Experts Brain Health Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss · 35 episodes · 618 sourced insights

What Tim Ferriss says about brain health

Everything Tim Ferriss and guests said about brain health across 35 episodes — each point linked to the exact second on YouTube. Sourced expert opinion, not medical advice.

In their own words

Huberman says he has doubled down on five foundational categories that must be re-upped every 24 hours: sleep, nutrients (macro and micro), movement, light (especially morning sunlight), and relationships.
00:05:08Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
He reversed his belief that you cannot train for endurance and strength at once; the data on concurrent training convinced him you can pursue multiple adaptations simultaneously, so he rebuilt his program to target one specific adaptation each day.
00:22:50Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
He details his full weekly split: Sunday endurance hike/jog, Monday legs, Tuesday sauna/cold plunge recovery, Wednesday cardio or torso, Thursday torso or cardio, Friday short VO2 max work, Saturday smaller muscle groups.
00:24:34Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Tibialis (tib) raises, learned from Ben Patrick (Knees Over Toes Guy), eliminated his right-side sciatica, fixed shin splints, and let him run pain-free; he also discovered he never actually had flat feet, just weak tibs.
00:33:01Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Dedicated neck training improved his posture, eye contact, confidence, and injury resilience; he does it lying on a bench and stomach with a towel-wrapped plate.
00:50:39Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
His sleep stack remains magnesium threonate, theanine, and apigenin, with added myo-inositol (900 mg) to help fall back asleep; if forced to pick two, he chooses magnesium threonate and apigenin.
01:15:41Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Rhodiola rosea (200 mg pre-workout) is his standout recent performance addition because it reduces perceived effort and post-exercise energy crash without suppressing cortisol, unlike Ashwagandha.
01:36:34Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Huberman has been monitoring sperm parameters and freezing sperm, and credits Ferriss with the idea that optimizing for fertility is a proxy for optimizing overall vitality.
01:44:32Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
The circuits devoted to movement plus those devoted to vision make up roughly 75 percent of the human brain.
00:21:12Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
After about 25-30 minutes of repetitive exercise, central pattern generators engage so the movement becomes near-automatic, like an autopilot button appearing on the steering wheel.
00:28:43Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Protein synthesis peaks around 48 hours after a resistance workout but is held for additional days, so a muscle group does not need to be hit every 48 hours.
00:59:29Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Charles Poliquin's caution: resistance training beyond 60 minutes raises cortisol, harming sleep and recovery, so Huberman keeps lifts to an hour or less.
01:02:43Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
A University of Houston study found 'soleus pushups' (seated calf raises) done while sitting significantly improved insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake.
01:10:48Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
The soleus is about 1 percent of body musculature but can account for over 15 percent of daytime energy expenditure.
01:11:54Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Gulping fluid signals the bladder to urgently urinate, so sip your last evening drink, but gulp large amounts of water first thing in the morning when the kidney functions differently.
01:18:23Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Morning light raises cortisol about 50 percent above baseline; late-shifted cortisol is associated with depression and immune disruption.
01:21:03Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
Neuropod cells in the gut signal sugar, fatty acids, and amino acids via the vagus nerve to the brain's dopamine centers, driving cravings and satiety.
01:29:06Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
An Israeli study found 20 minutes of afternoon sun on bare skin three times a week significantly increased free testosterone, estrogen, and libido; the skin acts as an endocrine organ via the P53 pathway.
01:53:41Dr. Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Mar 2023
In the staring-detection study, Wiseman's skeptic-run trials showed no effect while believer colleague Marilyn Schlitz's trials did - a clear experimenter effect; larger replications produced complete null results.
00:06:13Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Parapsychology, specifically Daryl Bem's precognition study that failed to replicate, became the bizarre catalyst for the entire replication-crisis movement now improving mainstream psychology.
00:06:44Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
In Wiseman's first mass participation lie-detection experiment with 30,000 callers, people watching video detected lies at chance (50%), but accuracy jumped to 61-70% when they only read transcripts or heard audio.
00:25:52Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Wiseman experimentally tested the NLP claim that eye direction reveals lying, using both staged thefts and real police missing-person press conferences - it showed no validity at all.
00:32:41Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
The widely cited Yale/Harvard goal study (3% with written goals later out-earning the other 97% combined) was never actually run - it is a complete myth spread through self-help books and the web.
01:15:42Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
With suggestion, about 40-50% of people will swear they saw a bent key continue bending or a seance table levitate, demonstrating how malleable memory and observation are.
01:21:58Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
The Apollo mission controllers averaged about 21 years old at start and 28 when Armstrong walked on the moon - mostly first-in-family university students from rural backgrounds, chosen for passion and teamwork.
01:31:12Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Most psychics, mediums, and remote viewers are not consciously faking; they fool themselves via confirmation bias and treating creative pattern-matching of dreams or guesses as genuine ability.
00:43:00Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Wiseman is a member of the Inner Magic Circle, an elite group of only about 300 magicians worldwide, and performed at the Magic Castle in Hollywood as a teenager.
00:09:52Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
His Laugh Lab study to find the world's funniest joke drew about a million participants and required a full-time employee to remove rude jokes, who amassed a compilation of 40,000 disgusting ones.
00:29:31Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Wiseman ran what he believes was the first social-media psychology experiment - a remote viewing study on Twitter where followers tried to guess his location (they couldn't).
00:47:14Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Wiseman suffered from night terrors and joked you can fake one to make a partner get up; he later learned night terrors fade in a cold room and when anxiety is reduced.
00:55:30Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Getting children (and adults) to re-visualize a recurring nightmare with a positive ending has roughly a 90% success rate at reducing it within a short period.
01:00:43Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
A paradoxical insomnia technique: actively try to keep your eyes open and stay awake, which exhausts you and makes you fall asleep faster.
01:01:13Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
The 'world's funniest joke' Wiseman's study produced involves two hunters in a wood; he refuses to tell it on air due to social pressure to laugh, pointing people to the web instead.
01:11:33Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Wiseman's 'luck diary' is based on habituation research - recording one daily gratitude or positive item resets attention and gradually shifts people's self-identity toward being luckier.
01:08:26Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
A door-knocker on Wiseman's shelf is an expensive magic prop that knocks on its own, which he uses to convince visiting children his old house is haunted.
01:33:49Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
A veteran performer keeps shows fresh by standing in the wings imagining the day he can no longer perform, letting the sadness sink in, then saying 'it's not tonight though' before going on.
01:44:47Richard Wiseman · The Tim Ferriss Show · May 2022
Huberman recommends everyone view sunlight for two to ten minutes every morning upon waking to trigger a healthy cortisol pulse and set timers for both wakefulness and later melatonin/sleepiness.
00:16:35Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
His preferred sleep cocktail is 50mg apigenin, 300-400mg magnesium threonate or bisglycinate, and 200-400mg theanine taken about 30 minutes before bed, paired with morning light.
00:36:20Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
He avoids melatonin because it suppresses the reproductive/sex-steroid axis and most supplements contain 10 to 1,000 times natural physiological levels.
00:32:08Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
The physiological sigh - a double inhale followed by an extended exhale - offloads carbon dioxide and brings stress levels down very fast in real time, often after just one to three repetitions.
00:48:53Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
A 20-minute non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) protocol after intense learning accelerates neuroplasticity by about 50 percent, per two recent Cell Reports papers.
00:46:20Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Huberman recounts a July 4, 1994 street fight at age 19 that became the turning point flipping him from a struggling, depressed dropout-track student toward neuroscience and academia.
01:08:26Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
He reveals he has done therapy with the same individual for 32 years, currently three sessions a week of psychoanalysis.
01:24:53Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
For testosterone, he uses 400mg/day Tongkat Ali and roughly 425mg Fadogia agrestis, which together raised his total testosterone by about 200 points without down-regulating LH.
02:00:35Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
The eyes are literally two pieces of brain squeezed out during early development - the only parts of the central nervous system outside the cranial vault.
00:06:41Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Ideal morning light exposure is about 14 to 16 hours before you want to sleep, and your 'temperature minimum' (about two hours before natural waking) is the anchor point for shifting the circadian clock and beating jet lag.
00:24:20Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Belladonna ('beautiful woman' in Italian) was historically made into a tincture women put in their eyes to hyper-dilate their pupils because it was considered attractive.
00:14:31Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Inhales speed the heart up and exhales slow it down (respiratory sinus arrhythmia), which is the basis of heart rate variability - so emphasizing longer exhales calms the system.
00:50:55Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
The Spiegel eye-roll test predicts hypnotizability; Tim scored about a 4, very hypnotizable, with eyes rolling back as the lids slowly closed.
00:53:29Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Clinical hypnosis shows roughly 60-80% success for smoking cessation, up to 90% improvement for anxiety, and 50-75% reduction in chronic pain in controlled studies.
00:57:05Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Turmeric is a fairly potent DHT antagonist; people sensitive to creatine-induced hair loss tend to see their DHT plummet on turmeric.
01:50:41Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
In a Dominican Republic genetic condition (guevedoces), children appear female at birth then sprout a penis and descend testicles around age 12 due to a DHT surge, revealing 5-alpha reductase's role.
01:55:53Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Most people benefit from delaying caffeine 90 minutes to two hours after waking so cortisol can clear residual adenosine and avoid an energy crash.
02:16:44Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Gut neurons sensing fat, amino acids, and sugar signal via the vagus nerve and nodose ganglia to trigger dopamine release, making us seek those foods even when the mouth is numbed and regardless of taste.
02:26:34Andrew Huberman · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jul 2021
Williams describes treating Deirdre Lehman, one of the most severe patients they had ever seen (catatonic, suicidal bipolar depression), and having her go from that state to completely normal in roughly 24 hours with accelerated TMS.
00:04:29Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
A paper in PNAS identified a depression biomarker: in healthy people the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex fires slightly before the cingulate, but in about 70 percent of depressed patients this signal is flipped, and only patients with the flipped biomarker responded to SAINT.
00:08:15Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
SAINT compresses a full six-week (about 30-session) FDA-cleared TMS course into a single day by giving 10 triple-dose sessions of 1,800 pulses, delivering roughly seven and a half months of TMS in five days, with average remission at 2.6 days.
00:29:33Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
In treatment-resistant patients where conventional TMS yields about 16 percent remission, SAINT achieved 90 percent remission in the open-label pilot and 79 percent transiting through remission in the randomized controlled trial (13 percent for sham).
00:52:30Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
Williams' Stanford ibogaine trial in 30 veterans with traumatic brain injury produced results so striking he ordered the postdocs to delete the code and redo the analysis, suspecting an error; the second run reproduced the same dramatic improvements, now holding out to a year.
01:06:38Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
To address ibogaine's roughly one-in-300 risk of fatal Torsade de pointes arrhythmia, every patient received IV magnesium upfront; about a thousand operators have gone to Mexico with this protocol and no torsades cases, versus a death in a 10-person New Zealand study.
01:28:52Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
An anecdotal deep-brain-stimulation case: a man treated for OCD became obsessed with Johnny Cash and sold all his other albums, reverted to old tastes when his battery died, and regained the obsession after a battery replacement, illustrating how little is understood about content-level brain effects.
02:13:06Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
Williams frames psychiatry in three eras: 1.0 (Freud/content), 2.0 (the serendipitous chemical era beginning with Thorazine), and 3.0 (the current circuit/neuromodulation era).
00:16:11Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) was originally developed by Tony Barker in the UK as a motor probe based on Faraday's law, inducing current in electrically conducting brain tissue while bypassing skin, scalp, and skull.
00:22:10Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
SAINT uses 90 percent of resting motor threshold, depth-corrected for prefrontal atrophy in older patients; there has never been a TMS-related seizure at sub-motor-threshold intensity, so risk tracks intensity rather than pulse count.
00:34:07Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
TMS produces an anti-pain (antinociceptive) effect by releasing endogenous opioids, which can be blocked with opioid-blocking drugs as shown in studies by Joe Taylor.
00:37:21Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
RCT patients averaged about nine years in their current depressive episode, five (plus or minus two) medication failures, and a lifetime depression load of roughly 25 years.
00:39:33Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
On average it takes about seven years to diagnose bipolar disorder from a patient's first depressive episode.
00:49:50Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
Comparative remission benchmarks cited: electroconvulsive therapy about 48 percent, a single ketamine infusion about 30 percent, with later-stage pharmaceutical interventions under 10 percent.
00:53:36Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
Williams first learned about ibogaine after randomly picking up Daniel Pinchbeck's 'Breaking Open the Head' while stranded in the San Salvador airport on the way to kite surf in Peru.
01:04:29Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
Ibogaine is described as a 'neurogen' acting across many receptor systems (kappa, mu, NMDA, SERT, some 5-HT2A) and upregulating BDNF and GDNF, unlike classic psychedelics that work mainly through 5-HT2A.
01:20:45Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
Williams and Raag Airan are packaging ketamine into nanoparticles delivered by IV and opened with focused ultrasound to drop the drug only into the cingulate, aiming to test 'tripless' therapeutic effects by targeting specific brain regions.
02:16:51Dr. Nolan Williams · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2024
Karr reveals she tried to kill herself in grade school by taking aspirin, which led her into therapy unusually early in life.
00:08:46Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
She got sober in 1989 after years of being unable to stop drinking despite trying every method, marking the turning point of her life.
00:39:29Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Her prayer practice began not from belief but from a sponsor telling her to get on her knees 'for yourself,' which produced unexpected moments of quiet 'south of the neck.'
00:44:06Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
After praying for money on her knees, she received an unsolicited $35,000 grant three weeks later, a story she swears is true.
00:51:54Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Writing The Liars' Club was so taxing that she would suddenly fall asleep mid-afternoon and sob; she warns aspiring memoirists to treat their trauma before writing about it.
01:18:50Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
She admits she would have kept drinking if her son had been an easy baby, but his chronic illnesses forced her to get sober.
01:38:35Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Her estranged sister died suddenly of pancreatic cancer that summer, and she found unexpected spiritual gifts in reconnecting with her sister's family.
01:39:36Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Karr reveals that about 30 percent of her closest male friends reached out after Tim's podcast to describe their own previously hidden experiences with sexual abuse.
01:43:17Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Karr's mother was married seven times, twice to Mary's father, and had shot at multiple men, leaving bullet holes in the kitchen tile.
00:05:43Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
As a child too short to reach the table, Karr used a water-stained Riverside Shakespeare as a booster seat and memorized speeches from Hamlet and Macbeth.
00:13:24Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
A high-school assistant principal badmouthed her to Macalester College admissions for being a 'bad citizen,' which she believes actually helped her get in.
00:19:08Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Of the six people Karr lived with after leaving home, four went to jail and two were dead before age 20; only she and one friend got sober and 'made it.'
00:21:47Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Her hyper-selective Syracuse graduate program receives around 1,200 applications for just 12 positions.
00:27:33Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Karr opens class by staging a scripted fake fight with colleague George Saunders to demonstrate that memory is a filter, not a perfect recording.
00:29:37Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
She has kept a commonplace book of beautiful language since 1978, on the advice of poet laureate Stanley Kunitz, and has 40 years of index cards with quotes.
00:38:27Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
She threw out roughly 1,200 finished pages of Lit and was about seven years late on her book contract before completing it.
01:11:00Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
At 65, Karr walks four miles each morning, does Pilates three or four times a week, and takes dance classes, saying she has never been happier in her life.
01:22:35Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
Asked what she'd put on a billboard, Karr chose: '90 percent of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath.'
01:45:21Mary Karr · The Tim Ferriss Show · Nov 2020
A ketogenic diet quiets the brain by lowering glutamate and elevating GABA, a calming neurotransmitter, which underlies its rapidly expanding use in metabolic psychiatry for depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety, and anorexia.
00:02:38Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
Lyme disease spirochetes (Borrelia) are essentially 100% glycolytic, so limiting glucose starves the microbe, and elevated beta-hydroxybutyrate stimulates the adaptive immune response, possibly explaining why ketosis resolved Tim's tick-borne cognitive symptoms.
00:11:25Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
Tim's very low blood ketone readings (0.1 to 0.4 mmol) despite feeling sharp are likely a false negative caused by very high ketone utilization and insulin sensitivity, meaning his tissues consume ketones before they show up in the blood.
00:32:42Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
You can get about 80% of the benefits with a low-carb diet (around 100g carbs/day) and periodically, roughly one week per month, drop into deeper ketosis, since higher ketones are not better and a sweet spot of 1 to 2 mmol is therapeutic.
01:07:00Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
1,3-butanediol and 1,3-butanediol-based ketone esters can cause chronic liver toxicity (depleting NAD and ATP, causing inflammation and fatty liver), and animals showed scary liver damage even when blood liver enzymes stayed normal.
01:31:54Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
1,3-butanediol is metabolized like ethanol, creates dependence and alcohol-like withdrawal, and is sold as an alcohol replacement, making these supplements dangerous for the elderly dementia population some companies target.
01:50:39Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
On a ketogenic diet, roughly 34 to 40% of the ketone in the heart is L-beta-hydroxybutyrate, which appears to improve cardiac output and increase blood flow to the brain by reducing peripheral vascular resistance.
01:22:33Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
Metabolic memory is real: like muscle memory, the more you stay in ketosis the faster your body re-adapts, driven by increased mitochondrial number and capacity plus epigenetic gene programs.
00:17:40Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
There are 160 or more registered clinical trials on exogenous ketones listed on clinicaltrials.gov.
00:05:14Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
About 80% of cancers are highly glycolytic, and while a ketogenic diet does not cure cancer it can slow tumor growth and augment standard care like radiation and chemo.
00:14:33Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
Tim's staple keto meal is two cans of chub mackerel with about 30ml of MCT oil plus apple cider vinegar, salt, and pepper, costing around three dollars.
00:23:59Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
Breath ketones (acetone) can be a more accurate indicator of ketosis than blood ketones during a caloric deficit, when blood ketone disposal into tissues is very high.
00:33:43Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
A B12 deficiency can cause brain atrophy and present as flat-out Alzheimer's disease, but can be reversed by correcting the deficiency.
00:59:42Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
High-sensitivity C-reactive protein (HSCRP) inflammation is now considered probably more atherogenic than LDL cholesterol.
01:00:13Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
To calculate the glucose-ketone index (GKI), divide blood glucose by ketone level; US glucose readings in mg/dL must first be divided by 18 to convert to mmol/L.
01:16:20Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
The only long-term human data on 1,3-butanediol is a single case report (Mary Newport's husband Steve) and a 28-day study using 25 grams per day.
01:35:33Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
The ketone ester traces back to Dr. Richard Veech, a student of Hans Krebs of the Krebs cycle; the work was funded in part by DARPA and developed at Oxford.
01:55:52Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
Ketones above the 2 to 5 mmol range create energy toxicity and reductive stress, so higher is not better for general therapeutic ketosis.
01:57:55Dr. Dom D'Agostino · The Tim Ferriss Show · Jan 2026
Panpsychism went from being ridiculed 15 years ago to becoming a mainstream academic position taught to undergraduates and widely published in academic journals.
00:01:36Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Panpsychism is the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality, with simple particles like electrons having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience.
00:04:11Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
There is no scientific consensus on consciousness; neuroscientist Christof Koch publicly conceded a 25-year bet to philosopher David Chalmers over a crate of wine, admitting the neural correlates of consciousness had not been found.
00:13:34Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
The pansychist inverts the standard scientific assumption, arguing consciousness is foundational and physical reality emerges from it, rather than consciousness emerging from complex brains.
00:19:48Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Galileo deliberately stripped qualities (colors, sounds, smells, tastes) out of the physical world and placed them in the soul, taking consciousness outside science to enable purely mathematical physics.
00:30:40Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington argued in the 1920s that physics doesn't tell us what matter is, only its mathematical structure, meaning we can derive physics from consciousness even if not the reverse.
00:55:32Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Goff publicly came out as a 'heretical Christian,' provoking traditional Christians who said he lacked correct beliefs and atheists who said he'd lost his mind.
01:03:23Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Goff argues both atheism and traditional theism fail: theism can't explain horrific suffering, while atheism can't explain the fine-tuning of physics for life, so he explores middle-ground options like cosmic purpose.
01:07:32Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, influenced by Godel's incompleteness theorem, holds with scientist Stuart Hameroff that consciousness is connected to quantum collapse in the brain's microtubules.
00:11:29Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Integrated information theory represents consciousness mathematically with the letter phi, proposing the 'lights come on' when a system has more integrated information in the whole than in its parts.
00:17:13Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Max Planck, the Nobel-winning father of quantum theory (1858-1947), said he regarded consciousness as fundamental and matter as derivative from consciousness.
00:21:53Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Color scientist Knut Nordby had cones missing from his eyes, seeing only black, white, and gray, yet studied the structure of color experience he could not perceive.
00:31:42Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
A letter signed by dozens of neuroscientists recently argued we must take seriously the possibility that insects are conscious; babies were once thought non-conscious and given surgery without anesthesia.
00:45:37Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Reverend Thomas Bayes developed Bayes' theorem while wrestling with David Hume's argument against miracles; it later became vital for tracking the COVID pandemic.
00:48:46Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
The cosmological constant tied to dark energy and the universe's acceleration was only discovered in 1998, evidence Goff argues Bertrand Russell never had access to.
01:08:34Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Historian Karen Armstrong argues the Greek word 'pistis,' translated as 'belief,' originally connoted trust, commitment, and engagement, not intellectual assent to propositions.
01:33:28Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Ayahuasca combines a DMT-containing plant with Syrian rue, which contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors that render the DMT orally bioactive.
01:52:22Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Philosopher Thomas Nagel's similar 2012 book Mind and Cosmos was 'destroyed' in reviews, while Goff's Why? received a warmer reception, which he reads as a sign of cultural change.
01:54:27Philip Goff · The Tim Ferriss Show · Apr 2025
Psychiatry spent 50 years studying serotonin and norepinephrine, which make up only about 2% of brain synapses, while ignoring glutamate, which accounts for roughly 90% of synapses and is the main information highway of the brain.
00:52:30Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
In the first ketamine study, the antidepressant effect was discovered almost by accident: patients went home and reported the next day that their depression was all better, an effect the researchers initially didn't know what to make of.
00:53:35Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
Ron Duman and George Aghajanian showed in 2010 that a single dose of ketamine produced rapid structural regrowth of brain synapses within 24 hours, reversing the synaptic losses caused by chronic stress.
00:58:19Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
In patients with synaptic deficits, more dissociation during ketamine correlated with greater synaptic regrowth and clinical improvement; in patients without deficits, dissociation was unrelated to response, meaning it means two different things in two groups.
01:32:29Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
The therapeutic window for IV ketamine is extremely narrow: 0.5 mg/kg works, but going down to 0.2 mg/kg is barely effective for anyone, while anesthetic doses lose the antidepressant effect entirely.
02:00:40Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
Krystal met heavy ketamine abusers in China and Taiwan using up to 8 grams (8,000 mg) a day intranasally, roughly 100 to 200 times a therapeutic dose, who became persistently psychotic even after stopping.
02:27:15Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
Pre-treating treatment-resistant depression patients with the immunosuppressant rapamycin raised the two-week ketamine response rate from about 13% to over 40%, possibly by stopping microglia from eating the newly created synapses.
03:18:24Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
Giving a high dose of naltrexone (an opiate blocker) before ketamine did not change ketamine's dissociative effects at all, undercutting the idea that dissociation depends on opioid receptor activity.
03:09:36Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
Untreated depression shortens lifespan by about five years on average, not through suicide, because depression worsens inflammation and the medical illnesses driven by it.
00:22:37Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
The first antidepressant, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, was discovered in 1957 by accident when tuberculosis patients given it found both their TB and their depression improving.
00:32:39Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
MAO inhibitors require avoiding aged cheese and wine because the tyramine they contain can spike blood pressure dangerously, occasionally causing strokes.
00:36:17Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
PCP (angel dust) was first given to a human in 1959 in Detroit and produced something like schizophrenia, but its mechanism (blocking the NMDA glutamate receptor) wasn't identified until the mid-1980s.
01:10:23Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
Ed Domino's early ketamine paper coined the term dissociative anesthesia, noting sensory information reached sensory cortex but was blocked in transmission to association cortex.
01:14:04Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
People with a personal or family history of alcohol use disorder have a built-in tolerance to ketamine's dissociative effects yet still get the antidepressant benefit.
01:31:26Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022
S-ketamine (Spravato) starts at a fixed 56 mg dose working up to 84 mg, while IV ketamine is dosed by weight at 0.5 mg/kg, giving IV a theoretical speed advantage.
01:47:04Dr. John Krystal · The Tim Ferriss Show · Sep 2022

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