Andrew Huberman joins Sam and Shaan to break down how he built one of the fastest-growing podcasts in history — from zero to top ten in under a year — without a PR firm, without selling anything, and while still holding a tenured position at Stanford. The conversation covers his morning routine (sunlight, yoga nidra, 90-minute deep work blocks), his approach to nutrition and hormones, the business model behind Huberman Lab, and his vision for a network of science-based podcasts.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Andrew Huberman (guest, neuroscientist, Stanford professor, Huberman Lab podcast)
Introduction and Pre-Roll [00:00:00]
Sam: Andrew Huberman was just on the podcast. If you don’t know who he is, I’m going to try and describe him very simply. He’s this guy who works at Stanford — I believe he’s a neuroscientist. Dr. Huberman is his name. He’s got this YouTube series and a podcast called Huberman Lab where basically he picks one topic — sleep, stress, building muscle, depression, addiction — and he’ll do like an hour to two hours of just talking into the camera and explaining very easy-to-understand ways of what it means and how you can overcome it, what supplements or exercises you can do to address it.
Sam: He’s only been around for ten months and he’s already one of the top ten most popular podcasts. He’s everywhere on YouTube. This guy is a badass. We just had him on the podcast. I’m kind of starstruck a little bit because I’m such a fan of his. I think you’re really going to dig this. It’s a little bit health-focused, and towards the end we get into more business stuff. But if you’re into business, you have to be healthy — otherwise you’re not going to be able to perform well. We talk a lot about morning routines and these aren’t just like “well, I write my journal” — it’s like, well, if you do this, based on science and peer-reviewed research, if you do this you’re going to feel this way and that’s going to help with X, Y, and Z. So it’s an evidence- and research-based thing. Pretty freaking cool. Enjoy it.
Shaan: What do I think? He’s really good for giving little hacks. I just feel like I took away six to ten little hacks I can use in my life that are going to make it better — mostly biologically, like actually improve my sleep or improve my ability to focus. I think there’s a lot of great little nuggets for people in it. Check it out.
Finding Huberman on the Internet [00:02:30]
Shaan: Do you check notifications on YouTube?
Andrew: I do not.
Sam: Okay, let me tell you something really quick. About two weeks ago — I’m a big Bay Area punk rock fan, so I listened to like old Rancid, old Green Day. I used to live in San Francisco for years. I was looking at an old interview with Tim Armstrong from Rancid, and it had very little views. I was loving this interview and I was going to comment on how much I love it, and I scrolled down — and you were the first comment on there. And I replied to you. I thought that was funny. We have similar interests. I did not expect to see you there on an old Tim Armstrong video.
Andrew: Yeah, I’m a huge Rancid and Tim Armstrong fan. Without taking up too much of our time on this, I’ve never met Tim personally, but growing up I was an Operation Ivy fan, a big fan of a band called Crimpshrine — this whole East Bay punk scene. And then Rancid came out, and actually Tim and Matt Freeman had a band called Downfall in between — you can find some of those tracks and I love those tracks. They cover such a huge range of styles and they’ve just done amazing things. So if there’s any content out there — Rancid acoustic, Downfall, rare Rancid tracks — I scour the internet for them. If you know something I don’t, send it to me.
Sam: This is one of the reasons I think people like you and why your podcast has taken off. Because you’re this intellectual powerhouse, but you look like an athlete, yet you kind of have this punk rock side to you. You’re just this really eclectic, interesting person. I think that’s one of the reasons you’re kicking ass.
Huberman’s Origin Story and Podcast Launch [00:05:00]
Shaan: So I did a little bit of research. I was delighted when you guys asked me on. I’m new to Twitter, frankly. I didn’t like Twitter when I first got on — I was like, wow, people are really combative compared to Instagram. I think it’s because you don’t have to show your face. But you guys showed up and I was like, oh wow, I guess there’s some nice people in the neighborhood. Sort of like finding the other punk rockers and skateboarders.
Shaan: We have Andrew Huberman here — Dr. Huberman — known for Huberman Lab. You’re a neuroscientist, a professor at Stanford, and you have an interesting podcast. I’ve seen you everywhere recently. I don’t know if you hired an amazing PR person, or if I’m just late to the party, but you went from “I’ve never heard of you before, like three months ago” to “I only hear about you, and my YouTube feed is basically just giving me more and more of your content every day.” Is that a new thing, or am I just discovering it now?
Andrew: It’s a very new thing. To give you the quick arc, leaving out all the pre-academia stuff — I did my training in neuroscience and physiology, things like temperature regulation, and over the years I worked on a number of different problems formally, in laboratories as a PhD student, postdoc, junior professor, and tenured professor. Things like stress and regeneration.
Andrew: What happened was, right around 2015, I started getting curious about how scientific information was making it out into the general public. But there really wasn’t a cause or a venue for doing that. There were these summit meetings that weren’t really my flavor — they would typically go something like: yoga class, group meditation, one talk, “buy my product, buy my book,” and then people go home.
Andrew: So what happened was in 2019, I have a good friend and business partner named Pat Dossett — he’s a Wharton grad, a former Navy SEAL operator, did nine years in the SEAL teams, a good friend of mine. We swim together. He started a company called Made For, which is a behavioral health company, with Blake Mycoskie, who’s the founder of TOMS shoes.
Andrew: In 2019, Pat asked me a question. We were literally getting out of the water after an early morning cold water swim, and he said, “What are you going to do in 2019 to make the world a better place?” I said, “Well, I’m trying to figure out neural regeneration, stress, and how to sleep better in my lab.” He was poking at me: “Yeah, but what are you really going to do?” I said, “I think it’d be fun to just teach science on the internet and just put quality information out there because I don’t see that.”
Andrew: So I started doing that in 2019 — little short posts, pretty nerdy stuff, mostly on Instagram. People seemed to like it. I got a book deal at the end of 2019. I thought I would do what most academics do — write a book, sell a book.
Andrew: And then 2020 hit. A couple things happened. One, I realized there was a tremendous need for people to have tools for managing stress and circadian rhythms and sleep, because everyone was locked down, stressed out, and confused — as was I, frankly. But I had access to these tools. So I started disseminating them by going on podcasts and on Instagram.
Andrew: Then eventually the podcast led to a Rogan appearance, which certainly had a lot to do with it. A Rich Roll appearance. And Lex Fridman, at the end of 2020, said, “You should start a podcast.” So January of 2021, I bought the mics, set it up.
Andrew: I looked to my skateboarding punk rock past. I have a friend named Mike Blabac — known as Blabac Photo in the skateboard and action sports community, shoots all the stuff of Ken Block driving rally cars, Danny Way, Tony Hawk, all the superstars of skateboarding and action sports photography. Mike said, “Let’s build an aesthetic that represents you.” I always wear the same black shirt — I own 26 of them. I always keep my hair short. This is just me on any day. And I started sitting down and saying, “What would I do in a classroom if someone was interested in stress and how to manage it?” I would give four lectures on that.
Andrew: So a big feature of the podcast that’s a little different from most is that I try and stay on theme, and I try to keep it like I would in a classroom, but then offer a lot of tools. That’s really how it happened — no PR firm, no big contracts, nothing we’ve got wasn’t built with my team.
Getting on Joe Rogan [00:13:00]
Sam: How did you get on Rogan? Because that was an obvious inflection point, and then it leads to Tim Ferriss, and then more and more.
Andrew: That was all this year. Let me close the hatch on something first — I haven’t released my book for two reasons. One is that in 2020 I didn’t want to sell anything. I was coming to the table as an academic with a tenured position and a salary — and frankly, even at Stanford, we don’t make big salaries. If my dean is listening, the salaries at Stanford are not in keeping with the cost of living in the Bay Area, which is why most people sit on company boards. You do science for the love of it.
Andrew: The second Rogan appearance happened because Joe said, “Huberman’s doing this podcast thing and people seem interested in it, let’s get him back on.” But how did it happen in the first place? I have a good friend and business partner at my podcast named Rob Moore. And no, he’s not taking new clients, because he no longer does what I’m about to describe.
Andrew: Rob came from the world of PR but then got really interested in podcasts. He started a podcast called The Fight with Teddy Atlas — he loves boxing.
Sam: Yeah, I listen to that every week!
Andrew: You work with that guy?
Sam: He’s got like a thick Boston accent, right?
Andrew: That’s Ken Rideout — a friend I met through Rob. Rob, you’re not going to find him. He sits behind an email wall. He’s a close friend of mine.
Andrew: October of last year — October, November 2020 — we went for lunch and I said, “Let’s start a podcast. Lex thinks we’ve got traction and I think he’s right.” He said, “Great, let’s do it. Let’s buy the mics.” We built the studio with our own hands. Mike showed up and the DC team came in — they’re friends of mine, DC Shoes, DC Skateboarding — and they helped me create an aesthetic where people would feel like they were in a classroom.
Andrew: Rob was the one who connected me to the person who connected me to Joe. There’s a little bit of a wall there just because they get flooded with requests. I think what’s beautiful about the Rogan podcast, having been a guest on there, is that Joe sits down with people he’d like to have a meal with and has a conversation. The human appetite for that is obviously huge.
Andrew: Joe has been tremendously helpful. Tim Ferriss, Rich Roll, Lex Fridman — and I will say that Lex has been my kind of guiding light in this whole process, about bringing certain elements of my person and personality to things. I am a died-in-the-wool punk rocker. I grew up in that scene. And the reason I gravitated towards it early is that at its essence it’s about showing up heartful and strong — it’s never a victim stance, but it’s not an aggressive stance. It’s not a weak stance either. It just resonated with me.
Andrew: Lex was the one who really said, “Pick two or three things that you really feel represent your relationship to science and that give you energy.” Lex is a genius, I have to say. He works so hard, he thinks so hard about where he’s going with all this. He just interviewed Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health — that is not an easy get.
The YouTube Strategy and What Made the Channel Work [00:19:00]
Sam: For those who are listening and don’t know who you are — I have your channel up right now. Your first video was launched ten months ago. You’re this good-looking dude, you’ve got a goatee, you look kind of like a football player, you’re wearing a black shirt with a black background, you’re pretty serious, and you’re just sitting there for like sixty minutes to almost two hours sometimes, explaining things that sound complicated — “How your nervous system works and changes,” “Master your sleep,” “Using eye movements and balance to learn faster.” These are somewhat complicated things, but you sit down and look at the camera for one to two hours and explain what it all means. And then you do something interesting where you say, “All right, so how do you take advantage of this and apply it?” You’re long-winded on purpose because you’re like, “I need you to know exactly how this works so you can decide what you want to do, versus me just telling you exactly what to do.”
Andrew: Yeah, there’s a balance. You can simplify something so people can understand it without removing their own agency to dive in deeper.
Andrew: So my goal — my purpose in life, and I know mission statements can sound cliche — is genuinely this: I like to pay attention to what puts energy into my body. You hear a song and it just fills you with energy. That energy is a neural energy. It’s your source. In the Eastern philosophies they’d call it chi. I’ve always sensed what I really enjoy, and for me, learning cool information and sharing it is what I want to do.
Andrew: So what I try to do is paint a tapestry at the beginning of each topic — stress, sleep, dopamine, ADHD, eating disorders, whatever — and arm people with the language. Make them realize that the nomenclature is just words, and we can replace some of those words, and let’s get a functional definition of things going. And then once they understand how things work a little bit, some of the algorithms so to speak, let’s talk about what you can do. How you can use light to change your circadian rhythms, particular patterns of breathing grounded in physiology to de-stress rapidly. And so yeah.
Sam: Can you explain this first video? Your first one was only ten months ago. That first video has 652,000 views. The very next one, a month later, a million views. The next one, 630,000. You were hitting right away. How did that happen?
Andrew: That’s a good question. A big part of it — I don’t think it was the thumbnails, because actually YouTube told us our thumbnails weren’t legible. I had these fancy anatomical drawings. We’ve since changed them. We’ve learned that faces do better than images, and the wider the eyes the more people click, kind of crazy stuff. We didn’t do that because I want people to know I’m here with serious information, because I’m serious about them.
Andrew: By the end of 2020, the Instagram channel had grown to several hundred thousand — but that took two years and fifty podcast appearances as a guest. So we announced that we were going to launch a YouTube channel, pushed people to subscribe, and then just started putting out content. Frequency is a big deal. We do one a week. And consistency of aesthetic counts — building the studio was fairly straightforward.
Andrew: I have to thank Mike Blabac and DC. One thing about skateboarders: they really know how to create original content in a DIY format. Mike is out on a shoot right now with Spike Jonze. I grew up around people who took video of us playing around on the streets on skateboards and made videos that became iconic things. Skateboarders were kind of the first YouTubers, if you look at old Transworld or 411 videos or old DC — what Bam was doing with Jackass, the CKY videos.
Shaan: That’s right, they really were.
Andrew: You mentioned 411, so you definitely know. I still skate — I was just hanging out with Mikey Taylor this weekend. But to be clear, I wasn’t a great skateboarder. I was okay. Thunder Trucks put me on out of sympathy, Spitfire put me on out of sympathy. I wasn’t going to be one of the big guys. It was just a community I really felt a part of. When I went off to college — because my high school girlfriend went to college — I tripped and fell into biology. I thought I’d be a skateboarder or a firefighter or something more physical, but I fell in love with biology and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
The Business Model: Zero-Cost Science [00:27:00]
Andrew: The other piece is keeping a fairly narrow message. We’ve turned down every option to make a little bit of extra money by peppering things with advertising everywhere. I want people to have a zero-cost trusted source for science, health, and fitness information. We’re not going to get everything exactly right, but I always consult with at least two or three professional colleagues in a given area before I do a solo podcast, because I don’t work on ADHD directly — I know a fair amount about it but I consult with experts. I use the scientific community, and it’s a kind of beautiful ecosystem: our advertisers are happy, we’re happy, but the main thing is the consumers get it at zero cost.
Andrew: That’s very different from a book, and very different from a behind-paywall strategy. I’ve seen a lot of health and science podcasters who are quite good move their stuff behind a paywall because you can make much more money charging ten or thirty dollars a month. I think people would be willing to do that for our content. However, I feel best about the fact that for some kid sitting halfway across the world who wants to understand weight training or ADHD or dopamine or sleep — as long as they have an internet connection, they have to tolerate a few ads, but the information is free.
Sam: A couple people, fans of the pod — and they are big fans — were excited to have you on because we mostly run a business-oriented podcast. That’s why we’re asking you about the business of how you became a content creator and how you got your audience.
Sam: Why don’t you just bail? You could be making a million dollars a year.
Andrew: Well, I’m academically masochistic. I actually took — I have a big project on human stress and we’ve been working on human fear. I love doing research. A fairly sizable portion of the Huberman Lab podcast income is going to be donated to research and to scholarships for students. I’m not extremely wealthy, nor do I suffer. Money is important — I always say money can’t buy happiness, but it absolutely can buffer stress. Anyone who’s ever had significant funds throughout their lifetime and then didn’t will understand exactly what I mean. But so is the ecosystem between academia, public health and science communication, and the private sector. For the time being it just makes sense for me to continue teaching at Stanford. I teach medical students in the winter on neuroanatomy. I direct the neuroanatomy course. I really enjoy academic conversations. They’re slow — it’s like leading through steel, one thin layer at a time — but what you get is a granularity, a process for getting to answers. I don’t think I’d be happy without doing that.
The Audience Engagement Strategy [00:32:00]
Andrew: One thing about comments, vis-à-vis business — comment sections are great, but better to make them interactive. I actively request feedback. I say, “Give us suggestions and ideas about future podcasts.” And then I’ve devoted entire episodes to what we call Office Hours — where I go through the most frequently asked questions and address those. So now there’s an incentive to put stuff in the comments. I think that’s a really good non-combative use of the comment section.
Andrew: YouTube comments used to be the running joke — “what is the most toxic cesspool of commentary that exists?” — and now YouTube comments are on the whole either funny or supportive or constructive. I don’t know what they changed in the algorithm, but they really changed that. TikTok is doing it too.
Shaan: Twitter rewards a different thing — witty in 140 characters is the upside, but the downside is the sharpest insult also gets rewarded, and you don’t have to show your face.
Andrew: Exactly. That brings out a different side of people. And I found Twitter to be an incredibly combative neighborhood at first, and then you guys showed up and I was like, “Oh, I guess there’s some nice people here.” Sort of like finding the other punk rockers and skateboarders.
Morning Routine Deep Dive [00:36:00]
Sam: I want to go through some of your greatest hits. When I was telling friends you were coming on, they said — we ask a lot of billionaires, “What’s your morning routine?” and they tell us, and people sort of equate that to “if I do this, I too will become a billionaire.” But if I ask you about your morning routine — which I’m guessing is centered around health, mental health, fitness, and regulating your body — that will actually be applicable to more people. Take us through it.
Andrew: Sure. I wake up — for me that’s usually somewhere between 5:30 and 6:30 depending on how early I went to sleep. I wake up and do an assessment of whether or not I feel rested. Most days the answer is no, because of life, staying up too late, stress, etc.
Andrew: So I do a ten to thirty minute yoga nidra session first thing in the morning. Yoga nidra is a passive listening practice — you can find yoga nidra links on YouTube. There’s a ten-minute yoga nidra, and I put out one for free called NSDR, Non-Sleep Deep Rest, which is a thirty-minute script where you just listen. It brings your brain into a state that’s pseudo-sleep. After that ten or thirty minute yoga nidra, I feel like I’ve slept as much as I need to sleep. It’s a remarkable reset. It avoids your brain going into the state of planning and organization — what we call “duration, path, and outcome” in the neural circuitry world — and keeps it in that liminal state of adjusting. There are some interesting published data showing that yoga nidra meditations can upregulate some neurotransmitters in the brain, including dopamine, that prepare you for action. They’re very restorative, especially in the absence of complete sleep.
Andrew: If I feel great, I might just get out of bed. And I have to be careful listing every step, because people say “wait, he doesn’t even go to the bathroom in the morning” — I mean, obviously I go right foot left foot to the bathroom first. Then I drink water and hydrate.
Andrew: And then I go outside and get sunlight in my eyes for ten to thirty minutes. Foundational. Absolutely critical practice. When I don’t do it for more than two days in a row, I start messing up all sorts of aspects of my life. And most people are not doing this.
Andrew: Even on cloudy days, do it. Don’t wear sunglasses unless you have a medical reason why you need to. It’s fine to wear corrective lenses or contacts. You don’t need to stare directly at the sun or even see the sun rise — those are the questions I get most often, so I’m hitting them as bullet points. If you wake up before the sun rises, flip on as many lights as you can in your space. And once the sun is out, go outside. I don’t care if you’re in the depths of a Scandinavian winter — the sun comes out at some point. Some people might need a daylight simulator, but honestly, the discussion about daylight simulators is usually an excuse to avoid just going outside.
Andrew: You can check your phone while you do this, or bring the newspaper if people still read those, or a book. I usually bring a journal and write down some things I want to do that day, clearing away some of the clutter. And sometimes I’ll combine this with a walk. Optic flow — when you’re just walking through space, not looking at your phone or anything in particular — that optic flow is known to suppress a circuit in the limbic system involved in threat detection. It is very calming to walk through space and reduces your overall levels of anxiety.
Andrew: So basically all of that can be accomplished in one hour. Wake up, yoga nidra for ten to thirty minutes, use the bathroom, drink some water — all the basic biological functions.
Sam: What about L-theanine and coffee?
Andrew: So I don’t ingest L-theanine during the day. I ingest it as part of a sleep cocktail before sleep. Some people will take L-theanine with coffee — it’s now in many energy drinks because it takes away some of the jitters that caffeine can induce.
Andrew: I don’t drink any caffeine until ninety minutes — ideally a hundred and twenty minutes — after I’ve woken up. During sleep, adenosine builds up in your system. Caffeine is an adenosine antagonist — it basically blocks the adenosine receptor. So when that caffeine wears off, you’re going to get a big crash because there’s a surplus of adenosine. But by waiting ninety minutes to two hours to ingest caffeine, your natural adenosine system tapers down very low as a consequence, and you don’t get that rebound crash in the afternoon.
Andrew: I drink yerba mate tea. I love it. It’s very high caffeine content so you don’t need very much of it. It also has a lot of GLP-1 — glucagon-like peptide 1 — which is being used now as an anti-diabetes and obesity drug. There are all sorts of great things about GLP-1, including upregulating dopamine receptors.
Andrew: After the walk I go inside, maybe do a quick ten-minute social media check with an alarm. And I want social media to continue to be a pleasure — because of the dopamine system, I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of someone else’s psychology or neurology. I want to stay in my own frame.
Andrew: The orientation I have in the early part of the day with that notebook is: I want to be in my own mental frame. During sleep is when we have neuroplasticity — the actual rewiring of neural connections occurs during sleep. When you wake up, you are in a position to extract whatever it is that these new neural circuits have figured out about the previous day’s events. If I immediately bombard myself with sensory input and distractions, I’m not able to do that.
Andrew: This morning, for instance — I’m preparing an episode on time perception. I’ve been reading a lot about it, and I woke up, went outside with the notebook, and just sat there and realized there’s a way to organize this episode that has to do with frame rates, sort of slow-motion versus fast-motion cognition. It’s not fully formed, but that could emerge because I gave it space.
Andrew: Then I move into more typical work. It’s great if you can avoid email until after noon, but that’s hard for a lot of businesses. So I’ll do a brief check on critical items, but then I like to write. I’m working on a book finally. I work on scientific papers, grants, reviewing papers. I try to make that pretty heavy intellectual lifting, and take that until about noon.
The Henry Rollins Tangent (and Why Huberman Has No Kids) [00:50:00]
Sam: Do you have a family?
Andrew: No. I have a relationship, and I had a dog until recently — he passed away. So I understand people have different constraints. He was a big part of my morning routine. A big ninety-pound bulldog mastiff named Costello. We would slowly do our walk together, get the sun together. Animals are perfectly happy to do these because they’re very innate behaviors. But no kids.
Sam: You remind me of Henry Rollins — except his jaw goes to about here. You know, Henry’s head is like this big. Shaan, do you know who Henry Rollins is?
Shaan: No.
Sam: One time I — okay. Shaan doesn’t know who Dolly Parton is. He didn’t know who Jimmy Buffett was. Shaan doesn’t know white people stuff. So we’re going to put this in the category. Henry Rollins was the lead singer of Black Flag. He was early in the punk rock scene to get into lifting weights. He’s this guy — he’s like in his sixties now, but basically he was singing punk rock, didn’t drink or anything, and he started lifting weights. Kind of like a meathead, not in a bad way, but he was jacked. And now at this point in his life he’s completely single, doesn’t have kids, and he’s a poet and an actor. Kind of like a renaissance man. If you Google him you’ll recognize him.
Andrew: I’m a big Ian MacKaye fan. Minor Threat, then Black Flag, and yes, Rollins was part of Black Flag. Ian and those guys were straight-edge — at that time it meant no alcohol, no drugs. Pretty firm stance in the eighties compared to the rest of the culture. I don’t know Henry, I don’t know Ian, but I listen to Minor Threat all the time.
Sam: So Henry is this guy — he might be in his sixties now, basically living this completely single, no kids, Renaissance-man life. And I picture you the same way — this interesting guy who’s alone, intensely studying, trying to crack a problem. That’s an interesting part of you.
Andrew: In the spirit of authenticity but not oversharing — I’m blessed with great friendships. I’ve always had a community, a lot of friends who swim, work out, play music. I’m really good friends with Michael Muller, who’s a photographer who does all the Marvel stuff. I train with him. I’m sometimes up at Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece’s pool — those are good friends of mine, I like those workouts.
Andrew: But yes, at this point in my life I live in a somewhat remote area. I have a gym and a sauna and a cold dunk. I spend a lot of time with books. I’m dying to get another dog. I do live that kind of monastic lifestyle.
Andrew: The children thing is interesting because I started off studying brain development and neuroplasticity. Let’s just say that if I do something, I do it a hundred percent. I have no children now, but if I do have kids I genuinely want five of them — I want a big family, or none at all.
The Eyes Are Brain Tissue [00:56:00]
Sam: We should talk because your specialty is around the eye, right? And I’ve heard you say this before — the eye is essentially part of the brain that exists outside of the cranium.
Andrew: That’s right. These two bits are two pieces of your central nervous system that got extruded out of the cranial vault during development. They’re the only part of your brain that’s facing the world out. They’re the way your brain figures out where it is in space and time — by the rising and setting of the sun, the changing amount of light throughout the year, regardless of where you live. And they’re responsible for delivering, let’s say, forty percent of the brain’s real estate devoted to vision in some way or another.
Andrew: We are incredibly visual animals. Even in blind people, that real estate for vision in the back of the head — the occipital cortex — gets overtaken by areas that respond to touch and hearing, which is why they’re so good at those. But in sighted individuals, vision is the predominant way we not only represent and see objects around us, but also the way we orient ourselves in space and time, and that we set our frame rate. Essentially, as you move through life, you’re either batching time in big chunks or small chunks, and that has to do with how you’re viewing the visual world.
Andrew: That’s probably abstract, but yes — these two bits are brain outside your cranial vault. And that’s why in the morning, one of the key things in the routine is: get outside, let the sun hit your eyes. It’s basically alerting the body that hey, the sun is up, kick start all your engines, it’s daytime.
The 80/20 on Health: Two Non-Negotiables [00:59:00]
Shaan: We talk a lot on this podcast about the 80/20. Shortcuts get a bad rap — they’re seen as the lazy thing to do — but in many ways a shortcut is: how do I identify the highest-leverage points? If you could change one or two behaviors for all the people listening right now — imagine a hundred thousand people — which two would you pick that have the highest ROI? What would make people happier, healthier, better?
Andrew: Great question. The two things that set the foundation for optimal mental and physical functioning are going to be really good sleep and really good mental frame.
Andrew: Let me give you the practices first so I don’t get accused of being so intellectual that I cure insomnia during this podcast. The first one is that morning sunlight in your eyes — non-negotiable, 360 days out of the year. If it’s raining, stand under an overhang. I’ve grown a little bit exhausted of the “well, I can’t do that because I’ve got kids” — take them outside with you, they need this too.
Andrew: That sets a cortisol increase in the morning, which is a healthy cortisol increase. It provides wakefulness and triggers your metabolism in the proper direction. If that cortisol spike happens too late — if you step out in the sunlight too often late in the day — you have a delayed cortisol spike, which is associated with insomnia and depression. There are good data on this.
Andrew: Get that morning sunlight 360 days out of the year. I like to think of it as raising the tide so that your boat can leave harbor — rather than “oh, this is like putting another outboard motor on my vessel.” It’s a foundational practice.
Andrew: The second one is a broader category: get your sleep right. Until you’re sleeping well 80 percent of the time or more, make that the priority. I can defer people to our newsletter at hubermanlab.com — it’s completely free, we don’t share your email. There’s the key tips for sleep, you can watch the Master Your Sleep episode, or download the 12 Steps for Optimal Sleep. There is a segment on supplementation with considerations and warnings, and also sections on NSDR protocols with links to those.
Shaan: What’s the mental framework?
Andrew: Mental frame is something I don’t think has been formalized in the kind of health and fitness optimization space. And Shaan is actually really good at that, by the way — he does a really good job at deciding what frame he’s going to be in.
Andrew: I put it this way: my number one mission, the thing I work on, is being able to be in the state of mind I want. Which is basically being able to experience the experiences I want, the way I want to. I just made it my top priority in life. Then I started to get good at it, because I realized: oh, this is the cheat code. You’ve got a stressed-out billionaire over there, and then you’ve got a joyful single mom over here — which quality of life do I actually want? I want the one where my state of mind is in states I enjoy, and not fear, anxiety, stress, depression.
Andrew: A lot of the stuff out there in the self-help and business literature is kind of nipping at the margins of this. The one person who really deserves a nod and is truly a pioneer is Cal Newport. So Good They Can’t Ignore You is an incredible book — everyone should be required to read it. Deep Work is essentially what I’m paraphrasing some of the protocols from. Cal is a computer science professor, he’s not on social media, but that book is about setting mental frame. Context switching is dangerous. It’s about not succumbing to distractions so you can do work that actually moves the needle.
Andrew: The key essence of Cal’s work as it relates to mental frame is this: the brain is extremely good at context switching. I could be doing this podcast right now and if a fire alarm goes off I can switch context and respond. But ninety percent of the work that moves the needle — that we are rewarded for, that enriches our professional lives and relationships — requires staying in one frame.
Andrew: Early in the day, when you get the download from sleep, you identify a few key things, and you start funneling your neural networks toward what I’m calling frame-setting. What you’re not doing is allowing something from the external environment to adjust your frame. So you get depth of connection with the work. I knew I was doing this podcast at noon and I wasn’t walking and thinking about it, but I set that as a goalpost, and my brain is orienting toward what I need to do, so that when we clip on, we’re ready to go.
Andrew: Context switching is deadly — I’m stealing Cal’s word. Some people will put Freedom on their computer so they can’t engage with the internet. This device I try to keep away from me for the first half of the day.
Andrew: Here’s the goal in the morning, to make this simple: I want to have one ninety-minute block that I completely conquer. Where I experience immense resistance to do something other than what I’m doing, but I stay in — gnawing away at writing something, reading something, trying to comprehend something.
Andrew: And you have to be very careful. The moment you walk to the restroom and look yourself in the mirror and notice something — you’re starting to switch mental frame. Ninety minutes seems like nothing, but it’s remarkable what you can accomplish. And more importantly, in that exercise of getting good at what we call “no-go” operations in the brain — pushing aside things, enforcing those blinders — you’re able to bring that same mental frame to other things later in the day. You engage it much quicker.
Andrew: It’s sort of like: if you’ve never driven a car above 110 miles an hour, you don’t really know how to get around a semi in front of you that’s braking fast on a downhill. But when you’ve done it, you’re comfortable at speed. You’re comfortable braking. This mental frame thing is not just about the work you do in that ninety minutes — it’s about getting better at deep work even for shorter bouts, because as the day goes on things start coming in, and you start getting pulled off center.
Andrew: And I’ll let people use their imagination, but this ability to stay in that groove comes into use in many aspects of life that have nothing to do with work. It’s all the same circuit — the prefrontal cortex saying: “duration, path, outcome — how long am I doing this, what path should I take, what outcomes am I getting?” And not getting pulled off center by someone else’s DPO.
Andrew: I’ve been fortunate enough to do some work with the special operations community in Canada and the US. In addition to those guys being really good at “shoot, move, and communicate,” the really exceptional ones know how to flip this switch. We think of it as grit, resilience, mental toughness — and yes, they’re all gritty. But there are a lot of gritty people out there. The difference is the ability to take your environment, narrow it, be effective, cut a fine slice through something, and then stop and move to something else. That’s a mental operation that involves multiple circuits, multiple neurotransmitters. You can’t say it’s just dopamine or just epinephrine — it’s going to be that, plus a bunch of other things.
What Huberman Sucks At [01:13:00]
Sam: Two quick questions. One — what do you suck at? Because when I talk to you I’m incredibly intimidated. When it comes to mental health and physical health and emotional health, I’m like, I’m so inadequate. And when I hang out with you now I’m like, this guy’s got it together. I know that’s not the case. You’re a human, you’ve got issues just like me. So I want to know what you struggle with. And also — do you just have loads of people dropping in your DMs hitting on you? Because I’m listening to you talk and I’m like, this guy is probably getting hit on constantly. Or is it all just dudes sending you pictures of a mole on their back asking what you think it is?
Andrew: I don’t find moles on backs incredibly fast — I’m just kidding. Every doctor has that. It’s just all my doctor friends: “Hey, what do you think this lump is?”
Andrew: Okay, to close the hatch on the earlier question — you asked for two tools and I gave three: morning sunlight, master your sleep, and the ninety-minute block. Remember: it’s not just about what you accomplish, it’s about getting into those frames and controlling it. You are setting the beginning, middle, and end of that frame. That’s what’s key. It’s not happening because someone else said “game time, noon on Sunday.” What you’re learning to do is flip the switch. You’re learning to engage that. And you have to be judicious in your use of this circuitry — you can’t do it twelve hours a day.
Andrew: There’s also a second newsletter which is about optimizing learning and plasticity — that’s the October newsletter at hubermanlab.com.
Andrew: Okay, what do I suck at. I am dreadfully poor at follow-up communications. I’m really bad. I like to respond to comments — I try to respond especially on Instagram. But I have to control my impulse to respond to everything, just for sake of time, so I can do the big important things.
Andrew: I’m a terrible cook. Absolutely terrible. I can destroy toast. I just don’t have the patience. My diet is pretty clean — basically low carb. I’ll eat some nuts and stuff in the morning if I’m hungry. I put salt in my water, which kills your hunger a lot of the time. A lot of people get shaky and think they need sugar — your electrolytes are just low. Put some sea salt or a pinch of salt in water, drink it, and go another two hours. Your brain functions great, blood volume goes up.
Andrew: I eat low carb throughout the day — meat and salad, maybe a little bit of rice or something if I train. I do exercise — one day weight training, one day run, alternating. I take one full day off each week. I never train for longer than an hour after warming up. I hit it as hard as I can. I’ve been doing that for thirty-two years. I’m forty-six now.
Andrew: I’m not a great writer. I’m not a bad writer, but verbal exchange is how I do best. So I solve this problem — I dictate into voice memos, put it on Rev.com, and then sculpt from there.
Andrew: And I’m a terrible musician. I love music, but I can’t play a chord to save my life. That’s okay. I’ll live with that.
Andrew: There are plenty of things I’m a world-class failure at. And if you talk to any of my ex-girlfriends, they’ll give you their take on what I’m good at and what I’m not. But I don’t try and hide those things.
Andrew: I just want to give a nod to Tim Ferriss — I only know him through the podcast interaction, but The 4-Hour Work Week and The 4-Hour Body had a tremendous impact in accelerating my career in science because I was able to focus on things that really matter. We should all be rereading those books — they’re so damn good.
Diet and Nutrition Philosophy [01:22:00]
Andrew: The diet thing — I do low carb during the day, and then I eat carbohydrates at night. I like starch. I like pasta. I try to limit my protein at night because it makes me sleepy, and I get into really great sleep by eating my starches later in the day. Usually around 8 PM I eat dinner, and then I go to sleep around 10:30. I’ll have a snack sometimes if I want one, but generally I don’t.
Andrew: If I’ve trained early in the day and I’m running around like crazy, I’m burning up a lot of glycogen. I want to repack my glycogen so I can train in the morning.
Sam: What’s something out there that you hear a lot but you don’t buy, or you think might actually be harmful? Some piece of conventional wisdom or hipster wisdom that you’d push back on?
Andrew: The nutrition space is a disaster. Absolute disaster. There’s a paper from Chris Gardner’s lab at Stanford showing that as long as people ingest fewer calories than they burn, you’re going to lose weight — regardless of whether those calories come from a low-carb, vegan, or pure-meat regimen. Calories in, calories out is a foundational principle.
Sam: What’s the controversial thing you’ve just said though?
Andrew: In the nutrition space there’s this other idea that’s grounded in some rationale — for instance, when you eat animal protein, there’s a metabolic cost, a “calories out” equation from the digestion and utilization of that protein.
Sam: Seems like a rounding error.
Andrew: It’s not huge. But it’s very different than if you were talking about an equivalent number of calories from starch. And there are hormonal effects of what I call a “bias diet.” I eat a macronutrient-complete diet — fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are sort of on an as-needed basis. If I’m training less, I might eat fewer of them.
Andrew: The nutrition space is a mess because everyone has to eat, and people have different preferences. A lot of what you see out there is really just geared toward finding an audience that prefers plants, prefers meat, or prefers to fast. Having explored the fasting science — there’s nothing wholly about fasting that provides autophagy, the cleaning up of dead cells. Low-calorie diets will do that even if you’re not so-called fasting. But it appears there are some benefits to having periods of each twenty-four-hour cycle where you’re not ingesting calories, independent of the total number of calories.
Andrew: The biggest issue — the mess I see out there — is that people are using social media to amplify controversies that don’t really exist. I’m willing to bet that eating more plants and less meat — forgive me Paul Saladino, he’s a friend of mine and he’s got great data to support what he does — but I like plants. I’m going to eat my salad. I’m also going to eat a steak. The battles on the internet over dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol and testosterone — it’s so crazy.
Andrew: The reason it’s crazy is not because it isn’t a valid conversation — we all have to eat and people want to live a long time and feel vital. It’s crazy because there’s really no unified field bringing together people with very diverse frameworks trying to resolve the same problem. It’s sort of like if I were in a discussion or disagreement with someone who’s a philosopher — I don’t know the principles of philosophy, so I think the issue on the internet right now is: who are the real experts? Are they the people with government jobs? The MDs? The PhDs? We’ve seen this with everything related to COVID.
Andrew: What I know I’d like to see more of are panel discussions where people can get to the heart of the matter by combining physicians, scientists, and practitioners. I do understand the frustration of people who’ve devoted a career to being in the trenches, doing the work, and then someone who has an MD or writes a book comes along and says “I’ve solved weight loss” — by way of eliminating one macronutrient, which by the way is not what Paul Saladino is saying. I just want to be clear that I’m not pointing anything at him directly.
Andrew: So nutrition is the worst in terms of the battles. But there are some shining bright lights in that space — for instance, Dr. Andy Galpin is an exercise physiologist who’s done work with a lot of athletes, he’s a professor at Cal State Fullerton. For endurance and strength, for female athletes and male athletes, for the everyday person — his content is just so damn solid and grounded in mechanism, all the way from muscle sarcomeres to “this is how long you should rest between sets if this is your goal.”
Andrew: And then in the nutrition space, I’ve found what works for me — this low carb approach starting around noon and then gradually transitioning into higher carbohydrates. Because I eat for health, but I mainly eat for mental and physical functioning. I’m paying attention to how I feel and I want to be able to do my work. That’s a missing piece of the equation — the performance lens on diet, not just the longevity lens.
Genetics, Chronotypes, and Individual Variation [01:35:00]
Shaan: Do you think there is one optimal diet for humans, or are there completely different configurations for different groups?
Andrew: I think there’s going to be some genetic bias toward certain things working. For instance, I lucked out — but I also suffer — because I don’t like alcohol. It just makes me go to sleep. So I don’t care if there’s alcohol or not. Some people really like a drink. That’s probably genetic.
Sam: Do you like to get messed up at all? Do you do anything? Drugs? Weed?
Andrew: No. Drugs no. I never liked marijuana or alcohol very much. My drug is learning and adrenaline. I’ve had to work on the adrenaline part — I’ve put myself into some unhealthy and dangerous situations. But I come alive with dopamine and adrenaline.
Sam: You don’t do any drugs, you don’t really drink.
Andrew: I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. I always say my advice is — actually, I’ll eat like a whole box of Twinkies when I want to party. That’s like my big night out. I eat bread. I love bread and I love butter on it. Basically bread is a vehicle for butter.
Andrew: If you increase your saturated fats a bit, do the blood work — you’ll watch your serum testosterone go up. I didn’t say it was good for your heart. I said it’s good for your vitality, which is different in the short run than in the long run.
Andrew: In terms of stimulants — I like caffeine. I’ll take L-tyrosine these days, 300 milligrams of alpha-GPC if I really want to laser in. I don’t do it more than two or three days a week maximum. And phenylethylamine or phenylalanine — those two combined and you’re in a focused tunnel. But I don’t touch modafinil, I don’t touch prescription stimulants. I don’t do recreational drugs. When I was in college, sure, I partied a bit. But I generally want to train in the morning and get work done.
Andrew: On the chronotype and diet question — the same way we have people that prefer to stay up late and wake up late, and people that prefer to wake up early, it’s a fairly normally distributed population. Some people probably feel better eating more starches and less protein, and more plants. And some people — Joe Rogan seems to be doing just fine on his elk meat diet. I think we can agree he seems to be thriving.
TRT, Testosterone, and Hormones [01:41:00]
Andrew: I will say in full disclosure that the people I know who are hormone-augmented — I’m not talking about big bodybuilders, I’m talking about people taking low doses of testosterone to replace something — they tend to crave or at least eat more proteins, because testosterone increases protein synthesis.
Sam: Yeah, I’m on it. I’m on it now. Prior to being on it I worked on it naturally for like two years to increase it. It was like 200 — it was so low. I was running a company at the time, I was so stressed out. So I took time off, ate meat, squatted, and then started taking TRT. My life changed. I started eating more meat — not for body reasons, for emotional reasons. But my body changed. I feel like a professional athlete at thirty-two. It’s pretty crazy.
Andrew: There’s a study — and I don’t know if you referenced it or someone else brought it up — there was this group where men were castrated, historically, and these guys consistently lived longer. And so like now that I’m on this, maybe I’ll live to be ninety instead of ninety-five. I don’t know. But it’s a pretty sick life, so that’s kind of the sacrifice you’re making.
Andrew: Basically, the idea that your story speaks to is a true one: vitality and longevity are orthogonal to one another. They’re not antagonistic, but they’re off-center from each other. Puberty is the most rapid stage of aging in our entire life — it’s accelerated aging. Introducing hormones of the sort that were robust during puberty will accelerate that process.
Sam: You just said that vitality and longevity are orthogonal — basically meaning the more optimized I want to feel, the less I’m going to live?
Andrew: Not necessarily. Let me explain how this would work in the real world. You decided to go on testosterone replacement, and your total testosterone was somewhere in the 200 nanogram-per-deciliter range — below the normal reference range. You’re saying going on it might shorten your life because of the way it can negatively affect lipid profiles, the way it affects the liver — there’s a lot of biochemistry we don’t have time to go into, and that’s true.
Andrew: However, testosterone — whether it’s coming from endogenous sources or from replacement — will also increase your energy level and your ability to lean into friction. You’re going to be running more, exercising more. So you could say, “My blood lipid profiles are perhaps a bit worse,” but with that extra energy you can now start exercising four times a week plus cardio, and recover with no problem, whereas if you weren’t on it, you’d probably be depleted.
Andrew: The main effect of testosterone is it makes effort feel good. The way I describe it: I want to fight all the time. Not necessarily fist-fight, but I want to be in a battle — a battle with myself, a battle with ideas. Friction feels good.
Andrew: Robert Sapolsky was on my podcast and pointed out that they’ve done experiments with altruistic acts of friction — people donating money for instance — it’s not just about beating people up. But the main point is: testosterone makes effort feel good, and makes you calmer. This is the thing people don’t realize. It gives you more energy but it makes you calmer.
Andrew: Stressed, angry people are typically in the low-to-mid range of testosterone, from a few studies. And counter to the popular belief, the higher testosterone is, you’re confident enough that if someone gets in your face, you can walk away. Your masculinity isn’t being challenged. You maintain your own frame. You’re not going to get pulled off by projection — and nowadays the buzzword is “gaslighting.” Everyone’s gaslighting everybody without really understanding what it means.
Andrew: I’m very interested in psychoanalysis. This whole concept of projection is fascinating. How does one actually shift someone’s nervous system, change the mental frame of another nervous system? It’s interesting and kind of spooky stuff when you start thinking about how your nervous system will frame-shift someone else’s frame. And this is vital in a positive sense too — when your child or your partner comes to you and says “I’m really stressed about something,” it requires an adaptive frame shift, and you need to do that.
Andrew: People who are autistic or have Asperger’s don’t frame-shift very well. They’re very much in their own frame, and they’re very good at certain kinds of things and less good at others. People who are highly empathic are susceptible to getting yanked down different frame-shift pathways, such that they can end up thinking, “Oh my God, I haven’t done anything with my life because I’ve been so consumed with so-and-so’s feelings around things.”
Andrew: So testosterone makes effort feel good. If you use that as an excuse to eat a little less or train a little less, you’re no better off and might be worse off. But if you use that as an opportunity to lean into life, that’s wonderful. I work with a number of professionals and athletes in a consulting role on some of this — new parents for instance who decide they don’t want any more kids and are dealing with lack of sleep. They often benefit from that, and the relationship can often benefit for a number of reasons. This is probably a whole other discussion I’d be happy to come on for sometime.
Andrew: I’m forty-six. I didn’t touch TRT until forty-five. I went forty-five years without it. I’ve talked about supplements that can naturally increase testosterone — fadogia and tongkat ali, you can see that on the Joe Rogan episode. A number of women are taking tongkat ali to increase their free testosterone and getting quite good results. I have no relationship whatsoever to any tongkat ali or fadogia company.
Andrew: Those supplements done properly from the right sources can increase testosterone by about 200 nanograms per deciliter. But when I went on TRT, my testosterone at that time was already sitting in the high 800s — I was doing fine. I did it as an experiment for part of a book. And it changes your mental frame. It makes you more self-directed, more willing to lean into challenge.
Andrew: I’m actually coming off of it now. But let me explain because I want to touch on estrogen too — a lot of men block estrogen when they take TRT, which is a terrible idea. Estrogen promotes brain longevity. Estrogen is good for connective tissues, it’s good for libido. Blocking estrogen is a bad idea in most cases. Some people are worried about water retention or gynecomastia, so they block it. But you have to work with an endocrinologist. It’s not “testosterone is good, estrogen is bad” — that is absolutely sophomore thinking.
Shaan: Did you get your —
Sam: That’s how I’m going to combat people — accuse them of sophomore thinking.
Pop Science and Understanding Mechanism [01:58:00]
Andrew: The gaslighting thing is funny, because gaslighting is something very different from how people are using it now. Having experience with borderline personalities — that’s a real psychiatric challenge, both for the borderlines and the people in their lives. Anytime I see valid psychiatric terms being bastardized on the internet, I get a little bit unsettled.
Shaan: That’s one of the challenges — pop science, the popifying of everything. It’ll be more viral if you make a blank statement, a blanket cause-and-effect claim. “It depends” is not an answer that goes very far.
Andrew: That’s exactly right. And here’s where I’m hoping for a tide change: if people can understand mechanism, they can start to understand nuance. I just did a podcast episode with Duncan French from the UFC Performance Institute. Duncan’s work has shown in peer-reviewed studies that short-term stress raises testosterone. Stress that lasts more than a day or two, or training sessions that go more than ninety minutes — those deplete testosterone. So is stress bad for reproduction? It depends.
Andrew: But if people understand mechanism, then they can understand: an ice bath is stress, but it will protect you against illness because in the short term, adrenaline buffers you against infection — adrenaline is the signal by which your immune system says “I need to combat something.” If people understand mechanism, then it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about acupuncture, cold baths, saunas, lifting weights, sprinting, Bikram yoga — they can digest the information more intelligently.
Andrew: I believe people are smart, and that if you extend a hand of respect to their intelligence, they’ll come along for the discussion about mechanism. Even if I were hit by a bus tomorrow, they could digest the next wave of information in a much more nuanced way.
Andrew: Science and health information on the internet is changing very quickly. And I just have to say — it was seeing Lex Fridman’s podcast that first showed me someone having really intense intellectual conversation on the internet. He’s so good. He’s so weird in a cool way. He’s unique. He’s kind of punk rock.
Audience Size, Business, and the Podcast Network [02:06:00]
Sam: How big is your audience right now? You’ve had ten months, so you’re north of a million YouTube subscribers. What about on podcast?
Andrew: On Instagram I think we’re sitting somewhere around 730,000 followers. On podcast downloads — I’ll be honest, I actually don’t know the exact number. Rob handles that. If I had to guess, five to ten million a month. I think it’s on the higher end of that.
Sam: Two million downloads per episode in the first couple weeks?
Andrew: I don’t know. I should ask Rob. Otherwise — are you killing me? I’m sorry, do you realize?
Sam: Surely Tim or whoever has talked to you — with two million downloads an episode, you could be very wealthy. I’m shocked you’re still teaching. I looked up Stanford professor salaries before the podcast. The average professor makes somewhere between $200,000 and $225,000 a year. Obviously a great living. But I thought, that’s high for an academic.
Andrew: For a non-MD academic, the pay is abysmal. Not just at Stanford — everywhere. In the Bay Area, that’s a tough life for someone with kids. I’m going to get some haters for this, but come hang out. Come hang out.
Sam: Have you enjoyed being famous?
Andrew: A couple of things. One, about the views — I really do need to check with Rob. I don’t track that. I know we’re doing well. And one thing on the business side since you have this audience: I only advertise products I actually use. I’ve been using Athletic Greens for over a decade. I use the Oura Ring. I use my code “huberman” for that. We work with Thorne — the quality of their supplements is so good that you can actually take less and get the same effect. That’s been my experience.
Andrew: But I do want to mention one thing about the medium as a business model that I’ve never talked about publicly. The Huberman Lab podcast is but one of several podcasts under a company I founded with Rob. David Sinclair from Harvard Genetics — “Lifespan” author — is launching the Lifespan podcast, and I own that brilliant podcast network.
Sam: You own that? Wait — you’re building a media business around longevity and healthy longevity?
Andrew: Yes. The goal is that many professors have excellent information to share on the gut microbiome, addiction, ADHD — that goes well beyond the depth I can provide in one of my episodes. They might need to do six or seven episodes but they probably don’t need to do a podcast in perpetuity. So the idea is to have a set of podcasts that you can come to. Mine if you like, David’s if you like, maybe you have a relative dealing with Parkinson’s and want to hear from somebody what you can really do about that. Or you have a kid and you want to know the science-based practices for neuroplasticity in a child — let’s talk to a world expert in that.
Andrew: So the idea is to have an umbrella for multiple podcasts. Huberman Lab is but one. David’s is going to be the second. We’ve got a third and fourth revving up now.
Sam: This is awesome. I had this thought a while back — I was thinking about my favorite science teacher growing up. He was great, but each class had about twenty kids, he’d teach five classes a day — about a hundred kids a day, a hundred students a year. And with the internet, I thought: wow, the best teachers in the world are going to have millions of students and make millions of dollars as they should. I’ve always been investing and looking for every platform where teachers are able to do that, where they’re able to scale. Because if I’m going to learn math or nutrition, I can either learn locally — that’s how the world always worked, I just learn from the best local teacher available to me — or now I can learn globally and find actually who is the best at not only being an expert but also packaging and conveying it in a way that’s entertaining, relatable, and fits me. That’s what you’re doing. You’re the perfect example of something I’ve been thinking about.
Shaan: It’s more popular in other countries already. China does a really good job of this — there are Chinese teachers who make tens of millions of dollars a year. Superstar teachers, like musicians and athletes. Same with India. I sent you that photo of a guy in India — his name is Byju. He would teach math in local villages and people would love learning from him. So he would go to other cities, and they would come find him because the word had spread through word of mouth. Eventually he was filling up stadiums — free to attend, just teaching math on a projector in a twenty-thousand-person stadium. And now he created an app, it’s like a ten-billion-dollar education app in India. That was his origin story.
Andrew: I love it. And I love the model around podcasting because yes, you have to tolerate some ads, but advertisers are happy, consumers are happy, and it’s zero cost to consumer. To me, if ever there was order in a universe — that’s it.
Andrew: That’s exactly what this is. The entrepreneurial spirit of — I’m going to teach science on the internet and some kid halfway across the world is going to have access to the same information as someone in a fancy university. I love that.
Sam: I know your company a little bit actually. Well actually — do you know my company at all?
Andrew: I’m afraid I don’t.
Sam: That’s all good. We owned this thing called The Hustle — a daily email that reached about two million people a day for business news. We just sold it to HubSpot for many tens of millions of dollars. We were making around twenty million dollars in ads. And the problem with ads is it’s cool when you’re doing it now — you can pick and choose Thorne and Athletic Greens, cool stuff. But then you get staff and you’re like, “All right, we’re going to try and triple every year.” And in order to triple every year, there aren’t that many Thornes and Athletic Greens, and then you’ve got to go look at some other stuff. And you’re like, “Well, we gotta hit these growth numbers.” So it kind of corrupts things. And not because you worship at the altar of your advertisers — but you always think about it. For example, what if I talked badly about Athletic Greens and they did something kind of wrong? You don’t want that to happen. That’s my point.
Andrew: That’s exactly my point. Even the most honest and good people — we’re all incentivized by something. And so maybe you’d be willing to defend an advertiser a little bit more because they’re giving you money. Which is a natural thing. That is an issue. And we do care about growth. But the reason we built out a philanthropic arm of this company is because I really empathize with the struggle that academic scientists live in day to day — they don’t have time to do their own research, let alone work for the world, which is what they’re really hired to do. Their grants come mainly from public sources.
Andrew: So we’re trying to find ways that money coming into the podcast goes back into the scientific community to fund better work. We’re starting to explore NFTs and how that might be incorporated.
Shaan: NFTs in this space — it’s very punk rock. Everybody would love to sell you their token and tell you why it’s the future.
Andrew: That’s exactly it. I love the DIY spirit. And I’m a patriot too. My dad’s a first-generation immigrant from Argentina. He came here on a navy scholarship. He’s a physicist. This is a country where you can make lateral moves. It’s hard to ascend, and we should acknowledge that not everyone starts in the same place. But you can make lateral moves here.
Andrew: Think about it this way: the Nobel Prize is given each year, and most prizes include or are given to people in the US. We have one of the most difficult funding schemes for getting money to do research in this country — compared to other countries where they basically stock the laboratories with money, it’s incredible how much we operate in this individual-lab startup-style workshop mode. That grind, that leaning into friction — I really believe that’s the hallmark of future development. And science didn’t have a podcast platform or information platform until recently.
Andrew: I’m hoping that my podcast and the others like David’s will soon populate a kind of information ecosystem. There’s some smart person out there thinking, “I’m going to do the podcast on amphibians because I love frogs” — and you never know what’s going to work. I love that spirit.
Wrap-Up [02:24:00]
Sam: Dude, thanks for coming on. This is badass. We haven’t done a podcast this long in a long time. By the way, we had Rob Dyrdek on recently — he’s the wealthiest skateboarder probably. You know Mike Blabac because Rob and Big — unfortunately Big passed away — and Mike did all the photos for that. Skateboarders — if you want to know what’s really cool and how to do the real DIY spirit, just look at skateboarders.
Andrew: I’m going to brag after this — I’m going to send you a video of my latest trick. I can’t tre flip but I shred a pool. I’m not that good.
Sam: You’re a badass, man. I’m so excited to have talked to you. I feel inspired. You’re a much bigger deal than you’re letting on.
Andrew: Genuine thanks for having me on. I felt immediate resonance. I think it’d be great to get together in person sometime. Are you in California?
Sam: I just bought a house in Texas, so I’m in Austin as of now. But I’m nomadic, so I’m back and forth.
Andrew: I’m going to be in Austin a bunch because I hang out with Lex there. He’s going to take me to jiu-jitsu — he’s a black belt so I don’t know what I’m getting into. But if you want to come work out — I have a really nice gym here, people come over, we lift heavy. We could box.
Sam: We probably shouldn’t box. I boxed, I had my boxing card and boxed pretty consistently. I’m not very good — you don’t get a nose like this from boxing well. And you do yoga. I feel like I can rule the world, but… let’s not box. Come on, man. I’ve got a rower, we can do anything you want. I’m fit.
Andrew: This is the TRT speaking, folks.
Sam: We could probably box a little bit.
Andrew: Let’s text. I’ll pass you my number by email. We’ll take it into the real world. Thank you, man. Great to have you.
Sam: Thanks. Never looking back.