then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator not
just seeking dopamine rewards that is infinite and i i can say with with great
certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company
and sell it how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it
how you constantly seeking because andrew huberman welcome to the show man
it's great to be here i should say dr andrew just just so people know what
they're what they're about to get dude it's awesome to have you back our first
interview completely melted my brain researching you is one of my favorite
things to do the breadth of topics that you cover is incredible
none more so than the fact that we can get to our mind through our body which i
think is one of the most incredible things before we started rolling though
i had this whole interview planned i knew exactly where we were going to go
and then you made a comment i was bringing up bitcoin and uh
cryptocurrency as i do because i'm obsessed and you said well there's only
one biological currency and that's dopamine that's right and i was like
well now i know where we're starting what do you mean by that yeah so you
know human beings have evolved tons of know human beings have evolved tons of
technologies technologies
and currencies bitcoin ethereum are not topics i know a
lot a lot about but when you think about dollar euro bitcoin ethereum you think
about wins and losses in sport in life in relationship and
anything something in your brain and body has to keep track of that did you
win did you lose what's a letdown what's a celebration and
i think one of the most important findings in the last few years in
neuroscience is that while the molecule dopamine is
associated with reward it's more about
motivation and craving there's a really classic experiment now
that people use to demonstrate this take two rats
and the rats independently separate cages can lever press
for food uh when they can access food
there's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food so
we always thought that food like many other rewards
like food sex warmth when you're cold cool when you're too warm
is triggering the release of dopamine is triggering the release of dopamine
but but
someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of those animals
and then what you find is that the animal without
dopamine still enjoys food still enjoys other pleasures so dopamine
is not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures it's involved in
motivation because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's
animal have to move just one rat's length
length believe it or not to get to that lever
the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing it will work through some
effort to go get the reward whereas the animal or turns out the human without
much dopamine can still experience pleasure they can
sit on their couch and cram their face with pleasure inducing calories or what
have you watch pleasure-inducing things on the television but they have very
little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure
so when i say dopamine is the universal so when i say dopamine is the universal
currency currency
currency of
of everything what i mean is it's driving
the motivation to develop new currencies when somebody can sit back and say uh
i'll just throw this number out let's say somebody has a hundred thousand
bitcoins which presumably now is worth oh my god
certainly more than it was a few years certainly more than it was a few years
ago ago
the way they can register whether or not they are in a position of wealth or not
has everything to do with the the number they see on the screen or in their
bitcoin wallet bitcoin wallet
but but
that number is converted into a chemical signal that has everything to do with
how much you had previously so so we could talk about the so-called reward
prediction error how good you feel with an experience has everything to do with
how much you had previously
and dopamine itself is what's driving the human species to
create these new technologies and so while we think of currencies as the goal
it's actually what's really driven the forward evolution of our our species has
been the desire to go seek things beyond the confines of our skin and when i say
the common currency is dopamine what i mean is the molecule dopamine when
secreted in the brain makes us pursue things build things create things makes
us want new things that we don't currently already have and so it has a
lot of dimensions to it but rather than think about dopamine as a signal for
reward like a dopamine hit we classically think to talk about it it's
more accurate really to think about dopamine as driving motivation and
craving to go seek rewards that's the rad experiment and it's a way of
tabulating where we are in our life are we doing well or are we doing poorly and
that happens on very short time scales like do you wake up feeling good or do
you wake up feeling kind of low you wake up feeling kind of low
or or
on long time scales if you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway
through your life how are you doing how do you gauge that well it has everything
to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks
and years so you're always comparing and all of this is subconscious but what's
cool is that once you make these processes conscious once you understand
a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our
perspective and our behavior then you can actually work with it so it's one of
can actually work with it so it's one of the
the um instances where knowledge of
knowledge actually turns out to be a really useful tool
dude that's crazy to me so one of the things that i get hit up about all the
time is people feel stuck
and as you like really push on them to figure out why they feel stuck they'll
be like yeah i want to do that and but i just you know i can't get out of bed or
i don't have the energy to pursue it or whatever and
you get into this common thing that people say in mindset
and i really believe it but i find it far more interesting when you're talking
about it from a neuro chemical standpoint which is you just don't want
it badly enough and when i think about
my own life i sometimes worry that i'm either more malleable than
other people or that i have a greater ability to manipulate my dopamine
release or whatever because i'm very good at building desire
and i like the way that desire feels now when you use the word hunger i think
people get confused because i actually don't enjoy being hungry for food i find
that totally unpleasurable however being hungry for sex i find
incredibly i feel alive i feel focused i feel energized i feel aggressive it's
complex for sure but i find that feeling incred the the act of wanting something
in the future in in that kind or in business and trying to build something
i've in fact that's an interesting insight into my own self
insight into my own self about
about i like to build
i like to build and
and do we know so we dopamine is the
neurochemistry of the pursuit of making sure that i have the energy to go but do
we know how we can spike that well first of all it's clear to me based
on your description that you've tapped into these
uh channels that release dopamine because craving and wanting whether or
not it's sex or or uh money or not it's sex or or uh money or
connection connection
or anything all right uh is that's the the primary trigger for dopamine release
yeah now sex and reproduction makes the most sense from the perspective of
evolution uh i mean any species every evolution uh i mean any species every
species species
has tends to have two primary goals one protect it's young and second make more
of itself usually in reverse order right so even for people that don't want
children i mean you might not or people of course not everyone is having sex
just to reproduce but at a primordial level that's what those circuits are
there for so every species in particular mammalian species where there's a lot of
parenting and caretaking of the young
tries to take make more of itself and everything that you see like maternal
aggression which is a powerful circuit that gets activated after
females of any species in particular mammals give birth they will fight to
the death and they gain superhuman strength in order to protect their young
that's a there's a known circuit for that in the brain that gets activated
once a female has offspring and it's robust
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legendary so interesting man like have you read
the book the female brain i have not oh my god so i just probably lost a lot of
points but no no but you're one it'll be super interesting because you'll know if
she's on the right track from a neuroscience perspective i remember
reading the book at the time i thought i was going to have kids
and i remember thinking whoa like this book chronicles what happens to a
woman's brain and how things change and i was like when you have kids man you
are inviting a neurochemical change in your significant
other that is going to play itself out in a very real way and i'd be lying if i
said that wasn't one of the things one of the many things but one of the things
that i factored into not having kids interesting uh and then the same with
menopause that it's this really dramatic sort of reorganizing might not be the
right word but that it it has real implications in the
way that the person moves just as the decline of testosterone has in men well
in on a on the positive side
during pregnancy the woman's hippocampus her brain area associated with memory
and retention of information it goes through a period in which it gets worse
for certain types of information but then achieves superior levels of working
memory once the babies arrive because there are a
lot of things to manage so this makes sense this is true in rodents this is
true in humans and then in terms of the biology of the father we now know that
when because typically parents have uh you know does seem like one spouse
always does more than the other but even in the most evenly divided
but even in the most evenly divided households
households the there's usually some co-parenting of
some sort but that the father has a big increase in the hormone prolactin
big increase in the hormone prolactin when
when the mother is expecting and the
prolactin lays down body fat it prepares for sleepless nights for women it it
sparks um the circuitry for milk letdown for for nursing
so the dad bod has a lot to do with prolactin this is true in in birds in
small mammals and in humans and this is now there was a paper published in
now there was a paper published in nature
nature on humans specifically about this and
when you think about the relationship between dopamine and prolactin it's it's
interesting and it takes us back to this motivation and craving that you were
describing earlier which is that dopamine and prolactin work in in
opposite fashion so the the most salient example of this
is sex and reproduction where anticipation of sex and reproduction
greatly increases dopamine but posts
but posts reproductive
reproductive post-sex it doesn't have to be for
reproduction there's a spark in prolactin in the mail that's the spike
excuse me in prolactin and that spike in prolactin is actually what sets the
refractory period during which he can't mate again so it sets a period of
quiescence to keep men it's repair bonding for the exchange
of chemicals through the nose to the through the skin and through the sweat
mainly through odor uh we could talk about pheromones if you want but that's
a topic that's somewhat controversial the actual identity of pheromones in
humans has not been identified but there are pheromone effects in humans
controversial in that people don't agree what's really happening well okay so
there's this culture of biologists that have clearly identified
pheromone effects in other in non-humans and non-human primates
but whether or not those are the classic definition of a pheromone
effect is that it's subconscious that you can't actually detect the smell
however we know that smells themselves conscious detection of them can evoke
very robust physiological responses one one example to just stay in this arena
of of of thought is that a guy by the name of gnome sobel who's at the
weizmann institute he used to be at berkeley he has a lab over in israel his
amazing lab works on olfaction smell and they discovered that the scent
of women's tears causes a dramatic and significant reduction in testosterone in
men what absolutely and this was published if anyone wants to go look it
up it was published in science magazine you know you can smell tears yeah we
have you know the super bowl of publishing and science is science nature
and self those are the three top journals this is published in science
magazine very stringent uh the smell of tears now it's subconscious at some
tears now it's subconscious at some level
level but the other thing that if we were
going to kind of play around in this hormones and behave interactions between
humans um there are some really interesting examples so for instance
interesting examples so for instance men
men will rate the smell of a woman's skin or
sweat or the perception of her face as more beautiful during the pre-ovulatory
phase of her menstrual cycle that pre-ovulatory phase is associated
with a number of different changes in hormones okay
just that smell will increase testosterone in a male
oral contraception in the female women taking oral contraception it
adjusts their hormones such that men no longer detect this change in
how attractive women are doesn't mean they find them unattractive but it means
they don't find them increasingly interactive during this certain period
of the of their of their menstrual cycle so we are constantly signaling back and
forth through hormones in fact we met over there
and shook hands because we've been tested for covet and the rest we shook
hands and what happened and what happens within 30
seconds of any human being contacting one another is they shake hands and then
they wipe their the chemicals of the other person on their face
gnome's lab has also shown this and so we are constantly signaling through
through chemical exchange sometimes it's subconscious and those are the so-called
pheromone effects sometimes it's low levels of odors that are beneath our
conscious detection and sometimes it's outright wow this person smells really
really good or they look particularly good today oftentimes that's tied to the
of the period in which they are ovulating in their menstrual cycle so i
want to plant a flag here about all the things that we do
that are messing with these mechanisms like
cologne or deodorant or oral contraception of which i'm not saying is
pornography like all interception has served a great role in it for certain
people some people might say was this an ethical discussion or is it good is it
bad but um either way it is having an effect right so to remove i only look at
things through the lens of biology not through the lens of of whether or not we
should or shouldn't do things i love it okay so we're planning that we're coming
back to it but now i want to get to how do we spike intentionally you've talked
about we can spike testosterone but i want to know can we spike dopamine
yeah so um and you've done this so your example of
craving is actually what you crave you crave the
feeling of craving is beautiful because it would what it means is that you don't
allow yourself to go so far down the arc of the dopamine trajectory to get to the
other source of motivation so there are two sources of motivation as it relates
to dopamine and then we can think about tools that we could export from these
that are nested in neurobiology the first is to do what you do
which is to be able to sense the craving as its own form of pleasure this has
kind of remnants of carol dweck's growth mindset that you eventually develop a
pleasure in the seeking and the striving has you know uh has flavors of a david
goggins type approach where where it seems like he gets pleasure from the
friction itself and so there are elements of that you seem to have that
as well as well
but but
if you can start to identify the craving as its own internally released drug this
thing dopamine that is a source of motivation then what you realize is that
capturing the reward is wonderful but attaching dopamine to the reward is
actually a little bit dangerous attaching yeah this is celebrating the
win celebrating the win more than the pursuit it actually sets you up for
failure in the future and so this gets us right into something called dopamine
reward prediction error and reward prediction error is basically if you
expect something to be really great and then it's not quite that great your
dopamine baseline lowers and now understanding what we know about
dopamine that means that not only did you you feel as if you lost because it
wasn't as much a celebration as you thought it would be but it also means
that you're starting from a lower place meaning you are less motivated now the
simpler way to conceptualize this is have a colleague at stanford she runs
the addiction dual diagnosis clinic at uh her name is dr anna lemke she has a
book called dopamine nation that's out right now
and she's really described as pleasure pain balance where anytime you have a
bunch of dopamine and you're in pursuit pursuit pursuit
after you achieve a win now this could be a business win a relationship a win
of any kind of any kind
but but
inevitably there's going to be a tipping back of the scale on the pain side and
that pain side is always going to go a little bit higher than the dopamine side
so this is what you would feel if you pursued a goal like building a big
pursued a goal like building a big company
company here it comes here comes the big sale
and then there's the well what now the kind of letdown now if you wait if you
simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while the scale starts to
for a short while the scale starts to reset
reset the problem is a lot of people
immediately roll right into the next immediately roll right into the next
pursuit pursuit
and then what happens is that scale starts to get stuck on the pain side a
little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and pretty soon no
amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation
so what what does this mean in terms of an actual tool well first of all
if people can do what you do they're going to be in a much better position in
life it doesn't matter if it's school sport relationship any domain of life if
you can start to register ah that craving and that friction and that
desire that almost kind of low level of agitation sometimes high level of
agitation that is that i'm trying to impose my will on the world in a
benevolent way we hope that's dopamine it's working with its
close cousin which is epinephrine which is adrenaline they are very close
cousins in fact dopamine manufactures epinephrine a lot of people don't know
this but adrenaline is actually made from the molecule dopamine
okay so those two are hanging out together it's like crave work crave work
craving work craving work craving work and then you get the win
and some people allow the big peak in dopamine to be
associated with the win associated with the win
and and
smart people learn to adjust their celebration
internally right this is all internal you could throw the biggest party in the
world but as long as you're kind of in laid back
laid back and
and looking at this not letting yourself get
manic crazy you won't necessarily crash as hard
and pretty soon your system will reset so you take the day you clean up the
dishes you relax you go what now i'm feeling a little low well rather than
going out and spiking your dopamine again just wait understand that the
scale will reset again give yourself a few days where you're going to feel a
little kind of underwhelmed things aren't going to be as interesting
it's going to be hard to trigger that big release because you just had
the peak well if you adjust that you relax you
understand there's always a little bit of a postpartum depression
we sometimes hear about postpartum depression that's a clinical thing but
there's always that kind of today's not as exciting
as the previous days what am i going to do with my life but then
if you let it start ratcheting up again then what you realize is your capacity
to tap into dopamine as a motivator not just seeking dopamine rewards that is
infinite and i i can say with with great certainty that this is
how you were able to build a big company and sell it how you've been able to
build a successful podcast and sell it how you constantly seeking because
seeking is the reward and i think for most people we think of the reward as
the finish line and so the key is to get to the finish line step into the end
zone but no end zone dance it's just like yep and now i'm gonna go do it
like yep and now i'm gonna go do it again
again that's really the key that's that's the
key to doing it over and over and when i see big athletes or
academics or anyone or musicians and academics or anyone or musicians and
they they
rise and crash it's clear they've lost the touch with
the motivation evoked dopamine and they've lost touch probably because it
hasn't really been described by the neuroscience community until anna has
started talking about this stuff publicly and i'm just kind of echoing
what she's beautifully said said much better than i am which is that
you should always expect that after a bunch of pleasure there's going to be
that low and then that craving how do i get back to there again and the key is
you have to walk the staircase again you don't get to do this as a square wave
pull you know you don't get to just ascend ascend ascend it's always up
ascend ascend ascend it's always up down
down up a little bit higher down up you know
it's that's the function so um i don't know if that resonates
with your experience i'm over here freaking out so you've literally just
explained what i will say is the single most important loop if you want to be
most important loop if you want to be successful
successful and you used words
attach right you had another one which was about your t i forget the exact word
but you're taking you're inserting yourself consciously into the process
because what i learned very early on and i'm so grateful in the same way that you
are grateful that your upbringing wasn't perfect but it ended up giving you a
frame of reference and insights that have propelled you forward i'm very
grateful that i spent a decade just trying to get rich that was the stated
mission i would say it every day like i'm here to get rich i show up to work
to get rich it's about getting rich rich rich rich and it didn't work
and so and my wife pulls me aside and she's like you're now damaging the
marriage like you're just so fiendishly focused on the goal
that there's nothing as integrated in your life you're doing something you
hate for an end state that may never hate for an end state that may never
come come
and that was so profound and it shook me so deeply and it suddenly became clear
that from a neurological perspective what i wanted was to feel alive and once
i put everything in the pursuit i'm just interested in can i show up every day
and sincerely pursue this thing which i may never get but i'm gonna honor myself
celebrate myself big up myself as the brits would say for just showing up
today and actually trying to make it today and actually trying to make it
happen happen
and one that's way more sustainable and then two you don't
you don't get tricked into thinking that oh when i get this thing that i'll feel
good because it's the craving that makes me feel alive so it's the state of
wanting that is in and of itself the pleasurable act that's right and so
i began to use the metaphor of i'm gonna climb this mountain only to want the
next mountain to climb and once i knew that well then you have to be totally
comfortable dropping back down and starting all over now the interesting
thing and i don't know if i'm fooling myself or if i have
so integrated that trick but the come down isn't hard for me so
i i think my last day at quest was a i i think my last day at quest was a
monday monday
and tuesday i started impact theory and so that went from i had 3 000 employees
your position matters you get a lot of deference uh you've got a privileged
parking space you know what i mean like there's there's a lot of things that go
into it and but i didn't none of like my reward
system was tied to that so it was very easy for me to start the next day with
there was only seven of us and no one had time for any deference of any kind
and i went from having an ea which you can't imagine how amazing that is to not
and you're doing everything for yourself and you're doing everything for yourself
again again
but that wasn't a painful thing because i was so focused on all right cool this
is step one again and now can can we repeat well it helps if you can expect
that there will be a little bit of a dip post win or post
whatever um that's helpful there's always a refractory period of any kind
so to speak if you expect it that's great because you eliminate the the
downside of the reward prediction error reward prediction error can also be
conceptualized as i tell you we're going to go this restaurant i keep building up
the food building up the food i actually raised the expectation and the
requirement that that food be really spectacular better off i just tell you
it's gonna be pretty good and then you're wowed by it right because if your
dopamine was higher in anticipation than the actual food evoked well then it
makes sense why would you're always integrating over the dopamine release
you had previously now there are a couple things that you
said in there that i want to highlight which i find so interesting uh and we
can get a little bit eastern philosophy mystical here but tie
it back to some real neuroscience which is you said you know that's the juice
the motivation is the juice you know the motivation is the juice you know
that that
if you look at eastern philosophy and they talk about qi you know in this you
know what is that i i wager that is dopamine the desire to pursue things and
to create more of oneself and as a species whether or not you decide
to have kids or not those circuits all use the one universal currency dopamine
of wanting more things that are outside the confines of your skin and that's
what's driven forward evolution of individuals and
families and cultures and our our species as a whole and again the
circuitry has been there for many many tens if not hundreds of thousands of
tens if not hundreds of thousands of years
years and so it's and it's highly conserved
and so what that means is that it doesn't matter if it's bitcoin or
ethereum it doesn't matter if it's putting rockets on other planets it
doesn't matter if it's building the first automobile it's the same currency
so understanding those cycles is really key the other thing is the element of
pain i think that understanding that pain and pleasure and this really
dynamic balance can also help us which in the following
can also help us which in the following way
way any pain that you feel the longer day
the less sleep the the kind of agony that things aren't working that power
outlet doesn't work or the internet is slow whatever it is
the amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience
is directly relation related excuse me to how much pain you experience so we
know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and
unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks
and they would measure their response and then they'd say we're going to
increase it we're going to increase it eventually they get to the point where a
slight shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of
painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure
pleasure now you couldn't do these experiments
anymore these are not the experiments i do in my lab
these are older experiments but for instance and this has been discussed
in scientific research papers uh giving somebody a like a 10-minute ice bath for
instance or even a three-minute ice bath or a one-minute ice bath it's quite
painful but there was a study from the university of prague uh european journal
physiology showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus
the amount of dopamine release goes up for two and a half hours to 250 percent
above baseline and that's not because the ice bath
itself evokes dopamine release a lot of people think oh cold water of ox
dopamine release no pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over yesterday
i tweaked my back because i do this stupid thing every few years the same
stupid thing and it's really painful and then you just remember all the ways in
which you can't move around i was like standing up this morning like ah and
just walking is so painful as the pain has started to dissipate you get a
little bit of a high right you get a little bit of a euphoria that's dopamine
because of the the degree of pain you experienced previously predicts how much
pleasure so when you start a company down in the dregs and you're shoveling
down in the dregs and you're shoveling again
again that's beautiful because that means that
the wind that you achieve is going to be as good or greater than
the one you had previously in your case with quest and so we go back to this
example the person that's not motivated that can't get off the couch that
doesn't want to do anything well this is the problem we remember the rad
experiment they are effectively the rat with no dopamine but they can still
with no dopamine but they can still achieve
achieve some sense of pleasure
by consuming excess calories by consuming social media and look i'm not
judging i do this stuff too right scrolling social media if you've ever
scrolled social media and you're like i don't even know why i'm doing this it
doesn't really feel that good and i can remember a time where you'd
see something it was just so cool or you see something online i remember this
when ted talks first came out i was like this is amazing these are some at least
some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights and then
now that they're like a gazillion ted talks i remember spending a winter in my
office at when i was a junior professor cleaning my office finally
and binging ted talks in the background thinking this is a good use of my time
pretty soon they all sucked to me i was like this isn't good so what you need to
do is stop watching dead docs for a do is stop watching dead docs for a
while while
wait and then they become interesting again and that's this pain pleasure
again and that's this pain pleasure balance
balance and so for people that aren't feeling
motivated the problem is they're not motivated but they're getting just
enough or excess sustenance so they're getting the little mild hits of opioid
it becomes an opioid system and if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed
to dopamine dopaminergic drugs dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for
everything you know drugs of abuse like cocaine amphetamine make people
incredibly outward directed or they hardly notice anything except what they
want more of more more it's very it's bad
because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the
reward it's very circular that only the drug can give that much dopamine nothing
they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself
so there's that and then there's the kind of opioid like effects
of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with
with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation
and craving and this is really the new evolution of the understanding of
dopamine and neuro in neuroscience which is that dopamine itself is not the
reward it's the build-up to the reward and the reward has more of a kind of
opioid bliss-like property which itself is not bad if it's endogenous released
from within but when we can just sit there like the like the rat with no
dopamine gorging ourselves with pleasures so to speak what you end up
with is somebody that feels really unmotivated and those pleasures no
longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits and so there's no reason for
them to go out and pursue anything and that's a pretty dark picture so the the
keys are to pursue rewards but understand that
the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated
wins okay you the celebration has to be less than the pursuit and that's hard
for some people to do they you know they it's got to be that
your celebration is slightly less your celebration is slightly less
dopaminergic dopaminergic
it can be very reflective you can be in gratitude those are other
neurotransmitter systems but you don't want to be on that high as you celebrate
the wind you want to be
trickling out your dopamine regularly until you pursue things and
then just understand there will always be a crash of pain and the more pain you
experience the more dopamine you can achieve if you get back on the avenue of
perfect yeah this gets into unintended consequences of modernity and so we're
living through this time where we you know going back to that flag that we
planted of these unintended consequences of oh i can make myself smell good oh i
can you know watch the coolest video oh like tick tock
dude i don't have an addictive personality that's the first thing where
i'll lose an hour and be like what the [ __ ] did i just do well that's
the problem is not pleasures the problem is that pleasure experienced without
prior requirement for pursuit yes prior requirement for pursuit yes
is is
terrible for us it's terrible for us as individuals it's terrible for us as as
groups and i have great confidence in the human species to work this out but
we are finding now and we are going to increasingly find that those who will be
successful young or old are going to be those people who can create their own
internal buffers they're going to be able to control their relationship to
pleasures because the proximity to pleasures and their availability is the
problem if you look at the increase in
use of drugs of abuse or prescription medication which at least at the first
pass deliver pleasure pain relief the whole issue with the opioid crisis and
and dopaminergic drugs like ritalin and dopaminergic drugs like ritalin
adderall adderall
you know there is sometimes there's a clinical need but tons of people are
taking those recreationally now or to study huge dopamine increases are what
those cause that is a problem that's a serious
problem because it creates a cycle where you you need more of that specific thing
i always say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things
that bring you pleasure that's such a good difference and you know and i don't
like to comment too much on enlightenment because you know i don't
really know what that is as a neurobiologist but a good life we could
say is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and even
better is a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you
pleasure and includes pleasure through motivation and hard work and
understanding this pain pleasure balance whereby if you experience pain and you
can continue to be in that friction and exert effort
the rewards are that much greater when they arrive
and so i think that if you look at any drug of
abuse or any situation where somebody isn't motivated or thinks that now they
may have clinically diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder but a lot
of what people think is adhd it turns out is people just over consuming
dopamine from various sources and then and also the context within a tick tock
feed is the context switch is insane the brain has never seen first of all
there's a first time in human evolution that we wrote with our thumbs but that's
a pretty benign shift and that the other shift is
normally you walk from one room to another or from a field into the trees
or from a hut into or a house or whatever it is but now you can get 10
000 context switches in that 30 minutes of scrolling on instagram or to talk and
so it's all about self-regulation we are going to select for the people that can
self-regulate and so then people say well how do you
self-regulate how do kids self-regulate well this is my hope and one of the
reasons i've gotten excited about public education and teaching neuroscience is
education and teaching neuroscience is that
that this is a place where knowledge of
knowledge actually can allow oneself to intervene when you think i'm feeling low
i don't feel good nothing really feels like am i depressed maybe but maybe
you're just you've saturated the dopamine circuits you're now in the pain
part of things what do you do well you have to stop you need you need to
replenish dopamine you need to stop engaging with this behavior and then
your pleasure for it will come back but you have to constantly control the hinge
it's not just about being back and forth on the seesaw you have to make sure the
hinge doesn't get stuck in pain or in pleasure so it's a dynamic process being
a human being it's not easy and remember these circuits didn't evolve for this
these circuits didn't evolve for this purpose
purpose they evolve primarily for
making more of ourselves that's why they're so closely tied to the
reproductive circuits and that's why it was interesting and very relevant that
you said that your desire to have sex with your wife is one
of the most powerful feelings and it kind of as a from a neurochemical
perspective it wicks out into all these other pursuits right those other
pursuits aren't about sex per se but it's the same molecules so the feeling
is the same it's just that some people for some people the amplitude of that
dopamine signal for craving sex is very high for some people that's lower and
it's higher for um video games you know whatever you lean into
and and you think about often
in these pursuits we'll start to reshape these circuits because these
dopaminergic circuits are tied to everything you know there are examples
of people getting addicted to the most incredible things they're also examples
of people getting very good but not addicted to chess for instance it's all
the same general set of mechanisms
yeah you talked earlier about the the knowledge of knowledge and that
was the big breakthrough for me at the darkest period of my life i happened to
grab a book we talked about this briefly in our first interview i happened to
grab a book that talked about neuroplasticity and they were
hypothesizing maybe this is a thing hypothesizing maybe this is a thing
and and
and that
that gave me hope because i could imagine
what was going on in my brain and once i can visualize it then i feel like i can
insert myself into it it's why i've gotten so interested in health why i'm
so interested in neuroscience is for me if i were sliding towards
depression i would do exactly what you're saying i would assess that and be
like okay wait a second i know that i can insert conscious control i know that
this is a biological experience and i'm i'm
obsessed with that idea that you're having a biological experience and to me
like there's some people that see the way the magic trick is done and it loses
the magic then for other people it's like you see that it's this is somebody
that's spent 30 000 hours learning how to move their hands so that you don't
notice that they just move the coin you know from this hand to this hand it's
it blows me away i love magic uh before the pandemic a friend took me up to the
magic castle here in hollywood and there's some incredible stuff going on
magic is actually really cool we could uh just as a from a neuroscience
perspective magic it's all about creating gaps in your perception that's
obvious right and when that happens because the the
brain is so accustomed to the laws of physics like objects fall down not up
etc when that happens it clearly triggers the surprise circuitry and that
itself that feeling of delight and surprise is absolutely tied also to
these dopamine dopamine circuits it's interesting though that that doesn't
send us into like terror like the people depends on the magic trick when i went
there there was this crazy trick that the guy did he took out cards and i was
invited up to sit next to him i signed my name on a card
i took the card i took the card i tore it up i put it in my pocket
and at the end of the show we went through a series of things at the end of
the show he took off his shoe and presented the card
to me with the signature intact and the card intact and that was my signature
so he clearly created gaps of perception um but at some point as adults so i
think as long as we know the context is right then we can we can do this one
thing about dopamine that i just want to make sure i
uh mention and it based on something you said earlier is that
one interesting question about the brain is just asking the question you know how
do we segment time how do we how do you know that this podcast has obviously has
a beginning in the middle and an end but you know how do we segment time and so
there have been some beautiful experiments done recently showing that
uh for instance if you're watching a sports game regardless of whether or not
your team scores like let's say basketball goes down court let's say
they missed the three-pointer and then you know it's a close game there's a
little blip of dopamine that says that was one segment of time
and so dopamine is a big way in which we segment time the other way are blinks
believe it or not yeah that every time we blink there's a
paper publishing current biology every time we blink we reset our perception of
that when i understand more i guess than the dopamine why would dopamine be
involved in time perfect question turns out that the frequency of blinking is
set by the level baseline level of dopamine in the brain yes so when people
are wide-eyed with excitement and they're and they're just they're not
blinking very often or someone is on a drug that kicks out a lot of dopamine
they hardly ever blink their pupils are they hardly ever blink their pupils are
huge huge
they're they're actually not segmenting time in the normal fashion
and so much of your life in retrospect is segmented by those peaks and dopamine
they those mark key events in your life when you met your wife uh that their
when you met your wife uh that their their
their all the segments of your life are are
noted by peaks and dopamine or the way that you happen to conceptualize
dopamine and so also people who are depressed are often very focused on the
past they ruin naturally they default to ruminating on the past when you adjust
people's dopamine levels to healthy levels they start becoming more forward
thinking and more present and so there's this relationship between blinking and
time perception dopamine and blinking how you conceptualize time has a lot to
do with these peaks and dopamine and when they occur
and this is a big deal because we're you know 2020 was a rough year for most
people 2021's feeling a little better but we don't really know where we are in
this whole arc of everything that's this whole arc of everything that's
happening happening
there's a lot of uncertainty yeah the dopamine peaks and the frequency of
those dopamine peaks have everything to do with how we carve up our experience
of time and anyone who spent a lot of time in deep meditation
starts to develop a kind of intuitive internal representation of the fact that
time is very fluid in this way when we say time is fluid what we mean is the
secretion of dopamine and these pulses is very fluid they are under control of
our of what's happening externally but also how you conceptualize your life
like where are you in your life are you you know hopefully we'll if david
sinclair has his way and hopefully he will we will all live to be you know
more than a hundred years old hopefully in good vitality so this is
the more esoteric aspect of dopamine real fast before we go about the time
thing yeah let me ask you so there was a period in my life i'll take it at about
two years where for whatever reason i it could have been six hours since i last
looked at a clock i would be within three minutes of what time it was and my
wife found it hilarious and so she'd be like what time is it and i'm like oh
it's 4 58. it was so weird that it like made my
radar is like oh my god i have like this special power and then it went away
and now i can probably get you within 15 minutes but like uh it was really eerie
is is there does that make a prediction or a round like
a consistency of dopamine release or something yeah you nailed it it's the
consistency that's an internal it's an interval timer as we say so when
people's dopamine is low they tend to overestimate okay okay
and when people's dopamine is high they tend to underestimate time now it is
true that dopamine when it's released is a little bit of a stimulant in the
system because of the way it works with epinephrine how finely you slice time is
very dependent on dopamine and your internal level of autonomic arousal a
really good example would be you're really excited about something or you're
really stressed about something doesn't matter dopamine is
elevated in excitement but norepinephrine epinephrine tend to be
elevated any time we're agitated or or elevated any time we're agitated or or
excited excited
just imagine you need to catch a flight you're in line at the security and the
person in front of you seems like they're going really really slowly your
frame rate is faster you're just carving up time more finely people are in car
accidents and then they report everything being in slow motion your
frame rate is is smaller you're essentially getting
you're taking larger time bins and this is why let's say you wake up and you're
really tired or you're just you're kind of out of it and you look and it's like
text messages and emails and all this stuff the world seems like it's going by
really really fast dopamine is what is the diagno is the
dynamic process by dopamine release i should say is the dynamic process by
which you adjust time perception so if you had a very keen perception of the
passage of time right down to the minute or so that suggests very regular
intervals of dopamine release and that's probably tied to outside events that are
below your conscious awareness below your conscious awareness
but but
uh dopamine releases i i sort of not to make this uh pg-13 or r-rated but
if we go back to the example of sex sex and sleep are the two times when space
and time have a very fluid type relationship it's very
hard to conceive space and time in sleep that's actually the nature of sleep is
we do the long blink no joke we close the shutters stop bringing in external
information and in sleep space and time are very
fluid right things can happen very fast or very slow slow motion you can be
flying it there's a lot of you know some of it is dreaming but space and time are
very fluid in wakefulness space and time are very anchored by
physical events in the world but our perception of those is dynamically
regulated by how much dopamine is in our system so it's beginning to sound like
dopamine does everything but it's really associated with motivation craving and
time interval keeping and so i would be willing to bet that your pulses of
dopamine were very regular just like dopamine were very regular just like
drops drops
so interesting so we do a lot of things who knows what i was doing at that
period if it had to do anything just that i'm getting older and so it starts
to disrupt itself who knows but what are some things so one thing i've
heard you talk about which i find really heard you talk about which i find really
interesting interesting
when i think about all the things that we're doing that are disrupting things
all these unintended consequences of modern behavior
i am truly glad that cell phones the internet and pornography
did not exist when i was younger because i don't know if at 14
i could have been disciplined enough if i had access to that and
what like when you think about the things that we're doing right now that
are sort of the that have maybe the most grand unintended consequences where do
you land yeah on the time scale of 24 hours one
of the the huge mistakes that we all make and i'm i've said this many times
so if people have heard me say this before forgive me but it turns out it's
still true still true
uh uh
getting too much bright light exposure from the hours of 10 pm until 4 am
unless you have to work shift work which is a unique case
that bright light exposure between 10 pm and 4 am even if you
adjust the colors of the lights you still need to get everything really
really dim because it actually blocks the release of dopamine through a
pathway that involves a structure called the habenula
the habenula was a kind of cryptic structure in the brain for a long time
but now we know there's a punishment signal in the brain you get
neurochemically punished for viewing bright light at those hours
how how would that be wired in we'd never be able to expose ourselves to
bright light ah so that's a great question so firelight won't do that
moonlight's fine candles lights that are dim are now in your environment
so the the pathway to the habenula and then to these dopamine reducing circuits
are the pain pathway that we're referring to earlier it's a generic
pathway through which lots of different types of signals and stimuli and events
can punish us internally this is so good dude and so i'm going to call this the
rich kid effect like there and you mentioned hard work
earlier there is a reason i think that children of wealthy parents end up
imploding because there is a an evolutionary the punishment pathway
evolutionary thing that's going on that says you didn't have to work hard for
the things that you own and because from uh i need you to go hunt and gather and
face a saber-toothed tiger i have to reward you for doing hard things and
punish you for not doing hard things well and
you know in the case of the the the generic model of the of the spoiled
rich kid it they actually can't access dopamine uh remember that that a movie
from the 80s it was a uh it was called like the toy or something with richard i
was like if this [ __ ] says toy i'm gonna have a seizure yes
richard pryor in that movie and the kid has everything and he's the he's the
epitome of the spoiled brat all the toys all the cars all the things now we see
this with people who actually go from rags to riches and then bathe in all
their the luxuries they didn't have as a child these are often the athletes that
don't go on to perform well again these are people that crash because of
other dopamine-seeking behaviors you know i'm not going to call out names but
there are far too many examples of these and i don't call out names mostly
because we are all capable of this we all would like to think that oh if i had
all that money or if i had all that success i would really be a good human
being and i wouldn't do those things anyone any human being that is immersed
in these dopamine circuits too much or who gets too much pleasure without
having to pursue it first and really work and
actually experience pain pleasure ratcheting back and forth along that
climb because it wasn't just dopamine like this for you it's probably pain
pleasure pain pleasure pain pleasure pain right they're always
proportional to one another so anyone that does that it has a
tremendously hard time accessing tremendously hard time accessing
pleasure pleasure
they can't do that and and we often think about the extremes of addiction
and those are really severe but we also have to think about the more subtle
forms of something we really love but indulging in it just a little too often
so that it no longer has that edge you know there have been really good
studies of people who jump out of airplanes with parachutes you know
i'm sure it's a lot of fun it looks like a thrill but people do over and over and
over again often die
doing other things they often become drug addicts because it's a huge high oh
yeah yeah a lot of that and you know there are a lot of examples
of this i mean you can get addicted to anything the key is to regulate that
behavior so you asked what you know what should people do well
you know what should people do well certainly
certainly i'm trying this now and i have some good
examples some young people i know and work with are taking breaks from not
just social media but no cell phone whatsoever i'm actually trying an odd
experiment which is for the first hour of every day no phone
mostly because part of your 25 no-gos mostly because part of your 25 no-gos
yes yes
right so we have circuitry in the brain related to the so-called basal ganglia
and we have go sort of activating you know think gas pedal and then we there's
a lot of no go circuitry a lot of no go circuitry
and and
learning how to keep that no go don't circuitry as we could call it
uh tuned up is very important and so many times throughout the day but i try
and get 25 a day where i actively refrain from doing something that i
impulsively want to do could be looking at my phone but it could even be
something trivial like i want to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water so
i'm actively engaging in i'm actively engaging in
self-den self-den
in denial not cognitive denial probably that too but how would i know um but in
action-based denial so restricting my behavior in some way as a way of keeping
these dopamine circuits tuned up also not looking at my phone first thing in
the morning for an hour because knowing what we now know about the
second phase of sleep and rem sleep being more predominant the second wave
of sleep and the fact that you're working through a lot of emotional and
logistical contingencies you're reshaping your brain in sleep that's
when neuroplasticity occurs during sleep it's triggered in wakefulness but it
actually takes place in sleep especially that second half of sleep
when you wake up in the morning you are in a perfect position to what i call
receive the download of all the work that your neural circuitry has been
doing the night before but if you immediately go to a sensory experience
especially a rich sensory experience of stuff scrolling by you're actually
missing the information that you processed at night and even more
importantly that second half of the night during rem sleep is when the
emotional weight of things start becomes let's say
you put it on the shelf properly things that are important to emotional
emotionally registered get put in one shelf things that were like the comment
you got on twitter that was triggering doesn't seem like such a big deal after
a good night's sleep and that's because that second half of sleep is actually
when you re-experience these things but your body can't secrete adrenaline it's
kind of an internal form of therapy or even trauma therapy and that's why
people who don't get that sleep are very you know they're easily agitated they
feel like the world is crushing down on them so when i wake up in the morning i
want to receive ideas that i want to learn from my learning and if you take
in new information you are not in a position to do that and 60 minutes is a
tough one so i give myself two no-gos for the 60-minute block if i can do it
and i'll tell you a lot of mornings i fail tom i don't do it interesting i
just i found that shocking but i heard you say that in another interview and i
was like well i mean i'm human you know there are mornings where
um i get enticed or worse worse i find myself reflexively picking
up without having made the conscious decision and that's when
i realized that you know we are all
deep in this process and i think uh we have to regulate it the the
experiment i'd like to do maybe you'll do this with me as a challenge because
the challenge is always good is in the new year i actually want to take every
odd waking hour of the day off the phone so even hours of the day
as long as it's waking i'm willing to have it on and work with it but odd
hours just turn it off no matter what i don't know if this will destroy most
of the relationships but just to see can i do it on a rigidly
externally imposed schedule because if you think about most of the growth in
life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them
but they are where we learn restraint dude this is so important i don't know
if i hate them anymore so people will often ask like how i do this that or the
other whatever it is like tom how do you other whatever it is like tom how do you
um um
so i work 93 hours a week that's like my average that's your average so
tom why do you work 93 hours every week and the answer is because 93 are joyful
and 94 wouldn't and 94 wouldn't
and and
when i start working more than that it usually means that i'm juggling so many
things that my brain seems to be using sleep as a way to track some of them or
something yeah so i find myself waking up a lot no i have a trick that allows
me to fall back asleep very fast but it's still not as restful as just
sleeping through the night what's the trick if you don't mind me entering i
don't at all so i have two pairs of airpod headphones
and i put them in and i put them on a uh
fiction book and i turn the volume down such that if i don't put a little bit of
pressure on my ear i can't make out what they're saying so as soon as i drift off
the pressure releases and i can still hear that noise is being made but i
can't track it and so i'm usually out probably in about three minutes wow that
that changed my life in terms of when i get stressed i can still fall back
asleep such a great skill and just reflecting on what you use
that murmur in the background and this kind of low level i can't quite detect
it is actually the way that your brain detects things as you're falling asleep
so i wonder if you've triggered your circuit to run in reverse where you
actually can send yourself back under what what it makes me think is that i
what what it makes me think is that i can't
can't process the problems
and listen to a story at the same time and so my brain clicks over into story
mode and it's like oh we're digesting this story i i'm getting input so
because i'm getting input because it's story my brain lets go of i have to
solve problems and then that allows me to fall right back asleep that's great
such a great skill and waking up in the middle of the night from time to time to
use the bathroom is actually quite use the bathroom is actually quite
normal normal
and some people are really obsessed by the fact oh no i woke up and then they
get triggered but i learned this last year um
that the peak in our alertness is actually about
90 minutes before our natural bedtime and a lot of people they you know they
reach the point in the evening where reach the point in the evening where
they're they're
ready to go to sleep and then they feel all this you know excitement and surge
of energy and they think oh no i'm not going to be able to fall asleep but
that's actually a natural surge that's followed by a dip a lot of people also
have the trouble of waking up in the middle of the night and wondering why
they can't fall back asleep this is dreadfully hard for a lot of people i
struggled that for years yeah and one of the solutions is to go to bed earlier
because it means that your melatonin is starting to get released early in the
evening and so we all have the natural ability to push to stay late stay up
later if we really need to this has obvious adaptive utility but some people
by who should go to bed quote unquote should go to bed at 9 or 10 p.m they're
pushing to 11 or 12 and then their melatonin signal is starting to drop off
now they can't fall asleep or they're waking up at two or three in
the morning and they're they're in trouble but it sounds like you've hit
the right schedule 93 hours is an impressive output
that's a lot of years of making an obscene amount of mistakes and to close
the loop on so people how do you accomplish xyz and the answer is partly
accomplish xyz and the answer is partly rules
rules so you have to be obsessed with your
goal right so for me that's all obsessions start with a goal what do you
want is that thing exciting and honorable assuming it's exciting and
honorable there's ways to like create feedback loops which is largely what
we've been talking about today about attaching the dopaminergic response
specifically to the pursuit of that thing rather than having it
thing rather than having it and
and and
by by
to because i'm so excited and because i so believe in the reality of my goals
that i actually could have them and that having them would be awesome
i can create rules in my life and then i really stick to those rules so once i'm
very careful about what rules i put in place because i have to believe that
they will actually lead me to this goal that's really exciting for me but if i
believe it then i can put them in and then also part of my identity is that
i'm the type of person that when i set a rule i follow it so i can create this
loop of like feeling good about myself and the thing that i'm pursuing but it
really works and i'm shocked how few people have the kind of rule that you're
talking about in the new year to say hey i'm only going to do odd hours there's
no phone yeah well and like i said i'm not perfect i'm not as disciplined as
you are about my no goes i try i actually find that tabulating is is kind
of fun um it's also fun to get really
triggering comments and and to not close the dopamine loop
for them i think if people understood um the dopamine reward prediction error
that we could end all the um amplifying comment battles online
because what happens is if someone takes a a jab at you of any kind there's
actually an open dopamine loop waiting for you to respond and any response
actually gives them that that dopamine response of success it's a little bit of
a it's like scoring a three-pointer and the no response actually drops their
dopamine below baseline and that's its own form of retaliation and i have to be
careful because i don't want to encourage people to retaliate but any
anything that short-circuits the kind of madness of getting pulled into
some online battle that's totally meaningless it's taking people away from
other powerful good things that they could do in the world
you know we've been talking mainly about dopamine and its scheduling and about
the fact that it can be attached to anything i think
many people find it hard to subjectively attach dopamine to something they don't
want to do this is something that uh if we'd spoken a year ago i would've i my
answer would have been a little bit different to the question of how do you
get motivated well one way to do that is if you are good at subjectively
if you are good at subjectively attaching
attaching dopamine to the pursuit just knowing
okay i really am hungry for this i'm just i'm going to tell myself that you
know making you know making it one percent of the way
is a success and i'm going to keep going and i'm going to keep ratcheting on and
that's great if you can do that but for people that can't do that understanding
this relationship with a pleasure pain balance can be more powerful just
understanding the more friction and pain that you experience the greater the
dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the
whole process of pursuing more dopamine and then the other aspect of it
is that any time that we're leaning into is that any time that we're leaning into
action action
you know it has the possibility of being an amplifying
process or a depleting process and the key to that is making sure that
you're balancing the dopamine and epinephrine systems you know epinephrine
being this molecule of universal currency of energy output it could be
out of hate or it could be out of love epinephrine doesn't care and actually
dopamine doesn't care none of these systems care about us they just
work underneath our underneath our conscious control but when you start to
understand that hitting the gas pedal is great but
hitting the gas pedal and then coming off the gas pedal a little bit
you can kind of sit in a more relaxed rpm actually allows you to go much
further i think that people leaning into action is terrific i always
say you can either be back on your heels flat footed or forward center of mass
the best situation is actually to be right upright but just know that you can
be forward center of mass at any point and you know that to take it back to sex
and reproduction because it's a salient example the arc of of sex is very
interesting because when you think about autonomic arousal it turns out that the
the arousal stage of sex actually involves release of dopamine
but is what we call parasympathetic dominant it's actually has to be relaxed
dominant it's actually has to be relaxed enough
enough in order to occur okay everyone can read
between the lines on this orgasm is actually
orgasm is actually a
a i want to say full blown it's a it's a
it is a sympathetic nervous system driven response it's
identical to the stress system it's driven by the same neural circuits as
driven by the same neural circuits as stress
stress and then what comes afterward
the parasympathetic system goes back up again it's that deep relaxation so why
do i say this not to talk about sex to do i say this not to talk about sex to
be be
you know to to serve as a highlighter but rather our species arrived here
because of this dance between arousal and relaxation arousal and relaxation
and one thing we can say for sure about every human being that's alive now is
that their parents at least once mastered this dance of relaxed but not
and excited but not too excited then really excited and then relaxed that
dance was mastered by all of our parents and that's what delivered us here to
some extent and so i what this means is that all the neural
circuits from the ones that led to our conception to the ones that lead to us
pursuing goals have this balance that's almost like a like a
seesaw right there's activation and calm activation and calm and it's that
dynamic process that's important to master in every endeavor so we use sex
as an example but in pursuit of goals you have to learn how to pursue
short-term goals and like the goals within the day make a
cup of coffee and goal and long-term goals and when i said dopamine is what's
setting the your time perception it's an interval
your time perception it's an interval timer
timer what you're saying is it's like the two
marshmallow experiment done at stanford def defer the dopamine
and actually if you can turn the waiting into the dopamine and then
you can extend out the reward for you know waiting for the second marshmallow
15 minutes later et cetera et cetera and there are many many examples of this in
the psychology and neuroscience literature and i would say finally in
2020 we finally as a field got a clear idea of how dopamine is really working
because before it was all about work dopamine hit right
sex gives you a doubling hit the internet gives you a dopamine what we
didn't realize is that repeated engagement with these things leads to
dopamine depletion and that the pain and pleasure balance
is always at work dude that's so brilliant dude
one the huberman lab is amazing on youtube people need to check that [ __ ]
out and your instagram page is also out and your instagram page is also
amazing amazing
where do you want people to follow you at yeah so well thanks um for those kind
words um yes i mean them so aggressively i'll bite through the camera to let
people know how seriously i mean that thank you yeah so i i have an instagram
page it's huberman lab and there i teach neuroscience in anywhere from one minute
to you know five minute tidbits and a lot of actionable tools that relate to
all sorts of things sleep and motivation etc and then the huberman lab podcast is
apple spotify and we have a youtube channel for people want to watch and
listen to it and they're it's a little bit different than most
podcasts because i will do four episodes all on one general theme like food and
the brain and these are long
hour to two hour long lectures where i just kind of blab on and on myself but
they're all time stamps so people can get information there and it's tools and
science and then we have great guests on who are expert in their fields people
like anna lemke um luminaries and the you know matt walker folks of that sort
of robert