Tom: Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. You’re here because you believe as I do
that human potential is nearly limitless. You know that having potential is not the
same thing as actually doing something with it. Our goal with this show and company is to
introduce you to the people and ideas that are going to help you actually execute on
your dreams. All right. Today’s guest is a hacker turned neuroscientist. He is a fascinating blend of a wide variety
of disciplines and this diversity has led him to explore some promising albeit nontraditional
ways of investigating the brain, namely cracking open the skull and peering inside whilst the
person is still living. What he’s found is so interesting it makes
my eyes bleed and has made him a much sought-after speaker and leading thinker who is influencing
academia and business in equal measure. His education is a wondrous grab bag of joy
and includes a PhD in neuroscience from Caltech and both an MA and Philosophy and a BSC in
Physics from Tel Aviv University. He is a visiting faculty member at MIT’s
Media Lab and his work has been published in such prestigious scholarly journals as
Nature, the highest ranking journal in world, as well as widely-distributed publications
such as Scientific American Mind, Wired and New Scientist. He was named one of the 40 leading professors
under 40 and his ground-breaking work has brought him acclaim and attention from all
over the globe including Hollywood where he’s been tapped as a consultant and contributor
on such hit shows as Mr. Robot, my favorite, Limitless, Bull, Falling Water, and Ancient
Aliens. He’s also the Alfred P. Sloan professor
at the American Film Institute where he teaches a screenwriting course on science and film. He holds multiple patents and is a multi-time
national storytelling champion whose talks have garnered him millions of views. Please help me in welcoming the professor
of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg’s School of Management and the neuroscience
program at Northwestern University, the neurosurgeon who has actually walked into a bank and robbed
it, Dr. Moran Cerf. Moran: Thank you. Tom: Thank you so much for joining us. I think the only reasonable place to start
with you is to ask how does it feel to rob a bank? Moran: It feels remarkable. I think … I’m trying to go back to the
memory of doing it the first time. It’s something that you [crosstalk 00:02:40]
before and after your life is ... Tom: How many times have you robbed a bank? Moran: I robbed a bank the way you mean as
in went into one and stole the cash, four times and stole money virtually dozens of
times. Tom: The stealing money virtually was your
job. Moran: Right. Tom: Walk us through how you end up walking
into a bank and actually robbing it. Moran: There are a number of people right
now whose job is to actually break into banks and steal the money online. This is a job that’s called pen tester. You’re hired by the bank’s board to try
and find ways to online steal the money. This is common. There are some banks who would let you also
try to test the physical security which would mean to actually go there and see if the cameras
are pointing to the right place, if someone left a Post-It note with the password on the
computer, and also to actually go and say, "Hey, give me your money." It’s not that popular among hackers because
they’re really good at that normally, but every now and then, you’ll hear about a
group of hackers who’ll try that we were among those who went instead. Let’s see if we can rob the bank the way
westerners did it. Tom: How do you then end up becoming a neuroscientist? Your job was pretty sexy. It’s not like it was drooling boring. You were robbing banks and hacking computers. Moran: The story involved a lot of characters
who influenced it, but I would say that the one person who influenced me the most is Francis
Crick who is at the time maybe the most influential neuroscientist studying consciousness in San
Diego that I happen to meet when I was a hacker, so totally something doing else in my life,
and had an evening with him. In this evening, he learned about my career
and said that your job is to basically look at the black box, see what comes in, what
goes out, and learn how it works. This is what hackers do. He said, “Think about using that in something
that’s going to be much more valuable to the world which is looking at the brain.” The brain is this black box. Instead of trying to figure out the code,
try to see how people behave, understand what they do and learn how their brains work to
make it happen. This took me two years to actually apply the
advice but … Tom: [Inaudible 00:04:45] You’re talking
about Francis Crick from Crick and Watson, the people who discovered the double helix
of DNA which is pretty interesting. Honestly, tell us about researching. I didn’t realize how recently he was active. It felt a little more decent to me. You’ve called him your idol. What was it about him in particular that made
him your idol? Moran: First of all, he tackled interesting
questions, right, because a lot of scientist, they try to do the same thing many, many times
just to accumulate more knowledge on the same problem. He was not that kind of guy. He really tried to look at all the things
that I was told as a kid, the interesting things in science but you should not ever
study them until you have a Nobel Prize. Studying dreams, consciousness, whether there’s
aliens out there, free will, all the cool things that we think about when we were kids
but are told as we enter academia don’t ever touch this thing at least until you get
a Nobel Prize. He was looking into all of those things and
really diving into them, so I felt that this was what’s interesting. Tom: You actually made a list, right, when
you first started your … Was it your PhD? You made the list of like here are the important
questions I think I want to explore? Moran: Day one on my fridge, I had this Post-It
note with all the things that I wanted to do if I ever get a PhD. Among those things were the things I mentioned. Tom: All right. Let’s take them piece by piece. I’m really fascinated by Free Will certainly,
and I’m assuming that you followed Sam Harris in terms of his talk about free will and all
the stuff that he has done on that. What is it that draws you to Free Will? Why are you interested? Moran: I think that in a way, there’s an
application to free will, right. We live life thinking we make decisions all
the time and responsible for our decisions and also determined and defined by those. If I ask you what do you want to have for
lunch and I offer you five different things and you make a choice, then your choice is
somehow your identity. This is like what you care about. If I told you right now that I could predict
what you’re going to choose an hour before you made a choice, a day, 20 years before,
it takes away some of our identity in a way but also gives us meaning because it says,
okay, there’s actually a narrative that we carry with us throughout life. Now, the choice has become really something
that defines who we are, not just the moment of but as a person in the world. I always care about like free will, understanding
it, predicting it, and also using it to change things. If you think that, okay, [inaudible 00:07:06]
determine do I have any meaning to my life … I’m sorry. They are not determined, we do have control
over them and that’s what makes us human. Tom: You believe that we do have free will
or you believe that it’s totally different on how we’re thinking of them. We have to totally re-imagine it. Morgan: There’s like two kind of moments
that need to be addressed. One is whether we do actually have this moment
of spark that happens when the choice is totally arbitrary and we have like a choice. I do believe that we have that free will,
a toss of a coin where something gets determined. What’s interesting is the moment when we
become aware of the free will choice, as in I ask you … [inaudible 00:07:41] ask you
do you want the fish or the steak at this moment like you have two options. Now, you’re about to make a choice. What do you want? Tom: Steak for sure. Morgan: You had a second now where you had
to look at all the options, I gave you only two, and make a decision. Now, at some point if I ask you when did you
make the choice, you would say, "Well, maybe as soon as I finished the sentence." Maybe you would say a fraction of a second
afterwards. The question is, A, how far before did we
know the answer to that. Also, was there anything I could have said
differently that would have make you say the fish. Most importantly, what’s the gap between
the moment you would tell me that’s the moment that you chose and the moment that
you actually chose. Apparently, there is a gap and this gap is
what we call the illusion of free will. The moment where you say that’s the moment,
[inaudible 00:08:25], this is when it happened. I can look at your brain and say, “You know
what? Actually here, your dinner that you’re going
to choose.” Or even like if you want to take it one step
further, we can actually stimulate your brain and make you choose this thing. I would tell you and I’d say, "Who made
the choice?" You say, "I have to make the choice myself. This was my decision." I’d say, “Well, you know what, here’s
me zapping your brain performance making you say fish.” [crosstalk 00:08:43]
Tom: What are you [inaudible 00:08:44] with? Transcranial magnetic stimulation? Morgan: Yes. This is not to me but there are people who
… Tom: Yeah, so what would you do? Can you really do the steak-fish one? Morgan: The only demo that I saw was one person
basically having a little box and they have buttons and they have to choose whether they
want to press the left or the right. People sit there and they pressed left, right,
right, left, left, left for like 10 minutes. Then someone asked them what is your choice
which button to press at any point? They’d say of course and then you zoom out
and you see a person sitting with a PMS like this machine that looks at the brain. They’re basically playing like a [puppeteer
00:09:13]; left, right, right, left. Tom: Get the fuck out of here. That’s real? Morgan: That’s real. What’s interesting isn’t that you can
do that. This is not surprising. We know that we can actually zap your brain
and make you move your head. What’s surprising is that you would tell
me it was my choice like you would believe that it was your decision. You wouldn’t question the fact that what
you did was your decision. This to me was an interesting part that we
can have this way with our brain to always defend it. In other words, whatever I did I wanted to
do. If I do this thing, it was my choice. Now we know that it wasn’t necessarily your
choice. That things affected you, that things made
you do what you did, and you will always claim that it was your decision so we can actually
show you that you’re not really fully … Tom: How do people respond when you show them? Morgan: Funny. They mostly try to defend free will so they
try to argue with me. I showed them the video of me telling things. They say, no, no, no. We have this experiment that we bring them
to the lab and we just tell them things. We say, "Okay, what do you want to eat after
the experiment? Where do you want to sit, here or there?" We ask them to make decisions and we don’t
really tell them anything. Just say take decisions, like sit here or
there? Do you want this pen or that pen? Do you want the light on or off? Then we ask them after the experiments how
many choices did you made? The people who experienced us toying with
their free will think that they made hundreds of choices. They made about 14 but they really feel that,
okay, I had to make choices, I control everything, this was my decision, they cannot try to grasp
into the ideal free will and say, "I had a lot of decisions to my life and I made them." They become a little more religious. They become a little bit more ethical. A lot of things happen to you when you feel
that what’s in question is your identity. Tom: That is so interesting. I’ve heard a lot of these studies and I’ve
not heard where you’re literally playing conga drums and whether they did the right
and left. I’ve seen one where you know they’re about
to do it before they do and so you turn the buttons on essentially to buzz them and tell
them not to press which is hilarious, but I didn’t know about that one. It’s so interesting. Okay, so you’re a guy with deep background
in narrative. You teach a screenwriting course, for God’s
sake. Help me understand how you know that you can
manipulate the brain and yet you still believe in free will. It sounds like you believe in free will and
the way that it’s tied to your own self narrative. Moran: Here’s the idea. I feel that there’s a lot of things that
affect our decision. The temperature in the room, the height of
the chair, the weight of the book we’re holding; a lot of things. This is studied by a lot of people in many,
many ways that show time and again that you can actually change a person’s behavior. We can list those things so someone can take
them and now have list of things that they can apply if they want to have better interactions
with people, what temperature should the room be, what they should do. We know that. We know that thing. At the same time, we still live life as if
it’s our decisions entirely. We know that I can trick you by making the
price of the food 6.99 rather than 7 and you would think it’s 6, not 7, just like the
simplest one in the book. All of us know it and it still works. Take that to a larger scale, we know that
there’s hundreds of thousands of biases that affect our brain and even if I tell you
what they are, you would still work the same way. Free will is becoming interesting to me when
we learn all of those things and we say, "Okay. Then who am I?" Who’s in charge? Who’s the puppeteer in this example? The reality is that … what we learn is that
there are more than one puppeteer in our brain. There’s many, many. Every day, one other guy wakes up, and so
one day with this guy, one day with this guy, and they’re vying for dominance. They fight and they compete. They make a decision together, they vote,
and ultimately we protect the person who spoke last and we say this is who I am. To me, the most interesting is that we can
now actually all their characters. We can show them fighting. We can tell you that there’s more people
in your brain. In doing so, we can actually allow you to
really manifest different sides of yours so you know maybe that you’re making better
choices in the morning and I make that choices in the evening. You might know that you’re making better
decisions when you’re hungry and I am when I’m full; when you’re talking to friends,
when you’re alone. We can now profile your brain. Tom: If somebody is watching us right now
and they’re thinking, “Okay, wait. Do I make better decisions when I’m hungry
or full, night, day?” What are you looking for and what can they
look for at home? Morgan: I would say what we do with a lot
of people who are in senior positions in companies that want to actually make decisions better,
we have a protocol that’s a little bit tedious. It’s not easy to do it but I’ll tell you
what it is, and then you can think of ways to maybe try it yourself. We have them basically walk for a week with
a diary and make choices and just write them down. Tell us like I had this fish or the steak
for lunch and I chose this and this is how I’ve chosen. They also write whether they were happy or
not with the choice. Now, this is done the way they wouldn’t
normally but we also add one more thing. We put EEG cap on their head …
Tom: All day? Morgan: … for more than 24 hours. They walk with something that measures their
brain activity. There’s moments where they have to replace
the battery. There’s a little like gaps there. Altogether, we have them walk through life
with both living life the way they do and reflect on their choices but also have us
look at their brain. What we do at the end of the three days, one
week, as long as they would do that … It’s uncomfortable and embarrassing sometimes. We ask them to look at all the choices and
tell us which ones were good, which ones were bad. Then we look at their brains and we see what
words their brain looking like. What did it look like when they made choices
that they were happy with? We sometimes see that there are things in
their brain that are repeated so maybe they made choices more using this part of the brain. I’m only trying to simplify it by looking
at the part of the brain that are more emotional rather than rational. We see that they activate more part of the
brain that are buried deep inside that has to do with reflection rather than like thinking. We tell them, “Here’s what we learned
about you. You are better in this and that state.” That’s one thing. It’s not easy to apply because you still
have to have this thing on your head. Not everyone can do that. At least people in senior positions who feel
that [inaudible 00:015:02] critical come to us and say, “Okay, help me. I want to know who I am better.” Tom: Now, what about those study you did where
you’ve got the cyclist on the bike, they’re going hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, and you
watch for certain brain states where you know, “Okay, they’re going to quit.” Then you use that information overtime to
get them to delay quitting farther and farther. How does that work? Morgan: Behind that lies the idea that the
brain is kind of like a muscle, and specifically, there’s part of the brain that we really
care about. It’s the part that’s doing self control. If you think about it in simple way [inaudible
00:015:33] is that you start running. You go running. The first mile, your legs say let’s run,
and the brain controls them so let’s run, and there another part of the brain that says
no problem at all. After one mile, your legs say it’s a little
bit painful but the part of the other brain that controls them say keep going. After 10 miles, the legs say I want to quit,
and the other part say, no, keep going. It’s like there’s a battle there and at
some point you're going to break. Now when you’re going to break depends on
a lot of things, your muscles, but it also depends on this control coming from the front
of your brain that overrides your experience, your pain. If we can see this moment where you break,
the moment where you stop despite the fact that you can do a little more, we can come
back to you tomorrow and say, “Let’s do the same thing you did yesterday. Have you run? Only this time when you get to the moment
when we see that you’re about to break, we’re going to play a sound. We’re going to tell you that we can see
that you’re about to break and we ask you to just continue for one more minute at this
moment that is beyond what you did yesterday.” Tom: What, in that moment, how do you appeal
to them? Is it like, come on, mother fucker, like you
got this or … Moran: That’s basically it. There’s a question in sport for a while,
why is it that people do better when they play home game versus outside game? What is it about your mom being in the audience
that makes you win the game? In theory, they doesn’t matter like throwing
the basketball should be the same. Somehow, we know that if your friends are
there, if you’re feeling better, we know that people do better when they’re, "Oh. They're kind of winning." There’s a lot of things that affect our
brain. What we try to understand right now is where
is it in their brain. What is this part of the brain that gets better
when your emotions are highlighted or heightened? Now we're seeing it. Tom: This is life like what you’re talking
about right now. Boys and girls at home, I’m telling you
there’s a banality to being an entrepreneur. There is a willingness to suffer to being
an entrepreneur, to being a great mom. Whatever it is that you’re trying to do,
suffering is involved. It literally like being able to extend your
breakpoint is what it’s about. When I read-
Moran: What I’m going to say is that we all face those moments when the alarm buzzes
at 6 a.m. We set the alarm at 10 p.m. and suddenly in
the morning we’re different people like we’re not the person who wants to wake up
anymore. It’s the same brain that sets the alarm
at 10 p.m. but now suddenly it’s 6 a.m. We’re not the same guy. This is the moment like that. We have to make a choice when we’re going
running, when we’re about to eat a cake. There’s like a tasty cake and we’re on
a diet. We say, oh, I shouldn’t eat the cake but
there’s a conflict. Now is the moment where those two parts of
the brain come to life. The more you know about yourself, the more
you’re aware of those situations, the better you can do in controlling them. The more you know about yourself, you can
do better in all of those tasks. That’s the ultimate thing. That’s why we’re here. We're giving you the knowledge. Once you know it, it doesn’t work anymore. Once you know that 6.99 isn’t 7, it’s
harder for it to work. Just knowing is enough for people to do better. Know that it’s in your capacity to change. That’s what we want. Tom: Like how does somebody become more self-aware? How do they begin to identify those things
that are particular to them so that they can extend their breaking point or so that they
can disprove whatever? Moran: All they need to do is they need to
communicate science in tangible way so people would know all the option. I said there’s hundreds and thousands of
options but there’re actually a couple of hundreds of biases that, we, humans have. I can give you examples in a second. Once you know them, they don’t work anymore. The job of scientist is to just translate
the knowledge of the brain into words that it can be then spoken to an audience who then
lives by then, and that’s it. All they need to do is just do this. Speak to people and list their biases. Then it doesn’t work anymore. At least when it happens you become a little
bit better in controlling that. That’s all we need. It’s pretty simple. Once you know it, it doesn’t work. Tom: Let’s use an example from your life. I love this story, by the way. You’re about to be published in Nature. It’s your first big break in science, and
this is really going to set up your career. Then someone wakes you up from a nap and you
basically say, “Yeah, recording dreams is possible.” You can’t take it back. You’re like “Wait, wait, that’s not
what I meant.” It goes crazy. The part that I love is Christopher Nolan
calls you up and says, “Hey, I just did this movie, Inception. You’re now the dream recording guy. I want you to come with me and do a worldwide
tour,” which would be a huge break for you and just be … I’m sure money and certainly
notoriety and you had to think about it. Even though you knew going means essentially
reinforcing this opinion that I actually don’t agree with, but turning it down means that
I had passed up that opportunity. What did you go through in the 24 hours before
you gave the answer? Moran: To give you the full story, I’m finishing
my PhD. I haven’t decided what I’d do next. Am I continuing in science? Do I go like back to being a hacker? This is like a moment of [inaudible 00:20:21]
in my life and suddenly there comes this moment where the end of my five-year PhD is getting
a lot of attention but all wrong; my career hindrance of this thing. Then I have suddenly an option to actually
own this thing and become this dream expert even though it’s based on a lie. I was fortunate enough to have enough checks
and balances that I didn’t really have to go far with that so here’s the interesting
reflection that I have right now. I knew it was impossible to look at people’s
dreams and [inaudible 00:20:52] I said it in sleepy state and created this like amazing
story for people that scientists are now recording dreams. The mistake was to leave this. To say it’s not possible, I’m not going
to own this thing even though the world cares about it. If anything can be learned from this thing
is that the world really wanted to have people record dreams because that’s why it’s
such a big thing because people care about it. Dreams are interesting. I went and I said it's impossible and I want
to kill the story. This was a mistake. Three years later, I’m sitting at home,
now 2013, and I got a call from BBC again. BBC were the first ones to let the story go
away. They called me again and they say, “Professor
Cerf, we wanted you to comment on dream recording and the possibility of doing that.” I said, “Guys, are you kidding me? I’m done with that. This is not too ... Like let’s not even
begin going there.” They said, “No, no. We know that you’re going to do that. We want you to comment on the work of Professor
Kamitani from Japan who is doing it right now.” Someone in Japan didn’t know that it was
impossible. He just didn’t hear me going anywhere public
and saying it’s impossible so he just did it. Three years after I said it was impossible,
someone did it, and two years after that, I joined. Now half the thing I do in life is actually
looking at people’s dreams. The mistake I made, it wasn’t just saying
something is possible when it was not. It was to say that something was impossible
before I knew it because I think that science is all about going to those dark places and
trying to find what’s impossible. My mistake was to say it was impossible before
I was sure about it. I should have said we don’t know yet, we
didn’t do it yet, but we should investigate. I was quick to say “I didn’t do it, it’s
impossible,” so I delayed things by three years. Five years after, I’m doing it right now. Tom: Dude, can I shake your hand? I fucking love that so much like most people
cannot look at something like that and say the mistake that I made was actually in the
opposite direction and I should’ve been bolder. I should’ve made a wiser proclamation. Then to actually join the team, that’s so
cool. Moran: Dreams is something that I was told
not to study. Now that’s what I do in my life every day. Now I’m never saying something is possible
before I’m certain that it’s impossible. Tom: I love that. I love it even more if you would go so far
as to say nothing is truly impossible. Then you’d really have me. Moran: I’ll go with you. You mentioned that I teach screenwriting and
I work with TV. The reason I do that is because I feel that
the best ideas for my research come from those hours with the kids who write plays, with
the fellows at the American Film Institute who writes science fiction, from movies that
inspired me like The Matrix. You mentioned that like this has inspired
us. We are kids of 1999. What happened then affected us. Star Trek affected my dad’s generation. The best paper that I had ever written has
a thousand of citation. The episode of Limitless that I worked on
last week and came out has five million people watching it. Those are the kids who are going to be me
in 20 years. If they think, oh, this is maybe possible,
they’re going to do that. You’re asking me how to change their behavior. This is how. To know what the possibilities are. Tom: I love that so much. Here’s the people watching the show, they
know my story very, very well, and I now run it into the ground because it’s so important. I am not an example of what happens when innate
talent meets hard work. I’m an example of what happens with a human
being anytime hard work is applied because I didn’t show early signs of promise. I got a 990 on my SATs. I was taking it twice. I don’t qualify for men’s or anything
like that. I have an average IQ. It’s like none of my raw materials are very
impressive but I work hard. I work hard over a very long period of time. In doing so, I’ve completely transformed
my life and I’ve transformed my mind to the point where now people just assume I’m
smart. The same people, right, that were looking
at me 20 years ago did not assume I was smart but they do now. The reason this conversation is so important
to be having with a neuroscientist is it all comes down to me to the narrative that you
tell yourself, when I was undereducated and lost and bordering on depress and all of that,
it was because the narrative that I told myself was that I was a victim of something. Once I gave up the victim mentality and I
realized I can do anything that I set my mind to, so now it’s a spiritual question, right? If you really believe you can do anything
you set your mind to, then how you spend your time is a spiritual question. Once I said, “Okay, what I’m going to
spend my time on is self-improvement. I’m going to see how much can I manipulate
my own brain.” I began researching the brain to understand
what’s malleable and what’s not; learning about myelin. If you don’t even know what myelin is to
like think that you’ve already maxed yourself out is fucking crazy. Researching the brain, finding out the anatomical
mechanisms that are at play, and the coming to, okay, this comes down to self-narrative. If I’m telling myself dreams can be recorded,
then they really can’t because I will stop shy of that. When you’re talking about never saying that
something is impossible when you’re not really sure, what I start thinking is thinking
big like thinking really big and watching The Matrix and saying, "Okay, either that
level of VR is actually possible or stopping bullets is actually possible," like whatever
the thing is that you take away from it. Time travel was one of the things on your
list. The promise I make to people watching the
show is from watching the show, you will accomplish more than you would have if you didn’t watch
the show. One of the key reasons for that is you’ll
finally understand that if you fail to think big, that’s on you. The only reason you’re not thinking big
is because you’re scared, because there’s nothing in the machinations of the brain,
there’s nothing in what has come before you in science, nothing that would lead you
to believe the thing you currently think is impossible actually is. Moran: Let me say this in neuroscience words. I love it so here’s how I’m going to say
it. Your brain goes with you and it carries all
of the history in the form of memories. All of you have from what happened before
you is stored in the form of memories and they’re not accurate and they’re compressed. That’s only about the past. You have no idea in the future even though
your brain tries to predict it all the time. This is what dreams are for. This is what decisions are for. You try to simulate the future and make predictions. You don’t know what’s going on. All you have is this sliver of reality which
is the present which is all you have, and you control everything that happens there. The nice thing about the present is that actually
it interacts with everything in your brain and you can change things. What we learned in the last five years is
that memories are different in how they work. If I have to summarize it to one sentence,
they change every time you use them. If you have a memory stored here or what you
had for lunch yesterday and I ask you what did you had for lunch, you basically open
them. Right now you tell me a story, but whatever
happens right now goes into the story and you say it differently. If I ask you tomorrow what you had for lunch,
you’ll open the modified version. Every time I ask you the same question, you
open a different version which means you can actually change the past. You can actually change your experience of
things. This is why therapy works. Your girlfriend breaks up with you, you go
to a therapist, she asks you what happened. You tell the story, she intervenes, you say
it differently. A week after, what happened, you tell a different
story. After five meetings, you have a different
version of the reality. That is powerful because it means that we
control the narrative that we have. We don’t really have to be confounded to
the story that we experienced. We can actually change it. That’s what the brain is for, to simulate
and change and adjust and synthesize better version of life. We can make ourselves happy. We can make bad things look better. We can control things and it’s all by virtue
of just telling a story, looking it differently, and saving it again. It’s as simple as that. We have the ability to actually change a story
all the time. Learning is one way to do that. Thinking and reflecting about ourselves is
another way to do that. Having more experiences allows us to do that. We know all of these now. Suddenly, there’s essence to this self-help
book that we read when we were kids and we know how to implement that. I become a preacher but …
Tom: No, but I love it, I love it, and I hope people are listening to your sermon because
like that is the most important thing anybody struggling to have success should know is
the narrative that you tell yourself about yourself is the most important thing you have. If you tell yourself a story of struggle,
inadequacy, not being good enough, failure, like all of that, then that’s going to reinforce
because that literally becomes your identity. Going back to what you’re saying at the
very beginning, you’ve got people and they’re justifying why they made some choice, right. When you said do you want the fish or the
steak, dude, inside I was like my narrative as a human being is I’m the guy who chooses
the steak, right. I know that isn’t even difficult. It would’ve been easier if you said steak
or cake because I’m really the guy that chooses steak over cake. It’s like that’s pure narrative. That’s what I want to tell myself. The big breakthrough in my life, the big breakthrough
on a map of my timeline if you were going to put a demarcation point, it is the day
I stopped thinking of myself as smart because I wasn’t, and I started thinking of myself
as a learner. That changed everything because now the narrative
that I was reinforcing, the memories I was pulling out changing just a little bit and
then putting back all revolved around reimagining myself as somebody who learns faster than
other people, is willing to learn, will put in the time and the effort to learn. It became this identity which was anti-fragile,
right, because now you could tell me I was stupid and it didn’t matter. It didn’t hurt me. It just compelled me to learn more. The reason I shook your hand earlier is I
really am moved when you say I was wrong about that. I should’ve done this. Any time people can say that, can just own
a mistake and see a better solution, that’s somebody who’s polishing a self-image in
a way that’s anti-fragile that the more they look at that failure, the harder they
go in an even better direction. It’s really incredible. All right. I want to ask you all the questions that I
get asked to which I have no answer and I’m hoping … because I get asked these questions
a lot. All right. Number one, how can I get more motivation? It’s the one thing because I’ve never
lacked motivation. I don’t know how to help people. Moran: Tough. Here’s how I would think about it. Motivation is a word, right. It’s a label that we put, set of events
in our brain. What you actually want is the outcome of that. You want to do things when it’s held. I think there a few things that we know work. One is evidence of past successes. If I say to you and go back to your memories
and I reframe them as successes, suddenly the current event that’s the same is a success. I think one thing is having success stories
and identification [inaudible 00:32:02]. There’s a lot of people out there. There was a person that is like you that had
similar experience and chose the thing that you want to choose. Find this person or this people and it’s
going to rub into you. I get asked by my students often how do I
become funnier, how do I become smarter like by [inaudible 00:32:21]. What I give them all the time is surround
yourself with people that you want to be like. You want to be funny? Just sleep next to comedians. Just go within the same room they are and
just sit with them. Its’ going to rub onto you by osmosis because
it’s the environment that surrounds us that really changes everything. Other people said that before but I’ll tell
you what the neuroscience behind it. We know now that brains interact with each
other through language in a way that synchronizes the brains. When I talk to you right now, if you’re
engaged with what I say, it means that if we scan our brain right now, our brains are
going to look alike, more than yours and someone on the street that isn't here. Two people in the same room, as soon as they
interact, their brains literally start to, if you want, pulsing in the same way. Part of their brain light up in the same way,
parts shut down. This is how we affect each other. This is how communication made humans who
they are. This is the one thing that makes us better
than all the other animals because we are able to communicate using language, affect
each other’s brain and create narrative that only exist together. We both believe in things that we’ve never
seen before like God or ideas that’s like democracy or money, like those things we invented,
we can communicate them and create this image in people’s brains, and they all share this
thing. In the same way, if you surround yourself
by people that you want to be like, you hear them communicate, they change your brain,
and it’s going to rub onto you. You’re going to actually become funnier
if you sit and listen to funny people next to you. You’ll actually become more motivated if
you’re next to people that are motivated. The next version of that, if you cannot find
them, if you're sitting right now in the rural part of Alaska and you can’t just find yourself
in Los Angeles with the people you want to be with, is to actually just look at them
on videos, on books. That’s the way our brain basically gets
content and change. Changing brains happens in many, many ways
but the easiest one that anyone can try is to say what kind of world I want to be in
and bring this world to you in the form of movies, stories, TV shows, all people. That’s the ways to get things that you want
next to you. Tom: Do you think when you’re doing that
that you’re getting into a repetitive brain-firing pattern that ultimately wires? Moran: You actually change your brain. We didn’t mention that the science behind
it match like in terms of what we do. We put electrodes in people’s brains and
we look at their brains while things happen to them. We actually see it in action. We see how the brain changes when people communicate. We see how the brain looks. When you watch a movie, we see how your brain
aligns with the movie. When you tell someone else the story about
the movie, their brain aligns with your brain but aligns also with the brain of the director
of the movie. Communication is this mechanism by which information
flows between brains and changes the brain. Actually, if you want to take it one step
above, this is also how we change ourselves because we [inaudible 00:35:06] all the time. You drive your car or you walk to work and
you’re just alone with yourself and you communicate, you also change your brain. You solidify the things that you want to be
more like and you suppress the ones you don’t want. We always talk. Those voices, those are basically the other
characters in our brain that talk to each other. You can choose which ones to give more weight
to so this is how you become the better person you want to be. We actually now play with things that change
behavior during the night when you’re sleeping in the following way. [crosstalk 00:35:37]
This is another new thing from the last 10 years in neuroscience that was finally discovered
which is you can learn change and transfer overnight. If you look at the night if you go to sleep
for eight-hour sleep, it’s not a uniformed experience. It’s not really just to fall asleep and
you spend eight hours in the same state. You actually have phases. We call them stages and cycles. There have different things that’s happening
in them and one of them is the stage where you’re dreaming. That’s when our brain basically simulate
future options and shows us a movie of things that could happen and allow us to live through
them, thinking the realities, the ultimate VR. We actually live life thinking that we’re
there, thinking how it would be to live with her in Alaska or to quit the job and move
to Vancouver. Really that experience filled it to our emotions
and then wake up with the answer what to do. This is one stage. There’s another thing stage that’s really
interesting, Stage 3 and 4 of the sleep. We call it slow-wave sleep. It’s a stage of the night where your brain
essentially takes all the experiences from the day before and waits them, and chooses
which ones to keep and which ones to take out. If you think about life when you go through
your day, there are many, many moments you call the present. About every one-and-a-half second you have
a different present, and then it goes in the past. It becomes a memory. You go to the next moment and you live it
and then you store it in the memory. Then when you go to sleep, your brain looks
at all those 50,000 moments that you had. It says, okay. When I walk from home to the bank, I had 20
of those moments. They’re not really important. I should compress them into one. Keep just one. Remove the others. When I kissed her, it was a moment that I
want to remember every fraction of so I want to keep all of them individually like one
big stock of experiences. Your brain does it. You’re in slow-wave sleep during this mode. You choose out of all of them and picks the
ones that’s important. What we learned in the last five years, 10
years, is that it can actually do things to you at this stage. When you’re sleeping, it will make you change
the pointer. We can choose for you to focus on the walk
to the bank rather than the kiss, and in doing so, we’re going to basically make you strengthen
those memories at the expense of others. We do that by using smells or sounds that
we play to your ears. In the right moment, the smell of the …
Tom: You judge that right moment because you’re actually watching like [inaudible 00:37:55]
[crosstalk 00:37:54] Moran: It has to be done. The important thing is you can’t do that
at home. You can’t just spray the smell and do it
all the time. You have to do it in the right moment because
if you just spray in the room, it’s going to wash out. You have to target the brain at the right
moment, but then the brain is going to say I smell this thing. This means that I want to focus on this moment
and strengthen that. What the experiments that we are doing and
others are doing right now show is that you can actually make a person learn things when
they’re sleeping. You can actually change their behavior. You can make them choose to focus on different
behaviors that they want to change and wake up not doing these things. You can actually do things. The classic experiment that was really popular
in the last three years since 2015 was people come to lab and they’re smokers and they
want to sleep. They go to sleep for two hours. The experiment just wait for the moment when
they’re brain is in this state when it’s listening to the outside world and reassessing
life. They spray the smell of nicotine into their
nose making their brain think, okay, out of all the memories I have, let’s focus on
those that have to do with smoking. Then immediately after, they blast the brain
with a smell of rotten eggs which basically makes the brain rewire and take nicotine and
wire it with like bad experiences. You do that a few times. When they’re sleeping, they wake up, they
have no idea what happened. Then suddenly, they say, "I don’t really
want to smoke anymore." For a few days they actually changed their
behavior. They don’t want to smoke, not knowing what
happened. They just came, took a nap, wake up, and they
don’t want to smoke. This is change in behavior neuroscience. You find the moment, you hit the brain with
it, you change the wiring, and the person wakes up a different person. Tom: That is amazing. Do people freak out about that like good or
bad? Moran: The answer is they do but they shouldn’t. I have an analogy that’s going to be the
way I look at it. Go back 406 years ago, 1610. Galileo Galilee points his telescope to the
moons of Jupiter and he looks at the orbit and he expected it to go in one way but it
doesn’t. It goes in a different way. He tries to understand what’s going on there. The only way to solve the equation is to realign
the planets of our Milky Way galaxy and specifically the solar system by putting the sun in the
center and put earth as the number three planet in the system which to him is the [inaudible
00:40:03] of humankind. What does it mean? That we’re just one more planet out of many? We’re not the center. It feels horrible to him. It changes everything. The equations require that so he does it. In doing so, he basically allows us to now
see the wide [inaudible 00:40:15] universe. Suddenly we see that the universe is much
bigger than we imagined and we can explore it. In the next 400 years, we saw more of the
universe and we learned a lot about what is out there. Now in the same way, in the last five years,
we’re beginning to understand that in our own brain, there are many, many voices and
we are not the most important one. We’re not even the center. We’re just one more voice out of many in
our head and we’re the one who think that they’re the most important. Actually, the quiet ones that don’t really
talk to us are the center of our universe. Now, this to us, again, feels like a [inaudible
00:40:48] of humankind. What does it mean that I’m not the center
of my own universe? The reality is that this will allow us to
understand the most important and interesting thing in the universe which is us. That’s I think a profound understanding. Yes, it’s scary that we’re not responsible
for our choices that happen to us, that we are creating a narrative based on things that
we’re not really full in control. That’s the beauty of us because now we can
actually explore more things in our brain and learn how things happen, and maybe we’ll
understand how to become better people. Tom: It’s really interesting. Moran: I somehow ended up being a preacher
tonight. I have no idea how it happened but I’m going
to take it. Tom: Yes, please. Preach now about the self-deception, how essentially
it feels like the layer that we view is also the voice … to use your vernacular, the
voice that we view as us is trying to cobble together this narrative based on these decisions
that are made by the quiet voices. How can we leverage that to either just tell
ourselves a more empowering story or to actually get the quiet voices to do what we want them
to do that’s more in line with our goals. Very specifically with self-deception, how
can that become a tool that we’re using in a self-aware way to push us forward. Moran: It is tool that we're deceiving ourselves
but we have to change the valance of the statement to a positive one. Set of deception sounds like a bad thing. This is our brain’s way of saving us. This is our brain’s … it’s [inaudible
00:42:22]. It’s still not living to reality the way
it is. This is actually mechanisms that our brain
created to optimize the world. We know that our eyes offer us only a small
fraction of all the things that the world has but we call this reality. We know that our nose smells only what’s
right here, and our noses [inaudible 00:42:42] to where the smells are. The smells are down here and our noses are
up here. We don’t even smell … We don’t have
it in place. All of those things may not … Our brain
deceives us. It always offers us a reality that isn’t
true. That’s great. This allows us to have a different view of
the universe that we get to create ourselves. On one hand, we want to know what’s out
there. That’s why we have x-ray sensors and ultraviolet
sensors because we want to actually know what are all the rays of light that are out there
that our eyes cannot see. That’s why we developed all those smart
tools to hear things that are beyond the frequencies that our ear can get. We want to know what’s out there, but our
brain through years of illusion created this set of deception that we call reality in a
way that’s perfect for us. It allows us to live life in a comfortable
way. Tom: One of the things you talked about along
the lines of self-deception is people are really bad at understanding what they want
and whether they’re intentionally deceiving themselves, intentionally deceiving you as
a researcher. One thing I get asked a lot is somebody wants
to be fulfilled. They want to find a career that they love. They want to start a company but they don’t
know what. How can people get good at understanding what
they want? Moran: I would say that the best way is to
be aware. Be aware meaning like [crosstalk 00:44:01]
take a note. What you see actually when you look at the
brains of people, we see how few repetitions of a message does it take for your brain to
rewire and now have it solidified. We can show you eight times. Tom: Eight? Moran: It varies but that’s the area. We show you eight times this person next to
this item, and first when you see this person, this cell lights up in your brain. The cell, it codes Tiger Woods, lights up
when you see Tiger Woods. They show you Gillette, another cell lights
up. We start showing you the two of them together,
after eight repetitions of seeing them together, suddenly the cell for Tiger Woods also codes
Gillette and the cell for Gillette code Tiger Woods. Suddenly, the cell [crosstalk 00:44:46] and
that’s it. Eight repetitions is very little. This is the amount of time that commercials
need to be shown on TV before you say, "Okay, now I know that this is the [inaudible 00:44:55]. That means that it’s very easy to place
in our brain things that we’re going to change it. Now that we also learned that these numbers
are pretty small, we can also look at what times of the day. We know that there’s times of the day where
it’s even three times. Tom: Why do you think it has to do with this? Is that like a circadian rhythm thing? Is that a level of alertness tied to food
like … I’m surprised by that. Moran: All of the above. Our brain has a lot of clocks in it, if you
want. There’s clocks and there's environment. In a way, it’s simple. The neuroscience proves what we can do behaviorally
very easily. Just pay attention, learn, surround ourselves
with people that we care about, and decide when we want to be fooled and when we don’t
want to be fooled. I think that this historian I really like
said that hundred years ago the biggest threat to humanity were famine, plague and war. Basically, it’s over. Those are no longer a threat for us. If someone is hungry right now, it’s because
politically we want them to be hungry. There shouldn’t be any hunger in the world
but there is because of reasons that’s beyond us. Basically, we conquered the things that we
should be … right now, it’s a lot more scary. You’re a lot more likely to die from overeating
than under-eating, right. Diabetes is a lot bigger threat to us than
malnourishment. In that sense, I think we conquered a lot
of things. Now, we’re at the level we start playing
God. We’re starting to think what can we do to
the body that’s going to make it better. We have privileges. We are focusing out on happiness and what
would make us happy. We are extending life to its limit and now
we’re realizing that the one thing that we don’t know how to deal with is not the
extension of life but the quality of life. A lot of us are going to get to age 150, you
and I, but we might spend the last 50 years not being there. Our bodies are going to be there but our brain
is going to be basically not able to do the thinking. A bunch of neuroscientists, and I’m helping
a little bit, but it’s a project that is beyond me are trying to fix that. This is really the science fiction aspect. The way to fix it is not by actually fixing
the brain using drugs but by placing components of it. What we’re doing right now …
Tom: With synthetic biology or … Moran: Yes, with the chips like you basically
take a chip and you … There are positive brain almost like a bridge so things come
from the in and get processed through and go out. A lot of things could come in, a lot of things
could come out, but it’s finite sense. There is a table of millions of things that
could come in, and for them there’s a clear what comes out. The idea is that when you’re starting to
decay, when your Alzheimer emerges, we’re going to put electrodes in your brain and
learn how the in-looks and the outlooks and learn that while you’re decaying and when
you get to the state where you’re really no longer out there, we’re going to take
out the part of the brain that’s biological that failed. We’re going to put a chip instead. That chip is going to now take the input from
here. Now you can open it to questions like is it
still me, if any of those chips bypass … Tom: That’s being worked on right now? Moran: It’s already working with rats. With rats, you can actually induce Alzheimer
and then replace the faulty parts with chips that do the mapping. It's done here in Los Angeles [inaudible 00:48:07]
by guys at USC. Tom: Man, you’re really getting … It’s,
A, exciting. B, you’re opening Pandora’s Box like this
is insane. I love this show. Moran: Yeah, we should talk about ethics in
the end. Whatever you tell me [inaudible 00:48:19]
… Tom: Let’s talk about ethics. Moran: … because there is an interesting
part. I’m spending my time, half my days, in a
business school. This could be seen like a really selling your
soul to the devil by helping people sell [inaudible 00:48:37] and crunch overnight to a person
who’s in phase three of their night. You can bombard their brain with [inaudible
00:48:42] crunch and they’re going to wake up and they want [inaudible 00:48:44] and
crunch instead of less. Tom: Can we switch that to crossbars? Moran: Please. The idea is that there’s like a war right
now where neuroscientists are splitting up and they’re finding things. They’re finding how to change behavior over
the night. We’re learning how we can change your biome
and make you a different person by playing with your gut bacteria that makes you different. We know how smell affects your behavior. We can make you like this woman, not that
woman by playing different smells. A lot of things happening and no one is in
control of that because policymakers are slow. It takes them a while to create the policies. The people who are really fast are businessmen
and marketing departments. They are really fast. They hear about it and they say, okay, let’s
apply that. My students, the MBA students, are the ones
to say, "Hmm, it’s interesting." My job … and that’s why I feel it’s
important to say it here, is to remind those students how bad they felt when they saw the
6.99. They say, "Oh, come on. I feel like I’m being schooled. Someone tells me that it’s 6.99 to fool
me but I want it to be just the fair price of $7. I would know. Why do they play with my …"
In 20 years, you’re going to be the guy who sets the price of an item and you’re
going to have the option as well to go for 6.99 and make a person buy or you can say
I’m going to be the better person. I’m going to not try to play on all those
biases and kind of change things. I think this is the reality we have to have
right now because scientists are going to offer you a lot of tools to do good or bad
and we have to choose as society how we play with them. Tom: Can I give you what I think is the right
answer now? I’m talking to the school of management
guy and the neuroscientist here. As an entrepreneur, as somebody who’s built
a food company in particular, the answer that I came to because I’m very much trying to
convince you to buy, and what I realized is we’re living in an era where companies have
an obligation, a moral obligation in my opinion, a moral obligation to make products worthy
of being used. If you’re making a product that actually
delivers value, and that’s so important, and yes I get it, who determines the value. I honestly think that the companies have to
be able to look themselves in the eye and say I believe this product is good for you. Moran: Hundred percent. Tom: If you believe that it’s good for the
person that you’re selling it to, then using the tools and techniques to get people to
buy it that makes sense to me. It all comes down to what you’re pushing
and promoting because if you’re … Think about policymakers trying to get adoption
on even just policies like getting STD test or whatever the case may be that things that
are good, not just for that person but for society as a whole. You have to sell it. You have to get people to believe in that
thing. As long as that thing is good for you, I think
getting people to believe in it is all right. Moran: I think the thing that as scientist
we have to explore the world. This is why we’re here to all the options
and including the ones that will be good for you and the ones that are going to be bad
for you, and then have you really understand how to make a choice better yourself. Tom: That’s good. One last question for you. What’s the impact that you want to have
on the world? Moran: The one thing that I’m really good
[inaudible 00:51:55] do is find ways to take complex ideas and make them into something
that is tangible for everyone. This is the impact that I want to be. I want to find ways, movies, conversations,
products, students to have everyone have the option. I want everyone in the world to know enough
so they can make a decision by themselves. Tom: I love it. Moran, thank you so much…
Moran: Thank you so much. Tom: … for coming on the show, man. That was incredible. Guys, I think we all are thinking the same
thing right now. Where can we find you online? Moran: I have a website that I built in the
last couple of weeks that’s pretty good I think. It has my name, morancerf.com, but, then again,
I have so many stories I told and students that take the message there. If you just look for ideas, you’ll find
me somewhere buried in them. Tom: Nice. Well, I can tell you from experience if you
drop his name in the YouTube, you’re going to get a treasure trove of amazing talks. Watch them all. They’re incredible. I hope you guys had as much fun with this
man as I have. I promise you I will be working to get him
back for round two. It is rare that I say that on the spot, but
I’m telling you I could go for round two. That will be amazing. I had so much fun picking this man’s brain,
the diverse way that he approaches. Everything he does is incredible. You’re going to see that as you dive into
his world. Watch the talks and hear him go from one subject
to another. He can go deep business and really like nuts
and bolts business, marketing, and then switch it over and show you photos of an actual brain
with electrodes in it and what they’re learning from that. It is utterly astonishing. I have rarely seen a human being who can so
rapidly and beautifully traverse the line between academia and business. For anybody out there that wants to be at
the cutting edge of what’s happening in marketing, you’re going to want to look
him up. It is absolutely phenomenal. From one narrator to another, as somebody
who believes in the power of story, my friend, you have a unique ability to do it. It’s absolutely incredible. Watch him on the Moth Storytelling. See the stories that allowed him to win the
awards. They’re amazing. All right, guys. This is a weekly show. If you’re not already following me, you
better be @tombilyeu. Hit it up. We’re doing really cool stuff on my socials. If you’re not already following Impact Theory,
get on it. It’s @impacttheory. Guys, as you know this is a weekly show so
be sure to subscribe, hit that bottom. Until next week, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Thank you so much. What a pleasure man. Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us for another
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