If you get into the sauna the way I just described,

not the two hours a day, but 30 minutes,

twice a week or three times per week,

you reduce the likelihood of dying

of a cardiovascular event by 27%.

If you do it four or more times per week,

you reduce the probability of dying by 50%.

Is there any scientific evidence

that being naked is beneficial in the sauna?

Well, in certain contexts, it leads to childbirth.

Okay, well, I'll have to read up on that.

I think Dorothy Parker said the cure for boredom is curiosity.

There is no cure for curiosity.

The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman,

his third time on this podcast.

He's a brilliant neuroscientist at Stanford University

and the host of one of the best,

the best, if you ask me,

Health and Science Podcast in the world

called Huberman Lab Podcast.

Check him out on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Most importantly, Andrew is a great human being

and has quickly become a great friend.

This is Alex Friedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman.

We meet again, my friend.

We should talk on each other's podcast once a year.

I think we should make a deal.

I was just talking to the guys.

This is a show called Louie, I don't know if you know it.

And yeah, with Louie CK.

And there's this thing called Bang Bang,

which people are probably watching know exactly

what I'm talking about.

It's this worst possible thing you can do

in terms of meals, which is you go to a restaurant,

do a full meal, and then you go to another restaurant

and do a full meal.

And you pat me, you, exactly.

So they go, Mexican Italian, sushi pizza, barbecue,

I hopped that, that one is disgusting.

This kind of thing reminds me of the joy of food.

Last time we were hanging out,

we went to see Joe Dew comedy,

and then we went to eat Russian food.

And it was a particularly fun experience

to go to a Russian restaurant.

I was the only person there that didn't speak Russian.

And eat Russian food with you.

And because I felt walking in, they trusted you.

They didn't trust me.

Yeah, the funny thing about the people there,

they were talking to you in Russian.

And then they refused to sort of switch to English,

even though they understood you speak no Russian.

This is Russian house in Austin, by the way.

Anyway, by way of question, what's the worst

or the best depending on your perspective, cheat meal?

Let's call it a picking out meal,

but it could be a cheat meal that you've ever had

or you want to have that's like on the bucket list

or something that's in the past,

like where you did something like a bang bang,

which is like, you're talking about multiple thousands

of calories that you just feel horrible about yourself,

but you still keep eating because it's delicious,

but also great company, something about the atmosphere

is just right, screw the diet, screw all the things

you know, like you should be doing,

but just throw it all out the window.

I've done that, several times.

Yeah, I don't do this anymore,

but the entire time I was a postdoc,

so five years and the entire time

I was a pre tenured professor, so five years.

So I basically followed the Tim Ferriss slow carb diet,

which is people can look it up, but it works really well.

It was basically some good animal proteins,

fish and meat and things like that.

Like slow carb.

Because slow carb is like low glycemic stuff,

is mostly lentils and beans and things and vegetables.

No dairy, no, anyway.

But then one day.

No pasta in there?

Sorry to interrupt.

No pasta.

So it wasn't low carb, but it was low glycemic carb.

And I did that and it worked terrifically well

just for energy levels,

because I want to be able to train and work.

And then one day a week, you're supposed to go full cheat day.

And so I would do what used to be 12 hours,

but then it became 24,

start to redefine what the day is.

And that was when Costello was pretty young

and we would do it together.

So I would get pizzas and croissants and donuts

and I would just do the full thing.

And by the end of the day,

you don't want to look at an item of food.

You're just repulsed by food.

The only modification I made was the next day

I would fast completely,

just to avoid the gastric distress of eating anything.

And so I would do them on Sundays

and then Mondays I'd fast all day.

And then by Tuesday, I felt pretty good again.

But Sunday and Monday,

or you just feel like you're sliding down the slope

of just blood sugar disaster.

A terrible idea or a good idea.

You know, at the time, I enjoyed it.

I love donuts, croissants, all that kind of stuff.

What's interesting is after stopping that whole protocol,

now I just try and eat well each day.

Protocol?

It's really a protocol.

Now I basically, I do a pseudo intermittent fasting.

I'm not really strict,

but I'll start eating around 11,

eat my first meal around 11.

I usually train in the morning,

eat my last bite of food somewhere around eight or nine.

And I'm not super strict.

I might have some berries or something late at night.

Three meals, two meals?

Two, two meals.

And then maybe a little bit of snacking on some nuts

or something in the middle.

Ever fast?

24 hours?

Never done long fast,

except when I was doing the cheat days.

And then, and actually there are a couple of different ways

to do cheat days that were fun.

Like if you were in a new city,

you could try all the restaurants that you wanted.

Yeah, and I think Tim and our mutual friend,

John Rominello did a,

I think it was like a cheat day marathon where they did,

you know, a marathon's 26.3 miles.

They went to 26.3 different locations in New York.

They put it on a map.

And I never took it to that extreme, but...

Wait, wait, wait.

Over how many days?

One day, that was their cheat day.

What?

Just because they were, you know...

Just a little bit of something at each place?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, there are things that guys do in their 30s

that you just shouldn't do in your 40s.

I can say that because I'm in my 40s.

And now I just try and eat well most days.

And what's interesting is about 12 to 14 months ago,

I completely lost all appetite for sweets.

I don't know what happened.

I still love savory food.

So meat and butter and cheese.

And I love vegetables too.

I love fruit also, but lost all appetite.

So if you put a donut in front of me or ice cream

or something like that, I just...

It's almost aversive to me.

And I don't know what happened.

I don't know what changed.

It's probably a scientific explanation.

Sure.

It says to do maybe...

Neuron moss.

Dementia.

Yeah.

The sugar, the desire for that rush maybe is gone

from your soul.

What was the most delicious things?

Croissant, donuts, what is there a thing that...

There's a place in Portland.

I don't know if it's still open called Little Teas Bakery.

And they have croissants that easily rival

the croissants in Paris.

People make a lot of the pastry in Paris,

but it's really the bread in Paris.

That's amazing.

We lived there when I was a kid.

And we did a sabbatical there.

And there they do the baguette morning bake

and afternoon bake.

And there's nothing like the bread in Paris or the people.

And but if you're in the Pacific Northwest,

you can find amazing croissants there.

What do you do with the croissant?

What do you do with the bread?

Butter or is it just...

I actually used to...

I don't eat them anymore.

I don't have much of an appetite for them

even though they're not a sweet food.

But I'm always putting butter on the croissant.

Butter on the butter croissant.

No jam.

I would never adulterate my croissant.

I have to actually be honest about this

because people talk about steak

and they talk about bread with the butter.

I feel like butter is cheating.

I feel like you're disrespecting the fundamental food

by adding butter.

Because butter, it's like an elite version of ketchup.

You're...

Well, there we diverge because for me,

bread is just a vehicle for butter.

A cracker is just a vehicle for cheese.

Oh, so that's just...

The cracker and the bread is just texture.

It's just that people look at you funny

if you just eat the butter straight,

which occasionally I do.

I got it.

So I put a little piece of bread underneath it,

not because I'm low carb, strictly low carb,

but just because otherwise you get some funny looks.

That's like pasta is a vehicle for pasta sauce.

It's interesting, but like Indian non bread,

you have the bread.

I've had a lot of soul searching

on which part of Indian brings me so much joy.

Is it the bread or is it all the sauces

that come with the bread?

Well, there we diverge again

because for whatever reason,

and no disrespect to anyone, but Indian food

doesn't appeal to me.

Well, you're a lucky man

because the number of calories in that food,

it sneaks like non bread.

I don't know how non bread is made,

but I think it's just soaked in oil

and it just very intensely.

Like the density of calories is very, very high.

For me, barbecue, I would say is probably the...

That's good.

Anytime I'm in Austin, I start thinking about barbecue.

I do love, you know, I do love meat.

My dad's Argentine, I mean, I love steak, I love meat.

I mean, Argentina chorizo sausage

is an appetizer before you have steak.

It's meat on top of meat.

And it's not just the men, right?

You see women, sometimes very petite women

eating steaks that are bigger than their skull size.

Slowly, they eat very slowly there

and they all eat dessert too, which is interesting.

And they generally do the sort of one meal per day.

They do that kind of reflexively.

That's how I think about it

because I often eat one meal a day,

especially when I'm traveling.

It feels like a cheap meal

because it allows, it gives you a bit of more freedom

to just lose yourself in the quantity of the food.

I did the three day fast

and I ate chicken breast,

like literally chicken breast with nothing else,

just grilled, and it was the most delicious

piece of meat I've ever eaten.

And that gives you, the problem is when you fast

the three days, you really can't pig out.

You really shouldn't.

Well, your stomach will shrink inside already.

Your gut microbiome is almost completely depleted

by fasting.

A lot of people think, oh, cleanses and fasts

are great for the microbiome.

They quash your microbiome.

However, when you start eating again,

the microbiome comes back better

than it was before you're fast.

For people who don't know,

Sergey and Todd are on the call.

They're kind of pulling stuff up.

They just pulled up felps with,

I forget how many calories, just eating 10,000.

You know what's interesting?

There's some cool physiology around this.

The reason he needed to eat so much

is not that he was burning that many calories

in pure movement.

It's that when you do exercise in water,

even if it's warm water,

the heat transfer in water is greater.

So you burn far more calories.

And again here, I'm admittedly lifting that from knowledge

that was passed on to me by Tim Ferriss that I didn't.

So, but I checked it out and it's absolutely true.

So if you exercise in water,

even if it's not really cold water,

your caloric needs go way up,

which is why you get out of the pool

and you're often really hungry.

And for fans of the Human Lab podcast,

and if you're not a fan, what do you do in your life?

You would probably chuckle at the fact

that Andrew just cited his sources,

even on that statement.

Because you're so good at,

I don't know how your memory works,

but the only person whose memory is better

than Joe Rogan is yours.

But my colleagues joke,

PubMed sort of scrolls through my mind.

Also in science, as you know,

attribution is so baked into what we do.

And I think that it's interesting,

because now spending a lot of time on social media,

attribution is not as common.

And, but in academia,

you learn really early on

that if you give a talk about your data

and you cite all these amazing sources,

all it does is make you look better, right?

Whereas in social media and elsewhere,

in the business sector,

it's almost like citing other people,

people feel as if it's going to take away

some of the credit.

All it does is place you in the company

of people that do really nice work.

So I have tremendous,

and I have genuine and tremendous respect for Tim.

He's been about 10 years ahead on a huge number

of health related things and other things,

an extremely kind person,

very thoughtful person.

So it's also just a pleasure

to shine light on other people.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I actually, to push back,

I know there's a culture of,

if you write a paper standing on the shoulders of giants,

it's a powerful thing.

But there's also a culture of not giving credit

to the strongest idea in your paper

and instead say it's kind of,

or imply that it's original.

There is a culture of kind of not celebrating others.

I think people get most competitive

in all walks of life,

but especially in science,

when they're as the closer they get

in the exact kind of thing they work on.

And so there's this dance,

you know, there's a few researchers

in each of the individual little things

that you work on.

If you're studying a particular kind of ant,

you know that other asshole

that also is studying that particular ant.

And then you're not going to often give credit

for the brilliant ideas

that that other researcher is doing.

And I think one of the things you've discovered

and just as part of your nature,

and which is why it's really great

that you have an audience

and you inspire others to do the same

is you celebrate that other ant study here.

It's great and everybody wins.

It raises all boats.

But that initial instinct to be like,

what is it in Borat?

Like my neighbor, my neighbor gets a toaster.

I get a bigger toaster.

That mindset to, you know,

it's not that I'm not competitive

in certain domains,

but yeah, I get great pleasure

from sharing things that I find.

And I think that, you know,

at the end of the day,

as strong as your community,

and you can build a wonderful community

just by pointing out things that you love.

Like these are all just loves.

I see a paper and I love it.

Only rarely do I think,

oh, I wish we had done that.

I usually think fantastic.

Now I can just focus on something else

because they checked off that box.

And by the way, you mentioned PubMed and Barbecue.

I should mention that I got a chance

to hang out with Rick Rubin.

Thanks to you.

He's a friend of yours and you made the connection.

That was a huge gift to my spirit, I guess.

He's a truly, truly special human being.

And there's a lot I could say

about why he's a special human being.

I'd love to learn how you met him,

but I should also just mention on the PubMed thing,

it was so interesting talking to him about music.

And both on the podcast and privately,

and just listening to music together,

because when you mention a song,

he does this thing where he like closes his eyes

and he finds that song in the album

that we're talking about.

And he steps through the album.

You could see the brain stepping through individual songs

to find that song in the album.

And there's that kind of lookup process.

And then he puts himself mentally in that space of like,

okay, this is whatever the album is,

and not just the ones he produced,

but all of it, he's an encyclopedia of music.

And it's so interesting.

It also, the thing I really love about him,

something like a calmness that radiates from him,

that it's okay to close your eyes and place yourself

in the place where that album was recorded,

in the feeling of that album, and like that silence,

let's go there, let's go there together.

It's like Alice in Wonderland, and we'll go there together.

You do a good Rick Rubin, minus the beard.

Minus the beard.

His beard is epic, right?

You can't fake a beard like that, you know.

How'd you guys meet?

Yeah, well, Rick, I'm very blessed to consider a close friend.

And Rick and I got introduced through a common friend

during the pandemic, and we started doing some FaceTime together

and just talking about things related to science and health.

And I'm not a musician.

I have no musical ability or talent.

I have a good ability to memorize lyrics,

and I love lyrics, and I love poetry.

So I asked him a lot of questions about musicians

that I happened to love, that he's worked with and knows.

And so he would give me stories about musicians,

and I would talk to him about health.

And then eventually, we formed a friendship where we would talk

about any number of different topics in life.

And then we started spending time together in person

when he was in town or nearby.

And as you now know, Rick, in addition to all his incredible

accomplishments, has an incredible understanding of how to get

the brain and body into state, right?

And as you pointed out, he's willing to do the things that allow

him to help these incredible artists get into the best state

to do their craft.

And so if he needs to sit there and be quiet with his eyes closed

for a minute or two or more, he'll do that.

He has routines to allow himself to get into state.

And it's really inspired me to think about states of mind

as something that we'd all love to just flip the switch

and say, we're focused or we're creative.

But to actually ratchet through the challenging steps

in order to do that and to figure out what one needs to do

on a regular basis to get into a proper state.

It's not just going to come from a cup of coffee,

a lamp of a particular wavelength or something.

It's going to be those things, but it's also going to be

really teaching oneself how to get into proper state.

Yeah, you did an episode on hypnosis.

Do you think it's a kind of self hypnosis?

Yes, I do.

Because hypnosis is a you limit the context, you're very alert

and you're very calm.

And he has a number of these different practices.

And so we would talk about those.

And then we also have enjoyed a lot of discussions

about deep neuroscience.

In fact, I introduced Rick to a friend of mine

who's a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist,

and they've become friendly.

You know, Rick is one of these people

that he sort of defies definition, incredibly kind,

incredibly private person too.

So, you know, I'm being respectful of that.

But and then, of course, he's a fan of your podcast.

And so when I learned that, I just made natural sense

to introduce you.

And I know he really enjoyed meeting you.

And we talk about you a lot.

And of course, in a positive light, I think his dedication

to getting into these states of mind

and his willingness to do that has completely

transformed my routines around life.

Like, for instance, before doing a very long podcast

recording, the solo ones, which often take me several hours

or more, six hours to record, sometimes more, sometimes less.

I realized that there's a certain brain state

associated with that.

So I have to really limit the kind of interactions

I have for the two hours before.

I actually walk and talk out loud through my neighborhood.

People think I'm crazy, but I live in a neighborhood

where there are a lot of crazy creatives anyway.

You're saying you're not crazy?

Well, at least not institutionally defined as crazy yet.

But, you know, getting into state of mind

is something that we'd all just imagine we flip the switch.

But Rick really convinced me, you have to do the work

to do the work.

Can you maybe linger on that, elucidate a little bit more

of your process of how you get in that space?

That's really interesting.

Because I have to admit, I do everything last minute

before podcasts.

I don't know, like, there's a lot of anxiety.

Because, like, whatever, if I have to pack,

if I have to set up stuff, you were luckily a few minutes,

you showed up a few minutes later.

Which, for an academic, is right on time.

Right on time.

But the stress is immense.

And on top of that, you look at, like, a situation

with Rick Rubin, I had to set up microphones in front of him.

And just that stress, the anxiety.

He knows a lot about microphones.

What did he say, which I really loved?

He's like, how close do you like the microphone to be?

That's a very Rick Rubin kind of thing, right?

That the details really matter.

The details really matter right down to your relationship

to the microphone, right?

Distance and whether or not it brings out the timbre

in your voice.

But of course, as he does, he produces music.

But he also said, like, you know, he is the professional.

He said, how close do you like it to be?

And he said it with the gentleness where I had,

like, an existential crisis where I don't know.

He gave me so much, like, wow, he made me feel like an artist.

That the microphone distance is a decision

you're supposed to make.

Well, I have to say, and this has actually come up

in some of our conversations about you.

I mean, you are an artist.

And actually, Joe Rogan, once I heard him talking

about podcasting and the fact that he's always

trying to get better at it, and he described podcasting

at one moment as an art, right?

And it is.

It's a certain medium of communication.

And there's a cadence and a rhythm that when it's working,

it really can facilitate the transfer of information.

And when it's not, it doesn't.

I mean, obviously, Joe, just being himself,

has tapped into that cadence that allows

and has made so many people excited to hear him talk.

Well, in his case, and in general, I think part of the art

is refusing the world as you get a bigger audience,

change who you are.

There's one quote that I've seen out there

where he says, you know, I'm like talking about himself.

He says, you know, I'm like the fish that got through the net.

There's no stage version of me, right?

How he is in person is how he is out in the world.

And of course, there's nuance to his life, right?

And his different relationships, of course.

But it's true.

I mean, we've had the great fortune of spending time

with him out away from the microphones, so to speak.

Joe is Joe.

So can you speak to that process?

You mentioned the walking and the talking to yourself

because that's fascinating.

Yeah, I try and do a couple of things.

First of all, when I was a kid, I had a little bit of a grunting tick.

When I was five or six, I would feel this build up of tension

in my throat and I would do this grunting tick.

If I get very tired, I start to do it still.

We actually know that this is related

to these basal ganglia circuits for go, no, go.

You've got an accelerator or a brake, basically,

in your neural circuitry.

And kids with Tourette's in OCD, the brake doesn't work quite as well.

And so one thing that happens is if I wake up in the morning

and especially if I'm well rested, well, if I'm not well rested,

I do a hypnosis or yoga nidra in order to recover my sleep

that works really well.

But then once I'm into the process of preparing the podcast,

I've already gone through my notes.

I know what I want to say more or less in a kind of general contour.

And then I take a walk and I try to, so no phone with me,

and I try to assess whether or not my energy is too high

or too low for podcasting.

Because when you podcast, as you know,

you have to punch out a lot of material,

but then there's times when you really need to slow down

and emphasize and articulate.

And so what I do, I've never revealed this,

what I do actually is I will recite the lyrics of songs

for about 10 minutes, songs I love, while I walk out loud.

It calms you and focuses you.

What does it do for you?

I think it gets my vocal cords warmed up and it also...

Do you sing or speak them?

I often sing them and fortunately nobody hears.

And as I do this, I start to evaluate whether or not

I'm straining to get the words out

or whether or not I'm straining to make them slow enough

so that I can articulate them.

So there are days when I have so much energy

that I'm trying to speak faster than I should

in order to articulate properly.

There are other days when I'm tired

and I can't sort of keep up with my thoughts.

And so what I try and do is assess that

and then adjust the transmission, the RPM so to speak.

For instance, I can speak very quickly

and then I can slow down.

So I can change the cadence of my voice.

And when you teach in the classroom, you learn as you know

because you're an excellent teacher,

I've watched your lectures in the classroom.

As you teach in the classroom when you want to slow down,

every teacher knows you turn to the whiteboard or chalkboard

and you start writing, right?

It gives you a break and then you turn around

and you fire back the kind of machine gun fire of information

and then you slow down or you underline something.

When you podcast, you don't have that opportunity, right?

There are no visuals in my podcast.

So what I try and do is always get my voice warmed up

and make sure that I'm thinking and speaking

at approximately the same rate.

And then I also do this thing of I put my vision

into panoramic vision when I walk, which is very calming.

And then I actually start to remind myself

of the purpose of podcasting.

This sounds very mission statement E,

but you asked what I do.

I remind myself first and foremost

that what I want to communicate, what I want to come through

is the beauty and utility of biology.

And I only feel comfortable saying the word beauty publicly now

about science things thanks to you because I think...

Love and beauty.

Yeah, love and beauty.

Love and beauty.

Dr. Andrew Hewerman.

Love and beauty, but also darkness and hatred.

And if you're talking about the Lex Freeman podcast,

you have to address the shadow, also the shadow side.

But I think about the...

I want to communicate the beauty and utility of biology.

And then I check my emotional state.

I want to make sure that I'm not angry about anything.

And certainly if I am, that I'm going to set it aside

for the podcast because that's not a place

for whatever I might be dealing with.

I also really start to feel into the parts of the research

and the papers I found that I really love

because that's the part of me that I like the most, frankly.

And on the podcast, if there's a paper...

Like for instance, we have a paper, excuse me,

a podcast coming out soon about heat as a tool.

Sauna, but some other things.

And in researching this, I learned so much about these heat shock proteins

and the use of sauna in Finland for increasing growth hormone,

but also for the treatment of mental illness.

And I realized I fell in love with this literature.

It's just a beautiful literature.

These people are true pioneers for doing this work.

Now everyone's in the sauna, but this was 20 years ago.

The way the experiments were done were amazing

with all these Finnish people with thermocouples up there,

rectum to measure temperature, swimming in pools.

It's hilarious and great.

And so I start to think about, and I think...

I just start to really access my love of the work.

And then when we finally sit down,

meaning my producer Rob and I and record,

I just sort of want to just bask in sharing it.

Just like the little version of me when I was six or seven,

I used to spend all weekend reading the Encyclopedia,

Guinness Book of World Records,

making my mother drive me places to introduce me to...

I had this obsession with trapping animals

when I was a kid, meet these people.

And then on Monday, I would insist on giving a lecture in class,

which is a little kid.

So that's basically what it is.

I just try and access that childlike energy.

And so I want to be clear.

The goal is always to make the information

interesting, clear, and actionable.

And if it's also surprising, then that's a bonus.

But that's basically the process.

But yeah, I'm singing and talking and getting into state.

And I used to feel very sheepish about sharing any of this.

It's the first time I've ever shared it out loud.

But Rick was the one who encouraged me to find a process that works

and continue to develop that process

and not let anything get near that process.

People in my personal life know this.

And when it's time, it's like,

I don't care what else is going on,

I'm moving into that brain state.

And there's probably a process like that for anything

that you do in life that you take seriously.

So the people that have perfected this is athletes.

Like if Olympic level athletes,

they have to have a process like this.

I think Tiger Woods actually was taught self hypnosis quite young

and used self hypnosis often during his tournaments,

sometimes to great success and other times less so.

Is there other places in life that you use kind of a protocol,

like a mental protocol to get ready?

Many of the best areas of life are their own form of hypnosis, right?

True.

You know that you're in hypnosis if, for instance,

you're in a movie and something happens

and you feel the emotional lift without being self conscious about it.

Yes, I think that one thing that we've tried to do in our house

is around meal times to try and set a state

that food isn't just something that we just throw down in our throats.

And I'm fortunate that my partner cooks really well

and so I try and give her the space to do that.

And that's a whole thing of her getting into state.

And then...

For the cooking.

For the cooking.

I can just see it.

I just see the way she approaches the whole thing

and the pleasure in serving it.

And I'm an eater, not a cooker.

Both are important roles.

You could be a very good eater.

There's something about, is there anything better in this world

than that feeling, especially if it's a family,

getting around a table, just the warmth of that.

I don't know, the cold outside of the cruel world

cannot touch you in this place that you've returned to.

And if... I mean...

Did you grow up eating meals as a family?

Yeah, yeah.

You used to sit down. No television.

No television.

I didn't really have a television period outside of meals.

So most of my time was spent like a stray cat

outdoors just running around playing soccer.

I imagine you in this dirt or concrete lot

between two very high rise buildings

playing soccer in athletic gear

that you only see in Eastern Europe.

You come to the States and people wear their athletic gear.

You go to Europe and you see...

Maybe it's the soccer culture,

but you see athletic gear that you just don't see anywhere else.

That's interesting. I mean, I grew up pretty poor.

So first of all, I was always wearing my brother's,

who's an older brother, brother's clothes.

And they were like old... Like, my favorite things

were American things that I didn't understand.

It would be like a Pepsi shirt or something.

And it was just... That was the gear.

And it was like too large for me,

but I thought I was the coolest person ever

just wearing this fancy, like Kanye type of fashion.

Yeah, there's something about it.

I feel like in Eastern Europe, they wear athletic gear

where like the guys like zip up the colors.

No, that's like fancy stuff.

That's if you like... Those are the cool kids.

I see. I see.

Like the cool soccer players, football players that...

Like they were in a league of some kind,

so they would get uniforms or like...

Or they somehow...

I always thought anyone who had anything nice

had to do something really bad to get it.

That was my way, view of the world.

Because I guess I didn't understand

how it's possible to be rich.

Because most of us were surrounded by people who were poor.

And that life was beautiful and simple.

And it's like, why do you escape that life?

But you still admire the cool...

Like when we got McDonald's, it was like,

what kind of world does this place come from?

Like who invented this?

It's a fascinating view from a child's perspective

of capitalism, essentially.

But the fact you ate dinner together is really interesting.

My parents divorced when I was an adolescent,

so then there was a total fracture of any family structure.

But prior to that, we ate dinner together every night.

I was expected to know how to use my knife and fork.

And it was like a very structured thing.

I don't know if kids do that now.

If I ever have kids, they're going to do that.

And certainly...

Actually, on the way over here, I was thinking...

I really want a lot of kids.

I want like a whole litter.

And I was thinking, if Lex has kids and I have kids,

then we can like pit them against each other with Jiu Jitsu.

This is my chance at redemption.

It's the law game.

Right?

They'll all want to be engineers or physicists.

They won't want to be biologists.

But in all seriousness, I look forward to the day

that our kids play together.

Yeah, I think there's something...

So the family dinner, the ritual of the family dinner,

but also the special occasion dinners.

Like, where there's a little bit more preparation,

a little bit more cooking,

whether it's on the weekend or for some holiday.

In Russia, it was a thing that actually I find completely missing.

For the most part, in America is there was neighbors.

There was a...

You broke the walls between families much more commonly.

Like, there would be kind of regular characters,

like a sitcom almost.

You know, if you watch the sitcom,

it's never just the family.

There's always, like, other characters that...

Just bursting in the door.

Bursting in the door.

I'm gonna start doing that here, just to make you feel at home.

I just started showing up at your studio.

I know where you live.

I think people want to respect, like, you know,

Michael Malis lives next door to me.

And I think people want to respect each other's privacy

or something like that.

And I think we all get super busy and, you know, like...

It's kind of work to do this dinner together

or, you know, if you see it as a thing that needs to be scheduled,

it's work.

We get busy.

There's a lot of stuff going on.

But if it's part of a ritual or part of the culture,

all of those walls get broken down.

And then you realize, like, later looking back,

those are the things you miss.

Like, that's what life is about.

Like, all the stupid stuff you're doing in terms of career, whatever.

All the busy things.

Those don't matter.

What matters is the people.

Yeah, in academia, you know, this changed in the last few years, of course,

but one of the great joys was professors will stop by your office or your lab.

Nobody set up an appointment.

There's a guy when I was a professor in San Diego,

a guy named Harvey Cartney, he's a member of the National Academy.

He's the truly the world's expert in the evolution of vision

and evolution of brains, generally.

And he would show up in my lab.

And he would just start talking to the students in postdocs.

And, I mean, in a pure encyclopedia.

And then you'd at some point you'd say,

hey, Harvey, I got to go and you kick him out, right?

Or this guy, he's a physicist, David Klein, David Kleinfield, who's the same way.

Actually, David Kleinfield is an interesting one.

He, a student of his, went on to create the Beavis and Butthead cartoon.

And one of them is David.

He's a physics professor now.

People can look him up.

And David's one of those guys who's walking in your office.

He just sit down.

He just start talking to you.

And so there's a kind of a family feel.

It's like Cheers or Seinfeld or one of those shows where somebody just walks in.

And yeah, I think you and I both share a love of the community around things.

And podcasting is a little bit more isolated.

I should say for the guest episodes, the preparation is completely different

because it's more conversational.

And so there I don't do any of this business of putting myself into state.

I just try and make sure that the guest is taken care of.

And I do list out the questions I'm going to ask before.

But those actually really like the interview episodes far more

than I like doing the solo ones.

Just psychologically mean.

I just like learning from someone directly.

Yeah.

Because you asking an expert about something like sitting here with you

when we recorded the podcast where you were a guest on the Huberman Lab podcast.

And for the first time and finally someone was explaining to me the difference

between machine learning, artificial intelligence and all these other things.

You know, and I've finally forgiven you for making me cry about Costello on camera.

Because it helped me move through it.

But in all seriousness, the interview ones are a sheer pleasure.

The solo ones I really enjoy, but they're work.

Sometimes I think like I'm going to sweat a little blood prepping for them.

Well, it's interesting because I do think prepping for interviews,

having a similar process might be also very valuable.

I have to think about that because I think when you do a conversation for several hours,

especially when it's a high stakes one.

So it's not like you and I know.

It's more like it's just chatting and so on.

The world order isn't going to shift according to it.

Although you never know.

We can never know.

Knowing you will probably be into some pretty controversial topics in a few minutes.

Oh boy.

You like to ride the edge more than I do.

Oh boy.

There are a number of topics that I just completely avoid.

The response to those is always that I have a lot of opinions about that,

but not a lot to say.

Whereas you've become far braver in terms of the topics you'll encounter

and some of your guests have been a bit controversial.

Some of them are people that a lot of people don't like

and you've been willing to just sit down and maybe it's the jiu jitsu thing.

I don't know.

It is tricky.

One of my goals for this year is to talk to people that a lot of people really don't like.

Are you going to share with us?

And here I am.

People that are in prison, major political leaders,

I've been thinking a lot about how to talk to really difficult controversial figures,

but find together something with them that's deeply honest about their nature,

about the ideas they have about the world,

like reveal something real.

And some people, you have to be very careful.

Some people are very good at hiding the real inside them, even from themselves.

That's something I think about a lot.

I think about dictators of the past and I put myself in the mindset,

well, how do you reveal something real about this person to themselves?

I think that to me, and you kind of spoke to that,

but a great conversation is one where both of you discover something new.

It's not just, so I love that too.

That's my favorite thing that you mentioned,

you ask all kinds of questions and get excited to learn from an expert,

but also to push them to discover something about themselves, about their ideas together.

And then that discovery, and sometimes it's like, we don't see it in the moment,

but the audience hears it.

It's weird to say like, I would compare it to when you're a musician,

you're playing with other musicians, you lose yourself in the moment.

Yeah, it's like it's working right.

But you don't really see the big picture impact of what it's working right actually feels like.

And that's where the audience can see that.

If you talk to somebody evil, for me as an interviewer, I have to empathize with that person.

I want to understand, I have to put myself in that mind space and to put yourself in that mindset,

you really have to become that, you have to understand the evil inside of you.

You can't just think if somebody is in power and has used that power to abuse others,

you can't just be a, I personally, a person who seeks to understand,

you can't just be a journalist asking generic questions.

You have to put yourself in a place where you're somebody who's given a lot of power

and slowly you start to abuse that power and what does that person become?

Who are you?

I have to plug myself into those moments in my life in the past where I've been angry at something

and where I've been cruel because I was angry in little ways,

but then you magnify them at scale and I have to go there and that's very human.

And then I have to look at another person from across the table for me and I understand,

well, you're there too.

And then you had more opportunity to do truly cruel things.

And then where I have to plug myself into places where I've been,

I can imagine I can go where I was cruel to others and was unaware of it.

So I was in a mind space where I was thinking that I'm doing good and I was doing not good.

Again, I've never gotten an opportunity to do any of those things at a large scale,

but all of us have done it at a small scale and I plug myself into that and then we're here.

Or two, if it's somebody who's in prison, if it's somebody who's a dictator,

we're in that space where evil is all of us have the capacity to do that evil

and I have to imagine myself being able to do that evil and then we're here together

in that dark, dark place.

And then if it's just right, something real can actually come.

Something from that person's childhood may be awakening to a realization that

I thought it was a good person and I'm not.

And that only happens when you truly empathize.

Those moments of discovery are beautiful, but they also happen in science.

When you just have a conversation and you realize, I feel like talking to Stephen Wolfram,

I feel like we constantly realize beautiful things together.

On this element of evil and sociopathy,

Jung had this notion that we have all things inside us and that we all have the capacity to be good or evil, etc.

But I have a good fortune of working with somebody who has deep understanding of psychiatry,

but also psychoanalysis and Jungian theory and he said to me recently,

whether or not all people have all things inside them is still debated in the psychology community

and in the neuroscience community and as a matter of philosophy.

But there are certain people, not many, but there are certain people

from whom they've actually lived out many versions of their possible selves in the first person.

And so those are unique individuals and even if they tapped into these things as you mentioned

at a more minor level as opposed to impacting people negatively at scale.

So being able to access those different parts of oneself is key and you've been willing to step into that.

My podcast is not one in which we get down to those matters.

You never know, we might do an episode on narcissism and sociopathy.

The other thing that I took away from a conversation with a friend who was a lot of years in special operations

in the intelligence community, he said, you know, if you look at somebody's past,

at some point you will come to understand some pretty good reasons as to why they became who they are.

But you have to draw the, his words, the red line someplace.

And what he was referring to was the fact that certain people, at least in the eyes of certain communities,

deserve to be eliminated as a consequence of their actions, right?

Regardless of what drove them to those actions.

So it gets right down to the line between nature, nurture, neuroscience, and the law and justice.

Complicated, complicated themes.

I can think of a number of people that I would love to hear you interview.

And here I'm not revealing the reasons why, but except for the fact that I think you would be uniquely suited to bring out

the important components of the conversation that other people have not been able to do,

which for instance, Liz Holmes, this is one of the most mysterious and yet dislike people on the planet.

She's sort of synonymous with deception.

I don't know if there have been any real interviews of her since the whole thing.

I haven't followed that case.

I listened to the book and I followed it a little bit because it was happening in my hometown, right?

Theranos was right up the road.

The building's still there.

It's interesting.

It's some of the most premier real estate in Silicon Valley, but nobody wants it.

It's very hard to sell a home where somebody committed suicide or committed a murder even if it's a beautiful home.

It's sort of feel like the Theranos building is that building.

So that would be a really interesting interview.

I would love to hear that interview.

One of the most interesting dark human beings in science.

Yeah.

And then there'll even be people that say, was it even science?

It might have all been deception.

It might have been one part deception, one part goal setting mixed in with clearly that there were so many factors impacting what happened.

I think the big difference between Theranos and that story and some of the other stories about Silicon Valley where people promised a lot more than they could deliver.

Is they were promising things that were directly related to health and healthcare.

People were taking blood tests with the understanding that the data they were getting was important information about sexually transmitted diseases and other diseases and making real world decisions on the basis of that.

Whereas if you remember when the iPhone first came out and Steve Jobs was still alive and the phones were dropping calls if you held it in a particular way and his response was a little flip.

He said, hey folks, it's a phone as if like don't get so worked up, but people held them understandably to a very high standard.

It seemed and I don't know because I certainly wasn't there.

It seemed like she sort of adopted this idea that you could get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right.

Except if the allegations are true.

And I think she was the found guilty, I believe, on a number of counts that a number of the things that they were doing were impacting real world decision making.

So Steve's point about the phone is just a phone.

Well, it depends on the call.

If you're calling 911, then it's not just a phone, right?

But in the case of blood tests and disease, that's serious.

I think that the Theranos case was super interesting to me because of the number of people from major universities and from government that both trusted her and the number of people who did not trust her and yet either didn't speak up or no one listened to them.

It was only in the forensic version of it that everyone said, oh, yeah, I knew that she was lying, et cetera, et cetera.

They were lying.

There are multiple people involved in those lies, apparently.

But I have a deep interest in the neuroscience of narcissism, sociopathy and some of the darker aspects of the mind.

So yeah, maybe someday we'll do a podcast together.

It can be like in the early 90s version of talk shows where we darken the lights and we do it together. You can use your voice because your voice is much more sinister sounding than mine.

Good cop, bad cop.

Well, it'd be interesting from a scientific perspective of somebody who is a sociopath or a psychopath how to reveal something real about them.

I think that requires not just, well, I don't know what that requires.

That requires the same skill that it takes to be a good therapist.

Right.

And some therapists won't work with sociopaths because they don't feel any progress can be made.

Some therapists will work with sociopaths because for the wealthy ones, they often, they want their money.

I think most therapists are good and benevolent, but there's some that will do it just the same way lawyers will work with criminals knowing they're criminals, right?

Oftentimes because they're criminals.

There are certain domains of psychiatry that are more tractable than others, right?

Borderlines are interesting.

I should just mention because they have this phenomenon of splitting.

So in the world of psychology, the idea is that being neurotic is actually the goal.

The idea that you could be, you know, feel something and then work a lot to overcome it or have some sort of defense mechanism in place, but that's not destructive.

That's actually a pretty healthy state to be in. It's provided it's not destructive.

Psychotic is truly delusional thinking about reality.

And the idea is that borderlines split, intermittently split between psychotic and neurotic.

That's why it's called this beautiful work by Melanie Klein that describes this, which I'm just now kind of delving into.

But, you know, so the borderline is the person who is like, I love you, I love you, I love you, and then truly feels as if they hate you and you become the bad object.

Borderlines are challenging for psychologists because of the splitting, right?

Schizophrenics are challenging because of the detachment from reality.

And narcissists are challenging because they're often so charming that even the therapists are charmed.

I believe you mentioned Carl Dessaroth. We'll talk about him.

He was definitely not a narcissist. He's one of the more humble people, but he is brilliant.

Thanks again to you. You've connected us.

I had the pleasure of having a conversation with him. You had a conversation with him. I really enjoyed it on the podcast.

You guys come from the same science, from the same place, maybe different journeys, fascinating things.

And levels. We were postdocs together. Carl is truly the Michael Jordan, the Wayne Gretzky.

Five children, amazing marriage to it. Also an amazing scientist, his wife, Michelle Mongees,

in our neurology department at Stanford, incredible thinker, writer, very kind person, humble.

Speaking of getting into state, sorry, Carl, I'm going to out you on this.

But Carl, despite being at the highest levels of science and engineering and a practicing psychiatrist,

his office is literally a coat closet with a small table lamp.

When you meet with Carl, if you manage to meet with him, because he's very hard to get to,

you walk in, you sit down as if you're going through some interrogation and some spy novel,

and he'll ask you, what are you most excited about lately?

And I've got 11 minutes or something. And that's a meeting with Carl, because he's that busy.

But he doesn't have the office with the pictures of the kids and the thing and all that is kept elsewhere.

So in order to get, I asked him, why do you work in this office, right?

You work on light and channels of light, things relate to light of all things.

Here you are in this dark room, and he said, well, this is what gets me into the state of mind

to be able to do what I want to do. Very Rick Rubin ish, not at all the same person,

but very similar in that he's figured out the physical space he needs in order to get into the optimal state

to do the work he needs to do in this lifetime. And it's very unusual, right?

If I don't have a window, I kind of freak out. I can do it here for a while.

We're in this black cube here, floating in space, of course.

But I find that amazing that these people that are operating at this super high level

are willing to actually deprive themselves of a lot of conditions.

They're not sitting there with the secretary coming in, offering them espresso every five minutes

and things like that. No, no, no. That's New York Neuroscience.

The New York Neuroscience Mafia is kind of famous for having all the tickets to the opera and this and that,

and they enjoy lifestyle a lot.

The New York Neuroscience Mafia.

Oh, there is one. There definitely is one. They know who they are.

They know who they are.

People don't know Andrew Huberman is from the West Coast,

and now he's just starting wars with the Neuroscience Mafia.

Well, they do amazing science. They love their lifestyle, and that's wonderful.

The culture is very different.

Carl and I think Silicon Valley in general kind of prides itself on this kind of monk like it says,

Sism, right?

But at the individual scale, be deliberate about controlling the environment.

I think about that with the conversations too.

I haven't been deliberate about that either in terms of controlling the space you're in.

Visually, yes, black curtains, all those kinds of things.

There is nothing like the Lex Friedman podcast studio.

First of all, when you do them remotely, I always feel like I'm in a witness relocation program.

Exactly.

You only get the coordinates at the last moment,

and you always get the sense that there are people behind the walls that are recording things.

Well, there's something about creating a feeling.

I have a sense that there's a robot over there.

There's several throughout this place.

I think part of creating a feeling would be having the robots constantly moving around and having a mind of their own.

Because that would most closely put guests and other humans that interact with into a place that's closest to my mind.

Because that's such an engineering mind, and one where when things come to life, it's a beautiful place to be.

And whatever that is, that could be art, but to me, robots are art.

And so I'm thinking about that, both for me and for guests.

And I'm also thinking about the difficult guests.

Just to return to, you said, Elizabeth Holmes, one person, maybe a couple of things I want to say.

One person I think I would like to talk to is Ghislaine Maxwell.

I always get afraid right before you reveal these kinds of things.

And now I know why I get afraid.

Again, assuming that she did the things that people claim she did, they're despicable.

These were underage children.

There's just no version of the story where she did the things she was accused of doing and is still a quote unquote good person.

In my mind.

And yet, I think there is tremendous interest in understanding what led her to do all that.

At least for some people.

Let me say a couple of things.

One is at a high level, let me say that she believes or her current story is that she's the victim.

Of who?

Jeffrey Epstein.

Oh my.

I think I'll just leave that there as is.

So these are ideas that you're facing.

The nature of truth and the nature of the human mind is what it is.

And this is imagine folks, if you went into a room with a person that says that, what do you do next?

Let me also say that I never or rarely, let me sit down and say never.

I rarely mentioned names that I'm interested in talking to without having made significant progress in already securing that interview.

So people sometimes ask me about Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin.

I do not bring them up lightly in terms of there's in terms of there being a path to an actual conversation.

That said, something I regret, but I'm not sure I know what to do with it.

But in the case of all the people I just mentioned, I haven't been preparing for those conversations.

I only start really preparing seriously when it's confirmed because it's such a heavy burden.

And one of the things I regret in having mentioned a conversation with Vladimir Putin before the war in Ukraine broke out in the past few years is that I would mention it very loosely, very casually.

And without having really deeply put myself into a place that I'm ready to talk to him.

And that's a tricky thing because then the internet, the audience in general, and just me when I listen back to my dumb self think, well, why are you speaking so lightly about these topics?

Well, I know you've had a longstanding interest in talking to him. I think now, well, I don't understand how I would sit down and have a conversation with somebody like that, but that's not in the range of my skill sets.

Or maybe not in the range of things that you're drawn to somehow.

Not so much. I mean, I would watch that episode with great interest.

Well, you did an episode recently with this guy who was a former cyber criminal turned stateside, right? I think he works for the government now.

And there was a segment in there. Remind me his name?

Brett Johnson.

There was a segment in there where he talked about stealing a lifetime's worth of collected coins from some elderly woman. And this was everything she had. And then he openly admitted that he felt no remorse, which is the way he described is purely sociopathic.

And then, of course, we learned that he grew up in a family where criminal behavior was very common. It was kind of embedded in his notions of what typical behaviors were. And I felt myself somewhat conflicted, but also hung up on this idea that he had behaved as a sociopath or in a sociopathic way.

And it created an internal conflict because he's quite charming guest and his stories are terrific. Especially, I really enjoyed his discussions about how he would go out and do all these things out of a desire to please his girlfriend.

So he was in service to other people, despite being a sociopath. He could say he was in service to them as a way to extract. It gets very complicated. I think it's the reason I went into science is that at some level, it's more about facts than it is opinions and judgments.

And I don't know that I have the ability to suspend judgment away from the kind of top level contours of my initial reaction to like, if it's true, like the Glenn Maxwell's and the Liz Holmes and other sociopaths is one of just kind of revulsion and repulsion.

But that could also reflect the fact that I'm not as neurologically sophisticated as somebody that can spin all the plates of empathy, forgiveness, but also holding people accountable at the same time. That's work.

If you think about it, that's three, four brain circuits having to work in parallel. That's the difference between chess or a game of go and a game of checkers. I guess I'm playing checkers.

No, so one is actually holding in your mind and two is the raw skill of conversation. You're very, just having listened to your interviews, you're very good at conversation, but the skill of conversation is really tricky.

I'm not being self deprecating. I'm being just objective. I'm not good at conversation. I'm working very hard, getting better at it.

I'm speaking not about just podcasting. I'm speaking just normal life. I have anxiety from social interaction.

Do you really?

Huge amount, yeah.

So this is interesting because I never detect that in you ever. And I think there are people that we both know that have said to me that they too feel anxious and yet your voice is steady. I don't see any perspiration.

Oh yeah.

You appear incredibly calm.

I'm scared shitless.

I was scared shitless with Rick Rubin.

Rick Rubin is, when you first meet him, is intimidatingly calm. But as you get to know him a bit, you realize that his, the kindness and the generosity that you sense is real. But yeah, I would never in a million years have guessed that you get anxious in conversation.

Okay, I just make another quick comment. This may come off entertaining to you, Andrew. Maybe you've already gotten the same. But having mentioned of Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Zelensky, Ghislaine Maxwell, there is a natural question.

How does Lex have access to these people? Who does he work for?

Like, how does he?

Who works for him?

Who works for him?

Right.

What does he have on others? This, I'm actually, I asked my, when I look in the mirror, just somebody who kind of enjoys conspiracy theories. I want to ask the same question. Like, well, I usually ask in the following way, like, how the fuck am I so lucky? Like, who am I being, am I a robot being controlled by somebody else?

Like, how is this, how is this my life right now? What is happening? It really does feel like a simulation. So let me just speak to several things. First of all, I have no boss. I know, I know of, nor am I controlled by any intelligence agencies of any nation.

We're going to get you a dog, Lex.

So that I could talk to. I'm scared of getting a dog because I would fall in love so deeply, I think that.

Next time I'm bringing a puppy. I'm just going to bring a puppy and I'm going to leave it here.

And then you'll never see me again. I mean, I love dogs so much, but I was also surprised and maybe, I have never talked to an intelligence agency, which is very interesting to me.

That you're aware of, because they're very good at communicating with people.

Right. But I've been very suspicious on this exact point. That's the downside of kind of being an introvert, having anxiety about social interaction, but then having so much love thrown your way because we connect over podcasts.

Podcasts have a powerful way of connecting people. So people come with you with love that I really love. I appreciate, but I wonder, like, exactly this question.

Like, why is this person with a Russian accent talking to me and showing me so much love?

Well, because, sorry to interrupt you again, but it's what we do. And it's a sign of interest, by the way. Sometimes, yeah, I have a colleague at Stanford and she said, you know, interruption, 75% of this time is a sign of real interest in what the person is saying, if nothing else.

Well, you're very lovable. I mean, I learned about hedgehog in the fog from you. You know, when I learned, you know, you're very lovable. People love you because you're lovable.

I love love. Okay. So 100%. And it's, I mean, especially here in Austin, Texas, people are so amazing. I go just hugs and just, I love people.

But do you want a family? Are you eventually 100%? No, I mean, you're, I take what you said as a challenge in terms of having a family with kids and they do jujitsu and obviously defeat you and make you miserable for your failures as a father because you couldn't.

You can be a great dad.

Build up an army of good jujitsu people. But yes, I would love a family. I would love to have children. But I just want to finish that point. I'm nervous about it. I'm nervous about the way people perceive what you're seeing as a forest comp type character, like what who I am.

I seem to be, and this is how like the world seems to work, is you just try, you try to be yourself, like you try to find yourself. That's maybe the better way to say it and just be that.

Be kind to people, work your ass off and say F you to anybody that wants to control you or to tell you what to do. Just be free and then put love out there in the world and doors open. This karma thing seems to work.

Like how the hell did, how the hell, my friends as you know, how the hell did I get a chance to eat barbecue with Rick Rubin, right? Like you guys had barbecue.

He's from New York. Any New Yorker that I know has very high standards for food because bad restaurants don't last long in New York.

And barbecue houses. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Texas barbecue. Well, you know, I would also add that you, whether or not you realize it or not, you took tremendous risk. I mean, we come from the same original community, which is academic science, right?

And to be at MIT and to start posting lectures online is risky, right? To, you know, I was third or fourth man in on in terms of podcasting as an academic because you had gone on Rogan many times. David Sinclair had gone on there, you know, especially before the pandemic, you just didn't see many academics and scientists talking in a public facing way.

So you took tremendous risk, right? You took tremendous risk, always wearing that jacket and tie, right? The only time I haven't seen you in that truly is when we rolled jujitsu, which is, and I hear I'm being generous to myself saying I rolled jujitsu and basically you choked me out in front of hundreds of thousands.

That was really risky.

It was great fun. And I thank you for doing that to have a beginner's mind is a beautiful thing.

I have admittedly, I have not been taking the classes, but I'm going to. I truly am. Especially there's a small chance I might find myself in Austin a bit more often in the near future.

But the

Well, if you're out in San Francisco, you train with Mark Zuckerberg. He just started. So there you go.

Oh, yeah.

You guys can

Interesting.

Sure.

I mean, he's actually, I mean, people listen to an episode, perhaps he's a fascinating human being.

I listen to it.

That's great.

You took tremendous risk as an academic to do what you did.

So I do believe that when one takes intelligent risk, because you can die or can crash your career, you can do all sorts of self destructive or destructive things when taking risks.

You took risks and they paid off.

Right.

And you take different risks at different stages, but I don't throw around the word admiration lightly.

I mean, I admire that you were in this classroom and in my team, like I'm going to film this and put it online.

One of your early interviews is with Ido Portal, who's very hard to get to.

I've communicated with Ido a few times.

You should definitely talk to him.

I can't wait to talk to him.

I'm dying to talk to him.

I was supposed to do some course teaching with him right before the pandemic hit and then it got canceled because it couldn't travel.

But getting to him is exceedingly challenging.

So you do have this incredible ability to get to people and for them to trust you and know you.

And I think it's through your authenticity.

And I think it's the fact that you're willing to go places where people haven't been before.

You know, this is what's the saying about pioneers.

How do you spot the pioneers?

They're the people with the arrows in their backs, you know.

So that's the, you know, yeah.

And that's actually a quote that I lifted from Terry Szygnowski, who's a, you know,

you should talk to Terry.

He's a computational neuroscientist down at the Salk Institute.

Howard Hughes investigator, et cetera.

But so, you know, taking risks that other people have not taken is, that's a real thing.

And to do it with integrity and rigor, that's a real thing.

And so, yeah, I'm complimenting you and I hope it lands and lands deeply.

But I also hope that people will hear that and understand that it's one thing to do what other people are already doing boldly.

It's a whole other thing to launch an entire art form or venue and you did that.

And you didn't write a book, hopefully you will someday, but you didn't go write a book.

A lot of academics have written books.

You went online.

Jordan Peterson, another controversial character.

He did it too, all those lectures that he filmed and then it's led to this other thing.

So, you know, there's karma and then there's also having the spine to just put it all on the line

and do something for which there is no prior example to hold on to while you go through those headwinds.

The really fascinating thing and actually a lot of people tell me about you, Andrew Cuban,

like the reach of a podcast is really fascinating.

It's not the numbers of people listen.

I don't know if that's important at all.

What's important is like the depth of connection you have with certain people.

It really moves them and like they really get you.

So, there's a lot of big Andrew Huberman fans that really get you.

It's not just the science.

It's the stuff between the lines.

It's Costello.

It's the whole picture of a scientist that finds beauty and biology and reveals it and they love you for it.

You know, because it was on television at the time, I followed that Amanda Knox story pretty carefully.

And I don't watch television, but whenever I would travel, if there was a TV on the airplane,

I would find myself getting wrapped into things like locked up abroad and these things were,

which would make you terrified to travel anywhere, let alone commit a crime overseas.

The scenes of some of these prisons are so dramatic.

I mean, her case got a ton of interest and then she went and then was a student at the University of Washington

and has talked quite openly about how she was treated and how people assume guilt and eventually,

she was exonerated and we can only go by what we know with the law determined.

But these are people that the world is fascinated by.

I'm guessing about a third of people have already decided this person is despicable.

Why would you ever give them an audience?

About a third of people, I think, are open to or at least interested in learning more about them.

And then I think the remaining third, kind of the third category that I put myself in,

which is what can I learn about people and myself even in my revulsion?

Right.

What can I learn about myself from listening to this conversation with somebody that I like to think,

I'm not talking about Amanda here, I'm talking about the other people that you're talking about,

that I can't relate to.

Hearing conversations with and about people that you cannot relate to is informative.

Otherwise, your whole mind literally becomes insular.

Well, there's an interesting thing I also had to, ever since the war in Ukraine broke out,

one of the questions I was asking myself, and this is not to be dramatic,

it's just a very simple, honest question that I think a lot of journalists that operate in the war zone

or documentary filmmakers, that every single guy has a chance to meet, have to be honest with themselves,

are you willing to put at risk your life for things you do?

What are you willing to die for?

What are you willing to die for?

It sounds very dramatic, but whenever risk goes up,

I mean, I don't know, you ask that if you want to take out a trip out to space on a commercial space flight.

Are you willing to die for this journey?

Now, the odds there are really small.

I just watched Apollo 13 again.

Great movie.

Yeah, great movie.

I'm not going to space.

I'm not going to space.

I'm afraid of heights.

No, I'm not afraid of heights.

It feels like a terrible place to die.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, death anywhere is not great.

Yeah, although, you know, I have a song teed up in my phone.

If the plane starts to go down, I'm going to spend the last few.

It's a rare song.

Nobody knows it.

It's a song off a B track of my favorite band, which is Rancid.

It's called The Sentence.

And I love it, and I listen to it almost every day.

Rancid, The Sentence?

The band is called Rancid.

Famous band, relatively.

Love those guys.

Love their music.

And the song is The Sentence.

You can only find it on a B side or outtake.

And if you don't know how to decipher Tim Armstrong's voice,

then you probably won't understand the lyrics,

because it's sung very, very fast.

But if the plane ever goes, anytime there's turbulence,

I put that thing in.

I put the headphones in.

I'm like, well, you know, if it's time, it's time.

I'm going to go out like this.

I don't want to drift off into the galaxy

just slowly asphyxiating and freezing to death.

That sounds horrible.

Just like I wouldn't want to drown.

But on a plane is okay?

Well, on a plane, I mean, like if the thing starts going down

and there's truly nothing you can do,

you might as well at least listen to your favorite song.

Yeah, true.

True.

I'll probably go with the pixies.

Where's my mind?

Like from Fight Club.

And just the calmness, just sit back.

Like the musician is playing at the Titanic.

I didn't know you were a pixies fan.

I'm going to have to.

Not so much a pixies fan.

Actually, I should say that I just, that was the,

where's my mind?

It was the chosen song for Fight Club at the end

when the buildings are coming down or something like that.

So that there's certain songs that just fit just right

for the collapse of human civilization.

And you're calmly appreciating like that.

That's just it.

This is how absurd this life is at any moment it can end.

And this is it.

I love how we both have death and demise.

Yeah.

Soundtracks.

It's just a question.

When you're an academic doesn't come up often.

Right.

That's all.

Yeah.

There are some academics that are bold and brave.

It's not a phenotype.

Being bold and brave in the physical world is

not a common phenotype of academics.

I mean, the great neurologist, one of my,

I don't have many heroes, but Oliver Sacks is a true hero.

I mean, people think of him as a writer,

but he was foremost a neurologist

and he took tremendous pushback from the neurology community

for doing his books and his articles.

He has a great biography called On The Move.

There's a wonderful documentary that just came out about him.

He died in 2015.

I'm actually kind of a collector of his things,

but he had tremendous, but he was accused of horrible things

until the movie Awakenings came out

with De Niro and Robin Williams.

Amazing movie, by the way.

People don't, they seem to not say great things about the movie.

I love them.

It was amazing.

And it was only once he became famous from that movie

that his more academic work started to receive any kind of attention.

And he was invited back to Columbia and NYU.

You know, the New York neuroscience mafia is a real thing.

And yes, you know who you are.

And some of them are actually coming on the broadcast.

They are...

I think we talked offline about this.

We should start a mafia to fight off whatever's going on in the East Coast.

Although I'm still in MIT, so I don't know how that works,

but Boston is different than New York.

Yeah, so I have tremendous respect for science done in New York.

Don't get me wrong.

They are excellent scientists.

It's just a very different culture than on the West Coast.

And the personalities...

Tremendous respect for the mob.

And the personalities are a bit more grandiose.

However, because of some of the shift in science culture in the last few years,

things around scandals and things of that sort,

they've been forced to tamp down some of their personality,

or at least their outspoken personality.

And I actually think it's revealed something really important and useful in science,

which is, you know, it used to be the case you could really inject your personality into what you do.

You know, Richard Feynman is a good example.

If he did today what he did then,

bongo drumming on the roof of Caltech, naked,

working out theorems in strict clubs and things of that,

he would have lost his job in moments, right?

So that kind of behavior isn't celebrated anymore.

It's actually punished.

And I'm only half kidding about this New York neuroscience mafia,

but because I now exist in multiple realms, I can say these sorts of things.

And I, again, admiration and respect,

but I will say that I think it's important that people in science

and kids that are curious about science understand that

you can have any personality provided that you're ethical and respectful in science

and do well, right?

They're true bench scientists that just want to be at the bench.

There are people that just want to be in their office.

There are people that really enjoy public speaking.

And there are people that love meetings.

There are people that hate crowds.

And so there's a place for everybody, truly a place for everybody in science.

I would like to be able to shine light on the fact that there are,

you can have a shy personality, an outgoing personality,

and you can, all of those can be, have excellent careers in science.

But you have to find the community in place that's right for you.

One reason I like Stanford is that Stanford is very much about the future.

We have Nobel Prize winners.

We have Fields Medal winners and all that stuff.

And their names are on walls and we acknowledge their great works.

But most of what you hear about in the halls of Stanford

is about what's happening now and what could happen next.

It's really about the future.

Whereas when I've spent time at other institutions not to be named,

you hear that, but there's a lot of kind of recycling and regurgitation

of how wonderful people are based on things they did previously.

And the students at Stanford, because of Silicon Valley,

sure, they have respect for Nobel Prizes.

They're delighted to be learning from and surrounded by all these great minds.

But they're mostly interested in what they are going to create.

And so I kind of, not kind of,

I really like the shift toward possibility

as opposed to things that are steeped in tradition.

You know, I've never been to high table dinner at Oxford.

I'm sure it's a wonderful experience.

I'm also not sure what purpose it serves for the world.

But I've never been and so I don't know what the conversations are

so maybe I'm, you know, speaking out of line here.

And now I'm definitely not getting invited.

Now you're definitely getting invited.

But yeah, I'm with you.

The cultures pick the right ones for you.

That's why I like MIT, the spirit of it.

To me, it's not about the past or the future.

It's about just tinkering and having fun building cool stuff.

Like the big ambitious projects is there.

I mean, maybe more next in the biology and the health side.

But like the engineering side,

it doesn't matter if this has any impact.

Let us build the coolest thing the world has ever built.

Whenever I'm in Kendall Square,

I've seen they have those buildings there

that actually tilt toward the ground.

The architecture of MIT is also really impressive.

Yeah, he pulled up, Sergei just pulled up,

he almost tweet, I'm inspired by curiosity.

That is what drives me.

So let us expand the scope and scale of consciousness

so that we may aspire to understand the universe.

Those are like three tweets in one, but curiosity, yeah, yeah.

Curiosity for its own sake.

What's that saying?

I think Dorothy Parker said,

the cure for boredom is curiosity.

There's no cure for curiosity.

And you need to celebrate.

So let me just briefly mention to my lovely friends at MIT

to celebrate different weirdness, to celebrate the weird characters.

I sometimes get loving pressure from my lovely friends at MIT

to tone down the weirdness a bit.

Really? Even from MIT?

I'm very fortunate to have a lot of leverage

to where I have completely resist the pressure.

But I'm very sure that there's young faculty

that with that subtle pressure would dissolve them into a puddle of tears.

Not, no, no.

Oh, they're from Boston, excuse me.

They're tougher than that.

But it's a slight nudging towards conformity

that I think ultimately destroys or at least lessens

the power of the kind of science that you can do when you encourage

diversity, diversity in all of its forms,

including the weirdness of ideas that are out of the box thinkers,

including the flamboyant behavior online,

how you choose to educate, how you choose to inspire.

People talk about freedom of speech,

but it's not just freedom of speech to say controversial things.

It's also freedom of speech to be weird.

Like, if you're for some reason fascinated in, like, you look at Elon Musk,

he talks about sex a lot.

Let the guy put sex memes up.

Who cares?

I mean, I feel like Elon can do basically whatever he wants.

Right, there's no pressure.

But there's a bunch of Elons in the academic world.

There's a bunch of Elons.

No, actually, sorry.

Let me backtrack because the man deserves props.

Right, he's unparalleled.

He's a CEO of major companies.

You better believe there's pressure to behave more like a CEO

as opposed to a giggling schoolboy who's posting memes throughout the night.

But that is him.

And that freedom, that's what freedom looks like.

I talked to a lot of CEOs,

and a lot of them feel like caged birds

who have long ago forgotten how to sing, quite honestly.

Like, there's like shareholders,

and they come up with excuses for themselves.

Here's why I have to be this way, you have to understand.

So on, there's PR, there's marketing people,

there's lawyers, there's all that kind of stuff.

But the final result is the authenticity is suffocated.

The beautiful weirdness of a CEO, of a leader,

of a creator, of a scientist, all that, that's all gone.

Well, Steve Jobs wouldn't have kept his job

in acting the way he did in his 20s and 30s in today's climate.

But he probably would have updated his protocols, so to speak.

A little bit, but maybe...

You know, he's screaming at employees.

I mean, these are anecdotes, right?

I call them anecdote data because people treat them as data,

but they're really just anecdotes.

We don't know, I wasn't there.

But I like the idea of authenticity without oversharing.

You're very authentic, but there are aspects to your life

that I'm aware of that your audiences will never be aware of,

and there are aspects to your life that I'll never be aware of.

And so you're still authentic, but...

Yeah, wait, which ones are you aware of?

People are going to wonder, like,

what is the sex dungeon? What is this?

No, no, no.

But an interesting choice of examples.

No, but I think that people lose the careers

on the basis of the movement of their thumbs, right?

I mean, the chair of psychiatry at Columbia recently lost his position

based on a response to a tweet.

People can look that up.

This is one of the most famous psychiatry departments in the world.

And he put something out there that was very insensitive, frankly.

And everyone that I talked to about it was like,

gosh, that was very, very insensitive, not thoughtful at all.

And he lost his job, right?

Or at least had to step down. I don't know the specifics.

So, you know, I think I read someplace that more than half of the job loss

due to online behavior is because people were trying to be funny, right?

I mean, not everyone can pull off with Tim Dillon.

Oh, and by the way, congratulations.

I heard that you and Tim just got married.

No, no, we didn't just get married. He proposed.

Got it, got it, got it.

And I said, yes.

Right. So, some people can get away.

Oh, yeah.

Thank you. Thank you, sir.

He has that.

Has that ready to go.

See those 13.3,000 likes, one of those is mine.

So, for people who are not aware, one of the days in April tweeted

that Tim Dillon asked me to get married and I said, yes.

I think Tim said, the wedding will be on 6th Street in Austin.

Bring all of your weapons, which of course is totally inappropriate.

This is, I was funny.

He's a comedian.

I was like PG funny and he's goes rated R funny right away.

But that said, I mean, if there's anyone, I would like to get married with this.

It's that guy and we would do it in Austin and it would be epic.

It would be like the wedding from November rain.

Mr. and Mrs.

Oh, wow.

Oh, Mr. and Mr. I apologize.

Wow. Yeah. And you broke and you broke tradition with the jacket color.

So, it sounds to me that you are a free speech absolutist.

I think freedom is really important and that includes letting people who are

hateful, letting people who are controversial have a voice on platforms.

But it becomes, I'm not sure what exactly to think because I also treasure

the quiet voices in the back of the room.

And sometimes the assholes silence those voices, meaning by being loud

and obnoxious and so on, it pushes away the thoughtful people.

So, I'm also a fan of creating communities.

Like you should be able to let people kind of build a community that's

positive, that's loving or that's constantly trolling or that's super hateful.

All those communities should have a place in the world.

But like the thing I've noticed is that hate can destroy a community full of hate

can destroy a community full of love easier than a community full of love

can overtake one with hate.

So, you have to kind of, I don't know exactly how but create digital mechanisms

that discourage the collision of these communities.