Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
andrew huberman his second time in the
podcast
he's a neuroscientist at stanford a
world-class researcher and educator
and now he has a new podcast on youtube
and all the usual places called
hubermann lab
that i can't recommend highly enough
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as a side note let me say that andrew is
a friend
and a new collaborator we're working on
a paper together
about a topic we're both really
passionate about at the intersection of
neuroscience and machine learning
but that's probably many months away
from being published
still i'm really excited about this work
he's one of the smartest and kindest
people i have the pleasure of talking to
on this podcast
so i hope we'll talk many more times in
the future
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friedman
and now here's my conversation with
andrew huberman
why do humans need sleep let's let's go
with a big
first question okay well the answer i'll
start with
is the one that i always default to when
there's a why
question which is uh i wasn't consulted
at the design
phase so so i wriggle my way out of
giving a
absolute answer right but
there's one mechanism that's very clear
that's super important which is that the
longer we are awake
the more adenosine accumulates
in our brain and adenosine binds to
adenosine receptors no surprise there
and it creates the feeling of sleepiness
independent of time of day or night
so there are two mechanisms one is we
get sleepy
as adenosine accumulates the longer
we've been awake the more adenosine is
accumulated in our system
but how sleepy we get
for a given amount of adenosine depends
on where we are in this so-called
circadian cycle
and the circadian cycle is just this
very very well conserved oscillation
it's a temperature oscillation where you
go from a low point
typically if you're awake during the day
and you're asleep at night you'll
your lowest temperature point will be
like three a.m four a.m and then your
temperature will start to creep
up as you wake up in the morning and
then it'll peak in the late afternoon
and then it'll start to drop again
toward the evening and then you get
sleepy again that
oscillation in temperature takes 24
hours temperature
yeah plus or minus an hour and i
don't even though i wasn't consulted at
the design phase i do not think it's a
coincidence
that it's aligned to the 24-hour spin of
the earth on its axis
and the fact that we tend to be bathed
in sunlight
for a portion of that spin and in
darkness for the other portion that's
been so there are two mechanisms the
adenosine accumulation and the circadian
time point that we happen to be at and
those converge
to create a sense of sleepiness or
wakefulness the simple way
to reveal these two mechanisms to
uncouple them is stay up for 24 hours
and you will find that even though
you've been let's say you stay up
midnight
2 a.m 3 a.m provided you're on a regular
schedule
like that i follow not like the kind
that you follow uh
you get i will get very sleepy around 3
4 a.m
but then around 5 or 6 or 7 a.m which is
my normal wake-up time
i'll start to feel more alert even
though adenosine has been accumulating
further so adenosine is higher for me
the longer i stay up and yet i feel more
alert than i did a few hours ago and
that's because these are
two interacting forces so adenosine
makes you sleepy
and then just how sleepy or how awake
you feel also depends on where you are
in this temperature oscillation that
takes 24 hours okay so that's
fascinating so there's a bunch of
oscillations going on
and then it kind of through the
evolutionary process
have evolved to all be aligned somewhat
and they interplay so it's
you said your your body temperature goes
up and down
there's chemicals in your brain that
uh oscillate and then there's the actual
oscillation
of the the sun in the
in the sky so all of that together
has some impact on each other and
somehow that all
results in us wanting to go to sleep
every night
right so um and we can get right into
the meat of this so i guess we just dove
right in but the
so the the temperature oscillation
is the effector of the circadian clock
so every cell in our body has a 24-hour
rhythm that's dictated by
genes like clock per bee male this is
one of the great successes of biology
they give a nobel prize to the record
i don't know if rapper got it forgive me
but sorry if you got it steve
congratulations if you didn't i'm sorry
i wasn't on the committee um
nonetheless did beautiful work steve
reporter and others
um but mike roshbosh and like other
people worked out these mechanisms in
flies and bacteria and mammals there are
these genes
that create 24-hour oscillations in gene
expression etc in every cell of our body
but what aligns those is a signal from
the master circadian clock which sits
right above the roof of the mouth
called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and
that clock
synchronizes all the clocks of the body
to this
general temperature rhythm by way of
controlling
systemic temperature which makes perfect
sense if you want to create a general
oscillation in all the tissues and
organs in the body
use temperature and so that work on
temperature if people want to explore it
further was joe takahashi who was at
northwestern now at ut
southwestern in dallas and it is
absolutely clear that humans do better
on a diurnal schedule
sorry lex than a nocturnal schedule
because
you could say well provided i sleep and
push adenosine back downhill which is
what happens when we sleep adenosine
is then reduced and provided i am on
more or less a 24 hour schedule why
should it matter that i'm awake when the
sun's out
and um and i'm asleep when the sun is
down but
it turns out that if you look at health
metrics people that are
strictly nocturnal do far worse
on immune function or metabolic function
etc
than people who are diurnal who are
awake during the daytime and animals
that are nocturnal
it's the opposite and animals that are
so-called crepuscular which
tend to be active at dawn and at dusk
this is a beautiful system i won't go
down that rabbit hole but these are
animals whose visual systems
operate best they tend to be predators
like mountain lions
they have optimized their waking times
for the times when the animals they eat
can't see well in those light conditions
but given the rod cone ratios in their
eyes
the the mountain lion is picking off
it's like when you see uh special forces
and they're looking through
night vision goggles and they have a
clear advantage
right they're seeing in the dark that's
basically what it's like to be a
mountain lion
as opposed to a bunny rabbit would you
say that a lot of these
cycles evolved in the predator-prey
relationships of the different
throughout the food chain so it's
basically all somehow has to do with
survival
in the in this complicated web of
predators and prey
almost certainly there had to have been
a time in which humans being
awake and active at night as opposed to
during the day
uh led to high level higher levels of
lethality
and probably particularly in kids you
imagine kids running around in the dark
and getting
that where there are a lot of animals
that can see really well under those
conditions and humans can't
and this would be all pre-electricity
even if you're carrying a torch
i mean the range of illumination on a
torch is nothing
compared to what um a a nighttime
predator like a large cat or something
can can do that i mean they basically
they can see everything they need to in
order to eat us
and not the other way around so one
fascinating thing you said
is uh that blew my mind and we went
right past
it uh which is the temperature is a
really powerful like if you were to
think about the ways that different
parts of the body
different systems the body would
communicate with each other
temperature would be a really good one
and that just i mean maybe it's obvious
but it kind of blew my mind just now
that yeah these systems are all
distributed
right and they have to kind of they're
not actually sending signals but they're
coordinating they need
some sort of universal thing to look at
in order to coordinate and temperature
is a nice one to
to uh to build around and that way
you can control the behavior of all
these different systems by controlling
the temperature right it's attractive to
think of a mechanism where this
master circadian clock secretes a
peptide or something that goes and
locks to receptors in all the cells and
gets it just right but that leaves far
too much room for
variability binding affinities cells in
a lot of
parts of our body are at different
stages of maturation they're turning
over
liver cells and so forth and for
instance our we have a clock in our gut
and in our liver
such that if we were just take out your
liver and put it on a table
and just look at the expression of these
genes it would be in a 24 hour
oscillation on its own it's independent
but something has to entrain them and
keep them all synchronized and so it's
not obvious that it would be temperature
takahashi's great gift to biology was to
show that
all the stuff coming out of this master
circadian clock
at the end of the day that's a weird
statement no pun intended
at the end at the end of the day end the
night at the um
at the end of the story it all boils
down to making sure that the temperature
of tissues
oscillates in the same fashion that's
blowing my mind and thinking
like what other mechanism could possibly
exist
to create that kind of oscillation well
you're
you're russian it's cold in russia for a
lot of the year the hibernation signal
in certain animals is a remarkable
signal there are peptides secreted from
this very same clock
that in animals like ground squirrels or
bears
they go into a kind of a torpor where
everything reproduction
metabolism everything is reduced while
they're in their cave they don't
actually stay asleep
all of winter that's a myth um and they
actually do these very
um dramatic and periodic arousals from
hibernation where they just shake and
shake and shake it looks like a seizure
and then they go back under into the
torpor
that's from a peptide that's released
but that's different because that's
about
shutting down the whole system it's
clear that having these very regular
oscillations every 24 hours is essential
for everything from
metabolism to reproduction is there uh
an optimal temperature for sleep that
i i should mention i think your latest
episode
uh you uh and people should go check out
helixsleep.com huberman to support
andrew uh thanks for the plug
i mean that's the amazing thing about
the stuff that you're creating oh
and yes you have a new podcast that's
amazing and this past month he did a
whole series on sleep
which people should definitely check out
there's some podcasts that come out
that just make me want to be a better
human being
by just the quality uh three blue one
brown grant
sanderson is like that for me just like
wow
this is uh education is best so andrew
uh symbolizes that captures that
brilliantly so go support the sponsor so
he doesn't stop doing the thing
uh so they i think they have a cooling
pad too
so i uh uh eight sleep mattress sponsors
me
uh they've been uh they sent me a
mattress
and it's been i've never listened i used
to sleep
on the floor sleeping where you fall you
sleep for a fall i don't give a shit
it doesn't doesn't really matter but so
like i would have never
bought a nice mattress because it's like
why
i'm fine this is a floor it's fine but
it was a game changer to uh be able to
control temperature like for me it's
cooling
to cool i don't know what the hell it is
well you want the brain and nervous
system
and the rest of the body needs to drop
by about anywhere from two to three
degrees in order to get into your
deepest sleep and transition to sleep
that's really going to help you don't
want to be cold that you're
bothered and can't fall asleep but
that's why some people like it really
cold in the room and under a warm
blanket or with socks on for some people
that can that can be good because this
temperature oscillation
is such that as your temperature is
dropping that correlates with the
generally with the most sleepy phase of
your circadian cycle
so cool is better for falling and
staying asleep and sleeping deeply
and then i i guess like that's what ate
sleep showed they have like an app
is uh it warms back up uh to wake you up
the idea that
i haven't actually used it i'm like this
is stupid uh
people say it works but i just keep it
the same temperature throughout the
night
but uh warming it up i guess wakes you
up which is
it was just fascinating yeah because
you're the wake up signal
is it's interesting to think about it's
not just correlated with an increase in
body temperature the increase in body
temperature
is triggering the release of cortisol
from your adrenals and that's the wake
up signal
do you think it's absolute temperatures
we're talking about is just even
relative
just even just a decrease well
everyone's going to have slightly
different basal temperature the idea
that everybody should be 98.6 i mean
that's a myth
and there are theories that body
temperature overall has been dropping in
the last 50 years or so i i doubt that's
true for somebody who's athletic like
you and is
you know young and healthy but basically
the the coldest period of that 24-hour
cycle
is when you are going to be sleepiest
there's actually a period within that
24-hour cycle
it's a it's a time point called your
temperature minimum and your temperature
minimum tends to be
about two hours before your typical
wake-up time
i'm not talking about the wake-up time
in the middle of the night where you go
use the bathroom or where you set an
alarm to go catch a flight i mean
if you were to just allow yourself to
sleep without a clock for a few days
measure when you typically wake up two
hours before then is your temperature
minimum
and that temperature minimum turns out
to be a very important
landmark in your circadian cycle because
it turns out that if you get bright
light in your eyes
in the hours immediately before your
temperature minimum
so two to four hours or any time within
the two or four hour window before that
temperature minimum
you are going to what's called delay
your circadian clock the next day
that whole oscillation is going to move
forward it will make you want to go to
sleep later
and wake up later whereas if you get
bright light in your eyes in the
hours after that temperature minimum so
let's say for me
typical wake up time is 6 a.m my
temperature minimum somewhere around 4
a.m if i get bright light in my eyes
5 a.m 6 a.m 7 a.m it's going to advance
that oscillation so that i want to go to
bed earlier
and wake up earlier the subsequent
nights so you might say
wait but most nights i go to sleep and
wake up at more or less the same time
why is that
and that's because the same thing is
happening on both sides you are both
advancing your clock a little bit
and assuming that you're looking at
light in the evening you're also
delaying your clock a little bit so you
get kind of captured in between and then
your rhythm more or less oscillates
at the at the same period as we say as
the
spin of the earth unless you're like you
where you're i get text messages from
you sometimes at
odd hours and i'm i if you're on the
east coast then i know that you had to
have been
pulling basically and all night yeah
yeah that's the interesting
uh point about the messiness of
sleep so most people seem to up perform
the best when they have like a regular
sleep schedule
i perhaps am the same
but i don't know that and i tend to
believe that
you can also perform relatively
optimally with
chaos of sleep of uh
like a weird soup of like power naps
and all-nighters and all of that as long
as you're
like happy doing what you love
and maybe you can um
tell me what you think about this i i
tend to for myself
try to minimize stress in life so
what i found for myself with diet
with sleep is that if i obsess about it
being perfect
then i'll actually stress quite a bit
when it's not
like i'll feel shitty
uh when i don't get enough sleep because
i know i should be getting more sleep as
opposed to
the actual physiological effects of not
getting enough sleep
i find if i just accept whatever the
hell happens
happens and smile and just you know take
it all in
like david goggins style like if it
sucks
it's even better or what is it jocko's
like good
or whatever he says right i think there
several things that you said that are
important but i
i agree that one can have a dysregulated
sleep schedule and still
be a happy person and productive in much
of my life i've pulled all-nighters and
slept weird schedules you know i think
many people
can probably relate to going to sleep
waking up four hours later being up for
an hour or two on your computer then
going back to sleep and getting amazing
sleep the next day functioning
i think we've i think it's important
that people have highlighted the
importance
of sleep and getting enough rest i do
think it's gone too far
and now i'm editorializing a little bit
but i think that
we've created this anxiety about sleep
that it's get if we don't sleep enough
we're gonna get dementia if we don't get
sleep then
uh you know the reproductive axis is
gonna you know completely crash
um you know there's a lot of evidence to
the contrary
and as well just based on personal
experience and based on the fact that
sure that it may be that a solid eight
hours with no
in uh interruptions in there or nine or
ten
could do great benefit but you can do
really well
if you do what you say which is you wake
up you don't want to start stressing
about it creating this meta stress about
sleep
being happy it is actually one of the
most powerful
things that you can do not allowing
yourself to go down that rabbit hole of
stress
for the following reason a lot of our
fatigue
is not due just to the build-up of
adenosine or time of day the circadian
thing we were talking about earlier an
additional factor
is that effort is in related to the
release of epinephrine of adrenaline in
our brain and body
at some point those levels get so high
that we get stressed mentally
we get stressed physically and we want
to give up there are good data published
in cell
showing that that signal the epinephrine
signal is eventually accumulates and
there's a quit
point dopamine the molecule of pursuit
and reward and feeling good
resets our ability to be an effort in
fact
a lot of people don't know this but
dopamine is actually what
epinephrine is made from if you look at
the biochemical cascade it starts with
tyrosine which is rich in found in red
meats and things of that sort
and tyrosine is eventually converted
through things like altopa into dopamine
dopamine is made into epinephrine so i
mean this sounds kind of new ag but
happiness joy and pleasure in what
you're doing
creates a chemical milieu that
provides more of the chemicals that
allow for effort
and there's nothing new ag about that
it's in every biochemistry textbook
it's in every decent neuroscience
textbook they just don't talk about the
happiness part they just talk about the
dopamine part
so i think that limiting your stress and
at least recognizing
okay if you're pulling an all-nighter or
you're somehow on messed up sleep
that there is going to be a point in
that 24-hour cycle where your brain is
not
trustworthy where your mental state is
not
worth placing too much weight on because
you are near that temperature minimum
and near that temperature minimum which
is correlates that two hour
about two hours before you would
normally wake up
the brain is is hobbling along
and anything you feel or think at that
time
should not be given too much value but
if you can trick
yourself into thinking that's the
pleasure point you afford yourself a
huge advantage
there's a study done by a colleague of
mine at stanford that showed
that positive anticipation about the
next day events
actually is a powerful metric
for creating quality sleep even if the
sleep is very reduced
and and you'll love this one and i i a
lot of people are gonna
you know might be critical of this so i
just want to make sure that so this was
work done
out of harvard medical it was um
bob stickgold's lab and emily hoagland
did this study that showed
looking at ochem performance on ochem
scores okay so organic chemistry
harvard's pretty tough subject highly
motivated
a number of very good control groups in
this study
what she showed was that consistency of
total sleep duration
was far more important for performance
on these
exams than total sleep duration itself
so it's not that just getting more sleep
allows you to perform better
consistently getting about the same
amount of sleep
is more is better for performance at
least in on okim
yeah than just getting more that's
interesting so that's
referring to more that there should be a
consistent habit
versus the total amount to me like the
entirety of the picture of sleep
is uh it's similar to nutrition in that
it feels like it's
there's so many variables involved and
it's so person specific
so you know a lot of studies i mean this
is the way of science
has to look and aggregate the effects on
sleep
it doesn't focus on high performers and
which are
individuals ultimately like the question
isn't
uh so it's a very important question
it's like what kind of diet
fights obesity reduces obesity
it's another question what kind of diet
allows david goggins to be the best
version of himself so
these high performers in different
avenues and the same thing with sleep
like people that tell me that i should
get eight hours of sleep
it's like it's i i
mean i i get it and they may be right
but they may be very wrong
and there's no evidence that eight is
better than six
that you could very well do better on
six than on eight
there are a few other things that um
turn out to be strong parameters for
success in this domain for instance
your entire life waking or asleep is
broken up into these 90-minute altradian
cycles if you look at ability to attend
or do math problems or do anything
drive drive performance tends to
ramp up slowly within a 90-minute cycle
peak and then come down
at the end of that 90-minute cycle and
in sleep we go through these
stage one two three four rem etc we'll
talk more about that if you like those
on 90-minute ultradian cycles as well
ending your sleep after a 90-minute
cycle at the
at the near the end of a 90-minute cycle
say at the end of six hours
in many cases is better for you than
sleeping an additional hour seven hours
and waking up in the middle of an
altradian cycle
and there are a few apps that can
measure this based on body movements and
things like that that
have you your alarm go off at the end of
an ultraviolet cycle
and if you wake up in the middle of an
altradian cycle sometimes not always you
can be very
groggy for a long period of time i
certainly do better on six hours than i
do on seven
i happen to like an eight hour sleep it
feels great but i
haven't slept an entire eight hours
without waking up in the middle of the
night at some point
in i don't know forever i can't remember
it's probably some point in
infancy but and i function well during
the day i think that
that's a big that's an important
parameter is how do you feel during the
day
almost everybody experiences some sort
of dip in energy in the late afternoon
or what would correlate to their
temperature peak
and that's a good time of day to get
either a 90
90 minute or less nap or if you're not a
napper
or you can't nap feet elevated
has been shown to be good for clear out
of some of this
the glymphatic system is this kind of
like sewer system of the brain you can
clear stuff out
so legs elevated or one thing that i've
um i'm a big proponent of and that my
lab has been studying is what i
i now call nsdr non-sleep deep breast
and this is just lying down there are
some scripts that we're going to put out
there soon as
a free resource there's some hypnosis
scripts that my colleague david spiegel
has put out there as a free resource
but non-sleep deep rest is allowing your
system to drop into states of
of real calm that allow you to get
better at falling asleep later
and they can be very restorative for
cognitive and motor function
there's at least one study out of
denmark that shows that
the basal ganglia which is an area of
the brain that's involved in motor
planning and action
one of these 20-minute non-sleep deep
breast protocols
resets levels of neuromodulators like
dopamine in the basal ganglia to
the same levels that they were right
after a long night's sleep
so i also respectfully
uh or semi-respectfully disagree with
the idea that you can't recover lost
sleep
what does that mean i mean that there's
no irs for sleep
so what does it mean to be in debt for
sleep
if you're falling asleep during the day
and you're sleepy like you're falling
asleep that's
a good sign of insomnia means you're not
sleeping enough at night
if you're fatigued during the day but
you're not falling asleep so you're just
exhausted but you're not finding
yourself falling asleep in meetings and
in conversation
then chances are you're fatiguing your
system through something else
like a long run in the middle of the
night
boston or whatever it is that you're up
to lately at uh 3 a.m
yes there is a magic to the nap and
maybe you could speak to the because you
mentioned these protocols
that don't necessarily so they're
non-sleep
but to me the nap
one or two a day can
almost irrespective of how much sleep i
get the night before
i have a fundamental change in my mood
and my
performance for the better for the
better for the better yeah likewise
so uh i do tend to kind of experiment
with durations
it's it's consistently surprising to me
how like a nap of like 10 minutes i
don't know maybe you can speak to the
perfect duration of a nap
but i find that it's like magic
that a short nap does as much good
and often better than a longer one for
me for me subjective what would be a
longer one
longer than 90 minutes no no like 90
minutes or but longer than 90
like two hours yeah that's dropping you
starting to drop you into rem sleep and
even if it's a tiny amount of rem sleep
people can come out of those naps kind
of disoriented
i mean remember in sleep space and time
are are totally uncoupled and so
they that's an odd state to re-enter the
world in if you're not going to stay
there for a while like for a good
night's sleep
i think a 20-minute nap is pretty
fantastic
would you say that's the op if you were
to recommend to the general and
it's very weird to recommend anything to
the general populace because
obviously it's very person specific but
what's a good one we say to friends is
20 minutes ago
30 minutes 20 or 30 minutes because
you're going unless you're sleep
deprived
you're going to stay out of rem sleep
rapid eye movement sleep if you're sleep
deprived you'll drop right into it if
you've ever traveled and you're really
jet lagged you go to the hotel you lay
down for one second all of a sudden
you're just like
you're you're in a psychedelic dream um
which can be pretty great too but i
think that
uh 20 30 minutes and if you can't sleep
some people have
trouble napping then learning to relax
the body as much as possible like trying
to remove
all expression from your face completely
letting your body kind of float
if people have a hard time relaxing when
they're awake
there's some terrific clinically and
research tested hypnosis protocols
that we could provide links to that are
cost-free and that teach you how to just
completely
release the alertness button and you
just start drifting now the problem is
if you don't have an alarm or something
to go off you
the other day i did one and i'm almost
embarrassed to say this but there's a
component of it where you actually are
supposed to let your hand float up
because it's a
hypnosis script so they it's my
colleague david spiegel in the script he
says
um let your hand float up i woke up an
hour later my hand was still floating
wow yeah and i was and i was completely
relaxed
so hypnosis is hypnosis is just a matter
of going deep relaxation narrowing of
context
and it's all self-imposed a lot of
people think that hypnosis is like the
stage thing with the pendant and the
chicken
you know people fucking like chickens
but real hypnosis
is self-hypnosis you're learning to it
involves
some shifts in the way that you the the
hypnotic induction involves looking up
closing your eyes slowly deep breath and
then imagine yourself floating
and people vary on a scale of about one
to four
for being the most easily hypnotized
there are a few people who it's very
hard for them to allow themselves to to
go into these states but for most people
they just they're gone and it's nice if
if you can have access to those states
because when you come out of it
you feel amazing you feel like you slept
the whole night at least
most people report that so refresh alert
ready to go i mean basically
you're ready yeah i know you have this
um interesting challenge coming up and
i'm curious what you're gonna do to
reset in the hours
it that the frequency of running is um
every four hours it's not going to allow
you to get any more than
a couple hours sleep in between flowers
so we should we should tell to people
i'd be curious
to get your thoughts and advice on it
i'm uh
on march 5th running 48 miles with mr
david goggins
so four miles every four hours and
people should join us
he's uh that madman is going to be live
on instagram
starting at 8 p.m pacific on march 5th
so you're gonna join him in person in
person undisclosed location
undisclosed location and i was i was
trying to clarify like okay so we're
gonna
like there'll be like friendly people
around or something no it's just me and
him friendly people i don't know
like i just feel it's very difficult to
be
with david alone in the room i imagine
his i mean i've done some work with
david his energy is infectious
yeah that's an intense schedule um
and the the periodicity of that those
four hour
every four hours four miles means that
there's no chance of catching an
extended
block of sleep so it's about three hours
that you have
non-exercising every time and of course
it takes time to try to fall asleep and
there's an intensity to the whole thing
i mean it's probably impossible to get
anything more
than uh two hours of sleep if you wanted
to so the optimal thing is probably
from the sound of it i'd be curious to
see what you think
but like it's getting a few 90 90-minute
naps okay well i thought about this a
bit
before we met up today so i think there
are two general approaches
that could work neither one necessarily
better than the other
one would be just to hammer through the
whole thing
just to get your level of alertness and
adrenaline
ramped up so that you don't expect
yourself to sleep
there are certain advantages there one
is a subjective kind of emotional
advantage
which is if you can't sleep you're not
gonna be stressed about that yes
and if you do fall asleep it's a bonus
provided you wake up and you don't look
up and you realize david's been out
running for
half an hour and you're behind right but
chances are that's not the way it'll go
you set an alarm so that's one approach
yeah and and i grabbed that from you
know a
couple friends who were um who are in
the seal teams and they'll say that you
know during buds there's this
infamous hell week and there's this five
hour five days excuse me definitely five
days
of no sleep although there is a
component where they offer a nap at one
particular point
and a lot of people will say that it's
worse to go down for that nap
and then be woken up 20 minutes later
than to just stay up
so so that's one option let's call it
the um full blitz hammer through
option and if you happen to fall asleep
you do bonus yeah the bonus
the other one would be to really anchor
in these ultradian cycles so coming back
from a run
you pr unless you're thoroughly
exhausted you're probably going to have
a few minutes where you're
going to want to stay awake it's going
to be hard to just immediately fall
asleep
and getting as much sleep as you can in
the intervening
periods provided that you guys aren't
posting constantly or doing something
else you also
there's a question whether or not you
want to nourish whether or not you want
to eat or not in that time
anytime we put food in our gut i don't
care if it's meat
or oatmeal or
broccoli or cardboard you're drawing
blood into the gut
and so you are going to divert some
energy towards digestion and it's going
to make you sleepy there's a reason why
the rest and digest the parasympathetic
nervous system is called that
so you could decide that you were only
going to sleep in certain
in between certain blocks that would be
another way to think about that
that because i did this last year
uh i ran very slow some of it was
walking i was listening audiobooks and
one of the biggest mistakes i did is to
overeat during that time right it was uh
made the experience very unpleasant so i
have been considering basically eating
almost nothing
throughout the day being fasted will
increase alertness because
high levels of epinephrine in your
system from fasting you just think about
fasting or being thirsty
before you get exhausted people always
think if i don't eat i'm going to be
tired
no the the energy that you derive from
food is going to be
uh used from glycogen and after a long
storage and conversion process so
the food that you eat is going to
consume energy to digest
and so a lot of people feel better
fasted and
presumably throughout history people
have fasted for long periods of time and
had to stay up for two or three days and
you know god forbid if a family member
is sick you can stay awake in the
hospital
without any trouble so that alertness
system and you know it's all mental
um actually and then there's a third
so you could try and sleep or or take
care in between yes
yeah and then there's a third approach
oh yeah but i didn't come up with it
but david did so i actually texted him
earlier because i had a feeling that i
heard that you were going to do this
challenge
so i asked david um
so these are david goggins words not
mine okay
one okay being organized is super
important
two you want to waste as little time as
possible
three you need to eat sleep and rehab
in as little time as possible so you can
sleep as much as possible oh interesting
by the way this is the first time i'm
reading this
yeah um four meal prep
and gear prep etc are very important
that's um
that's consistent with everything i know
about military they they don't
they don't leave too much to chance five
again these are david's words all that
said he's fucked on most all that
because he'll be interviewing me before
or after i will also be interviewing him
oh shit five long story short the only
thing that might help
is a very special pill this is
interesting
they're called s-i-u pills hard to get
but i believe he can get them s-i-u
stands for suck it up
tell him to grab his balls he'll find
those pills there
that's number six all right and then the
last one yeah stay hard brother
stay hard brother amen i
you know that was one of the other
things that i think makes
this challenging is that it'll be doing
a podcast throughout
so first of all i'll do a long one
before and after but also
i'll have to come up with things to talk
to him about
so like it's a different thing to do
something
privately and then publicly i know it
doesn't
seem that way but like one of the
hardest
the hardest thing i had to do last time
was to turn
on the camera and talk to the camera
because i
uh last time i did it i recorded um
every single time i did a leg
i recorded something i'm grateful for
it's just kind of unrelated i'm not a
fan of like
talking about like how i'm feeling or
how they're on is going
i want to do something totally unrelated
to the run
and with the run as the background you
know sort of something i'm grateful for
just any kind of uh interesting
discussion gratitude
i mean i hate the word hack like oh it's
a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin i i
don't like the word hack because
it's disrespectful to hackers who do a
real thing and
b a hack implies that it's some sort of
trick that you're
you're you're kind of gaming the system
you know what
what works is mechanism right biological
mechanisms
were designed to work and they were
selected for
to work under variable conditions and as
you know and i know and
we have great appreciation for the fact
that the nervous system was designed to
be an adaptive machine
so that you don't have to sleep eight
hours every night
you can do this thing and things like
gratitude allow you to tap into chemical
resources
and that's not a hack the fact that
being grateful for something external to
the event
happens to release serotonin and have a
certain soothing effect or
dopamine and give you more epinephrine
and let you go further
that's not a hack that's actually what
allowed the human machine
to evolve to the point that it is now
every time
you know an inventor eventually created
something that worked and felt great
about it you can imagine that the
the first you know air flight felt
pretty awesome
and motivated those people to go on and
do more they they didn't just go uh you
know yawn and go have a beer
so being able to access the genuine in
internal states of gratitude and reward
works
you can't trick the system you can't
pretend that you're grateful for
something but if you can identify or
attach yourself to some larger
goal or something that's deeply
gratifying to you or place it in service
to
a relative that passed away that you
care a lot about
that's not a hack that's accessing the
deepest components of your nervous
system and um to steal your kind of
lingo you know there's real beauty there
right yeah but for an introvert like
myself and i think david i don't know if
he's an introvert but like
he's not despite the fact that he has
written a great book
and he communicates he puts himself out
there he's not really
a fan of communication he's not i don't
know if he's energized by
speaking his mind i don't know well
enough to know i mean
we've done a little bit of work together
and um you know we're in communication
now and again he's obviously super
impressive
um i don't know it seems that he's a pr
seems like he's a pretty private guy
yeah you know so i don't have access to
that so for me
i'll just speak to myself and i think
david is the same but i'll speak to
myself that
it was a hugely draining thing not
to experience the gratitude experiencing
the gratitude just like you're saying
is really energizing and it's it's a
powerful thing it's a
it's a it can lift up your mood
but to turn on the camera and have to
use words which is very difficult to do
to explain
like what you're feeling and do it in
the way that you know a bunch of people
will be watching
is really draining and one of the things
i'm concerned about
that in this whole process how do i
keep my mind sharp while also
keeping the performance the physical
performance shop and that's a little bit
scary because
talking to david like actual
intellectually sharp like
thinking being charismatic and as much
as i can be
and like being still maintaining a sense
of humor too
because i can be i i become with sleep
deprivation
with exhaustion you start being the
russian bear comes out you start being
such a d like you i become a david
goggins essentially like
oh it makes you irritable sleep
deprivation makes us irritable
yeah there's it's clear so that in the
early part of the night we get a higher
percentage of those old trading cycles
are
occupied by slow wave sleep sometimes
just called non-rem sleep
and those early night sleep bouts
are great for muscular repair and for
certain forms of learning
but rem sleep the rapid eye movement
sleep which it starts to accumulate
and occupy more of those 90-minute
ultradian cycles
toward the late part of a sleep bout so
toward
typically toward morning but toward
after you've been asleep a while
that's when you do the emotional
processing that's when
we recover the ability to feel refreshed
and not irritated by things and
if you deprive people of rem sleep they
become selectively
uh bad at uncoupling the emotion from
things that happened in the previous
days so the little things start to seem
like big things
i always know i'm rem sleep deprived
when um
i'm irritable and when um i look at like
the word
the and it doesn't look like it's
spelled right and i'm kind of pissed off
about it like something's off and
we actually are becoming slightly um
psychotic when we're rem sleep deprived
you're not going to get a lot of rem
sleep in this thing except as you
fatigue more if you do fall asleep
you're going to drop more and more into
rem so that
those 90-minute cycles you won't have to
go through stage one stage two stage
three and then rem
you're just gonna drop right into ram so
you can count on your system to
compensate for you
but i think that just the knowledge that
you tend to get irritable as the time
goes on
just that third personing of yourself
that awareness the observer
that can be very beneficial because
there may be bouts during this event
when you just should probably say
nothing and maybe you just
um i don't know smile and record or not
smile or do
do whatever it is because you're gonna
be conserving energy if it feels like a
grind
that's epinephrine being released that's
epinephrine that you could devote to the
physical
effort but humor is an amazing anecdote
for this because
it resets that it's that dopamine
release
that gives us that fresh perspective and
it's a it's a real chemical thing
it's not a it's not a hack it's not a
it's not a trick
it's not a visualization it's biology in
action
well but i think the act
of uh interviewing of conversation in
these processes
even if you don't want to do it the
right thing to do
even when you're feeling irritable is to
to do the third person view and be able
to express with words that you're
feeling irritable
like express what you're going through
ex you know
use words which i hate doing i honestly
i think my
ultimate thing would be just to never
say a single word to david gagas and
just go through hell
it doesn't matter what we do but to do
it quietly to also express it
that's my ultimate hell and he's
definitely gonna be
if i know david at all he's he's going
to try and find your buttons like he's
gonna
he i mean he even though he knows he can
complete this
and i i believe that he trusts that you
can complete too i
i believe you can you will complete it
you know you will complete it right
there's no question about
that but he's not gonna make it easier
for you he's gonna make it harder
well i'm afraid so i'm like you know
it's very difficult for me so 48 miles
is not
easy i have not been trading that much
so i'm not ramping up
but it's not like going to kill me
we'll see what happens of course for him
he might almost get bored because i
think the 48 miles for him
is easy i think i don't know
that i don't know that ever gets easy i
have a friend
casey corgill who works with david he's
a does some
um physical uh rehab type stuff with him
and he
took casey on a 50 miler and he said
it's like 16 miles into it he was just
like
he had hit his wall yeah but they he
found it they
they find it to get you know you find
that portal
there is one thing i want to mention
there's some very good physiology
that can perhaps support the actual
running effort part these are very new
data
and we have a study going on with david
spiegel at stanford looking at how
different patterns of breathing
can affect heart rate variability heart
rate variability is good
there's this interesting mechanism i
think most people might
not realize but that medical students
learned that your breathing and your
heart rate and your brain are in this
really remarkable interplay it goes like
this
when you inhale this isn't breath work
we're not going to do breath work
but when you inhale the diaphragm moves
down
the heart gets a little bigger because
there's a little more space in the
thoracic cavity
and as a consequence blood flows a
little bit more slowly through that
larger volume
there's a category of neurons the
sinoatrial node
that sees that that recognizes that that
slower
rate through that larger volume sends a
signal to the brain stem and the brain
stem sends a signal back to the heart to
speed the heart up
so every time you inhale you're speeding
the heart up when you exhale
the diaphragm moves up the heart gets a
little smaller the volume is smaller
blood flows more quickly through the
heart a signal sent up to the brain and
the brain sends a signal back
to slow the heart down this is the basis
of heart rate variability
so at any point if you feel like your
heart is racing and you feel like you're
working too hard per unit of effort
focus on making your exhales longer or
more intense than your inhales
if ever you feel like you're truly
flagging you do not have the energy to
get up it's like okay it's time to go
and you're exhausted
you want to draw more oxygen into the
system get your heart rate going faster
now some people when they hear this
probably thinking well this is really
obvious but there's so much out there
about breath work and how to breathe and
all this stuff but no one talks about
how to do it in
real time while you're exerting effort
so this is something like almost like
second by second you can adjust things
to just
in real time based on how you're feeling
but based on the heart rate that's right
the experience of the heart rate
that's right so one thing that could
could be very efficient and we're doing
some work with athletes now
these are unpublished data but if you
while you're running
if you want to get into a nice cadence
of heart rate variability
do double inhales
while you're running what this will do
is when you do the double inhale has the
effect of
of reopening the avioli of the lungs
your lungs are filled with tons of
little sacs
when you they tend to collapse as you
fatigue when you
and carbon dioxide builds up in the
bloodstream and that's when we start
getting stress if you've ever been
sprinting you start getting beat and
you're going as hard as you can what
what you really need to do is double
inhale and reinflate these sacs in the
lungs and then offload a lot of carbon
dioxide
so when you're at a steady cadence and
you're feeling good double inhale
exhale double inhale exhale is a
terrific
way to breathe while you're in ongoing
effort by the way
any recommendations or differences in
nose or mouth breathing so nasal
breathing there's
a lot of excitement now obviously about
nasal breathing because of james
nestor's book breath
um there was also if people are gonna
know about that book that i do feel like
out of respect for my colleagues there
was a book by
sandra um khan and paul ehrlich at
stanford both professors at stanford
with a
forward by um jared diamond and robert
zapalski so
some heavy hitters in this book and the
book is called jaws
a hidden epidemic and it's all about how
nasal breathing is better for
us especially kids than being mouth
breathers under most conditions
for sake of improving immunity it turns
out there's a microbiome in the nose
like all sorts of good stuff about nasal
breathing preferentially
but when we exercise you can
you can do pure nasal breathing but the
problem is once you get up to kind of
third and fourth and fifth gear effort
you can't nasal breathe and be at
maximum capacity unless you've been
training it for a very long time
so i would say double inhale through the
nose offload through the mouth so double
inhale
exhale while you're in steady effort and
then if you really feel like you need to
gas it and you're pushing
the data show that then just use
whatever's there
right just go into kind of default mode
because
bringing too much concentration to
something is also going to spend
epinephrine
the goal is to get into that i don't
like the word but the flow state
where you're not thinking too much
you're just in exertion
so these are so these are things that
can help in the transitions
um but i don't think there's any secret
breathing technique you know anyone
who's been in the seal teams will kind
of
you know they'll tell you like there's
no breathing technique right
there's a there's tools that you can
look to from time to time
and these double inhale exhales can be
great for setting heart rate variability
in
very quickly and getting into a steady
cadence while you're exercising but if
there's a sprint like if suddenly you
guys are sprinting
ditch the ditch the double inhale exhale
and just sprint
one thing you mentioned he's probably
gonna push my buttons
it's a good place to ask a question
about anger so i'll probably get pissed
off at him at some point
i'm guessing and
do you have thoughts from a scientific
perspective
or also just the personal philosophical
perspective about the role of anger and
all of this in
in managing alertness performance
i think about this a lot because there's
so much out there about how important it
is to do things from a place of love
you know i tweet about it all the time
and i think and
love is powerful right you know it is
interesting that autonomic arousal
alertness let's just make use simple
language
alertness physiologically looks
identical
for love and excitement as it does for
anger and frustration and wanting to
defeat your opponent
or whoever that opponent happens to be
they're identical
except that the love component does tend
to
be associated with the release of
neurochemicals of the serotonin and
dopamine type
that do have this replenishment
component i don't think one wants to be
in
constant anger and friction but
i mean i'll come clean a bit there have
been portions of my career where some of
my best work
my extra two hours my ability to nail a
really hard deadline or problem has come
from not wanting to get out competed or
from
wanting to prove something these days i
i don't i'm not oriented from that place
toward my work quite as often but i
think we should be really honest
anger is powerful provided it's
channeled
it's very very powerful and it can give
you a ton of fuel
and gas to push when otherwise you'd
tap yeah joe rogan has
aside from being a fan of his has been
an inspiration to sort of be
to have a kind of loving view on the
world
in the way you approach the world to me
so i've
tended to want to approach the world
that way but in the same way
david goggins has been an inspiration to
like
uh yeah be angry at stuff and
uh use it as fuel like he almost
uh conjures up artificial demons in his
mind just so he can fight them
i you know but at the same time i tried
that because i did a challenge in the
summer
of for 30 days i was doing a lot of
push-ups and
it was uh over time it was
counterproductive for me
like i found that it was easier to just
like the roller coaster that the
emotional
like being angry at stuff takes you can
also be exhausting
oh absolutely and it can take you down
like the
the ups of it are good but the downs are
bad
and what i found is better to get to use
it as a boost every once in a while but
mostly to get lost
in the you're talking about the breath
work that
like getting lost in the ritual of it
like that the be
like that as opposed to going on the big
roller coasters of emotion
yet this brings us into the realm of
neuroendocrinology
is that there's a fascinating
relationship between the hormone system
and the nervous system
and yeah hormones work in general on
slower time scales the definition of a
hormone is something the chemical
released at one location in the body
goes and acts at multiple locations
far away and within the body pheromone
would be between two bodies
neurochemicals like dopamine serotonin
tend to work a little more quickly there
are hormones like adrenaline
and cortisol that can work very fast but
here i'm referring mainly to
testosterone prolactin prolactin tends
to be in men and women tends to make
people kind of
lazy and want to take care of young it
tends to throw down body fat so we can
stay up late
it's secreted in response to having
children these are all
in humans and in animals there's a very
interesting relationship between
testosterone and dopamine
[Music]
that speaks directly to what we're
talking about now
so dopamine and testosterone are closely
related in the pituitary system
and obviously testosterone comes from
the adrenals and from the testes
but the the major effect of testosterone
is to make effort feel good that's what
testosterone does it has other effects
too
right reproductive effects androgenizing
parts of the body etc
but it makes effort feel good the
testosterone molecule is synthesized
from cholesterol
cholesterol can either be made into
cortisol a stress hormone or
testosterone
but not both so you have a limited
amount of cholesterol
and it gets diverted towards stress or
towards tests
or this pathway where effort feels good
that's the pathway you want to get into
the anger pathway if we were to just
kind of
play a mind experiment here the anger
eventually is going to divert more of
that cholesterol molecule to cortisol
and stress and you will be slowly
depleting testosterone now going into
this
you'll have plenty of testosterone but
after a couple days there have been very
interesting studies showing that
testosterone
doesn't necessarily drop with sleep
deprivation that's a bit of a myth
you need it to replenish to stop you
need sleep to replenish testosterone
eventually
but the real question is are you
enjoying what you're doing
and here that the work was uh some of
the major work on this was done
by duncan french who runs the ufc
training center he did his phd
at uconn um stores did a really
beautiful
phd thesis looking at the relationship
between stress hormones testosterone
and dopamine really interesting work and
the the takeaway from all of this is if
you can just convince yourself or
ideally if you can just enjoy yourself
you are going to maintain or maybe even
increase testosterone stores
which will make effort feel good and to
me
aside from neuroplasticity where
everything becomes automatic after this
experience
to me that's the holy grail when effort
feels good
life just gets way better and we're not
talking about achieving the reward i'm
not talking about the end of this thing
i'm talking about the process of it
feeling really good yeah the you know
there is a magic to uh
i don't know if you can comment on this
but i find myself
being able to if i just say i'm feeling
good like this
this old hack of like smiling while
you're running
if i just tell myself i'm feeling really
good right now
no matter how i'm actually feeling i'll
start feeling way better and the whole
thing
there's the cascading effect that uh
allows me to maximize the effort it's
it's quite fascinating
it's weird hormones are powerful the
relationship between thoughts and
hormones and these physiological things
is enormous
i had a colleague that a few years ago
he was dying of
pancreatic cancer and i was interviewing
him just because i
he's an important figure in our
community and i was a friend
and there was one day where he he told
me he said you know i don't want to
make it past the new year i just and it
was it was crushing for me to hear
and i knew that he had been on some
androgen therapy
for for a whole set of other things and
i i said you know
um have you taken your andro androgen
cream and he was like no i haven't done
it go get it for me
i have this on film he takes it he puts
the andrew cream on i'm not suggesting
people take
androgens by the way ten minutes later
he says
you know what i think i want to live
into the new year and i'm going to write
12 letters of recommendation he went to
mit by the way
he said i'm going to write 12 letters of
recommendation and he did
and so there's something about these
molecules that in an
ancient way in all organisms all mammals
as far as we know
are linked to the will to live they're
linked to effort and making effort feel
good which has been fundamental to the
evolution of our species
i always say people think that the
opposite of testosterone is estrogen but
it's not
the opposite of testosterone is
prolactin which makes us feel quiescent
and not in pursuit of things etc
testosterone makes effort feel good
estrogen makes
emotions feel okay
and and and they are in mixed amounts in
um
in all people as i say of all
chromosomal backgrounds yeah
yeah i mean you also mentioned fasting
potentially through this uh two day
thing
it'd be cool to get your thoughts about
fasting in general do you think
uh on a personal level and at a higher
sort of
level of studies that you're aware of
and physiology
and so on what do you think about
intermittent fasting of like
not eating for 16 hours and then having
an eight-hour window
or something i've been doing a lot
recently which is
eating only once a day so that's 24-hour
fast i guess
one meal a day or something i've um
been thinking about doing haven't done
yet or doing like 72 hours or some
people do like
five day fasts in general so this would
be
for this particular run will be at a 48
hour fast
if i don't need it at all what do you
think about that for performance from
mood for all those kinds of things i can
speak a little bit to the science
and a little bit of my own experience
and then some anecdotes of people that
have done
very hard very long duration things and
what they've told me so i just want to
make sure i'm separating those out so
people know my sourcing
i think now none of this is about the
actual
long-term nutritional benefits of one
thing or the other
but if you look at the science on
intermittent fasting it's pretty
remarkable
before i was at stanford my lab was in
san diego one of my colleagues was
sachin panda
at the salk this phenomenal biologist
and researcher wrote a book called the
circadian code it's very very good and
and
kind of popularized intermittent fasting
although there were others that had
um talked about this before ori
hofmeckler talked about the warrior diet
people probably might not know who or he
is but he's he's sort of the originator
of the
this business of intermittent fasting
even once a day are limited
anyway sachin has published papers
peer-reviewed papers and very good
journals
like cell and elsewhere showing that
limiting the
consumption of calories to eight
you know four six or eight or even ten
hours of every 24 hour cycle
and keeping that more or less correlated
with the
light with when the sun is out leads to
less liver disease improved metabolic
markers
less body fat etc in the mouse studies
they even gave the mice the choice to
eat whatever they wanted as much as they
wanted as long as they restricted it to
a certain period
within the 24 hour cycle they they did
great they
they maintained a healthy weight or even
lost weight when they took the same
amount of food and they stretched it out
across the 24 the entire 24 hour cycle
so this is eating every hour or two
hours
the animals got fat and sick so it's
pretty remarkable data
how much of that translates to humans
isn't clear but one thing that's really
clear with humans is adherence
right we could talk a lot about
nutrition and some of the problems with
the studies on nutrition is that what
people will do in a laboratory
is often hard to do in the real world
low carbohydrate diets
just they tend because they tend to
focus on foods that have
high amino acid content like meats
generally people
are less hungry on their those than they
are on calorie matched
diets of fruits and vegetables and
carbohydrates because
when the insulin goes up you get hungry
and you want to eat more
so this is not a push for carnivore or a
push against one thing or the other
it's just there are a lot of factors but
we know for sure that when you're fasted
or when you have low amounts of
carbohydrate in your system complex
carbohydrate
your alertness is going to go up fast
increases
increases alertness and epinephrine
for the sole purpose of getting you to
go out and find food can you imagine if
our ancestors
got hungry and they were like oh i'm too
tired to go find food we wouldn't be
here you'd be like robots or some
one of your alien one of your alien
buddies will be like
running so i think that if you want to
be alert
fasting or keeping complex carbohydrates
to a minimum
is very valuable if you want to sleep
and you want to be sleepy
ingesting foods that have a lot of
tryptophan which is the precursor to
serotonin so complex carbohydrates
like rice and grains turkey white meats
those things do create a sense of
sleepiness however there is a caveat and
this is
one problem with the once a meal once a
day meal
is that anytime you have a lot of food
in the gut you're increasing sleepiness
because you're diverting blood to the
gut it's going to trigger the vagus to
signal to the brain to shut down your
system and utilize those nutrients can
you
digest and utilize those nutrients so
i've done the once
a day eating thing the problem is i eat
so much in that meal that i'm exhausted
and so it doesn't always lend itself
well to the schedule
but so in a six or eight hour eating
block for me is a little bit better
i do eat carbohydrates i'm probably one
of the few people left on the west coast
that actually consumes carbohydrates and
will
say that out loud people eat carbs
anymore that's weird they don't where do
you even find carbs what do you buy
i like oatmeal i like rice the other
time is if people are doing very high
intensity weight training they need to
replenish glycogen
on the alertness side i do feel like
it's probably person independent for me
alertness being alert makes my life
better
in a lot of ways more than just the
alertness itself
like for example one of the things that
discovered with fasting
is that when i was training twice a day
in jiu jitsu for example and competing
and so on
i performed way better at things that
you traditionally would say you need
carbs for which
is explosive movements and all that i
don't
know if i actually perform better in
terms of like
the the force of the explosion
the explosiveness what i do know is the
alertness resulted in me
uh doing the technique more precisely
that's the dopamine and epinephrine
system in action
and there's a you know there are some
other just
purely uh physical aspects to one diet
versus the other that
can be complicated if you're ingesting
carbohydrates complex carbohydrates
you're going to replenish glycogen which
is great
but they also tend to be bulky and
fibrous and i've never rolled jiu jitsu
but running when you have a lot of bulky
fibrous food in your in your gut or in
your intestine
it can be a barrier it can be
uncomfortable and so some people do
really well on low carbohydrate meat
rich diets because they're just not
as bloated they're not carrying as much
water and other stuff
carbohydrate carries a lot of water
molecules with it so there are aspects
to being able to train and being really
explosive because you feel light
one anecdote that really again i'm not
encouraging any one particular kind of
diet but i have a friend who is in the
uh in the seal teams um i happen to know
a number of people in that community and
he told me that he did this
very long fast it was so fast that i
think they you get to eat a little bit
of soup and or broth and there's like a
bar or something but it's like a
nine-day thing and he's
he's a very strong athlete and he said
that
on day six or seven he was running up
some
hills or something while he was on
deployment and he
felt amazing he kind of hit this other
level he was somebody who had boxed in
the naval academy
he was somebody who was had he knew
knows a new
high output and he felt like he
discovered the
the 13th floor that there was another
floor to this
performance space that he hadn't
experienced
except while he had fasted and he said
that that was a remarkable
clarity of mind energy it's a little bit
of what you described
he described a kind of suppleness and
explosiveness so there's probably
something there on which day
uh at once he was in the fifth or sixth
day of the february see this is the
thing is i've never been there
uh on the second third fourth fifth day
that kind of thing
but when i just don't eat for 20 hours
many times through my training the
clarity
it's like you feel like everyone is
moving super slowly
and you're able to like dominate people
you weren't able to before it's like
well you might have slipped into or
switched over rather into full ketosis
and ketogenic diets done properly can be
great for people
the problem is if you do it wrong you
can really mess it up i tried it once
and i basically got psoriasis i thought
my scalp was going to fall off i was
like slothing off all this
and i stopped and i was taking the
liquid ketones and then all of a sudden
i felt better again
but i was told that i just did it wrong
yes um that's so i think there's a right
way and a wrong way and you have to get
it right
definitely and so i've experimented
quite a bit with keto too
to see how my body feels and doing it
the right way and following all the
instructions
there's definitely a huge difference
that
like for example one of the things i
discovered everyone always said this
and but i tried this uh recently
over the past year as i started drinking
when i don't feel great if i'm fasting
uh bone broth
chicken bone broth oh yeah and for some
reason like magically it could be
this is the other thing the mind i don't
know but it makes me feel
really good well it could be the salt
so i mean neurons the action potential
neurons as you know is sodium's rushing
into the cell you need enough
extracellular sodium
in order for your brain and nervous
system to function and so salt i mean
unless people have hypertension salt is
great there was an article in science
magazine about a decade ago about how
salt had been demonized unless people
have hypertension provided you drink
enough water
salt is great you need sodium magnesium
and potassium to function
and for your nerve cells to work i mean
people who over drink water and don't
consume enough electrolytes die
now hydration is really important i know
david's really into hydration
he's mentioned that a few times i mean
hydrating
properly is key and so you definitely
want to make sure that you're
drinking enough water and getting enough
electrolytes that i mean we should have
actually talked about that at the
beginning because
that's going to keep your nervous system
functioning well and a lot of people
they'll get shaky or jittery
and when they're fasting and they'll
think they need sugar
and if they just put some salt in some
water they feel fine and like the other
stuff from
potassium magnesium whatever the other
electrolytes are but yeah
the yeah those three so i mean salt yeah
before sleep um salt
i mean this is a vast space and we're
kind of talking about the overlap
between
neurochemicals hormones and nutrition
and it's a fascinating space and it's
one that
the academic community has gems up
within the textbooks
it hasn't really made it into the public
sphere yet
and i think that's because people get so
caught up in the you know
being are you vegan or are you carnivore
and there's a vast space in between too
that people can explore like i'm not a
competitive athlete so
i eat meat and i also eat vegetables and
i eat
fruits and it's just about timing them
but i tend to eat carbohydrates when i
want to be sleepy i eat them at night
and everyone said that's the worst thing
you can't do that you sleep great after
eating a big bowl of pasta i'll tell you
and by the way i should i should give
you a big thank you for connecting me
with
belcampo farms they send me some meat
i think because of you and it's
delicious
so i i really i really appreciate that i
mean it also connected me with this
whole
world of people who are doing farming in
this ethical way and like really love
the whole process and like and as uh
from a both like a human level but also
scientific
level and the result is um
it's like ethical but also it's
delicious
and it makes you think about your diet
in a whole new kind of way
yeah i've known um i don't have any
commercial relationship to bill campbell
so i can be very clear i've known
anya fernald who who's one of the found
is the founder and ceo of el campo i've
known her since the ninth grade
it is true that her parents are faculty
members at stanford they're colleagues
of mine
but she's just a serious academic of
nutrition but also
of sustainable agriculture of you know
all sorts of things and also the meat
just
it's awesome it tastes really good and
no i'm not getting paid to say that no
they're not a
sponsoring my podcast it's just if you i
feel like if you're gonna eat animals
if that's in your framework and you're
gonna eat animals knowing that the
animals were
raised as happy as could be until you
know
time of slaughter is is at least
important to me and
and actually uh talk to her so i i will
talk to her on this podcast actually and
she
invited me uh like a week ago out to
to visit the farm in may or june or
whatever yeah they have the farm up at
the oregon board i haven't been there
yet but i've seen the pictures and it
just looks
awesome and i was like yes it looks
beautiful let me know when you're going
yeah let's go together you'll probably
run there but i'll drive there
yeah but that all that said i do want to
because
a lot of people who are vegan write to
me
and i do want to seriously in the same
seriousness that i approached keto
i do want to go like on a few months to
switch to a vegan diet at some point to
really try it
yeah i haven't done it yet because i'm
afraid i'm gonna function better
i'm argentine by my dad's side and i i i
don't
eat i don't eat meat super often but
well
for most people would it would seem
often but um but i
i do love steak i do um so i'm afraid
i'm gonna feel better there's a social
element to stake you're right because
coming from a russian background like i
can't imagine going to visit my folks
like my parents for thanksgiving or
something to say mom and dad i'm
uh you know i don't eat meat so is that
you know well i think if you're gonna
eat meat
getting it from sources that are
compatible with
um you know continuation of the planet
is
good i mean there are some some real
problems with the
factory farm meat you know you drive up
and down the five and you pass that
point where other all those cows
i mean as somebody who loves animals
um it's it's clear that it's
you know you want to limit the amount of
suffering of those animals
whenever i hear about um you know we
have we know people that hunt and that
go and get their own meat i
i really admire that i admire that
people do that we don't we don't tend to
do that in the
hills around stanford you know there are
mountain lions back there but that's
about it and i'm
i'm certainly i admire the vegan mindset
of being of just making that decision
you're just not going to consume other
beings but you know i haven't gone that
way but performance-wise i'm just
curious because
i was surprised i was certain that
eating five
six seven meals a day is the right thing
to do for all
if you want to be perform your best when
i was like 20 or whatever
and i would eat oatmeal like i thought
it's obvious i have to have a really
a lot of carbs in the breakfast i had a
lot of preconceived notions and then
when i started eating like once a day
this was at the peak of my competing jiu
jitsu
it was like everything i know about
nutrition is wrong
yeah you realize that like you have to
become a scientist first of all you have
to read literature you have to learn you
experiment but you also have to
become a scientist of your own body and
in the same way
i have a lot of preconceived notions of
what performance is like
under vegan diet and i want to do it
right like seriously not not
necessarily for the ethical reasons but
to see if it's performance wise
like can i remember there's like a
fruitarian diet where you eat fruit only
you know these extremes are like they're
pretty they're interesting because
people have
this need the extremes are informative
though right i mean
well-controlled experiments you
eliminate as many variables as you can
except the one you're interested in so
people are running these experiments i i
think that
it's hard to imagine getting i know
people say you can get enough amino
acids
from plant-based sources and i believe
that i
think it probably takes a little more
work one thing that's really clear is
that the benefit of these
omega-3 omega-6 ratios like fish oils
and things like that there are some data
that showed that the
getting at least a thousand milligrams
of the epa
which is in high in fish oils but other
things too even some meats
and other plants it in
double you know in matched uh placebo
double blind controlled studies
placebo-controlled double-blind studies
have shown that
those can offset anti-depressive
symptoms as much as some of the
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
like prolactins the prozac and zoloft so
that's pretty impressive and in
scandinavia people know
especially in winter to consume a lot of
those omega-3s
because they're good for you they're
good for the brain that's the other
question
wise what kind of stuff have you come
across that's
useful like i basically only take fish
oil
like you said electrolytes electrolytes
with water
the david goggins diet fish oil plus
fish oil and then uh
again the sponsor they made it so easier
the the sponsor your podcast and and
mine
athleticgreens.com slash huberman
support it i don't i don't know like
it's it's great stuff
for sure but also just takes away the
headache of like i don't have to think
about like yeah you're gonna get a bunch
of vitamins and minerals
it'll co it does that sounds like a plug
but i have genuinely been buying it
you know no discount no affiliation or
anything since 2012.
i think i heard about it on the tim
ferriss podcast was like oh i'm going to
try that stuff
and i liked it i mean when i was
starting my lab i was working insane
hours
i still work very long hours and getting
sick
limits productivity and i also wanted to
train and i wasn't
doing much training back then um
now i try and get you know three four
sessions in a week i'm not doing nothing
like what you and david are doing or
what you know
joe does or like you guys are way more
regimented and consistent than i am
um but i think that being healthy and
feeling good
is one of the great benefits to a career
is
having energy and just being not sick
can we take a step back to uh uh sleep
for
sure yeah so people should definitely
uh look through your podcast the first
five episodes were on sleep or
no i guess the first opening episode
wasn't uh first one was sort of how the
brain works generally is to give people
some background
and then we did four episodes on sleep
including some stuff about food
temperature exercise jet lag shift work
for the jet lag
folks and shift workers yeah it's like a
master class on sleep and then you're go
you're going on to a next uh
topic in the next few episodes which is
incredible well
neuroplasticity we'll talk about it but
on sleep
one of the cool things about the human
mind when it sleeps is dreaming
uh what do you think we understand about
the contents of dreams like what do
dreams mean all the stuff we see when we
dream
is there something that we understand
about
uh the contents of dreams some of it is
very concrete so
matt wilson who mit um
showed in rodents and it's been shown in
non-human primates and now it's been
shown in humans that
there is replay of spatial information
during sleep
so initially what matt showed was that
as
these little rodents navigate through a
maze they're the cells in the
hippocampus called place cells that fire
when the
animal encounters a turn or a corridor
and
that same exact same sequence is replay
during sleep
and it turns out this is true in
london taxi cab drivers before phones
and gps were what they are today
the london taxi cab drivers were famous
for knowing the routes through the city
through these mental maps and their
analysis of their place cell firing
during sleep and during wakefulness and
so we are essentially
taking spatial information about the
location of things and replaying it
during sleep however
it's not replayed so that you remember
it all it's replayed so that if
there's a reason to remember it the
links to the emotional system to the
components of the limbic system and
hypothalamus that are
relevant like you got into a car crash
or a particular location or you lost a
bunch of money because you were
a cab driver uber driver we'd say
nowadays and you were stuck at one
particular avenue all day and frustrated
and you're getting yelled at by your
spouse that information gets encoded
so that you never forget that at that
particular time of day in that
particular time of year
and this thing happened so context
starts getting linked to experience so
there's spatial information
that's absolutely replayed during sleep
and we experience this sometimes as
dreams the dreams that happen early in
the night when slow wave sleep or
non-rem sleep dominates
tends to be sleep of very kind of
general themes and kind of um
location it's a it can feel a little bit
eerie and kind of strange ins
not so incidentally the early phase of
the night is when growth hormone is
released
in the 80s and 90s there was a drug that
was very popular it's very illegal now
called ghb
you could actually buy it at gnc or
store then i never took it but it was a
popular party drug and some people
some famous celebrities died while on
ghb
they were also on a bunch of other
things so it's not clear what killed
them but ghb
was very big in certain communities
because it promoted a massive release
of growth hormone and gave people these
very hypnotic states so people go to
clubs and they were in these very
hypnotic states it was part of a whole
culture
that's early night and those dreams
tend to not have a lot of emotional
content or load
that phase of dreaming is associated
with
the occasional jolting yourself out of
sleep because somewhat lighter sleep
this the dreams that occur during rem
during rapid eye movement sleeping that
dominate towards mourning
are very different they tend to have
very little epinephrine is available in
the brain at that time
epinephrine again being this molecule
stress fear and excitement
you are paralyzed during these rem
dreams you're you cannot move
there's intense emotion at the level of
what you're feeling and their so-called
theory of mind
theory of mind is an idea that was put
forward by simon baron cohen sasha baron
cohen's cousin
i think on the podcast i mistakenly said
that he was at oxford it's like the
cardinal sin he's at cambridge forgive
me i'm not british but
so the dreams in rem have are heavily
emotionally laden
and it's very clear that those dreams
and rem sleep if you deprive yourself of
them
for too long you become irritable and
you start
linking generally negative emotions to
almost
everything rem the dreams that occur in
rem sleep are when we divorce emotion
from our prior experiences
and it's when we extract general rules
and themes
uh mit seems to come up a lot today but
it's
it's highly relevant susumu tonagawa
nobel prize for
immunoglobulin but obviously fantastic
neuroscientists as well
has shown that the replay of neurons in
the hippocampus and elsewhere in the
brain
is kind of an approximation of the
previous episode
and a lot of fear unlearning of
uncoupling
emotion from hard or traumatic events
that happened previously occurs
in rem sleep so you don't want to
deprive yourself of rem sleep for too
long
and those dreams tend to be very intense
now epinephrine is low
so that you can't suddenly act out your
dreams
but what's interesting is sometimes
people will wake up suddenly
while in a rem dream and their heart
will be beating really really fast
that's a surge of epinephrine that
occurs as you exit
rem sleep so you were having this
intense emotional experience without the
fear
you were essentially going through
therapy in your sleep self-induced
therapy
it's like trauma therapy where you try
and divorce the emotion from the
experience
and then you wake up and some people
also have the other component of rem
which is atonia which is paralysis pot
smokers
experience this a lot more than non-pot
smokers there's an invasion of paralysis
into the waking state
i'm not a pot smoker but i have
experienced this and when you wake up
and you're paralyzed for a second it's
terrifying but then you jolt yourself
alert
so the rem sleep is important for
kind of the self-induced therapy and
forgetting the bad stuff
it's good for uncoupling the emotions
from bad experiences
and just there are two therapies i move
into sensitization reprocessing
which is a eye movement thing that shuts
down the amygdala
during therapy not during sleep and
ketamine which is a dissociative
analgesic it's actually very similar to
pcp and ketamine is now being used as a
trauma therapy when someone comes into
the er for instance and they were in a
terrible car accident these are horrible
things to describe but you know
they saw a relative impaled on the
driving steering column or something
and they will give this drug to try and
shut off the emotion system
so that because they're not going to
forget let's be honest you don't forget
the bad stuff but
it is possible to uncouple the bad
events
from the emotional system and there's
all sorts of ethical issues about
whether or not that's good or bad to do
but
ptsd is a failure to uncouple the
emotion
from these intense experiences so the
goal of this kind of therapy
is in the uncoupling for that to be
permanent
yeah to uh to separate so they can
recount the event
and they can describe it without it
triggering the same somatic experience
of terror and dread
um because terror those feelings can be
debilitating obviously you're saying
physiologically in uh rem sleep a
similar process is happening that's
right
the thematically rem sleep is about
experiencing
or replaying intense emotions without
experience the
somatic the physical component of the
emotion either the acting out
or the accelerated heart rate and
agitation
likewise with things like ketamine
therapies that's the idea is you're
uncoupling the physical sensation from
the mental events what is rem sleep and
why is it
so special maybe we can comment on that
rabbit eye movement sleep
yeah discovered in the 50s at the
university of chicago it's
intense brain activity high levels of
metabolic activity
dreams in which people report a lot of
the theory of mind we were talking about
uh simon baron cohen theory of mind is
was actually something that he developed
for the diagnosis of
autism if you take kids most
kids of age five six seven you put them
in front of a tv screen
in the laboratory and you have them
watch a video where a kid is playing
with a ball or a doll
and then the kid puts it into a drawer
shuts the drawer and walks away and
another kid comes in and you ask the
child who's observing this
little movie you say what does this
second child think and they
a typical kid would say uh they want to
play and they don't know where the ball
or doll is or they
they they're upset or they're sad they
want the doll
autistic children tend to say the doll's
in the drawer
the the toys in the drawer they tend to
fixate
they can't get in on the event they
can't get into the mind of that they
don't have a theory of mind
dreams in rem have a heavy theory of
mind component people are after me
trying to get
me you can assign motive to other people
i'm afraid
but it's because there's an expectation
that doesn't tend to happen in slow wave
sleep dreams now all this of course is
by waking people up and asking them what
they were dreaming about which
from a standpoint of a ai guy or a
machine learning
or a is kind of like but it's the best
we've got
yes but brain imaging what in waking
states while people view a movie
and then brain imaging while people are
sleeping supports the idea that that's
basically what's going on
so rem sleep is amazing and you're not
going to get much of it during your
about with uh goggins but you will
afterward
why so to comment why won't i
so is it not possible to get into it
real quick
only if you're very very sleep deprived
but because you're going to be at
high muscular output that's going to
bias you towards more slow wave sleep
overall and your body
and brain are smart they it will know
they will know
that your main goal is to recover
so you can keep going so you can keep
firing neuromuscular contractions and
you can keep running so that you can
i mean it's amazing to think like why do
we ever stop
unlike weight training where i can't do
a 500 pound deadlift i just can't
i could train for it but i certainly
can't do a 600 pound i can't do that
what causes us to stop an endurance
event
is usually not a physical barrier it's
almost always a purely mental
barrier and that's a very interesting
problem i mean neuroscientists don't
tend to think about those sorts of
problems because it sounds so
non-neuroscientific but that's
fundamentally
related to the question of you know what
is pursuit
why what is the the desire to push and
to and to
carry on is there a neuroscientific
answer for that question you think
i think the closest thing is this um
paper from uh
from genealia farms the howard hughes
campus showing that if you put
uh animals into a simulated environment
where
you can measure their effort and the
forces on while they're running and you
can look at them and you can control the
visual environment and you can create a
scenario where the animal thinks that
it's
output is futile it thinks it knows it's
running and it's actually running
but you change the frequency of the
stripes going by in their visual world
such that they think they're not getting
anywhere and eventually they
quit and the thing that determines
whether or not they quit
is a threshold level of epinephrine in
the brain stem if you drop that level
back down or you
or you give the animals dopamine
essentially they keep going
if you take dopamine down they
they're like this isn't worth it it's
helpless they're just this isn't worth
my time and energy but this is where the
difference between humans
and non-human animals is interesting
because
it does feel like humans have an extra
level of cognitive
ability that might
be relevant here well you can pull from
different time references
so if you're in that moment you're gonna
need a kit of things to
pull from so you can think this is in
honor of someone else that passed away
right and you will find a gas reserve
that's amazing
right now whether or not mice are like i
remember my brother back in the other
cage when i was a little mouse
you know we don't know but it's
very likely that they don't do that that
they're so present they're in the
experience of
there and then and now that they aren't
able to extract
from the past and they're not able to
project into the future like how great
it's going to feel when i get to the end
of this really lame vr corridor i don't
think they think about that
and and think about like if i quit now
how would i have what kind of effect
will have on the rest of my life in the
future difficult times
like if you allow yourself to quit in
this particular moment you'll become a
quitter more and more in life and then
you're going to not get the the other
nice uh
the opposite sex mammals that's pretty
severe
you went there the whole way to
evolution and back again i mean but
that's that's really it i mean our
ability
to time reference in the past present or
future i do believe that we can be in
the present and the past or the present
and the future
or only in the present or only in the
future only in the past but i don't
think that we can really think about
past present and future all at once
and this has a similarity to covert
attention like we can split our visual
attention into two things
we really can duo task even though we
can't multitask
or we can bring those two spotlights of
attention to the same location
but it's very hard to split our
attention and really well into
three domains excuse me into three
domains
i think that that's very very
challenging and time
our time referencing scheme tends to be
just
one or two time references
so lisa feldman barrett i'm not sure if
you've done work together but at least
you're
i found out about her because of you
your podcast with her and i brought her
onto instagram doing an instagram live
about emotion
and it was fascinating and she's a very
spirited and very very smart
woman and uh fearless yeah and uh
brilliant
so i love her she's amazing uh she kind
of
sh she's not a scholar of hallucigens
hallucinogens or dreams but
she had this intuition that there may be
a connection
between the kind of dissociation that
happens in dreaming
and that happens in um
like psychedelics i because of my
previous conversation with you uh on
on this podcast uh matthew johnson from
johns hopkins reached out and he said
but
he he commented i think on something
that we commented i don't even remember
exactly what but that there's not
many studies it's not being
psychedelics and not being rigorously
studied in academic setting like with
the
full rigor of science and he said well
actually
uh that's exactly what we're doing and
they're extremely well funded now
and it was been a long battle to get it
accepted as a serious
uh scientific pursuit so um
but and i'd like to ask you a little bit
about that but
do you have a sense about
connection between dreams and
psychedelics or these uh
different explorations of mind studies
that are outside of the standard normal
one that's
the wake mindset yeah i loved your
discussion with matthew i
knew of the hopkins group and the stuff
they were doing but i didn't know
much about it at all and i learned a ton
from that podcast i reached out to him
just to say
i love what you're doing i think it's
incredible so yeah your podcast has been
a great source of
serious academic and intellectual um
conversation for me
i think what they're doing at hopkins is
amazing
um he has a collaborator there actually
they had a very popular paper i just
throw out there for fun
who was a postdoc at stanford her name
is ghoul um
she's turkish i believe um and
her and i i apologize her last name
escapes me at the moment but that's just
a function of my brain
um she had a paper showing that uh she
put octopi
on mdma on ecstasy and found out this
was published in
in a in current biology showing it was a
great journal showing that the octopi
then
wanted to spend more time with other
octopi they started cuddling
yeah so their colleagues out there but
um
the hopkins project is super interesting
because
i think they were initially supported
mainly through private philanthropy
and now you're starting to see some more
interest at the level of nih
about psychedelics it's a complicated
space because
the psychedelics are always looked at
through the lens of the 60s and people
losing their mind and
there's a you know in i always say you
know you don't want to ken keezy out of
the game you know ken kizu was amazing
right about the whole beat generation
thing and he was actually at the va
near stanford that's where he eventually
in menlo park he wrote one flew over the
cuckoo's nest or
maybe that was about him anyway the
comments will tell me how wrong i am
but it's i think i'm tossing these words
in the general in the right general
direction
but you know huxley
keyse they did a lot of lsd and they
all lost their jobs right they lost
their jobs at big institutions like
harvard and stanford and elsewhere
or they left because they
they made themselves the experiments yes
hopkins as far as i know
is when the first place is not the first
place where
whatever matt may or may not be doing in
his own life i don't know
it's really about the patients and
whether or not the patients in these
um institutional review board approved
studies whether or not they're getting
better
in situations like depression i think
it's clear that there's a very close
relationship
between hallucinogenic states and
dreaming of the sort that would describe
for rem dreaming
and there's a a terrific set of books
and body of scientific literature from a
guy named alan hobson
who was an md is it harvard med and he
wrote books like dream drug store
one of the first neuroscience books i
ever read was about hallucinations and
how
psychedelics and dreaming are very
similar that was way back when i was in
high school i was just curious
and he really understood the
relationship between lsd and rem dreams
and how similar they
are i think psychedelics and matt knows
way more about this than i do of course
but
psychedelics have some very interesting
properties
they are certainly not for everybody
right and kids it's a problem you know
i think the major issues right now
around the psychedelic
conversation is that it's clear that
they can
unveil certain elements of
neuroplasticity they make the brain
amenable to change changing up
space-time relationships changing up the
emotional load of an event and being
able to reframe that
it's clear that happens but there's two
major issues
one is that people talk about plasticity
as if plasticity is the goal
but plasticity is a state within which
you can direct neurology and the
question is
what changes are you trying to get to so
people are just taking psychedelics to
unveil plasticity
without thinking about what circuits
they want to modify and how
i think that's a problem i think there's
great potential however for people
opening up these states of plasticity
with psychedelics or otherwise
and directing the plastic changes toward
a particular endpoint and there's an
absolutely spectacular paper out of uc
davis
published as a full article in nature
just a couple months ago
showing that there are psychedelics that
are now can be modified so chemists have
gotten into the game now and modifying
to take away the hallucinogenic
component
where you still get the neural
plasticity components wow
and for a lot of people to be like oh
that's no fun that's not giving you the
the wild experience but i do think that
that holds great potential for people
that wouldn't otherwise
orient towards some of these drugs so i
think it's really marvelous what's
happening and what's about to happen and
i think there
there is one drug in that kit of drugs
that's
very unusual like psilocybin lsd those
promote heavy heavy serotonin release
and lateralized connections ramp up etc
matt talked about all that
but mdma ecstasy
is a very unusual situation where
dopamine is
very very high because of the the way
the drug is designed
dopamine release it goes through the
roof so people feel
great and they want to move and they
have a lot of energy
but serotonin levels are also high and
that's a very unnatural state
and why mdma may may and i want to
highlight may have particularly
high potential for the treatment of
certain forms of depression
is an interesting question because never
before in
as far as we know in human history has
there been
a possibility of opening up dopaminergic
and serotonergic states at the same time
dopamine being the molecule pursuit and
reward and more and more
and serotonin being one of bliss and
being content right where you're at so
it's almost like those two things wrap
back on themselves and create this very
unusual state
and i think the bigger conversation is
what to do with a state like that
like do you is it about self-love
is it about developing love for another
person is it about forgetting hate
like these are powerful molecules and i
think if the academic community
and the clinical community is going to
move forward with them in any serious
way
i think there needs to be a conversation
about what
they're being used for right and and
coupled with that i think similar to
what you're saying
like matt has talked about is others
have talked about
some of the biggest benefits of like
progress whether it's like quitting
smoking and all those kind of stuff
is in the is in the days after it's the
integration of the experience
so maybe you open up the brain to the
neuroplasticity but then there's like
work to be done
it's not you're like you shake up
something in it
in the biology of the brain but you have
to do then
it's work absolutely now a friend of
mine who's a
physician he says um who's quite open to
this idea that psychedelics could play a
real role in in real medicine says
better living through chemistry still
requires better living
and and i think it's it's a beautiful
statement i wish i had said it
be um but he gets the credit but
the plasticity window opens and then as
you said what are you gonna do in the
two weeks three weeks four weeks
afterward because that's the real
opportunity
but those psychedelic experiences are
really a case of an amplified experience
inside of an amplified experience so
much so that
everything seems relevant and it's um
it's it's fascinating i mean i my hope
is that
the ai and machine learning and the
brain machine interface and all that
will eventually be
merged with the psychedelic treatments
so that you
an individual can go in take whatever
amount of whatever's safe for them
working with a clinician
and really direct the plasticity while
maybe stimulating
the orbital frontal medial orbital
frontal cortex or increasing the
observer or decreasing the observer in
the brain or
decreasing the amygdala i mean it's
doable it's doable with
transcranial magnetic stimulation and
it's for shutting down activity and it's
doable with ultrasound ultrasound now
allows very focal
activation of particular brain regions
through the skull
non-invasively so it's approaching the
same kind of uh
therapy from different angles one ai is
the computational side so
injecting like the robotics injecting
like
maybe you can even think about it as
like electricity the electrical approach
versus then like the the chemical
approach absolutely and then the psycho
and then the psychology is
is subjective right so it's going to
take some real
um understanding of what that person's
um
lexicon is like you know that wasn't a
pun
i'm sorry it's terrible that's the one
thing i know from the feedback on my
podcast
my jokes are terrible but i never
claimed to be funny the
the uh but somebody who they really
trust
and understands when somebody says you
know
for a very stoic person like i'm
imagining you interviewed the great dan
gable
right i don't know anything about dan
but can you imagine like you asked dan
like you know how you feel about
something while on one of these drugs
and like
i mean his languaging might if he says
that was troubling it might mean that it
was very troubling or not troubling at
all
so people are language is a poor
guide because if i say i'm upset how
upset is that well that's very
subjective
so you need we need can you build a tool
for that can you build a ai tool for
that yeah deeper
yeah maybe that's the eye maybe that's
our that's what the eyes could reveal
so language is not just words it's
everything together and that's
one of the fascinating things about the
eyes in the window to the soul i mean
they express so much the face the eyes
the body
uh i mean lisa talks about that the
communication of emotions
it's a super complex perhaps it's a bit
of a
side fun tangent but matt
matthew johnson brings up dmt
and the experience of dmt is a as a
as from a scientific perspective just
just a mystery in itself
over its intensity what happens to the
brain and of course
joe rogan and others bring it up as a
very different special kind of
experience
uh and elves seem to come up often
i've never tried dmt what allows for a
hallucinogenic states
yes and it i mean dmt is a really
interesting molecule
there there are a lot of people
experimenting now
with um dmt um and
they just the way they've described it
is
as a kind of a freight train through
space and time
very different than the way people
describe lsd type experiences or
psilocybin where
time and space are very fluid but it
tends to be a kind of a slower
role if you will um so it's clear that
dmt
is tapping into a brain state that's
distinctly different
than the other psychedelics and
and you mentioned jiu jitsu and these
other communities i mean it's
i think it's interesting because jiu
jitsu is a non-verbal
activity and people get together and
talk about this non-verbal activity
and they show great love for it in the
same way that surfers you know i
known some surfers in my time and they
will get up at the crack of dawn
and drive really really far to sit in
the water and wait for this wave to come
i have to imagine it's pretty fantastic
i think that human beings now
some of whom are in the scientific
community are starting to feel
comfortable enough
to talk about some of these other loves
and other endeavors because
they do reveal a certain component about
our underlying neurology
i'm fascinated by the concept of
wordlessness
activities in which language is just not
sufficient to capture
and in which feel so vital as a reset as
important as sleep you know i think
that's one of the dangers of the phone
is not that you're going to get into
some online battle or that you're always
staring at the phone is that it's a word
so as we read things we're
hearing the script in our head and i
think getting into
states where we are in a state of
wordlessness
is is very renewing and replenishing and
just
can feel amazing for and i believe also
can help us tap into
creative states and allow our neurology
to access creative states
and sleep is one such wordlessness
period so one of the most interesting
things to me are states that one can
approach in waking non-sleep depressed
wordlessness
through maybe it's jujitsu maybe it's
for some people surfing maybe it's
dancing maybe it's just i don't know
staring at a wall who knows
but where the language components of the
brain are completely shut down
and it has to be the case that drugs are
no drugs
that the brain is entering and starting
to
states and starting to use algorithms
that are distinctly different than when
we're trying to
compose things in any kind of coherent
way for someone else to understand
there's no interest in anyone else
understanding what you're experiencing
in that moment
and that's beautiful and i think uh i
think it's not just beautiful because it
feels good
i think it's beautiful because it's
important and it's clearly fundamental
to our neurology
and your sense is there's a connection
between dreams and dmt and like
psychedelic like all of the
uh you can you can understand one by
studying the other so for example dreams
are also very difficult to study right
but they're
more accessible it's safer to study and
we're told we need to get more of it
whereas with psychedelics there's this
big question mark is it going to make
everyone crazy
is it is it going to be legal i mean
it's kind of interesting how
if one looks on instagram one could
almost think that these drugs are
already legal based on the way that
people commute but they're not yet
they're still a lot of them are
scheduled there's a lot of questions
yeah uh
i mean and but nevertheless it's like
uh my my hope is that uh science
opens up to these uh drugs a little bit
more it's just i have this intuition
that
like a lot of people share that they
would be able to
uh unlock a deeper understanding of our
own mind it's it's any kind of
same as studying dreams absolutely well
creativity is in the non-linearities
right but productivity is in the
implementation of linearities i mean
that's
that's what is absolutely clear this is
why i think we were talking earlier
about
why a formal rigorous training in
something where other people are looking
at you and telling you no not good
enough go back and do it again
there's real value to that because
otherwise it's just ideas
it's just vapors you know one thing that
matt mentioned
as the study that they're working on
is as opposed to i think most of the
psychedelic studies
they've done is on how to treat
different conditions
and one of the things they're working on
now is to try to do a study where
uh for creatives for people that don't
have a
condition to try and treat but instead
see how
this how psychedelics can help you
create so like
goodness if you take creatives and you
give them more psychedelics they're not
gonna be able to get out of their room
i don't know well but this is the i
maybe you can speak to that
psychedelics or not or dreams or tools
in general how to be better creatives
that's an interesting i don't often see
studies of this nature of like
how to take high performance in the
mental
creative space and get them to perform
even
uh better so it's not average people
it's like
masters of their craft like taking i
mean his examples was taking an elon
musk which is in the engineering space
and maybe musicians and all that kind of
stuff
and studying that that's a i mean that's
weird i usually the science
the scientific exploration there has
been done in
uh by the musicians themselves as has
been documented like jazz is like
all non-linearities yeah right but if
it's
but the people still have to know how to
play their instruments right right
there's some early
early skill building that's critical i
mean
when you mention someone like elon i
mean virtual i mean he's already a
virtuoso right because he and in so many
different domains
i've never met him but it's it's clear
right he
it's not just that he's ambitious and
bold and brave and all that it's all
that
and there's there's clearly
a different way of looking at the same
problems that everyone else is looking
at
and people are probably banging their
head against the refrigerator thinking
like think differently things
it doesn't work that way it involved
there's a certain anxiety in
for the i'm not talking about for elon
but i don't have no idea
but i think for somebody who's very
structured very regimented very linear
the anxiety comes from letting go of
those linearities
and for the person that's very creative
the anxiety comes from
trying to impose linearities right the
the
really creative artist or musician
they're they seem
nuts they seem like they can't get their
life together because they can't
and they you know we look at people who
are kind of pseudo aspergers or
aspergers or some forms of autism and
they are
so hyper linear but you take away those
linearities and they freak out
and that's kind of the essence of some
of those syndromes so i think that
the ability to toggle back and forth
between those states is what's
remarkable i mean
because we're here and we're having this
discussion i mean steve jobs is a good
example he
probably the best example somebody who
actually talked about his own process
about the merging of art and science art
and engineering
humanities and science very few people
can do that
well i you seem to have a capacity to do
that
like you you know poetry and you are a.i
guy like you
there's nothing linear about poetry as
far as i can tell i mean i
i do wonder just like we've been talking
about if there's any ways to push that
to its limits to
explore further i don't like leaning
this
this is why i'm bothered there's not
more science and psychedelics is
i haven't done almost so i've
eaten mushrooms a few times uh allegedly
but that's it you know and i the reason
i don't do more the reason i haven't
done dmt
is because it's illegal and it's like
not
well studied and it you know i
i'm in those things i'm not usually at
the cutting edge but i'm very curious
and it feels like
there could be tools to be discovered
there
not for fun not for recreation but for
like encouraging whether you're a linear
thinking to go non-linear or it's
non-linear to go linear
like to to shake things up you mentioned
dan gable
the idea of dan gable on psychedelics is
fascinating to me because
he's such a control freak i mean
that i would show up for that that would
not show up for but like so much of
these psychedelic experiences it feels
like
is for letting go that's right you don't
want to resist but that's
supposedly where the growth is in in
giving
oneself over to the process and that's
for people who are
like master controllers he's one of the
greatest coaches of all time it's
fascinating to see what that battle
looks like
of resistance and then of letting go uh
yeah i mean
i i can't wait to uh to to see where
these studies takes us what's clearly
happening
you know i've asked there i have a
couple colleagues at stanford who are
doing animal studies
i've asked around you know it's there's
a lot of discussion
in the neuroscience community about what
the perception of a laboratory is
if they work on psychedelics i mean
i i have to tip my hat to the folks at
hopkins they are pioneers
and as um terry signowski he's a
computational neuroscientist down at
salk says i don't think he was the first
person to say he says uh
you know how to spot the pioneers
they're the ones with the arrows in
their backs
yeah and you know it's it's an unkind
world
to a scientist that's trying to do
really cutting-edge stuff my colleague
david spiegel who studies medical
hypnosis it's he's got
dozens of studies now showing that
hypnosis can be beneficial for pain
management anxiety management cancer
outcomes
it's finally you know at the point where
there's so much data
but people hear hypnosis and they think
of stage hypnosis which is like the
furthest thing from what he's doing
and i think mind body
type stuff hypnosis respiration and
breathing i think the hard science
walk into the problem is always going to
be best to get the community on board
and then it's up to people like matt and
to really you know take it to the next
level and as i say not
keysi out of the game because keysi
basically was taking
too much of his own stuff and he started
dressing crazy at banana hats and like
you see him he had
the magic bus so you know the day so
like the day i start driving to work in
the magic bus
that's the day i lose my job i'm not
into buses or
or wearing fruit but you're going to get
a phone call from me and i hope you do
the same for me it's like
like dude what are you doing well what's
interesting earlier we're talking about
the challenge with david that you're
about to do
i mean that is a psychedelic experience
of sorts because you're biasing your
mind
towards a pretty extreme neurochemical
state and you don't know what you're
going to find there
and that's kind of the excitement at
least for me as an observer it's like i
want to know
what what the experience is like
afterward i want to know like how was it
i mean i'm sure you're going to get
something like you said you're going to
grow the question is how and not
resisting i mean it's the same as with a
psychedelic experience it's like
not like giving yourself over completely
to the experience and
not resisting and going through the
whole mental journey of whether it's
anger or excitement or exhaustion the
whole thing
it's uh i mean uh
that's in the entirety of the process
that david goes through when he does his
own
challenges and so on is that whole
journey he finds
purposely like missile seeks
the limits of the mind that whenever
the resistance is felt runs up against
it and then goes to the full journey of
going beyond it and seeing what's there
on the other side
well stress has these two sides the
limbic friction of being
tired and needing to get more energized
that's one form of stress
and then there's the feeling too amped
up and needing to calm down
the the typical discussion around
stresses is one thing
but it's all limbic friction it's just
that when i say lymbic friction
that's not a real scientific term i just
mean the limbic system wanting to pull
you down into sleep or wanting to put
you into panic
and you using top-down processing using
that
evolved forebrain to say
i'm not going to go to sleep and i'm not
going to freak out
and those top-down control mechanisms
are i mean when those get honed
that's beautiful because then you real
you're increasing capacity for
everything
you uh this month on the podcast you're
talking about neuroplasticity you
mentioned a bunch already
is there something you're looking
forward to
specifically like something maybe you're
fascinated
by that jumps to mind about
neuroplasticity
this fascinating property of the brain
yeah i think that
it's clear there's one facet of
neuroplasticity that
is very well supported by the research
data
that hardly anyone has implemented in
the real world
and that's the release of acetylcholine
from these neurons in the forebrain
called nucleus basalis
this is mainly the work of mike murzenik
who used to be at ucsf
and some of his scientific offspring
greg reckenzone and michael kilgaard and
others what they showed was
increases in acetylcholine this molecule
associated with focus
in concert meaning at the same time as
some
event motor event or music event or
any kind of sensory event immediately
reorganizes the neocortex so that
there's a permanent map representation
of that event and i
i absolutely believe that this can be
channeled toward
accelerated skill learning and my friend
and colleague eddie chang is
now the chair of neurosurgery at ucsf
but also a fine scientist in his own
right
not just a clinician he's doing studies
looking at rapid acquisition of language
using these principles he trained with
mersnick
it's clear we have these gates on
plasticity in the forebrain
and they are gated by nicotinic
acetylcholine
transmission and why that hasn't made it
into
protocols for motor learning sport
learning language learning music
learning
emotional learning i don't know i think
part of the reason has been
kind of cultural is that scientists
publish their paper and they move on
merzianic
talked a lot and still can be found from
time to time talking about
how these plasticine mechanisms can be
leveraged
but uh he had a commercial company and
so then people kind of backed away from
it a little bit i think he was
to be honest i think merzenik was ahead
of his time
and i think the timing is right now for
people to understand these mechanisms of
plasticity and start to implement them
also you know it all sounds like
becoming superhuman or optimizing or
whatever
all that yes but also what about kids
with language learning deficits or with
dyslexia
or just performance in school in general
you know i have a deep
interesting concern for the future of
science and mathematics and
in not just in this country but all over
the world and
more plasticity equals faster better
deeper learning
and if we don't do this i don't think
we're going to get the full
reach out of all the machine learning
tools either
because everyone talks about these huge
data sets and but those huge data sets
funnel into human interpretation i mean
we don't just like stare at the numbers
and bask right
so some the human brain i think needs to
leverage these plasticity mechanisms to
keep up with the thing that's happening
very very fast which is technology
development
so that's a long-winded way of saying
basal forebrain cholinergic transmission
and plasticity
it allows for plasticine adulthood and
allows for it in
single trial learning which is
incredible
but how do we leverage that like in the
physical space taking actions or is
there some chemicals that can stimulate
stimulate neuroplasticity like what i
think it's the intersection of the two
i think it's being engaged in a physical
practice while enhancing pharmacology
it has to be done safely and this is
full of open questions this is the very
beginning
of it like you're saying yeah a pill
that's safe
that increases nicotinic transmission i
mean i know a number of people that
chew nicorette actually they have an i
have a nobel prize winning colleague
at columbia not to be named um who
choose like six pieces of nicaragua in a
half hour conversation with him
and he started doing that as a
replacement for smoking because smoking
is nicotine nicotinic stimulation of the
cholinergic system so smokers have long
known that increases focus and attention
and learning
it's just that the lung cancer thing is
a barrier
now i'm not suggesting people take
nicorette but it's clear that we need
better directed pharmacology but you can
imagine next time you go in for a
learning bout
if it's really essential you might want
to stimulate the nicotinic system
if that's safe for you again i'm a
doctor so again i'm not telling people
to do this but that's where it's going
until we start merging machines with
pharmacology and behavior
it's it we're just kind of walking
around in the circle over and over again
and it's going to happen do you find
computer vision machine learning
from the perspective of tooling as an
interesting tool for
analyzing for processing all the data
from the neuroscience world from the
neurobiology biology the camera ever all
the different data sets that you can
have about the mind the eye
the everything that's neck and above
and also the central nervous system
absolutely i mean
i think that computer science and
engineering and chemistry
bioengineering is that's what's creating
the
acceleration and progress in
neuroscience right now i think
it's actually one place where science
i'm very reassured
science has invited in psychologists
computational biologists at least at
stanford mit and
other places too of course it's clear
that it's a everyone's invited kind of
party
right now the the major issue in the
field of neuroscience at least
through my view is that there's no
conceptual leadership no one is saying
we need to work on and solve this
problem or that problem
it's very fragmented right now now the
good news is people are communicating so
computer scientists and people who work
on ai machine vision are talking to
biologists and vice versa
but it's very dispersed is there a lot
of different data sets like
in your work that you've just come
across is a huge
number of disparate data sets around
neuroscience and so on or
well there's a lot of cell sequencing
stuff so the broad over it you know
on in boston and then on this coast the
chen zuckerberg initiative
um what you know um they did you know
three billion dollars to
sequence every cell type in humans and
in animals and try and
i think their goal is to cure every
disease by
some date i don't know in the in the
future
huge data sets of gene expression and
protein expression
that's valuable i think no one really
knows how to think about neural circuits
and what what is a neural circuit um
is it one structure is it two structures
communicating
i think this is where i actually think
that the robotics
is going to tell us how the brain works
because it it's tempting to think that
the brain has all these cell types
and circuits in order to solve specific
problems but
it might be that the fundamental
algorithm is to create cells and
circuits that can solve
variable problems we know in the retina
just a very simple example is that
we've always heard about like cones are
for color vision and high acuity and
rods are for night vision and
and non-color vision but at the dusk
dawn
transition certain cell types switch to
do completely different have a
completely different function for
viewing starry night versus
what they do during the daytime so
neurons multiplex
and i think building machines that can
multiplex
and can evolve themselves is going to
help us really understand what the brain
is doing
we need to tease out the fundamental
algorithms we know they're like motion
detection and
spatial vision and things like that i
think machines are going to be much
faster at that than
our understanding of biology and how the
brain does that
basically i'll be out of a job and
people like you will have a job no well
no though
i think the main idea is that uh there
won't be a job
that's machine learning or computer
vision it's just
it's a it's a tool that neuroscientists
will
use more and more and more and uh
biologists would use i mean this whole
idea that it will just be a
a tool that allows you to start
expanding the kind of things you can
study
and well the next generation coming up i
can say this because i now i'm
blessed to have a bioengineering student
they think about problems so differently
than biologists do we realized the other
day we both came up with a set of ideas
around a certain project and we realized
that
her version of it was the exact opposite
of mine you know and hers was far
far more rational it's just an
engineering perspective like why would
we
do that last we should do that first i
think that the next generation is
really interested in solving practical
problems so a lot like computer science
and engineering was in the late 90s it
was like
you can go do a phd in computer science
and engineering maybe
or you go work for a company and
actually build stuff that's useful
i think neuroscientists and people
interested in neuroscience are starting
to think
how can i build stuff that's useful and
this statement is supported by the fact
that many
people in my business leave their
academic labs
fortunately not all of them but they
leave their academic labs and they go
work for companies
like neural link like neural link this
is something i think with
we've spoken a few times offline about
as speaking of computer vision i'm
fascinated
by the eye i did a bunch of work on the
eye so from
there's the neuroscientist there's a
neurobiology way of studying the eye
and there's the computer vision way of
studying the eye and the computer vision
way of studying the eye of just like
observing non-contact sensing of humans
is really fascinating to me in studying
human behavior in different contexts
like
in semi-autonomous vehicles it seemed
like there is a lot of signal that comes
from the eye that comes from blinking
that's not fully understood yet it's
been in the lab it's been used quite a
bit
to study like the dilation of the pupil
all those kinds of things are used
for to uh to infer workload
cognitive load all those kinds of things
but the pictures
is murky it's not completely well
understood especially in the wild
how much signal you can get from the eye
from the human face
i've downloaded joe rogan's all the
podcasts he's ever done
video you have the youtube bank
i have the youtube bank for for a reason
that
this was before he went with spotify
it you own the archive there's pubmed
and then there's the joe rogan
experience owned by
or maintained by lex yeah privately for
my private
collection no the reason i did it uh and
i did the
really like rigorous processing of it
which is like
the i extracted all of the faces i did
the really good
blink track of the pupil tracking and
the blink
detection for the entirety that are oh i
should say it's
from episode like i forget what it is
but it's like episode 900 when
they switched to 1080p video but it was
like much crappier videos so
it's still kind of long when there was
marijuana consumption or when they were
drinking
when they're i mean there's like
just it won't throw off the data but
it's relevant to the
the relatively competitive data
so let's just put it uh this way there's
a lot of fascinating computer vision
problems involved but
i only kept long sequences of data
where the eyes detected exceptionally
well
and uh i also removed people that were
wearing glasses
i removed there are certain people that
have a way
of uh moving their eyes
and squinting where it's harder to infer
uh like concrete blinks
you know they'll kind of have a squint
the whole time
and their blink is very light it's very
tough to know what's uh uh what's an
actual bling so
you got those baseball cap wearing guys
yeah there are certain people that go on
podcasts and wear baseball caps and
and don't reveal their i don't know if
they realize it or not until
it comes out but their face is
completely obscured from
vision and from a computer vision
perspective people that wear
makeup and usually women on their eyes
it complicates things
like eyelashes all complicated things so
i
you know you can clean stuff up just so
you have really crisp signal
you don't have to you can you can deal
with issues but
you know there's so many hours of joe
rogan video anyway i say all that
because i was
searching for an interesting personal
experiment for me because
uh i saw in drivers when i was looking
at
eye movement and drivers it seemed to
indicate
there seemed to be quite a lot of signal
there that indicates
amount of cognitive load but it's not
clear if there's something conclusive
but if there is some signal that's a
really powerful one because eye movement
can be detected
in the wild like you and i sitting here
i can detect eye movement really well
pupil dilation is a really crappy
indicator and it's luminance dependent
like if i turn toward a light it's
it's a route it people change size
depending on level of alertness arouse
autonomic browser but also overall
levels of luminance
it's very very hard but there are
i mean you're sitting on a on a gold
mine um because
the there is a lot of interest right now
in
measuring state through non-contact
sensing yes uh heart rate variability
through changes in skin tone
but just off a camera can you imagine
that at the point where you just look at
some video and you're like oh they're
they're getting more stressed or worked
up and they're not based on a heat map
of some little patch on their face
because everyone's gonna
have this slight you know sort of um
compartmentalize it slightly differently
but you can learn it pretty quickly
we know this when someone's like giving
a talk and we see them starting it
blotching
on their on their neck you know this is
the like uh
the thesis defense response right we
know it and we're
it's a stressful situation because if
not passing your thesis defense is rough
and you can see that but cameras can
pick that up really easily
at much lower levels than the the
blatant blotching kind of effect
and eye movements certainly are powerful
indications of the state of the
autonomic
system so what do you do you think there
are things
from a high level that you can pick up
from eye movement and and
blinking well blink frequency is gonna
increase
as people get tired right um i i've
actually been teased a lot online
because i don't blink much when i'll do
a post
and i and so i did a whole post about
blinking about the science of blinking
there's some
data very strong data not from my lab
that showed that
every time you blink it resets your
perception of time they have people
do these kind of track uh kind of a
doppler like thing and
anyway blinking resets your perception
of time and there's a dopaminergic
mechanism in a
in the blink-related circuitry of the
brain uh
when people are very alert they tend to
not blink very much when we're sleepy we
tend to blink more and our eyes
tend to close now some people are more
hooded in there the way their eyes
sit some people are like this all the
time there are some very famous people
i'm not going to name them because i
might run into them at some point who
are like accused of being sociopaths
because they don't blink very often
but they might just have high levels of
autonomic arousal they just don't blink
very much
yeah also depends on how lubricated the
eyes are so i think within
individual yes you can get a lot of
information i don't think we can say
this person's blinking a lot they're
lying this person or they're tired this
person doesn't blink
they're they're stressed i think if you
understand that person's baseline you
can get it and presumably
uh well having been on the joe rogan
experience i can say when you first sit
down there if you've never been in there
before
you're in my data set by the way oh my
well i bet you i i
i will admit to being you know first
time being sitting down there i mean joe
was
incredibly gracious made me feel very
comfortable there but yeah it's a
it's an intense experience um it's a
small space too anytime you enter a
small space from a big space
in this old studio you're familiar with
there's a breaking in period where
you're getting to know somebody and so
i'm sure my levels of autonomic arousal
front of the podcast were higher than
later so but once you have a baseline
established you can get a lot of data on
somebody
simply from blinks um some people
averting gays too
if you have both people that's really
powerful this is the holy grail
another holy grail of neuroscience we've
mainly looked at subjects
in isolation absolutely there hasn't
been much brain imaging of two people in
interacting or even in animal models of
two mice or two monkeys interacting it's
all like
a person scanner bite bar i mean if
you've ever been in one of these
scanners like in a bite bar
it's very medieval and so you think in
the interaction there's actually
you can almost study them as a single
brain or as a single system the two
brains are a single system
i think with ai highly correlated yeah
maybe are your blinks triggering my
blinks like
you know or your non-blink epochs you
know extending my non-blink epochs
there's a fascinating space to explore
there and no one's done it
and because everyone let the joe rogan
experience archive disappear
except for you you've grabbed did you
get the comments too because i think the
comments were
almost as entertaining as the
conversation you know what you just made
me realize with the couplings i have a
better data set than the joe rogan
podcast with high resolution video which
is the raw video for this podcast
so for example both cameras right now
are recording you and i
full full feed the final result will
switch cameras back and forth but i have
the full feed
right so i can have the blinking for
both you and i the whole time
i bet you people trigger blanks and in
one another
you know and there's also like the the
simplest way to think about the blinks
and the attentional thing and the
alertness is two fighters in the in the
standoff
there's this whole lore around who
blinks first yeah it's like they blink
first well
what are what are we really asking
they're asking whether or not one person
can maintain
focus longer than the other person
which is an important parameter it's not
the only parameter but
it's an important parameter and so that
blinking contest even though they don't
square off as a blinking contest
it's well known that the first to blink
is revealing
something about their capacity to hold
attention
you've started an amazing podcast that
we mentioned a few times
uh people should definitely check it out
it's called the human
lab podcast it uh it does your
it's basically you it embodies
the personality of andrew huberman which
is like
makes science accessible um
but also uh fascinating
and giving it like what do you call it
you give tools for everyday life meaning
it kind of grounds in like what the hell
does this mean for my life
but then also does the beauty of science
at the same time so i
love i love both the the rigor and the
openness of the whole thing plus the
whole corrections things that we
mentioned
anyway what's uh been the hardest part
of this whole process
you're one of already one of
the only and one of the best
science podcasters out there so in that
process
what's been the hardest what's been the
most exciting part
well well first of all thanks for the
kind words about the podcast it was
inspired by you
i i absolutely it's um
that's no bs i the last time we met to
do an interview for your podcast we
talked a little bit about it and you
gave me the
um subtle nudge that maybe there was a
there was a podcast there and i thought
about it and i left and i was just like
i gotta do this thing and
you really gave me the encouragement to
do it now your podcast this podcast has
really forged the way
you've been tip of the spear on serious
scientific intellectual yet fun
accessible conversation and so
i as your colleague and
friend and but i just even if those
things weren't true like
this this podcast was and is the
inspiration there's no question so much
yeah i really like 100 percent and
when i decided to do the podcast the
huberman lab podcast i thought really
long and hard about what
would work best and would be most
beneficial turned out to be the hardest
thing
which is to stay on a single topic for
three or four or more episodes before
switching to a new topic
because i know from the experience of
university and teaching in university as
you know
as well that there's always the
temptation to pivot to something else
but the drilling into something really
deeply is where the
where the gems reside and the the
challenge has been
how to make it interesting how to keep
people on board how to give people tools
along the way
but also stay close to the scientific
data um
i like to think that we're headed in the
right direction it still needs to evolve
but that's been a challenge
i think i also am challenged by the fact
that there's a tremendous range of
backgrounds of listeners
so some people have asked for more names
like
more bits and parts of the nervous
system and cellular molecular mechanisms
and all that kind of thing
and other people said i don't understand
any of that stuff but i think i'm
keeping up and so
unlike a university course where there
are prerequisites and everyone's coming
to the table with more or less the same
knowledge
i have a very limited sense of what the
audience knows and doesn't know
so that's why i incorporated the feature
of the comment section on youtube
being a source of feedback and i
do a kind of an office hours like
episode every third or fourth episode
where i address
common questions and i think that the
podcast space
in my mind um at least for the sort of
podcast i'm doing
needed a venue for the listeners to be a
more integral part of the experience as
opposed to just commenting on what they
liked or didn't like
so while i like to hear what people
liked and didn't like i also really like
to hear about
hey tell me more about temperature
minimums and how they can be used to
phase shift circadian rhythms or
whatever it is
and i realized that i'm probably losing
some people along the way but hopefully
at the end of each month and because of
the way that the
episodes are archived people will come
away feeling
as if they've learned a ton and they
have tools that they can implement
and perhaps most importantly that
they're starting to think scientifically
about the tons of other stuff that's out
there
so that's been the challenge and it's
still really early days
but um and and of course there's also an
intentional challenge i realize that
people are busy
not everyone has two hours to listen to
a podcast about jet lag and shift work
and raising kids and sleep and that kind
of thing i'm not raising kids but i did
a whole thing about babies and sleep
with
you know and how parents can manage
their sleep when kids aren't sleeping
so it's been um i'm hacking through the
jungle of
all this stuff but and i'll come right
back to i
my inspiration and my my my uh
north star on this is
getting to a point where the audience
that listens to this feels the same way
that i do when i listen to your podcast
thank you so much like when i tune into
your podcast i'm gonna embarrass you a
little bit more by complimenting you a
little bit more um
but not out of a sadistic thing but just
because
when i tune into your podcast or joe's
podcast
i have the same sensation that other
people have like i feel like
i'm home of sorts i'm like i'm familiar
with the space
and i'd like people to feel comfortable
in the space that is the hubert lab
podcast whatever that ends up being
yeah that's the magic of podcasting it's
like i feel like i'm part of your life
now in a way that as a fan
that i wouldn't be otherwise and you
know like
i never was able to have that with carl
sagan for example
you know uh and that's a whole nother
level
of connection with a human being that
gets you excited
and then i share your excitement about
uh different topics in neuroscience or
just uh biology in general
and then i don't have to actually
understand everything you're saying
to uh to really enjoy it so
that that's the magic of podcasting is
like you can go through like 10 minutes
not understanding what the hell a person
is saying
and then you uh enjoy the excitement
and then you reconnect to a thing that
you do understand what they're saying
and you know that's uh that personal
coupled with the scientific rigor is
magic and finding the right
it's exploration like joe found
something that works for comedians which
is like
you know having a good laugh but also
every once in a while
talking seriously about difficult topics
the scientific space it was unclear i
you haven't had guests on not yet but uh
maybe you'll come on as a that's right
i'm just gonna invite my i was gonna try
to follow myself
i am i'm officially inviting you now
will you come on the podcast
fantastic but it was it was hard
it's still a little bit difficult to
tell people
that no you don't get it we're not going
to talk for 10 minutes
we're going to talk for three or four
hours
it's a different for scientists for like
they're like what i
don't what are we going to talk about
they think it's like the npr interview
yes and they don't realize first of all
i think at his best if you're like at
the level of joe rogan
who i think is an excellent
conversationalist
it you just lose track of time it can be
three four five hours and you lose track
of time
i'm still not there i find that it's
still painful
like the conversation is still
challenging sometimes you don't lose
quite as much of track of time it's
still an intellectual effort and i think
it might always be
as it would be with you because you're
talking about difficult topics
maybe that require more brand you're not
just
shooting the shit with like a brian red
band or somebody like comedians or just
joking
what's like uh remember those shows um
like where
those shows where someone would come out
and like spin plates and they're running
back and forth
really good scientific discussion is
like that
you have to be maintaining three or four
different logical arguments and jumping
back and forth
it's occasionally getting to like a real
streak of linearity
but as we found today that typically
there's three or four different things
that we're bouncing back and forth
and that requires a lot of updating of
these you know forebrain circuits it's
not
it's not a passive listening experience
but i like to think that the brain likes
that
i i do want to ask just because we all i
don't want to forget
the the question came up to me is your
podcast has the same kind of rigor that
i
think like a dan carlin podcast has a
history podcaster well that's a
definitely a compliment thank you it's a
handstand way
you know he's something for me to aspire
to so he goes through
hell to prepare he spends months
preparing it feels like
you've had to really prepare for your
podcast i definitely
prepare hard how does that are you okay
yeah i mean how much effort does that
take
it feels like a conference presentation
yeah so we record once a week and in the
intervening time
i listen to
many university level lectures so nih
has a
a bank of lectures i have some sources
of recorded university seminars
i'm trying to find the the points of
intersection so like for four episodes
on sleep it's not like i'm gonna
just regurgitate a popular book or take
one lecture and just
you know poach the content i'm gonna
find the overlap
in the different elements i also so what
i'll do is
i'll generally read 10 or 15
papers and generally those are good
reviews annual reviews
interview of neuroscience annual review
of physiology those kinds of things
i'll chase a few references i'll listen
to some youtube videos but of university
level lectures
and then i throw all that on a
whiteboard usually while i work out in
the morning
i'll just be working out i have a gym in
my house and i'll just put up
all these random ideas i want to cover
that dreams hallucination
and then i take that and i start
eliminating i draw lines between the
common points of intersection
and then from that i i distill out an
outline
and then i basically think about what i
want to say
on my walks with my dog and i bother a
couple people and blabbed to them so i
would say each podcast
yeah i put in 10 to 15 hours at least of
passive listening preparation and maybe
five or six of
active preparation so i do prepare quite
a lot
but it has a certain reward component
for me
i to come up at the end with something
that's somewhat crystallized
for me is just so satisfying it feels
like there's something about my dopamine
circuits that just love that
and uh the the only pain is that a year
later after i've talked about the stuff
a bunch of times it's so much more
succinct
but that's life you you know at some
point you got to pull the trigger well
i don't know what you think but for me
youtube
is uh that's why i'm sad that joe left
youtube there's a
archival nature to youtube that's kind
of magical so i'm really glad you're now
you're you you're uh
doing a lot of educational content on
instagram before
but now on doing this podcast thing on
youtube
i it's like a you know it's like feynman
lectures
like well that's very no i'm not saying
every podcast right
but there will be there you will have
some i could already tell there will be
some
lectures which are like
definitive like really special ones
that's the hope and the there's some
aspect that's archival to youtube where
at least i hope like 20 years from now
some kid is going to watch
uh watch a lecture yours and um
you know it'll it'll create the next
nobel prize right it'll create
it'll create another uh you know a dream
that then becomes a reality and that
that's a that's a special thing
that um that youtube provides i'm really
excited that you're on youtube
and at the same time i'm excited to see
where this thing goes
because um it seems like change is the
uh the cliche thing the change is the
only constant in these times because
you're paving uh with this podcast with
this
creativity what you were doing on
instagram as well you're paving the new
era
of what it means to do science so
actively doing research
and actively explaining that research in
new media it's it's very interesting
inspired and genuinely inspired by you
we we had this discussion last time
after the podcast recording and it was
it's clear that communication of science
cannot be left
to the the existing institutions and i'm
gonna talk about universities i just
mean that the
science section of newspapers is
sometimes there's some gems there but
generally it goes you know and yeah i
think you really have to know a field
in order to extract the best things from
that field and my hope is that other
practicing scientists and people
finishing their phd in postdoc and
people who are running labs or working
at companies will start to do this
i mean how amazing would it be for
instance if if someone
at neural link was
giving us hints about not necessarily
what they're developing because that's
complicated for all sorts of reasons but
would
talk to us about what the real
challenges of
building futuristic brain machine
interface are like and
and what the what it means to understand
a clinical problem and address it i mean
i
my hope is somebody there might
eventually do that that somebody in the
world of
um chemistry or synthetic materials or
whatever it is we'll do this in a way
that i could understand because i don't
have
expertise in those i think it would be
marvelous
and um your tip of the spear you were
out first and
i'm just uh happily trying to
to move along in the direction i'm going
but i i think the future of science
education is online
and i think that's going to be scary to
a lot of existing institutions but it's
not about
disrupting anything it's just about
trying to do things better yeah
you know some of the best interviews
uh some of the best investigative
journalism is done by people inside the
field
uh comes to mind a guy by the name of
elon musk who
who uh i love the the possibility that
he gets the pulitzer for that interview
but uh he grilled the crap out of vlad
the uh ceo of
uh robin hood i'm not sure if you know
on um
on the clubhouse clubhouse the other
night yeah i saw you guys in there
i was kept out i wasn't quick enough my
thumbs don't go fast enough so i was and
i wasn't about to sit in the waiting
room
have you tried that social network by
the way the clubhouse i've gone in there
a few times and checked some things out
i'm there i have a few questions about
it that um like if i'm in there
how one can participate or not
participate i
i like being a fly on the wall for those
conversations i've been very curious as
to what's going on in there oh
it's quite i mean i have a lot of
thoughts i've maybe it's useful to
comment
i also have a discord server uh that uh
you know has a few tens of thousands of
people on it and then
they have also a voice chat capability
so they have these get-togethers and i i
was using in
in the spring and summer like actively
uh on those voice discussions and it's
anywhere from 10 to like a thousand
people
all together in voice like you you
anyone can speak
anytime right but there's this weird
dynamic that people stay quiet
only one person speaks at a time because
they're all like respectful and it's the
community of like
uh like fundamentally respectful people
even though they're all anonymous
so like except like me and a few others
it's all anonymous people so interesting
and it works it's
but the the magical thing to me about
that community was how intimate
voice only communication can be it felt
as intimate as like a
like a small get-together at a home with
close friends
it felt like there's a calmness to it
and you're revealing
things about you know somebody suffering
from depression
or being suicidal so those are the dark
things or being super excited getting a
new girlfriend or
boyfriend like just the the depth of
human experience shared on voice without
video
is uh i was really surprised how
intimate that is for human connection
especially in this time of kobe to
replace that so that
so that so just to give you some context
there's something there
there there's definitely something there
one thing that comes to mind is
when like in clubhouse you have your
little icon so they don't actually you
don't see your face moving
i think when people see their own image
it puts them in a state of
self-consciousness that
is eliminated by just having an icon or
an avatar yes
right so like zoom is dreadful
because if i'm not used to talking to
people and seeing a little image of
myself staring back at me in the mirror
and it's just i know there are ways that
you can adjust that but it's
really awful yeah and i think that when
i get on zooms now i say hello and then
i shut down
the video component and then i just talk
in the end i come back on just to show
that
it's still there it's still me but i
think that
voice only is really interesting eddie
chang would be an interesting person to
talk to about this because he
understands so much about how inflection
communicates
emotionality and deeper state but
there's a balance between
i think just like you said this the
privacy
uh somehow uh allows for the intimacy so
like being able to
uh as opposed to put on putting on an
act which i realize we do when we're
visually presenting ourselves
right in remote communication but i
think that there's so few places where
people can
actually communicate without the fear of
penalty
yes those that's you know woefully
absent these days and so maybe people
are just relieved to be in a place where
they feel like
i can say what i want or not say
anything and it's okay
and so so clubhouse as you answer your
kind of uh question is
uh it was a big improvement to me over
discord which is
it has tears is it has a stage
where people the person that created the
room can invite people up
that would like to speak potentially
have the opportunity to speak and then
there's a bigger audience
that don't get a chance to speak unless
they click raise their hand and they get
called on so there's like a tier system
that allows
for there to be a group of like 5
10 20 30 people talking and a lot larger
amount in the audience which in discord
was the problems that everybody could
talk
and the other thing about clubhouse is
everybody
is strongly encouraged to represent
themselves so you're using your real
name it's not anonymous
and how many people were in that um
gamestop discussion
they currently uh limit
rooms to five thousand so i'm sure we
maxed out at five thousand there's a lot
of overflow rooms
this is the cool thing about clubhouse
really big people were on there
all tuned in and having a conversation
having all
from all you know all these different uh
worlds
being able to connect even though
without the niceties of like arranging
the meeting you could just show up and
leave which is
nice but uh the reason i'm
for my lessons from discord i'm
going to mostly stay away from cole
house and i think
we're going there under another name
right uh
uh i'll pretend i know the actual your
actual name
yeah it's i've learned it's quite
addicting
it's uh it's a time sink it's so the
intimacy of it
is you find yourself wasting quite a bit
of time on there
it pulls you in well it's interesting
they
would in sort of going back to the
podcast or earlier we're talking about
books
or creating a technology one thing
that's absolutely clear is that anything
that's easy to reproduce is probably not
worth
much effort and time yes right i mean
most posts could be easily reproduced
you just repost them
yeah so um now there are some original
posts that for which the attribution
goes to the original person it's clear
it came from you
but anything that can be easily
reproduced is doesn't really expand us
very much as individuals or or as groups
and most of what i see on social media
is stuff that
is is purely reproduced yes right
but i think clubhouse i mean
it could be that some real magic emerges
on there so
in moderation it could be good the magic
is this is another thing that i've
found through kovid that maybe you can
think about
is uh live i used to be
not understand the appeal of live video
or live connection or like in this
clubhouse live events because clubhouse
is technically for the most part it's
not supposed to be recorded
most people don't record most
conversations it's a one-time live event
and there's a magic to that there is
that's not
captured by a like your podcast or
my podcast produced video that's like
recorded
like packaged up well anything can
happen
it's that anything can happen and those
though that's the kind of thing like
live concerts right i definitely i love
live music
and it's the idea that because you can
always listen to the album actually the
album usually sounds cleaner and better
but it's just this idea that anything
can happen and then you listen to like
the parts
i don't know you uh like costello did
something weird uh your dog does
something weird and then you have to go
god damn it you have to go to the
kitchen or something to get something
and then you come back
and it's funny i watch a live video like
that of people
and i'll be there for the whole time
i'll wait for them to go to the kitchen
and come back
it's not like i tune out right and that
makes it like a richer experience for
some reason it's weird well it humanizes
it yeah
and i think there is this weird effect
of whether or not it's a podcast
instagram or twitter or anything else
there is
kind of like two people shouting into a
tunnel and then a bunch of people with
ears at the other end of those tunnels
and shouting some things back
you know that's that's kind of the
format we're in i think
i'll check out clubhouse again i've gone
in there a few times during the day and
i was surprised to see how many people
were in there in the middle of the day
i was like don't aren't these people
supposed to be working exactly but maybe
that is their work well be very careful
about the
um the time sync of it but yeah if you
want to you and i go together we have a
conversation on there
but one of the things you have to figure
out i don't still know
how to do it but how to exit which is
you just do the
isn't there the leave quietly button
yeah no but like when you and i are on
stage having a conversation
uh like and okay uni is harder but
like uh you really if it's just you and
i
then it's the usual human communication
of like all right i gotta go
like but when it's like four people
you you don't want to interrupt everyone
announce you're leaving you just have to
i mean
there's a weird dynamic that i haven't
quite figured out
of the etiquette isn't clear the
etiquette is not clear well
the etiquette on different platforms and
how that changes is really interesting
you know how youtube has one etiquette
which is kind of
it's a lot of harshness is tolerated on
youtube video comments
um twitter seems a bit harsher than
instagram
instagram there's kind of it seems to be
a little nice really nice
people are really nice on instagram for
the most part
um except for those uh phishing things i
actually know someone who had their
quite sizable account poached by those
copyright they come in with those like
you violated copyright things there's
all sorts of harshness in there
that if you think about it in the real
world i like to think about instagram as
if it was the real world
someone that comes over is basically
saying like hey can i hold your wallet
and go into the bank and i'll get some
money out for you and like
but there's this trust based on the
format it comes in
that it can almost get past your radar
unless you're suspicious
if if you took comments like you know
your
posts get a lot of comments and use it
you just walk past
500 random people on the street and just
listen to what they say
it something like that's ridiculous i
don't have time for that yeah but the
comments somehow take on this importance
and this relevance yes
and you feel we we feel obligated to
give them
value right and so the online
communities
the the rules really are different yeah
um
and they evolve with tom which is
fascinating with clubhouse it's a new
social network so it's evolving
and people are figuring out as you go
and the same thing with podcasting
on video and like scientific podcasting
this is the cool thing when i
look at what you've created i'm learning
i'm thinking like hmm that's interesting
to do it this way
because like nobody i have nobody to
copy
not many people to copy you know what i
mean if you threw out an idea i'm not
going to put it out here now because i
i don't want to because knowing you
you'll hold yourself to it no matter
what but when we talked about
um this issue of the challenge of
staying on a particular topic for a
while
i mean you do have some cool stuff
brewing in there oh no no not separate
from this format and i love your
interview format
but um when you told me about that i got
really excited that you might go forward
i'm not going to tell your audience what
it is it but i will say this it is
super cool i would have never thought
about it it's distinctly different than
what i'm doing or what lex is currently
doing
and if you decide to do that podcast
i will be your first and your number one
fan and i know there are going to be
millions of other
people interested that would be amazing
so if you decide to go forward with the
idea
no um that would be awesome i was gonna
say what it is but now i'm not going to
because
because that's even more interesting uh
i i brought up the
the clubhouse thing actually in elon um
because i just wanted to
uh get your thoughts about something
he's said a few times to me
and to me and in general is that he's
under a huge amount of stress
and i'm thinking of doing a startup
now and kind of thinking about all of
this
because i you know i enjoy podcast i
enjoy science
but he says that his life is basically
hell
very difficult he looks happy but he's
probably very good at
he's fulfilled he's fulfilled but the
stress levels
the constant fires that he has to put
out
and he says that most people wouldn't
want to be me
and that basically the reason he does
what he does is because
there's probably something wrong with
him like it's not
uh he can't help it but do that
it's kind of beautiful in a kind of
russian
masochistic way well i i just wonder
the stress i mean i'm sure you can
you can imagine the kind of stress he's
under because so
it's running three plus companies and
there's constant
like he he says that you know every
single meeting is a is not about like
should we install a coffee maker in the
in the
in the kitchen it's like
you know this rocket is going to blow up
and i don't we're all fucked
i don't know what to do and we have to
you have to fix
you have to fix the real like big
problems that are and like how do you
uh oh yeah how do you deal with that
what do you think about that kind of
life one
one is there a way to go you know walk
through that fire
and two should you
should you walk through that fire well i
mean without knowing i've never met elon
but certainly we have common friends in
you and in other people that uh he
worked with long ago
in the paypal days um all of whom speak
very highly of him
and show express immense admiration for
the number of things that he can
maintain
i think it's fair to say that he
accomplishes more
before 9 a.m than most people do in in
a decade it's clear and that what he
does would
dissolve most people into a puddle of
tears mostly because of this whole thing
about the brain working hard equates to
thinking about duration path and outcome
and anticipating outcomes given a b
c or d a lot of very scripted linear
thinking
and prediction and that is hard it's
stressful it requires intense
neurochemical output
and he's doing that for multiple
projects so presumably he's buffered
himself
from the coffee maker issues and the
little tiny issues but he is
himself unless there's something i don't
know he's walking around in a biological
system
he is that's uh allegedly yes yeah
allegedly so
um and i don't want to reveal too much
here but i have
a common um
a co-worker and colleague through some
contract work i do
that what i can tell you is that he's
accessing the best resources in terms of
how
to optimize his biology and
he's thinking about that not just for
himself but for all of neural link
because i think i'm not trying to dodge
the question but i think
there's the there's the scale of the
individual but then there's the
companies that
he's creating and you've got people
there that
you could imagine if they're working at
ten percent better capacity or can focus
five percent better for twenty percent
of the day
you're looking at a enormous increase in
productivity and
a reduction in the time to reach goals
which will reduce the amount of stress
presumably on elon unless he goes and
starts another endeavor
right so i think it's certainly not
healthy for most people
it seems to be where he gets his
dopamine hits i'm also
really struck by the fact that he has a
family and he has
you know he maintains he's got kids
growing up in a relationship and all
that so
it's super impressive i think that
um i don't know how old is elon yes 40
i'm pushing 50 i think 48
so even more impressive 29 because you
know
many people who've been at exceedingly
high output for a decade
or more don't do well their system
breaks down
well this is what he was saying he
uh actually the i mean i don't listen to
all of his interviews but
on that live on the clubhouse he
mentioned that
he was kind of worried it's interesting
he was worried that like sometimes
what i think he said is i'm worried that
some
at some point my brain is just going to
fail
because of the amount of load it's under
like
how much i have to think through
throughout the day like how many like
problems you have to think through like
you know it's like
puzzles it's constant puzzle solving i
would be concerned about
taking somebody who's in that regime and
suddenly putting them into a regime
where they don't have enough to bite
down into it's like my bulldog costello
he's happiest when chewing and tugging
with a big whole neck of his
and he is just not going to become a
retriever he's not going to
he does well and gets his dopamine hits
from
chewing and pulling and it it seems like
elon has
ended up where he is by way of his
natural leanings
i unless there's a backstory that's um
trauma-based or something and i don't
even begin to think that there is
it seems that he has he's one of those
rare individuals in history that has an
immense drive
to create in all these different domains
i'm just saying the obvious here
yeah but it seems like that's what makes
him tick
i mean you're doing an awful lot too
well the problem is
not really uh the the problem is um
about i've been on the verge of pulling
the trigger on on
on starting a company which will
increase the workload
significantly and uh i'm attracted to
that
because of a dream i have but it's a
little bit scary
because it can destroy you in in a lot
of ways
there's two there's two sources of
destruction so
one source is uh
i've for the first time in my life a few
um months ago i think
have gotten this feels like such a noob
thing to say but i've gotten some hate
on the internet
no i know right no but like i am such an
idiot i'm so naive to
it was supr you i i had the question
that i guess a lot of people
uh have when they get hate on the
internet it's like
like it's like mom why are these people
making up stuff about me
you know that kind of feeling of like
why why are you saying that
and and the the the the reason i mention
that is like
well if you go if you want to go and
start a business and
do as i think people should when they
start
a big ambitious business really try to
go big
like what does success look like in
terms of your emotional journey
you're going to have a lot of people who
make up stuff about you
who say negative thing i mean majority
hopefully if you do a good job
will be supportive and but there's still
going to be this army of people there
and like that that was scary to me
because
of how much emotional impact they had on
me
well and i also know a little bit i have
some glimpse into the fact that you put
your heart and soul into
everything you do you're not a you're
light-hearted about
certain things but you're even
light-hearted about being
full gas pedal 24 7. there's kind of
this
you know uh was it um
laird hamilton always says you know the
big wave surfers uh
he always says you know um bright light
dark shadow
you know and uh i think it's that
intensity
and when you do that and then suddenly
people are starting to
like throw some paint on your picture
you're like wait hold
you know you're going max capacity yeah
but i think the company
is an interesting one because you've
talked about doing this company before
i've been afraid i've just not been
pulling trigger uh
out of fear because i enjoy this life
this is this and starting to interrupt
but
it's ultimately this question of taking
a leap
is like uh say you're in academia
like you're at mit you're i really love
doing research at mit
i really love that life why take a leap
out
you know but i did because it's been a
dream
but now accidentally along the way i
found this
podcasting thing which is also really
fulfilling
and you know it's like why take a leap
because you have a huge lust for life
yeah i mean that's you i mean sometimes
when i'm on the internet and i think is
this
you hear about it like oh it's addicting
you know youtube's addicting all that
actually sometimes i think maybe that's
true but a lot of times i just think
there's so much here there's a lot of
garbage
but there's so many gems out there in
the world now it's almost
like sure how you allocate time is key
but
i i think you can do it all
yeah maybe not five more things yeah yes
but all yes
and one thing i just had this idea and
this is not grounded in any scientific
paper but i think the answer might come
to you during this um
this torture that you're about yourself
through with david because in those
mental states you're really asking the
question
right you're asking the question where
is my capacity
and am i even close to my capacity and
if i
am what's what's of the most value i
think we find the answers to those
things
in those non-verbal non-analytic states
it just comes to us i hope you're right
and i hope it's a profoundly fulfilling
experience as opposed to one that leads
to my demise
but yeah right
[Music]
it goes it all goes to the to the yeah
exactly to the hedgehog
uh now it all makes sense andrew uh
like we talked about offline on this
podcast i do hope we
write some stuff together do some
research together you're
you're you're one of the most inspiring
scientists
and speaking of communicating to the
world
uh so i can't wait to see what you do
with the podcast i'm already a huge fan
i've been telling everybody about it
i can't wait to see you talk to joe uh
as well soon
and i can't wait to see what kind of
people we write together thanks so much
for talking today
thank you that project's gonna be a lot
of fun can't wait and thanks again for
having me on appreciate you brother
thanks for listening to this
conversation with andrew huberman and
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thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time