Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we
discuss science and science based tools
for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today, my guest is dr. Lex Friedman dr. Lex Friedman, is an expert in electrical and computer engineering, artificial intelligence and Robotics. He is also the host of The Lex Friedman podcast, which initially started as a podcast, focus on technology and science of various.
It's kinds including computer science and physics but rapidly evolved to include guests and other topics as a matter of focus including sport for instance, dr. Lex Friedman is a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and he's had numerous guests on, who come from the fields of Brazilian jiu-jitsu brought from the coaching side and from the competitor side, he also has shown an active interest in topics such as chess and essentially anything that involves intense activation and
A judgment of the mind and or body. In fact, The Lex frieden and podcast has evolved to take on very difficult topics, such as mental health. He's at various psychiatrists and other guests on that relate to mental health and mental illness as well as guest focused on geopolitics. And some of the more controversial issues that face our times. He's had comedians, he's had scientists, he's had friends. He's had enemies on his podcast, Lex has a phenomenal, I would say a 1 in an eight billion.
Bility to find these people make them comfortable and in that Comfort, both try to understand them and to confront them in, to push them. So that we all learn. All of which, is to say that Lex Friedman is no longer just an accomplished scientist. He certainly is that, but he has also become one of the more preeminent, thought leaders on the planet. And if there's anything that really captures the essence of Lex Friedman, it's his love of learning his desire to share with us The Human Experience.
And to broaden that experience. So that we all may benefit in many ways, our discussion during today's episode captures, the many facets of Lex Friedman, although no conversation. Of course, could capture them. All, we sit down to the conversation. Just days after Lex returned from Ukraine, where he deliberately placed himself into the tension of that environment in order to understand the geopolitics of the region. And to understand exactly what was happening at the level of the ground and the people there, you may notice that he carries
Quite a lot of both emotion and knowledge and understanding and yet in a very classic Lex Friedman way. You'll notice that he's able to zoom out of his own experience around any number of different topics and view them through a variety of lenses. So that first of all everyone feel included, but most of all. So that everyone learns something new, that is to gain New Perspective. Our discussion also Ventures into the Waters of social media and how that landscape is changing the way that Science and Technology are.
We also get into the topics of motivation drive and purpose, both finding it and executing on that drive and purpose. I should mention that. This is episode 100 of the huberman Lab podcast and I would be remiss. If I did not tell you that there would be no human Lab podcast. Were it not for Lex Friedman? I was a fan of the Lex frieden and podcast long before I was ever invited onto the podcast as a guest. And after our first recording, Lex was the one that suggested that I start a podcast, he only gave me two pieces of advice.
This. The first piece of advice was start a podcast and the second piece of advice was that I not just make it me blabbing into the microphone and staring at the camera so I can safely say that I at least followed half of his advice and that I am ever grateful for Lex. Both as a friend, a colleague in science and now fellow podcaster for making the suggestion that we start this podcast. I already mentioned a few of the topics covered on today's podcast but I can assure you that there is far more to the person.
That many of us know as Lex Friedman. If you are somebody interested in artificial intelligence engineering or robotics, today's discussion is most certainly for you and if you are not but you are somebody who is interested in World politics. And more importantly, The Human Experience, both the individual and the collective Human Experience lectures. What can only be described as incredible insights into what he views as The Human Experience and what is optimal in order to derive from our time on this planet?
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing. You don't. That means the electrolytes. Sodium potassium and magnesium are in element in the correct ratios, but it has no sugar as
Should be for on the podcast. Electrolytes are critical to the function of every cell in the body and especially the cells in your brain, meaning the neurons or nerve cells. Indeed the ability for nerve cells to be active. And communicate with one. Another critically depends on sodium, potassium and magnesium. You can get electrolytes from a variety of sources but it's often hard to get them in the proper ratios, even from food. So if you're somebody who is exercising a lot and sweating or if you're somebody falling for instance, a low carbohydrate or even a semi low-carbohydrate diet
That will cause you to excrete electrolytes. I tend to have my element first thing in the morning when I wake up or within the first few hours of waking any time, while, or after I'm exercising or I've sweat a lot such as exiting the sauna. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element, that's LMN t.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase again, that's drink element. LMN t.com huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods.
Your health by giving you real time feedback on your diet, using a continuous glucose monitor, blood glucose or blood. Sugar is a critical aspect of your immediate and long-term health and indeed your feelings of vigor and mental Clarity and well-being. At any moment. One of the key things is to know how different foods and food combinations, and timing of food intake is impacting blood glucose. And with levels, you're able to assess all of that. In real time, I tried levels and what it taught me for instance, was that I can eat certain foods at certain times of day.
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And physical strength and endurance. So if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose, monitor yourself, go to levels dot, link / huberman. Again, that's levels dot link. Link-16 hubermann. Today's episode is also brought To Us by eight sleep aids,sleep. Make smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've talked to many times on this podcast about the critical relationship between sleep and body. Temperature that is in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep throughout the night.
Right. Our body temperature needs to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees and conversely. When we wake up in the morning that is in large part because of our body heating up by 123 degrees. Now people have different core body temperatures and they tend to run colder or hotter throughout the night. Eight sleep, allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, so that you have the optimal temperature that gets you. The best night's sleep. I started sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover about eight months ago and it is completely transformed by sleep. I sleep so much deeper. I
Got far less during the middle of the night. If at all, and I wake up, feeling far better than I ever have even after the same amount of sleep. If you want to try Aid, sleeping, go to eight, sleep.com huberman to save up to $400 off, their sleep fit holiday bundle, which includes their new pod. Three cover eight sleep. Currently ships in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eight, sleep.com hubermann. And now for my discussion with dr. Lex Friedman. Welcome back.
It's good to be back in a bedroom. This feels like a porn set. I apologize to open that way. Either ban porn says, so I should admit this, our
studio has been renovated. So, here we are for the Monumental recording of episode 100. So 100 of the room and Loud podcast which was inspired by The Lex Freeman podcast. Some people already know this story but I'll repeat it again for those that don't there would not be a huberman Lab podcast, we're
Not for Lex Friedman because after recording as a guest on his podcast a few years ago, he made the suggestion that I start a podcast and he explained to me how it works and he said you should start a podcast but just make sure that it's not. You blabbing the whole time Andrew and I only sort of followed the advice.
Yeah well you surprised surprised me surprised the world that you're able to
Talk for hours and cite. Some of the best signs going on and be able to give people advice without many interruptions or edits or any of that. I mean, that takes an incredible amount of skill that you probably born with. And some of it is developed. I mean, the whole science Community is proud of you, man. Stanford is proud of you. So yeah, it's a beautiful thing. It was really surprising because it's unclear, how a scientist can do a great podcast. That's not just shooting the shit about random stuff, but
It really is giving very structured, good advice. That's boiling down the state-of-the-art science into something that's actually useful for people. So that was impressive. It's like, holy shit. He actually pulled this off and doing it every week on a different topic. That I mean, you know, I'm usually positive especially for people, I love and support but damn, I thought there's no way he's going to be able to pull this all week after week, and it's been only getting better and better and better.
Do whole rant on recent podcasts, if you get with who of how awesome you are with Rana Alcala. Be, she's a emotion recognition person AI person and then she didn't know who you were and I was like the healthy me your. And I just wanted this whole rant of how awesome yours is hilarious. Well, I'm
very gratified to hear this. I have my it's a little uncomfortable for me to hear, but listen, I'm just really happy. If people are getting information.
Action that they like and can make actionable and it was inspired by you and look right back at you. I I've followed a number of your structural form at a tire. I don't wear a tie. I'm constantly reminded of this by my father who says it's all my podcast. He was like why don't you dress properly like your friend Lex? He literally said that and to debate that goes back and forth. But nonetheless
how's it feel episode 100? How does it feel? You know I can't imagine.
You're here you here after so many episodes and done so much. I mean the number of hours which is just insane. The amount of passion, the amount of work you put into this, what's it feel like
it feels great and it feels very much like the Horizon is still at the same distance in front of me, you know, every episode I just try and get information there and the process that we talked about in your podcast, we won't go into it of collecting information, distilling it down to some simple notes.
Walking around listening to music trying to, you know, figure out what the motifs are. And then as just like you, I don't use a teleprompter or anything like that. There's very minimal notes so feels great and I love it. And again I'm just grateful to you for inspiring and I just want to keep going and do more of it. And I should say, I am also relieved that we're sitting here because you recently went overseas to very intense war zone.
Literally, the Ukraine, and the entire time that you were there. I was genuinely concerned, you know, the world's a unpredictable place in general. And we don't always get the only vote in what happens to us. So, first of all, welcome, back safely, One Piece, One Alive piece. And what was that? Like, I mean, as at a broad level, at a specific level, what Drew you there? What surprised you and
how do you think it changed you and coming back
here?
I think there's a lot to say, but first it is really good to be back. One of the things that when you go to a difficult part of the world or a part of the world, that's going through something difficult, you really appreciate how great it is to be an American
Everything, the easy access to food despite what people think the stable reliable rule of law?
The lack of corruption in that you can trust that if you start a business or if you take on various Pursuits in life, that there's not going to be at scale manipulation of your efforts, such that you can't succeed. So that this kind of, you know, capitalism is in. That's the ideal of capitalism is really still burning bright in this country and it really makes you appreciate those aspects. And also, just the
We need to have a home for Generations across Generations. So you can have a, your grandfather living. I don't know, Kentucky in a certain city and then his children lived there and you live there and then you just continues on and on that's the kind of thing you can have when you don't have War because War destroys entire communities and destroys histories Generations, the like life stories that stretch across the generations.
Ins.
Yeah, I didn't even think about that until you said just now but photographs hard drives, get destroyed or just abandon right libraries. I mean nowadays things exist in the cloud but there's still a lot of material Goods that have you know, are irreplaceable. Right? What
even, you know in rural parts of the United States that don't exist in the cloud, right? A lot of people still will even in towns. They still love the physical photo album of your family, a lot of people still
Store their photographs of families in the stood, the VHS tapes and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But I think there's so many things I've learned and really felt the lessons, one of, which is nobody gives a damn, when your photos are gone and all that kind of stuff, your house is gone, the thing, time and time. Again, I saw for people that lost everything is how happy they are for the people.
They love the the friends, the family that are still alive, that's the only thing they talked about that. In fact, they don't mention actually with much dramatic sort of vigor about the trauma of losing your home. They're just non-stop saying how lucky they are that person X personalized still here. And that makes you realize that when you lose everything, it still makes you realize what really matters which is the people in your life.
A lot of people kind of realize that later in life, when you're facing mortality, when you're facing your death, or, you know, you get a cancer diagnosis that kind of stuff. I think people here in America in California was with the fires. You, you can still lose your home. You realize like it doesn't really matter. It's a pain in the ass but what matters is still the family, the people and so on. I think the most intense thing
I talked to several hundred people, some of which is recorded, I've really been struggling to put that out because I have to edit it myself and so it's you're talking about 30, 40 hours of
footage and it is emotionally struggling. It's expressional struggles is
extremely difficult. So I talked a lot of politicians. The number two in the country. Number three, I'll be back there to talk to the president to do a three-hour conversation. Those are easy to edit, you know, they're they're really heartfelt and thoughtful folks who
From different perspectives on the geopolitics of the war, but the ones that really hard to edit is like Grandma's that are, like, in the middle of nowhere, they lost everything. They still have hope, they still have love and some of them have some of them. Many of them unfortunately, have now hate in their heart. So in February 1, Russia invaded Ukraine.
This is the thing I realized about war. One of the most painful one lessons, is that?
War creates generational hate it. You know we sometimes think about wars the thing that kills people kill civilians, kills soldiers takes away lives, injures people but we don't directly think about the the secondary and tertiary effects of that. Which last decades, which is anyone who's lost a father or mother or daughter or son?
They now hate the not just the individual soldiers of the leaders that invaded their country, but the entirety of the people. So it's not that they hate Vladimir Putin or hate the Russian military. They hate Russian people.
So that tears, the fabric of a thing that for me, you know my my half my family's from Ukraine, half of my family is from Russia but there's a I remember the pain, the Triumph of WWII still resonates through my entire family tree. And so you remember when the Russians and ukrainians fought together against this Nazi invasion? You remember, a lot of that?
And now to see the fabric of this people's torn. Apart, completely with hey is very really, really difficult for me just to realize that things will just never be the same on this particular cultural historical aspect but also
there's so many painful ways in which things will never be the same, which is we've seen that. It's possible to have a major hot war in the 21st century. I think a lot of people are watching this China is watching this, India's watching this, United States is watching this and thinking
We can actually have a large-scale war, and I think the lessons learned from that might be the kind that lead to a major World War 3 in the 21st century. So, like, one of the things I realized watching the whole scene,
Is that we don't know shit about what's going to happen in the 21st century. And it might, we kind of have this intuition, like surely there's not going to be another War. We'll just Coast. Yeah. Yeah, yeah pandemic. Yeah. To normal back soon. Whatever that is. But you have to remember at the end of World War One, you know as Woodrow Wilson called it the war to end all wars. Nobody in the Ironically in a dark way. It was also the The Roaring 20s when people believe this.
There will never be another world war and 20 years after that, the the rise of Nazi Germany, the charismatic leader that captivated the minds of millions and built up a military that can take on the whole world. And so, it makes you realize that this is still possible. This is still possible. And then the, the tension, you see the, the media machine. The propaganda machine that I've gotten to see every aspect of
It's still fueling that division between America and China between Russia and India. And then Africa has a complicated thing that's trying to figure out who are they, with, who are they against? And just, as tension is building and building and like, he makes you realize, like, we might the thing that might Shake human civilization, may not be so far off.
That that's a realization you get to really feel. I mean there's some all kinds of other lessons and one of which is propaganda is I got to get a lot of letters emails and some of them are full of really intense language full of hate. From every side toward me. What? Well they hate is towards me as representing side x and x stands as a variable.
For every side. So either I'm has olenski show or I'm a Putin show or I'm a NATO show or I'm going to America America show American Empire show or I'm a democrat or a republican because it's already been in this country politicized. I think there's a sense of Ukraine. Is this place? That's full of corruption. Why we're sending money there? I think that's kind of the messaging on the Republican side.
I'd on the Democratic side. I'm not even keeping track of the actual messaging and the conspiracy theories and, and the narratives, but they are the tension is there and I get to feel it directly. And would you get to really experience has, there's a large number of narratives that all are extremely confident in themselves that they know the truth. People are convinced, first of all the time, not being lied to people in Russia, think there's no proper
And they think that, yes, yes. There's like State sponsor propaganda, but we're all smart enough to ignore the the sort of lame propaganda. That's everywhere. They know that we can think on our own, we know the truth and everybody kind of speaks in this way. Everybody in the United States says. Well, yes, there's mainstream media, they're full of messaging and propaganda but we were smart. We can think on our own of course we see through that every everybody says this and then the conclusion of
Of their thought is often hatred towards some group, whatever that group is. And the more you've lost, the more intense, the feeling of hatred, it's a really difficult field to walk through calmly and with an open mind and try to understand what's really going on. It's
super intense. That is the only words that come to mind. As I hear this, you mentioned something that it seems that hate General.
Liza's, you know, it's against an entire group or an entire country. Why do you think it is? That? Hey generalize has, and that love may or may not generalize. I've had so the one of the as you can imagine
The kind of question I asked is, do you have?
Love Or Hate in Your Heart. It's a question. I asked almost everybody and then I would dig into this exact question that you're asking.
I think some of the most beautiful things I've heard which is people that are full of hate, are able to self introspect about it. They they know they shouldn't feel it but I can't help but it's not they know that ultimately the thing that helps them and helps. Everyone is to feel love for fellow man but they're they've they can't help it. They know it's like a drug this a like hate escalates. It's a vicious spiral.
You just can't help it. And the question I also asked is, do you think you'll ever be able to forgive Russia and after much thought almost it's, it's split but most people will say no,
I will never be able to forgive.
And because of the generalization, you talked about earlier, that could even include all right, on statements. They mean all Russians
because because
If you do nothing, that's as bad or worse than then, then being part of the army that invades. So the the people that are just sitting there, the good Germans, the people, they're just quietly going on with their lives. You're just as bad. If not worse is their
perspective.
Earlier, you said that going over to the Ukraine. Is now allowed you to realize. Just so many of the positives of being here in the United States, I have a good friend, we both know him, I will name it by name, but we've communicated, the three of us from Tier 1 Special Operations. He spent years doing, deployments really amazing individual. And I remember when the pandemic hit, he said on a text thread, you know, Americans aren't used to the
Government interfering with their plans, you know around the world. Many people are familiar with governments dramatically interfering with their plans, sometimes what even in a seemingly random way here. We were not braced for that. They're, I mean, they're there. We get speeding tickets and there's, you know, lines to vote and things like that. But I think the pandemic was one of the first times at least in my life that I can remember, where it really seemed like the government was impeding, what people naturally wanted to do and that was a shock.
Four people here and I have a what might seem like a somewhat mundane question, but it's something that I saw on social media. A lot of people were asking me to ask you and, and I was curious about to what was a typical day like over there, where you sleeping in a bed, where you sleeping on the ground. Everyone seems to want to know what were you eating where you eating once a day? Were you eating your steak or were you, were you in Fairly deprived conditions over there? I saw a couple photos that you
posted with out of doors in front of rubble. Pith helmet on one case. You know what, what was that typical day like over
there? So there's there's two modes, one of them? I spent a lot of time in Kiev which is much safer than it may be obvious to stay. But for people who don't know, it's in the middle of the country and it's much safer than the actual front that the
The battle is happening. So, the much much safer than Kiev even is l'viv, which is the western part of the country. So, the times I spent in Kiev were fundamentally different than the time I spent at the front, and I want to the her son region, which is where a lot of really heated battles happening. There's several areas of this hard cave. It's in the northeast of the country and then there's donbas region, which is east of the country. And then there's her song region, which but I'm not good at geography.
So is the southeast of the country. And that's where, at least when I was, there was a lot of really heated fighting happening. So when I was in the hearse on region, there's you know, it's what you would imagine. The place I stayed in a hotel where all the lights have to stay off to the entire town. All the lights are off, if the kind of navigate through the darkness and then we'll use your phone to shine. And so on, this
is terrible for the Circadian system. Yeah.
That's exactly. How is this. How can I do this? Where's my element and athletic greens? How can I function know? There's I think it was balanced by the Deep appreciation of being alive
right now. I mean, this is the reason I asked is the reason I ask is, you know, we get used to all these Creature Comforts. Yes, and we don't need them, but we often come to depend on them in a way that makes us feel like we need them.
Yeah. But
Very quickly. There's something about the intensity of light that you see in people's eyes because they've been living through war. That makes you forget all those Creature Comforts. And it's, it was actually, you know, I'm somebody who hates traveling and so on, I love the creature habits. I love, I love the comfort of the ritual, right? But all that was forgotten very quickly, just the intensity of feeling, the intensity of love that people have for each other. That was that was obvious in terms.
Food. So there's a curfew. So depends on what part of the country. But usually, you basically have to scammer home at, like, 9:00 p.m. so the hard curfew and a lot of places is 11 p.m. night but by then you like you have to be home. So in some places is 10 so you at 9:00 p.m. you start going home, which for me was was kind of wonderful also because I get to spend
I get to be forced to spend time alone and think for many hours in wherever I'm staying, which is really nice. And everybody, there's a calmness in the quietness to the whole thing in terms of food once a day.
Just the food is incredibly cheap and Incredibly delicious. People are still one of the things they can still take pride in is making the best possible food. They can so meet but they do admire American Meats of the meat is not as great as it could be in that country. But I ate borscht every day, you know, all that kind of stuff mostly me. So spend the entire day wake up in the morning.
Coffee spend the entire day talking to people, which for me is very difficult because of the intensity of the story is one after the other after the other. We just talked to regular people talk to soldiers, talk to politicians, all kinds of soldiers. I talk to people there according Rescue Mission, so Americans hung out with Tim Kennedy. Oh yeah, I'm great. Tim Kennedy, they create in Canada who also
So him and many others revealed to me, one of the many reasons I'm proud to be an American is how trained and skilled and effective, American soldiers are
and I guess repeat for listeners this podcast, maybe we should familiarize them with who Tim Kennedy is because I realized that a number of them will
know. They do that. How do you try to summarize a
man right in in? Let's we can be accurate but not exhaustive, as your as any
Good data are accurate when I exhausted very skilled and accomplished MMA fighter. Very skilled in accomplish. Special, former Special Operations and we're American Patriot and podcaster to right. Does he have his own
podcast? Maybe I'm going, maybe we know Andy stump has his own podcast. Yes. Yeah, she's amazing podcast yeah which is
great. Yeah. Clearing hot podcast with a nice
Thompson but also Tim Kennedy is like the embodiment of America into the to the most
Well, in the most ridiculous degree. So he's like, what do you imagine?
What is the team America? That like, I just imagined him like shirtless on a tank. Rolling into enemy territory, just screaming at the top of his lungs. That's just his personality, but not
posturing. That's a yeah. She does the work as they say. So this is the
thing, he really embodies that. Now some of that is just his personality humor. I'd like to sort of comment on the humor of things not just with him, it's very one. Other interesting thing I've learned but also when he's actually helping people
He's extremely good at what he does, which is building teams that rescue that go into the most dangerous areas of Ukraine, dangerous areas anywhere else and they get the job done and look, one of the things I heard time and time again, which which really interesting to me that Ukrainian soldiers said that.
You know comparing Ukrainian Russian and American soldiers, American soldiers are the bravest which was very interesting for me to hear given how high the morale is for the Ukrainian soldiers. But that just reveals that training enables you to be brave. So it's not just about how well trained they are. And so on it's howling tents and ferocious that are in the fighting. And then makes you realize, like this is American Army, not just to the technology, especially the specialist.
Special force, guys, they still is one of the most effective and terrifying armies in the world and I'm listen just for context. I'm somebody who is for the most part anti-war a pacifist but you get to see, you know, some of the realities of War kind of wake you up to what needs to get done to protect its sovereignty to protect some of the values to protect civilians in.
Holmes and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes, you know, War has to happen. And I should also mention on the Russian side, because
Well, I haven't gotten to experience the Russian side yet. I do fully plan to travel to Russia as I've told everybody. I was very upfront with everybody about this. I would like to hear the story of Russians, but I do know, from the Ukrainian side, like the grandmas, I love Grandma's. They told me stories that the Russians really the ones that entered their Villages. They really, really believe they're saving. Ukraine from Nazis from Nazi occupation.
So they feel that there's the Ukraine is under control of Nazi organizations and their they believe they're saving the country. That's their brothers and sisters. So I think
I think propaganda. And I think truth is a very difficult thing to arrive in that, in that war zone. I think in the 21st century, one of the things you realize that so much of War, even more. So than, in the past isn't information war and people that just use Twitter for their source of information, might be surprised to know how much misinformation there is on Twitter, like real narratives being sold.
And so it's really hard to know who to believe and through all of that, you have to try to keep an open mind and ultimately ignore the powerful and listen to actual citizens, actual people. That's the other may be obvious lesson, is that?
Wars waged by powerful rich people and it's the poor people that suffer and that's just visible time and time
again.
You mentioned the fact that people still enjoy food or the pleasure of cooking or there's occasional humor or maybe frequent humor. No, Jocko willing has talked about this and in Warfare and the that the all the elements of the human spirit and conditions still emerge, at various times, find this amazing and you and I have had conversations about this before, but the, the aperture of the mind, you know, you know, that classic story that comes to mind is a, the one of Viktor Frankl or
Nelson Mandela, you know, you put somebody into a small box of confinement and some people break under those conditions. And other people find entire stories within a centimeter of concrete that can, you know, occupy them and it real stories and richness or humor or love or Fascination and surprised. And I find this so interesting that the mind is so adaptable. You know, we talked about Creature Comforts and then lack of Creature Comforts and the way that we can
And yet humans are always striving. It seems or one would hope for these better conditions to better their conditions. So as you've come back and you've been here now, back in the, in the states, for how long, after your
trip, depends on this podcast release, but it felt like I've never left. So practically speaking a couple
months. Yeah, and we won't be shy were recording this mid-september, so I'm,
but we actually recorded this several years ago. So we're anticipating the future.
We're going to start tell you. Is this a simulation you enjoy? I'm still trying to figure out what that actually
means,
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Is that it gets to be in the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important, it's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact, our immediate and long-term health, and those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens vitamins. And minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and it tastes great. If
I'd like to try out let it greens. You can go to athletic greens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens. While you're on the road, in the car, on the plane etcetera and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K to again, that's athletic greens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs. And the year supply of vitamin D3 K to, I know I speak for many people. When I say that we are very happy that you're back, we know that's not going to be the first and last trip that there will be others.
Um and that you'll be going to Russia as well and and presumably other places as well in order to explore and I have to say as a podcaster and as your friend, I was really inspired that your sense of adventure and your sense of not just Adventure, but thoughtful respectful Adventure. You understood what you were doing. You weren't just going there to get some wartime footage or something. This wasn't the kick or a thrill. This is really serious and remain serious. So thank you for doing
Doing it and please. Next time you go bring Tim Kennedy and again or I feel like, I
feel like Jim Carrey gets you into what will take it? Because he really loves going the most dangerous places and helping people. So I think he'd give me into more trouble in his worth and I should mention that.
I mean there's many reasons I went but it's definitely not something I take lightly or want to do again. I'm so I'm doing things that I don't want to do. I just feel like I have to you're compelled so I don't think there's now I'll definitely talk about it as we all should. There's different areas of the world that are seeing a lot of suffering Yemen. There's so many atrocities going on in the world today, but this one is just
Personal to me. So I want to, I feel like I'm qualified just because of the language. So most of the talking, by the way I've been, I was doing, it was in Russian and so because of the language because of the my history, I felt like I have to do this particular thing. I think it's in many ways, stupid, and dangerous. And that was made clear to me. But I do many things of this nature because the heart says pulls both stores that but also there's a
There's a freedom to not.
You know, I'm afraid of death but I think there's a freedom to it's almost like, okay, if I die, I want to take full advantage of not having a family currently. I feel like when you have a family, there's a responsibility for others. So you immediately become more conservative and careful. I feel like I want to take full advantage of this particular moment in my life when you can be a little bit more accepting of risk. So we should definitely read
Produces at some point. Maybe not before next time, you should just free some
sperm.
Really? Is that thing is that we do with ice bath? Is that how that works? You
know, it's interesting here's a there's always an opportunity to do some science protocols you know that there are products on the internet and there are actually a few decent manuscripts looking at how cold exposure can increase testosterone levels, but it doesn't happen by the cold directly good scientists. As the authors of those papers were and are realize that it's the vasoconstriction and then the vasodilation you
No, as that as people warm up again, there's increased blood flow to the testicles and in women. It seems, there's probably increased blood flow to the reproductive organs as well after people warm back up. So, that seems to cause some sort of hyper nourishment of the various cells. The sertoli in lytic cells of the testes, that lead to increased output of testosterone and in women testosterone as well. So the cold exposure in any case is obviously a, do you do the ice bath you into that I've not done, right?
A Russian. You probably consider that a hot tub. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. It's a nice thing to have fun with every once in a while to warm up. No, I haven't done that. Been kind of waiting to maybe do it together with you at some point. Great because we have a guide, we have one here,
it'll be straightforward for you. I always say that adrenaline comes in waves and so if you just think about it walls, like you're going through a number of Walls of adrenaline as opposed to going for time, becomes rather trivial with your Jiu-Jitsu background 10, you'll immediately recognize the physiological.
All sensation, even though it's cold specifically, it's the adrenaline that makes you want to hop out of the thing.
And now you've seen Jose so Joe set up a really nice man cave or its name in a cave because it's so big. It's like a network of man caves but it has ice bath and sauna next to each other.
So we have one of those here, ice bath and sauna. So have to get you in it when one of these days maybe tonight, we'll maybe tomorrow. No. Although there is a
I don't know, the underlying physiological basis but there does seem to be a trend toward truth-telling in the sauna. Some people refer to them as truth. Barrels mine's a barrel sauna shaped. Like a barrel, who knows? Why maybe under intense heat duress. People just feel compelled to share. They have a
complicated relationship, asanas, because of all the way cutting some, some of the deepest suffering. Sorry to interrupt, I've done was in the sauna. It's very, it's I mean, I've gone to some dark places in a sauna because I right
Russell my whole life Judo right Jutsu and those way Cuts can really test the mind. So your truth telling, yeah, it's a certain kind of truth-telling because you're sitting there and the clock moves slower than it has ever moved in your life. Yeah. So I usually, for the most part I would try to, you know, have a bunch of sweats garbage bags and all that kind of stuff and run. It's easier because you can distract the mind in the sauna. You can't distract them.
Is just you and all the excuses and all the, all the weaknesses in your mind, just coming to the surface and you're just sitting that sweating or not sweating. That's the
worst end to talk about visual aperture, you're in a small box. So it also inspires some claustrophobia, even if you're not claustrophobic, that's absolutely true. And the desire to just get out of the thing is where the address you get a pretty serious adrenaline Surge from from in the sauna as well. It now the saint actually will it
Deplete testosterone, but it kills sperm. So for people that sperm on a 60 days perm cycle. So if you're trying to donate sperm or because that's what got us on to this or fertilize an egg where eggs in whatever format dish, or in Vivo as we say in science, that which means. Well, you can look it up, folks. The 60-day sperm cycle. So if you go into a really hot sauna or a hot bath or a hot tub, you're in 60 days, those sperm are going to be significantly greater
Portion of them will be dead will be non-viable. So there's a simple solution to people just put ice pack down there or, you know, a jar, not this jar but a jar of cold fluid, you know, between their legs and just sit there and or they go back and forth between the ice bath on the sauna. But you probably, if you're going to go back over there, you should freeze sperm. We're going to do a couple episodes on fertility, when it's relatively inexpensive and you're young. So you probably do it now because there is a association with autism is male.
Get older. It's not a strong one, it's significant but it's still a
small contribution to don't isn't feeding sites as you age. Don't sperm get wiser or no there's no I have to back
that. No but you know men can conceive healthy children and considerable age but in any case but no they don't get wiser. It's like what happens is interesting? Aged steak. Well it's a little bit like like the maturation of the brain in the sense that some of the sperm get much better at swimming and then many of them get get less good. Motility is a strong correlate of the
The sperm, this is probably a good time to announce that. I'm selling my sperm is and FTS. See how much that? Oh, my goodness writing.
The well, your children, your future children. And my future children are supposed to do Jujitsu together since I've only done the one Jiu-Jitsu class. So I'm strongly vested in you having children. Yes. But only in the friendly kind of way.
Well yes friendly competition kind of way. Yeah prominently of the clan. Yep.
For sure. So
moving on to
science but still with our minds in the Ukraine, did you encounter any scientists or see any Universities or you know as we know in this country and in Europe and in elsewhere, you know, signs takes infrastructure, uni, buildings, you need Laboratories you need robots. You need a lot of equipment. And you need - A the freezers and you need incubators and you need money and you.
Need technicians and typically it's been the wealthier countries that have been able to do more research for sake of research and development of and privatization, certainly. The Ukraine had some marvelous universities and marvelous scientists what's going on with science and science scientists over there. And, and gosh, can we even calculate the loss of discovery that is occurring as the consequence of this
conflict. So science.
goes on the before the war Ukraine had a very vibrant Tech sector that which means engineering and all that kind of stuff in Kiev is a lot of excellent universities and they still go on the the the biggest hit I would say is not the infrastructure of the science but the fact because of the high morale,
Everybody is joining the military. So everybody's going to the front to fight including, you know, you and your huberman would be fighting and not because you have to but because you want to and everybody know would be really proud that you're fighting. Even though everyone tries to convince, you know, Andrew huberman. You have much better ways to contribute. There's deep honor in fighting for your country. Yes. But there are better ways to contribute to your country. Then just picking up a gun that you're
That trained with and going to the front, still, they do it, the scientist Engineers CEOs, professors students men and actors men and women, obviously primarily men. But men and women like much more than you would seen in other militaries. Women are everybody, everybody wants to fight. Everybody's proud of fighting. There's no discussion of
Of kind of pacifism. Should we be fighting? She's this right. Is this? You know, it's everybody's really proud of fighting so that that's a. So there's this kind of black hole that pulls everything. All the resource into the war effort, that's not just Financial, but also psychological. So it's like if you're a scientist it feels like what it feels like almost like your.
Is honoring Humanity by continuing to do things you were doing before. There's a lot of people that convert it to being soldiers. They literally watch a YouTube video of how to shoot a particular gun, how to armor drone with a grenade, you know? If you're a tech person, you know how to work with drones. So you're going to use that use whatever skills you got, figure out, whatever skills you got and how to use them to help the effort on the front. And so that's a big hit but that said that, you know,
Talk to a lot of folks in Kiev faculty primarily in the tech economics space. So I didn't get a chance to interact with folks who are on the biology chemistry Neuroscience side of things but that, that, that still goes on. So one of the really impressive things about Ukraine is that they're able to maintain infrastructure like Road food supply. All that kind of stuff education, while the wars going on, especially in Kiev, the war started. Where
Nobody knew what the key of us going to be taken by the Russian forces. It was surrounded.
and,
A lot of experts from outside or convinced that Russia would take care of and and they didn't. And one of the really impressive things as a leader. One of the things I really experienced is that a lot of people criticized szalinski before the war, we only had about like, 30 percent approval rate. A lot of people didn't like zelanski but one of the great things he did as a leader, which I'm not sure many leaders will be able to do is when Kiev
Clearly being invaded, he chose to stay his stay in the capital. Everybody all the American Military, the intelligence agencies, NATO, his own staff, advisers all told him to flee and he stayed. And so that's I think that was a beacon a symbol for the rest for the University for Science for for the infrastructure that we're staying too, and that kept the whole thing going. There's an interesting
social experiment that happened.
I think for folks who are interested in sort of gun control in this country, in particular, is one of the decisions they made early on, is to give guns to everybody.
Semi-automatics early on in the war or early on in the war
against ya. Everybody got a gun. They also released a bunch of prisoners from from prison because there was no staff to to to, to keep the prison's running. And so there's a very interesting psychological experiment of like, how is this going to go? Everybody has a gun, are they going to start robbing places? Are they going to start taking advantage of a chaotic situation and
What happened is that crime? Went to zero, so it turned out that this as an experiment worked
wonderfully, let's say case where love generalized. Yes. Or at least hate did not. We don't know if it's love or it sort of lack of initiative for self, you know,
Common culture, directed A. Yeah, I don't write its, I think that's a very correct to say that it wasn't hate. That was unifying people. It was love of country level Community. It's the probably the same thing though.
Will happen to humans when like aliens invade, as we're all, it's the common effort. Everybody puts everything else to the side plus just the sheer amount of guns, it's similar to like Texas. You realize like well there's going to be a self-correcting mechanism very quickly because the rule of law was also put aside right, like basically the police force lost a lot of power because everybody else has guns and they're kind of taking the Law into their own hands and
That system at least in this particular case in this particular moment in human history worked. So interesting lesson. You know
I did it is I had an interesting contrast I'll share with you I guess you mentioned Texas so not so long ago I was in Austin often visit you or others and Austin's you know and many doors that I walked past including a school said, no firearms. Past this point you know it's a sticker on the door. You see this on Hospital?
Times. I saw this at Baylor College of Medicine, etcetera, relatively common to see in Texas, not so common in California. And then I flew to the San Francisco Bay Area was walking by an elementary school in my old neighborhood, and saw a similar sticker and looked at it and it said no peanuts or other allergy containing foods. Past this point, on the door of this elementary school. So, quite a different contrast, like, you know, guns and peanuts. Now peanut allergy,
Obviously are very serious for some people. Although there's great research out of Stanford showing that early exposure to peanuts can prevent the allergies, it's but don't start rubbing yourself in peanut butter. Folks, if you have a peanut allergy, that's not the best way to deal with it. In any case, the contrast of what's dangerous. The contrast of you know, the familiarity with guns versus no familiarity you know and Israel and elsewhere. You can see machine guns in the airport in Germany, Frankfurt. You see machine guns in the airport.
Not so common in the United States. So again, there's I feel like there's this aperture Vision, there's this aperture of pleasures and create versus Creature Comforts and lack of Creature Comforts. And then there's this aperture of danger, right? People who are familiar with guns, you know, are familiar with people coming in and setting their firearm on the table and eating eating dinner, you know. But in if you're not accustomed to that it's jarring,
right? I should mention people know this throughout human history, but the human ability.
To get a simulated now, get used to violence is incredible. So like you could be living in a peaceful time like like we're here now and there will be one explosions I can 9/11 type of situation. That would be a huge shock is terrifying. Everybody freaks out. The second one is a huge drop-off in how he freaked out you get and would that in a matter of days. Sometimes hours. It becomes The New Normal, I've talked.
To so many people in hard cave which is one of the towns that seen a lot of heated battle. You ask them. Is it safe there? In fact, when I went to the closer and closer the war zone. Yes, people is it safe and their answers, usually, yeah. It's pretty safe. It's all
signal-to-noise it. Like,
nobody has told me except, like, Western reporters sitting in the west side of Ukraine. It's really dangerous.
Here. Everyone's like yeah you know it's good. Like my uncle just died yesterday like he was shot but it's pretty, you know, it's pretty good. Like the farm still running like they how do I put it they focus on the positive that's one but it's there's a deeper truth that which is you just get used to difficult situations and the stuff that make you happy and stuff that make you upset is relative to that new normal that you establish.
Well, I grew up in
California and there were a lot of earthquakes. I remember the 89 Quaker. Remember the Embarcadero freeway called pancaking on top of people and cars. I remember I moved to Southern California. There's a Northridge Quake wherever I move, there seemed to be earthquakes. I never worry about earthquakes ever. I just don't, in fact, I don't like the destruction they cause but every once in a while, an earthquake will roll through and it's kind of exciting. It sounds like a train coming through its like, wow, like the Earth is moving, you know, again, I don't want anyone to get harmed but I enjoy a good Rumble coming through. Nonetheless, its
All the noise. But if I saw a tornado freak out and people from the Midwest or probably comfortable with the, you know, Dan Gable, you're a wrestler for the Midwest of the, you know, and I've never met but I have great respect for. He's probably, you know, say these tornadoes like, yeah, maybe. Yeah. You know, so, so I think signal to noise is real.
Before I neglect, although I won't. Forget speaking of signal to noise and environment. You are returning to or have gone back to one of your original natural habitats which is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is just have. It said, it's actually difficult to pronounce in full MIT, right? So you've been spending some time there, teaching and doing other things, tell us what you're up to with our Mighty
recently. Well, it's I'm really glad that
You being on the west coast know, the difference in like, Boston, New York. I feel like a lot of people think it's like the East Coast.
So different. It's all visually the bostonians in New Yorkers.
Yeah, I love it. I get a gave lectures there in front of an in-person crowd what we talking about for the AI. So, different aspects of AI and, you know, robotics machine learning machine learning. So for people who know the artificial intelligence field, they usually
Use the term a I had people from outside, use a eyes, the biggest breakthroughs in the machine. Learning field was some discussion of Robotics. And so on. Yeah, it was in person is wonderful at I'm a sucker for that. I really avoided teaching or any kind of interaction during covid because people put a lot of emphasis on but also got comfortable with remote teaching and I think nobody enjoyed it except sort of
there's a notion that it's much easier to do because you don't have to, you know, you have to travel, you don't have to, you can do it in your pajamas, kind of thing, but when you actually get to do it, you don't get the same kind of joy that you do. When you're teaching as a student, you don't get the same kind of joy of learning. It's not as effective and all that kind of stuff. So to be in person together with people to see their eyes, to get their excitement, get the questions and all the interactions. That was awesome. And it's
Still.
Soccer and a believer in the the ideal of a mighty of the University. I think it's an incredible place. There's something in the air still. But it really hit the pandemic hit universities too hard because and I could say this is not you saying this is me saying it that administration's as in all cases, when people criticize institutions, the pandemic has given more power to the administration and taken away power from the faculty, and the students
And that's a from everybody involved including the administration. That's a concern because the university is about the teachers and the students that should be primary. And whenever you have a pandemic, as an opportunity to increase the amount of rules, like, one of the things that really bothered me, and I'll scream from the top of the MIT Dome about this, is they've instituted a new Tim ticket system, which is if your visitor to the campus at MIT, you have to register. You have to
First of all show that you're vaccinated but more importantly there's a process to visiting your. You need to get permission to visit one of the reasons I loved MIT, unlike some other suggestions MIT, just leaves the door open to anyone in classrooms. You can roll in the ridiculous characters. The students that are kind of like usually doing business stuff or economics can roll into a physics class and just, you know, you kind of not allowed but it's a gray area.
As you see that, you let that happen and that creates a flourishing of the community. That was beautiful. And I think adding extra rules puts a squeeze on it limits, some of the flourishing and I hope some of that dissipates over time as we kind of let go of the risk aversion that was created by the pandemic. As we kind of enter the new, the normal return back, some of that flourishing can happen. But when you're actually in there,
With the students I was as magic. I love it. I love it. Well, some
of your earliest videos on your YouTube channel, we review in the classroom, right? That's how this all
started. Yeah, yeah, it's all YouTube like putting stuff on on YouTube. It's terrifying. Right? Like well where's she at the time when you did it again you're
a Pioneer. In that sense you did that Jordan Pederson. Did that putting up lectures is? Yeah, I would. I teach still every winter. I teach
Director course, and I'll be doing even more teaching going forward, but the idea of those videos being on the web is that spikes my cortisol a little bit.
Yeah, it's terrifying because you get to and everybody has a different experience like for me being a junior research scientist, the kind of natural concern is like, who am I? And he when I was given this lecture is like, I don't deserve any of this,
why your humility coming through? And I actually think that
humility on the part of an instructor is good because that those that think, you know, that they are entitled and who else, who else could give this lecture, then? I worry more than I think. It's, I once heard, I don't know if it's still true that the at Caltech, right? The Great California Institute of Technology. Not far from here, is that many of the faculty are actually afraid of the students, not physically afraid, but they're intellectually afraid. Because the students are so smart and teaching there can be downright.
Frightening, I've heard but that's great. Keeps everybody on their toes and I think and, you know, I've been corrected in lecture before at Stanford and elsewhere, you know, when my lab was at UC San Diego where someone say it way, you know, last lecture you said this and now you said that we're on the podcast, you know? And I think it's that moment where, you know, you sometimes feel that that urge to defend you? Oh you're right. And I think it depends on how one was trained. My graduate advisor was wonderful at saying, I don't know all the time and she went
into Harvard Radcliffe UCSF and Caltech and Brilliant woman and had no problem saying, like, I don't know,
I don't have that problem in. So I usually have two guys that somebody speaks up, grab them, drag them out of the room, never see him again. So everybody is really supportive. I don't understand you know, I understand that the amount of love and support I get is
especially when the last few students are there and everybody seems to be nodding as you know. Now I think that I'd love to sit in on one of your lectures. I know very little about AI machine learning or robotics.
But I've never talked at MIT. Have you ever like given
lectures? Oh, yeah. And when I went on the job market for, as a faculty member, my final two choices were between MIT peak hour. I had a non-paper offer, wonderful place. Wonderful place to do neuroscience and UC San Diego, which is a wonderful Neuroscience program in the end. It made sense for me, be on the west coast for personal reasons but there's some amazing Neuroscience going on there goodness and that's always been true and it's going to continue. It's been a
Long time since I've been invited back there, oddly enough, when I started doing more podcasting and I still run a lab, but I shrunk my lab considerably when I was doing as a Dunmore podcasting, receive fewer academic lecture invites which makes sense but now they're sort of coming back. And so when people invite now, I always say the, you know, do you want me to talk about the ventral Thalamus and its role in anxiety and aggression? Or do you want me to talk about the podcast? And my big fear is I'm going to go back to give a lecture about the retina or something.
Start off with an athletic greens read or something like that just reflexively just kidding that wouldn't happen. But listen, I think it's great to continue to put keep a foot in both places. I was so happy to hear that you're teaching at MIT because podcasting is one thing teaching is another and there's overlap there in the Venn diagram, but listen to students that get to sit in on one of your lectures and you may see me sitting there in the audience soon. When I creep into your
class sunglasses. It's
right wearing a red shirt. You won't recognize me.
Well are certainly receiving a great gift. I've watched your lectures on YouTube even the early ones and listen. I know you to be a phenomenal
teacher. Yeah, there's something about so I'm also doing like that's in a pretty late last night working for a deadline on a paper one of the things that I hope to do for. Hopefully the rest of my life is to continue publishing and I think it's really important to do that.
Even if you continue the podcast because you want to be just on your own intellectual and scientific Journey as you do podcasting as at least for me and especially on the engineering side because I want to build stuff and I think that's
It keeps your ego in check. Keeps you humble? Because I think if you talk too much on the microphone, you start getting, you might lose track of the ground in that comes from engineering from science and scientific process in the criticisms that you get all that kind of stuff and how
slow and iterative is we have two papers. Right now that are in the revision stage, it's been a very long road and I was asked this recently because I went with my chairman, he said, do you want to continue run a lab or you just going to go full time on the podcast and Stan?
It has been very supportive. I must say, as I know, MIT has been a view of you and I said, oh I absolutely want to continue to be involved in research and do research and we start talking about these papers and we're looking over my this was my yearly review and looking back like goodness, these papers have been in play for a very long time, so it's a long road but you know you learn more and more in the more time you spend you know myopically looking at a bunch of data that the more you learn the more you think. I I totally agree you know talking to these devices for podcast is wonderful because it's fun. It really
Is a certain Niche that we both have and hopefully it lands some important information out there for people. But doing research is like the, you know, I guess if you know, you know, there's like that the you know, the unpeeling of the onion, knowing that there could be something there. There's just nothing like it.
I mean, you do, especially with the pandemic and for me both Twitter and the podcast has made me much more impatient about the slowness of the review.
Ooh process because whether I'll do that the Twitter world that, but even with podcasts you you have a cool, you'll find something cool. And then you have ideas and all the and you'll just say them and they'll be out pretty quickly. There, were you jealous right
now about something that we both found interesting and it's out in the world, you know?
And you can write up something like there is a culture in computer science of posting stuff on archive and preprints that don't get in your review. And sometimes they don't even go through the review process ever because like people just start using them if it's code and SEC. What was
It was the point of this, it works like the it's self-evident that it works because people are using it and that I think applies more change engineering Fields because it's an actual tool that works. It doesn't matter if you don't have to scientifically prove that it works, it works because using for a lot of people,
what Sarge interrupt. But I just said for point of reference, the famous paper, describing the double helix, which earned Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize and should have earned Rosalind Franklin Nobel Prize to of course, but they got it.
For the structure of DNA. Of course, that paper was never reviewed at nature. They published it because its importance was self-evident, or whatever,
they shine. So like the editors
he was at purely editorial decision, I believe, I mean, that's what I was told by someone who's currently in editor nature, if that turns out to not be correct. Someone will tell us in the comments for sure. Well, I think that's pretty interesting, right? I'm listening, perhaps the most significant Discovery in biology and bio engineering, which leading to bioengineering as well. Of course,
Of the last century was not
peer-reviewed. Yeah, but so, Eric Weinstein, but many others have talked about this which is I mean I don't think people understand
How poor the peer review process has just the amount of because you think pure review, means all the best peers get together and they review your stuff. But it's unpaid work and as usually a small number of people as a very have, a very select perspective, so they might not be the best person, especially if it's super novel
work and it's who has time to do it. I'm going to bunch of editorial board. Still why I don't know, but I enjoy the peer review process and sending papers out. Oftentimes the
Best scientists are very busy and don't have time to review and often times the more Premier journals will select from a kind of a unique kit of very good scientists who are very close to the work. Sometimes the people are very far from the work. Yeah it
really depends both have negatives, right? If you're very close to the work, there's jealousy and all those basic human things, very far from the work, you might not appreciate the Nuance contribution, all that kind of stuff and
their psychology, sorry to interrupt again. But good friend of mine who's extremely
Neuroscientist Howard Hughes investigator etcetera. Always told me that they, I won't even say whether or not who they are. They select the reviewers on the basis of who has been publishing very well recently because they assume that person is gonna be more benevolent, because they're there have been doing well, so that the the love expands could point
to that actually. But you know, the, the idea is that editors might actually be the best reviewers, so that that was the traditional. That's that's the thing I wanted to mention the Eric, why is that talks about the back?
And several decades ago, editors have much more power and there's something to be made for that. Has a editors. Are the ones who are responsible for crafting the journal, like they really are invested in this and so it and they're also often experts, right? So it makes sense for an Editor to have a bit of power. In this case, like usually if idea is truly novel, you could see it. And so it's it makes sense for an attitude to have more power in that regard of
As for me, I think peer review should be done the way tweets or done, which is like crowd-sourced or Amazon review, but the crowd decide, the crowd the side, and let the crowd ad.
Depth and breadth in in context for the contribution. So you know, if the paper overstates the degree of contribution, the crowd will check you on that. If there's not enough support or like the conclusions are not supported by the evidence, the crowd will check you on that. There should be the could be, of course, political bickering, that enters the picture especially on very controversial topics but I think I trust the intelligence of human beings to figure that.
At out. And I think most of us that are trying to figure this whole process out. I just wish it was happening much faster, because on the important topics, the review cycle could be, could be faster. And we learned that to covid that Twitter was actually pretty effective at doing science. Communication is really interesting. Some of the best scientists took to Twitter to communicate their own work and other people's work and always putting into some of the caveats and it's not done.
Peer reviewed and so on. But it's all out there and the data just moves so fast. And if you want stuff to move fast to it as the best medium of communication for that, it's cool to
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Over over dinner during conversations. Where I'd say I don't understand Twitter and you'd say I don't understand Instagram and of course we understand how it worked and how to work each respective platform. But I think we were both trying to figure out you know what is driving the psychology of these different venues because they are quite distinct psychology's for whatever reason. I think I'm finally starting to understand Twitter and enjoy it a little bit initially, I wasn't prepared for the level of kind of reflexive.
Knee that sounds a little bit oxymoronic. But that people kind of like pick up on one small thing and then you drive it down that that trajectory didn't seem to be happening quite, as much on Instagram, but I love your tweets. I do have a question about your Twitter account and how you do you have sort of internal filters of what you'll put up and won't put up because sometimes you'll put up things that are about life and Reflections other times, you'll put up things like what you're excited about in AI or of course, you know, point
Various podcasts including your own but others as well. You know, what do you? How do you approach social media? Not at how do you regulate your behavior on there in terms of how much time etcetera? I know you've talked about that before but you know, what's your mindset around social media? When you go on there to either post or forage or respond
information? I think I try to add some not to sound cliché, but some love out there.
Into the world into as o.j. Simpson calls it Twitter world. I think
there is this viral
negativity that can take hold. And I tried to find the right language to add, you know, Good Vibes out there and it's actually really really tricky because there's something about positivity that sounds fake. And I'm not, I can't quite put my finger on it. But whenever I talk about love and
Positive and almost childlike in my curiosity and positivity. People are starting to think, like surely, he is like skeletons in the closet. Like there's dead bodies in his basement. Like this must be a fake addict. It's the attic, the attic. I keep mine in the basement. That's the details.
I was referring to your routing. I don't have an attic or a basement. Oh, nor dead bodies. I just want to be very
clear. Yeah, I do have an attic and actually haven't been up to me.
There's bodies up there. But yes I would I prefer the basements colder down there. I like it. No, but there's an assumption that this is not genuine or not. It's disingenuous in some kind of way and so that try to find the right language for that kind of stuff got to how to be positive. Some of it, I was really inspired by elon's approach to Twitter, not all of it. But the, when he just is silly, I found that silly
- I think it's a Hermann Hesse a said something to paraphrase that one of my favorite writers. Yeah. Since I think in Steppenwolf said, learn what is to be taken, seriously and laugh at the rest. I think I tried to be silly. Laugh at myself, laugh at the absurdity of life and then in part, when I'm serious try to just be
Positive just see positive perspective but and also as you said, people pick out certain words and so on and they attack each other attack. Me over certain usage of words and in particular, tweet I think the thing I tried to do is think positively towards them, like do not escalate. So whenever somebody's criticizing me and so on, I just smile, if there's a lesson to be learned, I learned it and then I just send good.
Vibes, their way, don't respond and just hopefully sort of through Karma. And to kind of the ripple effect of positivity have like a, you know, an impact on them and the rest of Twitter and you find is like that builds your actions, create the community. So how I behave gives me surrounded by certain people, but, you know lately, especially Ukraine is one topic like this. I also thought about
Talking to somebody reached out to me is Andrew Tate. Who is extremely controversial? Although, from the perspective of a lot of people's a
misogynist and I've heard his name, and I know that there's a lot of controversy around and maybe you could familiarize me. I've been pretty nose down in podcast prep and I tried to do this vacation thing for about three four weeks. I've heard about that. Yeah, and it sort of worked. I did get some time in the Colorado Wilderness by myself which was great.
I did get some down time but in any event it meant mainly consists of reading and one teacher reading and nature sauna ice bath working out, good food, a little extra sleep, these kinds of things I really felt I needed it but I am pretty naive when it comes to the kind of current controversies but I've heard his name and I think he's been D platform. Don, a couple of platforms. Do I have that
right? As Ben?
Oh, I should also admit that while. I might know more than you, it's not by much. So it's like it's like a five-year-old talking to a four-year-old right now.
Is he an athlete a podcaster?
So, basic summary. He used to be a fighter kickboxer believe. It was pretty successful, and then US during that. And after that, I think it was in a reality show and he had all these programs that are basically like
the pickup artist advice. He has this like community of people where he gives advice on how to pick up women, how to, how to be successful in relationships, how to make a lot of money, and there's like it cost money to ensure that those programs. So a lot of the criticism that he gets is kind of, it's like a pyramid scheme where you convince people to join so that they can make more money and then they convince others to join that kind of stuff. But that's not why I'm interested in talking to him. I'm
Interested because one of the guests, maybe I shouldn't mention who but like one of the female guests, I had really big scientist said that her two kids that are 13 and 12 really look up to Andrew. Just male children panel, check mail and I hear this time and time again. So like he is somebody that a lot of teens young teens look up to so I haven't done.
Serious research. Like I usually try to avoid doing research until I like agree to talk and then I go deep. But there is an aspect to the way he talks about women.
That while I understand, and I understand certain Dynamics and relationships work for people and he's one of such person.
but I think him being really disrespectful towards women is not what I
it's not how I see what it means to be a good man. So the conversation I want to have with him is about masculinity. What is masculine? Did he mean in the 21st century? And so when I think about that kind of stuff and because we're talking about Twitter,
It's like going into a war zone. I'm like a happy-go-lucky person but you're
not sending me of the Ukraine, but I don't want to have this conversation on Twitter
because it's a really, really, really tricky one. Because also as you know, when you sit when you do a podcast like everybody wants you to to win and like there's not a, it's everything you do is positive, maybe you'll say the wrong thing. It's like an inaccurate thing.
You can correct yourself with Andrew today with Donald Trump with folks like this? You have to, I mean, it's a professional boxing. I think you have to push the person. You have to be really eloquent, you have to be all sympathetic because you can't just do what journalists do which is talk down to the person the entire time. That's easy, the hard things to empathize with the person to understand them, to steal men their case, but also to make your own case. So in that case, about what it means to be a man to me a strong,
Is somebody who is respectful to women, not out of weakness, not a social justice Warrior signaling and all that kind of stuff. But out of, that's what a straw man does. Like they don't need to be disrespectful to prove their position in life. He is often. Now a lot of people say it's a character. It's he's being misogynistic. He's being a misogynist as a kind of, for entertainment purposes like an avatar. Yeah, but to me that Avatar is has a lot of influence.
Fluence on Young Folks, so the character has his impact. No, I
don't think you can separate the Avatar and the person in terms of the impact, as you said, in fact, there are a number of accounts on Twitter and Instagram and elsewhere, which people have only revealed their first names or they give himself another name or they're using a cartoon image and part of that I believe. And at least from some of these individuals who actually know who they are. I understand is a an attempt to maintain their privacy.
Which is important to many people and in some cases, so that they can be more inflammatory and then just pop up elsewhere as something else without anyone knowing that it's the same
person. Some of the, this is the dark style. I've been reading a lot about Ukraine and Nazi Germany's of the 30s and 40s and so on. And you get to see how much the absurdity turns to evil quickly. One of the things I worry, one of the things I really don't like to see.
See, on Twitter on the Internet. Is how many statements end with a LOL? It's like, you think just because something is kind of funny or is funny, or is legitimately funny. It also doesn't have a deep effect on society. So, that's such a difficult gray area because some of the best comedy is dark and mean, but it reveals some important truth that we need to consider but sometimes
Midi is just covering up for destructive ideology and you have to know the line between those two. Hitler was seen as a joke in the late 20s and 30s. The Nazi, Germany until the joke became very serious. You have to be careful to know the difference between the, the joke in the reality and do all that. I mean, in a conversation, I'm just such a big believer, in conversation, to be able to reveal something through.
Conversation, but I don't know, one of the big, you know, you and I challenge ourselves all the time. I don't know if I have what it takes to have a, a good empathetic, but adversarial conversation.
I need to learn more about this type person or not learn about it. Yeah, it sounds, it sounds like maybe it's something to skip. I don't know because he and I'm not familiar with the content, but I was going to ask you whether or not you've seeked out or whether or not you would ever consider everything Donald.
As a guest on your
podcast. Yeah, I have to talk to Joe a lot about this and
I really, I really believe I can have a good conversation with Donald Trump, but
I haven't seen many good conversations with him. So like part of me thinks part of me believes it's possible but he often effectively runs over the
interviewer, thank you, sit him down, give him an element and athletic greens just rely on. I mean, that nice, cool air-conditioned black curtain Studio, you've got and you know, a different side might come out context is
powerful. Well, Joe is really good at this.
This which is relaxing person. You know? Like here have a drink right? Let's smoke a joint or whatever it is but some this energy of just let's relax and there's laughter and so on, I don't think as people know, I'm just not good at that kind of stuff. So I think the way I could have a good conversation with him is to really understand his world do.
Be able to steal manners worldview and those that support him, which is sorry to say, for people who seem to hate Donald Trump is a very large percentage of the country. And so you have to really empathize with those people have to empathize with Donald Trump, the human being, and from that perspective, asking hard questions.
Who do you think is the is the Counterpoint? If you're going to see, you know, seek balance and your guess, if you're gonna have Trump on then you have to
have whoo. Well it's interesting. There's any fauci
seems to be you know strongly associated with sort of counter values at least in the eye of the public things retiring soon but
I yeah he's retiring. So that's really interesting, Anthony fauci.
Yeah, definitely. But I don't think he's a counterbalance. He's a, he's a complicated fascinating figure, who seems to have attracted a lot of hate and distrust. But unloved from some people in
love and love from some people, I mean, I know people not even necessarily scientists who have, you know, profile cheese shirts. I've seen people with antivirus, you searched shirt, scuse me, but certainly, but who adore him, they're people who adore him on the same way their people that adore Trump. It's so interesting.
That, you know, one species of animal. It gets such Divergent neural
circuitry. It's almost feels like it's by Design and every single topic would find tension and division. It's fascinating to watch. I mean, I got to really witness it from zero to 100 in Ukraine where there's not huge significant division.
There was in certain parts of Ukraine but across Europe across the world. There was not that much division between Russia and Ukraine. And it was just born overnight, this intense hatred. So you see the same kind of stuff with with fauci over the pandemic. At first, we were all kind of holding huddled in uncertainty. Kind of there is a togetherness with a pandemic. Of course, there's more difficult because you're isolated but then you start to figure out like the probably the politicians and the media.
Try to figure out, how can I take a side here? And how can I now start reporting on this side or that side and say how the other side is wrong. And so I think Anthony fauci in is is a part of just being used as a scapegoat for certain things as part of that kind of narrative of division. But I think so, Trump is a singular figure.
That to me represents something important in American history. I'm not sure what that is but I think you have to think you put on your historian hat. Go forward in time and think back. Like how will he remembered be remembered, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, who is the opposite of that?
You have to I I would really have to think about that because because Trump is so singular. I think ALC is an interesting one. But she's so young, it's unclear to know how what if she represents a legitimate. The large-scale movement or not. Bernie Sanders is an interesting option but I wish he would be 30. 40 years younger? Like the young. Bernie would be a good. They're scientists working on that. Yeah, I think so.
Not him specifically. But well, yeah, I may be him. Whenever know there is a big conspiracy theory that Putin. Is that his? That's a body double. It's no longer berta's Putin. No, no.
That's a hard time
that the Putin who see on camera today is a body double. Hmm.
Well, one thing that you know, in in science and in particular in anatomy, there's
A classification scheme for different types of anatomists. Which they either say you're a lumper or a splitter, you know, some people like to call a whole structure. Something not necessarily just for Simplicity but for a lot of reasons and then other people like to micro divide, the nucleus into multiple names. And of course, people used to be able to name different brain structures after themselves. So that would be the nucleus of Lex and then that you know in the the huberman fasciculus or whatever less of that nowadays. But and by the way, those structures don't actually
Exist just yet. We haven't defined those yet. That I was making those names up, but what's interesting is it seems like in the last five years, there's been a lot of
Trent there's been a trend, scuse me toward a requirement for lumping. Like you can't say, it seems that it's not allowed. If you will to say. Hey yeah, you know, and here, I'm not stating my, I will never reveal my preferences about pandemic related things for hopefully obvious reasons it, you know, some people will say vaccines, yes, but masks. No or vaccines and masks. Yes, but let people work and other people say, no, everyone stay home and then other people will say no no, no vaccines do masks.
Let everybody work. No one was saying no vaccines no masks and stay home. I don't think so. There's this sort of lumping right that the boundaries around ideology really did start to defy science. I mean, it wasn't scientific. It was one part science is shhhh at times and sometimes really hard core science other times. It was politics economics. I mean, we really saw the Confluence of all these different domains of society that uses
Different criteria to evaluate the world. I mean I as a scientist you know, and remember when the vaccines first came out and I asked somebody, you know, one of the, the early concerns I had that was actually satisfied for me was, how does this thing turn off? You know, if you start your generating a Mourning house, actually get turned off? So, I asked a friend, you know, the, you know, a lot about RNA biology and how does it turn off? They explained it to me, I was like okay, makes sense as some other questions. So
But most people aren't going to think about it, at that level of detail necessarily, but it did seem that there was a chest kind of amorphous Blobs of ideology that they grabbed onto things and then there was this need for a Chasm between them. There it was almost felt like it became illegal in some ways to want, you know, two of the things from that menu. And one of the things from that menu, I really felt like I was being constrained by a kind of, like Bento Box model where I didn't get to Define. What was in the Bento Box. I
Deaver had Bento Box a or Bento boxes easy
but nothing in between and I think I'm not topic and I think a lot of topics most people are in the Middle with humility uncertainty and they're just kind of trying to figure it out. And I think there is just the extremes defining the nature of the division. So I think it's the role of a lot of us in our individual lives. And also if you're if you have a platform of any kind, I think you have to try to walk in the middle.
It'll like with the empathy and humility. And that's actually what science is about is is that is the humility still thinking about, who's the opposite of
trump, is it? Maybe it is not, I mean, maybe a fauci is orthogonal to, to Trump. I mean, I'd not everything has an opposite. I mean it's, you know, maybe he's in the end of one. Maybe he's in the minority of one because he was an outsider and from Washington who then made it
there. But also I wonder,
Yeah, you have to pick your battles because every battle you fight, you should take very seriously and just the amount of hate. I get I got and I still get for having sat down with the Pfizer, CEO does a very valuable lesson for me.
Well, that one was got you a lot of
heat? Yeah still does because he had
some some pretty controversial guests on a
that one. That one.
Is he still the Pfizer
CEO? I believe
socios, turnover like crazy. This is
Thing I didn't realize, you know, in science. If somebody moves institutions like a big deal, most people don't have more than two moves in their career maybe but they often, you know, move to the next building is a big deal, but it in biotech. It's like I've a former colleague of mine from San Diego and he's been CEO here. There is a CO there. He said, he went back to her company was a co-ed. Before, you know, if he's probably back at the University, who worked out for it for all, I know it's amazing how much moving around. There is, is very itinerant
profession? Yeah, I think they're there's in certain
I guess in biotech will be the case. The the CEO is more of like a manager type. So you can someone's jumping around benefits, your experience. So you get become better and better being a manager. There's some like leader revolutionary CEO's that stick around for longer because they're so critical to pivoting a company like the Microsoft CEO, currently, Sundar pichai. Somebody like that, obviously, Elon Musk, somebody like that. That is part of
Eating a company into new domains constantly. But yeah, biotech, there's a machine and for, in, in the eyes of a lot of people big Pharma is like, big tobacco. It's, it's the epitome of everything that is wrong with capitalism. It's, it's evil, right? And so, I showed up in the conversation where I thought was a pretty open mind, and really asked what I thought or difficult questions of him.
I don't think he's ever said down to a grilling of that kind. In fact, I'm pretty sure they cut the interview short because of that and I thought you know literally was hot in the room and we're sweating. And I was asking tough questions for for somebody that like half the country, were a large percent of the country believes, he's alleviate a lot of, he helped through the financial resources that that Pfizer has helped alleviate a lot of suffering in the world. So I thought for somebody like that, I was asking pretty hardcore.
Options boy. Did I get to hear from the side? Usually, one of the sides is more intense in their anger. So they're certain political topics like with with annotate. For example I would I would hear from a very it would probably be the left far left that would write very angrily and so
That's a group you'll hear from the visor, Co I didn't get almost any messages from people saying, why did you go so hard on on him, you know, he's a, he's an incredible human, incredible leader and CEO of a company that helped helped us with the vaccine and nobody thought would be possible to develop so quickly.
You did not get letters of.
I did not. I mean it here and there but the the Sea of people that said everything for me being weak that I wasn't able to
To call out this person. How do you sit down, honey, platform this evil person. That how do you make? Look? Human all that kind of stuff, and that you have to deal with that. Yet the, of course, it's great. It's great because I have to do some soul-searching which is like, did I like you have to ask some hard questions. I love criticism like that. You get to like you know, I had some low points. There's definitely some Despair and you start to wonder like was I too weak?
Should I talk to him? What is true and you sit there alone and just like marinate in that and hopefully over time that makes you better but I still don't know what the right answer. Was that one
is well I feel that money plays a role here. You know when people think big Pharma they think billions of dollars maybe trillions of dollars really and certainly people who make a lot of money.
Get scrutiny that others don't part of, is that they are often not always visible, but I think that there is a natural and reflexive and I'm not justifying it. I certainly don't feel this because I do I know some people who are very wealthy, some people were very poor, I can't say it scales with happiness at all. People are always shocked to hear that but it you know but that's what I've observed in very wealthy people.
Hello. But that people have a lot of money are often held to a different standard because people resent that some people resent that, and maybe there are other reasons as well. I mean among people who are very wealthy often times the wish is for status, right? Not money. You get a bunch of billionaires in a room, and unless one of them is Ilan, who is also has immense status for his accomplishments. Typically
If you put a Nobel Prize winner room with a bunch of billionaires, they're all talking to that person, right? And their many very interesting billionaires, but status is, is something that is often, but not always associated with money, but is a much rarer form of, of uniqueness out there. Positive uniqueness, if one, considers status positive, because there's a downside to. But so I wonder whether or not the Pfizer
Our CEO caught extra heat because people assume and I'm probably assume also that his salary is quite
immense. Yeah. So because I have a lot of data on this. I can see it's a very good hypothesis was tested
scientifically. He's about to tell me, it's a great hypothesis, but it's wrong. I know this summer, I know this smirk. I
honestly think it's wrong. There is that effect as there for a lot of people but I think the distrust is not towards a CEO. The distress is towards the company. One of the really difficult. So
Searching. I had to do which is just having interact with Pfizer, Folks at every level from Junior, to see. Oh, they're all really nice people. They have a mission, they talk about trying to really help people because that's the best way to make money is, come up with medicine. That helps a lot of people like the mission is clear. They're all good people. A lot of really brilliant people phds so you can have a system where all the people are good including the CEO.
Ooh, and by good, I mean people that really are trying to do everything. They dedicate their whole life to do good. And yet you have to think that that's system can deviate from a path that does good. Because you start to deceive yourself of what is good. You turn into a game, where money does come into play. From a company perspective where you convince yourself the more money you make, the more good, you'll be able to do. And then you start to
Focus more and more and more on making more money and then you can really deviate and lose track of what is actually good. I'm not saying necessarily Pfizer does that, but I think companies could do that. You can apply that criticism to social media companies to Big Pharma companies that the one of the big lessons for me. That's I don't know what the answer is, but that all the people inside, a company can be good.
People, you want to hang out with people, you want to work with but as a company is doing evil and like, that's a possibility. So like the distressed I don't think is towards the billionaire individual which I do see a lot of in this case. I think it's it's like Wall Street distrust that the Machinery of this particular organization has gone off track. It's the generalization of hate again. Yeah and then you good luck figuring out. What is true? This is the this
Is the tough stuff, but I should say, the individuals.
Like individual scientists at the NIH in Pfizer. I just incredible people. Like they're, they're really, they're really brilliant people. So the, you know, I never trust Administration or the business people, no offense business people, but the scientists are always good. The they they have the right motivator in life. But again with the kind of blinders on to focus on the science Nazi, Germany has history of people.
Is to focus on the science and then the politicians use the scientist to achieve whatever and they want. But if you just look narrowly at the Journey of a scientist, it's a beautiful one because they ultimately in it for the Curiosity, the moment of Discovery versus money or I mean, Prestige probably does come into play later and later in life. But especially young scientist thereafter, the it's like they pulling it the thread of curiosity, to try and discover
For something big to get excited by that kind of stuff and it's beautiful to see.
So this beautiful sea. I have a former graduates. You now a postdoc at Caltech, and I don't even know she had a cell phone. She would come into lab, put her cell phone into the desk, and she was tremendously productive, but that wasn't why I brought it up? She was productive as a side effect of just being absolutely committed and obsessed to discover the answers to the questions. She was asking as best she could and it was you could feel it. You just feel the intensity and
Just incredibly low activation energy. If there was an experiment to do, should just go do it. You're teaching at MIT. You are obviously traveling the world that you're writing the podcast, a lot of coverage of Chess recently which is interesting. I don't play chess but I do have
some scientific questions to you about
that, okay? Sure. And then let's get to those for sure. And then you're not going to like it. No. No. Okay. And then and then also some some very do I have to spell Massachusetts again.
And the also you still seem to have a proclivity for finding Gessler controversial, right? You think about Tate we're talking about Trump or time about the Pfizer CEO talking about fauci. These are these are in intense people. And so, what we're getting folks is a we're not doing neuroimaging here in the traditional sense of putting someone into a scanner. What we're doing here is we're using as the great Carl dieser author was on your podcast.
Thank you for that. Thank you for connect as he's an incredible
person. He's an incredible sight.
Actress, bioengineering, human being and, and writer, and your conversation with him was phenomenal. I listened to it twice. I actually have taken notes. We talked about it in this household. We really do his. His description of love is not to be missed. I'll just leave it at that because if I try and say it, I won't capture it. Well but you know, we're getting a language based map of at least a portion of Lex Friedman's brain here.
So what else is going on these days in that brain as it relates to robotics a I'll our last conversation was a lot about robots and the potential for robot human interaction. What even what is a robot Etc? Are you still working on robots or focused on robots? And you know where science showing up in your life? Besides the things we've already talked about.
So I think the last time we talked was before, Ukraine? Yes. Or
you were just about to
leave
Yes, so that, I mean,
so that's why I went on. I was like, you know, this might be the last you said, you want to come out here before or after I was like to come out there or don't want to see you before you go but here you are in the flesh. I
think so. A lot of just a lot of my mind has been occupied obviously with that part of the world. But the most of the difficult struggles that I'm still going through is that I haven't launched a company that I want to launch and the company has to do.
With a, I am in some maybe a longer conversation, but the ultimate dream is to put robots and every home, but short term, I see their possibility of launching a social media company and the it's a non-trivial explanation why that leads to robots in the home. But it's basically the algorithms that fuel effective social robotics so robots that you can form a deep connection with. And so I've been really, yeah. Been building prototypes
But struggling that, I don't have.
Maybe, if I were to be critical the guts to launch a company or that's high.
Well, it's combined. Think you've got the guts. I mean, it's clear if you'll do an interview with the Pfizer CEO, and you're considering putting this tape fellow on your podcasting, you've gone to the Ukraine that you, you have the guts. I know it's also a it means not doing quite a lot of
other, that's what I mean but it does takes the thing is as many people know.
When you fill your day and you're busy, that busyness becomes an excuse that you use against doing the things that scare you. A lot of people use family in this way, you know, my wife, my kids, I can't when in reality some of the most successful people have a wife and have kids and have families and they still do it. And so, a lot of times we can fill the day with busy work with, like, like
Yeah, of course, I have podcasts and all this kind of stuff, and they make me happy. And they're all the wonderful and the resources teaching, and so on. But all of that can just serve as an excuse from the thing that my heart says, is the right thing to do. And that's why I don't have the guts to Augusta. Say, no to basically everything. And then to focus all all, because part of it is I'm unlikely to fail at anything in my life, currently, because I've already found a comfortable place,
With with the startup it's mostly going to be most likely going to be a failure. It's not embarrassing failure. So
well, the machine learning data that I'm aware of, I don't know, a lot about machine learning. But the within the realm of Neuroscience, a bit of failure rate of about 15% is optimal for neuroplasticity and growth whether or not that translates to all kinds of practices isn't clear but getting trials, right? 85% of the time seems to be
Optimal for language learning, seems to be optimal for mathematics and seems to be optimal for physical Pursuits and on average, right? I'm sure I'm going to, you know, that, you know, you have more machine, learning geeks on to listen to your podcast and listen to this podcast, but it doesn't mean you have to fail on 15 percent of your weight sets, folks. I mean it could be you know 16% no I'm just kidding. But the it's it's not exact but it but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.
I think a lot of startup Founders would literally murder
For 85 percent chance of success. I think, I think given all the opportunities I have the, the skill set, the, the funding all that kind of stuff. My chances are relatively high for success but what relatively High means in the startup World Is Still Far Far Below 85. It's we're talking about single digit percentages, most startups
fail. Well, I think it means, you know, the decision to focus on the company and not other things, means the decision to close the hatch on dopamine.
Mean retrieval from all these other things that are very predictable sources of dopamine, not that everything is dopamine. But, you know, don't be mean, as I think the primary chemical driver motivation, you know, if you know that you can get some degree of satisfaction from scrolling social media or from that particular cup of coffee. That's what you're going to do. That's what you're going to consume. Unless you somehow invert the algorithm and you and you say you know it's actually my denial.
Of myself drinking that coffee. That's going to be the dopamine. Right? Interesting. Then you know and that's the beauty of having a forebrain is that you can make those decisions. You know this is the essence. I do believe of what we see of David goggin, there's much more there. There's a person that none of us know and only he knows of course but the idea that the pain is the source of dopamine. The the fruit that limbic friction as I sometimes like to call is the source of dopamine that runs counter to how most nervous.
Systems work but it was its decision based, right? It's not because his musculature is a certain way or his you know, he had crisper or something. It's because he decides to that and I think that's amazing it. But what it means in terms of starting a company and changing priorities as a closing the hatch On All or many of the current sources of dopamine so that you can derive dopamine from the failures within this narrow context. And there's a very reductionist View, kind of neuro.
View of what we're talking about. But I think about this a lot. I mean the decision to choose one relationship versus another is a decision to close down their opportunities, right? So I think that the, you know, the decision eat order, one thing off the menu versus others, is this decision to close down those other hatches. So I think that you absolutely can do it. It's just a question of. Can you flip the algorithm?
You have remap the source of dopamine to something else,
right? And maybe, maybe
Go out there not to succeed but make the you know, the journey is the Destination type thing. But you know, when you're financially vested and your timing and as far as I know, we only get one life at least on this planet, and you want to spend that wisely,
right? And a lot of that, the people that surround you and me, people are really important and I don't have people around me that say you should do a startup.
It's very difficult to find such people because Austin big startup culture. It is it is but it doesn't make sense for me to start of this is what the people that love me my whole life I've been telling me doesn't make sense what you're what you're doing right now. Just do the thing you were doing
previously. Why do I get the sense that? Because they are saying this, your app to go
home, I actually was never that. Unfortunately, unfortunately, I need I've talked to people, I love my parents family and so on friends, I'm one of those people that needs
No support for difficult things. Like, I Know Myself coaching wise is good too. I like so. Here's how I get coached best. Let's say wrestling. I like a coach that says you want to win the Olympics? They will not forsake. If I say, I want to win the gold medal at the Olympics in Freestyle Wrestling. I want to coach that doesn't blink once, and here's me and believes that I can do it and then is
Viciously intense and cruel to me on the on that Pursuit. Like if you want to do this let's do this. All right so but that's support that like that positivity. I don't I'm never you know I'm not energized nor do I see that as love a person saying like basically criticizing that like saying like you're you're too old to win the Olympic gold medal.
Right? You're like all the things you can come up with. That's not helpful to me. And I can't find a dopamine or I haven't yet a dopamine Source from the haters. Like basically people are criticizing you, sort of trying to prove them wrong, I'd it doesn't, it never got me off. Like it. Never
wear some people seem to like that. I mean, David Goggins or seems to come out. It seems driven by many sources that he has access I do. I don't know, because I've never asked him, but I
If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that he probably has a lot of options inside his head as to how to push through challenge. Not just overcome pain. Not but but he'll pose sometimes about the fact that, you know, people will say this or people will do this. And, you know, it's and and talk about the pushback approach. He'll also talk about the pushback approach. That's purely internal. It does. Involve anyone else great versatility there? Yeah, there's a, there's
literally, like a voice yields that, that represents some kind of
Like Devil that wants him to fail and he's, you know, he calls him bitch and all kinds of things saying, you know, fuck you. I'm not, I'm not, he's, there's always like an enemy and he's going against that enemy, and I wish maybe that's something. I mean, it's really interesting. Maybe you can remap it this way so that you can construct, like, that's kind of obvious mechanism, construct, an amorphous, blob. That is a hater. That wants you to fail, right there.
Of the day Vogons thing. You're in that that that that blob says you're too weak. You're too dumb. You're you're too old, you're too fat you
to whatever
and getting you to want to quit and so on. And then you start getting angry at that blob and maybe that's a good motivator. I haven't personally. Really tried that. Well I've had
external, you know, when it's challenged when I was a postdoc, very prominent laboratory, several prominent Laboratories, in fact we're working on the same thing that
I was and I was just a lowly postdoc working on a project. Pretty independent from the lab I was in and there was competition but there was plenty of room for everybody to win. But in my head and frankly I won't disclose who this is and N because there was some legitimate competition there and a little bit of friction not not too much. Healthy scientific friction. Yeah, I might have pushed a few extra hours or more a little bit. I have to say, it felt metabolizing
Or catabolic, right? It didn't I couldn't be sustained by it and I contrast that with the podcast or the work that my laboratory is doing now focused on stress and Human Performance Etc and it's pure love. I just I want it's pure curiosity and love. I mean they're hard days but I never there's no adversary in the picture there. The Practical, you know, workings of life.
That without those are thing that Joe really inspired me on and people do create adversary relationship.
Oops, and podcasting, because you get like YouTubers do this. They get, you know, they hate seeing somebody else be successful. There's a feeling of like, like jealousy. And some people even see that as healthy like oh this like mr. Beast is somebody's some of these popular YouTubers out. How do they get 100 million views and I only get 20 views
like mr. B's devoted his entire according to him. His entire life he's been focused on becoming this massive YouTube channel with that.
He's inspiring in many ways, but there's some people that get become famous for doing much, less, insane, pursuit of greatness that mr. Beast like this, people become famous on, you know, on social media, and so on, and it's easy to be jealous of them. I just one of the early things I've learned from Joe just being a fan of his pockets is how much he celebrated everybody. And I again maybe I ruined my whole dopamine thing but I don't get energized by people that are
They become popular, the podcasting space and YouTube. It doesn't. It's awesome. It's all of it as awesome and I'm inspired by that but the problem is that's not good. Motivators inspiration is like a cool humans can do this. This is beautiful but it's not. I'm looking, I'm looking, you know, for for forcing function. That's why I gave away the salary for my mighty. I was hoping my bank account had zero that will be a forcing function to be like, oh shit and I will, you know, and you're not allowed to have an opinion.
My job. So I wanted to launch and then the podcast becomes, you know, a source of income and so it's like that, damn it. Yeah.
Well, you know, and here I have to confess my biases. You are you're so good at what you do in the realm of podcast and your excellent other things as well. I just have less, you know, experience in those things. I know here. I'm I'm taking the liberty of speaking for many many people and just saying, I sure as
As hell. Hope you don't shut down the podcast, but as your friend and as somebody who cares, very deeply about your happiness and your deeper satisfaction. If it's in your hearts, heart to do a company. Well, then, damn it. Do the company,
and a lot of it. I wouldn't even characterized as happiness. I don't know if you have things like that in your, in your life, but I'm probably the happiest that I could possibly be right now. That's wonderful. But
The thing is there's a longing for the startup does not do with happiness. It's a something else that
got that itch. That sound
pretty sure, I'll be less happy because it's a really tough process. Its I mean to whatever degree you can extract happiness from struggle. Yes, maybe but I don't see it. I think I'll have some very very low points. There's a lot of people who found find companies found companies know about your and I also want to be in a relationship.
A ship. I want to get married and sure as hell in start-up is not going to increase the likelihood of that.
We could start up a family and start a
company with that. That's a, I'm a huge believer in that, which is getting a relationship at a low point in your life,
which is, I'm not disputing your stance, nor am I agreeing with it? I'd Celta every once in a while. There's a, there's a Lex Friedman ISM that
That hits a particular circuit in my brain. I tend to just laugh out
loud. I just think that it's easy to have a relationship. When everything is good, the relationships that become strong and are tested quickly are the ones when shit is going
down. Well, then there's hope for me yet. So, you know, before we sat down I was having a conversation with my podcast producer who is a woman
Say, Avid rather, he's a rabid consumer of podcast and finds these amazing podcast. He's small podcast and you know, and unique episodes. Anyway, we were talking about some stuff that he has had seen and read in the business sector and he was talking about the difference between you know job career and a calling. Right? And I think he was extracting this from conversations of CEOs and Founders Etc. Forget the specific Founders that
That brought this to light for him, but you know that this idea that if you focus on a job, you know, you can make an income and hopefully you enjoy your job or not, hate it too much. It career is represents a sort of, in my mind, a kind of series of Evolutions, that one can go through, Junior, Professor tenure etcetera, but a calling has a whole other level of of energetic, pull to it because it includes career and job and includes this concept of sort of like a life. It's very hard to draw the line between a calling in Korea.
Or in a calling in the other parts of your life. So the question therefore is do you feel a calling to start this company? Or is it born of a compulsion that irritates you? Is that like something you wish would go away in? Or is it something that you that you hope will won't go away?
No, I hope it won't go away. It's a calling. It's a calling. It's like awful. It's like
when I
See a robot when I first interacted with robots and it became even stronger. The most sophisticated the robots I interacted with. I see a magic there and you're like, you look around, does anyone else see this magic? Like it's kind of like, maybe when you fall in love, like that, that feeling like, does anyone else notice this person? I just walk in the room. I feel that way about robots and I can elaborate what that means.
But I'm not even sure I can convert it into words. I just feel like the social integration of robots in society, will create a really interesting world and our ability to anthropomorphize when we look at a robot and our ability to feel things, when we look at a robot is something that most of us don't yet experience. But I think everybody will experience the next few decades and that I just want to be a part of
Alex of exploring that because it hasn't been really thoroughly explored. The best robot assist in the world are not currently working on that problem at all, they try to avoid human beings completely and nobody's really working. That problem. In terms of when you look at the numbers, all the big tech companies that are investing money. The closest thing to that is Alexa and basically being a servant to help to tell you the weather play music and so on, it's not trying to form a deep connection and so I
Why sometimes you just notice the thing? Not, not only do. I notice the magic
There's a gut feeling which I try not to speak to because there's no track record, but I feel like I can be good at bringing that magic out of the robot. And there's no data that says, I would be good at that, but there's a feeling it's just feeling like I, you know, when I because I've done so many things, I love doing but playing guitar, all that kind of stuff digits. Ooh, I've never felt that feeling when I'm doing Jets. I don't feel.
The, the magic of the genius required to be extremely good at guitar. I don't feel any of that, but I've noticed it in others. Great musicians. They will, they notice the magic about the thing they do, and they, and they ran with it, and I just always thought, I think it had a different form when I had before new robots existed before a, I existed the form was
More about the magic between humans. The like I think of it as love but like the smile that your friends have towards each other, when I was really young and people would be excited when they first know each other and see notice each other. And there's that moment that they share that feeling together.
And I was like, wow that's really interesting. It is really interesting that these two separate intelligent organisms are able to connect also on this deep emotional level. It's like huh, it's just beautiful to see and I noticed the magic of that. And then when I started programming programming period, but then programming AI systems. You realize, oh, that could be that's not just between humans and humans that could be humans and other entities dogs cats,
And robots. And that's so I for some reason it hit me the most intensely when I saw a robots. So yeah, it's a calling but it's a calling that I can just enjoy.
The vision of it, the vision of a future world of an exciting future world. That's full of cool stuff or I can be part of building that and part being part of building, that means doing the hard work of capitalism, which is like, raising funds from people, which for me right now, is the easy part. And then hiring a lot of people, I don't know how much, you know, about hiring, but hiring hiring excellent people. Excellent people. Yeah, that will Define the
Victory of not only your company, but your whole existence, as a human being and, and building it up, not failing them because now they all depend on you, and not feeling the world with an opportunity to bring something, something that brings joy to people. And like, all that pressure just non-stop fires. They have to put out the drama of the having to work with people, you know, work with like lawyers and the human resources and supply chain. And and
You know, like because this is very compact compute, heavy, the infrastructure, the computer infrastructure and managing security cybersecurity is because you're dealing with people's data. So now you have to understand, not only the, the cyber security of data, and the Privacy, how to maintain privacy correctly, would data, but also the psychology of people trusting you with their data. And what is how, how, you know, if you look at Mark, Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and those folks they seem to be hey,
Aided by a large number of
people Jackson. I didn't, you know, I didn't Leslie. I think I always think of Jack as a, as a loved individual. But,
well, you have a very positive. Yeah.
Via the will attract a lot and I like his mind and I am someone close to him described him to me recently, as he's an excellent listener. That's what they said about Jack and that's my experience of him to very private person. So we'll leave it at that, but
And I think Jack Dorsey is one of the one of the Great's of our of the last 200 years and it's just much quieter about his stance on things, in a lot of people but much of what we see in the world. That's wonderful. I think we owe him a debt of gratitude. I'm just voicing my stance here but the person this is really
important. Yeah a wonderful person, a brilliant person, a good person but you still have to pay
The price of making any kind of mistakes as the head of a company, you don't get any extra bonus points for being a good
person. But his willingness to go on Rogan and deal directly and say, I don't know an answer to that in some cases, but to deal directly with some really challenging questions to me. Aren't him tremendous
respect? Yes. As an individual he was still part of them is so you, you've said your kit and I loved Jak 2 and I'm interact with them
all.
Been on your podcast.
Yes. But he's also part of a system as we talked about and I would argue that Jack shouldn't have brought anyone else with him on that podcast.
If you go through he had a Cadre of
oh he had a I guess the the league of the head legal with him. And also requires a tremendous amount of skill to go on a podcast like Joe Rogan and be able to win over the trust of people by being able to beat
Transparent and communicate how the company really works. Because the more you reveal about how social media company works, the more you open up for security, the, the vector of a tax increases. Also, there's a lot of difficult decisions in terms of censorship, and not that are made that. If you make them transparent, you're going to get an order of magnitude more hate to, have to make all those kinds of decisions. And I think that's one of the things I have to realize is you have to take the
That Avalanche of potentially hate if you make mistakes, will you, you have
a very clear picture of this architecture of what's required in order to create a company. Of course, there's division of labor to. I mean, you don't have to do all of those things in detail, but finding people that are excellent to do the, you know, to run the critical segments or is obviously key. I'll just say what I said earlier which is if it's in your heart.
Art's heart to start a company. If that indeed is your calling and it sounds like it is then I can't wait.
Does the heart have a heart? What's that expression? Even realize
probably not romantic style. A bar one point early days we worked on cuttlefish and they have multiple hearts and they but they pump green blood. Believe you're not very fascinating animal. Speaking of hearts and green blood earlier today before we sat down I solicited
For questions on Instagram and a brief post. So you want to if you'll look at some of them, yes, let's take these in real time. My podcast team is always teasing me that I never have any charge on my phone. One of these people that likes to run in the
Run in the yellow or whatever it is and I found. Yeah, nobody
house. Always the iPhone. People are out of battery.
Weird, a new one. So I'm in this one has plenty of battery. I just got a new one. So I've different numbers for different things, personal and work, etc. I'm trying that now. All right, get into the,
I have a, I have a chest thing to Dimension to
oh, yes, please, it will. I insult you? If I, if I look up these questions, as you asked,
okay, no, no.
No, but I will insult you by asking this question, because I think it's hilarious. So there's a, been a controversy about cheating. OK, Hans Nieman? Who's a 2700 player? Oh
yeah, I think you saw that clip on your Clips Channel, by the way, I love your Clips Channel and I'll listen to your full
channel. The big accusation is that he cheated by having. I mean, it's have joke, but it started getting me to wonder whether so that you can cheat by having vibrating anal beads.
So you can send messages
to. Let's rephrase that statement not you can but one can one
can one can argue that was a personal attack. Yes. But it made me realize, I mean, I'm just gonna just my
sixth street here.
I use it all the time for podcasting. Send myself messages to remind me myself of notes, but it's interesting. I mean, it I'm not going to call you again.
Yeah, that's exactly where I keep my phone.
The there it did get me down this whole Rabbit Hole of. Well, how would you be able to send communication?
In order to cheat in different sports. I mean that doesn't even have to do with chess and particular but it's interesting in chess and poker that there is there's mechanisms sort of modern-day where you're streaming live the competition so people can watch it on TV. If they can only send you a signal back they you know, it's just like a fun little thing to think about and if it's possible to pull off. So I wanted to get your scientific
Good evaluation of that technique it
using some sort of interceptive device like yeah,
vibrating some kind. Yeah, well no, no. That's one way to send signals is like, Morse code
basically. Yeah. So there's a famous, I believe there's a famous real-world story of physics. Students, I'm gonna get some of this wrong. So I'm saying this in kind of course form, so that somebody will correct this. But I believe it was physics. Graduate students from
From UC Santa Cruz or somewhere else. Maybe was Caltech, bunch of universities so that no one, you know, associated with any one University that went to Vegas and used some sort of tactile device for kind of coward. Counting think this was actually, demonstrated also, not this particular incident. I don't think in the movie Casino where there was they were they spotted a remember, Robert De Niro, who you have a not so
Vague resemblance to, by the way, in Taxi Driver God, I wish I had a
hit your impression right
now. Travis Bickle. Look it up, folks. Travis Bickle is you know, likes ever shaved his head and to him, oh, I would. So they had a tapping device on his ankle, that was signaling. Someone else was counting cards and then signaling to that person. So, yeah, that could be done in the tactile way. It could be done. Obviously, earpieces, if it's deep earpiece, I think that there are
Ways that they look for that, certainly any kind of vibrational device in whatever orifice provided someone can pay attention to that while still playing the game. Yeah, I think it's entirely possible now. Could it be done purely? Nur Ali, you know, could there be something that was? And listen, it wouldn't have to even be below the skull. This is where, whenever people hear about neural link or brain machine interface, they always think. Oh, you have to drill down below the skull. And put a chip below into the skull. I think there are people walking around nowadays with I'm glucose monitoring devices, like
Levels which I've used and it was very informative for me actually as a kind of an experiment gave me a lot of interesting insights about my blood sugar regulation how it reacted from Foods Etc? Well, you know, you can implant a tactile device below the skin with a simple incision. Actually one of the neurosurgeons at neural link, I know. Well, because he came up at some point through my laboratory and was at Stanford. And he actually has put in a radio receiver in his hand. And his wife has it too and he can open locks and
Of his house and things like that. So he's been to the skin under the skin. You can
go to that work. So how do you use a
piercer you go to a, you know, a body piercer type person and they can just slide it under there and it's got a battery life of something and, you know, some fairly long duration. How
do you experience the tactiles of the haptics of it?
Oh no, that's just allows them to open certain locks with just his hand, but you could easily put some sort of tactile device in their
this have to connect to the nerves. Or is it just like just vibration just
vibrations.
And, you know,
you can probably sense it even if it's under the
scale and it can be by can be Bluetooth linked. I mean, you know, I've seen there's a engineering laboratory at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, that's got an amazing device which is about the size of a Band-Aid. It goes on the clavicles and it uses sound waves. Pinged into the body to measure cavitation. I think about this for a moment. This is being used in the military where let's say you're leading an operation or something, people are getting shot at and on a laptop you can
Can see where the bullet entry points are people dead or they bleeding out, you know, entry exit points, you can get. If you take it out of the battlefield scenario, you can get breathing body position, 24 hours a day. There's so much that you can do looking at cavitation. So these same sorts of devices on 12-hour. Bluetooth could be, used to send all sorts of saying. Maybe every time you're supposed to hold your hand, I'm not a good Gambler. So I only play roulette when I go to Vegas because I you just long
Whirring and, you know, games we get to, you get some good mileage out of each out of each run. Usually, but the, you know, maybe every time you're supposed to hold a person, get sort of a, like a stomach cinching because this is, you know, stimulating the vagus a little bit and they get a little bit of a neck. So it doesn't have to be Morse code. It can be yes. No, maybe yeah. Writing me being, you know, give me a green red. Yellow type signaling. It doesn't have to be very sophisticated to give somebody a significant Advantage. Anyway, I haven't thought about this in detail.
Well, before this conversation. But oh, yeah, there's an immensely as I don't know if, you
know, poker player named Phil
Ivey. No, I don't follow the the gambling. What he's
considered to be one of the greatest poker players of all time legitimately, you know, he's just incredibly good but he got there's this big case where he was accused of cheating and prove and it's not really cheating, which is what's really fascinating? Is it turns out? So he plays poker at Texas,
The mostly but not all kinds of Poker. It turns out that the the grid and the back of the cards is often printed a little bit in perfectly. And so you can use the asymmetry of the imperfections to try to figure out certain cards. So if you play and you'll remember that a certain card is like I think the eighth in that deck that he was accused of and eight and nine or slightly different symmetry wise so he can now
I'll ask the dealer actually to rotate it to check the symmetry. So you ask the dealer to rotate the card to see that there's to detect the asymmetry of the back of the card and now he knows which cards are eights and nines and or likelier to be eights and nines and here he's using that information to play to play poker and win a lot of money, but it's just a slight advantage and his cases and in fact the judge found this that he's not actually cheating, but it's not right.
You can't use this kind of extra information, so it's fascinating. You can discover these little holes and games if you pay close enough
attention. Yeah, it's it's fascinating and I think that, you know, I did watch that clip about the potential of a cheating event in chess. And, and the fact that a number of chess players admit to cheating at some point in their career and very, very interesting was
online. So, online cheating is easier, right? When you're playing online cheating in a game.
Where the machine is much better than the human. It's very difficult to prove that you're human and that applies, by the way, another really big things and social media at the Bots. To if you're running a social media company have to deal with the boss and they become one of the really exciting things in machine learning and artificial intelligence to me is the the very fast Improvement of language models. So neural networks that generate text, then interpret text, the generate from text images and all that kind of stuff, but that's your now
On to create incredible Bots that look awfully a lot like humans.
Well Lisa and I can be those crypto Bots that seemed to populate my comment section when I post anything on Instagram, actually delete those, even though they add to the comment roster and you know, if it just like they bother me so much it is I spend, you know, at least 10-15 minutes on each bus, just deleting those, I don't know what they need to do, but I'm not interested in those whatever it is, they're offering.
Speaking of non Bots, I'm going to assume that all the questions are not from Bots are a lot of questions here with more than 10,000 questions. Goodness, I'll just take a few working from top to bottom.
What ideas have you been wrestling with lately? And I think about the company as one. But as I scroll to the next water, what are some
others?
well, some of the things we've talked about which is
The ideas of how to understand what is true. What is true about a human being? How to reveal that, how to reveal that the conversation, how to challenge that properly that at least understanding not diversion. So that that applies to everybody, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin,
also another idea is there's a deep distrust of Science and trying to understand the growing distrust of science trying to understand what's the role of those of us that have a foot in scientific Community how to be
How to regain some of that trust. Also, there's a sense, we talked about the, how to find and how to find out how to, how to find and how to maintain a good relationship. I mean, that's really been. I've never felt quite as lonely, as I have this year, when Ukraine, it's just like so many times. I would just lay there and just feeling so deeply alone because I felt that my
Home. Not my home like literally because I'm an American, I love, I'm a proud American Idol, died American but my home in the sense of my generation, only my family's home is now going is now has been changed forever. There's no more being proud of being from the former Russia or Ukraine isn't just, it's now a political message to say, if you do show your pride. And so it's been extremely
Only within that world if you with all the things I'm pursuing, how do you find a successful HP? Has been has been taught, but obviously, and there's a huge number of technical ideas with a start-up of like, how the hell do you make this
thing work?
Well, the relationship topic is when we talked a little bit about in last time we touched on a little bit more detail, we're going to come back to that. So I've made a note here, what? Or who inspired, Lex you to wear a suit every time you podcast. That's a good question. I don't know the answer to
that.
So the 22 inches that question, one is the suit and to is a black suit and black tie because I used to do H to have more variety, which is like there is those a black suit but I would sometimes do a red tie and a blue tie but that was mostly me trying to fit into society because like varieties, you're supposed to have some variety. What inspired me is at first was a general culture.
That that doesn't take itself seriously in terms of how you present yourself to the world. So in Academia in the tech world, just at Google, everybody was wearing my pajamas and they're very relaxed. And in the tech, I don't know how it is in the science in the chemistry biology and so on. But in computer science everybody was like very
I mean, very relaxed in terms of the stuff they wear. So I wanted to try to really take myself seriously and take every single moment, serious and everything. I do seriously and the suit made me feel that way. I don't know how it looks but it made me feel that way. And I think in terms of people I look up to that wore a suit that made me think of that. Is it's probably Richard Fineman. I see wonderful human being as I see him as like the epitome of class and humor and brilliance.
and, you know, obviously I could never come close to that kind of
You know, be able to Simply explain really complicated ideas and to have humor and wit but definitely aspire to that. And then there's just the, you know, Mad Men that whole era of the 50s, the classiness of that, there's something about a suit that both removes the importance of fashion from the character. You see the person? I think
Not to forget who said this might be like, Coco Chanel or something. Like this is that, you know, you do. You wear a Shabby dress and everyone sees the dress, you were a beautiful dress and everybody sees the woman. So in that sense I was hoping I'm quoting that correctly but it sounds good. I I think there's a sense in which
A simple. Classy suit allows people to focus on your character and then do so, like, with the full responsibility of that, like this is who I am and I love that. And I love what you said just
prior to that. You know my father who again is always asking me why I don't dress formally like you do always said to me growing up, if you over dress slightly
At least people know that you took them seriously so it's a sign a sign of respect for your audience to in my eyes someone asked is there an AI equivalent of psychedelics and I'm assuming they mean is there something that machines can do for themselves in order to alter their neural circuitry through unconventional activation patterns?
Yes obviously it's well I don't know exactly how psychedelics work but
You can see that with all the diffusion models now with Dolly and stable diffusion that generates from text Art. And there's a is basically in a small injection of noise and into a system that has a deep representation of visual information. So is able to convert text, to Art, introducing uncertainty, into that noise into that that's kind of maybe.
Maybe I could see that as a parallel to psychedelics and is able to create some incredible things from a from a conceptual understanding of a thing, it can create incredible art, that no human. I think could have at least easily created through a bit of introduction of Randomness, random as does a lot of work in the machine learning world just enough
There are a lot of requests of you for relationship. A lot of requests about statistics about you data, about you specifically flipping past. Those what was the hardest belt to achieve in Jiu-Jitsu? I would have assumed the black belt but is that actually true?
No. I mean everybody has a different journey through Jiu-Jitsu as people. Now for me, the black belt, was the ceremonial belt, which is not usually the case because I fought the wars like I train twice a day for, I don't know how many years, seven, eight years I competed non-stop, I compete against people much better than me. I competed against menu and beaten many black belts and brown belts.
I think for me personally, the hardest
belt was the
the brown belt because for people who know, Jiu-Jitsu the, the size of tournament divisions for blue belts and probably both is just humongous like, world's when I competed a world. It was like, 140 people in a division, which means you have to win. I forget how many times, but seven, eight, nine times in a row to metal
and so,
I just had to put in a lot of work during that time, and especially for competitors and structures. Usually, really make you earn a belt. So to earn the purple bubbles, extremely difficult, extremely difficult and then turn the brown. Belt means I had to compete non-stop against other purple Bells which are young. You talking about. Like the people that usually compete are like 23 24, 25 year olds that are like shredded incredible cardio. They can for some reason are in their life.
That they can didn't know kids nothing they can dedicate everything to this pursuit of their training. Two, three, four times. A day diet is on point. You're going and for me because, you know, they're usually bigger and taller than me and just more aggressive. Actual good athletes. Yeah, I have to go to throw a lot of Wars to her in that brown
belt, but that a try, this Jiu-Jitsu thing. Yeah,
you should. But it's different, right yuge.
I did the one class but I really want to
embrace it as, you know,
Many Pursuits like jets are different to do in your 20s and 30s and later it's like it's a different. You can't, you're not, you know, you can have a bit of an ego in your 20s. You can have that fire under you but you should be sort of more Zen like and why isn't patient later in
life? Well, one would hope that's the wisdom. Well, I think
Rogan is still a meathead. He still goes hard and crazy and he's still super competitive on that. So some people can
Jocko is somebody like that?
Well, whatever they're doing. They're doing something, right? Because they're still in it and that's super impressive. There were far too many questions to ask all of them. But several, if not many as two highly appropriate question for where we are in the Arc of this discussion and this is one admittedly that you ask in your podcast all the time, but I get the great pleasure of being in the the question asker.
Seat today. And so what is your advice to young
people?
so, I just gave a lecture at MIT and
Okay, the amount of love I got there is incredible. And so of course what your who you're talking to is usually undergrads maybe young graduate students and so they're one person did ask for advice as a question at the end of did a bunch of Q&A. So my answer was that the world will tell you to find a work-life balance to to sort of explore to try.
Try different fields to see what you really connect with. You know variety general education, all that kind of stuff and I said in your 20s I think you should find one thing you're passionate about and work harder that the new work that anything else in your life and if it destroys, you destroys you that's advice for in your 20s. I don't know how
University. True, that advice is, but I think at least give that a chance like, sacrifice, real sacrifice towards a thing, you really care about and work your ass off. That said, I've met so many people and I'm starting to think that advice is, is best applied or best tried in the engineering disciplines, especially programming. I think there's a bunch of disciplines in which you can achieve success with much fewer hours and it's much more important.
To actually have a Clarity of thinking, and great ideas and have an energetic mind, like the grind in certain disciplines does not produce great work. I just know that in computer science and programming it often. Does some of the best people ever that have built system have programs systems? I usually like the John Carmack, kind of people that drink soda, eat, pizza, and program, you know, 18 hours a day. So I don't know. Actually, you have two
I think really go discipline-specific. So my advice applies to my own life which is been mostly spent behind that computer and for that you really really have to put in the hours and what that means is essentially feels like a grind. I do recommend that you should at least try in your own that if you interview some of the most accomplished people ever, I think, if they're honest with you they're going to talk about their 20s as
As a journey of a lot of pain and a lot of really hard work, I think what really happens, unfortunately, is a lot of those successful people later in life. We'll talk about work-life balance. They'll say, you know what, I learned from that process is that it's really important, you know, to get like sun in the morning to have health to have good relationships, are
tough. It's exactly.
Like I think you have forgot those people have forgotten.
The value of the journey they took to that lesson, I think work-life balance is best learned the hard way, my my own perspective, there's certain things you can only learn the hard way and so you should learn that the hard way. Yeah. So that that's definitely advise. And I should say,
That I admire people that work hard. If you want to get on my good side, I think are the people that give everything. They got towards something, it doesn't actually matter what it is but towards achieving excellence in a thing. I that's, that's the highest thing that we can reach for us human beings. I think is Excellence at a thing.
I love it.
Well, speaking of excellent at a thing whether or not its teaching at MIT or the podcast, or the company that resides in the near future that you create. Mmm. I once again I'm speaking for an enormous number of people that you know excellence and hard work. Certainly are woven through everything that you do every time I sit down with you I begin and finish with such an immense feeling of
Of joy and appreciation and gratitude. And it wouldn't be Alex Friedman podcast or in case of a lecture, even being a guest on a podcast. If the word love weren't mentioned at least ten times. So the feelings of gratitude for all the work you do for taking the time here today to share with us what you're doing. Your thoughts, your insights, your what you're perplexed about and what drives you and you're calling center.
Palm. Yes, please. It was trying to cut me off but I was getting a little long.
Oh no, this is I was thinking about this recent is one of my favorite Robert Frost poems and I because I wrote several essays on it as you do because I think it's a popular one that's red and so essays being like trying to interpret poetry and it's one that sticks with me in both its calm Beauty but in the seriousness of what it means because I
Emily think it's the the so Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I think it's ultimately a human being a man asking the the old Sisyphus, the old Camus question of why I live. I think this poem even though it doesn't seem like it is a question of a man contending with suicide and choosing to live.
Who's whose woods these are? I think I know his house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here to watch his Woods. Fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there's some mistake the only other sounds The Sweep of easy wind and Downy flake.
The woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep.
The woods representing the darkness. The comfort of the woods representing death. And here's a man choosing to live. Yeah, I think about that often especially my dark darker moments as you have Promises to Keep
Thank you for having me. Andrew, you're beautiful human being. I love you brother. I love you
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