the Steelman case for why the FDA exists and then critique it from the lens of FDA 2.0. Right. In the sense of you do want a regulated marketplace in the sense of bands of bad actors and star reviews like, you know, you don't want to have. Just like Amazon, for example, has star reviews of books and it has bans of, you know, scammers or, you know, the App Store has star reviews and it has bans of malware in the same way you want from a drug marketplace reviews and bans of bad actors. But the FDA doesn't need to be the only one doing those reviews. It could be a competitive marketplace. It could be multiple jurisdictions, for example, the EU and India and China and, you know, or within the U.S. texas and California, California and so on, all competing with each other. And then if you get a thumbs up from any of them, you actually have competition between reviewers in the same way that you don't have like a single movie reviewer for everything. Right. You don't have a single critic. Right. So I'd love your thoughts on that because, I mean, maybe you can go piece by piece through the US Medical system. And why are a lot of the Huberman studies. Why, why aren't we all, you know, super? I mean, we're starting to get there maybe with the zempic and so and so forth. Why aren't we all super jacked and living forever? I think a big part of it is the US medical system, insurance system, reimbursement system, regulatory system, holding back the innovations that people are discovering. But I'd like to hear your thoughts maybe and go from there.
- [08:56]
B
Yeah, sure. Well, just to close the hatch on an, on something you mentioned, you said thanks for being a Huberman lab defender. Sure. I think, you know, there are various critiques, as is always the case when you're public facing. But you know, I would say that the response in the academic community and in the medical community just based on emails and conversations, is sort of divided into thirds. I think about a third understand what I'm trying to do, which is trying to give people actionable advice that can make them healthier and they support that, even though they understand that there's going to be some dilution of the specifics or that I'm going to be pooling things and make an effort to be clear about what the sources of information are. The middle third are sort of silent, sort of agnostic about it. And then the remaining third either are, I would say, probably divided such that they're either critical because they don't like the specific information. They sort of feel like it's not cast the way they would cast it. Or in many cases, I have to be honest, they're envious. They're not happy because someone else is talking about their work, frankly.
- [10:00]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [10:01]
B
And my point is always, I'd love to invite you on the podcast. I had a cannabis episode. It was criticized. I invited the guy on. So just to. But it's a, I think a good segue to the next piece, which is, you know, what do we consider actionable knowledge? And that's really the one of the major important roles of the fda, of course. And I think this is becoming most salient in the context of things like peptides and psychedelics. Right. These are the kind of the high salience issues right now. Here's my feeling. The reason that we don't get more direct recommendations about behavioral changes to support one's health is because there really just isn't an organized voice for that. I mean, one of my hopes was that Maha was going to do that. But, you know, if you really look at what they did, and, you know, I'm trying to get in their ear about this, they're like, oh, 100 push ups, 100 pull ups or something, which is kind of an unreasonable goal for in one workout, which is kind of an unreasonable.
- [11:00]
A
Or maybe it was 100 pull ups is a lot.
- [11:02]
B
That's a lot of pull ups. I mean, it's an unreasonable kind of thing for most people. And. And yet, you know, the New York Times health section will run things like, you know, five in apartment squat workouts you can do. None of that stuff works. No, none of that stuff changes behavior. I think for me, what seems to be the case is that what changes people's behavior is when they can experience a positive shift the first time and every time, which is why we. We push morning sunlight, why we been encouraging resistance training, et cetera. I think the big chasm in healthcare and here we could lump kind of traditional science and medical community and FDA and nih. Right. I have many friends in there, and to some extent, I still consider myself part of that community. And then we think about the podcast sphere. Everything ranging from me to Brian Johnson to fitness channels and the running community, is that the general population feels like they don't know where to start. And during the pandemic and because of the debate about vaccine mandates, et cetera, and lockdowns and masks, what ended up happening was we have no authoritative figure or panel. I am a big believer that we don't want individuals. We saw this during the pandemic, one guy telling people what to do, updating the information. Now people hate them or they love them, whatever. There's Fauci, obviously. But what I always thought, you know, we need panels. We need panels of people that are, that we know based on the data, that people will change their behavior, listen to their doctor, if their doctor looks like them, talks like them. There's so much data on that. So we need, we need some authoritative body. And I think that Maha's interest in reducing food dyes and then people doing push ups and pull ups, it's sort of like a general step in the right direction, but it's pretty micro. And I think it's, frankly, I think it's, it's off center from where it needs to be.
- [12:59]
A
Yeah.
- [13:00]
B
So what? You know, so, so that's a big, A big part of it, I think also in the United States. My dad's Argentine. Okay.
- [13:09]
A
Oh, interesting. Okay.
- [13:10]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [13:11]
A
So that's why you get bitcoined.
- [13:13]
B
Yeah, exactly. That's why I drink, and that's why I drink mate in the morning. So.
- [13:15]
A
Okay, great.
- [13:16]
B
You know, since I was a kid. So my dad's Argentine. He's a scientist, he's theoretical physicist. He actually came on the podcast, you know, and from the time I was very little, he said, you know, the reason people are overweight is they eat too much. And then, you know, like, we debated this for a very long time and, and in Europe and in Argentina and elsewhere, I think there's this idea that if you want to be healthier, you walk more, you move more, you eat less. Done. End of story. You want to sleep better. There are things you can do there too. I think that in the United States, two things are very true. First of all, this. The United States has never been a country where healthy cuisine has been celebrated. Think about the American cuisine. It's like hamburgers, hot dogs, French fries, milkshakes, apple pie. We've never really celebrated healthy eating. It was always abundance and taste. Mostly abundance. Calories. Calories per dollar. You know, before the super size candy bars. Yeah. Like you think of fourth of July where you, you know, okay, now it's great to celebrate things, but, you know, you spend a little bit of time in Europe and You realize people walk a lot more and the traditional food, including sweets, but desserts are eaten as desserts. But the traditional food is a focus on quality, on the source, on the tradition. None of that exists in the United States. I mean, there's the hunting community that think about where they get their meat and I think that's great. I'm a big supporter of that. But it's never been the case that Americans eat well ever. And it's always been the case that Americans like drugs. They like drugs. I mean, I've studied the weight loss phenomenon and, and you know, amphetamine was a big thing. Now it's sort of coming back. Believe it or not, Ozempic. Ozempic proved that people are eating too much relative to their, to their metabolic needs. So the simple statement is Americans like drugs and they don't like to do physical, don't like to eat nutritious food, and they generally don't like to do physical labor. Except, and this is a key caveat, is that Americans love to work hard. We're a hard, traditionally been a hard working community of people, but within the context of getting a paycheck for our work as opposed to doing things to better our bodies. Right. We're unique in that way. And I hear now that wellness is becoming really big in China. You know, that notion of morning exercise and sunlight, I mean, they're picking up on a lot of protocols that I and others have promoted. But being really healthy has never really been the American thing. But we love celebrating sports stars. I mean, we love our basketball stars, our football stars, baseball. It's not that we don't celebrate sport. We celebrate sport and we like to eat really unhealthy food while we watch other people exert.
- [16:05]
A
It's a culture of extremes, right?
- [16:07]
B
Yeah.
- [16:07]
A
So extremely unhealthy or extreme. Extremely hardworking and done healthy from that, right? In some ways. Right.
- [16:13]
B
And I'm trying to change that. I'm, I'm trying to change that and I'm trying to demystify it. I'm trying to anchor in science where possible. I'm trying to give people tools that work very quickly so they can get, you know, hooked by taking good care of themselves and feel the benefits of that. I'm trying to make most of what I promote behavioral tools for change. I do strongly believe in the role of nutrition, which I put under behaviors, but also honestly, supplements and peptides.
- [16:42]
A
What are the humans, what are the top five? You know, because off the top of your head, what do you think are the Most important things people should do, Behavioral tools, just, I don't know, like the overall, like of all your pods, what are the top five things people should do?
- [16:56]
B
Yeah, I think there's only one thing that if people knew they'd be 10 times healthier. And, and that's to understand that you want your cortisol high within the first hours after waking. I don't care when you wake up, but you want your cortisol high in the first hours after waking and you want your cortisol low in the evening. This brings together all of Brian's messaging, Matt Walker's messaging, my messaging. Here's the deal. You wake up in the morning because of an inflection in cortisol that occurs during sleep. Eventually it hits a threshold. You wake up in the first two hours, but especially the first hour after waking up. There's a whole set of mechanisms that are engaged that allow you to boost that cortisol even higher. We hear about cortisol as a stress hormone. It's not a stress hormone. Cortisol is designed to deploy energy to your brain and body so that you can respond to stressors end life, work, focus, et cetera. It sets in motion a cascade of all the things you want. Dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, the so called catecholamines. It sets a wave front for the rest of the day. But here's the really important thing. The higher that morning cortisol peak, the more energy and focus and your ability to learn things and do things you have during the day. And the lower your cortisol will be at night because the cortisol is on a what's called negative feedback loop where when its levels get too high, it starts self regulating and bringing its levels back down. So get your cortisol high in the morning. I'll list off some things. Viewing bright light will amplify your morning cortisol, especially in the first hour after waking. Can be a 10,000 lux artificial light or can be sunlight. Cloudy days, it works just fine. People say there's no sunlight where I live. Look, it's so much brighter at 8am on a cloudy day, even in Scandinavia in winter than it was at midnight the night before. So photons are coming through. 10,000 lux artificial light can help. Bright light exercise, even if you don't feel like it, will start to set a rhythm where your morning cortisol is kind of anticipatory and is even higher. Anticipating that exercise hydration. Believe it or not, things like caffeine and cold exposure, surprisingly, don't increase cortisol. They just prolong that peak a little bit. Okay. The other thing is, if you really want to boost your morning cortisol and you don't have a medical condition that prevents this, believe it or not, licorice root, which contains something called glycyrrhizin, is a very potent tool for increasing morning cortisol. In fact, people that are kind of finding that caffeine doesn't do it for them anymore, take, you need to get licorice root capsules that contain glycerize, and oftentimes they'll remove it because it can increase cortisol. And you take that with your morning coffee and you'll notice you have a lot more energy through the morning. It's a huge effect. So much so that it's contraindicated with a lot of prescription drugs that are stimulants.
- [19:33]
A
So just keep in mind on that topic of energy.
- [19:36]
B
Yeah.
- [19:37]
A
I think about that more as I get older. And quantifying that, I think is important because, you know, for example, we can quantify weight, we can quantify height, you can quantify many other biochemical covariates, like, you know, as, you know, cortisol levels, testosterone levels, other kinds of things. Right. But energy level is often, you know, lots of people have high, that we know have high intelligence, but they have low or variable energy. Famously Jeb Bush, low energy, Trump. But a lot of. In tech in particular, one of the things that distinguishes really high performers that I can see is just, they can just put in, they're tireless. It's not even. I mean, some of them are very smart, but the tirelessness and the consistency is a big part of it. And that just. Right. So maybe you have some thoughts on that. Go ahead.
- [20:43]
B
I would say, look, I am very hopeful that soon I'm not developing one there. There'll be a real time cortisol sensor, just like we have real time glucose sensors. I can't, you know, I don't want to make too much of it, but it's hard to be hyperbolic around this, getting that morning cortisol peak as high as it can be. And some days you can't get sunlight, and some days you can't exercise, and it's there. But do as many things as you can to boost your morning cortisol and then get into your day. And then I should just say just to make for completion sake in the evening or when it comes time for your bedtime, because I realize people wake up at different Times you want to do everything to lower your cortisol. Long exhale breathing, to lower your heart rate. You want to reduce the amount of bright screen light. So maybe you wear blue blockers, maybe you don't. Maybe you just dim the lights, maybe you don't. If you're going to exercise in the evening, it's been shown exercise in the evening because your baseline cortisol is already pretty low, will triple or quadruple your baseline levels of cortisol. And the consequence of that, because of this negative feedback loop that I was referring to, is that the next morning your morning cortisol levels are lower than they normally would be. And so people feel kind of groggy. So it's fine to exercise later in the day, but you need to protect your evening cortisol, make sure that it comes back down. This is a lot of what Brian and I and other people are talking about, but not talking about. We don't talk about it in this frame. So just think about your waking and your first two hours of your day and your last two hours of the day. The day set up everything. And the simplest thing to say, you asked for three or a small batch. I'm saying get your morning cortisol high, get your evening and nighttime cortisol or pre bedtime cortisol low. And you look at Brian's post, he's like, you know, read instead of being online or do some breathing. It all fits into this framework. I'm saying get exercise. Yeah. So it simplifies a lot. And I just want to point out, for longevity's sake, a so called flattening of the cortisol curve, meaning in the afternoon cortisol levels are not dropping, but they're relatively stable or they're dropping too slowly, is correlated with poor longevity outcomes, poor cancer outcomes, poor people who tend to be anxious or have middle of the night waking and then they can't get back to sleep, it's because their cortisol is too high. The whole notion that if you sleep with lights on in the room, even relatively dim lights, morning glucose is elevated, makes perfect sense through the lens of what cortisol does, which is to deploy glucose. So I think what we've seen in the last few years, look, I love technology, I'm from the South Bay, so I embrace technology. But I think what people are doing is they're boosting their evening cortisol too much. That's setting up issues the next morning. And then it took us several years for this to cascade. Right. And so if people Want to get back on track. And you have to push everything into this framework of high morning cortisol, low pre bed cortisol. You get that right? Like 80% of things fall into place. Figure out when you can exercise, do the post exercise, you know, sauna or hot shower to bring things down, you know. You know, avoid obviously caffeine in the evening. If you're going to take something like Ashwagandha to like reduce your cortisol, which is pretty potent at reducing cortisol, make sure you're doing that in the evening, not in the morning. All of this kind of stuff really adds up. And you asked what you know, you said people who are really hard driving and do you know, I've seen some scientists like this. I'm like, this is incredible. They work 15 hour days, seven days a week. How do they do it? I think it's very important for everybody to figure out what, what they can do consistently in terms of work hours over the next five years. Because it does change over time. But I turned 50 in two weeks. Honestly, I have more energy and I feel better than I did in my 30s and I felt awesome in my 30s. And it's because I put the work in, you know, I've just been doing it consistently. I mean it's like, it's like investing, you know, like it's just, you just compound, you compound gains, right? And so, and it's small at first and then over time you're like, this is crazy. My friends who are 50 are kind of turning into melted candles or they're trying to recover themselves. And I feel great. And it's not because I'm gifted genetically or anything. You just invest time and you invest energy in a number of things. And it took me to the point of understanding cortisol that was like, oh, pretty much everything centers around this. You do some mindfulness meditation. You could do it in the morning, sure. But in the evening it would be very beneficial. In the afternoon you say, well, what's going on there? Most of us are getting the bulk of our quality work done during about a two to four hour period. And then there are these phenoms. Like Elon, I think is a good example, seems to be able to just go, go, go, go, go. I hope his body holds up. I mean that's really the issue.
- [25:03]
A
He really is n of 1. I just think he violates every single rule that we have for founders in terms of like focus on one company at a time. And so like he just shatters, shatters all of Those rules. But yeah, yeah, he's.
- [25:16]
B
He's a tricky one to. To kind of generalize from. Yeah, yeah. I mean, some of my. I won't name names, but some of my friends who ended up making billions of dollars through, let's just say, online sales platforms and things in the 2000s have asked me many times, like, what do you think allows Elon to do what. What he does? And I, you know, and I think. I think some of it is that he's learned to funnel stress into output. He's very, you know, as far as go and no go circuits, he seems to be able to take whatever adrenaline is in his system and turn it into very funneled go. I doubt he does a ton of. Of whatever ambivalence he may have. He masks it very well.
- [25:57]
A
I mean, some of it is software, Some of it is hardware in the sense of his genetics and so on and so forth. But, I mean, the reason is I know a lot of you and I both know a lot of billionaires, a lot of successful people, but think we're reasonably successful ourselves. And everybody feels Elon's just playing a completely different sport. Like, he's just so far out there. Like, even, you know, Larry Page or Jensen Huang, who are obviously very, very, very competent people, have said something along those lines. But anyway, it's coming back. Okay. So one of the things that we're doing at network school is we're building startup societies. And so you're familiar with, like, you know, startup society, network state as a concept, you know.
- [26:35]
B
Yeah, maybe just summarize it for me. I mean, before we started, I saw a video that gives me a sense of kind of the. The culture and landscape there. Yes, but. But I'd like to understand more fully what you're doing.
- [26:45]
A
Sure. So think of us as the third kind of thing. So there's Internet companies, you know, there's Internet currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and now there's Internet communities. So, you know, people might say, hey, what kind of startup company do you want to found? Or more recently, I'm doing a new coin. We're having a third kind of thing, which is I want to start a new community based on X. Right. So, for example, if Andrew Huberman was to start a new community to take everything you're saying. Right. And you could engineer the environment. Okay. As like a small example, you wake up and there's like a glowing footpath that points you towards the treadmill and weights, and the cold water is right there, and the windows Open at that right time, you know, with Iot curtains to have the sunlight come in, you know what I mean? If you could edit the environment from the home to the, you know, like the neighborhood to the superstructure, you know, for example, a walkable community, for example, like what kinds of food is there? And so and so forth. What is the ideal human community? Because I actually think we can build it.
- [28:04]
B
Awesome. I mean, I think, you know, I think a lot nowadays about how eight sleep, you know, has really established itself as the leader, right. I think they're more or less peerless in the sense of being able to engineer the sleep environment. We understand the different states of mind and body one wants to enter. You want to be cooler, to fall asleep, you want your deep sleep, you want to get your rapid eye movement sleep, it turns out. Here's a fun one. If you can find a way to heat your sleep environment in the last two hours of sleep, you'll get a lot more REM sleep. So this kind of pan rule, like, oh, colder is better for sleep. That's great for falling asleep and getting deep sleep in the middle of the night, but not so great for REM sleep. For REM sleep, you can get another 30 minutes of REM sleep by making the last hours of your sleep warm environment. So, so for instance, they've done that, right? And you get data and you can update it. And now it's using AI to update your. What you need. And if you, well, woman has menopause, you know, it's updating there too. And we need to do the same thing for the waking environment, right? So little has been discussed about waking brain states. I mean, a few years back it was all like alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. We never hear about that anymore. We talk about focus, creativity. I mean, we're going to look back in 10 years and go, that's crazy. That's like saying like jogging is all cardio or, you know, or bodybuilding is all resistance. I mean, you can train for strength, you can train for power, you can train. I mean, we need to subdivide the waking day and states of mind according to what people want. When they, when they want to be present for their family, when the, when they want to be locked in to a given meeting. And right now it's all done very haphazardly. People like, oh, I drink caffeine, I hydrate and, you know, and I try and get some exercise. And I mean, we've approached sleep the right way finally. And the technologies with sleep are getting even better. Because of during sleep, eye trackers. And we could go down this rabbit hole, but we won't. But here's a little teaser that maybe we talk about next year. There's a lot of technology coming out that links the vestibular system and sleep, such that there will soon be technologies that will allow you to force your body and brain into sleep. You'll put on a device or your sleep environment will change and you will be asleep within minutes. And you could. And we need that for waking states. This idea that we're just supposed to kind of stumble through our life trying to figure out how to be the optimal self, frankly. It's where psychology and neuroscience initially branched off, was talking about ideas versus finding mechanisms. And then the two fields came together again. And so we could say, okay, like Elon representing the extreme. Someone with ADHD and kind of failure to launch Kid at home and his, you know, watching YouTube or, you know, just flailing is the kind of opposite extreme. But we should. We have protocols for how to get muscles stronger, how to get leaner, how to eat, how to improve blood lipids. I mean, we have protocols for all this stuff, but we have essentially no really grounded, mechanistic technology tools to direct brain states in the, in the waking day. It's like, oh, put. Put on a mask and maybe get into like a theta. It's like, it's crazy. It's like we're in the infancy. So an environment of the sort that you're talking about is an incredible idea because people need to know what to do when, in order to set the foundation of alertness and focus that then they can lean into at the right times. But then within that, that framework of sitting down and coding or sitting down and having a. Whatever therapy session, whatever the person is doing, maybe they're the therapist, maybe the patient doesn't matter. Maybe they're doing surgery to have tools that are constantly providing feedback to the brain so that it's in the right and body, so it's in the right state for those activities. And AI can do this, as, you know, I mean, this is, it's. It's not a big reach to accomplish this, but we really need to define what it is we're trying to accomplish. And I think for most entrepreneurs and most people who want a better life, it's really about understanding, okay, like, what are the three or four blocks of waking states I want to, you know, accomplish today? What am I going to place into those blocks? And then getting as much assistance as they possibly can. And sure, some will come from pharmacology, but I think most of it is going to come from directives. I love this idea of like the, the floor lighting up, sending you in the right direction, adjusting for the movement of the sun. Right now there are these apps that tell you well the sun is rising over here, not there. I mean it's cool, but it's super crude.
- [32:30]
A
Yeah, think about it. Right?
- [32:32]
B
So there's, there's so much room for technology development here. I'd like to see a real time cortisol sensor. I'd like to see that cortisol sensor have AI based feedback with one's activities so that you can, it will essentially tell you what to do and when to make things better, including your sleep. We have access to the sleep data. I mean soon all of this will be integrated. My question is where will it be integrated? I love the idea of an online community. I think also it should be the case that I just have like a little sticker sensor. I imagine this as a. The military uses this. They're little sticker sensors that use, you know, it's on Bluetooth, you know, 12 hour battery or something and it can measure everything through cavitation, heart rate, breathing rate, could get cortisol levels, it can feed. And this is used in the military in the context of kind of monitoring soldiers out on the field from an iPad. They can tell if someone got a bullet wound that's a through and through, if they're dead, if they can triage from a distance. I mean that's an extreme case. But we should be able to do this. We should be able, like. Oh, you know, like I'm probably a little more jazzed up right now than I need to be. If I want to, you know, focus in a couple of hours and it, but over time it's just going to naturally bring us into the states we want to be in as opposed to you know, these like subtle electronic taps on the shoulder all the time. It's, it's going to probably provide feedback to our vagus and basically control our respiration rate. And pretty soon we'll be as optimized as could possibly be without any invasive technology. I don't think of a sticker as invasive.
- [33:59]
A
Yeah, in fact actually there's, there's ones that don't break the skin that actually can, can transmit quite a lot of information. Like the sort of non invasive patches. Right, right. Or this non skin breaking, you know. So, okay, so the Huberman, the ideal Huberman startup society. Okay. If we were to take everything You've done because you have a bunch of edits. Let me give you an example. Suppose that we had the self driving car society. You take existing laws and you just change those laws. That, and you basically say for example, this zone only self driving cars are allowed, no humans. Okay. That actually changes a lot because for example, all the cars are parked on the edges and cars are parked in like tunnels underneath the city and people hit a button and the car goes and parks itself and you've got a walkable center and the entire shape of driveways changes and you don't have lots of parking like that one change actually has enormous ripple effects downstream. Right. So for example, are there any legal changes to permit something or ban something or both that you would propose that would start making the Huberman Special Economic Zone or Huberman Health Zone?
- [35:19]
B
Oh yes. I mean I really believe that if you get this cortisol thing right and you get your circadian rhythm right, you get your circadian rhythm right, everything else becomes 10 times, if not a thousand times easier in terms of getting exercise, eating correctly, mental health. I mean there are a ton of data on this now that the brighter your mornings and days, literally and the darker your nights in an additive way, the better your mental, mental health. Even if you're in a dim, even if you're in a dim environment all day long, which I don't recommend, if you make your nighttime environment very dark, mental health improves. If you make your mornings brighter and your days brighter, mental health improves. Now there have been a few companies that have attempted to create lighting that's bright enough during the day and create conditions that are dark at night. And it really hasn't gone anywhere. I mean, what I would like to see. So you said like in terms of regulations, I think buildings should get either by natural light or by artificial light. Should ensure that there's enough bright light early in the day and throughout the day and it's dimmer and darker at night. I mean, I wish that were a law. I mean, Americans don't like to be told what to do. But first of all, it would save on energy.
- [36:33]
A
What if it's not America? Assume it can be done somewhere in the world where those people are okay with great, you know something, as long as it works. Go ahead.
- [36:40]
B
Yeah. And even though, you know climate change is a controversial thing, you'd also be doing a tremendous service to birds and to insects and to the ecosystem of non human animals. Because the truth is that light pollution is really screwing things up in terms of like songbirds are Singing longer now their mating song and everyone goes, oh, that's cool. They're mating longer. Actually it's screwing up all sorts of things within the ecosystem because of light pollution. But what are you going to tell people? Oh, you got to turn off your lights. I mean we're, we're a hard driving species. We want to build stuff, you know, you turn off the lights. But there are ways to modify light cycles, still allow for night shifts, greatly improve health and as a byproduct of that, to improve the climate and the ecosystem for insects, birds and every other animal. In the same way that sound pollution in the oceans is causing major issues for migration of animals and things like that. I don't, that's not my main focus. But the more I realize that you know this, we're not going to only wake up with the sun and go to sleep with the sun. That's a great way to reset your mental health. By the way, there's some really beautiful studies by Kenneth Wright out of University of Colorado that shows people are depressed, people have anxiety issues, they go camping for a weekend. They actually did this experiment, wake up with the sun, go to sleep with the sun. And even though they're using flashlights at night and stuff, they're not shining the flashlights into their own eyes, right. And so and their circadian rhythms reset and their mental health improves tremendously. It's just over and over again. So I would make, I would enforce if, if I were in charge and I'm certainly not, let me put it differently. If I had a magic wand, I would create light cycles that are collaborative with human health. Now you do have your, your Mark Andreessens. He's, you know, he's always poking fun at me about the light. Mark and I, he's, it's self deprecating.
- [38:25]
A
He's self deprecating.
- [38:26]
B
Mark and I are friends and there's a.
- [38:27]
A
Of course, maybe I shouldn't reveal this.
- [38:29]
B
But like it's, it's a, it's a game we're playing and it's a lot of fun. But Mark makes a very good point, which is like he likes to stay up late and be online and he can crash out after four hours of bright light in the evening and in the morning. And you know, Mark is also a bit of an N of one too, right? I mean, if you really think about it, I mean, so I would enforce bright light during the morning and daytime and dark evenings. I would encourage more walking and more movement. We all know about steps that should be scripted into the day's activities in a way. You can't just take away escalators. But there should be something where we're not counting steps, where we have feedback on how much movement we're getting. I think glasses that can read out how much light has been delivered to the eyes. Did you get your photon quota for the day? All this stuff is so easy to do. The problem is it always gets productized. As in silo fashion.
- [39:20]
A
Exactly. So the integrated, you know, so it's useful. Like one of the things with mid journey and so on now is we can think about what the Huberman Health Village would look like. Just magic wand, like if you take everything, you know, and like what does the store serve in terms of food and what do the units look like and how are they arranged and where's the gym and how is that set up and what machines are there? And also like, you know, just mentioned light cycles, for example. I'll mention something, maybe you're aware of this, like Jinghua in China and a few other places will actually turn off the Internet, I think at like 11pm or something like that, and only a lot. Wow. Yeah, wow. So that the kids don't play video games all night.
- [40:08]
B
Amazing.
- [40:09]
A
Okay, so now that is something that people might not want imposed on them. But I think a deep point is you can opt in to constraints.
- [40:18]
B
Yep.
- [40:19]
A
Like in the same way, like if somebody joins the military, they're signing up for like the uniform code of military justice, you know, or what have you, they're opting in to constraints, you know, so it's like signing a contract, you are consensually signing a contract that then constrains you afterwards for mutual benefit. Right. So if you opt into constraints, a constrained society gives you in a sense willpower as a service. Right. So another example of this one thing we're rolling out at network school phone lockers so that everybody can give the speaker their full attention or a dinner, their full attention. So you know, like the phone lockers at gyms where you can put a phone in a lock, go beep, beep, beep, like this. Right. So we actually make heavier use of those phone lockers. So this way people have sort of this way they aren't like, oh, looking down at their phone, it's a break in the conversation and everybody there, that's like a phone free zone. Or like another example is a Faraday cage zone where it's just pencil and paper, it's offline time and the Internet is sort of blocked. You know, you go into an elevator. And the Internet is like blocked. So imagine that some fraction of buildings are offline offices. Right. They're Faraday free zones, basically.
- [41:32]
B
Right, fantastic.
- [41:33]
A
So the reason I think about that is I think that's like, you know, walkability. You know, we, we obviously cars are, I think cars are good, but we advance cars. We went to electric cars and self driving cars and even flying cars in China. We also subtracted cars where we had walkable communities. Right. And the same way the Internet, I think has a lot of good to it. We can advance that with AI and so on, so forth, but you can also subtract it and maybe the answer is like 12 hours a day minimum offline, like 8 hours. Go ahead.
- [41:59]
B
I converted an art gallery into a living space recently. I'm in that space now. I knew I wanted. I like fish tanks, obviously, so I wanted, you know, fish tanks. Actually the one right next to me, it's not complete yet, but there'll be an octopus there. I'm actually trying to get an octopus to use an iPad, you know, so.
- [42:15]
A
Oh, really? Oh, wow. Yeah, so they're smart.
- [42:17]
B
Actually, I'm very interested in merging cephalopods and AI. This is a pet project of mine, literally. Okay, so we'll talk about that some other time. I used to fish. Okay.
- [42:26]
A
Okay.
- [42:27]
B
To my left is a gym with the equipment that I want, with skylights. Below that I turned the basement, which used to be a video editing studio for another the previous owners, into a space. There's no. I don't allow any phones down there or Internet. I draw down there because I do anatomical drawings for my book and for other things. I read journal articles, I read books, textbooks, and there is. I do not bring my phone down there and I don't even.
- [42:56]
A
We both seem to use spatial memory. Like I have a little library nook that is just purely offline and I just use pencil and paper. And if I want something Internet, I will print it out and I'll bring it there and I'll mark it up longhand because we're both kind of born in the 80s or 90s or maybe you're in the late 70s and so on and so forth. And so remember the offline era. And it was actually good to focus offline and then you can operate online. Do you agree with that?
- [43:23]
B
100%. And I think that the people who want to have a strong online presence need to understand that you build the things to bring online offline exactly the moment you're. I've come to realize that the moment I'm online, especially in social media, which I love. I really enjoy social media. I am a merged consumer creator, and I think it was the investor, Chris Sacca, that said you're either, you know, a creator or a manager now. I think you're a consumer creator, and in order to bring really good material forward, you have to get offline. You have.
- [43:58]
A
Yes.
- [43:59]
B
I just spent a week, as I. As I do every summer, with name dropping here. But my good friend Rick Rubin, we're close, and I would go and I spend time with him in Europe, and most of that time we were spending discussing ideas. And the way Rick has created his life is all around being able to maximize the creative energy. He's big on sunlight. He takes great care of himself. He's awesome health. Now, some years back, he switched to kind of eating more meat and got much leaner and all this. But his whole life is around connecting with his family and connecting with his work. And he puts real work into it. Meditation every morning, listening to music, focusing his energy. I mean, there's nothing haphazard about Rick or his life. People, I think, see him as this, like, you know, really mellow dude. And. But there's an intensity there that's all funneled into incredible work. And observing that and being able to participate in those kinds of environments has been immensely beneficial. And I try and create my home environment that way. Now it gets trickier with kids and family and all this stuff and there. But there are ways to navigate that. There absolutely are. You know, and the key is really, I think, as you point out, to segment spaces or. Or segment times during the day, but it's very hard to say. Okay. Except perhaps at night, like, I'm gonna just stay offline. Right. I think that segmenting spaces helps a lot. A lot. And I.
- [45:25]
A
You mentioned something else.
- [45:26]
B
Yeah.
- [45:27]
A
Which is I think you. And I also do this, and I find a lot of people don't do this because it's not the default, but I turn off all notifications on just about everything, definitely. And I just go. And it's almost like a farmer harvesting.
- [45:40]
B
Yes.
- [45:40]
A
When I want to, I go and I respond to all my messages, but otherwise I turn off. I mute everything. I turn off all notifications. I never want pings appearing on screen. It's do not disturb to the absolute max and all the settings and so and so forth. Do you do the same?
- [45:57]
B
Yeah. So the model for all of this, actually, I gleaned for myself. I gleaned from academia, where I realized that the raw Material. There are two things that mattered most in progressing as a scientist. One is collecting data. And the other, well, three things really. So collecting and publishing data and sabbatical and raising money, Grants. Right. But then there were all these other things like teaching, mentoring, students are all very important and part of being an academic. But I had to put, I had on my whiteboard in my office as a junior professor before I got tenure. I said, papers, grants. And so I made it. I had to just remind myself to spend 80% of my time, my waking time, focusing on that, because otherwise there's committee work, there are colleagues dropping by, there's the guy that, that just got tenure and they want to come by and hang out, they want to have a coffee. And you will fail as an academic if you are not a bit selfish and self directed in grants and papers. And it's actually what you owe your laboratory, it's what you owe your students and postdocs. Because nothing stresses out a lab more than the question of will we get this grant? It stresses, it's like telling your kids, like, listen, I don't know if I'm gonna get a paycheck. I don't know if we're gonna eat. And they're like, oh my God, it's actually cruel. It's cruel to do so. I realized as an academic and I caught some flak for this, that I didn't have to go to every seminar. If I went to a seminar, and it wasn't very good, guess what? I stood up and walked out. Because I value my time and I care about my students and postdocs more than I care about the social constraints around this. And, you know, I did catch some flack. I had a couple like, oh, we don't see you at seminars. I was like, well, you're tenured. You're a Howard Hughes investigator. How about we, we talk in five years when. And you know, I'll have a bit more time for this, you know?
- [47:38]
A
Right.
- [47:39]
B
So it's. The culture often breeds a distribution of people's attention and kind of buy in of people's attention in a way that's not considerate of the real goals. Okay. And I love seminars, but if it's a shitty seminar, I'm walking out. I'm sorry.
- [47:54]
A
Yes, I agree with that.
- [47:56]
B
So I do the same thing in my personal life and in my work life, which is not everything can be optimized, but I try and set things up so that I can be more present for family and friends by virtue of the fact that I'm less present for them when I'm working. I also think that there soon will be a literature because I know there's experiments are happening where the brain we know is plastic. We train ourselves for different modes of attention. And if you're allowing your attention to be broken every three to seven minutes or even more frequently by other devices and other activities, other communications, you are training your brain to, you know, to be the squirrel that everyone jokes about with, like, you know, the squirrel, you know that you're becoming the squirrel. And it's, you know, squirrels probably have a better attentional mechanism than a lot of people nowadays. So I think it took us about 10 years to get here where we're starting to realize, oh, you know, our behaviors, feedback on our brain circuitry. And now we're starting to try and think about how to recover that. Setting up unique spaces where you just don't do certain things also helps other people respect those boundaries. Because if it's by virtual time, they're like, oh, I text. If I don't text you before 10:00am you know, it's, I can't get to you. Or after 10pm we tend to respect people's sleep boundaries where you say, you know, you don't expect a text back after 9pm for most people.
- [49:20]
A
Right, right, right, right, right.
- [49:21]
B
Okay. But space boundaries are great because people that know me know when I'm down in that basement, I'm not going to respond to anything. I don't care what time of day it is. So if I say I was in my basement, they're like, oh, they're not offended. And this stuff matters because in order to make a community work, it not just as a siloed like Huberman community or, or Johnson community or biology community, that eventually there's going to be crosstalk between these communities.
- [49:46]
A
Of course, of course.
- [49:47]
B
And so understanding that when people are offline, it's for a critical reason often just sends the message in the same way that, you know, former dean of our medical school, Phil Pizzo, everyone knew that guy ran every morning from 4:30 to 5:30am and then ran the medical school. And you go, he's a badass. And kind of. And you'd go, oh, like maybe I should do something like that. That's a little early. To the jocko.
- [50:13]
A
That's a little early. Cause you're waking up before the sun. But it is, you know, the certain kind of guy who likes to do that. Tim Cook also gets up and does his bike and, or what have you.
- [50:20]
B
Yeah. And the results obviously speak for themselves.
- [50:23]
A
Okay, yeah. So now, all right, so slightly switching gear. So that was good. That's like the human health zone for living. Okay, let's do it. What about let's do it? I want to do it. I.
- [50:33]
B
Let's do it. I mean I have it here in my own spot, but let's do it.
- [50:37]
A
Yeah, send me photos if you want and then I'll see if we can mock up something over here. Okay, now relate to that. On the other end of it is there's a lot of biotech that is not either. Biotech, biomedicine, genetics, the whole shebang, basically. Biomedicine is a whole thing where it is difficult to do in the US medical system because it can't easily get reimbursed or it can't get a so called CPT code, current procedural terminology or FDA doesn't allow it through or blocks it for many years, whether it's a drug or a device or there's also like clia, there's many different kinds of regulators and regulatory blocks. Another one is something called cpom, Corporate practice of medicine where in theory. Why don't you see too many hospital startups because a non physician can't employ a physician by law because of so called corporate practice of medicine doctrine and so on. And there's various workarounds for this, but they're all pain in the ass workarounds. So given all that, what does the human health zone look like for the developers of these technologies? So we just talked about kind of the consumer, right? Like the blinds and the sunlight and all of that kind of stuff. You know, the offline time, the patches, the glasses. Right. You mentioned all these things and that's amazing. What about on the producer side? What kinds of things do you see as being held back by the system or what kinds of things we just developed?
- [52:11]
B
You mean in terms of drug and other types of technologies? I'd like to see more be more ubiquitous.
- [52:17]
A
I'll give a concrete example. So have you heard of Mini Circle in Prospera?
- [52:20]
B
No.
- [52:21]
A
Okay, so Mini Circle is so first. What is Prospera? Prospera is a startup society in Honduras. The law got changed years ago to allow for new special economic zones. And one of the things they had there was a biotech free zone where you could pick regulations from 33 different countries. So you basically pick and choose. So this way you have regulatory competition like I was talking about earlier. And Mini Circle set up there and there's a bunch of people who are investors. Sam Alton's investor. I'm an investor, a bunch of other people, investors. And what this did is it basically had an experimental treatment to give you plasmids that would essentially increase your muscle mass, among other things. Okay. And so it's experimental treatment. And one of my friends took it and he said he felt absolutely. Now there are studies on why this looked like they weren't doing it totally blind. Okay. There's studies on why this looks interesting. He said he felt absolutely amazing afterwards, like 10 years younger, like it was almost like a blood transfusion. And he's posting about how he looked super jacked afterwards. And it was like a different mechanism of action. And then Bezos followed him, Jeff Bezos, because this is something money can't buy, like a genuinely new medical treatment. And that showed, you know, one of the reasons I'm into startup societies and network states is because we can actually get biotech free zones where it's willing, you know, patient willing. Doctor. Right. There's various controversy around this because people are like, oh my God, you shouldn't be free to, you know, I believe in your body, your choice. I do believe that you should be free to do it. That's right. And so that, that extends to medical sovereignty. Right? Like if you want to take a treatment and their guy wants to give it to you and you're like of, you know, of age, whether it's 21 or whatever it is in your jurisdiction, let's say it's post 21 years old, you're walking in clear eyed, you've got informed consent, whatever forms we need. Okay, what are procedures? You should be able to be medically sovereign in the same way that you should be able to opt out of the SEC's guidelines and actually go, you know, the SEC didn't want to let anybody other than quote, accredited investors invest in something which would have meant everybody who wasn't already wealthy would not have been able to invest in crypto and so they wouldn't become wealthy. Right. So the FDA often doesn't want people to have large effect size drugs. They want small side effect size drugs which are different. Right. Like large effect size means you have a huge effect. And it's like Ozempic, it's like, like a big change in your life. Small side effect size means FDA doesn't get any negative press. And those are very different in terms of whether it's beneficial to the end user or not. The entire system in the 20th century is set up to minimize side effect size as opposed to maximizing effect Size. Anyway, the reason, I'm just saying all that is that's an example of a special economic zone, a biotech free zone that allowed one of these treatments. Because you always see papers that have these amazing things happening in academia or on mouse experiments, but they never make it humans because it's like this long 10 year tunnel maybe to get through. Right. So let's say you.
- [55:27]
B
I mean, it's kind of amazing to me that right now it's like the creatine craze. Creatine's been around. I started taking creatine when I was 18 and that's like. And it works, right? Right now I'm not taking it.
- [55:39]
A
Makes you smarter too. Yeah, go ahead.
- [55:41]
B
Yeah. And if you're sleep deprived, I recommend people doubling or tripling the dose for a few days. You'll get a little bit more, you'll head to the bathroom a few more times, but you'll notice a significant offset of the sleep deprivation effect. I wouldn't do that over long periods of time. But yeah, the data on creatine are great. It works. I do a washout every few months where right now I just stop taking it. And you urinate out a lot of water. And it's kind of fun to see how strong you are without the creatine and then get back on. It kind of builds. It's a psychological thing, you get kind of build back. But you'd be surprised how much of what you earned on creatine in terms of strength, you keep even off creatine. In any case, everyone's crazy about creatine right now, right? It took forever for that to hit. You know, first it was vitamin D3, now it seems to be creatine. I think magnesiums are next because turns out I just had an expert chair of otolaryngology from Stanford come on and say, you know, taking magnesium before sleep or just once a day can offset hearing loss. We know hearing loss is related to dementia. You know, just a standard dose of Mag 3 and 8 or Magbis Glycinate is, you know, protects hearing for understood reasons. But you're not going to hear that, right? You're going to hear, we can go dig up the mouse papers, but there won't be a clinical trial on humans for treatment of tinnitus or anything with magnesium. And also go out there and say, hey, people should take magnesium. And then I get a bunch of MDs going like, oh, you're a supplement shill. And I'm like, all right, well let's see who has the. Our hearing. Look, look at me and look at you now. And in 10 years. Yeah, like, I hate to do that because it's kind of a dick thing to do, but I just go, all right. Like, I'm not the fastest or the strong, but I feel like I'm doing really well. My dad has always been very moderate about drinking. Careful not to eat too much. Not he's not obsessive exercises, but not too much. Focused on his sleep work, consistent hours. My dad's 82 and he's firing on eight cylinders. It's incredible. Like, he's still going strong. He's got little things here and there, deals with them. I, again, it's cumulative. So for me, the FDA piece, I think you pointed out very correctly. They're trying to minimize side effect size. I think the key with opting in and informed consent is that people need to be aware of the realistic risks. I'll give an example. So I'm going to kind of push back on this, even though I agree with you, which is stem cells, okay? Stem cell therapies were allowed in the United States. They were sort of allowed to happen. Kind of duck to the FDA radar. Stem cell sounds great, right? Like you want cells that can become other cells to replace connective tissue, brain and et cetera. But, you know, stem cells are a big part of the reasons why tumors proliferate too. There was a company down in Florida marketing stem cells for macular degeneration and other forms of blindness. People who were losing their vision are concerned about that. Got injections of stem cells into their eye and they went blind very quickly, which shut down any advertising for stem cells on Google. You can't just say, I, you have a stem cell company now. It's kind of merged with other things. It's kind of cryptic. What it is. Look, stem cells injected into your shoulder might be one thing or your knee. I know a very prominent physician in the wellness space who got injection of stem cells down in Mexico into his back, kept up with his sauna protocols. So it's unclear what actually causes and ended up with an egg sized infection. Sepsis issue that almost made him paralyzed. I know, because the repair surgery was done in a clinic I'm very familiar with by a very qualified neurosurgeon. And they said, this guy's super lucky. Why are you and your friends, you're, you know, messing around with stem cells. It's not FDA approved, et cetera. So the informed consent has to be done in a way that people understand that the realistic risks, not just in a. Hey, sign this form. With all the terrible stuff that can happen.
- [59:24]
A
Totally, totally.
- [59:25]
B
Right. I will accept a stem cell injection. Perhaps I've never had them, but maybe into my shoulder or my knee. I don't want it anywhere near my nervous system. I don't want it in the central nervous system, not in my spinal cord, not in my brain, not in my eye, thank you very much. It's just that that tissue is too precious, impossible to replace and the data just aren't there. That said, go ahead. I think there are a lot of things, like for instance, people struggle with sleep. I think even if you're already doing all the best things for sleep, there's an outsized benefit to getting a bit more REM sleep each night. Sure, you can heat your bed, but turns out there's a peptide called Pinealin which helps regenerate the pineal sites of the pineal gland, which secretes melatonin. And you can pulse with Pinealin every third night or so and see dramatic improvements in REM sleep consistently on every night. Really impressive. Not FDA approved, but not banned either. I think as soon as people realize how powerful Pinealin is as a sleep aid, it's going to be not as big as Ozempic, but it's going to be headed in that direction. Okay. You can ask Brian, I believe. I don't want to speak for him, but I'm pretty sure we've had conversations where he's either experimented with or uses Pineal. And I don't know if he does things like SS31, a peptide to improve mitochondrial health. Sure. Red light from the sun, red light from a red light bed or a unit will improve mitochondrial health. SS31 improves mitochondrial health. Is it safe? Well, we're still finding out. Seems to be pretty safe. These things will never get FDA approval unless they become like Ozempic where the effect size is huge and the market is huge. So I'm very excited about what you're saying. Where there are going to be markets for things that people are not aware of or it's being sold on gray market right now where it's not clear what you're getting. And I think fortunately the current administration seems to want peptides to be a semi regulated space as opposed to an unregulated space. But for peptides to be available because the pharma community would love to shut down the peptide and compounding pharmacy industry. Look, most people can get by taking one tenth of the amount of Ozempic or Ozempic, like drug for, for reduction of body weight with far fewer side effects. But 1/10 means the drug companies are making 1/10 the profit. So a lot of people are now going to compounding pharmacies for their Ozempic, Mounjaro and similar and getting awesome effects. Awesome effects. I don't take it. I never have. But if I ever need to lose some weight, I certainly will and I'll go that route. So I, I think it's, it's very, I would love to see a kind of emerge between better oversight of quality of products and messaging around, more thorough messaging around those products as opposed to just being kind of the wild west online. You can go online and buy peptides. There needs to be something in between strict FDA regulations and just kind of wild west gray market. We really need that. And I don't know if that could be established in Singapore, if it could be established elsewhere, but I think the current administration in the United States has made room for that, is going to continue to make room for that the same way we have for supplements. They're not unregulated. You have nsf, you know, tested for sport. There are regulations and guidelines that allow people to make better informed choices. We all know what those brands are. They're the like five or six big brands in supplementation you trust. Okay. This is third party tested, NSF certified for sport. If you're a state, if you're a mom or a dad or whatever, an academic or a, a programmer, you're an AI founder, you feel better taking something that has a few of those stamps, period.
- [62:55]
A
So I, I agree with a lot of that. I want to give a slight pushback on the pushback and then just get, you know. Okay, yeah. So my view is no plane crashes, no planes, no train crashes. No trains. Right. Like they say, if somebody wasn't first on, let's say an open heart surgery or a brain transplant, we never know that those things worked and you know, like somebody might be okay, but they're kind of failing and they take the risk of literally dying to get a heart transplant and then they're better. Right. So they take extreme downside risk for upside potentially. Right. And so I agree with you on the disclosure and on the information. There's ways you can do it with registries and so on and so forth potentially. Right. Talk to previous patients and so on. There's two other things that can be done, more than two, but at least two. So one of them is, you know, Pharm gkb, Russ Altman's I've heard of.
- [63:54]
B
It, but I'm not familiar with the details.
- [63:55]
A
Okay, so PharmGKB is because you're on, you're maybe more on the neuro side of things and I'm more on the diagnostics, like genomic side of things. Right. So far, I mean, obviously we know a little bit of both, but that's just kind of my background.
- [64:08]
B
Yeah.
- [64:08]
A
So PharmGKB has been around for more than 20 years and it's a database of all kinds of genetic slash drug interactions. Right. So If I have VKORC1 variants and CYP2A9, then what is my warfarin response? Right. And how does it relate to like vitamin K intake and so on and so forth. And sometimes you could have a little old lady that needs a huge warfarin dose and a big football player that, you know, bleeds out from a much smaller dose. And you don't know that until you know the genetics of it. So in theory, before you take some of these treatments, if everybody had their personal genome, we could partially forecast the result of that treatment for a large number of treatments. Right.
- [64:47]
B
And whole body mri, for instance, something that gets knocked a lot. I think it's fantastic, not just as a tumor detection tool, but as something like a structural detection tool. And understanding where people could benefit, where people might truly be at risk, I think. Absolutely, absolutely.
- [65:05]
A
And have you heard, you may have heard like organoids? Do you know that?
- [65:09]
B
Yeah, I had Sergio Pasca on the podcast recently. He's one of the leaders in that space.
- [65:14]
A
Okay, great.
- [65:14]
B
From Stanford. Yeah, we were postdocs together building assembloids and organoids to test neurons and other responses in a dish, basically.
- [65:22]
A
That's right. So in theory you could have a patient derived organoid that is mini Huberman in a petri dish or mini biology in a petri dish. And then I could. You know, it's amazing how much that cell culture will sort of predict about your own physiological response. But it's only the thing in the petri dish that is taking the hit, like an allergic response. It's not 100%, of course, but it's like a proxy for you. In the same way that like the pharmacogenomic lookup is like a proxy before your main body takes it. Just like you're saying, injected in my knee, injected in my arm. But not like the main stuff. Right. So this is less precious tissue that can kind of, you know, be a proxy for yourself, the organoid before it goes into. Right.
- [66:05]
B
I love that I'll tell you, you know, I mean if you, it made it brought to mind kind of a chuckle in my head where you know, it's so crazy if someone goes in for an allergen test, right. They like rub the thing on them. It's like, I mean it's, it's okay, it's low level but it's, it's kind of tedious and it doesn't allow you to implement over time. Like if some new allergen comes on or some new detection test, you want all that run, you don't want to go in. I mean we're finally getting to the point where you don't have to like go to an office quite as much. People, you know, they remote phlebotomist. I wonder what your thoughts are and why this space tends to stumble and stagger along for so long. And then like we get these so called breakthroughs, right? I mean it was epic. Manjaro. The GLP peptides have been known about for a very long time.
- [66:49]
A
Yes.
- [66:49]
B
We're in the niche communities of bodybuilding and fitness and all that. And then it broke through. There are other things. I think Pinealin is going to be very important. I think for people who want to increase testosterone. Rather than taking testosterone, people will be taking peptides like gonadorelin which support the hypothalamic pituitary axis more generally. Don't shut down hormone production. I mean it's just wild how we feel like the kit is basically, you know, like pharmaceuticals which don't give you much control over in space and time, but existing pharmaceuticals are, they'll get you someplace. I think of this kind of like my buddy Peter Attia, right. He because he's comes from medicine and it was trained at Stanford. Like he has more of a. He'll use some supplements and talk about them a little bit. He's really a behaviors and drugs guy, right. Like if you really like if you look at what he said, like so why. Yeah, it's just his training is in prescription drugs. He always says, you know, it's been tested BPC 157 for, for joints and recovery. Anyone that's taken it either got a very strong placebo effect or can just tell you somehow it works. Maybe it's placebo, maybe it's not. But Peter is like I don't know about BBC 157. It's not FDA. Like there's no trials on it. I feel comfortable taking it, trying it. So how do we bridge this space so that it becomes formalized because I. I think that there's a huge opportunity here, but someone's got to take it and run with it. And I don't know anyone that's like the. That's really doing that. What's that?
- [68:18]
A
Okay, say what you're gonna say and I'll say something.
- [68:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, I like to see when people build structures. So I. Not to go off on too long of a riff here, but, you know, I started talking about health practices during the pandemic. Then I started my podcast, and I was like, look, there's a lot of information you can glean from science that can. You can use to benefit yourself. But. And I'm writing this book, they'll be out next year. Not this September, but next September, because I want to formalize that into the protocols. But I have to say, like, what Brian was doing with blueprint, or what people are doing with function Health, or what. Or what Peter Attia is starting to do in these different. People are trying to bring it together under single platforms so that you don't have to do so much. People don't have to do so much work running around trying to figure out what to do. But it's still very piecemeal. It feels to me like there should be a front gate where you go in, they take blood, they take a skin sample, they build an organoid, you get a couple devices, and then you just live life for a while. You get feedback, update, live life update. You know, I don't think we're even close to there, because we could get there, because we absolutely could get there. And I just want to know what's the next step, let's say the next six months, 12 months, year, to get to that platform, Because I'm excited about what you're saying, but I worry that we're just going to go adrift as a. As a health field.
- [69:46]
A
Okay, so here is what I propose. So first is we write the spec for, like, literally, let's say it's an AI prompt, okay. For everything that the ideal human health zone would have. So let me just enumerate some of the things you mentioned. There's the patches, there's the glasses, there's the opening of the curtains and the cortisol spike in the morning cold water workout, and then shut down dark nights at night. There's also the diet. It's not hamburgers and stuff like that. It's, you know, like. Like healthier foods. There is the other kinds of devices, whether it's like, you know, watches, for like fit, you know, like, like step tracking. And so there's a zillion quantified self gizmos. There's peptides like Manjaro and GLPs. There are supplements. So there's creatine, vitamin D, magnesium. There's a bunch of other stuff that we mentioned, but that, that covers, that covers several pieces of. Yeah, right.
- [70:52]
B
And goal directed. And the psychology piece would be sort of where, where people would identify one or two pain points, either work focus, pain points, relational pain points, and you'd have real experts that could handle that quickly. I mean there's a whole conversation to be had about the kind of the, the psychedelic space like you know, which either seems to rescue entrepreneurs and founders or collapse them or.
- [71:14]
A
Yeah, collapse them. Yeah, exactly.
- [71:15]
B
You have to acknowledge them. You can do too much. Too many psychedelics.
- [71:19]
A
Yes.
- [71:20]
B
And for some people, too many psychedelics means one journey.
- [71:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [71:24]
B
It's a high risk thing and some people benefit from them tremendously. You know, on the podcast today, that's.
- [71:29]
A
That'S where the pharmacogenom.
- [71:31]
B
Yeah, sorry, it was the consciousness guy. And he talks about his experiences on dmt, fundamentally shifting how he thinks about consciousness and evolving his work. But he's a guy who did it once and is still thinking about that five years later and updating his research. I mean Christoph is one of the leaders in the research on consciousness for over 30 years. Yeah, I've seen a lot of people collapse themselves with psychedelics. So I'm not suggesting that, but where people have pain points and hang ups and psychological hangups, they need to not have to go to a retreat and be able to work on that. I mean I think that that would be integrated into the space as well.
- [72:09]
A
Yes. So by the way, the pharmacogenomic point could be helpful there as well because you might be able to predict which people would have a bad reaction versus which could tolerate it for psychedelics, for all kinds of things. But so, so my thought is here's, here's a possible line of attack, a let's figure out what the ideal is. Like the magic wand kind of thing. Right. You have, you know, you've been elected president of this network state. Okay. In a tech, what I call a techno democratic election, meaning you have on chain votes that are recorded. So you have a thousand, ten thousand people, they've recorded, recorded. You have authority to do. Okay, fine, so you can. Or you're just building community from scratch. You're like a real estate developer or some combination. All right, so You've laid out everything and so what does it look like? And so forth. So we have all that. Then we make a video like just a short of what a day in the life looks like and we pause and freeze frame. And when you see a patch kind of thing, for example, on someone's neck or below someone's shirt, we pause and we show citation, citation, citation, citation, citation, citation. Because you and I both, it's hard sci fi, this is not impossible stuff. It's just system integration of things where in many cases you point out they've been around for some time. Creatine has been around for some time, obviously the GLPs have been around for some time. The patches, more than 10 years ago I had seen the non invasive patches and it's just kind of been hard to get them out into the public for various regulatory reasons. So we take all this stuff. For example, there's treatments to reverse aging in mice that there's amazing phenotypes where you've got old bald mice over here and then a sleek mouse and they're both two years old. And there's cancer drugs that show reversing graying of hair. We freeze frame and we show sight, sight, sight pops out like this. So it's like suspension disbelief. Then the movie kind of continues and then we basically have something which says to a regulator in the UAE in lots of small countries, by the way, this is the secret, I think the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, okay, FDA holds back a lot of things, but the antithesis is you want some form of regulation, some form of quality control. Right. The synthesis I think is lots of small sovereigns which are still states and legitimately can enforce rules, could set up their own biotech free zones and have people like you or Peter Attia or Brian Johnson, plus traditional MDs or what have you as a panel, as you were mentioning earlier, that just review stuff for that sovereign and then they have a trade off between okay, maybe they'll get some flak, but maybe this is a really promising new treatment. Maybe it's like, like stool transplants for example. Sound weird, but they are good.
- [75:02]
B
Oh, the data are really impressive as are, you know, transfusions of young to old blood parabiosis. Oh, a former postdoc of mine went to go work for my, my colleague Tony Weiss, Corey's company, which is, Tony was the first person to you know, talk about transfusions, you know, the baby blood stuff and parabiosing animals and it's remarkable they're now looking at this for improvement of vision, you know, reversing blinding diseases. I mean, the data are still incoming, but it's spectacular.
- [75:30]
A
Yes.
- [75:31]
B
What it. The mouse data are spectacular. The human data are promising. And, you know, it's. I love this. I mean, I. If you tell me how to implement this, I'm game. Right. I think you're going to tell me that this is going to be linked to the crypto community. Right. At some level.
- [75:50]
A
Yeah, here's why. Here's why. The reason is crypto is risk capital. Right. There's billions and billions and billions of dollars in crypto. I mean, I think there's a deep similarity here. Which is. It is. I've heard of DCI D E S. Yeah. Okay. Right. So that's like crypto funding science outside the system. Right. So it's like, still technical people, but they're willing to go and add up all the numbers outside the academic masthead, for example. And just like crypto has built billions, trillions of dollars of value outside Wall street in a way that's open to everyone, not just those people in. I mean, it's still something which impresses the best people on Wall street, especially today. So, similarly with Desai, a few things that I think are coming, like the crypto plus science movement. One is turning people from patients into active participants in their own health.
- [76:48]
B
They're not just like, amen to that. I absolutely love that. I mean, the, you know, hospitals are depressing places, even for the physicians that work there. I mean, it's just like there's some beautiful hospitals. Like Stanford has built this incredible hospital, actually. Mark and Laura. Yeah, they endowed the emergency children's hospital. Right. They created that. I mean, they made that possible. Beautiful hospitals exist, but no one wants to go to a hospital. People care about their health and there's nothing in between. And this is sounding kind of, you know, cliche nowadays, but to say it, but between, you know, sickness care and not seeing your doctor, there's not a lot of pro health care. And you get those silly posters like, you know, here are the food groups and like, here's how you move. Like, none of that stuff works. None of it works.
- [77:42]
A
Exactly. Well, that's the thing. That's why I like what you and I mean, in a sense, you know, 10 years ago, I remember realizing that fitness and beauty were the back door to health and medicine. And the reason is people will actually pay cash out of pocket for fitness and beauty to get better. And then in that, you can sneak in all of the medical and health lessons and so on. To, like, improve from their baseline, as opposed to waiting till something is broke and then fixing it, which is the traditional medical system. And it does very little for you after, you know, like, like something. I mean, it can maybe get you back to normal, but then there's no interest in making you better than normal.
- [78:27]
B
Right, right. Well, have you noticed that the. If you look historically like there are these three main, very disparate communities from which every new health technology besides standard drug discovery.
- [78:38]
A
Let me guess, bro. Science.
- [78:40]
B
Okay. What are the other ones that you guess? Let's.
- [78:42]
A
Was that one of them?
- [78:43]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, I was going to say, you know, no one wants to admit this, but it's like bodybuilding.
- [78:49]
A
Yeah.
- [78:50]
B
Plastic surgery.
- [78:51]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [78:52]
B
And. And academic science. Those three communities couldn't be more different from one another. Right. And yet the bodybuilders learned to use nutrition and hormone augmentation and training, let's say, training nutrition. Right. And they took it to the extremes. But then. And then the aesthetic, whatever community.
- [79:15]
A
Korea.
- [79:15]
B
My goal is to be the last person in Los Angeles, where I currently live now, that hasn't gotten Botox or anything. I'm. I'm graying and like, I chose to not do that. I don't just.
- [79:22]
A
Yeah, but you're. You're a distinguished gray, I think.
- [79:25]
B
I don't, you know, I just sort of. I don't dye my hair. I just decided, you know, to see what. You know. I can't say I never will embrace that community. But I have a friend, Jason diamond, who's like. He's one of the, like, premier plastic surgeons. And. And it's interesting because that community is. Does all this stuff of, like, moving fat from here to there, and a little bit of this, a little bit the nip tuck thing, as they say. And then the academic community embraces real mechanisms and discovery. But I had to see a lot of my colleagues get sick and some die. And many look getting what we call the tenured look, where they're like five years after they start. You're like, what happened to you? A lot of founders experienced this too, because it's intense. But all kidding aside, the people in the sleep science community at Stanford were the ones that, back in the mid-90s, I would like Dement and a guy named Emmanuel Mignon, who discovered the genes and mechanisms of narcolepsy. Every day, the laboratory would migrate outside to get sunlight before going back in for the latter half of the day's work. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, you're Setting your circadian rhythm. This will give you energy the next morning. And this is an MD, PhD. He was a Howard Hughes investigator. At one point I'm thinking, like, these are interesting. These are smart people, right? And I'm like, why don't we know this stuff? He's like, oh, all the data are in mice. You can't get people to do this stuff consistently. And I thought, this is crazy. These are some of the most powerful mechanisms. Circadian biology is one of the most powerful aspects to our daily living. No one escapes circadian biology. It shapes our health, it shapes our illness, and we can work with it. And I thought to myself, gosh, somebody needs to bridge these things. I always enjoyed resistance training and running. I like to run. I'm not a great runner, but I'm an avid runner, as they say. And so I realized what we're trying to do and what the podcast community is trying to do, what Atiya is trying to do, what I'm trying to do, what Matt Walker is trying to do, what Brian's doing, and clearly what you're trying to do is create this fourth category that respects the view that some of that stuff is pretty extreme, but that it's not very. You can't implement it. Like, bodybuilding is not applicable to most people, but certain pieces of it are. Extreme endurance training isn't, but certain pieces of it are. The aesthetic thing is not. But certain pieces are. And academic science is applicable. Not all of it, but certain pieces are. And that's where I was like, okay, I bridged two of these three silos. I'm going to get out there and start messaging about it. And I love the idea of establishing a community. Here's my one concern that I would love for you to explain how we get our heads around. The moment you get a person in charge of a community, they're called a.
- [82:03]
A
Guru or a cult leader, unless they're a president. So I've got. Actually, go ahead, finish your saying. And I've got.
- [82:09]
B
Yeah, and so, you know, I'm only half kidding here, but, you know, like, sometimes the messaging can get contorted from the outside in a way that's very. That pulls the thing down from below. I'm not sure what people say. I'm worried about people not receiving the critical messaging or having the opportunity to implement this stuff because the moment it's under the rubric of. Of someone's name, typically it becomes. We get these, like, cult images, right?
- [82:31]
A
Totally, totally, totally. So I've got. I got a few thoughts on that so first is the same technology that you can use to send one bitcoin on chain you can actually use to record one vote. It's like the debit and credit. And in such a way that it's cryptographically provable that they made the vote, who did it, when they did it, which wallet they did it from, who they voted for, and so on and so forth. Basically you can, I can get to details, but a high level, you can see how that's true.
- [83:01]
B
Right, cool.
- [83:02]
A
So what we can do is we can actually have binding on chain plebiscites in the same way we have binding on chain transactions. And the amazing thing about cryptocurrency is it transacts across borders. Like that is say a Japanese person can pay a Brazilian, who can pay a Frenchman and so on and so forth. And that just works. It's all Internet. And the fact that they have three different national currencies doesn't matter with techno democracy. And I can share that video with you afterwards, we extend that so that you can now basically hold an election, a genuine election on chain. And a Japanese person, a Brazilian and a Frenchman can all vote for you as Andrew Heberman, president of a startup society. And that vote is what I call the social smart contract. They're literally signing a smart contract that is also a social contract. And it says you're basically collecting a thumbs up from a bunch of crypto wallets. But a crypto wallet is a much more powerful thing than people realize because today it's upstream of like funds and money and messaging. It's upstream of access to a discord or to a crypto wallet, which is money that's real. But tomorrow it's upstream of drones or doors. Like, like crypto wallets can open doors, like because they're keys, they can turn locks, they can turn on machines, they could turn on sequencing devices, they could unlock data stores. Crypto wallets can do a lot of things. They're basically just very powerful data structures. Right. And so if you have hundreds or thousands or millions of crypto wallets that are all voting for something, that's like the formation of a digital state, it is crowdfunding basically. Right? You can do a lot with that. It's a very, very general concept. And the formation of it can be shown to be a million consensual actions uncoerced of people's own free will. Right. It's like a streaming vote because they can all come in one at a time and you can build up that following over Time. Right. Okay. So because of that, that's a mechanism to come president, legitimately president of a network seat, because you're actually winning a vote of their own free will there. Right. And so we take the same concepts of democracy, just like, you know, sort of the Internet reclaimed free speech. You know, it was in touch and go and they pulled it, kind of pulled it back and we kind of reclaim free speech. We can reclaim democracy. So that's one big piece. Okay. And the second piece is. I agree with you. Like, you know, one of the things about network state, startup societies is you want it to be minimal, necessary, individual. So you publish a blueprint. And I know Brian has actually used the term blueprint. Right. So call it blueprint in the small B sense. You publish a blueprint and you're just doing the first one to show that it works. You're doing a template and you publish a template. Why? Because I know and you know, we don't have all the answers and then let other people copy and fork it. Just like an open source kind of blueprint. We actually have the architectural diagrams there and the, you know, all the kind of stuff. Right. So I think that is my answer to obviating or. Or addressing those two correct points that you mentioned, which are, A, we have legitimacy because it's provable, and B, we have decentralization so it's not personal.
- [86:21]
B
Great. I love. Helps me envision a number of ways that we could try and scale the protocols as we were refer to them.
- [86:29]
A
Yes.
- [86:30]
B
Because that's ultimately what I want to do. You know, sort of half kidding. You know, I decided to write a book called Protocols. Right. A user manual for the human brain and body, and was going to release it this month and then decided, well, I want to put illustration so that people can really put this stuff into a framework. Visuals make it big. But if you think about how clunky. I know, it's so clunky. It's so old school when you really think about the approach. And yet books and podcasts and social media are largely the best tools that we have at this point. Traditional media has a partial but diminishing role in this. Right. Although I will say it's kind of interesting. I went on Bill Maher a few weeks ago, we had discussion about public health and health practices, alcohol, sunlight, et cetera. And it's interesting to see some of these media channels that I think Bill's kind of sit somewhere in the middle between extreme right and extreme left. Yeah, basically right. I mean, he pokes the Democrats and, you know, the surge in new audience from that was tremendous. And so I think there's a, I anticipate, at least in the next 24 months, a growing role for new forms of traditional media, if you will, people who are not like, not cnn, New York Times versus Fox. Right. But things in between, even if they're linked to some of those networks, maybe.
- [87:50]
A
Maybe the new Barry Weiss, maybe the.
- [87:54]
B
Free Press is a great example of that. I think we're going to see more of that. And yet, if you. Okay, so if you add that in, plus books, plus podcasts, plus social media, the, the integrated implementation of all of this requires what you're describing. So I'm super excited about it. So I'm super excited about what I'm hearing, I'm learning during this podcast, which is awesome.
- [88:14]
A
You got it. And just. Exactly. So we have all of these Internet innovations and we want to package them together in the physical world. And so you just need like a relatively small piece of real estate to actually do that and a bunch of people who will opt in. So, for example, you know, my friends at Coinbase just set up something they call Basecamp, which is a pop up, like a pop up village where you can use Coinbase technologies to pay and do contracts and stuff like that.
- [88:42]
B
Bitcoin on Coinbase this morning.
- [88:44]
A
Great. Okay.
- [88:45]
B
That's the only place where I purchased my crypto. So.
- [88:48]
A
Okay, well, but, but bring it locally, get it to your local wallet and so on. So I love Coinbase. They'll also tell you that. So the, so Coinbase has Basecamp. This, this term we call a pop up. Right? Because doing like a full real estate build up, like we've done in Arabic school, is like a significant commitment. But we could have the Huberman Health Village pop up here at network school if you want to do that. And we just have whatever thousand square feet or tens of thousands of square feet, and we go through a bunch of your old podcasts and we just have a clip of you saying something and boom, we immediately cut to the implementation of that in the physical world, like the IOT curtains or something like that. Or you say magnesium and we've got the shelves with magnesium supplements in every room. Just like imagine 50 clips like that where you're basically projecting all your concepts, system integrated into the physical world. In the same way like an iPhone integrates a camera and it integrates an accelerometer. And the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Right? And the reason for this is you have a formula and you have managed to probably get an N of one implementation of that that works for you. But with some thought, you can probably scale that for others because they're not going to be as skilled and balancing it and setting it all up in such a way.
- [90:06]
B
I mean, that's what the book is. It's trying to explain to people what they can do in order of descending importance.
- [90:12]
A
Yeah, that's right. But. But like, for example, just as a small example, bulk orders of magnesium or creatine. They're not that expensive, but you could, you know, you can get bulk discounts on many different kinds of things, right? So a bunch of people doing them together. And what's cool about this is then people, you know, they come in and, you know, 30 days later, after the human health zone, right. Or whatever we want to call it, their. Their skin is glowing, their eyes are light. They've, you know, you show the sleep tracker. Actually, you know what, we could even do like a traditional academic study where we, you know, we show their metrics and stuff beforehand, and then we show everything improving 30 or 60 days in. And, and ideally it's like large effect size where it's just. You don't even have to do stats on it. It's just like, you know, boom, square wave. Right? And certain kinds of things are like that. Like, you know, the, the diabetes prevention program, the dpp, Are you familiar with that? Right. That has like a very large effect size because they basically make everybody work out and eat vegetables and so on.
- [91:14]
B
And so blood glucose regulation gets better.
- [91:16]
A
Yes, exactly. They lose like 10% of body weight or some significant amount, which is a lot for a lot. Right? So I think also this is something where once it's done on a small scale like that, and we videotape the whole thing and that's content for the pod, right? Then governments are like, whoa, this is awesome. I want to modify my city. Or a real estate developer says, I want to build a new real estate on this basis. So we built something which is both a cool experiment and demonstration in its own right, but it's meant to be a prototype and template for, like, healthy huberman living around the world.
- [91:51]
B
Listen, I'm all for it. Let's do it. Sounds like Singapore. Sounds like Singapore is the place to do it.
- [91:58]
A
Great place. Yes.
- [91:59]
B
US would be very complicated. California would be especially complicated. I mean, regulations here are, like, absurd. And I say that as a lifetime Californian who lived through the fires, multiple earthquakes, including the 89. I mean, the way that things are constrained here. Actually, I read the book or listened to the book Abundance. Ezra Klein's voice is quite good in explaining why it's so hard to get things done in California. Singapore sounds like the place to do it. I love this because we also need reflections and data and feedback from not just males, but we need women kids. A lot of my friends who are able are homeschooling their kids or in small collection. They have other kids over and they group homeschool their kids and they're creating these environments of kids are wearing red lens roka glasses in the evening, they're off devices at night. It's very controlled. They're eating really good food, they're getting their proteins, their essential fatty acids, they're getting sunlight. This is what you're trying to recreate. It sounds like one is trying to recreate, excuse me, something from the 70s and 80s and 90s. But actually it's taking the best of that, integrating it with devices and with modern nutrition and supplementation.
- [93:15]
A
Traditional.
- [93:16]
B
Yeah, it's not, it's not trying to go back to the wonder years. Only a few people will get that reference, you know, but it's trying to integrate that era of, of growing up as a teen or a young kid with what we now know from modern science, which is clearly going to extend life lifespan, clearly going to improve brain development, clearly going to set those kids apart in ways that none of us can predict. And it's not just. And of course they use their devices, they love their device. All these kids are into like Roblox and all the other stuff that other kids are into, but it's, it's a controlled environment and they come to learn that that environment of different things at different times of day, other things, not at certain times of day or night.
- [93:58]
A
Is normal, is better for them.
- [94:00]
B
It's normal, right?
- [94:01]
A
Yes, that's right, exactly. And you know, there's two or three other parts of this that we touched on that I wanted to, you know, say one is everybody there is a, is an active participant in their own health rather than just a passive row in a table, you know. Right. And so, you know, you know the concept of adaptive clinical trials, right, like where basically you don't have to, you know, the entire, you know, what's funny is I actually think we need to do case control studies on case control studies. We need to do regulatory science on regulators. And what I mean by that is like many things, I mean most things in software and hardware, I mean, SpaceX was not developed via case control studies. Those are only for teasing out a Small effect size that's not obvious to the visible eye. And iteration is, for example, when you try and find a software bug, you have a thesis on it and you do iteration, you do get bisect. There's other mechanisms to try to find what piece of code had the effect on the outcome. So a case control study, and case control studies means, for example, you have one jurisdiction that only uses that method to try to find new medical discoveries. And if another one that actually uses the older method, you don't like banting. And best from the 1920s, the way they discovered that insulin worked, they won a Nobel Prize. And they did it was first they had the theory, then they tested on dogs, then they tested on themselves, then they tested on volunteers, and then they had patients just literally jump out of bed, like true bench to bedside, like they walk over with the bubbling beaker. And that was something where from 1921 they had the idea, by 1923, scale production by Eli Lilly for the entire North American continent and they won the Nobel Prize. That was when pharma moved at the speed of software because they could iterate also they could change formulation. You know, all this kind of stuff that requires crazy FDA review to go from, you know, like injectable to oral to patch to this, that and the other they could just, that's like, you know, mobile client, desktop client, you know, command line client. They could just edit the formulation, edit the dosage, titrate this, that, and just look and see if it works and just do it by feel because the effect size was large enough that they could see it, right? That was when of course, there were patent medicines and scams and so on and so forth. But that was also when lots of the wonder drugs were developed, which is why. Which the FDA has acknowledged by grandfathering all kinds of drugs before the modern era. And in many ways I think we're going back to that time, right? So there will be more downside, there will be more things that don't work, there'll be a lot more miraculous things that really, really work. And on balance, these things scale because they get replicated billions of times and the failures happen usually once, right? So that is kind of the vision for what these health zones would be. And you know, obviously you can, you don't. No one's going to force you to take a treatment, but you could go in and you could be the first one, the first ten, the first hundred, the first thousand. Also one thing I think is those people who are very early adopters, we should give them the Equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Because people go and they die in the military. They die bungee jumping, they die skydiving, they die in sort of foolhardy things. They take risks that don't benefit anybody. But those people who are like the first to try some treatment that could benefit a lot of people should be honored. And you know, like, even if it doesn't work out for them, all their bills are paid and so on and so forth because, you know, it's, it's like a thing they're doing for humanity. You know what I mean? Like, we have to change. I totally can make movies on this. Go ahead.
- [97:33]
B
I totally agree. And you know, hopefully no one will die, but it's fair that you. Actually, some people will come to this rather late. You know, I've had people reach out who came to some of the protocols in the podcast that I cover on the podcast and elsewhere in their 80s. Oh, wow. And feel now some of them were already exercising, some were doing better. That's the other category that I forgot to mention earlier, that of people in the academic community who will reach out and say, hey, listen, you know, the sunlight thing or the, you know, rarely it's the creatine thing. But the, you know, exercise thing has been transformative. What we forget sometimes is that if people are, if you can get people to sleep better, like basically you have a friend for life. Right. If people can lose weight where they haven't been able to lose weight previously or feel more vigor, I think that creates a buy in of the very best kind. Right. Because they own the tools inside them at that point. I love the idea of building this community. I would really like to discuss further, presumably offline, how we, how we start to implement that. Okay. And I love the overlap with the crypto community. I mean, I know very little about crypto, but I've started to invest in crypto more in the last year or so, although I had started back in 2020.
- [98:55]
A
Crypto loves Huberman Buy a crypto will fund all kinds of human and Huberman grad student, human disciple type things his risk capital that loves your style.
- [99:05]
B
Great. Well, Huberman loves crypto because it's, you know, early on a very, very smart, I shouldn't name him, very successful entrepreneur from the Bay Area. Stanford grad told me to start investing whatever, some percentage of my investable income in crypto. And that was back in 2017. I didn't listen until 2020. But look, it's clear that this is here to stay in the same way I Feel it has a lot of semblance to like what we saw. Like these bro. Science, bodybuilding community. Yeah, all this.
- [99:38]
A
Exactly.
- [99:39]
B
I mean, you know, if we had a dollar for every woman, let's just say women who have no interest in lifting weights, who is now injecting Ozempic or Mounjaro or asking about peptides, we'd be extremely wealthy. So these things, the. Whatever's crazy now is going to be in the mainframe in, in five to ten years, maybe less.
- [99:59]
A
Absolutely.
- [100:00]
B
Breath work made the cut. They just had to call it respiration physiology. We and others published some, some clinical trials. Okay. Meditation. Now everyone knows if you actually take the time to meditate, like has benefits. You know, it took so long and people were attacked, viciously attacked, mystics, counterculture, kicked. I mean, the whole. And sometimes it's because of the merge of these things with kind of like drugs and sex and other things that can cause some like scandals and issues, but. Or deaths. Right. But I think if we really step back, we put on our rational minds for a moment, people realize, like, there's great things to be pulled from these different communities, including academic science, but that we've hit a roadblock now. We're really at a place where we need the sorts of communities that you're talking about. We need high fluency, high throughput mechanisms to fund and try things and iterate. And I love it. I'm all on board. I didn't expect this is where the conversation was going to go, but I'm super excited.
- [100:58]
A
Amazing. Great. And we can take Cuban into the physical world. I'll ask one last thing. This is just. Maybe you're already on this and I haven't seen the pods on it and so on. I do think it might be interesting for you to look at traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Indian medicine, like Ayurveda and so on. So like acupuncture, Ayurveda, yoga, meditation and so and so forth. The reason I say that is, for example, with acupuncture, you know, I wasn't like a believer in acupuncture because I was like an allopathic, you know, Western, whatever kind of guy. And then, you know, I had some like, you know, like, wrist issue. Like my wrist was sore for, you know, because like from an old lacrosse injury or what have you, and this is many, many years ago, like, and then I, I got some acupuncture and what was remarkable was the needles were like in like my leg or something like that. And amazingly I moved my like, right arm or like right wrist like this. And I could see that needle twinge, but if I move my left wrist, it didn't twinch. So there is something to this concept of like the meridians or what have you. There is like a wiring diagram for the body. They are onto something definitely. You know, and I was like, oh, wow, that's kind of interesting. Right. And so I feel like there's, you know, with the rise of China, the rise of India, there's. That seems like an interesting set of topics that I bet would expand your audience and people might be interested in looking at that. Something to think about.
- [102:34]
B
Yeah. So we touched on it, but probably too lightly and we should go, you know, full on into it. One of the interesting things about being a public health educator who's also a scientist at a university like Stanford is I've had to be thoughtful about which topics I embrace when to establish. You know, it's less about credibility, it's credibility, but it's more to give people a sense of how I approach something thing.
- [103:00]
A
Totally, totally.
- [103:01]
B
So, for instance, so just a couple of things within the area that you're talking about. I'm. In 2017, I started a practice called Yoga nidra, where you lie down, you do long exhale breathing. This was developed in India thousands of years ago. It literally translates to yoga sleep. And the state of mind you're trying to accomplish and that you soon learn to accomplish is one in which your brain is awake but your body is very, very relaxed. There's only one other state of being that approximate that, and that's REM sleep, when the brain is very active and the body is essentially paralyzed. It's now been shown in a lot of studies to improve learning and memory. Improve basically reduce the latency to fall asleep or fall back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night. Even if you do this during the daytime, it's been shown to improve outcomes for trauma, et cetera. I modified it and called it something called non sleep deep rest or nsdr. I removed the intentions, I removed any kind of mention of anything mystic or the chakras, et cetera. And I caught some heat from the traditional yoga nidra community. Understandably so. But the goal was when you call it non sleep deep rest, you immediately know what it is. Look, it's not a nap, because here's the thing. Naps will disrupt your nighttime sleep. They create sleep inertia. Non sleep deep rest and Yoga nidra improve your sleep at night. Meditation is designed to relax you. Nsdr. Non sleep deep Rest is designed to replenish your mental and physical vigor. And hypnosis is designed to modify your brain in a certain way. This is just designed to let you self direct your own relaxation while being awake has profound positive effects on cognition, sleep, and everything else. But if I called it yoga nidra, people go like, all right, that sounds kind of crazy. Does it require.
- [104:52]
A
But meditation?
- [104:53]
B
Okay, acupuncture or breathing. Right, acupuncture. For many years, acupuncture was considered kind of like medicine in the West Chufu Ma's lab at Harvard Medical School. Chufu is a very serious neurobiologist, trained and published beautiful papers in science, Nature, et cetera, on the nociceptive pain system. And as his name suggests, he's Chinese. So at some point, he decided to explore what insertion of these different needles at different locations in the body would do for things like cytokine release, inflammation, norepinephrine, dopamine, and other catecholamines. What he found was that different combinations of entry sites of these needles create very different outputs from the different glands of the body, but that there's a systematic map. And so. And some of these have been published.
- [105:50]
A
I didn't realize it's being published.
- [105:51]
B
Yeah, in Science. These were mouse studies, but they're starting to move into other areas. And they use electroacupuncture, so they'll do some stimulation of the nerves at those locations. But, you know, we know from experimental neuroscience that pressure can activate nerve pathways. So I absolutely believe that one of the most important things for modern medicine to do is to take the maps of the body from Eastern medicine, to take the maps, even like this notion of the chakras, this idea that from our neck down to about our pelvis, we have our sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic chain ganglia, chains of neurons that activate glands and other features in our body. Organs in our body through the deployment of different transmitters. And we know that at different locations along the sympathetic chain ganglia, they innervate different organs. And here the acupuncturists and those that talk about chakras have been talking for a long time about opening up. They call them in yoga the bandas, that they're essentially sphincters. You know, you don't just have a sphincter in your butt and your mouth, right. You have them in your throat. You have them all along your digestive tract. We're a tube. And so what labs like Chufu's are starting to do is starting to say, like, what is the conglomerate of nerve and gland and Vascular features at different locations along the sympathetic chain ganglia. How do those relate to activation of different releases of different hormones? And again, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to unpack this. But I think we can safely say that Ayurveda and Eastern medicine have figured out systematic maps. They don't know the mechanisms by which insertions of needles at this site and that site creates on average a particular outcome. Now you get people, and I won't even name them because they're so obnoxious. You get certain people, especially on X in the traditional medical community who love to throw shade, as the kids say, on things like Ayurveda, because. And they'll cite some instances in which, you know, some herbal like, like lead contaminated turmeric killed a patient and like that's the wrong way. We should always be asking, you know, at the one end of, of, of brain plasticity, meaning you have curiosity is brain plasticity, that's the window to brain plasticity. At the other end you have cynicism when you get, you know, the more cynical you are, the less plasticity you have. So if I hear a cynical doctor, I tune out what I am absolutely convinced of. Based on the Chufu Ma data and the experience with yoga nidra, which non sleep, deep breaths and now the clinical trials in the US that are being done there. Everything we know about meditation, breathwork, AKA respiration physiology is now becoming a big thing, even if it's just about sleep apnea, is that we have to look at these systematic maps through the lens of what we understand about mechanism and we are going to find a. It's already a treasure trove of actionable advice that is very likely to be mostly behavioral in nature. But also the Chinese herbal thing is incredible in terms of the sleep science, what they have access to, in terms of the acupuncturists understand about ways to improve sleep. Spectacular. On and on and on. So I'm totally on board. But we need really good scientists unpacking this stuff.
- [109:12]
A
That's right. So basically now that we've got a lot of people of Indian or Chinese descent that are also trained in Western medicine, like can be like chifu. Exactly. That's right. And I my view on this is also just as you said, like imagine somebody who was making a potion in the middle ages and they had 10 ingredients and the potion worked. And now from today's vantage point we would know that, okay, this one was the active ingredient. The other nine were just, you know, like the superstitious Part or what have you.
- [109:43]
B
Right?
- [109:43]
A
But the potion did work, right? And so that's sort of how I think about a lot of this stuff where if it survived through the ages, there's like some underlying physics or biology or biochemistry or what have you, you know, neurophysiology, whatever you want to call it. That probably means the thing works. And then you might be able to abstract out what the active ingredient is. For example, you mentioned electro acupuncture.
- [110:08]
B
Electroacupuncture. This is actually some of the most exciting work in the realm of psychedelics. There's a laboratory up at UC Davis trying to remove the psychedelic experience from psychedelics. There is this theory that what they do is they open brain plasticity in the weeks following the experience. And there's this question whether or not the actual experience that you have on a psychedelic is necessary to activate the plasticity window. And so there's this whole category of drugs that's going to be developed which is basically extracting the neuroplasticity inducing effects of psychedelics without the psychedelic journey, right? So these are, these are plasticity drugs without the mystic psychedelic experience. Now the people who are kind of anchored to the history of psychedelics will say, no, you need the journey, you need the anxiety. You have to like, embrace it. And you can say, okay, fine, but like, what about kids? You're not gonna send them into that. What about people who have a predisposition to psychosis or bipolar disorder? You're not gonna send them off to do psychedelics. That would be completely irresponsible. So we're starting to see like, ketamine broke through. Ketamine works very similar similarly to pcp. It's a dissociative anesthetic, works on the NMDA receptor. But when it was pcp, everyone was like, terrified. Ketamine is different, but similar enough so, you know, it's sort of like Manjaro bodybuilding peptides. It's like, you know, acupuncture, like where the re. The naming is critical. It's funny, even the addition of electro to acupuncture makes it a completely different beast to a lot of people just because of our bias towards like devices in the West. So, yeah, I mean, once again, apology, I would just say you're, you're definitely peering into the future on this. And I love that you're parting the veil on it and inviting people in. I'm totally on board. Totally on board. And I don't say that lightly because a lot of things where people like, let's build a device. I'm like, it's just like one more piece. It's not the the thing that's really going to move everybody forward. So I'm because you're talking about changing the whole community framework around medicine and healthcare. So I'm, I'm totally on board.
- [112:06]
A
Amazing. Great. And I'm looking forward to working with you. Let's discuss further offline and I'll put pull together a spec. And thanks for coming on the podcast.
- [112:15]
B
Great. Yeah, I can't wait to eventually meet in person. Come here. You're invited here anytime to check out my, my, you know, human Lairman lab. This is the other Huberman Lab. There's the one at Stanford. There's the one at that is the podcast. And then there's the one sitting in right now. Yeah.
- [112:33]
A
Amazing.