back to indexAndrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity, Fasting, and Neuroplasticity | Lex Fridman Podcast #164
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The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman,
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his second time on the podcast.
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He's a neuroscientist at Stanford,
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a world class researcher and educator,
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and now he has a new podcast on YouTube
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and all the usual places called Huberman Lab
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that I can't recommend highly enough.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Masterclass Online Courses for Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee,
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Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal,
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and BetterHelp Online Therapy.
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Click the sponsor links to get a discount.
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By the way, Masterclass is testing to see
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if they want to support this podcast long term.
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So if you're on the fence, now is the time to sign up.
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And I'm pretty sure Andrew will have
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a neuroscience masterclass on there soon enough,
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though his podcast is basically
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a weekly masterclass in itself.
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As a side note, let me say that Andrew is a friend
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and a new collaborator.
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We're working on a paper together
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about a topic we're both really passionate about.
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At the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning.
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But that's probably many months away from being published.
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Still, I'm really excited about this work.
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He's one of the smartest and kindest people
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I have the pleasure of talking to on this podcast,
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so I hope we'll talk many more times in the future.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it on our podcast, follow on Spotify,
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support it on Patreon, or connect with me
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on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with Andrew Huberman.
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Why do humans need sleep?
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Let's go with a big first question.
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Okay, well, the answer I'll start with
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is the one that I always default to
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when there's a why question,
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which is I wasn't consulted at the design phase.
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So I wriggle my way out of giving a absolute answer, right?
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But there's one mechanism that's very clear
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that's super important,
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which is that the longer we are awake,
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the more adenosine accumulates in our brain.
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And adenosine binds to adenosine receptors,
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no surprise there,
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and it creates the feeling of sleepiness
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independent of time of day or night.
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So there are two mechanisms.
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One is we get sleepy as adenosine accumulates.
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The longer we've been awake,
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the more adenosine has accumulated in our system.
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But how sleepy we get for a given amount of adenosine
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depends on where we are in this so called circadian cycle.
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And the circadian cycle
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is just this very, very well conserved oscillation.
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It's a temperature oscillation
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where you go from a low point.
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Typically, if you're awake during the day
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and you're asleep at night,
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your lowest temperature point will be like 3 a.m., 4 a.m.,
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and then your temperature will start to creep up
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as you wake up in the morning,
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and then it'll peak in the late afternoon,
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and then it'll start to drop again toward the evening,
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and then you get sleep again.
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That oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours.
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Plus your temperature.
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Yeah, plus or minus an hour.
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even though I wasn't consulted at the design phase,
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I do not think it's a coincidence
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that it's aligned to the 24 hour spin of the Earth
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The fact that we tend to be bathed in sunlight
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for a portion of that spin,
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and in darkness for the other portion of that spin.
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So there are two mechanisms,
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the adenosine accumulation and the circadian time point
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that we happen to be at.
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And those converge to create a sense
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of sleepiness, awakefulness.
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The simple way to reveal these two mechanisms,
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to uncouple them, is stay up for 24 hours,
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and you will find that even though you've been,
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let's say you stay up midnight, 2 a.m., 3 a.m.,
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provided you're on a regular schedule,
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like that I follow, not like the kind that you follow,
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I will get very sleepy around 3, 4 a.m.,
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but then around 5 or 6 or 7 a.m.,
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which is my normal wake up time,
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I'll start to feel more alert,
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even though adenosine has been accumulating further.
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So adenosine is higher for me the longer I stay up,
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and yet I feel more alert than I did a few hours ago.
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And that's because these are two interacting forces.
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So adenosine makes you sleepy,
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and then just how sleepy or how awake you feel
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also depends on where you are
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in this temperature oscillation that takes 24 hours.
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Okay, so that's fascinating.
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So there's a bunch of oscillations going on,
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and then they kind of, through the evolutionary process,
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have evolved to all be aligned somewhat,
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and they interplay.
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So you said your body temperature goes up and down.
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There's chemicals in your brain that oscillate,
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and then there's the actual oscillation
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of the sun in the sky.
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So all of that together has some impact on each other,
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and somehow that all results in us
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wanting to go to sleep every night.
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Right, so, and we can get right into the meat of this,
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so I guess we just dove right in,
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but the temperature oscillation
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is the effector of the circadian clock.
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So every cell in our body has a 24 hour rhythm
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that's dictated by genes like clock, purr, BMAL.
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This is one of the great successes of biology.
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They give a Nobel prize to Rappert,
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I don't know if Rappert got it, forgive me,
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but sorry if you got it, Steve, congratulations.
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If you didn't, I'm sorry, I wasn't on the committee.
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Nonetheless, did beautiful work, Steve Rappert and others,
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but Mike Roshbosh and other people worked out
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these mechanisms in flies and bacteria and mammals.
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There are these genes that create 24 hour oscillations
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in gene expression, et cetera, in every cell of our body.
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But what aligns those is a signal
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from the master circadian clock,
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which sits right above the roof of the mouth,
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called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
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And that clock synchronizes all the clocks of the body
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to this general temperature rhythm
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by way of controlling systemic temperature,
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which makes perfect sense.
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If you want to create a general oscillation
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in all the tissues and organs of the body, use temperature.
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And so that work on temperature,
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if people want to explore it further,
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was Joe Takahashi, who was at Northwestern,
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now at UT Southwestern in Dallas.
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And it is absolutely clear that humans do better
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on a diurnal schedule, sorry, Lex,
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than a nocturnal schedule, because you could say,
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well, provided I sleep and push adenosine back downhill,
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which is what happens when we sleep,
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adenosine is then reduced.
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And provided I am on more or less a 24 hour schedule,
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why should it matter that I'm awake when the sun's out
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and I'm asleep when the sun is down?
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But it turns out that if you look at health metrics,
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people that are strictly nocturnal do far worse
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on immune function, on metabolic function, et cetera,
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than people who are diurnal,
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who are awake during the daytime.
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And animals that are nocturnal, it's the opposite.
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And animals that are so called crepuscular,
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which tend to be active at dawn and at dusk,
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this is a beautiful system, I won't go down that rabbit hole,
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but these are animals whose visual systems operate best.
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They tend to be predators like mountain lions.
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They have optimized their waking times
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for the times when the animals they eat
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can't see well in those light conditions.
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But given the rod cone ratios in their eyes,
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that the mountain lion is picking off.
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It's like when you see a special forces
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and they are looking through night vision goggles
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and they have a clear advantage, right?
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They are seeing in the dark.
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That's basically what it's like to be a mountain lion
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as opposed to a bunny rabbit.
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Would you say that a lot of these cycles evolved
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in the predator prey relationships
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of the different throughout the food chain?
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So it's basically all somehow has to do with survival
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in this complicated web of predators and prey.
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Almost certainly, there had to have been a time
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in which humans being awake and active at night,
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as opposed to during the day,
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led to higher levels of lethality.
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And probably particular in kids,
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you imagine kids running around in the dark
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and getting that where there are a lot of animals
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that can see really well under those conditions
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And this would be all preelectricity.
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Even if you're carrying a torch,
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I mean, the range of illumination on a torch
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is nothing compared to what a nighttime predator,
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like a large cat or something can do.
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I mean, they basically, they can see everything they need to
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in order to eat us and not the other way around.
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So one fascinating thing you said
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is that blew my mind and we went right past it,
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which is the temperature is a really powerful,
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like if you were to think about the ways
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that different parts of the body,
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different systems in the body
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would communicate with each other,
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temperature would be a really good one.
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And that just, I mean, maybe it's obvious,
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but it kind of blew my mind just now
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that yeah, these systems are all distributed.
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And they have to kind of,
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they're not actually sending signals,
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but they're coordinating.
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They need some sort of universal thing to look at
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in order to coordinate.
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And temperature is a nice one to build around.
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And that way you could control the behavior
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of all these different systems
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by controlling the temperature.
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Right, it's attractive to think of a mechanism
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where this master circadian clock secretes a peptide
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or something that goes and locks to receptors
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in all the cells and gets it just right.
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But that leaves far too much room for variability,
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binding affinities, cells in a lot of parts of our body
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are at different stages of maturation.
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They're turning over liver cells and so forth.
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And for instance, we have a clock in our gut
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and in our liver such that if we were just take out
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your liver and put it on a table
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and just look at the expression of these genes,
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it would be in a 24 hour oscillation on its own.
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It's independent, but something has to entrain them
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and keep them all synchronized.
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And so it's not obvious that it would be temperature.
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Takahashi's great gift to biology was to show
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that all the stuff coming out of this master circadian clock
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at the end of the day, that's a weird statement,
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no pun intended, at the end of the day and the night,
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at the end of the story, it all boils down to making sure
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that the temperature of tissues oscillates
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in the same fashion.
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That's blowing my mind and thinking like
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what other mechanism could possibly exist
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to create that kind of oscillation.
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Well, you're Russian, it's cold in Russia
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for a lot of the year.
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The hibernation signal in certain animals
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is a remarkable signal.
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There are peptides secreted from this very same clock
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that in animals like ground squirrels or bears,
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they go into a kind of a torpor
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where everything, reproduction, metabolism,
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everything is reduced while they're in their cave.
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They don't actually stay asleep all of winter.
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And they actually do these very dramatic
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and periodic arousals from hibernation
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where they just shake and shake and shake.
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It looks like a seizure.
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And then they go back under into the torpor.
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That's from a peptide that's released.
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But that's different
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because that's about shutting down the whole system.
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It's clear that having these very regular oscillations
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every 24 hours is essential for everything
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from metabolism to reproduction.
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Is there an optimal temperature for sleep
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that I should mention?
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I think your latest episode,
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you and people should go check out
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helixsleep.com slash Huberman to support Andrew.
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Thanks for the plug.
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I mean, the amazing thing about this stuff
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that you're creating,
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oh, and yes, you have a new podcast.
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In this past month, you did a whole series on sleep,
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which people should definitely check out.
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There's some podcasts that come out
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that just make me want to be a better human being
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by just the quality.
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Three Blue One Brown, Grant Sanderson is like that for me.
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Just like, wow, this is education is best.
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So Andrew symbolizes that, captures that brilliantly.
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So go support the sponsor
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so he doesn't stop doing the thing.
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So I think they have a cooling pad too.
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So the 8 Sleep Mattress sponsors me.
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They sent me a mattress and it's been,
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I've never, listen, I used to sleep on the floor.
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Sleep where you fall.
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Sleep where I fall.
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I don't give a shit.
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It doesn't really matter.
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But so like, I would have never bought a nice mattress
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because it's like, why?
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This is a floor, it's fine.
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But it was a game changer to be able to control temperature.
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Like for me, it's cooling.
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I don't know what the hell it is.
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Well, you want the brain and nervous system
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and rest of the body needs to drop
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by about anywhere from two to three degrees
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in order to get into your deepest sleep
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and transition to sleep.
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That's really going to help.
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You don't want to be cold that you're bothered
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and can't fall asleep.
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But that's why some people like it really cold in the room
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and under a warm blanket or with socks on,
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for some people that can be good
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because this temperature oscillation is such
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that as your temperature is dropping,
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that correlates generally with the most sleepy phase
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of your circadian cycle.
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So cool is better for falling and staying asleep
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and sleeping deeply.
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And then I guess like that's what 8 Sleep showed.
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They have like an app is it warms back up to wake you up.
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The idea that I haven't actually used it.
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I'm like, this is stupid.
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People say it works,
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but I just keep it the same temperature throughout the night
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but warming it up, I guess wakes you up,
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which is fascinating.
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Yeah, because the wake up signal is,
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it's interesting to think about it's not just correlated
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with an increase in body temperature.
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The increase in body temperature
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is triggering the release of cortisol from your adrenals.
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And that's the wake up signal.
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Do you think it's absolute temperatures we're talking about
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or is it just even relative?
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Just even just the decrease.
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Well, everyone's gonna have
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slightly different basal temperature.
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The idea that everybody should be 98.6.
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I mean, that's a myth.
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And there are theories that body temperature overall
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has been dropping in the last 50 years or so.
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I doubt that's true for somebody who is athletic like you
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and is young and healthy.
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But basically the coldest period of that 24 hour cycle
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is when you are going to be sleepiest.
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There's actually a period within that 24 hour cycle,
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it's a time point called your temperature minimum.
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And your temperature minimum tends to be about two hours
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before your typical wake up time.
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I'm not talking about the wake up time
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in the middle of the night where you go use the bathroom
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or where you set an alarm to go catch a flight.
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I mean, if you were to just allow yourself
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to sleep without a clock for a few days,
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measure when you typically wake up,
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two hours before then is your temperature minimum.
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And that temperature minimum turns out to be
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a very important landmark in your circadian cycle
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because it turns out that if you get bright light
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in your eyes in the hours immediately
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before your temperature minimum,
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so two to four hours or anytime within the two
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or four hour window before that temperature minimum,
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you are going to what's called delay your circadian clock.
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The next day, that whole oscillation
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is going to move forward.
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It'll make you want to go to sleep later and wake up later.
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Whereas if you get bright light in your eyes
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in the hours after that temperature minimum,
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so let's say for me, typical wake up time is 6 a.m.,
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my temperature minimum somewhere around 4 a.m.
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If I get bright light in my eyes, 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 7 a.m.,
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it's going to advance that oscillation
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so that I'll want to go to bed earlier
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and wake up earlier the subsequent nights.
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So you might say, wait, but most nights
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I go to sleep and wake up at more or less the same time.
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And that's because the same thing
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is happening on both sides.
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You are both advancing your clock a little bit
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and assuming that you're looking at light in the evening,
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you're also delaying your clock a little bit.
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So you get kind of captured in between
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and then your rhythm more or less oscillates
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at the same period, as we say, as the spin of the earth.
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Unless you're like you where you're,
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I get text messages from you sometimes at odd hours
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and if you're on the East Coast,
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then I know that you had to have been pulling
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basically an all nighter.
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Yeah, yeah, that's the interesting point
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about the messiness of sleep.
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So most people seem to perform the best
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when they have like a regular sleep schedule.
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I perhaps am the same, but I don't know that.
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And I tend to believe that you can also perform
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relatively optimally with chaos of sleep,
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of like a weird soup of like power naps
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and all nighters and all of that,
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as long as you're like happy doing what you love.
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And maybe you can tell me what you think about this.
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So I tend to, for myself, try to minimize stress in life.
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So what I found for myself with diet,
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with sleep is that if I obsess about it being perfect,
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then I'll actually stress quite a bit when it's not.
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Like I'll feel shitty when I don't get enough sleep
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because I know I should be getting more sleep
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as opposed to the actual physiological effects
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of not getting enough sleep.
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I find if I just accept whatever the hell happens,
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happens and smile and just take it all in,
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like David Goggins style, like if it sucks,
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it's even better or what is it,
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Jocko's like good or whatever he says.
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I think there are several things
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that you said that are important,
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but I agree that one can have a dysregulated sleep schedule
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and still be a happy person and productive.
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Much of my life, I've pulled all nighters
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and slept weird schedules.
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I think many people can probably relate to going to sleep,
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waking up four hours later, being up for an hour or two
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on your computer, then going back to sleep
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and getting amazing sleep the next day functioning.
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I think it's important that people have highlighted
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the importance of sleep and getting enough rest.
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I do think it's gone too far
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and now I'm editorializing a little bit,
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but I think that we've created this anxiety about sleep
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that if we don't sleep enough, we're going to get dementia.
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If we don't get sleep,
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then the reproductive access is going to completely crash.
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There's a lot of evidence to the contrary and as well,
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just based on personal experience
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and based on the fact that sure,
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it may be that a solid eight hours
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with no interruptions in there or nine or 10
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could do great benefit,
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but you can do really well if you do what you say,
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which is you wake up,
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you don't want to start stressing about it,
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creating this meta stress about sleep.
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Being happy is actually one of the most powerful things
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allowing yourself to go down that rabbit hole of stress
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for the following reason.
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A lot of our fatigue is not due just to the buildup
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of adenosine or time of day,
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the circadian thing we were talking about earlier.
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An additional factor is that effort is related
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to the release of epinephrine,
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of adrenaline in our brain and body.
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At some point, those levels get so high
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that we get stressed mentally,
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we get stressed physically and we want to give up.
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There are good data published in Cell
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showing that that signal, the epinephrine signal,
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eventually accumulates and there's a quit point.
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Dopamine, the molecule of pursuit and reward
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and feeling good, resets our ability to be in effort.
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In fact, a lot of people don't know this,
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but dopamine is actually what epinephrine is made from.
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If you look at the biochemical cascade,
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it starts with tyrosine,
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which is found in red meats and things of that sort.
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And tyrosine is eventually converted
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through things like L dopa into dopamine.
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Dopamine is made into epinephrine.
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So, I mean, this sounds kind of new agey,
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but happiness, joy and pleasure in what you're doing
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creates a chemical milieu that provides more
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of the chemicals that allow for effort.
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And there's nothing new agey about that.
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It's in every biochemistry textbook.
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It's in every decent neuroscience textbook.
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They just don't talk about the happiness part.
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They just talk about the dopamine part.
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So, I think that limiting your stress
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and at least recognizing, okay,
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if you're pulling an all nighter
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or you're somehow on messed up sleep,
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that there is going to be a point in that 24 hour cycle
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where your brain is not trustworthy,
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where your mental state is not worth placing too much weight
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on because you are near that temperature minimum.
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And near that temperature minimum,
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which is correlates to that two hour,
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about two hours before you would normally wake up,
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the brain is hobbling along.
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And anything you feel or think at that time
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should not be given too much value.
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But if you can trick yourself into thinking
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that's the pleasure point,
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you afford yourself a huge advantage.
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There's a study done by a colleague of mine at Stanford
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that showed that positive anticipation
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about the next day events actually is a powerful metric
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for creating quality sleep,
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even if the sleep is very reduced.
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And you'll love this one.
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And a lot of people are going to,
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might be critical of this.
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So, I just want to make sure that,
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so this is work done out of Harvard Medical.
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It was Bob Stickgold's lab
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and Emily Hoagland did this study that showed
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looking at Ochem, performance on Ochem scores.
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Okay, so organic chemistry at Harvard
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is pretty tough subject, highly motivated,
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a number of very good control groups in this study.
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What she showed was that consistency of total sleep duration
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was far more important for performance on these exams
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than total sleep duration itself.
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So it's not that just getting more sleep
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allows you to perform better.
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Consistently getting about the same amount of sleep
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is better for performance, at least on Ochem,
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than just getting more.
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That's interesting.
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So that's referring to more
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that there should be a consistent habit
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versus the total amount.
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To me, like the entirety of the picture of sleep
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is similar to nutrition in that it feels like it's,
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there's so many variables involved
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and it's so person specific.
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So, you know, a lot of studies,
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I mean, this is the way of science,
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has to look in aggregate the effects on sleep.
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It doesn't focus on high performers
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which are individuals ultimately.
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Like the question isn't,
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so it's a very important question,
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is like what kind of diet fights obesity, reduces obesity?
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It's another question,
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what kind of diet allows David Goggins
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to be the best version of himself?
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So these high performers in different avenues.
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And the same thing with sleep,
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like people that tell me
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that I should get eight hours of sleep,
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it's like, it's, I mean, I get it
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and there may be right, but they may be very wrong.
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There's no evidence that eight is better than six,
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that you could very well do better on six than on eight.
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There are a few other things that turn out to be
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strong parameters for success in this domain.
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For instance, your entire life, waking or asleep
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is broken up into these 90 minute ultradian cycles.
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If you look at ability to attend or do math problems
link |
or do anything, you know, drive,
link |
performance tends to ramp up slowly within a 90 minute cycle
link |
peak and then come down at the end of that 90 minute cycle.
link |
And in sleep, we go through these stage one, two, three,
link |
four REM, et cetera, we'll talk more about that if you like,
link |
those on 90 minute ultradian cycles as well.
link |
Ending your sleep after a 90 minute cycle
link |
at the near the end of a 90 minute cycle,
link |
say at the end of six hours,
link |
in many cases is better for you
link |
than sleeping an additional hour, seven hours
link |
and waking up in the middle of an ultradian cycle.
link |
And there are a few apps that can measure this
link |
based on body movements and things like that,
link |
that have your alarm go off
link |
at the end of an ultradian cycle.
link |
And if you wake up in the middle of an ultradian cycle,
link |
sometimes not always you can be very groggy
link |
for a long period of time.
link |
I certainly do better on six hours than I do on seven.
link |
I happen to like an eight hour sleep, it feels great,
link |
but I haven't slept an entire eight hours
link |
without waking up in the middle of the night at some point
link |
in, I don't know, forever.
link |
I can't remember, it's probably some point in infancy.
link |
And I function well during the day.
link |
I think that that's an important parameter
link |
is how do you feel during the day?
link |
Almost everybody experiences some sort of dip in energy
link |
in the late afternoon
link |
or what would correlate to their temperature peak.
link |
And that's a good time of day
link |
to get either a 90 minute or less nap,
link |
or if you're not a napper or you can't nap,
link |
feet elevated has been shown to be good for clear out
link |
of some of this, the glymphatic system
link |
is this kind of like sewer system of the brain
link |
that you can clear stuff out.
link |
So legs elevated, or one thing that I'm a big proponent of
link |
and that my lab has been studying
link |
is what I now call NSDR, non sleep deep rest.
link |
And this is just lying down.
link |
There are some scripts that we're gonna put out there soon
link |
as a free resource.
link |
There's some hypnosis scripts
link |
that my colleague David Spiegel has put out there
link |
as a free resource,
link |
but non sleep deep rest is allowing your system
link |
to drop into states of a real calm
link |
that allow you to get better at falling asleep later.
link |
And they can be very restorative
link |
for cognitive and motor function.
link |
There's at least one study out of Denmark
link |
that shows that the basal ganglia,
link |
which is an area of the brain
link |
that's involved in motor planning and action,
link |
one of these 20 minute non sleep deep rest protocols
link |
resets levels of neuromodulators
link |
like dopamine and the basal ganglia
link |
to the same levels that they were
link |
right after a long night's sleep.
link |
So I also respectfully or semi respectfully disagree
link |
with the idea that you can't recover lost sleep.
link |
What does that mean?
link |
I mean, there's no IRS for sleep.
link |
So what does it mean to be in debt for sleep?
link |
If you're falling asleep during the day and you're sleepy,
link |
like you're falling asleep, that's a good sign of insomnia.
link |
It means you're not sleeping enough at night.
link |
If you're fatigued during the day,
link |
but you're not falling asleep,
link |
so you're just exhausted,
link |
but you're not finding yourself falling asleep in meetings
link |
and in conversation,
link |
then chances are you're fatiguing your system
link |
through something else,
link |
like a long run in the middle of the night in Austin
link |
or whatever it is that you're up to lately at 3 a.m.
link |
Yes, there is a magic to the nap.
link |
And maybe you could speak to the,
link |
because you mentioned these protocols
link |
that don't necessarily, so they're non sleep.
link |
But to me, the nap one or two a day
link |
can almost irrespective of how much sleep
link |
I get the night before,
link |
have a fundamental change in my mood, in my performance.
link |
For the better or for the worse?
link |
For the better, for the better.
link |
So I do tend to kind of experiment with durations.
link |
It's consistently surprising to me
link |
how like a nap of like 10 minutes,
link |
I don't know, maybe you can speak
link |
to the perfect duration of a nap,
link |
but I find that it's like magic
link |
that a short nap does as much good
link |
and often better than a longer one, for me, for me,
link |
subjectively speaking.
link |
What would be a longer one?
link |
Longer than 90 minutes?
link |
No, no, like 90 minutes,
link |
or a bit longer than 90 minutes, like two hours.
link |
Yeah, that's starting to drop you into REM sleep.
link |
And even if it's a tiny amount of REM sleep,
link |
people can come out of those naps kind of disoriented.
link |
I mean, remember, in sleep, space and time
link |
are totally uncoupled.
link |
And so that's an odd state to reenter the world in
link |
if you're not gonna stay there for a while,
link |
like for a good night's sleep.
link |
I think a 20 minute nap is pretty fantastic.
link |
Would you say that's the,
link |
if you were to recommend to the general,
link |
it's very weird to recommend anything
link |
to the general populace,
link |
because obviously it's very person specific,
link |
but what's a good one will you say to friends?
link |
Is 20 minutes a good powder?
link |
because you're going, unless you're sleep deprived,
link |
you're going to stay out of REM sleep,
link |
rapid eye movement sleep.
link |
If you're sleep deprived, you'll drop right into it.
link |
If you've ever traveled and you're really jet lagged,
link |
you go to the hotel, you lay down for one second,
link |
all of a sudden you're just like,
link |
you're in a psychedelic dream,
link |
which can be pretty great too.
link |
But I think that 20, 30 minutes,
link |
and if you can't sleep, some people have trouble napping,
link |
then learning to relax the body
link |
as much as possible,
link |
like trying to remove all expression from your face,
link |
completely letting your body kind of float.
link |
If people have a hard time relaxing when they're awake,
link |
there's some terrific clinically
link |
and research tested hypnosis protocols
link |
that we could provide links to that are cost free
link |
and that teach you how to just completely
link |
release the alertness button and you just start drifting.
link |
Now, the problem is if you don't have an alarm
link |
or something to go off,
link |
the other day I did one
link |
and I'm almost embarrassed to say this,
link |
but there's a component of it
link |
where you actually are supposed to let your hand float up
link |
because it's a hypnosis script.
link |
So they, it's my colleague, David Spiegel in the script,
link |
he says, let your hand float up.
link |
I woke up an hour later and my hand was still floating.
link |
Yeah, and I was completely relaxed.
link |
So hypnosis is just a matter of going deep relaxation,
link |
narrowing of context, and it's all self imposed.
link |
A lot of people think that hypnosis is like the stage thing
link |
with the pendant and the chicken,
link |
people fucking like chickens,
link |
but real hypnosis is self hypnosis.
link |
You're learning to, it involves some shifts
link |
in the way that you, the hypnotic induction involves
link |
looking up, closing your eyes, slowly deep breath,
link |
and then imagine yourself floating.
link |
And people vary on a scale of about one to four,
link |
four being the most easily hypnotized.
link |
There are a few people who it's very hard for them
link |
to allow themselves to go into these states,
link |
but for most people, they just, they're gone.
link |
And it's nice if you can have access to those states,
link |
because when you come out of it, you feel amazing.
link |
You feel like you slept the whole night,
link |
at least most people report that.
link |
So refresh, alert.
link |
I mean, basically you're ready.
link |
Yeah, I know you have this interesting challenge coming up
link |
and I'm curious what you're going to do to reset
link |
in the hours, the frequency of running is every four hours.
link |
It's not going to allow you to get any more
link |
than a couple hours sleep in between.
link |
So we should tell it to people.
link |
I'd be curious to get your thoughts and advice on it.
link |
I'm on March 5th, running 48 miles with Mr. David Goggins.
link |
So four miles every four hours and people should join us.
link |
He's, that mad man is going to be live on Instagram
link |
starting at 8 p.m. Pacific on March 5th.
link |
You're going to join him in person.
link |
Undisclosed location.
link |
Undisclosed location.
link |
And I was trying to clarify like, okay,
link |
so we're going to like, there'll be like friendly people
link |
around or something.
link |
No, it's just me and him.
link |
Like, I just feel it's very difficult to be
link |
with David alone in a room.
link |
I imagine his, I mean, I've done some work with David.
link |
His energy is infectious.
link |
That's an intense schedule.
link |
And the periodicity of those four hour,
link |
every four hours, four miles means
link |
that there's no chance of catching
link |
an extended block of sleep.
link |
So it's about three hours that you have
link |
non exercising every time.
link |
And of course, it takes time to try to fall asleep
link |
and there's an intensity to the whole thing.
link |
I mean, it's probably impossible to get anything more
link |
than two hours of sleep if you wanted to.
link |
So the optimal thing is probably from the sound of it,
link |
I'd be curious to see what you think,
link |
but like it's getting a few 90 minute naps.
link |
Okay, well, I thought about this a bit
link |
before we met up today.
link |
So I think there are two general approaches
link |
Neither one necessarily better than the other.
link |
One would be just to hammer through the whole thing,
link |
just to get your level of alertness and adrenaline ramped up
link |
so that you don't expect yourself to sleep.
link |
There are certain advantages there.
link |
One is a subjective kind of emotional advantages,
link |
which is if you can't sleep,
link |
you're not gonna be stressed about that.
link |
And if you do fall asleep, it's a bonus,
link |
provided you wake up and you don't look up
link |
and you realize David's been out running for half an hour
link |
and you're behind, right?
link |
But chances are, that's not the way it'll go.
link |
So that's one approach.
link |
And I grabbed that from a couple of friends
link |
who were in the SEAL teams and they'll say that,
link |
during BUDS, there's this infamous hell week
link |
and there's this five days,
link |
definitely five days of no sleep,
link |
although there is a component where they offer a nap
link |
at one particular point.
link |
And a lot of people will say that it's worse
link |
to go down for that nap and then be woken up 20 minutes later
link |
than to just stay up.
link |
So that's one option.
link |
Let's call it the full blitz hammer through option.
link |
And if you happen to fall asleep, you do.
link |
The other one would be to really anchor
link |
in these ultradian cycles.
link |
So coming back from a run,
link |
unless you're thoroughly exhausted,
link |
you're probably going to have a few minutes
link |
where you're going to want to stay awake.
link |
It's going to be hard to just immediately fall asleep.
link |
And getting as much sleep as you can
link |
in the intervening periods,
link |
provided that you guys aren't posting constantly
link |
or doing something else.
link |
There's a question of whether or not you want to nourish,
link |
whether or not you want to eat or not in that time.
link |
Anytime we put food in our gut,
link |
I don't care if it's meat or oatmeal
link |
or broccoli or cardboard,
link |
you're drawing blood into the gut.
link |
And so you are going to divert some energy
link |
towards digestion and it's going to make you sleepy.
link |
There's a reason why the rest and digest,
link |
the parasympathetic nervous system is called that.
link |
So you could decide that you were only going to sleep
link |
in between certain blocks.
link |
That would be another way to think about this.
link |
Because I did this last year.
link |
Some of it was walking.
link |
I was listening to audio books.
link |
And one of the biggest mistakes I did is to overeat
link |
It made the experience very unpleasant.
link |
So I have been considering basically eating almost nothing
link |
throughout the day.
link |
Being fasted will increase alertness
link |
because high levels of epinephrine in your system
link |
You just think about fasting or being thirsty
link |
before you get exhausted.
link |
People always think if I don't eat, I'm going to be tired.
link |
No, the energy that you derive from food
link |
is going to be used from glycogen after a long storage
link |
and conversion process.
link |
So the food that you eat is going to consume energy
link |
And so a lot of people feel better fasted.
link |
And presumably throughout history,
link |
people have fasted for long periods of time
link |
and had to stay up for two or three days.
link |
And God forbid, if a family member is sick,
link |
you can stay awake in the hospital without any trouble.
link |
So that alertness system, it's all mental.
link |
Actually, and then there's a third.
link |
So you could try and sleep or take care in between.
link |
And then there's a third approach.
link |
But I didn't come up with it, but David did.
link |
So I actually texted him earlier
link |
because I had a feeling that I heard
link |
that you were going to do this challenge.
link |
So these are David Goggins words, not mine.
link |
One, being organized is super important.
link |
Two, you want to waste as little time as possible.
link |
Three, you need to eat, sleep and rehab
link |
in as little time as possible
link |
so you can sleep as much as possible.
link |
By the way, this is the first time I'm reading this.
link |
Four, meal prep and gear prep, et cetera, are very important.
link |
That's consistent with everything I know about military.
link |
They don't leave too much to chance.
link |
Five, again, these are David's words.
link |
All that said, he's fucked on most all that
link |
because he'll be interviewing me before or after.
link |
I will also be interviewing him.
link |
Five, long story short,
link |
the only thing that might help is a very special pill.
link |
Ooh, this is interesting.
link |
They're called SIU pills.
link |
Hard to get, but I believe he can get them.
link |
SIU stands for suck it up.
link |
Tell him to grab his balls.
link |
He will find those pills there.
link |
That's number six, all right.
link |
And then the last one, stay hard, brother.
link |
Stay hard, brother.
link |
That was one of the other things
link |
that I think makes this challenging
link |
is that it'll be doing a podcast throughout.
link |
So first of all, I'll do a long one before and after,
link |
but also I'll have to come up
link |
with things to talk to him about.
link |
So it's a different thing to do something privately
link |
and then publicly.
link |
I know it doesn't seem that way,
link |
but one of the hardest,
link |
the hardest thing I had to do last time
link |
was to turn on the camera and talk to the camera
link |
because last time I did it,
link |
I recorded every single time I did a leg,
link |
I recorded something I'm grateful for.
link |
It's just kind of unrelated.
link |
I'm not a fan of talking about how I'm feeling
link |
or how the run is going.
link |
I want to do something totally unrelated to the run
link |
and with the run as the background,
link |
sort of something I'm grateful for
link |
or just any kind of interesting discussion.
link |
Gratitude, I mean, I hate the word hack,
link |
like, oh, it's a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin.
link |
I don't like the word hack because A,
link |
it's disrespectful to hackers who do a real thing
link |
and B, a hack implies that it's some sort of trick
link |
that you're kind of gaming the system.
link |
You know, what works is mechanism, right?
link |
Biological mechanisms were designed to work
link |
and they were selected for to work
link |
under variable conditions.
link |
And as you know, and I know,
link |
and we have great appreciation for the fact
link |
that the nervous system was designed
link |
to be an adaptive machine
link |
so that you don't have to sleep eight hours every night.
link |
You can do this thing.
link |
And things like gratitude allow you to tap
link |
into chemical resources.
link |
And that's not a hack.
link |
The fact that being grateful for something external
link |
to the event happens to release serotonin
link |
and have a certain soothing effect or a dopamine
link |
and give you more epinephrine and let you go further,
link |
that's not a hack.
link |
That's actually what allowed the human machine
link |
to evolve to the point that it is now.
link |
Every time, you know, an inventor eventually
link |
created something that worked and felt great about it,
link |
you can imagine that the first, you know,
link |
air flight felt pretty awesome
link |
and motivated those people to go on and do more.
link |
They didn't just go on, you know, yawn and go have a beer.
link |
So being able to access the genuine internal states
link |
of gratitude and reward works.
link |
You can't trick the system.
link |
You can't pretend that you're grateful for something,
link |
but if you can identify or attach yourself
link |
to some larger goal or something
link |
that's deeply gratifying to you,
link |
or place it in service to a relative that passed away
link |
that you care a lot about, that's not a hack.
link |
That's accessing the deepest components
link |
of your nervous system.
link |
And to steal your kind of lingo,
link |
you know, there's real beauty there, right?
link |
Yeah, but for an introvert like myself,
link |
and I think David, I don't know if he's an introvert,
link |
but like, he's not, despite the fact
link |
that he has written a great book and he communicates,
link |
he puts himself out there,
link |
he's not really a fan of communication.
link |
He's not, I don't know if he's energized
link |
by speaking his mind.
link |
I don't know him well enough to know.
link |
I mean, we've done a little bit of work together
link |
and, you know, we're in communication now and again.
link |
He's obviously super impressive.
link |
It seems like he's a pretty private guy.
link |
Yeah, so like, you know, so I don't have access to that.
link |
So for me, I'll just speak to myself,
link |
and I think David is the same,
link |
but I'll speak to myself that it was a hugely draining thing,
link |
not to experience the gratitude,
link |
experiencing the gratitude just like you're saying
link |
is really energizing, and it's a powerful thing.
link |
It's a, it can lift up your mood.
link |
But to turn on the camera and have to use words,
link |
which is very difficult to do,
link |
to explain like what you're feeling
link |
and do it in a way that you know
link |
a bunch of people will be watching is really draining.
link |
And one of the things I'm concerned about
link |
that in this whole process,
link |
how do I keep my mind sharp
link |
while also keeping the physical performance sharp?
link |
And that's a little bit scary
link |
because talking to David like actual intellectually sharp,
link |
like thinking, being charismatic as much as I can be,
link |
and like being so maintaining a sense of humor too,
link |
because I can be, I become with sleep deprivation,
link |
with exhaustion, you start being.
link |
The Russian bear comes out.
link |
You start being such a,
link |
like I become a David Goggins essentially like.
link |
Oh, it makes you irritable.
link |
Sleep deprivation makes us irritable.
link |
It's clear so that in the early part of the night,
link |
we get a higher percentage of those old Tradian cycles
link |
are occupied by slow wave sleep,
link |
sometimes just called non REM sleep.
link |
And those early night sleep bouts
link |
are great for muscular repair
link |
and for certain forms of learning,
link |
but REM sleep, the rapid eye movement sleep,
link |
which it starts to accumulate
link |
and occupy more of those 90 minute old Tradian cycles
link |
toward the late part of a sleep bout.
link |
So typically toward morning,
link |
but toward after you've been asleep a while,
link |
that's when you do the emotional processing.
link |
That's when we recover the ability to feel refreshed
link |
and not irritated by things.
link |
And if you deprive people of REM sleep,
link |
they become selectively bad at uncoupling the emotion
link |
from things that happened in the previous days.
link |
So the little things start to seem like big things.
link |
I always know I'm REM sleep deprived when I'm irritable.
link |
And when I look at like the word the,
link |
and it doesn't look like it's spelled right.
link |
And I'm kind of pissed off about it.
link |
Like something's off.
link |
And we actually are becoming slightly psychotic
link |
when we're REM sleep deprived.
link |
You're not going to get a lot of REM sleep in this thing,
link |
except as you fatigue more,
link |
if you do fall asleep,
link |
you're going to drop more and more into REM
link |
so that those 90 minute cycles,
link |
you won't have to go through stage one,
link |
stage two, stage three, and then REM,
link |
you're just going to drop right into REM.
link |
So you can count on your system to compensate for you.
link |
But I think that just the knowledge
link |
that you tend to get irritable as the time goes on,
link |
just that third personing of yourself,
link |
that awareness, the observer,
link |
that can be very beneficial
link |
because there may be bouts during this event
link |
when you just should probably say nothing.
link |
And maybe you just, I don't know,
link |
smile and record or not smile or do whatever it is
link |
because you're going to be conserving energy.
link |
If it feels like a grind,
link |
that's epinephrine being released.
link |
That's epinephrine that you could devote
link |
to the physical effort.
link |
But humor is an amazing anecdote for this
link |
because it resets that,
link |
it's that dopamine release
link |
that gives us that fresh perspective.
link |
And it's a real chemical thing.
link |
It's not a visualization.
link |
It's biology in action.
link |
Well, but I think the act of interviewing,
link |
of conversation in these processes,
link |
even if you don't want to do it,
link |
the right thing to do, even when you're feeling irritable,
link |
is to do the third person view
link |
and be able to express with words
link |
that you're feeling irritable.
link |
Like express what you're going through.
link |
Use words, which I hate doing.
link |
I honestly, I think my ultimate thing
link |
would be just to never say a single word to David Gagas
link |
and just go through hell.
link |
It doesn't matter what we do,
link |
but to do it quietly, to also express it.
link |
That's my ultimate hell.
link |
And I think that's...
link |
Well, he's definitely going to be,
link |
if I know David at all,
link |
he's going to try and find your buttons.
link |
Like he's going to, I mean,
link |
even though he knows he can complete this,
link |
and I believe that he trusts that you can complete it too,
link |
I believe you will complete it.
link |
You know you will complete it, right.
link |
There's no question about that.
link |
But he's not going to make it easier for you.
link |
He's going to make it harder.
link |
So I'm like, it's very difficult for me.
link |
So 48 miles is not easy.
link |
I have not been training that much.
link |
So I'm not ramping up,
link |
but it's not like going to kill me.
link |
We'll see what happens.
link |
Of course, for him, he might always get bored
link |
because I think the 48 miles for him is easy.
link |
I don't know that that ever gets easy.
link |
I have a friend, Casey Cordial, who works with David.
link |
He does some physical rehab type stuff with him.
link |
And he took Casey on a 50 miler
link |
and Casey said it's like 16 miles and do it.
link |
He was just like, he had hit his wall,
link |
They find it to get, you know, you find that portal.
link |
There is one thing I want to mention.
link |
There's some very good physiology
link |
that can perhaps support the actual running effort part.
link |
These are very new data.
link |
We have a study going on with David Spiegel at Stanford,
link |
looking at how different patterns of breathing
link |
can affect heart rate variability.
link |
Heart rate variability is good.
link |
There's this interesting mechanism
link |
that I think most people might not realize,
link |
but that medical students learn that your breathing
link |
and your heart rate and your brain
link |
are in this really remarkable interplay.
link |
It goes like this.
link |
When you inhale, this isn't breath work.
link |
We're not going to do breath work.
link |
But when you inhale, the diaphragm moves down.
link |
The heart gets a little bigger
link |
because there's a little more space in the thoracic cavity.
link |
And as a consequence, blood flows a little bit more slowly
link |
through that larger volume.
link |
And there's a category of neurons, the sinonitrile node,
link |
that sees that, that recognizes that slower rate
link |
through that larger volume.
link |
It sends a signal to the brainstem
link |
and the brainstem sends a signal back to the heart
link |
to speed the heart up.
link |
So every time you inhale, you're speeding the heart up.
link |
When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up,
link |
the heart gets a little smaller, the volume is smaller,
link |
blood flows more quickly through the heart,
link |
signal sent up to the brain,
link |
and the brain sends a signal back to slow the heart down.
link |
This is the basis of heart rate variability.
link |
So at any point, if you feel like your heart is racing
link |
and you feel like you're working too hard
link |
per unit of effort,
link |
focus on making your exhales longer
link |
or more intense than your inhales.
link |
If ever you feel like you're truly flagging,
link |
you do not have the energy to get up,
link |
it's like, okay, it's time to go and you're exhausted,
link |
you want to draw more oxygen into the system,
link |
get your heart rate going faster.
link |
Now, some people when they hear this probably think,
link |
well, this is really obvious,
link |
but there's so much out there about breath work
link |
and how to breathe and all this stuff,
link |
but no one talks about how to do it in real time
link |
while you're exerting effort.
link |
So this is something like almost like second by second,
link |
you can adjust things just in real time
link |
based on how you're feeling,
link |
but based on the heart rate.
link |
The experience of the heart rate.
link |
So one thing that could be very efficient
link |
and we're doing some work with athletes now,
link |
so these are unpublished data,
link |
but if you, while you're running,
link |
if you want to get into a nice cadence
link |
of heart rate variability, do double inhales
link |
while you're running.
link |
What this will do is that when you do the double inhale
link |
has the effect of reopening the alveoli of the lungs,
link |
your lungs are filled with tons of little sacks,
link |
when they tend to collapse as you fatigue
link |
and carbon dioxide builds up in the bloodstream.
link |
And that's when we start getting stressed.
link |
If you've ever been sprinting and you start getting beat
link |
and you're going as hard as you can,
link |
what you really need to do is double inhale
link |
and reinflate these sacks in the lungs
link |
and then offload a lot of carbon dioxide.
link |
So when you're at a steady cadence and you're feeling good,
link |
double inhale, exhale, double inhale, exhale
link |
is a terrific way to breathe
link |
while you're in ongoing effort.
link |
By the way, any recommendations or differences
link |
in nose or mouth breathing?
link |
So nasal breathing, there's a lot of excitement now,
link |
obviously about nasal breathing
link |
because of James Nestor's book, Breath.
link |
There was also, if people are going to know about that book,
link |
I do feel like out of respect for my colleagues,
link |
there was a book by Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich
link |
at Stanford, both professors at Stanford
link |
with a forward by Jared Diamond and Robert Sapolsky.
link |
So some heavy hitters in this book.
link |
And the book is called Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic.
link |
And it's all about how nasal breathing is better for us,
link |
especially kids, than being mouth breathers
link |
under most conditions for sake of improving immunity.
link |
It turns out there's a microbiome in the nose,
link |
like all sorts of good stuff
link |
about nasal breathing preferentially.
link |
But when we exercise, you can do pure nasal breathing.
link |
But the problem is once you get up to kind of third
link |
and fourth and fifth gear effort,
link |
you can't nasal breathe and be at maximum capacity
link |
unless you've been training it for a very long time.
link |
So I would say double inhale through the nose,
link |
offload through the mouth.
link |
So double inhale, exhale while you're in steady effort.
link |
And then if you really feel like you need to gas it
link |
and you're pushing, the data show that then
link |
just use whatever's there, right?
link |
Just go into kind of default mode
link |
because bringing too much concentration to something
link |
is also going to spend epinephrine.
link |
The goal is to get into that, I don't like the word,
link |
but the flow state where you're not thinking too much,
link |
you're just in exertion.
link |
So these are things that can help in the transitions,
link |
but I don't think there's any secret breathing technique.
link |
Anyone who's been in the SEAL teams will kind of,
link |
they'll tell you like, there's no breathing technique, right?
link |
There's tools that you can look to from time to time.
link |
And these double inhale exhales can be great
link |
for setting heart rate variability very quickly
link |
and getting into a steady cadence while you're exercising.
link |
But if there's a sprint,
link |
like if suddenly you guys are sprinting,
link |
ditch the double inhale, exhale, and just sprint.
link |
One thing that you mentioned,
link |
he's probably gonna push my buttons.
link |
It's a good place to ask a question about anger.
link |
So I'll probably get pissed off at him at some point.
link |
And do you have thoughts from a scientific perspective
link |
or also just the personal philosophical perspective
link |
about the role of anger in all of this
link |
and in managing alertness, performance?
link |
I think about this a lot
link |
because there's so much out there
link |
about how important it is to do things
link |
from a place of love, you know.
link |
I tweet about it all the time.
link |
And I think, and love is powerful, right?
link |
It is interesting that autonomic arousal alertness,
link |
let's just use simple language,
link |
alertness physiologically looks identical
link |
for love and excitement as it does for anger
link |
and frustration and wanting to defeat your opponent
link |
or whoever that opponent happens to be.
link |
They're identical except that the love component
link |
does tend to be associated with the release
link |
of neurochemicals of the serotonin and dopamine type
link |
that do have this replenishment component.
link |
I don't think one wants to be in constant anger
link |
and friction, but I mean, I'll come clean a bit.
link |
There've been portions of my career
link |
where some of my best work, my extra two hours,
link |
my ability to nail a really hard deadline or problem
link |
has come from not wanting to get out competed
link |
or from wanting to prove something.
link |
These days, I'm not oriented from that place
link |
toward my work quite as often,
link |
but I think we should be really honest.
link |
Anger is powerful provided it's channeled.
link |
It's very, very powerful and it can give you a ton of fuel
link |
and gas to push when otherwise you tap.
link |
Yeah, Joe Rogan has, aside from being a fan of his,
link |
has been an inspiration to sort of be,
link |
to have a kind of loving view on the world
link |
and the way you approach the world to me.
link |
So I've tended to want to approach the world that way,
link |
but in the same way, David Goggins has been an inspiration
link |
to like, yeah, be angry at stuff and use it as fuel.
link |
Like he almost conjures up artificial demons in his mind
link |
just so he can fight them.
link |
You know, but at the same time I tried that
link |
because I did a challenge in the summer
link |
of where for 30 days I was doing a lot of pushups
link |
and it was, over time, it was counterproductive for me.
link |
Like I found that it was easier to just,
link |
like the rollercoaster that the emotional,
link |
like being angry at stuff takes you can also be exhausting.
link |
Oh, absolutely, and it can take you down,
link |
like the ups of it are good, but the downs are bad.
link |
And what I found is better to get,
link |
to use it as a boost every once in a while,
link |
but mostly to get lost in the,
link |
you're talking about the breath work,
link |
the like getting lost in the ritual of it,
link |
like the beat like that,
link |
as opposed to going on the big rollercoasters of emotion.
link |
Yet this brings us into the realm of neuroendocrinology.
link |
There's a fascinating relationship between
link |
the hormone system and the nervous system.
link |
And, you know, hormones work in general on slower timescales.
link |
The definition of a hormone is a chemical released
link |
at one location in the body,
link |
goes and acts at multiple locations far away
link |
Pheromone would be between two bodies.
link |
Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin
link |
tend to work a little more quickly.
link |
There are hormones like adrenaline and cortisol
link |
that can work very fast,
link |
but here I'm referring mainly to testosterone, prolactin.
link |
Prolactin tends to be in men,
link |
and women tends to make people kind of lazy
link |
and want to take care of young.
link |
It tends to throw down body fat so we can stay up late.
link |
It's secreted in response to having children.
link |
These are all in humans and in animals.
link |
There's a very interesting relationship
link |
between testosterone and dopamine
link |
that speaks directly to what we're talking about now.
link |
So dopamine and testosterone are closely related
link |
in the pituitary system.
link |
And obviously testosterone comes from the adrenals
link |
and from the testes.
link |
But the major effect of testosterone
link |
is to make effort feel good.
link |
That's what testosterone does.
link |
It has other effects too, right?
link |
Reproductive effects,
link |
androgenizing parts of the body, et cetera.
link |
But it makes effort feel good.
link |
The testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol.
link |
Cholesterol can either be made into cortisol,
link |
a stress hormone, or testosterone, but not both.
link |
So you have a limited amount of cholesterol
link |
and it gets diverted towards stress
link |
or this pathway where effort feels good.
link |
That's the pathway you want to get into.
link |
The anger pathway,
link |
if we were to just kind of play a mind experiment here,
link |
the anger eventually is going to divert
link |
more of that cholesterol molecule to cortisol and stress,
link |
and you will be slowly depleting testosterone.
link |
Now going into this,
link |
you'll have plenty of testosterone,
link |
but after a couple of days,
link |
there've been very interesting studies showing
link |
that testosterone doesn't necessarily drop
link |
with sleep deprivation.
link |
That's a bit of a myth.
link |
You need it to replenish testosterone.
link |
You need sleep to replenish testosterone eventually.
link |
But the real question is,
link |
are you enjoying what you're doing?
link |
And here the work was,
link |
some of the major work on this was done by Duncan French,
link |
who runs the UFC Training Center.
link |
He did his PhD at UConn stores,
link |
did a really beautiful PhD thesis
link |
looking at the relationship between stress hormones,
link |
testosterone, and dopamine.
link |
Really interesting work.
link |
And the takeaway from all of this is,
link |
if you can just convince yourself,
link |
or ideally if you can just enjoy yourself,
link |
you are going to maintain
link |
or maybe even increase testosterone stores,
link |
which will make effort feel good.
link |
And to me, aside from neuroplasticity
link |
where everything becomes automatic after this experience,
link |
to me, that's the holy grail.
link |
When effort feels good, life just gets way better.
link |
And we're not talking about achieving the reward.
link |
I'm not talking about the end of this thing.
link |
I'm talking about the process of it feeling really good.
link |
Yeah, there is a magic to,
link |
I don't know if you can comment on this,
link |
but I find myself being able to,
link |
if I just say I'm feeling good,
link |
like this old hack of like smiling while you're running,
link |
if I just tell myself, I'm feeling really good right now,
link |
no matter how I'm actually feeling,
link |
I'll start feeling way better.
link |
And the whole thing, there's a cascading effect
link |
that allows me to maximize the effort.
link |
It's quite fascinating.
link |
Hormones are powerful.
link |
The relationship between thoughts and hormones
link |
and these physiological things is enormous.
link |
I had a colleague that a few years ago,
link |
he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
link |
And I was interviewing him
link |
just because he's an important figure in our community.
link |
And I was a friend.
link |
And there was one day where he told me,
link |
he said, I don't want to make it past the new year.
link |
And it was crushing for me to hear.
link |
And I knew that he had been on some androgen therapy
link |
for a whole set of other things.
link |
And I said, have you taken your androgen cream?
link |
And he was like, no, I haven't done it.
link |
I have this on film.
link |
He takes it, he puts the androgen cream on.
link |
I'm not suggesting people take androgens, by the way.
link |
10 minutes later, he says, you know what?
link |
I think I want to live into the new year.
link |
And I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation.
link |
He went to MIT, by the way.
link |
He said, I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation.
link |
And so there's something about these molecules
link |
that in an ancient way, in all organisms,
link |
all mammals, as far as we know,
link |
are linked to the will to live.
link |
They're linked to effort and making effort feel good,
link |
which has been fundamental to the evolution of our species.
link |
I always say, people think that the opposite
link |
of testosterone is estrogen, but it's not.
link |
The opposite of testosterone is prolactin,
link |
which makes us feel quiescent
link |
and not in pursuit of things, et cetera.
link |
Testosterone makes effort feel good.
link |
Estrogen makes emotions feel okay.
link |
And they are in mixed amounts in people,
link |
as I say, have all chromosomal backgrounds.
link |
I mean, you also mentioned fasting potentially
link |
through this two day thing.
link |
It'd be cool to get your thoughts about fasting in general.
link |
Do you think on a personal level
link |
and at a higher sort of level of studies
link |
that you're aware of and physiology and so on,
link |
what do you think about intermittent fasting
link |
of like not eating for 16 hours
link |
and then having an eight hour window
link |
or something I've been doing a lot recently,
link |
which is eating only once a day.
link |
So that's 24 hour fast, I guess, one meal a day
link |
or something I've been thinking about doing,
link |
haven't done yet of doing like 72 hours
link |
or some people do like five day fasts in general.
link |
So this will be for this particular run
link |
will be a 48 hour fast if I don't eat at all.
link |
What do you think about that for performance,
link |
for mood, for all those kinds of things?
link |
I can speak a little bit to the science
link |
and a little bit of my own experience
link |
and then some anecdotes of people that have done very hard,
link |
very long duration things and what they've told me.
link |
So I just want to make sure I'm separating those out
link |
so people know my sourcing.
link |
I think now none of this is about the actual
link |
longterm nutritional benefits of one thing or the other.
link |
But if you look at the science on intermittent fasting,
link |
it's pretty remarkable.
link |
Before I was at Stanford, my lab was in San Diego.
link |
One of my colleagues was such in Panda at the Salk
link |
is phenomenal biologist and researcher,
link |
wrote a book called the circadian code.
link |
It's very, very good and kind of popularized
link |
intermittent fasting, although there were others
link |
that had talked about this before.
link |
Ori Hofmechler talked about the warrior diet.
link |
People probably might not know who Ori is,
link |
but he's sort of the originator
link |
of this business of intermittent fasting
link |
eating once a day or limited.
link |
Anyway, Sachin has published papers,
link |
peer reviewed papers in very good journals
link |
like Cell and elsewhere,
link |
showing that limiting the consumption of calories
link |
to eight, four, six, or eight, or even 10 hours
link |
of every 24 hour cycle
link |
and keeping that more or less correlated with the light
link |
with when the sun is out leads to less liver disease,
link |
improved metabolic markers, less body fat, et cetera.
link |
In the mouse studies, they even gave the mice the choice
link |
to eat whatever they wanted, as much as they want,
link |
as long as they restrict it to a certain period
link |
within the 24 hour cycle, they did great.
link |
They maintained a healthy weight or even lost weight.
link |
When they took the same amount of food
link |
and they stretched it out across the entire 24 hour cycle.
link |
So this is eating every hour or two hours,
link |
the animals got fat and sick.
link |
So it's pretty remarkable data.
link |
How much of that translates to humans isn't clear,
link |
but one thing that's really clear with humans is adherence.
link |
We could talk a lot about nutrition
link |
and some of the problems with the studies on nutrition
link |
is that what people will do in a laboratory
link |
is often hard to do in the real world.
link |
Low carbohydrate diets just they tend,
link |
because they tend to focus on foods
link |
that have high amino acid content like meats.
link |
Generally people are less hungry on those
link |
than they are on calorie matched diets
link |
of fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates,
link |
because when the insulin goes up,
link |
you get hungry and you want to eat more.
link |
So this is not a push for carnivore
link |
or a push against one thing or the other.
link |
It's just, there are a lot of factors,
link |
but we know for sure that when you're fasted
link |
or when you have low amounts of carbohydrate in your system,
link |
complex carbohydrate, your alertness is going to go up.
link |
Fasting increases alertness and epinephrine
link |
for the sole purpose of getting you to go out
link |
Can you imagine if our ancestors got hungry
link |
and they were like, oh, I'm too tired to go find food.
link |
We wouldn't be here.
link |
It'd be like robots or something.
link |
One of your alien buddies will be like running the planet.
link |
So I think that if you want to be alert,
link |
fasting or keeping complex carbohydrates to a minimum
link |
If you want to sleep and you want to be sleepy,
link |
ingesting foods that have a lot of tryptophan,
link |
which is the precursor to serotonin,
link |
so complex carbohydrates like rice and grains,
link |
turkey, white meats,
link |
those things do create a sense of sleepiness.
link |
However, there is a caveat,
link |
and this is one problem with the once a day meal,
link |
is that anytime you have a lot of food in the gut,
link |
you're increasing sleepiness
link |
because you're diverting blood to the gut.
link |
It's going to trigger the vagus to signal to the brain
link |
to shut down your system and utilize those nutrients,
link |
digest and utilize those nutrients.
link |
So I've done the once a day eating thing.
link |
The problem is I eat so much in that meal
link |
that I'm exhausted.
link |
And so it doesn't always lend itself well to the schedule.
link |
But so in a six or eight hour eating block for me
link |
is a little bit better.
link |
I do eat carbohydrates.
link |
I'm probably one of the few people left on the West coast
link |
that actually consumes carbohydrates
link |
and we'll say that out loud.
link |
I don't know people eat carbs anymore, that's weird.
link |
Where do you even find carbs these days?
link |
The other time is if people are doing very high intensity
link |
weight train, they need to replenish glycogen.
link |
On the alertness side,
link |
I do feel like it's probably person dependent.
link |
For me alertness, being alert makes my life better
link |
in a lot of ways, more than just the alertness itself.
link |
Like for example, one of the things I discovered
link |
with fasting is that when I was training twice a day
link |
in jujitsu, for example, and competing and so on,
link |
I performed way better at things that you traditionally
link |
would say you need carbs for,
link |
which is explosive movements and all that.
link |
I don't know if I actually perform better
link |
in terms of like the force of the explosion,
link |
the explosiveness.
link |
What I do know is the alertness resulted
link |
in me doing the technique more precisely.
link |
That's the dopamine and epinephrine system in action.
link |
And there are some other just purely physical aspects
link |
to one diet versus the other that can be complicated.
link |
If you're ingesting carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates,
link |
you're going to replenish glycogen, which is great,
link |
but they also tend to be bulky and fibrous.
link |
And I've never rolled jujitsu,
link |
but running when you have a lot of bulky fibrous food
link |
in your gut or in your intestine, it can be a barrier.
link |
It can be uncomfortable.
link |
And so some people do really well on low carbohydrate,
link |
meat rich diets, because they're just not as bloated.
link |
They're not carrying as much water and other stuff.
link |
Carbohydrate carries a lot of water molecules with it.
link |
So there are aspects to being able to train
link |
and being really explosive because you feel light.
link |
One anecdote that really, again,
link |
I'm not encouraging any one particular kind of diet,
link |
but I have a friend who was in the SEAL teams.
link |
I happen to know a number of people in that community.
link |
And he told me that he did this very long fast.
link |
It was a fast that I think you get to eat a little bit
link |
And there's like a bar or something,
link |
but it's like a nine day thing.
link |
And he's a very strong athlete.
link |
And he said that on day six or seven,
link |
he was running up some hills or something
link |
while he was on deployment.
link |
And he felt amazing.
link |
He had kind of hit this other level.
link |
He was somebody who had boxed in the Naval Academy.
link |
He was somebody who knows and knew high output.
link |
And he felt like he discovered the 13th floor,
link |
that there was another floor to this performance space
link |
that he hadn't experienced except while he had fasted.
link |
And he said that that was a remarkable clarity of mind,
link |
energy, it's a little bit of what you described.
link |
He described a kind of suppleness and explosiveness.
link |
So there's probably something there.
link |
At once he was in the fifth or sixth day of the fast.
link |
See, this is the thing is I've never been there
link |
on the second, third, fourth, fifth day, that kind of thing.
link |
But when I just don't eat for 20 hours,
link |
many times through my training, the clarity,
link |
it's like you feel like everyone is moving super slowly
link |
and you're able to like dominate people
link |
you weren't able to before.
link |
Well, you might've slipped into,
link |
or switched over rather into full ketosis.
link |
And ketogenic diets done properly can be great for people.
link |
The problem is if you do it wrong, you can really mess it up.
link |
I tried it once and I basically got psoriasis.
link |
I thought my scalp was going to fall off.
link |
I was like sloughing off all this.
link |
And then I stopped and I was taking the liquid ketones.
link |
And then all of a sudden I felt better again.
link |
But I was told that I just did it wrong.
link |
So I think there's a right way and a wrong way
link |
and you have to get it right.
link |
And so I've experimented quite a bit with keto
link |
to see how my body feels and doing it the right way
link |
and following all the instructions.
link |
There's definitely a huge difference that,
link |
like for example, one of the things I discovered,
link |
everyone knows who said this,
link |
but I tried this recently over the past year
link |
is I started drinking when I don't feel great.
link |
If I'm fasting, a bone broth, a chicken bone broth.
link |
And for some reason, like magically it could be,
link |
this is the other thing, the mind, I don't know,
link |
but it makes me feel really good.
link |
Well, it could be the salt.
link |
So I mean, neurons, the action potential neurons,
link |
as you know, is sodium is rushing into the cell.
link |
You need enough extracellular sodium
link |
in order for your brain and nervous system to function.
link |
And so salt, I mean, unless people have hypertension,
link |
There was an article in Science Magazine about a decade ago
link |
about how salt had been demonized
link |
and unless people have hypertension,
link |
provide you drink enough water, salt is great.
link |
You need sodium, magnesium, and potassium to function
link |
and for your nerve cells to work.
link |
I mean, people who overdrink water
link |
and don't consume enough electrolyte die.
link |
Now, hydration is really important.
link |
I know David's really into hydration.
link |
He's mentioned that a few times.
link |
I mean, hydrating properly is key.
link |
And so you definitely want to make sure
link |
that you're drinking enough water
link |
and getting enough electrolytes.
link |
We should have actually talked about that at the beginning
link |
because that's going to keep
link |
your nervous system functioning well.
link |
And a lot of people, they'll get shaky or jittery
link |
when they're fasting and they'll think they need sugar.
link |
And if they just put some salt in some water,
link |
And like the other stuff, potassium, magnesium,
link |
whatever the other electrolytes are.
link |
But yeah, those three.
link |
I mean, salt, yeah.
link |
Magnesium is good before sleep.
link |
I mean, this is a vast space.
link |
And we're kind of talking about the overlap
link |
between neurochemicals, hormones, and nutrition.
link |
And it's a fascinating space.
link |
And it's one that the academic community has gems
link |
within the textbooks.
link |
It hasn't really made it into the public sphere yet.
link |
And I think that's because people get so caught up
link |
in the being, are you vegan or are you carnivore?
link |
And there's a vast space in between too
link |
that people can explore.
link |
Like I'm not a competitive athlete.
link |
So I eat meat and I also eat vegetables and I eat fruits
link |
and it's just about timing them.
link |
But I tend to eat carbohydrates when I want to be sleepy.
link |
I eat them at night.
link |
And everyone said, that's the worst thing.
link |
You can't do that.
link |
You sleep great after eating a big bowl of pasta.
link |
And by the way, I should give you a big thank you
link |
for connecting me with Bell Campo Farms.
link |
They sent me some meat, I think because of you.
link |
And it's delicious.
link |
So I really appreciate that.
link |
I mean, it also connected me with this whole world
link |
of people who are doing farming in this ethical way
link |
and like really love the whole process.
link |
And from both like a human level,
link |
but also scientific level.
link |
And the result is, it's like ethical,
link |
but also it's delicious.
link |
And it makes you think about your diet
link |
in a whole new kind of way.
link |
Yeah, I don't have any commercial relationship
link |
to Bell Campo, so I can be very clear.
link |
I've known Anya Fernald,
link |
who is the founder and CEO of Bell Campo.
link |
I've known her since the ninth grade.
link |
It is true that her parents are faculty members at Stanford,
link |
they're colleagues of mine,
link |
but she's just a serious academic of nutrition,
link |
but also of sustainable agriculture,
link |
of all sorts of things.
link |
And also the meat just, it's awesome.
link |
It tastes really good.
link |
And no, I'm not getting paid to say that.
link |
And no, they're not a sponsoring my podcast.
link |
It's just, I feel like if you're gonna eat animals,
link |
if that's in your framework and you're gonna eat animals,
link |
knowing that the animals were raised as happy as could be
link |
until time of slaughter is at least important to me.
link |
And actually talked to her,
link |
so I will talk to her on this podcast actually.
link |
And she invited me like a week ago out to visit the farm
link |
in May or June or whatever.
link |
Yeah, they have the farm up at the Oregon border.
link |
I haven't been there yet, but I've seen the pictures.
link |
It looks awesome and I was like, yes.
link |
It looks beautiful.
link |
Let me know when you're going.
link |
Yeah, let's go together.
link |
You'll probably run there, but I'll drive there.
link |
Yeah, but all that said, I do want to,
link |
cause a lot of people who are vegan write to me
link |
and I do want to seriously,
link |
in the same seriousness that I approached keto,
link |
I do wanna go like on a few months
link |
to switch to a vegan diet at some point to really try it.
link |
I haven't done it yet
link |
cause I'm afraid I'm gonna function better.
link |
I'm Argentine by my dad's side.
link |
And I don't eat meat super often,
link |
but well, for most people it would seem often,
link |
but I do love steak, I do.
link |
So I'm afraid I'm gonna feel better.
link |
There's a social element to steak, you're right.
link |
Cause coming from a Russian background,
link |
like I can't imagine going to visit my folks,
link |
like my parents for Thanksgiving or something to say,
link |
mom and dad, I don't eat meat.
link |
So instead of, you know.
link |
Well, I think if you're gonna eat meat,
link |
getting it from sources that are compatible
link |
with a continuation of the planet is good.
link |
I mean, there are some real problems
link |
with the factory farm meat.
link |
You know, you drive up and down the five
link |
and you pass that point where there are all those cows.
link |
I mean, as somebody who loves animals,
link |
it's clear that it's, you know,
link |
you wanna limit the amount of suffering of those animals.
link |
Whenever I hear about, you know,
link |
we know people that hunt and that go and get their own meat.
link |
I really admire that.
link |
I admire that people do that.
link |
We don't tend to do that in the hills around Stanford,
link |
you know, there are mountain lions back there,
link |
but that's about it.
link |
And I'm certainly, I admire the vegan mindset
link |
of just making that decision.
link |
You're just not gonna consume other beings,
link |
but you know, I haven't gone that way.
link |
But performance wise, I'm just curious because I was
link |
surprised, I was certain that eating five, six,
link |
seven meals a day is the right thing to do
link |
for if you wanna be perform your best
link |
when I was like 20 or whatever.
link |
And I would eat oatmeal, like I thought it's obvious
link |
I have to have a really, a lot of carbs in the breakfast.
link |
I had a lot of preconceived notions.
link |
And then when I started eating like once a day,
link |
this was at the peak of my competing in jiu jitsu,
link |
it was like, everything I know about nutrition is wrong.
link |
You realize that like, you have to become a scientist.
link |
First of all, you have to read literature,
link |
you have to learn, you have to experiment,
link |
but you also have to become a scientist of your own body.
link |
In the same way, I have a lot of preconceived notions
link |
of what performance is like under vegan diet.
link |
And I want to do it right.
link |
Like seriously, not necessarily for the ethical reasons,
link |
but to see if it's performance wise, like can I,
link |
I remember there's like a fruitarian diet
link |
where you eat fruit only.
link |
These extremes are like, they're pretty,
link |
they're interesting cause people have this need.
link |
The extremes are informative though, right?
link |
I mean, well controlled experiments,
link |
you eliminate as many variables as you can
link |
except the one you're interested in.
link |
So people are running these experiments.
link |
I think that it's hard to imagine getting,
link |
I know people say you can get enough amino acids
link |
from plant based sources and I believe that.
link |
I think it probably takes a little more work.
link |
One thing that's really clear is that the benefit
link |
of these omega three, omega six ratios,
link |
like fish oils and things like that.
link |
There are some data that show that the getting
link |
at least a thousand milligrams of the EPA,
link |
which is in high in fish oils, but other things too,
link |
even some meats and other plants,
link |
it in double, you know, in matched placebo,
link |
double blind controlled studies,
link |
placebo controlled double blind studies have shown
link |
that those can offset antidepressive symptoms
link |
as much as some of the selective serotonin reuptake
link |
inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft.
link |
So that's pretty impressive.
link |
And in Scandinavia, people know, especially in winter,
link |
to consume a lot of those omega threes
link |
because they're good for you, they're good for the brain.
link |
That's the other question.
link |
Nutrition wise, what kind of stuff have you come across
link |
Like I basically only take fish oil,
link |
like you said, electrolytes.
link |
Electrolytes with water, the David Goggins diet.
link |
And then again, the sponsor, they made it so easier.
link |
The sponsor of your podcast and mine,
link |
athleticgreens.com slash Huberman.
link |
I don't know, like it's great stuff for sure,
link |
but it also just takes away the headache of like,
link |
I don't have to think about.
link |
Yeah, you're going to get a bunch of vitamins and minerals.
link |
It sounds like a plug, but I have genuinely been buying it.
link |
I'm like, you know, no discount, no affiliation
link |
or anything since 2012.
link |
I think I heard about it on the Tim Ferriss podcast.
link |
I was like, oh, I'm going to try that stuff.
link |
I mean, when I was starting my lab,
link |
I was working insane hours.
link |
I still work very long hours.
link |
And getting sick limits productivity.
link |
And I also wanted to train
link |
and I wasn't doing much training back then.
link |
Now I try and get, you know, three, four sessions in a week.
link |
I'm not doing nothing like what you and David are doing
link |
or what, you know, Joe does,
link |
or like you guys are way more regimented
link |
and consistent than I am.
link |
But I think that being healthy and feeling good
link |
is one of the great benefits to a career
link |
is having energy and just being not sick.
link |
Can we take a step back to sleep for a little bit?
link |
And so people should definitely look through your podcast.
link |
The first five episodes were on sleep or no,
link |
I guess the first opening episode wasn't.
link |
First one was sort of how the brain works generally
link |
is to give people some background.
link |
And then we did four episodes on sleep,
link |
including some stuff about food, temperature, exercise,
link |
jet lag shift work for the jet lag folks and shift work.
link |
Yeah, take a masterclass on sleep.
link |
And then you're going on to a next topic
link |
in the next few episodes, which is incredible.
link |
We'll, neuroplasticity, we'll talk about it.
link |
But on sleep, one of the cool things about the human mind
link |
when it sleeps is dreaming.
link |
What do you think we understand
link |
about the contents of dreams?
link |
Like what do dreams mean?
link |
All the stuff we see when we dream,
link |
is there something that we understand
link |
about the contents of dreams?
link |
Some of it is very concrete.
link |
So Matt Wilson, who, MIT guy, showed in rodents
link |
and it's been shown in nonhuman primates
link |
and now it's been shown in humans
link |
that there is replay of spatial information during sleep.
link |
So initially what Matt showed was that
link |
as these little rodents navigate through a maze,
link |
there are these cells in the hippocampus called place cells
link |
that fire when the animal encounters a turn or a corridor.
link |
And that exact same sequence is replayed during sleep.
link |
And it turns out this is true in London taxi cab drivers.
link |
Before phones and GPS were what they are today,
link |
the London taxi cab drivers were famous
link |
for knowing the routes through the city,
link |
through these mental maps.
link |
And their analysis of their place cell firing during sleep
link |
and during wakefulness.
link |
And so we are essentially taking spatial information
link |
about the location of things and replaying it during sleep.
link |
However, it's not replayed so that you remember it all.
link |
It's replayed so that if there's a reason to remember it,
link |
the links to the emotional system,
link |
to the components of the limbic system and hypothalamus
link |
that are relevant,
link |
like you got into a car crash at a particular location,
link |
or you lost a bunch of money
link |
because you were a cab driver, Uber driver,
link |
we'd say nowadays,
link |
and you were stuck at one particular avenue all day
link |
and you were getting yelled at by your spouse,
link |
that information gets encoded
link |
so that you never forget that at that particular time of day
link |
and that particular time of year,
link |
and this thing happened.
link |
So context starts getting linked to experience.
link |
So there's spatial information
link |
that's absolutely replayed during sleep.
link |
And we experience this sometimes as dreams.
link |
The dreams that happen early in the night
link |
when slow wave sleep or non REM sleep dominates,
link |
tends to be sleep of very kind of general themes
link |
and kind of location.
link |
It can feel a little bit eerie and kind of strange.
link |
Not so incidentally,
link |
the early phase of the night
link |
is when growth hormone is released.
link |
In the 80s and 90s,
link |
there was a drug that was very popular.
link |
It's very legal now called GHB.
link |
You could actually buy it at GNC or a store then.
link |
I never took it, but it was a popular party drug
link |
and some famous celebrities died while on GHB.
link |
They were also on a bunch of other things,
link |
so it's not clear what killed them.
link |
But GHB was very big in certain communities
link |
because it promoted a massive release of growth hormone
link |
and gave people these very hypnotic states.
link |
So people go to clubs
link |
and they were in these very hypnotic states.
link |
It was part of a whole culture.
link |
That's early night.
link |
And those dreams tend to not have
link |
a lot of emotional content or load.
link |
That phase of dreaming is associated
link |
with the occasional jolting yourself out of sleep
link |
because it's somewhat lighter sleep.
link |
The dreams that occur during REM,
link |
during rapid eye movement sleep
link |
and that dominate towards morning are very different.
link |
They tend to have very little epinephrine
link |
is available in the brain at that time.
link |
Epinephrine again being this molecule
link |
of stress, fear, and excitement.
link |
You are paralyzed during these REM dreams.
link |
There's intense emotion
link |
at the level of what you're feeling
link |
and there's so called theory of mind.
link |
Theory of mind is an idea that was put forward
link |
by Simon Baron Cohen, Sasha Baron Cohen's cousin.
link |
I think on the podcast,
link |
I mistakenly said that he was at Oxford.
link |
It's like the cardinal sin.
link |
He's at Cambridge, forgive me.
link |
So the dreams in REM are heavily emotionally laden.
link |
And it's very clear that those dreams and REM sleep,
link |
if you deprive yourself of them for too long,
link |
you become irritable and you start linking
link |
generally negative emotions to almost everything.
link |
REM, the dreams that occur in REM sleep
link |
are when we divorce emotion from our prior experiences.
link |
And it's when we extract general rules and themes.
link |
MIT seems to have come up a lot today,
link |
but it's highly relevant.
link |
Susumu Tonagawa, Nobel prize for immunoglobulin,
link |
but obviously fantastic neuroscientist as well,
link |
has shown that the replay of neurons in the hippocampus
link |
and elsewhere in the brain is kind of an approximation
link |
of the previous episode and a lot of fear unlearning
link |
of uncoupling emotion from hard or traumatic events
link |
that happened previously occurs in REM sleep.
link |
So you don't want to deprive yourself of REM sleep
link |
And those dreams tend to be very intense.
link |
Now, epinephrine is low
link |
so that you can't suddenly act out your dreams.
link |
But what's interesting is sometimes people
link |
will wake up suddenly while in a REM dream
link |
and their heart will be beating really, really fast.
link |
That's a surge of epinephrine that occurs
link |
as you exit REM sleep.
link |
So you were having this intense emotional experience
link |
You were essentially going through therapy in your sleep,
link |
self induced therapy.
link |
It's like trauma therapy,
link |
where you try and divorce the emotion from the experience.
link |
And then you wake up.
link |
And some people also have the other component of REM,
link |
which is atonia, which is paralysis.
link |
Pot smokers experience this a lot more than non pot smokers.
link |
There's an invasion of paralysis into the waking state.
link |
I'm not a pot smoker, but I have experienced this.
link |
And when you wake up and you're paralyzed for a second,
link |
But then you jolt yourself alert.
link |
So the REM sleep is important
link |
for kind of the self induced therapy
link |
and forgetting the bad stuff.
link |
It's good for uncoupling the emotions from bad experiences.
link |
And just there are two therapies.
link |
Eye movement desensitization reprocessing,
link |
which is a eye movement thing that shuts down the amygdala
link |
during therapy, not during sleep.
link |
And ketamine, which is a dissociative analgesic.
link |
It's actually very similar to PCP.
link |
And ketamine is now being used as a trauma therapy
link |
when someone comes into the ER, for instance,
link |
and they were in a terrible car accident.
link |
I mean, these are horrible things to describe it.
link |
They saw a relative impaled
link |
on the steering column or something.
link |
And they will give this drug
link |
to try and shut off the emotion system
link |
so that, because they're not gonna forget,
link |
let's be honest, you don't forget the bad stuff,
link |
but it is possible to uncouple the bad events
link |
from the emotional system.
link |
And there's all sorts of ethical issues
link |
about whether or not that's good or bad to do.
link |
But PTSD is a failure to uncouple the emotion
link |
from these intense experiences.
link |
So the goal of this kind of therapy
link |
is in the uncoupling for that to be permanent.
link |
So they can recount the event
link |
and they can describe it
link |
without it triggering the same somatic experience
link |
of terror and dread,
link |
because terror, those feelings can be debilitating,
link |
And you're saying physiologically,
link |
in REM sleep, a similar process is happening.
link |
Thematically, REM sleep is about experiencing
link |
or replaying intense emotions
link |
without experiencing the somatic,
link |
the physical component of the emotion,
link |
either the acting out
link |
or the accelerated heart rate and agitation.
link |
Likewise with things like ketamine therapies.
link |
is you're uncoupling the physical sensation
link |
from the mental events.
link |
What is REM sleep and why is it so special?
link |
Maybe we can comment on that.
link |
Rapid eye movement sleep.
link |
Yeah, discovered in the 50s at the University of Chicago.
link |
It's intense brain activity,
link |
high levels of metabolic activity,
link |
dreams in which people report a lot of the theory of mind.
link |
We were talking about Simon Baron Cohen.
link |
Theory of mind was actually something
link |
that he developed for the diagnosis of autism.
link |
If you take kids, most kids of age five, six, seven,
link |
put them in front of a TV screen in the laboratory
link |
and you have them watch a video
link |
where a kid is playing with a ball or a doll.
link |
And then the kid puts it into a drawer,
link |
shuts the drawer and walks away.
link |
And another kid comes in and you ask the child
link |
who's observing this little movie,
link |
you say, what does this second child think?
link |
And a typical kid would say,
link |
they want to play and they don't know
link |
where the ball or doll is,
link |
or they're upset or they're sad, they want the doll.
link |
Autistic children tend to say the doll's in the drawer.
link |
The toy is in the drawer.
link |
They tend to fixate.
link |
They can't get on the event.
link |
They can't get into the mind of that.
link |
They don't have a theory of mind.
link |
Dreams in REM have a heavy theory of mind component.
link |
People are after me trying to get me.
link |
You can assign motive to other people.
link |
I'm afraid, but it's because there's an expectation.
link |
That doesn't tend to happen in slow wave sleep dreams.
link |
Now, all this of course is by waking people up
link |
and asking them what they were dreaming about,
link |
which from a standpoint of a AI guy
link |
or a machine learning or a neuroscientist kind of like,
link |
but it's the best we've got.
link |
But brain imaging in waking states
link |
while people view a movie
link |
and then brain imaging while people are sleeping
link |
supports the idea that that's basically what's going on.
link |
So REM sleep is amazing
link |
and you're not going to get much of it
link |
during your bout with Goggins,
link |
but you will afterward.
link |
Why, so to comment, why won't I?
link |
So is it not possible to get into it real quick?
link |
Only if you're very, very sleep deprived,
link |
but because you're going to be at high muscular output,
link |
that's going to bias you
link |
towards more slow wave sleep overall.
link |
And your body and brain are smart.
link |
They, it will know,
link |
they will know that your main goal is to recover
link |
so you can keep going.
link |
So you can keep firing neuromuscular contractions
link |
and you can keep running so that you can,
link |
I mean, it's amazing to think like, why do we ever stop?
link |
Unlike weight training
link |
where I can't do a 500 pound deadlift, I just can't.
link |
I could train for it,
link |
but I certainly can't do a 600 pound, I can't do that.
link |
What causes us to stop an endurance event
link |
is usually not a physical barrier.
link |
It's almost always a purely mental barrier.
link |
And that's a very interesting problem.
link |
I mean, neuroscientists don't tend to think about
link |
those sorts of problems
link |
because it sounds so non neuroscientific,
link |
but that's fundamentally related to the question of,
link |
What is the desire to push and to carry on?
link |
Is there a neuroscientific answer
link |
for that question you think?
link |
I think the closest thing is this paper
link |
from Janelia Farms, the Howard Hughes campus,
link |
showing that if you put animals
link |
into a simulated environment
link |
where you can measure their effort,
link |
the forces while they're running,
link |
and you can control the visual environment,
link |
and you can create a scenario
link |
where the animal thinks that its output is futile.
link |
It knows it's running and it's actually running,
link |
but you change the frequency of the stripes
link |
going by in their visual world,
link |
such that they think they're not getting anywhere,
link |
and eventually they quit.
link |
And the thing that determines whether or not they quit
link |
is a threshold level of epinephrine in the brainstem.
link |
If you drop that level back down
link |
or you give the animals dopamine, essentially,
link |
If you take dopamine down,
link |
they're like, this isn't worth it, it's helpless.
link |
This isn't worth my time and energy.
link |
Well, this is where the difference
link |
between humans and nonhuman animals is interesting,
link |
because it does feel like humans have an extra level
link |
of cognitive ability that might be relevant here.
link |
Well, you can pull from different time references.
link |
So if you're in that moment,
link |
you're going to need a kit of things to pull from.
link |
So you can think this is in honor of someone else
link |
and you will find a gas reserve that's amazing, right?
link |
Now, whether or not mice are like,
link |
I remember my brother back in the other cage
link |
when I was a little mouse, we don't know.
link |
But it's very likely that they don't do that,
link |
that they're so present,
link |
they're in the experience of there and then and now,
link |
that they aren't able to extract from the past,
link |
and they're not able to project into the future,
link |
like how great it's gonna feel
link |
when I get to the end of this really lame VR corridor.
link |
I don't think they think about that.
link |
And think about like, if I quit now,
link |
how will that have,
link |
what kind of effect will it have on the rest of my life
link |
in the future difficult times?
link |
Like if you allow yourself to quit
link |
in this particular moment,
link |
you'll become a quitter more and more in life,
link |
and then you're going to not get the other nice,
link |
the opposite sex mammals.
link |
That's pretty severe, you went there.
link |
You took it the whole way to evolution and back again.
link |
I mean, but that's really it.
link |
I mean, our ability to time reference
link |
in the past, present or future.
link |
I do believe that we can be in the present and the past,
link |
or the present and the future, or only in the present,
link |
or only in the future, only in the past.
link |
But I don't think that we can really think
link |
about past, present and future all at once.
link |
And this has a similarity to covert attention.
link |
Like we can split our visual attention into two things.
link |
We really can do a task, even though we can't multitask.
link |
Or we can bring those two spotlights of attention
link |
to the same location.
link |
But it's very hard to split our attention in really well
link |
into three domains, excuse me, into three domains.
link |
I think that that's very, very challenging.
link |
And our time referencing scheme tends to be just one
link |
or two time references.
link |
So Lisa Feldman Barrett, I'm not sure
link |
if you've done work together,
link |
but at least you're connected.
link |
I found out about her because of you,
link |
on your podcast with her.
link |
And then I brought her on to Instagram,
link |
doing an Instagram live about emotion.
link |
And it was fascinating.
link |
And she's a very spirited and very, very smart woman.
link |
Fearless and brilliant.
link |
So I love her, she's amazing.
link |
She kind of, she's not a scholar of hallucinogens
link |
or dreams, but she had this intuition
link |
that there may be a connection between the kind
link |
of dissociation that happens in dreaming
link |
and that happens in like psychedelics.
link |
I, because of my previous conversation with you
link |
on this podcast, Matthew Johnson
link |
from Johns Hopkins reached out and he said,
link |
but he commented, I think, on something that we commented
link |
on, I don't even remember exactly what,
link |
but that there's not many studies.
link |
It's not being psychedelics and not being rigorously studied
link |
in an academic setting, like with a full rigor of science.
link |
And he said, well, actually that's exactly what we're doing
link |
and they're extremely well funded now.
link |
And it's been a long battle to get it accepted
link |
as a serious scientific pursuit.
link |
So, but, and I'd like to ask you a little bit about that,
link |
but do you have a sense about connection
link |
between dreams and psychedelics or these different
link |
explorations of mind states that are outside
link |
of the standard normal one, that's the wake mindset?
link |
Yeah, I loved your discussion with Matthew.
link |
I knew of the Hopkins group and the stuff they were doing,
link |
but I didn't know much about it at all.
link |
And I learned a ton from that podcast.
link |
I reached out to him just to say,
link |
I love what you're doing.
link |
I think it's incredible.
link |
So yeah, your podcast has been a great source
link |
of serious academic and intellectual conversation for me.
link |
I think what they're doing at Hopkins is amazing.
link |
He has a collaborator there actually
link |
that had a very popular paper.
link |
I just throw out there for fun,
link |
who is a postdoc at Stanford.
link |
She's Turkish, I believe.
link |
And I apologize, her last name escapes me at the moment,
link |
but that's just a function of my brain.
link |
She had a paper showing that she put octopi on MDMA
link |
on ecstasy and found out, this is published
link |
in current biology, it was a great journal,
link |
showing that the octopi then wanted to spend more time
link |
with other octopi and they started cuddling.
link |
So they're colleagues out there.
link |
But the Hopkins project is super interesting
link |
because I think they were initially supported mainly
link |
through private philanthropy.
link |
And now you're starting to see some more interest
link |
at the level of NIH about psychedelics.
link |
It's a complicated space because the psychedelics
link |
are always looked at through the lens of the 60s
link |
and people losing their mind.
link |
And there's a, I always say,
link |
you don't want a Ken Kesey out of the game.
link |
Ken Kesey was amazing, right,
link |
part of the whole beat generation thing.
link |
And he was actually at the VA near Stanford.
link |
That's where he eventually, in Menlo Park,
link |
he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
link |
or maybe that was about him.
link |
Anyway, the comments will tell me how wrong I am,
link |
but I think I'm tossing these words
link |
in the right general direction.
link |
But Huxley, Kesey, they did a lot of LSD
link |
and they all lost their jobs, right?
link |
They lost their jobs at big institutions
link |
like Harvard and Stanford and elsewhere, or they left
link |
because they made themselves the experiments.
link |
Hopkins, as far as I know, is one of the first places,
link |
if not the first place, where whatever Matt
link |
may or may not be doing in his own life, I don't know.
link |
It's really about the patients
link |
and whether or not the patients
link |
in these institutional review board approved studies,
link |
whether or not they're getting better
link |
in situations like depression.
link |
I think it's clear that there's a very close relationship
link |
between hallucinogenic states and dreaming
link |
of the sort that were described for REM dreaming.
link |
And there's a terrific set of books
link |
and body of scientific literature
link |
from a guy named Allan Hobson,
link |
who was an MD, is at Harvard Med,
link |
and he wrote books like Dream Drugstore.
link |
One of the first neuroscience books I ever read
link |
was about hallucinations and how psychedelics
link |
and dreaming are very similar.
link |
That was way back when I was in high school.
link |
I was just curious.
link |
And he really understood the relationship
link |
between LSD and REM dreams and how similar they are.
link |
I think psychedelics, and Matt knows way more about this
link |
than I do, of course, but psychedelics
link |
have some very interesting properties.
link |
They are certainly not for everybody, right?
link |
And kids, it's a problem.
link |
I think the major issues right now
link |
around the psychedelic conversation is that it's clear
link |
that they can unveil certain elements of neuroplasticity.
link |
They make the brain amenable to change,
link |
changing up space time relationships,
link |
changing up the emotional load of an event
link |
and being able to reframe that.
link |
It's clear that happens.
link |
But there's two major issues.
link |
One is that people talk about plasticity
link |
as if plasticity is the goal,
link |
but plasticity is a state within which
link |
you can direct neurology.
link |
And the question is what changes are you trying to get to?
link |
So people are just taking psychedelics
link |
to unveil plasticity without thinking about
link |
what circuits they want to modify and how.
link |
I think that's a problem.
link |
I think there's great potential, however,
link |
for people opening up these states of plasticity
link |
with psychedelics or otherwise,
link |
and directing the plastic changes
link |
toward a particular end point.
link |
And there's an absolutely spectacular paper
link |
out of UC Davis published as a full article in Nature
link |
just a couple of months ago,
link |
showing that there are psychedelics
link |
that are now can be modified.
link |
So chemists have gotten into the game now
link |
and modifying to take away the hallucinogenic component
link |
where you still get the neuroplasticity components.
link |
And for a lot of people it'd be like, oh, that's no fun.
link |
That's not giving you the wild experience.
link |
But I do think that that holds great potential
link |
for people that wouldn't otherwise orient
link |
towards some of these drugs.
link |
So I think it's really marvelous what's happening
link |
and what's about to happen.
link |
And I think there is one drug in that kit of drugs
link |
that's very unusual, like psilocybin, LSD,
link |
those promote heavy, heavy serotonin release
link |
and lateralized connections ramp up, et cetera.
link |
Matt talked about all that.
link |
But MDMA, ecstasy, is a very unusual situation
link |
where dopamine is very, very high
link |
because of the way the drug is designed.
link |
Dopamine release, it goes through the roof.
link |
So people feel great and they want to move
link |
and they have a lot of energy.
link |
But serotonin levels are also high
link |
and that's a very unnatural state.
link |
And why MDMA may, and I want to highlight may,
link |
have particularly high potential
link |
for the treatment of certain forms of depression
link |
is an interesting question.
link |
Because never before, as far as we know in human history,
link |
has there been a possibility of opening up dopaminergic
link |
and serotonergic states at the same time,
link |
dopamine being the molecule pursuit and reward
link |
and more and more, and serotonin being one of bliss
link |
and being content right where you're at.
link |
So it's almost like those two things wrap back on themselves
link |
and create this very unusual state.
link |
And I think the bigger conversation
link |
is what to do with a state like that.
link |
Like is it about self love?
link |
Is it about developing love for another person?
link |
Is it about forgetting hate?
link |
Like these are powerful molecules.
link |
And I think if the academic community
link |
and the clinical community is going to move forward
link |
with them in any serious way,
link |
I think there needs to be a conversation
link |
about what they're being used for.
link |
Right, and coupled with that,
link |
I think similar to what you're saying,
link |
like Matt has talked about,
link |
as others have talked about,
link |
some of the biggest benefits of like progress,
link |
whether it's like quitting smoking
link |
and all this kind of stuff is in the days after,
link |
it's the integration of the experience.
link |
So maybe you open up the brain to the neuroplasticity,
link |
but then there's like work to be done.
link |
It's not, you shake up something in the biology of the brain
link |
but you have to do then it's work.
link |
Absolutely, a friend of mine who's a physician,
link |
he says, who's quite open to this idea
link |
that psychedelics could play a real role in real medicine.
link |
Says, better living through chemistry
link |
still requires better living.
link |
And I think it's a beautiful statement.
link |
I wish I had said it, but he gets the credit.
link |
But the plasticity window opens.
link |
And then as you said, what are you going to do in the two
link |
weeks, three weeks, four weeks afterward?
link |
Because that's the real opportunity.
link |
But those psychedelic experiences are really a case
link |
of an amplified experience inside of an amplified
link |
experience so much so that everything seems relevant.
link |
And it's fascinating.
link |
I mean, my hope is that the AI and machine learning
link |
and the brain machine interface and all that
link |
will eventually be merged with the psychedelic treatments
link |
so that an individual can go in,
link |
take whatever amount of whatever's safe for them,
link |
working with a clinician and really direct the plasticity
link |
while maybe stimulating the medial frontal cortex
link |
or increasing the observer or decreasing the observer
link |
in the brain or decreasing the amygdala.
link |
I mean, it's doable.
link |
It's doable with transcranial magnetic stimulation
link |
and it's for shutting down activity
link |
and it's doable with ultrasound.
link |
Ultrasound now allows very focal activation
link |
of particular brain regions through the skull,
link |
So it's approaching the same kind of therapy
link |
from different angles.
link |
One AI is the computational size of injecting
link |
like the robotics injecting like maybe you can even think
link |
about it as like electricity, the electrical approach
link |
versus then like the chemical approach.
link |
And then the psychology is subjective, right?
link |
So it's gonna take some real understanding
link |
of what that person's lexicon is.
link |
Like, you know, that wasn't a pun, sorry.
link |
I'm sorry, it's terrible, I'm like the worst.
link |
That's the one thing I know from the feedback on my podcast.
link |
My jokes are terrible, but I never claimed to be funny.
link |
But somebody who they really trust
link |
and understands when somebody says, you know,
link |
for a very stoic person, like I'm imagining
link |
you interviewed the great Dan Gable, right?
link |
I don't know anything about Dan,
link |
but can you imagine like you ask Dan,
link |
like, you know, how you feel about something
link |
while on one of these drugs?
link |
And like, I mean, his languaging might,
link |
if he says that was troubling,
link |
it might mean that it was very troubling
link |
or not troubling at all.
link |
So people are, language is a poor guide
link |
because if I say I'm upset, how upset is that?
link |
Well, that's very subjective.
link |
So you need, we need, can you build a tool for that?
link |
Can you build an AI tool for that?
link |
Yeah, deeper, yeah, well.
link |
Maybe that's the eye, maybe that's our,
link |
that's what the eyes could reveal.
link |
So language is not just words, it's everything together.
link |
And that's one of the fascinating things about the eyes
link |
and the window to the soul.
link |
I mean, they express so much, the face, the eyes,
link |
the body, I mean, Lisa talks about that,
link |
the communication of emotions, it's a super complex.
link |
Perhaps it's a bit of a side fun tangent,
link |
but Matt, Matthew Johnson brings up DMT
link |
and the experience of DMT is from a scientific perspective,
link |
just a mystery in itself over its intensity
link |
of what happens to the brain.
link |
And of course, Joe Rogan and others bring it up
link |
as a very different special kind of experience
link |
and elves seem to come up often.
link |
I've never tried DMT, what allows for hallucinogenic states?
link |
And it, I mean, DMT is a really interesting molecule.
link |
There are a lot of people experimenting now with DMT
link |
and the way they've described it is as a kind of a freight
link |
train through space and time, very different
link |
than the way people describe LSD type experiences
link |
or psilocybin where time and space are very fluid,
link |
but it tends to be a kind of a slower role, if you will.
link |
So it's clear that DMT is tapping into a brain state
link |
that's distinctly different than the other psychedelics.
link |
And you mentioned jujitsu and these other communities.
link |
I mean, I think it's interesting because jujitsu
link |
is a nonverbal activity and people get together
link |
and talk about this nonverbal activity
link |
and they show great love for it in the same way
link |
that surfers, I've known some surfers in my time
link |
and they will get up at the crack of dawn
link |
and drive really, really far to sit in the water
link |
and wait for this wave to come.
link |
I have to imagine it's pretty fantastic.
link |
I think that human beings now,
link |
some of whom are in the scientific community
link |
are starting to feel comfortable enough to talk about
link |
some of these other loves and other endeavors
link |
because they do reveal a certain component
link |
about our underlying neurology.
link |
I'm fascinated by the concept of wordlessness,
link |
activities in which language is just not sufficient
link |
to capture and in which feel so vital as a reset,
link |
as important as sleep.
link |
I think that's one of the dangers of the phone
link |
is not that you're going to get into some online battle
link |
or that you're always staring at the phone
link |
is that it's a words.
link |
As we read things, we're hearing the script in our head.
link |
And I think getting into states
link |
where we are in a state of wordlessness
link |
is very renewing and replenishing and just can feel amazing.
link |
And I believe also can help us tap into creative states
link |
and allow our neurology to access creative states.
link |
And sleep is one such wordlessness, period.
link |
So one of the most interesting things to me
link |
are states that one can approach in waking,
link |
non sleep depressed, wordlessness through,
link |
maybe it's jujitsu, maybe it's for some people surfing,
link |
maybe it's dancing, maybe it's just,
link |
I don't know, staring at a wall, who knows?
link |
But where the language components of the brain
link |
are completely shut down.
link |
And it has to be the case that drugs are no drugs,
link |
that the brain is entering and starting to states
link |
and starting to use algorithms
link |
that are distinctly different
link |
than when we're trying to compose things
link |
in any kind of coherent way for someone else to understand.
link |
There's no interest in anyone else understanding
link |
what you're experiencing in that moment.
link |
And that's beautiful.
link |
And I think it's not just beautiful because it feels good.
link |
I think it's beautiful because it's important
link |
and it's clearly fundamental to our neurology.
link |
And your sense is there's a connection between dreams
link |
and DMT and like psychedelic,
link |
like all of the, you can understand one
link |
by studying the other.
link |
So for example, dreams are also very difficult to study,
link |
but they're more accessible.
link |
It's safer to study.
link |
And we're told we need to get more of it.
link |
Whereas with psychedelics, there's this big question mark.
link |
Is it gonna make everyone crazy?
link |
Is it gonna be legal?
link |
I mean, it's kind of interesting how,
link |
if one looks on Instagram,
link |
one could almost think that these drugs are already legal
link |
based on the way that people commute, but they're not yet.
link |
There's still a lot of them are scheduled.
link |
And there's a lot of questions.
link |
I mean, but nevertheless, it's like,
link |
my hope is that science opens up
link |
to these drugs a little bit more.
link |
It's just, I have this intuition that,
link |
like a lot of people share,
link |
that they would be able to unlock deeper understanding
link |
It's any kind of, same as studying dreams.
link |
Well, creativity is in the nonlinearities, right?
link |
But productivity is in the implementation of linearities.
link |
I mean, that's what is absolutely clear.
link |
This is why I think we were talking earlier
link |
about why a formal rigorous training in something
link |
where other people are looking at you
link |
and telling you, no, not good enough,
link |
go back and do it again.
link |
There's real value to that
link |
because otherwise it's just ideas.
link |
You know, one thing that Matt mentioned
link |
as the study that they're working on is,
link |
as opposed to, I think most of the psychedelic studies
link |
they've done is on how to treat different conditions.
link |
And one of the things they're working on now
link |
is to try to do a study where, for creatives,
link |
for people that don't have a condition
link |
that they're trying to treat,
link |
but instead see how this,
link |
how psychedelics can help you create.
link |
If you take creatives and you give them more psychedelics,
link |
they're not gonna be able to get out of their room.
link |
Well, but this is the,
link |
maybe you can speak to that, psychedelics or not,
link |
or dreams or tools in general, how to be better creatives.
link |
That's an interesting,
link |
I don't often see studies of this nature
link |
of like how to take high performers
link |
in the mental creative space
link |
and get them to perform even better.
link |
So it's not average people.
link |
It's like masters of their craft, like taking,
link |
I mean, his examples was taking an Elon Musk,
link |
which is in the engineering space and maybe musicians
link |
and all that kind of stuff and studying that.
link |
That's a, I mean, that's weird.
link |
Usually the science, the scientific exploration there
link |
has been done by the musicians themselves,
link |
as has been documented.
link |
Like jazz is like all nonlinearities, right?
link |
But if it's, but the people still have to know
link |
how to play their instruments, right?
link |
There's some early skill building that's critical.
link |
I mean, when you mentioned someone like Elon,
link |
I mean, virtual, I mean, he's already a virtuoso, right?
link |
Cause he, and in so many different domains,
link |
I've never met him, but it's clear, right?
link |
He, it's not just that he's ambitious and bold and brave
link |
and all that, it's all that.
link |
And there's clearly a different way of looking
link |
at the same problems that everyone else is looking at.
link |
And people are probably banging their head
link |
against the refrigerator thinking like, think differently,
link |
think it doesn't work that way.
link |
It involves, there's a certain anxiety in for the,
link |
I'm not talking about for Elon, but I don't have no idea.
link |
But I think for somebody who's very structured,
link |
very regimented, very linear,
link |
the anxiety comes from letting go of those linearities.
link |
And for the person that's very creative,
link |
the anxiety comes from trying to impose linearities, right?
link |
The really creative artists or musician, they're,
link |
They seem like they can't get their life together
link |
because they can't.
link |
And they, you know, we look at people who are kind of
link |
pseudo Asperger's or Asperger's or some forms of autism
link |
and they are so hyper linear,
link |
but you take away those linearities and they freak out.
link |
And that's kind of the essence of some of those syndromes.
link |
So I think that the ability to toggle back and forth
link |
between those states is what's remarkable.
link |
I mean, because we're here and we're having this discussion,
link |
I mean, Steve Jobs is a good example.
link |
He probably the best example,
link |
somebody who actually talked about his own process,
link |
about the merging of art and science,
link |
art and engineering, humanities and science.
link |
Very few people can do that.
link |
Well, you seem to have a capacity to do that.
link |
Like you know poetry and you are AI guy,
link |
like you, there's nothing linear about poetry
link |
as far as I can tell.
link |
I mean, I do wonder, just like we've been talking about,
link |
if there's any ways to push that to its limits
link |
to explore further.
link |
I don't like leaning, this is why I'm bothered
link |
there's not more science and psychedelics is,
link |
I haven't done almost,
link |
so I've eaten mushrooms a few times allegedly,
link |
And the reason I don't do more,
link |
the reason I haven't done DMT is because it's illegal
link |
and it's like not well studied.
link |
And I'm in those things,
link |
I'm not usually at the cutting edge, but I'm very curious.
link |
And it feels like there could be tools
link |
to be discovered there, not for fun,
link |
not for recreation, but for like encouraging
link |
whether you're a linear thinking to go nonlinear
link |
or it's nonlinear to go linear, like to shake things up.
link |
You mentioned Dan Gable,
link |
the idea of Dan Gable on psychedelics is fascinating to me
link |
because he's such a control freak.
link |
I mean, he likes control.
link |
That I would show up for.
link |
That I would show up for.
link |
But like so much of these psychedelic experiences
link |
it feels like is for letting go.
link |
You don't wanna resist.
link |
That's supposedly where the growth is
link |
in giving oneself over to the process.
link |
And that's for people who are like master controllers.
link |
He's one of the greatest coaches of all time.
link |
It's fascinating to see what that battle looks like
link |
of resistance and then of letting go.
link |
Yeah, I mean, I can't wait to see where these studies take us.
link |
Well, it's clearly happening.
link |
You know, I've asked there,
link |
I have a couple of colleagues at Stanford
link |
who are doing animal studies.
link |
I've asked around, you know, it's,
link |
there's a lot of discussion in the neuroscience community
link |
about what the perception of a laboratory is
link |
if they work on psychedelics.
link |
I mean, I have to tip my hat to the folks at Hopkins.
link |
They are pioneers.
link |
And as Terry Signowski,
link |
he's a computational neuroscientist down at Salk says,
link |
I don't think he was the first person to say it.
link |
He says, you know how to spot the pioneers?
link |
They're the ones with the arrows in their backs.
link |
And you know, it's an unkind world to a scientist
link |
that's trying to do really cutting edge stuff.
link |
My colleague, David Spiegel who studies medical hypnosis,
link |
he's got dozens of studies now showing that hypnosis
link |
can be beneficial for pain management,
link |
anxiety management, cancer outcomes.
link |
And it's finally, you know,
link |
at the point where there's so much data,
link |
but people hear hypnosis and they think of stage hypnosis,
link |
which is like the furthest thing from what he's doing.
link |
And I think mind, body type stuff,
link |
hypnosis, respiration and breathing.
link |
I think the hard science walk into the problem
link |
is always going to be best to get the community on board.
link |
And then it's up to people like Matt
link |
and to really, you know, take it to the next level.
link |
And as I say, not Keezy out of the game
link |
because Keezy basically was taking too much of his own stuff
link |
and he started dressing crazy of banana hats.
link |
And like, you see him, he had the magic bus.
link |
So, you know, the day I start driving to work
link |
in the magic bus, that's the day I lose my job.
link |
I'm not into buses or wearing fruit, but.
link |
You're going to get a phone call from me
link |
and I hope you do the same for me.
link |
It's like, dude, what are you doing?
link |
Well, what's interesting earlier,
link |
we were talking about the challenge with David
link |
that you're about to do.
link |
I mean, that is a psychedelic experience of sorts
link |
because you're biasing your mind
link |
towards a pretty extreme neurochemical state.
link |
And you don't know what you're going to find there.
link |
And that's kind of the excitement,
link |
at least for me as an observer.
link |
It's like, I want to know what the experience
link |
is like afterward.
link |
I want to know like, how was it?
link |
I mean, I'm sure you're going to get something.
link |
Like you said, you're going to grow.
link |
The question is how.
link |
And not resisting.
link |
I mean, it's the same as with the psychedelic experience.
link |
It's like not like giving yourself over completely
link |
to the experience and not resisting
link |
and going through the whole mental journey
link |
of whether it's anger or excitement or exhaustion,
link |
That's, I mean, that's the entirety of the process
link |
that David goes through when he does his own challenges
link |
and so on is that whole journey.
link |
He finds purposely like missile seeks the limits
link |
of the mind that whenever the resistance is felt,
link |
runs up against it and then goes to the full journey
link |
of going beyond it and seeing what's there
link |
on the other side.
link |
Well, stress has these two sides,
link |
the limbic friction of being tired
link |
and needing to get more energized.
link |
That's one form of stress.
link |
And then there's the feeling too amped up
link |
and needing to calm down.
link |
The typical discussion around stress is one thing,
link |
but it's all limbic friction.
link |
It's just that when I say limbic friction,
link |
that's not a real scientific term.
link |
I just mean the limbic system wanting to pull you down
link |
into sleep or wanting to put you into panic
link |
and you using top down processing,
link |
using that evolved forebrain to say,
link |
I'm not going to go to sleep
link |
and I'm not going to freak out.
link |
And those top down control mechanisms are,
link |
I mean, when those get honed, that's beautiful
link |
because then you're increasing capacity for everything.
link |
This month on the podcast,
link |
you're talking about neuroplasticity.
link |
You mentioned a bunch already.
link |
Is there something you're looking forward to specifically,
link |
like something maybe you're fascinated by
link |
that jumps to mind about neuroplasticity,
link |
this fascinating property of the brain?
link |
Yeah, I think that it's clear
link |
there's one facet of neuroplasticity
link |
that is very well supported by the research data
link |
that hardly anyone has implemented in the real world.
link |
And that's the release of acetylcholine from these neurons
link |
in the forebrain called nucleus basalis.
link |
This is mainly the work of Mike Merzenich,
link |
who used to be at UCSF
link |
and some of his scientific offspring,
link |
Greg Reckensown and Michael Kilgard and others.
link |
What they showed was increases in acetylcholine,
link |
this molecule associated with focus,
link |
in concert, meaning at the same time as some event,
link |
motor event or music event or any kind of sensory event,
link |
immediately reorganizes the neocortex
link |
so that there's a permanent map representation
link |
And I absolutely believe that this can be channeled
link |
toward accelerated skill learning.
link |
And my friend and colleague, Eddie Chang,
link |
who's now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,
link |
but also a fine scientist in his own right,
link |
not just a clinician,
link |
he's doing studies looking at rapid acquisition of language
link |
using these principles.
link |
He trained with Merzenich.
link |
It's clear we have these gates on plasticity
link |
and they are gated by nicotinic acetylcholine transmission.
link |
And why that hasn't made it into protocols
link |
for motor learning, sport learning, language learning,
link |
music learning, emotional learning, I don't know.
link |
I think part of the reason has been kind of cultural
link |
is that scientists publish their paper and they move on.
link |
Merzenich talked a lot and still can be found
link |
from time to time talking about
link |
how these plasticity mechanisms can be leveraged.
link |
But he had a commercial company,
link |
and so then people kind of backed away from him a little bit.
link |
I think he was, to be honest,
link |
I think Merzenich was ahead of his time.
link |
And I think the timing is right now
link |
for people to understand these mechanisms of plasticity
link |
and start to implement them.
link |
Also, it all sounds like becoming superhuman
link |
or optimizing or whatever, all that, yes.
link |
But also what about kids with language learning deficits
link |
or with dyslexia or just performance in school in general?
link |
I have a deep, interesting concern
link |
for the future of science and mathematics
link |
and not just in this country, but all over the world.
link |
And more plasticity equals faster, better, deeper learning.
link |
And if we don't do this,
link |
I don't think we're going to get the full reach
link |
out of all the machine learning tools either,
link |
because everyone talks about these huge data sets,
link |
but those huge data sets funnel into human interpretation.
link |
I mean, we don't just like stare at the numbers and bask.
link |
So the human brain, I think,
link |
needs to leverage these plasticity mechanisms
link |
to keep up with the thing that's happening very, very fast,
link |
which is technology development.
link |
So that's a long winded way of saying
link |
basal forebrain, cholinergic transmission and plasticity,
link |
it allows for plasticity in adulthood
link |
and it allows for single trial learning, which is incredible.
link |
But how do we leverage that?
link |
Like in the physical space taking actions
link |
or is there some chemicals that can stimulate neuroplasticity?
link |
I think it's the intersection of the two.
link |
I think it's being engaged in a physical practice
link |
while enhancing pharmacology.
link |
And it has to be done safely.
link |
And this is full of open questions.
link |
This is the very beginnings of it, like you're saying.
link |
Yeah, a pill that's safe
link |
that increases nicotinic transmission.
link |
I mean, I know a number of people that chew Nicorette.
link |
Actually, I have a Nobel prize winning colleague
link |
at Columbia, not to be named,
link |
who chews like six pieces of Nicorette
link |
in a half hour conversation with him.
link |
And he started doing that as a replacement for smoking
link |
because smoking is nicotine nicotinic stimulation
link |
of the cholinergic system.
link |
So smokers have long known that increases focus
link |
and attention and learning.
link |
It's just that the lung cancer thing is a barrier.
link |
Now I'm not suggesting people take Nicorette,
link |
but it's clear that we need better directed pharmacology.
link |
But you can imagine next time you go in
link |
for a learning bout, if it's really essential,
link |
you might want to stimulate the nicotinic system
link |
if that's safe for you.
link |
Again, I'm a doctor.
link |
So again, I'm not telling people to do this,
link |
but that's where it's going.
link |
Until we start merging machines
link |
with pharmacology and behavior, we're just kind of walking
link |
around in the circle over and over again,
link |
and it's going to happen.
link |
Do you find computer vision, machine learning
link |
from the perspective of tooling as an interesting tool
link |
for analyzing, for processing all the data
link |
from the neuroscience world, from the neurobiology,
link |
biology, all the different data sets
link |
that you could have about the mind, the eye,
link |
the everything that's neck and above,
link |
and also the central nervous system and all?
link |
I think that computer science and engineering
link |
and chemistry, bioengineering, that's what's creating
link |
the acceleration and progress in neuroscience right now.
link |
I think it's actually one place where science,
link |
I'm very reassured, science has invited in psychologists,
link |
computational biologists, at least at Stanford, MIT,
link |
and other places too, of course, it's clear
link |
that it's a everyone's invited kind of party right now.
link |
That the major issue in the field of neuroscience,
link |
at least through my view,
link |
is that there's no conceptual leadership.
link |
No one is saying we need to work on
link |
and solve this problem or that problem.
link |
It's very fragmented right now.
link |
Now, the good news is people are communicating.
link |
So computer scientists and people who work on AI,
link |
machine vision are talking to biologists and vice versa,
link |
but it's very dispersed.
link |
Is there a lot of different data sets in your work
link |
that you've just come across?
link |
Is there a huge number of disparate data sets
link |
around neuroscience and so on?
link |
Well, there's a lot of cell sequencing stuff.
link |
So the Broad over in Boston and then on this coast,
link |
the Chen Zuckerberg Initiative,
link |
they did $3 billion to sequence every cell type
link |
in humans and in animals and I think their goal
link |
is to cure every disease by some date,
link |
I don't know, in the future.
link |
Huge data sets of gene expression and protein expression,
link |
I think no one really knows how to think
link |
about neural circuits and what is a neural circuit?
link |
Is it one structure?
link |
Is it two structures communicating?
link |
I think this is where I actually think
link |
that the robotics is going to tell us how the brain works
link |
because it's tempting to think that the brain
link |
has all these cell types and circuits
link |
in order to solve specific problems.
link |
But it might be that the fundamental algorithm
link |
is to create cells and circuits
link |
that can solve variable problems.
link |
We know in the retina, just a very simple example
link |
is that we've always heard about like cones
link |
are for color vision and high acuity
link |
and rods are for night vision and non color vision.
link |
But at the dusk, dawn transition,
link |
certain cell types switch to do completely different,
link |
have a completely different function
link |
for viewing starry night
link |
versus what they do during the daytime.
link |
So neurons multiplex.
link |
And I think building machines that can multiplex
link |
and can evolve themselves is going to help us
link |
really understand what the brain is doing.
link |
We need to tease out the fundamental algorithms.
link |
We know they're like motion detection
link |
and spatial vision and things like that.
link |
I think machines are going to be much faster at that
link |
than our understanding of biology
link |
and how the brain does that.
link |
Basically, I'll be out of a job
link |
and people like you will have a job.
link |
Well, no, I think the main idea is that
link |
there won't be a job that's machine learning
link |
or computer vision.
link |
It's just, it's a tool that neuroscientists
link |
will use more and more and more
link |
and biologists would use.
link |
I mean, this whole idea that it will just be a tool
link |
that allows you to start expanding
link |
the kind of things you can study.
link |
Well, the next generation coming up,
link |
I can say this because I now I'm blessed
link |
to have a bioengineering student.
link |
They think about problems so differently than biologists do.
link |
We realized the other day we both came up
link |
with a set of ideas around a certain project
link |
and we realized that her version of it
link |
was the exact opposite of mine.
link |
And hers was far more rational.
link |
It's just an engineering perspective.
link |
It's like, why would we do that last?
link |
We should do that first.
link |
I think that the next generation is really interested
link |
in solving practical problems.
link |
So a lot like computer science and engineering was
link |
in the late nineties, it was like,
link |
you can go do a PhD in computer science and engineering,
link |
maybe, or you go work for a company
link |
and actually build stuff that's useful.
link |
I think neuroscientists and people interested
link |
in neuroscience are starting to think,
link |
how can I build stuff that's useful?
link |
And this statement is supported by the fact
link |
that many people in my business leave their academic labs,
link |
fortunately not all of them,
link |
but they leave their academic labs
link |
and they go work for companies like Neuralink.
link |
This is something I think we've spoken a few times offline
link |
about, I mean, speaking of computer vision,
link |
I'm fascinated by the eye.
link |
I did a bunch of work on the eye.
link |
So there's the neuroscientists,
link |
there's a neurobiology way of studying the eye,
link |
and there's the computer vision way of studying the eye.
link |
And the computer vision way of studying the eye
link |
of just like observing, noncontext sensing of humans
link |
is really fascinating to me
link |
and studying human behavior in different contexts,
link |
like in semi autonomous vehicles,
link |
it seemed like there's a lot of signal
link |
that comes from the eye, that comes from blinking,
link |
that's not fully understood yet.
link |
It's been in the lab, it's been used quite a bit
link |
to study like the dilation of the pupil,
link |
all those kinds of things are used to infer workload,
link |
cognitive load, all those kinds of things.
link |
But the pictures is murky.
link |
It's not completely well understood,
link |
especially in the wild, how much signal you can get
link |
from the eye, from the human face.
link |
I've downloaded Joe Rogan's,
link |
all of the podcasts he's ever done, video.
link |
You have the YouTube bank.
link |
I have the YouTube bank for a reason
link |
that this was before he went with Spotify.
link |
You own the archive.
link |
There's PubMed, and then there's the Joe Rogan experience
link |
owned by, or maintained by Lex.
link |
For my private collection.
link |
No, the reason I did it,
link |
and I did a really rigorous processing of it,
link |
which is like I extracted all of the faces,
link |
I did the really good blink track,
link |
the pupil tracking and the blink detection
link |
for the entirety of the,
link |
oh, I should say it's from episode like,
link |
I forget what it is, but it's like episode 900
link |
when they switched to 1080p video.
link |
But it was like much crappier video.
link |
It's still kind of.
link |
Did you log when there was marijuana consumption
link |
or when they were drinking?
link |
I mean, there's so many.
link |
Because that's gonna, like just,
link |
it won't throw off the data,
link |
but it's relevant to the pupil data.
link |
So let's just put it this way.
link |
There's a lot of fascinating
link |
computer vision problems involved,
link |
but I only kept long sequences of data
link |
where the eyes detected exceptionally well.
link |
And I also removed people that were wearing glasses.
link |
I removed, there's certain people that have a way
link |
of moving their eyes and squinting
link |
where it's harder to infer like concrete blinks.
link |
They'll kind of have a squint the whole time.
link |
And their blink is very light.
link |
It's very tough to know what's an actual blink.
link |
Then you got those baseball cap wearing guys.
link |
There are certain people that go on podcasts
link |
and wear baseball caps and don't reveal their,
link |
I don't know if they realize it or not until it comes out,
link |
but their face is completely obscured from vision.
link |
And from a computer vision perspective,
link |
people that wear makeup and usually women on their eyes,
link |
it complicates things.
link |
Like eyelashes all complicate things.
link |
So you can clean stuff up
link |
just so you have really crisp signal.
link |
You don't have to, you can deal with issues,
link |
but there's so many hours of Joe Rogan video.
link |
Anyway, I say all that because I was searching
link |
for an interesting personal experiment for me
link |
because I saw in drivers when I was looking
link |
at eye movement in drivers, it seemed to indicate,
link |
there seemed to be quite a lot of signal there
link |
that indicates amount of cognitive load,
link |
but it's not clear if there's something conclusive,
link |
but if there is some signal, that's a really powerful one
link |
because eye movement can be detected in the wild.
link |
Like you and I sitting here,
link |
I can detect eye movement really well.
link |
Pupil dilation is a really crappy indicator.
link |
And it's luminance dependent.
link |
Like if I turn toward a light, it's a route.
link |
People change size depending on level of alertness,
link |
arouse autonomic arousal,
link |
but also overall levels of luminance.
link |
It's very, very hard, but there are,
link |
I mean, you're sitting on a gold mine
link |
because there is a lot of interest right now
link |
in measuring state through noncontact sensing.
link |
Heart rate variability through changes in skin tone,
link |
just off a camera.
link |
Can you imagine that at the point where
link |
you just look at some video and you're like,
link |
oh, they're getting more stressed or worked up
link |
and they're not based on a heat map
link |
of some little patch on their face.
link |
Cause everyone's going to have this slight,
link |
sort of compartmentalize it slightly differently,
link |
but you can learn it pretty quickly.
link |
We know this when someone's like giving a talk
link |
and we see them starting to blotching on their neck.
link |
This is like the thesis defense response, right?
link |
We know it and it's a stressful situation
link |
because not passing your thesis defense is rough.
link |
And we can see that,
link |
but cameras can pick that up really easily
link |
at much lower levels than the blatant blotching
link |
And eye movements certainly are powerful indications
link |
of the state of the autonomic system.
link |
So do you think there are things from a high level
link |
that you can pick up from eye movement and blinking?
link |
Well, blink frequency is going to increase
link |
as people get tired, right?
link |
I've actually been teased a lot online
link |
cause I don't blink much when I'll do a post.
link |
And so I did a whole post about blinking,
link |
about the science of blinking.
link |
There's some data, very strong data, not from my lab
link |
that show that every time you blink,
link |
it resets your perception of time.
link |
They have people do these kind of track
link |
a kind of a Doppler like thing.
link |
And anyway, blinking resets your perception of time.
link |
There's a dopaminergic mechanism
link |
in the blink related circuitry of the brain.
link |
When people are very alert,
link |
they tend to not blink very much.
link |
When we're sleepy, we tend to blink more
link |
and our eyes tend to close.
link |
Now, some people are more hooded
link |
in the way their eyes sit.
link |
Some people are like this all the time.
link |
There are some very famous people.
link |
I'm not gonna name them
link |
because I might run into them at some point
link |
who were like accused of being sociopaths
link |
cause they don't blink very often.
link |
But they might just have high levels of autonomic arousal.
link |
They just don't blink very much.
link |
Also depends on how lubricated the eyes are.
link |
So I think within individual,
link |
you can get a lot of information.
link |
I don't think we can say this person's blinking a lot.
link |
They're lying, this person or they're tired.
link |
This person doesn't blink, they're stressed.
link |
I think if you understand that person's baseline,
link |
And presumably, well, having been
link |
on the Joe Rogan Experience,
link |
I can say when you first sit down there,
link |
if you've never been in there before.
link |
You're in my data set by the way.
link |
Well, I bet you I will admit to being,
link |
first time sitting down there.
link |
I mean, Joe was incredibly gracious,
link |
made me feel very comfortable there.
link |
But yeah, it's an intense experience.
link |
It's a small space too.
link |
Anytime you enter a small space from a big space
link |
in his old studio, you're familiar with,
link |
there's a breaking in period
link |
where you're getting to know somebody.
link |
And so I'm sure my levels of autonomic arousal
link |
front of the podcast were higher than later.
link |
But once you have a baseline established,
link |
you can get a lot of data on somebody simply from blinks.
link |
Some people averting gaze too.
link |
If you have both people, that's really powerful.
link |
This is the holy grail, another holy grail of neuroscience.
link |
We've mainly looked at subjects in isolation.
link |
There hasn't been much brain imaging
link |
of two people interacting
link |
or even in animal models of two mice
link |
or two monkeys interacting.
link |
It's all like person scanner, bite bar.
link |
I mean, if you've ever been in one of these scanners,
link |
you're like in a bite bar.
link |
It's very medieval.
link |
And so you think in the interaction,
link |
there's actually, you can almost study them
link |
as a single brain or as a single system.
link |
The two brains are a single system.
link |
Highly correlated.
link |
Yeah, maybe are your blinks triggering my blinks?
link |
Are your non blink epochs extending my non blink epochs?
link |
There's a fascinating space to explore there
link |
and no one's done it.
link |
And because everyone let the Joe Rogan experience archive
link |
disappear, except for you.
link |
You grabbed, did you get the comments too?
link |
Because I think the comments were almost as entertaining
link |
as the conversation.
link |
You know what you just made me realize with the couplings,
link |
I have a better data set than the Joe Rogan podcast
link |
with high resolution video,
link |
which is the raw video for this podcast.
link |
So for example, both cameras right now are recording
link |
you and I full feed.
link |
The final result will switch cameras back and forth,
link |
but I have the full feed.
link |
So I can have the blinking for both you and I
link |
I bet you people trigger blinks and in one another,
link |
you know, and there's also like the simplest way
link |
to think about the blinks and the attentional thing
link |
and the alertness is two fighters in the standoff.
link |
There's this whole lore around who blinks first.
link |
It's like they blink first.
link |
Well, what are we really asking?
link |
They're asking whether or not one person can maintain focus
link |
longer than the other person,
link |
which is an important parameter.
link |
It's not the only parameter,
link |
but it's an important parameter.
link |
And so that blinking contest,
link |
even though they don't square off as a blinking contest,
link |
it's well known that the first to blink
link |
is revealing something about their capacity
link |
to hold attention.
link |
You've started an amazing podcast
link |
that we've mentioned a few times.
link |
People should definitely check it out.
link |
It's called the Huberman Lab Podcast.
link |
It does your, it's basically,
link |
it embodies the personality of Andrew Huberman,
link |
which is like make science accessible,
link |
but also fascinating and giving it,
link |
like what do you call it?
link |
You give tools for everyday life,
link |
meaning it kind of grounds it like,
link |
what the hell does this mean for my life?
link |
But then also does the beauty of science at the same time.
link |
So I love both the rigor and the openness
link |
of the whole thing,
link |
plus the whole corrections things that we mentioned.
link |
Anyway, what's been the hardest part of this whole process?
link |
You're one of, already one of the only,
link |
and one of the best science broadcasters out there.
link |
So in that process, what's been the hardest,
link |
what's been the most exciting part?
link |
Wow, well, first of all,
link |
thanks for the kind words about the podcast.
link |
It was inspired by you.
link |
I absolutely, that's no BS.
link |
The last time we met to do an interview for your podcast,
link |
we talked a little bit about it
link |
and you gave me the subtle nudge
link |
that maybe there was a podcast there
link |
and I thought about it and I laughed
link |
and I was just like, I gotta do this thing.
link |
And you really gave me the encouragement to do it.
link |
And your podcast, this podcast has really forged the way.
link |
You've been tip of the spear on serious scientific,
link |
intellectual, yet fun, accessible conversation.
link |
And so I, as your colleague and friend,
link |
but just even if those things weren't true,
link |
like this podcast was and is the inspiration.
link |
There's no question.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
Yeah, I really, like 100%.
link |
And when I decided to do the podcast,
link |
the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
I thought really long and hard about what would work best
link |
and would be most beneficial.
link |
It turned out to be the hardest thing,
link |
which is to stay on a single topic
link |
for three or four or more episodes
link |
before switching to a new topic.
link |
Because I know from the experience of university
link |
and teaching in university, as you know as well,
link |
that there's always the temptation
link |
to pivot to something else,
link |
but the drilling into something really deeply
link |
is where the gems reside.
link |
And the challenge has been how to make it interesting,
link |
how to keep people on board,
link |
how to give people tools along the way,
link |
but also stay close to the scientific data.
link |
I like to think that we're headed in the right direction.
link |
It still needs to evolve, but that's been a challenge.
link |
I think I also am challenged by the fact
link |
that there's a tremendous range of backgrounds of listeners.
link |
So some people have asked for more names,
link |
like more bits and parts of the nervous system
link |
and cellular molecular mechanisms
link |
and all that kind of thing.
link |
And other people have said,
link |
I don't understand any of that stuff,
link |
but I think I'm keeping up.
link |
And so unlike a university course
link |
where there are prerequisites
link |
and everyone's coming to the table
link |
with more or less the same knowledge,
link |
I have a very limited sense of what the audience knows
link |
So that's why I incorporated the feature
link |
of the comment section on YouTube,
link |
being a source of feedback.
link |
And I do kind of an office hours like episode
link |
every third or fourth episode
link |
where I address common questions.
link |
And I think that the podcast space in my mind,
link |
at least for the sort of podcasts I'm doing,
link |
needed a venue for the listeners
link |
to be a more integral part of the experience
link |
as opposed to just commenting
link |
on what they liked or didn't like.
link |
So while I like to hear what people liked and didn't like,
link |
I also really like to hear about,
link |
hey, tell me more about temperature minimums
link |
and how they can be used to phase shifts
link |
or cadient rhythms or whatever it is.
link |
And I realized that I'm probably losing
link |
some people along the way,
link |
but hopefully at the end of each month,
link |
and because of the way that the episodes are archived,
link |
people will come away feeling as if they've learned a ton
link |
and they have tools that they can implement.
link |
And perhaps most importantly,
link |
that they're starting to think scientifically
link |
about the tons of other stuff that's out there.
link |
So that's been the challenge and it's still really early
link |
days, but, and of course,
link |
there's also an intentional challenge.
link |
I realize that people are busy.
link |
Not everyone has two hours to listen to a podcast
link |
about jet lag and shift work and raising kids
link |
and sleep and that kind of thing.
link |
I'm not raising kids,
link |
but I did a whole thing about babies and sleep with,
link |
you know, and how parents can manage their sleep
link |
when kids aren't sleeping.
link |
So it's been, I'm hacking through the jungle
link |
of all this stuff, but, and I'll come right back to it.
link |
My inspiration and my North star on this is getting
link |
to a point where the audience that listens to this feels
link |
the same way that I do when I listen to your podcast.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
Like when I turn into your podcast,
link |
I'm going to embarrass you a little bit more
link |
by complimenting you a little bit more,
link |
but not out of a sadistic thing,
link |
but just because when I tune into your podcast
link |
or Joe's podcast, I have the same sensation
link |
that other people have.
link |
Like, I feel like I'm home of sorts.
link |
I'm like, I'm familiar with the space
link |
and I'd like people to feel comfortable in the space
link |
that is the Huber and Lab Podcast,
link |
whatever that ends up being.
link |
Yeah, that's the magic of podcasting.
link |
It's like, I feel like I'm part of your life now
link |
in a way that, as a fan, that I wouldn't be otherwise.
link |
And, you know, like I never was able to have that
link |
with Carl Sagan, for example, you know?
link |
And that's a whole nother level of connection
link |
with a human being that gets you excited.
link |
And then I share your excitement
link |
about different topics in neuroscience
link |
or just biology in general.
link |
And then I don't have to actually understand
link |
everything you're saying to really enjoy it.
link |
So that's the magic of podcasting is like,
link |
you can go through like 10 minutes
link |
and not understanding what the hell a person is saying,
link |
and then you enjoy the excitement
link |
and then you reconnect to a thing
link |
that you do understand what they're saying.
link |
And, you know, that's, that personal coupled
link |
with the scientific rigor is magic.
link |
And finding the right, it's exploration.
link |
Like Joe found something that works for comedians,
link |
which is like, you know, having a good laugh,
link |
but also every once in a while talking seriously
link |
about difficult topics.
link |
The scientific space, it was unclear.
link |
You haven't had guests on.
link |
Not yet, but maybe you'll come on as our first guest.
link |
I was gonna invite my,
link |
I was gonna try to force myself in there.
link |
I am, I'm officially inviting you now.
link |
Will you come on the podcast?
link |
I would love to, I would love to.
link |
It's still a little bit difficult to tell people
link |
that no, you don't get it.
link |
We're not gonna talk for 10 minutes.
link |
We're gonna talk for three or four hours.
link |
It's a different, for scientists,
link |
for like, they're like, what are we gonna talk about?
link |
They think it's like the NPR interview.
link |
And they don't realize, first of all,
link |
I think at his best, if you're like at the level
link |
of Joe Rogan, who I think is an excellent conversationalist,
link |
you just lose track of time.
link |
It can be three, four, five hours
link |
and you lose track of time.
link |
I'm still not there.
link |
I find that it's still painful.
link |
Like the conversation is still challenging sometimes.
link |
You don't lose quite as much of track of time.
link |
It's still an intellectual effort.
link |
And I think it might always be as it would be with you
link |
because you're talking about difficult topics,
link |
maybe that require more brain.
link |
You're not just shooting the shit with like a Brian Red Band
link |
or somebody like comedians or just joking.
link |
What's like, remember those shows,
link |
like where those shows where someone would come out
link |
and like spin plates and they're running back and forth.
link |
Really good scientific discussion is like that.
link |
You have to be maintaining three or four
link |
different logical arguments and jumping back and forth.
link |
It's occasionally get into like a real streak of linearity.
link |
But as we found today that typically there's three
link |
or four different things that we're bouncing back
link |
And that requires a lot of updating of these,
link |
you know, forebrain circuits.
link |
It's not a passive listening experience.
link |
But I like to think that the brain likes that.
link |
I do want to ask just cause we all,
link |
I don't want to forget the question came up to me
link |
is your podcast has the same kind of rigor
link |
that I think like a Dan Carlin podcast has
link |
who's a history podcaster.
link |
Well, that's a definitely a compliment.
link |
Dan's way, you know, he's something for me to aspire to.
link |
He goes through hell to prepare.
link |
He spends months preparing.
link |
It feels like you've had to really prepare for your podcast.
link |
I definitely prepare hard.
link |
I mean, how much effort does that take?
link |
It feels like a conference presentation.
link |
So we record once a week and in the intervening time,
link |
I listened to many university level lectures.
link |
So NIH has a bank of lectures.
link |
I have some sources of recorded university seminars.
link |
I'm trying to find the points of intersection.
link |
So like for four episodes on sleep,
link |
it's not like I'm going to just regurgitate a popular book
link |
or take one lecture and just poach the content.
link |
I'm going to find the overlap in the different elements.
link |
I also, so what I'll do is I'll generally read 10
link |
or 15 papers and generally those are good reviews,
link |
annual reviews, any review of neuroscience,
link |
annual review of physiology, those kinds of things.
link |
I'll chase a few references.
link |
I'll listen to some YouTube videos,
link |
but of university level lectures.
link |
And then I throw all that on a whiteboard.
link |
Usually while I work out in the morning,
link |
I'll just be working out.
link |
I have a gym in my house
link |
and I'll just put up all these random ideas.
link |
I want to cover that dreams, hallucination.
link |
And then I take that and I start to eliminate,
link |
I draw lines between the common points of intersection.
link |
And then from that, I distill out an outline.
link |
And then I basically think about what I want to say
link |
on my walks with my dog.
link |
And I bother a couple of people and blab to them.
link |
So I would say each podcast, yeah,
link |
I put in 10 to 15 hours at least
link |
of passive listening preparation
link |
and maybe five or six of active preparation.
link |
So I do prepare quite a lot,
link |
but it has a certain reward component for me.
link |
To come up at the end with something
link |
that's somewhat crystallized for me is just so satisfying.
link |
It feel like there's something about my dopamine circuits
link |
that just love that.
link |
And the only pain is that a year later
link |
after I've talked about the stuff a bunch of times,
link |
it's so much more succinct, but that's life.
link |
At some point you got to pull the trigger.
link |
Well, I don't know what you think,
link |
but for me, YouTube is,
link |
that's why I'm sad that Joe left YouTube.
link |
There's a archival nature to YouTube that's kind of magical.
link |
And so I'm really glad you're now,
link |
you're doing a lot of educational content on Instagram
link |
and Instagram before,
link |
but now I'm doing this podcasting on YouTube.
link |
It's like, you know, it's like Feynman lectures.
link |
Like, I'm not saying every podcast,
link |
but there will be, you will have some,
link |
I could already tell there'll be some lectures
link |
which are like definitive, like really special ones.
link |
And there's some aspect that's archival to YouTube
link |
where at least I hope like 20 years from now,
link |
some kid is gonna watch a lecture of yours
link |
and it'll create the next Nobel prize, right?
link |
It'll create another dream that then becomes a reality.
link |
And then that's a special thing that YouTube provides.
link |
So I'm really excited that you're on YouTube.
link |
And at the same time,
link |
I'm excited to see where this thing goes
link |
because it seems like change is the cliche thing,
link |
that change is the only constant in these times
link |
because you're paving with this podcast,
link |
with this creativity, what you were doing on Instagram
link |
as well, you're paving the new era
link |
of what it means to do science.
link |
So actively doing research
link |
and actively explaining that research in new media.
link |
It's very interesting to see.
link |
I'm genuinely inspired by you.
link |
We had this discussion last time
link |
after the podcast recording,
link |
and it's clear that communication of science
link |
cannot be left to the existing institutions.
link |
And I'm not talking about universities.
link |
I just mean that the science section of newspapers is,
link |
sometimes there's some gems there,
link |
but generally it goes, you know?
link |
And I think you really have to know a field
link |
in order to extract the best things from that field.
link |
And my hope is that other practicing scientists
link |
and people finishing their PhD and postdoc
link |
and people who are running labs or working at companies
link |
will start to do this.
link |
I mean, how amazing would it be, for instance,
link |
if someone at Neuralink was giving us hints
link |
about not necessarily what they're developing
link |
because that's complicated for all sorts of reasons,
link |
but would talk to us about what the real challenges
link |
of building futuristic brain machine interface are like
link |
and what it means to understand a clinical problem
link |
I mean, my hope is somebody there might eventually do that,
link |
that somebody in the world of chemistry
link |
or synthetic materials or whatever it is
link |
will do this in a way that I could understand
link |
because I don't have expertise in those.
link |
I think it would be marvelous.
link |
And you were tip of the spear, you were out first,
link |
and I'm just happily trying to move along
link |
in the direction I'm going.
link |
But I think the future of science education is online.
link |
And I think that's gonna be scary
link |
to a lot of existing institutions,
link |
but it's not about disrupting anything.
link |
It's just about trying to do things better.
link |
Yeah, some of the best interviews,
link |
some of the best investigative journalism
link |
is done by people inside the field.
link |
Comes to mind a guy by the name of Elon Musk,
link |
who I love the possibility that he gets a Pulitzer
link |
for that interview.
link |
But he grilled the crap out of Vlad,
link |
the CEO of Robinhood.
link |
I'm not sure if you're familiar.
link |
Oh, on Clubhouse the other night.
link |
Yeah, I saw you guys in there.
link |
I was kept out, I wasn't quick enough.
link |
My thumbs don't go fast enough.
link |
So I was, and I wasn't about to sit in the waiting room.
link |
Have you tried that social network,
link |
by the way, the Clubhouse?
link |
I've gone in there a few times and checked some things out.
link |
I'm there, I have a few questions about it
link |
that like if I'm in there,
link |
how one can participate or not participate.
link |
I like being a fly on the wall for those conversations.
link |
I've been very curious as to what's going on in there.
link |
Oh, it's quite, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts.
link |
Maybe it's useful to comment.
link |
I also have a Discord server
link |
that has a few tens of thousands of people on it.
link |
And then they have also a voice chat capability.
link |
So there's these get togethers.
link |
And I was using it in the spring and summer,
link |
like actively on those voice discussions.
link |
And it's anywhere from 10 to like 1,000 people
link |
all together in voice.
link |
Like anyone can speak anytime, right?
link |
But there's this weird dynamic that people stay quiet.
link |
Only one person speaks at a time
link |
because they're all like respectful.
link |
And it's a community of like fundamentally
link |
respectful people, even though they're all anonymous.
link |
So like, except like me and a few others,
link |
it's all anonymous people.
link |
It's so interesting and it works.
link |
But the magical thing to me about that community
link |
was how intimate voice only communication can be.
link |
It felt as intimate as like a small get together
link |
at a home with close friends.
link |
It felt like there's a calmness to it.
link |
And you're revealing things about, you know,
link |
somebody suffering from depression or being suicidal.
link |
So those are the dark things or being super excited,
link |
getting a new girlfriend or boyfriend.
link |
Like just the depth of human experience shared on voice
link |
without video is, I was really surprised
link |
how intimate that is for human connection,
link |
especially in this time of COVID, it replaced that.
link |
So just to give you some context, there's something there.
link |
There's definitely something there.
link |
One thing that comes to mind is when like in Clubhouse,
link |
you have your little icon.
link |
So they don't actually, you don't see your face moving.
link |
I think when people see their own image,
link |
it puts them in a state of self consciousness
link |
that is eliminated by just having an icon or an avatar.
link |
So like Zoom is dreadful because if I'm not used
link |
to talking to people and seeing a little image of myself
link |
staring back at me in the mirror.
link |
And it's just, I know there are ways
link |
that you can adjust that, but it's really awful.
link |
And I think that when I get on Zooms now,
link |
I say hello and then I shut down the video component.
link |
And then I just talk in the end.
link |
I come back on just to show that still there, it's still me.
link |
But I think that voice only is really interesting.
link |
Eddie Chang would be an interesting person
link |
to talk to about this because he understands so much
link |
about how inflection communicates
link |
emotionality in deeper state.
link |
But there's a balance between, I think,
link |
just like you said, this is the privacy
link |
somehow allows for the intimacy.
link |
So like being able to, as opposed to putting on an act,
link |
which I realize we do when we're visually
link |
presenting ourselves in remote communication.
link |
But I think that there's so few places
link |
where people can actually communicate
link |
without the fear of penalty.
link |
That's woefully absent these days.
link |
And so maybe people are just relieved to be in a place
link |
where they feel like I can say what I want
link |
or not say anything and it's okay.
link |
And so Clubhouse, to answer your kind of question is,
link |
there was a big improvement to me over Discord,
link |
which is it has tiers, it has a stage where people,
link |
the person that created the room can invite people up
link |
that would like to speak potentially,
link |
have the opportunity to speak.
link |
And then there's a bigger audience
link |
that don't get a chance to speak unless they
link |
click raise their hand and they get called on.
link |
So there's like a tier system that allows
link |
for there to be a group of like five, 10, 20, 30 people
link |
talking and a lot larger amount in the audience,
link |
which in Discord was the problems that everybody could talk.
link |
And the other thing about Clubhouse is everybody
link |
is strongly encouraged to represent themselves.
link |
So you're using your real name, it's not anonymous.
link |
And how many people were in that GameStop discussion
link |
They currently limit rooms to 5,000.
link |
So I'm sure maxed out at 5,000.
link |
There's a lot of overflow rooms.
link |
This is the cool thing about Clubhouse,
link |
really big people were on there all tuned in
link |
and having a conversation, having all from,
link |
all these different worlds being able to connect,
link |
even though without the niceties of like arranging
link |
the meeting, you could just show up and leave,
link |
which is really nice.
link |
But the reason for my lessons from Discord,
link |
I'm going to mostly stay away from Clubhouse.
link |
Or go in there under another name.
link |
I'll pretend I know the actual, your actual name.
link |
Yeah, it's, I've learned, it's quite addicting.
link |
It's so, the intimacy of it is you find yourself
link |
wasting quite a bit of time on there.
link |
Well, it's interesting.
link |
They would in sort of going back to the podcast
link |
or earlier, we're talking about books
link |
or creating a technology.
link |
One thing that's absolutely clear is that anything
link |
that's easy to reproduce is probably not worth
link |
much effort and time.
link |
I mean, most posts could be easily reproduced.
link |
You just repost them.
link |
So now there are some original posts that for which
link |
the attribution goes to the original person
link |
and it's clear it came from you.
link |
But anything that can be easily reproduced is,
link |
doesn't really expand us very much as individuals
link |
And most of what I see on social media is stuff
link |
that is purely reproduced.
link |
But I think Clubhouse, I mean, it could be
link |
that some real magic emerges on there.
link |
So in moderation could be good.
link |
The magic is, this is another thing that I've found
link |
through COVID that maybe you can think about is live.
link |
I used to be, not understand the appeal of live video
link |
or live connection or like in this Clubhouse live events.
link |
Because Clubhouse is technically, for the most part,
link |
it's not supposed to be recorded.
link |
Most people don't record most conversations.
link |
It's a one time live event.
link |
And there's a magic to that.
link |
That's not captured by like your podcast
link |
or my podcast produced video that's like recorded,
link |
Well, anything can happen.
link |
It's that anything can happen.
link |
And that's the kind of thing like live concerts.
link |
I definitely, I love live music.
link |
And it's the idea that,
link |
cause you can always listen to the album.
link |
Actually the album usually sounds cleaner and better,
link |
but it's just this idea that anything can happen.
link |
And then you listen to like the parts, I don't know,
link |
you like a Costello did something weird.
link |
Your dog did something weird.
link |
And then you have to go, God damn it.
link |
You have to go to the kitchen or something to get something.
link |
And then you come back and it's funny.
link |
I watched live video like that of people
link |
and I'll be there for the whole time.
link |
I'll wait for them to go to the kitchen and come back.
link |
It's not like I tune out.
link |
And that makes it like a richer experience for some reason.
link |
Well, it humanizes it.
link |
Yeah, humanizes it.
link |
And I think there is this weird effect of whether or not
link |
it's a podcast, Instagram or Twitter or anything else.
link |
There's kind of like two people shouting into a tunnel
link |
and then a bunch of people with ears at the other end
link |
of those tunnels and shouting some things back.
link |
You know, that's kind of the format we're in.
link |
I think I'll check out Clubhouse again.
link |
I've gone in there a few times during the day
link |
and I was surprised to see how many people were in there
link |
in the middle of the day.
link |
I was like, aren't these people supposed to be working?
link |
But maybe that is their work.
link |
Well, be very careful about the time sink of it.
link |
But yeah, if you want to, you and I go together,
link |
we'll have a conversation on there.
link |
But one of the things you have to figure out,
link |
I don't still know how to do it, but how to exit.
link |
And you just do the, isn't there the leave quietly button?
link |
Yeah, no, but like when you and I are on stage
link |
having a conversation, okay, you and I is harder.
link |
But like you really, if it's just you and I,
link |
then it's the usual human communication of like,
link |
all right, I gotta go.
link |
Like, but when it's like four people,
link |
you don't want to interrupt everyone
link |
and announce you're leaving.
link |
You just have to, I mean, there's a weird dynamic
link |
that I haven't quite figured out of.
link |
The etiquette isn't clear.
link |
The etiquette is not clear.
link |
Well, the etiquette on different platforms
link |
and how that changes is really interesting.
link |
You know, how YouTube has one etiquette,
link |
which is kind of, it's a lot of harshness is tolerated
link |
on YouTube video comments.
link |
Twitter seems a bit harsher than Instagram.
link |
Instagram, there's kind of, it seems to be a little.
link |
People are really nice.
link |
People are really nice on Instagram for the most part,
link |
except for those phishing things.
link |
I actually know someone who had their quite sizable account
link |
poached by those copyright.
link |
They come in with those like,
link |
you violated copyright thing.
link |
There's all sorts of harshness in there
link |
that if you think about it in the real world,
link |
I like to think about Instagram as if it was the real world.
link |
Someone comes over and is basically saying like,
link |
hey, can I hold your wallet and go into the bank
link |
and I'll get some money out for you?
link |
And like, but there's this trust
link |
based on the format it comes in
link |
that it can almost get past your radar
link |
unless you're suspicious.
link |
If you took comments, like, you know,
link |
you're posting a lot of comments and you said,
link |
you just walk past 500 random people on the street
link |
and just listen to what they say,
link |
it's like, that's ridiculous.
link |
I don't have time for that.
link |
But the comments somehow take on this importance
link |
and this relevance.
link |
And you feel, we feel obligated to give them value, right?
link |
And so the online communities,
link |
the rules really are different.
link |
And they evolve with time, which is fascinating.
link |
With Clubhouse, it's a new social network,
link |
so it's evolving and people are figuring it out as you go.
link |
And the same thing with podcasting on video
link |
and like scientific podcasting.
link |
This is the cool thing when I look at what you've created,
link |
I'm learning, I'm thinking like,
link |
hmm, that's interesting to do it this way.
link |
Because like, I have nobody to copy.
link |
Not many people to copy, you know what I mean?
link |
Well, you threw out an idea.
link |
I'm not gonna put it out here now,
link |
cause I don't wanna,
link |
cause knowing you, you'll hold yourself to it
link |
But when we talked about this issue of the challenge
link |
of staying on a particular topic for a while,
link |
I mean, you do have some cool stuff brewing in there.
link |
That's separate from this format.
link |
And I love your interview format,
link |
but when you told me about that,
link |
I got really excited that you might go forward.
link |
I'm not gonna tell your audience what it is,
link |
but I will say this, it is super cool.
link |
I would have never thought about it.
link |
It's distinctly different than what I'm doing
link |
or what Lex is currently doing.
link |
And if you decide to do that podcast,
link |
I will be your first and your number one fan.
link |
And I know there are gonna be millions of other people
link |
interested in that.
link |
It would be amazing.
link |
So if you decide to go forward with the idea,
link |
that would be awesome.
link |
I was gonna say what it is,
link |
but now I'm not going to because,
link |
cause that's even more interesting.
link |
I brought up the clubhouse thing actually in Elon,
link |
because I just wanted to get your thoughts
link |
about something he's said a few times to me and in general,
link |
is that he's under a huge amount of stress.
link |
And I'm thinking of doing a startup now
link |
and kind of thinking about all of this.
link |
Cause I enjoy podcasts, I enjoy science,
link |
but he says that his life is basically hell.
link |
It's very difficult.
link |
He looks happy, but he's probably very good at.
link |
He's fulfilled, but the stress levels,
link |
the constant fires that he has to put out.
link |
And he says that most people wouldn't want to be me.
link |
And that basically the reason he does what he does
link |
is because there's probably something wrong with him.
link |
Like it's not, he can't help it, but do that.
link |
Kind of beautiful in a kind of Russian masochistic way.
link |
Well, I just wonder the stress.
link |
I mean, I'm sure you can imagine the kind of stress
link |
he's under because, so it's running three plus companies
link |
and there's constant, he says that every single meeting
link |
is not about like, should we install a coffee maker
link |
It's like, this rocket is going to blow up
link |
and we're all fucked.
link |
I don't know what to do.
link |
And we have to, you have to fix,
link |
you have to fix real like big problems there.
link |
And like, how do you deal with that?
link |
What do you think about that kind of life?
link |
One, is there a way to walk through that fire?
link |
And two, should you walk through that fire?
link |
Well, I mean, without knowing I've never met Elon,
link |
but certainly we have common friends in you
link |
and in other people that he worked with long ago
link |
in the PayPal days, all of whom speak very highly of him
link |
and show, express immense admiration
link |
for the number of things that he can maintain.
link |
I think it's fair to say that he accomplishes more
link |
before 9 a.m. than most people do in a decade.
link |
And that what he does would dissolve most people
link |
into a puddle of tears.
link |
Mostly because of this whole thing
link |
about the brain working hard equates
link |
to thinking about duration path and outcome
link |
and anticipating outcomes given A, B, C, or D,
link |
a lot of very scripted linear thinking and prediction.
link |
And that is hard, it's stressful.
link |
It requires intense neurochemical output.
link |
And he's doing that for multiple projects.
link |
So presumably he's buffered himself
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from the coffee maker issues and the little tiny issues,
link |
but he is himself, unless there's something I don't know,
link |
he's walking around in a biological system.
link |
Yes, allegedly, yes.
link |
So, and I don't wanna reveal too much here,
link |
but I have a common coworker and colleague
link |
through some contract work I do that what I can tell you
link |
is that he's accessing the best resources
link |
in terms of how to optimize his biology.
link |
And he's thinking about that, not just for himself,
link |
but for all of Neuralink.
link |
Because I think, I'm not trying to dodge the question,
link |
but I think there's the scale of the individual,
link |
but then there's the companies that he's creating.
link |
And you've got people there that you could imagine
link |
if they're working at 10% better capacity
link |
or can focus 5% better for 20% of the day,
link |
you're looking at a enormous increase in productivity
link |
and a reduction in the time to reach goals,
link |
which will reduce the amount of stress presumably on Elon,
link |
unless he goes and starts another endeavor.
link |
So I think it's certainly not healthy for most people.
link |
It seems to be where he gets his dopamine hits.
link |
I'm also really struck by the fact that he has a family
link |
and he's got kids growing up and a relationship
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and all that, so it's super impressive.
link |
I think that, I don't know, how old is Elon?
link |
He's 40, I mean, pushing 50, I think 48.
link |
Even more impressive.
link |
Because many people who've been at exceedingly high output
link |
for a decade or more don't do well.
link |
Their system breaks down.
link |
Well, this is what he was saying.
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Actually, I mean, I don't listen to all of his interviews,
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but on that live on the clubhouse,
link |
he mentioned that he was kind of worried,
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it's interesting, he was worried that sometimes,
link |
what I think he said is,
link |
I'm worried that at some point my brain is just going to fail
link |
because of the amount of load it's under,
link |
like how much I have to think through throughout the day,
link |
like how many problems you have to think through.
link |
Like, it's like puzzles, it's constant puzzle solving.
link |
I would be concerned about taking somebody
link |
who's in that regime and suddenly putting them
link |
into a regime where they don't have enough
link |
to bite down into.
link |
It's like my bulldog, Costello,
link |
he's happiest when chewing and tugging
link |
at that big old neck of his,
link |
and he is just not going to become a retriever,
link |
he's not going to, he does well
link |
and gets his dopamine hits from chewing and pulling.
link |
And it seems like Elon has ended up where he is
link |
by way of his natural leanings.
link |
Unless there's a backstory that's trauma based or something,
link |
and I don't even begin to think that there is,
link |
it seems that he has,
link |
he's one of those rare individuals in history
link |
that has an immense drive to create
link |
in all these different domains.
link |
I'm just saying the obvious here,
link |
but it seems like that's what makes him tick.
link |
I mean, you're doing an awful lot too.
link |
Well, the problem is not really,
link |
the problem is I've been on the verge
link |
of pulling the trigger on starting a company,
link |
which will increase the workload significantly.
link |
And I'm attracted to that because of a dream I have,
link |
but it's a little bit scary
link |
because it can destroy you in a lot of ways.
link |
There's two sources of destruction.
link |
I've, for the first time in my life,
link |
a few months ago, I think,
link |
have gotten, this feels like such a noob thing to say it,
link |
but I've gotten some hate on the internet.
link |
But like, I am such an idiot.
link |
I'm so naive to, it was,
link |
I had the question that I guess a lot of people have
link |
when they get hate on the internet.
link |
It's like, mom, why are these people
link |
making up stuff about me?
link |
That kind of feeling of like, why are you saying that?
link |
And the reason I mentioned that is like,
link |
well, if you wanna go and start a business
link |
and do, as I think people should
link |
when they start a big, ambitious business,
link |
really try to go big.
link |
Like, what does success look like
link |
in terms of your emotional journey?
link |
You're going to have a lot of people
link |
who make up stuff about you,
link |
who say negative things.
link |
I mean, majority, hopefully, if you do a good job,
link |
will be supportive and,
link |
but there's still going to be this army of people there.
link |
And like, that was scary to me
link |
because of how much emotional impact that had on me.
link |
Well, and I also know a little bit,
link |
I have some glimpse into the fact
link |
that you put your heart and soul into everything you do.
link |
You're not a, you're lighthearted about certain things,
link |
but you're even lighthearted
link |
about being full gas pedal 24 seven.
link |
There's kind of this,
link |
Laird Hamilton always says,
link |
the big wave surfers, he always says,
link |
bright light, dark shadow.
link |
And I think it's that intensity.
link |
And when you do that,
link |
and then suddenly people are starting to like,
link |
throw some paint on your picture,
link |
you're like, wait, hold on, you know,
link |
you're going max capacity.
link |
But I think the company is interesting one
link |
because you've talked about doing this company before.
link |
I just not been pulling the trigger out of fear
link |
because I enjoy this life.
link |
This is, it's starting to interrupt.
link |
It's ultimately this question of taking a leap is like,
link |
say you're in academia, it's like you're at MIT,
link |
you're, I really love doing research at MIT.
link |
I really love that life.
link |
Why take a leap out?
link |
You know, but I did because it's been a dream,
link |
but now accidentally along the way,
link |
I found this podcasting thing,
link |
which is also really fulfilling.
link |
And you know, it's like, why take a leap?
link |
Cause you have a huge lust for life.
link |
I mean, that's you.
link |
I mean, sometimes when I'm on the internet
link |
and I think, is this, you hear about it like,
link |
oh, it's addicting, you know, YouTube's addicting all that.
link |
Actually, sometimes I think maybe that's true,
link |
but a lot of times I just think there's so much here.
link |
There's a lot of garbage,
link |
but there's so many gems out there in the world now.
link |
It's almost like, sure how you allocate time is key,
link |
but I think you can do it all.
link |
Not, maybe not five more things, but all.
link |
And one thing, I just had this idea
link |
and this is not grounded in any scientific paper,
link |
but I think the answer might come to you
link |
during this torture that you're about to get yourself
link |
through with David, because in those mental states,
link |
you're really asking the question, right?
link |
You're asking the question, where is my capacity?
link |
And am I even close to my capacity?
link |
And if I am, what's of the most value?
link |
I think we find the answers to those things
link |
in those nonverbal, nonanalytic states.
link |
It just comes to us.
link |
I hope you're right, and I hope it's a profoundly
link |
fulfilling experience as opposed to one
link |
that leads to my demise, but.
link |
You have a will, right?
link |
It all goes to the hedgehog.
link |
Yeah, exactly, to the hedgehog.
link |
Now it all makes sense.
link |
Andrew, like we talked about offline and on this podcast,
link |
I do hope we write some stuff together,
link |
do some research together.
link |
You're one of the most inspiring scientists,
link |
speaking of communicating to the world.
link |
So I can't wait to see what you do with the podcast.
link |
I'm already a huge fan.
link |
I've been telling everybody about it.
link |
I can't wait to see you talk to Joe as well soon.
link |
And I can't wait to see what kind of paper
link |
we write together.
link |
Thanks so much for talking to me.
link |
Thank you, that project's gonna be a lot of fun.
link |
Can't wait, and thanks again for having me on.
link |
Appreciate you, brother.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with Andrew Huberman, and thank you to our sponsors,
link |
Master Class Online Courses,
link |
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and BetterHelp Online Therapy.
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Click the sponsor links to get a discount,
link |
and remember, now is the time to sign up to Master Class
link |
if that's something you've been on the fence about.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words
link |
from Woodrow Wilson.
link |
We should not only use the brains we have,
link |
but all that we can borrow.
link |
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.