Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford and host of the Huberman Lab Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

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Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/andrew-huberman-4-transcript



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OUTLINE:

Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

(00:00) - Introduction

(09:42) - Exercise routine

(15:52) - Advice to younger self

(23:07) - Jungian shadow

(27:53) - Betrayal and loyalty

(48:03) - Drama

(1:05:42) - Chimp Empire

(1:10:35) - Overt vs covert contracts

(1:16:42) - Age and health

(1:22:49) - Sexual selection

(1:33:26) - Relationships

(1:45:59) - Fertility

(1:56:25) - Productivity

(2:13:13) - Family

The following is a conversation with my dear friend, Andrew Huberman, his fourth time on this podcast.

It's my birthday, so this is a special birthday episode of sorts.

Andrew flew down to Austin just to wish me a happy birthday, and we decided to do a podcast last second.

We literally talked for hours beforehand, and a long time after, late into the night, he's 1 of my favorite human beings, brilliant scientist, incredible teacher, and a loyal friend.

I'm grateful for good friends, for all the support and love I've gotten over the past few years.

I'm truly grateful for this life, for the years, the days, the minutes, the seconds I've gotten to live on this beautiful earth of ours.

And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.

It's the best way to support this podcast.

We got InsideTracker for bio data, Aidsleep for naps, AG1 for health, Shopify for selling stuff, and NetSuite for business management software.

Also if you want to work with our amazing team we're always hiring go to lexfreeman.com slash hiring.

I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors.

This show is brought to you by Insight Tracker, a service I use to track biological data, as data that comes from my own body.

It's really interesting to consider all the different signals that we send from our body, conscious and subconscious.

That's something I talked to Andrew in this podcast about.

Of all the thoughts and ideas and memories, real or fabricated or morphed or modified or recycled that lurk somewhere in the unconscious that when brought to the surface can bring a kind of relief or reinvigoration of the way we see the world around us.

So many signals and those little neurons firing together to construct the experience of the reality we see around us.

That is deeply rooted in all the different systems, including the immune system, the billions and billions and billions of organisms, half of which are cells, the other half are bacteria, all working together to create this experience that we humans call life.

And it's so interesting that by collecting that data, by listening to the signal that this entire gigantic complex biological systems create, we can start to try to figure out how to improve the functioning of it.

At first, top down, in a centralized manner, sort of listening to the music that the orchestra creates and trying to maybe rewrite the music or adjust the music or edit the music.

It's interesting, this whole journey we're on.

And I'm glad there's people that Turn that kind of journey into a company and try to help people by making the data from their body accessible and giving advice based on that data, making that advice accessible.

So you can get special savings for a limited time when you go to insighttracker.com slash Lex.

This episode is also brought to you by Asleep and its new Pod 3 mattress.

It is currently 100 plus degrees, 105, 106, 107 degrees in Austin.

And boy, does a cool bed surface feel good.

The air conditioning is holding on for dear life.

And even then, the ability to have a cold bed surface when you go in for a power nap with a little bit of a blanket, it's just heaven.

It's a refuge from the fire that burns outside the castle.

And that refuge for me is a biological 1 and a psychological 1.

It's kind of incredible in terms of just energy, how much better you can feel after a nap, and it's also incredible psychologically in terms of the positivity, the joy you can rediscover after a good nap.

Everything you can do you should put behind great sleep and great naps because it could just do magical things to your mind.

Books like Man's Search for Meaning reveal that it is indeed in the mind where the interpretation of the world's catastrophes lie.

So you have to equip your mind with the best tools in order to interpret those catastrophes, those tragedies, those hardships correctly.

Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to aidsleep.com slash flex.

This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and it's AG1 Drink.

It's an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.

I've been drinking it every single day, twice a day, for as long as I remember.

When I'm traveling, when I'm home, it just makes me feel like I have my life together.

Even when it feels like it is crumbling on the sides, or maybe shaken at the core due to whatever things happen in life that make it such a damn interesting rollercoaster.

Anyway, this is the 1 thing you can kind of control, is the nutrition you put in your body.

And so, you know, to do the vitamins and the minerals and all that good stuff, I think there's like 75 of them, to get that all in your body every single day, make sure the foundation, the bases are all covered.

They're great, they've been a really loyal and a loving and an incredible sponsor, so if you just like this podcast, go support them.

They'll give you a 1 month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash relax.

This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell whatever they want, anywhere, and make it easy.

So easy that even I have opened a Shopify store, but I haven't, I think, made it public yet.

I'm a huge fan of people's merch, and so a bunch of people requested that I put some merch out there.

It's just fun to wear a cool thing on a shirt and to celebrate the things you love in this world.

I love it when podcasts have merch, especially when they kind of celebrate the specific podcast and I can connect with people on the street by saying, I read that too, or I listen to that too.

I love wearing Metallica shirts for that very reason.

I can connect with people that, you know, have a similar love for Metallica as I do.

And there's just an endless number of band shirts that I love wearing because just for that you can connect with people.

They recognize that there's a smile that comes over their face and that you can talk about it and that's the beginning of a conversation and a beginning of a brief moment of exchanging the humanity that connects all of us.

Anyway, Shopify allows you to sell merch and whatever the heck else.

You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex.

Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today.

This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management software.

You should be using the best tools for the job.

36,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.

Not only that, since this is a birthday podcast, NetSuite is also celebrating a birthday.

It's funny, I remember, I think it was Jeff Bezos that said, no company lasts forever.

To understand that nothing really lasts forever.

And as somebody that runs a company, you should deeply, maybe, internalize that truth.

And based on that truth, do everything you can to maximize the lifetime of your company, which means first of all, making sure that all the details, all the infrastructure, all the financials and the inventory, all the business related details, all are taken care of, but also continuously innovate and pivot and adjust to the changing times.

Anyway, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com slash Lex.

That's netsuite.com slash Lex for your own KPI checklist.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman.

lose weight, but I always do the same fitness routine.

I have for like 30 years, basically lift 3 days a week, run 3 days a week.

But 1 of the runs is a long run, 1 of them's medium, 1 of them's a sprint type thing.

So What I've decided to do this year was just extend the duration of the long run.

I never want to be so heavy that I can't move.

Like I want to be able to go out and run 10 miles if I have to.

And I wanna be able to sprint if I have to.

It feels good to train like a lazy bear and just lift heavy objects.

But I've also started training with lighter weights and higher repetitions and for 3 months cycles and it gives your joints a rest.

And yeah, so I probably, you know, I think it also is interesting to see how training differently changes your cognition.

That's probably hormone related, you know, hormones downstream of training heavy versus hormones downstream of training a little bit lighter.

I think my cognition is better when I'm doing more cardio and when the repetition ranges are a little bit higher, which is not to say that people who lift heavy are dumb, but there is a, because there's real value in lifting heavy.

There's a lot of angry people listening to this right now.

No, no, no, but lifting heavy and then taking 3 to 5 minutes rest is far and away a different challenge than running hard for 90 minutes.

Just like getting in an ice bath, people say, oh, well, how is that any different than working out?

Well, there are a lot of differences, but 1 of them is that it's very acute stress.

So I think subjecting the body to a bunch of different types of stressors in space and time is really valuable.

So yeah, I've been playing with the variables in a pretty systematic way.

Well, I like long and slow for, like you said, the impact it has on my cognition.

Yeah, the wordlessness of it, the way it puts you in a, the way it seems to clean out the clutter, it can take away that hyper-focus and put you more in a relaxed focus for sure.

Well, for me, it brings the clutter to the surface at first.

Like all these thoughts come in there and then they dissipate.

You know, I've been, because I got knee barred pretty hard.

That's when somebody tries to break your knee.

So it's, you know, hyper-extend the knee that direction.

So in ways I don't understand, it kinda hurts to run.

I don't understand what's happening behind there.

It basically, the hamstring flex, like curling your leg hurts a little bit.

And that results in this weird, dull, but sometimes extremely sharp pain in the back of the knee.

So I've been playing around with walking recently, like for 2 hours and thinking.

Because I know a lot of like smart people throughout history have walked and thought.

And you have to like, you know, play with things that have worked for others, not just to exercise, but to like integrate this very light kind of prolonged exercise into a productive life, so they do all their thinking while they walk, it's like a meditative type of walking.

And it's really interesting, it really works.

Yeah, the practice I've been doing a lot more of lately is I walk while reading a book.

In the yard, I'll just pace back and forth or walk in a circle.

I'm holding the book and I'm walking and I'm reading.

Yeah, and I usually have a pen and I'm underlining.

I have this whole system like underlining stars, exclamation points, goes back to university of what things I will go back to, which things I export to notes and that kind of thing.

But from the beginning, when I opened my lab at that time in San Diego, before I moved back to Stanford, I would have meetings with my students or postdocs by just walking in the field behind the lab.

And I'd bring my bulldog Costello, bulldog mastiff at the time.

So these were slow walks, but I can think much more clearly that way.

There's a Nobel prize winning professor at Columbia University School of Medicine, Richard Axel, who won the Nobel prize, co-won Nobel prize with Linda Buck for the discovery of the molecular basis of olfaction.

And he walks in voice dictates his papers.

And now with Rev or these other, maybe there are better ones than Rev where you can convert audio files into text very quickly and then edit from there.

So I will often voice dictate first drafts and things like that.

And I totally agree on the long runs, the walks, the integrating that with cognitive work, harder to do a sprint.

And then the gym, you know, are you weight train?

You just seem naturally strong and like thicker jointed.

I mean, we did the 1 very beginner cause I'm a very beginner of jujitsu class together.

And yeah, as I mentioned then, but if people missed it, Lex is freakishly strong.

I think I was born genetically to hug people.

He had wrists like, you know, it's like you and Jocko and Costello have these like wrists and elbows that are super thick, you know?

And then, I mean, you look around and you see tremendous variation, you know, some people will have like the wrist width of a Whippet or Woody Allen, and then other people like you or Jocko, or, you know, there's this 1 Jocko video or thing on GQ or something.

The comments, I love the comments on YouTube because occasionally they're funny.

The best is when Jocko was born, the doctor looked at his parents and said, it's a man.

That's what I miss about Rogan being on YouTube with the full length episodes is all that comment.

So this is technically a birthday podcast.

What do you love most about getting older?

It's like the confirmation that comes from getting more and more data, which basically says, yeah, the first time you thought that thing, it was actually right because the second, third and fourth and fifth time, it turned out the exact same way.

In other words, there've been a few times in my life where I did not feel easy about something.

I felt a signal from my body, this is not good.

And I didn't trust it early on, but I knew it was there.

And then 2 or 3 bad experiences later, I'm able to say, ah, every single time there was a signal from the body informing my mind, this is not good.

Now, the reverse has also been true, that there've been a number of instances in which I feel sort of immediate delight, and there's this kind of almost astonishingly simple experience of feeling comfortable with somebody, or at peace with something, or delighted at an experience.

And it turns out all, literally all of those experiences and people turned out to be experiences in people that are still in my life and that I still delight in every day.

In other words, what's great about getting older is that you stop questioning the signals that come from the, I think, deeper recesses of your nervous system to say, hey, this is not good, or hey, this is great, more of this.

Whereas I think in my teens, my twenties, my thirties, I'm 40, almost 48, I'll be 48 next month.

I actually put a lot of work into overriding those signals and learning to fight through them, thinking that somehow that was making me tougher or somehow that was making me smarter, when in fact, in the end, those people that you meet that are difficult or there are other names for it.

It's like in the end, you're like, yeah, that person's a piece of shit.

Or this person is amazing and they're really wonderful and I felt that from go.

So you've learned to trust your gut versus like the influences of other people's opinions?

I've learned to trust my gut versus the forebrain over analysis, overriding the gut.

Other people often in my life have had great optics, right?

I've benefited tremendously from an early age of being in a large community of what has been mostly guys, but I have some close female friends and always have as well who will tell me that that's a bad decision or this person not so good or be careful or they're great or that's great.

So oftentimes my community and the people around me have been more aligned with the correct choice than not.

When you were younger, like, like friends, parents and so on?

I don't recall ever really listening to my parents that much.

I grew up in a, you know, we don't have to go back to my childhood thing, but my sense was- It's not your

I learned that recently in a psilocybin journey.

My first high dose psilocybin Journey, which was- Welcome back.

I was worried there for a second at 1 point, am I not coming back?

But in any event, yeah, I grew up with some wild kids.

You know, I would say about a third of my friends from childhood are dead or in jail.

About a third have gone on to do tremendously impressive things, start companies, excellent athletes, academics, scientists, and clinicians.

And then about a third are living their lives as kind of more typical.

I just mean that they are happy family people with jobs that they mainly serve the function to make money.

They're not sort of career into their career for career sake.

But So some of my friends early on gave me some bad ideas, but most of the time my bad ideas came from overriding the signals that I knew that my body, and I would say my body and brain were telling me to obey.

And when I say body and brain is that there's this brain region, the insula, which does many things, but it represents our sense of internal sensation and interoception.

And I was talking to Paul Conti about this, you know, as who, as you know, I respect tremendously.

I think he's 1 of the smartest people I've ever met.

I think for different reasons, he and Mark Andreessen are some of the like, smartest people I've ever met.

But Paul's level of insight into the human psyche is absolutely astounding.

And he says the opposite of what most people say about the brain, which is most people say, oh, the supercomputer of the brain is the forebrain.

It's like a monkey brain with a extra real estate put on there.

And the forebrain is what makes us human and gives us our superpowers.

Paul has said, and he's done a whole series on mental health that's coming out from our podcast in September.

So this is not an attempt to plug that, but he'll elaborate on

Yeah, so Paul Conti shot a, we did, he and I sat down, he did a 4 episode series on mental health.

This is not mental illness, mental health, about how to explore one's own subconscious, explore the self, build and cultivate the generative drive.

You'll learn more about what that is from him.

He's far more eloquent and clear than I am.

And he provides essentially a set of steps to explore the self that does not require that you work with a therapist.

This is self-exploration that is rooted in psychiatry.

And I don't think this information exists anywhere else.

I'm not aware that it exists anywhere else.

And he essentially distills it all down to 1 8 and a half by 11 sheet, which we provide for people.

And he says there, I don't want to give too much away because I would detract from what he does so beautifully, but if I tried and I wouldn't accomplish in any way.

But he said, and I believe that the subconscious is the supercomputer of the brain.

All the stuff working underneath our conscious awareness that's driving our feelings and our what we think are the decisions that we've thought through so carefully.

And that only by exploring the subconscious and understanding it a little bit, can we actually improve ourselves over time.

I think that so that the mistake is to think that thinking can override it all.

It's a certain style of introspection and thinking that allows us to read the signals from our body, read the signals from our brain, integrate the knowledge that we're collecting about ourselves and to use all that in ways that are really adaptive and generative for us.

What do you think is there in that subconscious?

You know, there's this idea, as you're familiar with too, I'm sure that this Jungian idea that we all have all things inside of us, that all of us have the capacity to be evil, to be good, et cetera, but that some people express 1 or the other to greater extent.

But he also mentioned that there's a unique category of people, maybe 2 to 5% of people that don't just have all things inside of them, but they actually spend a lot of time exploring a lot of those things, the darker recesses, the shadows, their own shadows.

I'm somebody who's drawn to goodness and to light and to joy and all those things like anybody else.

But I think maybe it was part of how I grew up.

Maybe, but then again, you know, even when I started spending more time with academics and scientists, I mean, you see shadows in other ways, right?

I recall a colleague in San Diego who, it was very clear to me, did not actually care about understanding the brain, but understanding the brain was just his avenue to exercise ambition.

And if you gave him something else to work on, he'd work on that.

I realized he has no passion for understanding the brain like all the, I assumed all scientists do.

Certainly why I went into it, but some people it's just raw ambition.

It doesn't even matter what they win, to which to me is crazy, but I think that's a shadow that some people explore, not 1 I've explored.

I think the shadow parts of us are very important to come to understand.

And look, better to understand them and know that they're there and work with them than to not acknowledge their presence and have them surface in the form of addictions or behaviors that damage us and other people.

So 1 of the processes for achieving mental health is to bring those things to the surface.

Yes, and you know, he, Paul describes 10 cupboards that 1 can look into for exploring the self.

There's the structure of self and the function of self.

Again, this will all be spelled out in the series in a lot of detail, also in terms of its relational aspect between people, how to pick good partners and good relationship.

He gets really into this from a very different perspective.

I was just sitting there just, I will say this, that that 4 episode series with Paul is at least to date, the most important work I've ever been involved in, in all of my career.

Because it's very clear that we are not taught how to explore our subconscious and that very few people actually understand how to do that.

Even most psychiatrists, he mentioned something about psychiatrists.

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#393 – Andrew Huberman: Relationships, Drama, Betrayal, Sex, and Love