Andrew Huberman Lets No One Near Him for Two Hours Before a Podcast

Fridman opens on food, the kind of meal where you throw the diet out the window. For five years as a postdoc and five more as a pre-tenure professor, Huberman ran Tim Ferriss's slow-carb protocol: animal protein, lentils, beans, vegetables, no dairy, no pasta, low-glycemic carbs. One day a week he was supposed to cheat. Twelve hours became twenty-four as he redefined what a day was. Costello, his bulldog, was young then. They did it together: pizzas, croissants, donuts, until the sight of food was repulsive. The next day he fasted completely, just to spare his gut, and by Tuesday he felt human again.

He does not do that anymore. He trains in the morning, takes a first meal around eleven, and has a last bite around eight or nine, two meals and maybe a handful of nuts. About twelve to fourteen months before this conversation, appetite for sweets vanished. Meat, butter, cheese, vegetables, and fruit still appeal. A doughnut or ice cream now feels almost aversive, and he does not know what changed. Ferriss and their mutual friend John Romaniello once ran a cheat-day marathon in New York: 26.3 stops in one day, a little of something at each place. Huberman never took it that far. There are things, he says, that men do in their thirties that they should not do in their forties.

The most delicious croissant he remembers was at Little T's Bakery in Portland, easily the equal of Paris, though he says Paris is really about the bread. Fridman needles him: butter on steak or bread is cheating, an elite ketchup, a disrespect of the food itself. Huberman diverges without apology. "Bread is just a vehicle for butter. A cracker is just a vehicle for cheese." He will eat butter straight. The scrap of bread is there because people look at you funny if you do not. He still cites Ferriss on why Michael Phelps needed so many calories: even in warm water, heat transfer is high, so pool work spikes demand. Fridman laughs that Huberman cites sources even in a conversation about barbecue. In science, Huberman says, attribution is baked in. On social media it is treated as if credit given were credit lost. Pointing at other people's good work only places you in their company.

Fridman had just spent time with Rick Rubin, a connection Huberman made. Mention a song and Rubin closes his eyes, steps through the album track by track, then stands inside the room where it was recorded — not only records he produced, the whole catalog. A calm radiates from him that makes it permissible to sit in silence and go there together. They met in the pandemic through a mutual friend, first on FaceTime, science and health for stories about musicians. Huberman has no musical talent. He can memorize lyrics, and he loves poetry. The friendship widened until they were talking about anything, then spending time in person.

What Rubin understands, Huberman says, is how to get a brain and body into state, and he is willing to do the unglamorous work that lets artists do theirs. If that means sitting with eyes closed for a minute or two, or longer, he does it. Everyone wants a switch labeled focused or creative. Coffee and a lamp of a particular wavelength can help. They are not the thing. The thing is ratcheting through the difficult steps, again and again, until you know what you personally need. Huberman treats that as a form of self-hypnosis: you limit the context, you stay very alert, and you stay very calm. A movie that lifts your emotion without you noticing is hypnosis too. The important parts of a life, he has come to think, are mostly some version of it. The difference is whether you wander in or build the door.

Rubin's dedication to those states, Huberman says, completely transformed his own routines. "You have to do the work to do the work." Fridman, by contrast, does everything last-minute, packing and mics and a pile of anxiety. When he set up microphones in front of Rubin, Rubin asked how close he liked them, with a gentleness that felt like an existential crisis: the distance was a decision, as if Fridman were an artist. Joe Rogan has called podcasting an art, a cadence that either carries information or does not. Part of that art, Huberman adds, is refusing to let a bigger audience rewrite who you are. Rogan has said he is the fish that got through the net: there is no stage version of him.

A Huberman Lab solo can take six hours. For the two hours before he walks into it, he limits the interactions he will have. He leaves the phone. He walks the neighborhood talking out loud. People think he is crazy; he lives among crazy creatives, so it passes. As a child he had a small grunting tic, a basal-ganglia go/no-go loop that still surfaces when he is exhausted. If he wakes unrested he will use hypnosis or yoga nidra to recover sleep. Then, notes already in contour, he walks and tries to read whether his energy is too high or too low for the microphone.

What he had never said publicly is that for about ten minutes he recites, and often sings, lyrics of songs he loves. It warms the vocal cords. It is also a diagnostic. On some days he has so much energy that he speaks faster than he can articulate. On others he is tired and cannot keep up with his thoughts. He wants thinking and speaking at approximately the same rate. In a classroom you turn to the chalkboard when you need to slow down, then you turn back and fire. A podcast has no board. Voice has to do that work. While he walks he also puts his vision into panoramic, which he finds calming, and he checks that he is not carrying anger into the room.

He reminds himself that what he wants to communicate is the beauty and utility of biology. He tries to feel his way back into the papers he loved that week. Researching heat, he fell for the Finnish literature: true pioneers, thermocouples, rectal temperatures, people swimming in pools twenty years before sauna was a lifestyle brand. He wants the six-year-old who spent weekends in the encyclopedia and the Guinness book, made his mother drive him to meet people, and insisted on giving a lecture in class on Monday. Interesting, clear, actionable; surprising is a bonus. Rick was the one who told him to find a process, keep developing it, and not let anything near it. People in his life know: when it is time, he is moving into that brain state. Olympic athletes do a version of this. Tiger Woods, he notes, was taught self-hypnosis young.

Fridman's goal that year was to sit with people a lot of people really do not like: figures in prison, major political leaders. Huberman avoids whole topics with a stock line, lots of opinions and not a lot to say. Fridman has gotten braver. He wants a conversation in which both people discover something, the way musicians lose themselves and only the audience hears the shape of it. To interview someone who has used power to abuse others, he argues, generic questions will not do. You have to plug yourself into the small cruelties of your own life, the times you were angry and mean, the times you thought you were doing good and were not, then magnify them. You meet the other person in that dark place. If it is just right, something real can surface: a childhood, a flicker of I thought I was a good person.

Jung's claim that we contain everything is still debated, a psychiatrist friend told Huberman. What is rarer is the person who has actually lived several versions of a possible self in the first person. A friend from special operations and intelligence put it more bluntly: look far enough into someone's past and you will find reasons they became who they are, and you still have to draw the red line. Huberman would like to hear Fridman interview Elizabeth Holmes, a name he treats as synonymous with deception, because Theranos was not a dropped iPhone call. People were making health decisions on blood tests. Fridman names Ghislaine Maxwell and, more carefully, the burden of even mentioning Vladimir Putin. He regrets how lightly he had floated that conversation in the years before the war, before he had put himself in a place ready to have it. He rarely says a name now without real progress toward the booking. The preparation starts when it is confirmed, because the weight is too heavy to carry as a bit.

Huberman went into science, he says, because at some level it is more about facts than opinions and judgments. He is not sure he can spin empathy, forgiveness, and accountability at once. That is three or four circuits in parallel, chess or go against his checkers. In the psychology he is reading, neurotic is actually the goal: you feel something and you have a defense that is not destructive. Psychotic is delusion. Borderlines, in Melanie Klein's picture, split. I love you becomes I hate you, and you become the bad object. Narcissists are hard because they charm even the therapist. Schizophrenia is hard because of the detachment from reality. Borderline is hard because of the split. Fridman adds that he is not good at conversation in ordinary life, that social interaction makes him anxious. Huberman has never detected it, not a waver in the voice, not a sheen of sweat.

Huberman and Karl Deisseroth were postdocs together. Deisseroth is, in Huberman's ranking, the Michael Jordan of their field: five children, a marriage to Michelle Monje in Stanford neurology, a practicing psychiatrist, and still among the most humble people Huberman knows. His office is a coat closet with a small table lamp. There are no photos of the kids, no prizes on the wall. You sit down as if you have walked into an interrogation in a spy novel. He asks what you are most excited about lately, and he has eleven minutes. Huberman once asked why a scientist of light and channels works in a dark room. Because this, Deisseroth said, is what gets him into the state of mind to do the work of this lifetime.

Huberman finds that astonishing. People at that level are willing to deprive themselves of a lot of conditions. They are not being brought espresso every five minutes. That, he says half in jest, is New York neuroscience, a culture of opera tickets and lifestyle that still, he is careful to add, does excellent science. West Coast, and Silicon Valley in particular, prides itself on a kind of monk-like asceticism. Fridman, who needs a window, is sitting with him in a black cube. The point is not suffering for its own sake. It is being deliberate about the room that produces the state. Rubin does it. Deisseroth does it. Huberman's two-hour walk is the same move in a different costume.

On Huberman's first Joe Rogan appearance, guests still posed afterward with an object. He picked up a Bushwhacker hatchet. Rogan told him to look at Mike Jones. Later, at the end of Fridman's own Rogan episode, not long after his grandmother died, Fridman recited Kipling's "If." Huberman had Jones engrave a line from that poem on a butcher knife and gave it to Fridman for his birthday: "Yours is the earth and everything that's in it." They toiled over the inscription until Huberman told Jones to pick what spoke to him. The craftsman chose that line. Fridman used to keep the knife on the table and took it off because it intimidated guests. Then, on the show, he reads the whole poem, a father's advice to a son, a mantra to live by.

Huberman goes back to it. Every third line, he says, is something that would mean you had lived well if you could say you had done it. He is lyrics-driven. He does not really understand musical structure. Joe Strummer of the Mescaleros, not the Clash, is a favorite; "Burning Lights" is one he names. Rancid's "The Sentence," a B-side most people do not know, is cued on his phone if the plane starts to go down. Fridman's equivalent is the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind," the calm at the end of Fight Club. Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," which Rubin produced, would be Fridman's favorite song. Cash and Strummer also cut "Redemption Song" with Rubin, a track Huberman will loop at home for hours.

There are songs he has loved so much he will not play them in a relationship until it has lasted a certain duration. Braid a song into the dopamine of a love, and when the love ends the song is tainted. Some tracks he will never play in anyone else's company. They are his. Music and poetry, he says, pull on neural threads of emotion that are independent of linear word structure. That is the beauty of them. He looks forward to aging in Erikson's sense: a life as one long developmental arc, not a problem of remaining twenty-five. He does not want to live past ninety or ninety-five. He wants to get as much done as he can, with integrity, and extract the richness of each stage instead of refusing the progression.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, has said he prefers Huberman's non-sleep deep rest to meditation. NSDR is an acronym Huberman coined for practices that are not meditation and still bring brain and body into relaxation and focus. Self-hypnosis is one variant. Yoga nidra is another. Meditation, for most people, is work: you crank up prefrontal cortex, watch thoughts instead of thinking them, or third-person your own breath. Many who meditate intensely feel more exhausted afterward. NSDR is a script you listen to. You do not have to try that hard. For someone who has been using the forebrain all day, twenty or thirty minutes is better spent on a jog with nothing in the ears, sitting in a chair and zoning out, or doing NSDR.

People are not very good at shifting states. Even severe ADHD, he says, can hyperfocus on what it likes, because liking releases dopamine. The hard part is the changeover. Deep in research or a podcast, the first third of a run is still thinking; the middle is fractured; only the last third lets go. Sleep to wake can be a step. Fear can be a step: an explosion, and you are in alertness. Ordinary consciousness does not step. A large part of the value of meditation and exercise, he argues, is not only the state you reach but the transition you force, and the transition back. David Goggins is, for him, a public demonstration of those transitions: from I don't want to, to you are going to do it anyway, then carrying that into ordinary life.

He is a fan of NSDR also because most people do not stick with meditation, and because some extreme states are not safe if you cannot return. Scott Carney wrote a book whose title Huberman is not sure of, perhaps *The Transcendence Trap*, collecting cases of people who came back from long silent retreats and later killed themselves. Huberman knows at least one person who never shifted back into a life that functioned. Unusual brain states can be hazardous if you cannot come home. He uses the Reveri app in the morning if he wakes too early, to drop back into sleep or at least into deep relaxation. On an eight-hour recording he will sometimes stop for a one-minute hypnosis. That minute only works if he is already doing the ten- and fifteen-minute versions every other day. The clinical use he hears about constantly is uglier: a partner's sexual past, infidelity, a death. Hypnosis, in the literature he trusts, can teach people to enter deep calm, project the intolerable image, and pair it with a different bodily emotion, loosening the mind-body line enough to observe the feeling and attach a better one.

Asked how to focus, Huberman first splits modulators from mediators. A fire alarm would modulate attention without being the mechanism of focus. Sleep is the same class: a rested autonomic system simply works better, and the best thing anyone can do for mental health, physical health, and performance is still enough quality sleep, enough of the time, for them. What mediates focus, without a full lecture on mechanism, is clearer. Mental focus follows visual focus, provided you are sighted. Training programs in China have children stare at a target, blinking, breathing calmly, holding a tight visual aperture. Reading is already that: a highlighter scrolling through the mind's eye.

You cannot snap into focus like a step function. You can pick an object at roughly the distance of the work you are about to do, stare for thirty to sixty seconds, and blink when you need to. Drift is normal. When it happens, narrow the aperture and bring the object back so it is the most prominent thing in the field, portrait mode on a phone. Then start. If vision is low or absent, the ears do the same job. Braille readers lose focus when the hands feel other surfaces and the ears take other sounds. Pharmacologic tools exist around the edges: just enough caffeine; 40 Hz binaural beats over headphones, the frequency with the most decent human data; 300 to 600 milligrams of Alpha-GPC with espresso, which can make a well-rested person feel like a laser for ninety minutes. He does not want people borrowing Adderall and Ritalin. He would always start with behavior.

Where the screen sits matters. Looking down is less effective than placing it at eye level or above. Eyes directed forward or up activate brainstem alertness; eyes down is a little like being pulled underwater. A hoodie, a hat, or a small compact room can improve focus the way blinkers work on a horse. Analytic work with a correct answer likes low ceilings. Creative work without a right answer likes the cathedral effect: outdoors, or a high ceiling, which reflexively expands the visual field. That expansion changes the brain in the time domain. Narrow and alert, you fine-slice life, a high frame rate. Dilated, the bins get bigger. An exciting day flies by and, in memory, is packed. A blank waiting room crawls and, in memory, is empty. Dopamine and norepinephrine set the grain. Dean Buonomano at UCLA, in a book Huberman thinks is called *The Brain Is a Time Machine*, writes about that contraction and expansion. Fridman defines the feeling of focus as losing track of time. Huberman agrees, with a warning: enough adrenaline and you parse quickly; too much and you remember nothing.

In the middle range, almost every study Huberman knows says higher autonomic arousal makes you more effective. Norepinephrine and adrenaline speed the parsing of information. Past the peak, everything collapses. The culture still recites that stress is simply bad. His Stanford colleague Alia Crum, who directs the Mind and Body Lab, has shown how much of the outcome lives in the story. Educate people that adrenaline makes them sharper thinkers and they become sharper. Educate them that stress wrecks cognition and cognition gets worse. Tell someone their recovery score is terrible and they perform worse the next day than if you tell them it is high, even when the nights were the same. That is why he does not wear a sleep tracker. The devices can be useful. The mindset around them is the variable he refuses to outsource.

Crum's sentence, not his, is that anything you experience, especially stress, is the consequence of that thing and what you believe about that thing. Consume a lot of information about stressful states bringing out your best, and you perform better. Consume a lot about stress crippling you, and you perform worse. The data, he says, are striking, and this is not growth mindset by another name. It is the ocean of knowledge you are standing in. That is why he thinks it is useful, not merely inspiring, to watch David Goggins, Jocko Willink, Cam Hanes, Ryan Hall. You are changing what your own arousal means. His analogy is a summer pool: kiddie end, high dive. Believe that a belly flop off the high dive will make you a better diver and, in the analogy, it will. Believe it is the most embarrassing moment of your life and you will never climb the board in front of anyone again, and you are also right.

Fridman asks what Huberman took from his episode with Andy Galpin, a tenured professor who biopsies muscle, runs a gym, works endurance and hypertrophy, and trains UFC athletes. Huberman puts him in the top three people who have their arms around the full spectrum of training. The first surprise was cold. Huberman had asked, in that recording, whether an ice bath after lifting really dented hypertrophy, guessing it was overblown. Galpin said no: it is a big deal, and it will short-circuit progress. Inflammation after a hard endurance, strength, or hypertrophy session is the stimulus you adapt to. Neck-deep uncomfortable cold within four hours reduces that inflammation. After four hours you are probably fine. Another day, or before the session, is better. Heat can be done immediately after training and is probably useful, because it dilates vessels and perfuses muscle and ligament. People who only need to recover, in-season athletes, skill work, are a different case. Cold showers, Huberman adds later, do not seem to blunt the training effect the way immersion does.

For strength, Galpin's 3-to-5 idea is almost a poem. Pick three to five compound, multi-joint lifts. Do three to five reps. Rest three to five minutes. Do that three to five times a week. Five squat days sounds like a lot. The adaptation, Galpin taught him, is mostly neural. You are near failure, not at it, so you do not get very sore, and motor neurons drive fibers more efficiently. That is why powerlifters can train often. Hypertrophy is another animal. The repetition range is broad, six to thirty. You want about ten sets per muscle per week, maybe more, and you have to go to failure or beyond. Three routes seem to grow muscle: micro-damage; tension-based gene programs that are not the same as damage; and the metabolic effect of high-rep work, blood flooding the tissue. Blood-flow restriction with a five-pound curl can hypertrophy a muscle without much soreness, which is evidence for that third path. Use proper cuffs. Cinching a limb with a rope can clot.

Huberman lifts every other day, three or four times a week, and jogs thirty to forty-five minutes of zone-two on the off days. Galpin told him that to build endurance on top of strength and size he should, one day a week, add an all-out ninety-second effort, rest, and maybe repeat. Flying from Los Angeles to Austin he almost missed the plane, sprinted through the airport with three bags, and thought: Andy, that is the ninety seconds. The other prescription is mile repeats: run a mile, rest for however long it took, run another as fast as you can, one to three times, once a week. Collapse it and you have a civilian template, weights an hour every other day, some sets to failure and some not, easy jogs on off days, sprints twice a week, miles on another. You will not optimize a marathon, a total, or a hypertrophy peak. For 75 percent of people, 75 percent of the time, Huberman says, what they want is some muscle, some strength, some endurance, and the capacity to sprint to the security gate without leaving a lung in the terminal.

Galpin likes heat after training. Huberman offers three uses of the sauna, with different doses. Typical research ranges are 80 to 100°C, 176 to 212°F, for five to thirty minutes. If the aim is a large growth-hormone pulse for metabolism, fat loss, or hard recovery, do not sauna often. The study that found a sixteen-fold rise had people sit thirty minutes as hot as they could safely tolerate, get out for five to ten with no cold, and repeat until they had two hours of exposure. That protocol is at most once a week. For cardiovascular death, frequency is the other way around. Using those same temperatures, thirty minutes two or three times a week was associated with a 27 percent drop in dying of a cardiovascular event. Four or more times a week, 50 percent. The Finnish follow-ups tried to rule out smoking, housing, even whether the person was in a happy relationship. A hot bath is next best if you have no sauna. Two layers of sweats and a run is a distant third, with a warning not to cook yourself.

How hot, how cold: uncomfortably so. You should feel that you really want to get out and still be able to stay in safely. What you are trying to trigger in the heat is dynorphin, which binds kappa opioid receptors and feels like agitation, the same miserable flavor alcoholics get in withdrawal. Heat-shock proteins then go to work on broken and misfolded proteins. Afterward, endorphin binds its own receptor more strongly, so a good meal or a person you like lands harder. In cold, the rise in epinephrine and dopamine is two to three hundred percent and lasts hours, data Huberman stresses were collected in men and women across a fairly wide age range, not in mice. That is why he is not a fan of infrared cabins that top out around 160 to 170°F. Far-red light has its own uses for skin and wound healing. It is not this stimulus.

The stoic ice-bath photo, sitting still with a hard face, is in his view the timid way through. Stay still and you grow a thermal sheath of warmer water around the skin. The harder way is to move the limbs, break the layer, then stand with arms open and let the water evaporate. You will shiver. Metabolism has to come on. He names this the Søberg principle after Susanna Søberg, who published in *Cell Reports Medicine* in 2021: if you are using cold specifically to raise metabolism, you may alternate however you like, but you end on cold. He tries for sauna one to three times a week and takes cold early in the day because it wakes him. Rubin once made Tim Ferriss record a podcast in a sauna; Ferriss was not heat-adapted, and you can hear language degrade. Heat and cold, Huberman says, pull you down from the inside. That is why SEAL screening uses cold. You can stay in it a long time before you die. You still have to hold a sentence together.

The Instagram pile includes the running joke of why Fridman is single, and a request for a series on sex. Huberman has done sexual development, testosterone and estrogen, love and desire, and an interview with the evolutionary psychologist David Buss. A short series on sexual health is coming, including the counterintuitive autonomic fact that arousal rides the parasympathetic, calming arm, while orgasm is sympathetic, the stress arm, after which parasympathetic rebounds and people go slack or fall asleep. Young men write to him in code about testosterone when they mean anxiety about function. Women, because of a twenty-eight-day cycle, start those conversations earlier. Freud, he says, got at least one thing right. The circuitry you used to attach to caregivers does not vanish at puberty. It is repurposed for romance and sex. That is why childhood anxious or secure patterns show up in adult pairing. Gender, in that transfer, is interchangeable. A woman with a wonderful father and an abusive mother can be drawn, heterosexually, to abusive men, because the dynamic is the mother's, laid down before the brain had a concept of sex. The book *Attached* tracks some of that carryover. Any discussion of sex, for him, has four conditions: age-appropriate, context-appropriate, consensual, and species-appropriate.

On the joke about Fridman remaining single, Huberman does not dodge. Partly he is busy. Partly he is waiting until it is time. An ex-girlfriend who is, he says, truly brilliant, gave him a picture an engineer would like. There are four arrows: how you feel toward the other person, how they feel toward you, how you feel about how they feel, and how they feel about how you feel. The third and fourth are where relationships get difficult, because your interpretation of the bond becomes part of the bond. If a parent is stressed, a child's job is not to soothe the parent. Healthy models say children should not even know how their parents feel for something like the first eight years. When that line is crossed, adulthood repeats it. Going through life with someone, he did not always think, is so much better than going through it alone. He is on good terms with almost all of his former girlfriends. The only really hard part of a good relationship, as he now sees it, is dealing with oneself and staying in the mode of caretaking.

At the top of his list is autonomic self-regulation: know how to calm yourself down. Looking to anything external to soothe you puts you in a terrible position to care for yourself or anyone else. Second, tend to the relationship a little more than you think you ought to, if the other person is doing that too. Third, there is often a power dynamic, and people need to know whether they do better leading, following, or in mutuality. *Can Love Last?*, a book by a psychoanalyst whose title he calls corny, argues that strong long relationships are people moving in and out of dependency and objectification. Early on you are attracted and not yet dependent; later you depend and objectify less, and heat fades unless you keep traveling that line. In some cultures partners touch for two weeks of the month and keep distance for two; statistically those pairings last, with high reported attraction, though he does not think most people can live that way. You have to be brave enough to enter without full armor and boundaried enough not to get beaten up. An Instagram line he half-remembers: if you want to be a warrior, prepare to get hurt; if you want to be an explorer, prepare to get lost; if you want to be a lover, prepare for both. When someone attached leaves, by death or decision or force, dynorphin release is massive. It is real physiological discomfort. If he knew how to break up optimally at the neural level, or could plug into a wall and reset, he would record that episode tomorrow. We do not have the knowledge.

Fridman says losing love is part of the magic, proof you felt something. Huberman agrees, and adds that after enough cycles you notice life is finite. Hardship, if you survive it, can bind a couple. Advice on finding the person comes from a friend in a strong marriage with kids and a high-demand life: it is a decision. You do not force the discovery, but you put it on the calendar of priorities. In graduate school Huberman did not want a girlfriend. He wanted the lab. A postdoc was different. At some point the question becomes what you want a day to look like, because a relationship, however structured, will be part of the daily routine. If you can picture waking up next to someone, doing a few things, working, meeting for dinner, walking a dog or taking kids, taking a trip, and if that picture is even remotely appealing, you backpedal from it. Fridman is able to be alone and happier with another person. Huberman looks forward to their kids rolling jiu-jitsu together. If that notion sounds like fun, you engineer backward. Then they thank each other, promise a future recording in a sauna and a cold plunge, and Fridman closes with Emerson: it is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.