Andrew Huberman: Peptides, Sleep Tech, and the End of Obesity

14:35Dr. Andrew Huberman:Lilly is working very hard to make sure that compounding pharmacies do not sell redditrutide. Compounding pharmacies and gray market sources already sell redditrutide. Many people are already taking it. It's not legal, but it's not necessarily enforced. And I'm not necessarily suggesting people do. But I think it's going to change society where, in theory, you could eradicate obesity, in theory.

15:01Daisy Wolf:Five years from now, what percent of Americans do you think are on GLPs? Well, I like to think that there's still some people who, because they've exercised good habits up until now, don't need them.

15:14Dr. Andrew Huberman:I don't know why I like that, but I suppose if you can get away without having to take a drug and get the same result, that's better. I'm guessing that more than half, especially people who come from families or communities where there's a lot of obesity are going to be taking them, probably taking them at lower dosages than are prescribed. and I don't think that you can control the compounding pharmacies in gray market. Mostly because, and I could be wrong here, so I want to be careful, but I'm not aware of a major adverse event. You know, it's a little bit the same way that steroids were discussed in the 80s and 90s, but people were dying, going into rages.

15:55Dr. Andrew Huberman:They were coming up with, you know, they're having a lot of problems. I'm not aware of anyone dying from taking BPC-157. So there's a lot more room for experimentation. I'm not suggesting people do that, but the margins for error seem to be greater. Yeah.

16:09Daisy Wolf:I mean, my understanding is it's not the like, the compounded drugs are probably generally safe, but it's the fear of contamination or a meningitis outbreak or whatever. It's happened in the past with compounding pharmacies being just less regulated than traditional drug manufacturing.

16:27Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah. I think it's really interesting, too, because as I watch this space, this peptide space emerge, which has mainly been around the GLPs, right? and BPC-157 body protection compound, which may or may not accelerate healing in animal models. It's very clear that it can improve cartilage growth, nerve regrowth, as well as vascular growth, which is a little bit worrisome if you have a tumor. You don't want to vascularize the tumor. No one has the right control experiment in themselves because they'll say, oh, I injected my shoulder and I healed so much more quickly, but it goes systemically, so you can't compare the two shoulders.

17:01Dr. Andrew Huberman:But no one wants to be in the control group. and the people are just assuming it's BPC, they're taking it. I mean, I think we probably would have heard of an adverse event by now, but who knows, maybe something will pop up. I think that when it comes to the GLPs in particular, there was a lot of debate for a while. The exercise fitness community were saying, oh, you know, you don't want to take a drug. You just need to eat right and exercise. I disagree. I think that some people have accumulated so much adipose tissue that it's modified their metabolism and even perhaps even brain circuitry and appetite, that it's really, really helps them.

17:37Dr. Andrew Huberman:And obviously behaviors and these drugs are gonna be the best combination. Or just the behaviors, if you can get away with them. I've never taken a GLP, so I can't talk about the experience of it. I have tried various peptides. I've tried BPC. I don't know if it helped me or not. I didn't have an injury. I didn't notice that I recovered any more quickly from exercise. I've tried pinealine as a sleep peptide. It gave me three hours a night of REM sleep, which was pretty awesome. very little human data. So now I just...

18:05Daisy Wolf:Are you continuing that?

18:05Dr. Andrew Huberman:No, I just take AGZ. And that's the truth.

18:08Daisy Wolf:So you want more data?

18:09Dr. Andrew Huberman:I'm a little scared about taking something that in animal models has been shown to both improve the function of, but maybe also the proliferation of pinealocytes, which produce melatonin, or they and other cells in the pineal. Because anytime you're stimulating cell growth, it could start going awry and then get a tumor or something like that.

18:30Daisy Wolf:Maybe you can just speak, kind of speak more broadly about the non-GLP peptide craze. There's been a lot of kind of black market activity around Chinese peptides.

18:42Dr. Andrew Huberman:I love how that term has come about.

18:44Daisy Wolf:There's looks maxing, like people, what is a peptide? What do you recommend? What should people avoid?

18:51Dr. Andrew Huberman:Sure. Short course, a peptide is just a short chain of amino acids make up a protein. Insulin's a peptide. All the things we're talking about up until now are peptides. So the phrase peptides has been kind of co-opted to mean a certain sort of a click of peptides, just like the word steroids. In people's minds, they think bodybuilders, but, you know, estrogen is a steroid hormone. People are always shocked to hear that. You know, so if you take estrogen, you're on steroids. Okay, but we know what people are saying when they say on steroids. So they're androgenic steroids, they're estrogenic steroids, there's corticosterone.

19:28Dr. Andrew Huberman:Okay, just in the same way, they're peptides that are to reduce hunger and appetite, the GLPs. Reditrutide being the newest generation, one soon to be released through Lilly, but already out on the market. from gray market sources are these sources that are sold all over the internet that are American or Canadian or whatever. And they list them as for research purposes only, not for human use, but they're selling them knowing that people are taking them. I mean, who's doing research on these peptides at home, right? This is not your, unless you're my lab down the road or someone else's lab, like, of course people are taking these.

20:08Dr. Andrew Huberman:They tend to be the gray market sources for research purposes only, not for human use, tend to be 99 % purity, which means they've been cleaned of most things, except I do worry a bit about repeated injection of a substance that contains 1%, say, lipopolysaccharide, which can cause inflammation. So maybe not in one injection, but maybe repeatedly over time, as well as other contaminants. Black market sources, and when you hear Chinese peptides, our companies online, we don't know that it's all coming from China, by the way. They sort of get hit the hardest in this, but people refer to Chinese and black market peptides as people who are going online, buying redditrutide, and you have no idea if it's redditrutide.

20:51Dr. Andrew Huberman:In contrast to the gray market sources where they might not be the cleanest, but they give you a data sheet that says this was tested. And if it says redditrutide, if it says BPC-157, that's what's actually in the vial and only that. Okay. So that's an important distinction. Compounding pharmacies have been compounding all sorts of things, selling drugs more cheaply than drug companies. They are controversial for that reason. We could talk about that. But other peptides that are interesting, excuse me. BPC-157 for tissue repair, producing inflammation, seems to have very, very high LD50. No one's really discovered it.

21:34Dr. Andrew Huberman:And people have been injecting enormously high amounts of this. I've not heard of an adverse event. I don't recommend doing that, however, because you don't want to vascularize a little tumor you might have on your liver or in your brain. But maybe for short-term use to treat an injury, if that's within your margins of risk, you know, I mean, that's up to you. Ideally, you'd get it from a compounding pharmacy if you can, or from one of these gray markets sources before you would go to a black market source. injectable injecting locally seems to be better than taking it systemically taking the oral forms it's unclear how much of that bpc a 157 gets into your bodily tissues pineal and as i mentioned for for sleep has become very popular there's a whole category of what are called growth hormone secretagogues which are very popular teslamorelin ipamorelin surmorelin mk677 these all stimulate the pituitary to release growth hormone, but they themselves are not growth hormone.

22:38Dr. Andrew Huberman:They will increase the amount of deep sleep that you get at night. Typically, you'll take these 30 minutes before sleep, ideally not having eaten anything in the previous few hours, will increase growth hormone and IGF-1. Some of those things I just mentioned are FDA approved. So, the sermorellin, for instance, I forget the exact indication, but to increase height, for instance, or tissue repair after surgery, some increasing growth hormone can be beneficial. Some people will just take growth hormone, but growth hormone is very expensive. So somatotrope, omnotrope. So that's what these peptides are very commonly used.

23:17Dr. Andrew Huberman:Those have been researched. So assuming the sourcing is clean, we have a lot of human data on the ones I just described as opposed to pinealine and BPC-157 where you have basically no human data. So there are human data on things like melanotan, which makes people tan from the inside, raises energy and libido dramatically, fat loss dramatically.

23:37Daisy Wolf:We put that in the looks maxing category.

23:40Dr. Andrew Huberman:I don't know. Or energy maxing or something. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. I mean, there's a lot about, so melanotan and some similar peptides have been FDA approved for hyposexuality in women. I think the Vileci is the drug for women. Men take it too. I have to say, those drugs, melanotan is very risky. Some of the skin color changes, the kind of oranging of the skin can be permanent. So you have to, this isn't the kind of thing you do to like go on vacation, right? This is, it might have more permanent effects.

24:15Daisy Wolf:Not the pre-wetting.

24:16Dr. Andrew Huberman:Right, and there's a risk for men of pre-epism, which, you know, the last erection you may ever have, it might last eight hours, but that might be the last one you ever, it can cause damage to the nerves and penile tissue. So people, you know, people here are like erection, fat loss, energy, tan, like, oh, great. You know, and you think you got to be real careful with these things if they do get abused. But I just mentioned these things and the melanotan whole pathway is super interesting because it raises dopamine. Dopamine and pigmentation are linked through an enzyme called tyrosinase, not to get technical here, but some animals are, look like they're albino in the winter, except they have dark eyes, like an arctic fox.

24:55Dr. Andrew Huberman:And then the summer sunlight comes, hits this pathway, increases dopamine, pigments the fur and they breed. So there's a relationship between sunlight, dopamine, fecundity, and these kinds of things. It's pretty interesting, right? Right. So people are taking these things and they're getting them either through black market, which I don't recommend, gray market, which is risky or compounding pharmacies. So now we're sort of ascending levels of stringency. And then you get to pharma sells it. You can buy Cermorelin from one of the drug companies. You can buy Reditrutide soon from Lilly. The cost tends to be, you know, three to 10 times higher.

25:37Dr. Andrew Huberman:the dosage recommendations tend to be higher. People have figured out doing their own kind of rogue experiments that you can get by taking much lower doses of things. So I think one of the more interesting uses of GLPs that I'm hearing about mainly from people getting it from compounding pharmacy and grain market sources is that you can get by with taking much lower doses. Some people are using it for reducing alcohol craving, for reducing just cognitive noise more generally, which I think is pretty interesting. And this is probably a good opportunity to just mention things for focus since we were going to talk about that.

26:12Dr. Andrew Huberman:You know, if you ever have in your copious amounts of spare time, which I'm sure you never have, because no one seems to have it anymore. There's some pretty interesting conversations that have taken place on X about drugs for focus because all the other hackers like to focus and program and work. And so we all have heard of modafinil used to treat excessive daytime sleepiness. It may have a slight cognitive enhancing effect, but it's mostly a focusing thing. It increases energy when you have poor sleep. It was designed to treat narcolepsy and other things. Is it better than Adderall? Different than Adderall because Adderall is more of an amphetamine-type stimulant.

26:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:Very interesting paper came out recently from WashU showing that Adderall, it wasn't really Adderall specifically, but Ritalin and other stimulants seem to improve focus about as well as a good night's sleep. But a lot of people aren't getting the good night's sleep they need. Because of it. Right, exactly. And it's not increasing focus per se. It's increasing alertness, which allows you to allocate your focus. This is, as far as I know, there are no drugs to increase focus per se. Now, the two things are tethered enough. You know, you need alertness to, alertness gates focus. Sleep gates alertness, unless you take a drug like Adderall or Modafinil.

27:41Dr. Andrew Huberman:There's a very interesting drug that I think is going to become far more popular soon, which is already FDA approved called Sunosi, S-U-N-O-S-I, which is approved for excessive daytime sleepiness, did very well in a trial for ADHD. And it's a little bit of a dirtier drug in the sense that it doesn't just hit the dopamine and norepinephrine pathways that some of the other drugs I mentioned do. It also hits serotonin a little bit. Seems to have a much gentler arc of alertness and focus. I confess I've tried it. It was a bit too much, and I was like, I don't, I think I'm going to stick with caffeine for now.

28:14Dr. Andrew Huberman:People will take Welbutrin, the atypical antidepressant, at low dosages to increase epinephrine, dopamine a little bit for focus. I mean, people are doing this all the time. Nicotine. So there's a lot of stimulant use right now for focus. So I do think that if there is a peptide that can be taken safely, that can reduce the amount of noise in the system and allow people to be more focused and allocate their attention in a more deliberate way without having to take stimulants, I think that would be fantastic. I think there's an excessive amount of stimulant use. And this is coming from somebody who drinks a lot of caffeine and frankly would love to have a drug that could increase focus, But you always pay the piper somehow, either in sleep or in cardiac challenges.

29:01Dr. Andrew Huberman:I mean, you don't want to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system so much for so often. It can probably shorten your life.

29:08Daisy Wolf:What does a proactive approach to health look like maybe five years from now? And what technology do you think needs to be built to enable that? Maybe put another way, like you, it feels like you've covered every single health topic on your podcast.

29:22Dr. Andrew Huberman:Still going.

29:23Daisy Wolf:What do you think you're going to be covering in kind of 26, 27, 28?

29:27Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah, we need to do autoimmune, cancer. We've got a bunch of things to go. But yeah, I mean, maybe this is a good opportunity to kind of weave in reading and writing to biology. So reading, I mean, people are wearing sleep sensors. This is like commonly done now, right? But you can't write to the sleep system yet. I think in five years, we're going to look back and we're going to be like, can you believe it? We were like cooling the room to try and fall asleep. I think we'll still have cooling mattresses, but like, it's going to be so crazy because there should be a way that you could just put like a small, like you can cool the core of the body more efficiently through the palms and the soles of the feet.

30:05Dr. Andrew Huberman:There's reasons for this. The vasculature there actually lacks capillaries. You can pass, you're not really cooling the blood directly, but you're essentially dumping more heat. This is cool technology from Stanford. I mean, I think someday, not long from now, you'll go to sleep with a little thing in your palm or on your feet and your core body temperature will just drop. You'll wear an eye mask that's moving your eyes back and forth and within six minutes or less, you'll be asleep. When you wake up in the morning, you'll flip that thing on, it'll give you a burst of 10 ,000 lux light and then you'll go outside.

30:37Dr. Andrew Huberman:These are trivially straightforward technologies to build, but no one's really building them right now because we're like, oh, we'll just cool the whole room. and we'll, you know, and I'll, you know, look at a 10 ,000 lux, you know, thing over there. Well, it's just, it's so easy to move these things to the body. So writing to our biology around sleep is going to be a big one. The other forms of reading that I think are happening now that are soon going to be writing as well. Well, I'd love to see not just real-time glucose sensing, love to see real-time cortisol sensing, morning cortisol peak, getting that.

31:15Dr. Andrew Huberman:But I mean, I can't overstate the importance of for everyone, women, men, premenopausal, postmenopausal, pregnant, not pregnant, kids, you want a big morning cortisol pulse and then you want that to trough in the late afternoon and stay low. You get that and you win 90 % of the game. But we don't have real-time cortisol measures.

31:34Daisy Wolf:People are working on these things. Like right now, for our listeners, there are continuous glucose monitors and they put kind of a little piece of like dental floss under your skin that monitors glucose in real time normally for diabetics. But people are working on kind of multi-biomarker sensors that could tell cortisol or a variety of things.

31:53Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah, I think that, you know, real-time cortisol would be very interesting. Of course, you'll get little blips of cortisol as you stress throughout the day. And the real question is, can you bring your cortisol back down afterwards? These blips and cortisol aren't a problem if they come back down. Sometimes if that whole curve gets shifted to the right a bit, it's actually worse cancer outcomes, reduced longevity. There are a lot of reasons to want that cortisol spike really big and then have it trough into the afternoon. um so that's one that i'd love to see um and then once you see that you know if at five or six p.m your cortisol is riding high you know you'd love to be have a way that you could dial it down and you could do that through conventional methods like long exhale breathing or short meditation maybe eating some starchy carbohydrates people forget that cortisol's main job is to deploy energy in the body this is why it gives you a glucose bump and there's a reason why starchy foods we call comfort foods is that it provides this sort of energy that allows cortisol to come down.

32:51Dr. Andrew Huberman:This is why a lot of people who follow very low starch diets oftentimes feel really stressed or at the edge of stress. I can't sleep well unless I've had enough starches during the day. Interesting. Now, if I haven't done any exercise or anything, I don't really need many starches. But if you're weight training, you're busy, you're using your mind, you're moving about, and then, you know, it's 11 o 'clock at night and you're fried and you fall asleep and then you're up at three in the morning, I'm willing to bet that had you had maybe a bowl of rice with dinner, you might actually sleep a lot better.

33:18Dr. Andrew Huberman:People don't talk about this, especially in the context of ketogenic diets, which sure you'll have more energy, but you can really mess up your sleep.

33:25Daisy Wolf:You heard it here. You can have carbs at dinner. I love that.

33:28Dr. Andrew Huberman:Please do it. Please. In fact, if you're going to have carbohydrates at any time, should be within a couple hours after resistance training or, you know, maybe three, four hours before sleep, maybe even a couple hours before sleep. People who reduce their carbohydrate intake too much or you're not going to sleep well it's just not um not nearly as well as you could if you had some moderate carb intake um obviously you want to try not to eat too close to bedtime and so forth so i think that the the i do think that the whole peptide thing is you know the the horse is out of the stable i think in five years you and i are going to have a little cocktail well, it's going to be one injection or one pill, and it's going to be a little bit of pinealine at night combined with something else.

34:11Dr. Andrew Huberman:It's going to be in the morning, something, whatever it is that you need to, not you specifically, of course, but whatever I need to, you know, ramp up my dopaminergic system a little bit to make sure that I'm getting enough micronutrients that maybe I'm going to put a little clotho in there to protect me against Alzheimer's. I mean, I think all of that stuff is going to be commonplace. The same way that people are not afraid of vitamin D, or they're taking some creatine, or magnesium, people are taking, magnesium is kind of the next wave of accepted supplements, I think, that feel safe enough.

34:44Dr. Andrew Huberman:For most, not all people, but safe enough. I think most everyone is going to be doing that. And I think the cost is going to be low enough that that statement, most everyone, is a real statement.

34:56Daisy Wolf:I love the read versus write breakdown. I think on the read side, it feels very clear where the world is going. Like, ChatGPT is already an incredible doctor, probably better than an average doctor an American can get access to. It knows nothing about you today, but we have these health information exchanges coming online. You know, function, we're building something that pulls in, you know, all of your health records from EHRs, all of your wearable data, all of your function blood test results, your imaging, and feeds it into this model in real time. where it's going to diagnose issues with you before you even feel symptoms.

35:34Daisy Wolf:And we saw like the 1.0 version of that in COVID when people's wearables kind of realized they had COVID before they even felt sick. And then when we have these continuous glucose monitors that can monitor a whole lot more, like the diagnostics and read side feels like very kind of clear where the world is moving. The right is super interesting, the right side. And that's where I think there are a million more ways this world could go.

36:00Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah, I mean, I borrow this read-write thing from, you know, my life as a neuroscientist. I mean, for many years, we wanted to chart the cell types of the nervous system. What are the connections? So, you're looking at the hardware. Then it was, let's record neurons, individual neurons, groups of neurons, extracellar, intracellar, calcium imaging, voltage dyes. Okay, now let's do causal experiments. Let's quiet those cells, increase the activity of those cells in the context of a perceptual experiment or a behavioral experiment in humans, ideally, right? But it was done first, you know, mice, I mean, everything rat, cat, monkey, bat, but it was, you know, it's got, you know, mice and it was non-human primates and now, and now humans.

36:34Dr. Andrew Huberman:And so I think when I think about reading and writing to our physiology, it's like, let's figure out what the normal patterns of activity are. And let's have simple ways to implement what's needed. Push that cortisol bump a little bit right now. It's so crude. It's almost funny. It's like, oh, will ashwagandha reduce this herb, reduce cortisol? Yeah. People take you in the morning, That makes no sense. You want your cortisol elevated in the morning. People will take a little bit in the evening and, you know, calm them down a bit. But if they take it for too long, it can start to have some off-target effects.

37:04Dr. Andrew Huberman:So I always say you don't want to take high doses for too long. We're cooling the room great. Everyone should cool the room. I cooled the room in my hotel yesterday. I love, love, love the eight sleep. Yes, they're a sponsor of my podcast, but I think it's a phenomenal technology. So much that I miss it when I travel. But ultimately, we're going to be cooling the body. Just cool your core, right? I should travel with a little thing. and put on my feet and the socks that'll cool my core. So I sleep and wake me up by, you know, one way to really improve the amount of REM sleep you get, not taking anything, warm your body in the last, warm your sleeping environment in the last hour before you wake.

37:39Dr. Andrew Huberman:REM levels go up. So you want it cool, then really cold, then warm. We shouldn't be relying on external hardware so much. And I don't, and so that's why I think the sleep mask thing, et cetera. I also think the real holy grail in all this is the ability to dial in cognitive states. I don't think, I know I'm going to, Matt McDougall, who, you know, I knew when he was at Stanford now is at Neuralink. He's phenomenal. Dan Adams, I think that group is terrific. I think our friend Eddie Chang, chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, phenomenal. They're reading and writing to the nervous system, but I do not think in the next 10 years, I'd love to, for them to prove me wrong, But I do not think that your hippocampus is going to be pulling in twice as much memory at, you know, twice the rate or something like that.

38:26Dr. Andrew Huberman:It's just not going to happen. We don't even understand how the hippocampus does that under normal conditions well enough yet. But I can imagine putting on a pair of glasses to sit down and do some work and your visual field goes. And there's some sort of level of stimulation, external stimulation that brings your, ramps up your level of focus. you set a timer, and for the next 40 minutes, you'll experience the kind of focus that you've only had a few times when you had all conditions right, and you'll work for that 40 minutes. And then you'll click that you're done, and then you'll take those things off and you'll go do something else.

39:01Daisy Wolf:I love that. I try to create that for myself.

39:03Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's coming. That's coming. And I keep pointing to the eyes, like the sleep mask that moves the eyes to make you fall asleep. Most of the access to the brain and nervous system is going to be maybe through the vagus, There's some superficial stimulation for calming effects or other things. Actually, vagal stimulation mainly causes alertness, but maybe, you know, some non-invasive technology will get good enough. Right now, I'm not really seeing it, but it's coming. But the amount of things that you can do to modify brain state through this region, just the eyes, ears, and the superficial nerves that run around there is just phenomenal.

39:40Dr. Andrew Huberman:So if I were going to personally invest in any companies that were doing that sort of thing, that's the body area and the sorts of things that I'd be really focused on.

39:49Daisy Wolf:Question on AI. You rose to prominence distilling kind of complex health information and studies into something that people can understand easily. This is now something like AI can do quite well. How do you think about that? How do you use AI in your day-to-day life?

40:05Dr. Andrew Huberman:Well, I use Claude to quiz myself. Claude is really good at generating tests for me on knowledge. So that's where I've been using it the most. I love the idea that an AI version of me could potentially deliver a podcast that would allow me to do other things. Sort of half kidding there. Here's what I know for sure is that there are many easy ways to generate a list of the 10 most important things to do to get great sleep. the 10 most important things to do to ensure brain health, given what we know. It's very easy to generate a list. But given that, why don't people just do those things? And I think it's because there's something about the human brain where the probability that we take on a protocol or change our behavior is highly dependent on A, of course, the effectiveness of that behavior as we experience it, but also how we learn the information.

41:04Dr. Andrew Huberman:When you understand mechanism, I think it gives a higher probability that somebody is going to implement the advice. And it may even change the way the protocol works. Now you could say that's all placebo or belief effect, but maybe not, right? Some of it is also the flexibility that's provided when you understand mechanism. You understand that if you can't get sunlight in the morning today, you just double up tomorrow because it's a summation system. It's not, it's a window that yes, if you miss for too many days, it becomes problematic. But once you understand how it's summing photons, et cetera, and AI could probably deliver that information, but I don't know that it can build it well enough.

41:47Dr. Andrew Huberman:But maybe I'm just telling myself that because I don't like the idea of being replaced by AI, but I don't know. I mean, I'd probably build the platform where the AI version of me was doing it. So I don't have a problem poaching myself.

41:59Daisy Wolf:Longevity escape velocity. Do you think that's real or fantasy?

42:04Dr. Andrew Huberman:I mean, I think the way that people are defining longevity now, it's got a lot of pretzel twists in it to try and say, well, I didn't say we were going to live forever. I, my, you know, I'm going to upload my content. Like if we're talking about this physical body that we currently inhabit, minus any robotic architecture inserted, I think it's pretty clear that the genetic upper limit is about 120. And for most of us, it's probably closer to about 105. So taking great care of ourselves, aiming for 100. I think aim for 100 is my motto. Just aim for 100, healthy. I think that's doable. I'm very excited.

42:49Dr. Andrew Huberman:I guess it's a little bit of an edgy topic, but I'm very excited by Tony Weiss-Corey's work from Stanford. And he had a company that's now sold alkyst, which talked about factors in young blood and in exercised blood that can rejuvenate the brain and body. So some of these factors that circulate after exercise are really beneficial. And yes, there are factors in younger blood that seem to be beneficial. This gets people worried about vampires and stuff, but we're talking about ethical things provided ethically, gathered and provided ethically, of course. What I think is really interesting is that there are some proteins that really appear to be rejuvenating.

43:26I also think if someone came along

43:30Dr. Andrew Huberman:tomorrow and said, Andrew, why don't we collect your blood after exercising for the next, you know, six months and let's just bank your blood so that if you ever have an injury, you can get some really healthy of your own blood. I would do that. It's kind of primitive from the standpoint of, you know, AI and all these things being available. But we know that infusion, blood infusions are beneficial. There's been a clinical trial for this. We know that blood infusions of exercise blood are even more beneficial. We also know that after a brain injury or a bodily injury, that things that are not just pro-inflammatory circulate in the blood that are bad for all organs.

44:07Dr. Andrew Huberman:So I think a very low bar but useful technology would be to bank a bunch of my own blood after exercise. And I'm like, I'm healthier now at 50 than I'm likely to be at 70. I would love my own blood at 70. Just get an infusion once a week. Totally. You know, I do that before I get some like glutathione NAD infusion, which is probably fine, but I don't know that it provides that much.

44:33Daisy Wolf:Last question. You have a pet octopus?

44:36Dr. Andrew Huberman:I do.

44:36Daisy Wolf:That is unusual. Tell us about him or her.

44:39Dr. Andrew Huberman:Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Van Gogh. Yeah, it's a starry night octopus, hence Van Gogh. And then it got even more eerie because Van Gogh lost one tentacle in the, in the fan. So it was like a, um, so when my lab was in San Diego, before I moved to Stanford, I worked on a different cephalopod called cuttlefish, which are like little underwater monkeys. They're incredibly intelligent. They're known for being great camouflagers. There's also this twist in their, uh, sociobiology where the males will, um, camouflage as females infiltrate and then mate with the females. um so i was studying their vision they're very interesting because they can see in panorama and they're very placid but then when they want to hunt their eyes translocate to the front and they generate depth perception stereopsis to hunt and i was very interested in whether or not they had two visual systems and i'm very interested in depth perception and prey capture and how that relates to bodily states just to weave this into what we were talking about earlier um when your eyes are focused on a single point, your levels of arousal and energy attention go up.

45:46Dr. Andrew Huberman:When your eyes are sort of, when your gaze is dilated, like you're viewing the corners of the room and the ceiling and the floor, that tends to make, put us into a calmer state. Some animals only exist in one or the other. We are unique that we can switch back and forth. Some other animals can, but I was studying that in Cuttlefish. When I moved to my current home, I converted an art gallery into a living space. I put a gym, I put a place to work downstairs where there's no wifi. I don't bring my phone down there. That's where I prepare for podcasts. I do drawing. I'm doing some illustrations these days for my book and a few other things.

46:19Dr. Andrew Huberman:And then it's like, Oh, I've always loved Aquaria. I'm going to put a freshwater discus tank. And I put a huge fresh, freshwater discus tank. I was like, you know, I think I need cephalopods again. So I got an octopus, I got a starry night octopus. And here's what I'm trying to do with the octopus. This has everything to do with AI. I'm trying to get the octopus to report to me what it's thinking, because I do think they're very intelligent. And we say, oh, they're like aliens. They're so intelligent. But we get the camouflage. They're very interactive. But an underwater iPad and the appropriate use of touchscreen and AI, I'm hoping will allow this or another octopus to communicate something about what it's thinking.

47:09Dr. Andrew Huberman:Okay, so how would you do this, right? So you can't apply a typical large language model. So you have to do it based on the coloration patterns, on the camouflage patterns. So it turns out AI can actually learn a lot by correlating the behaviors of an octopus with its camouflage patterns. The problem has always been that you have to do that in real time as the animal's swimming around and hunting and doing various things. So the challenge now is to get it to interact with stimuli that will give enough information so that this model, I don't know what we call it, we don't have someone more clever than I can come up with something that's not LLM, I don't know, it's something else, something related to camouflage patterns, could start revealing that certain camouflage patterns relate to certain behaviors, which relate to certain nuance in the behaviors, and then it could start teaching itself.

47:58Dr. Andrew Huberman:and then the idea would be that the AI would present something to Van Gogh or another octopus, I've got more on the way, that would start to influence behavior. There could be not just conversations between octopi, but where maybe I could speak, it would translate that into octopus, we call it, and then we could communicate. And here's the reason for doing this, okay? So There's this idea that other animals have all this intelligence. Normally, we measure that through behavior or through some highly specialized aspect of their nervous system or body like barn owls. They all do these fantastic feats.

48:39Dr. Andrew Huberman:Or what you find, and I don't like it, for instance, when I see, oh, this guy taught an octopus how to use a piano. I saw that. That's not interesting. Actually, all that tells you, that tells you more about how hard humans are willing to work to train a different organism to do something pretty rudimentary compared to what humans can do. It tells you everything about humans' obsession with teaching other animals to be more human. I'm interested in what the octopus understands about the world and can communicate that to me because I don't know that stuff. I can learn to play a piano. Why would I want to teach an octopus to play a piano?

49:15Dr. Andrew Huberman:That's fascinating.

49:16Daisy Wolf:I think you need a whole podcast outlining your experience.

49:20Dr. Andrew Huberman:Yeah, well, maybe this is what happens when we run out of topics to put on the HLP. And I'm probably not thinking about this as cleanly as I could or should, but I have to say, just in kind of wrapping this monologue, you get to the point doing public-facing health information where you can kind of feel the saturation point, and we need more technologies and tools, and I think that's great, and I really am excited for what's coming. But at some point, the conversations become, clear that we need more, right? And then you think about this whole vast landscape of animal intelligence and people have placed this thing on the cephalopods.

50:03Dr. Andrew Huberman:Like they're really smart. They know, I mean, they might be idiots for all we know, just dazzling us with colors. I don't think they're idiots. I think that they are accessing a certain perceptual landscape and they're thinking hard about what's there based on things I've observed and others have observed. but we really need to figure out a way to let them tell us what they're thinking.

50:25Daisy Wolf:Vander Huberman, thank you for coming on the A16Z show.

50:28Dr. Andrew Huberman:Thanks for having me here.

50:32Daisy Wolf:Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. follow us on x a16z and subscribe to our sub stack at a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening and i'll see you in the next episode as a reminder the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

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