The Peter Attia Drive - #249 ‒ How the brain works, Andrew's fascinating backstory, improving scientific literacy, and more

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.500 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.820 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

00:00:24.780 wellness, full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.900 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.320 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at

00:00:37.340 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.740 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.780 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Andrew Huberman. Of course, many of you recognize

00:00:54.420 Andrew, not because he is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, but rather

00:01:00.040 because he is the host of the very popular Huberman Lab podcast. In fact, I would say that

00:01:05.560 the Huberman Lab podcast is probably the number one podcast in the space of health, medicine,

00:01:11.700 et cetera. Andrew also happens to be a very close friend and someone who I spent a lot of time

00:01:15.780 talking with. And so it was really just a matter of time before we sort of formalized a discussion

00:01:21.100 and did it with a microphone in front of each of us. So I have to be honest with you, going into

00:01:25.720 this discussion, I had actually put something out to social media that said, hey, I'm going to be

00:01:29.380 talking with Andrew, shoot me a bunch of topics that people are interested in. And the response

00:01:33.040 to that was not surprisingly overwhelming. I think I went into this conversation with about 10 to 12 pages

00:01:39.380 of notes based on topics that people wanted to talk about in addition to topics that I wanted to

00:01:44.360 talk about. Unfortunately, I didn't get to one of them. I'm not even sure I looked at my page.

00:01:49.560 We just went off on our own. And basically we talk broadly about three things. We really talk about

00:01:57.400 neuroanatomy and a greater understanding of how the brain works and what the rule sets are with

00:02:06.100 respect to thinking and how senses work, hearing, seeing, smelling, et cetera. We go through some real

00:02:12.160 basics here. And I think this is an important podcast because I don't make the assumption that

00:02:16.540 the listener is familiar with all of these processes around the brain. And this is obviously something

00:02:22.780 that Andrew is very passionate about. He talks a lot about neuroscience. And then we kind of pivot

00:02:26.840 from there and talk about Andrew and his personal journey. So I think so many people are very familiar

00:02:32.240 with Andrew, the expert, but there were very few podcasts out there. In fact, I can only think of one

00:02:37.020 where we get any insight into Andrew's background. And because I know so much of Andrew and his background,

00:02:42.020 I thought this would be a very interesting thread to pull on. And so we talk about his journey from

00:02:45.680 childhood to his education, his career, and who the most important mentors in his life were.

00:02:51.340 We end the conversation talking about something admittedly, briefly, but importantly, which is

00:02:56.640 the crisis of scientific literacy and the importance of science communication, which is something that

00:03:01.900 Andrew has done an excellent job of. So I'll tell you before we start this podcast, of course,

00:03:06.160 we're planning a part two, because all of the content I went into this podcast with still

00:03:11.720 needs to be covered. And a few questions came up in this podcast that I didn't even get to follow

00:03:16.820 up on, which is the nature of how podcasts work. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation,

00:03:22.140 which will be part one of N with Andrew Huberman.

00:03:30.840 Andrew, awesome to have you here again, but this is the first time we're going to sit down and

00:03:35.120 do something formal about it, as opposed to just play patty cakes in the garage.

00:03:38.880 Great to be here. I always enjoy seeing you. I always learn from you. And when I train with you,

00:03:44.280 I always enter a new pain state like this morning with the blood flow restriction.

00:03:49.420 How did you enjoy that? Just, I guess, for listeners, what did we do? You had done a pretty

00:03:52.680 big workout. You went for a run.

00:03:54.280 I hadn't yet gone for a run. I hopped on the assault bike and was just pedaling and warming up.

00:03:57.780 Then I started doing some intervals of pedaling.

00:03:59.440 Yeah. It looked like you were working hard.

00:04:00.760 Yeah. And then I hopped off and was headed out for a run. And you said,

00:04:04.300 let's put the blood flow restriction cuffs on and give you a little workout. And I thought,

00:04:09.560 oh, we'll do it like last time and put them on my arms. And I've done that workout before.

00:04:13.460 We do some curls with a lightweight, with a blood flow restriction cuffs. And it's,

00:04:18.080 those were extremely painful in the past. This time putting on the legs was less painful

00:04:22.980 in a localized way. It was more of a whole body pain. So it was more distributed,

00:04:28.120 but pedaling for two minutes at 220 watts with the cuffs on my thighs. You don't feel like your

00:04:35.760 legs are going to pop. You feel like your whole body is a little bit swollen. But then when you

00:04:39.740 come off of that two minutes and you take the cuffs off, can't really describe the feeling,

00:04:44.040 but it's somewhere between bliss, relief, and a super charge. You know, so I took off for a run,

00:04:49.880 I think feeling more energized than I had in a long, long time.

00:04:52.440 I do what I had you do today. I do that two to three times a week at the end of a leg workout.

00:04:58.360 You're right. It's very different. There is something about the BFR cuffs on the arm.

00:05:03.200 I suspect it's because there's less fat here and it's easier to compress the vasculature. So you get

00:05:10.140 more distal occlusion, but I agree with you completely. Like doing bicep curls with those cuffs

00:05:16.700 on, it is really the definition of hell. And it's much more of a deep, awful pain in the leg.

00:05:22.920 But anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, I did enjoy it. I've noticed because I've now done

00:05:26.260 the blood flow restriction training three times, today being the third, that when it's done on

00:05:32.120 the upper body, the pain can be very localized and it starts to migrate around in interesting ways.

00:05:36.780 I think I've actually learned a thing or two about the distribution of sensory receptors in

00:05:40.700 the upper body, immense pain in the hands, for instance. And then the moment you think you can't

00:05:45.400 tolerate it at all, it migrates to your shoulder and away from the hands. Again, with the legs,

00:05:49.880 it's more evenly distributed. But I think as long as people don't try and cowboy it and

00:05:53.900 just tie tourniquets, which would be a bad, you'd need the proper blood flow restriction

00:05:57.340 cuffs, obviously. I think it's an incredible training. Can you just remind me what some

00:06:01.660 of the benefits are? Growth hormone increase for sure. Minimal soreness, despite getting

00:06:07.240 quite a lot of metabolic activity.

00:06:08.360 Yeah. It's basically less trauma with more sort of metabolic benefit as well. One of the reasons

00:06:13.340 I like doing the set I had you do today is I like exposing my legs to lactate, right? So the more

00:06:19.900 lactate you're exposed to, the more MCT the cells will upregulate. So basically you want your cells

00:06:25.340 to become more and more efficient at taking lactate and getting it out of the cell. And ultimately,

00:06:31.620 right, lactate's an amazing fuel. I mean, you probably know more about its role in neurons,

00:06:35.420 which I think is just starting to become appreciated. We typically thought of neurons

00:06:39.300 as only accepting glucose and ketones, but I think there's emerging evidence that lactate is a fuel.

00:06:44.760 And then of course the liver can turn lactate right back into glucose via the Cori cycle.

00:06:49.000 So I think the more efficiently our cells can get lactate out and start processing, it's not a poison

00:06:54.940 as we, you know, we once thought of lactate as kind of like a bad thing. It's not, it's just bad

00:07:00.120 if you don't know what to do with it. Yeah. My understanding about the distribution of neurons that

00:07:04.220 preferentially use lactate as a fuel under conditions of, let's say high stress, but also

00:07:09.640 just high exertion doesn't have to be stressful is that for somewhat obvious reasons, the hypothalamus

00:07:16.100 and areas of the brainstem that control breathing and more primitive functions are going to utilize

00:07:21.140 that fuel preferentially first. And this is actually evident when, for instance, you get into an ice

00:07:26.480 bath or any kind of adrenaline shock environment. What little neuroimaging is out there tells us that

00:07:32.880 the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in kind of rule setting and decision-making, but really

00:07:37.500 rule in contingency setting. We could talk more about this essentially shuts down, but doesn't

00:07:43.160 shut down because of lack of electrical activity. It shuts down because there's a preferential

00:07:47.060 shuttling of glucose and lactate to other regions of the brain that just need to keep everything

00:07:52.400 online. Translated to plain English, you get into the ice bath, you get the shot of adrenaline,

00:07:56.760 or you get the shot of adrenaline from anything, seeing a car crash or getting a troubling text

00:08:00.780 message. And essentially your forebrain quiets for about 20 to 30 seconds. And all the other

00:08:06.920 systems kind of ramp up in terms of survivability functions. And then forebrain can come online.

00:08:13.620 I think that a lot of people feel hijacked by the autonomic response associated with hypothalamus

00:08:18.360 and brainstem activation. Heart rate goes up, breathing goes up, pupils dilate, tunnel vision,

00:08:23.580 all of that happens immediately. And I think most people aren't familiar with those states.

00:08:27.380 The more familiar we can become with those states and the fact that they are indeed transient,

00:08:32.020 the lower the probability we get hijacked by them. So this is classic stress inoculation,

00:08:36.720 but it's nice to see that nowadays a number of people are doing this outside the military and

00:08:40.940 outside of sports training and just teaching themselves to be comfortable with that pulse

00:08:44.300 of adrenaline and doing it through deliberate cold exposure or blood restriction, coughs.

00:08:49.620 I think once you feel that first shot of pain, like how am I going to make it through two minutes

00:08:53.160 of this, that's another place where you just keep going and then all of a sudden your brain

00:08:57.240 comes online. The forebrain comes online. Yeah, that's interesting. So basically for a

00:09:01.800 lay person like me, when it comes to the brain, we basically evolutionary have decided that the

00:09:06.500 most advanced part of the brains, we can basically sacrifice temporarily for midbrain, brainstem,

00:09:12.920 all of these things that are absolutely essential. And so it's basically a shunting of resources away

00:09:17.400 from a somewhat gratuitous part of the brain that is the most evolved. Yeah. And I think when I say

00:09:23.320 things like the forebrain shuts down, I'm using a broad brush. You just mean less resources are

00:09:27.440 available for it. Yeah. One of the more powerful set of discoveries in the last few years, it comes

00:09:31.460 from a colleague of mine at Stanford, Nolan Williams, who's in psychiatry and neurology. I think the

00:09:36.100 simplest way to think about it is the following, that the prefrontal cortex, that's a brain real

00:09:40.200 state right behind the forehead, is really involved in rule setting for, by context. You know, there's

00:09:47.960 this classic Stroop task, give people a bunch of cards with words or numbers written on them in

00:09:52.480 different colors. And then you ask them to read the words or the numbers, pretty straightforward,

00:09:56.920 or you ask them to tell you the colors and ignore what the words say. Sounds easy, actually pretty hard

00:10:02.600 to do when going fast. And then you start switching back and forth. That is a very prefrontal cortex

00:10:08.420 dependent kind of task. And what does it reflect? It reflects the ability to adjust your rule set

00:10:15.500 depending on what's demanded of you in the context. So when I walk in here for a podcast,

00:10:20.140 very different rule setting context than when I'm alone at home or when I'm public speaking or

00:10:25.500 whether or not I'm even on podcasting. Slightly different rule sets, being a guest versus hosting

00:10:30.000 a podcast, but completely different sets when you're spending time with your children, your wife alone.

00:10:34.540 So rule setting and context is completely governed by prefrontal cortex. Hence the famous case of

00:10:40.580 Phineas Gage who caught a tamping iron, destroyed his orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex.

00:10:45.220 Why don't you tell that story? It's such a great story that everybody learns in neuroanatomy.

00:10:48.880 This is a classic story in neuroscience. And I should just mention that because I know that many people

00:10:53.220 out there, especially in the Twitter sphere, are obsessed with clinical trials and clinical trials

00:10:58.080 are wonderful and are immensely powerful, but we have to remember that in medicine and in particular

00:11:03.640 in neuroscience, most of what we know, for instance, about memory comes from one single patient,

00:11:09.620 HM, the famous HM who had bilateral hippocampal damage. They deliberately burned out as hippocampi

00:11:15.740 to offset epilepsy, temporal epilepsy. In the case of Phineas Gage, it was a naturally occurring

00:11:21.180 lesion. He was a railroad worker and they would drive these tamps in with explosives. And he caught

00:11:27.840 one coming up through the base of his jaw, went out through the forehead, somehow missed the critical

00:11:33.180 vasculature and he survives. This thing literally shot out the top of his head and he survived. And

00:11:39.200 thereafter, he became somebody who did not obey rule sets, inappropriate behavior. He wasn't

00:11:46.140 necessarily profane, but he didn't behave correctly for the context. Whereas before he was very well

00:11:52.860 mannered and he adjusted his behavior according to context. When he's out with beers for friends

00:11:57.140 or working on the railroads, he might speak and behave one way, go home, speak and behave another

00:12:01.480 way, et cetera. Completely lost the ability to switch rule sets according to context. So classic case,

00:12:07.840 his skull is preserved. There've been a lot of rumors about his behavior that are somewhat correct

00:12:13.500 and incorrect. There's also, for example, just one more thing. This was actually a lyric in a Bob

00:12:18.940 Dylan song, Kluver-Busey syndrome with bilateral damage to the amygdala, which many people think of

00:12:24.380 as involved in fear, but it's really a defense and kind of alertness system in the brain is what the

00:12:30.420 amygdala is really involved in. And monkeys or people who have bilateral amygdala damage, they can still

00:12:37.260 experience certain kinds of fear. For instance, drive up CO2, carbon dioxide in their environment and make

00:12:42.540 them breathe pure CO2, they will panic, but they become unafraid of things like snakes. If previously

00:12:48.620 they were afraid of snakes and they become kind of sexually and food inappropriate. So they'll pick

00:12:54.420 up a pen and start to gnaw on it, maybe taste it. Normally we don't try and taste inanimate objects

00:12:58.860 and the monkeys would try and copulate with various inanimate objects. And so there's this kind of bizarre

00:13:05.700 lack of context. And believe it or not, even though we think of the prefrontal cortex as this very

00:13:10.420 evolved structure, it is intimately involved with the so-called limbic pathway. It's actually what

00:13:15.760 we call monosynaptic.

00:13:16.500 So it's less evolved than the top of the cortex, the neocortex?

00:13:20.020 Yeah. It's kind of interesting. The whole dating of cortical areas is a little bit of a

00:13:24.680 controversial thing, but beautiful work by Arnold Kriegstein at UCSF has focused on this using

00:13:28.940 actually carbon dating as a way to approach this.

00:13:32.040 How would carbon dating help in that?

00:13:33.380 Yeah. So they've looked at brains from different species and they're starting to,

00:13:36.700 I mean, establishing homology from say a macaque versus a baboon versus a human. Humans from

00:13:41.160 different, the thing about, I should just interrupt myself and say that the thing that's hard about

00:13:44.680 studying the nervous system is that in terms of homology and evolution is there's no fossil record.

00:13:50.160 The skull is preserved, but the brain essentially degenerates and disappears. So you dig up some bones

00:13:54.900 and there's nothing there. And the two ways that you establish homology actually come from

00:13:59.240 development. One is developmental position. In general, when you look at two different brain

00:14:04.280 areas, like let's say the hippocampus, an area associated with memory in a mouse versus a human

00:14:11.120 in the mouse, the hippocampus is up near the top of the brain. And in a human, it's down near the

00:14:15.520 bottom. And you say, well, how can those be the same structure? But if you look during development,

00:14:19.020 they start off in the exact same place. It's just that the human brain, because it has so much

00:14:23.300 neocortex, the outer shell, the whole thing starts moving and moving and moving. And it ends up down

00:14:28.300 there at the bottom. The second criteria for establishing homology between species of a

00:14:33.020 given brain area or neuron type is connectivity. And so we know, for instance, that the prefrontal

00:14:38.720 cortex and amygdala are monosynaptically connected. There's just one connection because ultimately

00:14:43.740 everything is connected to everything. You and I are related through some distant lineage.

00:14:48.560 Wait, let me make sure I heard you correctly. You're saying that between the amygdala and the

00:14:51.840 prefrontal cortex is one synaptic connection. That's it. It doesn't go through a network.

00:14:56.640 Correct. If we were to put an anatomical tracer into the amygdala or to the prefrontal cortex,

00:15:02.260 you would see direct connections between those two structures. And you would see connections

00:15:08.360 with intervening structures. Because of course, ultimately, everything in the brain is connected

00:15:11.980 to everything. Just like on Google Maps, everything is connected to everything, even if by way of

00:15:16.280 ocean. The presence of a monosynaptic one connection or direct connection, or even a disynaptic

00:15:22.720 where there's an intervening connection, but only one, is an important criteria. Because what it

00:15:27.320 really says is that it establishes very fast communication between structures. And the brain

00:15:32.520 is so metabolically demanding in general that here we're making up just so stories, but we have to

00:15:36.900 assume that evolution doesn't and did not introduce a lot of extraneous wiring. So when we think about

00:15:42.760 prefrontal cortex, we think, oh, there's this executive function, complex rule setting,

00:15:48.020 contingencies. It must be very evolved. And indeed, it's the region of the human brain that's expanded

00:15:52.320 relative to other primates and other species. But it's involved in some primitive stuff as well,

00:15:58.540 not just by way of connectivity. And this kind of brings us back to the Nolan Williams discovery

00:16:02.960 in point, which is that I don't want to throw out a ton of nomenclature here, but we've got prefrontal

00:16:07.260 cortex for this rule setting and contingencies. You've got things like the amygdala and associated

00:16:11.560 structures that are kind of threat detection, but are kind of generic. They raise heart rate. They raise

00:16:16.680 awareness. They change the visual system and they tune your auditory system to localize things as

00:16:22.040 opposed to paying attention to everything in your environment. Imagine kind of a cone of attention

00:16:26.040 at the so-called cocktail party effect. You're trying to hear a conversation in particular,

00:16:30.520 not listen to just the buzz and the clinks of the glasses and stuff in the room. Okay. But also in

00:16:35.980 that circuitry involving prefrontal cortex and amygdala is an area of the brain that is becoming more

00:16:41.140 important to neuroscientists all the time, and especially to clinicians, which is the insula.

00:16:44.920 The insula has a map of the body surface and the internal organs and is essentially controlling,

00:16:53.620 at least in one region, interoception, which is our perception of everything that's happening

00:16:57.420 within our body. Our perception that our heart rate has increased or decreased, our perception that

00:17:01.440 our blood pressure is dropping, our perception that our gut feels acidic or full or empty, et cetera.

00:17:05.980 All of the visceral organs are mapped there. And it also-

00:17:10.580 What's the physical size of this region?

00:17:12.120 Oh, that's a great question. The amygdalas of the insular cortex is fairly expanded in humans,

00:17:18.900 meaning I'd have to check, but it's going to be larger than a few millimeters, which in neural

00:17:23.580 real estate- Wait, this is a sub piece of the amygdala or this is-

00:17:26.840 No, this is a separate structure, the insular cortex. Yeah. Okay.

00:17:29.820 That's a great question. I'd have to go check the measurements.

00:17:32.360 That's small.

00:17:32.620 It's small, but it contains a complete map of the internal body surface. And it's in

00:17:37.960 a position, this is really cool. It's in a position to integrate information about the

00:17:42.400 outside world and rule sets and internal state, and they all converge there. Now, under conditions

00:17:49.400 where we are rested, we are feeling rational, we understand the environment, we feel in control

00:17:55.280 of things, the prefrontal cortex leads activation of the amygdala and the insula. In other words,

00:18:02.900 I can say, okay, you know, my heart rate's going up a little bit, but I've done a podcast

00:18:05.900 before. I can get comfortable here. Okay. Someone who's never done public speaking, however,

00:18:10.240 if they get out on stage and they're feeling their heart rate going up and they're thinking,

00:18:13.700 oh my God, I'm going to pass out, or I'm going to say something ridiculous. And they're panicking.

00:18:17.520 What happens there? Well, Nolan's lab and others have shown that now the insula activity and the

00:18:23.520 amygdala starts leading the rule set of the prefrontal cortex. In other words, the coach

00:18:29.020 now becomes the player, the trainer becomes the trainee. So it's literally an inversion of,

00:18:34.580 instead of it going prefrontal cortex leads, insula leads amygdala, it's insula and amygdala

00:18:40.020 lead prefrontal cortex. And so the prefrontal cortex doesn't shut down completely under conditions

00:18:47.240 of say getting into an ice bath or panic. The prefrontal cortex can only access one or two

00:18:53.380 very specific rule sets. You lose flexibility of thinking. And this is kind of a duh when you hear

00:18:59.460 it. But I think the fact that neuroscientists are finally identifying the underlying neurology is very

00:19:04.320 exciting because what we're talking about is that neural circuits can run in both directions.

00:19:08.620 And we had always thought it was, okay, this activates that, activates that. It's kind of a

00:19:12.740 chain of events, but it can run in the other direction too. And this is why-

00:19:16.000 Sorry, just to make sure I understand, again, I apologize for my ignorance on this.

00:19:19.440 You're saying that the action potential moves in the other direction and the neurotransmitters

00:19:24.160 are actually released on the other side of the synapse?

00:19:26.100 No, I'm so glad that you asked this question. No, these, all these-

00:19:28.780 They have two versions.

00:19:29.580 All these structures are reciprocally connected. That's right. So we haven't changed anything

00:19:32.880 about the underlying cell biology, about the axon propagating down the axon,

00:19:36.820 the action potential propagating down the axon and transmitter release. It's just that it's a two-way

00:19:41.020 highway. And suddenly, if everything was running north to south, when we are in our rational mind,

00:19:48.460 creativity, all of those things under conditions of calm, as soon as a certain level of internal

00:19:53.880 discomfort arises, everything starts running south to north. And I think that's exceedingly

00:19:59.040 interesting because it means, first of all, it means that neural circuits are not just all the

00:20:05.280 classic lesion data. You lesion a structure, like you remove some prefrontal cortex, like the

00:20:09.560 Phineas Gage example. And you can start to see why, huh, you know, that's a cool naturally occurring

00:20:14.880 experiment. I mean, unfortunate for him, but cool for the world because we learned, but it's not a

00:20:19.100 great experiment because you're just getting an impression of what happens when you blow up one

00:20:23.520 city along this map, right? It doesn't tell you anything about the direction of flow of information

00:20:28.000 in and out of that map. And so the more we learn about prefrontal cortex and these other structures,

00:20:32.860 like the insula, the more we start to understand that the brain has neurons, of course, and we have

00:20:38.940 what are called receptive fields, which are basically the way in which specific neurons are

00:20:43.480 activated by specific events in the world, either in our bodies or outside our bodies, but that those

00:20:48.480 receptive fields are very dynamic depending on context and that the brain, while it has all this

00:20:54.660 diversity of response, it's not infinite. We have modes that we sort of fall into bins of when

00:21:01.140 autonomic arousal, that is levels of alertness, doesn't always have to be stress. I mean, in the context of

00:21:06.120 let's say sexual arousal or hunger, the rule set becomes very, very narrow. It's find food, it's

00:21:12.820 have sex, it's find a safe place to fall asleep. Whereas when we are rested and we have our basic

00:21:19.280 needs met, whatever those may be, then opens up the opportunity to start thinking in new and novel

00:21:26.660 ways. You can think, oh, it's sort of like the Stroop task on Taken to the Extreme. It's we're 2023,

00:21:31.400 you know, what is the metaverse going to look like? What's going to happen to Twitter? What's going to

00:21:35.600 happen to the economy? What's going to happen to public health? Is there going to be another debacle

00:21:39.860 with public health communication as it was over the last few years, et cetera? And so you can start

00:21:44.500 thinking, what you can start doing is combining different rule sets and evaluating those different

00:21:49.160 rule sets. And this, I believe, is one of the reasons why many people experience their best ideas

00:21:54.960 from doing a lot of structured thinking, but also from taking a walk and all of a sudden an idea

00:22:00.800 comes to us or in the shower, or when we aren't focusing on the implementation of a specific rule

00:22:06.760 set. It's very clear that the prefrontal cortex has this ability, depending on what else is going on in

00:22:12.280 our body, to start swirling and combining these different rule sets. I know you and I are both

00:22:16.300 fascinated by high performance, you and F1 and a number of other things in some other domains, but

00:22:21.260 there's this sort of classic laddering up of unskilled is the start of any performance,

00:22:26.720 then skilled, then mastery. And then this thing that we love to observe, which is virtuosity,

00:22:32.540 which is this combining of rule sets in a way that it seems even the performer didn't even realize

00:22:37.260 was possible. Anyway, I've transitioned to a number of domains, but at the very least,

00:22:41.360 what this whole prefrontal cortex insula amygdala circuitry is teaching us, again, mainly through the

00:22:46.720 work of Nolan Williams, this has not worked from my laboratory, is that when people,

00:22:51.260 people are in states of calm and certainly in states of what we consider mental health,

00:22:56.460 things run north to south, prefrontal cortex downward. When people, for instance, people who

00:23:01.760 are depressed have deficits in activation of particularly the left dorsolateral prefrontal

00:23:06.820 cortex, and much of their thinking and their life is run from the insulin amygdala up to the

00:23:13.540 prefrontal cortex. And this is why people wake up thinking, I don't know how to accomplish anything

00:23:18.520 today. There's no point in trying. Their rule set seem like they don't work because they are only

00:23:23.560 able to access specific rule sets of thinking. And so the rest of us say, well, hey, like get some

00:23:28.080 exercise and go for, apply for a job, look for a new relationship, but their rule set are not

00:23:33.500 available to them. It's almost like they can't see the playboard in the same way. And so Nolan's lab

00:23:39.100 has been using, for instance, transcranial magnetic stimulation to activate, not inhibit, but activate

00:23:44.660 left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in particular, and seeing that all of a sudden people are starting

00:23:49.460 to truly in the moment, new ideas about rule sets are revealed to them. Is the idea there that if you

00:23:56.040 stimulate and activate and send the current back north to south, it automatically reduces the south

00:24:04.360 to north or just overwhelms it? Most likely it overwhelms it and with time creates neuroplasticity

00:24:10.360 that reduces it. And the way it seems to do that is by temporarily shutting down people's

00:24:16.620 interoception. You know, we think so much about get connected to your body. It's so important to

00:24:20.620 be connected to your body. And indeed many people, their entire life and experience exists from the

00:24:26.580 neck up and the waist down. But interoception is a double-edged sword. It's also been shown that

00:24:32.280 people who have extreme levels of interoception, actually one can know. If you can reliably count

00:24:38.240 heartbeats without taking your pulse or using a heart rate monitor, chances are you have pretty

00:24:42.700 high levels of interoception. This can be trained up. I could guess my heart rate based on my external

00:24:48.500 cues. I'm probably at 60 beats per minute now because I'm higher than fully at rest, but not

00:24:54.780 much. But can you feel your heartbeat? Absolutely not. Some people can feel their heartbeat and it's

00:24:59.800 been shown they have very high levels of insula activity. There are sub-regions of the insula.

00:25:03.920 If I said amygdala a second, I apologize. I meant insula. There are sub-regions of the insula

00:25:08.640 that are particularly sensitive to internal state. Other regions of the insula are tuned to other

00:25:13.860 things. And just to be sure I understand this, anyone who's ever had a GI bug or something or

00:25:19.580 God forbid something worse, like extremely constipated or had a small bowel obstruction,

00:25:23.520 like the innervation of the small bowel in particular is insane. We are really able to detect pain

00:25:31.260 at even a modest amount of stretch. Just to be clear, are you talking about that pain is perceived

00:25:40.620 in the insula? That's right. That's probably what you're saying. Yeah. That's going to be a primary

00:25:43.820 site for delivery of somatic sensation to the brain. Oftentimes people say, the body contains so

00:25:52.120 much information. I have to say, I'm very, very open to the idea that the body plays an important role

00:25:57.380 in all things health and perception. But there is something particularly important about the real

00:26:03.440 estate in our skulls. You could amputate all four of my limbs. That would suck for me, but I'd still

00:26:09.060 be Andrew. If you take out one square millimeter of my prefrontal cortex, who knows, maybe I'd be a

00:26:14.500 nicer guy, but chances are I'm going to be a very different person. Now that is not true. If you remove

00:26:21.080 one square millimeter of say a different brain area, then I could think of a few where if you put a gun

00:26:25.540 to my head and you forced me to do that to myself, I'll tell you one thing. I'll say the last place I

00:26:30.060 would ever allow you to take a square millimeter of neural tissue is my neural retina because there

00:26:35.200 you take one square millimeter. That's interesting. I would have guessed hippocampus.

00:26:39.380 No, there are a few things I'd like to forget. I might ask where they're mapped and then have you

00:26:42.880 delete there. But in all seriousness, I think the neural retina would be the last place. I guess the

00:26:47.840 peripheral retina, I don't care so much about being able to see out here in my periphery, although that's

00:26:51.740 what you use when you're driving. A lot of people think you use foveal vision, central vision for

00:26:55.460 driving. I hate to tell you this, but there are many people out there driving around right now

00:27:00.280 who are legally blind in their central vision. Are they great drivers? No. Are they decent enough

00:27:06.680 drivers to pass the driving test? They are. So there are a lot of blind people, legally blind people.

00:27:11.300 In other words, you're basically saying you would prioritize vision over any other part of your brain?

00:27:15.620 Absolutely. Except perhaps motor cortex, because I could handle missing one eye. But if you look at the

00:27:21.520 allocation of real estate in the human brain, it's very clear that vision and movement

00:27:26.680 dominate most of the requirements. Yeah. So it's interesting. Movement,

00:27:31.160 clearly, if you look at the movement cortex, also sensation though. I mean, the homunculus is

00:27:35.340 enormous, right? Remind me how much real estate, I know the occipital cortex is responsible for vision

00:27:40.520 just on a neuron basis as a percent of total neurons. Is that the right way to think about it?

00:27:45.280 Yeah.

00:27:45.420 Or would you also include the glial cells?

00:27:46.860 Homage to Ben Barris, the great Ben Barris, my postdoc advisor and your former instructor at Stanford.

00:27:51.600 Yeah, we're going to talk about Ben shortly.

00:27:52.680 We'll talk about Ben. We should include the glia, otherwise the glianistas are going to come after

00:27:56.660 me. But glia obviously are very important cells. But if you were to just say strict volume-based

00:28:01.440 real estate, and you were to say, okay, how much of the human brain is allocated for vision and vision

00:28:08.500 only, but also how much of the human brain includes neurons that are responsive to visual stimuli?

00:28:14.440 So these might be areas of your auditory cortex that are also responsible for vision. Because of

00:28:19.580 course, if you hear something over to your left, you tend to look over to your left. So there's

00:28:23.680 integration. They're multimodal, what we call multimodal neurons. They have auditory and visual

00:28:27.920 receptive fields. They can be activated by auditory and visual cues. You'd say 40 plus percent,

00:28:32.900 probably 40 to 42 percent of the human brain has visual response specificity. Incredible.

00:28:38.660 This is amazing. You've probably heard me talk about this before, but one of the things I enjoy

00:28:42.980 about bow hunting is the ability to observe other species and how they have different superpowers from

00:28:50.500 us. So anybody who's ever been out there with a bow trying to get an access to you or an elk will tell

00:28:55.620 you their hearing is incredible, but their sense of smell is next level. We don't have a way to

00:29:03.740 comprehend it. I once heard, it might've been Michael Easter. I don't remember, but an author,

00:29:08.400 no, it wasn't. It was actually, I don't remember. Anyway, someone once gave this amazing description,

00:29:12.660 which was they were out walking and they came across a carcass. It was, I forget what the animal

00:29:18.580 was. It was like some animal that had been killed by another animal, but it was mostly still there.

00:29:22.280 And it was rotting and it was rancid beyond words once they were within like 10 feet of it.

00:29:29.200 And the analogy they used is, this is what we smell like to an elk a mile away.

00:29:35.800 Oh, that's such a great way to put it because we always hear, you know, sharks can smell a drop

00:29:39.960 of blood in the water from a mile away, but it's hard to think about that.

00:29:42.640 It's hard to imagine what that is.

00:29:43.680 Yeah. It doesn't translate to our own map of experience. I have to mention a book,

00:29:48.660 which is a wonderful book that frankly, I was a little pissed when it came out in the best of

00:29:53.120 ways because I always wanted to write.

00:29:54.580 The book you wanted to write.

00:29:55.300 It's the book I wanted to write because animals and animal behavior and perception is one of my

00:29:59.960 favorite things to think about. But there's a beautiful book written far better than I ever

00:30:03.760 could write by Ed Yong, who's a wonderful science writer called An Immense World that just came out,

00:30:09.200 which is all about the sensory specializations of other animals. I think you'd really enjoy it.

00:30:13.440 I'd love to read this.

00:30:14.080 Yeah. I'll send you a copy.

00:30:15.340 And my point is that the only sense that we seem to have to rival animals is vision.

00:30:21.000 In fact, we actually have better vision than a number of animals because we are tricolor,

00:30:25.260 right? Most of them are two. So there are some animals that certainly see better than us.

00:30:30.400 I think a lot of the sheep species can see things at a mile that we can't fathom,

00:30:35.900 but I think we probably see better than deer and elk, all things equal. It's still their ability to

00:30:41.980 smell and hear us so much better. So it's interesting to think that that much of our real estate is

00:30:46.320 assigned to vision. Whereas what's the olfactory neuronal component? It must be nothing for us.

00:30:52.240 Minimal in comparison, which doesn't necessarily, I should just say volume of real estate.

00:30:56.520 It's not always the best indicator.

00:30:57.900 No. In fact, there was a lot of mistakes made in the early days of neuroscience because of looking

00:31:02.800 at the number of neurons or the number of connections. A good example would be the raphe

00:31:07.180 nucleus of the brainstem manufacturer serotonin sends an enormous, enormous projection to the

00:31:13.100 circadian clock of the hypothalamus. And there've been dozens of experiments evaluating the role of

00:31:17.800 serotonin in that pathway and its ability to shift the circadian system. And thus far,

00:31:22.960 it seems like barely any influence. Who knows what it's doing? We assume it's doing something,

00:31:27.720 but it's not doing anything obvious based on the experiments that have been done.

00:31:31.120 To be a little careful in any description about animals and the natural world and vision,

00:31:34.720 because this could end up being a 15-hour podcast. Like I turn into the six-year-old version of

00:31:38.780 myself. I mean, literally my parents took me to a psychologist because they were worried I was

00:31:42.580 spending so much time learning about animals and the natural world. And then I used to come into

00:31:47.240 class, you know, I used to go into kindergarten and first grade and ask if I could give lectures

00:31:51.460 about that. It was an absolute obsession. So should I be worried about my five-year-old who

00:31:55.800 feels that way about dinosaurs right now? No, he'll probably be a paleontologist someday.

00:31:59.640 That's what he thinks. Maybe we'll get into backstory. I still feel a full body lift when we start

00:32:06.940 talking about retinas and animals. And so if you'll indulge me, there are a couple points related to what you

00:32:12.060 said a moment ago that I think most people might appreciate just in terms of calibrating themselves

00:32:16.440 to these sensory experiences. Cause I love the example you gave. We'll get back to olfaction in

00:32:20.880 a moment, but to get a sense of how well we see relative to other animals. If you were to hold out

00:32:26.400 your thumb at arm's distance, if I were to draw 60, six, zero black lines separated from one another on

00:32:34.460 your thumbnail, you would be able to perceive that. And we call that being able to measure 60 cycles

00:32:41.220 per degree cycles of black, white per degree of visual. Because at one arm length, that is one

00:32:46.620 360th. That's about one degree, about one degree. It's not, yeah, it's about one degree of visual

00:32:51.800 angle. You have to take into account the optics of the eye. If I were to draw 80 lines. And sorry,

00:32:56.440 just to be clear, when you say you put 60 lines on my thumb, I can't count the 60. I just recognize

00:33:03.340 that they are discrete lines. Exactly. Beautifully put. So most people with

00:33:08.760 20, 20 ish vision or with corrective lenses or with LASIK can see 60 cycles per degree. Some people

00:33:16.000 are better fighter pilots, et cetera. Some people might be 65, whatever. Exactly. A raptor bird of the

00:33:23.060 sort that I saw this morning here in Texas, like a red tail hawk or red shoulder hawk sees at 120

00:33:29.340 cycles per degree. So that means they can sit up on a light pole and look down at the ground and see

00:33:35.840 a small gopher raise its head in the ground. And it will look like they'll perceive it. They might not

00:33:41.900 be able to count the whiskers on that gopher's face, but they'll be able to perceive that movement.

00:33:46.360 Now this is interesting because we have a pupil. We have a fovea behind that. A fovea is just a

00:33:53.400 concentration. A fovea actually means a pit, but a concentration of retinal cells that allows us to

00:33:57.980 see at highest acuity in the central vision. How do we know this? Well, you can put your hand out to

00:34:02.400 the side and you know, your fingers are waving off in your periphery. For those just listening,

00:34:06.440 I'm just putting my fingers off to the side of my head while looking at Peter. And I can see that

00:34:09.940 they're moving, but I can't really count them. If it wasn't my hand, I wouldn't know how many fingers

00:34:13.140 were there. As I move my hand more in front of my face, I can count them. So central vision,

00:34:17.500 we have more pixels, if you will, than in peripheral vision, but only in the center.

00:34:21.920 And it's circular. You mentioned sheep, and this is kind of fun and thinking about hunting.

00:34:27.420 Redtail hawks have a fovea, but other types of raptors have another fovea that views the floor.

00:34:36.860 So for instance, a diving bird is the best example. Birds that fly along the ocean have a horizontal

00:34:42.120 visual streak that allows them to view the horizon.

00:34:45.040 What we consider central is their peripheral.

00:34:47.100 That's right. But they also have a fovea because they need to actually dive into a school of fish

00:34:52.740 and capture a fish while adjusting for the refractory index of the water. Refractory index,

00:34:57.660 of course, is that if you ever reach for a coin at the bottom of the swimming pool and you're

00:35:01.380 reaching for it, and it's only when you get very close that you realize you were off by a few

00:35:04.640 centimeters or more. So that's an incredible feat. And they do that by distributing the high pixel

00:35:10.320 region of their retina to a visual streak and down below of fovea. The sloth that hangs upside down

00:35:16.040 has its fovea on the top of the eye so it can view the jungle floor. And there are a lot of examples

00:35:20.420 of this. And my favorite example of this is the J-shaped, it's not really a fovea, but the J-shaped

00:35:25.040 high density, high pixel concentration of the retina of the elephant so that it can view the trunk and

00:35:32.960 the tip of its trunk because it has to make very high acuity placement of the trunk in order to eat

00:35:37.240 properly. So nature has evolved all these incredible retinal specializations. So animals, I know most

00:35:44.080 people are interested in the animal that is us, but animals all have differences in acuity and

00:35:49.080 distribution of what they see in the world. And you mentioned sheep. Sheep actually need to see

00:35:54.400 horizon, but they also need to pay attention to what they're eating because they're kind of like

00:35:59.020 lawnmowers, right? I mean, but they need to be aware of predators and things of that sort. So a guy

00:36:03.220 down in Australia for years named Jack Pettigrew did tons of beautiful experiments on animals like

00:36:07.880 sheep and goats, and they have incredibly high acuity vision, but for very select regions of visual

00:36:13.420 space. So herein lies the- Well, you're absolutely right about the horizon thing because, you know,

00:36:17.320 I have friends that do a lot of, you know, some of the hardest sheep hunting that can be done in

00:36:21.020 North America. I've heard some of them say that out to five miles, if you break horizon, you're

00:36:26.660 busted. That's right. Can you imagine that? Out to five miles, if you break the horizon,

00:36:30.840 the sheep will see you. And even if they're grazing, they can spot that because of the way

00:36:34.540 that visual streak, it's not straight across the eye, the way it's oriented. So for those of you

00:36:38.360 who want to creep up on animals or people, let's hope for either hunting, which I think is great,

00:36:43.580 or if you're hunting people, let's hope it's within your appropriate professional role,

00:36:47.480 military. All right. The point being one universal truth of all of this is that the retina and the

00:36:53.140 visual system is most sensitive to motion. So it's not as if the sheep says, oh, there's Peter

00:36:59.680 and his friends creeping up on me in the horizon. All they see is a deflection of something in their

00:37:03.960 visual field. And there's a very fast pathway that goes from retina to a brainstem structure

00:37:09.760 called the superior colliculus that immediately engages the orienting reflex. It's not even

00:37:14.980 conscious. It's not a decision-making process. It's something comes up in the periphery, something

00:37:19.640 moves in the periphery and the signal, the noise is great enough that we orient towards it or animals

00:37:25.380 orient towards it. If you watch, for instance, like the nature is metal channel on Instagram-

00:37:29.980 Sorry, do we do that as well?

00:37:31.560 We absolutely do.

00:37:32.340 Are we more sensitive to the sound or to something in our periphery moving?

00:37:37.880 Visual periphery moving. There are exceptions to that, but visual periphery moving. If you like

00:37:42.880 this sort of thing and you want to see it in action, if you go to the nature is metal, somewhat

00:37:46.840 gruesome Instagram channel, a lot of examples of lions hunting, and you'll notice the way they hunt.

00:37:52.660 They move very slowly, but they learn over time. We don't know what they're thinking,

00:37:57.940 but they learn over time that when they are out of the field of view, or if they are in field of

00:38:02.840 view, they remain completely still. In other words, the lion becomes invisible when they are not moving,

00:38:08.840 invisible to the prey when the lion is not moving. Now you could say, well, that's crazy because it's

00:38:13.460 sitting right there. But actually, if I were to eliminate all your retinal movements and you're

00:38:18.420 looking right at me, I would disappear. You're making little micro-saccades all the time that

00:38:22.360 prevent the habituation of the neurons that would otherwise erase your visual perception of me.

00:38:28.200 Explain that more.

00:38:29.180 So we think that I see the pen, I see you in front of me, and I can just see it constantly.

00:38:34.040 But the retina has little micro-saccades, little tiny jitter basically, that prevents the habituation

00:38:40.080 of the neurons in the visual system from essentially losing the perception of you. If I were, and these

00:38:46.300 experiments have been done, if I were to eliminate these little micro-saccades, you would become

00:38:50.900 invisible to me. The only way I would see it is if I moved my head or I moved my eyes in a bigger

00:38:55.580 eye movement.

00:38:55.860 How do you experimentally do that?

00:38:57.940 So these experiments were done by Hubel and Wiesel and Nobel Prize winners for a number of

00:39:02.240 different aspects of vision. You can do this by giving curare to eliminate the muscle-

00:39:07.280 The toxin.

00:39:07.580 The toxin. Eliminate the small muscle movements of the eye. And there's some other drugs that

00:39:11.740 you can use that tap into the cholinergic system.

00:39:13.900 I see. So you just temporarily paralyze or permanently paralyze these muscles.

00:39:18.460 Yeah. And we're doing this all the time. I mean, now we're getting into the realm of

00:39:21.460 sensory perception, but when my hands are on my thighs-

00:39:24.640 You acclimate to them.

00:39:25.300 Yeah. You acclimate, you habituate. Some people call it attenuation, habituation, but

00:39:28.540 adaptation. But you mentioned smell. You walk into a dentist's office, oh, the smell of the

00:39:34.180 dental cement, you want to vomit. And a couple of minutes later, you're sitting there reading

00:39:38.040 some boring magazine or looking at your phone and you don't notice it because the olfactory

00:39:41.660 neurons habituate. Because the nervous system mostly runs on a signal to noise over time algorithm.

00:39:48.620 The olfactory component is really profound, right? Like you walk into a fish market and you want to

00:39:53.900 puke. And five minutes later, you've sort of forgotten about it and you're looking at the fish.

00:39:58.060 Do we have that profound, again, I don't want to use the word adaptation because it's not the

00:40:03.100 right word, but I think just for people to understand. Is there examples of where we have

00:40:06.380 that visually as well, that strong in adaptation? There are a couple of them. There's rapid plasticity

00:40:12.380 in terms of adaptation. Well, if you go into a funhouse mirror type environment, they tend to

00:40:17.740 change the, that's more of a visual proprioceptive feedback where at first you feel kind of wobbly

00:40:22.300 and then you can move. You're like, oh, when I see myself move that way in the mirror, that's not

00:40:26.140 really how I need to respond. But at first you feel a little off balance. There's very fast adaptation

00:40:30.860 of the sort. Like you can put in, this is a wild experiment. You put glasses on somebody that

00:40:34.700 inverts the visual world. That's got to throw off your day. But guess what? Within four hours,

00:40:39.340 you're navigating just fine. What happens? This is crazy. The receptive fields invert

00:40:45.740 and all of a sudden you see the world right side up. Now that's wild.

00:40:49.260 What? You actually see it right side up or you just learn that left is right and right is left?

00:40:54.220 It flips, which is crazy. In four hours?

00:40:57.420 Yeah, about four hours or so. What actually happens at the cellular level to enable that?

00:41:02.300 This has been studied by Thomas Poggio and others, and it's still somewhat of a mystery.

00:41:07.100 It appears it's bottom up changes, meaning it shifts in the oculomotor and visual motor

00:41:13.020 structures of the brainstem, communicating with the higher level perceptual centers of the cortex.

00:41:17.740 Remember, if we were to splay out from most primitive to most evolved functions within vision,

00:41:23.580 we'd say, and we can make up just so stories. I always joke, I wasn't consulted the design phase,

00:41:28.460 so I don't know the logic. By the way, anytime someone asks you, why is something this way?

00:41:33.340 The response should be, I wasn't consulted in the design phase.

00:41:36.620 Consulted in the design phase, I love it.

00:41:37.180 It's actually a phrase that I borrowed from Russ Van Gelder, who's the chair of ophthalmology at

00:41:41.180 University of Washington. So thank you, Russ. But it captures the fact that anyone who tells you that

00:41:46.700 they were to consult in the design phase or seems to understand why something is arranged a certain

00:41:51.020 way, you can come up with just so stories, but that person might be suffering from delusions of grandeur.

00:41:56.060 So in any event, what we know for sure is that based on genetics and cellular architecture,

00:42:01.900 et cetera, that the primary function of the visual system was not to see and perceive things.

00:42:07.500 It was to recognize when it's daytime and when it's nighttime. Now we'll get back to this because

00:42:13.660 this turns out to be an important mystery that was solved recently. The neurons that handle this

00:42:18.380 are the so-called melanopsin, intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells. They don't pay attention

00:42:22.460 to shapes. They don't pay attention to much, but they tell the brain when it's daytime and they

00:42:27.020 tell the brain when it's absence of light. Okay. This is Sachin Pandas, Mara Hattar, all the greats

00:42:33.180 of circadian biology, Matt Walker, this stuff relates to sleep and wakefulness. The next thing is neurons

00:42:39.500 that can sense contrast and motion. More important to me than knowing that like your skin is a particular

00:42:45.900 tone is just knowing that you are there and that you are a moving object as opposed to stationary

00:42:50.540 objects in the room that I just need to navigate around. The contrast in motion comes next. Then

00:42:55.260 comes shape and form. Like, is that a fish that I want to move away from, or do I want to approach

00:43:02.140 and eat? Is it bigger than I am? Is it smaller than I am? These kinds of things. And then comes color

00:43:08.300 of the more traditional sort. Although I'll return to this interesting thing about color. And then the

00:43:11.820 final category is specific features of shape, such as your face. I recognize your face or JFK's face

00:43:20.380 or Marilyn Monroe's face. And indeed- I like being in the same category as those two really famous faces.

00:43:25.900 It should be. I mean, there's an area of the brain called the fusiform face gyrus. It lies way up along

00:43:30.780 the visual pathway, meaning very far from the retina, but neurons there are exquisitely tuned to specific

00:43:37.020 faces. In fact, if you lesion that area, people become what's called proprosognosia. Proprosognosia

00:43:44.780 is the syndrome whereby people say, that's a face. I know it's a face, but I don't know whose face it

00:43:50.940 is. Would that be true if it's their own? I don't know the answer to that, but it certainly gives them

00:43:55.580 severe deficits in processing, recognizing faces as someone in particular. In fact, Ben Barris,

00:44:01.340 who we both will get back to, had a mild face recognition deficit. I would sometimes walk into

00:44:07.020 his office. He'd say, are you Chala? Chala was a woman that worked in our lab. Now that kind of

00:44:12.300 question might've been more context appropriate given it was Ben, and that will make sense in a

00:44:15.900 few minutes. Ben was transgendered. So maybe his notions of gender and faces were a little bit

00:44:20.700 intermixed, but we don't think that people who are transgender perceive other people as different

00:44:25.020 genders. But he sometimes would say, is that Rich or is that Andy? He called me Andy. I know he'd

00:44:30.060 ask Rich if he was Andy. And so the reality is that this brain area controls recognition of

00:44:35.420 facial identity. Incredible, but very high level function. And just to be clear, there are extreme

00:44:41.900 examples, obviously a lesion where you can't recognize anybody. But for someone listening to

00:44:47.660 this, I'm sure people who go to parties and they meet somebody and they say, hey, Peter. And you're

00:44:54.140 like, yeah, we met three months ago at so-and-so's. There are also super recognizers.

00:44:59.340 These people are highly employable by security agencies. Now the machine learning and AI is

00:45:05.180 getting better than many humans at face recognition. 10 years ago, 15 years ago,

00:45:11.180 retinal scans, they existed, but nothing like the ones they have now. Face recognition on your phone

00:45:15.500 for getting into your bank account, pretty incredible, but there are super recognizers.

00:45:19.660 So there are healthy variants of this basically.

00:45:21.820 Oh yeah. And whether or not it's learned or whether or not there's a genetic component,

00:45:25.180 isn't clear. Monkeys, macaque monkeys, old world primates, as we are, also have this fusiform face

00:45:30.620 area. This is largely the work of Nancy Kanwisher at MIT. He's done beautiful work on this. And for

00:45:34.460 years it was debated, is this a face recognition area really? Or is it just recognition of, you know,

00:45:40.700 two dots and a line. But you know, if I draw two dots and a line on a piece of paper,

00:45:45.100 you say that's a face. You know, if I may curl that line upward a little bit, you say it's smiling.

00:45:49.260 If I turn it upside down or I put it at 90 degrees, it does not look like a face. So the

00:45:53.580 neurons in this area are amazingly tuned to specific features. Now I mentioned color vision

00:46:00.460 and you said other animals like, I hate to break it to you folks, but your dog sees you in kind of a

00:46:04.780 brown, red, orange-ish tones, not in the colors that we see. A mantis shrimp sees 60 different

00:46:11.100 variations of red that we can't even perceive. Now, all of that suggests that color vision was

00:46:16.780 a late evolution in the visual system. And indeed the genetics of the photo pigments in the eye

00:46:21.340 that absorb either red, green, or blue, meaning long, medium, and short wavelength lights, not

00:46:27.420 really red, green, blue, argue that's true. And I should just mention while I'm here, you asked

00:46:32.380 earlier whether or not our olfaction is diminished. Really beautiful work by a couple, Deeb and Deeb, D-E-E-B,

00:46:39.500 Samir Deeb and his partner, and I can't remember her name, forgive me, at the University of Washington

00:46:43.260 showed that if you look at the human genetics or genomics, that humans traded out diversity

00:46:49.500 of olfactory receptors. That is the ability to sense a rich array of scents compared to other animals

00:46:55.180 for evolution of that long, AKA red photo pigment. So trichromacy is this ability to perceive in the

00:47:04.780 color ranges that we perceive is a late stage evolution. And we traded out olfactory ability for that.

00:47:10.700 So the question is, why? Is it literally a real estate question? Is it a metabolic question?

00:47:16.780 Well, a number of things. Well, first of all, I want to be fair to the olfactory system and the

00:47:19.820 vulnerable nasal system. I mean, smell is incredibly important for humans. Anyone that got COVID and

00:47:23.580 couldn't smell well for a day like myself, that sucked. I mean, I remember biting into a handful of

00:47:28.980 blueberries and I couldn't taste it well either because it wasn't the cold, it's the lack of smell.

00:47:33.340 Those taste and smell are intermeshed. And I thought, oh my goodness, my life isn't over,

00:47:38.300 but this really sucks. This is not pleasant at all. These taste like little bags of water and I love

00:47:44.460 blueberries. Okay. Fortunately, my smell came back. We are sensitive to the smell of vomit, disgust,

00:47:51.740 I would hope. We are sensitive to the smell of our romantic partners, hopefully not disgust, right?

00:47:57.820 We tend to like that. Kids. Our kids, the smell of their heads and in the back of their heads,

00:48:02.540 they produce all sorts of scents. The debate between odors and pheromones,

00:48:06.560 pheromone effects in humans are present. What's the definition of a pheromone?

00:48:10.120 Everybody's heard about it, but I don't know the technical.

00:48:12.120 So hormone obviously is a, not obviously, but hormone is a chemical released in one location

00:48:16.120 in the body that can act at that location and many other locations, so-called endocrine signaling.

00:48:20.920 Or paracrine.

00:48:21.540 Or paracrine.

00:48:21.820 That's right next to it.

00:48:22.660 Yes. Thank you. A pheromone is a chemical released by one organism that can act on the

00:48:28.580 physiology of another organism. Now, there are beautiful examples of this.

00:48:31.960 And we capture these. Can we actually say, here is the molecular structure of a pheromone that was

00:48:37.560 released from the nape of my child's neck that I can smell and love?

00:48:42.880 The presence of true pheromones, the noun, in humans is still debated because the so-called

00:48:50.580 accessorial factory system that governs that pheromonal response in other animals,

00:48:55.040 there's an organ in the human nose called Jacobson's organ that is thought to be the

00:48:59.520 vestigial pheromonal organ. So that's debated. But what is absolutely clear is that the scent,

00:49:06.060 right? The conscious perception of that scent has dramatic effects on our physiology. There's a

00:49:12.180 direct wiring from the olfactory system. So this is not pheromone effects. These are odor effects.

00:49:16.820 And those are two different things. So the idea of a chemical coming off of your child and going

00:49:21.320 through the vomeronasal system and impacting these aspects of self-oxytocin release, probably

00:49:26.420 dopamine release, all sorts of wonderful things, that's debated. What is absolutely clear though,

00:49:31.060 is that that specific scent clearly is perceived and registered by you and has an

00:49:35.880 impact on your physiology? And if it's not done via a molecule that's traveling through the air,

00:49:41.060 going through the nares of my nose, what is the connection?

00:49:45.360 So it is a molecule traveling into the nose and impacting, in this case, it would be the deep

00:49:50.720 limbic cortex. You've got six-layered cortex, which is neocortex, thought to be more evolved.

00:49:55.100 You've got limbic and piriform cortex with fewer layers, thought to be more, like for instance,

00:49:59.680 the hippocampus, this memory center, is actually, it's three layers. It's cortical. It's not what we

00:50:04.320 think of as neocortex, but it's very clear from the work of Richard Axel and Linda Buck and others

00:50:08.780 that the smell of your child's head and neck is perceived and impacts specific neurons in these

00:50:17.720 more, quote unquote, more primitive brain areas. And there are many automatic, innate,

00:50:24.440 as well as learned responses to that. The desire, for instance, to focus off your own needs and focus

00:50:30.160 on their needs lists. I mean, there's no question that those are odor-driven responses. Whether or

00:50:34.900 not they are classic pheromone-driven responses, it's a little bit of splitting hairs. That's where

00:50:39.140 it's debated. And the reason it's debated is that pheromone effects are very powerful in other animals

00:50:43.860 and you see analogs to them in humans. I'll give a couple of examples, but I do want to highlight

00:50:50.240 that olfaction is absolutely powerful for humans. But of course, you can lose your olfaction and still

00:50:56.280 function just fine. You asked about vision and I just want to say, we'll get back to this. But one

00:51:00.560 of the reasons we think that the visual system is so dominant is that it allows us to function

00:51:06.360 based on perception things at a distance. I mean, the olfactory system does require fairly close

00:51:12.340 range contact. And there's a whole business that we can get into about- That's again, because we

00:51:18.460 optimized to not place much in it, right? I mean, if we were elk, presumably, and I would guess,

00:51:23.760 I'm making this up again, I would guess that a parent elk can smell its offspring elk at as great

00:51:31.200 a distance as it will spot and be spooked from us, which might be a mile away. Right. And this is

00:51:35.380 really wild. And I learned this recently from somebody who works on the olfactory systems of

00:51:39.260 species like elk. You know, we think of binocular vision, you know, vision through both eyes and then

00:51:43.580 you create a coherent picture. I think I know what you're about to say and I can't believe it,

00:51:47.000 but go ahead. Elk and many other animals that are very olfactory driven can sense odor plumes.

00:51:52.360 So think about cones of odor and switch between their different nostrils. And in fact, they can

00:51:58.380 distribute those odor plumes. So they can geolocate. They can geolocate. So they can track

00:52:02.920 three or four young or three or four hunters simultaneously and recognize there's two over

00:52:07.980 there and two over there through odor plumes. They can merge odor plumes. Now you might say,

00:52:12.060 that sounds crazy, but we do this all the time. I can talk to you and I can, it's called covert

00:52:16.560 attention. This is the phenomenon of being at the bar and you're talking to somebody, but you're

00:52:20.800 actually checking out somebody else at the bar or somebody walks in who you really dislike or like.

00:52:25.260 And so you're pretending to have a conversation, but you're really paying attention, covert attention.

00:52:29.340 They can create, or I can bring all my sphere of attention just onto you, wherever you're talking

00:52:34.840 to at the bar. So animals like elk can create and split multiple cones of odor attention. They can

00:52:42.020 also perceive depth with their odor plumes. Now this is really important and it makes sense,

00:52:47.760 right? That the concentration of an odor would fall off with distance. We do this with our

00:52:51.800 visual system. Obviously things on the horizon, you watch a plane fly overhead. It looks like it's

00:52:56.120 slow. If you're right up next to it, it's going to go blazing past or the F1, for instance. I'm

00:53:00.780 always like, why are the cars driving so slow? I thought this was car racing. Then they come by and

00:53:04.300 it's like, and it's incredibly fast. Okay. We'll get back to that because that illustrates or kind of

00:53:11.400 captures the relationship between visual perception and time perception. The same thing at a

00:53:17.380 distance appears to move slowly. The same thing up close appears to move quickly, even your hand,

00:53:22.300 right? You can even see this at arm's length versus up near your eye if you're sensitive to it,

00:53:26.420 but certainly a car a mile away versus, or my favorite example, go to New York city,

00:53:31.640 get up in a skyscraper, look out the window and you're looking at the little ants and cars moving

00:53:36.120 or the people or the ants moving around. It looks like it's moving kind of slowly. Then all of a sudden

00:53:39.780 look at something in your room and all of a sudden it's like, whoa, things are moving really fast

00:53:43.420 because they're close. Other animals do this with their odor plumes, which is insane. Insane because

00:53:49.180 it's not our experience. But then again, a pit viper sees in the infrared and can sense your heat

00:53:53.360 emissions in the same way as sensing movement, is sensing vectors of movement, et cetera.

00:53:59.240 So let's go back to this question of what was the limit for us to not have that? So again,

00:54:04.360 I'm just going to go back to given that neither of us were in the design phase,

00:54:08.700 your natural selection, you are the tool of evolution. Presumably there were variants of

00:54:15.420 us that were randomly occurring that had those skills that got out-competed by the ones that

00:54:22.600 had greater and greater visual acuity. Why wouldn't you have all of the above? Is it literally a running

00:54:28.460 out of real estate inside the cranium? And if so, why not get a bigger cranium? Neanderthals had bigger

00:54:33.160 cranium. Again, it's sort of a question that's unanswerable, but I find these types of questions

00:54:37.580 fascinating. Super interesting. And also the fact that we have these vestigial pheromonal organs,

00:54:42.720 which appears to be the case, or we have an olfactory system that can be used to a greater

00:54:48.940 degree than we do rely on it. A huge fan of the work of a guy named Noam Sobel. He used to be at

00:54:53.140 Berkeley and now he's in Israel. He's done experiments. When I was at Cal at UC Berkeley,

00:54:57.580 I used to see people doing these. He would put gloves and goggles, occluding goggles and all sorts of

00:55:02.560 stuff to block hearing and touch and vision. And he taught people to follow odor trails of

00:55:08.900 chocolate or other, and to distinguish between different odor trails. So you see these were

00:55:12.820 souls walking around on their hands and knees on Berkeley campus, not the weirdest of things that

00:55:16.780 you, I mean, basically on the Berkeley campus, you have to be naked and on fire before anyone

00:55:20.700 would stop, but people can learn this. So you can devote more resources to it. I think the most

00:55:25.820 straightforward answer is likely that we traded out space in there, that we traded out space.

00:55:30.720 And now, of course, I don't know because I wasn't there, but there is something important about

00:55:35.760 that relationship between vision and time perception. At some point in human evolution,

00:55:40.580 whether or not it was through the visual system or whether or not it was through the prefrontal

00:55:43.600 cortical mechanisms, something very special happened for old world primates and us in particular,

00:55:49.080 which is the thing that I really believe sets us apart from all the other animals, the reasons that

00:55:54.580 we are the curators of the earth and not other species, twofold. One, the duration of time

00:56:00.700 in our lifespan in which we can engage in neuroplasticity, the ability to deliberately

00:56:04.460 change our neural architecture through learning. And the other one is time perception. At some point,

00:56:12.620 we developed the ability to divorce from memories of the past and experiences in the present and also

00:56:21.180 anticipate experiences in the future. And I don't know because I'm not in the elk's mind or the mind of a

00:56:29.440 turtle, but everything that we know about their sensory life and perception says that, sure,

00:56:35.760 they have memories. This whole notion of a goldfish not having a memory, that's the stupidest thing I

00:56:39.620 ever heard. First of all, the experiment's never been done. And second of all, the goldfish has to

00:56:43.840 swim in circles. Who decided it forgot? I think that's a myth. But they can remember food is over

00:56:48.320 there, animals cash food for the winter and go back to those cash sites, squirrels, incredible memory

00:56:54.120 of location and landmarks and all this stuff. We do that. We have a memory of past. We have perception

00:56:59.840 of present, but we also can think about how past and present relate to anticipation of future events.

00:57:07.000 And that places us in an incredible arena of interaction with the natural world where we can

00:57:14.260 make plans and we can make plans in very specific ways. And so I believe if I were to hedge a guess,

00:57:21.440 I'd say our ability to be so dependent on vision and the fact that our visual system has this aperture,

00:57:28.700 we can view broad swaths of our visual environment. And when we do that, we carve up time in very broad

00:57:34.380 bins. This is very clear. Think about the plane flying slowly. Or we can narrow our visual aperture.

00:57:41.380 I mean, you and I could go outside, find a little anthill, and we could pay attention to all the micro

00:57:45.340 movements of that and focus on that for a couple of hours. We can narrow our visual aperture. Stress

00:57:49.480 or excitement will narrow our visual aperture. Remember the prefrontal cortex. Different rule

00:57:55.060 sets associated with different internal states that also relate to different modes of visual

00:58:00.460 perception. And at some point in human evolution, some ancient version of ourselves figured out how

00:58:07.080 to see into the future. We obviously can't directly see into the future, but to anticipate the rule sets

00:58:13.860 of events that are still yet to come. And other animals, if they do that, they don't seem to

00:58:20.740 actualize on that ability. I was joking. I had this bulldog for years and he loved chasing rabbits,

00:58:25.240 but he didn't wake up on New Year's Day and say, okay, 50 rabbits this year. And if he did,

00:58:30.920 he never actually succeeded in making a good plan to execute that.

00:58:34.020 How could we test that? It seems like that's probably the case. Is there a way that one could

00:58:39.960 test that experiment or test that hypothesis rather? I don't know. What I do know is that

00:58:44.780 there are certain states, including dreams, the liminal state between waking and sleeping,

00:58:49.420 when we are completely devoid of external visual input, right? Our eyes are closed and space and

00:58:56.840 time, this is also true in certain psychedelic states, space and time become not normal. First

00:59:03.460 thing we learn is objects fall down, not up. These are our caretakers. When I feel stressed,

00:59:07.880 I don't know that I need to let my diaper change. I just scream, my diaper gets changed. Hopefully

00:59:11.740 those are the rule sets that we come into the world with early rule sets. But then at some point,

00:59:16.920 our rule sets become very constrained by our immediate experience and by past experience,

00:59:22.120 like, oh gosh, that teacher is not nice. That babysitter.

00:59:24.940 Right. This is kind of the whole thesis of the matrix. It's Neo having to unlearn the constraints of

00:59:30.160 the matrix. That's right. And then at some point our, and I do think it's these experiences of vision

00:59:36.620 that are outside the realm of normal experience, that the prefrontal cortex, not us consciously,

00:59:44.020 but the prefrontal cortex learns, ah, there's the possibility, for instance, of birds fly, we don't

00:59:50.880 fly, but that, you know, I can throw a stick, you know, but what if I could throw a stick with, you know,

00:59:56.680 I don't know, somebody hung some leather ornaments on that stick and figured out they could throw it a

01:00:01.440 little bit further and a little longer. Experiments have to be done in the present, of course.

01:00:05.280 And now what I'm saying is obvious. So you're basically saying the evolution

01:00:08.780 of our species suggests that we were able to do this and we're not seeing that level of complexity

01:00:16.780 in terms of, I don't want to use planning because then it becomes a tautology, but we don't see the

01:00:22.960 complexity and behavior out of other species that we do in ourselves. And is that basically the best

01:00:28.840 explanation? Yes. Most animals don't, this again, relates to this other aspect of ourselves,

01:00:33.260 which is neuroplasticity. There's some self-knowledge that we have.

01:00:37.380 I mean, this is a bit of consciousness, right?

01:00:38.860 Right. I mean, we're getting a little bit into the abstract and we're certainly not getting into

01:00:42.060 the realm of laboratory experimentation and having proved any of this. But if I were to put it simply,

01:00:46.860 I think the evolution of the visual system allowed us to think in different time domains.

01:00:51.940 I think things like dreaming in liminal states give us access to visual experiences that are impossible

01:00:57.680 in regular conscious perceptual states, right? I mean, I had a dream the other day where I was

01:01:03.420 in a taxi and then all of a sudden I was someplace else. I mean, this is not real, but the brain can

01:01:07.800 learn things in those states. It can learn about new rule sets, new possibilities of rule sets.

01:01:14.080 Can that be harnessed, you think? So let's just assume you, this is not a great example. It's just

01:01:18.800 the first one that comes to my mind. You go back to nobody's run a four-minute mile. Nobody's broken

01:01:23.480 the four-minute mile. And if Roger Bannister had dream after dream of breaking the four-minute mile,

01:01:29.980 do we have reason to believe that that would have impacted his physiology and belief system

01:01:34.560 in the way that it did when he actually broke the four-minute mile and all of a sudden breaking the

01:01:39.640 four-minute mile became a standard occurrence? In other words, the rule set got broken in the real

01:01:44.540 world and that clearly demonstrated a path to progress. Do we have evidence that had that rule set

01:01:50.440 been broken in a dream state? It could have had a similar effect for the first individual.

01:01:56.920 The best evidence I have is the incredible work of my colleague at Stanford, Ali Crum,

01:02:01.940 Aaliyah Crum. I'd love to put you guys in touch and just be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

01:02:06.200 That's what's great about podcasting. We can all be flies on the wall for it.

01:02:09.000 She's worked on these mindset effects or belief effects. These are different than placebo effects.

01:02:14.780 Short answer is yes. There are a million examples. I'll give my three favorite examples.

01:02:18.240 You give somebody a milkshake. You tell them it's a low-calorie milkshake. You measure things like

01:02:23.100 their insulin, their glucose response, levels of satiety, levels of ghrelin, et cetera. You give

01:02:28.500 another group a milkshake. You tell them it's a high-calorie shake. Take all the same measures.

01:02:33.300 You'll see different responses.

01:02:34.420 Vastly different responses. You give hotel workers a little tutorial on the fact that cleaning hotel

01:02:40.040 rooms is boring, but it burns calories and can lower blood pressure, help you lose weight.

01:02:44.860 They lose on average between eight and 11 pounds in the following three or four weeks.

01:02:50.220 You don't say anything to hotel workers about all the benefits of their work and the exercise that

01:02:55.260 it includes. You just tell them that it involves a lot of movement, et cetera, et cetera. No consequence.

01:03:00.280 There's clearly a mindset effect. And my favorite example would be the one related to stress,

01:03:04.900 which is you tell people all the negative impacts of stress on memory and wellbeing and immune system,

01:03:10.440 or you tell people also true data on the performance enhancing effects of stress,

01:03:17.520 sharpening of memory capacity, reaction time reduced, which is also true. And you see exactly

01:03:22.220 what people believe in, what they're told and what they believe. You can't lie to yourself,

01:03:25.920 but what you believe about a given practice strongly regulates the physiology. Now, this is

01:03:31.520 interesting to me in terms of the four minute mile or other things. Like you tell people that

01:03:34.840 the burn of lactate, maybe even the lack of sleep that they had the night before reflects a training

01:03:40.500 adaptation, as opposed to overreaching and overtraining, you're going to see very different

01:03:43.920 outcomes. In fact, Ali has been cuing me to the idea that a lot of the sleep tracking stuff that

01:03:48.820 you tell people you didn't have a good night's sleep. They feel like shit the next day. You tell

01:03:52.560 them they had a great night's sleep independent of their sleep physiology. And listen, I am as much a

01:03:57.440 proponent of sleep as the core of mental and physical performance as Matt or anyone else included.

01:04:03.340 But let's be honest, what you believe about what you've been told has an immense impact on your

01:04:10.360 physiology. And I use this to explain some of the battles around nutrition, where you hear like these

01:04:15.200 dweebs over here are saying this online and these dweebs and goons over here. And it's kind of silly

01:04:19.700 after a while. There's a distribution where facts rule and physiology rules. The laws of thermodynamics

01:04:26.220 are intact, but then these belief effects can account for anywhere from, according to her, anywhere from

01:04:31.420 about eight to 20% of the effects of anything like a food or a behavior. She actually set out in her

01:04:38.040 thesis at Harvard to study the effects of exercise. And her advisor said to her, I think all the effects

01:04:44.020 of exercise are placebo. It was a prompt to go actually look at that. And she thought, well,

01:04:48.480 that's crazy. Ali's a former D1 athlete. She's also a trained clinical psychologist, runs a lab at

01:04:52.940 Stanford. She's one of these superhumans. But she said, well, that's crazy. No, exercise changes blood

01:04:57.420 pressure by way of a number of different physiological mechanisms. But she went and tested

01:05:00.660 this idea that it's all placebo. In fact, that there's a lot that is placebo. So mindset effects

01:05:06.780 are real in terms of physiology. Now, does that allow people to break mental barriers? Well, for

01:05:13.000 certain things like engineering, like sending rockets up to Mars, clearly there's an engineering

01:05:17.140 feat that has to adapt to the physical world. There's nothing obvious about that. I can't just will

01:05:20.920 it into existence. But in terms of what the limits are on human performance and what the limits are

01:05:27.580 in terms of creative endeavors, I mean, as far as we know, that's infinite. Our good friend,

01:05:32.540 Rick Rubin has a book on creativity coming out. And I don't want to talk about it because there's no

01:05:36.920 way I could capture Rick's brilliance there. But he and I have had a lot of discussions about this.

01:05:41.280 And it's clear that creativity is combining of existing rule sets, but also coming up with completely

01:05:47.560 novel rule sets. This is something that for the philosophically oriented or for the neuroscience

01:05:52.860 oriented or psychologically oriented is a fun space. When was the last time any of us took a

01:05:57.460 walk and thought, how do I completely fracture my notions of the rules in a given domain and think

01:06:03.240 about truly new ones? It's hard to do. But once you set the, for lack of a better word, the intention

01:06:09.340 around that, I do believe that when you enter sleep states, that the brain tries to solve the most

01:06:15.200 important problems that are happening in your daily life. I think I talked about this on a podcast

01:06:19.740 with Matt Walker a long time ago, and I'm sure everybody can relate to this. There's something

01:06:23.500 really beautiful about singular focus and purpose in life. And for me, some of the fondest memories

01:06:30.660 would be in college and medical school where, you know, life was remarkably simple. You had no

01:06:36.320 responsibility whatsoever. And when I was an undergrad, you know, I don't possess the vocabulary to

01:06:41.600 describe how much I loved mathematics. There probably isn't a vocabulary for it.

01:06:45.860 Well, I'm sure somebody could, but my vocabulary is not advanced enough to put into words the affection

01:06:50.480 and the joy that mathematics brought me. And the example I gave was I would dream about math problems.

01:06:58.640 And I remember in the real world, I was trying to solve a problem. It was a dumb problem that I had

01:07:04.480 made up to solve, which was I wanted to integrate the volume of a face. And I got stuck on the chin

01:07:12.680 because there's a dimple on this chin that I was trying to integrate. And I went to bed and I actually

01:07:18.480 dreamt the solution. I dreamt the function, which needed to be rotated around a Z-axis to come up with

01:07:25.760 the integral. And I woke up, got out of bed and solved this problem. And I'm thinking to myself, like,

01:07:30.620 that just doesn't happen anymore. And it probably doesn't happen anymore because I'm so distracted.

01:07:35.100 There are too many things I'm trying to do. And I lack that real sense of purpose. I'm sure you've

01:07:41.920 experienced this in your own life. So one way to describe it in the context of the neural

01:07:45.700 architectures that we've been talking about is you have all the necessary rule sets to complete all

01:07:50.880 the demands of your daily life, from parenting to podcasting to running your clinical practice and

01:07:55.720 on and on. And so you know how to toggle between those, you know not to apply one rule set in the

01:08:01.000 wrong context, and you just go, go, go, go, go. And there's an energetic cost to that.

01:08:05.140 When we are singularly focused on one context, even if it's one conceptual context,

01:08:10.900 you still have the same amount of total neural architecture.

01:08:14.620 Now it's just concentration.

01:08:15.680 Just devoted to that. I mean, I still have images burned in my brain of neural tissue that I was

01:08:22.280 viewing down the microscope. I can close my eyes and still see it. I'm not, you know,

01:08:25.900 photographic memory. I used to have an audiographic memory where I could turn on a recorder in my head

01:08:30.380 and then I could listen back to those conversations in the evening. A very interesting thing to have

01:08:35.160 actually. And to get into an argument with me at that time was no good because I could remember

01:08:38.960 what you said. I lost that ability. And I think I lost that ability, not because I truly lost it,

01:08:43.760 but I'm thinking about other things now. Now that was kind of a useless ability, frankly.

01:08:47.480 I don't know. That sounds like a more useful ability than being able to integrate faces.

01:08:50.780 Well, it helped me learn certain things, but I think ultimately being fairly narrow context and

01:08:55.780 being able to access these broader rule sets and come up with new rule sets is incredibly powerful.

01:09:01.480 Now there are certain states of body and mind that favor this creativity process, if we can call it

01:09:07.900 that. And you said it precisely, which is, and this is not a woo thing. I truly believe that even

01:09:15.640 though our ability to be gritty and to survive allows us to access a number of important rule sets,

01:09:23.800 we know based on the relationship between stress and survival that those rule sets and the prefrontal

01:09:29.580 cortex, that those rule sets are constrained. So I put you into a dangerous situation where you need

01:09:34.780 to protect your family. You're going to figure it out. I trust you. I know that. I know you're going to

01:09:39.440 work it out. But I also believe that there is a state of love that is associated with access to a

01:09:49.840 much broader rule set and creative rule set. And how do I know this is because it underlies our

01:09:54.740 evolution as a species. The number of different things that you can do to access survival, if

01:09:59.840 you're taking care of your family is immense, but the number of different adaptations that you can come up

01:10:04.620 with in order to raise your children to be as happy and healthy as they can be out of love is absolutely

01:10:10.820 infinite. Why? Because it really is, there's no other option. You're not fearing death. What you're

01:10:17.100 doing is you're trying to access this landscape of you want them to be as great as they can be. You

01:10:21.880 don't know how great they can be. That's the infinite rule set. Not having constraints on what the outcome

01:10:27.940 is, is really the way to access expanded rule sets. Now this is getting a little bit circular. I have to be

01:10:32.600 careful and like check my thinking. I'm sure the philosophers out there are going to nitpick this

01:10:36.160 and I hope they would. But in discussions with Rick about creativity and in discussions with you and

01:10:41.580 other folks, it's very clear that accessing these brain centers that have full understanding of

01:10:47.620 internal state and then full understanding of past, present, and future, that is absolutely the best

01:10:55.900 state to be in, in order to access expanded rule sets and ever expanding rule sets. Whereas anytime I'm

01:11:01.340 accessing knowledge about internal state, but it's constrained by outcome, I need this not to

01:11:07.400 happen. You've already shut down a number of rule sets. And this is why I think in dreaming, we aren't

01:11:13.200 constraining our rule sets. We all wish we could, but we're not constraining our rule sets. It could be a

01:11:17.900 nightmare. It could be the best fantasy we've ever had. You can fly all these things. The rule sets are

01:11:22.800 infinite, but constrained by experience. We're not aware yet that we can dream about things in a way that

01:11:29.360 does not reflect what we've already experienced. We might be able to, we don't know enough about

01:11:33.220 sleep and dreaming yet. The idea here is that placing one's mind and body into states of,

01:11:39.840 you know, and again, I'm sounding squishy here, but love, or we could also think anything that

01:11:45.600 doesn't include a, but not that is an expanded rule set. So I'm not going to do this podcast spinning

01:11:52.160 around in my chair on my head, but the moment I decide what's appropriate and inappropriate

01:11:56.820 behavior, I've now started to constrain the rule sets. Okay. So we can go around, around this circle

01:12:00.980 as much as we want, or as little as we want. But I think that once people start to understand what

01:12:05.800 places their body and mind into the most relaxed and quote unquote open state for accessing new rule

01:12:12.340 sets, the more quickly we can solve problems. That's absolutely clear. And we know this from the

01:12:17.940 laboratory. If I give you cognitive tasks and I just ramp up your level of autonomic arousal, and

01:12:21.720 we do this in my lab, are there any number of different ways to do this? You can function up

01:12:25.580 to a point, but it's mainly dependent on how well you have performed that thing in the past.

01:12:30.240 I give you something novel. I switch the contingency. I give you a more advanced

01:12:33.680 stroke type task. Everybody cliffs. I don't care if you're a SEAL team six guy. I don't care if you run

01:12:39.680 three countries. I don't care if you've parented 12 kids on your own. Your rule sets are constrained.

01:12:46.440 And so I throw something novel at you under conditions of even mild stress and you break down.

01:12:51.320 I throw something novel at you under conditions of relaxation and you can pull from what might even

01:12:57.860 seem like ridiculous rule sets and you can start solving problems. And humans do this exceptionally

01:13:03.180 well. And so I think that the more we can narrow context, as you said, medical school or math or

01:13:09.120 parenting, whatever it is, the more that we can narrow context, even if in the moment, but the more

01:13:13.440 that we can be in a relaxed state and ideally a state of something of wanting, not avoiding,

01:13:18.620 the more rule sets we can access. And I think that's where creative solutions come from. I mean,

01:13:23.100 I have to imagine that even though he's a brilliant engineer, that Elon wasn't thinking

01:13:26.540 about going to Mars because he hated earth. He's thinking about it because he loves the idea of

01:13:30.620 going to Mars. I'm not his psychologist, but I think every major advancement in human evolution

01:13:36.580 has largely been largely from a desire for something as opposed to an avoidance of something else.

01:13:42.660 Oh, boy, I'd have to think about that. That's interesting, right? I mean, let's think,

01:13:47.540 for example, so think of some of the amazing advances in cryptography and nuclear physics

01:13:53.140 in World War II. I mean, you could argue a lot of that was fear-based, right?

01:13:57.220 I completely agree, but I would argue that the people doing that work, if you were to really sit

01:14:00.980 them down and- They just loved that they were solving a problem.

01:14:03.500 They loved it. We got Feynman all around us here and he played a prominent role in my home

01:14:08.260 and my childhood as well. I mean, the love of what he did that came through. Sure,

01:14:13.300 he was working on the bomb, but he was also enjoying picking locks and laying out all the

01:14:17.700 secrets on the floor of the offices because he loved the playfulness of it. I mean, it was love,

01:14:22.340 love, love, love, love, light. Maybe love is too much of a loaded word because it sounds like,

01:14:27.140 oh, love, Andrew's from Northern California. He's spent too much time at Esalen or whatever.

01:14:31.380 That's not actually my hangout place, even though it's beautiful. That's not really what I'm about,

01:14:35.780 but I think delight is what captures this fascination, curiosity, and thrill of something that we see

01:14:43.140 or experience and want more of. I think delight is probably the better word for it. Yeah, I'm sure

01:14:48.180 you can get a lot done out of fear and the need to adapt. You get a hell of a lot more done out of

01:14:53.220 a genuine desire because you just want more of that thing. So I would argue that cryptographers,

01:14:57.860 we're in bliss. They didn't want to get blown up and they'd love to save people,

01:15:02.020 but there can be multiple purposes behind doing something.

01:15:05.940 Let's kind of go back. There's so much that I know a little bit about you,

01:15:08.820 but I don't think I know the whole story. So you grew up in NorCal or South?

01:15:11.780 Yeah. So I was born at Stanford Hospital. The joke I have is I was born at Stanford. I hung around

01:15:16.900 skateboarding on campus in my youth. Then I was trained at Stanford in part, and then I've been

01:15:22.340 faculty member. So I'll probably die at Stanford, but hopefully a long time from now. I was born in

01:15:26.340 Palo Alto. My dad's from South America. He's Argentine, dark hair, dark eyes, speak Spanish and English.

01:15:31.540 And he came to the US on a Naval scholarship. He was an experimental physicist at UPenn,

01:15:36.820 met my mother in New York. They moved to California, had my sister, who's three years

01:15:41.780 older than I am, and me in the early and mid seventies. My dad took a job at Xerox Park,

01:15:48.500 early days of the personal computer, the so-called graphical user interface and things like that.

01:15:53.060 And my mother was a stay-at-home mom, was a teacher.

01:15:55.780 It was in Menlo Park?

01:15:56.740 It was in Palo Alto. I lived right over the fence from Gunn High School, G-U-N-N,

01:16:00.980 the high school that's infamous for having the huge number of youth suicides. Fortunately, that's

01:16:06.740 adjusted. A lot of kids have Stanford professors. It's not the Palo Alto High School on the other

01:16:11.620 end of town. So our end of town tended to be a bit more middle and upper middle class. And Palo Alto

01:16:17.140 at that time even had Midtown, which there were some families that were definitely at or below the

01:16:21.620 poverty line, believe it or not. Nowadays at Palo Alto is all pretty upper class.

01:16:25.220 Including East Palo Alto?

01:16:26.740 East Palo Alto still struggles. East Palo Alto still struggles. Great people there,

01:16:30.420 but really struggles. So growing up from birth until about age 12 or 13, it was soccer, swim team,

01:16:38.500 tons of kids on my street, hanging out. There were all these boys my age. They had all had older

01:16:42.900 sisters my sister's age, pretty magical childhood. And my dad transitioned into theoretical physics,

01:16:48.420 and he was involved in the early days of chaos theory. So we spent a lot of our youth in Aspen

01:16:53.620 in the summers, not because we were part of the wealthy Aspen set, but there's the Aspen Center

01:16:57.380 for Physics. So I grew up running around hearing about Peter Kaus and Feynman and Mary Gilman. Those

01:17:02.820 were regular characters in my life and met those folks and they were around. A lot of stories about

01:17:08.340 academics. I was kind of exposed to the academic world. Frankly, it was a pretty cool childhood. We did a

01:17:14.020 sabbatical in Europe and I got real close with my sister because of the sabbatical. I'm still really

01:17:18.740 close with my sister. She's a therapist and an excellent one. Not my therapist, but an excellent

01:17:23.220 therapist. And it was pretty like normal childhood. Wasn't a great athlete. Wasn't a great student,

01:17:27.860 but I was always super curious about biology and animals. Like absolutely obsessed. My mom used to

01:17:32.420 drop me off at Monet's Pet Shop on California Avenue for those that don't.

01:17:36.260 You still live on California Avenue.

01:17:37.300 Did you? Yeah.

01:17:38.020 Yeah. It was directly across from Draper's Music, which is where the Grateful Dead got their start.

01:17:42.500 And those guys used to hang out there because they were from Menlo Park. The Edge, there was a club,

01:17:46.580 The Edge. You wouldn't find that in Palo Alto now. So it was a pretty healthy upbringing. We didn't

01:17:51.700 have any issues around alcohol or drugs in our home. It was a two-parent home, dinner together every

01:17:56.020 night. But there were some things looming under the surface. And so everything took a hard turn.

01:18:01.060 When I was about 12, 13, my parents divorced and unfortunately they didn't read the rule book,

01:18:06.980 or if they did, they broke every rule in the rule book. And it was a very high conflict situation.

01:18:11.540 So my dad moved out. I lived with my mom. My sister went off to college. At the time I had

01:18:16.500 gotten into skateboarding. I wasn't so much playing soccer and doing other things. And I fell really

01:18:21.940 deeply into the community of skateboarding, which at that time was really underground. It wasn't like

01:18:25.780 it is now. Skateboarding is a unique sport because you have interactions with kids of a lot of different

01:18:30.260 ages. So you're hanging out with like 30 year old guys, 20 year old guys, kids, your own age.

01:18:34.500 And a good friend of mine named Paul Zwanich was really good at skateboarding. And he started

01:18:38.420 picking up sponsors and turned pro while we were in high school. And we started going up to San

01:18:42.900 Francisco and hanging out at the... And you were still in the peninsula.

01:18:45.780 Yeah. I was like 13, 14 years old at the kind of famed, what's called Embarcadero or EMB crowd.

01:18:50.740 So early for skateboarding, this is a huge deal. It's kind of the golden era of street skateboarding.

01:18:56.180 And there I got exposed to a lot. I got exposed to drugs, alcohol, fights. I got exposed to a lot

01:19:01.940 of kids that just didn't go to school, just didn't go. There were a bunch of, a lot of

01:19:05.620 untoward elements. Also a lot of amazing skateboarding, just amazing. Got to see,

01:19:10.500 I can throw out names, but the young Danny Way would come through town or Rob Dyrdek would come

01:19:14.820 through town. And you know, these names will be familiar people, maybe DC shoes, those guys involved in

01:19:19.460 that. So I got to see all this stuff. I, in full disclosure, I wasn't a very good skateboarder.

01:19:23.940 I was okay, but I kept getting hurt. I shouldn't have the athleticism. I hit puberty late. I had

01:19:29.140 a long arc on my puberty. This is something I someday want to understand, which is, I think

01:19:33.300 there's a relationship between how long puberty lasts and longevity. I think it makes sense.

01:19:38.100 I hit puberty around 14, but I didn't acquire the secondary sex characteristics. I didn't like grow.

01:19:43.140 My musculature didn't come in. My physicality didn't develop until pretty late. Didn't grow a beard

01:19:48.020 until college. It was weird, but by the other marks of puberty, let's just say I hit puberty.

01:19:52.980 Okay. So I had all this upset about my home life. It frankly, it was pretty bad. My mom was struggling

01:19:59.220 a lot. My dad was trying to be in the picture, but there was a lot of conflict between us.

01:20:03.700 In any case to make what happened was something about my behavior cued the school system. Probably

01:20:09.380 the fact that I wasn't going to school much anymore. I got taken away. I got put into a residential

01:20:15.220 treatment program up on the peninsula. This was not for drug use, alcohol use, or hurting anyone or

01:20:21.140 myself. This was mainly for truancy. And they were really concerned about me.

01:20:24.900 Did they require the permission of your parents to do that?

01:20:27.380 Yes. I remember one day just getting called into the office and they were talking to me,

01:20:31.700 asking me questions about my home life. And I pretty quickly caught on to the fact that something

01:20:36.660 was going to happen. Let's just say I did everything I could to resist getting taken away,

01:20:41.060 but they took me away and put me under lock and key there. And I remember-

01:20:44.180 What grade?

01:20:44.740 I was in the ninth grade. So I was in the ninth grade. I was really angry, really upset. Yeah,

01:20:51.380 it's interesting. I don't have a ton of emotion around it anymore. I do feel like it was a terrible

01:20:56.420 situation for me to be in because my home life was so bad at that point.

01:21:00.660 And your sister was already in college?

01:21:02.020 My sister was gone. I think the way to capture my home life at that point was there was just no

01:21:05.940 one there. There was no one there and what was there was really scary.

01:21:08.740 And what was your mom doing? Was she working at this point to make up or your dad being gone?

01:21:12.820 She took a job. She was working, but to be honest, and look, I love my mom and I love my dad,

01:21:18.660 but they just were so focused on their own stuff. I think there was so much anger and resentment

01:21:23.860 between them. And I just basically was kind of running my own life. I was doing whatever I wanted,

01:21:28.660 which is terrible for a 14 year old. Boundaries are great. Rules are great. And I had this community

01:21:33.220 of young guys that was an amazing community and learning from some of the older ones, learning some

01:21:37.460 not healthy behaviors, learning some healthy behaviors too. When I got put away, it felt to

01:21:43.060 me super unfair, but I met really the counselors there were amazing. And I also was very lucky that

01:21:49.140 drugs and alcohol were never really my thing. So a lot of kids there were dealing with drug and alcohol

01:21:53.140 issues. I remember when I got there, they said, listen, you know, there are these younger kids

01:21:57.380 here and they're crazy. They're like miswired. And then there are adults over in that other building

01:22:05.460 and they're crazy, but you guys here, you're not crazy. And I remember thinking they have to be

01:22:11.620 saying that to the other buildings. So there was this moment where I'm like, is there something

01:22:15.780 genuinely wrong with me? Like, you know, again, I didn't do anything except I was not taking good

01:22:20.900 care of myself. And did you still leave the facility each day to go to school or was school within

01:22:25.300 there? Locked up in a room. My roommate turned out to be a really good guy. He was huge guy. He

01:22:30.820 looked like Richard Ramirez, the night stalker. And I was remembering like, I can't sleep. They're

01:22:34.740 coming in, doing bed checks like three times a night. You know, they're frisking us. They're

01:22:38.820 doing cavity searches for, did we bring in weapons? Did we bring in drugs? You're doing group therapy

01:22:44.100 with all these people. Some of them are talking about terrible molestation experiences, which fortunately

01:22:49.300 I didn't have drug things. And I'm just thinking like, why am I here? Like, I had no idea why I was

01:22:55.060 there. And I remember at the time I had picked up one skateboard sponsor, which was Spitfire wheels

01:22:59.860 and Thunder trucks. They put me on out of sympathy. And the team manager, I'm actually friends with him

01:23:03.840 still. His name is Steve Ruge. He's not a pot smoker now, but back then he was, which will explain

01:23:07.840 the voice I'll use in a moment. But I remember you literally got one phone call. So I wasn't going to

01:23:12.360 call my parents. So I called Steve and I was like, Hey Steve, I'm locked up here. Like I'm in the

01:23:17.840 peninsula. I'm in Belmont. I don't know what to do. And he goes, man, he's like, you're the most

01:23:22.420 normal guy. I know I can't help you. And I thought I'm really stuck. Like I'm genuinely stuck. Like

01:23:28.720 what am I going to do? And I remember thinking, I just didn't know where to go. So what happened

01:23:33.740 was I eventually worked the program they gave me. Someone there said, listen, just like play the

01:23:37.760 game. But eventually I realized I was like, they're asking questions that I actually want the answers

01:23:40.900 to. Like what's going on in my head? Why am I just letting my whole life go? What's going on at home?

01:23:46.520 And it turns out that I'll summarize by saying what I was dealing with, I can now in retrospect,

01:23:50.220 it was a super traumatic, daily traumatic environment. If I was at home or it was just

01:23:57.320 like pure neglect. I mean, just pure neglect. I mean, I, prior to that year, I had gone off to

01:24:02.200 skate camp. There was a skate camp in Visalia and all the other kids like went there with their bags

01:24:06.240 and their parents just, and I just like went, we just like hung out. We would just get in cars and

01:24:10.420 go. We went to Reno for a week to skate in the nationals. I sucked, but I went anyway. And we're just

01:24:15.960 there a bunch of kids. We were just parentless kids. So I was part of this huge group of

01:24:19.980 parentless kids. It's just gun high school. They, there's a spotlight on me. Whereas I think had

01:24:25.020 I been in inner city school or something, you know, you probably would have gone under the radar.

01:24:29.340 And it gave me great sensitivity to the fact that like the word gets thrown around a lot. I think

01:24:33.260 these days in incorrect ways, but it's like, I was very lucky. You could even call it privilege,

01:24:37.440 but very lucky to have that there was a spotlight on me. It was high signal to noise, right? This kid's

01:24:42.620 really crazy. I also was getting into a lot of fights. So I was getting into street fights and that whole

01:24:48.400 mess. So I eventually got out and the agreement was I would switch high schools.

01:24:53.620 How long were you in this place?

01:24:54.940 A month or more, which was plenty of time, frankly, you know, you're not controlling your food,

01:24:59.140 your sleep. It's all on their plan. Good kids were there. We lost a couple of kids,

01:25:03.920 a couple of kids killed themselves while we were there. It was.

01:25:05.940 While there?

01:25:06.560 While there.

01:25:07.000 I mean, you could get stuff in, you know, there was all sorts of networks in there and it wasn't jail,

01:25:12.340 but it wasn't far off. It sucked. I don't do a lot of youth mentoring or anything,

01:25:16.340 but I always, listen, the moment that that lock goes down or you're in handcuffs,

01:25:21.000 your control over everything just goes away. It's just truly something to avoid.

01:25:25.200 So one of the agreements on getting out was I'd switch high schools and I'd start therapy.

01:25:29.960 They wanted me in a new high school.

01:25:31.400 Now you went to a great high school. Was the idea that they just needed to get you a new peer group?

01:25:36.360 Weren't so concerned with my peer group. The idea was going to be that I'd live with my dad.

01:25:40.460 And I was actually excited to do that at the time. It was something I'd requested.

01:25:44.300 So I ended up switching to Palo Alto high school, so-called Pali high, just across from Stanford

01:25:49.580 campus. At the time I had a girlfriend that went there who I met. Cause I worked at the local

01:25:55.220 skateboard shop, Palo Alto toy and sport world skateboard shop in the back. And she came in

01:25:58.580 there. We started, wait, Palo Alto toy and sport was still there when I was there.

01:26:01.560 Yeah. It just closed recently. It was one of the oldest businesses in Palo Alto.

01:26:04.500 Yeah. I worked in the skateboard shop in the back and in the shoe department.

01:26:08.180 Used to buy my goggles there.

01:26:09.820 Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of swim stuff. I have to say, you know,

01:26:12.480 one thing that I had kind of baked into me is my enthusiasm for animals. And I liked

01:26:16.320 work. I always had some jobs. I had paper routes and I worked at the skate shop and all

01:26:20.760 that kind of thing. But I moved to Palo Alto high school. I was supposed to live with my

01:26:25.040 dad and this, I have to be respectful of certain elements of privacy that, but for

01:26:31.240 certain reasons it was decided that I wouldn't live with my dad. And at that point it was just

01:26:36.740 like gasoline on fire. I was like, okay, I can't live with my mom. I can't go to the high school.

01:26:42.520 By your determination or by theirs?

01:26:44.260 It was not my decision to not live with my dad. I was like, oh my God. So now all of a sudden it's

01:26:49.900 like gasoline on fire. And of course I'm hitting puberty too. Now, meanwhile, no attention to school,

01:26:54.680 no interest in biology anymore. You know, I'm just, it's like skateboarding and like just being a

01:26:59.080 punk, but also having a lot of fun and loving my friends. And my girlfriend at the time was really

01:27:04.540 sweet. So I ended up going to Palo Alto high for about three weeks and then just stopped going.

01:27:11.000 It was like, everything was just getting worse, worse, worse. Now the thing that really saved me

01:27:15.080 was this therapy thing. So I was placed into therapy. I had to go once or twice a week. I don't

01:27:20.020 recall, but that therapist who was trained in mostly psychoanalysis, but in some other dimensions too,

01:27:26.860 it was like the first person that, that really like paid attention. I was like, oh shit.

01:27:32.480 And it's interesting. Cause I do have the emotion. I do have to choke back a little bit here because

01:27:35.980 my parents love me. I love them, but it's a crazy thing to have somebody say, listen,

01:27:41.020 like to give you the confidence, like we're going to figure this out. There's something very powerful

01:27:44.800 about that. It wasn't like, you know, everything will be okay. It was like, we're going to figure this

01:27:49.020 out. And that to me was like an amazing dialogue to be in. So it was like, okay, let's parse your

01:27:55.200 situation, but even more so, let's just focus on what you want to do, what you want to create,

01:27:59.240 what's important to you. So I started working with this person and I'm not shy to say I've

01:28:05.600 continued to work with that person one to three times a week until now. And so you think about

01:28:11.020 sort of mentors and a very lucky 30 years later, this is more than 30 years later. So more than

01:28:16.560 three years later. And I confess at times I had to request some budget help to do this. When I was a

01:28:20.960 graduate student, it was really hard to do. I eventually had insurance that helped. I'm in a

01:28:25.720 position to still do it, but to just be able to understand my own thinking, to be able to separate

01:28:30.360 what was happening around me from what I wanted for myself. And look, I had a number of huge mistakes

01:28:37.620 along the way. It did not allow me to avoid stakes. And, you know, I eventually, what happened was I

01:28:42.420 got a different girlfriend. I stopped skateboarding. I got hurt really badly. And I started getting

01:28:47.640 involved in fitness. There was a football coach at our school, Bob Peterson.

01:28:51.240 And were you now still back at Palo Alto?

01:28:52.460 I went back to gun. There was an agreement and it was interesting. My hair used to be dyed black.

01:28:56.820 Then my hair grew out natural. I started wearing not skateboard clothes. I sort of decided to just

01:29:02.120 kind of be a little less outrageous, but I started Thai boxing, which was great. Got involved in

01:29:07.860 martial arts a little bit. Wasn't very good at it, but it was okay. Started lifting weights. My body

01:29:12.220 reacted like crazy to that. I wasn't on any hormone support. It was just the youth thing. I just kind of

01:29:17.340 responded really well to that. I started running. I ran cross country. Started getting really into

01:29:21.820 running and lifting weights. And I still wasn't very focused on school, but I was doing a little

01:29:26.480 bit better. And the girlfriend at the time was a year older and she had a really good work ethic.

01:29:33.220 And I started, I would run to her house on Sundays and wash her car. I just started doing a lot of

01:29:38.260 physical labor and I figured I'd go into the fire service. I could do that. And I started taking fire

01:29:42.300 science classes at Mission College. Loved the guys there. It was like workouts.

01:29:45.980 This is while you were still in high school. I was still in high school.

01:29:48.540 And I will say that at that young age, I made the mistake of, I started dabbling in some drugs.

01:29:53.800 No hard drugs, but psychedelics, which I think psychedelics have their place in the therapeutic

01:29:57.660 context when people are older. But while the brain is still developing, I don't think it's a good idea.

01:30:03.800 So I started doing that. I don't know how much to disclose or not out of respect for other people,

01:30:08.340 but I had a girlfriend early. There was a pregnancy. There was a number of things where my life still

01:30:13.920 wasn't bolted down and that was causing problems for me, but she was very loving and was great.

01:30:20.180 And what happened was she went off to college. She went to UC Santa Barbara. And so my senior year,

01:30:26.580 I was going down to visit her. She was already there and sleeping in the parking lot outside her dorm and

01:30:31.580 hanging out with people there. And so she was like my family. I basically mapped everything onto her.

01:30:36.120 And eventually what happened was I applied to Santa Barbara because I'll be damned if she was

01:30:41.280 going to be far away from me. And somehow I do not know how I got in. I think I barely broke a

01:30:48.100 thousand on the SAT, but I don't remember studying. And let's just say the night before I was not

01:30:53.380 putting myself in the most focused preparatory state. Somehow broke a thousand.

01:30:58.160 You didn't do the optimized sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress routine to take the test?

01:31:03.680 No. And if I reveal what I did to take the test, I think it might send the wrong message.

01:31:07.820 So I won't. But I got into UC Santa Barbara and I went there to be with her. And let's just say

01:31:14.440 two quarters into it, I had more fights than I did time in class. And by the end of the year,

01:31:21.840 I was basically flunking out. Why do you think that was?

01:31:25.480 I think I was just had so much fire and so much anger. It's interesting. I've never been angry at

01:31:31.160 people. I wasn't angry at anyone in particular. I just had so much fire inside.

01:31:36.300 I mean, at the risk of stating the obvious, I mean, it sounds like you were very angry at your

01:31:39.280 parents and you had good reason to be. Yeah. I was very angry with them.

01:31:42.560 And I assume your therapist came to a similar conclusion and helped you see that.

01:31:47.620 What were you able to do to try to reconcile or come to peace with that anger at your parents

01:31:53.240 throughout the three or four years in high school where you were presumably getting back

01:31:58.340 enough on track to at least be in a position to apply to college?

01:32:01.880 Yeah. And credit to my high school girlfriend, because basically there was no organization in

01:32:06.840 my life except the organization that I wanted her to see I was capable of.

01:32:11.340 And her parents must have loved you.

01:32:12.640 They hated me.

01:32:13.600 Oh, really?

01:32:14.340 They hated me.

01:32:14.620 So they tolerated.

01:32:15.680 With her dad.

01:32:16.420 It's not like you were an adopted son to them.

01:32:17.800 Her dad recorded our conversation. He was like, this guy's a punk. Why are you with him?

01:32:22.400 I mean, he was completely right. So these people know who they are. He was completely right.

01:32:25.980 He recorded our conversations. He was like, this guy's complete disaster. She had a tough

01:32:30.940 home life, really tough home life. And so I moved in and kind of a protective role too.

01:32:35.820 But, you know, she was a hard worker and her dad was an extremely hard worker. And so I had a lot

01:32:41.080 to prove. And I also was learning that, you know, especially with running and lifting weights and

01:32:44.740 the stuff in the fire service, there was a direct relationship between input and output.

01:32:48.400 Whereas in skateboarding, I always felt like it was like 10 units of input and I'd just get hurt.

01:32:52.440 I just wasn't a natural athlete for it. So there was some work done with my parents where you do

01:32:58.180 these one-on-one things in the therapist's office and I would express my anger or whatever it was.

01:33:03.180 But I don't actually remember being so furious as much as just feeling like

01:33:08.940 you people don't know what you're doing. Like you have no idea what you're doing. It was clear,

01:33:14.740 like they just didn't get it. And now-

01:33:17.080 Can we tell a funny story about every time we have a meal, I learn something about you that is

01:33:22.260 so remarkable. I can't believe it. And I think my favorite of the week is you're at some

01:33:29.220 skateboarding thing and there's no one there to take you home. You end up getting a ride home with

01:33:35.900 Tony Hawk's dad. They fly you home.

01:33:38.200 Yeah. So this is wild.

01:33:39.500 They bring you back home to San Diego.

01:33:41.120 I'm 14 years old. I go to the Linda Vista Boys Club. I compete in this skateboarding contest. I do

01:33:45.600 terribly. And then everyone heads off in their cars and like off to their places or with their

01:33:50.080 girlfriends or their parents. And I'm just there.

01:33:52.560 Yeah, you're just twiddling your thumbs.

01:33:53.940 With this kid, Billy Waldman, who people refer to him as the demon child. And Frank Hawk, who's

01:33:59.340 Tony Hawk's dad, who ran the National Skateboard Association, comes up to me. He's like, where are

01:34:03.240 you going? I was like, well, I'm from Northern California. I was going to take the bus to Lancaster.

01:34:06.840 There's this guy that I know in Lancaster. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. He's like,

01:34:10.080 you're coming with me. So he and his wife, Nancy Hawk, took me to their home. Tony had moved out.

01:34:15.280 I slept in Tony's room that night. To say it was filled with trophies is an understatement.

01:34:20.340 There's no space for anything except the bed because there are so many trophies. So like,

01:34:26.040 this is cool. I'm in Tony Hawk's room. We went to dinner and-

01:34:29.020 That would be like me somehow winding my way into Ayrton Senna's room after he's-

01:34:34.280 It's ridiculous.

01:34:34.860 It's ridiculous. And so they eventually flew me home. I think Frank talked to my mom and was like,

01:34:40.340 hey, listen, this kid needs some guardrails. Because skateboarding has a lot of truants and a lot

01:34:44.660 of wildness, but, and always did. It's part of its appeal to many, you know, no parents. You don't

01:34:49.780 need parents around a skateboard. You don't need your pre-workout drinking and slurpy, you know,

01:34:54.180 like you, you know, it was still like, or beer, right? I mean, it was beer and cigarettes. I mean,

01:34:58.960 you know, the 16 year old me or 15 year old me on skateboard, like a pack of cigarettes.

01:35:02.700 So that was me then. I don't recommend that. So what ended up happening was the next day he took me to

01:35:08.040 Tony's house in Fallbrook, got to meet Tony and Ray Underhill and a bunch of other guys and see the

01:35:12.980 ramps and pump around on the ramps a little bit and then flew home. And that was an amazing

01:35:16.680 experience. And then years later on Instagram, I sent a direct message to Tony and said, hey,

01:35:22.500 listen, I know you get a ton of messages, but your dad really took me in and his mom had passed away

01:35:26.800 recently. And I said, I'm really sorry. My condolences. I said, and if you don't believe

01:35:30.720 that my story is true, how's this? Your parents used to drink black coffee after dinner. And he wrote

01:35:36.440 back. I was like, no way, like nobody would know that. Right. But I remember thinking it's 830 at night.

01:35:40.660 We just finished dinner and they ordered black coffee in the restaurant. So that was pretty

01:35:44.860 cool. And yeah, a number of people swooped in and tried to help me along the way. I mean,

01:35:48.880 I also had amazing experiences skateboarding. It'd be a 14 year old kid at the Reno nationals,

01:35:53.060 running around the casinos with your friends and seeing these amazing skateboarding. And yeah,

01:35:57.400 you're also seeing like rampant amounts of drug use and rampant amounts of like odd types of,

01:36:02.620 let's just call it, wasn't traditional dating and relationships for high school students.

01:36:05.760 And you're like, this was the early mid nineties, early nineties. And it was fun to be free and wild,

01:36:12.560 but I felt like I was always the guy at the end because I wasn't very good at skateboarding.

01:36:16.460 I didn't have a home and I didn't have any structure. I was the guy that didn't know where

01:36:20.020 to go. It was like, I didn't know where to go. And to this day, even if I get a metascientific

01:36:24.340 meeting and everyone clears out at the end, I get totally depressed. I'm like, I feel like I've got

01:36:28.620 nowhere to go. I've owned homes. I had a dog. And there were times when I was like, wow,

01:36:32.500 like knock on the walls, like there's really something here. So yeah, I was angry with my

01:36:36.980 parents. And I think I was also just kind of like flabbergasted. Like, you know, now having spent

01:36:43.120 time with kids and friends who have kids, 14 is pretty young. And I was involved in all sorts of

01:36:48.160 things at 14 that I would never subject a 14 year old ever. Like you want to preserve that innocence of

01:36:54.100 youth as much as possible. And same time, I mean, it forced me to grow up, you know? So I think

01:36:59.460 the fighting and I think the hard work and the fact that I thought about making a living really

01:37:04.080 early on and all of that, feeling like I had to grow up quickly.

01:37:07.360 So you're in your first semester at UCSB and you're getting into fights with townies,

01:37:12.320 with college kids, people. I was never somebody who provoked fights or initiated them, but I was

01:37:17.500 just, somehow it was just finding me. And I was not a big drinker, but that town, there's a lot of

01:37:22.000 alcohol intake. So what happened was that summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college,

01:37:27.200 there was a house that everyone hung out at. And I decided to stay there for the summer.

01:37:32.140 Wouldn't go home. What would I do at home? The girlfriend and I had split up. We were kind of

01:37:36.940 having our issues. I was living in the town of Isla Vista with my pet ferret and I was squatting

01:37:41.920 in a house. I was like, why would I pay? Like skateboarding, you learn how to just kind of squat

01:37:45.200 in places. Like, so delivering bagels for the bagel cafe. And we show up at a friend's house and a bunch

01:37:52.800 of guys were stealing some stuff from the house. It was clear they were loading up their cars.

01:37:56.580 So got into this fight with a bunch of guys and the people I had shown up there with all scramble.

01:38:02.660 They all just took off. And so this fight started getting ratcheted up into weapons and like people

01:38:08.040 hitting each other with skateboards and like, so knives coming out and the whole thing, police show

01:38:11.980 up. In the end, I was let go because we were quote unquote protecting our property. And I actually,

01:38:19.780 I remember one of the police officers congratulated me. He was like, good job or something. I just

01:38:23.520 remember feeling like this picture sucks. Like here I am. I'm nine, now I'm now 19 years old.

01:38:29.820 No future in skateboarding, barely went to class, getting in fights. I'd been thrown out of the

01:38:35.340 dormitory for something stupid related to that. My girlfriend and I are split up. I work at the

01:38:41.420 bagel cafe. I was like, this is it. And why at this point did you think about, hey, I still have this

01:38:46.200 whole thing as being a firefighter potentially. Was that? I think at that point I was just like,

01:38:50.720 I don't really know what to do. I just remember walking back to the place where I was staying

01:38:54.420 and just thinking like, I'm a total screw up. Like I'm officially a screw up now. I don't care

01:38:59.180 where I was born. I don't care what my parents did. I'm officially a screw up. Nothing else mattered.

01:39:03.840 And I actually wrote a letter. I still have the letter. I wrote a letter. It was a summer of 94

01:39:09.160 to my mom saying all the things that I kind of felt about the past and what I'm going to do going

01:39:16.280 forward. And at that point, I really did make a hard left turn. I moved home. I took a leave of

01:39:20.980 absence. I didn't quit UC Santa Barbara. I took a leave of absence, moved home, went to Foothill

01:39:25.960 College. My sister was home from abroad after college. We lived at our house. Our mom was there

01:39:31.500 and this other girl we rented a room to, but I went to Foothill College and just I'd listen to myself.

01:39:36.900 I'd say the one thing I know how to do is memorize information. So I just started focusing

01:39:41.880 on coursework and working out. And from that point on, except for one course in college,

01:39:48.360 I was a straight A student the whole way through. So what happened was after a quarter there and a

01:39:52.740 summer, I went back to Santa Barbara. I lived in a studio apartment by myself. I got back together

01:39:58.300 with a girlfriend. And how did you fund this? Did you just take out loans to do all this?

01:40:01.940 My education was supported in part. There was some money that, and here I was very blessed. My dad,

01:40:06.120 my dad obviously helped. Not obviously, but my dad helped. That was great. I remember I didn't want

01:40:10.840 to go back to Santa Barbara. I wanted to go to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. I want

01:40:14.520 to be a journalist or do something related to writing. He said, no way. I'm not going to pay for

01:40:18.960 this. I'm like, sorry to people when they're Whitman. He was like, no way, no fluff education,

01:40:23.160 like liberal arts school. You're going to go back there where there's some sciences,

01:40:25.840 do something. Anyway, that was my house. And I went back and I just was a machine. It was like

01:40:33.440 Henry Rollins style, just like work out. I listened to Rancid, listened to Bob Dylan,

01:40:39.080 listened to classical music on loop, drank coffee, worked out, ran, studied, worked out, ran. And my

01:40:44.940 goal was to be on the far end of the curve. They used to publish the curve for every class outside.

01:40:50.000 And I just became a straight A student. Now the twist in this is eventually I started working in

01:40:55.240 a laboratory, took a class from a guy named Harry Carlyle, who was teaching about mental health and

01:41:00.260 neuroscience and physiology, brown fat. He had worked a lot in brown fat thermogenesis. I started

01:41:04.800 working in his laboratory on brown adipose tissues and dopamine antagonists and clozapine

01:41:10.500 neuroleptics and effects on temperature. I was obsessed with physiology and temperature. Meanwhile,

01:41:14.640 I was getting really interested in fitness and supplementation. And I tried to run cross

01:41:20.280 country for Santa Barbara, but you had to run a sub 10, two mile. That was way too fast.

01:41:24.840 Wait, a sub 10?

01:41:25.860 Two mile.

01:41:26.700 Oh, two mile.

01:41:27.220 That's to walk on. And there's no way I was. These guys were built like whippets. I'm six one. I was at

01:41:31.880 that point, I was about 185, 200 pounds. I was no way I was going to do it. So I was really into

01:41:37.020 fitness still. And I was studying.

01:41:38.260 How fast do you run two miles today?

01:41:39.320 I don't know, but my fastest mile ever was in high school. I ran a 457 first mile in a three mile

01:41:44.200 race and then bonked and had to walk off the race. So basically I failed the race, but that's what

01:41:49.920 adrenaline, it was pure adrenaline. It wasn't training capacity. So now I'm not that fast a runner. I've run a

01:41:55.140 couple of miles. I do a two mile run once a week and I'd be happy with a 12 to 13 minute time.

01:42:00.500 I'd be very happy with that. In fact. So, you know, I started getting really into working in

01:42:05.240 Harry's lab and he was great. My kind of guy, he smoked cigarettes in the lab. He'd light them

01:42:10.220 with the Bunsen burner and smoke in the fume hood. We drink coffee. We were injecting rats with MDMA.

01:42:15.700 We were studying the temperature regulating effects of MDMA and we were studying amphetamines. And I was

01:42:21.620 learning so much neuroscience and I was like a kid in a candy shop. I was like, this is amazing. Now

01:42:27.040 there wasn't any neuroscience at that time. It was called neurochemistry or neurobiology. And I was

01:42:31.540 taking psychology classes also. And they had, the degree was called biopsychology. Now I was a little

01:42:36.360 late to the train. So I was taking biopsychology courses and psychology courses. And then I met a guy

01:42:40.900 named Ben Reese, who is expert in visual system and visual system development. And I started learning

01:42:46.720 about all these retinal specializations. Then I learned there was a guy on campus named Gerald Jacobs,

01:42:50.280 who discovered the evolution of vision and color vision. He's a member of the national academy. I

01:42:54.060 started hanging out with all of these guys. And so my crowd completely changed to a bunch of

01:42:58.300 neuroscience dorks who were to me, the coolest guys in the world. And in many ways still are.

01:43:03.900 I have immense respect for Ben and for Gerald and all those guys and Harry. And so it was just

01:43:08.960 incredible. And I thought, wow. And I'm learning about all this mental health stuff that I saw when I

01:43:13.280 was locked up, that I saw in my friendship circle, in my family, people who were of anxiety,

01:43:17.840 there was schizophrenia. It's neurotransmitters. It's dopamine. It's norepinephrine. It's not just

01:43:23.660 Freudian theory, even though I respect Freudian theory. So I became a monster of school. And then

01:43:31.360 the girlfriend graduated and we decided to part ways. Wait, the same one?

01:43:35.740 Same one.

01:43:35.980 Did you guys get back together?

01:43:36.920 We managed to make it about two more years. And then for better or for worse. Now looking back,

01:43:41.760 I'd think like, okay, could have it worked out? Maybe, maybe not. It's one of those you don't know.

01:43:45.760 But I was on a mission basically to go to graduate school. And so it would take us five hours to go

01:43:51.020 through all this. But at this point, it was like no drinking, no drugs. Once a month, I would go out

01:43:56.000 and really tie one on with friends, really have a blast slash drinking too much, not a good idea,

01:44:03.400 period. But at the time, that was still in my framework of what I could do. But then over time,

01:44:08.160 I was like, I don't want to do this.

01:44:09.640 Now you're still with some regularity talking on the phone to this therapist.

01:44:13.460 Every week.

01:44:14.540 And I want to kind of go back to this pivotal moment, but was it that fight that you had

01:44:19.000 where the cops came? It sounds like a very orthogonal moment.

01:44:23.060 100%. It was really like, I'm going to end up dead or in jail, either because somebody kills me or

01:44:28.320 I'm going to, you know, I'm not proud of this, but okay. When I say like knives came out, it didn't

01:44:32.100 mean they were pulled on me. It was, everyone was involved in this. And I'm like, listen, I don't

01:44:36.340 want to hurt anyone. So sooner or later, I was going to end up killing somebody or getting killed

01:44:40.980 or in jail. And I'd been locked up once before. That's an experience I do not want again.

01:44:45.980 And I realized this is terrible. I'm not doing anything well. So that was the moment. And I

01:44:52.200 had the benefit of, at the time I was paying Mike Menser.

01:44:55.500 The bodybuilder.

01:44:56.140 I paid him a hundred dollars to coach me and give me a program. And he kind of took a liking to me.

01:45:01.040 So we'd have phone calls every once in a while where he was having me read a bunch.

01:45:03.800 How did you connect with Mike Menser?

01:45:05.040 I paid him. I read about a thing and he was like, this high intensity training is way better

01:45:08.640 and everything else. I saw it in the magazines. I stopped doing the high volume work. I started

01:45:12.840 doing two sets per muscle group each week and just grew like a weed. And I was like, this guy's

01:45:17.980 onto something. Now granted anything probably would have had me grow like a weed at that point,

01:45:22.820 but that worked particularly well. And then he was sending me books and ran books.

01:45:27.660 Is Mike still alive?

01:45:28.580 No, he's dead. He and his brother both died of heart attacks. I think they were pretty heavy

01:45:31.860 amphetamine users, but I remember him telling me he's kind of the OG for that training format,

01:45:38.800 right? And Dorian Yates worked under him. And I heard he was a pretty outrageous guy and he used

01:45:42.820 to bark at me over the phone and he was like, PhD stands for piled high and deep. But then he'd say,

01:45:48.760 listen, you seem really interested in ideas. Don't be a more, he said this,

01:45:52.100 these are Mike's words, not mine. He said, don't be a moron. Don't be a bodybuilder. Don't touch

01:45:55.820 steroids, which I didn't, even though they were around a lot in gyms at that point. He's like,

01:46:00.820 you have a mind, develop your mind. And that had a huge impact on me. Him, Bob Peters,

01:46:06.500 my high school football coach who taught me about weight training and running. Gary Hall,

01:46:10.900 who's actually my lab operations manager, was a guy that I grew up with skateboarding,

01:46:14.580 who told me early on when I was 14, he sat me down, looked me in the eye. He's a pretty tough love

01:46:19.140 kind of guy. And he's like, look, your parents are really messed up. And so many of the people

01:46:23.320 we know in skateboarding are super messed up. And he's like, if you mess up, I'm going to kick your

01:46:27.860 ass. And then in the end, he moved away to Milpitas and I kind of just drifted off.

01:46:32.800 But I remember that thinking, he said, it's not your fault, but if you screw up,

01:46:36.780 I'll come after you. It's your fault. We still laugh about that now. So, you know, I think in those

01:46:42.160 years I started just realizing like discipline is the answer. I'm sounding very Jocko-ish now,

01:46:46.200 but it was, it was the answer. I needed structure and the structure had to be self-imposed.

01:46:50.820 So I got really into school. And then by the time I graduated, you know, I graduated with honors.

01:46:56.320 I had published a paper, wasn't a magnificent paper, but the data are solid. And I got into

01:47:00.920 Berkeley and Princeton for graduate school. And I decided to go to UC Berkeley and I went to Berkeley.

01:47:06.960 I loved my time there, but the person I wanted to work with is Carla Schatz, who's now back at

01:47:12.180 Stanford, amazing developmental neurobiologist. She developed the phrase fire together.

01:47:15.900 They're wired together, brilliant neurobiologist. I was hanging around her lab and she moved to

01:47:19.560 Harvard. So what I decided to do is move up to UC Davis, where she suggested working with a younger

01:47:24.640 faculty member there named Barbara Chapman, who's my PhD advisor. Once I was in Barbara's lab,

01:47:30.960 I literally ended the relationship that I was in at that time. I'd met someone in Berkeley,

01:47:35.400 wonderful person, but I ended that relationship so that I could just focus on school. And I literally

01:47:41.440 lived in the laboratory. I'd bring my groceries. I'd train at the gym. I'd sometimes shower in the

01:47:46.080 monkey cage washer with the heat turned down. And I was just a machine. I was just work, work,

01:47:50.660 work, work, work, work. We published a bunch of papers. I would just blast rancid, Bob Dylan,

01:47:55.060 classical music, tinfoil on the windows. I was just obsessed. Now, granted, I wasn't paying much

01:48:00.360 attention to my emotional and personal development, but in terms of loving science and just focusing on

01:48:06.680 science. I mean, I still, I'm not choking up. I'm like, I literally feel my body like almost float.

01:48:11.900 I loved it so much. And I adored Barbara. I absolutely adored Barbara. So then some things

01:48:17.520 started happening along the way. I met Ben Barris, first transgendered member of the National

01:48:21.900 Academy. You met as Ben or as Barbara? Ben came to Davis to give a talk. He came into my lab and we

01:48:27.800 started talking. This is what year? This is 2002. I was supposed to deliver him to a seminar or 2001.

01:48:33.440 And we ended up being an hour late for his own seminar because he and I were just riffing on

01:48:38.580 science. I was like, this guy is the best. He's got this energy. I've always been pretty tuned into

01:48:43.460 people's kind of enthusiasm and excitement. I feel like I can spot bullshit pretty quick.

01:48:48.280 Bullshit meaning I've never been drawn to people who are purely ambitious. Ambition to me is kind of

01:48:53.760 like, it's an algorithm that works. Sure. But when somebody is in love with what they do,

01:49:00.060 and that was why I love skateboarding. You don't survive long in that community. It's a harsh

01:49:03.820 community. You don't survive long unless you love it. And the same thing with science. Like I was in

01:49:08.480 love with retinal biology and love with developmental neurobiology. And I saw Ben's love of glia. I could

01:49:13.580 care less about glia. Sorry, folks. They're interesting, but he loved glia. And so I think we resonated on

01:49:19.920 this passion. He happened to be transgendered. I didn't even know he was transgendered, but we became

01:49:25.740 friends. And then at some point I started going down to Palo Alto to teach his lab some techniques.

01:49:31.760 And he said at one point, you should just do a postdoc in my lab.

01:49:34.420 Did you know you wanted to do a postdoc for sure?

01:49:36.160 I knew I wanted to do a postdoc. I decided in undergraduate, I want to run a lab.

01:49:41.300 I want to teach students. I want to be a researcher. I'm going to do it ethically and I'm going to do it

01:49:47.700 honestly, but I'm going to do everything I can in my power to make sure that happens. And I looked up to

01:49:51.900 Harry Carlisle so much. He drove a black truck, smoked cigarettes. Again, don't smoke. It's bad. I don't

01:49:56.900 smoke anymore. But he drank coffee. I loved him. His wife was a therapist. She actually ran the psychology

01:50:02.600 center at UC Santa Barbara. I was like, I adore them. I want to be that. That's what I'm going to be.

01:50:07.700 And the fact that my dad was a professor kind of fell into that. Now, over the years, I was still in touch

01:50:13.740 with my parents. I think they were proud of my shift. Still had a lot of issues to work out with them.

01:50:18.360 My mom, less so. My dad and I, I would say we finally buried the hatchet in 2007. So what happened

01:50:28.560 was I graduated from UC Davis, took my PhD, took a postdoc actually at Harvard, but I didn't want to

01:50:35.140 work for the guy. I want to just come clean. I didn't actually start, but I was just sitting in

01:50:40.000 on lab meetings and the personality traits of this individual to me were repulsive.

01:50:45.560 Give me an example.

01:50:46.200 It was one observation. It was the way he treated a janitor with a stutter. And I've never been an

01:50:53.620 aggressor. I've never started a fight in my life. But I think from a time I was in, even my mom will

01:50:58.860 say nursery school, I've been kind of an advocate and protector of others. And I can still feel my

01:51:04.020 blood starts to boil if I think about that interaction. It was a later after work interaction

01:51:07.700 in the way that he communicated to somebody. And I was like, I don't think I can be here.

01:51:12.000 I don't think I can do this. Like, there's no way I can be here. This is not going to work.

01:51:16.440 So I'm sure this is a good person at some level, but I just remember thinking like,

01:51:21.040 oh no, like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?

01:51:24.040 So you've literally moved to Boston.

01:51:25.660 Moved to Boston.

01:51:26.340 You've committed to do a postdoc in this guy's lab.

01:51:27.720 Yeah. Broke up with my girlfriend on the West Coast. I had a girlfriend at the end of graduate

01:51:31.140 school. I purposely didn't date in graduate school. My conversation with people was,

01:51:34.900 listen, I'm focused on work. But I had a girlfriend at the end of graduate school who was great,

01:51:38.400 but broke up with her. Moved to the East Coast because we weren't going to continue into family

01:51:43.040 making and that sort of thing. And I'm there and I observed some things and I just realized

01:51:48.260 I cannot work for this person. So you're a couple of weeks into this thing?

01:51:51.660 I had not started yet. I was supposed to start January 1. This was November of 2005.

01:51:57.180 So you tell him I'm leaving.

01:51:58.440 2004. So I told him I was leaving.

01:52:00.800 Did you tell him why?

01:52:01.700 Well, I couldn't be direct. At that time, I didn't have the skills to be direct about that. I told him I

01:52:05.880 want to leave. And he said, no. He said, you need to get therapy first. I'm like, well,

01:52:09.680 I got loads of that under my belt. So that's not going to work. I'll just say there were certain

01:52:13.020 things in the interaction around my deciding to leave that made it absolutely-

01:52:16.660 Reinforced your decision.

01:52:17.300 I was just like, this is not going to work. So I called Ben Barris because I turned him down

01:52:22.340 for a postdoc. And I said, I don't know what to do. And he said-

01:52:24.320 And did you turn Ben down because he was working on glial cells?

01:52:27.280 No. Simple reason, he was in Palo Alto.

01:52:29.500 And you just needed to get away from the nest.

01:52:30.900 I did not want to be where I grew up. Listen, Palo Alto is a lovely place. Stanford's an amazing

01:52:34.500 place. But I had so much developmental history there. And I was like, that is the last place

01:52:38.820 on earth I want to be. But then Ben, in his love of biology, I remember I met with him

01:52:43.820 right before the holidays. And he just said, come to my lab. You can work on anything you want.

01:52:48.400 Ben was famous for working on glia. But when Ben was a graduate student in David Corey's lab at

01:52:52.480 Harvard, David Corey worked on hair cells, hearing stuff. And he allowed one person, Ben,

01:52:57.420 to do something different. And he said, but you have to pay it forward someday. So Ben was like,

01:53:01.760 I'm going to pay it forward through you. You can come to my lab. You can work on anything you

01:53:04.380 want. And I said, well, I want to work on this stuff that is related to what I was going to do

01:53:09.080 at Harvard, but I don't want to compete with that lab. They're a big monster lab. And Ben was like,

01:53:13.340 no, you have to work on that. And I was like, God, I don't want to work on that. He's like,

01:53:17.160 you have to. Like Ben was a real fighter. He was from Jersey. And he was just like, you know,

01:53:21.320 my mom is from Jersey. And I kind of have that in one side of my family. It was like fight,

01:53:25.040 you know? So I decided to work. There were three labs. So it would be me alone as a postdoc,

01:53:31.440 this guy at Harvard and a guy over in Basel, Botonoroska, who's doing amazing work. And we're

01:53:37.180 all trying to figure out genetic markers for retinal cells. At the time that was a big deal

01:53:41.520 and there was a big hunt for them. And my feeling was there's plenty to go around there. God knows

01:53:45.980 how many retinal cells, 40 ganglion cells, which are the output cells of the retina that connect to

01:53:50.780 the brain. There's so much territory. Why don't we all just work on this? So let's just say I ended up

01:53:57.220 getting my slice and this guy at Harvard got his slice. He had a lot more people. So he got a

01:54:03.000 bigger slice and Boton's done that and so much more for visual repair. He and Carl Diceroth,

01:54:08.460 who we both know, of course, have figured out ways to get blind people to see, putting light

01:54:12.980 sensitive options into the eye and et cetera. So, you know, I'm one postdoc, but it worked out well.

01:54:18.180 I mean, my career worked out well as a PhD student and as a postdoc. And then I eventually got a job

01:54:24.580 at UC San Diego, which is a great neuroscience program.

01:54:27.740 Before we leave that, give folks a bit of a sense of the difference between a PhD and a postdoc.

01:54:32.140 Yeah. So during your PhD, you're working closely under the mentorship of one person. That's also

01:54:36.680 true in the postdoc. During the PhD, the requirements are learn the basics of the field and be tested on

01:54:42.380 them in the classroom. Learn the basics of experimentation and experimental design, and then

01:54:47.420 become expert in one specific area by doing experiments. And then you get your PhD, I always say,

01:54:54.020 by being expert in one very specific area. And you have to know everything about what you did

01:54:58.180 and why, literally down to like what specific antibody you used and where it is in the refrigerator.

01:55:04.480 And you need to be able to do everything essentially that's on your papers. Learn the

01:55:08.300 publication process, learn how to write, learn to take rejection, learn to take challenge in the

01:55:12.440 seminar format, all of that. And let's just also talk about what is an expectation in a PhD as far

01:55:18.520 as publication? So this varies. I mean,

01:55:21.160 I did very well as a PhD student. We published four to six first author papers in great journals.

01:55:26.380 One to two would be sufficient if they're good quality papers. And some projects go better than

01:55:31.520 others. I think the key requirement of the PhD is to become a true expert in one area and then

01:55:37.500 to be able to frame how that fits into the context of the field as a whole.

01:55:41.580 Your PhD thesis is given not for saying, I did this, I did this, I did this, which any technician

01:55:45.820 could do. It's given to you for saying, I did this, I did this, I did this. And the implications

01:55:50.660 are blank. The implications are blank. And to extend that into the discoveries of past and

01:55:57.340 other laboratories. Once you can do that with some degree of mastery, you're ready to go.

01:56:02.600 And typically that correlates with having one first author manuscript in a good journal,

01:56:06.920 but not always. Sometimes it's two, sometimes it's four. I did my PhD in four years,

01:56:12.160 which was pretty quick.

01:56:13.240 And half of that was in the classroom. Half of that was in the lab.

01:56:15.880 Yeah. Typically you're taking courses only the first two years. Now also there's some

01:56:19.560 waiting here based on peer group. So for instance, I started my PhD when I was 25. I ended it when I

01:56:25.960 was 30. It took me about four years. I had no children. I was dating, but I wasn't in a committed

01:56:31.020 relationship for most of it. And I literally, I know people talk about this. I literally worked

01:56:36.220 12 to 16 hours a day and I was not in the best health. I lived on Pete's black coffee,

01:56:42.220 diet Mountain Dew, cucumbers, ground beef, oatmeal, oranges, and love of what I was doing.

01:56:49.040 I just was in creatine and athletic greens. Like it's true. I started taking athletic greens a long

01:56:53.700 time ago. Oh no, that was 2005. So 2012, that was as a postdoc was when I started actually taking

01:56:58.380 better care of myself. That wasn't athletic greens plug, but I always say I'd start taking in 2012.

01:57:02.360 So that was 2000 to 2004. And I was into vitamins and things like that, but it was just

01:57:07.920 caffeine drive, basic macronutrients. I worked out one day a week in the gym and I ran one day a week.

01:57:14.940 That's it?

01:57:15.440 That's it. And it wasn't good. I was young, so my body didn't fall apart, but it wasn't good.

01:57:21.120 And I prioritized everything around work.

01:57:24.440 What was the title of your dissertation?

01:57:26.060 It was a neural activity and axon guidance Q dependent development of eye specific segregation

01:57:31.940 in the lateral geniculate nucleus, which is basically saying there are molecules and there

01:57:36.140 are patterns of neural activity that govern brain wiring. At the time I was working in ferrets and

01:57:41.600 cats. So carnivore species, there wasn't a lot of, I wanted to move away from that. I've always been

01:57:45.980 an animal lover. I had a pet ferret. I didn't want to work on large animals. I've done some non-human

01:57:50.300 primate work. The fetal primates, fetal macaques published a lot there.

01:57:54.440 How big is an adult macaque? They're still pretty small, aren't they?

01:57:57.520 An adult macaque? No, an adult male macaque can be a couple of feet tall.

01:58:01.240 Really?

01:58:01.800 Oh, they'll rip a limb off of you if you let them carry.

01:58:03.780 I didn't realize they were that big.

01:58:05.060 They carry herpes B, which can kill you. There's a famous case in Atlanta,

01:58:08.280 one splashing its pee into a woman's eye. She wasn't wearing the face shield. She was dead like

01:58:11.940 two weeks later.

01:58:12.920 Oh my God.

01:58:13.500 Yeah. You'd be better off having HIV or AIDS.

01:58:15.920 Oh, for sure.

01:58:16.420 Than herpes B from a monkey. I do not like working on macaques for a number of reasons. I don't any longer.

01:58:21.780 Post-doc, you're not taking courses. You're mainly focused on research and you're developing

01:58:26.160 your own independent research program. You're largely independent and self-driven.

01:58:30.180 And the purpose of the post-doc, I mean, would you do a post-doc if you didn't want to have

01:58:35.260 your own lab? How many people do a post-doc and choose to go into industry rather than choose to

01:58:40.880 create and form their own labs?

01:58:42.460 Nowadays, it's about 80% go into industry, but now there are a lot more jobs for neuroscientists

01:58:46.740 in industry, places like Chinentech, et cetera. But at the time, there wasn't.

01:58:49.800 And now I think anyone that goes into academia-

01:58:52.100 And what defines the duration? I mean, at least in the PhD, you're tied to a very clear outcome,

01:58:57.000 which is the thesis.

01:58:58.700 You know when you're ready to move on as a post-doc because you generally have one or two

01:59:02.480 papers and a story to take into a seminar. Both the PhD and the post-doc, the goal is to have a

01:59:08.440 one-hour seminar of your own independent work and the context it fits into. And you get hired-

01:59:13.900 But I have an honorary PhD in some facet of Formula One where I can spend one hour talking.

01:59:18.600 Yeah, absolutely. I think you've heard more than one. The post-doc was great. I loved working for

01:59:23.560 Ben. So what happened was in 2005, I moved back to the Bay Area. I'm like, I'm not going to live

01:59:28.660 in Palo Alto. I live in San Francisco and I was working in Ben's lab and loving it. I was one of

01:59:34.940 many people in that lab. There were 30 people-

01:59:36.800 For what year, 05?

01:59:37.760 I started in 2005 and I finished in 2010.

01:59:40.480 This means we overlapped in the Bay Area again. Because I was there for med school,

01:59:43.960 97 to 01. I lived back there in 06 to 08. So just think, we would have passed each other

01:59:50.160 on 280 or 101 and not known. Isn't that amazing? I love realizing people that I've become very

01:59:54.980 close to, we cohabitated. And I worked in San Francisco. Of course, you lived there and

01:59:59.280 I worked there.

01:59:59.920 But I was living at Clayton and Parnassus right near UCSF, the old campus, the hospital. And

02:00:05.860 my sister was in the neighborhood and it just adopted my niece. And so I wanted to be there

02:00:10.360 so I could spend time with her. Because my sister is-

02:00:12.740 And we spent so much time up there because my wife ran the Coumadin Clinic at UCSF.

02:00:16.520 I was a few blocks from the Haight-Ashbury Clinic, a very different clinic, but famous because

02:00:20.680 of the Manson thing. And if anyone hasn't read Charles Manson, Chaos, Charles Manson, the

02:00:25.200 CIA and the Secret History of the 60s, a lot of history there. But I was commuting down to

02:00:28.860 80, working in Ben's lab, loving that. I'm in a huge, vibrant lab, lab meetings that would

02:00:34.200 last four hours or more. Ben was outrageous.

02:00:37.040 How big was the lab?

02:00:37.860 About 32 people run by a person with a face recognition issue. So you can imagine it was

02:00:43.160 hilarious. And yet the lab meetings were legendary. People would argue and fight. Ben could be

02:00:48.980 very politically incorrect, which was hilarious, but at the time also was important for us to

02:00:54.660 really have someone challenge us in these very direct ways. We were all politically correct,

02:01:00.160 but he tended to be pretty outrageous. I mean, Ben's done some pretty outrageous things.

02:01:03.500 And I learned so much from Ben about just staying in touch. He called it the light or the flame,

02:01:08.720 like staying in touch with the love of biology and not getting pulled into ambition. Now, Ben was

02:01:13.120 incredibly ambitious, but he just loved biology and I loved biology. And then something weird

02:01:19.020 happened in 2000.

02:01:20.740 And you know, of course, I had the distinction by just luck by the year I was in it, which was 97,

02:01:26.460 started Barbara Barris was our neuroscience head of neuroscience and the professor and ended the

02:01:33.840 year as Ben. She to he was transitioned during our year. And I'm trying to think like, even though

02:01:42.300 that's more than 25 years ago, it didn't seem that unusual. And I say that in a way not to sound

02:01:48.800 like, oh, wow, like look at how enlightened the medical student was. No, no, no. I'm not saying that

02:01:52.820 whatsoever. It had much more to do with Ben. Does that make sense?

02:01:56.840 When Ben moved to the Bay Area, Ben ended up passing away in 2017. And I wrote Ben's obituary

02:02:02.700 for nature. And I sat with Ben for many hours recording conversations with him that I hope to

02:02:07.520 someday release, talking about his history and the decision to transition and his thoughts on

02:02:12.540 when and how best for people to transition, what that means, his relationship to sex, the verb and

02:02:18.140 sexuality, academia. It's a great audiophile because he tears loose on people in academia.

02:02:24.360 He says at the beginning, is this for my obituary? And I said, yes. And he said, well, it better be for

02:02:27.940 a good journal. And I said, it's for nature. And he says, okay, forgive me for cussing, but this is a

02:02:32.420 direct quote. And he said, well, given that it's for my obituary, I'm going to say whatever the fuck I

02:02:36.160 want. And he really does. He lets people have it, but he also really expresses a lot of heart for

02:02:42.260 the things that he thinks are important in science and in life. You know, I'm sitting there like

02:02:46.620 tears just running down my eyes, like trying to get these recordings and I'm quaking. And I realized

02:02:51.840 what's happening. He's going to be dead soon. He had pancreatic cancer. As a non-clinician,

02:02:55.780 that was pretty intense. We had reconnected in 2012. He had read some of my blog stuff and reached

02:03:03.020 out to me and became interested in certain things that I was doing and asked if I would check his

02:03:08.580 blood and stuff like that. He was really into data. Yeah. I mean, maybe it's worth saying this now.

02:03:13.200 One thing that people don't realize about Ben is that he was always trying different diets. He

02:03:17.180 struggled with his weight a lot because he transitioned, he was taking testosterone,

02:03:20.440 but he had always struggled with his weight. And he had tried keto. He had tried fasting. He had tried

02:03:26.020 vegan diets. He was always sampling with different things. And he was always asking me about nutrition

02:03:30.600 and supplementation. And I would tell him something like, Hey, because when I was in his lab, I was

02:03:35.200 working a lot. And I remember the fewer carbohydrates I eat, the more I can stay awake. It's just kind of how it

02:03:41.200 works for me. I do eat carbohydrates. I'm a pure omnivore. I love starches, but I tend to eat oatmeal

02:03:46.060 and rice and pasta, clean quote unquote starches. But at the time he caught me drinking the oil off

02:03:51.560 the top of the almond butter and then slugging back to espresso. And he was like, what are you

02:03:54.860 doing? Like, you're going to die of a heart attack. And I was like, no, you have to understand

02:03:57.980 like certain lipids can be used as fuel if you're not taking enough carbohydrate. And then he would

02:04:02.420 scream, that's ridiculous. That violates all the rules of biology. And then he thought, by the way,

02:04:05.900 was Ben's voice. I'm not mocking him. That's, you can listen to a recording. And then he would come

02:04:10.000 back to me six months later and he's like, I'm doing this low carb thing and I'm losing weight

02:04:13.140 like crazy. How come nobody knows about it? And he was the one who told me. He said, forgive me,

02:04:18.020 my clinical colleagues. And Peter, you don't fall into this category. He was like, most doctors

02:04:22.340 are so unhealthy. He's like, they don't know anything. And he was an MD. Ben was an MD PhD.

02:04:28.320 And I remember him telling me, don't believe any dogma. Don't believe any of it. Ben was this,

02:04:34.020 he had this heretical thing. And so you're sensing a kind of a theme here. I liked hanging out with

02:04:38.660 like punks and skateboarders when I was younger, not because they were wild, but because they looked

02:04:43.900 at things differently. They really did. I love stories. Like I loved the Steve Jobs book. I mean,

02:04:48.740 I remember seeing Steve walking barefoot through the neighborhood when I was a postdoc, when I would

02:04:52.280 visit my folks in Palo Alto and my high school girlfriend, that girl that I met at the skateboard

02:04:55.900 shop, she was his vegan chef. So, and her sister worked for Steve also. So it was very like Palo Alto

02:05:01.760 themes. He was kind of a punk rocker and didn't even realize it. You know, my heroes are people like

02:05:05.600 Joe Strummer, Oliver Sacks, people that really went against the grain of their field out of love,

02:05:10.560 not as an FU. And Ben just loved what he loved so much. But when he started working on glia,

02:05:16.140 everyone thought glia were stupid. It's like support cells. Why would you do that? And he

02:05:19.400 showed they're important for everything, disease in particular, but also normal brain functioning and

02:05:24.340 development. So Ben was the one who really encouraged me to stay in touch with that kind of

02:05:30.280 feeling around doing things and to never let ambition pull you in a direction where you were

02:05:34.780 divorced from that for too long. And yet he was also an extremely hard worker, but he understood

02:05:39.500 that that's what Rick Rubin would call the source. That's the ability to stay working long hours and

02:05:45.020 not feel like you're depleting yourself. So Ben and I got really close in those years and then

02:05:51.000 that I was working for him, but he was healthy then as far as we knew. And then during those years

02:05:55.720 when I was working for Ben, I wasn't making enough money to survive in the Bay Area. I was really

02:06:00.220 struggling. What's a postdoc salary?

02:06:01.840 I had a Helen Hay Whitney fellowship, which is a kind of a premier fellowship from a private

02:06:06.100 institution. I only say that because they pay more and I was making 45, but rents were crazy

02:06:11.740 and gas and food and everything else, you know, 45 K living in the Bay area was rough and I didn't

02:06:17.440 have kids. So I actually went back to Thrasher magazine. I had a bunch of friends that worked

02:06:23.100 at, they're located in the only truly dangerous part of San Francisco hunters point. And they gave

02:06:27.760 me a job writing articles for Thrasher and Slap magazine, the sibling magazine. And so there

02:06:32.680 are a bunch of articles out there. I was writing under a different name.

02:06:35.240 You were?

02:06:36.020 I was making money.

02:06:37.260 Why under a different name?

02:06:38.540 I would use the name Andy instead. I don't know. Cause people in skateboarding knew me

02:06:41.760 as Andy.

02:06:42.200 Okay. Okay. Same last name.

02:06:43.720 Yeah. And I was writing articles on music and bands and going to hear bands play. And then

02:06:48.820 getting back to the lab at two or three in the morning, sleeping in Ben's office and then

02:06:52.980 working the day and that whole thing and making maybe an extra, you know, 500 to a thousand

02:06:56.780 bucks a month, but it was great. And I was getting to go to shows for free, getting to

02:06:59.920 know musicians, falling back in with a skateboard set a bit, all the ones that were healthy and

02:07:04.520 now had families and jobs, you know, all the other stuff got pushed away, all the dysfunction.

02:07:09.560 So I was in both worlds again. And then eventually I got a job at UC San Diego. I was picking between

02:07:14.500 a job there and MIT and my previous experience in Boston. I love Boston. I love the academic

02:07:18.720 community there, but it was like, I'm a California kid. I'm like a skateboarder and punk

02:07:22.800 rocker at heart. I had this one interaction with someone there before in the academic community.

02:07:28.540 I thought, you know, back there, everything's focused on lineage and how old you are and how

02:07:33.280 long you've been around. And in the Bay area, it's all about the young tech and youth is really

02:07:37.620 valued. You can be 25 years old in the Bay area. And if you have a great idea, people don't care.

02:07:42.920 You know, the East coast is different, at least at the time it was, it felt different. So I went to

02:07:46.960 UC San Diego and my lab flourished there. And then eventually I got-

02:07:50.860 So you got to San Diego in 12.

02:07:51.920 Officially started 2011. And I left in 2015, mostly because I got hired back to Stanford

02:07:57.400 when Ben was still in the department. Now the weird thread through all of this is that

02:08:02.120 when I was a graduate student, I lived in normal Heights, kind of out towards El Cajon. I went from

02:08:08.100 making 42, $45,000 a year as a postdoc. I started my job just so people know. I mean, I'm not shy.

02:08:13.900 Professors make about a hundred thousand, 110,000 as assistant starting a professor. And I went from having

02:08:20.600 essentially no responsibility. I bought a little house. I could afford like this little house.

02:08:25.340 I got a bulldog puppy and I got a laboratory and I hired a technician that I knew from Davis.

02:08:30.180 And we just went ham. We were just experiments, experiments, experiments. I lived in the lab

02:08:35.460 two or three days a week, brushing my teeth in the sink. My students were like, what's wrong with

02:08:38.820 this guy? You know, we were very fortunate. We published a bunch of papers in great journals.

02:08:42.700 More importantly, we were having a lot of fun doing research. I had all these microscopes.

02:08:46.560 I was like, my name's on the door. I can't believe this. And I didn't care that my name

02:08:50.140 was on the door. Actually, I've always thought that labs should name themselves after the work

02:08:53.920 they do, as opposed to the name for a number of reasons. I was having so much fun. It was

02:09:00.400 incredible. I met a woman there that, you know, I was in a five-year relationship with somebody there

02:09:04.900 that was really wonderful, who also taught me a lot about kind of how to balance my professional

02:09:09.840 life and my personal life. Despite that relationship not working out, there was a lot of important

02:09:13.940 elements of teaching me like, hey, it's good to come home for dinner with me and the dogs every

02:09:18.060 once in a while and taught me some self-care. Got back into doing some boxing, although I didn't

02:09:23.100 try not to spar too often. You're the fighter, not me. And I loved my time there. The challenges

02:09:28.920 persisted along the way, challenges of youth. And I think that as much work as-

02:09:33.380 Meaning the demons of your youth were still rearing some of the emotional damage?

02:09:38.160 And that would show up in various forms. But I think, you know, my dad and I finally put

02:09:42.600 to rest our challenges in 2007. He had written me a letter that was expressing some concern

02:09:49.960 and disappointment in the ways we were relating, but mostly concern. And I remember reading it

02:09:55.840 and thinking, this is when I was a postdoc at Ben's, in Ben's lab and thinking, you know,

02:10:00.440 he's reaching out. This is years after everything. You know, maybe it's time to take a look at

02:10:05.500 this, but I wasn't about to try and solve it in a conversation. So I was like, if you

02:10:09.000 want to do some work together, like, let's go to therapy. Let's have a conversation in

02:10:12.880 front of somebody who can really tell me where I'm wrong also. And we did total of four sessions,

02:10:19.080 I think, with a really excellent female therapist. And I remember the question was, who was going

02:10:23.600 to pay for it? And I told my dad, I'm like, I don't have much money, but I'm going to go

02:10:26.520 in 50-50 with you on this one. And that was important to me. So we did this. And after four

02:10:31.960 sessions, we realized that, you know, I think it was the first true, like, man-to-man conversation

02:10:37.200 we ever had. And I realized that, you know, a lot of the things that I would struggle with

02:10:41.480 growing up, he had struggled with too. Meaning in his life growing up as well?

02:10:44.900 Yeah. His relationship to his mother, his relationship to himself, trying to balance

02:10:49.260 a life in science and ambition, which is tough. Science is not, they're not throwing punches at

02:10:54.800 your face. They're not shooting at you. But you're also not winning millions of dollars at the end

02:10:59.500 of a case or cashing out a big IPO. And so the wins are really like wins of the heart

02:11:05.220 and wins of discovery, not to sound sentimental, but you get a paper in science or nature. I'm blessed

02:11:10.480 to have, you know, more than a few of those. And the first time you get it, you're like,

02:11:14.100 shit, will I ever do that again? So you're a lot like a professional athlete, but your world is

02:11:19.460 tiny. And once you realize that your world is tiny, you have two choices. You can either leave

02:11:24.680 because it's too small or you can go back to your love of the work, but then you also have to live

02:11:29.920 in the world and have a family and relationships. And so in those conversations, I think I realized,

02:11:34.880 I was like, wow, you know, I inherited some real gifts from my dad. Curiosity, love of craft.

02:11:40.640 He's certainly driven. My dad's almost 80 now and he's still firing on eight cylinders. He's excited

02:11:45.060 about cars. He's excited about science. He's excited about movies. He's excited. Like he's

02:11:49.500 just got so much going there. We resonated. Like we finally hit that point. That was good. Again,

02:11:56.120 I think a few times this discussion, I unexpectedly have to fight some emotion back,

02:11:59.820 but I think it's that, you know, when they say like forgiveness is really the best thing,

02:12:03.740 I think it really is. And we're good. We're super close. And then in that time in San Diego,

02:12:09.920 I went back into just full forward center of mass ambition. And it was really only the girlfriend

02:12:15.080 that kept me a little calibrated and my dog, my bulldog. And something happened in those years.

02:12:19.500 So when I was a PhD student, I published this paper. Second paper I published was published

02:12:23.860 in science. I was super proud. I was excited, you know, science paper. And I called Harry Carlisle

02:12:29.180 in San Diego and told him because he'd known my story and he kind of took me out of not doing much

02:12:35.460 to gave me a lab to work in. He saw me graduate with honors. I went off to Berkeley. So he was

02:12:39.320 tracking my career. Because he had gone from UCSB to- No, he stayed at UCSB. He had been my

02:12:44.420 professor down there. So he was like, congratulations. You know, next time you come through,

02:12:48.500 you should have a pizza with me and Jane, his wife, and we can catch up. I'm happy for you.

02:12:52.820 And then three days later, he shot himself in the bathtub, just killed himself. And I was like,

02:12:57.800 whoa, that was like, so I was down there two days later or three days later speaking at his funeral.

02:13:05.580 And I was like, holy shit. And I'd known a bunch of people that had died or gone to jail from the

02:13:09.900 skateboarding world. It was just crazy because this was the guy that had taught me about mental health

02:13:14.260 issues and about depression and how it's all neurochemistry. And it turns out there'd been a

02:13:18.060 Jane and I would meet for the next couple of years. I would go to their house and talk to her.

02:13:23.080 She recently passed away, but she told me that they had had a son who had died in a motorcycle accident

02:13:27.420 early on when he was in his teens. And Harry never quite got over that. But anyway, you know,

02:13:32.580 he should have known better. So I realized I was like, wow, you can have all the knowledge in the

02:13:36.740 world about the underlying biology and it might not save you. So that was kind of like a wake-up call.

02:13:42.380 And then what happened was when I was in San Diego, I was very, very close with Barbara Chapman,

02:13:48.860 my PhD advisor. She had two kids while I was in the lab. My niece was friends with them. Our families

02:13:53.320 were kind of merged and she started falling out of communication with people. And she ended up early

02:13:59.600 onset breast cancer, died, which was insane. So now I'm speaking at her memorial at the House of

02:14:06.720 Flowers in San Francisco. She's got two young girls, her husband I know. And I'm like, geez, like,

02:14:11.400 this is crazy. And that one was, I have to be careful not, I will cry if I talk, which I prefer

02:14:17.080 not to do on camera if I can, not just because it's distracting. That was horrible. That was like

02:14:22.240 losing my mother. Like, it was just like, and I was like, what the fuck? She had the BRCA2 mutation

02:14:27.960 and the BRCA1 mutation. So highly susceptible to cancers. So then I got through that, but that

02:14:33.680 certainly destabilized me. I reacted to that by just working twice as hard, which was not a good

02:14:38.740 formula. I get to Stanford. I get hired back to Stanford.

02:14:43.680 Which I'm sure a big part of what makes that great is you're now a colleague and a peer of Ben's

02:14:47.720 again. Next door laboratories. Next door. I go out to dinner with Ben Barris, Carla Schatz,

02:14:52.960 Krishna Shanoi, I think, and Karen Hirsch. We're at Ilfernaio downtown Palo Alto. My first week back,

02:14:59.520 I'm sitting across from Ben just like this. And he looks at me and he says, I think I'm having a heart

02:15:03.820 attack. Now he's an MD. I literally take him in my truck, my forerunner drive to Stanford hospital

02:15:09.200 and we spend the night talking. And he's like, don't tell anyone in my lab. I don't want anyone

02:15:14.200 to think I'm dying or something. Later that week, he has a second heart attack. He's throwing clots.

02:15:20.020 So he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. So from the moment I land at Stanford, I'm watching my third

02:15:26.560 advisor die. At that point, I was like, Ben and I used to joke, he's MD, morbid sense of humor. He's

02:15:32.480 like, and he called me Andy. Andy, you're the common denominator. So the joke is you don't

02:15:35.880 want me to work for you. Right. And I had a conversation with Barbara before she died,

02:15:40.260 which was crazy. Right. Super powerful. But you're just like, you're saying, I mean,

02:15:44.980 we're talking yesterday about hospice, people who work hospice, like saying goodbye to someone's

02:15:48.600 tough. Hearing that somebody went suddenly is tough. Saying goodbye to somebody is tough for a

02:15:52.520 whole other set of reasons. Luckily, her daughters are both doing really well. One graduated from

02:15:57.480 college. The other one is a neuroscience student at McGill, which is awesome. Makes me so happy.

02:16:01.780 Ben passing away was kind of the final nail in the coffin for me. I was like, okay, you know,

02:16:07.740 I need to actually like go all the way back and start doing some deep excavation. Because what was

02:16:13.940 happening was I was starting to just feel really shut off. I hated doing my work. I thought I might

02:16:19.500 write a book. Meaning you were losing love for science as well? I was losing the touch with the

02:16:22.900 source. I was working, but I had this big lab. I wasn't feeling, I was like, ah, and I started

02:16:27.560 kind of foraging. I started doing cage eggs at great white shark diving. Real smart. I might as

02:16:33.100 well box nine rounds with you or with like a real fighter, like with no headgear. Like I started

02:16:38.140 engaging in dangerous behavior again. I started running risks in life again. And here I am,

02:16:43.000 I'm a 42 year old man with a tenure at Stanford in a lab and I'm publishing. We published a full

02:16:49.660 article in nature in 2018 after Ben's death. And I just remember feeling like pretty joyless

02:16:54.700 and thinking like, what the fuck am I going to do? Forgive my language, but just like,

02:16:59.460 what am I going to do? Like I'm out of touch with all of it. So a couple of things happened.

02:17:02.860 One was I went to Hoffman. I did the Hoffman process, which is a no drugs, no psychedelics,

02:17:08.420 but kind of psychedelic, like state of self actualization stuff. By the way, when, anytime

02:17:12.780 I mentioned something like Hoffman, I realized that these are like, I think it's four or $5,000

02:17:16.480 for the week. They have scholarship programs. I've given some money recently to their scholarship

02:17:21.060 program. I think it was helpful for me, but one of the things that really helped was I went off

02:17:26.180 and did a week long trauma immersion thing in 2017 on the East coast with a brilliant guy named Ryan

02:17:32.560 Suave who does trauma-based work. So I was still trying to work through some old stuff and it's

02:17:37.760 hard to know, right? You amass a childhood experience. You amass some adult experiences of

02:17:42.020 major loss and yet your career is going like, who knows what's what? And as I mentioned probably in

02:17:47.940 this conversation, three or four, maybe more girlfriends, like it wasn't like I was somebody

02:17:52.420 who enjoyed skipping from relationships. Each one of those is a story of kind of like hope

02:17:56.260 for a permanent future and then a cliff. So I was dealing with that too. And again, I'm the common

02:18:02.300 denominator, right? I mean, I'm not going to take all the blame, but there's a consistent variable

02:18:07.520 there. So what happened was in 2017, I went there and I met a guy named Pat Dossett at Hoffman.

02:18:13.340 He was at my graduation and he done 13 years in the seal teams. We became friends.

02:18:18.820 This was in 2018, 2017, 2017. And through going down to LA where he was living and starting to

02:18:25.300 swim with him and hang out with him. It was in the turn to 2019. He said, what are you going to do for

02:18:29.700 the world in 2019? That was this kind of seed question. And I was like, I don't know what I

02:18:35.040 would do is I would probably post one minute clips on Instagram about the retina or nerdy stuff that I

02:18:41.900 think is really cool. So he was like, do it. And I was like, okay. And he's like, no, shake on it.

02:18:45.740 You know, like seal team kind of guy like, okay. So we shake on, I start doing that in 2019 and then

02:18:51.200 2020, the pandemic hits. And I thought maybe I'd write a book. And then I realized, oh, well,

02:18:56.100 my lab works on stress and I got some tools for stress and improving sleep. I'm not going to talk

02:19:00.640 about vaccines because that just seems like a barbed wire topic. People are losing jobs for that.

02:19:05.240 You can't win that conversation at the time. It felt crazy. And it was, and I thought,

02:19:10.480 I'm not a virologist anyway, but I'm just going to teach stuff by going on podcasts.

02:19:15.600 And 2020 started with one podcast. We did 30, I did 30 podcasts that year. I went on about 30

02:19:21.660 podcasts and went on Joe's podcast, you know, Rogan's podcast and Lex's podcast. At the end of 2020,

02:19:27.100 Lex was like, you should start a podcast, but don't make it just you talking. So I took half of the

02:19:31.940 advice. And in 2021, I hired the guy that was going to PR me for my book stuff, Rob Moore. And we started

02:19:38.360 the Huberman lab podcast in 2021. Seems so much longer ago.

02:19:43.600 Well, I think it's 2020. I was going on podcasts 2019. I was blabbing into Instagram. And I'll tell

02:19:48.620 you during those years, I was so frightened. It was like 2019. I just thought, gosh, I hope none of

02:19:54.060 my colleagues see this, but if they did everything I'm saying, they know is true. I just hope they

02:19:59.820 don't see it. Cause they're probably gonna be like, why is he on Instagram? I mean, I might as well

02:20:02.700 have been on Tik TOK. Probably the only reason I'm not on Tik TOK is that Stanford forbid us from being on

02:20:07.240 Tik TOK early on. They said it was a security risk, which it was and is. So that's why I'm not

02:20:12.220 there. If you see me on Tik TOK, that's not me or it's me, but someone poached the videos. So

02:20:16.560 2020, I was just really concerned for the world. Listen, I know the guy who's the director of the

02:20:23.500 National Institutes of Mental Health. I don't see one soundbite. Sorry, Josh. Like, I don't know you

02:20:28.120 well enough to kind of poke at you, but if it wasn't him, no advice on get regular sunlight,

02:20:33.240 stay on a circadian rhythm, learn some stress mitigation techniques. And the world's kind

02:20:37.100 of falling apart due to stress. And I'm thinking, okay, no one's going to step up. I'm just going

02:20:41.160 to do this. I wasn't selling a book. I didn't have a podcast. It was just giving information.

02:20:45.320 And then when the podcast started, I remember thinking, I really want to honor the incredible

02:20:49.880 place that is Stanford. I never want this to look like something that is the same as being in a class

02:20:55.780 at Stanford, but I'd love it to incorporate some of the brilliant minds that are at Stanford. So I

02:21:00.740 just invited a bunch of my colleagues on Carl. Yeah. Carl was one of your first guests.

02:21:04.380 One of my first guests and Anna Lemke and all these people and just showcasing,

02:21:07.560 put a spotlight on other people. And then this last year is where the funds really started for me

02:21:12.160 because I could start to include people that are just some of my other longstanding interests,

02:21:16.600 like Andy Galpin on fitness or Lane Norton on nutrition and things that relate to other interests

02:21:21.840 of mine, but still keeping it in a scientific frame. And throughout this whole time, I have this

02:21:26.440 weird journal where I have conversations with different people, including you and Rick Rubin,

02:21:32.200 some other brilliant minds that we know. And I take notes on those conversations.

02:21:36.060 And I also keep conversations I have with Barbara and with mainly with Barbara and Ben,

02:21:40.480 although mainly Barbara, and this isn't like writing to someone who's dead as if they're there,

02:21:44.260 but I try and take every major decision and kind of stance around podcast or stance around research

02:21:50.140 or what to do with my lab and filter it through the, I consider important lessons that I've learned

02:21:54.720 from them. I still do therapy one to three times a week. Cause if I didn't,

02:21:58.580 who knows what would happen. And I've talked about this on previous podcasts. I have done

02:22:02.700 some exploration of the psychedelic space, although not a lot and always in the company

02:22:06.320 of a physician. And two of those sessions for me, it was MDMA were immensely beneficial

02:22:13.860 for allowing me to have a conversation like this or to put my dog down with my own hands

02:22:21.040 and know that I was doing the right thing. But I was super close to, to just kind of register

02:22:26.240 what's important. And I have to say, you know, if this is just my life and my life arc,

02:22:30.740 but if there are any lessons in it, it's very clear that like staying in touch with the things

02:22:35.240 that give us energy as opposed to being ambitious for ambition's sake, like really getting the order

02:22:41.220 of that dialogue, correct. And putting love of craft first and letting ambition stem from that.

02:22:46.860 And also just friendship and amazing mentors. I mean, in the podcast space, I remember thinking

02:22:52.980 Tim Ferriss listened to his podcast early on and read his books, Joe Rogan, you, Lex, Rich Roll.

02:23:00.180 Rhonda.

02:23:01.060 Rhonda. I always joke, you know, first man in was actually a woman. It was Rhonda.

02:23:05.760 That array of people long before I knew any of you, it was like, these are the Ben Barris's,

02:23:11.840 the Richard Axel's of the podcast world. These are the greats of my field. So I pay a lot of

02:23:17.600 attention. Like, what are they doing? How can I do things well like them, but different?

02:23:21.280 Because in science, like in podcasting, there are no rewards for just imitation. There really

02:23:25.960 aren't. Beauty of podcasting relative to science is that if you and I have the same guest on in one

02:23:31.420 week, it raises it in the algorithm. Whereas in science, yes, if two papers come out simultaneously

02:23:36.480 in journal, that lends strength to the argument that the data and conclusions are true, right?

02:23:41.320 Because two discoveries independently, but there is this notion of scooping. If you publish a result

02:23:46.200 in a given arena and then I'm six months late, I can't get it into a good journal. Podcasting,

02:23:51.960 it's the opposite. You know, if Joe has David Goggins on yesterday, I think he did. And then

02:23:57.020 he comes on your podcast or my podcast. It's just rising tide raises all votes and the algorithm is

02:24:03.080 the tide. And so in that way, I feel like, wow, like I'm in a field, I'm still running my lab,

02:24:09.620 but I'm in a field where goodness grows goodness and sharing and being generous just makes everybody

02:24:17.280 succeed more. And you learn from seeing how someone relates in other conversations. So I don't know,

02:24:22.680 whatever deadening was created by the death of my advisors and from all the backstory and all that

02:24:28.860 stuff in 2020 and especially in 2021. And it was that conversation with Lex, but all the other stuff

02:24:36.640 that led up to it, it was just like rocket fuel right now. I truly say, if you gave me a hundred

02:24:42.740 billion dollars to stop podcasting, I wouldn't do it because to me, what I know for sure, based on my

02:24:49.760 experience is that at some point, the lights are going to go out for me dead, just like gone. You

02:24:54.580 know, this as a physician, people don't like to think that it's going to be lights out and sort of

02:24:57.860 like, what are you going to have and what you have done? And so I really feel like as much as I can

02:25:01.820 touch into like the beauty and utility of biology and share that, then I'm good. The rest is just

02:25:07.800 noise. You think about like kind of the sort of meteoric rise over the past two years for your

02:25:14.540 amazing work. What do you think you're going to be doing in two years? Podcasting. Well, given,

02:25:19.320 but with respect to a lab. So we have a paper that's right on the 99.9 yard line that this morning,

02:25:25.720 there's one little thing they want us to tweak before it goes in. This is a cell press paper I'm

02:25:29.620 really proud of on human, on breathing patterns and anxiety. So we're still publishing. We have

02:25:34.240 another paper that we're fighting. Another journal right now is often the case. You know, my lab has

02:25:39.880 got necessarily smaller because of podcasting, but I have a close collaboration with David Spiegel,

02:25:45.440 our associate chair of psychiatry, and we are spinning up a number of programs at Stanford around

02:25:49.740 mind body research. He works on clinical applications of hypnosis, Nolan Williams with psychedelics. I haven't

02:25:56.160 talked too much about this publicly, but all our podcasts are free. We release them every Monday,

02:26:00.680 sometimes Wednesdays as well, but we did launch this premium channel. And the purpose of that

02:26:05.500 premium channel was thanks to Andrew Wilkinson and tiny capital. There's a matching of funds for people

02:26:10.460 that subscribe to that. This isn't a pitch, but this is just the case. What I'm trying to do is raise

02:26:15.180 money to fund the best work. And so I really think in two years I'll be podcasting. I'll still be a

02:26:21.160 professor at Stanford still teaching. I teach next quarter. In fact, you'll be teaching the same

02:26:25.080 course that Ben taught me. Right. And bio 206, which is neuroanatomy and also it's functional

02:26:30.600 neuroanatomy. So all the system, everything from addiction. It's an amazing course. It's a fun

02:26:34.140 course. And I'd love to take it again, given that I literally probably remember 2% of it. It's a shame.

02:26:40.380 I'm sure we can figure out a way for you to. Could I audit it? Sure. I'm the course director. I say,

02:26:45.160 yes, we'd be honored to have you. That'd be amazing. So seriously, yes, I'll give you the schedule.

02:26:50.000 Start soon. I would like to get more involved in science philanthropy and in particular to fund

02:26:55.680 research on humans. I will say I'm very frustrated with the lack of progress in translating animal

02:27:00.780 models to human treatments. I know it's necessary. It takes time. I love the worm work, fly work,

02:27:06.400 mouse work in particular. There's also a place for primate work, although thresholds for that are

02:27:11.460 higher given the animals they are. But human work right now, there's some excellent human work

02:27:17.020 that really needs funding. And one of the things I experienced firsthand was we were always well

02:27:22.320 funded and still are, but the frustration of wanting to do the coolest thing and having to take

02:27:26.580 five years to ramp up to do it. And meanwhile, there's a lot of suffering. There's also a lot

02:27:30.660 to be gained from doing these studies right away. Stanford obviously has great channels for raising

02:27:35.400 funds for doing that kind of high ambition, high output work. But I think I'm in a unique position

02:27:41.140 to be able to understand the life of the researcher. And put simply, the last thing a researcher needs

02:27:47.240 to do is spend time writing all the justification. What we're doing is we're creating a system where

02:27:52.080 someone can literally type out no more than half a page, no more than half a page in 11-point font,

02:27:59.680 give it to us, and we give them money to do the work in the hopes that that will accelerate the

02:28:04.540 process. So raising funds for that through the podcast and more generally doing philanthropy is really

02:28:10.160 important. And I've always hoped that at some point I could shape science policy a bit, but the things

02:28:16.740 that really need shaping make big differences in discovery and curing disease in laboratories is

02:28:21.360 very simple. And I wish it were a different word, but it's money. Money's necessary, but not sufficient

02:28:26.480 to make progress. More money gives you more opportunity to try things, simply what it is. There's never a

02:28:33.240 case of too much money for doing research. There's sometimes a dearth of excellent people, but that's not a

02:28:37.760 problem at Stanford and other places, right? Of course, Stanford's not the only great place,

02:28:41.520 many excellent places. But the more money that can go into research, the more progress that will be

02:28:46.460 made, period. So I see myself podcasting and also being a really strong advocate for directing money

02:28:52.220 into research. And also we're losing a lot of graduate students and postdocs and potential graduate

02:28:57.480 students and postdocs. There's a big strike right now in the UC system because they're paid garbage

02:29:01.860 and many of them have kids. We're going to lose entire generations of great discovery. And so what

02:29:08.340 I'm also trying to do is create endowments so that we can pay people a reasonable wage. I mean,

02:29:13.480 I chuckle because it's just insane. Most of the people that are holding the power to make these

02:29:17.640 decisions wouldn't live a day with that amount of money in their bank account because it would give

02:29:21.740 them an autonomic shock to just know that they were not necessarily going to make it into the next

02:29:27.720 week. So I feel very strongly about give people resources that allow them to flourish. This is

02:29:33.140 very Ben Barris-ish. Give people resources that allow them to flourish, that allow them to stay in

02:29:38.180 touch with a source, if you will. And yeah, I mean, if I can raise a billion dollars for research in the

02:29:44.640 next two years or five years, not just through the podcast and I'm podcasting, if I have to shut my lab,

02:29:51.200 I do, but I think I'll have a greater impact on science and discovery than if I'm there

02:29:56.420 writing my next R01, which I just completed a revision anyway. So that's the long answer.

02:30:02.800 I had six pages of single space type on things that we were going to talk about.

02:30:07.660 We talked about exactly, let me see how many we talked about. Zero. We talked about exactly

02:30:12.620 zero of these. So the implication of course is when are you coming back to Austin so that we can

02:30:18.760 actually do the podcast? Anytime you'll have me.

02:30:22.620 That's so great. We'll sit down again.

02:30:23.940 This could be a part one.

02:30:24.880 I'm going to end with a sort of a philosophical question that touches on a theme that you

02:30:28.460 mentioned. So we talked about how there's really a sort of renegade skater spirit that

02:30:36.260 exists in some of the great minds. And we keep throwing around our friend Rick as an example

02:30:42.000 in the creative space, but briefly about Richard Feynman, who we didn't even get into some of

02:30:46.580 our stories about Feynman. And so there's no question that you need people who are willing

02:30:51.620 to question everything. I mean, it's no small miracle that the Apple campaign of think different

02:30:56.340 was arguably one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time. But we also have to

02:31:01.760 reconcile that science requires a lot of fundamental knowledge to even give you the privilege to think

02:31:09.560 differently. Let's not forget before you do the PhD, you've done four years of undergraduate

02:31:15.920 coursework, which admittedly is mostly learning an existing body of knowledge. You then spent two

02:31:23.440 years doing a PhD where you're learning an existing body of knowledge in a much narrower area than your

02:31:30.240 undergraduate, but at a much deeper level. You take a comprehensive exam that we didn't even talk

02:31:36.040 about how challenging the comps are, depending on the university especially, before you even earn the

02:31:40.820 right to now go sit in the lab to start to think different, which by the way is essential. If you

02:31:46.280 go into the lab, you can't by definition have a PhD thesis that's the same as somebody else's. You're not

02:31:51.600 going to get it. It has to be unique work. And to me, I think what's very difficult about communicating

02:32:00.620 science in the public is that line is difficult to explain. And it's very easy in social media,

02:32:10.540 for example, to just assume everybody's an expert. Like there's no real ability to distinguish

02:32:16.520 between signal and noise. Right. Or assume that if somebody got something wrong, that they're wrong

02:32:20.920 about everything else they're saying, which is certainly not the case. So, you know, I was

02:32:26.520 interviewed on a podcast recently and someone posed the question to me around this and I didn't have a

02:32:33.420 great answer. Like if I think of my purpose in that sense of source, I think of it as hopefully just

02:32:40.760 getting people to think about things and hopefully providing them with enough substrate, both in terms

02:32:47.340 of the knowledge and the mental models and the frameworks and the ability to have some of the

02:32:53.820 critical thinking. They're being armed with a tool that will allow them to look at the world and look at

02:33:00.520 other claims and stuff. But to be honest with you, I have no idea if I'm able to do that. Like it

02:33:05.560 strikes me as a very difficult thing to do. So my question is not about anything that I'm doing. It's

02:33:10.840 more about how do you see your role in addressing, I don't have a better word for it other than what's

02:33:18.280 going to sound a little bit crass, which is just a crisis of scientific literacy and a crisis of

02:33:24.480 scientific literacy that has led to a crisis of confidence.

02:33:29.680 First, I just want to say that not only are you getting people to think differently or think a bit

02:33:35.960 more deeply or a lot more deeply, you're also giving them very useful information. You're being humble.

02:33:41.080 I understand it's genuine, but I do want to say that as a consumer of your information, but also as

02:33:44.960 somebody who pays a lot of attention to the landscape of the space, the impact is real and it's

02:33:50.400 significant. And I've long been interested in the common themes between different movements and

02:33:57.400 cultures. And I watched it happen in skateboarding. I knew well enough to know that I wasn't going to

02:34:02.020 play a major role. I probably could have run a company or been involved in that. Although with my

02:34:06.080 social and professional skills back then, I've seen fistfights in the offices of some of these

02:34:10.620 companies, but some of them are worth many hundreds of millions of dollars now. And they run like

02:34:14.560 beautifully because it's a family feel. So a lot of that kind of craziness of the past is kind of

02:34:19.020 no longer around. They have HR departments and things, but also the landscape of science.

02:34:24.060 I realize there are people that are in this just for ambition. There are people that are real passion

02:34:27.500 like Ben and ambitious and everything in between. And likewise, within the social media sphere

02:34:32.740 and health education, you're seeing people that are just compelled to do it because they love it.

02:34:37.440 They are also ambitious. You see people with just pure ambition. You can tell they're just grabbing

02:34:41.300 on every recent event as a way to get some views and likes and grow their channels. Their fate is obvious

02:34:46.940 to me over time. I'm not being cynical, but it's just, you look at any other endeavor like music or art

02:34:52.100 or science for that matter, you know where that's going to end. It's just going to end. They're going to

02:34:55.960 flame out as we say. I think that thinking about these different universes or cultures, the human

02:35:03.160 aspect comes through. And I think it at least gives me one answer to your question, which is what are we

02:35:09.580 trying to do here? Like, what are we actually trying to do? So for me, it's, I have several things that are

02:35:14.320 really like mantras. It's, I want to communicate the beauty and utility of biology. I want to do that

02:35:19.680 by being a teacher and to some extent, a storyteller, but a story about biology.

02:35:25.240 And I want to be a giver. I just want to give, give, give. Now you raise an important point,

02:35:29.660 which is formal rigorous education often involves not doing anything creative.

02:35:34.760 That's right.

02:35:35.580 But it is the-

02:35:36.740 Especially in biology. I mean, I think this is the difference, right? Sort of interrupt you, but

02:35:39.460 in mathematics, that's not necessarily the case. Ramanujan didn't have the formal education. It

02:35:45.880 wasn't necessary. He was able to derive the insights from Gauss to Newton to Euler all the

02:35:53.760 way through. And he, in the dirt, was literally coming up with the creative insights. And that

02:35:59.200 is why mathematics and science are actually fundamentally very different things. And especially

02:36:03.820 in biology. There's no discipline of science in which this thing that we're talking about is more

02:36:09.460 present than in biology. The fact set is unbearably large.

02:36:15.080 It's unbearably large. And unfortunately, Feynman pointed out that unfortunately,

02:36:19.640 taxonomy gets you nowhere. Just knowing the names of things, something that I'm humbly,

02:36:23.680 I'm very good at. I can memorize the names of things, you know, many orders of magnitude beyond

02:36:28.720 like what is necessary or useful. We could have sat here and I could tell you the 20 or so different

02:36:33.500 kinds of ganglion cells in the retina, how they code visual space, what they inform the brain

02:36:37.700 likely or not. And the only thing that would have mattered is for you to understand that some cells

02:36:43.760 sense motion, some cells sense contrast, some encode color information, and that it's built up in kind

02:36:49.760 of a hierarchy pyramid pyramidal model to give you something like face recognition. That's all that

02:36:54.180 matters. It doesn't matter if it's the alpha cell, the beta cell, the theta cell, the schmata cell.

02:36:57.820 It doesn't matter. The names don't matter. And biology, so much of it is showing some degree of

02:37:04.520 ability in the taxonomy. Is it useless? No, because it sets up a common dialogue. That's why

02:37:11.100 taxonomy is useful, allows different people in different labs to communicate, but it doesn't

02:37:15.300 teach you rule sets. So if we go back to, I don't want to get back into prefrontal cortex per se,

02:37:21.000 but let's think about the Stroop task. If I give you letters and numbers in different colors and you

02:37:25.780 have to do that, you can't do the Stroop task if you can't speak the language that that's read

02:37:32.620 or recognize that, you know, seven plus seven is 14. Seven plus seven equals 14 is just true.

02:37:38.880 That's not changing. There's nothing creative about it, but you can't come up with alternate

02:37:41.940 rule sets if you don't have the basic substrates, the basic building blocks. So I look at an

02:37:46.620 undergraduate degree or even a high school degree and an undergraduate degree as developing

02:37:51.200 the raw materials from which to then start resampling those raw materials, which is the PhD

02:37:58.180 into hopefully what is truly novel, but many PhDs are truly novel, but not terribly impactful for

02:38:05.840 their field. Most PhDs in fact, and most postdocs, it's like your attempt to do it again to show I can

02:38:11.740 do it twice. That's basically it. Then you get your own laboratory. And there are some labs that survive

02:38:16.600 very well by just kind of turning a crank and doing the same thing over and over again. The

02:38:20.460 fundamental discoveries come from people really taking risk. So I think in the social media space,

02:38:25.780 there are a couple of different issues here. One is do people need to have a formal rigorous

02:38:29.640 education in something? I would say yes, but we need to put air quotes around formal. You look at a guy

02:38:35.720 like Rick Rubin. I don't know what Rick's undergraduate education was in, but I doubt it was in music

02:38:40.600 producing, but his formal rigorous education is in the real world of producing music.

02:38:46.300 But I think if we limit this to science, it gets more complicated.

02:38:49.760 So in that case, I think I would hope that the young person out there or even older person out

02:38:55.100 there who really wants to get good at science and scientific thinking, put themselves through

02:38:59.880 the hard filter that is a formal rigorous education in that thing. The beauty of looking at things

02:39:05.040 through the lens of biology or through the lens of science and experimentation is that really at

02:39:10.020 its essence, your goal is to falsify your own, what you think are best ideas.

02:39:14.260 And then this gets to the complete other end of the spectrum so that the listener doesn't assume

02:39:18.600 for a moment, we're just sitting here being elitist saying you shouldn't be the ones talking

02:39:23.220 about science if you don't have a background. I'm going to bring it right back to Ben's comment to

02:39:27.480 you when he had his epiphany, which is the medical profession doesn't know that much.

02:39:33.600 Well, exactly. And I think that I can't speak for Ben, but I do remember most of what he said

02:39:37.940 to me anyway. And it's very clear that scientific literacy in the general public does not require a

02:39:44.600 formal education in science. If you, I think it was Max Delbrook that said, assume zero knowledge

02:39:50.540 and infinite intelligence. I think about that all the time. I believe that people are curious

02:39:55.100 and that if you give them the raw materials to understand what you're about to tell them,

02:39:59.640 they can understand pretty much everything. I know there's the whole Feynman quote of,

02:40:03.760 you know, if you can't explain it to a six-year-old and you don't really understand it. That's true.

02:40:08.220 I also think that you can take adults or younger people and educate them. You give them a minimum

02:40:14.140 of nomenclature and you emphasize that the nomenclature isn't really the point. We call it

02:40:19.100 prefrontal cortex. We could have called it green monkey tree. It doesn't matter. It's in a rule set,

02:40:24.880 context appropriate setting machine in your brain and it's behind the forehead. It doesn't even matter.

02:40:29.880 It's behind the forehead, but it helps you remember prefrontal. Okay. So what's important

02:40:34.360 is the algorithm that it uses. And I think that in biology, we're always talking about processes.

02:40:40.220 And so one thing that I think is really important and can be communicated to the general public,

02:40:44.820 regardless of educational background, is that most of the time when you're paying attention to science,

02:40:49.380 forget the nouns, focus on the verbs. You want to understand how the brain wires up,

02:40:54.240 maybe a discussion that we can have next time or axon regeneration, forget that it's an axon,

02:40:58.600 just kind of understand and axon is like a wire. Okay. That helps you visualize it,

02:41:02.620 but I can put in your head the ideas of a number of different processes that are involved from going

02:41:06.780 from sperm meets egg to a baby and a brain. Why? Because it's a bunch of processes that when you

02:41:13.580 understand one of them, you can more easily understand the next and the next. Taxonomy

02:41:17.980 doesn't do that. If I tell you that brain area is called that, it doesn't give you one shred of a

02:41:23.320 hint of what a different brain area is called at all. In fact, it probably confuses you.

02:41:27.660 So in many ways, teaching the verbs of biology is what I think is necessary. And I've started even

02:41:35.200 doing this in the public discourse that I'm involved in. You know, I've talked about the

02:41:38.320 importance of getting morning sunlight, why low solar angle sunlight actually has more yellow,

02:41:43.500 blue contrast. And even though you don't perceive it through these cells, you look at it through

02:41:48.340 cloud cover, you see that yellow, blue contracts is what activates the cells in the retina. It says

02:41:52.020 it's morning when the sun's overhead, no yellow, blue contrast. You can take a picture of it with

02:41:55.760 your phone and see sunset, yellow, blue, and orange contrast activates these cells.

02:42:00.640 So what do you need people to understand? You don't need to see the sunrise. You need to see

02:42:04.880 the sun rising, the verb. You don't need to see it across the horizon. You need to see it when it's

02:42:08.980 low in the sky. If they hear that and they then remember, oh yeah, because that's when it's yellow

02:42:14.580 and blue. Now it doesn't matter what the ganglion cells are called melanopsin and schmelanopsin.

02:42:19.200 It doesn't matter. What you've got them on is a verb. And when you teach people the verb

02:42:23.760 action of biology, I believe they start to understand the real mechanism and the real

02:42:29.540 utility. And then the nouns kind of forgive my language. They don't really, no one gives a

02:42:34.480 shit. It doesn't matter, especially not to the general public. That's mostly trying to just

02:42:38.520 think about health information. We saw this during the pandemic. The problem with the vaccines were

02:42:42.180 these cute little things of like, okay, here's the viral, not cute, but ominous little spiky thing.

02:42:47.320 And here's the spike protein in this. And then they show these little movies and you know what

02:42:50.860 people really wanted to know? They wanted to know, how do I know it's going to be safe?

02:42:56.040 And what kind of safety is it going to afford me in terms of my health? Like what are the

02:43:00.740 probabilities? And then even when you told them that, a lot of people were still kind of standoffish

02:43:04.800 about it. And then there was this- Well, actually, I think you just hit on a very important point,

02:43:08.020 which I would argue that someone asked me this question also recently, knowing my love for

02:43:13.100 mathematics. Would the world be a better place if everybody knew calculus through freshman calculus in

02:43:18.240 college? And I said, no, the world would be a much better place if people knew freshman

02:43:23.380 statistics and probability through freshman college. That's right.

02:43:26.580 That's what's missing. That's right. And the way to understand statistics, of course,

02:43:29.940 you have to understand the mode, the medium, et cetera, the mean, the median, and the mode.

02:43:33.840 But what's really important is once you understand standard deviation, you don't care if people

02:43:38.980 know what one or two standard deviations from the mean is. You want them to know what it represents.

02:43:44.760 In other words, there's a verb in there.

02:43:46.280 Well, you also want them to understand what probability means. A 2% chance that something

02:43:50.800 is going to happen, what does that mean? Because that thing is either going to happen or not going

02:43:55.340 to happen. There's a binary outcome. Let's just make it simple. But how do you imagine that a

02:44:01.280 priority? How does expected value fit into that? And that, I think, gets to this point you raise,

02:44:06.560 which is it is important. And I think that's why so much scientific communication got destroyed

02:44:13.680 during the pandemic. You had the people who were in charge treating everybody like idiots. So they

02:44:21.400 didn't want to take the time to explain probabilistic things. Is the vaccine safe? Yes,

02:44:27.200 it's safe on average. Is there any chance of an adverse outcome? Of course there is. There's a chance

02:44:33.400 of an adverse outcome when you take a Tylenol or a baby aspirin. And we have to be able to sort of talk

02:44:38.440 through that. That's the thing that just keeps me up at night is like, why can't we introduce nuance

02:44:45.240 when it matters and not be fooled by noisy nuance that doesn't matter? Which people like to interject

02:44:52.520 as a way to, at the worst, hide their nefarious intentions and at the best, miss the point.

02:45:00.620 Right. No, I think that people were treated like idiots during the pandemic and they responded

02:45:04.700 in a very angry way. And when you treat people like idiots, they act like idiots or they get angry.

02:45:10.560 Or it's like a teenager who realizes that their parents don't understand anything. You know,

02:45:14.540 when people start seeing a lot of flip-flopping in messaging, I think that when people understand

02:45:20.500 or at least can visualize or experience the verb action of biology, they are forever changed.

02:45:26.680 If I give you 50 facts about the brain, it doesn't change you. But if I explain the process

02:45:33.900 underlying even just five of your daily experiences or what it means when you get tired,

02:45:39.640 what that is, how to ameliorate that, what it means when you get stressed and how to deal with

02:45:44.100 that. If I teach you the mechanisms that underlie those tools, then the tools are forever embedded

02:45:51.120 in you. Now, one has to be very careful because I, I always say the best case is where you can teach

02:45:55.340 people something that it works the first time. And every time like sunlight viewing, you know,

02:45:59.700 in a two, three days, everything's changed. If you're doing that consistently,

02:46:02.480 the right times or certain patterns of breathing for stress mitigation or et cetera, or exercise

02:46:07.640 for that matter. But you have to be very careful because if you give people something with the

02:46:12.360 promise that it works the first time and every time, and it doesn't, then you lose trust. So you

02:46:18.020 have to build trust over time. And again, I don't know the proper language for this, but I think

02:46:22.060 once people understand mechanisms, it must be the same way that physicians or psychologists start to

02:46:27.660 see it an interaction between two different people. So it was peanuts cartoons. It was like

02:46:31.740 chatter between the two of them, but it's the dynamics and they go, aha, the algorithm is this,

02:46:37.820 here's what's going on here. Here's how to fix it. And I think we need a better understanding of

02:46:42.340 algorithms. I mean, you're not going to teach somebody calculus by giving them, showing them

02:46:46.000 a problem set and a solution. You're going to teach them how you arrive at solutions to any problem

02:46:51.300 set using a particular algorithm, more or less. One way I think about it in calculus specifically

02:46:56.540 is if you can come to understand things from first principles and never go into things where

02:47:01.560 you have to memorize anything, the less you can rely on rote memory, the better. It's been great

02:47:07.280 sitting down with you and talking about this stuff. You covered a lot of stuff and none of it is sort of

02:47:12.900 what I had on my agenda, but that's not unusual for a podcast. I don't know how much you experience

02:47:16.940 that. All the time. Yeah. You sort of go into it with some thoughts, you get onto a tangent and

02:47:22.140 it's super interesting. And so I'm glad we got to spend this time together and I look forward to

02:47:25.580 sitting down and doing it again. Hopefully, like I said, it's just a great excuse to drag you back

02:47:28.640 to Austin. Yeah. I'd love to do it again. And I want to say thank you for being a mentor before you

02:47:34.680 even knew it as a model and podcaster of how to handle oneself professionally in public facing role

02:47:40.420 and for the information you share. And now more formally as a mentor, because I call you all the

02:47:45.080 time asking for advice in a number of different domains of life, whether you like it or not,

02:47:49.260 and also for being a friend. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The

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02:50:24.600 So,

02:50:26.980 you

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02:50:33.440 Thank you.

The Peter Attia Drive - April 03, 2023

#249 ‒ How the brain works, Andrew's fascinating backstory, improving scientific literacy, and more ｜ Andrew Huberman, Ph.D.

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