Looking at the summary, I can see an attribution error in the KEY TAKEAWAYS section. The bullet point about pinealon and REM sleep is attributed to Huberman, but the summary itself correctly states it was Paltrow who reported three hours of REM sleep nightly on pinealon, not Huberman.
Andrew Huberman discusses protein, peptides, neuroscience, and personal health philosophy with Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow interviews neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman on the Goop podcast.
Summary
Gwyneth Paltrow interviews Stanford neuroscientist and Huberman Lab podcast host Dr. Andrew Huberman in a wide-ranging conversation covering his personal background, the science behind GLP-1 drugs and peptides, nutrition, and the philosophy of health optimization. Huberman traces his path from skateboarding teenager to scientist, describing how science repaired his relationship with his physicist father. He explains the biological origins of GLP-1 drugs — discovered through research on Gila monsters — and discusses the emerging triple-agonist drug retatrutide, warning about risks from gray and black market peptide sources. He argues that most nutrition studies are "completely worthless" and that individual experimentation, low-sugar fermented foods, and sensible protein intake (around 100 grams per day for men) are more reliable guides than rigid dietary prescriptions.
On peptides, Huberman notes he has taken BPC-157 and pinealon personally but reports no dramatic effects from his own use; it is Paltrow who describes her own experimentation with pinealon, reporting that it gave her three hours of REM sleep nightly, though she no longer takes it and did not promote it publicly as a protocol.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Background
Gwyneth Paltrow: Welcome to the Goop podcast. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow and today I am thrilled — over the moon — to have with us the absolutely revered, incredible Stanford professor and very famous podcaster, Dr. Andrew Huberman. Welcome to the Goop podcast.
Andrew Huberman: Thank you. Delighted to be here.
Gwyneth Paltrow: I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast. I am a big fan of your work. Your deep dives are legendary. When you started doing your podcast and I started listening to it, it was really amazing to hear all of the rigorous science behind all of the things that I sort of was instinctively feeling and hearing around health and biology and what the body is capable of when you give it the right conditions. Did you have any idea when you started the podcast it would become what it is? My son who's 19 is obsessed. He quotes you all the time. And it's everybody — you hear, "Oh, I heard Stacy Sims on Huberman." You just hear it all the time from every kind of cohort.
Andrew Huberman: Thanks for the kind words, and no, I had no idea. I'd never done anything public-facing. It was kind of in me — it was getting built up in me over the course of my academic career because I've always been interested in health. After I broke my foot skateboarding a couple of times, I had to break the cardinal rule of skateboarding, which was I went to the football coach. Back then it was like jocks and skateboarders were two separate entities. It was like The Breakfast Club. I went to him and I said, "Listen, I'm getting hurt and I need to get strong." Also, I had a new girlfriend — my first real girlfriend — and her previous boyfriend had been on the football team. I was like, I need to figure something out here. So he explained how you strengthen your body: push-ups, pull-ups, here's the weight room. I'd sneak in there and not tell any of my skateboard friends. Now, skateboarders — they all work out. They even train their neck because of all the trying to protect their bodies. They're athletes after all. But back then you had to do it all in secret.
Then I got really interested in nutrition and supplementation because of those communities. I spent a little bit of time in gyms, but none of the supplements were useful — they were all weight gainers and pre-workouts and things like that. It was really because my dad's Argentine and he had these strong feelings about needing to eat meat, eggs, and vegetables, and my mom was more of a vegetarian type. So there was a little bit of a conflict there and I decided to just experiment and see how I felt best.
Pretty early on I was like, this is wild. We grew up eating decent food at home, but when I'm out with my friends it's all crap — everyone's at Taco Bell — and I started realizing if I eat well I feel better. This was completely outside what my peers were doing.
Then when I went off to college — I went to Santa Barbara —
Gwyneth Paltrow: Yeah, go Gauchos. And that's when you got really excited about biology and psychology?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. And did you at that point think, "Oh my gosh, I'm actually smart. I'm capable of reading, researching, retaining information"? Was that a turning point?
Gwyneth Paltrow: Yeah, I mean, I've always been good at memorizing information, especially if I draw things out or write them down.
Andrew Huberman: Really? Your recall is bananas.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Yeah, it's gotten a little shaky over the years. My colleagues used to joke that I have PubMed in my head. I don't have a photographic memory, but if I want to remember something, I generally can. It's not easy — it's hard. I had a lot of gaps in my education to make up, but I took all the courses I needed to take and I was like, this is actually a lot easier than skateboarding because I can study 10 hours but I don't break my bones. It doesn't hurt as much. I think I just wasn't destined to be an athlete.
Falling in love with science repaired my relationship with my dad.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Oh, that's so —
Andrew Huberman: Because he's a scientist. He's a theoretical physicist. We then had some common ground. I think I didn't appreciate until I was older that he was foreign, so it wasn't that he didn't care about my soccer games — it was just hard for him to plug into the culture we were in. We've enjoyed a really great relationship talking about physics and talking about science and the culture of science, which is a whole other thing — the personalities. We really bonded through that.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Did you resent that in any sense — that you were the one who had to take on the career and the education that would then bring you to connection with him?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's interesting. My dad and I have done some really good work — not formal therapy, but really good work around that. He's 82 and still just firing on all cylinders. It's awesome.
Yeah, I think that resentment was part of it — like, I'm not going to be a scientist, this kind of thing. And then I think maybe it's just getting older. I'm like, how did I possibly expect him to know exactly what I needed at all times?
Gwyneth Paltrow: It's like a resizing that we do of our parents in a way. We afford them the dignity of being just a person at the end of the day. I think it's a big milestone to cross as an adult.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I realize I'm getting a little emotional about it because I think I've finally come to this place where I got my mom's kind of sensitivity, and I'm very grateful to her for that. My mom would do poetry clubs in the summer — we would all have to memorize poetry and then we'd get a gummy worm or something. She's the lyrical one. And my dad — yeah, his life was very foreign to me. I think as I got into science I realized it requires a lot of time and it occupies a lot of mental space, and that must have been what he was doing. So we got to communicate about that a bit and now it's been great.
I should also say my dad is a bit of an iconoclast — he was an experimental physicist turned theoretical physicist turned computer scientist, and he never allowed himself to be so central to one little sub-community that they owned him. No one can own him. And so I've got that spirit in me. I love podcasting, but I don't want to see myself just as a podcaster, just like I didn't want to see myself just as a scientist.
The Podcast and Choosing Guests
Gwyneth Paltrow: I understand that very much. What is the criteria you use to determine whether you're going to put somebody on the pod?
Andrew Huberman: I really like people that are outside the box and have just taken on — built entire industries. You should come on the podcast, by the way. This has been in the back of my mind.
Gwyneth Paltrow: I'm not enough for your podcast.
Andrew Huberman: No, you absolutely are. Are you kidding me? I think you're an amazing example of somebody who has followed their interests, has built incredible businesses, but where there's so much offering based on your experience. I think that's really it — some people want their experience and their knowledge to be theirs and keep it in their community so that no one can damage the bubble. And I think the really brave people — and you truly embody this — are putting things out there with the understanding that some people aren't going to like it, but so many people will love it and resonate with it and be like, that's really cool.
So when I bring people on to talk about their work, if they're practitioners, I want to know what their mindset was when they cast away the history of their field, how they battled challenge, how they frame things. I think that's the human spirit — all the different elements braided together. And there's always a substory. It could be the challenges of my childhood, but also these days I'm really more into — like, my mom had a poetry club. I had a bird club with my friend Eddie — and he's going to kill me for saying this — and he's the chair of neurosurgery. I will go on record and no one will battle me on this in the community of neurosurgery: he is the best neurosurgeon on the planet.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Wow.
Andrew Huberman: He's highly revered. He does surgeries no one else will do. Is he doing the Neuralink stuff?
Gwyneth Paltrow: He has his own company doing that. Sorry, Elon. They would love to get him at Neuralink. He's doing things honestly ten times cooler. He's been written up a number of times. I'm so proud of him — he's gotten people with locked-in syndrome to speak.
He had a patient, Pablo, who hadn't spoken in 10 years, and through an AI interface that he built — decoding speech and language, which is really Eddie's expertise — Pablo said "hello." He can communicate with people.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Oh my gosh.
Andrew Huberman: He's been written up a number of times for that and other feats. He's spectacularly good. And he obviously has the heart of a poet as well, if he's having a bird club and also getting someone to speak. He's changing neurosurgery. He's changing medicine. He saved — I won't mention names — there's a very public-facing physician who paralyzed himself with a stem cell injection into his spine recently.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Don't get stem cells injected into the discs, I was told, because the discs can't receive stem cells.
Andrew Huberman: He went to a clinic. He was paralyzed. Eddie did the surgery — his team did the surgery, I should say — that no one else would do. This gentleman is now walking again. They were going to sever his spinal cord.
So these are real heroes. A lot of the podcast for me was about my love of a topic — the beauty and utility of biology — and proliferating this wisdom throughout the culture.
Gwyneth Paltrow: You have so many listeners. It's amazing to be like the tree and then the roots that spread from it.
Andrew Huberman: It's been fun. It's been wild. The public-facing piece has been really hard. I was not prepared for that.
Gwyneth Paltrow: You aren't. What was hard, or what is hard?
Andrew Huberman: People kind of want to keep you where they found you. So people are like, "Oh, it's a science professor talking about biology," but I brought on former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates on the podcast because he has the best training tools and he doesn't care if there's a double-blind placebo-controlled study for that. We just wanted to showcase that knowledge. People see that and then they go, "Wait, what's happened to your podcast?" But I hate to say this — it sounds kind of selfish because there's always been a give in the podcast — but the podcast is called Huberman Lab for a reason. It's my podcast. If I want to talk to someone, I'm going to talk to them. My PhD is still there. I'm still tenured. I'm not worried about whether or not I was or am a scientist. So it's obviously for the audience, but if I want to talk to Dorian or David Choe, I'm going to talk to them.
The hard part, I think, is when people think that that fundamentally changes the information they heard before. It doesn't. It's still true.
It's also been important for me to understand that, you know, vegans versus carnivore versus — for a long time resistance training was looked down upon for women, and now we know it's very important. The science takes a while to catch up.
Science, Traditional Medicine, and Drug Discovery
Andrew Huberman: It's exciting to me now that health and wellness is a hybrid of these things. I've got a colleague at Harvard Med, Chufu Ma, who studies acupuncture. He's figuring out that certain combinations of needle sites lead to either increases or decreases in inflammation. The ones that increase inflammation can increase mood because sometimes they'll stimulate dopamine release. The other ones can reliably reduce inflammation to address gut health issues and things of that sort. So if five years ago or ten years ago I said, "I'm going to host someone on the podcast to talk about acupuncture," people would have been like, "Oh god, next magic carpets." But the sand between the silos is really starting to show up and it's super exciting.
Gwyneth Paltrow: It is. And I think that's also where the consumer, having this new sort of agency around their health, is really forging forward. I say this all the time — in the early days of Goop, people would say, "Why are you writing a piece on acupuncture?" And the other part is, I always believe that if there's a modality that is generations and generations old, there's going to be something in there. There always is. And you always have to look at — I'm not saying we don't need double-blind placebo-backed studies, especially when it comes to medications — but there's always somebody who stands to benefit from that monetarily. Somebody who goes out of their way to study acupuncture and puts the science behind it — nobody's going to patent that, it's not going to become a three-billion-dollar drug. So the impetus isn't there to study these things and put scientific backing behind them, but there's still validity to them.
Andrew Huberman: Absolutely. And I think there are two areas I learned about recently through the podcast that have completely reframed the way I think about traditional and modern medicine.
The first was I had a guy on the podcast, Chris McCurdy. He's a researcher down in Florida and he studies kratom, which is a plant that causes both increases in alertness and is also a mild sedative. It's used in Indonesia — people chew on it there, it's just part of the culture. Here it's been used to isolate kratom from the plant and create very potent chemical derivatives that act like opioids. So it's become a real problem. It's helped some people get off opioids, but it's become a real problem drug. It's sort of like taking the coca leaf —
Gwyneth Paltrow: Like an over-the-counter thing. I saw it on the —
Andrew Huberman: A lot of issues, and you're going to start hearing more about this. Just like the coca leaf can be used to isolate cocaine, which obviously can cause problems, there are many things within the coca leaf that are beneficial. And he explained that all the drug companies have what are called bioprospectors — most of the drugs that we take, unless it's a synthetic version of a hormone or a peptide, are drugs that were discovered because they have bioprospectors literally in the jungle learning about different plants, bringing them back, isolating the different components, and seeing which ones would be good painkillers, which ones would be opioids, and so on. So the notion that plants and plant medicine — alkaloids and things like that — would somehow be woo is ridiculous. These are the origin of most modern medicines.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Isn't willow the basis for aspirin?
Andrew Huberman: Absolutely. And berberine is the basis for —
Gwyneth Paltrow: Metformin.
Andrew Huberman: Metformin. Berberine works as well as metformin for regulating blood sugar at a fraction of the cost.
And then I had a guy named David Fajgenbaum on the podcast who was a physician who got Castleman's disease and cured his own Castleman's disease.
Gwyneth Paltrow: What is Castleman's disease?
Andrew Huberman: Castleman's disease is a very serious disease — it's a cancer-like disease, I believe. Check me on that. But he was close to death in medical school and he actually had to sign away his life, and he just said, hell with it, I'm going to start taking every approved medication in small combinations. And he cured his own Castleman's disease. He now has a not-for-profit called Every Cure where people whose kids have diseases that are resistant to treatment can use AI to try and come up with combinations of existing approved medications to treat their condition — with great success.
Here's what's interesting: most drugs, once they pass through the patent, are not of interest to the drug companies anymore because they can be sold so cheaply. So there are tons and tons of drugs that have 40 or 50 different targets in the body, that were marketed for one thing, passed through the patent, and actually can be very effective for treating other things — but nobody's studying them in laboratories, no one's marketing them. His example is an extreme one, but he's got dozens of other examples. So the so-called pharmaceutical industry, while I do think they provide some useful things, is a business.
GLP-1 Drugs, Retatrutide, and the Gila Monster
Andrew Huberman: Right now, GLP-1s are obviously a big deal. And that was discovered because a biologist was studying Gila monsters.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Gila monsters don't need to eat very often. What is a Gila monster?
Andrew Huberman: A Gila monster is one of those big, chubby, venomous South American reptiles. The Gila monster — spelled G-I-L-A — does not need to eat very often. Some nerdy biologist was like, "Hmm, I wonder how they don't get hungry," isolated a peptide from the Gila monster. Turns out that's the GLP.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Are you serious? I did not know that.
Andrew Huberman: Serious. So this is how biology and basic science can lead to treatments for obesity — even though there are some issues with GLP-1s perhaps. You get a lot of muscle loss unless people resistance train. The early versions of Ozempic, Mounjaro, et cetera — for some people they get a lot of gastric discomfort because there are receptors in the hypothalamus that control hunger, and there are also receptors in the gut, so it makes people feel really full. And there are receptors for the GLP-1s all over the brain — just like serotonin and SSRIs, it's not a clean treatment. People get side effects. Same thing with the GLP-1s.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Can I ask you one question about that? Can you explain why they're saying there are certain GLP-1s that are single agonist, double, and now there are triple agonists which are purported to be better overall for health or less disadvantageous to muscle loss? What does that mean? And is that true?
Andrew Huberman: It is true. The big thing that's coming out soon is retatrutide. People are already taking it, but they're getting gray market or black market versions. The early versions of these drugs existed a while ago where you could agonize — meaning increase the amount of GLP-1 — to treat diabetes pretty successfully, and those were two- to four-fold increases in GLP-1. People did not lose much weight, if any. Then they developed Ozempic and Mounjaro, which increased levels of circulating GLP-1s like a thousandfold. So huge increases. The brain and body are not accustomed to seeing this. People would lose a ton of weight, but they would also lose muscle mass.
Gwyneth Paltrow: By not eating, or is there a secondary —
Andrew Huberman: They would just go into sub-caloric mode so fast. It would reduce appetite so fast at the level of the brain and the body — feeling full and not having the drive to eat. They would lose so much weight so fast, and if a large percentage of it was muscle mass, unless they did resistance training — people quickly realized that they could take less and still get a really great effect. That irked the drug companies. The side effects thing kind of got out of control and then it became somewhat political.
People from the exercise community, I think unfairly, said, "Hey, listen, you just need to do lifestyle things." I do think that once a person puts on enough adipose tissue, it changes the hormone environment, which changes the brain, and there's a lot of dysregulation that makes it really hard for them to just eat less. I'm not trying to give people a pass — I do think people should take really good care of themselves — but these drugs were saving lives.
We now have GLP-3, which is retatrutide. Eli Lilly holds the patent. I don't have any relationship with Eli Lilly. I wish I'd bought stock because they're about to make a trillion or more dollars with retatrutide.
Retatrutide is a more mild agonist of GLP-1. It also increases glucagon and something called GIP. So it hits three different pathways, each a bit more subtly. Lower side effect profile, and people lose up to a third of their body weight across a year or so. And it does seem to have some muscle-sparing effect.
Now, what people in the exercise and fitness community have realized is that there are places that will synthesize retatrutide. They're taking — I'm not recommending people do this — gray market, black market versions, getting it from compounding pharmacies. Eli Lilly is very upset about this because they stand to make an absolute fortune with this drug. But people are also realizing again that they can take less — they don't necessarily need to take the full prescription dose, which means they can extend the thousand-dollar-or-whatever-it-is-per-month prescription. They can share it with family members, which you're not supposed to do. People have gotten a little bit renegade about this stuff. It's sort of like sharing music in the 2000s — people are like, I'm not going to buy this. People are starting to get stuff where they can find it. But I do recommend that people avoid black market and gray market sources because they can be less than pure. You don't actually know what you're getting.
Peptides — Benefits, Risks, and Personal Experimentation
Gwyneth Paltrow: That's pretty concerning. I think it's been interesting to observe this whole peptide craze. I do understand that there are certain injectable peptides that are really helpful for brain health, gut health, retatrutide, this kind of thing. But there are like Chinese peptide companies — people are just — so how dangerous is that? You've got naturopaths passing around peptides, sellers of peptides getting them from China. How dangerous?
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. We're sort of where we were with supplements in the '90s, where there's really no third-party testing and it's kind of word of mouth. There were diet supplements in the '90s and 2000s that contained amphetamine, and there were muscle-building ones that had steroids in them. We know this. And then now we have third-party testing and reputable brands and the sort of big five or six brands that we all trust. So if you are absolutely committed to getting true, pure retatrutide, you'll have to get it from Eli Lilly.
Gwyneth Paltrow: And what is the vehicle? Is it a needle from Eli Lilly then?
Andrew Huberman: They're thinking about — and they may even have — an oral form, but it's going to be injectable subcutaneous. It's like a little 31-gauge — you just draw from the ampule into a disposable syringe and then inject, or they have pens and you change the needles on the pens.
I'm not recommending people do this, by the way. I've never taken a GLP-1, but it'd be kind of interesting to do it as an experiment, see how I felt. But I like to eat. I love to eat.
The retatrutide that's available now from gray market sources — the problem is that those gray market sources can have what's called lipopolysaccharide, LPS. It can say 99% purity, but that 1% means there could be some LPS. LPS will cause inflammation. One injection isn't going to do it, but multiple injections over time — I could see where that could become problematic. Compounding pharmacies are going to be better than online gray and black market sources.
People say "Chinese peptides" as a way of dissing foreign sources, but the truth is there are a lot of sources here in the United States that are dirty too. And they might not be retatrutide — it might be growth hormone, it might be who knows what. That's the problem. So you need a reliable source. I do think regardless of the source of the drug, you need to work with an MD. If you get it from an MD who gets it to you through a compounding pharmacy — right now it's illegal to do that for retatrutide because Lilly holds the patent, but people are doing it.
Things like BPC-157, which it seems everyone is now taking for tissue repair and inflammation — I'm not aware of a single adverse event. I'm also not aware of a single clinical trial in humans. There's one which looked at gut health but it's not a great study. There is a company that owns the patent, but they're just not interested in pursuing it.
Gwyneth Paltrow: And most people say that they heal faster and do better on BPC-157.
Andrew Huberman: Have you ever tried any of the peptides?
Gwyneth Paltrow: Yeah, I've tried a load of peptides. I'll experiment with things and I rarely continue. So I tried a peptide called pinealon, which has very, very little human data. I no longer take it, but I got great results from it. It gave me three hours a night of REM sleep.
Andrew Huberman: You're kidding.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Three hours a night of REM sleep. It was amazing.
Andrew Huberman: Is that healthy to have?
Gwyneth Paltrow: It felt great to me. I thought I'd try it — I'm a bit of an adventurer. I didn't put it out there as a protocol or something to suggest to people because that's just me, that's my own use. I've taken BPC-157 if I have a joint that's in pain. I've been lucky to be pretty much injury-free.
Gwyneth Paltrow: That's because you hung up your skateboard.
Andrew Huberman: Because I hung up the skateboard, and because — this is fitness advice for people — don't do the workout that you get challenged to do. When you go visit a friend and they're like, "Let's do this class," that's when people get hurt.
Gwyneth Paltrow: I always hurt myself putting down the heavy weight. Every time.
Andrew Huberman: Picking up and putting down weights is often when people get hurt because we're not bracing, we're not ready for the lift, we're not thinking about it — or we're in a staggered stance and kind of leaning over. Get someone else to put it back on the rack. It'll be good for them too.
So I think pinealon, BPC-157 — I've tried those. The problem is I don't have a control experiment. I stopped taking pinealon because I couldn't find another clean source and I didn't really need it. My sleep is solid doing what I do. With BPC-157, I'm lucky to not have an injury I'm dealing with, but it's hard to get really true BPC-157 now.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Why is that?
Andrew Huberman: No one's really compounding it — it's not supposed to be sold. There might be some places that are, but they're not supposed to.
And then I should say there are a bunch of peptides like tessamorelin, ipamorelin, MK-677 — these are growth hormone secretagogues that people take before sleep to promote growth hormone release during sleep, and those are FDA-approved for other things. So those are less mysterious and cutting-edge because they were approved for other purposes by drug companies.
Gwyneth Paltrow: So what is ipamorelin approved for?
Andrew Huberman: For increasing growth hormone for people with reduced stature. Some people will take growth hormone to try and grow taller when they're kids. Others will take a growth hormone secretagogue.
There are a couple of other clinical indications I can't quite remember. But things like melanotan — which is related to a peptide essentially secreted from the pituitary — literally causes tanning of the skin. It tends to make people hypersexual. It's a very interesting peptide and it's naturally occurring. The problem is it can make people — there are some really scary images online of people who have taken too much melanotan and they look like they've turned deep bronze when their natural skin tone is not that.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Wow.
Andrew Huberman: So you might say, "Oh, that sounds great," but it looks a bit unnatural. Some of the orange people that you see on television are probably on melanotan. It gives immense amounts of energy, increases libido like crazy, reduces fat.
Sunlight, Dopamine, and the Pigmentation Pathway
Andrew Huberman: What's really interesting about the peptide that it mimics is it comes from the pituitary, and when we are in sunlight — my favorite topic — it increases the release of this particular peptide. This peptide tans people from the inside when they take it, but it's the pigmentation pathway. Melanotan is very closely related to the dopamine pathway.
There's an enzyme called tyrosinase, which is in the — so tyrosine, which comes from foods like hard Parmesan cheese — the crystals on the outside of Parmesan cheese, that's basically tyrosine. It's an amino acid which is a precursor to dopamine. Incredible, right?
Gwyneth Paltrow: Amazing.
Andrew Huberman: The mutation that creates albinism is based on a mutation in the tyrosinase enzyme, which is a rate-limiting enzyme in the synthesis of both melanin and dopamine.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Wow.
Andrew Huberman: Incredible. And then you think — what about the beautiful arctic fox, which is white in the winter and pigmented in the summer? Guess what? It's because sunlight activates this peptide and some other pathways through tyrosinase activity, then tyrosine, then eventually dopamine — there are a bunch of steps: L-DOPA, then dopamine.
The animal now has energy, libido, it's pigmented, and it goes out and finds mates and mates. In the winter, it's a shutdown time. So sunlight is the thing that catalyzes these increases in dopamine, in pigmentation, and so on. A smart biochemist figured, let's isolate this peptide. And a company said, let's create melanotan. It's actually used to treat hyposexuality — it was approved for women first. I think the drug is called Vyleesi or something like that. I could be getting that wrong. Very interesting: energy, libido, dopamine, mood, levels of activity for long days — 14-hour days. You see this in the animal kingdom and you see it in humans.
I'm not recommending people take melanotan, but that's an FDA-approved peptide, for instance.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Oh, is it? Fascinating.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So whether or not you're talking about Gila monsters and treating obesity, or you're talking about melanotan and arctic foxes turning brown in the summer and mating only during the summer — you see this in tons of different species. There's a beautiful relationship between the seasons, the sun, pigmentation, and dopamine. And of course testosterone and estrogen, which are all downstream of that.
We are biological creatures and we have this brain override thing where we try to explain everything, but I think we're a lot more susceptible to things like pheromones — even though pheromone effects in humans have been hard to find. Odor is the most primitive form of communication between animals. So, people: trust your nose when picking a romantic partner. I really mean that. If their sweat smells really bad to you, if they smell bad to you, I actually think they're bad for you.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Interesting.
Andrew Huberman: I really believe this. I don't have hard data, but I'm convinced that when people are afraid or anxious, they emit a certain odorant. And I think we're going to start to learn more about this. I think it's one of the things that social media divorces us from a bit.
Gwyneth Paltrow: It divorces us from a lot.
Andrew Huberman: It divorces us from a lot. Yeah.
The Most Startling Discoveries from the Podcast
Gwyneth Paltrow: What is the most startling thing that you've learned doing the podcast in terms of information?
Andrew Huberman: I think the conclusion I've come to is that we have all the biological mechanisms within us to really take control of our state of mind, our state of body — to quiet our mind or to simply be comfortable in the chaos of our mind. But we're never taught that.
Whether you use an ice bath to raise your adrenaline and then lean into a hard day and make it feel easier, or you use exercise to raise your mood, or you use long-exhale breathing to slow your heart rate, or you get morning sunlight to calibrate your whole system — which is really what it does — I'm just overwhelmed by how amazing the human body is if we do the right things. I'm still kind of in awe of it.
Other animals that have spent a lot of time thinking about their biology are exceptionally good at a couple of things. Our blessing and our curse is that we can be good at any number of different things, but we are all pretty terrible at regulating our internal systems until we know what those things are.
The appreciation is: it's all there. Whether or not you decide to do 15 minutes of journaling about something really bothering you — three times, the Pennebaker trauma treatment — and the number of quality papers showing that that's extremely useful. You sit down and you write out for 15 minutes about something that's got you in your mind that you can't shake, and then you do it again a few days later, same practice, and you do it again a few days later. That's been shown to reduce symptoms of trauma, to help people come to understand things, to purge some of the inner chatter around that, the way it's waking them up and bothering them.
I'm also still blown away by neuroplasticity. The fact that we, unlike other animals, can reshape our neural circuitry because we decide to. My scientific great-grandparents David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel essentially showed that brain plasticity can really occur. We kind of knew it from language learning and some observations in kids over centuries, but they really defined this thing that we call neuroplasticity.
Whether somebody does therapy, or the Pennebaker journaling, or breathwork, or goes on a solo hike for 10 days, or a darkness retreat — something I hope to never do.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Me too.
Andrew Huberman: I'll tell you one thing that's going to kill the darkness retreat industry. Someone I know did one and I said, "Just not for me. Sell it to me." And she said, "Well, it was really tough because at the end they turned on the lights and there were all these spiders in there." And I was like, never. Forget it. I don't mind spiders, but I need to be able to see them around me. I have no interest in it.
Gwyneth Paltrow: I wonder too if it's a specific personality type or specific Enneagram type that can weather that. I would lose my mind.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Well, I'm a solid three on the Enneagram.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Okay. Where am I in terms of the ladder of health — that's up to you. But I like to think I'm at least ascending as opposed to descending. I'm a one. Yeah, I'm a one.
Andrew Huberman: Can you remind me what the one is?
Gwyneth Paltrow: A one is a reformer. Always trying to improve things all the time. And so it can index into the more beautiful aspect of that, and it can index into perfectionism and beating yourself up for stuff.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I think the Enneagram is brilliant. I think I got a lot more out of the Enneagram than I did out of the sort of five personality dimensions.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Me too. I'm very agreeable except when it comes to what I actually do — I'm kind of disagreeable. I'll like people and I'll take it all in, and then in the end I go my own way. So I felt like the agreeableness dimension didn't really capture me. It's like, how do you respond when people offer a counter idea? I'm not going to fight them on it, but I'm going to go home and make a decision. The Enneagram seems to really capture people. It has a lot of depth to it. The more you read about it, it's pretty fascinating.
Andrew Huberman: The three is the achiever, right?
Gwyneth Paltrow: It's the achiever. Yeah.
Andrew Huberman: My sister always gives me a hard time about that. She's a therapist. I think my dad's a four — he's like the romantic. Even though he's a scientist, my dad constructs his days. He's like, "I'm going to walk here and we're going to go there and we're going to have this for dinner." And we're Argentine, so everything's — and he reports what he had for dinner. They're in Uruguay right now, he and his wife visiting his brother. What are you doing? "Oh, we had this, we had that." It's all about the daily structure. That's really cool.
Do you use the Enneagram at work, for hiring people, or dating, or anything like that?
Gwyneth Paltrow: No, I should. Yeah. Well, I should say for work — I have this weird thing where when it comes to picking people for my lab, co-workers, or business partners, I'm proud to say only bull's-eyes.
Andrew Huberman: Wow.
Gwyneth Paltrow: People always say, "Oh, you're going to have this terrible relationship with your graduate adviser." I had a great relationship with my graduate adviser. I knew she was the one to mentor me at that stage. And my postdoc adviser. And I hope my students would say — they've all done well, they're running labs or off doing their thing. I never had these big conflicts. And then with my podcast team — Rob Moore and then the other guys I brought in, also from skateboarding — I knew Rob was the guy to produce the podcast and I said to him, hopefully he doesn't mind, I was like, "I'll do this but only if we're equal partners. I'm not going to do any of this like I'm the —" equal. And he was like, "No way." And I'm like, "Well, then we're not doing it." He was like, "Okay."
He's a phenom. And I brought in Mike Blabac, who's a famous skateboard photographer — he shot Danny Way jumping the Great Wall. He's iconic. And then Chris Ray and Martin Forbes — they've won all sorts of awards for filming, they're on the Red Bull film team, and they skateboard, and they work like nobody has their work ethic.
Protein Intake — Cutting Through the Noise
Gwyneth Paltrow: My husband was like, "Can you ask him about this protein intake thing?" Because he's always been into fitness and lifted weights and everything, but he says the amount of protein he's seeing recommended is insane — protein sequestered in every random thing.
Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's insane.
Gwyneth Paltrow: Okay, great.
Andrew Huberman: It's insane. I think if somebody — like a teenager who's growing very fast — should follow their appetite and eat nutritious food, including a lot of protein and healthy fat. This idea of one gram of protein per pound of body weight — for some people it's simple, for other people you feel kind of poisoned.
Whether you eat breakfast or you don't doesn't matter so much. We can kind of sense when you've had enough, certainly with animal protein. And I don't have any hard studies to back this up, but if you start to feel like you're force-feeding anything, that's bad.
Gwyneth Paltrow: And it's so conflicting. It's like, okay, you have to eat this much protein, it has to be great quality animal protein, grass-fed dairy, beef, et cetera. But then you have cardiologists saying don't eat red meat. And I was reading something really interesting lately around low-inflammation vegetarian diets being so good for lowering inflammation. So what's the deal?
Andrew Huberman: So there's a great study here. We can look to some really great peer-reviewed science from Justin Sonnenburg, who's actually my upstairs neighbor at Stanford — world expert in the microbiome. He and his wife Erica run probably the best microbiome lab anywhere. And Christopher Gardner, who's been a champion of vegetarian diets — I'm not a vegetarian, I'm an omnivore — but they did a study where they looked at people who ingest low-sugar fermented foods versus intentionally increasing dietary fiber from vegetables, some fruit, mostly vegetables, some grains, et cetera. It was a crossover design, so people washed out and then switched groups, and they looked at a bunch of different inflammatory markers.
We can confidently say that ingesting a couple of servings or more per day of low-sugar fermented foods — sauerkraut, natto, kefir, kimchi, Bulgarian full-fat yogurt, Greek yogurt, things like that — greatly reduces the inflammasome by way of improving the gut microbiome in a very significant way.
Gwyneth Paltrow: So wonderful.
Andrew Huberman: This thing that people say — well, if you have certain microbes and certain dysbiosis, then low-sugar fermented isn't good, it feeds the wrong things — we still don't know exactly which microbes are ideal, but you don't want to be dysbiotic where you don't have enough diversity. So we're not quite at the place where we can say it's these microbes specifically. There are a few that appear to be beneficial, but diversity of gut microbiome is great. Low-sugar fermented foods, increasing them gradually so that you don't get a ton of gastric discomfort — find a few that you like and ingest those every day.
The fiber group was very interesting. People increased their fiber pretty dramatically. Some people had increases in inflammatory markers. We know that some people — because of lectins and — it seems there are at least two different broad groups of people: some who can just eat lots and lots of vegetables of all kinds and it doesn't seem to irritate their gut, and others for whom it's highly individual. For instance, I can eat cooked broccoli — love it — cannot eat raw broccoli. Cabbage, love it. Other vegetables are tough for me. I feel kind of unwell when I eat them. So you need to experiment and find what vegetables and fruits work for you.
Gwyneth Paltrow: And it's interesting when people do the food sensitivity blood test — I don't know if those really mirror what's good for you or not, but a lot of people have an inflammatory response to broccoli or —
Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Or even if you do some blood tests, they'll show that you make antibodies to, say, strawberries. I do that. I love strawberries, but the fact that I have antibodies probably reflects the fact that as a kid I had some mild allergic reaction to them. In fact, I remember getting a little rash because I would eat like a whole bowl of strawberries. But now I can eat them just fine because I have antibodies. So we have to be a little careful with the blood testing versus the actual allergic reaction piece.
You were asking about protein, but the reason I'm taking this route to it is that it's great to eat enough fiber — this is important — but pick the right fibrous foods. Some people don't do well eating grains. They just don't. So when the cardiologists are saying too much red meat isn't good, what else are people eating? I think that if people are going to increase their red meat consumption — and I love a good steak four nights a week — I don't tend to eat that many grains. I have some rice, some oatmeal. I like some sourdough. I'll eat homemade pasta, but I don't tend to mix those at the same meal in large quantities.
I actually think the best studies have not been done separating, like, your high protein and then maybe you have a pasta dish later. That hasn't really been done. It's always so extreme. And so I don't really trust most of the studies on nutrition. I think most of them are completely worthless. I really do. At the extremes, I think the conclusions are real — too much saturated fat, not good, especially if you're consuming a lot of starchy carbohydrates and sugar. The combination of starch and sugar and fat — that's where things get problematic because we can just consume so much of them.
One thing I've been doing recently — I learned this from Sean Mackey, our head of the pain division at Stanford when he came on the podcast. I said, "What do you think of kind of these woo things for gut pain?" And he said he used to think it was ridiculous, but then he himself had some really serious gut issues and he discovered that onions and other histamine-producing foods would do this. And some of this might run in families.
My sister said to me that she started taking an enzyme to help before any kind of histamine-containing food or meal. I was like, I'll do that. It's like a little pill. I take it. Oh my goodness, I feel so much better. I used to get this thing where I'd feel a little itchy, feel a little tired if I had dairy a bit later. It was subtle, but I now take this little tiny — I forget what the name is — it's an enzyme that you take before meals that have high histamine content. I don't care what anyone tells me, I'm not waiting for a study. I feel so much better for pennies a day.
So some people might be susceptible to histamines. And Dr. Sean Mackey, MD-PhD, after all, said it relieved his gut pain to avoid high-histamine-containing foods or to take an enzyme that can help digest histamine-containing food. So I think we're very individual based on genetic lineage and how we grew up.
For men, probably getting 100 grams of quality protein per day minimum is good — should be pretty easy to do. Even if you're eating twice a day, that's pretty easy to do. Depending on a woman and her size and weight, maybe slightly less than that. But if you're doing a ton of resistance training, you're working very long hours, sure, increase the amount of protein. But that protein can come from a variety of sources. I don't like to eat meat more than once a day — it's too hard to digest, I get tired. I don't like to eat meat too close to bedtime. I end up with the meat sweats. And I think we should all experiment and figure out what works for us.
Gwyneth Paltrow: I couldn't agree more.
Andrew Huberman: But I don't think he should feel pressured to get whatever it is — one gram per pound of body weight — especially if he's happy with his body composition and he feels like he's holding on to the muscle he's got.
Closing Reflections
Gwyneth Paltrow: I'm so grateful to you because my son who's 19 — this generation of kids, they have anxiety stuff — and you honestly have given him permission to really think about himself as an autonomous person. He wakes up and the first thing he does is go outside.
Andrew Huberman: Awesome.
Gwyneth Paltrow: He's timing it, because he's not a good sleeper either. So he follows you religiously. I'm like, "Don't you want a cup of coffee?" He's like, "No, I have to wait — you know, the 60 minutes."
Andrew Huberman: He's cultivating good habits. I look forward to meeting him. You have my phone number, so if he has any questions he can reach out. I'm always happy to. Self-care is the best. It sets you up to be very successful.
Gwyneth Paltrow: It does. And I think it's like — I'm his mom, so he's seen it this way — but it's just been so nice that he's found you and he loves you. So thank you.
Andrew Huberman: Please give him my regards. I look forward to meeting him. And I'll say this was not a promotional, but I continue to eat Goop Kitchen every day. They don't pay me to say that. I just love it. I started ordering and I get it for my team. I love it. I eat the Huberman chili, and the roasted potatoes, and the salads, and the bone broth, the chicken broth.
Gwyneth Paltrow: That's awesome. Thank you.
Andrew Huberman: It's so good.
Gwyneth Paltrow: It's so good, and the ingredients are so clean. I'm so proud of it. Food is medicine — you talked about it today. When we're conscious about what we're eating, and it's a privilege, so if we're lucky enough to be conscious about what we're eating, to be able to provide meals that are so delicious and healthy — it's like a lifelong dream fulfilled.
Andrew Huberman: No, it's awesome. Thank you.