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

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. The event consisted of a lecture entitled The Brain-Body Contract, followed by a question and answer session. We wanted to make sure that the question and answer session was available to everybody, regardless of who could attend in person. I also want to make sure to thank the sponsors of that event, which were AG1 and Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct, and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3°. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3°. With Eight Sleep, you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning, middle, and end of your night. It has a number of other features, like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep that you get, things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night's sleep for you. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for well over 2 years now, and it has greatly improved my sleep. I fall asleep far more quickly, I wake up far less often in the middle of the night, and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an Eight Sleep mattress cover. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I've been taking AG1 since 2012, so I'm delighted that they sponsored the live event. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day, is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health, and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkAG1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkAG1.com/huberman to claim that special offer. And now, without further ado, the question and answer session from our live event at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. I turn 70 soon. What's your best advice to keep my brain healthy in old age? Uh terrific question. The advice I would give to you as somebody about to reach 70 is the same advice I give to anybody, which is that essentially all of the things that improve cardiovascular health and perfusion of your bodily tissues are going to improve functionality of the brain. Um because, of course, the brain is a uh a rich consumer of fuel, requires very good portals to deliver those fuels, and that capillaries, microcapillaries, and arteries and so forth need to be clean and clear. That's the big one. This is why I think the prescription now is let's generally accepted, and here I'm borrowing from my friend Peter Attia, but about 150 or maybe as much as 200 minutes of so-called zone two cardio per week. Movement that you can just barely carry out a conversation um is going to be very useful. One thing that's often not discussed is that load-bearing exercise of some sort is going to be better provided your body can tolerate it, but you should do something that um you can do consistently over those long durations um without injuring yourself. But, there's a very interesting literature about how load-bearing movements actually generate the release of hormones. Yes, hormones from bone that actually cross the blood-brain barrier and may influence health of neurons in brain areas such as the hippocampus. And there I'm sort of extending from preclinical data in animals to humans, but there's some human data starting to emerge that that's true. It's also true, and there's a wonderful paper out just today or yesterday from Dr. Andy Galpin's lab and collaborators talking about how if you look at cognitive health, it's highly correlated with things that relate to strength. And that is not to say that you should just do strength training exercise, but we know that all people truly all people should be doing some sort of resistance training two or three times per week. You know, and we know that grip strength and increasing asymmetry in grip strength between the the two hands is one of the indicators of deficits in control from the brain out to the periphery and is correlated with cognitive decline. There's also some interesting data about how when our the feet become floppy and kind of flaccid or the lack of ability to extend one's toes. I'm still work I'm been wearing this toe spreader thing. Has anyone tried those? Those hurt. Those hurt. I broke this foot a bunch of times, but I'll tell you when you get better at spreading your toes, it's really exciting. And it's really exciting for several reasons. It's really exciting cuz there's more stability in your feet. You can run and move and do things better without pain. But in addition to that, believe it or not, just as one of the first things that they're going to do when you come into this world is scrape the bottom of your foot and look for the Babinski reflex, which is a neural transmission uh reflex as all reflexes are. Um but it's testing that essentially the health of the nervous system that over time, you know, again, there many correlates of dementia, many, many correlates of dementia, but a an inability to finally control the extremities is certainly one of them. So, um strength training, cardiovascular training, and these are kind of um stereotyped answers for for your question and yet those are really the prime movers against cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. And then of course there's you know I'd be remiss if I didn't throw in something that was a little bit more edgy cuz that's what I do. Um You know there are interesting data about the use of drugs to increase acetylcholine transmission, right? I mean I was visiting a Nobel Prize winner at Columbia to learn about his incredible work some years ago and saw that he chewed no fewer than five pieces of Nicorette gum, something I don't recommend, during this short meeting. And I said, "What is this all about?" He said, "Well, you know, I don't smoke anymore because I don't want lung cancer, but um you know, he said nicotine is you know, a protective against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's." I was like, "Well, how can that be?" And he said, "Well, you know, you decreases in neuro modulation and dopamine acetylcholine correlated with cognitive decline, keeping your brain sharp, and so on and so forth." So, I'm not encouraging people to take nicotine. It increases blood pressure, vasoconstriction, um but it's an interesting consideration, you know, some of the emerging cholinergic and dopaminergic drugs or ways to increase acetylcholine and dopamine are certainly intriguing. And I won't tell you who that person is, but his name is Richard Axel. Next question. Yeah. How can I optimize sleep while working 24-hour shifts as a firefighter? 24 hours on, 48 hours off. Okay, and this probably also pertains to new parents and it probably also pertains to anyone that's going through a particular particularly stressful time where you're micro-waking throughout the night, so not just firefighters. So, what do we know? We know based on really good data that shift work is bad for us. It's just bad. We're We're a diurnal species. We're not nocturnal, but thank you thank you thank you shift workers because you essentially keep us all safe and make the world go round and um and so we need you and we want you healthy. So one of the main things is that you can make sure that you stay on the same sleep wake schedule schedule excuse me for at least 2 weeks. It's the swing shift that's really the worst. You can tell your boss I said that and if they won't agree and you're doing this 24-hour on 24-hour off there a couple of things that are really important. First of all the main way to wake up your nervous system even though it might not feel like a triple espresso is going to be that light exposure to the eyes and if you can't get it from sunlight is going to be from any bright artificial light. I'm not a huge proponent of the daylight simulators are very expensive. You can simply buy a 900 Lux LED far more inexpensively. I don't have any relationship to any company that that sells these but you can find them on Amazon or wherever you you happen to prefer to purchase things um or you can just get really close to a bright light. Anytime you're trying to wake up even if you don't feel that it helps you wake up very much mostly for the melatonin suppression cuz bright light will very acutely suppress melatonin and then the real question from shift workers always seems to be should I catch up on sleep or is that going to be problematic? Should I just stay up into the next cycle? And the answer there is a little bit nuanced but the best answer I can give across the board is if this is a pattern that you're going to be in regularly over say months or years then get whatever sleep you can. Get whatever sleep you can. If it's something that you're doing somewhat acutely like you're traveling to Europe and you're just going to force yourselves to stay up a day and a half then in in that case I would say no need to to get the maximum amount of sleep just try and stay with the local schedule. We have an entire episode about shift work that somehow um maybe didn't get as much recognition as it should have for shift workers and we'll try and get it out in better form. We don't always succeed in you know top carding things in a way that gets them out to the most people. One thing I will say is an opportunity to announce that our website hubermanlab.com is completely revamped so it's highly searchable. We'll take you to exact timestamps and is and now you can segregate out timestamps from newsletters from all this stuff so thanks to a lot of effort by my amazing team you can now navigate that site with a with to real precision. So if you want to say ADHD Adderall kids yes no for instance it will take you to precise timestamps that will address those issues. Next question please. How does hypnosis therapy work? Well this is a um a very interesting topic to me because my colleague associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford David Spiegel is a world expert in hypnosis and its neural underpinnings and its use for clinical applications. Um his father was a hip hypnotist also a psychiatrist um and when people hear hypnotism they think of stage hypnotism and being you know up on stage and doing things you don't want to in front of other people but really it's when we're talking about clinical applications or wellness applications of hypnosis we're talking about self-directed hypnosis. I really wish there was a better name because it I don't think hypnosis is going to advance very far as a field frankly because everyone thinks hypnosis um and it's it would be like a psychedelics were just called drugs. Right? We were taught in the 80s that drugs are bad and that your brain on drugs looks like an omelet and that's bad. And if you like omelets that they're still bad and drugs drugs of abuse are bad and and actually I hope we can talk briefly about psychedelics at some point because I do think there's a little bit of a runaway train around the topic of psychedelics now. I think we need to be very careful how uh approach that entire landscape. But, hypnosis essentially works by allowing someone to place their own brain into this very unique state. Earlier, we were talking about neuroplasticity, and we talked about the fact that neuroplasticity involves intense focus followed by deep rest in the form of deep sleep or non-sleep deep rest, maybe even Rick Rubining it and just kind of like laying there. Hypnosis is different because hypnosis is in a state in which your focus is very narrow, the context is very narrow, but you're very, very relaxed. So, maybe the Rubin example of being brain active and body very still is a bit more like hypnosis, to be fair. Why would it be the case that David Spiegel and his dad have literally a tool that is approved by the psychiatric associa- the major American Psychiatric Association, where they can figure out how hypnotizable you are by having you look up and try and close your eyelids while continuing to look up, the so-called Spiegel eye roll test. Sounds pretty wacky, right? This is like Tik Tok level wacky. Well, the reason is you have cranial nerves, so they sit more or less near your neck, that allow you to direct your focus, your eyes upward, and then you have cranial nerves that have your eyes go down, and the ones that the cranial nerves that drive your eyes up are associated with alertness and eyes open, no surprise, and the cranial nerves that are associated with pointing your eyes down and closing your eyelids are associated with what? With drowsiness, sleep, and lack of alertness. They're sort of a push-pull in the autonomic nervous system. And Spiegel, Spiegel's daddy and him figured out, cuz they're geniuses, that if somebody can maintain upward gaze while closing their eyelids, two things happen. One, you'll see the whites of their eyes, and it's pretty creepy. Two, that means they're highly hypnotizable because that is a reflection of the probability that they can enter a brain state in which they are both very awake and very relaxed. Pretty cool. Now, if that sounds kind of wacky cuz you're just looking at the periphery, keep in mind that one of the primary entry points for diagnosing concussion is to shine a light in one eye and have that pupil constrict and then see whether or not the other pupil constricts. The so-called consensual pupillary reflex. Although, technically I've been bothered by this from day one. It should be called the non-consensual pupil reflex cuz the other eye doesn't have a choice if everything's working. In any case, if you have a hard hit to the head, you'll see that you shine light in one eye, pupil constricts, and the other one stays really dilated and then you go, "Okay, get this person to the emergency room." Because there's been a severing of the connections between the two sides of the brain. So, looking in the eyes and trying to deduce what might be happening more centrally within the caverns of the skull and the brain is not a new thing. It is a primary diagnostic tool in neurology. It's also how your parents knew that you were taking drugs when you came in the door cuz your pupils were like that big. And that reflects a difference in autonomic arousal. And basically stimulants makes people dilate their pupils. This is also why the story about belladonna, people intentionally dilating their pupils to trick people into thinking that they were attracted to them. Thought about this one a lot, too. It's like not a precursor to a good relationship. It's like someone's using their physiology to pretend that they're attracted so the other person thinks that they're attracted so that they might become attracted. Anyway, it's a recipe for failure, almost as bad as most of the dating apps. Well, I wouldn't know, I'm not on them, but from what I hear. Okay. So, where were we? Hypnosis. Um when you are in a state of elevated attention, but very relaxed, guess what? Neuroplasticity occurs much faster because you're essentially marrying the two states that are normally divorced, which are heightened levels of attention first, and then deep rest. You're essentially putting the nervous system into a more, I wouldn't call it hyperplastic state, but a more plastic state. And for people that are highly hypnotizable, the success rates at, for instance, smoking cessation, pain relief, are pretty impressive. Uh it's Spiegel Lab has published a number of these. So, I think self-hypnosis is is a very interesting tool. I just hope that they rename it so that it um stands a chance of getting off the ground. I mean, one of the things that you learn as a public-facing educator is that what things are called has a great impact on whether or not they achieve any kind of um use in the world. Hence, why I decided to um swallow the the difficult pill of um partially renaming Yoga Nidra as non-sleep deep rest. I don't like to do that. Yoga Nidra has more than a thousand-year history, but it's When people hear Yoga Nidra, unless they are very open-minded, they hear magic carpet. They hear levitation. And it's unfortunate, and that's not how I feel, but for years I talked about Yoga Nidra. It's so cool. It's like a sleep state, but it's not. I'm like, "Yeah, like Yoga Nidra, okay." And but if you come from a culture where that's discussed, they're all about it. And so, non-sleep deep rest, you know, I felt like, "All right, leave my name out of it. You know, I'll be dead eventually. I mean, I'm in this line of advisors, right? I'm like approaching 50. I'm like I'm like I'm winning in my my lineage, but should I be fortunate enough to, you know, live past, you know, bullet, cancer, or car crash far enough, then, you know, NSDR hopefully will persist, and I don't need a piece of it. It's just the hope is that people will learn to put themselves into brain states that can be adaptive for them. So, be nice if something someone could come up with something other than hypnosis. I think Spiegel would agree. Super interested in psychedelics as medicine, to be done with somebody with experience. Worried about unlocking mental health conditions. Yeah, you should be. Uh what does the research say and what are your thoughts? Okay. Um barbed wire question, we like that. Um psychedelics. Well, let's just back up a little bit and acknowledge one thing that's more important than psychedelics or any thing else when it comes to rewiring the brain, which is that ultimately rewiring of the brain is about shifts in neuromodulators. Dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine. And it's no coincidence that you know, SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have been one of the major entry points for attempts to treat things like depression over the last 20-30 years or more. Uh when I was in college, there was That's when the book Listening to Prozac came out, but prior to that, there's a long history of drugs prescription drugs in that case to change levels of neuromodulators like serotonin or acetylcholine or dopamine in an attempt to cure or treat a disease. But keep in mind, despite the varied success of SSRIs, a topic unto itself, that there's a strong belief and there has been for a long time that if SSRIs worked, it wasn't because the depressed brain is deficient in serotonin, but rather because increasing serotonin offered the opportunity to increase neuroplasticity. Right, so it's a different way of thinking about it. And that's a segue for saying that when you say psychedelics, that's a broad category of drugs. Nowadays, people even lump ketamine into the that, although technically it's not a psychedelic, but that the sort of classic, if you will, psychedelics are LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, and psilocybin, aka mushrooms, although it comes in other sources as well. Um the major effect of psilocybin is to stimulate a particular serotonin receptor which has elevated density in particular brain areas and indeed there are many recent clinical trials, many, let's just say, um, let's say 12 to 20 good sized clinical trials done in in diverse locations on the planet, many at Johns Hopkins and UCSF, some in Switzerland, showing that enhancing and here you notice I'm using the mechanistic language, enhancing the transmission of the release of serotonin and activating particular serotonin receptors leads to an opportunity for more what? Neuroplasticity. Now, I say it that way not to add a bunch of words to but because the real question is whether or not the experience that one has while under the influence of psychedelics is critical to the clinical outcome. Or a growing idea just as a hypothesis I think is equally interesting is that it's the serotonin itself and that the things you see, the things you hear, the things you experience are not relevant. Now, uh, I have some experience with psychedelics. I had a bad time on psychedelics as a teenager. I was also pretty wayward youth but I I I've had a bad trip on LSD. I I for years I was scared that people were going to dose me with LSD after that. It was so bad. Um, I think across the board we can say kids doing psychedelics just seems like a bad idea. Their brains are already hyperplastic. If you have a predisposition to bipolar type issues or schizophrenia, it can exacerbate those issues and certainly certainly certainly if you don't have adequate support in the form of somebody that can guide you through the sessions as well as the pre-sessions, which are not done with psychedelics, as well as the so-called integration afterwards, it can be a really slippery slope. I know examples of people really suffering in the aftermath of psychedelic journeys. Now, there are a few interesting points as well, and it wouldn't be fair if I didn't say that several, if not many individuals, who have had so-called treatment-resistant depression, at least in these clinical trials, have reported feeling far better after psilo- therapy, but that psilocybin therapy was done with several pre-sessions, then the psychedelic sessions, then several after sessions, and it's not always the case that things turn out well. So, I think it's early days. Um what is interesting, and I think important, is to recognize that psilocybin this and the structure of psilocybin is very similar to serotonin itself. Very similar. But it activates particular receptors. A lot of people don't realize how similar to serotonin it is. And that microdosing psilocybin, I should say the data on microdosing psilocybin, something that's increasingly popular, is not particularly uh compelling. It's not clear what it does. It's not clear if it's of at any of any use. And I think the danger here is that we end up in a situation, as we did with, frankly, with cannabis. And by the way, I'm not somebody who demonizes cannabis. I think it has its uses for certain people, but very high THC concentration cannabis can be a problem, especially with people that have a predisposition to psychosis. And anyone that tells you that cannabis isn't addictive, just say, "Great. Like, don't smoke weed for a week. Let's see how you do." Yeah. And let's go on a plane trip together, right? And how are you sleeping? And you know, so I think um the chronic cannabis users are starting to take note of some of the issues it causes. But again, there are some some clinical applications. Now, when it comes to the sort of the the um high-speed train psychedelics, like DMT and so that's far fewer far less data available there. And then MDMA assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of PTSD, there the data I think are more robust. I think we're likely to see legalization or at least decriminalization in the next few years, but keep in mind that MDMA is methylenedioxy methamphetamine. So for people that like dopaminergic states, it's a particularly compelling state to be in so much so that they could overindulge in MDMA and then there's the issues of purity and I could do a 5-hour podcast on this right now. So I think the important point is approach with caution. Kids, absolutely not. Um, and I think it's a an exciting landscape, very exciting. And whereas a discussion like the one we just had um, would would have gotten me fired a few years ago. I mean Stanford has big programs now, a lot of philanthropy, federal grants, and many laboratories focused on the study of psychedelics. Um, so you know, I would say stay tuned, um, but keep in mind that neuro- increasing neuromodulator levels very acutely, whether or not it's with a prescription drug or whether or not it's with psychedelics is really what lies at the heart of the recovery, the potential recovery I should say, or the negative effects that happen to occur in uh, anyone that that embarks on the psychedelic journey. Do people who meditate need less sleep than people who don't? Ooh. That's interesting. Well, we know that from a study by Wendy Suzuki who I believe if NYU made the right choice, and I think they did, is now the Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU. She ran a memory lab for a long time. She's She has data showing um, that even 10, I think it's 13, but as little as 10 minutes of meditation versus we sitting still, breathing, focusing on your breathing, directing one's attention to third eye center, etc. We don't have a third eye. The pineal is thought to be the third eye, but um, I don't know why people say it's a light-sensitive tissue deep in the brain, but maybe that's why they call it the third eye. But in any case, that type of practice has been shown to increase memory, focus, aka learning. But there's some interesting footnotes in those papers which point to the fact that when people meditate too close to bedtime, oftentimes they have trouble sleeping because basically meditation is a focusing exercise. It's a it's a perceptual exercise. I don't think meditation is anything mystical. It's a it's a self-directed shift in your perception. To what? To your interoception, to your internal state as opposed to anything beyond the confines of your skin. There's nothing mystical about that. And then in that state, your brain starts to generate patterns of activity that are distinct from when you're sharing your attention between what's going on internally and what's going out what's happening out in the world, right? I think we need to demystify what people have cloaked as mystical. And when I say cloaked, I don't think that the people that meditate for thousands of years thought that there was anything uh mystical about it, but sometimes what we experience there can feel mystical. So if you have trouble sleeping, I recommend doing some sort of deep some sort of non-sleep deep rest practice, like NSDR, aka yoga nidra. Although those are different. NSDR generally lacks the uh the intention piece. Um and the ones that I put into the world, we've stripped away the intentions and we've stripped away any kind of language that would make you think that there was uh some sort of um let's just say like cultural aspect to it, which again is is un is admittedly a bit unfair to the origin practice of yoga nidra, but the problem again is that in yoga nidra, you're going to be doing intentions and hearing language that for some people, not all, might divorce you from the the the wish to to do it. In any case, um non-sleep deep rest done at any time of day, but especially if you fall asleep in the middle of the night, is going to be useful for helping you fall back asleep. Whereas meditation, again, is going to enhance your level of focus. So, I don't think it's a good practice if you're if you have trouble sleeping. Now, to finally answer your question, if you meditate, can you afford to sleep less? My friend Matt Walker would say no. However, many of us can't sleep as much as we want to, and many of us are not like Matt where we can wake up without an alarm clock. Like, I'll just keep sleeping and sleeping. Unless I went to bed at like 8:00. This is actually interesting and there's an asymmetry to your sleep needs. If you go to bed, remember that old adage, you know, every hour before midnight is worth two after? Well, it turns out that for people that are meant to be early risers, going to bed at 8:00, you'll wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 feeling great. You go to bed at 11:00, you feel groggy and there were good reasons to explain that. But, Matt would say that you need your sleep, period. I'm more of the camp, based on my read of the data, and yes, we are allowed to disagree and still be friends. It's allowed. That In fact, Matt's going to do a series on sleep with our podcast, even though he has a terrific podcast of his own, uh where we will maybe debate a little bit of this, that there are ways that you can at least replace the feeling of wakefulness that you would have lost if you don't sleep enough. And for me, really, that's why NSDR became such a an attractive tool to do for 10 or 30 minutes each morning if I didn't sleep enough the night before. Um I first learned about yoga nidra actually at a diction recovery center, trauma recovery center in Florida in 2017. I have a friend, a super talented trauma therapist who is also treats addiction, that um I've sent many, many people to, and he has this kind of seemingly, you know, like wizard ability to um get people who have been addicts to not be addicts. And um one of the tools he uses is uh yoga nidra every morning for 30 minutes and eventually an hour, which seems like a lot, but then he also has these people wake up very early, maybe an hour before they would normally wake up and go into that liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. Now, my experience is that 10 to 20 minutes of NSDR yoga nidra is sufficient to offset uh some sleep loss and allow at least me to function and many people report the same. We have a study going with the sleep laboratory at Stanford to explore this in more depth and what I can tell you cuz I'm involved in some of this work is that there are several military units because they have no opportunity to get sleep because they're working that have to rely on tools like this in order to be able to function at their highest level. And I'm sure they will tell you as I will that they'd prefer to get 8 to 10 hours of sleep, but guess what? They can't. And so I think that's an important takeaway is that we don't get to pick how much we sleep. Unless you're going to be completely neurotic about your sleep hygiene, which makes you kind of a less interesting person in life is what I'm told. You know, going to bed at 8:00 is great like some or most of the time, but you got to stay up every once in a while. I mean, after they released Chimp Empire on Netflix, I discovered that NSDR is a very valuable tool because and by the way, Chimp Empire and and Succession have a lot of parallels. And if you watch one I sort of I interleave Chimp Empire Succession, Chimp Empire Succession you start to realize like woah, like we're pretty similar. And then you look at the world differently, I promise. Your podcast has positively changed the lives of so many people including me. How has it changed your life? Uh okay. Um wasn't expecting that one. Thank you, Samantha. Well, first of all, I mean as this little 11-year-old told me. I mean, this is this is essentially what I've done my whole life. Um I'm a fairly private person, believe it or not I'm pretty introverted. Uh I spend a lot of time alone. Um and I think that's required for me to you know I basically have four modes. Four modes. One, I'm either readying myself through sleep um and NSDR to do one of the other three modes. Maybe there's a fifth mode. Um or I'm in one of these other three modes, which are is I'm either foraging for information, organizing that information, or dispersing that information. Or getting ready to do it all over again. Um and then there's this relaxation vacation thing that they keep telling me about. But then I went to Italy and then like Rick and I like just like hung out there. And um and it it didn't feel like work. I also discovered some really great podcasts. I don't know I think one of the coolest podcasts out there, if you like rock and roll, which I love, is uh History of 500 Songs but Andrew Hickey's podcast on rock and roll. I like the nerdy podcast. It's like a graduate or an education in rock and roll. It's so cool. Um and you'll learn a lot about music and history and the mobs involved and all that stuff. And from what I was told like Al Capone used to sit there, right? His exit was there. You know, so it's weird, right? And then he uh and then and he died of syphilis and like so I don't know how I feel about all that. Um but they told me that. Um so I think the podcast has been wonderful um as an opportunity to share things that I love. Um if I had my way it would be more like this, although more of a dialogue, frankly. Uh it's changed um my understanding of kind of like what what the world is like. I you know I I I certainly get um critique and that's good. Um but again I was raised by iconoclasts and particularly my post doc advisor Ben Barres, who unfortunately well as I mentioned is dead cuz I worked for him. Um and uh but you know, he was he really encouraged all of us in his lab and and uh and often we were very close friends. I spent the last year of his life recording interview with him. There's actually a documentary coming out about Ben. Um and then I'm going to release the audio uh interviews with Ben, which he approved, by the way, and you'll get to realize that the history of what you see is often not what the dead person really did or said. It's going to be fun. So, I can't wait till they release this documentary and then Ben gets to have his voice uh infuse it. And it'll be a cool documentary, but as uh some of you know that like what appears to be and what was in the historical narrative is is not necessarily what it what really happened. But, that's just life. So, I I suppose the short answer is that uh you know, I feel very honored with the opportunity, very very honored. Um and you know, it's a challenge at times. I suppose that the major challenges are when things are taken out of context, like little little clips and things of that sort. Being misunderstood doesn't feel good. But, look, at the end of the day I feel like uh the luckiest person in the world um because I get to spend my time learning. So, it's either, you know, I'm forging, I'm organizing, or I'm dispersing information that I also want and that I find in incredibly um useful if or if not that then certainly informative and at times enchanting as well. So, I try and focus on the positive and I have a number of practices that help me uh do that. Um and I am somebody who engages on social media. I'm not a post and ghost kind of person. I I I want to understand. I think that, you know, what cuttlefish are super interesting, but human beings are super interesting, too. And I have a a strong drive for for mastery, but also um I I do have a strong sense of of justice um and that can be problematic at times. I define justice as feeling like there's something for us to do about something. Like seeing something that sets us or that excites us is great, but then if you have a strong sense of justice, you feel like there's something you need to do about it. And not everybody feels that. And then of course, a desire to understand. And I think uh for reasons very personal to me that um relate mostly to just having a a kind of incredible array of experiences in life, many of which were um like shocking, disturbing, exciting, enchanting that I want to understand. And so, you know, it's changed things, but you know, it's like I don't know, I got one truck, one watch. I you know, it's not to say that I don't care about having things. I There are a few things I really love, but like mostly like I'm just thinking about the podcast we got to record on Monday, which is about willpower and tenacity. And if I don't stop myself, I'll give it right now. So. What do you feel is the next big thing to come to the forefront in the health space? Thanks for this question. Um One uh is non-protein amino acids. I think I I love these debates online because I know that there's something there. It's so cool cuz I grew up in seeing these debates, and you know there's something interesting there because people are debating about it. But the debate isn't what's interesting. It's almost always the thing that people aren't talking about that's sure to surface at some point. And you know, right now there's this obsession with like seed oils. It's like seed oil, seed oils. And I I can't demonize seed oils. All the data say that if you separate out their caloric load, there's nothing inherently bad about seed oils, and etc. I don't know. It's still an emerging literature, but there was a um a scientist at Stanford, Ed Rubenstein, who uh passed away of at a ripe old age, a brilliant scientist who um talked about and I had a lot of discussions with when I was a postdoc about non-protein amino acids. Turns out his son is a neuroscientist at UCSF. His other son's a physician at UCSF. So, it's another one of these low-performing families. Um, and all wonderful people. Um, and you know, Ed had data that, you know, unlike a lot of animals like birds, um, there are certain amino acids which are non-protein amino acids that exist in fairly high density in seeds and nuts, which is not to say that seeds and nuts are bad, right? I had almonds this evening. Okay, so please. Um, but non-protein amino acids are similar enough to mammalian protein amino acids that if they are consumed in abundance and perhaps especially in liquid form, that they may, again, may, cuz this is about the future, this isn't about what we know, this is about where I think there's an interest, a growing interest, they may be able to incorporate into certain proteins of our tissues of our body that potentially Ed thought could lead to misfolding of those proteins and may explain certain forms of neurodegeneration and other neurocognitive uh challenges. So, I I think non-protein amino acids are going to be an important discussion. Now, there are lots of non-protein amino acids that are not um that don't come from foods, but I think the discussion around non-protein amino acids from foods is going to be very interesting. Uh, so that's one area. The other area, and and perhaps you picked up on this a little bit tonight, is that I like the nuts and boltsy stuff around stress, neuroplasticity, but the high-level stuff. You know, I think, um, you know, the relationship between uh you know, structured thought, abstract thought. I I'm not interested in the free will discussion. I just feel like that's a career ender. Um, I'm friends with Robert Sapolsky and he's got a great book coming out about this, um, called Determined, so he obviously doesn't believe in free will, but he's far smarter than I ever could be. And, um, it just feels like that don't know that there's an end point with that one. Um, but if anyone could find it, it would be it would be Robert. Um, he's oh so smart. Uh, but I think that the higher level stuff, um, creativity, abstract reasoning and thought, defining and and better understanding the different states that we can go into in waking. And I and I confess, um, without a hint of of sheepishness about it that I also think the the notion of of spirituality and the belief in and things that are beyond our current and conscious understanding is super interesting. Um, I think that you know, as as a species we are uh we've been challenged and conflicted from go. At least that's what the historical scripture tells us. Um, and that it's sort of inherent to our experience that um life is challenging and perplexing and and also wonderful. And so I think a better understanding of of how to navigate all that. I mean this like the stuff in our skulls, except for the eyes, which by the way are two pieces of brain that are not in your skull, the retinas, have to point that out. Um, you know, it's it's tricky and we're trying to use that very tissue to understand it. And so I I'm intrigued by the possibility that there's certain aspects of self that um maybe are not um intended to be explored because they are not really of us, right? Brains interacting with one another is an interesting area certainly for scientific exploration, but I'm I'm fascinated by and and and excited about the possibility that, you know, at some point our species will both understand the mechanics of our emotions, mechanics of our thought process, creativity, and so on, but that we It also allow room for the for the stuff that we can't explain with science and to allow room for that in our in our life experience because I also believe that can be powerful. And while understanding things in great detail and putting mechanism and utility around that and applying that is wonderful. It's the it's the stuff of my life um which is obvious. I also think that there's great value in not trying to control and understand everything and enjoying the the the mystery of things that are that are clearly greater than us. How do you balance having fun with having such a rich knowledge and passion in neuroscience and optimization? Fun. Um People ask me like what do you do for fun? I think people think I do all the protocols. It's like Sure, I get my sunlight, I drink my water, I do that I do them but um uh fun um I like learning. Uh I like learning. I like I do enjoy physical movement. I like learning. You know, for me that Okay, so like for me it's the little things. I don't know. Maybe I'm weird. Um certainly been told that. Um like the other day there's a frog in my swimming pool and he's just like sitting there like and and I was just like spend some time looking at him back and forth and and then I had all sorts of ideas about like like what's he doing and what's he thinking and then I was thinking how Oliver Sacks used to spend time imagining experience experiencing life as a bat through only echolocation. He talked about this. And I thought and why would he do that, right? Is that And that's kind of cute. He's like delightful old man, right? He had a 600-lb free weight squat won the state California free squatting championship and like also like pretending he was a bat. He's a weird dude. Did methamphetamines, raced motorcycles, you know, like hung out with movie stars, but then also was like a recluse and liked rocks. Okay, that's a weird scientist. I've been around a lot of those. But, you know, in discussions with people that knew him, I mean that that exercise of kind of like seeing something he thought was cool like a bat, you know, and he allowed him to also use theory of mind to kind of think well, what would it be like to have locked-in syndrome and only be able to like blink your eyes to communicate? And and gave him an incredible compassion and sensitivity for other people that um then he transmuted into the form of like these wonderful books. So, for me, fun is really about doing the things that I do systematically each day, but then when something excites me, I know that feeling. I know it physically in in my body and to just follow that trail like a weirdo, right? Like a weirdo. Just like Baris was a weird and Barbara Chapman was weird and like like I think everybody's a little weird if you allow yourself to just see the things that you think are really cool. And there are a bunch of things that I think are really cool that enchant me, that a bunch of other people love, too. And I know that cuz it like I see we're all watching that video or something like that. Um but I think for me fun is is in the the practice of trying to stay open to the like the little things. Um the little things that kids say are always delightful cuz they're not filtering through all the that we filter ourself our life experience through, but also just um yeah, I like reading and learning, exercising. I mean, I like to think I'm not a very wooden person, but at the same time um I mean, I didn't see the Barbie movie. Um No no disrespect to Barbie. I I you know, I I go to movies. I do that kind of thing. I don't know what what else is there to do. At some point, you know, um what else is there to do? Uh anyway, I mean, I delight in in certain things as as I you now know far too much about, but um fun is a relative term. That was a hard question. Thank you. Thanks for the pass. Do you believe time changes due to daylight savings time is worth a potential loss of productivity? Look, daylight savings time is anti-health. Okay, this is where I'll get like It's just it's just dumb. It's just dumb. It's It's just so dumb. It's It makes no sense. I mean, the the director of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health, my good friend, long-time friend, and brilliant scientist Samer Hattar, will tell you it's a stupid idea. It's anti-biology. And it increase car crashes, increase heart attacks, increase depression. It's just It's like kids don't like to wake up early anyway. Parents don't like to wake up early, especially with kids that don't like to wake up early. It makes no sense. And then there's all these arguments about, you know, is it it really about trying to truncate the the the late You know, you want more light at in the evening, so there's less crime. Like That's totally unsubstantiated. Like it's completely unsubstantiated. So, the daylight savings thing is just stupid. Um basically, try and get as much light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight sunlight early in the day. And by the way, if you're worried about cataract, um that's a serious concern. After all, I have an appointment in ophthalmology. You know, cataract, macular degeneration, but guess what? The chair of ophthalmology at from Stanford, when he came on the podcast, verified this. When the sun is low in the sky, you're not really at risk of that. Right? So, when the sun is overhead, and you're like you're doing beaming your eyes, like trying to get Yeah, it's a problem. But we're talking about viewing low solar angle sunlight in the morning and in the evening. And if there's clouds, do it anyway. In fact, do it longer. And if you can't do that, look at some artificial light inside. Daylight savings is is just it's just open. Is it? Yeah. You know, what happens here is as the night goes on, the amount of GABA in my brain starts to diminish and then I just kind of go to short form. We've thought about podcasting in the middle of the night. That's why when I went on Lex's podcast recently, the more recent one, he did it at 8:00 at night and he cried he made me cry. He didn't cry. He made me cry. I was so tired and then I can't think and then he asked me about my dog and I'm talking about the dog. So, you know, his goal was to get me to cry. We have this friendship, you know. No, he he's delightful. What should I as a 19-year-old college student be doing to maximize the years of neuroplasticity I have left? I get this question I'm like, "Oh man, it's such a great question, Reese." Well, I don't I'm assuming yeah. I don't know who you are, Reese, or what you're doing. But, you're 19. So, the cool thing is your brain is hyperplastic. Life is a psychedelic experience without psychedelics. Um gosh, people always then say like if you could go back to your 19-year-old self, what would you do? And and that's a tricky one. There are movies about that, right? Um I you know, I would definitely worry less. Um yeah, I would worry less. I would have more fun. Um I would I would certainly um listen, I I started latching on to practices and the understanding of science as a way for me it was kind of like my world felt very unstable. Um and for me it brought stability. Um but, you want to avoid rigidity. So, you know, do you want to be the one 19-year-old who's like, "Oh, I got to get to sleep." You know, I got to go back to bed at 8:30 at night. No, yeah, you enjoy life, but I would say um when you're 19, learn how you learn, learn how to focus, learn how to rest. Basically, you can stress and focus as much as you want as long as you can still fall asleep at night and sleep well. And fall back asleep if you wake up. You know, that we hear stress is bad, stress is good, stress is bad, stress is good. Stress is bad unless you're getting enough sleep, in which case stress is called learning in life. Now, obviously don't do anything dangerous, avoid psychological and physical danger. But, I think as a 19-year-old, I mean my direct advice would be have some cardiovascular activity you like, have some resistance training activity you like, develop some sort of self-awareness practice, like journaling, could be meditation, um surround yourself with people that you like, avoid people you don't like. Um I mean, it it sounds so straightforward, but then we can all look into our personal histories and be like, "Well, I spent all this time trying to resolve this thing that like clearly you didn't like them. It's simple. Like you didn't like them. They weren't into cuttlefish or ferrets. You didn't like them. Wasn't your kind of person, right? And that's not a box you can check on the dating apps, they tell me, right?" The ferret thing, I think it'd be very very small subset of people. Um I think you know, the know thyself thing is huge. Learn Learn to tap into that early feeling of like this feels right, this doesn't feel right. Learn to be a bit of a of a rudder for yourself. And um and journal. I still have stacks of things that I wrote across the years. Most of it is terrible, but you will find if you go back that you kind of knew better all along, even if you didn't do better all along. Um that that voice in your head, don't do that, do that. This person's like, "Everyone else is crazy about this person, but not me." But this is like, you know, like I I I don't want to sound sentimental, but you have to you have to you have to find your heart, right? Or at least not lose it. You have to make sure that you're in touch with that piece of yourself that wasn't judging and just felt good. And as long as it's not something that's self-destructive, I think that's the most important thing. And then yeah, have tools and practices in place because they work. And when you're 19 and your neuro- is through the roof, you can you can do a lot less and get a lot more. But don't worry about hitting 25 and it all being over. Um certainly that's not the case, but you can cram in a lot early on. This you know, I still regret not learning an instrument. The data on people that learn an instrument even later in life, but certainly at 19 is that it greatly increases your ability to learn all sorts of things. So, learn an instrument. How can we transform the American education system to be more effective? Oh. So, in 10 seconds So, when I'm in charge now, I'm just kidding. The a little while back, I did an interview with a with a major media outlet and they were very gracious and and then they said like, "What's next?" And I was like, "I'm going to run for office." I was just like Now, you know, I was sort of a I I Look, it's not out of the question, but but frankly, I think that um I'm so poorly suited for that. It's obvious. Um I'm so poorly suited for that. So, it wasn't a joke, but it was you know, I think as a I spent some time afterwards like, "Oh, this should really go talk to people who do that for a living." And um and um but I am very interested in uh potentially informing policy. If I were to ever be asked, I'd certainly um respond. And and my stance on this is, you know, um much in the same vein as the podcast because keep in mind the podcast yes, Lex suggested I start one, but it was really during the the um those days of the the deep 2020-2021 pandemic where um by the way, I I wasn't allowed to talk about vaccines, so I didn't. And also, I don't have any expertise in it, so I was not uh well suited to do it. But I also decided it's a topic that enough people are talking about. So, my response in life and in general when people say, "What about something?" is I like, "Well, I've got a lot of opinions about that, but this isn't the venue." All right, okay. But during the pandemic I realized there was a a of circadian disruption, anxiety, stress, bunch of things happening with visual systems and biological systems that I felt there were tools that that people could perhaps benefit from. So, I just started putting that information into the world and I was really surprised. Really surprised that people that I knew from the neuroscience community, for instance, at NIMH or um you know, in government positions weren't talking about this stuff. So, I just kept doing it. Um and I think that it made clear to me that the education system is not one thing. It's It's tough, especially when talking about kids, like what to do. Um is a tricky thing, but that the education system in my mind should at least involve some sort of discussion early on about this thing called the brain, this thing called the body, how they work, how you can do certain things to um modulate your stress level, your sleep, the importance of not just the importance of sleep and nutrition and avoiding social isolation and you know, all these important things, but giving people some levers and knobs to to maneuver within themselves and you know, zero-cost tools as a way to do that that um transcend, you know, socioeconomic boundaries. Ideally, transcend language as well because, you know, we're not just talking about the United States and of course, within the United States, there are many different uh cultures speaking different languages, but um and maybe AI will soon allow us to put out the podcast into a bunch of different languages. I think it will. Um so, I think that the education system should start, in my opinion, with a with teaching kids how to understand themselves, what to do in difficult scenarios, that's really anchored in in the real pillars of biology and and psychology and trying to take some of the mystery out of trying to navigate the the tough business of growing up. Um I mean, if you think it's tough being an adult, which it can be certainly, it's really tough growing up as we all know. And I think that more tools, more tools, more protocols, more tools. But that's obviously a biased a biased opinion. And no one's ever asked me like, hey, what should we be teaching kids? But if they ask, as you can tell like I'm not going to shut up. So. I think that was our last question. Thank you all for coming tonight. I want to forgive me for going long. I do want to say thank you, sincere thank you for make your way out here especially on a weekday night. Thanks for your hospitality. My incredible team, I want to thank them. And certainly last but not least, thank you for your interest in science. Thank you. Thank you so much.