Andrew Huberman

Robert Greene says a splintered attention span makes people easier to influence. He asks whose interest the programming serves. If the aim is money, constant novelty makes deep focus harder, and advertisements and gimmicks land more easily because independent thought gets weaker. The brain, he says, needs slowness as nourishment: learning bit by bit until new pathways form, so a person is in charge of that landscape. The rhythm other people program is a desert with no connections, and that is the part he finds scary.

Andrew Huberman brings up an Olympic freestyle skier at Stanford, Eileen Gu, whose answer about training her mind was slowness rather than speed. She spends time thinking about

Robert Greene says his stroke made him more emotional and less able to control the feeling. He would start crying without knowing why, then feel a wave of ecstasy and wonder why it was happening. He looked into it and says a stroke affecting the right side of the brain often does that. He treats the left side as language, logic, and reasoning, and the right as more holistic and emotional. He calls the left-right split full of cliches and says Andrew Huberman would know more of the science. The account is his experience of his own stroke.

Other people still in wheelchairs made him feel their helplessness, and he almost cried. He quotes the poet John Keats on a life of sensations instead of t

Robert Greene says following the notes, the logic, and the progression is how he enters music, and the result is a sublime experience. A concert makes the exercise a little harder because the music is of a different order, but the same entry is still possible.

In the 70s, while he was in college, he went to Grateful Dead concerts and followed some of their long instrumental pieces the way he follows Scarlatti. The pieces were quite sublime. Recording the music leaves a listener outside it, at the level of entertainment and base stimulation. The sublime route is to be inside the work. With a movie from another period, he wants to feel inside the movie, as if he is there. Attention fixed on h

Andrew Huberman kept several octopuses and, before them, many cuttlefish in his lab in San Diego. He thinks the lab had 40 cuttlefish at one point. The animals are incredibly intelligent and do all sorts of wild stuff.

They have a beautiful camouflage ability and can camouflage half the body. Males in the wild sometimes camouflage as females, enter a clutch of females, and then mate with them. He thinks the scientific literature refers to the males as sneaky fuckers. The phrase does not sound very scientific. A separate podcast could discuss the ethics, or the lack of ethics, of the disguise.

The crude name fits a joke about two habits of evolutionary biologists. Some hyphenate their names

Andrew Huberman says dying changes how time feels: the frame rate of attention shifts, and the tiniest details in space and time come forward. His graduate advisor died at 50. She was a remarkable woman dying of cancer, married to a scientist, with two girls, and he was very close with her family.

In their final conversation she told him about goodness she had experienced recently. Once she realized she was going to be dead soon, she started thinking about the tiniest things in the space and time domain. The family are all redheads with bright red hair, and she noticed the curls of her daughter's hair moving when the girl walked into the room to see her. Her frame rate was changing.

He fin

Andrew Huberman says a recent blackout and fall altered how Michael Murphy sees the world. Two weekends ago at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Murphy, now 96 and a founder of the institute, described the aftermath. He is still clear-headed and still mobile. Whether the event was a stroke or some other event is unknown. The pixelation of his world changed, and he can now appreciate colors and shapes in the environment where he has spent so much time.

Chuck Close had visual deficits that allowed incredible art at a different spatial scale. El Greco painted odd shapes, and the way he figures the human body looks strange.

Andrew Huberman says that if someone is mildly or severely sleep deprived, 10 or even 20 grams of creatine the next morning can partially rescue some cognitive function and maybe some physical vigor. He says it is not a replacement for sleep.

He says the best evidence is that creatine puts water in the muscles and makes a person stronger because of that. He has taken it since he was 17, about 10 grams a day, with an occasional washout of about a week. He says he does not think there is evidence that it makes hair fall out, that it is inexpensive, and that it seems safe. Ross Edgley says he did not take creatine on the Yukon swim.

Ross Edgley says that toward the end of the Yukon swim they were getting into grams of caffeine, and that 400 milligrams made a hurting, mundane stretch feel better about 15 minutes later.

Andrew Huberman says he loves caffeine and has a high tolerance for it. Nicotine sets up a quick dependence for him, a fast up and down, so he does not treat it as an everyday tool. He keeps it as oral nicotine, such as a lozenge, not smoking or vaping. He calls alpha-GPC a milder alternative to nicotine. If he takes it late in the day, he says it can increase REM sleep instead of wrecking sleep the way many stimulants do. If he takes it too early, he crashes in the late afternoon. Besides caffeine, he sa

Andrew Huberman says deliberate cold exposure, done as a shower or a cold plunge and done safely, lets a person get familiar with a flood of adrenaline. The mind is in disarray for the first 20 or 30 seconds, and the person can slow their breathing and make a strategy to get through it or get out of it. He calls that stress inoculation: the chemicals do not change, and familiarity keeps panic from pushing adrenaline higher.

He says he is tired of seeing people hyperventilate and then go into cold water and die, and of videos of people jumping into ice holes and getting swept under. He says not to jump into an ice hole.

Andrew Huberman says neurosurgeon Robert Heath let patients with electrodes in the brain stimulate themselves. Across those patients, the spot they chose most was the midline thalamus, where the feeling was mild frustration and anger. They found it arousing and motivating, even though the stimulation did nothing useful while they sat in the chair.

Huberman says the result is a little dark. That arousal, a me-versus-them feeling, can drive people who might otherwise become complacent.

Andrew Huberman says his lab recorded great white sharks in the wild to bring into a VR lab. Photographer Michael Muller convinced him to get dive-certified and swim toward the sharks outside the cage. He had an air failure on the hookah line the day before, not outside the cage, and he says 2017 was when he deliberately stopped taking risks with his physical life.

Ross Edgley says that the first time he dived with tiger sharks and great whites, they came straight for him. The divers told him to control his breathing and slow his heart rate, and the shark looked at him and then left him alone. Andrew Huberman says great whites come in slowly and are not actively hunting a person when tuna a

Ross Edgley says black bears on the Yukon in Canada were skittish and felt fine, while brown bears were not skittish and looked at him as if they were deciding what he tasted like.

He asked the support team if he was okay, because a brown bear was looking at him like he was dessert. He told Andrew Huberman the crew pulled out a cannon, not a gun, and said that if the bear got too close it would end up in the freezer. Ross Edgley kept swimming.

Ross Edgley says what makes a great champion can make a bad human. He says he knows some of his swims are bad for his health, but they are good for his soul.

He recalls a comment about fighter John Jones. John Jones is incredible and unbelievable, but there is not enough money to fill the void in his life, and that same drive pushes him to greatness. Andrew Huberman says he does not know John and is not versed in mixed martial arts.

Ross Edgley calls the pattern strange. The void that money cannot fill is also what drives a champion.

Ross Edgley's dad kept coaching tennis after stage four skin melanoma spread through his legs and stopped him from running. Ross Edgley says the family lost his dad four or five years ago. Doctors said the tumours had spread and they did not want him on his feet coaching 12 hours a day. He looked the doctor in the eye, said it was not a problem at all, and told them they already had a wheelchair tennis coaching system he would use.

He had built tennis centers up and down the UK. He taught wheelchair tennis and visually impaired tennis, and sometimes blindfolded himself so he could play. After a bad fall, Ross Edgley ran to the hospital and found blood down his dad's face. His dad told him n

When a cuttlefish sees something it wants to eat, the eyes move from the sides of the head to the front, and the animal becomes a depth-perception hunter.

Andrew Huberman studied cuttlefish in his lab in San Diego. Cuttlefish are cephalopods, like octopuses. They normally swim with the eyes on the sides of the head, wary, with near 360 degree vision, because they are prey and can see far behind them. They have no skeleton for protection, only a bone that lets them float, so they are basically a protein snack. The eye move happens first. Body patterns then change through chromophores, camouflage drops away, and hunting takes over. He says the shift is real: it recruits machinery in the brain

Andrew Huberman says aiming vision at one target raises arousal and the ability to recruit physical energy and mental energy. Opening the gaze does the reverse: the body relaxes, and less energy can be sent to one place.

Animals with eyes on the side of the head tend to be prey and take in a panorama. Animals with eyes in front tend to be predators and get stronger depth perception. Some animals can shift the eyes from a wide view to a focused view. Human eyes stay fixed in the head, but moving vision toward a vergence point, a target, still raises arousal. People in the fight game know the narrow view. Dilating the gaze is like coming off the gas pedal. Vision and time perception are linke

Ross Edgley strength trains heavily between country-length swims because a ligament or a tendon is what stops the swim, not lactic threshold, VO2, or technique.

Olympian friends ask whether the swim around Iceland used a two-beat or four-beat leg kick, whether he was breathing on both sides, and what his VO2 and lactic threshold were. Caught in an Arctic storm and windmilling, none of the usual swim measures matter. He lifts for mechanotransduction: strength work does more than make muscles stronger. Connective tissue, ligaments, and tendons get stronger too. Andrew Huberman calls the result the chassis, and Edgley agrees the chassis cannot break down. He jokes that Adam Peaty, from Loughbo

Ross Edgley fueled the swim around Iceland by picturing his dad in heaven, a tennis coach looking down and telling everyone else that the swimmer circling Iceland was his. The image gave Ross goosebumps, felt primitive, and got him through dark times. Even now, he said, the thought could send him another hundred miles.

Ross lost his dad four years before the conversation. His dad had been his mentor and his coach. Ross was becoming a dad and was trying to get back from the Iceland swim for the birth of his son. In the book he wrote about Iceland, he wanted the swim to stand as a tribute to everything his dad taught him and as a letter to his future son. In the water he imagined his dad on a

Ross Edgley says outside doubt became less and less useful across his career because fewer people doubted him. He says the swim around Great Britain was probably the biggest one, and once they had swum around Great Britain he missed the doubt.

Weekly vlogs of the swim went up on YouTube. Ross Edgley read every comment on the first vlog because he was excited. Commenters said he was far too big to be a swimmer, that he would give up after 100 kilometers, and that he would not even make the south coast. He thinks it was five years ago when he went back and found someone had replied that the old comments had not aged well, and the reply made him feel good. After the Great Britain swim, people

Andrew Huberman says activity in a top-down circuit from the prefrontal cortex drives persistence and winning when other factors stay roughly equal. Quiet that region in a mouse that always won and the mouse becomes the loser. Raise activity in the same region in the loser, in real time, and the mouse wins every time. Cortisol and testosterone levels do not explain the switch.

A fetal mouse still cannot beat an adult mouse, and stimulating Huberman's prefrontal cortex would not let him out-deadlift someone clearly stronger. Huberman calls himself reasonably strong and says the other person absolutely is stronger. When two competitors sit within 10 or 20 percent of each other's ability, the