LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

26:03You start to crave the things according to what's actually in them, and highly processed foods and rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that. So, and that hasn't really been explored. There's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana Small at Yale, and Kevin Hall, elsewhere, you know, but it's sort of starting to get there. So, this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets, where they say, like, I'm only eating meat, like the lion diet, or whatever, like Costello, meat only. And like, that... Many of those people, quote, unquote, feel better, I think, because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content, the food, the chloric content, and the taste in a way that, after that, they like, see a cracker, and they're like, no.

26:44You know, they can reset the neural circuits around appetite and all of this stuff. But for me, because I'm an omnivore, like a normal person, and sorry, no disrespect to the carnivores, I just kind of like the blood drinking, like liver chomping, like, come on, like that... I'm going to catch a bullet, or like someone's going to bone at me. So, I fear them more than I fear the vegans, it'll just be like a bunch of... Yeah, the vegans will attack you online, but in person, they'll just like, hit you with a parsley, so it's not as... Yeah, the... I'm going to get myself in trouble.

27:20I'm an omnivore, like most people, and the... And so, for me, between 11 a .m. and 8 p .m. is typically 1 a .m., but sometimes I eat at 9. I didn't eat before this, because I don't like to eat right before I do this sort of things, I'll eat them all, you know, before I go to sleep tonight. I'm not super strict about this stuff. I'm not super, super strict, but in general, it's some sort of intermittent -ish fasting thing, and it tends to be meat and fish and eggs, and, look, parmesan cheese and coffee and oranges and cucumbers and lettuce and food, like food and pasta. And I suppose that having done that for so many years, I do, you know, adjust it, like if I do a hard resistance training workout, I'll eat a few more searching carbohydrates to replenish glycogen, but I tend to avoid extremes with all that stuff, and I love a great slice of pizza, and I've sort of lost my taste for sweets, but occasionally I'll do that, and I love vegetables like croissants and things of that sort.

28:14So, but, you know, all kidding aside, you know, I do try and eat pretty healthy every day. With a ton of intro out there about health and wellness, Andrew, I love the way that you're doing it. Nickyle, what are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy lifestyle? This is a great question, and, you know, I get accused a lot. I get accused a lot of things, but, you know, one of them is, well, no one can do all this stuff, but we talked about that earlier. We do the best with what we have and the time we have. Try and get some bright sunlight, even through cloud cover, especially through cloud cover every day.

28:55I try and dim the lights or, you know, get under red light, not red light panel necessarily, but just put in like red party light. You know, I've done that this whole trip when you traveled in the evening, just it's just a red light bulb. There's just not fancy. So, the red light bulb screws in this little pedestal, turn that on, all the other lights go off, and then makes for a nice easy taper into sleep, because, you know, the blue and bright fluorescent lights, the short wavelength light really is activating for the nervous system, especially late in the day. So, light is a big one for me. Try and get a few walks in.

29:26I think if you were going to exercise just two days a week, it's very clear that those two days per week should be include some resistance training exercise, and then maybe follow up with some easy cardiovascular training or something like that. Hopefully one could get out in about maybe three days or exercise, sometimes not outside. One can only exercise indoors, maybe three days per week. So, I don't think it takes a ton of time necessarily, but that might even be excessive. So, with busy lifestyle, I think it's those little carve outs of five or ten minute walk. When we had Andy Galpin on the podcast and did a series, and by the way, Andy's launching his own podcast through our podcast channel, which is a sitcom, which Robin, I started.

30:12He's got the perform podcast with Andy Galpin. He talked a little bit about these exercise snacks. These are actually pretty cool. In the sense that if you just take 60 seconds and do, you know, like a near all out, you know, run up the stairs, but be careful. Or jumping jacks for a minute as fast as you can. That raises heart rate in a way and adjusts your physiology in a way that really does carry over to better performance, including even things like VO2 max in other endeavors. So, it's probably not the case that that's all you should do, but even small bouts of exercise can be very, very valuable.

30:48So, that's reassuring. And then I am a huge fan of non -sleep deep brass decay, Yoganidro, which means Yogan sleep, which is just lying there, as we talked about before. But it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity, lying there and deliberately inducing, using your mind to deeply relax the different muscles of your body. Stay calm, long exhale, breathing, this kind of thing. There's a 10 minute NSTR with my voice on YouTube that you can simply find in a zero cost. There are many with other voices, female voices, etc., that you can find on YouTube as well. And if you don't like those, we're soon to release on our Heurin Lab Clips channel, a number of different meditations in NSTRs, again, all zero cost of 10 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute.

31:35I would say that for limiting stress, improving sleep and restoring mental and physical vigor, NSTR is perhaps the best tool out there. And again, I didn't create it. I simply took Yoganidro. I started calling it NSTR. And by the way, I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that. I was not trying to appropriate anything. I promise. The problem was I would talk about Yoganidro and studies of Yoganidro showing that it replenishes dopamine and the basal ganglia can restore mental and physical vigor. And then people would back away from me slowly, like, Yogan, I don't want to do Yogan.

32:08I'm like, no, this is Yogan's sleep. You don't actually move. And they're like, well, that sounds pretty different. And I know it sounds different. I'd go on and on. And then I just decided to call it non -sleep deep rest. And when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish, you move away from nomenclature. And I have very mixed feelings about renaming things. But I figure as long as I don't call it like the Huberman protocol, at least I'm distancing myself from it. And it's a zero -cost protocol. So non -sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical vigor. It can potentially help offset sleep that you didn't get.

32:41It can help you fall back asleep at night, doing the middle of the night. It can help you get better at falling asleep if you do it during the day. I did it for 20 minutes just prior to coming out here. I always do that prior to any event that requires a lot of focus. This kind of thing. Otherwise, the jokes I tell are really, you know, just not okay. And so I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore. At what age would you consider testosterone replacement therapy? Well, one of the risk versus benefits of starting it sooner rather than later. We got shouts as well. So one of the major effects of testosterone replacement therapy is spontaneous shouting out in crowds.

33:22Just kidding. You know, there have been a number of studies of testosterone in males and females. By the way, females have more testosterone than they do estrogen. You know that, right? Per desoliter of blood, higher testosterone than estrogen. Just on average, on average, they tend to have lower testosterone than men per desoliter of blood. So it's important in both males and females. I think you're referring to James to the use of so -called TRT in males, but I'll touch on it in females as well because low -dose TRT therapy, oops, sorry. I just did that. I get in trouble in lab. If you say like PCR reaction, ATM machine.

34:04Is there a name for that? Okay. The T at the end of TRT is therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy technically means that someone's levels prior to that therapy fall outside the reference range. So lower than 300 nanograms for desoliter typically, or some other array of symptoms, and they replace it, replacement therapy. Many, many people nowadays, in my opinion, far too many and too young, take what I call testosterone augmentation therapy, where their levels are within normal range and then they take it to get out of range. And look, there's nothing wrong with that.

34:47I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm not a cop. You do what you want to do. There are a couple things. TRT or TAT augmentation. And here we're just setting aside high -dose steroid use, because that's just a whole other biz. And frankly, the bodybuilders will get upset, but I'll get away from you, because you'll be waddling and I'll be running.

35:11That's just like a whole other business. So testosterone replacement therapy is widely used nowadays. I think far too young. Basically, it will lower your sperm count dramatically, if you're a male, so you'd have, if you want children, you want to conceive children, you will need to offset that by taking something like human -chorionic canadotropin HCG. Which is available synthetically. They used to sell it in the form of pregnant women's urine. There was a black market for it. We could really go off into the sticks with this question. In my opinion, if you want to explore this, I would say first, get your behaviors right.

35:57Sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress control, training. Get that right. Don't train too hard too long. Get that right. Then there are certain supplements, and we've talked about this on the podcast, some are debated a little bit more than others, things like zinc, tongali, etc. That can probably provide a boost beyond normal without shutting down the gonads. And then, and only then, if you feel you really want to do this, and it's in line with your ethics, or I don't know if you're playing a drug tested sport, etc. Then just minimal effective dose, and then if you want to have kids someday, or if you don't know if you want to have kids someday, make sure you're taking the appropriate things to offset that.

36:37That's basically what I would say. And the major effective testosterone in men and women is not libido per se, and it's not aggression per se. It tends to make people more like them. If you're a jerk, you can become more of a jerk. If you're calm, you can become more calm. If you're kind, you can, I don't know if you become kinder. But there actually have been studies of altruistic behavior and administration of testosterone by nasal spray, or other means. And frankly, people will become more out, they'll become competitively altruistic. I think the major effect also could be described as it makes effort feel good.

37:15So we could go on and on about this. I'll just toss in that nowadays there's a lot of excitement about peptides. I'm going to do an episode about peptides. A lot of the young people I run into here and in the States are like, what are your thoughts on BPC157? What do you think about this peptide? That peptide, peptides are simply small proteins, amino acid chains. So there are lots of things called peptides. But typically these are things that increase growth hormone. That keep in mind that anything that increases growth hormone will increase the growth of any and all tissues. So if you have a small tumor that you're not aware of, that will grow also.

37:48So just keep in mind if you're going to tickle these pathways, you're playing with some serious biology, but there are safe ways to do it. Sorry, you said what are the benefits of sooner rather than later, start it later. What are the physiological and practical differences between breathing techniques akin to WIMH off and the physiological sign relationship? Stress focus, etc. Okay, we can make this pretty straightforward. So I know WIMH, we go way back to 2015. I went over to the Pyrenees and visited him and hung out and then brought him to the States. WIMH off breathing is tumble breathing, but in science speak we call it cyclic hyperventilation.

38:25It's just cyclic hyperventilation. So if you inhale vigorously and long, your heart rate goes up. If you exhale vigorously and long, heart rate goes down. The process is called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Volume of the heart changes when you breathe in versus breathe out. Speed, which blood moves through the heart changes as the blood gets bigger or smaller, according to inhales and exhales. And basically the net effect is inhale, heart speeds up a little bit, exhale, heart slows down a little bit. So if you do WIMH off aka tumble breathing and you inhale vigorously and let it fall out of your mouth, and then you're going to increase heart rate, increase autonomic activation, etc.

39:13If you do a pattern of breathing like inhale, inhale, long, exhale, inhale, inhale, long, exhale, cyclic sighing, over time you're going to slow the heart rate down and you're going to calm down. That's just how it works. So when I hear about box breathing, or now you hear about box breathing, you're okay, it's relatively equal ratios of inhale, exhale. Just a little bit of pause in there. That's the box, inhale, hold, exhale, hold, inhale, hold, exhale, hold of varying durations, depending on your so -called carbon dioxide tolerance. But at the end of the day, you're maintaining kind of even heart rate when you do big cyclic hyperventilation aka WIMH off tumble breathing.

39:57You're increasing heart rate and autonomic arousal release of adrenaline. Do cyclic sighing, a lot of exhales. The opposite is true. Okay, so that should give you a framework for thinking about breathing and how to apply different breathing techniques and get us away from some of the naming of things. But I'm not trying to take anything away from so -called WIMH off breathing. By the way, if you're going to do WIMH off breathing, be very, very careful to not do cyclic hyperventilation or WIMH off breathing and then do breath holes and don't do it anywhere - don't do that anywhere near water. There are having cases of people drowning, dying from combining cyclic hyperventilation and breath holes with water because it changes the threshold for shallow water block out.

40:40When you exhale a lot or when you hyperventilate, you remove a lot of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is the stimulus to gasp. So what will happen is, indeed, if you do - you're blowing off a lot of carbon dioxide and then you go - right, that's a WIMH exhale. And then you hold and you go under water. Yeah, you'll hold your breath longer than you normally would, but instead of feeling that impulse to breathe, like the gasp reflex and you shoot for the surface, you'll just - black, done. So it's a serious thing and you want to be really careful to not combine cyclic hyperventilation and breath holes, especially both with cold water, frankly any water exposure.

41:26I always say don't do WIMH off to mo or cyclic hyperventilation breathing even standing or seated in a puddle. Okay, so in response to stress, it's really if you want to be more alert, increase the vigor and duration of your inhales, if you want to be more calm, increase the duration of your exels. Would you recommend that children also get morning sunlight? Yes, and your pets too. Unless they're nocturnal pets, right? For anyone that had the not so smart idea of getting a hamster, you realize they're nocturnal, right? They're going to run all night long on the wheel. In fact, rodents like to run on wheels so much that Hoppy Hofstra at Harvard has shown that if you put a little running wheel, like you know, little wheels have the mice like to run in a field, animals will run to the wheel and run in the field.

42:19It tells you everything you need to know about rodents. But really children need that, but obviously babies have sensitive eyes. You know, we all can potentially hurt ourselves with sunlight and down here the UV index is very high. When the sun is low in the sky, so -called low solar angle sunlight, in the morning and in the evening, the UV index, and mostly because of atmospheric interference, but some other things as well, it does not as damaging to the eyes. That's why it's easier to watch a sun rise or a sun closer to the horizon. It is to, you know, please don't stare at the sun in any case, but an overhead sun.

42:56So I think it's really important for circadian rhythms, but of course kids need their sleep. So if they're going to sleep in a little bit, that's fine. Just get them outside afterwards. It's the staying inside and staying on a phone, that's problematic. And then leaving that room at noon, really shift your circadian rhythm in unhealthy ways. And that's true for children, perhaps especially true for children. As a father, what can I be doing to get my children the best start in life? I want a great question. I hope my parents ask that. They abandoned me at the pet store. No, I'm kidding. They didn't abandon me.

43:29They didn't abandon me at the pet store. If they did, I noticed I was among my friends, the fishes and the birds. I think this question probably should be, I'm going to edit and say, what can we all be doing to give our children the best start in life? And what does that mean for those of us that have already started in life? So first of all, we have an episode of the Hubertman Lab podcast with an absolutely magnificent guest, Dr. Becky Kennedy, coming out on, I guess it would be Tuesday down here. So this coming week, all about this. And you know, we could talk about things for learning, encourage them to play an instrument.

44:10I would think that we perhaps should teach kids some tools to modulate their stress in real time, like physiological size. I don't see why not. I certainly wish I had tools to regulate my stress when I was younger. They didn't teach us that stuff. They didn't know it or the knowledge was there, but as I mentioned earlier, they didn't teach us that stuff. They taught us all sorts of stuff in high school health and stuff. I mean, they taught us that, you know, drunk driving is bad. It taught us it just takes one sperm, one time. They taught us all sorts of stuff, but they didn't teach us the business of physiological size or stress thresholds or about the intermedsing like cortex, because a lot of that stuff wasn't known or just wasn't discussed.

44:55So I think some tools to control one's inner landscape, play music. I certainly am going to encourage the exploration of these energy states that, you know, letting kids explore. I mean, they need rules and regulation and boundaries, of course. But there's this concept of impingement that I find very interesting that the classics psychologists used to talk about, you know, when we, when a kid says they like something or don't like things like, yes, they need to be doing certain things for their normal life progression. But kids are very good sensors of what works for them and what doesn't work for them.

45:29We don't want to impinge on, certainly, their healthy loves and desires, things that don't endanger them, right? Things that are really reflect their unique loves and desires. Don't force them to place Suzuki violin if they want to play the drums, right? Let them bang on stuff and let the kids that want to place a Suzuki violin do that. Don't make them play the drums. So these impingements, I actually think, are problematic. They lead to a lot of confusion. And if anything else, they, you know, they take us away from that unique wiring to be our own unique expression. Becky Kennedy does describe a few key principles of parenting that I think are really interesting and that extend all kinds of relationships.

46:07She talks about the main role of parenting and to some extent all relationships is to create boundaries and to make kids feel safe. It's pretty good to me. The other kind of short list of two things that she describes how to do this in ways that are highly actionable is that every child I found this really interesting, every child wants to feel real like they want to feel like they're real like they're seen they exist and they want to feel safe. And so that one of the things that really rung in my ears and still does from that episode recording again out this week is that when a kid or an adult says something about how they feel that perhaps one of the best responses we can give them is, you know, I believe you.

47:06Like that it doesn't you're not saying that like you don't want to go to school, don't go to school, right. We're not saying you don't you don't enjoy doing something, don't do it or you want like a, you know, a fifth serving of candy like you can say like I believe you, you know, no. You know, and so I think that a lot of it is is is you know we get confused with terms like validation and listening. I mean what I like so much about what Becky offers and I do hope to do a child development series in the not too distant future. What what I like so much about what Becky offers is that you know it boils down to simple concepts like we want to be real, which I guess is it kind of an analog for scene.

47:50And we want to feel safe not unlike when we did the podcast series on mental health with Dr. Paul Conti. He said you know it's really about mental health is really about agency and gratitude but there are a lot of things that siphon up into those feelings or those moments of or that state of agency and gratitude. So I would say that's perhaps the most important thing is you know boundaries make kids feel safe and then make them feel real like their feelings and what they're reporting matters. And then of course the impingement thing becomes a little bit complicated because they do need boundaries so we have to constrain their wishes sometimes in their behavior but we don't want to do it in a way that takes them away from that unique wiring that makes them who they are.

48:39So they can become you know the characters and people and professionals and creatives and scientists and poets and just you know good people right every day good people. So that's the best answer I can provide at this time. They're not going to give me another question but I can keep going just briefly if I may. But just first of all saying that again I'm very very grateful for the opportunity to convene with all of you here tonight. I realize it was me speaking and you listening except for the testosterone and I certainly you know I can't really express it enough in words what the podcast means to me.

49:27You know it's a bizarre thing it's completely transformed my life it's made it you know incredible I never dreamed of anything like this but for me it's really not about hearing my own voice. It's it's this compulsion that came in at early age and it's really my wish frankly that the tools the protocols the knowledge whatever it inspires you to do or to think you know we don't have to agree on everything I would hope we don't agree on everything the ways we disagree with me and with each other and with others that you know that we start maybe thinking about ourselves through lens of science and think about health and really trying to meet those discussions with with the kind of things that we can do.

50:14And of benevolence and curiosity and you know vigor you know good argument everyone's well healthy too that it really deserves you know I think we're we're in a very interesting and kind of sometimes scary time. I often feel scared frankly because of what I see and even in my own position in this whole landscape I sometimes think like I feel like a lot of times things are just kind of hanging on by a thread. But I actually have a lot of optimism I think our species is very smart I think that we've managed to navigate tricky places before and I think that through the learning and teaching of things that work for us that we learn from this these kinds of things and from each other that pretty soon we're going to start to fill in the gaps between the silos that are the yogic traditions the chiropractic massage health and fitness traditional medicine non -traditional medicine functional medicine I mean I really encourage all of you to do that.

51:09So I'm trying to you know stand back from it all and try and identify the common themes that may exist across these things and really try and identify some of the links and points of convergence more than the differences and at the very least to explore things if you don't like them you know that's great and if you do to pass them on to other people especially the behavioral tools that we all harbor within us that I think can really enhance our mental health and vigor. Our physical health and hopefully our longevity too so I could go on and on but I really just want to say thank you so much for coming out tonight this is our last night in Australia and I'm certainly going to miss being here and we intend to come back again soon thank you so much for paying tuning into the podcast and attention to and tuning into the podcast and for being willing to learn you're all amazing students and you're also amazing teachers.

52:06I learned from you all in comments and feedback so if you have that please keep that coming and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science.

52:24Actually I've never done this before but because it's my last night here I've always seen people do this and I've never done it but I'm going to do it. Can we get the house lights up I want to get one of these like I'm going to do this as a video and you don't have to do it your faces will show up but don't worry we won't it will be on the internet but this is not for me I just want to. I'm going to send my mother this okay there we go. Thank you. Thanks to you.

52:58Thank you you made my mother very happy.