#26 - Andrew Huberman

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

Hey, Andrew, welcome to The Network State Podcast. What I love about your show, I mean, you and I actually have fairly similar backgrounds in some ways, where we're both, at least I was at Stanford for almost 10 years, from 1997 to 2007, actually more than 10 years as first undergrad, then PhD, then basically postdoctoral faculty, and I taught CS and stats and genomics at Stanford. And then I left and founded Joe McSummit and sold that, gone to tech. And then you were a faculty member and you also in a sense in a different way, you became a creator, right? And you're still a faculty member there, am I wrong or not?

Andrew Huberman (0:40)

Yeah, yeah, still tenured. I got a meeting with my dean in about a week and a half for lunch. It's a friendly conversation, not an exit conversation. Yeah, I taught up until very recently. I ran a fairly big lab and then tapered that off during the pandemic. My last postdoc is now a faculty member. So I moved all my students and postdocs on to their next steps. But yeah, I'm still a tenured member of neurobiology and ophthalmology. I have a split appointment. And I was born at Stanford Hospital. I did my postdoc training at Stanford. Yeah, I worked in the sleep lab for summer during university.

And Stanford is my backyard. I grew up in South Palo Alto.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:20)

Okay, well, I think it's funny because we're both...

That soil is a very interesting thing. It's a bridge between, in my view, the old world and the new. Because in different ways, we sort of made our careers on the internet from there. And obviously, it's a weird thing because on the one hand, obviously Stanford is known for having a lot of people who get into tech, or in your case, get into becoming creators out of there. On the other hand, the university isn't really as friendly towards that as people might think from the outside. Like in the sense of when I was doing it in the 2000s, it was not, and now it's being changed, some entrepreneurship become more common in the 2010s and so on. But it's like VC was sort of over the hedgerows. It was not something that was like on campus in that way. And moreover, you know those posters that say like bench to bedside that they would have translational medicine. When you actually did go, when I did go and start a genomics company, suddenly you went from being an infant that everybody kind of liked to then, oh, you're doing something for profit. That's bad. And then they didn't want to talk to you until you became really, really big. Because it'd be a conflict of interest in academia to talk to a for profit company. There's like a weird thing there where there's like an air gap between, you know, Stanford and the actual tech stuff or creator stuff that comes out. I don't know if you experienced that at all or you saw that.

Andrew Huberman (2:47)

Well, my experience has been quite different. And I'm not saying this too dramatic. So I agree that once one makes it big, the tone always shifts. I mean, this is kind of true across the board. I heard a joke some time ago that I think is quite apt about Stanford, which is there are only two kinds of Stanford faculty, Stanford faculty with companies and Stanford faculty with successful companies.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:16)

That's funny.

Andrew Huberman (3:19)

Nowadays, former chair of genetics, Mike Snyder on our podcast. He's great.

Balaji Srinivasan (3:23)

He's very pragmatic. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (3:25)

He's got, I think, 11 or more companies. I think the backbone of Stanford is largely within the engineering school. I mean, of course, they have humanities and everything else. So the engineering of devices at Stanford is such a major theme, right? And someone who's trained both at Stanford and at Harvard Medical School explained to me that the lineage was such that Harvard tended to be more grounded in development of pharmaceuticals and Stanford really engineering the gamma knife and on and on. So I always experienced Stanford as a place where academia and industry were somewhat merged. But I came into it a bit later, right? I started my postdoc in 2005 At that time, people were founding companies based out of discoveries and biosciences. My downstairs neighbor was then and is still now Roger Kornberg, whose father, Arthur, won a Nobel Prize for RNA and then Robert got the structure of RNA. He has a company, actually, he was on the advisory board. I think he is still a true niogen, so the whole NR, NMN, NAD thing. There is Roger, Nobel Prize winner at Stanford, holding a bottle of NR like I take NR. I thought to myself, that was somewhere around 2016 and I thought things are changing.