Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity, Fasting, and Neuroplasticity | Lex Fridman Podcast #164
the following is a conversation with andrew huberman his second time in the podcast he's a neuroscientist at stanford a world-class researcher and educator and now he has a new podcast on youtube and all the usual places called hubermann lab that i can't recommend highly enough quick mention of our sponsors master class online courses four sigmatic mushroom coffee magic spoon low carb cereal and better help online therapy click the sponsor links to get a discount by the way masterclass is testing to see if they want to support this podcast long term so if you're on the fence now is the time to sign up and i'm pretty sure andrew will have a neuroscience master class on there soon enough though his podcast is basically a weekly master class in itself as a side note let me say that andrew is a friend and a new collaborator we're working on a paper together about a topic we're both really passionate about at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning but that's probably many months away from being published still i'm really excited about this work he's one of the smartest and kindest people i have the pleasure of talking to on this podcast so i hope we'll talk many more times in the future if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review and have a podcast follow on spotify support it on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now here's my conversation with andrew huberman why do humans need sleep let's let's go with a big first question okay well the answer i'll start with is the one that i always default to when there's a why question which is uh i wasn't consulted at the design phase so so i wriggle my way out of giving a absolute answer right but there's one mechanism that's very clear that's super important which is that the longer we are awake the more adenosine accumulates in our brain and adenosine binds to adenosine receptors no surprise there and it creates the feeling of sleepiness independent of time of day or night so there are two mechanisms one is we get sleepy as adenosine accumulates the longer we've been awake the more adenosine is accumulated in our system but how sleepy we get for a given amount of adenosine depends on where we are in this so-called circadian cycle and the circadian cycle is just this very very well conserved oscillation it's a temperature oscillation where you go from a low point typically if you're awake during the day and you're asleep at night you'll your lowest temperature point will be like three a.m four a.m and then your temperature will start to creep up as you wake up in the morning and then it'll peak in the late afternoon and then it'll start to drop again toward the evening and then you get sleepy again that oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours temperature yeah plus or minus an hour and i don't even though i wasn't consulted at the design phase i do not think it's a coincidence that it's aligned to the 24-hour spin of the earth on its axis and the fact that we tend to be bathed in sunlight for a portion of that spin and in darkness for the other portion that's been so there are two mechanisms the adenosine accumulation and the circadian time point that we happen to be at and those converge to create a sense of sleepiness or wakefulness the simple way to reveal these two mechanisms to uncouple them is stay up for 24 hours and you will find that even though you've been let's say you stay up midnight 2 a.m 3 a.m provided you're on a regular schedule like that i follow not like the kind that you follow uh you get i will get very sleepy around 3 4 a.m but then around 5 or 6 or 7 a.m which is my normal wake-up time i'll start to feel more alert even though adenosine has been accumulating further so adenosine is higher for me the longer i stay up and yet i feel more alert than i did a few hours ago and that's because these are two interacting forces so adenosine makes you sleepy and then just how sleepy or how awake you feel also depends on where you are in this temperature oscillation that takes 24 hours okay so that's fascinating so there's a bunch of oscillations going on and then it kind of through the evolutionary process have evolved to all be aligned somewhat and they interplay so it's you said your your body temperature goes up and down there's chemicals in your brain that uh oscillate and then there's the actual oscillation of the the sun in the in the sky so all of that together has some impact on each other and somehow that all results in us wanting to go to sleep every night right so um and we can get right into the meat of this so i guess we just dove right in but the so the the temperature oscillation is the effector of the circadian clock so every cell in our body has a 24-hour rhythm that's dictated by genes like clock per bee male this is one of the great successes of biology they give a nobel prize to the record i don't know if rapper got it forgive me but sorry if you got it steve congratulations if you didn't i'm sorry i wasn't on the committee um nonetheless did beautiful work steve reporter and others um but mike roshbosh and like other people worked out these mechanisms in flies and bacteria and mammals there are these genes that create 24-hour oscillations in gene expression etc in every cell of our body but what aligns those is a signal from the master circadian clock which sits right above the roof of the mouth called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and that clock synchronizes all the clocks of the body to this general temperature rhythm by way of controlling systemic temperature which makes perfect sense if you want to create a general oscillation in all the tissues and organs in the body use temperature and so that work on temperature if people want to explore it further was joe takahashi who was at northwestern now at ut southwestern in dallas and it is absolutely clear that humans do better on a diurnal schedule sorry lex than a nocturnal schedule because you could say well provided i sleep and push adenosine back downhill which is what happens when we sleep adenosine is then reduced and provided i am on more or less a 24 hour schedule why should it matter that i'm awake when the sun's out and um and i'm asleep when the sun is down but it turns out that if you look at health metrics people that are strictly nocturnal do far worse on immune function or metabolic function etc than people who are diurnal who are awake during the daytime and animals that are nocturnal it's the opposite and animals that are so-called crepuscular which tend to be active at dawn and at dusk this is a beautiful system i won't go down that rabbit hole but these are animals whose visual systems operate best they tend to be predators like mountain lions they have optimized their waking times for the times when the animals they eat can't see well in those light conditions but given the rod cone ratios in their eyes the the mountain lion is picking off it's like when you see uh special forces and they're looking through night vision goggles and they have a clear advantage right they're seeing in the dark that's basically what it's like to be a mountain lion as opposed to a bunny rabbit would you say that a lot of these cycles evolved in the predator-prey relationships of the different throughout the food chain so it's basically all somehow has to do with survival in the in this complicated web of predators and prey almost certainly there had to have been a time in which humans being awake and active at night as opposed to during the day uh led to high level higher levels of lethality and probably particularly in kids you imagine kids running around in the dark and getting that where there are a lot of animals that can see really well under those conditions and humans can't and this would be all pre-electricity even if you're carrying a torch i mean the range of illumination on a torch is nothing compared to what um a a nighttime predator like a large cat or something can can do that i mean they basically they can see everything they need to in order to eat us and not the other way around so one fascinating thing you said is uh that blew my mind and we went right past it uh which is the temperature is a really powerful like if you were to think about the ways that different parts of the body different systems the body would communicate with each other temperature would be a really good one and that just i mean maybe it's obvious but it kind of blew my mind just now that yeah these systems are all distributed right and they have to kind of they're not actually sending signals but they're coordinating they need some sort of universal thing to look at in order to coordinate and temperature is a nice one to to uh to build around and that way you can control the behavior of all these different systems by controlling the temperature right it's attractive to think of a mechanism where this master circadian clock secretes a peptide or something that goes and locks to receptors in all the cells and gets it just right but that leaves far too much room for variability binding affinities cells in a lot of parts of our body are at different stages of maturation they're turning over liver cells and so forth and for instance our we have a clock in our gut and in our liver such that if we were just take out your liver and put it on a table and just look at the expression of these genes it would be in a 24 hour oscillation on its own it's independent but something has to entrain them and keep them all synchronized and so it's not obvious that it would be temperature takahashi's great gift to biology was to show that all the stuff coming out of this master circadian clock at the end of the day that's a weird statement no pun intended at the end at the end of the day end the night at the um at the end of the story it all boils down to making sure that the temperature of tissues oscillates in the same fashion that's blowing my mind and thinking like what other mechanism could possibly exist to create that kind of oscillation well you're you're russian it's cold in russia for a lot of the year the hibernation signal in certain animals is a remarkable signal there are peptides secreted from this very same clock that in animals like ground squirrels or bears they go into a kind of a torpor where everything reproduction metabolism everything is reduced while they're in their cave they don't actually stay asleep all of winter that's a myth um and they actually do these very um dramatic and periodic arousals from hibernation where they just shake and shake and shake it looks like a seizure and then they go back under into the torpor that's from a peptide that's released but that's different because that's about shutting down the whole system it's clear that having these very regular oscillations every 24 hours is essential for everything from metabolism to reproduction is there uh an optimal temperature for sleep that i i should mention i think your latest episode uh you uh and people should go check out helixsleep.com huberman to support andrew uh thanks for the plug i mean that's the amazing thing about the stuff that you're creating oh and yes you have a new podcast that's amazing and this past month he did a whole series on sleep which people should definitely check out there's some podcasts that come out that just make me want to be a better human being by just the quality uh three blue one brown grant sanderson is like that for me just like wow this is uh education is best so andrew uh symbolizes that captures that brilliantly so go support the sponsor so he doesn't stop doing the thing uh so they i think they have a cooling pad too so i uh uh eight sleep mattress sponsors me uh they've been uh they sent me a mattress and it's been i've never listened i used to sleep on the floor sleeping where you fall you sleep for a fall i don't give a shit it doesn't doesn't really matter but so like i would have never bought a nice mattress because it's like why i'm fine this is a floor it's fine but it was a game changer to uh be able to control temperature like for me it's cooling to cool i don't know what the hell it is well you want the brain and nervous system and the rest of the body needs to drop by about anywhere from two to three degrees in order to get into your deepest sleep and transition to sleep that's really going to help you don't want to be cold that you're bothered and can't fall asleep but that's why some people like it really cold in the room and under a warm blanket or with socks on for some people that can that can be good because this temperature oscillation is such that as your temperature is dropping that correlates with the generally with the most sleepy phase of your circadian cycle so cool is better for falling and staying asleep and sleeping deeply and then i i guess like that's what ate sleep showed they have like an app is uh it warms back up uh to wake you up the idea that i haven't actually used it i'm like this is stupid uh people say it works but i just keep it the same temperature throughout the night but uh warming it up i guess wakes you up which is it was just fascinating yeah because you're the wake up signal is it's interesting to think about it's not just correlated with an increase in body temperature the increase in body temperature is triggering the release of cortisol from your adrenals and that's the wake up signal do you think it's absolute temperatures we're talking about is just even relative just even just a decrease well everyone's going to have slightly different basal temperature the idea that everybody should be 98.6 i mean that's a myth and there are theories that body temperature overall has been dropping in the last 50 years or so i i doubt that's true for somebody who's athletic like you and is you know young and healthy but basically the the coldest period of that 24-hour cycle is when you are going to be sleepiest there's actually a period within that 24-hour cycle it's a it's a time point called your temperature minimum and your temperature minimum tends to be about two hours before your typical wake-up time i'm not talking about the wake-up time in the middle of the night where you go use the bathroom or where you set an alarm to go catch a flight i mean if you were to just allow yourself to sleep without a clock for a few days measure when you typically wake up two hours before then is your temperature minimum and that temperature minimum turns out to be a very important landmark in your circadian cycle because it turns out that if you get bright light in your eyes in the hours immediately before your temperature minimum so two to four hours or any time within the two or four hour window before that temperature minimum you are going to what's called delay your circadian clock the next day that whole oscillation is going to move forward it will make you want to go to sleep later and wake up later whereas if you get bright light in your eyes in the hours after that temperature minimum so let's say for me typical wake up time is 6 a.m my temperature minimum somewhere around 4 a.m if i get bright light in my eyes 5 a.m 6 a.m 7 a.m it's going to advance that oscillation so that i want to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier the subsequent nights so you might say wait but most nights i go to sleep and wake up at more or less the same time why is that and that's because the same thing is happening on both sides you are both advancing your clock a little bit and assuming that you're looking at light in the evening you're also delaying your clock a little bit so you get kind of captured in between and then your rhythm more or less oscillates at the at the same period as we say as the spin of the earth unless you're like you where you're i get text messages from you sometimes at odd hours and i'm i if you're on the east coast then i know that you had to have been pulling basically and all night yeah yeah that's the interesting uh point about the messiness of sleep so most people seem to up perform the best when they have like a regular sleep schedule i perhaps am the same but i don't know that and i tend to believe that you can also perform relatively optimally with chaos of sleep of uh like a weird soup of like power naps and all-nighters and all of that as long as you're like happy doing what you love and maybe you can um tell me what you think about this i i tend to for myself try to minimize stress in life so what i found for myself with diet with sleep is that if i obsess about it being perfect then i'll actually stress quite a bit when it's not like i'll feel shitty uh when i don't get enough sleep because i know i should be getting more sleep as opposed to the actual physiological effects of not getting enough sleep i find if i just accept whatever the hell happens happens and smile and just you know take it all in like david goggins style like if it sucks it's even better or what is it jocko's like good or whatever he says right i think there several things that you said that are important but i i agree that one can have a dysregulated sleep schedule and still be a happy person and productive in much of my life i've pulled all-nighters and slept weird schedules you know i think many people can probably relate to going to sleep waking up four hours later being up for an hour or two on your computer then going back to sleep and getting amazing sleep the next day functioning i think we've i think it's important that people have highlighted the importance of sleep and getting enough rest i do think it's gone too far and now i'm editorializing a little bit but i think that we've created this anxiety about sleep that it's get if we don't sleep enough we're gonna get dementia if we don't get sleep then uh you know the reproductive axis is gonna you know completely crash um you know there's a lot of evidence to the contrary and as well just based on personal experience and based on the fact that sure that it may be that a solid eight hours with no in uh interruptions in there or nine or ten could do great benefit but you can do really well if you do what you say which is you wake up you don't want to start stressing about it creating this meta stress about sleep being happy it is actually one of the most powerful things that you can do not allowing yourself to go down that rabbit hole of stress for the following reason a lot of our fatigue is not due just to the build-up of adenosine or time of day the circadian thing we were talking about earlier an additional factor is that effort is in related to the release of epinephrine of adrenaline in our brain and body at some point those levels get so high that we get stressed mentally we get stressed physically and we want to give up there are good data published in cell showing that that signal the epinephrine signal is eventually accumulates and there's a quit point dopamine the molecule of pursuit and reward and feeling good resets our ability to be an effort in fact a lot of people don't know this but dopamine is actually what epinephrine is made from if you look at the biochemical cascade it starts with tyrosine which is rich in found in red meats and things of that sort and tyrosine is eventually converted through things like altopa into dopamine dopamine is made into epinephrine so i mean this sounds kind of new ag but happiness joy and pleasure in what you're doing creates a chemical milieu that provides more of the chemicals that allow for effort and there's nothing new ag about that it's in every biochemistry textbook it's in every decent neuroscience textbook they just don't talk about the happiness part they just talk about the dopamine part so i think that limiting your stress and at least recognizing okay if you're pulling an all-nighter or you're somehow on messed up sleep that there is going to be a point in that 24-hour cycle where your brain is not trustworthy where your mental state is not worth placing too much weight on because you are near that temperature minimum and near that temperature minimum which is correlates that two hour about two hours before you would normally wake up the brain is is hobbling along and anything you feel or think at that time should not be given too much value but if you can trick yourself into thinking that's the pleasure point you afford yourself a huge advantage there's a study done by a colleague of mine at stanford that showed that positive anticipation about the next day events actually is a powerful metric for creating quality sleep even if the sleep is very reduced and and you'll love this one and i i a lot of people are gonna you know might be critical of this so i just want to make sure that so this was work done out of harvard medical it was um bob stickgold's lab and emily hoagland did this study that showed looking at ochem performance on ochem scores okay so organic chemistry harvard's pretty tough subject highly motivated a number of very good control groups in this study what she showed was that consistency of total sleep duration was far more important for performance on these exams than total sleep duration itself so it's not that just getting more sleep allows you to perform better consistently getting about the same amount of sleep is more is better for performance at least in on okim yeah than just getting more that's interesting so that's referring to more that there should be a consistent habit versus the total amount to me like the entirety of the picture of sleep is uh it's similar to nutrition in that it feels like it's there's so many variables involved and it's so person specific so you know a lot of studies i mean this is the way of science has to look and aggregate the effects on sleep it doesn't focus on high performers and which are individuals ultimately like the question isn't uh so it's a very important question it's like what kind of diet fights obesity reduces obesity it's another question what kind of diet allows david goggins to be the best version of himself so these high performers in different avenues and the same thing with sleep like people that tell me that i should get eight hours of sleep it's like it's i i mean i i get it and they may be right but they may be very wrong and there's no evidence that eight is better than six that you could very well do better on six than on eight there are a few other things that um turn out to be strong parameters for success in this domain for instance your entire life waking or asleep is broken up into these 90-minute altradian cycles if you look at ability to attend or do math problems or do anything drive drive performance tends to ramp up slowly within a 90-minute cycle peak and then come down at the end of that 90-minute cycle and in sleep we go through these stage one two three four rem etc we'll talk more about that if you like those on 90-minute ultradian cycles as well ending your sleep after a 90-minute cycle at the at the near the end of a 90-minute cycle say at the end of six hours in many cases is better for you than sleeping an additional hour seven hours and waking up in the middle of an altradian cycle and there are a few apps that can measure this based on body movements and things like that that have you your alarm go off at the end of an ultraviolet cycle and if you wake up in the middle of an altradian cycle sometimes not always you can be very groggy for a long period of time i certainly do better on six hours than i do on seven i happen to like an eight hour sleep it feels great but i haven't slept an entire eight hours without waking up in the middle of the night at some point in i don't know forever i can't remember it's probably some point in infancy but and i function well during the day i think that that's a big that's an important parameter is how do you feel during the day almost everybody experiences some sort of dip in energy in the late afternoon or what would correlate to their temperature peak and that's a good time of day to get either a 90 90 minute or less nap or if you're not a napper or you can't nap feet elevated has been shown to be good for clear out of some of this the glymphatic system is this kind of like sewer system of the brain you can clear stuff out so legs elevated or one thing that i've um i'm a big proponent of and that my lab has been studying is what i i now call nsdr non-sleep deep breast and this is just lying down there are some scripts that we're going to put out there soon as a free resource there's some hypnosis scripts that my colleague david spiegel has put out there as a free resource but non-sleep deep rest is allowing your system to drop into states of of real calm that allow you to get better at falling asleep later and they can be very restorative for cognitive and motor function there's at least one study out of denmark that shows that the basal ganglia which is an area of the brain that's involved in motor planning and action one of these 20-minute non-sleep deep breast protocols resets levels of neuromodulators like dopamine in the basal ganglia to the same levels that they were right after a long night's sleep so i also respectfully uh or semi-respectfully disagree with the idea that you can't recover lost sleep what does that mean i mean that there's no irs for sleep so what does it mean to be in debt for sleep if you're falling asleep during the day and you're sleepy like you're falling asleep that's a good sign of insomnia means you're not sleeping enough at night if you're fatigued during the day but you're not falling asleep so you're just exhausted but you're not finding yourself falling asleep in meetings and in conversation then chances are you're fatiguing your system through something else like a long run in the middle of the night boston or whatever it is that you're up to lately at uh 3 a.m yes there is a magic to the nap and maybe you could speak to the because you mentioned these protocols that don't necessarily so they're non-sleep but to me the nap one or two a day can almost irrespective of how much sleep i get the night before i have a fundamental change in my mood and my performance for the better for the better for the better yeah likewise so uh i do tend to kind of experiment with durations it's it's consistently surprising to me how like a nap of like 10 minutes i don't know maybe you can speak to the perfect duration of a nap but i find that it's like magic that a short nap does as much good and often better than a longer one for me for me subjective what would be a longer one longer than 90 minutes no no like 90 minutes or but longer than 90 like two hours yeah that's dropping you starting to drop you into rem sleep and even if it's a tiny amount of rem sleep people can come out of those naps kind of disoriented i mean remember in sleep space and time are are totally uncoupled and so they that's an odd state to re-enter the world in if you're not going to stay there for a while like for a good night's sleep i think a 20-minute nap is pretty fantastic would you say that's the op if you were to recommend to the general and it's very weird to recommend anything to the general populace because obviously it's very person specific but what's a good one we say to friends is 20 minutes ago 30 minutes 20 or 30 minutes because you're going unless you're sleep deprived you're going to stay out of rem sleep rapid eye movement sleep if you're sleep deprived you'll drop right into it if you've ever traveled and you're really jet lagged you go to the hotel you lay down for one second all of a sudden you're just like you're you're in a psychedelic dream um which can be pretty great too but i think that uh 20 30 minutes and if you can't sleep some people have trouble napping then learning to relax the body as much as possible like trying to remove all expression from your face completely letting your body kind of float if people have a hard time relaxing when they're awake there's some terrific clinically and research tested hypnosis protocols that we could provide links to that are cost-free and that teach you how to just completely release the alertness button and you just start drifting now the problem is if you don't have an alarm or something to go off you the other day i did one and i'm almost embarrassed to say this but there's a component of it where you actually are supposed to let your hand float up because it's a hypnosis script so they it's my colleague david spiegel in the script he says um let your hand float up i woke up an hour later my hand was still floating wow yeah and i was and i was completely relaxed so hypnosis is hypnosis is just a matter of going deep relaxation narrowing of context and it's all self-imposed a lot of people think that hypnosis is like the stage thing with the pendant and the chicken you know people fucking like chickens but real hypnosis is self-hypnosis you're learning to it involves some shifts in the way that you the the hypnotic induction involves looking up closing your eyes slowly deep breath and then imagine yourself floating and people vary on a scale of about one to four for being the most easily hypnotized there are a few people who it's very hard for them to allow themselves to to go into these states but for most people they just they're gone and it's nice if if you can have access to those states because when you come out of it you feel amazing you feel like you slept the whole night at least most people report that so refresh alert ready to go i mean basically you're ready yeah i know you have this um interesting challenge coming up and i'm curious what you're gonna do to reset in the hours it that the frequency of running is um every four hours it's not going to allow you to get any more than a couple hours sleep in between flowers so we should we should tell to people i'd be curious to get your thoughts and advice on it i'm uh on march 5th running 48 miles with mr david goggins so four miles every four hours and people should join us he's uh that madman is going to be live on instagram starting at 8 p.m pacific on march 5th so you're gonna join him in person in person undisclosed location undisclosed location and i was i was trying to clarify like okay so we're gonna like there'll be like friendly people around or something no it's just me and him friendly people i don't know like i just feel it's very difficult to be with david alone in the room i imagine his i mean i've done some work with david his energy is infectious yeah that's an intense schedule um and the the periodicity of that those four hour every four hours four miles means that there's no chance of catching an extended block of sleep so it's about three hours that you have non-exercising every time and of course it takes time to try to fall asleep and there's an intensity to the whole thing i mean it's probably impossible to get anything more than uh two hours of sleep if you wanted to so the optimal thing is probably from the sound of it i'd be curious to see what you think but like it's getting a few 90 90-minute naps okay well i thought about this a bit before we met up today so i think there are two general approaches that could work neither one necessarily better than the other one would be just to hammer through the whole thing just to get your level of alertness and adrenaline ramped up so that you don't expect yourself to sleep there are certain advantages there one is a subjective kind of emotional advantage which is if you can't sleep you're not gonna be stressed about that yes and if you do fall asleep it's a bonus provided you wake up and you don't look up and you realize david's been out running for half an hour and you're behind right but chances are that's not the way it'll go you set an alarm so that's one approach yeah and and i grabbed that from you know a couple friends who were um who are in the seal teams and they'll say that you know during buds there's this infamous hell week and there's this five hour five days excuse me definitely five days of no sleep although there is a component where they offer a nap at one particular point and a lot of people will say that it's worse to go down for that nap and then be woken up 20 minutes later than to just stay up so so that's one option let's call it the um full blitz hammer through option and if you happen to fall asleep you do bonus yeah the bonus the other one would be to really anchor in these ultradian cycles so coming back from a run you pr unless you're thoroughly exhausted you're probably going to have a few minutes where you're going to want to stay awake it's going to be hard to just immediately fall asleep and getting as much sleep as you can in the intervening periods provided that you guys aren't posting constantly or doing something else you also there's a question whether or not you want to nourish whether or not you want to eat or not in that time anytime we put food in our gut i don't care if it's meat or oatmeal or broccoli or cardboard you're drawing blood into the gut and so you are going to divert some energy towards digestion and it's going to make you sleepy there's a reason why the rest and digest the parasympathetic nervous system is called that so you could decide that you were only going to sleep in certain in between certain blocks that would be another way to think about that that because i did this last year uh i ran very slow some of it was walking i was listening audiobooks and one of the biggest mistakes i did is to overeat during that time right it was uh made the experience very unpleasant so i have been considering basically eating almost nothing throughout the day being fasted will increase alertness because high levels of epinephrine in your system from fasting you just think about fasting or being thirsty before you get exhausted people always think if i don't eat i'm going to be tired no the the energy that you derive from food is going to be uh used from glycogen and after a long storage and conversion process so the food that you eat is going to consume energy to digest and so a lot of people feel better fasted and presumably throughout history people have fasted for long periods of time and had to stay up for two or three days and you know god forbid if a family member is sick you can stay awake in the hospital without any trouble so that alertness system and you know it's all mental um actually and then there's a third so you could try and sleep or or take care in between yes yeah and then there's a third approach oh yeah but i didn't come up with it but david did so i actually texted him earlier because i had a feeling that i heard that you were going to do this challenge so i asked david um so these are david goggins words not mine okay one okay being organized is super important two you want to waste as little time as possible three you need to eat sleep and rehab in as little time as possible so you can sleep as much as possible oh interesting by the way this is the first time i'm reading this yeah um four meal prep and gear prep etc are very important that's um that's consistent with everything i know about military they they don't they don't leave too much to chance five again these are david's words all that said he's fucked on most all that because he'll be interviewing me before or after i will also be interviewing him oh shit five long story short the only thing that might help is a very special pill this is interesting they're called s-i-u pills hard to get but i believe he can get them s-i-u stands for suck it up tell him to grab his balls he'll find those pills there that's number six all right and then the last one yeah stay hard brother stay hard brother amen i you know that was one of the other things that i think makes this challenging is that it'll be doing a podcast throughout so first of all i'll do a long one before and after but also i'll have to come up with things to talk to him about so like it's a different thing to do something privately and then publicly i know it doesn't seem that way but like one of the hardest the hardest thing i had to do last time was to turn on the camera and talk to the camera because i uh last time i did it i recorded um every single time i did a leg i recorded something i'm grateful for it's just kind of unrelated i'm not a fan of like talking about like how i'm feeling or how they're on is going i want to do something totally unrelated to the run and with the run as the background you know sort of something i'm grateful for just any kind of uh interesting discussion gratitude i mean i hate the word hack like oh it's a dopamine hack or it's a serotonin i i don't like the word hack because it's disrespectful to hackers who do a real thing and b a hack implies that it's some sort of trick that you're you're you're kind of gaming the system you know what what works is mechanism right biological mechanisms were designed to work and they were selected for to work under variable conditions and as you know and i know and we have great appreciation for the fact that the nervous system was designed to be an adaptive machine so that you don't have to sleep eight hours every night you can do this thing and things like gratitude allow you to tap into chemical resources and that's not a hack the fact that being grateful for something external to the event happens to release serotonin and have a certain soothing effect or dopamine and give you more epinephrine and let you go further that's not a hack that's actually what allowed the human machine to evolve to the point that it is now every time you know an inventor eventually created something that worked and felt great about it you can imagine that the the first you know air flight felt pretty awesome and motivated those people to go on and do more they they didn't just go uh you know yawn and go have a beer so being able to access the genuine in internal states of gratitude and reward works you can't trick the system you can't pretend that you're grateful for something but if you can identify or attach yourself to some larger goal or something that's deeply gratifying to you or place it in service to a relative that passed away that you care a lot about that's not a hack that's accessing the deepest components of your nervous system and um to steal your kind of lingo you know there's real beauty there right yeah but for an introvert like myself and i think david i don't know if he's an introvert but like he's not despite the fact that he has written a great book and he communicates he puts himself out there he's not really a fan of communication he's not i don't know if he's energized by speaking his mind i don't know well enough to know i mean we've done a little bit of work together and um you know we're in communication now and again he's obviously super impressive um i don't know it seems that he's a pr seems like he's a pretty private guy yeah you know so i don't have access to that so for me i'll just speak to myself and i think david is the same but i'll speak to myself that it was a hugely draining thing not to experience the gratitude experiencing the gratitude just like you're saying is really energizing and it's it's a powerful thing it's a it's a it can lift up your mood but to turn on the camera and have to use words which is very difficult to do to explain like what you're feeling and do it in the way that you know a bunch of people will be watching is really draining and one of the things i'm concerned about that in this whole process how do i keep my mind sharp while also keeping the performance the physical performance shop and that's a little bit scary because talking to david like actual intellectually sharp like thinking being charismatic and as much as i can be and like being still maintaining a sense of humor too because i can be i i become with sleep deprivation with exhaustion you start being the russian bear comes out you start being such a d like you i become a david goggins essentially like oh it makes you irritable sleep deprivation makes us irritable yeah there's it's clear so that in the early part of the night we get a higher percentage of those old trading cycles are occupied by slow wave sleep sometimes just called non-rem sleep and those early night sleep bouts are great for muscular repair and for certain forms of learning but rem sleep the rapid eye movement sleep which it starts to accumulate and occupy more of those 90-minute ultradian cycles toward the late part of a sleep bout so toward typically toward morning but toward after you've been asleep a while that's when you do the emotional processing that's when we recover the ability to feel refreshed and not irritated by things and if you deprive people of rem sleep they become selectively uh bad at uncoupling the emotion from things that happened in the previous days so the little things start to seem like big things i always know i'm rem sleep deprived when um i'm irritable and when um i look at like the word the and it doesn't look like it's spelled right and i'm kind of pissed off about it like something's off and we actually are becoming slightly um psychotic when we're rem sleep deprived you're not going to get a lot of rem sleep in this thing except as you fatigue more if you do fall asleep you're going to drop more and more into rem so that those 90-minute cycles you won't have to go through stage one stage two stage three and then rem you're just gonna drop right into ram so you can count on your system to compensate for you but i think that just the knowledge that you tend to get irritable as the time goes on just that third personing of yourself that awareness the observer that can be very beneficial because there may be bouts during this event when you just should probably say nothing and maybe you just um i don't know smile and record or not smile or do do whatever it is because you're gonna be conserving energy if it feels like a grind that's epinephrine being released that's epinephrine that you could devote to the physical effort but humor is an amazing anecdote for this because it resets that it's that dopamine release that gives us that fresh perspective and it's a it's a real chemical thing it's not a it's not a hack it's not a it's not a trick it's not a visualization it's biology in action well but i think the act of uh interviewing of conversation in these processes even if you don't want to do it the right thing to do even when you're feeling irritable is to to do the third person view and be able to express with words that you're feeling irritable like express what you're going through ex you know use words which i hate doing i honestly i think my ultimate thing would be just to never say a single word to david gagas and just go through hell it doesn't matter what we do but to do it quietly to also express it that's my ultimate hell and he's definitely gonna be if i know david at all he's he's going to try and find your buttons like he's gonna he i mean he even though he knows he can complete this and i i believe that he trusts that you can complete too i i believe you can you will complete it you know you will complete it right there's no question about that but he's not gonna make it easier for you he's gonna make it harder well i'm afraid so i'm like you know it's very difficult for me so 48 miles is not easy i have not been trading that much so i'm not ramping up but it's not like going to kill me we'll see what happens of course for him he might almost get bored because i think the 48 miles for him is easy i think i don't know that i don't know that ever gets easy i have a friend casey corgill who works with david he's a does some um physical uh rehab type stuff with him and he took casey on a 50 miler and he said it's like 16 miles into it he was just like he had hit his wall yeah but they he found it they they find it to get you know you find that portal there is one thing i want to mention there's some very good physiology that can perhaps support the actual running effort part these are very new data and we have a study going on with david spiegel at stanford looking at how different patterns of breathing can affect heart rate variability heart rate variability is good there's this interesting mechanism i think most people might not realize but that medical students learned that your breathing and your heart rate and your brain are in this really remarkable interplay it goes like this when you inhale this isn't breath work we're not going to do breath work but when you inhale the diaphragm moves down the heart gets a little bigger because there's a little more space in the thoracic cavity and as a consequence blood flows a little bit more slowly through that larger volume there's a category of neurons the sinoatrial node that sees that that recognizes that that slower rate through that larger volume sends a signal to the brain stem and the brain stem sends a signal back to the heart to speed the heart up so every time you inhale you're speeding the heart up when you exhale the diaphragm moves up the heart gets a little smaller the volume is smaller blood flows more quickly through the heart a signal sent up to the brain and the brain sends a signal back to slow the heart down this is the basis of heart rate variability so at any point if you feel like your heart is racing and you feel like you're working too hard per unit of effort focus on making your exhales longer or more intense than your inhales if ever you feel like you're truly flagging you do not have the energy to get up it's like okay it's time to go and you're exhausted you want to draw more oxygen into the system get your heart rate going faster now some people when they hear this probably thinking well this is really obvious but there's so much out there about breath work and how to breathe and all this stuff but no one talks about how to do it in real time while you're exerting effort so this is something like almost like second by second you can adjust things to just in real time based on how you're feeling but based on the heart rate that's right the experience of the heart rate that's right so one thing that could could be very efficient and we're doing some work with athletes now these are unpublished data but if you while you're running if you want to get into a nice cadence of heart rate variability do double inhales while you're running what this will do is when you do the double inhale has the effect of of reopening the avioli of the lungs your lungs are filled with tons of little sacs when you they tend to collapse as you fatigue when you and carbon dioxide builds up in the bloodstream and that's when we start getting stress if you've ever been sprinting you start getting beat and you're going as hard as you can what what you really need to do is double inhale and reinflate these sacs in the lungs and then offload a lot of carbon dioxide so when you're at a steady cadence and you're feeling good double inhale exhale double inhale exhale is a terrific way to breathe while you're in ongoing effort by the way any recommendations or differences in nose or mouth breathing so nasal breathing there's a lot of excitement now obviously about nasal breathing because of james nestor's book breath um there was also if people are gonna know about that book that i do feel like out of respect for my colleagues there was a book by sandra um khan and paul ehrlich at stanford both professors at stanford with a forward by um jared diamond and robert zapalski so some heavy hitters in this book and the book is called jaws a hidden epidemic and it's all about how nasal breathing is better for us especially kids than being mouth breathers under most conditions for sake of improving immunity it turns out there's a microbiome in the nose like all sorts of good stuff about nasal breathing preferentially but when we exercise you can you can do pure nasal breathing but the problem is once you get up to kind of third and fourth and fifth gear effort you can't nasal breathe and be at maximum capacity unless you've been training it for a very long time so i would say double inhale through the nose offload through the mouth so double inhale exhale while you're in steady effort and then if you really feel like you need to gas it and you're pushing the data show that then just use whatever's there right just go into kind of default mode because bringing too much concentration to something is also going to spend epinephrine the goal is to get into that i don't like the word but the flow state where you're not thinking too much you're just in exertion so these are so these are things that can help in the transitions um but i don't think there's any secret breathing technique you know anyone who's been in the seal teams will kind of you know they'll tell you like there's no breathing technique right there's a there's tools that you can look to from time to time and these double inhale exhales can be great for setting heart rate variability in very quickly and getting into a steady cadence while you're exercising but if there's a sprint like if suddenly you guys are sprinting ditch the ditch the double inhale exhale and just sprint one thing you mentioned he's probably gonna push my buttons it's a good place to ask a question about anger so i'll probably get pissed off at him at some point i'm guessing and do you have thoughts from a scientific perspective or also just the personal philosophical perspective about the role of anger and all of this in in managing alertness performance i think about this a lot because there's so much out there about how important it is to do things from a place of love you know i tweet about it all the time and i think and love is powerful right you know it is interesting that autonomic arousal alertness let's just make use simple language alertness physiologically looks identical for love and excitement as it does for anger and frustration and wanting to defeat your opponent or whoever that opponent happens to be they're identical except that the love component does tend to be associated with the release of neurochemicals of the serotonin and dopamine type that do have this replenishment component i don't think one wants to be in constant anger and friction but i mean i'll come clean a bit there have been portions of my career where some of my best work my extra two hours my ability to nail a really hard deadline or problem has come from not wanting to get out competed or from wanting to prove something these days i i don't i'm not oriented from that place toward my work quite as often but i think we should be really honest anger is powerful provided it's channeled it's very very powerful and it can give you a ton of fuel and gas to push when otherwise you'd tap yeah joe rogan has aside from being a fan of his has been an inspiration to sort of be to have a kind of loving view on the world in the way you approach the world to me so i've tended to want to approach the world that way but in the same way david goggins has been an inspiration to like uh yeah be angry at stuff and uh use it as fuel like he almost uh conjures up artificial demons in his mind just so he can fight them i you know but at the same time i tried that because i did a challenge in the summer of for 30 days i was doing a lot of push-ups and it was uh over time it was counterproductive for me like i found that it was easier to just like the roller coaster that the emotional like being angry at stuff takes you can also be exhausting oh absolutely and it can take you down like the the ups of it are good but the downs are bad and what i found is better to get to use it as a boost every once in a while but mostly to get lost in the you're talking about the breath work that like getting lost in the ritual of it like that the be like that as opposed to going on the big roller coasters of emotion yet this brings us into the realm of neuroendocrinology is that there's a fascinating relationship between the hormone system and the nervous system and yeah hormones work in general on slower time scales the definition of a hormone is something the chemical released at one location in the body goes and acts at multiple locations far away and within the body pheromone would be between two bodies neurochemicals like dopamine serotonin tend to work a little more quickly there are hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that can work very fast but here i'm referring mainly to testosterone prolactin prolactin tends to be in men and women tends to make people kind of lazy and want to take care of young it tends to throw down body fat so we can stay up late it's secreted in response to having children these are all in humans and in animals there's a very interesting relationship between testosterone and dopamine [Music] that speaks directly to what we're talking about now so dopamine and testosterone are closely related in the pituitary system and obviously testosterone comes from the adrenals and from the testes but the the major effect of testosterone is to make effort feel good that's what testosterone does it has other effects too right reproductive effects androgenizing parts of the body etc but it makes effort feel good the testosterone molecule is synthesized from cholesterol cholesterol can either be made into cortisol a stress hormone or testosterone but not both so you have a limited amount of cholesterol and it gets diverted towards stress or towards tests or this pathway where effort feels good that's the pathway you want to get into the anger pathway if we were to just kind of play a mind experiment here the anger eventually is going to divert more of that cholesterol molecule to cortisol and stress and you will be slowly depleting testosterone now going into this you'll have plenty of testosterone but after a couple days there have been very interesting studies showing that testosterone doesn't necessarily drop with sleep deprivation that's a bit of a myth you need it to replenish to stop you need sleep to replenish testosterone eventually but the real question is are you enjoying what you're doing and here that the work was uh some of the major work on this was done by duncan french who runs the ufc training center he did his phd at uconn um stores did a really beautiful phd thesis looking at the relationship between stress hormones testosterone and dopamine really interesting work and the the takeaway from all of this is if you can just convince yourself or ideally if you can just enjoy yourself you are going to maintain or maybe even increase testosterone stores which will make effort feel good and to me aside from neuroplasticity where everything becomes automatic after this experience to me that's the holy grail when effort feels good life just gets way better and we're not talking about achieving the reward i'm not talking about the end of this thing i'm talking about the process of it feeling really good yeah the you know there is a magic to uh i don't know if you can comment on this but i find myself being able to if i just say i'm feeling good like this this old hack of like smiling while you're running if i just tell myself i'm feeling really good right now no matter how i'm actually feeling i'll start feeling way better and the whole thing there's the cascading effect that uh allows me to maximize the effort it's it's quite fascinating it's weird hormones are powerful the relationship between thoughts and hormones and these physiological things is enormous i had a colleague that a few years ago he was dying of pancreatic cancer and i was interviewing him just because i he's an important figure in our community and i was a friend and there was one day where he he told me he said you know i don't want to make it past the new year i just and it was it was crushing for me to hear and i knew that he had been on some androgen therapy for for a whole set of other things and i i said you know um have you taken your andro androgen cream and he was like no i haven't done it go get it for me i have this on film he takes it he puts the andrew cream on i'm not suggesting people take androgens by the way ten minutes later he says you know what i think i want to live into the new year and i'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation he went to mit by the way he said i'm going to write 12 letters of recommendation and he did and so there's something about these molecules that in an ancient way in all organisms all mammals as far as we know are linked to the will to live they're linked to effort and making effort feel good which has been fundamental to the evolution of our species i always say people think that the opposite of testosterone is estrogen but it's not the opposite of testosterone is prolactin which makes us feel quiescent and not in pursuit of things etc testosterone makes effort feel good estrogen makes emotions feel okay and and and they are in mixed amounts in um in all people as i say of all chromosomal backgrounds yeah yeah i mean you also mentioned fasting potentially through this uh two day thing it'd be cool to get your thoughts about fasting in general do you think uh on a personal level and at a higher sort of level of studies that you're aware of and physiology and so on what do you think about intermittent fasting of like not eating for 16 hours and then having an eight-hour window or something i've been doing a lot recently which is eating only once a day so that's 24-hour fast i guess one meal a day or something i've um been thinking about doing haven't done yet or doing like 72 hours or some people do like five day fasts in general so this would be for this particular run will be at a 48 hour fast if i don't need it at all what do you think about that for performance from mood for all those kinds of things i can speak a little bit to the science and a little bit of my own experience and then some anecdotes of people that have done very hard very long duration things and what they've told me so i just want to make sure i'm separating those out so people know my sourcing i think now none of this is about the actual long-term nutritional benefits of one thing or the other but if you look at the science on intermittent fasting it's pretty remarkable before i was at stanford my lab was in san diego one of my colleagues was sachin panda at the salk this phenomenal biologist and researcher wrote a book called the circadian code it's very very good and and kind of popularized intermittent fasting although there were others that had um talked about this before ori hofmeckler talked about the warrior diet people probably might not know who or he is but he's he's sort of the originator of the this business of intermittent fasting even once a day are limited anyway sachin has published papers peer-reviewed papers and very good journals like cell and elsewhere showing that limiting the consumption of calories to eight you know four six or eight or even ten hours of every 24 hour cycle and keeping that more or less correlated with the light with when the sun is out leads to less liver disease improved metabolic markers less body fat etc in the mouse studies they even gave the mice the choice to eat whatever they wanted as much as they wanted as long as they restricted it to a certain period within the 24 hour cycle they they did great they they maintained a healthy weight or even lost weight when they took the same amount of food and they stretched it out across the 24 the entire 24 hour cycle so this is eating every hour or two hours the animals got fat and sick so it's pretty remarkable data how much of that translates to humans isn't clear but one thing that's really clear with humans is adherence right we could talk a lot about nutrition and some of the problems with the studies on nutrition is that what people will do in a laboratory is often hard to do in the real world low carbohydrate diets just they tend because they tend to focus on foods that have high amino acid content like meats generally people are less hungry on their those than they are on calorie matched diets of fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates because when the insulin goes up you get hungry and you want to eat more so this is not a push for carnivore or a push against one thing or the other it's just there are a lot of factors but we know for sure that when you're fasted or when you have low amounts of carbohydrate in your system complex carbohydrate your alertness is going to go up fast increases increases alertness and epinephrine for the sole purpose of getting you to go out and find food can you imagine if our ancestors got hungry and they were like oh i'm too tired to go find food we wouldn't be here you'd be like robots or some one of your alien one of your alien buddies will be like running so i think that if you want to be alert fasting or keeping complex carbohydrates to a minimum is very valuable if you want to sleep and you want to be sleepy ingesting foods that have a lot of tryptophan which is the precursor to serotonin so complex carbohydrates like rice and grains turkey white meats those things do create a sense of sleepiness however there is a caveat and this is one problem with the once a meal once a day meal is that anytime you have a lot of food in the gut you're increasing sleepiness because you're diverting blood to the gut it's going to trigger the vagus to signal to the brain to shut down your system and utilize those nutrients can you digest and utilize those nutrients so i've done the once a day eating thing the problem is i eat so much in that meal that i'm exhausted and so it doesn't always lend itself well to the schedule but so in a six or eight hour eating block for me is a little bit better i do eat carbohydrates i'm probably one of the few people left on the west coast that actually consumes carbohydrates and will say that out loud people eat carbs anymore that's weird they don't where do you even find carbs what do you buy i like oatmeal i like rice the other time is if people are doing very high intensity weight training they need to replenish glycogen on the alertness side i do feel like it's probably person independent for me alertness being alert makes my life better in a lot of ways more than just the alertness itself like for example one of the things that discovered with fasting is that when i was training twice a day in jiu jitsu for example and competing and so on i performed way better at things that you traditionally would say you need carbs for which is explosive movements and all that i don't know if i actually perform better in terms of like the the force of the explosion the explosiveness what i do know is the alertness resulted in me uh doing the technique more precisely that's the dopamine and epinephrine system in action and there's a you know there are some other just purely uh physical aspects to one diet versus the other that can be complicated if you're ingesting carbohydrates complex carbohydrates you're going to replenish glycogen which is great but they also tend to be bulky and fibrous and i've never rolled jiu jitsu but running when you have a lot of bulky fibrous food in your in your gut or in your intestine it can be a barrier it can be uncomfortable and so some people do really well on low carbohydrate meat rich diets because they're just not as bloated they're not carrying as much water and other stuff carbohydrate carries a lot of water molecules with it so there are aspects to being able to train and being really explosive because you feel light one anecdote that really again i'm not encouraging any one particular kind of diet but i have a friend who is in the uh in the seal teams um i happen to know a number of people in that community and he told me that he did this very long fast it was so fast that i think they you get to eat a little bit of soup and or broth and there's like a bar or something but it's like a nine-day thing and he's he's a very strong athlete and he said that on day six or seven he was running up some hills or something while he was on deployment and he felt amazing he kind of hit this other level he was somebody who had boxed in the naval academy he was somebody who was had he knew knows a new high output and he felt like he discovered the the 13th floor that there was another floor to this performance space that he hadn't experienced except while he had fasted and he said that that was a remarkable clarity of mind energy it's a little bit of what you described he described a kind of suppleness and explosiveness so there's probably something there on which day uh at once he was in the fifth or sixth day of the february see this is the thing is i've never been there uh on the second third fourth fifth day that kind of thing but when i just don't eat for 20 hours many times through my training the clarity it's like you feel like everyone is moving super slowly and you're able to like dominate people you weren't able to before it's like well you might have slipped into or switched over rather into full ketosis and ketogenic diets done properly can be great for people the problem is if you do it wrong you can really mess it up i tried it once and i basically got psoriasis i thought my scalp was going to fall off i was like slothing off all this and i stopped and i was taking the liquid ketones and then all of a sudden i felt better again but i was told that i just did it wrong yes um that's so i think there's a right way and a wrong way and you have to get it right definitely and so i've experimented quite a bit with keto too to see how my body feels and doing it the right way and following all the instructions there's definitely a huge difference that like for example one of the things i discovered everyone always said this and but i tried this uh recently over the past year as i started drinking when i don't feel great if i'm fasting uh bone broth chicken bone broth oh yeah and for some reason like magically it could be this is the other thing the mind i don't know but it makes me feel really good well it could be the salt so i mean neurons the action potential neurons as you know is sodium's rushing into the cell you need enough extracellular sodium in order for your brain and nervous system to function and so salt i mean unless people have hypertension salt is great there was an article in science magazine about a decade ago about how salt had been demonized unless people have hypertension provided you drink enough water salt is great you need sodium magnesium and potassium to function and for your nerve cells to work i mean people who over drink water and don't consume enough electrolytes die now hydration is really important i know david's really into hydration he's mentioned that a few times i mean hydrating properly is key and so you definitely want to make sure that you're drinking enough water and getting enough electrolytes that i mean we should have actually talked about that at the beginning because that's going to keep your nervous system functioning well and a lot of people they'll get shaky or jittery and when they're fasting and they'll think they need sugar and if they just put some salt in some water they feel fine and like the other stuff from potassium magnesium whatever the other electrolytes are but yeah the yeah those three so i mean salt yeah before sleep um salt i mean this is a vast space and we're kind of talking about the overlap between neurochemicals hormones and nutrition and it's a fascinating space and it's one that the academic community has gems up within the textbooks it hasn't really made it into the public sphere yet and i think that's because people get so caught up in the you know being are you vegan or are you carnivore and there's a vast space in between too that people can explore like i'm not a competitive athlete so i eat meat and i also eat vegetables and i eat fruits and it's just about timing them but i tend to eat carbohydrates when i want to be sleepy i eat them at night and everyone said that's the worst thing you can't do that you sleep great after eating a big bowl of pasta i'll tell you and by the way i should i should give you a big thank you for connecting me with belcampo farms they send me some meat i think because of you and it's delicious so i i really i really appreciate that i mean it also connected me with this whole world of people who are doing farming in this ethical way and like really love the whole process and like and as uh from a both like a human level but also scientific level and the result is um it's like ethical but also it's delicious and it makes you think about your diet in a whole new kind of way yeah i've known um i don't have any commercial relationship to bill campbell so i can be very clear i've known anya fernald who who's one of the found is the founder and ceo of el campo i've known her since the ninth grade it is true that her parents are faculty members at stanford they're colleagues of mine but she's just a serious academic of nutrition but also of sustainable agriculture of you know all sorts of things and also the meat just it's awesome it tastes really good and no i'm not getting paid to say that no they're not a sponsoring my podcast it's just if you i feel like if you're gonna eat animals if that's in your framework and you're gonna eat animals knowing that the animals were raised as happy as could be until you know time of slaughter is is at least important to me and and actually uh talk to her so i i will talk to her on this podcast actually and she invited me uh like a week ago out to to visit the farm in may or june or whatever yeah they have the farm up at the oregon board i haven't been there yet but i've seen the pictures and it just looks awesome and i was like yes it looks beautiful let me know when you're going yeah let's go together you'll probably run there but i'll drive there yeah but that all that said i do want to because a lot of people who are vegan write to me and i do want to seriously in the same seriousness that i approached keto i do want to go like on a few months to switch to a vegan diet at some point to really try it yeah i haven't done it yet because i'm afraid i'm gonna function better i'm argentine by my dad's side and i i i don't eat i don't eat meat super often but well for most people would it would seem often but um but i i do love steak i do um so i'm afraid i'm gonna feel better there's a social element to stake you're right because coming from a russian background like i can't imagine going to visit my folks like my parents for thanksgiving or something to say mom and dad i'm uh you know i don't eat meat so is that you know well i think if you're gonna eat meat getting it from sources that are compatible with um you know continuation of the planet is good i mean there are some some real problems with the factory farm meat you know you drive up and down the five and you pass that point where other all those cows i mean as somebody who loves animals um it's it's clear that it's you know you want to limit the amount of suffering of those animals whenever i hear about um you know we have we know people that hunt and that go and get their own meat i i really admire that i admire that people do that we don't we don't tend to do that in the hills around stanford you know there are mountain lions back there but that's about it and i'm i'm certainly i admire the vegan mindset of being of just making that decision you're just not going to consume other beings but you know i haven't gone that way but performance-wise i'm just curious because i was surprised i was certain that eating five six seven meals a day is the right thing to do for all if you want to be perform your best when i was like 20 or whatever and i would eat oatmeal like i thought it's obvious i have to have a really a lot of carbs in the breakfast i had a lot of preconceived notions and then when i started eating like once a day this was at the peak of my competing jiu jitsu it was like everything i know about nutrition is wrong yeah you realize that like you have to become a scientist first of all you have to read literature you have to learn you experiment but you also have to become a scientist of your own body and in the same way i have a lot of preconceived notions of what performance is like under vegan diet and i want to do it right like seriously not not necessarily for the ethical reasons but to see if it's performance wise like can i remember there's like a fruitarian diet where you eat fruit only you know these extremes are like they're pretty they're interesting because people have this need the extremes are informative though right i mean well-controlled experiments you eliminate as many variables as you can except the one you're interested in so people are running these experiments i i think that it's hard to imagine getting i know people say you can get enough amino acids from plant-based sources and i believe that i think it probably takes a little more work one thing that's really clear is that the benefit of these omega-3 omega-6 ratios like fish oils and things like that there are some data that showed that the getting at least a thousand milligrams of the epa which is in high in fish oils but other things too even some meats and other plants it in double you know in matched uh placebo double blind controlled studies placebo-controlled double-blind studies have shown that those can offset anti-depressive symptoms as much as some of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like prolactins the prozac and zoloft so that's pretty impressive and in scandinavia people know especially in winter to consume a lot of those omega-3s because they're good for you they're good for the brain that's the other question wise what kind of stuff have you come across that's useful like i basically only take fish oil like you said electrolytes electrolytes with water the david goggins diet fish oil plus fish oil and then uh again the sponsor they made it so easier the the sponsor your podcast and and mine athleticgreens.com slash huberman support it i don't i don't know like it's it's great stuff for sure but also just takes away the headache of like i don't have to think about like yeah you're gonna get a bunch of vitamins and minerals it'll co it does that sounds like a plug but i have genuinely been buying it you know no discount no affiliation or anything since 2012. i think i heard about it on the tim ferriss podcast was like oh i'm going to try that stuff and i liked it i mean when i was starting my lab i was working insane hours i still work very long hours and getting sick limits productivity and i also wanted to train and i wasn't doing much training back then um now i try and get you know three four sessions in a week i'm not doing nothing like what you and david are doing or what you know joe does or like you guys are way more regimented and consistent than i am um but i think that being healthy and feeling good is one of the great benefits to a career is having energy and just being not sick can we take a step back to uh uh sleep for sure yeah so people should definitely uh look through your podcast the first five episodes were on sleep or no i guess the first opening episode wasn't uh first one was sort of how the brain works generally is to give people some background and then we did four episodes on sleep including some stuff about food temperature exercise jet lag shift work for the jet lag folks and shift workers yeah it's like a master class on sleep and then you're go you're going on to a next uh topic in the next few episodes which is incredible well neuroplasticity we'll talk about it but on sleep one of the cool things about the human mind when it sleeps is dreaming uh what do you think we understand about the contents of dreams like what do dreams mean all the stuff we see when we dream is there something that we understand about uh the contents of dreams some of it is very concrete so matt wilson who mit um showed in rodents and it's been shown in non-human primates and now it's been shown in humans that there is replay of spatial information during sleep so initially what matt showed was that as these little rodents navigate through a maze they're the cells in the hippocampus called place cells that fire when the animal encounters a turn or a corridor and that same exact same sequence is replay during sleep and it turns out this is true in london taxi cab drivers before phones and gps were what they are today the london taxi cab drivers were famous for knowing the routes through the city through these mental maps and their analysis of their place cell firing during sleep and during wakefulness and so we are essentially taking spatial information about the location of things and replaying it during sleep however it's not replayed so that you remember it all it's replayed so that if there's a reason to remember it the links to the emotional system to the components of the limbic system and hypothalamus that are relevant like you got into a car crash or a particular location or you lost a bunch of money because you were a cab driver uber driver we'd say nowadays and you were stuck at one particular avenue all day and frustrated and you're getting yelled at by your spouse that information gets encoded so that you never forget that at that particular time of day in that particular time of year and this thing happened so context starts getting linked to experience so there's spatial information that's absolutely replayed during sleep and we experience this sometimes as dreams the dreams that happen early in the night when slow wave sleep or non-rem sleep dominates tends to be sleep of very kind of general themes and kind of um location it's a it can feel a little bit eerie and kind of strange ins not so incidentally the early phase of the night is when growth hormone is released in the 80s and 90s there was a drug that was very popular it's very illegal now called ghb you could actually buy it at gnc or store then i never took it but it was a popular party drug and some people some famous celebrities died while on ghb they were also on a bunch of other things so it's not clear what killed them but ghb was very big in certain communities because it promoted a massive release of growth hormone and gave people these very hypnotic states so people go to clubs and they were in these very hypnotic states it was part of a whole culture that's early night and those dreams tend to not have a lot of emotional content or load that phase of dreaming is associated with the occasional jolting yourself out of sleep because somewhat lighter sleep this the dreams that occur during rem during rapid eye movement sleeping that dominate towards mourning are very different they tend to have very little epinephrine is available in the brain at that time epinephrine again being this molecule stress fear and excitement you are paralyzed during these rem dreams you're you cannot move there's intense emotion at the level of what you're feeling and their so-called theory of mind theory of mind is an idea that was put forward by simon baron cohen sasha baron cohen's cousin i think on the podcast i mistakenly said that he was at oxford it's like the cardinal sin he's at cambridge forgive me i'm not british but so the dreams in rem have are heavily emotionally laden and it's very clear that those dreams and rem sleep if you deprive yourself of them for too long you become irritable and you start linking generally negative emotions to almost everything rem the dreams that occur in rem sleep are when we divorce emotion from our prior experiences and it's when we extract general rules and themes uh mit seems to come up a lot today but it's it's highly relevant susumu tonagawa nobel prize for immunoglobulin but obviously fantastic neuroscientists as well has shown that the replay of neurons in the hippocampus and elsewhere in the brain is kind of an approximation of the previous episode and a lot of fear unlearning of uncoupling emotion from hard or traumatic events that happened previously occurs in rem sleep so you don't want to deprive yourself of rem sleep for too long and those dreams tend to be very intense now epinephrine is low so that you can't suddenly act out your dreams but what's interesting is sometimes people will wake up suddenly while in a rem dream and their heart will be beating really really fast that's a surge of epinephrine that occurs as you exit rem sleep so you were having this intense emotional experience without the fear you were essentially going through therapy in your sleep self-induced therapy it's like trauma therapy where you try and divorce the emotion from the experience and then you wake up and some people also have the other component of rem which is atonia which is paralysis pot smokers experience this a lot more than non-pot smokers there's an invasion of paralysis into the waking state i'm not a pot smoker but i have experienced this and when you wake up and you're paralyzed for a second it's terrifying but then you jolt yourself alert so the rem sleep is important for kind of the self-induced therapy and forgetting the bad stuff it's good for uncoupling the emotions from bad experiences and just there are two therapies i move into sensitization reprocessing which is a eye movement thing that shuts down the amygdala during therapy not during sleep and ketamine which is a dissociative analgesic it's actually very similar to pcp and ketamine is now being used as a trauma therapy when someone comes into the er for instance and they were in a terrible car accident these are horrible things to describe but you know they saw a relative impaled on the driving steering column or something and they will give this drug to try and shut off the emotion system so that because they're not going to forget let's be honest you don't forget the bad stuff but it is possible to uncouple the bad events from the emotional system and there's all sorts of ethical issues about whether or not that's good or bad to do but ptsd is a failure to uncouple the emotion from these intense experiences so the goal of this kind of therapy is in the uncoupling for that to be permanent yeah to uh to separate so they can recount the event and they can describe it without it triggering the same somatic experience of terror and dread um because terror those feelings can be debilitating obviously you're saying physiologically in uh rem sleep a similar process is happening that's right the thematically rem sleep is about experiencing or replaying intense emotions without experience the somatic the physical component of the emotion either the acting out or the accelerated heart rate and agitation likewise with things like ketamine therapies that's the idea is you're uncoupling the physical sensation from the mental events what is rem sleep and why is it so special maybe we can comment on that rabbit eye movement sleep yeah discovered in the 50s at the university of chicago it's intense brain activity high levels of metabolic activity dreams in which people report a lot of the theory of mind we were talking about uh simon baron cohen theory of mind is was actually something that he developed for the diagnosis of autism if you take kids most kids of age five six seven you put them in front of a tv screen in the laboratory and you have them watch a video where a kid is playing with a ball or a doll and then the kid puts it into a drawer shuts the drawer and walks away and another kid comes in and you ask the child who's observing this little movie you say what does this second child think and they a typical kid would say uh they want to play and they don't know where the ball or doll is or they they they're upset or they're sad they want the doll autistic children tend to say the doll's in the drawer the the toys in the drawer they tend to fixate they can't get in on the event they can't get into the mind of that they don't have a theory of mind dreams in rem have a heavy theory of mind component people are after me trying to get me you can assign motive to other people i'm afraid but it's because there's an expectation that doesn't tend to happen in slow wave sleep dreams now all this of course is by waking people up and asking them what they were dreaming about which from a standpoint of a ai guy or a machine learning or a is kind of like but it's the best we've got yes but brain imaging what in waking states while people view a movie and then brain imaging while people are sleeping supports the idea that that's basically what's going on so rem sleep is amazing and you're not going to get much of it during your about with uh goggins but you will afterward why so to comment why won't i so is it not possible to get into it real quick only if you're very very sleep deprived but because you're going to be at high muscular output that's going to bias you towards more slow wave sleep overall and your body and brain are smart they it will know they will know that your main goal is to recover so you can keep going so you can keep firing neuromuscular contractions and you can keep running so that you can i mean it's amazing to think like why do we ever stop unlike weight training where i can't do a 500 pound deadlift i just can't i could train for it but i certainly can't do a 600 pound i can't do that what causes us to stop an endurance event is usually not a physical barrier it's almost always a purely mental barrier and that's a very interesting problem i mean neuroscientists don't tend to think about those sorts of problems because it sounds so non-neuroscientific but that's fundamentally related to the question of you know what is pursuit why what is the the desire to push and to and to carry on is there a neuroscientific answer for that question you think i think the closest thing is this um paper from uh from genealia farms the howard hughes campus showing that if you put uh animals into a simulated environment where you can measure their effort and the forces on while they're running and you can look at them and you can control the visual environment and you can create a scenario where the animal thinks that it's output is futile it thinks it knows it's running and it's actually running but you change the frequency of the stripes going by in their visual world such that they think they're not getting anywhere and eventually they quit and the thing that determines whether or not they quit is a threshold level of epinephrine in the brain stem if you drop that level back down or you or you give the animals dopamine essentially they keep going if you take dopamine down they they're like this isn't worth it it's helpless they're just this isn't worth my time and energy but this is where the difference between humans and non-human animals is interesting because it does feel like humans have an extra level of cognitive ability that might be relevant here well you can pull from different time references so if you're in that moment you're gonna need a kit of things to pull from so you can think this is in honor of someone else that passed away right and you will find a gas reserve that's amazing right now whether or not mice are like i remember my brother back in the other cage when i was a little mouse you know we don't know but it's very likely that they don't do that that they're so present they're in the experience of there and then and now that they aren't able to extract from the past and they're not able to project into the future like how great it's going to feel when i get to the end of this really lame vr corridor i don't think they think about that and and think about like if i quit now how would i have what kind of effect will have on the rest of my life in the future difficult times like if you allow yourself to quit in this particular moment you'll become a quitter more and more in life and then you're going to not get the the other nice uh the opposite sex mammals that's pretty severe you went there the whole way to evolution and back again i mean but that's that's really it i mean our ability to time reference in the past present or future i do believe that we can be in the present and the past or the present and the future or only in the present or only in the future only in the past but i don't think that we can really think about past present and future all at once and this has a similarity to covert attention like we can split our visual attention into two things we really can duo task even though we can't multitask or we can bring those two spotlights of attention to the same location but it's very hard to split our attention and really well into three domains excuse me into three domains i think that that's very very challenging and time our time referencing scheme tends to be just one or two time references so lisa feldman barrett i'm not sure if you've done work together but at least you're i found out about her because of you your podcast with her and i brought her onto instagram doing an instagram live about emotion and it was fascinating and she's a very spirited and very very smart woman and uh fearless yeah and uh brilliant so i love her she's amazing uh she kind of sh she's not a scholar of hallucigens hallucinogens or dreams but she had this intuition that there may be a connection between the kind of dissociation that happens in dreaming and that happens in um like psychedelics i because of my previous conversation with you uh on on this podcast uh matthew johnson from johns hopkins reached out and he said but he he commented i think on something that we commented i don't even remember exactly what but that there's not many studies it's not being psychedelics and not being rigorously studied in academic setting like with the full rigor of science and he said well actually uh that's exactly what we're doing and they're extremely well funded now and it was been a long battle to get it accepted as a serious uh scientific pursuit so um but and i'd like to ask you a little bit about that but do you have a sense about connection between dreams and psychedelics or these uh different explorations of mind studies that are outside of the standard normal one that's the wake mindset yeah i loved your discussion with matthew i knew of the hopkins group and the stuff they were doing but i didn't know much about it at all and i learned a ton from that podcast i reached out to him just to say i love what you're doing i think it's incredible so yeah your podcast has been a great source of serious academic and intellectual um conversation for me i think what they're doing at hopkins is amazing um he has a collaborator there actually they had a very popular paper i just throw out there for fun who was a postdoc at stanford her name is ghoul um she's turkish i believe um and her and i i apologize her last name escapes me at the moment but that's just a function of my brain um she had a paper showing that uh she put octopi on mdma on ecstasy and found out this was published in in a in current biology showing it was a great journal showing that the octopi then wanted to spend more time with other octopi they started cuddling yeah so their colleagues out there but um the hopkins project is super interesting because i think they were initially supported mainly through private philanthropy and now you're starting to see some more interest at the level of nih about psychedelics it's a complicated space because the psychedelics are always looked at through the lens of the 60s and people losing their mind and there's a you know in i always say you know you don't want to ken keezy out of the game you know ken kizu was amazing right about the whole beat generation thing and he was actually at the va near stanford that's where he eventually in menlo park he wrote one flew over the cuckoo's nest or maybe that was about him anyway the comments will tell me how wrong i am but it's i think i'm tossing these words in the general in the right general direction but you know huxley keyse they did a lot of lsd and they all lost their jobs right they lost their jobs at big institutions like harvard and stanford and elsewhere or they left because they they made themselves the experiments yes hopkins as far as i know is when the first place is not the first place where whatever matt may or may not be doing in his own life i don't know it's really about the patients and whether or not the patients in these um institutional review board approved studies whether or not they're getting better in situations like depression i think it's clear that there's a very close relationship between hallucinogenic states and dreaming of the sort that would describe for rem dreaming and there's a a terrific set of books and body of scientific literature from a guy named alan hobson who was an md is it harvard med and he wrote books like dream drug store one of the first neuroscience books i ever read was about hallucinations and how psychedelics and dreaming are very similar that was way back when i was in high school i was just curious and he really understood the relationship between lsd and rem dreams and how similar they are i think psychedelics and matt knows way more about this than i do of course but psychedelics have some very interesting properties they are certainly not for everybody right and kids it's a problem you know i think the major issues right now around the psychedelic conversation is that it's clear that they can unveil certain elements of neuroplasticity they make the brain amenable to change changing up space-time relationships changing up the emotional load of an event and being able to reframe that it's clear that happens but there's two major issues one is that people talk about plasticity as if plasticity is the goal but plasticity is a state within which you can direct neurology and the question is what changes are you trying to get to so people are just taking psychedelics to unveil plasticity without thinking about what circuits they want to modify and how i think that's a problem i think there's great potential however for people opening up these states of plasticity with psychedelics or otherwise and directing the plastic changes toward a particular endpoint and there's an absolutely spectacular paper out of uc davis published as a full article in nature just a couple months ago showing that there are psychedelics that are now can be modified so chemists have gotten into the game now and modifying to take away the hallucinogenic component where you still get the neural plasticity components wow and for a lot of people to be like oh that's no fun that's not giving you the the wild experience but i do think that that holds great potential for people that wouldn't otherwise orient towards some of these drugs so i think it's really marvelous what's happening and what's about to happen and i think there there is one drug in that kit of drugs that's very unusual like psilocybin lsd those promote heavy heavy serotonin release and lateralized connections ramp up etc matt talked about all that but mdma ecstasy is a very unusual situation where dopamine is very very high because of the the way the drug is designed dopamine release it goes through the roof so people feel great and they want to move and they have a lot of energy but serotonin levels are also high and that's a very unnatural state and why mdma may may and i want to highlight may have particularly high potential for the treatment of certain forms of depression is an interesting question because never before in as far as we know in human history has there been a possibility of opening up dopaminergic and serotonergic states at the same time dopamine being the molecule pursuit and reward and more and more and serotonin being one of bliss and being content right where you're at so it's almost like those two things wrap back on themselves and create this very unusual state and i think the bigger conversation is what to do with a state like that like do you is it about self-love is it about developing love for another person is it about forgetting hate like these are powerful molecules and i think if the academic community and the clinical community is going to move forward with them in any serious way i think there needs to be a conversation about what they're being used for right and and coupled with that i think similar to what you're saying like matt has talked about is others have talked about some of the biggest benefits of like progress whether it's like quitting smoking and all those kind of stuff is in the is in the days after it's the integration of the experience so maybe you open up the brain to the neuroplasticity but then there's like work to be done it's not you're like you shake up something in it in the biology of the brain but you have to do then it's work absolutely now a friend of mine who's a physician he says um who's quite open to this idea that psychedelics could play a real role in in real medicine says better living through chemistry still requires better living and and i think it's it's a beautiful statement i wish i had said it be um but he gets the credit but the plasticity window opens and then as you said what are you gonna do in the two weeks three weeks four weeks afterward because that's the real opportunity but those psychedelic experiences are really a case of an amplified experience inside of an amplified experience so much so that everything seems relevant and it's um it's it's fascinating i mean i my hope is that the ai and machine learning and the brain machine interface and all that will eventually be merged with the psychedelic treatments so that you an individual can go in take whatever amount of whatever's safe for them working with a clinician and really direct the plasticity while maybe stimulating the orbital frontal medial orbital frontal cortex or increasing the observer or decreasing the observer in the brain or decreasing the amygdala i mean it's doable it's doable with transcranial magnetic stimulation and it's for shutting down activity and it's doable with ultrasound ultrasound now allows very focal activation of particular brain regions through the skull non-invasively so it's approaching the same kind of uh therapy from different angles one ai is the computational side so injecting like the robotics injecting like maybe you can even think about it as like electricity the electrical approach versus then like the the chemical approach absolutely and then the psycho and then the psychology is is subjective right so it's going to take some real um understanding of what that person's um lexicon is like you know that wasn't a pun i'm sorry it's terrible that's the one thing i know from the feedback on my podcast my jokes are terrible but i never claimed to be funny the the uh but somebody who they really trust and understands when somebody says you know for a very stoic person like i'm imagining you interviewed the great dan gable right i don't know anything about dan but can you imagine like you asked dan like you know how you feel about something while on one of these drugs and like i mean his languaging might if he says that was troubling it might mean that it was very troubling or not troubling at all so people are language is a poor guide because if i say i'm upset how upset is that well that's very subjective so you need we need can you build a tool for that can you build a ai tool for that yeah deeper yeah maybe that's the eye maybe that's our that's what the eyes could reveal so language is not just words it's everything together and that's one of the fascinating things about the eyes in the window to the soul i mean they express so much the face the eyes the body uh i mean lisa talks about that the communication of emotions it's a super complex perhaps it's a bit of a side fun tangent but matt matthew johnson brings up dmt and the experience of dmt is a as a as from a scientific perspective just just a mystery in itself over its intensity what happens to the brain and of course joe rogan and others bring it up as a very different special kind of experience uh and elves seem to come up often i've never tried dmt what allows for a hallucinogenic states yes and it i mean dmt is a really interesting molecule there there are a lot of people experimenting now with um dmt um and they just the way they've described it is as a kind of a freight train through space and time very different than the way people describe lsd type experiences or psilocybin where time and space are very fluid but it tends to be a kind of a slower role if you will um so it's clear that dmt is tapping into a brain state that's distinctly different than the other psychedelics and and you mentioned jiu jitsu and these other communities i mean it's i think it's interesting because jiu jitsu is a non-verbal activity and people get together and talk about this non-verbal activity and they show great love for it in the same way that surfers you know i known some surfers in my time and they will get up at the crack of dawn and drive really really far to sit in the water and wait for this wave to come i have to imagine it's pretty fantastic i think that human beings now some of whom are in the scientific community are starting to feel comfortable enough to talk about some of these other loves and other endeavors because they do reveal a certain component about our underlying neurology i'm fascinated by the concept of wordlessness activities in which language is just not sufficient to capture and in which feel so vital as a reset as important as sleep you know i think that's one of the dangers of the phone is not that you're going to get into some online battle or that you're always staring at the phone is that it's a word so as we read things we're hearing the script in our head and i think getting into states where we are in a state of wordlessness is is very renewing and replenishing and just can feel amazing for and i believe also can help us tap into creative states and allow our neurology to access creative states and sleep is one such wordlessness period so one of the most interesting things to me are states that one can approach in waking non-sleep depressed wordlessness through maybe it's jujitsu maybe it's for some people surfing maybe it's dancing maybe it's just i don't know staring at a wall who knows but where the language components of the brain are completely shut down and it has to be the case that drugs are no drugs that the brain is entering and starting to states and starting to use algorithms that are distinctly different than when we're trying to compose things in any kind of coherent way for someone else to understand there's no interest in anyone else understanding what you're experiencing in that moment and that's beautiful and i think uh i think it's not just beautiful because it feels good i think it's beautiful because it's important and it's clearly fundamental to our neurology and your sense is there's a connection between dreams and dmt and like psychedelic like all of the uh you can you can understand one by studying the other so for example dreams are also very difficult to study right but they're more accessible it's safer to study and we're told we need to get more of it whereas with psychedelics there's this big question mark is it going to make everyone crazy is it is it going to be legal i mean it's kind of interesting how if one looks on instagram one could almost think that these drugs are already legal based on the way that people commute but they're not yet they're still a lot of them are scheduled there's a lot of questions yeah uh i mean and but nevertheless it's like uh my my hope is that uh science opens up to these uh drugs a little bit more it's just i have this intuition that like a lot of people share that they would be able to uh unlock a deeper understanding of our own mind it's it's any kind of same as studying dreams absolutely well creativity is in the non-linearities right but productivity is in the implementation of linearities i mean that's that's what is absolutely clear this is why i think we were talking earlier about why a formal rigorous training in something where other people are looking at you and telling you no not good enough go back and do it again there's real value to that because otherwise it's just ideas it's just vapors you know one thing that matt mentioned as the study that they're working on is as opposed to i think most of the psychedelic studies they've done is on how to treat different conditions and one of the things they're working on now is to try to do a study where uh for creatives for people that don't have a condition to try and treat but instead see how this how psychedelics can help you create so like goodness if you take creatives and you give them more psychedelics they're not gonna be able to get out of their room i don't know well but this is the i maybe you can speak to that psychedelics or not or dreams or tools in general how to be better creatives that's an interesting i don't often see studies of this nature of like how to take high performance in the mental creative space and get them to perform even uh better so it's not average people it's like masters of their craft like taking i mean his examples was taking an elon musk which is in the engineering space and maybe musicians and all that kind of stuff and studying that that's a i mean that's weird i usually the science the scientific exploration there has been done in uh by the musicians themselves as has been documented like jazz is like all non-linearities yeah right but if it's but the people still have to know how to play their instruments right right there's some early early skill building that's critical i mean when you mention someone like elon i mean virtual i mean he's already a virtuoso right because he and in so many different domains i've never met him but it's it's clear right he it's not just that he's ambitious and bold and brave and all that it's all that and there's there's clearly a different way of looking at the same problems that everyone else is looking at and people are probably banging their head against the refrigerator thinking like think differently things it doesn't work that way it involved there's a certain anxiety in for the i'm not talking about for elon but i don't have no idea but i think for somebody who's very structured very regimented very linear the anxiety comes from letting go of those linearities and for the person that's very creative the anxiety comes from trying to impose linearities right the the really creative artist or musician they're they seem nuts they seem like they can't get their life together because they can't and they you know we look at people who are kind of pseudo aspergers or aspergers or some forms of autism and they are so hyper linear but you take away those linearities and they freak out and that's kind of the essence of some of those syndromes so i think that the ability to toggle back and forth between those states is what's remarkable i mean because we're here and we're having this discussion i mean steve jobs is a good example he probably the best example somebody who actually talked about his own process about the merging of art and science art and engineering humanities and science very few people can do that well i you seem to have a capacity to do that like you you know poetry and you are a.i guy like you there's nothing linear about poetry as far as i can tell i mean i i do wonder just like we've been talking about if there's any ways to push that to its limits to explore further i don't like leaning this this is why i'm bothered there's not more science and psychedelics is i haven't done almost so i've eaten mushrooms a few times uh allegedly but that's it you know and i the reason i don't do more the reason i haven't done dmt is because it's illegal and it's like not well studied and it you know i i'm in those things i'm not usually at the cutting edge but i'm very curious and it feels like there could be tools to be discovered there not for fun not for recreation but for like encouraging whether you're a linear thinking to go non-linear or it's non-linear to go linear like to to shake things up you mentioned dan gable the idea of dan gable on psychedelics is fascinating to me because he's such a control freak i mean that i would show up for that that would not show up for but like so much of these psychedelic experiences it feels like is for letting go that's right you don't want to resist but that's supposedly where the growth is in in giving oneself over to the process and that's for people who are like master controllers he's one of the greatest coaches of all time it's fascinating to see what that battle looks like of resistance and then of letting go uh yeah i mean i i can't wait to uh to to see where these studies takes us what's clearly happening you know i've asked there i have a couple colleagues at stanford who are doing animal studies i've asked around you know it's there's a lot of discussion in the neuroscience community about what the perception of a laboratory is if they work on psychedelics i mean i i have to tip my hat to the folks at hopkins they are pioneers and as um terry signowski he's a computational neuroscientist down at salk says i don't think he was the first person to say he says uh you know how to spot the pioneers they're the ones with the arrows in their backs yeah and you know it's it's an unkind world to a scientist that's trying to do really cutting-edge stuff my colleague david spiegel who studies medical hypnosis it's he's got dozens of studies now showing that hypnosis can be beneficial for pain management anxiety management cancer outcomes it's finally you know at the point where there's so much data but people hear hypnosis and they think of stage hypnosis which is like the furthest thing from what he's doing and i think mind body type stuff hypnosis respiration and breathing i think the hard science walk into the problem is always going to be best to get the community on board and then it's up to people like matt and to really you know take it to the next level and as i say not keysi out of the game because keysi basically was taking too much of his own stuff and he started dressing crazy at banana hats and like you see him he had the magic bus so you know the day so like the day i start driving to work in the magic bus that's the day i lose my job i'm not into buses or or wearing fruit but you're going to get a phone call from me and i hope you do the same for me it's like like dude what are you doing well what's interesting earlier we're talking about the challenge with david that you're about to do i mean that is a psychedelic experience of sorts because you're biasing your mind towards a pretty extreme neurochemical state and you don't know what you're going to find there and that's kind of the excitement at least for me as an observer it's like i want to know what what the experience is like afterward i want to know like how was it i mean i'm sure you're going to get something like you said you're going to grow the question is how and not resisting i mean it's the same as with a psychedelic experience it's like not like giving yourself over completely to the experience and not resisting and going through the whole mental journey of whether it's anger or excitement or exhaustion the whole thing it's uh i mean uh that's in the entirety of the process that david goes through when he does his own challenges and so on is that whole journey he finds purposely like missile seeks the limits of the mind that whenever the resistance is felt runs up against it and then goes to the full journey of going beyond it and seeing what's there on the other side well stress has these two sides the limbic friction of being tired and needing to get more energized that's one form of stress and then there's the feeling too amped up and needing to calm down the the typical discussion around stresses is one thing but it's all limbic friction it's just that when i say lymbic friction that's not a real scientific term i just mean the limbic system wanting to pull you down into sleep or wanting to put you into panic and you using top-down processing using that evolved forebrain to say i'm not going to go to sleep and i'm not going to freak out and those top-down control mechanisms are i mean when those get honed that's beautiful because then you real you're increasing capacity for everything you uh this month on the podcast you're talking about neuroplasticity you mentioned a bunch already is there something you're looking forward to specifically like something maybe you're fascinated by that jumps to mind about neuroplasticity this fascinating property of the brain yeah i think that it's clear there's one facet of neuroplasticity that is very well supported by the research data that hardly anyone has implemented in the real world and that's the release of acetylcholine from these neurons in the forebrain called nucleus basalis this is mainly the work of mike murzenik who used to be at ucsf and some of his scientific offspring greg reckenzone and michael kilgaard and others what they showed was increases in acetylcholine this molecule associated with focus in concert meaning at the same time as some event motor event or music event or any kind of sensory event immediately reorganizes the neocortex so that there's a permanent map representation of that event and i i absolutely believe that this can be channeled toward accelerated skill learning and my friend and colleague eddie chang is now the chair of neurosurgery at ucsf but also a fine scientist in his own right not just a clinician he's doing studies looking at rapid acquisition of language using these principles he trained with mersnick it's clear we have these gates on plasticity in the forebrain and they are gated by nicotinic acetylcholine transmission and why that hasn't made it into protocols for motor learning sport learning language learning music learning emotional learning i don't know i think part of the reason has been kind of cultural is that scientists publish their paper and they move on merzianic talked a lot and still can be found from time to time talking about how these plasticine mechanisms can be leveraged but uh he had a commercial company and so then people kind of backed away from it a little bit i think he was to be honest i think merzenik was ahead of his time and i think the timing is right now for people to understand these mechanisms of plasticity and start to implement them also you know it all sounds like becoming superhuman or optimizing or whatever all that yes but also what about kids with language learning deficits or with dyslexia or just performance in school in general you know i have a deep interesting concern for the future of science and mathematics and in not just in this country but all over the world and more plasticity equals faster better deeper learning and if we don't do this i don't think we're going to get the full reach out of all the machine learning tools either because everyone talks about these huge data sets and but those huge data sets funnel into human interpretation i mean we don't just like stare at the numbers and bask right so some the human brain i think needs to leverage these plasticity mechanisms to keep up with the thing that's happening very very fast which is technology development so that's a long-winded way of saying basal forebrain cholinergic transmission and plasticity it allows for plasticine adulthood and allows for it in single trial learning which is incredible but how do we leverage that like in the physical space taking actions or is there some chemicals that can stimulate stimulate neuroplasticity like what i think it's the intersection of the two i think it's being engaged in a physical practice while enhancing pharmacology it has to be done safely and this is full of open questions this is the very beginning of it like you're saying yeah a pill that's safe that increases nicotinic transmission i mean i know a number of people that chew nicorette actually they have an i have a nobel prize winning colleague at columbia not to be named um who choose like six pieces of nicaragua in a half hour conversation with him and he started doing that as a replacement for smoking because smoking is nicotine nicotinic stimulation of the cholinergic system so smokers have long known that increases focus and attention and learning it's just that the lung cancer thing is a barrier now i'm not suggesting people take nicorette but it's clear that we need better directed pharmacology but you can imagine next time you go in for a learning bout if it's really essential you might want to stimulate the nicotinic system if that's safe for you again i'm a doctor so again i'm not telling people to do this but that's where it's going until we start merging machines with pharmacology and behavior it's it we're just kind of walking around in the circle over and over again and it's going to happen do you find computer vision machine learning from the perspective of tooling as an interesting tool for analyzing for processing all the data from the neuroscience world from the neurobiology biology the camera ever all the different data sets that you can have about the mind the eye the everything that's neck and above and also the central nervous system absolutely i mean i think that computer science and engineering and chemistry bioengineering is that's what's creating the acceleration and progress in neuroscience right now i think it's actually one place where science i'm very reassured science has invited in psychologists computational biologists at least at stanford mit and other places too of course it's clear that it's a everyone's invited kind of party right now the the major issue in the field of neuroscience at least through my view is that there's no conceptual leadership no one is saying we need to work on and solve this problem or that problem it's very fragmented right now now the good news is people are communicating so computer scientists and people who work on ai machine vision are talking to biologists and vice versa but it's very dispersed is there a lot of different data sets like in your work that you've just come across is a huge number of disparate data sets around neuroscience and so on or well there's a lot of cell sequencing stuff so the broad over it you know on in boston and then on this coast the chen zuckerberg initiative um what you know um they did you know three billion dollars to sequence every cell type in humans and in animals and try and i think their goal is to cure every disease by some date i don't know in the in the future huge data sets of gene expression and protein expression that's valuable i think no one really knows how to think about neural circuits and what what is a neural circuit um is it one structure is it two structures communicating i think this is where i actually think that the robotics is going to tell us how the brain works because it it's tempting to think that the brain has all these cell types and circuits in order to solve specific problems but it might be that the fundamental algorithm is to create cells and circuits that can solve variable problems we know in the retina just a very simple example is that we've always heard about like cones are for color vision and high acuity and rods are for night vision and and non-color vision but at the dusk dawn transition certain cell types switch to do completely different have a completely different function for viewing starry night versus what they do during the daytime so neurons multiplex and i think building machines that can multiplex and can evolve themselves is going to help us really understand what the brain is doing we need to tease out the fundamental algorithms we know they're like motion detection and spatial vision and things like that i think machines are going to be much faster at that than our understanding of biology and how the brain does that basically i'll be out of a job and people like you will have a job no well no though i think the main idea is that uh there won't be a job that's machine learning or computer vision it's just it's a it's a tool that neuroscientists will use more and more and more and uh biologists would use i mean this whole idea that it will just be a a tool that allows you to start expanding the kind of things you can study and well the next generation coming up i can say this because i now i'm blessed to have a bioengineering student they think about problems so differently than biologists do we realized the other day we both came up with a set of ideas around a certain project and we realized that her version of it was the exact opposite of mine you know and hers was far far more rational it's just an engineering perspective like why would we do that last we should do that first i think that the next generation is really interested in solving practical problems so a lot like computer science and engineering was in the late 90s it was like you can go do a phd in computer science and engineering maybe or you go work for a company and actually build stuff that's useful i think neuroscientists and people interested in neuroscience are starting to think how can i build stuff that's useful and this statement is supported by the fact that many people in my business leave their academic labs fortunately not all of them but they leave their academic labs and they go work for companies like neural link like neural link this is something i think with we've spoken a few times offline about as speaking of computer vision i'm fascinated by the eye i did a bunch of work on the eye so from there's the neuroscientist there's a neurobiology way of studying the eye and there's the computer vision way of studying the eye and the computer vision way of studying the eye of just like observing non-contact sensing of humans is really fascinating to me in studying human behavior in different contexts like in semi-autonomous vehicles it seemed like there is a lot of signal that comes from the eye that comes from blinking that's not fully understood yet it's been in the lab it's been used quite a bit to study like the dilation of the pupil all those kinds of things are used for to uh to infer workload cognitive load all those kinds of things but the pictures is murky it's not completely well understood especially in the wild how much signal you can get from the eye from the human face i've downloaded joe rogan's all the podcasts he's ever done video you have the youtube bank i have the youtube bank for for a reason that this was before he went with spotify it you own the archive there's pubmed and then there's the joe rogan experience owned by or maintained by lex yeah privately for my private collection no the reason i did it uh and i did the really like rigorous processing of it which is like the i extracted all of the faces i did the really good blink track of the pupil tracking and the blink detection for the entirety that are oh i should say it's from episode like i forget what it is but it's like episode 900 when they switched to 1080p video but it was like much crappier videos so it's still kind of long when there was marijuana consumption or when they were drinking when they're i mean there's like just it won't throw off the data but it's relevant to the the relatively competitive data so let's just put it uh this way there's a lot of fascinating computer vision problems involved but i only kept long sequences of data where the eyes detected exceptionally well and uh i also removed people that were wearing glasses i removed there are certain people that have a way of uh moving their eyes and squinting where it's harder to infer uh like concrete blinks you know they'll kind of have a squint the whole time and their blink is very light it's very tough to know what's uh uh what's an actual bling so you got those baseball cap wearing guys yeah there are certain people that go on podcasts and wear baseball caps and and don't reveal their i don't know if they realize it or not until it comes out but their face is completely obscured from vision and from a computer vision perspective people that wear makeup and usually women on their eyes it complicates things like eyelashes all complicated things so i you know you can clean stuff up just so you have really crisp signal you don't have to you can you can deal with issues but you know there's so many hours of joe rogan video anyway i say all that because i was searching for an interesting personal experiment for me because uh i saw in drivers when i was looking at eye movement and drivers it seemed to indicate there seemed to be quite a lot of signal there that indicates amount of cognitive load but it's not clear if there's something conclusive but if there is some signal that's a really powerful one because eye movement can be detected in the wild like you and i sitting here i can detect eye movement really well pupil dilation is a really crappy indicator and it's luminance dependent like if i turn toward a light it's it's a route it people change size depending on level of alertness arouse autonomic browser but also overall levels of luminance it's very very hard but there are i mean you're sitting on a on a gold mine um because the there is a lot of interest right now in measuring state through non-contact sensing yes uh heart rate variability through changes in skin tone but just off a camera can you imagine that at the point where you just look at some video and you're like oh they're they're getting more stressed or worked up and they're not based on a heat map of some little patch on their face because everyone's gonna have this slight you know sort of um compartmentalize it slightly differently but you can learn it pretty quickly we know this when someone's like giving a talk and we see them starting it blotching on their on their neck you know this is the like uh the thesis defense response right we know it and we're it's a stressful situation because if not passing your thesis defense is rough and you can see that but cameras can pick that up really easily at much lower levels than the the blatant blotching kind of effect and eye movements certainly are powerful indications of the state of the autonomic system so what do you do you think there are things from a high level that you can pick up from eye movement and and blinking well blink frequency is gonna increase as people get tired right um i i've actually been teased a lot online because i don't blink much when i'll do a post and i and so i did a whole post about blinking about the science of blinking there's some data very strong data not from my lab that showed that every time you blink it resets your perception of time they have people do these kind of track uh kind of a doppler like thing and anyway blinking resets your perception of time and there's a dopaminergic mechanism in a in the blink-related circuitry of the brain uh when people are very alert they tend to not blink very much when we're sleepy we tend to blink more and our eyes tend to close now some people are more hooded in there the way their eyes sit some people are like this all the time there are some very famous people i'm not going to name them because i might run into them at some point who are like accused of being sociopaths because they don't blink very often but they might just have high levels of autonomic arousal they just don't blink very much yeah also depends on how lubricated the eyes are so i think within individual yes you can get a lot of information i don't think we can say this person's blinking a lot they're lying this person or they're tired this person doesn't blink they're they're stressed i think if you understand that person's baseline you can get it and presumably uh well having been on the joe rogan experience i can say when you first sit down there if you've never been in there before you're in my data set by the way oh my well i bet you i i i will admit to being you know first time being sitting down there i mean joe was incredibly gracious made me feel very comfortable there but yeah it's a it's an intense experience um it's a small space too anytime you enter a small space from a big space in this old studio you're familiar with there's a breaking in period where you're getting to know somebody and so i'm sure my levels of autonomic arousal front of the podcast were higher than later so but once you have a baseline established you can get a lot of data on somebody simply from blinks um some people averting gays too if you have both people that's really powerful this is the holy grail another holy grail of neuroscience we've mainly looked at subjects in isolation absolutely there hasn't been much brain imaging of two people in interacting or even in animal models of two mice or two monkeys interacting it's all like a person scanner bite bar i mean if you've ever been in one of these scanners like in a bite bar it's very medieval and so you think in the interaction there's actually you can almost study them as a single brain or as a single system the two brains are a single system i think with ai highly correlated yeah maybe are your blinks triggering my blinks like you know or your non-blink epochs you know extending my non-blink epochs there's a fascinating space to explore there and no one's done it and because everyone let the joe rogan experience archive disappear except for you you've grabbed did you get the comments too because i think the comments were almost as entertaining as the conversation you know what you just made me realize with the couplings i have a better data set than the joe rogan podcast with high resolution video which is the raw video for this podcast so for example both cameras right now are recording you and i full full feed the final result will switch cameras back and forth but i have the full feed right so i can have the blinking for both you and i the whole time i bet you people trigger blanks and in one another you know and there's also like the the simplest way to think about the blinks and the attentional thing and the alertness is two fighters in the in the standoff there's this whole lore around who blinks first yeah it's like they blink first well what are what are we really asking they're asking whether or not one person can maintain focus longer than the other person which is an important parameter it's not the only parameter but it's an important parameter and so that blinking contest even though they don't square off as a blinking contest it's well known that the first to blink is revealing something about their capacity to hold attention you've started an amazing podcast that we mentioned a few times uh people should definitely check it out it's called the human lab podcast it uh it does your it's basically you it embodies the personality of andrew huberman which is like makes science accessible um but also uh fascinating and giving it like what do you call it you give tools for everyday life meaning it kind of grounds in like what the hell does this mean for my life but then also does the beauty of science at the same time so i love i love both the the rigor and the openness of the whole thing plus the whole corrections things that we mentioned anyway what's uh been the hardest part of this whole process you're one of already one of the only and one of the best science podcasters out there so in that process what's been the hardest what's been the most exciting part well well first of all thanks for the kind words about the podcast it was inspired by you i i absolutely it's um that's no bs i the last time we met to do an interview for your podcast we talked a little bit about it and you gave me the um subtle nudge that maybe there was a there was a podcast there and i thought about it and i left and i was just like i gotta do this thing and you really gave me the encouragement to do it now your podcast this podcast has really forged the way you've been tip of the spear on serious scientific intellectual yet fun accessible conversation and so i as your colleague and friend and but i just even if those things weren't true like this this podcast was and is the inspiration there's no question so much yeah i really like 100 percent and when i decided to do the podcast the huberman lab podcast i thought really long and hard about what would work best and would be most beneficial turned out to be the hardest thing which is to stay on a single topic for three or four or more episodes before switching to a new topic because i know from the experience of university and teaching in university as you know as well that there's always the temptation to pivot to something else but the drilling into something really deeply is where the where the gems reside and the the challenge has been how to make it interesting how to keep people on board how to give people tools along the way but also stay close to the scientific data um i like to think that we're headed in the right direction it still needs to evolve but that's been a challenge i think i also am challenged by the fact that there's a tremendous range of backgrounds of listeners so some people have asked for more names like more bits and parts of the nervous system and cellular molecular mechanisms and all that kind of thing and other people said i don't understand any of that stuff but i think i'm keeping up and so unlike a university course where there are prerequisites and everyone's coming to the table with more or less the same knowledge i have a very limited sense of what the audience knows and doesn't know so that's why i incorporated the feature of the comment section on youtube being a source of feedback and i do a kind of an office hours like episode every third or fourth episode where i address common questions and i think that the podcast space in my mind um at least for the sort of podcast i'm doing needed a venue for the listeners to be a more integral part of the experience as opposed to just commenting on what they liked or didn't like so while i like to hear what people liked and didn't like i also really like to hear about hey tell me more about temperature minimums and how they can be used to phase shift circadian rhythms or whatever it is and i realized that i'm probably losing some people along the way but hopefully at the end of each month and because of the way that the episodes are archived people will come away feeling as if they've learned a ton and they have tools that they can implement and perhaps most importantly that they're starting to think scientifically about the tons of other stuff that's out there so that's been the challenge and it's still really early days but um and and of course there's also an intentional challenge i realize that people are busy not everyone has two hours to listen to a podcast about jet lag and shift work and raising kids and sleep and that kind of thing i'm not raising kids but i did a whole thing about babies and sleep with you know and how parents can manage their sleep when kids aren't sleeping so it's been um i'm hacking through the jungle of all this stuff but and i'll come right back to i my inspiration and my my my uh north star on this is getting to a point where the audience that listens to this feels the same way that i do when i listen to your podcast thank you so much like when i tune into your podcast i'm gonna embarrass you a little bit more by complimenting you a little bit more um but not out of a sadistic thing but just because when i tune into your podcast or joe's podcast i have the same sensation that other people have like i feel like i'm home of sorts i'm like i'm familiar with the space and i'd like people to feel comfortable in the space that is the hubert lab podcast whatever that ends up being yeah that's the magic of podcasting it's like i feel like i'm part of your life now in a way that as a fan that i wouldn't be otherwise and you know like i never was able to have that with carl sagan for example you know uh and that's a whole nother level of connection with a human being that gets you excited and then i share your excitement about uh different topics in neuroscience or just uh biology in general and then i don't have to actually understand everything you're saying to uh to really enjoy it so that that's the magic of podcasting is like you can go through like 10 minutes not understanding what the hell a person is saying and then you uh enjoy the excitement and then you reconnect to a thing that you do understand what they're saying and you know that's uh that personal coupled with the scientific rigor is magic and finding the right it's exploration like joe found something that works for comedians which is like you know having a good laugh but also every once in a while talking seriously about difficult topics the scientific space it was unclear i you haven't had guests on not yet but uh maybe you'll come on as a that's right i'm just gonna invite my i was gonna try to follow myself i am i'm officially inviting you now will you come on the podcast fantastic but it was it was hard it's still a little bit difficult to tell people that no you don't get it we're not going to talk for 10 minutes we're going to talk for three or four hours it's a different for scientists for like they're like what i don't what are we going to talk about they think it's like the npr interview yes and they don't realize first of all i think at his best if you're like at the level of joe rogan who i think is an excellent conversationalist it you just lose track of time it can be three four five hours and you lose track of time i'm still not there i find that it's still painful like the conversation is still challenging sometimes you don't lose quite as much of track of time it's still an intellectual effort and i think it might always be as it would be with you because you're talking about difficult topics maybe that require more brand you're not just shooting the shit with like a brian red band or somebody like comedians or just joking what's like uh remember those shows um like where those shows where someone would come out and like spin plates and they're running back and forth really good scientific discussion is like that you have to be maintaining three or four different logical arguments and jumping back and forth it's occasionally getting to like a real streak of linearity but as we found today that typically there's three or four different things that we're bouncing back and forth and that requires a lot of updating of these you know forebrain circuits it's not it's not a passive listening experience but i like to think that the brain likes that i i do want to ask just because we all i don't want to forget the the question came up to me is your podcast has the same kind of rigor that i think like a dan carlin podcast has a history podcaster well that's a definitely a compliment thank you it's a handstand way you know he's something for me to aspire to so he goes through hell to prepare he spends months preparing it feels like you've had to really prepare for your podcast i definitely prepare hard how does that are you okay yeah i mean how much effort does that take it feels like a conference presentation yeah so we record once a week and in the intervening time i listen to many university level lectures so nih has a a bank of lectures i have some sources of recorded university seminars i'm trying to find the the points of intersection so like for four episodes on sleep it's not like i'm gonna just regurgitate a popular book or take one lecture and just you know poach the content i'm gonna find the overlap in the different elements i also so what i'll do is i'll generally read 10 or 15 papers and generally those are good reviews annual reviews interview of neuroscience annual review of physiology those kinds of things i'll chase a few references i'll listen to some youtube videos but of university level lectures and then i throw all that on a whiteboard usually while i work out in the morning i'll just be working out i have a gym in my house and i'll just put up all these random ideas i want to cover that dreams hallucination and then i take that and i start eliminating i draw lines between the common points of intersection and then from that i i distill out an outline and then i basically think about what i want to say on my walks with my dog and i bother a couple people and blabbed to them so i would say each podcast yeah i put in 10 to 15 hours at least of passive listening preparation and maybe five or six of active preparation so i do prepare quite a lot but it has a certain reward component for me i to come up at the end with something that's somewhat crystallized for me is just so satisfying it feels like there's something about my dopamine circuits that just love that and uh the the only pain is that a year later after i've talked about the stuff a bunch of times it's so much more succinct but that's life you you know at some point you got to pull the trigger well i don't know what you think but for me youtube is uh that's why i'm sad that joe left youtube there's a archival nature to youtube that's kind of magical so i'm really glad you're now you're you you're uh doing a lot of educational content on instagram before but now on doing this podcast thing on youtube i it's like a you know it's like feynman lectures like well that's very no i'm not saying every podcast right but there will be there you will have some i could already tell there will be some lectures which are like definitive like really special ones that's the hope and the there's some aspect that's archival to youtube where at least i hope like 20 years from now some kid is going to watch uh watch a lecture yours and um you know it'll it'll create the next nobel prize right it'll create it'll create another uh you know a dream that then becomes a reality and that that's a that's a special thing that um that youtube provides i'm really excited that you're on youtube and at the same time i'm excited to see where this thing goes because um it seems like change is the uh the cliche thing the change is the only constant in these times because you're paving uh with this podcast with this creativity what you were doing on instagram as well you're paving the new era of what it means to do science so actively doing research and actively explaining that research in new media it's it's very interesting inspired and genuinely inspired by you we we had this discussion last time after the podcast recording and it was it's clear that communication of science cannot be left to the the existing institutions and i'm gonna talk about universities i just mean that the science section of newspapers is sometimes there's some gems there but generally it goes you know and yeah i think you really have to know a field in order to extract the best things from that field and my hope is that other practicing scientists and people finishing their phd in postdoc and people who are running labs or working at companies will start to do this i mean how amazing would it be for instance if if someone at neural link was giving us hints about not necessarily what they're developing because that's complicated for all sorts of reasons but would talk to us about what the real challenges of building futuristic brain machine interface are like and and what the what it means to understand a clinical problem and address it i mean i my hope is somebody there might eventually do that that somebody in the world of um chemistry or synthetic materials or whatever it is we'll do this in a way that i could understand because i don't have expertise in those i think it would be marvelous and um your tip of the spear you were out first and i'm just uh happily trying to to move along in the direction i'm going but i i think the future of science education is online and i think that's going to be scary to a lot of existing institutions but it's not about disrupting anything it's just about trying to do things better yeah you know some of the best interviews uh some of the best investigative journalism is done by people inside the field uh comes to mind a guy by the name of elon musk who who uh i love the the possibility that he gets the pulitzer for that interview but uh he grilled the crap out of vlad the uh ceo of uh robin hood i'm not sure if you know on um on the clubhouse clubhouse the other night yeah i saw you guys in there i was kept out i wasn't quick enough my thumbs don't go fast enough so i was and i wasn't about to sit in the waiting room have you tried that social network by the way the clubhouse i've gone in there a few times and checked some things out i'm there i have a few questions about it that um like if i'm in there how one can participate or not participate i i like being a fly on the wall for those conversations i've been very curious as to what's going on in there oh it's quite i mean i have a lot of thoughts i've maybe it's useful to comment i also have a discord server uh that uh you know has a few tens of thousands of people on it and then they have also a voice chat capability so they have these get-togethers and i i was using in in the spring and summer like actively uh on those voice discussions and it's anywhere from 10 to like a thousand people all together in voice like you you anyone can speak anytime right but there's this weird dynamic that people stay quiet only one person speaks at a time because they're all like respectful and it's the community of like uh like fundamentally respectful people even though they're all anonymous so like except like me and a few others it's all anonymous people so interesting and it works it's but the the magical thing to me about that community was how intimate voice only communication can be it felt as intimate as like a like a small get-together at a home with close friends it felt like there's a calmness to it and you're revealing things about you know somebody suffering from depression or being suicidal so those are the dark things or being super excited getting a new girlfriend or boyfriend like just the the depth of human experience shared on voice without video is uh i was really surprised how intimate that is for human connection especially in this time of kobe to replace that so that so that so just to give you some context there's something there there there's definitely something there one thing that comes to mind is when like in clubhouse you have your little icon so they don't actually you don't see your face moving i think when people see their own image it puts them in a state of self-consciousness that is eliminated by just having an icon or an avatar yes right so like zoom is dreadful because if i'm not used to talking to people and seeing a little image of myself staring back at me in the mirror and it's just i know there are ways that you can adjust that but it's really awful yeah and i think that when i get on zooms now i say hello and then i shut down the video component and then i just talk in the end i come back on just to show that it's still there it's still me but i think that voice only is really interesting eddie chang would be an interesting person to talk to about this because he understands so much about how inflection communicates emotionality and deeper state but there's a balance between i think just like you said this the privacy uh somehow uh allows for the intimacy so like being able to uh as opposed to put on putting on an act which i realize we do when we're visually presenting ourselves right in remote communication but i think that there's so few places where people can actually communicate without the fear of penalty yes those that's you know woefully absent these days and so maybe people are just relieved to be in a place where they feel like i can say what i want or not say anything and it's okay and so so clubhouse as you answer your kind of uh question is uh it was a big improvement to me over discord which is it has tears is it has a stage where people the person that created the room can invite people up that would like to speak potentially have the opportunity to speak and then there's a bigger audience that don't get a chance to speak unless they click raise their hand and they get called on so there's like a tier system that allows for there to be a group of like 5 10 20 30 people talking and a lot larger amount in the audience which in discord was the problems that everybody could talk and the other thing about clubhouse is everybody is strongly encouraged to represent themselves so you're using your real name it's not anonymous and how many people were in that um gamestop discussion they currently uh limit rooms to five thousand so i'm sure we maxed out at five thousand there's a lot of overflow rooms this is the cool thing about clubhouse really big people were on there all tuned in and having a conversation having all from all you know all these different uh worlds being able to connect even though without the niceties of like arranging the meeting you could just show up and leave which is nice but uh the reason i'm for my lessons from discord i'm going to mostly stay away from cole house and i think we're going there under another name right uh uh i'll pretend i know the actual your actual name yeah it's i've learned it's quite addicting it's uh it's a time sink it's so the intimacy of it is you find yourself wasting quite a bit of time on there it pulls you in well it's interesting they would in sort of going back to the podcast or earlier we're talking about books or creating a technology one thing that's absolutely clear is that anything that's easy to reproduce is probably not worth much effort and time yes right i mean most posts could be easily reproduced you just repost them yeah so um now there are some original posts that for which the attribution goes to the original person it's clear it came from you but anything that can be easily reproduced is doesn't really expand us very much as individuals or or as groups and most of what i see on social media is stuff that is is purely reproduced yes right but i think clubhouse i mean it could be that some real magic emerges on there so in moderation it could be good the magic is this is another thing that i've found through kovid that maybe you can think about is uh live i used to be not understand the appeal of live video or live connection or like in this clubhouse live events because clubhouse is technically for the most part it's not supposed to be recorded most people don't record most conversations it's a one-time live event and there's a magic to that there is that's not captured by a like your podcast or my podcast produced video that's like recorded like packaged up well anything can happen it's that anything can happen and those though that's the kind of thing like live concerts right i definitely i love live music and it's the idea that because you can always listen to the album actually the album usually sounds cleaner and better but it's just this idea that anything can happen and then you listen to like the parts i don't know you uh like costello did something weird uh your dog does something weird and then you have to go god damn it you have to go to the kitchen or something to get something and then you come back and it's funny i watch a live video like that of people and i'll be there for the whole time i'll wait for them to go to the kitchen and come back it's not like i tune out right and that makes it like a richer experience for some reason it's weird well it humanizes it yeah and i think there is this weird effect of whether or not it's a podcast instagram or twitter or anything else there is kind of like two people shouting into a tunnel and then a bunch of people with ears at the other end of those tunnels and shouting some things back you know that's that's kind of the format we're in i think i'll check out clubhouse again i've gone in there a few times during the day and i was surprised to see how many people were in there in the middle of the day i was like don't aren't these people supposed to be working exactly but maybe that is their work well be very careful about the um the time sync of it but yeah if you want to you and i go together we have a conversation on there but one of the things you have to figure out i don't still know how to do it but how to exit which is you just do the isn't there the leave quietly button yeah no but like when you and i are on stage having a conversation uh like and okay uni is harder but like uh you really if it's just you and i then it's the usual human communication of like all right i gotta go like but when it's like four people you you don't want to interrupt everyone announce you're leaving you just have to i mean there's a weird dynamic that i haven't quite figured out of the etiquette isn't clear the etiquette is not clear well the etiquette on different platforms and how that changes is really interesting you know how youtube has one etiquette which is kind of it's a lot of harshness is tolerated on youtube video comments um twitter seems a bit harsher than instagram instagram there's kind of it seems to be a little nice really nice people are really nice on instagram for the most part um except for those uh phishing things i actually know someone who had their quite sizable account poached by those copyright they come in with those like you violated copyright things there's all sorts of harshness in there that if you think about it in the real world i like to think about instagram as if it was the real world someone that comes over is basically saying like hey can i hold your wallet and go into the bank and i'll get some money out for you and like but there's this trust based on the format it comes in that it can almost get past your radar unless you're suspicious if if you took comments like you know your posts get a lot of comments and use it you just walk past 500 random people on the street and just listen to what they say it something like that's ridiculous i don't have time for that yeah but the comments somehow take on this importance and this relevance yes and you feel we we feel obligated to give them value right and so the online communities the the rules really are different yeah um and they evolve with tom which is fascinating with clubhouse it's a new social network so it's evolving and people are figuring out as you go and the same thing with podcasting on video and like scientific podcasting this is the cool thing when i look at what you've created i'm learning i'm thinking like hmm that's interesting to do it this way because like nobody i have nobody to copy not many people to copy you know what i mean if you threw out an idea i'm not going to put it out here now because i i don't want to because knowing you you'll hold yourself to it no matter what but when we talked about um this issue of the challenge of staying on a particular topic for a while i mean you do have some cool stuff brewing in there oh no no not separate from this format and i love your interview format but um when you told me about that i got really excited that you might go forward i'm not going to tell your audience what it is it but i will say this it is super cool i would have never thought about it it's distinctly different than what i'm doing or what lex is currently doing and if you decide to do that podcast i will be your first and your number one fan and i know there are going to be millions of other people interested that would be amazing so if you decide to go forward with the idea no um that would be awesome i was gonna say what it is but now i'm not going to because because that's even more interesting uh i i brought up the the clubhouse thing actually in elon um because i just wanted to uh get your thoughts about something he's said a few times to me and to me and in general is that he's under a huge amount of stress and i'm thinking of doing a startup now and kind of thinking about all of this because i you know i enjoy podcast i enjoy science but he says that his life is basically hell very difficult he looks happy but he's probably very good at he's fulfilled he's fulfilled but the stress levels the constant fires that he has to put out and he says that most people wouldn't want to be me and that basically the reason he does what he does is because there's probably something wrong with him like it's not uh he can't help it but do that it's kind of beautiful in a kind of russian masochistic way well i i just wonder the stress i mean i'm sure you can you can imagine the kind of stress he's under because so it's running three plus companies and there's constant like he he says that you know every single meeting is a is not about like should we install a coffee maker in the in the in the kitchen it's like you know this rocket is going to blow up and i don't we're all fucked i don't know what to do and we have to you have to fix you have to fix the real like big problems that are and like how do you uh oh yeah how do you deal with that what do you think about that kind of life one one is there a way to go you know walk through that fire and two should you should you walk through that fire well i mean without knowing i've never met elon but certainly we have common friends in you and in other people that uh he worked with long ago in the paypal days um all of whom speak very highly of him and show express immense admiration for the number of things that he can maintain i think it's fair to say that he accomplishes more before 9 a.m than most people do in in a decade it's clear and that what he does would dissolve most people into a puddle of tears mostly because of this whole thing about the brain working hard equates to thinking about duration path and outcome and anticipating outcomes given a b c or d a lot of very scripted linear thinking and prediction and that is hard it's stressful it requires intense neurochemical output and he's doing that for multiple projects so presumably he's buffered himself from the coffee maker issues and the little tiny issues but he is himself unless there's something i don't know he's walking around in a biological system he is that's uh allegedly yes yeah allegedly so um and i don't want to reveal too much here but i have a common um a co-worker and colleague through some contract work i do that what i can tell you is that he's accessing the best resources in terms of how to optimize his biology and he's thinking about that not just for himself but for all of neural link because i think i'm not trying to dodge the question but i think there's the there's the scale of the individual but then there's the companies that he's creating and you've got people there that you could imagine if they're working at ten percent better capacity or can focus five percent better for twenty percent of the day you're looking at a enormous increase in productivity and a reduction in the time to reach goals which will reduce the amount of stress presumably on elon unless he goes and starts another endeavor right so i think it's certainly not healthy for most people it seems to be where he gets his dopamine hits i'm also really struck by the fact that he has a family and he has you know he maintains he's got kids growing up in a relationship and all that so it's super impressive i think that um i don't know how old is elon yes 40 i'm pushing 50 i think 48 so even more impressive 29 because you know many people who've been at exceedingly high output for a decade or more don't do well their system breaks down well this is what he was saying he uh actually the i mean i don't listen to all of his interviews but on that live on the clubhouse he mentioned that he was kind of worried it's interesting he was worried that like sometimes what i think he said is i'm worried that some at some point my brain is just going to fail because of the amount of load it's under like how much i have to think through throughout the day like how many like problems you have to think through like you know it's like puzzles it's constant puzzle solving i would be concerned about taking somebody who's in that regime and suddenly putting them into a regime where they don't have enough to bite down into it's like my bulldog costello he's happiest when chewing and tugging with a big whole neck of his and he is just not going to become a retriever he's not going to he does well and gets his dopamine hits from chewing and pulling and it it seems like elon has ended up where he is by way of his natural leanings i unless there's a backstory that's um trauma-based or something and i don't even begin to think that there is it seems that he has he's one of those rare individuals in history that has an immense drive to create in all these different domains i'm just saying the obvious here yeah but it seems like that's what makes him tick i mean you're doing an awful lot too well the problem is not really uh the the problem is um about i've been on the verge of pulling the trigger on on on starting a company which will increase the workload significantly and uh i'm attracted to that because of a dream i have but it's a little bit scary because it can destroy you in in a lot of ways there's two there's two sources of destruction so one source is uh i've for the first time in my life a few um months ago i think have gotten this feels like such a noob thing to say but i've gotten some hate on the internet no i know right no but like i am such an idiot i'm so naive to it was supr you i i had the question that i guess a lot of people uh have when they get hate on the internet it's like like it's like mom why are these people making up stuff about me you know that kind of feeling of like why why are you saying that and and the the the the reason i mention that is like well if you go if you want to go and start a business and do as i think people should when they start a big ambitious business really try to go big like what does success look like in terms of your emotional journey you're going to have a lot of people who make up stuff about you who say negative thing i mean majority hopefully if you do a good job will be supportive and but there's still going to be this army of people there and like that that was scary to me because of how much emotional impact they had on me well and i also know a little bit i have some glimpse into the fact that you put your heart and soul into everything you do you're not a you're light-hearted about certain things but you're even light-hearted about being full gas pedal 24 7. there's kind of this you know uh was it um laird hamilton always says you know the big wave surfers uh he always says you know um bright light dark shadow you know and uh i think it's that intensity and when you do that and then suddenly people are starting to like throw some paint on your picture you're like wait hold you know you're going max capacity yeah but i think the company is an interesting one because you've talked about doing this company before i've been afraid i've just not been pulling trigger uh out of fear because i enjoy this life this is this and starting to interrupt but it's ultimately this question of taking a leap is like uh say you're in academia like you're at mit you're i really love doing research at mit i really love that life why take a leap out you know but i did because it's been a dream but now accidentally along the way i found this podcasting thing which is also really fulfilling and you know it's like why take a leap because you have a huge lust for life yeah i mean that's you i mean sometimes when i'm on the internet and i think is this you hear about it like oh it's addicting you know youtube's addicting all that actually sometimes i think maybe that's true but a lot of times i just think there's so much here there's a lot of garbage but there's so many gems out there in the world now it's almost like sure how you allocate time is key but i i think you can do it all yeah maybe not five more things yeah yes but all yes and one thing i just had this idea and this is not grounded in any scientific paper but i think the answer might come to you during this um this torture that you're about yourself through with david because in those mental states you're really asking the question right you're asking the question where is my capacity and am i even close to my capacity and if i am what's what's of the most value i think we find the answers to those things in those non-verbal non-analytic states it just comes to us i hope you're right and i hope it's a profoundly fulfilling experience as opposed to one that leads to my demise but yeah right [Music] it goes it all goes to the to the yeah exactly to the hedgehog uh now it all makes sense andrew uh like we talked about offline on this podcast i do hope we write some stuff together do some research together you're you're you're one of the most inspiring scientists and speaking of communicating to the world uh so i can't wait to see what you do with the podcast i'm already a huge fan i've been telling everybody about it i can't wait to see you talk to joe uh as well soon and i can't wait to see what kind of people we write together thanks so much for talking today thank you that project's gonna be a lot of fun can't wait and thanks again for having me on appreciate you brother thanks for listening to this conversation with andrew huberman and thank you to our sponsors master class online courses four sigmatic mushroom coffee magic spoon low carb cereal and better help online therapy click the sponsor links to get a discount and remember now is the time to sign up to masterclass if that's something you've been on the fence about and now let me leave you with some words from woodrow wilson we should not only use the brains we have but all that we can borrow thank you for listening and hope to see you next time