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

EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:31 - Exercise routine
7:42 - Advice to younger self
14:56 - Jungian shadow
19:42 - Betrayal and loyalty
39:52 - Drama
57:31 - Chimp Empire
1:02:24 - Overt vs covert contracts
1:08:31 - Age and health
1:14:39 - Sexual selection
1:25:15 - Relationships
1:37:49 - Fertility
1:48:15 - Productivity
2:05:02 - Family

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Listen, when it comes to romantic relationships, if it's not 100% in you, it ain't happening.

And I've never seen a violation of that statement where it's like, yeah, it's mostly good, and there's this, and there's like the negotiations.

And that doesn't mean someone has to be perfect, the relationship has to be perfect, but it's got to feel 100% inside, like yes, yes, and yes.

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, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman.

I'm not trying to 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, so sometimes I do.

And I want to be able to sprint if I have to, so sometimes I do.

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, hyperextend the knee that direction.

So in ways I don't understand, It kind of 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 smart people throughout history have walked and thought.

And you have to play with things that have worked for others, not just to exercise, but to integrate this very light kind of prolonged exercise into a productive life.

So they do all their thinking while they walk.

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 hold it in 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, and he was a slow walker.

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 with sprints.

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

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, what 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 and 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 20s, my 30s, 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's 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, with like friends, parents and so on?

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

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

I learned that recently in a psilocybin journey.

My first high-dose psilocybin journey, which was, welcome back, done with a clinician, thank you very much, thank you.

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 now 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 interoception.

And I was talking to Paul Conti about this, 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

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, it's rooted in neuroscience.

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 it 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.

You know, 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 it was the crowd I was with.

But then again, 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 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.

You know, if you're a cardiothoracic surgeon or something like that, and 50% of your patients die, you're considered a bad cardiothoracic surgeon.

But with no disrespect to psychiatrists, there are some excellent psychiatrists out there.

There are also a lot of terrible psychiatrists out there because unless all of those, all of their patients commit suicide or half commit suicide, they can treat for a long time without it becoming visible that they're not so good at their craft.

And I think He would say that, yes, exploring some shadows, but also just understanding the self.

Really understand, like, who am I and what's important?

Again, I'm lifting from some of the things that he'll describe exactly how to do this.

People do not spend enough time addressing those questions.

And as a consequence, they discover what resides in their subconscious through the sometimes bad, hopefully also good, but manifestations of their actions.

We are driven by this huge 90% of our real estate that is not visible to our conscious awareness.

I've talked about this before, I've done therapy twice a week since I was a kid.

I had to as a condition of being let back in school.

I continue, I found a way to either through insurance or even when I didn't have insurance, I took an extra job writing for Thrasher Magazine when I was a postdoc so I could pay for therapy at a discount because I didn't make much money as a postdoc.

I mean, I think for me, it's as important as going to the gym.

And people think it's just, you know, ruminating on problems or getting sweat.

If you work with somebody really good, they're forcing you to ask questions about who you really are, what you really want.

It's not just about support, but there should be support, there should be rapport, but then it's also, there should be insight, right?

Most people who get therapy, they're getting support, there's rapport, but insight is not easy to arrive at, and a really good psychologist or psychiatrist can help you arrive at deep insights that transform your entire life.

Well, sometimes when I look inside and I do this often, you know, exploring who you truly are, you come to this question, do I accept, once you see parts, do I accept this or do I fix this?

Is this who you are fundamentally and it will always be this way?

Like for example, 1 of the things, especially recently but in general over time, I've discovered about myself, probably has roots in childhood, probably has roots in a lot of things, is I deeply value loyalty, maybe more than the average person.

And so when there's disloyalty, it can be painful to me.

And there's a million, that's 1 like little.

I think loyalty is a good thing to cling to, provided that when loyalty is broken, that it doesn't disrupt too many other areas of your life.

But it depends also on who's disrupting that loyalty.

If it's a coworker versus a romantic partner versus your exclusive romantic partner, depending on the structure of your romantic partner life.

You know, I mean, I have always experienced extreme joy and feelings of safety and trust in my friendships.

Again, mostly male friendships, but female friendships too, which is only to say that they were mostly male friendships.

The female friendships have also been very loyal.

So getting backstabbed is not something I'm familiar with.

And I'm with you and you and I are very much have the same values on this.

But that's 1 little thing, and then there's many other things.

Like I'm extremely self-critical, and you look at my, I look at myself, as I'm regularly very self-critical, there's a self-critical engine in my brain.

And I talked to actually Paul about this, I think on the podcast, quite a bit.

And he's saying this is a really bad thing.

You need to be able to be regularly very positive about yourself.

Don't mess with a thing that seems to be working.

Like I oscillate between being really grateful and really self-critical.

But then you have to like figure out what is it?

There's an, Maybe there's an insecurity in there somewhere that has to do with childhood.

And then you're trying to prove something to somebody from your childhood, this kind of thing.

Well, a couple of things that I think are hopefully valuable for people here.

1 way to destroy your life is to spend time trying to control your or somebody else's past.

So much of our destructive behavior and thinking comes from wanting something that we saw or did or heard to not be true, rather than really working with that and getting close to what it really was.

And sometimes those things are even traumatic and we need to really get close to them and for them to move through us.

And that, there are a bunch of different ways to do that with support from others and hopefully, but sometimes on our own as well.

I don't think we can rewire our deep preferences and what we find despicable or joyful.

I do think that it's really a question of what allows us peace.

Like, can you be at peace with the fact that you're very self-critical and enjoy that, get some distance from it, have a sense of humor about it?

Or is it driving you in a way that's keeping you awake at night and forcing you back to the table to do work in a way that feels self-flagellating and doesn't feel good.

Can you get that humility and awareness of how you're, of your one's flaws?

And I think that that can create, this word space sounds very new agey, like get space from it.

So, you know, you can have a sense of humor about how neurotic we can all be.

I mean, you know, neurotic isn't actually a bad term in the classic sense of the psychologists and psychiatrists, the Freudians, so that, you know, the best case is to be neurotic, to actually see one's own issues and work with them, whereas psychotic is the other way to be, which is obviously not good.

So I think the question of whether or not to work on something or to just accept it as part of ourselves, I think, really depends if we feel like it's holding us back or not.

And I think you're asking perhaps the most profound question about being a human, which is, you know, what do you do with your body?

I mean, if you, it's also a question we started off talking about fitness a little bit, which is for whatever reason, you know, do I need to run an ultra marathon?

David Goggins does, and does a whole lot more than that.

I don't think he does it just so he can run the ultras.

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Andrew Huberman: Relationships, Drama, Betrayal, Sex, and Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #393