Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity, Fasting, and Neuroplasticity

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman,

00:00:02.700 | his second time on the podcast.

00:00:04.620 | He's a neuroscientist at Stanford,

00:00:06.500 | a world-class researcher and educator,

00:00:08.900 | and now he has a new podcast on YouTube

00:00:11.980 | and all the usual places called Huberman Lab

00:00:15.300 | that I can't recommend highly enough.

00:00:18.140 | Quick mention of our sponsors.

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00:00:28.700 | Click the sponsor links to get a discount.

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00:00:36.900 | So if you're on the fence, now is the time to sign up.

00:00:40.260 | And I'm pretty sure Andrew will have

00:00:42.160 | a neuroscience masterclass on there soon enough,

00:00:44.660 | though his podcast is basically

00:00:46.300 | a weekly masterclass in itself.

00:00:48.820 | As a side note, let me say that Andrew is a friend

00:00:52.060 | and a new collaborator.

00:00:53.740 | We're working on a paper together

00:00:55.620 | about a topic we're both really passionate about.

00:00:58.500 | At the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning.

00:01:01.380 | But that's probably many months away from being published.

00:01:04.660 | Still, I'm really excited about this work.

00:01:06.740 | He's one of the smartest and kindest people

00:01:08.700 | I have the pleasure of talking to on this podcast.

00:01:11.100 | So I hope we'll talk many more times in the future.

00:01:14.380 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

00:01:16.660 | review it on our podcast, follow on Spotify,

00:01:19.580 | support it on Patreon,

00:01:20.860 | or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

00:01:23.660 | And now, here's my conversation with Andrew Huberman.

00:01:28.260 | Why do humans need sleep?

00:01:30.460 | Let's go with a big first question.

00:01:33.540 | - Okay, well, the answer I'll start with

00:01:36.900 | is the one that I always default to

00:01:38.580 | when there's a why question.

00:01:40.500 | I wasn't consulted at the design phase.

00:01:44.260 | So I wriggle my way out of giving a absolute answer, right?

00:01:49.260 | But there's one mechanism that's very clear,

00:01:55.140 | that's super important,

00:01:56.300 | which is that the longer we are awake,

00:01:59.100 | the more adenosine accumulates in our brain.

00:02:04.100 | And adenosine binds to adenosine receptors,

00:02:07.460 | no surprise there.

00:02:08.580 | And it creates the feeling of sleepiness,

00:02:12.380 | independent of time of day or night.

00:02:15.700 | So there are two mechanisms.

00:02:17.300 | One is we get sleepy as adenosine accumulates.

00:02:22.060 | The longer we've been awake,

00:02:23.180 | the more adenosine is accumulated in our system.

00:02:26.160 | But how sleepy we get for a given amount of adenosine

00:02:31.160 | depends on where we are in this so-called circadian cycle.

00:02:34.700 | And the circadian cycle is just this

00:02:36.900 | very, very well-conserved oscillation.

00:02:39.300 | It's a temperature oscillation

00:02:41.100 | where you go from a low point.

00:02:42.860 | Typically, if you're awake during the day

00:02:44.500 | and you're asleep at night,

00:02:45.980 | your lowest temperature point will be like 3 a.m., 4 a.m.,

00:02:50.660 | and then your temperature will start to creep up

00:02:52.660 | as you wake up in the morning,

00:02:53.900 | and then it'll peak in the late afternoon,

00:02:56.400 | and then it'll start to drop again toward the evening,

00:02:58.520 | and then you get sleep again.

00:02:59.680 | That oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours.

00:03:03.480 | - Plus or minus. - Temperature.

00:03:04.760 | - Yeah, plus or minus an hour.

00:03:06.620 | And I don't, even though I wasn't consulted

00:03:09.640 | at the design phase, I do not think it's a coincidence

00:03:12.720 | that it's aligned to the 24-hour spin of the earth

00:03:16.320 | on its axis, and the fact that we tend to be bathed

00:03:19.580 | in sunlight for a portion of that spin,

00:03:22.460 | and in darkness for the other portion of that spin.

00:03:24.320 | So there are two mechanisms, the Adenosine accumulation

00:03:26.640 | and the Circadian time point that we happen to be at,

00:03:29.680 | and those converge to create a sense

00:03:32.680 | of sleepiness, a wakefulness.

00:03:34.080 | The simple way to reveal these two mechanisms,

00:03:37.140 | to uncouple them, is stay up for 24 hours,

00:03:39.880 | and you will find that even though you've been,

00:03:42.440 | let's say you stay up midnight, 2 a.m., 3 a.m.,

00:03:46.240 | provided you're on a regular schedule,

00:03:48.280 | like that I follow, not like the kind that you follow,

00:03:51.440 | you get, I will get very sleepy around 3, 4 a.m.,

00:03:55.280 | but then around 5 or 6 or 7 a.m.,

00:03:58.200 | which is my normal wake up time,

00:03:59.680 | I'll start to feel more alert,

00:04:01.720 | even though Adenosine has been accumulating further.

00:04:06.000 | So Adenosine is higher for me, the longer I stay up,

00:04:08.920 | and yet I feel more alert than I did a few hours ago,

00:04:11.000 | and that's because these are two interacting forces.

00:04:13.640 | So Adenosine makes you sleepy, and then just how sleepy

00:04:16.520 | or how awake you feel also depends on where you are

00:04:19.000 | in this temperature oscillation that takes 24 hours.

00:04:21.240 | - Okay, so that's fascinating.

00:04:22.280 | So there's a bunch of oscillations going on,

00:04:24.720 | and then they kind of, through the evolutionary process,

00:04:28.160 | have evolved to all be aligned somewhat,

00:04:30.720 | and they interplay.

00:04:31.600 | So you said your body temperature goes up and down,

00:04:35.180 | there's chemicals in your brain that oscillate,

00:04:40.600 | and then there's the actual oscillation

00:04:42.200 | of the sun in the sky.

00:04:46.200 | So all of that together

00:04:50.680 | has some impact on each other,

00:04:52.680 | and somehow that all results in us

00:04:55.240 | wanting to go to sleep every night.

00:04:57.280 | - Right, and we can get right into the meat of this,

00:05:00.120 | I guess we just dove right in.

00:05:01.680 | The temperature oscillation is the effector

00:05:06.800 | of the circadian clock.

00:05:08.080 | So every cell in our body has a 24-hour rhythm

00:05:10.440 | that's dictated by genes like clock, per, b-mal.

00:05:14.640 | This is one of the great successes of biology,

00:05:16.480 | they give a Nobel Prize to Ruppert,

00:05:18.600 | I don't know if Ruppert got it, forgive me,

00:05:19.920 | but sorry, if you got it, Steve,

00:05:21.840 | congratulations, if you didn't,

00:05:22.880 | I'm sorry, I wasn't on the committee.

00:05:25.320 | Nonetheless, did beautiful work,

00:05:26.600 | Steve Ruppert and others,

00:05:28.960 | but Mike Roshbosch and like other people

00:05:31.360 | worked out these mechanisms in flies,

00:05:32.920 | in bacteria, in mammals,

00:05:34.120 | there are these genes that create 24-hour oscillations

00:05:37.400 | in gene expression, et cetera, in every cell of our body.

00:05:40.600 | But what aligns those is a signal

00:05:43.200 | from the master circadian clock,

00:05:44.620 | which sits right above the roof of the mouth,

00:05:46.200 | called the suprachiasmatic nucleus,

00:05:48.640 | and that clock synchronizes all the clocks of the body

00:05:53.040 | to this general temperature rhythm

00:05:55.920 | by way of controlling systemic temperature,

00:05:59.000 | which makes perfect sense.

00:06:00.080 | If you want to create a general oscillation

00:06:02.240 | in all the tissues and organs of the body, use temperature.

00:06:05.560 | And so that work on temperature,

00:06:07.800 | if people want to explore it further,

00:06:08.980 | was Joe Takahashi, who was at Northwestern now,

00:06:11.520 | at UT Southwestern in Dallas.

00:06:14.480 | And it is absolutely clear

00:06:17.360 | that humans do better on a diurnal schedule,

00:06:19.640 | sorry Lex, than a nocturnal schedule.

00:06:22.160 | Because you could say, well,

00:06:23.960 | provided I sleep and push adenosine back downhill,

00:06:27.440 | which is what happens when we sleep,

00:06:28.520 | adenosine is then reduced,

00:06:30.360 | and provided I am on more or less a 24-hour schedule,

00:06:33.480 | why should it matter that I'm awake when the sun's out

00:06:35.760 | and I'm asleep when the sun is down?

00:06:38.700 | But it turns out that if you look at health metrics,

00:06:41.880 | people that are strictly nocturnal

00:06:44.180 | do far worse on immune function,

00:06:47.500 | on metabolic function, et cetera,

00:06:49.260 | than people who are diurnal,

00:06:50.580 | who are awake during the daytime.

00:06:51.740 | And animals that are nocturnal, it's the opposite.

00:06:54.660 | And animals that are so-called crepuscular,

00:06:56.660 | which tend to be active at dawn and at dusk,

00:06:59.660 | this is a beautiful system,

00:07:00.920 | I won't go down that rabbit hole,

00:07:02.120 | but these are animals whose visual systems operate best.

00:07:05.400 | They tend to be predators like mountain lions.

00:07:07.660 | They have optimized their waking times

00:07:10.280 | for the times when the animals they eat

00:07:12.740 | can't see well in those light conditions.

00:07:15.320 | But given the rod-cone ratios in their eyes,

00:07:18.020 | the mountain lion is picking off,

00:07:20.020 | it's like when you see special forces

00:07:22.260 | and they are looking through night vision goggles

00:07:24.660 | and they have a clear advantage, right?

00:07:26.780 | They are seeing in the dark.

00:07:28.220 | That's basically what it's like to be a mountain lion

00:07:30.420 | as opposed to a bunny rabbit.

00:07:32.860 | - Would you say that a lot of these cycles

00:07:35.260 | evolved in the predator-prey relationships

00:07:38.140 | of the different, throughout the food chain?

00:07:39.920 | So it's basically all somehow has to do with survival

00:07:43.200 | in this complicated web of predators and prey?

00:07:46.960 | - Almost certainly.

00:07:47.980 | There had to have been a time in which

00:07:49.760 | humans being awake and active at night

00:07:52.500 | as opposed to during the day

00:07:54.700 | led to higher levels of lethality.

00:07:58.180 | And probably particular in kids,

00:08:00.320 | you imagine kids running around in the dark

00:08:01.900 | and getting where there are a lot of animals

00:08:03.760 | that can see really well under those conditions

00:08:05.620 | and humans can't.

00:08:06.600 | And this would be all pre-electricity.

00:08:08.620 | Even if you're carrying a torch,

00:08:10.060 | I mean the range of illumination on a torch

00:08:12.180 | is nothing compared to what a nighttime predator

00:08:16.900 | like a large cat or something can do.

00:08:19.340 | I mean, they basically, they can see everything

00:08:20.700 | they need to in order to eat us

00:08:22.620 | and not the other way around.

00:08:24.260 | - So one fascinating thing you said

00:08:26.380 | is that blew my mind and we went right past it,

00:08:30.620 | which is the temperature is a really powerful,

00:08:35.540 | like if you were to think about the ways

00:08:37.620 | that different parts of the body,

00:08:38.940 | different systems in the body

00:08:40.540 | would communicate with each other,

00:08:42.460 | temperature would be a really good one.

00:08:46.020 | And that just, I mean maybe it's obvious,

00:08:48.580 | but it kind of blew my mind just now

00:08:51.020 | that yeah, these systems are all distributed.

00:08:55.640 | - Right.

00:08:56.480 | - And they have to kind of,

00:08:58.020 | they're not actually sending signals,

00:08:59.680 | but they're coordinating.

00:09:00.820 | They need some sort of universal thing to look at

00:09:05.460 | in order to coordinate.

00:09:06.980 | And temperature is a nice one to build around.

00:09:11.020 | And that way you could control the behavior

00:09:14.260 | of all these different systems

00:09:15.420 | by controlling the temperature.

00:09:17.340 | - Right.

00:09:18.180 | It's attractive to think of a mechanism

00:09:20.060 | where this master circadian clock secretes a peptide

00:09:23.340 | or something that goes and locks to receptors

00:09:25.520 | in all the cells and gets it just right.

00:09:27.380 | But that leaves far too much room for variability,

00:09:30.020 | binding affinities, cells in a lot of parts of our body

00:09:33.780 | are at different stages of maturation.

00:09:35.540 | They're turning over liver cells and so forth.

00:09:37.820 | And for instance, we have a clock in our gut

00:09:40.260 | and in our liver,

00:09:41.180 | such that if we were just take out your liver

00:09:44.100 | and put it on a table

00:09:45.540 | and just look at the expression of these genes,

00:09:47.340 | it would be in a 24 hour oscillation on its own.

00:09:49.620 | It's independent.

00:09:50.580 | But something has to entrain them

00:09:52.280 | and keep them all synchronized.

00:09:53.580 | And so it's not obvious that it would be temperature.

00:09:55.820 | Takahashi's great gift to biology was to show

00:09:58.420 | that all the stuff coming out of this master circadian clock

00:10:03.420 | at the end of the day,

00:10:04.940 | that's a weird statement, no pun intended,

00:10:06.940 | at the end of the day and the night,

00:10:08.740 | at the end of the story,

00:10:11.120 | it all boils down to making sure

00:10:13.260 | that the temperature of tissues

00:10:14.740 | oscillates in the same fashion.

00:10:16.740 | - That's blowing my mind

00:10:17.740 | and thinking like what other mechanism could possibly exist

00:10:21.780 | to create that kind of oscillation.

00:10:23.540 | - You're Russian, it's cold in Russia for a lot of the year.

00:10:27.700 | The hibernation signal in certain animals

00:10:29.780 | is a remarkable signal.

00:10:30.980 | There are peptides secreted from this very same clock

00:10:34.140 | that in animals like ground squirrels or bears,

00:10:37.700 | they go into a kind of a torpor

00:10:39.860 | where everything, reproduction, metabolism,

00:10:42.260 | everything is reduced while they're in their cave.

00:10:44.260 | They don't actually stay asleep all of winter,

00:10:46.460 | that's a myth.

00:10:47.580 | And they actually do these very dramatic

00:10:50.940 | and periodic arousals from hibernation

00:10:53.460 | where they just shake and shake and shake,

00:10:54.860 | it looks like a seizure

00:10:55.700 | and then they go back under into the torpor.

00:10:57.700 | That's from a peptide that's released.

00:11:00.220 | But that's different

00:11:01.060 | because that's about shutting down the whole system.

00:11:03.620 | It's clear that having these very regular oscillations

00:11:06.740 | every 24 hours is essential for everything

00:11:09.420 | from metabolism to reproduction.

00:11:11.700 | - Is there an optimal temperature for sleep

00:11:17.220 | that I should mention, I think your latest episode,

00:11:21.340 | and people should go check out helixsleep.com/huberman

00:11:27.620 | to support Andrew.

00:11:29.420 | - Thanks for the plug.

00:11:30.520 | (both laughing)

00:11:31.860 | I mean, the amazing thing about the stuff they create,

00:11:34.780 | and oh, and yes, you have a new podcast, that's amazing.

00:11:37.780 | And this past month he did a whole series on sleep,

00:11:41.500 | which people should definitely check out.

00:11:44.100 | There's some podcasts that come out

00:11:45.860 | that just make me wanna be a better human being

00:11:51.240 | by just the quality.

00:11:53.300 | Three Blue One Brown, Grant Sanderson is like that for me.

00:11:57.180 | Just like, wow, this is, education is best.

00:12:00.780 | So Andrew symbolizes that, captures that brilliantly.

00:12:05.540 | So go support the sponsor

00:12:06.780 | so he doesn't stop doing the thing.

00:12:09.100 | So they, I think they have a cooling pad too.

00:12:11.860 | So I, Eight Sleep Mattress sponsors me.

00:12:15.700 | They've been, they sent me a mattress and it's been,

00:12:19.740 | I've never, listen, I used to sleep on the floor.

00:12:23.300 | - Sleep where you fall.

00:12:24.580 | - Sleep where I fall, I don't give a shit.

00:12:26.380 | It doesn't really matter.

00:12:28.660 | So like I would have never bought a nice mattress

00:12:32.260 | 'cause it's like, why, I'm fine.

00:12:33.860 | This is the floor, it's fine.

00:12:35.780 | But it was a game changer

00:12:38.060 | to be able to control temperature.

00:12:40.460 | Like for me, it's cooling.

00:12:42.000 | I don't know what the hell it is.

00:12:44.540 | - Well, you want the brain and nervous system

00:12:46.940 | and rest of the body needs to drop

00:12:48.420 | by about anywhere from two to three degrees

00:12:50.620 | in order to get into your deepest sleep

00:12:52.620 | and transition to sleep.

00:12:54.140 | That's really gonna help.

00:12:55.100 | You don't wanna be cold that you're bothered

00:12:57.660 | and can't fall asleep.

00:12:58.660 | But that's why some people like it really cold in the room

00:13:00.800 | and under a warm blanket or with socks on for some people.

00:13:04.260 | That can be good because this temperature oscillation

00:13:07.680 | is such that as your temperature is dropping,

00:13:10.540 | that correlates with the,

00:13:11.900 | generally with the most sleepy phase

00:13:13.980 | of your circadian cycle.

00:13:16.180 | So cool is better for falling and staying asleep

00:13:18.980 | and sleeping deeply.

00:13:20.060 | - And then I guess like that's what Eight Sleep showed.

00:13:22.820 | They have like an app is it warms back up to wake you up.

00:13:27.560 | The idea that I haven't actually used it.

00:13:29.620 | I'm like, this is stupid.

00:13:31.000 | People say it works,

00:13:33.780 | but I just keep it the same temperature

00:13:35.580 | throughout the night.

00:13:36.900 | But warming it up, I guess wakes you up,

00:13:40.740 | which is fascinating.

00:13:42.580 | - Yeah, because the wake up signal is,

00:13:45.380 | it's interesting to think about it.

00:13:46.300 | It's not just correlated

00:13:47.580 | with an increase in body temperature.

00:13:49.020 | The increase in body temperature

00:13:50.860 | is triggering the release of cortisol from your adrenals.

00:13:53.820 | And that's the wake up signal.

00:13:55.380 | - Do you think it's absolute temperatures

00:13:56.840 | we're talking about is just even relative,

00:13:59.200 | just even just the decrease?

00:14:00.820 | - Well, everyone's gonna have

00:14:01.660 | slightly different basal temperature.

00:14:03.300 | The idea that everybody should be 98.6.

00:14:05.780 | I mean, that's a myth.

00:14:07.220 | And there's a theories that body temperature overall

00:14:09.820 | has been dropping in the last 50 years or so.

00:14:12.020 | I doubt that's true for somebody who is athletic like you

00:14:14.980 | and is young and healthy.

00:14:17.340 | But basically the coldest period of that 24 hour cycle

00:14:22.340 | is when you are going to be sleepiest.

00:14:24.820 | There's actually a period within that 24 hour cycle.

00:14:27.220 | It's a time point called your temperature minimum.

00:14:30.000 | And your temperature minimum tends to be

00:14:32.400 | about two hours before your typical wake up time.

00:14:36.180 | I'm not talking about the wake up time

00:14:37.300 | in the middle of the night where you go use the bathroom

00:14:39.020 | or where you set an alarm to go catch a flight.

00:14:40.580 | I mean, if you were to just allow yourself

00:14:42.200 | to sleep without a clock for a few days,

00:14:44.740 | measure when you typically wake up,

00:14:46.260 | two hours before then is your temperature minimum.

00:14:48.620 | And that temperature minimum turns out

00:14:50.300 | to be a very important landmark in your circadian cycle.

00:14:54.820 | Because it turns out that if you get bright light

00:14:59.180 | in your eyes in the hours immediately

00:15:02.740 | before your temperature minimum,

00:15:04.500 | so two to four hours or anytime within the two

00:15:09.180 | or four hour window before that temperature minimum,

00:15:11.120 | you are going to what's called delay your circadian clock.

00:15:14.340 | The next day, that whole oscillation is going to move forward.

00:15:18.060 | It'll make you want to go to sleep later

00:15:19.820 | and wake up later.

00:15:20.980 | Whereas if you get bright light in your eyes

00:15:22.780 | in the hours after that temperature minimum,

00:15:26.140 | so let's say for me, typical wake up time is 6 a.m.

00:15:28.660 | My temperature minimum is somewhere around 4 a.m.

00:15:30.780 | If I get bright light in my eyes, 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 7 a.m.,

00:15:34.560 | it's going to advance that oscillation

00:15:37.580 | so that I'll want to go to bed earlier

00:15:39.260 | and wake up earlier the subsequent nights.

00:15:41.800 | So you might say, wait, but most nights I go to sleep

00:15:44.700 | and wake up at more or less the same time.

00:15:46.360 | Why is that?

00:15:47.200 | And that's because the same thing

00:15:48.840 | is happening on both sides.

00:15:49.980 | You are both advancing your clock a little bit

00:15:52.180 | and assuming that you're looking at light in the evening,

00:15:55.140 | you're also delaying your clock a little bit.

00:15:57.100 | So you get kind of captured in between

00:15:58.660 | and then your rhythm more or less oscillates

00:16:01.140 | at the same period as we say, as the spin of the earth.

00:16:05.020 | Unless you're like you where you're,

00:16:07.040 | I get text messages from you sometimes at odd hours.

00:16:10.120 | And if you're on the East Coast,

00:16:12.060 | then I know that you had to have been pulling

00:16:14.180 | basically an all nighter.

00:16:15.020 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:16:16.180 | That's the interesting point about the messiness of sleep.

00:16:21.180 | So most people seem to perform the best

00:16:24.300 | when they have like a regular sleep schedule.

00:16:26.620 | I perhaps am the same, but I don't know that.

00:16:32.580 | And I tend to believe that you can also perform

00:16:36.700 | relatively optimally with chaos of sleep,

00:16:40.860 | of like a weird soup of like,

00:16:46.260 | power naps and all nighters and all of that.

00:16:49.540 | As long as you're like happy doing what you love.

00:16:54.540 | And maybe you can tell me what you think about this.

00:17:01.060 | I tend to, for myself, try to minimize stress in life.

00:17:06.540 | So what I found for myself with diet, with sleep,

00:17:11.540 | is that if I obsess about it being perfect,

00:17:15.420 | then I'll actually stress quite a bit when it's not.

00:17:18.620 | Like I'll feel shitty when I don't get enough sleep

00:17:23.620 | because I know I should be getting more sleep

00:17:27.420 | as opposed to the actual physiological effects

00:17:30.620 | of not getting enough sleep.

00:17:32.220 | I find if I just accept whatever the hell happens,

00:17:35.100 | happens and smile and just take it all in,

00:17:39.420 | like David Goggins style, like if it sucks,

00:17:42.620 | it's even better or what is it?

00:17:45.140 | Jaco's like good or whatever he says.

00:17:47.260 | - Right, I think that several things that you said

00:17:50.380 | they're important, but I agree that one can have

00:17:53.760 | a dysregulated sleep schedule

00:17:55.780 | and still be a happy person and productive.

00:17:58.380 | In much of my life, I've pulled all nighters

00:18:00.220 | and slept weird schedules.

00:18:03.220 | I think many people can probably relate to going to sleep,

00:18:06.520 | waking up four hours later,

00:18:07.740 | being up for an hour or two on your computer,

00:18:09.420 | then going back to sleep and getting amazing sleep

00:18:11.260 | the next day functioning.

00:18:12.860 | I think it's important that people have highlighted

00:18:17.020 | the importance of sleep and getting enough rest.

00:18:20.880 | I do think it's gone too far

00:18:22.960 | and now I'm editorializing a little bit,

00:18:24.580 | but I think that we've created this anxiety about sleep

00:18:28.540 | that if we don't sleep enough, we're going to get dementia.

00:18:30.820 | If we don't get sleep, then the reproductive axis

00:18:34.100 | is going to completely crash.

00:18:36.220 | There's a lot of evidence to the contrary

00:18:39.380 | and as well, just based on personal experience

00:18:42.220 | and based on the fact that sure,

00:18:44.660 | it may be that a solid eight hours

00:18:46.780 | with no interruptions in there or nine or 10

00:18:50.480 | could do great benefit, but you can do really well

00:18:53.460 | if you do what you say, which is you wake up,

00:18:55.980 | you don't want to start stressing about it,

00:18:57.500 | creating this meta stress about sleep.

00:19:00.020 | Being happy is actually one of the most powerful things

00:19:04.220 | that you can do, not allowing yourself

00:19:05.700 | to go down that rabbit hole of stress

00:19:07.740 | for the following reason, a lot of our fatigue

00:19:11.380 | is not due just to the buildup of adenosine or time of day,

00:19:14.900 | the circadian thing we were talking about earlier.

00:19:16.500 | An additional factor is that effort

00:19:19.780 | is related to the release of epinephrine,

00:19:22.620 | of adrenaline in our brain and body.

00:19:24.420 | At some point, those levels get so high

00:19:28.740 | that we get stressed mentally,

00:19:32.340 | we get stressed physically and we want to give up.

00:19:34.420 | There are good data published in Cell

00:19:36.180 | showing that that signal, the epinephrine signal

00:19:38.620 | is eventually accumulates and there's a quick point.

00:19:42.060 | Dopamine, the molecule of pursuit and reward

00:19:45.340 | and feeling good, resets our ability to be in effort.

00:19:49.820 | In fact, a lot of people don't know this,

00:19:52.260 | but dopamine is actually what epinephrine is made from.

00:19:56.660 | If you look at the biochemical cascade,

00:19:58.260 | it starts with tyrosine, which is rich

00:20:00.420 | and found in red meats and things of that sort.

00:20:03.220 | And tyrosine is eventually converted

00:20:05.200 | through things like L-DOPA into dopamine.

00:20:07.460 | Dopamine is made into epinephrine.

00:20:09.460 | So, I mean, this sounds kind of new agey,

00:20:11.780 | but happiness, joy and pleasure in what you're doing

00:20:16.140 | creates a chemical milieu that provides more

00:20:20.340 | of the chemicals that allow for effort.

00:20:22.820 | And there's nothing new agey about that.

00:20:24.260 | It's in every biochemistry textbook.

00:20:26.080 | It's in every decent neuroscience textbook.

00:20:28.140 | They just don't talk about the happiness part.

00:20:29.580 | They just talk about the dopamine part.

00:20:31.380 | So I think that limiting your stress

00:20:33.420 | and at least recognizing, okay,

00:20:35.200 | if you're pulling an all nighter,

00:20:36.320 | you're somehow on messed up sleep,

00:20:38.480 | that there is going to be a point in that 24 hour cycle

00:20:43.360 | where your brain is not trustworthy,

00:20:46.060 | where your mental state is not worth placing

00:20:49.920 | too much weight on because you are near

00:20:51.920 | that temperature minimum.

00:20:53.360 | And near that temperature minimum,

00:20:54.880 | which is correlates to that two hour,

00:20:57.200 | about two hours before you would normally wake up,

00:21:00.360 | the brain is hobbling along.

00:21:03.860 | And anything you feel or think at that time

00:21:06.880 | should not be given too much value.

00:21:09.420 | But if you can trick yourself into thinking

00:21:11.760 | that's the pleasure point,

00:21:13.260 | you afford yourself a huge advantage.

00:21:15.240 | There's a study done by a colleague of mine at Stanford

00:21:17.600 | that showed that positive anticipation

00:21:20.560 | about the next day events actually is a powerful metric

00:21:25.560 | for creating quality sleep,

00:21:29.400 | even if the sleep is very reduced.

00:21:31.640 | And you'll love this one.

00:21:32.960 | And a lot of people might be critical of this,

00:21:36.040 | so I just want to make sure that,

00:21:36.940 | so this is work done out of Harvard Medical.

00:21:40.040 | It was Bob Stigold's lab,

00:21:42.760 | and Emily Hoagland did this study that showed

00:21:45.960 | looking at performance on OCHEM scores.

00:21:48.840 | Okay, so organic chemistry at Harvard

00:21:50.120 | is pretty tough subject, highly motivated.

00:21:52.600 | A number of very good control groups in this study.

00:21:55.960 | What she showed was that consistency

00:21:57.920 | of total sleep duration was far more important

00:22:01.720 | for performance on these exams

00:22:04.200 | than total sleep duration itself.

00:22:06.800 | So it's not that just getting more sleep

00:22:08.720 | allows you to perform better.

00:22:10.280 | Consistently getting about the same amount of sleep

00:22:13.680 | is better for performance, at least on OCHEM,

00:22:17.720 | than just getting more.

00:22:19.760 | - That's interesting.

00:22:20.600 | So that's referring to more

00:22:22.800 | that there should be a consistent habit

00:22:25.440 | versus the total amount.

00:22:27.680 | - To me, the entirety of the picture of sleep

00:22:30.480 | is similar to nutrition in that it feels like

00:22:36.280 | there's so many variables involved,

00:22:40.040 | and it's so person-specific.

00:22:42.400 | So a lot of studies, I mean, this is the way of science,

00:22:45.960 | has to look and aggregate the effects on sleep.

00:22:49.560 | It doesn't focus on high performers,

00:22:52.440 | which are individuals, ultimately.

00:22:55.760 | The question isn't, so it's a very important question,

00:22:59.200 | is what kind of diet fights obesity, reduces obesity?

00:23:04.200 | It's another question, what kind of diet

00:23:06.480 | allows David Goggins to be the best version of himself?

00:23:09.240 | So these high performers in different avenues.

00:23:11.920 | And the same thing with sleep.

00:23:14.020 | People that tell me that I should get eight hours of sleep,

00:23:17.600 | it's like, I mean, I get it, and they may be right,

00:23:24.760 | but they may be very wrong.

00:23:26.320 | - There's no evidence that eight is better than six,

00:23:29.480 | that you could very well do better on six than on eight.

00:23:33.440 | There are a few other things that turn out to be

00:23:36.120 | strong parameters for success in this domain.

00:23:38.440 | For instance, your entire life, waking or asleep,

00:23:42.160 | is broken up into these 90-minute ultradian cycles.

00:23:44.760 | If you look at ability to attend or do math problems

00:23:47.520 | or do anything, drive, performance tends to ramp up slowly

00:23:52.800 | within a 90-minute cycle, peak, and then come down

00:23:55.360 | at the end of that 90-minute cycle.

00:23:56.720 | And in sleep, we go through these stage one, two, three,

00:23:59.920 | four, REM, et cetera, we'll talk more about that

00:24:02.040 | if you like, those on 90-minute ultradian cycles as well.

00:24:05.440 | Ending your sleep after a 90-minute cycle,

00:24:08.720 | near the end of a 90-minute cycle,

00:24:10.820 | say at the end of six hours, in many cases is better

00:24:14.280 | for you than sleeping an additional hour, seven hours,

00:24:17.160 | and waking up in the middle of an ultradian cycle.

00:24:19.360 | And there are a few apps that can measure this

00:24:21.200 | based on body movements and things like that,

00:24:23.240 | that have your alarm go off

00:24:25.800 | at the end of an ultradian cycle.

00:24:27.880 | And if you wake up in the middle of an ultradian cycle,

00:24:30.480 | sometimes, not always, you can be very groggy

00:24:32.600 | for a long period of time.

00:24:34.240 | I certainly do better on six hours than I do on seven.

00:24:37.560 | I happen to like an eight-hour sleep, it feels great,

00:24:40.560 | but I haven't slept an entire eight hours

00:24:43.020 | without waking up in the middle of the night at some point

00:24:45.160 | in, I don't know, forever, I can't remember.

00:24:49.080 | It's probably some point in infancy,

00:24:50.840 | but, and I function well during the day.

00:24:53.120 | I think that that's a big,

00:24:55.120 | that's an important parameter,

00:24:57.220 | is how do you feel during the day?

00:24:58.960 | Almost everybody experiences some sort of dip in energy

00:25:02.040 | in the late afternoon,

00:25:03.000 | or what would correlate to their temperature peak.

00:25:05.320 | And that's a good time of day

00:25:06.680 | to get either a 90-minute or less nap,

00:25:10.560 | or if you're not a napper, or you can't nap,

00:25:13.960 | feet elevated has been shown to be good

00:25:17.860 | for clear out of some of this,

00:25:19.860 | the glymphatic system is this kind of like

00:25:22.580 | sewer system of the brain that you can clear stuff out.

00:25:24.740 | So legs elevated, or one thing that I'm a big proponent of,

00:25:29.060 | and that my lab has been studying,

00:25:30.220 | is what I now call NSDR, non-sleep deep rest.

00:25:34.300 | And this is just lying down.

00:25:36.340 | There are some scripts that we're going to put out there soon

00:25:38.460 | as a free resource.

00:25:40.060 | There's some hypnosis scripts

00:25:41.280 | that my colleague David Spiegel has put out there

00:25:42.820 | as a free resource.

00:25:44.100 | But non-sleep deep rest is allowing your system

00:25:46.640 | to drop into states of real calm

00:25:49.940 | that allow you to get better at falling asleep later.

00:25:52.500 | And they can be very restorative

00:25:53.820 | for cognitive and motor function.

00:25:55.620 | There's at least one study out of Denmark

00:25:58.060 | that shows that the basal ganglia,

00:26:01.340 | which is an area of the brain

00:26:02.340 | that's involved in motor planning and action,

00:26:04.300 | one of these 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocols

00:26:07.380 | resets levels of neuromodulators

00:26:09.260 | like dopamine in the basal ganglia

00:26:10.820 | to the same levels that they were

00:26:13.220 | right after a long night's sleep.

00:26:15.300 | So I also respectfully or semi-respectfully disagree

00:26:20.300 | with the idea that you can't recover lost sleep.

00:26:23.140 | What does that mean?

00:26:24.080 | I mean, there's no IRS for sleep.

00:26:26.200 | So what does it mean to be in debt for sleep?

00:26:29.240 | If you're falling asleep during the day and you're sleepy,

00:26:31.800 | like you're falling asleep,

00:26:32.980 | that's a good sign of insomnia.

00:26:35.280 | It means you're not sleeping enough at night.

00:26:37.040 | If you're fatigued during the day,

00:26:38.740 | but you're not falling asleep,

00:26:40.240 | so you're just exhausted,

00:26:41.360 | but you're not finding yourself falling asleep in meetings

00:26:43.560 | and in conversation,

00:26:45.080 | then chances are you're fatiguing your system

00:26:47.900 | through something else,

00:26:48.860 | like a long run in the middle of the night in Boston

00:26:52.620 | or whatever it is that you're up to lately at 3 a.m.

00:26:55.500 | - Yes, there is a magic to the nap.

00:26:58.040 | And maybe you could speak to the,

00:27:01.420 | 'cause you mentioned these protocols

00:27:03.020 | that don't necessarily, so they're non-sleep.

00:27:06.820 | But to me, the nap, one or two a day,

00:27:13.060 | can almost, irrespective of how much sleep

00:27:16.400 | I get the night before,

00:27:17.760 | have a fundamental change in my mood and my performance.

00:27:22.160 | - For the better?

00:27:23.000 | - For the better, for the better.

00:27:24.040 | - Yeah, likewise.

00:27:24.960 | - So I do tend to kind of experiment with durations.

00:27:29.760 | It's consistently surprising to me

00:27:33.520 | how a nap of 10 minutes, I don't know,

00:27:36.920 | maybe you could speak to the perfect duration of a nap,

00:27:39.680 | but I find that it's like magic

00:27:43.100 | that a short nap does as much good

00:27:46.780 | and often better than a longer one for me, for me.

00:27:50.180 | Subjective experience.

00:27:51.020 | - What would be a longer one?

00:27:51.980 | Longer than 90 minutes?

00:27:53.380 | - No, no, like 90 minutes,

00:27:55.060 | but longer than 90, like two hours.

00:27:57.060 | - Yeah, that's dropping you,

00:27:58.220 | starting to drop you into REM sleep.

00:27:59.780 | And even if it's a tiny amount of REM sleep,

00:28:01.940 | people can come out of those naps kind of disoriented.

00:28:04.700 | I mean, remember in sleep, space and time

00:28:06.460 | are totally uncoupled.

00:28:08.260 | And so that's an odd state to reenter the world in

00:28:12.400 | if you're not gonna stay there for a while,

00:28:13.960 | like for a good night's sleep.

00:28:15.240 | I think a 20 minute nap is pretty fantastic.

00:28:18.920 | - Would you say that's the,

00:28:19.940 | if you were to recommend to the general,

00:28:21.960 | it's very weird to recommend anything

00:28:24.720 | to the general populace

00:28:25.920 | because obviously it's very person specific,

00:28:28.440 | but what's a good one will you say to friends?

00:28:31.440 | Is 20 minutes a good time?

00:28:32.560 | - 20 or 30 minutes.

00:28:34.120 | 20 or 30 minutes 'cause you're going,

00:28:35.460 | unless you're sleep deprived,

00:28:37.400 | you're going to stay out of REM sleep,

00:28:40.060 | rapid eye movement sleep.

00:28:41.160 | If you're sleep deprived, you'll drop right into it.

00:28:43.120 | If you've ever traveled and you're really jet lagged,

00:28:45.100 | you go to the hotel, you lay down for one second,

00:28:46.960 | all of a sudden you're just like,

00:28:49.360 | you're in a psychedelic dream,

00:28:51.460 | which can be pretty great too.

00:28:54.120 | But I think that 20, 30 minutes,

00:28:58.360 | and if you can't sleep, some people have trouble napping,

00:29:01.840 | then learning to relax the body as much as possible,

00:29:04.760 | like trying to remove all expression from your face,

00:29:07.160 | completely letting your body kind of float.

00:29:10.080 | If people have a hard time relaxing when they're awake,

00:29:13.360 | there's some terrific clinically

00:29:15.700 | and research tested hypnosis protocols

00:29:18.480 | that we could provide links to that are cost-free

00:29:21.000 | and that teach you how to just completely

00:29:23.300 | release the alertness button and you just start drifting.

00:29:28.000 | Now, the problem is if you don't have an alarm

00:29:31.160 | or something to go off,

00:29:32.720 | the other day I did one and I'm almost embarrassed

00:29:35.440 | to say this, but there's a component of it

00:29:36.680 | where you actually are supposed to let your hand float up

00:29:38.600 | because it's a hypnosis script.

00:29:40.480 | So they, it's my colleague, David Spiegel,

00:29:42.680 | in the script, he says, let your hand float up.

00:29:46.120 | I woke up an hour later and my hand was still floating.

00:29:48.640 | - Wow, that's awesome.

00:29:49.680 | - And I was completely relaxed.

00:29:52.160 | So hypnosis is just a matter of going deep relaxation,

00:29:56.620 | narrowing of context, and it's all self-imposed.

00:29:59.580 | A lot of people think that hypnosis is like the stage thing

00:30:01.960 | with the pendant and the chicken,

00:30:03.880 | people fucking like chickens,

00:30:05.680 | but real hypnosis is self-hypnosis.

00:30:08.660 | You're learning to, it involves some shifts in the way

00:30:11.940 | that you, the hypnotic induction involves looking up,

00:30:15.080 | closing your eyes, slowly deep breath,

00:30:16.760 | and then imagine yourself floating.

00:30:19.200 | And people vary on a scale of about one to four,

00:30:23.040 | four being the most easily hypnotized.

00:30:25.640 | There are a few people who it's very hard for them

00:30:27.440 | to allow themselves to go into these states,

00:30:29.920 | but for most people, they just, they're gone.

00:30:33.000 | And it's nice if you can have access to those states,

00:30:36.380 | because when you come out of it, you feel amazing.

00:30:39.320 | You feel like you slept the whole night,

00:30:40.720 | at least most people report that.

00:30:42.600 | - So refresh, alert.

00:30:43.880 | - Ready to go.

00:30:44.720 | I mean, basically you're ready.

00:30:46.520 | Yeah, I know you have this interesting challenge coming up,

00:30:49.600 | and I'm curious what you're going to do to reset in the hours

00:30:52.640 | that the frequency of running is every four hours.

00:30:55.860 | It's not going to allow you to get any more

00:30:57.440 | than a couple hours sleep in between.

00:30:59.360 | - A couple hours, so we should tell to people,

00:31:01.120 | I'd be curious to get your thoughts and advice on it.

00:31:03.800 | I'm on March 5th, running 48 miles with Mr. David Goggins.

00:31:08.800 | So four miles every four hours, and people should join us.

00:31:14.560 | That madman is going to be live on Instagram,

00:31:19.280 | starting at 8 p.m. Pacific on March 5th.

00:31:23.360 | So-- - You're gonna join him

00:31:24.480 | in person? - In person.

00:31:26.000 | - Undisclosed location. - Undisclosed location.

00:31:28.960 | And I was trying to clarify, like,

00:31:30.720 | okay, so we're gonna, like,

00:31:33.840 | there'll be like friendly people around or something.

00:31:36.440 | No, it's just me and him. - Friendly people.

00:31:38.280 | - I don't know, like, I just feel it's very difficult

00:31:41.920 | to be with David alone in a room.

00:31:45.600 | - I imagine his, I mean, I've done some work with David.

00:31:47.760 | His energy is infectious.

00:31:49.480 | - Yeah.

00:31:50.320 | - That's an intense schedule,

00:31:52.160 | and the periodicity of those four hour,

00:31:56.160 | every four hours, four miles,

00:31:57.920 | means that there's no chance

00:31:59.160 | of catching an extended block of sleep.

00:32:01.800 | - So it's about three hours that you have

00:32:04.120 | non-exercising every time.

00:32:05.720 | And of course, it takes time to try to fall asleep,

00:32:09.960 | and there's an intensity to the whole thing.

00:32:11.800 | I mean, it's probably impossible to get anything more

00:32:16.800 | than two hours of sleep if you wanted to.

00:32:19.860 | So the optimal thing is probably, from the sound of it,

00:32:23.200 | I'd be curious to see what you think,

00:32:25.280 | but like it's getting a few 90 minute naps.

00:32:29.160 | - Yeah, well, I thought about this a bit

00:32:31.440 | before we met up today.

00:32:33.440 | So I think there are two general approaches that could work,

00:32:37.480 | neither one necessarily better than the other.

00:32:40.300 | One would be just to hammer through the whole thing,

00:32:44.800 | just to get your level of alertness and adrenaline

00:32:48.160 | ramped up so that you don't expect yourself to sleep.

00:32:52.480 | There are certain advantages there.

00:32:53.680 | One is a subjective kind of emotional advantages,

00:32:56.240 | which is if you can't sleep,

00:32:57.440 | you're not going to be stressed about that.

00:32:59.520 | And if you do fall asleep, it's a bonus,

00:33:01.800 | provided you wake up and you don't look up

00:33:03.520 | and you realize David's been out running for half an hour

00:33:06.100 | and you're behind, right?

00:33:07.480 | But chances are that's not the way it'll go.

00:33:09.120 | You'll set an alarm.

00:33:09.960 | So that's one approach.

00:33:11.920 | And I grabbed that from, you know,

00:33:14.280 | I've a couple of friends who were in the SEAL teams,

00:33:17.920 | and they'll say that, you know, during BUD/S

00:33:19.400 | there's this infamous hell week,

00:33:20.720 | and there's this five day, excuse me,

00:33:23.000 | definitely five days of no sleep.

00:33:25.060 | Although there is a component where they offer a nap

00:33:27.320 | at one particular point.

00:33:29.200 | And a lot of people will say that it's worse

00:33:32.680 | to go down for that nap and then be woken up

00:33:35.480 | 20 minutes later than to just stay up.

00:33:38.080 | So that's one option.

00:33:39.620 | Let's call it the full blitz hammer through option.

00:33:43.400 | And if you happen to fall asleep, you do.

00:33:45.320 | - Bonus, yeah. - It's a bonus.

00:33:46.920 | The other one would be to really anchor

00:33:49.880 | in these ultradian cycles.

00:33:51.120 | So coming back from a run,

00:33:52.720 | unless you're thoroughly exhausted,

00:33:55.440 | you're probably going to have a few minutes

00:33:56.880 | where you're going to want to stay awake.

00:33:58.760 | It's going to be hard to just immediately fall asleep.

00:34:01.360 | And getting as much sleep as you can

00:34:04.080 | in the intervening periods,

00:34:06.120 | provided that you guys aren't posting constantly

00:34:08.640 | or doing something else.

00:34:09.640 | You also, there's a question of whether or not

00:34:10.960 | you want to nourish, whether or not you want to eat

00:34:12.800 | or not in that time.

00:34:14.560 | Anytime we put food in our gut,

00:34:16.320 | I don't care if it's meat or oatmeal

00:34:20.320 | or broccoli or cardboard,

00:34:22.640 | you're drawing blood into the gut.

00:34:24.440 | And so you are going to divert some energy

00:34:27.200 | towards digestion and it's going to make you sleepy.

00:34:29.320 | There's a reason why the rest and digest,

00:34:31.080 | the parasympathetic nervous system is called that.

00:34:33.560 | So you could decide that you were only going to sleep

00:34:36.840 | in certain, in between certain blocks.

00:34:39.720 | That would be another way to think about this.

00:34:41.520 | - That, 'cause I did this last year.

00:34:45.240 | I ran very slow.

00:34:47.280 | Some of it was walking.

00:34:48.440 | I was listening to audio books.

00:34:49.520 | And one of the biggest mistakes I did

00:34:51.200 | is to overeat during that time.

00:34:54.120 | It was, it made the experience very unpleasant.

00:34:56.440 | So I have been considering basically eating almost nothing

00:35:00.240 | throughout the day.

00:35:01.360 | - Being fasted will increase alertness

00:35:03.520 | because high levels of epinephrine in your system

00:35:05.960 | from fasting.

00:35:07.040 | You just think about fasting or being thirsty

00:35:09.520 | before you get exhausted.

00:35:10.800 | People always think, if I don't eat, I'm going to be tired.

00:35:12.840 | No, the energy that you derive from food

00:35:15.800 | is going to be used from glycogen.

00:35:18.440 | And after a long storage and conversion process.

00:35:20.560 | So the food that you eat is going to consume energy

00:35:23.440 | to digest.

00:35:24.720 | And so a lot of people feel better fasted.

00:35:26.880 | And presumably throughout history,

00:35:29.300 | people have fasted for long periods of time

00:35:31.080 | and had to stay up for two or three days.

00:35:32.740 | And God forbid, if a family member is sick,

00:35:35.700 | you can stay awake in the hospital without any trouble.

00:35:38.160 | So that alertness system, and it's all mental.

00:35:41.480 | Actually, and then there's a third.

00:35:45.200 | So you could try and sleep or take care in between.

00:35:48.040 | - Yes.

00:35:48.880 | - Yeah, and then there's a third approach.

00:35:50.080 | - Uh-oh, yeah.

00:35:51.340 | - But I didn't come up with it, but David did.

00:35:54.440 | So I actually texted him earlier

00:35:57.120 | because I had a feeling that I heard

00:35:58.880 | that you were going to do this challenge.

00:36:00.960 | So I asked David.

00:36:02.660 | So these are David Goggins words, not mine.

00:36:08.720 | - Okay.

00:36:09.560 | - One.

00:36:10.400 | [laughing]

00:36:12.000 | Being organized is super important.

00:36:14.000 | Two, you want to waste as little time as possible.

00:36:17.740 | Three, you need to eat, sleep, and rehab

00:36:21.400 | in as little time as possible

00:36:22.760 | so you can sleep as much as possible.

00:36:25.000 | Oh, interesting.

00:36:25.840 | By the way, this is the first time I'm reading this.

00:36:27.320 | - Yeah.

00:36:28.920 | - Four, meal prep and gear prep, et cetera,

00:36:31.800 | are very important.

00:36:32.920 | That's consistent with everything I know about military.

00:36:35.900 | They don't leave too much to chance.

00:36:39.600 | Five, again, these are David's words.

00:36:42.520 | All that said, he's fucked on most all that

00:36:45.000 | because he'll be interviewing me before or after.

00:36:47.480 | I will also be interviewing him.

00:36:49.600 | - Oh, shit.

00:36:51.260 | - Five, long story short,

00:36:53.000 | the only thing that might help is a very special pill.

00:36:55.640 | Ooh, this is interesting.

00:36:57.520 | They're called SIU pills.

00:36:59.880 | Hard to get, but I believe he can get them.

00:37:02.120 | SIU stands for suck it up.

00:37:04.340 | Tell him to grab his balls.

00:37:07.800 | He will find those pills there.

00:37:09.380 | [laughing]

00:37:11.760 | - That's number six, all right.

00:37:13.200 | - And then the last one, stay hard, brother.

00:37:15.720 | - Stay hard, brother.

00:37:17.720 | - Amen.

00:37:19.040 | That was one of the other things

00:37:21.120 | that I think makes this challenging

00:37:22.840 | is that I'll be doing a podcast throughout.

00:37:26.000 | So first of all, I'll do a long one before and after,

00:37:28.700 | but also I'll have to come up

00:37:32.000 | with things to talk to him about.

00:37:34.400 | So it's a different thing to do something privately

00:37:39.400 | and then publicly.

00:37:41.160 | I know it doesn't seem that way,

00:37:43.080 | but one of the hardest,

00:37:46.580 | the hardest thing I had to do last time

00:37:49.400 | was to turn on the camera and talk to the camera.

00:37:52.440 | 'Cause last time I did it,

00:37:54.580 | I recorded every single time I did a leg,

00:37:57.880 | I recorded something I'm grateful for.

00:38:00.120 | It's just kind of unrelated.

00:38:01.800 | I'm not a fan of talking about how I'm feeling

00:38:05.100 | or how the run is going.

00:38:06.720 | I wanna do something totally unrelated to the run

00:38:09.600 | with the run as the background,

00:38:12.520 | sort of something I'm grateful for,

00:38:14.240 | just any kind of interesting discussion.

00:38:16.760 | - Gratitude, I mean, I hate the word hack,

00:38:20.240 | like, oh, it's a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin.

00:38:22.680 | I don't like the word hack because A,

00:38:24.680 | it's disrespectful to hackers who do a real thing.

00:38:27.240 | And B, a hack implies that it's some sort of trick

00:38:31.600 | that you're kind of gaming the system.

00:38:35.080 | You know, what works is mechanism, right?

00:38:38.000 | Biological mechanisms were designed to work

00:38:41.520 | and they were selected for to work

00:38:44.000 | under variable conditions.

00:38:45.920 | And as you know, and I know,

00:38:47.000 | and we have great appreciation for the fact

00:38:49.360 | that the nervous system was designed

00:38:50.860 | to be an adaptive machine

00:38:52.320 | so that you don't have to sleep eight hours every night.

00:38:55.720 | You can do this thing.

00:38:57.840 | And things like gratitude allow you

00:39:00.400 | to tap into chemical resources.

00:39:03.480 | And that's not a hack.

00:39:04.920 | The fact that being grateful for something external

00:39:07.360 | to the event happens to release serotonin

00:39:10.640 | and have a certain soothing effect or dopamine

00:39:13.700 | and give you more epinephrine and let you go further,

00:39:16.920 | that's not a hack.

00:39:18.000 | That's actually what allowed the human machine

00:39:20.960 | to evolve to the point that it is now.

00:39:23.120 | Every time, you know, an inventor eventually created

00:39:26.760 | something that worked and felt great about it,

00:39:28.680 | you can imagine that the first, you know, air flight

00:39:31.760 | felt pretty awesome and motivated those people

00:39:34.560 | to go on and do more.

00:39:35.800 | They didn't just go on, you know, yawning, go have a beer.

00:39:39.160 | So being able to access the genuine internal states

00:39:43.960 | of gratitude and reward works.

00:39:46.780 | You can't trick the system.

00:39:48.560 | You can't pretend that you're grateful for something.

00:39:50.780 | But if you can identify or attach yourself

00:39:52.720 | to some larger goal or something

00:39:55.180 | that's deeply gratifying to you,

00:39:57.120 | or place it in service to a relative that passed away

00:40:00.840 | that you care a lot about, that's not a hack.

00:40:04.480 | That's accessing the deepest components

00:40:07.160 | of your nervous system.

00:40:08.360 | And to steal your kind of lingo,

00:40:10.480 | you know, there's real beauty there, right?

00:40:12.280 | (both laughing)

00:40:13.680 | - Yeah, but for an introvert like myself,

00:40:15.920 | and I think David, I don't know if he's an introvert,

00:40:17.960 | but like he's not, despite the fact that he has written

00:40:22.760 | a great book and he communicates,

00:40:24.720 | he puts himself out there,

00:40:25.840 | he's not really a fan of communication.

00:40:28.600 | He's not, I don't know if he's energized

00:40:31.260 | by speaking his mind.

00:40:33.760 | - I don't know well enough to know.

00:40:34.960 | I mean, we've done a little bit of work together

00:40:36.800 | and we're in communication now and again.

00:40:38.960 | He's obviously super impressive.

00:40:40.600 | I don't know.

00:40:42.400 | It seems like he's a pretty private guy.

00:40:44.900 | So I don't have access to that.

00:40:47.920 | - So for me, I'll just speak to myself,

00:40:50.040 | and I think David is the same,

00:40:51.240 | but I'll speak to myself that it was a hugely draining thing

00:40:55.200 | not to experience the gratitude, experiencing the gratitude,

00:40:59.000 | just like you're saying is really energizing.

00:41:03.040 | And it's a powerful thing.

00:41:04.640 | It can lift up your mood,

00:41:08.400 | but to turn on the camera and have to use words,

00:41:12.800 | which is very difficult to do,

00:41:14.200 | to explain like what you're feeling

00:41:18.360 | and do it in a way that you know a bunch of people

00:41:20.760 | will be watching is really draining.

00:41:23.680 | And one of the things I'm concerned about

00:41:26.240 | that in this whole process,

00:41:29.200 | how do I keep my mind sharp

00:41:32.240 | while also keeping the physical performance sharp?

00:41:35.880 | And that's a little bit scary

00:41:38.040 | because talking to David, like actually intellectually sharp,

00:41:42.680 | like thinking, being charismatic as much as I can be

00:41:47.680 | and like being still maintaining a sense of humor too,

00:41:51.320 | 'cause I become with sleep deprivation, with exhaustion,

00:41:55.720 | you start being-

00:41:56.840 | - The Russian bear comes out.

00:41:58.080 | - You start being such a,

00:41:59.960 | like I become a David Goggins essentially like-

00:42:03.160 | - Oh, it makes you irritable.

00:42:04.400 | Sleep deprivation makes us irritable.

00:42:06.480 | - Yeah.

00:42:07.400 | - It's clear so that in the early part of the night,

00:42:09.700 | we get a higher percentage of those old tradian cycles

00:42:12.620 | are occupied by slow wave sleep,

00:42:15.280 | sometimes just called non-REM sleep.

00:42:17.080 | And those early night sleep bouts

00:42:21.240 | are great for muscular repair

00:42:23.600 | and for certain forms of learning,

00:42:25.440 | but REM sleep, the rapid eye movement sleep,

00:42:27.940 | which it starts to accumulate and occupy

00:42:29.980 | more of those 90 minute old tradian cycles

00:42:32.340 | toward the late part of a sleep bout.

00:42:34.920 | So typically toward morning,

00:42:37.480 | but after you've been asleep a while,

00:42:40.400 | that's when you do the emotional processing.

00:42:42.740 | That's when we recover the ability to feel refreshed

00:42:46.960 | and not irritated by things.

00:42:48.440 | And if you deprive people of REM sleep,

00:42:50.680 | they become selectively bad at uncoupling the emotion

00:42:56.460 | from things that happened in the previous days.

00:42:58.280 | So the little things start to seem like big things.

00:43:00.640 | I always know I'm REM sleep deprived when I'm irritable.

00:43:05.000 | And when I look at like the word the,

00:43:07.640 | and it doesn't look like it's spelled right,

00:43:09.000 | and I'm kind of off about it.

00:43:10.280 | Like something's off.

00:43:11.160 | And we actually are becoming slightly psychotic

00:43:15.200 | when we're REM sleep deprived.

00:43:16.880 | You're not gonna get a lot of REM sleep in this thing,

00:43:18.720 | except as you fatigue more, if you do fall asleep,

00:43:21.000 | you're gonna drop more and more into REM

00:43:22.480 | so that those 90 minute cycles,

00:43:24.140 | you won't have to go through stage one, stage two,

00:43:26.520 | stage three, and then REM,

00:43:27.880 | you're just gonna drop right into REM.

00:43:30.160 | So you can count on your system to compensate for you.

00:43:33.680 | But I think that just the knowledge

00:43:35.960 | that you tend to get irritable as the time goes on,

00:43:38.440 | just that third personing of yourself,

00:43:40.320 | that awareness, the observer,

00:43:42.120 | that can be very beneficial

00:43:43.360 | because there may be bouts during this event

00:43:46.160 | when you just should probably say nothing.

00:43:49.160 | And maybe you just, I don't know,

00:43:51.440 | smile and record or not smile or do whatever it is,

00:43:55.560 | because you're gonna be conserving energy.

00:43:57.500 | If it feels like a grind, that's epinephrine being released.

00:44:00.660 | That's epinephrine that you could devote

00:44:02.820 | to the physical effort.

00:44:04.560 | But humor is an amazing anecdote for this

00:44:06.820 | because it resets that, it's that dopamine release

00:44:10.780 | that gives us that fresh perspective.

00:44:13.060 | And it's a real chemical thing.

00:44:15.340 | It's not a hack, it's not a trick,

00:44:18.660 | it's not a visualization, it's biology in action.

00:44:22.620 | - Well, but I think the act of interviewing,

00:44:27.620 | of conversation in these processes,

00:44:29.940 | even if you don't wanna do it,

00:44:32.220 | the right thing to do, even when you're feeling irritable,

00:44:35.540 | is to do the third person view

00:44:39.220 | and be able to express with words

00:44:41.060 | that you're feeling irritable.

00:44:42.900 | Like express what you're going through,

00:44:45.900 | use words, which I hate doing.

00:44:48.860 | I honestly, I think my ultimate thing

00:44:50.740 | would be just to never say a single word to David Goggins

00:44:53.620 | and just go through hell.

00:44:55.300 | It doesn't matter what we do, but to do it quietly,

00:44:58.240 | to also express it, that's my ultimate hell.

00:45:01.780 | - And he's definitely gonna be, if I know David at all,

00:45:04.380 | he's going to try and find your buttons.

00:45:06.620 | Like he's gonna, I mean, he,

00:45:08.820 | even though he knows he can complete this,

00:45:10.980 | and I believe that he trusts that you can complete it too,

00:45:13.860 | I believe you can, you will complete it.

00:45:15.940 | You know you will complete it, right?

00:45:17.340 | There's no question about that.

00:45:18.660 | But he's not gonna make it easier for you,

00:45:20.300 | he's gonna make it harder.

00:45:21.380 | - Well, I'm afraid, so I'm like,

00:45:23.460 | you know, it's very difficult for me.

00:45:24.980 | So 48 miles is not easy.

00:45:26.900 | I have not been training that much,

00:45:28.300 | so I'm not ramping up, but it's not like going to kill me.

00:45:33.300 | We'll see what happens.

00:45:34.960 | Of course, for him, he might almost get bored

00:45:37.260 | because I think the 48 miles for him is easy.

00:45:40.700 | I think--

00:45:43.420 | - I don't know that ever gets easy.

00:45:45.660 | I have a friend, Casey Cordial, who works with David.

00:45:48.420 | He does some physical rehab type stuff with him.

00:45:53.420 | And he took Casey on a 50 miler,

00:45:55.940 | and Casey said it's like 16 miles into it,

00:45:57.940 | he was just like, he'd hit his wall.

00:46:00.740 | But he found it, they find it to get, you know,

00:46:04.740 | you find that portal.

00:46:06.100 | There is one thing I want to mention.

00:46:07.500 | There's some very good physiology

00:46:09.980 | that can perhaps support the actual running effort part.

00:46:12.940 | These are very new data.

00:46:14.620 | And we have a study going on with David Spiegel at Stanford

00:46:17.860 | looking at how different patterns of breathing

00:46:19.820 | can affect heart rate variability.

00:46:21.820 | Heart rate variability is good.

00:46:23.380 | There's this interesting mechanism

00:46:25.140 | that I think most people might not realize,

00:46:27.020 | but that medical students learn

00:46:28.300 | that your breathing and your heart rate and your brain

00:46:31.580 | are in this really remarkable interplay.

00:46:33.500 | It goes like this.

00:46:34.380 | When you inhale, this isn't breath work,

00:46:36.340 | we're not going to do breath work.

00:46:37.460 | But when you inhale, the diaphragm moves down.

00:46:40.860 | The heart gets a little bigger

00:46:43.380 | 'cause there's a little more space in the thoracic cavity.

00:46:45.660 | And as a consequence, blood flows a little bit more slowly

00:46:49.220 | through that larger volume.

00:46:50.740 | And there's a category of neurons,

00:46:52.460 | the sinonatrial node that sees that,

00:46:55.060 | that recognizes that slower rate through that larger volume.

00:46:59.620 | It sends a signal to the brainstem

00:47:00.980 | and the brainstem sends a signal back to the heart

00:47:02.740 | to speed the heart up.

00:47:04.340 | So every time you inhale, you're speeding the heart up.

00:47:06.220 | When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up,

00:47:08.400 | the heart gets a little smaller, the volume is smaller,

00:47:10.700 | blood flows more quickly through the heart,

00:47:12.640 | signal sent up to the brain,

00:47:13.860 | and the brain sends a signal back to slow the heart down.

00:47:17.860 | This is the basis of heart rate variability.

00:47:20.580 | So at any point, if you feel like your heart is racing

00:47:23.260 | and you feel like you're working too hard

00:47:25.260 | per unit of effort,

00:47:27.420 | focus on making your exhales longer

00:47:30.380 | or more intense than your inhales.

00:47:32.620 | If ever you feel like you're truly flagging,

00:47:34.740 | you do not have the energy to get up,

00:47:36.660 | it's like, okay, it's time to go and you're exhausted,

00:47:39.440 | you want to draw more oxygen into the system,

00:47:42.420 | get your heart rate going faster.

00:47:44.380 | Now, some people, when they hear this probably thinking,

00:47:46.180 | well, this is really obvious,

00:47:47.260 | but there's so much out there about breath work

00:47:49.020 | and how to breathe and all this stuff,

00:47:50.280 | but no one talks about how to do it in real time

00:47:52.500 | while you're exerting effort.

00:47:53.860 | - So this is something like almost like second by second,

00:47:57.940 | you can adjust things that just in real time

00:48:00.700 | based on how you're feeling,

00:48:01.740 | but it's based on the heart rate.

00:48:03.220 | - That's right.

00:48:04.060 | - The variance of the heart rate.

00:48:04.980 | - That's right.

00:48:05.820 | So one thing that could be very efficient

00:48:08.100 | and we're doing some work with athletes now,

00:48:10.180 | so these are unpublished data,

00:48:11.740 | but if you, while you're running,

00:48:14.340 | if you want to get into a nice cadence

00:48:16.820 | of heart rate variability,

00:48:18.260 | do double inhales while you're running.

00:48:23.060 | What this will do is that when you do the double inhale

00:48:25.260 | has the effect of reopening the alveoli of the lungs,

00:48:28.700 | your lungs are filled with tons of little sacks,

00:48:31.300 | when you, they tend to collapse as you fatigue,

00:48:34.060 | when you, and carbon dioxide builds up in the bloodstream.

00:48:36.500 | And that's when we start getting stressed.

00:48:37.780 | If you've ever been sprinting, you start getting beat

00:48:39.780 | and you're going as hard as you can,

00:48:41.220 | what you really need to do is double inhale

00:48:43.260 | and reinflate these sacks in the lungs

00:48:45.060 | and then offload a lot of carbon dioxide.

00:48:47.180 | So when you're at a steady cadence and you're feeling good,

00:48:49.740 | double inhale, exhale, double inhale, exhale

00:48:52.820 | is a terrific way to breathe while you're in ongoing effort.

00:48:56.900 | - By the way, any recommendations or differences

00:49:00.100 | in nose or mouth breathing?

00:49:03.000 | - So nasal breathing, there's a lot of excitement now,

00:49:05.860 | obviously about nasal breathing

00:49:07.060 | 'cause of James Nestor's book, "Breath."

00:49:09.340 | There was also, if people are going to know about that book,

00:49:11.900 | that I do feel like out of respect for my colleagues,

00:49:15.660 | there was a book by Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich at Stanford,

00:49:19.740 | both professors at Stanford,

00:49:20.900 | with a forward by Jared Diamond and Robert Sapolsky.

00:49:24.420 | So some heavy hitters in this book.

00:49:26.380 | And the book is called "Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic."

00:49:28.860 | And it's all about how nasal breathing is better for us,

00:49:32.580 | especially kids, than being mouth breathers

00:49:35.140 | under most conditions for sake of improving immunity.

00:49:38.300 | It turns out there's a microbiome in the nose,

00:49:40.240 | like all sorts of good stuff

00:49:41.500 | about nasal breathing preferentially.

00:49:43.820 | But when we exercise, you can do pure nasal breathing,

00:49:48.620 | but the problem is once you get up to kind of third

00:49:50.920 | and fourth and fifth gear effort,

00:49:52.740 | you can't nasal breathe and be at maximum capacity

00:49:55.420 | unless you've been training it for a very long time.

00:49:57.440 | So I would say double inhale through the nose,

00:49:59.400 | offload through the mouth.

00:50:00.660 | So double inhale, exhale while you're in steady effort.

00:50:03.780 | And then if you really feel like you need to gas it

00:50:05.940 | and you're pushing, the data show that then

00:50:08.440 | just use whatever's there, right?

00:50:10.820 | Just go into kind of default mode

00:50:12.540 | because bringing too much concentration to something

00:50:15.720 | is also going to spend epinephrine.

00:50:17.880 | The goal is to get into that, I don't like the word,

00:50:20.380 | but the flow state where you're not thinking too much,

00:50:22.920 | you're just in exertion.

00:50:24.880 | So these are things that can help in the transitions,

00:50:28.220 | but I don't think there's any secret breathing technique.

00:50:31.600 | Anyone who's been in the SEAL teams will kind of,

00:50:33.780 | they'll tell you like,

00:50:34.620 | there's no breathing technique, right?

00:50:37.100 | There's tools that you can look to from time to time.

00:50:41.380 | And these double inhale exhales can be great

00:50:43.140 | for setting heart rate variability very quickly

00:50:45.740 | and getting into a steady cadence while you're exercising.

00:50:48.300 | But if there's a sprint,

00:50:49.340 | like if suddenly you guys are sprinting,

00:50:50.980 | ditch the double inhale, exhale and just sprint.

00:50:54.880 | - One thing that you mentioned,

00:50:56.240 | he's probably gonna push my buttons.

00:50:58.540 | It's a good place to ask a question about anger.

00:51:01.200 | So I'll probably get pissed off at him at some point,

00:51:04.560 | I'm guessing.

00:51:05.800 | And do you have thoughts from a scientific perspective

00:51:10.800 | or also just the personal philosophical perspective

00:51:14.600 | about the role of anger and all of this

00:51:16.600 | in managing alertness, performance?

00:51:20.720 | - I think about this a lot because there's so much out there

00:51:23.800 | about how important it is to do things from a place of love.

00:51:27.040 | - I tweet about it all the time.

00:51:30.000 | - And I think, and love is powerful, right?

00:51:32.960 | It is interesting that autonomic arousal, alertness,

00:51:35.880 | let's just make use simple language,

00:51:37.240 | alertness physiologically looks identical

00:51:41.160 | for love and excitement as it does for anger and frustration

00:51:46.160 | and wanting to defeat your opponent

00:51:49.840 | or whoever that opponent happens to be.

00:51:52.400 | They're identical, except that the love component

00:51:54.960 | does tend to be associated with the release

00:51:57.600 | of neurochemicals of the serotonin and dopamine type

00:52:01.040 | that do have this replenishment component.

00:52:03.920 | I don't think one wants to be in constant anger and friction,

00:52:07.540 | but I mean, I'll come clean a bit.

00:52:10.380 | There've been portions of my career

00:52:11.600 | where some of my best work, my extra two hours,

00:52:14.160 | my ability to nail a really hard deadline or problem

00:52:17.720 | has come from not wanting to get out competed

00:52:21.320 | or from wanting to prove something.

00:52:24.720 | These days, I'm not oriented from that place

00:52:29.280 | toward my work quite as often,

00:52:30.920 | but I think we should be really honest.

00:52:33.020 | Anger is powerful, provided it's channeled.

00:52:36.320 | It's very, very powerful and it can give you a ton of fuel

00:52:40.400 | and gas to push when otherwise you'd tap.

00:52:44.700 | - Yeah, Joe Rogan has, aside from being a fan of his,

00:52:49.480 | has been an inspiration to sort of be,

00:52:52.520 | to have a kind of loving view on the world

00:52:55.760 | in the way he approached the world, to me.

00:52:58.240 | So I've tended to want to approach the world that way,

00:53:01.840 | but in the same way, David Goggins has been an inspiration

00:53:06.200 | to like, yeah, be angry at stuff and use it as fuel.

00:53:13.320 | Like he almost conjures up artificial demons in his mind

00:53:17.740 | just so he can fight them.

00:53:19.140 | But at the same time, I tried that

00:53:22.500 | 'cause I did a challenge in the summer of,

00:53:25.700 | well, for 30 days, I was doing a lot of pushups

00:53:27.940 | and it was, over time, it was counterproductive for me.

00:53:32.940 | I found that it was easier to just,

00:53:37.380 | like the rollercoaster that the emotional,

00:53:42.140 | like being angry at stuff takes you,

00:53:44.440 | can also be exhausting.

00:53:46.280 | - Oh, absolutely.

00:53:47.440 | - And it can take you down, like the ups of it are good,

00:53:51.060 | but the downs are bad.

00:53:53.140 | And what I found is better to get,

00:53:56.080 | to use it as a boost every once in a while,

00:53:57.840 | but mostly to get lost in the,

00:54:00.660 | you're talking about the breath work,

00:54:03.280 | like getting lost in the ritual of it,

00:54:05.380 | like the beat, like that,

00:54:07.240 | as opposed to going on the big rollercoasters of emotion.

00:54:10.920 | - Yeah, this brings us into the realm of neuroendocrinology.

00:54:14.320 | There's a fascinating relationship

00:54:15.980 | between the hormone system and the nervous system.

00:54:18.260 | And hormones work in general on slower timescales.

00:54:22.080 | The definition of a hormone is something,

00:54:23.420 | is a chemical released at one location in the body,

00:54:25.480 | goes and acts at multiple locations far away

00:54:28.260 | within the body.

00:54:29.100 | Pheromone would be between two bodies.

00:54:30.840 | Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin

00:54:33.900 | tend to work a little more quickly.

00:54:35.000 | There are hormones like adrenaline and cortisol

00:54:37.340 | that can work very fast,

00:54:38.440 | but here I'm referring mainly to testosterone,

00:54:42.760 | prolactin, prolactin tends to be in men and women,

00:54:45.540 | tends to make people kind of lazy

00:54:47.340 | and want to take care of young.

00:54:49.740 | It tends to throw down body fat so we can stay up late.

00:54:52.640 | It's secreted in response to having children.

00:54:54.940 | These are all in humans and in animals.

00:54:58.220 | There's a very interesting relationship

00:54:59.860 | between testosterone and dopamine

00:55:02.780 | that speaks directly to what we're talking about now.

00:55:07.580 | So dopamine and testosterone are closely related

00:55:11.840 | in the pituitary system.

00:55:14.320 | And obviously testosterone comes from the adrenals

00:55:16.800 | and from the testes.

00:55:18.440 | But the major effect of testosterone

00:55:21.920 | is to make effort feel good.

00:55:24.840 | That's what testosterone does.

00:55:26.240 | It has other effects too, right?

00:55:27.800 | Reproductive effects, androgenizing parts of the body,

00:55:30.680 | et cetera, but it makes effort feel good.

00:55:34.560 | The testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol.

00:55:38.180 | Cholesterol can either be made into cortisol,

00:55:41.220 | a stress hormone, or testosterone, but not both.

00:55:43.900 | So you have a limited amount of cholesterol

00:55:46.580 | and it gets diverted towards stress

00:55:49.020 | or this pathway where effort feels good.

00:55:52.040 | That's the pathway you want to get into.

00:55:55.300 | The anger pathway,

00:55:56.340 | if we were to just kind of play a mind experiment here,

00:56:00.260 | the anger eventually is going to divert

00:56:02.640 | more of that cholesterol molecule to cortisol and stress,

00:56:06.340 | and you will be slowly depleting testosterone.

00:56:08.740 | Now going into this, you'll have plenty of testosterone,

00:56:11.860 | but after a couple of days,

00:56:13.320 | there've been very interesting studies

00:56:14.900 | showing that testosterone doesn't necessarily drop

00:56:17.700 | with sleep deprivation.

00:56:19.140 | That's a bit of a myth.

00:56:20.340 | You need it to replenish,

00:56:22.020 | you need sleep to replenish testosterone eventually.

00:56:24.480 | But the real question is,

00:56:25.820 | are you enjoying what you're doing?

00:56:27.940 | And here that the work was,

00:56:29.980 | some of the major work on this was done by Duncan French,

00:56:33.320 | who runs the UFC Training Center.

00:56:34.880 | He did his PhD at Yukon stores,

00:56:37.640 | did a really beautiful PhD thesis

00:56:40.040 | looking at the relationship between stress hormones,

00:56:42.080 | testosterone, and dopamine.

00:56:44.560 | Really interesting work.

00:56:45.920 | And the takeaway from all of this is,

00:56:49.240 | if you can just convince yourself,

00:56:51.280 | or ideally, if you can just enjoy yourself,

00:56:54.400 | you are going to maintain

00:56:55.820 | or maybe even increase testosterone stores,

00:56:58.400 | which will make effort feel good.

00:57:00.560 | And to me, aside from neuroplasticity,

00:57:03.360 | where everything becomes automatic after this experience,

00:57:06.480 | to me, that's the Holy grail.

00:57:08.880 | When effort feels good, life just gets way better.

00:57:12.700 | And we're not talking about achieving the reward.

00:57:14.800 | I'm not talking about the end of this thing.

00:57:16.480 | I'm talking about the process of it feeling really good.

00:57:19.600 | - Yeah, there is a magic to,

00:57:21.640 | I don't know if you can comment on this,

00:57:24.720 | but I find myself being able to,

00:57:28.080 | if I just say I'm feeling good,

00:57:30.120 | like this old hack of smiling while you're running.

00:57:34.880 | If I just tell myself I'm feeling really good right now,

00:57:38.560 | no matter how I'm actually feeling,

00:57:40.760 | I'll start feeling way better.

00:57:42.080 | And the whole thing, there's a cascading effect

00:57:45.160 | that allows me to maximize the effort.

00:57:48.840 | It's quite fascinating.

00:57:50.400 | It's weird.

00:57:51.540 | - Hormones are powerful.

00:57:52.860 | The relationship between thoughts and hormones

00:57:54.840 | and these physiological things is enormous.

00:57:57.080 | I had a colleague that a few years ago,

00:57:58.880 | he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

00:58:01.520 | And I was interviewing him

00:58:03.040 | just 'cause he's an important figure in our community.

00:58:05.680 | And I was a friend.

00:58:07.040 | And there was one day where he told me,

00:58:09.400 | he said, "I don't want to make it past the new year."

00:58:12.800 | And it was crushing for me to hear.

00:58:15.080 | And I knew that he had been on some androgen therapy

00:58:17.680 | for a whole set of other things.

00:58:20.160 | And I said, "Have you taken your androgen cream?"

00:58:24.700 | And he was like, "No, I haven't done it.

00:58:25.840 | Go get it for me."

00:58:27.280 | I have this on film.

00:58:28.240 | He takes it, he puts the androgen cream on.

00:58:30.120 | I'm not suggesting people take androgens, by the way.

00:58:33.140 | 10 minutes later, he says, "You know what?

00:58:35.760 | I think I want to live into the new year.

00:58:37.560 | And I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation."

00:58:39.880 | He went to MIT, by the way.

00:58:41.200 | He said, "I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation."

00:58:43.880 | And he did.

00:58:44.720 | And so there's something about these molecules

00:58:47.160 | that in an ancient way, in all organisms,

00:58:50.480 | all mammals, as far as we know,

00:58:52.720 | are linked to the will to live.

00:58:54.760 | They're linked to effort and making effort feel good,

00:58:57.520 | which has been fundamental to the evolution of our species.

00:59:00.400 | I always say,

00:59:01.240 | people think that the opposite of testosterone is estrogen,

00:59:03.960 | but it's not.

00:59:05.000 | The opposite of testosterone is prolactin,

00:59:07.400 | which makes us feel quiescent

00:59:09.040 | and not in pursuit of things, et cetera.

00:59:11.240 | Testosterone makes effort feel good.

00:59:14.680 | Estrogen makes emotions feel okay.

00:59:17.020 | [laughing]

00:59:19.160 | And they are in mixed amounts.

00:59:23.520 | People, as I say, have all chromosomal backgrounds.

00:59:25.920 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:59:27.160 | - I mean, you also mentioned fasting potentially

00:59:29.560 | through this two-day thing.

00:59:31.560 | It'd be cool to get your thoughts about fasting in general.

00:59:35.040 | Do you think, on a personal level

00:59:38.320 | and at a higher sort of level of studies

00:59:41.120 | that you're aware of and physiology and so on,

00:59:44.560 | what do you think about intermittent fasting

00:59:46.420 | of like not eating for 16 hours

00:59:48.760 | and then having an eight-hour window

00:59:51.600 | or something I've been doing a lot recently,

00:59:53.560 | which is eating only once a day.

00:59:56.480 | So that's 24-hour fast, I guess, one meal a day.

01:00:00.640 | Or something I've been thinking about doing,

01:00:05.040 | haven't done yet, of doing like 72 hours.

01:00:07.680 | And some people do like five-day fasts in general.

01:00:11.440 | So this would be, for this particular run,

01:00:13.600 | would be a 48-hour fast if I don't eat at all.

01:00:17.600 | What do you think about that for performance,

01:00:19.780 | for mood, for all those kinds of things?

01:00:21.920 | - I can speak a little bit to the science

01:00:23.700 | and a little bit of my own experience

01:00:25.300 | and then some anecdotes of people that have done

01:00:27.620 | very hard, very long-duration things

01:00:29.460 | and what they've told me.

01:00:30.280 | So I just want to make sure I'm separating those out

01:00:32.220 | so people know my sourcing.

01:00:34.140 | I think, now, none of this is about

01:00:36.420 | the actual long-term nutritional benefits

01:00:38.760 | of one thing or the other.

01:00:40.560 | But if you look at the science on intermittent fasting,

01:00:43.340 | it's pretty remarkable.

01:00:45.140 | Before I was at Stanford, my lab was in San Diego.

01:00:47.100 | One of my colleagues was Sachin Panda

01:00:49.300 | at the Salk, is phenomenal biologist and researcher.

01:00:53.380 | Wrote a book called "The Circadian Code."

01:00:54.940 | It's very, very good.

01:00:55.780 | And kind of popularized intermittent fasting,

01:00:58.520 | although there were others that had talked about this

01:01:01.460 | before, Ori Hoffmechler talked about the warrior diet.

01:01:04.240 | People probably might not know who Ori is,

01:01:06.860 | but he's sort of the originator of this business

01:01:10.160 | of intermittent fasting, eating once a day or limited.

01:01:12.540 | Anyway, Sachin has published papers, peer-reviewed papers

01:01:16.040 | in very good journals like "Cell" and elsewhere,

01:01:18.920 | showing that limiting the consumption of calories

01:01:22.200 | to eight, four, six, or eight, or even 10 hours

01:01:26.820 | of every 24-hour cycle, and keeping that more or less

01:01:31.000 | correlated with the light, with when the sun is out,

01:01:35.180 | leads to less liver disease, improved metabolic markers,

01:01:39.580 | less body fat, et cetera.

01:01:41.720 | In the mouse studies, they even gave the mice the choice

01:01:43.800 | to eat whatever they wanted, as much as they wanted,

01:01:45.780 | as long as they restricted it to a certain period

01:01:48.180 | of within the 24-hour cycle, they did great.

01:01:50.860 | They maintained a healthy weight or even lost weight.

01:01:53.740 | When they took the same amount of food

01:01:55.380 | and they stretched it out across the entire 24-hour cycle,

01:01:58.340 | so this is eating every hour or two hours,

01:02:00.320 | the animals got fat and sick.

01:02:02.300 | So it's pretty remarkable data.

01:02:04.540 | How much of that translates to humans isn't clear,

01:02:06.540 | but one thing that's really clear with humans is adherence.

01:02:10.060 | Right, we could talk a lot about nutrition

01:02:11.880 | and some of the problems with the studies on nutrition

01:02:14.180 | is that what people will do in a laboratory

01:02:16.180 | is often hard to do in the real world.

01:02:18.600 | Low-carbohydrate diets, just they tend,

01:02:21.380 | because they tend to focus on foods

01:02:23.380 | that have high amino acid content, like meats,

01:02:26.980 | generally people are less hungry on those

01:02:29.800 | than they are on calorie-matched diets

01:02:32.560 | of fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates,

01:02:34.740 | because when the insulin goes up,

01:02:36.820 | you get hungry and you want to eat more.

01:02:38.520 | So this is not a push for carnivore

01:02:40.700 | or a push against one thing or the other,

01:02:42.540 | it's just there are a lot of factors.

01:02:45.140 | But we know for sure that when you're fasted

01:02:49.460 | or when you have low amounts of carbohydrate

01:02:51.620 | in your system, complex carbohydrate,

01:02:53.640 | your alertness is going to go up.

01:02:55.420 | Fast increases alertness and epinephrine

01:03:00.000 | for the sole purpose of getting you to go out and find food.

01:03:02.780 | Can you imagine if our ancestors got hungry

01:03:04.980 | and they were like, "Oh, I'm too tired to go find food,"

01:03:07.260 | we wouldn't be here.

01:03:08.220 | It'd be like robots or some, one of your alien buddies

01:03:12.020 | will be like running the planet.

01:03:13.940 | So I think that if you want to be alert,

01:03:16.700 | fasting or keeping complex carbohydrates

01:03:19.580 | to a minimum is very valuable.

01:03:22.100 | If you want to sleep and you want to be sleepy,

01:03:24.540 | ingesting foods that have a lot of tryptophan,

01:03:27.380 | which is the precursor to serotonin,

01:03:28.920 | so complex carbohydrates like rice and grains,

01:03:31.300 | turkey, white meats,

01:03:32.660 | those things do create a sense of sleepiness.

01:03:34.700 | However, there is a caveat,

01:03:36.220 | and this is one problem with the once a meal,

01:03:38.780 | once a day meal,

01:03:40.380 | is that anytime you have a lot of food in the gut,

01:03:43.180 | you're increasing sleepiness

01:03:44.620 | because you're diverting blood to the gut.

01:03:46.680 | It's going to trigger the vagus to signal to the brain

01:03:49.740 | to shut down your system and utilize those nutrients,

01:03:53.540 | digest and utilize those nutrients.

01:03:55.300 | So I've done the once a day eating thing.

01:03:58.160 | The problem is I eat so much in that meal that I'm exhausted.

01:04:02.220 | And so it doesn't always lend itself well to the schedule.

01:04:05.740 | But so in a six or eight hour eating block

01:04:07.980 | for me is a little bit better.

01:04:10.060 | I do eat carbohydrates.

01:04:11.220 | I'm probably one of the few people left

01:04:12.460 | on the West Coast that actually consumes carbohydrates

01:04:14.740 | and will say that out loud.

01:04:15.580 | - I don't know people who eat carbs anymore.

01:04:17.220 | That's weird.

01:04:18.060 | - They don't.

01:04:18.880 | - Where do you even find carbs these days?

01:04:20.020 | - I like oatmeal.

01:04:20.860 | I like rice.

01:04:21.680 | The other time is if people are doing

01:04:23.260 | very high intensity weight train,

01:04:24.740 | they need to replenish glycogen.

01:04:26.420 | - On the alertness side,

01:04:27.740 | I do feel like it's probably person dependent.

01:04:30.160 | For me, alertness,

01:04:31.600 | being alert makes my life better in a lot of ways,

01:04:36.580 | more than just the alertness itself.

01:04:38.780 | Like for example,

01:04:40.260 | one of the things I discovered with fasting

01:04:43.100 | is that when I was training twice a day in jiu-jitsu,

01:04:46.540 | for example, and competing and so on,

01:04:48.820 | I performed way better at things

01:04:51.460 | that you traditionally would say you need carbs for,

01:04:53.940 | which is explosive movements and all that.

01:04:56.040 | I don't know if I actually perform better

01:05:00.180 | in terms of like the force of the explosion,

01:05:05.180 | the explosiveness.

01:05:06.900 | What I do know is the alertness resulted

01:05:09.700 | in me doing the technique more precisely.

01:05:13.500 | That's the dopamine and epinephrine system in action.

01:05:16.180 | There are some other just purely physical aspects

01:05:23.060 | to one diet versus the other that can be complicated.

01:05:25.940 | If you're ingesting carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates,

01:05:28.620 | you're going to replenish glycogen, which is great,

01:05:31.060 | but they also tend to be bulky and fibrous.

01:05:33.500 | And I've never rolled jiu-jitsu,

01:05:35.340 | but running when you have a lot of bulky, fibrous food

01:05:37.860 | in your gut or in your intestine, it can be a barrier.

01:05:41.180 | It can be uncomfortable.

01:05:42.580 | And so some people do really well

01:05:44.260 | on low carbohydrate, meat-rich diets

01:05:46.220 | because they're just not as bloated.

01:05:48.380 | They're not carrying as much water and other stuff.

01:05:51.460 | Carbohydrate carries a lot of water molecules with it.

01:05:54.180 | So there are aspects to being able to train

01:05:56.020 | and being really explosive 'cause you feel light.

01:05:58.180 | One anecdote that really, again,

01:06:00.180 | I'm not encouraging any one particular kind of diet,

01:06:02.560 | but I have a friend who is in the SEAL teams.

01:06:07.140 | I happen to know a number of people in that community.

01:06:08.760 | And he told me that he did this very long fast.

01:06:11.420 | It was a fast that I think you get to eat

01:06:13.620 | a little bit of soup or broth,

01:06:15.460 | and there's like a bar or something,

01:06:16.920 | but it's like a nine-day thing.

01:06:18.720 | And he's a very strong athlete.

01:06:21.280 | And he said that on day six or seven,

01:06:24.680 | he was running up some hills or something

01:06:27.300 | while he was on deployment, and he felt amazing.

01:06:31.480 | He had kind of hit this other level.

01:06:33.080 | He was somebody who had boxed in the Naval Academy.

01:06:35.280 | He was somebody who knows a new high output.

01:06:40.280 | And he felt like he discovered the 13th floor,

01:06:43.700 | that there was another floor to this performance space

01:06:46.660 | that he hadn't experienced except while he had fasted.

01:06:50.560 | And he said that that was a remarkable clarity of mind,

01:06:53.640 | energy, it's a little bit of what you described.

01:06:55.480 | He described a kind of suppleness and explosiveness.

01:06:58.160 | So there's probably something there.

01:06:59.400 | - On which day?

01:07:01.000 | - At once he was in the fifth or sixth day of the fast.

01:07:04.000 | - See, this is the thing is I've never been there

01:07:06.360 | on the second, third, fourth, fifth day,

01:07:08.840 | that kind of thing.

01:07:09.920 | But when I just don't eat for 20 hours,

01:07:13.860 | many times through my training, the clarity,

01:07:18.840 | it's like you feel like everyone is moving super slowly,

01:07:23.200 | and you're able to like dominate people

01:07:25.520 | you weren't able to before.

01:07:26.920 | It's like-- - Well, you might have

01:07:28.240 | slipped into or switched over rather into full ketosis.

01:07:32.520 | And ketogenic diets done properly can be great for people.

01:07:36.400 | The problem is if you do it wrong, you can really mess it.

01:07:38.480 | I tried it once and I basically got psoriasis.

01:07:40.880 | I thought my scalp was gonna fall off.

01:07:42.400 | I was like sloughing off all this.

01:07:44.120 | And then I stopped and I was taking the liquid ketones.

01:07:47.160 | And then all of a sudden I felt better again.

01:07:49.000 | But I was told that I just did it wrong.

01:07:51.980 | That's so I think there's a right way and a wrong way

01:07:55.320 | and you have to get it right.

01:07:56.760 | - Definitely, and so I've experimented quite a bit

01:07:59.240 | with keto to see how my body feels

01:08:01.360 | and doing it the right way and following all the instructions

01:08:03.720 | that there's definitely a huge difference.

01:08:06.080 | For example, one of the things I discovered,

01:08:09.440 | everyone know who said this, but I tried this recently

01:08:13.880 | over the past year is I started drinking,

01:08:17.200 | when I don't feel great, if I'm fasting, bone broth,

01:08:21.640 | chicken bone broth.

01:08:23.000 | And for some reason, like magically, it could be,

01:08:25.680 | this is the other thing, the mind, I don't know,

01:08:28.460 | but it makes me feel really good.

01:08:30.920 | - Well, it could be the salt.

01:08:32.840 | So I mean, neurons, the action potential neurons,

01:08:35.560 | as you know, is sodium is rushing into the cell.

01:08:37.380 | You need enough extracellular sodium

01:08:39.760 | in order for your brain and nervous system to function.

01:08:42.280 | And so salt, I mean, unless people have hypertension,

01:08:45.780 | salt is great.

01:08:46.620 | There was an article in Science Magazine about a decade ago

01:08:49.080 | about how salt had been demonized.

01:08:50.880 | And unless people have hypertension,

01:08:52.400 | provide you drink enough water, salt is great.

01:08:54.600 | You need sodium, magnesium, and potassium to function

01:08:57.800 | and for your nerve cells to work.

01:08:59.300 | I mean, people who over drink water

01:09:00.960 | and don't consume enough electrolyte die.

01:09:03.880 | Now, hydration is really important.

01:09:05.640 | I know David's really into hydration.

01:09:07.280 | He's mentioned that a few times.

01:09:08.480 | I mean, hydrating properly is key.

01:09:11.400 | And so you definitely want to make sure

01:09:12.920 | that you're drinking enough water

01:09:14.280 | and getting enough electrolytes.

01:09:16.320 | We should have actually talked about that at the beginning

01:09:18.200 | because that's going to keep your nervous system

01:09:20.040 | functioning well.

01:09:21.440 | And a lot of people, they'll get shaky or jittery.

01:09:24.440 | And when they're fasting and they'll think they need sugar.

01:09:27.920 | And if they just put some salt in some water,

01:09:30.000 | they feel fine.

01:09:30.960 | - And like the other stuff, potassium, magnesium,

01:09:33.240 | whatever the other electrolytes are, but yeah.

01:09:35.680 | - Yeah, those three.

01:09:36.520 | So I mean, salt, yeah.

01:09:38.040 | Magnesium's good before sleep.

01:09:40.680 | Salt, I mean, this is a vast space.

01:09:43.400 | And we're kind of talking about the overlap

01:09:44.720 | between neurochemicals, hormones, and nutrition.

01:09:48.160 | And it's a fascinating space.

01:09:49.760 | And it's one that the academic community has gems

01:09:53.560 | within the textbooks.

01:09:54.640 | It hasn't really made it into the public sphere yet.

01:09:57.800 | And I think that's because people get so caught up

01:09:59.720 | in the, you know, being, are you vegan or are you carnivore?

01:10:03.520 | And there's a vast space in between too

01:10:05.920 | that people can explore.

01:10:06.800 | Like I'm not a competitive athlete, so I eat meat

01:10:10.400 | and I also eat vegetables and I eat fruits.

01:10:12.820 | And it's just about timing them.

01:10:14.360 | But I tend to eat carbohydrates when I want to be sleepy.

01:10:16.280 | I eat them at night.

01:10:17.120 | And everyone said, that's the worst thing.

01:10:18.760 | You can't do that.

01:10:19.760 | You sleep great after eating a big bowl of pasta,

01:10:21.760 | I'll tell you.

01:10:22.720 | - And by the way, I should give you a big thank you

01:10:25.680 | for connecting me with Belcampo Farms.

01:10:28.360 | They sent me some meat, I think because of you.

01:10:31.960 | (laughing)

01:10:33.160 | And it's delicious.

01:10:34.400 | So I really appreciate that.

01:10:37.200 | I mean, it also connected me with this whole world

01:10:40.160 | of people who are doing farming in this ethical way

01:10:43.840 | and like really love the whole process.

01:10:46.080 | And like, and as from a both like a human level,

01:10:49.560 | but also scientific level and the result is,

01:10:53.500 | it's like ethical, but also it's delicious.

01:10:57.760 | And it makes you think about your diet

01:11:00.360 | in a whole new kind of way.

01:11:01.840 | - Yeah, I've known, I don't have any commercial relationship

01:11:04.520 | to Belcampo, so I can be very clear.

01:11:06.000 | I've known Anya Fernald, who is the founder

01:11:09.880 | and CEO of Belcampo.

01:11:10.800 | I've known her since the ninth grade.

01:11:12.600 | It is true that her parents are faculty members at Stanford.

01:11:15.200 | They're colleagues of mine,

01:11:16.320 | but she's just a serious academic of nutrition,

01:11:18.780 | but also of sustainable agriculture,

01:11:21.320 | of all sorts of things.

01:11:22.760 | And also the meat just, it's awesome.

01:11:24.400 | It tastes really good.

01:11:25.220 | And no, I'm not getting paid to say that.

01:11:26.840 | No, they're not sponsoring my podcast.

01:11:29.040 | It's just, I feel like if you're gonna eat animals,

01:11:32.200 | if that's in your framework and you're gonna eat animals,

01:11:35.140 | knowing that the animals were raised as happy as could be

01:11:39.400 | until time of slaughter is at least important to me.

01:11:43.680 | - And actually talk to her.

01:11:45.280 | So I will talk to her on this podcast actually.

01:11:47.680 | And she invited me like a week ago out to visit the farm

01:11:52.240 | in May or June or whatever.

01:11:53.440 | - Yeah, they have the farm up at the Oregon border.

01:11:54.960 | I haven't been there yet, but I've seen the pictures.

01:11:56.760 | And it's just beautiful. - It looks awesome.

01:11:57.840 | And I was like, yes.

01:11:59.600 | - It looks beautiful.

01:12:00.440 | Let me know when you're going.

01:12:01.420 | - Yeah, let's go together.

01:12:03.320 | - You'll probably run there, but I'll drive there.

01:12:06.360 | - Yeah, but all that said, I do want to,

01:12:09.800 | 'cause a lot of people who are vegan write to me,

01:12:12.600 | and I do want to seriously,

01:12:14.720 | in the same seriousness that I approached keto,

01:12:17.280 | I do want to go on a few months

01:12:20.000 | to switch to a vegan diet at some point to really try it.

01:12:23.400 | - I haven't done it yet

01:12:24.400 | 'cause I'm afraid I'm gonna function better.

01:12:27.000 | (laughing)

01:12:28.000 | I'm Argentine by my dad's side.

01:12:30.200 | And I don't eat meat super often,

01:12:33.680 | but well, for most people it would seem often.

01:12:36.920 | But I do love steak, I do.

01:12:40.700 | So I'm afraid I'm gonna feel better.

01:12:41.960 | - There's a social element to steak, you're right,

01:12:43.840 | 'cause coming from a Russian background,

01:12:46.400 | I can't imagine going to visit my folks,

01:12:49.280 | like my parents for Thanksgiving or something,

01:12:51.200 | and say, "Mom and dad, I don't eat meat."

01:12:56.200 | - Well, I think if you're gonna eat meat,

01:12:58.000 | getting it from sources that are compatible

01:13:00.960 | with continuation of the planet is good.

01:13:05.200 | I mean, there are some real problems

01:13:07.200 | with the factory farm meat.

01:13:08.600 | You drive up and down the five and you pass that point

01:13:11.000 | where there are all those cows.

01:13:12.360 | I mean, as somebody who loves animals,

01:13:16.220 | it's clear that you wanna limit the amount of suffering

01:13:21.220 | of those animals.

01:13:22.200 | Whenever I hear about, we know people that hunt

01:13:25.940 | and that go and get their own meat, I really admire that.

01:13:28.160 | I admire that people do that.

01:13:30.080 | We don't tend to do that in the hills around Stanford.

01:13:33.520 | There are mountain lines back there, but that's about it.

01:13:35.420 | And I'm certainly, I admire the vegan mindset

01:13:40.260 | of just making that decision.

01:13:41.860 | You're just not gonna consume other beings,

01:13:44.140 | but I haven't gone that way.

01:13:45.960 | - For performance-wise, I'm just curious

01:13:48.000 | because I was surprised.

01:13:50.920 | I was certain that eating five, six, seven meals a day

01:13:54.260 | is the right thing to do if you wanna perform your best

01:13:58.860 | when I was like 20 or whatever.

01:14:01.160 | And I would eat oatmeal.

01:14:02.660 | Like I thought it's obvious I have to have a really,

01:14:05.540 | a lot of carbs in the breakfast.

01:14:06.880 | I had a lot of preconceived notions.

01:14:08.920 | And then when I started eating like once a day,

01:14:12.200 | this was at the peak of my competing in jujitsu,

01:14:15.900 | it was like everything I know about nutrition is wrong.

01:14:20.100 | You realize that you have to become a scientist.

01:14:22.720 | First of all, you have to read literature,

01:14:24.360 | you have to learn, you experiment,

01:14:26.040 | but you also have to become a scientist of your own body.

01:14:29.120 | In the same way, I have a lot of preconceived notions

01:14:32.080 | of what performance is like under a vegan diet.

01:14:35.440 | And I want to do it right, like seriously,

01:14:38.960 | not necessarily for the ethical reasons,

01:14:42.200 | but to see if it's performance-wise.

01:14:44.620 | Like can I, I remember there's like a fruitarian diet

01:14:47.740 | where you eat fruit only.

01:14:49.820 | These extremes are like, they're pretty,

01:14:52.500 | they're interesting 'cause people have this need.

01:14:55.420 | The extremes are informative though, right?

01:14:57.200 | I mean, well-controlled experiments,

01:14:58.820 | you eliminate as many variables as you can

01:15:00.740 | except the one you're interested in.

01:15:02.020 | So people are running these experiments.

01:15:04.500 | I think that it's hard to imagine getting,

01:15:09.460 | I know people say you can get enough amino acids

01:15:12.540 | from plant-based sources, and I believe that.

01:15:15.200 | I think it probably takes a little more work.

01:15:18.500 | One thing that's really clear is that the benefit

01:15:20.640 | of these omega-3, omega-6 ratios,

01:15:23.200 | like fish oils and things like that.

01:15:24.840 | There are some data that show that the,

01:15:26.660 | getting at least a thousand milligrams of the EPA,

01:15:30.100 | which is high in fish oils, but other things too,

01:15:32.240 | even some meats and other plants,

01:15:34.520 | in double, in matched placebo,

01:15:40.120 | double-blind controlled studies,

01:15:41.840 | placebo-controlled double-blind studies

01:15:43.400 | have shown that those can offset antidepressive symptoms

01:15:47.080 | as much as some of the selective serotonin

01:15:49.300 | reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft.

01:15:52.400 | So that's pretty impressive.

01:15:54.420 | And in Scandinavia, people know, especially in winter,

01:15:57.640 | to consume a lot of those omega-3s

01:16:00.320 | because they're good for you, they're good for the brain.

01:16:03.000 | - That's the other question.

01:16:04.880 | Nutrition-wise, what kind of stuff have you come across

01:16:08.320 | that's useful?

01:16:09.160 | Like I basically only take fish oil,

01:16:12.440 | like you said, electrolytes.

01:16:14.120 | Electrolytes with water, the David Goggins diet.

01:16:18.200 | - Fish oil.

01:16:19.040 | - Plus fish oil.

01:16:19.960 | And then again, the sponsor, they made it so easier.

01:16:23.960 | The sponsor of your podcast and mine,

01:16:26.640 | athleticgreens.com/huberman.

01:16:28.840 | - Great stuff. - Support it.

01:16:30.400 | I don't know, like it's great stuff for sure,

01:16:34.560 | but also just takes away the headache of like,

01:16:36.700 | I don't have to think about.

01:16:37.840 | - Yeah, you're going to get a bunch of vitamins and minerals.

01:16:40.280 | It does that.

01:16:41.360 | It sounds like a plug,

01:16:42.280 | but I have genuinely been buying it.

01:16:45.520 | No discount, no affiliation or anything since 2012.

01:16:48.560 | I think I heard about it on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

01:16:50.360 | I was like, oh, I'm going to try that stuff.

01:16:52.000 | And I liked it.

01:16:52.840 | I mean, when I was starting my lab,

01:16:54.220 | I was working insane hours.

01:16:56.200 | I still work very long hours.

01:16:57.960 | And getting sick limits productivity.

01:17:01.960 | And I also wanted to train

01:17:03.240 | and I wasn't doing much training back then.

01:17:07.080 | Now I try and get three, four sessions in a week.

01:17:09.720 | I'm not doing nothing like what you and David are doing

01:17:11.900 | or what Joe does.

01:17:13.640 | Or like you guys are way more regimented

01:17:15.680 | and consistent than I am.

01:17:16.940 | But I think that being healthy and feeling good

01:17:21.280 | is one of the great benefits to a career

01:17:24.160 | is having energy and just being not sick.

01:17:28.140 | - Can we take a step back to sleep for a little bit?

01:17:32.000 | And so people should definitely look through your podcast

01:17:37.200 | the first five episodes were on sleep.

01:17:40.680 | Or no, I guess the first opening episode wasn't.

01:17:43.960 | - First one was sort of how the brain works generally.

01:17:46.180 | It was to give people some background.

01:17:47.960 | And then we did four episodes on sleep.

01:17:50.280 | Including some stuff about food, temperature, exercise,

01:17:52.640 | jet lag, shift work for the jet lag folks and shift workers.

01:17:56.120 | - Yeah, it's like a masterclass on sleep.

01:17:57.600 | And then you're going on to a next topic

01:18:01.840 | in the next few episodes, which is incredible.

01:18:04.280 | Well, neuroplasticity, we'll talk about it.

01:18:06.840 | But on sleep, one of the cool things

01:18:10.360 | about the human mind when it sleeps is dreaming.

01:18:13.740 | What do you think we understand

01:18:17.340 | about the contents of dreams?

01:18:21.040 | Like what do dreams mean?

01:18:22.740 | All the stuff we see when we dream.

01:18:25.400 | Is there something that we understand

01:18:28.720 | about the contents of dreams?

01:18:32.060 | - Some of it is very concrete.

01:18:33.520 | So Matt Wilson, who MIT, showed in rodents

01:18:38.520 | and it's been shown in non-human primates.

01:18:40.600 | And now it's been shown in humans

01:18:41.840 | that there is replay of spatial information during sleep.

01:18:46.840 | So initially what Matt showed was

01:18:49.360 | that as these little rodents navigate through a maze,

01:18:52.980 | there are these cells in the hippocampus called place cells

01:18:55.320 | that fire when the animal encounters a turn or a corridor.

01:18:58.760 | And that same exact same sequence is replayed during sleep.

01:19:02.720 | And it turns out this is true in London taxi cab drivers.

01:19:07.480 | Before phones and GPS were what they are today,

01:19:11.060 | the London taxi cab drivers were famous

01:19:13.400 | for knowing the routes through the city,

01:19:15.880 | through these mental maps and their analysis

01:19:19.720 | of their place cell firing during sleep

01:19:21.640 | and during wakefulness.

01:19:22.680 | And so we are essentially taking spatial information

01:19:25.620 | about the location of things and replaying it during sleep.

01:19:28.160 | However, it's not replayed so that you remember it all.

01:19:32.280 | It's replayed so that if there's a reason to remember it,

01:19:36.280 | the links to the emotional system,

01:19:38.080 | to the components of the limbic system and hypothalamus

01:19:41.960 | that are relevant, like you got into a car crash

01:19:44.440 | or a particular location, or you lost a bunch of money

01:19:46.600 | because you were a cab driver, Uber driver,

01:19:48.800 | we'd say nowadays, and you were stuck

01:19:50.760 | at one particular avenue all day and frustrated.

01:19:53.400 | You were getting yelled at by your spouse.

01:19:55.320 | That information gets encoded so that you never forget

01:19:59.000 | that at that particular time of day

01:20:00.440 | and that particular time of year

01:20:02.200 | and this thing happened.

01:20:04.220 | So context starts getting linked to experience.

01:20:06.720 | So there's spatial information

01:20:08.360 | that's absolutely replayed during sleep.

01:20:10.720 | And we experienced this sometimes as dreams.

01:20:13.460 | The dreams that happen early in the night

01:20:15.200 | when slow wave sleep or non-REM sleep dominates,

01:20:18.520 | tends to be sleep of very kind of general themes

01:20:22.440 | and kind of location.

01:20:24.640 | It can feel a little bit eerie and kind of strange.

01:20:27.880 | Not so incidentally, the early phase of the night

01:20:30.100 | is when growth hormone is released.

01:20:32.320 | In the '80s and '90s, there was a drug

01:20:34.180 | that was very popular.

01:20:35.080 | It's very legal now called GHB.

01:20:37.340 | You could actually buy it at GNC or a store then.

01:20:41.620 | I never took it, but it was a popular party drug.

01:20:43.840 | And some people, some famous celebrities died while on GHB.

01:20:47.960 | They were also on a bunch of other things.

01:20:49.400 | So it's not clear what killed them,

01:20:50.480 | but GHB was very big in certain communities

01:20:54.080 | 'cause it promoted a massive release of growth hormone

01:20:57.720 | and gave people these very hypnotic states.

01:20:59.920 | So people would go to clubs

01:21:01.040 | and they were in these very hypnotic states.

01:21:02.880 | It was part of a whole culture.

01:21:05.220 | That's early night.

01:21:07.160 | And those dreams tend to not have

01:21:09.920 | a lot of emotional content or load.

01:21:12.720 | That phase of dreaming is associated

01:21:15.040 | with the occasional jolting yourself out of sleep

01:21:18.320 | 'cause it's a somewhat lighter sleep.

01:21:20.560 | The dreams that occur during REM,

01:21:22.440 | during rapid eye movement sleep

01:21:23.640 | and that dominate towards morning are very different.

01:21:26.520 | They tend to have very little epinephrine

01:21:30.000 | is available in the brain at that time.

01:21:32.040 | Epinephrine again being this molecule

01:21:33.400 | of stress, fear, and excitement.

01:21:35.240 | You are paralyzed during these REM dreams.

01:21:38.120 | You cannot move.

01:21:39.800 | There's intense emotion at the level of what you're feeling

01:21:44.520 | and there's so-called theory of mind.

01:21:47.000 | Theory of mind is an idea that was put forward

01:21:48.880 | by Simon Baron Cohen, Sasha Baron Cohen's cousin.

01:21:52.480 | I think on the podcast,

01:21:53.320 | I mistakenly said that he was at Oxford.

01:21:55.800 | It's like the Cardinal sin.

01:21:56.880 | He's at Cambridge, forgive me.

01:21:58.320 | I'm not British, but.

01:21:59.600 | So the dreams in REM are heavily emotionally laden.

01:22:02.900 | And it's very clear that those dreams and REM sleep,

01:22:05.840 | if you deprive yourself of them for too long,

01:22:08.600 | you become irritable and you start linking

01:22:12.080 | generally negative emotions to almost everything.

01:22:15.400 | The dreams that occur in REM sleep

01:22:17.820 | are when we divorce emotion from our prior experiences.

01:22:21.800 | And it's when we extract general rules and themes.

01:22:25.900 | MIT seems to come up a lot today,

01:22:27.500 | but it's highly relevant.

01:22:29.340 | Susumu Tonogawa, Nobel Prize for immunoglobulin,

01:22:32.860 | but obviously fantastic neuroscientist as well,

01:22:36.080 | has shown that the replay of neurons in the hippocampus

01:22:38.900 | and elsewhere in the brain is kind of an approximation

01:22:42.220 | of the previous episode.

01:22:44.260 | And a lot of fear unlearning of uncoupling emotion

01:22:48.540 | from hard or traumatic events that happened previously

01:22:51.780 | occurs in REM sleep.

01:22:53.280 | So you don't want to deprive yourself of REM sleep

01:22:55.060 | for too long.

01:22:55.980 | And those dreams tend to be very intense.

01:22:57.700 | Now, epinephrine is low so that you can't suddenly

01:23:00.500 | act out your dreams.

01:23:02.280 | But what's interesting is sometimes people will wake up

01:23:05.620 | suddenly while in a REM dream and their heart

01:23:08.520 | will be beating really, really fast.

01:23:10.460 | That's a surge of epinephrine that occurs

01:23:12.580 | as you exit REM sleep.

01:23:14.860 | So you were having this intense emotional experience

01:23:16.920 | without the fear.

01:23:18.140 | You were essentially going through therapy in your sleep,

01:23:20.620 | self-induced therapy.

01:23:22.020 | It's like trauma therapy where you try and divorce

01:23:24.100 | the emotion from the experience.

01:23:26.020 | And then you wake up and some people also have

01:23:28.700 | the other component of REM, which is atonia,

01:23:31.480 | which is paralysis.

01:23:33.060 | Pot smokers experience this a lot more than non-pot smokers.

01:23:36.860 | There's an invasion of paralysis into the waking state.

01:23:40.220 | I'm not a pot smoker, but I have experienced this.

01:23:42.620 | And when you wake up and you're paralyzed for a second,

01:23:44.960 | it's terrifying, but then you jolt yourself alert.

01:23:48.780 | So the REM sleep is important for kind of the self-induced

01:23:53.780 | therapy and forgetting the bad stuff.

01:23:56.820 | It's good for uncoupling the emotions from bad experiences.

01:24:00.180 | And just there are two therapies,

01:24:02.180 | eye movement desensitization reprocessing,

01:24:04.540 | which is a eye movement thing that shuts down the amygdala

01:24:08.100 | during therapy, not during sleep.

01:24:09.860 | And ketamine, which is a dissociative analgesic.

01:24:13.140 | It's actually very similar to PCP.

01:24:15.300 | And ketamine is now being used as a trauma therapy

01:24:18.560 | when someone comes into the ER, for instance,

01:24:21.320 | and they were in a terrible car accident.

01:24:22.780 | I mean, these are horrible things to describe,

01:24:24.180 | but you know, they saw a relative impaled on the driving,

01:24:26.820 | steering column or something,

01:24:28.060 | and they will give this drug to try and shut off

01:24:30.480 | the emotion system so that,

01:24:32.240 | because they're not going to forget, let's be honest.

01:24:34.660 | You don't forget the bad stuff,

01:24:36.200 | but it is possible to uncouple the bad events

01:24:39.640 | from the emotional system.

01:24:41.540 | And there's all sorts of ethical issues about whether or not

01:24:43.520 | that's good or bad to do,

01:24:44.580 | but PTSD is a failure to uncouple the emotion

01:24:48.120 | from these intense experiences.

01:24:50.180 | - So the goal of this kind of therapy

01:24:52.440 | is in the uncoupling for that to be permanent,

01:24:55.860 | to separate.

01:24:57.580 | - So they can recount the event,

01:24:59.260 | and they can describe it without it triggering

01:25:01.460 | the same somatic experience of terror and dread,

01:25:05.180 | because those feelings can be debilitating, obviously.

01:25:08.460 | - And you're saying physiologically in REM sleep,

01:25:11.860 | a similar process is happening.

01:25:13.180 | - That's right.

01:25:14.020 | That thematically, REM sleep is about experiencing

01:25:17.340 | or replaying intense emotions without experience,

01:25:21.020 | the somatic, the physical component of the emotion,

01:25:23.580 | either the acting out or the accelerated heart rate

01:25:26.220 | and agitation.

01:25:28.180 | Likewise, with things like ketamine therapies,

01:25:31.620 | that's the idea is you're uncoupling the physical sensation

01:25:34.340 | from the mental events.

01:25:36.060 | - What is REM sleep and why is it so special?

01:25:39.340 | Maybe we can comment on that.

01:25:40.620 | Rapid eye movement sleep.

01:25:42.260 | - Yeah, discovered in the '50s at the University of Chicago,

01:25:44.880 | it's intense brain activity,

01:25:46.980 | high levels of metabolic activity,

01:25:49.060 | dreams in which people report a lot of the theory of mind.

01:25:52.100 | We were talking about Simon Baron Cohen.

01:25:53.860 | Theory of mind was actually something that he developed

01:25:56.500 | for the diagnosis of autism.

01:25:58.920 | If you take kids, most kids of age five, six, seven,

01:26:03.300 | put them in front of a TV screen in a laboratory,

01:26:05.580 | and you have them watch a video

01:26:06.580 | where a kid is playing with a ball or a doll,

01:26:08.900 | and then the kid puts it into a drawer,

01:26:10.860 | shuts the drawer and walks away,

01:26:12.160 | and another kid comes in,

01:26:13.260 | and you ask the child who's observing this little movie,

01:26:15.700 | you say, "What does this second child think?"

01:26:18.500 | And a typical kid would say, "They want to play,

01:26:22.420 | and they don't know where the ball or doll is,"

01:26:24.060 | or "They're upset," or "They're sad, they want the doll."

01:26:27.840 | Autistic children tend to say, "The doll's in the drawer.

01:26:31.580 | The toy's in the drawer."

01:26:34.060 | They tend to fixate.

01:26:35.580 | They can't get in on the event.

01:26:37.320 | They can't get into the mind of the,

01:26:39.100 | they don't have a theory of mind.

01:26:40.900 | Dreams in REM have a heavy theory of mind component.

01:26:44.100 | People are after me trying to get me.

01:26:46.180 | You can assign motive to other people.

01:26:48.420 | I'm afraid, but it's because there's an expectation.

01:26:52.580 | That doesn't tend to happen in slow-wave sleep dreams.

01:26:55.180 | Now, all this, of course, is by waking people up

01:26:57.100 | and asking them what they were dreaming about,

01:26:58.620 | which from a standpoint of a AI guy or a machine learning guy

01:27:02.700 | or a neuroscientist, kind of like, eh,

01:27:04.640 | but it's the best we've got.

01:27:06.340 | But brain imaging in waking states

01:27:08.980 | while people view a movie and then brain imaging

01:27:11.540 | while people are sleeping supports the idea

01:27:13.060 | that that's basically what's going on.

01:27:15.380 | So REM sleep is amazing,

01:27:17.260 | and you're not gonna get much of it

01:27:18.600 | during your bout with Goggins, but you will afterward.

01:27:22.940 | - Why, so to comment, why won't I,

01:27:26.560 | so is it not possible to get into it real quick?

01:27:29.540 | - Only if you're very, very sleep-deprived,

01:27:32.900 | but because you're going to be at high muscular output,

01:27:36.060 | that's going to bias you

01:27:36.980 | towards more slow-wave sleep overall.

01:27:39.740 | And your body and brain are smart.

01:27:43.460 | They, it will know, they will know

01:27:45.900 | that your main goal is to recover so you can keep going,

01:27:50.300 | so you can keep firing neuromuscular contractions

01:27:52.580 | and you can keep running so that you can,

01:27:54.820 | I mean, it's amazing to think, like, why do we ever stop?

01:27:57.660 | Like, unlike weight training

01:27:58.940 | where I can't do a 500-pound deadlift, I just can't.

01:28:03.140 | I could train for it,

01:28:03.980 | but I certainly can't do a 600-pound deadlift.

01:28:05.540 | I can't do that.

01:28:06.820 | What causes us to stop an endurance event

01:28:10.860 | is usually not a physical barrier.

01:28:12.820 | It's almost always a purely mental barrier.

01:28:15.600 | And that's a very interesting problem.

01:28:17.780 | I mean, neuroscientists don't tend to think

01:28:19.340 | about those sorts of problems

01:28:20.740 | 'cause it sounds so non-neuroscientific,

01:28:23.900 | but that's fundamentally related to the question of,

01:28:27.200 | you know, what is pursuit?

01:28:29.100 | What is the desire to push and to carry on?

01:28:33.220 | - Is there a neuroscientific answer

01:28:34.860 | for that question, you think?

01:28:36.060 | - I think the closest thing is this paper

01:28:38.380 | from Genelia Farms, the Howard Hughes campus,

01:28:42.420 | showing that if you put animals

01:28:45.440 | into a simulated environment

01:28:47.740 | where you can measure their effort,

01:28:50.060 | the forces while they're running,

01:28:51.660 | and you can control the visual environment,

01:28:53.940 | and you can create a scenario

01:28:55.060 | where the animal thinks that its output is futile.

01:28:58.100 | It thinks, it knows it's running and it's actually running,

01:29:01.020 | but you change the frequency of the stripes going by

01:29:03.740 | in their visual world,

01:29:04.980 | such that they think they're not getting anywhere,

01:29:07.220 | and eventually they quit.

01:29:09.220 | And the thing that determines whether or not they quit

01:29:11.500 | is a threshold level of epinephrine in the brainstem.

01:29:14.460 | If you drop that level back down

01:29:16.060 | or you give the animals dopamine, essentially,

01:29:19.320 | they keep going.

01:29:20.420 | If you take dopamine down,

01:29:22.500 | they're like, "This isn't worth it.

01:29:24.660 | "It's helpless.

01:29:25.980 | "This isn't worth my time and energy."

01:29:27.660 | - But this is where the difference

01:29:28.820 | between humans and non-human animals is interesting

01:29:32.780 | 'cause it does feel like humans

01:29:34.140 | have an extra level of cognitive ability

01:29:38.120 | that might be relevant here.

01:29:41.580 | - Well, you can pull from different time references.

01:29:44.800 | So if you're in that moment,

01:29:46.600 | you're gonna need a kit of things to pull from.

01:29:49.460 | So you can think this is in honor of someone else

01:29:52.680 | that passed away,

01:29:53.960 | and you will find a gas reserve that's amazing.

01:29:58.220 | Now, whether or not mice are like,

01:30:00.040 | "I remember my brother back in the other cage

01:30:02.240 | "when I was a little mouse."

01:30:03.980 | We don't know,

01:30:05.040 | but it's very likely that they don't do that,

01:30:08.460 | that they're so present,

01:30:09.620 | they're in the experience of there and then and now,

01:30:12.500 | that they aren't able to extract from the past,

01:30:15.960 | and they're not able to project into the future,

01:30:18.340 | like how great it's gonna feel

01:30:19.720 | when I get to the end of this really lame VR corridor.

01:30:23.540 | I don't think they think about that.

01:30:25.060 | - And think about like, if I quit now,

01:30:28.660 | how will that have,

01:30:29.660 | what kind of effect will it have on the rest of my life

01:30:31.700 | in the future difficult times?

01:30:33.540 | Like if you allow yourself to quit

01:30:35.120 | in this particular moment,

01:30:36.220 | you'll become a quitter more and more in life,

01:30:38.180 | and then you're going to not get the other nice,

01:30:41.440 | the opposite sex mammals.

01:30:45.020 | - That's pretty severe.

01:30:46.140 | You went there, you took it the whole way to evolution

01:30:49.540 | and back again.

01:30:50.380 | I mean, but that's really it.

01:30:51.680 | I mean, our ability to time reference

01:30:54.260 | in the past, present, or future.

01:30:56.100 | I do believe that we can be in the present and the past,

01:30:59.340 | or the present and the future,

01:31:00.660 | or only in the present,

01:31:02.420 | or only in the future,

01:31:03.540 | or only in the past.

01:31:04.380 | But I don't think that we can really think

01:31:05.780 | about past, present, and future all at once.

01:31:08.220 | And this has a similarity to covert attention.

01:31:10.900 | Like we can split our visual attention into two things.

01:31:13.760 | We really can do a task,

01:31:15.560 | even though we can't multitask.

01:31:16.860 | Or we can bring those two spotlights of attention

01:31:18.620 | to the same location.

01:31:20.100 | But it's very hard to split our attention

01:31:22.060 | in really well into three domains,

01:31:24.420 | excuse me, into three domains.

01:31:26.580 | I think that that's very, very challenging.

01:31:29.260 | And our time referencing scheme tends to be

01:31:33.060 | just one or two time references.

01:31:36.960 | - So Lisa Feldman Barrett,

01:31:39.420 | I'm not sure if you've done work together,

01:31:40.740 | but at least you're--

01:31:41.660 | - I found out about her because of you

01:31:43.780 | and your podcast with her.

01:31:45.020 | And I brought her onto Instagram,

01:31:46.260 | did an Instagram Live about emotion.

01:31:48.340 | And it was fascinating.

01:31:49.500 | And she's a very spirited and very, very smart woman.

01:31:53.540 | - Fearless and brilliant.

01:31:55.380 | So I love her, she's amazing.

01:31:57.900 | She's not a scholar of hallucinogens or dreams,

01:32:02.900 | but she had this intuition that there may be a connection

01:32:07.540 | between the kind of dissociation that happens in dreaming

01:32:11.860 | and that happens in like psychedelics.

01:32:16.200 | Because of my previous conversation with you

01:32:20.420 | on this podcast, Matthew Johnson from Johns Hopkins

01:32:26.380 | reached out and he said,

01:32:28.060 | but he commented, I think,

01:32:31.260 | on something that we commented on,

01:32:32.820 | I don't even remember exactly what,

01:32:34.300 | but that there's not many studies,

01:32:36.580 | it's not being psychedelics

01:32:39.140 | and not being rigorously studied in an academic setting,

01:32:41.980 | like with a full rigor of science.

01:32:44.660 | And he said, "Well, actually,

01:32:46.620 | "that's exactly what we're doing

01:32:47.960 | "and they're extremely well-funded now."

01:32:50.180 | And it's been a long battle to get it accepted

01:32:53.000 | as a serious scientific pursuit.

01:32:55.780 | So, but, and I'd like to ask you a little bit about that.

01:33:00.780 | Do you have a sense about connection

01:33:04.180 | between dreams and psychedelics

01:33:05.940 | or these different explorations of mind states

01:33:09.460 | that are outside of the standard normal one,

01:33:12.100 | that's the wake mindset?

01:33:14.460 | - Yeah, I loved your discussion with Matthew.

01:33:16.580 | I knew of the Hopkins group and the stuff they were doing,

01:33:19.340 | but I didn't know much about it at all.

01:33:21.800 | And I learned a ton from that podcast.

01:33:23.480 | I reached out to him just to say,

01:33:25.620 | "Love what you're doing, I think it's incredible."

01:33:27.380 | So yeah, your podcast has been a great source

01:33:29.260 | of serious academic and intellectual conversation for me.

01:33:34.260 | I think what they're doing at Hopkins is amazing.

01:33:38.580 | He has a collaborator there,

01:33:40.220 | actually, they had a very popular paper

01:33:41.980 | I just throw out there for fun,

01:33:43.540 | who was a postdoc at Stanford.

01:33:46.340 | Her name is Gule.

01:33:47.820 | She's Turkish, I believe.

01:33:50.140 | And I apologize, her last name escapes me at the moment,

01:33:54.520 | but that's just a function of my brain.

01:33:57.200 | She had a paper showing that she put octopi on MDMA,

01:34:01.640 | on ecstasy and found out,

01:34:03.280 | this was published in Current Biology,

01:34:06.040 | it was a great journal,

01:34:07.200 | showing that the octopi then wanted to spend more time

01:34:09.980 | with other octopi, and they started cuddling.

01:34:12.560 | So they're colleagues out there.

01:34:14.800 | But the Hopkins project is super interesting

01:34:19.080 | because I think they were initially supported

01:34:21.180 | mainly through private philanthropy.

01:34:23.120 | And now you're starting to see some more interest

01:34:25.460 | at the level of NIH about psychedelics.

01:34:28.940 | It's a complicated space because the psychedelics

01:34:32.260 | are always looked at through the lens of the '60s

01:34:36.260 | and people losing their mind.

01:34:37.780 | I always say, you don't want a Ken Kesey out of the game.

01:34:42.580 | Ken Kesey was amazing, right?

01:34:43.820 | Part of the whole beat generation thing.

01:34:45.300 | And he was actually at the VA near Stanford.

01:34:48.180 | That's where he eventually, in Menlo Park,

01:34:49.540 | he wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,"

01:34:51.220 | or maybe that was about him.

01:34:52.340 | Anyway, the comments will tell me how wrong I am,

01:34:55.160 | but I think I'm tossing these words

01:34:57.060 | in the right general direction.

01:34:59.640 | But Huxley, Kesey, they did a lot of LSD

01:35:04.640 | and they all lost their jobs, right?

01:35:08.320 | They lost their jobs at big institutions

01:35:10.040 | like Harvard and Stanford and elsewhere,

01:35:11.620 | or they left because they made themselves the experiments.

01:35:18.060 | Hopkins, as far as I know, is one of the first places,

01:35:21.180 | if not the first place, where whatever Matt may

01:35:24.180 | or may not be doing in his own life, I don't know,

01:35:26.580 | it's really about the patients and whether or not

01:35:28.540 | the patients in these institutional review board

01:35:31.620 | approved studies, whether or not they're getting better

01:35:34.180 | in situations like depression.

01:35:35.820 | I think it's clear that there's a very close relationship

01:35:40.220 | between hallucinogenic states and dreaming of the sort

01:35:43.940 | that would describe for REM dreaming.

01:35:45.700 | And there's a terrific set of books

01:35:48.420 | and body of scientific literature

01:35:49.900 | from a guy named Alan Hobson, who is an MD,

01:35:52.700 | is at Harvard Med, and he wrote books like "Dream Drugstore."

01:35:56.340 | One of the first neuroscience books I ever read

01:35:58.020 | was about hallucinations and how psychedelics

01:36:00.780 | and dreaming are very similar.

01:36:02.300 | That was way back when I was in high school,

01:36:03.500 | I was just curious.

01:36:04.820 | And he really understood the relationship between LSD

01:36:08.100 | and REM dreams and how similar they are.

01:36:10.960 | I think psychedelics, and Matt knows way more about this

01:36:14.540 | than I do, of course, but psychedelics

01:36:17.380 | have some very interesting properties.

01:36:19.660 | They are certainly not for everybody, right?

01:36:21.640 | And kids, it's a problem.

01:36:23.940 | I think the major issues right now

01:36:25.620 | around the psychedelic conversation is that it's clear

01:36:29.220 | that they can unveil certain elements of neuroplasticity.

01:36:33.020 | They make the brain amenable to change,

01:36:35.520 | changing up space-time relationships,

01:36:37.380 | changing up the emotional load of an event

01:36:39.780 | and being able to reframe that.

01:36:41.460 | It's clear that happens.

01:36:43.240 | But there's two major issues.

01:36:45.180 | One is that people talk about plasticity

01:36:47.940 | as if plasticity is the goal,

01:36:50.180 | but plasticity is a state

01:36:51.660 | within which you can direct neurology.

01:36:53.620 | And the question is, what changes are you trying to get to?

01:36:56.820 | So people are just taking psychedelics to unveil plasticity

01:37:00.760 | without thinking about what circuits

01:37:03.020 | they want to modify and how.

01:37:04.580 | I think that's a problem.

01:37:06.380 | I think there's great potential, however,

01:37:08.440 | for people opening up these states of plasticity

01:37:12.220 | with psychedelics or otherwise

01:37:13.520 | and directing the plastic changes

01:37:16.180 | toward a particular endpoint.

01:37:17.480 | And there's an absolutely spectacular paper at a UC Davis,

01:37:22.060 | published as a full article in Nature

01:37:23.820 | just a couple of months ago,

01:37:25.380 | showing that there are psychedelics

01:37:28.380 | that are now can be modified.

01:37:30.100 | So chemists have gotten into the game now

01:37:31.860 | and modifying to take away the hallucinogenic component

01:37:34.460 | where you still get the neuroplasticity components.

01:37:37.740 | And for a lot of people, it'd be like, oh, that's no fun.

01:37:40.460 | That's not giving you the wild experience.

01:37:43.140 | But I do think that that holds great potential

01:37:45.140 | for people that wouldn't otherwise

01:37:47.340 | orient towards some of these drugs.

01:37:48.740 | So I think it's really marvelous what's happening

01:37:51.380 | and what's about to happen.

01:37:52.740 | And I think there is one drug in that kit of drugs

01:37:57.500 | that's very unusual, like psilocybin, LSD,

01:38:00.860 | those promote heavy, heavy serotonin release

01:38:04.180 | and lateralized connections ramp up, et cetera.

01:38:06.940 | Matt talked about all that.

01:38:08.340 | But MDMA, ecstasy, is a very unusual situation

01:38:13.300 | where dopamine is very, very high

01:38:16.140 | because of the way the drug is designed.

01:38:18.860 | Dopamine release, it goes through the roof.

01:38:21.100 | So people feel great and they want to move

01:38:23.860 | and they have a lot of energy.

01:38:25.300 | But serotonin levels are also high.

01:38:27.640 | And that's a very unnatural state.

01:38:30.420 | And why MDMA may, and I want to highlight may,

01:38:35.040 | have particularly high potential for the treatment

01:38:39.480 | of certain forms of depression is an interesting question

01:38:43.160 | because never before, as far as we know in human history,

01:38:47.640 | has there been a possibility of opening up

01:38:50.640 | dopaminergic and serotonergic states at the same time,

01:38:53.080 | dopamine being the molecule pursuit and reward

01:38:55.180 | and more and more, and serotonin being one of bliss

01:38:58.640 | and being content right where you're at.

01:39:00.100 | So it's almost like those two things

01:39:01.280 | wrap back on themselves and create this very unusual state.

01:39:04.520 | And I think the bigger conversation

01:39:06.360 | is what to do with a state like that.

01:39:08.280 | Like, do you, is it about self-love?

01:39:11.240 | Is it about developing love for another person?

01:39:13.480 | Is it about forgetting hate?

01:39:15.280 | Like, these are powerful molecules.

01:39:17.240 | And I think if the academic community

01:39:19.240 | and the clinical community is going to move forward

01:39:20.880 | with them in any serious way,

01:39:22.600 | I think there needs to be a conversation

01:39:24.400 | about what they're being used for.

01:39:28.360 | - Right, and coupled with that,

01:39:30.480 | I think similar to what you're saying,

01:39:32.840 | like Matt has talked about, as others have talked about,

01:39:35.820 | some of the biggest benefits of progress,

01:39:39.980 | whether it's quitting smoking and all this kind of stuff,

01:39:42.840 | is in the days after, it's the integration of the experience.

01:39:47.600 | So maybe you open up the brain to the neuroplasticity,

01:39:50.680 | but then there's work to be done.

01:39:52.320 | It's not, you're like, you shake up something

01:39:55.120 | in the biology of the brain,

01:39:58.000 | but you have to do then its work.

01:40:00.100 | - Absolutely.

01:40:01.120 | Now, a friend of mine who's a physician,

01:40:03.440 | he says, who's quite open to this idea

01:40:06.600 | that psychedelics could play a real role in real medicine,

01:40:10.400 | says, "Better living through chemistry

01:40:12.200 | "still requires better living."

01:40:14.440 | And I think it's a beautiful statement.

01:40:16.560 | I wish I had said it, but he gets the credit.

01:40:19.920 | But the plasticity window opens, and then as you said,

01:40:23.560 | what are you going to do in the two weeks, three weeks,

01:40:25.320 | four weeks afterward?

01:40:26.400 | Because that's the real opportunity.

01:40:28.280 | But those psychedelic experiences

01:40:29.880 | are really a case of an amplified experience

01:40:32.040 | inside of an amplified experience,

01:40:33.600 | so much so that everything seems relevant.

01:40:36.840 | And it's fascinating.

01:40:39.800 | I mean, my hope is that the AI and machine learning

01:40:43.960 | and the brain machine interface and all that

01:40:45.640 | will eventually be merged with the psychedelic treatments

01:40:49.620 | so that an individual can go in,

01:40:52.320 | take whatever amount of whatever's safe for them,

01:40:55.000 | working with a clinician, and really direct the plasticity

01:40:57.600 | while maybe stimulating the medial orbital frontal cortex,

01:41:01.960 | or increasing the observer,

01:41:03.280 | or decreasing the observer in the brain,

01:41:05.160 | or decreasing the amygdala.

01:41:06.480 | I mean, it's doable.

01:41:07.960 | It's doable with transcranial magnetic stimulation,

01:41:11.080 | and it's for shutting down activity,

01:41:12.720 | and it's doable with ultrasound.

01:41:14.600 | Ultrasound now allows very focal activation

01:41:17.440 | of particular brain regions

01:41:19.120 | through the skull noninvasively.

01:41:21.040 | - So it's approaching the same kind of therapy

01:41:23.980 | from different angles.

01:41:24.900 | One of AI's is the computational side,

01:41:26.760 | sort of injecting the robotics,

01:41:29.640 | injecting, maybe you can even think about it

01:41:32.640 | as electricity, the electrical approach,

01:41:35.760 | versus then the chemical approach.

01:41:38.680 | - Absolutely, and then the psychology is subjective, right?

01:41:42.780 | So it's gonna take some real understanding

01:41:45.960 | of what that person's lexicon is.

01:41:49.540 | Like, you know, that wasn't a pun, sorry.

01:41:51.440 | (laughing)

01:41:52.840 | Sorry, terrible.

01:41:54.240 | I'm like the worst.

01:41:55.120 | That's the one thing I know from the feedback

01:41:56.620 | on my podcast.

01:41:57.460 | My jokes are terrible, but I never claim to be funny.

01:42:00.060 | (laughing)

01:42:02.200 | But somebody who they really trust

01:42:04.720 | and understands when somebody says, you know,

01:42:08.160 | for a very stoic person, like I'm imagining

01:42:10.520 | you interviewed the great Dan Gable, right?

01:42:12.760 | I don't know anything about Dan,

01:42:13.880 | but can you imagine, like, you asked Dan, like, you know,

01:42:15.960 | how you feel about something while on one of these drugs?

01:42:18.320 | And like, I mean, his languaging might,

01:42:21.720 | if he says that was troubling,

01:42:24.280 | it might mean that it was very troubling

01:42:26.000 | or not troubling at all.

01:42:27.360 | So people are, language is a poor guide

01:42:31.300 | because if I say I'm upset, how upset is that?

01:42:33.720 | Well, that's very subjective.

01:42:35.360 | So you need, we need, can you build a tool for that?

01:42:38.400 | Can you build an AI tool for that?

01:42:39.720 | - Yeah, deeper, yeah, well--

01:42:40.800 | - Maybe that's the eye, maybe that's our,

01:42:43.380 | that's what the eyes could reveal.

01:42:44.840 | - So language is not just words, it's everything together.

01:42:47.380 | And that's one of the fascinating things about the eyes

01:42:50.460 | and the window to the soul.

01:42:51.520 | I mean, they express so much, the face, the eyes, the body.

01:42:56.140 | I mean, Lisa talks about that, the communication of emotions.

01:42:59.140 | It's a super complex.

01:43:01.100 | Perhaps it's a bit of a side fun tangent,

01:43:04.860 | but Matt, Matthew Johnson brings up DMT.

01:43:09.860 | And the experience of DMT is,

01:43:12.780 | from a scientific perspective,

01:43:16.180 | just a mystery in itself over its intensity

01:43:20.340 | of what happens to the brain.

01:43:21.860 | And of course, Joe Rogan and others bring it up

01:43:25.740 | as a very different, special kind of experience.

01:43:30.480 | And elves seem to come up often.

01:43:33.900 | - I've never tried DMT,

01:43:36.140 | what allows for hallucinogenic states.

01:43:38.740 | And it, I mean, DMT is a really interesting molecule.

01:43:41.940 | There are a lot of people experimenting now with DMT.

01:43:48.300 | And they just, the way they've described it

01:43:52.060 | is as a kind of a freight train through space and time.

01:43:56.060 | Very different than the way people describe LSD

01:43:58.180 | type experiences or psilocybin,

01:43:59.820 | where time and space are very fluid,

01:44:02.140 | but it tends to be a kind of a slower role, if you will.

01:44:05.340 | So it's clear that DMT is tapping into a brain state

01:44:10.220 | that's distinctly different than the other psychedelics.

01:44:13.860 | And you mentioned jujitsu and these other communities.

01:44:17.920 | I mean, it's, I think it's interesting

01:44:20.580 | because jujitsu is a nonverbal activity

01:44:23.460 | and people get together and talk about

01:44:24.860 | this nonverbal activity and they show great love for it.

01:44:27.700 | In the same way that surfers, you know,

01:44:29.820 | I've known some surfers in my time

01:44:32.020 | and they will get up at the crack of dawn

01:44:35.020 | and drive really, really far to sit in the water

01:44:37.140 | and wait for this wave to come.

01:44:38.180 | I have to imagine it's pretty fantastic.

01:44:40.860 | I think that human beings now,

01:44:43.800 | some of whom are in the scientific community

01:44:46.400 | are starting to feel comfortable enough

01:44:48.100 | to talk about some of these other loves and other endeavors,

01:44:51.380 | because they do reveal a certain component

01:44:54.060 | about our underlying neurology.

01:44:55.940 | I'm fascinated by the concept of wordlessness,

01:45:00.940 | activities in which language is just not sufficient

01:45:04.900 | to capture and in which feel so vital as a reset,

01:45:09.540 | as important as sleep.

01:45:11.300 | You know, I think that's one of the dangers of the phone

01:45:13.380 | is not that you're gonna get into some online battle

01:45:15.500 | or that you're always staring at the phone,

01:45:16.680 | is that it's a words.

01:45:17.920 | Whereas we read things, we're hearing the script in our head

01:45:20.800 | and I think getting into states

01:45:23.500 | where we are in a state of wordlessness

01:45:26.480 | is very renewing and replenishing and just can feel amazing.

01:45:31.480 | And I believe also can help us tap into creative states

01:45:36.080 | and allow our neurology to access creative states.

01:45:38.800 | And sleep is one such wordlessness period.

01:45:42.800 | So one of the most interesting things to me

01:45:45.860 | are states that one can approach in waking,

01:45:48.340 | non-sleep depressed, wordlessness through,

01:45:51.780 | maybe it's jujitsu, maybe it's for some people surfing,

01:45:54.180 | maybe it's dancing, maybe it's just,

01:45:56.220 | I don't know, staring at a wall, who knows.

01:45:58.260 | But where the language components of the brain

01:46:01.380 | are completely shut down.

01:46:03.220 | And it has to be the case that drugs are no drugs,

01:46:06.560 | that the brain is entering and starting to states

01:46:10.620 | and starting to use algorithms

01:46:12.120 | that are distinctly different

01:46:13.240 | than when we're trying to compose things

01:46:15.540 | in any kind of coherent way for someone else to understand.

01:46:17.780 | There's no interest in anyone else understanding

01:46:20.200 | what you're experiencing in that moment.

01:46:22.380 | And that's beautiful.

01:46:23.540 | And I think it's not just beautiful because it feels good,

01:46:27.740 | I think it's beautiful because it's important

01:46:29.780 | and it's clearly fundamental to our neurology.

01:46:32.740 | - And your sense is there's a connection

01:46:35.100 | between dreams and DMT and psychedelic,

01:46:37.140 | like all of the, you can understand one

01:46:41.700 | by studying the other.

01:46:42.660 | So for example, dreams are also very difficult to study,

01:46:46.260 | but they're more accessible, it's safer to study.

01:46:49.900 | - And we're told we need to get more of it.

01:46:51.880 | Whereas with psychedelics, there's this big question mark,

01:46:54.380 | is it gonna make everyone crazy?

01:46:56.300 | Is it gonna be legal?

01:46:58.060 | I mean, it's kind of interesting how,

01:47:00.140 | if one looks on Instagram, one could almost think

01:47:03.340 | that these drugs are already legal

01:47:04.820 | based on the way that people commute, but they're not yet.

01:47:06.820 | There's still a lot of them are scheduled.

01:47:08.300 | - And there's a lot of questions.

01:47:10.500 | I mean, but nevertheless, it's like,

01:47:13.560 | my hope is that science opens up to these drugs

01:47:20.140 | a little bit more.

01:47:21.880 | It's just, I have this intuition that,

01:47:24.420 | like a lot of people share that they would be able

01:47:27.300 | to unlock deeper understanding of our own mind.

01:47:32.060 | It's any kind of, same as studying dreams.

01:47:34.860 | - Absolutely.

01:47:35.700 | - So creativity is in the nonlinearities, right?

01:47:39.360 | But productivity is in the implementation of linearities.

01:47:43.100 | I mean, that's what is absolutely clear.

01:47:45.780 | This is why I think we were talking earlier

01:47:47.320 | about why a formal rigorous training in something

01:47:49.900 | where other people are looking at you and telling you,

01:47:51.580 | "No, not good enough, go back and do it again."

01:47:54.020 | There's real value to that because otherwise,

01:47:56.100 | it's just ideas, it's just vapors.

01:47:58.540 | - You know, one thing that Matt mentioned

01:48:01.220 | as the study that they're working on is,

01:48:04.900 | as opposed to, I think most of the psychedelic studies

01:48:07.660 | they've done is on how to treat different conditions.

01:48:12.020 | And one of the things they're working on now

01:48:13.700 | is to try to do a study where, for creatives,

01:48:18.140 | for people that don't have a condition

01:48:20.180 | that they're trying to treat,

01:48:21.020 | but instead see how this,

01:48:23.840 | how psychedelics can help you create.

01:48:25.980 | So like-- - Goodness,

01:48:27.140 | if you take creatives and you give them more psychedelics,

01:48:29.740 | they're not gonna be able to get out of their room.

01:48:31.660 | - I don't know.

01:48:32.660 | Well, but this is the, maybe you can speak to that,

01:48:36.140 | psychedelics or not, or dreams or tools in general,

01:48:38.980 | how to be better creatives.

01:48:40.620 | That's an interesting, I don't often see studies

01:48:43.940 | of this nature of like how to take high performance

01:48:47.000 | in the mental creative space

01:48:50.820 | and get them to perform even better.

01:48:53.660 | So it's not average people,

01:48:55.660 | it's like masters of their craft, like taking,

01:48:58.860 | I mean, his examples was taking an Elon Musk,

01:49:01.460 | which is in the engineering space,

01:49:03.220 | and maybe musicians and all that kind of stuff,

01:49:05.580 | and studying that.

01:49:06.660 | I mean, that's weird.

01:49:09.500 | Usually the science, the scientific exploration there

01:49:13.700 | has been done by the musicians themselves,

01:49:16.780 | as has been documented.

01:49:17.900 | - Like jazz is like all nonlinearities, right?

01:49:21.380 | But the people still have to know

01:49:23.660 | how to play their instruments, right?

01:49:25.740 | There's some early skill building that's critical.

01:49:29.580 | I mean, when you mention someone like Elon,

01:49:32.140 | I mean, he's already a virtuoso, right?

01:49:34.620 | 'Cause he, and in so many different domains,

01:49:36.420 | I've never met him, but it's clear, right?

01:49:39.220 | It's not just that he's ambitious and bold and brave

01:49:42.860 | and all that, it's all that.

01:49:44.300 | And there's clearly a different way

01:49:48.780 | of looking at the same problems

01:49:50.120 | that everyone else is looking at.

01:49:51.580 | And people are probably banging their head

01:49:53.300 | against the refrigerator, thinking like,

01:49:54.580 | think differently, it doesn't work that way.

01:49:56.820 | It involved, there's a certain anxiety in,

01:49:59.820 | for the, I'm not talking about for Elon,

01:50:01.540 | but I have no idea.

01:50:02.800 | But I think for somebody who's very structured,

01:50:06.780 | very regimented, very linear,

01:50:08.600 | the anxiety comes from letting go of those linearities.

01:50:12.060 | And for the person that's very creative,

01:50:14.080 | the anxiety comes from trying to impose linearities, right?

01:50:18.260 | The really creative artists or musician,

01:50:21.020 | they seem nuts, they seem like they can't get

01:50:23.740 | their life together because they can't.

01:50:26.040 | And we look at people who are kind of pseudo Asperger's

01:50:29.460 | or Asperger's or some forms of autism,

01:50:31.300 | and they are so hyper-linear,

01:50:33.140 | but you take away those linearities and they freak out.

01:50:36.460 | And that's kind of the essence of some of those syndromes.

01:50:39.100 | So I think that the ability to toggle back and forth

01:50:42.380 | between those states is what's remarkable.

01:50:44.140 | I mean, because we're here and we're having this discussion,

01:50:46.420 | I mean, Steve Jobs is a good example.

01:50:48.180 | He probably the best example,

01:50:49.980 | somebody who actually talked about his own process,

01:50:52.700 | about the merging of art and science,

01:50:54.900 | art and engineering, humanities and science.

01:50:57.820 | Very few people can do that.

01:50:59.580 | You seem to have a capacity to do that.

01:51:03.260 | Like you know poetry and you are AI guy,

01:51:06.300 | like there's nothing linear about poetry

01:51:08.660 | as far as I can tell.

01:51:09.780 | - I mean, I do wonder just like we've been talking about

01:51:12.660 | if there's any ways to push that to its limits

01:51:15.140 | to explore further.

01:51:17.660 | I don't like leaning, this is why I'm bothered

01:51:20.280 | there's not more science and psychedelics

01:51:22.380 | I haven't done almost,

01:51:24.700 | so I've eaten mushrooms a few times allegedly,

01:51:29.700 | but that's it.

01:51:31.740 | And the reason I don't do more,

01:51:33.500 | the reason I haven't done DMT is because it's illegal

01:51:36.380 | and it's like not well studied.

01:51:39.140 | I'm in those things, I'm not usually at the cutting edge,

01:51:44.100 | but I'm very curious and it feels like

01:51:46.460 | there could be tools to be discovered there,

01:51:51.140 | not for fun, not for recreation,

01:51:53.620 | but for like encouraging whether you're a linear thinker

01:51:58.620 | to go non-linear or it's non-linear to go linear,

01:52:01.820 | like to shake things up.

01:52:03.500 | You mentioned Dan Gable,

01:52:05.060 | the idea of Dan Gable on psychedelics is fascinating to me

01:52:07.760 | because he's such a control freak.

01:52:11.180 | I mean, he lets control-- - That I would show up for.

01:52:13.660 | That I would show up for.

01:52:15.220 | - But like so much of these psychedelic experiences

01:52:17.620 | it feels like is for letting go.

01:52:19.860 | - That's right.

01:52:20.680 | - To resist.

01:52:21.520 | - But that's supposedly where the growth is

01:52:23.900 | in giving oneself over to the process.

01:52:27.500 | - And that's for people who are like master controllers,

01:52:31.340 | he's one of the greatest coaches of all time,

01:52:33.140 | it's fascinating to see what that battle looks like

01:52:35.740 | of resistance and then of letting go.

01:52:38.660 | Yeah, I mean, I can't wait to see

01:52:42.540 | where these studies take us.

01:52:44.020 | - Well, it's clearly happening.

01:52:45.580 | You know, I've asked,

01:52:46.420 | I have a couple of colleagues at Stanford

01:52:47.700 | who are doing animal studies.

01:52:49.380 | I've asked around, you know,

01:52:51.460 | there's a lot of discussion in the neuroscience community

01:52:54.240 | about what the perception of a laboratory is

01:52:56.840 | if they work on psychedelics.

01:52:59.480 | I mean, I have to tip my hat to the folks at Hopkins,

01:53:02.840 | they are pioneers.

01:53:04.080 | And as Terry Signowski,

01:53:06.000 | he's a computational neuroscientist down at Salk says,

01:53:08.600 | I don't think he was the first person to say this,

01:53:09.960 | he says, you know how to spot the pioneers?

01:53:12.600 | They're the ones with the arrows in their backs.

01:53:14.520 | - Yeah.

01:53:15.360 | - And you know, it's an unkind world to a scientist

01:53:19.920 | that's trying to do really cutting edge stuff.

01:53:22.020 | My colleague, David Spiegel, who studies medical hypnosis,

01:53:25.140 | he's got dozens of studies now showing that hypnosis

01:53:28.740 | can be beneficial for pain management,

01:53:30.420 | anxiety management, cancer outcomes.

01:53:32.460 | And it's finally, you know,

01:53:34.260 | at the point where there's so much data,

01:53:36.900 | but people hear hypnosis and they think of stage hypnosis,

01:53:39.380 | which is like the furthest thing from what he's doing.

01:53:42.020 | And I think mind body type stuff, hypnosis,

01:53:47.020 | respiration and breathing,

01:53:48.440 | I think the hard science walk into the problem

01:53:52.560 | is always going to be best to get the community on board.

01:53:55.920 | And then it's up to people like Matt

01:53:58.120 | and to really, you know, take it to the next level.

01:54:01.720 | And as I say, not Kesey out of the game,

01:54:03.800 | because Kesey basically was taken too much of his own stuff

01:54:07.300 | and he started dressing crazy, a banana hats.

01:54:09.400 | And like you see him, he had the magic bus.

01:54:11.720 | So, you know, the day I start driving to work

01:54:14.340 | in the magic bus, that's the day I lose my job.

01:54:17.680 | I'm not into buses or wearing fruit, but-

01:54:21.000 | - You're going to get a phone call from me

01:54:22.340 | and I hope you do the same for me.

01:54:23.600 | It's like, dude, what are you doing?

01:54:26.660 | - Well, what's interesting earlier,

01:54:28.040 | we're talking about the challenge with David

01:54:29.520 | that you're about to do.

01:54:30.560 | I mean, that is a psychedelic experience of sorts

01:54:34.600 | because you're biasing your mind

01:54:36.240 | towards a pretty extreme neurochemical state

01:54:38.720 | and you don't know what you're going to find there.

01:54:40.760 | And that's kind of the excitement,

01:54:42.160 | at least for me as an observer.

01:54:43.640 | It's like, I want to know

01:54:45.360 | what the experience is like afterward.

01:54:49.520 | I want to know, like, how was it?

01:54:51.120 | I mean, I'm sure you're going to get something.

01:54:52.720 | Like you said, you're going to grow.

01:54:53.920 | The question is how.

01:54:54.860 | - And not resisting.

01:54:55.820 | I mean, it's the same as with a psychedelic experience.

01:54:57.840 | It's like not, like giving yourself over completely

01:55:01.440 | to the experience and not resisting

01:55:03.360 | and going through the whole mental journey

01:55:05.020 | of whether it's anger or excitement or exhaustion,

01:55:08.720 | the whole thing.

01:55:09.560 | It's, I mean, that's the entirety of the process

01:55:14.560 | that David goes through

01:55:17.920 | when he does his own challenges and so on,

01:55:20.500 | is that whole journey.

01:55:21.480 | He finds purposely, like,

01:55:24.120 | missile seeks the limits of the mind

01:55:27.320 | that whenever the resistance is felt,

01:55:30.640 | runs up against it,

01:55:31.920 | and then goes through the full journey of going beyond it

01:55:34.560 | and seeing what's there on the other side.

01:55:36.640 | - Well, stress has these two sides,

01:55:38.120 | the limbic friction of being tired

01:55:40.140 | and needing to get more energized.

01:55:41.720 | That's one form of stress.

01:55:43.520 | And then there's the feeling too amped up

01:55:45.640 | and needing to calm down.

01:55:46.920 | The typical discussion around stress is one thing,

01:55:50.160 | but it's all limbic friction.

01:55:51.720 | It's just that when I say limbic friction,

01:55:53.600 | that's not a real scientific term.

01:55:54.900 | I just mean the limbic system

01:55:55.960 | wanting to pull you down into sleep

01:55:57.640 | or wanting to put you into panic.

01:55:59.200 | And you using top-down processing,

01:56:01.720 | using that evolved forebrain to say,

01:56:04.880 | "Mm-mm, I'm not going to go to sleep."

01:56:06.880 | And, "Mm-mm, I'm not going to freak out."

01:56:09.120 | And those top-down control mechanisms are,

01:56:11.840 | I mean, when those get honed, that's beautiful

01:56:15.160 | because then you're increasing capacity for everything.

01:56:18.660 | - This month on the podcast,

01:56:22.360 | you're talking about neuroplasticity.

01:56:23.720 | You mentioned it a bunch already.

01:56:25.260 | Is there something you're looking forward to specifically,

01:56:29.040 | like something maybe you're fascinated by

01:56:31.920 | that jumps to mind about neuroplasticity,

01:56:34.720 | this fascinating property of the brain?

01:56:37.620 | - Yeah, I think that it's clear

01:56:39.560 | there's one facet of neuroplasticity

01:56:41.800 | that is very well supported by the research data

01:56:45.340 | that hardly anyone has implemented in the real world.

01:56:48.840 | And that's the release of acetylcholine from these neurons

01:56:51.600 | in the forebrain called nucleus basalis.

01:56:53.720 | This is mainly the work of Mike Merzenich,

01:56:56.000 | who used to be at UCSF,

01:56:57.360 | and some of his scientific offspring, Greg Reckin's own,

01:57:00.000 | and Michael Kilgaard and others.

01:57:01.480 | What they showed was increases in acetylcholine,

01:57:04.840 | this molecule associated with focus, in concert,

01:57:09.080 | meaning at the same time as some event,

01:57:11.920 | motor event or music event or any kind of sensory event,

01:57:16.920 | immediately reorganizes the neocortex

01:57:20.540 | so that there's a permanent map representation of that event.

01:57:23.980 | And I absolutely believe that this can be channeled

01:57:27.440 | toward accelerated skill learning.

01:57:29.980 | And my friend and colleague, Eddie Chang,

01:57:31.480 | who's now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,

01:57:34.760 | but also a fine scientist in his own right,

01:57:37.720 | not just a clinician,

01:57:38.760 | he's doing studies looking at rapid acquisition of language

01:57:42.560 | using these principles.

01:57:43.680 | He trained with Merzenich.

01:57:45.760 | It's clear we have these gates on plasticity

01:57:48.120 | in the forebrain,

01:57:48.960 | and they are gated by nicotinic acetylcholine transmission.

01:57:53.720 | And why that hasn't made it into protocols

01:57:56.880 | for motor learning, sport learning,

01:57:58.880 | language learning, music learning, emotional learning,

01:58:01.640 | I don't know.

01:58:02.480 | I think part of the reason has been kind of cultural

01:58:05.520 | is that scientists publish their paper and they move on.

01:58:07.840 | Merzenich talked a lot and still can be found

01:58:11.000 | from time to time talking about

01:58:13.120 | how these plasticity mechanisms can be leveraged.

01:58:16.560 | But he had a commercial company,

01:58:18.880 | and so then people kind of backed away from him a little bit.

01:58:21.260 | I think he was, to be honest,

01:58:22.720 | I think Merzenich was ahead of his time.

01:58:25.240 | And I think the timing is right now

01:58:27.340 | for people to understand these mechanisms of plasticity

01:58:30.360 | and start to implement them.

01:58:31.600 | Also, it all sounds like becoming superhuman

01:58:34.180 | or optimizing or whatever, all that, yes.

01:58:37.080 | But also what about kids with language learning deficits

01:58:39.760 | or with dyslexia or just performance in school in general?

01:58:43.760 | I mean, I have a deep interest and concern

01:58:46.200 | for the future of science and mathematics

01:58:48.500 | and not just in this country, but all over the world.

01:58:51.640 | And more plasticity equals faster, better, deeper learning.

01:58:56.200 | And if we don't do this,

01:58:58.060 | I don't think we're going to get the full reach

01:59:00.500 | out of all the machine learning tools either,

01:59:03.140 | because everyone talks about these huge data sets,

01:59:06.020 | but those huge data sets funnel into human interpretation.

01:59:09.480 | I mean, we don't just like stare at the numbers and bask.

01:59:12.380 | So the human brain, I think,

01:59:14.660 | needs to leverage these plasticity mechanisms

01:59:17.620 | to keep up with the thing that's happening very, very fast,

01:59:20.260 | which is technology development.

01:59:21.820 | So that's a long-winded way of saying

01:59:24.100 | basal forebrain cholinergic transmission and plasticity,

01:59:26.980 | it allows for plasticity in adulthood

01:59:29.080 | and it allows for it in single trial learning,

01:59:31.580 | which is incredible.

01:59:33.340 | - But how do we leverage that?

01:59:34.940 | Like in the physical space taking actions,

01:59:38.160 | or is there some chemicals that can stimulate,

01:59:40.880 | stimulate neuroplasticity?

01:59:44.460 | Like what- - I think it's

01:59:45.300 | the intersection of the two.

01:59:46.740 | I think it's being engaged in a physical practice

01:59:48.880 | while enhancing pharmacology.

01:59:50.980 | And it has to be done safely.

01:59:52.260 | - And this is full of open questions.

01:59:54.140 | This is the very beginnings of it, like you're saying.

01:59:56.620 | - Yeah, a pill that's safe

01:59:58.980 | that increases nicotinic transmission.

02:00:00.720 | I mean, I know a number of people that chew Nicorette.

02:00:03.020 | Actually, I have a Nobel Prize winning colleague

02:00:05.540 | at Columbia, not to be named,

02:00:08.360 | who chews like six pieces of Nicorette

02:00:09.980 | in a half hour conversation with him.

02:00:11.900 | And he started doing that as a replacement for smoking,

02:00:14.960 | because smoking is nicotine,

02:00:17.060 | nicotinic stimulation of the cholinergic system.

02:00:19.880 | So smokers have long known that increases focus

02:00:22.800 | and attention and learning.

02:00:24.120 | It's just that the lung cancer thing is a barrier.

02:00:27.120 | Now I'm not suggesting people take Nicorette,

02:00:29.040 | but it's clear that we need better directed pharmacology.

02:00:32.760 | But you can imagine next time you go in for a learning bout,

02:00:35.620 | if it's really essential,

02:00:37.420 | you might want to stimulate the nicotinic system

02:00:39.780 | if that's safe for you.

02:00:41.520 | Again, I'm a doctor.

02:00:42.520 | So again, I'm not telling people to do this,

02:00:44.160 | but that's where it's going.

02:00:45.800 | Until we start merging machines

02:00:47.480 | with pharmacology and behavior,

02:00:49.320 | we're just kind of walking around

02:00:52.640 | in a circle over and over again.

02:00:54.440 | And it's gonna happen.

02:00:56.320 | - Do you find computer vision, machine learning,

02:01:01.320 | from the perspective of tooling,

02:01:03.640 | as an interesting tool for analyzing,

02:01:07.240 | for processing all the data from the neuroscience world,

02:01:10.280 | from the neurobiology, biology,

02:01:13.080 | the chemical, all the different data sets

02:01:15.120 | that you could have about the mind,

02:01:16.640 | the eye, everything that's neck and above,

02:01:21.040 | and also the central nervous system and all?

02:01:23.480 | - Absolutely.

02:01:24.720 | I think that computer science and engineering

02:01:27.640 | and chemistry, bioengineering,

02:01:29.560 | that's what's creating the acceleration

02:01:33.400 | and progress in neuroscience right now.

02:01:35.640 | I think it's actually one place where science,

02:01:38.680 | I'm very reassured,

02:01:39.760 | science has invited in psychologists,

02:01:43.260 | computational biologists,

02:01:44.400 | at least at Stanford, MIT,

02:01:45.760 | and other places too, of course,

02:01:48.160 | it's clear that it's a everyone's invited

02:01:51.040 | kind of party right now.

02:01:53.120 | That the major issue in the field of neuroscience,

02:01:55.880 | at least through my view,

02:01:57.160 | is that there's no conceptual leadership.

02:01:59.200 | No one is saying we need to work on

02:02:00.700 | and solve this problem or that problem.

02:02:02.760 | It's very fragmented right now.

02:02:05.740 | Now, the good news is people are communicating.

02:02:07.840 | So computer scientists and people who work on AI,

02:02:10.400 | machine vision, are talking to biologists and vice versa.

02:02:13.640 | But it's very dispersed.

02:02:15.640 | - Is there a lot of different data sets?

02:02:17.360 | Like in your work that you've just come across,

02:02:21.120 | is there a huge number of disparate data sets

02:02:23.720 | around neuroscience and so on?

02:02:26.320 | - Well, there's a lot of cell sequencing stuff.

02:02:28.120 | So the Broad over in Boston,

02:02:31.160 | and then on this coast,

02:02:32.520 | the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,

02:02:35.000 | what they did, $3 billion to sequence every cell type

02:02:40.000 | in humans and in animals.

02:02:42.360 | And I think their goal is to cure every disease

02:02:45.800 | by some date, I don't know, in the future.

02:02:48.780 | Huge data sets of gene expression and protein expression.

02:02:54.560 | That's valuable.

02:02:55.760 | I think no one really knows how to think

02:02:58.280 | about neural circuits and what is a neural circuit.

02:03:02.920 | Is it one structure?

02:03:04.560 | Is it two structures communicating?

02:03:06.580 | I think this is where I actually think

02:03:08.840 | that the robotics is going to tell us how the brain works.

02:03:13.680 | Because it's tempting to think

02:03:15.400 | that the brain has all these cell types

02:03:18.040 | and circuits in order to solve specific problems.

02:03:20.800 | But it might be that the fundamental algorithm

02:03:23.120 | is to create cells and circuits

02:03:24.960 | that can solve variable problems.

02:03:27.080 | We know in the retina,

02:03:28.320 | just a very simple example is that we've always heard

02:03:30.880 | about like cones are for color vision and high acuity,

02:03:33.360 | and rods are for night vision and non-color vision.

02:03:37.520 | But at the dusk, dawn transition,

02:03:40.840 | certain cell types switch to do completely different,

02:03:43.160 | have a completely different function

02:03:44.440 | for viewing starry night

02:03:45.520 | versus what they do during the daytime.

02:03:47.960 | So neurons multiplex.

02:03:50.120 | And I think building machines that can multiplex

02:03:53.840 | and can evolve themselves is going to help us

02:03:57.040 | really understand what the brain is doing.

02:03:58.600 | We need to tease out the fundamental algorithms.

02:04:01.520 | We know they're like motion detection

02:04:03.280 | and spatial vision and things like that.

02:04:05.160 | I think machines are going to be much faster at that

02:04:07.420 | than our understanding of biology

02:04:11.040 | and how the brain does that.

02:04:12.440 | Basically, I'll be out of a job

02:04:15.120 | and people like you will have a job.

02:04:16.560 | - Well, no, I think the main idea is that

02:04:19.640 | there won't be a job that's machine learning

02:04:22.120 | or computer vision.

02:04:24.000 | It's just, it's a tool that neuroscientists

02:04:27.440 | will use more and more and more.

02:04:29.400 | And biologists would use.

02:04:31.920 | I mean, this whole idea that it will just be a tool

02:04:35.320 | that allows you to start expanding

02:04:39.220 | the kind of things you can study.

02:04:41.820 | - Well, the next generation coming up,

02:04:43.500 | I can say this 'cause I now I'm blessed

02:04:45.140 | to have a bioengineering student.

02:04:46.860 | They think about problems so differently than biologists do.

02:04:50.900 | We realized the other day,

02:04:51.760 | we both came up with a set of ideas around a certain project

02:04:54.380 | and we realized that her version of it

02:04:56.340 | was the exact opposite of mine,

02:04:58.380 | and hers was far more rational.

02:05:00.260 | It's just an engineering perspective.

02:05:01.620 | It's like, why would we do that last?

02:05:03.560 | We should do that first.

02:05:04.880 | I think that the next generation is really interested

02:05:08.060 | in solving practical problems.

02:05:09.820 | So a lot like computer science and engineering was

02:05:12.100 | in the late nineties, it was like,

02:05:13.820 | you can go do a PhD in computer science and engineering,

02:05:16.300 | maybe, or you go work for a company

02:05:18.260 | and actually build stuff that's useful.

02:05:20.180 | I think neuroscientists and people interested

02:05:21.900 | in neuroscience are starting to think,

02:05:23.780 | how can I build stuff that's useful?

02:05:25.580 | And this is statement is supported by the fact

02:05:27.880 | that many people in my business leave their academic labs.

02:05:32.100 | Fortunately, not all of them,

02:05:33.380 | but they leave their academic labs

02:05:34.540 | and they go work for companies, like Neuralink.

02:05:37.500 | - Like Neuralink.

02:05:38.580 | This is something I think we've spoken a few times offline

02:05:42.660 | about, as in speaking of computer vision,

02:05:47.300 | I'm fascinated by the eye.

02:05:48.820 | I did a bunch of work on the eye.

02:05:50.820 | So from, there's the neuroscientist,

02:05:52.940 | there's a neurobiology way of studying the eye,

02:05:55.060 | and there's the computer vision way of studying the eye.

02:05:57.980 | And the computer vision way of studying the eye,

02:05:59.940 | of just like observing, non-contact sensing of humans,

02:06:03.080 | is really fascinating to me.

02:06:04.380 | And studying human behavior in different contexts,

02:06:06.780 | like in semi-autonomous vehicles,

02:06:09.660 | it seemed like there's a lot of signal

02:06:11.780 | that comes from the eye, that comes from blinking,

02:06:14.280 | that's not fully understood yet.

02:06:16.980 | It's been in the lab, it's been used quite a bit

02:06:20.180 | to study like the dilation of the pupil,

02:06:22.660 | all those kinds of things we're used to infer,

02:06:26.540 | workload, cognitive load, all those kinds of things.

02:06:29.820 | But the picture is murky.

02:06:32.620 | It's not completely well understood,

02:06:34.380 | especially in the wild, how much signal you can get

02:06:36.860 | from the eye, from the human face.

02:06:38.640 | I've downloaded Joe Rogan's,

02:06:43.960 | all of the podcasts he's ever done, video.

02:06:46.160 | - You have the YouTube bank?

02:06:49.000 | - I have the YouTube bank.

02:06:50.500 | For a reason that, this was before he went with Spotify.

02:06:55.500 | - You own the archive.

02:06:58.180 | There's PubMed, and then there's the Joe Rogan experience

02:07:01.100 | owned by, or maintained by Lex.

02:07:03.900 | - Yeah, privately, for my private collection.

02:07:06.740 | No, the reason I did it, and I did the really rigorous

02:07:10.340 | processing of it, which is like,

02:07:12.200 | I extracted all of the faces,

02:07:15.780 | I did the really good blink track,

02:07:17.860 | the pupil tracking and the blink detection

02:07:21.100 | for the entirety of the, oh, I should say

02:07:23.340 | it's from episode, I forget what it is,

02:07:26.860 | but it's like episode 900 when they switched

02:07:29.260 | to 1080p video.

02:07:31.380 | It was like much crappier video.

02:07:33.500 | It's still kind of--

02:07:34.340 | - Did you log when there was marijuana consumption

02:07:36.620 | or when they were drinking?

02:07:38.260 | - When there's smoke, I mean, there's so many--

02:07:39.820 | - 'Cause that's gonna, like, it won't throw off the data,

02:07:43.060 | but it's relevant to the--

02:07:44.580 | - It's relevant to the context.

02:07:45.420 | - The pupil data.

02:07:46.240 | - So let's just put it this way.

02:07:50.180 | There's a lot of fascinating

02:07:51.540 | computer vision problems involved,

02:07:53.180 | but I only kept long sequences of data

02:07:57.140 | where the eyes detected exceptionally well,

02:08:00.380 | and I also removed people that were wearing glasses.

02:08:04.140 | I removed, there's certain people that have a way

02:08:08.700 | of moving their eyes and squinting

02:08:13.700 | where it's harder to infer, like, concrete blinks.

02:08:20.460 | You know, they'll kind of have a squint the whole time,

02:08:24.940 | and their blink is very light.

02:08:27.580 | It's very tough to know what's an actual blink.

02:08:32.580 | - And you got those baseball cap wearing guys.

02:08:35.540 | There are certain people that go on podcasts

02:08:37.060 | and wear baseball caps and don't reveal their,

02:08:39.860 | I don't know if they realize it or not until it comes out,

02:08:42.380 | but their face is completely obscured from vision.

02:08:45.700 | - And from a computer vision perspective,

02:08:47.860 | people that wear makeup,

02:08:49.220 | and usually women and their eyes, it complicates things.

02:08:52.700 | Like, eyelashes, all complicate things.

02:08:54.780 | So, you know, you can clean stuff up

02:08:57.180 | just so you have really crisp signal.

02:08:59.380 | You don't have to.

02:09:00.260 | You can deal with issues,

02:09:02.180 | but, you know, there's so many hours of Joe Rogan video.

02:09:04.960 | Anyway, I say all that because I was searching

02:09:08.380 | for an interesting personal experiment for me

02:09:11.620 | 'cause I saw in drivers,

02:09:14.540 | when I was looking at eye movement in drivers,

02:09:17.260 | it seemed to indicate,

02:09:19.300 | there seemed to be quite a lot of signal there

02:09:21.660 | that indicates amount of cognitive load.

02:09:25.580 | But it's not clear if there's something conclusive.

02:09:28.860 | But if there is some signal that's a really powerful one

02:09:31.940 | because eye movement can be detected in the wild,

02:09:35.260 | like you and I sitting here,

02:09:36.460 | I can detect eye movement really well.

02:09:38.420 | Pupil dilation is a really crappy indicator.

02:09:41.420 | - And it's luminance dependent.

02:09:42.700 | Like if I turn toward a light, it's a route.

02:09:45.940 | People change size depending on level of alertness

02:09:48.740 | or autonomic arousal, but also overall levels of luminance.

02:09:51.920 | It's very, very hard.

02:09:53.380 | But there are, I mean, you're sitting on a gold mine

02:09:56.900 | because there is a lot of interest right now

02:10:00.900 | in measuring state through non-contact sensing.

02:10:05.020 | Heart rate variability through changes in skin tone,

02:10:07.700 | but just off a camera, can you imagine that?

02:10:09.260 | The point where you just look at some video

02:10:11.200 | and you're like, oh, they're getting more stressed

02:10:13.100 | or worked up and they're not,

02:10:14.180 | based on a heat map of some little patch on their face.

02:10:16.740 | 'Cause everyone's gonna have this slight,

02:10:18.940 | sort of compartmentalize it slightly differently,

02:10:21.000 | but you can learn it pretty quickly.

02:10:22.500 | We know this when someone's like giving a talk

02:10:24.060 | and we see them starting a blotching on their neck.

02:10:27.220 | You know, this is the thesis defense response, right?

02:10:31.240 | We know it and it's a stressful situation

02:10:34.020 | 'cause not passing your thesis defense is rough.

02:10:37.540 | And we can see that,

02:10:38.760 | but cameras can pick that up really easily

02:10:40.800 | at much lower levels than the blatant blotching

02:10:43.860 | kind of effect.

02:10:44.700 | And eye movements certainly are powerful indications

02:10:49.180 | of the state of the autonomic system.

02:10:51.580 | - So what do you, do you think there are things

02:10:54.740 | from a high level that you can pick up

02:10:56.340 | from eye movement and blinking?

02:10:58.780 | - Well, blink frequency is gonna increase

02:11:01.100 | as people get tired, right?

02:11:04.300 | I mean, I've actually been teased a lot online

02:11:06.320 | 'cause I don't blink much when I'll do a post.

02:11:08.660 | And so I did a whole post about blinking,

02:11:10.980 | about the science of blinking.

02:11:11.900 | There's some data, very strong data,

02:11:13.700 | not from my lab that show that every time you blink,

02:11:16.700 | it resets your perception of time.

02:11:18.380 | They have people do these kind of track up

02:11:21.260 | kind of a Doppler like thing.

02:11:22.460 | And anyway, blinking resets your perception of time.

02:11:25.300 | There's a dopaminergic mechanism

02:11:26.900 | in the blink related circuitry of the brain.

02:11:29.600 | When people are very alert,

02:11:31.420 | they tend to not blink very much.

02:11:32.540 | When we're sleepy, we tend to blink more

02:11:33.920 | and our eyes tend to close.

02:11:35.340 | Now, some people are more hooded

02:11:37.020 | in the way their eyes sit.

02:11:38.420 | Some people are like this all the time.

02:11:40.620 | There are some very famous people.

02:11:41.740 | I'm not gonna name them because I might run into them

02:11:44.180 | at some point who are like accused of being sociopaths

02:11:47.020 | 'cause they don't blink very often.

02:11:48.740 | But they might just have high levels of autonomic arousal.

02:11:51.040 | They just don't blink very much.

02:11:53.340 | Also depends on how lubricated the eyes are.

02:11:54.980 | So I think within individual,

02:11:57.500 | you can get a lot of information.

02:11:59.100 | I don't think we can say this person's blinking a lot.

02:12:01.740 | They're lying, this person or they're tired.

02:12:03.700 | This person doesn't blink.

02:12:05.180 | They're stressed.

02:12:07.120 | I think if you understand that person's baseline,

02:12:10.340 | you can get it.

02:12:11.180 | And presumably, well, having been on the Joe Rogan

02:12:13.900 | experience, I can say when you first sit down there,

02:12:15.660 | if you've never been in there before.

02:12:17.020 | - You're in my dataset, by the way.

02:12:18.460 | - Oh my.

02:12:19.580 | Well, I bet you, I will admit to being,

02:12:22.420 | first time sitting down there.

02:12:23.980 | I mean, Joe is incredibly gracious,

02:12:25.700 | made me feel very comfortable there.

02:12:27.100 | But yeah, it's an intense experience.

02:12:30.120 | It's a small space too.

02:12:31.260 | Anytime you enter a small space from a big space

02:12:33.860 | in his old studio, you're familiar with.

02:12:38.060 | There's a breaking in period

02:12:39.180 | where you're getting to know somebody.

02:12:40.820 | And so I'm sure my levels of autonomic arousal

02:12:43.580 | front of the podcast were higher than later.

02:12:46.140 | But once you have a baseline established,

02:12:48.380 | you can get a lot of data on somebody simply from blinks.

02:12:52.820 | Some people averting gaze too.

02:12:54.780 | If you have both people, that's really powerful.

02:12:56.860 | This is the Holy Grail,

02:12:58.100 | another Holy Grail of neuroscience.

02:13:00.060 | We've mainly looked at subjects in isolation.

02:13:03.020 | There hasn't been much brain imaging

02:13:04.820 | of two people interacting,

02:13:06.720 | or even in animal models of two mice

02:13:09.100 | or two monkeys interacting.

02:13:10.380 | It's all like person scanner, bite bar.

02:13:13.500 | I mean, if you've ever been in one of these scanners,

02:13:14.780 | you're like in a bite bar.

02:13:16.240 | It's very medieval.

02:13:17.620 | - And so you think in the interaction,

02:13:19.620 | there's actually, you can almost study them

02:13:22.180 | as a single brain or as a single system.

02:13:24.420 | The two brains are a single system.

02:13:26.300 | - I think with AI- - Highly correlated.

02:13:28.020 | - Yeah, maybe are your blinks triggering my blinks?

02:13:30.100 | Like, you know, are your non-blink epochs,

02:13:32.700 | you know, extending my non-blink epochs?

02:13:35.220 | There's a fascinating space to explore there

02:13:38.100 | and no one's done it.

02:13:40.060 | And 'cause everyone let the Joe Rogan Experience archive

02:13:43.740 | disappear except for you.

02:13:45.260 | You grabbed- - Well, actually-

02:13:46.100 | - Did you get the comments too?

02:13:47.180 | Because I think the comments were almost as entertaining

02:13:49.700 | as the conversation.

02:13:50.660 | - You know what you just made me realize with the couplings?

02:13:53.080 | I have a better data set than the Joe Rogan podcast

02:13:55.580 | with high resolution video,

02:13:56.940 | which is the raw video for this podcast.

02:13:59.580 | So for example, both cameras right now

02:14:02.060 | are recording you and I full feed.

02:14:05.460 | The final result will switch cameras back and forth,

02:14:07.740 | but I have the full feed.

02:14:09.660 | So I can have the blinking for both you and I

02:14:11.900 | the whole time.

02:14:12.740 | - I bet you people trigger blinks in one another,

02:14:16.380 | you know, and there's also like the simplest way

02:14:19.300 | to think about the blinks and the attentional thing

02:14:21.580 | and the alertness is two fighters in the standoff.

02:14:25.520 | There's this whole lore around who blinks first.

02:14:27.900 | - Yeah. - It's like,

02:14:28.740 | they blink first.

02:14:29.560 | Well, what are we really asking?

02:14:30.820 | They're asking whether or not one person can maintain focus

02:14:35.140 | longer than the other person,

02:14:36.720 | which is an important parameter.

02:14:39.460 | It's not the only parameter,

02:14:40.620 | but it's an important parameter.

02:14:42.700 | And so that blinking contest,

02:14:44.100 | even though they don't square off as a blinking contest,

02:14:46.700 | it's well known that the first to blink

02:14:48.960 | is revealing something about their capacity

02:14:51.300 | to hold attention.

02:14:52.560 | - You've started an amazing podcast

02:14:56.140 | that we've mentioned a few times.

02:14:57.980 | People should definitely check it out.

02:14:59.860 | It's called the "Human and Man Lab Podcast."

02:15:02.540 | It does your, it's basically,

02:15:07.580 | it embodies the personality of Andrew Kuberman,

02:15:10.940 | which is like, makes science accessible,

02:15:14.320 | but also fascinating and giving it,

02:15:20.760 | like, what do you call it?

02:15:23.500 | You give tools for everyday life,

02:15:25.780 | meaning it kind of grounds it in like,

02:15:28.940 | what the hell does this mean for my life?

02:15:32.140 | But then also does the beauty of science at the same time.

02:15:35.360 | So I love both the rigor and the openness of the whole thing

02:15:40.360 | plus the whole corrections thing that we mentioned.

02:15:42.840 | Anyway, what's been the hardest part of this whole process?

02:15:47.500 | You're one of, already, one of the only,

02:15:52.420 | and one of the best science podcasters out there.

02:15:56.540 | So in that process, what's been the hardest,

02:15:59.820 | what's been the most exciting part?

02:16:01.460 | - Wow.

02:16:02.340 | Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words

02:16:04.860 | about the podcast.

02:16:05.700 | It was inspired by you.

02:16:07.060 | I absolutely, that's no BS.

02:16:11.540 | The last time we met to do an interview for your podcast,

02:16:14.780 | we talked a little bit about it,

02:16:15.820 | and you gave me the subtle nudge

02:16:19.360 | that maybe there was a podcast there,

02:16:21.740 | and I thought about it, and I left,

02:16:23.000 | and I was just like, I got to do this thing.

02:16:24.740 | And you really gave me the encouragement to do it.

02:16:26.820 | And your podcast, this podcast, has really forged the way.

02:16:30.260 | You've been tip of the spear on serious,

02:16:34.180 | scientific, intellectual, yet fun, accessible conversation.

02:16:37.620 | And so I, as your colleague and friend,

02:16:42.620 | but just even if those things weren't true,

02:16:45.480 | like this podcast was and is the inspiration.

02:16:48.580 | There's no question. - Thank you so much.

02:16:49.740 | - Yeah, I really, like 100%.

02:16:52.040 | And when I decided to do the podcast,

02:16:54.980 | the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:16:56.420 | I thought really long and hard about what would work best

02:16:58.940 | and would be most beneficial.

02:17:00.340 | Turned out to be the hardest thing,

02:17:02.120 | which is to stay on a single topic

02:17:04.460 | for three or four more episodes

02:17:06.600 | before switching to a new topic.

02:17:08.660 | Because I know from the experience of university

02:17:12.920 | and teaching in university, as you know as well,

02:17:16.460 | that there's always the temptation

02:17:19.420 | to pivot to something else,

02:17:20.740 | but the drilling into something really deeply

02:17:23.540 | is where the gems reside.

02:17:25.860 | And the challenge has been how to make it interesting,

02:17:29.580 | how to keep people on board,

02:17:31.300 | how to give people tools along the way,

02:17:33.560 | but also stay close to the scientific data.

02:17:37.680 | I like to think that we're headed in the right direction.

02:17:39.700 | It still needs to evolve, but that's been a challenge.

02:17:43.940 | I think I also am challenged by the fact

02:17:47.780 | that there's a tremendous range of backgrounds of listeners.

02:17:50.780 | So some people have asked for more names,

02:17:53.520 | like more bits and parts of the nervous system

02:17:55.700 | and cellular molecular mechanisms

02:17:57.560 | and all that kind of thing.

02:17:58.460 | And other people have said,

02:17:59.340 | "I don't understand any of that stuff,

02:18:00.900 | but I think I'm keeping up."

02:18:02.220 | And so unlike a university course

02:18:04.100 | where there are prerequisites

02:18:05.260 | and everyone's coming to the table

02:18:06.640 | with more or less the same knowledge,

02:18:08.380 | I have a very limited sense of what the audience knows

02:18:10.880 | and doesn't know.

02:18:11.940 | So that's why I incorporated the feature

02:18:13.540 | of the comment section on YouTube

02:18:15.780 | being a source of feedback.

02:18:18.080 | And I do a kind of an office hours-like episode

02:18:21.900 | every third or fourth episode

02:18:23.180 | where I address common questions.

02:18:25.480 | And I think that the podcast space in my mind,

02:18:29.100 | at least for the sort of podcasts I'm doing,

02:18:31.540 | needed a venue for the listeners

02:18:34.500 | to be a more integral part of the experience

02:18:37.260 | as opposed to just commenting

02:18:38.820 | on what they liked or didn't like.

02:18:40.500 | So while I like to hear what people liked and didn't like,

02:18:42.660 | I also really like to hear about,

02:18:44.140 | "Hey, tell me more about temperature minimums

02:18:46.920 | and how they can be used to phase shifts,

02:18:48.220 | circadian rhythms, or whatever it is."

02:18:50.220 | And I realized that I'm probably losing

02:18:51.920 | some people along the way,

02:18:52.900 | but hopefully at the end of each month,

02:18:56.280 | and because of the way that the episodes are archived,

02:18:59.040 | people will come away feeling as if they've learned a ton

02:19:01.920 | and they have tools that they can implement.

02:19:03.760 | And perhaps most importantly,

02:19:04.960 | that they're starting to think scientifically

02:19:07.640 | about the tons of other stuff that's out there.

02:19:10.760 | So that's been the challenge,

02:19:12.120 | and it's still really early days.

02:19:14.440 | But, and of course there's also an attentional challenge.

02:19:18.200 | I realize that people are busy.

02:19:19.440 | Not everyone has two hours to listen to a podcast

02:19:22.200 | about jet lag and shift work,

02:19:24.020 | and raising kids and sleep and that kind of thing.

02:19:27.120 | I'm not raising kids,

02:19:27.960 | but I did a whole thing about babies and sleep with,

02:19:30.360 | you know, and how parents can manage their sleep

02:19:32.460 | when kids aren't sleeping.

02:19:33.880 | So it's been, I'm hacking through the jungle

02:19:37.640 | of all this stuff, but, and I'll come right back to,

02:19:41.440 | my inspiration and my North star on this

02:19:47.220 | is getting to a point where the audience

02:19:52.220 | that listens to this feels the same way that I do

02:19:54.740 | when I listen to your podcast.

02:19:56.420 | - Thank you so much.

02:19:57.260 | - Like when I turn into your podcast,

02:19:58.940 | I'm going to embarrass you a little bit more

02:20:00.080 | by complimenting you a little bit more,

02:20:02.020 | but not out of a sadistic thing.

02:20:05.620 | But just because when I tune into your podcast

02:20:08.140 | or Joe's podcast,

02:20:09.780 | I have the same sensation that other people have.

02:20:11.980 | Like, I feel like I'm home of sorts.

02:20:15.500 | I'm like, I'm familiar with the space

02:20:17.340 | and I'd like people to feel comfortable

02:20:19.580 | in the space that is the Hubert and Lab Podcast,

02:20:21.660 | whatever that ends up being.

02:20:23.320 | - Yeah, that's the magic of podcasting.

02:20:25.820 | It's like, I feel like I'm part of your life now

02:20:28.060 | in a way that as a fan, that I wouldn't be otherwise.

02:20:32.280 | And, you know, like I never was able to have that

02:20:35.660 | with Carl Sagan, for example, you know?

02:20:37.840 | And that's a whole nother level of connection

02:20:42.180 | with a human being that gets you excited.

02:20:44.300 | And then I share your excitement

02:20:46.260 | about different topics in neuroscience

02:20:49.900 | or just biology in general.

02:20:54.620 | And then I don't have to actually understand

02:20:56.860 | everything you're saying to really enjoy it.

02:21:00.840 | So that's the magic of podcasting is like,

02:21:03.700 | you can go through like 10 minutes

02:21:05.620 | and understanding what the hell a person is saying.

02:21:08.340 | And then you enjoy the excitement

02:21:11.540 | and then you reconnect to a thing

02:21:12.980 | that you do understand what they're saying.

02:21:15.340 | And, you know, that personal coupled

02:21:19.940 | with the scientific rigor is magic.

02:21:22.580 | And finding the right, it's exploration.

02:21:24.940 | Like Joe found something that works for comedians,

02:21:27.720 | which is like, you know, having a good laugh,

02:21:31.000 | but also every once in a while,

02:21:32.820 | talking seriously about difficult topics.

02:21:35.460 | The scientific space, it was unclear.

02:21:40.300 | You haven't had guests on yet.

02:21:42.500 | But-

02:21:43.340 | - Maybe you'll come on as our first guest.

02:21:45.060 | - I was gonna invite my,

02:21:46.060 | I was gonna try to force myself in there.

02:21:48.180 | - I am officially inviting you now.

02:21:50.220 | Will you come on the podcast as a guest?

02:21:52.020 | - I would love to.

02:21:52.860 | - Fantastic.

02:21:53.700 | - But it was hard.

02:21:55.660 | It's still a little bit difficult to tell people

02:21:58.660 | that, no, you don't get it.

02:22:01.060 | We're not gonna talk for 10 minutes.

02:22:03.900 | We're gonna talk for three or four hours.

02:22:07.300 | It's a different, for scientists,

02:22:09.060 | for like, they're like, what are we gonna talk about?

02:22:12.340 | - I think it's like the NPR interview.

02:22:14.180 | - Yes.

02:22:15.020 | And they don't realize, first of all,

02:22:18.460 | I think at his best,

02:22:19.700 | if you're like at the level of Joe Rogan,

02:22:21.980 | who I think is an excellent conversationalist,

02:22:24.280 | you just lose track of time.

02:22:27.500 | It can be three, four, five hours

02:22:29.140 | and you lose track of time.

02:22:30.340 | I'm still not there.

02:22:31.860 | I find that it's still painful.

02:22:34.100 | Like the conversation is still challenging sometimes.

02:22:36.940 | You don't lose quite as much track of time.

02:22:39.340 | It's still an intellectual effort.

02:22:40.780 | And I think it might always be as it would be with you

02:22:43.380 | because you're talking about difficult topics,

02:22:45.780 | maybe that require more brain.

02:22:47.300 | You're not just shooting the shit

02:22:49.740 | with like a Brian Redband or somebody like comedians

02:22:52.380 | or just joking.

02:22:53.500 | - What's like, remember those shows,

02:22:55.300 | like where those shows where someone would come out

02:22:59.260 | and like spin plates and they're running back and forth.

02:23:02.380 | Really good scientific discussion is like that.

02:23:05.700 | You have to be maintaining three or four

02:23:07.980 | different logical arguments and jumping back and forth.

02:23:10.740 | It's occasionally get into like a real streak of linearity.

02:23:13.860 | But as we found today that typically there's three

02:23:17.260 | or four different things that we're bouncing back

02:23:18.620 | and forth from.

02:23:19.460 | And that requires a lot of updating of these,

02:23:21.820 | you know, four brain circuits.

02:23:23.020 | It's not a passive listening experience.

02:23:25.900 | But I like to think that the brain likes that.

02:23:28.820 | - I do want to ask just 'cause we all,

02:23:31.940 | I don't want to forget the question came up to me,

02:23:36.200 | is your podcast has the same kind of rigor

02:23:40.500 | that I think like a Dan Carlin podcast has

02:23:43.340 | who's a history podcaster.

02:23:45.080 | - Well, that's definitely a compliment.

02:23:47.900 | Thank you.

02:23:48.740 | Dan's way, you know, he's something for me to aspire to.

02:23:52.260 | - He goes through hell to prepare.

02:23:54.460 | He spends months preparing.

02:23:56.300 | It feels like you've had to really prepare for your podcast.

02:24:01.140 | - I definitely prepare hard.

02:24:02.980 | - How, is that, are you okay?

02:24:05.500 | - Yeah, I--

02:24:07.460 | - I mean, how much effort does that take?

02:24:09.500 | It feels like a conference presentation.

02:24:11.580 | - Yeah, so we record once a week

02:24:13.300 | and in the intervening time,

02:24:15.340 | I listen to many university level lectures.

02:24:20.340 | So NIH has a bank of lectures.

02:24:25.160 | I have some sources of recorded university seminars.

02:24:29.000 | I'm trying to find the points of intersection.

02:24:32.020 | So like for four episodes on sleep,

02:24:33.700 | it's not like I'm gonna just regurgitate a popular book

02:24:36.580 | or take one lecture and just, you know, poach the content.

02:24:39.380 | I'm gonna find the overlap in the different elements.

02:24:43.500 | I also, so what I'll do is I'll generally read

02:24:47.220 | 10 or 15 different papers.

02:24:49.340 | And generally those are good reviews, annual reviews,

02:24:52.100 | interview of neuroscience,

02:24:53.140 | annual review of physiology, those kinds of things.

02:24:55.540 | I'll chase a few references.

02:24:56.820 | I'll listen to some YouTube videos,

02:24:58.320 | but of university level lectures.

02:25:00.460 | And then I throw all that on a whiteboard,

02:25:03.380 | usually while I work out in the morning.

02:25:05.780 | I'll just be working out.

02:25:06.860 | I have a gym in my house

02:25:07.900 | and I'll just put up all these random ideas.

02:25:10.260 | I want to cover that, dreams, hallucination.

02:25:12.340 | And then I take that and I start eliminating,

02:25:14.660 | I draw lines between the common points of intersection.

02:25:17.180 | And then from that, I distill out an outline.

02:25:21.380 | And then I basically think about what I want to say

02:25:25.020 | on my walks with my dog.

02:25:27.220 | And I bother a couple of people and blab to them.

02:25:29.260 | So I would say each podcast, yeah,

02:25:31.140 | I put in 10 to 15 hours at least

02:25:33.180 | of passive listening preparation

02:25:35.620 | and maybe five or six of active preparation.

02:25:38.700 | So I do prepare quite a lot,

02:25:40.880 | but it has a certain reward component for me.

02:25:44.460 | To come up at the end with something

02:25:46.100 | that's somewhat crystallized for me is just so satisfying.

02:25:50.160 | It feel like there's something about my dopamine circuits

02:25:52.860 | that just love that.

02:25:54.500 | And the only pain is that a year later,

02:25:58.040 | after I've talked about this stuff a bunch of times,

02:26:00.140 | it's so much more succinct, but that's life.

02:26:04.220 | At some point, you gotta pull the trigger.

02:26:05.780 | - Well, I don't know what you think,

02:26:08.420 | but for me, YouTube is,

02:26:11.300 | that's why I'm sad that Joe left YouTube.

02:26:13.420 | There's a archival nature to YouTube that's kind of magical.

02:26:17.020 | And so I'm really glad you're now,

02:26:18.720 | you were doing a lot of educational content

02:26:23.720 | on Instagram before,

02:26:25.440 | but now doing this podcast thing on YouTube,

02:26:29.220 | it's like Feynman lectures.

02:26:33.940 | I'm not saying every podcast,

02:26:35.860 | but there will be, you will have some,

02:26:38.500 | I can already tell, there'll be some lectures

02:26:42.340 | which are definitive, really special ones.

02:26:47.340 | - That's the hope.

02:26:48.180 | - And there's some aspect that's archival to YouTube

02:26:51.740 | where, at least I hope, 20 years from now,

02:26:54.860 | some kid is gonna watch a lecture of yours

02:26:58.220 | and it'll create the next Nobel Prize.

02:27:02.860 | It'll create another dream that then becomes a reality.

02:27:07.860 | And that's a special thing that YouTube provides.

02:27:12.580 | So I'm really excited that you're on YouTube.

02:27:14.100 | And at the same time,

02:27:15.580 | I'm excited to see where this thing goes

02:27:17.460 | because it seems like change is the cliched thing,

02:27:22.460 | that change is the only constant in these times

02:27:25.340 | because you're paving with this podcast,

02:27:29.920 | with this creativity,

02:27:31.180 | what you were doing on Instagram as well,

02:27:32.900 | you're paving the new era of what it means to do science.

02:27:37.180 | So actively doing research

02:27:39.500 | and actively explaining that research in new media.

02:27:42.540 | It's very interesting.

02:27:43.940 | - I'm inspired, genuinely inspired by you.

02:27:47.220 | We had this discussion last time

02:27:49.100 | after the podcast recording,

02:27:51.500 | and it's clear that communication of science

02:27:54.580 | cannot be left to the existing institutions.

02:27:58.700 | And I'm not talking about universities,

02:27:59.840 | I just mean that the science section of newspapers is,

02:28:02.700 | sometimes there's some gems there,

02:28:05.180 | but generally it goes, you know,

02:28:08.060 | and I think you really have to know a field

02:28:11.380 | in order to extract the best things from that field.

02:28:13.660 | And my hope is that other practicing scientists

02:28:16.760 | and people finishing their PhD and postdoc

02:28:19.080 | and people who are running labs

02:28:20.340 | or working at companies will start to do this.

02:28:22.220 | I mean, how amazing would it be, for instance,

02:28:24.140 | if someone at Neuralink was giving us hints

02:28:30.000 | about not necessarily what they're developing,

02:28:32.000 | 'cause that's complicated for all sorts of reasons,

02:28:34.360 | but would talk to us about what the real challenges

02:28:39.360 | of building futuristic brain machine interface are like

02:28:43.680 | and what it means to understand a clinical problem

02:28:47.040 | and address it.

02:28:47.860 | I mean, my hope is somebody there might eventually do that,

02:28:50.720 | that somebody in the world of chemistry

02:28:53.680 | or synthetic materials or whatever it is

02:28:55.960 | will do this in a way that I could understand

02:28:57.800 | 'cause I don't have expertise in those.

02:28:59.900 | I think it would be marvelous.

02:29:02.260 | And you were tip of the spear, you were out first,

02:29:05.120 | and I'm just happily trying to move along

02:29:09.820 | in the direction I'm going.

02:29:10.760 | But I think the future of science education is online.

02:29:14.120 | And I think that's gonna be scary

02:29:17.380 | to a lot of existing institutions,

02:29:19.380 | but it's not about disrupting anything.

02:29:21.540 | It's just about trying to do things better.

02:29:23.340 | - Yeah, you know, some of the best interviews,

02:29:28.340 | some of the best investigative journalism

02:29:30.880 | is done by people inside the field.

02:29:33.640 | Comes to mind a guy by the name of Elon Musk,

02:29:36.200 | who I love the possibility that he gets a Pulitzer

02:29:40.720 | for that interview, but he grilled the crap out of Vlad,

02:29:44.080 | the CEO of Robinhood, I'm not sure if you remember.

02:29:47.000 | - Oh, on-- - Clubhouse.

02:29:49.400 | - On Clubhouse the other night.

02:29:50.360 | Yeah, I saw you guys in there.

02:29:51.840 | I was kept out, I wasn't quick enough.

02:29:53.780 | My thumb's doesn't go fast enough,

02:29:55.280 | so I was, and I wasn't about to sit in the waiting room.

02:29:57.480 | - Have you tried that social network, by the way,

02:29:59.160 | the Clubhouse?

02:30:00.040 | - I've gone in there a few times and checked some things out.

02:30:03.040 | I'm there, I have a few questions about it

02:30:05.040 | that like if I'm in there,

02:30:07.920 | how one can participate or not participate.

02:30:11.640 | I like being a fly on the wall for those conversations.

02:30:13.880 | I've been very curious as to what's going on in there.

02:30:15.760 | - Oh, it's quite, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts.

02:30:18.600 | Maybe it's useful to comment.

02:30:20.980 | I also have a Discord server that has a few tens

02:30:25.980 | of thousands of people on it,

02:30:27.560 | and then they have also a voice chat capability.

02:30:31.840 | So they have these get togethers.

02:30:34.040 | And I was using it in the spring and summer,

02:30:37.720 | like actively on those voice discussions,

02:30:40.680 | and it's anywhere from 10 to like 1,000 people

02:30:44.960 | all together in voice.

02:30:46.520 | Like anyone can speak anytime, right?

02:30:49.200 | But there's this weird dynamic that people stay quiet

02:30:52.300 | and only one person speaks at a time

02:30:54.140 | 'cause they're all like respectful.

02:30:55.540 | And it's a community of like fundamentally

02:30:59.260 | respectful people, even though they're all anonymous.

02:31:01.860 | So like, except like me and a few others,

02:31:04.940 | it's all anonymous people.

02:31:06.260 | - So interesting.

02:31:07.100 | - And it works.

02:31:08.300 | But the magical thing to me about that community

02:31:13.180 | was how intimate voice only communication can be.

02:31:18.500 | It felt as intimate as like a small get together

02:31:23.500 | at a home with close friends.

02:31:27.740 | It felt like there's a calmness to it,

02:31:29.900 | and you're revealing things about, you know,

02:31:33.720 | somebody suffering from depression or being suicidal.

02:31:37.180 | So those are the dark things,

02:31:38.620 | or being super excited getting a new girlfriend or boyfriend.

02:31:42.140 | Like just the depth of human experience shared on voice

02:31:46.600 | without video is, I was really surprised

02:31:49.840 | how intimate that is for human connection,

02:31:52.040 | especially in this time of COVID, it replaced that.

02:31:54.480 | So that, so just to give you some context,

02:31:57.480 | there's something there.

02:31:59.120 | - There's definitely something there.

02:32:00.120 | One thing that comes to mind is when like in Clubhouse,

02:32:03.120 | you have your little icon, so they don't actually,

02:32:05.120 | you don't see your face moving.

02:32:06.440 | I think when people see their own image,

02:32:08.840 | it puts them in a state of self-consciousness

02:32:11.580 | that is eliminated by just having an icon or an avatar.

02:32:14.920 | - Yes.

02:32:15.760 | - So like Zoom is dreadful,

02:32:18.480 | because if I'm not used to talking to people

02:32:21.000 | and seeing a little image of myself

02:32:22.440 | staring back at me in a mirror,

02:32:24.320 | and it's just, I know there are ways

02:32:26.560 | that you can adjust that, but it's really awful.

02:32:29.200 | And I think that when I get on Zooms now, I say hello,

02:32:32.240 | and then I shut down the video component,

02:32:34.520 | and then I just talk in the end,

02:32:35.640 | I come back on just to show that still there, it's still me.

02:32:38.840 | But I think that voice only is really interesting.

02:32:42.120 | Eddie Chang would be an interesting person

02:32:43.840 | to talk to about this,

02:32:44.660 | because he understands so much

02:32:45.960 | about how inflection communicates

02:32:48.320 | emotionality and deeper state.

02:32:50.160 | - But there's a balance between,

02:32:52.240 | I think just like you said,

02:32:53.720 | the privacy somehow allows for the intimacy.

02:32:58.720 | So like being able to, as opposed to putting on an act,

02:33:03.240 | which I realize we do

02:33:04.440 | when we're visually presenting ourselves

02:33:06.400 | in remote communication.

02:33:08.300 | But I think that there's so few places

02:33:10.040 | where people can actually communicate

02:33:12.280 | without the fear of penalty.

02:33:14.240 | - Yes.

02:33:15.080 | - That's woefully absent these days.

02:33:19.280 | And so maybe people are just relieved

02:33:21.200 | to be in a place where they feel like,

02:33:23.000 | I can say what I want or not say anything, and it's okay.

02:33:26.440 | - And so Clubhouse, to answer your kind of question,

02:33:29.760 | is it was a big improvement to me over Discord,

02:33:33.160 | which is it has tiers.

02:33:35.200 | It has a stage where people,

02:33:37.800 | the person that created the room can invite people up

02:33:40.320 | that would like to speak potentially,

02:33:42.640 | have the opportunity to speak.

02:33:43.840 | And then there's a bigger audience

02:33:45.920 | that don't get a chance to speak

02:33:47.440 | unless they click raise their hand and they get called on.

02:33:51.040 | So there's like a tier system that allows for there to be

02:33:56.040 | a group of like five, 10, 20, 30 people talking

02:34:00.280 | and a lot larger amount in the audience,

02:34:03.400 | which in Discord was a problem

02:34:04.640 | was that everybody could talk.

02:34:06.040 | And the other thing about Clubhouse

02:34:07.680 | is everybody is strongly encouraged to represent themselves.

02:34:11.600 | So you're using your real name.

02:34:13.160 | It's not anonymous.

02:34:14.960 | - How many people were in that GameStop discussion

02:34:18.120 | the other day?

02:34:18.960 | - They currently limit rooms to 5,000.

02:34:23.320 | So I'm sure maxed out at 5,000.

02:34:25.280 | There's a lot of overflow rooms.

02:34:27.640 | This is the cool thing about Clubhouse,

02:34:29.440 | really big people were on there all tuned in

02:34:32.200 | and having a conversation,

02:34:33.520 | having all from all these different worlds,

02:34:37.960 | being able to connect,

02:34:39.680 | even though without the niceties

02:34:41.640 | of like arranging the meeting,

02:34:43.200 | you could just show up and leave, which is nice.

02:34:45.800 | But the reason for my lessons from Discord,

02:34:50.260 | I'm going to mostly stay away from Clubhouse.

02:34:54.080 | And I think--

02:34:56.120 | - Or go in there under another name.

02:34:58.080 | - Right.

02:34:58.920 | - I'll pretend I know your actual name on Clubhouse.

02:35:02.600 | - Yeah.

02:35:03.440 | (laughing)

02:35:04.640 | I've learned it's quite addicting.

02:35:06.960 | It's a time sink.

02:35:08.560 | It's so, the intimacy of it is,

02:35:11.840 | you find yourself wasting quite a bit of time on there.

02:35:14.160 | It pulls you in.

02:35:15.520 | - Well, it's interesting.

02:35:16.800 | The, in sort of going back to the podcast

02:35:20.800 | or earlier we're talking about books

02:35:22.480 | or creating a technology.

02:35:24.500 | One thing that's absolutely clear

02:35:25.920 | is that anything that's easy to reproduce

02:35:28.960 | is probably not worth much effort and time.

02:35:33.400 | - Yes.

02:35:34.240 | - Right?

02:35:35.900 | Most posts could be easily reproduced.

02:35:39.320 | You just repost them.

02:35:40.300 | - Yeah.

02:35:41.140 | - So now there are some original posts

02:35:43.600 | that for which the attribution goes to the original person.

02:35:46.200 | It's clear it came from you.

02:35:48.000 | But anything that can be easily reproduced

02:35:50.180 | is doesn't really expand us very much

02:35:52.820 | as individuals or as groups.

02:35:55.300 | And most of what I see on social media

02:35:56.980 | is stuff that is purely reproduced.

02:36:00.420 | - Yes.

02:36:01.420 | - But I think Clubhouse, I mean,

02:36:05.340 | it could be that some real magic emerges on there.

02:36:08.220 | - So in moderation, it could be good.

02:36:10.220 | The magic is, this is another thing

02:36:12.500 | that I've found through COVID

02:36:15.180 | that maybe you can think about is live.

02:36:19.520 | I used to be, not understand the appeal of live video

02:36:24.540 | or live connection or like in this Clubhouse live events

02:36:28.860 | because Clubhouse is technically for the most part,

02:36:32.420 | it's not supposed to be recorded.

02:36:34.060 | Most people don't record most conversations.

02:36:36.540 | It's a one-time live event.

02:36:38.580 | And there's a magic to that.

02:36:40.260 | - There is.

02:36:41.100 | - That's not captured by a, like your podcast

02:36:44.660 | or my podcast produced video that's like recorded,

02:36:49.360 | like packaged up.

02:36:50.980 | - Well, anything can happen.

02:36:52.440 | It's that anything can happen.

02:36:54.220 | And that's the kind of thing like live concerts.

02:36:57.380 | I definitely, I love live music.

02:37:00.440 | And it's the idea that,

02:37:02.060 | 'cause you can always listen to the album.

02:37:03.420 | Actually, the album usually sounds cleaner and better,

02:37:05.860 | but it's just this idea that anything can happen.

02:37:08.300 | - And then you listen to like the parts, I don't know,

02:37:10.740 | you like Costello did something weird,

02:37:13.820 | your dog did something weird.

02:37:15.200 | And then you have to go, God damn it.

02:37:17.020 | You have to go to the kitchen or something

02:37:19.020 | to get something and then you come back.

02:37:21.520 | And it's funny, I watched live video like that of people

02:37:24.620 | and I'll be there for the whole time.

02:37:26.380 | I'll wait for them to go to the kitchen and come back.

02:37:28.820 | It's not like I tune out.

02:37:30.700 | And that makes it like a richer experience for some reason.

02:37:33.500 | It's weird.

02:37:34.340 | - Well, it humanizes it.

02:37:35.380 | - Yeah, humanizes it.

02:37:36.420 | - And I think there is this weird effect

02:37:38.260 | of whether or not it's a podcast, Instagram,

02:37:40.260 | or Twitter or anything else.

02:37:41.300 | There's kind of like two people shouting into a tunnel

02:37:44.500 | and then a bunch of people with ears

02:37:45.840 | at the other end of those tunnels

02:37:47.120 | and shouting some things back.

02:37:49.140 | You know, that's kind of the format we're in.

02:37:52.060 | I think, I'll check out Clubhouse again.

02:37:54.140 | I've gone in there a few times during the day

02:37:55.620 | and I was surprised to see how many people were in there

02:37:57.500 | in the middle of the day.

02:37:58.620 | I was like, "Aren't these people supposed to be working?"

02:38:01.340 | But maybe that is their work.

02:38:02.420 | - Well, be very careful about the time sink of it.

02:38:07.100 | But yeah, if you wanna, you and I go together,

02:38:09.140 | we'll have a conversation on there.

02:38:10.780 | But one of the things you have to figure out,

02:38:13.380 | I don't still know how to do it, but how to exit.

02:38:16.540 | - Which is you just do that.

02:38:18.420 | Isn't there the leave quietly button?

02:38:20.320 | - Yeah, no, but like when you and I are on stage

02:38:22.580 | having a conversation.

02:38:25.460 | Like, okay, you and I is harder,

02:38:27.820 | but like you really, if it's just you and I,

02:38:31.260 | then it's the usual human communication of like,

02:38:33.700 | "All right, I gotta go."

02:38:35.300 | Like, but when it's like four people,

02:38:38.140 | you don't wanna interrupt everyone

02:38:40.140 | and ask you're leaving.

02:38:41.020 | You just have to, I mean, there's a weird dynamic

02:38:43.220 | that I haven't quite figured out of--

02:38:46.060 | - The etiquette isn't clear.

02:38:47.180 | - The etiquette is not clear.

02:38:48.340 | - Well, the etiquette on different platforms

02:38:52.100 | and how that changes is really interesting.

02:38:54.140 | You know, how YouTube has one etiquette,

02:38:56.380 | which is kind of, a lot of harshness is tolerated

02:38:58.900 | on YouTube video comments.

02:39:01.260 | Twitter seems a bit harsher than Instagram.

02:39:03.980 | Instagram, there's kind of, it seems to be a little--

02:39:05.660 | - People are nice.

02:39:06.500 | - People are really nice.

02:39:07.580 | People are really nice on Instagram for the most part,

02:39:10.420 | except for those phishing things.

02:39:13.580 | I actually know someone who had their quite sizable account

02:39:16.900 | poached by those copyright.

02:39:18.580 | They come in with those like,

02:39:19.740 | you violated copyright thing.

02:39:21.780 | There's all sorts of harshness in there

02:39:23.540 | that if you think about it in the real world,

02:39:25.340 | I like to think about Instagram as if it was the real world.

02:39:28.260 | Someone comes over and is basically saying like,

02:39:30.300 | "Hey, can I hold your wallet and go into the bank

02:39:32.500 | and I'll get some money out for you?"

02:39:34.100 | But there's this trust based on the format it comes in

02:39:37.260 | that it can almost get past your radar

02:39:39.220 | unless you're suspicious.

02:39:40.980 | If you took comments, like, you know,

02:39:43.500 | your posts get a lot of comments and you just walk past

02:39:46.860 | 500 random people on the street

02:39:48.620 | and just listen to what they say,

02:39:50.580 | it's like, that's ridiculous.

02:39:52.060 | I don't have time for that.

02:39:53.580 | But the comments somehow take on this importance

02:39:55.540 | and this relevance and we feel obligated

02:39:59.220 | to give them value, right?

02:40:00.940 | And so the online communities,

02:40:03.620 | the rules really are different.

02:40:05.760 | - And they evolve with time, which is fascinating.

02:40:08.220 | With Clubhouse, it's a new social network,

02:40:10.060 | so it's evolving and people are figuring out as you go.

02:40:13.820 | And the same thing with podcasting on video

02:40:16.500 | and like scientific podcasting.

02:40:18.220 | This is the cool thing when I look at what you've created,

02:40:22.020 | I'm learning, I'm thinking like,

02:40:23.780 | hmm, that's interesting to do it this way.

02:40:26.380 | 'Cause like, I have nobody to copy.

02:40:29.340 | Not many people to copy, you know what I mean?

02:40:31.260 | - But you threw out an idea,

02:40:32.560 | I'm not gonna put it out here now 'cause I don't wanna,

02:40:35.280 | 'cause knowing you, you'll hold yourself to it

02:40:37.140 | no matter what.

02:40:37.980 | But when we talked about this issue of the challenge

02:40:41.740 | of staying on a particular topic for a while,

02:40:43.940 | I mean, you do have some cool stuff brewing in there.

02:40:46.220 | - Oh, no, no.

02:40:47.060 | - That's separate from this format.

02:40:48.020 | And I love your interview format,

02:40:49.920 | but when you told me about that,

02:40:52.020 | I got really excited that you might go forward.

02:40:53.980 | I'm not gonna tell your audience what it is,

02:40:55.900 | but I will say this, it is super cool.

02:40:58.660 | I would have never thought about it.

02:41:00.180 | It's distinctly different than what I'm doing

02:41:01.620 | or what Lex is currently doing.

02:41:03.300 | And if you decide to do that podcast,

02:41:07.460 | I will be your first and your number one fan.

02:41:09.980 | And I know there are gonna be millions

02:41:11.220 | of other people interested in that.

02:41:12.540 | It would be amazing.

02:41:13.900 | So if you decide to go forward with the idea,

02:41:16.920 | that would be awesome.

02:41:19.300 | - I was gonna say what it is,

02:41:20.260 | but now I'm not going to because

02:41:22.580 | that's even more interesting.

02:41:24.020 | I brought up the clubhouse thing actually in Elon

02:41:27.500 | because I just wanted to get your thoughts

02:41:31.860 | about something he's said a few times to me

02:41:34.740 | and to me in general,

02:41:37.260 | is that he's under a huge amount of stress.

02:41:40.100 | And I'm thinking of doing a startup now

02:41:44.540 | and kind of thinking about all of this.

02:41:48.020 | 'Cause I enjoy podcasts, I enjoy science,

02:41:51.380 | but he says that his life is basically hell.

02:41:56.040 | It's very difficult.

02:41:57.380 | - He looks happy, but he's probably very good at math.

02:41:59.860 | - He's fulfilled, he's fulfilled.

02:42:02.180 | But the stress levels, the constant fires

02:42:06.620 | that he has to put out.

02:42:08.500 | And he says that most people wouldn't wanna be me.

02:42:11.660 | And that basically the reason he does what he does

02:42:16.160 | is because there's probably something wrong with him.

02:42:19.580 | He can't help it, but do that.

02:42:24.180 | - It's kind of beautiful.

02:42:25.700 | In a kind of Russian masochistic way.

02:42:29.140 | - Well, I just wonder the stress.

02:42:31.700 | I mean, I'm sure you can imagine

02:42:34.780 | the kind of stress he's under

02:42:36.020 | because it's running three plus companies

02:42:39.940 | and there's constant,

02:42:42.860 | he says that every single meeting is not about

02:42:47.080 | like should we install a coffee maker in the kitchen?

02:42:51.800 | It's like, this rocket is going to blow up

02:42:56.260 | and we're all fucked, I don't know what to do.

02:42:59.120 | And you have to fix-- - Real problems.

02:43:02.200 | - Real, big problems that are,

02:43:04.080 | and how do you deal with that?

02:43:07.760 | What do you think about that kind of life?

02:43:09.360 | One, is there a way to walk through that fire?

02:43:13.100 | And two, should you walk through that fire?

02:43:18.940 | - Well, I mean, without knowing, I've never met Elon,

02:43:22.100 | but certainly we have common friends in you

02:43:25.740 | and in other people that he worked with long ago,

02:43:29.660 | the PayPal days, all of whom speak very highly of him

02:43:33.980 | and express immense admiration for the number of things

02:43:38.640 | that he can maintain.

02:43:40.080 | I think it's fair to say that he accomplishes more

02:43:43.180 | before 9 a.m. than most people do in a decade, it's clear.

02:43:48.180 | And that what he does would dissolve most people

02:43:51.780 | into a puddle of tears, mostly because of this whole thing

02:43:54.820 | about the brain working hard

02:43:59.300 | equates to thinking about duration, path, and outcome

02:44:02.300 | and anticipating outcomes given A, B, C, or D,

02:44:05.040 | a lot of very scripted linear thinking.

02:44:08.220 | And prediction, and that is hard, it's stressful,

02:44:11.600 | it requires intense neurochemical output.

02:44:14.300 | And he's doing that for multiple projects.

02:44:16.400 | So presumably he's buffered himself

02:44:18.600 | from the coffee maker issues and the little tiny issues,

02:44:21.380 | but he is himself, unless there's something I don't know,

02:44:24.100 | he's walking around in a biological system.

02:44:26.380 | That's- - Allegedly, yes.

02:44:29.480 | - Yeah, allegedly.

02:44:30.320 | So, and I don't want to reveal too much here,

02:44:33.820 | but I have a common co-worker and colleague

02:44:38.820 | through some contract work I do,

02:44:41.220 | that what I can tell you is that he's accessing

02:44:44.280 | the best resources in terms of how to optimize his biology.

02:44:48.460 | And he's thinking about that, not just for himself,

02:44:51.960 | but for all of Neuralink.

02:44:53.500 | Because I think, I'm not trying to dodge the question,

02:44:56.180 | but I think there's the scale of the individual,

02:44:59.580 | but then there's the companies that he's creating.

02:45:02.780 | And you've got people there that you could imagine

02:45:05.380 | if they're working at 10% better capacity

02:45:07.780 | or can focus 5% better for 20% of the day,

02:45:12.220 | you're looking at an enormous increase in productivity

02:45:15.780 | and a reduction in the time to reach goals,

02:45:18.100 | which will reduce the amount of stress,

02:45:20.420 | presumably on Elon,

02:45:21.340 | unless he goes and starts another endeavor.

02:45:23.700 | Right, so I think it's certainly not healthy

02:45:27.380 | for most people.

02:45:28.780 | It seems to be where he gets his dopamine hits.

02:45:31.300 | I'm also really struck by the fact that he has a family

02:45:34.380 | and he's got kids growing up and a relationship

02:45:38.220 | and all that.

02:45:39.060 | So it's super impressive.

02:45:41.180 | I think that, I don't know, how old is Elon?

02:45:44.860 | - He's 40, I mean, pushing 50, I think 48.

02:45:49.380 | - Even more impressive.

02:45:50.500 | - 49.

02:45:51.340 | - Because many people who've been at exceedingly high output

02:45:55.420 | for a decade or more don't do well.

02:45:58.580 | Their system breaks down.

02:45:59.980 | - Well, this is what he was saying.

02:46:02.300 | Actually, I mean, I don't listen to all of his interviews,

02:46:06.820 | but on that live on the Clubhouse,

02:46:09.620 | he mentioned that he was kind of worried.

02:46:13.420 | It's interesting.

02:46:14.660 | He was worried that sometimes,

02:46:17.660 | what I think he said is,

02:46:20.340 | "I'm worried that at some point my brain

02:46:23.740 | "is just going to fail

02:46:25.980 | "because of the amount of load it's under.

02:46:28.780 | "Like how much I have to think through throughout the day.

02:46:33.780 | "Like how many problems you have to think through."

02:46:38.260 | Like, you know, it's like puzzles.

02:46:39.860 | It's constant puzzle solving.

02:46:41.260 | - I would be concerned about taking somebody

02:46:43.940 | who's in that regime and suddenly putting them

02:46:46.020 | into a regime where they don't have enough

02:46:47.660 | to bite down into.

02:46:48.540 | It's like my bulldog Costello.

02:46:49.820 | He's happiest when chewing and tugging

02:46:51.580 | with that big old neck of his.

02:46:53.220 | And he is just not going to become a retriever.

02:46:55.140 | He's not going to, that he does well

02:46:57.580 | and gets his dopamine hits from chewing and pulling.

02:47:00.660 | And it seems like Elon has ended up where he is

02:47:04.260 | by way of his natural leanings.

02:47:07.820 | Unless there's a backstory that's trauma-based

02:47:11.820 | or something, and I don't even begin to think that there is,

02:47:15.260 | it seems that he has,

02:47:16.820 | he's one of those rare individuals in history

02:47:18.700 | that has an immense drive to create

02:47:21.260 | in all these different domains.

02:47:22.680 | I'm just saying the obvious here.

02:47:24.380 | But it seems like that's what makes him tick.

02:47:27.400 | I mean, you're doing an awful lot too.

02:47:29.060 | - Well, the problem is not really,

02:47:32.020 | the problem is I'm about,

02:47:35.060 | I've been on the verge of pulling the trigger

02:47:37.180 | on starting a company which will increase

02:47:40.620 | the workload significantly.

02:47:43.200 | And I'm attracted to that because of a dream I have,

02:47:48.200 | but it's a little bit scary because it can destroy you.

02:47:54.220 | In a lot of ways, there's two sources of destruction.

02:47:59.140 | So one source is,

02:48:02.340 | I've, for the first time in my life,

02:48:06.380 | a few months ago, I think, have gotten,

02:48:11.380 | this feels like such a noob thing to say,

02:48:14.100 | but I've gotten some hate on the internet.

02:48:16.860 | - No.

02:48:17.780 | - I know, right? - No.

02:48:18.900 | - But I'm such an idiot, I'm so naive to,

02:48:22.460 | it was, I had the question that I guess a lot of people

02:48:27.460 | have when they get hate on the internet.

02:48:29.420 | It's like, "Mom, why are these people

02:48:32.900 | "making up stuff about me?"

02:48:35.500 | That kind of feeling of like, "Why are you saying that?"

02:48:39.060 | And the reason I mention that is like,

02:48:43.460 | well, if you wanna go and start a business

02:48:46.380 | and do as I think people should

02:48:49.820 | when they start a big, ambitious business,

02:48:53.420 | really try to go big.

02:48:55.020 | What does success look like

02:48:58.060 | in terms of your emotional journey?

02:49:00.780 | You're going to have a lot of people

02:49:02.580 | who make up stuff about you, who say negative things.

02:49:06.700 | I mean, majority, hopefully, if you do a good job,

02:49:09.300 | will be supportive, but there's still going to be

02:49:11.980 | this army of people.

02:49:13.460 | And that was scary to me because of how much

02:49:18.500 | emotional impact that had on me.

02:49:20.540 | - Well, and I also know a little bit,

02:49:22.860 | I have some glimpse into the fact that you put

02:49:24.900 | your heart and soul into everything you do.

02:49:27.280 | You're not a, you're lighthearted about certain things,

02:49:30.620 | but you're even lighthearted about being

02:49:33.060 | full gas pedal 24/7.

02:49:35.980 | There's kind of this, was it,

02:49:38.860 | was it Laird Hamilton always says,

02:49:42.220 | the big wave surfer, he always says,

02:49:45.300 | "Bright light, dark shadow."

02:49:47.660 | And I think it's that intensity.

02:49:50.780 | And when you do that, and then suddenly

02:49:53.180 | people are starting to throw some paint on your picture.

02:49:56.420 | You're like, "Wait, hold up."

02:49:58.020 | You're going max capacity.

02:50:00.100 | But I think the company is an interesting one

02:50:02.260 | because you've talked about doing this company before.

02:50:05.140 | - I've been afraid.

02:50:05.960 | I've just not been pulling the trigger out of fear

02:50:09.380 | 'cause I enjoy this life.

02:50:10.500 | This is, and sorry to interrupt,

02:50:12.140 | but it's ultimately this question of taking a leap.

02:50:15.960 | It's like, say you're in academia, like you're at MIT.

02:50:20.720 | I really love doing research at MIT.

02:50:23.820 | I really love that life.

02:50:25.620 | Why take a leap out?

02:50:27.580 | But I did because it's been a dream.

02:50:30.480 | But now accidentally along the way,

02:50:33.340 | I found this podcasting thing,

02:50:35.820 | which is also really fulfilling.

02:50:37.900 | And it's like, why take a leap?

02:50:41.180 | - 'Cause you have a huge lust for life.

02:50:44.220 | - Yeah.

02:50:45.060 | - I mean, sometimes when I'm on the internet

02:50:47.480 | and I think, you hear about it, like,

02:50:49.360 | "Oh, it's addicting.

02:50:50.660 | YouTube's addicting."

02:50:52.100 | Actually, sometimes I think maybe that's true.

02:50:54.760 | But a lot of times I just think there's so much here.

02:50:57.840 | There's a lot of garbage,

02:50:59.560 | but there's so many gems out there in the world now.

02:51:02.860 | It's almost like, sure, how you allocate time is key,

02:51:06.600 | but I think you can do it all.

02:51:10.160 | Not maybe not five more things, but all.

02:51:14.560 | - And one thing, I just had this idea,

02:51:16.260 | and this is not grounded in any scientific paper,

02:51:18.460 | but I think the answer might come to you

02:51:20.280 | during this torture that you're about

02:51:23.700 | to put yourself through with David.

02:51:25.360 | Because in those mental states,

02:51:26.860 | you're really asking the question, right?

02:51:29.340 | You're asking the question, where is my capacity?

02:51:32.620 | And am I even close to my capacity?

02:51:35.580 | And if I am, what's of the most value?

02:51:37.980 | I think we find the answers to those things

02:51:40.340 | in those nonverbal, nonanalytic states.

02:51:43.560 | It just comes to us.

02:51:45.940 | - I hope you're right,

02:51:46.960 | and I hope it's a profoundly fulfilling experience

02:51:51.660 | as opposed to one that leads to my demise.

02:51:54.060 | But-- - You have a will, right?

02:51:55.660 | (laughing)

02:51:57.580 | It all goes to the hedgehog.

02:51:59.220 | - Yeah, exactly, to the hedgehog.

02:52:01.660 | Now it all makes sense.

02:52:02.960 | Andrew, like we talked about offline on this podcast,

02:52:06.900 | I do hope we write some stuff together,

02:52:09.620 | do some research together.

02:52:11.460 | You're one of the most inspiring scientists

02:52:14.700 | speaking and communicating to the world.

02:52:17.980 | So I can't wait to see what you do with the podcast.

02:52:22.420 | I'm already a huge fan.

02:52:23.620 | I've been telling everybody about it.

02:52:25.460 | I can't wait to see you talk to Joe as well soon.

02:52:30.020 | And I can't wait to see what kind of paper

02:52:32.620 | we write together.

02:52:33.460 | Thanks so much for talking to me.

02:52:34.860 | - Thank you, that project's gonna be a lot of fun.

02:52:37.060 | Can't wait.

02:52:37.900 | And thanks again for having me on.

02:52:39.020 | Appreciate you, brother.

02:52:41.060 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:52:42.620 | with Andrew Huberman, and thank you to our sponsors,

02:52:45.840 | Masterclass Online Courses, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee,

02:52:49.860 | Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal, and BetterHelp Online Therapy.

02:52:54.100 | Click the sponsor links to get a discount.

02:52:56.740 | And remember, now is the time to sign up to Masterclass

02:53:00.020 | if that's something you've been on the fence about.

02:53:02.580 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:53:04.660 | from Woodrow Wilson.

02:53:06.580 | "We should not only use the brains we have,

02:53:09.180 | "but all that we can borrow."

02:53:11.900 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:53:14.780 | (upbeat music)

02:53:17.360 | (upbeat music)

02:53:19.940 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity, Fasting, and Neuroplasticity | Lex Fridman Podcast #164

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