Journal club with Andrew Huberman: the impact of light exposure on mental health and an immunotherapy breakthrough for cancer treatment

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to another special episode of The Drive. This episode is actually a dual episode with my good friend Andrew Huberman, where we are going to be releasing our conversation on both the Huberman Lab podcast and The Drive. In this special episode, Andrew and I team up again for another round of Journal Club. And you may recall this is the second time we've done it, having done it back in September of 2023 We enjoy this so much that I suspect we're going to continue to do this, potentially at the cadence of about once a quarter, but of course we'll see. In today's Journal Club, we start by looking at a paper that Andrew highlighted, which looks at how light exposure and dark exposure can affect mental health. After that, I present a paper, which is kind of a landmark study on a class of drugs that I believe are some of the most relevant classes of drugs in cancer therapy over the past 20 years, the so-called checkpoint inhibitors. The hope here is not only that this conversation gives you insights in the specific papers that we're discussing, both of which I think are highly fascinating, but equally importantly, that you can learn something about how to read scientific papers, what to look for, and what the papers say and what's being reported and how that doesn't necessarily match with what the news is telling you. That's a really common issue, as many of you know, and I certainly rail against this, where I'll comment on a paper that the media has picked up on and completely misrepresented. And again, there's really only one antidote to this, and the antidote is learning how to read the papers yourself. And unfortunately, there really is no better way to do that than practice. And so what we really hope is that people will sit with us and maybe take a look at the papers before they watch the podcast or listen to the podcast, and try to get a sense of what they notice about these papers, what questions arise for them, and see if we touch on similar topics.
As a brief reminder to anyone who's been up in the Himalayas hunting Yeti for the past six years and doesn't know who Andrew is, he is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the host of the very popular Huberman Lab podcast. He's also a former podcast guest on episodes 249 and 270 So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Andrew Huberman.
Andrew, great to have you here for Journal Club number two. I'm already confident this is going to become a regular for us.

**Andrew Huberman** (3:33)
I'm excited. I really enjoy this because I get to pick papers I'm really excited about. I get to hear papers that you're excited about and we get to sharpen our skills at reading and sharing data and people listening can do that as well.

**Peter Attia** (3:49)
So last time I went first, so I think I'm going to put you on the hot seat first and have you go first and I'll follow you.

**Andrew Huberman** (3:56)
Well, I'm really excited about this paper for a number of reasons. First of all, it, at least by my read, is a very powerful paper in the sense that it examined light exposure behavior as well as dark exposure behavior. And that's going to be an important point in more than 85, people as part of this cohort in the UK. I'll just mention a couple of things to give people background. And I'll keep this relatively brief.
First of all, there's a long standing interest in the relationship between light and mental health and physical health. And we can throw up some very well agreed upon bullet points. First of all, there is such a thing as seasonal affective disorder. It doesn't just impact people living at really Northern locations, but basically there's a correlation between day length and mood and mental health, such that for many people, not all, but for many people, when days are longer in the spring and summer, they feel better. They report fewer depressive symptoms.