#277 – Andrew Huberman: Focus, Stress, Relationships, and Friendship

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford and host of the Huberman Lab Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Brave: https://brave.com/lex – LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack – ROKA: https://roka.com/ and use code LEX to get 20% off your first order – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off EPISODE LINKS: Andrew’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/AndrewHubermanLab Huberman Lab Podcast: https://hubermanlab.com Andrew’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/hubermanlab Andrew’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/hubermanlab PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:25) – Diet (17:30) – Attribution in science (20:11) – Rick Rubin (27:57) – Mental states (42:38) – Controversial guests (55:19) – Karl Deisseroth (59:34) – Difficult conversations (1:06:36) – Big guests (1:20:22) – Academia (1:27:23) – Freedom of speech (1:38:26) – If by Rudyard Kipling (1:45:37) – Music (1:51:16) – Public speaking (2:10:11) – Non-sleep deep rest (2:24:32) – Focus (2:34:52) – Stress and anxiety (2:54:48) – Sauna (3:06:14) – Sex (3:14:07) – Love and relationships

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his third time on this podcast. He's a brilliant neuroscientist at Stanford University and the host of one of the best, the best, if you ask me, health and science podcasts in the world called Huberman Lab Podcast. Check him out on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Most importantly, Andrew is a great human being and has quickly become a great friend. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Brave for web browsing, Element for hydration, Roka for style, Indeed for hiring,

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  and MasterClass for wisdom and inspiration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Brave, a fast, privacy-preserving browser that feels like Google Chrome, but without ads or the various kinds of tracking that ads can do. I love using it more than any other browser, including Chrome. It's my favorite go-to browser. I had a conversation with its founder, Brendan Icke, who, again, is just behind some of

• 1:25Lex Fridman?

  the most impactful technology in the software engineering space, in the tech space, ever. I mean, it's kind of incredible that one human can do so many fascinating things. And actually, just strictly the fact that there's innovation in the browser space is really exciting because it's becoming stabilized, kind of, it's becoming stale, almost. It's great to have competition, sort of challenge the big players, and that's exactly what Brave does masterfully. Get it at brave.com/lex, and it might become your favorite browser, too. They actually have their own Brave search engine that you should definitely check out. I love the minimalism of it, and it works great. All at brave.com/lex.

• 2:09Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Element Electrolyte Drink Mix, spelled L-M-N-T. To do low carbs diet correctly, the number one thing you have to get right is electrolytes, specifically sodium, potassium, and magnesium. And that's exactly what I drink Element for. I drink it many, many times a day, actually, now. And I just did a long run in the quickly increasing Austin heat, and I felt it. Ladies and gentlemen, it was pretty rough. And so I made sure that there is electrolytes like an hour before in me and then afterwards to replenish after a really long run.

• 2:54Lex Fridman?

  So this episode is with Andrew Huberman. He's a huge fan of Element. In fact, when we did the conversation, we're both drinking Element before and after and during. So yeah, I live by it, swear by it. They have a new flavor, my new favorite flavor, I should say, called Watermelon Salt. That's the one I go with. Olympians use it, tech people use it. Like I said, I swear by this stuff. Try it at drinklmnt.com/lex, spelled drink L-M-N-T.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Roka, the makers of glasses and sunglasses that I love wearing for their design, feel, and innovation on materials, optics, and grip.

• 3:37Lex Fridman?

  Roka was started by two All-American swimmers from Stanford and was born out of an obsession with performance. I met one of said founders, Rob. I've met him many times. He's an incredible human, kind human, brilliant human. They have a place here in Austin where they do a lot of the design. I don't know what else they do. And I'm sure they do a lot of stuff here, but I saw the design parts, which just it's great to see great engineering and a great mission-driven company. What else can I say? It's designed to be active in, extremely lightweight. I love the way it feels. I love the way it looks. It's classy, minimalist, or at least some of the glasses that I wear are minimalist,

• 4:21Lex Fridman?

  holds up in all conditions, super hot, super cold. I tried it in both. Check them out for both prescription glasses and sunglasses at roka.com and enter code Lex to save 20% on your first order. That's roka.com and enter code Lex.

• 4:38Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led in the past. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match that give you quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately. I don't think there's anything as important in life as the people you choose to surround yourself with. So that means your friends, that means your loved ones, if you're in a relationship. And if you draw a lot of meaning and you're passionate about your work, that means surrounding yourself with the right people that you work with.

• 5:22Lex Fridman?

  And so if you're in a position to actually hire those people, that's the same as choosing friends. You want to choose the right people to surround yourself with because they're going to be a source of meaning. They're going to be a source of happiness. This is not just productivity. Right now, get a free $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/lex. Get it at indeed.com/lex. Offer valid through April 30th. Terms and conditions apply. Go to indeed.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by MasterClass. 180 bucks a year get you an all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. The list is ridiculous. It's really fun to read, actually.

• 6:07Lex Fridman?

  The various subsets of that list. Chris Hadfield, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Will Wright, Carlos Santana, Garry Kasparov, Daniel Negrono, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese, Tony Hogg, Jane Goodall, and it keeps going on and on and on. I highly recommend you check it out. I think if you want to truly learn a topic, you definitely need to at least in part incorporate the masters. I believe that in a thing that you want to master yourself, you should at least once in your life, speak to the greats in that pursuit, in that discipline. A masterclass makes that easy for you. Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get 15% off an annual

• 6:51Lex Fridman?

  membership if you go to masterclass.com/lex. That's masterclass.com/lex for 15% off the annual membership, masterclass.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast and here is my conversation with Andrew Huberman.

• 7:25Lex Fridman?

  We meet again, my friend. We should talk on each other's podcast once a year. I think we should make a deal. I was just talking to the guys. There's a show called Louis. I don't know if you know it.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Louis CK?

• 7:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Louis CK. And there's this thing called Bang Bang, which people that are probably watching know exactly what I'm talking about. It's this worst possible thing you could do in terms of meals, which is you go to a restaurant, do a full meal, and then go to another restaurant and do a full meal. And you.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  That's brutal.

• 7:55Lex Fridman?

  So they go Mexican, Italian, sushi, pizza, barbecue, IHOP. That, that one is disgusting. This kind of thing reminds me of the joy of food.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Last time we were hanging out, we went, we went to see Joe do comedy and then we went to eat Russian food.

• 8:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And it was a particularly fun experience to go to a Russian restaurant. I was the only person there that didn't speak Russian.

• 8:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  And eat Russian food with you. And, um, cause I felt walking in, they, they trusted you. They didn't trust me.

• 8:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. The funny thing about the, the people there, they were talking to you in Russian and then they refused to sort of switch to English, even though they understood you speak no Russian. This is Russian house in Austin, by the way. Anyway, what, by way of question, what's the worst or the best, depending on your perspective, cheat meal? Let's call it a pigging out meal, but it could be a cheat meal that you've ever had or you want to have, that's like on the bucket list or something that's in the past, like where you did the, something like a Bang Bang, which is like, you're talking about multiple thousands of calories.

• 9:06Lex Fridman?

  That you just feel horrible about yourself, but you still keep eating because it's delicious, but also great company, something about the atmosphere is just right. Screw the diet, screw all the things, you know, I just like you should be doing, but just throw it all out the window.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  I've done that several times. Yeah, I don't do this anymore, but um, the entire time I was a postdoc, so five years and the entire time I was a pretenured professor. So five years, so I basically followed the uh, Tim Ferriss slow carb diet, which is, you know, people can look it up, but it worked really well. It was basically some, you know, like good animal proteins, you know, fish and meat and things like that.

• 9:47Lex Fridman?

  Why slow carb?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Because it's low carb because it's like low glycemic stuff is mostly lentils and beans and things and vegetables. No, no dairy, no um, anyway, but then one day.

• 9:57Lex Fridman?

  Pasta in there? Sorry to interrupt.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  No, no pasta. So it wasn't low carb, but it was low glycemic carb. And I did that and it worked terrifically well just for energy levels because I want to be able to train and work. And then one day a week, you're supposed to go full cheat day. And so I would do what used to be 12 hours, but then it became 24, you know, you start to redefine what the day is. Um, and I would, and that was when Costello was pretty young and we would do it together. So I would get pizzas and croissants and donuts and I would just do the full thing. And by the end of the day, you don't want to look at an item of food. You're just repulsed by food. The only modification I made was the next day I would fast completely just to avoid the gastric distress of eating anything.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And um, so I would do them on Sundays and then Mondays I'd fast all day. And then by Tuesday I felt pretty good again. But Sunday and Monday, or you just feel like you're sliding down the slope of just blood sugar disaster.

• 10:54Lex Fridman?

  Terrible idea or a good idea?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  You know, at the time I enjoyed it. I love donuts, croissants, all that kind of stuff. What's interesting is after stopping that whole protocol, now I just try and eat well each day. It's really a protocol. Now I basically, I do a pseudo intermittent fasting. I don't, I'm not really strict, but I'll start it eating around 11. Eat my first meal around 11. I usually train in the morning. Eat my last bite of food somewhere around eight or nine and I'm not super strict. I might have some berries or something late at night.

• 11:18Lex Fridman?

  Three meals, two meals?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Hmm, two, two, two meals and then maybe a little bit of snacking on some nuts or something in the middle.

• 11:25Lex Fridman?

  Ever fast 24 hours?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Never done a long fast, except when I was doing the two days and then um. And actually, there are a couple of different ways to do cheat days that were fun. Like if you were in a new city, you could try all the restaurants that you wanted. Yeah, and I think Tim and our mutual friend John Romanello did a, I think it was like a cheat day marathon where they did, you know, marathon's 26.3 miles. They went to 26.3 different locations in New York. They put it on a map. And I never took it to that extreme, but.

• 11:54Lex Fridman?

  Wait, wait, over how many days?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  One day. That was their cheat day. Just because they were, you know.

• 12:00Lex Fridman?

  Just a little bit of something at each place?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are things that guys do in their 30s that you just shouldn't do in your 40s. I can say that because I'm in my 40s. And now I just try and eat well most days. And what's interesting is about 12 to 14 months ago, I completely lost all appetite for sweets. I don't know what happened. I still love savory food, so meat and butter and cheese. And I love vegetables too. I love fruit also, but lost all appetite. So if you put a donut in front of me or ice cream or something like, I just, it's, it's almost aversive to me. And I don't know what happened. I don't know what changed.

• 12:33Lex Fridman?

  There's probably a scientific explanation.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:35Lex Fridman?

  It says to do maybe.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Neuron loss, dementia.

• 12:39Lex Fridman?

  The sugar, the, uh, the desire for that rush maybe is gone from your, uh, from your soul. So what was the most delicious thing? Is it croissant, donuts? What, what, is there a thing that, um?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  There's a place in Portland, I don't know if it's still open, called Little T's Bakery. And they have croissants that easily rival the croissants in Paris. People make a lot of the pastry in Paris, but it's really the bread in Paris that's amazing. We lived there when I was a kid and we did a sabbatical there. And you know, there they do the baguette morning bake and afternoon bake. And there's nothing like the bread in Paris, um, or the people, you know, and. But if you're in the, if you're in the Pacific Northwest, you know, you can find amazing croissants there.

• 13:22Lex Fridman?

  What do you do with the croissant? What do you do with the bread? Butter or is it just?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Actually, I don't eat them anymore. I don't have much of an appetite for them, even though they're not a sweet food. But, um, I'm always putting butter on the croissant. Butter on the butter croissant, no jam. I would never, I would never adulterate my croissant.

• 13:37Lex Fridman?

  I, I have to actually be honest about this because people talk about steak and they, they talk about bread with the butter. I feel like butter is cheating. I feel like you're disrespecting the fundamental food by adding butter. Because butter, it's like, it's like, it's like a elite version of ketchup.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Well, there we diverge because for me, bread is just a vehicle for butter.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  A cracker is just a vehicle for cheese.

• 14:06Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so that's just the cracker in the bread is just texture.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  It's just that people look at you funny if you if you just eat the butter straight, which occasionally I do.

• 14:13Lex Fridman?

  I got it.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  But so I put a little piece of bread underneath it, not because I'm low carb, strictly low carb, but just because otherwise you get some funny looks.

• 14:21Lex Fridman?

  Hmm, that's like pasta is a vehicle for pasta sauce. It's interesting, but like Indian non-bread, you have you have the bread. I've had a lot of soul searching on which part of Indian is brings me so much joy. Is it the bread or is it all the sauces that come with the bread?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Well, there we diverge again because for for whatever reason, and no disrespect to anyone, but Indian food doesn't appeal to me.

• 14:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, you're a lucky man because the the number of calories in that food, it sneaks like non-bread. I don't know how non-bread is made, but I think it's just soaked in oil and it just very intensely. Like the density of calories is very, very high. For me, barbecue, I would say is probably the.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  That's good. Anytime I'm in Austin, I start thinking about barbecue. I do love, you know, I do love meat. My dad's Argentine. I mean, I love steak. I love meat. I mean, Argentina chorizo sausage is an appetizer before you have steak.

• 15:21Lex Fridman?

  It's meat on top of meat.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  And it's not just, you know, it's not just the men, right? You see women, sometimes very petite women, eating steaks that are bigger than their their skull size. You know, slowly, they eat very slowly there and they all eat dessert too, which is interesting. And they generally do the sort of one meal per day and do that kind of real flexibly.

• 15:39Lex Fridman?

  That's how I think about it because I often eat one meal a day, especially when I'm traveling. It feels like a cheap meal because it allows it gives you a bit of more freedom. To just lose yourself in the quantity of the food. I did the three day fast and I ate chicken breast, like literally chicken breast and nothing else, just grilled. And it was the most delicious piece of meat I've ever eaten. And that, uh, and that gives you, the problem is when you fast for three days, you really can't pig out. You really shouldn't.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Well, your stomach will shrink in size already. Your gut microbiome is almost completely depleted by fasting. A lot of people think, oh, cleanses and fasts are great for the microbiome. They quash your microbiome. However, when you start eating again, the microbiome comes back better than it was before your fast.

• 16:22Lex Fridman?

  For people who don't know, Sergey and Todd are on the call. They're kind of pulling stuff up. They just pulled up Phelps with the, I forget how many calories he's eating, 10,000?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting. There's some, some cool physiology around this. The reason he needed to eat so much is not that he was burning that many calories in pure movement. It's that when you do exercise in water, even if it's warm water, the heat transfer in water is greater. So you burn far more calories. And again, here I'm admittedly lifting that from a knowledge that was passed on to me by Tim Ferriss. I didn't so, but I checked it out and it's absolutely true. So if you exercise in water, even if it's not really cold water, your caloric needs go way up, which is why you get out of the pool and you're often really hungry.

• 17:02Lex Fridman?

  And for fans of the Human Lab podcast, and if you're not a fan, what, what, what are you doing in your life? You would probably chuckle at the fact that Andrew just cited his sources even on that statement. Cause you're so good at, I don't know how your memory works, but um, the only person whose memory is better than Joe Rogan is yours.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  But my colleagues joke, um, you know, PubMed sort of scrolls through, through my, through my mind. Also in science, as you know, attribution is so baked into what we do. And um, and I think that it's interesting because now spending a lot of time on social media, attribution is not as common. And um, but in academia, you learn really early on that if you give a talk about your data and you cite all these amazing sources, all it does is. Make you look better, right? Whereas in social media and elsewhere in the business sector, it's almost like citing other people. People feel as if it's going to take away some of the credit. All it does is place you in the company of people that do really nice work. So I have tremendous, and I have genuine and tremendous respect for Tim.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  He's been about 10 years ahead on a huge number of health-related things and other things. Extremely kind person, very thoughtful person. So it's also just a pleasure to shine light on other people.

• 18:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, I actually, to push back, I know there's a culture of if you write a paper, standing on the shoulders of giants is a powerful thing. But there's also a culture of not giving credit to the strongest idea in your paper and instead say it's kind of, or imply that it's original. There is a culture of kind of not celebrating others. I think people get most competitive in all walks of life. But especially in science, when they're, the closer they get in exactly the thing they work on. And so there's this dance, you know, there's a few researchers in each of the individual little things that you work on. If you're studying a particular kind of ant, you know that other asshole

• 18:59Lex Fridman?

  that also is studying that particular ant. And then you're not going to often give credit for the brilliant ideas that that other researcher is doing. And I think one of the things you've discovered and just is part of your nature and which is why it's really great that you have an audience and you inspire others to do the same. You celebrate that other ant studier is great and you, everybody wins. It raises all boats. But that initial instinct to be like, what is it in Borat? Like my neighbor, my neighbor gets a toaster, I get a bigger toaster.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that mindset to, you know, it's not that I'm not competitive in certain domains. But yeah, I get great pleasure from sharing things that I find. And I think that, you know, at the end of the day, you're as strong as your community. And you can build a wonderful community just by pointing out things that you love. Like, these are all just loves. I see a paper and I love it. Only rarely do I think, oh, I wish we had done that. I usually think, fantastic, now I can just focus on something else because they checked off that box.

• 20:08Lex Fridman?

  And by the way, you mentioned PubMed and barbecue. I should mention that I got a chance to hang out with Rick Rubin, thanks to you. He's a friend of yours and you made the connection. That was a huge gift to my spirit, I guess. He's a truly, truly special human being. And there's a lot I could say about why he's a special human being. I'd love to learn how you met him. But I should also just mention on the PubMed thing, it was so interesting talking to him about music and both on the podcast and privately and just listening to music together. Because when you mention a song, he does this thing where he like closes his eyes and he finds that song in the album that we're talking

• 20:52Lex Fridman?

  about. And he steps through the album. You could see the brain like stepping through individual songs to find that song in the album. And there's that kind of lookup process. And then he puts himself mentally in that space of like, okay, this is, you know, whatever the album is, and not just the ones he produced, but all of it. He's an encyclopedia of of music. And it's so interesting. It also, the thing I really love about him is something like a calmness that radiates from him. That it's okay to close your eyes and place yourself in the in the place where that album was recorded, in the feeling of that album, like that that silence, let's go there. Let's go there together. It's like Alice in Wonderland.

• 21:37Lex Fridman?

  And we'll go there together.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  You do a good Rick Rubin, minus the beard.

• 21:40Lex Fridman?

  Minus the beard.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  His beard is epic, right? You can't fake a beard like that, you know?

• 21:45Lex Fridman?

  How'd you guys meet?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Rick, I'm very blessed to consider a close friend. Rick and I got introduced through a common friend during the pandemic. And we started doing some FaceTime together and just talking about things related to science and health. And I'm not a musician. I have no musical ability or talent. I have a good ability to memorize lyrics and I love lyrics and I love poetry. So I asked him a lot of questions about musicians that I happen to love that he's worked with and knows. And so he would give me stories about musicians and I would talk to him about health. And then eventually we formed a friendship where we would talk about any number of different topics in life. And then we started spending

• 22:26Speaker 01

  time together in person when he was in town or nearby. And as you now know, you know, Rick. In addition to all his incredible accomplishments, has an incredible understanding of how to get the brain and body into state, right? And as you pointed out, he's willing to do the things that allow him to help these incredible artists get into the best state to do their craft. And so if he needs to sit there and be quiet with his eyes closed for a minute or two and or more, he'll do that. He has routines to allow himself to get into state. And it's really inspired me to think about states of mind as something that, you know,

• 23:11Speaker 01

  we'd all love to just flip the switch and say, we're focused or we're creative, but to actually ratchet through the challenging steps in order to do that and to figure out what one needs to do on a regular basis to get into a proper state. It's not just going to come from a cup of coffee, you know, a lamp of a particular wavelength or something. It's going to be those things, but it's also going to be really teaching oneself how to get into proper state.

• 23:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you did an episode on hypnosis. Do you think it's a kind of self-hypnosis?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. Because hypnosis is a, you limit the context, you're very alert, and you're very calm. And he has a number of these different practices, and so we would talk about those. And then we also have enjoyed a lot of discussions about deep neuroscience. In fact, I introduced Rick to a friend of mine who's a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, and they've become friendly. You know, Rick is one of these people that he sort of defies definition, incredibly kind, incredibly private person too, so you know, I'm being respectful of that. But, and then of course, he's a fan of your podcast. And so when I learned that, I just made natural sense to introduce you. And I know he really enjoyed meeting you. And we talk about you a lot, and of course, in a positive light.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  You know, I think his dedication to getting into these states of mind and his willingness to do that has completely transformed my routines around life. Like, for instance, before doing a very long podcast recording, the solo ones, which often take me several hours or more, six hours to record, sometimes more, sometimes less, I realized that there's a certain brain state associated with that. So I have to really limit the kind of interactions I have for the two hours before. I actually walk and talk out loud through my neighborhood. People think I'm crazy, but I live in a neighborhood where there are a lot of crazy Creatives anyway.

• 25:00Lex Fridman?

  Saying you're not crazy?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Well, at least not institutionally defined as crazy yet. But you know, getting into state of mind is something that we'd all just imagine we'd flip the switch, but Rick really convinced me, you have to do the work to do the work.

• 25:16Lex Fridman?

  Can you maybe linger on that Lucy Day a little bit more, your process of how you get in that space? That's really interesting because I have to admit, I do everything last minute before podcasts. I don't know, like, there's a lot of anxiety because like, whatever, if I have to pack, if I have to set up stuff. You were luckily a few minutes, you showed up a few minutes later.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Which for an academic is right on.

• 25:41Lex Fridman?

  Right on time. But the stress is immense. And on top of that, you look at like a situation with Rick Rubin, I had to set up microphones in front of him. And just that stress, the anxiety.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  He knows a lot about microphones.

• 25:57Lex Fridman?

  What did he say, which I really loved? He's like, how close do you like the microphone to be?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  It's like. That's a very Rick Rubin kind of thing, right? That the details really matter.

• 26:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  The details really matter, right down to your relationship to the microphone, right?

• 26:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Distance and whether or not it brings out the timbre in your voice. But of course, this is what he does, he produces music.

• 26:21Lex Fridman?

  But he also said like, you know, he is the professional. He said, how close do you like it to be? And he said it with a gentleness where I had like an existential crisis, where I don't, I don't know. I, he gave me so much like, wow, like he made me feel like an artist, like that the microphone distance is a decision you're supposed to make.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Well, I have to say, and this has actually come up in some of our conversations about you, I mean, you are, you are an artist. And actually Joe Rogan. Once I heard him talking about podcasting and the fact that he's always trying to get better at it, you know, and he described podcasting at one moment as an art, right? And it is, it's a certain medium of communication and there's a cadence and a rhythm that when it's working, it really can facilitate the transfer of information. When it's not, it doesn't. I mean, obviously Joe just being himself has tapped into that cadence that allows, and it's made so many people excited to hear him talk.

• 27:21Lex Fridman?

  Well, in his case and in general, I think part of the art is refusing the world as you get a bigger audience, change who you are.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  There's one quote that I've seen out there where he says, you know, I'm like the, talking about himself, he says, you know, I'm like the fish that got through the net. There's no stage version of me, right? How he is in person is how he is, you know, out in the world. And of course, there's nuance to his life, right? And his different relationships, of course, but it's true. I mean, we've had the, you know, the great fortune of spending time with him out away from the microphones, so to speak. Joe is Joe.

• 27:56Lex Fridman?

  So can you speak to your, that process? You mentioned the walking and the talking to yourself, because that's fascinating.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I try and do a couple of things. First of all, I, when I was a kid, I had a little bit of a grunting tic. When I was five or six, I would feel this buildup of tension in my throat and I would do this grunting tic. If I get very tired, I start to do it still. We actually know that this is related to these basal ganglia circuits for go, no-go. You've got an accelerator or a brake, basically, in your neural circuitry. And kids with Tourette's and OCD, the brake doesn't work quite as well. And so one thing that happens is if I wake up in the morning and I'm, especially if I'm well rested, well, if I'm not well rested, I do a hypnosis or yoga nidra in order to recover my sleep. That works really well. But then, once I'm into the process of preparing the podcast,

• 28:46Speaker 01

  I've already gone through my notes. I know what I want to say more or less in a kind of general contour. And then I take a walk and I I try to so no phone with me and I try to assess whether or not my energy is too high or too low for podcasting. Because when you podcast, as you know, you have to punch out a lot of material, but then there's times when you really need to slow down and emphasize and articulate. And so what I do, this is I don't I've never revealed this. What I do actually is I will recite the lyrics of songs for about 10 minutes, songs I love while I walk out loud. It calms you and focuses you. What is the difference? I think it gets my vocal cords warmed up and it also Do you sing or speak them?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  I often sing them. And fortunately, nobody hears. And as I do this, I start to evaluate whether or not I'm straining to get the words out, or whether or not I'm straining to make them slow enough so that I can articulate them. So there are days when I have so much energy that I'm trying to speak faster than I should in order to articulate properly. There are other days when I'm tired and I can't sort of keep up with my thoughts. And so what I try and do is assess that and then adjust the transmission, the RPM, so to speak. For instance, I can speak very quickly and then I can slow down. So I can change the cadence of my voice. And when you teach in the classroom, you learn, as you know, because

• 30:12Speaker 01

  you're an excellent teacher, I've watched your lectures in the classroom, as you teach in the classroom, when you want to slow down, every teacher knows you turn to the whiteboard or chalkboard and you start writing, right? It gives you a break. And then you turn around and you fire back the kind of machine gun fire of of information. And then you slow down or you underline something. When you podcast, you don't have that opportunity, right? There are no visuals in my podcast. So what I try and do is always Get my voice warmed up and make sure that I'm thinking and speaking at approximately the same rate. And then I also do this thing of is I put my vision into panoramic vision when I walk, which is very calming. And then I actually start to remind myself of the purpose of podcasting.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  This sounds very mission statement-y, but you asked what I do. I remind myself first and foremost that what I want to communicate, what I want to come through is the beauty and utility of biology. And I only feel comfortable saying the word beauty publicly now about science things, thanks to you, because I think-

• 31:16Lex Fridman?

  Love and beauty.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:19Lex Fridman?

  Dr. Andrew Huberman.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Love and beauty, but also darkness and hatred. And if you're talking about the Lex Fridman podcast, you have to adjust, you have to address the shadow also, the shadow side. But I think about the, I want to communicate the, the beauty and utility of biology. And then I, I check my, my emotional state. I want to make sure that I'm not angry about anything. And certainly if I am, that I'm going to set it aside for the podcast, because that's not a place for, for my, whatever I might be dealing with. I also really start to feel into the parts of the research and the papers I found that I really love, because that's the part of me that I, I like the most, frankly. And on the podcast, if there's a paper, like for instance, we have a paper, excuse me,

• 32:06Speaker 01

  a podcast coming out soon about heat as a tool, you know, sauna, but some other things. And in researching this, I learned so much about these heat shock proteins and the use of sauna in Finland for increasing growth hormone, but also for the treatment of mental illness. And I realized I fell in love with this literature. It's just a beautiful literature. These people are true pioneers for doing this work. Now everyone's into sauna, but this was 20 years ago. The way the experiments were done were amazing with all these Finnish people with thermocouples up their rectum to measure temperature, swimming in pools. It's hilarious and great. And so I start to think about, and I think-

• 32:43Speaker 01

  You know, I just start to really access my love of the work. And then when we finally sit down, meaning my producer, Rob and I, and record, I just sort of want to just bask in, in sharing it. Just like the little version of me when I was six or seven, I used to spend all weekend reading the encyclopedia Guinness Book of World Records, making my mother drive me places to introduce me to, I had this obsession with trapping animals when I was a kid. Meet these people. And then on Monday, I would insist on giving a lecture in class as a little kid. So that's basically what it is. I just try and access that, that childlike energy. And so I want to be clear. The goal is always to make the information interesting, clear and actionable. And if it's also surprising, then there, then that's a bonus.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  But that's basically the process. But yeah, I'm, I'm singing and talking and, and getting into state. And I used to feel very sheepish about sharing any of this. This is the first time I've ever shared it out loud. But, but Rick was the one who encouraged me to find a process that works and continue to develop that process and not let anything get near that process. People in my personal life know this. And when it's time, it's like, I don't care what else is going on. I'm, I'm moving into that brain state.

• 33:56Lex Fridman?

  And there's probably a process like that for anything that you do in life that you take seriously. So the people that perfected this is athletes, like if Olympic level athletes, they have to have a process like this.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  No, but I think Tiger Woods actually was taught self-hypnosis quite young and used self-hypnosis often during his tournaments, sometimes to great success and other times less so.

• 34:20Lex Fridman?

  Is there other places in life that you use kind of a protocol, like a mental protocol to get ready?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Many of the best areas of life are their own form of hypnosis. Right?

• 34:34Lex Fridman?

  True.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  You know that you're in hypnosis if, for instance, you're in a movie and something happens and you feel the emotional lift without, without being self-conscious about it.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that um one thing that we've tried to do in our house is around mealtimes to try and set a state. That food isn't just something that we just throw down our our throats. And I'm fortunate that, you know, my partner cooks really well, and so I try and give her the space to do that. And that's a whole thing of her getting into state and then.

• 35:05Lex Fridman?

  For the cooking.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  For the cooking.

• 35:06Lex Fridman?

  Preparation of all.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  I can just see it. I just see the way she approaches the whole thing and the the pleasure in serving it and and I'm an eater, not a cooker.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  But.

• 35:15Lex Fridman?

  Both are important roles.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Both are.

• 35:17Lex Fridman?

  You could be a very good eater. Like there's something about, is there anything better in this world than that feeling, especially if it's a family, getting around a table? Just the warmth of that. I don't know, the it's like the cold outside of the cruel world cannot touch you in this place that you've returned to. And if, I mean.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Did you grow up eating meals as a family?

• 35:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  And you sit down, no television?

• 35:47Lex Fridman?

  Not well, I didn't really have television period uh outside of meals. So most of my time was spent, um, you know, like a stray cat outdoors, just running around, playing soccer.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  I imagine you in this like dirt or concrete lot between two very high rise buildings, playing soccer.

• 36:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  In uh in like athletic gear that you only see in Eastern Europe. You know how like you come to the States and people wear their athletic gear, you go to Europe and you see, maybe it's the soccer culture.

• 36:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  But you see athletic gear that you just don't see anywhere else.

• 36:23Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting. I mean, I grew up pretty poor, so first of all, I was always wearing my brother's, who's an older brother, brother's clothes. Uh, and they were like old.

• 36:36Lex Fridman?

  Uh, like the, my favorite things were American things that I didn't understand. It would be like a Pepsi shirt or something. And it was just, that was the gear and it was like too large for me, but I thought I was the coolest person ever, just wearing this fancy like Kanye like type of fashion.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something about, I feel like in, in Eastern Europe, they wear athletic gear where like the guys like zip up.

• 36:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that, no, that's like fancy stuff. That's if you like, those are the cool kids.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  I see.

• 37:05Lex Fridman?

  Like the cool soccer players, football players that, uh, like they were in a league of some kind. So they would get uniforms or like, or they somehow, I always thought anyone who had anything nice had to do something really bad to get it. That, that was my way, view of the world because like, um, like I, I guess I didn't understand how it's, it's possible to be rich because most of us were surrounded by people who are poor and that life was beautiful and simple. And it's like, why do you escape that life? But you still admire the, the cool, like, uh, when we got McDonald's, it was like, what kind of world does this place come from?

• 37:49Lex Fridman?

  Like who invented this? This is a fascinating view from a child's perspective of like, of capitalism.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  But, but the fact that you ate dinner together is really interesting. Uh, my parents divorced when I was an adolescent, so then there was a total fracture of any family structure, but prior to that, we ate dinner together every night. I was expected to know how to use my knife and fork and you know, it was like a very structured thing. Uh, I don't know if kids do that now. Um, you know, if I ever have kids, they're going to do that. And certainly, um, actually on the way over here, I was thinking, I was like, you know, uh, I really want a lot of kids. I want like a whole litter. And, um, I was thinking, if Lex has kids and I have kids, then like, then we can, we can like pit them against each other with jujitsu.

• 38:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  This is my chance at redemption.

• 38:38Lex Fridman?

  The long game.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Right? They'll all want to be engineers or physicists.

• 38:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Um, they won't want to be biologists. Um, but it, but in all seriousness, I, I look forward to the day that our, our kids, uh, play together.

• 38:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think there's something, so the family dinner, the ritual of the family dinner, like, but also the special occasion dinners, like, where there's a little bit more preparation, a little bit more cooking, whether it's on the weekend or for some holiday. In Russia, it was a thing that actually I find completely missing, for the most part, in America, is there was neighbors. There was a, you broke the walls between families much more commonly. Like, there would be kind of regular characters, like a sitcom almost. You know, if you watch a sitcom, it's never just the family. There's always like other characters that-

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Just bursting in the door.

• 39:29Lex Fridman?

  Bursting in the door.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  I'm gonna start doing that here, just to make you feel at home. I just start showing up in your studio. I know where you live.

• 39:35Lex Fridman?

  I think people want to respect, like, you know, Michael Malice lives next door to me, and I think people want to respect each other's privacy or something like that. And I think we all get super busy and, you know, like, it's kind of work to do this dinner together, or, you know, if you see it as a thing that needs to be scheduled, it's work. We get busy, there's a lot of stuff going on, but if it's part of a ritual, a part of the culture, that all of those walls get broken down, and then you realize, like, that's, like, later, looking back, those are the things you miss. Like, that's what, that's what life is about. Like, all the stupid stuff you're doing in terms of career

• 40:16Lex Fridman?

  or whatever, all the busy things, those don't matter. What matters is the people.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, in academia, you know, this changed in the last few years, of course, but one of the great joys was professors will stop by your office or your lab. Nobody set up an appointment. There was a guy, when I was a professor in San Diego, a guy named Harvey Carton, he's a member of the National Academy, he's the, truly the world's expert in the evolution of vision and evolution of brains generally. And he would show up in my lab, and he would just start talking to the students in postdocs. And- I mean, in a pure encyclopedia, and then you'd at some point, you'd say, hey, Harvey, I gotta go and you'd you'd kick him out, right? Or this guy, he's a physicist, David Kleinfeld, who's the same way. Actually, David Kleinfeld is an interesting one. He, a student of his,

• 41:03Speaker 01

  went on to create the Beavis and Butthead cartoon. And one of them is David. He's a physics professor. Now, people can look him up. And David's one of those guys who's just walking into your office, he just sit down, he just start talking to you. And so there's a kind of a family feel. It's like Cheers, or Seinfeld, or one of those shows where somebody just walks in. And yeah, I think you and I both share a love of the community around things. And podcasting is a little bit more isolated. I should say for the guest episodes, the preparation is completely different because it's more conversational. And so there, I don't do any of this business of putting myself into state. I just try and make sure that the guest is taken care of. And I do list out the questions I'm going to ask before, but those, I actually really like the interview episodes far more than I like doing the solo ones.

• 41:47Lex Fridman?

  Just psychologically, you mean?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I just like learning from someone directly.

• 41:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Because you asking an expert about something, like sitting here with you when we recorded the podcast where you were a guest on the Huberman Lab podcast, and for the first time, and finally, someone was explaining to me the difference between machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all these other things. You know, and I'm, I've finally forgiven you for making me cry about Costello on camera, but because it helped me move through it. But, but in all seriousness, the interview ones are are a sheer pleasure. The solo ones, I really enjoy, but they're, they're, they're work. Sometimes I think like I'm going to sweat a little blood prepping for them.

• 42:25Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's interesting because I do think prepping for interviews is, having a similar process might be also very valuable. Like, I have to, I have to think about that because

• 42:38Lex Fridman?

  I think when you do a conversation for several hours. Especially when it's a high stakes one. So it's not like you and I know, it's more like it's just chatting and so on.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  The world order isn't going to shift according to it. Although you never know.

• 42:50Lex Fridman?

  We never know.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Knowing you will probably be into some pretty controversial topics in a few minutes.

• 42:55Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  You like to ride the edge more than I do. There are a number of topics that I just completely avoid. And my response to those is always that I have a lot of opinions about that, but not a lot to say. You know, but whereas you you've become far braver in terms of the topics you'll encounter. And some of your guests have been a bit controversial, right? Some of them are are people that not a lot of that a lot of people don't like. Um, and you you've been willing to just sit down and maybe it's the jujitsu thing, you know?

• 43:25Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. It is tricky. One of my goals for this year is to talk to people that a lot of people really don't like.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Are you going to share with us? And here I am.

• 43:38Lex Fridman?

  What people that are in prison.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:41Lex Fridman?

  Major political leaders. I've been thinking a lot about how to talk to really difficult, controversial figures, but find together something with them that's deeply honest about their nature, about the ideas they have about the world, like reveal something real. And some people, you have to be very careful. Some people are very good at hiding the real inside them, even from themselves. That's something I think about a lot. I think about dictators of the past and I put myself in the mindset, well, how do you reveal something real about this person to themselves?

• 44:24Lex Fridman?

  I think that to me, and you kind of spoke to that, but

• 44:30Lex Fridman?

  a great conversation is when one where both of you discover something new. Like, it's not just, so I love that too. That's my favorite thing, what you mentioned, which is allowing your curiosity, ask all kinds of questions and get excited and to learn from an expert, but also to push them to discover something about themselves, about their ideas together. And then that discovery, and sometimes it's a like, we don't see it in the moment, but the audience hears it. It's weird to say, like, I would compare it to when you're a musician and you're playing with other musicians. You lose yourself in the moment. Yeah, it's all, it's like, it's working right. It's working, but you don't really

• 45:17Lex Fridman?

  see the big picture impact of what it's working right actually feels like. And that's where the audience can could see that. Like, if you talk to somebody evil,

• 45:31Lex Fridman?

  you know, for me, as an interviewer, I have to empathize with that person. If I want to understand, I have to put myself in that mind space and to put yourself in that mindset, you really have to become that, you have to, you have to understand the evil inside of you. Like, you have, you can't just think if somebody's in power and has used that power to abuse others. You can't just be a, well, I personally, a person who seeks to understand, you can't just be a journalist asking generic questions. You have to put yourself in a, in a place where you're somebody who's given a lot of power. And slowly you start to abuse that power. And what has that person become? Who are you?

• 46:13Lex Fridman?

  I have to plug myself into those moments in my life in the past where I've been angry at something. And where I've been cruel because I was angry in little ways. But then you magnify them at scale and I have to, I have to go there and that's very human. And then I have to look at another person from across the table from me and understand, well, you're there too. And then you had more opportunity to do truly cruel things. And, and then, um, and then where, like, I have to plug myself into places where I've been, or can imagine I can go, where I was cruel to others and was unaware of it. So I was in a mind space where I was thinking that I'm doing good and I was doing not good.

• 46:57Lex Fridman?

  Again, I've never gotten the opportunity to do any of those things at a large scale. But all of us have done it at a small scale. And I plug myself into that. And then we're, we're here, we're too, if it's somebody who's in prison, if it's somebody who's a dictator, we're in that space where evil is, is, all of us have the capacity to do that evil and I have to imagine myself being able to do that evil. And then we're here together in that dark, dark place. And then if it's just right, something real can actually come. Something from that person's childhood, a maybe awakening to a realization that I thought I was a good person and I'm not.

• 47:40Lex Fridman?

  And for that only happens when you truly empathize. Those moments of discovery are beautiful, but they also happen in science. We just have a conversation and you realize, I feel like talking to Stephen Wolfram. I feel like we constantly realize beautiful things together.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  On this element of, you know, evil and sociopathy that, you know, Jung had this notion that we have all things inside us. And that we all have the capacity to be good or evil, et cetera. But I have the good fortune of working with somebody who has deep understanding of psychiatry, but also psychoanalysis and Jungian theory. And, and he said to me recently, he said, you know, whether or not all people have all things inside them is still debated in the psychology community and in the neuroscience community. And as a matter of philosophy, but there are certain people, not many, but there are certain people

• 48:39Speaker 01

  for whom they've actually lived out many versions of their possible selves in the first person. And so those are unique individuals. Then even if they tapped into these things that, as you mentioned, as a, at a more minor level, as opposed to impacting people negatively at a, at a, at scale. So being able to access those different parts of oneself is, is key. And you've been willing to step into that, you know, my podcast is not one in which we, we get down to those matters.

• 49:06Lex Fridman?

  Yet, yet.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  You never know, we might do an episode on, on narcissism and sociopathy. The other thing that I took away from a conversation with a friend, he was a, did a lot of years in special operations in the intelligence community. He said, you know, it's, if you look at somebody's past. At some point, you will come to understand some pretty good reasons as to why they became who they are. But you have to draw the, his words, the red line someplace. And what he was referring to was the fact that certain people, at least in the eyes of certain communities, deserve to be eliminated as a consequence of their actions, right? Regardless of what drove them to those actions. So it gets right down to the line between nature, nurture,

• 49:49Speaker 01

  neuroscience, and the law and justice. Complicated, complicated themes. I can think of a number of people that I would love to hear you interview. And here I'm not revealing the reasons why, but except for the fact that I think you would be uniquely suited to bring out the important components of the conversation that other people have not been able to do, which, for instance, Liz Holmes. This is one of the most mysterious and yet disliked people on the planet. She's sort of synonymous with deception. I don't know if there have been any real interviews of her since the whole thing. I haven't followed that case.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I listened to the book and I followed it a little bit because it was happening in my hometown, right? Theranos was right up the road. The building's still there. It's interesting. It's some of the most premier real estate in Silicon Valley, but nobody wants it. It's very hard to sell a home where somebody committed suicide or committed a murder, even if it's a beautiful home. I sort of feel like the Theranos building is that building. So that would be a really interesting interview. I would love to hear that interview.

• 50:59Lex Fridman?

  One of the most interesting, dark human beings in science.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then there will even be people that say, you know, was it even science, right? It might have all been deception. It might have been one part deception, one part goal setting, mixed in with, clearly that there were- So many factors impacting what happened. I think the big difference between Theranos and that story and some of the other stories about Silicon Valley where people promised a lot more than they could deliver is they were promising things that were directly related to health and healthcare. People were taking blood tests with the understanding that the data they were getting was important, the information about sexually transmitted diseases and other diseases and making real world decisions on the basis of that. Whereas if you remember when the iPhone first came out and Steve Jobs was still alive and

• 51:48Speaker 01

  the phones were dropping calls if you held it in a particular way. And his response was a little flip. He said, it's, hey, folks, it's a phone, as if like, don't get so worked up. But people held him understandably to a very high standard. You know, she would sort of, it seemed, and I don't know, because I certainly wasn't there, seemed like she sort of adopted this idea that you could get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right, except if the allegations are true. And I think they, she was found guilty, I believe, on a number of counts, that a number of the things that they were doing were impacting real world decision making. So Steve's point about the phone, it's just a phone. Well, it depends on the call. If you're calling 911, then it's not just a phone, right? But in the case of blood tests and disease, you know, that's, that's serious.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  I think that the Theranos case was super interesting to me because of the number of people from major universities and from government that both trusted her and the number of people who did not trust her and yet either didn't speak up or no one listened to them. It was only in the forensic version of it that everyone said, oh, yeah, I knew that she was lying, et cetera, et cetera. They were lying. There are multiple people involved in those lies, apparently. But I have a deep interest in the neuroscience of narcissism, sociopathy and some of the darker aspects of the mind. So, yeah, maybe someday, maybe we'll do a podcast together. It can be like in the, in the, in the kind of early 90s version of talk shows where we darken the lights and we, we do it together. You can use your voice because your voice is much more sinister sounding than mine.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Good cop, bad cop.

• 53:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, it'd be interesting from a scientific perspective of somebody who is a sociopath or a psychopath, how to reveal something real about them. I think.

• 53:32Lex Fridman?

  That requires not just, well, I don't know what that requires. It requires the same skill that it takes to be a good therapist.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Right, and some therapists won't work with sociopaths because they don't feel any progress can be made. Some therapists will work with sociopaths because for the wealthy ones, they often, they want their money. I think most therapists are good and benevolent, but there's some that will do it, just the same way lawyers will work with criminals, knowing they're criminals, right? Oftentimes because they're criminals. There are certain domains of psychiatry that are more tractable than others, right? Borderlines are interesting, as you just mentioned, because they have this phenomenon of splitting. So in the, in the world of psychology, the idea is that being neurotic is actually the goal. The idea that you could be, you know, feel something and then work a lot to overcome it,

• 54:24Speaker 01

  or have some sort of defense mechanism in place, but that's not destructive. That's actually a pretty healthy state to be in, provided it's not destructive. Psychotic is truly delusional thinking about reality. And the idea is that borderline split, intermittently split between psychotic and neurotic. That's why it's called, there's beautiful work by Melanie Klein that describes this, which I'm just now kind of delving into. But, you know, so the borderline is the person who is like, I love you, I love you, I love you, and then truly feels as if they hate you and you become the bad object. Borderlines are challenging for psychologists because of the splitting, right?

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Schizophrenics are challenging because of the detachment from reality. And narcissists are challenging because they're often so charming that even the therapists are charmed.

• 55:19Lex Fridman?

  I believe you mentioned Carl Deseroff, we'll talk-

• 55:22Speaker 01

  He was definitely not a narcissist. He's one of the more humble people, but he is brilliant.

• 55:25Lex Fridman?

  Thanks again to you. You've connected us. I had the pleasure of having a conversation with him. You had a conversation with him. I really enjoyed it on the podcast. You guys come from the same science, from the same place, maybe different journeys, fascinating-

• 55:40Speaker 01

  End levels. We were post-docs together. Carl is truly- The Michael Jordan, the Wayne Gretzky, five children, amazing marriage, also an amazing scientist. His wife, Michelle Monji, is in our neurology department at Stanford, incredible thinker, writer, very kind person, humble. Speaking of getting into state, sorry, Carl, I'm going to out you on this, but Carl, despite being at the highest levels of science and engineering and a practicing psychiatrist, his office is literally a coat closet with a small table lamp. When you meet with Carl, if you manage to meet with him, because he's very hard to get

• 56:20Speaker 01

  to, you walk in, you sit down as if you're going through some interrogation in some spy novel, and he'll ask you, what are you most excited about lately? And I've got 11 minutes or something. And that's a meeting with Carl, because he's that busy. But he doesn't have the office with the pictures of the kids and the thing and all that. All that is kept elsewhere. So in order to get, I asked him, why do you work in this office? You work on light and channels of light, things relate to light of all things. Here you are in this dark room. And he said, well, this is what gets me into the state of mind to be able to do what I want to do. Very Rick Rubin-ish, not at all the same person, but very similar in that he's figured out the physical space he needs in order to get into the optimal state to do the work he needs to do in this lifetime.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And it's very unusual, right? If I don't have a window, I kind of freak out. I can do it here for a while. We're in this black cube here, floating in space, of course. But I find that amazing that these people that are operating at this super high level are willing to actually deprive themselves of a lot of conditions. They're not sitting there with the secretary coming in, offering them espresso every five minutes and things like that. No, no, no. That's New York neuroscience. I'm picking, the New York neuroscience mafia is kind of famous for having all the, you know, tickets to the opera and this and that, and they enjoy lifestyle a lot.

• 57:39Lex Fridman?

  The New York neuroscience mafia.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Oh, there is one. There definitely is one. They know who they are. They know who they are.

• 57:44Lex Fridman?

  For people who don't know, Andrew Huberman is from the West Coast, and now he's just starting wars with the neuroscience mafia.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Well, they do amazing science. They think, they love their lifestyle, and that's wonderful, but the culture is very different. Carl, and I think Silicon Valley in general, kind of prides itself on this kind of Monk like it says, Sisum, right?

• 58:05Lex Fridman?

  But at the individual scale, be deliberate about controlling the environment. I think about that with the conversations too. I haven't been deliberate about that either in terms of controlling the space you're in. Visually, yes, black curtains, all those kinds of things.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  There is nothing like the Lex Fridman podcast studio. First of all, when you, when you do them remotely, I always feel like I'm in a witness relocation program. You only get the coordinates at the last moment.

• 58:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  And you always get the sense that there are people behind the walls that, um, you know, are recording things.

• 58:39Lex Fridman?

  Well, there, there's something about creating a feeling. I have a sense that there's a robot over there. There's, there's several throughout this place. And I, I think, I think part of that, part of creating a feeling would be having the robots constantly moving around and having a mind of their own. Because that would most closely put guests and other humans they interact with into a place that's closest to my mind, because it's such an engineering mind. And it's, and one where when things come to life, it's a beautiful place to be. And whatever that is, that could be like art, but to me, robots are art.

• 59:22Lex Fridman?

  And so I'm thinking about that both for me and for guests. And, and I'm also thinking about the difficult guests, just to return to, you said Elizabeth Holmes, the one person, maybe a couple of things I want to say, so one person I've been, I think I would like to talk to is Ghislaine Maxwell.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  I always get afraid right before you reveal these kinds of things. And now I know why I get afraid. Yeah, I mean, again, assuming that she did the things that people claim she did, they're despicable, right? I mean, these were underage children, right? There's just no version of the story where she did the things she was accused of doing and is still a quote unquote, good person. There's just, in my mind, right? And yet I think there is tremendous interest in understanding, like what led her to do all that.

• 1:00:15Lex Fridman?

  So.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  At least for some people.

• 1:00:16Lex Fridman?

  Let me say a couple of things. So one is at a high level, let me say that she believes, or her current story is, is that she's the victim.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Of who?

• 1:00:29Lex Fridman?

  Of Jeffrey Epstein.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Oh, my.

• 1:00:32Lex Fridman?

  I think I'll just leave that there as it is. So this is, these are ideas that you're facing. The nature of truth and the nature of the human mind is what it is. And this is, imagine, folks, if you went into a room with a person that says that, what do you do next? Let me also say that I never, or rarely, let me not say never. I rarely mention names that I'm interested in talking to without having made significant progress in already securing that interview.

• 1:01:12Lex Fridman?

  So people sometimes ask me about Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. I do not bring them up lightly in terms of there's, in terms of there being a path to an actual conversation. That said, something I regret, but I'm not sure I know what to do with it. But in the case of all the people I just mentioned, I haven't been preparing for those conversations. I only start really preparing seriously when it's confirmed because it's such a heavy burden. And one of the things I regret in having mentioned a conversation with Vladimir Putin

• 1:01:56Lex Fridman?

  before the war in Ukraine broke out in the past few years is that I would mention it very loosely, very casually, and without having really deeply put myself into a place that I'm ready to talk to him. And that, that's a tricky thing because then the internet, the, the audience in general, and just me, when I listen back to my dumb self, think, well, why are you speaking so lightly about these topics?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Well, I know you've had a longstanding interest in. Talking to him, I think now, you know, uh, well, I don't understand um how I would sit down and have a conversation with somebody like that, but that's not in in the range of my skill sets. Right? I

• 1:02:45Lex Fridman?

  Or like, uh, maybe not in the range of things that you're drawn to somehow.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Not so much. I mean, I would watch that episode with with great interest. Um, well, you did an episode recently with this guy who was a uh former cybercriminal turned stateside, right? I think he works for the government now. And there was a segment in there. Um, remind me his name?

• 1:03:07Lex Fridman?

  Brett Johnson.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Brett Johnson. There was a segment in there where he talked about stealing a lifetime's worth of collected coins from some elderly woman. And this was everything she had. And then he openly admitted that he felt no remorse, which is the way he described is purely sociopathic. And then, of course, we learned that he grew up in a family where criminal behavior was very common. It was kind of embedded into his notions of what typical behaviors were. And I found myself somewhat conflicted, but also hung up, you know, hung up on this idea that, you know, I mean, he was, you know, he had behaved as a sociopath um or in a sociopathic way. And it

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  created a an internal conflict because he's a quite charming guest and his stories are terrific. Um, especially I really enjoyed his discussions about how he would go out and um do all these things out of a desire to please his his girlfriend, you know? So he was in service to other people despite being a sociopath. He could say he was in service to them as a way to extract. Gets very complicated. I think is the reason I went into science is that it at some level, it's more about facts than it is opinions and judgments. And I don't know that I have the ability to suspend judgment over the uh away from the kind of top level contours of my initial reaction to like, if it's true, like the Ghislaine Maxwells and the Liz Holmes

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  and the other sociopaths is one of just kind of revulsion and repulsion. But that could also reflect the fact that I'm not as, you know? Neurologically sophisticated as somebody that can spin all the plates of empathy, forgive forgiveness, but also holding people accountable at the same time. That's that's work. That takes, if you think about it, that's three, four brain circuits having to work in parallel. That's the difference between chess or a game of Go and a game of checkers. I guess I'm playing checkers and you're playing chess.

• 1:05:05Lex Fridman?

  No, so one is actually holding in your mind and two is the raw skill of conversation. You're you're very, just having listened to your interviews, you're very good at conversation. But the skill of conversation is really tricky. I'm not being self deprecating. I'm being just objective. I'm not good at conversation. I'm working very hard, getting better at it. I'm speaking not about just podcasting. I'm speaking just normal life. I have anxiety from social interaction.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Do you really?

• 1:05:41Lex Fridman?

  A huge amount, yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  So this is interesting because I never detect that in you, ever. And I think there are people that we both know that have said to me that they too feel anxious and yet your voice is steady. I don't see any perspiration.

• 1:06:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  You appear incredibly calm.

• 1:06:03Lex Fridman?

  Scared shitless. I was scared shitless with Rick Rubin.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Rick Rubin is, when you first meet him, is intimidatingly calm. But as you get to know him a bit, you realize that his, the kindness and the generosity that you sense is real. But yeah, I would never in a million years have guessed that you get anxious in conversation.

• 1:06:26Lex Fridman?

  Can I just make another quick comment? This may come off entertaining to you, Andrew. Maybe you've already gotten the same. But having mentioned Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Zelensky, Ghislaine Maxwell, there is a natural question. How does Lex?

• 1:06:50Lex Fridman?

  Have access to these people. Who does he work for? Like, how is he?

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Or who works for him?

• 1:06:58Lex Fridman?

  Who works for him?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:00Lex Fridman?

  What does he have on others? This, I'm actually, I ask my, when I look in the mirror, just somebody who kind of enjoys conspiracy theories, I want to ask the same question, like, well, I usually ask in the following way, like, how the fuck am I so lucky? Like, who am I be, am I a robot being controlled by somebody else? Or like, how is this, how is this my life right now? What is happening? It really does feel like a simulation. So let me just speak to several things. First of all, I have no boss. I know, I know of, nor am I controlled by any intelligence agencies of any nation.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  We're gonna get you a dog, Lex.

• 1:07:44Lex Fridman?

  So I could talk to. I'm scared of getting a dog because I would fall in love so deeply, I think, that.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Next time, I'm bringing a puppy. I'm just gonna bring a puppy and I'm gonna leave it here.

• 1:07:55Lex Fridman?

  Man, and then you'll never see me again. I mean, I love dogs so much, but the, I was also surprised and maybe, I have never talked to an intelligence agency, which is very interesting to me. Like, I.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  That you're aware of? Because they're very good at communicating with people.

• 1:08:17Lex Fridman?

  Right, but I've been very suspicious on this exact point. That's the downside of kind of being an introvert, having anxiety about social interaction, but then having so much love thrown your way because we connect over podcasts. Podcasts have a powerful way of connecting people. So people come with you with love that I really love, I appreciate, but I wonder, like, exactly this question, like, like, why is this person with a Russian accent talking to me and showing me so much love?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Well, because, sorry to interrupt you again, but it's what we do. And it's a sign of interest, by the way, sometimes. Sometimes, yeah, I have a colleague at Stanford and she said, you know, interruption, 75% of the time is a sign of real interest in what the person is saying, if nothing else. Well. You're very lovable.

• 1:09:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, that, that, but.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I learned about Hedgehog in the Fog from you. You know, when I learned, you know, you're very lovable. People love you because you're lovable.

• 1:09:19Lex Fridman?

  I love love. Okay. So 100% and it's, I mean, especially here in Austin, Texas, people are so, so amazing. I go just hugs and just, ah, I love people, but.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Do you want a family? Are you a?

• 1:09:30Lex Fridman?

  100%. I mean, you're, I take, I take what you said as a challenge. Uh, in terms of having a family with kids and they do jujitsu and obviously defeat you and, and make you, um, miserable for your failures as a father because you couldn't, uh.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  But you can be a great dad.

• 1:09:50Lex Fridman?

  Build up an army of good jujitsu people. But yes, I, I would love a family. I would love to have, uh, children, but I just want to finish that point because I'm nervous about it. I'm nervous about the way people perceive. What you're seeing is a Forrest Gump type character, like what, who I am, I, I seem to be, and this is how like the world seems to work. Is you just try, you try to be yourself, like you try to find yourself, maybe the better way to say it, and just be that.

• 1:10:20Lex Fridman?

  Be kind to people, work your ass off and say F you to anybody that wants to control you or to tell you what to do. Just be free and then put love out there in the world and doors open. This karma thing seems to work. Uh, something like, how the hell did, how the hell, my friends, you know? How the hell did I get a chance to eat barbecue with Rick Rubin? Right? Like.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  You guys had barbecue?

• 1:10:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I had barbecue. Uh, he, uh, you're right.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  He's, he's from New York. Any New Yorker that I know has very high standards for food because bad restaurants don't last long in New York.

• 1:10:58Lex Fridman?

  And barbecue counts as.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. Texas barbecue.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I would also add that you, whether or not you realize it or not, you took tremendous risk. I mean, we come from the same original community, which is academic science, right? And to be at MIT and to start posting lectures online is risky, right? To, you know, I was third or fourth man in on, in terms of podcasting as an academic because you had gone on Rogan many times, David Sinclair had gone on there, you know, the. Especially before the pandemic, you just didn't see many academics and scientists talking in a public facing way. So you took tremendous risk, right? You took tremendous risk, always wearing that jacket and tie, right? The only time I haven't seen you in that truly is when

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  we rolled jujitsu, which is, and I hear I'm being generous to myself, saying I rolled jujitsu, where basically you choked me out in front of hundreds of thousands.

• 1:11:50Lex Fridman?

  That was really, really.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  It was, uh, it was, uh, it was great fun and I, I.

• 1:11:55Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for doing that. To have a beginner's mind is a beautiful thing.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  I have, admittedly, I have not been taking the classes, but I'm going to, I truly am. Especially, there's a small chance I might find myself in Austin a bit more often in the, in the near future. But the.

• 1:12:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, if you're out in San Francisco, you should train with Mark Zuckerberg. He just started, so.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:12:14Lex Fridman?

  You guys could.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:12:18Lex Fridman?

  I mean, he's actually, uh, so many people listen to an episode, perhaps he's a fascinating human being.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  I listened to it. It was great. You took tremendous risk as an academic to do what you did. So I do believe that when one takes intelligent risk, because you can die, you can crash your career, you can do all sorts of self-destructive or destructive things when taking risks. You took risks and they paid off, right? And you take different risks at different stages, but I, I don't throw around the word admiration lightly. I mean, I admire that you were in this classroom and in my team, like, I'm going to film this and put it online. Uh, you, one of your early interviews is with Ido Portal, who's very hard to get to. I've communicated with Ido a few times.

• 1:13:00Lex Fridman?

  You should definitely talk to him.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  I can't wait to talk to him. I'm dying to talk to him. I was supposed to do some course teaching with him, uh, right before the pandemic hit and then it got canceled because he couldn't travel. But getting to him is exceedingly challenging. So you do have this incredible ability to get to people and for them to trust you and know you. And I think it's through your authenticity. And I think it's the fact that you're willing to go places where people haven't been before. You know, this is, what's the saying about pioneers? How do you spot the pioneers? They're the people with the arrows in their backs. You know, so that's the, you know, yeah. And, and that's actually a quote that I lifted from Terry Signowski, who's a.

• 1:13:39Lex Fridman?

  There you go.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:13:40Lex Fridman?

  Sources again.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Terry's, you should talk to Terry. He's a, um, uh, computational neuroscientist down at the Salk Institute, uh, Howard Hughes investigator, et cetera. But, so, you know, taking risks that other people have not taken is. That's a real thing. And to do it with integrity and rigor, that's a real thing. And so, yeah, I'm complimenting you and I hope it lands and lands deeply. But I also hope that people will hear that and understand that it's one thing to do what other people are already doing boldly. It's a whole other thing to launch an entire art form or venue. And you did that. And you didn't write a book. Hopefully you will someday, but you didn't go write a book. A lot of academics have written books.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  You went online. Jordan Peterson, another controversial character. He did it too. All those lectures that he filmed. And then it's led to this other thing. So, you know, there's karma and then there's also having the spine to just put it all on the line and do something for which there is no prior example to hold on to while you go through those headwinds.

• 1:14:52Lex Fridman?

  The really fascinating thing, and actually a lot of people tell me about you, Andrew Huberman, like the reach of a podcast is really fascinating. It's not the, it's not the numbers of people listen. I don't know if that's important at all. Is, what's important is like the depth of connection you have with certain people. It really moves them. Like a great, and like they really get you. So there's a lot of big Andrew Huberman fans that really get you. It's not just the science. It's the stuff between the lines. It's Costello. It's the whole picture of a scientist that finds beauty in biology and reveals it. And they love you for it.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  You know, because it was on television at the time, I followed that Amanda Knox story pretty carefully. And I don't watch television, but whenever I would travel, if there was a TV on the airplane, I would find myself getting wrapped into things like locked up abroad. Like, and these things where they, which would make you terrified to travel anywhere, let alone commit a crime overseas. You know, the, the scenes of some of these prisons are so dramatic. And you know, I mean, her case got a ton of interest. And then I, you know, she went and then was a student at the University of Washington and has talked quite openly about, you know, how she was treated and how people assume guilt and, you know, and eventually, you know, she was exonerated and, you know, we can only go by what we know with the law determined.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  But, you know, these are people that. The world is fascinated by, I would, I'm guessing about a third of people have already decided, this person is despicable. Why would you ever give them an audience? About a third of people, I think, are open to, or at least interested in learning more about them. And then I think the remaining third, kind of the third that, the category that I put myself in, which is, what can I learn about people and myself, even in my revulsion? Right? What can I learn?

• 1:16:51Lex Fridman?

  About myself?

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. What can I learn about myself from listening to this conversation with somebody that I, that I like to think, I'm not talking about Amanda here, I'm talking about the other people that you're talking about, that I, I don't, I can't relate to, right? Talk, hearing conversations with and about people that you cannot relate to is informative. Otherwise, your whole mind literally becomes insular, right?

• 1:17:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's an interesting thing I also had to, um, ever since the war in Ukraine broke out, one of the questions I was asking myself, uh, and this is not to be dramatic. It's just a very simple, honest question that I think a lot of journalists that operate in the war zone or documentary filmmakers that I've recently got a chance to meet, have to be honest with themselves. Are you willing to put at risk your life for things you do?

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  What are you willing to die for?

• 1:17:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What are you willing to die for? It sounds very dramatic. But whenever risk goes up, um, I mean, I don't know. You, you asked that if you want to take out a, a trip out to space on a commercial space flight. You have to, are you willing, are you willing to die for this, for this journey? Now, the odds there are really small.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  I just watched Apollo 13 again.

• 1:18:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Great movie.

• 1:18:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, great.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  I'm not going to space.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  I'm not going to space.

• 1:18:15Lex Fridman?

  Afraid of heights?

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  No, I'm not afraid of heights. I'm, I'm, I just, it feels like a, feels like a terrible place to die.

• 1:18:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, first of all, death anywhere is not great.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, although, you know, I have a song teed up in my phone. If my, if the plane starts to go down.

• 1:18:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  I'm gonna spend the last few. It's a rare song. Nobody knows. It's a song off a beat track of my favorite band, which is Rancid. It's on called The Sentence and nobody, nobody, and I love it and I listen to it almost every day.

• 1:18:45Lex Fridman?

  Rancid, The Sentence, it's called.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  The band is called Rancid, a famous band.

• 1:18:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Relatively. Love those guys, love their music. And the song is The Sentence. You can only find it on a, like a B-side or outtake. And it's, if you don't know how to decipher Tim Armstrong's voice, then you probably won't understand the lyrics. But, um, because it's sung very, very fast. But if the plane ever goes, anytime there's turbulence, I put that thing in. I put the headphones in. I'm like, well, you know, if it's time, it's time. I'm gonna go out like this. I don't want to drift off into the galaxy, just slowly asphyxiating and freezing to death. That sounds horrible. Just like I wouldn't want to drown or.

• 1:19:18Lex Fridman?

  But on a plane is okay?

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Well, on a plane, I mean, like if the thing starts going down and there's truly nothing you can do, you might as well at least listen to your favorite song.

• 1:19:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, true, true. I'll probably go with the Pixies, Where's My Mind, like from Fight Club. And just the calmness, just sit back like the musicians playing at the Titanic.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  I didn't know you were a Pixies fan. I'm gonna have to.

• 1:19:37Lex Fridman?

  Not, not so much a Pixies fan. Actually, I, I should say that I just, that was the, Where's My Mind? It was the chosen song for Fight Club at the end, when the buildings are coming down or something like that. So that, the, the, there's certain songs that just fit just right for the collapse of human civilization. And you, you're calmly appreciating like.

• 1:20:03Lex Fridman?

  That that's just it. This is how absurd this life is at any moment it can end and this is it. This is.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  I love how we both have death and demise.

• 1:20:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Soundtracks.

• 1:20:14Lex Fridman?

  It's just a question when you're an academic doesn't come up often.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Right, well.

• 1:20:20Lex Fridman?

  That's all. That's that's.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are some academics that are bold and brave. It's it's not a phenotype. Being bold and brave in the physical world is not a common phenotype of academics. I mean, the great neurologists, one of my, I don't have many heroes, but Oliver Sacks is a true hero. I mean, people think of him as a writer, but he was foremost a neurologist and he took tremendous pushback from the neurology community for doing his books and his articles. He has a great biography called On The Move. There's a wonderful documentary that just came out about him. He died in 2015. I'm actually

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  a kind of a collector of his things. But he tremendous, but he was accused of horrible things until the movie Awakenings came out with De Niro and Robin Williams.

• 1:21:07Lex Fridman?

  Amazing movie, by the way, people don't, they seem to not say great things about the movie. I love that movie.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Amazing. And it was only once he became famous from that movie that his more academic work started to receive any kind of attention and he was invited back to Columbia and NYU. You know, the New York neuroscience mafia is a real thing. And yes, you know who you are and some of them are actually coming on the podcast. They they they are.

• 1:21:34Lex Fridman?

  I think we talked offline about this. We should start a mafia to to bat to to fight off whatever's going on in the East Coast. Although I'm still in MIT, so I don't know how that works, but Boston is different than New York.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have tremendous respect for science done in New York. Don't get me wrong. They are excellent scientists. It's it's just a very different culture than on the West Coast. And the personalities, the personalities.

• 1:21:56Lex Fridman?

  Tremendous respect for the mob.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  And the personalities are are a bit more grandiose. However, because of some of the shift in science culture in the last few years, things around scandals and things of that sort. They've been forced to tamp down some of their personality or at least their outspoken personality. And I actually think it's revealed something really important and useful in science, which is, you know, it used to be the case, you could really inject your personality into what you do. You know, Richard Feynman is a good example. If he did today what he did then, bongo drumming on the roof of Caltech naked,

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  working out theorems in strip clubs and things like that, he would have lost his job in moments. Right? So that kind of behavior isn't celebrated anymore. It's actually punished. And I'm only half kidding about this New York neuroscience mafia, but because I now exist in multiple realms, I can say these sorts of things. And I, again, admiration and respect, but I will say that I think it's important that people in science and kids that are curious about science understand that you can have any personality, provided that you're ethical and respectful in science, and do well, right? There are true bench scientists that just want to be at the bench. There are people that just want to be in their office. There are people that really enjoy public speaking. And there are people that

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  love meetings and there are people that hate crowds. And so there's a place for everybody, truly a place for everybody in science. I would like to be able to shine light on the fact that there are, you can have a shy personality, an outgoing personality, and you can, all of those can be, have excellent careers in science. But you have to find the community and place that's right for you. One reason I like Stanford is that Stanford is very much about the future. We have Nobel Prize winners, we have field medal winners and all that stuff, and their names are on walls and we acknowledge their great works. But most of what you hear about in the halls of Stanford is about what's happening now and what could happen next. It's really about the future. Whereas when I've spent

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  time at other institutions not to be named, you hear that, but there's a lot of kind of recycling and regurgitation of how wonderful people are based on things they did previously. And the students at Stanford, because of Silicon Valley, sure, they have respect for Nobel Prizes, they're delighted to be learning from and surrounded by all these great minds, but they're mostly interested in what they are going to create. And so I kind of, not kind of, I really like the shift toward possibility as opposed to things that are steeped in tradition. You know, I've never been to a high table dinner at Oxford. I'm sure it's a wonderful experience. I'm also not sure what purpose it serves for the world. But I've never been, and so I don't know what the conversations are.

• 1:24:47Speaker 01

  And so maybe I'm, you know, speaking out of line here. And then now I'm definitely not getting invited.

• 1:24:52Lex Fridman?

  No, you're, you're definitely getting invited. But yeah, I'm with you that the cultures pick, pick the right ones for you. That's why I like MIT, the, the spirit of it. To, to me, it's not about the past or the future. It's about just tinkering and having fun, building cool stuff. Like the big ambitious projects, it's there. I mean, maybe more in action, the biology and the health side. But like the engineering side, it doesn't matter if this has any impact. Let us build the coolest thing the world has ever built.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Well, what they're, uh, whenever I'm in Kendall Square, I've seen, uh, they have those buildings there that actually tilt toward the ground. These are these, uh, the architecture of MIT is also really impressive.

• 1:25:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this, uh, he pulled up, uh, Sergey just pulled up Elon Musk tweet. I'm inspired by curiosity. That is what drives me. So let us expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we may aspire to understand the universe. There's, there's like three tweets in one, but curiosity, yeah, yeah. Curiosity for its own sake.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  What's that saying? Um, I think Dorothy Parker said, uh, the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

• 1:26:00Lex Fridman?

  And you need to celebrate. So let me just briefly mention to my lovely friends at MIT. To celebrate different weirdness, to celebrate the weird characters. I've, um, I sometimes get loving pressure from my lovely friends at MIT to tone down the weirdness a bit.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Really? Even from MIT?

• 1:26:31Lex Fridman?

  I'm very fortunate to have a lot of leverage to where I have completely resist the pressure. But I'm very sure that there's young faculty that with that subtle pressure would. Dissolve them into a puddle of tears. Not, no, no. Oh, they're from Boston, excuse me. From Boston, that's right. They're tougher than that. That's right, but it's a slight nudging towards conformity that I think ultimately destroys.

• 1:27:00Lex Fridman?

  Or at least lessens the, uh, the power of the kind of science that you can do when you encourage diversity, diversity in all of its forms, including the weirdness of ideas, the out of the box thinkers, including the flamboyant behavior online, uh, how you choose to educate, how you choose to inspire. You know, people talk about freedom of speech, but it's not just like freedom of speech to say controversial things. It's also freedom of speech to be weird. Like if you're for some reason fascinated in, uh, like you look at Elon Musk, he talks about sex a lot. Let the guy put sex memes up. Who cares? Like, I mean, I feel like Elon can do basically whatever he wants.

• 1:27:45Lex Fridman?

  Right. There's no pressure, but there's a bunch of Elons in the academic world. There's a bunch of Elon. No, actually, sorry. Let me backtrack because the man deserves props. Right. He's unparalleled. He's, he's a CEO of major companies. You better believe there's pressure to behave more like a CEO as opposed to a giggling schoolboy who's posting memes throughout the night. But that is him and that freedom, that's what freedom looks like. I talked to a lot of CEOs and a lot of them feel like, uh, caged birds who have long ago forgotten how to sing.

• 1:28:26Lex Fridman?

  Quite honestly, like they, they, there's like shareholders and they come up with excuses for themselves. Here's why I have to be this way. You have to understand so on. There's PR, there's marketing people. There's lawyers, there's all that kind of stuff, but the final result is the authenticity suffocated. The, the beautiful weirdness of a CEO, of a leader, of a creator, of a scientist, all that, that's all.

• 1:28:53Lex Fridman?

  That's all gone. Well, Steve, Steve Jobs wouldn't have.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  Kept his job and acting the way he did in his twenties and thirties in today's climate. But he probably would have updated his, uh, his protocols, so to speak.

• 1:29:06Lex Fridman?

  A little bit, but maybe.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  You know, you're screaming at employees. I mean, these are, these are anecdotes, right?

• 1:29:12Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Uh, I call them anecdata because people treat them as data, but they're, they're really just anecdotes. We don't know. I wasn't there. Um, but you know, I, I like the idea of authenticity without oversharing. Right? You're very authentic, but there are aspects to your life that I'm aware of, that your audiences will never be aware of. And there are aspects of your life that I'll never be aware of. And so you're still authentic, but.

• 1:29:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Which, wait, which ones are you aware of? People are gonna wonder like, what, what is, you see a sex dungeon? What is this?

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  No, no, no. But interesting, but interesting choice of examples. Um, no, but I think that, um, you know, people lose, lose the careers on the basis of the movement of their thumbs, right? I mean, the chair of psychiatry at Columbia recently lost his position based on a, a response to a tweet. People can look that up. This is one of the most famous psychiatry departments in the world. And he put something out there that was very insensitive, frankly. And, um, everyone that I talked to about it was like, gosh, that was very, very insensitive, not thoughtful at all. And, and he lost his job, right? Or at least had to step down. I don't know the specifics.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  So, um, you know, I, I think I read someplace that more than half of the, uh, job loss due to online behavior is because people were trying to be funny, right? I mean, not everyone can pull off what Tim Dillon. Oh, and by the way, congratulations. I heard that you and Tim just got married. Yeah.

• 1:30:42Lex Fridman?

  No, no, we didn't just get married. He proposed.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, got it, got it, got it.

• 1:30:45Lex Fridman?

  And I said, yes.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Right. So some people can get away. Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:49Lex Fridman?

  Thank you. Thank you, Sergey. Has that, has that ready to go?

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  See those 13.3 thousand likes? One of those is mine.

• 1:30:57Lex Fridman?

  Uh, so for people who are not aware, one of the days in April tweeted that Tim Dillon asked me to get married and I said, yes. I think Tim, uh, said, uh, the wedding will be on Sixth Street in Austin. Bring all of your weapons, which of course is totally inappropriate. This is, this is.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  But he's a comedian.

• 1:31:15Lex Fridman?

  I was, I was like, uh, PG funny and he's goes rated R, uh, funny right away. But that said, I mean, if there's anyone.

• 1:31:26Lex Fridman?

  I would like to get married with this, it's that guy and we would do it in Austin and when it would, it would, it would be epic. It would be like the, um, the wedding from November rain.

• 1:31:39Lex Fridman?

  One of the Mr. Mrs.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:31:42Lex Fridman?

  Oh, Mr. Mr. I apologize.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah. And you broke, and you broke, broke tradition with the, with the jacket color. So it sounds to me that you are a free speech absolutist.

• 1:31:52Lex Fridman?

  I think freedom is really important and that includes letting people who are hateful, letting people who are controversial have a voice on platforms, but it becomes, I'm not sure what exactly to think because, um,

• 1:32:09Lex Fridman?

  I also treasure the quiet voices in the back of the room. And sometimes the assholes, um, silence those voices, meaning by being loud and obnoxious and so on, it pushes away the thoughtful people. So I'm also a fan of creating communities. Like you, you should be able to let people kind of build a community that's positive, that's loving, or that's constantly trolling, or that's, uh, super hateful. All those communities should have a place in the world, but like, the thing I've noticed is that

• 1:32:51Lex Fridman?

  uh, hate can destroy, a community full of hate can destroy a community full of love easier than a community full of love can overtake one with hate. And so you have to kind of, I don't know exactly how, but create digital mechanisms that discourage the collision of these communities. They should all have a platform and ability to speak to a large audience, but I just, you have to be careful to protect that like little flame of, um, of connection that people have.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  That's good, the goodness, it sounds like. I mean, the, um, yeah, I think you, you, you know, in any great city, like New York, which I love, by the way, um, you want to have a symphony in an opera house and you want some punk rock shows happening on the Lower East Side. You, you, you want all of that. You just don't necessarily want them to overlap. In terms of social media, you know, and then podcasts and engagement, one thing that I decided very early on is, was to encourage comments and feedback, et cetera, but I have in my mind what I call classroom rules. You've taught in the university and then you teach in the university and there's cer- you establish a certain etiquette within the classroom of the kinds of questions that you'll tolerate, right?

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  So there's always the student that's gonna ask a question, which is basically a 10-minute monologue about their experience that really isn't a question that pertains to a lot of people. So you politely discourage that kind of question and you encourage the kinds of questions that are likely to be in the minds of many other students. It's just more efficient that way.

• 1:34:18Lex Fridman?

  Or not politely, which is much.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  You know, I try and respond to comments and I try and respond, but also, you know, there's this also this really interesting question. Now, if you block people or restrict people, people think that you're somehow afraid of the information that they're posting, but that's often not the case. I'm not in the habit of blocking or restricting too many people. Occasionally, we've had to do it only because of how other people are being treated in the comment section. What I can take and what I think other people deserve to take are two completely different things. David Goggins, right, who we both know well, I don't know if he still does this, but a few years ago, he posted something like, if people ask him, when do you sleep? He would just block them.

• 1:34:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Because it wasn't consistent with what he was trying to say. Of course, he sleeps, but it's, you know, he's trying to get a particular message out. I think people should just understand that everybody's page is their own to moderate, right? Just like in a classroom, there are certain rules, of course, of institution, but then you establish the etiquette within the context of the kind of class. You know, a class about personality psychology or the psychology of love, you're gonna have a very different range of conversations than, you know, a class on, you know, membrane physiology. So I think social media is a great place for conversation, but it's not necessarily a great place for every kind of conversation.

• 1:35:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and I also should say that people that do get blocked, I never, this is something I do very deliberately, blocked or ignored, I never think poorly of them. I actually explicitly think.

• 1:35:51Lex Fridman?

  If there's somebody that's like saying hateful things about me, whatever, I always think positive thoughts. It's not some kind of weird guru thing. But just actually found that as a hack. I think well of them and that allows me to never think of them again. Like I send them my love and like I think this is a like fascinating human being with a fascinating story. I would love to have time to actually learn about their story, but there's not enough time in the world. And I just think well of them and then I move on and enjoy a delicious meal with people that are close to me and I love and so on and just and move on. And then never adding to the negativity of like, just even in the privacy of my own mind, thinking a hateful thought towards them. It serves no purpose whatsoever.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that about you and I know that what you just said to be true. One of the, I think, more toxic things in life is what's called, you know, evacutive projection. When people feel something and they try and evacuate it and project it on to somebody else. Projection is fascinating, right? What you essentially just said is that you don't accept projections. And in fact, you transmute them, to put in the language of the Buddhists, you know, you transmute it into positivity and in that way you truly neutralize it and transmute it. I think that if people were better understood when they were experiencing or observing evacutive projection,

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  the world would be a much healthier and happier place. But it requires a certain, a stable internal rudder. And, you know, when we're tired or sick or angry, you know, we are hungry, excessively hungry. All of us are less, less good at it. I've been positively struck by the nature of most of the interactions, not just feedback, but my favorite thing as an educator in the classroom, but also on social media. My absolute favorite thing is when the comments about other people's comments are positively reinforcing. So you see people having conversations within the comments.

• 1:37:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  And you realize this is like if you, as an educator, again, you know, it's fun to teach and it's fun to talk to the students, but the real pleasure is in walking by a small group of students on campus and hearing them talking about the material. That's that just fills me with joy. And because what it means is that the ideas are reverberating in their nervous systems and will eventually wick out to others. So it's not just about feedback. It's about a venue for for parsing information.

• 1:38:20Lex Fridman?

  So you actually posted that we're going to talk on Instagram and I collected a bunch of the questions, which reminds me of I have to mention Mike Jones and a question he asked, but also a gift he gave quite a while ago, if it's okay. But first, a quick bathroom break.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:39Lex Fridman?

  We're looking at Instagram page of Mike Jones Knife and Tool. You should check it out. He get he Andrew gave me a gift from him that is a badass butcher knife. Yours is the earth. Dot, dot, dot is from IF by Roger Kipling.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the the story of this knife is kind of interesting, perhaps to people where it was I was coming out here to Austin to meet with Lex and it was his birthday. I want to get him a gift, but I didn't know what to get him. And I contacted this guy, Mike Jones, that I learned about through Joe Rogan. Because the first remember in the old days of Joe Rogan, when you go on the episode afterwards, you take a picture with an object. So it was like Elon with a flamethrower, people would have the axe. I picked up this bushwhacker hatchet thing. And I was like, I love this thing. And and Joe said, Oh, yeah, you should check out Mike Jones's work. He does these beautiful knives. And so then I heard your episode with Joe and you recited a poem at the end. It was right after your grandmother died.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  And there's a line in that poem from from IF that Mike engraved on that knife for you. So he makes these by by hand. I love the old days before the podcast.

• 1:39:57Lex Fridman?

  That's his first appearance.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  That was the first time on there. And it was a lot of fun in the old in the old studio in Los Angeles. And yeah, Mike makes these beautiful knives. And I have this in I just have a great admiration for crafts people. So, yeah. Do you use it? Do you cut your your one meal a day steaks with it?

• 1:40:17Lex Fridman?

  I feel.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Are you taking it with you on your travels?

• 1:40:21Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. I actually used to keep it on the table, but I thought it really intimidates guests.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 1:40:28Lex Fridman?

  But like.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  You can put it on their side.

• 1:40:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:31Lex Fridman?

  It's like, oops.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  It's trust, right?

• 1:40:34Lex Fridman?

  What's the story? I mean, yeah, but it's because it's not.

• 1:40:40Lex Fridman?

  It's quite badass, if I may say. So the craftsmanship is obvious, but also it is a knife.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  It's got some like Dexter like qualities to it.

• 1:40:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  It looks like it's designed to cleave through a limb.

• 1:40:53Lex Fridman?

  If I had like a family or something where people, there's nothing about this place that softens your kind of sense that this might person might not murder me.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Let's put it differently. This place could use a woman's touch.

• 1:41:09Lex Fridman?

  That's one way to put it. If it's okay, let me, because it is, it is a poem I

• 1:41:15Lex Fridman?

  go to often, actually. You mentioned reciting some lyrics and I'm actually going to go back to that at some point to get, get a few songs that touch you.

• 1:41:26Lex Fridman?

  But this is one of the things I go to often. I I'll read it to remind myself. It's advice from a father to son. And it's a kind of mantra that it's just nice to live by. So if it's okay, let me just use this opportunity one more time. Read F by Rudyard Kipling. If you can keep your head when all about you're losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don't deal in lies. Or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise.

• 1:42:09Lex Fridman?

  If you can dream and not make dreams your master, if you can think and not make thoughts your aim. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by nays to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to broken, and stoop and build them up with worn out tools. If you can make one heap of all your winnings, and risk it all on one turn of pitch and toss, and lose and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss. If you can force your heart to nerve and sin you to serve your turn long after they're gone,

• 1:42:52Lex Fridman?

  and so hold on when there's nothing in you except the will which says to them, "Hold on." If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, I like this one, and walk with kings, nor lose the common touch. If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much. If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it. And which is more, you'll be a man, my son. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you, Mike, for the knife. It's a, I don't know.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  It's a, and engraved in it.

• 1:43:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's yours. Yours is the earth and everything that's in it.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  We toiled over what to engrave. And then finally, I just said, "Mike, just pick something that speaks to you. You're the craftsman." And so he selected that.

• 1:43:50Lex Fridman?

  There's certain ways to pull yourself in that book. Actually, Carl Dyserath, Greg Dyserath, he wrote the book Projections. One of my favorite, first of all, just as you said, incredible writer. Just, I mean, if you wrote fiction, if you wrote those kinds of things, I'm curious to see where he goes with his writing. It's very interesting.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  I think that book took him ten years to write, which is vindication for me and for you because we're both supposed to write books and we haven't done it.

• 1:44:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, in some sense, your first book will have.

• 1:44:28Lex Fridman?

  You know, decades in it, right? Even if you just take half a year to write it. It's like the first book, like the first album for a musician. I mean, it's a light, it's a journey. It's a, it's a, it's ever, but he uses poems and quotes in there really well.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  It's a beautiful book. It's a dreamy book. I think when people hear that it's a book about neuroscience, they think they're gonna get a textbook or a protocols book or something. It's nothing like that, but it really is a deep dive into the mind of the psychiatrist and the researcher and so much feeling and compassion. I love that you love poetry. I mean, I didn't know that until I saw you on Rogan Read If. And I'm not a, a very rabid consumer of poetry, but I, I'm a big Wendell Berry fan. And I try and read a poem once every few days. Also, I think if is a tough act to follow.

• 1:45:22Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:45:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the richness and the, I mean, you said every, every third line in there is something that you would, you know, you'd consider your life well-lived if you, if you said that, right?

• 1:45:37Lex Fridman?

  What about the preparation for the solo podcast? You said you listen to certain songs, you would know, you sing or recite the lyrics to certain songs. Is there ones that kind of come to mind that are interesting?

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've always been very lyrics driven and I don't understand music. I've, I've talked to Rick about this. I think I've talked to you about this a little bit. I don't really understand, I mean, I can hear music and like it, but I don't really understand the, the structure of it, but lyrics make a lot of sense.

• 1:46:07Lex Fridman?

  But does it touch your soul, music? Or is it the lyrics?

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  It's the lyrics. It's not the instrumentals. So I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan and I'm gonna lose punk points for saying this, but I'm not a Clash fan.

• 1:46:16Lex Fridman?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  So he obviously is best known for the Clash. Most Clash songs start off great and then after about 30 seconds, in, at least in my mind, just kind of disintegrate into a bunch of mush. Whereas Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, which is what he did as an adult, as a, you know, later, and some of his solo work, he actually, Rick produced some work that he did with Johnny Cash. You know, Rick pulled Johnny Cash out of, essentially out of retirement and had him do his albums before he, he died. And so anything that Strummer did, there's a, there's a favorite song of mine by Strummer. It's called Burning Lights. You can find it, there is an album now where you can find it, or Tennessee Rain, or some of these things that he did, which are a little bit more folky, so not really punk.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  So I love that song. A bunch of songs by Rancid that I love. Yeah, Rancid is great. You know, and then if I listen to instrumentals, I do, I'll listen to classical piano. Some dreams are made for children, but most- It's not gonna sound good as a poem. They can play this, people can play the song. Play the song, okay. Yeah, so I'll, I mean, because it has to be sung, Joe's voice is what makes the song. I got it. Joe's voice is what makes the song. But yeah, that song Burning Lights, from I hired a contract killer. I don't know, the lyrics are pretty good. They're pretty good. I mean, Joe is an amazing writer, right? I'm, you know, I'm also a big Bob Dylan fan. Glenn Gould for classical piano.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  He was at Asperger's, you know, and, and actually, I think you can hear him grunting. He had a Tourette's-like tic. And I learned about Glenn Gould through Oliver Sacks. So I'll listen to any number of things. It depends on my mood. If I'm feeling a little more tired and I need to be amped up, I'll listen to something that's a little louder and faster. If I'm feeling kind of keyed up and I need to bring the cadence down a little bit, then I'll listen to something a little mellower, poppier. I, I love bands like, um, yeah, I'm a big fan of this British pop band called James. There's like 20 bands named James. But this one, you know, and again, I lose punk points for saying that, but they're amazing. And Best of- I think you've accumulated enough points where you can afford to lose a few.

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. But in any case, yeah, music and poetry are, they're, they're the, they're the subconscious, right? I mean, if you think about a Bob Dylan song, or a really good drummer song, or a poem, that the, the words don't mean anything when read linearly, but they make you feel something, they're tapping into the subconscious. That's really what they're doing. They're pulling on neural threads of emotion based on either timbre or cadence, or something that's independent of the word structure.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  And that to me is the beauty of music and poetry.

• 1:48:57Lex Fridman?

  I often say Johnny Cash's version of Hurt, that I say would be my favorite song ever.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  Well, he did a Nine Inch Nails song.

• 1:49:06Lex Fridman?

  He did, he covered.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  I think Rick produced that, pretty sure he produced that.

• 1:49:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he produced it. I mean, he did like the, Rick produced the, he pulled Johnny Cash out from a dark place to produce something that, um, I mean, when you look back is one of the great things ever in music, which are these like haunting covers of certain songs and originals.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer did a version of Redemption Song together that is, uh, that Rick produced, which is, um, on loop in my house sometimes, you know, for hours and hours.

• 1:49:44Lex Fridman?

  That song is fascinating. Bob Marley's song.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  Sung by Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer. You know, sometimes I think what it would be to be a fly on the wall when these guys were doing this stuff.

• 1:49:55Lex Fridman?

  These songs of freedom. There's certain songs where you're like, it, it, um, elicit an emotion that's unlike anything else. I mean, I was, I was trying to figure that out with, with Rick too. Like there's certain songs that make you want to pull out over to the side of the road and just weep or just, uh, get inspired to just get shit done or all of those kinds of things. Remember your family, the people you've lost, all that kind of stuff. I mean, Hurt, I hurt myself today to see if I still feel.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  There are certain songs that, um, I've loved so much that I actually won't play them during a relationship until the relationship passes a certain duration because you, if you start sharing in those experiences with somebody in the room and it starts to become associated with the relationship, you're braiding it in with the dopamine of, uh, of love and that relationship ends, the song is forever tainted. There are certain songs that I will never play in the company of anybody else. They're mine. They, I just, it's too risky to, uh, to give those up. And, uh, you know, and I think that, um.

• 1:51:08Lex Fridman?

  There's like levels.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  There are levels, right. Uh, exactly. We'll leave it at that.

• 1:51:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and the interesting thing about this kind of preparing for the solo episode, just interacting with Rick about that process of preparation and because you mentioned with interviews, by the way, you do solo solo, you're the only one in the room?

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  No, well, it used to be Rob, my producer, who I should say, you know, he's really the person behind the podcast. I mean, first of all, we're equal partners.

• 1:51:46Lex Fridman?

  You're just a pretty face.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  We're just, and I'm aging, man, not to, not to, I'm, I actually really, I like, I like aging. It's weird. A lot of people like friends with David Sinclair and it's all about not aging. I, I'm, I don't want to live past 90, 95. I'm just trying to get as much done as I can in this short life and do it right and with integrity and heart and accuracy, you know?

• 1:52:10Lex Fridman?

  And you like the stages?

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. If you read Erickson's stages of development, you realize that every stage of life is a, is a, is a set of neural circuits trying to resolve a problem. And, and if you're going to try and avoid that progression, sure, you might live longer. But, you know, it's sort of like saying like, do you want to go win the high school jujitsu championship? No, you graduated high school a long time ago, right? So I actually look forward to the future, even if it means that I'm starting to shift. I think that my biology will shift. You know, I'll fight that. I try and take good care of myself. But I don't want to get sick. I don't want to suffer. Who does? But I, I'm embracing this whole developmental arc.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  I mean, we don't, we're not children and then adults. Our entire life is one long developmental arc. And if you fail to embrace that, you fail to extract the richness of, of what it is to be a human being. So in any event, for the, I record, Rob is in the room. I'll sometimes stop and ask him for feedback if I feel like something's not landing right. So he gives, if it's clear, he'll let me know. If it's not clear, he'll let me know. Excuse me. And then, you know, Costello used to be in the room, the early days of the podcast, which weren't that long ago. He's snoring at my feet and. Farting and smelling up the room and we're all just kind of like gasping for air. He's a bulldog. That's what they do. With him gone, it changed. You know, the whole thing changed. There will be another dog soon.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  And as you know, I've been moving through that grief process, but having him there gave me a levity that I miss, but in my mind, he's still there.

• 1:53:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he's still there.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's still there. So, and you know, in time, there'll be another dog and who knows? You know, maybe there'll be a dog and a couple of infants running around, but that would be more distracting. So, but it's, there's no podcast that exists just because of the podcaster. This is true for Joe, this is true for your podcast, for me, that there's, it's not just a staff of people to post stuff. That's just the top level contour. There's the constant feedback and iteration of what you want it to become. And trying to hold on to something that's essential along the way. Cause everything has to evolve, but you can't lose the essence of something. Anytime a company or brand or a course or a scientist has done that, it just ends up terrible.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  It just is a, you know, it becomes like a cenotar version of itself.

• 1:54:40Lex Fridman?

  So to Rick is very, the power of the people in the room is great to inspire and to destroy. So you have to be extremely careful with the selection of people that are in the room. To me, I never really thought of it that way. I, I thought only, only positive things could happen.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  Oh, by adding people in the room?

• 1:55:01Lex Fridman?

  By adding people.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I think if there were an audience in the room, well, you know what? Someday I'd love to do a live podcast with you.

• 1:55:08Lex Fridman?

  We're doing, I saw you doing like a couple of live things, which is great that you're paving the way there to.

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  Well, we did one, I went up to University of British Columbia and did a lecture on a, on a college campus. And one of the more gratifying things that happened is this kid, so his early twenties, I think, stood up and said, you know, I've never been on a college campus. I didn't think I could go onto a college campus. And that still rings in my mind, whoever you are out there, that meant so much to me. Cause I was like, yes, there was something about that to me. I was like, okay, this, it made sense to come all the way up here and do this in person. Cause you can get out to a lot more people online. Public speaking events, it's not like it's that lucrative or anything. I mean, unless you're whatever, you're a famous celebrity or politician or something. I'm sure there are people that do well with it, but that's not what it's about for us. It's really about

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  being able to connect with people in a different venue and for interactions like that. I don't know how many of them we will do, but I'm curious to see how it goes. But I'd love to do a podcast with you.

• 1:56:07Lex Fridman?

  Is it energizing? My fear is the fear of the introvert is that I don't know if I can handle so much love and fascinating people all around. It's like, I don't know.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  Well, we'll invite a few haters, too.

• 1:56:24Lex Fridman?

  Well, yes. But I love the haters, too. But I don't know. It makes me nervous because Jordan Peterson is currently on tour. I got a chance to hang out with him.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Oh, right. He does a lot of live speaking.

• 1:56:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, he does. Like, he's now on tour where he does like every other day.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  But he doesn't have any small kids at home anymore. So you can do that. So yeah, you should do it before you have a family.

• 1:56:47Lex Fridman?

  It's exhausting. I mean, I'm just speaking from an athlete perspective. Like, if you're Mick Jagger with the Rolling Stones, it's just physically, I mean, you have to speak potentially for two hours, then offstage, like hanging out with people.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  It's a lot.

• 1:57:07Lex Fridman?

  It's a lot of hours. It's a lot of hours to stay focused, to keep finding your place of like calmness and excitement.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Well, and you're staying in hotels, your circadian rhythm's disrupted, you're not getting your like cold in sauna and your workout every day, your food isn't optimal. I think done in patches, I could enjoy it because it's fun to meet people from different places. I'm doing a public lecture in Copenhagen for the Lundbeck Foundation in June, June 3. And that one is particularly gratifying for me because the Lundbeck Foundation is an academic foundation. So the fact that, and then so when they invited, I asked, you know, do you want me to talk about what my lab does? Or do you want me to talk about the stuff on the podcast? They're like, no, no, not your lab. We want to hear about this like health stuff and the stuff that we cover on the podcast. So that was amusing to me and tells me that, you know, that things are changing now. I think 2020 and 2021

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  revealed a lot of things about people to ourselves. But one thing that it made very clear is that there's an enormous appetite for tools. For mental and physical health, but also understanding about science and how science is done. So thanks to you. Again, I'm not saying this to flatter you. It's true gratitude. There is now a runway for scientists to talk to people. I mean, you had the, I always forget this guy's name, the virus guy from Columbia.

• 1:58:20Lex Fridman?

  Vincent Rakanjella.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Amazing, right? I mean, forgetting the controversy around all the stuff of 2020, 21. I mean, he is an encyclopedia of all things virology.

• 1:58:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, people should listen to his podcast, This Week in Virology. He's also an incredible lecturer and educator. It's fascinating. It's fascinating when people take, again, that leap of putting all that education online. That's non-controversial at all. It's like everybody, people should go listen to him, for the most part, in terms of, at his best, at least. There's no politics in it. There's, there's, there's not a

• 1:58:59Speaker 01

  No, he's a virus jockey. He likes playing around with bacteria and viruses and

• 1:59:05Lex Fridman?

  But that said,

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  Molecular biology.

• 1:59:07Lex Fridman?

  We all say stuff carelessly all the time. So he gets in a bit of trouble on some of the things you've said about like dismissing lab leak theory, like, there's no way.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  He dismisses that?

• 1:59:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But not, he's not making, like, folks, there's a difference when you say stuff like off the cuff. And when you say stuff that's like core to your principles and you've thought about it for a very long time. You're talking for hours, for hundreds of hours, and you can just say stuff. You could just say your opinions. Will Smith slapped

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  I was wondering, okay, wait, how long have we been recording? I was wondering how long it was gonna take us before someone

• 1:59:48Lex Fridman?

  We talked about Ukraine.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  No, no, Will Smith. I was wondering whether or not we'd make it the, I had it planned.

• 1:59:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  I was literally in the back of my mind.

• 1:59:55Lex Fridman?

  We're two hours in.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  I had it planned that at the end, if we didn't talk about the Will Smith, Chris Rock thing, that I was gonna say, it's amazing, this is the first conversation to happen in a long time where there wasn't mentioned. Oh, no.

• 2:00:08Lex Fridman?

  No, do not pull it up. We don't need to see.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Here we go. It revealed some interesting things about um, human beings, impulse control and uh, lack thereof. But um, you know, oh my goodness. Chris Rock has a material for the rest of his career.

• 2:00:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think he's, he's not short on material. Well, I do. See, if I, if I knew what I, I wanted to tweet, if, if I knew you're allowed to just slap comedians, my conversation with Tim Dillon would have gone very differently. People just being humans, I, there's so much fascinating human nature on display there. It, it's also in terms of it coming, becoming a topic that a lot of people are talking about. Versus the war in Ukraine, for example, is also fascinating to watch, like, just these kind of news cycles moving through.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think in, if I may, I'm sorry to interrupt, but um, you know, anytime we observe something very limbic, very emotional. You know, we generally can empathize somewhat, right? We all know what it's like to feel angry, we all know what it's like to feel ashamed, we all know what it's like to feel shocked. Images of war are, for most people, very hard to relate to. We see it, it's, you know, there are these images and they're very traumatic and, and challenging to look at at times, and yet, most people have no idea what it feels like to be shot at, or what it feels like to have your home destroyed, or what it feels like to be um, an aggressor in that way.

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  So it's very, so I think that people naturally orient towards things that feel familiar to them, even though the circumstances are different.

• 2:01:42Lex Fridman?

  And people also forget, they look at these celebrities, that's just like looking at criticism of Will Smith, you forget that they're human too. That's, that's one of the most surprising things for me, having done this podcast and met celebrities and stuff like that. They're human. They're all human. And that's inspiring to me, like some of these great folks that have won Nobel Prizes and built some cool things. They're just human, like the rest of us.

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  Well, and if you look at actors and actresses, I mean, there's some amazing ones, right? And who also do well in their outside life, but their careers were built on the business of pretending to be other people.

• 2:02:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  And that's got to distort, maybe positively, but also just, let's be honest, what it is, that the neuroplasticity there, the changes in the areas of the brain that represent personality, have to be quite different for somebody who pretends to be lots of different personalities and gets paid for it. You're working the reward system into the system of self-identity. And, you know, you have to imagine that that can really contort somebody's neurology in ways that maybe they are not as, maybe they are not in touch with reality in the same way that we are. Remember earlier, we're talking about neurotic versus psychotic? You know, they may be more borderline in their kind of ground state than, than we think.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  And so I'm actually impressed anytime there's a celebrity who doesn't have a messed up life.

• 2:03:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  I'm like, oh, wow. You know, finally, somebody who's managed to, you know, maintain a, some semblance, at least from the outside of, of normalcy.

• 2:03:17Lex Fridman?

  So first of all, I can empathize with the actions that Will Smith did, right? They're not, I think they're kind of shit, not kind of, they're just shitty. You should probably talk privately, man to man, not, because otherwise, it's like a dramatic display. It's like, it's almost like you are a fake act, you're acting.

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  Well, there are all these questions, right? I mean, obviously, it was aggressive at some level. There's this question of whether or not it was impulsive. I think most people feel yes. There's a question, there was the protective nature of it because he was doing it to, you know, in it, apparently to, in defense. But then there's also the, the context, he lost touch with the context, right? Whereas Chris Rock basically gets, there, there's the possible critique that he went too far. That's going to be in the eye of the beholder. But then, depending on how you view comedy and jokes, but then there's also the fact that he took that slap and then just snapped right back, so much so that people thought maybe it was fake.

• 2:04:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  He also waited with his hands behind his back.

• 2:04:19Lex Fridman?

  That's his nature. He likes to stand like that. I mean, I, the- I got to tell a little bit of a story here to connect

• 2:04:30Lex Fridman?

  to what Chris Rock did. Like, I, I wish what Chris Rock did in terms of just taking this lab and keep going, first of all, just props for somebody that's able to maintain cool in that situation for the most part. I think I like watched it once.

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  You only have to be alive on this planet.

• 2:04:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  To see it, you can't avoid seeing it.

• 2:04:51Lex Fridman?

  I wish at that afterwards, he would sort of say something loving and kind to Will Smith and his wife and then hit him real hard, lean into the joke.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  See, and but there, I think in hockey, they call taking a number. I have a friend who plays hockey and there's this idea that like if someone checks you really badly in one game, you don't go and check them again. You don't get into a fight, but three games later, you like you blade them in the shin.

• 2:05:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  Like you, so what the, the ability to defer and to handle it in whatever fashion one feels is appropriate.

• 2:05:29Lex Fridman?

  They're probably also friends and all those kinds of things that they respect each other. So he probably didn't, but there's a comedian instinct. I saw this, I was in an open mic in, here in Texas. I won't say where, there's many open mics.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  We've gone to a few of these. These are pretty funny.

• 2:05:46Lex Fridman?

  No, so there, there is more sort of rougher kinda.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've been hanging out in like West Texas.

• 2:05:56Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  Austin's too tame for Lex, so he's like head to West Texas.

• 2:06:00Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. I put on a cowboy hat and instantly I became a cowboy. I've been talking like a cowboy. And I mean, I, I belong out there in the desert.

• 2:06:08Speaker 01

  He's gone from eating, you know, meat and athletic greens to rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes.

• 2:06:13Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. No, there was a open mic is, is late at night and this, I was one of the only people in the audience. There's a couple of drunk folks, a few drunk folks. One of them was a couple. And like bikers, like with helmets and so on, a guy and a girl. And then the comedian. The open mic comedian did a joke about people who wear helmets. I don't know if it was on purpose or not, but he did the joke. And then the guy about women who wear helmets. And the guy, it's this exact same situation. The guy stood up, walked up to him, there was no slap. It's so interesting because this happened before the Will Smith thing.

• 2:06:57Lex Fridman?

  So he, he walked up to the, to the comedian and, and said, he like, he, he, I think he like pointed his finger down and told him to stop or something like that. And then sat down. This is an audience of like six people. And, and at midnight around then, there's no, nobody, no security, nothing.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  In Texas.

• 2:07:20Lex Fridman?

  In Texas.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  Which implies.

• 2:07:22Lex Fridman?

  Oh, then this guy was the energy drunk, but also a biker. And has, what he felt his lady was now attacked by the comedian, right? With his words. And this, and the comedian was a kind of out of shape, small guy. So it's not threatening at all and probably in trouble. And the comedian, after he sat down, he looked a little bit scared. He paced back and forth. And then he did the joke again.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:07:57Lex Fridman?

  And I was sitting and I started, I leaned back and I just did this like, because that is comedy. And the guy was getting angrier and angrier. And he just sat there. And, and the comedian went on for a couple more minutes. And then did another bad joke, but another joke about how it's just like he leaned into it.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  If you go to a small comedy club, open mic or otherwise, you're in the shooting gallery. Like you're basically there teed up as a pin to get it. Uh, we went and saw Andrew Scholes in San Francisco.

• 2:08:33Lex Fridman?

  In San Francisco?

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was hilarious. It was amazing. I mean, he's, he's just masterful in his ability to command an audience. You know, and, but I felt for the people up front, but you know, no sympathy either because, you know, you buy tickets to sit up front at, at a Scholes show, you know, you're going to get it. But he was very loving.

• 2:08:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And funny, first of all, funny. The funniness really helps you. But the, the ethic of the comedian is like that fearlessness. What I really liked. This is like the danger, there's risk to comedy and there's also consequences.

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  Have you watched that show, the, um, what is it, the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Show? It's really good. Um, I watched a few of them. Um, guilty pleasure there. Uh, she plays a comic in the, I think it's the mid 1960s in, in New York and, um, and there's a, a character that somewhat resembles Lenny Bruce. It's sort of meant to be Lenny Bruce. Um, and they're always getting arrested and this, and this kind of thing. I think I learned about it from Joe. Anyway, it's, the writing's great. It's very funny. Um, but yeah, comedy is designed to push boundaries, right? And to get, and to say the thing that, you know, uh, that people aren't, feel they can't say. Not something in science, right? Science, you're supposed to, etiquette is a big part of how you communicate ideas. It's about constraining communication.

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  This is something I, I mean, I confess on the podcast, in the goals of making it clear, uh, interesting, surprising and actionable, you know, you have to constrain the amount and the style of information. Otherwise it becomes something else altogether. Right?

• 2:10:12Lex Fridman?

  I saw Sondra Pichai, Google CEO, said that he likes, uh, the thing you mentioned. Not, not the yoga nidra, but, uh, the, the NSDR, non-sleep, deep rest, uh, podcast, over meditation. I don't know if you saw that.

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw that. Yeah.

• 2:10:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Uh, why, what, what do you think that is? What, what do you think the difference is?

• 2:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So non-sleep, deep rest, NSDR is an acronym that I coined because it encompasses a lot of practices that are not meditation per se, but that bring the brain and body into a state of relaxation and focus. So hypnosis is one variant of NSDR. There are other variants of NSDR. You can just look these up and you'll find them. And I think that they've caught on and that the Google, um, the CEO of Google, uh, is an avid practitioner of NSDR. Because it has this amazing ability to reset your energy levels and focus. Whereas with meditation, many people find meditation hard. And part of the reason they find it hard is that it requires focus. NSDR is a state which is very calm and relaxing. You don't have to work too hard. You're just listening to a script.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  Whereas most forms of meditation, not all, but most forms of meditation, involve cranking up the activity in your prefrontal cortex. And trying to see your thoughts as opposed to thinking your thoughts. Or focus on your breath, but then third personing yourself in some respect. And that's work. And so many people who meditate quite intensely feel more exhausted. Now, that doesn't mean that meditation doesn't have any utility, but it's distinctly different than NSDR. And I think that people are working, certainly the CEO of Google, I have to imagine, is working very hard and using his forebrain. If he's gonna have 20 or 30 minutes to take a break, he should, and I think this is what he's doing, he should go out for a jog and not listen to anything and just kind of let his mind wander. Or sit there in a chair and just zone out or do NSDR.

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  The problem is, people are not that good at shifting states. We are all actually pretty good at, even people with severe ADHD, we had an episode about this, can become hyper focused on things that they actually enjoy. Because dope, and most of the drugs designed to treat ADHD are drugs that increase the levels of dopamine. So when you like something, there's dopamine release and you can focus. It's when you don't like something that's hard to focus. Shifting states is hard. I'm sure you've experienced this, if you've ever been in deep research or podcasting, podcasting, and then all of a sudden you go for a run, you probably spend the first third of that run thinking. And then in the middle third, you're kind of, that thinking is fractured a bit. And then in the final third is where you finally get to relax. Because the brain doesn't shift states very quickly.

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  We can go from sleep to wakefulness quickly. We can go from wakefulness to sleep quickly. But we don't shift between different states of consciousness like a step function. Except in rare cases, right? Fear is one. All of a sudden, we hear an explosion right now. It's a step function. We're in fear or we're in alertness, right? A heightened state of alertness. But NSDR is terrific at allowing people to learn to shift their state. And I actually would venture to argue that

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Part of the value of meditation and exercise is the actual state that you get into in deep meditation or exercise, but just as valuable is the transition that you have to take yourself through from one state of mind to the other and then back again. When I look, you know, David Goggins, he always seems to come up, but he, because he represents so many important things, drive, determination, override of emotional state, going from being a 300 pound plus person to a fit person through, he's never revealed anything substantial about what he ate or what he didn't eat. He basically says like, listen, run a lot, eat less, right? Yeah. But what's remarkable is so much of what he says is about those transitions, about taking oneself from a state of, I don't want to, to scruffing oneself and like you're

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  going to do it anyway, and then being able to carry that into, into regular life, so to speak. So I think that NSDR is immensely powerful, it's zero cost, and one of the reasons I'm such a fan of people doing it is that most people don't stick to a meditation practice. There have also been a few cases, you might find this interesting, there's a book by Scott Carney, I forget what it's called, I think it's called The Transcendence Trap or something, I'm going to have that title wrong, but there have been a fair number of cases of people that go and do very extensive meditation, silent meditation retreats, who then return to normal life and end up killing themselves. There are states of mind inside of extended meditations or silent meditations that are

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  very beneficial, and I'm certainly not suggesting people don't meditate, but I know at least one person who came back from one of these long extended meditation retreats and wasn't able to shift their state back into one that was functional and regular life. And that book includes a very dramatic story, I don't want to give it away in case people check out the book, but Scott told the story to me directly once, where someone feels they've reached enlightenment and then commits suicide. So these very unusual brain states are potentially hazardous if people can't return from them.

• 2:15:16Lex Fridman?

  So it's it's nice to focus not on those brain states, but instead on the shifting.

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  Right. I do. This morning I woke up a little bit earlier than I would have liked. I use this Reverie app that's research-backed, R E V E R I dot com. There's a free version of it and or you can try it for free. So I feel

• 2:15:33Lex Fridman?

  That's for hypnosis?

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  For hypnosis. And I do a self hypnosis to put me back into sleep. And if I can't sleep, just put me into a state of deep relaxation. I would, I would put hypnosis under the category of NSDR. Yoga nidra under the category of NSDR. There are now some NSDR scripts online. If you just go to YouTube that are you can just listen to and

• 2:15:51Lex Fridman?

  Do you like those?

• 2:15:52Speaker 01

  I do. Yeah, I think the one from made for is quite good. I have an affiliation with them, but it's free, so I feel comfortable mentioning it. I do. I I really like the Reverie app. I can very and as you, the more you do them, the more quickly you can shift your brain into a state of deep relaxation. I will sometimes stop mid podcast. If it's, sometimes our recordings go seven, eight hours and I'll stop and I'll do a one minute hypnosis. They have one minute hypnosis inside Reverie. You're only going to, you're only going to find that one minute hypnosis is effective. If you are routinely doing 10 and 15 minute hypnosis. In addition to that, meaning I do it every other day or so, 10 or 15.

• 2:16:28Lex Fridman?

  So there's a, is there a YouTube one minute hypnosis or is this for?

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  There are, but inside of Reverie as well, you can find them online, a really good.

• 2:16:36Lex Fridman?

  Pull it up, sorry, please.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Reverie is good. And then Michael Sealy, S E A L E Y. He has some long hypnosis scripts, but again, these are all free. And, you know, there's a lot of good research now on the neural networks and it shifts your so-called default network, the default mode network. It shifts how much of your forebrain you're using. And it also is very, very good. If you, I get so many questions about, hey, I'm really upset. I found out about my girlfriend's sexual past or hey, I'm so upset. I found out that my boyfriend was cheating or oh, so and so died. How do I get over these emotions? How do I deal with them? And hypnosis has shown to be very useful for people to learn to bring themselves into a state of deep relaxation,

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  to literally project in their mind's eye, these very intense things that they don't like. And then for people to associate with other emotions in their body to learn to be calm while feeling your feelings, to dissociate the mind-body communication to some extent.

• 2:17:36Lex Fridman?

  Just observe the feelings.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  Observe them and start to associate them with positive experiences. You're an Android guy, so soon it should be available on Android.

• 2:17:44Lex Fridman?

  Well, then it doesn't exist for me.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:17:47Lex Fridman?

  It's only, uh...

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  You know, I don't get...

• 2:17:49Lex Fridman?

  Android is a device of the people, all you elitist people with your iPhones.

• 2:17:52Speaker 01

  Okay, but tell me this about Android. Now, now you want to... This is the one thing that gets me.

• 2:17:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  Because I'm very close to someone who uses an Android phone. I feel like that...

• 2:18:01Lex Fridman?

  So you, you have great people in your life. That's good to know.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  No, their messages always look green to me, but I answer yours, not despite that. But they... I feel like the Android phones are very trigger-happy. Like, anything I touch does something, whereas the Apple phone is kind of built for like a macaque monkey to be able to operate, which is great for me because I'm more of a macaque monkey and you're a more sophisticated ape.

• 2:18:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  I feel that, I think like you have to be quite a bit...

• 2:18:26Lex Fridman?

  They're more sensitive.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to have, you know, I mean, I've got fat fingers, you know? I've got clumsy fingers, you know?

• 2:18:31Lex Fridman?

  And the Android is, is too... Well, maybe you need to soften your touch.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  What I would do is go into the most, sort by most popular, um, because there's some older ones that I really like and it generally scales with that. So I'll do the, um, this one, the hypnosis for clearing subconscious negativity. That's an hour-long one, the sleep and anxiety one, 40 minutes, but those you listen to as you fall asleep.

• 2:18:53Lex Fridman?

  As you fall asleep.

• 2:18:54Speaker 01

  Oh, we're gonna do this now?

• 2:18:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, let's listen to it.

• 2:18:56Speaker 02

  And I have created this hypnosis recording for you to help you...

• 2:19:02Lex Fridman?

  And this is the voice. How often does the voice pop up?

• 2:19:04Speaker 02

  And at the same time...

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  You don't watch it. You just listen to it.

• 2:19:08Speaker 02

  ...to reduce your anxiety. Now, one of the most important things to remember at the outset of any self-hypnosis experience is to know and understand that hypnosis...

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  So, people really should know that stage hypnosis is about the hypnotist getting you to do things you wouldn't normally do. Self-hypnosis, which is what we're talking about here, reverie in this, is about you getting your brain into the state that you want. And again, I mean, there's a ton of neuroimaging data and work on trauma and pain relief and our labs are working on this with David Spiegel's lab. I really encourage people to explore NSDR. And if this feels a little too wacky and out there, then I would just put in NSDR into YouTube and there's some good NSDR scripts.

• 2:19:55Lex Fridman?

  Yes, that's, by the way, uh, Sander is a, is a fan of your podcast. No, it's okay. We don't need to play.

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I don't know him and, um, uh, but I would, yeah, a lot of media outlets picked up on his love of NSDR. And I have to imagine running Google involves a lot of juggling a lot of, of.

• 2:20:12Lex Fridman?

  He's one of the great CEOs because everybody loves him. Everybody loves him.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Have you interviewed him?

• 2:20:16Lex Fridman?

  No, but we'll, we'll do the interview eventually. So it's this annoying thing about me being a stickler for three hours. CEOs don't seem to understand, like, not understand, but it's scheduling. So what happens is Sander said, yes, definitely. Let's do it. I'm a fan of podcasts. I'm a fan of yours. And, and, and then it goes to his executive assistant like, oh, let's find a slot. And then they immediately think, all right, well, one hour is good.

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  Forty-five minutes.

• 2:20:45Lex Fridman?

  Ninety minutes?

• 2:20:46Speaker 01

  By Zoom.

• 2:20:47Lex Fridman?

  Ninety minutes? Yeah, right. Well, no, they know in person. I'm sticking on that. But like, it's like, no, we need more. And it's so hard to, to.

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  Do you still travel to do your podcast or generally?

• 2:20:58Lex Fridman?

  No, most people come down here. Most people, uh, but for certain situations, obviously, like if you're in prison.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:21:08Lex Fridman?

  Or you're ahead of.

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  Imagine if you get out on work furlough, the people have anklets so that they can go to on the Lex Fridman podcast. It'd probably happen. Have you ever been in a prison?

• 2:21:17Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 2:21:19Speaker 01

  You know.

• 2:21:20Lex Fridman?

  Either a visitation or on the inside.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  From my hike, I can see San Quentin. It's really weird that San Quentin and Alcatraz, you know, Bay Area, beautiful. Everyone thinks like, you know, like there's the bay and there's Alcatraz and San Quentin sitting right there.

• 2:21:31Lex Fridman?

  Does that make you feel?

• 2:21:33Speaker 01

  Um, you know, it's amazing how easy it is to overlook that they're there and forget that they're there. But when I drive by San Quentin, I, I think about it. Um, I also think about the people who are in there who might be innocent. I've seen some of those episodes on Rogan and elsewhere. And Amanda Knox talks a lot about this, right? Whether or not you believe her story or not, I happen to believe her story personally, based on what I know. You know, I'm sure there are people disagree with me. I think to myself, what it must be like to be in a cell and know in your heart's heart, you didn't do it. You know, I mean, I can't think of, I can't think of many things worse. I can't think of many things worse.

• 2:22:12Lex Fridman?

  That's so clearly unjust, but life is full of unjust things like this. Cruel things happen all the time. You lose a loved one for no good reason. You lose your job.

• 2:22:29Lex Fridman?

  You lose your home.

• 2:22:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've been talking to a lot of refugees now and the war in Ukraine has really focused my mind to how much suffering there is in the world. And so just cruel things happen all the time and, and, and people kind of, there's the suffering and you, and you kind of go on. You stick to the people really close to you. There's still love all around you. Traumatic events kind of focus your mind on the like, very practical, like, okay, how do we solve the problem? How do we escape? Let's solve like survival, food, shelter, focus.

• 2:23:06Speaker 01

  Remember that book, um, All's Quiet on the Western Front, uh, World War One? There's this line in there, I forget what it is about how war is like the smell of a skunk, like a little bit is actually a little, is slightly, um, there's something slightly delicious of it is what it says in the, in the book. I happen to like the smell of like ferrets and skunks and things. I had a pet ferret when I was a kid and I like that musky scent. People, most people just, it's repulsive to them. It's actually a gene, believe it or not. Some people have the gene that makes that, the musky scent repulsive. Some people love it.

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  Let me ask you this, there's another gene, this is a fun one. Microwave popcorn smells good, neutral, or disgusting to you?

• 2:23:47Lex Fridman?

  Good, very good.

• 2:23:48Speaker 01

  There are people who have a gene that. Leads them to the perception that the smell of microwave popcorn that you find is good, it smells like putrid vomit to them. It's a particular gene variant and they can smell certain elements within the microwave popcorn. It's prominent in France, this gene. And so in laboratories where you have a lot of French people, it's often said like you're not allowed to make microwave popcorn. It smells putrid, disgusting, you know. So a lot of it's in the perception of the beholder.

• 2:24:21Lex Fridman?

  But okay, before I leave the NSDR, focus in general, as you said, it's for shifting mind states. Is there advice you have for how to achieve focus on a task?

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  Yes. First of all, we have to distinguish between modulators and mediators, and I'll do this very briefly. There are a lot of things that will modulate your state of focus, but they don't directly mediate your sense of focus. So for instance, if right now a fire alarm went off in this building, it would modulate our attention. We would get up and leave. It would be very hard to do what we're doing with that banging in the background, at least at first. So it's modulating focus, but it's not really involved in the mechanisms of focus, right? In the same way, being well rested when you sleep, your autonomic nervous system that adjusts states of alertness and focus and calm, works better than when you're sleep deprived. So if you're sleeping better, you're going to focus better. So I

• 2:25:22Speaker 01

  always answer this way to a question like this, because the best thing that anyone can do for their mental health, physical health and performance in athletic or cognitive endeavors or creative endeavors is to make sure that you're getting enough quality sleep, enough of the time for you. And that's going to differ. We could talk about what that means. Now, in terms of things that mediate focus, without getting into the description of mechanisms, because we have podcasts about that.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  It's very clear that mental focus follows visual focus, provided that you're a sighted person. Much of the training that's being done now in China to teach kids to focus better literally has them stare at a target, blinking every so often, but really training themselves to breathe calmly and maintain a tight visual aperture. When you read, you have to maintain a tight visual aperture. You're literally scrolling like a highlighter in your mind's eye, right? It's kind of obvious once you hear it. So for people that have problems focusing, sleep well,

• 2:26:22Speaker 01

  learn to dilate and contract your visual field consciously. This can be done if you practice it a little bit. And then, as I said before, it is very hard to get into a state of focus, like a step function immediately, like snapping your fingers. What you can do is you can pick any object, but ideally an object at roughly the same distance, placed at roughly the same distance to which you're going to do that work, and stare at it. You're allowed to blink. And as your mind starts to drift every once in a while to understand that's normal, but try and narrow your visual aperture and bring that into your visual field so that that's the most prominent thing, kind of like portrait mode in your phone. This would look very different in portrait mode than it would in just a standard photograph mode. And then, after doing that for 30 to 60 seconds,

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  moving into the work that you're about to do and really encourage yourself to do that. If you're somebody who's low vision or no vision, you're going to use your ears to do this. Braille readers have trouble focusing sometimes because they feel other stuff and they hear other stuff. So you learn to adjust that aperture consciously. And then, of course, there are pharmacologic tools. Just enough caffeine, but not too much, right? We've talked about white noise, brown noise, music or no music. Really varies, but it's very clear that binaural beats of 40 Hz can shift the brain into a heightened state of focus and cognition. So if you're going to use binaural beats, which should definitely be used with headphones, and there are a number of free apps out there and sources,

• 2:27:49Speaker 01

  40 Hz seems to be the frequency that Best supports the brain shifting into a particular.

• 2:27:55Lex Fridman?

  So can you give us the some, some, some, some binaural beats?

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're going to look for, you'd want to find a, an app that offers 40 hertz. I think Brainwave allows you to slide bar up to the particular frequency that you want. And I should say that there are other frequencies that are interesting, but 40 hertz binaural beat seems to be the one that there's the most quality research on.

• 2:28:20Lex Fridman?

  So it's like, it's like a beat.

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:22Lex Fridman?

  Um, yeah. But you're, you're saying there's a lot of mixed science on the, on the.

• 2:28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Lex Fridman?

  Like bright white noise and bright yellow noise.

• 2:28:28Speaker 01

  You really should be doing this with headphones because binaural beats are best accomplished by feeding two different frequencies to the two ears.

• 2:28:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  And then you have what's called the, this brainstem area that reads out what are called interoral time differences, and then it extracts the, the, the delta essentially.

• 2:28:42Lex Fridman?

  Turn it up.

• 2:28:48Speaker 01

  And then in other things that can enhance focus. So, you know, the pharmacology around this is pretty interesting. Things that tickle the dopamine pathway and the acetylcholine pathway, they work.

• 2:28:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:58Speaker 01

  There's your Ritalin, your Adderall's, your modafinil's, which are prescription. And there's a lot of, of non-prescription use of those prescription drugs. Not so much in my generation, but in people 35 and younger. You know, I hear all the time from day traders and programmers and stuff and kids that play video games. A lot of Ritalin, Adderall use. I think that unless it's prescribed by a doctor for a specific purpose of ADHD, I don't think people should go that route, frankly. Hits the dopamine system way too hard. Also has a number of negative effects on sexual side effects, all sorts of things that you just wouldn't want. There are a few compounds like alpha GPC, 300 milligrams to 600 milligrams of alpha GPC with a cup of espresso. If you're well rested, you're like a laser for 90 minutes, maybe two hours,

• 2:29:43Speaker 01

  but then it's going to taper off and you have to just recognize that. And then there's this whole world of nootropics now and people trying to figure out the racitams, paracetams and phenylethlyamine combined with this. And, you know, it's not quite in the place where you'd like it to be. There are a few companies that are doing this better than others. We talked about some of these on the podcast, but I would always start with behavioral tools and then consider pharmacology. And, and then I suppose the, the other thing for focus is there are these, this is a little more esoteric, but we covered this in an episode on workplace optimization. Where you place your screen is important. Staring down at a screen is not going to be as effective as placing it at eye level or above you. When the eyes are up, literally, your eyes are directed forward or up, the brainstem

• 2:30:28Speaker 01

  centers for alertness are activated. When your eyes are down, it's actually you're sort of, it's like being pulled underwater a little bit in the autonomic arousal sense. You're closing your eyes, it reflects the brainstem centers that are active becoming less, or for alertness, excuse me, becoming less active. But there's a really cool effect that's active in this room right now, which is that there've been some really interesting studies that when people work in small, compact spaces, or wear a hoodie or a hat, that can also improve focus, like blinders on a horse, for obvious reasons now, based on what I said before, but also analytic work, or the kind of work where there's a correct answer that you're seeking, is best supported by

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  these kind of low-ceiling environments, whereas there's something called the cathedral effect, which is when you work in an outdoor environment or a high-ceiling environment, it lends itself to kind of, pun intended, kind of loftier ideas and more creativity. And that probably has to do with the fact that there's a natural tendency, a reflex, to expand your visual field in these high-ceiling environments. Expansion of the visual field changes the way the brain works in the time domain. Your engineering and biology-oriented listeners will understand this, and music. For those that don't, the best way to think about it is when you have a narrow focus, portrait mode on your phone, or you're very alert, you are fine slicing life in time.

• 2:31:56Speaker 01

  It's like a, think of it as a high frame rate, like you're shooting in slow motion. When you have a, when you dilate your view, you're taking bigger time bins. And that one way to just let this hopefully land home is that if you've ever had a really exciting day, or podcast interview, or experience of any kind, your system is flooded with dopamine and norepinephrine, alertness and motivation, all this excitement, it seems like it goes by very, very fast. And yet, when you think back to that, it seems like a lot happened. This happened, and that happened. Now, think about waiting in the doctor's office, in a blank waiting room with no interesting art on the walls. It feels like it goes by very, very slow.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Dopamine and norepinephrine are at all-time low, and yet, when you think back on that experience, it's as if nothing happened, because you were... You were parsing time differently. So those are the roughly the tools and the neurochemicals around time perception and the time domain. There's a wonderful book, I'm forgetting the title, so wonderful, I forget the title, by Dean Buote Mano from UCLA, but I think it's called "The Brain is a Time Machine", that talks about this expansion and contraction of the time domain and what you can do to leverage it for work and creativity focus and so on.

• 2:33:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's fascinating that I think one way to define focus for me is the experience, the feeling of focus is losing track of time, is getting to a place where you're no longer operating in time.

• 2:33:26Speaker 01

  Well, and you mentioned being, you know, kind of cramming for something, well, you'll release a lot of adrenaline and it is true, you can get a lot done under pressure because of the way that you're slicing time. You don't actually have more time, it's that you're finally in a brain state that lends itself well to parsing information really quickly. Now, if we ramp up your level of stress enough, it's definitely, you know, it's a more or less normal distribution. We get you stressed enough, it's hard to remember anything, you're not parsing time well. But in that middle range, almost every study shows that the higher levels of autonomic arousal, meaning norepinephrine adrenaline in your system, the more effective you are at things. And we always hear stress and adrenaline, it's just bad, bad, bad.

• 2:34:10Speaker 01

  But my colleague Ali Cromer at Stanford has done these beautiful studies where if you just educate people on how adrenaline makes them sharper thinkers, they become sharper thinkers. If you educate them on the fact that stress makes your cognition worse, their cognition gets worse. This is why I don't wear a sleep tracker. If you tell people they slept poorly, your recovery score sucks, they naturally perform less well the next day than if you tell them your recovery score is high. And so I don't have anything against those companies, but I, in fact, we use some of their technology, can be very useful in certain contexts, but you want to determine your mindset around these things. And if you tell yourself, hey, deadlines make me sharp, pressure makes me sharp, you will perform better.

• 2:34:52Lex Fridman?

  So stress and anxiety. What is that? And can it be leveraged for good?

• 2:35:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Stressing, look, whether or not you get into a cold ice bath or a hot sauna so hot you want to get out, or you get hit square in the face with something over text that you really didn't want to hear or see.

• 2:35:15Speaker 01

  It's adrenaline. It's just adrenaline. And so your subjective readout of that and what it means is really important.

• 2:35:20Lex Fridman?

  And you can just channel that?

• 2:35:22Speaker 01

  Well, you can. If you, if you agree with the following statement, which I do and many people do because the data support it, which is Ali Crumb's statement, not mine, which is she directs the Mind Body Lab at Stanford. She's brilliant, by the way. Brilliant Harvard trained, Yale trained, trained licensed clinical psychologist, also tenured professor. She's a Olympian, no, excuse me, a division one athlete in gymnastics and martial arts. And her dad is a longtime martial arts trainer. He's done work with special forces. He's an amazing human being and a very humble, very kind, lovely woman and professor, scientist. She says, anything that you do and experience, but especially stress,

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  is the consequence of that thing and what you believe about that thing. And so if you consume a lot of information about the powers of stressful states to bring out your best, you will perform better. If you consume a lot of information about the power of stress to cripple you, you will perform worse. There's absolutely no question. The data are striking. And this is not growth mindset. This is just simply what sorts of, what do you believe about stress based on the dominant knowledge that you're consuming about it? So that's why it's fun to watch David Goggins. Here we go again, David, or Jaco, or Joe, or someone, or Cam Haynes, you know, put out this information about,

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  or Ryan Hall, who ran for Stanford and then now is like into the powerlifting thing and running. And there are others too, of course. When you start to consume a lot of that information, it's not just inspiring, it actually changes your perception of what your own stressful states mean. They, you can actually get better from stress if you're in the ocean of knowledge that stress grows you. If you're in the ocean of, living in the ocean of knowledge. I was seeing like a pool in the summer. You got the kiddie pool, the kids all peeing in it presumably. You got the diving thing, you got the high dive and all that. If you believe that the experience of belly flopping off the high dive is going to make you a better diver. In some sense, it, at least in this analogy, it will. Whereas if you feel that it's just the most embarrassing thing ever,

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  and it's going to cripple your ability to get out in the dive in front of anybody ever again. Well, you're, you're right about that, too.

• 2:37:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we actually talked with Carl about depression, all those kinds of things that there, there could be these, what are commonly seen as negative journeys, that could be, when reframed, can be used.

• 2:37:55Speaker 01

  You know, one of the reasons I enjoy our friendship so much is that you bring this Russian thing. You know, which I don't really understand it at a deep level. How could I? I'm not Russian, but, um, but this mindset like that, there's pain in life. When I watched that Hedgehog in the Fog cartoon, I thought, no wonder Russians do it the way they do. This is the most, it's so sad, it's beautiful in Sabbath, so sad. Whereas out here, it's like Sesame Street and, you know, my mother would not let me watch Sesame Street when I was a kid.

• 2:38:24Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:38:24Speaker 01

  She thought it was too chaotic.

• 2:38:26Lex Fridman?

  Too chaotic.

• 2:38:27Speaker 01

  Too chaotic. She was like, it's too chaotic.

• 2:38:29Lex Fridman?

  Too many things going on.

• 2:38:29Speaker 01

  Captain Kangaroo, we were allowed, and then Mr. Rogers, we were allowed. I never really liked shows. I liked doing things in, outside in the, in the yard. I was trying to trap all the animals. I didn't want to watch stuff on TV. But, you know, Hedgehog in the Fog is enough to turn any kid into a thinker and a philosopher and a poet. Here we go. I fell in love with this when, when you showed, look, it even walks with its arms behind its back.

• 2:38:53Lex Fridman?

  So if people don't know, and we're watching little clips here to get into, and it's a hedgehog that is wandering about in this fog at night and

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  Can't even see a lamp. The fog is so dense.

• 2:39:09Lex Fridman?

  And there's a, there's a feeling of searching. And then there's a, there's a horse that speaks from, from a distance, words of wisdom. Some people actually told me that they believe that's God, that's supposed to represent God. I always thought it was a motherly voice or a voice, a, a, a voice of conformity that's wants you to return to safety. And here's a, the, the hedgehog is searching for something that's in him for the unknown, to the explore the unknown. And ultimately, as it, um, as the cartoon unrolls, it's, he discovers a friend in a bear.

• 2:39:52Lex Fridman?

  And he also discovers a, a lifetime passion for looking up at the stars and the curiosity of exploring what is up there. And I see that as science is, is exploring the mystery. And also I see that as brave to explore the mystery, given all the uncertainty all around you. But there is a melancholy, the whole sound of it, the feel of it, the look of it. It was, um, it just captures both the melancholy and the wander of childhood. Which is like, there's a loneliness to it, like, nobody understands me.

• 2:40:31Lex Fridman?

  That's there, that, that children can, can, can feel, cause you're, you're trying to figure out

• 2:40:36Speaker 01

  That's my favorite character right there. I love the owl. I love the owl. The owl shows up every once in a while. I love the owl. Sorry, I, I interrupted you. Again.

• 2:40:45Lex Fridman?

  There's non sequitur. It means you're interested 70% of the time. The other 30%, you're just an asshole. So you have to figure out which

• 2:40:52Speaker 01

  So I'm told.

• 2:40:54Lex Fridman?

  There's non sequitur parts in this cartoon. It's, it's, Voda is one of the greatest cartoons of all time. Short, short little films, documentary filmmakers. So it is, um, you know, in, in the Soviet Union, in, in a lot of sort of authoritarian regimes.

• 2:41:11Lex Fridman?

  There's channels to communicate difficult ideas to people and you figure out those channels. And in the Soviet Union, one of those channels was children's cartoons. So you're actually there very much for adults.

• 2:41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that in some countries, not so much in the US, children are treated with more respect for their intelligence, you know, and not constantly getting this drivel of just kind of moronic explosions and whistles and bells and the voices that just kind of, you know, children, obviously, are children and need to be, their brains are young and plastic and need to be treated and nurtured as such, but they, but they have an intelligence. And I think that you treat them like morons and they're going to behave like morons. You treat them as, you know, people who can consume information and make sense of it

• 2:42:08Speaker 01

  in their own way, and that's what they're gonna do.

• 2:42:11Lex Fridman?

  They have a seriousness of looking at the world. I love people that talk with children like they're adults. Well, this like here's if you're talking to a mini Einstein, because you're like really, they're asking some big questions. And I think, I mean, people sometimes speak of me in this way, like, how dumb is this childlike person? But like, no, there's intelligence in these dumb, simple questions in like that a child asks. And I always loved those questions, the simplicity, but also the depth of those questions.

• 2:42:48Speaker 01

  The reason I started watching your podcast was you did an episode early on with Ray Dalio.

• 2:42:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:54Speaker 01

  And the first, maybe the first, but a question that you definitely asked him was you just said, what is money? And his answer was fantastic. It's a superb question and he gave a superb answer. And I never would have thought to ask that question. And it's the question, and it was the question to tee things off with. So, simple questions that get right to the heart of the matter.

• 2:43:22Speaker 01

  You know, and kids aren't often putting the same cultural filters and you know, they're not kids generally aren't concerned about getting canceled either.

• 2:43:31Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:43:33Speaker 01

  So they'll ask the question that no one else is willing to ask.

• 2:43:35Lex Fridman?

  And they're not concerned about the how dumb the question sounds. I find the most fascinating questions are just really, really simple. And it is a bit embarrassing to ask those simple questions of like, what is?

• 2:43:49Speaker 01

  Well, you're asking them for all of us, so please ask them. I think that question, what is money is crucial. And I think the simple questions are the most, obviously the most interesting.

• 2:44:00Lex Fridman?

  I'd ask you about, you had awesome podcasts. I mean, I can ask you questions about basically all your products. People should definitely listen to Huberman Lab, but with, with Andy Gap in the conversation, you talked about strength and muscle building and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:44:12Speaker 01

  He's an encyclopedia.

• 2:44:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:14Speaker 01

  And he also works with a lot of UFC fighters and he works with, he has a lab that includes a gym. And so he works on endurance and powerlifting and also hypertrophy training, et cetera. But he also does muscle biopsy. So he runs the full spectrum and he's a full tenured professor and he does all this stuff. So he's, he's a really unique person in this whole fitness landscape because there are a lot of PTs out there. There are a lot of kinesiologists, there are a lot of people studying nutrition and sports training, but he, I think he has the, among the people out there, he's at least in the top five, probably within the top three of people that really have their arms around the full extent of what's possible with, with training.

• 2:44:59Speaker 01

  And he works with the UFC Performance Center.

• 2:45:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, he just said a very systematic way of describing things. Those really nice, you know, skills, speed, power, strength, hypertrophy, so muscle mass, right? Endurance, all kinds of, and then the philosophical of like adaptation, how to overload stuff, all that very, is there stuff? I'll, I'll ask you about ice bath and sauna, which was surprising to me there. Is there stuff you took away from that conversation? Like principles about how to get strong, how to build muscle mass that like broaden and deepen your understanding of that task.

• 2:45:41Speaker 01

  Definitely, and I'll do these in bullet points because if people want the logic behind them and the mechanism, they can listen to that episode.

• 2:45:47Lex Fridman?

  It's a really good episode.

• 2:45:48Speaker 01

  I'll start with heat and cold really quickly and just say that avoid cold immersion. So ice baths and being in cold water up to the neck uncomfortably cold within the four hours after a training session that's designed to evoke an adaptation, either endurance, hypertrophy, or strength, because the inflammation that you experience from a hard endurance workout or from a hard strength or a hypertrophy workout is the stimulus that you're going to adapt to. The cold water immersion reduces inflammation and can short circuit some of that. After four hours, you're probably okay, but if you can do it a different day or you can do it before those sessions, that's better. Heat, however, can be done immediately after

• 2:46:30Speaker 01

  training and it's probably beneficial because of the way that it dilates the vascular system and perfuses the muscles and ligaments, et cetera, with more nutrients.

• 2:46:39Lex Fridman?

  And I should just mention, that was a crucial piece of information. It's a little bit surprising. Was it surprising to you?

• 2:46:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Because I actually, the way I posed the question to him about cold was, I hear that getting into an ice bath or a cold water immersion after training can reduce hypertrophy, but I'm guessing it's not that big of a deal. And he said, no, it is a big deal. It will short circuit your progress. Now, for people that are only interested in performance, who are doing a lot of workouts and trying to recover, but not trying to grow muscle, get stronger, or build endurance, then it makes sense to do cold.

• 2:47:06Lex Fridman?

  Like skill development.

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  Skill development, or you're an athlete in season. You know, so you have to, what's so great about Andy is he really points out the specific ways to train, given your specific goals.

• 2:47:17Lex Fridman?

  So for getting swole, stay out of the ice bath after a workout.

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  Lex is always making fun of the meatheads. I love it. I put myself in the meathead category, only because I don't do a real sport now. I work out and I run, which is

• 2:47:30Lex Fridman?

  I'm an aspiring meathead. Okay, so.

• 2:47:33Speaker 01

  One of these days, I'm going to get back to jujitsu, or I'm going to get to jujitsu. Now, in terms of training, he has this beautiful three by five concept for strength. Pick three exercises, compound exercises, multi-joint movements. Do them for, do three to five exercises for three to five repetitions per.

• 2:47:53Speaker 01

  Set, rest three to five minutes and do that three to five times per week. And for details, you can again, look to the episode, it's time stamped. But what's interesting about this is three to five times a week is a lot for a muscle group. Squatting through five times a week for five reps, meaning you're working pretty heavy, meaning you're close to failure, but not failure for strength generally. What Andy taught me is that people who are training mostly for strength can do these low rep type regimens frequently because most of the adaptation is neural. And because you're not pushing to failure, in most cases, you don't get that sore. And so it's the motor neurons getting the muscle fibers to contract more intensely

• 2:48:37Speaker 01

  or with more efficiency in other ways, that's leading to these strength gains. And this is why power lifters can train every day or five days a week or four days a week. For hypertrophy, I learned from Andy that the repetition range can be pretty broad. You're thinking anywhere from six to 30 repetitions. You should do 10 sets per muscle group per week, maybe even a bit more. So high volume. High volume, but you have to go to failure or beyond in order to stimulate growth. Why does it work at such a great range of repetitions? Well, there apparently are three ways that you stimulate hypertrophy and maybe more. One is tissue micro damage to the tissue.

• 2:49:20Speaker 01

  The other is through some sort of tension based changes in the molecular gene programs of cells that lead to protein synthesis that don't, that are distinct from damage. And the other metabolic effects of like high repetition work of super fusion of the muscle with blood. We know that third category exists because people are now doing this blood restriction training where they cuff off a muscle and they'll use a really lightweight. I've done these before, you can use a five pound weight and do curls with this and you're, you are in pain and the muscles are swelling up with blood. It does lead to hypertrophy, but in general, you're not sore, you're not doing tissue damage. And by the way, don't just tourniquet off a muscle because you have to use the proper cuffs, because you need the blood still to flow in one direction. You can't just cinch it off or you'll potentially kill yourself if you get a clot or you do

• 2:50:05Speaker 01

  it wrong. So get the appropriate cuffs, they're out there. And then for endurance, I learned something really cool. So I, I work out, basically I go to the gym. Every other day, on average, three or four days a week, I do that, but generally not two days in a row. It's workout, next day I'll do cardio, next day. And the cardio for me is always a 30 to 45 minute jog, kind of zone two cardio. Andy informed me that to build endurance while building strength and maintaining some muscle size, or even building muscle size, I would be wise to take one day a week and add to that, all out, max heart rate work for 90 seconds at least. So do 90 seconds then rest and then maybe do another 90 second all out sprint. I almost missed my flight going from Los

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  Angeles to Austin. I did that all out sprint in the airport yesterday. So I actually think it's done for me.

• 2:50:56Lex Fridman?

  So there was a sprinting Dr. Huberman throw.

• 2:51:01Speaker 01

  With three bags.

• 2:51:02Lex Fridman?

  That's awesome.

• 2:51:02Speaker 01

  Cause I travel, generally I'll travel with too much stuff.

• 2:51:06Lex Fridman?

  I love how you were probably running late for a flight and you used that as an opportunity to.

• 2:51:10Speaker 01

  Well, as I was doing it, I was thinking to myself, okay, Andy, that's a 90 second sprint. Cause I got to the, the security line. I finally got.

• 2:51:17Lex Fridman?

  But that's for better, that's for extending endurance?

• 2:51:20Speaker 01

  That's for, yeah, it, it actually has some carryover effects on, on endurance if you're doing the other stuff. And then he also said one day a week to do this workout and I haven't done it yet. Maybe we do it tomorrow. It'd be fun. Which is you run a mile, you ask yourself, how long did that take? Let's say it took eight minutes, then you walk or rest for eight minutes, then you run another mile as fast as you can, and then you rest for the equivalent period and you do that one to three times, once per week. So, and so as an all around fitness program, it make, you could collapse this into something where you say, okay, you're going to work out with the weights for about an hour every other day, maybe take two days off every once in a while, maybe not. You're going to do six to 15 repetitions. You're going to push to failure on some of those,

• 2:52:05Speaker 01

  not all, because some of those are designed to build more strength. You're not going to failure in heavier. Some are designed for hypertrophy, higher rep and going to failure. And then on off days, you're going to jog for 30 to 45 minutes. But for two days a week, you're either at the end of your jog or whatever, you're going to do some all out sprints for 90 seconds and then rest and repeat. And for another day, you're going to do these mile repeats.

• 2:52:32Speaker 01

  That's a pretty, that's a pretty large chunk of exercise movement. But if you kind of thread through the middle of all that, what you end up with is some decent strength building protocols, some decent hypertrophy, some cardiovascular training that establishes the so-called A base or a so-called base. So you're not going to get really good at anything. You're not going to become a marathoner this way, an optimizing marathon. You're not going to optimize powerlifting. You're not going to optimize hypertrophy. But for the typical person, 75% of people, 75% of the time, they want some muscle. They want some strength. They want some endurance and they want the capacity to sprint to the, to the security gate without, you know, leaving a lung in the terminal.

• 2:53:10Lex Fridman?

  So it's like functional stuff, like your life going up the stairs is easier, moving about, all that kind of, just regular life.

• 2:53:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I should mention that cold showers after training don't seem to short circuit the,

• 2:53:25Speaker 01

  the training effect to the same extent that immersion in cold water does. And that really speaks to the fact that cold showers, even though they can provide some of the adrenaline for the mental effects of like, oh, I have a lot of adrenaline in my system from a cold shower and I can remain calm. There's, there's utility to that. It's not going to have the same metabolic effects or other positive effects that cold water exposure has been shown to have. And that's unfortunate because most people have access to cold showers. Not everyone has access to a cold dunk or an ice dunk. But here in Austin, you have this place, and no, they don't pay me to say this, but I always like going to this place whenever I'm telling this place, Kuya. And they've got a sauna and a couple of ice baths and even have those salt tanks that you can float on the surface.

• 2:54:04Lex Fridman?

  Have ice baths there?

• 2:54:05Speaker 01

  They have cold water immersion. It's pretty cold.

• 2:54:08Lex Fridman?

  Still haven't done an ice bath.

• 2:54:10Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:54:10Lex Fridman?

  I need to, yeah, I need to.

• 2:54:11Speaker 01

  You're Russian, you'll probably get in and you won't even.

• 2:54:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, what is this? What's the big deal here?

• 2:54:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. Or people pay for this? I did a post, right, of you as a baby.

• 2:54:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:20Speaker 01

  It's, you know, I had to go deep to get that photo of Lex in a bassinet in the snow. Because in Russia, they actually did this for a long time. They thought that it, and indeed it does build the immune system to expose babies to the cold.

• 2:54:35Lex Fridman?

  I don't, I still don't know where you got that photo. And you were able to find exactly the right, it was, it was great.

• 2:54:40Speaker 01

  You didn't have a tie on, but you had all the look and seriousness that you do now. So it's clearly nature nurture. Clearly you were born with that.

• 2:54:48Lex Fridman?

  What about sauna? He does say that it's good to do heat.

• 2:54:51Speaker 01

  So there are three ways you can do sauna that I can just toss out as like brief things. If you want to get a really big growth hormone release for sake of metabolism, fat loss, you're training really, really hard in jujitsu and you want to recover. You don't want to sauna too often because the study that identified this massive 16 fold increase in growth hormone, they had people do this. It's crazy. They got into, okay, temperatures are 80 to 100 degrees centigrade. So that's 176 degrees Fahrenheit to 212 degrees Fahrenheit. For five to 30 minutes is the typical ranges that people work in in these research studies. For maximum growth hormone, hormone release, don't do sauna more than once a week, but get into the sauna for 30 minutes.

• 2:55:37Speaker 01

  As hot as you can safely tolerate. So probably for you, they'll be 210 because you're, I suspect you'll be on the high end of things. Then get out for five to 10 minutes. No cold exposure. Get back in the sauna for 30 minutes. Then they had them do it again, out for five minutes, back for 30 minutes, out for five minutes, back for three minutes. They had them do two hours of sauna exposure to get that growth hormone release. Now for the reduction in likelihood of dying of a cardiovascular event, stroke or otherwise, the more often you do sauna, the better. So if you look at all cause, all cause mortality or death due to cardiovascular events, and you look at sauna use frequencies using the same parameters, 80 to 100 degrees centigrade, one to seven times per week. Basically, the more often you get into the sauna for 30 minutes

• 2:56:24Speaker 01

  across the week, so 30 minutes a day is better than four times a week. Four times a week is better than two times a week and two times a week is better than one. And the reductions in mortality are really impressive. 27, if you get into the sauna, the way I just described, not the two hours a day, but 30 minutes. Twice a week or three times per week, you reduce the likelihood of dying of a cardiovascular event by 27%. If you do it four or more times per week, you reduce the probability of dying by 50% of a cardiovascular event. And in these studies, they rule out other things that people are doing, smoking. They even ask them, do you live in an apartment? Are you in a happy relationship? Like they evaluate other potentially confounding variables.

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  Now, for people that don't have access to a sauna, a hot water bath or hot tub is going to be your next best bet. And if you don't have access to that, do like the wrestlers do, which is, you know, put on two sets of sweats and a hoodie and a stocking cap and wrap yourself in plastics underneath all that and go for a run. But don't, please, nobody die of hyperthermia. I mean, you can die of warming up too much.

• 2:57:28Lex Fridman?

  Is this experience pleasant or stressful in the way? So is it as stressful as an ice bath?

• 2:57:36Speaker 01

  Okay, great question. People always ask how cold to make the ice bath or the cold water or the shower. You want it to be uncomfortably cold, meaning you want to feel like I really want to get out, but you can safely stay in. And that's going to vary by person and experience with it.

• 2:57:51Lex Fridman?

  Experience, yeah.

• 2:57:52Speaker 01

  With the sauna, it's the same thing. How hot to make it? Well, don't kill yourself, obviously. Be smart. If you're pregnant, you shouldn't be doing this anyway. But it's very clear that what you need is the release of something called dynorphin. We have endorphin, which makes us feel good. It binds to these mu opioid receptors in the body. You have dynorphin, which is the terrible feeling that you get when you're in really hot temperatures. It's also the terrible effect that alcoholics feel when they are in withdrawal. You feel agitated, you want to get out, it's really unpleasant. It's dynorphin binding to the so-called kappa opioid receptor is that's what you're trying to trigger. When you do that, a number of things happen. You set off heat shock proteins that go repair broken

• 2:58:36Speaker 01

  proteins and misfolded proteins. It also makes it so that later endorphin binds its receptor more strongly. So when you have this uncomfortable experience in the heat, You literally feel better in real life when pleasurable events come on, when you experience them. In the same way, I like to say this, that when you get into a cold ice bath or cold shower, the increase in epinephrine and dopamine is 200 to 300%. These are huge increases and they last many hours. This is shown, because lately I've gained a little bit of pushback on Twitter, that, which is, you know, interesting place. People say, well, that's just in mice. No, all the studies I just referred to are all done in humans,

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  men and women, fairly broad age ranges. So you want to be uncomfortable in the cold. You want to be uncomfortable in the heat. And this is why I'm not a big fan of infrared saunas, because they only go up to about 160, 170 degrees. Infrared light and far red light of all kinds has been shown to be beneficial for wound healing, acne, skin, eyes. There are even guys now putting on their testicles because it can increase testosterone and sperm production.

• 2:59:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, hormone release.

• 2:59:45Speaker 01

  Hormone release. But in terms of the sauna, you want that strong heat stimulus.

• 2:59:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And that's when you crawl up to the 200 mark and so on.

• 2:59:54Speaker 01

  Whenever I'm in New York, and there's also one in San Francisco, although the one in San Francisco is clothing optional, just to warn people, there's a place called Archimedes Banya.

• 3:00:02Lex Fridman?

  Is there any scientific evidence that being naked is beneficial in the sauna?

• 3:00:06Speaker 01

  Well, in certain contexts, it leads to childbirth.

• 3:00:10Lex Fridman?

  Okay, well, I'll have to read up on that. I read that somewhere.

• 3:00:13Speaker 01

  But I suppose it's not required, right, for childbirth. But in all seriousness, you know, in New York, I'll go to a place called Spa 88. And actually, Khabib's picture is on the wall. He goes there. And it's a, that one, it's clothing, they require clothing. I only just say that because it can be a little bit of a shock to people sometimes if they kind of walk in, there are a bunch of naked people, the one in San Francisco. If I go, I'm clothed, mostly because I run into coworkers or things like that, you know, I sort of more old fashioned in that way, I suppose. But.

• 3:00:43Lex Fridman?

  That you like to wear clothes around coworkers? Yes.

• 3:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:46Lex Fridman?

  Very old fashioned.

• 3:00:47Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just, to me, it just seems like, you know, that just be aware. But nonetheless, the Banyas have very hot saunas because they're Russian owned. And in New York, there's one on the Lower East Side. But the Spa 88 place, they have some saunas that the moment I get into those. I have a hard time catching a full breath. It burns. They've got a cold dunk that's like a shock. And then they've got a sauna, wet sauna, steam room that's a little mellower. So the nice thing about a banya is you can kind of find your place. And then they do the plazza where they take the eucalyptus leaves and you can pay someone. And you basically, you cover your groin and then they beat you with the, the, the, the leaves. And it's supposed to bring the vasculature to the surface. I've only done it once and frankly, I found it to be a little bit unnerving.

• 3:01:31Speaker 01

  I didn't really like the experience, but I, I'll try and get into a sauna as often as I possibly can, which is, you know, once or three times per week. And I try and do the cold exposure shower or immersion, but early in the day, cause it really wakes you up.

• 3:01:47Lex Fridman?

  One of my favorite things I've listened to, I wish there was a video, is listening to a bunch of stuff with Rick Rubin. And he did a thing with Tim Ferriss, the Tim Ferriss podcast. I don't know if you've ever heard it, but he forced them to do, they did the podcast in a sauna. And I don't think at the time, Tim Ferriss was adapted.

• 3:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you're not heat adapted, it can be pretty stressful.

• 3:02:12Lex Fridman?

  And I mean, obviously the whole experience is stressful as a, as somebody with, with microphones, like what, what is happening? But I just love that Tim was vulnerable enough to kind of give themselves over to whatever the hell this experience is. And I, I'm just so happy that Rick like pushed that kind of idea and just let's, let's do it.

• 3:02:35Speaker 01

  That's a very Rick Rubin kind of thing to do.

• 3:02:37Lex Fridman?

  And we must not, we like, we must do this. This has to be done.

• 3:02:41Speaker 01

  A podcast that was done from a sauna continuously would be really interesting. Like you could call it like the pressure cooker or something.

• 3:02:47Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I mean, like a regular podcast.

• 3:02:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like you have to sit with your guests in the sauna or they have to sit in the sauna.

• 3:02:52Lex Fridman?

  Well, that was one of the interesting things is, um, it was a sad thing because I believe there's no video of that podcast. But you could tell. There is a kinda, there was suffering, especially on Tim's part. It was like a degradation. He, he, he started over time not being able to put words together correctly, which he's very eloquent. And so you could see, there's like,

• 3:03:18Speaker 01

  There's a struggle. Heat and cold pull you down from the inside. You have to, I mean, there's a reason why the screening process for, um, make, you know, seal, seal, they call it seal training, but it's really screening and training involves cold waters. Cause you know, if you're in the heat too long, you'll die or damage tissue. In cold, you can do it quite extensively before you die or damage tissue, but it is stressful. I was gonna say one thing that, um, I sometimes enjoy seeing these social media posts where people will get into the ice bath. They'll look really stoic, like they're really tough. But actually, that's the wimpy way to go through it. When you get into cold water, if you stay very still, you develop a thermal sheath around you.

• 3:04:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:04:00Speaker 01

  That you're warming yourself. The, the really bold way is to get in and continue to sift your arms and legs. And it ends up feeling miserably colder.

• 3:04:10Lex Fridman?

  And then there's no sheath.

• 3:04:11Speaker 01

  Cause you're breaking up, you're breaking up that thermal layer. And then when you get out, you'll notice a lot of people huddle, or they'll, they'll put, or they'll grab the towel. In general, that's me, I'll get back, I'll get into the sauna. But if you really wanna stimulate the big increases in metabolism, you stand out there and you dry off with arms extended in open air. And as that water evaporates off you, it is really cold. But your body is forced to activate a number of the warming programs related to metabolism. This is the beautiful work of a woman named Susanna Soberg, who's Scandinavian. She published this paper last year in Cell Reports Medicine. And so I call this the Soberg Principle, which is, if you're doing ice and heat for whatever reason, doesn't matter if you end on heat or cold. But if you're using cold specifically to stimulate an increase in metabolism,

• 3:04:55Speaker 01

  end with cold. That's the Soberg Principle.

• 3:04:59Lex Fridman?

  And with cold, if you're alternating, and then if you want to do it the tough way, you let the shivering, so you just stand out and let the water evaporate.

• 3:05:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you ever waded into a cold ocean, you know, everybody's kind of like holding themselves, you know, if you really just, if you let yourself extend your limbs and move them around a bit, so you break up that thermal layer, that's, that's the tough way to do it. So when I see people on social media getting in and they're like really tough and trying to look hard.

• 3:05:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you want to be moving around.

• 3:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, smiling, talking, moving around is way, way colder.

• 3:05:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Are you able to talk? Can you do, so you suggest a podcast in the, in the sauna?

• 3:05:37Speaker 01

  How about this? I propose this since I got choked.

• 3:05:39Lex Fridman?

  You want to do the next podcast?

• 3:05:40Speaker 01

  I'll get two, so the folks from the plunge, maybe you could bring Lex a plunge. He certainly deserves one. And we can go side by side coffin style, or we can face one another when we do it.

• 3:05:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, we said we should do each other's podcast, so maybe next.

• 3:05:54Speaker 01

  Well, I can't wait to have you back on. I mean, we only scratched the surface.

• 3:05:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, let's do at least part of the next Huberman Lap podcast, either in the.

• 3:06:00Speaker 01

  I have a sauna and a cold plunge, so we could do, yeah, we could do, we do a sauna and a cold plunge version.

• 3:06:06Lex Fridman?

  I wonder the recording, how the recording works, if they're.

• 3:06:09Speaker 01

  Probably a bit of an echo in the sauna, but I'm sure we can take out the reverb.

• 3:06:13Lex Fridman?

  So Sergey wants to ask you about sex performance. Very journalistic, very hardcore hitting questions that we have here in the.

• 3:06:22Speaker 01

  Generally or a specific?

• 3:06:24Lex Fridman?

  No, he has a certain problem he needs help with. No, generally, you haven't done an episode on sex.

• 3:06:30Speaker 01

  Well, we did an episode early on on sexual development.

• 3:06:34Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:06:34Speaker 01

  We've done them on optimizing testosterone and estrogen, and we touched a little bit on the, on libido and somewhat on sex performance, but not much. We did an episode on relationships, love and desire, where we touched on libido specifically. So just as a quick mention of something, a lot of people take SSRIs or antidepressants that can disrupt sexual function. There are a few compounds, like macaroot and tonga ali and things like that, that at least in a few studies in humans have been shown to offset some of the, the sexual side effects.

• 3:07:08Speaker 01

  Now, in terms of sexual, and then, sorry, the episode on sexual development was about how the brain and body become organized in certain ways, how the brain becomes organized if you have X chromosomes or Y chromosomes, or et cetera. So, early, early development. Early development mainly, and the effects of hormones later on that template. We will be doing a, I'm actually putting together a series on sexual health. Everything from the menstrual cycle, which both men and women should understand, of course, understanding arousal, understanding, for instance, a lot of people don't realize this, but that orgasm is actually the consequence of activity in the sympathetic, meaning the stress arm of the autonomic nervous system.

• 3:07:52Speaker 01

  Whereas arousal is the consequence of the activity of the parasympathetic, the calming aspect of the, of the autonomic nervous system. It's counterintuitive, right? It's counterintuitive, and it kind of works like a seesaw. I mean, there's arousal, then there's relaxation, then there's arousal, but the, and then immediately after orgasm, and in males, ejaculation, what ends up happening is there's a rebounding of the parasympathetic nervous system, which it leads to oftentimes people feeling very relaxed or falling asleep. So, I'm gonna do a short series on sexual health that will be, that will include stuff about sexual performance, but also some, I'm working on getting an expert guest who can

• 3:08:33Speaker 01

  talk about some of the neurologic changes that happen as a consequence of sexual activity. And we did an episode with a guy from UT Austin here, David Buss, who's an evolutionary psychologist, talking about, went pretty deep into some of the typical and unusual dynamics of mating relation, whether or not people have kids or not, and what impacts that. But we're gonna do an episode on menopause, andropause. What's very surprising is I get a lot of questions about sexual health from the young male audience, which tells me that, well, here's what I think it reflects. I think that women, because of their menstrual cycles, early on, start to talk to one another

• 3:09:14Speaker 01

  about changes in physiology and psychology as a function of this 28-day cycle that they all experience sooner or later. Males, there's less of a conversation and it usually arrives in code. People will say, hey, what should I take to increase my testosterone? And I'll say, well, maybe nothing, you know? What are you specifically concerned about? And then over time, if you pull on those threads a little bit, you know, you get your answer. Sometimes I'll just get a direct question. But I think that the psychology of all this and in terms of jealousy and the terms of notions of roles and relationships is very dynamic right now and I'm fascinated by this. So we're going to do a four-episode series.

• 3:09:53Lex Fridman?

  What about sexual fantasy? What, to get Freudian for a second, what role does sexual fantasy have in the human condition?

• 3:10:02Speaker 01

  There's a book called The Erotic Imagination. It's a very psychoanalytic book written by a psychoanalyst that talks about how, well, here's the uncomfortable reality. Freud was at least right about one thing, which is that the brain circuitry that you used to develop attachments to your caregivers, mother and father or other caregivers, do not disappear when you hit puberty. They are repurposed for romantic and sexual relations. And so this is why the whole notion of anxious attached and secure attached, you know, stems from childhood attachment patterns, but it carries over to romantic relationships.

• 3:10:39Lex Fridman?

  So that the relationship with your mother has

• 3:10:41Speaker 01

  And father.

• 3:10:42Lex Fridman?

  And father has a, and probably other close people to you in your young age, has a secondary, tertiary, some kind of ripple effect on how your sexuality developed? Like what fantasies you might have, all that.

• 3:10:55Speaker 01

  Oh, without question. And of course, early experiences too, and traumatic or positive or neutral. The thing that's really important to remember, though, in this transfer of circuitry from one role to another is that,

• 3:11:08Speaker 01

  and it certainly consistent with psychoanalysis, that gender is interchangeable. Sex is interchangeable. So for instance, let's say you had a wonderful relation. Let's say this, let's take a hypothetical person. Okay, I'm truly not referring to myself. Let's take a, a, a young woman who has a wonderful relationship to her father and a just absolutely terrible abusive relationship to her mother, just for sake of example. She then goes into adulthood and she is drawn to very abusive men, not always, but let's just use in this example. And the dynamic is exactly the same as the dynamic she had with her mother. That's actually a common occurrence, even though in this context, she's heterosexual. She's romantically attracted to men.

• 3:11:51Speaker 01

  What is seen over and over again is that the dynamic with one parent can be transferred onto a romantic dynamic, but it doesn't have to be, you know, that if it was with the mother, then it only has to do with relationships to women. So gender is interchangeable because these circuitries are pre-sexual. They're laid down in our brain before the brain has any concept of sexual interactions. It's pre-verbal, excuse me. And so there are a lot of interesting examples and data to support this. The book Attached is a pretty interesting book by two psychologists. One, I think, is at Columbia University that talks about how childhood dynamics carry over to adult romantic attachment.

• 3:12:35Speaker 01

  So as you can tell, I get pretty alert in response to these questions. I get a lot of them really in this domain.

• 3:12:41Lex Fridman?

  They have a lot of impact on people and they're wondering about, they want to learn.

• 3:12:44Speaker 01

  And no one knows what other people are doing or what's normal. We kind of know deviancy. We know perversion. We know the extremes.

• 3:12:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:51Speaker 01

  We know the rules. Hopefully people know the rules, but you know, let's just be, there are a lot of people in the academic community, in particular at certain East Coast schools not to be named, that are in open relationships. This is more common now. It's not very common, but it's more common.

• 3:13:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:12Speaker 01

  And, you know, obviously that's a way of bypassing some of these more primitive emotions about jealousy, et cetera, and leveraging them towards maybe even ongoing relationships. I'm not passing judgment one way or the other. I always say four conditions have to be met for any discussion about sex and sexuality or sexual health. Age appropriate, context appropriate, consensual, and species appropriate.

• 3:13:37Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's weird because the thing I'm trying to figure out is why my sexual fantasy is to go to furry orgies and have sex with others dressed as squirrels and me, the other animals. So that could be, I have to, I'll see a therapist about that one.

• 3:13:57Speaker 01

  I'm not going to respond to that, except to say that as long as those four conditions are met.

• 3:14:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:04Speaker 01

  Consentual, age appropriate, context where species appropriate.

• 3:14:07Lex Fridman?

  So there's a bunch of questions on Instagram. One of them on this topic, on relationships, somebody suggested to do a part three of why Lex is single. There's a running joke about this.

• 3:14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I can answer it in part, right?

• 3:14:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:23Speaker 01

  Because, well, partially because you're very busy, partially because you've decided that until it's time, you're gonna wait until it's time, it's time, right? I mean, until it's time, you're waiting. And then, I mean, not saving yourself for marriage, I don't think. But, but in some sense, yeah, your wife, your future wife is out there.

• 3:14:47Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, she's being programmed. No, I, I mean, I definitely, I definitely believe that. I mean, first of all, I just love people and I fall in love very easily with people, with objects, with things, with life, with every moment.

• 3:14:59Speaker 01

  And that way, you're like Oliver Sacks, he fell, he would fall in love with minerals and concepts and things like that.

• 3:15:05Lex Fridman?

  And so like to me, this kinda, so a relationship is more like a commitment to one particular kind of object of your love. Like, it's almost like, it's like a journey that you take on together. Because also, the interesting thing about humans is they're moment by moment, a different person, day by day, week by week, month by month, they change, they evolve. There's an ups and downs and stuff like that. So you're, what you're doing is you're saying, well, I'm going to explore all the ways that this human gets morphed and changed and the, what makes them cry, what makes them excited,

• 3:15:47Lex Fridman?

  what makes them lonely, like the habits, like when they form certain habits, what

• 3:15:56Lex Fridman?

  How they feel when those habits are broken, like the stupid minute things that make everyday life, you're gonna be on that journey together, figuring that out, just the way we're trying to figure ourselves out, when we're like optimizing these things about diet and health, so on. You're kind of doing this computation together, because neither person really understands themselves at all, and you're together, both confused about each other, and you get to, almost like

• 3:16:23Lex Fridman?

  a relationship is a chance to understand yourself and to understand another person, like together, that process is some kind of iterative.

• 3:16:35Speaker 01

  You know, the dynamics, right? I mean, you're merging two nervous systems. This was once described to me very well by an ex-girlfriend, who's truly brilliant. She's really brilliant.

• 3:16:46Speaker 01

  She said, you know, there's four arrows. This is maybe to an engineer, or like a, so it makes sense. There's how you feel towards the other person.

• 3:16:54Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:16:54Speaker 01

  There's how they feel towards you. But then there's an, there's an arrow that comes back to you, which is how you feel about how they feel. And then they have an arrow of how they feel about how you feel, right? This is why if someone else is moody, or somebody else is upset,

• 3:17:11Speaker 01

  there's one version of ourselves where we respond to that, or they respond to us. But there's another version where we respond to that, but it's also, there's a processing of what it means for us that they're behaving that way, or feeling that way. And this, again, leads us back to that early attachment circuitry, because if a parent was stressed, the child's role is not to soothe the parent. In fact, healthy models of parenting say that children shouldn't actually know how their parents feel for like the first eight years of their life. They're not supposed to be in that mindset of empathizing for the parent. This is often not the case. But, and maybe the cutoff isn't exactly eight, but you get the idea. So, the dynamics of a relationship are where the learning is, because we learn

• 3:17:54Speaker 01

  how we react to other people reacting. It's, it's not a, just a two arrow system, it's at least this four arrow thing. But there's also the, the element of nurturing, right? I mean, I think that going through life with somebody is so much better than going through it alone. And I, I'd never thought I'd make that statement.

• 3:18:13Lex Fridman?

  So it wasn't always obvious to you?

• 3:18:15Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't always obvious to me. I've really enjoyed wonderful relationships. And some have been hard and there's certainly been a lot of growth. I'm on good terms with almost all my former girlfriends and close with some enough that I'm, I know their spouses and I'm close with their families. But no, it wasn't. And I think that when people say relationship is hard, the only really hard part of a good relationship is just dealing with oneself and making sure that you're staying in that mode of caretaking. Cause I do believe that if one is mainly focused on taking good care of the other person, provided they're also focused on taking good care of you to some extent, and we're good at taking care of ourselves,

• 3:18:58Speaker 01

  everybody flourishes, everything gets better. But no, I don't think I experienced that until fairly recently.

• 3:19:04Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the

• 3:19:07Lex Fridman?

  secret to a successful relationship?

• 3:19:12Speaker 01

  There isn't just one, but at least in the top five is

• 3:19:19Speaker 01

  master or at least be good at autonomic self-regulation. Know how to calm yourself down. Don't expect the, like, looking to anything external to soothe yourself is, it puts you in a terrible position to be a caretaker of yourself and other people, right? So learn how to self-soothe, right? Learn how to calm your mind, steady your actions, steady your voice. There are tools to do that. We talk about on the podcast, but elsewhere, have that in place. I also think that if, if your main focus is on, you want to have good boundaries, et cetera, but on tending to the relationship, doing a little bit more than you think you ought to do. If everyone does that, it goes great. I mean, I'm sometimes so positively struck by how supported I feel.

• 3:20:06Speaker 01

  Because for many years, I was just kind of doing everything on my own. So any little thing, I'm like, oh my goodness, this feels huge. And also I think the dynamics have to be right. Let's, let's be really honest. This is a little bit of a tricky topic, but.

• 3:20:19Speaker 01

  There is a power dynamic in relationships. Sometimes, not all, but in some relationships, it works much better if one person leads and the other person follows. In other relationships, it's more mutuality, works best. People need to know what they need. And so knowing what you need and what you crave is really important. And then, once you do that, you can create the relationship you want. I've seen that over and over again. And people are different. But I think that ultimately, I mean, right? It's, it's, there's the dopamine phase of a relationship. And then there's the serotonin phase, the kind of more mutuality, coziness and sweetness. There's a great book about how to make sure that the dopamine component

• 3:21:03Speaker 01

  and the serotonin component, so to speak, go on forever. And it has to do with, you know, when you first meet someone and you're attracted to them, you're essentially objectifying them. Meaning, not in the way people might think, you are not dependent on them for emotional stability or survival. As you get close with somebody, you really come to depend on them. And then you tend to objectify them less. And so this book, the book is, the name is kind of corny, but it's written by an analyst again, it's called Can Love Last? And it's a book about how really good, strong relationships are the consequence of people constantly moving through this dependency-objectification dynamic. And I use those words in the true, in the psychological sense, not in the way they're typically thrown around nowadays.

• 3:21:48Speaker 01

  So the idea, you know, in some cultures, men and women will only touch for two weeks out of the month. And then for the other two weeks, the excitement and the sensuality and all, and the sexuality is very heightened. And then they go back to this kind of distancing. Now, I don't think that's feasible for most people. But if you look statistically, those relationships tend to last a very long time with at least reported mutual feelings of intense attraction for many, many, many decades. So, human beings need to learn how to at least understand and control these dynamics. And there's a lot of divorce, there's a lot of cheating, there's a lot of stuff out there. It'd be great if people could resolve some of this stuff inside of the relationship, in my opinion.

• 3:22:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and this kind of intense attraction, I...

• 3:22:39Lex Fridman?

  There's actually one of the poems that Carl Desroth introduced me to. I think it's Two English Poems is the name. But one of the things I find myself for prolonged periods being attracted to is like, you notice some kind of magic and you keep wanting to dig to the depths like of that magic.

• 3:23:05Speaker 01

  You mean to really know that person.

• 3:23:07Lex Fridman?

  To really know a person deeply, yeah. You notice something.

• 3:23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:23:11Lex Fridman?

  Early on.

• 3:23:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:23:12Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what that is, but you just notice something special and you want to keep pulling at that thread. And you never really do.

• 3:23:20Speaker 01

  Well, you also have to be careful. You know, I get a lot of questions from guys. You have to be careful of the questions you ask in a relationship too. You have to make sure you really want that information. And it's not just about people's past, right? If you ask somebody how they really feel about something about you and they tell you, that may be soothing. It may be intensely stressful. You have to be. Here's one thing I know for sure. For a relationship to work, you have to be brave. You can't go in there fully protected. And yet you also can't go in there with no boundaries because you'll end up beat up. What's that quote? If you want to be a warrior, prepare to get hurt. If you want to be an explorer, prepare to get lost. And if you want to be both, you know, and if you become a lover, prepare to be both or something, something like that. I forget.

• 3:24:02Speaker 01

  This is one of these Instagram type things that you see passing by and you go, oh, that's pretty true. Love, love is scary because it takes us back to that primitive circuitry that is as primitive and basic as hunger, thirst, the desire for heat when we're cold, the desire for cold when we're overly warm. It's a, it's dynorphin. I mean, when somebody leaves, like the, you know, when somebody you were attached to leaves by death or by decision. Where you're forced apart, the dynorphin release is massive. It is true discomfort. People feel anxiety and discomfort. And moving through that is a hell of a process. I mean, if I knew how to best break up at a neurological level, or if you could just plug yourself into a wall and reset.

• 3:24:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I'd do that episode tomorrow, but we don't have that knowledge.

• 3:24:50Lex Fridman?

  Come on, I think we've covered this before. It's even been memeified. I think losing love is part of the magic of love. It means you've felt something.

• 3:25:00Speaker 01

  I agree, but at some point, like have you done it enough times? You know, life is finite. You know, it is beautiful to see these couples that seem very much in love despite many years, despite having been together many years.

• 3:25:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the way they look at each other.

• 3:25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'll say.

• 3:25:18Lex Fridman?

  They still see the magic.

• 3:25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they'll say, we got lucky, or it was, it's been hard, or this and that. I think external conditions being a little tougher is helpful for a couple.

• 3:25:30Lex Fridman?

  Hardship.

• 3:25:30Speaker 01

  I do, I do, because I think that you rally, you know, you, and you bond with people, you know, being, obviously you want to survive those conditions, but yeah, I do. I think that.

• 3:25:41Lex Fridman?

  Bonnie and Clyde. So.

• 3:25:43Speaker 01

  Well, they were a little.

• 3:25:45Lex Fridman?

  A little too much. Well, a little too much.

• 3:25:48Speaker 01

  They were sociopaths, but the, well, when two sociopaths.

• 3:25:51Lex Fridman?

  Love can make you do crazy things.

• 3:25:53Speaker 01

  Normally, it's interesting, normally sociopaths don't team up because they, because they manipulate each other. Sociopaths sadly are, are usually only interested in manipulating the highly pliable or unsuspecting. But when romantic attraction is woven in, then it gets really diabolical.

• 3:26:14Lex Fridman?

  Any advice on finding the love of your life, of my life? This is, this is, why Lex is single response. Why, any advice?

• 3:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, this comes from a friend of mine who's in a really excellent marriage with great kids and family and high demand life. It's a decision. Like, at some point, you just prioritize it as, okay,

• 3:26:40Speaker 01

  I'm going to make this happen, one way or another. And you don't force the discovery of that person. But, I mean, I've occasionally said, hey, I think you should meet this person or that person. And, well, it wasn't maybe my judgment was might have been off, but the timing wasn't right or something. But I think that, yeah, it's a decision. And it also has to do with life structure. I mean, there were years, so when I was in graduate school, I didn't want a girlfriend. I just wanted to be in lab. And I, sure, I had romantic dating interests, but I wasn't going to meet them through a committed, you know, live together situation. Wasn't where I was at. And as a postdoc, things are a little different, et cetera, et cetera. So, but at some point, it's sort of like, what do I want my daily routine to look like?

• 3:27:21Speaker 01

  Because ultimately, a relationship, however one structures, is going to be part of your daily routine. So at the point where you're like, you know, I'd really love to wake up next to somebody and do blank and blank together. And then I'd love to work and then we meet for dinner. And then we, you know, take the dog for a walk or take kids out or whatever it happens to be. Take a trip, but do it. You have to be, one has to be in the mindset of wanting to do couple-like things.

• 3:27:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:47Speaker 01

  People, and a lot of people don't think about it that way. They, they either fall into something or they, they don't see the benefits of coupling up. I think that the pandemic tuned people's awareness to the fact that some things are indeed easier on your own. Depends on finances, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of things are made better done with other people.

• 3:28:15Lex Fridman?

  100%. But I also, so I was very deliberately.

• 3:28:21Lex Fridman?

  It's an interesting way to put it. What do you want your day to look like? I think, what do you want your day to look like? What do you want your life to be? I was very deliberately always, first of all, happy to be alone. Like a conscious thinking. I know a lot of friends who are just unable to be alone. I'm able to be alone, but I'm much happier with another person. Like I'm able to share joy with other humans.

• 3:28:48Speaker 01

  I look forward to the day that our kids are rolling jujitsu. And my kids are, you know, hanging out with your kids. And if that notion sounds even remotely interesting, then, and fun, then, then it's sort of like you kind of backpedal from that and you go, well, it has to happen.

• 3:29:06Lex Fridman?

  How do you get that? Reverse engineer and think from first principles about love. Andrew, you're, uh, thank you for being my friend. Thank you for being an amazing human being who's so inspiring to so many people for constantly. I told this to Carl, like, one of the things that was really refreshing about you is that you, uh, when I tell you an idea and I tell you a thought, when I tell you something, you didn't, you don't shut it down as a first step. I was saying that that's common in the scientific community, that's common in people around you. You're, you're seeing what's the goal there. You get excited, you get excited together.

• 3:29:46Lex Fridman?

  And that's how you can really have a great friendship and a great, great, great stuff together. So I'm deeply grateful for that and just for connecting so many interesting people together. You're doing an amazing job, man. And thank you for existing. Thank, thank you for being you. Thank you for talking today. And next time I'll see you in the sauna and.

• 3:30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to say several things. First of all, thank you for having me on again. It's an honor and a pleasure. I don't say that formally. I really, truly mean it. I only, the Huberman Lab podcast, as I always say, only exists because you gave me the suggestion. And I'm so grateful that you did. So thank you. And for doing what you do, like you, you are brave and you're a first man in and you're just continuing to do it. Just whatever, as my postdoc advisor used to say, whatever you're doing, just keep going. And then in terms of our friendship, I mean, I think you know, and if you, and if you don't, I'm going to just keep telling you anyway, by texting, in person, you're an amazing friend. There's deep trust, there's. Immense respect and I love you, brother.

• 3:30:52Lex Fridman?

  I love you too, man. We did it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. I look forward to doing just that in the many years to come of friendship and fun conversations with Andrew. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.