Andrew Huberman on proposed 40% NIH budget cuts: 'You can't overstate the importance of NIH funding basic and applied research'

job. They're going to get off the road and back onto the road as quickly as possible. And that's the conversion of parking from parking lot to mobility hub you know where you can facilitate the cleaning servicing charging and deploying of vehicles.

I mean at this point our underlying technology enables kind of seamless I would say integration or connectivity between an autonomous vehicle and old world infrastructure. I mean at this point we're interacting with millions of Americans every single day that are on our platform or interacting with our locations.

And I think at this point we're onboarding 50,000 Americans every single day that are signing up for the first time with Metropolis. Yeah. Yeah.

The idea, you know, you're not going to a Whimo is not going to have like a a a humanoid robot in it that presses the parking ticket, you know, button when it's coming in and then is like feeding the ticket back in.

It obviously would just happen, you know, if Metropolis can be that hub for for autonomous vehicles, that it makes makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Uh talk to me about uh the like the evolution of financing.

you're obviously using a lot of venture capital, but I imagine that it's a certain point um you need to interface with private equity firms or banks or debt providers. H how can you get creative with the uh uh with the different structuring financially on some of these larger deals?

And can you give me kind of like a 101 on what it what it takes to get a billion dollar deal done these days? Yeah, I mean we did, you know, the last deal was a $1. 8 billion series C. Amazing. [Music] Huge. Huge. Yeah. Listen, we took an oldw world, you know, hundred-y old company that was publicly traded private.

Yeah. And yeah, look, it's, if you look at our cap table, it's exactly that. It's venture and private equity in the same rounds. So, last round was Eldridge, Vista, 3L, Tamasc, Vista, BDT, MSD.

Um, and like you normally don't find all of those players in one, you know, party capital, but yeah, look, I think that you guys talk about this more than I do, but the capital markets operate very clearly in these very set boxes.

It's credit, it's private equity, it's growth, and we kind of broke through that with an entirely different strategy, which is how do you take kind of next generation technology and artificial intelligence and start acquiring old world businesses to scale into the market even faster.

But in the context to your question, in the context of our business, it's structured to a great extent like any series C venture company would be structured. Talk to me about what the the communications challenge of taking over a 100-year-old company.

It feels like you're fortunate that you don't have the the the stench of maybe like, oh, we're going to buy and lay everyone off, but it is change management. It is it is a new it is a new structure in the organization. I'm sure there's some communication that you have to do uh when you when you buy a company.

What has that been like and what are kind of the best practices? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, look, I think that we went from a 200 person company organically to a 2,000 person company with our first inorganic acquisition and then to a 23,000 person company um with employees in 400 cities.

Uh so yeah, there's massive change management. There's massive internal communication protocols, but I'd say first and foremost, it's like how do we put our employees and our team first? And you're right, we were lucky because this was not a turnaround. This was not a structure where we're looking for cost synergy.

Metropolis and this strategy of taking these old world companies private was all about revenue synergy. It was how can we drive more revenue to and more value not only to real estate owners but to our employees and our team members. So, it's been exciting. And what we found is it's really interesting.

You see cultural friction on both sides. You see cultural friction in the engineer that's worked at Amazon for 10 years that now works for Metropolis. And then you see friction on the parking attendant.

But you find people that are really excited about building a hyperscaler and really excited about how they can leverage and build on the existing infrastructure of this 100-year-old company. That's great. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is great. This is fantastic.

Come back on when you're uh when you have a good reason for us to hit the size gong. I'm sure you'll have uh I'm sure you'll have many more in the near future. This is great. Looking forward to it. Thanks for taking the time, guys. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Uh next up, we have Andrew Huberman joining the stream.

We'll bring him in in just a second. We have some breaking news, too. Scott Woo has posted about uh uh the new model from OpenAI 03 price drop makes it 15 times cheaper than GT GPT4 32K the state-of-the-art model from two years ago. Meanwhile, the number of use cases is probably up 1 millionx.

Kudos to the OpenAI team for dropping the price. So, congratulations to everyone over there and welcome to the stream, Andrew. How are you doing? Great. Great. Great to see you. Thanks so much for joining. Yeah. What's new in your world? Uh what's new? Um goodness.

This week we have a big episode of the Huberman Lab podcast out with the current NIH director Dr. Jay Bacharia who's a MD and a PhD. A unique background because he has a background in medicine obviously the MD uh but he also has a background in economics. Yeah.

And um incidentally did his undergraduate masters PhD and medical school training and then was a professor of medicine at Stanford.

Stanford um you know he's he's Stanford the whole way and um as NIH director right he he holds a ton of power over what happens for the future of basic and clinical research and he looks at all of that through the lens of an economist um but mostly through the lens of a you know public health official so it's very unique um perspective and folks on X will recognize James vocal um I don't want to speak for him and and label we have to be careful with labels, but totally anti-lockdown.

I don't know. Um yeah, you know, you know, not not a huge fan of the lockdowns for most people, right? He he does say that there are certain populations that he felt should have been uh kept indoors, but other other folks probably in his view should have more actions. Well, it's a long episode.

I wanted to basically get a preview of it. You guys focus on a couple things. one how to fix the issues with science and two the importance of funding research uh both sorry basic research and then uh applied research.

So why don't we kind of cover a couple of those different my question was like the the narrative right now is that uh research funding is being cut like in immensely and I was wondering if you if you got a feel for how severe the cuts are. Is the narrative overblown?

what is the balance of cuts between applied and basic research and then we can kind of go into some of the implications of that. Sure. Okay. So, um there is an an upcoming vote in Congress uh in September I believe and it's on the table to cut the overall budget for research for NIH by 40%. 40. That's huge.

Which is huge. That's huge. I want the the budget for research at NIH. There there multiple dimensions to NIH and I don't want to get lost in the weeds of it. It's a you know NIH is something I'm very familiar with. I was on grants panels for you know over a decade. My lab was funded by NIH.

We could go really deep into the weeds but let's just keep it pretty simple. NIH funds basic research which is research that it's not specifically geared toward understanding the or trying to solve a particular cure or treatment for a disease.

So think um all everything we understand about cell biology not everything but much of what we understand about cell biology was it was because of NIH funded research into the functioning of the cell over the course of you know 50 or more years and that led to important implications for treatments and cures for cancer.

Um do we we don't have a quote unquote cure for all cancers but many cancers now can be cured. Um and to be clear these are non-commercial this is like non-commercial research. So things that you know we cover a lot of yeah we cover a lot of cannot be patented.

So basic research is you know a laboratory uh wants to understand um how cells work, how neurons work um how the immune system functions, gut brain access um uh studies on you know um how stress impacts health, sleep etc. Then the applied work is also funded by NIH. So clinical trials are funded by NIH.

This is an enormous portion of the overall budget. the exact division between basic and um clinical trial funding is hard to demarcate. But let's just for sake of this conversation just agree because it's true that most of the basic research and clinical trials that are run in the United States are funded by the NIH.

The NSF is a separate entity, right? Um but NIH is its specific goal is to improve the health and longevity of American citizens and by extension the rest of the world, right?

because it it is fair to say that while there are excellent uh you know research funding bodies in the UK and Germany and Switzerland and all over Asia and around the world that the NIH when people say it's the crown jewel it's the one that's devoted the most billions of dollars to basic and applied research and it's no coincidence that the majority of Nobel prizes um has in physiology and medicine uh and chemistry and related fields have come from work that was either initially seated by or certainly supported by the NIH.

So, you can't overstate the importance of NIH funding basic and applied research. That overall budget is facing a 40% cut in September. Now, you know, I'm hearing two things out there, right? I I wear many hats. One is my lab ran on NIH money. It no longer depends on NIH money.

There um I'm a podcaster, so I have the ear of folks who are like this is really scary, right? um that it gets very political because the current administration seems to be taking a more um like that they're going to revise the way that NIH is structured potentially 20 plus institutes down to eight.

So all of it looks at like downsizing. There are a lot of people who are terrified about this. Okay. There's another camp that I hear from a lot um and I can't even say particularly on X and I want to be very clear this camp doesn't always lean right.

It's it's pretty even across the board that are saying, "Wait a second. Why are we giving so much money to these universities to do research from our tax dollars? " And I know this will upset people who are very science-minded as I am, who care about science, but they're saying, "Why? Why are we doing this? " Right?

Some of these universities, not all, but some of them, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UT Austin, etc. , the private universities often, although some public ones do, have very large endowments. And they're thinking, "Why are we funding so much of this work? Maybe these tax dollars should go elsewhere.

" There's another key issue and this came up during the discussion with Dr.

about aacharia which is there are many many people okay I'm just who voiced to me that they don't want to give their tax dollars to basic or applied research at all okay this is a large and growing crowd because they feel that there needs to be for lack of a better way to put it some truth and reconciliation right they want two things acknowledged and I've and I've actually heard this from many of the let's just say the the highly recognizable names in the in the world of Silicon Valley um super tech or or founders and funders and um and um investors etc.

And those two things are the following. One they want the NIH to acknowledge or CDC andor others in government to acknowledge that there were in their mind failures during the pandemic in particular lockdowns that impacted the non-laptop class. Okay, we're talking about janitors, um, uh, staff, uh, teachers, kids, etc.

that, um, basically had to halt their work and their income. They're they're they're pissed off about this, right? That no one kind of acknowledged this. The other thing that they're very angry about is the lack of acknowledgement from the scientific community that the science community makes errors.

Sometimes errors that, for instance, in the field of Alzheimer's research, I want to point out, not all the work in the field of Alzheimer's is bad.

much of it is is very solid or or excellent but they they are frustrated by some recent kind of uh unveiling of the fact that there were findings that later were found to be fraudulent basically and that it was never checked up on and then that opens up a whole discussion which I also discussed with Dr.

Bachari about what's being done to solve the so-called replication crisis. So, they're upset about the about the public messaging around health and science, right? They would have preferred, it sounds like, that um people in government say, "Hey, listen, you know, we have a virus that we don't understand.

" Um, and we we have ideas about what might control it, but we don't fully understand this. So, it was very iterative and a lot of people are pissed off.

kind of like when you're, you know, 15 or 16 and you're being told you can't stay out late and then your parents are staying up late or, you know, you or like we had governors who were saying you had to wear a mask but then we're taped in fancy restaurants on the northern coast and you know at restaurants and like much in the way that a teenager goes wait a second like you smoke pot in college and you're telling me not to smoke pot like this there's a logical flaw here and we at least need to talk about it.

So there's this kind of notion that um that the this isn't my stance necessarily. I'd be happy to share my stance, but that the scientific community has kind of cloaked its errors. Y and and so there are a lot of people in the general public like don't give these universities a dime. Let them dip into their endowments.

And the last thing I want to say about that is not every university has large endowments. Most public universities do not have large endowments.

Um it's also true that universities don't like to spend their endowments and the typical way that they hide behind uh their their endowments or endowment spending is to say that money is earmarked for other things. Right?

So it's which is not to say that it isn't but and then the the last thing and I know I'm going kind of fire hose here but I want to make sure this comes out is that the big issue that is really on the table as well is this notion of indirect costs. You guys are finance guys.

So basically a laboratory get might get a grant of a million dollars across four years. So 250 a year for four years. And the university then gets what are called indirect costs. Um they get let's say 500k. Typically it's an anywhere from 300k on the million to up to 750k on the million.

There are a few cases of even more than that. The so-called indirect funds that take care of administrative costs and the the basic cost of doing research. And earlier this year, the Trump administration said, "We're cutting that to 15% across the board for all universities.

" And that was very prominent on X uh because Elon retweeted it and a number of other people retweet it. And I would say um while the indirects have been very controversial, I I just personally, it's my view.

Okay, this is my personal view is that a a severe cut to the indirects, while on the face of it might sound good, that's going to disproportionately hurt the public schools without large endowments, okay? Because they don't have money to dip into.

And you know, something more in the range of 30% seemed reasonable to me based on my understanding of what those funds are used for. But historically there have been some challenges with indirects.

You know there were universities I won't mention which caught for spending some indirects on things that were unrelated to the science. You know perhaps keeping the lights on in the English department. That's typically not the case now. It's for disposal of radioactive waste. It's for yes janitors.

It's for painting the walls of the building but it's not for making you know a lavish lifestyle for the administrators. Right. If administrators have a lavish lifestyle it's presumably through some other mechanism. Not IDC. Yeah there was some example.

I don't know if it was UCSF or some school where they had like a multiund million administrative budget and I think people really wanted to push on that and um but I I I think your concern is like obviously there's like this massive um trust issue between the public and new parts of the administration and science and how do we rebuild that trust without destroying the entire system.

Right? Is that is that kind of you nailed it and and I I would like to just highlight in the backdrop of all of this there there are is one very major emotional issue that I'm going to catch a lot of heat for this but I don't really care anymore. Um you know and we're on X.

So you know a lot of I put out a um a post recently that said hey listen I I I'm very concerned about this 40% overall cut as the most severe uh damage to to science. We're not talking about allocation.

We're not talking about indirects, you know, we're not talking about what's going to happen with that with that body of money. Uh we're just accept this 40% cut. And I'm very concerned about this, but I don't want to talk about, for instance, the fact that federal funding to Harvard or to Colombia has been frozen.

And a lot of people said, well, why not? I have a lot of friends at Harvard Med and at Colombia and elsewhere, and they're like, wait, this is why why won't you talk about that? Well, that's actually a different issue, right?

The reason that money has been frozen is that in the eyes of the administration, they are Harvard and Colombia are violating civil rights laws. Until that's resolved, there's no discussion about NIH to be had. That's not an NIH issue. It it funnels through NIH money. Yeah.

People are tying the issue even though just because it it has some of the same buzzwords. That's interesting. I I have a question about the 40%. Um I I mean there is a world where where like where what becomes important is the ranking of what gets cut.

And so my question is like within the within the basic research that you're seeing, what should we be fighting for hardest to keep? What basic science or applied science research are you most optimistic about going forward? Because we saw this with GLP1s.

I mean I'm sure crisper these stuff lang this stuff was Nahh funded at one point that there was a ton of research and then we get this big boom like but it's 10 years later what's on the frontier what are you most excited about and what should we be fighting for let's keep the funding there no matter what yeah great great question uh in fact the most important question so regardless of whether or not this 40% cut happens if it's less if it's kept the same um a couple of things first of all despite the fact that NIH funds basic research and that Many laboratories including my own for for many years focused on basic research like how does the visual system work.

We always had an eye every laboratory has an eye toward you know what the translational implications could be. Okay. So we were actively involved in trying to solve you know blindness due to glaucoma even though we were focusing on some basic questions. So I think it it it's a statistical issue.

If you step back and you say okay in the field of let's just say vision my my former field um what is the leading cause of blindness? Cataract. But you know what you can fix cataract you can slide out the lens and you put in a new lens that's being done now. Great. What's the second leading cause of blindness?

More than 70 million people worldwide. Glaucoma. You can test for eye pressures but once the cells in the eyes start deteriorating people go blind. There's no recovering those cells. So you can say wow. So okay. So let's take the top.

Let's take the the statistically that the the the the top causes of blindness and let's let's fund those. Okay. Um retinitis, pigmentotosa, etc. You could do this for pretty much any field.

So in the field of of brain health, you'd say, okay, dementia, you'd say um uh major depression, you'd say a stroke, uh you'd say, you know, I'm going to piss off some people because I'm not going to mention their their particular suffering, you know, here, but it's not hard to find Parkinson's, right? Um MS.

I mean it's not hard to know what the problems are to tackle. The problem is it deciding what the targets are. Sure. And as you mentioned like with crisper I mean in many ways it was a fortuitous thing right? Um D inner lab was working on bacteria.

Uh I mean is you know it's very hard to predict what basic research is going to lead into these different areas. But we we know what the critical areas are. So I'm not trying to dodge your question.

I do want to say that the emphasis from MA on chronic disease and chronic health issues I think has concerned some of the people in the scientific community because listen I as a podcaster that covers science and health will be the first to say that if you're not sleeping well your mental health and physical health is not going to be good and you can miss a few nights sleep but if you're chronically sleepd deprived you're sicker than you normally would be if your gut health isn't proper if you're not getting exercise if you're not getting sunlight if you're not doing these things of course Right.

But I think the people who are in the the kind of hardcore mechanistic science community are like great, we're all going to strive to do those things and we should, but not at the exclusion of figuring out signaling pathways that are vital for uh like the GLP1s are a beautiful example, right?

This peptide acts at the level of the brain and the gut to make people feel more full. It also, by the way, shut down the debate as to why people are fat. It's because they eat too much, right? They eat more than they burn. Remember people used to argue about it. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No, no. GLP1 silenced that.

It's like, yeah, that's really true. Now, are they eating too much because of a hormone issue related to having too much fat? Maybe there's some depression feel. Sure.

Like, I fully acknowledge like I'm not trying to be completely insensitive, but like, but we we isolated the problem by understanding that this peptide discovered in the discovery of this is worth spending two sentences on.

Hila monster, a reptile that doesn't need to eat very often, makes a lot of this peptide that it turns out in is manufactured by humans, too. If you increase it, thousandfold in humans, you know, you're not hungry anymore.

And so I think that, you know, the guy studying Hila, the Hila monster, I doubt was thinking about curing obesity, but there you go. Now, and and of course there's a debate to every one of these things. No medication should ever replace lifestyle factors, right? Yeah.

There are many I think we sometimes fail as healthy, fit people. We fail to understand that lifestyle factors are very hard for people to implement even if they have copious amounts of disposable income and some free time. It's it's just tough. It's just tough. It's hard to do.

And so I think that the the emphasis on nutrition and exercise is wonderful. I think I don't think anyone on either side of the political debate would argue that MA in principle, make America healthy again, isn't a great thing.

I think what they probably would appreciate hearing, now I'm speaking for kind of the more science mechanistic biology-minded folks, they'd probably like to hear a little bit more about, hey, you know, they're probably signaling pathways in the brain that are relevant to um, you know, to depression that maybe a next class of anti-depressant drugs would probably be good.

I don't think anyone would say there's no need to develop anti-depressant drugs. We probably take too many of the ones that don't work and have too many side effects.

But as a country, but when so when you say what are the most important things, what we really need is a is a very rationally grounded planning committee to sit back and say, you know what, we're going to put x number of dollars towards this, x number of dollars towards that, x number of dollars towards this.

And this is where I think Dr. Bodachara really um shined on the podcast. He said, and I will totally agree, and I got I have already my phone's been blowing up with some anger from colleagues about this.

much of the work that's funded by NIH, here's the dirty secret, is already completed because they tend to fund things that are very certain to be completed. And so people put forward grants based on work and preliminary data showing I can do this and it's already kind of worked out.

Then they use the money for the next iteration. This is the dirty secret of every NIH funded lab. And it tends to favor a kind of pedestrian more pedestrian science. Then they use foundation money and they use um other sources to kind of do the the high-risk stuff.

But if you were to look at like one of the the more impressive funding bodies in science like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, right? Um gives the equivalent HHMI folks as they're called never they always say it's not that much money, but let me many we can do the test.

We can take away their money and we can see how well they do or don't do. They don't like doing that. Um yeah, it's it's like being on academic steroids, right? Yeah. the equivalent of three grants per year basically NIH grants per year. Yeah. And more money translates to when when it's excess money.

I know that word excess money you know scares investors especially if they're taxpayers but if that money is being used to fund really like really bold hypotheses like it's my opinion that every single peptide not just GLP1 every single peptide shouldn't be getting tested in the gray market of like gyms and like biohacking.

That's frankly it's Yeah.

Isn't the reason that there we don't have good studies on a lot of peptides is it's not profitable to study them because they're effectively naturally occurring and you can't patent a like correct there like BPC57 right you hear about that all the time is will it accelerate healing you know the animal studies are solid there's no human studies my good friend Peter Aia is like I'm not going to touch that stuff there's no clinical data in humans um and the rest of us are like, "Well, I take it and it works.

" And there's there's no reason for a uh for a drug company to take it. I'll take it transiently for like a like a joint issue. Yeah. But the the core issue patent it Yeah. I' I've I've taken it, too. I've benefited from it. I recommended it to John a couple weeks ago. He had a he had an injury.

I just said, "Hey, I'm not going to like this is not something I'm going to take, you know, weekly for my entire life, but in in certain instances.

" But but break down that specifically that you're saying because it's because it's effectively science there's not there's no real ability would would a drug company have to create some variation of it in order to patent it is that is that yeah in fact um and I here I'm going to catch heat from everybody but you know the pharma companies that make GLP1s I mean most people have realized that GLP1s are very expensive and at the dosages that they're typically prescribed people get some discomfort um And so the new thing is people get it compounded at a compounding pharmacy and they're micro they're micro doing GLP-1s.

Um I the number of women that I know who are micro doing GLP-1 uh in service to the spring and summer um outrageous right outrageous. Yeah it's outrageous. And and the idea is that it's GOP1 is a good example.

I mean again insulin's a peptide you know but but there are many peptides like for instance I'm very um excited about this peptide pinealin for for sleep right and it's for some other properties too but there's no reason why a drug company would go patent pinealin they're busy patenting uh drugs like the recent class of drugs the doras this is an interesting story work on on a peptide called hypocratin um uh this peptide is involved in generating wakefulness it's also in the feeding pathway and there's a new class of sleep drugs that suppresses the wakeful fulness pathway as opposed to making you more sleepy.

So lower abuse potential. The Doras have been released, right? They maintain the the architecture of sleep pretty well compared to other sleep drugs like ambient etc. Here's the issue. They're about $325 a month. So for a lot of people that's prohibitively expensive and they're patented. Yeah.

To put it in context, that's that's a luxury gym membership. You know, it's pineal probably cost you. And I'm not suggesting people take pineal. I'm not a physician. So talk to your physician and then ignore him or her if you choose. Don't don't do uh what don't do that on my uh on my suggestion.

But you know it cost you about $15 a month, right? And and you know it's it's for me for for me personally has allowed me to I get two and a half hours of REM sleep a night in a six hour sleep bout.

So I've shortened my sleep bout to about six hours a night with a lot of deep sleep and and the pineal is it completely safe? Reasonably, but we don't know. We don't have clinical trials. Now I'm willing to run that experiment on me.

Yeah, but are you experimental freedoms and and that's a you know I don't want to cover too many things here but the I will say that Robert Kennedy has been pretty vocal about at least before the election about wanting things like peptides and stem cells and supplements to be more widely available.

The truth is they're pretty widely available now and I will put an asterisk on stem cells. I know a very prominent public facing physician who was almost paralyzed permanently from a stem cell injection into the disc of his back. I talked to a neurosurgeon friend who ultimately saved his life by the way.

Uh this is a well-known story within the the the wellness community. And he said, "Yeah, you know, the discs can't accept stem cell injections, but if you go down to Mexico or you go out of country and you say, you know, my back is hurting, they'll inject stem cells into the disk of your back.

" So, is this to say that stem cells are bad? No. They're not ready for clinical use yet.

And the United States has been very careful about things like this because before they were careful, there was a clinic in uh down in Florida that injected some stem cells into the eyes of people with macular degeneration who were worried about going blind. And guess what? They all went blind right away, permanently.

So I do want any discussion about peptides and these kind of things when you get into the realm of stem cells, it starts getting to be a serious matter. So, I don't want to give the the impression that I'm like, "Oh, yeah, try this, do that. " You know, shoulder hurt, put some stem cells in.

When you're talking about stem cells, you're talking about cells that can become essentially anything, including tumors. Yeah. Talk about I'm curious.

I mean, you you and and uh Rob, I feel like do such a good job of of threading the sort of needle around having conversations without giving endorsements for specific things that are untested and and really focused on um understanding uh helping people understand the world, the science themselves and then take the actions um that they themselves as well as um you know their their doctors uh believe they should Do you think that uh podcasters generally in health uh don't really understand broadly the responsibility they have?

I I remember when I was in college, there was a popular tech podcaster at the time that would pretty much widely endorse micro doing, right? And I I looked up I looked up to this guy, right? Psychedelics, right? Yeah. Psychedelics, right?

And and and in hindsight, I look back on that and I'm like that is so wild wildly irresponsible to to basically recommend, you know, that there's mic micro doing some people report tremendous benefits, but to sort of broadly endorse something in hindsight feels insane.

And I don't think people fully grasp the responsibility that they have and just how much impact they can have on an individual or or how a community thinks about something. Yeah. I mean, Rob and I, we take it super seriously.

I mean, I've probably taken I've taken heat for a bunch of things in the larger science community, but probably one of the things I've taken the most heat for is um my belief that certain supplements can be helpful. Um not as a replacement for for um you know, good behaviors and for prescription drugs.

I'm a fan of certain prescription drugs. Listen, I did an episode on ADHD and talked about the prescription drugs and took a ton of heat from the kind of natural uh folks.

And then I did one on behavioral tools for ADHD and took a lot of heat from the folks who said, "Hey, listen, my kid got a lot of benefit from taking stimulants for ADHD. " So, we we do weave back and forth and on that kind of knife edge.

Um, and it can be tricky in terms of micro doing because I saw it come up in the comments before today's discussion and I was just kind of flagged in my mind there.

The data on micro doing psilocybin are basically clear that it's not known to have any major effect on major depression or some of the other things that psilocybin is being tested for clinically um including major depression PTSD etc.

the data from clinical trials out of Robin Cartard Harris's lab at UCSF and elsewhere on highdosese psilocybin so macro dose right you know two two and a half grams uh four grams is the quoteunquote heroic dose if you're speaking Northern California language um you know uh uh you know those dosages done in in pretty uh maybe you know two two weeks apart or so with the support of a clinical staff going into it through it out of it etc.

have been very successful in those trials for the treatment of of depression. Micro doing has shown very little effect. Um MDMA was was put up to the FDA last year as a potential um treatment for PTSD. It has not been approved. It did not pass approval.

Uh unfortunately as a component of those trials um there were some sexual improprieties in one of the clinical conditions that you know all it takes is you know one bad incident, right? And then it was very but it cued people to this larger theme.

How are you going to protect patients who are really incap they're not incapacitated but they're not in a position to really advocate for themselves that you need probably multiple clinicians in the room and checks and balances. So I think ultimately it will be approved.

Um the remission rates on PTSD by the way from uh properly dosed and spaced MDMA um is remarkable up to somewhere between 60 and 70% remission rates on PTSD. And the new thing that people are very excited about is ibagane or ibogga. Uh 22-hour psychedelic journey.

This has been tested largely from Nolan Williams lab at Stanford um for the seems to in one or two sessions. It has uh led to a significant number of veterans um essentially ceasing their alcohol use disorder, what is typically called alcoholism and opioid use disorder.

But it you need to be heart rate monitored while you do this. The point here is that any discussion that we have on the podcast is, as you can tell, like I'm not known for being very succinct. It's and it's for a reason, right? You have to flesh out the conversation around these things.

You can't just say psilocybin is good. MDMA, yeah, like works great. Commission, you know, people can really get hurt. Yeah. And I think um discussions around whether or not you take magnesium 3 and8ate or bis glycinate before sleep like okay you can probably speed through those a little more quickly.

But when you get down to things about psychoactive drugs in particular schedule one illegal psychoactive drugs when you get down to things about um hormone therapies you know you're starting to get into the into the realm of where people can really screw themselves up.

That said, there's, you know, there are a number of things that I hope that the NIH and the and the public health messaging uh going forward will be more expansive about, which are drugs that are currently prescribed at at enormous rates in the United States and elsewhere for which there are very severe side effects like like the there's this whole thing about people taking finasteride and dutastasteride men to to keep their hair and getting permanent sexual dysfunction, right?

Permanent sexual dysfunction. Some of them killing themselves as a consequence of this. I mean, these are young guys. It's clear those drugs have very different effects in young people versus old. Some people can use them safely, some people can't. These are FDA approved drugs.

As well as, you know, I think we're finally coming around to the idea that the SSRIs can be very useful for things like OCD in certain cases for depression, but it's it's a double-edged blade. A lot of people suffered at um as a consequence. So, I I hope that um I hope very strongly for three things.

one as a scientist who essentially has my podcasting job because of the way the NI supported me coming up through graduate school postoc my lab I think a 40% cut uh would be uh too severe uh regardless of the IDC issue I I think it's just too severe it's going to kneecap science throughout the world and health the growth of new discoveries throughout the world I'd like to keep that funding level I really would what happens to IDC what happens to Harvard and Colombia separate matter within there.

But then I would very much like a a very thoughtful committee to go in and look at every single grant. Every single grant by area. Yeah. You have to have a scalpel, not a scalpel. And you could say, I mean, listen, in the field of neuroscience, am I the most qualified to decide what grant should be funded or not funded?

No. But I can tell you that I sat on study section for a long time and I can tell you there were clusters of grants that didn't solve what we call what good labs call the deletion test. If this laboratory didn't exist, would it change the direction of science? You have to pass the deletion test. Sorry, not solve.

You have to pass the deletion test. If you didn't exist, would it matter? That's a harsh test. Nobody wants to be subject to that test. But anyone that's getting millions and millions of taxpayer dollars, and by the way, millions of taxpayer dollars often to work on and kill. And we could argue about that.

I think most people are specious. They'd rather see a mouse or a rat life or a non-human primate life. But you know, we're killing animals. We're um we're occupying the lives of graduate students and postocs with taxpayer dollars. The the work needs to be justified by passing the deletion test.

And the idea that AI could, you know, do that maybe, but the idea that a jury of close peers are going to decide the deletion test and if you pass, that's flawed in my opinion because the in culture, we don't have time for this, but the inculture of science is, you know, people aren't like helping each other out just to help each other out.

But when you're very close to something, it's very hard to make a really clear decision about it. And when you're too far from it, you're not you're not qualified to.

So we need people that are in the middle who can really go in and say, "Okay, in the field of of let's say visual repair and neuroscience, give me a scalpel. I hate to do it, but also, you know, some are going to pass.

" And then I do think that instead of cutting people's funding entirely, there should be initiatives saying, "Hey, listen. If if you want to run a laboratory, would you be interested in working on these important projects that maybe the Americans paying for this research ought to be able to to vote upvote? Why not?

I mean, it's 2025 and the the NIH has done beautiful work over the last uh funded beautiful work over the last hundred years, but I think an update in the way these things are handled is great.

As I say that, every single one of my colleagues is probably quaking that they're not going to pass the deletion test, except the ones that know they would absolutely pass the deletion test. And then the question is who's making the decision?

And I'm not saying I should be making that decision, although I have some strong opinions about what's great, what's meh, and and what's like lousy. But I do think uh we need we need to be more discerning the same way that a bunch of VCs would sit around and say like, "Hey, what are we getting for this investment?

" Well, yeah. I think the question they ask is if we don't make this investment, is the is the world going to be, you know, worse off?

like does this company, you know, I think it's not the quite the same test, but I think it's important for investors to run that that process and understand are we really funding the future that we want or is this kind of a rounding error and the dollars could be better elsewhere. Can you give us a white pill?

Like are there any other organizations that can come in and help? I I I always think of uh what happened in computer science and artificial intelligence. Uh Google created the transformer architecture, not patentable. It created large language models and we got chatbt and we got all this great stuff.

It would be amazing if we could find a way that the big pharma companies that are big and profitable wind up stepping in and funding some of the gap. Maybe there's nonprofits. Maybe we just, you know, the the sheer will of the American people. We wind up voting for more funding.

But how do we really make science amazing and ensure really strong progression over the next few decades? Yeah, I mean it's that's the the key question, right? So, I mean, listen, I grew I was born at Stanford Hospital. You know, I did my training much of it at Stanford. I met I'll probably die at Stanford.

Hopefully, I don't hide in the hospital. I'd like to I don't know, die get in morning sunlight or something. But my dad's my dad's a physicist turned computer scientist, right? Worked at Xerox Park, which was an incubator for ideas, right, for many years. So, I grew up in that landscape.

And you know he always said you know eventually degrees in computer science um will be important for starting companies right but when I was young that wasn't the case right people dorked around on computers and made video games and and then we saw cell biology migrate into the world of biotech and for the treatment of certain diseases it has been I mean we can't forget that there are certain basic discoveries going back to our earlier discussion that have led to tremendous treatments like the drops to lower eye pressure and glaucoma if you catch your eye pressure elevation early and you take those drops you will keep your vision vision.

Wow. Okay. Right. You keep your vision. So, it's not like we can't cure glaucoma, but you have to that's based on basic work. So, the real key here is to ask, you know, so where has it been done successfully before? It's been done successfully in in the world of computer science and AI, right?

Growing up, I heard about AI. It was kind of like like no one no one took AI seriously growing up or brain machine interface was like sci-fi. That was so seriously. Now, my good friend from from childhood, Eddie Chang, who's the chair of nuros surgery at UCSF.

I mean, he's using um bra BMI, brain machine interface, and AI to get people with locked in syndrome to to speak and to and Elon's going to get them to move. I fully believe that Neurolink is going to solve paralysis. Yeah, I really do. I'm not saying that because we're on X.

It's I know I know the head neurosurgeon there. They're well on their way, right? Yeah. So, the question is what when should it move into biotech? And you know, Peter Teal had the breakthrough labs idea.

He was paying people to not go pursue graduate degrees in labs to get the PI like me papers and advance their careers and then maybe go get their own lab but to take great ideas and go to through breakthrough labs.

I don't know what happened to breakthrough labs, but I do think that incubators like that where you have enough money to test um you know to move fast, right? You know move fast, break things model, figure out whether or not um something is promising and then advance advance that. And here's the key.

As soon as something looks promising, you want to be able to pour human power onto that. And the problem in academia is every graduate student and postto needs a first author paper in order to have the potential to get a job.

And so one thing that I'm I've you know been in Jay Badacharia's ear about is you know I think I think the the independent investigator model of science in this country where it's the Huberman lab or it's the whatever lab named after the PI. I think that's a flawed model. This is going to really upset some people.

There should be labs named after a particular mission like curing blindness laboratory or solving Alzheimer's laboratory and then people can collaborate within that lab without the idea that they're necessarily going to go start their own lab.

In in Europe typically there's a lab head and it's it's very hierarchical but people who get PhDs often stay in those labs as permanent careers. They get paid better and better. The NIH has not had a mode to keep paying people as staff scientists and most people don't want to go off and run their own labs.

So I think the ability to iterate more quickly much like a a tech company funded by NIH would be enormously beneficial and I I could be wrong but I think it's going to be music to most people who would like to go to graduate school because what it means is that you can be on the bench next to someone and they get the thing that's really interesting and rather than feel like I got nothing you can now start working together to accelerate the progress of that work and so you now who can go off and run a lab becomes a separate issue but it's really becomes discoverybased science And and we can't forget that the taxpayers are funding this, right?

So this is like as much as we'd all like the next generation of scientists to all have their own labs, I think what we really want is for the next generation of scientists to have the opportunity to make fundamental discoveries that seed health and cures and treatments for disease, right?

I mean ultimately do we really care about the careers of scientists? No. That we care about treatments for cure treatments and cures for disease. the careerist model. Well, I do think it I do think it matters that that young people aspire to be scientists. Yes.

And I and that is a concern that I have about the destruction of of trust between the public and the science community via COVID.

The concern is that you'll have a a you know a 10-year period, a decade, you know, a decade where young young people say, "I'm not going to go into science because they have some and and I think that that's the work that that you do with Huberman Lab has potential to heal that divide between the public and the science community and and one of the reasons why I think it's so important.

" Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean I listen one of the most the three most gratifying things I can hear um as feedback for the podcast are I can't believe this is free um you know that that feels good um that people are sleeping better like oh goodness I made a few morning sunlight and dim the lights and a few things in the evening and like I'm sleeping better because I know that catalyzes many many other positive changes and then the third one and the one that's most heartening to me as a scientist less as a you know a health podcaster is when people say like you really turned me on to like neuroscience or, you know, uh or I'm going into the field of psychology.

I want to be a therapist, but I'm really starting to incorporate some physiological tools with my patients. That to me is those are the three most gratifying things. You know, I as you can probably tell, I'm very impassioned by this, right? Um folks close to me know this is how I talk all the time.

No, I haven't had any caffeine in the last, you know, four or five hours. Just trying to We have We have glad you love this stuff. All right. We love it. We drink it every time. debated. I I we didn't have time, but I debated having you join the call and it was just stacks of cans so that you couldn't even see us.

I do four of these a morning minimum, but I have a very high caffeine tolerance and uh um you know, fast metabizer. The fast metabolizer and and you know, there are many issues I care deeply about, but what you just put your finger on is so key. If this 40 I know people are like, don't give them this money.

They up during the pandemic, excuse my language, or they lied. Listen, these kids that would potentially become scientists, we can harness their energy. They didn't lie. They didn't do anything wrong.

And if you if we train them properly and we put them into an environment where where the spirit of that environment is just discovery based, maybe a little less careerist, a little more discovery based, you know, and we really fund the most important work, it we can really transform the treatment and cures for all these diseases that everyone is so concerned about.

I I know that because it's proved to be the case every single time. If you look at AIDS, there are two things that led to the treatments. And you know, AIDS isn't fully cured, but it's a very different landscape now than in the 80s. Two things, right? Money and emotion.

And it came emotion first and money and then a bunch of scientists and labs and a bunch of funding. Okay. So, where the reason we don't have a cure for schizophrenia, even though it's 1% of the world's population, is sadly it tends to run in families. there's not a strong lobby for for research on schizophrenia.

The director of NIMH told me that, former director Bob Desmond. The reason there's so much interest in autism is that any human being with half a heart looks at a kid and I'm not talking about kids that are on the spectrum who are a little neurode divergent who, you know, I work with those people.

Like, we're not talking about that. I'm talking about kids that have like stereotype motion, can't be in an open environment, will forever need support. I'm I'm not trying to like split the spectrum, but there there are kids on the spectrum that really struggle, right?

And so the reason there's so much interest in in finding treatments for things like that or for major depression is because many many people suffer, right? And what's required is money and scientists working on the right problems and ditching the things that aren't promising. The the faster you can iterate, the better.

And so I do think the Silicon Valley model has something to offer. And uh I don't know what the latest update is on Breakthrough Labs and if Peter's moved on from that. I haven't heard much about it, but that doesn't mean that they don't have something interesting.

But look, I as you Yeah, the key is like if if you have one, you know, one car that that comes out, it's not so great. You don't destroy the car industry, you know? You know, you don't like basically dismantle the entire system. This car, you know, hurt people, so we should just eliminate all cars, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, look, I think an engineering, we're on X after all, like an engineering um more of an engineering stance on on basic research is helpful.

It's also true that, you know, I can name off countless discoveries in biology where, you know, an accident of leaving something, you know, on the shelf too long or something led to an interesting discovery. I mean, there is some fortuitous aspect to it.

But now with AI you can also run lots of hypotheses in silic um more in vitro then move to invivo models.

I mean there is a way to make the the money go further but ultimately there's no replacement for great ideas and there's no replacement for the for human energy and the the best source of hum human energy that I know is youth and so you you need to catch people when they're coming out of college not send them to work in a lab for three years before they might go to graduate school then realize that they can't make a good living compared to their friends in finance like you're not going to get rich doing science although some scientists do get rich right I mean Janentech was started by scientists.

I mean that there are companies you know but ultimately you want to harness that that energy of youth and the spirit of discovery and give people the resources.

Now I had wonderful mentors and and one of the most important things they taught me was you get money, you give it to young people and you get the out of their way and let them try and and then when they don't work you you guide them and you say listen like you're wasting your time, move on.

Like no no no and they get bound to it. No, move on. It's like a bad relationship.

cut and run and then you just start the next thing and so and eventually you get hits and then if you compile human power onto those hits right I'm just describing what everyone knows to be true but this is not the way that the system has been designed it is it is old and clunky and it doesn't need to be scraped or you know hacked in half almost at a 40% cut but it does need to be revised it really does makes a lot of sense well this is fantastic I want to hit the gong for you.

Can you give us a stat? How big is the Huberman Huberman Lab podcast now? Can you give us an idea of the scale of the impact you've had? We like to hit the gong when we hear big numbers. He's looking over Rob. He's like, "No, no, don't leak any even some rough numbers.

Just any number maybe just one episode hit a million downloads. Give us some number something to hit the Those are rookie numbers. Those are rookie numbers. " Yeah. Um so, well, can I say one thing first? Please. anything that that you know rankings reflect acceleration not absolute reach. Yes.

Like Rogan like when people go like Rogan's not Rogan's reach is like beyond I I know the numbers I'm not going to talk about his numbers but it's it's like it's an order of magnitude greater than all the other major news hubs combined. Oh yeah. Unbelievable.

Uh we're but no we we are very blessed to reach um you know 20 million people. 20 million people. Let's go. Let's hit the gong. Thank you so much for coming on. Good. This is uh this was uh an important conversation. Fantastic. I'm excited for people to get the uh get into the entire episode. Yes. Yeah, it's fantastic.

It's over four hours long. No. And thank you. If nothing else, you know, with the Hubman Lab podcast, I I always say if nothing else, I'll cure insomnia. But no, the um in all seriousness, I you know, it's time stamps. You can break it down. If you want to get right to the vaccine stuff, skip to that bounce.

It's fantastic. I listened to it last night. It's great. can be digested however you want. I want to say thanks to you guys. I started watching your show since you had Rob on. Fantastic. What you guys do is great.

I also think that you're transforming the way that media is is, you know, dispersed each week and, you know, and and it's awesome. You guys are on X doing what you do and elsewhere. So, thanks so much. We appreciate it. Yeah, you guys are both welcome. Anytime. This is really fun. You ever need more matina, let us know.

Oh, yeah. We can always We're going to park a fridge right here. We're going to do it. the guys, the whole the whole crew back there is is cheering. Where are you guys based? We're in Los Angeles in Hollywood. Yeah. Yeah. We'll come right over. It's a nice day. We'll see you soon. Thanks so much for wpping up. Awesome.

You're the man. Cheers. All right. Uh fantastic episode. Very fun. Well, folks, we had 30 minutes scheduled with Andrew and we just we went longer, but we have some breaking news. We can go to the breaking news camera. Hopefully the breaking news. The breaking news printer. You want breaking news?

Watch it live as it comes out. I got to note that it's slightly out of I see the laser working. There we go. What is this? What is this? We got Whoa. Shane Poly Market says X and XAI are live on Poly Market. When I check Poly Market to get a gist of what's going on in the world. I always wish there was more context.

Now there is the first of many XAI partners with Poly Market to blend market predictions with X data and Gro analysis. Hardcore Truth Engine. see what shapes the world. The Truth Engine. Let's give it up for Truth Engines. We love Truth Engines. Um, this has been a fantastic show. We will be at YC Demo Day tomorrow.

We have a flight to catch. Uh, we covered most of the news. You've heard it. We talked about it yesterday. OpenAI hit 10 billion in ARR. Almost 2x end of 2024. Yeah. It's just it's just a casual 10 billion ARR. You know, it happens. Um, uh, happens all the time. Yep.

And uh yeah, I think that's pretty much it for the timeline. I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover, but uh I mean maybe we can close it out with this uh fantastic post from Mert who's been on the show from Helas.

He says, "Having $300 million liquid is truly an interesting limbo, golden handcuffs in a way. You have almost infinite money for daily expenses like groceries, Amazon binges, and chill little vacations. But you can't really splurge on anything sick.

You have just enough money to think about making a real boy amount, but a razor thin margin for error if you screw it up. You're also at the exact amount where it becomes cozy and hard to motivate yourself to go that much harder. Tough spot, tbh. Tough spot. Oh, we love he's an alltime poster. I love him.

We got to get him back on the show. He's so fun. Banger. Banger. This is great. Yeah, with a banger. Anyway, uh looking forward to tomorrow on Apple Podcast and Spotify. If you're in SF and you're at demo day, come by and say hi. We'd love to talk to you. Looking forward to it.