Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Dr. Jud Brewer : Fear, Freedom, and his book The Craving Mind (#049)

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

Dr. Jud Brewer is a mindfulness expert, using his background in addiction psychiatry to help people around the world. In this interview with Brian Keating, on INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE, Brewer talks about his book, “The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love – Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits.” Show notes and resources are available here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 00:08:53 The effects of nature versus nurture on cravings. 00:17:04 Are some cultures resistant to psychotherapy and meditation? 00:26:16 How technology can enhance mindfulness. 00:37:04 How to help our kids develop good habits. 00:44:03 Incorporating artificial intelligence & human empathy in healthcare. 00:49:38 Anxiety is rampant in academia. What can be done? 01:04:45 Questions INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE asks authors. I’ve used Brewer’s teaching in my own life and work. Mindfulness practices can help achieve higher efficiency and happiness at work, and moderate stress of all varieties, including the anxiety that comes with a global pandemic. Jud Brewer, M.D. Ph.D. is the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, as well as an associate professor in psychiatry. His company MindSciences develops mindfulness apps, including Eat Right Now, Craving to Quit, Breathe, and Unwinding Anxiety. Buy “The Craving Mind”  Brewer puts Anderson Cooper’s mindfulness to the test on 60 Minutes: https://youtu.be/PRjTWWuRanY Watch Brewer’s TED Talk here: https://youtu.be/-moW9jvvMr4 Find Jud Brewer on the web: https://drjud.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/judbrewer and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrJud Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes for a chance to win a copy of Brewer’s book: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 ‍♂️ Find Brian Keating on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Find Brian Keating on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 Into The Impossible is a Production of the http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Director, Erik Viirre Co-Director, Brian Keating Associate Director, Patrick Coleman Produced By Stuart W. Volkow (P.G.A.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is interstitiveness and magic. I'd like to have Dr. Judson Brewer with us today on The Into the Impossible podcast, all the way from Rhode Island. I believe you're in Rhode Island right now. Is that right, Judd? We live in Massachusetts, but yes, I work in Providence, the place right behind you. Yes, that's right. So those of you watching the video, we'll see my alma mater where I spent many years getting my Ph.D.

not becoming a real doctor like Dr. Judd, but becoming a doctor nonetheless, a philosophical doctor. And it's a great treat to talk to you. I only found out about you probably about a year, a year and a half ago. And since then, I've been kind of one of your chief evangelists on the West Coast, at least, and we're going to get into all your great work, and especially your book, because books are a big part of this podcast. I started doing the pandemic podcasting, which I trademarked, and internationally patented a few months ago,

just when it started to seem like the world was changing for authors such as yourself and myself. And I noticed you started to do something really useful and wonderfully gracious for the world. And I wanted to ask how that project's going. So first, maybe you can introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? And then I want to turn to this wonderful service

that you've been providing for me and thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Sure. I'm Judd Broome, the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center. I'm an associate professor in both the behavioral and social sciences in the school of public health and in psychiatry in the school of medicine. I also founded a startup called Mind Sciences. So that's who I am. But I love, Alison Wonderland says, who in the world am I? Ah, that is the great puzzle. That's right. And I've been following your many podcasts, your TED Talk, which by now has been seen by over 10 million people around the world on different sites. I want to touch base with you. In addition to the stuff you do as an academic, you're also doing a lot of what we call outreach and public education. Can you comment on some of the things you've been doing most particularly? I don't know why a professor in his or her right mind would add to their office hours. I always say being a professor is the hardest three hour.

weak job in the world. Now, you're making me look bad, Judd. So tell me, tell us about your office hours and your daily dose that you've been doing in March and April on mindfulness and anxiety prevention. Yeah, so as a psychiatrist, I've seen a lot of really good information go out around physical, you know, illness, like how to prevent the spread of coronavirus, how to, you know, eat healthy, things like that. But I haven't seen a lot on mental health, mental health. issues and mental wellness. And so I really felt motivated. I was inspired seeing, you know, others.

You know, you certainly haven't innovated a patient since I was a resident. So, you know, me, me jumping and volunteering in the ICU is probably not the best idea. But I can certainly help with some of the mental health side of things. So I was actually just inspired to start putting together short, you know, five to 10 minute YouTube videos on a daily basis because there's so much related to mental health that is really coming to the fore here. And it all was seated by a New York Times article that I wrote on, you know, like why we get anxious based on these fear responses and how social contagion and all that plays a role.

And so people said, oh, you know, that's a great article. Can, you know, what else can you give us? And it just turned out there's a lot more, everything from guilt and shame to getting addicted to the news feeds. Yeah, absolutely. And the addiction science that you study has been really effectively used by, again, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of people around the world, whether they know it or not. Because I think some of the stuff that you're known for, in particular, the habit loop, which we'll get into. and your book The Craving Mind, which we'll get into, those have really kind of brought to the forefront,

not just a philosophy, but actually actionable tools, tactics, techniques, that people can use to do things like quit smoking, be less intimately connected to their social media devices. In my case, lose weight. I dropped actually five pounds from my double chin to my stomach, Thanks to you. And I'm very, no, actually, it's, I do use your products.

Your Eat Right Now app is very healthy to maintain health during this pandemic period. First, because the podcast is often about talking about books. I want to talk about, you know, kind of the inspiration because I, like many people, do judge books by their covers. And I want to talk about what they cover design and the meaning of the title. What does that really mean, the craving mind? You know, I mean, I realized how addicted I was to things when I started studying addiction. You know, and the joke, you've probably heard this research is me search. But in fact, I started meditating in beginning of medical school and was doing, my PhD is actually

in immunology. I shifted to neuroscience during residency. I retooled there. And so I was just kind of studying, you know, studying molecular mechanics. of the immune system and things like that and going along. And when I was learning in my psychiatry rotations in medical school and then in residency, I started learning more about mental health and where we struggle and where we fall down, honestly, in psychiatry, there aren't a ton of great medications out there to help people.

And so I was really inspired to start asking these questions, like, well, what are we missing? What doesn't work? And it turns out that that started intersecting with my own personal mindfulness practice where I was noticing, wait a minute, a lot of this stuff that I was learning from Buddhist psychology could be applied today. And, you know, a decade or so later, after doing a bunch of the neuroscience research and clinical studies, I was just, I was just inspired to write this book because I realized there are a gazillion different ways that were addicted and that we have craving. And so, you know, I think the first half or two-thirds of my book is actually titled with different ways that were addicted, you know, addicted to technology, addicted to self, addicted to distraction, addicted to love, you know, one of my personal addictions that manifested quite a bit in college. And so the craving mind was just the way to kind of bring all of that together in kind of one common theme or what are they called the mule that carries the story, the threat of a story through a book.

Yeah, and I want to talk specifically about the cover itself. Tell us about the title of the book, how that came about, and the very simple kind of iconography that you used in the subtitle, too. Yeah, from cigarettes to smart phones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break that habit. I think the thread there, I was blown away by these common mechanisms where we can be addicted to cigarettes in the same way we can be addicted to eating in the same way we can be addicted to romantic love.

So that's where the subtitle came from. Ah, okay. Uh-huh. And the cover of the book, tell August to do that. What was that, the meaning behind it, perhaps,

and the reason for the design elements that you use and that. And I'll also show the audiobook because I read it and listened to it on the audiobook, and I always like to do that. And we'll give away a copy, obviously,

to people that read the, listen to it on iTunes and leave a review of this episode. So, yeah, talk about the cover design. The audiobook in particular, I'm going to get that up. You know, has a little bit more of the subtitle elements that go into it.

So it shows of the brain and it shows the various little icons pointing to different addictions that people have. And maybe about the title itself, Judd. What about the title itself? Talk us through that. Yeah, that's really the all-encompassing theme where it's really our mind that starts craving stuff, whether it's cigarettes or smartphones or love or distraction or whatever. And it's not, you know, it's not about the thing itself.

It's not the cigarette itself. Cigarettes certainly have addictive elements, but it's really the mind that gets hooked by all of these things. And craving is built in, would you say, into the human mind because of the different biological pathways that course through our genetics, or is it something more malleable that's epigenetically, perhaps imprinted by the environment, the milieu, the culture, even that we grow up in? I would say some of both.

So certainly these urges to act drive our very basic survival mechanisms. You know, so, you know, these mechanisms are set up to help us remember where food is and also to remember where danger is so we can avoid it. And it's interesting, dopamine firing happens when we get an unexpected reward, right? So you can imagine you're wandering around the savannah, suddenly find a food source. your brain fires this dopamine off that says, hey, remember this plate so you can come back here tomorrow and get some more food. Same thing, you know, you see this average of the tiger and you're like, oh, it's danger

over here. Remember this. Don't come back here tomorrow. But that dopamine firing doesn't happen every time we get to that food source because we've already learned it, right? That firing shifts from receiving the reward, you know, from finding that food to anticipating. So that dopamine firing goes to, it says, hey, you know, get off your butt, go get the food. So it motivates us to action once we've learned the behavior.

And so that's actually where the craving comes in. So that's a very basic learning mechanism. Yet, you know, I wouldn't say, it suggests, well, great example, cigarettes do not help our survival. But we can actually learn to crave cigarettes in the same way that we, you know, that these mechanisms help us find food. You know, we, but through a very different mechanism. So typically, and what I've seen in our studies, the typical onset of smoking is 13 years of age. So these are pretty young people that start smoking. And typically it's because of things like they want to be cool at school or they're rebelling against their parents or whatever.

You know, they want to fit in. So they'll actually overcome the adversiveness of smoking a cigarette because nicotine is actually a toxin. And so they feel sick the first time they smoke. but they'll actually, they'll fight against that. And then, ironically, become addicted to the nicotine itself because they'll go through withdrawal physically and then, you know, they'll reinforce that process. I had a patient who came in, he wanted to quit smoking after 40 years, and he had reinforced that pathway 293,000 times.

Right. So this is how much it can get looped in. So this is where genetics play together with epigenetics and also play together with with basic Q reinforcement paradigms. Now, I want to get into meditation. I want to talk about, you know, the focus in your work is very much on, is very much on kind of stimulating curiosity and hacking the loops themselves and short-circiting them before that they get to be dangerous addictions.

Obviously, some things, you know, might be less addictive or less detrimental, say, you know, nicotine is probably higher up on the list of things of, you know, potential dangers because it's linked to smoking, then say coffee might be. I'm hoping because, you know, I like to have some coffee every couple of minutes. But I want to talk first before we get into that. There's been a proliferation, as you must know, of meditation apps and books and TED talks and approaches and everything from, you know, from seeing, Recently on my audible, I saw Get Your Meditation, Your Daily Meditation from Puff Daddy. And I thought, you know, is this the sign? You know, have we really, nothing against Puff Daddy.

I'm sure, you know, he has a MD and a PhD also. No, I'm just kidding. But, you know, there are these books by, you know, Dan Harris, his brother, as I understand, Sam Harris. No, I don't think they're brothers, but they have these apps and they have these. And you've actually been in 10% happier. You've been featured on us and Dan Harris. his app and even online on his podcast. What separates this approach from those approaches?

And if meditation, just being a little provocative, if meditation is powerful, then shouldn't there be one modality of employing it that's superior to the others? I mean, we all want to be in better fitness. I don't think anyone really wants to smoke. I mean, there are better hobbies you can pick up. and smoking. So, you know, how is it that there's so many different applications? Is it just a sign of, you know, people jumping on the same bandwagon that you hacked many years ago? Or is there something

to these, you know, variety of different approaches? Yeah, here I think we can learn both from history and modernity, which is that historically, even if you look at, like, Buddhist psychology schools, for example, there are three main schools that have survived to a common day, you know, or the current day, like there's this terra Vodda, you know, that's considered more the Vapasana, some describe it as that, or insight meditation. There's Zen, there's Tibetan meditation. And they really have different flavors of teaching, you know,

the same core teachings, you know, with some slight, with some differences. And I think that actually appeals to different proclivities that people have. So, for example, you don't want to over-generate, But the Tarvada Buddhism is more kind of analytically, scientifically oriented. And that's what I got most interested in. So that I was drawn to that as compared to Zen or the Tibetan or the Vash Rayana schools. So I think there's a, you know, there's not a one size fits all for anything.

This goes from everything from diets to exercise to meditation programs. So that's one thing I think to keep in mind historically. Now, in modernity, I agree. I think it's just lots of people jumping on the badmigan. They're like, oh, I can record a guided meditation or I liked meditation. So I'm going to do one. I'm going to do my own. And it's not, you know, throw some money at something and you can have an app.

So I think there's a lot of that going on. And, you know, there's a wide range of quality in terms of some of these programs. So, for example, the 10% Happier app has, you know, they bring in very senior and skilled meditation teachers as part of their platform. Ours takes a slightly different approach than all of these basic ones, which is, you know, we're not actually aiming at like a general meditation app. There are plenty of those out there. But we're focusing on helping people with specific problems. So, you know, if you smoke or if you stress eat or overeat or if you have you. have anxiety, you know, that's where we're focusing because we're zooming right into the

neurobiologic mechanisms and targeting those specifically. And it just turns out that my lab has studied, that mindfulness actually works very well for these types of things. So we're taking more of an evidence-based approach. So for those of you watching, I've switched my background. This is a quiz for the professor, Professor Dr. Judd. Do you know what we're looking at in the background here. It looks like somebody's richly decorated living room. This is allegedly Freud's couch in Vienna. At least that's what the internet told me when I stole this picture.

Well, I see busts of the Buddha in the background. Yeah, yeah. So that's what made me doubtful. But there's some old-looking books. Anyway, the segue that I want to make now is into the practice, both in, you know, psychiatric training in graduate school and medical school, but also to the popularization of this we just spoke about. In your own work, I recall Freud saying something to the effect that there are certain

groups or cultures that are just generically are resistant to psychotherapy. So, you know, I'm Jewish, and we're not one of those groups, right? We're famously, you know, addicted to addiction recovery and neuroses. We're neurotic about our lack of neuroses if we don't have them. But in reality, is it true, do you believe it's true what Freud said that there are some cultures that are fundamentally just, you know, will be resistant to psychoanalysis? And if so, is that also true of meditation?

Some people just cannot meditate, cannot use these tools. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster, triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry

and the best have you wait in the world, Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Yeah, it's a good question. I think that I probably agree.

I have to think more about this, but I agree that there are going to be some people that are resistant, and especially if you take a specific type of psychotherapy, like psychoanalysis, there are going to be people that are going to be resistant to that. Interestingly, we see a fair number of different types of psychotherapies out there that might indicate that having more personalized approaches are going to be, they're going to span that one-size-fits-all category.

And so here, if Freud said, you know, there are people resistant to psychoanalysis, sure. Are there people resistant to psychotherapy? Sure. I have plenty of patients who are resistant to psychotherapy. And that may, you know, that can indicate a bunch of different things. But with the number of different types of psychotherapies out there, you're more likely to find matches for people.

Here I would say with meditation, I've had many, many people say that they, you know, they can't meditate or they don't like meditating or whatever. we've actually looked at, but I would say that I have not met a single person who's not interested in how their own mind works. So that's a different question. And I think if you approach it that way where, you know, I don't, I didn't know how my mind worked. I didn't even know it in medical school. I didn't know it in residency. I didn't have a good sense for that.

Maybe I didn't do my 50 years of psychoanalysis four days a week or whatever. But it'd be a little late at that point anyway. So here, I think some of the early Buddhist psychology is actually really insightful in the sense that it really teaches us how our minds work. And interestingly, it has a very strong correlation with the modern concepts around reinforcement learning. We wrote a paper on this showing that the ancient Buddhist psychology lines up beautifully with reinforcement learning with positive and negative reinforcement learning. with positive and negative reinforcement. And they came up with this before paper was even invented. So here, I think if we phrase it from the perspective of who's interested in how their mind

works, everybody raises their hand. Because not only whether it's a curiosity side of things or whether it's just helping them function, everybody wants to know something about how their mind works. So if we approach it from that perspective, I think this is somewhat universal. I mean, I'm sure there's going to be the mindite. What's the equivalent of a ludite who's not interested in their own mind works? There's going to be somebody, but that's going to be at the very far end of the bell curve in terms of oddity. Yeah.

Well, let's get into technology then. So, yeah, you're talking about, you know, 4,000-year-old, 5,000-year-old technology. So in addition to the technology that could be enhanced from learning about how the mind works and the tools that are used, you were on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper a few, about a year or two ago, and you're going through, you're putting him through an MRI, an fMRI, and he's meditating, he's thinking about something stressful, you know, his ratings are dropping by half a percent or something, and then all of a sudden you make him start meditating, he drops in, to use his language, he drops into meditation, and we'll roll some B-roll footage showing him in that, and it's

this huge contraption with gel, and you're squirting gel into 128 electrodes, and now, you know, I've got this thing here. It's called a muse headband. And I also, you know, I'm a techie, right? So I'm an anti-ledite, and I've got the Oculus and I've got earbuds and I've got this. I've got an aura ring. And I've got, I was shocked. Here's my aura ring. You know, you can't even see it. I've got the next generation stealth, you know, completely invisible transparent. First of all, do you buy into any of these things that I waste, you know, 200 bucks on this muse headset or is it just a placebo? though? There was a guy from the Wall Street, I'll give you a short answer, which is look for science. My bias is towards science. And it's actually hard to find any research showing definitive evidence for any of these things. I think they're a nice start and can get people curious and interested in things. But there's actually a Wall Street Journal reporter who called me, because he had mastered the mute. And I think he wanted a quote from a scientist to write his article. And we talked for a bit and he said, he just jumped down.

He said, look, can I come visit your lab? And he drove up from New York City like that night. And the next morning, we put him in our EEG neurofeedback rig where he could watch his own brain activity in real time. And we blinded him because it's really not literally, but we did a blinded experiment. so that he could not be biased because it's so easy to fool ourselves. I think Richard Feynman used to say, you know, we're the easiest to fool. He always said, he said the first principle is you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool.

And I've kind of wondered on Twitter, you know, what was his second principle? He says the first one. Yeah, that's fine. Good. That's right. That's about confirmation bias, right? Yeah, yeah, totally. So long story short, this guy, you know, was able to move the signal and it moved in the opposite direction of all of our studies of experienced meditators.

And then and then we unblinded him and said, you know, that's actually in the opposite direction of what we see. And he had told me the day before that he practiced, he practiced chigong for a long time. And I said, so I said, just do your chigong practice mentally because that has elements, I think, that are very similar to mindfulness. He did that and it immediately dropped. They moved into the direction that we find when people are effortlessly aware. So he ended up writing a very mixed article in Wall Street Journal. We'll have to link to that. Oh, I nailed the muse.

I got that third eye on the first try, yo, that type of thing. So they're, you know, I'm friendly with the folks at Muse. They never told me what their algorithm is. It's a trade secret, I think. So I don't know what they're doing, but I haven't seen any studies that they've published showing that this lines up, you know, definitively with anything. I'm sure they have some signal that they're going by. But I just, I would encourage folks just to be careful, you know, when they buy consumer products because, you know, also the electrodes across your forehead. Hopefully they've control for this.

But the biggest signal you're going to get is from your frontalis muscle. Right. Yeah. I think that that is actually being monitored. If I really grip my teeth or, you know, do, the thing I like about it is that it's not a guided meditation. You know, it's, you have wonderful guided meditations. But I think just like cross training, you know, I say it's like cross training your brain. You know, you can do different, different styles, guided meta, you know, loving kindness.

You can do. And I want to get into that because I think, I think for the listeners of the Inters of the Impossible podcast, you know, we're kind of tech forward. We're kind of interested in future technology, like our namesakes or Arthur C. Clark, you know, kind of provided a role model in many ways, not in all, but certainly in terms of thinking about the future and using science fiction as a way to kind of hack the future

and pre-game and your pre-frontal cortex. And you talk a lot about this mental models. You don't use the physics term for it, but it's called the Godankan experiment, the thought experiment. You do mention the thought experiment concept, but physicists know that as Godon. and I do wonder, you know, why wouldn't it be possible to have a technological input unless it might be that, you know, there's something about meditation.

What's the first step in many meditations? It's going to close your eyes. But then you have these other technologies like the Oculus, you know, VR headsets. And you don't get into this too much, but, you know, it was kind of written, I think, a little bit before the onslaught of AR and VR. But is there a place for it? I mean, can I imagine having a muse headband with goggles, with. with ears, with ear, and then like tiny haptic electric shocks, you know, if I stop,

you know, like we need some negative reinforcement too. It can't only be positive. Right. I, so I think that's a, I think it's technology absolutely plays a role. And we, you know, we, as people can see from the Anderson Cooper video, there is, you know, we're using, we're already starting to move from FMRI to EG neurofeedback where we can get specific signal from deep in people's brains, which wasn't possible 10 years ago. And we're even moving from 128 leads down to 32 leads or so. So I think that technology is improving rapidly enough that we can see, you know, we're going to see this thing happen, you know, in the next couple of years. And I, and we've done a bunch of studies specifically to map out these different

brain regions and how they line up with meditation, all this. We published a bunch of papers on it. So the idea is, can we get a technology that really does line up with the elements of meditation? And also, importantly, I think feedback is only good if it can teach us something about ourselves so we're not dependent on the technology. So I think technology is a great way to teach us something. But if we become dependent upon it, is that really that great of a thing? So here we found something really interesting from some of the neurophenomological studies that we've done, which were around when we looked at people's experience. So for example, there's this network or brain regions called the default mode network that gets activated when we get caught up in craving.

It gets activated when we're worrying about things. It gets activated when we get caught up in romantic love, you know, like lusting after or pining away about our loved one. I think here we can start to look at those experiential qualities and the experiential quality of that contraction that comes when we're caught up with anxiety actually registers in this default mode network with increased activity. This is what Andrew Cooper showed so well. It went off the charts actually. It was above, you know, like we didn't even have the scale to be able to reach that magnitude of his anxiety. So there, you know, that contraction is something that we all can. experience directly. And we can also experience the opposite of a contraction, which is expansion.

And here it gets really interesting. And I actually give a TEDx talk on flow. There's a guy, Micheimahai, who's a psychologist who described Flo in the 70s in a book that he wrote, where he basically talks about it being effortless, selfless, joyful, timeless, all this stuff. And the idea is, you know, this contraction quality says, okay, here I am. It actually gives us an experiential marker of us, right? And it's part of this self-referential brain network. Whereas if you start expanding and loosening, you know, kind of expanding that boundary, and you get it so big where you lose that sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins, you really get right into this territory of flow that Tickson-Mahy talked about.

And we're actually seeing this in some of our real-time real-time real feedback experiments, where, you know, we had an experienced meditator get into flow in her posture or singular. activity that part of the default mode network dropped precipitously. So here I would suggest we can use technology as a way to give people feedback to help them really get into that nuanced experience of subtle forms of contraction and subtle forms of expansion. And then we can start to calibrate our own experience and have that be the experimental paradigm, the lab, as well as the neurofeedback device. Then we don't necessarily need to have some expensive piece of equipment to give us

feedback once we've calibrated our own experience. So here I think technology can be tremendously helpful, yet it can also be a hindrance if we become reliant on it. You know, we can't walk around every day with a headset on our heads, you know, having it tap us, you know, with X, Y, or Z. I think it's, it's incumbent upon us to really have this become part of our lived experience. So I think that's really interesting. And I want to, I want to, I want to, dovetail that with kind of the, you know, one of the takeaways I get from, from your, both your work in smoking cessation and, and eating cessation and using this notion of curiosity as a superpower, and we'll get into that in just a little bit. But just a first, a little detour is a prerogative

of the host of the podcast. You know, I always thought about, you know, I've, I've always been, you know, basically I say I'm always on a diet and I'm always hungry in my whole life, essentially. and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing because I think it forces me to be disciplined and think about when I'm actually eating on a constant basis rather than one of my kids can eat like a whole bag of twizzlers

and he won't gain, he'll lose weight and so he's got the one six-pack in my side of the family. Actually, he has a 12-pack. He was born with a six-pack and it went up from there. On his umbilical cord, there was a six-pack. But, you know, my other kids are different

and I'm different. But I always thought, You know, is this an excuse? Tell me, you know, your free psychology lesson, a psychiatric session. I always justified to myself, well, you know, it should be easier to give up smoking because you don't need to smoke a little bit every day to live, but you need to eat. And it's always the middle ground, right? You see this in politics.

And you've talked about this on your office hours, on your daily meditation moments and just advice during the coronavirus pandemic that we become addicted. And the more polarizing, the better. And I think for our brains, at least and for the media, but you don't need news to survive. You could survive just fine, but you need food. And I wonder, is it truly harder to give up, you know, to lose weight because you have to strike this middle ground between these two poles?

Yes. And so this is how naive I was when I was a young, when I was a young psychiatrist, we all whipped to the couch. Yeah. Yeah. So it turns out that smoking is actually the hardest addiction to quit, which seems paradoxical to a lot of people. But, you know, they don't make movies about smoking like they do about drinking or

using heroin or other things. Right. And people don't, you know, abuse their kids. And, you know, they had a Marlboro and they go out and beat their kids or, you know, their spouse or something. Right, right. So smoking, when I did my first studies on smoking, it was actually because I was trying to tackle the hardest of addictions to quit.

And here, you know, we did a study where we got five times the gold standard, you know, quit rates in smoking cessation. So I was like, wow, there's something to this. And then so I was like, okay, wow, this works with the hardcore addiction. And then somebody said, you know, I'm actually noticing that I'm changing my eating patterns based on this. And then my eyes popped out of my head and said, wait a minute and realize that this is the same process for eating. Yet with eating, like you're pointing out, we have to eat to survive. So I think in one respect, it is harder because you can't just quit.

You can't just say, I'm never going to do that again. again. But the other aspect is modern society has made food, I'm not even call it food, made things hyper palatable to make us want to eat them. And then they flaunt it. You know, what is it ruffles or whatever? I bet you can't just eat one because we signed it that way. You know, I love my favorite peer review journal The Onion. Yeah, that's right. Next to Wikipedia. Yeah, they had a headline that says Dorito celebrates its one millionth ingredient. because, you know, this is a completely manufactured thing that's there to get us addicted.

And this is a great New York Times article from 2013. I think it was called the extraordinary science of addicted junk food, addictive junk food. I encourage anyone that's interested in this to read that. I make one of my classes at Brown, I have them read that paper. It's one of their favorite papers to read in the semester. But it just highlights all the ways that the industry is out there to get us addicted to consuming calories. and some of that you can even think of this historically that because corn syrup is so cheap because there's this corn subsidy you know it even goes back to that and so these conditions have been set up

where there's hyper-powerable stuff that gets us to eat that over healthy food so this is where the real challenge came in for me was oh well can we actually apply this to eating and it turns out that our bodies are much smarter than our thinking brains are our thinking minds are and so when we notice when we really pay attention, we start to see a number of patterns. Like, we'll eat food, not because we're hungry, but because we're stressed, right? Because it makes us feel better. It distracts us. One of my patients who was, she would binge on entire large pizzas in a single sitting. So she had full-blown binge eating disorder. And she'd do this 20 out of 30 days a month. She described it as, I would eat to numb myself. So she would, you know, she'd have an unpleasant

emotion that would come up and then she would eat as a way to numb herself. And that numbing felt better than the unpleasant emotion. So we can actually learn these habits. And so we learn to eat not because we're hungry, but because we're stressed or sad or bored or whatever. And there's actually a term for this called hedonic hunger, which means eating because of emotions rather than homeostatic hunger, which is eating out of actual physical hunger.

So there's all of these things that come into play in modern day. when in the past it was just, you know, is this poison or is this nutrient? It was as simple as that. Yeah, and actually going through it and looking at, well, you know, are there things that we can impose on ourselves, the technology to fight against technology, as you're saying, you know, these processed foods are engineered and there's, you know, socioeconomic reasons why that's so

and different imperatives towards that one degree or another. But yeah, I think, you know, one question, I've had for you is kind of can we pregame it like we have kids at home and many of my listeners have kids is there a way that you could sort of inoculate your kids so that they don't get bad habits they never smoke that you know I I basically you know I'm probably a terrible parent but I basically have convinced my kids at least the older three of them you know that that drugs will kill you like any kind of drug that's you know a schedule one narcotic you know just basically it kills people it's awful you shouldn't

try it, you know, the needle drugs, they stay off at, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I think maybe it's overblown a little bit, but I think, you know, what if it does kind of trigger this little, you know, audio recording in their head to go off someday when I'm not around, you know, maybe they'll listen. And I'm wondering, can your tools, can curiosity, can the DMN, can the habit loop hack, can that be used to inoculate kids to avoid the bad habit in the first place? Exema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with ebbglis.

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Yeah, so I think there are two elements to this. Did you ever see the movie? There's a documentary called Super Sizement. I saw some of it, and then I heard that there was some controversy about how that was produced. But yeah, go ahead. Okay. So I'll have a link to it. Yeah.

Yeah, the story to that is this guy basically says, I'm going to eat McDonald's every day for a month and see what happens. And at one point in the movie, and I'm saying this is a joke, so don't do this literally. He said, you know, when I have kids and we're driving by McDonald's, Because he had talked about how McDonald's actually has a playland specifically to get kids to associate playing with eating McDonald's, you know, and it's kind of a nefarious like cereal has prizes in it and, you know, happy meals have gay. So he said, every time I drive by McDonald's, I'm going to punch my kid. They associate pain with McDonald's. But I think that's, you know, that's, so that's one way to do it. I'm not recommending people do that.

No, no. But he's pointing out a basic concept, which is we associate X with Y. So what I would say is we can actually hack this reward-based learning system, but not in a way where we have to torture ourselves or where we have to punch ourselves or punch our kids. But just understanding the process actually makes it relatively straightforward to hack it. And the way that it works is that our brains are always looking for what I call the bigger, better offer, the BBO. Okay, the part of the brain is called the orboreal cortex that kind of stores and determines reward value. So, for example, and I put a short animation together on how to hack our minds for the reward value of our mind or something,

I put that out on my YouTube channel as well. Folks want to look at that. But basically, it talks about the difference between broccoli and chocolate cake. So we learn the reward value of chocolate cake, probably starting at a very young age. We go to a birthday party. We associate eating the cake with, you know, the sugar and the fat with eating ice cream, presents, friends, lots of fun, all that stuff. And then we reinforce that every time we go to a birthday party. So by the time where middle age, our brain says, hey, don't worry about the details. Cake is good, right?

Just eat the cake. So we wonder why it's so hard not to eat cake. Well, it's because that reward value has been set down for such a long time. So the way to actually hack into that is two things. One is to help us see really clearly how rewarding that food. is right in this moment. So we've actually built a tool right into our Eat Right Now app called the craving tool. Maybe you've played with it where we have people imagine eating the food when they have a

craving to eat the food. We have them imagine eating it so it can bring them on their current reward value, how rewarding it is right now. It doesn't matter if they're like, wow, I really want it now. That's fine. That tells us, okay, your reward value is this high. Then we have them pay attention as they eat the food. And if they eat, if they overeat or if they eat when they're not hungry, if they're

stressed, we ask them, how content do you feel afterwards? And what they realize is, it's actually not that great to overeat or to eat junk food or whatever. And it actually feels better to stop when I'm full. But then we just finished a study on this. We actually can model this out mathematically, these Rescorla-Wagner models, which are of reward value, you can actually see a significant reduction in reward value close to zero within, I think it's within 10 to 12 times of people using this craving tool.

Wow. So we can actually hack this system directly. We can model it mathematically, which to me is really fine. Yeah. But, you know, to the people that use the program, they see this as revolutionary because they realize they don't have to force themselves not to eat. They don't have to force themselves to go on these starvation diets. And in fact, start, you know, when we get, when we starve,

ourselves our body says hey there's there must be a famine i got to hold on to my calories so it's even harder to lose weight that way so here we say forget about it and we and people they come to us and they're like are you kidding because we say go ahead and eat whatever you want we say just pay attention as you eat because your body's pretty you know your body knows how to regulate this stuff you just have to pay attention to your body so starting that with it with kids is something that you know could be actually a way if not to completely inoculate them, but to at least make them aware at it as early an age as possible. Yeah, and I will highlight something really important, which is a lot of parents don't realize

that they're actually training their kids like their, you know, like Flipper or, you know, wild animals that are you training to do tricks. So, you know, if a kid starts crying at the grocery store and their parents says, hey, if you stop crying, I'll give you a lollipop, you know, suddenly they've just trained their kids to scream for lollipops, right? And that's, It's not like they're doing it on purpose. No, of course. But they have, you know, that's training kids to like, oh, junk food equals, you know, reward. Or, you know, if you eat all your dinner, you get some dessert, you know, that type of thing.

So I think there are ways that we can really look at the system and just understand how this reward-based learning works. So that parents can use their own wisdom to realize, you know, to help not perpetuate potential behaviors that are going to, you know, bite kids in the ass down the road. And they can teach them, wow, look how delicious this type. Because actually, healthy food tastes pretty good. I know there are a lot of finicky kids out there. But the more they just constantly eat hyper-palatable junk food, the more their dopaminergic systems are going to drive that eating in actual taste.

And so it's a food palate. Right. Yeah. So the joy of eating can come in where you can explore all sorts of different things, cooking with the kids. You know, we got an air fryer, which is just, and I actually just bought one of my good friends who's got, you know, young kids. So they can, they can like air fry green beans in ways that, you know, and have these

really different yummy tastes that are actually pretty healthy. Wow. Yeah. So moving from young kids to older kids and even adults, I want to talk now, switch to a topic. Again, it might be primarily of interest to folks like you and me. I think it can translate over, and I mentioned this in some of the emails I exchanged with you before we recorded the podcast, and that was about academic issues and kind of mental health, anxiety, et cetera. So the first quote I want to sort of get into, I want to talk about all the different things that academics face,

because as I say, I think they can be applicable to people outside of academia and leadership, organizations, and I do want to get to that in just a little bit. So the first thing I want to talk about is something you mentioned in your book, The Craving Mind. You mention this sort of study done on doctors that they reach a sort of saturation with how much empathy they can feel. You call it empathy fatigue. You talk about medical students and the amount of medical and kind of diagnostician healthcare professionals. And just especially in this time, they become so saturated with either grief or their own anxieties, et cetera, that they aren't able to show the kind of empathy that we would hope that our healthcare,

you know, practitioners, especially physicians, would display. Can you say something about that? And if there's anything that we can do about it, again, while students are in medical school or residency, et cetera. Yeah, I think this is a really important thing to be exploring. So the first thing is, if we, I'm going to go back to this thing about if we don't know how our minds work, how are we possibly going to be able to work with them? And here, I think empathy, I never learned anything about empathy in medical school. I think there was just a sim that we're supposed to empathize with our patient. I think that's changing now in current medical schools, which is great.

But the idea is, you know, with empathy, you're supposed to put yourself in your patient's shoes. And if your patient's suffering, then you're going to be suffering if you're really putting yourself in their shoes. But we're only suffering if we take their own suffering personally, right? And so the idea with mindfulness is it can help us see actually a different path, which is when we learn to not take things personally, which is really the root of what mindfulness is about,

we can actually step back, we can be with suffering, and there's an opposite action that happens. Instead of stepping back because it's painful, we step forward because we actually feel the suffering of others, and we're not worried about protecting ourselves or feeling bad ourselves. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. And I think it's an opportunity for physicians to demonstrate,

and I'll get into that in a second, But yeah, did you want to finish up that thought? Well, I was just going to say we did a study with our unwinding anxiety app. I don't know if you were going to get to that. But we found that we got a, you know, there's a strong correlation between physician anxiety and burnout. And there are a lot of reasons for that, both individual and institutional. But we did a pilot study. We just published it a couple of weeks ago where we just looked to see if physicians would use this unwinding anxiety app.

And we've got a 57% reduction in clinically validated anxiety scores. And we got a 50% reduction in certain aspects of burnout because there are individual aspects that are highly correlated with anxiety, such as cynicism. And people realize, oh, this is me getting caught up in this habit loop around being cynical. It's actually burning energy that's not helping anybody and just making my life more miserable. Very good. Yeah. And actually, I had a conversation about a week ago with Dr. Peter Diamandis, who like you, hasn't intubated anybody since he was in medical school.

But he was talking about the possibility of medicine being, if not largely, perhaps mostly outsourced to the cloud, to devices that I have in the room whose names I can't say, but it's called Aloysius or somebody, who's in the room or Shraggy or somebody like that, where you'll be, you know, because the classic, view of the doctor in the old days is the house call and the doctor sitting by the, and now it's the doctor's on a computer and the patient's on an iPhone, they're not even looking at each other. And I wonder if, you know, teaching doctors, these tools, as you're doing, could help, you know, obviate some of the advantages that, quite frankly, AI does have over humanity in that, you know, as patients talking, the AI could be searching every single, you know, person who's ever reported this in the

history of, you know, digitized health records. And that's huge. But the, you know, the chatbot can't replace the human touch. But if the doctor, him or herself, is not acting with that most human of qualities, empathy, and loving, kindness, et cetera, then what serves to differentiate them. So I think that is a huge thing. I want to, you know, a benefit to, you know, medical students and people to take advantage of. And we'll have links to that, to overcoming anxiety as well as the other apps. I want to turn out maybe to a select, yeah, go ahead. I can just mention something quickly, which is what I really see ideally is an augmentation of a medical care where physicians can move back into the places that they probably drew them to become doctors in the first place, which is the care of their patients. And so if they can have augmentation strategies where they've got AI in the background,

helping them with their differential diagnosis and looking up all the cross-reactivity for different medications, which we can't possibly store in our brains, that could be a great tool that could then free us up to actually be with our patients and have that compassionate care because compassion has been shown repeatedly to be a critical aspect of medicine. It's not just to take this pill and then you're fixed. a huge aspect of the personal component to that as well. And that might actually free us up once we figure out this whole electronic medical record conundrum and all this, you know, all these other regulatory things that are keeping physicians from actually doing, you know, being a doctor.

Right. I really see down the road a really nice blend between that personal, that caring component and the, you know, let's just call it the AI component that can help augment all of the, all of the different, um, informational aspects. Very good. So sticking with academia, let's take a step back in the educational career

of somebody who goes to college and has to face the first kind of step in the rung in the academic ladder is getting accepted to a college or a graduate school or a medical school and worrying about rejection. And then if you're accepted, once you get there,

you have sort of the opposite, the fear of being an imposter. called imposter syndrome. Can you talk about that in the academic setting? And what kind of tools people can use to cope with these twin, diametrically opposed fears that we might have? Yeah, I think this happens at every step of the game. I remember in high school, my college counselor told me that I would never get into Princeton,

and I was so pissed off that I applied there early just to piss her off. I never even visited. And that's why I ended up going to school. So, you know, I think this happened so much, you know, where it's like we get, you know, and then I, we get somewhere and we're like, oh, everybody's smarter than I am. I didn't know what school was like. So I think just knowing our minds, again, is going to take us really, really far here. If we can notice that we're caught up in these anxiety, these worry habit loops, like, oh, everybody else is smarter than I am. You know, they used to do this.

I think it was at MIT where they would say, you know, their freshman assembly, they'd say, stand up if you were the valedictorian of your sluitorian of your class. And like everybody stood up except one person who probably was mortified and traumatized from that for the rest of their life. You know, so I think here, if we can really tap into and see that our minds are actually, you know, this is this old survival mechanism that's just trying to help us survive, but it's kind of getting a little off course. And we're actually tripping ourselves up that way.

it can really help us take a step back and take us a long way toward healing because worrying that we're not good enough is going to actually make our thinking brain go offline and make it harder for us to see that we are actually good enough and it's going to make it harder for us to be able to bring out our natural talents so here's where you mentioned this earlier but we can get into this more this is where the superpower of curiosity comes in so you know we talked about seeing how unrewarding old habits are like overeating or whatever, but we didn't actually talk about that big or better offer. And I think in academics, curiosity is that bigger, better offer. It feels better. So, for example,

if somebody has a craving to eat food, what feels better? Caving or curiosity. You know, curiosity feels better. So even if somebody's trying to break a bad habit, they can, they can start to bring in curiosity itself. But we can also do this when we've got, when we're falling into bad habit patterns around self-judgment or self-doubt or, you know, shame or feeling like an imposter. We can get curious right in that moment and ask ourselves, oh, what does this feel like? Like not why am I feeling this way, but what does this feel like in my body? Does it feel more, you know, X, Y, or Z on the right side or the left side? And so we can start to get curious right in that moment about what those sensations feel like, and that curiosity itself helps us unwind

from those old habit loops right in the moment. Yeah, and I think that's something that's so endemic to the academic, you know, kind of ladder that we climb those of us that stay in academia. But again, you can translate, you know, this to any other field, whether it's, you know, making partner in a law firm or what have you. I think, you know, for me, one thing that's really come up a lot in, you know, as an academic, as a faculty member, is sort of, again, these two different opposing emotions or reactions, which is on one side, you know, we have this craving to be attributed. You may not know this, but you've probably heard of the H index, right? Yep. So I was actually conceived of one of my physics colleagues here, Jorge Hirsch in the physics

department, so H is for Hirsch. And it's sort of this metric that's supposed to track not just a number of times. A single paper has been cited, but the kind of corpus of your academic citations, you might want to explain to the listeners, but, you know, citations are like the ultimate, you know, thumbs up on Facebook or like on Instagrams or whatever, and it's, and it becomes addictive. I have to say, you know, that you want to be attributed and credited because, you know, we don't really get into academia for the money, but on the other hand, I think, you know, certainly having ideas and having the attention that we feel our ideas are due. I think that's one poll.

Again, these are the dichotomy here. The other side is like, you know, fear of being wrong and fear of failure that we have. Oh, what if, you know, this thing that I've been working on is taken out of context or if it's misattributed or if I'm wrong, I did a study and I had to retract it. I know that feeling, you know, or how to reinterpret its results. So how do we balance that? And again, this could be, you know, another sign of something that applies well outside of academia and a law firm or a real estate firm, whatever, wanting to get credit for successes, but also

avoid blame on the other hand. Is there an craving or addictive component to that as well? Yeah, I think there is. So here, you know, just in there have been studies, for example, with likes on Instagram, showing that this getting a bunch of likes activates both the reward centers as well as the self-referential parts of the brain. And like you're pointing out, you know, with academia, it's the H index or the number of citations that we have or, you know, whatever.

There are a bunch of different ways that we measure ourselves and measure our peers in terms of, you know, oh, how successful are they, basically, you know. You don't have to ask them, you know, it's not about salaries, but it's about, you know, how many citations do you have, you know? Right. So I think that, you know, we see that aspect in academia, just like we see it all over a place where in modern day, you can quantify this stuff like we've never been able to before. You know, I don't know when the H index came out, but it hasn't been around for 20 years.

It's relatively new. Same thing is true with social communication. We see, you know, teenagers sitting next to each other, texting each other rather than looking at each other in the face. Right. And it's interesting. Right. Well, and it's interesting because you, you know, our brains don't like uncertainty.

I did a YouTube video on a couple of things around uncertainty and anxiety. But the idea is that our brains really, you know, that uncertainty drives us to get information because information helps us survive. And our brains would much rather have something definitive than ambiguous. And so if you look at somebody's face and you look at their body posture and all this stuff, there's a lot of uncertainty in terms of what were they really mean by that? What was that tone of voice? Was that angry?

Was that inquisitive? And then you could compare that to just getting 50 likes on Facebook or Instagram. You know exactly where you stand. And then you can compare that to everybody else. It's a, you know, they've Z scored. You know, they basically normalize the scale so that everybody knows exactly what the, what it is. And you can actually put a monetary value on.

I think you can actually buy, I think it's true. You can buy likes on Instagram or use to be able to. So you can actually, you can determine how much a like is worth, whereas that's really different than just having a conversation with somebody and having to actually have that ambiguity and be with that ambiguity and learn from it. Right. And I think, you know, just coming back as we wind up a little bit, I don't know, you have a few more minutes to go, Judd?

A few more. Okay, great. I want to talk about the opposite sort of scenario where people are anti-curious. We see this in science, or people, you know, denialists and certain scientific paradigms or certain events or there's hostility in the case of, you know, well-meaning academicians to different paradigm shifts in academia. Is there, you know, evolutionary or there's some advantage to that? I mean, you could see the evolutionary advantage you talk about in the book of all you hear

rustling in the woods in the savannah of Africa, you know, those that were curious what's causing that survived and propagated their genetic material, whereas those that didn't, you know, were probably, you know, lion food or I don't know what happens in the savannah. But you get the point. So is there any, why do we have people that are anti-curious or suppression or denialist in some sense? Why do you think that is? Well, I think this goes back to this uncertainty thing. You know, certainty feels good.

And when something feels really good, we try to perpetuate it over and over and over and over. And so, you know, we see this when people, you know, reach a certain salary and a certain type of, you know, job that is secure. it's harder for them to say, I'm going to take a risk and try a different job, or I'm going to try this, or I'm going to try this. It's really scary because you don't know if you're going to succeed or fail. So I think there's an aspect of that even around ideas where people can get a test that are on ideas.

So there were two well-known physicists. You probably know these. So who was it that said, how does physics progress one funeral at a time? Yeah, Max Planck. Plank, yeah. So Plank says this. And then there's Einstein who says, you should never lose your holy curiosity.

You know, that's how much reverence he had for curiosity. So I think what they're both pointing to is how when we become stilified, when we become attached to our own ideas, we are no longer scientists. And this is for, this goes for everyone. You know, it's not just science, but I think science really exemplifies this. As soon as we are so attached to our own ideas that we have to defend them literally to our death, we've halted the progress of science because then people have to wait for us to die, sometimes literally, before they can say, well, what about this?

You know, because they don't have as loud of voice. They don't have as many likes on their, you know, proverbial Facebook on Facebook feed. So I think that's really the aspect of it is this, it's this old survival mechanism trying to say, hey, make sure things don't change, when in reality the only unchanging thing is change itself. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, I think it's fascinating when I look at those quotes or, you know, Einstein, another one of his famous quotes, you know, I have nothing but, you know, passionate.

I'm just passionately curious, et cetera. And he also said, you know, imagination is more important than knowledge, which I like as the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, but I hope if my, you know, neurosurgeon, God forbid, arrest you surgery, I hope he has, you know, or she has some knowledge, you know, I'm not just, I'm going to be really imaginative when I go and do this surgery on Brian's, you know, lame brain. I want to finish up before we turn to the last segment, which is standard amongst all of our podcast. But I want to finish up with a question from the audience who asked this of you about applying your ideas to the workplace and getting beyond the happy talk, which he calls employee development theater.

And he says the bottom line is that most workplaces are all about the bottom line. At the organizational level, there's profit and perpetuation of the company, or personal, individual advancement, even at the expense of others, i.e., there's a lot of duplicity and authenticity between the company and the customer, between employees and themselves, and in most organizations and the employees that hire them. We don't give much thought to how we might be manipulating or taking advantage of other people, but using notions of self-esteem, et cetera, can it be reconciled short of quitting? I guess he's talking about maybe a hostile workplace or ways to maybe isolate compartmentalize without being completely introverted and shut off from a company. Are there tools that we can beyond the kind of meta-loving kindness, which to him might feel inauthentic? Are there ways that he can sort of deal with these using techniques that you might have developed

in the workplace? Yeah. What a great question. So here I would say yes, absolutely. And I think some of this is, you know, there's this whole thing called delayed discounting. Are you familiar with this? No. So basically, the bunch of work, I think Warren Bickle was one of the folks that led this,

showing that we would prefer an immediate reward over a delayed reward, which basically, you know, gets uncertainty. I don't know if I'm going to get this reward later. And so we'll actually forego a greater reward that we're going to get later for an immediate reward. Is this like loss aversion or relative to that? I think it's related but slightly different. So basically the simple way to explain or give an example would be, you know, I'm going to give you, you know, if I were to offer you $12 in a week versus $10 today, what would you take? Yeah, right.

Yeah, I mean, I'm all about making sure you're still solvent. So it might take today's finances. Exactly. Even though, you know, that's a much better. That's a good yield on the. weeks. You know, that's a good interest rate for the week. That's delayed discounting. And I think that's our brains at play, you know, the workplace where there could be this immediate response where we're like, oh, I'm going to get this immediately, you know, right away. And we're not actually

looking at the old, you know, at the at the detriments of that. And so I think we can actually turn this on its head and really ask ourselves, okay, you know, if I'm given this this choice, for an immediate reward, how rewarding is this? You know, if I could step on my co-worker's head to get slightly ahead now, there's this excitement quality that comes to this that's through this whole, you know, evolutionary process. But at the same time, we could look at cooperation.

What's that actually look like? What's it feel like if we're truly cooperative? What I would suggest is that it feels better and actually leads to longer term benefits for everyone. It's just that it's kind of scary if we're like, well, that guy's going to screw me if I'm nice to him, so I better screw him first, you know, that type of thing. Wow.

So here I think we can really explore what it feels like and practice it. You know, what's it like to be kind to others? And does that actually help us feel better right now in the workplace? Does it lead to a better workplace environment, especially if we're in a leadership position? And does that actually give us better work product down the road? I would argue it helps people be more efficient, more effective, more rested, happier, all these other things that are actually going to make a much better business that'll spill out into customers where they're like, wow, that was a really nice person to interact with us compared to,

wow, that guy's burned out. Right. Jaded and introverted are not great combinations. Okay, I want to finish up with what I call the Into the Impossible Final Five. These are questions I ask all the guests. If you can be as short as possible, I know you don't have an infinite amount of time nor does any of us. The first one's about your book and about books in general. I kind of see books as like a DNA passed on throughout our species. And I'm going to be interviewing Carl Sagan, the late Carl Sagan's daughter, Sasha, later this week. And she quotes from her father about the magic of books that this is like time travel, basically. So speaking in that vein about time travel, and you could just answer a simple one sentence answer.

Personally, would you rather have a hundred people read the craving mind one year from now, or one person read the craving mind 100 years from now, longevity versus immediacy. Forgetting about book sales. The book in 100 years will be cost 100 times more than it does now. Yeah, 100 people read it one year from now, definitely. All right. And if you were to choose, if you had to choose a group of people to read this book,

would you rather have them be people that are skeptical, perhaps doubters, not hostile, obviously, because not going to sit down and read it, Or would you rather it be people that are open or intrigued by it, sort of already fans of what you're producing? Well, I would love to see skeptics who are not so stuck in their ruts of thinking that aren't open to any new ideas. But I'd much rather have skeptics who really look at things critically than like a fan base read this.

Great. And I see you as sort of a guarded optimist. You're a very cheerful person. You always put me in a good mood whenever I see you on the app or online. What are you pessimistic about? There's got to be things you're very pessimistic about. What are they? That's a good question.

What am I pessimistic about whether we as a human race will wake up fast enough not to destroy our planet? Okay, fair enough. And the last two questions, one's very easy and one's, a little bit harder. So this podcast is named after Arthur C. Clark's second law. His first law was that for any sufficiently advanced society technology, it's indistinguishable from magic.

And his second law was the only way to find out what's possible is to venture beyond a little bit into the impossible, and that's where we get our name from. But the question I have for you now is, what did you think as a 20-year-old, as a 30-year-old, as a young person, you thought it was impossible. But now that you went into the impossible, now it feels like you want to shake that 20-year-old version of Judd

and tell him it's going to be okay. What seemed impossible that you ended up accomplishing? I would have to say an understanding of my mind. You know, certainly have a long way to go. But, you know, it just seemed like such a black box and I was completely at the whims of my urges. Boy, it's actually relatively simple, and it's so helpful to know. Very good.

And then the last question I have for you is, and I suspect it'll be in the affirmative, but what you do as a scientist, as a professor, et cetera, is that something that their components are sort of equal between intrinsically, specific to yourself or other things that you can learn that you can teach that you can mentor so that basically a young version of me could be as successful as you are on what you do. I think the one thing I would mentor people in is curiosity. And I think that's both intrinsic and mentorable. So that's what I would say. You know, never lose that holy curiosity.

May we all aspire to what did Einstein say? you know, I'm curiosity over knowledge or whatever his quote was. Yeah, that's right. I'm nothing, if not passionately curious or something. Yes, let's train everybody to get addicted to curiosity. Yeah, and maybe imagination here at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. That makes a nice plug for us, and I want to give you a chance to plug anything that you're interested in promoting. You have the daily updates and anxiety and talk about your apps, your Twitter, your website.

Sure. So folks can find me two easiest places are the YouTube channel, which is Dr. Judd, DRJUD, and same for the website, which has all the apps on it, as well as a bunch of free resources. We've put animations out there to help people understand the neuroscience behind this stuff, even some free healthcare providers courses. We've even put out a free app called Breathe by Dr. Judd for people that just want to learn some basics around mindfulness. And then I'm also on Twitter at Judd Brewer, J-U-D-B-R-E-W-E-R. Great.

And we'll have links to all those. And I just want to thank you for this free 90-minute session that you provided for me and for tens of thousands of other people. Hopefully they'll be listening and watching this. Judd, it's been a delight following you online for many years. Great to hear your voice and actually responding to me when I scream at it. No, no, I don't scream at you. It's a wonderful service that you provided.

Thank you for the updates. Everything you do, it's done with such graciousness and generosity of spirit that I speak on behalf of the whole audience and just expressing our great gratitude to you. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our message, most recent guest's newest book.

Send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at imagine UCSD. Watch us on YouTube. Listen on iTunes.

Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, Director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.