#26 - Andrew Huberman

25:35And I, you know, and I think, I think some of it is that he's learned to funnel stress into output. He's very, you know, as far as go and no go circuits, he seems to be able to take whatever adrenaline is in his system and turn it into very funneled go. I doubt he does a ton of, of, um, whatever ambivalence he may have, he, he masks it very well. I mean, some of it is software. Some of it is hardware in the sense of There's genetics and so on and so forth. But I mean, the reason is I know a lot of you and I both know a lot of billionaires, a lot of successful people, but think we're reasonably successful ourselves.

26:09And everybody feels Elon is just playing a completely different sport. Like he's just so far out there. Like even, you know, Larry Page or Jensen Huang, who are obviously very, very, very competent people, have said something along those lines. But anyway, just coming back. Okay, so one of the things that we're doing at Network School is we're building startup societies. And so you're familiar with like, you know, startup society, network state as a concept. Should I, you know, make out? Yeah, maybe just summarize it for me. I mean, before we started, I saw a video that gives me a sense of kind of the culture and landscape there.

26:42Yes. But I'd like to understand more fully what you're doing. Sure. So think of us as the third kind of thing. So there's internet companies, you know, there's internet currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. And now there's internet communities. So, you know, people might say, hey, what kind of startup company do you want to found? Or more recently, I'm doing a new coin. We're having a third kind of thing, which is I want to start a new community based on X, right? So, for example, if Andrew Huberman was to start a new community, to take everything you're saying, right, and you could engineer the environment.

27:23Okay, as like a small example, you wake up and there's like a glowing footpath that points you towards the treadmill and waits and the cold water is right there and the windows open at that right time, you know, with IoT curtains to have the sunlight come in. You know what I mean? If you could edit the environment from the home to the, you know, like the neighborhood to the superstructure, you know, for example, a walkable community, for example, like what kinds of food is there and so on and so forth. What is the ideal human community? Because I actually think we can build it. awesome i mean i think you know i think a lot nowadays about how eight sleep you know has really established itself as the leader right i think they're more or less peerless in the sense of being able to engineer the sleep environment we understand the different states of mind and body one wants to enter you want to be cooler to fall asleep you want your deep sleep you want to get your rapid eye movement sleep it turns out here's a fun one if you can find a way to heat your sleep environment in the last two hours of sleep, you'll get a lot more REM sleep.

28:33So this kind of pan rule like, oh, colder is better for sleep. That's great for falling asleep and getting deep sleep in the middle of the night, but not so great for REM sleep. For REM sleep, you can get another 30 minutes of REM sleep by making the last hours of your sleep warm environment. So for instance, they've done that, right? And you get data and you can update it. Now it's using AI to update what you need. And if a woman has menopause, it's updating there too. too. And we need to do the same thing for the waking environment, right? So little has been discussed about waking brain states.

29:05I mean, a few years back, it was all like alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. We never hear about that anymore. We talk about focus, creativity. I mean, we're going to look back in 10 years and go, that's crazy. That's like saying like, jogging is all cardio or, you know, or bodybuilding is all resistance. I mean, You can train for strength. You can train for power. You can train. I mean, we need to subdivide the waking day and states of mind according to what people want. When they want to be present for their family, when they want to be locked in to a given meeting. And right now, it's all done very haphazardly.

29:42People are like, oh, well, I drink caffeine. I hydrate. And I try and get some exercise. And I mean, we've approached sleep the right way finally. and the technologies with sleep are getting even better because of during sleep eye trackers and we could go down this rabbit hole but we won't but here's a little teaser that maybe we talk about next year there's a lot of technology coming out that links the vestibular system and sleep such that there will soon be technologies that will allow you to force your body and brain into sleep you'll put on a device or your sleep environment will change and you will be asleep within minutes.

30:16And you could, and we need that for waking states. This idea that we're just supposed to kind of stumble through our life trying to figure out how to be the optimal self. It's all, frankly, it's where psychology and neuroscience initially branched off was talking about ideas versus finding mechanisms. And then the two fields came together again. And so we could say, okay, like Elon representing the extreme, someone with ADHD and kind of failure to launch kid at home and his, you know, watching YouTube or, you know, just flailing is the kind of opposite extreme. But we should, we have protocols for how to get muscle stronger, how to get leaner, how to eat, how to improve blood lipids.

30:57I mean, we have protocols for all this stuff, but we have essentially no really grounded mechanistic technology tools to direct brain states in the waking day. It's like, oh, put on a mask and maybe get into like a theta. It's like, it's crazy. It's like we're in the infancy. So an environment of the sort that you're talking about is an incredible idea because people need to know what to do when in order to set the foundation of alertness and focus that then they can lean into at the right times. But then within that framework of sitting down and coding or sitting down and having a whatever therapy session, whatever the person is doing, maybe they're the therapist, maybe they're the patient, doesn't matter.

31:40or maybe they're doing surgery, to have tools that are constantly providing feedback to the brain so that it's in the right end body, so it's in the right state for those activities. And AI can do this, as you know. I mean, it's not a big reach to accomplish this. But we really need to define what it is we're trying to accomplish. And I think for most entrepreneurs and most people who want a better life, it's really about understanding, okay, what are the three or four blocks of waking states I want to accomplish today? What am I going to place into those blocks? And then getting as much assistance as they possibly can.

32:14And sure, some will come from pharmacology, but I think most of it is going to come from directives. I love this idea of like the floor lighting up, sending you in the right direction, adjusting for the movement of the sun. Right now, there are these apps that tell you, well, the sun is rising over here or not there. I mean, it's cool, but it's super crude. Yeah. Think about it. That's right. So there's so much room for technology development here. I'd like to see a real-time cortisol sensor. I'd like to see that cortisol sensor have AI-based feedback with one's activities so that it will essentially tell you what to do and when to make things better, including your sleep.

32:47We have access to the sleep data. I mean, soon all of this will be integrated. My question is, where will it be integrated? I love the idea of an online community. I think also it should be the case that I just have like a little sticker sensor. I imagine this as the military uses this. They're little sticker sensors that use, you know, it's on Bluetooth, you know, a 12-hour battery or something, and it can measure everything through cavitation, heart rate, breathing rate, could get cortisol levels, it can feed, and this is used in the military in the context of kind of monitoring soldiers out on the field from an iPad.

33:19They can tell if someone got a bullet wound that's a through and through, if they're dead, if they, you know, they can triage from a distance. I mean, that's an extreme case, but we should be able to do this. We should be able to like, oh, you know, like, I'm probably a a little more jazzed up right now than I need to be if I want to, you know, focus in a couple of hours. But over time, it's just going to naturally bring us into the states we want to be in, as opposed to, you know, these like subtle electronic taps on the shoulder all the time. It's going to probably provide feedback to our vagus and basically control our respiration rate.

33:51And pretty soon we'll be as optimized as could possibly be without any invasive technology. I don't think of a sticker as invasive. Yeah. In fact, actually, there's ones that don't break the skin that actually can transmit quite a lot of information, like the sort of non-invasive patches, right? Right. Or this non-skin breaking. You know, so, okay. So the Huberman, the ideal Huberman startup society, okay, if we were to take everything you've done, because you have a bunch of edits. Let me give you an example. Suppose that we had the self-driving car society. You take existing laws and you just change those laws that – and you basically say, for example, this zone, only self-driving cars are allowed.

34:38No humans. OK? That actually changes a lot because, for example, all the cars are parked on the edges and cars are parked in like tunnels underneath the city. and people hit a button and the car goes in parks itself and you've got a walkable center and the entire shape of driveways changes and you don't have lots of parking. Like that one change actually has enormous ripple effects downstream. So for example, are there any legal changes to permit something or ban something or both that you would propose that would start making the Huberman Special Economic Zone or Huberman Health Zone? Oh, yes.

35:20I mean, I really believe that if you get this cortisol thing right and you get your circadian rhythm right, you get your circadian rhythm right, everything else becomes 10 times, if not a thousand times easier in terms of getting exercise, eating correctly, mental health. I mean, there are a ton of data on this now that the brighter your mornings and days, literally, and the darker your nights in an additive way, the better your mental health. Even if you're in a dim environment all day long, which I don't recommend, if you make your nighttime environment very dark, mental health improves. If you make your mornings brighter and your days brighter, mental health improves.

36:01Now, there have been a few companies that have attempted to create lighting that's bright enough during the day and create conditions that are dark at night. And it really hasn't gone anywhere. I mean, what I would like to see, so you said like in terms of regulations, I think buildings should get either by natural light or by artificial light should ensure that there's enough bright light early in the day and throughout the day and it's dimmer and darker at night. I mean, I wish that were a law. I mean, Americans don't like to be told what to do, but first of all, it would save on energy. What if it's not America?

36:34Assume it can be done somewhere in the world great where those people are okay with great you know something as long as it works go yeah and even though you know climate change is a controversial thing you'd also be doing a tremendous service to birds and to insects and to the ecosystem of non-human animals because the truth is that light pollution is really screwing things up in terms of like songbirds are singing longer now they're mating song and everyone goes oh that's cool they're mating longer actually it's screwing up all sorts of things within the ecosystem because of light pollution. But what are you going to tell people?

37:06Oh, you got to turn off your lights. I mean, we're a hard driving species. We want to build stuff. You're not going to turn off the lights. But there are ways to modify light cycles, still allow for night shifts, greatly improve health. And as a byproduct of that, to improve the climate and the ecosystem for insects, birds, and every other animal. In the same way that sound pollution in the oceans is causing major issues for migration of animals and things like that. That's not my main focus. But the more I realize that we're not going to only wake up with the sun and go to sleep with the sun.

37:41That's a great way to reset your mental health. By the way, there's some really beautiful studies by Kenneth Wright out of University of Colorado that shows people are depressed. People have anxiety issues. They go camping for a weekend. They actually did this experiment. Wake up with the sun, go to sleep with the sun. and even though they're using flashlights at night and stuff, they're not shining the flashlights into their own eyes, right? And so, and their circadian rhythms reset and their mental health improves tremendously. It's just over and over again. So I would make, I would enforce, if I were in charge and I'm certainly not, let me put it differently.

38:10If I had a magic wand, I would create light cycles that are collaborative with human health. Now you do have your Mark Andreessen's, he's always poking fun at me about the light. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mark and I, I don't know about you. It's self-deprecating. He's self-deprecating. Mark and I are friends. Yeah, of course. He's my friend. Maybe I shouldn't reveal this, but it's a game we're playing. It's a lot of fun. But Mark makes a very good point, which is he likes to stay up late and be online, and he can crash out after four hours of bright light in the evening and get up in the morning. Mark is also a bit of an N of one, too, if you really think about it.

38:43So I would enforce bright light during the morning and daytime and dark evenings. I would encourage more walking and more movement. We all know about steps that should be scripted into the day's activities in a way you can't just take away escalators. But there should be something where we're not counting steps, where we have feedback on how much movement we're getting. I think glasses that can read out how much light has been delivered to the eyes. Did you get your photon quota for the day? All this stuff is so easy to do. The problem is it always gets productized as in silo fashion. Exactly.

39:20So the integrated – so it's useful – like one of the things with Mid Journey and so on now is we can think about what the Huberman Health Village would look like just magic wand. Like if you take everything you know and like what does the store serve in terms of food and what do the units look like and how are they arranged and where is the gym and how is that set up and what machines are there? and also like, you know, just mentioned the light cycles. For example, I'll mention something, maybe you're aware of this, like Xinhua in China and a few other places will actually turn off the internet, I think at like 11 p.m.

40:01or something like that. At Xinhua? Wow. Yeah. Wow. So that the kids don't play video games all night. Amazing. Okay. So now that is something that people might not want imposed on them. But I think a deep point is you can opt in to constraints. Like in the same way, like if somebody joins the military, they're signing up for like the uniform code of military justice, you know, or what have you, they're opting in to constraints, you know, so it's like signing a contract. You're consensually signing a contract that then constrains you afterwards for mutual benefit, right? So if you opt into constraints, a constrained society gives you in a sense, willpower as a service, right?

40:42So another example of this, one of the things we're rolling out at network school, phone lockers, so that everybody can give the speaker their full attention or a dinner their full attention. So you know, like the phone lockers at gyms where you can put a phone in a lock, go beep, beep, beep, like this, right? So we actually make heavier use of those phone lockers. So this way people have sort of, this way they aren't like, oh, looking down at their phone, whatever, there's a break in the conversation. And everybody there, that's like a phone-free zone or like another example is a faraday cage zone where uh it's just pencil and paper it's offline time and the internet is sort of blocked you know you go into an elevator and the internet is like blocked so imagine that some fraction of buildings are offline offices right they're faraday free zones basically right fantastic so the reason i think about that is i think that's like you know walkability You know, we obviously cars are I think cars are good, but we advanced cars.

41:41We went to electric cars and self-driving cars and even flying cars in China. We also subtracted cars where we had walkable communities. Right. And the same way the Internet, I think, has a lot of good to it. We can advance that with AI and so on. We can also subtract it. And maybe the answer is like 12 hours a day minimum offline, like eight hours. Go ahead. I converted an art gallery into a living space recently. i'm in that space now i knew i wanted i like fish tanks obviously so i wanted you know fish tanks actually the one right next to me it's not complete yet but there'll be an octopus there i'm actually trying to get an octopus to use an ipad you know so so oh really oh wow yeah so they're smart actually i'm very interested in in merging cephalopods and ai this is a pet project of mine literally okay so we'll talk about that some other time i used to work on fish okay okay But to my left is a gym with the equipment that I want with skylights.

42:32Below that, I turned the basement, which used to be a video editing studio for another, the previous owners, into a space. There's no, I don't allow any phones down there or internet. I draw down there because I do anatomical drawings for my book and for other things. I read journal articles. I read books, textbooks. And there is, I do not bring my phone down there. And I don't even. And you just. And so we both seem to use spatial memory. Like I have a little library nook that is just purely offline, and I just use pencil and paper. And if I want something intranet, I will print it out, and I'll bring it there, and I'll mark it up longhand.

43:11Because we're both kind of born in the 80s or 90s or maybe in the late 70s and so on and so forth. And so remember the offline era, and it was actually good to focus offline, and then you can operate online. Do you agree with that? 100 % and I think that the people who want to have a strong online presence need to understand that you build the things to bring online offline. Exactly. The moment you're, I've come to realize that the moment I'm online, especially in social media, which I love, I really enjoy social media. I am a merged consumer creator. And I think it was the investor Chris Saka that said you're either, you know, a creator or a manager.

43:49Now I think you're a consumer creator. And in order to bring really good material forward, you have to get offline. You have to. I just spent a week as I, as I do every summer with name dropping here, but my good friend, Rick Rubin, we're, we're, we're close. And I would go and I spend time with him in Europe. And, and most of that time we were spending, um, discussing ideas and, and the way Rick has created his life is all around being able to maximize the creative energy. He's big on sunlight. He takes great care of himself. He's awesome health. Now, I mean, some years back, he switched to kind of eating more meat and he got much leaner and all this, but his whole life is around connecting with his family and connecting with his work.

44:33And he puts real work into it. Meditation every morning, listening to music, focusing his energy. I mean, there's nothing haphazard about Rick or his life. People, I think see him as this like, you know, really mellow dude. And, but there's an intensity there that's all funneled into incredible work and observing that and being able to participate in those kinds of environments has been immensely beneficial. And I try and create my home environment that way. Now it gets trickier with kids and family and all this stuff in there, but there are ways to navigate that. There absolutely are, you know, and the key is really, I think as you point out to segment spaces or, or segment times during the day, but it's very hard to say, um, say, okay, except perhaps at night, like I'm going to just stay offline.

45:20Right. I think that segmenting spaces helps a lot, a lot. And, um, I personally, something else, which is, I think you and I also do this and I find a lot of people don't do this because it's not the default, but I turn off all notifications on just about everything. Definitely. And I just go and it's almost like a farmer harvesting. When I want to, I go and I respond to all my messages, but otherwise I turn off, I mute everything. I turn off all notifications. I never want pings appearing on screen. It's do not disturb to the absolute max on all the settings and so on and so forth. Do you do the same?

45:56Yeah. So the model for all of this, actually, I gleaned for myself, I gleaned from academia where I realized that the raw material, there are two things that mattered most in progressing as a scientist. One is collecting data and the other, well, three things really. So collecting and publishing data and raising money, grants, right? But then there were all these other things like teaching, mentoring students. They're all very important in part of being an academic. But I had to put, I had on my whiteboard in my office as a junior professor before I got tenure, I just said papers, grants. And so I made it, I had to just remind myself to spend 80 % of my time, my waking time focusing on that because otherwise there's committee work, there's colleagues dropping by.

46:37There's the guy that, um, that just got tenure and they want to come by and hang out. They want to have a coffee and you will fail as an academic if you are not a bit selfish and self-directed in, in grants and papers. And it's actually what you owe your laboratory. It's what you owe your students and postdocs because nothing stresses out a lab more than the question of, will we get this grant? It's like telling your kids, like, listen, I don't know if I'm going to get a paycheck. I don't know if we're going to eat. And they're like, oh my God, it's actually cruel. It's cruel to do. So I realized as an academic, and I caught some flack for this, that I didn't have to go to every seminar.

47:14And if I went to a seminar and it wasn't very good, guess what? I stood up and walked out because I value my time and I care about my students and postdocs more than I care about the social constraints around this. And, you know, I did catch some flack. I had a couple of like, oh, we don't see you at seminars. And I was like, well, you're tenured, you're a Howard Hughes investigator. How about we talk in five years when, and, you know, I'll have a bit more time for this, you know? Right. So it's, the culture often breeds a distribution of people's attention and kind of buy-in of people's attention in a way that's not considerate of the real goals.

47:49Okay. And I love seminars, But if it's a shitty seminar, I'm walking out. I'm sorry. Yes, I agree with that. So I do the same thing in my personal life and in my work life, which is not everything can be optimized. But I try and set things up so that I can be more present for family and friends by virtue of the fact that I'm less present for them when I'm working. And I also think that there soon will be a literature, because I know these experiments are happening, where the brain we know is plastic. We train ourselves for different modes of attention. And if you're allowing your attention to be broken every, you know, three to seven minutes or even more frequently by other devices and other activities, other communications, you're training your brain to, you know, to be the squirrel that everyone jokes about with like, you know, the squirrel, you know, that you're becoming the squirrel.

48:43And it's, you know, squirrels probably have a better attentional mechanism than a lot of people nowadays. So I think it took us about 10 years to get here where we're starting to realize, oh, you know, our behaviors feed back on our brain circuitry. And now we're starting to try and think about how to recover that. Setting up unique spaces where you just don't do certain things also helps other people respect those boundaries. Because if it's by virtue of time, they're like, oh, I text. If I don't text you before 10 a.m., you know, I can't get to you. Or after 10 p.m. we tend to respect people's sleep boundaries where um you say you know you don't expect a text back after 9 p.m for most people right right right right okay but space boundaries are great because people that know me know when i'm down in that basement i'm not going to respond to anything i don't care what time of day it is so if i say i was in my basement they're like oh they're not offended and this stuff matters because in order to make a community work it not just as a siloed like Huberman community or Johnson community or Bologi community, that eventually there's gonna be crosstalk between these communities.

49:46Of course, of course. And so understanding that when people are offline, it's for a critical reason, often just sends the message. In the same way that, you know, former dean of our medical school, Phil Pizzo, everyone knew that guy ran every morning from 4.30 to 5.30 a.m. and then ran the medical school. And you go, he's a badass. and kind of, and you'd go, Oh, like maybe I should do something like that. That's a little early to the Jocko. That's a little early because you're waking up before the sun, but it is, you know, there's a certain kind of guy who likes to do that. Tim Cook also gets up and does his bike and, or what have you.

50:20Yeah. And the results obviously speak for themselves. Okay. Yeah. So now, all right. So slightly switching gears. So that was good. That's like the human health zone for living. Okay. Let's do it. What about, let's do it. I want to do it. Let's do it. I mean, I have it here in my own spot, but let's do it. Yeah. Send me photos if you want, and then I'll see if we can mock up something over here. Okay. Now relate to that on, on like sort of the other end of it is there's a lot of biotech that is not either a biotech, biomedicine, genetics, you know, the whole, whole shebang, basically biomedicine as a whole thing where it is difficult to do in the U.S.

51:00medical system because it can't easily get reimbursed or it can't get a so-called CPT code, you know, current procedural terminology, or FDA doesn't allow it through or blocks it for many years, whether it's a drug or a device, or, you know, there's also like CLIA, like, you know, there's many different kinds of regulators and regulatory blocks. Another one is something called CPOM, corporate practice of medicine, where in theory, why don't you see too many hospital startups? Because a non-physician can't employ a physician by law because of so-called corporate practice of medicine doctrine and so on.

51:40And there's various workarounds for this, but they're all pain in the ass workarounds. So given all that, what does the Huberman Health Zone look like for the developers of these technologies? So we just talked about kind of the consumer, right like you know the blinds and the sunlight and all that kind of stuff you know the offline time the patches the glasses right you mentioned all these things and that's amazing what about on the producer side what kinds of things you know do you see as being held back by the system or what kinds of things we just develop you mean in terms of uh drug and other types of technologies i'd like to see more you be more ubiquitous i'll give a concrete example so have you heard of mini circle in prospera no okay so mini circle is so first what is prospera prospera is a startup society in honduras the law got changed years ago to allow for new special economic zones and one of the things they had there was a biotech free zone where you could pick regulations from 33 different countries so you basically pick and choose so this way you have regulatory competition like I was talking about earlier.

52:46And mini circle set up there. And there's a bunch of people are investors, Sam Alton's investor, I'm an investor, a bunch of other people are investors. And what this did is it basically had an experimental treatment to give you plasmids that would essentially increase your muscle mass among other things. Okay. And so it's experimental treatment. and uh one of my friends took it and he said he felt absolutely now there's there are studies on why this looked like they weren't doing it totally blind okay there's studies on why this looked interesting he said it felt absolutely amazing afterwards like 10 years younger like it was like a blood transfusion and he's posting about how he looked super jacked afterwards and it was like a different mechanism of action and then bezos followed him jeff bezos because this is something money can't buy, like a genuinely new medical treatment.

53:36And that showed, you know, one of the reasons I'm into startup societies and network states is because we can actually get biotech-free zones where it's willing, you know, patient, willing doctor, right? And there's various controversy around this because people are like, oh my God, you shouldn't be free to, you know, I believe in your body, your choice. I do believe that you should be free to, yeah, that's right. And so that extends to medical sovereignty, right? Like if you want to take a treatment and their guy wants to give it to you, and you're like of age, whether it's 21 or whatever it is in your jurisdiction, let's say it's post-21 years old, you're walking in clear-eyed, you've got informed consent, whatever forms we need, okay, whatever procedures, you should be able to be medically sovereign in the same way that you should be able to opt out of the SEC's guidelines and actually go, you know, the SEC didn't want to let anybody other than, quote, accredited investors invest in something, which would have meant everybody who wasn't already wealthy would not have been able to invest in crypto.

54:34And so they wouldn't have become wealthy, right? So the FDA often doesn't want people to have large effect size drugs. They want small side effect size drugs, which are different, right? Like large effect size means you have a huge effect and it's like a Zempick. It's like a big change in your life. Small side effect size means FDA doesn't get any negative press. And those are very different in terms of whether it's beneficial to the end user or not. Like the entire system in the 20th century is set up to minimize side effect size as opposed to maximizing effect size. Anyway, the reason I'm just saying all that is that's an example of a special economic zone, a biotech free zone that allowed one of these treatments, because you always see papers that have these amazing things happening in academia.

55:18or on mouse experiments, but they never make it to humans because it's like this long 10-year tunnel, maybe, to get through, right? So let's say you could - Sometimes worse. I mean, it's kind of amusing to me that right now it's like the creatine craze. Creatine's been around. I started taking creatine when I was 18. And that's like, and it works, right? Right now I'm not taking it. It makes you smarter too. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, and if you're sleep deprived, I recommend people doubling or tripling the dose for a few days. You'll get a little bit more, you'll head to the bathroom a few more times, but you'll notice a significant offset of the sleep deprivation effect.

55:51I wouldn't do that over long periods of time, but yeah, the data on creatine are great. It works. I do a washout every few months where I like right now I just stopped taking it and I urinate out a lot of water and it's kind of fun to see how strong you are without the creatine and then get back on it kind of builds. It's a psychological thing. You get kind of build back. It's, um, but you'd be surprised how much of what, what you earned on creatine in terms of strength you keep even off creatine. And in any case, everyone's crazy about creatine right now, right? It took forever for that to hit.

56:20First it was vitamin D3. Now it seems to be creatine. I think magnesiums are next because it turns out, I just had an expert chair of auto-annualgy from Stanford come on and say, taking magnesium before sleep or just once a day can offset hearing loss. We know hearing loss is related to dementia. Just a standard dose of Magthreonate or Magbisglycinate protects hearing for understood reasons. But you're not going to hear that, right? You're going to hear, we can go dig up the mouse papers, but there won't be a clinical trial on humans for treatment of tinnitus or anything with magnesium. And I'll go out there and say, hey, people should take magnesium.

56:55And then I get a bunch of MDs going like, oh, you're a supplement shill. And I'm like, all right, well, let's see who has our hearing. Look at me and look at you now and in 10 years. Like I hate to do that because it's kind of a dick thing to do, but I just go, all right, like I'm not the fastest or the strong, but I feel like I'm doing really well. My dad has always been very moderate about drinking, careful not to eat too much. He's not obsessive. Exercises but not too much. Focused on his sleep. Worked consistent hours. My dad's 82, and he's firing on eight cylinders. It's incredible. He's still going strong.

57:29He's got little things here and there. Deals with him. And again, it's cumulative. So for me, the FDA piece, I think you pointed out very correctly. They're trying to minimize side effect size. I think the key with opting in and informed consent is that people need to be aware of the realistic risks. I'll give an example. So I'm going to kind of push back on this, even though I agree with you, which is stem cells. Okay. Stem cell therapies were allowed in the United States. They were sort of allowed to happen, kind of a duck to the FDA radar. Stem cell sounds great, right? Like you want cells that can become other cells to replace connective tissue, brain and etc.

58:10But you know, stem cells are a big part of the reasons why tumors proliferate too. There was a company down in Florida marketing stem cells for macular degeneration and other forms of blindness. People who were losing their vision or concerned about that got injections of stem cells into their eye and they went blind very quickly, which shut down any advertising for stem cells on Google. You can't just say you have a stem cell company. Now it's kind of merge with other things. It's kind of cryptic what it is. Look, stem cells injected into your shoulder might be one thing or your knee. I know a very prominent physician in the wellness space who got injection of stem cells down in Mexico into his back, kept up with his sauna protocols.

58:52So it's unclear what actually causes and ended up with an egg sized infection sepsis issue that almost made him paralyzed. I know because the repair surgery was done in a clinic I'm very familiar with by a very qualified neurosurgeon. And they said, this guy's super lucky. Why are you and your friends, you're, you know, messing around with stem cells. It's not FDA approved, et cetera. So the informed consent has to be done in a way that people understand that the realistic risks, not just in a, Hey, sign this form with all the terrible stuff that can happen. Totally. Totally. Right. I will accept a stem cell injection.

59:27Perhaps I've never had them, but maybe into my shoulder or my knee. I don't want it anywhere near my nervous system. I don't want it in the central nervous system, not in my spinal cord, not in my brain, not in my eye. Thank you very much. It's just that that tissue is too precious, impossible to replace. And the data just aren't there. That said, I think there are a lot of things like, for instance, people struggle with sleep. I think even if you're already doing all the best things for sleep, there's an outsized benefit to getting a bit more REM sleep each night. Sure, you can heat your bed, but turns out there's a peptide called pinealine, which helps regenerate the pinealocytes of the pineal gland, which secretes melatonin.

1:00:03And you can pulse with pineal in every third night or so and see dramatic improvements in REM sleep consistently on every night. Really impressive, not FDA approved, but not banned either. I think as soon as people realize how powerful pineal in is as a sleep aid, it's going to be not as big as Ozempic, but it's gonna be headed in that direction. Okay. You can ask Brian, I believe I don't want to speak for him, but I'm pretty sure we've had conversations where he's either experimented with or uses pineal and I don't know if he does. Things like SS31, a peptide to improve mitochondrial health. Sure, red light from the sun, red light from a red light bed or a unit will improve mitochondrial health.

1:00:42SS31 improves mitochondrial health. Is it safe? Well, we're still finding out. Seems to be pretty safe. These things will never get FDA approval unless they become like Ozempic where the effect size is huge and the market is huge. So I'm very excited about what you're saying where there are going to be markets for things that people are not aware of, or it's being sold on gray market right now where it's not clear what you're getting. And I think fortunately, the current administration seems to want peptides to be a semi-regulated space as opposed to an unregulated space, but for peptides to be available because the pharma community would love to shut down the peptide and compounding pharmacy industry.

1:01:23Look, most people can get by taking one-tenth of the amount of Ozempic or Ozempic-like drug for reduction of body weight with far fewer side effects. But one-tenth means the drug companies are making one-tenth the profit. So a lot of people are now going to compounding pharmacies for their Ozempic Monjaro and similar and getting awesome effects. Awesome effects. I don't take it. I never have. But if I ever need to lose some weight, I certainly will. And I'll go that route. So I think it's very... I would love to see a kind of a merge between better oversight of quality of products and messaging around, more thorough messaging around those products, as opposed to just being kind of the wild west online.

1:02:05You can go online and buy peptides. There needs to be something in between strict FDA regulations and just kind of wild west gray market. We really need that. And I don't know if that could be established in Singapore, if it could be established elsewhere. But I think the current administration in the United States has made room for that, is going to continue to make room for that. The same way we have for supplements. They're not unregulated. You have NSF, you know, tested for sport. There are regulations and guidelines that allow people to make better informed choices. We all know what those brands are.

1:02:36They're the like five or six big brands in supplementation. You can trust, okay, this is third party tested, NSF certified for sport. If you're a state, if you're a mom or a dad or whatever, an academic or a programmer, you're an AI founder, you feel better taking something that has a few of those stamps, period. So I agree with a lot of that. I want to give a slight pushback on the pushback and then just get, you know, okay. Yeah. So my view is no plane crashes, no planes, no train crashes, no trains, right? Like that say, if somebody wasn't first on, let's say an open heart surgery or a brain transplant, we'd never know that those things worked.

1:03:18and, you know, like somebody might be okay, but they're kind of failing and they take the risk of literally dying to get a heart transplant and then they're better, right? So they take extreme downside risk for upside potentially, right? And so I agree with you on the disclosure and on the information. There's ways you can do it with registries and so on and so forth potentially, right? Talk to previous patients and so on. There's two other things that can be done, more than two, but at least two. Um, so, uh, one of them is, you know, farm GKB, Russ Altman's, I've heard of it, but I'm not familiar with the details.

1:03:55Okay. So farm GKB, um, is cause you're on, you're maybe more on the neuro side of things and I'm more on the diagnostics like genomic side of things. Right. So far, I mean, obviously we know a little bit of both, but that's just kind of my background. So farm GKB has been around for more than 20 years and it's a database of all kinds of genetic slash drug interactions, right? So if I have VKORC1 variants and CYP2A9, then what is my warfarin response, right? And how does it relate to like vitamin K intake and so on and so forth? And sometimes you could have a little old lady that needs a huge warfarin dose and a big football player that, you know, bleeds out from a much smaller dose.

1:04:34And you don't know that until you know the genetics of it. So in theory, before you take some of these treatments, if everybody had their personal genome, we could partially forecast the result of that treatment for a large number of treatments, right? And whole body MRI, for instance, something that gets knocked a lot. I think it's fantastic, not just as a tumor detection tool, but as something like a structural detection tool and understanding where people could benefit, where people might truly be at risk. I think absolutely, absolutely. And have you heard, you may have heard like organoids.

1:05:08Do you know that? Yeah. I had Sergio Pasca on the podcast recently. He's one of the leaders in that space. Okay, great. Stanford. Yeah, we were postdocs together, building assembloids and organoids to test neurons and other responses in a dish, basically. That's right. So in theory, you could have a patient derived organoid that is mini Huberman in a Petri dish or mini biology in a Petri dish. And then I could, you know, it's amazing how much that cell culture will sort of predict about your own physiological response, but it's only the thing in the Petri dish that is taking the hit, like an allergic response.

1:05:44It's not 100%, of course, but it's like a proxy for you. And the same way that like the pharmacogenomic lookup is like a proxy before your main body takes it, just like you're saying, injected in my knee, injected in my arm, but not like the main stuff, right? Like, so this is less precious tissue that can kind of, you know, be a proxy for yourself, the organoid, before it goes into, right? I love that. I'll tell you, you know, I mean, it brought to mind kind of a chuckle in my head where, you know, it's so crazy if someone goes in for an allergen test, right? They like rub the thing on them. It's like, I mean, it's okay.

1:06:16It's low level, but it's kind of tedious and it doesn't allow you to implement over time. Like if some new allergen comes on or some new detection test, you want all that run. You don't want to go in. I mean, we're finally getting to the point where you don't have to like go to an office quite as much. People, you know, by the remote phlebotomist. I wonder what your thoughts are and why this space tends to stumble and stagger along for so long. And then like we get these so-called breakthroughs, right? I mean, Ozempic Monjaro, the GLP peptides have been known about for a very long time. And we're in the niche communities of bodybuilding and fitness and all that.

1:06:52And then it broke through. There are other things. I think pinealine is going to be very important. I think for people who want to increase testosterone rather than taking testosterone, people will be taking peptides like gonadalrelin, which support the hypothalamic pituitary axis more generally. Don't shut down hormone production. I mean, it's just wild how we feel like the kit is basically, you know, like pharmaceuticals, which don't give you much control over in space and time, but existing pharmaceuticals are, they'll get you someplace. I think of this kind of like my buddy, Peter Atiyah, right?

1:07:27because he comes from medicine and he was trained at Stanford. He has more of a, he'll use some supplements and talk about them a little bit. He's really a behaviors and drugs guy, right? Like if you really, like if you look at what he said, like I'm not gonna speak for him. Yeah, it's just his training is in prescription drugs. He always says, you know, it's been tested, BPC-157 for joints and recovery. Anyone that's taken it either got a very strong placebo effect or can just tell you somehow it works. Maybe it's placebo, maybe it's not. But Peter is like, I don't know about BBC 157. It's not FDA.

1:07:59Like there's no trials on it. I feel comfortable taking it, trying it. So how do we bridge this space so that it becomes formalized? Because I think that there's a huge opportunity here, but someone's got to take it and run with it. And I don't know anyone that's like the, that's really doing that. What's that? Okay, say what you're going to say and I'll say something. Yeah, I mean, I like to see when people build structures. So I, not to go off on too long of a riff here, but, you know, I started talking about health practices during the pandemic. Then I started my podcast and I was like, look, there's a lot of information you can glean from science that can, you can use to benefit yourself.

1:08:36But, and I'm writing this book, it'll be out next year, not this September, but next September because I want to formalize that into the protocols. But I have to say like what Brian was doing with blueprint or what people are doing with function health or what or what peter atia is starting to do in these different people are trying to bring it together under single platforms so that you don't have to do so much people don't have to do so much work running around trying to figure out what to do um but it's still very piecemeal it feels to me like um there should be a front gate where you go in they take blood they take a skin sample they build an organoid you get a couple devices and then you just live life for a while you get feedback, update, live life, update.

1:09:25I don't think we're even close to there because - But we could get there. We absolutely could get there. And I just want to know what's the next step in, let's say the next six months, 12 months, year to get to that platform, because I'm excited about what you're saying, but I worry that we're just going to go adrift as a health field. Okay. So here is what I propose. So first is we write the spec for like literally, let's say it's an AI prompt, okay, for everything that the ideal human health zone would have. So let me just enumerate some of the things you mentioned. There's the patches, there's the glasses, there's the opening of the curtains and the cortisol spike in the morning, cold water workout, and then shut down dark nights at night.

1:10:14There's also the diet. It's not hamburgers and stuff like that. It's, you know, like healthier foods. There is the other kinds of devices, whether it's like, you know, watches for like fit, you know, like step tracking. And so there's a zillion quantified self gizmos. There's peptides like Manjaro and GLPs. There's supplements. So there's creatine, vitamin D, magnesium. Um, there's, uh, there's a bunch of other stuff that we mentioned, but that, that covers, that covers several pieces of it. Right. And goal directed. And the psychology piece would be sort of where, where people would identify one or two pain points, either work, focus, pain points, relational pain points, and you'd have real experts that could handle that quickly.

1:11:04I mean, there's a whole conversation to be had about the kind of the, the psychedelic space, like, you know, which either seems to rescue entrepreneurs and founders or collapse them. Or, yeah, collapse them. Yeah, exactly. Or collapse them. You have to acknowledge it. Think of one shot them. You can do too much, too many psychedelics. Yes. And for some people, too many psychedelics means one journey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a high risk thing for some people. And some people benefit from them tremendously. You know, on the podcast today, I have Chris Hoffman Cox. That's where the, I bet pharmacogenom.

1:11:31Yeah, sorry. Who's the consciousness guy? And he talks about his experiences on DMT, fundamentally shifting how he thinks about consciousness and evolving his work but he's a guy who did it once and is still thinking about that five years later and updating his research i mean christoph is one of the leaders in the research on consciousness for over 30 years you know i've seen a lot of people collapse themselves with psychedelics so i'm not suggesting that but where people have pain points and hang-ups and psychological hang-ups they need to not have to go to a retreat um and be able to work on that i mean I think that that would be integrated into the space as well.

1:12:09Yes. So by the way, the pharmacogenomic point could be helpful there as well because you might be able to predict which people would have a bad reaction versus which could tolerate it for psychedelics, for all kinds of things. But so my thought is here's a possible line of attack. A, let's figure out what the ideal is, like the magic wand kind of thing, right? You have – you've been elected president of this network state in a – what I call a techno-democratic election, meaning you have on-chain votes that are recorded. So you have 1 ,000, 10 ,000 people that are recorded. You have authority to do – OK, fine.

1:12:43So you can – or you're just building the community from scratch. You're like a real estate developer or some combination. All right? So you've laid out everything, and so what does it look like? And so we have all that. Then we make a video, like just a short, of what a day in the life looks like. And we pause and freeze frame. And when you see a patch kind of thing, for example, on someone's neck or below someone's shirt, we pause and we show citation, citation, citation, citation, citation, citation. Because you and I both, you know, it's hard sci-fi. This is not impossible stuff. It's just system integration of things where, in many cases, you point out they've been around for some time.

1:13:22Creatine's been around for some time, obviously. The GLPs have been around for some time. The patches. More than 10 years ago, I had seen the noninvasive patches, and it's just kind of been hard to get them out into the public for various regulatory reasons. So we take all this stuff, you know, for example, there's treatments to reverse aging in mice that, you know, there's amazing phenotypes where, like, you've got old, bald, you know, mice over here. and then like a sleek mouse and they're both two years old and, you know, there's cancer drugs that show like reversing graying of hair, right?

1:13:51So we take all, we freeze frame and we show sight, sight, sight, sight, sight, like pops out, you know, like this, right? So it's like suspension, disbelief. Then like the movie kind of continues. And then we basically have something which says to a regulator in the UAE, in lots of small countries, by the way, this is the secret, I think. The thesis, antithesis, synthesis. OK, FDA holds back a lot of things, but the antithesis is you want some form of regulation, some form of quality control. Right. The synthesis, I think, is lots of small sovereigns, which are still states and legitimately can enforce rules, could set up their own biotech free zones and have people like you or Peter Atiyah or Brian johnson plus traditional mds or what have you as a panel as you're mentioning earlier that just review stuff for that sovereign and then they have a trade-off between okay maybe they'll get some flack but maybe this is a really promising new treatment maybe it's uh like like stool transplants for example sound weird but they are good oh the data are really impressive as are uh you know transfusions of young to old blood.

1:15:07Parabiosis. Oh, a former postdoc of mine went to go work for my colleague, Tony Weiss-Corey's company, which Tony was the first person to talk about transfusions, the baby blood stuff and parabiosis-ing animals. And it's remarkable. They're now looking at this for improvement of vision, reversing blinding diseases. I mean, the data are still incoming, me, but it's spectacular. The mouse data are spectacular. The human data are promising. And I love this. I mean, if you tell me how to implement this, I'm game, right? I think you're going to tell me that this is going to be linked to the crypto community, right?

1:15:48At some level. Here's why. Here's why. The reason is crypto is risk capital, right? There's billions and billions and billions of dollars in crypto. I mean, I think there's a deep similarity here, which is it is I've heard of Desai, D-E-S-A. Okay, right. So that's like crypto funding science outside the system, right? So it's like still technical people, but they're willing to go and add up all the numbers outside the academic masthead, for example. And just like crypto has billions, trillions of dollars of value outside Wall Street, right? In a way that's open to everyone, not just those people in, I mean, it's still something which impresses the best people on Wall Street, especially today.

1:16:36So similarly with DeSci, you know, a few things that I think are coming, like the crypto plus science movement. One is turning people from patients into active participants in their own health. They're not just like - to that. I absolutely love that. I mean, the, the, you know, hospitals are depressing places, even for the physicians that work there. I mean, it's just like, there's some beautiful hospitals like Stanford has built this incredible hospital. Actually, Mark and Laura. Yeah, they undoubtedly the emergency children's hospital, right? They created that. I mean, they, they made that possible.

1:17:12Beautiful hospitals exist, but no one, no one wants to go to a hospital. People care about their health and there's nothing in between. Um, and this is sounding kind of, you know, cliche nowadays, but, uh, to say it, but, um, between, you know, sickness care and, and not seeing your doctor, there's not a lot of pro healthcare and you get those silly posters, like, you know, here are the food groups and like, here's how you move. Like none of that stuff works. None of it works. Exactly. Well, that's the thing. That's why I like what you and, I mean, in a sense, you know, 10 years ago, I remember realizing that fitness and beauty were the back door to health and medicine.

1:17:54And the reason is people will actually pay cash out of pocket for fitness and beauty to get better. And then in that you can sneak in all of the medical and health lessons and so on to like improve from their baseline as opposed to waiting until something is broke and then fixing it which is the traditional medical system and it does very little for you after you know like like something i mean it can maybe get you back to normal but then there's no interest in making you better than normal right well have you noticed that the uh if you look historically like there are these three main very disparate communities from which every new health technology besides standard drug discovery.

1:18:38Let me guess bro science. Okay. What are the other ones that you guess? Let's, was that one of them? Yeah. Well, yeah, I was going to say, you know, no one wants to admit this, but it's like bodybuilding plastic surgery and, uh, and academic science. Those three communities couldn't be more different from one another. Right. And yet the bodybuilders learn to use nutrition and hormone augmentation and training let's say training nutrition it's bro science right and they took it to the extremes but then and then the aesthetic whatever community um korea my goal is to be the last person in los angeles where i currently live now that hasn't gotten botox or anything i'm i'm graying and like i chose to not do that i don't just you're a distinguished gray i think i don't you know i just sort of i don't dye my hair i just decided you know to see what you know i can't say i never will embrace that community.

1:19:33But I have a friend, Jason Diamond, who's like, he's one of the like premier plastic surgeons. And it's interesting because that community does all this stuff of like moving fat from here to there and a little bit of this and a little bit of the nip-tuck thing, as they say. And then the academic community embraces real mechanisms and discovery. But I had to see a lot of my colleagues get sick and some die and many look, getting what we call the tenured look, where they're like five years after they start, you're like, what happened to you? A lot of founders experienced this too because it's intense.

1:20:05But all kidding aside, the people in the sleep science community at Stanford were the ones that back in the mid 90s, I would like demand and a guy named Emmanuel Mignon who discovered the genes and mechanisms of narcolepsy. Every day, the laboratory would migrate outside to get sunlight before going back in for the latter half of the day's work. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, you're setting your circadian rhythm. This will give you energy the next morning. And this is an MD, PhD. He was a Howard Hughes investigator at one point. I'm thinking like, these are smart people, right?

1:20:37And I'm like, why don't we know this stuff? He's like, oh, all the data are in mice. You can't get people to do this stuff consistently. And I thought, this is crazy. These are some of the most powerful mechanisms. Circadian biology is one of the most powerful aspects to our daily living. No one escapes circadian biology. It shapes our health. It shapes our illness. And we can work with it. and I thought to myself, gosh, somebody needs to bridge these things. I always enjoyed resistance training and running. I like to run. I'm not a great runner, but I'm an avid runner, as they say. And so I realized that what we're trying to do and what the podcast community is trying to do, what Atiyah is trying to do, what I'm trying to do, what Matt Walker is trying to do, what Brian's doing, and clearly what you're trying to do is create this fourth category that respects the view that some of that stuff is pretty extreme, but that it's not very, you can't implement it.

1:21:29Like bodybuilding is not applicable to most people, but certain pieces of it are. Extreme endurance training isn't, but certain pieces of it are. The aesthetic thing is not, but certain pieces are. And academic science is applicable. Not all of it, but certain pieces are. And that's where I was like, okay, I bridged two of these three silos. I'm going to get out there and start messaging about it. And I love the idea of establishing a community. Here's my one concern that I would love for you to explain how we get our heads around. The moment you get a person in charge of a community, they're called a guru or a cult leader.

1:22:05Unless they're a president. So I've got actually, go ahead, finish your saying it. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm only half kidding here, but you know, like sometimes the messaging can get contorted from the outside in a way that's very, that pulls the thing down from below. I'm not what people say. I'm worried about people not receiving the critical messaging or having the opportunity to implement this stuff because the moment it's under the rubric of someone's name, typically we get these cult images, right? Totally, totally, totally. So I've got a few thoughts on that. So first is the same technology that you can use to send one Bitcoin on chain, you can actually use to record one vote.

1:22:44It's like the debit and credit category. And in such a way that it's cryptographically provable that they made the vote, who did it, when they did it, which wallet they did it from, who they voted for, and so on and so forth. Basically, I can get to details, but at a high level, you can see how that's true, right? Cool. So what we can do is we can actually have binding on-chain plebiscites in the same way we have binding on-chain transactions. and the amazing thing about cryptocurrency is it transacts across borders like that say a japanese person can pay a brazilian who can pay a frenchman and so on and so forth and that just works it's all internet and the fact that they have three different national currencies doesn't matter with techno democracy and i can i can share that video with you afterwards We extend that so that you can now basically hold an election, a genuine election on chain, and a Japanese person, a Brazilian, and a French person can all vote for you as Andrew Heurman, president of a startup society.

1:23:49And that vote is what I call the social smart contract. They're literally signing a smart contract that is also a social contract. And it says you're basically collecting a thumbs up from a bunch of crypto wallets. But a crypto wallet is a much more powerful thing than people realize because today it's upstream of like funds and, you know, like your like money and messaging. Like it's upstream of like access to a discord or to a to a crypto wallet, which is money. That's real. But tomorrow it's upstream of drones or or doors like like crypto wallets can open doors like because they're keys. They can turn locks.

1:24:25They can turn on machines. They could turn on sequencing devices. They could unlock data stores. Crypto wallets can do a lot of things. They're basically just very powerful data structures, right? And so if you have hundreds or thousands or millions of crypto wallets that are all voting for something, that's like the formation of a digital state. It is crowdfunding, basically, right? You can do a lot with that. It's a very, very general concept. and the formation of it can be shown to be a million consensual actions, uncoerced, of people's own free will, right? It's like a streaming vote because they can all come in one at a time and you can build up that following over time, right?

1:25:02Okay. So because of that, that's a mechanism to become president, legitimately president of a network state because you're actually winning a vote of their own free will there, right? And so we take the same concepts of democracy, Just like sort of the internet reclaimed free speech. It was in Touch and Go, and they kind of pulled it back, and we kind of reclaimed free speech. We can reclaim democracy. So that's one big piece. OK? And the second piece is I agree with you. Like one of the things about network states or societies is you want to be minimal necessary individual. So you publish a blueprint.

1:25:41And I know Brian has actually used the term blueprint, right? So call it blueprint in the small b sense. OK, you publish a blueprint and you're just doing the first one to show that it works. You're doing a template and you publish a template. Why? Because I know and, you know, we don't have all the answers and then let other people copy and fork it just like an open source kind of blueprint. We actually have the architectural diagrams there and the, you know, all the kind of stuff. Right. So I think that is my answer to obviating or addressing those two correct points that you mentioned, which are A, we have legitimacy because it's provable.

1:26:17and B, we have decentralization, so it's not personal. Great. I love it. It helps me envision a number of ways that we could try and scale the protocols, as we refer to them. Yes. Because that's ultimately what I want to do. You know, as I'm half kidding, I decided to write a book called Protocols, a user manual for the human brain and body, and was going to release it this month, and then decided, well, I want to put illustrations so that people can really put this stuff into a framework. Visuals make a big... But if you think about how clunky... I know, it's so clunky. It's so old school when you really think about the approach.

1:26:53And yet, books and podcasts and social media are largely the best tools that we have at this point. Traditional media has a partial but diminishing role in this, right? Although, I will say it's kind of interesting. I went on Bill Maher a few weeks ago. We had a discussion about public health and health practices, alcohol, sunlight, et cetera. and it's interesting to see some of these media channels that i think bills kind of sit somewhere in the middle between extreme right and extreme left um yeah basically right i mean he's interesting and you know the the surge in in new in new audience from that was tremendous and so i think there's a i anticipate at least in the next 24 months a growing role for um new forms of traditional media, if you will.

1:27:41People who are not like not CNN, New York times versus Fox, right. Um, but things in between, even if they're linked to some of those networks, maybe the new Barry Weiss, maybe the free press is a great example of that. I think we're going to see more of that. And yet if you, okay. So if you add that in plus books, plus podcasts, plus social media, that the, uh, integrated implementation of all of this requires what you're describing. So I'm super excited about it. So I'm super excited about what I'm hearing. I'm learning during this podcast, which is awesome. You got it. And just exactly. So we have all of these internet innovations and we want to package them together in the physical world.

1:28:22And so you just need like a relatively small piece of real estate to actually do that. And a bunch of people who will opt in. So for example, you know, my friends at Coinbase just set up something they call Basecamp, which is a pop-up, like a pop-up village where you can use Coinbase technologies to pay and do contracts and stuff like that. Oh, good. I purchased Bitcoin on Coinbase this morning. Great. Okay. That's the only place where I purchased my crypto. So, uh, okay. Well, but, but bring it locally or you get, get, get it to your local wallet and so on. So I love Coinbase, but they'll also tell you that.

1:28:54So, um, the, so Coinbase has Basecamp. This is, this is a term we call a pop-up, right? Because doing like a full real estate buildup like we've done in network school is like a significant commitment. But we could have the Huberman Health Village pop-up here at network school if you want to do that. And we just have whatever thousand square feet or tens of thousands of square feet. And we go through a bunch of your old podcasts. And we just have a clip of you saying something. And boom, we immediately cut to the implementation of that in the physical world, right? Like the IoT curtains or something like that, right?

1:29:29Or you say magnesium and we've got the shelves with magnesium supplements in every room. Just like imagine 50 clips like that where you're basically projecting all your concepts system integrated into the physical world. And the same way like an iPhone integrates a camera and it integrates an accelerometer and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And the reason for this is you have a formula and you have managed to probably get an N of 1 implementation of that that works for you. Mm-hmm. But with some thought, you can probably scale that for others because they're not going to be as skilled and balancing it and setting it all up in such a way.

1:30:06Yeah, I mean, that's what the book is. It's trying to explain to people what they can do in order of descending importance. That's right. But just as a small example, bulk orders of magnesium or creatine, they're not that expensive, but you can get bulk discounts on many different kinds of things, right? So a bunch of people doing them together. And what's cool about this is then people, you know, they come in and, you know, 30 days later after the human health zone, right, or whatever you want to call it, their skin is glowing. Their eyes are light. They've, you know, you show the sleep tracker.

1:30:41Actually, you know what? We could even do like a traditional academic study where we show their metrics and stuff beforehand, and then we show everything improving 30 or 60 days in. And ideally, it's like large effect size where it's just – you don't even have to do stats on it. It's just like, boom, square wave, right? And certain kinds of things are like that. Like you know the diabetes prevention program, the DPP? Are you familiar with that? Yes. That has like a very large effect size because they basically make everybody work out and eat vegetables and so on and so forth. Yeah, blood glucose regulation gets better.

1:31:16Yes, exactly. They lose like 10 % of body weight or some significant amount, which is a lot for a lot of people, right? So I think also this is something where once it's done on a small scale like that and we videotape the whole thing and that's content for the pod, right? Then like governments are like, whoa, this is awesome. I want to modify my city or a real estate of all versus I want to build a new real estate on this basis. So we built something which is both a cool experiment and demonstration in its own right. But it's meant to be a prototype and template for like healthy Huberman living around the world.

1:31:51Listen, I'm all for it. Let's do it. It sounds like it sounds like Singapore is the place to do it. Great place. Yes. U.S. would be would be very complicated. California would be especially complicated. I mean, regulations here are like absurd. And I say that as a lifetime Californian who lived through the fires, multiple earthquakes, including the 89. I mean, the way that things are constrained here. Actually, I read the book or listened to the book Abundance, you know, Ezra Klein's book. It's quite good in explaining why it's so hard to get things done in California. Singapore sounds like the place to do it.

1:32:26I love this because we also need reflections and data and feedback from not just males, but we need women, kids. A lot of my friends who are able are homeschooling their kids or in small collections. They have like other kids over and they like group homeschool their kids. And they're creating these environments of kids are wearing, you know, red lens, Roka glasses in the evening. They're off devices at night. They're, it's very controlled. They're eating really good food. They're getting their proteins, that are essential fatty acids. They're getting sunlight there. You know, this is what you're trying to recreate.

1:33:02Uh, it sounds like one is trying to recreate, excuse me, something like from the seventies and eighties and nineties, but actually it's taking the best of that, integrating it with devices and with modern nutrition and supplementation traditional. Yeah. It's not, it's not trying to go back to the wonder years. Only a few people will get that reference, you know, but it's trying to integrate that era of, of growing up as a teen or a young kid with what we now know from modern science, which is clearly going to extend life lifespan, clearly going to improve brain development, clearly going to set those kids apart in ways that none of us can predict.

1:33:42And it's not just, and of course they use their devices. They love their device. All these kids are into like roadblocks and all the other stuff that other kids are into, but it's a controlled environment. And they come to learn that that environment of different things at different times of day, other things not at certain times of day or night is normal. Is better for their health. It's normal, right? Yes, that's right. Exactly. And there's two or three other parts of this that we touched on that I wanted to say. One is everybody there is an active participant in their own health rather than just a passive row in a table, right?

1:34:16And so the concept of adaptive clinical trials, right? Like where basically you don't have to, you know, the entire, you know, what's funny is I actually think we need to do case control studies on case control studies. We need to do regulatory science on regulators. And what I mean by that is like many things, I mean, most things in software and hardware, I mean, SpaceX was not developed via case control studies. Those are only for teasing out a small effect size. It's not obvious to the visible eye. And iteration is, you know, for example, when you try and find a software bug, you have a thesis on it, and you do iteration, you do get bisect.

1:34:55There's other mechanisms to try to find, like, what piece of code had the effect on the outcome, right? And so a case-controlled study and case-controlled studies means, for example, you have one jurisdiction that only uses that method to try to find new medical discoveries. And if you have another one that actually uses the older method, you know, like Banting and Best from, like, the 1920s? So the way they discovered that insulin worked, I mean, they won a Nobel Prize. And the way they did it was they first they had a theory. Then they tested on dogs. Then they tested on themselves. Then they tested on volunteers.

1:35:34And then, you know, they had patients just like literally jump out of bed, like true bench to bedside, like they walk over with the bubbling beaker, you know. and that was something where from 1921 they had the idea about 1923 scale production by eli lily for the entire north american continent and they won the noble prize that was when pharma moved at the speed of software because they could iterate also they could change formulation you know all this kind of stuff that requires crazy fda review to go from you know like injectable to oral to patch to this that and other they could just that's like you know mobile client desktop client you know command line client they could just edit the formulation edit the dosage titrate this that and just look and see if it works and just do it by feel because the effect size was large enough that they could see it right that was when of course there were patent medicines and scams and so on and so forth but that was also when lots of the wonder drugs were developed which is why which fds acknowledged by grandfathering all kinds of drugs before the modern era and in many ways i think we're going back to that time right so there will be more downside there will be more things that don't work.

1:36:37There'll be a lot more miraculous things that really, really work. And on balance, these things scale because they get replicated billions of times and the failures happen usually once, right? So that is kind of the vision for what these health zones would be. And obviously, no one's going to force you to take a treatment, but you could go in and you could be the first one, the first 10, the first 100, the first 1 ,000. Also, one thing I think is those people who are very early adopters, we should give them the equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom because people go and they die in the military.

1:37:10They die bungee jumping. They die skydiving. They die in sort of foolhardy things. They take risks that don't benefit anybody. But those people who are like the first to try some treatment that could benefit a lot of people should be honored. And, you know, like even if it doesn't work out for them, all their bills are paid and so on and so forth because, you know, it's like a thing they're doing for humanity. You know what I mean? Like we have to change. I totally agree. movies on this go ahead i totally agree i and you know hopefully no one will die um but sure it's fair that you have some people will come to it rather late you know i've had people reach out who came to some of the protocols in the podcast that i cover on the podcast and elsewhere in their 80s oh wow and and feel now some of them were already exercising some were doing better that's the other category that i forgot to mention earlier that of people in the academic community who will reach out and say, hey, listen, you know, the sunlight thing or the, you know, rarely it's the creatine thing, but the, you know, exercise thing has been transformative.

1:38:10What we forget sometimes is that if people are, if you can get people to sleep better, like basically you have a friend for life, right? If people can lose weight where they haven't been able to lose weight previously or feel more vigor, I think that creates a buy-in of the very best kind, right? Because they own the tools inside them at that point. I love the idea of building this community. I would really like to discuss further, presumably offline, how we start to implement that. And I love the overlap with the crypto community. I mean, I know very little about crypto, but I've started to invest in crypto more in the last year or so.

1:38:52Although I had started back in 2020. crypto loves Huberman by a crypto will fund all kinds of human and human grad student human disciple type things has risk capital that loves your style great well Huberman loves crypto because it's uh you know early on a very very smart I shouldn't name him a very successful entrepreneur um from the bay area Stanford grad told me to start investing whatever in some percentage of my investable income in crypto. And that was back in 2017. I didn't listen until 2020. But look, it's clear that this is here to stay. In the same way, I feel it has a lot of semblance to like what we saw, like these bro signs bodybuilding communities.

1:39:37Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, if we had a dollar for every woman, let's just say women who have no interest in lifting weights, who is now injecting Ozempic or Monjaro or asking about peptides, we'd be extremely wealthy. So these things, whatever's crazy now is going to be in the main frame in five to 10 years, maybe less. Breath work made the cut. They just had to call it respiration physiology. We and others published some clinical trials. Okay, meditation. Now everyone knows if you actually take the time to meditate, like has benefits. You know, it took so long and people were attacked, viciously attacked.

1:40:16Mystics, counterculture, kick. I mean, the whole, and sometimes it's because of the merge of these things with kind of like drugs and sex and other things that can cause some like scandals and issues, but, or deaths, right? But I think if we really step back, we put on our rational minds for a moment, people realize like there's, there's great things to be pulled from these different communities, including academic science, but that we've hit a, we've hit a roadblock now. We're really at a, at a place where we need the sorts of communities that you're talking about. We need high fluency, high throughput, mechanisms to fund and try things and, and iterate.

1:40:51And I love it. I I'm all on board. I didn't expect this is where the conversation was going to go, but I'm super excited. Amazing. Great. And we can take your men into the physical world. You know, I I'll ask one last thing. This is just a, maybe you're already on this and I haven't seen the pods on it and so on. I do think it might be interesting for you to look at, um, traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Indian medicine like Ayurveda and so on. So like acupuncture, Ayurveda, yoga, meditation, and so on and so forth. The reason I say that is, for example, with acupuncture, you know, I wasn't like a believer in acupuncture because I was like an allopathic, you know, Western, whatever kind of guy.

1:41:32And then, you know, I had some like, you know, like wrist issue, like my wrist was sore for, you know, because like from an old lacrosse injury or what have you. and this is many many years ago like and then i uh i got some acupuncture and what was remarkable was the needles were like in like my leg or something like that and amazingly i moved my like right arm or like right wrist like this and i could see that needle twinge but if i moved my left wrist it didn't twinge so there is something to this concept of like the meridians or what have you, there is like a wiring diagram for the body. They are onto something, you know, and I was like, oh, wow, that's kind of interesting.

1:42:19Right. And so I feel like there's, you know, with the rise of China, the rise of India, there's that seems like an interesting set of topics that I bet would expand your audience and people might be interested in looking at that. It's something to think about. Yeah. So we touched on it, but probably too lightly and we should go full on into it. And one of the interesting things about being a public health educator, who's also a scientist at a university like Stanford, is I've had to be thoughtful about which topics I embrace when to establish, you know, it's less about credibility. It's credibility, but it's more to give people a sense of how I approach something.

1:42:59Totally. So for instance, so just a couple of things within the area that you're talking about. In 2017, I started a practice called Yoga Nidra, where you lie down, you do long exhale breathing. This was developed in India thousands of years ago. It literally translates to yoga sleep. And the state of mind you're trying to accomplish and that you soon learn to accomplish is one in which your brain is awake, but your body is very relaxed. There's only one other state of being that approximates that, and that's REM sleep, when the brain is very active and the body is essentially paralyzed. It's now been shown in a lot of studies to improve learning and memory, improve, basically reduce the latency to fall asleep or fall back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night, even if you do this during the daytime.

1:43:50It's been shown to improve outcomes for trauma, et cetera. I modified it and called it something called non-sleep deep rest or NSDR. I removed the intentions. I removed any kind of mention of anything mystic or the chakras, etc. And I caught some heat from the traditional yoga nidra community, understandably so. But the goal was when you call it non-sleep deep rest, you immediately know what it is. Look, it's not a nap because here's the thing. Naps will disrupt your nighttime sleep. They create sleep inertia. Non-sleep deep rest and yoga nidra improve your sleep at night. Meditation is designed to relax you.

1:44:28NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, is designed to replenish your mental and physical vigor. And hypnosis is designed to modify your brain in a certain way. This is just designed to let you self-direct your own relaxation while being awake. It has profound positive effects on cognition, sleep, and everything else. But if I called it yoga nidra, people go like, all right, that sounds kind of crazy does it require but meditation i don't really okay acupuncture breathing acu right acupuncture for many years acupuncture was considered kind of like medicine by in the west chufu ma's lab at harvard medical school um chufu is a is a very serious neurobiologist trained um and published beautiful papers in science nature etc on the nociceptive pain system and as his name suggests, he's Chinese.

1:45:21So at some point, he decided to explore what insertion of these different needles at different locations in the body would do for things like cytokine release, inflammation, norepinephrine, dopamine, and other catecholamines. What he found was that different combinations of entry sites of these needles create very different outputs from the different glands of the body, but that there's a systematic map. and so and some of these have been published i realize it's been published yeah in science these were mouse studies but they're starting to move into other areas and they use electro acupuncture so they'll do some stimulation of the nerves at those locations but you know we know from experimental neuroscience that pressure uh can activate nerve pathways so i absolutely believe that one of the the most important things for modern medicine to do is to take the maps of the body from Eastern medicine, to take the maps, even like this notion of the chakras, this idea that, you know, from our neck down to about our pelvis, we have our sympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic chain ganglia, chains of neurons that activate glands and other features in our body, organs in our body, through the deployment of different transmitters.

1:46:32And we know that at different locations along the sympathetic chain ganglia, they innervate different organs. And here, the acupuncturists and those that talk about chakras, I've been talking for a long time about opening up, they call them in yoga, the bond dust that they're essentially sphincters. You know, you don't just have a sphincter in your, your butt and your mouth, right? You have them in your throat. You have them all along your digestive tract. We're a tube. And so what labs like Chufu's are starting to do is trying to say, like, what is the conglomerate of nerve and gland and, um, and vascular, uh, features at different locations along the sympathetic chain ganglia?

1:47:09How do those relate to activation of different releases of different hormones? And again, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to unpack this, but I think we can safely say that Ayurveda and Eastern medicine have figured out systematic maps. They don't know the mechanisms by which insertions of needles at this site and that site create, on average, a particular outcome. Now you get people, and I won't even name them because they're so obnoxious um you get certain people especially on x in the traditional medical community who love to um throw shade as the kids say on things like ayurveda because and they'll cite some instances in which you know some herbal like like lead um um contaminated turmeric killed a patient and like that's the wrong way to speak about this case we should I would always be asking, you know, at the one end of brain plasticity, meaning you have curiosity, is brain plasticity.

1:48:07That's the window to brain plasticity. At the other end, you have cynicism. When you get, you know, the more cynical you are, the less plasticity you have. So if I hear a cynical doctor, I tune out. What I am absolutely convinced of, based on the Chufu Ma data, and the experience with Yoga Nidra, which non-sleep deep rest, and now the clinical trials in the US that are being done there, everything we know about meditation breath work aka respiration physiology is now becoming a big thing even if it's just about sleep apnea is that we have to look at these systematic maps through the lens of what we understand about mechanism and we are going to find a it's already a treasure trove of actionable advice that is very likely to be mostly behavioral in nature but also So the Chinese herbal thing is incredible in terms of the sleep science, what they have access to in terms of the acupuncturists understand about ways to improve sleep.

1:49:02Spectacular. And on and on and on. So I'm totally on board. But we need really good scientists unpacking this stuff. That's right. So basically now that we've got a lot of people of Indian or Chinese descent that are also trained in Western medicine. Like chief food. Yeah. Like chief food. Exactly. That's right. And my view on this is also, just as you said, like imagine somebody who was making a potion in the Middle Ages and they had 10 ingredients and the potion worked. And now from today's vantage point, we would know that, OK, this one was the active ingredient. The other nine were just, you know, like the superstitious part or what have you.

1:49:42Right. But the potion did work. Right. Right. And so that's sort of how I think about a lot of this stuff, where if it's survived through the ages, there's like some underlying physics or biology or biochemistry or what have you, you know, neurophysiology, whatever you want to call it. That probably means the thing works. And then you might be able to abstract out what the active ingredient is. For example, you mentioned electroacupuncture. This is actually some of the most exciting work in the realm of psychedelics. There's a laboratory at UC Davis trying to remove the psychedelic experience from psychedelics.

1:50:17There is this theory that what they do is they open brain plasticity in the weeks following the experience. And there's this question whether or not the actual experience that you have on a psychedelic is necessary to activate the plasticity window. And so there's this whole category of drugs that's going to be developed, which is basically extracting the neuroplasticity inducing effects of psychedelics without the psychedelic journey. So these are plasticity drugs without the mystic psychedelic experience. Now, the people who are kind of anchored to the history of psychedelics will say, no, you need the journey.

1:50:50You need the anxiety. You have to embrace it. And you can say, OK, fine. But what about kids? You're not going to send them into that. What about people who have a predisposition to psychosis or bipolar disorder? You're not going to send them off to do psychedelics. That would be completely irresponsible. So we're starting to see like ketamine broke through. Ketamine works very similarly to PCP. It's a dissociative anesthetic, works on the NMDA receptor. But when it was PCP, everyone was like terrified. Ketamine is different, but similar enough. So, you know, it's sort of like Manjaro bodybuilding peptides.

1:51:22It's like, you know, acupuncture, like where the re the naming is critical. It's funny. Even the addition of electro to acupuncture makes it a completely different beast to a lot of people just because of our bias towards like devices in the West. So, yeah, I mean, once again, I'll just say you're you're definitely peering into the future on this. And I love that you're parting the veil on it and inviting people in. I'm totally on board, totally on board. And I don't say that lightly because a lot of things where people like let's build a device. I'm like, ah, it's just like one more piece. It's not the thing that's really going to move everybody forward.

1:51:58So I'm, because you're talking about changing the whole community framework around medicine and healthcare. So I'm, I'm totally on board. Amazing. Great. And I'm looking forward to working with you. Let's discuss further offline and I'll pull together a spec and thanks for coming on the podcast. Great. Yeah. I can't wait to eventually meet in person. Come here you're invited here anytime to check out my my uh you know the human layer this is the other huberman lab there's the one at stanford there's the one at uh on that is the podcast and then there's the one i'm sitting in right now yeah amazing