Joe Rogan Experience #1958 - Andrew Huberman

Andrew Huberman 0:00 (drum roll) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Narrator 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience. (drum roll)

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Every now and then, pizza's good for you, right? What is, what is your, like, when you ... What is your schedule as far as, like, do you allow yourself bad food every now and then?

Andrew Huberman 0:22 Uh, my vices in the food department are croissants.

Joe Rogan 0:26 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 0:26 Thing is, I, you know, that hits the dopamine button and it's all about more. I mean-

Joe Rogan 0:31 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 0:32 I can, I can sink five of those things.

Joe Rogan 0:34 Chocolate croissants are my jam.

Andrew Huberman 0:36 Oh, really? I don't adulterate my croissants.

Joe Rogan 0:38 Really?

Andrew Huberman 0:39 No. Maybe extra butter. For me it's all the savory stuff. Savory, salty. So it's croissants every once in a while or piz-

Joe Rogan 0:45 Have you had a chocolate croissant?

Andrew Huberman 0:47 I have.

Joe Rogan 0:48 Pretty goddamn good. You like them?

Narrator 0:50 I'm with him. I'm all butter.

Joe Rogan 0:51 Really? Butter's nice. Butter's nice.

Andrew Huberman 0:54 Yeah. I think the all butter, for me, justifies having, you know, three or four.

Joe Rogan 0:57 When I lived in New York, I used to love buttered bagels.

Andrew Huberman 1:00 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:00 Or buttered rolls. They do not have that out here for some strange reason.

Andrew Huberman 1:04 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05 It's like a common thing. If you go to, like, a, like, a deli in New York, they always had buttered rolls. It was like a r- just a roll with a lot of butter on it and people would eat that with coffee.

Andrew Huberman 1:17 Yeah. They're-

Joe Rogan 1:17 Out here they don't have that for some strange reason.

Andrew Huberman 1:19 Huh.

Joe Rogan 1:19 Or in L.A. they don't have it either.

Andrew Huberman 1:21 I like how in New York when you get a soda, even at a little, uh, you know, little 7-Eleven type place, they offer you a straw, like-

Joe Rogan 1:27 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:27 It's one of the last civilized things in life to be offered a straw.

Joe Rogan 1:31 You know what I saw? The ... There's a chart. See if you can find this, of you know how we're supposed to be not, uh, using plastic straws anymore because turtles are dying? You know that, you know people give you plast-

Andrew Huberman 1:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:44 You know they give you paper straws?

Andrew Huberman 1:45 I grew up in ... I remember the, the six pack container, those plastic things that you used to see this sea gull with the thing around his-

Joe Rogan 1:49 Oh yeah, like the turtle-

Andrew Huberman 1:50 And that was, that was kind of, that was the picture.

Joe Rogan 1:50 Where it, like, constricted his shell. Have you ever seen that one?

Andrew Huberman 1:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:54 Like, it got around a turtle when he was little and as he grew the, the shell became like an hourglass. It was really gross. Um, but there was this chart of the countries in the world that pollute the ocean the most and it's fucking stunning. Um, and if we stop using plastic straws, we're not gonna put a fucking dent in it unless they do. Like, we're not even close to number one. We're not even close to number six. Like, the, the leading countries that pollute the ocean, I think number one was Philippines, I forget which-

Andrew Huberman 2:27 I was gonna say SouthEast ... Why would Southeast Asia have that issue?

Joe Rogan 2:32 I would imagine that when people are very poor, the last thing they're concerned about is not polluting. I would think that.

Andrew Huberman 2:39 I've seen those images of those giant, like, icebergs of plastic junk.

Joe Rogan 2:45 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:45 And I always hope that's not real.

Joe Rogan 2:47 Oh, it's real. Yeah, Boyan Slat is a, a gentleman who's been on the podcast before, has developed this device for, uh, it's like, it sifts the ocean. It's, like, it floats over the top of the ocean and it has this collector that sucks up plastic and then they take that plastic and use it and recycle it and make, like, eyeglasses out of it and all sorts of other different things. Like, who-

Narrator 3:13 He's Asian, that's-

Joe Rogan 3:13 Okay, so number one is China.

Andrew Huberman 3:15 By a, by a wide margin.

Joe Rogan 3:17 By a wide margin.

Andrew Huberman 3:18 Wow.

Joe Rogan 3:19 Countries polluting the oceans the most, andro- annual metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste and total amount ending up in global waters. S- this is fucking insane. So China is 8.80 metric tons. Indonesia's number two with 3.2. Philippines is number three with 1.9. You go all the way down, the United States is 0.30.

Andrew Huberman 3:45 Well, China's got no excuse because their GDP is way up there. They could actually manage it.

Joe Rogan 3:49 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 3:49 But some of these other countries, as you mentioned, are, are definitely lower GDP rel- relative to the United States and China.

Joe Rogan 3:54 Right. For sure. Like, yeah, definitely, like, Malaysia, Nigeria, but-

Andrew Huberman 4:00 China's got no excuse. That's in- incredible.

Joe Rogan 4:03 Yeah.

Narrator 4:03 Is some of that them buying our stuff, though? Don't we sell our trash?

Joe Rogan 4:07 We buy it from them, bro.

Narrator 4:08 Okay.

Joe Rogan 4:09 I mean, oh, trash.

Narrator 4:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:10 Buy their trash.

Narrator 4:11 Like, they, they take it and then be like, "Here, you, you deal with it." I've heard of that happening. I don't-

Joe Rogan 4:14 Hmm.

Narrator 4:14 Not to a gigantic extent like that. I don't know about, you know, seven billion.

Joe Rogan 4:17 Right, for waste management, right? Yeah, like they might have a comp- company that handles that. Perhaps. I mean, but also they produce so many plastic things. I mean, think about the amount of things that are plastic that are produced in China. It's pretty extraordinary.

Andrew Huberman 4:30 I remember for a while there was this discussion about kids toys with the, the coloring-

Joe Rogan 4:35 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 4:35 You know, and the tox- toxins and plastics.

Joe Rogan 4:37 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 4:38 Get ... I, you know, it, I guess I don't know if we're gonna go there because, uh (laughs) . We might as well, right?

Joe Rogan 4:44 Okay.

Andrew Huberman 4:44 Well, I, you know, it's interesting for ... Starting 2019 I started posting things on Instagram. That's how I got my stuff out. Then it was going on podcasts. Now we have the podcast, right? But I'd stayed off Twitter largely until this last year when I started putting a lot of stuff there. So you, you put stuff there, you start reading stuff there.

Joe Rogan 4:59 Oh no.

Andrew Huberman 4:59 And then-

Narrator 5:00 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 5:00 Well, what's been really interesting to me is I followed this whole lab leak thing.

Joe Rogan 5:04 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 5:04 Right? Because early in the pandemic people in my field started chattering about that. I was very ... I love exotic animals. N- not to own them, right? But I'm really interested in animal, um, conservation. And so the pangolin is an amazing animal. They pinned it on the pangolin early on, right?

Joe Rogan 5:20 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 5:20 And there were articles published in good journals, several of which I'm on the editorial board for. So early in the pandemic there were papers coming out really fast about, you know, the sequence of the virus in pangolins which were being sold in the Wuhan market, et cetera. And I was pretty disturbed by this mostly because of the, the pictures of the Wuhan market. The exotic animal trade is just ... It's, it's horrible, right?

Joe Rogan 5:42 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 5:42 Okay. Con- closed confinement, you know, these are beautiful animals that there's no justification for this stuff. But pangolin meat is sold at, uh, I forget what it is per pound, but it's sold ... It's a delicacy and it's, it's considered very lucrative and, uh, to get pangolin meat of all things. There's actually a female pangolin meat, um-... influencer on YouTube and s-

Joe Rogan 6:02 Really? (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 6:03 Oh, yeah. No, it's like a, it, it's, it starts to look like pangolin meat ASMR. It's crazy and disgusting.

Joe Rogan 6:09 Oh, wow.

Andrew Huberman 6:09 So they're mi- they're kind of mixing, you know, sexy women with exotic meats from these rare animals. It's just awful. So I was going deep down this rabbit hole of trying to understand this exotic animal trade, and then, um, and then there was chatter in my field about the fact that one of the members of the laboratory in Wuhan that was working with these, you know, very high, uh, restriction viruses, um, had done her training in the United States, which is true, um, had had, has a master's degree, but was running a laboratory, which is unusual, right? Typically, the head of a laboratory is someone with a PhD, MD, or both. Very rare for a so-called PI, a principal investigator, like, like me or, you know, a, another, a Matt Walker, for instance, principal investigator, to have less than a PhD. The fact that she ran a lab or was important in running this lab as a master's, with only a master's, is unusual. And then there was a lot of chatter in my field about the, the idea that it might have something to do with the fact that her significant other was a member of the Chinese Communist Party. And so, you know, sh- that laboratory had deep ties to government and vice versa. And that's true of all laboratories in China, all laboratories. So the whole notion of the lab leak hypothesis was not foreign to scientists like me, who thought, "Yeah, you know, my laboratory works with rabies viruses, adenoviruses, sin bis viruses." None of these are a- are as biohazardous as something like the coronavirus, but you work with these viruses and you have to use, you know, lab coats, gloves, bleach, sterilization. You're careful, you know? Hoods of pro- you know, you... But human error happens. So I'm not at all convinced one way or the other that it was a deliberate leak, but the idea that it would leak from a laboratory to a scientist like me who has what's called a wet lab, where you, you know, with solutions and beakers and things of that sort, things happen all the time. Not in my laboratory. We're very careful, and everyone's checked up on often. But the idea that human error could cause this is like, it was an "of course" to all scientists early on.

Joe Rogan 8:09 Well, they had been-

Andrew Huberman 8:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:10 ... cited in 2018 for violating safety protocols.

Andrew Huberman 8:13 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, all it takes-

Joe Rogan 8:14 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 8:14 ... is, you know, uh, people might not be familiar what pipetting is, but it's basically taking a little, uh, straw that sucks up, you know, press a button, it sucks up some fluid. You move things, you know, between little, little tiny vials. It can be done by robots too, but typically it's done by humans, and that's how m- and they put in a center. If you spin it, take off a little piece of that, or take the pellet out of the bottom that spun down, this kind of thing. All it takes is one loose thumb and it's on a lab coat. All it takes is that lab coat going on a rack. All it takes is somebody leaving work, putting their lab coat on there and touching that lab, and then it's out in the world.

Joe Rogan 8:44 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 8:44 Like it's not that complicated.

Joe Rogan 8:46 Right.

Andrew Huberman 8:47 Um, so it doesn't have to be that somebody had a plan to let this out. It could be. I don't have any knowledge of that. But the idea that it would come from a lab, to me, is far more plausible than the idea that it came from some pangolin sequence in the Wuhan market. So I think we were-

Joe Rogan 9:01 This is very...

Andrew Huberman 9:01 ... we were going down the wrong path on this for a long time, and I thought, "This is kind of bananas." And now everyone's so shocked and it's like, I think to people who work in biomedical research, like of course this sort of thing could happen. Of course. Because human error is the cause of most of these kinds of things.

Joe Rogan 9:17 Well, it was very clear that there was a concerted effort to dismiss the idea that it came from a lab, and it wasn't logical and it wasn't scientific. And they ignored, uh, the, the, all the evidence that seemed to point that it originated from that lab, including the people that worked in that lab who got sick. And now there's some new stupid story in the New York Times about a raccoon dog. They're saying it might have come from a raccoon dog.

Andrew Huberman 9:42 The s- is the civet, is that the, the, the-

Joe Rogan 9:44 No.

Andrew Huberman 9:45 ... the c-

Joe Rogan 9:45 No. No.

Andrew Huberman 9:45 Okay.

Joe Rogan 9:45 So it's some sort of a raccoon dog.

Andrew Huberman 9:47 Okay.

Joe Rogan 9:47 A civet is actually a cat.

Andrew Huberman 9:49 It's a, like a ferret type thing, right?

Joe Rogan 9:50 A civet is like in the cat family, I believe.

Andrew Huberman 9:53 Okay. Right.

Joe Rogan 9:53 And it's, uh, that's where you get, uh, kopi luwak coffee from.

Andrew Huberman 9:56 Oh, yeah, the, from the poop of the civet.

Joe Rogan 9:58 Yeah. Have you ever had it?

Andrew Huberman 9:59 Oh, it's the luwak coffee. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:01 Yeah. It's actually very good.

Andrew Huberman 10:02 Yeah. When I was a postdoc there was a, there was interest-

Joe Rogan 10:04 So this is it.

Andrew Huberman 10:05 That's the raccoon dog?

Joe Rogan 10:06 Yeah. So this is-

Andrew Huberman 10:06 That one doesn't eat coffee beans.

Joe Rogan 10:08 (laughs) I don't think so.

Andrew Huberman 10:09 Doesn't look-

Joe Rogan 10:09 I mean, maybe it does.

Andrew Huberman 10:10 Doesn't look like it.

Joe Rogan 10:11 It's a member of the canid family. It's also...

Andrew Huberman 10:13 It's a beautiful animal.

Joe Rogan 10:14 Let's go with it back to where you were. Um, a group that also includes domestic dogs and the only member that hibernates. Oh, wow. They r- they hibernate. Interesting. But here's the problem. Um, Saagar Enjeti was actually explaining this to me on Saturday night. He was like, "There are, there's direct evidence of people being infected that predates this establishment of this, uh, animal testing positive in that wet market." So I guess people were eating that animal? Is that the idea? But many months before that, people were sick from this. Like this is, what was this in D- I believe it was in December of 2019. Is that what they're saying? November or December of 2019.

Andrew Huberman 11:00 And it was March 2020 when, when everything kind of blasted, right?

Joe Rogan 11:04 Yeah, but it was September-

Andrew Huberman 11:05 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:06 ... and, or August of 2019 when the first people were infected. So this, it predates it by a considerable amount.

Andrew Huberman 11:12 Yeah. I think the lab leak hypothesis is, is far more plausible.

Joe Rogan 11:15 Well, the furin cleavage site, this, this thing that they've, they've established that it seems to indicate that this virus was manipulated. Like this is-

Andrew Huberman 11:24 Yeah, j-

Joe Rogan 11:24 Fur- the furin cleavage site. Excuse me.

Andrew Huberman 11:26 Yeah. There are two. You know, we hear about gain-of-function research, and now everyone associates gain of function with, gain of function of this particular virus. But gain-of-function research happens all the time in essentially every laboratory in the US and abroad that does mouse genetics. You knock out a gene and you ask, "What happens to this animal in the absence of a gene?" And then you knock it in and you see if it replaces that. Because in humans, human genetics is only loss of function. You don't have the option yet, CRISPR will allow this, to put things back in that are missing. And so gain-of-function research is extremely common. I mean, we do it in bio-

Joe Rogan 12:00 Yes.

Andrew Huberman 12:01 We're no longer working on animals, to be clear. We only do human studies now. But you're...... this is something that you're trained to do as a postdoc. Everyone learns loss of function, gain of function.

Joe Rogan 12:09 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 12:09 You need to do both. You know, the- the gain of function, actually there is that one CRISPR experiment, speaking of interesting science out of China. A guy, he actually was a postdoc at Stanford, um, worked for a guy named Steve Quake, and then separately, on his own, without permission or anything from Stanford, went off and started his own laboratory in China, and stood up at a meeting a few years ago and said he had done CRISPR in human babies. This has been done.

Joe Rogan 12:32 Yeah. He- he was arrested for this, right?

Andrew Huberman 12:34 He mu- yeah, he- he mutated the HIV receptor, which everyone thinks, "Okay, that was designed to prevent these babies from getting HIV." It turns out that that mutation is thought to perhaps enhance memory by sort of parallel mechanisms, and then it was very unclear for a short while whether or not this guy was either gonna get a Nobel Prize or whether or not they were gonna throw him in jail. And so everyone was very tense and waiting in my community, thinking, "Okay..." Because when somebody's kind of up for a big discovery like this, everyone kind of circles maybe wanting that maybe they should be involved in getting the accolades. But as- the moment that the international community, I think rightfully so, said, "This is horrible. You can't do this. There's no ethics committee, you need to think about what you're doing," everyone was just like, "I had nothing to do with this guy, never had any..." And, you know, there was a deep excavation of emails and all sorts, everyone was like, "I got nothing to do with this guy." So, it was pretty interesting. Then China said, "Oh, we're gonna- we're gonna punish him." But I'd be willing to bet both hands that his- his punishment consists of a jail cell that is pretty luxurious with a laboratory. There's no question that CRISPR is going on there. CRISPR is going on in certain regions of, you know-

Joe Rogan 13:41 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 13:41 ... of, you know, uh, other- other locations on the globe where things aren't as regulated. Because think about the potential payoff for being able to rescue a Huntington's mutation, right? A Huntington's chorea mutation that has somebody at some point in their life, you know, but k- un- unable to control their arms, hemiballismus of the arms. If you want-

Joe Rogan 14:00 What is it?

Andrew Huberman 14:01 Hem- uh, Huntington's disease. It's a deterioration of the parts of the brain that control motor function. The parts of the brain that control motor function have two main pathways. One is a go pathway, like reach for this coffee mug, and the other one is a no-go pathway, resisting movement. And the no-go pathway degenerates substantially, other things too, and people with Huntington's chorea end up with these writhing ballistic movements.

Joe Rogan 14:22 Oh, wow.

Andrew Huberman 14:22 And it's an inherited disease, so you know what gene. It's the huntingtin gene. And if you can, if you know that your, for instance, parent has it, you can get tested for it. A lot of people don't want to get tested, they don't want the answer, 'cause it's late onset. So you can be normal a certain portion of your life and then get it. It's a tragic disease. But if you test positive for this gene, you know you're going to get Huntington's, in which case with CRISPR you could just put the gene back in and rescue function.

Joe Rogan 14:46 What causes someone to eventually succumb to that disease? If it's a late onset disease, if they don't have it when they're young and they develop when they get older, what changes?

Andrew Huberman 14:55 Yeah, so it's not just deterioration of those particular neurons, it's- it's deterioration of the neurons that control those neurons, and everything's working in a kind of a top-down suppression all the time. In fact, um, the head neurosurgeon at Neuralink, who's somebody I know quite well named Matthew McDougall, he came up through my laboratory, Elon made a great choice in hiring him, um, told me recently the best way to think about the frontal cortex is that basically its main job besides picking context and strategy for a given situation is to tell certain parts of your brain that really want to do things, "Shh."

Joe Rogan 15:27 Hmm.

Andrew Huberman 15:27 That's the best description I've ever heard of prefrontal cortex. You know, it's what's keeping Jamie from doing things that he shouldn't right now and me doing things that I shouldn't right now and every time you have a crazy idea like, "Maybe I should jump off this bridge. Oh, w- why would I think that? I'm not..." That's a healthy operation of your brain saying, "I want to 'cause I'm kind of curious, but I don't want to, so I'm not going to."

Joe Rogan 15:46 Right.

Andrew Huberman 15:47 With Huntington's what happens is there's slow deterioration of those neurons, but there's a lot of deterioration of these neurons that control motor function. And eventually what happens is the deeper neurons that control motor function start shutting down the autonomic functions like breathing, heart rate, and so eventually people just succumb to some basic, um, you know, uh, re- we call them housekeeping functions, you know.

Joe Rogan 16:10 Hmm.

Andrew Huberman 16:10 So, they'll- they'll have to be on a respirator and they- they have to, um, you know, they have to use a catheter tube and, you know, they have to defecate into a bag and, you know, at some point they just become a- a- a deteriorated, um, mess of neurons. So, what's first to go there, however, is the- the control of motor function, and it goes first in the direction of too much activity because of all these brakes and accelerators that we have in- in the brain. Um, so in any case, CRISPR, gene manipulation of the sort that this guy did in this laboratory in China, again, I think an ethics c- committee needs to tell the world or decide for the world what people should be allowed to do and not do, but you can imagine for something like Huntington's, it would be tremendously advantageous. Like if you had a child who you knew was someday gonna get Huntington's, you'd want to do a CRISPR mutation and put the healthy gene back.

Joe Rogan 16:58 Is there anything that's been shown to slow down the progress of Huntington's?

Andrew Huberman 17:05 Uh, there I'm not so versed. It's a little bit like MS, let- another neurodegenerative disease, multiple sclerosis, where certain things exacerbate it, like inflammation of any kind.

Joe Rogan 17:15 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 17:15 Um, and- and those things can be, uh, almost random i- in- in some ways. Like some people who have, uh, MS will eat, uh, salad dressing with mustard in it, have a huge inflammatory response and have a flare-up, blurry vision and get worse a- and then it returns to-

Joe Rogan 17:30 Mustard?

Andrew Huberman 17:30 Things like mustard 'cause must-

Joe Rogan 17:32 Is mustard inflammatory?

Andrew Huberman 17:33 Well, mustard- mustard isn't necessarily whole body inflammatory, but it, if it's spicy mustard, it binds to what's called the substance P receptor or the- or the capsaicin receptor, we have receptors for anything that's kind of hot-

Joe Rogan 17:43 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 17:43 ... and spicy, um, and those are the same receptors that respond to hot liquid. Uh, heat and- and spicy, obviously very, very closely linked and pain, all three of those very close. Whereas pain relief, very closely related to menthol and cool, not just the taste, but the actual physical sensation of cool.

Joe Rogan 18:01 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 18:01 So heat, pain and inflammation, kind of our cousins in this- in this sense, and cool, menthol and lack of inflammation are also cousins in terms of receptors, neural circuits, this kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 18:13 So can spicy food cause inflammation?

Andrew Huberman 18:16 Sure, yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:17 Really?

Andrew Huberman 18:17 Yeah. But I think one of the best ways to think about inflammation, and, and here I, you know, I, definite hat tip to Layne Norton, who we both know, and Andy Alpin, who really, (laughs) both really impressed upon me the fact that if we were to measure somebody's blood pressure, inflammatory markers, heart rate, and cortisol during a hard workout, and you didn't know they were doing a hard workout, I just handed you the data, and you're a medical doctor, you'd say-

Joe Rogan 18:42 Right.

Andrew Huberman 18:42 ... "This person's dying."

Joe Rogan 18:43 Right. Right. Right.

Andrew Huberman 18:44 Right? So inflammation is robust during-

Joe Rogan 18:46 Right.

Andrew Huberman 18:46 ... during hard exercise. But I think what's so incredible about the human body is that the increase in blood pre- pressure, inflammation, et cetera, is what triggers the adaptation so that blood pressure and inflammation, et cetera, are all much lower the other 23 hours of the day.

Joe Rogan 19:01 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 19:02 And so there's something special about our system whereby, yeah, maybe if you had really hot peppers, like the most famous of these is the, um, Carolina Reaper.

Joe Rogan 19:10 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 19:10 You know about this? The Carolina Reaper-

Joe Rogan 19:11 I have some in my hot sauce.

Andrew Huberman 19:13 Oh.

Joe Rogan 19:13 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 19:14 Someone e-

Joe Rogan 19:15 Senor Lechuga made me this, uh, trio of hot sauces.

Andrew Huberman 19:18 There's-

Joe Rogan 19:18 And there's reapers in there.

Andrew Huberman 19:20 Is, is that a person or a brand, Senor Lechuga?

Joe Rogan 19:22 It's a brand.

Andrew Huberman 19:23 Okay.

Joe Rogan 19:23 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 19:23 I thought the awesome-

Joe Rogan 19:24 There's three hot sauces that we developed. Um, one of them is, uh, my friends over at Half Face Bi- Blades, they developed this one that I really like, so he added that to my little three collection, and it's like (sighs) I think it's reapers, uh, sun-dried tomatoes, and some other stuff, and, um, oh, and, uh, truffles. It's really good.

Andrew Huberman 19:48 Amazing.

Joe Rogan 19:49 Yeah. And then he's got two other ones, one of 'em with habanero and, but they're, there it is, those are the three. What happened? Yeah. So, uh, if you like hot shit, I like it hot.

Andrew Huberman 20:02 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 20:02 This stuff is, like, legit. So one of 'em is heirloom tomatoes, winter truffles, and reapers, that's the Half Face Blades, uh, cooperative. And then the other one is, I don't even know how to say that word, chilacalle? How do you say that?

Andrew Huberman 20:16 I have no idea. Chil-

Joe Rogan 20:17 Chilacalle.

Andrew Huberman 20:18 I'm not gonna, I'm gonna, I'm in Texas, I'll embarrass myself even more.

Joe Rogan 20:20 Get your cursor off that, please. Colima salt and ghost pepper, that's the, that one's rough, but it's really delicious though. And the other ones, habanero, uh, urfa chili, and paprika. And, uh, I love 'em all.

Andrew Huberman 20:34 Yum.

Joe Rogan 20:34 But I l- I like really hot.

Andrew Huberman 20:36 Well, th-

Joe Rogan 20:36 Like if you can't, if you're like, "Boy, this Tabasco is rough," stay the fuck away from that stuff.

Andrew Huberman 20:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 20:42 'Cause the stuff I like is pretty rough.

Andrew Huberman 20:44 Well, the Carolina Reaper in small amounts I'm sure can spice it just right.

Joe Rogan 20:48 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 20:48 There, there are these pepper-eating contests that people-

Joe Rogan 20:51 Oh, I've seen 'em.

Andrew Huberman 20:51 ... yeah. And-

Joe Rogan 20:52 We've, we've played 'em on the podcast. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 20:53 So a few years back, somebody ate a Carolina Reaper and ended up with what's called thunderclap headache. Thunderclap headache is a massive inflammation of the meninges of the brain. So you got your brain, it's sitting in fluid, everyone knows that, and then there's some thick dura stuff around it. There's thick, thick fibrous tissue, like, well, you're a hunter, so when you get, wanna take-

Joe Rogan 21:12 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 21:12 ... the brain out, people think, oh, you just kinda pop, pop the brain out. You have to, you need-

Joe Rogan 21:16 You gotta cut it out.

Andrew Huberman 21:16 ... a sharp razor or really sharp scissors to get through or a sharp knife. The swelling of the meninges is what happened to this person. They got a unbelievable headache, and it's actually inflammation-induced brain damage. Now, that's only eating a, an extremely hot pepper in, in huge quantities.

Joe Rogan 21:33 How many peppers did this guy eat?

Andrew Huberman 21:35 I don't know. I think, uh-

Narrator 21:36 Um, I'm checking.

Andrew Huberman 21:37 Yeah, check, yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:37 Just eating one of those things, like, you know, in the pepper sauce, my stuff, it's like the tiniest amount, it'll wreck you.

Andrew Huberman 21:44 Yeah, thunderclap headache. We know a couple other things about spice. And here, I, I just, I always, I wanna make sure I, I give proper attribution. The Nobel Prize was given a couple years ago to a f- a guy down at the Scripps Institute in San Diego, Ardem Patapoutian and David, um, excuse me, uh, oh gosh, David Julius at UCSF, for the discovery of these receptors for pressure, cool, heat. And then it's an amazing set of discoveries that just occurred really in the last 10 years. We know that all of those pathways go to areas of the brain that are involved in, of course, like behavior, like if you touch something really hot or you taste something really hot, for most people, they're gonna resist that. But also to the hypothalamus, which houses all these hormone control areas, et cetera. People who can tolerate stronger spice, men and women, we know it's correlated with higher levels of circulating testosterone. That, I think, is interesting. What we're really talking about is higher pain threshold.

Joe Rogan 22:37 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 22:37 And we, you and I have talked before about if there's one clear effect of testosterone, it's that it makes effort feel good, that that pain starts to have a little bit of a come hither kind of thing to it. It feels a little bit enticing-

Joe Rogan 22:49 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 22:50 ... when testosterone levels are elevated. When testosterone levels are lower or if people have lower levels of testosterone, effort feels more overwhelming. How's that?

Joe Rogan 22:59 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 23:00 Um, and the other thing is that ingestion of, of spicy peppers resets your calibration for what's spicy. I think we know that too. And in a way that also adjusts people's pain threshold. So if people gain bet- better eating hot peppers, they're better at dealing with all types of pain. And I find this fascinating because I know you and I are both kind of obsessed with ice baths and cold, cold plunges.

Joe Rogan 23:22 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 23:22 And I've been going deep into that literature around cold and what's really known about cold thermogenesis and not known, and it seems like the- these acute adrenaline, acute pain pathways, they do exactly what exercise does, which is in the moment if you were to measure somebody's inflammation, et cetera, you'd say, "This person is dying. They're in a terrible state." They might as well be getting, you know, open heart surgery with no anesthesia the way some people react to the ice bath. It's kind of silly, the, to us, but for people that don't like the cold, they're like, "You gotta be kidding me. I'd never go near it." They try and disparage it. They try and poke every hole in the data. They're just scared, right?

Joe Rogan 23:56 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 23:57 They're just scared. We know this. But they are actually the people that benefit the most because that really acute adrenaline spike, that pain that you feel creates a l- higher pain threshold later, higher threshold for work output, all the things that most people seek. And so to me it's always interesting that it, you have to look what's happening during, and you have to look at what's happening afterward. And, uh, for some reason as humans we like these creature comforts of massages, which are great, um, you know, the sauna, which is great, although if you crank it up really hot, it's work at some level.

Joe Rogan 24:28 It's always work at the end.

Andrew Huberman 24:30 ... it- there's that moment-

Joe Rogan 24:30 The last five minutes of a 25-minute session at 190-

Andrew Huberman 24:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:34 ... degrees, those are, that's work.

Andrew Huberman 24:35 Yeah, and there's something about the- the burning in the nose for me.

Joe Rogan 24:39 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 24:39 At least my heart rate starts to, like, I wanna get the hell out of there.

Joe Rogan 24:41 Burning in the nose. So are you using water on the rocks a lot?

Andrew Huberman 24:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:45 So that's what's giving you-

Andrew Huberman 24:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:46 ... the burning in the nose?

Andrew Huberman 24:47 Yeah. I- I-

Joe Rogan 24:48 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 24:48 You know, it's always hard to know how hot it is right at the pl- place where it reaches your body.

Joe Rogan 24:52 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 24:52 But I've been cranking it way, way up.

Joe Rogan 24:54 Like what temperature?

Andrew Huberman 24:55 Like 260.

Joe Rogan 24:56 What?

Andrew Huberman 24:57 260, but I cover-

Joe Rogan 24:58 2-6-0?

Andrew Huberman 24:58 But I cover my head.

Joe Rogan 25:00 God.

Andrew Huberman 25:00 So the-

Joe Rogan 25:00 Why- What are you, a brisket?

Andrew Huberman 25:01 No. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:01 The fuck are you doing?

Andrew Huberman 25:02 Well, so the... (laughs) Well, what I found is-

Joe Rogan 25:05 Why- Why are you doing that?

Andrew Huberman 25:06 Uh, uh, so what's interesting is your desire to get out of the- of the hot tub, or the- the too hot hot tub is because of burning on the skin, right?

Joe Rogan 25:13 Right.

Andrew Huberman 25:13 But your desire to get out of the sauna is usually a brain thing. And you'll notice this because if you go to a Russian banya-

Joe Rogan 25:19 Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman 25:19 ... they all wear the little wool hats.

Joe Rogan 25:20 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:21 That's to insulate their brain against the heat so they can stay in at hotter temperatures on their body. So I'm in at 260, but I've got my head covered with a wool cap so it doesn't feel as stressful. But I'm doing it 'cause I like to f- I like to sweat.

Joe Rogan 25:33 But if it doesn't feel as stressful, wouldn't it have less of a positive effect?

Andrew Huberman 25:37 Okay, so, um, this is great, 'cause what you're starting to do is tease out the variables.

Joe Rogan 25:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:40 So this is where I think it gets interesting. You can get better at sweating. I know fighters do this in preparation, you know, dropping weight, and you can get better by doing more sauna. You get a- to be a better sweater, which means that you can drop h- you can cool more easily, even in clothes, or if you're out running or hunting or doing anything. So there's some advantage to being a- better at sweating. And sweating itself is a whole interesting story. You actually have nerves that control the sweat glands. That's actually controlled by- by little nerve endings. And those pathways can grow very, very quickly in the presence of heat. So what I've been trying to do is learn how to dump heat better.

Joe Rogan 26:15 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 26:15 And if I don't use the, you know, the hat, what happened was I was getting up to 220 and I'd sit in there for, like, 45 minutes, and I'm thinking, "This is not doing anything for me anymore." I want to increase my sweating.

Joe Rogan 26:24 Have you brought in an independent thermometer?

Andrew Huberman 26:27 Um, you, you're not trusting the 260, man?

Joe Rogan 26:29 No.

Andrew Huberman 26:29 You're... No. Uh, so what I did is I had the... No, I haven't. So what, uh-

Joe Rogan 26:33 Who makes your sauna?

Andrew Huberman 26:35 Um, this is Dundalk. But, so what I had the guy do, who installed it for me, um, is put the thermometer down low.

Joe Rogan 26:43 Right.

Andrew Huberman 26:43 Because it's a trigger, right? It's-

Joe Rogan 26:44 Of course.

Andrew Huberman 26:44 ... it's gonna shut it off when it hits a certain temperature.

Joe Rogan 26:46 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:47 So what I'm really trying to do is get- get it really, really hot down near the floor, because then I'd, you know, when I stand up when it's that hot, I'm just ready to pass out. No chance.

Joe Rogan 26:55 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:56 But, you know, I think Laird, I don't wanna, um, get this wrong on the numbers, but you know, I know Laird brings his Airdyne bike in there.

Joe Rogan 27:02 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 27:02 And-

Joe Rogan 27:02 With oven mitts on. (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 27:04 (laughs) So he's got- he- he's gotta be putting himself at- at- at least 260, right? I mean-

Joe Rogan 27:09 Himself? I don't think he has-

Andrew Huberman 27:11 Oh, nice.

Joe Rogan 27:11 ... his sauna set at 260.

Andrew Huberman 27:13 No.

Joe Rogan 27:13 I think his sauna set in the 200s, though. I think it's, like, 215 or 220.

Andrew Huberman 27:17 But pedaling on the Airdyne, that's murder.

Joe Rogan 27:18 No, he's a psycho.

Andrew Huberman 27:19 Yeah, that psycho.

Joe Rogan 27:19 But he's a different kind of human being.

Andrew Huberman 27:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:22 I mean-

Andrew Huberman 27:22 But I'm contrasting this with cold.

Joe Rogan 27:24 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 27:24 And so-

Joe Rogan 27:25 Well, that's a difference. Are you-

Andrew Huberman 27:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:26 ... going cold and then 260?

Andrew Huberman 27:28 I'm a wimp. I s- I start in the cold for a minute, then I go into the sauna, then back into the cold for two minutes, back in the sauna, then three minutes in the cold.

Joe Rogan 27:35 But you're not a wimp. Why are you saying that?

Andrew Huberman 27:36 Well, listen, if I were tougher, I'd go five minutes in the cold straight off.

Joe Rogan 27:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 27:40 But I just had Susanna Søberg out for, uh, for a podcast, um, and she taught me some really interesting things. First of all, this has really helped. I did this-

Joe Rogan 27:49 We should explain that she's the woman who created the Søberg principle and-

Andrew Huberman 27:52 Yeah, yeah. Susanna Søberg, uh, did her PhD, um, in Denmark, is I- I think one of the best scientists in terms of deliberate cold exposure and its benefits, because she- she actually did something that's remarkable, uh, i- not just in that field, but overall, which is that she employed real-world type ex- experiences and exercise of deliberate cold and sauna and turned it into a very rigorous study of brown fat thermogenesis, which is this s- this sort of, think of it as sort of your, like the oil in y- the candle of your body, increases mitochondrial function, and thermogenesis heats you up, metabolism, uh, subjective well-being, sleep, et cetera. She did all of that and published this in Cell Reports Medicine, and I realize it's just one study, but to do the studies on humans is hard. To do it with multiple variables is even harder, and to do it in a real world context is even harder. So what she showed was that if people get 11 minutes of deliberate cold exposure per week total, and this is divided up into sessions of one to three minutes, or four minutes even, so it's not 11 minutes all at once, they fundamentally change the amount of brown fat that they have, which means they fundamentally change the number of mitochondria in the brown fat, which means they fundamentally change their thermogenic properties of their body, increase their metabolism. Now, the- the people who don't like cold say, "Well, the increase in metabolism wasn't enough to offset more than a few bites of a bagel or something." But that's not the point, really. What she also showed was that this increase in thermogenesis allowed people to be more comfortable in cold environments, even when they're not in the cold. And then people say, "Well, who cares, right? I'll throw on a- a jacket." Ah, but what she was able to show is that the ability to be comfortable in the cold correlates with a bunch of other important immune functions and metabolic functions and insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing. And the inability to do that is likely n- to not be healthy for us. She also showed that 57 minutes per week is the threshold for sauna. So if people get 57 minutes per week of uncomfortably warm but safe sauna exposure, they can get very similar effects. And it... And then that gave rise to this question I always said, "Do you end with cold or do you end with heat?" And she said, "End with cold because then your body's forced to warm itself back up."

Joe Rogan 30:07 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 30:08 And that's what's, uh, now called the Søberg principle, which is when you end with cold, your body has to use its natural machinery to heat back up. Wh- In talking to her recently, I learned some really interesting things that I've been i- incorporating. First of all, I've always avoided putting my head under until the very end in the cold. It turns out that if you put your face in the water right as you go in, you activate the mammalian dive reflex, and this reflex a-... increases the so-called parasympathetic activity of the autonomic nervous system, which is just nerd speak for it lowers your heart rate, it makes you calmer, and it makes you better able to tolerate stress. So try this next time. Go, you could even just put your face in before-

Joe Rogan 30:46 I go right under.

Andrew Huberman 30:47 You go right under.

Joe Rogan 30:47 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 30:47 So that's the right way to do it.

Joe Rogan 30:48 I c- plug my nose, I go right under.

Andrew Huberman 30:49 So I didn't know this. A lot of people that do deliberate cold get headaches, they don't feel good, and a lot of times it's because they slowly immerse themselves up to the neck and then right at the interface of cold and hot, it- it creates change, vasoconstriction right below, a little bit vasodilation above. They get headaches, they don't feel good, the heart rate is way too high. Putting your face under really helps.

Joe Rogan 31:08 Isn't that anxiety though? I- I just feel like that's all psychological.

Andrew Huberman 31:11 (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 31:11 I really do because there's- there's a moment when you get in the cold where there's a part of your brain that goes, "Let's get outta here. You can get out of this if you will just get out right now." And you gotta go, "Shut the fuck up." But if you don't say, "Shut the fuck up," then that thing runs rampant through your brain and that kicks your heart rate up and that kicks your anxiety up. I really think it's psychological.

Andrew Huberman 31:34 Well, it's psychological and it's physiological. So here's what-

Joe Rogan 31:36 Right, physiological-

Andrew Huberman 31:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:37 ... because of psychological.

Andrew Huberman 31:38 Absolutely. Uh, absolutely. So here's what we know for sure. For the first 20 to 30 seconds of cold shock when you get in-

Joe Rogan 31:45 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 31:45 ... which is how it's described, that prefrontal cortex that normally s- has the job of handling context and says, "Shh," to the reflexes of the brain and the impulses of the brain, is not active for 20 to 30 seconds. So your reflex to get the hell outta there-

Joe Rogan 32:01 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 32:02 ... is very... Uh, there's a clear and logical reason for that. After that 20 or 30 seconds, the forebrain starts coming online again. That's your opportunity to start negotiating with yourself of, "Oh, this is actually good for me. This, this is... I can handle this. I got through that, so I can get through the next one." What I've been doing recently is trying to not go for time, but going for, the only way I can describe this would be walls. Like, sometimes just getting in the thing there is a wall for me. It's like, "Okay, I got over one wall just getting in the damn thing." Then, I'm like, "Oh, God, here it comes." Forebrain's shutting down, I'm like panicking. "I'm gonna get through this." And then I'm watching for when I have the impulse to get out. And what I start to notice is that the, the gaps between those walls start getting longer and longer.

Joe Rogan 32:45 The more you do it.

Andrew Huberman 32:46 The more you do it.

Joe Rogan 32:46 You have one at your house?

Andrew Huberman 32:47 I do. Yeah, and then pretty soon what's happened is-

Joe Rogan 32:50 How cold is it?

Andrew Huberman 32:51 Uh, it's hard to... I, I suppose it's probably in the low 50s.

Joe Rogan 32:55 What?

Andrew Huberman 32:55 Low 50s or high- high 40s.

Joe Rogan 32:57 Why is it so warm?

Andrew Huberman 32:58 I don't know. Low 50s, high 40s.

Joe Rogan 33:00 Why do you do that?

Andrew Huberman 33:00 I stay in there longer. I don't know. Well, we have two. Uh, I confess we have the Morozko one, which is-

Joe Rogan 33:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 33:05 That one's really cold. And that one is-

Joe Rogan 33:07 You avoid that one.

Andrew Huberman 33:08 Sometimes.

Joe Rogan 33:09 Look at you.

Andrew Huberman 33:09 I like to go in the sauna first. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:10 I don't like what I'm hearing.

Andrew Huberman 33:12 Well, here's the thing. I've been doing longer exposure in the warmer one.

Joe Rogan 33:16 That's so much easier though.

Andrew Huberman 33:17 It is-

Joe Rogan 33:18 We had one here that was kind of broken.

Andrew Huberman 33:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:20 And it was at 54 degrees.

Andrew Huberman 33:21 Okay, that's too warm.

Joe Rogan 33:22 And I climbed in, I'm like, "This is a fucking jok- What, 50's okay though?"

Andrew Huberman 33:26 Yeah. All right. I- I, listen, what...

Joe Rogan 33:28 34.

Andrew Huberman 33:29 34?

Joe Rogan 33:30 That's where I like it.

Andrew Huberman 33:30 That's where you're... Yeah, you and Cam Hanes.

Joe Rogan 33:31 34.

Andrew Huberman 33:32 Um, listen.

Joe Rogan 33:33 I like it where the ice breaks off-

Andrew Huberman 33:34 I- I just got uni-

Joe Rogan 33:34 ... the bottom of the thing and floats-

Andrew Huberman 33:35 Nice.

Joe Rogan 33:35 ... to the top.

Andrew Huberman 33:36 Y- y- you realize I just uninvited myself on the, the Cam Hanes hunting trip. 'Cause he was like, "You should come hunting." I've never gone, but I think I just... He'll probably just say I'm a wuss un- until I get down to the 30s on these cold plunges.

Joe Rogan 33:46 No.

Andrew Huberman 33:46 I did a workout with him.

Joe Rogan 33:47 That's not gonna happen with you.

Andrew Huberman 33:48 I went up there. I was sore for two weeks. Those high rep weight workouts that he does-

Joe Rogan 33:51 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 33:52 ... they're insane.

Joe Rogan 33:53 Yeah, he does a lot of that stuff.

Andrew Huberman 33:54 Yeah. Like, I'm a slow, lazy bear in the gym. Like, I like to lift heavy where I ask to go, you know, this kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 33:58 Well, he does a lot of endurance work.

Andrew Huberman 34:00 Right.

Joe Rogan 34:00 You know, he does... A lot of his stuff is about muscular endurance and pain threshold and you know, what you can tolerate. It's all-

Andrew Huberman 34:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 34:06 ... repetitions. 'Cause repetitions, like, if you just do three to five reps, it's pretty easy. As you said, testosterone rewards that kind of effort.

Andrew Huberman 34:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:15 There's a big difference between that kinda stuff and, like, you know, he's an ultra-marathon runner.

Andrew Huberman 34:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:19 He likes to push the mind.

Andrew Huberman 34:21 Yeah. Well, I'll do the long runs. I do a long run on Sunday. I did two hours yesterday around... They call it a lake, but it looks like, more like a river to me. It's awesome.

Joe Rogan 34:27 It is a river.

Andrew Huberman 34:28 Okay.

Joe Rogan 34:28 It's a, it's a branch of the Colorado River.

Andrew Huberman 34:30 So I kept going around that thing until I couldn't go around anymore. But, um, yeah, I need to go colder. I- I will get in the ice one and I need-

Joe Rogan 34:37 What is this will, need to go? Why don't you just do it?

Andrew Huberman 34:40 Well, I... There are mornings I'll just jump in the cold one for 30 seconds.

Joe Rogan 34:44 I do it every fucking day.

Andrew Huberman 34:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:45 I don't have any negotiation.

Andrew Huberman 34:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:47 There's no negotiation.

Andrew Huberman 34:48 Yeah. No, I- I'm not saying I don't go in every day. I'm saying I don't always go into that one first.

Joe Rogan 34:51 I go first thing in the morning.

Andrew Huberman 34:53 Okay. Well, you're a, you're a better man-

Joe Rogan 34:55 It's what I do.

Andrew Huberman 34:55 We already did this.

Joe Rogan 34:55 No, it's not a better, man.

Andrew Huberman 34:56 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 34:56 It's just do it. It's just if you have, like, all these room... this negotiation room and all this leeway, then you won't do it. If you just br- I brush my teeth every day. Do you?

Andrew Huberman 35:08 Twice a day.

Joe Rogan 35:08 Yeah. Well, well get in the fucking cold. Just do it.

Andrew Huberman 35:11 All right. I'll start going in ice.

Joe Rogan 35:12 Just do it. It's three minutes. You know, some... In the beginning when I first got it, I would like procrastinate. I'd get a cup of coffee and then I looked down at my phone and it was 12 minutes later. I was like, "I already be done."

Andrew Huberman 35:21 Okay.

Joe Rogan 35:21 "I would've been done eight minutes ago."

Andrew Huberman 35:22 Well, I'm gonna get thermometers f- a second thermometer for the sauna, verify, you know.

Joe Rogan 35:26 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 35:26 I'm gonna verify the data, second independent measurement and the, and the cold. I'm gonna have to imagine that the Morozko one, because it has pieces of ice floating in it, has gotta be colder than 50. Um...

Joe Rogan 35:36 Yeah, I bet it is. You could tell. If you know a moro- so it has two lids. You have the lid where you climb in and then there's another lid where the equipment is. If you lift up that equipment lid, you'll see a thermometer.

Andrew Huberman 35:46 Okay.

Joe Rogan 35:46 You'll see a digital thermometer that's a setting. It's like what it said at and what it's actually at.

Andrew Huberman 35:51 Okay.

Joe Rogan 35:51 And I- I guarantee you're probably in the 30s.

Andrew Huberman 35:53 Okay. Um, so I've been doing shorter exposures there and then longer exposures in the 50 one.

Joe Rogan 36:00 What's the longer in the 50 one?

Andrew Huberman 36:01 Well, I'm in there a while.

Joe Rogan 36:02 That's not long.

Andrew Huberman 36:02 So that one... When I go in there, I'm staying, you know, 10, 20 minutes.

Joe Rogan 36:06 Really?

Andrew Huberman 36:06 And here's the reason. The study that was published in the European Journal of Physiology that showed these huge increases in dopamine, that was the first of these sorts of studies. I don't know if I've mentioned this. But when you go in the cold for a very brief period of time, one to three minutes-

Joe Rogan 36:18 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 36:18 ... and it's shockingly cold-

Joe Rogan 36:20 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 36:20 ... you have to catch your breath, stabilize your mind, that evokes a dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine release. These three things together are called the catecholamines. Those normally would increase from, you know, uh, um, a cup of coffee and a- and a hard sprint for, you know, 10 to 30 minutes, maybe an hour. When you do the cold exposure...... the way you're doing it, or longer exposures at about 50 degrees or so, you're seeing increases in dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine that are two to 3X above baseline. This is huge.

Joe Rogan 36:54 Wow.

Andrew Huberman 36:54 This is huge. This is on the order of many drugs, but the difference is most drugs spike dopamine and then drop it below baseline. The increases in this case are lasting many hours, two to four to even six hours.

Joe Rogan 37:08 That's amazing.

Andrew Huberman 37:08 And they are very... And you know, whenever people criticize deliberate cold exposure, they go, "It's not leading to that much fat loss." Granted. But it's... To my knowledge, there is no drug nor is there any form of exercise, conventional forms of exercise, that increase the catecholamines to that level for that long. And with dopamine, it's all about the, the amplitude and the duration, how fast it rises, how fast it stays up there. There's nothing quite like it in... You know, I did three plunges here. I'm staying at a place that actually has a plunge. I don't know the temperature, but it felt cold to me. So, I did three minutes, three minutes, three minutes, and they had a hot tub, so I bounced back and forth for a minute in between. And you, as you know, you feel better much of the day-

Joe Rogan 37:48 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 37:48 ... if not the entire day. That is not a coincidence. Your system is circulating much higher levels of the catecholamines. And this is shown in that paper. It's now been shown in a series of other papers. My colleague, Craig Heller at Stanford, has known this for a long time, and this is why, and for other reasons, the athletes at Stanford who use cold do it before their workouts.

Joe Rogan 38:07 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:08 Everyone now knows that it blocks hypertrophy if you do it after, uh, hyper-

Joe Rogan 38:11 But if you wait a few hours, you're okay.

Andrew Huberman 38:13 Four to six hours, you're probably fine.

Joe Rogan 38:14 Yeah, yeah. I- I like to do it first thing in the morning just because I don't wanna do it first thing in the morning. And that's why I like when people complain about cold plunges, that it's not worth it, it doesn't do anything. I'm like, "Fuck you, it doesn't." You're just... You just don't like the fact that other people can do it every day, and you don't like the fact that you can't do it every day-

Andrew Huberman 38:33 You're talking about me specifically? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 38:34 ... talking about... No, no, other people.

Andrew Huberman 38:35 Okay. (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:35 Not you. You do. But there's, there's people out there that will complain about something and find an excuse why it's not beneficial.

Andrew Huberman 38:42 Right.

Joe Rogan 38:42 And the reason for that excuse is not that there's not data. The reason for that excuse is coming up with some sort of an excuse for themselves. That's what that is.

Andrew Huberman 38:52 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that it... You know, I, I think of health and performance, so mental health, physical health, and performance along, you know, k- fundamentals. We talk about these all the time. I think the five c- pillars, if you will, are sunlight, if I may, getting light in your eyes.

Joe Rogan 39:09 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 39:10 Avoiding too frequent bright light exposure and your eyes at night, unless you're doing something you really enjoy, okay? So, you're at... doing comedy. You're out past 10:00 PM, right? You're not gonna wear sunglasses or something n- necessarily, but-

Joe Rogan 39:22 That would be ridiculous.

Andrew Huberman 39:23 It'd be ridiculous, right? It's like, yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:25 People would go, "What the fuck is this weirdo doing with sunglasses on?"

Andrew Huberman 39:27 (laughs) Right. Well, I've-

Joe Rogan 39:27 "It's past 10:00 PM. I have to have my blue blockers on."

Andrew Huberman 39:30 I've got friends that wear the red lights at night and dim all the lights, you know, that whole thing.

Joe Rogan 39:33 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 39:33 That's a little extreme. I... That's a little extreme. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:35 Those people are always weird.

Andrew Huberman 39:37 Yeah, but sunlight... So, sunlight during the day, morning and day, and trying to limit bright light exposure at night as much as is normally possible. Then I would say movement, so you gotta move, cardiovascular and resistance training.

Joe Rogan 39:50 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 39:50 That's one of the beautiful things I think that's happened in the last couple of decades, is that it... You know, resistance training is no longer just considered the thing that football players and bodybuilders do.

Joe Rogan 39:58 Right.

Andrew Huberman 39:58 Everyone, old, young-

Joe Rogan 40:00 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 40:00 ... female, male.

Joe Rogan 40:00 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 40:00 Women no longer, I hope, are concerned about getting, quote unquote, "too big" from weightlifting or something or turning into a bodybuilder.

Joe Rogan 40:06 I think that's kind of gone away.

Andrew Huberman 40:07 I like to think that's gone away.

Joe Rogan 40:09 Most women realize that the only reason w- why women do get too big is they take exogenous hormones.

Andrew Huberman 40:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:14 They're, they're taking steroids.

Andrew Huberman 40:15 Yeah, you throw a bunch of Anavar in there, you get the square jaw and-

Joe Rogan 40:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 40:18 ... yeah, the tort- tortoise shell abs.

Joe Rogan 40:19 That's what they wanna avoid.

Andrew Huberman 40:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:21 But women who don't do that and who lift weights regularly look way better.

Andrew Huberman 40:25 They look way better, and our friend, Peter Attia, I mean, has, um, you know, I guess, has talked about one of the major causes of death later is, you know, falls due to stepping down off things.

Joe Rogan 40:35 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 40:35 Inability to hang from a bar is, you know, correlated with lack of health, right, in men and women.

Joe Rogan 40:40 Sure.

Andrew Huberman 40:40 So, being able to have some strength. So, exercise, then nutrients, right? Macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. People now think about it, so you need all that stuff, vitamins, minerals, and then the other stuff. And then, I think, in addition to that, sleep, right? I think Matt Walker deserves a tremendous debt of gratitude from everybody because 10 years ago, everyone was like, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Now, we know y- you're probably not gonna dissolve into a puddle of your own tears from a couple of bad night's sleep every now and s- once in a while, but sleep makes you mentally, physically better. You perform better. And then the last one is this whole n- um, not notion, it's social connection, right? Y- you can't stay isolated constantly, or people lose their minds.

Joe Rogan 41:20 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 41:20 So, when you look at people that get very depressed or they're suicidal, one or several of those five things is going to be diminished. And then what happens is people hear about deliberate cold exposure, and if they don't like it or they wanna poke at it, they say, "Oh, it blocks hypertrophy." Okay, well, only if you do it in the four to six hours after a hypertrophy workout.

Joe Rogan 41:39 I thought it was two.

Andrew Huberman 41:41 Um, well, they've looked immediately after, you know, again-

Joe Rogan 41:43 Immediately after is bad.

Andrew Huberman 41:45 Immediately after is bad.

Joe Rogan 41:45 So, if you work out... but, but you can do it after cardio, right?

Andrew Huberman 41:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:49 Like, uh, like... The only time I do it right after workouts is after I do a... Generally, I do a really hard cardio workout, and then I'll do the sauna for 25 minutes, and then I'll do the cold plunge. I'll end with the cold plunge.

Andrew Huberman 42:02 Yeah, yeah, I think that the-

Joe Rogan 42:03 That's okay, right?

Andrew Huberman 42:04 Right. I mean, it blocks... It lowers inflammation, which is the re- which is what you want from the resistance training.

Joe Rogan 42:10 Right.

Andrew Huberman 42:10 Again, it goes back to this.

Joe Rogan 42:11 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 42:12 You know, it wasn't just these guys, but I... Again, I point to Layne and to Andy Galpin, who've been shouting from the rooftops for years, "Blood pressure up, inflammation up is a good thing." So, you have to be careful when someone says, "Oh, you know, you-"

Joe Rogan 42:22 It's a hormetic effect.

Andrew Huberman 42:23 "You eat the hormetic effect. You eat this, you become inflamed." Well-

Joe Rogan 42:26 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 42:26 ... how long and what's the hormetic effect? And so, in terms of, you know, deliberate cold exposure, people like to say, "Oh, it doesn't burn much fat, it blocks hypertrophy." But if you look at the mental benefits of having your catecholamines, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, systemically elevated to two to 3X f-... four to six hours after a 30-second to three-minute protocol, you're not gonna show me a drug or a form of exercise that can do that.

Joe Rogan 42:55 For me, the best thing for sleep is sauna.

Andrew Huberman 42:58 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:59 Like, sauna pre-sleep is amazing. Like-

Andrew Huberman 43:02 Well, that-

Joe Rogan 43:02 ... I really like-

Andrew Huberman 43:02 Do you know why that is?

Joe Rogan 43:03 Why is that?

Andrew Huberman 43:04 Ah, it's really interesting. When you heat the surface of your body, you would think, "Oh, you know, I'm- my whole body temperature is getting really hot." But if I were to measure your core body temperature, what happens is, your- your medial preoptic nucleus of the hypothalamus says, "Oh, the surface of my body is really hot, I'm gonna cool down my core temperature."

Joe Rogan 43:22 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 43:22 And falling asleep at night involve- requires a one to three degree drop in bodily temperature, and when you wake up in the morning, you have a one to three degree increase in bodily temperature in the morning. That triggers a cortisol spike, that triggers norepinephrine, and then you start waking up. So body temperature and the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep and wake up are very tightly correlated.

Joe Rogan 43:42 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 43:42 Like, your whole circadian rhythm is temperature driven, and so for instance, you probably have a best time of day for you to work out where you feel best. You probably- m- if I were to have you train at, you know, 2:00 AM when you went to bed at, you know, couple hours before, you'd feel miserable. You're not gonna perform as well. Grip strength in the middle of the night, I wake you up, I take your grip strength measurement, it's gonna be strong, but not as strong as it would be at your peak time during the day.

Joe Rogan 44:05 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 44:05 If we looked at your body temperature, we'd find that your- your grip strength is weakest when your body temperature is lowest.

Joe Rogan 44:10 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 44:10 So it- you'd say, "Well, I- I'm asleep, that's why." Ah, but we- there's an easy experiment, this has been done. We just keep you awake for 24 hours, we measure your body temperature, it has a very regular circadian rhythm, that persists. And we measure grip strength. That's been done numerous times. People living in caves, they've done those experiments on.

Joe Rogan 44:26 Have they done experiments where people do the sauna and then work out?

Andrew Huberman 44:30 Um, n-

Joe Rogan 44:32 'Cause if grip strength and if the- though it's tied to body temperature, if you can raise your core body temperature from the sauna-

Andrew Huberman 44:38 Uh, sauna's dropping your core body temperature.

Joe Rogan 44:40 The inside of it.

Andrew Huberman 44:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:41 But e- but even while you're at peak sauna, you're sweating like a pig.

Andrew Huberman 44:45 So at some point, you won't be able to thermoregulate anymore, and then your body temperature will go up and you can become hyperthermic.

Joe Rogan 44:51 So when you are in the sauna and it's 210 degrees and you're sweating like a pig, your body temperature is lower?

Andrew Huberman 44:58 Your core body temperature is fighting to get lower, and when you get out, your core body temperature continues to go down.

Joe Rogan 45:03 It plummets.

Andrew Huberman 45:03 That's right. And the exact opposite happens when you get in the cold plunge.

Joe Rogan 45:06 Right.

Andrew Huberman 45:06 You feel cold on the surface, so your body goes, "Oh, shit." Hypothalamus, again, medial preoptic area, gets a signal from- it's a- I mean, if you think about how beautiful this mechanism is, I still, like, get goosebumps, and no pun intended, when I think about it. You have receptors on your skin's surface that sense cold. Send that to your hypothalamus, which says, "Ha, it's cold out there, I'm gonna generate heat. How do I generate heat?" Well, there are two things you can do. "I can make you shiver, which will generate heat," or, "I can make you move." Another f- shivering is just another form of moving. Or, "I can activate this very specialized fat tissue," which is not under the skin, it's not subcutaneous fat, but it's around your critical organs, which is the brown fat. "Activate the mitochondria there, and basically, at that very core level, get electrons moving." And you start- and the brown fat, in turn, activates the thermogenic system and starts heating you up.

Joe Rogan 45:58 Wow.

Andrew Huberman 45:58 It's so crazy. And then what's beautiful is that the brown fat has a sort of memory of that experience, so even after you get out, you're walking around right now, I did cold plunge this morning, you did cold plunge this morning, right?

Joe Rogan 46:08 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 46:09 Okay, so your body temperature is about one to three degrees hotter, probably about one or two degrees hotter than it normally would be. Dopamine's getting cranked out, and so all day long, you're h- you're warmer at w- let's say, cool ambient temperature. In fact, in Scandinavia, I learned this in researching the- the Solberg work, I went in and w- went deep into the- this cold thermogenesis world over there that they've been researching this really carefully f- And they have a saying in Norway, I obviously don't know it in Norwegian, but it translates to essentially, in the spring, as it's getting warmer in Texas, what you wanna do is to put, they say put on more layers. Why? So that you can prepare yourself for being able to cool yourself off easily in the summer when it's really hot. You'll be more comfortable in the heat of summer in Texas if you bundle up a bit more in the spring.

Joe Rogan 46:57 Really?

Andrew Huberman 46:57 Yeah. Well, you're adapting. And then they say the opposite too.

Joe Rogan 47:00 That just sounds annoying. What is-

Andrew Huberman 47:02 W- but then they say in the fall what you're supposed to do is not walk around with a sweater, you wear a T-shirt, and then guess what? In the winter, you're thermogenically-

Joe Rogan 47:09 How about just fucking wear clothes for the weather?

Andrew Huberman 47:11 Okay. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 47:11 This is ridiculous.

Andrew Huberman 47:12 Okay, but-

Joe Rogan 47:12 Look, I get the whole idea of sauna and cold plunge and adapting your body, but they- now we're just g- y- you know, I think too much of this is mental masturbation to some people.

Andrew Huberman 47:22 Okay, l- let me be clear, it's- it's the principle.

Joe Rogan 47:24 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 47:24 It's the principle. I'm- I'm not- I'm not saying-

Joe Rogan 47:26 I understand the science behind it.

Andrew Huberman 47:27 Yeah, I'm not saying wear a- a sweatshirt in the spring, I'm s-

Joe Rogan 47:29 Just wear what's comfortable, Jesus Christ.

Andrew Huberman 47:31 I- what I'm saying is that when we- it- what-

Joe Rogan 47:34 What?

Andrew Huberman 47:34 Jamie's laughing.

Joe Rogan 47:35 (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 47:35 He's from Ohio, they're just like, "This is ridiculous." The, uh, it's cold enough out there, you don't need a plunge.

Joe Rogan 47:39 I'm from Boston.

Andrew Huberman 47:40 Well, so-

Joe Rogan 47:40 Same thing.

Andrew Huberman 47:41 Right. I- I think the principle is what's interesting, right?

Joe Rogan 47:43 Yes, it is interesting.

Andrew Huberman 47:44 Is that if you teach your body to tolerate warm, then you will be more comfortable in very hot. It's sort of obvious.

Joe Rogan 47:52 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 47:53 And vice versa for cold.

Joe Rogan 47:54 Well, I certainly think that there's a great benefit to being able to tolerate temperatures, whether it's cold temperature or warm temperature, because I think there's a mental resiliency aspect to it.

Andrew Huberman 48:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:03 What's interesting to me is when I get out of the cold, um, my entire body, my skin is bright red.

Andrew Huberman 48:10 Mm.

Joe Rogan 48:10 You know, where your body's trying to heat itself up 'cause you're in there for three minutes, or I'm in there for three minutes. But when I get out of the sauna, generally I stretch and, um, my house is warm, right? And a- nighttime, I- I do the sauna in the house, and when I'm stretching, within a minute or two minutes after the sauna, I'm fucking freezing 'cause my body's trying to cool off so quickly.

Andrew Huberman 48:32 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 48:32 You know, because it's gone through the whole 25-minute session.

Andrew Huberman 48:35 Well, the contrast of heat and cold is, we know, very good for our cardiovascular system because we think of the blood vessels and capillaries and arteries as just tubes, but they're really cells, endothelial cells, they're laid out like Silly Putty linking them-

Joe Rogan 48:47 Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman 48:48 ... all in tubes, and they are very contractile. They need to do that because of the pulsing of blood through them. That's the whole basis of systolic and diastolic blood pressure is the top measurement. It's a pressure when it's not blood pumping through and it's pressure when it's relaxed, okay? So, um...... the, the system is, can become very dynamic. Doesn't mean, you don't want it rigid, especially given, you know, what Attia tells us, and I believe him, is that the number one killer in the world is cardiovascular disease or cerebrovascular disease. You want the little microcapillaries of your body to be very flexible, not rigid. So, when you go heat-cold, you're basically going vasoconstriction, dilation, vasoconstriction, dilation.

Joe Rogan 49:22 But I'm not, I'm not talking about heat-cold. I'm just talking about heat and stretching, just getting out of it. My body cools itself off, and I get-

Andrew Huberman 49:29 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 49:29 ... really cold within, like, five minutes.

Andrew Huberman 49:31 So, that could be the drop, which is when your, um, your blood goes to the center of your body to preserve your core organs, and then the surface of your body is cold. And then as you start to heat up again, and you're, there's vasodilation and it goes out to the surface, your bo- your surface is cold, and it actually cools the blood at the surface. And that's what's called the drop.

Joe Rogan 49:50 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 49:50 And that's when your body temperature goes down. Now, even once you put on clothes and head to your workout or head to work, what's gonna happen is your body temperature is now going to increase more quickly. It normally would do that anyway early in the day. As you wake up, your body temperature goes up, up, up, up, up, up, up. And then whenever you achieve a, sort of a dip in, uh, energy in the afternoon, there's probably one time in the afternoon, whether or not you need a nap or not, that you feel a little bit lethargic, and then you kinda come back. That represents the peak in your body temperature for 24 hours.

Joe Rogan 50:20 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 50:20 In fact, most people, if they wanna figure out their sort of optimal bedtime, I know this gets pretty down in the weeds, you just look at that number, so maybe it's 3:00, and you say, "About seven hours after that, plus or minus an hour."

Joe Rogan 50:31 Hm.

Andrew Huberman 50:31 That's probably when somebody should go to sleep. How do I know that? 'Cause that's when body temperature starts dropping by, what, one to three degrees. So, doing cold early in the day makes total sense. Doing cold, deliberate cold exposure before a workout, total sense. Doing sauna before sleep, total sense.

Joe Rogan 50:47 The cold in the morning, the other thing that it does when I get out is it makes me, like, really fucking happy, which is what you were talking about-

Andrew Huberman 50:54 It's the dopamine.

Joe Rogan 50:54 ... with the dopamine raise. It's so significant. I mean, it really, it is a joy of life feeling, and then as I start my workout, I generally start really slow. I just do, like, a lot of, like, shadow boxing, and maybe I'll skip a little rope to try to get my blood up. And then once I do that for a few minutes, then I have a series of 100 push-ups and 100 body weight squats that I do every day. So, I go through that, and that's my warmup for everything else, 'cause it's pretty low stress, low impact, very easy to do. And then by the time the 100 is, 100 squats and the 100 push-ups are done, I'm warm. And then I start whatever workout I'm gonna do, but God damn, I feel happy.

Andrew Huberman 51:31 Yeah, well, that's, those are-

Joe Rogan 51:32 Like, that is, uh, the people that are trying to avoid it because, "Oh, I fucking doesn't do anything, nyah." Shut up. Just, just do it. Stop your excuses, and stop arguing about it. You're only arguing about it because you don't wanna experience discomfort. I know what you're doing. You know what you're doing. We all know what you're doing. Shut the fuck up. Just get in there. Just do it. It's great for everybody. And if you c- can't fucking handle it, don't talk about it. But don't pretend that it's not good for you. It's nonsense. It's one of the most, if it, you could sell that shit in a pill, it would be so valuable. I mean, how many people are on SSRIs, and they're like, "I kinda feel better." Like-

Andrew Huberman 52:11 Or... Well, first of all, I completely agree with you. Completely agree. And I'm not the, you know, again, Craig Heller in our biology department at Stanford has been talking in this general theme for a long time. Anna Lembke, who you had on here, talked about patients of hers who got sober using cold plunges. You say, "Well, how, how did they get sober using cold plunges? You just, you know, taking one addiction and replacing it with another?" No. What's very clear is that when you're, when you're suffering or you're lazy or you're procrastinating, doing something that's harder than the state that you're in bounces you back-

Joe Rogan 52:43 Yes.

Andrew Huberman 52:43 ... much faster.

Joe Rogan 52:44 Yes.

Andrew Huberman 52:44 This is all based in the dynamics of dopamine. It, it's sort of crazy. You know how people are procrastinating to write something or do something, and they start cleaning the house?

Joe Rogan 52:51 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:51 Something they normally don't wanna do. Well, it's just something that's easier than the thing that you're supposed to do.

Joe Rogan 52:57 Right.

Andrew Huberman 52:57 It turns out, and I learned this from Anna, if you do something that's even harder than the thing that you're trying to avoid, all of a sudden, you're able to do that. And you're like, "Oh, okay, well, it's just psychology, right?" No, it's not psychology alone. It's psychology, but it's the, once dopamine is deployed at that level, you're a different person. And I know this because if you take someone's dopamine and lower it, that makes them depressed. That gives them, if you lower it even more and give them a movement disorder, Parkinson's. If you give them their dopamine back, their focus increases. How do I know that? There's a reason there's an ADHD drug shortage right now. Ritalin, Adderall, they all tap into this system, the dopaminergic and adrenaline norepinephrine system.

Joe Rogan 53:39 Hm.

Andrew Huberman 53:39 So, one of the most prescribed and over-prescribed classes of drugs is a drug designed to try and get exactly this effect of cold plunges. And so I completely agree. If people would just take a very cold shower or a very cold plunge, or it's a little bit longer at 50 degrees, although I agree with you that shorter, colder is better. Uh, what I didn't describe, and I'm not trying to rescue myself here, but I do that daily, but then on Tuesdays is the typical day where I do very, very hot and very, very cold back and forth for well over an hour back and forth, back and forth.

Joe Rogan 54:09 Yeah, you do that, that serious, um, growth hormone-increasing protocol.

Andrew Huberman 54:14 Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to condition myself to really be able to tolerate heat and cold.

Joe Rogan 54:18 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 54:18 The other thing I learned, again, from Susanna, I take cr- no credit for this, is, um... And I'm not suggesting people replace the cold plunge with this or a cold shower with this. You're starting to see more of this on social media, and it's embarrassingly silly to think that that's a replacement, what I'm about to describe as a replacement for cold plunges. But if you put... She taught me, she said, "If you even just put a small portion of your skin in ice-cold water, like your hand or your arm, you actually activate the brown fat system." That's how robust the system of surface temperature to body is. And so, I don't think it's a good replacement. But now you're seeing people saying, "Oh, you just have to put your face in a, ice, in a bowl of ice water," yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:57 There was a device that, that, that was going around a while back that y- people were using when they were lifting weights, where they were putting their hand into something that was freezing their hand. And it increased their ability to do work quite substantially. Do you, do you know what I'm talking about?

Andrew Huberman 55:12 Yeah. So, this was developed by Craig Heller's lab. It's called the CoolMitt.

Joe Rogan 55:15 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 55:15 Um, it's a bit controversial, and I'll tell you why. So, you have-... on, on the surface of your hands, on the bottoms of your feet, and on your upper face, you have what's called glabrous skin. It's the only skin on your body that's incapable of growing hair, because there are no hair stem cells there. It's also the place where, believe it or not, it goes, normally things go arteries, veins, capillaries. But in this case, you're missing one of those components, and what it is is that the top of your face, the palms of your hands, and the bottom of your feet are like radiators. You can... Heat passes out of your body ve- very readily. This is why animals like bears, who are covered with hair, will stand in cold water to cool off. It's very effective. It's also true that if you wanna heat up, you do it through these portals. And so, um, Craig's lab did two really important experiments. The first one was heating people up. It turns out when people come out of anesthesia, it's very slow, and this is a problem for all sorts of critical reasons related to s- keeping people alive. And if you measure people's body temperature when they're coming out of anesthesia, it's very low, and as it, it heats up, they wake up, just like out of sleep. His laboratory developed these heating devices that would heat people's palms or the bottoms of their feet, and they found that they could bring them out of anesthesia much faster and recovery rates were much better. Super impressive result, not talked about often enough. And the reason it's not talked about often enough is all this stuff around thermogenic studies was really hot in like the 19... no pu- no pun, in the... sorry, in the '50s, '60s, '70s, and then it, it was sort of considered kinda like not lame, but it wasn't hot science. Ah, there I go again.

Joe Rogan 56:46 It's-

Andrew Huberman 56:47 I'm just, I'm really trying, not trying to pun here. (laughs) Um, then what, what's happened in recent years is people have gotten into these protocols and it's become more popular. His laboratory also showed that one of the reasons why we fail on like a set of dips or chins, local muscular failure is due to heating of the muscle locally due to work, and then there's a, an enzyme called pyruvate kinase which is very heat dependent. When your muscle gets too hot, pyruvate kinase can't function and your muscle fails. It's one of the reasons you fail on a set.

Joe Rogan 57:17 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 57:18 So what they figured out was if you cool people's core body temperature, they can do more work. Now it got a little confused. People say, "Oh, I didn't double my bench press after cooling my hands." Well, that's not really the point. The point is that, let's say you can do 10 sets of 10 at a given weight with two minutes of rest in between and that's all you can do and you're hitting failure, maybe you have to adjust the weight down on sets four, five, six, et cetera, classic 10 sets of 10 that I don't know if people still... German volume training, or five sets of five. If you lower th- the core body temperature through the proper use of palmar cooling, as it's called, or through some other device, what you find is people can continue to get the same number of repetitions provided they keep the rest the same and they can double the amount or more of work that they're doing total. So they can increase their volume. The interesting thing is they preserve the training effect. So if you can go from doing, I don't know, how many dips? I saw you do a bunch of push-ups right there on a podcast recently. You did like 75, right?

Joe Rogan 58:13 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:14 So in theory if we'd been p- cooling your palms, you would've been able to keep going much longer.

Joe Rogan 58:20 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 58:20 Possibly 150. And you say, "Well how could that be?" Well it's just a, it's a local change in the enzymatic reaction at the level of muscle. Now the problem with palmar cooling is people will go out there and say, "I'm gonna hold ice packs." But if you do that, you'll constrict the portals, it has to be the right temperature so that you can continue to pass cool in and that's why it requires a device to g- heat... uh, excuse me, to cool your palms but not so cold that you vasoconstrict. And so there is the CoolMitt device, to be honest, is it a very effective device? It... they've never been very effective at marketing that device, but they use... athletes at Stanford use it, but nowadays what athletes mainly are doing, and I talk to pro basketball players, football players, tier one military, they're doing cold before their training-

Joe Rogan 59:03 Hm.

Andrew Huberman 59:03 ... 'cause it's just simpler and you don't need a device. Inter-workout or intra-workout cooling is really an interesting topic, but it hasn't been perfected at the level of devices. They're still kind of clunky, you gotta go put your hand in the thing. No, no knock on CoolMitt, I mean I think they're tr- uh, they're trying really hard. I actually got one for Cam that I still need to deliver to him.

Joe Rogan 59:23 Well what if someone just is in the middle of a workout and they just get in a cold plunge for five seconds?

Andrew Huberman 59:29 Yeah, you need to lower your core body temperature so y- in...

Joe Rogan 59:33 20 seconds?

Andrew Huberman 59:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:33 Half hour? (laughs)

Andrew Huberman 59:35 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 59:35 Like what, how long are you going there for?

Andrew Huberman 59:36 Yeah. Probably... uh, here's what I think could really help, and you could try it. Um, if you don't have access to a CoolMitt, and I can get you one for you to try, but if you hold on... y- you'd wanna hold something cold between your hands for maybe 20, 30 seconds.

Joe Rogan 59:49 Why not just dunk your hand into the cold plunge?

Andrew Huberman 59:51 Could do that too.

Joe Rogan 59:52 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 59:52 If you have your cold plunge right there.

Joe Rogan 59:53 Yeah, my cold plunge is right next to the gym, I could-

Andrew Huberman 59:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:55 ... just dunk my hands in there.

Andrew Huberman 59:56 Yeah. Yeah, the relationship between temperature and sleep, temperature and the d- deployment of these neurochemicals, temperature and performance is one of these variables that right now professional sports teams and tier one military and scientists are really starting to understand, like this is not a small variable.

Joe Rogan 1:00:12 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 1:00:12 This is a super powerful variable. It's just not an easy one for the conventional gym to have. Maybe at some point in the future every sta- they'll have stations in the gym where you kinda plug in.

Joe Rogan 1:00:22 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:00:23 Um, and you can just do more work. It's all about the ability to do more work.

Joe Rogan 1:00:27 Yeah. And recover.

Andrew Huberman 1:00:29 And recover. And it's clear that the cold after training is... if your goal is to train again, well then you want inflammation down. But if your goal is to improve as a consequence of that training session, you have to be careful how much you're blocking the inflammation.

Joe Rogan 1:00:41 Yeah, I know a lot of jujitsu guys like to do cryotherapy post-training and they say that it helps tremendously, and because of that reduction of inflammation, 'cause you're not really training for hypertrophy, you're training for volume and work and, you know, and cardiovascular function and your, your ability to execute techniques over and over and over again.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:00 I mean the ability to do more work is, I think, one of the not-so-secret secrets of performance-enhancing drugs too.

Joe Rogan 1:01:06 Yes.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:06 Yeah. I mean even-

Joe Rogan 1:01:08 It's everything.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:08 It's even at the level of being able to get a really good night's sleep even when you're slightly over-trained.

Joe Rogan 1:01:13 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:13 You know, uh, you know, people always say, "Well what do, what do these performan- do steroids make you grow muscle?" Well they'll increase protein synthesis, but-

Joe Rogan 1:01:19 Well look at Lance Armstrong. I mean he was on steroids and he was rail thin. It's not about that, it's about recovery.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:25 He could just do-

Joe Rogan 1:01:26 It's about what do you ask your body to do?

Andrew Huberman 1:01:28 He could just do more work.

Joe Rogan 1:01:29 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:29 And I think-

Joe Rogan 1:01:30 Do more work.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:30 ... and I, I, I... for all I know I believe he's natural but like you think about a guy like Floyd Mayweather and I-I used to see him running in the middle of the night, and you know, it's Vegas.

Joe Rogan 1:01:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:40 If his testosterone happens to be exceedingly high naturally, he can do more work and recover than the person whose testosterone is lower, before they hit a wall. So I'm not saying he was using anything. What I'm saying is, if somebody is- has higher levels of circulating testosterone, male or female, they can do more work and recover. That's just the way it is.

Joe Rogan 1:02:01 Here it is. "Floyd Mayweather reportedly took banned IV prior to Manny Pacquiao fight." So banned, but- but this is banned IV for what? It might- might be banned IV just because they had some sort of a protocol set and- for U- Yeah, see USADA. So USADA is, uh, they're- they're the ones who regulate the UFC testing, and they use- they won't let allow- allow people to use IVs because IVs will allow you to mask whether or not you've done performance-enhancing drugs. I don't think it was just that.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:35 I mean, amph-

Joe Rogan 1:02:36 I think it was, uh, he tested positive for something.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:39 I mean, amphetamines cause a- it's gonna vary by dose, et cetera, but a- at least 1,000-fold increase in basal catecholamine levels. That's what they do.

Joe Rogan 1:02:48 How many people do you know that are on Adderall?

Andrew Huberman 1:02:52 (inhales deeply) In the, um ... I don't have a lot of friends in the finance world, but of the ones that are ... Y- you know, the friends I have who are in finance, 100%. The scientists I know, zero, but scientists generally aren't o- of the Adderall type. Um, musicians, not so much. Uh, those are kinda the categories. And podcasters, I don't know (laughs) , and I don't know how many.

Joe Rogan 1:03:14 Quite a few podcasters.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:15 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:16 There's the- a lot of people that are journalists that are on it.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:20 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:03:20 A lot of writers and journalists are on it. I- I've been shocked when- when I talk to these people.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:25 Well, you know my feeling about writers and journalists.

Joe Rogan 1:03:28 What's your feeling?

Andrew Huberman 1:03:29 Well, I don't know if we bring this up or not, but, um ... You know, I think the tides have changed in recent years, in that, you know, conventional media, uh, has- is used to kind of they email you, they want a conversation that, you know, I think sometimes they're surprised you don't leap to- to have that conversation, or ... You know, I think one of the- the problems with the traditional press is that, uh, it's hard to know where their heart is, or like where they are on a topic. And so conversations with them have become, um, a bit of a razor's edge, frankly.

Joe Rogan 1:04:00 Well, they're- they're also, like, deeply influenced by money. Like that- there's- there's no- There- that raccoon-dog thing, I guarantee you there are some people behind the scenes that're trying to come up with some sort of a plausible scenario that's alternative to the lab leak theory, and that's why they're coming up with this. It's not- Uh, th- the people that I've talked to that understand this, I've had m- many conversations with virologists and, uh, evolutionary biologists who explained to me why this is most likely a lab leak. No one is- n- they're not arguing with this. So when someone comes along with this, and they're saying, "Oh, we found it," like, no you didn't. No, you- you know you didn't. You're- you're writing this article because you're being influenced to do so. Like someone is telling them that this is a good thing to put out. Someone is giving them information and saying, "We- we believe this, and you should print this." Look, it's-

Andrew Huberman 1:04:54 And it's-

Joe Rogan 1:04:55 There's some- there's money behind that that doesn't reach independent journalism. That's the difference. Like the- the amount of money behind an advertisement that goes to CNN or an advertisement that goes to The New York Times, it's a different thing than what goes to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar, than what goes to Matt Taibbi Substack. There's none there. There's no influence there. These people are influenced by gigantic corporations. That's why they put out articles that are not plausible. That's why people don't trust them anymore. That's why, you know, p- people think they're fucking shady.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:29 Yeah, well, the- it- the- you're right. They're incentivized by a whole set of things that are not obvious from the articles themselves.

Joe Rogan 1:05:35 Yes.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:35 I'm a huge fan of what Sagar and Crystal have done and are doing.

Joe Rogan 1:05:39 Me too.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:39 Huge fan.

Joe Rogan 1:05:40 It's incredible.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:40 It's incredible, and it's important, and-

Joe Rogan 1:05:42 And they're so fucking honest. Like they- they give you what is their actual take on whatever's going on in the news, and it's well researched. And the- the fact that that exists now is so important, because if it was not for independent journalism, we would be in a pickle. We would be in a really bad state, because a lot of people got duped by the pharmacy, the pharmacological i- i- industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the- the medical industry, the industrial- military-industrial complex. They've been duped by so many different companies and corporations that have a vested interest in getting one narrative out, and if you can get that narrative out through the traditional pipelines of mainstream media with no one fact-checking, no one interfering, no independent journalists saying, "Actually, that's not true at all. Here's why they did that. This was the influence. Here's where the money is. We have emails. We can show you they were influenced," i- if it wasn't for them, we would be fucked, and it's one of the beautiful things about the internet today. The internet today allows people like that to thrive because these mainstream media corporations are so corrupt. They're so obviously indebted to the companies that pay for their advertising.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:01 Yeah, I mean, my- my initial experience of them was, uh, l- long before I had a podcast, did an interview with traditional media, and then it comes out, and um, I was ... They didn't say anything bad, but my quote was given to somebody else, their quote was given to me.

Joe Rogan 1:07:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:19 And then you say ... And I wrote and said, "Hey, you know, this is factually incorrect. I didn't say this. First of all, I'm not a medical doctor." This how ... You have th- They swapped the names, uh, accidentally. And then I got this, "Oh, well," you know, kind of response, like, "Too late." (laughs) You know? And- But when it's your-

Joe Rogan 1:07:34 No retraction.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:35 But what ... No. And when it's your neck on the line, you know, it's your name ... I mean, in science-

Joe Rogan 1:07:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:38 ... all we have is our reputations.

Joe Rogan 1:07:39 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:40 In science or in anything, that's all we have is our reputation. So it's a scary thing to hand that over to somebody. So unless it's a particular few set of sources, I generally decline traditional media conversations. The other- And now that the fight isn't just for traditional m-... you know, over media, traditional or independent. You know, the universities too, right? We, we're asking... I have to say, and I'm not... This is not, uh, to be, uh, you know, politically correct or incorrect. Stanford has been very good about letting different faculty at Stanford voice their differing opinions on everything from COVID to politics. You know, there's a free speech, um, a right to free speech, uh, petition that's been going around the campus for a while. Uh, you can find this online. Now, a lot of people also will hear things about, "Oh, I hear on college campuses like Stanford, you're, you're getting a lot of pressure to do this or a lot of pressure to do that." Yeah, there, there are pressures from students and top-down... Uh, listen, students are under pressure, administrators are under pressure, faculty are under pressure. But Stanford has been very good about allowing people to have their own independent social media channels and talk to the public the way they feel is best.

Joe Rogan 1:08:47 That's excellent.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:48 And I, and I-

Joe Rogan 1:08:49 That's great to hear.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:49 ... have to say, it's one of the things that makes me really proud to be there. It's an amazing place too. But i- if you... And I'm not gonna throw out names here because it's not my place in this, they should probably just come on the podcast separately, but you've got people at every end of the, of the major debates out there about public health, and everything in between, on Twitter, few are on Instagram, but on Twitter, voicing their opinion. And honestly, I think