LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Seattle, WA

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Recently I had the pleasure of hosting two live events, one in Seattle, Washington and one in Portland, Oregon, both entitled the Brain Body Contract, where I discussed science and science related tools for mental health, physical health and performance. My favorite part of each evening, however, was the question and answer period that followed the lecture. I love the question and answer period because it gives me an opportunity to hear directly from the audience as to what they want to know most and indeed to get into a bit of dialogue so we really clarify what are the underlying mechanisms of particular tools, how best to use the tools for things like focus and sleep. We also touched on some things related to mental health and physical health. It was a delight for me and I like to think that the audience learned a lot. I know that many of you weren't able to attend those events, but we wanted to make the information available to you. So what follows? This is a recording of the question and answer period from the lecture in Seattle, Washington. I hope you'll find it to be both interesting and informative. I'd also like to thank our sponsors of these live events. The first is Momentous Supplements, which is our partner with the Huberman Lab Podcast, providing supplements that are of the very highest quality, that ship international and the that are arranged in dosages and single ingredient formulations that make it possible for you to develop the optimal supplement strategy for you. And I'd also like to thank our other sponsor which is Inside Tracker, which provides blood tests and DNA tests so you can monitor your immediate and long term health progress. I'd also like to announce that there are two new live events scheduled. The first one is going to take place Sunday, October 16th at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. The other live event will take place Wednesday, November 9th at the Beacon Theater in New York City. Tickets to both of those events are now available online@hubermanlab.com tour that's hubermanlab.com tour I do hope that you learn from and enjoy the recording of the question and answer period that follows this. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. What is your most used protocol? I'm assuming that you mean the protocol that I use the most. I genuinely do the morning sunlight viewing in this evening. I went and looked at the sunset every single evening and I absolutely do 10 to 30 minutes of some Non Sleep Deep Rest protocol every single day. Every single day. The reason I called it Non Sleep Deep Rest is because while I love the classic traditions of and things like Yoga Nidra, my fear was that if I called things Yoga Nidra that people would get spooked. But I also have to say that I rather loathe the fact that scientists use so many fancy terms that it also vaults information from the very people that fund the work. So I have a kind of an axe to grind with the scientific community too. So Non Sleep Deep Rest was my attempt to and put my arms around a number of different things like Yoga Nidra, which I have great reverence for and other tools like that. I do that usually in the early afternoon or if I wake up first thing in the morning and I haven't slept enough or not that well, I'll do 30 minutes of yoga Nidra and I feel terrific. After that I'll just mention a brief anecdote I learned about Yoga Nidra while researching a book that I never wrote that may or may not ever be published. I went and spent a week in a trauma center and addiction treatment center in Florida and saw some amazing work of some amazing people and some amazing transformations. And it was a big part of their daily routine for these people to do Yoga Nidra and Non Sleep Deep Rest. And I thought they're really onto something here. So almost religiously for me, every day, 10 to 30 minutes. Not that it matters, but the CEO of Google's really into NSDR. I don't know him, but there's he's written about that a number of times. In Seattle. Sunrise varies from 4:30am to 9am depending on season. Are you recommending to vary or wake up outside time with the seasons? Somewhat. You know, you don't need to see the sun cross the horizon. That would be great. But not everyone can wake up with the sun. You want to get so called low solar angle sunlight. Why? Because of that yellow blue contrast that we talked about before. Many people wake up before the sun is out. If that case, if you want to be awake, turn on as many bright lights as you can up here. I don't know, does anyone here? You don't have to admit this if you don't want to, but maybe nod or raise your hand if you're comfortable admitting that in the winter you feel less well or typically in the transition. Yeah, it's huge up here. It's really, it's amazing. And then when you're on campus or that's where I've Spent time and you see Rainier and it's like the blossoms are out and you feel almost high because that's dopamine. Animals that have white pelage in the winter and then it turns dark in the summer and spring months. That pathway, the melanin pathway, is from tyrosine, which is the precursor to dopamine and also to melanin production in the fur. So the whole system is linked. It's not rigged, it's linked. So what do I suggest? I suggest in the winter months, getting 30 minutes of sunlight viewing. I know it's a lot, but it's much better than feeling lousy all day. And then the real key in the winter is to try and catch some sunlight before it goes down. If you're indoors and it goes down and then you go outside and it's dark, your brain and body don't really know where they are in time. And then you flip on Ozark and you're watching Ozark and then you really don't know where you are in time. I have one more episode. Don't tell me what happened. That show is. When I was a postdoc, I used to recommend the Wire to my competitors. True. I go to sleep fired up, ready and excited to do whatever it takes. When I wake up, that drive is depleted. Why? And what can I do? Interesting. Have not heard that one before. But if I were to venture a guess, you know, we didn't spend much time tonight talking about the autonomic nervous system. This kind of seesaw that takes us from very alert, potentially panicked, but to very, very deep sleep. Even, you know, God forbid we go into a coma. It's because the parasympathetic nervous system is overactive relative to the sympathetic nervous system. Seesaw of autonomic function. You may be sleeping very, very deeply. And when you are in deep, deep rest, the last thing you want to do is get into that forward center of mass. Thinking, planning, predicting, right? In, you know, again, in yoga, Nidra, again, non sleep, depressed. There's this common theme in the script of going from thinking and doing and predicting to being and feeling. They say, and I'm not making fun of them, as the moment I hear that, I go just going to be and feel, what are you doing? You're actually just moving into sensation, but no planning. Right. There's nothing mysterious about it. Sensation, but no planning. Now, in sleep, a very deeply parasympathetic sleep state. What's happening? You actually. That visual aperture is actually so big, right. You're not in panoramic vision. Your eyes are actually closed. Space and time are from past, present and future are invited into your thinking. You're in a deep, deep state of relaxation. And it may be dustin that when you're waking up, you're having a hard time transitioning out of that because you're sleeping so deeply. You may be waking up mid sleep cycle. Many people find it useful to set an alarm so that they wake up at the end of a 90 minute so called ultradian cycle. There are some sleep apps that do this on the phone. I can't recall their names, but. So rather than sleeping seven hours, you might be better off sleeping six or seven and a half hours. Right. Waking up at the end of one of these 90 minute cycles. Try that. That would be consistent with what we know about the biology. But I think it's common to if you sleep very deeply, to wake up and not necessarily want to spring out of bed. I've heard of these people that just want to spring out of bed and attack day. Jocko willing 4:30 in the morning. His Casio phone watch. I'm seeing his watch when it's like eight for me. I'm like, wow, like again, these people are amazing. I must be doing something wrong. But these are, you know, I don't wake up that way. You know, like Tigger. I'm like, I want water, I want sunlight. Ninety minutes later, I want caffeine. Yeah. What are some of your favorite books that have had the biggest impact on you, Kyle G. Thank you, Kyle. Gosh, so many, you know, for nonfiction, well, Oliver Sacks autobiography on the move had a profound impact on me. You know, people hated him. The scientific community tried to kick him out. They said horrible things about him, created all sorts of scandals. It wasn't until Awakenings became a blockbuster movie that suddenly he got appointments at NYU and Columbia. Then now they wanted him back. And the revered neurologist, like, incredible, right? But he was also a real seeker in the cuttlefish thing. And he had a lot of internal struggles too, some of which I relate to, some of which I don't. I actually been in touch with his former partner because I actually moved to Topanga Canyon for a short while just because Oliver lived there. I thought, if I go there, I'll actually finish this book. Guess what? Just moving someplace doesn't allow you to finish a book. He lived in Topanga. So I was like, that's the key. It didn't work. And people were wondering why I was hanging around their house all the time. Because it was Oliver's former home. So that's an amazing book and tells you my obsessive nature. The other books that have had a profound influence on me, I would say in the nonfiction realm, well, I learned how to make a decent steak and a few other simple recipes not well from Tim Ferriss book the Four Hour Chef, because I really needed help. That was a fun one. I like Robert Greene's book Mastery because I've had amazing mentors. And that book is all about finding mentors and assigning mentors to you, even if you don't know them. And as you can tell from my stories about Oliver, who I never met, and a few other folks that I've just decided that they don't know it, but I'm mentoring them, they're mentoring me. Excuse me. That book was really important for me and that mentor. Mentee relationships always involve a breakup, either by death or by decision or by consequence. Your circumstance, rather. There's something happens and they're supposed to break. You're not supposed to apprentice with somebody forever. That was an interesting book for me. I would say in the fiction realm, I would say in the fiction realm, it's all childhood books because it's been a long time since I've read fiction. I read a lot of poetry. I'm a big Wendell Berry fan. I like poetry because poetry, to me is like the subconscious. The structure is all messed up. And you think you understand what they're talking about, but you don't really know. And so it always feels important and consequential, even though you know it's your own interpretation. And then I love the psychologists. I love Jung, I love Erickson. I love. I love the psychologist and could read endlessly about the early days of attachment theory and things like that because I find that stuff to be fascinating. So those books have been a lot of fun. And I love picture books with animals. And so if you can get a hold of Joel Sartore's Instagram account, the PhotoArch, he decided to take pictures of every animal on the planet, especially the ones that are endangered. He's an amazing photographer, but his books are even better. So if you like animal books, what excites you most about the future research of mental health treatment, particularly anxiety and depression? OOI Michael. Thank you, Michael. Well, there. I think that we're in an exciting time. I am. I'll just reveal my biases. I'm quite pessimistic at the idea that we're going to have better medication soon for most things. What I do think we are starting to approach is a time in which we understand how broad categories of drugs impact broad categories of chemicals which kind of shift our mind and broad categories of directions. What does all that mean? I think we're starting to realize that because there are different receptors for all these chemicals all over the brain and body, that that side effectless drug is unlikely to exist for mental health. But that the combination of maybe some pharmacology, but especially behavioral tools, people actually learning how to drive this thing that we call our nervous system is potentially helpful, maybe very helpful now in cases like schizophrenia, autism. And I didn't put those next to one another for any reason, by the way. OCD eating disorders. And I'm very mindful of the fact that, you know, anorexia is the most lethal of all the psychiatric disorders. Right. Amazing and sad fact. I think for those conditions we are soon going to enter a time in which it's going to be combination behavioral drug therapy and yes, brain machine interface. I don't mean putting chips down below the skull. I think there's going to be. And there are things happening now of people using devices like virtual reality as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation, placing a magnet on a particular location in the head, combined with a particular maybe drug, maybe psychedelics, maybe not to enhance plasticity. I hear a vote for psychedelics and I want to make a serious point about psychedelics. Five years ago when I. Well, four years ago when I started doing a bit of public facing stuff, I was absolutely terrified to say that word, terrified. I thought I'd lose my job, I really did. I thought donze psychedelics. And I'll be very honest, you know, for me, I think that the clinical data on MDMA and on psilocybin are very interesting. Very interesting. I don't think they are the first and only pass at rewiring the brain, but it is clear that the brain can enter a state of heightened learning capacity, but it needs to be directed towards something. The goal of opening plasticity just it opens plasticity. That's not the goal. It's like running. The goal isn't running. The goal is to run in a particular direction. So what I think is really needed is to drive that plasticity in particular directions. And I would love to see more directed use of those in of course, the safe clinical setting where it's appropriate. And a guest on the podcast, Matthew Johnson, who's at Johns Hopkins, I asked him what's the deal with microdosing? And you know what his answer was? I was very surprised. He Said macro dose. And I thought, okay, I'm not a guy who, you know, I'm not into, I'm not, I'm not pushing this. I'm not a proponent. I said, you're kidding me. Why, why, why would you say this guy runs an NIH funded lab at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine? Thought why? And he said, because the one session with a trained professional that's triggering rewiring plasticity, that's guided is as far as they know from the data you can go back and listen to. These are his words, not mine, but he's the expert in this area. Are encouraging plasticity in a particular direction. And he thinks that that's far more useful than just kind of nudging the system a little bit without any particular goal or outcome. Very interesting and very surprising. And again, a trained academic at one of the most elite institutions in the world. I think we're in very exciting times for those compounds. And there are studies at Stanford and elsewhere on ketamine and other things. But it's early days. Young people should be very cautious. Young, young people and adults should be cautious, especially people with pre existing psychiatric issues and people who have the propensity for addiction. Although some of those compounds are being used to treat addiction. So I'd be an idiot and I would be lying if I didn't say that it is very exciting times for psychedelic therapies. Where do you see the biggest area? And I've done only one clinical trial. True, I took part in one clinical trial. So I don't speak from a lot of experience there. Just a little bit, I was a subject in that trial. Where do you see the biggest area for performance enhancement within the elite athletes and operators that already hit marks of proper sleep and nutrition? Meg Young, thanks for your question, Meg. Yeah, I think that. Well, first of all, very few of them hit marks for proper sleep. But for those that do so once you have your sleep dialed in and you got your nutrition dialed in and the motivational component is there, I think where there's a lot of work still to be done and where people can really get outsized effects is in this weird little cavern of human existence that we call creativity. And I didn't have time to talk about it tonight, but. But there's a very unique brain state that we call creativity, which is taking pre existing neural maps and starting to combine them in unique ways to create new ways of performance. Performance can be basically summarized in any domain as essentially four stages. You have unskilled skilled mastery, which is when the Brain can generate movements or cognitive computations that create very predictable outcomes. And then there's this fourth tier, this fourth layer, which is virtuosity. And virtuosity by definition means inviting back in a component of uncertainty. What this looks like in terms of operators, or this looks like in terms of athletes, or even we can say musicians or people who are in the cognitive fields, or poets or writers is what it means is introducing that uncertainty about what's going to happen next. And the way to do that is to destabilize the system. In other words, to create states of mind in which there are literally sensory disruptions. It's like what I would like to see is more training in a kind of fun, house of mirrors type environment. That's when you start to see incredible performances emerge. And virtuosos invite in uncertainty. They actually don't know what they're going to do next. And so this becomes a little bit of a vague concept. And what I'm about to tell you next might seem a little silly. But one of the best ways to access creative states is to no surprise, use your visual system to view things that are highly unstable and uncertain. I don't just love fish tanks. I love staring at videos of aquariums in Tokyo and actually watching the fish because it's completely unpredictable. There's some evidence that doing things like that, or people will say, oh, I was in the shower, I took a walk in nature. And then I had this idea. I actually don't think it was the walk or the shower. It's that nature is filled with unpredictable visual stimuli, auditory stimuli. When you can predict what's going to happen next, you have very little opportunity to, to up level your game, so to speak. It's only by way of unpredictable sensory input that you can do that. So if you're a coach or you're working with people who are very high level performers, do you want them to stand on one leg and spin around and then do what they're doing? Not necessarily. What you want to do is try and get them into brain states that are different than the brain states that they're in when they normally enter their practice. The liminal state between sleep and waking up. Excuse me. The liminal state between sleep and waking is a very powerful one for accessing creativity. Many people access ideas as they're waking up in the morning. They have great insights. Other people while strolling in nature, I don't think it's the strolling or the waking up. I think it's the lack of as we call it top down regulation on rules. You are able to access combinations of neural maps that are unusual. So you can play with this a little bit. A lot of people throughout history have used compounds drugs to do this right? Great writers would get drunk and then try and write or wake up and they would. The amount of self abuse that people, including athletes and creatives put themselves through to try and capture these windows of cognitive ability is pretty intense. And I don't think that's a good idea. I think one should be an explorer and try and find these cognitive states in ways that are non destructive. I'm starting to sound like my mother with all this heelflips on lock, no kick flips. Next question. The there's some skateboarders in the audience. My first non biological family. There's some amazing skateboarders in this audience and I'm not going to be the one doing a kickflip anytime soon, but they're great to have. One of the reasons we built the podcast with the help of the great Mike Blaback is because I learned a long time ago that if you want things done right and you want to do them outside the lane lines and you want to have control over how things come across, you do it with skateboarders. Because I didn't come from a community where, you know, I didn't have parents at my sports games and things like that. So thanks to the skateboarders and the misfits and the those folks. Do you have any tips on how to improve memory? Yes. Ron Verrett. Yes. Okay, this is a wild literature and I love it. And it's changing the way that I do things. I thought that to remember things, you're supposed to get really, really excited, really focused and remember them. And guess what? That's not how you do it. There are data and there are stories going back to medieval times that they used to teach kids things and then throw them in the river. There's a beautiful annual review of neuroscience written by the late James McGaugh, brilliant researcher who taught me that in this review. And it turns out that if you want to remember something, you want to spike adrenaline after you acquire that information. After. That means the double espresso, the ice bath after you study for math immediately after. And you think about this. That makes perfect sense, right? Think about the one trial learning that nobody wants to experience, which is a car accident or some traumatic thing. You didn't get the spike of adrenaline first, you got the spike of adrenaline after. So again, I discourage the use of excessive Stimulants or, you know, anything like that. But if you're going to try and remember information, you need to get your brain and body into a high autonomic arousal state, literally. You need to deploy adrenaline into your system after you have made the attempt to learn some information. So much so that if you give people a beta blocker after learning emotional information, they don't learn it as well. Incredible. Just incredible data in animals and humans. This is the beautiful work of Larry Cahill at UC Irvine and James McGaugh. So that's how I would focus on remembering things better. And it's also true that if you tell yourself that something's really important to you, you'll be able to learn it better. If you meet people and they tell you their name and you forget two seconds later, well, you should probably be thinking, and now I do this, I meet people and I think, okay, what terrible thing did this person do? Just try and spike my adrenaline or something like that? It's a terrible trick, but I haven't figured out a better way. But that's actually one data supported way to do that. Easily a dozen or more studies in humans on that very topic. How do you manage social media addiction, Paul? Oy. Well, we should be careful with the use of the word addiction, because here I think it's entirely appropriate when you are engaging in a behavior over and over and over again and you're thinking to yourself, this isn't even that interesting. You're officially addicted. That's the litmus test for addiction. Not this feels so good. People talk about the dopamine hits of social media. Those only come at the beginning. But then when you find yourself scrolling like, what am I doing? Maybe it's that narrow visual aperture, you're a hypnotized chicken. But maybe also you are seeking more dopamine hits, because guess what, that dopamine wave pool is depleted, at least for that activity. It is true that dopamine, you have a baseline and then you have peaks that ride on that baseline. I do think that we can have dopamine for one behavior, not for another. But it's a, it's a generalized phenomenon. So how do you manage it? You have to stop seeking within social media. And so I've taken on the practice of turning off my phone for a couple hours each day. It's incredibly hard. People get really upset too. By the way, you haven't noticed these tethers that people expect. We recorded a podcast recently, and so I don't want to go into too much Depth now about attachment and grief. And, you know, we all have a map. Now you understand what the maps are of space, time, and a dimension called closeness to everyone that we know. Space, where they are, time, when they are dead, alive, when will I see them again, et cetera, and closeness. And the phone has allowed us to tap into space, time and this closeness map, which define all our attachments on a very regular basis. So you can understand why it's so valuable to people. You know, the plane lands and everyone's texting. The plane take off, everyone's texting. It's like, where are you? Well, the plane's in the air. There's this thing called flight tracker. No one cares about that anymore. You want to hear from the person. So I do think that I used to do an. Every odd hour of the day, my phone was off and, like, half the relationships in my life disappeared. They couldn't. They couldn't tolerate it. I loved it, but I loved them, too. So I would say take breaks, and I would say at least an hour. And if you find yourself excited to get back on the phone, that excitement, that is the dopamine system. So you can kind of learn where it is for you, but if you find yourself scrolling mindlessly and it's not doing anything for you, you're driving that wave pool down, down, down, down, down. So hopefully that analogy will help. It's weird to call myself Dr. Huberman. In my business, if you refer to yourself in the third person, it means you're officially a narcissist. So I'm just going to start with, were you nervous tonight? If so, what did you do to prepare? Brianne, you saw my nervousness, didn't you? No, the. I asked myself that question. I was excited. And I think I'm good at lying to myself and telling myself that autonomic arousal that might be nervousness is excitement. But in truth, I was and am really excited to tell you all these stories and about biology. I know this might sound like a little bit of a line, but I actually don't feel myself as a. As a. Like a person when I do the podcast or I do this stuff. I took a walk before I got here, and I have to be careful. There are only two topics that make me cry. One is talking about my bulldog. The other is talking about my graduate advisor. So I have to be very careful. But I took a walk and I imagined that they were here. And I know, I know. Don't make me cry. Lex Friedman made me cry on a podcast, and it was really unfair. And he was like digging and digging. And there are a few people in the audience that know Costello. And it's like, you know, and I just kept thinking to myself before coming in here, like, you know, I, I love them and miss them and I, Costello would be entirely bored with this whole thing. So I distracted myself a bit and not so nervous. I do get nervous about things, sure, I'm human. But when it comes to biology, I think I still feel like that little kid who just wants to tell you all the stuff, you know, so, you know, can't help it. Is learning from failure equal to learning from success? Is one more efficient than the other? Rachel, thanks for your question. Well, on a trial by trial basis, we know that when you fail at an attempt, on the next attempt, your forebrain is in a position to engage better. And this makes total sense, right? You feel that frustration, you want to get the next one right? Well, you're harboring, or I should say funneling more neural resources. Your focus, that aperture tightens. Now you have to be mindful of that too, because when you have a failure and then you're like, you're going to hit the bullseye. I'm thinking about a dart board because I'm terrible at darts. You know, sober, I'm terrible at darts. I don't even drink. So that next trial, part of the problem is, is that focus can narrow so much that you can start to lose access to information that might help you if you were just to relax a little bit and dilate that focus a little bit. But in general, on a trial by trial basis, focus is the cue that your nervous system is going to be positioned to learn better on the next trial. Now, in terms of life experiences, gosh, I wish for everyone fewer failures and more successes. But, you know, failures keep you humble. And I've had a lot of them. I mean, if people ever wanted and they, you know, I'd be happy to tell you about. I mean, I've made a ton of mistakes in life. I ton of mistakes. Some of those were mistakes of persistence, like dumb decisions. I kept like, it's going to change, it's going to change, and it's clearly never going to change. And then some were failures of misjudgment about other people or situations. And a lot of them were just plain failures, like the experiment didn't work or it just wasn't the right thing. And you try and reframe those. I do think that we owe it to ourselves and to the people that we know. To try and generate some wins here, here and there, and try and help other people generate wins, you know, in running a lab over the years. And I still. Do you realize that you want your students to publish a paper and feel that success pretty early so that they can experience A, how much work it is, so they pick problems wisely, but B, so they can feel that like, I can do this. And I think that, you know, this gets into the psychological as well. I think that yes, failures help, but successes help. And there I think, you know, I function best in a team. And I think that for those of you that are. Feel like you're fighting some challenge alone, I do think that there are great resources to be had in trying to access other, you know, other people as sources of support. I think that that's a great tool. There's this whole literature, scientific literature around social connection and how that can help us reframe motivation and goals. Anyway, maybe that's a topic to, to expand on another time. But failure is important on a trial, trial by basis. People who don't experience enough wins for a long period of time. The brain is a prediction machine, after all, and they start to predict failure. So takes a bit more work to wedge oneself out of that. When are you going to start training Jiu Jitsu? Lex made me ask Ryan Flores. Okay, here's the story with that. Lex said, do you want to try Jiu Jitsu? I said, sure. Lex said, okay. It'll be great to show people beginner's mind. Said, sure. We went and did a Jiu Jitsu class. He was very nice. Nice, nice. Russian nice. Like, oh, yeah. Then he puts it on the Internet with me in a rear naked. Him putting me in a rear naked choke. It was actually Lex Friedman choking out Andrew Huberman there. I just talked about myself in the third person. Damn it. Edit that one. I have not had the time for Jiu Jitsu. I like my ears the way they are, you know. Have you ever seen these people that do Jiu jitsu? Their ears literally look like stomps. No, I should do it. It looks like a great sport. And unlike the other sports I've been involved in my life, boxing. Please don't do it. It's not healthy. Skateboarding, all this. You don't really damage your head doing Jiu Jitsu. So no, I'm gonna get you back for that one, Lex. Okay, can you go through? Oh, wow. John Edwards. There's a joke that my friends used to tell about the supplements I take. They used to say someone Would say, what supplements do you take? And they would just go, all of them. I don't take all of them. But I have been very systematic for about 30 years. I've been interested in compounds that change the nervous system. And I do think that the, the events of the last few years have changed the way that people view supplements. I think that more people are starting to think about how to take better care of their health. And they, people are realizing that obviously great sleep mindsets, social connection, exercise, nutrition and so forth are very important. But I actually don't know anybody. Granted, I run with a strange crowd, but I don't know anybody that doesn't take something nowadays. You know, I could go through the whole list, but I would say the most fundamental things, and there's no product pitch here, the most fundamental things are the things that are going to support your kind of foundational health. So for that's going to mean mainly getting, either by food sources or supplements is going to be getting sufficient amounts of these essential fatty acids. So important. For some people that's taking liquid fish oil. For some people it's capsules. For some people that's eating fish. I don't like the way fish tastes unless I'm in Seattle, by the way, the seafood here is amazing. Not so much in California. So I think the essential fatty acids, and then I'm big on the data, dare I say, out of Stanford, Justin Sonnenberg's lab and Chris Gardner's lab, that these fermented foods, of which all these cultures have interesting fermented foods, kefir and sauerkraut and kimchi and you know, pick your, pick your fermented food, that those seem to really encourage health of the gut microbiome. So I started eating a lot of those and taking no probiotics except in, you know, a few of the supplements that I was already taking. So I, I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think by and large, if you're eating well and doing the other foundational behaviors well, you can get away with a minimum of supplements. D3 it seems to be a lot of people deficient D3, but not everybody. So I think those are the main ones. However, I do think that nutrition should be the primary entry point. Again, it should be behaviors first, then nutrition, then supplements, then prescription drugs only if you need them. And then, you know, for some people, their brain machine interface like TMS and things like that are going to be useful. But behaviors change your nervous system. No supplement actually rewires you or changes your nervous system behaviors do that. I hope I didn't dodge that question entirely. I do take some of the things that we talk about on the podcast to do some focused work sometimes Alpha gpc. But lately I've been doing this whole thing of cold water exposure to spike my adrenaline because I hate it and it spikes my adrenaline after learning. Based on the McGaugh and Cahill data, what would be your best one or two pieces of advice? Recommend protocols for improving learning and retention for graduate students in science and medicine. We try to sleep sometimes. Thank you. JD oh great, you're here. Uw jd so you know, I used to teach this course at Cold Spring harbor on career development for scientists, and there's a lot in there. But the two things that are most important are for sake of answering this question.