How Many Hours Does Andrew Huberman Prep a Podcast?

Andrew Huberman puts at least 10 to 15 hours of passive listening preparation into each podcast. He says the active preparation might be five or six hours. He prepares quite a lot, and coming up at the end with something somewhat crystallized is satisfying. He says it feels like his dopamine circuits just love that payoff.

He looks for the overlap in the different elements. He generally reads 10 or 15 papers, mostly good reviews: annual reviews and the annual review of physiology. He chases a few references and listens to university-level lectures on YouTube. In the morning he works out in the gym in his house and throws random ideas on a whiteboard, including dreams and hallucination. He starts to eliminate, draws lines between the common points of intersection, and distills an outline. On walks with his dog he thinks about what he wants to say, then bothers a couple of people and blabs to them.

The only pain is that a year later, after he has talked about the stuff a bunch of times, the same material is so much more succinct. At some point he pulls the trigger anyway.