Have you explored psychedelics? I just did, which was the very first time. And by the way, these are all illegal and less than a clinical trial, so don't possess or sell these things, you will go to jail, but which ones did you do? So, 100% to.
Well, today is a very special day. First of all, it has been confirmed that Bert was kidnapped and we're thrilled that he's being held for ransom. In his place, we have an absolute special treat. Somebody, we've never had a smart person on the show, let alone somebody qualified to teach us something.
And so today we got both of those, we knocked them both out. I don't know, I always wear this, I'm surprised at you wearing this, but it is another blue-eyed, handsome man with a beard and a black shirt. It's professor Andrew Huberman. Thanks for coming in.
Thanks for having me here. There's a lot of reasons I'd love to be here and finally got here, but look, I'm no replacement for Bert Kratcher, I said there's no. Yes, you are. I hope people aren't expecting me to be nearly as funny as Bert.
That's okay. That's so spontaneous as Bert. Well, you know, I think we're gonna have a great, actually this is already one of my favorite podcasts that I've ever done. We're thrilled to find out, you know, people have told you that we look alike, they've told me that we look alike.
We did 23 of Me, turns out your father's third cousin slept with my mother in 1964. And so it's almost pretty much, it's almost pretty much. We have Latin roots and what do you wanna do? We're related, sorry guys, that's it.
Put it on the internet. We're trying to figure out whether or not there's time for this solid days, whether or not we can get the families together, we'll make it happen. We'll make it happen. Before we get into, like I have so many questions I wanna ask you that are more academic and in your field.
I wanna know a little bit if you would share about Huberman roots, you know? So you were, the surprise, I didn't realize you actually grew up in the same community that you basically live in now. Yeah, I was born at Stanford Hospital. Wow, I did some, not all of my training at Stanford School of Medicine and now I work at Stanford School of Jesus.
The only joke I have to tell today is that someday I expect to die at Stanford School of Medicine. That's really cool. Hopefully a long time from now. I like that more of a joke.
Thanks. Yeah, my father's from Buenos Aires. Baja, no, that's the most Spanish I'm gonna speak. Yeah, Che, boo, boo.
I think they're doing well in the World Cup, right? They are, this will air afterwards. Let's just go for it. Congratulations to Argentina on winning the World Cup.
Yeah, my cousin's there. It's crazy. You know, you go to dinner with them and, you know, before there were smartphones. They're just living on the radio.
They're out of their fucking other minds. Otherwise, I think my dad's the odd man out there. Growing up, he wasn't really into football soccer. It is other level.
It is other level. I mean, one of my favorite videos of all time is of a guy, El Tano Basman. Have you seen that guy? No.
So he's, there's obviously, I mean, Argentina is all behind their national team as a country, right? Which is kind of the nice thing about the World Cup is it kind of, you know, sports are a great equalizer unifies the whole country, but club wise, you know, there's, there's in the pandente, booka river, and San Lorenzo. There's all these other, there's always clubs, right? So the most famous fan of river is named Tano Basman, and his family recorded him absolutely losing his goddamn mind to the point where they sent him to the doctor after this went viral.
I mean, he ends up, he ends up kicking over furniture and like, really, really losing his shit. I mean, it's one of my favorite things I've ever seen. And I think it's a lot of people who are like, well, I'm not going to be a fan of the world. I mean, I'm not going to be a fan of the world.
I'm not going to be a fan of the world. I'm not going to be a fan of the world. I'm not going to be a fan of the world. I'm not going to be a fan of the world.
It's one of my favorite things I've ever seen. And we'll check it out in a bit. But people will change marriages, they'll change schools, they'll change children, but they don't change their commitment to their nothing. No.
There was a, I want to say, it was probably a year, maybe two years ago, there were, there was club finals, so it was like intercity finals. And when one of the buses would come into the stadium, fans of the opposing team broke all the window, like through rocks that the windows shattered the windows. And then the teams had to play their finals. So like the champions went out of the country.
So they flew the teams out of the country to play the final game. And they're like, we want to play it here, but we can't. It's too violent. It's crazy.
Yeah, my cousin who's grown with kids now, every weekend, I think it's on Saturday, he goes to play football soccer with his friends that he grew up playing with. Right? And there's, there must be no joke. 50 fields, like trying to find their field is impossible unless you know where to look.
And little kids, adults, like everybody's out there. It's incredible. Yeah. Their love of the game is.
It's infectious. Yeah, absolutely. And here the Brazilians and the Italians are like going crazy. Oh, yeah.
That's my Argentina won the World Cup. Yeah, man. That was amazing. That last game.
I was in the United States on a naval scholarship. He was a physicist, is a physicist. Went to school in Philadelphia. I met my mom in New York and they fell in love, moved to California and had my sister and me and grew up at a time when Palo Alto wasn't this super wealthy community.
Yeah. We weren't poor, but it wasn't what it is now. Right? It wasn't crazy VC kind of money.
Yeah. There were kids at my school that, you know, we lived in a single story home. It was a nice home. It was relatively, you know, typical American home.
Yeah. And, you know, a lot of the kids were associated with Silicon Valley, which at the time were a lot of the children of engineers. Sure. And yeah.
And we're graduate students who come over and those sorts of things. So that played a definitely a big part in your development, though, right? Yeah. I remember asking my dad when I was about, you know, six or seven, you know, what do you do for work?
And he said, he tried to explain what he did and physics is complicated and theoretical physicists, especially abstract, especially to a six year old. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. He was one of the early founders of chaos theory. So if you've read the book chaos or if you haven't, you know, that there's some description of the work there. And so he was explaining some of that to me.
And he just said, look, the reason I do it is because you remember, you know, that feeling the night before your birthday, I was like, oh, yeah, it was like, it's like, it's like that almost every day. That's a pretty cool description. And then what he should have told me was, but everyone's why you open the present and there's nothing in there, because that science, there's a lot of failed attempts. But yeah, basically the long story made short is that I was on a standard track of every kid, plate soccer, to swim team in Palo Alto, a lot of kids down the end of my street grow up, you know, skateboarding and building ramps and forts and you got into that.
Got into all that. I got really in the skateboarding thing. What happened was when I was about 13, 14, no sob story here, but my parents split up like super high conflict for us. I'm not in good terms with both my parents.
But they basically took a, you are on. I'm gonna get to it with both my parents. But they read basically the rule book of what not to do in a divorce, it's just like this is my, I think we're gonna go get one of those. So I went a little bit feral, or a lot feral from about 14 until 19, fell straight into the skateboarding community at that time in the early 90s, this so called Embarcadero EMB crowd, was really spinning up.
Some amazing skateboarding. Rob Dyrdek came out to the EMB and would hang out. But it was a ton of amazing skateboarding, a lot of flights, a lot of drugs, a lot of pregnant girlfriends, a lot of chaos, not every single one of those things. I won't let my checklist out.
I was like, that's a fucking sound bro. A lot of people dead in jail, it was crazy. But the skateboarding was amazing. It made amazing friends.
And so from a pretty early age, I found that being in a big pack of guys, because at that time, skateboarding was mostly just guys, it was my family. And so I started traveling for skateboarding admittedly, and I have to be careful here because the skateboarders were like, pick me apart. I wasn't very good. I was okay.
Got a little sponsor, I think they put me on for sympathy, but I was really part of that community. Which translates to, I'm way better than that. I'm a skateboarder. No, no, no, no, but I'm not as good as the very best.
I kept getting broken. I kept getting, you know, broke my left foot five times. It just didn't, my body hadn't fully developed. I had a long arc of puberty.
I think I'm still going through it. Yeah. It's going to, you see your hair's coming in there? Yeah, yeah.
And you know, I grew up quick as a consequence of those years. You know, I learned, hey, look, a lot of kids just don't go to school. Like they just don't go. So I stopped going to school doing a lot of skateboarding.
And the whole thing of being true, and got me in some trouble, I got put away for a little while. You did. I did. I didn't harm anybody.
I didn't harm myself, but the school understood. You know, this would go to Palo Alto, so like, you know, just go to school. Yeah. They're going to find you and basically get you at least attempt to put you under discipline.
You have to be some teacher from that era's favorite story of, like, bad kid, you flipped it around. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I got out of that place. That place was really unpleasant.
Kids, let me just tell you, the moment the door locks, it sinks in. Like, if you think life sucks, wherever you are in freedom, think about how much it sucks. And you have no zero control over your schedule, your life, your interactions. But I learned a lot in there.
And I learned that maybe I wasn't responsible for everything. I was still a minor, you know, that was happening to me. But I got out and unfortunately, instead of shaping up, what I did is I was just a lot more cryptic about my activities, which is normal. Yeah, natural for you.
Got a girlfriend. She became my main focus. I wasn't skateboarding quite as much after that because I got hurt. Got really into tie boxing, lifting weights and running.
I'm really into fitness, starting early. Yeah. We had a football coach in our school, Bob Peters. And he was the one who wrote the script that eventually became the John.
He was the one with Mr. Mom. And it was called Wait till Your Mother Gets Home. And he was this great big strong guy.
And all the girls liked him. And I was like, okay, well, yeah, that and this new girlfriend. And I saw a picture of her ex-boyfriend. And he's like this big strong guy.
That'll do. And I was like, you know, this like scary care of a skateboard kid. And so I started lifting weights and doing all that. And Bob Peters taught me how to take good care of my body, but also really focused on me also doing running and things that sort.
Anyway, in those years, I'd love to say that I got right back into school, but I really didn't perform well in school, getting into fights a lot. I was troubled. I was, you know, I've never been a drug alcohol guy, but I gobbled in some substance abuse back then. And got it, you know, my girlfriend pregnant.
Like there was a bunch of things that I looked back on. I was like, I was really wayward. So I followed her. She went off to college.
And I felt pretty alone. So I was, I traveled down to where she went to school. You see Santa Barbara. And I lived in the parking lot outside her dorm.
You lived in the parking lot? It's like a stock. So I keep it on. No, I'm kidding.
We just wanted to be together. We'd party on the weekends. We'd party on the weekends. And then if anyone went near, I'd beat them up.
Who's that guy? Yeah, I was kind of, you know, I was really afraid to lose her. You know, pretty soon. Did you really beat up guys that came close to me?
I might have. I might have. And you know what? You know what?
This is, and I don't recommend this. I don't recommend this. You know what? I've got my protector or your person that's really there for me.
So we got a parrot. We had, you know, the whole Don't Picture. Wait, this time, you know. You're this is like college.
I should have been, she was a year older than me. So I should have been in high school. But you've now been lifting and throwing bombs for a like a few years, right? You're really bad guys.
Don't pay, don't do what I did. Just don't do it. Unless you really want to impress a girl. No, no.
I was determined to keep her. And then, so we'll get back to how this can all go badly wrong. So what happened was I had to figure out a way to get into college. Yeah, because she was there.
And I didn't think I'd go to college, but I thought, okay, what am I going to go to? Basically nothing, but I can lift weights and I can run. I like hanging out with friends and working with big teams, guys, I've done a little bit of that, skateboard shops and factories. And I thought, I'm a firefighter.
Everyone loves firefighters. I wanted a dog. So I started taking fire science classes at Mission College in the South Bay. Loved the work.
Just felt like it was just the greatest. It's like, cook with your friends and fight fires. Everyone loves firefighters. Not everyone loves cops.
And you know who else loves firefighters? Chicks. All of your decisions are chipped. Fucking driven.
There's a, or in neuroscience we say they were hypotherlamic driven. The area of the brain, here's your first take. The area of the brain sits roughly over the roof of your mouth that's associated with all your primitive drives. You know, the drive for sex and reproduction, temperature control, a version of vomit, the approach to something that smells delicious.
This is all housed in one little tiny brain area, about the size of a gumball called the hypothalamus. Amazing, amazing structure. Stimulate one small set of neurons in the structure. Anyone else will go into a rage.
Stimulate the nearby neurons. I mean, less than millimeters away. And you will try and mate with the nearest person of your particular clippity. Let's get that going.
Where is it now? And so there are, yeah, I guess Elon's spinning up Neural Link, you know, they got a figure out where to put the stimulating chip, but hypothalamus probably not high on the list because it's pretty sensitive and can get unwieldy. In any event, I decide I was going to become a firefighter. But then someone out at Mission College said, listen, you stand a much better chance of going up the ranks in the fire department if you have a bachelor's degree.
And so I took the SAT. I have no idea how it happened, but I somehow managed to break a thousand. Not much. I thought you were about to say 1600.
I was like, you son. No, no, my girlfriend was like in the high 1500s. I went to a school where literally they'd publish that as a double page spread of who was going to what school. Yeah, my Harvard early initially.
Now listen, there's a dark side and a light side everything I'm telling you because gun high school, G-U-N-N is the school that I went to, which is now infamous because the academic demands on kids became so severe that in the late 90s and 2000s, it was the school, the high school with the most suicides in the entire nation. There's a train tracks that run through how long between middle school and high school and kids were killing themselves on the train tracks. It's like a rash of suicides. Yeah, you can look this up, very tragic.
Hopefully they've solved that problem. But you know, kids at gun high school are forbidden from meeting earlier than 7 a.m. at the nearby Starbucks to start studying for the SAT. People move from China.
We're moving from China to buy homes near there just so their kids could go to that school, public school. So this academic rigor thing can go a little too far. That's obviously not what happened to me at that stage. But I took the SAT, I applied to UC Santa Barbara, and somehow I got in, I wrote an honest essay.
It was just said, listen, I was not a good student. I had some challenges early on, but I take responsibility for them, my girlfriend got to UCSB. I want to be a firefighter, I want to Dalmatian. I live in the parking lot.
I live in the parking lot. And obviously touch the cord. And so the lesson there is kids tell the truth on your entrance exams. I made up a fucking story about the kid.
I was like, there's a kid Eric who inspired me. He was going to die. I made it up. Wait, he was about to die.
I was like, that is messed up. It's like a basketball diaries. Yeah, yeah, I think I was like a basketball fiction. I was a terrible high school student.
And I was actually curious to know if you were just always like this great, great student as being somebody in academia now. But I was a terrible student. And when I was applying to college, I wasn't getting anywhere. I don't think I got anywhere.
I guess I went to one school I went to. But they were like, it's right, essay. And I remember I had this friend that whatever, he was just a regular kid. I just, I put a disease.
I think he said, oh, he had cancer. And like he inspired me. And he just, he just, he just, he just could be entitled what not to do. By the way, he's fine.
OK, he's fine. He cured him. I think I'm with my love and my affection. I got into, no, I got into the only school that, first of all, I never heard of it.
And then my, I remember sitting with the, like a high school, I went to a prep school where they grew up. Well, I moved around a lot, but I ended up going to a prep school in Florida, in the Viral Beach area. And all the kids, they did this thing where they post, like, and it was just like Stanford Harvard. Yale, Princeton, all the big schools, all the impressive schools.
And then there would be like a little drop in next tier of schools with, you see kids. And there was a couple of fuck-offs that were doing like, community college. The same kids in the yearbook had said was not available. Not available, yeah, exactly.
And mine, people would go like, what is that? Because the name was Lenore Ryan. They were like, is that like a special trade school? I was like, no, it's an actual school, a college, university now.
But anyway, I think, I mean, I got, I couldn't believe it. I did so poorly as a student. I took the SATs. The first time I took it, I got 10.30, which they were like, that's not that bad.
And I was like, I should take it again. I took it again. I got the lower score. And they were like, stick it out.
And they were like, stick it out. And they were like, that's stick to that. I think you get 150 points for filling out your name. And I thought it was more information.
Yeah, I think you get more. Like, every once in a while, I look back on that. And I just think, you know, I'm a cack monkey learned more in my high school than I did. Yeah.
And, but a big part of it is that you were not yet applying yourself. That's right. I was very serious about fitness. I was very serious about the girlfriend.
I mean, I'd wake up on Sunday morning, run to her house, run six miles, wash her, Ford Bronco, wash it was at church, just to show her like, I'm a devoted hardworking guy. Because her dad hated me. He recorded our phone conversations and discovered all sorts of stuff. He had every right to hate me.
Right? I was a punk. I mean, when I say punk, I mean, for me, I was also really tight in the punk rock community. Like, me a punk that's like a term of endearment.
But I was a punk kid. I was getting in fights. You know, he had a daughter and he had every right. And I think was reasonable and wanting to have her be with somebody who was really solid.
Jen, yeah, gone off to college. I think it was worth it. She was going to hang back. And, you know, he had somebody who had less than a high school education, really made something of himself, like, essentially being a janitor and doing maintenance and all these apartments.
So, you know, now I have the adult perspective and he was doing exactly what he should have. Right. Protecting. You're a really devoted boyfriend.
I was a very devoted boyfriend until I wasn't. Because basically what happened was I got into UC Santa Barbara, went down there and it was crazy. I mean, at that time it was, you know, party central. But I had already done a lot of that in the skateboarding world.
Right? So I didn't show up wanting to party. I was like, this is just easy picking. Right?
And so I was getting into a lot of fights. She and I were getting into a lot of, you know, arguments and then no one wanted to go near us because, you know, we were both, we were a little sit and Nancy like, right? There were no drugs. I feel very lucky that I went to college in the early 90s when there were, if there were hard drugs, I never saw.
It's really interesting that you describing what you were like and the absence of drugs because it sounds like all the stories you would hear about somebody going like and then I shot up. No, no, no. For me, it was Thai boxing and I loved her and I was really packed. You still practice that?
I mean, you still do not. No, no, I fought a couple fights. I boxed actually when I was assistant professor in San Diego. I started sparring Wednesday nights and started boxing.
But, you know, I started getting a little stutter from getting hit. So I boxed for a little, like, just, you know, going to get lessons and like, I started clapping. It's the most amazing thing. I feel like I need this brain to do the bullshit that I do requires my brain to not be rocked.
No, no, no, no. And listen, you call it bullshit, but it's important and I think the real estate in here, it can't be replaced easily. My lab works on an over-generation. Yeah, you especially should.
Yeah, I learned a lot. I mean, I think, you know, I've always had that drive and so I'm looking back at probably should don't you jit. So there's something that, you know, Joe and Jaco tell me or Lex tells me, you know, you can go really hard in jit too without having to worry about getting, you know, concussed. So, you know, those years were pretty wild.
But so at the end of my first year, the girlfriend and I had broken up. No one wanted to go near us, right? I had basically failed out of my classes. Really?
I was really dismayed and, you know, what happened that summer was July 4th, 1994, a bunch of friends through barbecue. Some guys were stealing some stuff from the house. A big fight broke out. Police showed up.
It was like knives, bottles, the whole thing. And I stayed up. I stayed on my feet. It was good.
I didn't get arrested that day. Actually, one of the cops congratulated me and I remember feeling just kind of the pit in my stomach. So I went back to where I was staying alone. I was squatting in a house in Alavista that summer with my ferret.
You know, I got the ferret in the doors. That's right. Yeah, in the doors. And I remember thinking like I basically am like, like, I'm officially a loser.
I'm not very good at skateboarding. I haven't done that in years. You know, okay, I've got some drive to do fitness. I work at the Bagel Cafe.
It's a job, but it's a minimum wage job. A girlfriend's gone getting in fights. Someone's going to get killed or go to jail. Either near them.
And it was really that day that I decided that's it. So I took a leave of absence. I didn't drop out. I took a leave of absence.
Went home to Palo Alto and went to Foothill College Community College. And this is a plug for the community college. You know, community colleges get a kind of a bad rap, especially when you're hanging out with Stanford professors and you know, I'm probably there might be one other Stanford professor if there's more than one let me know that went to community college. They're all went pedigree schools.
Sure. You know, someone who you see Santa Barbara is a good school, but I think you can get a really great education at community college or any school if you just apply yourself in focus. It's about your, you're trying to do well. 100%.
And they're good teachers at all these places. They're bad teachers at all these places. The bigger and more famous places. Sometimes the researchers are too busy to put a lot of effort into their teaching.
And sometimes they're spectacular. Like Robert Sapolsky, you know, it varies. Now at this point though, I'm jumping in here, but at this point, are you still thinking I'm going to be a firefighter? I'm just going to get this.
I know what I was going to do. Honestly, I realized that I was basically, I got an A plus degree in being a loser. Because in my book, everything I would describe, you know, sounds like kind of a wild ride, but you know, I had a number of friends at that point that were dead or in jail that really just flamed out. Really?
And also was watching some of the better skateboarders that I grew up around like Danny Way start DC shoes, you know, doing amazing things. You're like, that's cool. Some people are soaring, but I always knew I didn't have the athleticism that they had. So I had a hard talk with myself and I basically thought, listen, okay, I'm frustrated and angry about stuff that happened in childhood and, you know, the kind of like break of my family, but you know, boo-hoo, like no one's going to care.
I'm 19. Right? And I was like, what do you think is? I asked myself, what am I good at?
What do I like? And I've always loved biology and animals. I've always had a ton of curiosity for learning. Even in those crazy years, I would go to Tower Books, kids, it's a bookstore, it doesn't exist anymore.
And I'd read about fitness or I'd read about animals or I'd read about sex. I was like, you know, in the book stacks, I'd try to learn as much as I could and or psychology. And so I thought, well, I can learn and memorize things, especially if I write them down. I'm just going to go all out at learning in school.
So I took classes in psychology and biology and really became a straight A student through a lot of hard work. Because you were interested too though. And I was scared. Okay.
And so I thought, well, these are also, you know, the girlfriend thing did have a lot to do with it. Because I thought, you know, if I were to just start a family now, how would I support anybody? I became very practical very fast because, you know, there wasn't anything to fall back on at that point. And, you know, I'm sure had I gone, you know, had in my parents that said, help me out, it's all your fault or something, you know, they would have done something, they're good people.
But that actually would have been the worst thing for me. And I know a lot of kids that were living at home, they had gone to high school with that were kind of the not so ambitious crowd that were on the dole that way, you know, at 1500 bucks a month. So, I had to go to the studio apartment by myself, and it was listen to rancid, Bob Dylan, classical music, on repeat, drink coffee, workout, study. That was it.
And once a month, admittedly, I'd go out and just tie one on. I would just let loose with friends. But over time I started noticing, you know, the days after that, I'd really struggle to study and do anything. You know, it covered pretty well in your early 20s.
But that's a big fucking change from these days. Because I can have like one drink and feel it. And then if I have two more, I feel like my recovery is like 72 hours. It's lousy.
And if you're tracking your sleep, you'll see it's really awesome. Yeah, there's actually a trick to the hangover. I don't know if I want to give it to people because I don't know if I want people to drink more. We did an episode on alcohol for the live podcast.
Go ahead. That's a good room in loud podcast. Actually turned out to be our most popular episode of 2022 is about the health effects of alcohol. Look, I am not against drinking for, you know, most adults who aren't alcoholics, who aren't pregnant.
But really when you look at the data, it's a toxin to the brain and body. There are some health benefits in certain studies, but the idea that you're going to get resveratrol from wine, I mean, you have to drink so much wine to get that enough for a sveratrol. Basically, you can have two drinks a week and still be okay. Most people are drinking far more than that.
Yes. And here's what I say. Then you should do a bunch of other things to support your health, right? Try and get good sleep, get exercise, you know, clean vascular and weight training exercise, try and eat mostly non-processment, minimally processed food, get sun in the morning, all the sort of human lab podcast staples of health and well-being we can talk more about these if you want.
But in any case, back then, you know, I'd go out once a month, Taiwan on have fun with friends. Everyone wanted me to continue to get in fights and kind of get egged on to be your former self. Right. Yeah.
So there was no smoking weed. There was no wildness. It was just studying. I wanted to be the A plus student at the end of the curve.
I want to be that data point out there. And across those next three years, you know, I just, aside from one class and still pisses me off where I got to be plus, it was just straight as the whole way. It was the B plus, but his in developmental and biology. And guess what?
I became a developmental and a biologist. That's probably why. Yeah. It just still got me that the teacher was super tough and I love the topic, which is why I eventually pursued that.
But, you know, I finished. You're a big fights guy though. You got in so many fights? I back then and you look, another point, that's important.
I never was the aggressor. Is there any of the fights? No. Well, okay.
I suppose if somebody was like, you know, there was this whole thing I was very protective of my girlfriend. Dude, this fucking girlfriend. But I'll tell you, I'll tell you, I don't want to say her name, my friend, no, her name. But the other thing is she was also a fighter.
So, you know, there was what she known as what is, I mean, I don't know if this was academic term, a mouthy broad. No, she was actually pretty quiet. Really? But you wouldn't want to piss her off.
I remember because, so we had broken up and I got kind of a wandering eye at that point. I was starting seeing other people and the other kind of thing. And she, yeah, she, I mean, she would walk up to girls then and shove them in their parties and stuff. So, pretty soon no one wanted to go near us.
So we had only one option which was to get back together. This is like a fucking Jerry Springer. It's crazy. It's crazy.
But we had hard home lives and we became each other's family. And it's confusing at that age because you're each other's family, but you also are feeling the pull of, you know, you should date other people. You're trying to explore in the world. So, I mean, eventually what happened was she graduated ahead of me.
It took a little longer because of the time away, moved home. And I stayed there, graduated. And then I went to graduate school first at UC Berkeley and then later UC Davis and then was at Stanford and then San Diego and then now I'm at Stanford. So, you know, in those years I did what I could with the resources I had, which was not a lot, even as a graduate student in postdoc.
I mean, I tell you, they don't make enough money these days especially. I did my best to try and do therapy, which I'm a big proponent of. I know a lot of people think that's just sitting back and blaming everybody else. Oh, like, I actually started working with the same, continued working with the same therapists that I did when I got out of the lockup.
And I'm not embarrassed to say this because I think he's spectacular and I really needed someone to advocate for me as, you know, because my parents weren't a great place to do that at that time. But we continued to work together for 34 years. That's fantastic. Yeah.
And I've used insurance when I could and he cut me a rate when he could and I worked extra just to be clear when I was a postdoc. I worked at Thrasher Magazine, Skateboard Magazine. Yeah. So, I had money to pay for therapy.
I think it's seriously, just as seriously as the gym. But I will say if people don't have access to that, you know, journaling is powerful. I still have stacks of journals that I'm afraid people are going to find and read. Yeah.
Not because there's anything damning there. It's just embarrassing. It's embarrassing. You know, journaling is really powerful.
What the data say is also just talking to a trusted friend, even if they don't respond. Even if they don't respond. It's actually a text. But even if they don't respond leads people to better insights than if they just try and prove it.
It's the baseline, like, what to do to basically rid one's self of shame is that the shame, like, thrives in secret. So when people feel shame, they tell you, like, the first thing to do is at least find a trusted source to even if they don't say anything. So then you go like, oh, it's out. Like, I didn't, it's not inside and a secret.
I've done therapy now for, I think I'm just coming up on, I think this will be like 11 years. Fantastic. I love it. Same therapist.
Well, I started, no, I started with one, but this one now is the majority of the time. So it's probably like seven years with this person. Right. But I love them.
I think it's fantastic. Well, a few years ago, I would have been afraid to ask this question, but now I can ask it because I've had several guests on the podcast who are colleagues who might work in this area. Have you explored psychedelics? I just did, which for the very first time, which, by the way, these are all illegal and less than a clinical trial.
So don't possess or sell these things. You will go to jail, but which ones did you do? So first of all, it was a awesome experience. I didn't know what I was going to get.
And I told the, uh, told the people that were organizing this. I asked for a private, because they do like groups. I asked for a private session. And I got like this really beautiful place to go.
So they were like, you want to do it? You got to your house? Like, get out of your fucking mind. You're like, no, and I have kids and I'll be like, walk around the house.
Yeah. So I imagine what your kids will be doing. Oh, yeah. I'm fucking weird.
So I, uh, I got this beautiful place and then I still had there and then, you know, they say and I, and I agree with this to go into it with intention. Right. Right. Like that's like kind of like, if you're not going to do anything, at least do that go in, don't just go like, I want to feel some shit.
Like have an intention. So I shared that, which, you know, I won't share, but I shared the, what the intentions were and then they, I asked them like, what am I going to get? And they go, we found that it's best to tell you afterwards. Really?
Yes. So I've never heard of that. Well, this is like, I'm not saying it's wrong. This is like the week in advance.
Right. So the day of they go, we're going to give you this first. And it's an African plant called Kana. Okay.
Okay. And so you have a neuromodulators, dopamine serotonin, see what's calling it, et cetera. They do a bunch of different things all over the brain and body. I, but Kana increases serotonin.
I think it's a serotonin dump, which is a lot like what psilocybin does. It is. So yeah, but the thing about this particular, um, is it, it says, it looks like dopamine also. So MDMA stimulates dopamine and serotonin.
Well, they call this one the love one. Yeah, that sounds so, it sounds like an impathogen, um, which MDMA is and, um, yeah, Kana is a very interesting compound. So I wasn't just done after that, buddy. Oh, that was just, that was the base coat.
Yeah. Then I got comedians, comedians go hard into the pain. Yeah. Then I got a, I got a second, uh, dose of Kana.
And then they were like, they were gauging me because I, I got a place where I could separate from them, but they were just kind of like supervising. Uh, no, well, I actually went into a room that had a set up light show on the ceiling and a, a speaker that was playing like a playlist of like chants and music. And I went into a really good place with this. And then they were asking me, they were like, do you want to like, how do you feel?
Do you want to just like go down or do you want to like, do you feel like you want to take this further? And I was like, let's go. Yeah. So then I got the, uh, the, uh, the, so I've been, so I've been, and that was prepared in a chocolate that also had ayahuasca.
Oh, yeah. Wow. Okay. So I did that.
Wow. And then I was just like, you were out there. Yeah. Uh, it was pretty great.
Yeah. You know, I, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, a few years ago, I would have never brought this up, um, because the, the stuff was considered super at the edge, right? Academic losing jobs and that kind of thing. I mean, the counterculture movement of the 60s and 70s obviously focused on psychedelics, yeah.
Um, Lucy and this guy with diamonds, yada, yada. And so meditation and psychedelics were synonymous back then. What happened in the nineties and 2000s is a lot of laboratories took meditation seriously as an exploration, a lot of good science to support meditative practices, ways to improve focus mainly. A lot of people think it's a relaxation exercise.
Actually improves focus. We talk about this psychedelics were still kind of earmarked as, you know, drugs that were illicit. Then what's happened in the last really five to seven years is thanks to the incredible work of Matthew Johnson at Johns Hopkins University and got him Robin Cartart, who used to be over in London, but who's now at UC San Francisco clinical trials started on psilocybin and then the maps group out in California. So there's all done legally clinical trials with federal taxpayer money done at universities, major universities looking at the antidepressant, long term antidepressant effects of things like psilocybin, MDMA, MDMA in particular for trauma.
And the data are astounding, right? 66% of people who do, you know, these two MDMA sessions, spaced appropriately in conjunction with a clinician, you know, you got someone there who support them show, you know, long-term depression relief, this kind of thing. We did an episode with a guy named Dr. Nolan Williams, who's one of these incredible, incredible doctors at Stanford.
He's a triple board certified neurologist psychiatrist who's doing work on Ibogaine. Um, there's another psychedelic psilocybin, all the various psychedelics. And he really emphasized, you know, that obviously kids who were developing should stay away from the stuff that I would say, you know, before you're 25, you might want to think seriously or really, you know, reconsider because the brain is still plastic. But what's very clear is that these compounds, they provide a dump of these neuromodulae, like dopamine or serotonin in particular ways.
And in those very unusual states of sometimes hallucinations, but different modes of thinking, the brain learns new associations. And on MDMA, people can see something that's very traumatic, that's been looping in their head or that they've been hiding from themselves and see it from a new perspective. And that that, and this is really important. People think that everything that happens, it happens during the psychedelic session, but that's just the opening of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplastic is just a process. The question is, where is it directed? And so here's the double-edged sword. If someone takes psychedelics and just pays attention to the music that they're listening to, there might be a few insights there.
But it is sort of a waste of plasticity, if you ask me, because there's a real opportunity to ratchet through some of the more challenging things. You can use an intention. Other times people will just kind of let what comes up through the subconscious, like the Freudian Succo and what have done. I'm very direct about this.
You know, I did psilocybin in some LSD when I was in high school in college, completely regret it. Did not have good experiences. Some weren't bad, but had some bad experiences. Just do not recommend it at all.
Why? Because I was in a place to really make sense of what was going on. And I think that the brain is so plastic until age 25 anyway, that there's a lot of good work that can be done through just insight, hard work, et cetera. As an adult, I've done three in conjunction with an MD, three different MDMA sessions, each of which was very different.
And each of which really helped me move through a lot. A lot of forgiveness, a lot of being able to feel. I used to be able to feel things like in my head. I could have emotions and waste down.
I could feel but my body didn't feel like a coherent whole when I'd have an emotion. And I was really good at packing down emotions. And then you're up one way or another. So that all largely got resolved.
Obviously, not far from perfect. I always say I have 3,000 pet peeves and about 3,000 flaws to match those pet peeves. So they go to hand in hand. And then the second session was just, I finished it out.
It was very mellow and it was just all about acceptance. And then the third session really was a deep dive into some complicated stuff that I've been trying to navigate more recently. And I would say in every one of these cases, it matches exactly what the clinical literature shows, which is that people gain new insight in positive ways that allow them to be more empathic towards others, but more importantly, more empathic towards themselves. And so I don't want to send people off to get these things.
Obviously, I would enroll in a clinical trial. As an academic, I have the responsibility of saying if you want to do this legally, I would enroll in a clinical trial or go to a place where it's legal and work with a physician and don't look at these things as magic bullets, but rather opportunities to do better work. They're a little bit like, frankly, a little bit like performance enhancing drugs in the sense that do I recommend people take anabolic steroids? No.
But if you're really into fitness and you've already reproduced, successfully reproduced and you're in your mid to late 40s and you're thinking about taking a lot of testosterone, yeah, you can do a lot more exercise. If you just take it thinking it's going to replace the exercise, you would have done. Forget it. And again, that has to be done safely too in conjunction with an MD.
But they really amplify the plasticity process and the clinical data are astounding. I mean, there's a real shift now. It's a huge shift. Academic academics at the level of government funding.
And the last thing I'll say about this is that I think is important is that within the veterans community, there's a group called Veterans Solutions. Again, I don't know. I'm getting paid to say this right. But I paid attention to what they're doing.
These are former special operators of what they call tier one operators and other operators who basically their careers put them in the face of a lot of stuff and they're tough as nails, but they come back and a lot of them are challenged with some of those things and how it's about that. And so I went to an event that Veterans Solutions put on Veterans Day last year and Coronado Island, which courses home to buds and Seelton Training. So you got a lot of tier one operators there. You also had, I won't name names, but you had far right politicians and far left politicians.
On the same stage, talking about the benefits of responsible use of psychedelics as therapeutics to offset the enormous wave in suicide that's been happening in veterans. And so you look at that and you go, okay, that's one very important community, but there are other communities like this. And this is the one place where I see partisan politics actually meeting in the middle. I couldn't believe it.
Governor Rick Perry was there talking about heart medicine. I was like, what? And you had other folks like Rick Doblin from maps who was a conscientious objector. And he had the guts to say that in a room for material not for sure.
I was like, wow. And listen, I was scared for his life. But everyone really centered around the fact that people grow up have different experiences. And at some point, I really do think that the only opportunity really meet in the middle for social issues and political issues, economic issues and everything in between is going to be through plasticity.
I think after age 25, people are pretty locked into their modes of thinking. Even if they don't like those modes of thinking. They still are totally locked in. There's very little change.
Being set in your ways is a real thing. I mean, that experience, for me, by the way, I'm already very much looking forward to the next one because I really enjoyed it so much. Yeah. And I read that.
You're not asking for the most of my personal. I know, but inside insights, I love by the way, because I had zero experience with this, and the only thing that I could even relate this to was basically cannabis in some form, right? And I'm a real pot smoker. I shouldn't have smoked.
You don't sound like, you know, the pot smoker. No, no, no. They actually messes up their time perception of hearing. So they have that like draw.
Oh, really? Yeah. The pot voice is a real thing. That's a real thing.
And it also adjusts on the neural innervation of the throat, the control speech. I mean, pot smokers, not all of them, right? Some are highly articulate, highly articulate, but some of them just sound dumb. The chronic smokers are special.
Listen, and I mean, like people that are in nukes of the memory system, like high THC. And of course, the THC community is crazy. We didn't episode on cannabis. You got it wrong.
You didn't talk about the terpenes and that look, I don't have anything. I don't have any problem with I'm basically like live and let live. It doesn't harm anyone. But kids vaping or smoking high THC containing cannabis.
I mean, there's a huge predisposition towards psychosis in those kids later, especially young males. A lot of what you see in terms of homelessness on the street, a lot of that psychosis is high THC cannabis induced. And nobody likes to speak very, very, very, so there's amazing research out of Canada on this. And then here's what I'm not trying to do.