Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:18:03 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:18:03] S0: Vanta automates compliance so your team can spend less time on security reviews and more time getting customers. Vanta cuts audit prep by 82% and gives you instant up to date proof of trust without all the manual work, so you can close deals faster and with less friction. Customers report a 526% return on investment, and more than 16,000 companies use Vanta, including Ramp, Harvey, and Snowflake. Get started with $1,000 off at vanta.com/invest. Ridgeline is the first end to end system of record with embedded AI for investment management firms running portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, and compliance on one unified platform. Firms are moving off legacy technology and onto Ridgeline because of how far ahead Ridgeline's AI features are compared to anything else in investment management software. I've been hearing from a lot of investment managers about AI and they fall roughly into two camps, with some unsure where to even start and others convinced that they can build their own order system over a weekend. The reality is that running an investment firm will always require governance, controls, and a single source of truth for your data. And no amount of AI enthusiasm changes that requirement. Ridgeline is built on exactly that foundation, which is why I believe that the firms that come out ahead in the AI era will be the ones running on Ridgeline's unified platform. If you're serious about your firm's AI strategy, Ridgeline should be part of that conversation, and you can request a demo at ridgeline.ai. Since you've been covering it for so long, I'm curious what you think the biggest challenge or problem or issue is facing your whole field. Like if I think about this as the quest to learn and teach, to understand our health and our well-being and ways of making it better, What is the biggest challenge facing the field today,
00:19:50 · Andrew Huberman
[00:19:50] S1: do you think? I mean, I feel like the public discourse around health and longevity is a fucking disaster. It is a bunch of clowns and people are doubling and tripling down on the theatrics. I'm not saying I get everything right or that I have all the answers. I'm definitely not saying that. I got into this at the right time, but the downside is that it was so devoid of anyone else. There were people talking about health only in their area that they worked on in their lab, but not broadly, that, you know, the bar for entry in public discourse around health is basically zero. You know, it's like, you show your abs and you admit you're on steroids, you have a following. Some dude shows his abs or some woman like shows her glutes and claims to be all natural and we believe them, and suddenly they have a following. So, I mean, if that's the bar for entry, I come from a field where having a PhD isn't even nearly sufficient. It's necessary, but not even nearly sufficient to say that you've contributed something to the understanding of the brain. Like, we could take somebody like Tim Ferriss was talking about a lot of this stuff early on, the biohacking, self optimization. And what I love about Tim is he's remained Tim. There was this period where he experimented. He had some things that he felt probably weren't a good idea, you know, he talks about those, like things that he wishes he hadn't done, and things that he's happy he did. And then he's also in investing in all these other things. I think Tim's fantastic, because he's being Tim. So I'm not referring to that. And then you started getting these more and more extreme versions where people were coming in with basically no science or health training, and saying, Hey, like, here's how you optimize the mind and body, and I know this because I'm doing all these things and I used to be fat and I'm not fat anymore. And I think that's fine in principle, but then it just keeps getting crazier and crazier. And so what you've seen now is there's a big gap between, if I'm just honest, between the A tier public health educators and what used to be the B tier public educators, it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Because one has to be true to self, but you also have to take the endeavor seriously. It's very easy to get attention. It's very hard to keep respect.
00:21:49 · Andrew Huberman
So, I do think that the public health discourse is harmed when it becomes about the theatrics. And I'm not trying to not name names here, mean, think everyone can look out on the landscape of everyone, from Brian to me to Gary Breca to Asprey to anyone else, there are a lot in the space, and just go, like, whose persona resonates, not just what captures the entertainment value? So what I would expect will happen next, now that we've gone from high amounts of interest in this, to this optimization optimization, now it's turned into, are we over optimizing? I I think we're going see a downturn in the number of things that people are willing to do each day. They're like, this is just too much. It's gotten kind of kooky. It's kind of crazy. And the characters, I need more serious peers. I need serious peers with training in either science or medicine, maybe pharmacology, and they're out there. But I think those people are going to rise to the surface. We haven't seen them yet. So I look forward to having colleagues like that. And then I think what's going happen is we're going to get many, many more people trained as PhDs, trained as MDs, are going to be doing serious science health discourse, not regressing to the TikTok dance model, the focus on me model, and really educating people in a way that's unique, that I'm certain I haven't even tapped into. Someone's gonna come along that's better than me. So I think this field is gonna go into a downturn now, the public education around health and optimization, longevity, etcetera, is going to go into a bit of a downturn. And then I think we're gonna get an influx of a lot of great people, and then it will be where I would like to see it.
00:23:16 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:23:16] S0: How about on the research side? Biggest problem facing the field.
00:23:19 · Andrew Huberman
[00:23:19] S1: Well, think the coolest problem that's also the biggest problem is how we can non invasively write to the nervous system in So sleep and waking my best friend from childhood, Eddie Chang, is chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He's a bioengineer. He's doing things similar ish to what Neuralink is doing, but removing brain tumors and this kind of thing. I've been with him to surgeries, like right up there next to the tumors. Patient is awake, he's probing areas of the brain, he has permission to map areas related to speech and language, etc. So breaching the skull is a big deal. The neurosurgeons say, Well, you know, a titanium plate would be better, it's stronger, it lasts longer, but most people don't want to have to do that. They do it because they need something taken out, like a tumor, or an epileptic foci. I think the big one now is who can develop, it will probably be ultrasound, but a noninvasive way of selectively activating or quieting brain areas with high amounts of temporal precision. Like getting people who are in locked in syndrome to speak, as Eddie has done, or getting people who have a spinal injury to walk, which Neuralink and Eddie and others are trying to develop technologies to do, that is heroic, right? But ultimately, and I'll go on record saying this, anyone who thinks that Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Elon's got Neuralink as his stated neural interest, Anyone that thinks that those are LLM AI companies is perhaps going to be surprised at this prediction. Every single one of those is going to be a biotech company. They're all interested in the brain. You talk to any of those guys, they may not have formal training in it, but they understand a lot of neuroscience, and they will all tell you, Here's the goal, right? The goal is to be able to read and write from your brain non invasively. And there are straightforward ways to do that. So the big thing is, how can you stimulate a brain area with temporal and spatial precision? How can you quiet that brain area with spatial and temporal precision? How can you dial up or down the level of quieting? Because it's one thing to say silent versus activated, but the nervous system has a lot of graded signals in it.
00:25:15 · Andrew Huberman
Mean, we don't think about those signals, but the communication between areas is gated, it's graded, thresholds for activation change, even just for things like drive and motivation. A non invasive device where you could literally crank up your level of motivation by stimulating the nucleus accumbens and related pathways while engaging in a particular learning task or in hard work, and then turning it off so that you can capture more energy, you have more of a square wave function on your energy output, that's coming. And those companies are all about that. That's what the real arms race of AI is about. So I sort of chuckle when I think, like, okay, like the LLMs are great or terrible, depending on who you are, and I believe they're great. I'm a big fan of AI. But the dynamic modulation of your own neural activity, using non invasive technologies, not pharmacology, but then using AI to be able to understand, okay, this level of activation in this brain area for you, Patrick, is related to a hyper motivated brain state that makes it very hard for you to do anything else the rest of the day, and it will just learn to titrate. But you say, Well, that sounds kind of science fiction. How far off is that? I mean, my eight sleep changes the temperature throughout the night to give me more REM sleep or deep sleep. It's already doing that. It's just we're okay with these things in sleep, and it's doing that through a powerful but indirect method, temperature change. But it's no small thing to dynamically change and measure the degree of change in the nervous system in order to access a given state, sleep or otherwise, better. And that's what these companies want to do. So my field of neuroscience has to embrace this, and they are. That the people who are trying to figure out what are the natural signals occurring in the brain when people think, when people see, when people move their limbs in a particular way. That's been the last thirty, forty years. That's all reading from the nervous system. Now it's about writing to the nervous system non invasive.