249 ‒ How the brain works, Andrew’s fascinating backstory, improving scientific literacy, and more

hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter attia well Andrew awesome to have you here again but this is the first time we're going to sit down and do something formal about it as opposed to just play Patty Cakes in the garage great to be here I always enjoy seeing you I always learn from you and when I train with you I always enter a new pained State uh like this morning with the uh Blood Flow Restriction what did that how did you enjoy that just I guess for listeners what did we do we put the you had done a pretty big workout you went for a run I hadn't yet gone for a run I hopped on the assault bike and was just pedaling and warming up then I started doing some intervals of pedaling Hardware looked like you were working hard yeah and then I hopped off and was headed out for a run and you said let's put the Blood Flow Restriction cuffs on and give you a little workout and I thought oh we'll do it like last time and put them on my arms and I've done that workout before we do some curls with a lightweight with a Blood Flow Restriction cuffs and it's those were extremely painful in the past um this time putting on the legs was less painful in a localized way it was more of a whole body pain so it's more distributed but peddling for two minutes at 220 Watts with the cuffs on my thighs you don't feel like your legs are going to pop you feel like your whole body is a little bit swollen but then when you come off of that two minutes and you take the Cuffs off I can't really describe the feeling but it's it's somewhere between Bliss relief and a supercharge you know so I took off for a run I think feeling more energized than I had in a long long time yeah it's I do what I had you do today I do that two to three times a week at the end of a leg workout and um you're right it's very different there is something about the bfr cuffs on the arm and I I don't I suspect it's because there's less fat here and it's easier to compress the vasculature so you get more distal occlusion but I agree with you completely like doing bicep curls with with those cuffs on is it is really the definition of hell and it's much more of a deep awful pain in the legs uh but anyway I'm glad you enjoyed it yeah I did enjoy it I I've noticed because I've now done the Blood Flow Restriction Training three times today being the third that when it's done on the upper body the pain can be very localized and it starts to migrate around in interesting ways I think I've actually learned a thing or two about the distribution of sensory receptors in the upper body immense pain in the in the hands for instance and then the moment you think you can't tolerate it at all it migrates to your shoulder and away from the hands and again with the legs it's more evenly distributed but I think as long as people don't try and cowboy it and just tie tourniquets which would be a bad you need the proper blood restriction cuffs obviously I think it's an incredible training can you just remind me what some of the benefits are growth hormone increase for for sure minimal soreness despite getting quite a lot of metabolism yeah it's basically less trauma uh with with with more sort of metabolic benefit as well so the so the one of the reasons I like doing this set I had you do today is um I like exposing my legs to lactate right so the more lactate you're exposed to the more MCT the cells will upregulate so basically you want your cells to become more and more efficient at taking lactate and getting it out of the cell and ultimately right lactate's an amazing fuel I mean you probably know more about its role in neurons which I think is just starting to become appreciated we've typically thought of neurons as only accepting glucose and ketones but I think there's emerging evidence that lactate is a fuel and then of course the liver can turn lactate right back into glucose via the Corey cycle so I think the more efficiently our cells can get Lactaid out and start processing it's not a poison as we I think once you know we once thought of lactate as kind of like a bad thing it's not it's just it's bad if you don't know what to do with it yeah my understanding about the distribution of neurons that preferentially use lactate as a fuel under conditions of let's say high stress but also just High exertion doesn't have to be stressful is that for somewhat obvious reasons the hypothalamus and areas of the brain stem that control breathing and more primitive functions are going to utilize that fuel preferentially first and this is actually evident when for instance you get into an ice bath or any kind of adrenaline shock environment the what little neuroimaging is out there tells us that the prefrontal cortex which is involved in kind of rule setting and decision making but really Rule and contingency setting we could talk more about this essentially shuts down but doesn't shut down because of lack of electrical activity it shuts down because there's a preferential shuttling of glucose and lactate to other regions of the brain that just need to keep everything online so you get into the ice translated to plain English you get into the ice bath you get the shot of adrenaline or you get the shot of adrenaline from anything seeing a car crash or getting a troubling text message and essentially your forebrain quiets for about 20 to 30 seconds and all the other systems kind of ramp up in terms of survivability functions and then forebrain can come online I think that a lot of people feel hijacked by the autonomic response associated with hypothalamus and brain stem activation heart rate goes up breathing goes up pupils dilate tunnel vision all of that happens immediately I think most people aren't familiar with those States and the more familiar we can become with those States and the fact that they are indeed transient the lower the probability we get hijacked by them so this is classic stress inoculation but it's um nice to see that nowadays a number of people are doing this outside the military and outside of sports training and just teaching themselves to be comfortable with that pulse of adrenaline and doing it through deliberate cold exposure or the the blood restriction coughs I think once you feel that first shot of pain like how am I going to make it through two minutes of this that's another place where you just keep going and then all of a sudden your brain comes online the forebrain comes online yeah that's interesting so basically for for a lay person like me when it comes to the brain um the we basically evolutionary have decided that the most advanced part of the brains we can basically sacrifice temporarily for midbrain brain stem all these things that are absolutely essential and so it's it's basically a shunting of resources away from a somewhat gratuitous part of the brain that is the most evolved yeah and I think when I say things like the forebrain shuts down I'm using a broad brush yeah you just need less resources are available for it I mean one of the more powerful set of discoveries in the last few years it comes from a colleague of mine at Stanford Nolan Williams who's in Psychiatry and neurology and I think the simplest way to think about is the following that the prefrontal cortex the brain real estate right behind the forehead is really involved in rule setting for by context so um you know there's this classic Stroop task you give people a bunch of cards with words or numbers written on them in different colors and then you ask them to read the words or the numbers it's pretty straightforward or you ask them to tell you the colors and ignore what the words say sounds easy actually it's very hard to do when going fast and then you start switching back and forth that is a very prefrontal cortex dependent kind of task and what does it reflect it reflects the ability to adjust your rule set depending on what's demanded of you in the context so when I walk in here for a podcast very different rule setting context than when I'm alone at home or when I'm public speaking or whether or not I'm even though I'm podcasting right slightly different rule sets being a guest versus hosting a podcast but completely different sets when you're spending time with your children your wife alone so rule setting and context is completely governed by prefrontal Cortex hence the famous case of Phineas Gage who caught a tamping iron destroyed his orbital frontal prefrontal cortex why don't you tell that story it's such a great story that everybody learns in neuroanatomy yeah so that this is a classic story in neuroscience and I should just mention that um because I know that many people out there especially in the Twitter sphere um are obsessed with clinical trials and clinical trials are wonderful and are immensely powerful but we have to remember uh that in medicine in in particular in Neuroscience most of what we know for instance about memory comes from one single patient hm the famous hm who had hip bilateral hippocampal damage that's uh they deliberately burned out as hippocampi to offset epilepsy temporal lobe epilepsy um in the case of Phineas Gage it was a naturally occurring lesion a he was a a railroad railroad worker excuse me um and they would drive these these tamps in with explosives and he caught one coming up through the base of his jaw it went out through the forehead somehow missed the critical vasculature and he survives this thing literally shot out the top of his head and he survived and thereafter um he became somebody who did not obey rule sets uh inappropriate behavior he wasn't necessarily um profane but he didn't behave correctly for the context whereas before he was very well mannered and He adjusted his behavior according to college when he's out with beers for friends or working on the railroads he might speak and behave one way go home speak and behave another way Etc completely lost the ability to um switch rule sets according to context so classic case um his skull is preserved there have been a lot of rumors about his behavior that are somewhat correct and incorrect there's also for example um just one more thing this was actually a lyric and a Bob Dylan song Clover Busey syndrome syndrome which bilateral damage to the amygdala which many people think of as involved in fear um but it's really a defense and kind of alertness system in the brain is what the amygdala is really involved in and monkeys or people who have bilateral amygdala damage they can still experience certain kinds of fear for instance um you drive up CO2 carbon dioxide in their environment and make them breathe pure CO2 they will panic but they become um unafraid of things like snakes if previously they were afraid of snakes and they become kind of sexually and um uh food inappropriate so they'll pick up a pen and start to nod it maybe taste it normally we don't try and taste inanimate objects um and the monkeys would try and um copulate with various inanimate objects and so there's this kind of bizarre lack of context and believe it or not even though we think of the prefrontal cortex as very evolved structure it is intimately involved with them with the so-called limbic pathway it's actually what we call monocyte so it's less evolved than the top of the cortex the neocortex yeah it's kind of interesting you know the whole um dating of of cortical areas is a little bit of a controversial thing but beautiful work by Arnold craigstein at UCSF has focused on this using actually uh carbon dating um as a way to approach this how would carbon dating help in that yeah so they've looked at brains from different species and they're starting to I mean establishing homology from say a macaque versus a baboon versus a human humans from different um you know the thing about I should just interrupt myself and say that the thing that's hard about studying the nervous system is that there's in terms of homology and evolution is there's no fossil record right like that the skull is preserved but the brain actually you know essentially degenerates and disappears so you dig up some bones and there's nothing there and the two ways that you establish homology um actually come from uh development one is developmental position in general when you look at two different brain areas like let's say the hippocampus an area associated with memory in a mouse versus a human in the mouse the hippocampus is up near the top of the brain and in a human it's down near the bottom and you say well how can those be the same structure but if you look during development they they start off in the exact same place it's just that the human brain because it has so much neocortex the outer shell the whole thing starts moving and moving and moving and it ends up down there at the bottom the the second criteria for establishing homology between species of a given brain area or neuron type is connectivity and so we know for instance that the prefrontal cortex and amygdala are monosynaptically connected there's just one connection because ultimately everything is connected to everything right you and I are related through some distant lineage wait let me make sure I heard you correctly you're saying that between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is one synaptic connection that's it it doesn't go through a network correct there if we were to put a anatomical Tracer into the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex you would see direct connections between those two structures and you would see connections with intervening structures because of course ultimately everything in the brain is connected to everything it's just just like on Google Maps everything is connected to everything even if by way of ocean um the the presence of a monosynaptic one connection or direct connection or even a dysynaptic where there's an intervening connection but only one it is an important criteria because what it really says is that it establishes very fast communication between structures and you know the brain is so metabolically demanding in general that you know here we're making up just those stories but we have to assume that Evolution doesn't and did not introduce a lot of extraneous wiring so when we think about prefrontal cortex we think oh there's this you know executive function complex rule setting contingencies it must be very evolved and indeed it's the region of the human brain that's expanded relative to other primates and other species but it's involved in some primitive stuff as well not just by way of connectivity and this kind of brings us back to the Nolan Williams Discovery and point which is that I don't want to throw out a ton of nomenclature here but we've got prefrontal cortex for this rule setting and contingencies you've got things like the amygdala and Associated structures that are kind of threat detection but are kind of generic they raise heart rate they raise awareness they raise they change the visual system and they they tune your auditory system to localize things as opposed to paying attention to everything in your environment imagine kind of a cone of attention at the so-called cocktail party effect you're trying to hear a conversation in particular not listen to Just the buzz and the clinks of the glasses and stuff in the room okay but also in that circuitry with involving prefrontal cortex and amygdala is an area of the brain that is becoming more important to neuroscientists all the time and important and especially to clinicians which is the insula the insula has a map of the body surface and the internal organs and is essentially controlling at least in one region interception which is our perception of everything that's happening within our body our perception that our heart rate has increased or decreased our perception that our blood pressure is dropping our perception that our gut feels acidic or full or empty Etc all of the visceral organs are mapped there and it'll see what's the physical size of this region oh that's a great question the amygdalas of the insular cortex is um is fairly expanded in humans meaning uh I'd have to check but it's it's going to be larger than a few millimeters which in neural real estate um wait this is a sub piece of the amygdala or this no this is a separate structure it's the insular cortex yeah um but that's a great question I I'd have to go it's small but it contains a complete map of the internal body surface and it's in a position this is really cool it's in a position to integrate information Nation about the outside world end rule sets and it end internal State and they all converge there now under conditions where we are rested we are feeling rational we understand the environment we feel in control of things the prefrontal cortex leads activation of the amygdala and the insula in other words I can say okay you know my heart rate's going up a little bit but I've done a podcast before I can get comfortable here okay someone who's never done public speaking however if they get out on stage and they're feeling their heart rate going up and they're thinking oh my God I'm going to pass out or I'm going to say something ridiculous and they're panicking what happens there well Nolan's lab and others have shown that now the insula activity and the amygdala starts leading the rule set of the prefrontal cortex the in other words the the coach now becomes the player right the trainer becomes the trainee so it's literally an inversion of instead of it going prefrontal cortex leads to insula leads amygdala it's insulin amygdala lead prefrontal cortex and so the prefrontal cortex doesn't shut down completely under conditions of say getting into an ice bath or panic the prefrontal cortex can only access one or two very specific rule sets you lose flexibility of thinking and this is kind of a duh when you hear it but I think the fact that neuroscientists are finally identifying the underlying neurology is very exciting because what we're talking about is that neural circuits can run in both directions and we had always thought it was okay this activates that activates that it's kind of a chain of events but it can run in the other direction too and this is why for instance sorry just to make sure I understand because again I apologize for my ignorance on this um you're saying that the action potential moves in the other direction and the neurotransmitters are actually released on the other side of the synapse no I'm so glad that you asked this question no the these all they have two versions all these structures are research they're reciprocally connected that's right so we haven't changed anything about the underlying cell biology about the axon propagating down the axon um and the action potential propagating down the axon and transmitter release it's just that it's a two-way Highway yeah and suddenly if everything was running north to south when we are in our rational mind you know create creativity all of those things under conditions of of of calm as soon as a certain level of internal discomfort arises everything starts running south to North and I think that's exceedingly interesting because it means for it first of all it means that neural circuits are not just you know the all the classic lesion data you lesion a structure like you remove some prefrontal cortex like the Phineas gauge example and you can start to see why huh you know that's a cool like naturally occurring experiment I mean unfortunate for him but cool for the world because we learned but it's not a great experiment because you're just getting an impression of what happens when you blow up one city along this map right it doesn't tell you anything about the direction of flow of information in and out of that map and so the more we learn about prefrontal cortex and these other structures like the insula the more we start to understand that the brain has neurons of course and we have what are called receptive fields which are you know basically the way in which specific neurons are activated by specific events in the world either in our bodies or outside our bodies but that those receptive fields are very Dynamic depending on context and that the brain while it has all this diversity of response it's not infinite we have modes that we sort of fall into bins of when autonomic arousal that is levels of alertness um it doesn't always have to be stress I mean in the context of say sexual arousal or hunger the rule set becomes very very narrow right it's it's fine food it's have sex it's um Flawless find a safe place to fall asleep whereas when we are arrested and we have our basic needs met whatever those may be then opens up the opportunity to start thinking in new and novel ways you can think oh it's sort of like this troop task on you know taken to the extreme it's okay you know we're 2023 um you know what is the metaverse going to look like what's Twitter what's going to happen to Twitter you know what what's going to happen to the economy what's going to happen to Public Health is there going to be another you know debacle with you know public health communication as it was over the last few years Etc and so you can start thinking in the way what you can start doing is combining different rule sets and evaluating those different rule sets and this I believe is one of the reasons why many people experience their best ideas from doing a lot of structured thinking but also from you know taking a walk and all of a sudden an idea comes to us or in the shower or um when we aren't focusing on the implementation of our specific rule set it's very clear that the prefrontal cortex has this ability depending on what else is going on in our body to sort of start swirling and combining these different rule sets and I I know you and I are both fascinated by high performance you would with F1 and a number of other things in some other domains but you know there's the sort of classic laddering up of you know unskilled is the start of any you know of performance then skilled then Mastery and then this thing that we love to observe which is virtuosity which is this combining of rule sets in a way that it seems even the the performer didn't even realize was possible anyway I've transitioned to a number of of domains but at the very least what this whole prefrontal cortex in slow amygdala circuitry is teaching us again mainly through the work of Nolan Williams this is not work from my laboratory is that when people are in states of calm and certainly in states of what we consider mental health things run north to south prefrontal cortex downward when people for instance people were depressed have deficits in activation of in particular the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and much of their thinking and their life is run from the insulin amygdala up to the prefrontal cortex and this is why people um they believe that you know wake up thinking you know I don't know how to accomplish anything today uh there's no point in trying their rule sets are seem like they don't work because they are only able to access specific rule sets of thinking and so the rest of us say well hey like get some exercise and go for you know apply for a job look for a new relationship but their rule sets are not available to them it's almost like they can't see the playboard in the same way and so Nolan's lab has been using for instance transcranial magnetic stimulation to activate not inhibit but activate doors dorsal left door lateral prefrontal cortex in particular and seeing that all of a sudden people are starting to it truly in the moment new ideas about rule sets are revealed to them and as the idea idea there that if you stimulate and activate and send the current back north to south it automatically reduces the south to North or just overwhelms it most likely it overwhelms it and with time creates neuroplasticity that that reduces it and the way it seems to do that is by temporarily shutting down people's enteroception you know we think so much about get connected to your body it's so important to be connected to your body and indeed many people their entire life and and experience exists from the neck up and the waist down but interception is a double-edged sword it's also been shown that people who have extreme levels of interoception actually one can know if you can reliably count heartbeats without taking your pulse or using a heart rate monitor chances are you have pretty high levels of interoception this can be trained up wow yeah some people I don't think I mean I could guess my heart rate based on my external cues I'm probably at 60 beats per minute now because I'm higher than fully at rest but not much but can you feel your absolutely not some people can feel their heartbeat and they have and it's been shown they have very high levels of insulin activity and in particular there are sub-regions of the of the insula if I said amygdala second I apologize they're I meant insula there are sub-regions of the insula that are particularly sensitive to internal State other regions of the insulin are tuned to other things and just to be sure I understand this look the anyone who's ever had a you know GI bug or something or God forbid something worse like you know had a you know been extremely constipated or had a small bowel obstruction like the um innervation of this small bowel in particular is insane right like we are really able to detect pain at even a modest amount of uh stretch just to be clear are you talking about that pain is perceived in the insulin is that that's right that's part we're saying yeah that's going to be a primary site for delivery of somatic sensation to the brain you know oftentimes people say you know that the the body contains so much information I you know I have to say I'm very very open to the idea that the body plays an important role in all things health and perception but there is something particularly important about the real estate in our skull yeah so this is right and they want to go you could amputate all four of my limbs and um that would suck for me um but I'd still be Andrew if you take out one square millimeter of my prefrontal cortex who knows maybe I'd be a nicer guy but chances are I'm going to be a very different person now that is not true if you remove one square millimeter of say a different brain area and I could think of a few where if you put a gun to my head and you force me to do that to myself um they'll I'll tell you one thing I'll say the last place I I would ever allow you to take a square millimeter of neural tissue as my neural retina because they're you know the you take one square millimeter that's interesting I would have guessed hippocampus no there are a few things I'd like to forget I might ask where they're mapped and then to take have you delete there right in all seriousness I think the neural retina would be the last place I guess the peripheral retina I don't care so much about being able to see out here in my periphery although that's what you use when you're driving a lot of people think you use fovial Vision central vision for driving I hate to tell you this but there are many people out there driving around right now who are legally blind in their central vision are they great drivers no are they decent enough drivers to pass the driving test that they are so a lot of blind people legally blind people in other words you're basically saying you would prioritize Vision over any other part of your brain absolutely except perhaps motor cortex um because I could handle missing one eye but I listen I if you look at the allocation of real estate in the human brain it's very clear that vision and movement dominate most of the requirements yeah so it's interesting movement clearly if you look at you know the the sort of the movement cortex also sensation though I mean the homunculus is enormous right um remind me how much real estate I know the occipital cortex is responsible for vision just on a on a neuron basis as a percent of total neurons is that the right way to think about it yeah or would you also include the glial cells uh well in um uh homage to Ben Barris the great Ben Burris my postdoc advisor and your former instructor we should include the glia um otherwise the the glianistas are going to come after me but glia obviously are very important cells but if you were to just say strict you know volume based real estate yeah and you were to say okay how much of the human brain is allocated for vision and vision only but also how much of the human brain includes neurons that are responsive to visual stimuli so these might be areas of your auditory cortex that are also responsible for vision because of course if you hear something over to your left you tend to look over to your left so there's integration they're multi-mode what we call multimodal neurons they have auditory and visual receptive Fields they can be activated by auditory and visual cues you say 40 plus percent probably 40 to 42 percent of the human brain has a visual response specificity incredible this is amazing you've probably heard me talk about this before but one of the things I enjoy about bow hunting is the ability to observe other species and how they have different superpowers from us so anybody who's ever been out there with a bow trying to you know get an access to you or an elk will tell you their hearing is incredible but their sense of smell is next level it's we don't have a way to comprehend it I once heard might have been Michael Easter I don't remember but an author someone no it wasn't it was actually I don't remember anyway someone once gave this amazing description which was they were out walking and they came across a carcass that was I forget what the animal was it was like some animal that had been killed by another animal but it was mostly still there and it was rotting and it was rancid beyond words once they were within like 10 feet of it and the analogy they used is this is what we smell like to an elk a mile away oh that's such a great way to put it I need to because we always hear you know sharks can smell a drop of blood in the water from a mile away but it's hard to think about it start to imagine what that is yeah it doesn't translate to our own map of experience I have to mention a book which is a wonderful book that uh frankly I was a little pissed when it came out um in the best of ways because I always wanted to the book you wanted to write it's a book I wanted to write because animals and animal behavior and perception is one of my my favorite things to to think about there's a beautiful book written far better than I ever could write by Ed young who's a wonderful scientific science writer called an immense world that just came out which is all about the sensory specializations of other animals I think you'd really I'd love to read this yeah I'll send you a copy yeah and and my point is that the only sense that we seem to have to rival animals is Vision in fact we actually have better Vision than a number of animals because we're a tri-color right most of them are two um and so there are some animals that certainly see better than us I think a lot of the sheep species can see things at a mile that we can't fathom um but I think we probably see better than deer and Elk all things equal it's just that it's still you know their ability to smell and hear us is so much so much better so it's interesting to think that that much of our real estate is assigned to Vision whereas I mean what's the olfactory neuronal component it must be nothing minimal in comparison which doesn't necessarily you know I should just say volume of real estate is not always the best indicator No in fact there was a there was a lot of mistakes made in the early days of Neuroscience um because of looking at the number of neurons or the number of connections a good example would be the rafae nucleus of the of the brain stem manufacture serotonin sends an enormous enormous projection to the circadian clock of the hypothalamus and there have been dozens of experiments evaluating the role of serotonin in that pathway and it's a ability to shift the Circadian system and thus far it seemed like barely any influence who knows what it's doing we assume it's doing something but it's not doing anything obvious based on the experiments have been done to be a little careful in any description about animals in the natural world and vision because this could end up being a 15-hour podcast like I turn into about the six-year-old version of myself I mean literally my parents took me to a psychologist because they were worried I was spending so much time learning about animals and the natural world and then I used to come into class and I you know I used to go into kindergarten in first grade and ask if I could give lectures about that it was an absolute Obsession so should I be worried about my five-year-old who feels that way about dinosaurs right now no it would probably be a paleontologist someday that's what he thinks yeah I mean I maybe we will get into backstory but I still feel a full body lift when we start talking about retinas and animals and um so if you'll indulge me there are a couple points related to what you said a moment ago that I think most people might appreciate just in terms of calibrating themselves to these sensory experiences because I love the example you gave we'll get back to a faction in a moment but to get a sense of how well we see relative to other animals if you were to hold out your thumb at arm's distance if I were to draw 60 6-0 black lines separated from one another on your thumbnail okay you would be able to perceive that and we call that being able to measure 60 cycles per degree cycles of black white per degree of visual because at one arm length that is one 360th yeah that's a 40 degree about one degree it's not yeah it's about one degree of visual angle you have to take into account the Optics of the eye if I were to draw 80 lines and sorry just to be clear when you say you put 60 lines on my thumb I can't count the 60. I just recognize that they are discrete lines exactly okay beautifully put um so most people with 2020-ish Vision or with corrective lenses or with Lasik can see 60 cycles per degree some people are better fighter pilots Etc some people someone might be 65 yeah whatever exactly a raptor bird of the sort that I saw this morning here in Texas um like a red tail hawk or red-shouldered Hawk Sees at 120 cycles per degree so that means they can sit up on a light pole and look down at the ground and see a a small gopher raise its head in the ground and it will look like they'll perceive it they might not be able to count the whiskers on that gopher's face but they'll be able to perceive that movement now this is interesting because we have a pupil we have a phobia behind that a phobia is just a concentration phobia actually means a pit but a concentration of retinal cells that allows us to see at highest Acuity in the central vision how do we know this well you can put your hand out to the side and you know your fingers are waving off in your periphery for those just listening I'm just bringing my fingers off to the side of my head while looking at Peter and I can see that they're moving but I can't really count them if it wasn't my hand I wouldn't know how many fingers were there as I move my hand more toward in front of my face I can count them so central vision we have more pixels if you will than in peripheral vision but only in the center and it's circular you mentioned sheep and this is kind of fun and thinking about hunting red tail hawks have a phobia but other types of raptors have another phobia that views the floor so for instance a diving bird is the best example birds that fly along the ocean have a horizontal visual streak that allows them to view the Horizon right so they're they're what we consider Central is their peripheral that's right but they also have a phobia because they need to actually dive into a school of fish and capture a fish while adjusting for the refractory index of the water refractor index of course is that you know if you ever reach for a coin at the bottom of the swimming pool and you're reaching for it and it's only when you get very close that you realize you were off by a few a few uh centimeters or more so that's an incredible feat and they do that by Distributing the Hypixel region of their retina to a visual streak and down below of phobia the sloth that hangs upside down has its phobia on the top of the eye so it can view the jungle floor and there are a lot of examples of this in my favorite example this is the j-shaped it's not really a phobia but the J is shaped high density High pixel concentration of the retina of the elephant so that it can view the trunk and the tip of its trunk because it has to make very high Acuity placement of the trunk in order to eat properly so Nature has evolved all these incredible retinal specializations so animals and in particular I know most people are interested in the animal that is us but animals all have differences in Acuity and distribution of what they see in the world and you mentioned sheep sheep actually need to see Horizon but they also need to pay attention to the what they're eating because you know they're just mostly like they're kind of like lawn mowers right I mean but they need to be aware of predators and things of that sort so a guy down in Australia for years named Jack pedigree did tons of um beautiful experiments on animals like sheep and goats and they have incredibly High Acuity Vision but for very select regions of visual space so herein lies that well you're absolutely right about the Horizon thing because you know I have friends that do a lot of you know some of the hardest sheep hunting that can be done in North America and they'll say I've heard some of them say that out to five miles if you break Horizon you're busted that's right can you imagine that out to five miles if you break the Horizon the Sheep will see you and even if they're grazing they can spot that because of the way that visual streak it's not straight across the eye the way it's oriented so for those of you who want to creep up on animals or people um let's hope for either hunting which I think is great uh or hopefully not if you're hunting people let's hope it's for it's within your appropriate professional role um for uh military all right the point being um one universal truth of all of this is that the retina and the visual system is most sensitive to motion so it's not as if the Sheep says oh there's Peter and his friends creeping up on me in the Horizon all they see is a deflection of something in their visual field and there's a very fast pathway that goes from retina to a brain stem structure called The Superior colliculus that immediately engages The orienting Reflex it's not even conscious it's not a decision-making process it's something comes up in the periphery something moves in the periphery and the signal to noise is it's great enough that we Orient towards our animals Orient towards it if you watch for instance like the nature is metal channel on um sorry do we do that as well we absolutely do and are we Are we more sensitive to the sound or to something in our periphery moving visual periphery moving oh there are exceptions to that but visual periphery moving if you like this sort of thing and you want to see it in action if you go to inserts to the nature is metal um somewhat gruesome Instagram Channel a lot of examples of lions hunting and you'll notice the way they they hunt they they move very slowly but when the animal they have they learn over time we don't know what they're thinking but they learn over time that when they are out of the field of view or if they are in in field of view they remain completely still in other words the line becomes invisible when they are not moving invisible to the to the prey when the line is not moving now you could say well that's crazy because it's sitting right there but actually if I were to eliminate all your retinal movements and you're looking right at me I would disappear you're making little microseconds all the time that prevent the habituation of the neurons that would otherwise erase your visual perception wait explain that more so if we think that I see the pen I see you in front of me and I can just see it constantly but the retina has little micro psychods little tiny Jitter basically that prevents the habituation of the neurons in the visual system from essentially losing the perception of you if I were and these experiments have been done if I were to eliminate these little micro psychods you would become invisible to me the only way I would see you is if I moved my head where I moved my eyes in a bigger how do you experimentally do that so these experiments were done by Hugo and weasel and got Nobel Prize winners for a number of different aspects of vision you can do this by giving kurari to eliminate the muscle toxic the toxin eliminate the small muscle movements of the eye there's some other drugs that you can use that tap into the cholinergic system I see so you just temporarily paralyze or permanently paralyzed these muscles and we're doing this all the time I mean now we're getting into the realm of sensory perception but when my hands are on my um on my thighs and you acclimate to that yeah you acclimate you habituate some people call it attenuation habituation but um adaptation um but you mentioned smell uh let's use a you walk into a dentist's office oh the smell of the dental cement you want to vomit and a couple minutes later you're sitting there reading some boring magazine or looking at your phone and you don't notice it because the olfactory neurons habituate because the nervous system mostly runs on a signal to noise over time algorithms so the olfactory component is really profound right like you walk into a fish market and you want to puke and five minutes later you've sort of forgotten about it and you're looking at the fish that's right um do we have that profound a uh again I don't want to use the word adaptation because it's necessarily the right word but I think just for people to understand I don't is there examples of where we have that visually as well that strong an adaptation yeah what there are a couple of them um I mean there's there's rapid plasticity in terms of adaptation um well if you go into a fun house mirror type environment they they tend to change the um that's more of a visual percept uh proprioceptive feedback where at first you feel kind of wobbly and then you can move you're like oh when I see myself move that way in the mirror that's not really how I need to respond but at first you feel a little off balance um they've put there's very fast adaptation of the sort like you can put in uh this is a wild experiment you put glasses on somebody that inverts the visual world that's got to throw off your day but guess what within four hours you're navigating just fine what happens what this is crazy the receptive Fields invert and all of a sudden you see the world right side up now that's wild you actually see it right side up or you just learn that left is right and right is left no you it flips which is crazy in four hours yeah about four hours what actually happens at the cellular level to enable that yeah so this has been studied uh by um Thomas pogio and and others um and it's still somewhat of a mystery but this has to do with whether it appears its bottom-up changes meaning it shifts in the oculomotor and visual motor structures of the brain stem communicating with the higher level perceptual centers of of the cortex remember if we were to splay out the um from most primitive to most evolved functions within Vision we'd say and we can make up Just So Stories of I always joke you know I wasn't consulted the design phase so I don't know I don't know the logic by the way anytime someone asks you you know why is something this way the response should be I wasn't consulted in the design phase I love it I was actually a phrase that I I borrowed from Russ van gelder who's the chair of Ophthalmology at University of Washington so um uh thank you Russ but but it captures the fact that you know anyone who tells you that they were to consult the design phase or seems to understand why something is arranged a certain way you can come up with just those stories but that person might be suffering from delusions of grandeur so in any event what we know for sure is that based on genetics and seller architecture Etc that the primary function of the visual system was not to see and perceive things it was to recognize when it's daytime and when it's night time now we'll get back to this because this turns out to be an important mystery that was solved recently the neurons that that handle this are the so-called melanops and intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells they don't pay attention to shapes they don't pay attention to much but they tell the brain when it's daytime and they tell the brain when it's absence of of light okay this is Sachin pandas atar all the all the greats of circadian biology Matt Walker this stuff relates to sleep and wakefulness the next thing is neurons that can sense contrast and motion more important to me than knowing that like your skin is a particular tone is just knowing that you are there and that you are a moving object as opposed to stationary objects in the room that I just need to navigate around okay so motion and con contrast in motion comes next then comes shape and form like is that a fish that I want to move away from or do I want to approach and eat is it bigger than I am is it smaller than I am these kinds of things and then comes color of the more traditional sort although I'll return to this interesting thing about color and then the final category is specific features of shape such as your face I recognize your face or JFK's face or Marilyn Monroe's face and indeed I like being in the same category as those two really famous faces yeah there you go as it should be I mean there's an area of the brain called the fusiform face gyrus it lies way up along the visual pathway meaning very far from the retina but neurons there are exquisitely tuned to specific faces in fact um if you lesion that area people become what's called proposition a pro pasagnosia is the syndrome um whereby people say that's a face I know it's a face but I don't know whose face it is would that be true if it's their own I don't know the answer to that but it certainly gives them severe deficits in processing recognizing faces as someone in particular in fact Ben Barris who we both will get back to had a mild face recognition deficit I would sometimes walk into his office he'd say ah are you Chala Chalo is a woman that worked in our lab now that kind of question might have been more context appropriate given it was Ben and that will make sense in a few minutes Ben was transgendered so that he could kind of maybe his Notions of gender and faces were a little bit intermixed but we don't think that people who are transgendered perceive other people as different genders but he sometimes would say is that rich or is that Andy he called me Andy I know he'd asked Rich if he was Andy and so the the reality is that um this brain area controls recognition of facial identity incredible but but very high level function and just to be clear there are you know extreme examples obviously a lesion where you can't recognize anybody but for someone listening to this um there are I'm sure people who go to parties and they meet somebody and they say hey Peter and you're like yeah yeah and it's like yeah we didn't we met three months ago at so-and-so's right they're also super recognizers these people are highly employable by security agencies now the machine learning and AI is getting better than many humans at face recognition remember I mean 10 years ago 15 years ago retinal scans didn't they existed but nothing like the ones they have now face recognition on your phone for getting into your bank account it's pretty incredible but they're super recognizers um there are people so there are healthy variants of this basically oh yeah yeah and whether or not it's learned or whether or not there's a genetic component isn't clear uh monkeys macakmonkeys Old World primates as we are also have this fuse performed face area this is largely the work of Nancy can Wisher at MIT it's done beautiful work on this and for years it was debated is this a face recognition area really or is it just recognition of you know two dots and a line but you know if I draw two dots in a line on a piece of paper you say that's a face you know if I make it curdle that line upward a little bit you say it's smiling if I turn it upside down or I put it at 90 degrees it does not look like a face so the neurons in this area are amazingly tuned to specific features now I mentioned color vision and you said other animals like I hate to bring it to you folks but your dog sees you in kind of a brown red orange-ish tones not in the colors that we see a mantis shrimp sees 60 different variations of color that of red that we can't even perceive now all of that suggests that color vision was a late evolution in the visual system and indeed the genetics of the photo pigments in the eye that absorb either red green or blue meaning long medium and short wavelength lights not really red green blue argue that's true and I should just mention while I'm here you asked earlier whether or not we trade you know whether or not our old faction is diminished really beautiful work by a couple deeb and deep d-e-e-b um Samir deeb and his partner and I can't remember her name forgive me um at the University of Washington showed that if you look at the human genetics or genomics that humans traded out diversity of olfactory receptors that is the ability to sense a rich array of scents compared to other animals for evolution of that long AKA Red photopigment so trichromacy is of this ability to perceive in the color ranges that we perceive is a late stage Evolution and we traded out olfactory ability for that so the question is why is it literally a real estate question is it a metabolic question I think well a number of things well first of all I want to be fair to the olfactory system in the vomar nasal system I mean smell is incredibly important for humans anyone that got coveted and couldn't smell well for a day like myself that sucked I mean I remember biting into a handful of blueberries and I couldn't taste it well either because it wasn't the coldest the lack of smell those taste and smell are intermeshed um and I thought oh my goodness my life isn't over but this really sucks this is not pleasant at all these just take it tastes like little bags of water and I love blueberries okay fortunately my smell came back we are sensitive to the smell of vomit discussed I would hope we are sensitive to the smell of our romantic Partners hopefully not discussed right um we tend to like that our kids our kids the smell of their heads and in the back of their heads they produce all sorts of scents the debate between odors and pheromones pheromones pheromone effects in humans are are present what's the definition of a pheromone everybody's heard about it but I don't know the technology pheromone is a molecule so hormone obviously is a not obviously but hormone is a chemical released in one location in the body that can act at that location in many other locations so-called endocrine signaling yes yes thank you a pheromone is a chemical released by one organism that can act on the physiology of another organism now there are beautiful examples we capture these can we actually say here is the molecular structure of a pheromone that was released from the nape of my child's neck that I can smell and love okay um the presence of true pheromones the noun in humans is still debated because the so-called accessorial factory system that governs that pheromonal response in other animals has there's an organ in the human nose called Jacobson's organ that is thought to be the vestigial pheromonal organ but so that's debated but what is absolutely clear is that the scent right the conscious perception of that scent has dramatic effects on our physiology there's a direct wiring from the olfactory system so this is not pheromone effects these are odor effects and those are two different things so the idea of a chemical coming off of your child and going through the vomar nasal system and impacting these aspects of cellos oxytocin release probably dopamine release all sorts of wonderful things um that's debated what is absolutely clear though is that that specific scent clearly is perceived and registered by you and has an impact on your physique and if it's not done via a molecule that's traveling through the air going through the Nares of my nose what is the connection uh so it is a molecule traveling into the nose and impacting in this case it would be the Deep limbic cortex you've got six layered cortex which is neocortex thought to be more evolved you've got limbic and piriform cortex where the fewer layers thought to be more like for instance the hip the campus this memory Center is actually a it's three layers it's cortical um it's not what we think of as neocortex but it's very clear from the work of Richard Axel and Linda buck and others that the the smell of your child's head and neck yep is perceived and impacts specific neurons in these more quote unquote more primitive brain areas and that there are many automatic innate as well as learned responses to that the desire for instance to focus off your own needs and focus on their needs um Bliss I mean there's there's no question that those are odor driven responses whether or not they are classic pheromone driven responses it's a little bit of splitting hairs that's where it's debated and the reason it's debated is that pheromone effects are very powerful in other animals and you see analogs to them in humans I'll give a couple of examples but I do want to highlight that olfaction is absolutely powerful for humans but of course you can lose your old faction and still function just fine you asked about vision and I just want to say we'll get back to this but one of the reasons we think that the visual system is so dominant is that it's it allows us to function and based on perceptions of things at a distance I mean the olfactory system does require fairly close range contact the and there's a whole business that we can get into about being that that's again because we optimized to not Place much in it right I mean again if we were elk presumably and I would guess I mean I'm making this up again I would guess that a parent elk can smell its Offspring elk at as great a distance as it will spot and be spooked from us which might be a mile away right and this is really wild and I I learned this recently from somebody who works on the olfactory systems of species like elk you know we think of binocular vision uh you know Vision through both eyes and then you create a coherent picture I think I know what you're about to say and I can't believe it the elk and many other animals that are very olfactory driven can sense odor plumes so think about sort of cones of odor and switch between their different nostrils and in fact they can distribute those odor plumes so they can geolocate you look at so they can track three or four young or three or four Hunters simultaneously there's two over there and two over there through odor plumes they can merge odor plumes now you might say that sounds crazy but we do this all the time I can talk to you and I can um it's called covert attention this is the phenomenon being at the bar and you're talking to somebody but you're actually checking out somebody else at the bar or somebody walks in who you really dislike or like and so you're pretending to have a conversation but you're really paying attention covert attention um they can create or I can bring all my sphere of attention just on to you uh wherever you're talking to at the bar so animals like elk can create and split multiple cones of odor attention they can also perceive depth with their odor plumes now this is really important and it makes sense right that the concentration of an odor would fall off with distance we do this with our visual system obviously things on the horizon you watch a plane fly overhead it looks like it's slow if you're right up next to it it's going to go blazing past story that F1 for instance I'm always like why are the car is driving so slow I thought this was car racing then they come by and it's like and it's incredibly fast okay we'll get back to that because that illustrates or or kind of captures the relationship between visual perception and time perception the same thing at a distance move appears to move slowly the same thing up close appears to move quickly even your hand right you can even see this at arm's length versus up near your eye if you're sensitive to it but certainly a car a mile away versus um or my favorite example go to New York City get up in a skyscraper look out the window and you're looking at the little ants and cars moving or you know the people are the ants moving around it looks like it's moving kind of slowly right then all of a sudden look at something in your room and all of a sudden it's like whoa things are moving really fast because they're close other animals do this with their odor plumes which is insane insane because it's not our experience but then again a pit viper sees in the infrared and can sense your heat emissions in the same way as sensing movement is sensing vectors of movement Etc okay so so let's go back to this question of why what was the limit for us to not have that so again I'm just going to go back to given that neither of us were in the design phase um your natural selection you are the tool of evolution presumably there were variants of us that were randomly occurring that had those skills that got out competed by the ones that had greater and greater visual acuity why wouldn't you have all of the above is it literally a running out of real estate inside the cranium and if so why not get a bigger Cranium I mean neanderthals had bigger crane like again it's sort of a question that's unanswerable but I find these types of questions fascinating yeah super interesting and also the fact that we have this vestigial pheromonal organs which appears to be the case or we have an olfactory system that can be used to a greater degree than we do rely on it I I'm a huge fan of the work of a guy named Noam Sobel he used to be at Berkeley and now he's in in Israel he's done experiments uh when I was at Cal at UC Berkeley I used to see people doing this he would put um gloves and goggles including goggles and all sorts of stuff to block hearing and touch and vision and he taught people to follow odor Trails of chocolate or other and to just distinguish between different odors you see these these poor souls walking around on their hands and knees on the on the Berkeley campus not the weirdest of things that you I mean basically on the Berkeley campus you have to be naked and on fire before anyone would stop but the um people can learn this so you can devote more resources to it but I think that I think the most straightforward answer is likely that um we traded out space in there we trade that we traded out space and now of course I don't know because I wasn't there but there is something important about that relationship between vision and time perception at some point in human evolution whether or not it was through the visual system or whether or not it was through the prefrontal cortical mechanisms something very special happened for Old World primates and Us in particular which is the thing that I really believe sets us apart from all the other animals the reasons that we are the curators of the earth and not other species is twofold one the duration of time in our lifespan in which we can engage neuroplasticity the ability to deliberately change our neural architecture through learning and the other one is time perception at some point we developed the ability to divorce from memories of the past and experiences in the present and also anticipate experiences in the future and I don't know because I'm not in the Elks mind or the mind of a turtle but everything that we know about their sensory life and perception says that sure they have memories this whole notion of a goldfish not having a memory that's that's like the stupidest thing I ever heard first of all the experiment's never been done and second of all like like why would the Goldfish has to swim in circles who who decided it forgot I think that's a myth so but they can remember food is over there animals cash food for the winter and go back to those cash sites it squirrels incredible memory of location and landmarks and all this stuff we do that we have a memory of past we have perception of present but we also can think about how past and present relate to anticipation of future events and that places Us in an incredible uh Arena of interaction with the natural world where we can make plans and we can make plans in very specific ways and so I believe if I were to hedge a guess I'd say our ability to be so dependent on vision and the fact that our visual system has this aperture we can in View Broad swaths of our visual environment and when we do that we back we carve up time in very broad bins this is very clear think about the plane flying slowly or we can narrow our visual aperture I mean you and I could go outside find a little ant hill and we could pay attention to all the micro movements of that and focus on that for a couple of hours we can narrow our visual aperture stress will or excitement will narrow our visual aperture remember the prefrontal cortex different rule sets associated with different internal states that also relate to different modes of visual perception and at some point in human evolution some ancient version of ourselves figured out how to see into the future we obviously can't directly see into the future but to anticipate the rule sets of events that are still yet to come and other animals if they do that they don't seem to actualize on that ability I was joking you know my I had this Bulldog for years and he loved chasing rabbits but he didn't wake up on New Year's Day and say okay 50 rabbits this year and if he did he never actually succeeded in making a good plan to execute that so how could we test that I mean I it seems like that's probably the case is there a way that one could test that experiment yeah or test that hypothesis I don't I don't know what I do know is that there are certain States including dreams the liminal State between waking and sleeping when we are completely devoid of external visual input right our eyes are closed and space and time this is also true in certain psychedelic States space and time become not normal right we you know you don't first thing we learn is objects fall down not up right you know uh these are our caretakers uh when I feel stressed I don't know that I need to have my diaper change I just scream my diaper gets changed hopefully right those are the rule sets that we come into the world with early rule sets but then at some point our rule sets become very constrained by our immediate experience right and by past experience like oh gosh that teacher is not nice that babysitter but this is kind of the whole thesis of the Matrix right it's Neo having to unlearn the constraints of the Matrix that's right and then at some point our and I do think it's these experiences of vision that are outside the realm of normal of normal experience that the prefrontal cortex not us consciously but the prefrontal cortex learns ah there's the possibility for instance of um you know birds fly we don't fly but that you know I can throw a stick you know but what if I could throw a stick with you know I don't know somebody hung some leather ornaments on that stick and figured out they could throw it a little bit further in a little longer right I mean these are the the real the real world experiments have to be done in the present of course and now what I'm saying is obviously we're getting the evolution of our species suggests that we were able to do this and we're not seeing that level of complexity in terms of I don't want to use planning because then it becomes a tautology but we don't see the complexity and behavior out of other species that we do in ourselves and is that basically the best explanation yes yeah I mean I most animals don't this again relates to this other aspect of ourselves which is neuroplasticity there's something there's some self-knowledge that we have I mean this is a bit of Consciousness right right I mean we're getting a little bit into the abstract and we're certainly not getting into the realm of laboratory experimentation and having proved any of this but if I were to if I were to put it simply I think the evolution of the visual system allowed us to think in different time domains I think things like dreaming in liminal States give us access to visual experiences that are impossible in regular conscious perceptual States impossible right I mean I had a dream the other day where I was in a taxi and then all of a sudden I was someplace else I mean this is not real right but the brain can learn things in those States I mean it can learn about new rule sets new possibilities of rule sets can that be harnessed you think so let's just assume you I'll give it this is not a great example it's just the first thing that comes to my mind you go back to uh you know nobody's run a four minute mile nobody's broken the four minute mile and um if Roger Bannister had dream after dream of breaking the four minute mile do we have reason to believe that that would have impacted his physiology and belief system in the way that it did when he actually broke the four minute mile and all of a sudden breaking the four minute mile became a standard occurrence in other words the rule set got broken in the real world and that clearly demonstrated a path to progress do we have evidence that had that rule set been broken in a dream state it could have had a similar effect for the first individual uh the best evidence I I have is the incredible work of my colleague at Stanford Ali Crum Alia Crum I'd love to put you guys in touch didn't just be a fly on the wall for that conversation that's what's great about podcasting we can all be flies on the wall for it um she's worked on these mindset effects or belief effects these are different than and Placebo effects the short answer is yes she's there are a million examples so I'll give my three favorite examples um you give somebody a milkshake you tell them it's a low calorie milkshake you measure things like their insulin their glucose response level levels of satiety levels of ghrelin Etc you give another group milkshake you tell them it's a high calorie shake you take all the same measures you'll see different responses vastly different responses you give hotel workers a little tutorial on the fact that you know cleaning hotel rooms is boring but it burns calories and I can lower blood pressure help you lose weight they lose on average between 8 and 11 pounds in the following three or four weeks okay you don't say anything to hotel workers about all the benefits of of their work and the exercise that it includes you just tell them that it involves a lot of movement etc etc no no consequence there's clearly a mindset effect and my favorite example would be this the one related to stress which is you tell people all the negative benefit all the negative impacts of stress on memory and well-being and immune system or you tell people also true data on the performance enhancing effects of stress sharpening of memory capacity Reaction Time reduce which is also true and you see exactly what people believe in what they're told and what they believe you can't lie to yourself but what you believe about a given practice strongly regulates the physiology now this is um interesting to me in terms of the four minute mile or other things like you tell people that um the burn of lactate the um the maybe even the lack of sleep that they had the night before reflects a training adaptation as opposed to overreaching and over training you're going to see very different outcomes in fact Ali's been um cueing me to the idea that a lot of the sleep tracking stuff that you tell people you didn't have a good night's sleep oh I feel like [ __ ] the next day you tell them they had a great night's sleep independent of their sleep physiology and listen I I am as much a proponent of sleep as a the core of mental and physical performance as as Matt or anyone else um you included but let's be honest what you believe about what you've been told has an immense impact on your physiology and I use this to explain some of the battles around nutrition where you hear like these dweebs over here are saying this online and these dweebs and goons over here and it's kind of silly after a while clearly there are there's a distribution where facts Rule and Physiology rules the laws of thermodynamics are intact but then these belief effects can account for anywhere from according to her anywhere from about eight to twenty percent of the effects of anything like a food or a behavior she actually set out in her thesis at Harvard um to study the effects of exercise and her advisor said to her I think all the effects of exercise are Placebo and it was kind of a it was a it was a prompt to go actually look at that and she thought well that's crazy Ali's a former D1 athlete she's also trained clinical psychologist runs a lab at Stanford she's one of these superhumans but she said well that's crazy no exercise changes blood pressure by way of a number of different physiological mechanisms but she went and tested this idea that it's all Placebo in fact that there's a lot that is Placebo so mindset effects are real in terms of physiology now does that allow people to break mental barriers well for certain things like engineering like sending Rockets up to Mars clearly there's an engineering feat that has to be um that has to adapt to the physical world there's nothing obvious about that I can't just will it into existence but in terms of what the limits are on human performance and what the limits are in terms of create creative endeavors well that's I mean as far as we know that's infinite uh our good friend Rick Rubin right has a book on creativity coming out and and I don't want to talk about it because there's no way I could capture Rick's Brilliance there but he and I have a lot of discussions about this and it's it's clear that creativity is combining of existing rule sets but also coming up with completely novel rule sets and this is something that it for the philosophically oriented or for the Neuroscience oriented or psychologically oriented is a fun space I mean when was the last time any of us took a walk and thought how do I completely fracture my Notions of of the rules in a given domain and and think about truly new ones it's hard to do but once you set the for lack of a better word the intention around that I do believe that when you enter sleep states that the brain tries to solve the most important problems that are happening in your daily life I think I talked about this on a podcast with Matt Walker a long time ago I have um I'm sure everybody can relate to this um there's something really beautiful about uh singular focus and purpose in life and for me some of the the Fondest Memories would be in you know college and medical school where you know life is remarkably simple you know you had no responsibility whatsoever and when I was an undergrad I mean you know I don't possess the vocabulary to describe how much I loved mathematics there probably isn't a vocabulary for it well I'm sure somebody could but I but my vocabulary is not Advanced enough to put into words the affection and the joy that mathematics brought me and uh the example I gave was I would dream about math problems and I remember in the real world I was trying to solve a problem it was a dumb problem that I had made up to solve which was I wanted to integrate the volume of a face and I got stuck on the chin because there's a dimple on this chin that I was trying to integrate and I you know I went to bed and I actually dreamed the solution I dreamed the function which needed to be rotated around a z-axis to come up with the integral and I woke up got out of bed and solved this problem and I'm thinking to myself like that just doesn't happen anymore and it probably doesn't happen anymore because I'm so distracted there were too many things I'm trying to do and I lack that real sense of purpose and uh I I don't know I don't know if I'm sure you've experienced this in your own life oh yeah I mean I think that um you so it one way to describe it in the context of the neural architectures that we've been talking about is you have all the necessary rule sets to complete all the demands of your daily life from parenting to podcasting to running your clinical practice and on and on and so you know how to toggle between those you know not to apply one rule set in the wrong context and you just go go go go go and there's an energetic cost to that when we are singularly focused on one context even if it's one conceptual context you still have the same amount of total neural architecture right now it's just concentrated just devoted to that I mean I still have images burned in my brain of neural tissue looking that I was viewing down the microscope I can close my eyes and still see it now I don't have a I'm not um you know photographic memory I don't have a photographic memory I used to have an audio graphic memory where I could turn on a recorder in my head and then I could listen back to those conversations in the evening a very uh dangerous uh thing to have actually and to get into an argument with me at that time was no good but the uh because I I could remember what you said I lost that ability and I think I lost that ability not because I truly lost it but I'm thinking about other things now now that was kind of a useless ability frankly um I don't know that's not that sounds like a more useful ability than being able to integrate faces well it helped me learn certain things but I think ultimately being fairly narrow context and being able to access these these broader rule sets and come up with new rule sets is incredibly powerful now there are certain states of body and mind that favor this creativity process if we can call it that and you said it um precisely which is and this is not a woo thing I truly believe that even though our ability to be gritty and to survive allows us to access a number of important rule sets we know based on the relationship between stress and survival that those rule sets and and the prefrontal cortex that those rule sets excuse me are constrained right so I put you into a dangerous situation where you need to protect your family you're going to figure it out I trust you I know that I know you're going to work it out but I also believe that there is a state of love that is associated with access to a much broader rule set and creative rule said how do I know this is because it underlies our Evolution as a species the number of different things that you can do to access survival if you're taking care of your family is immense but the number of different adaptations that you can come up with in order to raise your children to be as happy and healthy as they can be out of love is absolutely infinite why because it really is there's no other option you're not fearing death what you're doing is you're trying to access this landscape of you want them to be as great as they can be you don't know how great they can be that's the infinite rule set and so the nut not having constraints on what the outcome is is really the way to access expanded rule sets now this is getting a little bit circular I have to be careful and like check my thinking I'm sure the philosophers out there are gonna you know nitpick this and I hope they would but in discussions with Rick about creativity and in discussions with you and other and other folks it's very clear that the accessing these brain centers that have full understanding of internal state and then full understanding of past present and future that is absolutely the best state to be in in order to access expanded rule sets and ever expanding rule sets whereas anytime I'm accessing knowledge about internal state but it's constrained by outcome I need this not to happen you've already shut down a number of rule sets right so anytime so and this is why I think in dreaming we we aren't constraining our rule sets we all wish we could but we're not constraining our rule sets it could be a nightmare it could be the best fantasy we've ever had you can fly all these things the rule sets are infinite but constrained by experience we're not aware yet that we can dream about things in a way that does not reflect what we've already experienced we might be able to we don't know enough about sleep and dreaming yet the idea here is that placing one's mind and body into states of of you know and again I'm sounding squishy here but love or um we could also think anything that doesn't include a but not that is an expanded rule set right so I'm not going to do this podcast spinning around in my chair on my head but the moment I I decide what's appropriate and inappropriate behavior I've now started to constrain the rule sets Okay so we can go around around this circle as much as we want or as little as we want but I think that once people start to understand what places their body and mind into the most relaxed and quote unquote open state for accessing new rule sets the more quickly we can solve problems that's absolutely clear and we know this from the laboratory if I give you cognitive tasks and I just ramp up your level of autonomic arousal and we do this in my lab are there any number of different ways to do this you can function up to a point but it's mainly dependent on how well you have performed that thing in the past I give you something novel I switch the contingency I give you kind of a more advanced Stroop type task everybody Cliffs I don't care if you're a Seal Team Six guy I don't care if you run three countries I don't care if you've parented 12 kids on your own your rule sets are constrained and so I throw something novel at you under conditions of even mild stress and you break down I throw something novel at you under conditions of relaxation and you can pull from what might even seem like ridiculous rule sets and you can start solving problems and humans do this exceptionally well and so I think that the more we can narrow context as you said medical school or math path or parenting whatever it is more that we can narrow context even if in the moment but the more that we can be in a relaxed State and ideally a state of something of wanting not avoiding the more rule sets we can access and I think that's where Creative Solutions come from I mean I have to imagine that even though he's a brilliant engineer that Elon wasn't thinking about going to Mars because he hated Earth he's thinking about it because he loves the idea of going to Mars I'm not his psychologist but I think every major advancement in human evolution has largely been largely from a desire for something as opposed to an avoidance of something else hmm boy I'd have to think about that um yeah that's interesting right I mean um although let's think for example so so think of some of the amazing advances in um cryptography and nuclear physics in World War II I mean you could argue a lot of that was fear-based right yeah but I would yes I completely agree but I would argue that the people doing that work if you were to really sit them down and they just love that they were solving a problem they loved it right we think we got Feynman all around us here and he played a prominent role in my home and my my childhood um as well and I mean the love of what he did that came through sure he was working on the bomb right but he was also enjoying lock picking locks and laying out all the the secrets on the floor of the of the offices because he loved the playfulness of it right I mean it was love love love love love love um Delight I think maybe love is is too much of a loaded word because it sounds like oh I love Andrew's from Northern California like he's spent too much time at esslin uh whatever that's not actually my hangout place even though it's beautiful um that's not really what I'm about but I think Delight is what captures this like Fascination curiosity and thrill of something that we see or experience and want more of I think Delight is probably the better word for it and I think um yeah I'm sure you can get a lot done out of fear and the need to adapt uh you get a hell of a lot more done out of a genuine desire because you just want more of that thing so I would argue that cryptographers were like we're in Bliss now they didn't want to get blown up that's and they'd love to save people but there can be multiple multiple purposes behind doing something so let's kind of go back because I I feel like there's there's there's so much that that I know a little bit about you but I don't think I know the whole story so you grew up in NorCal or South okay yeah so I was born at Stanford Hospital the joke I have is I was born in Stanford I kind of hung around skateboarding on campus and in my youth then I uh I was trained at Stanford in part and then I've been faculty members say I'll probably die at Stanford but hopefully a long time from now so I was born I was born in Palo Alto my dad's from South America he's Argentine dark hair dark eyes speak Spanish um and English and he came to the U.S on a naval scholarship uh he was an experimental physicist at UPenn met my mother in New York they had my moved to California had my sister um who's three years older than I am and me uh in the mid early and mid 70s my dad took a job at Xerox Park early days of the personal computer the so-called graphical user interface and things like that um and my mother was a stay-at-home mom uh was a teacher and uh I was in Menlo Park it was in Palo Alto I lived right over the fence from Gunn High School g-u-n-n the high school that's um Infamous for having that a huge number of years unfortunately that's adjusted a lot of kids of Stanford professors it's not the Palo Alto High School on the other end of town so our end of town tended to be a bit more um uh middle and upper middle class and Polito at that time even had Midtown which there were some families that were definitely at or below the poverty line Believe It or Not nowadays it's you know Palo alto's all pretty upper class um Chad including East Palo Alto East palato still struggles yeah he's followed so still struggles great people there but really struggles um so growing up from birth until about age 12 or 13 it was soccer swim team um tons of kids on my street hanging out there were all these boys my age girl they had all had older sisters my sister's age pretty magical childhood and um and my dad I transitioned into theoretical physics and he was involved in the early days of Chaos Theory so we spent a lot of our youth in Aspen in the Summers not because we were part of the wealthy Aspen set but there's the Aspen Center for physics so I grew up running around hearing about you know Peter Kaus and um and Feynman and Mary Gilman those were regular characters in my life and met you know those folks and they were around a lot of stories about academics I was kind of exposed to the academic world um and then and and frankly it was a pretty cool childhood we did a sabbatical in Europe and it got real close with my sister because of the sabbatical I'm still really close with my sister um she's a therapist and an excellent one um not my therapist but an excellent therapist and um and it was pretty like normal childhood wasn't a great athlete wasn't a great student but I was always super curious about biology and animals like absolutely obsessed my mom used to drop me off at Monet's Pet Shop on California Avenue for those that don't live on California did you yeah it was directly across from Draper's music which is where the Grateful Dead got their start um and those guys used to hang out there because they were from Menlo Park The Edge there was a club The Edge you wouldn't find that in Palo Alto no um so it was a pretty healthy upbringing you know we didn't have any issues around like alcohol or drugs in our home was two parent home dinner together every night um but there were some things looming under the surface and and so everything took a hard turn when I was about 12 13 um my parents divorced and unfortunately they didn't read the rule book or if they did they broke every rule in the rule book um and it was a very high conflict situation um so my dad moved out um I lived with my mom my sister went off to college um and at the time I had gotten into skateboarding I wasn't so much playing soccer and doing other things and I felt really deeply into the community of skateboarding which at that time was really underground it wasn't like it is now I started skateboard is a unique sport because you have interactions with kids of a lot of different ages so you're hanging out with like 30 year old guys 20 year old guys kids your own age and a good friend of mine named Paul zawanich was really good at skateboarding and he started picking up sponsors and turned Pro while we were in high school and we started going up to San Francisco and hanging out and you were still in the peninsula yeah I was like 13 14 years old at the kind of famed what's called Embarcadero or EMB crowd it's you know early for skateboarding this is a huge deal it's kind of golden era of Street skateboarding and there I got exposed to a lot I got exposed to drugs alcohol fights um I got exposed to a lot of kids that just didn't go to school just didn't go um there were a bunch of you know a lot of untoward elements also a lot of amazing skateboarding just amazing got to see I can throw out names but the young Danny Way would come through town or Rob Dyrdek would come through town and you know these names will be familiar people maybe DC shoes those guys were involved in that so I got to see all this stuff I in full disclosure I wasn't a very good skateboarder I was okay but I kept getting hurt I didn't have the athleticism I hit puberty late I had a long arc on my puberty this is something I someday want to understand which is I I think there's a relationship between how long puberty lasts and Longevity I don't think it makes sense um anyway I mean I I hit puberty around 14 but I didn't acquire the um secondary sex characteristics I didn't like grow my musculature didn't come in my physicality didn't develop until pretty late didn't grow beard until College couldn't grow it was weird but you know I by the other marks of puberty let's just say I I hit puberty okay so I had all this upset about my home life it frankly was pretty bad my mom was struggling a lot my dad was trying to be in the picture but there was a lot of conflict between us in any case to make what happened was something about my behavior cued the school system probably the fact I wasn't going to school Much Anymore um I got taken away I got put into a residential treatment program up on the peninsula this was not for drug use alcohol use or hurting anyone or myself this was mainly for truancy and they were really concerned about me okay um did that did they require the permission of your parents to do that yeah so I you know I remember one day just getting called into the office and um they were talking to me asking me questions about my home life and and I you know pretty quickly caught on to the fact that something was going to happen and um I did every let's just say I did everything I could to resist getting taken away but they they took me away and put me under lock and key there and I remember at what grade uh I was in the ninth grade so I was in the ninth grade and um I was really angry really upset um uh yeah it's interesting I don't have a ton of emotion around it anymore but I I do feel like it was a terrible situation for me to be in because like there was my home life was so bad at that point um and your sister was already sister was gone I think the way to capture my home life at that point was there was just no one there there was no one there and what was there was really what was your mom doing uh was she working at this point to make uh she was she took a job um she was working um but to be honest and look I love my mom um and I love my dad but um they just were so focused on their own stuff like I think there was so much anger and resentment between them and I just basically was kind of running my own life I was doing whatever I wanted which is terrible for a 14 year old like boundaries are great rules are great and I had this community of young guys that was an amazing Community Learning from some of the older ones learning some not healthy behaviors learning some healthy behaviors too um but uh when I got put away um it felt to me super unfair but I met really the counselors there were amazing and I also was very lucky that drugs and alcohol were never really my thing so a lot of kids there were dealing with drug and alcohol issues I remember when I got there uh I remember when I got there they said listen um you know they're these younger kids here and um they're crazy they're like miswired and then there are adults over in that other building and they're crazy but you guys here you're not crazy and I remember thinking they have to be saying that to the oh you on the other buildings so there was this moment where I'm like is there something genuinely wrong with me like I didn't you know again I didn't do anything except I was not taking good care of myself and did you still leave the facility each day to go to school or with school within their locked up in a room my roommate turned out to be a really good guy he was a huge guy he looked like Richard Ramirez The Night Stalker and I was remembering like I can't sleep they're coming in doing bed checks like three times a night that you know they're frisking us they're doing cavity searches for did we bring in weapons did we bring in drugs you're doing group therapy with all these people some of them are talking about terrible molestation experiences which fortunately I didn't have you know um drug things and I'm just thinking like why am I here like I had no idea why I was there and I remember at the time I had picked up one skateboard sponsor which was spitfire wheels and Thunder Trucks they they put me on out of sympathy and the team manager I'm actually friends with him still his name is Steve Ruby he's not a pot smoker now but back then he was which will explain the voice I'll be using a moment but I remember you literally got one phone call so I wasn't going to call my parents so I called Steve and I was like hey Steve I'm uh I'm locked up here like I'm in the peninsula I'm in Belmont I don't know what to do he goes man he's like you're the most normal guy I know I can't help you and I thought I'm really stuck like I'm genuinely stuck like what am I gonna do and I remember thinking like I'm not I just didn't know where to go so what happened was I eventually worked the program they gave me someone there said listen just like play the game but eventually I realized I was like they're asking questions that I actually want the answers to like what's going on in my head why am I just letting my whole life go what's going on at home and it turns out that it was just a it's a very all summarize by saying what what I was dealing with I can now in retrospect it was a super traumatic daily traumatic environment if I was at home or it was um just like pure pure pure neglect right I mean just pure neglect I mean I prior to that year I had gone off to skate camp there was a skate camp in Visalia and all the other kids like went there with their bags and their parents or something and I just like went we just like hung out we were just getting cars and go there was we went to Reno for a week to skate in the Nationals I sucked but I went anyway and we were just there a bunch of kids we were just parentless kids so I was part of this huge group of parentless kids it's just gone high school they there's a spotlight on me whereas I think had I been in an inner city school or something you know you probably would have gone under the radar and it gave me great sensitivity to the fact that like you know growing up like I'm not gonna the word gets thrown around a lot I think these days in in the incorrect ways but it's like I was very lucky you could even call it privilege but very lucky to have that that there was a spotlight on me it was high signal to noise right this kid's really crazy I also was getting into a lot of fights so I was getting into street fights and that whole mess and um so I eventually got out and the agreement was I would switch high schools how long were you in this place you know I don't know is it uh a month or more which was plenty of time frankly um you know you're not controlling your food your sleep it's all on their plan a good kids were there we lost a couple kids couple kids killed themselves while we were there it was it was well there well there wow um I mean you could get stuff in wow you know there was all sorts of networks in there and it wasn't jail but it wasn't far off it sucked and um yeah I always tell I don't do a lot of Youth mentoring or anything but I always listen the moment that that lock goes down or you're in handcuffs it it's like your control over everything just goes away like it's just truly something to avoid so one of the agreements on getting out was I'd switch high schools and I'd start therapy they wanted me in a new high school now you went to a great High School yeah was the idea that they just needed to get you a new peer group um they weren't so concerned with my peer group they so that the idea was going to be that I'd live with my dad um and I was actually excited to do that at the time it was something I'd requested so I ended up um switching to Palo Alto High School so-called Pally High just across from Stanford campus and um and at the time I had a girlfriend that went there um you know uh who uh I met because I worked at the local skateboard shop Palo Alto toy and Sport world uh skateboard shop in the back and she came in there we we started um sport was still there when I was there yeah it just closed recently it was one of the oldest businesses in Palo Alto yeah I I worked in the skateboard shop in the back um and in the shoe department used to buy my goggles there yeah oh yeah yeah a lot of swim stuff yeah I have to say you know one thing that that I had kind of baked into me is I my enthusiasm for animals and I liked work I I always had summer jobs I had paper routes and I worked at the skate shop and all that kind of thing um but I moved to Palo Alto High School I was supposed to live with my dad and then um and this I have to be respectful of certain elements of privacy that but um for certain reasons um it was decided that I wouldn't live with my dad and at that point it was just like gasoline on fire I was like okay I can't live with my mom I can't go to the hospital by your determination or by theirs uh it was not my decision to not live with my dad so I was like oh my God so the now all of a sudden it's like gasoline on fire and of course I'm hitting puberty too so now meanwhile no attention to school no interest in biology anymore you know I'm just like skateboarding and like just being a punk right but also having a lot of fun and loving my friends and my girlfriend at the time was really sweet um and so I ended up going to Palo Alto High for about three weeks and then just stopped going as just you know so it was like everything was just getting worse worse worse now the thing that really saved me was uh this therapy thing so I was placed into therapy I had to go once or twice a week I don't recall but that therapist um who is trained in mostly psychoanalysis but in some other dimensions too um was like the first person that um that really like paid attention I was like oh [ __ ] you know and it's interesting because I do have the emotion I do have to choke back a little bit here because you know it it's my parents love me I love them but it's it's a crazy thing to have somebody say listen like like to give you the confidence like we're gonna figure this out there's something very powerful about that it wasn't like you know everything will be okay it was like we're gonna figure this out and that to me was like an amazing um dialogue to be in so it was like okay let's parse your situation but even more so let's just focus on what you want to do what you want to create what's important to you so I started working with this person um and I'm not shy to say I've continued to work with that person one to three times a week until now and so you know you think about sort of mentors and a very lucky 30 years later this is more than 30 years later yeah so more than three years later and I I confess at times um I had to request some budget help to do this when I was a graduate student it was really hard to do I eventually had insurance that helped um you know I now have I'm in a position to still do it but to just be able to understand my own thinking to be able to separate what was happening around me from what I wanted for myself and look I I had a number of um huge mistakes along the way it did not allow me to avoid um mistakes and you know uh you know I eventually what happened was I got a different girlfriend um I stopped skateboarding and it hurt really badly um and I started getting involved in Fitness there was a a football coach at our school and Bob Peterson were you now still come back and probably I got I went back to gun there was an agreement and it was interesting because I my hair used to be dyed black I like let my hair grow out natural I started wearing like not skateboard clothes I sort of kind of decided to just kind of be a little less outrageous um but I started Thai boxing which was great there was um I got involved in martial arts a little bit wasn't very good at it but it was okay started lifting weights my body reacted like crazy to that I wasn't on any hormone support it was just the youth thing I just kind of responded really well with that I started running I ran cross country getting really into running and lifting weights and I still wasn't very focused on school but I was doing a little bit better and the girlfriend at the time was a year older and she had a really good work ethic and um and I started you know I would run to her house on Sundays and wash her car I would um I just started doing a lot of physical labor and I figured I'd go into the fire fire service I was like I could do that um and I started taking fire science classes at Mission College loved the guys there it was like workout this is while you're still in high school I was still in high school and um and I will say that at that young age I made the mistake of I started dabbling in some drugs it was no hard drugs but psychedelics which I think psychedelics have their place in the therapeutic context when people are older but while the brain is still developing I don't think it's a good idea so I started doing that um you know my I you know I don't know how much to disclose or not out of respect for other people but you know I had a girlfriend early you know there was a pregnancy there was a number of things where you know my life still wasn't bolted down um and that was causing problems for me and um but she was very loving and was great and what happened was she went off to college she went to UC Santa Barbara and so my senior year I was going down to visit her she was already there and sleeping in the parking lot outside her dorm and hanging out with people there um and so she was like my family I basically mapped everything on to her and eventually what happened was I applied to Santa Barbara because I'll be damned if she was gonna be far away from from me and somehow I do not know how I got in I think I barely broke a thousand on the s.a.t but I don't remember studying and let's just say the night before I was not putting myself in the most focused uh Preparatory State somehow broke it you didn't you didn't do the optimized sleep nutrition exercise stress routine to take the test no and if I reveal what I did to take the test I think it might send the wrong message yeah anyway so I won't but um but you know I got into UC Santa Barbara and I went there to be with her and let's just say two quarters into it I had more fights than I did time in class and by the end of the year I was basically flunking out why do you think that was I think I was just had so much fire and so much anger I think it was just it's interesting I've never been angry at people like I wasn't angry at anyone in particular I just had so much like fire I mean I mean at the risk of stating the obvious I mean it sounds like you were very angry at your parents and you had good reason to be yeah I was very angry with them and and I assume your therapist came to a similar conclusion and helped you see that um what were you able to do to try to reconcile or come to peace with that anger at your parents throughout the three or four years in high school where you were presumably getting back enough on track to at least be in a position to apply to college yeah um and credit to my high school girlfriend because basically there was no organization in my life except the organization that I wanted her to see I was capable of and her parents must have loved you they hated me oh really they so they tolerated it's not like you were an adult her dad recorded our like this guy's a punk why are you with him you know he and he was right I mean he was completely right so these people know who they are he was completely right he recorded our conversations he was like this guy is a complete disaster she had a tough home life really tough home life and so I moved in in kind of a protective role too but um you know she was a hard worker and her dad was an extremely hard worker and so I had a lot to prove and I also was learning that you know especially with running and lifting weights and the stuff in the fire service this was a direct relationship between input and output whereas in skateboarding I always felt like it was like 10 units of input and I'd just get hurt I just wasn't a natural athlete for it um so you know there was some work done with my parents where you do these one-on-one things in the therapist office and I would express my anger or whatever it was but I don't actually remember being so Furious as much as just feeling like you people don't know what you're doing like you have no idea what you're doing it was clear like the way they're they just didn't get it I just thought and now you know um can we tell a funny story about uh this is every every time we have a meal I learned something about you that is so remarkable I can't believe it and I think my favorite of the week is you're at some skateboarding thing and like there's no one there to take you home and you you end up getting a ride home with Tony Hawk's Dad they fly you home yeah so this is wild or they bring you back home to San Diego I'm 14 years old I go to the Linda Vista Boys Club I compete in this skateboarding contest I do terribly and then everyone heads off in their cars and like off to their places or with their girlfriends or their parents and I'm just there you're just twiddling your thumbs right with this kid Billy Waldman who people on the skateboarding that um he was the people referred to him as the demon child and Frank Hawk who's Tony Hawk's dad who ran the national skateboard Association comes up to me is like where are you going I was like well I'm from Northern California I was gonna take the bus to Lancaster there's this guy that I know in Lancaster and he's like no no no no no he's like you're coming with me so he and his wife Nancy Hawk took me to their home Tony had moved out I slept in Tony's room that night it was like to say it was filled with trophies is an understatement there's no space for anything except the bed because there are so many trophies so like this is cool up in Tony Hawk's room we went to dinner and yeah but that's like that would be like me somehow winding my way into Ayrton senna's room after he's you know I mean it's it's ridiculous it's ridiculous yeah and then and so they eventually flew me home I think that Frank talked to my mom was like Hey listen you know this kid needs some some guard rails you know because skateboarding has a lot of truance and a lot of wildness but and always did it's part of its appeal to many you know no parents you don't need parents around a skateboard right you don't need your pre-workout drinking and Slurpee you know like you you know it was still like or or beer right I mean it was it's a beer and cigarettes I mean you know the 16 year old me or 15 year old me escape we're like a pack of cigarettes you know it's like a you know so that was me then I don't recommend that but um so what ended up happening was the next day he took me to Tony's house in Fallbrook got to meet Tony and Ray Underhill and a bunch of other guys and see the ramps and pump around on the ramps a little bit and then flew home and that was an amazing experience and then years later on Instagram I sent a direct message to Tony and said Hey listen I know you got a ton of messages but you know your dad really took me in and his mom had passed away recently and I said I'm really sorry my condolences I said and if you don't believe that my story is True how's this your parents used to drink black coffee after dinner and he wrote back and was like no way like nobody would know that right but I remember thinking it's 8 30 at night we just finished dinner and they ordered black coffee in the restaurant so that was pretty cool and and yeah a number of people you know swooped in and tried to help me along the way I mean I also had amazing experience of skateboarding it'd be a 14 year old kid at the Reno Nationals running around the casinos with your friends and seeing these amazing skateboarding and yeah you're also seeing like rampant amounts of drug use and rampant amounts of like odd types of let's just call it wasn't traditional dating and relationships for high school students and you're like this was the early mid 90s or early 90s and it felt it was fun to be free and wild but I felt like I was always the guy at the end because I wasn't very good at skateboarding and I wasn't I didn't have a home and I didn't have any structure I was the guy that didn't know where to go it was like I didn't know where to go and to this day even though I am at a scientific meeting and everyone clears out at the end I get totally depressed I'm like I feel like I've got nowhere to go I've owned homes I had a dog and there were times when I was like wow like it's you know like knock on the walls like there's really something here so yeah I was angry with my parents and I think I was also just kind of like flabbergasted like you know now you know I having spent time with kids and friends who have kids you know 14 is pretty young you know and I was involved in all sorts of things at 14 that like I would never subject a 14 year old ever like you want to preserve that in a sense of Youth as much as possible and same time I mean it forced me to grow up you know so I think the fighting and I think the the hard work and the fact that I thought about making a living really early on and all of that I'm feeling like I had to grow up quickly you know and uh so you're in your first semester at UCSB and you're getting into fights with townies with college kids people I was never somebody who provoked fights or initiated them but I was just somehow it was just finding me you know and and I was not a big drinker but that town there's a lot of alcohol intake so what happened was at that summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college there was um a house that everyone hung out at and I decided to stay there for the summer wouldn't go home what would I do at home my the girlfriend and I had split up we were kind of having our issues and um I was living in the town of Isla Vista with my pet ferret and I was squatting in a house I was like why would I pay like skateboarding you learn how to just kind of squat in places like so delivering Bagels For The Bagel Cafe and I we show up at a friend's house and um a bunch of guys were stealing some stuff from the house that was clear they were loading up their cars so got into this fight with a bunch of guys and the people I had shown up there with ALS scrambled they all just took off and so this fight started getting ratcheted up into weapons and like and and people hitting each other with skateboards and like so knives coming out and the whole thing police show up in the end I was let go um because we were quote unquote protecting our property um and actually I remember when the police officers congratulated me he was like good job or something I just remember feeling like this picture sucks like here I am I'm nine now I'm now 19 years old no future in skateboarding I barely went to class getting in fights I'd been thrown out of the dormitory for something stupid related to that um my girlfriend and I are split up I work at The Bagel Cafe like I was like this this is it and why at this point did you did you think about hey I still have this whole thing as being a firefighter potentially was that yeah I think at that point I was just like I don't really know what to do I I just I just remember walking back to the place where I was staying and just thinking like I'm a total screw like I'm officially a screw-up now I don't care where I was born I don't care what my parents did I am officially a screw-up like it doesn't matter nothing else mattered and I actually wrote a letter I still have the letter I wrote a letter it's a summer in 94. um to my mom saying all the things that I kind of felt about the past and what I'm gonna do going forward and at that point I really did make a hard left turn I moved home I took a leave of absence I didn't quit UC Santa Barbara took a leave of absence moved home went to Foothill College my sister was home from abroad after college we lived at our house our mom was there and this other girl we rented a room too um but I went to Foothill College and just was like listen the one I'd listen to myself I'd say the one thing I know how to do is memorize information so I just started focusing on coursework and working out and from that point on except for one course in college I was a straight A student the whole way through so what happened was after a quarter there and a summer I went back to Santa Barbara I lived in a studio apartment by myself I got back together with a girlfriend and how did you fund this did you just take out loans to do all this yeah so my my education was supported in part there was some money that from fortunately and here I was very blessed my dad obviously helped um not obviously but my dad helped that was great um I remember I didn't want to go back to Santa Barbara I want to go to Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington I want to be a journalist or do something related to writing he said no way I'm not going to pay for some like sorry to people when they're women he was like no way no no fluff education like liberal arts school you're gonna go back there where there's some Sciences you can do do something anyway that was that was my house and I went back and I just was a machine it was like Henry Rollins Style just like work out I listened to Rancid listen to Bob Dylan listen to classical music on Loop drink coffee worked out ran studied worked out ran say and my goal was to be the on the far end of the curve they used to publish the curve or every class outside and I just became a straight A student now the the twist in this is eventually I started working in a laboratory I took a class from a guy named Harry Carlisle who was teaching about mental health and Neuroscience and Physiology Brown fat he had worked a lot in brown fat thermogenesis I started working in his laboratory on Brown adipose tissue so I haven't um and dopamine antagonists and clozapine neuroleptics and effects on temperature I was obsessed with physiology and temperature meanwhile I was getting really interested in Fitness and supplementation and I tried to run cross-country for Santa Barbara but you had to run a sub 10 two mile that was way too fast wait a sub ten two mile oh two miles that's to walk on and there's no way I was these guys were built like whippets and at that point I was I'm six one I was at that point I was about 185 200 pounds I was no way I was going to do it um so I was really into fitness still and I was just you run two miles today I don't know but my fastest mile ever was in high school I ran a 457 first Mile in a three mile race and then bonked and had to walk off the race so basically I failed the race but that's what adrenaline it was pure adrenaline it wasn't training capacity so now I'm not that fast a runner I've run a couple miles on I do a two mile run once a week and I'd be happy with a with a 12 to 13 minute time I'd be very happy with that in fact um so you know I started getting really into working in Harry's lab and he was great my kind of guy he smoked cigarettes in the lab he lied him with the bunsenburger and smoking the fume Hood we drink coffee we were injecting rats with with with MDMA we were studying the temperature regulating effects of MDMA and we were studying amphetamines and I was learning so much neuroscience and I was like a kid in a candy shop I was like this is amazing now there wasn't any neuroscience at that time it was called neurochemistry or neurobiology um and I was taking psychology class classes also and they had the degree was called biopsychology now I was a little late to the train so I was taking biopsychology courses and psychology courses and then I met a guy named Ben Reese who is expert in visual system and visual system development and I started learning about all these retinal specializations then I learned there was a guy on campus named Gerald Jacobs who discovered the evolution of vision and color vision he's a member of the National Academy I started hanging out with all of these guys and so my crowd completely changed to a bunch of Neuroscience dorks who were to me the coolest guys in the world and in many ways still are I I think I've immense respect for Ben and for Gerald and all those guys and Harry and so it was just incredible and I thought wow and I'm learning about all this mental health stuff that I saw when I was locked up that I saw in my Friendship Circle in my family people who have anxiety there was schizophrenia it's neurotransmitters it's dopamine it's it's norepinephrine it's not just you know Freudian Theory Theory excuse me even though I respect Freudian Theory so I became a monster of school and then the girlfriend graduated and we decided to part ways and wait the same one same did you guys get back together we managed to make it about two more years and then um for better for worse you know now looking back and think like okay could have had worked out probably maybe maybe not it's one of those you don't know but I was on a mission basically to go to graduate school and so I don't want to break you know it would take us five hours to go through all this but at this point it was like no drinking no drugs once a month I would go out and really Tie One On With Friends that like really have a blast slash you know drinking too much not a good idea period but at the time that was still in my framework of what I could do but then I over time I was like I don't want to do this now you're still with some regularity talking on the phone to this therapist every week and um I I want to kind of go back to this pivotal moment but was it that fight that you had that got where the cops came was that really that sounds like a very orthogonal moment 100 because it was it was really like the the I'm gonna end up dead or in jail either because somebody kills me or I'm gonna you know I'm not proud of this but okay when I say like knives came out it didn't mean they were pulled on me like we were it was everyone was involved in this and I'm like listen I don't wanna I don't want to hurt anyone so sooner or later I was gonna end up killing somebody or getting killed or just you know I mean they're or in jail and I'd been locked up once before I mean that's an experience I do not want again and I realize this is terrible like I I'm not doing anything well so that was the moment and um and I had the benefit of uh at the time I was paying Mike menser the body the bodybuilder um I paid him a hundred dollars to coach me and give me a program and he kind of took a liking to me so we'd have phone calls every once in a while where he was having me read a bunch how did you connect with Mike menser I paid him I read about a thing he was like this high intensity training is way better than everything else I saw it in the magazines I stopped doing the high volume work I started doing two sets per muscle group each week and just grew like a weed and I was like this guy's on to something now granted anything probably would have had me grow like a weed at that point but that worked particularly well and then he was sending me books and ran books is Mike still alive no he's dead he and his brother both died of heart attacks they were I think they were pretty heavy amphetamine users um but I remember him telling me he's kind of the OG for that training format right yeah and Dorian Yates worked under him and I heard he was a pretty outrageous guy and he used to bark at me over the phone and he was like PhD stands for piled high and deep but then he'd say listen you seem really interested in ideas don't be a more he said this these are Mike's words not mine he said don't be a [ __ ] don't be a bodybuilder don't touch steroids right which I didn't I'd say even though they were around a lot in gyms at that point he's like you have a mind develop your mind and that had a huge impact on me him Bob Peters of a high school football coach who taught me about weight training and running um Gary Hall who's actually my lab operations manager was a guy that I grew up with skateboarding who told me early on when I was 14 he sat me down looked me in the eye he's a pretty tough love kind of guy and he's like look your parents are really messed up and so many of the people we know in skateboarding are super messed up and he's like if you mess up I'm gonna kick your ass and then in the end he moved away to Milpitas and I kind of just drifted off but I remember that thinking he said it's not your fault but if you screw up it's your fault and you know we we still laugh about that now so you know I think in those years I started just realizing like discipline is the answer I'm sounding very jocko-ish now but but it was it was the answer I needed structure and the structure had to be self-imposed so I got really into school and then by time I graduated um you know I graduated with honors I published a paper wasn't a magnificent paper but the data were solid um and I got into Berkeley and Princeton uh for graduate school and and I decided to go to UC Berkeley and I went to Berkeley and um I did I loved my time there but the person I wanted to work with is Carla Schatz who's now back at Stanford amazing developmental neurobiologist she developed the phrase fire together wire together brilliant neurobiologist I was hanging around her lab and she moved to Harvard so what I decided to do is move up to UC Davis where she suggested working with a younger faculty member there named Barbara Chapman who is my PhD advisor once I was in Barbara's lab I literally ended the relationship that I was in at that time I had met someone in Berkeley wonderful person but I ended that relationship so that I could just focus on school um and I literally lived in the laboratory I'd bring my groceries I train at the gym I'd sometimes uh shower in the monkey cage washer I was with the heat turned down and I was just a machine I was just work work work work we published a bunch of papers I was just blast rancid Bob Dylan classical music tin foil on the windows I was just obsessed now granted I wasn't paying much attention to my emotional and personal development but in terms of loving science and just focusing on science I mean I still like if I'm not choking up I'm like I literally feel my body like almost float I loved it so much and I adored Barbara I absolutely adore Barbara So then some things started happening along the way I met Ben Barris the first transgendered member of the National Academy I didn't I wasn't good you met as Ben or as Barbara Ben came to Davis to give a talk he came into my lab and we started talking so this is what you're like this is 2002. okay I was supposed to deliver him to a seminar or 2001 and we ended up being an hour late for his own seminar because he and I were just riffing on science I was like this guy is the best he's got this energy I've always been pretty tuned into people's um kind of enthusiasm and excitement I feel like I can spot [ __ ] pretty quick [ __ ] meaning I've never been drawn to people who are purely ambitious ambition to me is kind of like it's an algorithm that works sure but when somebody is in love with what they do I and that's why I love skateboarding it was like they he didn't survive longer in that Community it's a harsh Community you don't you don't survive long unless you love it and the same thing with science like I was in love with retinal biology and love with Developmental neurobiology and I saw Ben's love of glia I could care less about glia sorry folks they're interesting but he loved glia and so I think we resonated on this passion he happened to be transgendered I didn't even know he was transgendered but we were we became friends and then at some point I started going down to Palo Alto to teach his lab some techniques and um and he said at one point you should just do a postdoc in my lab so did you know you wanted to do a postdoc for sure I knew I wanted to do a postdoc I decided on I decided in undergraduate I want to run a lab I want to teach students I want to be a researcher and I I'm going to do it ethically and I'm going to do it honestly but I'm gonna do everything I can in my power to make sure that happens and I looked up to Harry Carlisle so much he drove a black truck Smoked Cigarettes again don't smoke it's bad I don't smoke anymore but he drank coffee I just I loved him his wife was a therapist she actually ran the therapy center at um The Psychology Center at UC Santa Barbara I was like I adore them it's just these are awesome I want to be that that's what I'm going to be you know and the fact that my dad was a professor kind of fell into that um now over the years we were I was still in touch with my parents I think they were proud of my shift yeah I still had a lot of issues to work out with them my mom less so my dad and I I would say we finally buried the hatchet in 2000 and I really think 2000 and seven I was a postdoc in that so what happened was I I graduated from um uh UC Davis took my PhD took a postdoc actually at Harvard but um I didn't want to work for the guy there was some personal album I'm going to just come clean I mean I didn't actually start but um I was just sitting in on lab meetings and I the personality traits of this individual to me were repulsive give me an example um it was one observation um it was the way he treated a janitor with a stutter and like I've never been in a great an aggressor I've never started a fight in my life but I think from a time I was in you know even my mom will say Nursery School I've been kind of a Advocate and protector of others and I can still feel my blood starts to boil if I think about that interaction it was a later after work interaction in the way that he communicated to somebody and I was like I don't think I can be here I don't think I can do this because if I'm like I think like there's no way I can be here like this is this is not going to work so I'm sure this is a good person at some level but I just remember thinking like oh no like what am I gonna do what am I gonna so you've literally moved to Boston committed to do a postdoc in this guy's lap I broke up with my girlfriend on the west coast I had a girlfriend at the end of graduate school I purposely didn't date in graduate school I I my conversation with people was listen I'm focused on work but I had a girlfriend at the end of graduate school who was who was great but broke up with her moved to the east coast because we weren't gonna you know continue into family making and that sort of thing and I'm there and I observed some things and I just realized I cannot wait this person a couple weeks into this thing I had not started yet I was supposed to start January one this was right this was November of 2005. so so you tell them I'm leaving 2004. um so I told him I was leaving would you tell him why uh well I couldn't be direct at that time I didn't have the skills to be direct about that I told him I wanted to leave and he said no he said you need to get therapy first I'm like well I got loads of that under my belt so that's not going to work and then they were I'll just say there were certain things in the interaction around my deciding to leave that made it reinforced your decision like I was like I was like this is not going to work so I'm so I called Ben Barris as I turned him down for a postdoc and I said I don't know what to do and did you turn Ben down because he was working on glial cells no simple reason he was in Palo Alto and you just needed to get I did not want to be where I grew up listen palette is a lovely Place Stanford's an amazing place but I had so much developmental history there yeah and I was like that is the last place on Earth I want to be but then Ben in his love of biology I remember I met with him right before the holidays and he just said come to my lab you can work on anything you want Ben was famous for working on glia but when Ben was a graduate student in David Corey's Lab at Harvard David Corey worked on hair cells hearing stuff and he allowed one person Ben to do something different and he said but you have to pay it forward someday so Ben was like I'm Gonna Pay It Forward three you can come to my lab you can work on anything you want and I said well I want to work on this stuff that is related to what I was going to do at Harvard but I don't want to compete with that lab they're a big monster lab and Ben was like no you have to work on that I was like God I don't want to work he's like you have to like Ben was a real fighter he was from Jersey and and he's just like you know my mom is from Jersey and I kind of have that in one side of my family it was like like fight you know so I decided to work there were three Labs so it would be me alone as a postdoc this guy at Harvard and a guy over in Basel botanarasca who's doing amazing work and we're all trying to figure out genetic markers for for retinal cells at the time that was a big deal and there was a big hunt for them and my feeling was there's plenty to go around there God knows how many retinal cells 40 ganglion cells which are the output cells of the retina that connect to the brain there's a bunch of there's so much territory why don't we all just work on this so let's just say um I ended up getting my slice and uh this guy at Harvard got his slice he had a lot more people so he got a bigger slice and boton's done that and so much more for visual repair he and Carl diceroth who we both know of course have um figured out ways to get blind people to see putting light sensitive options into the eye and Etc so you know I'm one post doc but it worked out well I mean my career worked out well as a PhD student and as a postdoc and then I eventually got a job at UC San Diego which is a great Neuroscience program before we leave that um give folks a bit of a sense of the difference between a PhD and a postdoc yeah so during your PhD you're working closely under the mentorship of one person that's also true in the postdoc during the PHD the the requirements are learn the basics of the field and be tested on them in the classroom learn the basics of experimentation and experimental design and then become expert in one specific area by doing experiments and then you get your PhD I always say by being expert in one very specific area and you have to know everything about what you did and why literally down to like what specific antibody you use yeah where it is in the refrigerator and you need to be able to do everything essentially that's on your papers learn the publication process learn how to write learn to take rejection learn to take challenge in the seminar format all of that and then and let's just also talk about um what is an expectation in a PhD as far as publication so this varies I mean I did very well as a PhD student we published you know four to six first author papers in great journals one to two would be sufficient if they're good quality papers and some projects go better than others I think the key requirement of the PHD is to become a true expert in one area and then to be able to frame how that fits into the context of the field as a whole your PhD thesis is given not for saying I did this I did this I did this which any technician could do it's given to you for saying I did this I did this I did this and the implications are blank the implications are blank and to extend that into the discoveries of past and other Laboratories once you can do that with some degree of Mastery you're ready to go and typically that correlates with having one first author manuscript in a good Journal but not always sometimes it's two sometimes it's four I did my PhD in four years which was pretty quick and half of that was in the classroom half of that was in the lab totally dedicated to the lab yeah typically you're taking courses only the first two years now also there's some waiting here based on peer group so for instance I started my PhD when I was 25 I ended it when I was 30 even though it took me about four years um I had no children I was dating but I wasn't in a committed relationship for most of it and I literally I know people talk about this I literally worked 12 to 16 hours a day and I was not in the best health I lived on Pete's black coffee diet Mountain Dew cucumbers ground beef oatmeal oranges and love of what I was doing I just was in in creatine I was an athletic greens like I always it's true I started taking athletic greens a long time ago oh no that was 2005 so 2012. that was as a postdoc it was when I started actually taking better care of myself um I wasn't an athletic greens plug but I always say it starting in 2012 so that was 2000 to 2004 and I was into vitamins and things like that but it was just caffeine Drive basic macular nutrients I worked out one day a week in the gym and I ran one day a week because I was that's it that's it and it wasn't good right it was really I was young so my body didn't fall apart but it wasn't good um and I prioritized everything around work so post your what was the title of your dissertation uh it was a neural activity and axon guidance Q dependent development of i-specific segregation and the lateral geniculate nucleus which is basically saying there are molecules and there are patterns of neural activity that govern brain wiring and um at the time I was working in ferrets and cats um so carnivore species there wasn't a lot of Gene and I wanted to move away from that I've always been an animal lover I had a pet ferret I didn't want to work on large animals I've done some non-human primate work the fetal primates fetal macaques published a lot there how big is an adult macaque they're still pretty small aren't they an adult macaque no an adult male macaque can be you know a couple feet tall really Oh They'll rip a limb off of you if you let them they didn't realize they were that big they carry herpes bee which can kill you it's a famous case in Atlanta of the one splashing its pee into a woman's eye she wasn't wearing the face shield she was dead like two weeks later yeah yeah you'd be better off having HIV or Aids for sure herpes be from a monkey I do not like working on macaques for a number of reason I don't any longer um postdoc you're you're not taking courses you're mainly focused on research and you're developing your own independent research program you're largely independent in itself and the purpose of the post-doc is I mean would you do a postdoc if you didn't want to have it your own lab how many people do a postdoc and choose to go into industry rather than choose to create and form their own Labs nowadays about 80 percent go into industry but now there are a lot more jobs for neuroscientists and Industry places like China Tech Etc but at the time there wasn't now I think anyone that goes into Academia and what defines the duration I mean at least in the PHD you're tied to a very clear outcome which is the thesis yeah when you know when you're ready to move on as a postdoc because you generally have one or two papers and a story to take into a seminar both the PHD and the postdoc wait the goal is to have a one-hour seminar of your own independent work and the context it fits into and you get hired can I could I have an honorary PhD in some facet of formula one where I can spend one hour sure talking yeah yeah absolutely I think you've earned more than one I mean I think that the postdoc was great I loved working for Ben um so so what happened was in 2005 I moved back to the Bay Area I'm like I'm not gonna live in Palo Alto I live in San Francisco and I was working in Ben's lab and loving it I mean I was in I was one of many people in that lab there were 30 people what year this is two thousand uh I started in 2005 and I finished in 2010. so that this means we overlapped in the Bay area again because you know I was there for med school 9701 and then I lived back there in 06 to 08 yeah um so just think that we would have passed each other on 280 or 101 yep and and not known yeah I love I love realizing people that I've become very close to we cohabitated and I worked in San Francisco of course you lived there and I worked there but yeah I was living at Clayton and Parnassus right near UCSF stuff that the old campus the hospital and my sister was in the neighborhood and it just adopted my niece and so I wanted to be there so I could spend time with her um because my sisters and we spent so much time up there because my wife ran the Coumadin Clinic at UCSF okay yeah we were I was a few blocks from the hate Ashbury Clinic very different Clinic yeah um but famous because of the Manson thing and if anyone hasn't read uh Charles Manson a chaos Charles Manson the CIA and the secret history of the 60s a lot of history there I was commuting down um 280 working in Ben's lab loving that I'm a huge vibrant lab meanings that would last four hours or more Ben was outrageous um how big was the lap 32 people um and with a run by a person with a face recognition issue so you can imagine like the the it was hilarious and yet the lab meanings were legendary people would argue and fight it was Ben could be very Politically Incorrect which was hilarious but at the time also was important for us to really have someone challenge Us in these very direct ways um we were all politically correct but he tended to be pretty outrageous I mean Benson's a pretty outrageous things and um and I learned so much from Ben about just staying in touch he called it the light but like or the flame like staying in touch with the love of biology and not getting pulled into ambition now Ben was incredibly ambitious but he he just loved biology and I loved biology and then something weird happened in 2000 and you know of course I had the distinction by just luck by the year I was in it which was 97 started Barbara Barris was our Neuroscience head of Neuroscience and the professor and ended the year as Ben wow so he she to he was transitioned during our um during our year amazing and I'm trying to think like even though that's more than 25 years ago it didn't seem that unusual like it and I say that in a way not to sound like oh wow like look at how enlightened the the medical student was no no I'm not saying that whatsoever it would it had much more to do with Ben I think you know does that make sense yeah Ben when when Ben moved to the Bay Area I know this because I so I ended up I saw all I can get to this in a minute but Ben ended up passing away in 2017 and I wrote Ben's obituary for nature and I sat with Ben for many hours recording conversations with him that I hope to someday release um talking about his history and the decision to transition and his thoughts on when and how best for people to transition what that means his relationship to sex the verb and sexuality Academia and it's a it's a great audio file because he tears loose on people in Academia because he's like he says at the beginning is this for my obituary and I said yes and he said well it better be for a good journal and I said it's for nature and he says okay and then in um you know this but forgive me for cussing but this is a direct quote and I said um and he said well given that it's my for my obituary I'm gonna say whatever the [ __ ] I want and he really does he lets people have it but he also really expresses a lot of heart for the things that he thinks are important in science and in life and I you know I'm sitting there like tears just running down my eyes like trying to get these recordings and I'm quaking and like it's and I realize what's happening he's gonna be dead soon right he had pancreatic cancer and you know as a non-clinician that was pretty intense we had reconnected um in 2012. he had read some of my blog stuff and reached out to me and became you know interested in certain things that I was doing and asked if I would check his Bloods and and stuff like that he was really into Data yeah I mean maybe it's worth saying this now I mean one thing that people don't realize about Ben is that he was always trying different diets he struggled with his weight a lot um because he transitioned he was taking testosterone but he had always struggled with his weight and he had tried keto he had tried um fasting he had tried um vegan diets he was always sampling with different things and he was always asking me about nutrition and supplementation and I would tell him something like hey because when I was in his lab I was I was working a lot and I I remember the fewer carbohydrates I eat the more I can stay awake it's just kind of how it works for me I do eat carbohydrates I'm a pure omnivore I love starches but I tend to eat oatmeal and rice and pasta clean quote-unquote starches but at the time he caught me drinking the the oil off the top of the almond butter and then slugging back to Espresso and he was like what are you doing like you're gonna die of a heart attack and I was like no you have to understand like certain lipids can be used as fuel if you're not taking enough carbohydrate and then he would scream that's ridiculous that violates all the rules of biology and then he can't that by the way was Ben's voice I'm not mocking him that's you can listen to a recording and then he would come back to me six months later and he's like I'm doing this low carb thing and I'm losing weight like crazy how come nobody knows about it and he was the one who told me he was he said forgive me my clinical colleagues and uh Peter you don't fall into this category he was like most doctors are so unhealthy he's like they don't know anything and he was an MD right Ben was an MD PhD and I remember him telling me I was like don't believe any Dogma don't believe any of it like Ben was this he had this heretical thing and so you're sensing a a kind of a theme Here I liked hanging out with like punks and skateboarders when I was younger not because they were wild but because they looked at things differently they really did I love stories like I loved the Steve Jobs book I mean I remember seeing Steve walking barefoot through the neighborhood when I was a postdoc when I would visit my folks in Palo Alto and my high school girlfriend that girl that I met the skateboard show she was his vegan Chef so and her sister worked for for Steve also so it's very like Palo Alto theme so he was obvious he was kind of a punk rocker and didn't even realize it you know my heroes are people like Joe Strummer all of her sacks people that really went against the grain of their field out of love not as an Fu right right and Ben just loved what he loved so much that when he started working on glia everyone thought glio was stupid it's like support cells why would you do that and he showed they're important for everything disease in particular but also normal brain functioning and development so Ben was the one who really encouraged me to like to stay in touch with that kind of feeling around doing things and to never let ambition pull you in a direction where you were divorced from that for too long and yet he was also an extremely hard worker but he understood that that's that's what Rick Rubin would call The Source like that's the ability to stay working long hours and not feel like you're depleting yourself so Ben and I got really close in those years and then that I was working for him but he was healthy then as far as we knew um and then during those years when I was working for Ben I wasn't making enough money to survive in the Bay Area I was really struggling what's a postdoc salary uh I had a Helen hay Whitney Fellowship which is a kind of a premier Fellowship from a private uh institution I only say that because they pay more and I was making 45 but rents were crazy and gas and food and everything else and um as a you know 45k living in the Bay Area was rough and I didn't have kids so I actually went back to Thrasher magazine I had a bunch of friends that worked at they're located in the only truly dangerous part of San Francisco Hunter's Point um and they gave me a job writing articles for Thrasher and slap magazine The Sibling magazine and so there are a bunch of Articles out there I was a I was writing under a different name but you were I was making money why under a different name I always use the name Andy instead I don't know because people in skateboarding knew me as Andrew okay okay um but same last name yeah okay so and I was writing articles on music and bands and going to hear bands play and then getting back to the lab at two or three in the morning sleeping in Ben's office and then working the day and that whole thing and making maybe an extra you know 500 to a thousand bucks a month but it was it was great I was getting to go to shows for free getting to know musicians falling back in with the skateboard set a bit all the ones that were healthy and now had families and jobs you know all the all the other stuff got pushed away you know all the dysfunction so I was in both worlds again and then eventually I got a job at UC uh San Diego I was picking between a job there in MIT and my previous experience in Boston I love Boston I love the academic Community there but I was like I'm a California kid I'm like a skateboarder and punk rocker at heart I had this one interaction with someone there before in the academic Community I thought you know back there everything's focused on lineage and how old you are and how long you've been around and in the Bay Area it's all about the young Tech and youth is really valued I if you're you could be 25 years old in the Bay Area and if you have a great idea people don't care what you're you know the east coast is different at least at the time it was it felt different so I went to UC San Diego and um my lab flourished there uh and then eventually you got to San Diego in 12. uh I was hired in uh I officially started 2011. okay and I left in 2015 mostly because I got hired back to Stanford when um Ben was still in the department now the the weird thread through all of this is that um when I was a graduate student where did you live in San Diego uh I lived in normal Heights um near kind of out towards El Cajon I went from making 40 to 45 000 a year as a postdoc I started my job just so people know I mean I'm not shy professors make about a hundred thousand hundred ten thousand as assistant starting a professor and I went from having essentially no responsibility I bought a little house that I could afford like this little house um I got a bulldog puppy and I got laboratory and I hired a technician that I knew from Davis and we just went ham we were just experiments experiments experiments I lived in the lab two or three days a week brushing my teeth in the sink my students were like what's wrong with this guy but we we you know we were very fortunate we published a bunch of papers in great journals we have more importantly we're having a lot of fun doing research I had all these microscopes I was like my name's on the door I can't believe this and I didn't care that my name was on the door actually I've always thought that Labs should name themselves after the work they do as opposed to the name um for a number of reasons I was having so much fun it was incredible um I met a woman there that I you know I was in a five-year relationship with somebody there that was really wonderful who also taught me a lot about kind of how to balance my professional life and my personal life you know despite that relationship not working out there was a lot of important elements of like teaching me like hey it's good to come home for dinner with me and the dogs every once in a while and taught me as some self-care got back into doing some boxing although I didn't try not to spar too often uh you're the fighter not me um and I loved my time there but some the the challenge along the way the challenge is persisted along the way um challenges of Youth and I think that as much work as getting the the Demons of your youth were still rearing yeah some of the emotional uh damage yeah I think that the um and that would show up in various forms but I think you know my dad and I finally put to rest our um challenges in 2007. um he had written me a letter uh that was expressing some concern and disappointment um in the ways we were relating but mostly concern um and I remember uh reading it and thinking this is when I was a postdoc at Ben's uh in Ben's lab and thinking like you know he's reaching out this is years after everything right um you know maybe it's time to take a look at this but I wasn't about to try and solve it in a conversation so I was like if you want to do some work together like let's go to therapy let's have a conversation in front of somebody who can really like tell me where I'm wrong also and we did a total of four sessions I think with a really excellent female therapist who um and I remember the question was who was going to pay for it and I told my dad I'm like I don't have much money but I'm gonna go in 50 50 with you on this one like and that was important to me so we did this and after four sessions we realized that um you know I think it was the first kind of like true like man-to-man conversation we we ever had and I realized that you know a lot of things that I would struggle with growing up he had struggled with too um meaning you know his life growing up as well yeah his relationship to his mother his relationship to himself um trying to balance a life in science and ambition which is tough I mean science is not um they're not throwing punches at your face they're not shooting at you but you're also not will winning millions of dollars at the end of a case or cashing out a big IPO and so the wins are really like Winds of the heart and wins of Discovery like not to sound sentimental but you know the you get a paper in science or nature I'm blessed to have you know more than a few of those and the first time you get it you're like [ __ ] will I ever do that again so you're a lot like a professional athlete but your world is Tiny and once you realize that your world is Tiny you have two choices you can either leave because it's too small or you can go back to your love of the world work but then you also have to live in the world and have a family in relationships and so in those conversations I think I realized I was like wow like you know I inherited some real gifts from my dad um curiosity love of Craft um he's certainly driven my dad's almost 80 now and he's still firing on eight cylinders he's excited about cars he's excited about science he's excited about movies he's excited like he's just got so much going there and um we we resonated like we finally hit that point and um that was good you know um again I think a few times this discussion I unexpectedly have to fight some emotion back but I think it's that you know when they say like forgiveness is um really the best thing I think it really is and um we're good we're super close and then in in that time in San Diego I went back into just full forward Center of mass ambition and it was really the only the girlfriend that kept me a little calibrate in my doc my bulldog and um and and something happened in those years so when I was a PhD student I published this paper uh second paper I published was published in science I was super proud I was excited you know science paper and I called Harry Carlisle in San Diego and told him I was like hey you know because he'd known my story and he kind of took me out of not doing much to gave me a lab to work in he saw me graduate with honors I went off to Berkeley so he was tracking my career because he had gone from UCSD UCSB to no he just said he stayed at UCSB he was just he would be my professor down there so he was like congratulations you know next time you come through you should have a pizza with me and Jane his wife and we can catch up I'm happy for you and then three days later he shot himself in the bathtub just killed himself and I was like whoa like that was like so I was down there two days later or three days later speaking at his funeral and I was like holy [ __ ] you know and I'd known a bunch of people that had died or gone to jail from the skateboarding world that was like the it was it was just crazy because this was the guy that had taught me about mental health issues and about depression and how it's all neurochemistry it turns out there had been a Jane and I would meet for the next couple of years I would go to their house and talk to her and um she recently passed away but she told me that they had had a son who had died in a motorcycle accident early on when he was in his teens and Harry never quite got over that but anyway you know he should have known better so I realized I was like wow you can have all the knowledge in the world about the underlying biology and it might not save you so that was kind of like a wake-up call and then what happened was when I was um in San Diego um I was very very close with Barbara Chapman my PhD advisor she had two kids while I was in the lab my niece was friends with them our families were kind of merged and she started falling out of communication with people and she ended up uh early onset breast cancer died when she was insane so now I'm speaking at her Memorial at the House of Flowers in San Francisco she's got two young girls her husband I know and I'm like geez like this is crazy like and that one was I have to be careful not I will cry if I talk which I prefer not to do if on camera if I can not just because it's distracting but the that was um horrible that was like losing my mother like it's just like and I was like what the [ __ ] she had the bracket 2 mutation and the bracha one mutation so highly susceptible to cancers so then I got through that but that certainly destabilized me um I reacted to that by just working twice as hard which was not a good formula I get to Stanford I get hired back to Stanford I go out which I'm sure a big part of what makes that great is you're you're now a colleague and a peer of Ben's again next door Laboratories next door I go out to dinner with Ben Barris Carla Schatz Krishna shenoy and I think and Karen Hirsch we're at um Il Fornaio Downtown Palo Alto my first week back I'm sitting across from Ben just like this and he looks at me and he says I think I'm having a heart attack now he's an MD so I I literally take him in my truck my Forerunner drive to Stanford Hospital and we spend the night talking and he's like don't tell anyone in my lab I don't want anyone to think I'm dying or something later that week he has a second heart attack he's throwing clots so he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and so from the moment I land at Stanford I'm watching my third advisor die and at that point I was like okay like Ben and I used to joke he's MD morbid sense of humor he's like and and he called me Andy Andy you're the common denominator so the joke is you don't want me to work for you right um but I you know and I'm and I had a conversation with Barbara before she died which was crazy right super powerful but you're just like you're saying I don't know uh I mean we're talking yesterday about hospice people who work hospice like saying goodbye to someone's tough you know hearing that somebody went suddenly is tough saying goodbye to somebody is tough for a whole other set of reasons um luckily her daughters are both doing really well one graduate from college the other one is a neuroscience student at McGill which is awesome makes me so happy Ben passing away was was kind of the final nail in the coffin for me I was like okay you know I need to actually like go all the way back and start doing some deep excavation because what was happening was I was starting to just like feel really shut off I hated doing my work I wasn't in I thought I might write a book meaning you were losing love first I was losing the touch with the with the source I was working but I had this big lab I wasn't feeling I was like ah and I started kind of foraging I started doing cagex at great white shark diving you know real smart right might as well box nine rounds with with you or with like a real fighter like with no headgear right like I started engaging in dangerous Behavior again um started running risks in life again and here I am I'm a 42 year old man with a tenure at Stanford in a lab and I'm publishing we publish a full article in nature in 2018 after Ben's death and I just remember feeling like pretty joyless and thinking like what the [ __ ] am I gonna do you know forgive my language but just like what am I gonna do like this I'm out of touch with all of it so a couple of things happened one was um was I became I went to Hoffman I did the Hoffman process which is a pure you know no uh no drugs no no psychedelics but uh kind of psychedelic-like state of self-actualization stuff um by the way when anytime I mention something like Hoffman I realized that these are like you know I think it's four or five thousand dollars for the week they have scholarship programs um I've given some money recently to their scholarship program I think um it was helpful for me but one of the things that really helped was I went off and did a week-long trauma immersion thing in 2017 um on the East Coast with a brilliant guy named Ryan Suave who does um trauma-based work um so I was still trying to work through some old stuff and it's hard to know right UMass a childhood experience UMass some adult experiences of major loss and yet your career is going like who knows what's what right um a number and listen I mentioned probably in this conversation three or four maybe more girlfriends like it wasn't like I was somebody who enjoyed skipping from a relationship to each one of those is a story of kind of like hope for a permanent future and then a cliff so I was dealing with that too and um and again I'm the common denominator right I mean I I'm not gonna take all the blame but there's a consistent variable there so what happened was in 2017 I went there and I met a guy named Pat dossett at Hoffman he was at my graduation and he um done 13 years in the SEAL Teams and um we became friends and uh through this was in 2018 2017 2017. and through um going down to La where he was living and starting to swim with him and hang out with him it was in the turn to 2019 he said what are you gonna do for the world in 2019. that was this kind of seed question and I was like I don't know what I would do is I would probably like post one minute Clips on Instagram about the retina or nerdy stuff that I think is really cool so he's like do it and I was like okay and he's like no shake on it you know like Seal Team kind of guy like okay so we shake on and I start doing that in 2019 and then 2020 the pandemic hits and I thought maybe I'd write a book and then I realized oh well my lab works on stress and I've got some tools for stress and improving sleep I'm not going to talk about vaccines because that just seems like a barbed wire topic people are losing jobs for that you can't win that conversation at the time it felt crazy and it was and I thought I'm not a virologist anyway but I'm just going to teach stuff by going on podcasts in 2020 started with one podcast we did 30 I did 30 podcasts that year I went on about 30 podcasts and went on Joe's podcast you know Rogan's podcast and Lexus podcast at the end of 2020 Lex was like you should start a podcast but don't make it just you talking so I took half of the advice and in 2021 I hired the guy that was going to PR me for my book stuff Rob Moore and we started the uberman Lab podcast in 2021. which is it January it seems so much longer ago I think because 2020 I was going on podcasts 2019 I was blabbing into Instagram and I'll tell you during those years I was so frightened it was like 2019 I just thought gosh I hope none of my colleagues see this but if they did everything I'm saying they know is true I just hope they don't see it because they're probably like why is he on Instagram I mean I might as well have been on Tick Tock probably the only reason I'm not on Tick Tock is that Stanford forbid us from being on Tick Tock early on they said it was a security risk which it was and is so that's why I'm not there if you see me on Tick Tock that's not me or it's me but someone poached the videos so 20 20 I was just really concerned for the world frankly I was like listen I know the guy who's the director of the National Institutes of mental health I don't see one sound bite sorry Josh but like I don't know you well enough to kind of poke at you but if it wasn't him no advice on get regular sunlight stay on a circadian rhythm learn some stress mitigation techniques it was like in the world's kind of falling apart due to stress and I'm thinking okay No One's Gonna step up I'm just gonna do this and I I wasn't selling a book I didn't have a podcast it was just giving information and then when the podcast started I remember thinking I really want to honor the incredible place that is Stanford I never want this to look like something that is um the same as being in a class at Stanford but I'd love it to incorporate some of the Brilliant Minds that are at Stanford so I just invited a bunch of my colleagues on Carl Yeah Carl was one of your first guys one of my first guests in on alemke and all these people and just showcasing put a spotlight on other people and um and then this last year is where the the funds really started for me because I could start to include people that are of some of my other long-standing interests like Andy Galpin um on Fitness or Lane Norton on nutrition and and things that relate to other interests of mine but still keeping it in a scientific frame so um and throughout this whole time I have this weird Journal um where I have I have um conversations with different people including you and Rick Rubin um are uh people who some other Brilliant Minds that we know and I take notes on those conversations and I also keep conversations I have with Barbara and with um mainly with Barbara and Ben although mainly Barbara and this isn't like writing to someone who's dead as if they're there but I try and take every major decision and and kind of stance around podcasts or stance around research or what to do with my lab and filter it through the what I consider important lessons that I've learned from them I still do therapy one to three times a week because if I didn't you know who knows what would happen um and uh and then I've and I've talked about this on previous podcasts I've I have done some exploration of the Psychedelic space although not a lot and always in the company of a physician um and two of those sessions for me it was MDMA um were immensely beneficial for allowing me to um have a conversation like this or to be a better you know uh to put my dog down with my own hands and know that I was doing the right thing I was super close to to just kind of register what's important and I have to say you know if this is just my life and my life art but if there are any lessons in it it's it's uh it's very clear that like staying in touch with the things that that give us energy as opposed to being ambitious for ambition's sake like really getting the order of that dialogue correct and putting love of craft first and letting ambition stem from that and also just friendship and amazing mentors I mean in the podcast space you know I remember thinking Tim Ferriss listen to his podcast early on and read his books Joe Rogan you Lex ritual Rhonda Rhonda yeah I was joking you know first man in was actually a woman it was Rhonda right like that array of people long before I knew any of you it was like these are the Ben barrises the uh the Richard axels the these names of of the podcast world like these are the these are the greats of my field and uh so I pay a lot of attention like what are they doing what are what what how can I do things well like them but different because in science like in podcasting there's no there are no rewards for for just imitation there really aren't the beauty of podcasting relative to science is that if you and I have the same guests on in one week it raises it in the algorithm whereas in science yes if two papers come out simultaneously in in a journal that lends strength to the argument that the the data and conclusions are true right because two discoveries independently but there is this notion of scooping right if you publish a result in a given Arena and then I'm six months late I can't get it into a good Journal podcasting it's the opposite you know if Joe has David Goggins on yesterday I think he did and then he comes on your podcast or my podcast it's just that Rising tide raises all boats and the algorithm is the tide and so in that way I feel like wow like I'm in a field I'm still run my lab but I'm in a field where like goodness grows goodness and sharing and and being generous just makes everybody succeed more and you learn from seeing how someone relates in other conversations so I don't know whatever uh deadening was was created by the the death of my advisors and from all the backstory and all that stuff in 2020 and especially in 2021 and it was that conversation with Lex but all the other stuff that led up to it it was just like Rocket Fuel it's like right now I truly say you if you gave me a hundred billion dollars to stop podcasting I wouldn't do it because to me I what I know for sure based on my experience is that at some point the lights are going to go out for me dead just like gone you know this as a physician people don't like to think this way it's gonna be lights out and sort of like what are you gonna have and what you have done and so I really feel like as much as I can touch into like the beauty and utility of biology and share that then I'm good um the rest is just noise we think about like kind of the sort of meteoric rise over the past two years for your amazing work what do you think you're gonna be doing in two years podcasting well given but with respect to a lab yeah so so we have a paper that's right on the 99.9 yard line that uh this morning with this one little thing they want us to tweak before it goes in this is a cell press hey bro I'm really proud of on the human on breathing patterns and anxiety so we're still publishing we have another paper that um we're fighting at another Journal right now is often the case you know my lab has got necessarily smaller because of podcasting but I have a close collaboration with uh David Spiegel our associate chair of Psychiatry and we are spinning up a number of programs at Stanford around Mind Body Research he works on clinical applications of hypnosis Nolan Williams with um with psychedelics I haven't talked too much about this publicly but we like all our podcasts are free we released them every Monday sometimes Wednesdays as well but we did launch this premium channel and the purpose of that premium channel was thanks to Andrew Wilkinson and Tiny Capital there's a matching of funds for people that subscribe to that this isn't a pitch but this is just the case what I'm trying to do is raise money to fund the best work and so I really think in two years I'll be podcasting I'll still be a professor at Stanford still teaching I teach next quarter in fact um you'll be teaching the same course that Ben taught me right and bio 206 which is neuroanatomy and also it's functional neuronatomy so all the system everything from addiction is an amazing course it's a fun course and and I'd love to take it again given that I literally probably remember two percent of it it's a shame I'm sure we can figure out a way for you to could I audit it sure I'm the course director so I say yes um we'd be we'd be honored to have you that'd be amazing um so seriously yes um I won't I'll give you the schedule starting soon um but I I would like to get more involved in science philanthropy and in particular to fund research on humans uh I will say I'm very frustrated with the lack of progress in translating animal models to human treatments I know it's necessary it takes time I love the worm work fly work Mouse work in particular there's also a place for primate work although it's the correct you know thresholds for that are higher given the animals they are but human work right now there's some excellent human work that really needs funding and one of the things I experienced firsthand was we were always well funded and still are but the frustration of wanting to do the coolest thing and having to take five years to ramp up to do it and meanwhile there's a lot of suffering there's also a lot to be gained from doing these studies right away Stanford obviously has great channels for raising funds for doing that kind of high ambition high output work but I think I'm in a unique position to be able to understand the life of the researcher and put simply the last thing a researcher needs to do is spend time writing all the justification what I'd like what we're doing is we're creating a system where someone can literally type out no more than half a page no more than half a page in 11 Point font give it to us and we give them money to do the work in the hopes that that will accelerate the process so raising funds for that through the podcast and more generally doing philanthropy is really important and I've always um hoped that at some point I could shape science policy a bit but the things that really need shaping make big differences in Discovery and curing disease in Laboratories is very simple and I wish it were a different word but it's money money is necessary but not sufficient to make progress more money gives you more opportunity to try things simply what it is there's never a case of too much money for doing research there's sometimes a dearth of excellent people but that's not a problem at Stanford in other places right even I mean of course Stanford's not the only great place many excellent places but the more money that can go into research the more progress that will be made period so I see myself podcasting and also being a really strong advocate for directing money into research and also we're losing a lot of graduate students and postdocs and potential graduate students in postdocs there's a big strike right now in the UC system because they're paid garbage and many of them have kids and they're we're going to lose entire generations of great discovery and so what I'm also trying to do is create endowments so that we can pay people a reasonable wage I mean I chuckle because it's just insane most of the people that are holding the power to make these decisions wouldn't live a day with that amount of money in their bank account because it would give them a a an autonomic shock to just know that they were not necessarily going to make it into the next week so I feel very strongly about give people resources that allow them to flourish this is very Ben bearish-ish give people resources that allow them to flourish that allow them to stay in touch with the source if you will and yeah I mean if I can raise up you know billion dollars for research in the next two years or five years not just through the podcast and I'm podcasting if I have to shut my lab I do but I think I'll have a greater impact on science and Discovery than if I'm there you know writing my next r01 which I just completed a revision anyway so that's the long answer so I had six pages of single space type none of the things that we were going to talk about um we talked about exactly let me see how many we talked about zero we talked about exactly zero of these so the implication of course is when are you coming back to Austin so that we can actually do the podcast uh well I've any time you'll have me all right so great we'll sit down again and this could be a part one yeah yeah um I want to end with a with sort of a philosophical question that that touches on a theme that you mentioned so we talked about how there's there's really um a sort of renegade skater spirit that exists in some of the great minds and you know we we keep throwing around our friend Rick as an example in the creative space but you know we talked briefly about Richard Feynman who we didn't even get into some of our our stories about Feynman um and so there's no question that you need people who are willing to question everything I mean it's uh it's no small miracle that the Apple campaign of think different was arguably one of the most successful ad campaigns of all time but we also have to reconcile that science requires a lot of fundamental knowledge to even give you the privilege to think differently let's not forget before you do the PHD you've done four years of undergraduate coursework which admittedly is mostly learning an existing body of knowledge correct you then spent two years doing a PhD where you're learning an existing body of knowledge in a much narrower area than your undergraduate but at a much deeper level you take a comprehensive exam that we didn't even talk about how challenging the comps are before you depending on the University especially before you even earn the right to now go sit in the lab to start to think different which by the way is essential if you go into the lab you can't by definition have a PhD thesis that's the same as somebody else's you're not going to get it it has to be unique work and to me I think what's very difficult about communicating science in the public is that line is difficult to explain and it's very easy in social media for example to just assume everybody's an expert like there's no real ability to distinguish between signal and noise right or assume that if somebody got something wrong that they're wrong about everything else they're saying which is certainly not the case so you know I was interviewed on a podcast recently and someone posed the question to me around this and you know I didn't have a great answer you know I think of like if I think of my purpose um in that sense of source I think of it as hopefully just getting people to think about things and hopefully providing them with enough substrate both in terms of the knowledge and the the mental models and the Frameworks and the ability to have some of the critical thinking um then you're they're they're being armed with a tool that will allow them to to look at the world and look at other claims and stuff but to be honest with you I have no idea if I'm able to do that like it strikes me as a very difficult thing to do so my question is not about anything that I'm doing it's more about how do you see your role in addressing I don't have a better word for it other than what's going to sound a little bit crass which is just a crisis of scientific literacy and a crisis of scientific literacy that has led to a crisis of confidence yeah well first I just want to say that not only are you getting people to think differently or think a bit more deeply or a lot more deeply you're also giving them very useful information and uh you're being humble and I I understand it's genuine but I do want to say that as a consumer of your information but also as somebody who pays a lot of attention to the landscape of the space the impact is real and it's significant and I've long been interested in the kind of the common themes between different movements and cultures and I watched it happen in skateboarding I knew well enough to know that I wasn't going to play a major role I probably could have run a company or been involved in that although with my social and professional skills back then I mean I've seen fist fights in the offices of some of these companies but some of them are are many worth many hundreds of millions of dollars now and they run like you know beautifully because it's a family feel so a lot of that kind of craziness of the past is kind of no longer around they have HR departments and things um but also the landscape of science I realize there are people that are in this just for ambition there are people that have real passion like Ben and ambitious and everything in between and likewise within the social social media sphere right you and health education you're seeing people that are just compelled to do it because they love it they are also ambitious you see people just pure ambition they're just you can tell they're just grabbing on every recent event as a way to get some views and likes and grow their channels their fate is obvious to me over time um I'm not being cynical but it's just you look at any other Endeavor like music or art or science for that matter you know where that's going to end it's just going to end they're going to flame out as we say I think that in thinking thinking about these different universes of or cultures the the human um the human aspect comes through and I think it at least gives me one answer to your question which is you know what are we trying to do here like what are we actually trying to do so for me as I have several things that are that are really like mantras is I want to communicate the the beauty and utility of biology I want to do that by being a teacher and to some extent a Storyteller but a story about biology and I want to be a giver I just want to give give now you raise an important point which is formal rigorous education often involves not doing anything creative but it is especially in biology I mean I think this is the difference right sort of interrupt you but in mathematics that's not necessarily the case like ramanujan didn't have the formal education it wasn't necessary he was able to derive the insights from Gauss to Newton to Euler all the way through and he in the dirt was literally coming up with the creative insights and and that is why mathematics and science are actually fundamentally very different things and especially in biology there's no discipline of Science in which this thing that we're talking about is more present than in biology the fact set is unbearably large it's unbearably large and unfortunately as Feynman pointed out the or as Feynman pointed out fortunately Feynman pointed out that unfortunately taxonomy gets you nowhere that's right attack just knowing the names of things something that I'm I you know humbly I'm very good at I can memorize the names of things um you know many orders of magnitude Beyond like yeah what is necessary or useful right I can tell you that we could have sat here and I could have told you the 20 or so different kinds of ganglion cells in the retina how they code visual space what they inform the brain likely or not and the only thing that would have mattered is for you to understand that some cells sense motion some cells sense uh contrasts some in code color information and that it's built up in kind of a hierarchy pyramid pyramidal model to give you something like face recognition that's all that matters it doesn't matter if the alpha cell the beta cell the Theta sell the schmatta cell doesn't matter the names don't matter and biology so much of it is is showing um some degree of ability in the taxonomy okay is it useless no because it sets up a common dialogue that's why taxonomy is useful allows different people in different labs to communicate but it doesn't teach you rule sets so if we go back to I don't want to get back into prefrontal cortex per se but let's think about the Stroop task if I give you letters and numbers in different colors and you have to do that you can't do the Stroop task if you can't speak the language that that's read or recognize that you know 7 plus 7 is 14 right 7 plus 7 equals 14 is just true that's not changing there's nothing creative about it but you can't come up with alternate rule sets if you don't have the basic substrates the basic building blocks so I look at an undergraduate degree or even a high school degree and an undergraduate degree as developing the raw materials from which to then start re-sampling those raw materials which is the PHD into hopefully what is truly novel but many phds are truly novel but not terribly impactful for their field most phds in fact and most postdocs it's like your attempt to do it again to show I can do it twice that's basically it then you get your own laboratory and there are some Labs that survive very well by just kind of turning a crank and doing the same thing over and over again the the fundamental discoveries come from people really taking risk so I think in the social media space there are a couple of different issues here one is do people need to have a formal rigorous education in something I would say yes but we need to put air quotes around formal you look at a guy like Rick Rubin I don't know what Rick's undergraduate education was in but I doubt it was in music producing um but his formal rigorous education is in the real world of producing music right but again I think if we limit this to science it gets more complicated so in that case I think I would hope that the young person out there or even older person out there who really wants to get good at science and scientific thinking put themselves through the heart filter that is a formal rigorous education in that thing that the beauty of looking at things through the lens of biology or through the lens of Science and experimentation is that really it is Essence your goal is to falsify your own what you think are best right and then this gets to the complete other end of the spectrum so that the listener doesn't assume for a moment we're just sitting here being elitist saying you shouldn't be the ones talking about science if you don't have a background I'm going to bring it right back to Ben's comment to you when he had his Epiphany which is the medical profession doesn't know that much well exactly and I think that you know I can't speak for Ben but I do remember most of what he said um to me anyway and it's very clear that scientific literacy in the general public does not require a formal education in science if you I think it was Max delbrook that said assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence I think about that all the time I believe that people are curious and that if you give them the raw materials to understand what you're about to tell them they can understand pretty much everything I know there's the whole Feynman quote of you know if you can't explain it to a six-year-old then you don't really understand it that's true I also think that you can take adults or younger people and educate them you give them a minimum of nomenclature and you emphasize that the nomenclature isn't really the point right we call it prefrontal cortex we could have called it green monkey tree doesn't matter it's in a rule set context appropriate setting machine in your brain and it's behind the forehead doesn't matter it's beyond the forehead but it helps you remember a prefrontal okay so what's important is the algorithm that it uses and I think that in biology we're always talking about processes and so one thing that I think is really important and can be communicated to the general public regardless of educational background is that most of the time when you're paying attention to science forget the nouns focus on the verbs right you want to understand how the brain wires up maybe a discussion that we can have next time or axon regeneration forget that it's an axon just kind of understand and axon is like a wire okay that helps you visualize it but I can put in your head the ideas of a number of different processes that are involved from going to from sperm meets egg to a baby and a brain why because it's a bunch of processes that when you understand one of them you can more easily understand the next and the next taxonomy doesn't do that if I tell you that brain area is called that it doesn't give you one shred of a hint of what a different brain area is called at all in fact it probably confuses you so in many ways teaching the verbs of biology is what I think is necessary and I've started even doing this in the in the public discourse that I'm involved in you know I've talked about the importance of getting morning sunlight why low solar angle sunlight actually has more yellow blue contrast and even though you don't perceive it through these cells you look at it through cloud cover you see that yellow blue contracts is what activates the cells in the retina it says it's morning and the sun's overhead no yellow blue contrast you can take a picture of it with your phone and see Sunset yellow blue and orange contrast activates these cells so what do you need people to understand you don't need to see the sunrise you need to see the sun rising the verb you don't need to see it cross the Horizon you see it when it's low in the sky if they hear that and they then remember oh yeah because that's when it's yellow and blue now it doesn't matter what the ganglion cells are called melanops and schmelanops and it doesn't matter what you've got them on is a verb and when you teach people the verb action of biology I believe they start to understand the real mechanism and the real utility and then the nouns kind of forgive my language they don't really no one gives a [ __ ] doesn't matter especially not to the general public that's mostly trying to just think about health information we saw this during the pandemic the problem with the vaccines were these cute little things of like okay here's the viral not cute but ominous little spiky thing and here's the spike protein in this and then they show these little movies and you know what people really wanted to know they wanted to know how do I know it's going to be safe and what kind of safety is it going to afford me in terms of my health like what are the probabilities and then even when you told them that a lot of people are still kind of standoffish about it and then there's this well actually I think you just hit on a very important point which um I would I would argue that someone asked me this question also recently knowing my love for mathematics um would the world be a better place if everybody knew calculus through freshman calculus in college and I said no but they would the world would be a much better place if people knew freshman statistics and probability yes through freshman College that's right that's what's missing that's right and the way to understand statistics statistics excuse me of course you have to understand the mode the medium Etc the mean the median and the mode but what's really important was is once you understand standard deviation you don't care if people know what one or two standard deviations from the mean is you want them to know what it represents in other words there's a verb in there well you also want to understand what probability means right a two percent chance that something is going to happen what does that mean because that thing is either going to happen or not going to happen there's a binary outcome let's just make it simple but how do you imagine that a priori how does expected value fit into to that and that I think gets to this point you raise which is you know it is important and I think that's why so much science got so much scientific communication got destroyed during the pandemic is you had the people who were in charge treating everybody like idiots so they didn't want to take the time to express explain probabilistic things you know is the vaccine safe yes it's safe on average is there any chance of adverse outcome of course there is there's an adverse there's an a chance of an adverse outcome when you take a Tylenol or a baby aspirin and we have to be able to sort of talk through that and I I guess that's that's the thing that just keeps me up at night is like why can't we introduce Nuance when it matters and not be fooled by noisy Nuance that doesn't matter which people like to interject as a way to at the worst hide their nefarious intentions and at the best missed the point right no I think that people were treated like idiots during the pandemic and they responded in it in a very angry way and when you treat people like idiots uh they act like idiots or they get angry um and or they think or it's like a teenager who realizes that their parents don't understand anything you know when people start seeing a lot of flip-flopping in messaging I think that when people understand or at least can visualize or experience the verb action of biology it they are forever changed if I give you 50 facts about the brain it doesn't change you but if I explain uh the process underlying even just five of your daily experiences or what it means when you get tired what that is how to ameliorate that um what it means when you get stressed and how to deal with that if I teach you the mechanisms that underlie those tools then the tools are forever embedded in you now one has to be very careful because I I always say the best case is where you can teach people something that it works the first time and every time like sunlight viewing you know in a two three days Everything's changed if you're doing that consistently at the right times or certain patterns of breathing for stress mitigation or Etc or exercise for that matter but you have to be very careful because if you give people something with the promise that it works the first time and every time and it doesn't yeah then trust you lose you lose trust so you have to build trust over time but and again I don't know the proper language for this but I think once people understand mechanisms it must be the same way that Physicians inside or psychologists start to see an interaction between two different people and it's like it's like uh those peanuts cartoons it's like chatter between the two of them but it's the Dynamics and they go aha the algorithm is this here's what's going on here here's how to fix it and I think we need a better understanding of algorithms right you're not going to teach somebody calculus by giving them showing them a problem set and a solution you're going to teach them how you arrive at solutions to any problem set using a particular algorithm more or less right I had the great greatest uh person who taught me some complex areas of calculus uh well anyway you know what I'm going to get into it's such a long story but but I agree with you completely that that when you when you one way I think about it in in calculus specifically is if you can come to understand things from first principles and never you know go into things where you have to memorize anything um the less you can rely on rote memory the better well it's been it's been great sitting down with you and talking about this stuff um we as I said you know we we we covered a lot of stuff and none of it is sort of what I had on my agenda but that's not unusual for a podcast I don't know how much you experience that all the time Yeah you sort of go into it with with some thoughts and and you you get onto a tangent and it's super interesting and and so I'm glad we got to to spend this time together and I look forward to sitting down and doing it again hopefully uh like I said it's just a great excuse to drag you back to Austin yeah I'd love to do it again and I want to say thank you for being a mentor before you even knew it um when as a model and podcaster of how to handle oneself professionally in public facing role and uh and for the information you share and uh and now more formally as a mentor because I call you all the time asking for advice in a number of different domains of life uh whether you like it or not and also uh for being a friend yeah thanks Andrew [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 911,365

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Id: OGe1bTccCyg

Length: 183min 33sec (11013 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2023