Dr. Bernardo Huberman: How to Use Curiosity & Focus to Create a Joyful & Meaningful Life

Andrew Huberman:
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Bernardo Huberman. Dr. Bernardo Huberman is the vice president of NextGen Systems at Cable Labs. Prior to that, he was the director of the Social Computing Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard, and he is, as his name suggests, my father. Today, we discuss various topics in science, including relativity theory, chaos theory, and quantum computing. But I'd like to assure you that even if you have zero background in physics, computer science, or mathematics, that entire discussion will be clear to you as to what those things are and even some of how they work. During today's discussion, we also talk about a life of science, that is, what it is to spend one's life in curiosity, in trying to understand the universe around us, and how to understand ourselves. Indeed, today, we also talk about neuroscience, how the brain works, and the different sorts of questions that I do believe everybody asks, whether you're a scientist or not. Questions like, where do we come from? Is there a God? What is our use or purpose in the universe? And how is it that we can ponder these super high-level, abstract questions about how we got here and what our purpose is, and how things work at the quantum level, tiny bits of things that we can't even see, and at the same time, to lead an everyday life that is meaningful and joyful. We talk about this in the context of understanding oneself in relation to others, family, community, including scientific community, and what it is like to come from a different country. My father immigrated from South America. What it was like to do science in the United States then and now, cultural differences, and of course, we touch on some of our relationship as well. How could we not? I must say, for me, it was an immense pleasure and privilege to have this conversation, not just because Dr. Huberman is my father, but because I believe the knowledge and indeed some of the wisdom that he shares will be useful to everybody about what it is to carve one's own unique trajectory in terms of career and life, and at the same time, how to savor the simple, everyday things that make life so worth living. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft that mattress is or how firm it is, how breathable it is, all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. So if you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz that asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I started sleeping on a Dusk mattress about three and a half years ago, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. So much so that when I travel to hotels and Airbnbs, I find I don't sleep as well. I can't wait to get back to my Dusk mattress. So if you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman. Take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for your unique sleep needs. Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 25% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school. But pretty soon, I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise. Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and talk to about any and all issues that concern you. Second of all, great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support, but also directed guidance, the do's and the not-to-do's. And third, expert therapy can help you arrive at useful insights that you would not have arrived at otherwise. Insights that allow you to do better, not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also the relationship to yourself and your professional life and all sorts of career goals. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you can really resonate with and provide you with these three benefits that I described. Also, because BetterHelp is carried out entirely online, it's very time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. So if you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. Dr. Bernardo Huberman, welcome. Thank you, Andrew. And also great to see you, Dad. Same here. I guess no premonition would have foreseen this one. No. Absolutely not. And people might notice today I'm drinking out of a mate gourd, in part in honor of my father's father, who drank out of his loose-leaf mate every morning. My first sip of mate was taken sitting in his lap when I was maybe four years old. Yes. Indeed. In my Spider-Man pajamas. In any event, let's talk about science. You're born in Argentina. Mm-hmm. As I recall, because once we had a conversation about it, you had a teacher, maybe it was in high school, who turned you on to physics, which became your field of choice. Yes. But prior to that Were you interested in different subjects? I don't recall if you had an avid interest in academics, or you just did it because you were supposed to, prior to that teacher. Then we'll talk about him.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. I was always very interested in ideas and so on. Science at that time was a bit vague, but I read a lot of philosophy. I didn't understand much of what I read, but nevertheless, I kept reading it. I was interested in psychology. I was an avid reader. As a matter of fact, I embarrassed my father, or actually made him disappointed when, for a birthday, I think I was 14 years old, I asked him to buy me the 12 volumes of Freud's writings.

Andrew Huberman:
Really?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. And he said, "What for?" But I was very impressed with it. Of course, I couldn't even understand half of what these books had in them. So I was very interested in many things. And I must say to you that my interest in science, in particular physics, doesn't come from the standard thing that you see here in the United States, mostly. Namely, I was not a whiz kid in math. I was not one of these people that can really do things very quickly and so on. But I was interested because I thought that physics was going to complement my attempt at understanding how the whole universe is put together. The philosophers were saying all sorts of things. I went to a very special school that I learned six years of Latin and so on, and I had to read things like Kant and Cosmogony, and so on, that really didn't mean much to me. But suddenly I started discovering that physics might be interesting. And I had a cousin, Hector, who was a physicist, a particle physicist already. He was living at that time in France. And so there was a little bit of that influence. But my interest was in things that had to do with fairly abstract ideas. I cannot believe that at one point or the other, I was very good in geometry class, being able to prove theorems. The teacher would just say, "Let's prove this." And I was somehow able to reason through and come to some proofs. So I think that I was very interested in ideas and not necessarily in the very concrete aspects of science at that time.

Andrew Huberman:
Can I ask you a question about early schooling?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So if I remember correctly, you were born naturally left-handed.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
They forced you to learn-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Correct

Andrew Huberman:
... to write with your right hand.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
You went to a very strict school.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Like military levels of strictness.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Almost, yes. It's a very interesting type of education. They have it in France. It's called a lycée in France. And this is a very special school in Argentina. It was actually founded in the 1500s by the Jesuits, and my father went to that school. And so he wanted me to go there, and my brother went there, too. And it's six years of a very strict education, mostly humanistic. I learned Greek and learned Latin. I learned immense amounts of history, which I loved. And there were other courses in French and so on. In French, we had to memorize incredibly long poems that we had to recite.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you still remember some of them?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Some of them, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because sometimes early memories are embedded so deeply that-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. And my brother and I sometimes tell each other some of the pieces of these poems. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I'll just say something right now to foreshadow what will likely happen several times throughout today's discussion, which is any time that my father is in the presence of his brother, my Uncle Carlos, they start laughing about jokes that they've been telling over and over, back and forth with one another since they were young kids. So just the mere mention of his brother will bring a bit of a smile and a chuckle to-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... both of our faces.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. So I learned a lot of French, and also my parents decided, my mother mostly, that I had to learn French and English, and I went to Alliance Française, where for five years I went there. I was essentially the only boy in the class, which was very nice in a way. And in order to graduate, essentially, to be fluent in French. But in the special school I went to, the discipline was very strict. We were supposed to do things you don't do in the United States. The moment the teacher walks in, everybody stands up, and if you're late in standing up, you're just kicked out of the classroom and things of that sort.

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But it was a lovely experience in many ways when I reflect on it because it gave me a humanistic education that has been incredibly useful in my career. Most people don't realize that. I tend to think of things in a very broad context, and it's because of the education I had.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. So, and I loved history of Rome, and I'd learn to recite things in Latin. And so I enjoyed that very much. My brother didn't, actually. And so.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, you two are very different.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I have great adoration for Carlos, but you two are very different. And along those lines, I was just about to ask or mention, and some of our Argentine and South American listeners generally, and perhaps even European listeners, might be shocked and perhaps disappointed to learn that you're one of the few Argentines that I know who doesn't care much for the game of football, soccer. It doesn't seem to concern you much at all.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. The reasons for that are sort of interesting, I think. I've reflected on that because my own wife likes to watch a soccer game. She's Danish. She likes the European tournaments. I never liked mob behavior. I never liked this whole passionate involvement in these things. I don't know why. I was never able to understand it, to the point that I never went to a soccer game till the week before I left for the United States. My brother insisted that I had to go to a soccer game, and this is sort of embarrassing, but at one point or the other, there was a good goal and so on, I stood up and said, "This is great." And it turned out I was on the wrong side of the audience, and people got very almost violent with me. So yeah, soccer to me is something that I watch, but I'm not passionate about it.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. I never really felt that it was that interesting. Although I was in a rowing team, I learned boxing. I did a lot of sports, but I don't like that much of spectator sports. Like tennis, I played tennis since I was a teenager.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm not a spectator sport fan either.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The other day, someone asked me what my favorite sports team is. You'll like this. And I said the Harlem Globetrotters because they're undefeated.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They have the best record.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And that was actually the one professional sports team game you took me to when I was a kid. We'd always go see-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely

Andrew Huberman:
... the Globetrotters.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. Unbelievable.

Andrew Huberman:
They're undefeated.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. Unbelievable. Yes. My father took me to see them, too. They're fantastic. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I love it. So your father was not a scientist.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Your brother's not a scientist. And you were fated, according to them, to join the family business. But then you had a teacher who exposed you to physics.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
To physics, and to the notion of being authentic in what you want. There were two parts to it. He was a very interesting and tormented man, I felt. But it was very interesting. He would come into the class, most of the students really didn't care about what he was saying and so on. I was fascinated, not only by what he was saying, but his whole personality. But I need to say something here that is important. I also was rather irresponsible. You see, I grew up in a well-to-do family, that I never thought how I was going to make a living. So it was easy to be interested in science or anything because it's what you do. Yeah. You're interested in culture, you read books, you do things. But my father used to say, "What are you going to do once you graduate? You don't want to start teaching in elementary schools or something of that sort." My brother used to say, "If he does physics, I'll have to support him," because... Yeah, he still says that.

Andrew Huberman:
So scientists were considered poor.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Poor, yeah. They couldn't get a job. Science in Argentina, Argentina has a big tradition in medical sciences, I think two or three Nobel Prizes and so on. But in physics, they produce some very good physicists. One of them lives in the United States. He's very, very famous, Maldacena, and I haven't met him, but I know that he's one of the top people in the field. But I just got into this because I was interested. It sounded fascinating and abstract, and the ideas were so powerful. And I think, and I reflected a lot on this, when you are psychologically in adolescence, because my parents made me jump two grades, so I was much younger than my classmates, and that created a lot of problems for me. At the time when you're developing and so on, all the boys were talking about girls and so on, I still was really into understanding why the excitement and so on. I was very young. But it gave me a sense of order. Reading a book about physics and understanding that there are laws that tell you how things work gave me a tremendous sense of order and power. So everything else was a little bit in flow, and the family and my own relationships with friends and girlfriends or whatever. And going back to science, it was just this sense of... And I still remember those days. It was very soothing in a way.

Andrew Huberman:
So it's like a touchstone.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And I teach later-

Andrew Huberman:
And what grade were you expo-- This teacher-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... was this middle school, high school?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. No, yeah, in high school. Yeah. I was 13 or 14 years old, yeah, when I finally, I started listening to this, and I said, "Wow, this is impressive. It's powerful." There are ways to know what's true and what's not true. You just don't speculate on things. But most of the stuff I didn't really understand. Then I had this cousin of mine, Hector, who was already gone, but I would go to his parents' house, and there, there were his books, all these incredible books on quantum mechanics, relativity, and I would just take them home, and I didn't really comprehend a lot of the math, but somehow it seemed impressive. It was like looking into a mechanism or something. And I used to take them to school, and one of my teachers once said, "You seem interested in this, but you don't understand this, so you need to learn it." And he was the one who started pushing me into this. On the other hand, my family was saying, "You should become a lawyer." Just my brother and father.

Andrew Huberman:
And that never interested you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. It's interesting because now I'm very interested in aspects of constitutional law and so on. When I hear about arguments against the Supreme Court and so on. I became very interested in law and economics later on, just to read about it. But what my father was talking about at the dining room table was all about strategies of getting something done half an hour before the opposition, so you win a case. I was totally interested in that.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm sensing a bit of a theme, which is that social dynamics and what other people do, regardless of whether or not they like it or it earns them a particular living, didn't capture you. The idea that people and their groups and their ways of thinking and behaving, while they may not bother you, it didn't captivate you the way that it sounds like physics made you think that there's something kind of bigger, that there's something more universal.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Which indeed physics is, right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It explains most everything.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. And I-

Andrew Huberman:
Most everything.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. And I also think that I was a bit of a loner. It was very hard to find people that, children or young people that thought like me. So eventually, I became part of a group. We were four or five guys that used to get together on Saturdays and go to the movies and so on, and then afterwards discuss whatever we were interested in and so on. I was only 16 years old and deciding what to do with my life. Of all four of us, we committed. Some of them came from incredibly wealthy families, two of them. We committed to really be true to ourselves and pursue what we liked. But I was the only one. The other two ended up running the business of their parents, and one of them essentially, I don't know what he did. I saw him years later.

Andrew Huberman:
Money becomes a pretty bright beacon for a lot of people.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I'm grateful to you that you never pushed me to go in any particular direction.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You pushed me to not go in particular directions, but never with respect to academic choices.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
In fact, I don't recall you telling me or Laura, by the way, folks, that's my sister's name, that we had to do ... anything except attend our classes and do our best, but I never felt pushed to go into science.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Although you had a little bit of a curiosity about it.

Andrew Huberman:
Animals.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Animals. And I remember I was going through a period in which I started getting convinced that there was very little to do in physics, and I wanted to change. And one day, on a bike ride, I think I was carrying you on the back of my bicycle. You were young. You asked me, "What is the unsolved problem?" And I said, "I don't think it's in physics, but it's the brain." And you said, "Okay, I'll go into that." You said. I'll never forget that.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it's interesting. I'm fascinated by human memory, as you know. I know you are as well, and I recall that story as well. I recall it slightly differently, but we're really closely aligned, which is, I remember you used to walk me to school in the morning.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And you would drop me off at the cut-through to the path behind Gunn High School.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I would pick up Kristen Harnett across the street, and you told me it would be better if I picked her up by myself and walked her to the end of the street-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... which is where class was. You were teaching me chivalry. And I remember asking you what you do. I was probably five or six years-- Well, let's see, first grade, so it'd probably be somewhere around six or seven years old. I asked you what you do, and you said, "Physics." And I said, "Well, what is that?" And you said, "Well, let me tell you the feeling it gives me instead." You said, "You know the night before your birthday?" And I said, "Yeah." And you said, "You know that feeling?" And I said, "Yeah." And you said, "Well, that's how I feel every day when I go to work."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I remember, I'll never forget that. And I said, "What do you do?" And you said, "I'm a physicist." And I said, "Well, then I'll be a physicist." And then I recall, so maybe we had the conversation twice, you saying, "Well, most of the big problems in physics are solved, so you should pick something perhaps a little less untread, like..." And I said, "Like what?" And you said, "Well, the brain is pretty interesting." And then I said, "Okay-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... I'll work on that."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. No, that's true.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
This issue of feeling like before your birthday is something I remember saying to you. I don't recall feeling that way every day. I do recall feeling like this when I had an idea, and finally it worked out, and we wrote a paper, and so on. It was an incredibly exciting time. Well, you know about it. You've done it yourself now. And so I wanted to convey that to you. It was very interesting and important to me that you understood that. On the other hand, it made me feel very isolated as well, not only with you, with everybody. It's a very esoteric field. You used to walk into the study, look at me, writing equations and so on, and you'd say, "What's that?"

Andrew Huberman:
I was thinking about your study, which was just a door down from my childhood bedroom.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I still remember the way that your study smelled. I can still smell it. I have an incredible sense of memory for certain things.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I can still remember how your books were aligned, where your stereo was placed, your photos, your photo of Einstein, your photos of me and Laura and Mom. I remember all of it. And the sofa that was just off behind it because you're a nap taker, which I inherited from you. But I remember that, yeah, you would spend a lot of time in that office and listening to classical music. Do you listen to music while you work, or did you listen-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
All the time. Yeah. Classical music for me is something I discovered very young. My parents also loved classical music, my brother too, and it's something that to me, has a tremendous emotional resonance with the way I feel. Sometimes it's background music. Sometimes I really listen very carefully. It's something that I, yes, I've always had in my life and still have it. It's very important to me.

Andrew Huberman:
But not many musicians in our family.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. Unfortunately. Yeah. Although there is a very famous one.

Andrew Huberman:
We've all tried.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
We've all tried.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. You in particular. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we all failed.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. There is a very famous Huberman, the great violinist, Bronislaw Huberman. There's a picture, I think I sent it to you, he and Einstein. He was one of the greatest violinists in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, an incredibly interesting man. He's the founder of the Israel Philharmonic, and that's one of the reasons that the name Huberman is in some street in Israel, because of him. But-

Andrew Huberman:
Are we related to him?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Unfortunately not.

Andrew Huberman:
Which explains the lack of musical prowess in our family.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We all love music, but none of us are good musicians.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. Right. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Except my cousin Diego.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Diego, he has perfect ears, so he can really do interesting things. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So, going back to your childhood, this teacher.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
So, what was it? You already had a sort of seeded interest in finding order, in things that made the world make sense. What was the political situation in Argentina at that time?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Quite horrible parts of it. There was a dictatorship that lasted for a long time, this Perón thing and so on. He was really a follower of Mussolini and people of that sort during World War II.

Andrew Huberman:
So what did that mean out in the streets? You grew up in the heart of Buenos Aires.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But what did that mean in terms of, was there poverty everywhere? Was there violence? What does it spell out to you?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, it was a very oppressive regime. You had to be careful what you talked about. In my family, like most in that social class, we had maids and a cook, and so you had to be very careful what you said.

Andrew Huberman:
Because they would run that information back?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely. And your grandfather, my father, at one point, was prevented from coming to visit me in the United States because he was classified as a communist because he did not join the Peronist party.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, for the record, we are not communists. We are both big believers in capitalism-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... sitting here at this table.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. So, it was terrible. It was a terrible time. It was a very oppressive time.

Andrew Huberman:
But he wasn't a communist either.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, of course not.

Andrew Huberman:
All right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Of course. No, he was on the other side. But the idea at that time, it was to be classified as such. Eventually, that information leaked, obviously, to the American authorities. So when he asked for a visa, they denied him. It was a very complicated story. I don't think we should waste time to know how it got eventually resolved through a friend of mine who was a priest, a Jesuit here in the United States. But the point being that during that time, you had to be very careful the way you spoke, the way you said things.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And there was a dictatorship that was very much like the fascists in Italy. And actually, that dictatorship lasted until a few years ago, because as you know, perhaps you heard, the new president we have is one that actually ran against this whole ideology, Peronism and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Milei.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Milei, yes. So I was not political at all, but you had to be careful. But it was a funny time. And when he was overthrown through a military revolution, my parents were delighted, and I remember the celebrations and so on. But that was considered the minority that was against him. It was a social class movement. The working class was behind Peron and what he promised and what he gave them. But that eventually died. So the real problem was that there was no real commitment to science as an investment that a country should make. Yes, it was nice to have Nobel Prizes, and it's culturally good, but they didn't have the pragmatic notions that we have, see in the United States, of doing science means solving concrete problems.

Andrew Huberman:
And this was in the 1950s?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And '60s, too. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. So this was one of the biggest and fastest progressions of physics and its implementation in the US.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Yes, right.

Andrew Huberman:
So were you hearing about that?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Of course. I was following it all, and I wanted to buy books about it and so on. I had some conflicts with my father about spending money on books that he thought that were not going to take me anywhere and so on. He was a very pragmatic lawyer. He didn't understand why I was doing these things. So yes, I was aware of everything. And actually, the university was very good. I entered the university at you had to choose what you wanted to do, and after a tremendous personal crisis, I decided not to go into law or engineering, which was the alternative my father offered, and decided to study physics. And I didn't regret it at all. It was a very impressive time. I got a good education in physics, a little bit too abstract.

Andrew Huberman:
So this was experimental physics or theoretical-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Both

Andrew Huberman:
... physical physics?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Both. In the lab, I was okay. I was better in classes on advanced-- I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics and calculus and beyond that, and complex analysis and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
So it turns out you were good at math after all.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Good, yes. I understand math. I'm not a whiz, like many of my students have been. I had guys that can do incredible things. That I can do them, but slowly. Okay. I understand, yes. But yeah, physics is something that I knew how to be intuitive about it. I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn't pan out, but yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So the teacher in high school-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... were they the one that told you that there was a career in this thing?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. He said, "You should devote yourself to this if you really care about it." He was a man that obviously he was sort of tormented on many levels and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
You say that because of the way he carried himself physically?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. Yeah. He was troubled, but it was interesting. Intense man. I still remember his name was in-- He was a philosopher. His name was Eggerslan, which is a German name, and he started talking about discovering Christianity and what it meant to him, and what it is to be authentic, and so on. And then I had a very large exposure to the great thinkers of the antiquity, the Roman and Greek. So it was all, to me, fascinating, interesting. And it was good to have friends that I could discuss these things with.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think it's a disservice that nowadays in the United States, and even when I was growing up, but especially now, that we don't force kids to be exposed to all these topics? We try and track people into something early on. Actually, a recent guest told me that many schools are now just giving knowledge, but not expecting kids to do problem sets.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Teaching them about physical activity, but not expecting them to do physical activity. Seriously.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, that sounds a little bit funny.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Well, no, but that is the direction that education in this country has gone.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. I was a visiting professor in France, actually. You live there because of that, in Paris. And I discovered the French intellectual tradition is also very, very abstract compared to the American. The English and the Americans are the ones that took physics, and the Russians, too, into a very, very practical realm and made progress that are very, very concrete, almost engineering-like.

Andrew Huberman:
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Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
When I came to the United States, I must tell you, I came as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, let's talk about that. So how did you end up getting into the United States as a graduate student?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
You applied.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, I was graduating and the future looked rather gloomy. I had a girlfriend whose father was very wealthy, and she said, "No problem, you're going to work for my dad, and he's got a factory" or whatever.

Andrew Huberman:
Why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you'll go for?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, not at all.

Andrew Huberman:
I've never known you to work for anyone except you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, in a way. You're right.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm a bit the same.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. So yes. Just the idea of running a business was not... I was truly idealistic and irresponsible, too. But I had a cousin who already got his PhD in theoretical physics at Columbia University, was a professor in France, then Sweden, and so on. So I felt that perhaps I should go to the United States. And so I started applying to this. My father was saying, "I won't even help you with this." He didn't like it. My parents didn't like it. I was very close to my family in many ways. And so I applied to many places. I remember being accepted at, I think it was Cornell, and I said, "Oh, New York, that's great." Till someone said to me, "You have to take a plane to go to the real New York." I mean, Ithaca is not-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. He loves New York City. We both love New York City.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, Ithaca is not for you.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So anyway, I got this very nice fellowship to go to University of Pennsylvania, which is-

Andrew Huberman:
Who was the fellowship from?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
The Navy. The United States Navy. Yeah. I'm very grateful for that. And I actually wrote that in my PhD thesis. I was very grateful, and I think it was incredible that they were supporting that kind of research.

Andrew Huberman:
They wanted to bring you to the US to build weapons?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, not at all. I came to the United States working for Professor Burstein, who just died at the age of 100 or 101. And, no, but I was supported by the United States Navy. It was a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. But I remember, in my first interview with some of the teachers, Penn professors, there I am talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the guy says to me, "Let me give you an interesting problem. You have a ping pong ball, but instead of being a classical ping pong ball, it's a quantum one. Could you tell me at what heights will it bounce?" I had no idea what to do. I had no sense that you could turn all this knowledge into something implementable, practical, and so on. So it was quite a struggle the first year.

Andrew Huberman:
So you had theoretical understanding-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... not experimental understanding.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Yes, or empirical and so on. I didn't know how to calculate things very well. Yeah. I didn't think about this-

Andrew Huberman:
Just like being good at math.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I was good, yeah, math, understanding the math. There's a different thing between understanding math-

Andrew Huberman:
Sure. Implementing

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... implementing and creating things. Well, you learn that. I had four years of graduate school.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And got my PhD in physics, so obviously, yeah, I learned how to do it. But what I'm saying is that I had this very vague theoretical understanding of how the world worked, but not really practical. I didn't have it at my fingertips. That's what you learn when you go to graduate school, as you know yourself. Okay. So that's-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's one thing to learn about the brain as an undergraduate, but in graduate school is where I learned how to slice brains, stain brains-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... trace connections, record from neurons, and it's a whole other business-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely

Andrew Huberman:
... to get your hands dirty in the thing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely. And the same thing for me. Yeah, taking courses and discovering what you like and dislike. I was a little bit bound to my professor because he was the one who gave me the fellowship, but I didn't like what he did, which was always very problematic. And he's-

Andrew Huberman:
Did you have a good relationship?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
It was funny. He sort of tried to become my surrogate father. But on the other hand, intellectually, I always felt the guy was not quite there. He was very famous and so on, but-

Andrew Huberman:
Sure. He's a member of the National Academy.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He was not.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But he was very famous.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But I always felt that there was a lack of depth into what we were doing. It was not just him, it was just the solid-state physics. There was a very famous, Murray Gell-Mann, who had total contempt for solid-state physics. He used to call it squalid-state physics.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. For those that don't know Murray Gell-Mann, we'll get to Murray later, because I had the interesting experience of meeting him as a child. But he discovered the quark, he won the Nobel Prize. In many ways, is considered at least as superb a physicist as Feynman, maybe better.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Lesser known-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but among physicists-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Profound

Andrew Huberman:
... would evoke great fear in everybody.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
We'll get to Murray in a little bit. So did you enjoy graduate school?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes, but it was incredibly hard. Very hard, the first year on top of that. And also, personally, I was very lonely. I was transplanted into a whole different world. Philadelphia is not a city I would recommend to many people to live in. I escaped every weekend to New York, and my professor was always upset about that.

Andrew Huberman:
And you went from being pretty well-off financially to basically having no money.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I had no money. I lived on very little money, as a matter of fact. Yes. My father felt that, "Okay, this is what you're going to do. You're going to survive on this." They paid for a ticket once a year to go back to visit, and it was incredibly nice and soothing to be back, to be taken care of and everything else, the life in the family. And then going back again to Philadelphia and the reality of just being a student. Unlike many people and foreign students that were with me in other places, I did not enjoy-- It was quite a cultural adventure for me to meet people from all over the world, to learn what they... I became very close to a Japanese postdoc, a very interesting man. But I was quite miserable. And-

Andrew Huberman:
So this was in the mid-'60s?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes, late '60s. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I did not like my life there at all. I lived for four years. I didn't have a single girlfriend or anything. I dated and so on, but I just felt that I was transplanted into an environment that I didn't like.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. And on top of that, my conflict with my advisor was not serious because they were not overt, but they were there all the time. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That can be tough. For those listening here, the relationship to your graduate advisor is a potentially wonderful A potentially hazardous one because they exert enormous control over your future.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Not just through letters of recommendation, but opportunities, and I got lucky in that sense.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You were very lucky. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
My advisor was the kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him, he ordered for you.

Andrew Huberman:
Are you kidding me?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I'm not kidding. He was that kind of guy. He would take the whole group to a Chinese restaurant, and before you said, "I don't like this," he just ordered. Once he took me for a whole weekend to his summer house to finish a paper. The guy couldn't finish a paper, and I was a mess. And his daughter was there, she was 16 or 17, and she said, "Are you two going to talk physics?" I was going to say, "No, let's go for a walk." He said, "That's all we're going to do." But the physics consisted of him regurgitating whatever we were doing. I remember I was so miserable, looking at my watch, seeing how the heck do I get out of here? I didn't have a car. So I was sort of his prisoner from Friday to Sunday night. So it was hard for me. I never really felt that happy. On the other hand, I had no other options at that time. Okay. But then as soon as I graduated, I got out.

Andrew Huberman:
I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... from mine. I delighted in my advisor, as you know.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
She was amazing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You had fantastic people. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I got lucky. And I got a lot of that from you, which was to, for those who don't know, I left a program at Berkeley, which everyone thought I was insane to leave Berkeley to go to Davis. That was by choice. But I remember what you said. You said, "How big is your incoming class at Davis?" Right? Because by all standard criteria, Berkeley is the better institution. Davis is great, but Berkeley's considered exceptionally strong. And I said, "There are three of us." And you said, "Well, either you're making the best decision of your life or the worst mistake of your life."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then I think you asked me what was driving the decision, and I said, "Well, there's this person there, her name is Barbara Chapman, and she just seems to be working on things that if I don't work on these problems, I'm going to regret it. And I can't imagine working on anything else." And you said, "Well, go for it." Which I really appreciate because any parent, if I were a parent and my kid said, "I'm going to leave Berkeley and go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again," I think I probably would've balked.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, Barbara also played a very nice, supportive, emotional role in your life. It was obvious that she had tremendous preference for you.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You were like her son in many ways.

Andrew Huberman:
I smile and well up a little bit only because, well, she passed away young, but she's just an amazing person, so I feel very blessed for that. That wasn't your experience with your advisor. So during that time, I did want to ask about this. I asked about it being the mid to late '60s because it was the counterculture movement.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. Yeah. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And one thing that people should know about you, I'll just offer this up, is that in the entire time I've known you, which is a while now, you've been very clear, you never had any interest in recreational drugs.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Never did them.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Even though that was super common then.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I've never seen you have more than a glass of wine.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
You've never been drunk in your life.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Never.

Andrew Huberman:
And you don't like football despite being from Argentina. It occurred to me on the drive over, peer pressure is just not something that impacts you. You're not going to do something because people around you are doing it.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, no, you're absolutely right.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I always felt this sense of uniqueness or whatever. But I became very humble because of it. I'm not arrogant. It's not that I feel that-

Andrew Huberman:
No, no, no

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... others are worse and so on. But yes, when I came to the United States, there was a decision I had to make, which is I remember explicitly thinking about. It was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the social environment in which I was in Argentina. So you could do whatever you wanted. And I was not the only one who came. There were three or four brilliant mathematicians and physicists that came with me. And I saw them within a year just losing it all. One of them never graduated. They got into drugs. They moved to the village in New York, and they decided that that was the life they wanted to have. Problem is that 10 years on, what are you doing, right? Getting to be an old hippie is not that interesting. So I really had that notion at that time that I needed to be very disciplined, and I had to internalize a set of values and to ask myself what I want and what I don't want. And so, yes, indeed, I used to go to parties. To me, it was quite a surprise in New York, Philadelphia, people smoking pot and all sorts of other incredible things, getting drunk, and so on. It was something that I would say, "No, thank you," and that was it. And I felt quite okay with it. And I never felt the need to satisfy a group of people that were like this in order to be included.

Andrew Huberman:
There's only one person that I've ever met in my entire life, now that I'm 49, I can say things like now that I'm 49, who has never been drunk, never done drugs. Basically has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once, and that's Rick Rubin.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
My good friend who's-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I like your meaning.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. By all standards is probably the greatest music producer of all time across a dozen different genres, right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Not just rock and roll-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... but classical, country, all this. And I once asked Rick, "You worked in music where drugs and alcohol are everywhere."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Or at least used to be. And he just said, "Yeah, it never really interested me. I could be around it but not participate."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship to what's going on around you, where you don't feel pulled into it.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I also didn't understand, for instance, the role of drugs and alcohol in young people, and I was a graduate student, to a large extent, plays a role of relaxation and getting rid of stress and anxiety and so on. To me, it was very interesting that people would actually come sometimes to my place and ask, "Do you have something to smoke?" Or, "Why?" "Because I'm nervous," or whatever. Well, deal with your State of anxiety, but you don't have to drink in order to do that. And I was always a little bit also concerned about my brain. I was afraid that these things would just take me over the edge, off the rails. But I think I need to say this, I was also rather judgmental of people who did it at that time. And it was a way, by being judgmental, by saying, "This is wrong," then I was able to stay on my track. Okay. Today, I'm much more understanding. I hear people, and if that's what works for them, it's fine, although I still don't like it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And it was even worse when we came to California, because here, everything was going on, not just drugs and everything else. So-

Andrew Huberman:
Well, let's talk about that, but not that specifically right off the bat. So you finished your PhD.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You could have done a postdoc, become a professor.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I was playing with that. My dream was to go to Cambridge University in England, not only because the Cavendish Laboratory was fantastic. There was a whole thing on DNA, Crick was there and so on. So I thought that perhaps I would just start inhaling some of those vapors.

Andrew Huberman:
You wanted to get into biology.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, I was interested.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Because I read the famous book by Watson, "The Double Helix," and I couldn't sleep. I read it one night and said, "It's incredible what this guy did."

Andrew Huberman:
Amazing book.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Amazing book, yes. So I said, "Oh, the whole thing is becoming like physics. It's no longer all these complicated names and so on." I was-

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it's crystallography, which is-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... physics and chemistry are so interdigited.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Crystallography is boring because it's like botany. You have to learn all these crystals.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm just chuckling because the spaghetti model folks, or as we call them, the crystallographers, are probably covering their eyes right now, but that's all right. They love what they do, and thank goodness for them.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, of course.

Andrew Huberman:
Because they design novel drug pockets-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, right

Andrew Huberman:
... and receptors. They're doing some cool stuff.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So I thought that being at Cambridge was okay. You would suffer from not even heating in the rooms and so on. But then what happens was, I met your mother, and then she brought a little bit of reality into my life and said-

Andrew Huberman:
How so?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, she said, "It's time for you to graduate." Because I was just staying there as a PhD student. I was fine. Okay. The money was a problem, but I got to live like this.

Andrew Huberman:
You met Mom in New York.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I met your mother in New York, yes. And she had her feet on the ground and said, "It's time for you to graduate," and so on, and then she actually was right. And so I decided to look for a job, and my professor wasn't necessarily letting me go. He wanted me to stay as a postdoc with him, which-

Andrew Huberman:
Right. This is something people don't often understand, is that if a student or postdoc is very good, the advisors are disincentivized to move them along to their job.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But it's a tricky game because you want the support of your advisor, but oftentimes your advisor, if you're very good-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... they want to keep you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So there was also another aspect at that time. By then, I started thinking that I wanted to live a much more comfortable life. I come from a family that lived a very comfortable life, and I wanted that very badly. And so I started looking for jobs and so on. My advisor was not too keen to tell me what to do. So instead of going, I could have gone for a postdoc to a couple of places, but I wanted to be a little more independent. And I discovered that there were research institutions like IBM and Xerox in the West Coast and so on, where people could do science, good science, and Bell Labs was the most famous one of all.

Andrew Huberman:
That was on the East Coast.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
In the East Coast. I went to Bell Labs for an interview, and I felt that they were running there like a Russian internment camp almost. It was unbelievable. We were 10 of us, and they took us around, and people were taking notes of what you were saying and asking and so on, telling us that it was an elite place. It was an elite place.

Andrew Huberman:
So East Coast.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The East Coast institutions, it makes sense to me now why, having been raised in the Bay Area, that East Coast institutions and I are just never going to mix. Because they love tradition-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... they love hierarchy, and they love history. Whereas on the West Coast, it's all about the startup, the IPO.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's about what happened in the last three years and what's going to happen in the next 10 years.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Well, on the other hand, there is something nice to be said about the European model of universities-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... in the sense that the biggest contrast, you say this, I remember, when professors came to a colloquium and so on, they were wearing suit and tie at the University of Pennsylvania and Ivy League school and so on. I came to Stanford. I went to the first colloquium, and the students were coming in shorts with their dogs into the auditorium. I couldn't believe it. It was such an incredible cultural change.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. But smart. Smart.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, incredibly smart.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Incredibly smart. No doubt about that. So in any event, I discovered something which historically became incredibly important, although I was marginally involved in it, which was Xerox Corporation had invented a copier, decided that they were going to get into the information age, and they decided to establish a new research center in Palo Alto, next to Stanford, where they would recruit people that would work on this whole thing, computers and information and physics and so on. And I came in, and the guys, whoever interviewed me, they said, "Oh, this is exactly the place for you." So that's what I did. And the interesting thing was that while I was there doing what I thought was interesting things, there was a whole group of people, very small, that invented the personal computer. Steve Jobs saw it and built the first Mac out of the Alto.

Andrew Huberman:
I had a classmate in high school, Becca Kanara.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I remember because she rode a Vespa to school.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Her mother was involved in that stuff.

Andrew Huberman:
And her mom was involved in-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... creating the, it was Adele.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Adele, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Adele Goldberg. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Adele Goldberg, in developing the-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
SmallTalk

Andrew Huberman:
... ability to move-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... what appeared to be pages on the screen.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Object-oriented languages, yeah. I had no idea that was going on, I'll be honest with you. It was going on the second floor. They were all hippie-like. It was a scandal of the life that they had there. It was the '70s, and still, the Bay Area was not what it's now. Everybody went to risottos, those take long lunches, and there was a lot of stuff on drugs and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Can I ask a question about that? So Xerox PARC was this incredible place. I remember going there when I was a kid to your lab.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Actually, one of my earliest recollections was you took me into your and Jim Boyce's ... experimental lab.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You told me to pick a piece of fruit. There was a bowl of fruit. I picked a banana. You took out the banana, you peeled it, and you dipped it into liquid nitrogen.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I forgot.

Andrew Huberman:
And then you told me to throw it on the ground, and we shattered the banana.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I remember that. So that was happening, but you mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and that indeed Jobs borrowed or stole, mostly because PARC didn't protect the intellectual property well. I mean, he didn't do it illegally.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
They basically gave it away.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
They basically gave it away, right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Xerox was thinking that copiers were the future. That's it.

Andrew Huberman:
But I also recall, because I overheard the conversations between you and Mom when I was a kid, perhaps, that it was pretty wild at PARC. There was this whole room with the beanbags. People were taking LSD and other drugs.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That wasn't your scene, though.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, not at all.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I was in the physics lab, and we can talk later a little bit about it, with Jim Boyce, who was a very interesting collaborator of mine, and so on. We had a lot of fun, but not on that level. As a matter of fact, we were considered very square people doing what we were doing. This is a group of people that were truly the... Books have been written on this whole class of people that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became. They were brilliant people trying to do new things. Adele, Alan Kay. There were many of them. Bob Taylor.

Andrew Huberman:
Did you ever want to get involved in that stuff?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I used to see them as so... Yeah, I'll tell you how I got involved. The head of the group, Bob Taylor, a very charismatic man who was responsible for the development of the personal computer. He was the head of the computer science lab. He once heard that I played ping-pong, so he started challenging me to ping-pong, and so we used to play ping-pong. And the conversations were so odd because I would say, "Oh, you do computer science. I have some mathematical problems. I would like some guys in your lab to help me." He said, "We are not the kind of computer scientists you imagine, like at IBM with a white coat, fixing machines and solving math. We want to revolutionize the world. We want to change the way you think." He used to say that to me. And I sort of understood a little bit of it, but quite frankly, it seemed totally out of whatever I was doing.

Andrew Huberman:
This is when Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, et cetera, a16z now, when he was sitting in the very seat you're sitting in here, he described this notion of wild ducks.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That at companies, you have these people that are small groups of people that are really kind of wild and outrageous and really testing the outer limits-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... of what's possible.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think they serve an important role?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Tremendous. And I was a little bit of that in my field at that time. I was the first one to realize that once I saw these machines, I could use them for doing things even in physics that no one could do. And the kinds of fields that I chose to work on were totally out of what people were doing at Xerox or IBM and so on. I think that these people are essential. Now, the question is, what does a company or a university do with those ideas and so on? Xerox lost it completely. They showed them the stuff, and there's whole books that have been written about it.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, one thing that I think I'm realizing now I inherited from you, consciously or unconsciously, is that while I've been more of a risk-taker with various aspects of my life than I probably should have been, but that I've always enjoyed being near people who are really pushing the boundary on something.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Like my love of skateboarding, but not just skateboarding, but our friend Danny Way jumping the Great Wall of China, building mega ramps in his yard. I knew I wasn't going to do that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But there's something about being adjacent to people like that-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... that changes the way that I've approached things that were more pedestrian to make them less pedestrian.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And maybe we'll return to this because I think that being around people who are real mavericks and real iconoclasts can be very beneficial, but it doesn't mean that you have to jump in and do what they're doing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Well, I decided at one point to take huge risks, and as a matter of fact, my first piece of work after I got my job at Xerox PARC, which was supposed to work on some solid-state physics or whatever, was I had this notion, this fantasy of Einstein in the patent office. So I would start working on things that were crazy. There's a whole notion in physics, which is called tachyons, particles that are faster than the speed of light.

Andrew Huberman:
How do you say it?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Tachyons.

Andrew Huberman:
Tachyons.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
It's from the word tachos, which means fast, swift, means particles that are faster than the speed of light, which is impossible.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But some physicists were playing with that idea, okay? And I became very interested in that. As a matter of fact, my first paper out of graduate school was on tachyons, and I had the pride of getting the paper accepted in the top physics journal.

Andrew Huberman:
It's "Physics Review Letters"?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
"Physics Letters," yes. Yeah. And I remember my cousin Hector sending me a note or something saying, "Well, now I see the road to perdition," he said. But I was so proud of it. I really thought that I was doing something incredible. And it had nothing to do with the work I was doing on a daily basis, and I published several papers on things that were very important to me.

Andrew Huberman:
You have a lot of single-author papers.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
This is something that is especially rare in biology, but you have a lot of single-author papers.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. I was very proud of that. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. We should all know that proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. In fact, even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance to a considerable degree. It's also important that you're not just hydrated, but that you get adequate amounts of electrolytes in the right ratios. Drinking a packet of LMNT dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate amounts of hydration and electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of both, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I'll also drink a packet of LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. There are a bunch of different great-tasting flavors of LMNT. I like the watermelon, I like the raspberry, I like the citrus. Basically, I like all of them. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim an LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's LMNT spelled L-M-N-T, so it's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data secure and private. It does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see or sell your data. Now, I'm familiar with the effects of not securing my data well enough. Several years ago, I had one of my bank accounts hacked, and it was a terrible amount of work to have that reversed and for the account to be secured. When that happened, I talked to my friends in the tech community, and what they told me was that even though you think your internet connection may be secure, oftentimes it's not, especially if you're using Wi-Fi networks such as those on planes, in hotels, at coffee shops, and other public places. Surprisingly, even at home, your data might not be as secure as you think. To make sure that what I described before would never happen to me again, I started using ExpressVPN. The great thing about ExpressVPN is that I don't even notice that it's running, since the connection it provides is so fast. I have it on my computer and on my phone, and I keep it on whenever I'm connected to the internet. With ExpressVPN, I know everything is secure. My web browsing, all my passwords, all my data, and of course, anything that's behind an account wall, like a bank account. It can't be tracked, and no one can access or steal your data, which is terrific. If you'd like to start protecting your internet activity using ExpressVPN, you can go to expressvpn.com/huberman, and you can get an extra three months free. Again, that's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com/huberman to get an extra three months free. Can I ask you a question as a slight departure, but it's something I've always wanted to ask you. And feel free to say no if it's not something that could be done in a couple of minutes. So many people hear Einstein's name, they think of the hair, they think of relativity. Is it possible to explain relativity in a way that the everyday person can get it a little bit better than they perhaps understand it now?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. As a matter of fact, I learned not long ago that Einstein himself wrote a popular book on relativity that seems to be very, very accessible. Okay. Now, there are two aspects to relativity. There are two things that our brains were not made by evolution to understand intuitively. One is relativity, and the other one is quantum physics. We have intuitions like an animal, for instance, if you see a lion running after a zebra and so on, the lion can actually calculate intuitively the speed at which it can move and so on. We can do the same. But if you start thinking about what happens when you get to near the speed of light, we have no intuition whatsoever. Time almost stops. There are all sorts of complicated things, lengths contract. It's a very complicated set of things, and that's why it's very hard to understand, although the math works. Then there is general relativity. That is even worse because there is some kind of a warping of space time that is responsible for gravitation. But I'll go into that in a second. The other one is quantum physics. Not only are they not wired to understand it near the speed of light, because no one moves near the speed of light. We move at speeds that are fairly small compared to the speed of light. And quantum mechanics is at such a microscopic level that is below basically the level of a molecule. It's in molecules, atoms, and inside the atom. So it's very hard to visualize or even understand some of the very counterintuitive ideas like entanglement and also... So relativity can be understood in the sense that you can explain certain things, but people say, "Well, how can it work like that?" And then you have to get into the math. Okay. I took a course a few years ago on general relativity, and I just-

Andrew Huberman:
Just for fun?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. I wanted to learn it finally. It's profound, deep, and it makes you feel that this man, Einstein, he had help from a lot of people, but still, it's an incredible thing. It's on a level of Beethoven's symphonies and Mozart's piano concertos. It's something that comes into your head, and we are able to do, through a lot of struggle. It took him years to do that. Okay. But it's profound. Now, when you say can you explain, the point is Einstein one day discovered that if the speed of light is the speed of light, no matter how fast you move with respect to a beam of light, it's still moving at the speed of light. That means that the notion of simultaneity between two events is relative now. So you and I might say, "Yes, now is 1:10," but if you are moving very fast with respect to me, instead of 1:10, you'll say something else, okay? Just because time for you and I are not synchronized. And that leads to all sorts of very interesting effects, and practical effects, too, because from there comes the idea that mass and energy are the same. From there, nuclear weapons came out of that, all sorts of very interesting things. And today we can even detect gravitational waves that are coming from almost the beginning of the universe. We can detect that because of those theories. They can calculate. So It's profound, yes. Einstein, I think, stands on-- Newton too, by the way. Newton and Einstein, I think they're top people. But they talk to God, in a way, as they say.

Andrew Huberman:
We'll get back to God a little bit later. It seems to me that even though it's very hard to grasp, it's worth asking for those of us that don't have an intuitive sense of relativity theory that is starting to peer into these things a little bit, trying to understand them. Do you think that it gives one's mind an ability to tap into forms of cognition that we don't normally think about when we're looking at macro mechanics of the world around us, that objects fall down, not up, and a helium balloon goes up, okay, and you can learn something about helium. But it's all pretty straightforward with just a few simple bullet points. Whereas when you get into quantum mechanics, it challenges the mind in a way that it really feels like for most people, there's a cliff, and we just kind of go, "Okay." And obviously, there's trust there, but for people that are curious about understanding how the really tiny bits of the physical universe link up with the really big bits of the physical universe, where's the best place to start?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, okay. You're asking a very interesting question, which is, for most of us who are trained in physics, we learn how to calculate, we learn how to operate with these things. I just got a patent on using quantum mechanics for communication and so on. But still, the puzzle is why does it work the way it works? So what I'm saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things operationally. I don't know what happens in your brain because I have ideas that come out of intuitions, not just formulas and equations, and yet I don't necessarily think I understand deeply why these things are the way they are. They are where they are, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be like that. Our brains, as I said before, they are essentially conformed to understand the macroscopic world, not high speeds and so on. So physicists who work in general relativity, I don't, can do incredible calculations, can tell you what a black hole collapsing into another black hole would do, and they're using general relativity things, and so they can do it. Now, what it does to your brain that allows you to operationally work with these equations and solve it and have new ideas, it's something I don't understand. For instance, the example that I give about quantum mechanics, that's a very simple one because I talk to a lot of people nowadays that work on this, is I can give you two dice. Okay? Just dice. You can go to Mars, and I stay here. The dice are, let's assume they are quantum mechanically entangled. I throw my dice, I see three, you got three. And we don't communicate. They're entangled. This is faster than the speed of light. I throw again, five, you get five. I do one, you get one. It's an amazing thing.

Andrew Huberman:
What is the origin of the entanglement?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
It's a property of quantum systems that they can get entangled, that's the word, and somehow what happens to your system affects mine, but doesn't affect it in the sense, sends a signal. No signal. They're entangled. Now, this becomes rather-

Andrew Huberman:
They're not entangled through other bits of the universe.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
They're totally independent?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Totally independent, yes. They are entangled in the sense that quantum mechanically, they started like this. Now, there are ways, there are trivial things. There's a famous example of the socks. Okay, so you take a trip, and you took a pair of socks. Let's assume they are blue socks and so on, and then you open your bag, and you, "Oh, I forgot one sock." So this is my blue sock, so you know that there is a blue sock at home. So knowing that is a correlation, but that's trivial, right? We can do that with anything. In quantum mechanics, imagine that you look at a sock, but the sock is changing colors all the time. So now you observe it is red, the other one is red. I observe it is green, the other one is green. Okay, randomly.

Andrew Huberman:
So little bits of the universe are entangled.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, some people, and a friend of mine who's a Buddhist, claims that there is a whole religious or Buddhist way of saying that everything was entangled. Yes. Originally, all atoms, all electrons, all elementary particles were entangled. Yes, because the universe started very tiny, and everything was entangled. Okay, so you could imagine that the universe is entangled, so what happens here affects the other. But the entanglement gets lost when perturbations and noise appears and so on. So we are not today entangled with, I don't know. We don't think that we are entangled.

Andrew Huberman:
Some people think that-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... some people are entangled.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, let's get to it, maybe-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But that's a whole, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That's a whole thing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That's a-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That's poetry.

Andrew Huberman:
That's poetry, exactly. There's another example that brings us to a very salient aspect of my childhood, which is chaos theory.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. So I'll say it so you don't have to. You're one of the founders of chaos, or certain aspects of chaos theory. We'll talk about that. But for those of us that grew up in the '80s and '90s, I was born in '75, who saw the movie "Jurassic Park," there's a moment in that movie where I think Jeff Goldblum is explaining, what is it? Chaos theory, and maybe it was the butterfly flapping its wings-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Right

Andrew Huberman:
... in one location and impacting something someplace else. For the poets in the world, right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
That was a very captivating example because I think the human brain can naturally understand that things around us, we can have an impact on them, and they can have an impact on us. But the notion that a small insect thousands of kilometers away can impact something that's going on more adjacent to us, it seems outrageous, sci-fi, but the notion that one thing impacts another and impacts another, that's pretty straightforward, right? There's just a dominoing of the physical world. Chaos theory is different.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, could you explain chaos?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'll just add one more thing just for context for you to, sort of the paints in the palette. Around the same time, I remember the book "Chaos" coming out, and where there was a lot of excitement around chaos, and this was coming up. There was also a lot of discussion about fractals. The idea that when you zoom into things at a very, very small level, you start seeing some regularities. Now we know this about crystal structures, right? Like you put a drop of water under a-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... high-powered microscope, you're going to see structure there. It's not random. The angles are very-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... consistent, at least around certain nodes, et cetera. So I think people love this idea that we have repeating patterns and numbers in nature, that things at a distance can impact us more closely. This is the kind of stuff that the non-physics brain can understand.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And it does enchant, right? We sort of poked at poetry. I love poetry, you love poetry. But I think it enchants because I think humans are naturally interested in how the randomness of life might not be as random as it appears. So, what is chaos?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Where does it exist in our lives? Not emotional chaos. And what is the relationship between fractals and chaos, if any?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. Let me say first of all about why chaos is what it is, and it's not quantum. And there is quantum stories, and there is a quantum chaotic field, but I won't go into that. Chaos is a very interesting idea. It flies against our intuitions. Since the times of Newton, we know that if you give me the position and the velocity of an initial particle, I can use Newton's equations of motion to tell you where that particle is going to be anywhere-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... with an incredible precision. When we launch a rocket, we want to go to the moon, we can calculate and predict exactly where that rocket is going to be after so many hours, after so many days, and so on. Actually, we use the equations of motion to predict that trajectory, and it's a precise trajectory.

Andrew Huberman:
This is how Elon was able to capture the rocket with the chopsticks recently.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Something of that sort, yeah. Okay. Now, the idea of chaos is, so that's okay, it works. There are some cases where, let's assume, now I'm going to give you a simple example. So I take a ball, a billiard ball on a billiard table. I send it out, and at the moment, I can know exactly the position of velocity, I can tell you exactly where it's going to go. Chaos says that a tiny difference in the initial position or velocity of that ball will take it very far from the other one, which is ridiculous. If I tell you that two cars start at exactly the same speed, in the same position, and one of them has a little more, they'll stay parallel to each other. In some systems, and I'll tell you in a second, that actually those two trajectories diverge completely. So it's what we call sensitivity to initial conditions. Okay. That's what chaos is all about in classical mechanics. What is really weird about it is that it happens in systems that also undergo friction. Because let me give you an example that I used to teach chaos at Stanford for many years. So imagine I give you a beaker full of molasses, and you take a very big stainless steel ball, and you just throw it into the thing. Well, after a while, it will just drift with a thing, it's called Stokes' law, because friction slows it down, and it just goes. And now you throw another one from another altitude, and all of them are going to do exactly the same. Some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite. Even though there is friction, everything tends to just slow it down. They just keep going far apart from each other. Amazing thing. So that's chaos. Okay. And I can tell you a little bit why I got so involved in this and the work we did.

Andrew Huberman:
Does chaos exist in every physical system?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mostly, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe even in neurons or the brain.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, yes. Absolutely. This is why I don't want to get into a controversy here about issues of whether we live deterministic lives or not, but if things that are a little bit random and so on, or even just a tiny difference in initial conditions can take you to very different outcomes. But this, we're not talking about many particles, we are talking two. Okay. So that's one. Now, fractals is a different story that comes out of a guy who I knew very well, Benoit Mandelbrot, a very funny character, brilliant too, but very strange, who discovered that certain things are so similar that if you look at the coast of Britain, he used to say that, you look at the coast of Britain and you say, "Okay, tell me, how long is the coast of Britain?" You go with a meter and you measure it. Now, suppose that the meter that you're using now can measure up to an inch. Well, you're going to get a different distance even though you are adding the same, because there are all these little things in the coast of Britain that are essentially so similar that add a tremendous amount of length. That's what a fractal is all about. These are structures that are not just a simple line, but they have all these other things. Okay. He thought that it was a whole new geometry. As a matter of fact, and I tell you this because I knew Benoit very well, I met him through a talk that I gave on chaos. He used to hang out with chaos physicists. He was a mathematician, brilliant man in many ways. I was having dinner with him in Copenhagen in a restaurant. And the very pretty waitress came to us and so on, and served us, and we were talking. He's a Frenchman. He spoke with a very heavy French accent. And so she says something, "What are you doing here?" He says, "We are at a conference, but I'm not just as a conference. I'm a very special man," he said to her. And she said, "How come?" And he says, "Do you know who Euclid was?" And she says, "Sort of." She said, "Well, he was a Greek man who invented geometry." And he said, "Oh, well, guess what? I am better than Euclid. I invented a different geometry."

Andrew Huberman:
He said that?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. He said that.

Andrew Huberman:
Points to the waitress in Denmark that knew about Euclid.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That was very odd.

Andrew Huberman:
The Danes are smart.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Okay. That was very funny that he would talk about it. So he would give a talk, and he would say, "My equations can generate anything." Indeed, he could generate any patterns. So he would say, "You want a mountain? Here goes a mountain." And you see a mountain, beautiful graphs and so on. So self-similarity is a very powerful idea in physics because it allows you that if you know something at a certain scale, you can predict what it's going to be at different other scales. And I use that. But chaos and fractals are not always the same. As he used to say, because he didn't like physicists, because we never liked his talks. We always said, "Okay, so you're telling us that things are..." He used to say, "I'm not interested in pulleys. I'm not interested in things that move things up and down," he used to say.

Andrew Huberman:
He's thinking about elementary physics class.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Something of that sort.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. So, but fractals are very interesting because these are so similar structures. At all levels, they look the same. You look at it big, you look at small, they have the same type of geometric behavior. Chaos is all about dynamics, how things evolve in time. Okay? And chaotic systems, they tend to diverge from each other for a long, long time. The man who invented the idea of the butterfly effect was a man called Ed Lorenz, who was a very famous meteorologist at MIT, and he was solving the equations of the atmosphere, trying to predict the behavior of the weather. And he noticed in these very old computers and so on, that sometimes he would get different behaviors. He thought there was something wrong about the computer, and he discovered that the only thing that was wrong was that the initial conditions that he was giving them was very tiny different, and he would get different things. From there, he went into that. I mean, there are ideas that are very beautiful, like strange attractors and so on. I mean, we don't have to go into that. But so chaos is really a field that essentially explains why things that seem to be simply explained by classical physics tend to diverge from each other, and they give rise to random outcomes. That's the important thing. You can use chaos in order to generate random numbers. You can use chaos to generate random patterns. I've done that. It's very simple.

Andrew Huberman:
And chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay, so I was working at some there, and I don't think it's interesting how I got into this because I was doing something else, and suddenly I decided I was going to do this, and I really started going very fast at this. But then I had a very bright student, you met, Ted Hoag, and we decided, let's see if we can see chaos in quantum mechanics. And we started doing it, and there were a couple of papers by the Russians actually showing that this was the case, and we discovered that it was not the case. We actually proved that quantum systems are not chaotic. There's some kind of interference between them and so on, that makes them recur back and forth periodically. They are not chaotic.

Andrew Huberman:
Why do I find that reassuring, that if you get down to a small enough level, that you can really predict what's going to happen as opposed to small perturbations leading to big-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... differences in outcome?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. Yeah. That was the whole point. We discovered that quantum mechanics, there are waves and interferences and so on that make the system recur.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
As a matter of fact, I had quite an exchange with Dick Feynman about it. When I met him, I went to give a talk at Caltech, and I was in his office, and he said, "So what are you going to talk about? Because I don't want to waste my time." And I said, "About chaos." He said, "Okay." I said, "Some things are very, in particular, in quantum mechanics." So I'm smiling because he was so sharp and so on. So he said, "Okay, give me the problem." And he said, "What is it?" I said, "Well, okay, I give you an electron, and you have it in a potential, and I give you a laser." And he says, "The laser inside or outside the apparatus?" Just like that. So I said, "Outside." "So you turn on the laser?" I said... "So what happens to the electron?" And I knew he was going to give me the answer that was already in the literature, but he appeared to be thinking. Well, he stood up and walked around, and was making all sorts of noises. And then suddenly he says, "The energy grows linearly in time." I said, "No, it doesn't." "How do you know?" I said, "We measure it. I can show you," and so on. And he was very impressed because that means that there is no chaos, actually. Then he said, "Oh, you know why I got it wrong." I said, "No, because I wasn't thinking in colors, only black and white."

Andrew Huberman:
Was he trying to be funny?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Of course.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He was always funny.

Andrew Huberman:
Let's talk about Feynman and Gell-Mann and Mandelbrot and all the rest as a collection for a moment. One of the great gifts of my life has been that you would talk about scientists. It really enchants me. I'm so delighted when I hear it. I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And not athletes. Which is great, but scientists. And it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist, you both revere the work they did. You see something unique about them. And something I learned very early on, and I've certainly internalized, is, and forgive me because I'm assuming here, is that there's a certain aspect of their quirkiness or something about them, to take them seriously but not too seriously. I never learned to assume that because somebody was a Nobel Prize winner, that they were perfect, for instance. You would tell me Einstein had, he was amazing. There was relativity, the patent office, all this stuff, and he had all these problems with women.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And I read the books, right? Or this person, I won't name names because these people are still alive. Silicon Valley. Actually, when you and I used to take walks when I was a postdoc, we used to see Jobs-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... walking around, right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
No shoes. He had feet, no shoes. And you would say, "He's amazing. This guy's brilliant." But then we would chuckle about some of the-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... the Jobisms.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people. That these founders, the creators, they're just people, and they often have very challenging areas of their life as well. They're not perfect. They're not gods.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Some of them have almost godlike access to the universe and understanding it. But it seems to me that you hold people up for their contributions, but you never actually, thank goodness, put people on a pedestal to the point where you're like, "This person is spectacular in every way." And I'm not saying you cut them down to size, but I learned very-- And this has served me well in my life in now public-facing or on Twitter. Like if I make a mistake and someone comes at me, it's somebody that I respect. I go, "Ugh." But then I remember, this person has a lot of issues in certain domains of their life. So, to realize that we're all human, this notion of none of us are gods.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And yet there are people like Feynman, like Gell-Mann, like Einstein, who have almost supernatural levels of ability.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So what's that about? How do you hold knowledge, insight, and stature in your mind alongside the humanness, the inherent flawed nature of all of us?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, okay. It's complicated. There are many ways to think about it. In some of these names, for instance, these people are built into giants by the media, too. I mean, Feynman, if you go to Quora and so on, everybody's asking, what did Feynman do? What was he wearing, and so on, as if he was a god. Obviously, what he did in physics. And I interrupt myself here because he really worked very hard, very hard, according to Gell-Mann in particular, to creating a myth about himself.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He worked very hard. When I met him, I can even tell you the anecdotes. I only met him for an hour, but he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression with you.

Andrew Huberman:
R-rated and X-rated anecdotes.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But I remember the good one was that I was going to give a colloquium, and he said, "Should I come?" I say, "I think you should come." And then he said, "Well, then I'm going to give you a piece of advice. Do not look at me, because if you look at me during your talk, you're going to get confused," and so on. And actually, that's exactly what happened. I started the colloquium at Caltech, the Marine boot camp of science, and there I am starting to talk, and suddenly I said, instead of saying the next hour, I said something like in the next week or something as so, because there he was, and then he started saying, "Look elsewhere." That kind of guy.

Andrew Huberman:
For anyone who hasn't lectured, there's a tendency sometimes when one is going fast to fill in without thinking. It's just something that-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... one learns. I've had to learn it the hard way when we missed it in the recording and this kind of thing. It's a humbling moment. But yeah, I think that Feynman would've been canceled by the standards of the last few years.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, he was. I took even my father once to a lecture he was giving in San Francisco, and he was giving a beautiful lecture to, I don't know, get some award for teaching and so on, and suddenly a bunch of women walked into the front of the big room, and they started coming. Because it turns out that in one of his lectures, he said something like, "If you do it this way, you're as bad as a woman's driver."

Andrew Huberman:
Feynman said that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Feynman said that. And then all these women were saying things, and then he said, "I love women. They're all smart." He was very clever the way-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So he would've lost his job by the standards of-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Might be

Andrew Huberman:
... recent years.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Okay. But regardless of that, because I really want to go back to this issue, people like Murray Gell-Mann, to me, he was the most intimidating person I've ever met. Now, eventually, I got to know him because he liked what I was doing, and as a matter of fact, he and I organized a workshop, an incredibly luxurious place in France, at the estate of Madame Schlumberger, one of the oil people. Actually, it was an incredible meeting that he and I organized. So I got to know him a little bit personally, and all he was complaining at that time is he couldn't get a date. He was a widow, and he wanted to... Women were intimidated by him, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, as I recall, because I remember meeting him when I was a kid, and we both shared a love of birds, but he was perhaps one of the world's most obnoxious people.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I mean, he was like-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But you impressed him. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you want me to remind you of this, because we had two stories there. Your mother and I were taking a hike in Aspen, and we saw a bird that looked incredibly complicated and so on. So we looked at the bird. The next day, we went to him because he loved birds, as you know, and I said, "I saw a most unusual bird." He said, "Describe it." So I da, da, da, and he gave me the name in Latin of the bird, and then he said, "That's the most common bird in the Bay Area of California. As a matter of fact, you should see it when you pick up the newspaper next time you're there." And indeed, two weeks later, I went to pick up "The New York Times," and there was the bird. But at the same time, I said, "Andrew likes birds," and he asked you, "What is your favorite bird?" And you said, "The rainbow lorikeet."

Andrew Huberman:
Still is.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And he said, "This kid knows. This kid knows." He said, "I'll never forget that."

Andrew Huberman:
I know my birds.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
I know my birds.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, but it's amazing. Because if you could have said a parrot, he would have not been very interested. Okay. But he was intimidating, very intimidating, and he was nasty, too, when he wanted to be. So he enjoyed the power he had. I was a member of the board of the directors of the Aspen Center, so we had to decide what programs we had every summer, and he would come to me and say, "Whom do you want me to insult today?"

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He had all sorts of very funny names for all sorts of physicists and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
The downside of people like that in science, because I've known some, too. There's a very famous neuroscientist, now in his 70s, who has a Nobel Prize, who also is known for generating anecdotes about himself.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And in recent years, because of political correctness, wokeism, and so forth, tends to do that less because he has sort of a trucker's mouth. Brilliant guy, but is kind of known for being outrageous and trying to create tales about themselves.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
This is something that scientists do.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? In order to maintain their legacy.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Also to feel good about themselves. By the way, Gell-Mann, I worked with him. He was incredible, and the way he would interrupt people and so on. And there are two things I can tell you that are interesting. Once, he was announcing some new results. He was working on this whole thing on quarks and other things, and actually it was string theory. And he announced a seminar, and everybody goes into the garden. The seminars are nice. I need to remind the audience perhaps here that the Aspen Center for Music was right next to the tent. They were rehearsing. So the seminar was supposed to start at 3:00, and there's Gell-Mann comes with all his notes under his arm. He always had notes, walking pace, and nothing happened. And suddenly, they were rehearsing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which just starts, da, da, da, dan. And then you heard the sound, and then he started. "I will now tell you about a new theory of how the universe works." That's the way he spoke.

Andrew Huberman:
So, what strikes me is that these people take themselves very seriously.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think that's important in life?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I don't. As you know, I like to have a good sense of humor about myself and be self-deprecating. I think some people have issues, and they do that. It all depends on how you see things.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Matina. Matina makes loose-leaf and ready-to-drink yerba mate. Now, I've often discussed yerba mate's benefits, such as regulating blood sugar, its high antioxidant content, the ways it can improve digestion, and its possible neuroprotective effects. It's for all those reasons that yerba mate is my preferred source of caffeine. I also drink yerba mate because I simply love the taste. And while there are a lot of different choices out there of yerba mate drinks, my personal favorite, far and away, is Matina. It's made of the highest quality ingredients, which gives it a really rich but also a really clean taste, so none of that tannic aftertaste. In fact, given how amazing Matina tastes and their commitment to quality, I decided to become a part-owner in the company earlier this year. In particular, I love the taste of Matina's canned zero-sugar cold brew yerba mate, which I personally helped develop. I drink at least three cans of those a day now. I also love their loose-leaf Matina, which I drink every morning from the gourd. So, I add hot water and sip on that thing, and I'll have some cold brews throughout the morning and early afternoon. I find it gives me terrific energy all day long, and I'm able to fall asleep perfectly well at night, no problems. If you'd like to try Matina, you can go to drinkmatina.com/huberman. Right now, Matina is offering a free one-pound bag of loose-leaf yerba mate tea and free shipping with the purchase of two cases of their cold brew yerba mate. Again, that's drinkmatina.com/huberman to get a free bag of yerba mate loose-leaf tea and free shipping. Let me ask you about this. So, further down my list of things I wanted to talk to you about is that you've always loved, it's clear from a young age, high-level concepts-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... deep concepts, order in the universe, working on hard problems. You just filed another patent. As long as I've known you, you've been pursuing some new area of knowledge or implementation of knowledge.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And yet you, like your father, I know you delight in everyday things.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Since I was a kid, you've taken a walk after dinner. You bike to work if you can that day because of the weather. You love a really good espresso, a really good meal.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The high and the low are checked-off boxes for you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. That's different, I think, than the way most people think about scientists, especially theoreticians. Theorists, excuse me. Which one is it, theoreticians or theorists?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Theorists, they say, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Theorists.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That we assume the academics that are always somewhere else, like they're up here, they're not grounded, they're not feet on the ground. But you like everyday things.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
You're very much like-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... where we're going to eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely

Andrew Huberman:
... conversation about relativity.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I think that there is a myth that sometimes gets perpetuated at universities. My first meeting with my advisor when I got to University of Pennsylvania, he said, "I want you to know one thing. You're going to live like a monk." I said, "What does that mean? No fun? Nothing?" "You're going to work. I want you to work. You're getting paid to do something." I was so scared. And then I told him that on weekends, I had to escape to New York City to take a walk in Central Park and look at nice things, and I always enjoyed the good things of life, and at that time, I couldn't afford them, but that doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy them. And I do believe that I inherited this from my father, a tremendous enjoyment of life in general. And yes, I am very physical and tactile about things. I like to surround myself with things that are beautiful. I enjoy, as you said, good meals and the daily things about life. I'm not just living in some stratosphere and not being able to enjoy a meal I'm having, and so on. No, the opposite. And yes, in that sense, I am very much like that. And Marie's the same way, and so that's why we enjoy that.

Andrew Huberman:
Your wife.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, my wife, sorry. Yes. We really enjoy, she in particular, being Danish, they have this idea of slow eating and enjoying the good things of life, and I'm very much like that. Yes, very much. I don't feel guilty about it. If I can afford certain-

Andrew Huberman:
Nor should you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
Nor should you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, there is a certain aesthetic component to science, and the idea that they sell you that Einstein didn't care about anything. Actually, if you look at the negotiations that Einstein had with the Institute for Advanced Studies for salaries, you'll see that he really cared a lot about these things, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, so our notion of him as it was just science, and he had no interest in material things is false?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Yes. I had an uncle, actually, Hector's father. There was a branch of the family that was very much into culture. They had beautiful collections of paintings and so on. And once, I was what, 14 or so, and I remember at a party, we had big social parties in my parents' house, and he was lecturing me that I should never care about anything but truth and concepts and so on. I was a little bit scared. I wanted to enjoy life as well, okay? So, it was a little bit complicated. No, I enjoy everything, of course. I think I got it out of my father, mostly, yes. My mother was a little more ascetic in a way. But yes, the tiny little things of life are what makes one's life.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm slowly starting to get that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I think I've been a little rabid about my interests, almost to an obsessive level, to the point where I've sometimes overlooked how many opportunities for just lovely daily interactions I have. I try, but I feel like I've just been chasing the carrot-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... of knowledge. I love doing what I do. I've always done that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, but you have to be careful indeed. As you know, I meditate, and for many years and so on. And being in the present and being able to just be there and nothing else is a tremendous source of satisfaction and calms me down and so on. And I love-

Andrew Huberman:
When did you start that?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, I started actually out of the discovery, a trivial thing that many people have. I discovered that every time my blood pressure was taken by the doctor, it was just going through the roof. It's called the white coat phenomenon or something of that sort. And I got very, very upset about it because I tried to control it, and it got worse and worse and worse, and they told me what to do. And so at one point or the other, I have a friend, a colleague more than a friend, who's a Buddhist, who started telling me about have you tried, first of all, biofeedback? That's one I tried. For a year, I did biofeedback. And then he started telling me about meditation. So one day, actually, he's a physicist as well, he was visiting me in my lab, and he said, "Let's do it." I did a session with him in meditation, and I couldn't believe it. My hands suddenly were warm and felt incredibly nice. So I decided that I really wanted to learn how to do it. And I started doing it at a time when I truly needed it because I realized that without being aware, I was anxious. Like for instance, I would see myself walking down the street holding my fists this way. That's not a very relaxed way of living. Okay. So I really started doing this meditation on a fairly continuous basis, and I really enjoy it. And it's very important as a father, I say this to anyone too, that you have to enjoy life. Pursuing these things, eventually, the value is in the pursuit, not in achieving them anyhow. So you might as well pursue many things at the same time. A good meal eaten properly can be very, very nice, too.

Andrew Huberman:
I love that about you. It's something I'm working on. Along those lines, I remember when I was in graduate school, we published a paper, and then we published a second paper in "Science." And I remember thinking, "This is such a proud moment, a first author paper in the journal 'Science.'" And I told you, and you said, "Well, enjoy it, and just be aware that by tomorrow, you'll be worried that you'll never do it again."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Exactly. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And fortunately, we published in "Nature" and a few other journals a bunch of times after that. But you also warned me about the postpartum-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... of post-excitement.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Something great happens. At that time, we, as a field of neuroscience, didn't really understand dopamine dynamics, but now we do. What you were describing is this trough in dopamine that we get-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... a day or two after some big event.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Typically, postpartum is associated with the birth of a child, but it could be getting a degree, or a great party, or a paper in "Science" or "Nature," a first author paper. And you said, "A couple of days from now, you're going to feel low."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
"And you just have to wait." And I'll never forget what you said. You said, "Just go back to what inspired the first project, pick a different problem. It'll happen again."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And the second time it happened, I was like, "He was right. It happened again."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And again, and again. I haven't had an infinite number of those papers in those journals, but I learned about the dopamine dynamics associated with pursuing a goal, and then you get the thing, and you're very excited, and then you feel the drop.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And that I think that is something that even ancient philosophers knew about it, the Buddha, the Greeks, and so on, this idea that they said the things we pursue, they are ephemeral in a way, in the way the feelings that they elicit in us. And I think that you're right. And there is also another tendency one has to try to avoid, which is you're successful in something, and you continue doing exactly the same thing because, by now, you know how to do it with your hands tied here.

Andrew Huberman:
Correct.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And I always felt that I want to go elsewhere. And I have sort of a reputation for changing fields. And I don't do that in order for others to be puzzled by it. It's just that I'm curious, and I want to have a feeling again, like falling in love, the new thing. It's nice at the beginning, but eventually, whatever you're doing, it becomes trite and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, let's talk about that because after chaos-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... I remember we had reporters in our house, and there was a-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... TV and the book by Jim Glick, and then you switched to something completely different.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And you got into computer science.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Well, computer science is a-

Andrew Huberman:
Computers.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Computers. What happened was that a lot of the success that we had was because I was at PARC. We had phenomenal computer facilities there, things that we could visualize that at the time very few people could do. And one of them, actually, someone suggested I get a patent. There is a patent for the chaos that sometimes people have in T-shirts that actually we discovered for the first time with guys from UC Santa Cruz, with Jim Crutchfield and so on. He was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so on. But what happened was, okay, so we did this, we did quantum, and then one day, I said, "Okay, so what do I do now?" Okay, well, you can go and publish one paper after the other in chaos. You can produce 10 PhDs with this. But then I said, "Why don't I do the opposite? I'm using computers to help me with physics. Why don't I use the physics to study computers?" Well, that's an interesting idea, but this is it. So why don't you do that? So what happened to me, I was at a meeting on chaos in Copenhagen, and I couldn't sleep one night, and I had a book called "The Computer and the Brain" by John von Neumann, perhaps someone that was a true genius. I don't know if you heard of him. He invented computers. He was a phenomenon at all levels, and he was part of the Manhattan Project. He was perhaps one of the most brilliant people to have ever existed, at least that we are aware of. He was at the Institute for Advanced Studies, von Neumann. There are all sorts of anecdotes about him. He had a photographic memory. You could give him a page of a phone book, he would look at it, close it, and then he would recite the phone numbers from bottom to top.

Andrew Huberman:
Totally useless skill.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, but he was a genius, true genius. He invented computers. He invented game theory in economics. I mean, it was-

Andrew Huberman:
Useful skill.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, exactly. Okay. In any event, so he wrote a very little book called "The Computer and the Brain." No equations, nothing. And one night, 4:00 in the morning, I cannot sleep. I get down, it was summer, so the sun was still set over there in Copenhagen, and I went there to read it, and I said, "This is what I'm going to do. I don't know anything about brains, but I can imagine if the brain is like a computer, I could do something like that. But I also want to apply some of what I know to these things." And the first thing that occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we had at PARC. These computers would communicate with each other, as we nowadays know it as the Internet and so on. So there were many aspects of this, and I decided that because I was very influenced by one or two students that were very much into economics and libertarian ideas and so on, and one of them had taken two courses in econ at Caltech, so we decided to start looking at this as a market where computers essentially buy and sell programs to execute in their machines and so on. So we started really doing what we call the ecology of computation. It was a big effort, which married economics with artificial intelligence and computer, but it became a big thing. And so I became, again, it's like falling in love again. It's a new field. I thought it was great.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, the discovery process of falling in love is half the fun.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I also was able to underst- There is a lot of formalism in economics, and some of it is really academic. But there are some ideas that are very profound, to the extent that some people consider me an economist sometimes because I think in terms of utility, rewards, and risk and all this stuff. And as a matter of fact, a lot of the work I'm doing now on resource allocation in networks comes from ideas from economics.

Andrew Huberman:
When you go into a new field, in order to learn about the field, is that mainly through talking to people in the field, reading books?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Both.

Andrew Huberman:
And it doesn't strike me that you have ever tried to ingratiate yourself into any field. It's not like you're trying to be a member of the field. You go in it as an observer and a learner.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. I need to say this. I don't think that many people have said that if I stayed in one field-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... I would have done much better in terms of reputation and so on. As a matter of fact, I can tell you an anecdote that is-

Andrew Huberman:
You mean like awards and stuff?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. For instance, not long ago, I was already doing computers after chaos and so on. I won't name the person, but a very good physicist professor at Berkeley came into my office, says, "Bernardo, we have an issue here." I say, "What is it?" "That your name for a membership in the National Academy of Science is coming up." And I said, "Oh, that's nice." He said, "But there's a problem. You're not writing papers in physics. You're writing papers in computer science, and we need a physicist because otherwise, the chemist will get that job." The physicist don't like the chemist.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, welcome to academia.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. So I said, "What do you want me to do?" He said, "Well, can you perhaps write one or two more papers on this so we can show?" I said, "No, I cannot do that. I can't."

Andrew Huberman:
Isn't there a famous story about Feynman and being elected to the National Academy?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, he refused to. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. I think they told him he was in the National Academy.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then he said, "Well, what do I do?" And they said, "Well, you elect in-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Other members

Andrew Huberman:
... other members." And he said-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... "I quit."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, right. Well, yeah. So in any event, I never became a member of the National Academy.

Andrew Huberman:
But you never sought prizes.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. I would have liked to get them. Why not? It's not that I said they are meaningless, but there was nothing that I could do about it. And since I was not, as you said, I was always a little bit of a always moving on to the next thing, never staying long enough, going to these meetings where by now you heard it all over and over and over again. So yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I have to say that, as you know, I still have my position at Stanford and teach. I'm involved in a little bit of research, but one of the great advantages I had is that all my advisors died or killed themselves, so I was orphaned in science. And so there was never an expectation from my advisors that I do the next thing because they were dead.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
So I thought about that, but I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcasts, I remember you being a little bit concerned. You're like-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... "What are your colleagues going to think?" And I think at that point, the way that science was going and the structure of academia relative to what my needs in life were, and just a passion to wanting to do something new, I put a lot of thought to the fact that you've changed fields many times, and I just felt absolutely compelled to get into science communication, and there was no stopping that. But I have to thank you. A lot of the reason I was able to take the step to do the podcast, in addition to being supported by Lex Fridman's suggestions and a lot of help from others, Joe Rogan and others, but is that I was like, well, that's what you're supposed to do. When you hit a point in where what you're doing isn't as compelling, you wait for the thing that draws you forward. Seems like you were always drawn forward. I always think of carrot and stick. It's not like you disliked where you were, it's that there was some carrot that you identified-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Right

Andrew Huberman:
... and you go towards the carrots.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And also something very, the other day, my wife was actually mentioning, I've been, in a sense, an orphan. I never had mentors. It's very interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
Except this frankly not terrific graduate advisor.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He was not my mentor, really. He didn't even want me to do the things that I wanted to do. So I never had someone who was whispering, "Bernardo is the guy too. You should be considering for this or that." I had the fortune to really get to the top of many of these fields, and interacting with the top people. We talk about Feynman, Gell-Mann. There are many very famous people that I respect immensely that I met when I was in France. As you know, I was teaching there. I met people that are brilliant and so on, and I felt treated with tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on. But I never had mentors in that sense. And also, as I said, I am a little bit restless. I am very curious about everything. And so sometimes I see something, and I say, "Oh, there's an opportunity to do something interesting." I think that the issue of being curious is extremely important, and it's interesting because I reflect a lot on, say, my father. My father was an immensely curious person, but all about details. He never liked abstractions of any kind. He was very proud that he went to the same school I went, and the only course he flunked was philosophy. Because he said it doesn't make any sense. Now, perhaps he was right about that. Sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about. A couple of months ago, in Denmark, we were invited, my wife and I, to a dinner with philosophers talking about artificial intelligence. I thought that these people didn't really know what was going on. But nevertheless, yes, I am curious, and sometimes I move on to things, and I feel that the internal reward you get from doing something new and interesting and exciting is much better than a recognition that someone will come and say whatever. Don't misunderstand me. I would not say no to recognition, but it's not really that I do this in order to get that. That's not me at all.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, the whole thing sort of brings my thinking back to the early discussions about other students are not interested in physics, you're interested in physics. Other people are smoking a lot of weed and partying like... No. Like you said, you've not had mentors. That's one area in which you and I have been very different.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I've always attached myself to mentors.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Many of them.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Well, there might be a psychological reason, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That you need this or needed at one point or the other, these parental-type figures. So yeah, it might be. I wish I had them. Don't misunderstand me. As a matter of fact, my influence on my students, I produced more than 15 PhDs. It's also strange because none of them stayed in physics. Now, the department at Stanford was not too happy with that. It's not that I told them not to, but they all smelled that I was doing something else. From computers, I became very aware of what was going on very early on with the internet. As you know, I started doing all this stuff on social long before anyone was doing, and economics of attention and all that stuff. And many of the students, the other day, I found one of them. I met one, Lada Adamic, who I think you-

Andrew Huberman:
She was early at Google.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, she went to Facebook. And the other day, she wrote me a note saying, "I was so lucky that I met you." She was going to do a thesis on I don't know what, collecting solar.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, you've collected some pretty interesting students. We won't name names other than Lada's, but some of them are very well-known people in the tech industry now.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. And I think that, yeah, it seemed like the people that would gravitate towards you. It's interesting, your laboratory is off-campus.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So anyone that decides to be off-campus is already making a choice toward they don't want to be part of the standard culture.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But they thought it was interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So I want to get back to this issue of internet and Silicon Valley. I recall it was the early '90s, so it'd be like '89, '90, '91. Remember, I had this girlfriend, Gretchen.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And her dad was the editor of Guitar Player magazine. And I'll never forget, he told me, he said, "Yo, it's going to be all about multimedia." Remember that? No one talks about multimedia. He said, "Your television is going to be, your computer is going to be, your stereo is going to..." He was right. Basically, everything was going to be synthesized into common devices, and we now know that bore out to be true. But at what point did you decide that things like computers were mainly going to be a route to industry and not to academia? This is really important, I think, for people to understand because right now it's kind of happening in biomedical sciences.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But you see this at Stanford. People get degrees in computer science, but not to become computer science professors. Sometimes, but really so that they can go into industry. So how do you see nowadays, like for people that are interested in science or technology, do they need to go to graduate school? Like is a PhD useful anymore?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, Peter Thiel says that you shouldn't even get a bachelor's. I think that's what he-

Andrew Huberman:
I have great respect for Peter. There are a lot of things that are easier to say when you're already a billionaire.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, I know. Like Steve Jobs saying, "Passion is everything."

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Necessary but not sufficient.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Necessary but not sufficient.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So I think that what's happening today, we are going through a technological revolution. There's no doubt about it. We used to learn about the printing press, and now it's the same thing with computers. I still remember, and this is amazing because today it's so obvious. People didn't know much what was going on at PARC, everything. One night we were having for dinner, I remember Emmanuel Mignot, who was-

Andrew Huberman:
He discovered the orexin-hypocretin relationship. That's the cause of narcolepsy, is a mutation.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. He was a friend of ours and his wife. They were at home at our dinner, and I was telling them that you could go to a computer and go through the Louvre Museum in Paris, and they said, "What are you talking about?" And so we finished dinner, and we all drove to PARC at night. And I turn on my computer, and there was a man, I still remember his name, something Pioch was the last name. He had gone taking pictures of every painting at the Louvre and put them online so you could just navigate through the Louvre. Today, it's obvious, trivial. At that time, they couldn't believe it. There you are in Palo Alto on an evening, going through all the rooms of the Louvre. They just couldn't understand what was going on.

Andrew Huberman:
What year was this?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I don't remember, but it was just-

Andrew Huberman:
Must've been like '94?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... when the web started coming, that was right before that.

Andrew Huberman:
So we all had to get email in college in the final year of '97, so it must have been somewhere around like '94, '95.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Something of that sort. Right at the time Andriessen made the web available to everybody, basically, Netscape.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So in any event, so it was an amazing thing. It was amazing. Now, all these developments were really done in companies, not necessarily in academia. Okay? That is an interesting point, and I think that today, an immense amount of the advances that we see in biotechnology, in computers, in everything, are essentially done I would say for profit by companies. I think social networks, we started doing social networks at a time when no one even thought of doing it. I used to say I do social science with a capitalist because sociologists used to study the behavior of five widows in some Norwegian village and write a paper. We could look at 150,000 people, how they visit this site or that site, and we were able to predict behaviors. So I think that today everybody knows that that's the case, and the same thing with artificial intelligence.

Andrew Huberman:
But for a kid in high school or kids in college, is it worth getting a graduate education?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, it all depends on what you want to do.

Andrew Huberman:
Law, medicine, you need the professional degree. These are ultimately professional degrees, so you need the training. I don't want a surgeon that didn't go to medical school.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. But the danger is, and I remember a very bright guy I had in my team, you don't want to become a blue-collar worker. See, what I'm saying is the following, being a hacker or being able to deal with software was an incredibly profitable profession. Now you have these large language models that can actually program for you. You need to write a program, you go to ChatGPT, and it'll write it for you. So suddenly, if you don't have a set of talents, a way of imagining things or doing something, you become basically just someone that just hacks for so many dollars an hour. Now, it's true that they can give you options. If the company does well, you get rich and so on. But I still believe that you need some contextual cultural part to this. Okay. Now, I personally believe that humanities and all sorts of other things are very important, and to understand where is your cultural environment, where are you coming from, and where is this society going is important. But on the other hand, as you said, you can just finish high school and start hacking and become very good at it, and doesn't require much more than that.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think the examples of Zuck, Elon, and others essentially departing standard education to start companies, certainly not talking about the companies, but do you think those examples are good examples for people to internalize, or are they unicorns?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, I think that they're unicorns, and you have to be very careful. We only talk about the success stories. We don't go and interview the guy that is loading a landscaping truck because his startup didn't go anywhere. Okay. Our tendency to see these people as heroes and to try to imitate them is a very dangerous one, I think. Now, that doesn't mean that you should not be working on the things you care and gamble, but these are the guys who played a lottery and won.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Do you remember there were many other social websites before Facebook?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And they all died, and Facebook could have died, too. Zuckerberg might disagree with me, but it could have died, okay? And all these things are like that. Apple went almost under. They brought Steve Jobs again, and the guy put them into the stratosphere. And the same thing with Elon Musk. He's a high risk-taker, and so far, every time he flips a coin, he comes the right way. But to say, "I want to be like him," you have to be very careful and to calculate the odds. Okay. So when you say this, how many of these kids really make it? It's a very complicated thing. So I think that to have a strong background in something will help you when suddenly the field switches from being a programmer and making a lot of money to suddenly programmers are a dime a dozen-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... or becoming a technician, basically. Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
I had a perfectly thriving career as a lab scientist with grants and private funding and a bunch of other things, publishing regularly, and when I decided to switch to this, were you worried?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, because I saw it as a very slow departure from what you were doing, and I saw the success very early on. I realized that you were essentially satisfying two things that are very important to you. You like to explain things. You're incredibly good at explaining things since you were a little kid. You were always explaining everything to people, and you have a talent, let's face it. I'm not saying this because I want to flatter you. I really believe that, and everybody says so. The success of your podcast is a success at explaining things in ways that people understand. They don't have to go and buy a book on neuroanatomy to understand what you're saying. So I knew that this was a path. Now, I didn't realize how incredible the path was, and there was a lot of randomness in it. For instance, you started podcasting at a time when very few people were podcasting. If you start today, the story would be very different.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, the timing was the pandemic. People were home.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
They were listening to podcasts.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And this brings to something to me that many times people have asked me about me, what makes me do what I do. I believe in the idea of walking on beaches with very few footprints. When you go into a crowded field, it's a mess. So many of the times that I move into something else is when I realize that there's a mob scene of scientists working at this, and the chances of doing something interesting are very small, okay? The internet has allowed information to go everywhere. A guy in Zambia can actually read the same things that I read here, so it's very hard to compete against such a crowd, and many people are brilliant, and many of them are smart. So you started something very early on, and you were lucky that you chose a field that resonates with the needs of people, okay? There are also other people who do podcasting and goes nowhere. So I think that I never worried. I actually was elated to see the trajectory of your podcast. The only thing is You have a tenured position, and that is a nice safety cushion if everything else were-- Today, you're beyond the reach of justice, as I say. So no problem. You don't need it, in a sense, unless you want it.

Andrew Huberman:
No one's beyond the reach of justice.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But yeah, I still maintain my tenured position. I spoke to my chairman in ophthalmology this morning, and I'll teach this spring or in the fall.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, and it's good for you, too, to really interact with young people and to hear what they care and so on. But I never worried, in the sense that I thought that you have enough talent to do well, and you chose to do it. I remember, during COVID, at the beginning, we were at your sister's house, and you were drawing all these little diagrams and showing me.

Andrew Huberman:
I used to make my drawings.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. And then, so I think you put them on Twitter or something of that sort, and it was the beginning of something much more interesting and important.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And so I never worried about it. I think that all of us, the whole family, and those who know you, are sort of impressed at the explosive success of this story here. Your podcast is amazing. I don't have to tell you.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you. Well, it reflects a kind of early compulsion more than anything of learn and teach, learn and share.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. But there's also, I need to say something. The other day, actually, we were watching your interview with Esther Perel, and regardless of the fact that I think it's a great interview, both my wife and I were reflecting on the fact that it's also an incredible tribute to the way you conduct an interview. Okay. So there is a talent there. Not many people can take someone and talk and make it interesting, let's put it that way. So you have that.

Andrew Huberman:
I inherited your curiosity.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, but it's more than that. It's also a way of drawing people out and so on, which is also part of your practice. So I never had any doubts. The opposite. The issue is, obviously, you're taking it to many, many places long beyond what you started, which was essentially explaining to people how neuroscience works, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. We've gone into a lot of health domains and other things.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And I've also been blessed with an amazing team. This is something that I think, while we share a lot of things in common, if I may, I've always been kind of a pack animal. If it was skateboarding, draw friends together. If it's birds, I have my bird club-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... with Eddie Chang, who now, as you know, is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. It's kind of wild to think about. But yeah, I've rarely gone alone.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm just struck. We've had many conversations over the years, but I'm just struck at how you've been able to be-- You've been a bit of a lone wolf with these different camps. You make friends, you have colleagues, you maintain long-term relationships.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I have groups of people who collaborate with me. I don't do this alone.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
The opposite.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. But I haven't changed crowds very often. And it seems like you've had to go into economics-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and theoretical physics-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Right

Andrew Huberman:
... and all these things, and yeah, that's an interesting difference, and look-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And it's daunting and thrilling at the same time. Sometimes, when you start giving talks in a field that you've never done much of before, and you see this audience, it can be intimidating, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Even when I started doing chaos, I thought I was doing very well till I gave a talk at Berkeley, and there were mathematicians. I regard mathematicians as the top, top people in the world. And I was saying something, and a guy, he's a very famous mathematician, he said, "That's a lie." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Can you prove it?" "No." Because physicists don't prove theorems.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He said, "Well, then it's a lie. If you cannot prove it, it's a lie."

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
It was quite a cold shower on me.

Andrew Huberman:
That happens to me on Twitter every now and again, where they'll find something where I misspoke, and they do it, and it's super embarrassing. You correct yourself, you move on.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. And then you learn things, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And you have a conversation with someone.

Andrew Huberman:
And you never forget those things. This is what I learned. You never forget the errors you made. Like on a qualifying exam. Most people will never take a qualifying exam, but they basically ask you questions until you get something wrong.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The moment you say, "I don't know," or you get something wrong, that's an important moment, because it's also the thing that you go look up, and you never forget.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Right. And also, the tiny humiliations can be very good, too, for you. This is very important.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I've had plenty of those.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
I've had plenty of those.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I do, too. I think it's a very, very important part of growing up and discovering that you don't understand something. But I always, I need to say this, in spite of the fact that you paint me as a lone wolf, I'm not. I'm very social, and I love interacting with people. And I always been very lucky that I surround myself with groups of people, including today, that are brilliant and resonate with the kinds of things I want to do. And so it's very stimulating. I'm not the kind of person that sits in a corner and does theories and publish papers. I published papers on my own. That was my romantic period, where I needed to be Einstein in the patent office. And not that I thought I was Einstein, but it was very important that I was the only author. Okay. Today, I don't mind putting my name, whatever, and I don't need it. I have hundreds of papers and lots more than enough patents and so on. So I like interacting with people. It's very, very important to me. When I have an idea, I need to tell people about an idea.

Andrew Huberman:
So I can relate.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. So that's very good. And I still see some of my old students and collaborators like Tad and so on, and we take walks every once in a while and discuss things. And so I learn a lot from him, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Right now, you're working, as I understand, on quantum internet.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
This is a mysterious term to most everybody.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
You alluded to it earlier, about quantum entanglement.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Or about entanglement.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But my understanding is that foreign governments, countries and our government and country are very interested in quantum internet.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
That it might actually be at least as important as AI, maybe more important, for security reasons, et cetera. Can you explain quantum internet in a way-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... that I can understand and the listeners can understand?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes, I can explain.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I'll tell you the original thing. Quantum mechanics was essentially finished in 1925, so we are not reinventing new physics here. Okay? There's the physics of gravitation and quantum, but that's not really what we're talking about. What happens is the following. The basis of all secure interactions in the internet on computers are based on the idea that there are certain mathematical equations or functions that are very hard to resolve. So when I send you something encoded, if someone is listening to that conversation that is encoded and tries to read it, it's very hard to do because in order to decode that code, it's some kind of symbols and so on, you need to, I don't know, months or years of a computer to do it. Okay. But it can be done. Computer codes get broken all the time because the basis of these codes are mathematical functions. You have a mathematical function, you can create a computer program that will try to unravel it, and it can be unraveled. Okay, so that's one thing. Now here comes quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics provides security that is not given by mathematics, but by the laws of physics. So if you have a way of sending messages from one computer to the other encrypted using quantum mechanisms, they cannot be broken.

Andrew Huberman:
Can you give me an example of a quantum mechanism for encoding information?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. So imagine that I'm sending you messages. Every message is encoded in binary ones and zeros. Okay, so I'm sending a message, which is a string of ones and zeros. That string of ones and zeros could be "Hello, Andrew," or it could also be something that is secretly encoding to something. If it's classical encryption, which is what we use today, a computer, in principle, can look at those symbols and unravel them. Now let me show you how it works in quantum. In quantum, when I send you a quantum message, the act of touching it, trying to look at it, destroys it. That's what happens in quantum, not in classical thing. I can look at strings of ones and zeros, and I look at them, and I can make a copy of it, and then I read them, I take them to my lab, and I decrypt them. Okay? If I look at a string of qubits, quantum bits moving, that are not ones and zeros, they are different things.

Andrew Huberman:
These are moving parts?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
They're moving parts. They are usually photons. You can use fiber optics. You can use-

Andrew Huberman:
So these are-- I know what photons are.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, photons.

Andrew Huberman:
So they're little bouncing energy of light.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. They're photons anyway. Yeah, little bunches of light because photon. If they're going around, the photon could be polarized up or down or whatever. But if it's in a quantum state, which is in the intermediate between, the moment I look at it, the moment I capture it, I collapse it into one or the other, and I destroy the state.

Andrew Huberman:
The interaction with it changes it.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
The measurement destroys it. This is the mystery of quantum mechanics, that the measurement collapses. We call it the word collapses into one state or the other. Before that, it was anything. We could be anything. So when I use quantum signals, I'm sending qubits, quantum bits that are called qubits. The act of observing the qubit renders into a classical one or zero. So then there's no way. You cannot break it.

Andrew Huberman:
So does that mean that the practical implementation of this-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... equates to-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Unbreakable

Andrew Huberman:
... unbreakable code.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Code. Exactly. Now, in order-

Andrew Huberman:
Which is why, of course-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Everybody wants

Andrew Huberman:
... other governments. What I've been told is that in China, they're working very hard on this.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
And that here, we're working very hard on this.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
We are work. I'm working, too. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. And you're working very hard on this.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Now-

Andrew Huberman:
So-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But wait

Andrew Huberman:
... who's there? Has anyone gotten there yet?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. The problem is the following. In order to decrypt this, remember that I told you that you can use mathematics, okay? Some of these functions are incredibly complex. It might take the age of the universe perhaps to decode them mathematically. Let's not talk about quantum. But if you had a quantum computer, now we're talking about a quantum computer, it can do it in a couple of hours. A quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the ones used in encryption in hours, whereas it would take the age of the universe for a monster computer, not standard computer you can buy, to do it.

Andrew Huberman:
So in theory, whoever gets this ability first can read essentially-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Everything

Andrew Huberman:
... all the information that's being sent around the world.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Not only that, and many people are doing, the Chinese, the Koreans, and we're doing. They are grabbing everything now that is encrypted. They cannot decrypt it, and they store it because someday they'll be able to decrypt it.

Andrew Huberman:
But who knows if it will still be relevant?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, but it may be.

Andrew Huberman:
And we don't know what they have.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Imagine if you can get-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, sure.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Remember when North Korea, they cracked, what was it? Disney? And then they discovered all these emails where people, like George Clooney, I don't know who, was complaining about this or that. So imagine-

Andrew Huberman:
And worse.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh? And worse.

Andrew Huberman:
And worse.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And worse.

Andrew Huberman:
We just didn't hear about that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Okay. So if you grab all this information, we cannot decrypt it today, but if quantum computers become available, and there are people working on quantum computing, they'll be able to decrypt it. In the meantime, people are working on deploying these quantum networks. We're working on that, too. Not to deploy them, but just to see whether or not it's feasible to do that, okay? The Chinese are ahead of almost everybody. They have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these qubits, so these are impossible to decrypt. Okay?

Andrew Huberman:
Wait. So they're sending the qubit. So you can already communicate in quantum.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, yeah. We communicate all the time. Yeah. I have a lab in Colorado that does that. Yeah, absolutely, over 100 kilometers. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But that's not what standard internet is using.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. But eventually, we will have a quantum internet based on all this, because in order to talk to these quantum computers, you have to send qubits, not just normal bits.

Andrew Huberman:
So this is a race.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, a race. I need to tell you that a lot of people, including this government, that claim that this is not really that relevant or important. But in Europe, for instance, they're really putting a lot of money into that. NATO-

Andrew Huberman:
Why would our government not think it's important?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Because there is a sociological phenomenon here. Cryptography has always been the promise of the mathematicians because they are mathematical functions, like discrete logarithms and so on. They believe the moment they heard about quantum computers, they said, "Oh, we can solve the problem. We can create algorithms, mathematical algorithms, that are going to be even harder to break." They call that post-quantum. But they don't know it's true. The United States government is following this post-quantum because they think it's easier and so on. Already, they published two of these very fancy algorithms. Two students with a laptop were able to decrypt it within a week. So obviously, you cannot prove that no one will ever decrypt these things. Okay. So the cryptographers, they don't like physics. They don't work as physicists, so they say quantum key distribution, that's the name of this thing. It's esoteric, it's not important, and so on. And also, it won't work. Well, they say it's going to work for short distances, about 10 to 20 kilometers. We just published a paper that got tremendous publicity and an award and so on as best paper, that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers. Okay. And the Chinese are sending that from satellites, okay, so impossible to decrypt. Military communications based on these kind of things are impossible to decrypt. So they're very important. But there is a whole group of people that are saying, "No, post-quantum is what we want." And so NIST, the National Institute of, I think Science and Technology, they are really pushing the post-quantum thing. In Europe, it's the opposite. They're really embracing quantum. Denmark, for instance, is very far ahead into these things. NATO just gave them a pile of money to work on quantum and so on. So it all depends. It's a complicated thing because the crypto people are all mathematical people, so they don't care about quantum.

Andrew Huberman:
Is any of this going to be useful for trying to understand, I don't know, how the brain works?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well-

Andrew Huberman:
There's still debate as to whether or not the way that we're thinking about brain function is even the right way. We think about neurons, action potentials, and chemicals. But the physicists, whenever they poke their noses into this stuff, they tend to think about it a little bit differently, or they start to think about, well, state dependence, like the brain that you have at 8:00 a.m. is very different than the brain you have at 2:00 a.m. or 4:00 in the afternoon. Maybe everything's happening differently, and maybe some of this actually gets down to the quantum level. We can't say, "This neuron talks to this neuron, and when they talk in the following way, you get a certain output."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, there are two-

Andrew Huberman:
Is there relevance here?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay, there are two things I want to say. Beware of physicists getting into brains, in brain work. They always end up-

Andrew Huberman:
It's like the new thing now.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, I know.

Andrew Huberman:
Neuroscience swung the doors open.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I was into neuroscience for a while as well.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I think recently neuroscience has made a good move of including people from psychology, computation, even philosophy-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... economics, and biology. Basically, all levels of-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... of analysis.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay, but the other thing you asked about quantum and the brain, there is Roger Penrose, who just got the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He's one of the few people who have very esoteric ideas about the brain being totally quantum, and he's an incredibly brilliant man. He was the advisor of Hawking.

Andrew Huberman:
I heard him on Lex's podcast.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And yeah, he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating, maybe as bound networks as opposed to independent entities and-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But no one really follows it, and I'm not an expert in that. But so Roger Penrose is the one who's pushing this. Many of the physicists who go into brain science are not very clever at doing brain science because I heard a story, I think it was Francis Crick or someone, I was at a conference and he was saying this, that a physicist came to him and said, "I decided to go into brain science." And so he said, "Okay, what have you done?" And the guy says, "I measured the specific heat of the brain. What do I do with it?" Basically.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I think it's good that computationally-minded people have joined neuroscience-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because it was getting too modal, too descriptive.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
That said, I do think that math is so important, but it's often used to intimidate biologists into thinking that their ideas either might not be true or that there's better ideas out there. I will say that when computational neuroscience first started, it seemed like the attempts to model the brain were pretty feeble.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And actually, I'll just say it, they were pretty lame. But now, I think with AI and LLMs-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, that's a whole different story

Andrew Huberman:
... the biologists have had to step back and say, "Hey, these math, physics, engineering, AI types, they have the potential to really evolve the field."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, right.

Andrew Huberman:
At least that's my stance.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. I was at conferences where people say things like, "The brain is a massively parallel machine." And I say, "Wait, are you sure of that?"

Andrew Huberman:
That's a meaningless exercise.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. So I said, "If I show you a row of trees, and I say, 'Tell me how many are they,' do you really take the whole thing and you say 75, or you have to go sequentially?" It's not parallel, it's sequential.

Andrew Huberman:
But LLMs are pretty interesting, right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, yeah. I'm working on them.

Andrew Huberman:
You can take four or five large language models, essentially sort of pseudo-brains, and have them work on the same problem.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That's it.

Andrew Huberman:
It's hard to work with five people in parallel in a way that's coherent, right? You can only talk so much over one another.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. It's very interesting. That's exactly what we're doing now. Years ago, with Jeff Strager, we wrote a paper on the idea of showing how programs collaborating with each other could solve problems very fast that human or others cannot do. And it's a basis of a lot of the work we want to do now, yes. And there are people who are already thinking of putting many of these LLMs together and then see whether or not they do better than a single one or better than a human.

Andrew Huberman:
So you think AI is going to improve life for the typical citizen?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes, because you can use these things in order to do things that were very hard to do before.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I use them, and it's amazing. We just published a paper on hallucinations in LLMs and so on. Because they hallucinate, everyone say, "Oh, they say anything."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But yes. They are very useful. And I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that produce them, like OpenAI and so on. Yes. It's a very important field.

Andrew Huberman:
But 10, 15 years ago, whenever I'd bring up AI, you would chuckle and say, "This stuff is like..."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, the funny thing is that the other day, well, I don't want to name him, one of the managers at Xerox PARC. When I was at PARC, I started playing with the idea of using machine learning to see what they can do, and the AI people at that time said, "That's nonsense. We need to think about logic. How does a brain-" Think how do we do cognitive psychology and so on. We were just doing neural nets. That's exactly it. And the other day, I was meeting with some of these people, and they were saying to me, "We used to laugh at you doing this stuff because we could do only very little." And today it's the rage. Now, the difference between what I was doing and what is being done today is the scale. I don't know if you know that they are now using nuclear power reactors in order to power the data centers.

Andrew Huberman:
I didn't know that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But it's an immense cost of computing.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You have no idea the amount of work that it takes to one trillion tokens in order to get one of these things to work.

Andrew Huberman:
It strikes me you've always been very open-minded and very willing to adopt new technologies.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But it hasn't changed your daily life very much.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Not much at all. I remember early on you showed me the internet, and you said, "Be very careful." And I said, "Why?" You said, "It's like mental chewing gum."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
You chew and chew. Those were your words. You said, "You chew and chew, and at first it tastes good, then it doesn't taste very good at all, then you don't taste it at all, and then you realize there's no nutrition."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I always think about that in terms of phone usage or web foraging behavior.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And you still bike to work, you take a walk in the afternoon or after eating. You've always been incredibly regular with your routine, despite the evolution of all these technologies. You're not the guy in Silicon Valley who's tricked out with all the gear.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, there is another-

Andrew Huberman:
Actually, I've never seen you at a cafe with a laptop.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, sometimes, but there's another aspect to this. As you know, up to five years ago, I spent four years working on the economics of attention and why is it that people attend to things. And I really believe, and I'm not an expert, that there is a tremendous resonance between these machines and our human brains, and they are addictive. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, where I was director in the labs, Meg Whitman, she used to say, "I wake up in the middle of the night to look at my phone." And I know people who do that, and there are members of my family who do that more often than I would like to see them do that.

Andrew Huberman:
You don't do that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. I do it, but I don't have this compulsion to see what's going on. I had a student that he said, "I love spam because at least something is happening."

Andrew Huberman:
Oh my goodness.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He said that.

Andrew Huberman:
Spam?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Spam. He said, "I get spam and I look at it because something's happening," he used to say.

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He's now a very successful financial guy. Stopped doing spam. Brilliant fellow.

Andrew Huberman:
But that's because maybe your internal world is rich enough that you don't-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, but I look at news. I like to look at things. I look at videos. Don't misunderstand me. It's not that I ignore it. But yeah, I like the latest things and so on, especially if they are beautiful and so on. But yeah, I'm not into whatever the latest is and so on. And I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free from-

Andrew Huberman:
VR

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... and gave them to you, and I never used them. Once or twice.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I've used VR in my lab, but I don't want to spend time in VR.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, and also, as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed before this podcast, I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world. Okay? So yeah, digital is interesting and it's fascinating in some ways, but I like things like mechanical watches, cameras that click when you press them, and so on, but not artificially. Okay? So I really like that. I like things that are very classical and so on in many ways, and I enjoy that. I like technology. Don't misunderstand me. And I use it a lot. And I use it, and I do new things with them, and I get patents and so on. But yeah, I'm not a techie guy in the same sense. I like to have an analog life, not a digital life.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Riding a bicycle is analog. Walking is analog. Sitting and meditating is analog. Of course, you can also listen through the internet to a good thing that helps you meditate or go to sleep. Don't misunderstand me. But I don't have this fascination with things and so on. Some people do, but.

Andrew Huberman:
It seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You seem very grounded in the present.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I've never read a single book of science fiction. Most of the people I work with, and I admire them, they all come with ideas from books in science fiction, and they always say, "Did you read this or that?" And I say, "I have no idea." I never liked it. I like to read about real people with real blood and real feelings. Science fiction to me is devoid of that. It's imagining droids doing this or that. I couldn't care less.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I always think that physicists must love science fiction because they-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Never read a single book or looked at it in a movie of science fiction. I couldn't care less. I don't relate to that. I don't think that these people display human-like behavior anyhow. So I'm not saying that it's not interesting to others.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I'm not saying-

Andrew Huberman:
But you're not a futurist.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. Even though they call me a futurist because I always anticipate things.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. But you're not somebody who thinks about what life is going to be like 100 years from now.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. I like to know life is now.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. And I also, as Niels Bohr once said, "It is hard to predict anything, especially the future." Okay? We all predict the past very well. I don't know what's going to go. We've seen things happening, indeed, unbelievable things. The technology that allows you to become such a worldwide known phenomenon is because of the technology. Imagine if you were just declaiming the Roman Senate centuries ago. Very few people would-

Andrew Huberman:
I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now, but with no microphones or cameras.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So yeah. I'm not a futurist, and that's it. People tell me I am because I anticipate things, but not because I imagine a world in which I couldn't care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though Elon Musk thinks it's very important.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think it's a cool project?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I don't know. I want to ask him why. And then he tells me things like, he says things like, "Well, civilization is going to die here. We are going to asphyxiate," and so on. I don't know. Let it happen. I don't know. Just enjoy now.

Andrew Huberman:
You're not worried about the future.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
In that sense, oh, I'm an optimist.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I believe that technology will solve the global warming problem, everything. It's obvious how to solve it. There's nothing very mysterious.

Andrew Huberman:
If you-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Nuclear power is going to do it. Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Once we get over our preconceived notions of nuclear power.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. But very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident. Let's face it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, they need to name it something else.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Maybe, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Like many things that once were thought to be dangerous when renamed-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... turn out to not be so dangerous that when renamed, people are willing to adopt them.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So yeah. I don't worry too much about the future. I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to steer away from the brink, hopefully.

Andrew Huberman:
You don't seem to worry too much generally. You're not a big worrier.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-mm. No.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. You and I are different that way.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
You and I are different that way.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. You worry a lot, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Not if I keep busy.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
These days, a lot less. I think at the transition points between different circumstances and at the transition points between different career things, I think it makes sense to worry. It sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that you reach for the next rung and grab it, right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And not miss. I think there's been elements of uncertainty in my life where I felt like, okay, I'm going to ground the things I can control. But no, I don't stay up at night worrying about things.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Also, I think meditation is profoundly effective at this. Suddenly, you're here, and that's this. The past is the past. You cannot do anything, and the future hasn't arrived, so what the heck?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I really believe that, and it has helped me immensely. There are a few things I'm very proud. I went for my medical checkup a year ago, and the doctor says, "I love to hear you breathe." I said, "What's wrong with my breathing?" He says, "So slow and calm."

Andrew Huberman:
So you got over the white coat syndrome.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Because of meditation. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
You sent me your lab results this morning, so everything looks great.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You've always been regular about exercise.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Not excessive.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
You're never one of the marathoners or the-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... 5:00 a.m. in the pool people, but no.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I tried once to run a marathon, actually. So it wasn't-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It's very common in the area where, in around Stanford, to be pretty extreme about athletics. That was never your thing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Steady, long-distance runner.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. I told you that once.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I'm not a sprinter, yeah. Some people are, and by the way, I admire them immensely.

Andrew Huberman:
You mean in life? We're speaking metaphorically.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, in general.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
There are some people who really can do things incredibly fast, and they move from one thing to the other, and so on. Yeah, I like people who reflect some wisdom. For instance, it's very strange for someone like me, but I see a Buddhist monk, and I feel calmer by just seeing that person.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I don't know. There is something. It's not just the spirituality, the power they have to be here totally and absolutely. It's impressive to me. Some other people say, okay, he has funny robes or something. I like that a lot. My therapist used to tell me that to use meditation to move away from trouble and troubling thoughts is not a good idea. So you have to embrace the world, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But I use it, so it's just to stay calm and to enjoy and to see things for what they are. And I think it's just, yeah. The future is the future. I don't know. Well-

Andrew Huberman:
You can only control what you can control.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. But there are some people who worry all the time about the future.

Andrew Huberman:
Given your understanding of quantum mechanics, relativity, and the real world, and perhaps just generally knowing what you know and experiencing what you've experienced, do you believe in some sort of higher power, organizing force, or let's just be blunt, do you believe in God?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, okay. The word God has a lot of implications, right? I don't believe in a God that keeps track of what you and I are doing at this point. There are too many people and so on. So I don't believe in this notion of an agent there that is somehow knowing what everybody on this planet is doing, and so on. I do feel sometimes, and especially because of the studies I have, and actually from reading people who have been very, very deep, in particular the thoughts of people like Einstein, Heisenberg, and so on, that there seems to be, at times, a sense of an organizing principle in the universe and to learn those rules. So there is this notion, philosophically it's called pantheism, that God is in nature already. Spinoza and all these people studied this. That is very appealing to me, the notion that there is something, that this thing, if it's evolving, it's like an entity. But not an entity that says, "Oh, tomorrow you'll die," or so on. You'll die, you die. There are lots of events that lead to death or to happiness and so on, but not because someone is out there checking. I don't believe there is enough memory to store all this, although today I saw you can buy SanDisk memories, terabytes that are this big.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So I don't believe in God, but it's a matter of belief, not anything else. Unfortunately, these beliefs translate sometimes in complicated action. I do believe that there is a sense of mystery. I once heard, I don't know who said it, but it's a very good sentence that if you listen to Beethoven, say, the man struggled, but it's amazing he was able to create that music. On the other hand, Mozart seems to have been getting the messages from heavens on a daily basis, just wrote it down. So some people are given this connection to something much bigger, and you have access to that through listening to that music, the experiences we have.

Andrew Huberman:
There is this idea out there that consciousness doesn't just exist within our brains, but-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... as sort of a collective network, and things come through us, not just as individuals, but as-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Union thing is a lot of that. I'm very interested in the word spiritual and what it means to see that things transcend our particular needs at any point. But the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny. If you look at any movie, "Braveheart" or whatever, you see one group of warriors has a priest saying, "God is with us." And the other one is about to engage, and says the same thing to the other group. That's a little bit funny, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I think humans and human brains, in particular, are amazing. Amazing what human brains can do. This computer in our heads is-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... spectacular.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And yet it also has limitations. And I think-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... well, put differently, does it make you nervous or worry you that I seem to have an increasing interest in God and religion?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. I think that is a beautiful journey in which you're in. And there are two pieces to this. Provided you don't start using this to somehow spout arguments why people shouldn't do this or that.

Andrew Huberman:
No, no. It's only my own exploration of my own life.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I respect that. I think it's a very important thing. There is an issue here that I read reading Wilson, actually, E. O. Wilson, which he wrote this beautiful book on human nature, and he claims that the religious instinct comes out of a submissive component in us that animals have. Dogs are submissive, and we believe that we need to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king, some deity or something other. That's his theory.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I certainly don't feel any compulsion to be submissive to other humans. I think in knowing the limitations of the human brain and cognition, I don't care how smart, I don't care how successful an individual or a group is, it's very clear that the human brain is limited in parsing the universe that we're in.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Otherwise, we wouldn't continue to have the same issues over and over. Although I do like to think that we're falling forward, we're evolving forward as opposed to devolving as a species. But we tend to repeat a lot of the same mistakes-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely

Andrew Huberman:
... over and over again.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And there's also a technical thing here. We sometimes confuse randomness with premonition or God doing something. Dodging a bullet by turning your head, as our next president did, is an incredible thing. The probability is so, so, so small, but that doesn't mean that there was someone who said, "Turn your head, do it, and so the bullet will pass." We ascribe causality to something that was truly random. It could have also, in another scenario, the same turn of the head would've been to the other side, and this person would be dead. But sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... that we cannot explain, and we say, "Oh, it must be God that made sure that you and I met or that we thought the same thoughts," and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Although, as a biologist who started off as a neurodevelopmental biologist, I think I just had to see, there are two things that changed my understanding of what might be possible. One was Barbara Chapman, my advisor, once treated me to an experiment. It was kind of a funny thing, typical Barbara, you know how nerdy she was. She said, "Are you willing to stay up all night?" And I was like, "Okay. Yep." And she took zebrafish eggs and fertilized them, and I sat for 11 hours with food. I got up to use the restroom, and I watched a zebrafish egg duplicate and become a fish, in real-time with my eyes. Not some movie on YouTube, although that's impressive, too. People can look these up. But to just actually see life emerge from a set of cells through its own organizing principles, all of which can be explained by genes, transcription factors, the physics of the mitotic spindle. Math and biology and chemistry can explain all of it. But there was something truly spectacular about it that seems so non-random because it's not random.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
And then the other one is that, I guess I've had enough experiences with prayer and the consequences of prayer in my real life that I sort of can't get my head around the idea that there's not a god or some sort of organizing force. I can't accept it-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because, yes, there's causality, reverse causality, correlation, and mistaking correlation and causality, but somehow, I like to think I'm grounded in science and reality, but I don't think science can explain it all.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, no. I think that this experience of this spirituality, for instance, I remember, it still happens, spending a night outdoors and looking at the sky. It's an incredible thing, the stars, and you feel so small, and yet there is order to all that. It's not just random stuff. They move according to laws that fortunately we humans were able to discover, which is an amazing thing when you think about it. Dogs did not discover gravity.

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You know? They experience it.

Andrew Huberman:
Certainly not Costello.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Costello was gravity.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. So I really think that there is something to be said about these spiritual experiences, and I really believe that, very importantly, and I listen to people talk. I recently have been looking at some stuff that C. S. Lewis, he was a man who was studying the sagas and the mythology of the Vikings and so on, and eventually became a devout Christian, thinking that this was the only answer, because all religions have the same element. So I understand that. I respect it. I've experienced that at times in my life. But when I think seriously about it, I think that the moment, we have this computer, and we can get glimpses of all this, but I don't believe there is this notion, and no one can prove to me that there is someone there organizing my life minute by minute or second by second.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I don't believe that. I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and randomness, beautiful ones, okay. And Having you and Lara as children is a fantastic randomness in my life.

Andrew Huberman:
Hopefully it wasn't too random.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. In the sense that children that come unhealthy, whatever. It's a very impressive thing.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. The number of things that have to organize to create-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Exactly

Andrew Huberman:
... a healthy child is-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it's truly a miracle.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. True.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. But a lot of it is random, too.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
The same set of parents can produce two different set of children, too. Okay. That's a very important-

Andrew Huberman:
Well, Lara and I are pretty different.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, absolutely, but in very beautiful ways, too. So, neither of you does behave or conducts a life that I would be unhappy, or your mother would be unhappy with.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But going back to this, I believe that indeed spirituality is important. I have a lot of access to that through classical music. There are times that I really believe that is it. I can get very emotional listening to music. Very emotional. My wife always notices that when I do that, and I think that then you're having access to something very different. Of course, it can be explained physiologically by all sorts of resonances and so on. But who cares?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You know.

Andrew Huberman:
You mentioned that you can peer into the future with ideas that you're working on, and yet you don't get too far ahead. You're not thinking like 100 years from now-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... what's it going to look like? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Sometimes. Because I left my family when I was still very young, I always had a certain nostalgia for things. Okay. I became friend with a very impressive guy in France, Claude Jopart. I think he was the director of the Geophysics Institute, and both of us had very similar parents in different, well, French and Argentina, but still, and similar educations. And I have sometimes a certain nostalgia that is almost melancholy about the way we grew up, and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Melancholy.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
A little bit of that.

Andrew Huberman:
But I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina. You would have 10, 15 cousins over for lunch every Sunday.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. It was very-

Andrew Huberman:
That doesn't sound melancholy.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, but there were moments, moments of loneliness, moments of times where I felt very misunderstood. I had, unfortunately, a very punishing mother. But I still remember her, and I think about her in ways that are not necessarily always very happy. I was looking at photos a while ago, and there are pictures of her that is she's smiling, coming out of the Pacific Ocean in Carmel. She took a walk, and so on. But I reflect back in the past in that sense. And sometimes, I'm asked, "How did you grow up?" My wife, being Danish, she grew up in a very different way from upper middle class Argentines. So, we reflect on that, the kinds of childhoods we had and so on. But not in the sense that, "Oh, I wish I had that now."

Andrew Huberman:
No regrets.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, not many.

Andrew Huberman:
That's good.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
There is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else, which is if I look at my family, my brother stayed, produced family, children, grandchildren, and so on. I came here, and I produced children, grandchildren, and there are going to be two diverging branches of the family. That doesn't mean-

Andrew Huberman:
We still get together. We got together last year for your birthday.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. No, I know. That's what is so important to me. Yes. But I think about it sometimes. And when I go back and I see their lives, very similar to what I had or different perhaps, there is a certain sense of thinking about the past. But I also realize that if I didn't take the steps I took, I would be as miserable as some of my old friends that are really struggling even to find meaning in what they do, or even surviving economically. So, I was really lucky.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, so was I, because I wouldn't have existed because you wouldn't have met Mom.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That's true, too. Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe you would've, but-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... but I'm grateful I didn't grow up in Buenos Aires. I love the city.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I second that.

Andrew Huberman:
I love the country.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I don't feel that-

Andrew Huberman:
I couldn't have done any of the things I've done in South America, given maybe, but the landscape was just completely different.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, I go there, and after a week, I want to come back. Yeah. Definitely.

Andrew Huberman:
So you love this country.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I love this country. I feel very much part of this country, and very grateful to what this country has done for me, for my family, and that includes you and your sister, okay, and my wife.

Andrew Huberman:
When did you become a citizen?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, many years ago. And I really did it consciously. There were practical things, but no, I really believe in it. I really believe it is an incredible country and gives incredible opportunities to people. As Elon says, Elon Musk, I'm also an immigrant and very happy to be one.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. You've always been a patriot.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely. And on the other hand, as I said, Argentina is complicated. I go there and a lot of smells and things that bring memories that are amazing.

Andrew Huberman:
Food's not bad either.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
The food's not bad.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. But it's also the whole atmosphere, and the first two, three days are an incredible experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on. But after a while, I also see a darker side to it. I must tell you that on the other hand, my country-in-law, Denmark, is also a country that I like immensely. There's nice people, and pleasant and soft, very soft, especially in summer.

Andrew Huberman:
But the Danes are also strong people.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The average Dane is so smart. I think the high school education there must be among the best in the world.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. There is a notion of proficiency. People are proficient at what they do. Yeah. You go to a store, you have a problem at the airline or whatever, you'll get someone who really knows how to solve it. But it's a small society, very homogeneous, tremendous sense of humor, which I enjoy. And it's very soft. People enjoy life. They have notions like slow food movements, and things of that sort. So, I like it. I could not live there because it's a very homogeneous way of behaving. The Lutheran ethic is there. They're not religious, but they're Lutheran. So, I feel very comfortable in Europe and so on. But I like being here. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I feel like our family now includes so many different nationalities and religions-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and backgrounds and philosophies and political stances.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, it's good too, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's great. It's starting to look like the UN with some extra.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity. It was incredible.

Andrew Huberman:
That's good.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. So that was also good to be, as its child, to hear these arguments about politics and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I hear a few of those now.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Arguments about politics. We won't get into politics. One thing that I did want to say, however, is that I remember a long time ago, and I'm certain because I wrote it in my journal, you said, "Politically incorrect views are often right." Is that true still?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Still true for you, I should say?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes, absolutely. Because this has only to be judged in time. Okay? I think that the issue of political incorrectness is some kind of a mob behavior that says you should think like us. Okay? We should be able to express our views with respecting others and so on, and we should be respected for that. I think that this whole notion that others are telling you what to think or not to think is a little bit complicated. And I must say something which I hope it doesn't get me in trouble with my Danish side of the family or friends. Societies like the Scandinavian societies that are extremely uniform in thinking, the word should is used all the time.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. You should do this. You shouldn't do that. Good that you did it. They enforce behavior in a very, very particular way. It's not a herding instinct, but there is a very, very strict Lutheran tradition of telling you what you should and you shouldn't do. So I know very few people, and I've been going to Denmark for many, many years, that really have iconoclastic ideas that are away from the mean, and they're considered odd.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay? Very few, including the physicists, and they have fantastic school of physics there. Niels Bohr was there. So it's a society that conformity is the issue there, right? So on the other hand, I think that it's good to think differently. And there's a man, perhaps you heard of him. I admire him. He died. Freeman Dyson. He was on a level with Feynman and Gell-Mann, by the way. He used to have very strange ideas, too. He used to say, "Global warming, what's wrong with it? The Sahara is going to be a garden." And people go, "What?" Yeah. The Sahara Desert will become a garden. People will be able to eat all that food.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I think people hear that, but then they counter it against these very heart-wrenching pictures of polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking, this kind of thing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
There are more polar bears today than when Mr. Al Gore said that we're going to die.

Andrew Huberman:
Listen, I'm not going to argue climate change with you because I have no knowledge there.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, I'm giving a data point.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, no, I'm not countering. I'm just saying, this is getting very intense on the internet now because the arguments on both sides seem pretty strong-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... at least as they're presented. So who's right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, the question is what can we do about it? That's the issue, and I think that technology and wisdom are going to solve it. I think so. I really believe that very strongly. I'm an optimist when it comes to that. But when I'm talking about being politically incorrect, it's this idea of saying things that a group of people say you shouldn't be saying or thinking those thoughts. And the question is, can we debate those things rationally or nicely, respecting people's beliefs? Okay? And I believe in that very strongly, and I think being politically incorrect is a way of saying you're smiling at them, but it's okay. Why not? Who said that we shouldn't be like that? I remember encountering the first libertarians when I was already working as a physicist, and they were saying to me, "Why are we afraid of the Russians?" I say, "Well, what, do you think they're going to invade the United States? Can you imagine Russia invading? If they invade, how are they going to control us?" They had these arguments. They were very funny arguments. Why do we need an army? Why do we need taxes? And I really thought that was so provocative and so interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you consider yourself a libertarian?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
In many ways, I like the idea of liberty. I believe very strongly in it. This country was founded on that. I think that our founding fathers really believed in it, and I admire them for that. Reading Jefferson and so on is really inspiring to me. I think that some of the political movement is a little bit odd. They always end up with political candidates that go nowhere and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Why do you think that is?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
Why do you think that is?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I think that they're-

Andrew Huberman:
If they're so rational, they're often among the smartest people in the room.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
But they are not strategically smart.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I've met at times libertarians that think incredible thoughts, and they're living in Silicon Valley, and they're poor. Even though they are the ones who are supposed to know.

Andrew Huberman:
Some are poor.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Some are not. But I'm saying it's very interesting. They choose presidential candidates no one ever heard of.

Andrew Huberman:
I think many of them are on the spectrum in a way that doesn't allow them to get into the minds of other people in a way that would allow them to convince other people-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... about their arguments.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
A lot of politics, as we know, is show business. In this recent election, it was all posturing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It was all about grabbing emotion.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It was not about logic. It was about emotion.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. I have several of my people that they put all their money to freeze themselves.

Andrew Huberman:
You going to cryo yourself?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
My dad and I have had this running joke for a lot of years because someone we know very well, and several people we know well, have set aside significant amounts of money to have their heads or entire bodies frozen on the idea that they're going to be brought back later, Han Solo style. You've always laughed at this idea.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, but not only that, there's a colleague of mine at Stanford who accuses me of being friends with a guy that is like that. And I told this guy, I said, "He thinks that you're a bad influence on me." And the guy said, "Well, tell him that we are the ones who are going to come back and do what we believe."

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
He's going to be gone.

Andrew Huberman:
You're not interested in-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... living to be 200?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
It's not the issue. These people are interested in living for another thousand years, so when they wake up, they see how the world looks. They read science fiction, so they are very interested to know what the world looks like once they wake up. So okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, there are people in the health space that are trying to not die. Brian Johnson and others.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That's a different story.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. What's your thought on trying to live to be 150 or something like that?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, if you can live, the issue is not the age, it's the conditions of your body and mind, okay? That's the issue. I had the misfortune and fortune of having two parents that lived very long lives. One My father was incredibly lucid until the end. My mother had everything, every dementia and complications that came from being an anorexic all her life, and so on. So my father enjoyed being lucid until the end. And so he didn't take care of himself physically so well. So the idea is, if you live up to 100 or 150 or 200, and you can still do the things you enjoy in life, is one thing. To be like my mother, who couldn't even comprehend what was in front of her when you put a cup of tea, then it's very sad, but it can happen at the age of 35. So yeah, I'm not into a race to live forever.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I want to live healthily. I want to enjoy life. Enjoyment is the most important piece. What's the point of being tethered to tubes all over the place, flat on a bed, and you say, "Oh, I made another year of my life." That's not really a life, at least for me.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you worry about and/or wish for anything for me, for Laura?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes. To be super happy people. No, I don't want to use the word happy. I want to see you joyful.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Joy. Joy is more important than happiness.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Joy is a state of mind. Happiness is, okay, yeah, I said a list of things I want to have, and I have them, and I smile a lot. Joyfulness is a sense of being in yourself, and I would like that. You two are very different. Laura lives much more in the moment than you do, for reasons-- Okay. It's her view of the world.

Andrew Huberman:
It's her demeanor.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
It's her way.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Her demeanor. It's very good. I mean, sometimes-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, Laura's focused on what she's going to do this weekend.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm focused on what I'm going to do this weekend, next week, the next month, and for the next eight months.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, and I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend, and that's it, and everything else is going to come to you. I believe, and now I'm speaking in a way that is more paternal than anything else. You have had a charmed life, and everything came to you since you were very little, and you exhibited behaviors, and so on, that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from the very beginning. It's not that you were a genius at chess or Rubik's Cube or anything. I know some kids that are like that. But there was something in there. And so I think that learning to just relax and rest, but it's part of your behavior. Since you were little, you had these problems. Okay. I used to put you on my lap and say, "It's going to be fine," and you say, "Well, what if I cannot do my homework?" Okay. But you could.

Andrew Huberman:
Or even my stuffed animals.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. The same. That gave you tremendous-

Andrew Huberman:
Needed to be organized in a particular way.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, it gave tremendous-

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I probably have-- Remember I had the grunting tic?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I probably-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Drove us nuts. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I probably have a little bit of an OCD-type thing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Might be it.

Andrew Huberman:
Not diagnostically significant.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
But when I bite down into something that I'm pursuing, it's very hard for me to think about anything else.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, I know. Well, we talked about it when you were at Berkeley once. You told me that you were starting to run, but you wanted to run like everybody else was running, I don't know how many miles. And it's just-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, no, I heard there was a guy who had been in the department, Randy Nelson. He's now a professor in Ohio. Somebody just in passing said, "Oh, yeah, Randy worked 80 hours a week-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... or 90 hours a week." And I was like, "95 hours."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, I remember that.

Andrew Huberman:
But what's interesting is I'm not a naturally competitive person.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
It was just this idea, I've tended to want to know-- And I've since stopped this, but there was a long time where I wanted to figure out what my body and mind were capable of.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I just wanted to see how high is that ceiling. And it was only when I almost suffocated on a scuba dive or when I was working to the point of exhaustion or-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then I also realized that I published a number of papers to get tenure. I didn't need that many, but I enjoyed every one. It's not like I'm not having fun.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right. But this i-

Andrew Huberman:
I'm having fun.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. This idea of pushing oneself to limits, the question is why? I think there is so much to enjoy in a regular life and with the things that we have already.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
We have to work to get them-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... the way we want. But I don't think that worrying for the sake of worrying or-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... just worrying.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I don't tend to worry. Well, you know what changed that for me in a major way? I've had moments. I think I can recall, I have a favorite best day of my life moment. I won't share it here, so it's not relevant right now. But Costello helped bring me into the moment.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He would do these things that I would delight in that were just so simple, like the way he would fall over or something.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I think that having another creature there that is very much in the moment brings you into the moment.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And you were very connected to it, too. I think that if you were connected to someone that has that property of bringing you down and so on-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... you will start enjoying it. I-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, the people I've te- I've had amazing partners, as you know. Some less than amazing, but many amazing partners, and they tended to be also into the future, focused on what's not quite there yet. But I must say, I think women in general do it better than men, that they're better at grounding to the present.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, it depends.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I think that my wife tends to be more anxious than I am about the future.

Andrew Huberman:
So maybe it's not gender-related.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, in trying to sort of tell her that she shouldn't worry so much, I think that I also suddenly reflect, what am I doing here? And I try to also slow down myself.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I think you're someone who's running from one thing to the other, to say colloquially. But it would be nice if you said, "Okay, I'm fine."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You have a podcast that is doing well. You don't have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years.

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Five years will arrive.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't think out that far. I don't think about the career piece. I often don't have a plan. I know what we're going to do this year. I don't know what we're going to do after that. But professionally, I think part of it was science. We're talking about a lot of things, but for many years, from the time I squared my life away and when I turned 19, it was like, okay, I'm going to get things right now. There's always been these milestones. You're going to finish your undergraduate degree. I did a master's. Then you did a PhD, then the postdoc, then you need to get tenure. I think the academic system ... was a system of two to five-year bursts, like sprinting marathons in many ways, to try and grab the next thing to get to the next level. And there was a lot of uncertainty for a long time.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think I'm finally now coming into a place of certainty, feelings of like, "Oh, things are good, and they've gone great."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But it's hard.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Oh, of course it's hard.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's hard.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Especially if you have that kind of temperament. Yes. And I think you need to train yourself almost to-- I just had a set of the words that are-- It's a matter of bringing elegance into your life, almost. To live it in a way that is elegant, is nice in itself. That is important. One of the things I learned, living with a Dane, Danes don't like you to eat standing. They sit. They set a table, and they light a candle and it's very nice.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
It creates a pace.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, the ritual.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
The ritual. Rituals are very important. And also, the other thing that is very important, and I discovered, is to have something to look forward to. You cannot just wake up one day and say, "And now what?" There has to be something.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. That's important. We all have that.

Andrew Huberman:
So Rogan talks about this thing about, because he has a podcast, he does four episodes a week. Plus, he's an announcer of the UFC, he has his comedy career, he has three kids, he's in a happy marriage, and he's really into working out and all this. And I heard something recently, it was actually the forward to Cameron Haynes's book. I was listening to it. And it was amazing, he said, "You have to approach your life, no matter how busy or how simple, as a kind of work of art." You can't just think of it as daily life.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
You have to have some macroscopic view of this so that you know where to put things.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Well-

Andrew Huberman:
And it's a lot of what you're saying as well

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... what I say, elegance. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Life has to have elegance. Otherwise, it's just disjoint moments. And sometimes it would be like that, and it can be very creative too. But most of the idea is to really get into something. I personally think that when you describe me as being very steady or whatever, it sounds very boring, too, for that matter. Right?

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know. There's a beauty in steadiness because from places of steadiness, you can take good risks.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, right.

Andrew Huberman:
Right?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And I think that my mind is not in a steady state. But I don't have this notion I have to see things. Everybody's talking about something, I have to see it. I never felt like that, no. I like to see things, don't misunderstand me, but it's very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I like them to do.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, you don't seem to need to go on jungle adventures-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-mm

Andrew Huberman:
... or ice skate across Antarctica.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
You've never been one for the kind of wild outing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, the wild outing is here.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That's my wild outing, yeah. I can have very wild thoughts about things that I would like. Sometimes they're totally wrong and so on, but yeah. In a funny way, I am a little bit of what the French call an armchair philosopher or whatever. There are these people who write articles about Africa without ever having left France or something of that sort. So I'm not like that. But I don't necessarily crave this physical adventure for the sake of adventure. I like beautiful things. And I don't mind repeating the same beautiful thing every year if necessary, going vacation to the same places and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, you like to go back to the same places.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, there is a difference between tourism, where you see new things and so on. I like that. There's also the idea of vacation, where you just sit and enjoy what you have.

Andrew Huberman:
I confess, I've not ever done it.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well-

Andrew Huberman:
And you know this about me. I've never taken a vacation

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
... you should go to the summer house in Denmark. You can spend a week there just enjoying it. That's it. I don't know if I show you pictures, from the window, they see the deer in the garden. They just sit there. It's nice. So it's nice. You cannot spend a life doing that. I'm not a monk.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay? I'm not a meditator that will spend hours on this. But it's nice to rest. It's very important, I think.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. And the rituals are important to you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Very important, yes. Yeah. The rituals have a, it's also very reassuring because then you know it's predictable, right? You don't want a totally unpredictable life all the time. That's why people create rituals.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
You know?

Andrew Huberman:
You, early on, taught me about etiquette.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's something that, years later, I think it was probably in the mid-'90s, for some reason, we were at the movies together, and we saw some people at the movies, and they were wearing their bathroom slippers. And more or less their pajamas to the movies. And I'll never forget, you grabbed my arm. You didn't grab it forcefully, but you grabbed me, you said, "You see that?" And I said, "Yeah." And you said, "People are coming to the movies in their pajamas." I said, "Yeah." And you said, "That's the beginning of the end to any society."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I thought you were joking. But it's something I've thought about a lot. You also said, and I'll never forget, "You're always better off being overdressed-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... because then at least your class that you're speaking to or your hosts-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... et cetera, they know that you took them seriously."

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I don't think we really appreciate etiquette. As Americans especially, we've somehow confused freedom of choice with discarding etiquette.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It's not something that you hear discussed very much, but what about etiquette? And what-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, there are many components. I think the most important one is a societal one. One of the things that I like, for instance, if you go to England, how polite people are. Politeness is a virtue. And politeness, the higher the social class, the higher the demand to be polite. It's behavior. It's being nice to people. It's understanding where they are. And associated with that, there are codes. Some of them are behavioral, some of them are dress codes. I had a brilliant Italian economist working with me, and now he's on the East Coast, who told me he went to a wedding in Italy after living in the United States, and he went to his cousin's wedding, and his uncle said, "You show no respect. You're not wearing cufflinks." He said, "Well, but my shirt is all buttoned." "No, no, go home and get cufflinks because you're showing lack of respect for not dressing the proper way to this wedding." So I think that there are expectations that people have about certain kinds of behavior. If you look at, say, the pictures of what's going on now in Washington and so on, you notice that Mr. Elon Musk, who's always in a T-shirt that says, "Let's go to Mars," suddenly he's wearing a tuxedo because he's now part of a group of people that are behaving like government officials should behave. You don't go in sandals and shorts.

Andrew Huberman:
But Silicon Valley is famous for the flip-flops and the hoodie.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right, because the problem is that people confuse the style with the message. They think that because you wear a hoodie because Mark Zuckerberg was wearing hoodies makes you brilliant. Okay? And I think that the issue of dress codes elicit a certain sense of behavior in people, as you said. How would you feel if you went on a first date with someone that comes in her slippers and her bathrobe and says, "Let's go to the movies?"

Andrew Huberman:
It's not happened yet.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So what I'm saying is you don't have to overdo it. That's another issue. And you have to also conform to the roles of the society. I noticed, for instance, that on the East Coast, people dress much more properly than on the West Coast. You go to New York and you see men wearing suits and ties. You don't see that here, perhaps in LA, not in the Bay Area, ever.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. One thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... men keep their jackets and ties on-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Of course

Andrew Huberman:
... the whole night. I've always kept my jacket and tie on the entire night. In the United States, it's almost like moments after people arrive at any party in a suit, they start undressing.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Right. Why did they dress up then?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. So that's my view. So I am not necessarily someone that advocates wearing a tie when I go to work and so on, but I really believe that there are codes of conduct that sort of reflect many things. And you're projecting a message, right? The idea of a hoodie at one point or the other, first of all, was herding behavior. Everybody had to wear one because then you're cool or whatever. Okay. In adolescence, I understand it. That's what you do as an adolescent. You do what others do. But as you grow up, you can also signal who you are by the way you dress and you behave.

Andrew Huberman:
What do you think about the discourse on platforms like X, where you can see a mix, including a lot of academics and high-level thinkers acting kind of like teenagers?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, okay. They want to be popular. That's all. They want to draw attention.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. This is kind of a new thing. I won't name names, but some people who are considered some of the smartest people in the world, their discourse on social media is like they wouldn't last two seconds on the schoolyard. They'd get hit in the face. They seem weird, like grown men acting kind of like teenagers.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Okay. Well, they have a problem because they want to be thought of as young. That's a whole different story, okay? That's a different story. Now, having said what I said, I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether or not the rules that say how you should dress to do one thing or the other do not operate for you, and then you decide to be very different. There are many people who are like that and like to be iconoclastic. I heard many stories about, we were talking about Richard Feynman, who actually made a case, Mary Gelman used to say that about him, to be so different that people will talk about him because he was very interested in people telling stories about him.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Bongo drumming naked on the roof.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
Not brushing his teeth.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Exactly. All that. Okay. But he was very good at drawing attention. Okay, that's fine. You can also draw attention by dressing very nicely. It's all a matter of-- I was reflecting, we go to the symphony in San Francisco regularly, and we are donors and so on. Sometimes you go to a concert, and it's an amazing thing what you see there. Some people nicely dressed, some people dressed as if they just woke up, didn't have time to get dressed and got there, and they're whatever in their hoodie.

Andrew Huberman:
But do you think that, going back to the initial ping of the question, do you think that we have societally gone, that we're sort of drifting towards, for lack of a better word, chaos? Social interaction chaos.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, I think the pendulum will swing again.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
The other day, I was talking to someone, reading actually, that suddenly, not only in New York but in the Midwest, men are starting to wear jackets and ties, not just for work. Okay. They go on dates like that. So it's a pendulum. It goes back and forth, back and forth. I don't think we're going to end up in a time when you have to wear tails to have a breakfast or something. I think only the aristocrats used to do that. But I think that it's an issue of how we perceive the world through the eyes of television and movies, okay?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
If movies start showing that everybody's dressed whatever, people are going to do the same thing.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
If movies start showing-- The trends that we see in movies are the trends that essentially society follows, okay?

Andrew Huberman:
Definitely.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So I don't think we're going to chaos. It's going to revert.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
California is a particular place because it has always been a place where people, in order to feel free, they had to dress differently, and who cares, and all that stuff. But it's not everywhere.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It's kind of interesting that now counterculture is conservativism.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. We're back to that. The anti-war group is the more conservative. Anyway, it's-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Also, it's interesting how Americans are fascinated with English aristocracy and traditions. I've been to high table dinner at King's College in Cambridge twice. Everybody dresses properly. They wear gowns, and the fellows are sitting at a top table, and everybody else. And people love it, and we like to see that in the movies.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it's theater

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's academic theater, a little bit of pomp and circumstance-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but it's theater.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And it's nice. Well, we have the same thing on commencement traditions and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, no parent wants to go to a graduation that's kind of a free-for-all.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
They want to see some order.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
And I think that there is a place for that. And some people will-- There are designers and so of clothing and so on that exploit this nostalgia for that kind of elegant world, Ralph Lauren and so on. It's always 1960s fancy club-type clothing and so on.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Do you plan to ever retire?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I don't know what it means. If retire, no, because I'm not a postal worker. I'm not a cook at a restaurant that eventually says, "Okay, I cooked it long enough that I collect my retirement and go home." I have a mind that it works, and I need an environment where that mind can thrive, and I need an environment where the-- For one year, when I left Hewlett-Packard, I took a course in general activity and so on. But I was really a bit idle. So suddenly, I'm in a context where people have problems and so on that I really like to listen to. There's a social component to work, as you know. So retirement means what you're a postal working. One day you stop delivering mail and you stay home watching the paint dry, and that's not me. Okay. So to me, I'm working, and I enjoy it, and the day that will come that I cannot enjoy it, I'll stop. And I think that, again, goes with this issue of getting bored with things that you don't like to do because you've done it for a long time. No, I enjoy my life. But I don't think in terms of age. I'll say something. The CEO of my company, he's a great guy, Phil McKinney, said, "Bernardo, I don't work for the money here." I said, "I don't either." I mean, I like to get paid, but if I don't like it, I'll walk, and I can do that.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
So it's not that I'm doing this for the income. That's what I'm trying to say.

Andrew Huberman:
Seems like you've never pursued money for its own sake.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. But-

Andrew Huberman:
Nor did you ever encourage me to pursue money for its own sake.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No. But as my cousin, the physicist, used to say, "Money doesn't bring happiness, but it points in the right direction."

Andrew Huberman:
I would say money doesn't bring happiness, but it can buffer stress.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right, and it allows you to have the things you want to have, and you don't have to... Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. I think money is an important aspect of our lives, having it and so on. I lived for many years as a graduate student with no money, and it was very painful, I'll tell you. Sometimes I didn't eat dinner because I didn't have any money. So I like having money to do the things that I like, but I don't work for money. Many people say, "Well, I invented so many things. I could have started some of these companies and make a lot of money up." I don't regret that at all.

Andrew Huberman:
The ultra-rich people that I know who are happy are still working every day.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Right, because beyond a certain amount of money, you still have to brush your teeth like everybody else. Okay, you can dream of having 150 toothbrushes, but so what?

Andrew Huberman:
Right. And you can only eat so many steaks.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
That we all cover. The question is what do you do with your life? Now, you want to travel, well, you can travel. It's nice if you can travel in better ways than being an undergrad with a backpack, although it can be adventurous.

Andrew Huberman:
I had fun backpacking-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, okay

Andrew Huberman:
... on a limited budget where-

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... part of the joy of traveling that way is you're thrown into street-level interactions.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I did too.

Andrew Huberman:
And use hostels and things like that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, I went through Europe like this.

Andrew Huberman:
I wouldn't change that for anything.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, I went through Europe as a graduate student. I quit everything. I went to Europe in winter, and it was quite an adventure.

Andrew Huberman:
In the winter?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
In the winter. It was horrendous. I had very little money. I stayed in places in Paris, where the lady in the little hotel would turn off the light if I turn it on in the middle of the night. It was awful. And yet-

Andrew Huberman:
To save energy?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. And it was very funny. But I met people that were interesting, and I engaged. Every once in a while, I hear from one or two of those people I met years ago on trains. I went by train everywhere. I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter.

Andrew Huberman:
Everything seems to lead back to Denmark.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, it's a nice country.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, now you have a Danish wife.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, so-

Andrew Huberman:
And have for a long time.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Huh?

Andrew Huberman:
And have for a long time.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah, many times. Yeah. It's a very different contrast to Europe, this Central Europe and so on. Northern Europe, Denmark, Sweden, Norway is a very special kind of country and people. Yeah, I like them a lot. Life is very easy there.

Andrew Huberman:
I like Scandinavia.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. It's very nice. Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Good-natured people.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Good saunas.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yeah. Everything, yes.

Andrew Huberman:
And sunshine, at least in the summer.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
In the summer only, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Any plans for the next couple of years? Anything that we should put on the calendar, make sure that we get in?

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
No, because I cannot plan that well. I don't plan. I just-

Andrew Huberman:
Me either. Maybe I inherited it from you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, I just move. I'm intuitive. I'm very intuitive about these things. I suddenly see something in all this quantum stuff. I don't know. I started hearing about it. I talked to a brilliant guy who was in my lab, and I said, "Hey, Gene, dude, what do you think about this?" He said, "Oh, sounds interesting. Let's do it." And we're doing it. I am lucky that I get paid to do that. But no, I don't have plans like that. We would like to organize our life a little bit differently now that we have a summer house in Denmark and so on. I still plan to travel there. I like Europe a lot, but I don't know if I can live there. I like Switzerland a lot. I want to go to Argentina every year, and I feel very close to my family. That's very important. We are all going for an event there. I hope that you can join us if you can. So those things are very important to me. But no, I don't have plans for anything. I don't know. I like to be surprised.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, Dad, I want to extend a A real sense of gratitude from me, from everyone listening and watching, although you may argue that they're not going to be interested. This has been our back and forth over the last months as I've tried to convince you to do this podcast. I can assure you that they were, they are very interested. Your story is a really unique one, and I can say that both as your son, but also as somebody who's sat across from scientists from all different domains and backgrounds, not just neuroscientists. I also really appreciate your ability to explain complicated things in ways that at least we can start to get an understanding, because these are hard concepts.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think what comes through so clearly is that somehow you've been able to grab these high-level, really abstract concepts and work with them and try and understand them, but you've also been able to lead a life where you're really grounded in the day-to-day and in reality. And I have to say, your wish for me and for Lara, and I assume for everyone else, to be joyful.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I'll work on that. And also, I must say it just hit me like square in the face during this discussion that I get such peace, and I can really focus on being joyful knowing that you're joyful. It's so clear you have a joyful life at so many levels, and that you've pursued what you wanted to do over and over. And some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were going to get into our issues and things like that. I'll just briefly say that, yeah, we've had our ups, we've had our downs, and we've certainly landed up, and much, much higher than we ever would had we not had all of that.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And as I told you last year around this time on your birthday when we all got together to celebrate, we're not just good, we're beyond good. So anything that comes up around that, I want to just go on record saying that that's water under the bridge and I don't ever think about it. All I think about are the incredible gifts that you've given me about curiosity and pursuing my curiosity, about putting new footprints on untread beaches, the early discussions around the excitement that science can bring. I remember all of it. I really remember all of it, and in immense detail. And I love your stories about scientists, both how they soar and also how human they are, and how they're fallible like the rest of us. So there's not a day that goes by where I don't thank God, because I do believe in God, that you're my father, that you and Mom created me and Lara, and that I've had the life that I have, and that I continue to have the life that I have. So I just want to thank you for the example and the nurturing, and for coming here. There aren't words.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Well, thank you. You know how much I love you. I think that these words are the biggest gift that I get, and I think any father listening to that, to his son or daughter saying that would also feel the same way, or a mother for that matter. It's a very fulfilling feeling to have that notion that you feel that you owe so much to what you got. And also the fact that you've done incredibly well and the kind of person you are. Yeah. So I wish you all the wisdom that you need in order to just go through life the way you're going. But I think that it's nice, too, also that we are sort of on the same wavelength on many things. In you, I see more of a reflection of what I always wanted to be as well. So that's easier in a way. Perhaps it's because fathers and sons have that.

Andrew Huberman:
We certainly relate.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, thank you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
I love you.

Dr. Bernardo Huberman:
I love you, too. You know that.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. To learn more about his work, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep, to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." If you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, that's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, our Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three-page PDFs. Those one to three-page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol. We also have protocols for optimizing your sleep, dopamine, and much more. Again, all available, completely zero cost. Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab, scroll down to Newsletter, and provide your email. We do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.