awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe, a day, reduced long COVID symptoms. It's good news, right? And there's so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like, I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music through awe, right, as a mechanism. Welcome to the Uberman 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. My guest today is Dr. Dacker Keltner. Dr. Dacker Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Dacker is an expert in the science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding. Today we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions, including the role of teasing and social bonding, the role of embarrassment in social bonding, and his fascinating work on awe and the things that lead to awe. As he describes, awe is not elusive. It happens when we shift our perception from a very small scale to a very large scale or back again, such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista. Today you'll understand what all of that really means and more importantly how you can create this incredible thing that we call awe in everyday life. We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding in groups and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds. So today is a very practical as well as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change the way that you think about your life every day and think about opportunities for awe every day. As you'll soon see, Dacker Keltner is a truly special scientist known for his incredible rigour and creativity in the study of emotions, but also continually offering you the public ways to be and feel genuinely better and to get more out of life. It was a true honor and pleasure to host him. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, 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, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Dacker Keltner. Dr. Dacker Keltner. Welcome. Good to be with you Andrew. Aw. Yeah. We all intuitively know what it is and yet we also don't know how to articulate it. Yeah. I want to say the words overwhelmed, excited. I get the physical sensation of a lift. I don't think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed into a turtle position. That's right. Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that. But what got you into awe? Yeah. And I love the word lift. That's really interesting. Yeah. I was a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in. And that field in the 90s and early 2000s was really focused on negative emotions. And you know the science, right? Anger, fear, fighter flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol, disgust, Paul Raus and John Hype. And thinking about emotions from that lens and it as a young scientist and given the powerful tools of emotion, science of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena, it didn't make contact with my life and my own experience. You know, I was raised as a wild child in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon. And you know, it was like music and social change and protest and, you know, and beauty. And I was raised by a dad who's a visual artist. And my mom taught Romanicism and Virginia Woolf and awe and the mind. And I was like, wow, there's all this stuff that our science, my science can't speak to music and visual patterns and dance and collective movement. And you know, someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry, you know. And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman, I was like, you know, what should I do with my career? And he's like study all, you know, and so that got me going. If we could, maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment. You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student sees these faces of disgust, of pleasure. Darwin talked about this. Yeah. Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults where they'll show a baby like, you know, recoiling from something or, you know, wide eyed and leaning in, you know, there's always seems to be a motor component to this that maybe isn't as captured in those two dimensional photographs. But what's the story about their hardwired facial emotions? And what are the revisions to that story that I'm probably not aware of? Yeah. Thank you for asking that. You know, I spent 30 years working on that very problem. Paul Ekman came in and, you know, as you suggested, right? He did this revolutionary work in New Guinea, you know, showed photos of six emotions, static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile. They kind of interpreted the faces like you or I would, naming it using the right words to describe those faces. And that, you know, and this is how science occasionally works, which is just by accident, that became the field. And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal are they in different cultures? Ekman really posited sort of a strong universality that's been contested by Jim Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett and others. But since then, there are controversies around how hardwired they are. Do they occur reliably in a child's development? Yes and no, you know, young children showed disgust expressions, like social mammals do. They rinse it, bad smells, just like you or I would. Angers a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally. But then our lab and several labs around the world, you know, Jess Tracy, you'd be British Columbia, D.C. Souter. And I want to talk about this computational work, started to expand the vocabulary of faces. And now we, there's a lot of data that suggests there are 20 different facial expressions. Laughter, love, compassion, awe, you know, whoa, embarrassment, shame, pain, you know, and that in some sense has broadened the taxonomy of emotions. We used to think of six. Now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind. And that's where the field is heading is to really start to think about physiological patterns, brain patterns of these distinct states. And I'll tell you the hard-wiring question. I mean, it's hard science to do, right? Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries getting their emotional expressions and then making sense of them. It used to take one hour to code the facial muscle movements of one minute, right? So this is slow science. And I would really encourage listeners and viewers to go to AllenCowen.com. And I had a grad student at Berkeley, Allen Cowan, who, you know, he's a computational genius and he looked at our old science and said, we can use AI to code the face. And he did it with Google engineers. He coded two million videos from 144 cultures and 16 facial expressions, 75% overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks, concentration on a test, you know, laugh at friends. So right now I would say 50 to 60% is hardwired as part of who we are in our evolutionary history. And then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways. I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Juve. 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his episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers. When we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. The mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is, all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz and it will ask you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, your stomach, maybe you know, maybe you don't, do you tend to run hot or cold during the night, things of that sort. You answer those questions and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the dusk du sk mattress. I've been sleeping on a dusk mattress for more than four years now and it's been far in a way the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixleap.com/Huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with True Med, which allows you to use your HSA/FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses. Again, that's helixleap.com/Huberman to get up to 27% off. I'm going to ask a question that may or may not be possible to answer. But if anyone could, it would be you and it's not a test. Here's what I'm thinking. The relationship between emotions and what we call motor patterns movement is obviously very close. Discussed a recoil, explore awe, anger, etc. Then there's this other node which is language. We have emotions, motor, language. Obviously, those can't be dissociated. But can we imagine somebody, a hypothetical person who can keep their body very still while they're angry and be very articulate. That includes not moving their hands. We'd probably think perhaps that person's like sociopathic, but that's not the picture I'm trying to paint. Then on the other extreme, you can imagine somebody who is very angry and is just stimulating a lot and moving away. We can immediately say, "Yeah, that makes sense." We could do this for any emotion. How should we think about emotion as an experience and how it's expressed only three axes? Which is motor, language, and then the emotion itself. I feel like without conceptualizing that, I, as a true novice of this, this isn't my area of understanding or expertise, I can't really understand what an emotion is. But if I understand how those are linked, maybe that's a portal into that. Yeah, no. I mean, it's a profound question, Andrew. It's central to our field, which is and I appreciate it coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species. There are these motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world. When you see the child that's crying, you're going to bring it in close and caress and touch and have emotion. Fighting arrival or when you see rotten food, that motor pattern will be there. That's part of our research that 75% of that is this motor pattern of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional events of life. Then we have this massively complicated conceptual system that puts words to experience. That's mainly what we study in psychological science is just, "Oh, I'm feeling angry. You're ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion." And we know, and you're questioned points to this, like very often they're disconnected, right? The motor pattern and the language we use and how I would interpret it in another person. On balance, they correlate point two, so they're just weekly. They're kind of these streams of behavior that are just part of who we are, right? Our motor patterns in language. And there are a lot of ways to think about it. You can think about cultures that value being calm, like a lot of East Asian cultures. Be calm. Don't disrupt things. Don't blurt out. Don't protest, right? And you'll see this disconnect. You can think about certain people who they just are more authentic and their motor patterns come out in expressions, and they will tell you how they feel. So it's a central problem that we grapple with. And then I love your third part of this equation of emotion science, which is the feeling, the emotion. Michael Paulin is right. You know, this new book on consciousness, the conscious feeling of something. We think we can get it to it with words. I don't think so. You probably wouldn't either, right? Studying the other species you studied, right? It's some weird mixture of everything that's happening in your body. And ironically, the emotion or the feeling is still one of the uncharted territories of our field. Why, as these complicated motor patterns take unfold and words are unfolding in images and memories and visual things that you study, how does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe? And we barely know. You know, we just we don't know. Every once in a while, I'll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science, like the chakras or something. Yeah. And it's kind of interesting, right? I mean, even if just one looks at just purely as a Western scientist, this idea that maybe there's a confluence of of nerves and of vascular churn stuff that makes you feel kind of like rooted at like and calm, right? Versus like up in your head. I've been watching this really interesting Instagram channel. It's a woman who does voices for cartoons. And she has the most incredible understanding of voice. And she's commenting a lot of the time on people in shows that I don't watch, but they have little excerpts of where like I guess there's this doctor on the this it's like an ER type show. It's like a revisiting of the show ER. But she talks about how as he's matured from season to season in his role on the show. And he's mentoring how she literally talks about how his larynx and pharynx are how he's controlling those differently as he matures. And then when he has a breakdown, how the the voice moves further up into his head and what what that's about. And so seeing about this, I'm like, you know, here's somebody that's a very unique, you know, window into all of this. But we sort of know this intuitively. Like when we're excited, like there's this kind of rising from the bottom. And when we're relaxed, everything just kind of sinks down to the diaphragmatic breathing. And as a scientist who studies emotion, how do you sort of decide what what which it lends to look at things through? Because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about might sound a little esoteric, but it's actually the stuff that's easiest to measure. Yeah. Presumably you can quantitatively measure like breaths per minute when somebody's looking at an awe-inspiring image versus like a trivial image. I love your reference to chakra's. And, you know, the older I get, you know, I've been doing emotion science for 34 years or five years. It's good to think about the other traditions. You know, we wouldn't have thought about the breath, the power of the breath, without the contemplative meditation traditions that you've impart tested and Richie Davidson and others. And lo and behold, the breath deep exhalation activates the vagus nerve calms us down. That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest, which kind of sounds like the heart chakra. And all the speculation around how your soul is in your heart. Well, there's a neurophysiological correlate of that. I love the paintings of Alex Gray, the psychedelic artist. Like, if you want an image of what our neurophysiology is, as it synchronizes in love, you could, it's pretty close or it's interesting, right? So it's good to find inspiration in that. One of the great things about the science of emotion and I brought these tools into the study of awe, you know, which is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion. You know, you can measure it with facial muscles and gaze patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and, you know, different measures of vagal tone and immune system activation and activation in the gut and, of course, brain activation and the voice, which is one of my favorite modalities. I learned this in some sense from Darwin. Darwin's expression of emotion in man and animals is, in my view, and we're just publishing a paper on this on everything that he said about human emotion. 53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior. I wrote it with Darwin's color Frank Sullivan, who knows everything about Darwin. And I choose how to study an emotion based on what's happening out in our lives and are the phenomena out there, right? So if you're studying awe, you should get people around big
trees or in musical concerts or in museums, right? If I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty and I'm like, I got to study young men teasing each other because we embarrass each other intentionally. Oh my goodness, we have to hear about that work together. It's become very relevant nowadays because of the, I'll just call it what it is, it's not dreaded, it's the dreadful manosphere, you know, which people use very broadly, but I think now it's being allocated to the worst of the worst. But then there is this phenomenon among males where they'll rib each other, and there's a healthy version of males interacting too. So we'll get back to that. I base it on what's the phenomenon of interest, right? That speaks to humanity and then what are our best measures that we can go after it. These days, if you want to measure awe, what's your favorite awe stimulus? First stop, and thank you for asking about measurement. It's interesting, like people like, oh, you can't study awe, you know, you don't know how to measure it, it's, it's ineffable, it's mysterious, it's spiritual, we can measure awe really well, you know, the vocalization, whoa, you know, the facial expression, activation parts of the brain aren't deactivated, vagal tone, the goose bumps is a good part of the awe response. As we started to study awe, we did two things, and one is typical, you know, science, which is get your most cool awe videos, show them to people, you know, and I had some missteps in this science. I had a woman who was an honor student at Berkeley who was coming back from Burning Man, and you know, she's like, I'm going to show engineers fractal imagery, and you know, the engineers are like, who is this woman? I mean, there's the, I've never been to Burning Man, but there's the, the post-Burning Man glow that people come back with, that is for understandable reasons, hard for most people to enter with them. It's like a kid coming back from summer camp. There's great visual imagery, you know, BBC Earth is awesome, and it's, it makes people feel awe, slow motion guys. I don't know if you know these guys. They film wild things in slow motion, like, you know, dropping a wine glass, and it's this spectacular photography and just, you know, you're like, so it opens you up. We'll put a link to that. Yeah. I love super slow-mo. Yeah. And that fits our definition, which is like, you don't understand what's happening, it's fast, it's mysterious. But what I'm really proud of Andrew is the work we did out in the field, right? So one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got your master's degree at and headed into neuroscience was in our paleontology museum. There's a replica of a T-Rex skeleton. When I was five years old and I learned about dinosaurs, it changed my life. It was just in the LA Natural History Museum, like, wow! So we studied people standing near the T-Rex skeleton and they became expansive and collective. We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees. We studied people at Yosemite, you know, yang by a student in my lab, stopped hundreds of travelers from all over the world right when you see Yosemite. And she said, how do you feel about yourself right now? And they're like, I feel small and quiet, but part of something really large, right? Subsequent to that, there are scientists who are studying mosh pits at concerts and, you know, surfers and, you know, rock, I mean, it's, you know, backpackers. And, you know, we studied one of my favorite studies later with Stacey Bear, who's a veteran who ran, who's amazing human being, an awe pioneer. We studied people rafting down the American river, you know, veterans. It's like, whoa! We've studied people in art museums, Carnegie Hall, you know, so it's, you know, one of the joys is when science, you know, just in the spirit of your questions, it's like, well, what should I really do here? Right? I could stay in the lab and it's like, no, you know, we got to go do stuff, you know, that my dream study was to like have a participant come in and engage in conversation and the other participant is Shaquille O'Neal, right? And it's like seven foot two, three hundred fifty pounds, you'd be like, whoa, but couldn't do that. So, so there, it's been fun. It's been a wild ride. And so many thoughts. First one, I'm lucky I didn't rotate through your lab because I would have never become a neuroscientist, but I'm unlucky. We're glad you missed that opportunity. But I'm, but I'm unlucky because it would have been so much fun to, because I, while I loved the wet lab, as they call it, getting into these experiments would just be incredible. Couple things at the Shaquille O'Neal thing. I, you know, I think we're all moved by these, I guess they used to call them make-a-wish foundation things where a kid who sadly is dying gets some last wish and it's a tragic circumstance, but then you get to observe these kids and most importantly, they get to experience something that they never could imagine happening like a Shaquille O'Neal walking in. I feel like that's probably happened or something. And I think what we're witnessing in those moments has to be all like they can't believe that this human or this event, whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it sort of layers upon layers of there's like a grief component for those of us watching, but a huge aspect of the, of just how touching it is, is the fact that like for those moments they're not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality. Even as I talk about it, it's profound. Yeah, it's just an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right? That's a particularly complicated and interesting case where you've got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. And anyway, that's just an observation, but horizons are something that fascinated me from time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon, our visual angle widens. That's cool. We become more parasympathetic. There's a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic 90s and so on. So we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. We focus in through a tunnel. It's quite the opposite. Nice. But I feel like there's something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, thinking about your semity or in a bunch of trees. And then the horizon opens up. Yeah, there's this transformation of visual space. And those moments, at least for me, are the moments. So I mean, I can hike along a ridge line for a long time, be like, this is amazing, but there's something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness. Yeah, it could be brought to the lab. But do you think that's what's going on in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Do people work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon? Do they attenuate? They're like, oh yeah, like another horizon. I don't know, you know, working with Rangers right now. And I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated, but they're still finding it in subtler ways. Yeah, that's really interesting. And you know, it's interesting as I've been privileged to know Pete, doctor, it picks R for 15 years and worked on some of his films inside out and inside out to you. And so you played a big role in that. Yeah. And through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know, in one of our conversations, I was like, tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children's films, animated films. And he described first just what you said, like, you know, the film is narrow, like a certain kind of attention, you know, sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things. And then it comes, it's suddenly you see the vastness of something. And it's true. It is awe-inspiring. When you think about it neuroscientifically, it's a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception. And then it becomes metaphorical, right? It's like, God, I'm thinking about, like, I love one of the wonders of life that that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies. And very often people be like, God, I've been working so hard at this, you know, I'm working on a paper, something in technology or some part of my life. And then you suddenly realize it's part of something large, right? One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, you know, she's a cellist for the Philadelphia symphony said, you know, I practiced for five hours a day. It's hard, man. And it's small and narrow. And where's my finger? And then when I'm on stage and I feel the notes go out into this space, the vastness you're talking about, I feel like I'm part of history, right? And I tear up and cry. So I think you're, I think you've got to send me those papers, Andrew, because I think it's fundamental, which is from small to vast. And in fact, we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco, brain health, old people go out in an awak once a week for eight weeks, 75 years older, older, and all we ask them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things. You know, look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them all and less physical pain over eight weeks. And now we're finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it. I'm struck by the awak and I know this comes up in your book and elsewhere and you've done a lot of research.
search on this. For those listening, what would an all walk look like? And what are some of the health benefits you just mentioned a few that have been observed both in the short and the long term? Yeah, thank you. You know, we are a walking species. You know, it is just in our DNA to walk. We meandered from Africa all the to all the continents. A lot of people Rebecca Solnet writes about this like walking is almost sacred. It's a kind of consciousness. Like you're saying like, whoa, I'm picking up a vast review of what's around me and I decided to just create this all walk, you know, and I did it for a meditation group or a mindful magazine. You just slow down. A lot of people walk hundreds of, you know, tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States. It's good for you, you know, so we just add it all. Like on your regular walk once a week in our study, go somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go, go someplace that may surprise you. I walk around Berkeley a lot and I was like, well, I'm going to go past the little playground that my daughters played at when they were young and just feel that, you know, cordonisi's park with the rock slide and the tunnel. Exactly. I love that place. You're the road. And there's a secret, should we give this away? Yeah. There's a secret hiking trail through, it's actually through a private property's backyard and they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash. And there's an incredible waterfall in place to stand at the top. There's a beam there. You've been there. I'm sure we can look out over this what is kind of like a trench of tree. It's a total transformation of one space to the next. Thank you. If you look for it properly, I'm sure now it's on the internet. It's in kind of swinging gates, not locked. And so hard to find. And there's a little monastery maybe nearby. Yeah. And you might and you might see me a couple of years ago, you would have seen me in my dog, but you might see me eating a slice of pizza from the cheese board sitting on that log. I spent a lot of time there. I'm getting goosebumps. And that is just pure Berkeley. Thank you. So yeah. So in this study, all walk, go on your walk, find a place that's going to be a little surprising, or it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder. And it's interesting. No one's asked me this question, you know, your observation about small to vast. And we just said, slow down, deep in your breathing, sink it up with your your walking, which you've studied empirically, the breath. And then go from small to vast, you know, look at clouds. Look at the whole pattern of clouds. Just slow it down. Look at trees. Look at the light on the trees and look at points of light and then patterns of light. Look at, you know, I love walking past playgrounds is one of my favorite sources of awe. Listen to one laugh and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right? That's all. And they walk through. They do that for half an hour. And what we find in that study is is they become more vast in their consciousness. They're more aware in the photographs that they provided of what's around them. They feel more kindness over the eight weeks. They feel more awe over an eight week period. It rises. And then the finding that was, you know, important for people who are elderly is less physical pain. You know, your body starts to ache when you're 75, you know, or earlier and awe. I think through the inflammation process, you know, and reducing it cause less pain. You know, this dovetails with other health benefits, awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day, reduced long COVID symptoms. And there's so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like, I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music through all, right? As a mechanism. I have a lot of thoughts about this going from a small to large. Yeah, I'd love to hear them. But before I do, I have another question. I have another question. I think for a lot of people, including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of ourself, like getting outside of ourselves. But I'm starting to think based on the way you're describing it, that it's about being tethered to the larger picture, that it's not a yes, it's getting out of our heads, quote unquote. But it's actually very much an embodied experience. It's very, it's almost like full body. And so now I'll answer your question. This is usually where people start putting in the comments, like, you talk too much, let your desktop. But try and folks, he asked me twice. So you asked me a question. I'm going to answer it. Anyone that knows me, you know, if I, okay, so I've thought about this, this relationship between visual aperture and a time perception for a long time. This is my, my deepest obsession. And it gets a little bit into the book I'm writing, but it, but it, it's probably reserved for after there's some experiments. And I, to the fear of my podcast crew, I actually am considering going back in the lab to do this experiment. So we know what, what do we know for certain? We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small, like looking through a soda straw view or watch maker type aperture, or you're in it, let's just say it could be a pleasant or unpleasant text communication. It's going back and forth that your perception of time is different. You're fine slicing those dot, dot, dots coming through. Yeah. It's just like, it feels like an eternity. Yeah. And it's bi-directional with your, let's just call it level of alertness. It doesn't even have to be stressed, but sympathetic nervous system, right? So if I'm in line at the store and I have some place to be my visual aperture shrinks, and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever. Yeah, because you're in these little migraines. When I'm relaxed, it feels like I'm slicing time differently. Okay, when we see a horizon and our aperture opens up, as I mentioned, then we relax. But we also are taking fewer time bit snapshots. So people might think, oh, fewer, you're in slow motion, because there were no, you're, it's the opposite, right? Slow motion is high frame rate. This thing by video where you can catch slow motion, you need to high frame rate. This is why when people experience like a car crash they'll often say that things like they were slowing down, but more snap shots. That's cool. So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain. So if I'm listening to a specific conversation in a party, I'm fine slicing my perception of auditory space. Our friend, Irv Hafter, taught me this. When I listened to everything, and I take it in as a whole, it's a more relaxed experience. So a long time ago, I was, because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things. And I came up with this meditation, but it's not meditation at all. And some of my listeners will be familiar with it. I decided to call it for lack of a better term space time bridging. The meditation is very simple. You close your eyes and you do three breaths, thinking about your skin inward, so inter-reception. You open your eyes and you look at your hand, you take three breaths, but you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe eight or ten feet away. You do the same. Then you find a horizon. And then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon, like you're just on a planet, it's floating in space. And like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or whatever. And then you get right back to yourself. And so what the idea here is that it helped me a lot, because I noticed that meditations where I was completely focused inward made me more focused inward. Going for a run, I could get outside my head, and I started to play with the idea that maybe it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture, per se, but it's the like every great thing in biology or psychology. It's the process. It's not an event. It's the process of going from one aperture to the next. And that's kind of what life is about. Yeah, absolutely. Like when this two shall pass is really about taking a broader time snapshot, like eventually this which is visual, which is visual. And so there's a long answer to your question, but this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning. But it's also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I'm working. Yeah. Like there is no place or event in a day or in life that's actually the right way to live. Like you can go to Big Sur and if you're lucky enough to go to Esselon, like you're like this is it, but it's only it because you came from your office in my opinion. Yeah. And then you go back again. Yeah. You figure this out. Like you they're title of this paper which you're the senior author is a balanced mind, off-osters equanimity via temporal distancing. Yeah. So it's so it's about time, not about space. It is. That's fascinating. So that's that's how I think about this. Now maybe you can tell us about this paper because I'm getting embarrassing. I've been going way too long. This is why we're in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know, you study the visual system and and we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Matthias Tonopowski who was at Berkeley and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony. It was a music director there. And he said I was like and he was he studies the great and he's a conductor of symphonies. And I was like, what's the sea music?
hard to understand scientifically. It is complicated. I was like, "What's that why awe and music? Why do we cry? Why do we get goose bumps? Why do I mean profound?" And he's like, "Time." It's all about what it does to our sense of time. And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore. What awe does to the self, and I'm putting together a couple of your comments, is, and Jane Goodall got it most right. And it's so great to study things with science, and then you see someone you really revere, say something. And she felt that chimpanzees feel awe. I do too. Believe that. So it's a controversial issue. Chimps show, in front of all, alerted me to this, who recently passed away, and I just want to pay reverence to him, or homage to him. They're great primatologists. So he said, you got to look at Jane Goodall, and writing about chimps. And the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature. They sit quietly, like around rivers, like that waterfall in Berkeley. They look at things, they get goose bumps, they touch things like we would out in nature. They rock, and Jane Goodall said, "Why wouldn't they feel awe?" Or the beginnings of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside of the self. So with awe, we have a sense of self-interception and the like, and then we connect to vast things out there. And that's what our research documented as kind of a central mechanism of awe, or transformation. It's like, when you're at Yosemite, or when you are standing next to that T.R.X. skeleton, or when you've, you know, when you've thought about the passage of time that happens with life, right? And there are new meditations around that. You're like, "Wow, I am part of something vast. I'm part of evolution. I'm part of nature. I'm part of an ecosystem." And it changes your whole mind, right? It changes the neurophysiology of the mind. Default mode network starts to quiet down, activates vagal tone, and you do feel like you're tethered, as you said, to like music, or culture, or a political movement, or the team you love, right? And it's transcendent. And if you look at where we are today, we need more of that. You know, we need to get our young people to be connecting to big things. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it, and the reason I still take it, is because AG1 is to my knowledge the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink, and it tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. 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I didn't expect that we would land here at least not so early in the conversation, but we've had Christoph on this podcast talking about consciousness, incredible neuroscientist, and I really think her. I've watched his career evolve over the years, and he's continued to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness. And we'll hear nowadays about oh, like maybe consciousness is outside the brain, and I think if nothing else, our brains are important components in it, maybe not. I don't know. I don't want to do the experiment on myself to find out, like I was disaribrated or something, which basically means having your cortex removed, folks sorry for the nerd speak. But the idea is connecting through time, like in our own lives, is a very unique form of awe. So, like if I hear a song, and it reminds me when I was like 15, and then all of a sudden all the, the mat, I call it like the magic library, that's how the brain works, right? It's like, it's like a Harry Potter, like you take out a book, you see a subject, and then also in the library, the books around it change. And so, I think about the time we did this and the time we did that and everyone has these notions, but there's very much linked to them. That's one form of linking up through time. And then there's this other one where you feel something with someone else, you know you're connected in that moment, but there's this idea for getting squishy on here, but there's this idea that maybe your past present and future is connected to their past and present and future. And if you let yourself go there, no drugs required. If you let yourself go there, you're like, oh, we're part of this together. And that there were sort of moving more now as a conscious fleet than as individuals. I think that's a very real experience, even for people that are like very resistant to kind of like even the language of collective consciousness and it's like that. And I think concerts are where we generally feel that because we're in it requires a sort of shared perceptual experience or emotional experience. And so when you say getting young people connected that way, it's very different than like node-to-node. It's sort of like it's an openness that comes first you have to connect to your past present and future and then you're kind of open to it. I feel like then that that window opens. And then if there's one person there are a thousand people standing there like it's on. But if not, and you're just in your experience, you're the person at the party wondering whether or not you have something between your teeth, which is the lamest way to be at a party, but we've all been there, right? Anyway, I'm getting a little outside the box here, but what do your thoughts about individual experiences? Like on the all walk versus a couple on an all walk versus connecting to a whole mess of people, some of whom you've never met. I mean, you've highlighted this temporal, this dynamic that you're pointing to with respect to all and the experience of all. And we're so limited in how we measure experience. And I think you're right. I think that your first sense of like one of the most awesome qualities of awe is connecting in your mind through the layers of consciousness and experience that shifts out of the micro to this expansive narrative about your mind, right? And so I grew up around the UCLA campus because my mom got her PhD there at UCLA at UCLA in the late 60s. And there were eucalyptus trees. And then I went to Northern California, or there were not as many eucalyptus trees. And the first day I was at UC Santa Barbara, it was an undergrad. I smelled the eucalyptus and it was all, it was just like all of these experiences through the olfactory process. Yeah, I was awestruck by that smell, right? And that's through the connecting through time. I am very persuaded by the new literature on brain synchronization that we are and I talk about this a bit in awe and there's just new science coming out. We're always syncing up with other people. You know, when a nine-month-old listens to music, they are syncing up to the sounds and rhythms of their culture's music and they're synced up physiologically with whomever is in their midst. When we go to a concert, or we watch a sporting event, you know, if you're if you like sports, your heart rate is syncing up, your brains are synchronizing that it's and that in some sense is the materialistic account of collective consciousness. We're all sharing brain patterns and awareness. And I think that it's it's part of some of our deepest forms of awe, you know, and music. Now the current science of music is like it is very hard to get people to think collectively in the same way. You know, when you teach a classroom, it's impossible. But music does it within milliseconds, right? When you talk to people who've been to Taylor Swift shows or Swifties, it's serious, right? They are instantly bonded. That's the United in like a moral cause, almost or a identity cause. So that's profound. That's very hard work to do. And when Jonathan Heiden, I wrote about awe early in our careers, you know, we were like we need these emotions to make us be part of collectives because we are a very collective species. It was one of our signature strengths is to fold into groups and cooperate and share. It's hard work. It's vulnerable to exploitation. And awe is one of the fastest pathways through what you're talking about through physical dancing together, chanting together.
other sporting events together, what email Durcon called collective effervescence, right? Music, just syncing up with each other, feeling like we're part of this vast group, sharing a sense of humanity, a sense that we all suffer in the same way, or exult in the same way, and it's profound, you know. I don't think we'll ever get this with science, but I love, you know, you know, I've had all these conversations about awe and musical awe, I'm like, when's a time, and I could ask you this question, when being at a concert has changed your life? Oh, I mean, there's some of the most important, not just memorable, but important experiences of my entire life. So tell me about one or two. My sister listened to The Grateful Dead and Kat Stevens and all that kind of stuff. And from the first time I heard people will immediately think, well, bullet belt and Mohawks, but I was a punk rock kid. I mean, I'll never forget like my friend who's now well-known in the skateboard community, Jim Thibault. I know Jim. You know, Jim, it's close friend of mine. I take son as a Jim. Do you? Yeah, I texted with him this morning. We text each other every morning. The great Jim Thibault. He basically runs skateboard. He's the dean of skateboard and the quiet. Good friends with Tommy Guerrero. Jim gave me my first couple of black coffee. He was the person who inspired me to just start journaling when I was 14. I was put on out of sympathy onto thunder trucks. And he at the time, he was around the factory, which at that time was over in Third Street, where all the hunters point on Yosemite. But anyway, Jim gave me a tape because back then it was tapes. A bank called crimp shrine, which is from Berkeley. And they were on lookout records, which eventually were first releases of Green Day. I wasn't so much forgive me. I like those guys. I know some of them, but I was super, I heard that tape. It was like, this is amazing. Like, this is amazing. Like, I've never heard anything quite like it. Yeah. It was super raw. And then I, I was like, I need more of this. It was like, it was like a drug. I was like, I need more of this, whatever this is. And so he gave me a stiff little fingers tape. And that was just it. And then it was stiff little fingers, Operation Ivy, Rancid. I mean, I could easily like do a whole literally a thesis on that whole kind of era and genre of punk rock. I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan. Yeah. Um, mescaleros and yeah. Biggest Rancid fan there ever was. I'm blessed to be good friends with Tim Armstrong these days. But I only met him later in life. And that still freaks me out because we're close friends. But whenever I see him, it's still I'm like, that's Tim Armstrong because there's the fort talk about time travel. That's the 14 15 year old version of me. Those guys are a bit older. And they were like gods in the Bay Area for our scene. And then when they made it, you know, they're just still so good. Yeah. The show that changed everything for me was this would be summer between 93 and 94. A little club. It was either called the stage house or the stage coach in Santa Barbara. That was near the railroad tracks downtown. And it was um, Rancid playing with Sikavodol, which was a East Coast hardcore band, which you know, and my now good friend Toby Mors was there. And I remember going there and being kind of scared. I mean, I'm kind of like my way around. It was just like those guys were older. It was like how to kind of violent feel. Yeah. They were from Albany and West Oakland and some of some of some of there was an edge there. And I remember thinking, this is exciting. I feel very much a part of this. I love the music. I know every lyric and I'm a little bit frightened and I love it. And I think it was just you know, I just got the adrenaline back. And there's a little bit of you don't know what it is going to happen. And it feels a little dangerous, but it's mostly benevolent. And it's an irreplaceable feeling. And I think about some time, I think about a lot of the time. Yeah. And you know, thank you. And I, you know, when I was writing this book on awe, some forms of awe, you know, there are eight wonders that give us awe, you know, summer. You kind of understand them. Nature is pretty straightforward. Spirituality meditation, you know, and music and your description of it exactly, exactly captures how rich it is and complicated, which is there is something about that sound and the acoustic patterns that come through your, your drums and head into your auditory cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people and the insta friends, like you said, for life, you know, brothers and sisters almost that and you're like, this is what life's about. And Susan Langer, a philosopher really got it right. She's like, music is this tonal language of emotion and identity and awe in music, very fitting with our conversation is when those sounds come into you, move you and connect you to something that is what you care about in life. You know, I remember I grew up, I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s and there was more music there than I almost anywhere in human history, you know, from, you know, the Mamas and Papas and Frank Zappa. Jim Morrison was out here. Jim Morrison was living there on the doors and the, you know, Bob Dylan was passing through and the bird is a joke, you know, it was everywhere. That's wild. Just to think about how much incredible music was being created. Oh man, you know, right. The beach boys were, you know, I mean weren't Fleetwood Mac back into Penga. Yeah, I mean, it was like, and I was eight and nine and just to, you know, to grow up on Bob Dylan. And when I saw about the recent film with Timothy Schell, I mean, I start crying, you know, I was just like, this is life, you know, yeah. And so that's why we study all, you know, it, it, and, you know, music is one of our great technologies. There's now research showing it's good for chronic pain. I think it's a frontier in healthcare and, you know, just giving people contemplative meditative approaches to music and, and, and all as part of the answer. And you and I shared yet another thing, Andrew, you know, when I grew up in the foothills of this airs as a teenager, Ted Nugin and, you know, it was poor, what, you know, area Ted Nugin, ACDC. And that's all fine. And when I first heard the sex pistols in, I was lucky to be in England when never mind the ballaks came out. And I was in a working class, fighting town. And I heard that. I was like, that's it. And then that led me to Iggy Pop, who's one of my moral heroes. So, you know, amazing, who's really into Chigong, apparently. I heard him like years ago on the radio. And someone was asking, like, how does he stay in such good shape? And he's just tons of Chigong breathing. Wild, wild, wild. You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't. But there's something that feels kind of, um, divorced from language about the experience that we're talking about, even though there's lyrics tied in there. And what brings that to mind is there's a really good book, one that I like anyway, um, called A Fighter's Heart by a guy named Sam Sheridan. His wife actually wrote that movie monster, uh, with Charlize Thoreau, I think is the actress that played her. And, um, and I don't know Sam, but, but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms. And he explores them all. And, um, there's this great line in there, because I've done a little bit of boxing and, um, and sparred a bit. I don't recommend it. As a neuroscientist, how can I recommend it? What were you doing? I was, and I was actually in my thirties. But, anyway, I was working some stuff out. But, uh, do not recommend, uh, the sport. Yeah, the training out, but you don't want to get hit in the head. Not good for your brain whatsoever. But he talks about how, fighting with someone, sparring or fighting with someone is, uh, he said it's like, uh, it's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have. Yeah. Because you're in this primitive non-language state. Yeah. I mean, he actually likens it to a one night stand. He says something like, oh, you know, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know, but you, you feel connected, you know, so I don't know if that's the best. It's certainly not the most politically correct, uh, way to put it. But, but I understand what he's talking about. Really? You're, you're in this moment of you're both vulnerable. Yeah. In the case of the fighting, you're both vulnerable. You're trying to hurt each other. You're also obeying some rules, right? It's not, not anything goes. And he talks about how it transcends language. Yeah. And that creates a forever bond. And it's true. Yeah. I didn't do a ton of sparring, but you have a respect. Yeah. You went through something hard together. Yeah. Even if it's only three, three minute rounds. Like, that's it. It's real. But it's separate from language. And earlier we were talking about the experience, the experience of emotion as this kind of triad of the feeling, the motor component to it and language. But I do think that maybe the language piece can go. I'm with you in some sense. Daroan wrote about the motor components, got a lot of it right. William James was about the body, you know, in the physiology and, you know, language is what we rely on as social scientists. But it, I think it's, as William James said, when he tried to describe his experience of transcendence, uh, when he took laughing gas and Let him down the path.
understand spirituality, it's like words are tattered fragments, they barely touch the real thing. Yeah, and I just want to dwell for a moment, you know, part of all. And I learned this like talking to veterans, you know, and I did work with Stacy Bearer and we did this Sierra Club research, getting veterans out on the rivers. And he's one of my heroes in the book of getting tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature, you know, and these are guys who've lost limbs and they're rock climbing, you know, and it's just like, like, there's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life. And there's violence and there's a lot of horror, carnage, etc. But there's awe. And I love your idea. And I think any teacher of the martial arts would say that's the point is that we can transcend death or violence by martial arts, by performing them and putting them into a contemplative form for the body. One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie is Raging Bull, man in Martin Scorsese, like Jake Lamata and Sugar Ray have these epic battles and they look at each other, you know, and one of the great scenes and they're just like, we're united. This is, we're way beyond the fight, you know, I think you're right. I think it's part of this transcendent moment that of people crashing into each other. Moshpits. Yeah. One of my favorite objects of study and awe and Moshpits have a law, a set of laws to them. Yeah, people have studied like the physics or the physics and you think you're crash and you are, you're bruising yourself, you know, but there's something transcendent there about what we find. I could be wrong, but I think Raging Bull, I think the soundtrack was Clash Inspired. Was there something about it in the documentary, which I highly recommend called The Future is Unwritten, which is the Joe Strummer thing where some, there's some link up between the Clash. I think Scorsese says, you know, the Clash Inspired the soundtrack to Raging Bull or something like that. Really? Anyway, he's a big Clash fan. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Andrew, I get to ask you one more question. Yeah, yeah. So why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you? One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice. So why Joe Strummer? Oh, man. All right, I'm going to try and keep this brief. I mean, just to give you a sense of how, what did an impact he's had on me? I mean, I've always worn these button down black shirts, even before I was public facing. Because I saw him do a show, a Mezcalero show, I wasn't there, but he, by the way, Joe Strummer and the Mezcalero actually think is better than the Clash. Clash was a short run. It was only five years. Yeah. And with five years. Yeah. Pretty much. And then they're done. They came back with the Mezcalero's and just incredible. I mean, they're masterpieces produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong. He went at Hellcat Records. He went to a small label. He also sang songs with Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin. I actually know the story of that because I'm friends with Rick and I insisted on him telling me the story. Sometimes I tell you that. But I mean, masterpieces laid in life and there was a show that that Strummer played where he was wearing his black button down, soaking in sweat, soaked in sweat and he just wouldn't take the thing off. I think he might have rolled up like one cuff and I was like, "That's punk, his fuck." I was like, "Hey guys, so rad." And he died at 50, I'm 50 now, died at 50. I go see the mural of him right off. It's right off Tompkins Square Park in Alphabet City. Every time I'm in New York, I just go see it. The aviator says future is unwritten and you can go there and pay your respects. I've talked to Rick about this a lot, like what was it about him? Yeah. Because they were close friends. I never met Strummer. But I think there's three reasons. One is he had that Bob Dylan like ability to write lyrics that you're not, especially with mescaleros, where you're not really sure what the song is about, but it makes sense. Not just because it's beautiful, but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics are actually saying. Beyond language. Like a great song, for instance, would be like on the road to rock and roll. Like that could be about being on tour or something, but it transcends something obvious. The other thing is the way he used his breath was like there was a, his intonation is like unparalleled. And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand. Because during the summer I go hang out with Rick whenever I can and I went or two and we watched documentaries, including flash documentaries. And I asked him, I was like, what was it? Like why does he have this thing? Because he said these incredible things, you know, he would say things like, you know, you got to bring humanity back into the center of the thing. And those are really beautiful quotes, but like a lot of people will give beautiful quotes. And Rick in very Rick Rubin style said, everything he said, he brought his whole life experience into those statements. And I was like, just the statements, like the quotes, you know, like, you know, we got to bring the humanity back into the road. And he goes, no, everything he said, it was like you got the sense that he was bringing all of himself to it, even if he was being kind of quiet. And I go, okay, so this is clearly on a plane of understanding that I can't put language to. But even me, that's like half the things Rick says, it's like a riddle mixed up in a poem, you know, put out there, you know, as a principle and he's like, what the hell is that mean? But it feels true. And I think that, you know, and Rick's superpower is that Rick knows what a true feeling feels like. Yeah. And he knows what a false feeling feels like. And he's only interested in truths, period. And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of is exactly that. It's like there are all these layers of meaning and representation and, you know, and we try to figure out true moments of awe and with all of our measures. And it is this like it's all coming together as a package that tells us it's happened. So we can think about things that promote awe, the awe walk, going small to large aperture maybe back again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, coming back into our home after something big is there's nothing like that, right? The dog, the kids, the spouse, the whatever, you know, like those little things, the plants, you know, the, you know, so it runs both ways. It's no fun, but we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe. Because as I step back from what we're talking about today and I think, okay, language, it can be part of it, but it can also in molecular biology or genetics, we call it a dominant negative. It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions. A ton of stuff. Yeah. There's a joke around molecular labs and neuroscience labs that you'd be like, that person's a dominant negative. You know, you don't have a new phrase. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to be called a dominant negative. I call people that in my head a lot online. I go, man, that person's a dominant negative. They're not contributing to the greater good. They're just like, so there's, you know, language can be that or be neutral, repositive, it can definitely be that. And then there's something about being over identified with self. You know, so on the recommendation of Tim Armstrong, someone he wouldn't associate with the grateful dead, he was like, God, listen to the grateful dead. And I was like, what? What? There's Tim, the Tim Armstrong, transplants, rancid, operation IV, telling me I should listen to the grateful dead. He's a huge music fan of all sorts of things. Yeah. I said, why? And he said, uh, he said, dare punk rockers. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, he said, yeah, they, they played a different show every night. That's how they're, I'm not going to keep doing it. I can do a pretty decent Tim, but apparently they're the, the people that followed them. That was a big part of it. It was all. Yeah. All new, right? Every show was unique. Start getting really into listening to the grateful dead in the last couple years. And then I started listening to documentaries, biographies of them. And there's this amazing moment in one of them. I can't remember which where somebody says, what killed it? What killed the collective of music, like that, that feeling. And the answer someone gave was cocaine. And then the question was, why cocaine? And someone said, because cocaine is all about me. It's the me drop. So I was like, whoa, I'm a neuroscientist. So I can tack that to you're talking about dopamine and adrenaline. And it's, when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated, that's a very, I mean, amphetamines, especially, but it's, it becomes a me thing. Yeah. That's every idea that's. Yeah. That's the thing that needs to happen. Right. It's the important thing. If not out there, it needs to happen, like that's the only thing that matters. Very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics, very different than just the sober experience, words, kind of a downer, but then the non intoxicated experience of just being with the music, no substances. So I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states and, but more broadly, how meanness, self-interested states are a dominant negative for all. That was the best entrance into that question.
I've ever encountered, you know, it's amazing, Andrew, you know, I grew up for three years, formative years in Laurel Canyon, 68 to 70, and then we moved to the foothills of the Sierra's in Northern California. And it was peak Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell, and the Birds, and the Beach Boys, and it was just jealous. Yeah, it was incredible. And he was in a positive way. When my brother passed away, and he was my brother of all, you know, 14 months younger, and I was in this reflective period, I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon. And they made the same point, which is kind of things shifted after we, you know, in the early 70s, and the historian said it's cocaine, that it moved from, you know, Marijuana and mushrooms, it's psychedelics a bit, but really, you know, people playing music, you know, Joni Mitchell, or Graham Nash, or whomever it is, and then suddenly cocaine comes, and the whole spirit changed. Yeah, I think the great enemy of awe is meanness, is what Ralph Aldo Emerson, who is one of our great writers of awe, you know, he has this moment out in nature, cold day, in Massachusetts, sees this forest, and, you know, he's like standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by by there, and uplifted into infinite space. And there's that uplift that you described earlier of awe. All mean egotism vanishes. And that's awe, you know, awe quiets the self. And when you look at where we are, you know, Jean Twenge, you know, longitudinal data, we're more self-focused, you know, we're taking a quarter of the pictures that we take, or of the self. It's preposterous. It's pretty crazy. It's half of the photos we take are of the self, or the self with another person, or another thing. It's perverse, you know, the world has become more narcissistic. We're led by narcissists. It's been, you know, it's just taken as a default, and it's not a default. It's a corruption of our minds. Because the mind, as you described earlier, is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact, at seeing their beauty, at hearing their words, at looking at collectives, discerning patterns of nature or collectives. And all of that works against awe, right? That, you know, if I am focused on myself, I'll feel this awe. If I am worried about my striving in society, or my bottom line in my bank account, you know, or thinking about money, it countervails awe. So, yeah, I think, you know, that's why awe is important for our times. We are in this, for various reasons, this period of too much self-focus. It's costing young people. It makes them anxious, you know, and they gotta, they gotta, they gotta go dance. They gotta hear some music. They gotta share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is, you know, and just to get out of this self. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. 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And while I've been doing it for years, it's always been overly complicated and expensive, but now with function, it's extremely easy and affordable. To learn more, visit FunctionHealth.com/Huberman and use the code "Huberman" for a $50 credit towards your membership. The example you gave of sports earlier, I think, is an important one only because I think some people, not me, but some people will, all right, I don't really want to go camping or backpacking. I do. I spend as much time in the assembly as I can. The dancing concert, you know, maybe that's not for them. I do think I'm not a big professional sports fan, like a few things, but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on, like, when I see a game, one of our members of our podcast team that's not here today is, like, just obsessively excited about professional football and Seattle Seahawks. So this is a good year for him. And I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl, that it's not just about his relationship to his team. It's about being a kid and everyone else there in a Seahawks jersey is, like, they have, they must feel a connection. Because they presumably, the super fans know that the other super fans know the history. They know how important this is. They know all the trials and tribulations of the team and on and on. And so it's, gosh, it's so different. I'm just realizing, like, it's the, it's the furthest thing from, like, doing a PhD in the sciences. Folks, doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun. It's a hell of a lot of work. And there's nothing else quite like it. It's irreplaceable. I wouldn't redo it for any other way. But it is a very, like, you're, it's a very solitary thing. It is. You don't even cross, you cross finish line, your advisor's area, your family comes, but it's, it's like, it is a tunnel like this big. Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is you're going through that, the tunnel with, you know, millions of people. One of the joys of awe science, you know, we gathered stories of awe from 26 countries. And it's one of my favorite parts of this research. And this is like India and Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico and Japan and Korea and South Korea and Russia. And we, everybody, we brought them in, got these stories. Hey, you know, like, what is vast and mysterious? What gives you goosebumps? What's amazing or awesome to you. And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina, they're going to write about, they're going to tell you about football, you know, and, you know, when you get stories from parts of the United States, they're going to talk about, you know, American football and baseball, you get stories from Boston. It's, there's going to be a Red Sock story. And we have not studied sports in my emotion science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes. They're picked last in grammar school. They're grouchy about sports. And yet it's super emotional. And I will tell you a story that has science and personal wisdom. As I, I gathered these stories like, God, you know, part of collective effervescence, just like Taylor Swift or being in a punk mosh pit is also sports. And, and just like, it is awesome to follow a sports team and be their live. And there's this great obscure sociology paper that said, being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion because you have your rituals. They have these towels. They, they sing around. You think of yourself as the stealer nation. They talk about God-like experiences on the field. They have these spiritual moments where in freezing days, they'll take off their clothes and cheer and cry together. And I was teaching this recently and there were two stealer fans in the audience and they're like, it's exactly it, but I'll tell you more. Like, everywhere you go, if you're a fan, a stealer fan, there are stealer bars that you can go to. And when the stealers play, they're going to be stealers fans. And if you're a kid and the stealers lose, somebody's old will tell you, I remember when we lost in 1983 and we'll recover, we'll, you know, I have this expansion of time. It was so rich to me. You know, it was like, we love sports. You know, sports, the Olympics are old. They're 3,000 years old. The ball court games and the Maya, you know, in the Mayan traditions are, we're amazing ways to gather community and become collective, right? So, you know, it was really eye-opening for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports. And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr who was coaching the warriors at the time. He's a righteous guy, you know. He is a person of truth and just getting his sense of like how awesome it is to, I mean, for him to coach a game and the warriors were in this amazing period and look up into the stands and 10,000 people are dancing. Because of your coaching, you know, I was like, that's pretty good. He's really tapped in, isn't he? He's a meditator and wildlife experience and trauma early, you know. His dad losing his dad. Yeah. And that orienting him to what really matters. I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe, but I'm also thinking about solutions. Yeah. You know, it's spring to mind that, you know, it's fine. Sometimes I get tacked to like ice baths for some, look folks, that was a whim. I mean, that was a whim. I mean, sure, I've done some cold plunges I like. I got to do the cold. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, you know, it's psychologically painful and you feel better afterwards and it'll make you, it'll make anyone mentally stronger because cold is a universal stressor.
But you know, it gets kind of a bad rap 'cause mostly 'cause people don't like doing it. Everyone loves the sauna. It's kind of funny. Everyone's cool with sauna and the fins love the sauna and it's a social thing for them. And one thing that I think has been overlooked and it just sprang to mine now. So I overlooked it as well. It's a, you know, there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people, but that we can also do on our own and when we do them on our own, we are no other people doing it on their own too. And so it's kind of a, it's a different version of what we've been talking about. And you know, the quote unquote, health and wellness community, they take some heat like people say, I don't tell them about supplements or all about cold plunges. You know, and I've got a like a particular finger I hold up when I hear that. But it's not about that. There's this deeper layer that's much more important that's formed over the last, I would say five to 10 years 'cause it used to be meditation breath where S-Lingrit love S-Lingrit. Amazing here. Incredible place. It's historic. A historic and many important things actually happened there that people don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics and world peace. Yeah. That maybe some Russians in there, for example, and the Cold War. Yeah, I mean, and Gorbachev. Yeah, incredible, right? But you know, so it used to be these isolated pockets, but now, you know, people get together to sauna. You get together to do breath work. People get together to cold plunge. And of course, for thousands of years, humans have been doing this. This is not a new thing. And people look at that and they go, this is wacky or it's about the marketing of this. Actually, I think that there's a connection that's formed among people who want to take good care of their health. They want to have some control over their state because otherwise the world will take control of it for you. Yeah. And meditating is a very solitary experience for most people. So there's something pretty nice about going to Obanya. I love Banya. Yeah. And then also doing the sauna on your own or cold plunge on your own. And I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media. So from now on, when I see people doing things that I go, oh, cool, like I like a bit of that. I don't maybe do it every day or I do that every day, too, get to see my morning sunlight. The notion that there's a community being built, that was the original intention of social media. And so I think social media can have this dominant negative effect on awe and day-to-day experience. So a question is, are there ways, surely there are, but how could we build more of a sense of this communal feeling, leveraging what people are already doing? They're already on their phones and scrolling. Hopefully they're also doing things to benefit their health, to make them feel less isolated because as Jonathan, hey, and others have pointed out, quite correctly, it can really fracture us into the me, the ego version, where it's, but it's kind of the perfect venue to connect people. I agree. So I don't expect you to come up with any answers right on the fly, but I feel like it's not going anywhere. So how could we build or glean more sense of a community through things that we're actually doing in our daily lives, is I think a question that's worth exploring. It's profoundly important, you know? The, you know, the preceding question is like, what are the enemies of awe? What gets in the way or the barriers? And you just nailed a couple is, you know, online life, you know, and I think Jonathan Hyte is right that it's not only anxiety producing, but we don't think about the opportunity costs of like, it deprives me of awe, you know? And in our study of 2600 people around the world, what makes them feel awe, no one ever said, being on met our Facebook or, you know, or, you know, or Instagram, there are a couple of reasons worries I have about online life and I'm kind of working on this now, you know, and one is the content itself, which is, you know, it's been algorithmically designed. I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms, I was advising there, were set in place of like, making people hate each other and not demonstrate all of our, all the wonderful things about human beings, which are ample. And then online life disrupts sharing and the technologies of today have disrupted sharing. So we don't share music like we used to share. We used to listen to music together. That's down, going to movies is down 40%, right? That used to be a very important collective cultural experience. Did you see the latest Scorsese or Pixar or whatever? Now it's streaming, right? So I really worry about that. And I think the next challenge in the technological world and the social media and the platforms is like you said, how do you enable the sharing of experience? You are absolutely right. A lot of what we do for our bodies in the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it. Or suddenly you're not meditating and breathing, but you're also sharing your mind and your experience. You're not listening to music, you're sharing an understanding of the music together in its cultural history. One of my favorite examples is farmers markets. They were non-existent in their 90s, right? And they used to be very common in American culture. And now there are 9,000 farmers markets growing. And yeah, people go to buy kale and get the honey and they're fresh bread or whatever, but they're also going because it's community. It's profound community. And we derive a lot of benefits from that. Profound benefits, 10 years of life expectancy community. 10 years. 10 years. Oh my goodness, there's so much obsession these days around. What sport allows you to live the longest turns out? It's like pole vault thing, which most people aren't gonna do. Sprinting, gymnastics. There's stuff that involves a lot of jumping and landing. Is that right? Really? And fast twitch activity. I mean, there were a bunch of other features there about like who's biased to go into those sports and whatnot. But I mean, I think it's in keeping with this idea that like getting your heart rate way, way up and moving quickly as quickly as you safely can, like once a week at something is probably a good idea. But the greatest benefit seen there is something like five to eight years. So you're talking about a 10 year benefit. And that's a meta analysis of 350,000 participants. So you can go to the bank with that. Like social community, very good for the body. I think it's the greatest challenge of our social media and our platforms. And I've advised it Facebook, 2010 to 2015, Google, Pinterest, a little bit of Apple. And I keep telling them like, you know, this is the singular challenge. And it's so, it's hard. It's, you know, technologies are asynchronous. You know, hey, I send you a text and 18 hours later, I hear from you, you're not making eye contact. The visual connection is degraded. You know, Steve Pinker observed rightly so. Like, when I'm on Zoom, I have to look at that down to see the camera or I look at the screen. So my eye contact is going down. I'm not making eye contact like we are. It's just the technology works against it. And I think it's the hard problem of the social media platforms is, can they do what you're aspirationally asking for, which is like, get us to feel connected? You know, Mark Zuckerberg, the original statement about Facebook was open and connected. And I think they failed. And I think we got to, it's the challenge of our times. - I know Mark a bit. And I know, you know, I trust he wants that. - I know. I really do. I know some people will push back on that statement, but I actually know that he wants that. And I know some of the folks in the leadership at Instagram, they want that. Like, these people actually have very healthy personal lives. They understand the value of connection, both at the level of the family, friendships, but also at large, they want that. I think that maybe I'm being optimistic here, but maybe AI will offer an opportunity for that as opposed to divorcing us from gathering and seeing facial expressions and hearing voices together or observing other things. You know, I do think that right now, the way that most social media experiences land is the exact opposite of all. I will say that because, and I can say that with a fair degree of certainty, because I spend a good amount of time on social media teaching learning and looking for entertainment, trying not to get, you know, rage-baited or numbing out. Those are the two things I look out for. Rage-baiting and numbing out. There's a version of social media that's happening right now where we're going further and further into our silos. Yeah. But I don't think it has to be that. Not at all. I don't. I think it could be really leveraged to connect people. You know, when I started advising at Facebook 2010, it was like Arab Spring and democracy was spreading. And in many ways, we've had this great democratization of things of people sharing music instantaneously. I can hear music from any part of the world, which, you know, that's profound and visual art and knowledge and podcasts. And we've got to be nuanced about this. But we do need, you know, to think intentionally about design, you know, and that, you know, I really worry about the privileging of hate. I forgot what you called it. But that has been privileged. And that's not human nature. We are not all trolls and, you know, jacking people.
and that is a degradation of who we are. And I think science would guide us in many ways to avoid that. So I think we're in this big reflection period about how to redesign. And I hope they listen to the social science. It has a lot of good things to say. - I've had this thought that the way social media is now, it's the direct opposite of all for the following reason. All inspiring experiences, you never forget 'em. You never forget them. I mean, we could spend 15 hours talking about first concert, second concert, first love, first kiss, first get a break up, which is its own form of awe, like shit, there's this flip side to this love thing, right? I mean, there's all that. I sometimes do the test of myself. I go, okay, I spend, I don't know how much time on social media yesterday, but do I remember anything specific I don't think I do. I don't think I remember anything specific, but there was tons of sensory input, a fair amount of time. I remember a damn thing. And so that's scary, 'cause the only thing that resembles that is drugs of abuse. And I'm very fortunate that I don't have a drug thing. I never, I never felt drawn to them in a way that I felt like I couldn't escape from them, or same with alcohol, easy, easy clip for me to not drink. I will say, but my friends who have had real challenges with alcohol and substances, they'll tell you like it's this super compelling thing, but then you don't have anything to say about it or for it. It's just a space-time disintegration. And not the space-time disintegration of psychedelics, which may have some benefits, we'll talk about that. So to me, that's the problem with social media. There's nothing memorable about yesterday's social media. And I do think that the people who build it want it to be impactful on the day-to-day scale, but also, of course they'd want it to be memorable. - Yeah. - Some kids should be talking about like you're talking about Laurel Canyon. - Yeah, I know. - But I don't know if they're gonna feel that way. - Well, you know, one of the things I'm really interested in right now, Andrew is all design, right? And you know, I'm working with Gayle Architecture and Copenhagen, like how do you design cities for more awe? It's not hard, and it's good for people, right? A little bit of music, a little bit of green space, a little bit of art, get people looking at each other and talking and buzzing, right? Easy to do. And I think you've just laid out, you know, and someone could write a manifesto, like maybe my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe. It's small, awe's vast. It's sped up, awe slows things down. It has a fragmentation to it, awe integrates, right? It's about micro things, awe's about systems. Like when you feel awe towards music, it's like, I get it all here right now. Its content is not inspiring very often. And it all could be. - Sometimes it is, I think that the space time aperture that we talked about before, I think the problem with social media is actually its power to bring the whole space time into an aperture this big. I actually think that it has to do crazy hypothesis. Happy to be wrong. I actually think the whole problem with it has to do with the fact that it brings long-time scales, past, present, and future, different frame rates into one real world visual aperture. - Right, right. Because when I haven't been to the sphere in Las Vegas, but friends of mine who are musicians, who love live music, who are producers, who love live music, tell me it is incredible. And it's, in some cases the live band is there, and in other cases they're not. And so there's no reason why that technology should be awesome for, again, here we go. No better word, no better word for awe than awesome. So we're just gonna stick with it and roll with it. There's no reason why digital can't be awe-inspiring. - Yeah, it should, and we just have to take a step back in these conversations, right? There's new work out about AI, helping medical doctors, and it's in the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco, it's like having the best brain trust about medicine right with you all the time. Who wouldn't want that? And I think let's remember that. And yeah, I think that's the challenges to have these AI and the devices that it is manifest on, get us to what's awesome. And we'll see, you know, I hope so. - I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. 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Right now, Our Place is having their biggest sale of the season. You can save up to 40% site-wide now through April 12th. Just head to fromourplace.com/huberman. Again, that's fromourplace.com/huberman to save up to 40%. Can we talk about embarrassment? Yeah. My favorite, my other favorite emotion. And again, my career. It was guys, right? Guys, specifically teasing one another. I definitely experienced that and I definitely participated in it in a benevolent way. But the teasing that happens in groups of good male friends can be pretty brutal. Oh yeah. But there's a pleasure in it. Most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. So what's that about? Well, you know, it all begins really in-- like, when I started scientifically to depart from the Eckman canon, if you will, of those six emotions we talked about earlier. And I was doing a project in his lab and we were startling people and studying the startle response, a seven muscle movement motor pattern built into the nervous system. And I noticed people got embarrassed after they were startled unexpectedly. He blasted him with a noise out of the blue in the lab. And they were like, whoa, I think I spit and beat my pants or whatever. They show this response. And I took it to Eckman and it's the blush. And people have heard their gaze and they look away and they hide their face. And he's like, that's a motor pattern of emotion. You should go study it, and I did. And then I started to notice-- and there's a really rich literature on that-- and Darwin wrote about this-- that a person's embarrassment is a sign of their commitment to the collective, right? Like, man, you know, called you by the wrong name or I farted in the yoga class or whatever it is. And I'm embarrassed. Like, I'm sorry, man, I apologize. That really matters. And when you see people get embarrassed, you like them more and you trust them more and you give resources to them. And you think they're a good group member. And then I was like, man, I've played a lot of pickup basketball in my life, thousands of games. And you're banging and there's just a lot of teasing and taunting. And people I admire, great athletes tease and taunt. It's just part of what we do when we're banging into each other. And I started to put it together like the right kind of teasing within a collective. You're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group, right? And then the wrong kind of teasing, which we document in our labs, like, that's bullying and harassment and we can pinpoint, like, that's inappropriate. You're trying to, you're not keeping people in the group. You're excluding them or humiliating them. So we did this study, as one of my first studies, we brought four fraternity groups of fraternity, four fraternity guys in each interaction from this fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin. And we gave them each nicknames or we gave them each initials. And we had them make up nicknames based on the initials. So two letters of a nickname were AD. And I'm not sure I can say what the nicknames were like, but you know, another drunk and it gets pretty profane. And so we let them tease each other. And they start teasing each other. And they are really like, this is young men coming out of a fraternity house teasing each other. There are funny stories. People got embarrassed. The stories and the teasing was kind of about like, I'm going to accuse you of something that you shouldn't do in this group, right? Like pass out drunk naked in the streets of Wisconsin. Don't do that, right? And then they get embarrassed and they say, I'm not going to do that.
And what we found is the more that they got embarrassed, the better they liked each other because it's turning to this motor pattern of like, "Well, I'm showing you that I care about what you're accusing me of and I'll get embarrassed. You see that in me, we become closer. The guys who are better teasers and they were more playful and funny and made people aware of the norms that matter to the group, but not really humiliate people. Those guys are more popular in the group and that's been replicated, right? Just storytelling and ribbing each other and it was part of healthy group functioning. It's just embarrassing each other. You think about roasts, you know, it's the end of your career. You're going to get that someone's going to talk about your career. You're going to get hammered. And it's wonderful. I fear that. Yeah, yeah. And that's part of this phenomenon of like we make fun of the people we love the most. Siblings are your big families with a lot of siblings. Tees each other like mad, you know, and they joke and they josh and they wrestle and they give each other nookies and they have nicknames for each other again to like make sure everybody's aware of what matters and how not to violate those rules. So it was, it was fun research. It was mental. I bet. I mean, it grew up in a big, big packs of boys. I mean, in my street growing up and the skateboarding thing and then science, it was a little bit different. Actually, when I came up, there was more of that. It changed over time for good. I think for good reasons. Yeah. And then of course, there's my podcast team and people keep telling me the reason I get teased a lot is because they, because they like me. Exactly. And I saw an interesting, well, two things, a former guest on this podcast who's a psychiatrist who's also very versed in Eastern philosophy, Dr. K, as they call him, so that embarrassment is important because it also signals that you're not a creep, especially he was referring to heterosexual relationships where a guy says something trying to be, you know, trying to flirt basically or pick up on someone and then the woman says something back and he like gets embarrassed. He realized like he said the wrong thing. If he doesn't show embarrassment, he's creepy. If he does, it verifies that he has a certain degree of empathy and self-reflection. Now, so that was his point, but it feels relevant here. And he's right. I mean, you know, Darwin early on wrote about the blush being a sign of your healthy character, your moral virtue almost. And in non-human species, the facial redening is associated with physical robustness. And then in humans, we think of it as moral robustness like, yeah, I care about stuff. We did work early on, Bob Knight at Berkeley, orbital frontal patients. The orbital frontal cortex is in part where your ethical consideration takes place. And if you have damage to that region of the brain through brain trauma, you fall off a motorcycle or, you know, fall off a ladder, you don't show embarrassment where you should. And they feel creepy, if you will, or just like, like, hey, they're not playing by the rules. So it's a very subtle thing. Irving Goffman wrote a lot about it, the great sociologist's like, our embarrassment is telling people like, I know what the rules are and I care about them. I'm committed to them. So you're psychiatrists' friend is right. I'm on the lines of teasing someone I'm proud to call a friend who's also public facing Chaka Willink, who's also, it turns out, one of our friends for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is that he grew up really into East Coast hardcore music, not a genre. I gravitate towards, but there's some marginal overlap with the types of music we've gone to shows together. And he put something up, you know, every once in a while on social media, somebody posts something that really lands in a wall or something or Jaco and he's a man, a few words. So I'm going to put more words to it than he was able to. But the quote was something like, you know, if you want to understand, and he's set former Navy SEAL, the SEAL team operator, most people know that, but if you want to understand males in groups and healthy masculine friendship, guys are going to tease each other relentlessly in front of each other, but they'll never tease behind somebody's back and they'll back the other person who they were just teasing in person against the rest, you know, they'll buffer them against any kind of criticism. So that's a very interesting kind of contrast there that I think is true. You know, it's not like you tease your friend behind his back. It's the teasing to his face that actually builds the bond. There's another piece of that, which is that you know that that person would back you if you're out of the room. And you know, a couple of friends, all my friends come to mind, but a couple of people who really think about and talk about this loyalty component, Jaco was talking about there, Lex Friedman. You know, it's a critical component to, I'm sure female friendship too, although I only know my own experience. So to male friendship, which is that they can say anything to your face. Even be harsh criticism, but you know that if you're out of the room, they're not going to cut you down. They're going to reserve that for when you're standing in front of them, thankfully. We documented that in the fraternity study that, you know, when you tease somebody and you're like, "Hey, man, do you see this guy's dance moves or do you see this guy shoot free throw?" Whatever it is, you're just making light of human foieble and all the funny things that we do. And there's just this really subtle repair work where they're saying like, "I'm teasing you, but I know you got it, you know, and I'll support you." And I agree. I think that, you know, part of what teasing does is it says like, "What do we as a collective really care about?" And let's surface those norms in a lighthearted way. And we know together. And if you make mistakes, you should be apologetic about it. But part of it also is just this sort of, "I got your back repair work that they did." And it's profound. It, you know, is interesting. I was kind of this shy kid, I was very small growing up and kind of the teasing often cross lines in high school, just, you know, bullying and so forth. And then I started to play basketball and, you know, and I realized like a lot of it's just just men making sure they know that the rules of the game, you know, and showing also in those moments of the joys of laughing together like, "I support you. I'm with you." Right. What a sophisticated thing to do compared to the alternatives. I have a sister. So I was always struck by the brothers in my neighborhood. Yeah. In particular, like I would hear screaming outside, go outside, it's older brother, his name is Peter holding Michaels face in the sprinklers. His brother is just crying and crying, screaming. I mean, relentless older brother torture. Some people hear this and probably be like, "Oh, call the cops." You know, and I don't know what the reaction is nowadays. I'll try not to be generationally biased. I don't know. Yeah, he was abusing his younger brother, but if anyone said or tried to do anything to either one of them, they would immediately pair up and fight anyone. It was interesting, right? For a guy who had an older sister, and this is a very different experience, right? I mean, she had her own form of older sister kind of hazing to her younger brother. But there really does seem to be something critical about kind of defining the relationship with people one-on-one in groups versus when there's an outside threat, and not that we want outside threat. But as long as we're talking about the sort of the, I don't want to say disintegration. That's too pessimistic. The sort of gradual erosion of this collective feeling. Is there less just kind of grouping up together and doing things? Yeah, you know, I, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, first there was the science of loneliness and isolation, John Cassiopo, and then those who followed, like, whoa, we are fragmenting. And we spend much, too much time alone, isolated, and then COVID hit, lockdown, et cetera. And our Surgeon General, former Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy got a ride, like, it's an epidemic of loneliness. And I, as a social psychologist, you know, interested in these social emotions, I'm like, you know, you just look at the basic raw facts, like, picnics are down by half. We don't go to movies like we used to, we don't, we don't listen to music together. We don't, 30, the estimate is that 30% of meals in the United States, people eat them by themselves. You know, I eat a lot of my meals by myself. We go and walks by ourselves, we don't go to church, church is way down. So the, kind of the broad sociological trends are alarming on that fragmentation. But I think the young generation is putting it back together in really interesting ways. You know, we know from survey data, the 25-year-olds, 30-year-olds are really interesting game nights. You know, those are coming back. They're interested in living together, cooperative living. They are cooking more with each other, value-wise, they care more about community than my
I was the great explosion of individualism, and they're kind of like, you know, if I choose a job, I want to make sure I'm working with other people I like. I didn't think about that. I don't know, you know. So I think it's coming back, and I love the signs of, you know, festivals are reappearing now. The farmer's market that I've talked about, the, you know, the dance groups that are now returning, contact dance. I mean, these yoga studios, one out of eight Americans does yoga, you know. I do yoga two to three times. That's so wild. It's amazing. 15 years ago, no one would have predicted that. Also 15 years ago, no one would have predicted that the single, we're being told that one of the single most important health interventions that women and men should do is like lift weights. The only people who lifted weights when I was growing up were like bodybuilders and pre-season football players. Is that true? Lifting weights is, I mean, you never want to actually live this way. But if you, if you could only pick one form of exercise to do once a week, that's what you would do. I mean, just in terms of bone health, if it's done properly, you probably get some cardiovascular benefit too, but just in terms of brain health. I mean, obviously you want to do both, but resistance training has clearly has a longevity benefit. But for the longest time, I mean, you just didn't see women in gyms. Very few, excuse me, just very few. And if you did, they were sort of they, you know, women are pushing them heavy for them or in some cases heavier than the guys are lifting. But regardless, that's a, that's a huge shift. So many more people are in gyms. And I wonder whether or not it contributes to some sort of feeling of that. It does. I mean, a training hard around other people. Yeah, that's cool. I think Vivek Murthy in particular, who I deeply admire and have worked with a bit, you know, he got our health world. Think about it. Surgeon general of the United States, the first one to come out of public health traditions, did work in India, right? And he's like, there's this social side that you've covered in your show, like to health, the physical health, to the, the telomeres of your, your cells, your DNA and the Vegas nerve and so forth, oxytocin, cortisol, it's social. There's, there are social dimensions to our nervous system. And I think that's coming, Andrew, like we're starting to see, why do I go to a farmer's market? Because I feel a sense of community. And why do I love yoga? Because I'm doing these postures all synchronized with people. I don't know and I feel a sense of all and transcendence. Why do I live weights? Right. There's the banter and the discussion and the history and the sense of, you know, of what this all means culturally. I think that's coming. I think the gyms are appealing to it in some sense, right? A little bit more community activity activity. And I think it's good news. You know, I love the Japanese onsen. You go for the water, you know, in the, the springs and the heat and so forth. But they and their wisdom have built entire community experiences around it. Where you, you wash yourself and you bathe together and you eat together and you, they're saying's up on the walls and you spend a little time with your kids there, right? So I hope we learn because I think it's important. Yeah, I'm thinking a lot now about how we can bridge between these incredible technologies. I am a fan and but also the non-negotiable technology of our nervous system and our biology and our psychology, right? Lately, because I have a query, I'm really into this thing called aquiscaping, which is this Japanese form of like plants and freshwater fish and just obsessed with it. And when the ecosystem is doing well, I'm like, I feel, it's a form of, it's brought me some awe at times when like the things are going well and they're like, wow, it's just beautiful. And I think there are things that I would never do to my fish. I would never isolate them from one another. But I give them enough places to hide from one another because there's a lot of dominance hierarchy stuff being worked out between these discus. I make sure they're on a light cycle. I make sure they're fed but not over fed or under fed, right? And I wouldn't do most of the things that we do to ourselves to my fish. You know, I wouldn't isolate them and give them like little videos of other fish to look at. Like, I know that wouldn't that wouldn't work. I know that they would die. I know that, you know, and so I think we can learn a lot from more simpler organisms and the sort of basic units of care and community. They're very similar. And we get played out differently, but they're very similar because obviously we evolved similar nervous systems, let alone similar needs. I would like to talk about psychedelics, if you're willing. I think they're two, at least two views of psychedelics. With the caveat that this is not a call for people to just start taking them, that, you know, these are powerful compounds that people with psychosis or bipolar conditions in their family really, really need to be careful. And on and on. Just be careful. I don't say that to protect myself. I say that to protect whoever's listening and watching. These are snow, no, no small bump. It's a whole thing. So some people will say, okay, they just send you inward. And that's the opposite of what we're talking about, like getting all the awe inside, like, okay, that's, I mean, that's pretty extreme. People will say that their experiences with psychedelics allowed them to come out of that experience and really have a felt connection to people, to plants, to animals, to life that is profoundly positive for their feelings of connection. And seeing all perhaps even in lots of things. So how should we think about psychedelics? And we should probably constrain the question a little bit, like, I'm not talking about MDMA, which is not psychedelic. It's an empathogen, ketamine, it's not psychedelic. It's a sociovacetic. I'm starting to do this now because people start to lump. And it's actually causing issues that for the potential legalization. So we need to be splitters, not lumpers here. So I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin, maybe DMT, ILOSCA, the classic psychedelics. Yeah, what are your thoughts on these? I'm good friends with Michael Pollan and was, you know, kind of walking the Berkeley Hills as he was producing that book and, you know, watched as we started a center for psychedelics at Berkeley. And, you know, it's a revolution. I mean, it's psychedelic use is up, you know, 40% since his book. I mean, it's incredible to watch. And I have a few thoughts, you know, one is, you know, make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come. Those are spirit medicines in their community that are part of deep ethical traditions, you know, and to honor that with, you know, you know, sharing of resources and knowledge and the right kind of acknowledgement. That's really important. I think in some sense, and, you know, David Yaden at Johns Hopkins and others, and some of the early Roland Griffiths work spoke to this that they are about all fundamentally, you know, they open up your mind and you see all life forms and time is different and your sense of self vanishes. You know, you're just connected to vast things, ecosystems and sense of humanity. And I think in some sense and done when done in the right way, that's good news, you know, Molly Crockett and her team at Princeton, like, you go to a festival and you have psychedelics a year later, you're kinder through all right. It's important. I think it's great news, what it does for the hard problems of the mind, you know, death anxiety, addiction, trauma, maybe veterans who are suffering twice the rates of PTSD, they're drawn to this, you know, and the VA is working on this. And the data look pretty good, OCD, right, hard problems of the mind panic right that I've impart dealt with that is good news. I worry about micro dosing, you know, I think people are taking these things like coffee and it's not coffee, you know. I drink coffee and I know a thing or two about psychedelics, experience and it's definitely not. And the data speak to this and we've suddenly unleashed the use of it. Tens of millions of people are using it, not in the way that Michael Paulin describes if like putting it into a cultural container of inquiry, knowledge and guidance. And someone who knows what they're doing around you and they're safe to even safety. Yeah, so we're seeing that. And I, you know, they changed my life. I got to them early, you know, in my late teens, 17, 18, 19, I was a very anxious, obsessive kid and I think they open up my mind in this perspective way we've been talking about, I don't really do them now, you know, they gave me a lot. That's why they're here. You know, it's, it's funny, you know, Andrew, like when I was doing them, we were reading Castaneda who's been debunked, you know, and we were reading the traditions and thinking about them spiritually.
in the doors of perception and all this good stuff, right? We were, they were embedded in a culture of trying to find mysticism or whatever it is and I hope people are doing that, you know, if they're going to be doing on them, make it a form of inquiry. It's a complicated story like everything, like technology. Well, they're a form of plant technology, right? Plank, which quick vignette on that, we had someone here, Chris McCurdy, who runs a lab out in Florida. He studies a cratome and other compounds from plants. The pharma companies, they bioprospect. They send people looking for plants that then they can find isolates and everything from aspirin to cratome to anesthetics like cocaine. I'm not suggesting people use it as an anesthetic. They come from plants, but they're isolated and then synthesized and enriched. And that's where the opioid, the extreme opiate, the extreme stimulant. You know, that's where it comes from, but they all come from plant alcohol. Many of them come from plant alkaloids, which is interesting in its own right. But I share your feelings about microdosing. The data Robin Carter at Harris tells me and he's the real expert, of course. The data say there's no evidence of benefit from microdosing, at least on major depression, as compared to like two rounds of psilocybin with a guide therapy before, during and after. Right, you know what I'm going on. So how do people hear that? Yeah, I hope they hear that. I had the opposite experience as you. I actually regret having done psychedelics when I was younger and they were terrifying. I didn't have a good experience. I stopped, didn't go anywhere near them. And then later in a therapeutic setting had a few experiences with them, not many, but that were immensely beneficial for me. So kind of the opposite direction there. But what we're talking about now, about kind of okay, you know, there's this problem with certain technologies, there's the cultural, the culture wars, there's the political wars, there's the actual war that's also going on right now. A lot of ways this resembles like the 70s, 80s. So there's not that. I mean, I remember a time when you had yuppies and you had hippies and you had progars. I mean, watch a John Hughes film. And it was like the idea was it was like, oh, we're actually similar, right? You know, the extent to which those films like showed people, hey, like people were actually similar along certain dimensions as opposed to so different. But you know, I wonder because I think about that they're not so recent and recent history of things, everything from breathwork, cold plunges, psychedelics, awe, music, the collective consciousness. I mean, yeah, it's going to look different now. The same way that it, it looked different back then, right? Like I'm trying to get outside my Gen X self these days and think like, so what would it look like? Like I'm the old guy now. So what would it look like if these technologies? I just mentioned a few, but all of them, including social media. What would it look like if those were all used to the greatest benefit? Like what would that look like? Can we be the open-minded parents of the 80s, you know? Can we be the. Yeah, like because I feel like I can scream all day or about what I think, about the science of this and that to younger people. But the only thing I actually have control over is like me. How do we, let's say 40 to 100-year-olds? Let's really lean it on the 40 to 70-year-olds. Okay. How do we create the environment so that younger people can flourish with these technologies as opposed to being like the parents of the 70s and A's that are like, "Oh, they got long hair," and like, "What is this like punk-rock thing?" Like, "I don't want to be that person. That sucks." I also don't want to be that, and I see this a lot, unfortunately, people who are part of those movements. And then they're just like towing the party line because they're like wholeheartedly adhering to one political group without thinking about whether or not there's any any hint of rational argument on the other side, right? The whole point is not to be against the whole idea is to be for what you believe is right. And so, I don't know how to do this. You're older than I am by a little bit. You're clearly wiser than I am, seriously. And you have more life experience. So, what do we do? Really, like, what and how can we do? Because I don't like this. You guys are all on your phone. That doesn't feel good to me because they were telling us when we were younger. Like, this is ridiculous. Like, the older guys are like, you know, small wheels on skateboard. They were right about the small wheels things. Turns out the wheels got too small. But the, uh, Jim will understand that. But what do we do? I think we're in this moment, you know, with everything going on, you know, with AI and being online and polarization and climate crisis and, uh, you know, the things that we worry about, the rise of white supremacy, politics, etc. Everybody's asking this question of like, what, how do we kind of move forward and, and, you know, in light of many of the things that we've talked about in this conversation, I'm most focused on, um, what Robert Putnam started to write about and other people started to write about, like, just the breakdown of collective life and shared life. And I think that's the, you know, defining issue of our times, as well as our relationship to the natural world. And I find awe, uh, as do other people really refreshing it, it provides a road map, which is, you know, and I'll give you a very concrete example. I'm, I'm working with Gail architecture on a cities of awe initiative. And they do amazing work, hundreds of cities around the world. 70% of human population is in cities. Most of our carbon emissions come out of cities. And this is, this is a place we can redesign and make it better, right? And awe is a wonderful lens. So you can ask, and you could ask the same of like, what do you give to a teenager who's suffering suicidal ideation or what do you give to a veteran who is coming back and feeling alienated from the world? Uh, you give them awe, right? And what does that mean? It's like, well, you give them a little nature. And that's, you rewild part of a city, right? You give them some public art. We love art. You know, we love visual art. You give them, uh, the opportunity to recognize the moral beauty. You know, you found it in Joe's drummer. Just get them to interact with other people from face to face. You give them, uh, a little collective stuff, right? You, hey, we're going to have the yoga class in the town square or the Mexican zokolo, everybody walks together at a certain hour of the day and they suddenly feel peaceful, right? Uh, you give them ideas about big ideas and life. You give them a little bit of opportunity for meditation and reflection. Um, that's easy to do. And when I, you know, was writing this book and just teaching social science for 30 years, it's like, man, you know, we used to do this really well. And it used to be temples and church. You know, that's where it all was brought together. And now we don't go there. 55% of Americans go to church. It used to be 90 or temple. I don't. I never did. You know, and I, and I, in some sense, miss it. You know, I see one of my best friends, very religious. He view them and they, they have so much and we're recreating that right now, right? And we've got to do it in a coherent way. If it's the place where people are lifting weights, there should be music there. There should be visual stuff. There should be some art nature. There should be some wisdom and some moral beauty, right? That's, uh, I love iron works where I go climb because you go there and it's like, people are climbing, but there's, you, you get to see the, there's the art exhibit each month of a local artist. There's some music going on. You get to listen to music. So this isn't that hard to do, Andrew. And I think the awe science gives us a roadmap to think about what we share. I love that. Um, I was not into CrossFit, but, um, next girlfriend of mine, when I met her was like really in the CrossFit and they would do barbecues and they clean the gym and they would dress up in costumes and stuff. And remember, this is when I moved to San Diego to start my lab down there before I moved to Stanford. And I remember thinking, like, this kind of crazy. Like, I went to the gym growing up. I always, since I was in my teens. And I'm like, really? You guys like, so, and they had this awesome social community. I know CrossFit is somewhat fallen out of favor now. I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation. You may be pleased to hear. I just thought of this. I can't remember. I can't believe that I didn't remember this earlier. One of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after the clash because, you know, he went into the kind of void of, like, he wasn't doing anything. He he wandered for a long time. He went down to Spain. Oh, he grew out of beard, moved to Spain. And, um, didn't tell anyone who he was and they kind of realized who he was eventually. He was really searching, you know, his life. And he lost his brother to suicide, I believe. He ran the, uh, the Paris marathon. He's kind of famous. I think while smoking a cigarette, people always say, and I don't think he did any training. One thing that he was very well known for until his death was he would do campfires. Yeah. In Manhattan, he would take people down to the river. And he had some famous friends, like Jim Jarmusch and, you know, and, uh, well known people in that.
world, but he would invite whoever, and there were kids, you got to see this documentary, it's so good. We'll put a link to it for people to see it, it's so good. There were kids, there were adults, and they stay out to like two or three in the morning, playing music, singing, drumming, people get up and talk, and so he was constantly doing these campfires. His entire life, knowing close friends of his, it's like this is actually what he did, and he wasn't getting, they were able to film a few of these, but that was not the point. And he would bring out a radio, because he thought like maybe you could like make it like a radio show of the thing, but it was not to record and distribute. It was just, so I don't know, I got this crazy idea in the back of my mind that maybe like I'm going to start doing campfires. I have to weigh in on some science. Okay. Oh, am I going to destroy the environment? No, not at all. Okay. I was afraid you were going to tell me that. In fact, I think this is a deep idea. There's this new science of campfires, and they're several hundred thousand years old. And also, when you study people in small-scale societies, they gather at night around campfires, and they tell certain kinds of stories, stories of how they're all connected and helping each other, and watching out for what is dangerous in the dark, and a lot of stuff happens. It's fundamental to our humanity around campfires. So I think you're onto something really important, that we need to return. When I go to the climbing gym, we all take saunas, you know, I do probably four saunas a week. Nice. And you get your sweat, and your heart rate goes up, and so good for your body. But then it's like, everybody sort of offhandedly notes, like, I love the conversations that happen in the sauna, you know? And it's true. And so, yeah, we've got to, there are all these ways to get back to what we should be doing right now, to bring us together, and campfires would be a good start. I'll come to your first one. Awesome. Campfire, also, great red light therapy. No joke. Long wavelength light only coming out of that fire, and you know, everyone's obsessed with like red light therapy. You can get from the sun, and you don't want to get too much UV, but yeah, you get tons of long wavelength light exposure, which is great, which is known to be great for mitochondria. I mean, don't get me, I don't want to get going on this as too much of a tension. We've got guests on here from University College London. I mean, the long wavelength light actually goes all the way through your body, even in light clothing, and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria, which actually improves mitochondrial function in every single cell that has mitochondria. So where do we get this light from? Typically, it's from sunlight, when it's low solar angle, so it's low in the sky because of Rayleigh scattering, you're getting rid of the UV. That's why you can see the orange and red, and it's not painful to look at the sun when it's low in the sky. When it's overhead in the UV index, it's higher, it's, you know, full spectrum, and you have to be careful of that. You're also, you got some color to you, but like you, someone tells me your lineage was kind of like fair skin, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. So, but everyone, it needs to be cautious about that, but that long wavelength light, you know, people buy red light units and things, and those can be beneficial. They use them clinically now, but good date on that, but campfires do it. And people love campfire. And there is this thing, if you were out in front of a campfire at night, and if you stay up very late, you wake up feeling pretty darn good. You know, so I'm calling it right now. My team's going to hate me for this, but you know, campfire coming to your town. Yeah. I've always dreamed of doing this, like taking a year and just getting a boss and just going from town to town and having science, health discussions, but mostly just listening to people and doing campfires. And we probably would film it just because it, you should do it. I got to create content. My dream was to take that bus and to go to all the basketball courts of the country. That's your thing. Yeah. It's the same thing. It's like, people gathering, banging into each other, would I figure out an experiment that goes with it? Well, my knees are the, the Stanford just developed this way to regenerate cartilage in humans. Okay. Well, then I'll look into it. Yeah. I think it'd be, I love the idea. Do you believe in life after death? I don't ask every guest that by the way. Yeah. You're the only person I've ever asked that. Do you believe that something happens after? I do. I do. Um, yeah, you know, and I write about this and I'm when my brother Ralph passed away, colon cancer, 55 or so, you know, and I watched the whole transition and, you know, his battle against it and his acceptance and then his leaving. And I had this profound experience that night, you know, a transcendent experience. And I'm like you, you know, Andrew, it's like neurons and statistics and cells. And we can figure it all out and characterize everything and it's like I saw space in a different way. I saw something alive in him. And then afterward I had, a lot of people have this kind of grief experience of he was around his voice, his hand was on my back. And I just thought for several years and still to this day of, you know, um, quantum reality and things beyond our three dimensional four dimensional view of time and space and, you know, those basic laws and that there is, you know, consciousness may be patterns of, you know, magnet electromagnetic waves around our minds and bodies that are sinking up with other people that transcend the Newtonian world of the brain. And I believe that. And we don't know how to study it. Uh, I sense it in life, I think a lot of other people do too. And so that keeps me open to it. And now I've moved from, you know, being as skeptical but open, you know, agnostic to like, yeah, there's something there that's beyond what we know. So I believe it, very cool. I hope you're right. I believe it too, but I just hope you're right. I sense you're right. Dacker, thank you so much for making the trip down here to talk with us today and, and share what you've been up to for all these years. Uh, you've had it and continue to have it magnificent career. You know, it's, it's really hard to do really good science and it's even harder to do really good science with a purpose, uh, and you're doing that and you continue to. And you just have a way about you that everyone now has, uh, been able to experience firsthand that like, you really care. That's clear. You put a ton of thought into the work that you're doing. Uh, you've raised 25 professors, which is no small feat. I'll tell you. It's a monumental feat, which means that the work will continue and, um, and you're still going. And I'm grateful for your book and, and that you're continuing to do this and, um, I hope you take that trip to, uh, maybe if you can't do it around the entire country, you get, you know, hit some pickup basketball games, uh, cause I think there's something to be learned there for sure. I sense it. And, and thanks for inspiring me and, and I know you've inspired a ton of other people. So we'll put links to everything that you discussed into your book, um, but you've definitely inspired us to, to think more deeply about basically what it is to be human and where to take all this technology that we have and this opportunity that we have and really do, uh, real good with it. So, um, very grateful to you. Thank you. Well, thank you, Andrew. It's been an incredible conversation. Let's do more. Definitely do it again. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Dacker Keltner to learn more about his work and to find links to his books, including his book on all. Please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. 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