How Your Immune System Works & How to Improve It | Dr. Max Krummel

My guest is Dr. Matthew (Max) Krummel, PhD, professor at UCSF and one of the world’s leading immunologists. We discuss how your immune system works and how sleep, emotions, and even memories shape immune function. We also explore thymus function, its role in autoimmunity, and its potential role in combating cancer. And we discuss how the type and timing of immunization can impact health. This episode provides an actionable framework for understanding how your immune system works, which ought to benefit people of all ages and health statuses. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Max Krummel (00:02:18) Immune System, Immunotherapy (00:08:36) Illness, Childhood & Immune System (00:13:02) Aging & Immunity, DNA Mutations (00:18:36) Sponsors: Joovv & Eight Sleep (00:21:14) Self vs Non-Self Recognition, Aging, Cancer; Immune Surveillance (00:30:11) Cancer, Immune System, Age & Measuring Change (00:35:57) Thymus, T Cells; Aging & Cancer (00:42:13) Reproduction, Aging & Immune System; Basic Research (00:47:28) Sleep & Illness Susceptibility (00:52:55) Sponsor: AG1 (00:54:08) Umbilical Cord Banking; Organoids, CAR T Cells, Thymus (01:02:57) Scientific Curiosity, Failures, & Discovery (01:13:14) Spatial Biology & Immune Cells; Memory & Immune State; Stress, Meditation (01:25:00) Sponsor: Function (01:26:37) Mindset; Tissue Engineering, Peptides, Systems Biology (01:34:25) Immunizations in Childhood and Beyond (01:39:37) Pharmaceutical Companies, Public Distrust (01:49:22) Disease Risk, Immunity; Autism, Flu, (01:58:56) Biological Resilience, Cancer; Computational Research (02:08:02) Autoimmune Conditions, Asthma, IBD (02:13:34) Autoimmunity & Genetic Diversity Benefits (02:17:11) Science Communication, Max's Substack (02:24:07) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A famous immunologist in the 1970s drew this parallel in wartime and said in World War II, submarines had two sets of books. One of them was a book that gave them the sound profile of all the US submarines. And so they could listen to the whir of the engines. And if they heard a whir of the engine that had the certain cycle of a general motor's engine, they wouldn't fire. So that's the sort of like self, I know what self is. And then they had another book that was the engine sounds of the known diesel engines of whatever engines of the German submarines. And if they heard that, then they absolutely would fire. And that's a self versus non-self discrimination problem, just like the immune system has to do. But what I bring you with it, aging, is this concept that as you get

• 0:40Speaker 00

  weirder and different, your body is getting like more complex, then those books, you know, start to have every possible, possibly every possible permutation of every biomolecule could be made by your body at that point. And then a virus doesn't necessarily have anything unique about it.

• 0:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 1:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Max Krummel, a professor and leading expert in immunology and cancer biology at the University of California, San Francisco. Today, we discuss your immune system, how it works, what it needs to function at its best, and how things like aging vaccines sleep, and even your thoughts and emotions shape immune function. For instance, most everybody knows that being sleep deprived makes you more prone to getting sick. But why? Meaning mechanistically, why? Well, it turns out there's a specific set of cells that need to migrate in a particular way during sleep. And we talk about how you can reinforce that process in ways other than sleep. We also discuss incredible findings

• 1:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  that certain brain states and memories can be associated with an immune system status you had when those memories formed, and evidence that just recalling those memories, thinking about where you were, what you were feeling at those times when the memories formed, can activate your immune system in the same way, which is remarkable. We also have a very candid discussion about vaccines and medications more broadly. You'll notice that Dr. Krummel is incredibly balanced throughout today's conversation, and yet he's also willing to state his views very clearly. So it provides a very rich discussion about vaccines and all the rest. Indeed, thanks to Max's incredible breadth of understanding of immunology and much more, and his ability to break down complex topics and make them accessible, plus

• 2:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  his genuine care for public education and science, today's is a truly special and important episode to educate and inform you in actionable ways. I should also mention that Dr. Krummel has an incredible zero-cost Substack. It's called The Immune Beyond. You can access it by going to theimmunebeyond, all one word, dot substack dot com. And there he teaches about science and more. Again, it's awesome. It's free, so definitely check it out. 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, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Max Krummel. Dr. Max Krummel, welcome.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 3:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Most everybody, including me, has heard of this thing we call the immune system. And most people just think, okay, this is the thing that when I'm rested, it keeps me from getting sick. And when I'm not as well rested, I tend to get more sick. And there are these airborne things, and we can get sick. And there's like funguses and viruses. And I think that's probably what most people understand. And they probably also understand that there are like cells and T cells and B cells. But if we want to think about a bit of the history of our understanding of the immune system and what we understand now, maybe you could orient us. Because in reading your work prior to this discussion, I'm realizing that this is a very recent field. And also, there's still a lot that we do not understand.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  When I started immunology, sort of 30 years ago, I was rotating in labs at Berkeley, I think you were at Berkeley as well. And one of the transcription factor biologists, mentor said, you know, why do you want to work in immunology? It's not really a field. And so the time was kind of true. You know, everything was about DNA, cloning. We still, you know, it's obviously still a lot about molecular biology, what we do. But, you know, at the time, it was pretty simple. We thought of the immune system as something that, on the one hand, it had to come into play when you saw a virus or something foreign. And otherwise, it generally had to be quiet and kind of leave you alone. I think cancer immunotherapy changed that a lot, that that gave us the idea that you could tune its reactivity so that you could get to the point where if you gave an immunotherapy, what it was actually

• 4:47Speaker 00

  doing was raising the threshold of when a T cell would activate, and allowing T cells that might be just letting the tumor get by, they'd be able to go and go after that tumor and kill it. I think that changed the spectrum a certain degree where we suddenly saw, okay, this isn't just a, just a, you know, foreign versus self thing, because a tumor is kind of not exactly self, but it's also not foreign. It was once you, it's a cell that's kind of evolved. So I think tumor immunology really changed our perspective on that, you know, to the point where we now think of it as a tunable system. But then I think, you know, a lot has happened in the last 20 years. There's been a lot of excitement about cancer immunotherapy, because we're curing people with cancer, which really

• 5:29Speaker 00

  wasn't done before. You're now in the space where the immune system is showing all these other roles. I mean, you know it in the nervous system, the brain, there's microglia that do various functions, cleaning up, et cetera. But it's in your gut, it's allowing microbes to live in you, but it's titrating them. It's keeping them there in kind of like the right quantity. So it's kind of guarding yourself. It's, you know, it's in your liver, regulating how much you metabolize. There's a collection of cells there. It's in your heart. It's, you know, regulating cardiomyocyte function. Those are the muscle cells of your heart. They have to be cleaned up from time to time. So there's a set of immune cells that will help get rid of their byproducts in the heart. So it has all these additional

• 6:14Speaker 00

  functions that kind of before, we're lost in the, in the just, you know, the foreign battle against the foreign. And now we have this kind of perspective of this system that measures us all the time. It measures everything about us, and it exists in some ways, I think is to help us be who we are. You know, and that's, hopefully, that's you as a healthy person. You know, in chronic disease, unfortunately, it can be part of the problem where it becomes part of the things that's letting the chronic thing, whether that's a tumor, or kidney disease, or what have you, it can actually help perpetuate it. Because, well, it's, you know, in some ways, it's trying its best, but it's applying the wrong program to the wrong situation. So, yeah, it's changed a ton. And I'll give you another little funny

• 6:57Speaker 00

  story, which is that, you know, when I first came into immunology, again, we had this story, like, you know, mentor who says, you know, this isn't really a field. The year was, like, I came into the field in 1989, and that's right at the peak of AIDS. And AIDS was like, as a biologist, was really interesting, because, you know, the HIV virus infects T cells. So your body is filled with 10 to the 11th or so T cells, like a ton of different kinds of T cells. And you had a, you have a subset of T cells that are called CD4 T cells, kind of a flavor of T cells. And the virus gets rid of those. So HIV virus will infect the CD4 T cells, and then, then you end up with not having

• 7:38Speaker 00

  them. And the manifestations of AIDS, for those that weren't around during it, was, it was just a ton of different opportunistic infections. So like soil bacteria that you and I, you know, fight off without even thinking about it, would, would, would kill people. But so too, would you see, you saw people with carbozytocoma, you saw like a opportunistic, like, or, you know, cancers emerging. And you just saw all these kind of manifestations of where the immune system was important. Dementia's in people with HIV as well. You know, it was an early accent at the time on how many different things the immune system might be important for. So regardless of whether, you know, it was a field or not, it was clearly important. And it was all these things we didn't know about it that like fueled the discoveries that have led to where we are right now.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  And some of those, you know, I think it's worth pointing out, were just these curiosity questions, like, what are these cells? Like, they were hard to study at the beginning. You know, they're, they don't live, you know, it's sometimes hard to keep cells out of a human body alive. So, you know, there's, there's issues about, you know, how do you keep these things alive in the very first place? And then, and then what kinds of things, you know, trigger them to do stuff? And you got to make reagents to test those, you know, ideas you might have about what they might do. It was a long haul, I think, to get ourselves together, where we now have a pretty good understanding of all the molecules and the cell types and the behaviors that they can engage in. And it just gets more, you know, more, more complex and more like rich, as we understand that they're basically, every single T cell in your body is like a free agent, and they're part of a sensory system.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Each one can measure the concentration of a, of a set of biomolecules, proteins, and in the form of peptides, they can measure that. And each one then can say that's out of range or that's in range. So it's like you have like 10 to the 11th little sensors going around you, curating you, you know, making sure you're the right thing. And if they see something that's out of range, they can do something about it. You know, like the whole thing is magnificent.

• 9:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  It is magnificent. Do you mind if we take a developmental perspective on this for a second? And then I have a basic health question.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  The developmental perspective is, I think most of us either remember or have observed that when humans are young, they get sick a lot more. Presumably, that's because their immune system isn't as well developed. But kids tend to get sick and then get over being sick pretty quickly.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe you could describe what's going on there?

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it also is the case that, you know, as we get older, much older, in fact, last quarter of life, let's say, people tend to get sick more. What's going on in terms of immune system function? Or is there something more broadly happening at level of just kind of energetics, mitochondrial function? Very curious about this.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  If I can take a step even further back, I will ask you a question of like, who are you? And I don't mean that like in a personal sense, but I can talk about that too if you want. But the more the question is like, at some point, where does your body end? And where does the world outside start? And one of the things that, you know, you start to realize if you look in the microscope is that we're covered with microbes all over our surface. We're covered with microbes all the way in our gut. In fact, we can't, you know, you can't digest, you've probably heard this before, but you can't digest animal fats if it weren't for the bugs, the bacteria in your gut. They make some of the key components of bioacids that allow you to digest animal fats. So you need this system that's around you. So you aren't just the cell, like, if you learn biology, you've got the, again,

• 11:08Speaker 00

  we're going to go way back. There's the egg and the sperm, and they fertilize, and now you got this, this, this cell that starts to divide and gives rise to every other cell in our body. So you might say that your body is just that collection of cells. But in fact, it's absorbed a lot of viruses and bacteria from our environment. And to go into that really briefly, that's really important because we only have 20,000 genes in our genome. So there's only so much in a given life that we can do with those genes. And so by absorbing all kinds of other species onto us, we get their genomes. So like you said, like I was saying, the bacteria in your gut can now help you absorb nutrients that you wouldn't otherwise. If you eat sushi, you've heard this probably, right?

• 11:47Speaker 00

  You get bacteria in your gut that can help you absorb the seaweed, nutrients from seaweed. So taking this into your question, when you're first born, you've never really seen anything. And so two things are, I think, worth pointing out at the early phase of life. One of them is for the first six months or so, your immune system is pretty poor at being trained on things. And it's presumably, we presume that for those six months, that's because your body's developing so fast that if you were to have a super active immune system, you might actually find yourself attacking yourself. You might think that you're foreign because some genes turn on during development and then all of a sudden your immune system's like, oh, I see something different and now I need to react. So that's well known and that's one of the reasons why some childhood vaccinations, they're

• 12:32Speaker 00

  really important to protect kids over life, why they aren't given until you're six months or older. But I think to your point, one of the things that's happening with kids is that then, as they go into their, like until they're 10 and you're talking about they get sick a lot, they just haven't seen a lot of these bugs before. So they don't have an immune system that knows what flu is because they've never seen, the body's never, that body, kid's body, has never seen flu before. So every single virus and pathogen that hits it is going to elicit some amount of illness. But then they have a very strong immune system and reacts and gets rid of that. With the exception of the ones that are those certain viruses and bacterias, mumps, measles, rubella, that are lethal. And that's why we immunize, as we say. And those are things that your immune system, if they get too much of those, kids will die.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  And so it's better to protect them with a vaccine. All right. So that's the front end, right? The front end has this initial immunosuppression, then just exposure to all these things that are in our environment and you and I take on as part of our genomes. But we have to get a, we have to reach a détente with some of them. You know, we have to get to the point where the immune system can kind of like fire back when they show up, if they're bad, and allow them to live in us if they're good with us. And so I think that's what's happening a lot in those first years of life. And you can see that both in the form of kids getting sick a lot, but you'll also see that their guts develop way diverse microbiome. They allow a whole bunch of things that come in from the outside and are acceptable and are quite good for you. So that's the front end.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  In the back end of life, it's a little bit more complicated, but I'll tell you, I'll tell you two things that I think are important. On the one hand is the idea that, is the fact that a lot of your cells in general become less functional, including immune cells. And you get less cells produced and that might just be because we were never selected as organisms to live as long as we do right now. That's the idea of aging, right?

• 14:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do we know that? That we just were supposed to be dead by 70?

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Well, no, but we do know that we can reproduce and pass on our genes successfully already when we're 16. So the selective pressure to pass on your genes, if you imagine that's how genetic evolution happens, is that you pass on your genes as being successful. You can already do that at 16 and anything after that is just cream on the crop. But at some point, maybe there's no selection. So we don't know that, but it's a reasonable hypothesis to say there wasn't any real selective pressure for passing on genes that do anything pass when you're actually having kids.

• 14:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  The psychologists would tell us that the wisdom of people, you know, 60, 70, 80 and beyond is useful for groups of humans that live in villages of 100 or so people because they can give information to younger people that is on the periodicity of like every five to 10 years, maybe every 30 years. But that's a just so story, right? That mean, it's a nice just so story.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  I like it too. And I think the geneticists will refer to that as like the grandfather effect where genes may be selected for, and maybe they're mostly about genes that make us social for the elderly, that do, you know, they're going to have effects on the fitness of their grandchildren, which is their genes. And so I think there's something to be said for that in conceptual space. I don't know if I can prove it to you that that's.

• 15:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's a tough experiment to do.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  It's a really tough experiment to have two villages where the grandparents are eliminated or like kept, you know, both non-ethical and also non-ethical. But we were talking about the aging immune system and I think, I think there's two things that again, come to this question that I was asking, like, who are you? And I was saying, okay, well, in aging, you have this issue that the immune system is tapering and it's efficacy, it's many of the cells that you've been holding your whole life start to literally, they die off. But there's another thing, which is I think a lot of people don't realize when you say, basic biology would say that sperm, you know, like fertilized the egg, so you've got your mom's genes and your dad's genes, you've got 23 chromosomes for your mom, 23 chromosomes for your dad. And at least when you're first born, every cell is a clone, it has exactly the same information.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  But DNA replication and DNA sort of like fidelity isn't perfect. Like they say that on your skin, the cells of your skin may have somewhere between 10 and 30,000 mutations per cell, per day, just from like basic sun exposure. And that's higher than some of the other organs. But the basic idea is that your DNA is susceptible to UV radiation. That's one of the reasons we put on sunscreen. But what it practically means, no matter what number you put in there, whether it's 10,000 mutations per day, or remember, the genomes are huge, right? So 10,000 mutations out of terabytes of information still is only a certain number, but do that over years. And the main thing is that that means is that every cell in your body is no longer

• 17:13Speaker 00

  identical to the one next to it because this one got different mutations on day one, this one got some mutations on day two, and slowly but surely you are becoming like a mosaic. And I say mosaic, you know, because like the tile that you see in Morocco, you know, very intricate designs. Because if you actually start to look into tissue, you'll find that certain clones, certain mutations do make certain cells more fit. And they're the ones that if you scratch yourself in a cell, has to like, some new has to form, they might be the fittest to fill that void. And one of the other clones over here that got a different mutation may not be fit to fill that clone in. So you end up with this pastiche of who you are. So now, again, I ask you, like, who are you now? So if I want to defend against something that looks different, what if everything looks

• 17:58Speaker 00

  different? What if every cell is different from every other cell? Okay, you want another analogy?

• 18:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  I would like another analogy. The only exception that I can think of to this, and I could be wrong, is that our neurons, our central nervous system neurons, our brain and spinal cord, most all of them are the same ones that we were born with.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  There's same cells.

• 18:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Same cells, but so you're saying mutations are constantly accruing in the neurons as well?

• 18:24Speaker 00

  In the DNA. So it is fascinating, by the way, that neurons live that long and hair cells, they say that the proteins in our hair cells of our hair are the same exact molecules, atoms, as we had when we were born. So there's some cells that are long, but in their nuclei, the DNA that's encoding who they are, who those cells are, is subject to mutation ongoing. And it depends on how deep they are. We tend to think that one of the reasons that immune stem cells live in our bone marrows, you know, our long bones are hollow. And in there is the source of the immune system's revitalization. It's the stem cells that make more white blood cells. We'd like to think that they live in there because it protects them from radiation. They hang out, the stem cells are, you know, the bone actually serves not only a structural

• 19:08Speaker 00

  purpose in our body, but it's a cavity in which things can live.

• 19:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Keep it away from solar radiation.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Solar radiation.

• 19:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Keep it away from chemical cues in the environment that can mutate.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Exactly. Sequester your stem cells.

• 19:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Don't burn them.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  That kind of thing.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Likewise, the neurons in the, inside of the skull.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And the spinal cord.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Are protected.

• 19:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're protected.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's interesting.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, JOV. JOV makes medical-grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now, in addition to sunlight, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near infrared and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health. These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduce pain and inflammation, improve mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays, there are a lot of red light devices out there.

• 20:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  But what sets JOV lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, near infrared and infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the JOV whole body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session. And I use the JOV handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you would like to try JOV, they're offering up to $400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit JOV, spelled J-O-O-V-V dot com slash Huberman. Again, that's J-O-O-V-V dot com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep.

• 20:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now, and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. The latest Eight Sleep model is the Pod 5. This is what I'm now sleeping on and I absolutely love it. It has so many incredible features.

• 21:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  For instance, the Pod 5 has a feature called Autopilot, which is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns and then adjusts the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It'll even elevate your head if you're snoring and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $350.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  Sometimes I tend to think the immune system, you want to defend it like you want to defend a nation and you want to defend it from outsiders. And I've just told you a story that's, if you want to take a political statement from it's pro-immigration because all these bacteria that live on us are actually bringing us goods and they do a lot of work.

• 22:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  We just lost half the audience.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  I'm sorry.

• 22:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm just kidding. I'm totally joking. We're a bipartisan audience.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Well, you know, take it how you want, but by analogy, it's the argument for, you know, why certain influx of, in this case, organisms onto us create a more robust person than we were before. But I want to give you this story that one of a famous immunologist in the 1970s drew this parallel in wartime and said in, you know, World War II submarines would be underneath the ocean and they'd be traveling around and they would, if they could, if they heard another submarine, they would scuttle the missiles, the, you know, torpedoes, because that could be the enemy and the enemy could fire at them. And so they had two sets of books that they used.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  One of them was a book that gave them the sound profile of all, let's say it's the US, of all the US submarines. And so they could listen to the whir of the engines. And if they heard a whir of the engine that had the certain cycle of a general, you know, motor's engine, they wouldn't fire. So that's the sort of like self, I know what self is. And then they had another book that was the engine sounds of the known diesel engines of whatever engines of the German, you know, submarines. And if they heard that, then they absolutely would fire. And that's a self versus non-self discrimination problem, just like the immune system has to do. But what I bring you with it aging is this concept that as you get weirder and different and your, your body is getting like more complex, then as those books, you know, start

• 23:56Speaker 00

  to have every possible, possibly every possible permutation of every biomolecule could, could, could be made by your body at that point. And then a virus doesn't necessarily have anything unique about it. A virus is also going to make proteins and that's your immune system can see the viral proteins and say, oh, a new thing has come in and that's, you know, that's out of range. And now I need to mount that a T cell response against this. I need to make the, you know, bring in the troops. But with aging, we have this, this kind of, you know, us diverging problem. So that this, you know, this system that's supposed to sense us is just, you know, has a lot of cosmic background, has a lot of noise in it. And so I think, I think that's one of the reasons why we also have issue when we're aging. And it's, I think it's also one of the reasons why cancer is more prevalent in later life. For, I mean, there's two parts to that.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  One is of course you've accumulated mutations in your cells that could be cancerous, but also the immune system has been seeing those and all the various different accumulations of them and ones like them, you know, over these years to the point where the weird doesn't look that weird anymore. You know, something like a cancer that is different than you, it's not that much different than like another cell over here that's gone, you know, like, and it's just happily making skin and isn't cancerous, but you know, it's, it's, it's got some differences.

• 25:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about the argument that there's so much cellular turnover that the cells that accumulate these mutations are being eliminated? You're saying because they're clonal, they're producing different, they become different, they produce cells that are also different, then they die. Is this, is that the way it works?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think, I think you are bringing something up that's also true, which is that all the time, I think the immune system is defending us against, you know, mutations. So one example that everybody sees when they get to be about 40 or, or 50 is, is all these white spots on your skin. And we, we think that those are places where the immune system has sensed a collection of cells that were precancerous, maybe they were even beginning of cancer and has wiped them out. And, and so the, you know, a lot of the origin of cancers in skin is melanin producing cells like melanoma is what we call skin cancer. Those melanocytes, that, that white area, they've been wiped of a whole collection of melanocytes. And that's why it's, you know, it's, it's white instead of as dark as your, as the rest of your skin.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  So, you know, to that extent, the idea that the immune system is, is pruning you all the time is, you know, there's, it looks like there's pretty good evidence for that. And the question is, when does somebody become dangerous? That's, that's, that's, you know, that's fundamentally a question with cancer and these sorts of things. If you said, I want to actually have the fittest cells in my skin to fill in a gap if I scratch myself. I would like to have cells that quickly replicate, just like maybe in kids, kids heal so ridiculously quickly, right?

• 26:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because they have an abundance of these cells that...

• 26:39Speaker 00

  I think, I think they're, they're, they're wound healing. I mean, there's a group out of Stanford that studies this, but essentially, you know, wound healing in, in, in young is quite, quite a bit faster and more efficient. And there's many levels of that. There's many levels of that.

• 26:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. But yeah, remarkably faster. And if you're a parent, you've seen this, you know, you cut yourself on the same day as a kid, your kid cut yourself and they're, they're, three days later it came and find it on them and, you know, like four weeks later, you're still like, you know, scat or something. But I was just coming to the point that if you do that and you want this, do you want, you maybe want that to fill back in because you're certainly out in the wild, having an open wound is a bad thing. So you'd like to heal quickly. Well, if a mutation has happened that fills that cell in quick, more quickly, that is almost by definition, a mutation that's let that cell divide faster. Well, what is cancer? It's cells that divide faster. So in some sense, all these events in your life where winners win by filling in the space left by cells that die is selecting for cells that get a little out of range with

• 27:37Speaker 00

  growth, that they may be a little bit better at growing. And then again, there's a quick question, it's like, well, how much better do you want that? You want it to like help you, but at some point you don't want it to basically form a lesion and grow, grow, grow, grow, grow and go other places and grow, which is called metastasis in cancer, which is how most people die. To me, that the issue of self and non-self is one of the ones that's been with immunology for a very long time. And again, it's way richer than we thought about, I think in the 1990s or 2000s. You know, and then at the same time, the idea of what you can do with that information is also, I call this kind of the new immunity. Immunity used to be like a fuel gauge. You'd say it was low for self, then it was really high against viruses and it was like a fuel gauge. Now it's really hot.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  And what we originally thought we were doing with cancer and immunotherapy was making it just hotter generally. But now you realize that in between like immune system not caring about something at all and, and going and, you know, like releasing all its fury on something are all these other things it can do with the information it gathers in there. And that's where I was saying, you know, it can, it can like quarantine bacteria. It's not going to kill them. It's, it's in that zone and bacteria, as long as they're in the right zone, there's not too many of them, there's not too few of them. The immune system can actually help them be there. It can produce things that like either tightens them out of circulation or keeps them there. You know, and all these other settings, like you say, in the heart and the, you could almost any organ and, and the immune system is consistently present and it's consistently measuring you. And the you again, is this complex you.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  It's not just what came from the egg, it's the you, it's you right now, including all the mutations that you might have accrued and all the bacteria and, and the viruses. You know, we have a lot of viruses in our bodies that we tend to think that at the end of a, of a illness, that we've gone back to our pure state. This may come from religion, you know, that we were born pure and if God had made us correctly, then we would be pure at the end of things. And, you know, that would be pure immunity, would purify us of things. But the more we look, the more we find that every virus leaves a little evidence of, a little bit of itself. And then there's a, then there's the goal for the immune system to kind of quarantine that, to say this, you know, maybe we don't want to kill every one of our cells to get rid of every virus that's infected one of our cells. We need to leave some of those alive.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  We don't like, for example, herpes virus infection infects the nerves and when people have, you know, an emergence, they're going to get nerve pain and worse. A lot of that is caused by the immune system reacting to the virus trying to get out and then killing off neurons. So the, the, it's immunopathology. The immune system is causing as much of the damage and problem as the viruses. And it's the failure of that détente. And when certain viruses are just sitting in us, we're perfectly fine. You know, we have new viruses in your, as long as they're laying dormant, our immune system can say, okay, I'm just hang out here and if anything bad happens, I'm going to squelch that. But it's not like we've been purified. You know, that's a reality that's a little bit too bad, but you know, it's also one

• 30:29Speaker 00

  where you say, again, if, if the goal of us is to make it to 30, let's say you get a, a, an early liver infection of a HCV or HPV. If the immune system can just let that be, you're not going to destroy your own liver and you'll live to produce and your genes will get passed on. On the other hand, if you mounted a massive immune response, you know, you went all the way in the fuel gauge to the right, your, your immune system can kill you. It absolutely can, you know, it's, can kill any cell it wants. So, so that, that, that again, that idea that the space in between is the one that we actually are starting to understand that it has all these specialized roles that are not always about getting rid of things at all cost.

• 31:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  This raises a question for me and obviously I'm not an immunologist, but it seems like one...

• 31:12Speaker 00

  You're going to be one by the end of today.

• 31:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  I hope so. I like the sound of that, as will the audience. One potentially useful...

• 31:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Strategy the immune system could have, perhaps, would be rather than to decide to launch an attack on a particular cell because it's mutated and different enough, to assess how many cells throughout the body, or even just get a local average of how many cells have similar mutations, or just are different.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  So that if we are indeed born pure, in the biological sense.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's just keep it there, for sake of today's discussion. And, you know, by the time we are, you know, 32 years old, we are a mosaic of mutations. As it appears we are. If the immune system could surveil multiple regions in the body, maybe compare organs, or maybe keep it within organ system and say, you know, the number of mutated cells, or not pure me cells, would be one way to do it more simply, perhaps, has exceeded a certain threshold. Measured, I don't know, like enough receptors have something in them that the cell goes, okay, you know what, I'm gonna fight.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 32:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the same way that, you know, soldiers, you know, they might hear a shot whiz by, but then do they necessarily reveal their location and launch an attack? No, but if it's enough of an attack, they'll fight back.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  It seems like there should be some way to, that the immune system could quantify either bodywide, or local organ, or over some period of time, they could integrate over time. I have to imagine that such a mechanism exists.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  You're coming from neurobiology, as I know. And so there is that in neurobiology of accommodation, right? If, I always tell the story of, I went to this little village in France called Epoisse. If you know the name, Epoisse is a kind of a famous cheese that they make in this town, and it's super stinky. And they make it only in that town, and they make a lot of it in that town. And so when you drive into that town, it's like somebody has the worst foot odor. It's striking, it really hits you. But after being in the town for like an hour, you don't notice it.

• 33:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  And that's neuronal accommodation, where you're nervous, there's the same kind of thing you're talking about, where the, you know, the sensors in your nose can become, they're like, okay, I've seen it, I've seen it, now it's not anymore, and so I'm gonna tune that out, because then your nose has the potential to smell other dangers or other stuff, right? So that's the nervous system. I think you're exactly right where you're going with this, and we think this is true, that the immune system is, you know, for danger, it's looking for something that you would call like, it's how it's seeing the signal over time. So a virus may, you know, let's say you're a T cell that recognizes a virus. Well, you're looking for something that you've had nothing of before, and then all of a sudden, the virus comes in, it starts replicating, and you have a lot of it. And then at some point, if you get rid of it, it'll come back down to next to nothing.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  And in that period, you mount an immune response, and you learn it, and so the next time around, it'll be faster to respond to it and keep you from getting sick. That's one kind of signal. But self can have either one of two signals, I think. One of them is that you've had it your entire life. So that amount of, maybe it's insulin, you know, which we think in general, you know, it has a little bit of signal up and down as you have a trigger, but there's a range for that. And so your body gets used to that range, and the T cells that see insulin, they are very low, they're gonna only be very, very low reactive to that, and there's a whole story behind that, but basically, they're gonna see that level. But you can also have things that the immune system is gonna wanna treat like self, that maybe do a slow rise. They don't have this peak that you have with viruses.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  So like a mutant cell, and maybe it's just a tiny, tiny bit above normal, for months, and then it makes two copies of itself, and now it's a little bit higher than normal. And the immune system is, you know, has, I think, one of the deficits with cancer is exactly that, that things that you do, and this is sort of like, I try to live my life a little bit this way, but it's not validated by any, you know, any experimental stuff, is the idea that whatever you are, is what the immune system is gonna help you be. If it's a slow direction this way, it's gonna be okay with that. What it doesn't like is like big spikes. And that's maybe the signal that you're asking about, like, could you actually get to the point where you'd be reactive? The problem with cancer is that it is, you know, it's slow and it grows over time, and

• 35:32Speaker 00

  I think we're made to absorb slow change. Because if it's not causing us to be sick yesterday, and a little bit more of it isn't causing us to be sick today, then it's probably just a developmental change. Maybe it's a new bacteria, maybe it's a new, you know, that's commensal, as long as it doesn't accompany. Again, viruses have two features in common. One, one is this spike of, you know, appearance, but they also cause damage in that window. And so you have like these cues that I think the immune system, and I say the immune system because it's, some cells are gonna see the damage, and some cells are gonna see the additional proteins that come in, and then they exchange information, just like your brain, you know. You can talk about the fact that the brain has this wired, you know, set of cells that are wired in space, across your body, from your brain all the way to a muscle, let's say.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  The immune system has this collection of cells that are, they're literally crawling around us right now. And if, we used to do, we still do a lot of imaging, if you look in a piece of skin, you can see the cells, the immune system are really, really surveying us, they're crawling around. But they get together like neurons, and they can form synapses, and one can say to another one, this is what I saw. And the other says, oh, you saw that? Oh, I, you know, I'm just being this. And they can, you know, form a cluster of cells that basically get together, like a neural little mini brain in our tissue, and they can say, this is bad, we gotta do something about that. But I think the slow burn doesn't do that. The slow burn is one of the ones where the cells are like, yeah, it's not that bad.

• 36:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  I realize this perhaps is not your immediate area of research, but recently, I've been seeing a lot more interest in the thymus. This organ that we have when we're young, and it disappears as we get older, and there's a lot of interest in the thymus. Maybe because we've never covered the thymus on this podcast in any amount of detail. If you could just educate us a bit, what it is, what it does, and why it might be interesting as a therapeutic. I mean, maybe we, in a few years, we'll all be banking our thymic cells, maybe we will be, I know some people are already injecting non-FDA approved peptides that come from the thymus, I'm not recommending anyone do that, but people are already doing it, because that's the internet in 2026. But what's the thymus, what does it do?

• 37:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why this interest?

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I can back up one step, and I've used the word T cell before. And T cell originally was thymus cell. So for those that maybe don't, you know, have gone to have blood taken, you know, if you have blood taken in a hospital, whatever, you'll get red blood cells, and those are the cells that carry oxygen around your body. And then you have white blood cells, that come in two flavors, two, well, they come in multiple flavors, but for the moment, we'll talk about two. One are called B cells, and one are called T cells. And T cells were named because of the thymus. So the thymus is this funny organ, and it has a funny history. In fact, I'm writing these substacks these days, and I'm writing one that's supposed to be released tomorrow about the thymus, because it really should have gotten the Nobel Prize. There's a guy who's alive, he's like 97 years old in Australia, who did this, saw, did

• 38:24Speaker 00

  this remarkable kind of experiment. There was this time when kids that had heart issues would come in for surgeries, and they would discover this enormous white, whitish organ, this growth, near the heart, as they were taking the body, you know, this, they're cutting it open. And all the autopsies up to that point had been done mostly with adults, and in adults, there's only this small little thing there. And so they were like, oh my God, part of the heart thing is this overgrown thing. They didn't really know what it did. And so they would remove it. And the kids then go home, and it was usually exploratory heart surgery, but the kids would go home. And far from dying of heart disease, many of them would die from like opportunistic infections.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  They'd get all these infections, they'd get flu, and et cetera. And so there was this hint that maybe this removal had taken out a critical part of your immune system, had made it so you were super susceptible to bacteria. And so this guy named Jacques Miller, who's this nice seven-year-old codger in Australia. At the time, he was in England, and he basically took a bunch of mice, and then when they were newborn, he removed their thymus, the same little whitish organ. And sure enough, those mice, they basically grew up, okay, but then they all would succumb to bacterial infections. And in fact, a few of them even got tumors, which was kind of noted at the time, but forgot. And the reason why that is, is because the thymus is the place that makes all your T cells. And it comes from a kind of a convoluted path, but we know how we're talking about how the

• 39:52Speaker 00

  stem cells of your immune system lives in your bone. Well, there's stem cells that live in their bone, and they travel through your blood to the thymus, and become T cells. And the reason they need to do that is that the thymus is this kind of super special place that is able to present to them, to show them all of the genes in your genome, in various different ways. And so the T cells that come in there, the T cells are developing, and they each have a possible 10 to the 11th different kinds of receptors, to smell different things. And you don't want any of these to come out that are too reactive to you. So you don't wanna, you don't wanna produce T cells that are gonna go off and kill your pancreas, or, you know, kill your big toe or anything. You wanna, you wanna maintain like tolerance, so you wanna make sure that you don't make the immune system, it's too harsh.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  So the thymus has the role of producing T cells, but also of educating them in some ways, of only letting the ones that come out, that have sensors that are correctly tuned, to let you be you, in that way.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Now, to the point about the story and you were asking about aging is that is that in kids, those are really big because at that point, we were talking about the developing immune system, it has to go from like, you know, living under the veil of your mother's immunity, and then it needs to let some development happen, and then it needs to burst out and start to be able to react against whatever bacteria and viruses you're going to see over life. So your thymus has a huge output. So as like between, really from, you know, three to six months old and, you know, into your into your four or five years age, tapering, your body makes tons of T cells. And it's because probably what you're talking about, you're getting exposed to all kinds of different bacteria and viruses. And so you need to make that make that collection of immune cells that both some of them, you know, see self

• 41:30Speaker 00

  at low levels, but then they also can maybe react against different things in the environment, including the ones you need to defend against. Then what happens is because, again, I think we're not needing that later, and maybe we don't even want that, the thymus involutes. It gets super, super small. So that in aged people, it's like tiny. And, and so it's not putting out new T cells. And so the reason why there's interest in like these peptides, but all these other approaches to like revitalize the thymus, is that like in cancer, for example, wouldn't you like to have a whole bunch of new T cells that could come into into you, flood in there with exactly the specificity for the for the tumor? The tumor has managed to teach all your normal cell, your other T cells in your body, that it's normal. Maybe

• 42:13Speaker 00

  you need a source of new material to come in and do that. And there's really two ways. I think you mentioned you talked to Alex Marson, that's a long ago, and I'm sure he would have talked about engineering cells that you can engineer on the outside and give them specificity. But the sort of like, if you will, the more natural route to that might be to let the thymus make use of more T cells and and make sure that as they come out, you make sure that they can react against this tumor or whatever it is you need to defend against. It's always been a fascinating organ from the sense that it's the origin of all the cell types that we care about, the T cells in that case. But it does have this like aging, you know, sort of aging effect that seems to make us a little bit more susceptible to things later in life. And, you know, again, we could argue about what whether there was a big evolutionary design behind doing that, or whether it

• 42:58Speaker 00

  just wasn't needed. Because if you got you had to 30 and you died of an arrow wound, you know, you know, and but you've given your genes, you're a winner in the evolutionary sense, you know?

• 43:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love this, this stance on, well, if you've already reproduced, I'll just give a brief vignette. We were introduced by our mutual friend, David Feltham, who's a phenomenal developmental biologist from UC Santa Cruz, and his wife Sophie Salama is also phenomenal biologist, a mutual friend. And years ago, I was in Dave's lab because we are longtime collaborators and published a bunch of papers together. And he was doing some injections. I'm going to get you in trouble, Dave. He doesn't do this any longer.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna join him to get you in trouble because

• 43:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  He was doing some injections, and he might have been using, might have been using carbocyanide dyes. This was kind of conventional tool back. You put a little crystal in a piece of tissue that's fixed tissue. So it's not a live animal or anything. And then you put it in the fridge, and then the fluorescent dye would label a set of neurons in a pathway. And I walked over and I saw Dave doing this, and he wasn't wearing any gloves. And I thought, these are carbocyanide dyes.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  With cyanide

• 44:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Cyanide.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I said, Dave, don't you want to put on gloves? And he literally looked up from the microscope at me, I'll never forget. And he said, I've already successfully reproduced. And he went back to doing it. And it's his lab. So and everyone else was following a safety protocol. Don't go after him. He doesn't do this any longer, folks. But there's an interesting mindset among you, because he comes from cell biology.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Randy Scheckman's lab. You both trained in Nobel Prize winning laboratories as graduate students. So I find it remarkable that this this stance of, well, if you've already successfully reproduced, really aren't needed. But his kids are now graduated or in college. So there is this thing about raising the young, too.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  And not just creating them and then dying.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Agreed. I think there's a fitness associated with being older than that. And again, when I say that this, it is maybe just taking this from a purely like, what would have been the source of what we are today? You know, what would have been the selective pressures on them? And it would have been a little bit like David's saying, you got to, you know, the selective pressure is to get your, you know, for for for my genes to be passed on, my offspring have to be born, and then have to get to some age, because most humans are born pretty incapable for a period. It's not like giraffes where they drop off and they, you know, drop out and within an hour, they're running. So that that that period of raising children, I think, creates more pressure in humans to, you know, to successfully

• 45:33Speaker 00

  be healthy longer. But I guess just, you know, that it may be a negative viewpoint in there, but that concept that maybe there isn't as much pressure for you to be healthy. And going with this is the idea that some of the things that we want to be super efficient early on, might actually be bad for us as we get like, I'm like, I think this issue that I that I brought up at our Mosaic is a is a real confounder to everything, because that creates something that is quite hard to defend against, I think, that that aging backdrop. And, you know, some of the immune system that is really going to be important to just be super reactive early on, may have some, you know, compensatory problems when in faced with that new reality of a 50 year old, or 70 year old, or whatever, it looks

• 46:18Speaker 00

  quite, you know, looks quite more complex. But you would have, you would have definitely wanted in gene space, you know, gene space, what genes you have to select for, you know, an immune system, let's say, or even just your body system, that makes sure that you get to 30, let's say, are you? And it's, again, there's, that isn't to say that we can't overcome some of those deficiencies if we understand them. But here's my plug for basic research is that to understand them, we have to ask them some questions that are almost 90% of them are going to be dead ends. You know, you can hypothesize it's one thing, but you got to do the experiment to like eliminate that. And this is one of the things that people I don't think always understand about science is that for all discoveries that, you know, I've made or other people have made, there is hundreds

• 47:01Speaker 00

  and hundreds of like disappointments, you know, and you'll recognize this where you you just go home from the lab at the end of the day, and you've, you know, you've done everything right. But the answer isn't the one isn't the right one.

• 47:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, one control experiment can nuke your whole project.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Well, there's that.

• 47:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  One good control.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  There's obviously that you have to do the experiment well and have it controlled. But but the answer just could be not the one you thought. And, you know, we can only imagine stuff, and then try and see if it's true, and or more importantly, try to prove that it's not true. This is the better experiments, the kind of we call them killer experiments, right? The ones that kill them, kill the idea if they're wrong, if the idea is wrong. But it's killer because it if it's turns out the way you hope it will. You know, again, when we get to some of these aging things, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of intuition that we all can put into this, whether we're like, professional scientists or at home scientists. But it's really hard to say that intuition, like your idea about how the way the world should work, is in fact, the way the world does work. You know, that I

• 47:59Speaker 00

  wish that because of the age, certain things would happen. That's a, that's lovely. But it could be super, when the word was Baroque, you know, like, the whole system could be, you know, configured in a completely weird way that doesn't really initially make intuitive sense to us. And that's also why some of those discoveries are so big to us. We're like, oh, my God, I didn't realize that this system that seems like it might be quite as simple, is so complicated. The world is so strange.

• 48:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, when I started in neurobiology, the brain, the actually, the entire central nervous system was considered an immune privileged organ.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  There weren't supposed to be immune cells there. And thanks to the beautiful work of Carla Schatz, with the majoristic compatibility complex work, and Ben Baris.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Ben Baris.

• 48:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'm failing to mention all their scientific offspring, Beth Stevens, Shala Araglu, like, and on and on. It would take the rest of the episode to name all of Ben's scientific offspring.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 48:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  And Carlos, too.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  And you're being you.

• 48:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. I didn't work on those issues. But but I was in those labs when it was happening. We now know that the immune system is active and alive in the central nervous system throughout the whole lifespan, serving critical roles.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  There are two things that, well, three really, that are somewhat practical questions. I'll start with the most basic one. Why is it, at a mechanistic level, that if you miss a night or two of sleep, that your immune system seems so less effective in fighting off infections? Do we know what's happening? Is it like you've got so much adenosine, which is the sleepy molecule, and, and like, that adenosine inhibits T cell function or something? Do we actually know? Because I think all of us are familiar with the fact that if we we don't sleep well or enough for a couple of nights, we're much more susceptible to getting sick.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is there a mechanistic understanding of why that's so?

• 49:42Speaker 00

  I think there are bits and pieces of it. I think some, some really nice work shows that at night, a few wacky thing, when you're asleep, a few what you might have thought would be wacky things happen. And one of them is that a lot of your immune cells clear back to the bone marrow.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  And your tissues become populated with a bunch of neutrophils that come out of the bone marrow and seem to be depositing collagen around your body. And so there's a lot of things that I think are reparative about sleep. I've thought about this a lot in my own life, as probably you have with sleep, as to one of the questions, of course, is why do we bother to have sleep? And I guess I can only imagine is because our, you know, we've created these bodies of ours are so capable and they're so energetically and, you know, consumptive and they make all these byproducts during the day that at some point you just need a cleanup phase. And that's one interpretation of sleep. You just need to reset. So the immune system is definitely resetting. And, you know, there's, as I say, there's evidence that a lot of the cells go kind of quiescent into the tissues and

• 50:42Speaker 00

  they may leave you alone for those reparative processes and actually allow those. You know, in terms of the data on there, there's a lot of studies that are being done. And I can't say that I've come to a conclusion about that. This is, this comes in the question of like, is it known? Or do I not know it? Or is it, does nobody know it? And I'd say this is might be one of these areas where about 10 factions of people know it, but they don't agree. You know, so there's variations on things. But I think the data, for example, that immune cells dive into the bone marrow at night is pretty solid.

• 51:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  That makes sense.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  What they're doing and why that's important in the long sense of like, what you're talking about, everything from, well, but I think it's, you know, the things that happen overnight, you're definitely your cognition improves. Is that immune or is that neuronal or both? I think it's both.

• 51:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Something in the lymph plumbing immune system. One thing that's just striking like that is undeniable is probably the best way to put it is, everybody has bags under their eyes and looks like shit when they are sleep deprived. They sleep for a night or two, and it goes away. That's clearly accumulation of lymph. We actually know that. That's just lymph fluid that's not being cleared. And it might not even be the brain's glymphatic clearance system. It's just, there's a bunch of lymph pooling under your eyes. That's why you look like shit.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then you sleep for two nights, well, and then you look better again. And the eyes get glassy. We know that the eyes get glassy when we're sleep deprived. That's also a lymphatic clearance issue. This is well established. Like, so there's some things that are just like plumbing works better when we sleep and get up again. There's something literally about lying down and getting up. But that, to me, can't explain the immune thing entirely. Because like, the lymphatic system is like, among other things, you know, immune surveillance, but, I mean, one night, it's lousy sleep, and the person coughing across the room gets you sick, often. But when you're well rested, you actually feel this robustness, like, man, like, okay, I might wash my hands or just kind of avoid

• 52:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  them. And you're good.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's, I mean, it's an incredible effect, in one way or the other.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Again, I don't know the degree to which we can nail down, you know, which, which part of things that are happening is which, I always liked the story that the, there's macrophages, immune cells, in your eye that are basically clearing the, clearing the lens. You know, so there's, there's all these like, places where it's doing little cleanup that you can imagine that if the, the thing it's trying to get rid of is granularity, that you need to have sleep where you just aren't making more granularity so that it can, you know, sort of like when you wash your car windshield, you do it completely at that point. And you, but you can't be driving with flies hitting, right?

• 53:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, exactly. That's a great analogy.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  You know, so I think there's certain elements of some of these cleanup processes that happen best when you're not getting things, you know, dirty. Or, again, I think a lot of what we're talking about is byproducts of our energetics that leave, you know, some damage behind it. And I think we just use a lot of ATP and we do a lot of stuff as our bodies and the sleep is this time where you cannot be, you know, producing more of that and get ahead of the curve on cleaning things up a bit. Like pulling into a gas station, cleaning off your windshield.

• 53:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients: creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB, and zinc carnecine. Each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health. Calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown, and zinc carnecine to support and improve the lining of your gut. All three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them, and therefore, I love seeing them added to the existing AG1 formula. As most of you

• 54:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly 14 years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product, and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. This thymus thing is really intriguing. And I know a lot of people who opted to bank their child's umbilical cord, in the hopes that the stem cells from the umbilical cord will someday be useful.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  How invasive is it? And or should we be banking thymic cells? Because these seem like incredibly valuable cells for their ability to immune surveil and create kind of the perfect situation, using our own endogenous T cells to battle infections. I mean, I kind of wish I had a little, little chunk of my thymus.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  In a minus 80 freezer someplace, so that when I'm 85 years old,

• 55:41Speaker 00

  You might be able to.

• 55:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  I might be able to exploit that.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I'll say that the umbilical cord one is, is pretty straightforward. It's, you know, the umbilical cord is being essentially discarded anyway. And it contains a lot of, as you know, bone marrow stem cells, that the utility of those is a little different than the thymus. The utility of banking that material, and banking just means you put it into a vial, small little, you know, small little vial with the right of media, and you set it in a very, very cold environment for whenever you might need it. Is that if you need to have a bone marrow transplant, so for example, if you have a tumor of the bone marrow system, you can subject yourself to radiation and wipe out all that tumor cells, but you'll wipe out all the stem cells. But if you get this vial here, you've got a little replacement.

• 56:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Has that ever been done successfully?

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can do.

• 56:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  So are there, are there kids?

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Autologous, autologous.

• 56:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are there kids or adults that are alive today because they banked their umbilical cord?

• 56:36Speaker 00

  But certainly companies sell access to that.

• 56:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, and somebody has to pay to keep the freezers on backup generators and things like that. So people invest time and money into this idea.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is there a walking, talking, breathing human who would be otherwise dead, would otherwise be dead, excuse me, because they, they paid money to bank their umbilical cord?

• 56:54Speaker 00

  It's a really good question. I don't know the answer to that question.

• 56:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I guess the parents paid.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  I can tell you, and this will be just like, this is, this is the depths of to which you're describing, default, I'm injecting a, you know, like mouse, is that in mice, this is true. That if you take, you know, bone marrow stem cells, you can reconstitute a mouse with a blood, blood cancer, and you can do that. I'm sure you can do it in humans, too. I have zero doubt that it also works. I don't know whether those companies have done that. That's, that's just actually something where I, all of my knowledge.

• 57:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is offered en masse now.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe it's more than that. Do you want to, do you want to keep the umbilical cord?

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Honestly, honestly, I would do it because it's one of those situations where if it's not too, well, I don't know if it, you know, it depends on your, your, how much money you have to spend, because the.

• 57:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Assuming it's within, within the noise.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those. So it's one of those ones where you, particularly when you have kids, there's this whole aspect of like, I would like to protect them from anything that could come their way. And I think this would, if they happen to have a childhood leukemia, this would, this would cure it.

• 57:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which is an incredible statement, if you think about it, even if it hasn't been done successfully yet. You didn't say it might be able to lead to a cure by virtue of a new technology. You said it would cure it.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, that's a big statement.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  You can tell I'm ratcheting up from like sleep to banking thymus and umbilical cord. Now I'm going to go to the sort of next level, which is not just in the Bay Area, a lot of people, however, are starting to think about, oh, maybe I make some induced pluripotent stem cells from a fibroblast from one of my skin cells, put the so-called Yamanaka factors on, revert to stemness, and then I might be able to grow a new pancreas, or study my, you know, whatever organs in these so-called organoids, or whatever they're referred to.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 58:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I learned today from you, that if I take that fibroblast now, that fibroblast might not be completely Andrew Huberman, as I know him to be genetically. It's actually could have some mutations. That seems important to compare against a sort of a standard cell. I don't want to grow organoids from, from an IPS environment that carries mutations. That, that seems like a bad idea.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because then anything I would, I'm not talking about transplanting in those organoids. I'm talking about studying them, thinking I'm getting information about them. People are doing this. And thinking, oh, I'm seeing what drugs are effective in treating, you know, a liver disease or a heart disease. But if those are mutant cells, that's a lousy experiment.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say there are likely to be mutant cells for that reason. I think the biggest question would be whether your induction of them to become the organ that you, you know, want was successful, was replicating the actual organ itself. So you're, you're referencing these things called organoids, which are collections of cells from a body of a human, for example, that are induced with various different factors to grow to resemble maybe an organ, a particular organ. You know, I think all of us have little doubt, and this is the source of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, that making stem cells that can become pre-tickled organs will at some day happen. We will figure all these things out. And I believe in science. I believe in our ability to sort of like test, learn, test, learn, test, learn. How

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  soon, you know, that becomes useful is a bigger question. If you take out your fibroblast today, that might only cure you someday in the future. And meanwhile, you may die of that thing that you wish you had, the stem cells, because it's not yet ready, the technology and the understanding isn't yet ready. But the other problem about those is you probably will die of something else, head by a car, you know, it won't help you that you've got those things back. So I think in some of these cases, like overemphasizing, this might be your point about the storage of umbilical cords, is like, at what point is that a high odds situation where you, your kid needs it and you have it stored away, versus all the other things, fates that can be flawless as humans, that have nothing to do with, you know, stem cells from the bone marrow. And to me, that's, that's a point where you could

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  spend your life worrying about how you're going to die. And maybe that's not a good way to live.

• 1:00:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, certainly not how I live. Right now, there's a lot of kind of excitement and attention around so-called longevity. And at the extremes of never dying or living to be 120, which seems to be the, perhaps the genetic limit currently. It's not my fascination. I'm more interested in living in the years I've got, as it seems you are too.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Healthy living, yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Vital, healthy, you know, being able to move sense and, and think, seems like, and remember, you know, those seem like the critical ones.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  You know, a moment ago, you mentioned the concept of like removing a bit of thymus. And I think that the issues with, for me with that are, you know, it's an invasive surgery. And like, if you were to take out thymus, it would, it's not clear to me that it's the thymus that you need. You might be able, I mean, in fact, you can make thymic, so the thymus is both the cells that come into it from the bone marrow. So it's as an organ, it has contents. But its structure are some thymic epithelial cells, a kind of cell that make a matrix that all those cells live in, and they get educated in. And there's definitely, you know, pretty strong work. It says that you can create sort of a thymic epithelium that will do some of this work. But whether, you know,

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  a guy at home could hold on to the thymic cells and we would be in a position to do something important for longevity in our lifetime, I don't know. I honestly don't know. Some things, in my career, I've seen things happen really fast, so fast that almost like you didn't realize that you were doing it. And you're like, oh my God, we've got a cure for cancer. That's great. Okay, let's go on, do the next thing. Two things that, so you're like, you know, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, they, we thought that we would have some stem cell therapies, you know, within the seven or eight year window of that bond, first bond, and then there's a second bond. We didn't really get very many out of that. We learned a lot. And that is the risk.

• 1:02:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  About stem cell biology.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  About stem cell, about biology. And that is the risk we take when we do research. You know, we're talking a moment ago about how many times you might be in a lab spending hundreds of hours and not getting anything that you understand. And then, and then one hour and you understand everything. Because, you know, so all of a sudden, all those failures make, make sense. I think when we get into some of this stem cell biology, it's, it's intuitive and it's almost certainly true that we will have some of these things. Whether we will have them in time for like you or me, I don't know. I just don't know. And I think that's true of a lot of these things that say, oh, you know, we seem to be right on the cusp right now. For example, in, in cancer therapy, we've been on the cusp for 10 or 15 years of these things called CAR Ts. Alex will have told you about this, where you engineer your T cells and you give them special receptors that can get them to go

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  into, to eliminate tumors. But for whatever reason, they haven't worked in patients. They haven't worked, they haven't worked, they haven't worked. And T cell, the immune system gets turned off. These cells don't make it. They don't fail, they fail to eliminate the tumor. We will figure that out. But we've been thinking we've figured out, you know, sort of for five or 10 years. And it's, it's, you know, that gets frustrating. And I think it gets frustrating for people that are like waiting for it to, on the outside, like, why can't you solve this? And you're like, well, because the universe isn't always configured how we think it is. And that's discovery. That's the problem of discovery. If we knew what we needed to do, we would engineer it and it would work.

• 1:03:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. This is an important discussion that we haven't spent enough time on in this podcast, that I think is very important for people to hear. And I have some thoughts about it, but I'd love for any disagreements. I'm not looking for just agreements. But so my observation from a couple decades or more doing science, and then mainly shifting to podcasting, but this is what I do. I talk with great scientists. So that's the podcast. So I'm very immersed in like, what's happening right at the cutting edge. And because of great guests like you, you know, my, my sense is that in every field, there's been like this kind of steady pressure, like water on rock pressure, like, okay, we're going to understand, like salamanders regenerate. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that too? Cut off a limb, it could grow back. Okay, amazing. I think it's like Ellie Tanaka's

• 1:04:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  work has just shown that. You're like, wow, this would be incredible for amputees and brain regeneration. And but then it never really transfers. Or like, oh, we're going to figure out ways to get genes into cells. We're going to electroporate liposomes. We're going to use calcium phosphate, like great research tools, tons of things happen. And it's like, we're going to modify genes, zinc finger nucleus, all this. Okay, CRISPR, boom. And one thing just breaks through and goes so much further. And even though, you know, the ethics are questionable, there are babies that have deliberately induced gene alterations with CRISPR, sickle cell anemia treatments as well, some more benevolent example. But then the person who went rogue and just kind of did this in humans in China.

• 1:05:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  But CRISPR just kind of broke through it all. The excitement about stem cells led to like, yeah, I mean, even initiatives at the legislative level and like all these labs working on things. And then, as you said, it's kind of like run up against the dam.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I feel like in 10 years, some or all of that information will be extremely relevant when boom, one thing will just like leap out of bacteria or like grasshoppers, no pun intended with the grasshoppers. But the last example would be, you know, for years, it was like, the country's getting fatter, the country's getting obese. What are we going to do? Do calories matter? Of course, calories matter, this kind of thing, energy, you know, laws of thermodynamics still apply. And then all of a sudden, this fricking Gila monster biologist.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tells people what they already knew, because the GLPs were already being used as a drug, just not at significantly high levels. And all of a sudden, we have a imperfect, but very important, more or less, dare I say, cure.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  For obesity. It's got problems. There's muscle wasting, you know, there could be other issues, apathy, et cetera. I'm not, I'm not trying to discount any of that. But I feel like that's the way science works. It's like steady pressure, steady pressure, steady pressure, frustration, and something comes out of nowhere. And it almost seems prerequisite to have all those years of frustration and failure.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then, and you say, well, couldn't we have just gotten CRISPR first or the GLPs first? Like, why did we go through all these, you know, billions of dollars of expenditures, time, energy?

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't know. I feel like there's some natural order to this. And, and I just would like your thoughts on. I feel like it's necessary, but not sufficient to have lots and lots and lots of failures.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think it's necessary, and necessary, absolutely necessary, to study things that are just at some point curiosities. And that sounds like science is about trivia. But, you know, you gave the example clip one, somebody was just curious as to why Gila monsters, it was, the feature was that Gila monsters can go into, you know, dormancy for like 10 months, not eat, and then, and then come out. And like, how do they manage that? And so that's, that was just like, what is that? What is it? What causes that? CRISPR. You know, that was, people were studying, like, how do bacteria defend against other bacteria? Well, they use this, it turns out, there's this enzyme, and it remembers the sequence of this one bacteria that has come and invaded you before, and then can like modify the genome and get rid of it and like kill it. Well, that same, you know, that

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  same enzyme then, which we now use for all this human engineering, came out of a basic, like how do bacteria defend themselves? It's not anything about like, you know, modifying sickle cell anemia. It was about how does the world work? My career is exactly as long as, as the lifespan of this, this field we call cancer immunotherapy. I did the first immunotherapy experiment. I injected a mouse with an antibody that I had made. It was against molecules on T cells. And I'd shown already in the lab that that molecule caused the T cells to get more activated when you blocked it. And, and we did a series of like other mouse experiments of like all kinds of diseases, and it, you know, kept jamming up the T cells. And then, then, you know, Jim, my, my, I said, we got some tumors in the fridge. And so we set up that experiment. And, you know, he injected this antibody and

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  the tumors melted. Well, that was the start of cancer immunotherapy. Really, that's, that's the, that's the origin.

• 1:08:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is the experiment for which, let's just be direct here, that your, your advisor won the Nobel Prize.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  Correct, correct.

• 1:08:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Did you at least get to attend the ceremony?

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, that's, that's a little thing. This is how science works, folks. Doesn't matter who did the experiment. It matters what lab you're in.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  You got to, you know, get to go. The, the after parties were good. But I guess, I'm, I'll take you back. Like, we weren't trying to cure cancer when we started this. I, the thesis project, when I went into Jim, this is my, my mentor at that point. The discussion was like, well, there's some molecules on T cells. And I said, you know, we knew from AIDS and a few other things that T cells were important. So that was the attraction, even though you had people say, why would you do immunology? Well, they seem to be interested. And there was a molecule and I was like, well, yeah, let's just see what it does. And once you saw you could turn things off, then everything became possible. Right now you set an immune system, you could dial up, you could say, well, if I could dial up, what will happen to vaccination? Well, it got better. What will happen to, you know, multiple sclerosis? The disease got worse. You know, what will happen to cancer? Ooh, we can start to have an effect on it.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  And, and, and, you know, the X-ray, you know, the people were studying physics. And then it turns out to be that they were like, oh, I can, I can, I can measure bone. And that's how we use X-rays now, like to, you know. So there's all these examples that everything, you know, like the big things often come from these orthogonal directions. And then we realize what it might mean. And I think you have to start there. Otherwise you'll just plow this direction and you'll hit those walls because you don't have to work around that comes with some orthogonal piece of information. Orthogonal meaning at right angles, right? So, you know, again, the CRISPR came from bacteria, but it's really useful in us as an engineering tool. But we wouldn't have known that if somebody hadn't been out there sort of saying, okay, well, how do, how do bacteria do it? You know, how do they defend themselves? Oh, they use this enzyme.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  And I think that's a really important message that, that dispels this idea that everything is sort of like basically just easy for us to engineer. Yes, once you have the CRISPR tool, it becomes actually kind of easy to do some really cool things with it and still creative. But the fundamental leap that you're describing, I don't think in many of those cases that people were kind of conceiving when they were in the first dregs of doing it, this would become an industry. You know, this would become a whole thing. And, and maybe that's important because you need to foster that. If, if everybody always thought they were doing it to build a company and, you know, sell a product or something, then, then I don't think we would do the things that get us new. You know, that's, that's all, that's all kind of what we already know. That's human knowledge. We want to build human knowledge and to build a human knowledge, we got to go off the piece. You can't ski on the slope.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  You got to be like in the trees and maybe you'll bonk your head a bunch of times. I, I think that's the reality. And it's like, you got a lot of people out there that are, that are, that have decided to do that for a life because it's a, it's a, it's a chance to like solve a puzzle. It's like, there's, there's puzzles about how the world works. And if you've ever done a Jigsaw puzzle, you find there's always like, oh, you're getting, and especially in the end, you're like, how, you know, what pieces come together to do it? I think that's what makes this whole science thing really fun. It's, that's the, that's the reward is that you get the puzzle piece in and you're like, oh, you know, it makes sense that now I know what I've been building. I've been building this puzzle. And, and then you go back and you do it again, because that's really satisfying at the end of it, even though, you know, you, again, with the family puzzle, the first parts are so hard.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Thousand pieces and you, you've maybe find the edge, but the intervening where there's like all clouds, super hard. And, and I think that's, that's, that is what science is a lot about, is, is doing that and then realizing what the picture is. You know, what is that picture of it? And then, and then all the, you know, the brakes are, are off. I often tell people that if, if, if an experiment, if an experiment you'll do in a lab has a 10% chance of yielding anything interesting, you got to do at least 10, you know, to even meet the fundamental stats. You actually have to do quite a few more.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  So that's where it's not a, it's not a cost effective thing. If you, it's, it's really difficult to be a scientist because there's no quid pro quo. There's nothing, there's nothing to say, if you put in five hours, that you'll get five units of goodness of, of knowledge out of it. A lot of times you get zero. And, and, but then sometimes you put five, you got 500.

• 1:12:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  And, and those are the jackpot moments.

• 1:12:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like life.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  It's like life. It really is.

• 1:12:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  I have to say, anyone who's considering a PhD, we had a call in from audience recently and someone said they're finishing undergraduate, they want to go the, or finishing graduate school, should they go the research route? They want to do a postdoc. And I'm like, yes, yes, and yes. I, rather than answer publicly, I decided to just have a call with this individual because it's a rather niche question. But, I mean, also just in training your reward system to work for five years on something is so valuable, especially in this day and age. Because everything else feels like it comes at like warp speed.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it clicks.

• 1:13:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, like, and to just put steady pressure on something with all the failures and all the things, and then to finally complete something. It's, a lot of people think it'll be underwhelming. I think, I think quite the opposite.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like, anyone that's like done a triathlon or, you know, raised, raised a kid or done anything, you're like, oh my goodness. Like, and that never ends, right?

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's nothing better than these long-term investments.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Nothing.

• 1:13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. When they break through that, when you're like, your analogy, when you break through that dam or when you realize sometimes that you've broken through the dam. And that's, that's one of the funny things about, I think, science. And maybe it's true in triathlons and stuff too, where you've realized that you've all of a sudden got somewhere.

• 1:13:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I haven't done a triathlon, so I have to be fair. Rob, our producer sitting to our left, he has done many Ironmans. And he has that mindset of just steady pressure. I mean, his relationship to work and effort is remarkable because he burns so little energy worrying about things that we refer to as in the left column, like the stuff you can't impact and just focusing on what you can impact.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, so a lot of it is about learning energetic control. Like doing science, that is, or anything is about what not to think about, what, what to force yourself not to do or think about.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  If I may, I'd like to shift us to this very interesting area of immunology and biology, which you refer to as spatial biology.

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:14:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'm going to pose a question that may or may not fit with this framework, but either way, I'd like to, like you did, educate us on it. I'm fascinated by these old kind of barbaric experiments in medicine. Wonderful book, by the way, folks, is The Prince of Medicine about Galen. If you ever want to learn about how we learned about medicine back when it was truly barbaric and it's like surgeries done on warriors and without anesthesia. And we've known for a long time that if somebody, God forbid, has a finger lopped off or a hand lopped off, that might actually be a worthwhile investment to make an incision in the gut and stuff that thing in the gut to keep it warm and keep the tissue viable for regeneration. Once you try and put it back on, turns out that's true.

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  Is that true?

• 1:15:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of juicy stuff in the, in the gut that maybe it's the warmth, maybe it's the immune system.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:15:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe it's the lack of infection from being inside as opposed to outside the body. Who knows?

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Gut, you mean the intestine or you mean the stomach?

• 1:15:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Within the stomach.

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  The stomach itself.

• 1:15:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I'm not suggesting anyone do this experiment. As I started reading into this, I discovered that there are a lot of really cool experiments, not just in rib limb or tissue preservation and, and restoration. Like for instance, I've talked many times on this podcast about the fact that above our, the roof of our mouth, we have this small cluster of neurons, the suprachiasmatic nucleus organizes the circadian rhythms of every cell in our body, from the genetic to the transmitter level, peptides, et cetera, keeps us sleep, wake cycles, does all the organization that we need for circadian rhythms. So much so that you can take just one subpopulation of these neurons, the calbindin expressing suprachiasmatic nucleus neurons. It's like 5% of the total neurons in this already tiny cluster of neurons.

• 1:16:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you can transplant them pretty much anywhere.

• 1:16:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  And certainly in the brain, and you'll restore the circadian rhythm of an arrhythmic animal.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:16:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  So that tells you a lot of cool things. It says, okay, there's probably something that's secreted or, but like these cells are that important and it doesn't really matter where they are, at least in the brain. They can do what they need to do, which is super cool.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then I started reading about, oh, like you could actually take perhaps like a little bit of pancreatic tissue and like stuff it in the, you know, under the skin.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  Kidney capsule.

• 1:16:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not ideal, but you get some function back. So I'm fascinated by this because we like to think that the organization of our organs is so critical.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  But maybe they just need to be there. Now, no one should test this hypothesis unless they have to. But when we think about the immune system, you described the function of the thymus beautifully. You talked about the bone marrow, but you also talked about the massive migration of these cells that are working in this network. How important is spatial compartmentalization of these cells? Or is the rule eliminate spatial compartmentalization in order to make the immune system function at its best? And there's a very specific practical question for which I'm asking this, but I'm just going to tuck that away to pique people's interest and I'll get to it. But this is relevant to how we, to decision, important decisions that we make, I believe.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  Well, the, I, the answer is yes and yes. You know, it's, it's both. So although I described the immune system in the earlier part of this discussion as super migratory and, you know, hitches a ride in the blood, gets into tissues, it travels through your lymphatics, there are these things called lymph nodes down the lymphatic tubing, which for those that don't know, lymphatics are like drainage. It's how you drain the fluid back out of your tissue. So although there's, you know, these mass migration of cells, there's also in, like even in just in T cells, there's T cells that lodge in particular settings and they, you know, act to protect that tissue and they, and they're resident cells of those tissues, they never leave. And so both are true. You have, you know, parts of your immune system that are, you know, protective or, or

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  like nurturing of particular areas and then there's ones that are circulating and can hit any, any spot. You know, going back to your idea of organs and such being moved, I think there's two components to that, that you might be thinking about. One of them is the question of whether the organ can survive in the new space. Like, does it have the growth factors and the blood flow and the lymphatic outflow and maybe even some neuronal activity that, you know, makes that tissue work? So, so that's where like, if you take the pancreas, you can famously put it underneath the kidney capsule. Kidney has kind of like a skin around it. You can tuck some, some, some pancreatic cells in there and they're super happy. They love that. They get all the blood flow they need and it seems to be just right for them.

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

  But if you've got somebody with diabetes, for example, and you try to put new pancreatic cells in anywhere in their body, the immune system will attack it, just as it did the first, diabetes, for those who don't know, type one diabetes is caused by the immune system. It gets too active against the pancreas. It's autoimmunity. It's where it's now saying the pancreas is, is not self, it's something foreign and it wipes it out. And that's the source of what I said earlier, like your immune system can be quite dangerous. So like when you talk about this concept of like spatial, there's a few things to bring in. One is this, the organ, can the organ get what it needs? And then does the immune system accept it in some ways in that environment? And that's where like some, some of your immune system that lives spatially in certain areas

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  is going to be very like defensive against whatever it's, you know, specific against in that area, but may not care what's happening elsewhere because those cells just aren't, it's not like the brain where you're like, if I do something here, it's sensed in my brain. The immune system that if it does, if the cells don't migrate, they don't have really a lot of ways to communicate. They can, they can hitch some signals on neurons. And that's a really interesting thing. We could talk about the, the capacity for your brain and, you know, the insular cortex. There's a great set of stories emerging about how your insular cortex can program your immune state into organs and can, via, via the vagus can, can essentially program.

• 1:20:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  By levels of calm or stress or by thoughts themselves?

• 1:20:06Speaker 00

  Well, the, the one, the latter one is the one that gets me super excited about the possibility that you could have triggers for thoughts that, so the insular cortex, as I understand it, it's a source of some of our moral decision making. It's also the, the thought to be the part of our brain where if you cut your hand and, and I see it bleeding, I can feel it in my hand. I go, oh, ow, you know, I can sense and you can sense each other's pain. It's a set, set that this very nice Israeli group did this, Roy Slav did this very nice study where they induced into the guts of, of mice inflammatory bowel disease. They fed them a really kind of weird sugar that causes them, the bowel to puncture and then they get, they get a really bad, you know, stomach ache, stomach ache, inflammatory maladies, diarrhea.

• 1:20:50Speaker 00

  And, and in that period, they used, you know, you know what dreads are. So they, they marked for the, for the crowd, it's, they used, they, they used, they used a way to, to mark all the neurons that were firing during that period in the insular cortex. And then later they could fire them, like after the mouse had recovered. And the, they saw evidence that the immune system was resetting up itself in the gut as if it had just been punctured, you know, like with this. And the cues for that, in that case, were a drug, but we know that we can, you know, cue the insular cortex like me watching you do things. So it's always, it's made me wonder whether, you know, like some of the things we, we smell cut grass and we can, you know, instantly take us back to a whole bunch of thoughts about how we were when we were kids and maybe even make you feel a little like that. Whether there's aspects to this to which are, you know, our ability of our

• 1:21:35Speaker 00

  thoughts to control that region are, are going to be revealed to, you know, to have potential that you could train, you know, train yourself to, to, you know, to bring up an immune state in a particular tissue.

• 1:21:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  And just so we make sure everyone's on board, what you just described, because there's a lot there. If I understand correctly, we know that the nervous system can do contextual learning, like if, like if an animal or, or human, just keep it a humans, gets shocked, scared or traumatized in a given region, or even I've had friends visit San Francisco and get their cars broken into and their computers stolen. You can develop a context, context dependent or, and or place dependent memory where you kind of don't like San Francisco as much, even though the rest of the trip was awesome. That's a pretty broad interpretation. Or you have a great experience someplace and you actually really love San Francisco because you met your future spouse there. You just had a

• 1:22:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  particularly awesome experience there. Even if it was just in one part, you might feel better about your computer getting stolen anyway. Okay. Insula seems like a, you know, let's take the positive example. Let's keep it positive for a moment. I think what you're describing is that if we remember the positive thing, if there was a positive immune status associated with that, the immune system is also part of that contextual memory. And so merely by recalling the positive or negative, but in this case, positive memory, we can also recall, we recall not just the memory, but also the body state. And the body state includes the immune status that accompanied the positive or negative event.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  That's what these studies are starting to merge in.

• 1:23:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's cool. That's really cool because we've heard for so long that like, we know that chronic stress impedes immunity. We also know that acute stress boosts it. And that's something that, you know, with all due respect to my colleagues who've focused on the ill effects of chronically elevated cortisol, like the, the immune enhancing effects of acute cortisol and stress are really important. And, and I think they've been overlooked. But I love this because one of the problems slash luxuries that I, I have is I sit sort of at the interface between like real science and biology and like what most people perceive as complete nonsense wackiness. But more and more we're finding that's within the complete nonsense wackiness,

• 1:23:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  there are kernels of truth, like that you can actually meditate your way into a better state, which helps serve your immune system and so on and so, and that's seeming less and less wacky, even outside California, because of studies like the one you described.

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  One of my friends who's a faculty, Dan Lemon at NYU, we were talking about the same study and he was like, that may be what meditation is doing. Cause it may be allowing your brain to, you know, communicate and reset, you know, less inflammatory states across your body because of this axis. And the study was really, I think it was, you know, there's still work to be done, but the, you know, the, the fundamentals of it was in the actual event, there were certain cells that would accumulate in there. And then in the induced event, when you've made the, the brain fire again of this mouse, you would see, you know, not as profound, but you saw this, this evidence of these same sorts of cells accumulating there as if they, you know, they're ready for that inflammation. And I think what we're talking about is the idea that you could have that go both

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  directions. And that, again, you know, the, the concept of, I mean, I'm sure you've talked about this before of meditation where the idea is that you, you know, you, it's one of the ways that you can control your autonomous nervous system is through, is through your breath. That happens with meditation. I think that, to me, there's something intuitive about that. But, you know, I just, an hour ago, warned you about the problem of science being intuitive, that some things that make, they sort of make a great story in our minds, then don't turn out to be true. But the, the data on this insert cortex thing is starting to look like it's a real thing. Like there's a real connection between some of the peripheral states and, and like regions of the brain. And however those are triggered now, maybe, you know, again, I've, I've asked that, well, maybe

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  when you're healthy, you should smell like mint. And then when you want to be healthy again, like, you know, there's, it's kind of crazy thoughts. But, but again, there's an element of that that's intuitive too, where you say, oh, that seems to be the case. My mom makes me a comfort meal. Is it really the meal settling in? Or is it just that, that the sensations that make me feel like, you know, less stressed in one sense, but maybe also to this point, and literally resetting your tissue.

• 1:25:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives you insights into your heart health, your hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans. Function not only provides testing of over 160 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, it also analyzes these results and provides recommendations for improving your health from top doctors. For example, in a recent test with Function, I learned that some of my blood lipids were slightly out of range. As a result, I decided to start supplementing with

• 1:26:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  nattokinase, which can naturally help reduce LDL cholesterol. And it did. In a follow-up test, I could confirm that this strategy worked. My blood lipids are now back exactly where I want them. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is just so important for health. I mean, how else are you going to know what's going on under the hood? And while I've been doing blood work for years, it used to be time consuming, complicated and expensive. In fact, I used to spend thousands of dollars per year trying to get this kind of data. And the data, frankly, were not all that good. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. A Function membership is only a dollar a day, $365 a year. And if you think about the information it provides and the health challenges it helps you avoid and the proactive

• 1:27:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  things that it can do for you to enhance your health, I truly look at it as a savings. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code huberman for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. I'm always struck by extremes of personality, but in both directions. So there are these people who just say like, I don't get sick. And they don't get sick. And it's super frustrating because I'm not one of these people that's very sickly, but I occasionally get like a sniffle or a cold or something, you know, less and less with each year, because I do feel like pay more attention to the sleep piece than I, certainly than I did when I was a graduate student, postdoc

• 1:28:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  or junior professor. But there does seem to be this quote unquote positive, or let's just call it a reinforced mindset as opposed to like an immune reinforcement associated with mindset. Because some people will say like, I, I just always get sick. And I believe them. They always seem sick. But it could be that you get sick in a given environment once, and then you, you just decide that you're sickly. So then, you know, it could be that the immune system is listening to these thoughts, but not in the form of words. I think this is where like it gets hokey for people, like real biologists and physicians are like, yeah, you gotta be kidding me. Like, but, because immune cells don't listen to thoughts, they listen to brain states.

• 1:28:42Speaker 00

  Triggers of some sort.

• 1:28:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Triggers of some sort, right? And then there's like, as humans, we have this obsession with language that makes it seem like you can, you know, write affirmations and then it's the word content, but it's the feeling state associated with that, that at a biological level makes total sense. So we were talking about spatial biology and the fact that you can tuck some pancreas in the kidney. And unless they, someone has type one diabetes, a lot of the functions of the pancreas can, can still persist or transplantation of these clock neurons. And clearly there are limits to this, but in the context of the immune system. I'm wondering, can we take a little bit of thymic tissue, bank it, and then just later,

• 1:29:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  like, put it in a slow-release capsule under our skin of our hand? You know, like, and that might sound crazy, but I have friends, one of whom might be at Duralink now, who actually embedded a little radio receiver under his hand to be able to open his locks at his home and his car, and his wife might have one also. And like, that might sound really like Bay Area, like, future tech, kind of wacky biohacking. But if I knew that I could be much healthier by taking a few thymic cells in a sterile capsule and sliding it under the skin, you know, people get their ears pierced with, you know, less invasive procedures, why not?

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the question is, why would that, you know, is that likely to work? You're basically, remember how we were just talking about if I do 10 experiments, one might work? Yours isn't a bad idea, but, you know, is there, it's more than likely at one of the nine out of 10, I would guess.

• 1:30:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure, but is there a correlate from any studies on animals?

• 1:30:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, we know that in a lot of studies of cancer and tumors, I used to see these mice down in the vivarium, they would slide tumors under the skin and study them and give animals drugs or give animals stuff.

• 1:30:32Speaker 00

  Very common, yeah.

• 1:30:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, tumors are happy to thrive in novel environments, so why wouldn't healthy cells?

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  No, I think you can. I think one of the things that comes into play a little bit about that, that's more about, you know, replacing an organ with one that might be better, is that at some point, if you come in, so one of the challenges of tissue engineering is if you want to bring in new genes, the vector, the material, the surrounding, whether you're bringing it, using a virus to, you know, to bring it into those cells that you're going to now put into the person, whether it's a virus or a small piece of DNA called plasmid, you effectively are giving that a new bit of identity. And when that, when you go to transplant that organ back in, it's seen as foreign. And it's, it's just like you just put an infected cell in you, you know, as far as the immune system knows, all of a sudden, there's a cell with a huge number of new

• 1:31:23Speaker 00

  things being expressed, and some of them viral, literally. So, you know, that's a, that represents an issue, I think, when we talk about any kind of, you know, sort of engineering at the moment is, is if you engineer a system to be maybe better, the immune system isn't necessarily going to want better. And, and so you have to overcome this issue of tolerance, maybe at the same time. And, and again, that's why that particular experiment, depending on what you're putting under the kidney capsule or whatever, it matters what the immune state is and what that thing is, as to whether your immune system's going to let it fly.

• 1:31:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm not considering doing this. I just, I, I think we are, I don't know how old you are, but I can guess based on some mutual friends we have, but I'm guessing that a lot of people who are able to understand speech, they're old enough to understand speech, are thinking that in our lifetime, we are going to be able to use our own cells, or peptides, or synthetic versions of peptides from our own cells and so forth, to, to overcome a lot of the issues that our parents and grandparents were not able to overcome.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  You know, with regards to like, the peptide side of things, and even the cells, and this is maybe where you're going with space, is that context does matter for the immune system. So, and it matters for all biological systems. I'll just give you an example, we did a study of wound healing some years ago. And if you have a wound in a mouse, it's maybe just a, like, you know, if you ever have a melanoma removed, they do a punch biopsy, it's a little circle. So you can do that in the back of a mouse, and then you can watch the wound healing happen. The, there's zones within there, where certain biology is really important to be happening. And then, so, so imagine the wound is like this, and it's open, the cells, like, one layer back are doing certain things, but the other ones behind that are also induced to do something.

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  The wound isn't just this area, it's, it's actually sensed all, like a gradient, almost like in the neurons. And so these cells need to do different things than these cells. So if you wanted to administer some, you know, like, like a peptide, or even just a cell type, you have to be a little bit conscious of like, where it's going to do the work you want it to do. And the natural system does that naturally, like, the cells on the inside actually instruct the cells one layer back. But you don't necessarily want everybody getting the same signal. So like, development happens that way, you know about gradients, and we were talking about this earlier, that there's gradients. So, so I think one of the tricks that we don't really understand about this is, when is something good for a process? And when is it only good when it's given in the right dose at the right time? And I think that's one of the tricks about some of these things.

• 1:33:52Speaker 00

  And again, that's where, you know, both in the lab and, you know, like, I would say that more so than ever in our lives, you know, we're seeing, you know, people kind of like, experimenting with things on themselves. And one of the sad parts about this, we don't capture a lot of data therefore, you know, because it's not seen as a study, and we can't say, everybody that took this gets this result. And, and then you have this rise of things on the internet of anecdotes that become seen as data, like, I took this thing and this happened. And that's, you know, I could drink this drink, and have something great happen to me, or something bad happen to me, but it might have nothing to do with the drink, right? You know, that, that issue is one that I think is really, is really critical in this, in this window of time right now. And honestly, I don't know what to think about the idea that people, you know, do experiments on themselves.

• 1:34:36Speaker 00

  I think we all want to improve ourselves, or I'll do some kind of experiments on ourselves, really. You read a book, you're trying to improve yourself, right? The physical one gets a bit tricky when, you know, you're not sure whether something is going to be dangerous or not, but.

• 1:34:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, yeah, and I'm not promoting that people do this. I think that, of course, you would want to see preclinical, clinical, and other trials for this.

• 1:34:57Speaker 00

  I think I would personally, I mean, just.

• 1:34:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I mean, I, there are a few areas where I am a bit more adventurous, but for the most part, I'm like, you know, based on my training and background, I have to orient toward, you know, I'd like a bunch of, let me put it this way, I'd like a bunch of other people to do it first.

• 1:35:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like, who wouldn't? It's fun to be first, unless you're doing something really stupid and that can get you killed, in which case, like, let other people go first.

• 1:35:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think a good example of that right now is, and this is, you know, sort of nationwide or even international, is vaccine hesitancy. I know this is a touchy topic, so we can.

• 1:35:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, but you can feel open.

• 1:35:32Speaker 00

  Well, I'll just point out that, that the, one group that's completely, no matter whether they're hesitant against childhood vaccines, and the number of them we get, and the fact that the government makes you take them and these sorts of things, that if those people have cancer, they're very interested in vaccines. Because it's, there's really good data that you can promote more immune cells against the tumor by making a vaccine that consists of some of the proteins and peptides that are unique to the tumor and not different from you. And you introduce those as if you would introduce a virus or anything in a childhood vaccine, similar concept, just different peptides, they're peptides from the tumor. And, and in those situations, it's context, right? So if you and I had cancer, and we don't have, the conventional cures are not going

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  to work on us, we know, there we know statistics really well. Chemo is not very good for a lot of cancers, and that's the only thing we got. But if you have access to something that's relatively new, and particularly vaccines, despite what, you know, some people worry about, they're pretty safe. And so the, the certain die versus try out a vaccine drives a lot of people to be interested in vaccines. And I would say, yeah, in that case, it's a really, you know, you can see where people's, their, their question about whether they're going to try something or not is very context-dependent.

• 1:36:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very. I think, I don't want to go too deep into the vaccine debate, and I don't want to be a spokesperson for either side, because that's not my role today, but I think that the, the, what you refer to as vaccine hesitancy, actually comes back to an earlier issue that maybe you'd be willing to comment on, which is, I think there are a very large number of people for whom they are neither anti-vaccine nor super pro, but they are, they're asking about timing and combinations.

• 1:37:15Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 1:37:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're saying, okay, listen, and we had Jay Bhattacharya on here, and I've had several others who've said, maybe there should be an investigation of the spacing of these things, how many, how critical it is to do at a given age, you know, and on and on. We could pick any vaccine for that reason. And as an immunologist, do any of those questions make sense to ask? I mean, I could see how, you know, bombarding the immune, the young immune system with a lot of vaccines is a very different thing than spacing out the delivery of those vaccines. I'm not saying don't give them all, I'm saying, over what time window does one give them?

• 1:37:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think a lot of people, many more people are asking that question.

• 1:37:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's just a quieter murmur than are saying, listen, we don't want to take any of these things.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  We don't want our kids to take any of these.

• 1:38:04Speaker 00

  I agree with that too, and I think there's some fair aspect to which most of these vaccines were not studied in the context when they were studied of what it does, you know, in, in, in combination, and these sorts of timings. The fact is that, you know, the evidence that there's, that there's bad things happening doesn't look to me, you know, tremendously strong, it's almost like anecdotal sort of information.

• 1:38:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Unless it's your kid.

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Unless it's your kid, in which case you're going to look for an explanation. So I don't know.

• 1:38:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just being fair, as long as we're admitting psychology as a factor.

• 1:38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there's fairness on both sides of that discussion, and I think, I think that almost certainly where we are now, there's probably ways to put together vaccines, and certainly more convenient ways. It's, I, as a parent, I, I actually had something very similar where I delayed, you know, my first daughter's, one of her vaccines, partly because I know that, that as a, you know, like, there's a certain element to which, when we design a protocol, like, the protocol for immunotherapy of cancer for patients was, was actually based a little bit on the mouse work, a lot on the mouse work that I did. You can imagine that mice and humans are quite different, but that is the protocol. And protocol is protocol, and that's how it's done in medicine, and that's because you have a fairly good sense of the safety of it because of statistics.

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  But that isn't to say that it's the only protocol that would work. And I think you're getting at this concept of like, could there be at least a more convenient one?

• 1:39:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or best or safest?

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  Or safest, or even one that is less disruptive to the lives of the children and the parents. We delayed one of our kids' vaccines, you know, by just a month or something, because she had not been feeling well, just straight up. And it is true, you know, and I'd say that a couple of the vaccines that have come out that I've had recently, the shingles one is a good example, it has knocked me completely out, and it, you know, is very, very heavily adjuvanted, so it's clearly, it's, you know, it's having to. Does it, does it need to be? You know, I actually don't know, I don't know what studies were done. And, and there's kind of an aspect to which, I don't know that we're all being shielded from the information, but I don't know that we all know how to read the information about how these regimens were chosen. Some of them are chosen by competing pharma, pharma companies that each make their own, you know, materials and.

• 1:40:12Speaker 00

  You know, again, I think there's a, there's a lot in this question. I don't know how much of it also represents the one problem of science that I could talk about is this, this issue that's a lot of science treat science as a kind of a papacy. Like, we know the language, we know the facts, and we probably don't have time to tell you why we think this and where the holes are.

• 1:40:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Excuse me for interrupting, but you know, a huge basis of this podcast is to counter exactly that.

• 1:40:40Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:40:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, I know all these incredibly smart, incredibly well-meaning people who have lives of their own, health lives of their own, health challenges of their own, kids of their own, and on and on, and no one was hearing from them.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  It was, and as things get more politicized, there's less incentive to give nuance. I actually really appreciate you providing some nuance on the, I mean, it's clear where you stand on vaccines generally, based on what you've said, but you're, you're offering perhaps the opportunity for, for better understanding and certainly delivery of the information.

• 1:41:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. I mean, it's a huge problem.

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I guess it's, it's one of those ones that I can only speak about what I did, right? As a, as a, as a human, when I had kids and I looked at the data, and I have probably better capacity than some anyways to read it and look at risk versus harm, you know, the percentages of these things. I absolutely, you know, vaccinated kids and that was, it seemed like, it seems even now like a reasonable no-brainer. But I just told you too, that I, I asked to go off protocol, because at some point, I know that these protocols have a little bit of like, again, they were designed on a, one study, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't work if you wait another month. In fact, if you do, if you've done enough mouse experiments, I have, you know, that when you vaccinate on a slightly different schedule, you can still end up with the same outcome. You know, that is

• 1:41:56Speaker 00

  protection, you know, with slightly different schedules. It's not that convenient for doctors and hospitals and even sometimes for patients to get off on, you know, like weird schedule, and then you forget a dose, and then it isn't as effective, right? So there's, there's efficacy that comes with, you know, trying to follow the protocol, and because the protocol has some convenience built into it, that means you're gonna do it. It's, it's like, it's like brushing your teeth in the morning. You do it in the morning, the evening, it's when you do it. And so you'll do it twice a day. So, there's a lot in this. I mean, you know, there's a lot of politics, I think, involved in vaccine too, that relates to the question of like, at what point can the government do, tell you what to do, which is, you know, it's a, it's a surrogate question to the vaccine one, where a vaccine is, you know,

• 1:42:39Speaker 00

  if there's a harm, who gets to choose what the harm benefit, and then how resources are given out for like schools, and you know, we know all these, we know all these sort of nuances. From the science standpoint, I don't think you want to wipe out the baby with the bathwater. I don't think you, personally, like, I would not immunize my kids. Could there be additional studies about the combination of these into like, fewer shots? I think so. See, why not? Here's where you get the financial rise. What's the benefit to any pharma company of doing that?

• 1:43:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I think this is, again, I have to be careful that I don't place myself into an advocacy group that I'm not. I'm, I look at everything on a case-by-case basis.

• 1:43:16Speaker 00

  I try to do the same.

• 1:43:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I really try to do that. But the, you know, and I've tried to be, in recent years, more open to the, to at least understanding what the anti-big pharma stance is really about. You know, it comes up a lot around SSRIs, but you talk to somebody with clinical-grade OCD, and they will tell you that SSRIs saved their life. So there you go. Okay, well, you know, so we can say all we want about pharma. Are you talking about people getting in, taking insulin, or, you know, until recently, the GLPs were mostly available through pharma. Now they're sort of, it's kind of Wild West. People are microdosing them from all sorts of compounding pharmacies as their own issues and so on. But my sense is that the frustration around the kind of dictatorial, like, you're gonna do this at this point because this,

• 1:44:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  or else, like, your persona non grata, that kind of, like, people not, people being shunned in both directions, in either direction, rather, that's, you know, that's really the source of the problem. There, there really hasn't ever been a conversation quite like this.

• 1:44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:44:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  At least not one I've seen publicly. Yeah, there are not a lot of labs that are gonna devote themselves to this. People will wage the argument that, and I don't know if this is actually true, but that the pharma companies are protected against lawsuits about vaccine injuries.

• 1:44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, they are.

• 1:44:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, I think that probably is frustrating to, very frustrating, excuse me, to a parent whose kid seemed essentially fine, got a vaccine, and three days later started exhibiting symptoms that then set them off on a course that was really, really tragic.

• 1:44:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  And those groups are the ones that have accumulated the most oomph out there.

• 1:44:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  And if you think about the, those parents, it's totally understandable.

• 1:44:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why they would feel that way. Whether or not the basis of their feelings is exactly right, I can't speak to, but you can understand. If your kid is one way, walk out of the doctor's office is, is another way, and you can't do anything about it, that's gotta be mad, I mean, beyond maddening.

• 1:45:12Speaker 00

  And, and the question is, what could you have done differently, I think, is, in those situations, having been in them, at that exact situation where you said, oh, now it's done, and now I can't go back.

• 1:45:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you did that to them. This is the thing that, well, this is the thing I think that is not often discussed, is that the, the parents made that choice on the basis of what they thought was the best. So there's a certain guilt slash anger, I mean, there's a whole psychology to it that's completely understandable.

• 1:45:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  The kid didn't wander into the clinic.

• 1:45:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, on the way over here, I was thinking about some of the things that, you know, are happening in, in medical space, and you know, you guys have, obviously, from time to time, talk about heptides and these sorts of things that people are using, you know, off-label, well, not even off-label, they're just getting them from, from wherever, the internet. And you know, I was thinking, well, you know, there's a funny thing there, because the legitimacy of pharma companies has sort of fallen into even worse straits than before, because I think, I was thinking about this, a lot of it does relate to the fact that we are advertised to take a lot of things that often aren't, you know, the side effects are worse than the, than the symptoms that we're relieving. And, and that sort of, you know, again, I, I may find myself like, having a bunch of colleagues hate me for talking about this with you, but I do think it's

• 1:46:24Speaker 00

  kind of important at some point to surface where all this comes from, you know, and, and the idea that we can do experiments on ourselves, on our own bodies, again, it's quite different to say, read a book, although you can be infected by, we believe, like, by, you know, scripture and things in your behavior. But somehow in here, this idea that, that, you know, we can be told to do things by people that aren't quite in our best interests, I think it opens up the idea that, well, why, why can't I choose my best interest? You know, who, who are these experts that I can't always trust?

• 1:46:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  What's more American than that, after all?

• 1:46:58Speaker 00

  Well, it is, it is, it is part of the pioneering spirit. Like, if the, if the government's not gonna protect my 40 acres, I gotta have a gun and protect it myself. And that's, that's been a part of our culture for a very long time. And I think this idea of individuality plays into this, but it could be exacerbated at the moment by the, by the fact that there, you know, haven't always been good communication with something you're trying to work out, and, and maybe even surfacing these ideas that are hard to talk about, like, should we trust pharma companies? I know a lot of people that work for pharma, and they really, they are doing good. They, they, you know, they're like you and me. They, they really think, and they are treating disease, they're making really good drugs, and they do really good things. But it's not always true. Not just be, just because of, you know, a bunch of people, and it's not always true that the subtle best interest of a corporation is the same as the best interest of an individual.

• 1:47:42Speaker 00

  So, you know, we have to surface those things exist. It's not like we have to say that is right or wrong, or whatever, but at some point, those, these kind of perverse incentives exist. And I, I wonder why, you know, like, pharma companies haven't gotten better tests for who's gonna respond to these checkpoint drugs that we made. We've had, we've had a few papers that show who are responders and who are not, but it's still the case that if you get to come in with melanoma, even though there's only a 50% chance you're gonna be cured, which is great, it used to be zero with these drugs, you still take, 100% of the market takes that drug. Well, because the 50% that aren't gonna respond, they don't know who they are. And so everybody takes it. So, the companies that sell those have no incentive to develop a test. Although get, if they develop a test that shows who

• 1:48:22Speaker 00

  is and who isn't gonna respond, they'll cut their market into 50 in half. So, I don't think any pharma executives act out there going, eh, eh, eh. But if there's no, there's no positive incentive to do that study, to study those things. And I think it's kind of true in some of these other drugs that we've been, you know, brought, brought forward, some of which are better and worse than others. We could, told that this is gonna be good for us, and, and we should take it. And, and there's a, again, you're, you're getting to the American kind of like mentality, which is to say, well, at some point, if you fool me twice, or, you know, I'm not gonna believe it. And, and I might not believe it against the entire spectrum of things called science. And the problem is that there's people like you and me that are trying to actually do, and, and most of us, I'd say, 99.9% of us

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  are working our asses off to like, you know, figure things out and discover stuff that's important for mankind. And then you have these sort of issues that arise, and you're like, well, then, should you distrust as a, as a, as a species, should you distrust the entire class of science? Probably not. You just need to maybe make it so that knowledge is, is freer, and knowledge is better communicated, and that, and that, and you do watch out for those situations where there should be, you know, and maybe vaccines are one, we, you know, we just need to do something sensible, like what you're describing, and just to do a study, and say, let's do that study, and, and make that very public that we do it. And say, we're gonna do that. And, and obviously, people can sign up for, you know, via, you can have this regimen, or you can have the old regimen, or the new regimen.

• 1:49:48Speaker 00

  You know, again, I, I may be speaking, I don't do vaccines. It's not what my lab studies, but there could be some sense to saying, well, maybe science as a whole could take this on and say, what would be, maybe, maybe the answer isn't just say, no vaccines, and we, we think they do, there's good evidence that they're protective. But to the extent that you're coming out, could we make it less, let's do it, and let's just do it, let's do that experiment. But I don't see that, that's one of the things that's not happening right now, is that nobody's actually describing an experiment. What would be the experiment?

• 1:50:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, well, the discussions haven't happened. And I should say a couple of things. First of all, thank you for being willing to venture into this area. I seriously doubt that any of your colleagues are going to be upset that you're having this conversation. I will make sure that anything we put out is in context. If anyone cuts a clip, I will be the first to dive in there and say, this is taken out of context. But, to any people, colleagues or otherwise, that would say, hey, actually, this is the wrong stance. You don't want to be talking about nuance in a time when there's so much threat to traditional medicine and vaccines, et cetera, I will say this. The idea that you need to push back with a with just a fire hose of do this or else did not work. The pandemic proved that.

• 1:51:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  That in fact, I think one of the biggest mistakes was to have one individual as opposed to a panel of people with more nuance communicating public health information at that time. Any person, scientist, doctor, or otherwise, who thinks that the way to convince people to change their behavior around vaccines or anything else is to just ram it down the public's throat and say, or else you're whatever, you're political this, or you're a fascist or whatever. Okay. That is proven to be wrong. And the path forward is really this kind of conversation. It's highly educated people like yourself in the educated in the immune system who understand this, who have children, who've made certain choices, saying, yes, and I

• 1:51:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  can understand why you would be considering the following questions, and we should do a study. And in the meantime, you're not preventing anyone from getting vaccines. There's now a hunger for more nuanced conversation around these things. And I think it's the right time to have it when we're not in the throes of a pandemic.

• 1:52:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yet, yet, I mean, there's some things that are on the rise. It is scary. I'll be quite blunt. You know, the the rise in measles is scary. People say, well, measles, they used to have measles parties. Talk to somebody who had massive inflammation and brain inflammation from measles, not a pretty picture. Not a pretty picture.

• 1:52:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I think it's great that these conversations are starting and it won't be taken out of context.

• 1:52:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, on the vaccination front, I mean, I just wrote a little, a little subtext also about, you know, the origins of smallpox vaccination. And I think what's lost in those stories is if you look on the internet, the the absolute, that's a terrible disease. I mean, you know, the reality of what we're protecting against, we haven't, it, it's really hard to like, also have the conversation without doing a little bit of reading into your history. You know, and I don't think the history books are pulling the wool over our eyes by saying some of these things were really horrendous.

• 1:52:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Smallpox was dreadful.

• 1:52:59Speaker 00

  So, so there's an element of that, though, that I think, you know, that we have to make sure that the conversation focuses on, on what are we, what are we trying to achieve here? And, and, and sometimes that, that question is, can get lost. But I think, man, if my kid got smallpox, or got measles, or got mumps, and, and, you know, as we know, like measles is not a theoretical, again, you know, it's certain, that, that concept is enough to say, well, there is a risk of that. And that's one where you, it's like you, and you're not teaching your kid how to cross the street properly. If you didn't do that, and then the kid got hit by a car, you'd just be decimated. So, you know, just because we haven't seen these things for a while, doesn't mean that they're not still real. And I think that's also an important, again, that's what, that's me as a parent, and I

• 1:53:43Speaker 00

  did look at the history and at these things, and they really are bad. And so we are, you know, we are defending against something, but, you know, is there a better way to do it? You propose experiment. That's, that's, you know, I think there's a, you know, like, cutting off, you know, the concept of human curiosity and science at their legs is probably not the way to figure out something out, from my experience. You, you, you dive in, you think of the experiment that will answer the question, and you say, well, that, is that the killer experiment for this thing? Again, I think you look at the numbers and the numbers from my, this is me as a parent, looking at the numbers of, of, you know, like, the danger of, of, of bad stuff happening versus the, you know, the odds of an adverse effect, they were all that high.

• 1:54:28Speaker 00

  But, you know, again, if you're one of the people that, even if it is that, even if it is caused by vaccine, which I don't, by the way, can I tell you a little story?

• 1:54:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Please.

• 1:54:37Speaker 00

  Maybe you know this already, but if you want to induce autism in mice, people do it by injecting a bacterial infection into the mom when she's pregnant. Which tells you that an immune challenge can affect the neurons of the, of a developing pup. So it's not outside the realm to say that in some situations, in an adjuvant situation, again, I may regret saying this, because it's, you know, it's, it's going to open up a conversation to have this, but it's a, it's not outside the bounds to say that a, a immune insult will have influence on neural development. Period. Is it the source of autistic children? Or was it in fact that the mom had infection during pregnancy? It's not absolutely wacko to think, and you should think this as a neurobiologist, I

• 1:55:20Speaker 00

  think you'll probably agree, to think that inflammation, some of the molecules of inflammation will affect the, the cells of the brain.

• 1:55:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:28Speaker 00

  In fact, one of the, one of the best experiments that I look along these lines, it's not about, about autism at all, but it's about, when you get a flu, you tend to go, you tend to feel like you want to social isolate yourself. At least I do, and most people do, I think, they kind of want to crawl in a hole, that call and all feel. There's an experiment that was done that involved injecting gamma nerfuron, which is one of the things your immune system makes when it's fighting off an infection, into the blood, blood sugar of a mouse, and then just watching it. And they become, you know, socially isolating from just the molecule that's made by the immune response during infection.

• 1:56:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not even from being sick.

• 1:56:01Speaker 00

  Not even being sick. They're not sick, oh, they just are given this, this cue that's part of the systemic immune response, and then they, they show the signs of social isolation. And the lab that did this also showed that the brain has receptors for these immune molecules. And, you know, the simple conclusion of that paper is, you know, there's still always work to be done, but simple conclusion was that the brain could sense infection and, and it would affect behavior, even in mature, in us as mature. So, you know, again, there's these, these ideas that there is, that there's something that, I mean, scientists use that infection of a mom, you know, to lead to neuronal changes that lead us to be able to, to study autism in later mice. So there's definitely potential there.

• 1:56:45Speaker 00

  I don't know that the vaccines and all of them, and whether there's a circumstance, or whether it's, you know, getting the mom actually had a fever before and the vaccine now just triggered, or it didn't, or just circumstance, because you give vaccines at two years of age, which is when autism appears. There's all kinds of options, you know, and, and those sort of anecdotes of, of that. And I just think that that, that fact, that, you know, the way that we study autism is by giving a pregnant female mouse an infection, is sort of like, okay, that's, that's important to know. That work is still ongoing by laboratories to understand autism. They want to understand the origins of it. And maybe it will not turn out to be vaccines at all. Again, we, we need data.

• 1:57:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  We definitely need data.

• 1:57:28Speaker 00

  We're almost in a COVID situation. I just grabbed the COVID situation now in retrospect is one that is data sparse. And this is why I've been trying to work on, I was telling, telling you about this project of trying to work on the publishing problem, but it's not, it's not just the publishing problem, it's how we, how we synthesize knowledge, that under data sparse circumstances to make decisions, I think we're not very good at that, societally. When we have tons of data and it says, absolutely, if you have cancer, you take, you know, therapy, and there's a 50% chance you're going to revive, great, those stats are solid, they're very good, and I would, I would take that drug every time. But if it's sort of a case where you're like, no, there's some things that are happening, and there's some other things that happen, we don't know. You remember the beginning of COVID, we talked about it amongst ourselves in the labels,

• 1:58:11Speaker 00

  and we were coming in to analyze blood, and it was kind of unsafe, because we didn't know what was safe. We didn't know how it was transmitted, we didn't know anything about it, was it, could we, could we get it from blood? And, and that kind of went on for a while, right? And this was the source of like, a lot of confusion that came from the medical, it was seen, seen as confusion, that matter of fact, it's like, do you mask, do you not mask, do you touch, do you not touch? I think that's a, that's a data sparse situation. You know, the, the data that we had was sparse, it wasn't a lot of information. And so, you know, how do you make a decision when you don't have a lot of data?

• 1:58:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I think that's the major argument, when there, you know, there are people that will critique, people saying, okay, your experience is anecdotal, it's correlative, but then the, the, with regard to vaccines and autism and other issues, but then the pushback is, well, this vaccine, et cetera, was directionally guided by sparse information to begin with, under times of pressure, there's financial incentives. So it's just this ping pong that goes back and forth. But many thousands of parents write to me and say, should I wait on certain vaccines? And I'm like, listen, I am not the person to answer that question.

• 1:59:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you have every right to ask your doctor.

• 1:59:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? But they're not asking because they're extremists, they're not anti-vaxxers, they're asking because they love their kids.

• 1:59:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:59:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they've seen enough things to call into question the incentives, and they just know that the conversation cannot be as polarized as it's presented to them in reality. The, the data cannot be as polarized as it's been presented.

• 1:59:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, certainly, certainly in media, some of these things get presented quite, quite, you know, inflammatory. And again, if newspapers want to sell a newspaper, they show a plane crash, you know, so it's not happening every day.

• 1:59:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, but they'll show you an airline ad in the same issue.

• 1:59:51Speaker 00

  There's that too, yeah, yeah. I think one of the interesting things that we could get into is that in you, in a lot of these studies, scientists are, there's a motivation to, to make the most of your result. And we've talked about why that's important, is that if you find something orthogonal, CRISPR, checkpoint blockade, you know, X-rays, you look for that orthogonal use for it, right? And you, or that, that orthogonal meaning, that sometimes we call it extensibility. Like, I see that if I, if I drop a coffee cup on the thing, that gravity pulls it down. Well, then I can learn that I can drop all kinds of things, I can make gravity work for me, you know, becomes a tool. And, and I think one of the things that's, that it is lost sometimes, is that some things are not extensible. So, you know, you can imagine that, like, if I, if I had something that moves, makes

• 2:00:34Speaker 00

  a cell move, that that might screw up the whole system forever. But humans and our bodies turn out to be remarkably resilient. I mean, we can go from minus 20 degrees to, you know, 110 degrees, we cannot eat for a long time, you know, all, you know, all these things don't cause us to fall apart. So if we didn't have resilience, I think our species wouldn't exist, because there's all these pressures and all these varieties of life under which would lead. And I think a lot of science sometimes doesn't, you know, and, and from the outsider, even as an insider, you can read a paper and they, they, they point to why it might be important, but they're really doing that to, to garner interest for their story, you know, and then say, this might be important for this, but I haven't shown it's important for, they, they don't say that it's important, it might be important.

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  And they're trying to look for that ortho, that orthogonal, or that extensibility of it. And I think that's kind of important also, just to go a little bit off this topic for a moment, in how we think about drugging diseases as we go forward. And that is to say, we've looked for these one and done drugs that you take a pill and it cures everything, you know, forever. That's sort of founder of youthish. And, you know, we found a few of those. I'd say checkpoint blockade is one of those that you can take it and, you know, in 50% of melanoma, it's everything, the tumor goes away and everything's great. But most biological systems, if you have one button to push, they're super non-resilient. A virus can exploit that button, you know, that that can cause, you know, collapse. And so most things are wired, like in these really complicated ways.

• 2:02:00Speaker 00

  And I think what a few of us are thinking, and this is for cancer in particular, where you want to get the immune state from like, remember we had a little concept of a fuel gauge? You want to get it from one position to another position. It may not just be about a push here. You may have to push some cells that way, create some new environment that looks like development, you know, your cells develop through states. And you push the biological systems to reach this new state in a way that doesn't look like the linear between like low immune reactivity and high reactivity. You might have to push it in a series of ways because resiliency, the systems, like even in chronic disease, but even in health, we're pretty resilient. And I agree, you can stand up to a lot of stuff.

• 2:02:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can humans do that even in the context of abundant funding for basic research? Can what you just described actually be tested to the point where we can develop things? And the analogy here is, I had my dad on the podcast, he's a theoretical physicist. And he explained to me that one of the most important things you learn in physics is that you can't really understand quantum mechanics using your logical brain. You need the math to prove it. And this is when, whenever somebody, he also warned, whenever somebody says they understand quantum stuff, you have to ask them to demonstrate it for you. Because these people talk quantum because, and we make all these assumptions about quantum. They talk about quantum fields, so we think they're smart.

• 2:03:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  But, but the theoretical physicists and for engineers, you know, develop all sorts of incredible theorems and real experiments and then technologies based on all of that. Because the math works, not because we can conceptualize it. And I wonder, given the complexity of biological systems, perhaps in 2026, we're running up against this barrier where by virtue of the sociology of science, that papers need to have one, maybe two take home messages. By virtue of the fact that there's a limited amount of funding, people need to sleep at night and on and on, that doing the kinds of experiments like you described, like pushing the cells this way, nudging them that way, and then drugging the outcome in a way that

• 2:04:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  is beneficial but not detrimental. Is this a place where machines are going to be better or at least helpful in doing these experiments?

• 2:04:15Speaker 00

  I take the standpoint that AIs, and I think, you know, this is back to talking about AI experts, it's really quite good at producing stuff that is in the corpus. The corpus is the knowledge that we already have. Almost by definition, when you're coming at that with or something discovery, you're discovering something, it doesn't exist in the corpus. You might have hints of it there, but you still have to do the experiments at some point. So if I'm going to answer, you know, the question you're trying to raise, if I get a tumor from a patient and I take apart all the cell and I look at all the genes that are expressed in all the different cell types, I can build in silico a network where I can look at how all those cells are wired together now. And I can ask, you know, what would be the possible consequence of clipping this molecule's ability to touch that cell?

• 2:05:00Speaker 00

  That's, that's now doable, but it relies on an area of math that's not really AI. It's called machine learning, and sometimes these things are conflated. But machine learning is basically looking to say, what are some of the relationships that I can discover about, you know, the relationship between this feature of the cell and this other feature of the cell? So it's, it's learning about it and then it's, then it allows you to propose a bunch of experiments, but you still kind of have to choose and select which ones you're going to do. Some experiments are just really expensive. And that's where you have to have, I think, still human judgment that comes into that and say, am I going to spend a year studying this question? Or am I going to study a little bit more and try to understand some, some things in a greater detail than maybe the machine learning gave me?

• 2:05:42Speaker 00

  But it's not clear to me that anywhere right now, we can say, the corpus of knowledge doesn't have a bunch of examples of cures, you know, across from treatments and say, oh, all I need to do is match those up, which is kind of what AI does when it comes to large things, you query it, it looks statistically and says, what are the, what are the relationships between what you query and what I give you back as an answer? And in discovery space, we don't have examples of the, you know, the other end. We have, you know, sure, I could tell you all the things that you could do, but, you know, knowing which one is going to be orthogonal, big, big hit isn't there? But what I'm talking about a little bit is, is to, is to take a problem apart and say, if I have something like I want to change something and anything, this could be how,

• 2:06:24Speaker 00

  if I want to change the world, it's unlikely that any one act will do it. Also, the world is pretty, political systems, despite what we think are somehow semi-stable. But a series of, of these nudges can create the condition where the last one takes you across the border. And I think that's what we're going to have to do in disease, where we say, look, nature doesn't necessarily want us banging on it, it'll bang back. What in fact, in fact, we need to do is if we want this tumor to get eaten, geared, we need to first let it not look like it's a wound that's healing. So don't give it the power of the immune system, the positive power. And then get to the point where we can say, well, now we want it to teach the immune system to kill it. But we might not be able to do that until we kind of disassemble some of its defenses. And that's, that's a way of, you know, again, in this kind of deep computational space,

• 2:07:09Speaker 00

  we end up with a lot of feature of the tissue, of the tissue cells and how they're organized and what genes they're expressing that start to look like Magellan's map of the, of the, of the world that, you know, in its early phase, it only had parts. And then, you know, starts as you explore and you add things to it. I think when we start to think about how tissues are configured, we're starting to be able to see these really complicated states where the immune system is doing this and fibroblasts, certain cells are doing this and epithelous cells are doing this. And that's a, that's a, we call the market types. They're, they're like, they're like a way that biology organizes itself. And to get from one to the next, we need to understand how it does it developmentally. That would be a really nice thing to follow. And then we need to give those cues in order. And that's where I was coming back, you know, when you were talking about peptides earlier

• 2:07:52Speaker 00

  and saying, well, they may, some, some of these drugs may well work, but I might imagine that they might work best if given in the right sequence and the time and the place. And that that's when you really want to like hammer it to get the system to go to that. But then it might be connected to another one. And we all want to find the one thing that like, you know, the fountain of youth, the thing that cures a disease. And, and it's been forever that we've been looking for a single, you know, single hits, one and done. But it may be a collection of, and you know, this is probably, this is how I live my life for health, is a collection of behaviors and food you eat and sleep you get. And all these things create and partners, you know, your loves of your life, the friends you have, they're all part of, I think, this, this, and that's getting a little away from immunology, obviously, but it's.

• 2:08:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, but when you think about the insula, you know, not so much. A good friend of mine who's a physician in the Bay Area says, you know, better living through chemistry still requires better living, which I love because it says, you should never abandon as much as one can. The foundational stuff of sleep, exercise, nutrition, circadian rhythm, light, social connection, you know, stress mitigation and on and on. Could I ask you a couple of additional questions about the immune system?

• 2:09:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, please.

• 2:09:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Before we wrap, because I know many people are curious about autoimmune issues. More and more I hear about, you know, I don't know if chronic fatigue considered an autoimmune issue by most. A lot of people seem to have chronic fatigue. There was a debate, does it really exist? For someone who believes they have it, they, it absolutely exists. They're tired, I believe them. I know someone who had a myalgia recently. Psoriasis is something that I maybe have known to be now autoimmune. Asthma, these are interesting conditions, not all of them life threatening. But some of them cause a lot of discomfort.

• 2:09:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  What is known about the formation of autoimmune conditions, either inheritance, lifestyle factors? And then what excites you about some of the newer treatments that might be available or are currently available? Those and other things, it's a big question, but.

• 2:09:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a big question. Well, fundamentally, again, this is, I think we're.

• 2:10:04Speaker 00

  The immune system and you know, our bodies have, I think they have playbooks like a football team or something that they can run and they can put players in particular configurations. Again, we call those archetypes. The immune system is trying to do a certain kind of thing. It's genetically and through history, it's wired to work with it with cells in certain ways. And I think if you look at autoimmunities, there's a, there's a view of them that they represent a misplaced immune system that's either thinks that it's under attack or it thinks that it's meant to be doing something that it really isn't. And so the origins of some of those are genetic for sure. There's, you know, lupus, there's a familial mutation in a receptor that's on a B cell that normally helps turn off the immune system.

• 2:10:44Speaker 00

  And it's defective. And so those people are susceptible to getting, they're called autoantibodies. That's where the B cells, we talked a lot about T cells, but B cells are the ones that make antibodies and they're the ones that you try to prove, you know, to jazz up for COVID vaccines. You know, those can be overactive and they can be genetically overactive. And you know, one wonders why we'd ever have such genes and why they'd be propagated, except that maybe in some sorts of circumstances, you need it when there's a big pandemic or some of those people might have a particularly good response. So there's definitely genetic origins of some of these things. I think what's, you know, what's interesting to some extent is something that you alluded to with asthma where asthma was one of these things that historically would be called an allergy and it still is an allergy and where you have,

• 2:11:25Speaker 00

  you know, inciting things that are grass, pollen, you know, these sorts of things. But in a lot of these settings, the concept that that is, is coming in part and parcel with, you know, the immune system recognizing self, you know, is a, is a thing. And to the degree that we don't understand some of the diseases as well as we should, given the tools we have today, there's a lot, there's actually work to be done in a lot of these areas where you say, what is the immune system up to? Like 10 years ago, we might've just said, oh, you know, what is, if I died, I might've taken a lung of an asthmatic patient who died and like cut it and look it in a microscope and say, oh yeah, I can really see that there's thickening of the airways and that was, that's why they couldn't breathe. But like I'm saying,

• 2:12:08Speaker 00

  now we can go into those and we can look at every single cell and ask how those are wired together. Is there only one form of asthma? That's no, there's actually definitely those seven or eight. And they have, and that's why some people were, you know, like can take the inhalers and it works and other people can't. Some people, they're very like chlorine sensitive. They go to a pool and it initiates their cold sensitive. So there's, there's variations on what sets up that inflammatory focus. And I would call it like an archetype. Some of them have lots of cells called eosinophils. Other ones have lots of cells called neutrophils. So it's asthma isn't just one disease. It's one symptom, you know, difficulty breathing, but it has many different sort of configurations. And, and I guess I'm, I would just say that in a lot of this domain, I mean, we have a study right now that's looking at across

• 2:12:51Speaker 00

  a bunch of autoimmunities to figure out whether they have things in common with each other. And psoriasis is one where you start to see, you know, variations and lupus for sure, and inflammatory bowel disease. And, and you know this in the clinic because inflammatory bowel disease, you asked about drugs, is a good case where there's a couple of different drugs that for some patients work really well. TNF therapy, for example, saying it blocks a cytokine. And some people with IBDs, it's like really bad diarrhea, it manifests and very, very painful. You know, some people, they, so there starts to be classes of patients that have responses to these things. Those drugs are exciting because they say you can modulate this. But a little bit like the checkpoint drugs, we don't really understand

• 2:13:33Speaker 00

  why one works in one patient and one doesn't. Inflammatory bowel disease is an autoimmunity is pretty tricky too, because people will respond to a drug for a while and then they'll stop. And then the doctors just have to do this like whack a mole thing where they try one and it doesn't work. So they try the next and where it doesn't work.

• 2:13:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sounds like psychiatry.

• 2:13:49Speaker 00

  It does. Yeah, there's a lot. It sounds like a

• 2:13:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  No disrespect to the psychiatrist.

• 2:13:54Speaker 00

  Psychiatrist, no, but you're trying

• 2:13:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  They have a hard job, right? I mean, drugs will work for a while, then they don't work. Side effects crop up that never existed before. It's, it's a tough one.

• 2:14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, agreed. Agreed. So yeah, autoimmunity is a real thing. It's, it has, you know, I think it's similar to cancer where we're just with cancer, starting to understand the fact that it comes in these different immune flavors. And so the drugs that you try to use, it's clearly the immune system can do a lot of good work for us. But what you need to do to it in these different sort of archetypal immune systems is going to be different. You know, you just got a different football team out there playing or they're running a different play.

• 2:14:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  If somebody has a mild autoimmune condition, like let's say mild psoriasis, does that, I've read, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I've read that that might confer, because it's autoimmune, that might confer them with a bit better viral and bacterial infection resistance. So you know, there's a trade off there. Like, okay, so scalps, the cells are like sloughing off and like, I think it's like interleukin-17 or something now, like the treatment, they have some good shampoos for this or, but

• 2:15:02Speaker 00

  Anti-interleukin-17.

• 2:15:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  And anti-interleukin-17, but, but you, that individual is maybe better at fighting out other infections. So, you know, given there's a anti-interleukin-17 treatment that works, cool, like no flaky, itchy scalp. And, and yet you're more resistant to infection. So you could see how it's adaptive in the modern context. And now severe psoriasis can be very disruptive for people. And people might wonder like, are we really talking about psoriasis? But I think it's sort of an interesting case point for why autoimmunity could actually be useful.

• 2:15:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:15:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not always the case. It's like there to give us asthma or flaky scalp.

• 2:15:43Speaker 00

  You know, we could talk about, there's a lot of disease states, you know, the argument for why we would ever have a sickle cell gene. This is the one that causes people to have hemophilia and it's a lot of Sub-Saharan African gene, people from that origin have this, is that it's actually defensive against malaria is, you know, it seems to be the case. So, so having that, I think this is true. A lot of these situations where the diversity of the human population over time, by having some of these things that make some people hypersensitive to, you know, to maybe bacterial viral infection at the cost of having things like psoriasis pop up or, you know, various, various other autoimmunities is the only way that, you know, like a billion strong population has to, to, to move forward.

• 2:16:27Speaker 00

  And I always give this example that, because I think it's a really straightforward one. If you take a flask of bacteria and, and you put them in glucose, which is like sugar, like you put in your coffee, maybe sucrose, either one, you put them in a, in a simple sugar and you watch the colony grow, you'll get these cells that grow really, really fast. The bacteria is, you know, becomes billions, trillions of individual cells, but there's almost always some just losers that are dividing slowly. And it's for whatever reason, the system always springs those off. And you're like, why would you do that? Why would the system, why wouldn't just the winners win? But if you take a little bit of that culture and you put it into galactose, which is a milk sugar, often the ones that were winners don't win anymore. And it's from the loser pool that the new ones emerge. And

• 2:17:10Speaker 00

  this is a case of like, you know, like a crowd fitness that comes from diversity of genes. And so some of these things that make some of us susceptible to disease are also, as you're pointing out, in other situations, going to be quite good for you. And, and that seems unfair at the time that you have these kind of bad genes, but like a different day, you would have been happier, you know? So I think there's a lot to be said. And that's also why a lot of the things that we look at, you know, anecdotally, somebody takes a supplement and it works for them. I mean, I don't know how much you know about this literature, but the, the differences in urine, mine, vitamin requirements is going to be quite profound because the metabolic enzymes that we have for the vitamins that we might take in are going to be different between us. And so these FDA limits, these numbers

• 2:17:55Speaker 00

  are averages. Some people may need five times that amount of, you know, vitamin X and other people may need a fifth.

• 2:18:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I think this is super critical. The supplement world is just kind of like scattershot. Well, I appreciate the rational grounding and all of it. I think, uh, thread throughout today's conversation, I think that I picked up on, you know, I, the fact that we covered things like peptides and things like that. And I'm not certain about the peptide question across the board. It's clear some are beneficial. It's clear some are still experimental. I'm just a big fan of more data and more data collected the right ways and communicated the right ways as the same way with vaccines and all the rest. You have an amazing Substack. I know that because I've spent time there.

• 2:18:33Speaker 00

  No, thanks.

• 2:18:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Part of the reason we invited you here today is to learn about the immune system. And we barely talked about cancer. I realize we're going to have to get you back to talk about that. But you've done an amazing job of educating us on the immune system. I really want to thank you and speak on behalf of many, many people for that. Never before has somebody presented in the ways that you have. And as somebody who thinks in analogy and likes to teach in analogy, I really appreciate that, that stance. What inspired you to get into public education about science and health before coming on this podcast? And by the way, everyone should check out Max's Substack. We'll put a link to it in the, in the show

• 2:19:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  notes. It's, it's so thoughtful, so nuanced, so relevant to all the issues that we're talking about, if not directly, then in the, in the general contour and in some cases directly. And I imagine you're going to continue doing this. So what inspired you to do it? And how can we make sure that you continue to do it?

• 2:19:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, thank you for the call. It is, it's something I've been trying to work on for about 10 years. And it, it really started when a group of us, you know, were, were hanging around after a conference and we were talking about some of the issues with science and society. And there were many, you know, there's many, there's, there's, we've surfaced a few of them today. But I think something that you guys are working on is, is the capacity for everyone else to think as a scientist. Like what, you can ask yourself, you know, oh, why don't people agree with this data that you show and take the action that seems logical? But then you present it in such a way that they can't, you know, that two things, two things are important about it. I think one of them is if you present the information in a format

• 2:20:16Speaker 00

  that isn't, you know, familiar, you're not going to be able to teach anything, anybody, anything about what's important. But the other thing is that, you know, we were talking, we, we spent some time talking about this and we consulted some other folks that are in science comms. And then we realized, you know, the other thing is that, that, that if you say you're a scientist, It's not a neutral statement. Science has a history, and history is stronger than science, actually. So the history, like, you know, there's hesitancy among African Americans, for example, to take drugs because of things of history of Tuskegee, which is like 80 years ago, or however long ago, 60 years ago. Why? It's not in their lifetime, in many of these people. And so part of the realization was like, maybe part of what we really should be doing

• 2:20:58Speaker 00

  as scientists is, one of part of our job should be to figure out how we relate to other humans. And it's, you know, there's a painting of this, and obviously, the media and things help this happen because it makes it interesting to have a, you know, kind of a nerdy scientist. And we all, you can be a nerdy scientist, I heard you, and, you know, but also, you're a human, you're a human being. You have, you know, there's even foibles to, you know, loves and hates and, and.

• 2:21:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Certainly foibles, I have plenty of those.

• 2:21:24Speaker 00

  We can get in that off this podcast, but, but, you know, this concept of if we want to relate, you know, if we want to have impact of the work you do, if you want it to be relevant, at some point, you have to, the science, science as a field, needs to make sure that it doesn't ostracize itself from people. And I think one of the issues there, I just use the word ostracize, you know, is separate, is this concept that we speak in our vocabulary that is gets very precise. And we forget that, you know, if you hear a foreign language and you hear one word that you don't recognize it, it throws you off for a few sentences. And next thing you know, you don't know what people are talking about. And I think that concept that, you know, and again, this is where I think bringing

• 2:22:05Speaker 00

  it down a level and saying, let's give it analogy, let's give it, that strikes me as really, really important to the impact that you can have with, with your science. And that, and that science can have in, in terms of teaching people what we could do better, which I think we all want to do. But if you end up thinking that science is a distrusted, weird collection of people that have different motivations and designs, then, then you've lost. That, that the potential for it to do good is, is gone. So the Substack came about it because I was like, well, I need to write as a person a little bit more and tell about some of the, you know, the time that you've spent on this and why it matters and what it's like to, to do this work.

• 2:22:47Speaker 00

  And, and in some respects, also what it's like to, to lose in this, which happens way more often than, you know, it's, it's like a casino, right? In science, in science, you hear the bells and some cool device comes out and it's, but, but there's a bunch of people pulling the arm, you know, and they're, they're not winning. And so.

• 2:23:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well put, yeah.

• 2:23:05Speaker 00

  So I feel like that's kind of an important part of this, that, that, again, it's not the glory story always. You know, the best, some of the bestselling books about science are, you know, are the wins. But, you know, it's might be more relatable at some point to get all of it. So that's kind of what, what I was trying to put together. And, and at the same time, I think the immune system is also just so relevant and so important, and it's got all these different facets and these archetypes and these sorts of things that it's doing that we kind of scratched the surface today. So, anyway, thanks for calling in, I've been working hard for a bit.

• 2:23:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I hope you continue to, and thank you so much for the work you've been doing in your laboratory and all the people in your laboratory doing that work. Because now you're the one calling the shots while other people do experiments. But for your advocacy for science and public education, it's huge. We need more people like you, but you certainly put your own unique signature on it, and the Substack reflects that. It's an incredibly interesting set of reads, and, and people will really learn. So that's essential, especially in this day and age. But even not in this day and age, science is, is just really cool. And with all the meaningless drivel out there, it's nice to go to a place like your Substack, and I'm speaking to the audience now. You will learn if you read Max's Substack.

• 2:24:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  You will be inspired by certain things, and I promise you, so I'm saying this intentionally, mark my words, at some point, somewhat, somebody's going to contact you that they decided to study the immune system, or they learned something, or they explored a, a novel treatment with their physician in a given unfortunate, or maybe even fortunate situation that bettered their lives. It's, it's incredible what Substacks and conversations like the one you've been willing to have today and going forward can, can really do. So, thank you so much. Definitely come back again and tell us about cancer and other, other things, because I, took us off course quite a lot, but I, I had a great time talking about all of this, and I'm going to be thinking about a lot of it, and really appreciate you.

• 2:25:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, same here, thanks so much.

• 2:25:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Max Krummel. To learn more about his work and to find a link to his superb Substack, please see the links in the show note caption. 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 by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also 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 for me 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.

• 2:25:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 pre-sale 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. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

• 2:26:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  So that's Instagram, X, 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 information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll

• 2:27:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Max Krummel. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.