LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in Los Angeles, CA

00:00:00.320 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | Recently, the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted a live event

00:00:11.600 | at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.

00:00:13.760 | It was entitled The Brain-Body Contract.

00:00:15.900 | The first part of the evening was a lecture

00:00:17.920 | about science and science-based tools

00:00:19.680 | for mental health, physical health, and performance.

00:00:22.480 | The second half was a question and answer period

00:00:25.340 | in which the audience asked me questions from the podcast

00:00:29.000 | or related to their own interests

00:00:30.760 | or things that they've gleaned from social media,

00:00:33.040 | or just general questions about mental health,

00:00:34.820 | physical health, and performance.

00:00:36.680 | And I answered those questions for them.

00:00:38.540 | We wanted to make the recorded version

00:00:40.080 | of that question and answer session available to everybody,

00:00:43.020 | regardless of who could attend.

00:00:44.740 | So what follows is the question and answer period

00:00:47.320 | from the Wiltern Theater Brain-Body Contract

00:00:49.840 | live Huberman Lab event.

00:00:51.960 | Want to be sure to thank the sponsors from that event.

00:00:54.480 | They were 8 Sleep, which makes smart mattress covers

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00:00:59.680 | I started sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover

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00:01:05.040 | I sleep so much deeper.

00:01:06.900 | I wake up far less during the middle of the night,

00:01:08.920 | if at all, and I wake up feeling far better

00:01:11.360 | than I ever have, even after the same amount of sleep.

00:01:14.560 | In fact, I love my 8 Sleep so much that when I travel,

00:01:18.100 | now I'm quite bothered that Airbnbs and hotels

00:01:21.000 | don't have 8 Sleep mattress covers on them.

00:01:23.040 | And I've even shipped my 8 Sleep mattress cover out

00:01:25.500 | to meet me in the location that I arrived to

00:01:27.700 | so that I get the best possible sleep.

00:01:29.860 | If you want to try 8 Sleep,

00:01:30.700 | you can go to 8sleep.com/huberman

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00:01:45.220 | Again, that's 8sleep.com/huberman.

00:01:47.820 | I'd like to also thank our supplement partner, Momentus.

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00:02:02.240 | If you're interested in any of those supplements,

00:02:04.240 | please go to livemomentus.com/huberman.

00:02:07.580 | And now without further ado, the question and answer period

00:02:10.720 | from the Huberman Lab live event in Los Angeles.

00:02:13.640 | [upbeat music]

00:02:23.820 | What occurs in the mind body when you have ADHD?

00:02:26.460 | Are there ways to address it without medication?

00:02:29.040 | Thank you for this question.

00:02:30.480 | So attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

00:02:32.700 | used to be called ADD.

00:02:34.260 | The hyperactivity part is a little misleading.

00:02:37.240 | And again, I'm not a clinician here.

00:02:39.540 | Here's what we know works for some people.

00:02:43.700 | And yet there are always going to be side effects

00:02:45.580 | of any kind of chemical manipulation,

00:02:49.740 | which is that we know that people, kids and adults

00:02:53.400 | with ADHD actually have a tremendous capacity to focus

00:02:57.140 | if they like what they're focusing on.

00:02:59.020 | You take a kid with ADHD who can't focus

00:03:02.180 | and you give them their favorite video game

00:03:03.700 | and they are a laser.

00:03:05.580 | The threshold to access the dopamine system is higher.

00:03:10.460 | And dopamine has this incredible ability

00:03:12.820 | to focus the brain and other aspects of the nervous system.

00:03:16.640 | Certainly if people require medication,

00:03:20.260 | I'm not going to tell you to stop taking that medication.

00:03:23.660 | But the focus training exercises

00:03:26.300 | that have been explored mainly in China,

00:03:29.040 | but they're starting to be explored over here as well,

00:03:33.140 | do seem to be of benefit.

00:03:34.820 | And these are, as they sound,

00:03:36.340 | they use them in schools in China now,

00:03:39.120 | which are literally visual focus exercises.

00:03:41.440 | Your mental focus, that is your ability

00:03:44.120 | to focus on things cognitively, follows your visual focus.

00:03:48.060 | And of course, your stress will anchor your,

00:03:51.220 | essentially put you in a soda straw view of the world.

00:03:53.660 | So yes, there are non-medication based treatments.

00:03:56.980 | By medication, I'm assuming you mean

00:03:58.420 | prescription medication.

00:03:59.900 | There are of course, supplement based medications

00:04:02.260 | that will increase dopamine, mainly L-tyrosine.

00:04:05.540 | Again, this is something to think carefully about

00:04:08.380 | before you start tampering with your dopamine system.

00:04:10.340 | But it is the, L-tyrosine is the precursor to dopamine.

00:04:13.980 | So it will raise your dopamine levels.

00:04:17.480 | But I believe, and you'll hear me say this

00:04:20.540 | as many times as necessary, that one should,

00:04:25.280 | if you can, rely on behavioral tools first.

00:04:28.600 | Then of course, sleep and nutrition are prerequisite.

00:04:33.600 | Again, for all mental health, physical health performance,

00:04:36.640 | you simply can't neglect those.

00:04:37.820 | And then, and only then, if those,

00:04:40.900 | all of that isn't working to rely on supplement based tools

00:04:44.200 | or on prescription medication.

00:04:47.060 | So it's clear that vivant, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera,

00:04:52.060 | work for ADHD, but some people choose to rely

00:04:55.900 | on more subtle forms of pharmacologic manipulation

00:04:58.440 | like L-tyrosine.

00:04:59.360 | And this focusing exercise essentially consists

00:05:03.380 | of spending one to three minutes trying

00:05:05.100 | to maintain visual focus.

00:05:06.340 | And yes, you are allowed to blink.

00:05:07.680 | I don't know why we tend to stare at something

00:05:09.600 | we don't blink, but don't let your eyes dry out.

00:05:12.420 | And that can increase your ability to focus cognitively.

00:05:16.440 | And it works.

00:05:17.840 | And keep in mind that focusing always involves refocusing.

00:05:21.800 | We covered a beautiful data set, not collected by my lab,

00:05:25.360 | by Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU, that at roughly 10 minute,

00:05:29.120 | it's actually 13 minute a day meditation of the sort

00:05:32.080 | where you just focus on your breathing,

00:05:34.200 | has been shown to improve focus significantly.

00:05:37.280 | Why don't we hear about this more?

00:05:38.780 | Well, she's now Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU

00:05:40.920 | and all the students are hearing about it.

00:05:42.860 | Hopefully they're doing it,

00:05:43.780 | but it takes a little bit of discipline.

00:05:45.260 | For some reason, 10 minute a day type meditation

00:05:48.860 | is something that very few people follow consistently.

00:05:51.240 | But if you're looking for non medication based treatments

00:05:54.300 | for ADHD or you're somebody who just struggles with focus,

00:05:57.000 | the focusing exercise or the meditation I just described

00:06:01.140 | can be very useful, so say the data.

00:06:04.320 | Yeah, thanks for bringing up space time bridging.

00:06:07.380 | Are people familiar with what space time bridging is?

00:06:09.300 | I haven't talked a lot about it.

00:06:11.140 | Okay, this is, thanks for bringing that up.

00:06:13.340 | We actually have an episode on meditation coming up soon

00:06:15.620 | where I cover it and I talked about it long ago

00:06:17.900 | and then I kind of abandoned it

00:06:19.940 | because well, we wanted more data

00:06:22.980 | and it's a pretty interesting technique.

00:06:26.060 | If you think about the nervous system

00:06:28.580 | and vision in particular,

00:06:30.180 | but if you're not a sighted person,

00:06:31.460 | you're low vision or no vision,

00:06:33.500 | you could do this with your hearing,

00:06:34.700 | but I'm gonna assume most people here are sighted.

00:06:37.160 | If not, just translate this to the auditory system.

00:06:41.460 | You have this incredible ability to close your eyes

00:06:44.000 | and focus for instance on,

00:06:45.220 | people talk about the third eye center,

00:06:47.020 | focusing right behind your forehead.

00:06:48.500 | Do you know why people do that when they meditate?

00:06:52.660 | The reason is that you actually have no sensation

00:06:55.400 | in your brain.

00:06:56.260 | It's the one place to focus your attention

00:06:59.700 | for which you abandon sensation.

00:07:01.980 | If I think about any portion of my body or my breathing,

00:07:06.700 | I'm going to sense what's happening.

00:07:08.140 | I'm going to perceive my inner landscape,

00:07:10.660 | so-called interoception,

00:07:12.500 | or my outer, if I look out into the world,

00:07:14.500 | it's exteroception.

00:07:15.980 | When you focus your attention with your eyes closed,

00:07:18.860 | you do have to close your eyes just behind your forehead,

00:07:21.660 | you are focusing on your thinking.

00:07:24.080 | Sort of obvious, but I don't,

00:07:27.260 | at least to me it had never been stated that clearly.

00:07:29.300 | Again, one of the problems

00:07:31.100 | with some of the more traditional practices,

00:07:34.060 | but also the problem with science

00:07:36.760 | is that there's a shrouding of everything

00:07:38.420 | in very complex language,

00:07:40.360 | which sucks.

00:07:42.240 | Why does it suck?

00:07:43.080 | Because it's a separator.

00:07:44.060 | You eliminate the number of people

00:07:45.500 | that could be brought to potentially useful practices.

00:07:48.360 | And I don't like it when people, including myself,

00:07:52.000 | overuse mechanism and descriptions of fancy phrases

00:07:57.000 | to mask basic principles.

00:07:59.460 | So, simplest language, I think is a,

00:08:02.340 | it tends to unify people around the practices.

00:08:06.400 | So when you focus on this so-called third eye center,

00:08:09.940 | or a spot right behind your forehead or on your breath,

00:08:12.560 | it's a little tricky with the breath,

00:08:13.660 | but when you focus on your frontal cortex,

00:08:17.460 | there's nothing to sense

00:08:18.940 | because there's no sensory neurons there.

00:08:20.760 | There's no touch, there's no pain, nothing.

00:08:22.640 | That's why in these gory movies,

00:08:24.200 | you can take the skull off.

00:08:25.800 | Or in neurosurgeries, they're poking around in there,

00:08:28.040 | and the person's playing a violin.

00:08:30.080 | No anesthetic, no anesthetic.

00:08:32.240 | Doesn't require anesthetic, there's no sensory neurons.

00:08:34.920 | Can't sense anything there.

00:08:37.480 | So, space-time bridging involves,

00:08:40.860 | it's essentially a meditation,

00:08:42.040 | but it's really a perceptual exercise.

00:08:44.020 | I think that's where we're going with this.

00:08:46.520 | Is it starts by closing your eyes

00:08:49.540 | and focusing on that location

00:08:52.060 | for which there's no sensation, there's only thought.

00:08:55.960 | And then opening your eyes and focusing on a location,

00:08:59.780 | maybe about the distance of your hand.

00:09:01.780 | And you focus also on your breathing.

00:09:05.420 | So you sort of imagine a kind of a tether between that.

00:09:08.640 | You can split your attention to these two locations.

00:09:10.480 | You're thinking about your body

00:09:11.660 | and you're thinking about a location outside of you.

00:09:14.660 | And then you, while continuing to think about your body,

00:09:17.540 | so-called interoception, focus on your breathing,

00:09:19.460 | you focus further out, and then further out,

00:09:21.900 | and then further out.

00:09:22.740 | And then ultimately, you know that little cartoon or meme

00:09:25.200 | where they're like, we're just a little blue dot

00:09:26.960 | floating in a big universe,

00:09:28.220 | and it's supposed to make all your problems go away?

00:09:31.060 | Like, it kind of works because what you've done

00:09:33.700 | is you've expanded your perception and you go,

00:09:35.840 | oh yeah, like the stuff that's happening in here

00:09:37.540 | is really important when I'm focused

00:09:39.500 | on what's happening in here.

00:09:41.600 | But when I'm focused on what's going on

00:09:43.760 | and the kind of the vastness of all this,

00:09:46.300 | and we're just a little, you know,

00:09:47.220 | pale blue dot and all that, it changes your perception.

00:09:50.860 | Not just your visual perception, obviously,

00:09:53.320 | changing your visual perception

00:09:55.180 | changes your cognitive perception,

00:09:56.580 | which changes your emotional experience.

00:09:58.580 | So the space-time bridging is a perceptual exercise

00:10:01.820 | where you step from focusing internally

00:10:04.420 | to focusing externally at a short distance,

00:10:06.560 | then a further distance, further distance, further distance,

00:10:08.780 | and then trying to imagine yourself

00:10:10.740 | in this larger landscape.

00:10:11.980 | It sounds very mystical,

00:10:12.820 | but it's actually very neurobiological,

00:10:14.860 | and it captures something really amazing.

00:10:17.720 | Why is the T in there, the time, space-time bridging?

00:10:21.060 | 'Cause this is space, but time is in there

00:10:24.220 | because when you focus in close,

00:10:27.480 | your slicing of time is finer.

00:10:30.260 | You notice the subtle fluctuations in your breathing

00:10:32.700 | and things that are happening up close.

00:10:35.300 | Whereas when you focus further out,

00:10:37.440 | your perception of time actually changes,

00:10:40.040 | which is why in panoramic vision we are calm.

00:10:42.120 | And when you think about we're just a pale blue dot

00:10:44.360 | and we mostly only live to about 85

00:10:46.060 | or maybe 100 years old,

00:10:47.200 | and then like what's happening right now,

00:10:48.740 | my boss being a jerk and all that doesn't really matter

00:10:52.180 | because, you know, like the earth is spinning

00:10:53.920 | and all that kind of stuff,

00:10:55.460 | which is all true and is the stuff of philosophy

00:10:57.780 | and mindfulness and I think is beautiful.

00:10:59.620 | What you're really doing is you're changing

00:11:01.140 | your time perception by changing your space perception.

00:11:04.220 | So space-time bridging is very useful

00:11:07.060 | because most people get locked at one step,

00:11:12.060 | one of these stations,

00:11:14.100 | especially under conditions of stress.

00:11:15.820 | And people who have trouble focusing,

00:11:19.460 | I'm glad you brought this up in this context of ADHD,

00:11:22.740 | people who have a hard time focusing

00:11:24.300 | whether or not they have ADHD or not

00:11:26.380 | tend to skip back and forth between different space-time

00:11:30.820 | domains as we call them in science.

00:11:32.480 | So this is a simple exercise that you can do

00:11:34.780 | focusing internally then stepping out externally

00:11:37.360 | and then stepping back in,

00:11:38.900 | all the while paying attention to your inner landscape

00:11:42.020 | just simply by focusing on your breathing.

00:11:44.560 | It's a tool that we're still collecting data on

00:11:46.660 | in terms of its utility, but people are already using it.

00:11:49.140 | And I don't think of it as a meditation,

00:11:51.820 | I think of it as a perceptual exercise.

00:11:54.100 | Thanks for asking that.

00:11:55.500 | Okay, as a teenager, what are five things

00:11:57.060 | you would recommend to physically feel my best?

00:11:58.860 | I'm a 15-year-old surfer who attends high school

00:12:01.720 | and plays soccer.

00:12:02.900 | Well, it sounds like you're doing a lot of things right.

00:12:05.300 | To physically feel your best.

00:12:11.740 | Okay, so I'm gonna grasp at some context here

00:12:14.680 | that I'm not, that's not within reach.

00:12:18.020 | I'm assuming if you are doing all these things,

00:12:21.100 | you're hopefully doing a bunch of other things too

00:12:23.220 | and they're going to be demands on you that you,

00:12:25.740 | probably some of them you don't want to do school

00:12:27.300 | and things like that, are going to have varying levels

00:12:31.060 | of like joy and delight and demand

00:12:33.460 | of things you don't want to do.

00:12:36.660 | I don't want to default always to the simplest of tools,

00:12:39.620 | but I certainly think that even as a 15-year-old,

00:12:42.780 | if you're not already getting lots and lots of sleep,

00:12:44.940 | that's going to be great.

00:12:45.980 | Tell your parents that I said you should get

00:12:47.620 | lots and lots of sleep

00:12:49.420 | while you're not sleeping through classes.

00:12:51.180 | I am a professor after all, I couldn't tell you otherwise.

00:12:55.940 | I would say if I could travel back in time,

00:12:59.260 | as a 15-year-old, I would encourage you

00:13:02.820 | to cultivate some sort of mindfulness practice.

00:13:06.780 | I know this sounds a little cliche,

00:13:08.660 | but having some awareness of your thinking

00:13:12.100 | about your thinking is good,

00:13:13.780 | but I'm actually not going to say sit down

00:13:16.240 | and meditate for 10 minutes a day or do NSDR.

00:13:19.940 | I'm actually not going to tell you that.

00:13:21.380 | I think given how plastic your brain is,

00:13:24.180 | how much it's changing at 15,

00:13:26.720 | I would encourage you,

00:13:27.700 | and maybe you would set a timer for this,

00:13:29.600 | to actually develop just a really keen awareness

00:13:33.240 | of what stresses you out, what relaxes you,

00:13:37.140 | what delights you, et cetera,

00:13:39.580 | and just to simply develop an awareness of that

00:13:43.460 | because those are your antennae.

00:13:47.300 | And I certainly had a meditation practice as a youth,

00:13:52.300 | mostly given to me because I was a little haywire

00:13:54.860 | and I needed it, and it worked pretty well,

00:13:58.100 | but I think in retrospect, what I wish I had developed

00:14:01.540 | was more of a sense of how I navigated stress

00:14:06.460 | or things I enjoyed and things I didn't enjoy,

00:14:10.500 | and I would just encourage you to have a general awareness,

00:14:13.900 | try and detect and learn about what raises your adrenaline,

00:14:18.380 | what raises your dopamine, what raises your serotonin,

00:14:21.420 | and then start thinking about tools.

00:14:23.980 | But again, the awareness is going to be very valuable,

00:14:28.020 | and gosh, as a 15-year-old, you are in this amazing,

00:14:31.700 | blessed period of heightened neuroplasticity.

00:14:34.660 | Should we all be so lucky, so enjoy it.

00:14:37.700 | Next question, please.

00:14:42.620 | Clarity on adrenaline regarding cold water.

00:14:44.580 | Should we wait to feel the rise of adrenaline,

00:14:46.460 | the get-me-out-of-here feeling,

00:14:47.780 | and the fall of it before bailing?

00:14:49.420 | Yes.

00:14:50.900 | Provided it doesn't kill you.

00:14:52.420 | You know, I don't want to say cold water,

00:14:55.340 | it's hard to kill yourself with cold water,

00:14:57.420 | provided your head's above and you're breathing,

00:15:00.300 | but the, it's, sorry, my podcast producer's always,

00:15:05.300 | I can't help that anyway.

00:15:10.940 | It's, it's a great tool,

00:15:15.580 | and different days it'll feel different.

00:15:17.540 | So for instance, doing cold, any kind of adrenaline

00:15:20.780 | and deliberate cold exposure

00:15:22.740 | or adrenaline-increasing activity early in the day,

00:15:25.660 | you might find that you are more quote-unquote

00:15:27.380 | resilient than later.

00:15:28.940 | In other words, the wall, like,

00:15:30.220 | I really don't want to do this.

00:15:31.740 | This is actually interesting for, I think,

00:15:33.580 | it extends beyond cold water.

00:15:35.460 | Let's say you really don't want to do something.

00:15:38.660 | Pay attention to the fact

00:15:39.980 | that maybe it's not the right thing to do.

00:15:41.820 | But assuming it's something that you know you should do,

00:15:43.940 | but you don't want to do,

00:15:45.340 | you are already in the first wall of adrenaline.

00:15:49.660 | You don't experience it necessarily

00:15:51.380 | as heightened levels of stress.

00:15:53.700 | You might experience it as heightened levels of fatigue

00:15:56.100 | or a hard time shifting on that kind of activation state

00:15:58.780 | that's required to move through the thing.

00:16:01.580 | But I do encourage you to take advantage of that.

00:16:06.580 | Of course, and we have an episode coming out tomorrow,

00:16:09.060 | actually, that answers questions like,

00:16:10.420 | should you train if you're sick?

00:16:11.780 | And, you know, what if you travel?

00:16:12.980 | And, you know, there's context always.

00:16:15.660 | But I think that you do want to experience,

00:16:19.340 | if you want to get the most out of the cold water exposure

00:16:21.700 | and to be more specific, the adrenaline,

00:16:24.420 | then you want to get to that point of,

00:16:25.940 | I really want to get out of here,

00:16:27.300 | but I know I can stay in safely,

00:16:28.780 | but I really want to get out of here.

00:16:30.780 | And it's a little hard to explain,

00:16:33.340 | but there's just so much learning in those short moments

00:16:37.220 | about where your mind goes.

00:16:39.580 | And this sounds very kind of, again, subjective

00:16:43.020 | and maybe a little wishy-washy,

00:16:45.100 | but you can realize great things about yourself

00:16:48.860 | in those moments.

00:16:49.700 | You can find insight in those moments.

00:16:52.860 | Also keep in mind that the degree of discomfort,

00:16:56.180 | not just physical, but mental discomfort,

00:16:58.740 | is directly predictive of the pain to pleasure wave

00:17:03.640 | that you'll experience afterwards.

00:17:04.860 | The reason it feels so good

00:17:05.900 | when you get out of the ice bath and you're showered off,

00:17:08.220 | I always do the warm shower after.

00:17:09.600 | I don't do this end on cold thing.

00:17:11.780 | I don't know.

00:17:12.620 | It just seems a little too painful.

00:17:14.060 | And then take a warm shower and then you feel great.

00:17:17.580 | And that's the surge of dopamine

00:17:19.100 | that we know based on a paper published

00:17:20.980 | in the European Journal of Physiology lasts many hours

00:17:23.860 | and it's a 100 to 200% increase in dopamine.

00:17:27.860 | It is not a subtle effect.

00:17:29.620 | And then people say, well, wait,

00:17:30.840 | is that dopamine going to crash my dopamine system?

00:17:32.900 | No, because there's a nice slow rise.

00:17:35.080 | In fact, I'm actually not aware of many things

00:17:37.620 | besides love and delight that can create this long,

00:17:42.100 | slow arc of dopamine lasting many hours.

00:17:46.220 | Maybe you're aware of other things.

00:17:47.560 | If you are, let me know.

00:17:48.900 | But it turns out that long arc is a true antidepressant.

00:17:53.900 | And my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Anna Lemke,

00:17:57.600 | who's the head of our dual diagnosis addiction clinic,

00:18:00.640 | has talked about in her amazing book, "Dopamine Nation,"

00:18:03.760 | about patients of hers

00:18:05.260 | that have really helped themselves along

00:18:07.580 | and out of the more depressive phases

00:18:09.260 | of working through addiction

00:18:12.060 | and in just depression in general

00:18:14.160 | through directed cold water therapy.

00:18:16.100 | So I'm obviously a fanatic about it

00:18:18.880 | in the sense that it's a powerful,

00:18:21.340 | relatively safe if done properly way

00:18:24.980 | to modulate your internal dopamine.

00:18:27.940 | Hopefully I answered your question.

00:18:29.260 | Next question, please.

00:18:32.960 | Sorry, I caught it raised, it went off.

00:18:34.500 | The fall as well.

00:18:35.900 | Yes, I think you should get out

00:18:37.480 | once you've accomplished something.

00:18:40.560 | Don't get out when you panic unless it's dangerous, sorry.

00:18:44.020 | How can you train your brain to feel more confident

00:18:45.840 | in moments where you tend to feel intimidated?

00:18:47.700 | Ah, okay.

00:18:50.140 | These are hard question.

00:18:52.820 | Because context is tricky here

00:18:55.980 | 'cause I don't know what the context is.

00:18:59.100 | And confidence on short timescales

00:19:02.340 | and then long timescales.

00:19:03.400 | So confidence in school, confidence in career,

00:19:05.700 | those are long arc things,

00:19:08.940 | whereas confidence to be able to do something

00:19:11.880 | in the short term is different.

00:19:13.540 | But remember those action sequences

00:19:15.600 | that trigger the release of dopamine.

00:19:17.540 | Dopamine, I've mainly talked about the dark side of dopamine

00:19:20.220 | but I hopefully also talked about the sort of upward spiral

00:19:23.280 | that dopamine can cause mainly by thinking about delight

00:19:25.960 | and things that you really enjoy.

00:19:28.180 | That carries over.

00:19:30.560 | And I would say that you want to micro slice

00:19:35.560 | the demands of what's maybe got you back

00:19:38.700 | on your heels a bit.

00:19:40.300 | Actually a good friend of mine who's here tonight,

00:19:43.820 | I think also my friend Pat,

00:19:45.580 | he has a great way of conceptualizing this,

00:19:49.300 | which is for most all endeavors

00:19:51.900 | we either feel back on our heels,

00:19:53.340 | flat-footed or forward center of mass.

00:19:55.300 | Like we can really do something.

00:19:57.020 | We're flat-footed, we're back on our heels.

00:19:58.480 | And sometimes getting from back on our heels,

00:19:59.980 | let's call that lack of confidence

00:20:01.700 | to just on two feet and confident enough to move forward

00:20:05.860 | or at least stay in the game.

00:20:08.000 | That's going to require, you could lean on different tools.

00:20:12.060 | I can't say which would be ideal

00:20:15.040 | for the circumstance you have in mind.

00:20:17.660 | But I do think that having a way to calm yourself

00:20:21.220 | will give you access to more resources, internal resources.

00:20:26.220 | We know this.

00:20:28.060 | This was something I meant to bring up

00:20:29.280 | during the discussion about fear versus love, et cetera,

00:20:32.700 | trying to access delight and love.

00:20:35.260 | When we are in a state of fear or stress or anxiety,

00:20:39.900 | the rule set, the options available to us

00:20:44.080 | and indeed our creativity is greatly diminished.

00:20:47.780 | And this has to do with the way

00:20:49.140 | that the prefrontal cortex interacts

00:20:51.240 | with an area of the brain called the insula,

00:20:52.980 | which relates to our internal landscape.

00:20:55.100 | And there's this weird phenomenon,

00:20:57.160 | which is that normally our brain, our thinking brain

00:21:00.940 | and our rule setting brain can,

00:21:03.060 | it leads our, the brain parts that control

00:21:08.060 | and pay attention to how we feel internally.

00:21:10.260 | And that's why, for instance, if you feel a little nervous,

00:21:12.260 | you can still do something.

00:21:13.580 | At some point you get stressed enough

00:21:15.940 | and we know this from work by my colleague, David Spiegel,

00:21:19.700 | it reverses and these areas of the brain

00:21:22.620 | that are paying attention, like how flushed my face is

00:21:24.660 | or whether or not I'm sweating or my breathing

00:21:26.460 | actually start to shut down creative decision-making.

00:21:30.920 | So I would say the way to have more confidence

00:21:32.860 | is to learn to control that stress

00:21:35.260 | and keep the part of your brain,

00:21:37.040 | the prefrontal cortex is that part,

00:21:39.780 | that can come up with new rules that can be funny,

00:21:44.600 | that can be creative, that keeps that brain part leading.

00:21:49.600 | The way you think about this is the prefrontal cortex

00:21:51.900 | is sort of like the coach and the rest of your brain

00:21:53.540 | are sort of like the players.

00:21:54.540 | And if you get too stressed,

00:21:56.440 | the players start to lead the game and the coach follows

00:21:59.100 | and kind of drags them along.

00:22:00.000 | So I would encourage you to focus

00:22:01.700 | on real-time stress modulation

00:22:03.780 | and to raise your stress threshold

00:22:05.860 | using the sorts of tools we talked about

00:22:08.940 | and to register your wins.

00:22:10.860 | I didn't get into this in too much detail,

00:22:12.580 | but one of the amazing things about the dopamine system

00:22:16.060 | is that it's highly subject to your interpretation.

00:22:20.920 | If you tell yourself that a fail was a win

00:22:25.380 | and you can see or conceptualize some way

00:22:27.740 | in which that's actually true,

00:22:30.020 | you get to tap into the dopamine system.

00:22:31.920 | You might think that's crazy.

00:22:32.880 | You can cheat your own brain.

00:22:34.220 | You can cheat your own neurochemistry and indeed you can.

00:22:37.020 | You can change the time space, time referencing.

00:22:39.880 | We see this with examples like Nelson Mandela

00:22:42.840 | or Viktor Frankl.

00:22:43.700 | You know, you read their stories, right?

00:22:45.160 | Trapped in little cells, right?

00:22:48.160 | Confined, imprisoned, and they come up with new ways

00:22:51.620 | to access the dopamine system

00:22:53.140 | by now not thinking about what they're not getting,

00:22:55.920 | but thinking about what they can control

00:22:57.540 | in their immediate experience.

00:22:59.060 | Many, many examples of this

00:23:01.100 | throughout literature and history.

00:23:03.140 | And the dopamine system is the life force system.

00:23:08.580 | I don't say that in any loose way.

00:23:11.220 | Dopamine is life force.

00:23:13.820 | It's the wish and the desire to continue.

00:23:16.820 | It's persistence.

00:23:19.740 | And so if you can think about

00:23:23.000 | what might seem like a failure

00:23:24.760 | and really spend some time thinking about

00:23:27.340 | not the potential wins on the outside,

00:23:29.660 | but how you can conceptualize that

00:23:31.220 | as a potential win internally,

00:23:32.980 | you really do get to achieve an internal chemical win

00:23:37.980 | and that chemical win sets you up for more real wins.

00:23:43.220 | If that makes sense.

00:23:44.420 | It's incredible how contextualized the dopamine system is,

00:23:47.160 | but if it weren't, why would it matter

00:23:49.340 | if we're talking about money or mates or food

00:23:52.220 | or job or school?

00:23:53.300 | You don't get 50 reward systems and motivation systems.

00:23:57.060 | You get one, and that's the dopamine system.

00:23:59.700 | Next question, please.

00:24:03.580 | What is the competing mechanism

00:24:05.300 | behind bilateral eye movement, EMDR,

00:24:07.580 | that helps resolve psychological trauma?

00:24:10.200 | The competing mechanism.

00:24:11.800 | Well, let me try and answer as best I can.

00:24:16.800 | I'm not sure I understand the full extent of the question,

00:24:19.800 | but EMDR, moving your eyes from side to side, right?

00:24:24.800 | And then recounting a trauma is a very common

00:24:28.240 | and actually one of the four approved treatments

00:24:31.220 | that are behavioral for trauma.

00:24:33.640 | So it's taken seriously in the psychiatric

00:24:36.840 | and psychological community for good reason.

00:24:39.020 | It tends to work best for single event traumas

00:24:41.760 | as opposed to like entire childhoods.

00:24:44.380 | No joke there.

00:24:45.220 | Like some people have their entire childhood was traumatic.

00:24:47.260 | Other people, they experience a trauma,

00:24:50.340 | single event trauma or repeated periods

00:24:53.500 | of the same or similar type of trauma.

00:24:56.340 | Eye movements from side to side have been shown

00:25:00.580 | in a number of studies to very potently reduce the activity

00:25:04.560 | of a brain structure called the amygdala,

00:25:06.060 | which most people are familiar with

00:25:07.860 | because of the character from the Star Wars movie,

00:25:10.060 | amygdala, there's a neuroscientist somewhere on that team.

00:25:15.060 | It is indeed a threat detection center.

00:25:19.300 | And when you move through space, not outer space,

00:25:23.500 | but when you walk like this,

00:25:24.860 | your eyes actually generate these subtle side to side shifts

00:25:28.260 | unless you're focusing on a specific target.

00:25:31.100 | And my lab and other laboratories have found

00:25:34.380 | that that leads to a very potent quieting

00:25:37.660 | of the threat detection system.

00:25:40.140 | And then EMDR is essentially a process

00:25:42.420 | of pairing that calmer state

00:25:45.100 | with no threat detection system activated

00:25:48.260 | with the recount of something

00:25:49.500 | that normally would be quite triggering.

00:25:51.420 | So it's, you've heard of Pavlovian conditioning,

00:25:53.500 | like a bell rings and the animal gets fed

00:25:56.260 | and animal salivates.

00:25:58.560 | Eventually just the bell will evoke the salivation.

00:26:01.100 | You're doing the reverse of that.

00:26:02.820 | It's called behavioral desensitization.

00:26:05.020 | It has an underlying mechanism, et cetera.

00:26:07.380 | But the idea is to pair a calm state

00:26:09.660 | with recount of something.

00:26:11.980 | It has been shown to be successful.

00:26:13.980 | There are people who think that

00:26:16.380 | the side to side eye movements and the recount of trauma

00:26:20.300 | may actually be invoking some form of hypnosis.

00:26:23.700 | My colleague, David Spiegel's expert in clinical hypnosis.

00:26:28.220 | He's appeared on my podcast, Rich Roll's podcast

00:26:30.820 | and a few other podcasts and talks about this.

00:26:32.740 | It is not staged hypnosis, it's clinical hypnosis.

00:26:35.300 | So there may be something going on there.

00:26:37.640 | EMDR, again, some people get great relief from it,

00:26:40.480 | other people don't.

00:26:41.380 | What's kind of nice is that this eye movements

00:26:43.740 | from side to side or simply taking a walk

00:26:45.820 | as long as you're not looking at your phone

00:26:47.320 | and not allowing your eyes to move from side to side

00:26:50.120 | is a very good way to shut down the fear and stress system.

00:26:54.260 | So taking a walk, I think is relaxing for obvious reasons.

00:26:57.020 | And there are data showing that part of the reason

00:26:59.080 | why animals scratch at the door and wanna go for a walk

00:27:01.420 | may not actually be the exercise.

00:27:02.820 | There's kind of an anxiety and then an anxiety relief

00:27:05.060 | that occurs.

00:27:06.580 | Of course, they probably have to go to the bathroom too.

00:27:08.600 | One of Costello's great joys in life

00:27:10.400 | was just peeing on everything.

00:27:12.240 | Outdoors, thankfully.

00:27:15.940 | So the psychological trauma rewiring,

00:27:18.580 | unfortunately, there haven't been a lot of brain imaging

00:27:20.380 | studies looking at this long term of how well EMDR works.

00:27:24.620 | What I think is going to happen in the next few years,

00:27:26.660 | by the way, is it is not going to be a discussion around,

00:27:29.840 | should you do EMDR?

00:27:30.980 | Should you do transcranial magnetic stimulation?

00:27:33.140 | Should you do behavioral therapy?

00:27:34.700 | It's going to be combination therapies.

00:27:36.820 | Combination therapies, including pharmacologic manipulations

00:27:40.180 | to essentially give a boost to the systems

00:27:44.180 | that encourage neuroplasticity like dopamine and serotonin

00:27:47.160 | and adrenaline, and then also then perform EMDR.

00:27:52.060 | And if you wanna talk about what's happening

00:27:53.980 | in the landscape of clinical trials

00:27:55.580 | on some of the psychedelics, I'm happy to talk about it.

00:27:57.640 | They're still illegal, but they are being used

00:28:01.400 | in clinical trials and very interesting stuff

00:28:04.080 | is happening there.

00:28:05.440 | Okay, next question, please.

00:28:06.860 | What new research or interventions are you most excited

00:28:08.880 | about in the realm of health and wellness?

00:28:12.560 | So what I think is going to be very interesting

00:28:17.240 | in the next few years really reflects my obsession

00:28:21.480 | that you've seen a little bit of tonight.

00:28:23.160 | But the thing that I think is going to be most useful,

00:28:25.320 | and I've seen this in science before,

00:28:27.960 | and I think we're going to see it in health and wellness,

00:28:30.680 | is that there are all these tools and all these people

00:28:33.560 | and he's saying this and she's saying that

00:28:36.640 | and what we're going to start paying attention to

00:28:39.160 | is what are the common themes, right?

00:28:42.400 | And a broader and more important theme is going to be one

00:28:47.640 | of modulation versus mediation.

00:28:49.540 | What do I mean?

00:28:50.520 | Well, if someone were to pull a fire alarm right now

00:28:54.840 | and please don't, that will shift our attention

00:28:58.660 | and make it hard to focus on what I'm saying

00:29:00.400 | and knowing me, I'd probably just stay up here talking.

00:29:03.940 | Do we think that fire alarms mediate attention?

00:29:08.060 | No, they modulate it, right?

00:29:10.840 | If it were very, very cold in this room

00:29:12.360 | like it was when we first got here tonight,

00:29:14.820 | we were arctic cold.

00:29:16.400 | Hopefully it's warmed up a bit.

00:29:19.460 | It hasn't, I'm so sorry.

00:29:22.360 | So sorry.

00:29:24.400 | Yeah, I attempted to, yeah.

00:29:27.940 | I almost thought maybe we all just do a bunch of breathing

00:29:30.340 | to heat up, like adrenaline release.

00:29:31.940 | But I don't know, these days,

00:29:33.340 | getting groups of people to all breathe on each other

00:29:35.180 | is not exactly, I can see that might go the wrong way

00:29:38.980 | in terms of what people interpret.

00:29:41.260 | So the idea here is that certain things

00:29:46.260 | directly mediate something.

00:29:49.280 | Like a physiological side directly calms you down quickly.

00:29:52.500 | It mediates the calming response.

00:29:55.580 | Getting good sleep makes you less easily triggered.

00:29:58.820 | It modulates stress, but is sleeping

00:30:02.100 | directly mediating stress control?

00:30:04.660 | No, and I think this is really important

00:30:07.060 | and this brings up the topic of the gut-brain axis.

00:30:10.860 | The gut is rich with these little bugs,

00:30:14.400 | bacteria, trillions of them,

00:30:15.720 | which is an eerie thought to me.

00:30:17.520 | But also the surface of your skin,

00:30:18.940 | the surface of your eyes.

00:30:20.020 | You have a skin microbiome, a nasal microbiome.

00:30:22.140 | Every mucosal lining has a microbiome.

00:30:24.980 | In fact, think about this, this is a crazy

00:30:29.180 | but worthwhile tangent.

00:30:31.020 | Have you ever bitten the inside of your mouth?

00:30:33.720 | It sucks, right?

00:30:34.560 | And you get a cut and it hurts, but guess what?

00:30:37.340 | The inside of your mouth heals without a scar.

00:30:41.500 | Think about that.

00:30:42.560 | Weird, right?

00:30:43.400 | You cut anywhere else on your body

00:30:44.980 | and depending on how well you heal

00:30:46.620 | and your age and your immune status, you get a scar.

00:30:49.680 | Your mouth is filled with bacteria

00:30:54.100 | and it's open to the world.

00:30:55.860 | But the gut microbiome, provided it's healthy,

00:30:59.780 | provides an incredible ability to heal quickly.

00:31:04.140 | And I'm not somebody who's done a lot of acupuncture.

00:31:08.140 | I've went a few times and now there's interesting science

00:31:10.220 | happening on acupuncture, but what's the first thing they do

00:31:12.140 | when you walk in there?

00:31:13.300 | And then they go, oh yeah.

00:31:16.780 | And they have this cool intuition

00:31:18.420 | that's not based on Western mechanistic science.

00:31:20.920 | It's more of an intuition based on millions,

00:31:23.700 | if not billions, of data points

00:31:25.300 | that have been put into these charts.

00:31:27.020 | It's pretty cool, right?

00:31:28.340 | And what they are looking at, I believe,

00:31:30.540 | and from what my colleagues who work on microbiome tell me,

00:31:32.740 | is they can look at the pallor of your tongue,

00:31:35.100 | in particular in the back, and get a sense

00:31:36.540 | of whether or not the microbiome there

00:31:38.720 | is of the appropriate stuff.

00:31:42.620 | But they don't go, oh, lactobacillus and then bacillus.

00:31:45.540 | They all on to illus, right?

00:31:47.100 | Oh, you're dysbiotic.

00:31:49.500 | Instead, they get a sense.

00:31:51.140 | Now, parents of small babies learn to detect

00:31:54.300 | all sorts of things coming out of essentially

00:31:56.020 | every orifice of the child as a readout of health

00:31:58.860 | because the child doesn't have language.

00:32:00.780 | And a dog owner, unfortunately,

00:32:02.340 | he learned to do this too, for better or for worse,

00:32:05.100 | probably for better, right?

00:32:06.440 | So we have this intuition about gut health,

00:32:09.500 | but gut health would be another example

00:32:12.020 | where it's very clear now that fiber can be helpful,

00:32:15.780 | but it's mostly consuming these fermented foods

00:32:18.460 | that have been used for ages,

00:32:21.260 | but low-sugar fermented foods of the natto,

00:32:23.780 | kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, et cetera.

00:32:26.420 | All these things, depending on which culture you're in,

00:32:29.980 | they come in different forms, certain yogurts, et cetera,

00:32:33.660 | that allow the gut to be healthy,

00:32:35.380 | and it modulates a huge number of systems.

00:32:38.360 | So I don't think that you're going to cure depression

00:32:40.500 | by adjusting your gut microbiome,

00:32:43.660 | but if your gut microbiota are not well,

00:32:47.960 | and you improve that,

00:32:49.500 | it will indeed shift the neurotransmitter systems

00:32:52.140 | of your brain and give you a elevated mood.

00:32:55.540 | That shouldn't come as a surprise anymore,

00:32:57.400 | but I think that the whole world thinks like,

00:32:59.200 | gosh, it must be the serotonin in the gut.

00:33:01.340 | No, it's actually not serotonin in the gut,

00:33:03.600 | it's that the gut microbiota create chemicals

00:33:05.860 | that actually become serotonin in the brain

00:33:09.660 | or become dopamine in the brain.

00:33:11.780 | And so I think that the gut microbiome,

00:33:13.680 | I would put in the same category,

00:33:15.180 | although not quite as important,

00:33:17.060 | I would put it in the category of like sleep.

00:33:19.040 | It modulates a huge number of other processes,

00:33:21.600 | it doesn't mediate them.

00:33:23.580 | So sunlight, sleep, healthy gut microbiome,

00:33:28.200 | exercise, good nutrition, social connection,

00:33:32.060 | these things all create this general milieu

00:33:34.760 | or environment of health.

00:33:36.940 | I would like to see more distinction

00:33:39.700 | between modulating and mediating

00:33:42.580 | to effects and tools out there

00:33:44.520 | because I also see a lot of unnecessary argument.

00:33:47.900 | People are like, there's no example

00:33:49.320 | that improving your gut microbiome cures depressions.

00:33:52.540 | Of course there's not,

00:33:53.380 | but there are really good examples

00:33:54.480 | if your gut microbiome is off

00:33:56.400 | that improving it can improve mood,

00:33:58.680 | which depending on where you are

00:34:00.400 | on that spectrum of depression can really relieve things.

00:34:03.180 | So I think that the future of health,

00:34:05.920 | we hear so much about personalized medicine

00:34:07.600 | and matched to your genome,

00:34:08.740 | but we don't even have the basic,

00:34:10.580 | most people don't even have the basics right.

00:34:13.320 | And if you watch or listen to the podcast long enough,

00:34:16.680 | hopefully certain themes start to kind of repeat themselves.

00:34:19.840 | But a key theme that you learn in science,

00:34:22.920 | you teach your students,

00:34:24.480 | does it modulate or does it mediate it?

00:34:26.360 | You need to be careful with your language there.

00:34:28.600 | And there's great information

00:34:30.320 | or as we say, interpretational power there.

00:34:33.660 | If you understand the difference,

00:34:35.680 | then I think we can go a long way

00:34:38.600 | by making that distinction modulating versus mediating.

00:34:41.800 | There are probably other things that modulate health

00:34:43.980 | that I'm overlooking now

00:34:45.160 | just because of the flow that I'm in.

00:34:48.020 | The cool mitt, yeah.

00:34:52.280 | The cool mitt, Palmer cooling.

00:34:54.680 | Okay, I promised to talk about Palmer cooling.

00:34:57.240 | Well, I'll do it now.

00:34:58.300 | Palmer cooling, they changed the Q&A format.

00:35:00.980 | What can I say?

00:35:01.820 | This is like teaching in the classroom.

00:35:04.020 | All right, very briefly that Palmer cooling,

00:35:07.960 | which is essentially placing,

00:35:09.280 | you can cool the core of the body most quickly

00:35:12.800 | by placing cold objects on the hands,

00:35:16.160 | the bottoms of the feet or on the top of the face

00:35:18.680 | because of the arrangement of vasculature.

00:35:21.560 | Normally, you've got this arteries, capillaries, veins things

00:35:25.000 | but at those locations in the body,

00:35:27.520 | you skip the capillaries and you can basically,

00:35:29.720 | you're not really passing cool into the body

00:35:31.380 | but you're cooling off the core of the body more quickly.

00:35:34.020 | And if you do that in between sets of exercise

00:35:36.420 | or during a run or cycling,

00:35:38.300 | you can dramatically increase your ability to continue.

00:35:41.880 | I actually use the cool mitt for cognitive work

00:35:44.800 | but you don't need a cool mitt.

00:35:46.360 | Sorry, cool mitt guys.

00:35:48.400 | You can just get a thing of ice water

00:35:51.800 | or just very cold water and you,

00:35:53.640 | I know it sounds trivially easy

00:35:55.080 | but you're actually just cooling your core

00:35:57.960 | by putting your hands or even one hand

00:36:00.620 | on a relatively cold thing of water or ice

00:36:04.320 | but not so cold that it constricts the vasculature there.

00:36:08.340 | This is the incredible work of my colleague at Stanford,

00:36:10.940 | Dr. Craig Heller.

00:36:12.660 | Why wouldn't more people do this

00:36:14.320 | if you can double the amount of endurance believe it or not

00:36:17.100 | or double the number of sets of exercise you can do

00:36:19.620 | or feel more alert and do more cognitive work?

00:36:22.980 | Why wouldn't more people do it?

00:36:24.420 | Because people just don't do it and it sounds crazy.

00:36:27.720 | It really sounds crazy but it's a real thing

00:36:30.220 | and I wish more people would do it.

00:36:31.460 | The athletes at Stanford do it.

00:36:33.320 | People in the military do it.

00:36:34.340 | So people who know know and they use it, enjoy it.

00:36:37.280 | It's just, it's almost like seems too off target

00:36:42.280 | from what you're trying to accomplish.

00:36:44.300 | I don't know, for some reason,

00:36:45.260 | people are finally on board breathing.

00:36:47.820 | Like in a specific way as a useful tool.

00:36:50.020 | A few years ago, no one was into that.

00:36:52.780 | I mean, just think of how far we've come.

00:36:54.600 | It's incredible.

00:36:56.000 | People are talking about psychedelics,

00:36:57.500 | meditation, breathing.

00:36:59.380 | I think the pandemic for all its pains

00:37:02.360 | and what a challenging period for all sorts of reasons

00:37:05.420 | did wake people up to the idea

00:37:07.060 | that you have to take control over your health

00:37:09.860 | because there's no magic fairy coming to do it for you.

00:37:13.500 | And with all due respect, there's no government agency

00:37:16.440 | that's gonna like drop off the kit at your front door

00:37:19.460 | of like, here's how you take good care of yourself.

00:37:21.500 | So it's just not gonna happen.

00:37:24.440 | And it wouldn't happen under any circumstances.

00:37:26.620 | So it's a personal responsibility issue.

00:37:28.980 | All right, what lessons from skateboarding?

00:37:32.180 | The failure part, you know, the failure, failure, failure.

00:37:36.280 | I mean, for me, you know,

00:37:38.860 | never was a good skateboarder.

00:37:39.980 | Still have close friends in that community

00:37:42.060 | and our photographer and a guy who does all the visuals

00:37:45.520 | and the other guys that do the visuals for our podcast,

00:37:47.960 | Mike playback and Chris and Martin are all of that community.

00:37:51.840 | You know, I think that for me,

00:37:53.060 | that community was really, as Mike will sometimes say,

00:37:56.480 | skateboarders hate everything.

00:37:57.980 | Meaning they have a very high threshold

00:38:00.620 | for what they consider acceptable.

00:38:02.180 | It's not just what you do, it's how you do it.

00:38:04.500 | Super important.

00:38:05.880 | And I think in neuroscience,

00:38:08.020 | there's a lot of stuff.

00:38:10.220 | In science in general, there's so many papers

00:38:12.940 | and there's so many experiments,

00:38:14.200 | like how do you navigate that landscape?

00:38:16.200 | I think it helped me develop a sense of taste.

00:38:18.860 | But the taste that I'm referring to

00:38:20.100 | is not necessarily a taste of which science is cool

00:38:23.240 | or not cool, that too.

00:38:24.860 | But it came through a few times tonight

00:38:26.820 | when I was talking about my mentors.

00:38:28.520 | You know, I picked back then skateboarding

00:38:31.420 | 'cause I really liked the people.

00:38:33.220 | And also you didn't need your parents to go to a game.

00:38:36.040 | And so that worked for me.

00:38:37.340 | And you could kind of make your own schedule.

00:38:40.940 | And I do think it's very important

00:38:43.260 | to the extent that you can in science

00:38:46.140 | and in everything to surround yourself

00:38:47.780 | with the kinds of people

00:38:48.620 | that you just really enjoy being around.

00:38:50.780 | And so to me, the podcast running a lab

00:38:54.100 | feels a lot like skateboarding.

00:38:55.880 | It's the same energy, it's the same neurochemical systems

00:38:58.900 | firing, so that's, yeah, that one.

00:39:01.980 | Next, favorite Feynman.

00:39:05.500 | Oh, oh wait, no, that's inappropriate.

00:39:07.680 | I do have a Feynman story, but it's inappropriate.

00:39:11.980 | Darn it.

00:39:13.660 | Maybe some time.

00:39:16.260 | This is why I don't drink.

00:39:18.060 | Good decision making.

00:39:19.220 | Well, I read all of Feynman's books.

00:39:25.180 | So I had the pleasure, I never met him.

00:39:27.620 | He was dead before I was born.

00:39:29.880 | But my dad did and he had good Feynman stories

00:39:34.200 | and they were inappropriate.

00:39:35.600 | So the cool thing about Feynman, right,

00:39:40.380 | was that he didn't really care

00:39:44.720 | if people understood the specifics

00:39:47.940 | of what he was talking about.

00:39:49.620 | He just wanted people to get turned on

00:39:51.500 | to how amazing physics was and he loved general principles.

00:39:55.300 | And one of the things, the example that's sometimes given,

00:39:58.860 | I don't know how many of you are familiar

00:40:00.140 | with the Feynman books, but surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman

00:40:02.660 | or what do you care what other people think?

00:40:04.540 | All of that stuff, it's wonderful.

00:40:06.180 | He picked locks, when he worked at Los Alamos Labs,

00:40:08.740 | they were working on the bomb.

00:40:10.100 | And he basically, well, there and elsewhere.

00:40:12.260 | And every morning, the offices used to come in

00:40:14.620 | and he would spread all the top secret papers

00:40:16.740 | out on the floor.

00:40:17.740 | He would break into the safes at night

00:40:19.220 | and then they were perplexed who could do this.

00:40:20.700 | And he liked safe cracking,

00:40:22.060 | literally like national security secrets,

00:40:24.580 | just for fun, prankster.

00:40:26.660 | He also bongo drum naked on the roof of Caltech.

00:40:29.540 | And he did most of his writing of theorems

00:40:31.860 | in strip clubs, in fact.

00:40:33.620 | Learned to draw late in life,

00:40:39.180 | was really into flotation tanks and very curious about,

00:40:44.180 | but never did psychedelics.

00:40:46.060 | That's as I understand.

00:40:48.060 | But one of the cool Feynman factoids

00:40:51.140 | is that when he was a kid,

00:40:53.340 | he talked about when he was a child

00:40:55.420 | that his dad used to take him bird watching.

00:40:57.660 | And he'd say, well, that's a whatever scrub Jay

00:41:00.420 | and that's a whatever thrush.

00:41:03.380 | And his dad said, no,

00:41:05.020 | don't cloud your mind with naming and taxonomy.

00:41:10.500 | That's not meaningful.

00:41:13.380 | Because then what if it's the different,

00:41:15.340 | the pygmy thrush or the lesser this or that.

00:41:19.340 | The more important thing is to start to identify principles

00:41:21.900 | of why certain birds behave one way

00:41:26.140 | and certain birds behave another

00:41:27.180 | and to start finding the commonalities and the regularities.

00:41:31.460 | And that's a theme that I obviously tonight

00:41:33.460 | have tried to impose.

00:41:35.340 | And it's actually something that I can't do in podcasts,

00:41:38.020 | necessarily, 'cause I can't thread across 40 episodes

00:41:40.860 | or something like that in the same way

00:41:42.020 | that I could in an evening like this.

00:41:43.820 | So that's an appropriate Feynman story.

00:41:46.860 | Also, it just seemed like a delightful guy.

00:41:50.180 | And he's kind of cool.

00:41:51.020 | He's a little bit street, right?

00:41:52.200 | He had that thick accent.

00:41:53.340 | He was from Far Rockaway,

00:41:54.300 | but he didn't really care much what people thought.

00:41:56.540 | Or he did and he pretended he didn't.

00:41:58.700 | Careful when people tell you

00:41:59.620 | they don't care what people think.

00:42:00.980 | I think he did to the extent that it's still to allow him

00:42:05.300 | to get the message out there.

00:42:07.340 | Okay, next question, please.

00:42:09.640 | My horse.

00:42:13.380 | Wow.

00:42:14.220 | I love this.

00:42:17.700 | I delight in all things animals, but especially horses,

00:42:20.340 | because my high school girlfriend had a horse.

00:42:22.400 | And they do that thing where people go,

00:42:26.700 | oh, horses can detect how they know more about you

00:42:29.780 | than you know.

00:42:30.600 | And then I get into the horse and the horse is like this.

00:42:33.260 | And it's like a litmus test.

00:42:35.060 | Having a girlfriend with a horse

00:42:36.140 | was very intimidating for me, actually.

00:42:38.620 | I felt like I had to compete with the horse.

00:42:41.100 | She spent all this time with the horse.

00:42:42.780 | She was very large, very like, you know.

00:42:44.980 | Anyway, eventually I broke the horse.

00:42:52.520 | Okay, my horse does the double inhale long exhale often.

00:42:57.100 | He's a bit of a stressy guy.

00:42:58.340 | Warm blood, yeah, warm blood.

00:43:01.300 | I used to work at the barn.

00:43:02.820 | I used to shovel manure and work at the barn.

00:43:06.960 | She brought her horse to college.

00:43:08.240 | That's how she followed her off to college.

00:43:09.780 | I never would have gone to college

00:43:10.900 | if she hadn't gone to college.

00:43:13.460 | And the horses are interesting animals.

00:43:16.600 | They do tell you a lot.

00:43:17.860 | The horse does the double inhale long exhale often.

00:43:20.540 | He's a bit of a stressy guy.

00:43:21.700 | Do you suppose this physiological stress

00:43:23.240 | regularly transcends for you?

00:43:24.180 | Absolutely, absolutely.

00:43:26.780 | In fact, I mentioned warm bloods, right?

00:43:29.220 | I have a colleague at Stanford.

00:43:31.620 | She's amazing.

00:43:33.180 | Her name is Sue McConnell

00:43:34.200 | and she is an expert in dog genetics.

00:43:37.340 | So you can imagine I'm always asking her questions.

00:43:41.740 | And we talk about dogs and we talk about horses

00:43:44.820 | because she also, I think she raises warm bloods.

00:43:48.640 | And you hear about hot bloods and warm bloods

00:43:51.260 | and you also, if you have any familiarity with dogs,

00:43:54.380 | there are dogs like Costello

00:43:56.100 | where like a nuclear bomb could go off

00:43:58.020 | and Costello might open an eye.

00:43:59.800 | That's the bulldog, economy of effort.

00:44:04.080 | They're not going to get activated

00:44:05.760 | unless there's a reason to do it.

00:44:07.080 | They are very, as we call, parasympathetic dominant.

00:44:10.780 | That seesaw of autonomic arousal

00:44:12.780 | is just really, really relaxed.

00:44:16.060 | Getting them into action is more of an effort.

00:44:20.000 | There are other animals like the whippet, right?

00:44:23.000 | Or the Italian greyhound, like they're always cold,

00:44:30.160 | that are very sympathetic dominant.

00:44:33.180 | And then of course, within a breed

00:44:34.580 | or within a species, there's a range.

00:44:36.820 | And humans also out within a range.

00:44:40.500 | I think anyone who's had children will tell you,

00:44:43.500 | he or she has been like this since birth.

00:44:45.800 | Calm, easygoing, or like really easily stressed.

00:44:49.760 | I think that seesaw, we didn't get into tonight too much,

00:44:53.220 | but there's a concept with the autonomic regulation

00:44:56.520 | of a hinge.

00:44:57.840 | So don't think so much about being really stressed out

00:44:59.880 | or really relaxed, but certain animals,

00:45:01.860 | the hinge is tightened so that the seesaw

00:45:04.880 | just kind of tilts mellow like Costello.

00:45:07.580 | A bulldog almost seems like a different animal

00:45:11.500 | than a whippet.

00:45:13.060 | They're so very different.

00:45:14.880 | And within the category of horses,

00:45:16.940 | and I'm not an expert in horse genetics,

00:45:20.060 | but they are selected for,

00:45:21.780 | not just for their physical attributes,

00:45:25.260 | but for their psychological or temperament attributes.

00:45:30.260 | And you see this in dogs too.

00:45:32.180 | In fact, the reason I picked Costello,

00:45:34.020 | and Elvis can verify this story,

00:45:35.500 | is I wanted a dog for so many years,

00:45:38.980 | and I went there, and there were all these puppies,

00:45:42.620 | and I was like, I heard you need to take them

00:45:45.260 | in the other room, one by one,

00:45:47.180 | and then if it barks for its siblings,

00:45:48.820 | and you're like, oh, it's a healthy puppy.

00:45:50.740 | So I walk in and all the dogs are running around like crazy.

00:45:53.260 | It was right around Christmas time, right Elvis?

00:45:54.940 | And they're running around,

00:45:56.140 | and then there's one in the back,

00:45:58.260 | and he's taking advantage of the fact

00:45:59.740 | that all the other ones are waiting,

00:46:00.580 | and he's just eating out of all of their bowls.

00:46:03.580 | And I was like, I want that one.

00:46:05.660 | So I took that chubby little bastard in the next room,

00:46:08.740 | and I thought, okay, he's gonna bark for his siblings.

00:46:12.780 | And he laid down and he took a nap.

00:46:14.900 | And I was like, this one, I want this one.

00:46:17.500 | Why did I want that one?

00:46:18.880 | Well, this completes the principle,

00:46:21.860 | which is I wanted a dog like that,

00:46:23.940 | because I'm not like that.

00:46:25.460 | And I was very interested in a dog I could take care of,

00:46:29.100 | but also a dog that would help regulate my nervous system.

00:46:32.420 | And so for me, having a dog like that,

00:46:34.300 | as opposed to a whippet or something

00:46:35.940 | that was gonna, you know, like constantly around

00:46:37.720 | is gonna, you know, a very calming effect.

00:46:39.940 | And to this day, memory of his snoring

00:46:41.760 | still puts me to sleep.

00:46:43.100 | So I think that your horse probably has,

00:46:45.620 | it kind of idles a little bit higher.

00:46:47.180 | Think about the RPM, you know,

00:46:49.500 | revs a little bit higher at a given speed,

00:46:51.020 | higher, more RPM at a given speed.

00:46:53.440 | That's the way I think about the autonomic system.

00:46:55.140 | How do you reset that?

00:46:56.860 | Well, this is why a lot of exercise is good, right?

00:47:00.380 | Incidentally, my girlfriend's horse was crazy.

00:47:02.820 | It was gelded late, and it was crazy.

00:47:06.540 | I almost said nuts, but like a bad pun, so right.

00:47:10.360 | It was not nuts, but it was crazy.

00:47:12.660 | It was gelded late.

00:47:13.860 | Next question.

00:47:17.240 | Is there any science behind staying motivated

00:47:23.600 | or developing discipline?

00:47:25.060 | Ooh, so this represents kind of the higher tier

00:47:27.980 | of where I think things are gonna go in the next few years,

00:47:30.220 | where we're going to start seeing this convergence

00:47:33.060 | of psychology and biology,

00:47:34.680 | where we can get to these harder concepts.

00:47:37.140 | You know, I like to think that we can stay motivated

00:47:41.700 | through a simple process that now will make sense to you,

00:47:45.340 | because the last thing I covered

00:47:46.500 | was toggling back and forth between our ability

00:47:50.460 | to be gritty and lean in, kind of in friction,

00:47:53.500 | maybe even a little anger, fear, competitiveness, et cetera,

00:47:56.440 | that kind of grr, grinding in,

00:47:58.820 | but that the more sustaining fuel,

00:48:01.400 | the sort of hybrid version, right,

00:48:07.140 | hybrid fuel model would be one in which you can access that,

00:48:10.580 | but that's a depletable and not so renewable resource

00:48:15.260 | without a lot of rest,

00:48:16.460 | meaning working hard out of anger, determination,

00:48:19.380 | and kind of grit will work,

00:48:21.080 | but when you are depleted, you have to stop for a long while,

00:48:26.580 | whereas if you can access this delight system,

00:48:29.980 | which is really one of dopamine and serotonin both,

00:48:34.560 | in other words, and I wanna think of a,

00:48:36.560 | not of a different way to put this,

00:48:38.260 | but to try and think about what sorts of things and tools

00:48:42.380 | allow you to be and feel most loving.

00:48:46.260 | I know it sounds weak, but it's anything but weak,

00:48:50.220 | to be most loving in the verb sense of the word

00:48:53.280 | toward what you're doing.

00:48:54.640 | I actually used to use this trick in college

00:48:56.420 | when I'd encounter a topic I hated.

00:48:59.100 | I would tell myself, I'm really,

00:49:02.100 | I'm just gonna fall in love with this

00:49:04.340 | by trying to find the gems within it.

00:49:06.220 | Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't,

00:49:07.900 | but the wish to do it that way,

00:49:10.060 | as opposed to, okay, I'm just gonna grind this out,

00:49:13.100 | at least for me at the time was a powerful tool.

00:49:16.340 | So motivation and discipline is a tricky one.

00:49:19.740 | That's sort of the just do it thing.

00:49:21.540 | You need tools to modulate your stress

00:49:24.480 | and to get your sleep, do all the basic things right,

00:49:28.180 | set the right context for you to be in your best chance

00:49:32.640 | of being disciplined.

00:49:34.720 | And that itself is its own form of discipline.

00:49:37.580 | But in terms of continual motivation,

00:49:40.320 | you're not gonna manage to go against the grain

00:49:45.380 | for very long.

00:49:46.420 | People have managed to go against challenge

00:49:50.100 | for a very long time, for very long times.

00:49:52.920 | In fact, I was reading recently

00:49:54.260 | about the psychology of people who've been kidnapped.

00:49:57.240 | And they have this odd trick that they used.

00:49:59.900 | Have you heard about this?

00:50:00.740 | It's sort of like Stockholm syndrome,

00:50:01.900 | but they actually convinced themselves

00:50:03.840 | to fall in love with their captors.

00:50:06.120 | And then they come up with new ways to escape them,

00:50:08.680 | which is kind of cool.

00:50:09.780 | So there's something about mentally feeling

00:50:14.140 | like you're trying to go from back on your heels

00:50:16.160 | to flat-footed that's very energetically costly.

00:50:20.620 | So again, these systems are very susceptible

00:50:23.600 | to what we call context or top-down regulation.

00:50:28.300 | Hopefully that helps.

00:50:29.140 | I know it's a little bit abstract.

00:50:30.700 | I wish I could give you a one-minute exercise

00:50:32.620 | that would make you motivated.

00:50:33.480 | But we do talk about tools like to get adrenaline going

00:50:37.320 | and things like that.

00:50:38.320 | But spend some time thinking about what would allow you

00:50:41.140 | to sustain effort through positive feelings.

00:50:43.840 | It's not a light concept at all.

00:50:47.200 | Okay, next question, please.

00:50:49.200 | What would be your biggest piece of advice

00:50:50.660 | for achieving one's dreams?

00:50:52.040 | Oi, that's a tough one.

00:50:54.080 | Again, this is gonna be a little abstract.

00:51:02.000 | I'm a believer in this idea of a seed message.

00:51:11.980 | Robert Greene has talked a lot about this,

00:51:15.920 | that we can all kind of think back to a event

00:51:21.620 | or stage of our life.

00:51:22.820 | Typically it's before puberty for other reasons

00:51:27.100 | that are kind of interesting.

00:51:28.620 | But where we delight in something.

00:51:31.140 | So for me it was fish.

00:51:32.380 | And obviously now I don't need to work on fish.

00:51:35.220 | It wasn't about the fish.

00:51:36.460 | I hope that came through.

00:51:37.660 | I mean, aquaria are really cool.

00:51:39.780 | But it's not about the fish.

00:51:42.300 | It was something about the way they moved.

00:51:43.740 | It was something about the way that it tickled my excitement.

00:51:46.520 | I used to get dropped off at this little pet shop

00:51:48.220 | in California Avenue in Palo Alto called Monet's Pet Shop.

00:51:50.900 | My mom used it as childcare.

00:51:52.340 | And she would drop me off there and I had this book

00:51:54.060 | and I would log all the tropical fish

00:51:56.280 | and which ones could be with which ones.

00:51:58.000 | And then I was obsessed, right?

00:52:00.240 | But for me it was something about organizing

00:52:02.060 | and being able to make reliable predictions.

00:52:04.540 | It was about parsimony.

00:52:05.580 | It was about principles as opposed to,

00:52:08.780 | and the colors delighted me and all that kind of stuff.

00:52:11.380 | The equipment delighted me.

00:52:13.000 | But then I had puberty and then like it was something else.

00:52:16.500 | And then I went to college and it was something else.

00:52:20.220 | And I got a girlfriend and it was something else.

00:52:22.420 | So it changes over time.

00:52:26.060 | But this is why I recommended to that young 15-year-old person

00:52:30.020 | that they learn to tap into that sense of like, oh,

00:52:32.740 | like this is cool.

00:52:34.380 | Like this feels cool.

00:52:35.260 | I know not everyone else thinks it's cool.

00:52:37.260 | Maybe they do.

00:52:38.120 | Like this feels good.

00:52:39.900 | I actually have a somatic experience of this.

00:52:41.940 | I'm not a very somatically oriented person.

00:52:43.740 | I'm more up here.

00:52:44.820 | But I actually kind of know if I'm

00:52:47.540 | onto something if this left arm just kind of starts fidgeting.

00:52:50.460 | It's like I want to move or like some people.

00:52:52.660 | You can start to identify ways in which you suddenly

00:52:55.900 | have this positive energy.

00:52:57.540 | It's not a fear energy.

00:52:59.180 | It's almost like a magnetism to things.

00:53:01.580 | And just don't be confused or misdirected

00:53:05.060 | in thinking that it's that thing.

00:53:07.180 | It's that, again, energy or that attraction to something

00:53:11.380 | that feels right that is your, I wish we had these divining

00:53:16.340 | rod to find water.

00:53:18.140 | That's your tool.

00:53:19.420 | It's like antennae.

00:53:20.820 | You want to grow your antennae.

00:53:22.680 | So how do you follow your dreams?

00:53:24.940 | Well, I never thought I'd do a podcast.

00:53:28.140 | I never thought I'd become a neuroscientist.

00:53:30.220 | You have to be willing, of course, to take risks

00:53:32.580 | and to iterate quickly but not so quickly that you fail out

00:53:39.120 | of the game, et cetera, if you do get back in, et cetera.

00:53:41.780 | But it's really about developing an awareness.

00:53:44.500 | Now, the key thing is you're not going to find this by going up

00:53:47.100 | a mountain and sitting there or waiting for your passion

00:53:49.900 | to just kind of rock it.

00:53:51.220 | Does this sort of piano fall onto your head?

00:53:53.060 | It's not going to happen that way.

00:53:54.480 | You have to interact with the sensory world

00:53:57.140 | and different kinds of people.

00:53:58.740 | And you have to be a little bit of an adventurer

00:54:01.620 | in a safe way, of course, an adventurer,

00:54:05.140 | and learn to recognize the signals.

00:54:08.760 | And some people are very in tune with this.

00:54:12.260 | There's an amazing podcast with Rick Rubin recently

00:54:14.660 | on Joe Rogan's podcast where he talks

00:54:16.800 | about the creative processes.

00:54:20.220 | It seems like whatever is going on in that beard of his

00:54:22.580 | just connects to the world.

00:54:23.740 | And he can just, like, there.

00:54:26.540 | That's where you need to go.

00:54:29.420 | But that's part of the magic is you don't really know.

00:54:32.560 | And because it's all energetic.

00:54:35.460 | It's all energetic.

00:54:36.980 | And when I say energetic, I don't

00:54:38.400 | mean in the mystical sense.

00:54:39.320 | I mean you have to learn to sense

00:54:40.700 | those fluctuations in energy.

00:54:42.020 | Some people can sense them very easily

00:54:44.080 | because they're very mellow.

00:54:45.020 | And if something gets them really excited,

00:54:46.780 | they notice, as a big delta, as we say in science, big change.

00:54:50.720 | Other people, they ride kind of high all the time.

00:54:54.180 | And so everything is exciting to them.

00:54:55.960 | And they miss a lot of the subtle fluctuations

00:54:58.300 | in what's really special and right for them.

00:55:00.140 | In fact, mania is characterized by hyper-elevated levels

00:55:04.220 | of dopamine.

00:55:04.780 | And everything is a good idea.

00:55:08.200 | And depression is the opposite.

00:55:09.820 | Nothing is a good idea.

00:55:11.260 | Nothing is going to work.

00:55:13.140 | And those are the extremes.

00:55:14.540 | And those are rough conditions, obviously.

00:55:17.920 | But for most people, it's about learning

00:55:20.020 | to detect those subtle fluctuations.

00:55:21.940 | And every time, every single time,

00:55:24.260 | you find somebody who is exceptional at their craft

00:55:27.300 | and doing well in life.

00:55:28.380 | There are a lot of people who are exceptional at their craft,

00:55:30.880 | but not necessarily doing well on the whole.

00:55:34.740 | Those people have a kind of intuition

00:55:38.300 | about what feels good to them.

00:55:40.100 | This year's Nobel Prize winner in chemistry

00:55:41.900 | is my colleague Carolyn Bertosi.

00:55:43.940 | And all I know of her, except the fact

00:55:46.660 | that she's an amazing chemist, is

00:55:48.740 | they did this interview with her.

00:55:50.160 | And she said that when everyone would go out in college,

00:55:52.160 | she was finding excuses to stay home and read

00:55:54.060 | organic chemistry.

00:55:55.300 | Now that, to me, sounds like a bad night.

00:55:58.820 | But for her, it was pure delight.

00:56:01.860 | And she's wired for that.

00:56:03.980 | And I think her work is going to be

00:56:06.300 | vitally important and transformative for humanity.

00:56:09.020 | I really do.

00:56:09.980 | So how do you succeed in chasing your dreams?

00:56:14.420 | You succeed in identifying what they are,

00:56:16.120 | but you don't know at the outset.

00:56:17.500 | You want to find the energy to find the right path

00:56:23.780 | and continually course correct when you will undoubtedly

00:56:26.780 | be off your path.

00:56:28.580 | That's essentially what I've done.

00:56:29.940 | I still look for the feeling of delighting

00:56:32.380 | in Costello or the cuttlefish.

00:56:34.300 | That's what I'm looking for.

00:56:35.580 | It's not a template I have to match, but that's my like,

00:56:38.180 | oh, yeah, I know what that feels like.

00:56:39.780 | It's like a texture.

00:56:40.780 | It's like if you think about a bunch of different textures

00:56:43.200 | of sandpaper, it's like this one that just feels really good.

00:56:46.940 | And so you're comparing everything to that.

00:56:49.740 | Because the system that involves all these chemicals,

00:56:53.060 | you'll find it if you learn to pay attention to it.

00:56:55.820 | But you won't find it sitting, staring at your belly button,

00:56:58.660 | or going up a mountain.

00:57:00.020 | You have to be in sensory experience in order to find it.

00:57:04.520 | Reflection is good, but you need to get into action.

00:57:07.820 | OK, well, all right.

00:57:09.780 | Well, OK, so psilocybin, opinion of the psychedelics generally.

00:57:14.880 | We just had an episode with my colleague, Nolan Williams,

00:57:17.260 | who's a triple board certified neurologist, psychiatrist.

00:57:19.940 | This is a fun thing about working at Stanford.

00:57:21.300 | It's also very humbling because you're like, whoa,

00:57:23.380 | who are these people?

00:57:25.380 | Got three board certifications.

00:57:27.140 | You know, the psilocybin, first of all, not for everybody,

00:57:29.980 | people with psychosis.

00:57:31.260 | It is still illegal, decriminalize certain places.

00:57:35.600 | So obviously, cautionary notes, people

00:57:38.360 | who have drug addiction issues or other kinds of addiction

00:57:42.180 | issues need to be thoughtful about diving

00:57:44.640 | into a neurochemical landscape like that.

00:57:46.480 | But it does appear that the clinical trials on one

00:57:52.280 | macro dose-- this is what's interesting to me.

00:57:54.320 | A lot of people talk about microdosing psilocybin.

00:57:56.740 | But the data, at least according to Matthew Johnson, who

00:57:59.640 | is also on the podcast, the data for microdosing

00:58:02.880 | are not really there, frankly.

00:58:05.520 | The data on single session macrodose,

00:58:09.220 | the sort of heroic doses that have been talked about

00:58:11.640 | in the psychonaut community for depression and, to some extent,

00:58:16.940 | PTSD, and for eating disorders, and for end of life preparation

00:58:23.060 | are quite encouraging.

00:58:24.300 | In fact, the current data suggests

00:58:26.140 | that about 2/3 of people achieve lasting relief from one

00:58:29.780 | session.

00:58:30.720 | Now, keep in mind, those are guided sessions

00:58:34.660 | with physicians in the room, et cetera.

00:58:37.200 | I do think there's a potential hazard of all psychedelics,

00:58:39.760 | which is they alter--

00:58:42.120 | this includes MDMA, or especially MDMA.

00:58:44.320 | They alter the chemical landscape in you

00:58:46.540 | such that a lot of things can serve

00:58:49.280 | as attractors in that state, meaning

00:58:51.240 | you can get really into the sound of music in an MDMA

00:58:54.200 | session, feel connected to that, and waste the opportunity

00:58:58.360 | for some more meaningful transformative rewiring.

00:59:02.360 | And I do think that that's worth paying attention to.

00:59:05.880 | So that's the usefulness of having a therapeutic guide

00:59:09.480 | there, is they can continually steer you

00:59:11.200 | back to what, at least for you, is the more meaningful work.

00:59:16.080 | But it's very encouraging.

00:59:17.720 | And Nolan Williams, who I trust--

00:59:20.980 | he's, again, triple board certified MD--

00:59:23.600 | said that in the studies of lifetime perceived individual

00:59:28.240 | and societal risk of all the compounds

00:59:30.860 | out there, except for caffeine, psilocybin

00:59:33.200 | is at the bottom of the list, whereas things

00:59:36.140 | like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, methamphetamine

00:59:40.200 | sit at the top of the list.

00:59:41.840 | Actually, alcohol quite high on that list

00:59:44.400 | at certain amounts of consumption.

00:59:46.320 | So I'm very excited about what's happening

00:59:49.580 | in the landscape of psilocybin, but I'm not

00:59:51.440 | so excited about the microdosing data.

00:59:53.920 | Very excited about the single heroic dose data.

00:59:57.240 | One interesting thing there, perhaps,

00:59:59.560 | what seems to be the unifying feature

01:00:01.180 | of a successful psilocybin session,

01:00:05.900 | is that at some point, the person feels

01:00:08.580 | as if it's too much of an autonomic thing.

01:00:12.540 | They kind of get to this point, and then they

01:00:15.080 | are encouraged to, quote unquote, "let go."

01:00:16.860 | And I'm fascinated by this concept of letting go,

01:00:19.020 | because I'm a neuroscientist.

01:00:20.600 | We don't know what that means.

01:00:22.520 | But it seems like being able to ride

01:00:24.560 | the wave of autonomic arousal from top to bottom

01:00:29.200 | seems to be very powerful for trauma and depression

01:00:31.400 | treatment.

01:00:31.680 | And this is interesting.

01:00:32.720 | A lot of people think that one of the major issues in humans

01:00:36.160 | nowadays is we're stressed about a lot of things,

01:00:38.240 | but we never actually get to go into the full stress response

01:00:41.840 | and then let it relax again.

01:00:45.040 | And catharsis was big at one point.

01:00:48.400 | Scream therapy, Steve Jobs is really into scream therapy.

01:00:51.400 | Whether or not catharsis is healthy or not

01:00:53.280 | has been debated, but the data are kind of pointing to the fact

01:00:58.280 | that it may be provided that the catharsis is not obviously

01:01:01.820 | someone damaging themselves or somebody else.

01:01:04.560 | So maybe I should all be screaming a lot more.

01:01:07.440 | Why does my desire to eat disappear

01:01:09.880 | after I use the sauna?

01:01:11.800 | Oh, interesting.

01:01:12.500 | I can go in hungry and get out with no desire to eat.

01:01:15.940 | I can only speculate.

01:01:18.720 | The sauna or any kind of deliberate heat

01:01:20.760 | exposure that's uncomfortable releases this molecule

01:01:23.320 | dynorphin.

01:01:24.400 | This is actually the same molecule that's

01:01:26.360 | released under conditions of alcohol withdrawal.

01:01:30.280 | Makes you feel agitated and not good.

01:01:32.360 | And then there's this rebound.

01:01:34.280 | The way it feels good is later it

01:01:37.400 | causes this upregulation in the so-called mu-opioid receptors.

01:01:40.640 | So the chemicals that you have, your so-called endogenous

01:01:43.800 | opioids, not the opioids that relate to the opioid crisis,

01:01:47.160 | but the ones that you naturally make

01:01:49.000 | are able to have a more robust effect after the sauna.

01:01:53.720 | Dynorphin is an appetite suppressant.

01:01:57.120 | And for reasons related to kind of general discomfort

01:02:01.520 | in the body.

01:02:02.440 | So that's the only reason I can speculate.

01:02:04.280 | There are a number of other things

01:02:05.660 | that sauna does, including massive increases in growth

01:02:08.320 | hormone, provided you don't sauna too much.

01:02:11.200 | So if you do it once a week for four 20-minute sessions spaced

01:02:14.800 | five minutes apart, you get these enormous increases

01:02:18.200 | in growth hormone.

01:02:18.960 | If you start doing it more often,

01:02:20.600 | you get still significant but smaller increases

01:02:24.320 | in growth hormone.

01:02:26.740 | And my team-- this is how the podcast goes, too.

01:02:29.840 | At some point, Rob just goes, it's enough.

01:02:31.920 | So if you think that the episodes are long now,

01:02:34.000 | they'd be a lot longer.

01:02:35.200 | Listen, I just want to--

01:02:36.200 | before we part, I know it's Sunday night

01:02:38.360 | and people have to go.

01:02:39.500 | I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight.

01:02:41.820 | I know that, at least for me, I'm

01:02:43.840 | still sort of baffled, but pleasantly so,

01:02:46.540 | that people are interested in investing time to come out

01:02:49.660 | and hear hours of a nerd like me talk about science and tools.

01:02:55.640 | And I'm delighted that people are hopefully

01:02:58.280 | gleaning some useful information.

01:02:59.800 | Please do pass along the information.

01:03:01.480 | I didn't invent this stuff, as I mentioned before.

01:03:03.480 | I was not consulted to the design phase.

01:03:05.160 | I have no domain over it.

01:03:06.600 | This is the stuff of Mother Nature.

01:03:08.440 | Whatever other beliefs you have, they're here in Austin.

01:03:12.340 | Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't finish by saying,

01:03:15.040 | have a wonderful night and thank you

01:03:17.080 | for your interest in science.

01:03:18.280 | [CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]

01:03:21.640 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:03:25.000 | [CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]

01:03:28.360 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:03:32.320 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:03:35.660 | you

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