Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #85 Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

Neuroscientist and Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford University, Andrew D. Huberman works to understand Why are we here, what are we good at...we discuss the current understanding of how the brain works. We dive into the positive effects of daylight, Neurotransmitters in our hormones systems, the evolutionary reason behind dad bod, the stress response and mitigation, growth mindset, Breath-work and how respiration affects the nervous system, hypnosis as a tool, the importance of sleep, managing autonomic arousal and how our internal stress response has evolved, Psychedelics, Float Tanks and states of consciousness, why we should rethink the way we feel about emotions, and expanding the brain’s notion of what comes next. Connect with Andrew: Website | http://www.hubermanlab.com/ Instagram | https://bit.ly/2YKUPr9 Show Notes: Design Your Life Ticket Link https://bit.ly/2UOp7Gi Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat Zinn | https://amzn.to/2CSmwFc Duncan French | https://www.instagram.com/dr_duncan_french/ Coolidge Effect | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_effect Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky | https://amzn.to/2JZiOzK Growth Mindset | https://www.mindsetworks.com/Science/Impact Brian Mackenzie | https://powerspeedendurance.com/artofbreath/ Michael Sealy | https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelSealey Whoop HOH Podcast | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYLxkXz_Lr8&t=10s Yoga Nidra | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H0FKzeuVVs David Goggins | https://davidgoggins.com/ War of Art by Steven Pressfield | https://amzn.to/2HSRIbx Inside Out | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/ A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle | https://amzn.to/2FJVTmM Viktor Frankl | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl What I Talk About When I Talk About Running | https://amzn.to/2I3Kelg Michael Muller | https://www.mullerphoto.com/#/ Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit       Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe to Human Optimization Hour  iTunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY

All right, y'all, we have an unforgettable two-day experience hosted by Onnit in Austin, Texas coming up on Thursday, May 2nd, and Friday, May 3rd called Design Your Life. The event kicks off on a Thursday evening at Austin's historic Paramount Theater, where attendees will have the chance to see award-winning, best-selling, internationally recognized authors and serial entrepreneurs Gary Vee and Aubrey Marcus. For the first time ever, these two influential voices will appear on the same stage. They will talk about health, wellness, entrepreneurship, and success. But most of all, they will tackle the question of how to design your life around the ROI of happiness, not money.

Special guest opener NQ, who's one of my favorite fucking poets on earth, will kick off the evening with his unique style of spoken word. And there's a VIP add-on for those who are wishing to add more. And if you're looking for more, purchase the Friday add-on at checkout and join us in an immersive all-day experience at an East Austin private venue. Enjoy keynote talks by Aubrey Marcus, David Rutherford, who's an amazing guy. He's been a guest on the podcast and Emily Fletcher and a storytelling workshop within queue. Lunch, drinks, dinner, all included.

At the end of the day, you'll have the tools and inspiration to design your best life. Please note, tickets for the Friday add-on are limited and only available with the purchase of a ticket to the Thursday show. So if you're ready to purchase tickets, we have a link for you in our show notes. All you got to do is click on it. It'll take you right to the Paramount Theater's main page and you can purchase tickets. Thank you guys. We hope to see you there. It's going to be fucking awesome. We have a very special guest and I know I say that often because I love my guests, but this one is fucking amazing.

And I purposely, because I'm in the presence of greatness and such an intelligent human being, I'm starting to scale back the curse words. But there's still a couple times where I get really excited and you hear an F-bomb. We have Dr. Andrew Huberman in the house today from Stanford Neurology. He is one of the smartest people I've ever sat down with. He has an incredible backstory. We're both from the South Bay, so I kind of geek out when I get to sit in front of a Bay Area kid like myself. And I know you're going to find this one fascinating.

We had to split this into two episodes, and guess what? We're going to have more episodes with Dr. Andrew Huberman because I'm in love with this dude. So I'm going out to Stanford. I'm going to be a guinea pig in his lab. We're going to look at my brain. We're going to look at meditation techniques and all sorts of other goodies. Check this one out. I know you're going to dig it. Hit us up online and let us know what you think. Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist, neurobiologist. How do you? Either one. Either way? Either one, both. And you're out of Stanford.

That's right. So let's, I mean, I looked up the Wikipedia and all that, and it's pretty detailed. You've done a lot of things and you're into a lot of things that I find absolutely fascinating. But let's start with growing up because we're both from the same neck of the woods. You're a little bit further out the peninsula. You were born and raised in Palo Alto? I was. Before it was the Silicon Valley monster that it is now. But yeah. And which high school do you go to? I went to Gunn High School, U-N-N. And at the time, Palo Alto was a pretty,

at least the size of Palo Alto I lived on was middle-class place, a lot of kids of academics, and a lot of engineers in the South Bay. People forget that Silicon Valley was like, a lot of engineers moved there. It wasn't this incredibly wealthy, influential place that it is now, but it was a great place to grow up. A lot of hills to run around in, a lot of ways to entertain oneself as a kid. Yeah, for sure. I miss it. I don't miss the cost of living, but I definitely miss it as a landscape for sure. The cost of living is definitely something

that it needs to contend with. It can't go on like this forever. A lot of people are stricken. Well, we got them all moving here to Austin. So I apologize in advance. Yeah, that's good. So talk about growing up. Well, I mean, what got you into all this?

What'd you study when you were in school and really what led you here to where you are today? Yeah, my story with science is on the face of it, it might make perfect sense, but then there were definitely some bumps and bruises and scars and scrapes along the way that make it kind of unlikely that I would end up a scientist. So basically, the short story is my dad's a scientist. So he's from Argentina. He actually moved to this country to do a graduate degree. So there wasn't much science in Argentina. So he's a physicist. So I grew up in a house where people didn't really talk about sports. My dad talked about scientists and ideas and science. So there was a heavy influence of that. So up until about age, I would say 11 or 12, it was a pretty normal childhood. Grew up with friends down the street, playing skateboarding, playing soccer, swimming, just kind of standard South Bay kid. And I wanted to be a scientist. I really thought it was really interesting. I always loved animals and the natural world. That's something we could talk about. Like my lab now works on things related to fear and courage and these kinds of things. And

I've always been really interested in sort of prey predator behavior. I've always been interested in how animals are really specialized in certain behaviors. So always loved animals. So there was a lot to kind of point to the idea that I might become a scientist or a biologist. And then when I turned 12 or 13, my parents separated and I basically stopped going to school. It was a very high conflict situation. And I won't go into all the details, not because, you know, just for sake of time, I won't go into all the details, but this was at a time when there weren't a lot of families that were separated. And so I was one of the few kids in my school where my dad was away, my mom was going through her thing, and it was very challenging.

And so I felt deep into the skateboard punk rock community, one that I still have pretty close ties with, and that I've kind of reestablished some ties in recent years. So that basically became my family. So I was taking the 7F bus to San Francisco. I was hanging around the so-called, maybe some of your listeners will know this, this sort of EMB crowd, which was the Embarcadero Justin Herman Plaza was kind of a Mecca for skateboarding. So I got a fast education as a 13 year old kid from Palo Alto in what it was like to be kind of parentless and free. And it was a very wild and adventurous time. Saw a lot of fights, got into a lot of fights, you know, got, you know, saw a lot of people

crash and burn, you know, a lot of people, you know, become addicts a couple, you know, over the years, people, you know, lost their minds, you know, also some kids really flourished. So I got to see some of the, and know some of the guys that eventually went on to be, you know, found huge companies and do really well, become very famous in the, you know, skateboarding and music community. And so you, that actually influenced my turn to science because what I saw was that, you know, some people could have a drink and never drink again or drink or not drink. It was kind of a choice. And other people took a drink and it was like something changed. And it was like, that was the last thing they did. They quit skateboarding or they always show up drunk or, you know, and then some of the kids were like

all about skateboarding. They were, you know, superior athletes. And so it was clear to me that, you know, behavior wasn't really what dictated how people reacted to things. It had something to do with what was going on in the inside. And at the time I didn't really understand any of that. I didn't know anything about psychology. I didn't know anything about biology, but basically what happened was somehow, I don't know how, because I barely finished high school. I applied to college and I got in. So did you do like a GED? No. So I eventually graduated. I was going part-time. So long story short is I actually was taken out of gun high school. I was let back into gun high school. So I took a little vacation,

involuntary vacation, was let back into gun high school. So I took a little vacation, involuntary vacation, was let back into school on the condition that I would do therapy. And there's a time when like nobody did therapy. So there I was like skateboarding with my friends and hanging out. It was like three o'clock in the afternoon, three times a week.

I was like, I gotta go guys, I gotta go to therapy. They would laugh or whatever it was, but I actually became quite close with my therapist, in a professionally boundaried way, but where became quite close with my therapist, you know, in a professionally boundaried way, but where he really instilled in me the idea that, you know, the mind was an interesting thing to think about and to think about how my circumstances were affecting me, but also how what was going on inside me, you know, how I could control what was going on inside me. He gave me the book, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the kind of early

books on meditation. And I was really taken by that. So I started doing daily meditation practice when I was 15. I started taking hikes by myself. So I started doing some things that weren't really part of the skateboarding culture at that time, but weren't standard. But yeah, over the years, I started to develop an interest in the mind and in psychology, but I was still barely getting through school. And so I decided to actually go into the fire academy. So basically what happened was I got a girlfriend. I heard that her boyfriend was like some big, strong guy from Mountain View High School,

her previous boyfriend. And I was like this skinny, scrappy skateboard kid. So I started doing my pushups and drinking my weight gainers. This is the late 80s, right? So we didn't have all the great supplement and technology that we do now or knowledge. And so I started getting into weightlifting. I fought Muay Thai. I started getting into boxing. You know, I was fighting anyway. I figured I might as well fight in a gym, you know, and get some skills. Exactly. And, you know, and, and so I learned a little bit about how to, you know, harness aggression

and how to really think about my adrenaline response and use it. So that was all happening simultaneously. And the firefighter thing was really that I wanted a job where I could, I like, I love the camaraderie of skateboarding. I love being surrounded by like a big pack of guys, you know, and we would just go, you know, like terrorize, you know, back then, terrorize curbs. And, you know, we weren't, we weren't real criminals. There were a few kind of criminals and, you know, sociopaths in the bunch, but mostly it was just a bunch of like fatherless kids, kids that whose parents weren't really interested in participating in

their sports life. So they took it upon themselves to do that. So the firefighting community was great because, you know, it's a big group of guys it was mostly guys then there were a few women in the departments but i started taking fire science classes down at mission college yep i did the same did you yeah it was great i loved it and it was like i mean any to me any job where like working out was part of the job i thought this is fantastic you know and people like firefighters people have a mixed response to cops but everybody loves firefighters you know like dogs you got to have a dog at the engine house. So it just was the right community for me. And then, so I wrote a college entrance essay talking about how I wanted degrees so that I could run a station house. And I got into UC Santa Barbara, Lord knows how, I don't know how. I don't even remember taking the

SAT. I did take it, but I don't even remember taking it. So somebody either messed up or saw some glimmer of something. And I went off to UC Santa Barbara, mostly because my high school girlfriend went there. I just wanted to be near her. She was my family at that point. And I was starting to reestablish ties with my parents, but that was the reason I went. And after two quarters there, I left. It was just, I wasn't going to class. I was getting in fights. It was just a mess. It was like, I went there and there were all these kids that for them, it was this new environment with a first exposure to drinking, first exposure to drugs. I'd kind of been through all that. And I was very lucky that I never really liked drinking or drugs. It was not my thing.

I just, for me, it was adrenaline. I loved that. And I had this drive and I didn't know what to put it into. So I left and I moved home. And at that point, a bunch of friends that I had grown up with were really starting to fall off the cliff. So all that partying and all that lack of regulation was really starting to show up. A couple of people commit suicide. A guy lost his mind, schizophrenia due to, you know, methamphetamine use. And like, it was just crazy. And so I looked at that and I compared to what I'd seen in college. And I was, you know, I thought, you know, I think it's clear I'm not going to become a professional athlete. You know, I just, I, I love athletics and I love sports, but I just never had a real talent for it. I'm hardworking,

but I didn't really have a talent for it. And so I just decided, I remember the day, it was actually July 4th, 1994. I'd gotten into this big melee fight with a bunch of guys in Isla Vista, the little town there. And it was their fault. I insist it was their fault. They were robbing us and it was a mess, but I, I was going to end up dead or in jail. It was just clear. I'm like, you know, and nobody's going to care. You know, when you're 15, people are like, oh, you know, he's troubled, you know, his parents or this and that.

And I realized like, it's just going to be another story of just, you know, kind of just to trash. And so I decided I had a decent enough mind for remembering things. I always had a pretty good memory and I liked ideas. I like concepts. I'd much rather, on any given day, I think people are great, but I'd much rather talk about concepts and ideas than people. People are wonderful to know and have relationships with, but I was just really excited about ideas. And so I thought, you know what? I'm just going to take everything I've got and work as hard as I can in school and just get good at that. And I'll figure it out later. It was kind of in desperation. So I moved back to

Santa Barbara. I re-enrolled and I got a little studio apartment and I didn't live with anybody and I just lived alone. All I did was lift weights and study. I just memorized my textbooks. And I made it a point to quantify everything. So while I was trying to get stronger in the gym, I was also making a point to get the... They'd post the curve, the sort of distribution of scores. And they didn't have names next to it. They'd have numbers. It was all coded.

But I was determined to be the outlier point on the far end. And I wasn't in competition with everybody else. It was just me. I'd never been the best at anything. One of the things growing up skateboarding was really tricky. Like I'd go to these skate parks and you'd see that, you know, I remember growing up and you're seeing like the young Danny Way, you know, the young Colin McKinnon. These guys are like spinning 540s and kick flipping and indie grabbing, you know, and there I am just like trying to get off the, like the mini ramp lip as hard as I can, you know, and just doing the very best I could. And I realized, you know, I was way far behind, but suddenly with academics, I realized, you know, this is, it's kind of like running long distance. It's like the harder you work, the more you get back and it's, and the more frustration you feel, the more you're probably learning. And so I just took to it. And at first it was psychology. And then I, this guy took an abnormal psychology

course and there was an amazing professor. His name was Harry Carlisle. And then this guy took an abnormal psychology course and there was an amazing professor. His name was Harry Carlisle. And he was telling me about schizophrenia and about depression. And he was talking about neurochemicals. This is in the early 90s. There wasn't even a field in neuroscience. And so I was like, oh, this is amazing. He's telling me all the reasons why I saw all this suffering. He's also telling me all the reasons why some people are just incredible. I learned a lot about hormones and behavior. So I don't have a lot of formal training in it, but I did a master's degree at Berkeley eventually on sort of endocrine relationship to behavior. So that, you know, if you're interested in fitness,

you know, this was, I think, you know, Muscle Media 2000 had just come out, but, you know, there wasn't really a lot of, there was no internet. So there wasn't really a lot of discussion about hormone regulation, but there I was learning all about how things like testosterone and DHT and alpha-5 reductase and all this enzymatic activity in biochemistry was impacting things like aggression, mating, all the, it was incredible. I was like, this is definitely the land for me. So I started working in his lab and my first project was to inject MDMA ecstasy into rats. That's amazing. So this was, this was the early nineties, right? So it was like people, there were some people who had died. Like it wasn't that many, but it's a couple of people

have died from overheating on ecstasy at raves. And so he studied thermal regulation and it's still an interesting question, how you know how warm you are relative to your environment and how to regulate temperature. So we were injected. We just called up one of the pharmaceutical companies that ordered a vial of pharmaceutical grade MDMA, and we're injecting rats with this stuff. And he was kind of a- You still have the same source? I'm sure it's still there. Now it's because it's schedule one. You need, yeah, I confess I've never tried MDMA. I've never tried it. You know, it's interesting.

You're still young. Yeah, I'm youngish, 43. But we were looking at the effects of MDMA and I was working in his lab and he was an amazing guy because he wouldn't even know what this meant. But he was kind of a punk rocker at heart too. You know, he was an ex-Navy guy. He drank coffee in the lab. He'd smoke in the lab and he'd

put his head in the fume hood so that he wouldn't get caught. I needed that kind of mentor. And so we started working together, publishing papers. I was a straight A student at that point. And he pulled me aside and he said, you've got this incredible work ethic. You should consider graduate school because they'll actually pay you. And I was like, ah, you know, my dad was an academic and I'm still kind of resentful of the, my, this childhood stuff. And then I realized that the only person who was in my own way was me, right? Like as long as I kept a resent for, you know, I have a great relationship with my dad nowadays, but like, I was like resenting somebody for the job they had. And what was I going to do? Shoot myself in the foot and not become a scientist because my dad was a scientist and I was angry. So luckily I had this mentor to

encourage me. He never pushed too hard. I decided that's it. So I wrote down my goals. It was going to be PhD by the time I was 30. I want my own lab just like him by the time I was 35. And I wanted tenure at a great university by the time I was 40. And I had that piece of paper up on my wall until I hit those goals. And I think for me, just so the trajectory was a bumpy one in, but I can honestly say that then and now the science that I'm doing in my lab is very much influenced by the pains and struggles that I had then, as well as the ones that I observed in other people. So nowadays, a huge amount of my life is spent trying to research and understand fear, anxiety, depression, even things like neural regeneration, which is important to people in the, not just in the fight community, but in the sports community, in the military community, in lots of communities, so like head injury. And I'm very

involved in public education. So I do a daily one minute instagram neuroscience post you know and it's not geared toward any specific actionable things right now but it's really because when i was 12 13 14 you know i was desperate for information and i didn't know where to get it so i'd go to you know like tower books or whatever mountain view and hide in the stacks and read read whatever i could about everything from you know like sports fitness to you you know, I was a young, young man. So like sports fitness, sex and psychology, you know, and then people walk by, I don't kind of like hide, you know, or something, but it was just, I was just hungry for information. Sex books behind the psychology. Well, there wasn't much back then. Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't much back then, you know, but now

like things are so evolved now there's all this information, but so that's what I do. I'm a, I'm a professional neuroscientist. I've been doing that for 20 plus years. And like I said, the rodent was bumpy, but there was that early seed of my dad being a scientist and my grandfather was a scientist for that matter. And I've just always been super curious about how the world works. And if you think about the human being as an animal, there are a lot of animals on this planet. We understand a little bit about how they work. I'm just very curious about why are we here? What are we good at? What are we less good at?

How can we use that to evolve our species? And yeah, so that's one long, very long run on sentence. But I appreciate the invitation to tell the backstory. Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely love it. Well, there's a lot that I want to ask you about, but first, you know, I didn't realize that you had studied the endocrine system and gotten into hormones. Have you looked at how hormones, particularly male and female sex hormones play into neurochemistry?

So I haven't looked at that specifically in a number of years. The system I was working on when I was at Berkeley was the melatonin system. So briefly, I think most people know this, but maybe if they don't. So melatonin is this incredible timekeeping signal, right? So when days are long and you get a lot of light, light suppresses melatonin through the eye to the pineal. And the pineal is the only source of melatonin in the body. So when days are long, the melatonin pulse that you get is very short. Okay. When days are short, the melatonin pulse is long. So this is the ancient timekeeping system that every animal has in order to know when it is in time. And what I mean by that is as the

earth goes around the sun and it's tilted, the day length changes. So the amount of sun coming in is different. So animals that are seasonal breeders, right? When the melatonin pulses, let's say yesterday it was, so it's spring here now. And so let's say the melatonin pulse was, you know, eight hours yesterday and the day before, but today it's a little bit longer. It might be 8.2 hours. Your body does a slow integration of that and says, oh, you know, the amount of daylight is getting longer. It doesn't know daylight. It only knows how much melatonin is there. And so there's less melatonin. And so now the reproductive system can actually prepare itself for longer days because all animals are anticipating longer days as a time when there's more lights, you can forage without danger, there's more food available. And as a result, preparing to reproduce and create young is like

a good thing. Now, if the days were getting shorter and the melatonin pulse was getting longer, then there would be a sort of slow signal to your entire body to start suppressing the sex hormone axis and to start preparing for basically the winter when there's going to be less food. It's not a good time to have young and reproduce. Now, some animals are so tightly wound to this circuitry, this melatonin circuitry, that like for instance, in a hamster, if you take a hamster and you put it in short days, its testes shrink from the size of like a marble to a size of a grain of rice within about four days. It's incredible. Now, in humans, we're not seasonal breeders. We can override that. But there are some remnants of this system in humans as well. So it's something that people don't think about. So like my first

daily practice every morning is to get a morning light pulse to the eyes. A lot of people don't know this, but the effects of daylight on mood, on stem cells, actual stem cells in the skin and in hair, and on all these endocrine functions are through the eyes. The only source for the body to know what time of day it is and when in the year you are is by getting light through the eyes through these specialized receptors called the melanopsin ganglion cells. Incredible discovery made by my good friend, Samer Hattar at Johns Hopkins. Like, so, you know, getting that light pulse is key to telling your brain and body what time of year it is. Now, if you get a little bit of extra light, you're, you're sort of priming your system for more sex

hormone secretion and receptor activity. So now you asked about neurotransmitter sex hormone interaction specifically. So that's a really interesting one. So it's complicated because of all the feedback loops, right? As everyone knows, if you ramp up anything too high, eventually it gets downregulated. This is sort of the essence of performance enhancing drugs and the need for off cycles and why off cycles are painful for people to do and whatnot. But here's the sort of general relationship. The dopamine and testosterone and epinephrine tend to go hand in hand. They're kind of close cousins. So there's actually a guy, you probably know him probably better than I do, Duncan French, who's out at the UFC training center. I haven't met him. Yeah. So he did his PhD work and Duncan, forgive me if

I'm messing up some of the details, but the way I recall him telling me this is his PhD work, and Duncan, forgive me if I'm messing up some of the details, but the way I recall him telling me this is his PhD work, he has a doctorate, was in the relationship between adrenaline and testosterone secretion. So it turns out that in the short term, high bouts of adrenaline actually promote secretion of testosterone. But over the long run, if you have too much adrenaline, then testosterone secretion is blunted. And this makes sense. When you think about it evolutionarily, like one of the core things that my lab works on that is really important just for everyone to understand is that, not because I work on it, but because it's just important, is that autonomic arousal, like being in a kind of on or go mode, is evolution's way of biasing you towards certain

behaviors. So I know everyone's in intermittent fasting, but if you fast long enough, you're going to get agitated long before you get tired and you feel lethargic. That agitation was designed to mobilize you to go find food, okay? If you are lonely or you go without sex for long enough, you're going to feel agitated and lonely and sad.

That response was designed to get you to go find a mate and to develop social ties and mate. So you're being leveraged. Just like if you eat a big meal and you're relaxed or after sex, you're going to feel this like post-coital bliss that was designed to get you to relax. Right. And so when you start thinking about the neurotransmitters and the hormone systems, the ones that operate together, you know, they, they embody a kind of logic. It's not random. So things like serotonin and things of the kind of opioid system tend to blunt people's level of kind of activity.

And they kind of make people lethargic. They tend to make people kind of blissful. And bliss is wonderful, but bliss doesn't cause you to seek, right? Testosterone, adrenaline, dopamine. Those are the kind of things that are going to get you to go seek and look for things to start forging for things. And on the extreme, like in a drug, you know, an addicted, drug addicted person, it really shows up where like the amphetamine user or the dopamine user is hungry all the time for their fix, right? You know, and it's like this rabid kind of seeking, right? And it's not, you know, some of

the side effects of those drugs include sort of hypersexuality and things of that sort, you know, to a limit, right? And so dopamine and testosterone tend to hang out together. Now it's interesting because, and I always love this study. So prolactin is a really interesting one that people don't think about a whole, whole lot. Prolactin is responsible for milk letdown in females for nursing. But in males, there's really good data, beautiful study published in Nature a few years ago that even, let's say a man and a woman conceive a child, there's a tendency for the man to also gain weight close to the delivery. Now, some people are really good with their behavior, right? They take, like yourself, they take, you know, I just met you now, but obviously, you know, you're in great shape. You take great care of yourself. You're paying attention to your diet. You know, think

about a lot of your friends. They all got dad bod, right? Why? Now there's actually an evolutionary mechanism that causes prolactin secretion in males as the young start to show up. It does two things. It suppresses sexual appetite and it puts on fat stores. And the reason is it's preparing the fathers for long nights of no sleep, right? So we evolved all these systems on that background. Now, in addition, mating. So before orgasm, sorry, I should be specific. Before ejaculation in males, the dopamine levels are very high. Testosterone is increased by sexual activity. And then there's a, after ejaculation, not after orgasm, but after ejaculation, there's a secretion of prolactin. That secretion of prolactin is actually

responsible for the refractory period during which you can't obtain an erection. Now, and the duration of that prolactin response dictates how soon, again, a male will seek sex. Now, a kind of interesting one, when I was studying this stuff, there's what are called pheromonal effects. So, hormones are things that exist within the body. They're kind of moderately slow acting and they affect tissues at a distance, okay? Pheromones are sort of like hormones, but they operate between individuals. So there's a famous thing called the Coolidge effect. I think your listeners might appreciate this one. So the story goes, I hope I get this right, that the science is right, but I hope I get the anecdote right, that President Calvin Coolidge was visiting a

chicken farm. And he was there with his wife and they were walking through and the guy that was hosting them showed them this rooster. And he said, this is an amazing rooster. He can copulate. He can have sex something like 400 times a day. And his wife, Coolidge's wife kind of elbowed him and said, oh, you see that? And he said, yeah. And Coolidge said, yeah, but let me ask you this. Same hen or different hen?

And the guy said, different hen. Yes. So here's the reason. It's a real effect. You can find it in the endocrine books. It's called the Coolidge effect, right? So the Coolidge effect is that the introduction of a novel female after copulation inhibits prolactin. So there's a real endocrine, you know, mechanism for this, where the presentation of a novel female reduces prolactin and enables the male to copulate again, to have sex again. So these are ancient mechanisms, but you say, okay, well, what is it really? As a scientist, you sit back and you go, what is it really about the presentation of that novel female? And what it is, is it's the dopamine, it's the anticipation

of copulation that causes a secretion of dopamine. Dopamine inhibits prolactin. So you specifically ask for interactions between the endocrine and neurotransmitter system. Dopamine inhibits prolactin and then frees up this system, this biological system for mating. So the reason I find this amazing is that what it says is that hormones and neurotransmitters are working together to essentially control how well motor neurons in the body work. Because ultimately, copulation is the result of motor neuron that innervate all the genitalia, right? So what this means is that

social context, right? Novelty, familiarity, they're affecting neurotransmitters that are affecting hormones that are affecting the animals. And in, you know, some of this stuff, we can talk about human pheromone effects too, like the ability to either perform or not perform an activity. It's incredible. Right. And so what it says is that like, we love to think that like in this social context, we can override everything with thinking, but there are some very hardwired systems within the body. Now I'm not, I'm from the Bay area. So like you've got every variation and, uh, kind of relationship theme there. I'm not a proponent of necessarily of, of any particular relationship thing, as long as it's consensual and both people or peoples are happy

or people's involved. Yeah. As long as people are happy, it's consensual. Like I'm a scientist, I have no judgment. How could I, right? But in the sense that these systems existed for very good reason, you can start looking at pretty much any system or any behavior and you can start pulling it apart from these hormone interactions. Like the women's synchronization of their menstrual cycles.

The data have been criticized a little bit recently, but all women will tell you, when they live in close quarters together, their menstrual cycles start to synchronize. That's definitely through a pheromone effect. Is that so the men know when to go on a hunt? It's unclear exactly, you know, because in certain tribal communities, it's thought that men and women, you know, might've coexisted more closely than others. But there are a lot of cultures where men and women don't actually touch for two weeks out of the month. And then for two weeks out of the month,

they're incredibly sexually active. And that was designed to get them to both reproduce as well as to maintain high levels of interest in their specific partner and a monogamous partner throughout the marriage. It's a pretty interesting idea. So there's all sorts of ways that culturally one can modify. This does sort of open up interesting questions about, you know, what sorts of behaviors we're doing that, you know, lend themselves better or worse to

sustaining a marriage, to child rearing, all sorts of things. But anyway, we could spin off into pheromone effects for hours. But the one I find really interesting and that I think might be relevant to your listeners is about competition. You know, male-male competition is something that in some cases discouraged. I think around here, we're in the on it facility. I think there's a lot of male-male, there's a lot of fighting goes on here, right? So the utility of fighting, there's a beautiful study that was published in, I'm riffing long. Is this okay? No, this is perfect. I'm tossing you underhanded softballs and you're knocking them out of the park. All right. So I always say there's

two things you never want to say to a professor. One is, you know, tell us what you're interested in. And the second is take your time. And you never want to say those in the same sentence because you run the risk going all day, but just interrupt me at any point. But I wish my lab had done this study, but it is so amazing. So there's this paper published in science and where things are published is really important, but science magazine is excellent showing that you take two rats or two mice and you put them in a tube. They'll fight. One will try and push the other one out. It's just a natural behavior. They don't like being in there and they'll try and push one out. The loser, the one that gets pushed out

will have a higher tendency to lose on subsequent fights with other competitors. The winner will have a higher tendency to win. So we all kind of go, okay, yeah, winners become winners, et cetera. So the three things that are really incredible about this though, is that if you push one animal from behind

so that it wins, it becomes a winner even though it wasn't responsible for the win. Okay. So this last year, there was this paper published where they looked in the brain. They're like, okay, what part of the brain is involved? And it's like, what's really going on? Because that's just a phenomenon. And one of the things I dislike most, frankly, is when science comes out,

they'll drop some really interesting study. It's all over the major papers and newspapers and magazines. And then all of a sudden it's like, and people run with it, but we don't really know where to run with it or what to do. And it often can be misused in fact, but they really worked out the mechanism. So they looked at what parts of the brain are active in the winter. And it's this area called the medial prefrontal cortex. Now this area is thought to be involved in everything from thinking to anxiety, et cetera. But when they increased the activity in this region, an animal became a winner every single time. And when they decreased the activity, the animal became a loser every single time.

So you go, okay. And what's really interesting is that was true, not just in this tube battle, but if you then put the animals into like a small little arena where it's really cold, mice don't like the cold, but there's a little corner that's warm. The alpha male always gets the warm spot. The winner got the warm spot every time. So it transfers. It's like you win on the mat and you win in business. You win in mate competition. You win in all, it's like they became winners across the board. And it turns out the way it was doing it is to change the internal, like the interpretation of the anxiety response. So when there's fighting, there's always going to be autonomic arousal. There's just no way to be completely relaxed the whole way through. I don't care whose arm goes up

at the end. Both people were in a heightened state of alert, right? But there's something about this brain area and how it interprets anxiety. And it looks like that the winner takes whatever level of internal arousal, like autonomic arousal is occurring, and it converts that into a thought that they're winning. There's something about believing in your own ability to win and the fact that whatever stress you're experiencing is a good thing that puts you in the winning bracket. And it's just incredible. And so my lab has been exploring that puts you in the winning bracket. And so, just incredible. And so, my lab has been exploring this in humans in a different way and various things related to the stress response. But what it says is that the internal response, that stress and cortisol

response, it's 100%, at least in terms of competition, it's 100% how you interpret it, right? If you think of it as like, oh my God, I'm drowning, or oh my goodness, I'm really in trouble, or oh my goodness, I'm losing, there's a good chance you're going to lose if you try and suppress that response. But if you can ride that response and you can push it, there's that outer limit. I think you're not, and so I have a feeling you know this from your own experience, there's a point where you realize that this is actually designed to get own experience. There's a point where you realize that this is actually designed to get you someplace. It's not something to tamp down.

And I think one of the things I'm really pushing nowadays is the idea that we've worked so hard to kind of keep stress at bay, which is great. We meditate, we're in our breathing, we do all this stuff to keep stress at bay. Sleep is really important. But there's another side of the coin, which is that that intense response was designed to be leveraged to endpoints that evolutionarily were good. And so I think that as humans, we need to rethink the stress response and really understand that it's like a wave. You can ride it someplace that you couldn't without it. And that it's really, it's potentially like rocket fuel. But people are trying so hard to suppress that response. And in this experiment anyway, even though it was rodents, it's very clear that if the anxiety response is read out as kind of a

bad thing and you're trying to suppress it all the time, there's a good chance you're going to lose. Whereas if you can leverage that, there's a good chance you're going to win. Yeah. So much of that makes sense to me. Obviously, that's why I'm over here just shaking my head like a little bobblehead. First, there's this idea, and are you familiar with Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers? Yeah. So this is my colleague, Rob Spolsky. Yeah.

Yeah. Great book. Great book. Yeah. I mean, so much of this comes back to acute versus chronic stress, right? So, if you're chronically stressed due to your job, your relationships, those kinds of things, or shitty diet, whatever the case is, it's pretty obvious you're going to look for that need to reduce stress and that'll be your focus. And then if you can figure out where the acute stressors,

the best ones are that move the needle for you and you live in a lesser stressed environment, you're not chronically stressed, you can introduce things like that. If you're chronically stressed and you go to do heavy back squats in a cold tub, you might get sick or run down or beat up or injured, right? What are the things that you're looking at in terms of acute stressors that can be really beneficial to people? Yeah. So, and here I'm going to weave back and forth between my lab science and then, you know, I've been interested and involved in sort of whatever you want to call it. You know, people call it biohacking. I don't even know. I'm not sure what exactly to call it, but they're the things that I well. But so my lab, my lab's focus has been to really try and understand mechanistically, what is this thing we call the stress response? And how can it be leveraged toward what we call adaptive outcomes, which could mean winning on

the mat, could mean winning in a race, could mean succeeding in finishing a college or a graduate degree, you know, under all high stress, different duration, competitive environments, right? So last year, we discovered this brain area in the central thalamus. It's called the ventral midline thalamus. I didn't really discover it. My graduate student working in the lab, Lindsay Soleil, discovered it. And this is an area that has two channels. One channel activates the fear kind of freezing response, and the other channel activates what we call a confrontational response. In response to a threat, the triggering of one part of this brain area causes the animal to freeze or to run and hide. But under different conditions where a different part of this brain area is activated, the animal literally walks out and confronts the threat every single time.

And only if the threat is there. So it's not like turning the animal into like some sort of rage machine. It's only if there's a threat. So really it's kind of a fear to courage shift. It was pretty remarkable when we saw this. We're doing the same sort of work in humans using virtual reality. So one of the things that we've built is a,

you know, I got tired of just working on animals. I think it's important. It can tell you where to look in the brain, but humans are what we care about. So we built a virtual reality chamber essentially, where people can have very realistic experiences of diving with great white sharks, of heights, of attack dogs, you know, pick your poison. And then we look at their behavior and we're measuring their breathing, their heart rate, et cetera. And in some cases, because we have access to patients from neurosurgery, we're actually recording from the human amygdala with wires dropped down below the skull into the human

amygdala. So here's what we're finding, that there are certain modes of confrontation to threats. And threats, I don't mean doing something stupid like jumping in front of somebody with a gun just because you think that's a good idea. I mean, things like leaning into challenging mental work, learning hard, you know, strain and hard thinking, leaning into hard physical work, et cetera, that is intensely rewarded over time. It's tied in with the dopamine system. There we go. Dopamine again. This circuitry is tied into the dopamine system such that over time, the stress response comes to be interpreted

differently, that that feeling of internal arousal, heart beating faster, lungs breathing faster, pupils dilated, the so-called stress response actually starts to become a positively reinforced experience. Now, this brings up notions of Carol Dweck, my also colleague at Stanford's growth mindset. Carol's a close collaborator of mine now. Growth mindset is one of these things that's sorely misunderstood. So just briefly, and I think Carol would approve of this definition, growth mindset is not just believing that you can get better. That's part of it, right? If you do hashtag growth mindset on Instagram, you get millions of hits. And the things that are related

to it are not often really growth mindset. But first of all, you have to believe that you can be better. Second of all, what Carol had discovered is that there's about 8% of kids that have this so-called growth mindset, where even though they knew they couldn't get the right answer on an exam, they were highly motivated to do these really hard problems. Growth mindset is about getting dopamine reward from friction, from effort, and from strain, which is different than thinking about the outcome. And inevitably, people or kids that have growth mindset perform spectacularly well. So the way to adopt this is to think when you're in the most painful point of something that you're exactly where you need to be, that you're on the ladder, so to speak. And it's not, as Carol and I often talk about this, it's not being

delusional and saying, oh, I'm winning. Because actually positive thinking, sometimes you're actually badly wrong. If you think you're winning, and this is bad because I would never spar him, but I remember in the Algeria Pacquiao fight, I like boxing. My grandfather fought and was also a biochemist. And so we have that relationship over time. And I watched, you know, I watched that fight and, you know, Al Jiri was like badly outdone and he was in his corner and his coach is telling him, you're doing great. You're winning. You're winning. Yeah. That is not growth mindset. Okay. That is called, that's called just false. That's just called, that's just, that's lying.

Delusion. Delusion. Now I think he was making his best effort and, you know, I sometimes go Long Island. So I hope if I show up in Huntington, they don't beat me up because that's where the jury is. But I think they understand what I'm saying. Telling yourself you're winning when you're actually losing is wrong. But that's because you're comparing where you are now to the outcome you want. The key is to compare yourself of where you are now to where you need to be in the moment. And so the strain and effort of the moment is the thing where you need to be in the moment. And so the strain and effort of the moment is the thing to pay attention to. We put so much emphasis on paying

attention to the long-term goal that sometimes we forget that if you pay too much attention to the long-term goal, you're going to start judging where you're at relative to that goal. So one thing that we've been exploring in humans is the extent to which people who can take on adaptive decisions, can take that adaptive behaviors, can take that stress response and kind of move the horizon in closer and just focus on, okay, I'm in a high stress regime. This is really painful. We see this and we work on people with generalized anxiety who are trying to overcome fear of heights and just walking across a virtual height plank can be terrifying for them. But if they can get one step in front of the other, despite high levels of anxiety,

they can eventually overcome that. And so we've been looking at everything from how breathing affects the anxiety response to heart rate, pupil size, et cetera. I'd be happy to talk about all that in as much detail as you like. But I think the principle to take away is this, that the growth mindset is not about suppressing anxiety

so that you're able to move, cruise through things with ease. That's just one part of it. It's really about trying to understand that stress response as key to your growth. It's absolutely key. And I think people that lift weights or run long distance or are involved in competitive sports, they fundamentally understand this, but even they kind of migrate away from it over time where recovery is super important, but you need the stimulus, right? And the stimulus for growth is that stress response. And if you think about it evolutionarily, let's say we were all living

in a little clan here in the on it offices, and we didn't know anything about the outside world. We would start to kind of eventually what drove people to leave was they didn't have enough of what they needed. There's this sort of the seeking, right? So if you had enough everything, you had enough mates, enough food, enough water, you'd be fine. But at some point there was some deprivation. And so we had to do a risk benefit analysis. And so it was really about taking that anxiety and venturing out into the unknown to find resources. Some people died and some people succeeded and they were rewarded. And with that reward came the idea that, ah, there's something about looking out into the environment that's useful, that can allow me to have more than I have in the moment.

But you can't divorce yourself from the anxiety of wondering whether or not things are going to turn out okay. You can't divorce yourself from the anxiety of strain and effort. There's just simply no way. And in fact, you weren't really designed to do it. So to kind of peel this around to a practical answer, because often listeners and people want to know, well, what do I do with this is, you know, I think the field of wellness and biohacking and high performance is great, but it lacks definition. So one thing I'd really like to see more of in the, in these communities and in the scientific community for that matter is more careful definition. Like what is mindfulness? Like really, what are we really talking

about? What is stress? And what are stress mitigation processes that are useful? So one thing I think is really useful is think about real-time tools versus offline tools. I believe personally that everybody, whether or not they're an MMA fighter, they're in a CrossFit, they're running ultras, or they're a student in class that doesn't do anything physical, whatever it is, has four tools. One tool to get you to mitigate your stress response in real time. So let's say the stress response hits. You need to keep it, you can't let it go too high or too low. You don't want to suppress it, but something to do that. You also probably want an offline tool that allows you to raise your ceiling on what stress feels like, you know I'm buds with whim and i've known him for a long time and like, you know

I think wim hof breathing is in particular is a useful tool for kind of shifting your perception of what stressful is That's an offline tool. It's not you can do it in real time but it's not you're not going to start wim hof huffing in the middle of your Like rolling jujitsu because your breathing has got to be devoted to other things. So you need offline tools and real-time tools to cope with stress. And I think people need real-time tools and offline tools to bring themselves into heightened states of arousal, right? So there are times when you're actually too low on the arousal plane, and the key is to get higher up there where you can access even better levels of performance.

And so I think the so-called autonomic nervous system, it's absolutely under our control. It's a total misnomer. It's just that your heart rate and your breathing are taken care of on their own. You don't need to flip the on switch. You wake up every morning and if everything's going well, your breathing and your heart rate is going the way it should, but you absolutely have levers that you can control and move in order to shift those. And I think that there's been a lot of focus on like, okay, breathing is a great tool or, you know, the ice bath is a great tool, but we really aren't thinking about what they're best for. And as a result of that, I don't think they'll ever evolve past where they are unless we start thinking, okay, like what's the utility of breath holds? No one can tell me. So my lab is very interested in trying to figure out what the

utility of breath holds is. Is it better at letting you deal with adrenaline in your system? Is it better at carbon dioxide tolerance? For all the incredible tools that are out there, there isn't a lot of good information about systematic ways to approach it. And I don't want to peel everything down to like a really reductionist approach. You know, I'm friends with Brian McKenzie and those guys, and, you know, and Brian's about as reductionist as you get in the breathwork community. And I love how quantified, you know, how he loves to quantify everything. That's one of the things that initially brought us together as friends and as, as, you know, sort of informal collaborators. But I think that this world of biohacking needs definition.

It's kind of ironic that in the weightlifting community, they've really worked things down to kind of a fine science, whereas in the endurance community, it's kind of like whoever you're listening to seems to be the person who knows the most. And I don't claim to know everything or the most at all. I just would like to see sharper definition on all this stuff about stress, stress mitigation, ice baths, breathing, and so on. And so my lab has been exploring the extent to which different breathing protocols or different hypnosis protocols, hypnosis is one that we're really interested in. It's used medically and we're interested in it as a stress mitigation tool and a tool for high performance. To what extent those tools can be leveraged to allow people to make themselves better? Shit, that was good. I'm going to ask so many questions right now. But let's talk hypnosis. I'm not too familiar with it. Is the idea behind hypnosis that you're put into a trance-like state where your mind is a little bit more malleable and then you can start to imprint different ideas

and concepts like self-belief and courage. Yeah, so hypnosis is one that, you know, it's interesting, like breath work is now starting to hit the mainstream, right? We're looking at this. There are other laboratories looking at this where there's some early discussion about maybe creating consortiums

at various institutions around this. If I just called it respiration physiology, you know, then everyone's on board. When it was called breathwork, people were like, oh, you know, what does that, you know, and people think that there's something about breathwork where people close their eyes and lie down. And then everyone thinks like levitation gurus and magic carpets. Right. Exactly. And especially outside the Bay Area. And Austin's a pretty progressive community, but respiration absolutely can impact the nervous system as well and the brain. Nasal breathing, in fact, has been correlated in two really nice studies with enhanced memory recall, just being in nasal breathing. And not just for, I always get beat up, people try and beat me up on this and they say, oh, but that's only for memorizing odors,

which is kind of like, duh, if you're breathing through your nose for odors. No, it's also for other kinds of memories. So we can fight that out elsewhere. But hypnosis is very interesting because hypnosis, people think about stage hypnosis. They think about the eye moving the necklace back and forth and putting people into trance. But here's some fundamental kind of components of hypnosis. First of all, hypnosis has been used medically to great success. There's a lab at Stanford run by David Spiegel, who's a board-certified MD and psychiatrist who uses this for a variety of different things to great end, including smoking cessation and other things. They've done a lot of brain imaging about what's happening during hypnosis. And the way he describes is that during hypnosis,

there's a kind of narrowing of context. So it's not that the person is going to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do, but they will say and think and believe things based on suggestions that are independent of the context. So you get this kind of tunnel vision for what's going on so that if you were hypnotizing me, you could tell me something and you could say, every time I touch the table, you're going to laugh harder and harder. And if I'm prone to hypnosis or suggestible, I might

start laughing and laughing because I'm just phasing out all the other people in the room and the context. So hypnosis involves bringing people into a deep state of relaxation, kind of like that first stage of sleep where you'll suddenly kick if you were having a kind of a light dream about running or something. Would this be theta wave state? Yeah, it's sort of like early theta. You start drifting in and out of theta and other deeper sleep states. But yeah, theta is a reasonable way to think about it.

And at that point, the way that the hypnotist talks to the patient is that the sentence structure is often broken up so that it's not complete sentences. So it's sort of stripped down into its elemental components so that context also falls away. So you start hearing things that are high impact words related to whatever it is that you're trying to deal with. In our lab, we use one related to anxiety and stress for people with generalized anxieties. So that we talk about control, about internal control. And so what you're doing is you're shutting down cortical activity and you're actually trying to engage neuroplasticity and just change in neural circuits at the level of what some people call the subconscious,

but you're really talking about subcortical. The subconscious sounds really amazing and mystical, but it's really subcortical. It's the stuff below deliberate thought. And so hypnosis is one way in which you can introduce new behaviors, you can introduce new beliefs, but it has to be with the authority of the person who's being hypnotized and not just after and before the hypnosis. The person being hypnotized has to be interested in gaining the outcome. So I think a lot of people are afraid of hypnosis because they think you can be reprogrammed in ways that you don't want to be reprogrammed. Watch the movie Get Out.

Exactly. So the brain, we're a self-preservation device first and foremost. And so the brain is really sits at the heart of that, of that device. And so you're not going to start doing things, you know, assuming the hypnotist is responsible, you know, you're not going to start doing things that you wouldn't otherwise do, but you can really start to shift beliefs and perceptions. And for addiction, it's a potentially powerful tool because you start to introduce that gap that mindfulness and meditation is designed to do, that sort of moment between thought and feeling and action where you become more considerate of outcomes in both the past, like, oh, when I took on that behavior in the past, it really took me

down a bad road. Or in the future, I don't want to disappoint myself or other people. You can really start to introduce that gap. And I think in the next few years, you're going to see respiration work, breath work really take off in the psychiatric community. And it's already taking off in the general population, of course, in the biohacking community, high-performance community. And then you're also going to see hypnosis show up as a tool. I've been doing hypnosis for a long time. I use these scripts just off YouTube. There's this guy, Michael Seeley. I have no, I've never met him.

I have no business relationship to him. S-E-A-L-E-Y. I think he's Australian. And he has a bunch of scripts that, I try and do one once every three or four days. This is just like a video you watch on YouTube. It's just audio, actually. You lie down, you listen.

They range from about 20 minutes to an hour. And they range from things like, I was using them to improve my ability to get into deep sleep. So one thing that, you know, we hear so much about the importance of sleep, but the last thing you want to tell someone who has trouble sleeping is how important sleep is.

It's like, it creates this own anxiety. And so I think it was just clear to me that, you know, I'm a big fan of supplements and these kinds of things, but I think that, you know, I often get asked, you know, like what's the number one nootropic on the planet? And I say a really good night's sleep, right? Without question. Yeah. And so the question is then how do you get a really good night's sleep? Like I can go online and find tons of information on how to get a great workout in. How do you get a really good night's sleep? So you can go cold in the room, you wear socks. I know you did something on this recently with the guy who founded Whoop.

That was a great podcast, by the way. Thank you. I learned a ton. But then ultimately, there are people that just have a lot of sleep-related anxiety. And so I was having trouble sleeping and I wasn't worried about anything in particular. And I realized, in case you haven't noticed, my nervous system goes on pretty easily. This is how I am without coffee. So I have a hard time downshifting unless I'm totally exhausted. And so I realized, I need to learn how to sleep better. So I looked up this Michael Seeley guy,

and there's some scripts there that teach you how to relax your nervous system. The other practice that is really useful, which is very much like hypnosis, something called yoga nidra, N-I-D-R-A. Some people spell it N-I-D-R-E. And you can just go onto YouTube and put in yoga nidra. And it literally means yoga sleep. And you lie down and it's a script where you listen, they take you into a kind of shallow plane of sleep. And what it does is you do that once or three times a week, maybe anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes a session, and it teaches your body and your nervous system how to downregulate. A lot of people just don't know how to downshift. Is this done through binaural beats or is it like somebody actually

talking to you and giving you words that are specifically supposed to trigger you into different states? It's people giving you words designed to trigger you into specific states by focusing your attention into three different spheres of consciousness. That sounds very mystical. But really focusing on your internal state, like your breathing and your heart rate versus the surface of your body in contact with whatever surface you're in versus the sounds in the room versus kind of thinking outside the room. These are the different kind of planes of attention that humans can adopt that incidentally other animals, if they do it,

we don't know, but humans are really good at this. Like we can, we can riff about Mountain View and San Jose in the 19, early 1990s right now, we can transport in time in a conversation. That's the uniquely human ability we think, you know, and, and so these scripts are designed to kind of direct your focus of kind of time and space into specific locations. And by doing that in a particular sequence, and this is what hypnotists are excellent at, it drops the body into the, and mind into a state where you're no longer tracking where you are, which is really the kind of essence of falling asleep. Right. And so by these transitions between focusing on where you are now and other things, it's like driving off the road. Mentally, we tend to be within the lane lines or going back and forth. We all know people that are always going back and forth. But

an inability to fall asleep is really being stuck between those lane lines. And so these scripts, whether or not they're hypnosis scripts or yoga nidra, really the way that I interpret them is that they're taking you back and forth across the lane lines of kind of time and space. And it's what happens when you're in sleep, you have no control over where you are in those lane lines, which is kind of the essence of dreaming. And so my lab has been using yoga nidra and hypnosis and breathing scripts. But because I'm in the scientific community, and if I talked about yoga nidra, hypnosis, and breath work a few years ago, people probably look at me a little askance. I decided to just take those scripts and just strip them down and figure out what are the

components. They all involve, for instance, long exhale breathing. So getting into sleep inevitably involves blowing off a lot of CO2. You do the opposite thing. You can hold your breath and then your autonomic arousal is going to go up. So blowing off CO2, long exhales is a big part of hypnosis. It's a big part of yoga nidra, and it's a big part of mitigating the stress response. So I like to kind of, you know, so I invite the breath workers because they're some of my friends. So like Wim, Brian, Laird, like all of you guys,

like, you know, like let's have a scientific discussion, right. About how this really works. There's so much nuance, but let's face it long exhales. And I know there's variation, but long exhales tend to promote blowing off carbon dioxide and decreasing levels of autonomic arousal. Just like in breathing in a lot, I don't want to blast the microphone here, but kind of Wim Hof type breathing, go sucking air in is going to drive up autonomic arousal. So if you start to look at the different practices that are out there, they tend to take people one direction or another. You get into the ice bath, what are you supposed to do? Nasal breathe, right? And get into relaxation. Or if you're somebody who just can't relax in the sauna or in the ice bath, what do you do? You take your arousal up to match the stressor that

you're in. So my lab has been really trying to kind of systematize this. So let's say you're somebody who can get yourself comfortable. I know a's, I won't throw out his name, but for obvious reasons, but he's a, you know, X, you know, X, X team guy, X seal team guy gets into cold water. He's just like, he's just, he's stoic about it, right? He's clearly able, he's been trained over, he was a professional at lowering his level of autonomic arousal in high stress environments, right? That's what a lot of what those guys get trained to do among many other things. There are other people that getting into the ice bath is so stressful for them. And I wager the hypothesis that in that case where they can't bring their autonomic arousal down, let them ramp it up and get into it through the kind of the stoke of a, like a Wim Hof event where everyone's like kind of high on

the event and, um, and on breathing those people then get in and it's like a thrill. So autonomic arousal can push you into things. You can tamp it down to kind of learn how to suffer better, so to speak, or to suffer less. You know, you can play at both ends of the spectrum. Hypnosis and breath work of the sort that we're doing in our lab is mostly related to try and bring people's level of autonomic arousal down. But I also think there's tremendous value to having tools that let you increase autonomic arousal to match the stress of the event that you're in. A fighter in a corner in round nine, I guess I'm not thinking about MMA, I'm thinking about boxing, in the old days, they used to slap them, right? They used to slap them and they're screaming at

them. They're clearly not trying to calm them down, right? What they're trying to do is get them into that kind of top 10% plane of something. And if you're not a fighter, you're a runner, you know that there's that space where it's great feeling nice and calm while you're moving. But there's that other space. David Goggins alludes to this. We've done a little bit of consulting work together just once or twice. And David, I think, is remarkable in his ability to access that higher plane of arousal. And he sort of lives there. He thrives there. And I think most people never even taste what that place is like. And I think that there's tremendous benefit to knowing that lowering the stress response and moving into stressful environments is one access point, but also increasing your autonomic arousal and entering the stress response from that point also has tremendous benefit.

So- Yeah, I think just from a life standpoint too, like having both ends of the spectrum is really like we're here to experience. That's one of the reasons we're here and to learn and to grow, but we learn and grow best through experience. Definitely.

I mean, even when we're retired from fighting, I still wanted to do jujitsu competitions because of the fact that that would get my heart rate up and it was putting me in this uncomfortable situation where I would have to try to stay calm in the storm, just like an ice bath. But I couldn't really get that with weightlifting, even on like a max effort squad or any of those things, the way that I do with the human interaction. Well, someone wasn't trying to hurt you. Yeah. There's something fundamental about that interpersonal competition.

It's like the tube test with the rats. You can't recreate that. Now, I don't believe that everyone should get out there and fight, right? I do believe in competitive sports as a great tool. People are really focused on head trauma nowadays, and that's obviously a serious consideration. It's a real thing, right? Depending on how much and over what period of time, it's a real consideration. But I think that competition, I was thinking about this the other morning, because I tend to wake up with a little bit of morning anxiety. And I've thought, but I wake up with

that morning anxiety and I actually fear the day that I don't wake up with that. Because I think about that's my get up and go. That's my, oh my goodness, I have so much to do. The day I get up and I don't have anything to do is the day I'm going to worry, right? I think that we evolved this internal stress response and competition as a way to make our species better. I mean, without competition, I'm guessing you wouldn't, if you had no one to fight in those years and now, you know, to roll jujitsu, you probably wouldn't be, I'm guessing, as good a human being overall as you are, right? I mean, it probably, it helped shape you. And so we are in many ways defined by the competitions that we will embrace. And whether or not that competition is with, you know,

mental material like books and studying or whether or not it's physical competition, we need external influences. I think these days we're so attracted to the idea that we can control everything from the inside, but you need human interaction. It's absolutely necessary. And I think that it sort of harkens back to the story at the beginning. It's like all the stress and that I was going through in those years. I mean, it absolutely made me better, right? Absolutely made me better. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't wish hardship on people, but humans are remarkable in their ability to step into challenge and to meet challenge. You know, I think that there's this important and very,

very serious conversation now about mental health, right? The number of people suffering is just tremendous. But I think that we also are forgetting that, you know, that suffering process is, it's a jumping off point, right? And I've had a number of friends commit suicide. I understand just how, you know, that's a horrible tragedy and depression is absolutely terrible. But there's also this question of, you know, sort of like, what is our expectation about our mood, right? Like we're so, what are we really trying to achieve with our moods?

And so I always say, you know, there are five things that embody our whole existence. It's like our sensations, what we feel, our emotions, our perceptions, our thoughts, and our actions. That's pretty much it. And of all of those, the emotions are the most mysterious. It's kind of a combination of perception and thoughts. You can control your behavior. You can control your thoughts. People often forget this, but your thoughts are your choice. I'm not saying you can suppress thoughts. I think there's been a lot of attention on trying to learn how to suppress thinking. I've never been able to suppress thinking ever, but what I can do is introduce new thoughts. Actually, Steven Pressfield,

who wrote the war of art, brilliant author and ex-military guy. He, he really, I think he said something like, you know, he was like in his mid forties before he had his first real thought. And what I like to think he was referring to was the first time that he realized that you could actually introduce a thought, that thoughts aren't just all spontaneous, so they can be deliberate. Your sensations you can control by your environment, and your perceptions are largely about your thoughts about what you sense. But your feelings, I think we overvalue feelings. And here I'm going to come across as kind of a hardened male about this. I would place myself actually kind of on the wide emotionality scale. But I've learned over the years that emotions are just kind of a mishmash

of perception and thought. I think we overvalue their utility. And this is just my opinion. I don't have any scientific data to support it, but I also don't even know how you study emotions in the lab. Every time I see a laboratory that claims they study emotions, they're studying behavior. Every time there's, I, you know, people are talking about fear and about courage. They're talking about a behavior that's measured. We don't know what these animals feel. You know, I'm the foggiest. I don't know what you feel right now. I barely understand what I feel right now. So I think that as a species we've been, and in terms of mental health, we've been

over-focused on feelings. And I think we need to think more carefully about physiology. I think we're kind of in the physiology movement right now where people are realizing, wow, these drugs, like the opioid crisis, really impact our physiology and therefore our emotions and people are stricken. It's really terrible. At the same time, I think we need to start thinking about how our physiology can be leveraged to help us. So good sleep being the foremost. The number one thing, just without question, is good sleep, right? To impact waking states in a good way. There's just no question. So then tools to improve sleep of the sort that I described earlier, Nidra and hypnosis, just being two of them, long exhale breathing, being another one, learning how to downshift. So those are just some practical tools.

But then in general, I think that the field of neuroscience has great responsibility now. And I'm trying to encourage this in my community, the neuroscience community, which is let's start having discussions about the brain that are not just about brain structures, about fear or brain structures and some phenomenon, but let's really start to place this into a context that people can understand so they can better understand themselves. Because scientists are always reluctant to give tools to people because they want to avoid liability. And of course, I want to avoid that. That's why I'm talking about things I do, not necessarily what I don't prescribe. I'm not an MD, I don't prescribe anything. I'm a professor, I profess lots of things.

That's what I always say, you know, but people can decide for themselves what's useful or not, but we're safe or not for them. But I think that in general, you know, we need to rethink emotions. Like what are we really trying to accomplish with our emotional states? And that's a kind of a bigger, deeper question

that I'm curious about and I think about anyway, it's a little bit of a, a little bit of a tangent, but I think we, anytime someone's talking about emotions, I'm sort of like, what do we really, like, what's the end goal? Is it to never be sad or is it to be comfortable being sad? You know, is it to never, to be, you know, super happy all the time. That's great. But then, you know, without those highs, you can't, without those lows, you can't appreciate the highs. Do you, do you have kids? I do not. I've got a niece. I've got a 90 pound bulldog. I was going to ask if you've seen the movie Inside Out.

I have not seen Inside Out. Okay. It's pretty cool. They basically get into the thoughts of this young girl who's growing up and they have, you know, there's, there's joy, there's sadness, there's anger, and all these different pieces to what makes her work internally. And, you know, there's joy, there's sadness, there's anger, and all these different pieces to what makes her work internally. And, you know, one of the main lessons in that is that they're all necessary. You know, it's not just about joy. Sadness brings benefit, right? But what you were talking about earlier really made me think of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth.

That was when I read that for the first time. And forgive me for anybody who comes on this show. It probably comes up every other show when I read that for the first time and forgive me for everybody, anybody comes on this show. It probably comes up every other show when I bring up this book, but that was the first time where I understood viscerally. I am not my thoughts. I am the awareness that witnesses those thoughts. And so much of that is taught in meditation where it's like, oh, okay, you, you can go down the rabbit hole on any thought you choose if you hold onto it, or you can just let it move through you. You're not going to stop the thoughts from moving through you, but you're not the thought. You're not what you're thinking is, right? And that gives you a greater degree of awareness and a greater degree of what you can do moving forward.

I think the same can be said for emotions. Like if you feel a certain thing, it's totally fine to feel that, but also to know I'm not that thing. How many people do we know that are in a victim mentality where they're like, I'm really sad or I'm really depressed. And that's the narrative they say to themselves every day and that they say to everyone they fucking know. And it just locks them into that thing because they're holding onto it

rather than letting it move through them. Yeah, it really starts to take on their identity. You know, one reason why, and I'm not, to be fair, I don't know him real well, but I put a blurb in for his book on the bat jacket. And I worked that one day with Goggins is an interesting one, right? I look at these people like Wim, like David, you know, these various people, they're very interesting. I'm interested in what they're able to do, of course. Tremendously impressive people, right? Real pioneers, in fact.

But I'm also interested in why people pay attention to them and what they're really paying attention to. So, you know, like David, and this is repeating a little bit of what I said about his book, which I'm not here to plug his book. We have no business relationship. I just really, I worked with him for a day on this consulting thing. And I was like, oh my goodness, this guy is every bit as intense as he shows up on the various public facing things. It was really impressive. Middle day, everyone else was kind of dragging. He's like, no, let's go harder. And I was like, wow, it was fun and refreshing. But I also realized that, and this doesn't encapsulate him entirely, how could it, but it's just one statement. But what's interesting is that he sort of relegated or pushed down kind of feelings, emotions, and even motivation, right? He sort of place, you know, that fifth thing behavior, I was like, you know, sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action. He places sort of action as holy. Like you go anyway, you do, you know, Jocko's like this too. You go regardless of sensation, perception, feelings, and thoughts. You're just kind of like, eh, like, you know,

and you go with action. You let action lead. Okay. Other people of the Eckhart Tolle, of the Viktor Frankl sort are sort of like, no, thought is where the power is, right? Thought is where I can third person myself, right? Other people like Wim are sort of in the sensation mode. I know Wim well enough to know the backstory and you probably know this too. I mean, he found all that in part through tremendous grief over his wife's suicide tremendously sad and um i adore when we've spent a lot of time done some mountaineering together and uh spent a lot of time together and you know he found out for himself that moving into sensation could take him out of all the rest and he could third person himself that way so when you're thinking about it all these are different

routes to third person and this actually so you you're that way. So when you're thinking about it, all these are different routes to third person. And this actually, so you actually point to, you're saying more clearly what I was trying to say before and kind of failed to. What I hear you saying is that when the emotion that you're experiencing or the thought that you're experiencing actually is getting in your way, then becoming that is the worst possible thing that you can do. It kind of eliminates that third person ability. And so I think it's incredible that, you know, people are looking to David, looking to Wim, and there are others, of course, I'm just not including all the names right now, but I think that there are others that where people are taking

behavior as an entry point to kind of find the third person. Even Murakami wrote the book, What I Think About When I Think About Running. I mean, the guy's like a brilliant writer, creative fiction writer, and he writes this book about running. And if you read the book, the whole thing is about how in running and suppressing his conscious states, he was able to kind of find himself, right? So I think we're starting to see a common theme, which is that you can take any one of these different five entry points, but what you can't do is let the system just ride on its own and kind of lead you someplace. When you do that, I think you find yourself in a pretty dark place.

And that sort of raises the question, why a dark place? Why not a great place? And I think for many people, if they're lucky enough to have the constitution or the kind of mood or emotional tone that everything's cheery, then you're lucky, perhaps. But those people don't often tend to reach that much. In pain and in suffering and in stress, we tend to look for these ways to get out and around ourselves, kind of third person ourselves. I think it's what's so exciting about the biohacking movement, the high performance movement. I think to me, it's just incredible. Maybe it's just from where I sit,

but I think it's like the fact that you and I are in the same room, that neuroscience cares about the same things that people in the martial arts community care so much about. We're in the psychology community, you're in the whatever you want to call it, self-help, personal evolution community.

I really think that we're on the cusp of a new level of human evolution. I really believe that. Where we're thinking about the self and we're making it actionable. We're starting to figure out tools that we can use to get out and around this nervous system that on the one hand is really good at supporting our wellbeing and behavior and outcomes. And on the other hand can really cripple us. And I really am excited for where the human species is going to evolve to. One thing that what you said also cued me to was that the ability to kind of think in different time reference schemes is something that I think is really important. There's something about grief

and emotions, in particular bad emotions, but also positive emotions, that sort of narrows our time existence or our notion of time. And I'm very intrigued by this, but here's the reason why. Let's say I can tolerate something bad for one second, pain for one second. If I can tolerate for a second, I can tolerate for 10 seconds, assuming it's not causing tissue damage or something. If I can tolerate for 10 seconds, why not a minute? Well, at some point, emotions have this weird property that they start to create the perception in the person. I've experienced this myself, of course, where it starts to feel like it's either going to go on forever or if it goes away, it's going to come back. It's like this phantom. And I think a big

source of mental disease is the idea that, yeah, I'm sad and I'm going to feel better, but then I'm going to feel sad again. And I think what I would love to see neuroscientists do and people in the mental health community and people in the wellness community do is start to hack that process. What tools can we use that allow someone who's in a deep state of grief and can move out of it or see out of it also understand that it's not a permanent state? So there's something, and I don't have any scientific explanation for this, but there's something about emotions, they hijack our sense of time. It's not just our sense of feeling. Because you've been on the mat in uncomfortable situations. You've been in mat in uncomfortable situations. You've been

in life in uncomfortable situations. We've all been there. And it's like, you know, it's going to end at some point. Emotions are different. When you're in that mode, you feel as if it's going to go on forever, or it's going to kind of sneak out while you're sleeping and like, you know, like bite you in the neck and invade your nervous system, like some sort of like serpent. And so I think that's the fear. It starts to become what I call meta anxiety, which is fear of being anxious, right? I'm not just anxious. I'm afraid I'm going to be anxious. Yeah. Almost like the fear that you won't sleep when you can't sleep at night. Exactly. So this is more of a call to arms than it is a, I don't have any good answers for this,

but I think that pinpointing the problem is the first step in finding a solution. And the problem that I'm trying to pinpoint is that it's not just that emotions hijack your ability to get up and go out for a run. You know, the thing that David and Jocko and all these guys have clearly learned how to bypass, right? Whatever I feel, I'm going to go anyway. You know, it's the notion that, you know, I feel a certain way. I think for the person who's really like burying their head under the covers and doesn't want to like go out

and is like clinically depressed, it's the idea that they're in pain and it's just going to go on forever. And that's the thing that we really need to attack is the go on forever part. I don't think we need to attack the pain or the sadness part. I think we need to attack the go on forever part. And so I'm also encouraging my colleagues in the psychiatric community and in the neuroscience community, like, let's figure that out. Where does the sense of time come from in the brain?

You know, grief, when somebody dies, we say, you know, this too shall pass. Eventually we know it gets better, but some people are collapsed by grief and they commit suicide. And so if you want to mitigate suicide, which I think everyone believes is a good thing to try and do, then let's go after this sense of time. And so I know it's a kind of abstract thought, but I think it has great utility. I think if we can do that, we will change mental disease and the way that mental disease is treated forever. And I'm not going to solve it on my own. I'm going to take a stab at it. I'm going to put everything I've gotten to it, but it's going to take a community of people working on this,

both in the scientific community and in the exterior community. I think it's not often something I talk about, but I think the incredible fascination with psychedelics is in part an attack on this notion of how we perceive time. I don't want to say attack, because it's not very in keeping with why most people go into it. But that, you know, I think most people are trying to understand themselves in time,

not just in space. And that's not, and this isn't a plug for psychedelics, nor I think actually a lot of it is being used here. I'm going to plug them. You may, I can't from the, I should just say from the position I sit in, I can't do that responsibly. I'm not, I think I want to, so again, I look at it a little bit from the outside.

I think, why are people so excited about them as opposed to me being excited by them, right? So I personally am, it's not my leaning. It's not my orientation. I don't judge, but it's just not my thing. But I find it incredible that so many people are focused on them as a potential tool. And they do have certain properties that are really related to time-space relationships. They tend to bend space-time relationships so that if this were a psychedelic trip and my dog Costello suddenly like floated through the window, that would, that would be amazing, but it wouldn't necessarily be entirely surprising. It'd be like, we would accept that time-space violation. You go and see a magic, like a go see magic, like people doing cards, they're violating your space-time relationship. Anytime a magician, you know, appears to levitate, you're like, wow, it's like a violation of your

space-time understanding. Flow states, riding a big wave surfer, jumping out of an airplane. Right. So, you know, I think if your listeners take away nothing else about neuroscience, I think this is the most important thing everyone should understand about the brain. Your brain is trying to understand statistics. It's trying to understand the statistics of your environment and your internal state, your internal environment. So, inside you, it's trying to understand the statistics of your environment and your internal state, your internal environment. So inside you, it's trying to just understand the statistics. When am I happy? When am I sad? What makes me happy? What makes me sad? What makes me feel good? What makes me feel worse? What is going on in the room? Who's a, you know, who's friend, who's foe,

who's neutral, who's a threat, this kind of thing. Who's a potential mate, who's not. This is like fundamental operations that are happening below the conscious state. And so psychedelics and sleep for that matter, I'm actually very excited about sleep as a way to access a lot of the things that I think people are using psychedelics to try and achieve. And this isn't a knock on psychedelics. I just, like I said, I'm in the biomedical community. These are drugs that are currently under investigation for exploration for their medical utility, but those are still clinical trials that are still ongoing. The data aren't back. So until the data are back, I'm going to just see what the

data says. I'll vouch anecdotally. Yeah, you can vouch anecdotally. Right. No, and you have liberty to do that. Clearly, people deriving, are interested in them and are interested in deriving benefit from them. And they tend to bend the space-time relationship. So fundamentally, it's about changing the space-time relationship. And it is interesting that most of the discussion about psychedelics is about them

in reference to mental disease. You know, I think everyone would agree that, I would hope that, I would hope, that recreational use of drugs, purely recreational use, is potentially hazardous just for our species, right? And especially for kids and things of that sort, just really potentially hazardous. But as a therapeutic tool, it brings me back. It's like, okay, here again, we have a tool where it's changing people's relationship to how they perceive the self in time. And I think that an ability to know that things pass, an ability to know that what you're feeling in the moment is not a permanent state

and doesn't necessarily return, an ability to know that your identity 10 years ago, hopefully, isn't your identity now, and you can actually transform your identity over time is immensely powerful. It's when we get into these locked regimes of who we are, how we feel, how we think that kind of the like impending doom really takes over, not to be dramatic about it, but everyone I know that isn't able to adopt a kind of different ideas about how things could be different on the outside and on the inside is suffering, right? And everyone I know that has the kind of mindset, unfortunately, I happen to know a lot of people like this, that understand that, yeah, your internal state is something you can shift with exercise, with movement, with ice bath, with

breathing, with whatever your particular leanings are, then they seem to understand that grabbing hold of that internal real estate first is kind of a door that opens like, oh, my world and my life is actually something I completely control. And so this conversation, this portion of the conversation might not seem that scientific, but it's absolutely scientific in the sense that the brain is a time-space statistical guessing machine. It just wants to know what's coming next. That's all it wants to know. And so if you can start to expand the notion of what could come next, you really start to open up possibility. And in possibility, you start to open up the physiology of the body to explore.

And in exploration, you get different outcomes. So these, I think, this kind of mystical or abstract level of the conversation is really at the core of what human beings are best at, which is using the front of our brain to conceive new ways of doing things. This is like the reason we're not, this is the reason we run the planet

and other animals don't. It's like my dog Costello doesn't wake up and say, oh, you know, I want more food. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tomorrow, you know, he just basically is like, he does what he needs to, to get what he needs in the moment.

We're the planners. And in planning, we can do so much more, but in planning, it's also where we suffer if we plan to feel the same way. So in a lot of ways, we're planning to feel the same way. Yeah, and we're planning for negativity rather than positivity. Definitely. And that's a really gross way to narrow it down. But you touched on a lot here. I had battled pretty severe depression coming out of college. And really, it was that sense that this will never end. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

And then through moving through that, being introduced to plant medicines and psychedelic drugs, to put it plainly, really did give me a different perspective on things. And sure, there's definitely, I mean, there's all sorts of components when it comes to time. Like even seeing the past from a different angle with a new lens is critical for healing. But then in the future, the present, looking at what's going to happen forward and the different trajectories that are possible, it just opened up whole new worlds to me. I wanted to ask you, because Johns Hopkins, I think, is working on a psilocybin study for depression right now. Obviously, MAPS is pushing MDMA through phase three trials. They've

got breakthrough status with the FDA for PTSD, and that's all psychoassisted. It's not like you'll go to Walgreens and pick up an eighth of mushrooms and head home with it. My question to you is, are you guys studying anything with the brain and altered states of consciousness? And this could be something as simple as like a float tank or something like that. Yeah. So my lab isn't working on any of those things specifically. And I should just say, I have immense sensitivity to the communities that care about these issues. And just as a quick editorial, like I am absolutely thrilled that people are thinking and talking about the brain and states of consciousness. You know, I lived in this kind of like lonely place for the longest time where I was like,

I was like embarrassed to talk about my interest in psychology and in meditation and things. And like, it's amazing. Our species has evolved, right? And I wasn't ahead of my time. I just think that the psychedelic discussion is an important discussion. And I actually, I tip my hat to you and to a number of your friends who opened up this discussion responsibly. I think that it's something that as long as we're trying to hide something, we're in trouble, right? So the fact that discussion is out there means that

we're going to, in five years time, we're going to look back. And I think the work that you've done and the work that people are doing at Hopkins and these other places is going to take us to a new and far better place. I really believe that. So, um, so I appreciate, and I appreciate that. I think that's going to change the way we think about human consciousness. I fundamentally do. And, um, in terms of altering states using other tools. So my lab has mainly been focusing on respiration hypnosis and this Nidra-like protocol. And I say Nidra-like because unfortunately naming like Nidra, Kundalini, Wim Hof breathing, the naming is either commercial related or it starts to alienate people who would otherwise come to the table

because they hear that stuff and it sounds really mystical. So what we've done is we've really just stripped those things down into their kind of core elements that we can measure. We're not doing float tanks. It would be fun to do an exploration of float tanks. Part of the problem is I have to get people to drive to Stanford campus, find parking. We give them a parking pass. We pay them. So if you want to be a subject in our experiments, can I plug this? Yes, please. Okay, I have a lab Instagram.

I don't have a personal Instagram, but you can see my face there because I do a daily, not that seeing me is the important part, but I do a daily neuroscience information post. It's Huberman Lab, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-L-A-B. So at Huberman Lab. And then we recruit subjects there.

So you can send a DM there and we can bring you to the lab. We pay you. It's not a tremendous amount of money, but we pay you for your time. We give you a parking pass. You come to the lab, you come in, it's about two hours in the middle of the day, typically. And we measure different anxiety states. We take you through these sort of intervention protocols. One of those three, we randomize them. We also have controls, which is interesting. You rarely hear about controls, right? So you can hear a hypnosis script or our control involves hearing something that is matched for tone and everything except the exact word content. So unfortunately in the biohacking community, there aren't a lot

of controls. People see effects, they report effects, but you want good controls, sort of placebo, right? So we also compared a placebo. So it's hard to get people to come in and also do something like a float tank. It's just the time involved and the sort of inconvenience involved would limit the number of subjects. But we are very interested in bringing hypnosis and breathwork in, in a kind of larger scale. So we're talking about expanding to other universities and running things in parallel. We also have a way that we can do this remotely. So when we have a patient that has electrodes in their amygdala, we drive basically this whole setup, typically up to UCSF or another location, and we run it on the patient because they often can't come to us. But if people are willing to come to us, we give them one of those three interventions. I think the flow tank is a very interesting one

because that's working at the level of sensation, right? So it's really when it's sensation, perception, feeling, thought, action, it's kind of like this mantra of mine, but it's working at manipulating sensation and kind of taking you out of that space-time, typical space-time relationship where there's a table here in front of me and you're trying to kind of trick the body's perceptions into thinking that what you feel in the moment is kind of extended out in space and in time. And I know for some listeners, this might be a little bit kind of woo or hard to appreciate, but one way you could do this is if I tell you now to like focus on the feeling on the bottoms of your feet, you were focusing on the, that you were sensing the bottom from the bottoms of your feet all along, but your perception wasn't directed there.

So in the float tank, your perception is such because of the temperature of the water and the salinity of the water that your perception starts to sort of expand to regions outside your body, right? So that you're no longer paying attention to the interface of the surface of your body that's outside the water, the surface of your body that's under the water. And so that kind of perceptual distortion leads you to a state in which your thoughts are tethered differently to sensation. And now your thoughts can drift in new dimensions that they're normally not going. This is what happens in sleep all the time, except that you're not able to direct it.

Whereas when you maintain some level of consciousness, like you're awake in the float tank, then you can start to, you take off down that road. Let's stay with the lane lines kind of metaphor from before. So you're driving between the lane lines. I make the temperature of the water and the salinity, the salt concentration of the water such that now one of the lane lines, I make the temperature of the water and the salinity, the salt concentration of the water such that now one of those lane lines just kind of evaporates. And now you start drifting off in this direction, but you're not asleep at the wheel, right? You're actually holding the steering wheel and you're like, oh, I've never driven through a field like this before. I'm going to keep driving through this field. And then all of a sudden you snap back because you're like, oh, I'm in a float tank. But then you start drifting again and you start heading off.

Now in sleep, you're meandering across the lane lines all the time and you're not in control. It's like there's this little demon inside like turning the wheel. Psychedelics, from what I understand, right, is a little bit like the float tank in the sense that it takes you off in a direction, somewhere between sleep and the float tank. And now you can meander off in a different direction. And then you might see something. So you said you got a new perspective on suffering, on trauma. When you said that, I almost interrupted you, but I refrained because I was really curious.

Like getting a new lens on your own experience involves changing your sensation and your perception of something, a memory, right? And it sounds so easy to do on the one hand, but it's so hard to do in this thing because your brain right here in this room is locked to the statistics of the room. It's like, no matter how hard I hit myself on the side of the head, I can't get my mind to see something differently. Psychedelics and sleep and things like the float tank and deep forms of like Vipassana meditation allow people to kind of shut down either sensation or perception.

Oftentimes it's action. Like in Vipassana, you're supposed to sit for long periods of time. You're not supposed to speak. These are different routes. You're basically shutting down brain areas. And then in doing so, you kind so, you move your consciousness through a different route to achieve the same end and you see a different perspective. And so if this is sounding all very mystical, you're nodding. So I like to think this is making some sense. Perfect sense to me, for sure. Yeah, right. You've been there. And so I think the key is how can we lift and move those lane lines? And what is the best route to take? So the lane

line comes off and you're like, oh, wow, I can actually fly above the road, right? So from that perspective of seeing something painful or even something positive, like the birth of a child or like your lifetime, from that perspective, what are some deliberate routes that you can take? And this is where I think that if eventually psychedelics become a valid clinical tool, a legal clinical tool, because I think they are showing some promise, and it probably will happen given the way things are going, there's going to be great responsibility of the therapists that are guiding these sessions. Tremendous responsibility. In the same way that I think a lot of people that are doing breathwork release work aren't qualified to take people where they need to go. You're talking about holotropic breathing and something else.

Holotropic breathing. Again, you're using the nervous system. Shamanic breathwork. Yeah. You're using an entry point. You're taking people into these heightened states of arousal. People are having experiences. And I'm not here to knock on anybody. I'm not a clinician, so it's not like I could do it any better. But I think that we need to understand how the practitioner, the clinician, you know, there are communities in South America and over again into that experience repeatedly versus maybe just once. It's the difference between being able to derive a lot of utility from the float tank for people that are not inclined to use psychedelics, right? Or young kids where the brain is immensely plastic, right? In young kids, you have to treat any intervention that you use, anything, even if it's breath work, as a serious consideration. I've had some people approach me about like, hey, should eight-year-olds, should my kid be Wim Hofing for jujitsu practice? I don't

know. Probably not, right? I mean, these are, you know, maybe, maybe not, that's not my place to say. I think that, but anytime you have a power tool that's going to disrupt this relationship between sensation and perception and thought, whatever the tool, it needs to be something that is in a relatively controlled environment where the person that's guiding the experience is highly skilled. And I actually think that we should create certification programs for these things. I think that there should be some way of knowing that the person that's guiding you through something knows what they're doing in order to get, not just to avoid bad stuff, because this all sounds very sinister, but also

to get you the maximal benefit. And I love what you said about seeing a new perspective because that's the thing that's so hard to do. I can't look at this bottle of water and create a new sense of meaning about it that isn't psychosis. You know, the definition of psychosis is assigning meaning to things that have no meaning. When you walk down the street and someone comes up to you

and starts talking gibberish, it's really sad because they're hearing and seeing meaning in things where there is no meaning. But the ability to do that a little bit for your own life experiences or your other people's life experiences is the difference between depression and happiness. It's the difference between empathy and being compassionate towards somebody and being highly critical and feeling kind of like angry at the world. So I think we need to systematize some of this stuff. And one reason why I came out here, I've heard a lot about you guys. Again, I know and love the work that you've done and threw on it and the discussions that you've held. I listened to them.

And I think that it's important that we not just like make everything ultra scientific and dry either. And so I'm one of these people that kind of traverses back and forth between these communities. Because I hope that in doing so, the discussion is going to lead to people, practitioners, people in every one of these communities that is going to really care about the endpoints.

And so, you know, at some point it's going to be useful to think about like, where are we trying to go with all this? Right. Anyway, I'm riffing long. I love it, brother. You're crushing it. I guess I feel at home here. You guys are cordial from the moment I walked in. Texan hospitality.

I would. Yeah. I'm very curious about what kind of stuff you're doing at the lab, because I'd love to come through. Obviously, my family's still back in the Bay and I visit there often. I'd love to pay you a visit. That would be excellent. Yeah, please do. Yeah, we're exploring, trying to understand the stress response, trying to understand when to tamp it down and when to increase it as a way to access high performance, cognitive performance, physical performance. We are using entry points like vision, hypnosis, et cetera. You've heard some about those

here. Vision is one that we haven't talked a lot about, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the use of the visual system and modes of viewing the world, either focused vision or panoramic vision as ways of dilating one's understanding of time. And that's kind of a whole other discussion. Maybe we have another time. But because the visual system is the mode in which the brain and body come to sort of adopt different time regimes or ways of sort of thinking about the outside world. So that's something that we're interested in, but I'd love to have you through anytime. You have VIP to my lab come through. Awesome.

And it'd be great. It's a fun place and we got a lot of great tech toys because it's the Bay Area. We've got some great VR. We discarded with all the computer generated imagery. The friend, Michael Muller, who's a world famous photographer in Hollywood, who also does shark diving.

And so we filmed 360 vr of great white sharks and like brought real footage to the lab because the the computer generated images are kind of lame to be honest so bringing real experiences to the lab to make it as realistic as possible is a big part of what we do so yeah all that stuff hell yeah well we can leave that as the teaser trailer for when I come into the lab. Yeah, that'll be excellent. And I'll bring Giles out. We'll get some video footage

and some really cool content there. Amazing. And I definitely want to have you back on. So we'll bring podcasting gear too. And we'll just, we'll do it up. That'd be great. Thanks so much for having me on. Dude, you've been amazing.

So just Huberman, at Huberman Lab. Yeah, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-L-A-B. So at Huberman Lab at Huberman lab. Yeah. H U B E R M A N L A B. So at Huberman lab at Instagram, I have a lab webpage too, but it all links out from their Instagram seems to be the sort of jumping off point for most things now. Perfect. Man, it's been excellent having you, brother. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Oh yeah. Cheers. Thank you guys for tuning in to the human optimization hour with my man, Dr. Andrew Huberman. We had a great episode. I know you loved it. Hit him up on the gram. That's where you'll find him at Huberman Lab. And also hit me up at Kingsbow on Instagram and Twitter. And as always, go to onnit.com slash podcast for 10% off all supplements and food products.