#876: Dr. Andrew Huberman — Peptides, Performance, and Protocols

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I dig into the fringes, the edges, to find out what people have discovered, what they're using, and what you can use. My guest today is the one and only Andrew Huberman, PhD. A lot of you will know who he is. We cover things like lessons from Dorian Yates, his current training regimen, psychedelics, peptides. He's used a lot of them, so this is pretty broad-ranging coverage of peptides, AI and health, and much more. For those of you who do not know Andrew, he is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he runs the Huberman Lab. His research spans brain development, visual perception, and repair from blinding diseases, the neuroscience of stress and resilience, and neuroplasticity. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles in journals including some very well-known journals like Nature, Cell, Science, and Neuron, and his honors include the Kogan Award, the McKnight Neuroscience Scholar Award, and the Pew Biomedical Scholar Award. In 2021, he launched the Huberman Lab podcast, which became and remains the most popular health and science podcast in the world. Dr. Huberman is the co-founder of SciCom Media, the company behind the podcast Huberman Lab, performed with Dr. Andy Galpin and David Senra. He's the author of the forthcoming book, and we cover this in some length, Protocols, Subtitle, and Operating Manual for the Human Body. You can find all things Andrew Huberman at hubermanlab.com.
And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and very tactical conversation with, yes, you guessed it, Dr. Andrew Huberman. Optimal, minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?
Well, you know what? Why don't we just do a quick callback, The Dark Wizard. This sounds like an Ozzy Osbourne album, but it's not. It's a documentary. We were chatting about it before we started recording. Since it's top of mind, why don't you just describe what that's about? Because this involves a character that I tracked for a super long time.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:22)
Yeah, Dean Potter.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:23)
Dean Potter. So what is The Dark Wizard? Why has it struck you so?

**Andrew Huberman** (2:27)
Okay, so I learned about this movie from Andy Stumpf, who's a retired Navy SEAL Tier 1 operator who then set two world records with the Red Bull high performance team doing wing-suitin, base jumping, wing-suitin, whatever you want to call it, the squirrel suit. He told me about this movie, The Dark Wizard, which is about Dean Potter, who started off as a climber and then became, people can watch the documentary, and then got into parachuting, and then what he called free-basing, which was climbing and then jumping off a rock and parachuting, and then eventually wing-suitin. And I won't give away anymore, but it's a really interesting four-part series that gets into his mental health challenges, how he was able to funnel, let's just call them the high dopamine, more manic states, into incredible feats of performance, and then how he balanced out the lows. But the most interesting part about it to me is at the level of something I think about a lot these days, which is energy. Like we're born into this world with a certain amount of energy, and we think about it as time and longevity. But there are people that seem to, I don't want to give anything away here about the movie, but there are people that seem to have more of this thing that we call energy, and when they're able to focus it, they take performance to outrageously high levels. And you see how the energy folds back on him and almost destroys him at times, and also times when he's somehow able to harness it and put it to these incredible feats. But the most important thing about the film is he talks about and he demonstrates through the activities I talked about before, wingsuiting, etc.
He demonstrates how when you are in competition with other people, it's a misuse of the energy that can harm you. But when you are seeking what he calls just seeking beauty, like really trying to chase the feeling, the pure experience of taking that energy and putting it into something that you love, that's when the really impressive feats land and that move you forward. So there does seem to be something almost spiritual about whether or not we're funneling energy into things that really reflect us at our best.
What he calls funneling into beauty versus competition. And competition is, it turns out, is what destroys people. And everyone will say, no, no, no, it's actually what allows you to reach a higher and higher bar. But if you watch all four episodes, you realize, no, that's an illusion. And when you get caught in that, you're limiting your output, you're limiting your performance. It also has multiple cameos by the great Alex Honnold. And their competition is extremely interesting. So I'll leave it at that. It's a long teaser, but it's a real insight into human psychology and energy, which is something, again, I'm just obsessed with, because ultimately it's where we place our efforts. That's all we've got. That's all we've got.