Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman,
00:00:02 his second time on the podcast.
00:00:04 He’s a neuroscientist at Stanford,
00:00:06 a world class researcher and educator,
00:00:08 and now he has a new podcast on YouTube
00:00:11 and all the usual places called Huberman Lab
00:00:15 that I can’t recommend highly enough.
00:00:18 Quick mention of our sponsors,
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00:00:24 Magic Spoon Low Carb Cereal,
00:00:26 and BetterHelp Online Therapy.
00:00:28 Click the sponsor links to get a discount.
00:00:31 By the way, Masterclass is testing to see
00:00:34 if they want to support this podcast long term.
00:00:36 So if you’re on the fence, now is the time to sign up.
00:00:40 And I’m pretty sure Andrew will have
00:00:42 a neuroscience masterclass on there soon enough,
00:00:44 though his podcast is basically
00:00:46 a weekly masterclass in itself.
00:00:48 As a side note, let me say that Andrew is a friend
00:00:52 and a new collaborator.
00:00:53 We’re working on a paper together
00:00:55 about a topic we’re both really passionate about.
00:00:58 At the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning.
00:01:01 But that’s probably many months away from being published.
00:01:04 Still, I’m really excited about this work.
00:01:06 He’s one of the smartest and kindest people
00:01:08 I have the pleasure of talking to on this podcast,
00:01:11 so I hope we’ll talk many more times in the future.
00:01:14 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:01:16 review it on our podcast, follow on Spotify,
00:01:19 support it on Patreon, or connect with me
00:01:21 on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
00:01:23 And now, here’s my conversation with Andrew Huberman.
00:01:27 Why do humans need sleep?
00:01:30 Let’s go with a big first question.
00:01:33 Okay, well, the answer I’ll start with
00:01:36 is the one that I always default to
00:01:38 when there’s a why question,
00:01:40 which is I wasn’t consulted at the design phase.
00:01:44 So I wriggle my way out of giving a absolute answer, right?
00:01:50 But there’s one mechanism that’s very clear
00:01:55 that’s super important,
00:01:56 which is that the longer we are awake,
00:01:59 the more adenosine accumulates in our brain.
00:02:04 And adenosine binds to adenosine receptors,
00:02:07 no surprise there,
00:02:08 and it creates the feeling of sleepiness
00:02:12 independent of time of day or night.
00:02:15 So there are two mechanisms.
00:02:17 One is we get sleepy as adenosine accumulates.
00:02:22 The longer we’ve been awake,
00:02:23 the more adenosine has accumulated in our system.
00:02:26 But how sleepy we get for a given amount of adenosine
00:02:31 depends on where we are in this so called circadian cycle.
00:02:34 And the circadian cycle
00:02:35 is just this very, very well conserved oscillation.
00:02:39 It’s a temperature oscillation
00:02:41 where you go from a low point.
00:02:42 Typically, if you’re awake during the day
00:02:44 and you’re asleep at night,
00:02:45 your lowest temperature point will be like 3 a.m., 4 a.m.,
00:02:50 and then your temperature will start to creep up
00:02:52 as you wake up in the morning,
00:02:53 and then it’ll peak in the late afternoon,
00:02:56 and then it’ll start to drop again toward the evening,
00:02:58 and then you get sleep again.
00:02:59 That oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours.
00:03:03 Plus or minus.
00:03:04 Plus your temperature.
00:03:05 Yeah, plus or minus an hour.
00:03:06 And I don’t,
00:03:08 even though I wasn’t consulted at the design phase,
00:03:10 I do not think it’s a coincidence
00:03:12 that it’s aligned to the 24 hour spin of the Earth
00:03:16 on its axis.
00:03:17 The fact that we tend to be bathed in sunlight
00:03:20 for a portion of that spin,
00:03:22 and in darkness for the other portion of that spin.
00:03:24 So there are two mechanisms,
00:03:25 the adenosine accumulation and the circadian time point
00:03:28 that we happen to be at.
00:03:29 And those converge to create a sense
00:03:32 of sleepiness, awakefulness.
00:03:34 The simple way to reveal these two mechanisms,
00:03:37 to uncouple them, is stay up for 24 hours,
00:03:39 and you will find that even though you’ve been,
00:03:42 let’s say you stay up midnight, 2 a.m., 3 a.m.,
00:03:46 provided you’re on a regular schedule,
00:03:48 like that I follow, not like the kind that you follow,
00:03:50 I will get very sleepy around 3, 4 a.m.,
00:03:55 but then around 5 or 6 or 7 a.m.,
00:03:58 which is my normal wake up time,
00:03:59 I’ll start to feel more alert,
00:04:01 even though adenosine has been accumulating further.
00:04:06 So adenosine is higher for me the longer I stay up,
00:04:08 and yet I feel more alert than I did a few hours ago.
00:04:11 And that’s because these are two interacting forces.
00:04:13 So adenosine makes you sleepy,
00:04:15 and then just how sleepy or how awake you feel
00:04:17 also depends on where you are
00:04:19 in this temperature oscillation that takes 24 hours.
00:04:21 Okay, so that’s fascinating.
00:04:22 So there’s a bunch of oscillations going on,
00:04:24 and then they kind of, through the evolutionary process,
00:04:28 have evolved to all be aligned somewhat,
00:04:30 and they interplay.
00:04:31 So you said your body temperature goes up and down.
00:04:35 There’s chemicals in your brain that oscillate,
00:04:40 and then there’s the actual oscillation
00:04:42 of the sun in the sky.
00:04:46 So all of that together has some impact on each other,
00:04:52 and somehow that all results in us
00:04:55 wanting to go to sleep every night.
00:04:57 Right, so, and we can get right into the meat of this,
00:05:00 so I guess we just dove right in,
00:05:01 but the temperature oscillation
00:05:05 is the effector of the circadian clock.
00:05:08 So every cell in our body has a 24 hour rhythm
00:05:10 that’s dictated by genes like clock, purr, BMAL.
00:05:14 This is one of the great successes of biology.
00:05:16 They give a Nobel prize to Rappert,
00:05:18 I don’t know if Rappert got it, forgive me,
00:05:19 but sorry if you got it, Steve, congratulations.
00:05:22 If you didn’t, I’m sorry, I wasn’t on the committee.
00:05:25 Nonetheless, did beautiful work, Steve Rappert and others,
00:05:28 but Mike Roshbosh and other people worked out
00:05:31 these mechanisms in flies and bacteria and mammals.
00:05:34 There are these genes that create 24 hour oscillations
00:05:37 in gene expression, et cetera, in every cell of our body.
00:05:40 But what aligns those is a signal
00:05:43 from the master circadian clock,
00:05:44 which sits right above the roof of the mouth,
00:05:46 called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
00:05:48 And that clock synchronizes all the clocks of the body
00:05:53 to this general temperature rhythm
00:05:55 by way of controlling systemic temperature,
00:05:59 which makes perfect sense.
00:06:00 If you want to create a general oscillation
00:06:02 in all the tissues and organs of the body, use temperature.
00:06:05 And so that work on temperature,
00:06:07 if people want to explore it further,
00:06:08 was Joe Takahashi, who was at Northwestern,
00:06:11 now at UT Southwestern in Dallas.
00:06:14 And it is absolutely clear that humans do better
00:06:18 on a diurnal schedule, sorry, Lex,
00:06:20 than a nocturnal schedule, because you could say,
00:06:23 well, provided I sleep and push adenosine back downhill,
00:06:27 which is what happens when we sleep,
00:06:28 adenosine is then reduced.
00:06:30 And provided I am on more or less a 24 hour schedule,
00:06:33 why should it matter that I’m awake when the sun’s out
00:06:35 and I’m asleep when the sun is down?
00:06:38 But it turns out that if you look at health metrics,
00:06:41 people that are strictly nocturnal do far worse
00:06:46 on immune function, on metabolic function, et cetera,
00:06:49 than people who are diurnal,
00:06:50 who are awake during the daytime.
00:06:51 And animals that are nocturnal, it’s the opposite.
00:06:54 And animals that are so called crepuscular,
00:06:56 which tend to be active at dawn and at dusk,
00:06:59 this is a beautiful system, I won’t go down that rabbit hole,
00:07:02 but these are animals whose visual systems operate best.
00:07:05 They tend to be predators like mountain lions.
00:07:07 They have optimized their waking times
00:07:10 for the times when the animals they eat
00:07:12 can’t see well in those light conditions.
00:07:15 But given the rod cone ratios in their eyes,
00:07:18 that the mountain lion is picking off.
00:07:20 It’s like when you see a special forces
00:07:22 and they are looking through night vision goggles
00:07:24 and they have a clear advantage, right?
00:07:26 They are seeing in the dark.
00:07:28 That’s basically what it’s like to be a mountain lion
00:07:30 as opposed to a bunny rabbit.
00:07:32 Would you say that a lot of these cycles evolved
00:07:35 in the predator prey relationships
00:07:38 of the different throughout the food chain?
00:07:39 So it’s basically all somehow has to do with survival
00:07:43 in this complicated web of predators and prey.
00:07:46 Almost certainly, there had to have been a time
00:07:49 in which humans being awake and active at night,
00:07:52 as opposed to during the day,
00:07:54 led to higher levels of lethality.
00:07:58 And probably particular in kids,
00:08:00 you imagine kids running around in the dark
00:08:01 and getting that where there are a lot of animals
00:08:03 that can see really well under those conditions
00:08:05 and humans can’t.
00:08:06 And this would be all preelectricity.
00:08:08 Even if you’re carrying a torch,
00:08:10 I mean, the range of illumination on a torch
00:08:12 is nothing compared to what a nighttime predator,
00:08:16 like a large cat or something can do.
00:08:19 I mean, they basically, they can see everything they need to
00:08:21 in order to eat us and not the other way around.
00:08:24 So one fascinating thing you said
00:08:26 is that blew my mind and we went right past it,
00:08:30 which is the temperature is a really powerful,
00:08:35 like if you were to think about the ways
00:08:37 that different parts of the body,
00:08:38 different systems in the body
00:08:40 would communicate with each other,
00:08:42 temperature would be a really good one.
00:08:46 And that just, I mean, maybe it’s obvious,
00:08:48 but it kind of blew my mind just now
00:08:51 that yeah, these systems are all distributed.
00:08:55 And they have to kind of,
00:08:58 they’re not actually sending signals,
00:08:59 but they’re coordinating.
00:09:00 They need some sort of universal thing to look at
00:09:05 in order to coordinate.
00:09:06 And temperature is a nice one to build around.
00:09:11 And that way you could control the behavior
00:09:14 of all these different systems
00:09:15 by controlling the temperature.
00:09:17 Right, it’s attractive to think of a mechanism
00:09:20 where this master circadian clock secretes a peptide
00:09:23 or something that goes and locks to receptors
00:09:25 in all the cells and gets it just right.
00:09:27 But that leaves far too much room for variability,
00:09:30 binding affinities, cells in a lot of parts of our body
00:09:33 are at different stages of maturation.
00:09:35 They’re turning over liver cells and so forth.
00:09:37 And for instance, we have a clock in our gut
00:09:40 and in our liver such that if we were just take out
00:09:43 your liver and put it on a table
00:09:45 and just look at the expression of these genes,
00:09:47 it would be in a 24 hour oscillation on its own.
00:09:49 It’s independent, but something has to entrain them
00:09:52 and keep them all synchronized.
00:09:53 And so it’s not obvious that it would be temperature.
00:09:55 Takahashi’s great gift to biology was to show
00:09:58 that all the stuff coming out of this master circadian clock
00:10:03 at the end of the day, that’s a weird statement,
00:10:05 no pun intended, at the end of the day and the night,
00:10:08 at the end of the story, it all boils down to making sure
00:10:13 that the temperature of tissues oscillates
00:10:15 in the same fashion.
00:10:16 That’s blowing my mind and thinking like
00:10:18 what other mechanism could possibly exist
00:10:21 to create that kind of oscillation.
00:10:23 Well, you’re Russian, it’s cold in Russia
00:10:26 for a lot of the year.
00:10:27 The hibernation signal in certain animals
00:10:29 is a remarkable signal.
00:10:30 There are peptides secreted from this very same clock
00:10:34 that in animals like ground squirrels or bears,
00:10:37 they go into a kind of a torpor
00:10:39 where everything, reproduction, metabolism,
00:10:42 everything is reduced while they’re in their cave.
00:10:44 They don’t actually stay asleep all of winter.
00:10:46 That’s a myth.
00:10:47 And they actually do these very dramatic
00:10:50 and periodic arousals from hibernation
00:10:53 where they just shake and shake and shake.
00:10:54 It looks like a seizure.
00:10:55 And then they go back under into the torpor.
00:10:57 That’s from a peptide that’s released.
00:11:00 But that’s different
00:11:01 because that’s about shutting down the whole system.
00:11:03 It’s clear that having these very regular oscillations
00:11:06 every 24 hours is essential for everything
00:11:09 from metabolism to reproduction.
00:11:13 Is there an optimal temperature for sleep
00:11:17 that I should mention?
00:11:19 I think your latest episode,
00:11:22 you and people should go check out
00:11:24 helixsleep.com slash Huberman to support Andrew.
00:11:29 Thanks for the plug.
00:11:30 I mean, the amazing thing about this stuff
00:11:34 that you’re creating,
00:11:34 oh, and yes, you have a new podcast.
00:11:37 That’s amazing.
00:11:37 In this past month, you did a whole series on sleep,
00:11:41 which people should definitely check out.
00:11:44 There’s some podcasts that come out
00:11:47 that just make me want to be a better human being
00:11:51 by just the quality.
00:11:53 Three Blue One Brown, Grant Sanderson is like that for me.
00:11:57 Just like, wow, this is education is best.
00:12:00 So Andrew symbolizes that, captures that brilliantly.
00:12:05 So go support the sponsor
00:12:06 so he doesn’t stop doing the thing.
00:12:09 So I think they have a cooling pad too.
00:12:11 So the 8 Sleep Mattress sponsors me.
00:12:17 They sent me a mattress and it’s been,
00:12:19 I’ve never, listen, I used to sleep on the floor.
00:12:23 Sleep where you fall.
00:12:24 Sleep where I fall.
00:12:25 I don’t give a shit.
00:12:26 It doesn’t really matter.
00:12:27 But so like, I would have never bought a nice mattress
00:12:32 because it’s like, why?
00:12:33 I’m fine.
00:12:33 This is a floor, it’s fine.
00:12:35 But it was a game changer to be able to control temperature.
00:12:40 Like for me, it’s cooling.
00:12:43 I don’t know what the hell it is.
00:12:44 Well, you want the brain and nervous system
00:12:46 and rest of the body needs to drop
00:12:48 by about anywhere from two to three degrees
00:12:50 in order to get into your deepest sleep
00:12:52 and transition to sleep.
00:12:54 That’s really going to help.
00:12:55 You don’t want to be cold that you’re bothered
00:12:57 and can’t fall asleep.
00:12:58 But that’s why some people like it really cold in the room
00:13:00 and under a warm blanket or with socks on,
00:13:02 for some people that can be good
00:13:05 because this temperature oscillation is such
00:13:08 that as your temperature is dropping,
00:13:10 that correlates generally with the most sleepy phase
00:13:13 of your circadian cycle.
00:13:16 So cool is better for falling and staying asleep
00:13:18 and sleeping deeply.
00:13:20 And then I guess like that’s what 8 Sleep showed.
00:13:22 They have like an app is it warms back up to wake you up.
00:13:27 The idea that I haven’t actually used it.
00:13:29 I’m like, this is stupid.
00:13:32 People say it works,
00:13:33 but I just keep it the same temperature throughout the night
00:13:36 but warming it up, I guess wakes you up,
00:13:40 which is fascinating.
00:13:42 Yeah, because the wake up signal is,
00:13:45 it’s interesting to think about it’s not just correlated
00:13:47 with an increase in body temperature.
00:13:49 The increase in body temperature
00:13:50 is triggering the release of cortisol from your adrenals.
00:13:53 And that’s the wake up signal.
00:13:55 Do you think it’s absolute temperatures we’re talking about
00:13:57 or is it just even relative?
00:13:59 Just even just the decrease.
00:14:00 Well, everyone’s gonna have
00:14:01 slightly different basal temperature.
00:14:03 The idea that everybody should be 98.6.
00:14:05 I mean, that’s a myth.
00:14:07 And there are theories that body temperature overall
00:14:09 has been dropping in the last 50 years or so.
00:14:12 I doubt that’s true for somebody who is athletic like you
00:14:15 and is young and healthy.
00:14:17 But basically the coldest period of that 24 hour cycle
00:14:22 is when you are going to be sleepiest.
00:14:24 There’s actually a period within that 24 hour cycle,
00:14:27 it’s a time point called your temperature minimum.
00:14:29 And your temperature minimum tends to be about two hours
00:14:33 before your typical wake up time.
00:14:36 I’m not talking about the wake up time
00:14:37 in the middle of the night where you go use the bathroom
00:14:39 or where you set an alarm to go catch a flight.
00:14:40 I mean, if you were to just allow yourself
00:14:42 to sleep without a clock for a few days,
00:14:44 measure when you typically wake up,
00:14:46 two hours before then is your temperature minimum.
00:14:48 And that temperature minimum turns out to be
00:14:50 a very important landmark in your circadian cycle
00:14:54 because it turns out that if you get bright light
00:14:59 in your eyes in the hours immediately
00:15:02 before your temperature minimum,
00:15:05 so two to four hours or anytime within the two
00:15:09 or four hour window before that temperature minimum,
00:15:11 you are going to what’s called delay your circadian clock.
00:15:14 The next day, that whole oscillation
00:15:16 is going to move forward.
00:15:18 It’ll make you want to go to sleep later and wake up later.
00:15:21 Whereas if you get bright light in your eyes
00:15:22 in the hours after that temperature minimum,
00:15:26 so let’s say for me, typical wake up time is 6 a.m.,
00:15:28 my temperature minimum somewhere around 4 a.m.
00:15:30 If I get bright light in my eyes, 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 7 a.m.,
00:15:34 it’s going to advance that oscillation
00:15:37 so that I’ll want to go to bed earlier
00:15:39 and wake up earlier the subsequent nights.
00:15:41 So you might say, wait, but most nights
00:15:44 I go to sleep and wake up at more or less the same time.
00:15:46 Why is that?
00:15:47 And that’s because the same thing
00:15:48 is happening on both sides.
00:15:49 You are both advancing your clock a little bit
00:15:52 and assuming that you’re looking at light in the evening,
00:15:55 you’re also delaying your clock a little bit.
00:15:57 So you get kind of captured in between
00:15:58 and then your rhythm more or less oscillates
00:16:01 at the same period, as we say, as the spin of the earth.
00:16:05 Unless you’re like you where you’re,
00:16:07 I get text messages from you sometimes at odd hours
00:16:10 and if you’re on the East Coast,
00:16:12 then I know that you had to have been pulling
00:16:14 basically an all nighter.
00:16:15 Yeah, yeah, that’s the interesting point
00:16:18 about the messiness of sleep.
00:16:21 So most people seem to perform the best
00:16:24 when they have like a regular sleep schedule.
00:16:28 I perhaps am the same, but I don’t know that.
00:16:32 And I tend to believe that you can also perform
00:16:36 relatively optimally with chaos of sleep,
00:16:40 of like a weird soup of like power naps
00:16:47 and all nighters and all of that,
00:16:49 as long as you’re like happy doing what you love.
00:16:56 And maybe you can tell me what you think about this.
00:17:01 So I tend to, for myself, try to minimize stress in life.
00:17:06 So what I found for myself with diet,
00:17:10 with sleep is that if I obsess about it being perfect,
00:17:15 then I’ll actually stress quite a bit when it’s not.
00:17:18 Like I’ll feel shitty when I don’t get enough sleep
00:17:24 because I know I should be getting more sleep
00:17:27 as opposed to the actual physiological effects
00:17:30 of not getting enough sleep.
00:17:32 I find if I just accept whatever the hell happens,
00:17:35 happens and smile and just take it all in,
00:17:39 like David Goggins style, like if it sucks,
00:17:42 it’s even better or what is it,
00:17:45 Jocko’s like good or whatever he says.
00:17:47 I think there are several things
00:17:49 that you said that are important,
00:17:51 but I agree that one can have a dysregulated sleep schedule
00:17:55 and still be a happy person and productive.
00:17:58 Much of my life, I’ve pulled all nighters
00:18:00 and slept weird schedules.
00:18:03 I think many people can probably relate to going to sleep,
00:18:06 waking up four hours later, being up for an hour or two
00:18:08 on your computer, then going back to sleep
00:18:10 and getting amazing sleep the next day functioning.
00:18:12 I think it’s important that people have highlighted
00:18:17 the importance of sleep and getting enough rest.
00:18:20 I do think it’s gone too far
00:18:22 and now I’m editorializing a little bit,
00:18:24 but I think that we’ve created this anxiety about sleep
00:18:28 that if we don’t sleep enough, we’re going to get dementia.
00:18:30 If we don’t get sleep,
00:18:31 then the reproductive access is going to completely crash.
00:18:36 There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary and as well,
00:18:40 just based on personal experience
00:18:42 and based on the fact that sure,
00:18:44 it may be that a solid eight hours
00:18:46 with no interruptions in there or nine or 10
00:18:50 could do great benefit,
00:18:51 but you can do really well if you do what you say,
00:18:54 which is you wake up,
00:18:55 you don’t want to start stressing about it,
00:18:57 creating this meta stress about sleep.
00:19:00 Being happy is actually one of the most powerful things
00:19:04 that you can do,
00:19:05 allowing yourself to go down that rabbit hole of stress
00:19:07 for the following reason.
00:19:10 A lot of our fatigue is not due just to the buildup
00:19:13 of adenosine or time of day,
00:19:14 the circadian thing we were talking about earlier.
00:19:16 An additional factor is that effort is related
00:19:21 to the release of epinephrine,
00:19:22 of adrenaline in our brain and body.
00:19:25 At some point, those levels get so high
00:19:28 that we get stressed mentally,
00:19:32 we get stressed physically and we want to give up.
00:19:34 There are good data published in Cell
00:19:36 showing that that signal, the epinephrine signal,
00:19:39 eventually accumulates and there’s a quit point.
00:19:42 Dopamine, the molecule of pursuit and reward
00:19:45 and feeling good, resets our ability to be in effort.
00:19:49 In fact, a lot of people don’t know this,
00:19:52 but dopamine is actually what epinephrine is made from.
00:19:56 If you look at the biochemical cascade,
00:19:58 it starts with tyrosine,
00:19:59 which is found in red meats and things of that sort.
00:20:03 And tyrosine is eventually converted
00:20:05 through things like L dopa into dopamine.
00:20:07 Dopamine is made into epinephrine.
00:20:09 So, I mean, this sounds kind of new agey,
00:20:11 but happiness, joy and pleasure in what you’re doing
00:20:16 creates a chemical milieu that provides more
00:20:20 of the chemicals that allow for effort.
00:20:22 And there’s nothing new agey about that.
00:20:24 It’s in every biochemistry textbook.
00:20:26 It’s in every decent neuroscience textbook.
00:20:28 They just don’t talk about the happiness part.
00:20:29 They just talk about the dopamine part.
00:20:31 So, I think that limiting your stress
00:20:33 and at least recognizing, okay,
00:20:35 if you’re pulling an all nighter
00:20:36 or you’re somehow on messed up sleep,
00:20:39 that there is going to be a point in that 24 hour cycle
00:20:43 where your brain is not trustworthy,
00:20:46 where your mental state is not worth placing too much weight
00:20:50 on because you are near that temperature minimum.
00:20:53 And near that temperature minimum,
00:20:54 which is correlates to that two hour,
00:20:57 about two hours before you would normally wake up,
00:21:00 the brain is hobbling along.
00:21:03 And anything you feel or think at that time
00:21:06 should not be given too much value.
00:21:09 But if you can trick yourself into thinking
00:21:11 that’s the pleasure point,
00:21:13 you afford yourself a huge advantage.
00:21:15 There’s a study done by a colleague of mine at Stanford
00:21:17 that showed that positive anticipation
00:21:20 about the next day events actually is a powerful metric
00:21:26 for creating quality sleep,
00:21:29 even if the sleep is very reduced.
00:21:31 And you’ll love this one.
00:21:32 And a lot of people are going to,
00:21:35 might be critical of this.
00:21:36 So, I just want to make sure that,
00:21:36 so this is work done out of Harvard Medical.
00:21:40 It was Bob Stickgold’s lab
00:21:42 and Emily Hoagland did this study that showed
00:21:45 looking at Ochem, performance on Ochem scores.
00:21:48 Okay, so organic chemistry at Harvard
00:21:50 is pretty tough subject, highly motivated,
00:21:52 a number of very good control groups in this study.
00:21:55 What she showed was that consistency of total sleep duration
00:22:00 was far more important for performance on these exams
00:22:04 than total sleep duration itself.
00:22:06 So it’s not that just getting more sleep
00:22:08 allows you to perform better.
00:22:10 Consistently getting about the same amount of sleep
00:22:13 is better for performance, at least on Ochem,
00:22:17 than just getting more.
00:22:19 That’s interesting.
00:22:20 So that’s referring to more
00:22:22 that there should be a consistent habit
00:22:25 versus the total amount.
00:22:27 To me, like the entirety of the picture of sleep
00:22:31 is similar to nutrition in that it feels like it’s,
00:22:38 there’s so many variables involved
00:22:40 and it’s so person specific.
00:22:42 So, you know, a lot of studies,
00:22:44 I mean, this is the way of science,
00:22:45 has to look in aggregate the effects on sleep.
00:22:49 It doesn’t focus on high performers
00:22:52 which are individuals ultimately.
00:22:54 Like the question isn’t,
00:22:57 so it’s a very important question,
00:22:59 is like what kind of diet fights obesity, reduces obesity?
00:23:04 It’s another question,
00:23:05 what kind of diet allows David Goggins
00:23:07 to be the best version of himself?
00:23:09 So these high performers in different avenues.
00:23:11 And the same thing with sleep,
00:23:13 like people that tell me
00:23:15 that I should get eight hours of sleep,
00:23:18 it’s like, it’s, I mean, I get it
00:23:23 and there may be right, but they may be very wrong.
00:23:26 There’s no evidence that eight is better than six,
00:23:29 that you could very well do better on six than on eight.
00:23:33 There are a few other things that turn out to be
00:23:36 strong parameters for success in this domain.
00:23:38 For instance, your entire life, waking or asleep
00:23:42 is broken up into these 90 minute ultradian cycles.
00:23:44 If you look at ability to attend or do math problems
00:23:47 or do anything, you know, drive,
00:23:50 performance tends to ramp up slowly within a 90 minute cycle
00:23:54 peak and then come down at the end of that 90 minute cycle.
00:23:56 And in sleep, we go through these stage one, two, three,
00:23:59 four REM, et cetera, we’ll talk more about that if you like,
00:24:02 those on 90 minute ultradian cycles as well.
00:24:05 Ending your sleep after a 90 minute cycle
00:24:07 at the near the end of a 90 minute cycle,
00:24:10 say at the end of six hours,
00:24:12 in many cases is better for you
00:24:14 than sleeping an additional hour, seven hours
00:24:17 and waking up in the middle of an ultradian cycle.
00:24:19 And there are a few apps that can measure this
00:24:21 based on body movements and things like that,
00:24:23 that have your alarm go off
00:24:25 at the end of an ultradian cycle.
00:24:27 And if you wake up in the middle of an ultradian cycle,
00:24:30 sometimes not always you can be very groggy
00:24:32 for a long period of time.
00:24:34 I certainly do better on six hours than I do on seven.
00:24:37 I happen to like an eight hour sleep, it feels great,
00:24:40 but I haven’t slept an entire eight hours
00:24:43 without waking up in the middle of the night at some point
00:24:45 in, I don’t know, forever.
00:24:48 I can’t remember, it’s probably some point in infancy.
00:24:51 And I function well during the day.
00:24:53 I think that that’s an important parameter
00:24:57 is how do you feel during the day?
00:24:58 Almost everybody experiences some sort of dip in energy
00:25:02 in the late afternoon
00:25:03 or what would correlate to their temperature peak.
00:25:05 And that’s a good time of day
00:25:06 to get either a 90 minute or less nap,
00:25:10 or if you’re not a napper or you can’t nap,
00:25:13 feet elevated has been shown to be good for clear out
00:25:19 of some of this, the glymphatic system
00:25:22 is this kind of like sewer system of the brain
00:25:23 that you can clear stuff out.
00:25:24 So legs elevated, or one thing that I’m a big proponent of
00:25:29 and that my lab has been studying
00:25:30 is what I now call NSDR, non sleep deep rest.
00:25:34 And this is just lying down.
00:25:36 There are some scripts that we’re gonna put out there soon
00:25:38 as a free resource.
00:25:40 There’s some hypnosis scripts
00:25:41 that my colleague David Spiegel has put out there
00:25:42 as a free resource,
00:25:44 but non sleep deep rest is allowing your system
00:25:46 to drop into states of a real calm
00:25:49 that allow you to get better at falling asleep later.
00:25:52 And they can be very restorative
00:25:53 for cognitive and motor function.
00:25:55 There’s at least one study out of Denmark
00:25:58 that shows that the basal ganglia,
00:26:01 which is an area of the brain
00:26:02 that’s involved in motor planning and action,
00:26:04 one of these 20 minute non sleep deep rest protocols
00:26:07 resets levels of neuromodulators
00:26:09 like dopamine and the basal ganglia
00:26:10 to the same levels that they were
00:26:13 right after a long night’s sleep.
00:26:15 So I also respectfully or semi respectfully disagree
00:26:20 with the idea that you can’t recover lost sleep.
00:26:23 What does that mean?
00:26:24 I mean, there’s no IRS for sleep.
00:26:26 So what does it mean to be in debt for sleep?
00:26:29 If you’re falling asleep during the day and you’re sleepy,
00:26:31 like you’re falling asleep, that’s a good sign of insomnia.
00:26:35 It means you’re not sleeping enough at night.
00:26:37 If you’re fatigued during the day,
00:26:38 but you’re not falling asleep,
00:26:40 so you’re just exhausted,
00:26:41 but you’re not finding yourself falling asleep in meetings
00:26:43 and in conversation,
00:26:45 then chances are you’re fatiguing your system
00:26:47 through something else,
00:26:48 like a long run in the middle of the night in Austin
00:26:52 or whatever it is that you’re up to lately at 3 a.m.
00:26:55 Yes, there is a magic to the nap.
00:26:58 And maybe you could speak to the,
00:27:01 because you mentioned these protocols
00:27:03 that don’t necessarily, so they’re non sleep.
00:27:06 But to me, the nap one or two a day
00:27:13 can almost irrespective of how much sleep
00:27:16 I get the night before,
00:27:18 have a fundamental change in my mood, in my performance.
00:27:22 For the better or for the worse?
00:27:23 For the better, for the better.
00:27:24 Yeah, likewise.
00:27:24 So I do tend to kind of experiment with durations.
00:27:29 It’s consistently surprising to me
00:27:33 how like a nap of like 10 minutes,
00:27:36 I don’t know, maybe you can speak
00:27:37 to the perfect duration of a nap,
00:27:39 but I find that it’s like magic
00:27:43 that a short nap does as much good
00:27:46 and often better than a longer one, for me, for me,
00:27:50 subjectively speaking.
00:27:51 What would be a longer one?
00:27:51 Longer than 90 minutes?
00:27:53 No, no, like 90 minutes,
00:27:54 or a bit longer than 90 minutes, like two hours.
00:27:57 Yeah, that’s starting to drop you into REM sleep.
00:27:59 And even if it’s a tiny amount of REM sleep,
00:28:01 people can come out of those naps kind of disoriented.
00:28:04 I mean, remember, in sleep, space and time
00:28:07 are totally uncoupled.
00:28:08 And so that’s an odd state to reenter the world in
00:28:12 if you’re not gonna stay there for a while,
00:28:13 like for a good night’s sleep.
00:28:15 I think a 20 minute nap is pretty fantastic.
00:28:18 Would you say that’s the,
00:28:19 if you were to recommend to the general,
00:28:21 it’s very weird to recommend anything
00:28:24 to the general populace,
00:28:25 because obviously it’s very person specific,
00:28:28 but what’s a good one will you say to friends?
00:28:31 Is 20 minutes a good powder?
00:28:32 20 or 30 minutes.
00:28:34 20 or 30 minutes,
00:28:34 because you’re going, unless you’re sleep deprived,
00:28:37 you’re going to stay out of REM sleep,
00:28:40 rapid eye movement sleep.
00:28:41 If you’re sleep deprived, you’ll drop right into it.
00:28:43 If you’ve ever traveled and you’re really jet lagged,
00:28:45 you go to the hotel, you lay down for one second,
00:28:46 all of a sudden you’re just like,
00:28:48 you’re in a psychedelic dream,
00:28:52 which can be pretty great too.
00:28:55 But I think that 20, 30 minutes,
00:28:58 and if you can’t sleep, some people have trouble napping,
00:29:01 then learning to relax the body
00:29:03 as much as possible,
00:29:04 like trying to remove all expression from your face,
00:29:07 completely letting your body kind of float.
00:29:10 If people have a hard time relaxing when they’re awake,
00:29:13 there’s some terrific clinically
00:29:15 and research tested hypnosis protocols
00:29:18 that we could provide links to that are cost free
00:29:21 and that teach you how to just completely
00:29:24 release the alertness button and you just start drifting.
00:29:28 Now, the problem is if you don’t have an alarm
00:29:31 or something to go off,
00:29:32 the other day I did one
00:29:34 and I’m almost embarrassed to say this,
00:29:35 but there’s a component of it
00:29:36 where you actually are supposed to let your hand float up
00:29:38 because it’s a hypnosis script.
00:29:40 So they, it’s my colleague, David Spiegel in the script,
00:29:43 he says, let your hand float up.
00:29:46 I woke up an hour later and my hand was still floating.
00:29:49 Yeah, and I was completely relaxed.
00:29:52 So hypnosis is just a matter of going deep relaxation,
00:29:56 narrowing of context, and it’s all self imposed.
00:29:59 A lot of people think that hypnosis is like the stage thing
00:30:01 with the pendant and the chicken,
00:30:03 people fucking like chickens,
00:30:05 but real hypnosis is self hypnosis.
00:30:08 You’re learning to, it involves some shifts
00:30:11 in the way that you, the hypnotic induction involves
00:30:14 looking up, closing your eyes, slowly deep breath,
00:30:16 and then imagine yourself floating.
00:30:19 And people vary on a scale of about one to four,
00:30:23 four being the most easily hypnotized.
00:30:25 There are a few people who it’s very hard for them
00:30:27 to allow themselves to go into these states,
00:30:29 but for most people, they just, they’re gone.
00:30:33 And it’s nice if you can have access to those states,
00:30:36 because when you come out of it, you feel amazing.
00:30:39 You feel like you slept the whole night,
00:30:40 at least most people report that.
00:30:42 So refresh, alert.
00:30:43 Ready to go.
00:30:44 I mean, basically you’re ready.
00:30:46 Yeah, I know you have this interesting challenge coming up
00:30:49 and I’m curious what you’re going to do to reset
00:30:51 in the hours, the frequency of running is every four hours.
00:30:55 It’s not going to allow you to get any more
00:30:57 than a couple hours sleep in between.
00:30:59 Couple hours.
00:31:00 So we should tell it to people.
00:31:01 I’d be curious to get your thoughts and advice on it.
00:31:03 I’m on March 5th, running 48 miles with Mr. David Goggins.
00:31:10 So four miles every four hours and people should join us.
00:31:14 He’s, that mad man is going to be live on Instagram
00:31:19 starting at 8 p.m. Pacific on March 5th.
00:31:23 So.
00:31:24 You’re going to join him in person.
00:31:25 In person.
00:31:26 Undisclosed location.
00:31:27 Undisclosed location.
00:31:28 And I was trying to clarify like, okay,
00:31:31 so we’re going to like, there’ll be like friendly people
00:31:35 around or something.
00:31:36 No, it’s just me and him.
00:31:37 Friendly people.
00:31:38 I don’t know.
00:31:39 Like, I just feel it’s very difficult to be
00:31:42 with David alone in a room.
00:31:45 I imagine his, I mean, I’ve done some work with David.
00:31:47 His energy is infectious.
00:31:49 Yeah.
00:31:50 That’s an intense schedule.
00:31:53 And the periodicity of those four hour,
00:31:56 every four hours, four miles means
00:31:58 that there’s no chance of catching
00:31:59 an extended block of sleep.
00:32:01 So it’s about three hours that you have
00:32:04 non exercising every time.
00:32:05 And of course, it takes time to try to fall asleep
00:32:09 and there’s an intensity to the whole thing.
00:32:11 I mean, it’s probably impossible to get anything more
00:32:17 than two hours of sleep if you wanted to.
00:32:19 So the optimal thing is probably from the sound of it,
00:32:23 I’d be curious to see what you think,
00:32:25 but like it’s getting a few 90 minute naps.
00:32:29 Okay, well, I thought about this a bit
00:32:31 before we met up today.
00:32:33 So I think there are two general approaches
00:32:35 that could work.
00:32:37 Neither one necessarily better than the other.
00:32:40 One would be just to hammer through the whole thing,
00:32:44 just to get your level of alertness and adrenaline ramped up
00:32:49 so that you don’t expect yourself to sleep.
00:32:52 There are certain advantages there.
00:32:53 One is a subjective kind of emotional advantages,
00:32:56 which is if you can’t sleep,
00:32:57 you’re not gonna be stressed about that.
00:32:59 And if you do fall asleep, it’s a bonus,
00:33:01 provided you wake up and you don’t look up
00:33:03 and you realize David’s been out running for half an hour
00:33:06 and you’re behind, right?
00:33:07 But chances are, that’s not the way it’ll go.
00:33:09 You set an alarm.
00:33:09 So that’s one approach.
00:33:12 And I grabbed that from a couple of friends
00:33:15 who were in the SEAL teams and they’ll say that,
00:33:18 during BUDS, there’s this infamous hell week
00:33:20 and there’s this five days,
00:33:23 definitely five days of no sleep,
00:33:25 although there is a component where they offer a nap
00:33:27 at one particular point.
00:33:29 And a lot of people will say that it’s worse
00:33:32 to go down for that nap and then be woken up 20 minutes later
00:33:36 than to just stay up.
00:33:38 So that’s one option.
00:33:39 Let’s call it the full blitz hammer through option.
00:33:43 And if you happen to fall asleep, you do.
00:33:45 It’s a bonus.
00:33:46 The other one would be to really anchor
00:33:49 in these ultradian cycles.
00:33:51 So coming back from a run,
00:33:52 unless you’re thoroughly exhausted,
00:33:55 you’re probably going to have a few minutes
00:33:56 where you’re going to want to stay awake.
00:33:58 It’s going to be hard to just immediately fall asleep.
00:34:01 And getting as much sleep as you can
00:34:04 in the intervening periods,
00:34:06 provided that you guys aren’t posting constantly
00:34:08 or doing something else.
00:34:10 There’s a question of whether or not you want to nourish,
00:34:11 whether or not you want to eat or not in that time.
00:34:14 Anytime we put food in our gut,
00:34:16 I don’t care if it’s meat or oatmeal
00:34:20 or broccoli or cardboard,
00:34:22 you’re drawing blood into the gut.
00:34:24 And so you are going to divert some energy
00:34:27 towards digestion and it’s going to make you sleepy.
00:34:29 There’s a reason why the rest and digest,
00:34:31 the parasympathetic nervous system is called that.
00:34:33 So you could decide that you were only going to sleep
00:34:36 in between certain blocks.
00:34:39 That would be another way to think about this.
00:34:42 Because I did this last year.
00:34:45 I ran very slow.
00:34:47 Some of it was walking.
00:34:48 I was listening to audio books.
00:34:49 And one of the biggest mistakes I did is to overeat
00:34:53 during that time.
00:34:54 It made the experience very unpleasant.
00:34:56 So I have been considering basically eating almost nothing
00:35:00 throughout the day.
00:35:01 Being fasted will increase alertness
00:35:03 because high levels of epinephrine in your system
00:35:05 from fasting.
00:35:07 You just think about fasting or being thirsty
00:35:09 before you get exhausted.
00:35:10 People always think if I don’t eat, I’m going to be tired.
00:35:12 No, the energy that you derive from food
00:35:15 is going to be used from glycogen after a long storage
00:35:19 and conversion process.
00:35:20 So the food that you eat is going to consume energy
00:35:23 to digest.
00:35:24 And so a lot of people feel better fasted.
00:35:26 And presumably throughout history,
00:35:29 people have fasted for long periods of time
00:35:31 and had to stay up for two or three days.
00:35:32 And God forbid, if a family member is sick,
00:35:35 you can stay awake in the hospital without any trouble.
00:35:38 So that alertness system, it’s all mental.
00:35:42 Actually, and then there’s a third.
00:35:45 So you could try and sleep or take care in between.
00:35:48 And then there’s a third approach.
00:35:51 But I didn’t come up with it, but David did.
00:35:54 So I actually texted him earlier
00:35:57 because I had a feeling that I heard
00:35:58 that you were going to do this challenge.
00:36:01 So I asked David.
00:36:05 So these are David Goggins words, not mine.
00:36:09 One, being organized is super important.
00:36:14 Two, you want to waste as little time as possible.
00:36:17 Three, you need to eat, sleep and rehab
00:36:21 in as little time as possible
00:36:22 so you can sleep as much as possible.
00:36:25 Interesting.
00:36:26 By the way, this is the first time I’m reading this.
00:36:28 Four, meal prep and gear prep, et cetera, are very important.
00:36:32 That’s consistent with everything I know about military.
00:36:36 They don’t leave too much to chance.
00:36:39 Five, again, these are David’s words.
00:36:42 All that said, he’s fucked on most all that
00:36:45 because he’ll be interviewing me before or after.
00:36:47 I will also be interviewing him.
00:36:49 Oh, shit.
00:36:51 Five, long story short,
00:36:53 the only thing that might help is a very special pill.
00:36:55 Ooh, this is interesting.
00:36:57 They’re called SIU pills.
00:36:59 Hard to get, but I believe he can get them.
00:37:02 SIU stands for suck it up.
00:37:06 Tell him to grab his balls.
00:37:07 He will find those pills there.
00:37:09 That’s number six, all right.
00:37:13 And then the last one, stay hard, brother.
00:37:15 Stay hard, brother.
00:37:17 Amen.
00:37:19 That was one of the other things
00:37:21 that I think makes this challenging
00:37:22 is that it’ll be doing a podcast throughout.
00:37:25 So first of all, I’ll do a long one before and after,
00:37:28 but also I’ll have to come up
00:37:31 with things to talk to him about.
00:37:34 So it’s a different thing to do something privately
00:37:40 and then publicly.
00:37:41 I know it doesn’t seem that way,
00:37:43 but one of the hardest,
00:37:46 the hardest thing I had to do last time
00:37:49 was to turn on the camera and talk to the camera
00:37:52 because last time I did it,
00:37:54 I recorded every single time I did a leg,
00:37:57 I recorded something I’m grateful for.
00:38:00 It’s just kind of unrelated.
00:38:01 I’m not a fan of talking about how I’m feeling
00:38:05 or how the run is going.
00:38:06 I want to do something totally unrelated to the run
00:38:10 and with the run as the background,
00:38:12 sort of something I’m grateful for
00:38:14 or just any kind of interesting discussion.
00:38:16 Gratitude, I mean, I hate the word hack,
00:38:20 like, oh, it’s a dopamine hack or it’s a serotonin.
00:38:22 I don’t like the word hack because A,
00:38:24 it’s disrespectful to hackers who do a real thing
00:38:27 and B, a hack implies that it’s some sort of trick
00:38:31 that you’re kind of gaming the system.
00:38:35 You know, what works is mechanism, right?
00:38:38 Biological mechanisms were designed to work
00:38:41 and they were selected for to work
00:38:44 under variable conditions.
00:38:45 And as you know, and I know,
00:38:47 and we have great appreciation for the fact
00:38:49 that the nervous system was designed
00:38:50 to be an adaptive machine
00:38:52 so that you don’t have to sleep eight hours every night.
00:38:55 You can do this thing.
00:38:57 And things like gratitude allow you to tap
00:39:00 into chemical resources.
00:39:03 And that’s not a hack.
00:39:04 The fact that being grateful for something external
00:39:07 to the event happens to release serotonin
00:39:10 and have a certain soothing effect or a dopamine
00:39:13 and give you more epinephrine and let you go further,
00:39:16 that’s not a hack.
00:39:18 That’s actually what allowed the human machine
00:39:21 to evolve to the point that it is now.
00:39:23 Every time, you know, an inventor eventually
00:39:26 created something that worked and felt great about it,
00:39:28 you can imagine that the first, you know,
00:39:31 air flight felt pretty awesome
00:39:33 and motivated those people to go on and do more.
00:39:35 They didn’t just go on, you know, yawn and go have a beer.
00:39:39 So being able to access the genuine internal states
00:39:44 of gratitude and reward works.
00:39:46 You can’t trick the system.
00:39:48 You can’t pretend that you’re grateful for something,
00:39:50 but if you can identify or attach yourself
00:39:52 to some larger goal or something
00:39:55 that’s deeply gratifying to you,
00:39:57 or place it in service to a relative that passed away
00:40:00 that you care a lot about, that’s not a hack.
00:40:04 That’s accessing the deepest components
00:40:07 of your nervous system.
00:40:08 And to steal your kind of lingo,
00:40:10 you know, there’s real beauty there, right?
00:40:12 Yeah, but for an introvert like myself,
00:40:15 and I think David, I don’t know if he’s an introvert,
00:40:17 but like, he’s not, despite the fact
00:40:21 that he has written a great book and he communicates,
00:40:24 he puts himself out there,
00:40:25 he’s not really a fan of communication.
00:40:28 He’s not, I don’t know if he’s energized
00:40:31 by speaking his mind.
00:40:33 I don’t know him well enough to know.
00:40:34 I mean, we’ve done a little bit of work together
00:40:36 and, you know, we’re in communication now and again.
00:40:38 He’s obviously super impressive.
00:40:41 I don’t know.
00:40:42 It seems like he’s a pretty private guy.
00:40:44 Yeah, so like, you know, so I don’t have access to that.
00:40:47 So for me, I’ll just speak to myself,
00:40:50 and I think David is the same,
00:40:51 but I’ll speak to myself that it was a hugely draining thing,
00:40:55 not to experience the gratitude,
00:40:57 experiencing the gratitude just like you’re saying
00:41:00 is really energizing, and it’s a powerful thing.
00:41:04 It’s a, it can lift up your mood.
00:41:08 But to turn on the camera and have to use words,
00:41:12 which is very difficult to do,
00:41:14 to explain like what you’re feeling
00:41:18 and do it in a way that you know
00:41:20 a bunch of people will be watching is really draining.
00:41:23 And one of the things I’m concerned about
00:41:26 that in this whole process,
00:41:29 how do I keep my mind sharp
00:41:32 while also keeping the physical performance sharp?
00:41:35 And that’s a little bit scary
00:41:38 because talking to David like actual intellectually sharp,
00:41:42 like thinking, being charismatic as much as I can be,
00:41:47 and like being so maintaining a sense of humor too,
00:41:51 because I can be, I become with sleep deprivation,
00:41:54 with exhaustion, you start being.
00:41:56 The Russian bear comes out.
00:41:58 You start being such a,
00:41:59 like I become a David Goggins essentially like.
00:42:03 Oh, it makes you irritable.
00:42:04 Sleep deprivation makes us irritable.
00:42:06 Yeah.
00:42:07 It’s clear so that in the early part of the night,
00:42:09 we get a higher percentage of those old Tradian cycles
00:42:12 are occupied by slow wave sleep,
00:42:15 sometimes just called non REM sleep.
00:42:17 And those early night sleep bouts
00:42:21 are great for muscular repair
00:42:23 and for certain forms of learning,
00:42:25 but REM sleep, the rapid eye movement sleep,
00:42:27 which it starts to accumulate
00:42:29 and occupy more of those 90 minute old Tradian cycles
00:42:32 toward the late part of a sleep bout.
00:42:34 So typically toward morning,
00:42:37 but toward after you’ve been asleep a while,
00:42:40 that’s when you do the emotional processing.
00:42:42 That’s when we recover the ability to feel refreshed
00:42:47 and not irritated by things.
00:42:48 And if you deprive people of REM sleep,
00:42:50 they become selectively bad at uncoupling the emotion
00:42:56 from things that happened in the previous days.
00:42:58 So the little things start to seem like big things.
00:43:00 I always know I’m REM sleep deprived when I’m irritable.
00:43:05 And when I look at like the word the,
00:43:07 and it doesn’t look like it’s spelled right.
00:43:09 And I’m kind of pissed off about it.
00:43:10 Like something’s off.
00:43:11 And we actually are becoming slightly psychotic
00:43:15 when we’re REM sleep deprived.
00:43:16 You’re not going to get a lot of REM sleep in this thing,
00:43:18 except as you fatigue more,
00:43:20 if you do fall asleep,
00:43:21 you’re going to drop more and more into REM
00:43:22 so that those 90 minute cycles,
00:43:24 you won’t have to go through stage one,
00:43:26 stage two, stage three, and then REM,
00:43:27 you’re just going to drop right into REM.
00:43:30 So you can count on your system to compensate for you.
00:43:33 But I think that just the knowledge
00:43:35 that you tend to get irritable as the time goes on,
00:43:38 just that third personing of yourself,
00:43:40 that awareness, the observer,
00:43:42 that can be very beneficial
00:43:43 because there may be bouts during this event
00:43:46 when you just should probably say nothing.
00:43:49 And maybe you just, I don’t know,
00:43:51 smile and record or not smile or do whatever it is
00:43:55 because you’re going to be conserving energy.
00:43:57 If it feels like a grind,
00:43:58 that’s epinephrine being released.
00:44:00 That’s epinephrine that you could devote
00:44:02 to the physical effort.
00:44:04 But humor is an amazing anecdote for this
00:44:06 because it resets that,
00:44:09 it’s that dopamine release
00:44:10 that gives us that fresh perspective.
00:44:13 And it’s a real chemical thing.
00:44:15 It’s not a hack.
00:44:17 It’s not a trick.
00:44:18 It’s not a visualization.
00:44:20 It’s biology in action.
00:44:22 Well, but I think the act of interviewing,
00:44:28 of conversation in these processes,
00:44:29 even if you don’t want to do it,
00:44:32 the right thing to do, even when you’re feeling irritable,
00:44:35 is to do the third person view
00:44:39 and be able to express with words
00:44:41 that you’re feeling irritable.
00:44:42 Like express what you’re going through.
00:44:45 Use words, which I hate doing.
00:44:48 I honestly, I think my ultimate thing
00:44:50 would be just to never say a single word to David Gagas
00:44:53 and just go through hell.
00:44:55 It doesn’t matter what we do,
00:44:57 but to do it quietly, to also express it.
00:45:00 That’s my ultimate hell.
00:45:01 And I think that’s…
00:45:02 Well, he’s definitely going to be,
00:45:03 if I know David at all,
00:45:04 he’s going to try and find your buttons.
00:45:06 Like he’s going to, I mean,
00:45:08 even though he knows he can complete this,
00:45:10 and I believe that he trusts that you can complete it too,
00:45:13 I believe you will complete it.
00:45:15 You know you will complete it, right.
00:45:17 There’s no question about that.
00:45:18 But he’s not going to make it easier for you.
00:45:20 He’s going to make it harder.
00:45:21 Well, I’m afraid.
00:45:22 So I’m like, it’s very difficult for me.
00:45:25 So 48 miles is not easy.
00:45:26 I have not been training that much.
00:45:28 So I’m not ramping up,
00:45:30 but it’s not like going to kill me.
00:45:34 We’ll see what happens.
00:45:34 Of course, for him, he might always get bored
00:45:37 because I think the 48 miles for him is easy.
00:45:40 I think…
00:45:41 I don’t know that that ever gets easy.
00:45:45 I have a friend, Casey Cordial, who works with David.
00:45:48 He does some physical rehab type stuff with him.
00:45:53 And he took Casey on a 50 miler
00:45:55 and Casey said it’s like 16 miles and do it.
00:45:57 He was just like, he had hit his wall,
00:46:00 but he found it.
00:46:02 They find it to get, you know, you find that portal.
00:46:06 There is one thing I want to mention.
00:46:07 There’s some very good physiology
00:46:10 that can perhaps support the actual running effort part.
00:46:12 These are very new data.
00:46:14 We have a study going on with David Spiegel at Stanford,
00:46:17 looking at how different patterns of breathing
00:46:19 can affect heart rate variability.
00:46:21 Heart rate variability is good.
00:46:23 There’s this interesting mechanism
00:46:25 that I think most people might not realize,
00:46:27 but that medical students learn that your breathing
00:46:29 and your heart rate and your brain
00:46:31 are in this really remarkable interplay.
00:46:33 It goes like this.
00:46:34 When you inhale, this isn’t breath work.
00:46:36 We’re not going to do breath work.
00:46:37 But when you inhale, the diaphragm moves down.
00:46:42 The heart gets a little bigger
00:46:43 because there’s a little more space in the thoracic cavity.
00:46:45 And as a consequence, blood flows a little bit more slowly
00:46:49 through that larger volume.
00:46:50 And there’s a category of neurons, the sinonitrile node,
00:46:53 that sees that, that recognizes that slower rate
00:46:58 through that larger volume.
00:46:59 It sends a signal to the brainstem
00:47:01 and the brainstem sends a signal back to the heart
00:47:02 to speed the heart up.
00:47:04 So every time you inhale, you’re speeding the heart up.
00:47:06 When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up,
00:47:08 the heart gets a little smaller, the volume is smaller,
00:47:10 blood flows more quickly through the heart,
00:47:12 signal sent up to the brain,
00:47:13 and the brain sends a signal back to slow the heart down.
00:47:17 This is the basis of heart rate variability.
00:47:20 So at any point, if you feel like your heart is racing
00:47:23 and you feel like you’re working too hard
00:47:25 per unit of effort,
00:47:27 focus on making your exhales longer
00:47:30 or more intense than your inhales.
00:47:32 If ever you feel like you’re truly flagging,
00:47:34 you do not have the energy to get up,
00:47:36 it’s like, okay, it’s time to go and you’re exhausted,
00:47:39 you want to draw more oxygen into the system,
00:47:42 get your heart rate going faster.
00:47:44 Now, some people when they hear this probably think,
00:47:46 well, this is really obvious,
00:47:47 but there’s so much out there about breath work
00:47:49 and how to breathe and all this stuff,
00:47:50 but no one talks about how to do it in real time
00:47:52 while you’re exerting effort.
00:47:53 So this is something like almost like second by second,
00:47:57 you can adjust things just in real time
00:48:00 based on how you’re feeling,
00:48:01 but based on the heart rate.
00:48:03 That’s right.
00:48:04 The experience of the heart rate.
00:48:04 That’s right.
00:48:05 So one thing that could be very efficient
00:48:08 and we’re doing some work with athletes now,
00:48:10 so these are unpublished data,
00:48:11 but if you, while you’re running,
00:48:14 if you want to get into a nice cadence
00:48:16 of heart rate variability, do double inhales
00:48:21 while you’re running.
00:48:23 What this will do is that when you do the double inhale
00:48:25 has the effect of reopening the alveoli of the lungs,
00:48:28 your lungs are filled with tons of little sacks,
00:48:31 when they tend to collapse as you fatigue
00:48:34 and carbon dioxide builds up in the bloodstream.
00:48:36 And that’s when we start getting stressed.
00:48:37 If you’ve ever been sprinting and you start getting beat
00:48:39 and you’re going as hard as you can,
00:48:41 what you really need to do is double inhale
00:48:43 and reinflate these sacks in the lungs
00:48:45 and then offload a lot of carbon dioxide.
00:48:47 So when you’re at a steady cadence and you’re feeling good,
00:48:49 double inhale, exhale, double inhale, exhale
00:48:52 is a terrific way to breathe
00:48:54 while you’re in ongoing effort.
00:48:56 By the way, any recommendations or differences
00:49:00 in nose or mouth breathing?
00:49:03 So nasal breathing, there’s a lot of excitement now,
00:49:05 obviously about nasal breathing
00:49:07 because of James Nestor’s book, Breath.
00:49:09 There was also, if people are going to know about that book,
00:49:12 I do feel like out of respect for my colleagues,
00:49:15 there was a book by Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich
00:49:19 at Stanford, both professors at Stanford
00:49:20 with a forward by Jared Diamond and Robert Sapolsky.
00:49:24 So some heavy hitters in this book.
00:49:26 And the book is called Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic.
00:49:28 And it’s all about how nasal breathing is better for us,
00:49:32 especially kids, than being mouth breathers
00:49:35 under most conditions for sake of improving immunity.
00:49:38 It turns out there’s a microbiome in the nose,
00:49:40 like all sorts of good stuff
00:49:41 about nasal breathing preferentially.
00:49:43 But when we exercise, you can do pure nasal breathing.
00:49:48 But the problem is once you get up to kind of third
00:49:50 and fourth and fifth gear effort,
00:49:52 you can’t nasal breathe and be at maximum capacity
00:49:55 unless you’ve been training it for a very long time.
00:49:57 So I would say double inhale through the nose,
00:49:59 offload through the mouth.
00:50:00 So double inhale, exhale while you’re in steady effort.
00:50:03 And then if you really feel like you need to gas it
00:50:05 and you’re pushing, the data show that then
00:50:08 just use whatever’s there, right?
00:50:10 Just go into kind of default mode
00:50:12 because bringing too much concentration to something
00:50:15 is also going to spend epinephrine.
00:50:17 The goal is to get into that, I don’t like the word,
00:50:20 but the flow state where you’re not thinking too much,
00:50:22 you’re just in exertion.
00:50:24 So these are things that can help in the transitions,
00:50:28 but I don’t think there’s any secret breathing technique.
00:50:31 Anyone who’s been in the SEAL teams will kind of,
00:50:33 they’ll tell you like, there’s no breathing technique, right?
00:50:37 There’s tools that you can look to from time to time.
00:50:41 And these double inhale exhales can be great
00:50:43 for setting heart rate variability very quickly
00:50:45 and getting into a steady cadence while you’re exercising.
00:50:48 But if there’s a sprint,
00:50:49 like if suddenly you guys are sprinting,
00:50:50 ditch the double inhale, exhale, and just sprint.
00:50:54 One thing that you mentioned,
00:50:56 he’s probably gonna push my buttons.
00:50:58 It’s a good place to ask a question about anger.
00:51:01 So I’ll probably get pissed off at him at some point.
00:51:04 I’m guessing.
00:51:05 And do you have thoughts from a scientific perspective
00:51:12 or also just the personal philosophical perspective
00:51:14 about the role of anger in all of this
00:51:16 and in managing alertness, performance?
00:51:20 I think about this a lot
00:51:21 because there’s so much out there
00:51:23 about how important it is to do things
00:51:25 from a place of love, you know.
00:51:28 I tweet about it all the time.
00:51:30 And I think, and love is powerful, right?
00:51:32 It is interesting that autonomic arousal alertness,
00:51:35 let’s just use simple language,
00:51:37 alertness physiologically looks identical
00:51:41 for love and excitement as it does for anger
00:51:45 and frustration and wanting to defeat your opponent
00:51:49 or whoever that opponent happens to be.
00:51:52 They’re identical except that the love component
00:51:54 does tend to be associated with the release
00:51:57 of neurochemicals of the serotonin and dopamine type
00:52:01 that do have this replenishment component.
00:52:03 I don’t think one wants to be in constant anger
00:52:06 and friction, but I mean, I’ll come clean a bit.
00:52:10 There’ve been portions of my career
00:52:11 where some of my best work, my extra two hours,
00:52:14 my ability to nail a really hard deadline or problem
00:52:17 has come from not wanting to get out competed
00:52:21 or from wanting to prove something.
00:52:24 These days, I’m not oriented from that place
00:52:29 toward my work quite as often,
00:52:30 but I think we should be really honest.
00:52:33 Anger is powerful provided it’s channeled.
00:52:36 It’s very, very powerful and it can give you a ton of fuel
00:52:40 and gas to push when otherwise you tap.
00:52:44 Yeah, Joe Rogan has, aside from being a fan of his,
00:52:49 has been an inspiration to sort of be,
00:52:52 to have a kind of loving view on the world
00:52:55 and the way you approach the world to me.
00:52:58 So I’ve tended to want to approach the world that way,
00:53:01 but in the same way, David Goggins has been an inspiration
00:53:06 to like, yeah, be angry at stuff and use it as fuel.
00:53:13 Like he almost conjures up artificial demons in his mind
00:53:17 just so he can fight them.
00:53:19 You know, but at the same time I tried that
00:53:22 because I did a challenge in the summer
00:53:25 of where for 30 days I was doing a lot of pushups
00:53:27 and it was, over time, it was counterproductive for me.
00:53:33 Like I found that it was easier to just,
00:53:38 like the rollercoaster that the emotional,
00:53:42 like being angry at stuff takes you can also be exhausting.
00:53:46 Oh, absolutely, and it can take you down,
00:53:48 like the ups of it are good, but the downs are bad.
00:53:53 And what I found is better to get,
00:53:56 to use it as a boost every once in a while,
00:53:57 but mostly to get lost in the,
00:54:00 you’re talking about the breath work,
00:54:01 the like getting lost in the ritual of it,
00:54:05 like the beat like that,
00:54:07 as opposed to going on the big rollercoasters of emotion.
00:54:10 Yet this brings us into the realm of neuroendocrinology.
00:54:14 There’s a fascinating relationship between
00:54:16 the hormone system and the nervous system.
00:54:18 And, you know, hormones work in general on slower timescales.
00:54:22 The definition of a hormone is a chemical released
00:54:24 at one location in the body,
00:54:25 goes and acts at multiple locations far away
00:54:28 within the body.
00:54:29 Pheromone would be between two bodies.
00:54:31 Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin
00:54:33 tend to work a little more quickly.
00:54:35 There are hormones like adrenaline and cortisol
00:54:37 that can work very fast,
00:54:38 but here I’m referring mainly to testosterone, prolactin.
00:54:43 Prolactin tends to be in men,
00:54:45 and women tends to make people kind of lazy
00:54:47 and want to take care of young.
00:54:49 It tends to throw down body fat so we can stay up late.
00:54:52 It’s secreted in response to having children.
00:54:54 These are all in humans and in animals.
00:54:58 There’s a very interesting relationship
00:54:59 between testosterone and dopamine
00:55:04 that speaks directly to what we’re talking about now.
00:55:07 So dopamine and testosterone are closely related
00:55:11 in the pituitary system.
00:55:14 And obviously testosterone comes from the adrenals
00:55:16 and from the testes.
00:55:18 But the major effect of testosterone
00:55:21 is to make effort feel good.
00:55:24 That’s what testosterone does.
00:55:26 It has other effects too, right?
00:55:27 Reproductive effects,
00:55:28 androgenizing parts of the body, et cetera.
00:55:31 But it makes effort feel good.
00:55:34 The testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol.
00:55:38 Cholesterol can either be made into cortisol,
00:55:41 a stress hormone, or testosterone, but not both.
00:55:43 So you have a limited amount of cholesterol
00:55:46 and it gets diverted towards stress
00:55:49 or this pathway where effort feels good.
00:55:53 That’s the pathway you want to get into.
00:55:55 The anger pathway,
00:55:56 if we were to just kind of play a mind experiment here,
00:56:00 the anger eventually is going to divert
00:56:02 more of that cholesterol molecule to cortisol and stress,
00:56:06 and you will be slowly depleting testosterone.
00:56:08 Now going into this,
00:56:10 you’ll have plenty of testosterone,
00:56:11 but after a couple of days,
00:56:13 there’ve been very interesting studies showing
00:56:15 that testosterone doesn’t necessarily drop
00:56:17 with sleep deprivation.
00:56:19 That’s a bit of a myth.
00:56:20 You need it to replenish testosterone.
00:56:22 You need sleep to replenish testosterone eventually.
00:56:24 But the real question is,
00:56:25 are you enjoying what you’re doing?
00:56:27 And here the work was,
00:56:29 some of the major work on this was done by Duncan French,
00:56:33 who runs the UFC Training Center.
00:56:34 He did his PhD at UConn stores,
00:56:37 did a really beautiful PhD thesis
00:56:40 looking at the relationship between stress hormones,
00:56:42 testosterone, and dopamine.
00:56:44 Really interesting work.
00:56:45 And the takeaway from all of this is,
00:56:49 if you can just convince yourself,
00:56:51 or ideally if you can just enjoy yourself,
00:56:54 you are going to maintain
00:56:55 or maybe even increase testosterone stores,
00:56:58 which will make effort feel good.
00:57:00 And to me, aside from neuroplasticity
00:57:03 where everything becomes automatic after this experience,
00:57:06 to me, that’s the holy grail.
00:57:08 When effort feels good, life just gets way better.
00:57:12 And we’re not talking about achieving the reward.
00:57:14 I’m not talking about the end of this thing.
00:57:16 I’m talking about the process of it feeling really good.
00:57:19 Yeah, there is a magic to,
00:57:23 I don’t know if you can comment on this,
00:57:24 but I find myself being able to,
00:57:28 if I just say I’m feeling good,
00:57:30 like this old hack of like smiling while you’re running,
00:57:34 if I just tell myself, I’m feeling really good right now,
00:57:38 no matter how I’m actually feeling,
00:57:40 I’ll start feeling way better.
00:57:42 And the whole thing, there’s a cascading effect
00:57:45 that allows me to maximize the effort.
00:57:48 It’s quite fascinating.
00:57:50 It’s weird.
00:57:51 Hormones are powerful.
00:57:52 The relationship between thoughts and hormones
00:57:54 and these physiological things is enormous.
00:57:57 I had a colleague that a few years ago,
00:57:58 he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
00:58:01 And I was interviewing him
00:58:03 just because he’s an important figure in our community.
00:58:05 And I was a friend.
00:58:07 And there was one day where he told me,
00:58:09 he said, I don’t want to make it past the new year.
00:58:12 And it was crushing for me to hear.
00:58:15 And I knew that he had been on some androgen therapy
00:58:18 for a whole set of other things.
00:58:20 And I said, have you taken your androgen cream?
00:58:24 And he was like, no, I haven’t done it.
00:58:25 Go get it for me.
00:58:27 I have this on film.
00:58:28 He takes it, he puts the androgen cream on.
00:58:30 I’m not suggesting people take androgens, by the way.
00:58:33 10 minutes later, he says, you know what?
00:58:35 I think I want to live into the new year.
00:58:37 And I’m going to write 12 letters of recommendation.
00:58:39 He went to MIT, by the way.
00:58:41 He said, I’m going to write 12 letters of recommendation.
00:58:43 And he did.
00:58:44 And so there’s something about these molecules
00:58:47 that in an ancient way, in all organisms,
00:58:50 all mammals, as far as we know,
00:58:52 are linked to the will to live.
00:58:54 They’re linked to effort and making effort feel good,
00:58:57 which has been fundamental to the evolution of our species.
00:59:00 I always say, people think that the opposite
00:59:02 of testosterone is estrogen, but it’s not.
00:59:05 The opposite of testosterone is prolactin,
00:59:07 which makes us feel quiescent
00:59:09 and not in pursuit of things, et cetera.
00:59:12 Testosterone makes effort feel good.
00:59:14 Estrogen makes emotions feel okay.
00:59:19 And they are in mixed amounts in people,
00:59:24 as I say, have all chromosomal backgrounds.
00:59:26 Yeah.
00:59:27 I mean, you also mentioned fasting potentially
00:59:29 through this two day thing.
00:59:31 It’d be cool to get your thoughts about fasting in general.
00:59:35 Do you think on a personal level
00:59:38 and at a higher sort of level of studies
00:59:41 that you’re aware of and physiology and so on,
00:59:44 what do you think about intermittent fasting
00:59:46 of like not eating for 16 hours
00:59:48 and then having an eight hour window
00:59:51 or something I’ve been doing a lot recently,
00:59:53 which is eating only once a day.
00:59:56 So that’s 24 hour fast, I guess, one meal a day
01:00:00 or something I’ve been thinking about doing,
01:00:05 haven’t done yet of doing like 72 hours
01:00:07 or some people do like five day fasts in general.
01:00:11 So this will be for this particular run
01:00:13 will be a 48 hour fast if I don’t eat at all.
01:00:17 What do you think about that for performance,
01:00:19 for mood, for all those kinds of things?
01:00:21 I can speak a little bit to the science
01:00:23 and a little bit of my own experience
01:00:25 and then some anecdotes of people that have done very hard,
01:00:28 very long duration things and what they’ve told me.
01:00:30 So I just want to make sure I’m separating those out
01:00:32 so people know my sourcing.
01:00:34 I think now none of this is about the actual
01:00:37 longterm nutritional benefits of one thing or the other.
01:00:40 But if you look at the science on intermittent fasting,
01:00:43 it’s pretty remarkable.
01:00:45 Before I was at Stanford, my lab was in San Diego.
01:00:47 One of my colleagues was such in Panda at the Salk
01:00:50 is phenomenal biologist and researcher,
01:00:53 wrote a book called the circadian code.
01:00:54 It’s very, very good and kind of popularized
01:00:57 intermittent fasting, although there were others
01:00:59 that had talked about this before.
01:01:01 Ori Hofmechler talked about the warrior diet.
01:01:04 People probably might not know who Ori is,
01:01:06 but he’s sort of the originator
01:01:08 of this business of intermittent fasting
01:01:11 eating once a day or limited.
01:01:12 Anyway, Sachin has published papers,
01:01:15 peer reviewed papers in very good journals
01:01:17 like Cell and elsewhere,
01:01:18 showing that limiting the consumption of calories
01:01:22 to eight, four, six, or eight, or even 10 hours
01:01:26 of every 24 hour cycle
01:01:28 and keeping that more or less correlated with the light
01:01:32 with when the sun is out leads to less liver disease,
01:01:37 improved metabolic markers, less body fat, et cetera.
01:01:41 In the mouse studies, they even gave the mice the choice
01:01:43 to eat whatever they wanted, as much as they want,
01:01:45 as long as they restrict it to a certain period
01:01:48 within the 24 hour cycle, they did great.
01:01:51 They maintained a healthy weight or even lost weight.
01:01:53 When they took the same amount of food
01:01:55 and they stretched it out across the entire 24 hour cycle.
01:01:58 So this is eating every hour or two hours,
01:02:00 the animals got fat and sick.
01:02:02 So it’s pretty remarkable data.
01:02:04 How much of that translates to humans isn’t clear,
01:02:06 but one thing that’s really clear with humans is adherence.
01:02:10 We could talk a lot about nutrition
01:02:11 and some of the problems with the studies on nutrition
01:02:14 is that what people will do in a laboratory
01:02:16 is often hard to do in the real world.
01:02:18 Low carbohydrate diets just they tend,
01:02:21 because they tend to focus on foods
01:02:23 that have high amino acid content like meats.
01:02:27 Generally people are less hungry on those
01:02:29 than they are on calorie matched diets
01:02:32 of fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates,
01:02:34 because when the insulin goes up,
01:02:36 you get hungry and you want to eat more.
01:02:38 So this is not a push for carnivore
01:02:40 or a push against one thing or the other.
01:02:42 It’s just, there are a lot of factors,
01:02:45 but we know for sure that when you’re fasted
01:02:49 or when you have low amounts of carbohydrate in your system,
01:02:52 complex carbohydrate, your alertness is going to go up.
01:02:55 Fasting increases alertness and epinephrine
01:03:00 for the sole purpose of getting you to go out
01:03:01 and find food.
01:03:02 Can you imagine if our ancestors got hungry
01:03:04 and they were like, oh, I’m too tired to go find food.
01:03:07 We wouldn’t be here.
01:03:08 It’d be like robots or something.
01:03:09 One of your alien buddies will be like running the planet.
01:03:13 So I think that if you want to be alert,
01:03:16 fasting or keeping complex carbohydrates to a minimum
01:03:20 is very valuable.
01:03:22 If you want to sleep and you want to be sleepy,
01:03:24 ingesting foods that have a lot of tryptophan,
01:03:27 which is the precursor to serotonin,
01:03:28 so complex carbohydrates like rice and grains,
01:03:31 turkey, white meats,
01:03:32 those things do create a sense of sleepiness.
01:03:34 However, there is a caveat,
01:03:36 and this is one problem with the once a day meal,
01:03:40 is that anytime you have a lot of food in the gut,
01:03:43 you’re increasing sleepiness
01:03:44 because you’re diverting blood to the gut.
01:03:46 It’s going to trigger the vagus to signal to the brain
01:03:49 to shut down your system and utilize those nutrients,
01:03:53 digest and utilize those nutrients.
01:03:55 So I’ve done the once a day eating thing.
01:03:58 The problem is I eat so much in that meal
01:04:00 that I’m exhausted.
01:04:02 And so it doesn’t always lend itself well to the schedule.
01:04:05 But so in a six or eight hour eating block for me
01:04:08 is a little bit better.
01:04:10 I do eat carbohydrates.
01:04:11 I’m probably one of the few people left on the West coast
01:04:13 that actually consumes carbohydrates
01:04:14 and we’ll say that out loud.
01:04:15 I don’t know people eat carbs anymore, that’s weird.
01:04:17 They don’t.
01:04:18 Where do you even find carbs these days?
01:04:20 I like oatmeal.
01:04:20 I like rice.
01:04:21 The other time is if people are doing very high intensity
01:04:24 weight train, they need to replenish glycogen.
01:04:26 On the alertness side,
01:04:27 I do feel like it’s probably person dependent.
01:04:30 For me alertness, being alert makes my life better
01:04:34 in a lot of ways, more than just the alertness itself.
01:04:38 Like for example, one of the things I discovered
01:04:41 with fasting is that when I was training twice a day
01:04:45 in jujitsu, for example, and competing and so on,
01:04:48 I performed way better at things that you traditionally
01:04:52 would say you need carbs for,
01:04:53 which is explosive movements and all that.
01:04:56 I don’t know if I actually perform better
01:05:00 in terms of like the force of the explosion,
01:05:05 the explosiveness.
01:05:06 What I do know is the alertness resulted
01:05:09 in me doing the technique more precisely.
01:05:13 That’s the dopamine and epinephrine system in action.
01:05:16 And there are some other just purely physical aspects
01:05:23 to one diet versus the other that can be complicated.
01:05:25 If you’re ingesting carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates,
01:05:28 you’re going to replenish glycogen, which is great,
01:05:31 but they also tend to be bulky and fibrous.
01:05:33 And I’ve never rolled jujitsu,
01:05:35 but running when you have a lot of bulky fibrous food
01:05:37 in your gut or in your intestine, it can be a barrier.
01:05:41 It can be uncomfortable.
01:05:42 And so some people do really well on low carbohydrate,
01:05:45 meat rich diets, because they’re just not as bloated.
01:05:48 They’re not carrying as much water and other stuff.
01:05:51 Carbohydrate carries a lot of water molecules with it.
01:05:54 So there are aspects to being able to train
01:05:56 and being really explosive because you feel light.
01:05:58 One anecdote that really, again,
01:06:00 I’m not encouraging any one particular kind of diet,
01:06:02 but I have a friend who was in the SEAL teams.
01:06:07 I happen to know a number of people in that community.
01:06:08 And he told me that he did this very long fast.
01:06:11 It was a fast that I think you get to eat a little bit
01:06:14 of soup or broth.
01:06:15 And there’s like a bar or something,
01:06:16 but it’s like a nine day thing.
01:06:18 And he’s a very strong athlete.
01:06:21 And he said that on day six or seven,
01:06:24 he was running up some hills or something
01:06:27 while he was on deployment.
01:06:28 And he felt amazing.
01:06:31 He had kind of hit this other level.
01:06:33 He was somebody who had boxed in the Naval Academy.
01:06:35 He was somebody who knows and knew high output.
01:06:40 And he felt like he discovered the 13th floor,
01:06:43 that there was another floor to this performance space
01:06:46 that he hadn’t experienced except while he had fasted.
01:06:50 And he said that that was a remarkable clarity of mind,
01:06:53 energy, it’s a little bit of what you described.
01:06:55 He described a kind of suppleness and explosiveness.
01:06:58 So there’s probably something there.
01:06:59 On which day?
01:07:01 At once he was in the fifth or sixth day of the fast.
01:07:04 See, this is the thing is I’ve never been there
01:07:06 on the second, third, fourth, fifth day, that kind of thing.
01:07:09 But when I just don’t eat for 20 hours,
01:07:14 many times through my training, the clarity,
01:07:18 it’s like you feel like everyone is moving super slowly
01:07:23 and you’re able to like dominate people
01:07:25 you weren’t able to before.
01:07:26 It’s like.
01:07:27 Well, you might’ve slipped into,
01:07:29 or switched over rather into full ketosis.
01:07:32 And ketogenic diets done properly can be great for people.
01:07:36 The problem is if you do it wrong, you can really mess it up.
01:07:38 I tried it once and I basically got psoriasis.
01:07:40 I thought my scalp was going to fall off.
01:07:42 I was like sloughing off all this.
01:07:44 And then I stopped and I was taking the liquid ketones.
01:07:47 And then all of a sudden I felt better again.
01:07:49 But I was told that I just did it wrong.
01:07:52 Yes.
01:07:53 That’s right.
01:07:54 So I think there’s a right way and a wrong way
01:07:55 and you have to get it right.
01:07:56 Definitely.
01:07:57 And so I’ve experimented quite a bit with keto
01:07:59 to see how my body feels and doing it the right way
01:08:02 and following all the instructions.
01:08:03 There’s definitely a huge difference that,
01:08:07 like for example, one of the things I discovered,
01:08:09 everyone knows who said this,
01:08:11 but I tried this recently over the past year
01:08:15 is I started drinking when I don’t feel great.
01:08:18 If I’m fasting, a bone broth, a chicken bone broth.
01:08:22 And for some reason, like magically it could be,
01:08:25 this is the other thing, the mind, I don’t know,
01:08:28 but it makes me feel really good.
01:08:30 Well, it could be the salt.
01:08:32 So I mean, neurons, the action potential neurons,
01:08:35 as you know, is sodium is rushing into the cell.
01:08:37 You need enough extracellular sodium
01:08:39 in order for your brain and nervous system to function.
01:08:42 And so salt, I mean, unless people have hypertension,
01:08:45 salt is great.
01:08:46 There was an article in Science Magazine about a decade ago
01:08:49 about how salt had been demonized
01:08:50 and unless people have hypertension,
01:08:52 provide you drink enough water, salt is great.
01:08:54 You need sodium, magnesium, and potassium to function
01:08:57 and for your nerve cells to work.
01:08:59 I mean, people who overdrink water
01:09:00 and don’t consume enough electrolyte die.
01:09:03 Now, hydration is really important.
01:09:05 I know David’s really into hydration.
01:09:07 He’s mentioned that a few times.
01:09:08 I mean, hydrating properly is key.
01:09:11 And so you definitely want to make sure
01:09:12 that you’re drinking enough water
01:09:14 and getting enough electrolytes.
01:09:16 We should have actually talked about that at the beginning
01:09:18 because that’s going to keep
01:09:19 your nervous system functioning well.
01:09:21 And a lot of people, they’ll get shaky or jittery
01:09:24 when they’re fasting and they’ll think they need sugar.
01:09:27 And if they just put some salt in some water,
01:09:30 they feel fine.
01:09:30 And like the other stuff, potassium, magnesium,
01:09:33 whatever the other electrolytes are.
01:09:34 But yeah, those three.
01:09:36 I mean, salt, yeah.
01:09:38 Magnesium is good before sleep.
01:09:40 Salt.
01:09:42 I mean, this is a vast space.
01:09:43 And we’re kind of talking about the overlap
01:09:44 between neurochemicals, hormones, and nutrition.
01:09:48 And it’s a fascinating space.
01:09:49 And it’s one that the academic community has gems
01:09:53 within the textbooks.
01:09:54 It hasn’t really made it into the public sphere yet.
01:09:57 And I think that’s because people get so caught up
01:09:59 in the being, are you vegan or are you carnivore?
01:10:03 And there’s a vast space in between too
01:10:05 that people can explore.
01:10:06 Like I’m not a competitive athlete.
01:10:08 So I eat meat and I also eat vegetables and I eat fruits
01:10:12 and it’s just about timing them.
01:10:14 But I tend to eat carbohydrates when I want to be sleepy.
01:10:16 I eat them at night.
01:10:17 And everyone said, that’s the worst thing.
01:10:18 You can’t do that.
01:10:19 You sleep great after eating a big bowl of pasta.
01:10:21 I’ll tell you.
01:10:22 And by the way, I should give you a big thank you
01:10:25 for connecting me with Bell Campo Farms.
01:10:29 They sent me some meat, I think because of you.
01:10:33 And it’s delicious.
01:10:34 So I really appreciate that.
01:10:37 I mean, it also connected me with this whole world
01:10:40 of people who are doing farming in this ethical way
01:10:43 and like really love the whole process.
01:10:46 And from both like a human level,
01:10:49 but also scientific level.
01:10:51 And the result is, it’s like ethical,
01:10:56 but also it’s delicious.
01:10:57 And it makes you think about your diet
01:11:00 in a whole new kind of way.
01:11:01 Yeah, I don’t have any commercial relationship
01:11:04 to Bell Campo, so I can be very clear.
01:11:06 I’ve known Anya Fernald,
01:11:07 who is the founder and CEO of Bell Campo.
01:11:10 I’ve known her since the ninth grade.
01:11:12 It is true that her parents are faculty members at Stanford,
01:11:15 they’re colleagues of mine,
01:11:16 but she’s just a serious academic of nutrition,
01:11:18 but also of sustainable agriculture,
01:11:21 of all sorts of things.
01:11:22 And also the meat just, it’s awesome.
01:11:24 It tastes really good.
01:11:25 And no, I’m not getting paid to say that.
01:11:26 And no, they’re not a sponsoring my podcast.
01:11:29 It’s just, I feel like if you’re gonna eat animals,
01:11:32 if that’s in your framework and you’re gonna eat animals,
01:11:35 knowing that the animals were raised as happy as could be
01:11:39 until time of slaughter is at least important to me.
01:11:43 And actually talked to her,
01:11:45 so I will talk to her on this podcast actually.
01:11:47 And she invited me like a week ago out to visit the farm
01:11:52 in May or June or whatever.
01:11:53 Yeah, they have the farm up at the Oregon border.
01:11:54 I haven’t been there yet, but I’ve seen the pictures.
01:11:56 It looks awesome and I was like, yes.
01:11:59 It looks beautiful.
01:12:00 Let me know when you’re going.
01:12:01 Yeah, let’s go together.
01:12:03 You’ll probably run there, but I’ll drive there.
01:12:06 Yeah, but all that said, I do want to,
01:12:09 cause a lot of people who are vegan write to me
01:12:13 and I do want to seriously,
01:12:14 in the same seriousness that I approached keto,
01:12:17 I do wanna go like on a few months
01:12:19 to switch to a vegan diet at some point to really try it.
01:12:23 I haven’t done it yet
01:12:24 cause I’m afraid I’m gonna function better.
01:12:26 I’m Argentine by my dad’s side.
01:12:30 And I don’t eat meat super often,
01:12:33 but well, for most people it would seem often,
01:12:36 but I do love steak, I do.
01:12:40 So I’m afraid I’m gonna feel better.
01:12:41 There’s a social element to steak, you’re right.
01:12:43 Cause coming from a Russian background,
01:12:45 like I can’t imagine going to visit my folks,
01:12:49 like my parents for Thanksgiving or something to say,
01:12:52 mom and dad, I don’t eat meat.
01:12:55 So instead of, you know.
01:12:56 Well, I think if you’re gonna eat meat,
01:12:58 getting it from sources that are compatible
01:13:00 with a continuation of the planet is good.
01:13:05 I mean, there are some real problems
01:13:07 with the factory farm meat.
01:13:08 You know, you drive up and down the five
01:13:09 and you pass that point where there are all those cows.
01:13:12 I mean, as somebody who loves animals,
01:13:16 it’s clear that it’s, you know,
01:13:19 you wanna limit the amount of suffering of those animals.
01:13:22 Whenever I hear about, you know,
01:13:24 we know people that hunt and that go and get their own meat.
01:13:27 I really admire that.
01:13:28 I admire that people do that.
01:13:30 We don’t tend to do that in the hills around Stanford,
01:13:32 you know, there are mountain lions back there,
01:13:34 but that’s about it.
01:13:35 And I’m certainly, I admire the vegan mindset
01:13:40 of just making that decision.
01:13:41 You’re just not gonna consume other beings,
01:13:44 but you know, I haven’t gone that way.
01:13:45 But performance wise, I’m just curious because I was
01:13:49 surprised, I was certain that eating five, six,
01:13:53 seven meals a day is the right thing to do
01:13:55 for if you wanna be perform your best
01:13:58 when I was like 20 or whatever.
01:14:01 And I would eat oatmeal, like I thought it’s obvious
01:14:04 I have to have a really, a lot of carbs in the breakfast.
01:14:06 I had a lot of preconceived notions.
01:14:08 And then when I started eating like once a day,
01:14:12 this was at the peak of my competing in jiu jitsu,
01:14:14 it was like, everything I know about nutrition is wrong.
01:14:20 You realize that like, you have to become a scientist.
01:14:22 First of all, you have to read literature,
01:14:24 you have to learn, you have to experiment,
01:14:26 but you also have to become a scientist of your own body.
01:14:29 In the same way, I have a lot of preconceived notions
01:14:32 of what performance is like under vegan diet.
01:14:35 And I want to do it right.
01:14:38 Like seriously, not necessarily for the ethical reasons,
01:14:42 but to see if it’s performance wise, like can I,
01:14:45 I remember there’s like a fruitarian diet
01:14:47 where you eat fruit only.
01:14:50 These extremes are like, they’re pretty,
01:14:52 they’re interesting cause people have this need.
01:14:55 The extremes are informative though, right?
01:14:57 I mean, well controlled experiments,
01:14:58 you eliminate as many variables as you can
01:15:00 except the one you’re interested in.
01:15:02 So people are running these experiments.
01:15:04 I think that it’s hard to imagine getting,
01:15:09 I know people say you can get enough amino acids
01:15:12 from plant based sources and I believe that.
01:15:15 I think it probably takes a little more work.
01:15:18 One thing that’s really clear is that the benefit
01:15:20 of these omega three, omega six ratios,
01:15:23 like fish oils and things like that.
01:15:24 There are some data that show that the getting
01:15:27 at least a thousand milligrams of the EPA,
01:15:30 which is in high in fish oils, but other things too,
01:15:32 even some meats and other plants,
01:15:34 it in double, you know, in matched placebo,
01:15:40 double blind controlled studies,
01:15:41 placebo controlled double blind studies have shown
01:15:43 that those can offset antidepressive symptoms
01:15:47 as much as some of the selective serotonin reuptake
01:15:49 inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft.
01:15:52 So that’s pretty impressive.
01:15:54 And in Scandinavia, people know, especially in winter,
01:15:57 to consume a lot of those omega threes
01:16:00 because they’re good for you, they’re good for the brain.
01:16:03 That’s the other question.
01:16:04 Nutrition wise, what kind of stuff have you come across
01:16:08 that’s useful?
01:16:09 Like I basically only take fish oil,
01:16:12 like you said, electrolytes.
01:16:14 Electrolytes with water, the David Goggins diet.
01:16:18 Fish oil.
01:16:19 Plus fish oil.
01:16:19 And then again, the sponsor, they made it so easier.
01:16:24 The sponsor of your podcast and mine,
01:16:26 athleticgreens.com slash Huberman.
01:16:28 Great stuff.
01:16:29 Support it.
01:16:30 I don’t know, like it’s great stuff for sure,
01:16:34 but it also just takes away the headache of like,
01:16:36 I don’t have to think about.
01:16:37 Yeah, you’re going to get a bunch of vitamins and minerals.
01:16:40 It does that.
01:16:41 It sounds like a plug, but I have genuinely been buying it.
01:16:44 I’m like, you know, no discount, no affiliation
01:16:47 or anything since 2012.
01:16:48 I think I heard about it on the Tim Ferriss podcast.
01:16:50 I was like, oh, I’m going to try that stuff.
01:16:52 And I liked it.
01:16:52 I mean, when I was starting my lab,
01:16:54 I was working insane hours.
01:16:56 I still work very long hours.
01:16:57 And getting sick limits productivity.
01:17:01 And I also wanted to train
01:17:03 and I wasn’t doing much training back then.
01:17:07 Now I try and get, you know, three, four sessions in a week.
01:17:09 I’m not doing nothing like what you and David are doing
01:17:11 or what, you know, Joe does,
01:17:13 or like you guys are way more regimented
01:17:15 and consistent than I am.
01:17:17 But I think that being healthy and feeling good
01:17:21 is one of the great benefits to a career
01:17:24 is having energy and just being not sick.
01:17:28 Can we take a step back to sleep for a little bit?
01:17:32 And so people should definitely look through your podcast.
01:17:37 The first five episodes were on sleep or no,
01:17:41 I guess the first opening episode wasn’t.
01:17:43 First one was sort of how the brain works generally
01:17:46 is to give people some background.
01:17:47 And then we did four episodes on sleep,
01:17:50 including some stuff about food, temperature, exercise,
01:17:52 jet lag shift work for the jet lag folks and shift work.
01:17:56 Yeah, take a masterclass on sleep.
01:17:57 And then you’re going on to a next topic
01:18:01 in the next few episodes, which is incredible.
01:18:04 We’ll, neuroplasticity, we’ll talk about it.
01:18:06 But on sleep, one of the cool things about the human mind
01:18:11 when it sleeps is dreaming.
01:18:15 What do you think we understand
01:18:17 about the contents of dreams?
01:18:21 Like what do dreams mean?
01:18:22 All the stuff we see when we dream,
01:18:25 is there something that we understand
01:18:28 about the contents of dreams?
01:18:32 Some of it is very concrete.
01:18:33 So Matt Wilson, who, MIT guy, showed in rodents
01:18:38 and it’s been shown in nonhuman primates
01:18:40 and now it’s been shown in humans
01:18:41 that there is replay of spatial information during sleep.
01:18:47 So initially what Matt showed was that
01:18:50 as these little rodents navigate through a maze,
01:18:52 there are these cells in the hippocampus called place cells
01:18:55 that fire when the animal encounters a turn or a corridor.
01:18:58 And that exact same sequence is replayed during sleep.
01:19:02 And it turns out this is true in London taxi cab drivers.
01:19:07 Before phones and GPS were what they are today,
01:19:11 the London taxi cab drivers were famous
01:19:13 for knowing the routes through the city,
01:19:15 through these mental maps.
01:19:17 And their analysis of their place cell firing during sleep
01:19:21 and during wakefulness.
01:19:22 And so we are essentially taking spatial information
01:19:25 about the location of things and replaying it during sleep.
01:19:28 However, it’s not replayed so that you remember it all.
01:19:32 It’s replayed so that if there’s a reason to remember it,
01:19:36 the links to the emotional system,
01:19:38 to the components of the limbic system and hypothalamus
01:19:41 that are relevant,
01:19:43 like you got into a car crash at a particular location,
01:19:45 or you lost a bunch of money
01:19:46 because you were a cab driver, Uber driver,
01:19:48 we’d say nowadays,
01:19:49 and you were stuck at one particular avenue all day
01:19:52 and frustrated,
01:19:53 and you were getting yelled at by your spouse,
01:19:55 that information gets encoded
01:19:57 so that you never forget that at that particular time of day
01:20:00 and that particular time of year,
01:20:02 and this thing happened.
01:20:04 So context starts getting linked to experience.
01:20:06 So there’s spatial information
01:20:08 that’s absolutely replayed during sleep.
01:20:10 And we experience this sometimes as dreams.
01:20:13 The dreams that happen early in the night
01:20:15 when slow wave sleep or non REM sleep dominates,
01:20:18 tends to be sleep of very kind of general themes
01:20:22 and kind of location.
01:20:24 It can feel a little bit eerie and kind of strange.
01:20:27 Not so incidentally,
01:20:29 the early phase of the night
01:20:30 is when growth hormone is released.
01:20:32 In the 80s and 90s,
01:20:33 there was a drug that was very popular.
01:20:35 It’s very legal now called GHB.
01:20:38 You could actually buy it at GNC or a store then.
01:20:41 I never took it, but it was a popular party drug
01:20:43 and some famous celebrities died while on GHB.
01:20:47 They were also on a bunch of other things,
01:20:49 so it’s not clear what killed them.
01:20:50 But GHB was very big in certain communities
01:20:54 because it promoted a massive release of growth hormone
01:20:57 and gave people these very hypnotic states.
01:20:59 So people go to clubs
01:21:01 and they were in these very hypnotic states.
01:21:02 It was part of a whole culture.
01:21:05 That’s early night.
01:21:07 And those dreams tend to not have
01:21:09 a lot of emotional content or load.
01:21:12 That phase of dreaming is associated
01:21:15 with the occasional jolting yourself out of sleep
01:21:18 because it’s somewhat lighter sleep.
01:21:20 The dreams that occur during REM,
01:21:22 during rapid eye movement sleep
01:21:23 and that dominate towards morning are very different.
01:21:26 They tend to have very little epinephrine
01:21:30 is available in the brain at that time.
01:21:32 Epinephrine again being this molecule
01:21:33 of stress, fear, and excitement.
01:21:35 You are paralyzed during these REM dreams.
01:21:38 You cannot move.
01:21:39 There’s intense emotion
01:21:41 at the level of what you’re feeling
01:21:44 and there’s so called theory of mind.
01:21:47 Theory of mind is an idea that was put forward
01:21:48 by Simon Baron Cohen, Sasha Baron Cohen’s cousin.
01:21:52 I think on the podcast,
01:21:53 I mistakenly said that he was at Oxford.
01:21:55 It’s like the cardinal sin.
01:21:56 He’s at Cambridge, forgive me.
01:21:58 I’m not British.
01:21:59 So the dreams in REM are heavily emotionally laden.
01:22:02 And it’s very clear that those dreams and REM sleep,
01:22:05 if you deprive yourself of them for too long,
01:22:08 you become irritable and you start linking
01:22:12 generally negative emotions to almost everything.
01:22:15 REM, the dreams that occur in REM sleep
01:22:17 are when we divorce emotion from our prior experiences.
01:22:21 And it’s when we extract general rules and themes.
01:22:25 MIT seems to have come up a lot today,
01:22:27 but it’s highly relevant.
01:22:29 Susumu Tonagawa, Nobel prize for immunoglobulin,
01:22:32 but obviously fantastic neuroscientist as well,
01:22:36 has shown that the replay of neurons in the hippocampus
01:22:38 and elsewhere in the brain is kind of an approximation
01:22:42 of the previous episode and a lot of fear unlearning
01:22:46 of uncoupling emotion from hard or traumatic events
01:22:50 that happened previously occurs in REM sleep.
01:22:53 So you don’t want to deprive yourself of REM sleep
01:22:55 for too long.
01:22:55 And those dreams tend to be very intense.
01:22:57 Now, epinephrine is low
01:22:59 so that you can’t suddenly act out your dreams.
01:23:02 But what’s interesting is sometimes people
01:23:04 will wake up suddenly while in a REM dream
01:23:07 and their heart will be beating really, really fast.
01:23:10 That’s a surge of epinephrine that occurs
01:23:12 as you exit REM sleep.
01:23:14 So you were having this intense emotional experience
01:23:16 without the fear.
01:23:18 You were essentially going through therapy in your sleep,
01:23:20 self induced therapy.
01:23:22 It’s like trauma therapy,
01:23:23 where you try and divorce the emotion from the experience.
01:23:26 And then you wake up.
01:23:27 And some people also have the other component of REM,
01:23:30 which is atonia, which is paralysis.
01:23:33 Pot smokers experience this a lot more than non pot smokers.
01:23:36 There’s an invasion of paralysis into the waking state.
01:23:40 I’m not a pot smoker, but I have experienced this.
01:23:42 And when you wake up and you’re paralyzed for a second,
01:23:44 it’s terrifying.
01:23:46 But then you jolt yourself alert.
01:23:48 So the REM sleep is important
01:23:51 for kind of the self induced therapy
01:23:54 and forgetting the bad stuff.
01:23:56 It’s good for uncoupling the emotions from bad experiences.
01:23:59 And just there are two therapies.
01:24:02 Eye movement desensitization reprocessing,
01:24:04 which is a eye movement thing that shuts down the amygdala
01:24:08 during therapy, not during sleep.
01:24:09 And ketamine, which is a dissociative analgesic.
01:24:13 It’s actually very similar to PCP.
01:24:15 And ketamine is now being used as a trauma therapy
01:24:18 when someone comes into the ER, for instance,
01:24:21 and they were in a terrible car accident.
01:24:22 I mean, these are horrible things to describe it.
01:24:24 They saw a relative impaled
01:24:26 on the steering column or something.
01:24:28 And they will give this drug
01:24:29 to try and shut off the emotion system
01:24:31 so that, because they’re not gonna forget,
01:24:33 let’s be honest, you don’t forget the bad stuff,
01:24:36 but it is possible to uncouple the bad events
01:24:39 from the emotional system.
01:24:41 And there’s all sorts of ethical issues
01:24:42 about whether or not that’s good or bad to do.
01:24:44 But PTSD is a failure to uncouple the emotion
01:24:48 from these intense experiences.
01:24:50 So the goal of this kind of therapy
01:24:52 is in the uncoupling for that to be permanent.
01:24:55 Yeah.
01:24:56 To separate.
01:24:57 So they can recount the event
01:24:59 and they can describe it
01:25:00 without it triggering the same somatic experience
01:25:03 of terror and dread,
01:25:05 because terror, those feelings can be debilitating,
01:25:07 obviously.
01:25:08 And you’re saying physiologically,
01:25:10 in REM sleep, a similar process is happening.
01:25:13 That’s right.
01:25:14 Thematically, REM sleep is about experiencing
01:25:17 or replaying intense emotions
01:25:19 without experiencing the somatic,
01:25:22 the physical component of the emotion,
01:25:23 either the acting out
01:25:24 or the accelerated heart rate and agitation.
01:25:28 Likewise with things like ketamine therapies.
01:25:31 That’s the idea,
01:25:32 is you’re uncoupling the physical sensation
01:25:34 from the mental events.
01:25:36 What is REM sleep and why is it so special?
01:25:39 Maybe we can comment on that.
01:25:40 Rapid eye movement sleep.
01:25:42 Yeah, discovered in the 50s at the University of Chicago.
01:25:44 It’s intense brain activity,
01:25:46 high levels of metabolic activity,
01:25:49 dreams in which people report a lot of the theory of mind.
01:25:52 We were talking about Simon Baron Cohen.
01:25:53 Theory of mind was actually something
01:25:55 that he developed for the diagnosis of autism.
01:25:58 If you take kids, most kids of age five, six, seven,
01:26:03 put them in front of a TV screen in the laboratory
01:26:05 and you have them watch a video
01:26:06 where a kid is playing with a ball or a doll.
01:26:08 And then the kid puts it into a drawer,
01:26:10 shuts the drawer and walks away.
01:26:12 And another kid comes in and you ask the child
01:26:14 who’s observing this little movie,
01:26:15 you say, what does this second child think?
01:26:18 And a typical kid would say,
01:26:21 they want to play and they don’t know
01:26:22 where the ball or doll is,
01:26:24 or they’re upset or they’re sad, they want the doll.
01:26:27 Autistic children tend to say the doll’s in the drawer.
01:26:32 The toy is in the drawer.
01:26:34 They tend to fixate.
01:26:35 They can’t get on the event.
01:26:37 They can’t get into the mind of that.
01:26:39 They don’t have a theory of mind.
01:26:40 Dreams in REM have a heavy theory of mind component.
01:26:44 People are after me trying to get me.
01:26:46 You can assign motive to other people.
01:26:48 I’m afraid, but it’s because there’s an expectation.
01:26:52 That doesn’t tend to happen in slow wave sleep dreams.
01:26:55 Now, all this of course is by waking people up
01:26:57 and asking them what they were dreaming about,
01:26:58 which from a standpoint of a AI guy
01:27:01 or a machine learning or a neuroscientist kind of like,
01:27:04 but it’s the best we’ve got.
01:27:06 But brain imaging in waking states
01:27:08 while people view a movie
01:27:10 and then brain imaging while people are sleeping
01:27:12 supports the idea that that’s basically what’s going on.
01:27:15 So REM sleep is amazing
01:27:17 and you’re not going to get much of it
01:27:18 during your bout with Goggins,
01:27:21 but you will afterward.
01:27:22 Why, so to comment, why won’t I?
01:27:26 So is it not possible to get into it real quick?
01:27:30 Only if you’re very, very sleep deprived,
01:27:32 but because you’re going to be at high muscular output,
01:27:36 that’s going to bias you
01:27:37 towards more slow wave sleep overall.
01:27:39 And your body and brain are smart.
01:27:43 They, it will know,
01:27:44 they will know that your main goal is to recover
01:27:49 so you can keep going.
01:27:50 So you can keep firing neuromuscular contractions
01:27:52 and you can keep running so that you can,
01:27:54 I mean, it’s amazing to think like, why do we ever stop?
01:27:57 Unlike weight training
01:27:58 where I can’t do a 500 pound deadlift, I just can’t.
01:28:03 I could train for it,
01:28:03 but I certainly can’t do a 600 pound, I can’t do that.
01:28:07 What causes us to stop an endurance event
01:28:10 is usually not a physical barrier.
01:28:12 It’s almost always a purely mental barrier.
01:28:15 And that’s a very interesting problem.
01:28:17 I mean, neuroscientists don’t tend to think about
01:28:19 those sorts of problems
01:28:20 because it sounds so non neuroscientific,
01:28:23 but that’s fundamentally related to the question of,
01:28:27 what is pursuit?
01:28:29 What is the desire to push and to carry on?
01:28:33 Is there a neuroscientific answer
01:28:34 for that question you think?
01:28:36 I think the closest thing is this paper
01:28:38 from Janelia Farms, the Howard Hughes campus,
01:28:42 showing that if you put animals
01:28:45 into a simulated environment
01:28:47 where you can measure their effort,
01:28:50 the forces while they’re running,
01:28:51 and you can control the visual environment,
01:28:53 and you can create a scenario
01:28:55 where the animal thinks that its output is futile.
01:28:58 It knows it’s running and it’s actually running,
01:29:01 but you change the frequency of the stripes
01:29:03 going by in their visual world,
01:29:05 such that they think they’re not getting anywhere,
01:29:07 and eventually they quit.
01:29:09 And the thing that determines whether or not they quit
01:29:11 is a threshold level of epinephrine in the brainstem.
01:29:14 If you drop that level back down
01:29:16 or you give the animals dopamine, essentially,
01:29:19 they keep going.
01:29:20 If you take dopamine down,
01:29:22 they’re like, this isn’t worth it, it’s helpless.
01:29:26 This isn’t worth my time and energy.
01:29:27 Well, this is where the difference
01:29:28 between humans and nonhuman animals is interesting,
01:29:32 because it does feel like humans have an extra level
01:29:35 of cognitive ability that might be relevant here.
01:29:41 Well, you can pull from different time references.
01:29:44 So if you’re in that moment,
01:29:46 you’re going to need a kit of things to pull from.
01:29:49 So you can think this is in honor of someone else
01:29:52 that passed away,
01:29:54 and you will find a gas reserve that’s amazing, right?
01:29:58 Now, whether or not mice are like,
01:30:00 I remember my brother back in the other cage
01:30:02 when I was a little mouse, we don’t know.
01:30:05 But it’s very likely that they don’t do that,
01:30:08 that they’re so present,
01:30:09 they’re in the experience of there and then and now,
01:30:12 that they aren’t able to extract from the past,
01:30:16 and they’re not able to project into the future,
01:30:18 like how great it’s gonna feel
01:30:19 when I get to the end of this really lame VR corridor.
01:30:23 I don’t think they think about that.
01:30:25 And think about like, if I quit now,
01:30:28 how will that have,
01:30:29 what kind of effect will it have on the rest of my life
01:30:31 in the future difficult times?
01:30:33 Like if you allow yourself to quit
01:30:35 in this particular moment,
01:30:36 you’ll become a quitter more and more in life,
01:30:38 and then you’re going to not get the other nice,
01:30:41 the opposite sex mammals.
01:30:45 That’s pretty severe, you went there.
01:30:46 I don’t know.
01:30:48 You took it the whole way to evolution and back again.
01:30:50 I mean, but that’s really it.
01:30:51 I mean, our ability to time reference
01:30:54 in the past, present or future.
01:30:56 I do believe that we can be in the present and the past,
01:30:59 or the present and the future, or only in the present,
01:31:02 or only in the future, only in the past.
01:31:04 But I don’t think that we can really think
01:31:05 about past, present and future all at once.
01:31:08 And this has a similarity to covert attention.
01:31:10 Like we can split our visual attention into two things.
01:31:13 We really can do a task, even though we can’t multitask.
01:31:16 Or we can bring those two spotlights of attention
01:31:18 to the same location.
01:31:20 But it’s very hard to split our attention in really well
01:31:23 into three domains, excuse me, into three domains.
01:31:26 I think that that’s very, very challenging.
01:31:29 And our time referencing scheme tends to be just one
01:31:34 or two time references.
01:31:36 So Lisa Feldman Barrett, I’m not sure
01:31:39 if you’ve done work together,
01:31:40 but at least you’re connected.
01:31:41 I found out about her because of you,
01:31:43 on your podcast with her.
01:31:45 And then I brought her on to Instagram,
01:31:46 doing an Instagram live about emotion.
01:31:48 And it was fascinating.
01:31:49 And she’s a very spirited and very, very smart woman.
01:31:53 Fearless and brilliant.
01:31:55 So I love her, she’s amazing.
01:31:57 She kind of, she’s not a scholar of hallucinogens
01:32:02 or dreams, but she had this intuition
01:32:04 that there may be a connection between the kind
01:32:09 of dissociation that happens in dreaming
01:32:11 and that happens in like psychedelics.
01:32:16 I, because of my previous conversation with you
01:32:21 on this podcast, Matthew Johnson
01:32:25 from Johns Hopkins reached out and he said,
01:32:28 but he commented, I think, on something that we commented
01:32:32 on, I don’t even remember exactly what,
01:32:34 but that there’s not many studies.
01:32:36 It’s not being psychedelics and not being rigorously studied
01:32:40 in an academic setting, like with a full rigor of science.
01:32:44 And he said, well, actually that’s exactly what we’re doing
01:32:48 and they’re extremely well funded now.
01:32:50 And it’s been a long battle to get it accepted
01:32:53 as a serious scientific pursuit.
01:32:55 So, but, and I’d like to ask you a little bit about that,
01:33:00 but do you have a sense about connection
01:33:04 between dreams and psychedelics or these different
01:33:07 explorations of mind states that are outside
01:33:10 of the standard normal one, that’s the wake mindset?
01:33:14 Yeah, I loved your discussion with Matthew.
01:33:16 I knew of the Hopkins group and the stuff they were doing,
01:33:19 but I didn’t know much about it at all.
01:33:21 And I learned a ton from that podcast.
01:33:23 I reached out to him just to say,
01:33:25 I love what you’re doing.
01:33:26 I think it’s incredible.
01:33:27 So yeah, your podcast has been a great source
01:33:29 of serious academic and intellectual conversation for me.
01:33:35 I think what they’re doing at Hopkins is amazing.
01:33:38 He has a collaborator there actually
01:33:40 that had a very popular paper.
01:33:42 I just throw out there for fun,
01:33:44 who is a postdoc at Stanford.
01:33:46 Her name is Gul.
01:33:47 She’s Turkish, I believe.
01:33:50 And I apologize, her last name escapes me at the moment,
01:33:54 but that’s just a function of my brain.
01:33:57 She had a paper showing that she put octopi on MDMA
01:34:01 on ecstasy and found out, this is published
01:34:04 in current biology, it was a great journal,
01:34:07 showing that the octopi then wanted to spend more time
01:34:10 with other octopi and they started cuddling.
01:34:12 So they’re colleagues out there.
01:34:14 But the Hopkins project is super interesting
01:34:19 because I think they were initially supported mainly
01:34:21 through private philanthropy.
01:34:23 And now you’re starting to see some more interest
01:34:25 at the level of NIH about psychedelics.
01:34:28 It’s a complicated space because the psychedelics
01:34:32 are always looked at through the lens of the 60s
01:34:36 and people losing their mind.
01:34:37 And there’s a, I always say,
01:34:40 you don’t want a Ken Kesey out of the game.
01:34:42 Ken Kesey was amazing, right,
01:34:43 part of the whole beat generation thing.
01:34:45 And he was actually at the VA near Stanford.
01:34:48 That’s where he eventually, in Menlo Park,
01:34:49 he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
01:34:51 or maybe that was about him.
01:34:52 Anyway, the comments will tell me how wrong I am,
01:34:55 but I think I’m tossing these words
01:34:57 in the right general direction.
01:34:59 But Huxley, Kesey, they did a lot of LSD
01:35:05 and they all lost their jobs, right?
01:35:08 They lost their jobs at big institutions
01:35:10 like Harvard and Stanford and elsewhere, or they left
01:35:13 because they made themselves the experiments.
01:35:18 Hopkins, as far as I know, is one of the first places,
01:35:21 if not the first place, where whatever Matt
01:35:23 may or may not be doing in his own life, I don’t know.
01:35:26 It’s really about the patients
01:35:27 and whether or not the patients
01:35:29 in these institutional review board approved studies,
01:35:32 whether or not they’re getting better
01:35:34 in situations like depression.
01:35:35 I think it’s clear that there’s a very close relationship
01:35:40 between hallucinogenic states and dreaming
01:35:43 of the sort that were described for REM dreaming.
01:35:45 And there’s a terrific set of books
01:35:48 and body of scientific literature
01:35:49 from a guy named Allan Hobson,
01:35:51 who was an MD, is at Harvard Med,
01:35:53 and he wrote books like Dream Drugstore.
01:35:56 One of the first neuroscience books I ever read
01:35:58 was about hallucinations and how psychedelics
01:36:00 and dreaming are very similar.
01:36:02 That was way back when I was in high school.
01:36:03 I was just curious.
01:36:04 And he really understood the relationship
01:36:07 between LSD and REM dreams and how similar they are.
01:36:10 I think psychedelics, and Matt knows way more about this
01:36:14 than I do, of course, but psychedelics
01:36:17 have some very interesting properties.
01:36:19 They are certainly not for everybody, right?
01:36:21 And kids, it’s a problem.
01:36:23 I think the major issues right now
01:36:25 around the psychedelic conversation is that it’s clear
01:36:29 that they can unveil certain elements of neuroplasticity.
01:36:33 They make the brain amenable to change,
01:36:35 changing up space time relationships,
01:36:37 changing up the emotional load of an event
01:36:39 and being able to reframe that.
01:36:41 It’s clear that happens.
01:36:43 But there’s two major issues.
01:36:45 One is that people talk about plasticity
01:36:47 as if plasticity is the goal,
01:36:50 but plasticity is a state within which
01:36:52 you can direct neurology.
01:36:53 And the question is what changes are you trying to get to?
01:36:56 So people are just taking psychedelics
01:36:58 to unveil plasticity without thinking about
01:37:02 what circuits they want to modify and how.
01:37:04 I think that’s a problem.
01:37:06 I think there’s great potential, however,
01:37:08 for people opening up these states of plasticity
01:37:12 with psychedelics or otherwise,
01:37:13 and directing the plastic changes
01:37:16 toward a particular end point.
01:37:17 And there’s an absolutely spectacular paper
01:37:20 out of UC Davis published as a full article in Nature
01:37:23 just a couple of months ago,
01:37:25 showing that there are psychedelics
01:37:28 that are now can be modified.
01:37:30 So chemists have gotten into the game now
01:37:31 and modifying to take away the hallucinogenic component
01:37:34 where you still get the neuroplasticity components.
01:37:37 And for a lot of people it’d be like, oh, that’s no fun.
01:37:40 That’s not giving you the wild experience.
01:37:43 But I do think that that holds great potential
01:37:45 for people that wouldn’t otherwise orient
01:37:47 towards some of these drugs.
01:37:48 So I think it’s really marvelous what’s happening
01:37:51 and what’s about to happen.
01:37:52 And I think there is one drug in that kit of drugs
01:37:57 that’s very unusual, like psilocybin, LSD,
01:38:00 those promote heavy, heavy serotonin release
01:38:04 and lateralized connections ramp up, et cetera.
01:38:06 Matt talked about all that.
01:38:08 But MDMA, ecstasy, is a very unusual situation
01:38:13 where dopamine is very, very high
01:38:16 because of the way the drug is designed.
01:38:18 Dopamine release, it goes through the roof.
01:38:21 So people feel great and they want to move
01:38:23 and they have a lot of energy.
01:38:25 But serotonin levels are also high
01:38:27 and that’s a very unnatural state.
01:38:30 And why MDMA may, and I want to highlight may,
01:38:35 have particularly high potential
01:38:38 for the treatment of certain forms of depression
01:38:41 is an interesting question.
01:38:43 Because never before, as far as we know in human history,
01:38:47 has there been a possibility of opening up dopaminergic
01:38:51 and serotonergic states at the same time,
01:38:53 dopamine being the molecule pursuit and reward
01:38:55 and more and more, and serotonin being one of bliss
01:38:58 and being content right where you’re at.
01:39:00 So it’s almost like those two things wrap back on themselves
01:39:02 and create this very unusual state.
01:39:04 And I think the bigger conversation
01:39:06 is what to do with a state like that.
01:39:08 Like is it about self love?
01:39:11 Is it about developing love for another person?
01:39:13 Is it about forgetting hate?
01:39:15 Like these are powerful molecules.
01:39:17 And I think if the academic community
01:39:19 and the clinical community is going to move forward
01:39:20 with them in any serious way,
01:39:22 I think there needs to be a conversation
01:39:24 about what they’re being used for.
01:39:28 Right, and coupled with that,
01:39:30 I think similar to what you’re saying,
01:39:32 like Matt has talked about,
01:39:34 as others have talked about,
01:39:35 some of the biggest benefits of like progress,
01:39:39 whether it’s like quitting smoking
01:39:41 and all this kind of stuff is in the days after,
01:39:45 it’s the integration of the experience.
01:39:47 So maybe you open up the brain to the neuroplasticity,
01:39:50 but then there’s like work to be done.
01:39:52 It’s not, you shake up something in the biology of the brain
01:39:58 but you have to do then it’s work.
01:40:00 Absolutely, a friend of mine who’s a physician,
01:40:03 he says, who’s quite open to this idea
01:40:06 that psychedelics could play a real role in real medicine.
01:40:10 Says, better living through chemistry
01:40:12 still requires better living.
01:40:14 And I think it’s a beautiful statement.
01:40:16 I wish I had said it, but he gets the credit.
01:40:19 But the plasticity window opens.
01:40:22 And then as you said, what are you going to do in the two
01:40:24 weeks, three weeks, four weeks afterward?
01:40:26 Because that’s the real opportunity.
01:40:28 But those psychedelic experiences are really a case
01:40:30 of an amplified experience inside of an amplified
01:40:33 experience so much so that everything seems relevant.
01:40:36 And it’s fascinating.
01:40:39 I mean, my hope is that the AI and machine learning
01:40:43 and the brain machine interface and all that
01:40:45 will eventually be merged with the psychedelic treatments
01:40:49 so that an individual can go in,
01:40:52 take whatever amount of whatever’s safe for them,
01:40:55 working with a clinician and really direct the plasticity
01:40:57 while maybe stimulating the medial frontal cortex
01:41:01 or increasing the observer or decreasing the observer
01:41:04 in the brain or decreasing the amygdala.
01:41:06 I mean, it’s doable.
01:41:07 It’s doable with transcranial magnetic stimulation
01:41:11 and it’s for shutting down activity
01:41:12 and it’s doable with ultrasound.
01:41:14 Ultrasound now allows very focal activation
01:41:17 of particular brain regions through the skull,
01:41:19 noninvasively.
01:41:21 So it’s approaching the same kind of therapy
01:41:23 from different angles.
01:41:24 One AI is the computational size of injecting
01:41:28 like the robotics injecting like maybe you can even think
01:41:32 about it as like electricity, the electrical approach
01:41:35 versus then like the chemical approach.
01:41:38 Absolutely.
01:41:39 And then the psychology is subjective, right?
01:41:42 So it’s gonna take some real understanding
01:41:45 of what that person’s lexicon is.
01:41:49 Like, you know, that wasn’t a pun, sorry.
01:41:51 I’m sorry, it’s terrible, I’m like the worst.
01:41:55 That’s the one thing I know from the feedback on my podcast.
01:41:57 My jokes are terrible, but I never claimed to be funny.
01:42:02 But somebody who they really trust
01:42:04 and understands when somebody says, you know,
01:42:08 for a very stoic person, like I’m imagining
01:42:10 you interviewed the great Dan Gable, right?
01:42:12 I don’t know anything about Dan,
01:42:13 but can you imagine like you ask Dan,
01:42:15 like, you know, how you feel about something
01:42:17 while on one of these drugs?
01:42:18 And like, I mean, his languaging might,
01:42:21 if he says that was troubling,
01:42:24 it might mean that it was very troubling
01:42:26 or not troubling at all.
01:42:27 So people are, language is a poor guide
01:42:31 because if I say I’m upset, how upset is that?
01:42:33 Well, that’s very subjective.
01:42:35 So you need, we need, can you build a tool for that?
01:42:38 Can you build an AI tool for that?
01:42:39 Yeah, deeper, yeah, well.
01:42:40 Maybe that’s the eye, maybe that’s our,
01:42:43 that’s what the eyes could reveal.
01:42:44 So language is not just words, it’s everything together.
01:42:47 And that’s one of the fascinating things about the eyes
01:42:50 and the window to the soul.
01:42:51 I mean, they express so much, the face, the eyes,
01:42:54 the body, I mean, Lisa talks about that,
01:42:57 the communication of emotions, it’s a super complex.
01:43:01 Perhaps it’s a bit of a side fun tangent,
01:43:04 but Matt, Matthew Johnson brings up DMT
01:43:10 and the experience of DMT is from a scientific perspective,
01:43:16 just a mystery in itself over its intensity
01:43:20 of what happens to the brain.
01:43:21 And of course, Joe Rogan and others bring it up
01:43:25 as a very different special kind of experience
01:43:31 and elves seem to come up often.
01:43:34 I’ve never tried DMT, what allows for hallucinogenic states?
01:43:38 And it, I mean, DMT is a really interesting molecule.
01:43:41 There are a lot of people experimenting now with DMT
01:43:46 and the way they’ve described it is as a kind of a freight
01:43:54 train through space and time, very different
01:43:56 than the way people describe LSD type experiences
01:43:59 or psilocybin where time and space are very fluid,
01:44:02 but it tends to be a kind of a slower role, if you will.
01:44:06 So it’s clear that DMT is tapping into a brain state
01:44:10 that’s distinctly different than the other psychedelics.
01:44:13 And you mentioned jujitsu and these other communities.
01:44:17 I mean, I think it’s interesting because jujitsu
01:44:21 is a nonverbal activity and people get together
01:44:24 and talk about this nonverbal activity
01:44:26 and they show great love for it in the same way
01:44:28 that surfers, I’ve known some surfers in my time
01:44:32 and they will get up at the crack of dawn
01:44:35 and drive really, really far to sit in the water
01:44:37 and wait for this wave to come.
01:44:38 I have to imagine it’s pretty fantastic.
01:44:40 I think that human beings now,
01:44:44 some of whom are in the scientific community
01:44:46 are starting to feel comfortable enough to talk about
01:44:48 some of these other loves and other endeavors
01:44:51 because they do reveal a certain component
01:44:54 about our underlying neurology.
01:44:55 I’m fascinated by the concept of wordlessness,
01:45:01 activities in which language is just not sufficient
01:45:04 to capture and in which feel so vital as a reset,
01:45:09 as important as sleep.
01:45:11 I think that’s one of the dangers of the phone
01:45:13 is not that you’re going to get into some online battle
01:45:15 or that you’re always staring at the phone
01:45:16 is that it’s a words.
01:45:17 As we read things, we’re hearing the script in our head.
01:45:20 And I think getting into states
01:45:23 where we are in a state of wordlessness
01:45:26 is very renewing and replenishing and just can feel amazing.
01:45:31 And I believe also can help us tap into creative states
01:45:36 and allow our neurology to access creative states.
01:45:38 And sleep is one such wordlessness, period.
01:45:42 So one of the most interesting things to me
01:45:45 are states that one can approach in waking,
01:45:48 non sleep depressed, wordlessness through,
01:45:51 maybe it’s jujitsu, maybe it’s for some people surfing,
01:45:54 maybe it’s dancing, maybe it’s just,
01:45:56 I don’t know, staring at a wall, who knows?
01:45:58 But where the language components of the brain
01:46:01 are completely shut down.
01:46:03 And it has to be the case that drugs are no drugs,
01:46:06 that the brain is entering and starting to states
01:46:10 and starting to use algorithms
01:46:12 that are distinctly different
01:46:13 than when we’re trying to compose things
01:46:15 in any kind of coherent way for someone else to understand.
01:46:17 There’s no interest in anyone else understanding
01:46:20 what you’re experiencing in that moment.
01:46:22 And that’s beautiful.
01:46:23 And I think it’s not just beautiful because it feels good.
01:46:27 I think it’s beautiful because it’s important
01:46:29 and it’s clearly fundamental to our neurology.
01:46:32 And your sense is there’s a connection between dreams
01:46:35 and DMT and like psychedelic,
01:46:37 like all of the, you can understand one
01:46:41 by studying the other.
01:46:42 So for example, dreams are also very difficult to study,
01:46:46 but they’re more accessible.
01:46:48 It’s safer to study.
01:46:49 And we’re told we need to get more of it.
01:46:51 Whereas with psychedelics, there’s this big question mark.
01:46:54 Is it gonna make everyone crazy?
01:46:56 Is it gonna be legal?
01:46:58 I mean, it’s kind of interesting how,
01:47:00 if one looks on Instagram,
01:47:02 one could almost think that these drugs are already legal
01:47:04 based on the way that people commute, but they’re not yet.
01:47:06 There’s still a lot of them are scheduled.
01:47:08 And there’s a lot of questions.
01:47:10 I mean, but nevertheless, it’s like,
01:47:15 my hope is that science opens up
01:47:18 to these drugs a little bit more.
01:47:21 It’s just, I have this intuition that,
01:47:24 like a lot of people share,
01:47:25 that they would be able to unlock deeper understanding
01:47:30 of our own mind.
01:47:31 It’s any kind of, same as studying dreams.
01:47:34 Absolutely.
01:47:35 Well, creativity is in the nonlinearities, right?
01:47:39 But productivity is in the implementation of linearities.
01:47:43 I mean, that’s what is absolutely clear.
01:47:45 This is why I think we were talking earlier
01:47:47 about why a formal rigorous training in something
01:47:49 where other people are looking at you
01:47:51 and telling you, no, not good enough,
01:47:52 go back and do it again.
01:47:54 There’s real value to that
01:47:55 because otherwise it’s just ideas.
01:47:57 It’s just vapors.
01:47:58 You know, one thing that Matt mentioned
01:48:01 as the study that they’re working on is,
01:48:04 as opposed to, I think most of the psychedelic studies
01:48:07 they’ve done is on how to treat different conditions.
01:48:12 And one of the things they’re working on now
01:48:13 is to try to do a study where, for creatives,
01:48:18 for people that don’t have a condition
01:48:20 that they’re trying to treat,
01:48:21 but instead see how this,
01:48:23 how psychedelics can help you create.
01:48:26 So like.
01:48:26 Goodness.
01:48:27 If you take creatives and you give them more psychedelics,
01:48:29 they’re not gonna be able to get out of their room.
01:48:31 I don’t know.
01:48:32 Well, but this is the,
01:48:34 maybe you can speak to that, psychedelics or not,
01:48:37 or dreams or tools in general, how to be better creatives.
01:48:40 That’s an interesting,
01:48:42 I don’t often see studies of this nature
01:48:44 of like how to take high performers
01:48:47 in the mental creative space
01:48:50 and get them to perform even better.
01:48:53 So it’s not average people.
01:48:55 It’s like masters of their craft, like taking,
01:48:58 I mean, his examples was taking an Elon Musk,
01:49:01 which is in the engineering space and maybe musicians
01:49:04 and all that kind of stuff and studying that.
01:49:06 That’s a, I mean, that’s weird.
01:49:09 Usually the science, the scientific exploration there
01:49:13 has been done by the musicians themselves,
01:49:16 as has been documented.
01:49:17 Like jazz is like all nonlinearities, right?
01:49:21 But if it’s, but the people still have to know
01:49:23 how to play their instruments, right?
01:49:25 There’s some early skill building that’s critical.
01:49:29 I mean, when you mentioned someone like Elon,
01:49:32 I mean, virtual, I mean, he’s already a virtuoso, right?
01:49:34 Cause he, and in so many different domains,
01:49:36 I’ve never met him, but it’s clear, right?
01:49:39 He, it’s not just that he’s ambitious and bold and brave
01:49:42 and all that, it’s all that.
01:49:44 And there’s clearly a different way of looking
01:49:49 at the same problems that everyone else is looking at.
01:49:51 And people are probably banging their head
01:49:53 against the refrigerator thinking like, think differently,
01:49:55 think it doesn’t work that way.
01:49:56 It involves, there’s a certain anxiety in for the,
01:50:00 I’m not talking about for Elon, but I don’t have no idea.
01:50:03 But I think for somebody who’s very structured,
01:50:06 very regimented, very linear,
01:50:08 the anxiety comes from letting go of those linearities.
01:50:12 And for the person that’s very creative,
01:50:14 the anxiety comes from trying to impose linearities, right?
01:50:18 The really creative artists or musician, they’re,
01:50:21 they seem nuts.
01:50:22 They seem like they can’t get their life together
01:50:24 because they can’t.
01:50:26 And they, you know, we look at people who are kind of
01:50:28 pseudo Asperger’s or Asperger’s or some forms of autism
01:50:31 and they are so hyper linear,
01:50:33 but you take away those linearities and they freak out.
01:50:36 And that’s kind of the essence of some of those syndromes.
01:50:39 So I think that the ability to toggle back and forth
01:50:42 between those states is what’s remarkable.
01:50:44 I mean, because we’re here and we’re having this discussion,
01:50:46 I mean, Steve Jobs is a good example.
01:50:48 He probably the best example,
01:50:49 somebody who actually talked about his own process,
01:50:52 about the merging of art and science,
01:50:54 art and engineering, humanities and science.
01:50:57 Very few people can do that.
01:51:00 Well, you seem to have a capacity to do that.
01:51:03 Like you know poetry and you are AI guy,
01:51:06 like you, there’s nothing linear about poetry
01:51:08 as far as I can tell.
01:51:09 I mean, I do wonder, just like we’ve been talking about,
01:51:12 if there’s any ways to push that to its limits
01:51:15 to explore further.
01:51:17 I don’t like leaning, this is why I’m bothered
01:51:20 there’s not more science and psychedelics is,
01:51:22 I haven’t done almost,
01:51:24 so I’ve eaten mushrooms a few times allegedly,
01:51:29 but that’s it.
01:51:31 And the reason I don’t do more,
01:51:33 the reason I haven’t done DMT is because it’s illegal
01:51:36 and it’s like not well studied.
01:51:39 And I’m in those things,
01:51:42 I’m not usually at the cutting edge, but I’m very curious.
01:51:45 And it feels like there could be tools
01:51:49 to be discovered there, not for fun,
01:51:51 not for recreation, but for like encouraging
01:51:57 whether you’re a linear thinking to go nonlinear
01:52:00 or it’s nonlinear to go linear, like to shake things up.
01:52:03 You mentioned Dan Gable,
01:52:05 the idea of Dan Gable on psychedelics is fascinating to me
01:52:07 because he’s such a control freak.
01:52:11 I mean, he likes control.
01:52:12 That I would show up for.
01:52:13 That I would show up for.
01:52:15 But like so much of these psychedelic experiences
01:52:17 it feels like is for letting go.
01:52:19 That’s right.
01:52:20 You don’t wanna resist.
01:52:21 That’s supposedly where the growth is
01:52:23 in giving oneself over to the process.
01:52:27 And that’s for people who are like master controllers.
01:52:31 He’s one of the greatest coaches of all time.
01:52:33 It’s fascinating to see what that battle looks like
01:52:35 of resistance and then of letting go.
01:52:38 Yeah, I mean, I can’t wait to see where these studies take us.
01:52:44 Well, it’s clearly happening.
01:52:45 You know, I’ve asked there,
01:52:46 I have a couple of colleagues at Stanford
01:52:47 who are doing animal studies.
01:52:49 I’ve asked around, you know, it’s,
01:52:51 there’s a lot of discussion in the neuroscience community
01:52:54 about what the perception of a laboratory is
01:52:56 if they work on psychedelics.
01:52:59 I mean, I have to tip my hat to the folks at Hopkins.
01:53:02 They are pioneers.
01:53:04 And as Terry Signowski,
01:53:06 he’s a computational neuroscientist down at Salk says,
01:53:08 I don’t think he was the first person to say it.
01:53:09 He says, you know how to spot the pioneers?
01:53:12 They’re the ones with the arrows in their backs.
01:53:14 Yeah.
01:53:15 And you know, it’s an unkind world to a scientist
01:53:19 that’s trying to do really cutting edge stuff.
01:53:22 My colleague, David Spiegel who studies medical hypnosis,
01:53:25 he’s got dozens of studies now showing that hypnosis
01:53:28 can be beneficial for pain management,
01:53:30 anxiety management, cancer outcomes.
01:53:32 And it’s finally, you know,
01:53:34 at the point where there’s so much data,
01:53:36 but people hear hypnosis and they think of stage hypnosis,
01:53:39 which is like the furthest thing from what he’s doing.
01:53:42 And I think mind, body type stuff,
01:53:45 hypnosis, respiration and breathing.
01:53:48 I think the hard science walk into the problem
01:53:52 is always going to be best to get the community on board.
01:53:55 And then it’s up to people like Matt
01:53:58 and to really, you know, take it to the next level.
01:54:01 And as I say, not Keezy out of the game
01:54:03 because Keezy basically was taking too much of his own stuff
01:54:07 and he started dressing crazy of banana hats.
01:54:09 And like, you see him, he had the magic bus.
01:54:11 So, you know, the day I start driving to work
01:54:14 in the magic bus, that’s the day I lose my job.
01:54:17 I’m not into buses or wearing fruit, but.
01:54:21 You’re going to get a phone call from me
01:54:22 and I hope you do the same for me.
01:54:23 It’s like, dude, what are you doing?
01:54:26 Well, what’s interesting earlier,
01:54:28 we were talking about the challenge with David
01:54:29 that you’re about to do.
01:54:30 I mean, that is a psychedelic experience of sorts
01:54:34 because you’re biasing your mind
01:54:36 towards a pretty extreme neurochemical state.
01:54:38 And you don’t know what you’re going to find there.
01:54:40 And that’s kind of the excitement,
01:54:42 at least for me as an observer.
01:54:43 It’s like, I want to know what the experience
01:54:47 is like afterward.
01:54:49 I want to know like, how was it?
01:54:51 I mean, I’m sure you’re going to get something.
01:54:52 Like you said, you’re going to grow.
01:54:53 The question is how.
01:54:54 And not resisting.
01:54:55 I mean, it’s the same as with the psychedelic experience.
01:54:57 It’s like not like giving yourself over completely
01:55:01 to the experience and not resisting
01:55:03 and going through the whole mental journey
01:55:05 of whether it’s anger or excitement or exhaustion,
01:55:08 the whole thing.
01:55:09 That’s, I mean, that’s the entirety of the process
01:55:16 that David goes through when he does his own challenges
01:55:19 and so on is that whole journey.
01:55:21 He finds purposely like missile seeks the limits
01:55:26 of the mind that whenever the resistance is felt,
01:55:30 runs up against it and then goes to the full journey
01:55:33 of going beyond it and seeing what’s there
01:55:35 on the other side.
01:55:36 Well, stress has these two sides,
01:55:38 the limbic friction of being tired
01:55:40 and needing to get more energized.
01:55:41 That’s one form of stress.
01:55:43 And then there’s the feeling too amped up
01:55:45 and needing to calm down.
01:55:47 The typical discussion around stress is one thing,
01:55:50 but it’s all limbic friction.
01:55:51 It’s just that when I say limbic friction,
01:55:53 that’s not a real scientific term.
01:55:54 I just mean the limbic system wanting to pull you down
01:55:57 into sleep or wanting to put you into panic
01:55:59 and you using top down processing,
01:56:01 using that evolved forebrain to say,
01:56:04 I’m not going to go to sleep
01:56:06 and I’m not going to freak out.
01:56:09 And those top down control mechanisms are,
01:56:11 I mean, when those get honed, that’s beautiful
01:56:15 because then you’re increasing capacity for everything.
01:56:20 This month on the podcast,
01:56:22 you’re talking about neuroplasticity.
01:56:23 You mentioned a bunch already.
01:56:25 Is there something you’re looking forward to specifically,
01:56:29 like something maybe you’re fascinated by
01:56:31 that jumps to mind about neuroplasticity,
01:56:34 this fascinating property of the brain?
01:56:37 Yeah, I think that it’s clear
01:56:39 there’s one facet of neuroplasticity
01:56:41 that is very well supported by the research data
01:56:45 that hardly anyone has implemented in the real world.
01:56:48 And that’s the release of acetylcholine from these neurons
01:56:51 in the forebrain called nucleus basalis.
01:56:53 This is mainly the work of Mike Merzenich,
01:56:56 who used to be at UCSF
01:56:57 and some of his scientific offspring,
01:56:59 Greg Reckensown and Michael Kilgard and others.
01:57:01 What they showed was increases in acetylcholine,
01:57:04 this molecule associated with focus,
01:57:07 in concert, meaning at the same time as some event,
01:57:11 motor event or music event or any kind of sensory event,
01:57:17 immediately reorganizes the neocortex
01:57:20 so that there’s a permanent map representation
01:57:22 of that event.
01:57:23 And I absolutely believe that this can be channeled
01:57:27 toward accelerated skill learning.
01:57:29 And my friend and colleague, Eddie Chang,
01:57:31 who’s now the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,
01:57:34 but also a fine scientist in his own right,
01:57:37 not just a clinician,
01:57:38 he’s doing studies looking at rapid acquisition of language
01:57:42 using these principles.
01:57:43 He trained with Merzenich.
01:57:45 It’s clear we have these gates on plasticity
01:57:48 in the forebrain,
01:57:48 and they are gated by nicotinic acetylcholine transmission.
01:57:53 And why that hasn’t made it into protocols
01:57:56 for motor learning, sport learning, language learning,
01:57:59 music learning, emotional learning, I don’t know.
01:58:02 I think part of the reason has been kind of cultural
01:58:05 is that scientists publish their paper and they move on.
01:58:07 Merzenich talked a lot and still can be found
01:58:11 from time to time talking about
01:58:13 how these plasticity mechanisms can be leveraged.
01:58:16 But he had a commercial company,
01:58:18 and so then people kind of backed away from him a little bit.
01:58:21 I think he was, to be honest,
01:58:22 I think Merzenich was ahead of his time.
01:58:25 And I think the timing is right now
01:58:27 for people to understand these mechanisms of plasticity
01:58:30 and start to implement them.
01:58:31 Also, it all sounds like becoming superhuman
01:58:34 or optimizing or whatever, all that, yes.
01:58:37 But also what about kids with language learning deficits
01:58:39 or with dyslexia or just performance in school in general?
01:58:44 I have a deep, interesting concern
01:58:46 for the future of science and mathematics
01:58:48 and not just in this country, but all over the world.
01:58:51 And more plasticity equals faster, better, deeper learning.
01:58:56 And if we don’t do this,
01:58:58 I don’t think we’re going to get the full reach
01:59:00 out of all the machine learning tools either,
01:59:03 because everyone talks about these huge data sets,
01:59:06 but those huge data sets funnel into human interpretation.
01:59:09 I mean, we don’t just like stare at the numbers and bask.
01:59:12 So the human brain, I think,
01:59:14 needs to leverage these plasticity mechanisms
01:59:17 to keep up with the thing that’s happening very, very fast,
01:59:20 which is technology development.
01:59:21 So that’s a long winded way of saying
01:59:24 basal forebrain, cholinergic transmission and plasticity,
01:59:27 it allows for plasticity in adulthood
01:59:29 and it allows for single trial learning, which is incredible.
01:59:33 But how do we leverage that?
01:59:34 Like in the physical space taking actions
01:59:38 or is there some chemicals that can stimulate neuroplasticity?
01:59:44 Like what?
01:59:45 I think it’s the intersection of the two.
01:59:46 I think it’s being engaged in a physical practice
01:59:48 while enhancing pharmacology.
01:59:51 And it has to be done safely.
01:59:52 And this is full of open questions.
01:59:54 This is the very beginnings of it, like you’re saying.
01:59:56 Yeah, a pill that’s safe
01:59:58 that increases nicotinic transmission.
02:00:00 I mean, I know a number of people that chew Nicorette.
02:00:03 Actually, I have a Nobel prize winning colleague
02:00:05 at Columbia, not to be named,
02:00:08 who chews like six pieces of Nicorette
02:00:10 in a half hour conversation with him.
02:00:11 And he started doing that as a replacement for smoking
02:00:14 because smoking is nicotine nicotinic stimulation
02:00:18 of the cholinergic system.
02:00:19 So smokers have long known that increases focus
02:00:22 and attention and learning.
02:00:24 It’s just that the lung cancer thing is a barrier.
02:00:27 Now I’m not suggesting people take Nicorette,
02:00:29 but it’s clear that we need better directed pharmacology.
02:00:32 But you can imagine next time you go in
02:00:34 for a learning bout, if it’s really essential,
02:00:37 you might want to stimulate the nicotinic system
02:00:39 if that’s safe for you.
02:00:41 Again, I’m a doctor.
02:00:42 So again, I’m not telling people to do this,
02:00:44 but that’s where it’s going.
02:00:45 Until we start merging machines
02:00:47 with pharmacology and behavior, we’re just kind of walking
02:00:52 around in the circle over and over again,
02:00:54 and it’s going to happen.
02:00:56 Do you find computer vision, machine learning
02:01:01 from the perspective of tooling as an interesting tool
02:01:04 for analyzing, for processing all the data
02:01:08 from the neuroscience world, from the neurobiology,
02:01:11 biology, all the different data sets
02:01:15 that you could have about the mind, the eye,
02:01:17 the everything that’s neck and above,
02:01:21 and also the central nervous system and all?
02:01:23 Absolutely.
02:01:24 I think that computer science and engineering
02:01:27 and chemistry, bioengineering, that’s what’s creating
02:01:32 the acceleration and progress in neuroscience right now.
02:01:35 I think it’s actually one place where science,
02:01:38 I’m very reassured, science has invited in psychologists,
02:01:43 computational biologists, at least at Stanford, MIT,
02:01:46 and other places too, of course, it’s clear
02:01:48 that it’s a everyone’s invited kind of party right now.
02:01:53 That the major issue in the field of neuroscience,
02:01:55 at least through my view,
02:01:57 is that there’s no conceptual leadership.
02:01:59 No one is saying we need to work on
02:02:00 and solve this problem or that problem.
02:02:02 It’s very fragmented right now.
02:02:05 Now, the good news is people are communicating.
02:02:07 So computer scientists and people who work on AI,
02:02:10 machine vision are talking to biologists and vice versa,
02:02:13 but it’s very dispersed.
02:02:15 Is there a lot of different data sets in your work
02:02:18 that you’ve just come across?
02:02:21 Is there a huge number of disparate data sets
02:02:23 around neuroscience and so on?
02:02:26 Well, there’s a lot of cell sequencing stuff.
02:02:28 So the Broad over in Boston and then on this coast,
02:02:32 the Chen Zuckerberg Initiative,
02:02:37 they did $3 billion to sequence every cell type
02:02:40 in humans and in animals and I think their goal
02:02:43 is to cure every disease by some date,
02:02:47 I don’t know, in the future.
02:02:50 Huge data sets of gene expression and protein expression,
02:02:54 that’s valuable.
02:02:55 I think no one really knows how to think
02:02:58 about neural circuits and what is a neural circuit?
02:03:02 Is it one structure?
02:03:04 Is it two structures communicating?
02:03:06 I think this is where I actually think
02:03:08 that the robotics is going to tell us how the brain works
02:03:13 because it’s tempting to think that the brain
02:03:16 has all these cell types and circuits
02:03:18 in order to solve specific problems.
02:03:20 But it might be that the fundamental algorithm
02:03:23 is to create cells and circuits
02:03:24 that can solve variable problems.
02:03:27 We know in the retina, just a very simple example
02:03:29 is that we’ve always heard about like cones
02:03:31 are for color vision and high acuity
02:03:33 and rods are for night vision and non color vision.
02:03:37 But at the dusk, dawn transition,
02:03:40 certain cell types switch to do completely different,
02:03:43 have a completely different function
02:03:44 for viewing starry night
02:03:45 versus what they do during the daytime.
02:03:47 So neurons multiplex.
02:03:50 And I think building machines that can multiplex
02:03:53 and can evolve themselves is going to help us
02:03:57 really understand what the brain is doing.
02:03:58 We need to tease out the fundamental algorithms.
02:04:01 We know they’re like motion detection
02:04:03 and spatial vision and things like that.
02:04:05 I think machines are going to be much faster at that
02:04:07 than our understanding of biology
02:04:11 and how the brain does that.
02:04:13 Basically, I’ll be out of a job
02:04:15 and people like you will have a job.
02:04:16 Well, no, I think the main idea is that
02:04:19 there won’t be a job that’s machine learning
02:04:22 or computer vision.
02:04:24 It’s just, it’s a tool that neuroscientists
02:04:27 will use more and more and more
02:04:29 and biologists would use.
02:04:31 I mean, this whole idea that it will just be a tool
02:04:35 that allows you to start expanding
02:04:39 the kind of things you can study.
02:04:41 Well, the next generation coming up,
02:04:43 I can say this because I now I’m blessed
02:04:45 to have a bioengineering student.
02:04:46 They think about problems so differently than biologists do.
02:04:50 We realized the other day we both came up
02:04:52 with a set of ideas around a certain project
02:04:54 and we realized that her version of it
02:04:56 was the exact opposite of mine.
02:04:58 And hers was far more rational.
02:05:00 It’s just an engineering perspective.
02:05:01 It’s like, why would we do that last?
02:05:03 We should do that first.
02:05:04 I think that the next generation is really interested
02:05:08 in solving practical problems.
02:05:09 So a lot like computer science and engineering was
02:05:12 in the late nineties, it was like,
02:05:13 you can go do a PhD in computer science and engineering,
02:05:16 maybe, or you go work for a company
02:05:18 and actually build stuff that’s useful.
02:05:20 I think neuroscientists and people interested
02:05:21 in neuroscience are starting to think,
02:05:23 how can I build stuff that’s useful?
02:05:25 And this statement is supported by the fact
02:05:27 that many people in my business leave their academic labs,
02:05:32 fortunately not all of them,
02:05:33 but they leave their academic labs
02:05:34 and they go work for companies like Neuralink.
02:05:37 This is something I think we’ve spoken a few times offline
02:05:42 about, I mean, speaking of computer vision,
02:05:47 I’m fascinated by the eye.
02:05:48 I did a bunch of work on the eye.
02:05:50 So there’s the neuroscientists,
02:05:52 there’s a neurobiology way of studying the eye,
02:05:55 and there’s the computer vision way of studying the eye.
02:05:57 And the computer vision way of studying the eye
02:05:59 of just like observing, noncontext sensing of humans
02:06:03 is really fascinating to me
02:06:04 and studying human behavior in different contexts,
02:06:06 like in semi autonomous vehicles,
02:06:09 it seemed like there’s a lot of signal
02:06:11 that comes from the eye, that comes from blinking,
02:06:15 that’s not fully understood yet.
02:06:16 It’s been in the lab, it’s been used quite a bit
02:06:20 to study like the dilation of the pupil,
02:06:22 all those kinds of things are used to infer workload,
02:06:27 cognitive load, all those kinds of things.
02:06:29 But the pictures is murky.
02:06:32 It’s not completely well understood,
02:06:34 especially in the wild, how much signal you can get
02:06:36 from the eye, from the human face.
02:06:40 I’ve downloaded Joe Rogan’s,
02:06:43 all of the podcasts he’s ever done, video.
02:06:47 You have the YouTube bank.
02:06:49 I have the YouTube bank for a reason
02:06:51 that this was before he went with Spotify.
02:06:57 You own the archive.
02:06:58 There’s PubMed, and then there’s the Joe Rogan experience
02:07:01 owned by, or maintained by Lex.
02:07:04 For my private collection.
02:07:06 No, the reason I did it,
02:07:08 and I did a really rigorous processing of it,
02:07:11 which is like I extracted all of the faces,
02:07:15 I did the really good blink track,
02:07:17 the pupil tracking and the blink detection
02:07:21 for the entirety of the,
02:07:22 oh, I should say it’s from episode like,
02:07:26 I forget what it is, but it’s like episode 900
02:07:28 when they switched to 1080p video.
02:07:31 But it was like much crappier video.
02:07:33 It’s still kind of.
02:07:34 Did you log when there was marijuana consumption
02:07:36 or when they were drinking?
02:07:38 I mean, there’s so many.
02:07:39 Because that’s gonna, like just,
02:07:41 it won’t throw off the data,
02:07:43 but it’s relevant to the pupil data.
02:07:47 So let’s just put it this way.
02:07:50 There’s a lot of fascinating
02:07:51 computer vision problems involved,
02:07:53 but I only kept long sequences of data
02:07:57 where the eyes detected exceptionally well.
02:08:00 And I also removed people that were wearing glasses.
02:08:04 I removed, there’s certain people that have a way
02:08:08 of moving their eyes and squinting
02:08:14 where it’s harder to infer like concrete blinks.
02:08:21 They’ll kind of have a squint the whole time.
02:08:24 And their blink is very light.
02:08:27 It’s very tough to know what’s an actual blink.
02:08:32 So I wanted to.
02:08:33 Then you got those baseball cap wearing guys.
02:08:35 There are certain people that go on podcasts
02:08:37 and wear baseball caps and don’t reveal their,
02:08:39 I don’t know if they realize it or not until it comes out,
02:08:42 but their face is completely obscured from vision.
02:08:45 And from a computer vision perspective,
02:08:47 people that wear makeup and usually women on their eyes,
02:08:51 it complicates things.
02:08:52 Like eyelashes all complicate things.
02:08:54 So you can clean stuff up
02:08:57 just so you have really crisp signal.
02:08:59 You don’t have to, you can deal with issues,
02:09:02 but there’s so many hours of Joe Rogan video.
02:09:04 Anyway, I say all that because I was searching
02:09:08 for an interesting personal experiment for me
02:09:11 because I saw in drivers when I was looking
02:09:15 at eye movement in drivers, it seemed to indicate,
02:09:19 there seemed to be quite a lot of signal there
02:09:21 that indicates amount of cognitive load,
02:09:25 but it’s not clear if there’s something conclusive,
02:09:28 but if there is some signal, that’s a really powerful one
02:09:31 because eye movement can be detected in the wild.
02:09:35 Like you and I sitting here,
02:09:36 I can detect eye movement really well.
02:09:38 Pupil dilation is a really crappy indicator.
02:09:41 And it’s luminance dependent.
02:09:42 Like if I turn toward a light, it’s a route.
02:09:45 People change size depending on level of alertness,
02:09:48 arouse autonomic arousal,
02:09:49 but also overall levels of luminance.
02:09:51 It’s very, very hard, but there are,
02:09:54 I mean, you’re sitting on a gold mine
02:09:57 because there is a lot of interest right now
02:10:00 in measuring state through noncontact sensing.
02:10:05 Heart rate variability through changes in skin tone,
02:10:07 just off a camera.
02:10:08 Can you imagine that at the point where
02:10:10 you just look at some video and you’re like,
02:10:11 oh, they’re getting more stressed or worked up
02:10:13 and they’re not based on a heat map
02:10:15 of some little patch on their face.
02:10:16 Cause everyone’s going to have this slight,
02:10:18 sort of compartmentalize it slightly differently,
02:10:21 but you can learn it pretty quickly.
02:10:22 We know this when someone’s like giving a talk
02:10:24 and we see them starting to blotching on their neck.
02:10:27 This is like the thesis defense response, right?
02:10:31 We know it and it’s a stressful situation
02:10:34 because not passing your thesis defense is rough.
02:10:37 And we can see that,
02:10:38 but cameras can pick that up really easily
02:10:40 at much lower levels than the blatant blotching
02:10:43 kind of effect.
02:10:44 And eye movements certainly are powerful indications
02:10:49 of the state of the autonomic system.
02:10:51 So do you think there are things from a high level
02:10:55 that you can pick up from eye movement and blinking?
02:10:58 Well, blink frequency is going to increase
02:11:01 as people get tired, right?
02:11:04 I’ve actually been teased a lot online
02:11:06 cause I don’t blink much when I’ll do a post.
02:11:08 And so I did a whole post about blinking,
02:11:11 about the science of blinking.
02:11:11 There’s some data, very strong data, not from my lab
02:11:14 that show that every time you blink,
02:11:16 it resets your perception of time.
02:11:18 They have people do these kind of track
02:11:20 a kind of a Doppler like thing.
02:11:22 And anyway, blinking resets your perception of time.
02:11:25 There’s a dopaminergic mechanism
02:11:26 in the blink related circuitry of the brain.
02:11:30 When people are very alert,
02:11:31 they tend to not blink very much.
02:11:32 When we’re sleepy, we tend to blink more
02:11:33 and our eyes tend to close.
02:11:35 Now, some people are more hooded
02:11:37 in the way their eyes sit.
02:11:38 Some people are like this all the time.
02:11:40 There are some very famous people.
02:11:41 I’m not gonna name them
02:11:42 because I might run into them at some point
02:11:44 who were like accused of being sociopaths
02:11:47 cause they don’t blink very often.
02:11:48 But they might just have high levels of autonomic arousal.
02:11:51 They just don’t blink very much.
02:11:53 Also depends on how lubricated the eyes are.
02:11:54 So I think within individual,
02:11:57 you can get a lot of information.
02:11:59 I don’t think we can say this person’s blinking a lot.
02:12:01 They’re lying, this person or they’re tired.
02:12:03 This person doesn’t blink, they’re stressed.
02:12:07 I think if you understand that person’s baseline,
02:12:10 you can get it.
02:12:11 And presumably, well, having been
02:12:13 on the Joe Rogan Experience,
02:12:14 I can say when you first sit down there,
02:12:15 if you’ve never been in there before.
02:12:17 You’re in my data set by the way.
02:12:18 Oh my.
02:12:19 Well, I bet you I will admit to being,
02:12:22 first time sitting down there.
02:12:24 I mean, Joe was incredibly gracious,
02:12:25 made me feel very comfortable there.
02:12:27 But yeah, it’s an intense experience.
02:12:30 It’s a small space too.
02:12:31 Anytime you enter a small space from a big space
02:12:33 in his old studio, you’re familiar with,
02:12:38 there’s a breaking in period
02:12:39 where you’re getting to know somebody.
02:12:40 And so I’m sure my levels of autonomic arousal
02:12:43 front of the podcast were higher than later.
02:12:46 But once you have a baseline established,
02:12:48 you can get a lot of data on somebody simply from blinks.
02:12:52 Some people averting gaze too.
02:12:54 If you have both people, that’s really powerful.
02:12:56 This is the holy grail, another holy grail of neuroscience.
02:13:00 We’ve mainly looked at subjects in isolation.
02:13:03 There hasn’t been much brain imaging
02:13:04 of two people interacting
02:13:06 or even in animal models of two mice
02:13:09 or two monkeys interacting.
02:13:10 It’s all like person scanner, bite bar.
02:13:13 I mean, if you’ve ever been in one of these scanners,
02:13:14 you’re like in a bite bar.
02:13:16 It’s very medieval.
02:13:17 And so you think in the interaction,
02:13:19 there’s actually, you can almost study them
02:13:22 as a single brain or as a single system.
02:13:24 The two brains are a single system.
02:13:26 I think with AI.
02:13:27 Highly correlated.
02:13:28 Yeah, maybe are your blinks triggering my blinks?
02:13:30 Are your non blink epochs extending my non blink epochs?
02:13:35 There’s a fascinating space to explore there
02:13:38 and no one’s done it.
02:13:39 And because everyone let the Joe Rogan experience archive
02:13:43 disappear, except for you.
02:13:45 You grabbed, did you get the comments too?
02:13:47 Because I think the comments were almost as entertaining
02:13:49 as the conversation.
02:13:50 You know what you just made me realize with the couplings,
02:13:53 I have a better data set than the Joe Rogan podcast
02:13:55 with high resolution video,
02:13:56 which is the raw video for this podcast.
02:13:59 So for example, both cameras right now are recording
02:14:02 you and I full feed.
02:14:05 The final result will switch cameras back and forth,
02:14:07 but I have the full feed.
02:14:09 So I can have the blinking for both you and I
02:14:11 the whole time.
02:14:12 I bet you people trigger blinks and in one another,
02:14:16 you know, and there’s also like the simplest way
02:14:19 to think about the blinks and the attentional thing
02:14:21 and the alertness is two fighters in the standoff.
02:14:25 There’s this whole lore around who blinks first.
02:14:28 It’s like they blink first.
02:14:29 Well, what are we really asking?
02:14:30 They’re asking whether or not one person can maintain focus
02:14:35 longer than the other person,
02:14:36 which is an important parameter.
02:14:39 It’s not the only parameter,
02:14:40 but it’s an important parameter.
02:14:42 And so that blinking contest,
02:14:44 even though they don’t square off as a blinking contest,
02:14:46 it’s well known that the first to blink
02:14:48 is revealing something about their capacity
02:14:51 to hold attention.
02:14:53 You’ve started an amazing podcast
02:14:56 that we’ve mentioned a few times.
02:14:57 People should definitely check it out.
02:14:59 It’s called the Huberman Lab Podcast.
02:15:02 It does your, it’s basically,
02:15:07 it embodies the personality of Andrew Huberman,
02:15:10 which is like make science accessible,
02:15:15 but also fascinating and giving it,
02:15:21 like what do you call it?
02:15:23 You give tools for everyday life,
02:15:25 meaning it kind of grounds it like,
02:15:28 what the hell does this mean for my life?
02:15:32 But then also does the beauty of science at the same time.
02:15:35 So I love both the rigor and the openness
02:15:39 of the whole thing,
02:15:40 plus the whole corrections things that we mentioned.
02:15:42 Anyway, what’s been the hardest part of this whole process?
02:15:47 You’re one of, already one of the only,
02:15:52 and one of the best science broadcasters out there.
02:15:56 So in that process, what’s been the hardest,
02:15:59 what’s been the most exciting part?
02:16:01 Wow, well, first of all,
02:16:02 thanks for the kind words about the podcast.
02:16:05 It was inspired by you.
02:16:07 I absolutely, that’s no BS.
02:16:11 The last time we met to do an interview for your podcast,
02:16:14 we talked a little bit about it
02:16:15 and you gave me the subtle nudge
02:16:19 that maybe there was a podcast there
02:16:21 and I thought about it and I laughed
02:16:23 and I was just like, I gotta do this thing.
02:16:24 And you really gave me the encouragement to do it.
02:16:26 And your podcast, this podcast has really forged the way.
02:16:30 You’ve been tip of the spear on serious scientific,
02:16:34 intellectual, yet fun, accessible conversation.
02:16:37 And so I, as your colleague and friend,
02:16:42 but just even if those things weren’t true,
02:16:45 like this podcast was and is the inspiration.
02:16:48 There’s no question.
02:16:49 Thank you so much.
02:16:50 Yeah, I really, like 100%.
02:16:52 And when I decided to do the podcast,
02:16:55 the Huberman Lab Podcast,
02:16:56 I thought really long and hard about what would work best
02:16:58 and would be most beneficial.
02:17:00 It turned out to be the hardest thing,
02:17:02 which is to stay on a single topic
02:17:04 for three or four or more episodes
02:17:06 before switching to a new topic.
02:17:08 Because I know from the experience of university
02:17:12 and teaching in university, as you know as well,
02:17:16 that there’s always the temptation
02:17:19 to pivot to something else,
02:17:20 but the drilling into something really deeply
02:17:23 is where the gems reside.
02:17:25 And the challenge has been how to make it interesting,
02:17:29 how to keep people on board,
02:17:31 how to give people tools along the way,
02:17:34 but also stay close to the scientific data.
02:17:37 I like to think that we’re headed in the right direction.
02:17:39 It still needs to evolve, but that’s been a challenge.
02:17:43 I think I also am challenged by the fact
02:17:47 that there’s a tremendous range of backgrounds of listeners.
02:17:50 So some people have asked for more names,
02:17:53 like more bits and parts of the nervous system
02:17:55 and cellular molecular mechanisms
02:17:57 and all that kind of thing.
02:17:58 And other people have said,
02:17:59 I don’t understand any of that stuff,
02:18:00 but I think I’m keeping up.
02:18:02 And so unlike a university course
02:18:04 where there are prerequisites
02:18:05 and everyone’s coming to the table
02:18:06 with more or less the same knowledge,
02:18:08 I have a very limited sense of what the audience knows
02:18:10 and doesn’t know.
02:18:11 So that’s why I incorporated the feature
02:18:13 of the comment section on YouTube,
02:18:15 being a source of feedback.
02:18:18 And I do kind of an office hours like episode
02:18:21 every third or fourth episode
02:18:23 where I address common questions.
02:18:25 And I think that the podcast space in my mind,
02:18:29 at least for the sort of podcasts I’m doing,
02:18:31 needed a venue for the listeners
02:18:34 to be a more integral part of the experience
02:18:37 as opposed to just commenting
02:18:38 on what they liked or didn’t like.
02:18:40 So while I like to hear what people liked and didn’t like,
02:18:42 I also really like to hear about,
02:18:44 hey, tell me more about temperature minimums
02:18:46 and how they can be used to phase shifts
02:18:48 or cadient rhythms or whatever it is.
02:18:50 And I realized that I’m probably losing
02:18:51 some people along the way,
02:18:52 but hopefully at the end of each month,
02:18:56 and because of the way that the episodes are archived,
02:18:59 people will come away feeling as if they’ve learned a ton
02:19:01 and they have tools that they can implement.
02:19:03 And perhaps most importantly,
02:19:04 that they’re starting to think scientifically
02:19:07 about the tons of other stuff that’s out there.
02:19:10 So that’s been the challenge and it’s still really early
02:19:13 days, but, and of course,
02:19:16 there’s also an intentional challenge.
02:19:18 I realize that people are busy.
02:19:19 Not everyone has two hours to listen to a podcast
02:19:22 about jet lag and shift work and raising kids
02:19:25 and sleep and that kind of thing.
02:19:27 I’m not raising kids,
02:19:27 but I did a whole thing about babies and sleep with,
02:19:30 you know, and how parents can manage their sleep
02:19:32 when kids aren’t sleeping.
02:19:33 So it’s been, I’m hacking through the jungle
02:19:37 of all this stuff, but, and I’ll come right back to it.
02:19:41 My inspiration and my North star on this is getting
02:19:46 to a point where the audience that listens to this feels
02:19:53 the same way that I do when I listen to your podcast.
02:19:56 Thank you so much.
02:19:57 Like when I turn into your podcast,
02:19:58 I’m going to embarrass you a little bit more
02:20:00 by complimenting you a little bit more,
02:20:02 but not out of a sadistic thing,
02:20:05 but just because when I tune into your podcast
02:20:08 or Joe’s podcast, I have the same sensation
02:20:11 that other people have.
02:20:11 Like, I feel like I’m home of sorts.
02:20:15 I’m like, I’m familiar with the space
02:20:17 and I’d like people to feel comfortable in the space
02:20:20 that is the Huber and Lab Podcast,
02:20:21 whatever that ends up being.
02:20:23 Yeah, that’s the magic of podcasting.
02:20:25 It’s like, I feel like I’m part of your life now
02:20:28 in a way that, as a fan, that I wouldn’t be otherwise.
02:20:32 And, you know, like I never was able to have that
02:20:35 with Carl Sagan, for example, you know?
02:20:38 And that’s a whole nother level of connection
02:20:42 with a human being that gets you excited.
02:20:44 And then I share your excitement
02:20:46 about different topics in neuroscience
02:20:49 or just biology in general.
02:20:54 And then I don’t have to actually understand
02:20:56 everything you’re saying to really enjoy it.
02:21:00 So that’s the magic of podcasting is like,
02:21:03 you can go through like 10 minutes
02:21:05 and not understanding what the hell a person is saying,
02:21:08 and then you enjoy the excitement
02:21:11 and then you reconnect to a thing
02:21:12 that you do understand what they’re saying.
02:21:15 And, you know, that’s, that personal coupled
02:21:19 with the scientific rigor is magic.
02:21:22 And finding the right, it’s exploration.
02:21:24 Like Joe found something that works for comedians,
02:21:27 which is like, you know, having a good laugh,
02:21:30 but also every once in a while talking seriously
02:21:34 about difficult topics.
02:21:36 The scientific space, it was unclear.
02:21:40 You haven’t had guests on.
02:21:41 Not yet, but maybe you’ll come on as our first guest.
02:21:45 I was gonna invite my,
02:21:46 I was gonna try to force myself in there.
02:21:48 I am, I’m officially inviting you now.
02:21:50 Will you come on the podcast?
02:21:51 I would love to, I would love to.
02:21:53 But it was hard.
02:21:55 It’s still a little bit difficult to tell people
02:21:59 that no, you don’t get it.
02:22:01 We’re not gonna talk for 10 minutes.
02:22:03 We’re gonna talk for three or four hours.
02:22:07 It’s a different, for scientists,
02:22:09 for like, they’re like, what are we gonna talk about?
02:22:12 They think it’s like the NPR interview.
02:22:14 Yes.
02:22:15 And they don’t realize, first of all,
02:22:18 I think at his best, if you’re like at the level
02:22:20 of Joe Rogan, who I think is an excellent conversationalist,
02:22:26 you just lose track of time.
02:22:27 It can be three, four, five hours
02:22:29 and you lose track of time.
02:22:30 I’m still not there.
02:22:31 I find that it’s still painful.
02:22:34 Like the conversation is still challenging sometimes.
02:22:36 You don’t lose quite as much of track of time.
02:22:39 It’s still an intellectual effort.
02:22:40 And I think it might always be as it would be with you
02:22:43 because you’re talking about difficult topics,
02:22:45 maybe that require more brain.
02:22:47 You’re not just shooting the shit with like a Brian Red Band
02:22:51 or somebody like comedians or just joking.
02:22:53 What’s like, remember those shows,
02:22:56 like where those shows where someone would come out
02:22:59 and like spin plates and they’re running back and forth.
02:23:02 Really good scientific discussion is like that.
02:23:05 You have to be maintaining three or four
02:23:07 different logical arguments and jumping back and forth.
02:23:10 It’s occasionally get into like a real streak of linearity.
02:23:13 But as we found today that typically there’s three
02:23:17 or four different things that we’re bouncing back
02:23:18 and forth from.
02:23:19 And that requires a lot of updating of these,
02:23:21 you know, forebrain circuits.
02:23:23 It’s not a passive listening experience.
02:23:25 But I like to think that the brain likes that.
02:23:28 I do want to ask just cause we all,
02:23:31 I don’t want to forget the question came up to me
02:23:36 is your podcast has the same kind of rigor
02:23:40 that I think like a Dan Carlin podcast has
02:23:43 who’s a history podcaster.
02:23:46 Well, that’s a definitely a compliment.
02:23:47 Thank you.
02:23:48 Dan’s way, you know, he’s something for me to aspire to.
02:23:52 He goes through hell to prepare.
02:23:54 He spends months preparing.
02:23:56 It feels like you’ve had to really prepare for your podcast.
02:24:01 I definitely prepare hard.
02:24:02 How does that?
02:24:04 Are you okay?
02:24:06 Yeah.
02:24:07 I mean, how much effort does that take?
02:24:09 It feels like a conference presentation.
02:24:11 Yeah.
02:24:12 So we record once a week and in the intervening time,
02:24:15 I listened to many university level lectures.
02:24:21 So NIH has a bank of lectures.
02:24:25 I have some sources of recorded university seminars.
02:24:28 I’m trying to find the points of intersection.
02:24:32 So like for four episodes on sleep,
02:24:33 it’s not like I’m going to just regurgitate a popular book
02:24:36 or take one lecture and just poach the content.
02:24:39 I’m going to find the overlap in the different elements.
02:24:43 I also, so what I’ll do is I’ll generally read 10
02:24:47 or 15 papers and generally those are good reviews,
02:24:51 annual reviews, any review of neuroscience,
02:24:53 annual review of physiology, those kinds of things.
02:24:55 I’ll chase a few references.
02:24:56 I’ll listen to some YouTube videos,
02:24:58 but of university level lectures.
02:25:00 And then I throw all that on a whiteboard.
02:25:03 Usually while I work out in the morning,
02:25:05 I’ll just be working out.
02:25:06 I have a gym in my house
02:25:07 and I’ll just put up all these random ideas.
02:25:10 I want to cover that dreams, hallucination.
02:25:12 And then I take that and I start to eliminate,
02:25:14 I draw lines between the common points of intersection.
02:25:17 And then from that, I distill out an outline.
02:25:21 And then I basically think about what I want to say
02:25:25 on my walks with my dog.
02:25:27 And I bother a couple of people and blab to them.
02:25:29 So I would say each podcast, yeah,
02:25:31 I put in 10 to 15 hours at least
02:25:33 of passive listening preparation
02:25:35 and maybe five or six of active preparation.
02:25:38 So I do prepare quite a lot,
02:25:40 but it has a certain reward component for me.
02:25:44 To come up at the end with something
02:25:46 that’s somewhat crystallized for me is just so satisfying.
02:25:50 It feel like there’s something about my dopamine circuits
02:25:52 that just love that.
02:25:54 And the only pain is that a year later
02:25:58 after I’ve talked about the stuff a bunch of times,
02:26:00 it’s so much more succinct, but that’s life.
02:26:04 At some point you got to pull the trigger.
02:26:05 Well, I don’t know what you think,
02:26:08 but for me, YouTube is,
02:26:11 that’s why I’m sad that Joe left YouTube.
02:26:13 There’s a archival nature to YouTube that’s kind of magical.
02:26:16 And so I’m really glad you’re now,
02:26:18 you’re doing a lot of educational content on Instagram
02:26:23 and Instagram before,
02:26:25 but now I’m doing this podcasting on YouTube.
02:26:29 It’s like, you know, it’s like Feynman lectures.
02:26:32 Like, I’m not saying every podcast,
02:26:35 but there will be, you will have some,
02:26:38 I could already tell there’ll be some lectures
02:26:42 which are like definitive, like really special ones.
02:26:47 That’s the hope.
02:26:48 And there’s some aspect that’s archival to YouTube
02:26:51 where at least I hope like 20 years from now,
02:26:54 some kid is gonna watch a lecture of yours
02:26:58 and it’ll create the next Nobel prize, right?
02:27:02 It’ll create another dream that then becomes a reality.
02:27:08 And then that’s a special thing that YouTube provides.
02:27:12 So I’m really excited that you’re on YouTube.
02:27:14 And at the same time,
02:27:15 I’m excited to see where this thing goes
02:27:17 because it seems like change is the cliche thing,
02:27:22 that change is the only constant in these times
02:27:25 because you’re paving with this podcast,
02:27:29 with this creativity, what you were doing on Instagram
02:27:32 as well, you’re paving the new era
02:27:34 of what it means to do science.
02:27:37 So actively doing research
02:27:39 and actively explaining that research in new media.
02:27:42 It’s very interesting to see.
02:27:44 I’m genuinely inspired by you.
02:27:47 We had this discussion last time
02:27:49 after the podcast recording,
02:27:51 and it’s clear that communication of science
02:27:54 cannot be left to the existing institutions.
02:27:58 And I’m not talking about universities.
02:27:59 I just mean that the science section of newspapers is,
02:28:03 sometimes there’s some gems there,
02:28:05 but generally it goes, you know?
02:28:08 And I think you really have to know a field
02:28:11 in order to extract the best things from that field.
02:28:13 And my hope is that other practicing scientists
02:28:16 and people finishing their PhD and postdoc
02:28:19 and people who are running labs or working at companies
02:28:21 will start to do this.
02:28:22 I mean, how amazing would it be, for instance,
02:28:24 if someone at Neuralink was giving us hints
02:28:29 about not necessarily what they’re developing
02:28:31 because that’s complicated for all sorts of reasons,
02:28:34 but would talk to us about what the real challenges
02:28:39 of building futuristic brain machine interface are like
02:28:43 and what it means to understand a clinical problem
02:28:47 and address it.
02:28:47 I mean, my hope is somebody there might eventually do that,
02:28:50 that somebody in the world of chemistry
02:28:53 or synthetic materials or whatever it is
02:28:55 will do this in a way that I could understand
02:28:57 because I don’t have expertise in those.
02:28:59 I think it would be marvelous.
02:29:02 And you were tip of the spear, you were out first,
02:29:05 and I’m just happily trying to move along
02:29:09 in the direction I’m going.
02:29:10 But I think the future of science education is online.
02:29:15 And I think that’s gonna be scary
02:29:17 to a lot of existing institutions,
02:29:19 but it’s not about disrupting anything.
02:29:21 It’s just about trying to do things better.
02:29:23 Yeah, some of the best interviews,
02:29:28 some of the best investigative journalism
02:29:30 is done by people inside the field.
02:29:33 Comes to mind a guy by the name of Elon Musk,
02:29:36 who I love the possibility that he gets a Pulitzer
02:29:40 for that interview.
02:29:41 But he grilled the crap out of Vlad,
02:29:44 the CEO of Robinhood.
02:29:46 I’m not sure if you’re familiar.
02:29:47 Oh, on Clubhouse the other night.
02:29:50 Yeah, I saw you guys in there.
02:29:51 I was kept out, I wasn’t quick enough.
02:29:53 My thumbs don’t go fast enough.
02:29:55 So I was, and I wasn’t about to sit in the waiting room.
02:29:57 Have you tried that social network,
02:29:58 by the way, the Clubhouse?
02:29:59 I’ve gone in there a few times and checked some things out.
02:30:03 I’m there, I have a few questions about it
02:30:05 that like if I’m in there,
02:30:07 how one can participate or not participate.
02:30:11 I like being a fly on the wall for those conversations.
02:30:13 I’ve been very curious as to what’s going on in there.
02:30:15 Oh, it’s quite, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts.
02:30:18 Maybe it’s useful to comment.
02:30:20 I also have a Discord server
02:30:23 that has a few tens of thousands of people on it.
02:30:27 And then they have also a voice chat capability.
02:30:31 So there’s these get togethers.
02:30:33 And I was using it in the spring and summer,
02:30:37 like actively on those voice discussions.
02:30:40 And it’s anywhere from 10 to like 1,000 people
02:30:44 all together in voice.
02:30:46 Like anyone can speak anytime, right?
02:30:49 But there’s this weird dynamic that people stay quiet.
02:30:52 Only one person speaks at a time
02:30:54 because they’re all like respectful.
02:30:55 And it’s a community of like fundamentally
02:30:59 respectful people, even though they’re all anonymous.
02:31:01 So like, except like me and a few others,
02:31:04 it’s all anonymous people.
02:31:06 It’s so interesting and it works.
02:31:08 But the magical thing to me about that community
02:31:14 was how intimate voice only communication can be.
02:31:18 It felt as intimate as like a small get together
02:31:24 at a home with close friends.
02:31:27 It felt like there’s a calmness to it.
02:31:29 And you’re revealing things about, you know,
02:31:33 somebody suffering from depression or being suicidal.
02:31:37 So those are the dark things or being super excited,
02:31:39 getting a new girlfriend or boyfriend.
02:31:42 Like just the depth of human experience shared on voice
02:31:46 without video is, I was really surprised
02:31:49 how intimate that is for human connection,
02:31:52 especially in this time of COVID, it replaced that.
02:31:54 So just to give you some context, there’s something there.
02:31:59 There’s definitely something there.
02:32:00 One thing that comes to mind is when like in Clubhouse,
02:32:03 you have your little icon.
02:32:04 So they don’t actually, you don’t see your face moving.
02:32:06 I think when people see their own image,
02:32:08 it puts them in a state of self consciousness
02:32:11 that is eliminated by just having an icon or an avatar.
02:32:15 So like Zoom is dreadful because if I’m not used
02:32:20 to talking to people and seeing a little image of myself
02:32:22 staring back at me in the mirror.
02:32:24 And it’s just, I know there are ways
02:32:26 that you can adjust that, but it’s really awful.
02:32:29 And I think that when I get on Zooms now,
02:32:31 I say hello and then I shut down the video component.
02:32:34 And then I just talk in the end.
02:32:35 I come back on just to show that still there, it’s still me.
02:32:38 But I think that voice only is really interesting.
02:32:42 Eddie Chang would be an interesting person
02:32:43 to talk to about this because he understands so much
02:32:45 about how inflection communicates
02:32:48 emotionality in deeper state.
02:32:50 But there’s a balance between, I think,
02:32:52 just like you said, this is the privacy
02:32:55 somehow allows for the intimacy.
02:32:59 So like being able to, as opposed to putting on an act,
02:33:03 which I realize we do when we’re visually
02:33:05 presenting ourselves in remote communication.
02:33:08 But I think that there’s so few places
02:33:10 where people can actually communicate
02:33:12 without the fear of penalty.
02:33:15 That’s woefully absent these days.
02:33:19 And so maybe people are just relieved to be in a place
02:33:21 where they feel like I can say what I want
02:33:24 or not say anything and it’s okay.
02:33:26 And so Clubhouse, to answer your kind of question is,
02:33:31 there was a big improvement to me over Discord,
02:33:33 which is it has tiers, it has a stage where people,
02:33:37 the person that created the room can invite people up
02:33:40 that would like to speak potentially,
02:33:42 have the opportunity to speak.
02:33:43 And then there’s a bigger audience
02:33:45 that don’t get a chance to speak unless they
02:33:48 click raise their hand and they get called on.
02:33:51 So there’s like a tier system that allows
02:33:54 for there to be a group of like five, 10, 20, 30 people
02:33:59 talking and a lot larger amount in the audience,
02:34:03 which in Discord was the problems that everybody could talk.
02:34:06 And the other thing about Clubhouse is everybody
02:34:09 is strongly encouraged to represent themselves.
02:34:11 So you’re using your real name, it’s not anonymous.
02:34:14 And how many people were in that GameStop discussion
02:34:18 the other day?
02:34:18 They currently limit rooms to 5,000.
02:34:23 So I’m sure maxed out at 5,000.
02:34:25 There’s a lot of overflow rooms.
02:34:27 This is the cool thing about Clubhouse,
02:34:29 really big people were on there all tuned in
02:34:32 and having a conversation, having all from,
02:34:35 all these different worlds being able to connect,
02:34:39 even though without the niceties of like arranging
02:34:42 the meeting, you could just show up and leave,
02:34:44 which is really nice.
02:34:45 But the reason for my lessons from Discord,
02:34:50 I’m going to mostly stay away from Clubhouse.
02:34:54 And I think.
02:34:56 Or go in there under another name.
02:34:58 Right.
02:35:00 I’ll pretend I know the actual, your actual name.
02:35:02 Yeah, it’s, I’ve learned, it’s quite addicting.
02:35:06 It’s a time sink.
02:35:08 It’s so, the intimacy of it is you find yourself
02:35:12 wasting quite a bit of time on there.
02:35:14 It pulls you in.
02:35:15 Well, it’s interesting.
02:35:16 They would in sort of going back to the podcast
02:35:20 or earlier, we’re talking about books
02:35:22 or creating a technology.
02:35:24 One thing that’s absolutely clear is that anything
02:35:27 that’s easy to reproduce is probably not worth
02:35:31 much effort and time.
02:35:33 Yes.
02:35:34 Right?
02:35:35 I mean, most posts could be easily reproduced.
02:35:39 You just repost them.
02:35:40 Yeah.
02:35:41 So now there are some original posts that for which
02:35:44 the attribution goes to the original person
02:35:46 and it’s clear it came from you.
02:35:48 But anything that can be easily reproduced is,
02:35:50 doesn’t really expand us very much as individuals
02:35:53 or as groups.
02:35:55 And most of what I see on social media is stuff
02:35:57 that is purely reproduced.
02:36:00 Yes.
02:36:01 But I think Clubhouse, I mean, it could be
02:36:05 that some real magic emerges on there.
02:36:08 So in moderation could be good.
02:36:10 The magic is, this is another thing that I’ve found
02:36:13 through COVID that maybe you can think about is live.
02:36:20 I used to be, not understand the appeal of live video
02:36:24 or live connection or like in this Clubhouse live events.
02:36:28 Because Clubhouse is technically, for the most part,
02:36:32 it’s not supposed to be recorded.
02:36:34 Most people don’t record most conversations.
02:36:36 It’s a one time live event.
02:36:38 And there’s a magic to that.
02:36:40 There is.
02:36:41 That’s not captured by like your podcast
02:36:44 or my podcast produced video that’s like recorded,
02:36:49 like packaged up.
02:36:50 Well, anything can happen.
02:36:52 It’s that anything can happen.
02:36:54 And that’s the kind of thing like live concerts.
02:36:57 I definitely, I love live music.
02:37:00 And it’s the idea that,
02:37:02 cause you can always listen to the album.
02:37:03 Actually the album usually sounds cleaner and better,
02:37:05 but it’s just this idea that anything can happen.
02:37:08 And then you listen to like the parts, I don’t know,
02:37:10 you like a Costello did something weird.
02:37:13 Your dog did something weird.
02:37:15 And then you have to go, God damn it.
02:37:17 You have to go to the kitchen or something to get something.
02:37:19 And then you come back and it’s funny.
02:37:22 I watched live video like that of people
02:37:24 and I’ll be there for the whole time.
02:37:26 I’ll wait for them to go to the kitchen and come back.
02:37:28 It’s not like I tune out.
02:37:30 And that makes it like a richer experience for some reason.
02:37:33 It’s weird.
02:37:34 Well, it humanizes it.
02:37:35 Yeah, humanizes it.
02:37:36 And I think there is this weird effect of whether or not
02:37:39 it’s a podcast, Instagram or Twitter or anything else.
02:37:41 There’s kind of like two people shouting into a tunnel
02:37:44 and then a bunch of people with ears at the other end
02:37:46 of those tunnels and shouting some things back.
02:37:49 You know, that’s kind of the format we’re in.
02:37:52 I think I’ll check out Clubhouse again.
02:37:54 I’ve gone in there a few times during the day
02:37:55 and I was surprised to see how many people were in there
02:37:57 in the middle of the day.
02:37:58 I was like, aren’t these people supposed to be working?
02:38:01 But maybe that is their work.
02:38:02 Well, be very careful about the time sink of it.
02:38:07 But yeah, if you want to, you and I go together,
02:38:09 we’ll have a conversation on there.
02:38:10 But one of the things you have to figure out,
02:38:13 I don’t still know how to do it, but how to exit.
02:38:17 Which is like.
02:38:18 And you just do the, isn’t there the leave quietly button?
02:38:20 Yeah, no, but like when you and I are on stage
02:38:22 having a conversation, okay, you and I is harder.
02:38:27 But like you really, if it’s just you and I,
02:38:31 then it’s the usual human communication of like,
02:38:33 all right, I gotta go.
02:38:35 Like, but when it’s like four people,
02:38:38 you don’t want to interrupt everyone
02:38:40 and announce you’re leaving.
02:38:41 You just have to, I mean, there’s a weird dynamic
02:38:43 that I haven’t quite figured out of.
02:38:45 The etiquette isn’t clear.
02:38:47 The etiquette is not clear.
02:38:48 Well, the etiquette on different platforms
02:38:52 and how that changes is really interesting.
02:38:54 You know, how YouTube has one etiquette,
02:38:56 which is kind of, it’s a lot of harshness is tolerated
02:38:58 on YouTube video comments.
02:39:01 Twitter seems a bit harsher than Instagram.
02:39:04 Instagram, there’s kind of, it seems to be a little.
02:39:05 People are nice.
02:39:06 People are really nice.
02:39:07 People are really nice on Instagram for the most part,
02:39:11 except for those phishing things.
02:39:13 I actually know someone who had their quite sizable account
02:39:16 poached by those copyright.
02:39:18 They come in with those like,
02:39:19 you violated copyright thing.
02:39:21 There’s all sorts of harshness in there
02:39:23 that if you think about it in the real world,
02:39:25 I like to think about Instagram as if it was the real world.
02:39:28 Someone comes over and is basically saying like,
02:39:30 hey, can I hold your wallet and go into the bank
02:39:32 and I’ll get some money out for you?
02:39:33 And like, but there’s this trust
02:39:35 based on the format it comes in
02:39:37 that it can almost get past your radar
02:39:39 unless you’re suspicious.
02:39:40 If you took comments, like, you know,
02:39:43 you’re posting a lot of comments and you said,
02:39:45 you just walk past 500 random people on the street
02:39:48 and just listen to what they say,
02:39:50 it’s like, that’s ridiculous.
02:39:52 I don’t have time for that.
02:39:53 But the comments somehow take on this importance
02:39:55 and this relevance.
02:39:56 And you feel, we feel obligated to give them value, right?
02:40:00 And so the online communities,
02:40:03 the rules really are different.
02:40:06 And they evolve with time, which is fascinating.
02:40:08 With Clubhouse, it’s a new social network,
02:40:10 so it’s evolving and people are figuring it out as you go.
02:40:13 And the same thing with podcasting on video
02:40:16 and like scientific podcasting.
02:40:18 This is the cool thing when I look at what you’ve created,
02:40:22 I’m learning, I’m thinking like,
02:40:23 hmm, that’s interesting to do it this way.
02:40:26 Because like, I have nobody to copy.
02:40:29 Not many people to copy, you know what I mean?
02:40:31 Well, you threw out an idea.
02:40:32 I’m not gonna put it out here now,
02:40:33 cause I don’t wanna,
02:40:35 cause knowing you, you’ll hold yourself to it
02:40:37 no matter what.
02:40:38 But when we talked about this issue of the challenge
02:40:41 of staying on a particular topic for a while,
02:40:43 I mean, you do have some cool stuff brewing in there.
02:40:46 Oh, no, no, no.
02:40:47 That’s separate from this format.
02:40:48 And I love your interview format,
02:40:49 but when you told me about that,
02:40:52 I got really excited that you might go forward.
02:40:54 I’m not gonna tell your audience what it is,
02:40:55 but I will say this, it is super cool.
02:40:58 I would have never thought about it.
02:41:00 It’s distinctly different than what I’m doing
02:41:01 or what Lex is currently doing.
02:41:03 And if you decide to do that podcast,
02:41:07 I will be your first and your number one fan.
02:41:09 And I know there are gonna be millions of other people
02:41:12 interested in that.
02:41:12 It would be amazing.
02:41:13 So if you decide to go forward with the idea,
02:41:18 that would be awesome.
02:41:19 I was gonna say what it is,
02:41:20 but now I’m not going to because,
02:41:22 cause that’s even more interesting.
02:41:24 I brought up the clubhouse thing actually in Elon,
02:41:27 because I just wanted to get your thoughts
02:41:31 about something he’s said a few times to me and in general,
02:41:37 is that he’s under a huge amount of stress.
02:41:40 And I’m thinking of doing a startup now
02:41:44 and kind of thinking about all of this.
02:41:47 Cause I enjoy podcasts, I enjoy science,
02:41:51 but he says that his life is basically hell.
02:41:56 It’s very difficult.
02:41:57 He looks happy, but he’s probably very good at.
02:41:59 He’s fulfilled.
02:42:01 He’s fulfilled, but the stress levels,
02:42:04 the constant fires that he has to put out.
02:42:08 And he says that most people wouldn’t want to be me.
02:42:11 And that basically the reason he does what he does
02:42:16 is because there’s probably something wrong with him.
02:42:19 Like it’s not, he can’t help it, but do that.
02:42:24 Kind of beautiful in a kind of Russian masochistic way.
02:42:29 Well, I just wonder the stress.
02:42:31 I mean, I’m sure you can imagine the kind of stress
02:42:35 he’s under because, so it’s running three plus companies
02:42:39 and there’s constant, he says that every single meeting
02:42:45 is not about like, should we install a coffee maker
02:42:49 in the kitchen?
02:42:51 It’s like, this rocket is going to blow up
02:42:56 and we’re all fucked.
02:42:57 I don’t know what to do.
02:42:59 And we have to, you have to fix,
02:43:01 you have to fix real like big problems there.
02:43:04 And like, how do you deal with that?
02:43:07 What do you think about that kind of life?
02:43:09 One, is there a way to walk through that fire?
02:43:13 And two, should you walk through that fire?
02:43:18 Well, I mean, without knowing I’ve never met Elon,
02:43:22 but certainly we have common friends in you
02:43:25 and in other people that he worked with long ago
02:43:29 in the PayPal days, all of whom speak very highly of him
02:43:34 and show, express immense admiration
02:43:37 for the number of things that he can maintain.
02:43:40 I think it’s fair to say that he accomplishes more
02:43:43 before 9 a.m. than most people do in a decade.
02:43:48 It’s clear.
02:43:49 And that what he does would dissolve most people
02:43:51 into a puddle of tears.
02:43:53 Mostly because of this whole thing
02:43:56 about the brain working hard equates
02:43:59 to thinking about duration path and outcome
02:44:02 and anticipating outcomes given A, B, C, or D,
02:44:04 a lot of very scripted linear thinking and prediction.
02:44:09 And that is hard, it’s stressful.
02:44:11 It requires intense neurochemical output.
02:44:14 And he’s doing that for multiple projects.
02:44:16 So presumably he’s buffered himself
02:44:18 from the coffee maker issues and the little tiny issues,
02:44:21 but he is himself, unless there’s something I don’t know,
02:44:23 he’s walking around in a biological system.
02:44:26 He is.
02:44:27 Yes, allegedly, yes.
02:44:29 Yeah, allegedly.
02:44:30 So, and I don’t wanna reveal too much here,
02:44:33 but I have a common coworker and colleague
02:44:39 through some contract work I do that what I can tell you
02:44:42 is that he’s accessing the best resources
02:44:45 in terms of how to optimize his biology.
02:44:48 And he’s thinking about that, not just for himself,
02:44:51 but for all of Neuralink.
02:44:53 Because I think, I’m not trying to dodge the question,
02:44:55 but I think there’s the scale of the individual,
02:44:59 but then there’s the companies that he’s creating.
02:45:02 And you’ve got people there that you could imagine
02:45:05 if they’re working at 10% better capacity
02:45:07 or can focus 5% better for 20% of the day,
02:45:12 you’re looking at a enormous increase in productivity
02:45:15 and a reduction in the time to reach goals,
02:45:17 which will reduce the amount of stress presumably on Elon,
02:45:21 unless he goes and starts another endeavor.
02:45:23 So I think it’s certainly not healthy for most people.
02:45:28 It seems to be where he gets his dopamine hits.
02:45:31 I’m also really struck by the fact that he has a family
02:45:34 and he’s got kids growing up and a relationship
02:45:38 and all that, so it’s super impressive.
02:45:40 I think that, I don’t know, how old is Elon?
02:45:44 He’s 40, I mean, pushing 50, I think 48.
02:45:49 Even more impressive.
02:45:51 Because many people who’ve been at exceedingly high output
02:45:55 for a decade or more don’t do well.
02:45:58 Their system breaks down.
02:46:00 Well, this is what he was saying.
02:46:03 Actually, I mean, I don’t listen to all of his interviews,
02:46:06 but on that live on the clubhouse,
02:46:09 he mentioned that he was kind of worried,
02:46:13 it’s interesting, he was worried that sometimes,
02:46:18 what I think he said is,
02:46:20 I’m worried that at some point my brain is just going to fail
02:46:26 because of the amount of load it’s under,
02:46:28 like how much I have to think through throughout the day,
02:46:34 like how many problems you have to think through.
02:46:38 Like, it’s like puzzles, it’s constant puzzle solving.
02:46:41 I would be concerned about taking somebody
02:46:43 who’s in that regime and suddenly putting them
02:46:46 into a regime where they don’t have enough
02:46:47 to bite down into.
02:46:48 It’s like my bulldog, Costello,
02:46:49 he’s happiest when chewing and tugging
02:46:51 at that big old neck of his,
02:46:53 and he is just not going to become a retriever,
02:46:55 he’s not going to, he does well
02:46:57 and gets his dopamine hits from chewing and pulling.
02:47:00 And it seems like Elon has ended up where he is
02:47:04 by way of his natural leanings.
02:47:07 Unless there’s a backstory that’s trauma based or something,
02:47:12 and I don’t even begin to think that there is,
02:47:15 it seems that he has,
02:47:16 he’s one of those rare individuals in history
02:47:18 that has an immense drive to create
02:47:21 in all these different domains.
02:47:22 I’m just saying the obvious here,
02:47:24 but it seems like that’s what makes him tick.
02:47:27 I mean, you’re doing an awful lot too.
02:47:29 Well, the problem is not really,
02:47:33 the problem is I’ve been on the verge
02:47:36 of pulling the trigger on starting a company,
02:47:39 which will increase the workload significantly.
02:47:43 And I’m attracted to that because of a dream I have,
02:47:49 but it’s a little bit scary
02:47:51 because it can destroy you in a lot of ways.
02:47:56 There’s two sources of destruction.
02:47:59 So one source is,
02:48:02 I’ve, for the first time in my life,
02:48:06 a few months ago, I think,
02:48:10 have gotten, this feels like such a noob thing to say it,
02:48:14 but I’ve gotten some hate on the internet.
02:48:16 No.
02:48:17 I know, right?
02:48:18 No.
02:48:19 But like, I am such an idiot.
02:48:20 I’m so naive to, it was,
02:48:24 I had the question that I guess a lot of people have
02:48:28 when they get hate on the internet.
02:48:29 It’s like, mom, why are these people
02:48:32 making up stuff about me?
02:48:35 That kind of feeling of like, why are you saying that?
02:48:39 And the reason I mentioned that is like,
02:48:43 well, if you wanna go and start a business
02:48:46 and do, as I think people should
02:48:49 when they start a big, ambitious business,
02:48:53 really try to go big.
02:48:54 Like, what does success look like
02:48:58 in terms of your emotional journey?
02:49:00 You’re going to have a lot of people
02:49:02 who make up stuff about you,
02:49:05 who say negative things.
02:49:06 I mean, majority, hopefully, if you do a good job,
02:49:09 will be supportive and,
02:49:10 but there’s still going to be this army of people there.
02:49:13 And like, that was scary to me
02:49:16 because of how much emotional impact that had on me.
02:49:20 Well, and I also know a little bit,
02:49:22 I have some glimpse into the fact
02:49:24 that you put your heart and soul into everything you do.
02:49:27 You’re not a, you’re lighthearted about certain things,
02:49:30 but you’re even lighthearted
02:49:32 about being full gas pedal 24 seven.
02:49:35 There’s kind of this,
02:49:40 Laird Hamilton always says,
02:49:42 the big wave surfers, he always says,
02:49:45 bright light, dark shadow.
02:49:47 And I think it’s that intensity.
02:49:50 And when you do that,
02:49:51 and then suddenly people are starting to like,
02:49:54 throw some paint on your picture,
02:49:56 you’re like, wait, hold on, you know,
02:49:57 you’re going max capacity.
02:50:00 But I think the company is interesting one
02:50:02 because you’ve talked about doing this company before.
02:50:05 I’ve been afraid.
02:50:05 I just not been pulling the trigger out of fear
02:50:09 because I enjoy this life.
02:50:10 This is, it’s starting to interrupt.
02:50:12 It’s ultimately this question of taking a leap is like,
02:50:17 say you’re in academia, it’s like you’re at MIT,
02:50:21 you’re, I really love doing research at MIT.
02:50:23 I really love that life.
02:50:25 Why take a leap out?
02:50:27 You know, but I did because it’s been a dream,
02:50:30 but now accidentally along the way,
02:50:33 I found this podcasting thing,
02:50:35 which is also really fulfilling.
02:50:37 And you know, it’s like, why take a leap?
02:50:41 Cause you have a huge lust for life.
02:50:44 Yeah.
02:50:45 I mean, that’s you.
02:50:45 I mean, sometimes when I’m on the internet
02:50:47 and I think, is this, you hear about it like,
02:50:49 oh, it’s addicting, you know, YouTube’s addicting all that.
02:50:52 Actually, sometimes I think maybe that’s true,
02:50:54 but a lot of times I just think there’s so much here.
02:50:57 There’s a lot of garbage,
02:50:59 but there’s so many gems out there in the world now.
02:51:02 It’s almost like, sure how you allocate time is key,
02:51:06 but I think you can do it all.
02:51:11 Not, maybe not five more things, but all.
02:51:14 And one thing, I just had this idea
02:51:16 and this is not grounded in any scientific paper,
02:51:18 but I think the answer might come to you
02:51:20 during this torture that you’re about to get yourself
02:51:24 through with David, because in those mental states,
02:51:26 you’re really asking the question, right?
02:51:29 You’re asking the question, where is my capacity?
02:51:32 And am I even close to my capacity?
02:51:35 And if I am, what’s of the most value?
02:51:38 I think we find the answers to those things
02:51:40 in those nonverbal, nonanalytic states.
02:51:43 It just comes to us.
02:51:45 I hope you’re right, and I hope it’s a profoundly
02:51:50 fulfilling experience as opposed to one
02:51:52 that leads to my demise, but.
02:51:54 You have a will, right?
02:51:55 It all goes to the hedgehog.
02:51:59 Yeah, exactly, to the hedgehog.
02:52:01 Now it all makes sense.
02:52:02 Andrew, like we talked about offline and on this podcast,
02:52:06 I do hope we write some stuff together,
02:52:09 do some research together.
02:52:10 You’re one of the most inspiring scientists,
02:52:15 speaking of communicating to the world.
02:52:18 So I can’t wait to see what you do with the podcast.
02:52:22 I’m already a huge fan.
02:52:23 I’ve been telling everybody about it.
02:52:26 I can’t wait to see you talk to Joe as well soon.
02:52:30 And I can’t wait to see what kind of paper
02:52:32 we write together.
02:52:33 Thanks so much for talking to me.
02:52:34 Thank you, that project’s gonna be a lot of fun.
02:52:37 Can’t wait, and thanks again for having me on.
02:52:39 Appreciate you, brother.
02:52:41 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:52:42 with Andrew Huberman, and thank you to our sponsors,
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02:52:54 Click the sponsor links to get a discount,
02:52:56 and remember, now is the time to sign up to Master Class
02:53:00 if that’s something you’ve been on the fence about.
02:53:02 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:53:04 from Woodrow Wilson.
02:53:06 We should not only use the brains we have,
02:53:09 but all that we can borrow.
02:53:11 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.