Full Transcript for #164 – Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity & the Limits of the Human Mind

Speaker 1

The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his second time on the podcast. He's a neuroscientist at Stanford, a world-class researcher and educator, and now he has a new podcast on YouTube and all the usual places called Huberman Lab that I can't recommend highly enough. Quick mention of our sponsors, Masterclass Online Courses, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Magic Spoon Low-Carb Cereal, and BetterHelp Online Therapy.

Click the sponsor links to get a discount. By the way, Masterclass is testing to see if they want to support this podcast long-term, so if you're on the fence, now is the time to sign up. And I'm pretty sure Andrew will have a neuroscience Masterclass on there soon enough, though his podcast is basically a weekly Masterclass in itself. As a side note, let me say that Andrew is a friend and a new collaborator.

We're working on a paper together about a topic we're both really passionate about at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning, but that's probably many months away from being published. Still, I'm really excited about this work. He's one of the smartest and kindest people I have the pleasure of talking to on this podcast, so I hope we'll talk many more times in the future.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on our podcast, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do all of the ads now, none in the middle. I'll try to, improvise and rant a little bit more than I've done in the past. I give you timestamps, so if you skip, please still check out the sponsors.

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That's foursigmatic dot com slash lex. This episode is also sponsored by Magic Spoon, low-carb, keto-friendly cereal. It has zero sugar, eleven grams of protein, and only three net grams of carbs. If you know what's good for you, you'll go with the cocoa flavor, my favorite flavor and the flavor of champions. Actually, speaking of cocoa, I got a chance to exchange a bunch of messages with the great Joey Diaz, Joey Coco Diaz.

He is, as Joe Rogan says, the sweetest human being. It's kind of incredible, actually, how much care he has, given how sort of edgy his comedy is. There's so much love underneath that, that is just beautiful. I do hope I get to talk to him on this podcast. Eventually, he's just a special human being. I just felt the love. It was great. Plus, I was a bit starstruck.

I mean, the whole thing is amazing. Okay, go to magicspoon.com slash Lex in the description and use code Lex at checkout for free shipping. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P Help. I hope you don't need help with spelling help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours.

I've mentioned before that I actually wanted to be a psychiatrist, when I was younger. It was a way for me to try to understand the human mind. And of course, talk therapy or, you know, psychotherapy was, Fascinating tool in my mind of, of exploring the human mind, and I suppose, you can think of podcasts as a kind of psychotherapy, maybe for me.

Maybe that's the reason I'm doing this thing in general, but there's also other forms, like I'm doing the, the Goggins Challenge. That's a kind of therapy. I'll be alone with my thoughts and with a madman, Mr. David Goggins. So in a Freudian sense, I'm sure I'm going to discover something about myself, something maybe that I don't want to discover, but probably something I definitely need to work through.

Anyway, BetterHelp is easy, private, affordable, available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash lex. That's betterhelp.com slash lex. I think one of the luxuries I have now is there's so many people that want to advertise on this podcast. I'm starting to care less and less in reading the copy they give me. I'm just going to go off script and just, speak from the heart.

And if they want to drop us, they drop us, who cares? That said, I only try to take on sponsors that I actually use and love. So if they drop us, I'll genuinely miss them and keep using them. Okay. And now finally, here's my conversation with Andrew Huberman.

Why do humans need sleep? Let's, let's go with a big first question.

Speaker 2

Okay. Well, the answer I'll start with is the one that I always default to when there's a why question, which is, I wasn't consulted at the design phase. So, so, so I wriggle my way out of giving a absolute answer, right? But There's one mechanism that's very clear, that's super important, which is that the longer we are awake, the more adenosine accumulates in our brain.

And adenosine binds to adenosine receptors, no surprise there, and it creates the feeling of sleepiness, independent of time of day or night. So there are two mechanisms. One is we get sleepy

as adenosine accumulates. The longer we've been awake, the more adenosine is accumulated in our system. But how sleepy we get for a given amount of adenosine depends on where we are in this so-called circadian cycle. And the circadian cycle is just this very, very well-conserved oscillation. It's a temperature oscillation where you go from a low point, typically if you're awake during the day and you're asleep at night, you'll, your lowest temperature point will be Like 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and then your temperature will start to creep up as you wake up in the morning, and then it'll peak in the late afternoon, and then it'll start to drop again toward the evening, and then

you get sleep again. That oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours,

Speaker 1

plus or minus,

Speaker 2

yeah, plus or minus an hour. And I don't, even though I wasn't consulted at the design phase, I do not think it's a coincidence that it's aligned to the 24-hour spin of the Earth on its axis, and the fact that we tend to be bathed in sunlight for a portion of that spin and in darkness for the other portion of that spin. So there are two mechanisms, the adenosine accumulation and the circadian time point that we happen to be at, and those converge to create a sense of sleepiness or wakefulness.

The simple way to reveal these two mechanisms, to uncouple them, is stay up for 24 hours, and you will find that even though you've been, let's say you stay up midnight, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., Provided you're on a regular schedule, like that I follow, not like the kind that you follow, you get, I will get very sleepy around three, four AM, but then around five or six or seven AM, which is my normal wake-up time, I'll start to feel more alert, even though adenosine has been accumulating further.

So adenosine is higher for me the longer I stay up, and yet I feel more alert than I did a few hours ago, and that's because these are two interacting forces. So adenosine makes you sleepy, and then just how sleepy or how awake you feel also depends on where you are in this temperature oscillation that takes 24 hours.

Speaker 1

Okay, so that's fascinating. So there's a, a bunch of oscillations going on, and they, they kind of, through the evolutionary process, have evolved to all be aligned somewhat, and they interplay. So it's, you said your, your body temperature goes up and down. There's chemicals in your brain that, oscillate, and then there's the actual oscillation of the The, the sun in the, in the sky.

So all of that together has some impact on each other, and somehow that all results in us wanting to go sleep every night.

Speaker 2

Right. So, and we can get right into the meat of this, although I guess we just dove right in, but the, so the The temperature oscillation is the effector of the circadian clock. So every cell in our body has a 24-hour rhythm that's dictated by genes like clock, PER, BMAL. This is one of the great successes of biology. They give a Nobel Prize to Reppert, and I don't know if Reppert got it, forgive me, but sorry, if you got it, Steve, congratulations.

If you didn't, I'm sorry, I wasn't on the committee. nonetheless, did beautiful work, Steve Reppert and, and others. but Mike Roschbosch and like other people worked out these mechanisms in flies and bacteria and mammals. There are these genes that create 24-hour oscillations in gene expression, et cetera, in every cell of our body. But what aligns those is a signal from the master circadian clock, which sits right above the roof of the mouth, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

And that clock synchronizes all the clocks of the body to this general temperature rhythm. By way of controlling systemic temperature, which makes perfect sense. If you want to create a, a general oscillation in all the tissues and organs of the body, use temperature. And so that work on temperature, if people want to explore it further, was Joe Takahashi, who was at Northwestern, now at UT Southwestern in Dallas.

And It is absolutely clear that humans do better on a diurnal schedule, sorry, Lex, than a nocturnal schedule, because you could say, well, provided I sleep and push adenosine back downhill, which is what happens when we sleep, adenosine is then reduced, and provided I am on more or less a 24-hour schedule, why should it matter that I'm awake when the sun's out and, and I'm asleep when the sun is down? But it, it turns out that if you look at health metrics, people that are strictly nocturnal do far worse on immune function, on metabolic function, et cetera, than people who are diurnal, who are awake during the daytime.

And animals that are nocturnal, it's the opposite. And animals that are so-called crepuscular, which tend to be active at dawn and at dusk, this is a beautiful system. I won't go down that rabbit hole, but these are animals whose visual systems operate best. They tend to be predators like mountain lions. They have optimized their waking times for the times when the animals they eat can't see well in those light conditions.

But given the rod-cone ratios in their eyes, the, the mountain lion is picking up, it's like when you see, special forces and they're looking through night vision goggles, and they have a clear advantage, right? They are seeing in the dark. That's basically what it's like to be a mountain lion as opposed to a bunny rabbit.

Speaker 1

Would you say that a lot of these cycles evolved in the predator-prey relationships of the different throughout the food chain? So it's basically all somehow has to do with survival in the, in this complicated web of predators and prey?

Speaker 2

Almost certainly. There, there had to have been a time in which humans being awake and active at night, as opposed to during the day, led to high level, higher levels of lethality. And pr- probably particular in kids, you imagine kids running around in the dark and getting, that where there are a lot of animals they can see really well under those conditions, and humans can't.

And this would be all pre-electricity. Even if you're carrying a torch, I mean, the range of illumination on a torch is nothing compared to what, an Nighttime predator, like a large cat or something can, can do. I mean, they basically, they can see everything they need to in order to eat us and not the other way around.

Speaker 1

One fascinating thing you said is, that blew my mind and we went right past it, which is the temperature is a really powerful, like, if you were to think about the ways that different parts of the body, different systems in the, in the body would communicate with each other, temperature would be a really good one. And that just, I mean, maybe it's obvious, but it kind of blew my mind just now that, yeah, these systems are all distributed.

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker 1

And they have to kind of, they're not actually sending signals, but they're coordinating. They need some sort of universal thing to look at in order to coordinate. And temperature is a nice one to, to, to build around. And that way, You can control the behavior of all these different systems by controlling the temperature.

Speaker 2

Right. It's attractive to think of a mechanism where this master circadian clock secretes a peptide or something that goes and locks to receptors in all the cells and gets it just right, but that leaves far too much room for variability, binding affinities. Cells in a lot of parts of our body are at different stages of maturation. They're turning over, liver cells and so forth.

And for instance, we have a clock in our gut and in our liver, such that if we were just take out your liver and put it on a table and just look at the expression of these genes, it would be in a 24-hour oscillation on its own. It's independent. But something has to entrain them and keep them all synchronized. And so it's not obvious that it would be temperature.

Takahashi's great gift to biology was to show that all the stuff coming out of this master circadian clock At the end of the day, that's a weird statement, no pun intended. At the end of the day and the night, at the, at the end of the story, it all boils down to making sure that the temperature of tissues oscillates in the same fashion.

Speaker 1

It's blowing my mind and thinking, like, what other mechanism could possibly exist to create that kind of oscillation?

Speaker 2

Well, you're, you're Russian, it's cold in Russia for a lot of the year. The hibernation signal in certain animals is a remarkable signal. There are peptides secreted from this very same clock that in animals like ground squirrels or bears, they go into a kind of a torpor where everything, reproduction, metabolism, everything is reduced while they're in their cave.

They don't actually stay asleep all of winter, that's a myth. and they actually do these very, dramatic and periodic arousals from hibernation where they just shake and shake and shake, it looks like a seizure, and then they go back under into the torpor. That's from a peptide that's released. But that's different because that's about shutting down the whole system.

It's clear that having these very regular oscillations every 24 hours is essential for everything from metabolism to reproduction.

Speaker 1

Is there, an optimal temperature for sleep that I, I should mention, I think your latest episode, you, and people should go check out helixsleep.com slash huberman to support Andrew.

Speaker 2

thanks for the plug.

Speaker 1

I mean, the amazing thing about the stuff they create, and oh, and yes, you have a new podcast. That's amazing. And this past month, he did a whole series on sleep, which, people should definitely check out. There's some podcasts that come out,

That just make me want to be a better human being by just the quality. three blue one brown, Grant Sanderson is like that for me. Just like, wow, this is, education is best. So Andrew, symbolizes that and captures that brilliantly. So go support the sponsor so he doesn't stop doing the thing. so they, I think they have a cooling pad too. So I, the eight sleep mattress, sponsors me.

they've been, they send me a mattress and it's been, I've never, listen, I used to sleep on the floor, sleep where

Speaker 2

you fall,

Speaker 1

sleep where I fall. I don't give a shit. It doesn't, doesn't really matter. But so like I would have never bought a, a nice mattress. Because it's like, why? I'm fine. This is the floor, it's fine. But it was a game changer to, be able to control temperature. Like for me, it's cooling. To cool, I don't know what the hell it is.

Speaker 2

Well, you want the brain and nervous system and the rest of the body needs to drop by about anywhere from two to three degrees in order to get into your deepest sleep and transition to sleep. That's really going to help. You don't want to be cold that you're bothered and can't fall asleep. But that's why some people like it really cold in the room and under a warm blanket or with socks on for some people.

That can, that can be good because this temperature oscillation is such that as your temperature is dropping, that correlates with the, generally with the most sleepy phase of your circadian cycle. So cool is better for falling and staying asleep and sleeping deeply.

Speaker 1

And then I, I guess like that's what eight sleep showed. They have like an app is, it warms back up. to wake you up. The idea that, I haven't actually used it, like this is stupid.

it, people say it works, but I just keep it the same temperature throughout the night. But, warming it up, I guess, wakes you up, which is, which is fascinating.

Speaker 2

Yeah, because you're, the wake-up signal is, it, it's interesting to think about. It's not just correlated with an increase in body temperature. The increase in body temperature is triggering the release of cortisol from your adrenals, and that's the wake-up signal.

Speaker 1

Do you think it's absolute temperatures we're talking about, or is it just even relative? Just even just the decrease?

Speaker 2

Well, everyone's going to have slightly different basal temperature. The idea that everybody should be 98.6, I mean, that's a myth. And there are the theories that body temperature overall has been dropping in the last 50 years or so. I, I, I doubt that's true for somebody who is athletic like you and is, you know, young and healthy. But Basically, the, the coldest period of that 24-hour cycle is when you are going to be sleepiest.

There's actually a period within that 24-hour cycle, it's a, it's a time point called your temperature minimum, and your temperature minimum tends to be about two hours before your typical wake-up time. I'm not talking about the wake-up time in the middle of the night where you go use the bathroom or where you set an alarm to go catch a flight.

I mean, if you were to just allow yourself to sleep without a clock for a few days, measure when you typically wake up. Two hours before then is your temperature minimum, and that temperature minimum turns out to be a very important landmark in your circadian cycle because it turns out that if you get bright light in your eyes in the hours immediately before your temperature minimum, so two to four hours, or any time within the two or four hour window before that temperature minimum, you are going to what's called delay your circadian clock.

The next day, that whole oscillation is going to move forward. It'll make you want to go to sleep later and wake up later. Whereas if you get bright light in your eyes in the hours after that temperature minimum, so let's say for me, typical wake-up time is 6 a.m., my temperature minimum is somewhere around 4 a.m. If I get bright light in my eyes, 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 7 a.m., it's going to advance that oscillation so that I'll want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier the subsequent nights.

So you might say, wait, but most nights I go to sleep and wake up at more or less the same time. Why is that? And that's because the same thing is happening on both sides. You are both advancing your clock a little bit and assuming that you're looking at light in the evening, you're also delaying your clock a little bit. So you get kind of captured in between and then your rhythm more or less oscillates at the, at the same period as we say is the spin of the earth.

Unless you're like you where I get text messages from you sometimes at odd hours, and I'm, I, if you're on the East Coast, then I know that you had to have been pulling basically an all-nighter. Yeah,

Speaker 1

yeah. Well, that's the interesting, point about the messiness of sleep. So most people seem to outperform the best when they have like a regular sleep schedule.

I perhaps am the same, but I don't know that. And I tend to believe that you can also perform relatively optimally with chaos of sleep, of,

like a, a weird soup of like power naps and all-nighters and all of that, as long as you're

like happy, doing what you love. And maybe you can,

tell me what you think about this. So I, I tend to, for myself, try to minimize stress in life. So what I found for myself with diet, with sleep, is that if I obsess about it being perfect, then I'll actually stress quite a bit when it's not. Like, I'll feel shitty,

when I don't get enough sleep. Because I know I should be getting more sleep as opposed to the actual physiological effects of not getting enough sleep. I find if I just accept whatever the hell happens, happens and smile and just, you know, take it all in like David Goggins style, like if it sucks, it's even better. Or what is it, Jocko's like good or whatever he said.

Speaker 2

I think there are several things that you said that are important, but I, I agree that one can have a dysregulated sleep schedule and still be a happy person and productive. In much of my life, I've pulled all-nighters and slept weird schedules. You know, I think many people can probably relate to going to sleep, waking up four hours later, being up for an hour or two on your computer, then going back to sleep and getting amazing sleep the next day functioning.

I think we've, I think it's important that people have highlighted the importance of sleep and getting enough rest. I do think it's gone too far, and now I'm editorializing a little bit, but I think that we've created this anxiety about sleep that it's get, if we don't sleep enough, we're going to get dementia. If we don't get sleep, then, you know, the reproductive axis is going to, you know, completely crash.

you know, there's a lot of evidence to the contrary, and as well, just based on personal experience and based on the fact that, sure, there, it may be that a solid eight hours with no, interruptions in there, or nine or ten, could do great benefit, but you can do really well if you do what you say, which is you wake up, you don't want to start stressing about it, creating this meta stress about sleep.

Being happy is actually one of the most powerful things that you can do, not allowing yourself to go down that rabbit hole of stress for the following reason. A lot of our fatigue is not due just to the buildup of adenosine or time of day, the circadian thing we were talking about earlier. An additional factor is that effort is related to the release of epinephrine, of adrenaline in our brain and body.

At some point, those levels get so high that we get stressed mentally, we get stressed physically, and we want to give up. There are good data published in Cell showing that that signal, the epinephrine signal, eventually accumulates and there's a quit point. Dopamine, the molecule of pursuit and reward and feeling good, resets our ability to be in effort.

In fact, A lot of people don't know this, but dopamine is actually what epinephrine is made from. If you look at the biochemical cascade, it starts with tyrosine, which is rich in, found in red meats and things of that sort. And tyrosine is eventually converted through things like L-dopa into dopamine. Dopamine is made into epinephrine. So, I mean, this sounds kind of new agey, but happiness, joy, and pleasure in what you're doing creates a chemical milieu that provides more of the chemicals that allow for effort.

And there's nothing new agey about that. It's in every biochemistry textbook. It's in every decent neuroscience textbook. They just don't talk about the happiness part. They just talk about the dopamine part. So I think that limiting your stress and at least recognizing, okay, if you're pulling an all-nighter or you're somehow on messed up sleep, that there is going to be a point in that 24-hour cycle where your brain is not trustworthy, where your mental state is not Worth placing too much weight on because you are near that temperature minimum.

And near that temperature minimum, which is correlates to that two hour, about two hours before you would normally wake up, the brain is, is hobbling along. And anything you feel or think at that time should not be given too much value. But if you can trick yourself into thinking that's the pleasure point, you afford yourself a huge advantage.

There's a study done by a colleague of mine at Stanford that showed that positive anticipation about the next day events actually is A powerful metric for creating quality sleep, even if the sleep is very reduced. And, and you'll love this one, and I, I, a lot of people are gonna, you know, might be critical of this, so I just want to make sure that, so this is work done out of Harvard Medical.

It was, Bob Stickgold's lab, and Emily Hoagland did this study that showed looking at OChem, performance on OChem scores. Okay, so organic chemistry at Harvard is a pretty tough subject, highly motivated. A number of very good control groups in this study. What she showed was that consistency of total sleep duration was far more important for performance on these exams than total sleep duration itself.

So it's not that just getting more sleep allows you to perform better. Consistently getting about the same amount of sleep is more, is better for performance, at least in, on OChem, than just getting more.

Speaker 1

That's interesting. So that's referring to more that there should be a consistent habit versus, the total amount. To, to me, like, the entirety of the picture of sleep is, it's similar to nutrition in that it feels like it's...

There's so many variables involved, and it's so person-specific. So, you know, a lot of studies, I mean, this is the way of science, has to look in aggregate the effects on sleep. It doesn't focus on high performers, which are individuals, ultimately. Like, the question isn't... so it's a very important question, is like, what kind of diet fights obesity? Reduces obesity.

It's another question, what kind of diet allows David Goggins to be the best version of himself? So these high performers in different avenues. And the same thing with sleep, like people that tell me that I should get eight hours of sleep, it's like, it, it's, I, I mean, I, I get it, and they may be right, but they may be very wrong. And there's

Speaker 2

no evidence that eight is better than six, that you could very well do better on six than on eight. There are a few other things that, turn out to be strong parameters for success in this domain. For instance, your entire life, waking or asleep, is broken up into these 90-minute ultradian cycles. If you look at ability to attend or do math problems or do anything, you know, drive, performance tends to Ramp up slowly within a ninety-minute cycle, peak, and then come down at the end of that ninety-minute cycle.

And in sleep, we go through these stage one, two, three, four, REM, et cetera. Talk more about that if you like. Those on ninety-minute ultradian cycles as well. Ending your sleep after a ninety-minute cycle, at the, at the, near the end of a ninety-minute cycle, say at the end of six hours, in many cases is better for you than sleeping an additional hour, seven hours, and waking up in the middle of an ultradian cycle.

And there are a few apps that can measure this based on body movements and things like that, that have you, your alarm go off at the end of an ultradian cycle. And if you wake up in the middle of an ultradian cycle, sometimes, not always, you can be very groggy for a long period of time. I certainly do better on six hours than I do on seven.

I happen to like an eight-hour sleep. It feels great, but I haven't slept an entire eight hours without waking up in the middle of the night at some point in

Forever. I can't, I can't remember. It's probably some point in infancy, but, and I function well during the day. I think that that's a big, that's an important parameter is how do you feel during the day? Almost everybody experiences some sort of dip in energy in the late afternoon or what would correlate to their temperature peak. And that's a good time of day to get either a 90, 90 minute or less nap, or if you're not a napper or you can't nap, feet elevated has been shown to be good for clear out of some of this, the glymphatic system is this kind of like sewer system of the brain that you can clear stuff out.

So legs elevated, or one thing that I've, I'm a big proponent of and that my lab has been studying is what I, I now call NSDR, non-sleep deep rest. And this is just lying down. There are some scripts that we're going to put out there soon as a, as a free resource. There's some hypnosis scripts that my colleague David Spiegel has put out there as a free resource.

But non-sleep deep rest is allowing your system to drop into states of, of real calm that allow you to get better at falling asleep later, and they can be very restorative for cognitive and motor function. There's at least one study, out of Denmark that shows that the basal, the basal ganglia, which is an area of the brain that's involved in motor planning and action, one of these 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocols resets levels of neuromodulators like dopamine in the basal ganglia to the same levels that they were right after a long night's sleep.

So I also Respectfully, or semi-respectfully disagree with the idea that you can't recover lost sleep. What does that mean? I mean, there's no IRS for sleep. So what does it mean to be in debt for sleep? If you're falling asleep during the day and you're sleepy, like you're falling asleep, that's a good sign of insomnia, means you're not sleeping enough at night.

If you're fatigued during the day, but you're not falling asleep, so you're just exhausted, but you're not finding yourself falling asleep in meetings and in conversation, then chances are you're fatiguing your system through something else, like a long run in the middle of the night in Boston or whatever it is that you're up to lately at, 3 a.m.

Speaker 1

Yes. There is a magic to the nap, and, and maybe you could speak to the, cause you mentioned these protocols that don't necessarily, so they're non-sleep. But to me, the nap, one or two a day, can Almost irrespective of how much sleep I get the night before, have a fundamental change in my mood and my performance levels. For the better, for the better, for the better.

Yeah,

Speaker 2

likewise.

Speaker 1

So, I do tend to kind of experiment with durations. It's, it's consistently surprising to me how like a nap of like ten minutes, I don't know, maybe you can speak to the perfect duration of a nap, but I find that it's like magic that a short nap does as much good and often better than a longer one for me, for me subjectively. What would be a

Speaker 2

longer one? Longer than ninety minutes?

Speaker 1

No, no, like ninety Minutes or a bit longer than ninety minutes, like two hours. Yeah,

Speaker 2

that's dropping you, starting to drop you into REM sleep. And even if it's a tiny amount of REM sleep, people can come out of those naps kind of disoriented. I mean, remember in sleep, space and time are, are totally uncoupled. And so they, that's an odd state to reenter the world in if you're not going to stay there for a while, like for a good night's sleep.

I think a twenty minute nap is pretty fantastic.

Speaker 1

Would you say that's the op- If you were to recommend to the general, it's, it's very weird to recommend anything to the general populace because obviously it's very person specific, but what's a good one will you say to friends? Is twenty minutes a good- Twenty or thirty

Speaker 2

minutes. Twenty or thirty minutes because you're going, unless you're sleep deprived. You're going to stay out of REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. If you're sleep deprived, you'll drop right into it. If you've ever traveled and you're really jet lagged, you go to the hotel, you lay down for one second, all of a sudden you're just like, you're, you're in a psychedelic dream, which can be pretty great too.

but I think that, 20, 30 minutes, and if you can't sleep, some people have trouble napping, then learning to relax the body as much as possible, like trying to remove all expression from your face completely, letting your body kind of float. If people have a hard time relaxing when they're awake, there's some terrific, clinically and research tested hypnosis protocols that we could provide links to that are cost-free and that teach you how to just completely

Release the alertness button and you just start drifting. Now the problem is if you don't have a, an alarm or something to go off, you, the other day I did one and, I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but there's a component of it where you actually are supposed to let your hand float up because it's a hyp, hypnosis script. So they, my colleague gave it Spiegel in the script, he says, let your hand float up.

I woke up an hour later and my hand was still floating.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and I was,

Speaker 2

and I was completely relaxed. So

Speaker 1

hypnosis is,

Speaker 2

hypnosis is just a matter of going deep relaxation, narrowing of context, and it's all self-imposed. A lot of people think that hypnosis is like the stage thing with the pendant and the chicken, you know, people barking like chickens, but

Speaker 1

real hypnosis

Speaker 2

is self-hypnosis. You're learning to, it involves some shifts in the way that you, the, the hypnotic induction involves looking up, closing your eyes, slowly deep breath, and then imagining yourself floating. And People vary on a scale of about one to four, four being the most easily hypnotized. There are a few people who it's very hard for them to allow themselves to, to go into these states, but for most people, they just, they're gone.

And it's nice if, if you can have access to those states, because when you come out of it, you feel amazing. You feel like you slept the whole night, at least most people report that. So

Speaker 1

refreshed alert.

Speaker 2

Ready to go. I mean, basically, you're ready. yeah, I know you have this, interesting challenge coming up, and I'm curious what you're going to do to reset in the hours. It, the, the frequency of running is, every four hours. It's not going to allow you to get any more than a couple hours sleep in between. A couple

Speaker 1

hours. So we should, we should tell to people. I'd be curious to get your thoughts and advice on that. I'm, on March 5th, running 48 miles with Mr. David Goggins. So four miles every four hours, and people should join us. He's, that madman is going to be live on Instagram. Starting at 8 PM Pacific on March 5th. So... You're

Speaker 2

going to join him in person?

Speaker 1

In person.

Speaker 2

Undisclosed location.

Speaker 1

Undisclosed location. And I was, I was trying to clarify like, okay, so we're going to,

like, there'll be like friendly people around or something. No, it's just me and him. Friendly

Speaker 2

people?

Speaker 1

I don't know. Like, I just feel it's very difficult to be with David alone in a room.

Speaker 2

I imagine his, I mean, I've done some work with David. His energy is infectious.

Speaker 1

I don't,

Speaker 2

that, that's an intense schedule. and the, the periodicity of that, those four hour, every four hours, four miles, means that there's no chance of catching an extended block of sleep.

Speaker 1

So it's about three hours that you have non-exercising every time. And of course, it takes time to try to fall asleep, and there's an intensity to the whole thing. I mean, it's probably impossible to get anything more Than, two hours of sleep if you wanted to. So the optimal thing is probably, from the sound of it, I'd be curious to see what you think, but like it's getting a few 90-minute naps.

Speaker 2

Well, I thought about this a bit before we met up today. So I think there are two general approaches that could work, neither one necessarily better than the other. One would be just to hammer through the whole thing, just to get your level of alertness and adrenaline ramped up so that you don't expect yourself to sleep. There are certain advantages there.

One is a subjective kind of emotional advantage, which is if you can't sleep, you're not going to be stressed about that. And if you do fall asleep, it's a bonus, provided you wake up and you don't look up and you realize David's been out running for half an hour and you're behind, right? Chances are that's not the way it'll go. You'll set an alarm.

So that's one approach. And, and I grabbed that from, you know, a couple of friends who were, who were in the SEAL teams, and they'll say that, you know, during BUDS, there's this infamous hell week, and there's this five-hour, five days, excuse me, definitely five days of no sleep, although there is a component where they offer a nap at one particular point.

And a lot of people will say that it's worse to go down for that nap and then be woken up 20 minutes later than to just stay up. So, so that's one option. Let's call it the, full blitz, hammer through option. And if you happen to fall asleep, you do. It's a bonus. The other one would be to really anchor in these ultradian cycles. So coming back from a run, unless you're thoroughly exhausted, you're probably going to have a few minutes where you're going to want to stay awake.

It's going to be hard to just immediately fall asleep. And Getting as much sleep as you can in the intervening periods, provided that you guys aren't posting constantly or doing something else. You also, there's a question whether or not you want to nourish, whether or not you want to eat or not in that time. Anytime we put food in our gut, I don't care if it's meat or oatmeal or broccoli or cardboard, you're drawing blood into the gut, and so you are going to divert some energy towards digestion, and it's going to make you sleepy.

There's a reason why the rest and digest, the parasympathetic nervous system is called that. So you could decide that you were only going to sleep in certain, in between certain blocks, that would be another way to think about this.

Speaker 1

That, because I did this last year, I ran very slow, some of it was walking, I was listening to audiobooks, and one of the biggest mistakes I did is to overeat. During that time. It was, it made the experience very unpleasant. So I, I have been considering basically eating almost nothing throughout the day.

Speaker 2

Being fasted will increase alertness because high levels of epinephrine in your system from fasting. You just think about fasting or being thirsty before you get exhausted. People always think, if I don't eat, I'm going to be tired. No, the, the energy that you derive from food is going to be, used from glycogen and after a long storage and conversion process.

So the food that you eat is going to consume energy to digest. And so a lot of people feel better fasted. And presumably throughout history, people have fasted for long periods of time and had to stay up for two or three days. And, you know, God forbid if a family member is sick, you can stay awake in the hospital without any trouble. So that alertness system, and it's, you know, it's all mental.

actually, and then there's a third So you could try and sleep or, or take care in between. Yeah. And then there's a third approach.

Speaker 1

Uh-oh. Yeah.

Speaker 2

But I didn't come up with

Speaker 1

it, but

Speaker 2

David did.

Speaker 1

So,

Speaker 2

I actually texted him earlier because I had a feeling that I heard that you were going to do this challenge. So I asked David.

so these are David Goggins words, not mine.

Speaker 1

Okay.

Speaker 2

One.

Speaker 1

Okay.

Speaker 2

Being organized is super important. Two. You want to waste as little time as possible. Three, you need to eat, sleep, and rehab in as little time as possible so you can sleep as much as possible. Oh, interesting. By the way, this is the first time I'm reading this.

four, meal prep and gear prep, et cetera, are very important. That's, that's consistent with everything I know about military. They, they don't, they don't leave too much to chance. Five. Again, these are David's words. All that said, he's fucked on most all that, because he'll be interviewing me before or after. I will also be interviewing him.

Speaker 1

Oh, shit.

Speaker 2

Five, long story short, the only thing that might help is a very special pill. this is interesting. They're called SIU pills. Hard to get, but I believe he can get them. SIU stands for suck it up.

Tell him to grab his balls. He'll find those pills there.

Speaker 1

That's number six, all right. And then

Speaker 2

the last one, stay hard, brother.

Speaker 1

Stay hard, brother. Amen. I, you know, that was one of the other things that I think makes this challenging is that it'll be doing a podcast throughout. So, first of all, I'll do a long one before and after, but also

I'll have to come up with things to talk to him about. So, like, it's, it's a different thing to do something Privately and then publicly. I know it doesn't seem that way, but like

one of the hardest, the hardest thing I had to do last time was to turn on the camera and talk to the camera. Cause I, last time I did it, I recorded, every single time I did a leg, I recorded something I'm grateful for. It's just kinda unrelated. I'm not a fan of like talking about like how I'm feeling or how the run is going. I want to do something totally unrelated to the run and with the run as the background, you know, so sort of something I'm grateful for, just any kind of, interesting discussion.

Speaker 2

Gratitude, I mean, I hate the word hack, like, oh, it's a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin. I, I don't like the word hack because A, it's disrespectful to hackers who do a real thing. And B, a hack implies that it's some sort of trick that you're, you're You're kind of gaming the system. You know, what, what works is mechanism, right? Biological mechanisms were designed to work, and they were selected for to work under variable conditions.

And as you know, and I know, and we have great appreciation for the fact that the nervous system was designed to be an adaptive machine so that you don't have to sleep eight hours every night. You can do this thing. And things like gratitude allow you to tap into chemical resources, and that's not a hack. The, the fact that being grateful for something external to the event happens to release serotonin and have a certain soothing effect or, dopamine and give you more epinephrine and let you go further.

That's not a hack. That's actually what allowed the human machine to evolve to the point that it is now. Every time, you know, an inventor eventually created something that worked and felt great about it, you can imagine that the, the first, you know, air flight felt pretty awesome and motivated those people to go on and do more. They, they didn't just go, oh, you know, yawn and go have a beer.

So being able to access the genuine internal states of gratitude and reward. Works. You can't trick the system. You can't pretend that you're grateful for something. But if you can identify or attach yourself to some larger goal or something that's deeply gratifying to you, or place it in service to a relative that passed away that you care a lot about, that's not a hack.

That's accessing the deepest components of your nervous system. And, to steal your kind of lingo, you know, there's real beauty there, right?

Speaker 1

Yeah, but for an introvert like myself, and I think David, I don't know if he's an introvert, but like, he's not Despite the fact that he has written a great book and he communicates, he puts himself out there, he's not really a fan of communication. He's not, I don't know if he's energized by speaking his mind. I don't know him well enough

Speaker 2

to know. I mean, we've done a little bit of work together and, you know, we're in communication now and again. He's obviously super impressive. I don't know. It seems that he's a pre, it seems like he's a pretty private guy. I, you know, so I don't have access to that.

Speaker 1

So for me, I'll just speak to myself, and I think David is the same, but I'll speak to myself that it was a hugely draining thing not to experience the gratitude. Experiencing the gratitude, just like you're saying, is really energizing. And it's, it's a powerful thing. It's a, it's a, it can lift up your mood. But to turn on the camera and have to use words, which is very difficult to do, to explain

Like what you're feeling and do it in a way that you know a bunch of people will be watching is really draining. And one of the things I'm concerned about that in this whole process, how do I keep my mind sharp while also keeping the perform, the physical performance sharp? And that's a little bit scary because talking to David, like actual intellectually sharp, like thinking, being charismatic and as much as I can be and like being so maintaining a sense of humor too, because I can be, I, I become with sleep deprivation, with exhaustion, you start being, the

Speaker 2

Russian bear comes out. You

Speaker 1

start being such a, like you, I become a David Goggins essentially, like,

Speaker 2

oh, it makes you irritable. Sleep deprivation makes us irritable.

Speaker 1

Yeah,

Speaker 2

there's, it's clear. So that in the early part of the night, we get a higher percentage of those old tradian cycles are occupied by slow-wave sleep, sometimes just called non-REM sleep. And those early night sleep bouts are great for muscular repair and for certain forms of learning. But REM sleep, the rapid eye movement sleep, which it starts to accumulate and occupy more of those 90-minute ultradian cycles toward the late part of a sleep bout, so toward, typically toward morning, but toward after you've been asleep a while, that's when you do the emotional processing.

That's when we recover the ability to feel refreshed and not irritated by things. And if you deprive people of REM sleep, they become selectively

bad at, at uncoupling the emotion from things that happened in the previous days. So the little things start to seem like big things. I always know I'm REM sleep deprived when, I'm irritable and when, I look at like the word the and it doesn't look like it's spelled right and I'm kind of pissed off about it. Like something's off and we actually are becoming slightly, psychotic when we're REM sleep deprived.

You're not going to get a lot of REM sleep in this thing except as you fatigue more, if you do fall asleep, you're going to drop more and more into REM so that those 90 minute cycles you won't have to go through stage one, stage two, stage three and then REM. You're just going to drop right into REM. So you can count on your system to compensate for you.

But I think that just the knowledge that you tend to get irritable as the time goes on, just that third personing of yourself, that awareness, the observer, that can be very beneficial because there may be bouts during this event when you just should probably say nothing. And maybe you just, I'm gonna smile and record or not smile or do, do whatever it is because you're, you're gonna be conserving energy.

If it feels like a grind, that's epinephrine being released. That's epinephrine that you could devote to the physical effort. But humor is an amazing anecdote for this because it resets that, it's that dopamine release that gives us that fresh perspective. And it's a, it's a real chemical thing. It's not a, it's not a hack, it's not a, it's not a trick, it's not a visualization, it's biology in action.

Speaker 1

Well, but I think the act of, interviewing, of conversation in these process, even if you don't wanna do it, the right thing to do, even when you're feeling irritable, is to, to do the third person view. And be able to express with words that you're feeling irritable. Like, express what you're going through. You know, use words, which I hate doing.

I honestly, I think my ultimate thing would be just to never say a single word to David Goggins and just go through hell. It doesn't matter what we do, but to do it quietly. To also express it, that's my ultimate hell. And I think that's... Well, he's definitely

Speaker 2

going to be, if I know David at all, he's going to try and find your buttons. Like, he's going to, I mean, even though he knows he can complete this, and I believe that he trusts that you can complete it too, I believe you can, you will complete it. You know you will complete it. Right, there's no question about that. But he's not going to make it easier for you.

He's going to make it harder.

Speaker 1

Well, I'm afraid, so I'm like, you know, it's very difficult for me. So 48 miles is not easy. I have not been training that much, so I'm not ramping up, but it's not like going to Kill me. We'll see what happens. Of course, for him, he might almost get bored because I think the 48 miles for him is easy. I think...

Speaker 2

I don't know that I don't know that that ever gets easy. I have a friend, Casey Cordell, who works with David. He's a, does some, physical, rehab type stuff with him. And he took Casey on a 50-miler, and Casey said it's like 16 miles into it, he was just like, he, it hit his wall. But they, he found it. They, they find it together, you know, you find that portal.

There is one thing I want to mention. There's some very good physiology that can perhaps support the actual running effort part. These are very new data. We have a study going on, with David Spiegel at Stanford looking at how different patterns of breathing can affect heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is good. There's this interesting mechanism, that I think most people might not realize, but that medical students learn that your breathing and your heart rate and your brain are in this really remarkable interplay.

It goes like this. When you inhale, this isn't breath work, we're not going to do breath work, but when you inhale, the diaphragm moves down.

The heart gets a little bigger because there's a little more space in the thoracic cavity. And as a consequence, blood flows a little bit more slowly through that larger volume. And there's a category of neurons, the sinoatrial node, that sees that, that recognizes that, that slower rate. Through that larger volume, sends a signal to the brainstem, and the brainstem sends a signal back to the heart to speed the heart up.

So every time you inhale, you're speeding the heart up. When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little smaller, the volume is smaller, blood flows more quickly through the heart, signal sent up to the brain, and the brain sends a signal back to slow the heart down. This is the basis of heart rate variability. So at any point, if you feel like your heart is racing and you feel like you're working too hard per unit of effort, focus on making your exhales longer or more intense than your inhales.

If ever you feel like you're truly flagging, you do not have the energy to get up, it's like, okay, it's time to go, and you're exhausted, you want to draw more oxygen into the system, get your heart rate going faster. Now, some people, when they hear this, probably think, well, this is really obvious, but there's so much out there about breath work and how to breathe and all this stuff, but no one talks about how to do it in real time while you're exerting effort.

Speaker 1

So this is something like almost like second by second, you can adjust things to just in real time based on how you're feeling, but based on the heart rate.

Speaker 2

That's right. The

Speaker 1

experience of the heart rate.

Speaker 2

That's right. So one thing that could be very efficient, and we're doing some work with athletes now, so these are unpublished data, but if you, while you're running, if you want to get into a nice cadence of heart rate variability, do double inhales.

While you're running, what this will do is that when you do the double inhale, has the effect of, of reopening the alveoli of the lungs. Your, your lungs are filled with tons of little sacs. When you, they tend to collapse as you fatigue, when you, and carbon dioxide builds up in the bloodstream, and that's when we start getting stressed.

If you've ever been sprinting and you start getting beat, and you're going as hard as you can, what, what you really need to do is double inhale and reinflate these sacs in the lungs, and then offload a lot of carbon dioxide. So when you're at a steady cadence and you're feeling good, double inhale, exhale, double inhale, exhale is a terrific way to breathe while you're in ongoing effort.

Speaker 1

By the way, any, recommendations or differences in, nose or mouth breathing?

Speaker 2

So nasal breathing, there's a lot of excitement now, obviously, about nasal breathing because of James Nestor's book, Breath. there was also, if people are gonna know about that book, they, I do feel like out of Respect for my colleagues. There was a book by Sandra, Kahn and Paul Ehrlich at Stanford, both professors at Stanford, with a foreword by, Jared Diamond and Robert Sapolsky, so some heavy hitters in this book.

And the book is called Jaws, a Hidden Epidemic, and it's all about how nasal breathing is better for us, especially kids, than being mouth breathers under most conditions for sake of improving immunity. It turns out there's a microbiome in the nose, like all sorts of good stuff about nasal breathing preferentially. But when we exercise, you can, you can do pure nasal breathing, but the problem is once you get up to kind of third and fourth and fifth gear effort, you can't nasal breathe and be at maximum capacity unless you've been training it for a very long time.

So I would say double inhale through the nose, offload through the mouth. So double inhale, exhale while you're in steady effort. And then if you really feel like you need to gas it and you're pushing, the data show that then just use whatever's there, right? Just go into kind of default mode because Bringing too much concentration to something is also going to spend epinephrine.

The goal is to get into that, I don't like the word, but the flow state where you're not thinking too much, you're just in exertion. So these are, so these are things that can help in the transitions, but I don't think there's any secret breathing technique. You know, anyone who's been in the SEAL teams will kind of, you know, they'll tell you like, there's no breathing technique, right? There's a, there's tools that you can look to from time to time, and these double inhale exhales can be great for setting heart rate ability in very quickly and getting into a steady cadence while you're exercising.

But if there's a sprint, like if suddenly you guys are sprinting, ditch the, ditch the double inhale exhale and just sprint.

Speaker 1

One thing that you mentioned, he's probably going to push my buttons. It's a good place to ask a question about anger. So I'll probably get pissed off at him at some point. I'm guessing. And do you have thoughts From a scientific perspective, or also just the personal philosophical perspective about the role of anger in all of this, in, in managing alertness, performance.

Speaker 2

I think about this a lot because there's so much out there about how important it is to do things from a place of love, you know. I

Speaker 1

tweet about it all the time.

Speaker 2

And, and I think, and love is powerful, right? It, you know, it is interesting that autonomic arousal, alertness, let's just use simple language, alertness physiologically looks identical for love and excitement as it does for anger and frustration and wanting to defeat your opponent or whoever that opponent happens to be. They're identical, except that the love component does tend to be associated with the release of neurochemicals of the serotonin and dopamine type that do have this replenishment component.

I don't think one wants to be in constant anger and friction, but I mean, I'll come clean a bit. There have been portions of my career where some of my best work, my extra two hours, my ability to nail a, a really hard deadline or a problem has come from not wanting to get outcompeted or from wanting to prove something. These days, I, I, I don't, I'm not oriented from that place toward my work quite as often, but I think we should be really honest.

Anger is powerful, provided it's channeled. It's very, very powerful, and it can give you a ton of fuel and gas to push when otherwise you'd tap.

Speaker 1

Yeah, Joe Rogan has, aside from being a fan of his, has been an inspiration to sort of be, to have a kind of loving view on the world in the way you approach the world to me. So I've tended to want to approach the world that way. But in the same way, David Goggins has been an inspiration to like

yeah, be angry at stuff and, use it as fuel. Like, he almost, conjures up artificial demons in his mind just so he can fight them.

you know, but at the same time I tried that, cause I, I did a challenge in the summer of, well, for 30 days I was doing a lot of push-ups, and it was, over time, it was counterproductive for me. Like, I found that it was easier to just,

like, the rollercoaster that the emotional, like, being angry at stuff takes you, can also be exhausting.

Speaker 2

Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1

And, and it can take you down, like, the, the ups of it are good, but the downs are bad. And what I found is better to get, to use it as a boost every once in a while, but mostly to get lost in the, you're talking about the breath work, the Like getting lost in the ritual of it, like the, the beat, like that, as opposed to going on the big roller coasters of emotion.

Speaker 2

Yeah, this brings us into the realm of neuroendocrinology. There's a, there's a fascinating relationship between the hormone system and the nervous system. And, you know, hormones work in general on slower timescales. The definition of a hormone is something, is a chemical released at one location in the body, goes and acts at multiple locations far away within the body.

Pheromone would be between two bodies. Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin tend to work a little more quickly. There are hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that can work very fast. But here I'm referring mainly to testosterone Prolactin, prolactin tends to be, in men and women, tends to make people kind of lazy and want to, take care of young.

It tends to throw down body fat so we can stay up late. It's secreted in response to having children. These are all in humans and in animals. There's a very interesting relationship between testosterone and dopamine that speaks directly to what we're talking about now. So dopamine and testosterone are closely related in the pituitary system.

And obviously, testosterone comes from the adrenals and from the testes. But the, the major effect of testosterone is to make effort feel good. That's what testosterone does. It has other effects too, right? Reproductive effects, androgenizing parts of the body, et cetera. But it makes effort feel good. The testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol.

Cholesterol can either be made into cortisol, a stress hormone, or testosterone, but not both. So you have a limited amount of cholesterol, and it gets diverted towards stress or towards this pathway where effort feels good.

That's the pathway you want to get into. The anger pathway, if we were to just kind of play a mind experiment here, the anger eventually is going to divert more of that cholesterol molecule to cortisol and stress, and you will be slowly depleting testosterone. Now, going into this, You'll have plenty of testosterone, but after a couple days, there have been very interesting studies showing that testosterone doesn't necessarily drop with sleep deprivation.

That's a bit of a myth. You need it to replenish testos- You need sleep to replenish testosterone eventually. But the real question is, are you enjoying what you're doing? And here that the work was, some of the major work on this was done by Duncan French, who runs the UFC training center. He did his PhD at UConn, Storrs. Did a really beautiful PhD thesis looking at the relationship between stress hormones, testosterone, and dopamine.

Really interesting work. And the, the takeaway from all of this is, if you can just convince yourself, or ideally, if you can just enjoy yourself, you are going to maintain or maybe even increase testosterone stores, which will make effort feel good. And to me, aside from neuroplasticity, where everything becomes automatic after this experience, To me, that's the holy grail.

When effort feels good, life just gets way better. And we're not talking about achieving the reward. I'm not talking about the end of this thing. I'm talking about the process of it feeling really good.

Speaker 1

Yeah, the, you know, there is a magic to,

I don't know if you can comment on this, but I find myself Being able to, if I just say I'm feeling good, like this, this old hack of like smiling while you're running, if it, if I just tell myself, I'm feeling really good right now, no matter how I'm actually feeling, I'll start feeling way better. And the whole thing, there's a cascading effect that, allows me to maximize the effort.

It's, it's, it's quite fascinating. It's, it's weird.

Speaker 2

Hormones are powerful. The relationship between thoughts and hormones and these physiological things is enormous. I had a colleague that a, a few years ago, he was dying of, of pancreatic cancer. And I was interviewing him just cause I, he's an important figure in our community and I was a friend. And there was one day where he, he told me, he said, you know, I don't want to make it past the new year.

I just, and it was, it was crushing for me to hear. And I knew that he had been on some androgen therapy. for a, for a whole set of other things. And I, I said, you know, have you taken your andro, androgen cream? And he was like, no, I haven't done it. Go get it for me. I have this on film. He takes it, he puts the androgen cream on. I'm not suggesting people take androgens, by the way.

Ten minutes later, he says, you know what? I think I want to live into the new year. And I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation. He went to MIT, by the way. He said, I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation. And he did. And so there's something about these molecules that in an ancient way, in all organisms, all mammals, as far as we know, are linked to the will to live.

They're linked to effort and making effort feel good, which has been fundamental to the evolution of our species. I always say, people think that the opposite of testosterone is estrogen, but it's not. The opposite of testosterone is prolactin, which makes us feel quiescent and not in pursuit of things, et cetera. Testosterone makes effort feel good.

Estrogen makes emotions feel okay. And, and, and they are in mixed amounts in, in people, as I say, of all chromosomal backgrounds.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

I mean, you also mentioned fasting potentially through this, two-day thing. It'd be cool to get your thoughts about fasting in general. Do you think,

on a personal level and at a higher sort of level of studies that you're aware of and physiology and so on, what do you think about intermittent fasting of like not eating for 16 hours and then having an eight-hour window or something I've been doing a lot recently, which is eating only once a day. So that's 24-hour fast, I guess, one meal a day, or something I've,

been thinking about doing, haven't done yet, of doing like 72 hours, or some people do like five-day fasts. In general. So this will be, for this particular run, will be a, 48-hour fast if I don't eat at all. what do you think about that for performance, for mo-mood, for all those kinds of things?

Speaker 2

I can speak a little bit to the science and a little bit of my own experience, and then some anecdotes of people that have done very hard, very long-duration things and what they've told me. So I just want to make sure I'm separating those out so people know my sourcing. I think, now, none of this is about the actual long-term nutritional benefits of one thing or the other.

But if you look at the science on intermittent fasting, it's pretty remarkable. before I was at Stanford, my lab was in San Diego. One of my colleagues was Sachin Panda at, at the Salk. It's phenomenal. Biologist and researcher, wrote a book called The Circadian Code. It's very, very good and, and kind of popularized intermittent fasting, although there were others that had, talked about this before.

Ori Hofmekler talked about the warrior diet. People probably don't, might not know who Ori is, but he's, he's sort of the originator of the, this business of intermittent fasting. He didn't once a day or limited. Anyway, Sachin has published papers, peer-reviewed papers in very good journals like Cell and elsewhere, showing that limiting the consumption of calories to eight, you know,

Speaker 1

Four, six, or eight, or even ten hours of every 24-hour cycle, and keeping that more or less correlated with the light, with when the sun is out, leads to less liver disease, improved metabolic markers, less body fat, et cetera. In the mouse studies, they even gave the mice the choice to eat whatever they wanted, as much as they wanted, as long as they restricted it to a certain period within the 24-hour cycle, they, they did great.

They, they maintained a healthy weight or even lost weight. When they took the same amount of food and they stretched it out across the 24, the entire 24-hour cycle, so this is eating every hour or two hours, the animals got fat and sick. So it's pretty remarkable data. How much of that translates to humans isn't clear, but one thing that's really clear with humans is adherence, right? We could talk a lot about nutrition and some of the problems with the studies on nutrition is that what people will do in a laboratory is often hard to do in the real world.

Low-carbohydrate diets, just they tend, because they tend to focus on foods that have high amino acid content, like meats, generally people are less hungry on their, those than they are on calorie-matched diets of fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates, because when the insulin goes up, you get hungry and you want to eat more. So this is not a push for carnivore or a push against one thing or the other.

It's just there are a lot of factors. But we know For sure that when you're fasted or when you have low amounts of carbohydrate in your system, complex carbohydrate, your alertness is going to go up. Fast increases, increases alertness and epinephrine for the sole purpose of getting you to go out and find food. Can you imagine if our ancestors got hungry and they were like, oh, I'm too tired to go find food, we wouldn't be here.

You'd be like robots or something like one of your alien, one of your alien buddies will be like running the planet. So I think that, if you want to be alert, fasting or keeping complex carbohydrates to a minimum is very valuable. If you want to sleep and you want to be sleepy, ingesting foods that have a lot of tryptophan, which is the precursor to serotonin, so complex carbohydrates like rice and grains, turkey, white meats, those things do create a sense of sleepiness.

However, there is a caveat, and this is one problem with the once a meal, once a day meal. Is that anytime you have a lot of food in the gut, you're increasing sleepiness because you're diverting blood to the gut. It's going to trigger the vagus to signal to the brain to shut down your system and utilize those nutrients, can, you know, digest and utilize those nutrients.

So I've done the once a day eating thing. The problem is I eat so much in that meal that I'm exhausted. And so it doesn't always lend itself well to the schedule. But so in a six or eight hour eating block for me is a little bit better. I do eat carbohydrates. I'm probably one of the few people left on the West Coast that actually consumes carbohydrates and will say that out loud.

I don't know

Speaker 2

people eat carbs anymore. That's weird.

Speaker 1

They don't. Where

Speaker 2

do you even find carbs these days?

Speaker 1

I like oatmeal. I like rice. The, the other time is if people are doing very high intensity weight training, they need to replenish glycogen.

Speaker 2

On the alertness side, I, I do feel like it's probably person dependent. For me, alertness, being alert makes my life better in a lot of ways. More than just the alertness itself. Like, for example, one of the things I discovered with fasting is that when I was training twice a day in jujitsu, for example, and competing and so on, I performed way better at, at things that you traditionally would say you need carbs for, which is explosive movements and all that.

I don't know if I actually perform better in terms of like the, the force of the explosion, the explosiveness. What I do know is the alertness resulted in me, doing the technique more precisely.

Speaker 1

That's the dopamine and epinephrine system in action. And there's a, you know, and there There are some other just purely, physical aspects to one diet versus the other that can be complicated. If you're ingesting carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, you're going to replenish glycogen, which is great, but they also tend to be bulky and fibrous.

And I don't, never rolled jujitsu, but running when you have a lot of bulky, fibrous food in your, in your gut or in your intestine, it can be a barrier, it can be uncomfortable. And so some people do really well on low-carbohydrate, meat-rich diets because they're just not as bloated. They're not carrying as much water and other stuff. The carbohydrate carries a lot of water molecules with it.

So there are aspects to being able to train and being really explosive because you feel light. One anecdote that really, again, I'm not encouraging any one particular kind of diet, but I have a friend Who was in the, in the SEAL teams, I happen to know a number of people in that community, and he told me that he did this very long fast. It was a fast that I think they, you get to eat a little bit of soup and, or broth, and there's like a bar or something, but it's like a nine-day thing.

And he's, he's a very strong athlete, and he said that on day six or seven, he was running up some hills or something while he was on deployment, and he felt amazing. He had kind of hit this other level. He was somebody who had boxed in the Naval Academy. He was somebody who was, had, he knew, knows and knew high output, and he felt like he discovered the, the thirteenth floor, that there was another floor to this performance space that he hadn't experienced.

Except while he had fasted. And he said that that was a remarkable clarity of mind, energy. It's a little bit of what you described. He, he described a kind of suppleness and explosiveness. So there's probably something there.

Speaker 2

On which day?

Speaker 1

at once he was in the fifth or sixth day of the fast. See,

Speaker 2

see, this is the thing is I've never been there, on the second, third, fourth, fifth day, that kind of thing. But when I just don't eat for 20 hours,

many times through my training, The clarity, it's like you feel like everyone is moving super slowly, and you're able to like dominate people you weren't able to before. It's like,

Speaker 1

well, you might have slipped into, or switched over rather into full ketosis. And ketogenic diets done properly can be great for people. The problem is if you do it wrong, you can really mess it up. I tried it once, and I basically got psoriasis. I thought my scalp was going to fall off. I was like sloughing off all this, and then I stopped, and I was taking the liquid ketones, and then all of a sudden I felt better again.

But I was told that I just did it wrong. Yes.

Speaker 2

So I think there's

Speaker 1

a right way and a wrong way, and you have to get it right.

Speaker 2

Definitely, and so I've experimented quite a bit with keto to see how my body feels and doing it the right way and following all the instructions. There's definitely a huge difference. That, like for example, one of the things I discovered, everyone always said this, and, but I tried this, recently over the past year, is I started drinking, when I don't feel great, if I'm fasting, bone broth, chicken bone broth.

Oh,

Speaker 1

yeah.

Speaker 2

And for some reason, like magically, it could be, this is the other thing, the mind, I don't know, but it makes me feel really good.

Speaker 1

well, it could be the salt. So, I mean, neurons, the action potential neurons, as you know, is sodiums rushing into the cell. You need enough extra cellular sodium in order for your brain and nervous system to function. And so salt, I mean, unless people have hypertension, salt is great. There was an article in Science Magazine about a decade ago about how salt had been demonized, and unless people have hypertension, provided you drink enough water, salt is great.

You need sodium, magnesium, and potassium to function, and for your nerve cells to work. I mean, people who overdrink water and don't consume enough electrolyte die. now, hydration is really important. I know David's really into hydration. He's mentioned that a few times. I mean, hydrating properly is key. And so you definitely want to make sure that you're drinking enough water and getting enough electrolytes.

That, I'm, we should have actually talked about that at the beginning because that's going to keep your nervous system functioning well. And a lot of people, they'll get shaky or jittery and when they're fasting, and they'll think they need sugar. And if they just put some salt in some water, they feel fine.

Speaker 2

And like the other stuff, potassium, magnesium, whatever the other electrolytes are, but yeah, the, yeah, those

Speaker 1

three. So, I mean, salt, yeah.

Speaker 2

Salt is good before

Speaker 1

sleep. salt. I mean, this is a vast space, and we're kind of talking about the overlap between neurochemicals, hormones, and nutrition, and it's a fascinating space, and it's one that the academic community has gems, within the textbooks. It hasn't really made it into the public sphere yet, and I think that's because people get so caught up in the, you know, being, are you vegan or are you carnivore? There's a vast space in between too that people can explore.

Like I'm not a competitive athlete, so I eat meat and I also eat vegetables and I eat fruits and it's just about timing them. But I tend to eat carbohydrates when I want to be sleepy. I eat them at night. And everyone said that's the worst thing. You can't do that. You sleep great after eating a big bowl of pasta, I'll tell you.

Speaker 2

And by the way, I should, I should, give you a big thank you for connecting me with, Bell Campo Farms.

they sent me some meat, I think because of you.

And it's delicious. So I, I really, I really appreciate it. I mean, it also connected me with this whole world of people who are doing farming in this ethical way and like really love the whole process and like, and as, from a both like a human level, but also scientific level. And the result is, it's like ethical, but also is delicious. And it makes you think about Your diet in a whole new kind of way.

Speaker 1

Yeah, I've known, I don't have any commercial relationship to Belcampo, so I can be very clear. I've known Anya Fernald, who's, who's the, one of the, is the founder and CEO of Belcampo. I've known her since the ninth grade. It, it is true that her parents are faculty members at Stanford, they're colleagues of mine, but she's just a serious academic of nutrition, but also of sustainable agriculture, of, you know, all sorts of things.

And also the meat just, it's awesome. It tastes really good. And no, I'm not getting paid to say that. No, they're not, sponsoring my podcast. It's just, if you, I feel like if you're going to eat animals, if that's in your framework and you're going to eat animals, knowing that the animals were raised As happy as could be until, you know, time of slaughter is, is important, least important to me.

And,

Speaker 2

and actually, talk to her, so I, I will talk to her on this podcast, actually, and she invited me, like a week ago out to, to visit the farm in May or June or whatever.

Speaker 1

Yeah, they have the farm up at the Oregon border. I haven't been there yet, but I've seen the pictures, and it looks awesome.

Speaker 2

And I was like, yes. It

Speaker 1

looks beautiful. Let me know when you're going.

Speaker 2

Yeah, let's go together. I mean, this is, it's... You'll

Speaker 1

probably run there, but I'll drive there.

Speaker 2

Yeah, but that, all that said, I do want to, because a, a lot of people who are vegan write to me And I do want to seriously, in the same seriousness that I approached keto, I do want to go, like, on a few months to switch to a vegan diet at some point, to really try it.

Speaker 1

I haven't done it yet, because I'm afraid I'm going to function better. Like, I'm Argentine by my dad's side, and I, I, I don't eat, I don't eat meat super often, but, well, for most people it would, it would seem often, but, but I, I do love steak, I do. so I'm afraid I'm going to feel better. There's

Speaker 2

a social element to steak, you're right, because coming from a Russian background, like, I can't imagine going to visit my folks, like my parents for Thanksgiving or something and say, Mom and Dad, I'm, you know, I, I don't eat meat, so is it, you know?

Speaker 1

Well, I think if you're gonna eat meat, getting it from sources that are compatible with, a, you know, continuation of the planet is good. I mean, there are some, some real problems with the factory farm meat. You know, you drive up and down the five and you pass that point where all those cows, I mean, as somebody who loves animals, it's, it's clear that it's You know, you want to limit the amount of suffering of those animals.

Whenever I hear about, you know, we have, we know people that hunt and that go and get their own meat, I, I really admire that. I admire that people do that. we don't, we don't tend to do that in the hills around Stanford, you know, there, there are mountain lions back there, but that's about it. And I'm, I'm certainly, I, I admire the vegan mindset of being, of just making that decision.

You're just not going to consume other beings, but, you know, I haven't gone that way.

Speaker 2

But performance-wise, I'm just curious, because I was surprised, I was certain that eating five, six, seven meals a day is the right thing to do for all, if you want to be, perform your best when I was like 20 or whatever. And I would eat oatmeal, like I thought it's obvious I have to have a really, a lot of carbs in the breakfast. I had a lot of preconceived notions, and then when I started eating like once a day, this was at the peak of my competing in jiu-jitsu.

It, it was like everything I know about nutrition is wrong. You realize that like you have to become a scientist. First of all, you have to read literature, you have to learn, you experiment, but you also have to become a scientist of your own body. In the, in the same way, I have a lot of preconceived notions of what performance is like under vegan diet, and I want to do it right, like seriously, not, not necessarily for the ethical reasons, but to see if it's performance wise, like can I, I remember there's like a fruitarian diet where you eat fruit only.

These

Speaker 1

extremes are like, they're pretty, they're interesting because people have this need. The extremes are informative though, right? I mean, well-controlled experiments, you eliminate as many variables as you can except the one you're interested in. So people are running these experiments. I, I think that

It's hard to imagine getting... I know people say you can get enough amino acids from plant-based sources, and I believe that. I think it probably takes a little more work. one thing that's really clear is the, the benefit of these, omega-3, omega-6 ratios, like fish oils and things like that. There are some data that show that the, getting at least a thousand milligrams of the EPA, which is in high in fish oils, but other things too, even some meats and other plants, it, in double, you know, in matched, placebo double-blind controlled studies, placebo controlled double-blind studies have shown that those can offset antidepressive symptoms as much as some of the selective

serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prolac and, Prozac and Zoloft. So that's pretty impressive. And in Scandinavia, people know, especially in winter, to, to consume a lot of those omega-3s because they're good for you, they're good for the brain.

Speaker 2

That's the other question. nutrition-wise, what, what kind of stuff have you come across that's useful? Like, I basically only take fish oil, like you said, electrolytes. There's electrolytes with water, the David Goggins diet,

Speaker 1

fish oil,

Speaker 2

plus fish oil, and then, again, the sponsor, I, they made this so easier, the, the sponsor of your podcast and, and mine, athleticgreens.com slash huberman, to go support it. I don't, I don't know, like, it's, it's great stuff for sure, but also just takes away the headache of like, I don't have to think about, like. Yeah,

Speaker 1

you're gonna get a bunch of vitamins and minerals, you know, co, does that. Sounds like a, a plug, but I have genuinely been buying it on my, you know, no discount, no affiliation or anything since 2012. I think I heard about it on the Tim Ferriss podcast. I was like, oh, I'm gonna try that stuff, and I liked it. I mean, when I was starting my lab, I was working insane hours.

I still work very long hours, and getting sick Limits productivity. And I also wanted to train, and I wasn't doing much training back then.

now I try and get, you know, three, four sessions in a week. I'm not doing nothing like what you and David are doing or what, you know, Joe does, or like you guys are way more regimented and consistent than I am. but I think that being healthy and feeling good is one of the great benefits to a career is having energy and just being not sick.

Speaker 2

Can we take a step back to, sleep a little bit? So people should definitely look through your podcast, the first five episodes were on sleep, or, no, I guess the first opening episode was,

Speaker 1

first one was sort of how the brain works generally, is to give people some background, and then we did four episodes on sleep,

Speaker 2

including

Speaker 1

some stuff about food, temperature, exercise, jet lag, shift work for the jet lag folks and shift workers. Yeah,

Speaker 2

check a masterclass on sleep, and then you're, you're going on to a next,

topic in the next few episodes, which is incredible. We'll, neuroplasticity, we'll, we'll talk about it. But on sleep, one of the cool things about the human mind when it sleeps is dreaming.

what do you think we understand about the contents of dreams? Like, what do dreams mean, all the stuff we see when we dream? Is there something that we understand about, the contents of dreams?

Speaker 1

Some of it is very concrete. So, Matt Wilson, who MIT guy, showed in rodents, and it's been shown in non-human primates, and now it's been shown in humans, that there is replay of spatial information during sleep. So initially what Matt showed was that As these little rodents navigate through a maze, there are these cells in the hippocampus called place cells that fire when the animal encounters a turn or a corridor, and that same, exact same sequence is replayed during sleep.

And it turns out this is true in, London taxi cab drivers. Before phones and GPS were what they are today, the London taxi cab drivers were famous for knowing the routes through the city, through these mental maps, and their analysis of their place cell firing during sleep and during wakefulness. And so we are essentially taking spatial information about the location of things and replaying it during sleep.

However, it's not replayed so that you remember it all. It's replayed so that if there's a reason to remember it, the links to the emotional system, to the Components of the limbic system and hypothalamus that are relevant, like you got into a car crash at a particular location, or you lost a bunch of money because you were a cab driver, Uber driver, we'd say nowadays, and you were stuck at one particular avenue all day and frustrated, and you were getting yelled at by your spouse.

That information gets encoded so that you never forget that at that particular time of day and that particular time of year, and this thing happened. So context starts getting linked to experience. So there's spatial information that's absolutely replayed during sleep, and we experience this sometimes as dreams. The dreams that happen early in the night when slow-wave sleep or non-REM sleep dominates tends to be sleep of very kind of general themes and kind of, location.

It's a, it can feel a little bit eerie and kind of strange. Not so incidentally, the early phase of the night is when growth hormone is released. In the eighties and nineties, there was a drug that was very popular, it's very illegal now, called GHB.

you could actually buy it at GNC or a store then. I never took it, but it was a popular party drug and some people, some famous celebrities died while on GHB. They were also on a bunch of other things, so it's not clear what killed them. But GHB was very big in certain communities because it promoted a massive release of growth hormone and gave people these very hypnotic states.

So people go to clubs and they were in these very hypnotic states. It was part of a whole culture. That's early night. And those dreams tend to not have a lot of emotional content or load. That phase of dreaming is associated with the occasional jolting yourself out of sleep because it's somewhat lighter sleep. The dreams that occur during REM, during rapid eye movement sleep that dominate towards morning are very different.

They tend to have Very little epinephrine is available in the brain at that time. Epinephrine, again, being this molecule of stress, fear, and excitement. You are paralyzed during these REM dreams. You cannot move. There's intense emotion at the level of what you're feeling and there's so-called theory of mind. Theory of mind is an idea that was put forward by Simon Baron-Cohen, Sasha Baron-Cohen's cousin.

I think on the podcast, I mistakenly said that he was at Oxford. It's like the cardinal sin. He's at Cambridge, forgive me. I'm not British. So the dreams in REM are heavily emotionally laden, and it's very clear that those dreams and REM sleep, if you deprive yourself of them for too long, you become irritable and you start linking Generally negative emotions to almost everything.

REM, the dreams that occur in REM sleep are when we divorce emotion from our prior experiences. And it's when we extract general rules and themes. MIT seems to come up a lot today, but it's, it's highly relevant. Susumu Tanagawa, Nobel Prize for, immunoglobulins, but, obviously fantastic neuroscientist as well, has shown that the replay of neurons in the hippocampus and elsewhere in the brain is kind of an approximation of the previous episode and a lot of fear unlearning of uncoupling emotion from hard or traumatic events that happened previously occurs in REM sleep.

So you don't want to deprive yourself of REM sleep for too long. And those dreams tend to be very intense. Now, epinephrine is low so that you can't suddenly act out your dreams. But What's interesting is sometimes people will wake up suddenly while in a REM dream, and their heart will be beating really, really fast. That's a surge of epinephrine that occurs as you exit REM sleep.

So you were having this intense emotional experience without the fear. You were essentially going through therapy in your sleep, self-induced therapy. It's like trauma therapy, where you try and divorce the emotion from the experience. And then you wake up. And some people also have the other component of REM, which is atonia, which is paralysis.

Pot smokers experience this a lot more than non-pot smokers. There's an invasion of, of paralysis into the waking state. I'm not a pot smoker, but I have experienced this. And when you wake up and you're paralyzed for a second, it's terrifying.

Speaker 2

But

Speaker 1

then you jolt yourself alert. So the REM sleep is important for Kind of this self-induced therapy and forgetting the bad stuff. It's good for uncoupling the emotions from bad experiences. And just there are two therapies, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, which is a eye movement thing that shuts down the amygdala during therapy, not during sleep, and ketamine, which is a dissociative analgesic.

It's actually very similar to PCP. And ketamine is now being used as, as a trauma therapy when someone comes into, the for instance, and they were in a terrible car accident. I mean, these are horrible things to describe, but, you know, they saw a relative impaled on the driving, steering column or something, and they will give this drug to try and shut off the emotion system so that, because they're not going to forget, let's be honest.

You don't forget the bad stuff, but it is possible to uncouple the bad events from the emotional system. And there's all sorts of ethical issues about whether or not that's good or bad to do, but the PTSD is a failure to uncouple the emotion from these intense experiences.

Speaker 2

So, so the goal of this kind of therapy It's in the uncoupling for that to be permanent, to, to, to separate.

Speaker 1

So they can recount the event and they can describe it without it triggering the same somatic experience of terror and dread, because terror, those, feelings can be debilitating, obviously. And

Speaker 2

you're saying physiologically in, REM sleep, a similar process is happening. That's

Speaker 1

right. The, thematically, REM sleep is about experiencing or replaying intense emotions without experience the somatic, the physical component of the emotion, either the acting out or the accelerated heart rate and, agitation. Likewise, with things like ketamine, therapies, that's the idea is you're uncoupling the physical sensation from the mental events.

Speaker 2

What is REM sleep and why is it so special? Maybe we can comment on that. Rabbit eye movement sleep.

Speaker 1

Yeah, discovered in the fifties at University of Chicago, it's intense brain activity, high levels of metabolic activity, dreams in which people report a lot of the theory of mind. We're talking About, Simon Baron-Cohen. Theory of mind is, was actually something that he developed for the diagnosis of aut-autism. If you take kids, most kids of age five, six, seven, put them in front of a TV screen in, in a laboratory, and you have them watch a video where a kid is playing with a ball or a doll, and then the kid puts it into a drawer, shuts the drawer, and walks away, and another kid comes in, and you ask the child who's observing this little movie, you say, what does this

second child think? And they, a typical kid would say, they want to play, and they don't know where the ball or doll is, or they, they, they're upset, or they're sad, they want the doll. Autistic children tend to say, the doll's in the drawer. The, the, the toy is in the drawer. They tend to fixate, they can't get in, on the event, they can't get into the mind of the, they don't have a theory of mind.

Dreams in REM have a heavy theory of mind component. People are after me trying to get me. You can assign motive to other people. I'm afraid, but it's because there's an expectation. That doesn't tend to happen in slow-wave sleep dreams. Now, all this, of course, is by waking people up and asking them what they were dreaming about, which from a standpoint of a AI guy or a machine learning guy or a neuroscientist, kind of like, but it's the best we've got.

But brain imaging will, in waking states, while people view a movie, and then brain imaging while people are sleeping, supports the idea that that's basically what's going on. So REM sleep is amazing, and you're not going to get much of it during your bout with, Goggins, but you will afterward.

Speaker 2

Why? So to, to, to comment, why won't I, so is it not possible to get into it real quick?

Speaker 1

Only if you're very, very sleep deprived, but because you're going to be at high muscular output, that's going to bias you towards more slow-wave sleep overall. And your body and brain are smart. They, it will know, they will know that your main goal is to recover

so you can keep going, so you can keep firing neuromuscular contractions and you can keep running, so that you can... I mean, it's amazing to think, like, why do we ever stop? Like, unlike weight training, where I can't do a 500-pound deadlift, I just can't. I could train for it, but I certainly can't do a 600-pound deadlift. I can't do that.

What causes us to stop an endurance event is usually not a physical barrier. It's almost always a purely mental barrier. And that's a very interesting problem. I mean, neuroscientists don't tend to think about those sorts of problems because it sounds so non-neuroscientific, but that's fundamentally related to the question of, you know, what is pursuit? Why, what is the, the desire to push and to, and to carry on?

Speaker 2

Is there a neuroscientific answer to, for that question, you think?

Speaker 1

I think the closest thing is this, paper from,

From Janelia Farms, the Howard Hughes campus, showing that if you put, animals into a simulated environment where you can measure their effort, the forces on, while they're running, and you can look at the, and you can control the visual environment, and you can create a scenario where the animal thinks that its output is futile. It thinks, it, it knows it's running and it's actually running, but you change the frequency of the stripes going by in their visual world such that they think they're not getting anywhere, and eventually they quit.

And the thing that determines whether or not they quit is a threshold level of epinephrine in the brainstem. If you drop that level back down or you, or you give the animals dopamine, essentially, they keep going. If you take dopamine down, they, they're like, this isn't worth it. It's helpless now. They're just, this isn't worth my time and energy.

Speaker 2

Well, this is where the difference between humans and non-human animals is interesting, because it does feel like humans have an extra level of cognitive, ability that Might be relevant here,

Speaker 1

where you can pull from different time references. So if you're in that moment, you're going to need a kit of things to pull from. So you can think, this is in honor of someone else that passed away, and you will find a gas reserve that's amazing, right? Now, whether or not mice are like, I remember my brother back in the other cage when I was a little mouse, you know, we don't know, but it's very likely that they don't do that, that they're so present, they're in the experience of there and then and now, that they aren't able to extract From the past, and they're not able to, to project into the future, like how great it's going to feel when I get to the end of this

really lame VR corridor. I don't think they think about that.

Speaker 2

And, and think about like, if I quit now, how will that have, what kind of effect will it have on the rest of my life in the future difficult times? Like if you allow yourself to quit in this particular moment, you'll become a quitter more and more in life, and then you're going to not get the, the other nice, the opposite sex mammals.

Speaker 1

That's pretty severe. You went there,

Speaker 2

you

Speaker 1

took it all, you took it the whole way to evolution and back again. I mean, but that's, that's really it. I mean, our ability to time reference in the past, present, or future. I do believe that we can be in the present and the past, or the present and the future, or only in the present, or only in the future, or only in the past, but I don't think that we can really think about past, present, and future all at once.

And this has a similarity to, covert attention. Like, we can split our visual attention into two things. We really can duo task, even though we can't multitask, or we can bring those two spotlights of attention to the same location. But it's very hard to split our attention in really well into three domains, excuse me, into three domains.

I think that that's very, very challenging. And time, our time referencing scheme tends to be just one or two time references.

Speaker 2

So Lisa Feldman Barrett, I'm not, I'm not sure if you've done work together, but Lisa,

Speaker 1

I found out about her because of you and your podcast with her, and I brought her onto Instagram, did an Instagram live about emotion,

Speaker 2

and

Speaker 1

it was fascinating. And she's a very spirited and very, very smart woman and,

Speaker 2

fearless and, brilliant. So I, I love her. She's amazing. she kind of, she's not a scholar of hallucinogens, hallucinogens or dreams, but she had this intuition that there may be a connection between the kind of dissociation that happens in dreaming and that that happens in,

like psychedelics. I, because of my previous conversation with you,

on, on this podcast, Matthew Johnson from Johns Hopkins reached out, and he said, but, he, he commented, I think, on something that we commented on, I don't even remember exactly what, but that there's not many studies, it's not being, psychedelics are not being rigorously studied in academic setting, like with a full rigor of science. And he said, well, actually, that's exactly what we're doing, and they're extremely well-funded now, and it's been a long battle to get it accepted as a serious, scientific pursuit.

So, but, and I'd like to ask you a little bit about that, but do, do, do you have a sense about connection between dreams and psychedelics, or these, different explorations of mind states that are outside of the standard normal one, that's the wake mindset?

Speaker 1

Yeah, I loved your discussion with Matthew. I knew of the Hopkins group and the stuff they were doing, but I didn't know Much about it at all, and I learned a ton from that podcast. I reached out to him just to say, I love what you're doing. I think it's incredible. So yeah, your podcast has been a great source of, serious academic and intellectual, conversation for me.

I think what they're doing at Hopkins is amazing. he has a collaborator there. Actually, they had a very popular paper I just throw out there for fun. who is a postdoc at Stanford. Her name is Gul. she's Turkish, I believe. and her, and I, I apologize, her last name escapes me at the moment, but that's just a function of my brain. she had a paper showing that, she put octopi on MDMA on ecstasy and found out, this is published in, in a, in Current Biology, showing, it was a great journal, showing that the octopi then wanted to spend more time with other octopi.

They started cuddling.

Speaker 2

So,

Speaker 1

they are colleagues out there. But, the Hopkins, the Hopkins project is super interesting because I think they were initially supported mainly through private philanthropy, and now you're starting to see some more interest at the level of NIH about psychedelics. It's a complicated space because the psychedelics are always looked at through the lens of the sixties and people losing their mind and there's a, you know, in, I always say, you know, you don't want a Ken Kesey out of the game.

You know, Ken Kesey was amazing, right? Part of the whole beat generation thing and he was actually at the VA near Stanford. That's where he eventually, in Menlo Park, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or maybe that was about him. Anyway, the comments will tell me how wrong Am, but it's, I think I'm tossing these words in the general, in the right general direction.

But, you know, Huxley, Kesey, they did a lot of LSD, and they all lost their jobs, right? They lost their jobs at big institutions like Harvard and Stanford and elsewhere, or they left, because they, they made themselves the experiments. Hopkins, as far as I know, is one of the first places, if not the first place, where whatever Matt may or may not be doing in his own life, I don't know, it's really about the patients and whether or not the patients in these, institutional review board approved studies, whether or not they're getting better in situations like depression.

I think It's clear that there's a very close relationship between hallucinogenic states and dreaming of the sort that are described for REM dreaming. And there's a, terrific set of books and body of scientific literature from a guy named Alan Hobson, who was an MD, is at Harvard Med, and he wrote books like Dream Drug Store. one of the first neuroscience books I ever read was about hallucinations and how psychedelics and dreaming are very similar.

That was way back when I was in high school. I was just curious. And he really understood the relationship between LSD and REM dreams and how similar they are. I think psychedelics, and Matt knows way more about this than I do, of course, but psychedelics Have some very interesting properties. They are certainly not for everybody, right? And kids, it's a problem, you know, the...

I think the major issues right now around the psychedelic conversation is that it's clear that they can unveil certain elements of neuroplasticity. They make the brain amenable to change, changing up space-time relationships, changing up the emotional load of an event and being able to reframe that. It's clear that happens. But there's two major issues.

One is that people talk about plasticity as if plasticity is the goal, but plasticity is a state within which you can direct neurology. And the question is, what changes are you trying to get to? So people are just taking psychedelics to unveil plasticity without thinking about what circuits they want to modify and how. I think that's a problem.

I think there's great potential, however, for people opening up these States of plasticity with psychedelics or otherwise, and directing the plastic changes toward a particular endpoint. And there's an absolutely spectacular paper out of UC Davis, published as a full article in Nature just a couple months ago, showing that there are psychedelics that are now can be modified, so chemists have gotten into the game now, and modifying to take away the hallucinogenic component, where you still get the neural plasticity components.

And for a lot of people, it'd be like, oh, well, that's no fun. That's not giving you the wild experience. But I do think that that holds great potential for people that wouldn't otherwise orient towards some of these drugs. So I think it's really marvelous what's happening and what's about to happen. And I think there is one drug in that kit of drugs that's very unusual, like psilocybin, LSD, those promote heavy, heavy serotonin release and lateralized connections ramp up, et cetera.

Matt talked about all that. But MDMA, ecstasy, is a very unusual situation where dopamine is very, very high because of the, the way the drug is designed. Dopamine release, it goes through the roof. So people feel great and they want to move and they have a lot of energy. But serotonin levels are also high, and that's a very unnatural state.

And why MDMA may, may, and I want to highlight may, have Particularly high potential for the treatment of certain forms of depression is an interesting question because never before in, as far as we know, in human history has there been a possibility of opening up dopaminergic and serotonergic states at the same time, dopamine being the molecule pursuit and reward and more and more, and serotonin being one of bliss and being content right where you're at.

So it's almost like those two things wrap back on themselves and create this very unusual state. And I think the bigger conversation is what to do with a state like that. Like, do you, is it about self-love? Is it about developing love for another person? Is it about forgetting hate? Like, these are powerful molecules, and I think if the academic community and the clinical community is going to move forward with them in any serious way, I think there needs to be a conversation about What they're being used for.

Speaker 2

Right. And, and coupled with that, I think similar to what you're saying, like Matt has talked about, as others have talked about, some of the biggest benefits of like progress, whether it's like quitting smoking and all those kinds of stuff, is in the, is in the days after, it's the integration of the experience. So maybe you open up the brain to the neuroplasticity, but then there's like work to be done.

It's not, you're like, you shake up something in, in the, in the biology of the brain, but you have to do then, it's work.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. Now, a friend of mine who's a, a physician, he says, who's quite open to this idea that psychedelics could play a, a real role in, in real medicine, says, better living through chemistry still requires better living. And, and I think it's, it's a beautiful statement. I wish I had said it be, but he gets the credit, but The plasticity window opens, and then as you said, what are you going to do in the two weeks, three weeks, four weeks afterward? Because that's the real opportunity.

But those psychedelic experiences are really a case of an amplified experience inside of an amplified experience, so much so that everything seems relevant. And it's, it's, it's fascinating. I mean, I, my hope is that the AI and machine learning and the brain machine interface and all that will eventually be merged with the psychedelic treatments so that you, an individual can go in, take whatever amount of whatever's safe for them, working with a clinician, and really direct the plasticity while maybe stimulating the orbitofrontal, medial orbitofrontal cortex, or increasing the observer, or decreasing the observer in the brain, or decreasing the amygdala.

I mean, it's doable. It's doable with Transcranial magnetic stimulation, and it's for shutting down activity, and it's doable with ultrasound. Ultrasound now allows very focal activation of particular brain regions through the skull, non-invasively.

Speaker 2

So it's approaching the same kind of, therapy from different angles. One of AIs, the computational side, sort of injecting, like the robotics, i-i-injecting, like, maybe you can even think about it as like electricity, the electrical approach versus then like the, the chemical approach.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. And then the psycho-and then the psychology is, is subjective, right? So it's going to take some real, understanding of what that person's, lexicon is, like, you know, no, that wasn't a pun,

Speaker 2

sorry.

Speaker 1

Sorry, terrible. I'm like the worst. That's the one thing I know from the feedback on my podcast. My jokes are terrible, but I never claim to be funny.

The, the, but somebody who they really trust and understands when somebody says, you know, For a very stoic person, like I'm imagining you interviewed the great Dan Gable, right? I don't know anything about Dan, but can you imagine like you asked Dan like, you know, how you feel about something while on one of these drugs? And like, I mean, his languaging might, if he says that was troubling, it might mean that it was very troubling or not troubling at all.

So people are, language is a poor guide because if I say I'm upset, how upset is that? Well, that's very subjective. So you need We need, can you build a tool for that? Can you build a AI tool for that?

Speaker 2

Maybe that's the

Speaker 1

eye, maybe that's our, that's, that's what the eyes could reveal.

Speaker 2

So language is not just words, it's everything together, and that's one of the fascinating things about the eyes and the window to the soul. I mean, they express so much, the face, the eyes, the body.

I mean, Lisa talks about that, the communication with motion, it's, it's a super complex. Perhaps it's a, a bit of a side fun tangent, but Matt, Matthew Johnson brings up DMT, and the experience of DMT is a, is a, is, from a scientific perspective, just a, just a mystery in itself, over its intensity, what happens to the brain. And of course, Joe, Rogan and others bring it up as a very different, special kind of experience,

and elves seem to come up often. I've

Speaker 1

never tried DMT. What allows for hallucinogenic states?

Speaker 2

Yes.

Speaker 1

And it, I mean, DMT is a really interesting molecule. There, there are a lot of people experimenting now with, DMT.

and they just, the way they've described it is as a kind of a freight train through space and time. Very different than the way people describe LSD type experiences or psilocybin, where time and space are very fluid, but it tends to be a kind of a slower roll, if you will.

so it's clear that DMT is tapping into a brain state that's distinctly different than the other psychedelics. And, and you mentioned jujitsu and these other communities. I mean, it's I think it's interesting because jujitsu is a nonverbal activity, and people get together and talk about this nonverbal activity, and they show great love for it.

In the same way that surfers, you know, I've known some surfers in my time, and they will get up at the crack of dawn and drive really, really far to sit in the water and wait for this wave to come. I have to imagine it's pretty fantastic. I think that human beings now, some of whom are in the scientific community, are starting to feel comfortable enough to talk about some of these other loves and other endeavors because they do reveal a certain component about our underlying neurology.

I'm fascinated by, the concept of wordlessness, activities in which language is just not sufficient to capture, and in which Feel so vital as a reset, as important as sleep. You know, I think that's one of the dangers of the phone is not that you're going to get into some online battle or that you're always staring at the phone, is that it's a words.

So as we read things, we're hearing the script in our head. And I think getting into states where we are in a state of wordlessness is, is very renewing and replenishing and just can feel amazing. And I believe also can help us tap into creative states and allow our neurology to access creative states. And sleep is one such wordlessness period.

So one of the most interesting things to me are states that one can approach in waking, non-sleep deep rest, wordlessness through, maybe it's jujitsu, maybe it's for some people surfing, maybe it's dancing, maybe it's just, I don't know, staring at a wall, who knows? But where the language components of the brain are completely shut down, And it has to be the case that drugs are no drugs, that the brain is entering and starting to states and starting to use algorithms that are distinctly different than when we're trying to compose things in any kind of coherent way for someone else to understand.

There's no interest in anyone else understanding what you're experiencing in that moment. And that's beautiful. And I think, I think it's not just beautiful because it feels good. I think it's beautiful because it's important and it's clearly fundamental to our neurology.

Speaker 2

And in your sense, there's, there's a connection between dreams and DMT and like psychedelic, like all of the,

you can, you can understand one by studying the other. So for example, dreams are also very difficult to study, right? But they're more accessible. It's safer to study.

Speaker 1

And we're told we need to get more of it. Whereas with psychedelics, there's this big question mark. Is it going to make everyone crazy? Is it, is it going to be legal? I mean, it's kind of interesting how if, if one looks on Instagram, one could almost think that these drugs are already legal based on the way that people commute, but they're not yet.

There's still a lot of them are scheduled. And there's a

Speaker 2

lot of questions. I mean, and, but nevertheless, it's like, my, my hope is that, science opens up to these, drugs a little bit more. It's just, I have this intuition that And like a lot of people share that they would be able to, unlock a deeper understanding of our own mind. It's, it's any kind of dream, same as studying dreams. Absolutely.

Speaker 1

Well, creativity is in the nonlinearities, right? But productivity is in the implementation of linearities. I mean, that's, that's what is absolutely clear. This is why I think we were talking earlier about why a formal rigorous training in something where other people are looking at you and telling you, no, not good enough, go back and do it again.

There's real value to that because otherwise it's just ideas. It's just vapors.

Speaker 2

You know, one thing that Matt mentioned as the study that they're working on is, as opposed to, I think most of the psychedelic studies they've done is on, how to treat different conditions. And one of the things they're working on now is to try to do a study where,

for creatives, for people that don't have a condition that they're trying to treat, but instead see how this How psychedelics can help you create. So like...

Speaker 1

Shouldn't this... If you take creatives and you give them more psychedelics, they're not going to be able to get out of their room.

Speaker 2

I, I don't know. Well, but this is the... I, maybe you can speak to that, psychedelics or not, or dreams or tools in general, how to be better creatives. That's an interesting... I don't often see studies of this nature of like, how to take high performers in the mental creative space and get them to perform even, better. So it's not average people, it's like masters of their craft, like taking, I mean, his examples was taking an Elon Musk, which is in the engineering space and maybe musicians and all that kind of stuff, and studying that.

That's a... I mean, that's weird. I, usually the science, the scientific exploration there has been done in, by the musicians themselves, as has been documented. Like

Speaker 1

jazz is like all nonlinearities, right? But if it's, but the people still have to know how to play their instruments, right? There's some early, early skill building that's critical. I mean, when you mention someone like Elon, I mean, virtu, I mean, he's already a virtuoso, right? Cause he, and in so many different domains. I've never met him, but it's, it's clear, right? He, it's not just that he's ambitious and bold and brave and all that.

It's all that, and there's, there's clearly a, a different way of looking at the same problems that everyone else is looking at. And people are probably banging their head against the refrigerators thinking like, think differently, think, it doesn't work that way. It involve, there's a certain anxiety in for the, I'm not talking about for Elon, but I don't have no idea.

But I think for somebody who's very structured, very regimented, very linear, the anxiety comes from letting go of those linearities. And for the person that's very creative, the anxiety comes from trying to impose linearities, right? The, the really creative artists or musician, they're, they seem nuts. They seem like they can't get their life together because they can't.

And they, you know, we look at people who are kind of pseudo Asperger's or Asperger's or some forms of autism, and they are so hyperlinear, but you take away those linearities and they freak out. And that's kind of the essence of some of those syndromes. So I think that the ability to toggle back and forth between those states is what's remarkable.

I mean, because we're here and we're having this discussion, I mean, Steve Jobs is a good example. He, probably the best example, somebody who actually talked about his own process, about the merging of art and science, art and engineering, humanities and science. Very few people can do that.

Speaker 2

Well, I,

Speaker 1

you seem to have a capacity to do that.

Speaker 2

I,

Speaker 1

I, like you, you know poetry and you are AI guy, like you, there's nothing linear about poetry as far as I can tell.

Speaker 2

I mean, I, I do wonder, just like we've been talking about, if there's any ways to push that to its limits to explore further. I don't like leaning, this, this is why I'm bothered there's not more science to psychedelics is I haven't done almost, so I've eaten mushrooms a few times, allegedly, but that's it, you know, and I, the reason I don't do more, the reason I haven't done DMT is because it's illegal and it's like not well studied and it, you know, I, I'm in those things, I'm not usually at the cutting edge, but I'm very curious and it feels like

there could be tools to be discovered there, not for fun, not for recreation, but for like Encouraging whether you're a linear thinker to go nonlinear or, or it's nonlinear to go linear, like to, to shake things up. You mentioned Dan Gable. The idea of Dan Gable on psychedelics is fascinating to me because he's such A control freak. I mean, he likes control.

That I would show up

Speaker 1

for. That I would not show up for.

Speaker 2

But like so much of these psychedelic experiences, it feels like is for letting go. That's right. You don't want to resist. But

Speaker 1

that's supposedly where the growth is in, in giving oneself over to the process.

Speaker 2

And that's for people who are like master controllers, he's one of the greatest coaches of all time. It's fascinating to see what that battle looks like of resistance and then of letting go. yeah, I mean, I, I, I can't wait to, to, to see where these studies takes us.

Speaker 1

Well, it's clearly happening. You know, I've asked, there, I have a couple of colleagues at Stanford who are doing animal studies. I've asked around, you know, it's, there's a lot of discussion in the neuroscience community about what the perception of a laboratory is if they, work on psychedelics. I mean, I, I have to tip my hat to the folks at Hopkins.

They are pioneers. And as, Terry Signowski, he's a computational neuroscientist down at Salk, says, I don't think he was the first person to say, he says, you know, how to spot the pioneers. They're the ones with the arrows in their backs. And, you know, it's, it's an unkind world to a scientist that's trying to do really cutting edge stuff.

My colleague, David Spiegel, who studies medical hypnosis, it's, he's got dozens of studies now showing that hypnosis can be beneficial for pain management, anxiety management, cancer outcomes. And it's finally, you know, at the point where there's so much data, but people hear hypnosis and they think of stage hypnosis, which is like the furthest thing from what he's doing.

And I think Mind-body type stuff, hypnosis, respiration and breathing. I think the hard science, walk into the problem is always going to be best to get the community on board. And then it's up to people like Matt and, to really, you know, take it to the next level and, as I say, not Keezy out of the game because Keezy basically was taking too much of his own stuff and he started dressing crazy in banana hats and like you see him, he had the, the magic bus.

So, you know, the day, so Lex, the day I start driving to work in the magic bus, that's the day I lose my job.

Speaker 2

I'm

Speaker 1

not into buses or, or, or wearing fruit, but, You're

Speaker 2

going to get a phone call from me and I hope you do the same for me. It's like, like, dude, what are you doing?

Speaker 1

Well, what's interesting earlier we were talking about the challenge with David that you're about to do.

Speaker 2

I

Speaker 1

mean, That is a psychedelic experience of sorts because you're biasing your mind towards a pretty extreme neurochemical state, and you don't know what you're going to find there. And that's kind of the excitement, at least for me as an observer, it's like I want to know what, what the experience is like afterward. I want to know like, how was it? I mean, I'm sure you're going to get something.

Like you said, you're going to grow. The question is how.

Speaker 2

And not resisting. I mean, it's the same as with a psychedelic experience. It's like not, like giving yourself over completely to the experience and not resisting and going through the whole mental journey of whether it's anger or excitement or exhaustion, the whole thing. It's, I mean,

that's it, the entirety of the process that David goes through when he does his own challenges and so on is that whole journey. He finds purposely, like, missile seeks the limits of the mind that, that, whatever, whenever the resistance is felt, runs up against it, and then goes through the full journey of going beyond it and seeing what's there on the other side.

Speaker 1

Well, stress has these two sides, the limbic friction of being tired and needing to get more energized. That's one form of stress. And then there's the feeling too amped up and needing to calm down.

Speaker 2

The,

Speaker 1

the, the typical discussion around stress is one thing, but it's all limbic friction. It's just that when I say limbic friction, I, that's not a real scientific term. I just mean the limbic system wanting to pull you down into sleep or wanting to put you into panic, and you using top-down processing, using that evolved forebrain to say, mm-mm, I'm not going to go to sleep, and mm-mm, I'm not going to freak out.

And those top-down control mechanisms are, I mean, the way Those get honed, that's beautiful because then you real, you're increasing capacity for everything.

Speaker 2

You, this month on the podcast, you're talking about neuroplasticity, you mentioned it a bunch already. Is there something you're looking forward to specifically, like something maybe you're fascinated by that jumps to mind about neuroplasticity, this fascinating property of the brain?

Speaker 1

Yeah, I think that it's clear there's one facet of neuroplasticity that is very well supported by the research data that hardly anyone has implemented in the real world. And that's the release of acetylcholine from these neurons in the forebrain called nucleus basalis. This is mainly the work of, Mike Merzenich, who used to be at UCSF, and some of his scientific offspring, Greg Raconson and Michael Kilgard and others.

What they showed was Increases in acetylcholine, this molecule associated with focus, in concert, meaning at the same time as some event, motor event or music event or any kind of sensory event, immediately reorganizes the neocortex so that there's a permanent map representation of that event. And I, I absolutely believe that this can be channeled toward accelerated skill learning.

And my friend and colleague, Eddie Chang, who's now the, chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, but also a fine scientist in his own right, not just a clinician, he's doing studies looking at rapid acquisition of language using these principles. He trained with Merzner. It's clear we have these gates on plasticity in the forebrain, and they are gated by nicotinic acetylcholine transmission, and why that hasn't made it into protocols for motor learning, sport learning, language learning, music learning, emotional learning, I don't know.

I think part of the reason has been kind of cultural, is that scientists publish their paper, they move on. Merzenich talked a lot and still can be found from time to time talking about how these plasticity mechanisms can be leveraged. But, he had a commercial company, and so then people kind of backed away from it a little bit. I think he was, to be honest, I think Merzenich was ahead of his time, and I think the timing is right now for people to understand these mechanisms of plasticity and start to implement them.

Also, you know, it all sounds like being, becoming superhuman or optimizing or whatever. All that, yes, but also what about kids with language learning deficits or with dyslexia or just performance in school in general? You know, I have a deep interest and concern for the future of science and mathematics and in, not just in this country, but all over the world, and more plasticity equals faster, better, deeper learning.

And if we don't do this, I don't think we're going to get the full reach out of all the machine learning tools either,

Speaker 2

because

Speaker 1

everyone talks about these huge data sets, and, but those huge data sets funnel into human interpretation. I mean, we don't just like stare at the numbers and bask, right? So some, the human brain, I think, needs to leverage these Plasticity mechanisms to keep up with the thing that's happening very, very fast, which is technology development.

So that's a long-winded way of saying, basal forebrain cholinergic transmission and plasticity, it allows for plasticity in adulthood and allows for it in single trial learning, which is incredible.

Speaker 2

But how do we leverage that, like in the physical space taking actions, or is there some chemicals that can stimulate,

stimulate neuroplasticity, like what could be... I think it's the

Speaker 1

intersection of the two. I think it's being engaged in a physical practice while enhancing pharmacology. And it has to be done safely.

Speaker 2

And this is full of open questions. This is the very beginnings of it, like, like you're saying.

Speaker 1

Yeah, a, a pill that's safe, that increases nicotinic transmission. I mean, I know a number of people that chew Nicorette. actually, there have an, I have a Nobel Prize winning colleague at Columbia, not to be named, who chews like six pieces of Nicorette in a half hour conversation with him. And he started doing that as a replacement for smoking because smoking is nicotine, nicotinic stimulation of the cholinergic system.

So smokers have long known that it increases focus and attention and learning. It's just that the, the lung cancer thing is a, is a barrier. Now, I'm not suggesting people take Nicorette, but it's clear that we need better directed pharmacology. But you can imagine next time you go in for a learning bout, if it's really essential, you might want to stimulate the nicotinic system if that's safe for you.

Again, I'm not Doctor. So again, I'm not telling people to do this, but that's where it's going. Until we start merging machines with pharmacology and behavior, it's, it, we're just kind of walking around in a circle over and over again, and it's going to happen.

Speaker 2

Do you find, computer vision, machine learning, from the perspective of tooling as an interesting tool for

analyzing, for processing all the data from the neuroscience world, from the neurobiology, biology, the chem- ever, all the different data sets that you can have about the mind, the eye, the,

everything that's neck and above, and also the central nervous system and all.

Speaker 1

absolutely. I mean, I think that computer science and engineering and chemistry, bioengineering is That's what's creating the acceleration and progress in neuroscience right now. I think it's actually one place where science, I'm very reassured, science has invited in psychologists, computational biologists, at least at Stanford, MIT, and other places too, of course.

It's clear that it's a everyone's invited kind of party right now. The major issue in the field of neuroscience, at least through my view, is that there's no conceptual leadership. No one is saying we need to work on and solve this problem or that problem. It's very fragmented right now. Now, the good news is people are communicating, so computer scientists and people who work on AI, machine vision are talking to biologists and vice versa, but it's very dispersed.

Speaker 2

Is there a lot of different data sets? Like in your work that you've just come across, it's a huge number of this per data sets around neuroscience and so on, or,

Speaker 1

well, there's a lot of cell sequencing stuff. So the Broad over at, you know, in, on, in Boston, and then on this coast, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, what, you know, they did, you know, three billion dollars to sequence every cell type in humans and in animals and try and, I think their goal is to cure every disease by some date, I don't know, in the, in the future.

huge data sets of gene expression and protein expression, that's valuable. I think no one really knows how to think about neural circuits and what, what is a neural circuit? is it one structure? Is it two structures communicating? I think, this is where I actually think that the robotics is going to tell us how the brain works, because it, it's tempting to think that the brain has all these cell types.

And circuits in order to solve specific problems, but it might be that the fundamental algorithm is to create cells and circuits that can solve variable problems. We know in the retina, just a very simple example is that we've always heard about like cones are for color vision and high acuity and rods are for night vision and, and non-color vision.

But at the dusk-dawn transition, certain cell types switch to do completely different, have a completely different function for viewing starry night versus what they do during the daytime. So neurons multiplex, and I think building machines that can multiplex and can evolve themselves is going to help us really understand what the brain is doing.

We need to tease out the fundamental algorithms. We know they're like motion detection and spatial vision and things like that. I think machines are going to be much faster at that than our understanding of biology and how the brain does that. Basically, I'll be out of a job and people like you will have a job. No,

Speaker 2

well, no, the, I think the, the main idea is that, there won't be a job that's machine learning or, computer vision. It's just, it's a, it's a tool that neuroscientists will use more and more and more, and, biologists would use. I mean, this whole idea that it will just be a, a tool that allows you to start

expanding the kind of things you can study.

Speaker 1

Well, the next generation coming up, I can say this cause I, now I'm blessed to have a bioengineering student, they think about problems so differently than biologists do. we, we realized the other day we both came up with a set of ideas around a certain project, and we realized that her version of it was the exact opposite of mine, you know, and hers was far, far more rational.

It's just an engineering perspective. It's like, why would we do that last? We should do that first. I think that the, the next generation is really interested in solving practical problems.

Speaker 2

It's

Speaker 1

a lot like computer science and engineering was in the late nineties. It was like, you can go do a PhD in computer science and engineering, maybe, or you go work for a company and actually build stuff that's useful. I think neuroscientists and people interested in neuroscience are starting to think, how can I build stuff that's useful? And this is statement is supported by the fact that many people in my business leave their academic labs, fortunately not all of them, but they leave their academic labs and they go work for companies.

Like Neuralink.

Speaker 2

Like Neuralink. This is something I think we've, we've spoken a few times offline, about

as, I mean, speaking of computer vision, I'm fascinated by the eye. I did a bunch of work on the eye. So from, there's the neuroscientist, there's a neurobiology way of studying the eye, and there's the computer vision way of studying the eye. And the computer vision way of studying the eye, of just like observing, non-contact sensing of humans, is really fascinating to me, and studying human behavior in different contexts, like in semi-autonomous vehicles.

It seemed like there's a lot of signal that comes from the eye that comes from blinking, that's not fully understood yet. It's been in the lab, it's been used quite a bit to study, like, the dilation of the pupil, all those kinds of things were used for, to, to infer workload, cognitive load, all those kinds of things, but the picture's is murky.

It's not completely well understood, especially in the wild, how much signal you can get from the eye, from the human face.

I've, downloaded, Joe Rogan's, all of the podcasts he's ever done, video.

Speaker 1

You have the YouTube bank.

Speaker 2

I have the YouTube bank. For, for a reason that this was before he went with Spotify.

Speaker 1

You own the archive. There's PubMed, and then there's the Joe Rogan experience owned by, or Lex. Or maintained by Lex, by. Yeah, privately,

Speaker 2

for my private collection. No, the reason I did it, and I did the really, like, rigorous processing of it, which is like the, I extracted all of the faces, I did the really good blink track, the pupil tracking and the blink detection for the entirety of the, oh, I should say it's from episode, like, I forget what it is, but it's like episode 900 when, they switched to 1080p video.

But it was like much crappier video. It's still kind of... Did you

Speaker 1

log when there was marijuana consumption or when they were

Speaker 2

drinking? I mean, there's so many... Because that's

Speaker 1

going to, like, just, it won't throw off the data, but it's relevant to the

Speaker 2

people

Speaker 1

data.

Speaker 2

So let's just put it this way. There's a lot of fascinating computer vision problems involved, but I only kept long sequences of data where the eyes detect exceptionally well. And I also removed people that were wearing glasses. I removed, there's certain people that have a way of moving their eyes and squinting where it's harder to infer, like, concrete blinks.

You know, they'll kind of have a squint the whole time. And their blink is very light. It's very tough to know what's,

what's an actual blink. So I wanted to... You got

Speaker 1

those baseball cap wearing guys. Baseball cap, yeah. There are certain people that go on podcasts and wear baseball caps and, and don't reveal their... I don't know if they realize it or not until it comes out, but their face is completely obscured from vision.

Speaker 2

And from a computer vision perspective, people that wear makeup, and usually women on their eyes, it, it complicates things. Like eyelashes all complicate things. So I, you know, you can clean stuff up just so you have really crisp signal. You don't have to, you can, you can deal with issues, but, you know, there's so many hours of jargon video.

Anyway, I say all that because I was searching for an interesting personal experiment for me, because, I saw in drivers when, when I was looking at eye movement in drivers, it seemed to indicate, there seemed to be quite a lot of signal there that indicates Amount of cognitive load. But it's not clear if there's something conclusive. But if there is some signal, that's a really powerful one because eye movement can be detected in the wild.

Like you and I sitting here, I can detect eye movement really well. Pupil dilation is a really crappy indicator.

Speaker 1

And it's luminance dependent, like if I turn toward a light, it's, it's a route, it, pupils change size depending on level of alertness, arousal, autonomic arousal, but also overall levels of luminance. It's very, very hard. But there are, I mean, you're sitting on a, on a gold mine, because the, there is a lot of interest right now in measuring state through non-contact sensing.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Speaker 1

heart rate variability through changes in skin tone, just off a camera. Can you imagine that at the point where you just look at some video and you're like, oh, they're, they're getting more stressed or worked up and they're not based on a heat map of some little patch on their face? Because everyone's going to have this slight, you know, sort of, compartmentalize it slightly differently, but you can learn it pretty quickly.

We know this When someone's like giving a talk and we see them starting to get blotching on their, on their neck, you know, this is the like, the thesis defense

Speaker 2

response,

Speaker 1

right? We know it and we're, it's a stressful situation because of not passing your thesis defense is rough. And we can see that, but cameras can pick that up really easily at much lower levels than the, the blatant blotching kind of effect. And eye movements certainly are powerful indications of the state of the autonomic system.

Speaker 2

So what, what do you, do you think there are things, from a high level that you can pick up from eye movement and, and blinking?

Speaker 1

Well, blink frequency is going to increase as people get tired, right? I have actually been teased a lot online because I don't blink much when I'll do a post. And I, and so I did a whole post about blinking, about the science of blinking. There's some data, very strong data, not from my lab, that show that every time you blink, it resets your perception of time.

They have people do these kind of track a, a kind of a Doppler-like thing. And anyway, blinking resets your perception of time. There's a dopaminergic mechanism in a, in the blink-related circuitry of the brain. when people are very alert, they tend to not blink very much. When we're sleepy, we tend to blink more, and our eyes tend to close.

Now, some people are more hooded in their, the way their eyes sit. Some people are like this all the time. There are some very famous people, I'm not going to name them because I might run into them at some point, who are like accused of being sociopaths because they don't blink very often. But they might just have high levels of autonomic arousal.

They just don't blink very much. it also depends on how lubricated the eyes are. So I think within individual, you can get a lot of information. I don't think we can say, this person's blinking a lot, they're lying, this person, or they're tired, this person doesn't blink, they're, they're stressed. I think if you understand that person's baseline, you can get it.

And presumably, well, having been on the Joe Rogan experience, I can say when you first sit down there, if you've never been in there before,

Speaker 2

You're on my data set, by the way.

Speaker 1

Oh my. Well, I bet you I, I, I will admit to being, you know, first time being, sitting down there, I mean, Joe was incredibly gracious, made me feel very comfortable there, but, it's a, it's an intense experience. it's a small space too. Anytime you enter a small space from a big space, in his old studio,

is it, you're familiar with, there's a breaking in period where you're getting to know somebody. And so I'm sure my levels of autonomic arousal front of the podcast were higher than later. So, but once you have a baseline established, you can get a lot of data on somebody simply from blinks. some people averting gaze too. If you have both people, that's really powerful.

This is the holy grail, another holy grail of neuroscience. We've mainly looked at subjects in isolation.

Speaker 2

There

Speaker 1

hasn't been much brain imaging of two people interacting, or even in animal models of two mice or two monkeys interacting. It's all like person scanner, byte bar. I mean, if you've ever been in one of these scanners, you're like in a byte bar. It's very medieval. So

Speaker 2

you think in the interaction, there's actually, you can almost study them as a single brain or as a single system. The, the two brains are a single system.

Speaker 1

I think with AI.

Speaker 2

Highly correlated.

Speaker 1

Yeah, maybe are your blinks triggering my Like, you know, are your non-blink epochs, you know, extending my non-blink epochs? There's a fascinating space to explore there, and no one's done it. And because everyone let the Joe Rogan Experience archive disappear, except for you, you grabbed it. Did you get the comments too? Because I think the comments were almost as entertaining as the conversation.

Speaker 2

You know what you just made me realize with the couplings, I have a better data set than the Joe Rogan podcast with high resolution video, which is the raw video for this podcast. So for example, both cameras are now recording you and I full, full feed. The final result will switch cameras back and forth, but I have the full feed.

Speaker 1

Right.

Speaker 2

So I can have the blinking for both you and I the whole time.

Speaker 1

I bet you people trigger blinks and in one another, you know, and there's also like the, the simplest way to think about the blinks and the attentional thing and the alertness is two fighters in the, in the standoff. There's this whole lore around who blinks first.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

It's like they blink first. Well, what What are we really asking? They're asking whether or not one person can maintain focus longer than the other person, which is an important parameter. It's not the only parameter, but it's an important parameter. And so that blinking contest, even though they don't square off as a blinking contest, it's well known that the first to blink is revealing something about their capacity to hold attention.

Speaker 2

You've started an amazing podcast that we've mentioned a few times. people should definitely check it out. it's called the Huberman Lab Podcast. It, it does your, it's basically,

it embodies the personality of Andrew Huberman, which is like, makes science accessible,

but also, fascinating and giving it like, what, what do you call it? You give tools for everyday life, meaning It kind of grounds in like, what the hell does this mean for my life? But then also does the beauty of science at the same time. So I, I love, I love both the, the rigor and the openness of the whole thing, plus the whole corrections thing that you mentioned.

Anyway, what's, been the hardest part of this whole process? You're one of, already one of the only and one of the best science podcasters out there. So in that process, what's been the hardest, what's been the most exciting part?

Speaker 1

Well, well, first of all, thanks for the Kind words about the podcast. It was inspired by you. I, I absolutely, it's, that's no BS. I, the last time we met to do an interview for your podcast, we talked a little bit about it and you gave me the, subtle nudge that maybe there was a, there was a podcast there and I thought about it and I left and I was just like, I got to do this thing.

And you really gave me the encouragement to do it. And I, your podcast, this podcast has really forged the way. You've been tip of the spear on serious, scientific, intellectual, yet fun, accessible conversation. And so I, as Your colleague and friend and, but, just even if

Speaker 2

those

Speaker 1

things weren't true, like this, this podcast was and is the inspiration. There's no question. Yeah, I really, like a hundred percent. And when I decided to do the podcast, the Huberman Lab podcast, I thought really long and hard about what would work best and would be most beneficial. Turned out to be the hardest thing, which is to stay on a single topic for three or four more episodes before switching to a new topic.

Because I know from the experience of university and teaching in university, as you know, as well, that

there's always the temptation to pivot to something else, but the drilling into something really deeply is where the, where the gems reside. And the, the challenge has been how to make it interesting, how to keep people on board, how to give people tools along the way. But also stay close to the scientific data. I like to think that we're headed in the right direction.

It still needs to evolve, but that's been a challenge. I think I also am challenged by the fact that there's a tremendous range of backgrounds of listeners. So some people have asked for more names, like more bits and parts of the nervous system and cellular molecular mechanisms and all that kind of thing. And other people have said, I don't understand any of that stuff, but I think I'm keeping up.

And so unlike a university course where there are prerequisites and everyone's coming to the table with more or less the same knowledge, I have a very limited sense of what the audience knows and doesn't know. So that's why I incorporated the feature of the comment section on YouTube being a source of feedback. And I do a kind of an office hours-like episode every third or fourth episode where I address common questions.

And I think that the podcast space, in my mind, at least for the sort of podcasts I'm doing, Needed a venue for the listeners to be a more integral part of the experience as opposed to just commenting on what they liked or didn't like. So while I like to hear what people liked and didn't like, I also really like to hear about, hey, tell me more about temperature minimums and how they can be used to phase shift circadian rhythms or whatever it is.

And I realize that I'm probably losing some people along the way, but hopefully at the end of each month, and because of the way that the episodes are archived, people will come away feeling as if they've learned a ton and they have tools that they can implement, and perhaps most importantly, that they're starting to think scientifically about the tons of other stuff that's out there.

So that's been the challenge, and it's still really early days, but, and, and of course, there's also an intentional challenge. I realize that people are busy. Not everyone has two hours to listen to a podcast about jet lag and shift work and raising kids and sleep and that kind of thing. I'm not raising kids, but I did a whole thing about babies and sleep with, you know, and how parents can manage their sleep when kids aren't sleeping.

So it's been, I'm hacking through the jungle of all this stuff, but, and I'll come right back to, I, it, my inspiration and my, my, my, North Star on this is getting to a point where The audience that listens to this feels the same way that I do when I listen to your podcast.

Speaker 2

Like

Speaker 1

when I tune into your podcast, I'm going to embarrass you a little bit more by complimenting you a little bit more,

but not out of a sadistic thing, but just because when I tune into your podcast or Joe's podcast, I have the same sensation that other people have. Like, I feel like I'm home of sorts. I'm like, I'm familiar with the space and I'd like people to feel comfortable in the space that is the Huberman Lab podcast, whatever that ends up being.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's the magic of podcasting. It's like, I feel like I'm part of your life now in a way that, as a fan, that I wouldn't be otherwise. And, you know, like, I, I never was able to have that with Carl Sagan, for example, you know? and that's a whole nother level of connection with a human being that gets you excited, and then I share your excitement about, different topics in neuroscience or just,

biology in general, and then I don't have to actually understand everything you're saying to, to really enjoy it. So that, that's the magic of podcasting is like, you can go through like ten minutes not understanding what the hell a person is saying, and then you, enjoy the excitement, and then you reconnect to a thing that you do understand what they're saying.

And, you know, that's, That personal, coupled with the scientific rigor, is magic. And finding the right, it's exploration. Like, Joe found something that works for comedians, which is like, you know, having a good laugh, but also every once in a while talking seriously about difficult topics. The scientific space, it was unclear. I, you haven't had guests on

Speaker 1

yet,

Speaker 2

but,

Speaker 1

That's why I'm, I was

Speaker 2

gonna invite my, I was gonna try to force myself in there.

Speaker 1

I am, I'm officially inviting you now. Will you come on the podcast as well? I

Speaker 2

would love to. But it was, it was hard. It's still a little bit difficult to tell people that, no, you don't get it. We're not gonna talk for ten minutes. We're gonna talk for three or four hours. It's a different for scientists, for like, they're like, what, I, I don't, what are we going to talk about? They

Speaker 1

think it's like the NPR interview.

Speaker 2

Yes. And they don't realize, first of all, I think at his best, if you're like at the level of Joe Rogan, who I think is an excellent conversationalist,

it, you just lose track of time. It can be three, four, five hours and you lose track of time. I'm still not there. I find that it's still painful. Like the conversation is still challenging sometimes. You don't lose quite as much of track of time. It's still an intellectual effort. And I think it might always be, as it would be with you, because you're talking about difficult topics, maybe that require more brain.

You're not just shooting the shit with like a Brian Redband or somebody like comedians or just joking.

Speaker 1

Well, it's like, remember those shows, like where Those shows where someone would come out and like spin plates and they're running back and forth. Really good scientific discussion is like that. You have to be maintaining three or four different logical arguments and jumping back and forth. It's occasionally you get into like a real streak of linearity.

But as we found today that typically there's three or four different things that we're bouncing back and forth from. And that requires a lot of updating of these, you know, foreground circuits. It's not, it's not a passive listening experience. But I like to think that the brain likes that.

Speaker 2

I, I do want to ask, just because we were all, I don't want to forget the, the question came up to me, is your podcast has the same kind of rigor that I think like a Dan Carlin podcast has, who's a history podcaster.

Speaker 1

That's a, definitely a compliment. Thank you. It feels like Dan's way, you know, he's something for me to aspire to. So

Speaker 2

he goes through hell to prepare. He spends months preparing. It feels like you've had to really prepare for your podcast.

Speaker 1

I definitely prepare hard.

Speaker 2

How, does that, are you okay?

Speaker 1

Yeah, how much

Speaker 2

time, I mean, how much effort does that take? It feels like a conference presentation.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so we record once a week, and in the intervening time, I listen to

many university-level lectures. So NIH has a, a bank of lectures. I have some sources of, of recorded university seminars. I'm trying to find the, the points of intersection. So like for four episodes on sleep, it's not like I'm going to just regurgitate a popular book or take one lecture and just, you know, poach the content. I'm going to find the overlap in the different elements.

I also, so what I'll do is I'll generally read 10 or 15 papers, and generally those are good reviews, annual reviews, interview of neuroscience, annual review of physiology, those kinds of things. I'll chase a few references, I'll listen to some YouTube videos, but of university level lectures. And then I throw all that on a whiteboard, usually while I work out in the morning.

I'll just be working out. I have a gym in my house and I'll just put up all these random ideas. I want to cover that, dreams, hallucination. And then I take that and I start eliminate, I draw lines between the common points of intersection. And then from that, I, I distill out an outline. And then I basically think about what I want to say on my walks with my dog.

And I bother a couple of people and blab to them. So I would say each podcast, yeah, I put in 10 to 15 hours at least of passive listening preparation and maybe five or six of active preparation. So I do prepare quite a lot, but it has a certain reward component for me. To come up at the end with something that's somewhat crystallized for me is just so satisfying.

It feel like there's something about my dopamine circuits that just love that. And the only pain is that a year later after I've talked about the stuff a bunch of times, it's so much more succinct. But that's life. You know, at some point you got to pull the trigger.

Speaker 2

Well, I don't know what you think, but for me, YouTube is why I'm sad that Joe left YouTube. There's a archival nature to YouTube that's kind of magical. And so I'm really glad you're now,

you were doing a lot of educational content on Instagram before. But now, doing this podcast thing on YouTube, I, it's like, it's, you know, it's like Feynman lectures. Like,

Speaker 1

I'm not saying every podcast,

Speaker 2

but there will be, there, you will have some pod, I can already tell, there'll be some lectures which are like definitive, like really special ones. And the, there's some aspect that's archival to YouTube where, at least I hope, like 20 years from now, some kid is going to watch, watch a lecture of yours and,

you know, it'll, it'll create the next Nobel Prize, right? It'll create, it'll create another, you know, a dream that then becomes a reality. And that, that's a, that's a special thing that, that YouTube provides. So I'm really excited that you're on YouTube. And at the same time, I'm excited to see where this thing goes because,

it seems like change is the the cliche thing. The change is the only constant in these times because

you're paving, with this podcast, with this creativity, what you were doing on Instagram as well, you're paving the new era of what it means to do science. So actively doing research and actively explaining that research in new media. It's, it's very interesting

Speaker 1

to see. Inspired, genuinely inspired by you. We, we had this discussion last time after the podcast recording, and it was, it's clear that communication of science cannot be left to the, the existing institutions. And I'm not talking about universities. I just mean that the science section of newspapers is, sometimes there's some gems there, but generally it goes, you know, and yeah, I think you really have to know a field.

In order to extract the best things from that field. And my hope is that other practicing scientists and people finishing their PhD and postdoc and people who are running labs or working at companies will start to do this. I mean, how amazing would it be, for instance, if, if someone at Neuralink was giving us hints about not necessarily what they're developing, because that's complicated for all sorts of reasons, but would talk to us about what the real challenges of building futuristic brain-machine interface are like and, and what the, what it means to understand a clinical problem and address it.

I mean, I, my hope is somebody there might eventually do that, that somebody in the world of, chemistry or synthetic materials or whatever it is, will do this in a way that I could understand because I don't have expertise in those. I think it would be marvelous. And, you were tip of the spear, you were out first, and, I'm just, Happily trying to, to move along in the direction I'm going.

But I, I think the future of science education is online, and, and I think that's going to be scary to a lot of existing institutions, but it's not about disrupting anything. It's just about trying to do things better.

Speaker 2

Yeah. You know, some of the best interviews, some of the best investigative journalism is done by people inside the field. comes to mind a guy by the name of Elon Musk, who, who, I love the, the possibility that he gets a Pulitzer for that interview. But, he grilled the crap out of Vlad, the, CEO of, Robinhood. I'm not sure if you've heard

Speaker 1

of him.

Speaker 2

clubhouse,

Speaker 1

clubhouse the other night. Yeah, I saw you guys in there. I was kept out. I wasn't quick enough.

Speaker 2

My

Speaker 1

thumbs don't go fast enough, so I was, and I wasn't about to sit in the waiting room. Have you

Speaker 2

tried that social network, by the way, the clubhouse? I've,

Speaker 1

I've gone in there a few times and checked some things out. I'm, there, I have a few questions about it that, like if I'm in there, it, it, how one can participate or not participate. I, I like being a fly on the wall for those conversations. I've been very curious as to what's going on in there.

Speaker 2

Oh, it's quite, I mean, I have a, a lot of thoughts. I've, maybe it's useful to comment. I also have a Discord server, that, you know, has a few tens of thousands of people on it, and then they have also a voice chat capability. So there, there are these get-togethers. And I, I was using it in, in the spring and summer, like actively, on those voice discussions, and it's anywhere from ten to like a thousand people.

All together in voice, like you, anyone can speak anytime, right? But there's this weird dynamic that people stay quiet and only one person speaks at a time,

Speaker 1

because

Speaker 2

they're all like respectful and it's a community of like, like fundamentally respectful people, even though they're all anonymous. So like, except like me and a few others, it's all anonymous people. So

Speaker 1

interesting.

Speaker 2

And it works. It's, but the, the, the magical thing to me about that community was how intimate voice-only communication can be. It felt as intimate as like a, like a small get-together at a home with close friends. It felt like there's a calmness to it, and you're revealing things about, you know, somebody suffering from depression or being suicidal.

So those are the dark things, or being super excited, getting a new girlfriend or boyfriend. Like, just the depth of human experience shared on voice without video is, I was really surprised how intimate that is for human connection, especially in this time of COVID, it replaced that. So that, so that, so just to give you some context, there's something there.

Speaker 1

There is, there's definitely something there. One thing that comes to mind is when, like in Clubhouse, you have your little icons, so they don't actually, you don't see your face moving. I think when people see their own image, it puts them in a state of self-consciousness that is eliminated by just having an icon or an avatar.

Speaker 2

Yes. Right?

Speaker 1

So like Zoom is dreadful, because if, I'm not used to talking to people and seeing a little image of myself staring back at me in the mirror, and it's just, I know there are ways that you can adjust That, but it's really awful. And I think that when I get on Zooms now, I say hello and then I shut down the video component and then I just talk in the end.

I come back on just to show that it's still there, it's still me. But I think that voice only is really interesting. Eddie Chang would be an interesting person to talk to about this because he understands so much about how inflection communicates emotionality and deeper state.

Speaker 2

But there, there's a balance between, I think, just like you said, the privacy

somehow allows for the intimacy. So like being able to, as opposed to putting on an act, which I realize we do when we're visually presenting ourselves in remote communication.

Speaker 1

But I think that there's so few places where people can actually communicate without the fear of penalty.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Speaker 1

Those, that's You know, woefully absent these days. And so maybe people are just relieved to be in a place where they feel like I can say what I want or not say anything, and it's okay.

Speaker 2

And so, so Clubhouse, as you, to answer your kind of, question is, there was a big improvement to me over Discord, which is it has tiers. There's, it has a stage where people, the person that created the room can invite people up that would like to speak potentially, have the opportunity to speak. And then there's a bigger audience that don't get a chance to speak unless they click raise their hand and they get called on.

So there's like a tier system that allows for there to be a group of like five, ten, twenty, thirty people talking and a lot larger amount in the audience, which in Discord was a problem was that everybody could talk. And the other thing about Clubhouse is everybody is strongly encouraged to represent themselves, so you're using your real name.

It's not anonymous. How many

Speaker 1

people were in that, GameStop discussion the other day?

Speaker 2

They currently, limit rooms to 5,000, so I'm sure maxed out at 5,000, there's a lot of overflow rooms. This is the cool thing about Clubhouse, really big people were on there, all tuned in and having a conversation, having all, from, you know, all these different, worlds being able to connect. Even though without the niceties of, like, arranging the meeting, you could just show up and leave, which is really nice.

But, the reason I'm, for my lessons from Discord, I'm going to mostly stay away from Clubhouse, and I think...

Speaker 1

Or go in there under another name.

Speaker 2

Right. I'll

Speaker 1

pretend I know the actual, your actual name on. Yeah.

Speaker 2

Is, I've learned, it's, it's quite addicting. It's, it's a time sink. It's so, the intimacy of it is You find yourself wasting quite a bit of time on there. It pulls you in.

Speaker 1

Well, it's interesting, the... We're just... In sort of going back to the podcast, earlier we were talking about books or creating a technology. One thing that's absolutely clear is that anything that's easy to reproduce is probably not worth much effort and time, right? I mean,

most posts could be easily reproduced. You just repost them. So, and now there are some original posts that for which the attribution goes to the original person, and it's clear it came from you. But anything that can be easily reproduced is doesn't really expand us very much as individuals or, or as groups. And most of what I see on social media is stuff that is, is purely reproduced,

Speaker 2

right?

Speaker 1

But I think Clubhouse, I mean, it could be that some real magic emerges on there.

Speaker 2

So in, in moderation could be good. The magic is, this is another thing that I've found through COVID that maybe you can think about, is, live. I used to be not understand the appeal of live video or live connection or like in this Clubhouse live events. Because Clubhouse is technically, for the most part, it's not supposed to be recorded.

Most people don't record most conversations. It's a one-time live event. And there's a magic to that,

Speaker 1

there is,

Speaker 2

that's not captured by a, like your podcast or, my podcast produced video that's like recorded, like packaged up.

Speaker 1

Well, anything can happen. It's that anything can happen. And those, that's the kind of thing like live concerts. I, I definitely, I love live music. And it's the idea that, cause you can always listen to the album. Actually, the album usually sounds cleaner and better, but it's just this idea that anything can happen.

Speaker 2

And then you listen to like the parts, I don't know, you, like Costello did something weird, your dog did something weird, and then you have to go, god damn it, you have to go to the kitchen or something to get something and then you come back. And it's funny, I watch a lot of video like that of people, and I'll be there for the whole time.

I'll wait for them to go to the kitchen and come back. It's not like I tune out. Right. And that makes it like a richer experience for some reason. It's weird.

Speaker 1

Well, it humanizes it. Yeah, it humanizes

Speaker 2

it.

Speaker 1

And I think there is this weird effect of whether or not it's a podcast, Instagram, or Twitter, or anything else. There is kind of like two people shouting into a tunnel, and then a bunch of people with ears at the other end of those tunnels and shouting some things back. You know, that's kind of the format we're in. I think I'll check out Clubhouse again.

I've gone in there a few times during the day, and I was surprised to see how many people were in there in the middle of the day. I was like, aren't these people supposed to be working? Exactly. But maybe that is their work.

Speaker 2

Well, be very careful about the time sync of it. But yeah, if you want to, you and I go together, we have a conversation on there. But one of the things you have to figure out, I don't still know how to do it, but how to exit. Well, did you

Speaker 1

just do the, isn't there the leave quietly button?

Speaker 2

Yeah, no, but like when you and I are on stage having a conversation,

like, and okay, you and I is harder, but like, you really, if it's just you and I, then it's the usual human communication of like, all right, I gotta go. Like, but when it's like four people, you're, you don't want to interrupt everyone and announce you're leaving, you just have to, I mean, there's a weird dynamic that I haven't quite figured out.

Of how, The

Speaker 1

etiquette isn't clear. The

Speaker 2

etiquette is not clear.

Speaker 1

Well, what, The etiquette on different platforms and how that changes is really interesting. You know, how YouTube has one etiquette,

Speaker 2

which

Speaker 1

is kind of, a lot of harshness is tolerated on YouTube video comments. Twitter seems a bit harsher than Instagram. Instagram, there's kind of, it seems to be a little

Speaker 2

nice.

Speaker 1

People are really nice. People are really nice on Instagram for the most part. except for those, phishing things. I actually know someone who had their quite sizable account poached by those copyright. They come in with those like, you violated copyright thing. There's all sorts of harshness in there that if you think about it in the real world, I like to think about Instagram as if it was the real world.

Someone comes over and is basically saying like, hey, can I hold your wallet and go into the bank and I'll get some money out for you? And like, but there's this trust based on the format it comes in that it can almost get past your radar unless you're suspicious. If, if you took comments like, you know, your posts get a lot of comments and you said, you just walk past five hundred random people on the street and just listen to what they say, it, like, that's ridiculous.

I, I don't have time for that. But the comments somehow take on this importance and this relevance, and you feel, we, we feel obligated to give them value, right? And so the online communities, the, the rules really are different.

Speaker 2

Yeah. and they evolve with time, which is fascinating. With Clubhouse, it's a new social network, so it's evolving and people are figuring out as, as you go. And the same thing with podcasting on video and like scientific podcasting. This is the cool thing when I look at what you've created. I'm learning. I'm thinking like, that's interesting to do it this way.

Cause like nobody, I have nobody to copy. Not many people to copy, you know what I mean? Well, you

Speaker 1

threw out an idea. I'm not going to put it out here now cause I, I don't want to, cause knowing you, you'll hold yourself to it no matter what. But when we talked about, this issue of The challenge of staying on a particular topic for a while. I mean, you do have some cool stuff brewing in there. Oh,

Speaker 2

no, no. That's

Speaker 1

separate from this format, and I love your interview format, but

Speaker 2

when you

Speaker 1

told me about that, I got really excited that you might go forward. I'm not going to tell your audience what it is, but I will say this, it is super cool. I would have never thought about it. It's distinctly different than what I'm doing or what Lex is currently doing, and if you decide to do that podcast, I will be your first and your number one fan, and I know there are going to be millions of other people interested in that.

It would be amazing. So if you decide to go forward with the idea,

that would be awesome.

Speaker 2

I was going to say what it is, but now I'm not going to because that's even more interesting. I brought up the clubhouse thing, actually, and Elon, because I just wanted to

get your thoughts about something you've said a few times to me and in general, is that he's under a huge amount of stress. And I'm thinking of, doing a startup now and kind of thinking about all of this, cause I, you know, I enjoy podcasts, I enjoy science, but he says that his life is basically

Speaker 1

Basically hell. That's very difficult. He

Speaker 2

looks happy, but he's probably very good at... He's

Speaker 1

fulfilled. He's fulfilled, but the stress levels, the constant fires that he has to put out, and he says that most people wouldn't want to be me, and that basically the reason he does what he does is because there's probably something wrong with him. Like, it's not a... He can't help it, but do that.

Speaker 2

It's kind of beautiful. In a kind of Russian masochistic way.

Speaker 1

Well, I, I just wonder the stress, I mean, I'm sure you can, you can imagine the kind of stress he's under because, so it's, it's running three plus companies, and there's constant, like he, he, he says that, you know, every single meeting is a, is not about like, should we install a coffee maker in the, in the, in the kitchen? It's like, you know, this rocket is going to blow up, and I don't, we're all fucked.

I don't know what to do. And we have to, you have to fix, you have to fix real, like, big problems that are, and like, how do you,

oh yeah, how do you deal with that? What do you think about that kind of life? One, one, is there a way to, you know, walk through that fire? And two, should you, should you walk through that fire?

Speaker 2

Well, I mean, without knowing, I've never met Elon, but certainly, we have common friends in you and in, other people that, he worked with long ago, the PayPal days,

all of whom speak very highly of him and show, express immense admiration for the number of things that he can maintain. I think it's fair to say that he accomplishes more before 9 a.m. than most people do in, in A decade, it's clear, and that what he does would dissolve most people into a puddle of tears. Mostly because of this whole thing,

about the brain working hard equates to thinking about duration, path, and outcome, and anticipating outcomes given A, B, C, or D, a lot of very scripted linear thinking and prediction, and that is hard, it's stressful, it requires intense neurochemical output, and he's doing that for multiple projects. So presumably he's buffered himself from the coffee maker issues and the little tiny issues, but he is himself, unless there's something I don't know, he's walking around in a biological system.

He is, that's,

Speaker 1

allegedly, yes. Yeah,

Speaker 2

allegedly. So, and I don't want to reveal too much here, but I have a, a common,

A coworker and colleague through some contract work I do that, what I can tell you is that he's accessing the best resources in terms of how to optimize his biology. And he's thinking about that, not just for himself, but for all of Neuralink. Because I think, I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think there's the, there's the scale of the individual, but then there's the companies that he's creating.

And you've got people there that you could imagine if they're working at ten percent better capacity or can focus five percent better for twenty percent of the day, you're looking at a enormous increase in productivity and a, and a reduction in the time to reach goals, which will reduce the amount of stress, presumably on Elon, unless he goes and starts another endeavor.

Right. So I think it's certainly not healthy for most people. It seems to be where he gets his dopamine hits. I'm also really struck by the fact that he has a family and he has, you know, he maintains, he's got kids growing up and a relationship and all that. So it's super impressive. I think that, I don't know, how old is Elon? He's

Speaker 1

40, I mean, pushing 50, I think 48.

Speaker 2

Even more impressive. Because, you know, many people who've been at exceedingly high output for a decade or more don't do well. Their system breaks down.

Speaker 1

Well, this is what he was saying. He, actually the, I mean, I don't listen to all of his interviews, but on that live on the Clubhouse, he mentioned that he was kind of worried. It's interesting. He was worried that, like, sometimes he, what I think he said is, I'm worried that some At some point, my brain is just going to fail because of the amount of load it's under, like how much I have to think through throughout the day, like how many, like, problems you have to think through.

Like, you know, it's like puzzles. It's constant puzzle solving.

Speaker 2

I would be concerned about taking somebody who's in that regime and suddenly putting them into a regime where they don't have enough to bite down into. It's like my bulldog, Costello, he's happiest when chewing and tugging with that big old neck of his, and he is just not going to become a retriever. He's not going to, he does well and gets his dopamine hits from chewing and pulling.

And it, it seems like Elon has ended up where he is by way of his Natural leanings. I, unless there's a, a backstory that's, trauma-based or something, and I don't even begin to think that there is, it seems that he has, he's one of those rare individuals in history that has an immense drive to create in all these different domains. I'm just saying the obvious here, but it seems like that's what makes him tick.

I mean, you're doing an awful lot too.

Speaker 1

Well, but the problem is not really, the, the, the problem is, about, I've been on the verge of pulling the trigger on, on, on, starting a company which will increase the workload significantly. And, I'm attracted to that because of a dream I have, but it, it's a little bit scary because it can destroy you in, in, in a, in a lot of ways. There's two, there's two sources of destruction.

So one source is, I've, for the first time in my life, a few,

months ago, I think, have gotten, this feels like such a noob thing to say it, but I've gotten some hate on the internet.

Speaker 2

No.

Speaker 1

I know, right?

Speaker 2

No.

Speaker 1

But like, I am such an idiot. I'm so naive to, it was surpr, it, I, I had the question that I guess a lot of people, have when they get hate on the internet. It's like, like, it's like, mom, why are these people making up stuff about me? You know, that kind of feeling of like, why, why are you saying that? And, and the, the, the, the reason I mention that is like, well, if you go, if you want to go and start a business and do,

as I think people should when they start a big, ambitious business, really try to go big. Like, what does success look like in terms of your emotional journey? You're going to have a lot of people who make up stuff about you, who say negative things. I mean, majority, hopefully, if you do a good job, will be supportive and, but there's still going to be this army of people there.

And like, that, that was scary to me because of how much emotional impact that had on me.

Speaker 2

Well, and I also know a little bit, I have some glimpse into the fact that you put your heart and soul into everything you do. You're not a, you're lighthearted about certain things, but you're even lighthearted about being full gas pedal

Speaker 1

24-7.

Speaker 2

There's kind of this, you know, what is it,

What is it, Laird Hamilton always says, you know, the big wave surfer, he's, he always says, you know, bright light, dark shadow, you know, and, I think it's that intensity, and when you do that, and then suddenly people are starting to, like, throw some paint on your picture, you're like, wait, hold, you know, you're going max capacity. But I think the company is an interesting one because you've talked about doing this company before.

Speaker 1

I've been afraid. I've just not been pulling the trigger, out of fear, because I enjoy this life. This is, it's starting to draw, but it's ultimately this question of taking a leap. It's like,

say you're in academia, like you're at MIT, you're, I really love doing research at MIT. I really love that life. Why take a leap out? You know, but I did, because it's been a dream. But now, accidentally along the way, I found this podcasting thing, which is also really fulfilling. And, you know, it's like, why take a leap?

Speaker 2

Because you have a huge lust for life.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I mean, that's you. I mean, sometimes when I'm on the internet, and I think, is this, you know, you hear about it, like, oh, it's addicting, you know, YouTube's addicting, all that. Actually, sometimes I think maybe that's true, but a lot of times I just think, there's so much here. There's a lot of garbage, but there's so many gems out there in the world now.

It's almost like, sure, how you allocate time is key, but I,

I think you can do it all. Maybe not five more things, but all.

Speaker 1

And

Speaker 2

one thing, I just had this idea, and this is not grounded in any scientific paper, but I think the answer might come to you during this,

This torture that you're about to put yourself through with David,

Speaker 1

because in

Speaker 2

those mental states, you're really asking the question, right? You're asking the question, where is my capacity? And am I even close to my capacity? And if I am, what's, what's of the most value? I think we find the answers to those things in those nonverbal, non-analytic states. It just comes to us.

Speaker 1

I hope you're right. And I hope it's a profoundly fulfilling experience as opposed to one that leads to my demise. But,

Speaker 2

it goes, it all goes to the, to the hedgehog. Yeah,

Speaker 1

exactly, to the hedgehog. now it all makes sense. Andrew, like we talked about offline on this podcast, I do hope we write some stuff together, do some research together. You're, you're, you're one of the most inspiring scientists. Yeah, speaking or communicating to the world. so I can't wait to see what you do with the podcast. I'm already a huge fan.

I've been telling everybody about it. I can't wait to see you talk to Joe, as well soon, and I can't wait to see what kind of paper we write together. Thanks so much for talking to

Speaker 2

me. Oh, thank you. That project's going to be a lot of fun. Can't wait. And thanks again for having me on. Appreciate you, brother.

Speaker 1

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman, and thank you to our sponsors, Masterclass Online Courses, Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Magic Spoon Low-Carb Cereal, and BetterHelp Online Therapy. Click the sponsor links to get a discount, and remember, now is the time to sign up to Masterclass if that's something you've been on the fence about.

And now, let me leave you with some words from Woodrow Wilson. We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.