Huberman Lab - Dr. Lex Fridman: Navigating Conflict, Finding Purpose & Maintaining Drive

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Dr. Lex Friedman. Dr. Lex Friedman is an expert in electrical and computer engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He is also the host of the Lex Friedman podcast, which initially started as a podcast focused on technology and science of various kinds, including computer science and physics, but rapidly evolved to include guests and other topics as a matter of focus,

Starting point is 00:00:38 including sport. For instance, Dr. Lex Friedman is a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and he's had numerous guests on who come from the fields of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu from the coaching side and from the competitor side. He also has shown an active interest in topics such as chess and essentially anything that involves intense activation and engagement of the mind and or body. In fact, the Lex Freeman and podcasts has evolved to take on very difficult topics such as mental health. He's had various psychiatrists and other guests on

Starting point is 00:01:10 that relate to mental health and mental illness, as well as guests focused on geopolitics and some of the more controversial issues that face our times. He's had comedians, he's had scientists, he's had friends, he's had enemies on his podcast. Lex has a phenomenal, I would say, a one in an 8 billion ability to find these people, make them comfortable, and in that comfort both try to understand them and to confront them and to push them so that we all learn. All of which is to say that Lex Friedman is no longer just an accomplished scientist. He certainly is that, but he has also become one of the more preeminent thought leaders on the

Starting point is 00:01:51 planet. And if there's anything that really captures the essence of Lex Friedman, it's his love of learning, his desire to share with us, the human experience, and to broaden that experience so that we all may benefit. In many ways, our discussion during today's episode captures the many facets of Lex Friedman, although no conversation, of course, could capture them all. We sit down to the conversation just days after

Starting point is 00:02:13 Lex returned from Ukraine, where he deliberately placed himself into the tension of that environment in order to understand the geopolitics of the region and to understand exactly what was happening at the level of the ground and the people there. You may notice that he carries quite a lot of both emotion and knowledge and understanding, and yet in a very classic Lex Friedman way, you'll notice that he's able to zoom out of his own experience around any number of different topics and view them through a variety

Starting point is 00:02:43 of lenses so that first of all, everyone feel included, but most of all, so that everyone learns something new, that is to gain new perspective. Our discussion also ventures into the waters of social media and how that landscape is changing the way that science and technology are communicated. We also get into the topics of motivation, drive, and purpose, both finding it and executing on that drive and purpose. I should mention that this is episode 100 of the Hubertman Lab podcast, and I would be

Starting point is 00:03:12 remiss if I did not tell you that there would be no Hubertman Lab podcast where it not for Lex Friedman. I was a fan of the Lex Friedman podcast long before I was ever invited on to the podcast as a guest. And after our first recording, Lex was the one that suggested that I start a podcast. He only gave me two pieces of advice. The first piece of advice was start a podcast. And the second piece of advice was that I not just make it me blabbing into the microphone

Starting point is 00:03:38 and staring at the camera. So I can safely say that I at least followed half of his advice and that I am ever grateful for Lex both as a friend, a colleague in science, and now fellow podcaster for making the suggestion that we start this podcast. I already mentioned a few of the topics covered on today's podcast, but I can assure you that there is far more to the person that many of us know as Lex Friedman. If you are somebody interested in artificial intelligence, engineering, or robotics, today's discussion is most certainly for you.

Starting point is 00:04:08 And if you are not, but you are somebody who is interested in world politics and more importantly, the human experience, both the individual and the collective human experience, Lex shares what can only be described as incredible insights into what he views as the human experience and what is optimal in order to derive from our time on this planet. Before you begin, I'd like to emphasize that this

Starting point is 00:04:31 podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium, the so-called electrolytes, and no sugar.

Starting point is 00:04:58 Salt, magnesium, and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular, to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of 1,000 milligrams, that's one gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body

Starting point is 00:05:35 and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement. That's LMNT.com slash Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelementlmnt.com slash Huberman.

Starting point is 00:05:55 And now for my discussion with Dr. Lex Friedman. Welcome back. It's good to be back in a bedroom. This feels like a porn set. I apologize to open that way. I've never feels like a porn set. I apologize to open that way. I've never been in a porn set, so I should admit this. Our studio has been renovated.

Starting point is 00:06:10 So here we are for the monumental recording of episode 100. Episode 100 of the Huberman Lab podcast, which was inspired by the Lex Freeman podcast. Some people already know this story, but I'll repeat it again for those that don't. There would not be a Uber and Lab podcast where not for Lex Freeman because after recording

Starting point is 00:06:32 as a guest on his podcast, a few years ago, he made the suggestion that I started a podcast and he explained to me how it works. And he said, you should start a podcast, but just make sure that it's not you laughing the whole time, Andrew. And I only sort of follow the advice. Yeah, well, you surprised me, surprised the world that you're able to talk for hours

Starting point is 00:06:54 and cite some of the best signs going on and be able to give people advice without many interruptions or edits or any of that. I mean, that takes an incredible amount of skill that you're probably born with and some of it is developed. I mean the whole science community is proud of you man. Stanford is proud of you. So yeah it's a beautiful thing. It was really surprising because it's unclear how a scientist can do a great podcast that's not just shooting the shit about random stuff, but really is giving very structured good advice. That's boiling down the state of the art science into something that's actually useful for people. So that that was impressive It's a holy shit. He actually pulled this off and doing it every week on a different topic That I mean, you know, I'm usually positive, especially for people I love and support, but damn, I thought there's no way he's going to be able to pull this off week after week.

Starting point is 00:07:50 And he's been only getting better and better and better. At a whole rant on recent podcasts, I forget with who, of how awesome you are with Rana Elkalube. She's a emotion recognition person, AI person, and then she didn't know who you were. And I was like, what the hell did you mean? And I just wanted this whole rant of how awesome you are, it's hilarious. Oh well, I'm very gratified to hear this.

Starting point is 00:08:16 It's a little uncomfortable for me to hear, but listen, I'm just really happy if people are getting information that they like and can make actionable. And it was inspired by you. And look, right back at you, I, I've followed a number of your structural formats, a tire. I don't wear a tie. I'm constantly reminded of this by my father, who says, it saw my podcast. He was like, why don't you dress properly like your friend Lex? He literally said that. And to debate that goes back and forth, but nonetheless, how does it feel? Episode 100.

Starting point is 00:08:50 And how does it feel? You know, I can imagine you're here. You're here after so many episodes and done so much. I mean, the number of hours is just insane. The amount of passion, the amount of work you put into this. What's it feel like? It feels great. Um, and it feels very much like the, the horizon is still at the same distance in front of me. You know, every episode I just try and get information there and the process that we talked

Starting point is 00:09:17 about in your podcast, so we won't go into it of collecting information, distilling it down to some simple notes, walking around, listening to music, trying to, you know, figure out what the motifs are, and then, just like you, I don't use a teleprompter or anything like that. There's very minimal notes, so it feels great, and I love it. And again, I'm just grateful to you for inspiring it, and I just want to keep going and do more of it. And I should say, I am also relieved that we're sitting here because you recently went overseas to a very

Starting point is 00:09:51 Intense war zone literally the Ukraine and The entire time that you were there. I was genuinely concerned You know the world's a unpredictable place in. And we don't always get the only vote in what happens to us. So first of all, welcome back safely, one piece, one alive piece. And what was that like? I mean, at a broad level, at a specific level,

Starting point is 00:10:18 what drew you there, what surprised you? And how do you think it changed you in coming back here? I think there's a lot to say but first it is really good to be back. One of the things that when you go to a difficult part of the world or part of the world that's going through something difficult, you really appreciate how great it is to be an American. Everything, the easy access to food, despite what people think, the stable, reliable rule of law, the lack of corruption in that you can trust that if you start a business or if you take on various pursuits in life, that there's not going to be at scale manipulation

Starting point is 00:11:04 of your efforts such that you can't succeed. So this kind of, you know, capitalism in its, in its, the ideal of capitalism is really still burning bright in this country and it really makes you appreciate those aspects. And also just the ability to have a home for generations across generations. So you can have your grandfather live in Kentucky in a certain city and then his children live there and you live there and then you just continues on and on. That's the kind of thing you can have when you don't have war because war destroys entire communities and destroys the histories, generations,

Starting point is 00:11:47 like life stories that stretch across the generations. So I didn't even think about that until you said, just now about photographs, hard drives get destroyed or just abandoned, right? Libraries, I mean nowadays things exist in the cloud, but there's still a lot of material goods that have you know are irreplaceable Right, well even you know in rural parts of the United States that don't exist in the cloud right a lot of people still Well even in towns they still love

Starting point is 00:12:17 The physical photo album of your family a lot of people still store their photographs of families and the VHS tapes and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, but I think there's so many things I've learned and really felt the lessons. One of which is nobody gives a damn when your photos are gone and all that kind of stuff. Your house is gone. The thing time and time again, I saw for people that lost everything is how happy

Starting point is 00:12:48 they are for the people they love the friends the family that are still alive. That's the only thing they talk about that. In fact, they don't mention actually with much dramatic sort of vigor about the trauma of losing your home. They're just non-stop saying, how lucky they are that person X, person Y is still here. And that makes you realize that when you lose everything, it makes you realize what really matters, which is the people in your life.

Starting point is 00:13:20 I mean, a lot of people kind of realize that later in life when you're facing mortality, when you're facing your death, or you get a cancer diagnosis, a lot of people kind of realize that later in life when you're facing mortality, when you're facing your death, or you get a cancer diagnosis, that kind of stuff. I think people here in America, in California, was with the fires, you can still lose your home, you realize like, nah, it doesn't really matter. It's a pain in the ass, but what matters

Starting point is 00:13:41 is still the family, the people, and so on. I think the most intense thing, I talk to several hundred people, what matters is still the family, the people and so on. I think the most intense thing, I talked to several hundred people, some of which is recorded. I've really been struggling to put that out because I have to edit it myself. And so you're talking about 30, 40 hours of footage

Starting point is 00:14:00 and it is emotionally struggling. Yeah, it's emotional struggling. It's extremely difficult. So I talked to a lot of politicians, the number two in the country, number three. I'll be back there to talk to the president to do a three hour conversation. Those are easy to edit.

Starting point is 00:14:13 You know, they're really heartfelt and thoughtful folks from different perspectives on the geopolitics of the war. But the ones that's really hard to edit is like, grandma's that are like in the middle of nowhere, they lost everything, they still have hope, they still have love, and some of them have, some of them, many of them unfortunately, have not hate in their heart. So in February when Russia invaded Ukraine, this is the thing I realized about war. One of the most painful lessons is that war creates generational hate. You know, we sometimes think about wars.

Starting point is 00:14:54 The thing that kills people, kills civilians, kills soldiers, takes away lives, injures people. But we don't directly think about the secondary interstery effects of that, which last decades, which is anyone who's lost the father or mother or daughter or son, they now hate not just the individual soldiers or the leaders that invaded their country, but the entirety of the people. soldiers of the leaders that invaded their country, but the entirety of the people. So it's not that they hate Vladimir Putin

Starting point is 00:15:29 or the Russian military, they hate Russian people. So that tears the fabric of a thing that, for me, you know, my, half my family is from Ukraine, half my family is from Russia, but there's a I remember the pain the triumph of World War II still resonates through my entire family tree and so you remember when the Russians and Ukrainians fought together against this Nazi invasion you remember a lot of that and not to see the fabric of this

Starting point is 00:16:02 And you remember a lot of that. And now to see the fabric of this, people's torn apart completely with hate is really, really, really difficult for me just to realize that things will just never be the same on this particular cultural, historical aspect. But also, there's so many painful ways in which things will never be the same, which is we've seen that it's possible to have a major hot war in the 21st century. I think a lot of people are watching this, China is watching this, India is watching this, United States is watching this, and thinking we can actually have a large scale war. And I think the lessons learned from that might be the kind that lead to a major World War 3 in the 21st century.

Starting point is 00:16:50 So like one of the things I realized watching the whole scene is that we don't know shit about what's going to happen in the 21st century. And it might, we kind of have this intuition like surely there's not going to be another war. It will just coast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:08 Yeah. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal.

Starting point is 00:17:16 Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal.

Starting point is 00:17:24 Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Back to normal. Ironically, in a dark way, it was also the warring 20s when people believed this. There will never be another world war. And 20 years after that, the rise of Nazi Germany, the charismatic leader that captivated the minds of millions and built up a military that can take on the whole world. And so it makes you realize that this is still possible. This is still possible. And then the tension, you see the media machine, the propaganda machine that I've gotten to see every aspect of, it's still fueling that division between America and China, between Russia and India. And then Africa has a complicated thing that's trying to figure out who they

Starting point is 00:18:08 with, who they against. And just this tension is building and building. And like you make you realize, like we might, the thing that might shake human civilization may not be so far off. That's a realization you get to really feel. I mean, there's all kinds of other lessons. And one of which is propaganda is I get a lot of letters, emails, and some of them are full of really intense language, full of hate from every side toward me. Well, the hate is towards me as representing side X and X stands as a variable for every side. So either I'm a Zelensky show or I'm a Putin show or I'm a NATO show or I'm an America, America show, American Empire show or I'm a NATO show or I'm an America, America show, American Empire show, or I'm a Democrat or a

Starting point is 00:19:09 Republican because it's already been in this country politicized. I think there's a sense of Ukraine is this place that's full of corruption, why we're sending money there. I think that's kind of the messaging on the Republican side, on the Democratic side. I'm not even keeping track of the actual messaging and the conspiracy theories and the narratives, but the tension is there and I get to feel it directly. When you get to really experience, there's a large number of narratives that all are extremely confident in themselves that they know the truth. People are convinced, first of all, that they're not being lied to.

Starting point is 00:19:52 People in Russia think there's no propaganda. They think that, yes, yes, there is like state-sponsored propaganda, but we're all smart enough to ignore the sort of lane propaganda that's everywhere. They know that we can think on our own, we know the truth. And everybody kind of speaks in this way. Everybody in the United States says, well, yes, there's mainstream media, they're full of messaging and propaganda. But we're smart, we can think on our own.

Starting point is 00:20:20 Of course, we see through that. Everybody says this. And then the conclusion of their thought is often hatred towards some group. Whatever that group is and the more you've lost the more intense the the feeling of hatred. It's a really difficult field to walk through calmly and with an open mind and try to understand what's really going on. It's super intense.

Starting point is 00:20:48 There's the only words that come to mind as I hear this. You mentioned something that it seems that hate generalizes. It's against an entire group or an entire country. Why do you think it is that hate generalizes and that love may or may not generalize? I've had, so one of the, as you can imagine, the kind of question I asked is, do you have love or hate in your heart? It's a question I asked almost everybody. And then I would dig into this exact question that you're asking.

Starting point is 00:21:25 I think some of the most beautiful things I've heard, which is people that are full of hey, are able to self-introspect about it. They know they shouldn't feel it, but they can't help it. They know that ultimately the thing that helps them and helps everyone is to feel love for fellow man, but they can't help it. They know it's like a drug, they say like hate escalates.

Starting point is 00:21:53 It's like a vicious spiral. You just can't help it. And the question I also asked is, do you think you'll ever be able to forgive Russia? And after much thought, almost, it's split, but most people will say no. I will never be able to forgive. And because of the generalization you talked do nothing, that's as bad or worse than than than being part of the army that invades. So the the people that are just sitting there,

Starting point is 00:22:39 the good Germans, the people that are just quietly going on with their lives, you're just as bad, it's not worse, is their perspective. Earlier you said that going over to the Ukraine as now allowed you to realize just so many of the positives of being here in the United States. I have a good friend, we both know him, I won't name him by name, but we've communicated the three of us from Tier 1 special operations. He spent years doing deployments, really amazing individual. And I remember when the pandemic hit, he said on a text thread, Americans aren't used to the government interfering with their plans. Around the world, many people are familiar with governments You know, around the world, many people are familiar with governments dramatically interfering with their plans, sometimes even in a seemingly random way. Here, we were not braced for that.

Starting point is 00:23:32 I mean, you know, they're... we get speeding tickets and there's lines to vote and things like that. But I think the pandemic was one of the first times, at least in my life that I can remember where it really seemed like the government was impeding what people naturally wanted to do. And that was a shock for people here. And I have a, what might seem like a somewhat mundane question, but it's something that I saw on social media. A lot of people were asking me to ask you. And I was curious about, too, what was a typical day like over there? Were you sleeping in a bed? Were you sleeping on the ground? Everyone seems to want to know what were you eating? Were you eating once a day?

Starting point is 00:24:10 Were you eating your steak? Or were you in fairly deprived conditions over there? I saw a couple photos that you posted out of doors in front of a rubble with pit helmet on in one case, you know, what was a typical day like over there? So there's two modes. One of them, I spent a lot of time in Kiev, which is much safer than it may be obvious to state, but for people who don't know, it's in the middle of the country and it's much safer than the actual front, that the where the battle is

Starting point is 00:24:48 happening. So the much, much safer than Kiev even is Laviv, which is the western part of the country. So the times I spent in Kiev were fundamentally different than the time I spent at the front. And I went to the Horsan region, which is where a lot of really heated battles happening. There's several areas. So there's Harcube. It's in the northeast of the country. And then there's Donbass region, which is east of the country.

Starting point is 00:25:13 And then there's Herzan region, which I'm not good at geography. So is the southeast of the country. And that's where, at least when I was there, was a lot of really heated fighting happening. So when I was in the her son region, there's, you know, it's what you would imagine. The place I stayed at a hotel where all the lights have to stay off. So the entire town, all the lights are off. They have to kind of navigate through the darkness and then use your phone to shine and so on. This is terrible for the circadian system. Yeah have to kind of navigate through the darkness and then use your phone to shine and so on.

Starting point is 00:25:46 This is terrible for the circadian system. Yeah, that's exactly how can I do this? Where's my element and the fledigreens? How can I function? No. So there's, I think it was balanced by the deep appreciation of being alive. Right, no, I mean, this is the reason I asked. This is the reason I ask is, you know, we get used to all these creature comforts.

Starting point is 00:26:09 And we don't need them, but we often come to depend on them in a way that makes us feel like we need them. Yeah, but very quickly, there's something about the intensity of life that you've seen people's eyes because they're living through war that makes you forget all those crucial comforts. And it's it was actually, you know, I'm somebody who hates traveling and so on. I love the creature habits. I love I love the comfort of the ritual, right? But all of that was forgotten very quickly. Just the the intensity of feeling, the intensity of love that people have for each other. That was obvious. In terms of food, so there's a curfew.

Starting point is 00:26:50 So, depends on what part of the country, but usually you basically have to scammer home at like 9 p.m. So, the hard curfew in a lot of places is 11 p.m. at night, but by then you like you have to be home. So in some places is 10. So at 9 p.m. you start not going home, which for me was was kind of wonderful also because I get to spend, I get to be forced to spend time alone and think for many hours in wherever I'm staying, which is really nice and everybody is a calmness and a quietness to the whole thing. In terms of food, once a day, just the food is incredibly cheap and incredibly delicious. People are still... One of the things that can still take pride in is making the best possible food they can.

Starting point is 00:27:47 So meat, but they do admire American meat so the meat is not as great as it could be in that country, but I eat porridge every day, you know, all that kind of stuff. Mostly meat. So spend the entire day wake up in the morning with coffee, spend the entire day talking to people, which for me is very difficult because of the intensity of the story is one after the other, after the other, we just talk to regular people, talk to soldiers, talk to politicians,

Starting point is 00:28:17 all kinds of soldiers, talk to people there who are doing rescue missions so Americans hang out with Tim Kennedy. Oh yeah, I'm great Tim Kennedy. The great Tim Kennedy who also him and many others revealed to me one of the many reasons I'm proud to be an American is how trained and skilled and effective American soldiers are. I guess for listeners of this podcast, maybe we should familiarize them with who Tim Kennedy is because I realize that a number of them will know.

Starting point is 00:28:55 How do you do that? How do you try to summarize a man? Right. And in, let's say we can be accurate but not exhaustive as any good data are accurate but not exhaustive. Very skilled and accomplished MMA fighter, very skilled and accomplished, former special operations. And we're American, Patriot and podcast or two, right? Does he have his own podcast?

Starting point is 00:29:19 Maybe. Maybe. We know Andy Stump has his own podcast. Yes, he's amazing podcast. Yeah, it's just great. Yeah. Clearing hot podcasts with Andy Stump has his own podcast. Yes, it's amazing podcast. Yeah, it's great. Yeah Clearing hot podcast with Andy Stump. But also Tim Kennedy's like the embodiment of America into the to the most beautiful and the most ridiculous degree. So he's like Would you imagine What is the team America that?

Starting point is 00:29:42 like I just imagine him like shirtless on a tank rolling into an inventory just screaming at the top of his lungs. That's just his personality. But not posturing. That's it. Yeah, he actually does the work as they said. So this is the thing he really embodies that.

Starting point is 00:29:57 Now some of that is just his personality humor. I'd like to sort of comment on the humor of things not just with him. It's very one other interesting thing I've learned. But also when he's actually helping people, he's extremely good at what he does, which is building teams that rescue, that go into the most dangerous areas of Ukraine, dangerous areas anywhere else, and they get the job done. And, one of the things that hurt time and time again, which, which really interesting

Starting point is 00:30:26 to me that Ukrainian soldiers said that, you know, comparing Ukrainian, Russian and American soldiers, American soldiers are the bravest, which was very interesting for me to hear given how high the morale is for the Ukrainian soldiers. But that just reveals that training enables you to be brave. It's not just about how well trained they are and so on. It's how intense and ferocious they are in the fighting. It makes you realize this is American army, not just to the technology, especially the

Starting point is 00:30:59 special force guys. They're still one of the most effective and terrifying armies in the world. And I'm listening just for context, I'm somebody who is for the most part anti-war, a pacifist, but you get to see you know some of the realities of war kind of wake you up to what needs to get done to protect to what needs to get done to protect sovereignty, to protect some of the values, to protect civilians and homes and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes war has to happen. And I should also mention on the Russian side, because while I haven't gotten to experience the Russian side yet,

Starting point is 00:31:41 I do fully plan to travel to Russia. As I've told everybody, I was very upfront with everybody about this. I would like to hear the story of Russians. But I do know from the Ukrainian side, like the Gramas, I love Gramas. They told me stories that the Russians really, the ones that entered their villages, they really, really believe they're saving Ukraine from Nazis, from Nazi occupation. So they feel that the Ukraine is under control of Nazi organizations, and they believe they're saving the country that's their brothers and sisters.

Starting point is 00:32:18 So I think propaganda and I think truth is a very difficult thing to arrive in that war zone. I think in the 21st century, when I think you realize that so much of war, even more so than in the past, is an information war. And people that just use Twitter for their source of information might be surprised to know how much misinformation There is on Twitter like real Narratives being sold and it's so it's really hard to know who to believe and Through all of that you have to try to keep an open mind and ultimately ignore the powerful and listen to actual citizens actual people That's the other, maybe obvious lesson, is that

Starting point is 00:33:10 wars waged by powerful rich people, and it's the poor people that suffer. And that's just visible time and time again. You mentioned the fact that people still enjoy food or the pleasure of cooking or there's occasional humor or maybe frequent humor. And O'Jaco, Willink, has talked about this in warfare and all the aperture of the mind. The classic story that comes to mind is the one of Victor Frankl or Nelson Mandela. You put somebody into a small box of confinement and some people break under those conditions.

Starting point is 00:33:57 And other people find entire stories within a centimeter of concrete that can occupy them. And real stories and richness or humor or love or fascination and surprise. And I find this so interesting that the mind is so adaptable. You know, we talked about creature comforts and then lack of creature comforts. And the way that we can adapt and yet humans are always striving. It seems or one would hope for these better conditions to better their conditions. So as you've come back and you've been here now back in the States for how long after your trip.

Starting point is 00:34:33 Depends on this podcast release, but it felt like I've never left. So practically speaking a couple months. Yeah, and we won't be sure. We're recording this mid-September. So we actually recorded this several years ago be sure we're recording this mid-September, so we actually recorded this several years ago, so we're anticipating the future. This is where we're going to start talking, this is a simulation.

Starting point is 00:34:52 You and Joe, I'm still trying to figure out what that actually means. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. and the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of results of the results of results of the results of the results of the is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health. And those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins, and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great.

Starting point is 00:35:49 If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to atlettegreens.com slash huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's at letitgreens.com slash human to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3K2. I know I speak for many people when I say that we are very happy that you're back. We know

Starting point is 00:36:16 that it's not going to be the first and last trip that there will be others and that you'll be going to Russia as well and presumably other other places as well, in order to explore, and I have to say, as a podcaster and as your friend, I was really inspired that your sense of adventure, and your sense of not just adventure, but thoughtful, respectful adventure, you understood what you were doing. You weren't just going there to get some wartime footage

Starting point is 00:36:42 or something, this wasn't a kick or a thrill. This was really serious and remain serious so thank you for doing it and Please next time you go bring Tim Kennedy And again, I feel like I feel like Tim Kennedy gets you to Well, we'll take it because he really loves going to the most dangerous places and helping people So I think you get me into more trouble and it's worth. And I should mention that I mean, there's many reasons I went, but it's definitely not

Starting point is 00:37:11 something I take lightly or want to do again. So I'm doing things that I don't want to do. I just feel like I have to. You're compelled. So I don't think there's, now I'll definitely talk about it as we all should. There's different areas of the world that are seeing a lot of suffering. Yemen, there's so many atrocities going on in the world today, but this one is just personal to me.

Starting point is 00:37:36 So I want to, I feel like I'm qualified just because of the language. So most of the talking, by the way, I was doing it, it was in Russian. And so because of the language, because of my history, I felt like I had to do this particular thing. I think it's in many ways stupid and dangerous. And that was made clear to me, but I do many things of this nature because the heart says pulls towards that. I'm afraid of death, but I think there's a freedom to, it's almost like, okay, if I die, I want to take full advantage of not having a family currently.

Starting point is 00:38:20 I feel like when you have a family, there's a responsibility for others. So you immediately become more conservative and careful. I feel like I want to take full advantage of this particular moment in my life when you can be a little bit more accepting of risk. So you should definitely reproduce at some point. Maybe before next time you should just freeze some sperm. Really? I think is that what you do with ice bath?

Starting point is 00:38:45 Is that how that works? You know, it's interesting. Here's there's always an opportunity to do some science protocols. You know, there are products on the internet, and there are actually a few decent manuscripts looking at how cold exposure can increase testosterone levels.

Starting point is 00:38:59 But it doesn't happen by the cold directly. Good scientists, as the authors of those papers, were in R, realized that it's the vasoconstriction and then the vasodilation. As people warm up again, there's increased blood flow to the testicles. In women, it seems there's probably increased blood flow to the reproductive organs as well after people warm back up. That seems to cause some hypernourishment of the various cells, the serotonin-litic cells of the testes that lead to increased output of testosterone and

Starting point is 00:39:32 in women testosterone as well. So the cold exposure in any case is obviously, do you do the ice bath? How you into that? I have not done that. As a Russian, you probably consider that a hot tub. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a nice thing to have fun with every once in a while, to warm up. No, I haven't done it. I've been kind of waiting to maybe do it together with you at some point. Great, we have a guide.

Starting point is 00:39:57 No, we have one here. It'll be straight forward for you. I always say that adrenaline comes in waves. And so if you just think about it, walls, like you're going through a number of walls of adrenaline, as opposed to going for time, becomes rather trivial with your G-Gitsu background and whatnot, you'll immediately recognize the physiological sensation, even though it's cold, specifically, it's the adrenaline that makes you want to hop out of the thing.

Starting point is 00:40:17 And you've seen Joe's, so Joe set up a really nice man cave, or it's's naming a cave because it's so big. It's like a network of man caves, but it has ice bath and a sauna next to each other. So we have one of those here ice bath and sauna so we'll have to get you in it when one of these days maybe it's a trouble. Maybe tomorrow. No, though there is a I don't know the underlying physiological basis, but there does seem to be a trend toward truth telling in the sauna. Some people refer to them as truth barrels. Mine's a barrel sauna, shaped like a barrel. Who knows why? Maybe under intense heat derests, people just feel compelled to share. I have a complicated relationship with saunas because of all the weight cutting. Some of the deepest suffering started to interrupt. I've done was in the sauna. I mean, I've gone to some dark places in the sauna.

Starting point is 00:41:11 I wrestle my whole life, judo, gizitsu, and those weight cuts can really test the mind. So you're in truth telling. Yeah, it's a certain kind of truth telling, because you're sitting there and the clock moves slower than it has ever moved in your life. Yeah, so I usually, for the most part, I would try to, you know, have a bunch of sweats, garbage bags and all that kind of stuff and run. That's easier because you can distract the mind and the sauna you can't distract the mind is just you and all the excuses and all the

Starting point is 00:41:46 weaknesses in your mind is coming to the surface and you're just sitting there and sweating or not sweating, that's the worst. And talk about visual aperture. You're in a small box, so it also inspires some claustrophobia, even if you're not claustrophobic. That's absolutely true. And the desire to just get out of the thing is where the adrift, you get a pretty serious adrenaline surge from in the sauna as well. Now the sauna actually, it won't deplete testosterone, but it kills sperm.

Starting point is 00:42:14 So for people that sperm are at 60 day sperm cycles, so if you're trying to donate sperm or, because that's what got us onto this, or fertilize an egg or eggs in whatever format, dish or in vivo, as we say in science, which means, well, you can look it up, folks. The 60-day sperm cycle, so if you go into a really hot sauna or a hot bath or a hot tub, your in 60 days, those sperm are going to be a significantly greater portion than will be dead, will be non-viable. So there's a simple solution, people just put ice pack down there, or a jar, not this jar,

Starting point is 00:42:51 but a jar of cold fluid between the legs and just sit there and, or they go back and forth between the ice path and the sauna. But you probably, if you're gonna go back over there, you should freeze sperm. We're gonna do a couple episodes on fertility when it's relatively inexpensive and you're young so you should freeze sperm. We're gonna do a couple episodes on fertility when it's relatively inexpensive. And you're young so you should probably do it now

Starting point is 00:43:08 because there is a association with autism as males get older. It's not a strong one, it's significant, but it's still a small contribution to the autism phenotype. As you age, don't sperm get wiser or no? There's no signs to back that. No, but men can conceive healthy children in a considerable age, but in any case,

Starting point is 00:43:28 but no, they don't get wiser. It's like, what happens is interesting age stake. Well, it's a little bit like the maturation of the brain in the sense that some of the sperm get much better at swimming and then many of them get less good. Motility is a strong correlate of the DNA of the sperm. This is probably a good time to announce that I'm selling my sperm as an NFTs.

Starting point is 00:43:46 I was gonna see how much that tell you. Oh my goodness, writing the... Well, your children, your future children, and my future children are supposed to do Jiu-Jitsu together since I've only done the one Jiu-Jitsu class, so I'm strongly vested in you having in children, but only in the friendly way. Well, yeah, friendly competition kind of way, yeah. you having in children, but only in the friendly way.

Starting point is 00:44:09 Well, yeah, friendly competition kind of way, yeah. Dominance of the clan, yeah. For sure. So moving on to science, but still with our minds in the Ukraine. Did you encounter any scientists or see any universities, or as we know in this country and in Europe and in elsewhere, you know,

Starting point is 00:44:29 science takes infrastructure, you need buildings, you need laboratories, you need robots, you need a lot of equipment, and you need minus 80 freezers, and you need incubators, and you need money, and you need technicians, and typically it's been the wealthier countries that have been able to do more research for sake of research and development of and productization.

Starting point is 00:44:52 Certainly the Ukraine had some marvelous universities and marvelous scientists. What's going on with science and scientists over there and and gosh can we even calculate the loss of discovery that is occurring as a consequence of this conflict. So science goes on. The before the war Ukraine had a very vibrant tech sector that which means engineering and all that kind of stuff. And Kiev has a lot of excellent universities and they still go on. The biggest hit I would say is not the infrastructure of the science, but the fact because of the high morale, everybody is joining the military.

Starting point is 00:45:35 So everybody is going to the front to fight, including you know, you know, you know, Andrew Huberman would be fighting and not because you have to, but because you want to. And everybody you know would be really proud that you're fighting. Even though everyone tries to convince, you know, Andrew Huberman, you have much better ways to contribute. There's deep honor in fighting for your country, yes, but there are better ways to contribute to your country than just picking up a gun that you're not that trained with and going to the front still they do it the scientists engineers CEOs

Starting point is 00:46:11 professors Students men and actors men and women obviously primarily men, but men and women like Much more than you would see in other militaries, women are everybody. Everybody wants to fight. Everybody's proud of fighting. There's no discussion of kind of pacifism. Should we be fighting? Should this right? Does this, you know, it's everybody's really proud of fighting.

Starting point is 00:46:37 So that's a, so there's this kind of black hole that pulls everything, all the resource into the war effort. That's not just financial, but also psychological. So it's like, if you're a scientist, it feels like, it feels like, almost like you're dishonoring humanity by continuing to do things you were doing before. There's a lot of people that converted to being soldiers. They literally watch a YouTube video of how to shoot a particular gun, how to arm a drone with a grenade. You know, if you're a tech person, you know how to work with drones, so you're going to use that, use whatever skills you got, figure out whatever skills you got,

Starting point is 00:47:23 and how to use them to help the effort on the front. And so that's a big hit. But that said that, you know, I've talked to a lot of folks in Kiev, faculty, primarily in the tech economics space. So I didn't get a chance to interact with folks who are on the biology, chemistry, neuroscience, side of things, but that still goes on. So one of the really impressive things about Ukraine is that they're able to maintain

Starting point is 00:47:49 infrastructure like road, food supply, all that kind of stuff, education while the war's going on, especially in Kiev. The war started where nobody knew whether Kiev was going to be taken by the Russian forces. It was surrounded. And a lot of experts from outside were convinced that Russia would take Kiev. And they didn't. And one of the really impressive things as a leader, one of the things I really experienced is that a lot of people criticized Zelensky before the war.

Starting point is 00:48:24 He only had about like 30% approval rate. A lot of people didn't criticized Zelensky before the war. He only had about like 30% approval rate. A lot of people didn't like Zelensky. But one of the great things he did as a leader, which I'm not sure many leaders would be able to do, is when Kiev was clearly being invaded, he chose to stay in the capital. Everybody, all the American military, the intelligence agencies, NATO, his own staff, advisors, all told him to flee and he stayed.

Starting point is 00:48:55 And so that's, I think that was a beacon, a symbol for the rest, for the University, for science, for the infrastructure that we're staying to. And that kept the whole thing going. There's an interesting social experiment that happened. I think for folks who are interested in sort of gun control in this country in particular, is one of the decisions they made early on is to give guns to everybody. Semiautomatics. Early on in the war. Early on in the war.

Starting point is 00:49:25 Early on in the war. OK. So everybody got a gun. They also released a bunch of prisoners from prison because there was no staff to keep the prisons running. So there's a very interesting psychological experiment of like, how is this going this gonna go everybody has a gun? Are they gonna start robbing places that they're going to start taking advantage of a chaotic situation and

Starting point is 00:49:52 What happened is that crime went to zero? So it turned out that this as an experiment worked wonderfully. Let's say case where love generalized Yes, or at least hate did not we don't know if it's love or it's sort of lack of initiative or self-common culture directed. Yeah, I don't... Right. I think that's very correct to say that it wasn't hate that was unifying people. It was love of country, love of community.

Starting point is 00:50:21 It's the probably the same thing that will happen to humans when like aliens invade. It's the common effort, everybody puts everything else to the side. Plus just the share amount of guns, similar to like Texas, you realize like, well, there's going to be a self-correcting mechanism very quickly. Because the rule of law was also put aside, right? Like, basically, the police force lost a lot of power because everybody else has guns and they're kind of taking the law into their own hands. And that system, at least in this particular case, in this particular moment in human history worked. So interesting lesson, you know? I'd, it is. I had an interesting contrast that I'll share with you

Starting point is 00:51:06 because you mentioned Texas. So not so long ago, I was in Austin, often visit you or others in Austin, as you know. And many doors that I walked past, including a school, said no firearms passed this point. You know, as a sticker on the door. You see this on hospitals sometimes, I saw this at Baylor College of Medicine, etc. relatively common to see in Texas, not so common in California. And then I flew to the San

Starting point is 00:51:33 Francisco Bay Area, was walking by an elementary school in my old neighborhood and saw a similar sticker and looked at it and it said no peanuts or other allergy-containing foods pass this point on the door of this elementary school. So quite a different contrast, you know, guns and peanuts. Now, peanut allergies, obviously, are very serious for some people. Although there's great research out of Stanford showing that early exposure to peanuts can prevent the allergies. It's, but don't start rubbing yourself in peanut butter,

Starting point is 00:52:03 folks, if you have a peanut allergy, that's not the best way to deal with it. In any case, the contrast of what's dangerous, the contrast of, you know, the familiarity with guns versus no familiarity, you know, in Israel and elsewhere, you know, see machine guns in the airport in Germany, Frankfurt, you see machine guns in the airport, not so common in the United States. So again, there's, I feel like there's this aperture vision, there's this aperture of pleasures and creatures, versus creature comforts and lack of creature comforts. And then there's this aperture

Starting point is 00:52:35 of danger, right? People who are familiar with guns, you know, are familiar with people coming in, setting their firearm on the table and eating dinner, you know, but if you're not accustomed to that, it's jarring. Right. I should mention, people know this throughout human history, but the human ability to get assimilated, no, get used to violence is incredible. So like, you could be living in a peaceful time like we're here now and there

Starting point is 00:53:06 will be one explosion, like a 9-11 type of situation. That'd be a huge shock. Terrifying everybody freaks out. The second one is a huge drop off in how you freaked out you get. And with the matter of days, sometimes hours, it becomes the normal. I've talked to so many people in Harcayd, which is one of the towns that's seen a lot of heated battle You ask them is it safe there In fact when I went to the Close and closer the war zone. Yes people is it safe and There are answers usually yeah, it's pretty safe. It's all signal the noise

Starting point is 00:53:43 it like Usually, yeah, it's pretty safe. It's all signal the noise. It like nobody has told me, except like Western reporters sitting in the West side of Ukraine. It's really dangerous here. Everyone's like, yeah, you know, it's good. Like my uncle just died yesterday. Like he was shot. But it's pretty, you know, it's pretty good.

Starting point is 00:54:03 Like the, the farm's still running. Like the the farm still running like the the they how do I put it? They focus on the positive that's one, but it's there's a deeper truth though, which is you just get used to difficult situations and the stuff that make you happy and stuff that make you upset is relative to that new normal that you establish. Well, I grew up in California and there were a lot of earthquakes. I remember the 89 quake, I remember the Embarcador, a freeway pancake on top of people and cars. I remember I moved to Southern California,

Starting point is 00:54:31 there was a Northridge quake, wherever I moved, there seemed to be earthquakes. I never worry about earthquakes, ever. I just don't, in fact, I don't like the destruction they cause, but everyone's a while an earthquake will roll through and it's kind of exciting. It sounds like a train coming through. It's like, wow, like the earth is moving. You know, again, I don't want anyone to get harmed,

Starting point is 00:54:46 but I enjoy a good rumble coming through, not in the less. It's signal the noise. But if I saw a tornado freak out and people from the Midwest are probably comfortable with, you know, dangable, a great wrestler from the Midwest. So you know, and I've never met, but I have great respect for he's probably, you know, he's a tornado. I was like, yeah, maybe, you know, know so so I think signal the noise is is real

Starting point is 00:55:08 before I neglect although I won't forget speaking of signal the noise and environment you are returning to or have gone back to one of your original natural habitats, which is the message you should do of technology. Which is natural habitat. It's actually difficult to pronounce in full, MIT, right? So you've been spending some time there teaching and doing other things. Tell us what you're up to with MIT recently. Well, I'm really glad that you being on the West Coast

Starting point is 00:55:42 know the difference in like Boston, New York. I feel like a lot of people think it's like the East Coast It's already different. It's especially to Boston into New Yorkers. Yeah, very aggressive. Oh my goodness Yeah, I love it. I get a gave Lectures there in front of a in-person crowd what were you talking about for the AI so different aspects of AI and for the AI, so different aspects of AI. And robotics machine learning, machine learning. So for people who know the artificial intelligence field, they usually don't use the term AI

Starting point is 00:56:11 and the people from outside use AI. The biggest breakthroughs in the machine learning field was some discussion of robotics and so on. Yeah, this in person is wonderful. I'm a sucker for that. I really avoided teaching or any kind of interaction during COVID because people put a lot of emphasis on but also got comfortable with remote teaching

Starting point is 00:56:35 and I think nobody enjoyed it. Except sort of there's a notion that it's much easier to do because you don't have to, you know, you don't have to travel, you can do it in your pajamas kind of thing. But when you actually get to do it, you don't get the same kind of joy that you do when you're teaching. As a student, you don't get the same kind of joy of learning. It's not as effective and all that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:57:02 So to be in person together with people, people to see their eyes to get their excitement Get the questions and all the interactions that was awesome and I'm still A sucker and a believer in the the ideal of MIT of the university. I think it's an incredible place. There's something in the air still, but it really hit the pandemic hit universities thought hard because, and I can say this is not using it, this is me saying it, that administrations, as in all cases, when people criticize institutions, the pandemic has given more power to the administration and taken away power

Starting point is 00:57:40 from the faculty and the students. And that's a, from everybody involved, including the administration, that's a concern because the university is about the teachers and the students, that should be primary. And whenever you have a pandemic, there's an opportunity to increase the amount of rules. Like one of the things that really bothered me, and I'll scream from the top of the MIT dome about this,

Starting point is 00:58:03 is they've instituted a new Tim ticket system, which is if you're a visitor to the campus at MIT, you have to register, you have to first of all show that you're vaccinated, but more importantly, there's a process to visiting. You need to get permission to visit. One of the reasons I loved MIT, unlike some other institutions, MIT just leaves the door open to anyone. In classrooms, you can roll in the ridiculous characters, the students that are kind of like usually doing business stuff or economics can roll into a physics class and just, you

Starting point is 00:58:39 know, you're kind of not allowed, but it's a gray area. So you let that happen. And that creates a flourishing of the community. That was beautiful. And I think adding extra rules puts a squeeze on and limits some of the flourishing. And I hope some of that dissipates over time as we kind of let go of the risk of version

Starting point is 00:59:03 that was created by the pandemic. Because we kind of enter the normal return back some of that flourishing can happen. But when you're actually in there with the students, yeah, it was magic, I love it, I love it. Well, some of your earliest videos on your YouTube channel were of you in the classroom, right? That's how this all started.

Starting point is 00:59:21 Yeah, that's how YouTube, like putting stuff on YouTube is terrifying, right? Well, especially at the time when you did it again, you're a pioneer in that sense. You did that, Jordan Peterson did that. Putting up lectures is, yeah, I would, I teach still everyone to I teach direct a course and I'll be doing even more teaching going forward.

Starting point is 00:59:45 But the idea of those videos being on the web is yeah, that spikes my cord is all a little bit. Yeah, it's terrifying because you get to and everybody has a different experience like for me being a junior of research scientists, the kind of natural concerns like like, who am I? When I was given this lecture, it's like, I don't deserve any of this. I think I was a tier of humility coming through, and I actually think that humility on the part of an instructor is good

Starting point is 01:00:14 because those that think they are entitled and who else could give this lecture, then I worry more. I think it's, once heard, I don't know if it's still true that the, at Caltech, right, the Great California Institute of Technology, not far from here, that many of the faculty are actually afraid of the students, not physically afraid, but they're intellectually afraid because the students are so smart. And teaching there

Starting point is 01:00:40 can be downright frightening, I've heard. But that's great, keeps everybody on their toes. And I think, and I've been corrected in lecture before at Stanford and elsewhere. You know, when my lab was at UC San Diego, where someone will say, wait, you know, last lecture, you said this, and now you said that, it worked on the podcast, you know, and I think it's that moment where, you know,

Starting point is 01:01:01 you sometimes feel that urge to defend you, oh, you're right. And I think it depends on moment where you sometimes feel that urge to defend you, oh, you're right. And I think it depends on how one was trained. My graduate advisor was wonderful at saying, I don't know all the time. And she went to Harvard, Radcliffe, UCSF, and Caltech, and Brilliant Woman. And I had no problem saying like, I don't know. I don't have that problem. So I usually have two guys that somebody speaks up, grab them, drag them out of the room,

Starting point is 01:01:25 never seem again. Everybody is really supportive. I don't understand the amount of love and support I get. Especially when the last few students are there and everybody seems to be nodding as you're going, no, I think that I'd love to sit in on one of your lectures. I know very little about AI machine learning or robotics. But I've never talked to MIT.

Starting point is 01:01:44 Have you ever given lectures? Oh, yeah. And when I went on the job market as a faculty member, my final two choices were between MIT P.Cour. I had an on-paper offer. Wonderful place, wonderful place to do neuroscience. And UC San Diego, which is a wonderful neuroscience program. In the end, it made sense for me to be on the West Coast

Starting point is 01:02:03 for personal reasons. But there's some amazing neuroscience program. In the end, it made sense for me to be on the West Coast for personal reasons, but it was some amazing neuroscience going on there, goodness. And that's always been true and it's going to continue. It's been a long time since I've been invited back there. Oddly enough, when I started doing more podcasting and I still run a lab, but I shrunk my lab considerably when I was doing, as I've done more podcasting,

Starting point is 01:02:23 I've received fewer academic lecture invites, which makes sense. But now they're sort of coming back. And so when people invite now, I always say, do you want me to talk about the ventral thalamus and its role in anxiety and aggression, or do you want me to talk about the podcast? And my big fear is I'm going to go back to you a lecture about the retinol or something and I'll start off with an athletic greens read or something like that. Just reflexively.

Starting point is 01:02:45 Just kidding. That wouldn't happen. But listen, I think it's great to continue to keep a foot in both places. I was so happy to hear that you're teaching at MIT because podcasting is one thing. Teaching is another, and there's overlap there in the Venn diagram. But listen to students that get to sit in on one of your lectures, and you may see me sitting there in the audience soon, when I creep into your class. Some glasses.

Starting point is 01:03:07 That's right. Wearing a red shirt, you won't recognize me. We're certainly receiving a great gift. I've watched your lectures on YouTube, even the early ones. Listen, I know you'd be a phenomenal teacher. Yeah, there's something about, so I'm also doing like, they said it pretty late last night, working for a deadline on a paper. One of the things that I hope to do for, hopefully, the rest of my life is to continue publishing. And I think it's really important to do that,

Starting point is 01:03:42 even if you continue the podcast because you want to be just on your own intellectual and scientific journey as you do podcasting. Because at least for me, and especially on the engineering side, because I want to build stuff. And I think that keeps your ego in check, keeps you humble, because I think if you talk too much on a microphone, you start getting, you might loose track of, you know, the grounding that comes from engineering, from science and the scientific process

Starting point is 01:04:15 and the criticisms that you get, all that kind of stuff. And how slow and iterative it is. We have two papers right now that are in the revision stage, and it's been a very long road. And I was asked this recently because I met with my chairman. He said, do you want to continue running a library? You're just going to go full-time on the podcast. Stanford has been very supportive, I must say.

Starting point is 01:04:31 As I know, MIT has been a view. I said, oh, I absolutely want to continue to be involved in research and do research. We start talking about these papers. We're looking over my, this was my yearly review and looking back, goodness, these papers have been in play for a very long time. So it's a long row, but you learn more and more and the more time you spend, you know, biopically looking at a bunch of data, the more you learn and the more you think. I totally agree, you know, talking into these devices for podcasts is wonderful because it's fun. It relieves a certain itch that we both have and hopefully it lands some important information

Starting point is 01:05:04 out there for people. But doing research is like the, I, you know, I'd, I guess if you know, you know, there's like the, you know, the unpeeling over the onion knowing that there could be something there, there's just nothing like it. I mean, you do, especially with the pandemic, and for me me both Twitter and the podcast have made me much more impatient about the slowness of the review process because Twitter will do that. But even with podcasts you have a cool you'll find something cool and then you have ideas and you'll just say them and they'll be out pretty quickly. They're waiting to post right now about something that we both found

Starting point is 01:05:44 interesting and it's out in the world. And you can write up something like, there is a culture and computer science of posting stuff on archives and preprints that don't get in your review. And sometimes they don't even go to the review process ever because people just start using them if it's code. And it's like, what's the point of this?

Starting point is 01:06:01 It works like the self-evident that it works because people are using it. And that, I think, applies more to engineering fields because it's an actual tool that works. It doesn't matter if you don't have to scientifically prove that it works. It works because it's using for a lot of people. Well, it's our gender up, but just for a point of reference,

Starting point is 01:06:20 the famous paper describing the double helix, which earned Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize and should have earned Rosalind Franklin the Nobel Prize. Two, of course, but they got it for the structure of DNA, of course, that paper was never reviewed at nature. They published it because its importance was self-evident or whatever they just said. So like the editors?

Starting point is 01:06:41 It was that purely editorial decision. I believe, I mean, that's what I was told by someone who's currently in edit nature. If that turns out to not be correct, someone will tell us in the comments for sure. Well, I think that's pretty interesting. That's really interesting. Perhaps the most significant discovery in biology and bioengineering, which leading to bioengineering as well, of course, of the last century was not peer reviewed. Yeah, but so Eric Weinstein,

Starting point is 01:07:06 but many others have talked about this, which is, I mean, I don't think people understand how poor the peer review process is. It's just the amount of, because you think peer review means all the best peers get together and they review your stuff. But it's unpaid work and it's usually a small number of people and it's a very, they have a very select perspective so they might not be the best person,

Starting point is 01:07:33 especially if it's super novel work. And as you as time to do it, I'm on a bunch of editorial boards still. Why I don't know, but I enjoy the pure review process and sending papers out. Oftentimes, the best scientists are very busy and don't have time to review. And oftentimes the more premier journals will select from a kind of a unique kit of very good scientists who are very close to the work, sometimes they'll be very far from the work.

Starting point is 01:07:57 They really depend on us. And both have negatives, right? If you're very close to the work, there's jealousy and all those basic human things very far from the work, you might not appreciate the nuance, contribution, all that kind of stuff. And their psychology started to interrupt again, but a good friend of mine who's extremely successful

Starting point is 01:08:13 neuroscientist, Howard Hughes investigator, et cetera, always told me that they, I won't even say whether or not who they are, they select their reviewers on the basis of who has been publishing very well recently, because they assume that that person is going to be more benevolent because they've been doing well so that the love expands. It's a good point to that, actually. But the idea is that editors might actually be the best reviewers.

Starting point is 01:08:37 So that was the traditional, that's the thing I wanted to mention. Eric Weinstein talks about the back several decades ago. Editors have much more power. And there's something to be made for that because they, editors are the ones who are responsible for crafting the journal. They really are invested in this. And they're also often experts, right? So it makes sense for an editor to have a bit of power in this case.

Starting point is 01:09:03 Like, usually, if an idea is truly novel, you could see it. It makes sense for an editor to have more power in that regard. Of course, for me, I think pure review should be done the way tweets are done, which is like crowdsourced. Or Amazon reviews. I love the crowd decide. I have the crowd decide. And let the crowd add depth and breadth in context for the contribution. So, you know, if the paper overstates the degree of contribution, the crowd will check

Starting point is 01:09:37 you on that. If there's not enough support or like the conclusions are not supported by the evidence, the crowd will check you on that. There could be of course a political bickering that enters the picture, especially on very controversial topics, but I think I trust the intelligence of human beings to figure that out. I think most of us are trying to figure this whole process out. I just wish it was happening much faster because on the important topics, the review cycle could be faster. And we learned that through COVID that Twitter was actually pretty effective at doing science communication.

Starting point is 01:10:13 It was really interesting. Some of the best scientists took to Twitter to communicate their own work and other people's work and always putting into sort of the caveats that it's not peer reviewed and so on, but it's all out there, and the data just moves so fast. And if you want stuff to move fast, Twitter is the best medium of communication for that. It's cool to see. I'm now on Twitter more regularly, and initially it was just Instagram, and I remember we used UNI used to have these over dinner or drink conversations where I'd say I don't Understand Twitter and you'd say I don't understand Instagram. And of course we understand how it worked and how to work

Starting point is 01:10:52 Each respective platform, but I think we were both trying to figure out, you know What is driving the psychology of these different venues because they are quite distinct psychologies? For whatever reason I think I'm finally starting to understand Twitter and enjoy it a little bit. Initially, I wasn't prepared for the level of kind of reflexive scrutiny. It sounds a little bit oxymoronic, but that people kind of like pick up on one small thing

Starting point is 01:11:17 and then drive it down that trajectory. It didn't seem to be happening quite as much on Instagram, but I love your tweets. I do have a question about your Twitter account and how do you have internal filters of what you'll put up and won't put up? Because sometimes you'll put up things that are about life and reflections other times you'll put up things

Starting point is 01:11:39 like what you're excited about in AI or of course point to various podcasts, including your own, but others as well. How do you approach social media? How do you regulate your behavior on there in terms of how much time, etc. I know you've talked about that before, but what's your mindset around social media when you go on there to either post or forage or respond to information. I think I try to add some, not the song cliche, but some love out there into the world,

Starting point is 01:12:15 into, as OJ Simpson calls it, Twitter world. I think there is this viral negativity that can take hold. And I tried to find the right language to add good vibes out there. And it's actually really, really tricky because there's something about positivity that sounds fake. I can't quite put my finger on it, but whenever I talk about love and the positive, and almost a childlike and my curiosity and positivity, people start to think like, surely he has like skeletons in the closet.

Starting point is 01:12:54 Like there's dead bodies in his basement. Like this must be a fake... The attic. It's the attic? The attic. I keep minding the basement. That's the details. I was referring to your attic.

Starting point is 01:13:04 I don't have an attic or a basement. Oh. nor dead bodies. I just want to be very clear. Yeah, I do have an attic and Actually, I haven't been up to maybe there's bodies up there. But yes, I I prefer the basement. It's colded down there. I like it. No, but there's an assumption that this is not genuine or not It's this in January since I'm kind of way and so I try to find disingenuous in some kind of way. So I tried to find the right language for that kind of stuff, how to be positive. Some of it I was really inspired by Elon's approach to Twitter, not all of it, but the is silly. I found that silliness, I think it's Herman Hesse said something to paraphrase that one of my favorite writers. I think in Stepon Wolf said learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. I think I try to be silly, laugh at myself, laugh at the

Starting point is 01:14:08 absurdity of life, and then in part when I'm serious try to just be positive. Just see a positive perspective. But and also as you said, people pick out certain words and so on and they attack each other, attack me over certain usage of words and in particular tweet I think the thing I try to do is think positively towards them Like do not escalate. So whenever somebody's criticized me and so on I just Smile if there's a lesson to be learned I learn it and then I just send good vibes their way. Don't respond and just hopefully sort of through karma and through kind of the ripple effect of positivity have like an impact on them and the rest of Twitter.

Starting point is 01:14:56 And what you find is like, that builds your actions create the community. So how I behave gets me surrounded by certain people. But lately, especially Ukraine is one topic like this. I also thought about talking to somebody who we start to me is Andrew Tate, who's extremely controversial. Although from the perspective of a lot of people is a misogynist.

Starting point is 01:15:23 And I've heard his name, and I know that there's a lot of controversy around him. Maybe you could familiarize me. I've been pretty nose down in podcast prep and I tried to do this vacation thing for about three, four weeks. I've heard about that. Yeah, and it sort of worked.

Starting point is 01:15:38 I did get some time in the Colorado wilderness by myself, which was great. I did get some downtime, but in any event, it mainly consists of reading and... In nature. Reading and nature, sauna, ice bath, working out, good food, a little extra sleep, these kinds of things, I really felt I needed it,

Starting point is 01:16:01 but I am pretty naive when it comes to the kind of current controversies. But I've heard his name. And I think he's been deplatformed on a couple of platforms, do I have that right? So I should also admit that while I might know more than you, it's not by much. So it's like, it's like a five year old talking to a four year old right now. Is he an athlete, a podcaster? So, uh, basic summary, he used to be a fighter, a kickboxer, I believe, was pretty successful. And then, uh, during that, and after that, I think it was in a reality show.

Starting point is 01:16:39 And he had all these programs that are basically like, pick up artist advice. He has this like community of people where he gives advice on how to pick up women, how to how to be successful in relationships, how to make a lot of money. And there's like, um, it costs money to enter that those programs. So a lot of the criticism that he gets is kind of, uh, it's like a pyramid scheme where you convince people to join so that they can make more money and then they convince others to join that kind of stuff. But that's not why I'm interested in talking to him.

Starting point is 01:17:12 I'm interested because one of the guests, maybe I should mention who, but one of the female guests I had, a really big scientist, said that her two kids that are 13 and 12 really look up to Andrew. Do you have male children? Male children. Male. And I hear this time and time again. So like he is somebody that a lot of teens, young teens look up to. So I haven't done serious research.

Starting point is 01:17:44 Like I usually try to avoid doing research until I agree to talk and then I go deep. But there is an aspect to the way he talks about women that while I understand and I understand certain dynamics and relationships work for people and he's one such person. But I think him being really disrespectful towards women is not what I, it's not how I see what it means to be a good man. So the conversation I want to have with him is about masculinity, what does masculinity mean in the 21st century? And so when I think about that kind of stuff and because we're talking about Twitter,

Starting point is 01:18:32 it's like going into a war zone. I'm like a happy, go lucky person, but you're not sending me to the Ukraine, but I don't want to have this conversation on Twitter because it's, it's a, it's a really, really, really tricky one because also as you know When you sit when you do a podcast like everybody wants you to To win and like there's not a It's everything you do is positive. Maybe you'll say the wrong thing. It's like an inaccurate thing. You can correct yourself with

Starting point is 01:19:04 Andrew Tate with Donald, with folks like this, you have to, I mean, it's a professional boxing. You have to push the person, you have to be really eloquent. You have to be all sympathetic because you can't just do what journalists do, which is talk down to the person the entire time. That's easy. The hard thing is to empathize with the person to understand them to steal man their case But also to make your own case. So in that case about what it means to be a man to me a strong man is somebody who's respectful to women

Starting point is 01:19:34 Not out of weakness not out of social justice warrior signaling and all that kind of stuff But out of that's what a strong man does like they don't need to be disrespectful to prove their position in life. He is often, now a lot of people say it's a character. It's he's being misogynistic. He's being a misogynist as a kind of for entertainment purposes. So like an avatar. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:58 But to me that avatar has a lot of influence on young folks. So the character has impact. Has impact. Oh, I don't think you can separate the avatar and the person in terms of the impact. As you said, in fact, there are a number of accounts on Twitter and Instagram and elsewhere, which people

Starting point is 01:20:17 have only revealed their first names, or they give them self another name, or they're using a cartoon image. And part of that, I believe, and at least from some of these individuals who actually know who they are, I understand as, A, an attempt to maintain their privacy, which is important to many people.

Starting point is 01:20:35 And in some cases, so that they can be more inflammatory and then just pop up elsewhere as something else without anyone knowing that it's the same person. Some of the, this is the dark stuff. I've been reading a lot about Ukraine and Nazi Germany, so the 30s and the 40s and so on. And you get to see how much the absurdity turns to evil quickly. One of the things I worry, one of the things I really don't like to see on Twitter and

Starting point is 01:21:02 the internet is how many statements end with LOL. It's like you think just because something is kind of funny or it's funny or is legitimately funny, it also doesn't have a deep effect on society. So there's such a difficult gray area because some of the best comedy is dark and mean, but it reveals some important truth that we need to consider. But sometimes comedy is just covering up for destructive ideology. And you have to know the line between those two. Hitler was seen as a joke in the late 20s and the 30s, the Nazi Germany, until the joke became very serious. You have to be careful to know the difference between the

Starting point is 01:21:52 joke and the reality and do all that. I mean, in a conversation, I'm just such a big believer in conversation, to be able to reveal something through conversation. But I don't know, one of the big, you know, you and I challenge ourselves all the time, I don't know one of the big you know you and I challenge ourselves all the time I don't know if I I have what it takes to have a a good empathetic but adversarial conversation. I need to learn more about this tape person or not learn about it. Yeah it sounds like maybe it's something to skip I don't know because the end I'm not familiar with the content, but I was going to ask you whether or not you've seeked out or whether or not you would ever consider having Donald Trump as a guest on your podcast.

Starting point is 01:22:33 Yeah, I've talked to Joe a lot about this and I really believe I can have a good conversation with Donald Trump, but I haven't seen many good conversations with him. So like, pardon me, things, pardon me, believes it's possible, but he often effectively runs over the interviewer. You can sit him down, give him an element, let it green. Just relax. I mean, that nice, cool air conditioned black curtain studio you got. And a different side might come out. Context is powerful.

Starting point is 01:23:18 Well, Joe's really good at this, which is relaxing person. Like, here, I have a drink. Let's smoke a joint or whatever it is, but some this energy of just less relax and there's laughter and so on. I don't think as people know, I'm just not good at that kind of stuff. So I think the way I could have a good conversation with him is to really understand his world view, be able to steal man's world view, and those that support him, which is I'm sorry to say, for people who seem to hate Donald Trump, is a very large percentage of the country. And so you have to really empathize, but

Starting point is 01:23:56 those people who have empathized with Donald Trump, the human being, and from that perspective, ask them hard questions. Who do you think is the counterpoint? If you're gonna seek balance in your guess, if you're gonna have Trump on, then you have to have who on. Well, that's interesting. Is he in the Nephouchi?

Starting point is 01:24:19 Seems to be strongly associated with counter values, at least in the eye of the public. Things were tiring soon, but I, yeah, he's retiring. So that's really interesting, Anthony Fauci. Yeah, definitely, but I don't think he's a counterbalance. He's a complicated, fascinating figure who seems to have attracted a lot of hate and distrust. And love from some people. And love from some people. And love from some people.

Starting point is 01:24:46 I mean, I know people not even necessarily scientists who have, you know, profalty's shirts. I've seen people with anti-falsy shirts, excuse me, but certainly, but who adore him? They're people who adore him. On the same way, there are people that adore Trump. It's so interesting that, you know, one species of animal

Starting point is 01:25:05 gets such divergent neural circuitry. It's almost feels like it's by design and every single topic would find tension and division. It's fascinating to watch. I mean, I got to really witness it from zero to 100 in Ukraine, where there's not a huge significant division. There was in certain parts of Ukraine, but across Europe, across the world, where there is not a huge significant division.

Starting point is 01:25:27 There was in certain parts of Ukraine, but across Europe, across the world, there was not that much division between Russian and Ukraine, and it was just born overnight, this intense hatred. So, and you see the same kind of stuff with Fauci over the pandemic. At first, we're all kind of huddled in uncertainty. There is a togetherness with that pandemic.

Starting point is 01:25:48 Of course, there is more difficult because you're isolated. But then you start to figure out, probably the politicians in the media try to figure out, how can I take a side here? And how can I now start reporting on this side or that side and say, how the other side is wrong? And so I think anything, Fauci, is a part of just being used as a scapegoat for certain things as part of that kind of narrative of division. But I think, so Trump is a singular figure that to me represents something important in

Starting point is 01:26:23 American history. I'm not sure what that is, but I think you have to think you put on your historian hat, go forward in time and think back. Like how will he remember, be remembered 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now? Who is the opposite of that? You have to, I would really have to think about that because Trump is so singular. I think AOC is an interesting one, but she's so young, it's unclear to know what, if she represents a legitimate, the large scale movement or not, Bernie Sanders is an interesting

Starting point is 01:27:00 option, but I wish he would be 30, 40 years younger, like the young Bernie would be a good. They're scientists working on that. Yeah, I think so. Not him specifically, but. Well, yeah, maybe him, we never know. There is a big conspiracy theory that Putin is, that's a body double. It's no longer a Buddhist. Is Putin?

Starting point is 01:27:23 No, no, no. I'm having a hard time. The current. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, a classification scheme for different types of anatomists, which they either say you're a lumper or a splitter. Some people like to call a whole structure or something, not necessarily just for simplicity, but for a lot of reasons. And then other people like to micro divide the nucleus into multiple names. And of course, people used to be able to name different brain structures after themselves.

Starting point is 01:27:58 So there'd be the nucleus of Lex and then the, you know, the Huberman, Ficiculous, or whatever, less of that nowadays, but, and by the way, those structures don't actually exist just yet. We haven't defined those yet. That was making those names up, but what's interesting is it seems like in the last five years, there's been a lot of trend, there's been a trend,

Starting point is 01:28:24 excuse me, toward a requirement for lumping. Like, you can't say, it seems that it's not allowed, if you will, to say, hey, yeah, you know, and here I'm not stating my, I will never reveal my preferences about pandemic-related things for, hopefully, obvious reasons. You know, some people will say vaccines, yes, but masks, no, or vaccines and masks, yes, but let people work. And other people will say, no, everyone stay home. And then other people will say, no, no vaccines,

Starting point is 01:28:52 no masks, let everybody work. No one was saying no vaccines, no masks, and stay home, I don't think. So there's this sort of lumping, right? The boundaries around ideology really did start to defy science. I mean, it wasn't scientific. It was one part science-ish at times, and sometimes really hardcore science. Other times, it was politics, economics. I mean, we really saw the confluence of all these different domains of society that use it very different criteria to evaluate

Starting point is 01:29:24 the world. I mean, as a scientist, you know, I remember when the vaccines first came out and I asked somebody, you know, one of the early concerns I had that was actually satisfied for me was how does this thing turn off? You know, if you start generating mRNA, how does it actually get turned off? So I asked a friend, you know, they know a lot about RNA biology and how's it turned off? They explained it to me and I was like, okay, make sense. I asked some other questions. So, but most people aren't going to think about it at that level of detail necessarily, but it did seem that there was just kind of amorphous blobs of ideology that grabbed onto things,

Starting point is 01:30:02 and then there was this need for a chasm between them. It was almost felt like it became illegal in some ways to want two of the things from that menu. And one of the things from that menu, I really felt like I was being constrained by a kind of bento box model where I didn't get to define what was in the bento box. I could even have bento box A or bento box Z,

Starting point is 01:30:26 but nothing in between it. And I think on that topic, and I think a lot of topics, most people are in the middle with humility, uncertainty, and they're just kind of trying to figure it out. And I think there is just the extremes defining the nature of this division. So I think it's the role of a lot of us in our individual lives.

Starting point is 01:30:47 And also if you have a platform of any kind, I think you have to try to walk in the middle like with empathy and humility. And that's actually what science is about is the humility. I'm still thinking about who's the opposite of Trump. Well, maybe it is not. I mean, maybe Fauci is orthogonal to Trump. I mean, not everything has an opposite. I mean, it's, you know, maybe he's in the end of one. Maybe he's in the minority of one because he was an outsider from Washington who then made it there.

Starting point is 01:31:16 But also, I wonder, you have to pick your battles because every battle you fight, you should take very seriously. And just the amount of hate I get, I got, and I still get for having sat down with the Pfizer CEO. That was a very valuable lesson for me. Well, that one got you a lot of heat. Yeah, it still does. Because you had some pretty controversial guests on that one. Is he still the Pfizer CEO? I believe so. because you had some pretty controversial guests on that one.

Starting point is 01:31:45 Is he still the Pfizer CEO? I believe so. CEO's turnover like crazy. This is the thing I didn't realize, in science, if somebody moves institutions like a big deal, most people don't have more than two moves in their career, maybe, but they often move to the next building as a big deal. But in biotech, it's like I have a former colleague, my from San

Starting point is 01:32:06 Diego, and he's been CEO here. There he's a CEO there. He went back to a company, he was a CEO at B4. You know, if he's probably back at the university, he worked out for it for all I know. It's amazing how much moving around there is. It is a very actinerant profession. Yeah, I think there are, in certain companies, I guess in biotech, will be the case. The CEO is more of like a manager type,

Starting point is 01:32:25 so you can sometimes jumping around, benefits your experience, so you get become better and better at being a manager. There's some like leader revolutionary CEOs that stick around for longer because they're so critical to pivoting a company, like the Microsoft CEO currently, Santa Brechai, somebody like that Sunday, but Chai somebody like that

Starting point is 01:32:46 Obviously Elon Musk is somebody like that that is part of pivoting a company into new domains constantly But yeah, in biotech there's a machine and for you know in the eyes of a lot of people Big pharma It's like big tobacco. It's It's the epitome of everything that is wrong with capitalism. It's evil. Right? And so I showed up in the conversation where I thought with a pretty open mind and really

Starting point is 01:33:16 asked what I thought were difficult questions of him. I don't think he's ever sat down to a grilling of that kind. In fact, I'm pretty sure they cut the interview short because of that. And I thought, you know, literally it was hot in the room and we're sweating. And I was asking tough questions for somebody that like half the country, or a large percent of the country believes he's alleviated a lot of, he helped through the financial resources that Pfizer has helped alleviate a lot of suffering in the world. And so I thought for somebody like that, I was asking pretty hard questions. Boy, did I get

Starting point is 01:33:52 to hear from the side? Usually one of the sides is more intense in their anger. So there's certain political topics like with the entertain, for example, I would hear from a very, it would probably be the left far left that would write very angrily. And so that's a group you'll hear from. The Pfizer CEO, I didn't get almost any messages from people saying, why did you go so hard on him? He's an incredible human, incredible leader and CEO of a company that helped us with the vaccine and nobody thought it would be possible to develop so quickly.

Starting point is 01:34:40 You did not get letters of that. I did not. I mean, they're here and there, but the sea of people That said everything for me being weak that I wasn't able to call out this person How do you sit down? How do you platform this evil person that how do you make them look? Human all that kind of stuff and then you have to deal with that yet the Of course, it's great. It's great because I have to do

Starting point is 01:35:05 some soul searching, which is like, did I? You have to ask some hard questions. I love criticism like that. You get to like, you know, I hear some low points. There's definitely some despair and you start to wonder like, was I too weak? Should I have talked to him? What is true? And you sit there alone and just like marinate in that. And hopefully over time it makes you better, but I still don't know what the right answer with that one is. Well, I feel that money plays a role here.

Starting point is 01:35:35 You know, when people think big pharma, they think billions of dollars, maybe even trillions of dollars really. And certainly people who make a lot of money get scrutiny that others don't. Part of is that they are often not always visible. But I think that there is a natural and reflexive and I'm not justifying it. I certainly don't feel this because I do. I know some people who are very wealthy, some people are very poor. I can't say it scales with happiness at all. People are always

Starting point is 01:36:13 shocked to hear that, but that's what I've observed in very wealthy people. But that people who have a lot of money are often held to a different standard because people resent that, some people resent that, and maybe there are other reasons as well. I mean among people who are very wealthy, oftentimes the wish is for status, right? Not money. You get a bunch of billionaires in a room, and unless one of them is Elon, who is also as immense status for his accomplishments, typically if you put a Nobel Prize winner in a room

Starting point is 01:36:51 with a bunch of billionaires, they're all talking to that person, right? And they're many very interesting billionaires, but status is something that is often but not always associated with money, but is a much rarer form of uniqueness out there, positive uniqueness, if one considers status positive,

Starting point is 01:37:14 cause there's a downside too. But so I wonder whether or not the Pfizer CEO caught extra heat because people assume, and I probably assume also that his salary is quite immense. Yeah, I so because I have a lot of data on this, I can say it's a very good hypothesis. Let's test the scientific. He's about to tell me it's a great hypothesis, but it's wrong. I know the smirk. I know this smirk. I honestly think it's wrong. There is that effect is there for a lot of people, but I think the distrust is not towards the CEO, the distrust

Starting point is 01:37:46 is towards the company. One of the really difficult soul searching I had to do, which is just having interacted with Pfizer folks at every level, from junior to the CEO, they're all really nice people. They have a mission, they talk about trying to really help people, because that's the best way to make money is come up with medicine that helps a lot of people. The mission is clear, they're all good people, a lot of really brilliant people, PhDs, so you can have a system where all the people are good, including the CEO, and by good, I mean, people that really are trying to do everything, they dedicate their whole life to do good. I mean, people that really are trying to do everything they dedicate their whole life to do good. And yet, you have to think that that system can deviate from a path that

Starting point is 01:38:33 does good. Because you start to deceive yourself of what is good. You turn into a game where money does come into play from a company perspective, where you convince yourself the more money you make, the more good you'll be able to do, and then you start to focus more and more and more on making more money, and then you can really deviate and lose track of what is actually good. I'm not saying necessarily Pfizer does that,

Starting point is 01:39:00 but I think companies could do that. You can apply that criticism to social media companies, to big pharma companies that one of the big lessons for me that I don't know what the answer is, but that all the people inside a company could be good. People you would want to hang out with, people you'd want to work with, but as a company is doing evil. And like that's a possibility.

Starting point is 01:39:23 So like the the distrust, I don't think is towards the billionaire individual, which I do see a lot of, in this case, I think it's like Wall Street distrust, that the machinery of this particular organization has gone off track. It's the generalization of hate again. Yeah. And then good luck figuring out what is true. This is the this is the tough stuff. But I should say the individuals like individual scientists at the NIH and Pfizer are just incredible people. Like they're really they're really brilliant people. So the you know I never trusted administration or the business people, no offense, business people, but the scientists are always good. They have the right motivator in life. But

Starting point is 01:40:13 again, with the kind of blinders on to focus on the science, Nazi Germany has history of people just to focus on the science. And then the politicians use the scientists to achieve whatever and they want. If you just look narrowly at the journey of a scientist, it's a beautiful one because they ultimately, in it, for the curiosity, the moment to discover it versus money, I mean prestige probably does come into play later in life, but especially young scientists, they're after the pulling it's like they pulling it the threat of curiosity to try to discover something big. They get excited by that kind of stuff and that's beautiful to see.

Starting point is 01:40:52 So, it's beautiful to see. I have a former graduate student now, a postdoc at Caltech, and I don't even know if she had a cell phone, she would come into lab, put her cell phone into the desk, and she was tremendously productive, but that wasn't why I brought it up. She was productive as a side effect of just being absolutely committed and obsessed to discover the answers to the questions she was asking, as best she could. And you could feel it. You just feel the intensity and just incredibly low activation energy.

Starting point is 01:41:21 If there was an experiment to do, so just go do it. You're teaching at MIT, you are obviously traveling the world, you're writing the podcast a lot of coverage of chess recently, which is interesting, I don't play chess, but I have some scientific questions to you about that. Oh, okay, sure. And then let's get to those for sure. And then you're not going to like it. Oh, no, okay. And then all right. And then also some some very, um, do I have to spell messages? It's again, um, of course. The, the, also, you still seem to have a proclivity for finding guests are controversial, right? You're thinking about tape. We're talking about Trump. We're talking about the Pfizer CEO. We're talking about Fauci. These are, these are intense people. And so what we're getting folks is a,

Starting point is 01:42:06 we're not doing neuroimaging here in the traditional sense of putting someone into a scanner. What we're doing here is we're using as the great Carl Diceroth who was on your podcast. Thank you for that. Thank you for connecting us. He's an incredible person. He's an incredible psychiatrist by our engineer

Starting point is 01:42:19 and human being and writer. And your conversation with him was phenomenal. I listened to it twice. I actually have taken notes. We talk about it in this household. We really do. His description of love is not to be missed. I'll just leave it at that because if I try and say it, I won't capture it.

Starting point is 01:42:39 But you know, we're getting a language-based map of at least a portion of Lex Friedman's brain here. So what else is going on these days in that brain as it relates to robotics, AI, our last conversation was a lot about robots and the potential for robot human interaction. What even what is a robot, et cetera, Are you still working on robots or focused on robots? And we're a science showing up in your life besides the things we've already talked about. So I think the last time we talked was before Ukraine.

Starting point is 01:43:15 Yes, or you were just about to leave. Yes, so that means. So that's why I went on. I was like, you know, this might be the last, you said, you want to come out here before our after I was like, I'm like, come out there before. I I don't want to see before you go. But here you are in the flesh. I think so a lot of Just a lot of my mind has been occupied obviously with that part of the world

Starting point is 01:43:37 but the the most of the difficult struggles that I'm still going through is that I Haven't launched a company that I want to launch and the company has to do with AI. I mean, it's maybe a longer conversation, but the ultimate dream is to put robots in every home. But short term, I see their possibility of launching a social media company. And it's a non-trivial explanation why that leads to robots in the home, but it's basically the algorithms that fuel effective social robotics. So robots that you can form a deep connection with.

Starting point is 01:44:14 And so I've been really, yeah, I've been building prototypes, but struggling that I don't have maybe, if I were to be critical, the guts to watch a company. Or that's high. Well, it's combined. I think you've got the guts. I mean, it's clear if you'll do an interview with the Pfizer CEO and you're considering putting this tape fellow on your podcast and you've gone to the Ukraine that you have the guts. It's also a, it means not doing quite a lot of other things.

Starting point is 01:44:46 That's what I mean, but it does take, the thing is, as many people know, when you fill your day and you're busy, that busyness becomes an excuse that you use against doing the things that scare you. A lot of people use family in this way. You know, my wife, my kids, I can't. When in reality, some of the most successful people

Starting point is 01:45:11 have a wife and have kids and have families, and they still do it. And so a lot of times we can fill the day with busy work, with like, yeah, of course I have podcasts and all this kind of stuff, and they make me happy. And they're wonderful, and there's resources teaching and so on, but all of that can just serve as an excuse from the thing that my heart says is the right thing to do. And that's why I don't have the guts, the guts to say no to basically everything and

Starting point is 01:45:40 then to focus all on it because part of it is I'm unlikely to fail at anything in my life currently because I've already found a comfortable place With the start-up. It's mostly going to be most likely going to be a failure. It's not an embarrassing failure so Well the machine learning data that I'm aware of Don't know a lot about machine learning, but within the realm of neuroscience, say that a failure rate of about 15% is optimal for neuroplasticity and growth. Whether or not that translates to all kinds of practices isn't clear, but getting trials right 85% of the time seems to be optimal for language learning, seems

Starting point is 01:46:23 to be optimal for mathematics, and seems to be optimal for mathematics, and seems to be optimal for physical pursuits. On average, I'm sure I'm going to, you know, you have more machine learning geeks that listen to your podcast than listen to this podcast, but it doesn't mean you have to fail on 15% of your weight sets, folks. I mean, it could be 16%. No, I'm just kidding. But it's not exact, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb. I think a lot of startup founders would literally murder for 85% chance of success. I think, given all the opportunities I have, the skill set, the funding, all that kind of stuff, my chances are relatively high for success,

Starting point is 01:47:05 but what relatively high means in the startup world is still far, far below 85. It's, we are talking about single-digit percentages, most startups fail. Well, I think it means, you know, the decision to focus on the company and not other things means the decision to close the hatch on dopamine retrieval

Starting point is 01:47:22 from all these other things that are very predictable sources of dopamine. Not that everything is dopamine, but dopamine is, I think, the primary chemical driver of motivation. If you know that you can get some degree of satisfaction from scrolling social media or from that particular cup of coffee, that's what you're gonna do. That's what you're going to consume, unless you somehow invert the algorithm and you say, it's actually my denial of myself

Starting point is 01:47:52 drinking that coffee that's gonna be the dopamine. Right? That's interesting. Then, and that's the beauty of having a forebrain, is that you can make those decisions. This is the essence I do believe of what we see of David Goggins. There's much more there. There's a person that none of us know, this is the essence I do believe of what we see of David Goggins. There's much more there There's a person that none of us know and only he knows of course, but

Starting point is 01:48:10 the idea that the pain is the source of dopamine the Limbic friction as I sometimes like to call it is the source of dopamine that runs counter to how most nervous systems work But it was it's decision-based, right? It's not because his musculature is a certain way or he had CRISPR or something, it's because he decides that. And I think that's amazing, but what it means in terms of starting a company and changing priorities is a closing the hatch on all or many of the current sources of dopamine so that you can derive dopamine from the failures

Starting point is 01:48:45 within this narrow context. And there's a very reductionist view, that kind of neurocentric view of what we're talking about. But I think about this a lot. I mean, the decision to choose one relationship versus another is a decision to close down other opportunities, right? So I think that the, you know,

Starting point is 01:49:04 the decision to order one thing off the menu versus others is the decision to close down those other hatches. So I think that you absolutely can do it. It's just a question of, um, can you flip the algorithm? Yeah, remap the source of dopamine to something else, right? And maybe go out there not to succeed, but make the journey as the destination type thing. But when you're financially vested in your time, and as far as I know, we only get one life at least on this planet, and you want to spend that wisely. And a lot of the people that surround you, the people are really important and I don't have people around me

Starting point is 01:49:49 That say you should do a start-up. It's very difficult to find such people because there's often big startup culture Yeah, it is, but it doesn't make sense for me to start up This is what the people that love me my whole life have been telling me doesn't make sense what you're what you're doing right now Just do the thing you were doing previously. Why do I get the sense that because they are saying this you're apt to go. No, I actually was never that unfortunately. Unfortunately I need, I've talked to people I love, my parents, family and so on friends. I'm one of those people that needs unconditional support for difficult things.

Starting point is 01:50:23 Like I know myself coaching wise. it's good to, I like, here's how I get coached best, let's say wrestling. I like a coach that says, you want to win the Olympics, they will not force, if I say I want to win the gold medal at the Olympics and freestyle wrestling, I want to coach that doesn't blink once and hears me and believes that I can do it. And then is viciously intense and cruel to me on that pursuit. Like if you want to do this, let's do this. But that's support. So, but that's support that like that positivity. I don't I'm never, you know, I'm not energized. Nor do I see that as love a person saying like basically criticizing that.

Starting point is 01:51:21 Like saying like you're you're too old to win the Olympic gold medal, right? You're like all the things you can come up with. That's not helpful to me. And I can't find a dopamine, or I haven't yet, a dopamine source from the haters. Like basically people they're criticizing you just trying to prove them wrong. It doesn't, it never got me off. Like it never, where some people seem to like that.

Starting point is 01:51:43 I mean, David Goggins always seems to come out. He seems driven by many sources that he has access. I don't know because I've never asked him, but if I were to venture a guess, I'd say that he probably has a lot of options inside his head as to how to push through challenge, not just over-compain, but he'll post sometimes about the fact that people will say this or

Starting point is 01:52:06 people will do this and talk about the pushback approach. He'll also talk about the pushback approach that's purely internal, that doesn't involve anyone else. Great versatility there. Yeah, there's literally a voice he yells at. It represents some kind of devil that wants him to fail. And he's, you know, he calls him bitch and all kinds of things saying, you know, fuck you. I'm not, I'm not.

Starting point is 01:52:31 He's, there's always like an enemy and he's going against that enemy. And I wish, maybe that's something, I mean, it's really interesting. Maybe you can remap it this way so that you can construct, like that's a kind of obvious mechanism. Construct a morphous blob that is a hater that wants you to fail, right? That's kind of the David Goggins thing. You're in that that that blob says you're too weak, you're too dumb, you're you're too old, you're too fat, you're too whatever, and getting you to want to quit and so on.

Starting point is 01:53:05 And then you start getting angry at that blob. It may be that's a good motivator. I haven't personally really tried that. Well, I've had external challenge when I was a post-doc, very prominent laboratory. Several prominent laboratories, in fact, were working on the same thing that I was, and I was just a slowly post-doc working on a project

Starting point is 01:53:24 pretty independent from the lab I was in. And there was competition, but there was plenty of room for everybody to win. But in my head, and frankly, I won't disclose who this is, and because there was some legitimate competition there, and a little bit of friction, not too much healthy scientific friction, yeah, I might have pushed a few extra hours or more, a little bit. I have to say it felt metabolizing, it felt catabolic, right? It didn't, I couldn't be sustained by it.

Starting point is 01:53:56 And I contrast that with the podcast or the work that my laboratory is doing now, focus on stress and human performance, et cetera. And it's pure love. I just, I want, it's pure curiosity and love. I mean, they're hard days, but I never, there's no adversary in the picture. They're the practical, you know,

Starting point is 01:54:14 workings of life that, but those are the things that Joe really inspired me on. And people do create adversarial relationships and podcasting because you get, like, YouTubers do this. They get, you know, they hate seeing somebody else be successful. There's a feeling of like,

Starting point is 01:54:32 like jealousy and some people even see that as healthy. Like, ooh, this, like Mr. Beast is somebody, some of these popular YouTubers out. How do they get 100 million views and I only get 20 views. Like Mr. Bees devoted his entire, according to him, his entire life. He's been focused on becoming this massive YouTube channel.

Starting point is 01:54:50 Well, that, you know, he's inspiring in many ways, but like there's some people that get become famous for doing much less insane pursuit of, of greatness than Mr. Bees. Like this people become famous on, you know famous on social media and so on. And it's easy to be jealous of them. I just, one of the early things I've learned from Joe, which is being a fan of his podcast is how much he celebrated everybody. And again, I guess, maybe I ruined my whole dopamine thing,

Starting point is 01:55:18 but I don't get energized by people that become popular. The podcasting space and YouTube, it's awesome. It's all of it is awesome. And I'm inspired by that. But the problem is that's not a good motivator. Inspiration is like, ooh, cool, humans can do this. This is beautiful, but I'm looking. I'm looking for forcing function.

Starting point is 01:55:41 That's why I gave away the salary from MIT. I was hoping my bank account had zero. That would be a forcing function to be like, oh shit. And you're not allowed to have a normal job. So I wanted to launch. And then the podcast becomes a source of income. And so it's like, god damn it. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:59 Well, you know, and here I have to confess my biases. You are so good at what you do in the realm of podcast. And you're excellent at other things as well. I just have less experience in those things. I know here I'm taking the liberty of speaking for many, many people and just saying, I sure as hell, hope you don't shut down the podcast, but as your friend and as somebody who cares very deeply about your happiness and your deeper satisfaction, if it's in your heart's heart to do a company, well then dammit, do the company.

Starting point is 01:56:39 And a lot of it, I wouldn't even care, categorize as happiness. I don't know if you have things like that in your, in your life, but I'm probably the happiest I could possibly be right now. That's wonderful. But the thing is, there's a longing for the startup that has nothing to do with happiness. It's something else. That's that itch. That's that. That's thatch. I'm pretty sure I'll be less happy because it's a really tough process. because it's a really tough process. I mean, to whatever degree you can extract happiness from struggle, yes, maybe.

Starting point is 01:57:10 But I don't see it. I think I'll have some very, very low points. There's a lot of people who find companies, found companies know about. And I also want to be in a relationship I want to get married and sure as hell a startup is not going to increase the likelihood of that.

Starting point is 01:57:29 We could start up a family and start a company. I'm a huge believer in that, which is getting a relationship at a low point in your life, which is... Sorry, I'm not disputing your stance. Nor am I agreeing with it. It's just, everyone's a wild, there's a, there's a Lex Friedmanism that hits a particular circuit in my brain, I have to just laugh out loud.

Starting point is 01:57:55 I just think that it's easy to have a relationship whenever things good. The relationships that become strong and are tested quickly are the ones when shit is going down. Well then there's hope for me yet. Before we sat down, I was having a conversation with a podcast producer who is a, I wouldn't say avid rather he's a rabid consumer of podcasts and finds these amazing podcasts,

Starting point is 01:58:26 he's a small podcast and unique episodes. Anyway, we were talking about some stuff that he had seen and read in the business sector and he was talking about the difference between job, career and a calling. I think he was extracting this from conversations of CEOs and founders, et cetera. I forget the specific founders that brought this to light for him. But, you know, this idea that if you focus on a job, you can make an income and hopefully you enjoy your job or not hate it too much. A career is, it represents a sort of, in my mind, a kind of series of evolutions that one can go through, junior professor, tenure, etc. But a calling has a whole other level

Starting point is 01:59:11 of energetic pull to it because it includes career and job and includes this concept of sort of like a life. It's very hard to draw the line between a calling in career and a calling in the other parts of your life. So the question therefore is, do you feel a calling to start this company? Or is it a born of a compulsion that irritates you? Is it like something you wish would go away? Or is it something that you hope won't go away? No, I hope it won't go away. It's a calling. It's a calling.

Starting point is 01:59:45 It's like, it's like, when I see a robot, when I first interacted with robots, and it became even stronger, the most sophisticated, the robots I interacted with, I see a magic there. And you're like, you look around, does anyone else see this magic?

Starting point is 02:00:04 Like, it's kind of like like maybe when you fall in love like that that feeling like Does anyone else notice this person? I just walk in the room. I feel that way about robots and I can elaborate With that means, but I'm not even sure I can convert it into words. I just feel like the social integration of robots in society will create a really interesting world. And our ability to anthropomorphize when we look at a robot and our ability to feel things when we look at a robot is something that most of us don't yet experience, but I think everybody will experience the next few decades. And I just want to be a part of that exploring that because it hasn't been really Thorolique's explored.

Starting point is 02:00:55 The best roboticists in the world are not currently working on that problem at all. They try to avoid human beings completely. And nobody's really working on that problem in terms of when you look at the numbers, all the big tech companies that are investing money. The closest thing to that is Alexa and basically being a servant to help tell you the weather, play music, and so on. It's not trying to form a deep connection. And so I, sometimes you just notice the thing,

Starting point is 02:01:24 not only do I notice the magic, there's a gut feeling, which I try not to speak to because there's no track record, but I feel like I can be good at bringing that magic out of the robot. And there's no data that says I would be good at that, but there's a feeling. It's just a feeling. Like, I, you know, when I, because I've done so many things, I love doing playing guitar, all that kind of stuff. Jiu-Jitsu, I've never felt that feeling. When I'm doing Jiu-Jitsu, I don't feel the magic of the genius required to be extremely good. At guitar, I don't feel any of that. But I've noticed it in others. Great musicians, they will, they notice the magic

Starting point is 02:02:11 about the thing they do. And they, and they randled it. And I just always thought, I think it had a different form when I, before and you robots existed, before AI existed. The form was more about the magic between humans. I think of it as love, but the smile the two friends have towards each other when I was really young and people would be excited when they first know each other and see, notice each other. And there's that moment that they share that feeling together.

Starting point is 02:02:48 I was like, wow, that's really interesting. It is really interesting that these two separate intelligent organisms are able to connect all of a sudden on this deep emotional level. It's like, huh. It's just beautiful to see. And I noticed the magic of that. And then when I started programming, programming period, but then programming A-Systems, you realize, oh, that could be,

Starting point is 02:03:12 that's not just between humans and humans, that could be humans and other entities, dogs, cats, and robots. And that's so I, for some reason, it hit me the most intensely when I saw robots. So yeah, it's like calling but it's a calling that I can just enjoy

Starting point is 02:03:34 the division of it the vision of a future world of an exciting future world that's full of cool stuff or I can be part of building that and being part of building that means doing a hard work of capitalism which is like raising funds from people which for me right now is the easy part and then hiring a lot of people I don't know how much you know about hiring but hiring excellent people. Excellent people yeah that will define the trajectory of not only your company, but your whole existence as a human being and building it up, not

Starting point is 02:04:10 failing them, because now they all depend on you and not failing the world with an opportunity to bring something that brings joy to people. And like all that pressure, just non-stop fires they they have to put out the drama, having to work with people you never work with, like lawyers and the human resources and supply chain. Because this is very compute-heavy, the computer infrastructure, managing, cybersecurity, cybersecurity, because you're dealing with people's data. So now you have to understand not only the cybersecurity of data and the privacy, how to maintain privacy, correct the word data, but also the psychology of people trusting you with their data. And what is,

Starting point is 02:04:58 how, how, you know, if you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and those folks, they seem to be hated by a large number of people. Jack, I think I always think of Jack as a loved individual, but you have a very positive view of the world. I like Jack a lot, and I like his mind, and someone close to him described him to me recently as, he's an excellent listener. That's what they said about Jack.

Starting point is 02:05:27 And that's my experience of him too, very private person. So we'll leave it at that. But listen, I think Jack Dorsey is one of the, one of the greats of our, of the last 200 years. And it's just much quieter about his stance on things than a lot of people. But much of what we see in the world that's wonderful,

Starting point is 02:05:50 I think we owe him a debt of gratitude. I'm just voicing my stance here. But the person, this is really important. Yeah. A wonderful person, a brilliant person, a good person. But you still have to pay the price of making any kind of mistakes as the head of a company. You don't get any extra bonus points for being a good person.

Starting point is 02:06:13 But his willingness to go on Rogan and deal directly and say, I don't know an answer to that in some cases, but to deal directly with some really challenging questions to me earned him tremendous respect. Yes. As an individual, he was still part of him is, so you've said you're, and I love Jack too, and I interact with him all the time. He's been on your podcast. Yes. But he's also part of a system as we talked about.

Starting point is 02:06:40 And I would argue that Jack shouldn't have brought anyone else with him on that podcast. If you go, he had a cadre of, oh, he had a, I guess, the legal, the head legal, uh, with him. And also it requires a tremendous amount of skill to, to go on a podcast like Joe Rogan and be able to win over the trust of people and be able to win over the trust of people by being able to be transparent and communicate how the company really works. Because the more you reveal about how social media company works, the more you open up for security,

Starting point is 02:07:13 the vector of attacks increases. Also, there's a lot of difficult decisions in terms of censorship and not that are made, that if you make them transparent, you're going to get a nod of magnitude more hate. So you have to make all those kinds of decisions. And I think that's one of the things I have to realize is you have to take that avalanche of potentially hate if you make

Starting point is 02:07:40 mistakes. Well, you have a very clear picture of this architecture of what's required in order to create a company. Of course, there's division of labor, too. I mean, you don't have to do all of those things in detail, but finding people that are excellent to do, you know, to run the critical segments are obviously key. I'll just say what I said earlier, which is if it's in your heart's heart to start a company, if that indeed is your calling and it sounds like it is, then I can't wait. Does it, does a heart have a heart? I don't know. What's that expression about me? Probably not. The romantic side. In my lab, at one point, early days we worked on

Starting point is 02:08:21 cuddlefish and they have multiple hearts and they, pump green blood believe it or not very fascinating animal. Speaking of hearts and green blood earlier today before we sat down I solicited for questions on Instagram in a brief post so do you want to if you'll look at some of them? Yes let's take these in real time. My podcast team is always teasing me that I never have any charge on my phone when these people that likes to run in the yellow or whatever it is. And iPhone.

Starting point is 02:08:55 Yeah, and that was. And it was, what was the iPhone people who are out of battery? Oh, I've got a new one. So, I mean, this one has plenty of battery. I just got a new one. So, I've different numbers for different things, personal and work plenty of battery. I just got a new one. So I've a different numbers for different things personal and work, et cetera. I'm trying that now. All right. Get into the. I have a I have a chest thing to to mention to.

Starting point is 02:09:16 Oh, yes, please. Will I insult you if I if I look up these questions as you ask me? Okay. No, no, but I will insult you by asking this question, except I think it's hilarious. So there's up in a controversy about cheating. Okay. Hans Neiman, who's a 2700 player. Oh, yeah, it's all cheating. It's all cheating. On your clips channel. By the way, I love your clips channel. And I listen to your full channel. The big accusation is that he cheated by having, I mean, it's, it's, have joke, but it's starting to get me to wonder whether, um, I mean, it's have joke, but it's starting to get me to wonder whether So that you can cheat by having vibrating anal beads

Starting point is 02:09:51 so you can send messages to let's rephrase that statement Not you can, but one can one can. Yeah, thank you. That was a personal attack. Yes, but it's it made me realize I mean I'm just gonna just myself I Yes, but it's it made me realize I mean, I'm just gonna just myself here. I use it all the time for podcast things to send myself messages to remind me myself of notes, but it's interesting. I mean it I'm not gonna call you again Yeah, that's exactly where I keep my phone the there it did get me down this whole rabbit hole, well, how would you be able to send communication in order to cheat in different sports? I mean, that doesn't even have to do with chess in particular,

Starting point is 02:10:33 but it's interesting in chess and poker that there's mechanisms sort of modern day where you're streaming live the competition. So people can watch it on TV. If they can only send you a signal back, it's just like a fun little thing to think about. And if it's possible to pull off. So I want to get your scientific evaluation of that technique. To cheat using some sort of interceptive device.

Starting point is 02:11:04 Yeah, vibrating of some kind, yeah. Well, no, no, that's one way to sense that. Yeah. And those is like, Morse code, basically. Yeah, so there's a famous, I believe there's a famous real world story of physics students. I'm going to get some of this wrong. So I'm saying this in kind of a course form

Starting point is 02:11:23 so that somebody will correct this. But I believe it was physics graduate students from UC Santa Cruz or somewhere else maybe it was Caltech bunch of universities so that no one you know Associates with a one university that went to Vegas and used some sort of tactile device for kind of card counting, I think. This was actually demonstrated also not this particular incident, I don't think in the movie Casino where they spotted a Robert De Niro who you have a not-so-veg resemblance to, by the way, in taxi driver. Oh, God, I wish I had a... Traveller impression right now. Traveller's Bickle.

Starting point is 02:12:07 Look at up folks. Traveller's Bickle is, you know, likes ever shaved his head into a mark. I would. So, he had a tapping device on his ankle that was signaling someone else was counting cards and then signaling to that person. So, yeah, that could be done in the tactile way. It could be done. Obviously earpieces, if it's deep earpiece, I think that could be done in the tactile way. It could be done obviously earpieces if it's deep earpiece. I think that there are ways that they look for that.

Starting point is 02:12:29 Certainly, any kind of vibrational device in whatever orifice provided someone could pay attention to that while still playing the game. Yeah, I think it's entirely possible now. Could it be done purely, norally? Could there be something that was, and listen, it wouldn't have to even be below the skull. This is where whenever people hear about neurolink or brain machine interface,

Starting point is 02:12:50 they always think, oh, you have to drill down below the skull and put a chip below into the skull. I think there are people walking around nowadays with glucose monitoring devices like levels, which I've used, and it was very informative for me, actually, as a kind of an experiment, gave me a lot of interesting insights about my blood sugar regulation,

Starting point is 02:13:06 how it reacts to different foods, et cetera. Well, you can implant a tactile device below the skin with a simple incision. Actually, one of the neurosurgeons at NeuralLink, I know well because he came up at some point through my laboratory and was at Stanford and he actually has put in a radio receiver in his hand and his wife has it too and he can open locks

Starting point is 02:13:27 and of his house and things like that. So he's been to the skin. Under the skin, you can go to a... That's not work, so how do you... A piercer, you go to a body piercer type person and they can just slide it under there and it's got a battery life of something and some fairly long duration.

Starting point is 02:13:43 How do you experience the haptics of it? Oh no, that just allows him to open certain locks with just his hand, but you could easily put some sort of tactile device in there. But does that have to connect to the nerves or is it just like just vibration? Just vibration and you know, you can probably sense it, even if it's under this kind of one. And it can be Bluetooth linked. I mean, you know, I've seen, there's a engineering laboratory

Starting point is 02:14:06 at the University of Illinois, champagne, or Banna that's got an amazing device, which is about the size of a band-aid. It goes on the clavicles, and it uses sound waves pinned into the body to measure cavitation. I think about this for a moment. This is being used in the military where, let's say, you're leading an operation or something, are getting shot shot at and on a laptop

Starting point is 02:14:27 You can see where the bullet entry points are are people dead? Are they bleeding out? You know entry exit points You can get if take it out of the battlefield scenario you can get breathing body position 24 hours a day. There's so much that you can do looking at cavitation. So these same sorts of devices are on 12 hour Bluetooth could be used to Send all sorts of things maybe maybe every time you're supposed to hold your hand. I'm not a good gambler So I only play roulette when I go to Vegas because I you just long boring and you know games We get to you get some good mileage out of each out of each run usually, but the

Starting point is 02:15:03 You know, maybe every time you're supposed to hold, the person gets sort of like a stomach sinching because this is, you know, stimulating the vagus a little bit and they get a little bit of an egg. So it doesn't have to be more code. It can be yes, no, maybe, right? It can be, you know, it can be green, red, yellow, type signaling. It doesn't have to be very sophisticated to give somebody a significant advantage. Anyway, I haven't thought about this in detail before this conversation, but oh yeah, there's an immense lens. Does that, I don't know if you know a poker player named Phil Ivey? No, I don't follow the gambling.

Starting point is 02:15:36 Well, he's considered to be one of the greatest poker players of all time. Legitimately, you know, he's just incredibly good, but he got, there's this big case where he was accused of cheating and proven, and it's not really cheating, which is what's really fascinating, is it turns out, so he plays poker, that Texas hold him mostly, but all kinds of poker. It turns out that the grid on the back of the cards is often printed a little bit imperfectly. And so you can use the asymmetry of the imperfections to try to figure out certain cards.

Starting point is 02:16:14 So if you play and you remember that a certain card is like I think the eight in that deck that he was accused of and eight and nine would slightly different different symmetry wise. So he can now ask the deal actually to rotate it to check the symmetry. So you would ask the deal to rotate the card to see that there's to detect the asymmetry of the back of the card. And now he knows which cards are eights and nines and or likely to be eights and nines.

Starting point is 02:16:44 And he was using that information to play to play poker and win a lot of money but it's just a slight advantage and his cases and in fact the judge found this that he's not actually cheating but it's not right you can't use this kind of extra information so it's fascinating you can discover these little holes and games if you pay close enough attention yeah it's it's it's fascinating that you can discover these little holes and games if you pay close enough attention. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I think that, you know, I did watch that clip about the potential of cheating event in chess and the fact that a number of chess players admit to cheating at some point in their career. Very interesting. It was online. So online cheating is easier, right?

Starting point is 02:17:25 When you're playing online cheating in a game where the machine is much better than a human, it's very difficult to prove that you're human. And that applies, by the way, another really big thing is in social media at the bots, too. If you're running a social media company, you have to deal with the bots. And they become one of the really exciting things in machine learning and artificial intelligence to me is the very fast improvement of language models. So neural networks that generate text, then interpret text that generate from text, images

Starting point is 02:17:55 and all that kind of stuff. But that's, you're now going to create incredible bots that look awfully a lot like humans. Well, at least there are not gonna be those crypto bots that seem to populate my comment section when I post anything on Instagram. I actually delete those even though they add to the comment roster and, you know, if they bother me so much,

Starting point is 02:18:16 I spend at least 10, 15 minutes on each post just deleting those. I don't know what they need to do, but I'm not interested in those, whatever it is they're offering. Speaking of non-bots, I'm going to assume that all the questions are not from bots. There are a lot of questions. More than 10,000 questions. Goodness. I'll just take a few working from top to bottom. What ideas have you been wrestling with lately? And I think about the company as one, but as I scroll to the next, what are some others?

Starting point is 02:18:52 Well, some of the things we've talked about, which is the ideas of how to understand what is true, what is true about a human being, how to reveal that, how to reveal that to a conversation, how to challenge that, properly, that at least to understanding not the origin, so that that applies to everybody from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Also another idea is there's a deep distrust of science and trying to understand the growing distrust of science, trying to understand what's the role of those of us that have a foot in the scientific community, how to find and how to find and how to maintain a good relationship.

Starting point is 02:19:53 I mean, that's really been, I've never felt quite as lonely as I have this year with Ukraine. It's just like so many times I would just lay there and just feeling so deeply alone because I felt that my home, not my home like literally because I'm an American. I love, I'm a proud American. I'll die an American. But my home in the sense of my generation, my family's home is now going, is now has been changed forever. There's no more being proud of being from the former Russia or Ukraine. It's just, it's now a political message to say, if you'll, to show your pride. And so, it's been extremely lonely, but within that world,

Starting point is 02:20:40 with all the things I'm pursuing, how do you find a successful HBASBIN? That's been taught. But obviously, and there's a huge number of technical ideas with a startup of like, how the hell do you make this thing work? Well, the relationship topic is when we talk a little bit about and last time we touched on a little bit more detail. We're gonna come back to that, so I've made a note here.

Starting point is 02:21:03 What or who inspired Lex you to wear a suit every time you podcast? That's a note here. What or who inspired Laxu to wear a suit every time you podcast? That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. So there's two answers to that question. One is a suit and two is a black suit and black tie. Because I used to do, I used to have more variety, which is like, it was also a black

Starting point is 02:21:26 suit, but I would sometimes do a red tie and a blue tie. But that was mostly me trying to fit into society because like, varieties, you're supposed to have some variety. What inspired me is that at first was a general culture that doesn't take itself serious in terms of how you present yourself to the world. So in academia, in the tech world, just at Google, everybody was wearing like pajamas and they're very relaxed in the tech. I don't know how it is in the science in the chemistry, biology, and so on. But in computer science, everybody was like very, In computer science, everybody was like very, I mean, very relaxed in terms of the stuff they wear. So I wanted to try to really take myself seriously

Starting point is 02:22:12 and take every single moment seriously and everything I do seriously, and the suit made me feel that way. I don't know how it looks, but it made me feel that way. And I think in terms of people I look up to, the war suit that made me think of that is probably Richard Feynman. I see it.

Starting point is 02:22:27 It's such a wonderful human being. I see him as like the epitome of class and humor and brilliance. And, you know, obviously, I can never come close to that kind of, you know, be able to simply explain really complicated ideas and to have humor and wit, but definitely a spar to that. And then there's just the, you know, madman, that whole era of the 50s, the classiness of that. There's something about a suit that both removes the importance of fashion from the character

Starting point is 02:23:03 you see the person. I think Not to I forgot who said this might be like Coco Chanel or something like this is that you know you drew you Where a shabby dress and everyone sees the dress you wear a Beautiful dress and everybody sees the woman. So in that sense, I was, I hope I'm quoting that correctly, but that sounds good. I think there's a sense in which a simple, classy suit allows people to focus on your character

Starting point is 02:23:41 and then do so like with the full responsibility of that. Like, this is who I am. people to focus on your character and then do so like with the full responsibility of that. Like, this is who I am. Yeah. I love that. And I love what you said just prior to that. You know, my father who again is always asking me why I don't dress formally like you do. Always said to me growing up, if you overdress slightly, at least people know that you took

Starting point is 02:24:02 them seriously. So it's a sign of respect for your audience too in my eyes. Someone asked, is there an AI equivalent of psychedelics? And I'm assuming they mean, is there something that machines can do for themselves in order to alter their neural circuitry through unconventional activation patterns? Yes, obviously. alter their neural circuitry through unconventional activation patterns. Yes, obviously. Well, I don't know exactly how psychedelics work, but you can see that with all the diffusion models now with Dolly and the stable diffusion that generates from text art.

Starting point is 02:24:49 And there's a, it's basically a small injection of noise into a system that has a deep representation of visual information. So I was able to convert text to art and introducing uncertainty into that noise into that. That's kind of maybe, I could see that as a parallel to psychedelics and it's able to create some incredible things from a conceptual understanding of a thing It can create incredible art that no human I think could have at least easily created through a bit of Introduction of randomness randomness does a lot of work in the machine learning world just enough

Starting point is 02:25:24 there are a lot of requests of you for relationship, a lot of requests about statistics, about you data, about you specifically flipping past those. What was the hardest belt to achieve in Jiu-Jitsu? I would have assumed the black belt, but is that actually true? No, I mean everybody has a different journey through jiu-jitsu as people know for me the black belt was the ceremonial belt which is not usually the case

Starting point is 02:25:59 because I fought the wars like I training twice a day for I don't know how many years, seven or eight years, I competed nonstop. I competed against people much better than me, I competed against many, and beaten many black belts and brown belts. I think for me personally, the hardest belt was the brown belt, because for people who know Jiu Jitsu, the size of tournament divisions for blue belts and purple belts is just humongous. Like, worlds when I competed at worlds, it was like 140 people in a division, which means you have to win. I forget how many times, but 7, 8, 9 times in a row to metal.

Starting point is 02:26:46 And so I just had to put in a lot of work during that time. And especially for competitors, instructors usually really make you earn a belt. So to earn the purple belt was extremely difficult, extremely difficult. And then to earn the brown belt means I had to compete nonstop against other purple belts, which are young. You're talking about, like, the people that usually compete are like 23, 24, 25 year olds

Starting point is 02:27:11 that are like shredded, incredible cardio. They can, for some reason, are in their life where they can do, no kids, nothing. They can dedicate everything to this pursuit. So they're training two, three, four times a day, diet is on point. You're going and for me because you know, they're usually bigger and taller than me and just more aggressive actual good athletes. Yeah, I have to go to throw a lot of wars to earn that round belt. But they're gonna try this to you, Jetsu thing. Yeah, you should. But it's a different. I did the one class, but I really want to embrace it.

Starting point is 02:27:45 As you know, many pursuits, leg juts are different if you're doing your 20s and 30s and later. It's like it's a different, you can't, you're not, you know, you can have a bit of an ego in your 20s. You can have that fire under you, but you should be sort of more zen-like and wise and patient later in life. Well, one would hope. That's the wisdom. Well, I think Rogan is still in meathead. He still goes hard and crazy and he's still super competitive on that.

Starting point is 02:28:16 So some people can jacos, somebody like that. But whatever they're doing, they're doing something right because they're still in it. And that's super impressive. There were far too many questions to ask all of them, but several, if not many, asked a highly appropriate question for where we are in the arc of this discussion. And this is one admittedly that you ask in your podcast all the time, but I get the great pleasure of being in the question asker seat today. And so what is your advice to young people? So I just gave a lecture on MIT. And the amount of love I got there is incredible.

Starting point is 02:29:04 And so of course, what you're who you're talking to is usually undergrads, maybe young graduate students. And so, one person did ask for advice as a question at the end. I did a bunch of Q&A. So my answer was that the world will tell you to find a work-life balance to sort of explore, to try to try different fields to see what you really connect with, you know, variety, general education, all that kind of stuff. And I said in your 20s, I think you should find one thing you're passionate about and work harder at that than you work at anything else in your life.

Starting point is 02:29:52 And if it destroys you, it destroys you. That's advice for in your 20s. I don't know how university true that advice is, but I think at least give that a chance like sacrifice real sacrifice towards A thing you really care about and work your ass off that said I've met so many people And I'm starting to think that advice is is best applied Or best tried in the engineer disciplines especially programming I Think there's a bunch of disciplines in which you can achieve success with much fewer hours and it's much more important to actually

Starting point is 02:30:30 have a clarity of thinking and great ideas and have an energetic mind. Like the grind in certain disciplines does not produce great work. I just know that in computer science and programming it often does. Some of the best people ever that have built system, have program systems, I usually like the John Carmack kind of people that drink soda, pizza, and program, you know, 18 hours a day. So I don't know actually, you have to, I think really go discipline specific. So my advice applies to my own life which has been mostly spent behind that computer and for that you really really have to

Starting point is 02:31:10 put in the hours and what that means is essentially it feels like a grind. I do recommend that you should at least try it in your own. That if you interview some of the most accomplished people ever I think if they're honest with you they're going to talk about their 20s as a journey of a lot of pain and a lot of really hard work. I think what really happens, unfortunately, is a lot of those successful people later in life will talk about work like that. So I'll say, you know what I learned from that process is that it's really important to get like, son in the morning, to have health,

Starting point is 02:31:51 to have good relationships. To have friends. Yeah, sure, exactly. But like, I think you have forgot, those people have forgotten the value of the journey, they took to that lesson. I think work, life balance is best learned the hard way. My own perspective, there's certain things

Starting point is 02:32:11 you can only learn the hard way and so you should learn that the hard way. Yeah, so that's definitely advice. And I should say that I admire people that work hard. If you wanna get on my good side, I think are the people that give everything they got towards something. It doesn't actually matter what it is,

Starting point is 02:32:30 but towards achieving excellence in a thing, that's the highest thing that we can reach for as human beings, I think, is excellence at a thing. I love it. Well, speaking of excellence at a thing, whether or not it's teaching at MIT or the podcast or the company that resides in the near future that you create. I once again am speaking for an enormous number of people that, you know, excellence and Once again, I'm speaking for an enormous number of people that, you know, excellence and hard work certainly are woven through everything that you do. Every time I sit down with you, I begin and finish with such an immense feeling of joy and appreciation and gratitude. And it wouldn't be a Lex Friedman podcast or in case of a Lex Friedman, being a guest on a podcast, if the word love weren't mentioned at least 10 times. So the feelings of gratitude for all

Starting point is 02:33:33 the work you do for taking the time here today to share with us what you're doing, your thoughts, your insights, your what you're perplexed about and what drives you and your callings. Can I read a poem? Yes, please. He was trying to cut me off, but I was getting along. No, no, no. This is... I was thinking about this recently. It's one of my favorite Robert Frost poems.

Starting point is 02:33:56 And I... Because I wrote several essays on it as you do, because I think it's a popular one that's read. And so essays being like trying to interpret poetry. And it's one that's thick, so with me, in both its calm beauty, but in the seriousness of what it means, because I ultimately think it's the, so stopping by woods on a snowy evening. I think it's ultimately a human being, a man asking the old, pacifist, the old Kamu question of why live. I think this poem, even though it doesn't seem like it, is a question of a man contending with suicide and choosing

Starting point is 02:34:38 to live. Whose words these are, I think I know. His house is in the village, though. He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer, to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year. He gives this harness bells a shake, to ask if there's some mistake. The only other sounds the sweep of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Starting point is 02:35:21 The woods representing the darkness, the comfort of the woods representing death. And he has a man choosing to live. Yeah, I think about that often, especially my dark, dark moments is you have promises to keep. Thank you for having me, Andrew, your beautiful human being. I love you, brother. I love you, brother. Thank you for joining me today from a discussion with Dr. Lex Friedman and special thanks to Dr. Lex Friedman for inspiring me to start this podcast. If you're learning from Ender and Join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube

Starting point is 02:36:00 channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and on Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. If you have questions or suggestions about topics and guests you'd like me to include on the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. In addition, please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning of today's episode. That's

Starting point is 02:36:24 the best way to support this podcast. During today's episode, we did not discuss supplements, but on many previous episodes of the Hubertman Lab podcast, we do discuss supplements. Because while supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like enhancing sleep and focus and hormone augmentation and so forth. The Hubertman Lab podcast has partnered with Momentous Supplements because they are of the very highest quality

Starting point is 02:36:47 and they ship internationally. In addition to that, they have single ingredient formulations that allow you to devise the supplement regimen that's most effective and most cost effective for you. If you'd like to see the supplements discussed on the Uberman Lab podcast, please go to livemomentus.com slash Uberman. If you haven't already signed up for the

Starting point is 02:37:05 Huberman Lab podcast zero cost neural network newsletter, we invite you to do so. It's a monthly newsletter that has summaries of podcast episodes and various protocols distilled into simple form. You can sign up for the newsletter by going to HubermanLab.com, go to the menu and look for news letter. You supply your email, but we do not share it with anybody else. And as I mentioned before, the newsletter is completely zero cost. And if you're not already following us on social media, we are Huberman Lab on Instagram, Huberman Lab on Twitter, and Huberman Lab on Facebook.

Starting point is 02:37:36 And at all of those sites, I provide science and science related tools for mental health, physical health, and performance, some of which overlap with information covered on the Hubertman Lab podcast, but often which is distinct from information covered on the Hubertman Lab podcast. So again, that's Hubertman Lab on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Thank you again for joining me for the discussion

Starting point is 02:37:54 with Dr. Lex Friedman. And as always, thank you for your interesting silence. you

Huberman Lab - Dr. Lex Fridman: Navigating Conflict, Finding Purpose & Maintaining Drive

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.