Andrew Huberman's full backstory from childhood to podcast | Andrew Huberman & Peter Attia

it's going to go back because I I feel like there's there's so much that that I know a little bit about you but I don't think I know the whole story so you grew up in NorCal or so yeah so I was born at Stanford Hospital the joke I have is I was born in Stanford I kind of hung around skateboarding on campus and in my youth then I uh I was trained at Stanford in part and then I've been faculty members I'll probably die at Stanford but hopefully a long time from now so I was born I was born in Palo Alto my dad's from South America he's Argentine dark hair dark eyes speak Spanish and English and he came to the U.S on a naval scholarship uh he was an experimental physicist at UPenn met my mother in New York they had my moved to California had my sister um who's three years older than I am and me uh in the mid early and mid 70s my dad took a job at Xerox Park early days of the personal computer the so-called graphical user interface and things like that um and my mother was a stay-at-home mom uh was a teacher and and uh I was in Menlo Park it was in Palo Alto I lived right over the fence from Gunn High School g-u-n-n a high school that's um Infamous for having that a huge number of years unfortunately that's adjusted a lot of kids of Stanford professors it's not the Palo Alto High School on the other end of town so our end of town tended to be a bit more um uh middle and upper middle class and Polito at that time even had Midtown which there were some families that were definitely at or below the poverty line Believe It or Not nowadays it's you know Palo alto's all pretty upper class um Chad including East Palo Alto East Paltrow still struggles yeah he's followed so still struggles great people there but really struggles um so growing up from birth until about age 12 or 13 it was soccer swim team um tons of kids on my street hanging out there were all these boys my age girl they had all had older sisters my sister's age pretty magical childhood and um and my dad turned positioned into theoretical physics and he was involved in the early days of Chaos Theory so we spent a lot of our youth in Aspen in the Summers not because we were part of the wealthy Aspen set but there's the Aspen Center for physics so I grew up running around hearing about you know Peter Kaus and um and Feynman and Mary Gilman those were regular characters in my life and met you know those folks and they were around a lot of stories about academics I was kind of exposed to the academic world um and then and and frankly it was a pretty cool childhood we did a sabbatical in Europe and I got real close with my sister because of the sabbatical I'm still really close with my sister um she's a therapist and an excellent one um not my therapist but an excellent therapist and um and it was pretty like normal childhood wasn't a great athlete wasn't a great student but I was always super curious about biology and animals like absolutely obsessed my mom used to drop me off at Monet's Pet Shop on California Avenue for those that don't live on California did you yeah it was directly across from Draper's music which is where the Grateful Dead got their start um and those guys used to hang out there because they were from Menlo Park The Edge there was a club The Edge you wouldn't find that in Palo Alto no um so it was a pretty healthy upbringing you know we didn't have any issues around like alcohol or drugs in our home was two-parent home dinner together every night um but there were some things looming under the surface and and so everything took a hard turn when I was about 12 13 um my parents divorced and unfortunately they didn't read the rule book or if they did they broke every rule in the rule book um and it was a very high conflict situation um so my dad moved out um I lived with my mom my sister went off to college um and at the time I had gotten into skateboarding I wasn't so much playing soccer and doing other things and I fell really deeply into the community of skateboarding which at that time was really underground it wasn't like it is now I started skateboard is a unique sport because you have interactions with kids of a lot of different ages so you're hanging out with like 30 year old guys 20 year old guys kids your own age and a good friend of mine named Paul zawanich was really good at skateboarding and he started picking up sponsors and turned Pro while we were in high school and we started going up to San Francisco and hanging out and you were still in the peninsula yeah I was like 13 14 years old at the kind of famed what's called Embarcadero or EMB crowd it's you know early for skateboarding this is a huge deal it's kind of the golden era of Street skateboarding and there I got exposed to a lot I got exposed to drugs alcohol fights um I got exposed to a lot of kids that just didn't go to school just didn't go um there were a bunch of you know a lot of untoward elements also a lot of amazing skateboarding just amazing got to see I can throw out names but the young Danny Way would come through town or Rob Dyrdek would come through town and you know these names will be familiar people maybe DC shoes those guys were involved in that so I got to see all this stuff I in full disclosure I wasn't a very good skateboarder I was okay but I kept getting hurt I didn't have the athleticism I hit puberty late I had a long arc on my puberty this is something I someday want to understand which is I I think there's a relationship between how long puberty lasts and Longevity I think it makes sense um anyway I mean I I hit puberty around 14 but I didn't acquire the um secondary sex characteristics I didn't like grow my musculature didn't come in my physicality didn't develop until pretty late didn't grow beard until College couldn't grow it was weird but you know I by the other marks of puberty let's just say I I hit puberty okay so I had all this upset about my home life it frankly was pretty bad my almost struggling a lot my dad was trying to be in the picture but there was a lot of conflict between us in any case to make what happened was uh something about my behavior cued the school system probably the fact I wasn't going to school Much Anymore um I got taken away I got put into a residential treatment program up on the peninsula this was not for drug use alcohol use or hurting anyone or myself this was mainly for truancy and they were really concerned about me okay um did that did they require the permission of your parents to do that yeah so I you know I remember one day just getting called into the office and um they were talking to me asking me questions about my home life and um and I you know pretty quickly caught on to the fact that something was going to happen and um I did every let's just say I did everything I could to resist getting taken away but they they took me away and put me under lock and key there and I remember what grade uh that was I was in the ninth grade so I was in the ninth grade and um I was really angry really upset um uh yeah it's interesting I don't have a ton of emotion around it anymore but I I do feel like it was a terrible situation for me to be in because like there was my home life was so bad at that point um and your sister was already in college sister was gone I think the way to capture my home life at that point was there was just no one there there was no one there and what was there was really what was your mom doing uh which was she working at this point to make uh for your dad she was she took a job um she was working um but to be honest and look I love my mom um and I love my dad but um they just were so focused on their own stuff like I think there was so much anger and resentment between them and I just basically was kind of running my own life I was doing whatever I wanted which is terrible for a 14 year old like boundaries are great rules are great and I had this community of young guys that was an amazing Community Learning from some of the older ones learning some not healthy behaviors learning some healthy behaviors too um but uh when I got put away um it felt to me super unfair but I met really the counselors there were amazing and I also was very lucky that drugs and alcohol were never really my thing so a lot of kids there were dealing with drug and alcohol issues I remember when I got there uh I remember when I got there they said listen um you know they're these younger kids here and um they're crazy they're like miswired and then there are adults over in that other building and they're crazy but you guys here you're not crazy and I remember thinking they have to be saying that to the oh you on the other buildings so there was this moment where I'm like is there something genuinely wrong with me like I didn't you know again I didn't do anything except I was not taking good care of myself and did you still leave the facility each day to go to school or with school within their locked up in a room my roommate turned out to be a really good guy he was a huge guy he looked like Richard Ramirez The Night Stalker and I was remembering like I can't sleep they're coming in doing bed checks like three times a night that you know they're frisking us they're doing cavity searches for did we bring in weapons did we bring in drugs you're doing group therapy with all these people some of them are talking about terrible molestation experiences which fortunately I didn't have you know um drug things and I'm just thinking like why am I here like I had no idea why I was there and I remember at the time I had picked up one skateboard sponsor which was spitfire wheels and Thunder Trucks they they put me on out of sympathy and the team manager I'm actually friends with him still his name is Steve Ruby he's not a pot smoker now but back then he was which will explain the voice I'll be using a moment I remember you literally got one phone call so I wasn't going to call my parents so I called Steve and I was like hey Steve I'm uh I'm locked up here like I'm in the peninsula I'm in Belmont I don't know what to do he goes man he's like you're the most normal guy I know I can't help you and I thought I'm really stuck like I'm genuinely stuck like what am I gonna do and I remember thinking like I'm not I just didn't know where to go so what happened was I eventually worked the program they gave me someone there said listen just like play the game but eventually I realized I was like they're asking questions that I actually want the answers to like what's going on in my head why am I just letting my whole life go what's going on at home and it turns out that it was just a it's a very I'll summarize by saying what what I was dealing with I can now in retrospect it was a super traumatic daily traumatic environment if I was at home or it was um just like pure pure neglect right I mean just pure neglect I mean I prior to that year I had gone off to skate camp there was a skate camp in Visalia and all the other kids like went there with their bags and their parents or something like I just like went we just like hung out we were just getting cars and go there was we went to Reno for a week to skate in the Nationals I sucked but I went anyway and we were just there a bunch of kids we were just parentless kids so I was part of this huge group of parentless kids it's just gone high school they there's a spotlight on me whereas I think had I been in an inner city school or something you know you probably would have gone under the radar and it gave me great sensitivity to the fact that like you know growing up like I'm not gonna the word gets thrown around a lot I think these days in in the incorrect ways but it's like I was very lucky you could even call it privilege but very lucky to have that that there was a spotlight on me it was high signal to noise right this kid's really crazy I also was getting into a lot of fights so I was getting into street fights and that whole mess and um so I eventually got out and the agreement was I would switch high schools how long were you in this place you know I don't know is it uh a month or more which was plenty of time frankly um you know you're not controlling your food your sleep it's all on their plan good kids were there we lost a couple kids couple kids killed themselves while we were there it was it was well there well there wow um I mean you could get stuff in wow you know there was all sorts of networks in there and it wasn't jail but it wasn't far off it sucked and um yeah I always tell you tell I don't do a lot of Youth mentoring or anything but I always listen the moment that that lock goes down or you're in handcuffs it it's like your control over everything just goes away like it's just truly something to avoid so one of the agreements on getting out was I'd switch high schools and I'd start therapy they wanted me in a new high school now you went to a great High School yeah was the idea that they just needed to get you a new peer group um they weren't so concerned with my peer group they so that the idea was going to be that I'd live with my dad um and I was actually excited to do that at the time it was something I'd requested so I ended up um switching to Palo Alto High School so-called Pally High just across from Stanford campus and um and at the time I had a girlfriend that went there um you know uh who uh I met because I worked at the local skateboard shop Palo Alto toy and Sport world the skateboard shop in the back and she came in there we we started um sport was still there when I was there yeah it just closed recently it was one of the oldest businesses in Palo Alto yeah I I worked in this cable shop in the back um and in the shoe department used to buy my goggles there yeah oh yeah yeah a lot of swim stuff yeah I have to say you know one thing that that I had kind of baked into me is I my enthusiasm for animals and I liked work I I always had summer jobs I had paper routes and I worked at the skate shop and all that kind of thing um but I moved to Palo Alto High School I was supposed to live with my dad and then um and this I have to be respectful of certain elements of privacy that but um for certain reasons um it was decided that I wouldn't live with my dad and at that point it was just like gasoline on fire I was like okay I can't live with my mom by your determination or by theirs uh it was not my decision to not live with my dad so I was like oh my God so the now all of a sudden it's like gasoline on fire and of course I'm hitting puberty too so now meanwhile no attention to school no interest in biology anymore you know I'm just like skateboarding and like just being a punk right but also having a lot of fun and loving my friends and my girlfriend at the time was really sweet um and so I ended up going to Palo Alto High for about three weeks and then just stopped going as just you know so it was like everything was just getting worse worse worse now the thing that really saved me was uh this therapy thing so I was placed into therapy I had to go once or twice a week I don't recall but that therapist um who is trained in mostly psychoanalysis but in some other dimensions too um was like the first person that um that really like paid attention I was like oh [ __ ] you know and it's interesting because I do have the emotion I do have to choke back a little bit here because you know it it's my parents love me I love them but it's it's a crazy thing to have somebody say listen like like to give you the confidence like we're gonna figure this out there's something very powerful about that it wasn't like you know everything will be okay it was like we're gonna figure this out and that to me was like an amazing um dialogue to be in so it was like okay let's parse your situation but even more so let's just focus on what you want to do what you want to create what's important to you so I started working with this person um and I'm not shy to say I've continued to work with that person one to three times a week until now and so you know you think about sort of mentors and a very lucky 30 years later this is more than 30 years later yeah so more than three years later and I I confess at times um I had to request some budget help to do this when I was a graduate student it was really hard to do I eventually had insurance that helped um you know I now have I'm in a position to still do it but to just be able to understand my own thinking to be able to separate what was happening around me from what I wanted for myself and look I I had a number of um huge mistakes along the way it did not allow me to avoid um mistakes and you know uh you know I eventually what happened was I got a different girlfriend um I stopped skateboarding and got hurt really badly um and I started getting involved in Fitness there was a a football coach at our school and Bob Peterson were you now still back at politics I got I went back to gun there was an agreement and it was interesting because I my hair used to be dyed black I like let my hair grow out natural I started wearing like not skateboard clothes I sort of kind of decided to just kind of be a little less outrageous um but I started Thai boxing which was great there was a I got involved in martial arts a little bit wasn't very good at it but it was okay started lifting weights my body reacted like crazy to that I wasn't on any hormone support it was just the youth thing I just kind of responded really well with that I started running I ran cross country getting really into running and lifting weights and I still wasn't very focused on school but I was doing a little bit better and the girlfriend at the time was a year older and she had a really good work ethic and um and I started you know I would run to her house on Sundays and wash our car I would um I just started doing a lot of physical labor and I figured I'd go into the fire fire service I was like I could do that um and I started taking fire science classes at Mission College loved the guys there it was like work out this is while you're still in high school I was still in high school and um and I will say that at that young age I made the mistake of I started dabbling in some drugs it was no hard drugs but psychedelics which I think psychedelics have their place in the therapeutic context when people are older but while the brain is still developing I don't think it's a good idea so I started doing that um you know my I you know I don't know how much to disclose or not out of respect for other people but you know I had a girlfriend early you know there was a pregnancy there was a number of things where you know my life still wasn't bolted down um and that was causing problems for me and um but she was very loving and was great and what happened was she went off to college she went to UC Santa Barbara and so my senior year I was going down to visit her she was already there and sleeping in the parking lot outside her dorm and hanging out with people there um and so she was like my family I basically mapped everything on to her and eventually what happened was I applied to Santa Barbara because I'll be damned if she was gonna be far away from from me and somehow I do not know how I got in I think I barely broke a thousand on the s.a.t but I don't remember studying and um let's just say the night before I was not putting myself in the most focused uh Preparatory State somehow broke it you didn't you didn't do the optimized sleep nutrition exercise stress routine to take the test no and if I reveal what I did to take the test I think it might send the wrong message yeah anyway so I won't but um but you know I got into UC Santa Barbara and I went there to be with her and let's just say two quarters into it I had more fights than I did time in class and by the end of the year I was basically flunking out why do you think that was I think I was just had so much fire and so much anger I think it was just it's interesting I've never been angry at people I wasn't angry at anyone in particular I just had so much like fire I mean I mean at the risk of stating the obvious I mean it sounds like you were very angry at your parents and you had good reason to be yeah I was very angry with them and and I assume your therapist came to a similar conclusion and helped you see that um what were you able to do to try to reconcile or come to peace with that anger at your parents throughout the three or four years in high school where you were presumably getting back enough on track to at least be in a position to apply to college yeah um and credit to my high school girlfriend because basically there was no organization in my life except the organization that I wanted her to see I was capable of and her parents must have loved you they hated me oh really they so they tolerated with oh her dad it's not like you were an adult her dad recorded our like this guy's a punk why are you with him you know he and he was right I mean he was completely right so these people know who they are he was completely right you've recorded our conversations he was like this guy is a complete disaster she had a tough home life really tough home life and so I moved in in kind of a protective role too but um you know she was a hard worker and her dad was an extremely hard worker and so I had a lot to prove and I also was learning that you know especially with running and lifting weights and the stuff in the fire service it was a direct relationship between input and outplay whereas in skateboarding I always felt like it was like 10 units of input and I'd just get hurt I just wasn't a natural athlete for it um so you know there was some work done with my parents where you do these one-on-one things in the therapist office and I would express my anger or whatever it was but I don't actually remember being so Furious as much as just feeling like you people don't know what you're doing like you have no idea what you're doing it was clear like the way there they just didn't get it I just thought and now you know um can we tell a funny story about uh this is every every time we have a meal I learned something about you that is so remarkable I can't believe it and I think my favorite of the week is you're at some skateboarding thing and like there's no one there to take you home and you you end up getting a ride home with Tony Hawk's Dad they fly you home yeah so this is wild or they bring you back home to San Diego I'm 14 years old I go to the Linda Vista Boys Club I compete in this skateboarding contest I do terribly and then everyone heads off in their cars and like off to their places or with their girlfriends or their parents and I'm just there you're just twiddling your thumbs right with this kid Billy Waldman who people on the skateboarding that um he was the people referred to him as the demon child and Frank Hawk who's Tony Hawk's dad who ran the national skateboard Association comes up to me is like where are you going I was like well I'm from Northern California I was gonna take the bus to Lancaster there's this guy that I know in Lancaster and he's like no no no no no he's like you're coming with me so he and his wife Nancy Hawk took me to their home Tony had moved out I slept in Tony's room that night it was like to say it was filled with trophies is an understatement there's no space for anything except the bed because there are so many trophies so like this is cool up in Tony Hawk's room we went to dinner and yeah that's like that would be like me somehow winding my way into Ayrton senna's room after he's you know I mean it's it's ridiculous it's ridiculous yeah and then and so they eventually flew me home I think that Frank talked to my mom was like Hey listen you know this kid needs some some guard rails you know because skateboarding has a lot of truance and a lot of wildness but and always did it's part of its appeal to many you know no parents you don't need parents around a skateboard right you don't need your pre-workout drinking even Slurpee you know like you you know it was still like or or beer right I mean it was it's beer and cigarettes I mean you know the 16 year old me or 15 year old man skateboard like a pack of cigarettes you know it's like a you know so that was me then I don't recommend that but um so what ended up happening was the next day he took me to Tony's house in Fallbrook got to meet Tony and Ray Underhill and a bunch of other guys and see the ramps and pump around on the ramps a little bit and then flew home and that was an amazing experience and then years later on Instagram I sent a direct message to Tony and said Hey listen I know you got a ton of messages but you know your dad really took me in and his mom had passed away recently and I said I'm really sorry my condolences I said and if you don't believe that my story is True how's this your parents used to drink black coffee after dinner and he wrote back I was like no way like nobody would know that right but I remember thinking it's 8 30 at night we just finished dinner and they ordered black coffee in the restaurant so that was pretty cool and and yeah a number of people you know swooped in and tried to help me along the way I mean I also had amazing experiences skateboarding you know be a 14 year old kid at the Reno Nationals running around the casinos with your friends and seeing these amazing skateboarding and yeah you're also seeing like rampant amounts of drug use and rampant amounts of like odd types of let's just call it wasn't traditional dating and relationships for high school students and you're like this was the early mid 90s um or early 90s and it felt it was fun to be free and wild but I felt like I was always the guy at the end because I wasn't very good at skateboarding and I wasn't I didn't have a home and I didn't have any structure I was the guy that didn't know where to go it was like I didn't know where to go and to this day even if I am at a scientific meeting and everyone clears out at the end I get totally depressed I'm like I feel like I've got nowhere to go I've owned homes I had a dog and there were times when I was like wow like it's you know like knock on the walls like there's really something here so yeah I was angry with my parents and I think I was also just kind of like flabbergasted like you know now you know I having spent time with kids and friends who have kids you know 14 is pretty young you know and I was involved in all sorts of things at 14 that like I would never subject a 14 year old ever like you want to preserve that in a sense of Youth as much as possible and same time I mean it forced me to grow up you know so I think the fighting and I think the the hard work and the fact that I thought about making a living really early on and all of that I'm feeling like I had to grow up quickly you know and uh so you're in your first semester at UCSB and you're getting into fights with townies with college kids people I was never somebody who provoked fights that initiated them but I was just somehow it was just finding me you know and and I was not a big drinker but that town there's a lot of alcohol intake so what happened was at that summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college there was um a house that everyone hung out at and I decided to stay there for the summer wouldn't go home what would I do at home my the girlfriend and I had split up we were kind of having our issues and um I was living in the town of Isla Vista with my pet ferret and I was squatting in a house I was like why would I pay like skateboarding you learn how to just kind of squad in places like so delivering Bagels For The Bagel Cafe and I we show up at a friend's house and um a bunch of guys were stealing some stuff from the house that was clear they were loading up their cars so got into this fight with a bunch of guys and the people I had shown up there with ALS scramble they all just took off and so this fight started getting ratcheted up into weapons and like and and people hitting each other with skateboards and like so knives coming out and the whole thing the police show up in the end I was let go um because we were quote unquote protecting our property um and I actually I remember when the police officers congratulated me he was like good job or something I just remember feeling like this picture sucks like here I am I'm nine now I'm now 19 years old no future in skateboarding I barely went to class getting in fights I'd been thrown out of the dormitory for something stupid related to that um my girlfriend and I are split up I work at The Bagel Cafe like I was like this this is it and why at this point did you did you think about hey I still have this whole thing as being a firefighter potentially was that yeah I I think at that point I was just like I don't really know what to do I I just I just remember walking back to the place where I was staying and just thinking like I'm a total screw like I'm officially a screw-up now I don't care where I was born I don't care what my parents did I am officially a screw-up like it doesn't matter nothing else mattered and I actually wrote a letter I still have the letter um I wrote a letter this is summer in 94. um to my mom saying saying all the things that I kind of felt about the past and what I'm gonna do going forward and at that point I really did make a hard left turn I moved home I took a leave of absence I didn't quit UC Santa Barbara took a leave of absence moved home went to Foothill College my sister was home from abroad after college we lived at our house our mom was there and this other girl we rented a room too um but I went to Foothill College and just was like listen the one I'd listen to myself I'd say the one thing I know how to do is memorize information so I just started focusing on coursework and working out and from that point on except for one course in college I was a straight A student the whole way through so what happened was after a quarter there and a summer I went back to Santa Barbara I lived in a studio apartment by myself I got back together with a girlfriend and how did you fund this did you just take out loans to do all this yeah so my my education was supported in part there was some money that from fortunately and here I was very blessed my dad obviously helped not obviously but my dad helped that was great um I remember I didn't want to go back to Santa Barbara I want to go to Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington I want to be a journalist or do something related to writing he said no way I'm not going to pay for some like sorry to people when they're women he was like no way no no fluff education like liberal arts school you're gonna go back there where there's some Sciences you're gonna do do something anyway that was that was my house and I went back and I just was a machine it was like Henry roll install just like work out I listened to Rancid listen to Bob Dylan listen to classical music on Loop drink coffee worked out ran studied worked out ran say and my goal was to be the on the far end of the curve they used to publish the curve or every class outside and I just became a straight A student now the the twist in this is eventually I started working in a laboratory I took a class from a guy named Harry Carlisle who was teaching about mental health and Neuroscience and Physiology Brown fat he had worked a lot in brown fat thermogenesis I started working in his laboratory on Brown adipose tissue so I haven't um and dopamine antagonist and clozapine neuroleptics and effects on temperature I was obsessed with physiology and temperature meanwhile I was getting really interested in Fitness and supplementation and I tried to run cross-country for Santa Barbara but you had to run a sub 10 two mile that was way too fast wait a sub ten two mile oh two miles that's a walk-on and there's no way I was these guys were built like whippets and at that point I was I'm six one I was at that point I was about 185 200 pounds I was no way I was going to do it um so I was really into fitness still and I was just you run two miles today I don't know but my fastest mile ever was in high school I ran a 457 first Mile in a three mile race and then bonked and had to walk off the race so basically I failed the race but that's what adrenaline it was pure adrenaline it wasn't training capacity so now I'm not that fast a runner I've run a couple miles on I do a two mile run once a week and I'd be happy with a with a 12 to 13 minute time I'd be very happy with that in fact um so you know I started getting really into work in Harry's lab and he was great my kind of guy he smoked cigarettes in the lab he lied him with the bunsenburger and smoking the fume Hood we drink coffee we were injecting rats with with with MDMA we were studying the temperature regulating effects of MDMA and we were studying amphetamines and I was learning so much neuroscience and I was like a kid in a candy shop I was like this is amazing now there wasn't any neuroscience at that time it was called neurochemistry or neurobiology um and I was taking psychology class classes also and they had the degree was called biopsychology now I was a little late to the train so I was taking biopsychology courses and psychology courses and then I met a guy named Ben Reese who is expert in visual system and visual system development and I started learning about all these retinal specializations then I learned there was a guy on campus named Gerald Jacobs who discovered the evolution of vision and color vision he's a member of the National Academy I started hanging out with all of these guys and so my crowd completely changed to a bunch of Neuroscience dorks who were to me the coolest guys in the world and in many ways still are I I think I've immense respect for Ben and for Gerald and all those guys and Harry and so it was just incredible and I thought wow and I'm learning about all this mental health stuff that I saw when I was locked up that I saw in my Friendship Circle and my family people who have anxiety there was schizophrenia it's neurotransmitters it's dopamine it's it's norepinephrine it's not just you know Freudian Theory Theory excuse me even though I respect Freudian Theory so I became a monster of school and then the girlfriend graduated and we decided to part ways and wait the same one same did you guys get back together we managed to make it about two more years and then um for better for worse you know now looking back and think like okay could have had worked out probably maybe maybe not it's one of those you don't know but I was on a mission basically to go to graduate school and so I don't want to break you know it would take us five hours to go through all this but at this point it was like no drinking no drugs once a month I would go out and really Tie One On With Friends that like really have a blast slash you know drinking too much not a good idea period but at the time that was still in my framework of what I could do but then I over time I was like I don't want to do this now you're still with some regularity talking on the phone to this therapist every week and um I I want to kind of go back to this pivotal moment but was it that fight that you had that got where the cops came was that really that sounds like a very orthogonal moment 100 because it was it was really like the the I'm gonna end up dead or in jail either because somebody kills me or I'm gonna you know I'm not proud of this but okay when I say like knives came out it didn't mean they were pulled on me like we were it was everyone was involved in this and I'm like listen I don't wanna I don't want to hurt anyone so sooner or later I was gonna end up killing somebody or getting killed or just you know I mean they're or in jail and I'd been locked up once before unless that's an experience I do not want again and I realize this is terrible like I I'm not doing anything well so that was the moment and um and I had the benefit of uh at the time I was paying Mike menser the body the bodybuilder um I paid him a hundred dollars to coach me and give me a program and he kind of took a liking to me so he'd have phone calls every once in a while where he was having me read a bunch how did you connect with Mike menser I paid him I read about a thing he was like this high intensity training is way better than everything else I saw it in the magazines I stopped doing the high volume work I started doing two sets per muscle group each week and just grew like a weed and I was like this guy's on to something now granted anything probably would have had me grow like a weed at that point but that worked particularly well and then he was sending me books and ran books is Mike still alive no he's dead he and his brother both died of heart attacks they were I think they were pretty heavy amphetamine users um but I remember him telling me he's kind of the OG for that training format right yeah and Dorian Yates worked under him and I heard he was a pretty outrageous guy and he used to bark at me over the phone and he was like PhD stands for piled high and deep but then he'd say listen you seem really interested in ideas don't be a more he said this these are Mike's words not mine he said don't be a [ __ ] don't be a bodybuilder don't touch steroids right which I didn't I say even though they were around a lot in gyms at that point he's like you have a mind develop your mind and that had a huge impact on me him Bob Peters of a high school football coach who taught me about weight training and running um Gary Hall who's actually my lab operations manager was a guy that I grew up with skateboarding who told me early on when I was 14 he sat me down looked me in the eye is a pretty tough love kind of guy and he's like look your parents are really messed up and so many of the people we know in skateboarding are super messed up and he's like if you mess up I'm gonna kick your ass and then in the end he moved away to Milpitas and I kind of just drifted off but I remember that thinking he said it's not your fault but if you screw up it's your fault and you know we we still laugh about that now so you know I think in those years I started just realizing like discipline is the answer I'm sounding very jocko-ish now but but it was it was the answer I needed structure and the structure had to be self-imposed so I got really into school and then by time I graduated um you know I graduated with honors I had published a paper wasn't a magnificent paper but the data were solid um and I got into Berkeley and Princeton uh for graduate school and I decided to go to UC Berkeley and I went to Berkeley and um I did I loved my time there but the person I wanted to work with is Carla Schatz who's now back at Stanford amazing developmental neurobiologist she developed the phrase fire together wire together brilliant neurobiologist I was hanging around her life and she moved to Harvard so what I decided to do is move up to UC Davis where she suggested working with a younger faculty member there named Barbara Chapman who is my PhD advisor once I was in Barbara's lab I literally ended the relationship that I was in at that time I'd met someone in Berkeley wonderful person but I ended that relationship so that I could just focus on school um and I literally lived in the laboratory I bring my groceries I train at the gym I'd sometimes uh shower in the monkey cage washer I was with the heat turned down and I was just a machine I was just work work work work we published a bunch of papers I was just blast rancid Bob Dylan classical music tin foil on the windows I was just obsessed now granted I wasn't paying much attention to my emotional and personal development but in terms of loving science and just focusing on science I mean I still like if I'm not choking up I'm like I literally feel my body like almost float I loved it so much and I adored Barbara I absolutely adored Barbara So then some things started happening along the way I met Ben Barris first transgendered member of the National Academy I didn't I wasn't the you met as Ben or as Barbara Ben came to Davis to give a talk he came into my lab and we started talking this is what you're like this is 2002. okay I was supposed to deliver him to a seminar or 2001 and we ended up being an hour late for his own seminar because he and I were just riffing on science I was like this guy is the best he's got this energy I've always been pretty tuned into people's um kind of enthusiasm and excitement I feel like I can spot [ __ ] pretty quick [ __ ] meaning I've never been drawn to people who are purely ambitious ambition to me is kind of like it's an algorithm that works sure but when somebody is in love with what they do I and that's why I love skateboarding it was like they you didn't survive longer in that Community it's a harsh Community you don't you don't survive long unless you love it and the same thing with science like I was in love with retinal biology in love with Developmental neurobiology and I saw Ben's love of glia I could care less about glia sorry folks they're interesting but he loved glia and so I think we resonated on this passion he happened to be transgendered I didn't even know he was transgender but we were we became friends and then at some point I started going down to Palo Alto to teach his lab some techniques and um and he said at one point you should just do a postdoc in my lab so did you know you wanted to do a postdoc for sure I knew I wanted to do a postdoc I decided on I decided in the undergraduate I want to run a lab I want to teach students I want to be a researcher and I I'm going to do it ethically and I'm going to do it honestly but I'm gonna do everything I can in my power to make sure that happens and I looked up to Harry Carlisle so much he drove a black truck Smoked Cigarettes again don't smoke it's bad I don't smoke anymore but he drank coffee I just I loved him his wife was a therapist he actually ran the therapy center at um The Psychology Center at UC Santa Barbara I was like I adore them it's just these are awesome I want to be that that's what I'm going to be you know and the fact that my dad was a professor kind of fell into that um now over the years we were I was still in touch with my parents I think they were proud of my shift yeah I still had a lot of issues to work out with them my mom less so my dad and I I would say we finally buried the hatchet in 2000 and I really think 2000 and seven I was a postdoc in that so what happened was I I graduated from um uh UC Davis took my PhD took a postdoc actually at Harvard but um I didn't want to work for the guy there were some Personnel album to just come clean I mean I didn't actually start but um I was just sitting in on lab meetings and I the personality traits of this individual to me were repulsive give me an example um it was one observation um it was the way he treated a janitor with a stutter and like I've never been in an agre an aggressor I've never started a fight in my life but I think from a time I was in you know even my mom will say Nursery School I've been kind of a Advocate and protector of others and I can still feel my blood starts to boil if I think about that interaction it was a later after work interaction in the way that he communicated to somebody and I was like I don't think I can be here I don't think I can do this because if I'm like I think like there's no way I can be here like this is this is not gonna work so I'm sure this is a good person at some level but I just remember thinking like oh no like what am I gonna do what am I gonna so you've literally moved to Boston committed to do a postdoc in this guy's lap broke up with my girlfriend on the west coast I had a girlfriend at the end of graduate school I purposely didn't date in graduate school I my conversation with people was listen I'm focused on work but I had a girlfriend at the end of graduate school who was who was great but broke up with her moved to the east coast because we weren't gonna you know continue into family making and that sort of thing and I'm there and I observed some things and I just realized I cannot wait this person a couple weeks into this thing I had not started yet I was supposed to start January one this was right this was November of 2005. so so you tell them I'm leaving 2004. um so I told him I was leaving could you tell him why uh well I couldn't be direct at that time I didn't have the skills to be direct about that I told him I wanted to leave and he said no he said you need to get therapy first I'm like well I got loads of that under my belt so that's not going to work and then they were I'll just say there were certain things in the interaction around my deciding to leave that made it reinforced your decision like I was like I was like this is not going to work so I'm so I called Ben Barris as I turned him down for a postdoc and I said I don't know what to do and did you turn Ben down because he was working on glial cells no simple reason he was in Palo Alto and you just needed to get everybody from not want to be where I grew up listen Paulo's a lovely Place Stanford's an amazing place but I had so much developmental history there yeah and I was like that is the last place on Earth I want to be but then Ben in his love of biology I remember I met with him right before the holidays and he just said come to my lab you can work on anything you want Ben was famous for working on glia but when Ben was a graduate student in David Corey's lab at Harvard David Corey worked on hair cells hearing stuff and he allowed one person Ben to do something different and he said but you have to pay it forward someday so Ben was like I'm going to pay it forward three you can come to my lab you can work on anything you want and I said well I want to work on this stuff that is related to what I was going to do at Harvard but I don't want to compete with that lab they're a big monster lab and Ben was like no you have to work on that I was like God I don't want to work he's like you have to like Ben was a real fighter he was from Jersey and he was just like you know my mom is from Jersey and I kind of have that in one side of my family it was like like fight you know so I decided to work there were three Labs so it would be me alone as a postdoc this guy at Harvard and a guy over in Basel botanarasca who's doing amazing work and we're all trying to figure out genetic markers for for retinal cells at the time that was a big deal and there was a big hunt for them and my feeling was there's plenty to go around there God knows how many retinal cells 40 ganglion cells which are the output cells of the retina the connect to the brain there's a bunch of there's so much territory why don't we all just work on this so let's just say um I ended up getting my slice and uh this guy at Harvard got his slice he had a lot more people so he got a bigger slice and boton's done that and so much more for visual repair he and Carl diceroth who we both know of course have um figured out ways to get blind people to see putting light sensitive options into the eye and Etc so you know I'm one post doc but it worked out well I mean my career worked out well as a PhD student and as a postdoc and then I eventually got a job at UC San Diego which is a great Neuroscience program before we leave that um give folks a bit of a sense of the difference between a PhD and a postdoc yeah so during your PhD you're working closely under the mentorship of one person that's also true in the post-doc during the PHD the the requirements are learn the basics of the field and be tested on them in the classroom learn the basics of experimentation and experimental design and then become expert in one specific area by doing experiments and then you get your PhD I always say by being expert in one very specific area and you have to know everything about what you did and why literally down to like what specific antibody you use yeah where it is in the refrigerator and you need to be able to do everything essentially that's on your papers learn the publication process learn how to write learn to take rejection learn to take challenge in the seminar format all of that and then and let's just also talk about um what is an expectation in a PhD as far as publication so this varies I mean I did very well as a PhD student we published you know four to six first author papers in great journals one to two would be sufficient if they're good quality papers and some projects go better than others I think the key requirement of the PHD is to become a true expert in one area and then to be able to frame how that fits into the context of the field as a whole your PhD thesis is given not for saying I did this I did this I did this which any technician could do it's given to you for saying I did this I did this I did this and the implications are blank the implications are blank and to extend that into the discoveries of past and other Laboratories once you can do that with some degree of Mastery you're ready to go and typically that correlates with having one first author manuscript in a good Journal but not always sometimes it's two sometimes it's four I did my PhD in four years um which was pretty quick and half of that was in the classroom half of that was in the lab dedicated to the lab yeah typically you're taking courses only the first two years now also there's some waiting here based on peer group so for instance I started my PhD when I was 25 I ended it when I was 30 even though it took me about four years um I had no children I was dating but I wasn't in a committed relationship for most of it and I literally I know people talk about this I literally worked 12 to 16 hours a day and I was not in the best health I lived on Pete's black coffee diet Mountain Dew cucumbers ground beef oatmeal oranges and love of what I was doing I just was an and creatine I was an athletic greens like I always it's true I started taking athletic greens a long time ago oh no that was 2005 so 2012. that was as a postdoc was I started actually taking better care of myself um I wasn't an athletic greens plug but I always say starting in 2012 so that was 2000 to 2004 and I was into vitamins and things like that but it was just caffeine Drive basic macronutrients I worked out one day a week in the gym and I ran one day a week because I was that's it that's it and it wasn't good right it was really I was young so my body didn't fall apart but it wasn't good um and I prioritized everything around work so post your what was the title of your dissertation uh it was uh neural activity and axon guidance Q dependent development of i-specific segregation and the lateral geniculate nucleus which is basically saying there are molecules and there are patterns of neural activity that govern brain wiring and um at the time I was working in ferrets and cats um so carnivore species there wasn't a lot of Gene and I wanted to move away from that I've always been an animal lover I had a pet ferret I didn't want to work on large animals I've done some non-human primate work the fetal primates fetal macaques published a lot there how big is an adult macaque they're still pretty small aren't they an adult macaque no an adult male macaque can be you know a couple feet tall really Oh They'll rip a limb off of you if you let them I didn't realize they were that big they carry herpes bee which can kill you it's a famous case in Atlanta of the one splashing its pee into a woman's eye she wasn't wearing the face shield she was dead like two weeks later yeah yeah you'd be better off having HIV or Aids for sure and herpes from a monkey I do not like working on macaques for a number of reason I don't any longer um postdoc you're you're not taking courses you're mainly focused on research and you're developing your own independent research program you're largely independent in itself and the purpose of the post-doc is I mean would you do a postdoc if you didn't want to have it your own lab how many people do a postdoc and choose to go into industry rather than choose to create and form their own Labs nowadays about 80 percent go into industry but now there are a lot more jobs for neuroscientists and Industry places like China Tech Etc but at the time there wasn't now I think anyone that goes into Academia and what defines the duration I mean at least in the PHD you're tied to a very clear outcome which is the thesis yeah when you know when you're ready to move on as a postdoc because you generally have one or two papers and a story to take into a seminar both the PHD and the postdoc wait the goal is to have a one-hour seminar of your own independent work and the context it fits into and you get hired can I could I have an honorary PhD in some facet of formula one where I can spend one hour sure talking yeah absolutely I think you've earned more than one I mean I think that the postdoc was great I loved working for Ben um so so what happened was in 2005 I moved back to the Bay Area I'm like I'm not gonna live in Palo Alto I live in San Francisco and I was working in Ben's lab and loving it I mean I was in I was one of many people in that lab there were 30 people what year this was two thousand uh I started in 2005 and I finished in 2010. so that this means we overlapped in the Bay area again because you know I was there for med school 9701 and then I lived back there in 06 to 08 yeah um so just think that we would have passed each other on 280 or 101 yep and and not known yeah I love I love realizing people that I've become very close to we cohabitated and I worked in San Francisco of course you lived there and I worked there but yeah I was living at Clayton and Parnassus right near UCSF the the old campus the hospital and my sister was in the neighborhood and it just adopted my niece and so I wanted to be there so I could spend time with her um because my sisters and we spent so much time up there because my wife ran the Coumadin Clinic at UCSF okay yeah we were I was a few blocks from the hate Ashbury Clinic very different Clinic yeah um but famous because of the Manson thing and if anyone hasn't read uh Charles Manson a chaos Charles Manson the CIA and the secret history of the 60s a lot of history there I was commuting down um 280 working in Ben's lab loving that I'm a huge vibrant lab meetings that would last four hours or more Ben was outrageous um how big was the lap 32 people um and with a run by a person with a face recognition issue so you can imagine like the the it was hilarious and yet the lab meanings were legendary people would argue and fight it was then could be very Politically Incorrect which was hilarious but at the time also was important for us to really have someone challenge Us in these very direct ways um we were all politically correct but he tended to be pretty outrageous I mean Ben sent's a pretty outrageous things and um and I learned so much from Ben about just staying in touch he called it the light but like or the flame like staying in touch with the love of biology and not getting pulled into ambition now Ben was incredibly ambitious but he he just loved biology and I loved biology and then something weird happened in 2000 and you know of course I had the distinction by just luck by the year I was in it which was 97 started Barbara Barris was our Neuroscience head of Neuroscience and the professor and ended the year as Ben wow so he she to he was transitioned during our um during our year amazing and I'm trying to think like even though that's more than 25 years ago it didn't seem that unusual like it and I say that in a way not to sound like oh wow like look at how enlightened the the medical student was no no not I'm not saying that whatsoever it would it had much more to do with Ben I think you know does that make sense yeah Ben when when Ben moved to the Bay Area I know this because I so I ended up so I can get to this in a minute but Ben ended up passing away in uh 2017. and I wrote Ben's obituary for nature and I sat with Ben for many hours recording conversations with him that I hope to someday release um talking about his history and the decision to transition and his thoughts on when and how best for people to transition what that means his relationship to sex the verb and sexuality Academia and it's a it's a great audio file because he tears loose on people in Academia because he's like he says at the beginning is this for my obituary and I said yes and he said well it better be for a good journal and I said it's for nature and he says okay and then in um you know this but forgive me for cussing but this is a direct quote and I said and he said well given that it's my for my obituary I'm gonna say whatever the [ __ ] I want and he really does he lets people have it but he also really expresses a lot of heart for the things that he thinks are important in science and in life and I you know I'm sitting there like tears just running down my eyes like trying to get these recordings and I'm quaking and like it's and I realize what's happening he's gonna be dead soon right he had pancreatic cancer and you know as a non-clinician that was pretty intense we had reconnected um in 2012. he had read some of my blog stuff and reached out to me and became you know interested in certain things that I was doing and asked if I would check his Bloods and and stuff like that he was really into Data yeah I mean maybe it's worth saying this now I mean one thing that people don't realize about Ben is that he was always trying different diets he struggled with his weight a lot um because he transitioned he was taking testosterone but he had always struggled with his weight and he had tried keto he had tried um fasting he had tried vegan diets he was always sampling with different things and he was always asking me about nutrition and supplementation and I would tell him something like hey because when I was in his lab I was I was working a lot and I I remember the fewer carbohydrates I eat the more I can stay awake it's just kind of how it works for me I do eat carbohydrates I'm a pure omnivore I love starches but I tend to eat oatmeal and rice and pasta clean quote-unquote starches but at the time he caught me drinking the the oil off the top of the almond butter and then slugging back to Espresso and he was like what are you doing like you're gonna die of a heart attack and I was like no you have to understand like certain lipids can be used as fuel if you're not taking enough carbohydrate and then he would scream that's ridiculous that violates all the rules of biology and then he can't that by the way was Ben's voice I'm not mocking him that's you can listen to a recording and then he would come back to me six months later and he's like I'm doing this low carb thing and I'm losing weight like crazy how come nobody knows about it and he was the one who told me he was he said forgive me my clinical colleagues and uh Peter you don't fall into this category he was like most doctors are so unhealthy he's like they don't know anything and he was an MD right Ben was an MD PhD and I remember him telling me I was like don't believe any Dogma don't believe any of it like Ben was this he had this heretical thing and so you're sensing a a kind of a theme Here I liked hanging out with like punks and skateboarders when I was younger not because they were wild but because they looked at things differently they really did I love stories like I loved the Steve Jobs book I mean I remember seeing Steve walking barefoot through the neighborhood when I was a postdoc when I would visit my folks in Palo Alto and my high school girlfriend that girl that I met the skateboard show she was his vegan Chef so and her sister worked for for Steve also so it's very like Palo Alto themes and he was obvi he was kind of a punk rocker and didn't even realize it you know my heroes are people like Joe Strummer all of her sacks people that really went against the grain of their field out of love not as an Fu right and Ben just loved what he loved so much but when he started working on glia everyone thought glia were stupid it's like support cells why would you do that and he showed they're important for everything disease in particular but also normal brain functioning and development so Ben was the one who really encouraged me to like to stay in touch with that kind of feeling around doing things and to never let ambition pull you in a direction where you were divorced from that for too long and yet he was also an extremely hard worker but he understood that that's that's what Rick Rubin would call The Source like that's the ability to stay working long hours and not feel like you're depleting yourself so Ben and I got really close in those years and then that I was working for him but he was healthy then as far as we knew um and then during those years when I was working for Ben I wasn't making enough money to survive in the Bay Area I was really struggling what's a postdoc salary uh I had a Helen hay Whitney Fellowship which is a kind of a premier Fellowship from a private uh institution I only say that because they pay more and I was making 45 but rents were crazy and gas and food and everything else and um as a you know 45k living in the Bay Area was rough and I didn't have kids so I actually went back to Thrasher magazine I had a bunch of friends that worked at they're located in the only truly dangerous part of San Francisco Hunter's Point um and they gave me a job writing articles for Thrasher and slap magazine The Sibling magazine and so there are a bunch of Articles out there I was a I was writing under a different name but you were I was making money why under a different name I always use the name Andy instead I don't know because people in skateboarding knew me as Andrew okay okay um but same last name yeah okay so and I was writing articles on music and bands and going to hear bands play and then getting back to the lab at two or three in the morning sleeping in Ben's office and then working the day and that whole thing and making maybe an extra you know 500 to a thousand bucks a month but it was it was great and I was getting to go to shows for free getting to know musicians falling back in with the skateboard set a bit all the ones that were healthy and now had families and jobs you know all the all the other stuff got pushed away you know all the dysfunction so I was in both worlds again and then eventually I got a job at UC uh San Diego I was picking between a job there in MIT and my previous experience in Boston I love Boston I love the academic Community there but I was like I'm a California kid I'm like a skateboarder and punk rocker at heart I had this one interaction with someone there before in the academic Community I thought you know back there everything's focused on lineage and how old you are and how long you've been around and in the Bay Area it's all about the young Tech and youth is really valued I if you're you could be 25 years old in the Bay Area and if you have a great idea people don't care what you're you know the east coast is different at least at the time it was it felt different so I went to UC San Diego and um my lab flourished there uh and then eventually you got to San Diego in 12. uh I was hired in uh I officially started 2011. okay and I left in 2015 mostly because I got hired back to Stanford when um Ben was still in the department now the the weird thread through all of this is that um when I was a graduate student where did you live in San Diego uh I lived in normal Heights um near kind of out towards El Cajon I went from making 40 to 45 000 a year as a postdoc I started my job just so people know I mean I'm not shy professors make about a hundred thousand hundred ten thousand as assistant starting a professor and I went from having essentially no responsibility I bought a little house that I could afford like this little house um I got a bulldog puppy and I got laboratory and I hired a technician that I knew from Davis and we just went ham we were just experiments experiments experiments I lived in the lab two or three days a week brushing my teeth in the sink my students were like what's wrong with this guy but we we you know we were very fortunate we published a bunch of papers in great journals we were more importantly we're having a lot of fun doing research I had all these microscopes I was like my name's on the door I can't believe this and I didn't care that my name was on the door actually I've always thought that Labs should name themselves after the work they do as opposed to the name um for a number of reasons I was having so much fun it was incredible um I met a woman there that I you know I was in a five-year relationship with somebody there that was really wonderful who also taught me a lot about kind of how to balance my professional life and my personal life you know despite that relationship not working out there was a lot of important elements of like teaching me like hey it's good to come home for dinner with me and the dogs every once in a while and taught me as some self-care got back into doing some boxing although I didn't try not to spar too often uh you're the fighter not me um and I loved my time there but some the the challenge along the way the challenge is persisted along the way um challenges of Youth and I think that as much work as any of the the Demons of your youth were still rearing yeah some of the emotional uh damage yeah I think that the um and that would show up in various forms but I think you know my dad and I finally put to rest our um challenges in 2007. um he had written me a letter uh that was expressing some concern and disappointment um in the ways we were relating but mostly concern um and I remember uh reading it and thinking this is when I was a postdoc at Ben's uh in Ben's lab and thinking like you know he's reaching out this is years after everything right um you know maybe it's time to take a look at this but I wasn't about to try and solve it in a conversation so I was like if you want to do some work together like let's go to therapy let's have a conversation in front of somebody who can really like tell me where I'm wrong also and we did a total of four sessions I think with a really excellent female therapist who um and I remember the question was who was going to pay for it and I told my dad I'm like I don't have much money but I'm gonna go in 50 50 with you on this one like and that was important to me so we did this and after four sessions we realized that um you know I think it was the first kind of like true like man-to-man conversation we we ever had and I realized that you know a lot of things that I would struggle with growing up he had struggled with too um meaning you know his life growing up as well yeah his relationship to his mother his relationship to himself um trying to balance a life in science and ambition which is tough I mean science is not um they're not throwing punches at your face they're not shooting at you but you're also not winning millions of dollars at the end of a case or cashing out a big IPO and so the wins are really like Winds of the heart and Winds of Discovery like not to sound sentimental but you know the you get a paper in science or nature I'm blessed to have you know more than a few of those and the first time you get it you're like [ __ ] will I ever do that again so you're a lot like a professional athlete but your world is Tiny and once you realize that your world is Tiny you have two choices you can either leave because it's too small or you can go back to your love of the work but then you also have to live in the world and have a family in relationships and so in those conversations I think I realized I was like wow like you know I inherited some real gifts from my dad um curiosity love of Craft um he's certainly driven my dad's almost 80 now and he's still firing on eight cylinders he's excited about cars he's excited about science he's excited about movies he's excited like he's just got so much going there and um we we resonated like we finally hit that point and um that was good you know um again I think a few times this discussion I unexpectedly have to fight some emotion back but I think it's that you know when they say like forgiveness is um really the best thing I think it really is and um we're good we're super close and then in in that time in San Diego I went back into just full forward Center of mass ambition and it was really only the girlfriend that kept me a little calibrate in my doc my bulldog and um and and something happened in those years so when I was a PhD student I published this paper a second paper I published was published in science I was super proud I was excited you know science paper and I called Harry Carlisle in San Diego and told him I was like hey you know because he'd known my story and he kind of took me out of not doing much to gave me a lab to work in he saw me graduate with honors I went off to Berkeley so he was tracking my career because he had gone from UCSD UCSB to no he just said he stayed at UCSB he was just he would be my professor down there so he was like congratulations you know next time you come through you should have a pizza with me and Jane his wife and we can catch up I'm happy for you and then three days later he shot himself in the bathtub just killed himself and I was like whoa like that was like so I was down there two days later or three days later speaking at his funeral and I was like holy [ __ ] you know and I'd known a bunch of people that had died or gone to jail from the skateboarding world that was like the it was it was just crazy because this was the guy that had taught me about mental health issues and about depression and how it's all neurochemistry and turns out there had been a Jane and I would meet for the next couple of years I would go to their house and talk to her and um she recently passed away but she told me that they had a son who died in a motorcycle accident early on when he was in his teens and Harry never quite got over that but anyway you know he should have known better so I realized I was like wow you can have all the knowledge in the world about the underlying biology and it might not save you so that was kind of like a wake-up call and then what happened was when I was um in San Diego um I was very very close with Barbara Chapman my PhD advisor she had two kids while I was in the lab my niece was friends with them our families were kind of merged and she started falling out of communication with people and she ended up uh early onset breast cancer died which was insane so now I'm speaking at her Memorial at the House of Flowers in San Francisco she's got two young girls her husband I know and I'm like geez like this is crazy like and that one was I have to be careful not I will cry if I talk which I prefer not to do if on camera if I can not just because it's distracting but the that was um horrible that was like losing my mother like it was just like and I was like what the [ __ ] she had the bracha 2 mutation and the bracha one mutation so highly susceptible to cancers so then I got through that but that certainly destabilized me um I reacted to that by just working twice as hard which was not a good formula I get to Stanford I get hired back to Stanford I go out I'm sure a big part of what makes that great is you're you're now a colleague and a peer of Ben's again next door Laboratories next door I go out to dinner with Ben Barris Carla Schatz Krishna shenoy and I think and Karen hirosh we're at um Il Fornaio Downtown Palo Alto my first week back I'm sitting across from Ben just like this and he looks at me and he says I think I'm having a heart attack now he's an MD so I I literally take him in my truck my Forerunner drive to Stanford Hospital and we spend the night talking and he's like don't tell anyone in my lab I don't want anyone to think I'm dying or something later that week he has a second heart attack he's throwing clots so he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and so from the moment I land at Stanford I'm watching my third advisor die and at that point I was like okay like Ben and I used to joke he's MD morbid sense of humor he's like and and he called me Andy Andy you're the common denominator so the joke is you don't want me to work for you right um but I you know and I'm and I had a conversation with Barbara before she died which was crazy right super powerful but you're just like you're saying I don't know uh I mean we're talking yesterday yesterday about hospice people who work hospice like saying goodbye to someone's tough you know hearing that somebody went suddenly is tough saying goodbye to somebody is tough for a whole other set of reasons um luckily her daughters are both doing really well one graduate from college the other one is a neuroscience student at McGill which is awesome makes me so happy Ben passing away was was kind of the final nail in the coffin for me I was like okay you know I need to actually like go all the way back and start doing some deep excavation because what was happening was I was starting to just like feel really shut off I hated doing my work I wasn't in I thought I might write a book meaning you were losing love first I was losing the touch with the with the source I was working but I had this big lab I wasn't feeling I was like ah and I started kind of foraging I started doing cage eggs at great white shark diving you know real smart right might as well box nine rounds with with you or with like a real fighter like with no headgear right like I started engaging in dangerous Behavior again um started running risks in life again and here I am I'm a 42 year old man with a tenure at Stanford in a lab and I'm publishing we publish a full article in nature in 2018 after Ben's death and I just remember feeling like pretty joyless and thinking like what the [ __ ] am I going to do you know forgive my language but just like what am I going to do like this I'm out of touch with all of it so a couple of things happened one was um was I became I went to Hoffman I did the Hoffman process which is a pure you know no uh no drugs no no psychedelics but uh kind of psychedelic like state of self-actualization stuff um by the way when anytime I mention something like Hoffman I realized that these are like you know I think it's four or five thousand dollars for the week they have scholarship programs um I've given some money recently to their scholarship program I think um it was helpful for me but one of the things that really helped was I went off and did a week-long trauma immersion thing in 2017 um on the East Coast with a brilliant guy named Ryan Suave who does um trauma-based work um so I was still trying to work through some old stuff and it's hard to know right UMass a childhood experience UMass some adult experiences of major loss and yet your career is going like who knows what's what right um a number and listen I mentioned it probably in this conversation three or four maybe more girlfriends like it wasn't like I was somebody who enjoyed skipping from a relationship to each one of those is a story of kind of like hope for a permanent future and then a cliff so I was dealing with that too and um and again I'm the common denominator right I mean I I'm not gonna take all the blame but there's a consistent variable there so what happened was in 2017 I went there and I met a guy named Pat dossett at Hoffman he was at my graduation and he um done 13 years in the SEAL Teams and um we became friends and uh through this was in 2018 2017 2017. and through um going down to La where he was living and starting to swim with him and hang out with him it was in the turn to 2019 he said what are you gonna do for the world in 2019. that was this kind of seed question and I was like I don't know what I would do is I would probably like post one minute Clips on Instagram about the retina or nerdy stuff that I think is really cool so he's like do it and I was like okay and he's like no shake on it you know like Seal Team kind of guy like okay so we shake on and I start doing that in 2019 and then 2020 the pandemic hits and I thought maybe I'd write a book and then I realized oh well my lab works on stress and I've got some tools for stress and improving sleep I'm not going to talk about vaccines because that just seems like a barbed wire topic people are losing jobs for that you can't win that conversation at the time it felt crazy and it was and I thought I'm not a virologist anyway but I'm just going to teach stuff by going on podcasts in 2020 started with one podcast we did 30 I did 30 podcasts that year I went on about 30 podcasts and went on Joe's podcast you know Rogan's podcast and Lexus podcast at the end of 2020 Lex was like you should start a podcast but don't make it just you talking so I took half of the advice and in 2021 I hired the guy that was going to PR me for my book stuff Rob Moore and we started the uberman Lab podcast in 2021 which is it January it seems so much longer ago well I think it's 2020 I was going on podcasts 2019 I was blabbing into Instagram and I'll tell you during those years I was so frightened it was like 2019 I just thought gosh I hope none of my colleagues see this but if they did everything I'm saying they know is true I just hope they don't see it because they're probably like why is he on Instagram I mean I might as well have been on Tick Tock probably the only reason I'm not on Tick Tock is that Stanford forbid us from being on Tick Tock early on they said it was a security risk which it was and is so that's why I'm not there if you see me on Tick Tock that's not me or it's me but someone poached the videos so 20 20 I was just really concerned for the world frankly I was like listen I know the guy who's the director of the National Institutes of mental health I don't see one sound bite sorry Josh but like I don't know you well enough to kind of poke at you but if it wasn't him no advice on get regular sunlight stay on a circadian rhythm learn some stress mitigation techniques it was like in the world's kind of falling apart due to stress and I'm thinking okay No One's Gonna step up I'm just gonna do this and I wasn't selling a book I didn't have a podcast it was just giving information and then when the podcast started I remember thinking I really want to honor the incredible place that is Stanford I never want this to look like something that is um the same as being in a class at Stanford but I'd love it to incorporate some of the Brilliant Minds that are at Stanford sorry I just invited a bunch of my colleagues on Carl Yeah Carl was one of your first guys one of my first guests in on olympi and all these people and just showcasing put a spotlight on other people and um and then this last year is where the the funds really started for me because I could start to include people that are of some of my other long-standing interests like Andy Galpin um on Fitness or Lane Norton on nutrition and and things that relate to other interests of mine but still keeping it in a scientific frame so um and throughout this whole time I have this weird Journal um where I have I have um conversations with different people including you and Rick Rubin um are uh people who some other Brilliant Minds that we know and I take notes on those conversations and I also keep conversations I have with Barbara and with um mainly with Barbara and Ben although mainly Barbara and this isn't like writing to someone who's dead as if they're there but I try and take every major decision and and kind of stance around podcasts or stance around research or what to do with my lab and filter it through the what I consider important lessons that I've learned from them I still do therapy one to three times a week because if I didn't you know who knows what would happen um and uh and then I've and I've talked about this on previous podcasts I've I have done some exploration of the Psychedelic space although not a lot and always in the company of a physician um and two of those sessions for me it was MDMA um were immensely beneficial for allowing me to um have a conversation like this or to be a better you know uh to put my dog down with my own hands and know that I was doing the right thing I was super close to to just kind of register what's important and I have to say you know if this is just my life and my life art but if there are any lessons in it it's it's uh it's very clear that like staying in touch with the things that that give us energy as opposed to being ambitious for ambition's sake like really getting the order of that dialogue correct and putting love of craft first and letting ambition stem from that and also just friendship and amazing mentors I mean in the podcast space you know I remember thinking Tim Ferriss listen to his podcast early on and read his books Joe Rogan you Lex ritual Rhonda Rhonda yeah I was joking you know first man in was actually a woman it was Rhonda right like that array of people long before I knew any of you it was like these are the Ben barris's the uh the Richard axels the these names are of of the podcast world like these are the these are the greats of my field and uh so I pay a lot of attention like what are they doing what are what what how can I do things well like them but different because in science like in podcasting there's no there are no rewards for for just imitation there really aren't the beauty of podcasting relative to science is that if you and I have the same guests on in one week it raises it in the algorithm whereas in science yes if two papers come out simultaneously in in a journal that lends strength to the argument that the the data and conclusions are true right because two discoveries independently but there is this notion of scooping right if you publish a result in a given Arena and then I'm six months late I can't get it into a good Journal podcasting it's the opposite you know if Joe has David Goggins on yesterday I think he did and then he comes on your podcast or my podcast it's just that Rising tide raises all boats and the algorithm is the tide and so in that way I feel like wow like I'm in a field I'm still running my lab but I'm in a field where like goodness grows goodness and sharing and being generous just makes everybody succeed more and you learn from seeing how someone relates in other conversations so I don't know whatever uh deadening was was created by the the death of my advisors and from all the backstory and all that stuff in 2020 and especially in 2021 and it was that conversation with Lex but all the other stuff that led up to it it was just like Rocket Fuel it's like right now I truly say you if you gave me a hundred billion dollars to stop podcasting I wouldn't do it because to me I what I know for sure based on my experience is that at some point the lights are going to go out for me dead just like gone you know this as a physician people don't like to think this is gonna be lights out and sort of like what are you gonna have and what you have done and so I really feel like as much as I can touch into like the beauty and utility of biology and share that then I'm good um the rest is just noise we think about like kind of the sort of meteoric rise over the past two years for your amazing work what do you think you're gonna be doing in two years podcasting well given but with respect to a lab yeah so so we have a paper that's right on the 99.9 yard line that uh this morning there's one little thing they want us to tweak before it goes in this is a cell press paper I'm really proud of on the human on breathing patterns and anxiety so we're still publishing we have another paper that um we're fighting at another Journal right now is often the case you know my lab has got necessarily smaller because of podcasting but I have a close collaboration with uh David Spiegel our associate chair of Psychiatry and we are spinning up a number of programs at Stanford around Mind Body Research he works on clinical applications of hypnosis Nolan Williams with um with psychedelics I haven't talked too much about this publicly but we like all our podcasts are free we released them every Monday sometimes Wednesdays as well but we did launch this premium channel and the purpose of that premium channel was thanks to Andrew Wilkinson and Tiny Capital there's a matching of funds for people that subscribe to that this isn't a pitch but this is just the case what I'm trying to do is raise money to fund the best work and so I really think in two years I'll be podcasting I'll still be a professor at Stanford still teaching I teach next quarter in fact um you'll be teaching the same course that Ben taught me right and bio 206 which is neuroanatomy and also it's functional neuronatomy so all the system everything from addiction is an amazing course it's a fun course and and I'd love to take it again given that I literally probably remember two percent of it it's a shame I'm sure we can figure out a way for you to could I audit it sure I'm the course director so I say yes um we'd be we'd be honored to have you that'd be amazing um so seriously yes um I won't I'll give you the schedule starting soon um but I I would like to get more involved in science philanthropy and in particular to fund research on humans uh I will say I'm very frustrated with the lack of progress in translating animal models to human treatments I know it's necessary it takes time I love the worm work fly work Mouse work in particular there's also a place for primate work although it's the correct you know thresholds for that are higher given the animals they are but human work right now there's some excellent human work that really needs funding and one of the things I experienced firsthand was we were always well funded and still are but the frustration of wanting to do the coolest thing and having to take five years to ramp up to do it and meanwhile there's a lot of suffering there's also a lot to be gained from doing these studies right away Stanford obviously has great channels for raising funds for doing that kind of high ambition high output work but I think I'm in a unique position to be able to understand the life of the researcher and put simply the last thing a researcher needs to do is spend time writing all the justification what I'd like what we're doing is we're creating a system where someone can literally type out no more than half a page no more than half a page in 11 Point font give it to us and we give them money to do the work in the hopes that that will accelerate the process so raising funds for that through the podcast and more generally doing philanthropy is really important and I've always um hoped that at some point I could shape science policy a bit but the things that really need shaping make big differences in Discovery and curing disease in Laboratories is very simple and I wish it were a different word but it's money money is necessary but not sufficient to make progress more money gives you more opportunity to try things simply what it is there's never a case of too much money for doing research there's sometimes a dearth of excellent people but that's not a problem at Stanford in other places right even I mean of course Stanford's not the only great place many excellent places but the more money that can go into research the more progress that will be made period so I see myself podcasting and also being a really strong advocate for directing money into research and also we're losing a lot of graduate students and postdocs and potential graduate students in postdocs there's a big strike right now in the UC system because they're paid garbage and many of them have kids and they're we're going to lose entire generations of great discovery and so what I'm also trying to do is create endowments so that we can pay people a reasonable wage I mean I chuckle because it's just insane most of the people that are holding the power to make these decisions wouldn't live a day with that amount of money in their bank account because it would give them a an autonomic shock to just know that they were not necessarily going to make it into the next week so I feel very strongly about give people resources that allow them to flourish this is very Ben bearish ish give people resources that allow them to flourish that allow them to stay in touch with the source if you will and yeah I mean if I can raise up you know billion dollars for research in the next two years or five years not just through the podcast and I'm podcasting if I have to shut my lab I do but I think I'll have a greater impact on science and Discovery than if I'm there writing my next r01 which I just completed a revision anyway so that's the long answer [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 454,020

Keywords: Andrew Huberman, Peter Attia, Stanford University, Post doc, Ph.D., backstory, Huberman lab, podcast, neuroscience, neurobiology

Id: UmDszWABTr4

Length: 85min 7sec (5107 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023