Master the Creative Process | Twyla Tharp

Twyla Tharp is a world-renowned dancer, choreographer and expert on the creative process. She explains how to achieve creative success by keeping a highly disciplined routine that ultimately allows you to bring your creative visions to life. She explains how to establish a central message for each project, how to think about your audience, navigate criticism and continually elevate your standards with daily actions. We discuss how one's view of hard work, competition and even your name can shape what you think you're capable of and ultimately achieve. This episode offers direct, practical advice from a world-class creator on how to access your inner vision, build a strong body and mind, and do your best work. Show notes: https://go.hubermanlab.com/Yx57rWq Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Our Place: https://fromourplace.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Mateina: https://drinkmateina.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Twyla Tharp (00:03:28) Focus & Creative Work, Tool: "Spine" of Creative Work (00:06:22) Creator & Audience Dynamic; Intention, Finances (00:11:57) Early vs Late Works, Learning & Selectivity throughout Career (00:15:59) Sponsors: Our Place & Eight Sleep (00:19:09) "Cubby-Holing", Career Change & Reputation (00:21:48) Creator Community & Selectivity; Success & Useful Failure (00:27:42) Work Process, Schedule; Selecting Dancers, Supporting the Arts, Expectations (00:32:36) Successful Performance; Beauty, Arts Compensation (00:36:22) Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ballet & Invention; Philip Glass, Minimalism (00:43:18) Knowledge vs Instinct, Taste; Avant Garde; Classical Training (00:47:05) Kirov Ballet, Kids, Uniformity; Body Types (00:52:13) Sponsor: AG1 (00:53:36) Movement, Body Frequency, Power (01:00:18) Creative Process, Spine; Idea, Habit (01:04:15) Rituals, Gym, Discipline; Farming, Quaker & Community; Communication (01:12:16) Communication, Signaling & Distance; Feeling Emotion (01:18:11) Boxing, Strength Training (01:21:41) Sponsors: LMNT (01:23:01) Ballet Barre Work, Fundamentals (01:29:09) Body's Knowledge, Honoring the Body, Kids & Movement (01:35:42) High Standards & Childhood; Wordlessness & Movement, Twins (01:41:31) Translator, Objectivity; Critics, Creator Honesty (01:46:50) Sponsor: Mateina (01:47:50) Evolution & Learning; Amadeus Film & Research (01:53:53) Medicine, Keto Diet; Ballet Training & Performance, Desire (02:00:50) Young Dancers & Competition, Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Reward, Hard Work (02:08:47) Tool: "The Box"; Ritual, Practice vs Habit; Honorary Degrees (02:13:37) Tool: Idea "Scratching"; Movement & Longevity, Apprentice (02:19:46) Aging & Less Movement, Fearlessness; Taking Up Space, Names (02:25:42) Acknowledgements (02:27:18) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  You have a reputation for having risen early and gotten to the gym by 5:00 a.m. for two hours, day in after day out. Tell us about that ritual and do you still enjoy it?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  It's not a ritual and I never enjoyed it. It's a reality and you do it because you need an instrument that you can challenge. Just set the mechanism for the day you're going to have to do it. It's kind of boring and it's kind of loathsome.

• 0:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you give us a bit of insight into your inner dialogue around days when you don't want to go? Is there a self-talk or have you learned to push aside the voice that says, "Maybe not today"?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  It's simple. If you don't work when you don't want to work, you're not going to be able to work when you do want to work.

• 0:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Twyla Tharp. Twyla Tharp is a world-renowned dancer and choreographer. Her onstage and film works easily place her not just in the top 1% of all choreographers of all time, but also among the top tier of all creative artists, past and present. I knew I wanted to host Twyla on this podcast after listening to her book, The Creative Habit, where she spells out how to build a schedule, habits, and routines that make your best creative expressions come to life. What I love about it is it's direct and it's action-oriented. There's nothing mystical about it. She explains in her book how even for people that have just one hour a day to write, or sing, or draw,

• 1:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  or paint, or whatever, to get the most from that time in terms of creative output. Then as I learned more about her, I was also super impressed that even in her 60s, by the way, she's 84 now, she could deadlift more than 200 pounds, which is more than twice her body weight, bench press her body weight for three clean repetitions, and was taking up boxing to keep her movement and reflexes sharp. As you'll see today, she is a phenom and it comes by way of hard work. She's still in the gym every single morning at 4:00. 5:00 AM for two full hours. Today, we discuss how to build self-discipline in and around your creative mind. And we discuss movement as a language. There's this new idea emerging in neuroscience that bodily movement, then music, and then speech is how humans came to communicate with each other.

• 2:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  We discuss that and how movement can help us process and explain our emotions and our ideas. We also discuss Twyla's life growing up on a farm and how that shaped her mindset about work and community. And we also talk about what it means to have and express your unique creativity and how to evolve your sense of taste. Oh, yeah, and we also discuss telepathy. You'll notice the rapport between Twyla and I is very different than is typical for other Huberman Lab podcasts I've done. She is a real firecracker, and we had a ton of fun exploring and challenging ideas, mostly her challenging me. It was a true honor and pleasure to learn from such a virtuoso of the arts and frankly of life. And as you'll soon learn, we can all learn a lot from Twyla.

• 3:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Twyla Tharp. Twyla Tharp, welcome.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Huge fan, huge, huge fan, and love, love, love your book.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  The Creative Habit. It's just an incredible book, and it's taught me so much. And I want to talk about that today, but I want to talk about a bunch of things. Let's start with what a spine is. I think this is such an important component of the book and this concept of a spine. And the way I think about this is that many, many people feel they might have something inside them that they want to put into the world. They want to access their creativity or their creative. And there's so much information out there about how to go about that. But this notion of a spine is really critical because it keeps us on track.

• 4:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Otherwise, it can be a wandering in the desert. Suddenly, you're swimming in the ocean. Suddenly, the phone, you get a text. And please explain what a spine is and why this is such a vital concept for anyone that wants to create anything.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Spine means focus. Spine means concentration. If you think about it geometrically, spine is the center, both laterally and vertically. So if we're talking physically, you have a right and a left side. You have a top and you have a bottom. And these elements are connected through the center, right? So they have to be coordinated. You simply cannot function. If your right side is going one way and your left side's going this other way, you're going nowhere. So you have to move off your center. In terms of how you organize information, there's also a center to it. It's like, okay, over here, you have this and this.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  And you can transfer what you understand from this arena to inform this side, but it has to pass through a common point. And that common point is the center. And until you feel that, or want anyone working, either physically, or let's use the word very broadly and generically, artistically, until you know where you are grounded, where you feel the most confident that you are, what you said, you're at sea. You could be going this way, that way, unless you know how to navigate from the stars, which few people do anymore, you're screwed.

• 6:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  So when I think about a spine in a, like a scientific paper, I was taught there can only really be one major conclusion, maybe two, but one major conclusion of any paper, even though the dataset probably points to 50 different things that are potentially interesting. In terms of a podcast, or a movie, or a book.

• 6:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's sometimes not obvious to the reader, or to the listener, or to the observer, what the spine is. But my understanding is that the creator has to understand what the spine is going into it. So could you give a couple of examples from your own work? And maybe if they come to mind, a couple of examples from visual arts, or movies, or something where it's clear to the creator what the spine is, but it might not be entirely clear to the person watching or consuming the content.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I am a great fan of Agatha Christie and Jonathan Corrigan. Okay, and the reason why is because from the get-go, you know there is one conclusion.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  But that their job is to keep you away from that conclusion for as long as possible.

• 7:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Who did the crime?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Who did the crime? Who's the killer? Who, whata, whata? What is the crime, for starters? And they'll delay as long as they can in their singular, you know, style definite modes. I mean, Agatha Christie has, her format is practically that of a sonnet. I'm sure you could actually count words, and I've never seen a study, that show along, okay, she's gonna do red herring, number one, X-words in. And this is where she's gonna throw in the extra crime to push the tension up, to get it to go to here. But we all know we're playing the same game.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I think that anyone who is successful in communicating to other people gains their trust, gains their confidence, that you're not gonna screw them.

• 8:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  How much you think it's important to get into the audience's mind about what they want? Or is the spine coming from the, solely from the creator? Is it about the creator's relationship to the work? Or are you thinking about what the audience wants and what they need?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  The question about audience and intention is a sort of sensitive one because it's, "Okay, are you manipulating the audience and are you there just to take advantage of them?" Or, at the other extreme of that spectrum, "Are you doing it because you're in an ivory tower and you're off here doing your own investigations and maybe they connect, maybe they don't, who cares?" Right? Those are the two extremes: total manipulation of audience, total disregard of audience. And depending on who I'm working for or with, I do both.

• 8:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  To me, it seems like it's one of the toughest things as a creator, to both want to honor your audience's wishes, but you also have to have something that you want to communicate. And we never know how things are going to land, but for somebody who wants to create something, maybe we could orient them toward their own spine, like, or to the spine of the work. Where does that start?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think that the word intention, which is, you know, so vague these days, but why are you doing this? What is your purpose in doing it? What's your interest? Why do you want to do this? What's in it for you? Are you to learn? Are you... Is this a contract signed? Do you have an obligation to be successful to a producer who's investing a lot of money? And that's a given going in. That's going to determine a range of possibilities for you, right? And unfortunately, the bottom line controls a lot of this issue, at least for me.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  It's a given if I've signed a contract to deliver a specific result, that's what I'm doing. It doesn't matter what I want. It's, do I get that accomplished or not? It's, in a way, a kind of sacred bond, okay? You honor your contracts. On the other hand... If I am not in a singular position of earning any money, I can do anything I want. Or anything, not that I want, but anything that I think is important. Okay, so how do you determine the parameters of important? Because that helps with intention.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  In the olden days, which dates as in before 1979, anything before 79 is the olden days. In the olden days, that would include the 60s, we did things because we wanted to change the direction the earth rotated. End of story. Good luck.

• 11:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tell me more about that.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  It simply meant that whoever the practitioner was, was completely exposed to everything. Say you're a painter. You're completely exposed to everything everybody is doing. And you see another way of going about it. And you do that. Everybody is plugged into that same mechanism. And if they swerve into your area, you shift again. You have to continuously be altering perception as an artist. That notion does not seem so relevant these days, perhaps.

• 11:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why do you think that is?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Because you could live cheaper. In the 60s, you could live very cheap. Now you cannot live very cheaply as an artistic force. You're paying bills, lots of bills.

• 11:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've long thought that the best work that people do is at the beginning when they don't have any feedback yet and they're just being themselves. It's hard to stay connected to that early energy of just being oneself without the notion of contracts and feedback and perception of feedback. Do you think it's important?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  I've never been of the persuasion that my understanding was the greatest when I knew nothing, as when I knew more. I've always been of the persuasion that the more you know, the bigger your challenge. If one looks at lives of artists, for example Beethoven, take Beethoven early work, take Beethoven late work, very different, different challenges. There is argument to be made, depending on your particular set of the coherency of the classicism of the earlier quartets, as opposed to the late quartets and the total

• 13:04Speaker 01

  dissolution that he was able to accomplish at the end of his career, totally taking the sound world apart, that he could only actually do because he was deaf. He had developed during the course, unfortunately, of a very long time, decades, the awareness that he was losing his hearing, and by the end, he genuinely, basically, was completely deaf, which forced him into his own world. And there, he looked at himself across the ages.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  So, in a piece, I think of the Diabelli, which is the last thing he wrote for keyboard after the sonatas, and he actually had started the Diabelli fifteen, maybe even, I'm forgetting my details here, but fifteen years earlier than when he came back to complete it. And he got bored with it initially, because to a younger composer, it wasn't challenging enough. When he came back to it later, he had a humility about him that said, "That theme, which I used to poo-poo, because it's like, you're kidding."

• 14:24Speaker 01

  "Yada, didi, baba, yada, da, up, yada, didi, baba, yada, da, up, da, da, di, cut in half, yada, da, di, drop it back down, yada, da, di." And he's going, "What?" And later, he comes back and he says... Right. Not stupid, simple. I could never have written anything that simple or that useful. And you finish it, and it's arguably the greatest set of keyboard variations in the entire repertoire. Which you want, the earlier Beethoven, the Beethoven who has passed away through many different works, a mass, an opera, many quartets, and returns

• 15:07Speaker 01

  to it with this new information to look at it again.

• 15:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fascinating. There's something about the more you know, the bigger your challenge.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 15:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  If I may, from what you just said, maybe also the bigger the opportunity.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Totally. But the more kind of distracting it is, and the harder it is to focus, part of that's physical. But part of it is also that there are many more options available with accomplishment, if you will, but you have to be selective about what you have available to you to work with. In the earlier phase, you'll take what you can get. And now, if you take what you can get, you will be very wildly distracted by everything.

• 15:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PFASs, or forever chemicals, are still found in 80% of nonstick pans, as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products. As I've discussed before on this podcast, these PFASs, or forever chemicals like Teflon, have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems. So it's very important to avoid them. This is why I'm a huge fan of Our Place. Our Place products are made with the highest quality materials and are all PFAS and toxin-free. I particularly love their Titanium Always Pan Pro. It's the first

• 16:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  nonstick pan made with zero chemicals and zero coating. It uses pure titanium. This means it has no harmful forever chemicals and does not degrade or lose its nonstick effect over time. It's also beautiful to look at. I cook eggs in my titanium Always Pan Pro almost every morning. The design allows for the eggs to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan. I also cook burgers and steaks in it, and it always puts a really nice sear on the meat. But again, nothing sticks to it, so it's really easy to clean and it's even dishwasher safe. I love it and I use it constantly. Our Place now has a full line of titanium Pro cookware that uses the first of its kind titanium nonstick technology. For a limited time, Our Place is offering an extra 10% off their current holiday sale on their titanium cookware.

• 17:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Visit fromourplace.com/huberman and use the code SAVEHUBERMAN10 to claim the offer. With 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can try this fantastic cookware with zero risk. Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep-tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according

• 18:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  to your unique needs. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now, and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. The latest Eight Sleep model is the Pod 5. This is what I'm now sleeping on, and I absolutely love it. It has so many incredible features. For instance, the Pod 5 has a feature called Autopilot, which is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns and then adjusts the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It'll even elevate your head if you're snoring, and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. If you would like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to get $450 off the Pod 5 Ultra. This is part of Eight Sleep's extended holiday sale, which goes from now until December 31st, 2025.

• 18:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $450 now through December 31st, 2025.

• 19:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Recently, I listened to a conversation between my good friend Rick Rubin, who we were talking about earlier, who's a big fan of yours. You inspired his book, and he wanted me to tell you that.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 19:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  And he was speaking with Gwyneth Paltrow, who's, of course, an actress and has done incredible things in health and wellness business, etc. And she said something very interesting. She said, "People generally like to keep you where they found you." And it's an interesting statement that I think taps into something, again, that as a creator or as a consumer of creative content feels very true, that we encounter somebody, like somebody goes to one of your dances, or we see a great movie with Gary Oldman in it or something. You see a Basquiat for the first time, and it either impacts you or it doesn't.

• 20:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  But if it does, there's this tendency to want to keep that person and the work they do in that place. It's like we think we own the creator in some way and the work, in this very naive and selfish way. Do you think that that creates a real problem for anyone that's trying to put things into the world? Because, as you stated, with time, the creator gains knowledge, you evolve your craft. But your fan base, the people that love you, they love you for something that you're not really any longer. You're evolving.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Because somewhere over the rainbow syndrome, right? Garland always was asked for one song. Or, John, anyone is always asked for their hit because everyone wants to touch upon that which seems to somehow be their greatest accomplishment. It's aggravating. I mean, obviously, it's called cubbyholing. And for the person doing the work...

• 21:02Speaker 01

  There are artists who work serially, right? Who work in series and who make incremental changes. And they kind of have, in a way, a stab at the best of all possible worlds. But there are others who feel that, okay, you got that, I gotta go over here. And that's because, in a way, they're right. Because if you want to constantly be gaining, it's a game. You want to be gaining the attention, you do it by change. You don't do it by reinforcing. That just creates a comfort zone. And it can build a reputation. It can build a career. That it gives you more and more of what you expect.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  But for the person who's making the work, that can kind of be deadly.

• 21:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Did you know Jean-Michel Basquiat?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  A different generation. I knew the painters, the downtown painters, in the 60s.

• 21:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you give me some examples of?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Oh, you want to know the famous names?

• 22:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I don't want to know the names. I just have a question about.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Tony Smith, Frank Stella, Motherwell.

• 22:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. The reason I ask is.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Ad Reinhardt.

• 22:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  The reason I ask is that earlier you were saying that there's a time, or there was a time, when a given field, everyone knew each other in what they were doing. And I like Basquiat, I'm not obsessed with them or anything. There's a wonderful scene in the movie Basquiat with him and Benicio del Toro, or the actor playing him and Benicio del Toro, about this notion of fame. We'll put a link to it in the caption so people can see it. And it's just a wonderful example of how people will love you, then they'll hate you for how you changed, then they'll love you for how you were. And then, and it's hilarious. And again, for a consumer of content, it's perhaps even more interesting than somebody who's a creative.

• 22:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  But the point being that nowadays, I feel like there's so much stuff out there. Art and music and dance and Instagram puts it all on, you know, smorgasbord display for us.

• 23:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's kind of harder to know where one sits in a community of creators. And so, to what extent do you think that being surrounded by other creators, like visual artists or other dancers, then versus now, was or is useful?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, the early era, also age is a factor here. I was very young. I was just out of college. And I felt very much the student. It's a different deal now, and it's a different kind of responsibility. And the work's gonna be different. In the early era, I went to see absolutely everything. Now I go to see absolutely nothing. And it is partially a matter of time. But more importantly, it's an awareness that you want to feel isolated,

• 24:08Speaker 01

  in a way, because you are, and that's the truth. So you need to operate from a truthful place. And when you talk about this plethora of information that is out there, I do try to inform myself to some degree about different areas of culture. But I do it through a media perspective, because that's how the consumer is receiving it. Consumer is not at the individual exhibition or at the individual performance. They're getting it through media. So in looking at it through media, I already have a double perspective on it. I have the artist's perspective, but I have the journalist's, if for lack of a better word, we'll call it podcasting journalism.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Will we be forgiven?

• 24:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 24:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Podcasting's a weird thing. We could talk about later what it is and what it isn't.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Okay, we'll wait till this is off to discuss that, right?

• 25:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  But the challenge for me becomes, okay, in all of this swirl of stuff, what do you believe? Forget who, you can't believe anyone. But what, what can you believe? What is really grounded in a way that's productive? And in thinking, I mean, you know, I've just come off, and if you'll forgive me for diverging here for a moment, two really hard years of working. A 60th anniversary tour that was a very big culmination of a long, long working process, which put a lot on the line and which was unfortunately very successful.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Because success is much harder to follow than failure. So here you sit, "Okay, babe, you've done it all. Now what? And so where do you go? And you don't go around asking other people for the answer to your question. One has to find a way of rerouting without abandoning who you are and what you believe in order to just make change, really? How does that work? So it's an extremely attenuated place to be. Not many people make it this far. Not many people are looking at their 61st year of work. Right?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  So that's like, "Okay, so show us." Well, maybe I don't want to. And maybe I will, who knows?

• 26:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  You said that coming off of a success is much more challenging than coming off of a failure. I think that will surprise a number of people. Because people, myself included, probably feel like when you do well, you get the confidence that you can do well again. There's that also. Whereas when you fail, you're like, "Ugh."

• 26:56Speaker 01

  You can do that again, too.

• 26:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you tell your dancers that?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  No, because my dancers don't fail. That's why I work with dancers who want to work as hard as I do.

• 27:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's talk more about that process.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  In your book,

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  you talked about failure being critical, failing a lot, a lot in private.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  That had a big impact on me.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 27:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think that the, this notion of making lots and lots of failures and mistakes.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Privately.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  When you're working, you don't know if it's a failure or not. You only know if it's useful. You know if it's exciting. You know if it generates a next question. That's useful. You don't know if it's good or bad.

• 27:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's go back to your dancers and how you put them through the paces, so to speak. Because I think it also frames up this notion of rituals very, very nicely. For the uninformed, like myself, give us an example of your day and a day in the studio. The top contour of that.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  It depends on where you are in this wonderful word called process. If you are at the beginning, it's all more fluid. And while the one key ingredient I have always found to doing work is you've got to be able to do a schedule. You've got to be able to tell people what time they're coming and what shoes to bring. Okay? That's already actually made a lot of choices for you. And that's, that I think is a good thing. I mean, there's no point in just saying, oh, we'll work whenever you get here and, you know, bring whatever. Whatever is not my favorite word. So choices get made and a schedule gets done.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  And ordinarily, again, it depends on what the project is. But if it's, let's just give as much range here as possible. If it's me making a new piece, I will set a schedule. Dancers come in, they will have done class themselves. They will come warm. Okay? That is not a part of my day. I have my own work to do in preparing for that rehearsal. But in, in also maintaining my own physical instrument to the degree that I can. Because the more I can bring into the studio, the more I can give them. And the more I can expect them to bring in.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  So I have a tandem path going on here with the dancers. And we meet up, we join. And I usually will come with a certain preset sense of where we're going with this thing. And then see how it actually works in real time and real space, which is a very useful and tough mistress. And eliminates a lot of fantasy, very quickly.

• 30:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Who decides who gets to work with you?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  I do. Well, that's actually not true. In a way, they do. The dancers that I work with, I obviously audition. But I also screen from the perspective of who wants to work with me? Who's going to come and say, yeah, I'll go through that wall? Is that what we're doing? I'll go through the wall. And you want to know that you have that in the room. You're not going to ask them to go through the wall all the time. But, you know, if it seemed like it was an approach that was going to be useful, you've got to know that that commitment is really solid. And that's best indicated by their desire. Not your finding them totally appropriate, but their desire.

• 30:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are most dancers living with the understanding that it's going to be very, very long hours and probably very little pay for a while?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  For sure, very little pay and forever.

• 30:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wild world.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Crazy. Crazy and, to my way of thinking, not acceptable. Because, you know, I'm all in favor of the folks who do the work and the training to accomplish physically. And I don't make a clear distinction between either folks who are in business or athletes. To me, it is all the same enterprise. But dancers have nowhere near the possibility of earning a living that a great athlete has, not even sort of kind of in the ballpark, not even in the parking lot, not even on the highway to the ballgame. How did this happen and why does it continue?

• 31:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  It raises interesting questions at how we support the arts or don't support the arts, I think.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Are we taking over your show for the next two and a half years?

• 31:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  If we must, you know.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 31:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  This conversation, no doubt, will draw some additional attention to dance, but the larger issue of, you know, people being able to make it in the arts is not just as a, as a luxury, but as a like, critical piece of culture and life. I mean, I love beautiful things. I love beautiful dogs. Most all dogs are beautiful, even the bulldogs. But I love beautiful things and it, and it enriches life in more ways than just feeling delighted. I think there's immense carryover from the arts to other areas of, of culture. And so we could make an economic argument about that, but it's part of the reason you're here. But just sort of return to the, this business of, of ritual.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Can I interrupt you before you go there?

• 32:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Because I'd like to take up two things. One is the notion of the reality being that when we do a successful performance, I measure it by, did that audience leave in a better frame of mind than it came in with? In other words, we provide a service. And we provide a service that gives them a sense of optimism. Yea, verily, I might even go to joy, to the belief that they, that they too occupy this body that does these phenomenal things and thank you, Lord. Okay? That's a service. I think dancers should be paid more for

• 33:20Speaker 01

  that service and that it needs to be acknowledged. The other point that I want to bring up is you've used it twice now. I didn't stop you the first word. Beauty, what is this?

• 33:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  It could be something I see or hear that it stirs a, some set of emotions in me that carries forward. And what you just said a moment ago about the audience leaves in a different state. I mean, it's, the word that came to mind was like, it's like really great therapy. But it's, in some sense, it's better than that because.

• 33:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was also thinking that perhaps in the top ten of all my favorite memories are several live performances that I, when I was the observer. It's like those things really stick with us. And I think they change us in meaningful ways, especially when we're in the audience with other people, not just watching on a screen. They can be transformative, for sure.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  And in a live audience becomes, of course, a whole nother thing about costs and expenditures, but that it confirms that not only do you feel a new righteousness for yourself by a performance, but that you sense others do as well. And that creates a community bonding. And, you know, OK, football games, you know, everybody is very rowdy about it. Most performances, people are not, but that doesn't mean that it still doesn't take that hold of people who are experiencing the same thing in real time. We tend to dismiss that which is familiar.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  And that sense is actually not all that familiar, but it feels very intimate, and it is. But it actually is quite rare. And the rarer a piece of art, and I will call a performance a piece of art, is, the more value it has. And the more that is compensated for culturally and economically. There should be a price point on beauty. Let's put it that way.

• 35:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, there is for everything else.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Well, I know.

• 35:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. You know, there is a price point for beauty in terms of, people could say, well, the sunrise is free, and the sunrise is beautiful, but seeing it in certain locations costs a lot more money than seeing it in other locations, that's for sure.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Right. And that brings up another thing, because in a way, it's a kind of horrible thinking to go, yeah, it's a privilege. You know what? You can't pay me. You can't buy me. I don't have a price. And that, I'm sure, is one of the things in great dancers who are certainly not paid, as I've said before, and I'll say at least 300,000 times more, commensurate with a great athlete. That is probably one, and I've never, actually, I've never brought it up directly with a great dancer. How much is it your own sense of independence and liberty that makes you the artist that you are?

• 36:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think the name that most people probably associate with dance is probably Baryshnikov. If they don't know much about dance, they know that name, or it's familiar to them. What was it about Mikhail Baryshnikov that sort of had him break through the common consciousness that way?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  First of all, Misha Moore, these days, actually, is remembered by younger generations from his later cultural input, i.e. Sex and the City, than he is as a classical ballet artist, all right? Let's just start there.

• 36:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because he showed up in Sex and the City as a, as a character.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Show business is a funny thing.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  And that's, and that's how he is often recognized by younger audiences, younger, you know, folk. What was he in the beginning? He was, actually, there was a cellist, then there was Nuryev, and then Misha. Politically, he came across the line. It was Russia, America. He chose America. He's our hero. Plus which, he was gorgeous. He's unquestionably, in my opinion, in that era, the possessor of a technique that was a culmination of the 20th century and that will never be matched.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And to see him work at the bar, or to see him in the absolute interior realm of what the classical ballet was, was an unbelievable privilege.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  But not many people saw that. Not many people saw him at the bar, which is where you build your chops, okay? He also was capable of taking those chops and expanding on them, breaking through their boundaries, trying it this way, do it that way, but utilizing the power that he had from that simple classical base to take it outward. Lots of inventiveness in that regard. And the guy was gorgeous. What can I tell you?

• 38:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  His looks made a difference.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  And what does that mean? But what does that mean? It means a wide-ranging interest that you feel includes you, as you, the spectator. You feel he's including you in his wideness of vision. Where does that come from? From the intellect? From his musicality? From his training? From his personality? From his cultural breeding? Latvian? And it is a singular commodification, one of my favorite words that drives people up the walls when I use that word in relation to the arts of performing. But he was very, very, very astute

• 39:17Speaker 01

  in many different areas, starting from an athletic ability through to a poetic sensibility.

• 39:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's interesting you said that because he was attractive that people felt that they were a part of it in a way that was not typical.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  We all want to be godly. We all want to be a part of the sublime. Few can give us that.

• 39:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  So when they say, you know, artists, or I include dancers, I'm just broadly speaking, artists are like portals. Is that what you mean?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I would accept that.

• 39:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Years ago, I went to a Philip Glass concert at UC Berkeley. I'll be honest, I didn't understand it. I left there in a different state, mostly of confusion

• 40:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  that people were willing to pay for that. I'm sorry if I'm insulting any Philip Glass fans, but this is my podcast. I'm going to be very direct.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was told I maybe hadn't seen the right Philip Glass concert. I was very confused.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Why?

• 40:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, I'm not a musician. I'm not, but when I like something, I know I like it and I tend to really like it. But it's rare for me to encounter something that's like, it just felt like,

• 40:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  it felt extremely experimental at every, at every part of it. And I, and I couldn't tell whether or not people were telling themselves that they liked it because it was him or whether they really liked it.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  What year is this that you went to this concert?

• 40:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gosh, this must have been 2008? 2007, 2008?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  That's very late. Okay, so Phil obviously has been working since the 60s. And I've done one major collaboration with Phil and one recent collaboration. And in the beginning, the audience for minimalism, right?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Reich, Riley, Glass, came gradually. And so when the initial piece called "In the Upper Room" was done,

• 41:37Speaker 01

  it had a power and a force that involved also discovery. Now, the later piece, which is called "Slack Tide", it fills a known commodity and was addressed slightly differently. Rather than, I mean, you know, Phil,

• 42:00Speaker 01

  it's percussive. The lyric element has been reduced, okay? And You're a sensitive soul. You think of the word beauty. And that does not mean total elimination. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It means inclusion. And so the later Glass work was done in conjunction with a Chicago percussion group called Third Coast, who Phil's worked with a lot and who he trusts to do iterations, if you will, on the work. And we iterated with a flute. Flutes don't do this. Flutes do this. So we put a stream on top of that. That's in the music.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  I mean, iterations are a study in and of themselves, right? What makes something different from and yet still the same as? Good luck with that one. But that was the different range. I dare say, if you go and look at, because Third Coast produced a recording of this work, you listen to Slack Tide and then tell me a response to Glass. But basically, minimalism took the lyric element and reduced it to just the temporal passage in time.

• 43:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, it's interesting, because of all the concerts I've seen, this one still sticks with me as like a stimulus to learn more. Because one thing that I'm totally fascinated by and perplexed by is that, with the exception of comedy, the more one learns about something, the artist, what went into the art, the dance, what went into it, typically, the more one likes that piece or that genre. Like, the more I learn about something, then I can listen to it with a different ear. I can watch it with a different eye. Comedy's the exception. If it's not funny, learning about the origins of the joke don't make it any funnier. Learning about the comedian doesn't make it funnier. It just, it sort of just like falls further and further.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  See, I think that's true of your other art forms, too. I think you're confusing, forgive me, knowledge with instinct. I mean, instinctively responding to the humor, but instinctively, a piece of art can reach you, but you can be baffled by it. But we don't like confusion, so we might call that something we should learn about before we can acknowledge liking it. That's one of the things that is, I think, really difficult and something I think a lot about, which is not only protecting but refining instinct.

• 44:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tell me more about that.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  I know, it's fascinating, isn't it? I can't tell you about it because I could be writing a book.

• 44:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, well, Rick Rubin, who I feel, even though you haven't met yet, you share a certain kinship with, talks about taste all the time, about this, you know, a sense of taste and trusting your own sense of taste as a consumer and as a creator.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is so key. That's why I brought up the Philip Glass thing, because I'm not writing off Glass on the basis of one concert. But I didn't walk out of there thinking like, maybe I'm an idiot, maybe I didn't get it. I thought, and I didn't think they're all idiots, I just thought, I guess I'm just different, because everyone else here seems to really love this, and this is like, I just doesn't hit me right. It's like, I don't like sardines. Never liked sardines. You give me a hundred sardines, I'm gonna hate them a hundred times more than the first sardine, I promise, because I've eaten a hundred sardines. It's just, but I don't care that I don't like sardines, I just, I'm over it. I was over it from the first sardine.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Right. Fills on the cusp of the avant-garde. The avant-garde is a smug place to be, and can be very aggravating, and can also be not that bright, and very indulgent. There might have been some sense of that to it. The avant-garde can confuse itself with originality and vice versa.

• 46:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you think it's important for dancers to be classically trained before they get into other forms?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  To be classically trained, absolutely. You want to be a musician and not understand the circle of fifths? The harmonies of construction of all music? No. Ballet is a format for the human body moving in space that has evolved over many centuries and has got a head start on us. And if you want to learn about how you move, you might as well try and jump a little further forward by studying ballet. I don't care ultimately if you're arabesque, which is one leg behind, one leg under, right? If your arabesque is aligned in a perfectly classical manner, unless it's a perfectly classical ballet. But I do care you have that gear and you can reference it in terms of

• 46:56Speaker 01

  where's the leg going to move from? And does it get to that point? Can it stop right on its center or not? That's what ballet can do.

• 47:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  If there's a proper way for a movement to be done,

• 47:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  the limb, the, every element within the limb has to move from point A to point B in a certain trajectory. And people come in different sizes and shapes, and you've got multiple dancers on stage. How do you reconcile that?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  You don't. And the word is properly. Properly. What is proper?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I had the experience of working with the Karaf in St. Petersburg. And I went to their school. And the children are lined up and they are exact replicas. And they have a huge selection mechanism throughout the country for picking those 10 or 12 kids that are going to be in there of whatever age. And I saw one group of little, little boys, less than eight years old. There are probably eight or nine of them in their little black shorts, their little white shirts.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  And I just came in briefly and they were being, you know, as they do, it's a part of the tradition and it's wonderful, being very respectful and it was like, oh, come in and you will sit here and they will continue and then we're getting moved to the next class. And one little boy came out and said, no, no, no, we want to do more. So we went back and they started jumping out of sequence because the ballet class is very carefully constructed to warm up the body and also to develop the training. So you're working both laterally and in depth in every technique class. They went out of sequence so the boys could jump, which is usually not done until the very end of class. And this little guy

• 48:57Speaker 01

  had real what we call ballon. He could go up and he could like, for a moment, it seems like he's able to suspend. He knew he had that. He could fly. And he knew I wouldn't see that at the bar. So he wanted to, but he was what we call pronated. His feet were hyperextended to the outside. So he's not going straight up through the metatarsal. He's going up through the outside of the leg. And, you know, I pulled the teacher out and I said, you know, that kid's phenomenally talented. And he said, yeah, we know. And I said, but he's pronated. He said, we know that too, but we have eight other ones. Like, we, if he doesn't figure that out, he's out and we'll bring in another one. And this can be the difference between a child who grows

• 49:41Speaker 01

  into an adult with a career and a life and one who's lost. So parents are very protective of trying to get this opportunity for their kids and it's heartbreaking. And the way they are trained is they are wrenched into these positions. And I saw in an older class of young girls, an arabesque, and one leg was not slightly behind. The teacher came and literally pinned the leg behind with one arm and drew the shoulder out this way, literally pushed her and then released her. And that's how they teach. You think that's gonna happen in America? I don't think so. And that's what it takes to create a line of people who, at the bar,

• 50:26Speaker 01

  hit exactly the same arabesque. It's both a thing of extraordinary beauty and a thing of incredible lack of choice. Because that arabesque is gonna be set for life in that one angular demarcation, right? And, you know, heaven knows here in the West, we like to encourage all kinds of wanderings around, which is hard to get through the head of a child who's been trained in this way, to stay within those parameters. And it says something also, obviously, about the political situation, right? Those kids don't have a lot of choice. They toe the line.

• 51:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  So is the goal to get that uniformity?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and it's, I mean, for a person who works sometimes to what's called unison, there are times when you want, I don't do it that often. It's a lot of work. And I don't like what it says about democracy. But if you need to have unison, you want unison. And that means an exact agreement on time and space. Now, your other question about what about different body types and so forth? I can accommodate that because I can gain my unison from the center. What we're talking about at the ballet here gains it from the periphery, from the exterior point, from the broad reach.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I'll accept my broad reach is not gonna be actually in uniform. But my center is gonna be, and I'll make that compromise. It's a compromise of sorts. It's not really a compromise. It's an agreement. I'll make that definition because I want them to work from an interior purpose, and the visuals of it are your problem.

• 52:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  By now, I'm sure that many of you have heard me say that I've been taking AG1 for more than a decade, and indeed, that's true. The reason I started taking AG1 way back in 2012, and the reason why I still continue to take it every single day, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps that you might have in your diet, while also providing support for a demanding life. Given the probiotics and prebiotics in AG1, it also helps support a healthy gut microbiome. The gut microbiome consists of trillions of little microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune status, your metabolic health, your hormone

• 52:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  health, and much more. Taking AG1 consistently helps my digestion, keeps my immune system strong, and it ensures that my mood and mental focus are always at their best. AG1 is now available in three new flavors: berry, citrus, and tropical. And while I've always loved the AG1 original flavor, especially with a bit of lemon juice added, I'm really enjoying the new berry flavor in particular. It tastes great, but then again, I do love all the flavors. If you'd like to try AG1 and try these new flavors, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. Just go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get started. I'm gonna ask a couple of questions in the frame of biology

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  that I think, I'm hoping you might find interesting, but you certainly have the information that I'm seeking here. First off, you may know this, but if you don't, there's a great Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, his name was Sherrington, and he said, "The final common path is movement." That basically, the movement of an organism, especially mammals, is really what the nervous system is constructed for. And, you know, more modern theories are that movement came, and dance came, then song, then language. But that movement is the foundation of everything.

• 54:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  As it relates to evolution of a species, finding mates, finding food.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Can I interrupt you?

• 54:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Please.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  It is even more basic because movement is the first thing we're gonna do. And you don't make any sound until you can move parts of you. You don't feed yourself until you can move that hand. You don't write anything, language, music, or nada, without movement. Why do we therefore stick movement way down here, under the bottom of our cultural heap, as somehow shameful, or what? What is it with the aspect of dance that makes it a less kind of revered format than sculpture or painting or music? A secondary handmaiden to the arts, really?

• 55:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I certainly appreciate movement. And I know that, and I like to think that people's obsession with athleticism in some sense reflects that, too.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 55:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've been wanting to ask you this question for a very long time, since I heard your book, even though it's not about the creative process. And here goes. I'm gonna keep this as brief as possible, just to give the raw materials for your response. So, the motor neurons, the neurons that control movement. They control movement of the trunk. They control movement of the fine digits of the fingers that are the fingers, the digits, as we call them in science, right, nerd speak. The wrists, everything. So we say from proximal to distal, like from center out. There's this incredible thing that's been discovered over the last 20 years or so, which is that the molecular identities of the neurons

• 56:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  that control the movement of my trunk and your trunk, forward and back and side to side, are exactly the same as the neurons that control undulation in a fish.

• 56:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  The neurons that control the movement of the proximal limbs, like the upper arms and the thighs, are molecularly identical to the neurons that exist to control fin movement in fish. And that what evolved was progressively more and more motor neurons so that we as old world primates can manipulate the fine digits in like so. Okay, so that's fine. That just tells you that there's this kind of primitive to more evolved structure of neurons that control movement from center out. What's fascinating to me is that while I'm sure there are people who can move their trunk at very high frequency, you know, undulate very at high frequency, that's a hard thing to do.

• 57:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  That that generally has to be learned. Like, I can move my trunk slowly from side to side, but it's hard to move it very fast from side to side. But I can move my fingers very fast. And so there's there's basically a frequency map from the center out on the body. So now, when I look at the way people move, I think, because I'm a neuroscientist and I have this knowledge in my head, like, they're they're communicating frequency. And frequency in the visual, in photon space, gives you very interesting, you know, we have wavelength. We have also frequency. Like, we in sound, you have high, low and high pitches, low to high pitch. And in other domains, you also have this.

• 57:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so to me, first of all, I'd love your thoughts on this. I'm not I'm not asking for validation of a theory. This is just is what it is. I didn't come up with this. But I wonder whether or not consciously or unconsciously, when you've choreographed dance, whether or not you're making music with movement in a way that maps on to this idea of a frequency map from center out. Maybe, in part, no?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Sweetness, my love, did we not discuss already much earlier the importance and specificity, specificity, specificity of center?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Now, what you're saying about the different rates of the tendrils, the neurons, the cellular

• 58:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, the neurons that control the trunk versus the upper arms versus the digits.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, this has got more choice, can make more choice than this can make. Do I think about the parts of the body as sometimes? In other words, the legs can be working at one rate of speed, say half time, of what the arm is doing. And they'll be on the same metronomic base, but they'll be operating at a different speed. Certainly, I would think of that. When I think about power, that sometimes you can isolate through the center and there'll be like a huge impact from the top, but that the body, the lower body will be fluid sometimes. I mean, I've ripped off Tai Chi forever. It's okay. So we're doing Tai Chi and suddenly we

• 59:21Speaker 01

  boing, and then we're back into it, right? So it's like, just like a jolt goes through it. And I suppose that's a change in your neurological construct. I mean, what interests me in what you're saying is a part of the nightmare of my life, which is dance has difficulty, and one of the reasons it has difficulty in being registered by many people in our culture is that it doesn't have easy access to being documented and recorded in the way that music does or language does. What you're saying, I've argued for many years, should be a way of documenting movement that people could read. And then they could read a dance.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  And then they would feel grounded in that tradition and understanding of that tradition. They could study that tradition. That's not now possible.

• 1:00:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to talk about the creative process a bit in a way that perhaps people can, you know, structure some of their own creative pursuits.

• 1:00:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  At what point do you know the spine?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  The beginning and the end.

• 1:00:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Okay, what do I mean? In the beginning, you hope for it. And you have a little taste of it, or you wouldn't be able to, I wouldn't be able to start without the tiniest little indication, there's something there that's actually gonna hook it and it's gonna allow me to start building. And this is where process becomes very reassuring. You start building the wall. You're just mixing the mortar and putting the brick in, mixing the mortar and putting the bricks on. The wall grows and it develops all of this stuff happening. And you're just doing the mortar and the brick. And it's very not menacing and extraordinarily rewarding in the place you wanna live. But you can't, cuz you gotta finish the work and let it go. A dismal moment.

• 1:01:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe we put this into example. Let's say I wanna write a short story. I realize you're a choreographer, not a writing instructor. But we'd say, like, what's the, would you, and then you say, well, someone says that they wanna write stories or books. So what's the spine?

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing is, what's the idea? The first thing is, where, where is the, where's the story? I mean, some writers have to know the end before they can start at the beginning. Others want nothing to do with the end until they've at least reached the middle, because they want the work to find itself. That all is, you know, that's a part of the privilege of being a writer, and the pain of being a writer.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  But the construct of starting, sometimes it's simply habit and discipline. And you are gonna go in and you are going to start at, let's say, 6:45 every morning, and you're gonna give yourself, you've only got an hour and a half. Okay, I'm not talking about you're a professional writer. I'm talking about you're a person who maybe wants to become a professional writer, but who's got at least one other job and maybe two, and probably a kid to deal with. An hour and a half is a lot of time in that life. So, starting, you gotta start with something. And either there's an idea that you're, that you really are...

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  energized by, or just, you know, you start writing something, get something on the page, and bit by bit, it becomes a habit, and maybe that habit evolves, and maybe it doesn't, and maybe you give it up, and maybe you find that you, then you get an idea, you find something you keep returning to, and it pulls you, it hypnotizes you, it makes you want to follow it, see where it will go to, see how it will develop, and then at a certain point, it's done, it's played out. Maybe you can guide that so that it becomes more exciting, and you learn how to build as you're going along, and you learn how to direct it so that it's going to get to

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  either a surprising end, where it has to end, and the reader's going to say, I should have seen that, or you're going to say, I should have seen that, or you're going to go, no way, you're a liar, I'm not going to buy this book.

• 1:03:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  But the showing up at 6:45 consistently is the, is the, is the bricklaying that's essential.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it allows you to think that you could be a writer.

• 1:03:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sort of living into a, a delusion that could be a reality.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Could be.

• 1:03:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  And maybe it's not a delusion, because maybe what you start to write immediately is a very interesting sentence or two.

• 1:04:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Some days.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Some days, yeah, you can't expect a good time every day. You might want to quote me on that.

• 1:04:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  You have a reputation for having risen early and gotten to the gym by 5:00 a.m. for two hours, eating three hard-boiled eggs post-workout, day in after day out, for a very long time. Tell us about that ritual, and do you still enjoy it?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  It's not a ritual, and I never enjoyed it. It's a reality, and you do it because you need an instrument that you can challenge. And in order to challenge something, you've got to know how it stands. I mean, I could challenge, you wouldn't want me to, the centering of this, but I can only do it if it's already grounded, then I can try to throw it off. You can't just throw things off, they've got to be set before you can throw them off, right? So that is, you just set the mechanism for the day you're going to have to do it.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  It's kind of boring and it's kind of loathsome. I would rather go to the gym than brush my teeth, I'll tell you that.

• 1:05:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you give us a bit of insight into your inner dialogue around days when you don't want to go? Is there a self-talk or have you learned to push aside the, the voice that says, "Maybe not today"?

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no, no. It's simple. If you don't work when you don't want to work, you're not going to be able to work when you do want to work. End of story.

• 1:05:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Were you always like this?

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  What do you mean, "like this"?

• 1:05:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  I didn't mean that in that sense and you know I didn't.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:05:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know I didn't. You know I didn't. I meant, were you, have you always been this disciplined and had this, uh, this clear view of the necessity for hard work?

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  My mother was an extraordinary force in anybody's life. She happened to be in mine. Okay? I was trained as a very young child to practice. Whether, anything, everything had to be practiced. It had to be scheduled to be practiced and time is limited and you don't waste it. And you work very hard and you try to maximize that period of time because otherwise you're being wasteful. And while I said I'm from San Berdoo, I am, but I'm not. I am from the Midwest. I was born in Indiana and left when I was eight.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  But up until that point, I had the extraordinary good fortune of being on my grandparents' farm for long stretches of time without my parents. And these farms were in Amish territory in the family's Quaker. And the land was the land, period. There was no electricity. There were no phones. There was plant the seed, grow the seed, kill the hogs, ring the check at chicken's neck and you work or you don't eat.

• 1:07:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, the Midwest sensibility is something to behold. I have a lot of friends in the Midwest. There's a real decency out there in terms of how people communicate with one another. They do and don't know. And there's a real thing to farmers.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  At Stanford, when I was a postdoc, there was a MD/PhD student in the laboratory. She'd grown up on a mushroom farm, not the psilocybin mushrooms, the kind you eat and don't hallucinate, on a mushroom farm in rural Pennsylvania. And her work ethic, and this is at Stanford School of Medicine, where people are very driven, not just on average.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Her work ethic was unbelievable.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  And her cheerfulness about it was also unbelievable.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  It was spectacular.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  The delight, in fact.

• 1:07:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, she had a bike accident on, a few people will know who this is. She had a horrible bike accident on campus, knocked out all her teeth. Someone had stepped out in front of her. She was back in the laboratory with falsies in and working, I think, within like 48 hours. This would have put anyone else out for a much longer time. I haven't kept up with her, but I'm sure that she's a spectacular physician, scientist, wherever she is. But there's really something to the farming piece.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  It is communal, and it is the sense that while these farms are very isolated, I mean, you know, 100-acre plots that are divided by tree barriers from one another, that somebody has your back all the time. I still have my grandmother's quilting frames. And they, when established, it require eight women, a four to a side, and the quilt gets done. And then you make eight of them, and each one gets a quilt. And you know that to do the big job, the barn that's got to get up, you have to utilize forces outside yourself in order to accomplish this, and that you owe.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  You owe them. And you want to, it's not an obligation, it's a sharing. And you understand, okay, I'm getting that barn. I owe services here for seven more barns or whatever.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  This is an excellent thing. And I do try to think of dance that way. And I do think a well-made dance is a good community. It's society as it ought to be. It works the way we should work together.

• 1:09:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  You mentioned Quaker.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've been to a couple Quaker meetings.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Silent meetings?

• 1:09:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, every once in a while, someone would stand up and say something. And a friend who was, there's a Quaker house near where I used to live when I was finishing my masters and I got, became friendly with a guy outside because we would drink coffee the same coffee shop and chat. And he was like, you should come to a meeting. You might find it interesting. And I, I knew I was in a benevolent place when I walked in. Because, you know, in Berkeley, California, if somebody says, hey, you should come to a meeting, and you're like, you know, you're like, you don't know what you're getting into, right? But they had a picture of the Quaker Oats guy on the wall as a joke. I knew, I'm like, okay, they can poke some fun at themselves.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, yeah, someone would stand up every once in a while, say something, there was some reflection, and then at the end, everyone kind of like said goodbye and took off. It was, it was interesting.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, those in, in, in those days for me were Wednesday evenings, and they were silent meetings. And there would be meetings where no one had anyone to, anything to say. They were silent meetings. And simply, you can help me out here. They were not using language, but surely neural rays were going out. And probably if there'd been a catastrophe in the culture, you know, some kind of huge fire or something awful, you know that people are thinking, you have a sense of what that thinking is, and that there was and is and can be a kind of non-verbal communication.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  It's not even a physical, you're not using sign language to communicate, but that you have a sense of what we called in the day, in the air. In the air. And that that is a very powerful form of communication that we don't really respect anymore. And how potent is it neurologically?

• 1:11:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  This last year, the podcast series Telepathy Tapes was very, very popular. I haven't had a chance to watch it in full. I listened to a little bit of it. It's about how kids who are nonverbal perhaps can tap into this. And it's gotten some criticism from the standard scientific community, but also less than you would have anticipated if it had all been complete BS. So I think there's, you know, it's gotten partial acceptance there. This brings us back to the notion of a center, believe it or not. Fish have lateral lines. They sense the electrical fields of other fish and other things near them.

• 1:12:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, there's many, many examples from the animal kingdom of, you know, like the platypus with its electric. People call it an electric sensing bill, but it sends out these electrical fields that then it can detect things in its environment because its vision is very poor. Somebody once said, Ed Yong, the writer, said that so many animals rely on smell. We sort of smell with our eyes, which sounds crazy, but we use our eyes the way that other animals use their noses. And that gives you an insight into how they use their noses. But most animals have a sense of how close or far other members of their species and other things are. We tend not to think about that unless you live in a big, open space and you get on

• 1:13:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  the New York subway and like suddenly you're like, whoa, this is pretty, you know, this is different. But we have these, we don't really have a lateral line, but we have remnants of things that are similar. There are beautiful studies showing that if you look for, in an experimental context, magnetoreception in the human brain, people perform above chance. In other words, we can detect magnetic fields. People are going to think I'm crazy, but this is published in Science magazine.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:13:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, we can sense electric fields, but we sort of have to train ourselves to do it. And perhaps some people are just naturally leaning that way. So there are absolutely Is, when I say energetic, neural communication across space that isn't just words, sounds, sound waves, and vision, photons. So, there's stuff happening at a distance. And smell, I think we vastly underestimate the extent to which pheromones and odors of people who are upset, or, you know, there's a study showing that human tears affect hormones in people around them.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  You need to have a 16-year-old boy around you when it comes to the sensitivity to smell and perfumes being sold commercially these days.

• 1:14:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  But the thing about distance is something that I'm very, very interested in. I mean, the awareness is mostly visual for dancers, and it's usually established, again in class, if you have a crowded class, the distance can be, the next one would be out here from this point. But a really crowded class, the distance might be out here, in which case you're going to be angling yourself to the diagonal so you're able to get full, full reach, which is going to impact on design, right? But there are also ways, and it's very demanding, actually, and it requires a lot of trust

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  on everybody's part, where I can get dancers to work very close together. And that has a real visual impact, and it becomes a physical sensation of the person watching. It can become an anxiety, "Oh, don't step on that, she's going to get stepped on," and it, you know, there I'm kind of using it crassly. But it's interesting to push people in, into what's called one another's space, and be able to condense the amount of area that people feel comfortable in or require, which could be a very good thing culturally speaking, because we got less and less space.

• 1:15:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it's interesting that this notion of communication across space, if we could just continue down this path a bit. Last year I had the great honor, really, to do a lecture about music in the brain with Rene Fleming, the great opera singer. And we got on to this topic of the fact that opera singers will capture an emotion. They're using their diaphragm in a very particular way, getting a certain frequency of vibration in their body, obviously using air, you know, shaping the air as it leaves their lungs to sing. And how, maybe, that's actually impacting the same sets of neurons in the audience, but they're not singing. Okay, this is kind of an interesting idea that where you're feeling the emotion of the singer

• 1:16:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  because your phrenic nerve, the nerve that controls the diaphragm, it might be vibrating at a similar frequency.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:16:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  This sort of gets back to this like more, I don't want to call them primitive, but more fundamental aspects of language and communication.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  I wonder with dance, and perhaps with athleticism too, like on a football field, when we see somebody move or people move in a certain way, whether or not, we don't realize it perhaps, but that there's almost the illusion that we're moving like that.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like we're accessing this in this idea of portals, like artist portals, that we're actually sensing at some level what it would be like to move like that. And of course, I can't.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, these ocular glasses, right? That you believe that you're projecting yourself into that item up there and actually feeling it. Hello, right? That must be what is working, what's creating that illusion. You're not really inside that item, but you feel and believe as though you are.

• 1:17:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I've done a VR where it's a, you think you're in a different body. It's really weird and kind of cool.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess so. I'm a little terrified to deal with it. Or also, I haven't taken the time to really expose myself to it. It definitely is of interest, but you know, when you talk about soccer or an athletic event, you know, you can feel in boxing, you can feel the impact. You can feel how much poundage is behind that punch.

• 1:18:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, you boxed.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  With Teddy Atlas as your trainer. We have some friends of Teddy Atlas around here.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  What motivated that?

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  I was in my early 40s and the Olympics were in LA and I was making a new piece and I wanted to compete, but there are no competitions for what I do. I mean, a dancer's range is much more than an athlete's, not to the same degree and specialization, but across the border, speed, flexibility, you know, maneuverability in air, coordination, flexibility. Dancers got all of these components to a very high degree. So, no events for me at the Olympics, but I could make a piece that would be highly athletic and I wanted to be in the very best

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  possible shape I could be in. So, I decided that the training that was involved in a boxer being in shape was more extreme than what I was doing with my dancing regimen and that the, you know, the rope coordination, the stamina being involved, the power coming off the punch, the grounding of the body so that you had a punch, the willingness to take the blow in exchange for the unwillingness to go down. You would not go down. You're not going down. And we don't do that in dance, so I figured, well, I'll go where they do

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  do that. So Teddy, we were running steps backwards. This is a very good thing. I mean, you know, and shadow boxing, it's a great, great training format.

• 1:19:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I agree. You know, as a neuroscientist, I have to put a call out against sparring for anyone who's not trying to make it a profession and maybe even for those that are, that's their choice. But, but speedbag work and the visual coordination that's involved is also incredible. Near, far, but also just switching from peripheral to central vision is, I imagine it improves the brain in many, many ways, except for the getting hit in the head part.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  Well, probably.

• 1:20:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you're also well-known for being quite strong. Tell us about your deadlift

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you know, it's, I was training with, in a real weight gym with competitive weightlifters and was very serious.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  From the time I was probably in my 50s until mid 60s, say, and that you were nobody in that gym if you didn't do your body weight for three on the bench. I mean, you know, what are you in here for? Right? So it had that kind of requirement to it, which is very encouraging if you want to lift heavy weight.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  And also snap pneumonia, right? Which is like, okay, I actually never did that. But the jolt of pulling more weight off the ground than you really can do, or you have ever done, really does send a rush to the body that is unique.

• 1:21:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  And what was your personal record?

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  227.

• 1:21:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  227 deadlift.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:21:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Awesome.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know about that. I mean, you just do it day in, day out. And I wasn't, you know, you can't train day in, day out. But training rigorously and continuously for probably eight or 10 years, yeah.

• 1:21:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise.

• 1:22:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack.

• 1:23:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Several times you've mentioned the bar.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think most of us understand there's a bar along the wall with a mirror sometimes behind it, etc. What, for the uninformed, like, for me, what is, what is bar work really about? And what, could you give us an example of a few, I mean, is it designed to improve flexibility? Is it for, what, what is this notion of the bar?

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  All the above. A bar is a set regimen of exercises that are developed to strengthen the structure of the body, to basically approach the jumps, to gain height in the air for the men, for the women if they're working on point, the strength in the legs and the torso to be able to support that weight in the little area down here. And so it's developed essentially from, bars evolved, but basically their format is brilliantly

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  designed and begins with usually plie, which the terminology is French, which means to fold. So you're folding the body in the plie, you're folding, you're going down, and the positions are first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, okay? First, you have actually one center that comes off of here and here, or you're off to this side, or you're off to that side, but if you're working very rigorously, you're working to develop that single center in first. Second is a much more evolved kind of higher muscular kind of situation where it's being

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  supported from the torso and the leg muscles more than from the feet. The third position is never used because third looks like a bad fifth, so it's just been eliminated, which is kind of too bad, because I, I actually do use third, but not if I think it's at a moment where it could be judgmentally determined, actually it was an uncrossed fifth, oh dear. But in any case, so third weight is somewhere between openly distributed and

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Cross through a single center between the two legs. Okay, this is the fourth, right? And the fifth, that fourth is closed, so that it's just a reduced, even higher center. Okay, in these positions, first, second, usually not third, first, second, fourth and fifth, plie, first to bend, to fold. Next, tendre, to stretch, to reach out from that base. Not so far as you're gonna fall, but far enough so that you have to evolve and occupy a little bit more space each time you do it. And you will go first from the tendre to a plie, to a tendre, to a plie, and then tendre

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  to a straight leg, which by drawing in, you're pulling the center even higher. And so therefore, it comes later in the series of exercises. They're designed to evolve, right? After the stretches comes the rond de jambe, one of the few exercises, actually, that's circular. Most of ballet comes from fencing. It's very linear. It's the attack, it's the retreat. But it doesn't have a whole lot of that going on unless somebody's gotten very ambitious, flamboyant with their fencing styles, could be, I don't know. But in any case, rond de jambe is the circling of the leg from a full fourth forward, all

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  the way to an open second, all the way to a full fourth back. All the way back to your second, all the way back to your fourth forward and down, full rotation. Both sides, by the way, you're always reversing. Even the ones that are in a symmetrical position, you still reverse right and left, because as I'm sure you're well aware, right and left occupy your body all the time and are constantly arguing with one another. We have an interior conflict going on that makes almost anything else in life impossible. But so we have right and left, which we're always trying to balance, okay?

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  After rond de jambe, you can have petit pas de main, which is little throws, little throws. So from your fifth or from your first, you're reaching quickly out, little darting movements, right? Then you can have frappe, which is to beat frappe.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  And so from the ankle, it'll be a flexed foot that extends boom and boom. And all of this is about developing relevé to lift, to relevé, right? Up to the metatarsal, as high as you can get, pulling up through all of this relevé. And this develops the strength that you need to jump. Because from the plie down, you're gonna drive up. And the more power you have down here, the more you can get up. That little extra eighth of an inch counts, okay? So frappe, after frappe is grand batman, the big batman, the big throw, all the way up and down.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  But not all the way up, changing the angle of the hip so that the rotation is going to alter the line, holding the hip straight through, up, e up, e up, either through fourth or through second, or through arabesque and back. Those are the fundamentals. Now, if you're Meris Cunningham, you can operate in all of the interstices through all of that, but you still have the regulation of the body's map. And that's what the ballet has already done.

• 1:28:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Not amazing, just very highly evolved in terms of how to control movement, in terms of strengthening and developing the body.

• 1:29:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Did the people that developed this care about the underlying physiology? Or they just, and I'm not saying they should, but it seems like an incredible intuition, at least, that they came up with it.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  You'll forgive me for saying something stupid like this. The body is very smart. And one of my problems has always been, what knows what first? Okay? Does the body already get it, brain, and we're trying to educate you? Or is it brain telling body what to do? In the case of the classical technique, I think it's actually the body that feels that it could get a little higher, if only its rotation were a little more open. So it urges that, ugh, that, ugh, duh.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  I don't think brain is going, well, you know what? If you actually could open that leg out, you'd go higher and you're going, brain? I don't know about that. What does that mean? You don't know what it means. The body knows what that means.

• 1:30:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've heard it said, you know, we think that we're a brain with a body, but perhaps we were a body with, that later got a brain.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  There are certain sophisticated movements, rhythms and so forth. I mean, for example, a great composer is a great mathematician, right? And the indications and the divisions of time I would accept is coming, you know, particularly because of how you see the notation and how the note can be subdivided. It's a very visual thing. Once you're into the eye, you're into the brain. I mean, you know, it's like, you know what I'm saying? This is more about the body. And this, how the toes are going about its business down here, are very much involved about the body.

• 1:30:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. Thinking sometimes is really overrated.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:31:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. Yeah, as human, old world primates, which we are, we got a bunch more machinery up front in the prefrontal cortex, which let us think and plan and reflect and strategize a lot more. Also allowed humans to do bad things a lot more. Trickery and things like that, but also to plan really incredible, wonderful things. But I do think it, in many ways, it was at the expense of some of the machinery involved in these. I hate to use the language lower. Let's just say more fundamental intuition. I, you're, I'm not, I don't want to give too many anecdotes,

• 1:31:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  but years ago, I developed an obsession with comparative neurology. There's this beautiful journal, it's hundreds of years old, called The Journal of Comparative Neurology. I was fortunate enough to participate with that journal, but, you know, for a while, reviewing these papers, which for, by, for modern science, people don't really care about these papers. They're like, what is the cerebellar vermisque shape of the, you know, whatever? The Atlas Turtle? I don't even know if there's an Atlas Turtle, but I just guess we were talking about Teddy Atlas. Of the whatever, right? Of the, of the...

• 1:32:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Two-toed, three-toed sloth, whatever, all these weird species. But no single paper teaches you that much, except about this really arcane thing about the mallard duck hypothalamus or something. I'm sure that paper's in there, by the way. But when you start comparing the nervous systems of these different animals and the way they move and the way they think, because there are certainly papers about humans in there, you start getting emergent fundamentals. You go, oh, my goodness, you know, the, like, the, once the forebrain got bigger, the cerebellum got a little smaller in this one area. And it, and evolution starts to make a lot more sense. But evolution at the level of things like we're talking about today, movement and communication.

• 1:33:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it leaves you with this question, which is a lot of the reason you're here today is I, I, I think we all really want to understand, even if we don't know that we want to understand, like, what are we really here to do? What are we good at? How do we tap into these other aspects of ourselves?

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  When you talk about the brain developing in different areas to different degrees, I sometimes wonder about, and I mean to be neither naive nor romantic here, the morality of the body. And if the people who run our governments and who design our social systems had a sense on a daily basis of preserving and protecting and honoring their physical bodies, if their brain would be allowed to concoct some of the schemata that then tell bodies everywhere what they're going to be doing.

• 1:33:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tell me more. I think I'm, I, I think I understand. I do believe that taking care of the body and one's health first is fundamental. Anyone that's lost their health for any amount of time understands what I'm talking about. But we don't tend to do that. We, we prioritize the brain a lot without understanding that it exists in this whole context of the body.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  It's not just health. It's, uh, it's propriety and excellence. Who wants to nurture and encourage the body to realize its full potential that it was gifted with when it was born?

• 1:34:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's say you and I were in charge of education.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:34:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you think kids, teenagers, maybe even young adults and older, should all do something akin to like gymnastics?

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  It's an interesting thought, which one? I mean, I respect gymnastics a lot. I get dancers sometimes who are not ballet trained, but who are gymnastically trained. They're courageous in a different way. They have a different center, but they have a willingness to throw through space that a dancer does not, or you're not trained in the ballet to throw. There are moments that you dart forward, but they're very restricted, whereas a gymnast is continuously comfortable with that kind of spatial explosion, which is a beautiful thing.

• 1:35:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Should there be a policy that every young person needs to do a form of movement that encompasses a lot of different tempos and some jumping, some rolling, some stretching? Because we tend to specialize in sport very early, or people decide they're no good at sports?

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  No, no, they're not allowed to do that, sorry. Something they've got to find, that they're good enough at to encourage themselves to respect themselves, otherwise they quit.

• 1:35:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I will interrupt you here just to say that I think this brings us back to your early development and expectation on people, on kids and adults, in other words, standards. I heard somebody say something really interesting recently that was, you know, it used to be, now I'm sounding like an, you know, I am 50, it used to be that there were pretty high standards set on all of us. Whether or not we got a lot of love and support depended on the household, but the standards were always high. There seems to be a period of time in which there was a lot more love and support, some people will disagree with me, but maybe standards weren't held as in high regard. Of course, it varies by family, varies by circumstance.

• 1:36:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I think ideally we get back to a point where standards are high for everyone. Like etiquette, God forbid, you know, not going to the movies in your pajamas, for instance.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, not just etiquette, but also behavior, which a group of social dance, whether it's ballroom or square dance, there are rules and regulations and there are ways that you know that you can work that are going to respect the traffic pattern, if nothing else, and that's going to transfer to how you drive a car.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  And this, you know, gets established early and deeply in a young person. And you know, we're talking here, I don't know, second grader, third graders. I mean, as much as I make light of my mother, and I don't make light of her at all, but sometimes feel challenged by the education that I received. It was not a bad education. It was across the boards. It was very difficult for me societally. But I was grounded in music. I was grounded in movement. I was grounded in these different forms of community activity, including string quartets.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  I was grounded in the family owned the Foothill Drive-In Theater between Rialto and Fontana. Okay, I grew up, from the time I was eight until I went to college, watching a screen and getting myself into the snack bar when there would be a run on hot dogs because it was really boring up here. And I saw boring come, get to the snack bar, sell hot dogs, okay? Plus which, it was a place where the speakers often didn't work. There were a lot of cars, 600 cars. It was a big, big movie house, okay? And a big screen. And so I learned to watch action and without sound.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  And I learned to watch movement and what communicated without language.

• 1:38:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's incredible you're saying this. One of the things that I listed, I wanted to talk to you about is this concept of wordlessness. A few years ago, I started practicing something because someone said, you should try this. You should try and walk down the street and just feel what's going on and try not to get into a verbal dialogue about it. And just experience life through the lens of like what must be like to be some other species of animal. And this might sound silly to people, but it's an incredible portal.

• 1:39:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Into how limited our experience of things normally is. And maybe for some people, they're always in wordlessness and they need to get more into words. But it sounds like you had an incredible upbringing. First of all, you were taught to be hardworking. I mean, I think one can't overemphasize how, I mean, hard work is awesome and because it's a super skill for anything you encounter, right? But watching the movies without sound, that's incredible.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Well, even more, I had twin brothers and a sister who was born three days before they were a year old. So essentially, they were triplets. And my mother gave up and started feeding them all with the same spoon and put them in the same room. And they developed Halaalia, which happens with, you probably know this, a certain percentage of twins. A language before they learn to speak English. They evolve because they're so close to one another all the time. And it's a guttural, syllabic form of communication. I could speak it, but I could certainly understand it. My parents could not understand it nor speak it. So I became the family translator.

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  So from day one, I'm observing and serving the audience.

• 1:40:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Love it.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  And it's nonverbal.

• 1:40:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is wild. I'm close friends with a pair of identical twins. And they tell this story from their childhood where one walks in and goes up to the toast of the other one. They were, they're women now, they were little girls then, and takes her fingers and goes like this over the toast.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  To this day, the other one won't eat that type of toast. But it was like, it wasn't like, oh, this is bad. There was just, something was communicated in the movement. And to this day, will not touch that, that type of toast.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's so funny, and they, they have tons of stories about this, is that they can communicate without words.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Right. And a lot of it was, I don't remember a lot of, this was bread and butter.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  And so, very early, I got the idea that movement communicates. Who needs all this garble on top in your brain? It's got to, what is that, right or left? That's gonna be, that side is gonna be right. You don't need to translate it into language to understand what the movement is asking for.

• 1:41:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  But unlike so many artists and creatives, the world is very fortunate that you were asked to be a translator, because you don't exist in some, I could think of names here, but I don't want to insult anyone. There are some artists that are genuinely weird to the rest of us, because we can't understand them. Now, they're not necessarily weird, they're just different. But I have to imagine there are probably many, many incredible creatives whose work we never hear or see, because there's no one there to translate it for them, and they certainly can't do it for themselves. You have to have a certain amount of fluency in the world of business, in the world of being able to communicate with words.

• 1:42:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Otherwise, your work doesn't get out there. Maybe that's why there are so few people that really sit, you know, where they do in their craft.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  I think that a word here is objectivity. That in doing work, there are moments where you have to get outside that work, and you have to look at it as an outsider.

• 1:42:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  How do you do that? Do you film it and watch?

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  I do it by pulling myself out of the action. I mean, there were times when I danced, right? And I danced inside as well as trying to get outside. This is genuinely a way to become extremely neurotic, and it's a very difficult task. In some ways, it's very rewarding, because the whole thing evolves from you, and plus, which you're the jury. But it's not gonna be, you can't maintain it for very long. And anybody who makes something wants to have, anybody wants to have the capacity to be unemotional about it, get back, forget how you feel about it. What does it say to you?

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  You, in a way, become your own translator. Does this read?

• 1:43:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  You said something really, really useful, I think, about critics in your book. You said that the good ones, the honest ones, the ones that aren't just trying to get some clickbait or get someone to read their stories so they can get their couple thousand bucks so they can make rent that month. The really good critics keep us honest about who we're supposed to be as creators. Now, that makes it sound like people who aren't creating stuff that's being critiqued out in the world don't have anything to learn from what you're about to say. But I would argue that from the very beginning, when we start to create anything, a short

• 1:44:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  story, a poem, even if we're just daydreaming about what we might create, it's impossible to not get into the, "Well, what are people gonna... How is this gonna land? What are people gonna think?" So, learning how to hold critique is critical to the creative process, even if journalists aren't eventually writing about your work. How do you work with inner critic, which is really about outer critics, let's be honest? How do you work with that? And what's your relationship to that?

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  This is very, very difficult, because you have to love what you're doing. Anything that's gonna be really meaningful, there has to be an extraordinary degree of love. And we do refer, in my office, to, you know... The child of that work, each dance, in a way, is your gift, and it's your child. And somebody's out here, and they're gonna slit its throat? How are you supposed to feel about that? Also, because what we do is very, very personal. Musicians translate it into sound. There's a certain distancing from them personally. We're very personal.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  You speak bad of my dance, you speak bad of my body. I don't go down so well.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Right, so it's difficult to process the exterior critic's word. And on the other hand, as I said, one still has to, even though you love the thing, you gotta, I mean, you know, long ago, my trainer actually had two huge wolf hounds. And I made the mistake one day of criticizing one of them. I mean, never criticize a guy's dog, okay?

• 1:45:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is true.

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  Yes, you can criticize a child, but not the dog, all right?

• 1:46:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wolf hounds are beautiful animals.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  They are.

• 1:46:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very majestic animals.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  Yes, they had to. But so, yes, there you are. You know, this critic just called your dog a bad name. And, okay, maybe your dog has got only three legs and six months to live. I'm being cruel, but am I? I'm being realistic. Your dog has three legs and six months to live.

• 1:46:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, that's not a criticism, that's a...

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Observation.

• 1:46:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Observation.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it comes across because it's less than perfect. So you see, it's a difficult arena, and there's no single answer. And you gotta, it's like neon, you gotta shift on, shift off, shift on, shift off. Is it crazy? A little.

• 1:46:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm excited to share that Mateina, the yerba mate drink I helped create, is now available at Whole Foods stores nationwide. Longtime listeners of this podcast know that yerba mate is my preferred caffeine source. It provides smooth energy without giving you the jitters, and it has a lot of other potential benefits, including helping to regulate your blood sugar, improving digestion, mild appetite suppression, and much more. Mateina is my absolute favorite of all the yerba mate brands out there, and I've tried them all. Given my love for Mateina, I decided to become a part-owner in the business, and I helped them create their new line of products, which are all entirely zero sugar. These zero-sugar cold-brewed Mateina flavors are fantastic. I drink at least three cans of them every single day. You'll often see them on the table during my podcast recordings.

• 1:47:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  I absolutely love the product, and I'm proud to now have it sold at Whole Foods. So check out Mateina at Whole Foods stores nationwide. It's cold-brewed with the absolute best ingredients, it has zero sugar, and it tastes amazing. And if you don't have a Whole Foods near you, you can also buy it online at drinkmateina.com. Every once in a while, I find myself thinking, oh, you know, in the early 2000s, you know, the way art and music and media was, it was better in the, you know, growing up in this era. But then I realized that people have probably been saying that sort of thing forever. And that for young people now, I have a niece who just went off to college, like, you know, she's not thinking about how it was back then.

• 1:48:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  For her, it's happening now. And I think it's hard for us to adapt to the fact that we were young once and now we're less young and that it's all new for them. And so the question is, and they don't have that frame of reference. So when it comes to critics, when it comes to dance and art, do you see things getting better, worse, or do you just think of it as like, oh, it's just, it's always been just an evolution? I have a hard time going, oh, you know, we had great music in the 90s. It was awesome music came out.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  You should have been around in the 70s.

• 1:48:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Exactly. You're making, exactly, that's the point. Right. So, but for people who are 16, 18 now, they're not thinking that way. They're thinking, we got all that music and there's all this other great music. So I think the goal perhaps is to just stay open.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's not judgmental, it's not good or bad. It's what can I learn from this? What can I take from this? What can I transpose from this to put over here? What can I use? Make everything transactional.

• 1:49:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can you elaborate on that?

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  No, I like it like that.

• 1:49:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Full stop, okay.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, transactional, what serves me here? What can I use? Sometimes transactional gets a bad name. You were trying to use something. Yeah, I'm trying to use something.

• 1:49:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, the whole thing of, you know, great artists steal, you know, nothing is a new idea, this kind of thing. Do you believe that?

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. To some degree, I mean, that's why it's one of my privileges to work with the life of a composer, if I'm serious about that. I worked on Almedez, right? So I read all of Mozart's writings, which are voluminous, and looked at every manuscript he had ever touched. And I was given access to this. Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?

• 1:50:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  For the movie Amadeus.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Love that movie.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  Thank you. We did too.

• 1:50:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Love that movie.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  The, the images of the lime being thrown over the bodies still, you know, imprinted in my mind, but it tells you about that era and how,

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:50:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  how little people had.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Totally, and how much was preserved from the era. We shot in Prague for Vienna. It was hard working there, still under the regime. And that, in a way, put it closer to what Mozart had to deal with, the sort of restrictions that he had. But the research that went into that picture was enormous. The, the, all, all of the illumination was from candles. All of the illumination in the candles, they used the same base wax as they had used 200 years before. All the mechanisms on stage were what were used in the original productions. And because we shot in the opera

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  house, which had not been updated, in fact, it's one of the ways Milosch got back in, was to say, okay, we will pay for the reconstruction of the opera house when we're done. And they took him up on it. But I was using the same mechanics under the stage that Mozart had. The door that opened into the orchestra was the door he touched when he came in to join the orchestra. And we had scenes that had live fire. We were swinging live fire around. You don't do this, but we were. And out of the floor, there were little holes. And we figured out that those little holes were a special kind of pollen that they put down. And if they lit them, they would send up sparks. And we were doing the sparks from

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  the floor out of the pollen. And you had chandeliers coming down that had hundreds of candles. And in between takes, you're shifting all of the candles in like 50 chandeliers coming down here before you can do the next take. Meanwhile, you got the clothes that are in here, and there are no gussets. So nobody's arm is going any higher than this. You got the men in heels like this. Nobody is running with huge strides. Stuff like that. Wow. Now, am I, you know, I don't know what to do with that kind of information other than to marvel at human invention.

• 1:52:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  We've definitely come a long way.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  I don't know that we've come a long way. Things were different and they maximized their resources.

• 1:52:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  I will say candles are better than white light LEDs, but that's a topic from another podcast.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  Probably. When are we going to do that?

• 1:52:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Incendescents are better than LEDs. But I'm just thinking about all these candles and I'm wondering whether or not it was very, very warm to work in that environment.

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  Sure, it was very, very warm.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  People were sweating all the time. What do you think smell was in the 18th century? Very stenchy is how smell was in the 18th century.

• 1:53:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  I had no idea what went into the making of that film. It was a spectacular film. Everyone should see that.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  It was real.

• 1:53:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  It'll also give you a window into how psychiatric illness was treated. There's that brutal scene from a, I guess they called them insane asylums.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:53:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  And nowadays, we probably understand that 95% of those people were probably suffering from things that nice at-home care probably would have resolved.

• 1:53:45Speaker 01

  There's a pill for it.

• 1:53:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or there's a pill for it.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or a combination of sunlight and pills and other things. Speaking of which, what's your view on modern versus ancient medicine versus the body just being really smart?

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  I know not much about either ancient nor modern medicine. I'm not sure I'm equipped to have a view on these things. I simply, myself, try to stay as close to what is, forgive the word, natural as possible. In terms of eating, I am currently not eating.

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  Except for this trip, okay? No carbs, no sugar. All right. Which I find to be, keto diet, I find to be more manageable. I can control it better. I know where my weight is. I can feel how close to the bone. Where, whata, whata, I got a hee, ho, ha. You can't do that if you're eating a lot of pasta. So that's, and also, I fortunately cannot cook. Therefore, I basically eat everything raw. I can eat meat raw. I certainly eat vegetables raw. I'm not exaggerating. I can use the oven, okay? I can boil water. But that's about it. No sauces, ever. Nothing decorative, just, you know. I've often said if there were a pill for food, I'd take it.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  I'm not sure I would because I'm not sure it would have what I needed in it. I'm not sure I'm getting that anyway. But at least I'm making an effort. And I know where it comes from. I don't like mystery a lot.

• 1:55:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it sounds like meat, fish, fruits and vegetables are your staples.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  Say so.

• 1:55:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, likewise. And I think it's funny that nowadays saying it makes total sense when we say, you know, the carbs and sugar are really the problem in most cases. And whereas for years, it felt like the public health space around nutrition was utterly confused. It was like fat is the bad thing, then protein, then meat is the bad thing. I mean, deli meats probably are, they are not great for us.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  Terrible.

• 1:55:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  But healthily sourced.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  We went through a period, probably about a year or even two, where we carb loaded because we thought we'd have more energy, we'd be stronger. We just got heavier. But anyway, maybe we had a little more power.

• 1:56:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I have a friend whose daughter is very interested in ballet. She actually is part of a conservatory that goes up, they actually live in San Francisco. I don't know, she's part, I don't think she's part of the San Francisco Ballet, but there's something adjacent to that. And I said, you know, how is that? You know, because you hear these stereotypes of, you know, it's brutal on young girls' probably boys as well, but minds about their weight and the training and it's unhealthy. And he said nowadays, they've adjusted for some of that and they really try and keep a healthier environment. What's your view on that? I mean, standards versus? Health, I mean, this is a topic that spills over into everything. In science, I used to work hundred-hour weeks, hundred, one, zero, zero.

• 1:57:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  I heard there was a guy that worked a hundred and one, so I worked a hundred and two. Then I realized that I couldn't sustain that. I'm not suggesting anyone do that, but everyone has a kind of war story from their time. But, you know, now there does seem to be more care taken to mental health, physical health. So how do you balance that in the world of dance where you want standards to continue to stand or rise, but you also don't want people mentally destroyed?

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  This is a hard one.

• 1:57:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  There's always going to be a trade-off to some degree. I mean, the stress of performance is, whether it's athletic performance or, you know, dance performance is extreme. And unfortunately, it's been my experience, it's the better the performer, the worse the nerves before.

• 1:57:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Huh.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Sorry about that. The more intensely important that curtain going up is to that person. And the possibility of failure is always there. And the degree of rehearsing that's going to address that is, why didn't you do more? Is always the response. So that is, I'm sorry, it's a reality, it's a choice. Don't, don't choose that profession. We can't make life totally nice. It is partially what it is. Choose something else.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  You know, often, and I'm not alone in this, one hears it often, you know, a parent or a child even will come up, can I be a dancer? I say, don't do it. Find something else if you possibly can. If you can't, be a dancer.

• 1:58:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because you want to set that thick, thick line.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it ha, and there are other folks who will find their own way to address that line and who will massage that line. And as part of creativity is addressing those old lines of boundaries, classical, modern, oi.

• 1:59:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's interesting, when you put that barrier, you naturally select for the people that really want it.

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yesterday, I had an early morning call with a friend of mine, who's a former, what they call, tier-one SEAL team operator. So, he was in the Navy SEALs, but then there's another selection process within it for the tier-one, or the sort of elite within that already elite community. And he has children, and I said, are they interested in military? He said, "One of them is." And I said, "Is he interested in going to the teams?" And he's like, "He is." I said, "What are you telling him?" And he said, "I'm telling him not to do it." And he keeps coming back that he wants to do it, and I'm reassured. He keeps telling him, "Don't do it. You're gonna hate it. It's gonna be the worst thing ever." And he keeps coming back, "No, I wanna do it, no, I..." So, he's convinced now that he actually wants to do it.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  Well, but unfortunately, telling a kid not to do it is a bait, and can just engender, "I wanna do it," just to prove that you're gonna go up against authority. That's not the right reason to select.

• 2:00:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  Better to just say, "You gotta really, really wanna do this." Even more, can't you find something else? And if they can question it, they don't wanna do it enough.

• 2:00:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  He did add that if he feels he likes it more than it sucks, his words, then he'll be okay.

• 2:00:32Speaker 01

  I would buy that.

• 2:00:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's gotta be some tilt in the seesaw more towards, "I like this more than it sucks."

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd buy that. That's fair.

• 2:00:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I see a lot of parallels between the communities that you come from and he comes from, frankly.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  Elite is elite. It has a price to pay.

• 2:00:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you think nowadays, because of social media and the internet, there's a larger pool of dancers to select from, and talent that gets selected to work with you, for instance, is better? Because it's just such a bigger pool, that the top 1% reflects an even better 1%?

• 2:01:08Speaker 01

  It's different, because the talent is being trained and challenged in a different way as young people. In other words, they're now competitive. Activities for dance, I started to say activities, sports for dance. It's not quite a sport, though it can verge, which is fine. But when I was evolving as a dancer, we had very strict borders. This was tap, this was ballet, this was modern, this is jazz over here. And you could step across the borders and try out different of these, even acquire knowledge from all of them to become something, but you had to do it on your own.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  And then you would, you know, work to gain acceptance into whatever performing arena. Now, children, very young children, eight years old, even younger, six-year-old kids, there are competitions for children as dancers or as performers. And this engenders a totally different purpose and performance in the kid. I was not, I'm Buster Keaton, right? I take it on the chin, stoic, down, out, or I make the move, right? The kids are out there to sell it, and they're out there to get their points. And it is partially in their technique, but it's also immediately in their manipulation of the audience.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  Great, that's called performing, and maybe you'll be a good actor, but in the meantime, you're shortchanging your technique because you're not asking the audience to just gauge you on what you can do physically, but how you can sell it because you want those points, and so do your parents. So these competitions, in a way, are very difficult. And for a long time, I wouldn't work with competition-trained dancers. Now, I find that it's broadened and that the kids are more sophisticated in the ways that they attack technique for performing. And they're also hardened, in a way. I can put them in younger. I don't worry they're going to be nervous. They're not going to be nervous.

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  They were nervous when they were out here trying to get, you know, graded thirty points on the Wata Wata and the Wits and Wits and to get the hits for the Wata Wata and, you know, they're no longer nervous about squat, so put 'em in. This is great. But in the meantime, they are doing it for reasons outside of the thing itself, for what they can gain from it, from their internet hits, from their hang and their hina, the Wata Wata, as opposed to just doing it for the thing itself and taking what comes from it. It's different.

• 2:03:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, that extrinsic reward, while it's important to keep people moving forward if they want to be a professional, it definitely contaminates the core motivation.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  And what the kid will accomplish, because they won't have to do it the hard way. They'll do it the easy way if it works as well. I was always trained to do it the hard way. You can always do it the easy way, train for the hard way. And I can see that in performers. And a performer who has done it the hard way has more range. And when they work, you're going to be more interested in them because they're making more choices. And an interesting artist is a choice maker. An interesting performer is always about making choice. That's what will keep you focused on them. If they're just doing what they think is going to win, you're going, really?

• 2:04:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Listen, I love social media. I teach on social media. But the problem with social media as it relates to craft and feedback, et cetera, is that it puts you on a reinforcement schedule of, you did something yesterday, you can put it out there and you can immediately get the response. I think there's a sweet spot between practice, mastery, and feedback. And when it, animals of which we are, get, we adapt to certain contingencies. You know, every forty-eight hours, I expect something back. Every seventy-two hours, every, I want to, I always tell people if they want to do a PhD, you got to love the topic, you

• 2:05:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  got to embrace the lifestyle. But also, if nothing else, it will teach you to work very, very hard for four years to get something.

• 2:05:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sometimes there are a couple of publications in there, or more, or less. But if nothing else, it will teach you how to work very, very hard for something that only comes to you at earliest four years from now, which I think is very valuable.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Even four years is like a promise. You might wanna think about working for no reward. And after four years, you don't get anything other than the opportunity to continue.

• 2:06:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love that. I love that. My graduate advisor put this into me. We published a paper in Science. I was so excited, and I said, "We're gonna throw a party? We're gonna celebrate?" And she just laughed. And she was like, "I could buy you a pizza, but I'm not even gonna do that." She said something to that extent. I can't remember the exact words, but I remember what came next. She said, "You already got the party."

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 2:06:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I was like, "You're right. I love doing the experiment." And we went on, I think we published close to ten papers together. And when I wasn't thinking about the PhD, in fact, they forced me to take my qualifying exam. I didn't want to take, I just loved doing experiments. And if you love doing experiments, turns out you publish a lot of papers. Publish a lot of papers, turns out it's easy to get a PhD.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 2:06:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Et cetera.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  You're doing something for the right reasons, not to get something else.

• 2:06:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it's hard to explain that to someone who's really driven. Not even nowadays. It's just hard to explain that to somebody, because I think people who are really driven also, they want people to understand something.

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  They need to understand excellence on their own terms. Not from outside, but from inside. "I can do more. I can do more. That's what I'm interested in. Oh, you like that? Not enough. I want more."

• 2:07:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just letting that really sink in. I totally agree. I'm just trying to think of the messaging that... Works for kids.

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  Almost none. I have a grandson, believe me.

• 2:07:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  They operate on their own, in their own frame.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:07:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. It worked on you, worked on me to some extent.

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  Yes, because my mother was a concert pianist and she wasn't able to, the war came and she started teaching to help support the family. And in a way, I think I was aware of the sacrifice that she had made, but I also heard the level of excellence from the time I was a teeny itsy-bitsy. I went to her lessons, she'd continued, and I heard the practicing. And I think even with no training, I heard that that was better than that, and they got closer. And you develop your own morality. You don't have somebody telling you what is good and what is bad.

• 2:08:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  It sounds like, if I may, that you develop your own internal standard that's very high.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  It's very high, it's unattainable, and you're gonna hate yourself a lot of the time.

• 2:08:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  They don't tell you that, but it's true.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  Well, I'm just saying.

• 2:08:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it's true. I don't know if hate, hate's a strong word.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  It is a strong word.

• 2:08:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe not satisfied, but...

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  Sorry, it's called hate.

• 2:08:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love your honesty. You said before, before you can think outside the box, you have to have a box. But you also talk about having an actual box.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:08:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Explain.

• 2:08:58Speaker 01

  Well, the actual box holds the tangible items that are very sensory, that have the feel or the smell or the weight of when you first thought that idea. Maybe your dance isn't gonna look like a rock, but when you picked up that rock, there was a certain kind of physical resistance, and that suggested a kind of movement. And if you don't keep that rock, you'll forget sometimes where it came from. I was working on a film script once, and I was told, "Look, write down your initial instinct, your initial idea for what the film is to be. Put it in a drawer and lock the drawer, because there are times when you're gonna not know what the fuck you're doing."

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Unlock the drawer and remind yourself, that rock can remind you of that original instinct, that original movement that evolved around you and go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's where I am. That's what I'm doing. But we overthink things and we compound it and it's not that complicated. You want to keep it as simple as possible. You want to, I think, keep it as close to the initial reason you wanted to do it, the initial sense of excitement. And again, to use the same old word, love that you had for that moment in time that you wanted to share.

• 2:10:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love the idea of anchoring to physical items around something that's conceptual because the conceptual journey can be, whether it's a book, or a dance, or whatever, a podcast, it can be so opaque at times. And you're just, you're trying to stay anchored to the center, to the spine. But it can be really tough. And having a physical object that you understand means A, and that's it. It's, it's, it's non-negotiable.

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  There are certain things you don't forget. Those are the important things. That's what truth is. You don't forget it.

• 2:10:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I guess this is the reason we have plaques and wedding rings and things like that is they, they symbolize something in a very simple way that everyone understands. And in this case, it's important that you understand.

• 2:11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's a symbol of. That's different. Symbol is different from the actual rock. The rock is the thing itself. It's not a symbol of anything. It's the rock.

• 2:11:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it has a property that is what you're trying to thread through your work?

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  Yes. Doesn't stand for something else.

• 2:11:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  It actually has that thing.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  And that's in a way why ritual, because ritual is not quite the same as practice. Ritual is done for a purpose. It's done to accomplish an end. Purpose, you just do it.

• 2:11:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  So let's break those apart. Ritual, purpose, and habit. If you were to separate those out.

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  Okay. Ritual, to accomplish a goal or a kind of control. Practice, a consistent, ongoing activity that somehow keeps reoccurring. Habit, you do because you're in the habit of doing. I mean, habit and practice are actually very close. Habit is dangerous because you gotta do it that way. That's the habit for it. Practice is just get the job done. You can do it in different ways, but get the job done. Habit, you gotta do it the same way.

• 2:12:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Throughout the entire listening to your book, I had this question in the back of my mind. Did you take weekends off?

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  No, what's a weekend? It's, you know, it's seven-day work week here.

• 2:12:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Love it.

• 2:12:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  You've gotten things like honorary degrees from Harvard, this kind of thing. A lot of accolades from a lot of different places. Do those things matter to you?

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  No, they matter more to other folks. And sometimes I have trouble with them.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  They don't tell me anything that I have done, or more importantly, will do. Can I honestly say it's not nice for somebody to say to you, "You've done a great job"? I can't say that. I can, you know, try to feel that it's... I think one thing about that kind of action is that it takes a magnanimous person to recall that they have a goal that's gonna be ongoing, no matter how many accolades they get. But the people giving the accolade want to matter. They want to count. They want to believe that what you have done is important. And in a way, you owe it to them more than to yourself to accept that.

• 2:13:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  I know you don't like the term, but you came up with it. And I think it's very interesting and important, which is this notion of scratching. When you're searching for the next idea or the idea, like this notion of scratching. Could you tell people what scratching is about?

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  Okay, two, two conditions where scratching is kind of an approach. One is you're really lost and you have no sense that there's any progress to be made. And if so, where's the direction to go? And you have to be patient with yourself and the situations and just try something. And did it mean anything or not? And having the faith to continue, that is a kind of scratching. The other is you know perfectly well where you're going. You just don't know how to get there.

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  And in scratching at or essaying or trying that approach, you've still got to remember where your basic thing is, but you know you've got somewhere to go. That's a nicer place to be than when you are just in an absolute vacuum and scratching for something that has meaning.

• 2:15:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  And scratching can take a lot of forms. You've said it could be going to a museum and seeing what captures your eye. It could be just living your daily life and just making sure that you capture anything that kind of pokes through.

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, being, being open about, about things and being willing to be caught off guard, being willing to be surprised.

• 2:15:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you talk about movement and longevity? I mean, you're-

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  How long have we got?

• 2:15:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  As long as you want.

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  I don't want, it's my least favorite topic and it's my most important topic at the moment, which is why it's my least favorite topic. Bodies alter every so often, okay? A body at 10 is going to be different from a body at 20. What it can accomplish, 20 to 40, there's a kind of continuity in there that is encouraging. Over 40, body is going to start behaving differently. 47, 50s is getting a little bit numbed and all of a sudden you're feeling restricted and you get pissed off. And you have got to find a way of respecting the fact that you can no longer do what you

• 2:16:11Speaker 01

  did when you were 20 or 25, but you're still, you're pretty potent. And that's a good thing. And I managed to push that. I was dancing still pretty hard until I was about 65, which is a long reach. But after 65, I began to feel really restricted. No, you can't do just anything, even once. And, oh, by the way, what you're doing might not be strengthening the body. You might be weakening the body, repeating that. Oh, my God, what do I do here? Nothing. And 70, functional. 80 sucks.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  You're restricted now, and your body has lost facility, and you can't pretend it's any other way, because you see it and everybody else sees it. And you need help. And you don't like help. How do you maintain your independence and still accept graciously help as a reality and not a shame? How do you accept a declining body as not demoralizing? Those are tough questions. And particularly if you're invested in the body, and it's where you learn what's true and what isn't true. It could be true for somebody who can still do it. It's not true for you, because you can't, you still don't have that speed. You don't have that flexibility.

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  You don't have that option. And so it becomes, I suppose, and I haven't quite accomplished this, but I think about it, obviously, a lot, we all do, is an exchange rate. Okay, I'm going to have to give up a kind of, sort of, physical independence, but in exchange for this, I can have a lot of goodwill. How can I circulate that goodwill to get this thing done that still feels as though it's a worthy enough accomplishment to offer?

• 2:18:16Speaker 01

  But it's a totally different mechanism and its physicality translated differently. And, you know, one, I always in the studio, I was a very good dancer and I managed to build a career because dancers wanted to work with me because they become better dancers. And now it is not a body that is dancing better than any other dancer. It is a body that is not moving and that needs still to be able to correspond to a great dancer with many, many options that you have something to offer them and that you can realize something with them that is of great value.

• 2:19:00Speaker 01

  I dislike the word mentor. I don't think about that much because I like better the word apprentice, that people learn. You don't teach them, they learn. And that is a component here and I think that that's a kind of, I mean, that's the upside is you can still be mutual. You can still share this process and it's same as it ever was. You bring what you got, they bring what they got, you put them together and you get more than the independent whata whatas. And that can still happen if you let it happen and if you don't get too pissed off.

• 2:19:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Although being a little pissed might help in terms of the pushing through.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  Everybody needs a little pissed, all the time.

• 2:19:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  The thing I heard you say once, which I really, which really stuck with me was that you think that perhaps one of the reasons why people age at the level of the brain and the level of curiosity is that they start moving less, that it works in that direction. And I started observing people of different ages and indeed, even just the amount of gesticulating that people do, it starts to decline over time. You're an exception to this. I know only a few other exceptions to that rule. I think it is a rule. You look at kids, they're moving all the time and I think it drops off fairly linearly after, as you said, probably about age forty or so, it really, people start moving less.

• 2:20:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's a species of ocean animal that when it lands down on a rock, it actually eats its own brain. Except the part that just keeps it alive there to sense when something swims over it and then it can do its thing. In other words, if we stop moving, our nervous system atrophies.

• 2:20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's very clear. And it seems that the distal, the fingers and the feet, the neurons that control those certainly lose their strength before we lose our trunk strength and so on. So there's this kind of outward to center atrophy. So move more, move more, move more in every aspect of life seems to be the takeaway.

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not just more, it's degree also. I think that with age, we recess, we pull backwards, we reach out less even than we can, partially the sight begins to decline, the hearing. And the kind of fear sets in. You still have to be able to maintain a fearlessness in regards to boundaries that you don't have to pull up shy, you don't have to pull up short of a boundary. You can still address that boundary, it's just you're not going to be able to reach as far across as you could have in each of these different decades. It's just, you know, you can do one thing when you were, you know,

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  two years old, you can do another thing now. And it's accepting that everything can give you pushback. You have to accept pushback. You have to still accept pushback. It's going to feel differently, but you still want it.

• 2:22:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe that's the thing to seek, is that friction.

• 2:22:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:22:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  In describing dancers and dance, you talked a lot about taking up space. It's interesting, now we're talking about people reflexively taking up less and less space as they get older. Voice occupies space too. So it's kind of interesting to think about...

• 2:22:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Movement as the fundamental way in which we have action at a distance or impact at a distance. And as we, as you said.

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  Shriveled.

• 2:22:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. Maybe that's the thing to fight against.

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  You know, the word fight, we fight against everything and I do it too. We all do, do it. It's, it's, we gotta look at it, I say to myself, as an opportunity. It's, it's not, it's not a fight. It's an opportunity to, to keep the, keep the pressure on. I mean, we become, we become frightened.

• 2:23:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've seen that in some older folks. They get, there's a fear that sets in.

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  Right, and that's not necessary because we also got compensations. For no reason, I'm thinking here of Camo had twins. And one of them was, for some reason, thinking she was gonna go blind. I guess she'd been diagnosed. She started practicing being blind. She started keeping on, keeping her eyes closed. This is a 12-year-old taking a cane and starting, trying to find her way as a blind person. She'd see perfectly well. She was providing against the future. You're not gonna provide against death, so just get over it and keep, you know, pushing through like you can see because you can.

• 2:23:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like meet the friction that's there, but at, at that edge, not any further.

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Right, at, at a reasonable point where there is a competition, not where you're pre, pre, pre-defeated.

• 2:24:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Speaking of taking up space, you've mentioned before that the fact that your name is Twyla.

• 2:24:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Perhaps shaped you in some ways.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:24:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm fascinated by this, that how names shape our self-perception, how they shape others' perceptions of us, and how, to some extent, we might live into those perceptions.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  Yes. My mother, as with everything, provided me with a moniker that would serve me. So the name Twyla, she saw in a newspaper, but it was spelled with an I. The original Twyla, who was a pig-colling princess in the next county. Twyla, I forget her last name. In any case, my mother changed it to a Y because she thought Twyla with a Y would look better on a marquee. Okay, she was right. That the T had to be selected for the alliteration between Twyla and Tharp, T.T., Marilyn Monroe.

• 2:25:13Speaker 01

  All stars have got alliterative names. She's not wrong. It makes it easier to remember. It also seems to have a reinforcing quality. One name is a T, another T must be good, two Ts, right? Yeah, this is all my mother's subliminal thinking to provide me with the course of stardom. Should I select, that's what I should go towards.

• 2:25:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  God bless her.

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I said.

• 2:25:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, Twyla Tharp, thank you so much for coming here today.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:25:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  It is a real honor for me.

• 2:25:50Speaker 01

  No, it's fun.

• 2:25:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  A real pleasure, a real honor. And I know you are uncomfortable with accolades, so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna barrel into them by just saying that it's an honor because I think your work is incredible. I think the book is incredible. So many people that I told I was gonna sit down with you today, I'm surprised they're not, you know, beating down the doors outside. And that's because I think you represent a lot more than just incredible, elite-level dance and choreography. You certainly represent that and the arts. And thank you for your comments about supporting the arts, that those will propagate far and wide and hopefully have an impact. But you also represent this spirit behind creating things, leaning into friction,

• 2:26:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  but also embracing the, for lack of a better word, the dance of it all, including what comes from the outside and the internal process. This is a complicated thing, and I know many, many people want it, or just love to see people striving and creating. And so you really embody that spirit. And, you know, the words aren't enough to express how grateful I am and how grateful millions and millions of people are. So, thank you. So, God bless your mother for naming you Twyla, and God bless you for coming here today.

• 2:27:08Speaker 01

  Thank you, sweetheart. And God bless you for doing this, and for believing it's worthwhile. So, thank you.

• 2:27:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Twyla Tharp. To learn more about her work and to find a link to her truly spectacular book, The Creative Habit, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific, zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of

• 2:28:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled, "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com.

• 2:28:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols, in the form of one- to three-page PDFs that cover everything

• 2:29:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Twyla Tharp. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

• 2:29:52Speaker 02

  They're running a Cover 2 defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats, order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.