LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Chicago, IL

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event

at The Chicago Theater in Chicago, Illinois.

The event consisted of a lecture entitled "The Brain Body

Contract" followed by a question and answer session.

We wanted to make sure that the question and answer session was

available to everybody, regardless

of who could attend in person.

I also want to make sure to thank

the sponsors of that event, which were AG1 and Eight Sleep.

Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating,

and sleep tracking capacity.

One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep

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because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep,

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by about 1 to 3 degrees.

And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized,

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I fall asleep far more quickly, I wake up far less often

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Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA,

Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.

Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman.

AG1 is an all in one vitamin mineral probiotic drink.

I've been taking AG1 since 2012, so I'm

delighted that they sponsored the live event.

The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason

I still drink AG1 once or twice a day,

is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs.

That is, it provides insurance that I

get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics

and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical

health, and performance.

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They're giving away five free travel packs, plus a year's

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Again, that's drinkAG1.com/huberman to claim

that special offer.

And now, without further ado, the question and answer session

from our live event at The Chicago

Theater in Chicago, Illinois.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I turn 70 soon.

What is your best advice to keep my brain healthy in old age?

Terrific question.

The advice I would give to you, as somebody about to reach 70,

is the same advice I give to anybody,

which is that, essentially, all of the things that improve

cardiovascular health and perfusion

of your bodily tissues are going to improve functionality

of the brain.

Because, of course, the brain is a rich consumer of fuel,

requires very good portals to deliver those fuels,

and the capillaries, micro capillaries and arteries,

and so forth, need to be clean and clear.

That's the big one.

This is why I think the prescription now

is that's generally accepted, and here I'm

borrowing from my friend Peter Attia, but about 150,

or maybe as much as 200 minutes of so-called zone 2 cardio

per week, movement that you can just barely carry out

a conversation, is going to be very useful.

One thing that's often not discussed

is that load bearing exercise of some sort

is going to be better, provided your body can tolerate it,

but you should do something that you can do consistently

over those long durations without injuring yourself.

But there's a very interesting literature

about how load bearing movements actually

generate the release of hormones,

yes, hormones, from bone that actually

cross the blood-brain barrier and may influence

health of neurons in brain areas such as the hippocampus.

And there, I'm extending from preclinical data in animals

to humans, but there's some human data starting

to emerge that that's true.

It's also true, and there's a wonderful paper out

just today or yesterday from Dr. Andy Galpin's lab

and collaborators talking about how

if you look at cognitive health, it's

highly correlated with things that relate to strength.

And that is not to say that you should just

do strength training exercises but we

know that all people, truly all people,

should be doing some sort of resistance training

two or three times per week.

You know, and we know that grip strength and increasing

asymmetry in grip strength between the two hands

is one of the indicators of deficits in control

from the brain out to the periphery,

and it's correlated with cognitive decline.

There's also some interesting data

about how when the feet become floppy and kind of flaccid

or the lack of ability to extend one's toes.

I'm still working, I've been wearing this toe spreader

thing.

Has anyone tried those?

Those hurt.

Those hurt.

I broke this foot a bunch of times.

but I'll tell you when you get better at spreading your toes,

it's really exciting.

And it's really exciting for several reasons.

It's really exciting because there's

more stability in your feet.

You can run and move and do things better without pain.

But in addition to that, believe it or not, just as one

of the first things that they're going

to do when you come into this world

is scrape the bottom of your foot and look

for the Babinski reflex, which is a neural transmission

reflex, as all reflexes are, but it's testing,

essentially, the health of the nervous system.

That over time, again, there are many correlates

of dementia, many, many correlates of dementia,

but an inability to finely control the extremities

is certainly one of them.

So strength training, cardiovascular training, these

are kind of stereotyped answers for your question

and, yet, those are really the prime movers

against cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease.

And then, of course, I'd be remiss

if I didn't throw in something that was a little bit more

edgy because that's what I do.

There are interesting data about the use

of drugs to increase acetylcholine transmission,

right?

I mean, I was visiting a Nobel Prize winner at Columbia

to learn about his incredible work some years ago

and saw that he chewed no fewer than five pieces

of Nicorette gum, something I don't recommend,

during this short meeting.

And I said, what is this all about?

And he said, well, you know, I don't smoke anymore

because I don't want lung cancer.

But he said nicotine is protective against

Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

I was like, how can that be?

And he said, well, you know, decreases in neuromodulation,

dopamine, acetylcholine correlated

with cognitive decline, keeping your brain sharp,

and so on and so forth.

So I'm not encouraging people to take nicotine.

It increases blood pressure, vasoconstriction,

but it's an interesting consideration

some of the emerging cholinergic and dopaminergic drugs are ways

to increase acetylcholine and dopamine

are certainly intriguing.

And I won't tell you who that person is

but his name is Richard Axel.

Next question.

Yeah.

How can I optimize sleep while working 24/7 hour

shifts as a firefighter, 24 hours on 48 hours off?

OK.

And this probably also pertains to new parents,

and it probably also pertains to anyone

that's going through a particularly stressful time,

where you're micro waking throughout the night, so not

just firefighters.

So what do we know?

We know, based on really good data,

that shift work is bad for us.

It's just bad.

We're a diurnal species.

We're not nocturnal.

But thank you, thank you, thank you, shift workers,

because you essentially keep us all safe

and make the world go round.

And so we need you, and we want you healthy.

So one of the main things is that you

can make sure that you stay on the same sleep-wake schedule,

excuse me, for at least two weeks.

It's the swing shift that's really the worst.

You can tell your boss I said that.

And if they won't agree, and you're

doing this 24 hour on 24 hour off,

there are a couple of things that are really important.

First of all, the main way to wake up your nervous system,

even though it might not feel like a triple espresso

is going to be that light exposure to the eyes.

And if you can't get it from sunlight

is going to be from any bright, artificial light.

I'm not a huge proponent of the daylight simulators.

They're very expensive.

You can simply buy a 900 lux led far more inexpensively.

I don't have any relationship to any company

that sells these but you can find them on Amazon

or wherever you happen to prefer to purchase things.

Or you can just get really close to a bright light.

Anytime you're trying to wake up,

even if you don't feel that it helps you wake up

very much, mostly for the melatonin

suppression, because bright light will very

acutely suppress melatonin.

And then the real question from shiftworkers

always seems to be, should I catch up on sleep

or is that going to be problematic?

Should I just stay up into the next cycle?

And the answer there is a little bit nuanced,

but the best answer I can give across the board

is, if this is a pattern that you're

going to be in regularly, over say months or years,

then get whatever sleep you can.

Get whatever sleep you can.

If it's something that you're doing somewhat acutely,

like you're traveling to Europe and you're just

going to force yourself to stay up a day and a half

then, in that case, I would say, no need

to get the maximum amount of sleep.

Just try and stay with the local schedule.

We have an entire episode about shift work

that somehow maybe didn't get as much recognition

as it should have for shift workers,

and we'll try and get it out in better form.

We don't always succeed in top carding things

in a way that gets them out to the most people.

One thing I will say is an opportunity

to announce that our website, hubermanlab.com, is

completely revamped so it's highly searchable.

It will take you to exact timestamps,

and now you can segregate out timestamps from newsletters,

from all this stuff.

So thanks to a lot of effort by my amazing team,

you can now navigate that site to real precision.

So if you want to say ADHD, Adderall, kids, yes,

no, for instance, it will take you

to precise timestamps that will address those issues.

Next question, please.

How does hypnosis therapy work?

Well, this is a very interesting topic to me

because my colleague, Associate Chair of Psychiatry

at Stanford, David Spiegel, is a world expert in hypnosis

and its neural underpinnings and its use

for clinical applications.

His father was a hypnotist, also a psychiatrist.

And when people hear hypnotism, they think of stage hypnotism

and being up on stage and doing things you don't want to

in front of other people.

But really, it's when we're talking

about clinical applications or wellness

applications of hypnosis, we're talking

about self-directed hypnosis.

I really wish there was a better name,

because I don't think hypnosis is going

to advance very far as a field, frankly, because everyone

thinks hypnosis.

And it would be like if psychedelics

were just called drugs, right?

We were taught in the 80s that drugs are bad,

and that your brain on drugs looks like an omelet,

and that's bad.

And if you like omelets, they're still bad.

And drugs of abuse are bad.

And, actually, I hope we can talk briefly

about psychedelics at some point,

because I do think there's a little bit

of a runaway train around the topic of psychedelics now.

I think we need to be very careful how we

approach that entire landscape.

But hypnosis essentially works by allowing someone

to place their own brain into this very unique state.

Earlier, we were talking about neuroplasticity,

and we talked about the fact that neuroplasticity involves

intense focus followed by deep rest in the form of deep sleep

or non-sleep deep rest, maybe even Rick Rubining it and just

kind of like laying there.

Hypnosis is different because hypnosis

is a state in which your focus is very narrow,

the context is very narrow, but you're very, very relaxed.

So maybe the Rubin example of being brain active and body

very still is a bit more like hypnosis, to be fair.

Why would it be the case that David Spiegel and his dad

have literally a tool that is approved by the Psychiatric

Association, the major American Psychiatric Association,

where they can figure out how hypnotizable

you are by having look up and try and close

your eyelids while continuing to look up,

the so-called Spiegel eye roll test.

Sounds pretty wacky, right?

This is like TikTok level wacky.

Well, the reason is you have cranial nerves,

so they sit more or less near your neck, that

allow you to direct your focus, your eyes, upward,

and then you have cranial nerves that have your eyes go down

and the ones that the cranial nerves that drive your eyes up

are associated with alertness and eyes open.

No surprise.

And the cranial nerves that are associated

with pointing your eyes down and closing your eyelids

are associated with, what, with drowsiness, sleep,

and lack of alertness.

There's sort of a push-pull in the autonomic nervous system.

And Spiegel, Spiegel's daddy and him,

figured out, because they're geniuses,

that if somebody can maintain upward

gaze while closing their eyelids, two things happen.

One, you'll see the whites of their eyes,

and it's pretty creepy.

Two, that means they're highly hypnotizable,

because that is a reflection of the probability

that they can enter a brain state in which they

are both very awake and very relaxed.

Pretty cool.

Now, if that sounds kind of wacky,

because you're just looking at the periphery,

keep in mind, that one of the primary entry

points for diagnosing concussion is to shine a light in one eye

and have that pupil constrict and then

see whether or not the other pupil constricts,

the so-called consensual pupillary reflex.

Although, technically, and I've been bothered

by this from day one, it should be

called the non-consensual pupil reflex,

because the other eye doesn't have a choice if everything's

working.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

In any case, if you have a hard hit to the head,

you'll see that you shine light in one eye, the pupil

constricts, and the other one stays really dilated.

And then you go, OK, get this person to the emergency room

because there's been a severing of the connections

between the two sides of the brain.

So looking in the eyes and trying

to deduce what might be happening more centrally

within the caverns of the skull and the brain

is not a new thing.

It is a primary diagnostic tool in neurology.

It's also how your parents knew that you were taking drugs

when you came in the door because your pupils were

like that big, and that reflects a difference

in autonomic arousal.

And, basically, stimulants, as, most dilate their pupils.

This is also why the story about belladonna, people

intentionally dilating their pupils

to trick people into thinking that they

were attracted to them.

I've thought about this one a lot, too.

It's like not a precursor to good relationship.

It's like someone's using their physiology

to pretend that they're attracted

so the other person thinks that they're attracted so that they

might become attracted.

Anyway, it's a recipe for failure, almost as bad

as most of the dating apps.

Well, I wouldn't know.

I'm not one them, but from what I hear.

OK.

So where were we?

Hypnosis.

When you are in a state of elevated attention

but very relaxed, guess what, neuroplasticity

occurs much faster because you're essentially

marrying the two states that are normally divorced,

which are heightened levels of attention

first and then deep rest.

You're essentially putting the nervous system into a more,

I wouldn't call it hypoplastic state, but a more plastic

state.

And for people that are highly hypnotizable,

the success rates at, for instance, smoking cessation,

pain relief, are pretty impressive.

Spiegel Lab has published a number of these.

So I think self hypnosis is a very interesting tool.

I just hope that they rename it so

that it stands a chance of getting off the ground.

I mean, one of the things that you

learn as a public facing educator

is that what things are called has a great impact on

whether or not they achieve any kind of use in the world.

Hence, why I decided to swallow the difficult pill of partially

renaming yoga nidra as non-sleep deep rest.

I don't like to do that.

Yoga nidra has more than 1,000 year history.

But when people hear yoga nidra, unless they are very open

minded, they hear magic carpet.

They hear levitation, and it's unfortunate,

and that's not how I feel.

But for years, I talked about yoga nidra, it's so cool.

It's like a sleep state but it's-- they're like, yeah,

like yoga nidra.

OK.

But if you come from a culture where that's discussed,

they're all about it.

And so non-sleep deep rest, you know, I felt like, all right,

leave my name out of it.

You know, I'll be dead eventually.

I mean, I'm in this line of advisors, right?

I'm like approaching 50.

I'm like, I'm winning in my lineage.

But should I be fortunate enough to live past bullet cancer

or car crash far enough, then NSDR hopefully will persist,

and I don't need a piece of it.

It's just the hope is that people

will learn to put themselves into brain states that

can be adaptive for them so it'd be nice

if someone could come up with something other than hypnosis.

I think Spiegel would agree.

Super interested in psychedelics as medicine

to be done with somebody with experience.

Worried about unlocking mental health conditions.

Yeah.

You should be.

What does the research say, and what are your thoughts?

OK.

Barbed wire question, we like that.

Psychedelics, well, let's just back up a little bit

and acknowledge one thing that's more

important than psychedelics or anything

else when it comes to rewiring the brain, which

is that, ultimately, rewiring of the brain is about shifts

in neuromodulators, dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine,

norepinephrine, acetylcholine.

And it's no coincidence that SSRIs, Selective Serotonin

Reuptake Inhibitors, have been one of the major entry

points for attempts to treat things like depression

over the last 20-30 years or more.

When I was in college, that's when the book Listening

to Prozac came out.

But prior to that, there's a long history

of drugs, prescription drugs, in that case,

to change levels of neuromodulators,

like serotonin or acetylcholine or dopamine,

in an attempt to cure or treat a disease.

But keep in mind, despite the varied success of SSRIs,

a topic unto itself, that there's a strong belief,

and there has been for a long time, that,

if SSRIs worked it wasn't because the depressed brain is

deficient in serotonin, but rather

because increasing serotonin offered the opportunity

to increase neuroplasticity.

So there's a different way of thinking about it,

and that's a segue for saying that when you say psychedelics,

that's a broad category of drugs.

Nowadays, people even lump ketamine into that.

Although, technically, it's not a psychedelic.

But the sort of classic, if you will,

psychedelics are LSD, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide,

and psilocybin, aka mushrooms.

Although, it comes in other sources, as well.

The major effect of psilocybin is

to stimulate a particular serotonin

receptor which has elevated density in particular brain

areas.

And indeed, there are many recent clinical trials, many,

let's say 12 to 20 good sized clinical trials done

in diverse locations on the planet, many at Johns Hopkins

and UCSF, some in Switzerland, showing that enhancing,

and here you'll notice I'm using the mechanistic language,

enhancing the transmission of the release of serotonin

and activating particular serotonin receptors

leads to an opportunity for more, what, neuroplasticity.

Now, I say it that way not to add a bunch of word soup

but because the real question is whether or not

the experience that one has while

under the influence of psychedelics

is critical to the clinical outcome.

Or a growing idea, just as a hypothesis,

I think is equally interesting is

that it's the serotonin itself and that the things you see,

the things you hear, the things you experience

are not relevant.

Now, I have some experience with psychedelics.

I had a bad time on psychedelics as a teenager.

I was also pretty wayward youth.

But I've had a bad trip on LSD.

For years, I was scared that people were going

to dose me with LSD after that.

It was so bad.

I think across the board, we can say, kids doing psychedelics

just seems like a bad idea.

Their brains are already hypoplastic.

If you have a predisposition to bipolar type

issues or schizophrenia, it can exacerbate those issues.

And, certainly, if you don't have adequate support,

in the form of somebody that can guide you through the sessions,

as well as the presessions, which are not

done with psychedelics, as well as the so-called integration

afterwards, it can be a really slippery slope.

I know examples of people really suffering

in the aftermath of psychedelic journeys.

Now, there are a few interesting points, as well,

and it wouldn't be fair if I didn't say that several,

if not many, individuals who have

had so-called treatment resistant depression, at least

in these clinical trials, have reported

feeling far better after psilocybin therapy,

but that psilocybin therapy was done with several presessions,

then the psychedelic sessions then several after sessions.

And it's not always the case that things turn out well.

So I think it's early days.

What is interesting, and I think important,

is to recognize that psilocybin and the structure of psilocybin

is very similar to serotonin itself, very similar,

but it activates particular receptors.

A lot of people don't realize how similar to serotonin it is,

and that microdosing psilocybin, I

should say the data on microdosing

psilocybin, something that's increasingly popular,

is not particularly compelling.

It's not clear what it does.

It's not clear if it's of any use.

And I think the danger here is that we end up in a situation

as we did with, frankly, with cannabis.

And, by the way, I'm not somebody

who demonizes cannabis.

I think it has its uses for certain people,

but very high THC concentration cannabis

can be a problem, especially with people that have

a predisposition to psychosis.

And anyone that tells you that cannabis isn't addictive,

just say, great, don't smoke weed for a week.

Let's see how you do.

Yeah.

And let's go on a plane trip together.

And how are you sleeping?

And so I think the chronic cannabis users are starting

to take note of some of the issues it causes but,

again, there are some clinical applications.

Now, when it comes to the high speed train psychedelics,

like DMT, that's far less data available there.

And then MDMA, assisted psychotherapy

for the treatment of PTSD, there,

the data I think are more robust,

and I think we're likely to see legalization

or at least decriminalization in the next few years.

But keep in mind that MDMA is methylenedioxymethamphetamine.

So for people that like dopaminergic states,

it's a particularly compelling state

to be in, so much so that they could overindulge in MDMA,

and then there's the issues of purity,

and I could do a five hour podcast on this right now.

So I think the important point is approach with caution.

Kids, absolutely not.

And I think it's an exciting landscape, very exciting,

and whereas a discussion like the one

we just had would have gotten me fired a few years ago.

I mean, Stanford has big programs now,

a lot of philanthropy, federal grants,

and many laboratories focused on the study of psychedelics.

So I would say stay tuned.

But keep in mind that increasing neuromodulator levels very

acutely, whether or not it's with a prescription drug

or whether or not it's with psychedelics,

is really what lies at the heart of the recovery,

the potential recovery, I should say,

or the negative effects that happen

to occur in anyone that embarks on the psychedelic journey.

Do people who meditate and need less sleep than people who

don't?

Oh, that's interesting.

Well, we know that from a study by Wendy Suzuki, who I believe,

if NYU made the right choice, and I

think they did is, now the Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU.

She ran a memory lab for a long time.

She has data showing that even 10, I

think it's 13, but as little as 10 minutes of meditation,

so it'll be sitting still, breathing,

focusing on your breathing, directing one's attention

to third eye center, et cetera.

We don't have a third eye.

The pineal is thought to be the third eye.

But I don't know why people say it's

a light sensitive tissue deep in the brain

but maybe that's why they call it the third eye.

But, in any case, that type of practice

has been shown to increase memory focus, aka learning,

but there's some interesting footnotes

in those papers, which point to the fact

that when people meditate too close to bedtime, oftentimes,

they have trouble sleeping because, basically, meditation

is a focusing exercise.

It's a perceptual exercise.

I don't think of meditation is anything mystical.

It's a self-directed shift in your perception to,

what, to your interoception, to your internal state,

as opposed to anything beyond the confines of your skin.

There's nothing mystical about that.

And then, in that state, your brain

starts to generate patterns of activity that

are distinct from when you're sharing

your attention between what's going on internally

and what's happening out in the world, right?

I think we need to demystify what people

have cloaked as mystical.

And when I say cloaked, I don't think

that the people that have meditated for thousands

of years thought that there was anything mystical about it

but, sometimes, what we experience

there can feel mystical.

So if you have trouble sleeping, I

recommend doing some sort of non-sleep deep rest practice,

like NSDR, aka yoga nidra.

Although, those are different.

NSDR generally lacks the intention piece.

And the ones that I've put into the world,

we've stripped away the intentions,

and we've stripped away any kind of language that would make you

think that there was some sort of,

let's just say, like cultural aspect to it,

which, again, is admittedly a bit unfair to the origin

practice of yoga nidra.

But the problem, again, is that in yoga nidra,

you're going to be doing intentions and hearing

language that for some people, not all,

might divorce you from the wish to do it.

In any case, non-sleep deep rest done at any time of day,

but especially if you fall asleep

in the middle of the night, is going

to be useful for helping you fall back asleep.

Whereas meditation, again, is going

to enhance your level of focus.

So I don't think it's a good practice

if you have trouble sleeping.

Now, to finally answer your question, if you meditate,

can you afford to sleep less?

My friend, Matt Walker, would say no.

However, many of us can't sleep as much as we want to,

and many of us are not like Matt, where we can wake up

without an alarm clock.

I'll just keep sleeping and sleeping,

unless I went to bed at like 8:00.

This is actually interesting.

There's an asymmetry to your sleep needs.

If you go to bed, remember that old adage,

every hour before midnight is worth two after?

Well, it turns out that for people

that are meant to be early risers, going to bed at 8:00,

you'll wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 feeling great.

You go to bed at 11:00, you feel groggy,

and there are good reasons to explain that.

But Matt would say that need your sleep, period.

I'm more of the camp, based on my read of the data,

And, yes, we are allowed to disagree and still be friends.

It's allowed.

In fact, Matt's going to do a series on sleep

with our podcast, even though he has

a terrific podcast of his own, where we will maybe

debate a little bit of this, that there are ways that you

can at least replace the feeling of wakefulness

that you would have lost if you don't sleep enough.

And for me, really, that's why NSDR

became such an attractive tool to do for 10 or 30 minutes each

morning if I didn't sleep enough the night before.

I first learned about yoga nidra,

actually at addiction recovery center, trauma recovery center

in Florida in 2017.

I have a friend, a super talented trauma therapist,

who also treats addiction, that I've sent many, many people to,

and he has this kind of seemingly like wizard ability

to get people who have been addicts to not be addicts.

And one of the tools he uses is yoga nidra every morning

for 30 minutes, and eventually an hour,

which seems like a lot, but then he

also has these people wake up very early, maybe an hour

before they would normally wake up, and go

into that liminal state between sleep and wakefulness.

Now, my experience is that 10 to 20 minutes of NSDR, yoga nidra,

is sufficient to offset some sleep loss

and allow at least me to function,

and many people report the same.

We have a study going with the Sleep Laboratory at Stanford

to explore this in more depth.

And what I can tell you, because I'm

involved in some of this work, is

that there are several military units, because they have

no opportunity to get sleep because they're working,

that have to rely on tools like this

in order to be able to function at their highest level.

And I'm sure they will tell you, as I will,

that they'd prefer to get 8 to 10 hours of sleep.

But, guess what, they can't, and so I

think that's the important takeaway is that we don't get

to pick how much we sleep, unless you're

going to be completely neurotic about your sleep hygiene, which

makes you kind of a less interesting person in life,

is what I'm told.

Going to bed at 8:00 is great like some or most of the time

but you got to stay up every once in a while.

I mean, after they released "Chimp Empire" on Netflix,

I discovered that NSDR is a very valuable tool.

And by the way, "Chimp Empire" and "Succession"

have a lot of parallels.

And if you watch one, I interleave "Chimp Empire",

"Succession", "Chimp Empire", "Succession".

And you start to realize, like, whoa, like were pretty similar.

And then you look at the world differently, I promise.

Your podcast has positively changed

the lives of so many people, including me,

how has it changed your life?

OK.

I wasn't expecting that one.

Thank you, Samantha.

Well, first of all, I mean, as this little 11-year-old

told me.

I mean, this is essentially what I've done my whole life.

I'm a fairly private person.

Believe it or not, I'm pretty introverted.

I spend a lot of time alone, and I think that's required for me.

I basically have four modes.

Four modes.

One, I'm either readying myself through sleep and NSDR

to do one of the other three modes,

maybe there's a fifth mode, or I'm in one of these other three

modes, which is I'm either foraging for information,

organizing that information, or dispersing that information,

or getting ready to do it all over again.

And then, there's this relaxation vacation thing

that they keep telling me about.

But then I went to Italy, and then like Rick

and I like just hung out there, and it didn't feel like work.

I also discovered some really great podcasts.

I don't know, I think one of the coolest

podcasts out there if you like rock and roll, which I love,

is A History of 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey's podcast on rock

and roll.

I like the nerdy podcasts.

It's like a graduate or an education in rock and roll.

It's so cool.

And you'll learn a lot about music and history

and the mobs involved and all that stuff.

And from what I was told, like Al Capone used to sit there,

right?

His exit was there, you know, so it was weird.

Right?

And then he died of syphilis, and like

so I don't know how I feel about all that,

but they told me that.

So I think the podcast has been wonderful as an opportunity

to share things that I love.

If I had my way, it would be more like this,

although more of a dialogue, frankly.

It's changed my understanding of what the world is like.

I certainly get critique, and that's good.

But, again, I was raised by iconoclasts,

and particularly my postdoc advisor, Ben Barrus,

who unfortunately, as I mentioned,

is dead because I worked for him.

But he really encouraged all of us in his lab.

And often, we were very close friends.

I spent the last year of his life recording

interview with him.

There's actually a documentary coming out about Ben,

and then I'm going to release the audio interviews with Ben,

which he approved, by the way.

And you'll get to realize that the history of what you see

is often not what the dead person really did or said.

It's going to be fun, so I can't wait

till they release this documentary,

and then Ben gets to have his voice infused in it.

And it'll be a cool documentary.

But, as some of you know, that what appears to be and what was

and the historical narrative is not necessarily

what really happened, but that's just life.

So I suppose the short answer is that I feel very honored

with the opportunity.

Very, very honored.

And it's a challenge at times.

I suppose the major challenges are

when things are taken out of context, like little clips,

and things of that sort.

Being misunderstood doesn't feel good.

But look, at the end of the day, I

feel like the luckiest person in the world

because I get to spend my time learning.

So it's either I'm foraging, I'm organizing

or I'm dispersing information that I also want

and that I find incredibly useful.

Or if not that, then certainly informative and, at times,

enchanting as well.

So I try and focus on the positive,

and I have a number of practices that help me do that.

And I am somebody who engages on social media.

I'm not a post and ghost kind of person.

I want to understand.

I think that cuttlefish are super interesting,

but human beings are super interesting too.

And I have a strong drive for mastery,

but also I do have a strong sense of justice,

and that can be problematic at times.

I define justice as feeling like there's something

for us to do about something.

Like seeing something that upsets us

or that excites us is great, but then

if you have a strong sense of justice,

you feel like there's something you need to do about it,

and not everybody feels that.

And then, of course, a desire to understand.

And I think, for reasons very personal to me,

that relate mostly to just having

a kind of incredible array of experiences in life,

many of which were like shocking, disturbing, exciting,

enchanting that I want to understand.

And so it's changed things, but it's like, I don't know,

I got one truck, one watch.

Which is not to say that I don't care about having things.

There are a few things I really love,

but mostly, like I'm just thinking about the podcast

we got to record on Monday which is

about willpower and tenacity.

And if I don't stop myself, I'll give it right now.

So what do you feel is the next big thing

to come to the forefront in the health space?

Thanks for this question.

One is non-protein amino acids.

I love these debates online because I know

that there's something there.

It's so cool because I grew up in seeing these debates,

and you know there's something interesting there

because people are debating about it.

But the debate isn't what's interesting.

It's almost always the thing that people

aren't talking about that's sure to surface at some point.

And right now, there's.

This obsession with like seed oils it's like seed oil.

Seed oils.

And I can't demonize seed oils.

All the data say that if you separate out

their caloric load, there's nothing inherently bad

about seed oils, and et cetera.

I don't know.

It's still an emerging literature.

But there was a scientist at Stanford, Ed Rubenstein, who

passed away at a ripe old age, a brilliant scientist, who

talked about, and I had a lot of discussions

with when I was a postdoc, about non-protein amino acids.

It turns out his son is a neuroscientist at UCSF.

His other son is a physician at UCSF.

So it's another one of these low performing families.

And all wonderful people.

And you know, Ed had data that unlike a lot of animals,

like birds, there are certain amino acids, which

are non-protein amino acids, that

exist in fairly high density in seeds and nuts,

which is not to say that seeds and nuts are bad.

I had almonds this evening, so please.

But non-protein amino acids are similar enough

to mammalian protein amino acids that if they are consumed

in abundance, and perhaps especially

in liquid form, that they may, again, may,

because this is about the future.

This isn't about what we know.

This is about where I think there's

interest and growing interest.

They may be able to incorporate into certain proteins

of our tissues of our body that potentially Ed

thought could lead to misfolding of those proteins

and may explain certain forms of neurodegeneration

and other neurocognitive challenges.

So I think non-protein amino acids are going

to be an important discussion.

Now, there are lots of non protein amino acids

that don't come from foods, but I

think the discussion around non protein amino acids from foods

is going to be very interesting.

So that's one area.

The other area, and perhaps you picked up on this a little bit

tonight, is that I like the nuts and boltsy stuff around stress,

neuroplasticity.

But the high level stuff, I think the relationship

between structured thought, abstract thought,

I'm not interested in the free will discussion.

I just feel like that's a career ender.

I'm friends with Robert Sapolsky,

and he's got a great book coming out

about this called "Determined", so he obviously

doesn't believe in free will.

But he's far smarter than I ever could be.

And it just feels like, I don't know that there's

an endpoint with that one.

But if anyone could find, it would be Robert.

He's oh so smart.

But I think that the higher level stuff, creativity,

abstract reasoning and thought, defining and better

understanding the different states

that we can go into in waking.

And I confess, without a hint of sheepishness about it,

that I also think the notion of spirituality

and the belief in things that are

beyond our current and conscious understanding

is super interesting.

I think that as a species we've been challenged and conflicted

from go, at least that's what the historical scripture tells

us, and that it's sort of inherent to our experience

that life is challenging and perplexing and also wonderful.

And so I think a better understanding

of how to navigate all that, I mean, this stuff in our skulls,

except for the eyes, which, by the way,

are your two pieces of brain that are not

in your skull, the retinas.

I have to point that out.

You know, it's tricky, and we're trying to use that very tissue

to understand it.

And so I'm intrigued by the possibility

that there are certain aspects of self that maybe are not

intended to be explored because they are not really

of us, right?

Brains interacting with one another

is an interesting area, certainly

for scientific exploration, but I'm

fascinated by and excited about the possibility

that, at some point, our species will both understand

and the mechanics of our emotions,

mechanics of our thought process, creativity, and so on,

but that we will also allow room for the stuff

that we can't explain with science and to allow room

for that in our life experience because I also

believe that can be powerful.

And while understanding things in great detail

and putting mechanism and utility around that

and applying that is wonderful, it's

the stuff of my life, which is obvious,

I also think that there's great value in not

trying to control and understand everything

and enjoying the mystery of things that

are clearly greater than us.

[APPLAUSE]

How do you balance having fun with having

such a rich knowledge and passion in neuroscience

and optimization?

Fun.

People ask me, like what do you do for fun?

I think people think I do all the protocols.

It's like, sure, I get my sunlight, I drink my water.

I do.

I do them.

But fun, I like learning.

I like learning.

I do enjoy physical movement.

I like learning.

For me, OK, so like for me, it's the little things.

I don't know, maybe I'm weird.

Certainly, I've been told that.

The other day, there was a frog in my swimming pool,

and he was just like sitting there like.

And I just like spent some time looking at him back and forth,

and then I had all sorts of ideas about what's he doing?

And what's he thinking?

And then I was thinking how Oliver Sacks used

to spend time imagining experiencing life as a bat

through only echolocation.

He talked about this.

And I thought, and why would he do that?

Right?

And that's kind of cute.

He's like delightful old man, right?

He had a 600 pounds free weight squat, won the state California

squatting championship but also liked pretending he was a bat.

He's a weird dude.

Did methamphetamines, raced motorcycles,

hung out with movie stars, but then also was like a recluse

and liked rocks.

OK, that's a weird scientist.

Been around a lot of those.

But in discussions with people that knew him,

I mean, that exercise of like seeing something he thought

was cool like a bat allowed him to also use theory of mind

to kind of think, what would it be

like to have locked in syndrome and only

be able to blink your eyes to communicate?

And gave him an incredible compassion and sensitivity

for other people that then he transmuted

into the form of these wonderful books.

So for me, fun is really about doing the things

that I do systematically each day,

but then when something excites me.

I know that feeling.

I know it physically in my body.

And to just follow that trail like a weirdo, right?

Like a weirdo, just like Barrus was weird

and Barbara Chapman was weird.

And like, I think everybody's a little weird

if you allow yourself to just see the things that you

think are really cool.

And there are a bunch of things that I

think are really cool that enchant me

that a bunch of other people love too.

And I know that because I see we're all watching that video

or something like that.

But I think for me, fun is in the practice

of trying to stay open to like the little things.

The little things that kids say are always

delightful because they're not filtering

through all the bullshit that we filter our life

experience through.

But also just, yeah, I like reading and learning,

exercising.

I mean, I like to think I'm not a very wooden person.

But, at the same time, I mean, I didn't see the "Barbie" movie.

No disrespect to Barbie.

I go to movies.

I do that kind of thing.

I don't know what else is there to do?

At some point, you know, what else is there to do?

Anyway, I mean, I delight in certain things,

as you now know far too much about.

But fun is a relative term.

That was a hard question.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING & APPLAUDING]

Thank you.

Thanks for the pass.

Thanks for that.

Do you believe time changes due to daylight savings

time is worth a potential loss of productivity?

Daylight saving time is anti-health.

OK, this is where I'll get like, it's just dumb.

It's just dumb.

It's just so dumb.

It makes no sense.

I mean, the director of the Chronobiology Unit

at the National Institutes of Mental Health, my good friend,

long time friend and brilliant scientist, Samer Hattar,

will tell you, it's a stupid idea.

It's anti-biology.

And increased car crashes, increase heart attacks,

increased depression.

Kids don't like to wake up early anyway.

Parents don't like to wake up early,

especially with kids that don't like wake up early.

It makes no sense.

And then there are all these arguments

about is really about trying to truncate the late,

you want more light in the evening so there's less crime.

Like, that's totally unsubstantiated.

Like, completely unsubstantiated.

So the daylight savings thing is just stupid.

Basically, try and get as much light in your eyes,

ideally from sunlight early in the day.

And, by the way, if you're worried about cataract,

that's a serious concern.

After all, I have an appointment in ophthalmology.

Cataract, macular degeneration.

But guess what, the chair of ophthalmology from Stanford

when he came on the podcast verified this.

When the sun is low in the sky, you're

not really at risk of that.

So when the sun is overhead and you're

like beaming in your eyes, like trying to get,

yeah, it's a problem, but we're talking

about viewing low solar angle sunlight in the morning

and in the evening.

And if there's clouds, do it anyway.

In fact, do it longer.

And if you can't do that, look at some artificial light

inside.

Daylight savings, it's just stupid.

You know, what happens here is as the night goes on,

the amount of GABA in my brain starts to diminish,

and I just kind of go to short form.

We've thought about podcasting in the middle of the night.

That's why when I went on Lex's podcast recently, the more

recent one, he did it at 8:00 o'clock at night, and he cried.

He made me cry.

He didn't cry.

He made me cry.

I was so tired, and I can't think,

and then he asked me about my dog,

and I'm talking about the dog.

So his goal was to get me to cry.

We have this friendship, you know.

No, he's delightful.

What should I as a 19-year-old college student

be doing to maximize the years of neuroplasticity I have left?

I get this question, I'm like, oh, man.

It's such a great question.

Rhys, I'm assuming, yeah.

I don't know who you are, Rhys, or what you're doing,

but you're 19.

So the cool thing is, your brain is hypoplastic.

Life is a psychedelic experience without psychedelics.

Gosh, people always say, like, if you

could go back to your 19-year-old self,

what would you do?

And that's a tricky one.

There are movies about that, right?

You know, I would definitely worry less.

Yeah.

I would worry less.

I would have more fun.

I would certainly, listen, I started

latching on to practices and the understanding of science

as a way, for me it was kind of like my world

felt very unstable.

And for me, it brought stability.

But you want to avoid rigidity.

So do you want to be the one 19-year-old who's like, oh,

got to get to sleep.

You know, I got to go back to bed at 8:30 at night.

Enjoy life.

But I would say, when you're 19, learn how you learn.

Learn how to focus.

Learn how to rest.

Basically, you can stress and focus

as much as you want as long as you can still fall asleep

at night and sleep well and fall back asleep if you wake up.

We hear stress is bad, stress is good, stress is bad,

stress is good.

Stress is bad unless you're getting

enough sleep, in which case, stress is

called learning in life.

Now, obviously, don't do anything dangerous.

Avoid psychological and physical danger.

But I think as a 19-year-old, I mean my direct advice would

have some cardiovascular activity you like,

have some resistance training activity you like, develop

some sort of self awareness practice like journaling.

It could be meditation.

Surround yourself with people that you like.

Avoid people you don't like.

I mean, it sounds so straightforward but then

we can all look into our personal histories

and be like, wow, I spent all this time trying

to resolve this thing that, clearly, you didn't like them.

It's simple.

You didn't like them.

They weren't into cuttlefish or ferrets.

You didn't like them.

Wasn't your kind of person, right?

And that's not a box you can check on the dating apps,

they tell me, right?

The ferret thing, I think it'd be very, very, very

small subset of people.

I think the know thyself thing is huge.

Learn to tap into that early feeling of like this

feels right.

This doesn't feel right.

Learn to be a bit of a rudder for yourself.

And journal.

I still have stacks of things that I

wrote across the years, most of it is terrible,

but you will find if you go back that you kind of knew

better all along even if you didn't do better all along.

That voice in your head, don't do that.

Do that.

This person's like everyone else is

crazy about this person but not me.

I don't want to sound sentimental,

but you have to find your heart, right, or at least not lose it.

You have to make sure that you're

in touch with that piece of yourself that wasn't

judging and just felt good.

And as long as it's not something

that's self-destructive, I think that's the most important

thing.

And then, yeah, have tools and practices in place,

because they work, and when you're 19,

and your neural neuroplasticity is through the roof,

you can do a lot less and get a lot more.

But don't worry about hitting 25 and it all being over.

Certainly, that's not the case.

But you can cram in a lot early on.

I still regret not learning an instrument.

The data on people that learn an instrument even later in life,

but certainly at 19, is that it greatly increases your ability

to learn all sorts of things.

So learn an instrument.

How can we transform the American education system

to be more effective?

Oh, so in ten seconds.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

So when I'm in charge.

Nah, I'm just kidding.

A little while back, I did an interview

with a major media outlet, and they were very gracious.

And then they said, like, what's next?

And I was like, I'm going to run for office.

I was just like, look, it's not out of the question.

But frankly, I think that I'm so poorly suited for that,

it's obvious.

I'm so poorly suited for that.

So it wasn't a joke, but I think as I spent some time afterwards

like, I should really go talk to people

who do that for a living.

But I am very interested in potentially informing policy.

If I were to ever be asked, I'd certainly respond.

And my stance on this is much in the same vein as the podcast,

because keep in mind, the podcast, yes,

like suggested I start one, but it was really during those days

of the deep 2020 and 2021 pandemic where, by the way,

I wasn't allowed to talk about vaccines so I didn't.

And also, I don't have any expertise in it,

so I was not well suited to do it.

But I also decided it's a topic that enough people are

talking about.

So my response in life, and in general,

when people say, what about something is I like,

well, I've got a lot of opinions about that,

but this isn't the venue.

OK.

But during the pandemic, I realized

there was a lot of circadian disruption, anxiety, stress,

a bunch of things happening with visual systems

and biological systems that I felt

there were tools that people could, perhaps, benefit from.

So I started putting that information into the world,

and I was really surprised, really

surprised that people that I knew

from the neuroscience community, for instance

at NIMH or in government positions,

weren't talking about this stuff, so I just kept doing it.

And I think that it made clear to me

that the education system is not one thing.

It's tough, especially when talking about kids like what

to do is a tricky thing.

But that the education system, in my mind,

should at least involve some sort of discussion

early on about this thing called the brain,

this thing called the body, how they

work, how you can do certain things to modulate your stress

level, your sleep not just the importance of sleep

and nutrition and avoiding social isolation and all

these important things, but giving people some levers

and knobs to maneuver within themselves and zero cost tools

as a way to do that that transcend

socioeconomic boundaries, ideally transcend language

as well, because we're not just talking about the United

States.

And of course, within the United States,

there are many different cultures

speaking different languages.

And maybe AI will soon allow us to put out

the podcast into a bunch of different languages.

I think it will.

So I think the education system should start, in my opinion,

with teaching kids how to understand themselves,

what to do in difficult scenarios that's really

anchored in the real pillars of biology and psychology,

and take some of the mystery out of trying

to navigate the tough business of growing up.

I mean, if you think it's tough being an adult, which

it can be, certainly.

It's really tough growing up, as we all know.

And I think that more tools, more tools,

more protocols more tools, more tools, more protocols,

more tools.

But that's obviously a biased opinion.

And no one's ever asked me like, hey, what should we

be teaching kids?

But if they ask, as you can tell, like,

I'm not going to shut up.

So I think that was our last question.

Thank you all for coming tonight.

forgive me for going long.

I do want to say thank you, sincere

thank you for making your way out here, especially

on a weekday night.

Thanks for your hospitality.

My incredible team, I want to thank them.

And certainly, last but not least,

thank you for your interest in science.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]