#83: The Maverick of Brain Optimization

"My lab is interested in pursuing how we can enhance cognition to improve quality of life." - Adam Gazzaley Dr. Adam Gazzaley http://gazzaleylab.ucsf.edu/ (@adamgazz https://twitter.com/adamgazz) obtained an M. D. and a Ph. D. in Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, then postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley. He is now the director of the Gazzaley Lab at UC San Francisco, a cognitive neuroscience laboratory. His recent studies go far beyond mere description — he and his lab are exploring neuroplasticity and how we can optimize cognitive abilities, even in healthy adults. So, what happens when you combine cognitive-focused video games with neurofeedback, magnetic and electrical stimulation, and even performance-enhancing drugs? Well, that's just one of many things we cover in this conversation. As someone with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease on both sides of my family, I find Adam's work to be of incredible importance and promise. I hope this discussion blows your mind, in the best way possible. Enjoy! Show notes, links, and resources can be found at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast https://rss.libsyn.com/shows/52710/destinations/fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This podcast is brought to you by a new sponsor, LegalZoom http://www.legalzoom.com/. Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic - now worth more than a billion dollars) first incorporated his company on LegalZoom http://www.legalzoom.com/. LegalZoom, which I've used myself, can help you with almost anything legal, including setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a non-profit, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom http://www.legalzoom.com/ is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract review, and otherwise help you run your business. Use the code "Tim" at checkout to get $10 off your next order. Take a gander at everything you can get for a fraction of what you'd expect -- LegalZoom.com http://www.legalzoom.com/ This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.. Thanks for listening!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I would assume appropriate timing.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, and there is a fun story behind it. Legalzoom.com. I've used them for a number of businesses. And Matt Mullenweg, you might recall, a guest on this podcast, CEO of Automattic, now valued at more than $1 billion. And he is one of the developers behind WordPress, which powers roughly 23% of the internet. He first incorporated Automattic on Legalzoom.com. Now, Legalzoom can help you do a number of things that I might recommend, like setting up a will, doing a trademark search, a proper trademark search, so you don't put a ton of time and effort into a business and then get shut down, for instance, or have to change your name. More than a million people have already trusted Legalzoom over the last decade

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  to help start and build their businesses. So if you need to, say, form an LLC or a nonprofit, anything like that, if you're doing business solely in your own name, as a friend told me recently, you're kind of flying naked. You're opening yourself up to a lot of liabilities and issues. So check out Legalzoom.com. You got to protect yourself. They have been helping people not only with the docs, because you don't want to pay necessarily someone thousands of dollars to just copy and paste something from one Word doc to the next. So you can not only find things like cease and desist letters and so on, but they have helpful support, so they have people on hand to answer your questions, all based in the US. And obviously, you're looking for legal advice. Well, they're not a law firm,

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  but Legalzoom has built a network of independent attorneys available in most states. So they can give you advice on the best way to get started, plus provide contract review and other services to help run your business. And they're no surprises. Legalzoom provides complete transparency, upfront pricing, and customer reviews, and 100% satisfaction guarantee.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  So take a look, LegalZoom.com. Chances are you will find something that brings up the thought, "Oh, God, I didn't even think of that. I really need to take care of that." So do the boring legal stuff upfront, so you don't risk a lot later. Go to LegalZoom.com, use the code TIM at checkout, T-I-M. Use the code TIM at checkout, and you will get $10 off. That's LegalZoom.com.

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I've used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project, and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite, and you have an original that you love, or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already

• 3:17Tim Ferriss?

  used it and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/Tim. That's 99designs.com/Tim.

• 3:36Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, you sexy minxes. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where my job is to attempt to deconstruct world-class performers. I interview the best of the best, whether they be chess prodigies, hedge fund managers, billionaire startup investors, actors, politicians, special ops operatives, and generals, and everything in between. What I try to do is tease out the routines, the habits, the first 60 minutes of their day, favorite books, all the tools and tricks that you can apply to your own life to emulate and hopefully replicate a lot of their success. And this episode is by popular demand. Many of you have asked for more scientists, especially more unorthodox

• 4:21Tim Ferriss?

  scientists. And you've enjoyed past episodes with Dr. Peter Attia, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, among others. Those were very, very popular. And today, I bring you Adam Gazali. Adam Gazali has been requested by name, and now you have him. So Gazali, the Gaz Monster, the Gaz Man. No one calls him any of those things, but he's a buddy of mine. Dr. Adam Gazali got his MD and PhD in neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Then did his postdoc training in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Now he's the director of the Gazali Lab at UC San Francisco, which is a cognitive neuroscience lab. And I've spent time in the lab with things stuck to my scalp, getting zapped,

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  both as a subject, but also as an experimenter, a very novice data gatherer. And I thank Adam for letting me bumble my way through that. Adam has a very unique research approach. In his lab, they use a powerful combination of tools that are very often used in isolation. But in his lab, they're combined. So that includes FMRI, EEG, and transcranial magnetic and electrical stimulation. Now, the last category, the stimulation, has become a hot subject because you have people playing, say, first-person shooter games where they're taking a 9-volt battery equivalent in charge and applying it to their scalps to improve accuracy. It's trippy stuff. And to start with, his research, using these tools and others, has expanded our understanding of the alterations in the brain

• 5:49Tim Ferriss?

  that lead to age-related cognitive decline. But that's not enough, obviously, for me. Most important, or most interesting to me, his recent work goes far beyond description. He and his lab are exploring neuroplasticity and how we can optimize our cognitive abilities, even if we're healthy, via engagement with custom-designed video games. And of course, then that leads to the question, what happens when you combine these games with neurofeedback, electrical stimulation, or even performance-enhancing drugs? What about using all of them at once? Well, that's just one of the things that we cover in this conversation, which is very wide-ranging, and it gets dense in a few areas. Bear with it. Listen, you will pick up a lot.

• 6:29Tim Ferriss?

  But we also talk about how he came to be as good at what he does as he has. That was a hell of a sentence. And his routines, all the things that he does to bolster a world-class operation and world-class performance. So without further ado, please enjoy Adam Gazali.

• 6:50Tim Ferriss?

  Adam, sir, welcome to the show.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 6:53Tim Ferriss?

  So I am stoked to be in this beautiful office. I've been in the cave all day. You have more sunlight in your office and lab. We're here at UCSF and the name of the lab is?

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Kazali Lab.

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  Of course. Very well named. And I've had my brain shocked here. I have, I suppose, participated in shocking other brains, to use a scientific term. And you have paralets under your desk.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Yes, I do.

• 7:21Tim Ferriss?

  For working out. And I just found your entire career so fascinating. We've spent a lot of time together and I wanted to have you on the show to just explore all the nooks and crannies of this multifaceted life you've designed for yourself. And I thought we could start with, of course, you're very good at hosting parties. So when you're at such a party, your own party or otherwise, if somebody asks you, what do you do? How do you answer that?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  It's not an easy question at a party, but I definitely get asked that one. You know, I usually start by saying I'm a neurologist and a neuroscientist because it sort of lays the framework from my perspective. But if I have to get into a very short answer, then I dive right into the fact that my lab is interested in pursuing how we can enhance cognition to improve quality of life.

• 8:11Tim Ferriss?

  And you have a magazine cover outside of this lab on the wall. And that is Nature. And you have work that is the cover story. What is that work? What is the tagline on the cover?

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Nature was kind enough to put the title "Game Changer" on the cover of the journal, which is quite a favorable pun for our lab, I would say.

• 8:40Tim Ferriss?

  And the, in the game itself, so that is a reference to, I guess it was Neuro Racer?

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:47Tim Ferriss?

  In this case?

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:48Tim Ferriss?

  And the, why was that such a game changer in their mind?

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Well, it's a good question. I, I think that what that paper was able to show that had not really been documented well before, was that a team of scientists could work with video game professionals to build something customized that targets a process in the brain that's deficient in a certain population. In this case, it was older adults and their cognitive control abilities. And then after you build that game, you can go through a careful placebo-controlled study with neural measures to document the mechanisms of the effect and show that you can create sustainable and meaningful changes in the brain using a video game.

• 9:34Tim Ferriss?

  So the, the aspect that I found most fascinating is the sustained part. So if, if we're looking at using very, very simple video games, but video games that can be made quite sexy, to say, reverse or mitigate the cognitive decline associated with the progression of age. What did you see in terms of the persistence of effect? Did they have to do it every day or it just fell off a cliff?

• 10:03Speaker 03

  Well, that was actually one of the most surprising findings of this study. So it took us a year to build a video game. We worked with friends of mine that were professional video game designers and engineers and artists at LucasArts back in 2008. So after a year of development, it took us five years to do this study, which involved looking at lifespan changes from 20 to 80 years old and using the game as a therapeutic to improve cognition. Our study involved one month of gameplay by the, by older adults, healthy to 60 to 80 year olds around the Bay Area. And they'd play it for one hour a day, three days a week for four weeks. And then we looked before and after it, what changed in terms of their cognitive abilities and what changed in their brain.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Around six months or so. Pretty much around six months, I realized, wow, we should at least bring these folks back and see what's going on.

• 10:55Tim Ferriss?

  As a follow up.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  As a follow up. It wasn't really planned or funded in the study. But we saw such profound changes in this group a month later that we just wanted to take a peek. So we took these laptops back from them. Many of them were upset to have lost access to the game, which is pretty funny because they were pretty much all technically non savvy. To say the least, before they started playing and they get really good at the game and and they feel a connection with it. So. They haven't played the game in six months. We bring them back and we just had them play the game again. What we found, shockingly enough, was that their ability to multitask on this game, which is a notoriously challenging activity for older adults. As we've documented in dozens of papers over the years.

• 11:39Tim Ferriss?

  Not to interrupt, when we say older, when does that start to, is it like a thirty plus, you just start to lose incrementally this ability?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Well, you know, traditionally, we tend to, we tended to think of older as sixty five and then it was sixty and then it was fifty. And now from my perspective, older is being more, you know, older than twenty three years old. Because when we look at cognitive abilities, especially like these very fluid control abilities, processing speed, working memory, attention. We find that you pretty much decline from twenty three on. So, but in this particular study, usually when you're just doing a comparison between age groups, you tend to go for twenty year olds compared to sixty year olds. To sort of maximize those effects if you only have limited funding and you can't do the entire lifespan. So we were, we were pretty surprised to see that their ability to multitask in this game and this three D environment had not declined.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Six months later, even though it was very deficient prior to training. Reached levels of twenty year olds after a month of training and then preserved at the twenty year old level for six months. Had we known that, we would have done a lot more detailed study to see what other skills persisted. And in our current studies, we're doing that. We're very focused on the follow up and to see this sustainability. What does it mean? What causes it? It's definitely very exciting.

• 12:57Tim Ferriss?

  Just, it's so amazing to me because I. It brings up all sorts of interesting questions. And I mean, you're the master at formulating these questions. And you're also, I think, a master at not fooling yourself, right? I mean, as a scientist, you have to really question your assumptions and look for alternate explanations for what you think is happening. But I remember, just before we started recording, we were talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger and how anxious I was before interviewing him. But when I asked him about transcendental meditation, what I thought so fascinating is he said that he embraced TM, did it on a daily basis for something like a year, and

• 13:39Tim Ferriss?

  then felt, even years later, that the effects had persisted. And if that is the case, there are many different ways you could explain it, but if you're, let's say, trying to tie it together with NeuroRacer and other tools, what are the possible, the theories or the plausible explanations? Is it some type of plasticity change? Is it, is there a biochemical element? What are the possible explanations for that or mechanisms?

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say that there's two main mechanisms for sustainability effects such as, you know, we found in our study and other people have observed in their lives. And one is what you just described, plasticity. So our brains are plastic, meaning that they modify at every single level, from structure to chemistry to physiology, all in response to interactions with the environment, right? It's the very basis of all learning. And plastic changes, when they occur in a deep way and involve all those multiple levels of change, can last for quite a long time. So it's possible that the changes were deep enough that the system just reached a new sort of homeostasis, right? In addition to our brain being plastic, it also has a great deal of stability as well,

• 14:52Speaker 03

  right? It just doesn't change very easily. That would be very dangerous and detrimental. So it's possible that it's been moved into a new, more optimal state, and then that state preserved just because the plastic changes were so profound. Another possibility, which is interesting, and no, I don't think any less interesting, but a different one, is that...

• 15:14Speaker 03

  You engage in training that's very different, that then moves your brain into a different state and a different set of abilities that you didn't have before. It's possible that because of that, you have now modified your behavior and how you interact with the environment. And that new manner of interaction is what leads to the sustainability.

• 15:35Tim Ferriss?

  So what would be an example?

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Here's a sort of lowball example, right? Not so complicated, but let's say you go to the gym for a couple of months and you get some benefit, right? Now, no one really thinks that if you stop working out for a year, that benefit will maintain, right? We got a good, pretty good idea that you do need to keep sustained physical activity to see a benefit. So you stop going to the gym because you moved and the gym's no longer accessible for whatever reason, you let your membership run out. But then, because you're feeling more empowered by being in shape, you start taking the stairs and not the elevator. And so there is an example, sort of obvious one, of a change that you made in your life, a behavioral change in response to the training, right? It was caused by the training.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  But that change in your life then leads to the sustainability of those effects, not because of the direct effects, but because you continue to exercise them in a different way than you were trained.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  Which is very common, right? I mean, for instance, if you're looking at behavioral change and you want to get someone to change their diet, but if you're disallowed from saying, "Change your diet," get them to start exercising. And they'll start being more conscious of health-related decisions across the entire spectrum of their activities.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  It's what we always hope happens, right? Because that really has profound effects and reverberates. You get this cascade of beneficial effects that feed on each other. So it was caused by the training program, but the sustainability of it is caused by the behavioral influences that that training program have that then allows you to maintain.

• 17:11Tim Ferriss?

  And the Nature magazine, I suppose it would be better called a journal?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a journal.

• 17:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, with a very nice glossy cover on it.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, there's like two top science journals, general science journals in the world, Nature and Science, and Nature being one of them, and not publishing a ton of paper on video games.

• 17:32Tim Ferriss?

  So Nature, as I understand it, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is having the cover of Nature is kind of like in the business world. Walking into the airport on the way to your gate and your face is on the cover of every business magazine because there are dozens and dozens of business magazines. But like you said, they're kind of two big players in this space. How did that feel when it was 100% and you were no longer worried about bad juju and jinxing yourself when that day came when you knew it was 100% you were going to have the cover of that magazine?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  I mean, it was definitely ecstasy, you know, I mean, I've

• 18:09Tim Ferriss?

  Where were you? When did it, when did it really, when you were like, okay, now it's 100%?

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was, you know, not in a very glamorous location, sitting in front of my computer, checking email, of course, is the way I found out. It's not like someone drops in on a parachute with the

• 18:23Tim Ferriss?

  Gives you a golden ticket?

• 18:24Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's not, not quite dramatic. But, you know, I mean, it was, it was incredible because you spend, you know, your whole life, I did an MD and a PhD and I was in school for 18 years after, you know, after high school and just a long pathway and then build a research program, create a lab, do a very risky study that most people thought was crazy, building a video game to rewire brains of older adults and go through all those stages and then just the act of getting published is just incredibly grueling. And then obviously go all the way to being accepted into nature and then the cover. It's just, it's just a very drawn out, painful process. So when it ends, like you said, in one moment where it's there, it's, it's absolutely thrilling.

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  And the risk that you mentioned, I think is an interesting topic to explore with you because you've crafted a very, from my perspective as an outsider, but also from the perspective of PhDs who have worked with you, Daria, for instance, a very unorthodox setup here for yourself. What gave you the confidence to build the game and tackle that despite the perception by many people that it was a very risky thing to do? Like, what was the internal self-talk? What allowed you to do it?

• 19:44Speaker 03

  I mean, mostly, it made sense to me. To me, it was a logical approach. We've been building up confidence in the video game, genre in general, as being able to transform or to have an influence on behavior. Our research had pointed to it in many directions that this was possible. And to me, it just seemed that it was time that we challenged the system, not step in the footsteps of everyone that went before us. Much of the field looks at molecular approaches pharmaceuticals. And I was incredibly excited, as everyone is, about all the innovation in the tech world. And to be able to bridge that with

• 20:27Speaker 03

  neuroscience for health outcomes just seemed incredibly exciting. And I've never really been too afraid of doing things like that, of stepping out when it seems risky.

• 20:37Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that? Do you define risk differently from other scientists? Or is it from experiences you've had that other scientists haven't? Because it is a very, when looked at sort of amorphously, it's a risk averse community, it would seem, in a lot of senses.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  I think that we were sort of trained to travel through our scientific careers in a very iterative process. You know, you build on the discoveries that came immediately before you and you advance them. And that's not really how I want to do science. I want to do fundamental breakthroughs, if possible. And so, if you have that mindset, if that's how you challenge yourself, that that's what you want to do with your life, with your, like, you know, small amount of time that you have here to make a difference, then the only way to do it is to do the type of research that other people would think of as risky or even foolhardy, you know? I mean, that's just part of the game.

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  Which person, historical figure in science or elsewhere, do you most admire?

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Well, I could tell you who I was most inspired by. When I was a kid, I didn't grow up with science or medicine in my life. I grew up in Queens. My parents didn't go to college, no one in my family did, and they were very academic, supportive of me as a kid, but I just didn't have that influence. And I was watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. And, you know, and I know it's a pretty common one because I've heard other people, but it was a really powerful, just friendly way of being introduced to complexities and wonders that were, was gripping to me as a kid. And I watched it with my dad. It was a great bonding for us. And, you know, the way he delivered it was just captivating and it

• 22:32Speaker 03

  was really, would sort of seal the deal for me that I wanted to be a scientist.

• 22:36Tim Ferriss?

  When you decided you wanted to be a scientist, was it just a scientist? Or was there an area that you thought you wanted to explore?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Well, I decided somehow that I wanted to be a scientist at age seven, before I actually knew what that meant. But I think I was largely very stubborn. And so if someone asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I'd say, a scientist. And I kept saying that my entire life, and maybe that's why I'm a scientist now. At some point, it's probably around when I was exposed to Cosmos, I thought I wanted to be astronomer. Something in, you know, that space, whether it was more on the physics side or, you know, astronaut side, I didn't really know. But I was really captivated with the cosmos. And it was missing something for me that I didn't know until I discovered the brain and neuroscience research, which was when I was an undergraduate, so not really all that young.

• 23:30Tim Ferriss?

  Where did you do your undergraduate?

• 23:32Speaker 03

  I was in upstate New York at Binghamton University. And I, I was at one of the, I was a biochemistry major, taking one of the very few non-science classes that I was required to take. You know, I feel like if I could go back, I'd take all humanities classes. But at that time, I had a pretty heavy science schedule. This was called, this class was called History of the Future. And they were talking about-

• 23:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's an amazing title.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  It's an amazing title. And it was an amazing class because- That really tried to capture lessons from our past that guide how we view the future. And one of the other elements of the class was to see movies like Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes. And, you know, it's just amazing, like sort of, uh, it was, and these were obviously very popular class. And one of the lessons was on the future of the brain and nanotechnology in the brain. And I had not really thought about the brain. And when I went, I literally immediately went to the, to the library the next day and took out like 40 bucks, just, you know, 20 at a time, just carrying them back to my room. And I felt like that same

• 24:36Speaker 03

  just immense excitement when I first discovered cosmos and astronomy, but in a much more profound way, because it was more connected with people and humanity. And that's what I always felt missing. The space was looking out and this was looking in. And so at that moment, I knew that I was going to spend the rest of my life on, you know, now it's 30 years later.

• 24:57Tim Ferriss?

  What did that, what is that excitement feel like? Because it's very different from the excitement that you would feel if you just drink too much coffee, for instance, right? I would imagine. For you, what does that feel like when you're like, oh, oh, I think I'm about like, this is the precipice or the plat, you know, the, the springboard?

• 25:16Speaker 03

  I mean, I think it's what people feel when they describe having an epiphany, you know? I mean, it's, it's a transformational feeling. It's the type of sensation that you know, you will never be the same. Like something has fundamentally shifted in you that will last probably the rest of your life, which turned out to be true.

• 25:33Tim Ferriss?

  Turned out to be true.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:35Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, what makes, what makes this lab unique or unusual?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Well, we are unusual in several respects. The first is that we do some very basic science in this lab. So we try to understand how neural networks in the brain underlie higher order cognitive abilities, attention, memory, perception. We try to understand how those abilities of our brain are vulnerable, for example, to distraction and multitasking. We look at how the brain changes as we get older in that regard. So I classify all that as sort of basic science. We're trying to understand how the brain works.

• 26:13Tim Ferriss?

  You're using a lot of imaging.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  And we use functional MRI, EEG, transcranial stimulation, tools of human neuroscience, right? Human cognitive neuroscience. In that sense, we're similar to many cognitive neuroscience labs. But we do something different, and now it occupies more than half of our lab's efforts. And that's, we also have a research program to say, how can we use our expertise, our methodology, our perspectives, to not just understand the brain, but to try to develop novel approaches to enhancing it, and then validating that our approaches are actually effective. So to be able to sweep across the breadth of discovery, to invention,

• 26:53Speaker 03

  to validation, and then even filing patents and moving concepts out of the lab into industry to really connect at that sort of scope, I don't really know any other labs that do that. So I think that's a really unique aspect.

• 27:07Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's, it's, it's very ballsy, too, in so much as, and again, this is just from someone who's spent a lot of time around scientists, but who has never practiced as a, a real, serious academic in any way in, in the hard sciences, is that you're not only describing, you're not only describing these basic scientific phenomena and answering these science questions, but you're also bleeding into the prescriptive, right? Where you're looking at recipes and technologies that can be used to improve function, potentially

• 27:44Tim Ferriss?

  even in so-called like normie, normal, healthy adults, right? And that's, I think, you know, one of the many reasons we get along so well. But what are, what are some of the concepts or the insights that have made the jump out of this lab into the private sector?

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was, you know, just to reflect on that a moment, you know, sort of when that happened, it was around 2008. So I've been doing this for a long time already. I already had my own lab, already made some really important discoveries on the brain and the aging brain and distraction and multitasking. That's what I was largely known for in my research. And then I basically became a little dissatisfied at just reporting the bad news, that our brains were fragile in ways that we didn't fully understand, that it all got worse as we got older. I mean, that's like a great intellectually fascinating story for a bunch of scientists. For the general public, it's sort of a crappy story. It's not the happy ending we're hoping for.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  No, I joke around, you know, the first time I gave a big talk to an audience of older adults about our discoveries on the aging brain, and I closed the talk, I feel, you know, I was staring at all these faces, and they had the look on their face like, wow, I'm watching a movie, everyone died, and the credits rolled. And I was like, you know, this is not how I want to end the movie. You know, we could have gone on for another 40 years, as most labs do, and try to understand all of the details and complexity of why these things happen, why our ability to focus and our attention declines with age. And we're going to continue to do a lot of that. But to be able to actually create things

• 29:32Speaker 03

  that can help these people, that's what is something I always wanted to do. And I wouldn't say I lost track of it, it just took a long time for us to get to that point that we could do it in a responsible way. So, over the years since we've had that transition, and it really started with NeuroRacer, now it's become much more extensive and expansive in our approach, the things that have left the lab are really largely built around our design principles on how we construct games from scratch, working with professionals, because I give a lot of respect to... Video game professionals and artists and designers, but we work very closely with them

• 30:15Speaker 03

  and create the algorithms and how multiple algorithms interact with each other to challenge the brain in an adaptive and high feedback way that actually leads to change. And so that's what most of my patents surround, that concept that you can build that methodology to advance how our brain functions.

• 30:37Tim Ferriss?

  And the algorithms, this is where I massacre concepts that are sacred to a lot of people, but so is it safe to think of the algorithm as, in this case, I guess, probably sort of an adaptive algorithm, which is a series of kind of if-then statements that are put, that are formulated in a proprietary way and ordered in a proprietary sequence?

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's appropriate. I mean, we tend to think of them, rather than if-then, as a full closed loop. So, you know, that's how we sort of visualize what we're doing. We're creating a closed loop between an intervention. So you intervene in some way, you record the impact with as low latencies as possible, right? So as short a time as possible, you see what happens.

• 31:23Tim Ferriss?

  As little delay as possible.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Little delay. With that information, we then cycle back, reformulate the intervention, apply again. And if you do that with as little delay as possible, you create this very powerful closed-loop feedback system.

• 31:38Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  And that is the most powerful way to change anything, whether it's a physical system with, you know, a diamond drill and, you know, you're trying to, you know, pummel into the earth, or you're trying to change a biological system like the brain. Our current approach to therapeutics and improving the brain, largely in the pharmaceutical world, using molecules, is a very open-loop system. Very long time delays between the intervention, knowing what's happening, even the ability to know what happened is usually not quantitative at all, and then a very poor feedback system that leads to updating it, right? I mean, just imagine, you go to the doctor, you have an attention problem or depression, you take a medicine, you go home, you subjectively record the effects and side effects, you go back a month later, you recount them, and then, oh, we're going to go up on the dose a little bit.

• 32:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  And, you know, that is just not a way to change something, especially something as complex as the human brain.

• 32:29Tim Ferriss?

  Playing darts with a blindfold on.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's like the basis of like our entire mental health care system.

• 32:33Tim Ferriss?

  You don't even hit the dartboard for a month.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  You know, and some people respond well, and maybe they got lucky, and other people are just struggling. And this is, you know, a broad, big, big, global problem. We don't have effective means of improving how the brain functions across people that are suffering, that have disorders, and people that are healthy and just trying to improve their brains.

• 32:53Tim Ferriss?

  When you think of the word "successful," who's the first person, or who are the first people who come to mind?

• 32:59Speaker 03

  That's a really good question. I mean, I think I've spent too much time thinking about people that are not successful to answer that question immediately.

• 33:20Tim Ferriss?

  Why have you spent so much time thinking about people who are not successful?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Well, maybe not people that are not successful, but approaches that are not successful. Because I'm trying to find the holes in the system, the way of changing it in a meaningful way. And to do that, I'm looking for where we're missing the boat.

• 33:38Tim Ferriss?

  And by "system," you mean just this kind of scientific establishment?

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, changing the scientific establishment, but changing more of what we think about as medicine, especially when it comes to the brain. And I'd say education when it comes to the brain. So, you know, it's probably, I don't know, maybe it's a fault, maybe not, but I really don't spend a lot of time looking at success cases. I really spend most of my time looking at where we're not reaching the high bar that we should be, both in education and in medicine.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  How do you vet people who want to be in your lab?

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Most people that want to meet in my lab are pretty aggressive at trying to get into the lab. Usually, that's a good sign.

• 34:21Tim Ferriss?

  And how many people, just for those...

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, with, I mean, we have a probably, you know, core group of full-time, you know, FTEs on the payroll of a little over 20, but our extended team of interns and volunteers and, you know, is close to 100 people. So, it's quite large. A lot of people come in the lab and spend time volunteering or interning. Just to get to know what we do and for us to get to know them. I'm looking for people that are very rigorous, very careful. I like people that are, how I describe it, sort of, you know, optimistically cautious. They're conservative in that they're not overinflated in what they say, but they're excited and they're enthusiastic and they think, you know,

• 35:07Speaker 03

  that there's something really here that gets, that drives them to be here.

• 35:12Tim Ferriss?

  How do you establish that? So, the rigorous side, I mean, is it, is it just all on their resume, their CV? Or are there sort of behaviors you look for, questions you ask in interviews?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  No, I don't really have like a really tight methodology on how I do that. You know, a lot of it is that connection you get with someone when they're talking about what they do, what excites them. I mean, that's usually where I start, you know? What do you think about that really gets you excited? Because I'm more interested in what drives someone and motivates them and makes them want to get out of bed in the morning than, than a list of, you know, classic resume check, checkboxes. And once I hear that and, and look at them and hear them and, you know, obviously in the context that they have been successful in many ways and, and have, have the type of requirements that we'd want in this lab.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  But once I, once we have that back and forth, then I know that that's, you know, the person that that's perfect for this place.

• 36:14Tim Ferriss?

  What are common misconceptions about the brain or cognitive function that just refuse to die? Like, I'd love for you to comment on the, you know, we, as we all know, we only use 10% of our brains.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say that one.

• 36:28Tim Ferriss?

  So, could you just dive into that for a second?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I have been unable to find where that originated from. The most, the best I could find is that it seems that when the early researchers were exploring brain function in different areas, they would, in animal models, they'd make little ablations. They would destroy little areas of the brain and look what was happening. And there were large areas of the brain that you can do that to that you wouldn't see an impact. You wouldn't see a negative impact. You do that over the motor cortex, over the sensory cortex, over the visual cortex, bam, you can't, you can't see, you can't move, you can't feel. We know that this does that. But there's lots of areas of the brain whose function is a little

• 37:13Speaker 03

  bit more mysterious, and you have to see it a higher order way than you can under anesthesia or even in animals. And so it started leading to the impression that there were some areas that just didn't seem to be doing anything. We now appreciate that that's not true at all. The most complex structure in the entire universe doesn't have just like a vacant parking lot, you know, waiting, waiting for someone to drive in and start building. It's, it's all used all the time, and in complex ways that we didn't always understand. I mean, for, for a long time, we tended to think about brain areas as sort of like islands of blobs of function. We now know that real higher order brain processing and function comes more from network interaction, how brain areas are communicating with each other. And so one

• 37:58Speaker 03

  brain area might do something very different depending on the context of what other brain areas that it's communicating with are doing at the same time. So it's a very complex, we call multivariate system, that's dynamic and constantly changing over time. And I think this complexity that we've only really recently begun to understand to any degree led to sort of very sort of naive views of the brain, that we didn't use at all.

• 38:22Tim Ferriss?

  What are some, and the idea that there are very specific, discrete areas of the brain that are kind of like separate people on an assembly line who only do one thing is still very persistent. And I mean, it's very-

• 38:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd say it's another sort of myth of the brain.

• 38:36Tim Ferriss?

  What, what are some red flags that people can keep in mind to avoid the charlatans of, who claim to be scientists of the brain? Because there are a lot of people running around, kind of jumping up and waving their arms and so on.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a frustrating thing for scientists, and neuroscientists. And to, you know, to speak to, you know, specifically what I mean by that, the, the brain and science in general could be a very powerful marketing tool. It, you know, it's have millennia of successes and technology which is right in our face all the time, really grew out of scientific exploration. And so we're constantly reminded at what a powerful tool science is. But the-

• 39:26Speaker 03

  The challenge and the way you can think of challenging someone that you think might not be using science in a legitimate way is that science is not really about what we have done. Science is a methodology, science is an approach. And so basing something on science doesn't really make that much sense to me. I mean, almost everything is based in some way on science. If it's not based on science at all, we shouldn't almost even be talking about it, you know, or it really falls into another realm.

• 39:58Tim Ferriss?

  Because you're talking about rational inquiry and the sort of structured way of thinking about evidence or lack thereof.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know, we have this really, really massive framework that we've built to understand the world that gives us so much leeway into how we consider things that basing something on science is super low bar. It doesn't mean that much. Like, in the next hour, we could sit here with a glass of wine and put, you know, a thousand things based on science on the board.

• 40:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  What's more important, and what's sort of being used in an imprecise way, is the concept of being validated by science. And what that means, and how hard that is to do, and the details and the complexity of getting there in a rigorous way that's peer-reviewed and defensible and reproducible, that's a different story. And so the basing on science is not so exciting to me. The being validated by scientific methodology, that's what we're all trying for. And I think that people should keep that in mind when they're reading something about science. What, is it really just being used as a marketing, you know, weapon or tool?

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Or is there really a careful description of the research approach that went into it? And of course, those limitations that exist that are inevitable. Everything has those.

• 41:15Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that's a huge one for me, is if someone is painting their data or their approach to be the best, the perfect, and they're not very upfront about the limitations or the potential flaws in the data, that to me just reeks of pseudoscientists.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, you know... It's impossible to do something that doesn't have a long list of limitations. And I could easily go through them with my work, and I do all the time. Some of the complexities are driven by the media. I mean, I spend a lot of time with the media trying to hone my message and make a balanced message. And if you look and you'll see I have articles in, you know, New York Times, New York Magazine, I'm quoted. And you'll see, you know, these little disclaimers and these balance points that I work very diligently with those journalists to say, hey, could you put this in for me as, you know, a sort of thank you for me taking the time to do this interview with you because without this, it's just not fully balanced.

• 42:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  But if you don't do that, you know, very frequently you wind up with something that's really only capturing the highlights, and it's not that the highlights are wrong, they're just not the complete story. They're incomplete. You know, for example, in our research and even our nature paper, we're massively excited by the elements we found, but it is a step one, you know, in my mind, it is a proof of concept. It's the, it's the reason we get excited that we have a signal there that something's going on that leads to larger studies to reproduce it and to show even more aspects of its sustainability. And also, we never even looked at how those changes in the brain and cognition translate into people's lives. We would have needed much larger numbers.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  And it's very hard to even tell that in any study because we don't have great quantitative markers of how someone's life is being impacted by something that we're doing. So those are just obvious limitations to me that I like to also express in addition to the things that we're excited about.

• 43:19Tim Ferriss?

  Is it possible that, or what is the likelihood? Do you think that some video games that are already out there, pre-existing video games, have some of the cognitive enhancement effects or maintenance effects that those device in the lab do?

• 43:38Speaker 03

  I think it's beyond likely. I think there's no doubt that that is true. As a matter of fact, we were inspired into the video game. Research in a, in a pretty profound way by the work of colleagues of ours, Daphne Bevelay and Sean Green, who showed in, and also in a nature paper, there's only, only several nature papers on video games, but another one in 2002 showing that consumer video games, first-person shooter games, the games that some people have the most trouble with because of the violent nature of them, that young people that played them would show much superior cognitive abilities compared to the peers that don't play these games. And if you take someone naive that doesn't play video games and you haven't played, you also see these

• 44:21Speaker 03

  effects, especially compared to other games like Tetris. And so, I would say undoubtedly in my mind, there are ingredients of the, um, active ingredients in consumer video games that could lead to brain changes in a meaningful and sustainable way, that they're there. But because these games are built for entertainment purposes, I don't think they're going to go there as far as they can if they were designed with an understanding of the brain and cognition in mind and the population you're trying to impact. Right. But on the flip side of that, you also don't want to build something that's not fun and entertaining. And that's what makes this field so challenging, to build from

• 45:04Speaker 03

  scratch and reach something that has the engagement, immersion, and enjoyment that a video game does, because people have a pretty high bar for what they, what they expect out of a video game now, especially young people. They're like, "That's not fun. I'm not going to engage in that." So, to get there and then to also have all of the mechanics and the video game engine itself target these brain processes, to do both of those, that's the ultimate challenge. And I think that's why we don't have a ton of examples of this being done at a really high level, because it is so challenging and requires, it's expensive and it requires people working together that have, that traditionally have not. Right. And so it requires an openness and a communication between professionals, both

• 45:48Speaker 03

  of whom feel that, and, and are experts, you know, video game professionals and artists and engineers and designers talking with scientists, both very strong-willed people, high-level performers, both feel that they know how to do their job. And you're like, "No, you're actually not doing your job. You're doing a new job that never existed. You're creating something together that's a hybrid." That's, that's the challenge.

• 46:12Tim Ferriss?

  One of my, the mention of first-person shooters reminds me of one of my more embarrassing outings in any activity ever was, I think it was my first game ever, and I could get this wrong, pretty sure it was Halo. It was my first game ever, and I sat down to play this guy who I literally felt like I couldn't be onscreen for more than a second without dying. Ended up being this guy named Fatality with I's as the ones, who I think is a world champion.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  I think if your name is Fatality, you don't want to play video games against them.

• 46:44Tim Ferriss?

  But his, the hand-eye coordination and just his ability, almost like presciently to know exactly where I would be in this sort of three-dimensional, artificial space, this virtual space, was mind-blowing. I mean, I could not believe how fast this guy was. The, I'll switch gears for a second, because I want to talk about some of the other aspects of your life as well, but what books, they don't have to be science-related, what book have you gifted most often to other people?

• 47:19Speaker 03

  I'm a, I'm a big fan of science fiction books. Most of my reading is on the future. I'm really mostly satisfied when reading books that's describing future possibilities and realities. You know, I read a tremendous amount for my work, and so I read articles all the time. And when I'm not reading that, I find it most gratifying to just push my creativity, and not read about things that other scientists are doing, but read about potential futures. So, you know, starting with Asimov when I was a kid, Foundation series, you know, life-changing for me as a kid, and still have read it multiple times throughout my life. So, that's probably...

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Sure, that's probably the biggest share that I've done is introducing people to Asimov and the Foundation series. But I continue, you know, I'm reading right now, books by, author Peter Hamilton and others that, The Reality Dysfunction is a book that I tell people to read all the time.

• 48:26Tim Ferriss?

  What was the title?

• 48:27Speaker 03

  It's called Reality Dysfunction. It's a series called The Night's Dawn Trilogy, takes place in the distant future, great technology, great human interactions, and it just stimulates my creativity to read really talented authors that are describing future possibilities.

• 48:44Tim Ferriss?

  What, now, I want to drill into that because I love science fiction, love fantasy too, I'm kind of a fantasy nerd from way too much Dungeons and Dragons. I think also from too much Dungeons and Dragons, I tend to get obsessed with world builders, so like Frank Herbert and Dune blew me away. Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein also. What aspect of reading science fiction, what type of, what aspect of the science fiction helps you to push your creativity?

• 49:15Speaker 03

  I'm also a fan of world or even, you know, beyond that, like sort of the space opera genre where you just have so many characters and ideas interacting over thousands of pages. Those are my favorite things to read, and you know, there's a lot of that out there. It's a definite, you know, category within science fiction and fantasy. I, I mean, no doubt I'm inspired by futuristic technology, you know, people that are, that have some background, that are smart enough to come up with things that are far beyond our capabilities, but reasonable, really excite me. So, I would say that that's the, the part that drives, you know, my creativity is, is thinking about the technology and saying, wow, we don't have that, what would it take

• 50:00Speaker 03

  to have that? You know, and sometimes you just can't get there, but it sits in my mind, and even now in the lab, when we're, I'm seeing all these things coming together, and sometimes I'm talking about it with someone, I'm like, it sort of sounds like I'm describing a science fiction book, but it's what I do every day, so I guess those worlds are starting to meet.

• 50:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, so we, we watched some, some, we watched a movie recently, I guess it's Ex Machina is how you say it, perhaps say it, of the machine, or from the machine, I guess technically. Uh, which seemed imminently feasible in a lot of ways, uh, which made it fun. Uh, you have a project that's going to be getting underway soon that I'd love to hear you talk more about. I'm not sure if this is the official name, but the nickname at least, Neuroman.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  It doesn't really have an official name. That's the name that we call it around the web.

• 50:52Tim Ferriss?

  I like it. That's.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  The Neuroman Project.

• 50:54Tim Ferriss?

  So then, uh, tell me about the Neuroman Project because, uh, you work out.

• 51:02Tim Ferriss?

  It every day or is it?

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Five days.

• 51:04Tim Ferriss?

  Five days a week.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:05Tim Ferriss?

  Very fit guy. Uh, you've got the silver fox thing going, which I'm really envious of because I do not, uh, have that. I have sort of the, the true detective, uh, Woody Harrelson thing going, uh, and, uh, moving into hopefully Jason's Statham territory, but I digress. Where the hell was I going with that? Oh, you're very fit. You're very sharp cognitively. Uh, and yet, or, uh, or I should say most interesting to me is this, this, uh, this experiment or series of experiments you're going to be jumping into. So tell, tell us and tell me more about this.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Okay. So this is a recent, recent development in my life is this Neuroman Project that we're calling it sort of a fun title and a fun idea. You know, as a scientist, we have a very prescribed regimented methodology that we go about doing an experiment. You know, very carefully placebo controlled, blinded experiments, um, very rigorous analysis, very careful, uh, comparisons against, you know, uh, other groups. And that's what we do and what we'll always do. That's how science works. That's how we're going to figure out if many of the, uh, approaches that we're taking in this lab actually work, the valid, the approach of validation. And while we're doing that, what I'm seeing happen is we're developing all these new games that are really exciting.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  We, uh, three of them, we've been working on for two years now. And it's going to take us a long time to figure out if these work and to really understand the mechanisms and the individual differences, why some people respond, why some don't. But what's going to take us even longer. Is to figure out how these games interact with each other.

• 52:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Because I don't think the win, there's not a holy grail out there. There's not one thing that's going to fix us or elevate us to our satisfaction. What's most exciting to me is what we call a multimodal approach. How do all of these games interact to elevate you? How do they, what are the other synergistic effects? How do they add on each other? Maybe pharmaceuticals can be dropped to a way lower dose and be act to enhance it. Brain stimulation, neurofeedback. We do all of these things in the lab and it's going to take us decades to look at how these all interact. But given that, we don't think certainly the video game play is likely to be very dangerous.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  I have decided to do a very unorthodox study on myself, more of a project to sort of what I say to the lab is put my time where my mouth is and say, I'm going to treat myself like a research participant, even though it's not a formal study. There's no control group, more of a case study, which exists in our field in many ways. And play three of our games, Metatrain, Body Brain Trainer and Rhythmicity. I can tell you what those games are. Play them all concurrently, which we don't do. We usually study one at a time. We're only studying one at a time and these are in study right now. Play them all at the same time, over the same period of time for two months.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  And see what I can do to my own brain, my own cognition, other aspects of my physiology. And so that's one goal is to see, you know, if I look across a med, you know, so we'll be doing everything in pre and post testing on me that we normally do in a study. So MRI, structural and functional EEG during cognitive testing, stress measurements, blood work, inflammatory markers, epigenetics, sleep recording, all of that.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Over a two-month period before and after many things during to see how engaging in these change these levels. And we have dozens and dozens of 20-year-olds in the lab that come into the lab as participants, as data to act as a sort of baseline. So my question is, well, how do I compare on these metrics to a 20-year-old? I'm 46 right now. And with this type of training approach, what can I do to move these metrics closer? How close can I get? Or can I exceed them? So that's one challenge.

• 55:05Tim Ferriss?

  Turn to the womb, maybe like age three.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that would be a downswick. Seriously, it's actually a really good point because there is that turning point, you know, the sort of peak where you develop, you develop, you develop, and then you don't really plateau for very long, we're saying, we think, and a lot of data suggests that. And, you know, and that peak is probably for these type of abilities, maybe around 23 years old. So that would be some of the highest levels we see. So the project gives me the ability to just have fun and see what I can do with my own abilities, using approaches that I designed that are lab-developed. But, you know, there's other benefits. It gives me like a very humbling experience of being a participant in my own lab and learn it from that perspective, like where it's a

• 55:48Speaker 03

  burden, where it's not. I get to see my games that I've designed from the inside out, like how they really function. I think that I can improve all these games by the experience and even improve my skills as a game designer through this. And so I think there's a lot of real benefits. It's definitely nothing that I've ever heard a colleague doing. I mean, you know, the reality is some people work on things that would just be plain and appropriate or dangerous experimental drugs, but, you know, where we just don't know the side effects and it certainly would be unwise. But, you know, I think in this case, because of the type of interventions we're working on, I really have a sort of a little opening to do something pretty fun.

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  No, I'm very excited about this. I wanted people to hear about it on the podcast because obviously we'll want to follow up. But the N of One Guinea Pig, sort of Adam 2.0 project is, not surprisingly, very fascinating to me. What, could you go through the three games and explain each of them?

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Sure, so the three games, Metatrain, Rhythmicity and Body Brain Trainer. So Metatrain is an iPad-based game. We've been working on all of these for years. This started as an NIH-funded study. And what the original design was, I took-

• 57:07Tim Ferriss?

  National Institute of Health.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  National Institute of Health, correct. Where, you know, a lot of the more traditional scientific funding comes in. And it's been challenging to get video game therapeutic research funded, but it's slowly happening. And so what Metatrain is, I was inspired by mindfulness practice and some of the data showing that these, you know, contemplative practices that have been around thousands of years have impact on our minds and attention, beyond stress relief, but even cognitive impacts. And so what I've done in Metatrain is take design principles from concentrated meditation and integrated them with our video game mechanics of adaptivity and feedback and put it in an iPad. And then we've built this out several times with a big team here.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Zinga philanthropically donated time and engineering support and money to help us actually build this out, which is really fun to work with professionals that are trying to do some good in addition to, you know, their standard bottom line. So that's what Metatrain is. So Metatrain teaches you how to better self-regulate internal distraction. At least that's what its goal is. And the hypothesis of Metatrain is that if you learn how to do that through the game algorithms, that we'll see a benefit, that you can hold your attention to your breath for longer periods of time without being distracted. But the biggest win is that we'll see benefits on other aspects of cognitive control, like

• 58:34Speaker 03

  working memory and other externally focused attention, and that we'll see changes in the brain and be able to understand the mechanisms of that. That's Metatrain.

• 58:43Tim Ferriss?

  So one, a couple of real quick interruptive follow-ups on that. The first is, are you measuring things like cortisol, C-reactive protein and so on primarily as related to Metatrain?

• 58:53Speaker 03

  We're doing that for all of our studies.

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know-

• 58:57Tim Ferriss?

  But in your particular case, do you think the highest, do you hypothesize the highest correlation in those biomarkers will come from Metatrain?

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Not necessarily.

• 59:06Tim Ferriss?

  One answer.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  I think that all of them have the potential for stress management in addition to cognitive improvement. Interestingly enough.

• 59:16Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  And so, I don't know. And that's an example of why this is not a great controlled study because I won't be able to see the differential contributions of the different games. But that's okay because we have many studies that are doing that. We have studies where all of these are done independently and we'll see which has the most impact on that type of blood-based, sort of, stress-related outcomes. So we'll see that. So that's Metatrain.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  BBT, we call it BBT in the lab, Body-Brain Trainer. We built that one entirely in-house with our own game design team and game development team. It is a motion capture game that's played using the Kinect 2, part of the Microsoft Xbox One gaming platform, which is a pretty unique use of that platform. And what BBT does is that it challenges you both cognitively and physically at the same time in one integrated game experience. So it's the first thing that we know that's really designed from scratch to do this with adaptive algorithms, both in the cognitive domain and physical domain. So let me explain what I mean by that.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  All of our games are adaptive cognitively, meaning that as you improve, the game detects that on a second-by-second basis and then scales the challenge appropriately to your ability.

• 1:00:34Tim Ferriss?

  Makes it harder.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  It's like a

• 1:00:35Tim Ferriss?

  The harder you get, the harder it gets.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  It's like a personal trainer there, every single second, picking it up, picking up your abilities in a very quantitative way and inching you forward. And if you're overwhelmed, then it'll back off. But it'll hold you at a high level of challenge where it's not so hard that you're frustrated, not too easy where you're bored. That's like a big part of our game engine. So cognitive adaptive engines are part of BBT as it is Metatrain. But BBT also has physical adaptive engines. So by that, what I mean is that before you play BBT, you get a VO2 max, which determines, it's a way of determining at what Heart rate, you should be challenged to be right at that sort of anaerobic zone where we're looking for for this type of benefits.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  What we then do is have you have our participants, including me, when I start playing this soon. We're a heart rate monitor and we feed your heart rate into the game algorithm. So what happens is if you're under our goal, the game will push you to have larger amplitude movements, faster movements. Once you hit your heart rate goal and exceed it, it could titrate it back. So just like we do on the cognitive side, from a physical cardiac side, aerobic training side, we can also hold you right at that perfect level.

• 1:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  And how are those instructions delivered? Is there like a big mime on a screen that you have to mimic or what is that?

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Well, you're seeing your hands move, but that's really it. You're basically just being challenged with cognitive demands across a 3D beautiful game environment. Pushing your working memory, your selective attention, your ability to switch between tasks. But you're not thinking about this from the cognitive or the physical perspective. You're just seeing these challenges in this sort of Mayan inspired world that you're trying to return treasures to. And you're just grabbing for objects and making decisions and playing a game.

• 1:02:26Tim Ferriss?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  And that's, that's, that's the, that's the goal is to make it just a fun game that you work through over a two month period of time. So Metatrain in its current formulation is played three days a week for an hour each session for two months. So that's what I'll be doing. So that's, that's body brain training, sorry. Metatrain is played for 30 minutes a day, five days a week.

• 1:02:50Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  At home. So Metatrain is a home game. BBT, we play in the Neuroscape lab, this new lab we have that we created just to be able to do experiments like this. We hope that this also goes home, but the technology is so new. We actually just today, interestingly enough, set a BBT in my loft. So I give attention play. Actually, I think my girlfriend, Jo, is going to be training on BBT at home.

• 1:03:12Tim Ferriss?

  Cool, very cool.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  That's, that's still an ongoing discussion, but she's into it, my lab's into it. So we might have Neuro Woman project going alongside. Now she's like, I want to do a Metatrain as well. So we'll see what we do. We do there.

• 1:03:26Tim Ferriss?

  End of two.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, end of two. I know, exactly. The couple, the neuro couple. So the last game that I'll be training on is called Rhythmicity. Rhythmicity is a game that we've been working on with an indie game designer, Studio B. And the hypothesis here is that if we have a game that through adaptivity teaches you to become more rhythmic, which is also a question, can you become more rhythmic? We think you can. We're going to document that you can through gameplay. And then the question is, if you are now more rhythmic, is your brain more rhythmic? Rhythm is a fundamental aspect of how our brain works. It's not just an artifact that we've discovered, you know, that you have alpha, theta, gamma

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  at different frequencies, but it's a core property of how our brain functions at a highest level from attention, perception, memory, all are driven by these rhythms. And not just the rhythms in isolation, coherence and synchrony, phase locking between rhythms. So because our brain, as all of our biology and even all of our physics is rhythmic in nature, does becoming more rhythmic improve the rhythms of the brain, improve your function and other aspects of cognition? And so that's the hypothesis. So the game is a fun game, you know, similar in some ways maybe to a little bit of the interface and things like Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  But instead of just playing different songs and, you know, having some level of complexity, adaptivity there, we have a very high level of adaptivity. We're feeding you more complex rhythms at a faster tempo with less time across the audio and the visual domain. So that's, that's the last game, Rhythmicity.

• 1:05:05Tim Ferriss?

  What is the protocol? The frequency and duration of sessions?

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Rhythmicity is probably going to have a similar protocol to Metatrain, although we're still formulating that. That's the least developed. So both Metatrain and BBT are already in study. Rhythmicity is just finishing game development, but will be ready for me in July for my training. It'll probably be five days a week, 30 minutes a day.

• 1:05:28Tim Ferriss?

  Now, you've spent a good amount of time, just coming back to the rhythm, with world-class drummers, have you not?

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's actually how Rhythmicity was inspired, through my relationship and friendship with Mickey Hart, who's the percussionist from the Grateful Dead. We were doing a talk together in New Orleans for the AARP, because he had a really profound experience in his life, because his grandmother, who had Alzheimer's disease, and he was a caregiver for her, she didn't speak to him for a long time. And then, he's playing the drums with her one day, and all of a sudden, she just like got into the groove and said his name, and he was just blown away. And all of a sudden, music and rhythm from being a tool of entertainment, became something more. And he's been different ever since. I mean, he's always been on this kick. He's spoken in front of Congress many times.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  We've spoken together at the White House and Congress together, South by Southwest, all over the place, about rhythm in the brain. And so, I was really inspired by his own impressions, and his own passion for rhythm as a therapeutic tool, and his own frustrations, that no one's really done the study that I described to you. We know that people that have high levels of music training experience in their lives, when you look at their brains when they're older, they're not like other older adults. There are definitely some improvements and some advantages, but there's not really a carefully controlled study of what elements of music. I mean, there's many things that go into being a musician, and so, it's provocative, but...

• 1:06:59Tim Ferriss?

  Not to mention just the kinesthetic element.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Oh, exactly, and so many, so many things. And so, it's interesting, it's a signal, something might be there. Same thing with meditation training. Very hard, in a very carefully controlled study, to pull out what are the active ingredients? And is this element of either meditation, or physical fitness, or rhythm? So, that's a commonality, is that these practices often sit in what we think of as alternative. And I don't think that that is doing them justice, right? Because people are not, they're not being prescribed, they're not really part of what we think of as medicine. And hopefully, through these type of studies that we're doing now, where we take active ingredients of them, drop them in our game engine, and then do placebo-controlled studies,

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  we'll start validating this at the level that professionals like... I would prescribe that.

• 1:07:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that opens up a whole Pandora's box, obviously, of insurance reimbursement and so on, so that it becomes more economically feasible and even attractive, potentially.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  For sure. And that's what we hope to see in the future.

• 1:08:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. With drumming and music, just two quick side notes. One is, there's a great short movie called The Lady in Number Six, which is about 30 minutes long. It's about the world's oldest living pianist and Holocaust survivor, 109 years old, named Alice, still plays a piano every day, which is a fascinating watch. The other, which is even shorter, is a YouTube video, I think it's three to five minutes long, really blew me away because I have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's on both sides of my family. So this is, as you know, from conversations, an area of great interest to me and why I was, for a very short stint, sort of a dilettante neuroscience guy at Princeton for a year. So, and why I've enjoyed

• 1:08:50Tim Ferriss?

  spending so much time in this lab, among other reasons. But it's a video, and I think if people just search Alzheimer's patient listening to music from his era, they took this gentleman, must have been, I'd guess, in his 80s, maybe even 90s, African-American gent, pretty much mute, vegetative, practically.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  I've seen this video.

• 1:09:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my God. And then they take music that he would have heard when he was young and played to him, and he starts having a normal, I mean, holding an entire conversation.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  That's profound.

• 1:09:26Tim Ferriss?

  It's really profound.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's so when, you know, Mickey and I first started interacting, I was looking for other examples of that and sharing them with him. You know, there's so much we do not understand about the brain and, you know, and its wonders and how to control it and how to allow our ability to impact it, improve our lives. And it's just, those type of things are inspiring. And if we could distill them down and make them systematic and reproducible, so it's not just some, like, you know, very amazing but rare event, but something that's reproducible and prescribable and deliverable, that would be just game changing.

• 1:10:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So it's not something you hope for, but something you can engineer.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  What is the fascination with photography? And obviously, those of you listening can't see this. You've got two gorgeous, large dual screens cycling through photographs. I know you are an avid photographer. When did that start? And why did it start?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, these are some of my photographs from over the years. I have a couple hanging up here as well. I never did anything artistic in my entire life until I was in my late twenties. And I was at my family's house, and my uncle, who had recently married into my family, was a radiologist and also a very avid photographer, amateur photographer. But even more than that, he was very into collecting cameras and photography equipment. And he gave me a book by a photographer by the name of Galen Rowell, actually Bay Area photographer.

• 1:11:02Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell Rowell?

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  R-O-W-E-L-L, Rowell. And Galen, G-A-L-E-N. And he is one of the world's most amazing photographers. He unfortunately passed away right at the time that I moved here. And I had met him once at a lecture of his, and he was looking forward to discovering the brain, because he had a great interest in cognition. And he wrote this book called Mountain Light that my uncle shared with me. And Mountain Light is an amazing book, because one page is a beautiful nature photograph, and the other page is a complete text. And in there, it describes the nature experience, which was amazing to me, being in New York and not exposed to nature all that much.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  The technical elements of photography, which appealed to my geek personality, you know, all the little details and numbers to get it perfect. And then, really, a little bit of a view of cognition, which is my field, you know, talking about perception and attention. And this was something that Galen really appreciated. And, you know, page after page of beautiful photo, and then all those descriptions just captivated me, probably, you know, what I'd call another epiphany, life epiphany. And my uncle saw that. I read the book for eight hours, went up to his room and brought down a camera from The Year I Was Born, a Nikon from 1968, and said, "Here, you got it." There's a gift, there's your, there's your camera. You know, it was totally manual, almost impossible to use.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  He gave me like thirty-two rolls of film, like a case of unopened film. And then, and then basically took me up to, you know, uh, their balcony and overlooking, you know, uh, this is Long, Long Island, uh, overlooking sort of a wooded scene and taught me how to use the light meter. I went back, uh, I was living in Manhattan at the time, going to medical school on Upper East Side at Mount Sinai. Uh, my balcony overlooking Manhattan, I got really lucky, I had about, you know, I had, I had a support, I didn't even own a tripod then, and took a couple of photos of this amazing sunset in August that I, after I had developed, I was like, they were just amazing. And I showed them people and they're like, you're a really good photographer. I'm like, I am? Which wasn't true, of course, at all.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  I just got really lucky. But that like early, like positive feedback made me think that maybe I could do it. And so I spent months being not a good photographer in Central Park, learning how to do nature photography and it captivated me and I went and spent many years traveling around the world doing photography. I started a company called Wanderings. I built my website, uh, Come Wander in nineteen ninety-nine using HTML, not even any program. And, uh, sold a lot of photos. I did my own printing. Most of my sales were to, uh, hospitals. Interestingly enough, I had a nice connection there since at this point I was a neurology resident. And I had a lot of, you know, I had a captive audience late at night of all the nurses

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  and other support team that are just sitting around with me at three in the morning in an ICU and say, here's some of my nature photography. And so I do my own printing and we realized that hospital rooms, waiting rooms, ORs, uh, ICUs could use a little bit of nature. And, you know, they're just pretty sterile places. And, and so we started realizing that it was having a sort of profound impact on, on patients. And so I, uh, I had a nature, a photography career for a while. Um, you know, people have often asked over the year, what is sort of? Is there a relationship between me being a scientist and a photographer, especially when I was active in both of those things?

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  And one part was quite obvious to me is that, to me, they're both an exploration of nature, right? That's what science is. You're looking for organization and meaning. And that's what you do, and what I would do in nature photography is look for organization. And granted, in the photography, it's more looking for aesthetic and meaning from an emotional response. And in the lab, you're looking for more of organization at a different level, but they really weren't all that different.

• 1:15:02Tim Ferriss?

  No, not at all. I think often of this video, there's also an essay, and it's probably, at this point, a book, which is an interview, comprises an interview with Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel Prize.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, when you ask me people that are successful, he was actually one of the first people that jumped into mine.

• 1:15:25Tim Ferriss?

  He's a great one. I mean, bongo player, safe cracker.

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would put him at the top of the list.

• 1:15:31Tim Ferriss?

  So, the video, which people should be able to find, if you search my name in the video, I've kind of tracked down a higher quality version, is The Joy of Finding Things Out. And he would have these debates with some of his artist friends, and they'd say, "Well, you know, you think on the molecular level, and the beauty of the flower is lost on you." And he'd say, "No, actually, I totally disagree." He said, "If I understand the inner workings of the flower, I think it gives an extra layer of depth, so that I have more appreciation of the flower." And started learning to paint when he was well past his prime in terms of his career and his work with, after the Challenger disaster, and so on and so forth. But fascinating character. That's one of my favorite books, Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Yes, I read that many years ago.

• 1:16:16Tim Ferriss?

  What a hilarious, incredible guy. You operated at a very high level in the lab, managing a lot of people, juggling a lot of different projects. What are your morning rituals or routines? What does the first 60 to 120 minutes of your day look like?

• 1:16:40Speaker 03

  Little coffee involved, a little breakfast.

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  When do you wake up?

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  I try, I wake up like six.

• 1:16:46Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna bug you with the details.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  I wake up at like six to six thirty AM, no matter what time I go to sleep. Um, I, I try to get up. I, I, I usually don't set an alarm. I'm very responsive to light. I have a big loft with open windows and skylights and I don't close them in any way. And so I like to wake up with the light, um, so you know, easier in the summer and, um, get up, shower, coffee, small breakfast, usually like an egg or some protein.

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  How do you make your coffee?

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  Um, just a shot of espresso. So pretty straight up and.

• 1:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  How do you make your espresso?

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  Um, I usually use an espresso. So just get it nice and fast. Um, you know, on a weekend I'll go out and get a nice.

• 1:17:32Tim Ferriss?

  Schmancy.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Higher quality cup of coffee, but, um, you know, for the most part, I'm just really about just getting things done in the morning so I can get out of the house and usually go to the gym. So lately I go to the gym, train in the morning, uh, before I start the, before I start my workday.

• 1:17:48Tim Ferriss?

  Do you get to the gym? Do you wake up at six, six thirty?

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm at the gym, um, by eight, seven thirty, eight. Um, eight o'clock. I'm actually just reworking my schedule now, which is why I hesitated for a moment because I'm going to be moving to seven thirty where I'll be doing BBT training. Um, as my, as my physical workout in the morning, uh, three days a week, starting in July, July sixth. Um, but yeah, so, so, uh, you know, traditionally I've, I've, I've moved between afternoon and morning workouts, but I've really been enjoying the morning workouts for, for a bit now. Um, I feel really energized by it. Um, and you know, so I'm, I'm in the lab. Even the fact that I, you know, woke up, had breakfast, uh, worked out in the gym, thirty minutes cardio,

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  thirty minutes weight training is usually my routine. I've been doing it since I've been seventeen years old in one form or another. And then, you know, I'm in the gym by like, you know, I'm, I'm in the lab at nine thirty. So some people ten at the latest and most people are just like pulling in to start their day at that time.

• 1:18:50Tim Ferriss?

  Do you, I hate that feeling. I'm that guy who comes in and is just like, I hate you, Adam. You've already done more than I'll get done in the next six hours. Uh, the, uh, the working out, do you record your workouts in any way?

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:19:04Tim Ferriss?

  More of a kind of instinctive.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I've been doing it. No, I mean, I have a regimen. You know, I work out two body parts a day, three days a week, and then on the other two days, I sort of just have fun, do whatever I'm in the mood for. So that's my, my weight training workout. And then the cardio workout is bike, treadmill, or elliptical for 30 minutes.

• 1:19:26Tim Ferriss?

  And you and I were chatting before we got started with the, the record button pressed about exercise. And I, I enjoyed getting into it, and I want to explore it a little bit, because it seemed like we exercised perhaps for very different psychological needs. So I was mentioning that I almost always train by myself and have historically, because it's been my meditative time, my time to say, count, which is how a lot of people meditate. Just happens that I do it while moving, in this particular case. And so I would almost always have earphones in, oftentimes even without music, just so people wouldn't talk

• 1:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  to me. And I train by myself. But you seem to get something else out of it. So I was hoping you could just elaborate, because it.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've, I've always, for the most part, always had a single workout partner over the last 20 years of gym time. And it's someone that's also very compatible, from a physical fitness point of view of what they're trying to achieve. And it was my friend Brian, back when I was in New York City, my friend Daria, over the last eight years here in San Francisco. And, you know, it's, there's an intensity there. You're definitely pushing each other to work out, both to get to the gym, to not miss, and also to get through like a high level workout, not cheat. But then there's also like, just a little human connection, a little talking without an agenda, just what's going on

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  in your day? What are you thinking about? Do you have any crazy visions you want to talk about? Some small talk? And I don't really have a lot of that in my life. Everything's pretty intense and pretty goal directed. And so it's, it's, I think, a type of.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  Relaxation, that maybe like a little bit of humanity that served a valuable role to me.

• 1:21:18Tim Ferriss?

  A bit of therapeutic release, it seems. And what struck me when we were talking about this is that I don't have a lot of that in my day either, because I'm typically working by myself. Every once in a while, I'll work in one of the offices, one of the startups that I advise or invested in. But I also need that type of therapeutic non-agenda, no agenda time. But the way that surfaces then, the way that I satisfy that is by going out and having drinks. And I'm just, and I think that is probably one of the reasons, it's not because I do enjoy wine, but I don't feel compelled. I don't have a wine deficiency. I don't need to drink it five nights a week.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:57Tim Ferriss?

  But I'll go out and I'll be like, okay, I don't want it to be 15 minutes long, so I'm gonna have more than one drink. And so we end up kind of waxing philosophic for an hour. And so it just struck me that maybe I should start working out with someone, because it would, it would satisfy that need, scratch that itch. And I would be less inclined to have like three glasses of wine, four nights a week.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's a great place to do that. You also get the added benefit of, of having someone push you from a physical point of view, physical fitness point of view. But I, I mean, I agree. I think it's incredibly valuable. Everyone needs that just little open time to let their, let their minds wander and to laugh and to say things that you're not so worried about, you know, because you're not in front of an audience like I am frequently. And so I do think it's valuable. And if you're looking for a workout partner, I actually have a slot opening up.

• 1:22:48Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. We should, actually. You know what? Lightning strikes. And you mentioned Daria. So Daria, many of you know, I do, you know, one of my close friends is Kevin Rose. He is married to Daria. And I saw something funny recently, which was somebody on Twitter said, you know, at Kevin Rose just announced that he's moving to New York City. And related news, at T Ferris just changed his relationship status to, it's complicated.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 1:23:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm gonna miss those guys, but.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:23:18Tim Ferriss?

  I'd imagine you spend a fair amount of time in New York.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, New York is my, my home, uh, my original home. I mean, San Francisco is most definitely my home now, and I love it here, and I have no intentions of leaving. Um, uh, although we have so many good friends in New York now, and I'm very good friends with Kevin and Dari as well. Uh, but my family lives in Chelsea, my parents, my sister and my other sister lives in upstate New York, and so I go back to New York all the time. And that's where I spent my whole, my whole childhood and early adult life. And, you know, going to New York to me, I always say it's like, you know, jamming like a bat, you know, like a, uh, energy right into your brain. It's like charging, charge you up and not, nothing, no place I've ever been has that amount of just pure human energy.

• 1:24:01Tim Ferriss?

  Potential energy.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it feels great. And so, you know, even a long weekend in New York, I'm like, okay, ready to go back to San Francisco.

• 1:24:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's, that's, I, I feel like it's kind of like holding on to the third rail. In a way, it's, it's so stimulating that I find it excessive for my system past a certain point.

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, and, and you know, in, in reality though, having been someone that's lived there for a long time, it's different when you live there.

• 1:24:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  You know, you learn like, you know, the guy that sells you coffee on the corner and your way to go to work and all of a sudden your block feels really familiar and then your neighborhood. So it's not always like that when you're actually a resident, but.

• 1:24:39Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose that's, yeah.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  It, it's, it's not as much as, as you might expect. Once you live there, you do get into that routine and it does feel smaller, but it's a unique place and how energetic it is. And how energetic the people are. And so, I mean, I do agree. It's, it's a lot.

• 1:24:56Tim Ferriss?

  It has a lot of horsepower per square foot. It's a very dense, energetic environment. Um, let me ask a couple of, uh, rapid fire questions. I always say that and then I'm very long winded, so I'll try to keep them short. But, uh, the answers don't need to be short. They can be though. Uh, when you are feeling down or self doubt, fill in the blank, negative emotion, what do you look to for inspiration or to get you back on track? What do you do?

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, in all reality, I'm pretty even keeled in terms of my mood and in terms of my outlook.

• 1:25:35Tim Ferriss?

  Have you always been that way?

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  As far as I can remember. I mean, I don't really fluctuate all that much. I mean, I get stressed and of course, something crappy happens and I'm bummed out. But I don't really get too derailed or get caught in a rut. I don't really have that many memories of that. You know, usually when, if I am derailed in any way, my favorite thing is just interacting with my friends, you know, going out and having a nice dinner, getting a drink and watching some music. Live music is a frequent source of release for me.

• 1:26:11Tim Ferriss?

  Live music?

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  Live music.

• 1:26:13Tim Ferriss?

  Any type?

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  I mean, lots of different music. You know, I like, you know, most people would call it like alternative, which has changed dramatically from new wave to whatever it is now. But, um, yeah, I mean, watching musicians perform that are talented and passionate and feeling the vibe of the music and dancing and just being in, you know, a festival, like, I love that. You know, and so I'm a very, very social person for someone that spends as much time in academic center lab as I have. You know, you know, I throw a party every, every month and I, I, I feed off of, of that human energy.

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  And so I'd say if I am feeling not at my normal level mentally or emotionally, my social interactions is usually the way that I find to get back.

• 1:27:05Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you're very, I would say, extroverted also, so it's kind of medicine for the extrovert.

• 1:27:10Speaker 03

  I would say, I would say that's true.

• 1:27:12Tim Ferriss?

  Do you listen to music when you work?

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  Often.

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  What type of music? What, what do you, what is your most played band or track or station at the moment?

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Well, I have a very unusual way, I think, of listening to music. I almost always listen to music I've never heard before. I have my favorites in the gym. I have, of course, have a playlist. You know, when I really, you know, want a quick fix, I have my favorite of whatever that time is. Well, it changes all the time. I mean, most of the bands that I listen to, I might have just discovered a couple of months ago. So like, for example, recently, I've been using the Discover feature on Spotify, and you know, you have these recommended, and I'll just let it go for a bit. And, you know, if it like, sort of in a bottom-up way, something like Triggers, and I hear it, I'll be like, oh, you know, let me listen to that. Oh, Tame Impala, oh, they're interesting. I sort of like their

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  vibe. And so I'll listen to them for a while. You know, I mean, bands that have captivated me for a long time, like Radiohead. I like bands that, you know, are explorative, you know, musical styles, you know, Dave Matthews Band. But for the most part, I really try to listen to as much new music as possible. Cool. And you use Spotify on the desktop as well? Spotify on the desktop, yeah, for the most part. So like, when I'm sitting here, you know, it's probably open right now, on some screen here, you know, so I was just flipping through. I look at what other people who's music taste I like, what they're listening to. And, you know, I keep like, a pretty active playlist for my party. And I like

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  it to be fresh, so I'm constantly looking for music that can attract my attention away from what I'm doing. I'm like, ooh, I like that. And then, once I hear that, I'll go and pull that band out and see what other stuff they've created, and then listen to them along. You walk into a bar, what drink do you order? I mean, it really depends. I would say my go-to is a really nice whiskey, maybe with just a cube in it. If I'm feeling a little fancy, maybe an Old Fashioned. There are some times I just want a glass of wine or a beer. So it really, it really depends.

• 1:29:33Tim Ferriss?

  He's just a scientist. It really depends for everything.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  It really does.

• 1:29:38Tim Ferriss?

  The whiskey, any particular whiskey?

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  I'm a rye whiskey fan. Rye first, then bourbon and scotch, then Japanese whiskey and then a scotch, I would say in that order. And rye whiskeys, I mean, I like so many of them. And I'm always changing what's my favorite.

• 1:29:56Tim Ferriss?

  Give me, give a recommend, I'll recommend one and I'll try it tonight.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  Um, Whistle Pig?

• 1:30:02Tim Ferriss?

  Whistle Pig?

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good one, sure.

• 1:30:05Tim Ferriss?

  I'll try it just for the name.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great name. I think I have some in my lab.

• 1:30:08Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's my nickname.

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  Some in my office here, I could pull some of that out. Yeah, I know, I mean, ryes are an interesting whiskey because they really were the dominant form of American whiskey pre-prohibition because the industry was more north, where, you know, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New York, where rye did really well. And then with prohibition and the move towards, the move south with corn and bourbon really exploded, which is still by far dominant. But rye's coming back and I love it. It's really like earthy and just delicious.

• 1:30:38Tim Ferriss?

  I agree, 100%. What, let's see. What biography is your favorite, if any? Do you read biographies?

• 1:30:49Speaker 03

  I don't read all that many. I've read some on, well, I mean, I most recently read the Steve Jobs biography, the Isaacson one, which was pretty fascinating. Anyone that lives around this neighborhood, it's like, you sort of have to, you know, they could ask you to leave San Francisco. So that's a requirement. Yeah, but when I was a kid, you know, Ben Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, I was really influenced by a bio, I don't even remember who was, who wrote it, of Teddy Roosevelt, which was really pretty cool.

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  Why were you so, how did it influence you?

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  I mean, I like hero stories, you know. I've always been attracted to people who have sort of challenged their status quo and were successful at it and, you know, sort of marched to their own beat.

• 1:31:37Tim Ferriss?

  I have a recommendation for you, since you gave me whistle pig.

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:40Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, there's a book called Tuxedo Park about Alfred Lee Loomis.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:31:45Tim Ferriss?

  Who was a masterful stock market investor, got out before, I think, the 1929 crash. It's one of the few who not only survived, but really exited at the top. And used his, he was an amateur scientist, but one of those kind of old timey, really impressive amateur scientists. Like in the sense that Ben Franklin was kind of like an amateur scientist, but you're like, wait a second, like. And he financed this place similar to Bletchley Park in a way. Uh, which for anyone who's seen, um, The Imitation Game will sound familiar because that's where, of course, they were cracking Enigma. Uh, but he brought in scientists who would otherwise have no contact with one another to develop technologies.

• 1:32:27Tim Ferriss?

  Some for commercial use, but many of them for wartime use. Fascinating story.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  Wow, it sounds great.

• 1:32:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I mean, like almost all of these heroes too, a very flawed character.

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  I'll put on my list.

• 1:32:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a great book. If you had to choose between losing your hearing,

• 1:32:47Tim Ferriss?

  your smell and taste, or one eye, which would you choose and why?

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  Oh, man, that's bumming me out even thinking about any of those things.

• 1:32:58Tim Ferriss?

  I couldn't make it both eyes because that, that I think is too much of a.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  No, everyone would keep their eyesight. I mean, we just, you'd be too incapacitated by it.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  I would say one eye. I mean, I love food without even just smell alone. You'd lose so much of, of those things that give me pleasure, you know, multiple times a day. And, you know, like you just heard, I listen to music all day long. I mean, it would, it would suck losing an eye, but, uh, at least I could see and hear and smell. So I'll go with that.

• 1:33:32Tim Ferriss?

  And you'd get a cool eye patch out of it.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:36Tim Ferriss?

  What are your hopes for? Let me rephrase that, actually. That's too speculative. What do you hope to do with virtual reality in the near future?

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  We don't fully understand the potential of virtual reality in any domain because it doesn't really exist. So even from an entertainment point of view, it's fascinating. But the ability to create such a real and immersive experience, both visual and sound, that's the real, that's the real goal, right? And obviously haptic too, if we could have tactile feedback. But even just visual and sound, I mean, I don't think of it as a visual modality at all. To create that real experience in, in a setting that would otherwise not be, you know, accessible to that type of experience, gives us the potential to heighten

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  the human experience in many ways. You can heighten it from a pure enjoyment perspective, which is where most of the technology is driving right now. But to use it as a way to elevate our minds is really, really exciting to me. And so we, in this lab, have been putting a lot of thought into what type of interactivity in a virtual reality environment would lend itself to enhance how our brains work and, and improve, prove our existence. And, you know, we don't know all those answers, but we're experimenting with them.

• 1:35:08Tim Ferriss?

  And there's some really interesting things that it would seem you could do potentially in this lab also. I mean, if you had an Oculus, and then, for instance, what are the, I'm sure seen this, it's effectively a, an, an unpowered treadmill with a waist harness, Omni, that allows you to run in any direction.

• 1:35:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, Virtuex's product Omni, which we're like slated on the top of this. I just had a conversation with their president and CEO about, that will be delivered to my lab as soon as it's finally out. We're actually a Kickstarter investor in that. We're, we're serious about our technology. We, we've invested in many Kickstarter projects, many of which we haven't seen yet, but we're hopeful.

• 1:35:47Tim Ferriss?

  But you've had 700 update emails, I'm sure.

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  Yes, a lot of emails. But yeah, so the Omni gives us the potential that we can actually move and walk in virtual reality. So that's incredibly exciting because the more I play BBT and think about embodied cognition, not being, you know, a floating jar with some fingers and eyeballs, but actually being a moving human being, I see the value in that. And so I love the idea of most of our games having an embodied format. And so virtual reality where you could walk in and move is pretty exciting.

• 1:36:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this makes me think of the simulacrum. And if we have the potential to create movies that have animals that are so photorealistic that they're indistinguishable to most people from actual nature footage. And if we're at a point in the very nascent game of virtual reality where we have something like the Omni and so on, it makes, it seems epistemologically arrogant to think that we are the only people at any time in any dimension who have achieved that ability. I mean, it brings up a lot of interesting sort of philosophical questions

• 1:37:06Tim Ferriss?

  that would have only previously existed in like a freshman undergrad philosophy class.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. I mean, I'm like, I'm even more excited about not using virtual reality as a way of expanding outward, but expanding inward. So we have a project here where we created something called the Glass Brain. If you look that up online, you'll see plenty about it and see some videos on it. But essentially, it's a high-resolution view of our brain, both structurally using an MRI scanner in our center here, as well as EEG to capture online electrical activity in your brain.

• 1:37:43Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, this is the animation that you showed me of Mickey Art.

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:37:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. You guys have to Google this.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how we first, we first did it for a gig that Mickey and I were doing. In many places, we wound up doing this, as I mentioned before, in front of Congress and South by Southwest. And other places, but uh now we've keep advancing the technology and we have a virtual reality version of it. So you could put on, let's say, an Oculus Rift, grab an Xbox joystick, and if we've already scanned your brain and we've done all of our processing and you're wearing an EEG cap, fly inside your own functioning brain, which is an amazing experience. And where do we go with that? Well, one really sort of amazing potential is that you can essentially

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  play a video game using the signals in your own brain as the stimuli of the game.

• 1:38:37Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that gets super recursive.

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  We're exploring that. So basically, a very sort of futuristic view of neurofeedback, where you learn how to control your brain rhythms by interacting with them, sort of in situ, in the place in your brain where they're coming from. And, you know, this is what I was saying earlier, when, you know, what I do on a day-to-day basis starts sounding a little like my science fiction books. But we're there, we're doing this already. There's an image here, this is these two guys, so.

• 1:39:04Tim Ferriss?

  So the image we're looking at is two people sitting down, looks like they have VR headsets?

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  Both of them have VR headsets. The person on the left is Mickey Hart, so Grateful Dead percussionist, he's wearing a VR headset and a 64-channel wireless EEG cap. So he's in VR and he's playing a rhythm game, an early version of Rhythmicity.

• 1:39:22Tim Ferriss?

  And just for people listening, so 64-channel basically means 64?

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  Electrodes.

• 1:39:28Tim Ferriss?

  Electrodes.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, electrodes. So it's a high-density cap, but it's mobile, it's custom-built for this lab, and pretty exciting technology on its own. So he's in VR, playing this game, he's looking at this beautiful space scenario with all Grateful Dead little shout-outs everywhere, and he's having fun, and that's showing up on one screen. This is a 120-foot widescreen, 24 feet high, a keynote that I gave at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose. So 3,000 people in the audience, giant screen, this is the demo after my talk. So Mickey's in there doing that. The guy next to him, his name is Tim Mullin, he's one of our head engineers, really brilliant guy from UCSD, he's wearing a virtual reality goggles on Oculus Rift.

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

  But he's actually flying inside Mickey's functioning brain while Mickey's in his own virtual reality. So I always think of it and say it's like Russian like neuro nested dolls, you know? Like Mickey's in his virtual world, playing his rhythm game, wearing his EG cap, and Tim is just looking around his functioning brain while he's doing that.

• 1:40:32Tim Ferriss?

  So trippy.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:33Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, how much of our current reality at some point are we going to realize is just like that set of nested Russian dolls?

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we did this live in front of an audience last year, you know, this is all possible.

• 1:40:45Tim Ferriss?

  I want to, I want to kind of sniff test a theory that has floated around for a few decades, and you may have come across this before, but I'd be curious to get your thoughts. Cause I just saw an article today, this was actually not an article, it was a link to a study abstract, uh, which was, I want to say on PubMed, and it was looking at the historical use of hallucinogens by indigenous people primarily in South America to improve the hunting ability of their dogs. Really fascinating stuff. And, uh, we could go down that rabbit hole, but just to try to keep myself, talking about

• 1:41:25Tim Ferriss?

  multitasking, try to keep myself focused for a second, uh, there's a theory of hallucinogenic experience, and there are many theories, obviously, many of them completely speculation, but one of them is that the hallucinations are not all internally generated, uh, and instead that the hallucinogens are basically deactivating filters that would otherwise block out this noise that we see or hear as hallucinations. Is that conceivable, based on our current understanding?

• 1:42:04Speaker 03

  I mean, we, we get a lot of signals into our, you know, our brains through all the receptors we have. Um, obviously there's many signals out there that we don't have receptors for. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't think that hallucinogen would allow you to receive signals that you don't have receptors for. I mean, you know, that would be, uh... You know, a little bit of a stretch from my perspective, but you know, I mean, I never say never. I just don't have any hypothesis of how that would happen. But it is possible that you could be interpreting things that may have not been in your awareness or even

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  been inhibited by your top-down sort of conscious control that is now released, not even just in hallucination, but in dreams as well. So yeah, I think that, you know, it's sort of coming internally, but your internal world has been painted and sculpted by your external experience. So I bet, you know, it's some combination.

• 1:43:06Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to, we talked earlier about the multimodal approach. And let's just say you have, you have Meditrain, you have BBT, and then you have rhythmicity. And you mentioned you could potentially at some point add in a pharmacological intervention.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:26Tim Ferriss?

  And potentially that the multimodal approach would allow you to get a kind of higher yield from a lower dose.

• 1:43:34Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:35Tim Ferriss?

  What compounds, if you, when you get to that point, or if you ever got to that point here, what are the compounds that would be kind of on the short list for exploring?

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there's a whole class of drugs that, you know, fell into the cognitive enhancement domain that really became Alzheimer's drugs called cholinestriose inhibitors, boosting the cetocolinergic system, cetocolin system. And these cholinergic agents act pretty bluntly to, in many ways, improve attention. But there's a limit and side effects associated with with higher doses. So I think it'd be pretty interesting to see what they might look like at a lower dose, but when you're activating the attention networks appropriately. I think that that is a really important question of what, how do they interact? We

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  don't know that yet. Modafinil is a drug that has had some cognitive enhancement data that seems interesting enough to look at an interaction as well. So I'd say those two.

• 1:44:39Tim Ferriss?

  On the cholinestriose inhibitor side, are you looking at something that is?

• 1:44:45Tim Ferriss?

  Potentially prescription medication or would be like a Hooper Zine A type over the counter thing?

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  I mean, there are plenty of prescription medicines out there that we're that we, you know, that I've

• 1:44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Is it Aricept?

• 1:44:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Tim Ferriss?

  That's a Hooper.

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Tim Ferriss?

  The cholinestraic inhibitor.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  Exactly, that's the most prescribed one.

• 1:45:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  It's a drug I'm most familiar with because that's what I prescribe the most when I'm seeing patients. So as a neurologist, I saw patients for many years and most of them had early Alzheimer's disease, cognitive impairment associated with aging and Aricept is usually was really our first line agent and still largely is. And, you know, I mean, to me, it's still crazy like we really give people these drugs when they have cognitive impairment and most of the time we don't tell them to do anything, right? So it's like, to me, it's always like, you know, like a bodybuilder taking steroids and not working out anymore or getting like, you know, high, uh, high performance oil for your sports car and then leaving it in the garage. Like you gotta run it through the engine to get the benefits.

• 1:45:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  So I feel like we've, we've really missed the boat in understanding how a really, like as I mentioned, blunt instrument like these neurotransmitter receptor modulators are, how they interact with something that activates a network in a selective way like what you get from a video game.

• 1:46:04Tim Ferriss?

  And the, uh, midafinil, of course, uh, well, I shouldn't say of course, but I believe is originally, you know, provisional designed for, as an anti narcolepsy drug. Um, funny how many sprinters had prescriptions written for narcolepsy when that came out.

• 1:46:19Speaker 03

  Now it's, it's more broader than that. Now jet lag is on the list.

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Now jet lag.

• 1:46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, uh, shift workers.

• 1:46:24Tim Ferriss?

  Do, do people at this point, uh, understand the mechanism of action, midafinil?

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  I'm not, I'm not an expert in that, but, um, I don't think that we fully understand the mechanism of action. I mean, I think, I remember when I first started putting it on my list of things to prescribe, um, as a neurologist, we didn't even know what receptor systems it acted on. It was just like, we don't know, we found this by accident, but it doesn't seem very dangerous. Matter of fact, that is pretty, pretty low in adverse effects and addictive potential. So it's a pretty good one. But now, from doing some, you know, reading, although we have never used in the lab, so I haven't dove so deep, it does seem like there's a lot of receptors that it acts on. And so I would say that we probably do not have a firm idea on the intricacies of the

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  mechanisms that lead to its effect.

• 1:47:17Tim Ferriss?

  What is the most exciting data that you've come across, or studies, or otherwise, related to TDCS or technologies like that? And if you could explain for folks what that?

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so TDCS is a technique that falls into a larger category that I call TES, transcranial electrical stimulation. TDCS is direct current. Picture a 9-volt battery, right? And that's literally what we're talking about in terms of voltage and amperage is at that level, very low. There's another related technique that we use in the lab a lot, which is TACS. So that's alternating current, just AC current. And then there's another technique that's also related to this because it's transcranial, which is TMS, which is magnetic stimulation. And all of these approaches have in common in that the way of using electromagnetic

• 1:48:13Speaker 03

  fields to influence the electromagnetic properties of our brain under the scalp, through the scalp, right? So not invasively, so not like neurosurgery, or implantable electrodes, which we use also as clinical care, for like example Parkinson's disease. So, you know, our brain is really an electrical machine and using rhythm as a fundamental principle. And so if we manipulate it, we can hopefully get beneficial aspects of it. You could get negative aspects as well, which is why I always feel that we're a little premature in putting this tool out there without more appropriate guidance and testing. But I do think there's exciting potential in this field.

• 1:48:58Speaker 03

  We actually just published our first TDCS paper that you contributed to, and I appreciate that.

• 1:49:04Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 1:49:05Speaker 03

  In several different ways, even as a data collector. And... We showed that you could get some benefits, and this was just the opening study to get, start getting our feet wet with this technology in multitasking abilities over a very short period of time that you don't seem to get without it. Now, it's very subtle, but the fact that there's any change at all in a controlled study like that is interesting, to say the least. I mean, there are many, many papers like this from other labs showing that you can boost certain cognitive abilities by applying low electrical fields, low amperage electrical fields through the scalp, either DC or AC, but seeing it from your

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  own lab as a scientist is always like, hmm, interesting, it really does seem to work. And now we have several studies going on using alternating currents where we can actually target rhythms in the brain, right? Because alternating current is essentially a rhythm. So we can make an alternating current at, let's say, 4 Hz, theta rhythm. We know that theta rhythms from the prefrontal cortex are involved in attention. As a matter of fact, that was the metric that was low in older adults in the neuro-racism study beforehand that we normalized with video game play. So what does it mean if you're playing a video game and we know that, you know, we have the impression from our data that boosting this level over a month is what helped performance on this and even other tasks that we didn't

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  train on the game? Well, how about if you play the game and we boost this rhythm by applying the rhythm across your scalp? Can we lead to a more rapid learning curve? So let's say you just got back from war and you're a wounded warrior and you have traumatic brain injury and you have cognitive impairment and we have these games that target networks that are deficient in you, but you need a little extra boost of those underlying rhythms or the plasticity? Can we use an electrical current during gameplay to lead to a more effective outcome? That's what we're interested in. That is a cool study. Yeah, we're doing that. That's real cool.

• 1:51:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Adam, I know that we're gonna, we're gonna go paint the town red after this, so I want to be cognizant of budgeting enough time for us to really get into trouble. But a few last questions. One is if you could give your 30-year-old self some advice, what would that advice be?

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  Let's see, advice to a 30-year-old.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  I would say to have no fear.

• 1:51:39Speaker 03

  I mean, you got one chance here to do amazing things and being afraid of being wrong, or making a mistake, or fumbling is just not really how you do something of impact. You just have to be fearless.

• 1:51:59Tim Ferriss?

  I like that. And last, where can people learn? No, this isn't the very last.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:52:05Tim Ferriss?

  That was a head fake.

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  Second to last.

• 1:52:07Tim Ferriss?

  Second to last is, where can people

• 1:52:12Tim Ferriss?

  learn more about the lab?

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:15Tim Ferriss?

  Photography, everything.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we have a lab website. The shortcut in has a long edu, but gazlab.com, G-A-Z-Z-L-A-B dot com will get you there pretty quickly. My last name, Gazali, made up in Ellis Island, is a very, is entirely a unique name as far as I can tell by Google.

• 1:52:32Tim Ferriss?

  SEO optimized.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's perfect. So if you search my last name, G-A-Z-Z-A-L-E-Y, you'll find tons of links to talks I've given, to my photography, to our lab website, to lots of media surrounding the type of work that we do.

• 1:52:52Tim Ferriss?

  And the, the final question is, if, if you had an additional $10 million, just came in a, in a Secret Santa envelope or whatever, what would, what might you do with that? Because, I mean, you, I, when we sit here and play on the whiteboard, I'm always just blown away by kind of the, the number of not just options, but attractive, interesting, impactful options that you have. What might you do with that?

• 1:53:22Speaker 03

  I would, I would just do exactly what we're doing. I would just funnel that right into the, into the momentum that my lab already has. You know, the things we're doing are pretty edgy for traditional scientific funding sources like the NIH, which also happens to be pretty broke right now. NIH, the National Institute of Health is at an all-time historic low in terms of the funding of science. Not great times. So, we're forced to go to non-traditional sources like philanthropy to try to get money for people, from people that believe in what we're doing to do this work. This work is, is expensive. You know, we have to hire experts, you know, programmers and, and we're trying to get, get cutting-edge

• 1:54:04Speaker 03

  technology into the lab. And it takes a lot of, of money and time and expertise. And so, there are things that I want to do, technologies I want to try, people I want to hire, that we just don't have the resources to do. We have the vision of what we want to do. We have more games we want to build. We want to look at how the games interact. These studies are large. They're expensive. I would just, you know, funnel it into our ongoing research program and try to get it to the next level as rapidly as possible.

• 1:54:35Tim Ferriss?

  I like it. I like this plan, Adam. And the other plan I like is going to maybe go out and have some wine as our cognitive handicap.

• 1:54:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:54:46Tim Ferriss?

  Before, before we get back to the

• 1:54:47Speaker 03

  Sounds good.

• 1:54:48Tim Ferriss?

  Focus on cognitive enhancement.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  Sounds great.

• 1:54:49Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you so much for the time, man. Always fun. And everybody listening, check out the lab, check out Adam's work. And we will be definitely following Neuromen and the adventures of Adam and co. very closely. For show notes, guys, links, resources, et cetera, books, things we talked about, just go to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Thanks, everyone.

• 1:55:22Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one stop shop for all things graphic design related. I have used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a T-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love, or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it and created some amazing things

• 1:56:07Tim Ferriss?

  that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 1:56:26Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, and there is a fun story behind it, LegalZoom.com. I've used them for a number of businesses. And Matt Mullenweg, you might recall, a guest on this podcast, CEO of Automattic, now valued at more than $1 billion. And he is one of the developers behind WordPress, which powers roughly 23% of the internet. He first incorporated Automattic on LegalZoom.com. Now, LegalZoom can help you do a number of things that I might recommend, like setting up a will, doing a trademark search, a proper trademark search, so you don't put a ton of time and effort into a business and then get shut down, for instance, or have to change your name. More than a million people have already trusted LegalZoom

• 1:57:08Tim Ferriss?

  over the last decade to help start and build their businesses. So if you need to, say, form an LLC or a nonprofit, anything like that, if you're doing business solely in your own name, as a friend told me recently, you're kind of flying naked. You're opening yourself up to a lot of liabilities and issues. So check out LegalZoom.com. You got to protect yourself. Have been helping people not only with the docs, because you don't want to pay necessarily someone thousands of dollars to just copy and paste something from one Word doc to the next. So you can not only find things like cease and desist letters and so on, but they have helpful support. So they have people on hand to answer your questions, all based in the US. And obviously, you're looking for legal advice.

• 1:57:51Tim Ferriss?

  Well, they're not a law firm, but LegalZoom has built a network of independent attorneys available in most states. So they can give you advice on the best way to get started, plus provide contract review and other services to help run your business. And they're no surprises. LegalZoom provides complete transparency, upfront pricing, and customer reviews, and 100% satisfaction guarantee. So take a look, LegalZoom.com. Chances are you will find something that brings up the thought, "Oh, God, I didn't even think of that. I really need to take care of that." So do the boring legal stuff upfront so you don't risk a lot later. Go to LegalZoom.com, use the code TIM at checkout. T-I-M. Use the code TIM at checkout, and you will get $10 off. That's LegalZoom.com.

• 1:58:35Tim Ferriss?

  And until next time, thank you for listening. Thank you.