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 Huberman Lab that I can't recommend
highly enough.
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At the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning, but that's probably many months
away from being published.
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And now, here's my conversation with Andrew Huberman.
Why do humans need sleep?
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 I wasn't consulted at the design phase.
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, your lowest temperature point will be 3 AM,
4 AM, and then your temperature will start to creep up as you wake up in the morning,
and then it'll peak in the late afternoon, and then it'll start to drop again toward
the evening, and then you get sleep again.
That oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours plus or minus an hour.
And even though I wasn't consulted at the design phase, I do not think it's a coincidence
that it's aligned to the 24-hour spin of the Earth on its axis and the fact that we
tend to be bathed in sunlight for a portion of that spin and in darkness for the other
portion of that spin.
So there are two mechanisms, the adenosine accumulation and the circadian time point
that we happen to be at.
And those converge to create a sense of sleepiness, awakefulness.
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 AM,
3 AM, provided you're on a regular schedule, like that I follow, not like the kind that
you follow.
I will get very sleepy around 3, 4 AM, but then around 5 or 6 or 7 AM, which is my normal
wake-up time, I'll start to feel more alert, even though adenosine has been accumulating
further.
So adenosine is higher for me the longer I stay up, and yet I feel more alert than
I did a few hours ago.
And that's because these are two interacting forces.
So adenosine makes you sleepy, and then just how sleepy or how awake you feel also depends
on where you are in this temperature oscillation that takes 24 hours.
Okay, so that's fascinating.
So there's a bunch of oscillations going on, and then they kind of, through the evolutionary
process have evolved to all be aligned somewhat, and they interplay.
So you said your body temperature goes up and down, there's chemicals in your brain
that oscillate, and then there's the actual oscillation of the sun 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, and we can get right into the meat of this, I guess we just dove right in, so
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,
beam out.
So the great success is a biology, they give a Nobel Prize to the repert, and I don't
know if repert got it, forgive me, but sorry, if you got it, Steve, congratulations, if
you didn't, I'm sorry I wasn't on the committee, nonetheless did beautiful work, Steve repert
and others, 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, et cetera, in every cell of our body, but what aligns those is a signal
from the master circadian clock, which sits right above the roof of the mouth called the
suprachiasmatic nucleus, and that clock synchronizes all the clocks of the body to this general
temperature rhythm by way of controlling systemic temperature, which makes perfect sense
if you want to create a general oscillation in all the tissues and organs of the body,
use temperature.
And so that work on temperature, if you 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 a denticing back downhill, which is what happens
when we sleep, a denticing that 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 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, et cetera, than people
who are diurnal, who are awake during the daytime, and animals that are nocturnal, it's
the opposite, and animals that are so-called crepuscular, which tend to be active at dawn
and at dusk.
This is a beautiful system, I won't go down that rabbit hole, but these are animals whose
visual systems operate best, they tend to be predators like mountain lions, they have
optimized their waking times for the times when the animals they eat can't see well in
those light conditions, but given the rod cone ratios in their eyes, the mountain line
is picking off, it's like when you see special forces and they are looking through night
vision goggles, and they have a clear advantage, right, they are seeing in the dark, that's
basically what it's like to be a mountain lion as opposed to a bunny rabbit.
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 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 led to higher levels of lethality, and probably in particular in kids,
imagine kids running around in the dark and getting where there are a lot of animals they
can see really well under those conditions, and humans can't, and this would be all pre-electricity.
Even if you're carrying a torch, the range of illumination on a torch is nothing compared
to what a nighttime predator like a large cat or something can do, they basically can
see everything they need to in order to eat us and not the other way around.
One fascinating thing you said is that blew my mind and went right past it, which is that
temperature is a really powerful, like if you were to think about the ways that different
parts of the body, different systems in the body would communicate with each other, temperature
would be a really good one, and that just, I mean maybe it's obvious, but it kind of
blew my mind just now, that yeah, these systems are all distributed, and 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 build around, and that way
you can control the behavior of all these different systems by controlling the temperature.
It's attractive to think of a mechanism where this master circadian clock secretes a peptide
or something that goes and locks to receptors in all the cells and gets it just right, but
that leaves far too much room for variability, binding affinities, cells in a lot of parts
of our body are at different stages of maturation, they're turning over, liver cells and so forth,
and for instance, we have a clock in our gut and in our liver, such that if we would just
take out your liver and put it on a table and just look at the expression of these genes,
it would be in a 24-hour oscillation on its own, it's independent, but something has to
entrain them and keep them all synchronized, and so it's not obvious that it would be temperature.
Takahashi's great gift to biology was to show that all the stuff coming out of this master
circadian clock at the end of the day, that's a weird statement, no pun intended, at the
end of the day and the night, at the end of the story, it all boils down to making sure
that the temperature of tissues oscillates in the same fashion.
It's blowing my mind and thinking what other mechanism could possibly exist to create that
kind of oscillation.
Your Russian, it's cold in Russia for a lot of the year, the hibernation signal in certain
animals is a remarkable signal.
There are peptides secreted from this very same clock that in animals like ground squirrels
or bears, they go into a kind of a torpor where everything, reproduction, metabolism,
everything is reduced while they're in their cave.
They don't actually stay asleep all of winter, that's a myth, and they actually do these
very dramatic and periodic arousals from hibernation where they just shake and shake and shake,
it looks like a seizure, and then they go back under into the torpor.
That's from a peptide that's released, but that's different because that's about shutting
down the whole system.
It's clear that having these very regular oscillations every 24 hours is essential for
everything from metabolism to reproduction.
Is there an optimal temperature for sleep that I should mention?
I think your latest episode, and people should go check out helixsleep.com slash huberman
to support Andrew.
Thanks for the plug.
The amazing thing about this stuff, and yes, you have a new podcast, that's amazing.
This past month, you 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, but
just the quality.
Three Blue One Brown, Grant Sanderson is like that for me, just like, wow, this is education
is best.
Andrew symbolizes that, captures that brilliantly, so go support the sponsor so he doesn't stop
doing the thing.
I think they have a cooling pad, too.
So Eight Sleep Matches sponsors me.
They sent me a mattress, and it's been, I've never, listen, I used to sleep on the floor.
Sleep where you fall.
Sleep where I fall.
I don't give a shit.
It doesn't really matter, but I would have never bought a nice mattress, because it's
like, why?
I'm fine.
This is a floor.
It's fine.
It was a game changer to be able to control temperature.
For me, it's cooling.
I don't know what the hell it is.
Well, you want the brain and nervous system and 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 be good because this temperature oscillation is such that as your
temperature is dropping, that correlates generally with the most sleepy phase of your circadian
cycle.
Cool is better for falling and staying asleep and sleeping deeply.
I guess that's what Aidsleep showed.
They have an app.
It warms back up to wake you up.
The idea that I haven't actually used it, I'm like, this is stupid.
People say it works, but I just keep it at the same temperature throughout the night,
but warming it up, I guess wakes you up, which is fascinating.
Yeah, because the wake-up signal, it's interesting to think about it.
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 it just even relative?
Just even just the decrease?
Well, everyone's going to have slightly different basal temperature.
The idea that everybody should be 98.6, that's a myth.
There are theories that body temperature overall has been dropping in the last 50 years or
so.
I doubt that's true for somebody who is athletic like you and is young and healthy.
Basically, 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 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 saying 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.
That temperature minimum turns out to be a very important landmark in your circadian
cycle because it turns out that if you get bright light in your eyes in the hours immediately
before your temperature minimum, so two to four hours or any time within the two or four
hour window before that temperature minimum, you are going to what's called delay your
circadian clock.
The next day, that whole oscillation is going to move forward, it'll make you want to go
to sleep later and wake up later.
Because 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'll want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier the
subsequent nights.
So you might say, wait, but most nights I go to sleep and wake up at more or less the
same time.
Why is that?
And that's because the same thing is happening on both sides.
You are both advancing your clock a little bit and assuming that you're looking at light
in the evening, you're also delaying your clock a little bit so you get kind of captured
in between and then your rhythm more or less oscillates at the same period as we say as
the spin of the earth.
Unless you're like you where I get text messages from you sometimes that odd hours and if you're
on the East Coast, then I know that you had to have been pulling basically an all night.
That's the interesting point about the messiness of sleep so most people seem to 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 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 tell me what you think about this.
So I tend to for myself try to minimize stress in life so what I found for myself with diet
with sleep is that if I obsess about it being perfect, then I'll actually stress quite a
bit when it's not like I'll feel shitty when I don't get enough sleep because I know I
should be getting more sleep as opposed to the actual physiological effects of not getting
enough sleep.
I find if I just accept whatever the hell happens, happens and smile and just take it
all in like David Goggins style, like if it sucks, it's even better or what is it, jocos
like good or whatever he says.
Right.
I think there's several things that you said that are important, but I agree that one can
have a dysregulated sleep schedule and still be a happy person and productive.
Much of my life I've pulled all nighters and slept weird schedules.
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 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 if we don't sleep enough, we're going to get dementia.
If we don't get sleep, then the reproductive axis is going to completely crash.
There's a lot of evidence to the contrary and as well, just based on personal experience
and based on the fact that, sure, it may be that a solid eight hours with no interruptions
in there or nine or 10 could do great benefit, but you can do really well if you do what
you say, which is you wake up, you don't want to start stressing about it, creating this
meta-stress about sleep.
Being happy is actually one of the most powerful things that you can do, not allowing yourself
to go down that rabbit hole of stress.
For the following reason, a lot of our fatigue is not due just to the buildup of adenosine
or time of day, the circadian thing we were talking about earlier.
An additional factor is that effort is related to the release of epinephrine, of adrenaline
in our brain and body.
At some point, those levels get so high that we get stressed mentally, we get stressed
physically and we want to give up.
There are good data published in Cell showing that that signal, the epinephrine signal 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.
Tyrosine is eventually converted through things like al-dopa into dopamine.
Dopamine is made into epinephrine.
This sounds kind of new agey, but happiness, joy and pleasure in what you're doing creates
a chemical milieu that provides more of the chemicals that allow for effort.
There's nothing new agey about that.
It's in every biochemistry textbook.
It's in every decent neuroscience textbook.
They just don't talk about the happiness part.
They just talk about the dopamine part.
I think that limiting your stress and at least recognizing, okay, if you're pulling it all
night 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.
Near that temperature minimum, which correlates to about two hours before you would normally
wake up, the brain is hobbling along.
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.
You'll love this one and a lot of people might be critical of this, so I just want to make
sure that, so this is work done out of Harvard Medical, Bob Stickgold's lab, and Emily Hoglund
did this study that showed looking at performance on Ochem scores.
Okay, so organic chemistry at Harvard is a pretty tough subject, highly motivated.
A number of very good control groups in this study, what she showed was that consistency
of total sleep duration was far more important for performance on these exams than total
sleep duration itself.
It's not that just getting more sleep allows you to perform better, consistently getting
about the same amount of sleep is better for performance at least on Ochem 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 similar to nutrition in that it feels
like there's so many variables involved and it's so person-specific.
So 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, which are individuals ultimately.
The question isn't, so it's a very important question is like what kind of diet fights
obesity, reduces obesity?
It's another question, what kind of diet allows David Goggins to be the best version of himself?
So these high performers in different avenues and the same thing with sleep, like people
that tell me that I should get eight hours of sleep, it's like, I get it and they may
be right, but they may be very wrong.
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 turn out to be strong parameters for success in this
domain.
For instance, your entire life, waking or asleep, is broken up into these 90-minute
ultradian cycles.
If you look at ability to attend or do math problems or do anything, 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, et cetera, we talk
more about that if you like, those on 90-minute ultradian cycles as well.
Ending your sleep after a 90-minute cycle 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 ultradian cycle.
And there are a few apps that can measure this based on body movements and things like
that that have you, your alarm go off at the end of an ultradian cycle.
And if you wake up in the middle of an ultradian cycle, sometimes not always, you can be very
groggy for a long period of time.
I certainly do better on six hours than I do on seven.
I happen to like an eight-hour sleep, it feels great, but I haven't slept an entire eight
hours without waking up in the middle of the night at some point in, 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-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 glimphatic system is this kind of like sewer system of the brain that
you can clear stuff out.
So legs elevated or one thing that I'm a big proponent of and that my lab has been studying
is what I now call NSDR, non-sleep deep rest.
And this is just lying down.
There are some scripts that we're going to put out there soon as a 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 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 rest protocols resets levels of neuromodulators like dopamine in the basal
ganglia to the same levels that they were right after a long night's sleep.
So I also respectfully or semi-respectfully disagree with the idea that you can't recover
lost sleep.
What does that mean?
I mean, there's no IRS for sleep.
So what does it mean to be in debt for sleep?
If you're falling asleep during the day and you're sleepy, like you're falling asleep,
that's a good sign of insomnia, means you're not sleeping enough at night.
If you're fatigued during the day, but you're not falling asleep, so you're just exhausted,
but you're not finding yourself falling asleep in meetings and in conversation, then chances
are you're fatiguing your system through something else, like a long run in the middle
of the night and lost in or whatever it is that you're up to lately at 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.
Have a fundamental change in my mood and my performance.
For the better.
For the better.
For the better.
Yeah, likewise.
I do tend to kind of experiment with durations, it's consistently surprising to me how like
a nap of like 10 minutes, I don't know, maybe you could 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, subjective experience.
What would be a longer one, longer than 90 minutes?
No, no, like 90 minutes, but longer than 90 minutes.
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.
Right.
I mean, remember, in sleep, space and time are totally uncoupled, and so that's an odd
state to reenter the world in if you're not going to stay there for a while, like for
a good night's sleep.
I think a 20-minute nap is pretty fantastic.
Would you say that's the, if you were to recommend to the general, 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, 30 minutes, 20 or 30 minutes, because 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 in a psychedelic dream, which
can be pretty great too.
But I think that 20, 30 minutes, and if you can't sleep, some people have trouble napping,
then learning to relax the body as much as possible, like trying to remove all expression
from your face, completely letting your body kind of float.
If people have a hard time relaxing when they're awake, there's some terrific clinically and
research-tested hypnosis protocols that we could provide links to that are cost-free
and that teach you how to just completely release the alertness button and you just
start drifting.
Now, the problem is, if you don't have an alarm or something to go off, 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, let your hand float
up.
I woke up an hour later and my hand was still floating.
Wow.
That's awesome.
It's really relaxed.
So 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 hypnotic induction
involves looking up, closing your eyes, slowly deep breath, and then imagining yourself floating.
And people vary on a scale of about one to four for being the most easily hypnotized.
There are a few people who it's very hard for them to allow themselves to go into these
states, but for most people, they just, they're gone.
And it's nice 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 refreshed alert.
Ready to go.
I mean, basically you're ready.
Yeah, I know you have this interesting challenge coming up and I'm curious what you're going
to do to reset in the hours.
The frequency of running is every four hours is not going to allow you to get any more
than a couple hours of sleep in between.
A couple hours.
So we should, we should tell to people, I'd be curious to get your thoughts and advice
on it.
I'm, I'm March 5th running 48 miles with Mr. David Goggins.
So four miles every four hours and people should join us.
Is that mad man is going to be live on Instagram starting at 8pm Pacific on March 5th.
So you're going to join him in person, in person, undisclosed location, undisclosed location.
And I was, I was trying to clarify like, okay, so we're going to, like there'll be like friendly
people around or something.
No, it's just me and him, friendly people.
I don't know.
I just feel it's very difficult to be with David alone in a room.
I imagine his, I mean, I've done some work with David, his energy is infectious.
That's an intense schedule.
And the, the periodicity of 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 two hours of sleep if you wanted
to.
So the optimal thing is probably from the sound of it.
I'd be curious to see what you think, but like it's getting a few 90 minute naps.
Yeah.
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 advantages, which is if you can't sleep, you're not going
to be stressed about that.
And if you do fall asleep, it's a bonus provided you wake up and you don't look up
and you realize, David's been out running for half an hour and you're behind, right?
But chances are that's not the way it'll go.
You set an alarm.
So that's one approach.
And I grabbed that from a couple of friends who were in the SEAL teams and they'll say
that during Bud's, there's this infamous Hell Week and there's this 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 that's one option.
Let's call it the full blitz hammer through option.
And if you happen to fall asleep, you do.
Bonus.
It's a bonus.
The other one would be to really anchor in these ultradian cycles.
So coming back from a run, unless you're thoroughly exhausted, you're probably going to have a few
minutes where you're going to want to stay awake.
It's going to be hard to just immediately fall asleep and getting as much sleep as you
can in the intervening periods provided that you guys aren't posting constantly or doing
something else.
There's a question of whether or not you want to nourish, whether or not you want to eat
or not in that time.
Any time 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 between certain blocks.
That would be another way to think about this.
Because I did this last year, I ran very slow.
Some of it was walking.
I was listening to audiobooks and one of the biggest mistakes I did is to overeat during
that time.
Right.
It 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 energy that you derive from food is going to be used from glycogen and after a long
storage and conversion process.
So the food that you eat is going to consume energy to digest and so a lot of people feel
better fasted and presumably throughout history, people have fasted for long periods of time
and had to stay up for two or three days and God forbid, if a family member is sick, you
can stay awake in the hospital without any trouble.
So that alertness system, it's all mental.
And then there's a third, so you could try and sleep or take care in between.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then there's a third approach.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
But I didn't come up with it.
What is it?
I actually texted him earlier because I had a feeling that I heard that you were going
to do this challenge.
So I asked David.
So these are David Goggins words, not mine.
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.
Four, meal prep and gear prep, et cetera, are very important.
That's consistent with everything I know about military.
They don't leave too much to chance.
Five, again, these are David's words.
All that said, he's fucked on most of 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.
Oh, this is interesting.
They're called SIU pills.
Hard to get, but I believe he can get them.
SIU stands for suck it up.
Tell him to grab his balls.
He will find those pills there.
That's number six.
All right.
And then the last one, stay hard, brother.
Stay hard, brother.
Amen.
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 it's a different thing to do something privately and then publicly.
I know it doesn't seem that way, but 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 last time I did it, I recorded, 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 the run 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 interesting discussion.
Your attitude, I mean, I hate the word hack, like, oh, it's a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin.
I don't like the word hack because A, it's disrespectful to hackers who do a real thing.
And B, a hack implies that it's some sort of trick that you're kind of gaming the system.
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 a 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 first, you know, air flight felt pretty awesome and motivated
those people to go on and do more.
They didn't just go on, you know, yawn and go have a beer.
So being able to access the genuine internal states of gratitude and reward works.
You can't trick the system.
You can't pretend that you're grateful for something, but if you can identify or attach
yourself to some larger goal or something that's deeply gratifying to you or place it
in service to a relative that passed away that you care a lot about, that's not a hack.
That's accessing the deepest components of your nervous system.
And to steal your kind of, 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 enough to know.
I mean, we've done a little bit of work together and, you know, we're in communication now
and again, he's obviously super impressive.
I don't know.
It seems like he's a pretty private guy, 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 a powerful thing.
It can lift up your mood, but to turn on the camera and have to use words, which is very
difficult to do, to explain like what you're feeling and do it in a way that you know a
bunch of people will be watching is really draining.
And one of the things I'm concerned about that in this whole process, how do I keep
my mind sharp while also keeping the physical performance sharp, and that's a little bit
scary because talking to David, like actual intellectually sharp, like thinking, being
charismatic as much as I can be and like being so maintaining a sense of humor too, because
I can be, I become with sleep deprivation, with exhaustion.
You start being-
The Russian bear comes out.
You start being such a-
I become a David Goggins essentially.
Oh, it makes you irritable.
Sleep deprivation makes us irritable.
It's clear so that in the early part of the night, we get a higher percentage of those
old Tradian cycles are occupied by slow wave sleep, sometimes just called non-rem sleep.
And those early night sleep bouts are great for muscular repair and for certain forms
of learning, but REM sleep, the rapid eye movement sleep, which it starts to accumulate
and occupy more of those 90-minute Tradian cycles toward the late part of a sleep bout.
So typically toward morning, but toward after you've been asleep a while.
That's when you do the emotional processing.
That's when we recover the ability to feel refreshed and not irritated by things.
And if you deprive people of REM sleep, they become selectively bad at uncoupling the emotion
from things that happened in the previous days.
So the little things start to seem like big things.
I always know I'm REM sleep deprived when I'm irritable and when I look at the word
the and it doesn't look like it's spelled right and I'm kind of pissed off about it.
Something's off.
Anyway, we actually are becoming slightly psychotic when we're REM sleep deprived.
You're not going to get a lot of REM sleep in this thing, except as you fatigue more,
if you do fall asleep, you're going to drop more and more into REM so that those 90-minute
cycles you won't have to go through stage one, stage two, stage three, and then REM,
you're just going to drop right into REM.
So you can count on your system to compensate for you.
But I think that just the knowledge that you tend to get irritable as the time goes on,
just that third person of yourself, that awareness, the observer, that can be very beneficial
because there may be bouts during this event when you should probably say nothing and maybe
you just smile and record or not smile or do whatever it is because you're going to
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 real chemical thing.
It's not a hack, it's not a trick, it's not a visualization, it's biology in action.
Well, but I think the act of 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 do the third person view and be able to express with words that you're feeling irritable.
Express what you're going through, use words which I hate doing.
I honestly 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.
It's definitely going to be, if I know David at all, he's going to try and find your buttons.
Even though he knows he can complete this and I believe that he trusts that you can
complete it too, I believe you will complete it.
You know you will complete it.
Right.
There's no question about that, but he's not going to make it easier for you.
He's going to make it harder.
Well, I'm afraid so I'm like, it's very difficult for me, so 48 miles is not easy.
I have not been training that much, I'm now ramping up, but it's not like going to kill
me.
We'll see what happens.
Of course, for him, he might always get bored because I think the 48 miles for him is easy.
I don't know that ever gets easy.
I have a friend, Casey Corgel, who works with David, he does some physical rehab type stuff
with him and he took Casey on a 50-miler and Casey said, it's like 16 miles into it.
He was just like, it hit his wall, but he found it.
They find it to get, you find that portal.
There is one thing I want to mention, there's some very good physiology that can perhaps
support the actual running effort part.
These are very new data.
We have a study going on with David Spiegel at Stanford looking at how different patterns
of breathing can affect heart rate variability.
Every variability is good.
There's this interesting mechanism that I think most people might not realize, but that
medical students learn that your breathing and your heart rate and your brain are in
this really remarkable interplay.
It goes like this.
When you inhale, this isn't breath work, we're not going to do breath work.
When you inhale, the diaphragm moves down.
The heart gets a little bigger because there's a little more space in the thoracic cavity.
As a consequence, blood flows a little bit more slowly through that larger volume.
There's a category of neurons, the sinus natural node, that sees that, that recognizes
that slower rate through that larger volume.
Sends a signal to the brainstem and the brainstem sends a signal back to the heart to speed
the heart up.
Every time you inhale, you're in speed in the heart up.
When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little smaller, volume is smaller,
blood flows more quickly through the heart, signal sent up to the brain and the brain
sends a signal back to slow the heart down.
This is the basis of heart rate variability.
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.
Some people want to 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.
No one talks about how to do it in real time while you're exerting effort.
This is something like almost like second by second, you can adjust things just in real
time based on how you're feeling, but based on the heart rate, the experience of the heart
rate.
That's right.
One thing that could be very efficient and we're doing some work with athletes now, these
are unpublished data, but 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 reopening the avioli
of the lungs.
Your lungs are filled with tons of little sacs.
They tend to collapse as you fatigue and carbon dioxide builds up in the bloodstream
and that's when we start getting stressed.
If you've ever been sprinting and you start getting beat and you're going as hard as you
can, what you really need to do is double inhale and reinflate these sacs in the lungs
and then offload a lot of carbon dioxide.
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?
Nasal breathing, there's a lot of excitement now obviously about nasal breathing because
of James Nester's book, Breath.
There was also, if people are going to know about that book, I do feel like out of respect
for my colleagues, there was a book by Sandra Kahn and Paul Erlich at Stanford, both professors
at Stanford, with a forward by Jared Diamond and Robert Sapolsky, some heavy hitters in
this book.
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.
When we exercise, 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.
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 things that can help in the transitions, but I don't think there's any
secret breathing technique.
Anyone who's been in the SEAL teams will kind of, they'll tell you like, there's no breathing
technique, right?
There's tools that you can look to from time to time.
And these double inhale, exhales can be great for setting heart rate ability in very quickly
and getting into a steady cadence while you're exercising.
But if there's a sprint, like if suddenly you guys are sprinting, ditch the, ditch the
double inhale, exhale and just sprint.
One thing that you mentioned, he's probably going to push my buttons.
It's a good place to ask a question about anger.
So I'll probably get pissed off at him at some point, I'm guessing.
And do you have thoughts from a scientific perspective or also just the personal philosophical
perspective about the role of anger and all of this 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, I tweet about it all the time.
And love is powerful, right?
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 that these days, I'm not oriented from that
place toward my work quite as often, but I think we should be really honest.
Anger is powerful, it 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 tap.
Yeah, Joe Rogan has, aside from being a fan of his, has been an inspiration 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 be angry at stuff and use it as fuel.
He almost conjures up artificial demons in his mind just so he can fight them.
But at the same time, I tried that because I did a challenge in the summer of a world
for 30 days.
I was doing a lot of push-ups and it was over time, it was counterproductive for me.
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, the, like getting lost in the
ritual of it, like the, the beat like that, as opposed to going on the big roller coasters
of emotion.
Yeah, this brings us into the realm of neuroendocrinology is there's a fascinating relationship between
the hormone system and the nervous system and hormones work in general on slower timescales.
The definition of hormone is something is chemical released at one location in the body
goes in acts at multiple locations far away and within the body.
Pheromone would be between two bodies.
Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin tend to work a little more quickly.
There are hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that can work very fast, but here I'm referring
mainly to testosterone, prolactin, prolactin tends to be in men and women tends to make
people kind of lazy and want to take care of young.
It tends to throw down body fat so we can stay up late.
It's secreted in response to having children.
These are all in humans and in animals.
There's a very interesting relationship between testosterone and dopamine that speaks directly
to what we're talking about now.
So dopamine and testosterone are closely related in the pituitary system and obviously testosterone
comes from the adrenals and from the testes.
But the major effect of testosterone is to make effort feel good.
That's what testosterone does.
It has other effects too, reproductive effects, androgenizing parts of the body, et cetera,
but it makes effort feel good.
The testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol.
Cholesterol can either be made into cortisol, a stress hormone, or testosterone, but not
both.
So you have a limited amount of cholesterol and it gets diverted towards stress or 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 testosterone eventually, but the real question is, are you enjoying
what you're doing?
And here, some of the major work on this was done by Duncan French, who runs the UFC Training
Center.
He did his PhD at Yukon Stores, did a really beautiful PhD thesis looking at the relationship
between stress hormones, testosterone, and dopamine.
Really interesting work.
And 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.
There is a magic to, I don't know if you can comment on this, but I find myself being able
to, if I just say I'm feeling good, like this 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 a cascading effect that allows me to maximize the effort.
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 his important figure in our community, and I was
a friend.
And there was one day where he told me, he said, I don't want to make it past the new
year.
And it was crushing for me to hear.
And I knew that he had been on some androgen therapy for a whole set of other things.
And I said, have you taken your androgen cream?
And he was like, no, I haven't done it.
He'll get it for me.
I have this on film.
He takes it.
He puts the androgen cream on.
I'm not suggesting people take androgens, by the way.
Ten minutes later, he says, you know what?
I think I want to live into the new year.
And I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation.
He went to MIT, by the way.
He said, I'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation.
And he did.
And so there's something about these molecules that in an ancient way, in all organisms,
all mammals as far as we know, are linked to the will to live.
They're linked to effort and making effort feel good, which has been fundamental to the
evolution of our species.
I always say, people think that the opposite of testosterone is estrogen, but it's not.
The opposite of testosterone is prolactin, which makes us feel quiescent and not in pursuit
of things, et cetera.
Testosterone makes effort feel good.
Estrogen makes emotions feel OK.
And they are in mixed amounts in people, as I say, of all chromosomal backgrounds.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you also mentioned fasting, potentially, through this two-day thing.
It'd be cool to get your thoughts about fasting in general.
Do you think on a personal level and at a higher sort of level of studies that you're
aware of and physiology and so on, what do you think about intermittent fasting of like
not eating for 16 hours and then having an eight-hour window?
Or something I've been doing a lot recently, which is eating only once a day.
So that's 24-hour fast, I guess, one meal a day.
Or something I've been thinking about doing, haven't done yet, of doing like 72 hours.
And some people do like five-day fasts in general.
So this will be, for this particular run, will be a 48-hour fast.
If I don't eat at all, what do you think about that for performance, for 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 with Sachin Panda
at the Salk is phenomenal biologist and researcher, wrote a book called The Circadian Code.
It's very, very good and kind of popularized intermittent fasting, although there were
others that had talked about this before, Ori Hofmeckler talked about the warrior diet.
People probably might not know who Ori is, but he's sort of the originator of this business
of intermittent fasting.
He didn't want today or limited.
Anyway, Sachin has published papers, peer-reviewed papers in very good journals like Cell and
elsewhere showing that limiting the consumption of calories to eight, four, six or eight or
even 10 hours of every 24-hour cycle and keeping that more or less correlated with the light
with when the sun is out leads to less liver disease, improved metabolic markers, less
body fat, et cetera.
In the mouse studies, they even gave the mice the choice to eat whatever they wanted as
much as they wanted as long as they restricted it to a certain period within the 24-hour
cycle.
They did great.
They maintained a healthy weight or even lost weight.
When they took the same amount of food and they stretched it out across the entire 24-hour
cycle, so this is eating every hour or two hours, the animals got fat and sick.
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.
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, because they tend to focus on foods that have high amino acid
content like meats, generally people are less hungry on 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.
This is not a push for carnivore or a push against one thing or the other.
There are a lot of factors.
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 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.
We'd be like robots or something like one of your alien buddies will be like running
the planet.
You can only dream.
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 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, digest and utilize those nutrients.
I've done the once a day eating thing.
The problem is I eat so much in that meal that I'm exhausted and so it doesn't always
lend itself well to the schedule, but so in a six or eight hour eating block for me is
a little bit better.
I do eat carbohydrates.
I'm probably one of the few people left on the West Coast that actually consumes carbohydrates
and will say that out loud.
I don't know people eat carbs anymore.
That's weird.
They don't.
What do you even find carbs these days?
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.
For example, one of the things I discovered with fasting is that when I was training twice
a day in Jiu Jitsu, for example, on 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 the force of the explosiveness.
What I do know is the alertness resulted in me doing the technique more precisely.
That's the dopamine and epinephrine system in action.
There are some other just purely physical aspects to one diet versus the other that
can be complicated.
If you're ingesting carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, you're going to replenish
glycogen, which is great, but they also tend to be bulky and fibrous.
I don't have never rolled Jiu Jitsu, but running when you have a lot of bulky, fibrous food
in your gut or in your intestine, it can be a barrier, it can be uncomfortable.
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.
There are aspects to being able to train and being really explosive because you feel light.
One anecdote that really, again, I'm not encouraging any one particular kind of diet, but I have
a friend who was in the SEAL teams, I happened to know a number of people in that community,
and he told me that he did this very long fast.
It was a fast that I think you get to eat a little bit of soup or broth, and there's
like a bar or something, but it's like a nine-day thing, and he's a very strong athlete.
He said that on day six or seven, he was running up some hills or something while he was on
deployment, and he felt amazing.
He had kind of hit this other level.
He was somebody who had boxed in the Naval Academy.
He was somebody who had, he knew, knows a new high output, and he felt like he discovered
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?
Once he was in the fifth or sixth day of the fitness.
See this is the thing, I've never been there on the second, third, fourth, fifth day, that
kind of thing, but when I just don't eat for 20 hours, many times through my training,
the clarity, you feel like everyone is moving super slowly, and you're able to dominate
people you weren't able to before.
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 sloughing off all this, and then I stopped, and I was taking the liquid ketones,
and then all of a sudden I felt better again.
But I was told that I just did it wrong.
Yes.
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 keto2 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 know who said this, but I tried this recently over the past year, is I started
drinking when I don't feel great, if I'm fasting, bone broth, chicken bone broth.
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 of neurons, as you know, is sodiums 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,
provide 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 electrolyte die.
Now, hydration is really important, I know David's really into hydration, he's mentioned
that a few times.
Hydrating properly is key, and so you definitely want to make sure that you're drinking enough
water and getting enough electrolytes.
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 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, potassium, magnesium, whatever the other electrolytes are, but yeah,
those three.
So, I mean, salt, yeah, magnesium is good before sleep, salt.
I mean, this is a vast space, and we're kind of talking about the overlap between neurochemicals,
hormones, and nutrition, and it's a fascinating space, and it's one that the academic community
has gems within the textbooks.
It hasn't really made it into the public sphere yet, and I think that's because people get
so caught up in the, you know, being, are you vegan or are you carnivore, 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 give you a big thank you for connecting me with Bell Campo Farms.
They sent me some meat, I think because of you, and it's delicious.
So I really appreciate that.
I mean, it also connected me with this whole world of people who are doing farming in this
ethical way, and really love the whole process, and as, from both a human level, but also
scientific level, and the result is, it's 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, I don't have any commercial relationship to Bell Campo, so I can be very
clear.
I've known Anja Fernald, who is the founder and CEO of Bell 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 all
sorts of things, and also the meat just, it's awesome, it tastes really good.
And no, I'm not getting paid to say that, no, they're not sponsoring my podcast, it's
just, 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 time of
slaughter is at least important to me.
And actually, talk to her, so I will talk to her on the spot, yes, actually, and she
invited me like a week ago out to visit the farm in May or June or whatever.
Yeah, they have the farm up at the Oregon border.
I haven't been there yet, but I've seen the pictures.
It 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 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.
I haven't done it yet, because I'm afraid I'm in a function better.
I'm Argentine by my dad's side, and I don't eat meat super often, but, well, for most
people, it would seem often, but I do love steak, I do, so I'm afraid I'm going to feel
better.
There's a social element to steak you're right, because coming from a Russian background,
like, I can't imagine going to visit my folks, like my parents for Thanksgiving or something
to say, mom and dad, I don't eat meat, so is it, you know.
Well, I think if you're going to eat meat, getting it from sources that are compatible
with a continuation of the planet is good.
There are some real problems with the factory farm meat.
You drive up and down the five, and you pass that point where all those cows, I mean, as
somebody who loves animals, it's clear that it's, you want to limit the amount of suffering
of those animals.
Whenever I hear about, you know, we have, we know people that hunt and that go and get
their own meat, I really admire that, I admire that people do that.
We don't tend to do that in the hills around Stanford, you know, there are mountain lines
back there, but that's about it, and I'm certainly, I admire the vegan mindset of just making
that decision, you're just not going to consume other beings, but, you know, I haven't gone
that way.
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, if you want to be, perform
your best when I was like 20 or whatever.
And I would eat oatmeal, like I thought it's obvious I have to have a really, a lot of
carbs in the breakfast.
I had a lot of preconceived notions, and then when I started eating like once a day, this
was at the peak of my competing in Jiu-Jitsu, it was like everything I know about nutrition
is wrong.
You realize that like you have to become a scientist, first of all, you have to read
literature, you have to learn, you have to 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 necessarily for the ethical reasons, but to see if it's performance-wise, like
can I, I remember there's like a fruitarian diet where you eat fruit only.
These 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 think that it's hard to imagine getting, I know people say you can get enough amino
acids from plant-based sources, and I believe that.
I think it probably takes a little more work.
One thing that's really clear is the benefit of these omega-3, omega-6 ratios, like fish
oils and things like that, there are some data that show that getting at least 1,000
milligrams of the EPA, which is in high in fish oils, but other things too, even some
meats and other plants, in matched placebo, double-blind controlled studies, placebo-controlled
double-blind studies have shown that those can offset antidepressive symptoms as much
as some of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft.
That's pretty impressive.
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, nutrition-wise, what kind of stuff have you come across that's
useful?
I basically only take fish oil, like you said, electrolytes, electrolytes with water, the
David Goggins diet, plus fish oil, and then again, the sponsor, they've made it so easier,
the sponsor of your podcast and mine, athleticgreens.com slash you women, support it.
I don't know, it's great stuff for sure, but it also just takes away the headache of like,
I don't know what to think about.
Yeah, you're going to get a bunch of vitamins and minerals, it does that, sounds like a plug,
but I have genuinely been buying it, no discount, no affiliation, anything since 2012, I think
I heard about it on the Tim Ferriss podcast, I was like, oh, I'm going to try that stuff,
and I liked it.
When I was starting my lab, I was working insane hours, I still worked very long hours,
and getting sick limits productivity, and I also wanted to train, and I wasn't doing
much training back then.
Now I try and get three, four sessions in a week, I'm not doing nothing like what you
and David are doing, or what Joe does, or like you guys are way more regimented and
consistent than I am, but I think that being healthy and feeling good is one of the great
benefits to a career is having energy, and just being not sick.
Can we take a step back to sleep a little bit?
Sure, yeah.
So people should definitely look through your podcast, the first five episodes were on sleep,
or no, I guess the first opening episode wasn't...
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 work.
Yeah, second masterclass on sleep, and then you're going on to a next 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.
What do you think we understand about the contents of dreams?
What do dreams mean, all the stuff we see when we dream?
Is there something that we understand about the contents of dreams?
Some of it is very concrete, so Matt Wilson, who, MIT, 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.
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 replayed during sleep.
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.
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've
gotten to a car crash at a particular location or you lost a bunch of money because you were
a cab driver, Uber driver, we'd say nowadays, and you were stuck at one particular avenue
all day and frustrated, and you were getting yelled at by your spouse, that information
gets encoded so that you never forget that at that particular time of day, in that particular
time of year, and this thing happened, so context starts getting linked to experience.
There's spatial information that's absolutely replayed during sleep, and we experience this
sometimes as dreams.
The dreams that happen early in the night when slow wave sleep or non-rem sleep dominates
tends to be sleep of very kind of general themes and kind of location.
It can feel a little bit eerie and kind of strange.
Not so incidentally, the early phase of the night is when growth hormone is released.
In the 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 a store then, I never took it, but it was a popular
party drug and some famous celebrities died while on GHB.
They were also on a bunch of other things, so it's not clear what killed them, but GHB
was very big in certain communities because it promoted a massive release of growth hormone
and gave people these very hypnotic states, so people go to clubs and they were in these
very hypnotic states, it was part of a whole culture.
That's early night and those dreams tend to not have a lot of emotional content or load.
That phase of dreaming is associated with the occasional jolting yourself out of sleep
because it's somewhat lighter sleep.
The dreams that occur during REM, during rapid eye movement sleep and that dominate
towards morning are very different.
They tend to have very little epinephrine is available in the brain at that time, epinephrine
again being this molecule stress, fear and excitement.
You are paralyzed during these REM dreams.
You cannot move.
There's intense emotion at the level of what you're feeling and there's so-called theory
of mind.
Theory of mind is an idea that was put forward by Simon Baron Cohen, Sasha Baron Cohen's
cousin.
I think on the podcast I mistakenly said that he was at Oxford.
It's like the cardinal sin.
He's at Cambridge.
Forgive me.
I'm not British.
The dreams in REM are heavily emotionally laden and it's very clear that those dreams
and REM sleep, if you deprive yourself of them for too long, you become irritable and
you start linking generally negative emotions to almost everything.
The dreams that occur in REM sleep are when we divorce emotion from our prior experiences
and it's when we extract general rules and themes.
MIT seems to have come up a lot today, but it's highly relevant.
Sasumatonagawa, 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, eye movement desensitization, reprocessing, which is a
eye movement thing that shuts down the amygdala during therapy, not during sleep.
And ketamine, which is a dissociative analgesic, it's actually very similar to PCP.
And ketamine is now being used as 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 they saw a relative impaled on the 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, to
separate.
So they can recount the event and they can describe it without it triggering the same
somatic experience of terror and dread because those feelings can be debilitating obviously.
You think physiologically in REM sleep a similar process is happening.
That's right.
Themetically, REM sleep is about experiencing or replaying intense emotions without experiencing
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, rapid 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 Simon Baron Cohen.
Theory of mind was actually something that he developed for the diagnosis of autism.
If you take kids, most kids of age five, six, seven, 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?
A typical kid would say, they want to play and they don't know where the ball or doll
is or they're upset or they're sad.
They want the doll.
Autistic children tend to say the doll's in the drawer, the toy is in the drawer.
They tend to fixate, they can't get in on the event, they can't get into the mind of
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 an AI guy or a machine learning guy or a neuroscientist,
but it's the best we've got.
But brain imaging, 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.
REM sleep is amazing and you're not going to get much of it during your goggins, but
you will afterward.
Why 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.
Your body and brain are smart.
It 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.
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 deadlift.
I can't do that.
What causes us to stop an endurance event is usually not a physical barrier.
It's almost always a purely mental barrier.
And that's a very interesting problem.
I mean, neuroscientists don't tend to think about those sorts of problems because it sounds
so non-neuroscientific.
But that's fundamentally related to the question of what is pursuit?
What is the desire to push and to carry on?
Is there a neuroscientific answer for that question, you think?
I think the closest thing is this paper from Janelia Farms, the Howard Hughes campus showing
that if you put animals into a simulated environment where you can measure their effort, the forces
on while they're running, and you can control the visual environment, and you can create
a scenario where the animal thinks that its output is futile.
It knows it's running and it's actually running, but you change the frequency of the stripes
going by in their visual world such that they think they're not getting anywhere and eventually
they quit.
And the thing that determines whether or not they quit is a threshold level of epinephrine
in the brainstem.
If you drop that level back down or you give the animals dopamine, essentially, they keep
going.
If you take dopamine down, they're like, this isn't worth it.
It's helpless.
This isn't worth my time and energy.
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 going to need a kit of things to pull from.
So you can think this is in honor of someone else that passed away and you will find a
gas reserve that's amazing.
Now whether or not mice are like, I remember my brother back in the other cage when I was
a little mouse.
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 think about like, if I quit now, what kind of effect will it have on the rest of
my life in the future difficult times?
Like if you allow yourself to quit in this particular moment, you'll become a quitter
more and more in life and then you're going to not get the other nice, the opposite sex
mammals.
That's pretty severe.
You went there.
I don't know.
You took it all.
You took it the whole way to evolution and back again.
I mean, but that's really it.
I mean, our ability to time reference in the past, present or future.
I do believe that we can be in the present and the past or the present and the future
or only in the present or only in the future or only in the past, but I don't think that
we can really think about past, present, and future all at once.
And this has a similarity to covert attention like we can split our visual attention into
two things.
We really can duo task, even though we can't multitask or we can bring those two spotlights
of attention to the same location, but it's very hard to split our attention in really
well into three domains, excuse me, into three domains.
I think that that's very, very challenging and time, our time referencing scheme tends
to be just one or two time references.
So Lisa Feldman Barrett, I'm not sure if you've done work together, but Lisa, I found out
about her because of you, your podcast with her, and then I brought her onto Instagram
to do an Instagram live about emotion and it was fascinating and she's a very spirited
and very, very smart woman and fearless and brilliant.
So I love her, she's amazing.
She's not a scholar of 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 psychedelics.
Because of my previous conversation with you on this podcast, Matthew Johnson from Johns
Hopkins reached out and he said, but he commented, I think, on something that we commented on,
I don't even remember exactly what, but that there's not many studies, it's not being psychedelics
and not being rigorously studied in an academic setting like with a full rigor of science.
And he said, well, actually, that's exactly what we're doing and they're extremely well
funded now.
And it's been a long battle to get it accepted as a serious scientific pursuit.
So but 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 different explorations of mind states 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, love what you're doing.
I think it's incredible.
So yeah, your podcast has been a great source of serious academic and intellectual conversation
for me.
I think what they're doing at Hopkins is amazing.
He has a collaborator there actually that had a very popular paper I just threw out
there for fun, who was a postdoc at Stanford, her name is Ghoul.
She's Turkish, I believe.
And I apologize, her last name escapes me at the moment, but that's just a function
of my brain.
She had a paper showing that she put Octopi on MDMA on XSC and found out this was published
in Current Biology, it was a great journal showing that the Octopi then wanted to spend
more time with other Octopi and they started cuddling, so they're colleagues out there.
But 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 I always say, you don't want to Ken Keezy out of the
game.
Ken Keezy was amazing, right?
Probably 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 I think I'm tossing these words
in the general, in the right general direction.
But Huxley, Keezy, they did a lot of LST 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 made themselves the experiments.
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 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 were described for REM dreaming.
And there's a terrific set of books and body of scientific literature from a guy named
Alan Hobson who was an MD at Harvard Med and he wrote books like Dream Drug Store.
One of the first neuroscience books I ever read was about hallucinations and how psychedelics
and dreaming are very similar.
That was way back when I was in high school, I was just curious.
And he really understood the relationship between LST 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 and kids, it's a problem.
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.
There's an absolutely spectacular paper at a 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 neuroplasticity components.
Over a lot of people will be like, oh, that's no fun, that's not giving you the wild experience.
But I do think that that holds great potential for people that wouldn't otherwise orient
towards some of these drugs.
So I think it's really marvelous what's happening and what's about to happen.
And I think there is one drug in that kit of drugs that's very unusual like psilocybin,
LSD, those promote heavy, heavy serotonin release and lateralized connections ramp up,
et cetera.
Matt talked about all that.
But MDMA, ecstasy, is a very unusual situation where dopamine is very, very high because
of the 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 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.
Do you, is it about self-love?
Is it about developing love for another person?
Is it about forgetting hate?
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.
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 this kind of stuff 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 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, who's quite open to this idea that
psychedelics could play a real role in real medicine, says better living through chemistry
still requires better living.
And I think it's a beautiful statement.
I wish I had said it, but he gets the credit, but the plasticity window opens.
And then as you said, what are you going to do in the two weeks, three weeks, four weeks
afterward, because that's the real opportunity.
But those psychedelic experiences are really a case of an amplified experience inside of
an amplified experience, so much so that everything seems relevant.
And it's fascinating.
I mean, 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 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
noninvasively.
It's approaching the same kind of therapy from different angles.
One of AI is the computational size of injecting, like the robotics injecting, like maybe you
can even think about as like electricity, the electrical approach versus then like the
chemical approach.
Absolutely.
And then the psychology is subjective, right?
So it's going to take some real understanding of what that person's lexicon is like, you
know, that wasn't a pun.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
It's terrible.
I'm like the worst.
That's the one thing I know from the feedback on my podcast.
My jokes are terrible, but I never claimed to be funny.
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?
Yeah.
Deeper.
Yeah.
Well, 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 and the window to the soul.
I mean, they express so much, the face, the eyes, the body.
I mean, Lisa talks about that, the communication of emotions.
It's a super complex.
This is a bit of a side fun tangent, but Matt Matthew Johnson brings up DMT and the experience
of DMT as a, as from a scientific perspective, just a, just a mystery in itself over its
intensity and what happens to the brain.
And of course, Joe Rogan and others bring it up as a very different special kind of
experience and elves seem to come up often.
I've never tried DMT.
What allows for hallucinogenic states?
And it, I mean, DMT is a really interesting molecule.
There are a lot of people experimenting now with DMT and they just, the way they've described
it is as a kind of a freight train through space and time, very different than the way
people describe LSD type experiences or psilocybin where time and space are very fluid, but it
tends to be a kind of a slower role, if you will.
So it's clear that DMT is tapping into a brain state that's distinctly different than the
other psychedelics.
And, and you mentioned jujitsu and these other communities.
I mean, it's, I think it's interesting because jujitsu is a nonverbal activity and people
get together and talk about this nonverbal activity and they show great love for it in
the same way that surfers, you know, I've known some surfers in my time and they will
get up at the crack of dawn and drive really, really far to sit in the water and wait for
this wave to come.
I have to imagine it's pretty fantastic.
I think that human beings now, some of whom are in the scientific community are starting
to feel comfortable enough to talk about some of these other loves and other endeavors
because they do reveal a certain component about our underlying neurology.
I'm fascinated by the concept of wordlessness, activities in which language is just not sufficient
to capture and in which feel so vital as a reset, as important as sleep.
You know, I think that's one of the dangers of the phone is not that you're going to get
into some online battle or that you're always staring at the phone is that it's a words
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 very renewing and replenishing and just can
feel amazing and I believe also can help us tap into creative states and allow our neurology
to access creative states and sleep is one such wordlessness period.
So one of the most interesting things to me are states that one can approach in waking,
non-sleep, depressed, wordlessness through maybe it's jiu-jitsu, maybe it's for some
people surfing, maybe it's dancing, maybe it's just I don't want to stare in 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 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, 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 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.
And still a lot of them are scheduling.
And there's a lot of questions, I mean, but nevertheless, it's like, my hope is that science
opens up to these 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 unlock deeper understanding of our own mind.
It's any kind of, same as the studying dreams, right?
Absolutely.
Productivity is in the non-linearities, right?
But productivity is in the implementation of linearities.
I mean, 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 work 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-
Oh goodness.
If you take creatives and you give them more psychedelics, they're not going to be able
to get out of there right, you know?
I don't know.
Because I maybe can speak to that, psychedelics are 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 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.
Usually the science, the scientific exploration there has been done in, by the musicians themselves
as has been documented.
Like jazz is like all non-linearities, right?
But if it's, but the people still have to know how to play their instruments, right?
There's some early, early skill building that's critical.
I mean, when you mentioned 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 clear, right?
It's not just that he's ambitious and bold and brave and all that, it's all that.
And 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 refrigerators, thinking like,
think differently, it doesn't work that way.
It involves, 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 really creative artists or musician, 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 ass burgers or ass burgers
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.
I, like you, you know, poetry and you are AI guy, like you, there's nothing linear about
poetry as far as I can tell.
I mean, 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, 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'm in those things and 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 nonlinear or it's nonlinear to go linear, like to, to shake things up.
You mentioned Dan Gable.
The idea of Dan Gable and psychedelics is fascinating to me because he's such a control
freak.
I mean, he,
That's what I'd show up for, that's what I'd show up for.
But like so much of these psychedelic experiences, it feels like is, are letting go.
That's right.
You don't want to resist.
But that's supposed, 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.
Yeah, I mean, I, I can't wait to, to see where these studies takes us.
What's clearly happening, you know, I've asked, there, I have a couple of colleagues at Stanford
who are doing animal studies, I've asked around, you know, it's, there's a lot of discussion
in the neuroscience community about what the perception of a laboratory is if they work
on psychedelics.
I mean, I, I have to tip my hat to the folks at Hopkins, they are pioneers.
And as Terry Szygnowski, he's a computational neuroscientist down at Salk says, I don't
think he was the first person to say, he says, you know, how to spot the pioneers.
They're the ones with the arrows in their backs.
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, and it's finally, you know, at the point where there's so much data.
But people hear hypnosis and they think of stage hypnosis, which is like the furthest
thing from what he's doing.
And I think mind body type stuff, hypnosis, respiration and breathing, I think the hard
science walk into the problem is always going to be best to get the community on board.
And then it's up to people like Matt and to really, you know, take it to the next level.
And as I say, not Keesey out of the game, because Keesey basically was taking too much
of his own stuff.
And he started dressing crazy of banana hats and like you see him, he had the magic bus.
So you know, the day, so the day I start driving to work in the magic bus, that's the day I
lose my job.
Where are you going?
I'm not into buses or, or, or wearing fruit, but you're going to get a phone call for me
and I hope you do the same for me as 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, I mean, that's 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 whatever 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.
And the typical discussion around stress is one thing, but it's all limbic friction.
It's just that when I say limbic 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're increasing capacity for everything.
This month on the podcast, you're talking about neuroplasticity, you mentioned it a
bunch already.
Is there something you're looking forward to specifically?
Like something maybe you're fascinated by that jumps to mind about neuroplasticity,
this fascinating property of the brain?
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 Mersinich who used to be at UCSF and some of his scientific
offspring, Greg Reckon's own and Michael Kilgard and others.
What they showed was increases in acetylcholine, this molecule associated with focus.
Brain 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 absolutely believe that this can be channeled toward accelerated skill learning.
And my friend and colleague Eddie Chang who's now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, 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 Mersinich.
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.
Mersinich talked a lot and still can be found from time to time talking about how these
plasticity mechanisms can be leveraged, but he had a commercial company and so then people
kind of backed away from it a little bit.
I think he was, to be honest, I think Mersinich 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.
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?
I have a deep interest and concern for the future of science and mathematics and 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, but those huge data sets funnel into human interpretation.
We don't just stare at the numbers and bask.
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.
That's a long-winded way of saying basal forebrain, cholinergic transmission and plasticity,
it allows for plasticity in adulthood and it allows for it in single trial learning,
which is incredible.
But how do we leverage that?
In the physical space taking actions or is there some chemicals that can stimulate neuroplasticity?
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.
This is full of open questions.
This is the very beginnings of it, like you're saying.
Yeah, a pill that's safe that increases nicotinic transmission.
I know a number of people that chew Nicorette.
Actually, I have a Nobel Prize-winning colleague at Columbia, not to be named, who chews like
six pieces of Nicorette and a half-hour conversation with him.
He started doing that as a replacement for smoking because smoking is nicotine, nicotinic
stimulation of the cholinergic system.
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, get them a doctor.
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, we're just walking around in
a 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, all the different data sets that you can have about the mind, the
eye, everything that's neck and above, and also the central nervous system and all?
Absolutely.
I think that computer science and engineering and chemistry, bioengineering, 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 in other places
too, of course, it's clear that everyone's invited party right now.
The major issue in the field of neuroscience, at least through my view, is that there's
no conceptual leadership.
No one is saying we need to work on and solve this problem or that problem.
It's very fragmented right now.
Now, the good news is people are communicating.
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?
In your work that you've just come across, is there a huge number of disparate data sets
around neuroscience and so on?
Well, there's a lot of cell sequencing stuff.
The Brode over at Boston and then on this coast, the Chen Zuckerberg Initiative, what
they did, $3 billion to sequence every cell type in humans and in animals and trying,
I think their goal is to cure every disease by some date, I don't know, in the future.
Huge data sets of gene expression and protein expression, that's valuable.
No one really knows how to think about neural circuits and what is a neural circuit?
Is it one structure, is it two structures communicating?
I think this is where I actually think that the robotics is going to tell us how the brain
works because it'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 non-color
vision, but at the dusk-dawn transition, certain cell types switch to have a completely different
function for viewing starry night versus what they do during the daytime.
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, I think the main idea is that there won't be a job that's machine learning or computer
vision, it's a tool that neuroscientists will use more and more and biologists would use.
This whole idea that it will just be a tool that allows you to start expanding the kind
of things you can study.
The next generation coming up, I can say this because 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 and hers was far
more rational.
It's just an engineering perspective.
Why would we do that last?
We should do that first.
I think that the next generation is really interested in solving practical problems.
It's 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?
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 Neuralink.
Like Neuralink.
Yeah.
This is something I think we've spoken a few times offline about, speaking of computer
vision.
I'm fascinated by the eye, I did a bunch of work on the eye.
There's the neuroscientist, there's the neurobiology way of studying the eye, and there's the computer
vision way of studying the eye.
The computer vision way of studying the eye of just observing, non-contact sensing of
humans is really fascinating to me and studying human behavior in different contexts like in
semi-autonomous vehicles.
It seemed like there's a lot of signal that comes from the eye, that comes from blinking
that's not fully understood yet.
It's been in the lab, it's been used quite a bit to study like the dilation of the pupil,
all those kinds of things were used 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 of the podcasts he's ever done, video.
You have the YouTube bank.
I have the YouTube bank for a reason that this was before he went with Spotify.
You own the archive.
There's PubMed, and then there's the Joe Rogan experience owned by Lex, or maintained by
Lex.
My private collection, no, the reason I did it, and I did the really rigorous processing
of it, which is like, I extracted all of the faces, I did the really good blink track of
the pupil tracking and the blink detection for the entirety, I should say it's from
episode, I forget what it is, but it's episode 900 when they switched to 1080p video.
It was like much crappier video, it's still kind of-
Did you log when there was marijuana consumption or when there was drinking?
I mean, there's so many-
Because that's going to just, it won't throw off the data, but it's relevant to the pupil
data.
So let's just put it this way.
There's a lot of fascinating computer vision problems involved, but I only kept long sequences
of data, where the eyes detected exceptionally well, and I also removed people that were
wearing glasses, I removed, there's certain people that have a way of moving their eyes
and squinting where it's harder to infer like concrete blinks, they'll kind of have a squint
the whole time, and their blink is very light, it's very tough to know what's an actual blink.
Then you got those baseball cap wearing guys, there are certain people that go on podcasts
and wear baseball caps 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 complicate things.
So you can clean stuff up just so you have really crisp signal, you don't have to, you
can deal with issues, but 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 I saw in drivers when I was looking at eye movement in drivers, it seemed to indicate
there seemed to be quite a lot of signal there that indicates amount of cognitive load.
But it's not clear if there's something conclusive.
But if there is some signal, that's a really powerful one because eye movement could 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.
Pupils change size depending on level of alertness, autonomic rousal, but also overall levels
of luminance.
It's very, very hard.
But there are, I mean, you're sitting on a gold mine because there is a lot of interest
right now in measuring state through non-contact sensing.
Heart rate variability through changes in skin tone, just off a camera, can you imagine
that at the point where you just look at some video and you're like, oh, they're getting
more stressed or worked up and they're not based on a heat map of some little patch
on their face because everyone's going to have this slight, you know, sort of compartmentalize
it slightly differently, but you can learn it pretty quickly.
We know this when someone's like giving a talk and we see them starting to blotching
on their, on their neck, you know, this is the like, the thesis defense response, right?
We know it and it's a stressful situation because not passing your thesis defense is
rough.
And we can see that, but cameras can pick that up really easily at much lower levels
than the 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 blinking?
Well, blink frequency is going to increase as people get tired, right?
I mean, they'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 show that every time you blink,
it resets your perception of time.
They have people do these kind of track a kind of a Doppler like thing and anyway, blinking
resets your perception of time that there's a dopaminergic mechanism in a, in the blink
related circuitry of the brain.
When people are very alert, they tend to not blink very much.
When we're sleepy, we tend to blink more and our eyes tend to close.
Now some people are more hooded in their, the way their eyes sit.
Some people are like this all the time.
There are some very famous people, I'm not going to name them because I might run into
them at some point who are like accused of being sociopaths because they don't blink
very often, but they might just have high levels of autonomic arousal.
They just don't blink very much.
Yeah.
Also depends on how lubricated the eyes are.
So I think within individual, you can get a lot of information.
I don't think we can say this person's blinking a lot.
They're lying.
This person or they're tired.
This person doesn't blink, they're, they're stressed.
I think if you understand that person's baseline, you can get it and presumably while 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 on my data side by the way.
Oh my.
Well, I bet you I will admit to being, you know, first time sitting down there, I mean
Joe was incredibly gracious, made me feel very comfortable there, but yeah, it's an
intense experience.
It's a small space too.
Anytime you enter a small space from a big space in his old studio, is it your familiar
with there's a breaking in period where you're getting to know somebody.
And so I'm sure my levels of autonomic arousal front of the podcast were higher than later.
So, but once you have a baseline established, you can get a lot of data on somebody simply
from blinks.
Some people averting gaze to 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.
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 person scanner, bite bar.
I mean, if you've ever been in one of these scanners, you're like in a bite bar.
It's very medieval.
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?
Yeah.
I mean, my 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 grab-
Well, actually-
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 center than 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 feed.
The final result will switch cameras back and forth, but I have the full feed.
So I can have the blinking for both you and I the whole time.
I bet you people trigger blinks in one another.
And there's also the simplest way to think about the blinks and the attentional thing
and the alertness is two fighters in the standoff.
There's this whole lore around who blinks first.
Yeah.
Who blinks first?
Well, 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.
You should definitely check it out.
It's called the Huberman Lab Podcast.
It embodies the personality of Andrew Huberman, which is like makes science accessible, but
also fascinating and giving it like, what do you call it?
You give tools for everyday life, meaning it kind of grounds it 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 both the rigor and the openness of the whole thing plus the whole corrections
thing as I mentioned.
Anyway, what's been the hardest part of this whole process?
You're one of already one of the only and one of the best science podcasters out there.
So in that process, what's been the hardest, what's been the most exciting part?
Wow.
Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words about the podcast.
It was inspired by you.
I absolutely, that's no BS.
The last time we met to do an interview for your podcast, we talked a little bit about
it and you gave me the subtle nudge that maybe there was a podcast there and I thought about
it and I left and I was just like, I got to do this thing and you really gave me the encouragement
to do it.
Your podcast, this podcast has really forged the way.
You've been tip of the spear on serious scientific, intellectual, yet fun, accessible conversation.
So I, as your colleague and friend, but just even if those things weren't true, this podcast
was and is the inspiration.
There's no question.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, I really, like 100%.
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.
It 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 gems reside and the challenge has been how to make it interesting, how to
keep people on board, how to give people tools along the way, but also stay close to the
scientific data.
I like to think that we're headed in the right direction.
It still needs to evolve, but that's been a challenge.
I think I also am challenged by the fact that there's a tremendous range of backgrounds
of listeners.
So some people have asked for more names, like more bits and parts of the nervous system
and cellular molecular mechanisms and all that kind of thing.
And other people 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 kind of an office hours-like episode every third or fourth episode where I address
common questions.
And I think that the podcast space in my mind, at least for the sort of 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
shifts or cadence 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 and of course there's
also an intentional challenge.
I realize that people are busy, not everyone has two hours to listen to a podcast about
jet lag and shift work and raising kids and sleep and that kind of thing.
I'm not raising kids, but I did a whole thing about babies and sleep with, you know, and
how parents can manage their sleep when kids aren't sleeping.
So it's been, I'm hacking through the jungle of all this stuff, but and I'll come right
back to my inspiration and my North Star on this is getting to a point where the audience
that listens to this feels the same way that I do when I listen to your podcast.
Thank you so much.
Like when I turn into your podcast, I'm going to embarrass you a little bit more by complimenting
you a little bit more, but not out of a sadistic thing, but just because when I tune into your
podcast or Joe's podcast, I have the same sensation that other people have.
Like, I feel like I'm home of sorts.
I'm like, I'm familiar with the space and I'd like people to feel comfortable in the
space that is the Huber and 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, and that's a whole nother level of connection with a human being that gets
you excited.
And then I share your excitement about different topics in neuroscience or just biology in
general.
And then I don't have to actually understand everything you're saying to really enjoy it.
So that's the magical podcasting is like, you can go through like 10 minutes and understanding
what the hell a person is saying, and then you enjoy the excitement and then you reconnect
to a thing that you do understand what they're saying.
And you know, that's the, 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 yet, but maybe you'll
come on as a, I was going to invite my, I was going to try to force myself in there.
I am, I'm officially inviting you now, will you come on the podcast?
I would love to.
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 or five hours and you lose track of time.
I'm still not there.
I find that it's still painful.
Like the conversation is still challenging sometimes.
You don't lose quite as much of track of time.
It's still an intellectual effort.
And I think it might always be as it would be with you because you're talking about difficult
topics, maybe that require more brain.
You're not just shooting the shit with like a Brian Red Band or somebody like comedians
or just joking.
Well, it's like, remember those shows, like where those shows where someone would come
out and like spin plates and they're running back and forth and so 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 from.
And that requires a lot of updating of these, you know, for brain circuits.
It's not, it's not a passive listening experience.
But I like to think that the brain likes that.
I do want to ask just because we all, I don't want to forget the question came up to me.
Is your podcast has the same kind of rigor that I think like a Dan Carlin podcast has
is a history podcaster.
That's definitely a compliment.
Thank you.
Dan's Dan's way, you know, he's something for me to aspire to.
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 bank of lectures.
I have some sources of recorded university seminars.
I'm trying to find the points of intersection.
So like for four episodes on sleep, it's not like I'm going to just regurgitate a popular
book or take one lecture and just, you know, poach the content.
I'm going to find the overlap in the different elements.
I also, so what I'll do is I'll generally read 10 or 15 different papers and generally
those are good reviews, annual reviews, annual review 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 to eliminate, I draw lines between the common points of
intersection and then from that, I distill out and outline.
And then I basically think about what I want to say on my walks with my dog and I bother
a couple of people and blab to them.
So I would say each podcast, yeah, I put in 10 to 15 hours at least of passive listening
preparation and maybe five or six of active preparation.
So I do prepare quite a lot, but it has a certain reward component for me.
To come up at the end with something that's somewhat crystallized for me is just so satisfying.
It feel like there's something about my dopamine circuits that just love that.
And the only pain is that a year later after I've talked about the stuff a bunch of times,
it's so much more succinct.
But that's life.
You know, at some point you got to pull the trigger.
Well, I don't know what you think, but for me, YouTube is, that's why I'm sad that Joe
left YouTube.
There's a archival nature to YouTube that's kind of magical.
And so I'm really glad you're now, you're doing a lot of educational content on Instagram
before, but now doing this podcast thing on YouTube, it's like, you know, it's like Feynman
lectures.
I'm not saying every podcast, but there will be, you will have some, I can already tell,
there'll be some lectures which are like definitive, like really special ones.
And 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 a lecture of yours and, you know, it'll create the next
Nobel Prize, right?
It'll create, it'll create another, you know, a dream that then becomes a reality.
And then that's a, that's a special thing that the YouTube provides.
So I'm really excited that you're on YouTube.
And at the same time, I'm excited to see where this thing goes because it seems like
changes the, the cliche thing, the change is the only constant in these times because
you're paving with this podcast, with this creativity, when 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 to see.
Inspired and genuinely inspired by you.
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 going
to 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 and postdoc
and people who are running labs or working at companies will start to do this.
I mean, how amazing would it be for instance, if someone at Neuralink was giving us hints
about not necessarily what they're developing because that's complicated for all sorts of
reasons, but would talk to us about what the real challenges of building futuristic brain
machine interface are like and what the, what it means to understand a clinical problem
and address it.
I mean, I, my hope is somebody there might eventually do that, that somebody in the world
of chemistry or synthetic materials or whatever it is will do this in a way that I could understand
because I don't have expertise in those.
I think it would be marvelous and you were tip of the spear, you were out first and I'm
just happily trying to move along in the direction I'm going, but 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, some of the best investigative journalism is done
by people inside the field.
Comes to mind a guy by the name of Elon Musk who, who I love the, the possibility that
he gets the Pulitzer for that interview, but he grilled the crap out of Vlad, the CEO of
Robin Hood.
I'm not sure.
Oh, on Clubhouse.
On Clubhouse the other night.
Yeah.
I was in there.
I was kept out.
I wasn't quick enough.
My thumb doesn'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 it in, uh, 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, anyone can speak anytime, right?
But there's this weird dynamic that people stay quiet and only one person speaks at a
time.
Cause they're all like respectful.
It's a 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, 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's
suffering from depression or being suicidal.
So those are the dark things or being super excited, getting a new girlfriend or boyfriend.
Like just the depth of human experience shared on voice without video is, uh, I was really
surprised how intimate that is for human connection, especially in this time of COVID, it replaced
that so that, so that, so just to give you some context, there's something there.
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.
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 still there
are 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 in deeper state.
There's a balance between, I think just like you said, there's the privacy somehow allows
for the intimacy.
So like being able to, as opposed to putting on an act, which I realized we do when we're
visually presenting ourselves in remote communication.
But I think that there's so few places where people can actually communicate without the
fear of penalty that's 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 clubhouse as you to answer your kind of question is there 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 five, 10, 20,
30 people talking and a lot larger amount in the audience, which in discord is a problem
is 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 GameStop discussion?
They currently limit rooms to 5,000.
So I'm sure maxed out of 5,000.
There's a lot of overflow rooms.
This is the cool thing about clubhouse.
Really big people were on there all tuned in and having a conversation, having all,
from all, you know, all these different worlds being able to connect.
Even though without the niceties of like arranging the meeting, you could just show up and leave,
which is nice.
But the reason I'm from my lessons from discord, I'm going to mostly stay away from
clubhouse and I think we're going there under another name.
Right.
I'll pretend I know the actual, your actual name one.
Yeah.
It's, I've learned, it's, it's quite addicting.
It's, it's a time sink.
It's so the intimacy of it is you find yourself wasting quite a bit of time on there.
It pulls you in.
Well, it's interesting, the, which 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.
So now there are some original posts that for which the attribution goes to the original
person and it's clear it came from you, but anything that can be easily reproduced is
doesn't really expand us very much as individuals or, or as groups.
And most of what I see on social media is stuff that is, is purely reproduced.
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 COVID that maybe you can think
about is a 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, that's the kind of thing like live concerts and I definitely, I love live music
and it's the idea that, cause you can always listen to the album.
Actually, the album usually sounds cleaner and better, but it's just this idea that
anything can happen.
And then you listen to like the parts, I don't know, like Costello did something weird, your
dog did something weird, and then you have to go, God damn it, you have to go to the
kitchen or something to get something and then you come back.
And it's funny, I watched 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 and that makes it like a richer experience for some reason.
It's weird.
Well, it humanizes it.
And I think there is this weird effect of whether or not it's a podcast, Instagram or
Twitter or anything else.
There is it's 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 and you know, that's
kind of the format we're in.
I think I'll check out Clubhouse again.
I've gone in there a few times during the day and I was surprised to see how many people
were in there in the middle of the day.
I was like, don't know, aren't these people supposed to be working?
Exactly.
But maybe that is their work.
I'll be very careful about the time sinker of it.
But yeah, if you want to, you and I go together, we'll 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.
And you should just do the, isn't there the leave quietly button?
Yeah, no.
But like when you and I are on stage having a conversation, like, okay, you and I is harder.
But like, you really, if it's just you and I, then it's the usual human communication
of like, all right, I got to go.
But when it's like four people, 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.
The etiquette isn't clear.
The etiquette is not clear.
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.
Twitter seems a bit harsher than Instagram.
Instagram, there's kind of, it seems to be a little nice.
People are really nice.
People are really nice on Instagram for the most part, except for those fishing things.
I actually know someone who had their quite sizable account poached by those copyright.
They come in with those like, you violated copywriting.
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 and is basically saying like, hey, can I hold your wallet and go into
the bank and I'll get some money out for you?
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 you took comments like, you know, you post a lot of comments and you just walk past 500
random people on the street and just listen to what they say, it's like, that's ridiculous.
I don't have time for that.
But the comments somehow take on this importance and this relevance and you feel, we feel obligated
to give them value, right?
And so the online communities, the rules really are different.
And they evolve with time, which is fascinating with Clubhouse, it's a new social network
so it's evolving and people are figuring out as 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?
When you threw out an idea, I'm not going to put it out here now because I don't want
to, because knowing you, you'll hold yourself to it no matter what.
But when we talked about this issue of the challenge of staying on a particular topic
for a while, I mean, you do have some cool stuff brewing in there separate from this
format.
And I love your interview format, but 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, but I will say this, it is super cool.
I would have never thought about it.
It's distinctly different than what I'm doing or what Lex is currently doing.
And if you decide to do that podcast, I will be your first and your number one fan and
I know there are going to be millions of other people interested in that would be amazing.
So if you decide to go forward with the idea, that would be awesome.
I was going to say what it is, but now I'm not going to because that's even more interesting.
I brought up the clubhouse thing actually in Elon because I just wanted to get your
thoughts about something he's said a few times to me and to me 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 podcasts, I enjoy science, but he says that his life is basically hell.
Oh yeah.
It's very difficult.
He looks happy, but he's probably very good at it.
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 a, he can't help it, but do that.
It's kind of beautiful in a kind of Russian masochistic way.
I just wonder the stress.
I mean, I'm sure you can imagine the kind of stress he's under because so it's running
three plus companies and there's constant, like he says that, you know, every single
meeting is, it's not about like, should we install a coffee maker 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 a real like big problems that are,
like how do you, oh yeah, how do you deal with that?
What do you think about that kind of life?
One is there a way to, 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 he worked with long ago, the PayPal days, all of whom
speak very highly of him and show, express immense admiration for the number of things
that he can maintain.
I think it's fair to say that he accomplishes more before 9am 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 it himself, unless there's something I don't know, he's walking around in a biological
system.
He is.
Yes.
Allegedly, yes.
Yeah, allegedly.
And I don't want to reveal too much here, but I have a common 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 Neuralink.
Because I think, I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think 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 10% better capacity
or can focus 5% better for 20% of the day, you're looking at an 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.
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's got kids growing up
and a relationship and all that.
So it's super impressive.
I think that, I don't know how old is Elon?
40, I'm pushing 50, I think 48.
Even more impressive.
Because many people who've been at exceedingly high output for a decade or more don't do
well.
Their system breaks down.
Yes.
Well, this is what he was saying.
He actually, 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 sometimes what I think he said is, I'm worried that at some point
my brain is just going to fail because of the amount of load it's under.
How much I have to think through throughout the day?
How many problems you have to think through?
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 old neck
of his.
And he is just not going to become a retriever.
He's not going to, that he does well and gets his dopamine hits from chewing and pulling.
And it seems like Elon has ended up where he is by way of his natural leanings.
Unless there's a backstory that's trauma-based or something and I don't even begin to think
that there is, it seems that he has, he's one of those rare individuals in history that
has an immense drive to create in all these different domains.
I'm just saying the obvious here, but it seems like that's what makes him tick.
I mean, you're doing an awful lot too.
Well, the problem is not really, the problem is about, I've been on the verge of pulling
the trigger on starting a company which will increase the workload significantly.
And I'm attracted to that because of a dream I have, but it's a little bit scary because
it can destroy you in a lot of ways.
There's two sources of destruction.
So one source is, I've, for the first time in my life, a few months ago, I think, have
gotten, it 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'm such an idiot.
I'm so naive to, it was super, I had the question that I guess a lot of people have when they
get hate on the internet, it's like, mom, why are these people making up stuff about me?
That kind of feeling of like, why are you saying that?
And the reason I mentioned that is like, well, 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.
What does success look like in terms of your emotional journey?
You're going to have a lot of people who make up stuff about you, who say negative things.
I mean, majority hopefully, if you do a good job, will be supportive and, but there's still
going to be this army of people there.
And like that, that was scary to me because of how much emotional impact 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 lighthearted about certain things, but you're even lighthearted about being full
gas pedal 24-7.
There's kind of this, was it Laird Hamilton always says, the big wave surfer, he always
says, bright light, dark shadow, and I think it's that intensity.
And when you do that, and then suddenly people are starting to throw some paint on your picture,
you're going max capacity.
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 out of fear because I enjoy this life.
This is, I'm starting to interrupt, but it's ultimately this question of taking a leap.
He's like, say you're in academia, you're at MIT, I really love doing research at MIT.
I really love that life.
Why take a leap out?
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 it's like, why take a leap?
Because you have a huge lust for life.
Yeah.
It's you.
I mean, sometimes when I'm on the internet, and I think, is this, you hear about like,
oh, it's addicting, 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 think you can do it all.
Yeah.
Maybe not five more things.
But all.
I mean, 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 torture that you're about to get 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 of the most value?
I think we find the answers to those things in those nonverbal, nonanalytic 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.
You have a will, right?
It all goes to the hedgehog.
Exactly.
To the hedgehog.
Now, it all makes sense.
Andrew, like we talked about offline on this podcast, I do hope we write some stuff together,
do some research together.
Absolutely.
You're one of the most inspiring scientists speaking and communicating to the world.
I can't wait to see what you do with the podcast.
I'm already a huge fan.
I've been telling everybody about it.
I can't wait to see you talk to Joe as well soon, and I can't wait to see what kind of
paper we write together.
Thanks so much for talking to me.
Thank you.
That project's going to be a lot of fun.
Can't wait.
Thanks again for having me on.
Appreciate you, brother.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman, and thank you to our
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