Andrew Huberman: Peptides, Sleep Tech, and the End of Obesity

You don't want to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system so much, so often. It can probably shorten your life. There's a whole category of what are called growth hormone secretagogues, which are very popular. People hear erection, fat loss, energy, tan, like, oh great. This isn't the kind of thing you do to like go on vacation. You got to be real careful with these things.

In theory, you could eradicate obesity. People can lose up to a third of their body weight. Melanotan, which makes people tan from the inside, raises energy and libido dramatically, fat loss dramatically. BPC-157, body protection compound. It's not legal, but it's not necessarily enforced. They list them as for research purposes only, not for human use. I mean, who's doing research on these peptides at home? Anytime you're stimulating cell growth, it could start going awry and then get a tumor or something like that. If that's within your margins of risk, and that's up to you.

I want to talk about what's happened over the last 5 years. Slowly through the 80s, through the 90s, and then the early 2000s, everyone wanted to know what they could take to improve their immune system and their health. There's a very interesting drug I think is going to become far more popular soon, which is...

Thank you. Delighted to be here.

So I think the major driver was there were a few breakthrough supplements that changed the way that people think about healthcare and decided they needed to be more self-directed in their healthcare. I'll return to that in a second. I think the other thing is that the health and fitness industry collided with mainstream medicine and just self-care in the following way. When I was growing up, the only people that lifted weights were bodybuilders, football players, and people going off to the military. I was told if you lift weights, the muscle will turn to fat if you stop. That everyone in gyms is on steroids. I think what happened is slowly through the 80s, through the 90s, and then the early 2000s, the world started accepting, oh, there are modes of fitness that allow me to eat healthily and take care of myself. And yes, there's some extremes there, but it was actually quite compatible with a normal healthy life. So, what happened during the pandemic was everyone wanted to know, this was before and after the vaccines, wanted to know what they could take to improve their immune system and their health. And the first thing that sort of broke through was vitamin D.

Maybe because it can be increased by sunlight and everyone gets some exposure to sunlight. Doctors weren't saying don't take it. The studies on it were kind of mixed, but they were like, okay, you know, take everyone start having some vitamin D around. Then, you know, the melatonin craze had already kind of come and gone. But that's a hormone. And then as time went on and people started getting more interested in physical fitness, not just jogging or doing cardio, but as resistance training came in, it inevitably brought with it an interest in protein needs. So, are you going to take supplements that increase your daily protein? You know, we could argue about whether or not you need more or less protein. I don't necessarily think everyone needs one gram per pound of body weight. Some people feel kind of poisoned, like overwhelmed when they eat that much. I think you have to sense for yourself what you want and what you need.

If I'm going to work out then, you know, caffeine before that seems to help. And then gradually now the creatine craze, it's funny. Creatine was something that was popular in gyms when I was like 16 years old, 17 years old, and then oh there are all these cognitive benefits, etc. So it came in with the fitness.

Vitamin D came in with COVID. And then with COVID, people were very actively debating whether or not you could trust the government to give you what you needed to make you healthy. And I think whether you were pro-vaccine, vaccine skeptical, or anti-vax, what became very clear is everyone realized some bell went off. We are all responsible for our own health.

A lot of the mental health issues that we saw during the lockdowns were disruption in circadian biology. I know people were indoors more. There was more drinking. There was a bunch of other issues. But I'll just say there's a really beautiful study with more than 80,000 subjects out of the UK that shows, and this is a recent study, that shows that the brighter people's days are and the darker their nights, the healthier they are mentally. And this is especially true for people with OCD, anxiety, mania, schizophrenia, major depression. I mean basically every psychiatric challenge is made worse by dim days and bright nights. And so what we saw during COVID was people were just drifting in a circadian sense. It was as if we had put people into a cave and done the cave experiment and then there was COVID, right? And then there's all the vaccine stuff which you know frankly isn't my domain but it was so important to me to give people tools to be able to control their circadian biology, momentary anxiety with things like long exhale breathing which just simply reduces heart rate. We know through something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia involves the vagus nerve. You know the vagus is sending a bunch of sensory information about the body to the brain. But then a percentage of the vagus is descending, it's motor. It controls the heart rate. So when you exhale deliberately you slow your heart rate down. So this is the, you don't need to do breath work. You just, if you want to calm down you do a long exhale. And so these little simple things for which there's mechanistic science to support them, that was really what we started putting out into the world. So I think that's what happened and then you know there we were, you know, I was literally in a closet with my bulldog and my producer and a microphone and just like talking out to the world and things just so people became really strong advocates for themselves. They're like oh I need to go figure out how to take care of myself.

Well, I very deliberately have not joined a MAHA panel to maintain the flexibility that I want to say what I believe. A good example would be I think that some of the things they're doing are directionally right, trying to improve the food supply, get people embracing healthy behaviors. These are very much like Huberman Lab things, right? At the same time I for instance think that the mRNA vaccines for cancer are a transformative, incredible, life-saving technology.

Yeah, I think that well it's interesting. So the funding for mRNA vaccines for respiratory illnesses has been cut. I was told, and I don't know if this is true, that the funding for mRNA vaccines for cancers was not cut but there was some very tricky messaging around that at that time. So much so that you know because I'd gone on Bill Maher and I said it's foolish to cut this funding for the cancer research but I got a call from Washington and said we didn't cut the money for that, we cut the money for the other thing and I said okay so it's like it's but the messaging has been deliberately broad on both sides. So the challenge has been that because we now, let's just call it a duck a duck. We've got right-wing media and we've got left-wing media and then we've got a few people in the middle like Bill Maher who are kind of like you know just calling shots.

Yeah. So thank you. But for the most part the way that clicks and ad revenue etc is working for these news outlets is don't say anything positive about the other side even if there's something that they do that's favorable and really paint with a broad brush. And both sides are really guilty of that. The left has been not supportive of the moves that I think are directionally correct which are improving the food supply, getting people more active, etc. because their criticism is that's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That's their criticism. My stance is anything that gets people moving in the direction of their own health, doing things that are proactive for their own health, circadian health, reducing anxiety, improving sleep, eating cleaner food, more movement is fantastic. Is it the only thing I'd like to see done? No. But it certainly is important. And so I'll be supportive of the things I think are good and I'm going to criticize the things that I think are not good. And I'm just going to continue to do that. It means I have fewer friends and more enemies. I'm kind of used to that by now.

I often get referred to as an influencer or a health podcaster. They seem to have forgotten my science training. But I get it. I understand why. Now after 5 years I really understand how media works.

In part because podcast channels have become bigger than a lot of the, at least in the health domain, than the more traditional houses. So, I think I've been called a MAHA podcaster. I don't know how they got to that because I don't ever recall.

Yeah. Yeah, they took it from me. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, thank you. I did make a comment about the food guidelines. I said that I thought it was directionally right, but that I would have liked to see more vegetables and fiber, some, you know, low sugar fermented foods. And it's so interesting to see how that would get attacked. If I see something like that that I said getting attacked, then I think, wow, like they must be so poorly paid or just so desperate to write something for whatever 500 bucks or a thousand bucks to make rent that like that to spend time on that. I do think that there's been a real drop in standards of what we consider news. And that makes me sad, frankly. It saddens me because it cheapens the entire health space. And so, it's very easy to point at how, you know, health influencers and biohackers have contaminated the space. But I actually think that traditional media is more to blame because are we really arguing about whether or not the food guidelines are perfect? They were cast as, oh, you know, now they're promoting a lot of meat. No, that's not what it was. If you actually read it, the servings of grains and fruits and vegetables were at least as high as what they were recommending for meat. So, it's just silly. It's just silly. It's like red shirts, blue shirts kind of playground.

Yeah. So, I'm enjoying now. I'm in this place where I love that I don't belong to any camp.

I feel very free. I've been asked to write op-eds for the New York Times about the mRNA vaccine thing, and I said, "Listen, I'd be happy to do it, except they didn't. I was told, I don't know if it's true, but I was told that they didn't cut the funding for cancer." So, that makes it a tough op-ed to write. At the same time, I've been asked to give my input to folks at MAHA and certainly NIH. I've worked very hard behind the scenes to try and ensure that funding for basic research is not cut. And it looks like, I'm not going to take credit for this at all, but looks like there might be a 2% increase. There's bipartisan support to maintain funding for NIH research, basic research. So, you know, you can't put me in a camp. And I'm happy about that.

Yeah. I'm hoping this analogy works. You know, when I was growing up, if you could afford a nice car, you had a nice car. Otherwise, there were a lot of kind of junky cars on the road. And then this thing called credit came along where everyone could have a nice car or lease a nice car. So, you don't really see that like rundown cars in a, you know, you do some places, but you really don't. I see the GLPs the same way. It used to be that being really fit at a certain age reflected the fact you do a lot of exercise and I think that the GLPs make it such that people can be a healthy weight without having to exercise. We know however that people should resistance train in particular to offset the muscle loss. But Retatrutide went through phase three at Lilly, people can lose up to a third of their body weight in a pretty short amount of time with some degree of muscle sparing. So this is also called GLP-3. It also seems to bypass some of the side effects that some of the previous GLPs created. Although no drug is perfect, of course. But the real reason it's interesting to me is that already people have realized that they can get much lower cost and or take lower doses of GLP drugs by going through compounding pharmacies. Lilly is working very hard to make sure that compounding pharmacies do not sell Retatrutide. Compounding pharmacies and gray market sources already sell Retatrutide. Many people are already taking it. It's not legal, but it's not necessarily enforced. And I'm not necessarily suggesting people do, but I think it's going to change society where in theory you could eradicate obesity. In theory.

Well, I like to think that there's still some people who because they've exercised good habits up until now don't need them. I don't know why I like that, but I suppose if you can get away without having to take a drug and get the same result, that's better. I'm guessing that more than half, especially people who come from families or communities where there's a lot of obesity are going to be taking them, probably taking them at lower dosages than are prescribed. And I don't think that you can control the compounding pharmacies and gray market mostly because, and I could be wrong here, so I want to be careful, but I'm not aware of a major adverse event. You know, it's a little bit the same way that steroids were discussed in the 80s and 90s, but people were dying, going into rages. They were coming up with ALS, you know, they're having a lot of problems. I'm not aware of anyone dying from taking BPC-157. So, there's a lot more room for experimentation. I'm not suggesting people do that, but the margins for error seem to be greater.

Than traditional drug manufacturing.

I think it's really interesting too because as I watch this space, this peptide space emerge, which has mainly been around the GLPs, right? And BPC-157, body protection compound, which may or may not accelerate healing in animal models. It's very clear that it can improve cartilage growth, nerve regrowth as well as vascular growth which is a little bit worrisome if you have a tumor. You don't want to vascularize the tumor. No one has the right control experiment in themselves because they'll say, "Oh, I injected my shoulder and I healed so much more quickly," but it goes systemically. So, you can't like compare the two shoulders. And so, but no one wants to be in the control group and the people are just assuming it's BPC. They're taking it. I mean, I think we probably would have heard of an adverse event by now, but who knows, maybe something will pop up. I think that when it comes to the GLPs in particular, there was a lot of debate for a while. The exercise fitness community were saying, "Oh, you know, you don't want to take a drug. You just need to eat right and exercise." I disagree. I think that some people have accumulated so much adipose tissue that it's modified their metabolism and even perhaps even brain circuitry and appetite that it really helps them. And obviously behaviors and these drugs are going to be the best combination. Or just the behaviors if you can get away with them. I've never taken a GLP so I can't talk about the experience of it. I have tried various peptides. I've tried BPC. I don't know if it helped me or not. I didn't have an injury. I didn't notice that I recovered any more quickly from exercise. I've tried pinealin as a sleep peptide. It gave me 3 hours a night of REM sleep, which was pretty awesome. Very little human data. So now I just...

No, I just take AGZ. And that's the truth.

I'm a little scared about taking something that in animal models has been shown to both improve the function of but maybe also the proliferation of pinealocytes which produce melatonin or that they and other cells in the pineal. Because anytime you're stimulating cell growth it could start going awry and then get a tumor or something like that.

I love how that term has come about.