A Cannabis Clip Sat Quiet for a Year. Then It Hit X.

Fridman opens with a slightly rude question: will there ever be a day Huberman walks away from podcasting? Definitely, Huberman says. He came up on the edge of skateboard culture — he insists he was not a great skater, because that crowd is relentless about inflated claims — and what he watched there was a pattern. You do the thing at the highest level you can, then you pivot and support the young talent coming in. Danny Way and Colin McKay started DC with Ken Block, then brought in the next line of riders. The same logic, he says, is how you recognize a great scientist.

Richard Axel, Catherine Dulac, Karl Deisseroth: they are known not only for their own work but for mentoring people who go on to run labs. Feynman is the counterexample — multi-generational world-class, and almost nobody can name a mentee. Huberman got into podcasting on a fairly early wave, he says, because Fridman told him to do it. He will keep going as long as it feels like he is putting something useful into the world. Meanwhile SciComm Media, the company he started with Rob Moore, is launching *Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin*, and Huberman has a new obsession with scouring the internet for young faces in science and health.

The two filters for that scouting are energy and how someone treats other people — how they answer comments. It is like picking a skate team or a lab: you want people you would actually enjoy working with. They talk about clean exits: Jon Stewart leaving *The Daily Show* when everyone wanted him to stay, Dave Chappelle disappearing into park standup, Khabib Nurmagomedov walking away undefeated. Fridman brings up Grigori Perelman, who refused the Fields Medal and the money and vanished into private life. What did he do after mathematics? Life, Fridman says, 100% private. Huberman respects that. Bob Dylan skipped his Nobel. Punk, Huberman says. The best artists, Fridman thinks, are not doing it for the prize.

Huberman spent time with Rick Rubin in Italy last June. In the morning they treaded water and listened to *A History of Rock and Roll in 100 Songs*. For a fair amount of the day Rubin was in a practice Huberman cannot stop thinking about: body very still, mind very active. Karl Deisseroth described something similar on Huberman's show — forcing himself, after the kids are asleep, to sit still and think in complete sentences. Huberman maps it onto REM sleep, when the body is paralyzed and the mind is extremely active, the stage of elaborate, emotion-filled dreams and a lot of ideas. People described Einstein pausing on Princeton walks while the mind kept churning at a higher rate. These are observations, not controlled studies. The inverse is also common: ideas in the shower or on a run, body moving, mind in default mode.

James Hollis, an 84-year-old Jungian who has written 17 books, is the guest Huberman is proudest of capturing. The team went to him in DC because he could not travel. Hollis came in with a cane, sat down, and did not miss a syllable. Take yourself out of stimulus and response, Hollis said, and spend ten or fifteen minutes in the quiet of your thoughts — walking, seated, lying down, it does not have to be meditation — and the unconscious starts to show you who you are and what you want. Stay in do-do-do and you miss the messages. He also has a Goggins streak: get out of bed, suit up, shut up, get to work. Both modes, Huberman thinks, are required. The shadow is real. We have circuits for rage and for altruism; some are atrophied, some hypertrophied. Looking inward is how you grow.

Huberman's own generator is not emptiness. Tim Armstrong of Rancid writes every day and sometimes wakes in the night to draw or paint. Joni Mitchell talked about the same move. Find a creative outlet about 15 degrees off your main craft and do that thing. For Huberman it is anatomical drawing — neurons, circuits. After a while the mind starts turning on the nervous system, and podcast topics surface. Lately he is obsessed with autonomic control: a paper showing ordinary people can learn, through biofeedback, to change pupil size without changing luminance, which means they can touch the supposedly automatic autonomic system. He draws the circuit, wonders about the mechanism, and finds a recent Nature-family paper. Fridman has no 15-degree offset. He picks a dragon, sits, and stares. If he is tired he still sits. Energy rises, or an idea pops, but there has to be silence and an empty room. Huberman's reaction is immediate: he loves how linear that is.

Huberman published a cannabis episode more than a year before this taping. It covered benefits and risks, and it depended on the person, age, and genetics. Online, it was quiet. Then a clip hit X — four-ounce gloves, he says, versus the 16-ounce gloves of Instagram and YouTube — and people in the cannabis research field piled on. The sentence that riled things most was that for certain individuals, not all, high-THC cannabis has a high potential for inducing psychosis. One behavioral neuroscientist came out swinging with four-letter language of a sort Huberman would not use at a university, especially among colleagues.

Huberman's move was the one he would make anywhere: come on the podcast, tell me where I am wrong. The first question was how to be sure of no misrepresentation. Record the whole conversation, Huberman said; they have never done a gotcha. Then: how do I know you really want me? We will fly you out. The guest insisted on buying his own ticket, to keep some distance — some of the academic suspicion, Huberman thinks, is that health podcasts exist to sell something. After DMs, email, and a call, he agreed. "You get a very different person on the phone than you do on Twitter." There was an immediate apology: I am not normally like that, but online.

Fridman admires Huberman's restraint and still wants it said: the guy was being a dick, stayed condescending after a polite invitation, and that posture is part of why the public learned to distrust scientists during COVID. The people who should symbolize intellectual humility often lose it on the internet. Huberman's explanation is plain. People regress online. Confrontational people in real life are rare. Throw stones over a wall and you still get to go home and cuddle the dog. In a room, a lot of those sentences do not get said. At a Cold Spring Harbor course he used to host evening battles in front of students — neural prosthetics versus molecular tools to restore vision — always couched in data, with the rare well-placed insult, not coming out swinging. The internet is a record of how you show up. The podcasters he is scouting are judged on that as much as on energy.

Mid-conversation Huberman points the camera at Fridman's fridge, two people who like compounds walking the shelves. There is canned LMNT, a sponsor for both of them, which he opens because it is cold, not because of the ad read. There is sugar-free Mateína yerba mate he helped develop and partly owns; he is half Argentine and there is a photo online of him at three, on his grandfather's lap, sipping from a gourd. There is coffee with a scoop of unsweetened cocoa Bryan Johnson gave him, which he says nukes appetite. Johnson had hurt an ankle and was injecting BPC-157. Huberman did a peptides episode: in animals BPC-157 is angiogenic, which is not what you want if a tumor is looking for blood supply, and human data are thin. He will try a compound one at a time for four or five days, stays off anything that strongly hits major hormone pathways, and has found growth-hormone secretagogues wreck his REM.

Then a piece of Nicorette, not a sponsor. Nicotine raises blood pressure and is probably not for everyone, but pouches between lip and gum are exploding. Huberman does not smoke, vape, dip, or snuff. The interest started in 2010 in Richard Axel's office at Columbia. The Nobel laureate kept popping gum. Why? Axel said it protects against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's; Huberman still does not know if that was a joke. Axel also said smoking had helped his focus and creativity, he quit to avoid lung cancer, focus dropped, and he switched to gum. The mechanism is tidy. Nucleus basalis cholinergic neurons spray acetylcholine across neocortex; when you focus, release rises at nicotinic receptors. Exogenous nicotine turns that circuit up from the outside.

Dose is the other half. Huberman's cap is two pieces a week. The day after, the throat can spasm as if you want to cough, a problem if you sing or record long shows. Fridman tried a pouch at dinner with Joe Rogan and got high; that is usually six to eight milligrams, Huberman says, and he has watched people go from one Zyn a day to a canister. Tucker Carlson has said publicly that nicotine keeps his sex life vivid. Huberman would rather not think about Carlson's sex life. Nicotine constricts vessels; Cialis and Viagra dilate them. Under 25 he is blunt: do not use it, the brain is too plastic. On vaping he once said it is probably safer than smoking but has its own issues, and caught heat for a long time. As a health educator, anything you say will anger someone. It depends where the center of mass is, and how far outside it you are standing.

Caffeine is the main lever in Huberman's life. The delayed-caffeine advice, he now slightly regrets popularizing, is only for people who crash in the afternoon: wait 60 to 90 minutes. A huge lunch or a bad night will crash you anyway. A weirder observation: if he trains before 8:30 a.m., even starting a bit tired, he has energy all day. If he waits until he feels peak at 10 or 11, the afternoon is shot — and afternoon is when the work that pays happens. Force exercise, food, socializing, or bright light to the same clock for three to seven days and an anticipatory circuit grows. That is why you sometimes wake before the alarm. Recent papers even show people can answer simple math problems in sleep. Fridman cannot resist: they might screw up the cumulative probability of 20% across multiple months.

A few years back Huberman recorded an 11-hour session that became a four-and-a-half-hour fertility episode, covering spermatogenesis, the ovulatory cycle, IVF, ICSI, and pregnancy rates by age. Couples have written to say they have children because of it; his first joke is, what were you doing during the episode? In one stretch he was explaining cumulative probability. A clip made it sound as if he were adding percentages to 120%. He even joked, 120%, that is a different thing altogether. What he should have said was that is impossible, here is how it actually works. His lab has published cumulative-probability histograms, including in a 2018 *Nature* paper. He knows independent from cumulative. The cut plus the joke made a perfect gaffe.

He did not litigate the edit. He went online: in this fertility episode I made a math error, here is the formula, here is the graph. He treated it as a teaching moment twice over — how cumulative probability works, and the fact that some of the people dogpiling, including sharp names, did not understand it either. His father called and laughed: old-school hammering of academics. He has also botched a micron-to-millimeter conversion; those get fixed in captions and audio, YouTube being harder to patch. "If you make a mistake, it's substantive and related to data, you apologize and correct a mistake, use a teaching moment." In 1998 or 1999, TAing biopsychology at Berkeley for five or six hundred students, he drew the pituitary's two lobes on the chalkboard, back to the room, and said they just sort of hang there. The hall erupted: it looked like a scrotum. He thought he could not turn around. He did, they all laughed, and those students, he is certain, never forgot that the pituitary has two lobes.

Fridman brings up Andrés Escobar, 27, own goal for Colombia at the 1994 World Cup in the United States, gunned down after he went home. Some gaffes get people killed. How forgiving we are online depends on the nature of the mistake. Most people were fairly gracious about the math clip; some were not. AI, Huberman notes, now makes this kind of check easier, and a lot of internet errors are being cleaned up one by one.

Huberman's method is to ask several experts and live in the overlap of the Venn diagram. The open question is whether he should stay only there. Researching oral health, he learned how tightly it is tied to heart and brain: cavity-causing streptococcus can travel, and some dementias and heart disease may start in the mouth. Four dentists converged. Teeth demineralize into cavities and can remineralize if the hole is not too deep; saliva is a remarkable fluid for that, and alcohol mouthwash kills some of what you need. He posted the episode waiting to be attacked. Dentists thanked him. That, he says, is rare. More often, after psilocybin, MDMA, or ADHD-medication episodes, people thank him in private and will not say so in public because the attack would come.

What actually infuriates him is being assigned claims he did not make. He is not against water fluoridation; the episode walked through fluoride's benefits, the super-strong bonds in enamel at micron scale, and hydroxyapatite as another route. He is not a sunscreen truther; he wears mineral sunscreen on his face. There is a cohort that thinks all sunscreen is bad. He is not in it. Say that certain sunscreen ingredients are problematic — Rhonda Patrick has been getting vocal about this — and people lump you. "With politics, there's this urgency to just put people into a camp of expert versus renegade. And it's not like that." He still reads the extremes, including the seed-oil-and-sunburn theories, because he wants to know what the armies will throw at the castle. There is generally more agreement than disagreement. People who take care of themselves, he has noticed, get attacked for it.

Ozempic and Mounjaro sit in the middle of that mess, and Huberman's stance is middle of the middle. He does not understand why the wellness world is so against the drugs, or why they have to be the only path. Some people have lost real weight. Muscle and lean mass can go with it; resistance training can offset that. The origin story is the part he loves. They act on GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide-1, first found in the Gila monster, a lizard-like animal that does not eat often. Scientists found a peptide that curbs appetite in brain and gut, with high sequence homology to what we now call GLP-1. Newer data suggest the class can even blunt some addictions. "Just go run," the biohackers say. Some people are carrying so much extra weight that running would injure them. Get them healthier on the drug, add lifting and food, bring the elements together. Pharmaceuticals-are-bad versus supplements-are-bad is the same camp reflex. What he wants in health and in politics is a league of reasonable people, issue by issue, filling in the center. Reasonable does not sell clicks.

Fridman is still figuring out how to interview the people in the 2024 race well. He wants long-form: Trump on Rogan, and he is honest enough to want Biden there too. Huberman figures both would go on, separately. Short political TV, Fridman says, becomes a set of pre-cooked questions; two or three relaxed hours puts a human in the light, shadow included, good, bad, and ugly. Rogan is the best in the world at just shooting the breeze. Huberman does not think people grasp Rogan's output: three or four podcasts a week, UFC announcing, stadium comedy, midweek clubs, husband, father, friend, jiu-jitsu. Superhuman. Then the conversation skids. Would Trump actually go to jail? Fridman jokes he would have to commit a crime to record him inside. Huberman says please do not. You would not get to wear the suit.

In Los Angeles Huberman gets pulled into gatherings of podcasters, entertainment, big agencies, big tech. He looks around. About half the room is very left and will tell you exactly who they want to win; the other half is for the other side. A lot of people the outside world files on one aisle are, one-on-one, on the opposite one. "What people think about people's political leaning is often exactly wrong." He has seen the same thing on campuses. Fridman adds that despite Twitter, most people sit near the center, center-left or center-right. Huberman is more interested in who the next big candidate even is. He cannot see that person. The deeper issue is who would want the job. Who wants to live in a 12-hour news cycle, dunking on the other team so nobody notices you screwed up? That is not only uninteresting. At some point it has to be psychosis-inducing.

In 2016, to build a fear stimulus in VR for the lab, Huberman and portrait photographer Michael Muller went to Guadalupe Island off Mexico and shot great whites in 360 video. The study landed in *Current Biology*. In 2017 he went back and left the cage. The day before, in the cage on a hookah line with no scuba, the hose got constricted, air failed, and he had to share. It was a mess. The next day, because he did not want PTSD and did not want that fear to define him, he exited with other divers. Guadalupe water is very clear. Swim toward a white shark and it banks off; turn your back and you read as prey. That evening the cages were up, the crew was fishing tuna for dinner, and a shark took the whole fish off the line. Neuralink's head neurosurgeon, Matt MacDougall, shot it; Nature Is Metal ran it. It looks like a miss. It cut the tuna like a band saw. From the side you see the girth. Two flicks of the tail and the animal is a missile.

Ocean Ramsey, in his view the greatest cage-exit diver, can read when a shark is aggressive and when it is not. Their group understood none of that and never should have been there. After he surfaced he told himself he was done taking risks with his life; he wanted to live. Days later, across the border, he was still saying it. Fridman recites the technique: do not swim away, look at it, swim toward it, if it is close you can put a hand on it and guide. Some people roll sharks; you will not roll one coming in at speed. They are ambush hunters that do not really foveate. You lock eyes with one, look down, and another is coming. They work together. Eyes on the sides of the head, a primitive system; electroreception and smell do most of the work. Fridman likes that Huberman is already thinking about the visual system.

Saltwater crocodile versus great white? Huberman does not like salties; they scare him badly. Muller sent a photo from Cuba of a smaller one, and even that was enough. Fridman was going to talk trash about croc bite force until recent numbers said the shark bites harder, which wrecked his agility-does-not-matter theory. Turning a big salty, Huberman says, is like turning a battleship. They pull up the Surfrider Foundation attack map. Northern California has had a few; a 52-year-old man in chest-deep water, 25 to 50 yards out, a white shark breached and seized his head. Huberman feels for the man and the family. It happens, and the base rate is tiny if you stay out of the ocean. Fridman reaches for a rotten joke about six misses in a row. Huberman takes it: 120% chance.

Huberman has never done ayahuasca; he is curious, and also curious about ibogaine. Fridman has done ayahuasca twice, never high-dose psilocybin, only a couple of small doses, and he was afraid of what Jung's shadow might be hiding. The ride was, for him, unusually positive. He cannot say what the lesson is — Russian constitution, maybe, or the jungle itself. The jungle strips the nonsense. No phone, no meetings, time sense gone, sun up, sun down. Huberman puts biology under that. Every mammal has a short-wavelength cone and a long-wavelength cone; the eye subtracts them to mark morning and evening. Low sun mixes short and long — blue plus yellow-orange at dawn, red-orange plus blue at dusk — while noon is full spectrum. The light is always full spectrum; atmosphere and low solar angle create the difference retinal neurons care about, and they send it to the suprachiasmatic nucleus. We are wired to sunrise and sunset.

Fridman asks about rainforest canopy: you often cannot see the sun. Even under trees, Huberman says, daytime photon counts dwarf night. People tell him there is no sun at their latitude in winter; go outside on a heavy overcast day, it is still far brighter than night. The object can be invisible. The light is there. What he is really obsessed with is the brain's aperture in time. You can consciously set the window: this room, Austin, the planet. Hard work — programming, training, research, podcasting — slices time at different densities. When things are hard, zoom out and see the episode as one element in a whole life, with more to come. People kill themselves, he says, because they cannot see past the window they are in, or they think it will last forever. When we are happy we almost never ask whether this will last forever. That asymmetry is worth sitting with.

Fridman's preparation for the wave was not to resist. Piano, guitar, jiu-jitsu, sports: he knows how to relax the body and accept what is happening, and he thinks that is why the experience stayed good. Huberman is more interested in ibogaine. Stanford's Nolan Williams is doing TMS and imaging on people who have taken it. As Huberman understands it, you get about 22 hours, no hallucinations with eyes open; close them and you see high-resolution footage of real events from your life, with agency inside the movies. Heart has to be healthy; you wear a monitor. It is not in the same family as the usual psychedelics. Veteran Solutions has combined ibogaine with other psychedelics for veterans with PTSD, and he has tried to support them mainly by saying in public that the work is good. People who were cratered or zombied after war get back a lightness they did not think they would have again. They look up Kentucky, which seemed ready to spend opioid-settlement money on ibogaine research, then backed away. Fifty billion is flowing to states from the manufacturers. Kentucky has some of the highest opioid death counts. "Sooner or later we'll get some happy news up on the internet during this episode." You survived the jungle, Huberman says. Jungle or not, Fridman answers, when you hear the call for adventure, do it.

Bucket list, Fridman: Mars. He loves that humans reach for the stars and take large risks; he would be willing to die there. Huberman flips through Joel Sartore's Photo Ark — portraits of animals that also do conservation work. A bat people treat as a little disease vector is, in the picture, beautiful. A cat with frontal eyes reminds him of someone he met as a kid: curious, playful, carnivorous, forested. Fridman felt species diversity as a shock in the jungle; most of those insects are unnamed. Huberman loves New York because it is a tropical reef: look anywhere and something is alive. The Bay Area is a kelp forest, a big fish now and then, like a large IPO, and long stretches of not much. He wants to use animation, not anime, to carry science, and he is in talks with Sesame Street. Cookie Monster is dopamine: cookie, now. Oscar is grouchy, Snuffleupagus shy, the Count counts. Narrow circuits, archetypes, Jung again. Fridman wants to talk to Putin. Huberman wants Cookie Monster. That, they agree, illustrates a lot.

Huberman's own list starts with a book. He is going to a cabin for a couple of weeks to write, something he has never done, hoping the whole mental space drops into the page. Fridman mentions Jack Nicholson in *The Shining*. Let's hope not. He used to take weekends alone in Gualala on the northern California coast, reading and writing papers, and he misses it. He wants more time with relatives in Argentina and on the East Coast, more time with parents who are still in good health. Then the sentence he came to say: he wants to get married and have a family. It is an important priority, and he is putting a lot of work into the runway. Advice, to himself and to listeners: pick the right partner, and do the work on yourself — know thyself. A new friend, a famous actor with four kids, leaned in at lunch: it is the best gift you will ever give yourself, and pick the mother of your kids very carefully. A lot of people want to live to 200. There is also the old-fashioned route: children who carry half your DNA forward.

He wants two kids, or five — completely different dynamics. He and his sister talk almost every day, three or four times a week, sometimes only a few lines; he cannot imagine another sibling because this one is already rich. Jonathan Haidt had just been on his show arguing no smartphones or social media until 16. Huberman has been thinking about friends buying neighboring land, not a commune, because brains do best in a small-village setup, free-range kids, forts and dirt-clod wars, the childhood he cannot picture doing without. New York kids moving through the city with agency look cool to him. The suburbs of his youth were something to escape on the 7F bus toward San Francisco. So the list also includes a few years in a major city that is not Los Angeles or San Francisco — maybe New York — and a rural foothold in Colorado or Montana, waking with the sun, pivoting between the two. San Francisco used to be the city where you had to be naked and on fire to get a second look. It changed. Lately he sees skate crews like GX1000 bombing hills with spotters at intersections, and co-living houses in and out of tech. Cities are supposed to let the young evolve the place.

Fridman has gotten religious about time. Google Sheet, scripts, a cell that glows green when a goal is hit. He does not log workout details, only that the work happened. The rule is a set of tasks, currently eleven, at least five minutes each, every day. Guitar is one. He usually goes far longer; the point is the streak. Huberman's morning: if sleep was short, non-sleep deep rest, yoga nidra, 10- and 20-minute tracks he has put on Spotify. He and Matt Walker have an IRB in for what NSDR actually does to the brain; older work hints at dopamine. Hydrate, caffeine if he is online — mate, coffee, maybe another can — resistance three days, running three, one off, done by 8:39 if he can, then real work. A sticky note on the computer reminds him what finished work feels like. Book, podcast research, fighting social media, texts, WhatsApp, YouTube. In a groove he can go 90 minutes to three hours. Fridman tries to hit four and admits it is often torture. Huberman has watched him stare at a notebook, pen frozen, hydraulic pressure building, then the line starts moving.

The team is everything. The magic ingredient in the Huberman Lab potion is Rob Moore, in the room for every solo and every guest interview. They talk several times a day and pour over decisions to the point of neurosis: book-jacket photos, whether the curve on the *Perform* logo is right, which sponsors to keep when a product changes. A circulating ad in his voice about someone going "from a two to a seven" is AI; he would never number a person that way. If you bought the thing, he is sorry. Fridman knows you need a team and also that every collaboration — engineering, robotics, research — spends the same energy deep work needs. He is an introvert; even loved people drain him. Huberman used to be alone much more. That is on the bucket list: more time dropped into work by himself. Social media shoves the brain the other way. After the morning block, lunch, more work, NSDR or a short nap around 2:30, maybe more caffeine, lean in again. Two or three real bouts and by 5 or 6 p.m. it is over.

At Jocko's they work and train all day, then sauna and cold plunge together at night. Huberman likes gathering at a specific hour. He has a home gym; Tim used to come lift. Once a day with people, once a day alone: basic, said a million times, rarely done. If nobody is organizing, be the person who calls the party. That is a thing an introvert has to learn. When Fridman came through town the house was already full; Huberman was getting a rare massage, then everyone including the dog piled in. It was sweet. Choose the people, though. From ayahuasca and the jungle Fridman came back with a stricter allocation of time. He wrote down Conor McGregor on loyalty: "Don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with." Set the trash talk aside. If you invest in people and they stand with you, what else is life? Huberman: hardship will show you who your real friends are. That is for sure. It will also show you who actually spent time understanding you. People are complicated. Read the quote again. From that angle, hardship is a gift. It also makes you stronger.

They close the way the Chinese write-up remembers. Huberman says the whole podcast ride has been a great one, and it started with Fridman telling him to do it. Fridman showed up in hard seasons, in public and in the house. It is an honor to be his friend. "I love you, brother." "Love you too." Fridman leaves Jung on the way out: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.