How to Access Your Creativity | Rick Rubin

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today my guest is Rick Ruben Rick Rubin is credited with being one of the most creative and prolific music producers of all time the range of artists with whom he's worked with and discovered is absolutely staggering ranging from artists such as LL Cool J Public Enemy Minor Threat fugazi Beasty Boys Jesus and Mary Chain Jay-Z Red Hot Chili Peppers Metallica Green Day Tom Petty System of a Down Joe Strummer Kanye West Johnny Cash Adele and many many more not surprisingly therefore Rick is considered somewhat of an enigma that is people want to know how it is that one individual is able to extract the best creative Artistry from so many different people in so many different genres of music well as today's discussion reveals Rick expertise in the creative process extends well beyond music in fact our conversation takes us into the realm of what the creative process is specifically and generally across domains including music of course but also writing film science and essentially all domains in which new original thought ideas and production of anything becomes important our conversation Ventures from abstract themes such as what is creativity and where does it stem from to the more concrete everyday tool-based approaches to creativity including those that Rick himself uses and that he's seen other people use to great success that took us down some incredible Avenues ranging from a discussion about the subconscious to how the subconscious interacts with our conscious mind and how the subconscious and conscious mind interact with nature around us and within us indeed our conversation got rather scientific at times but all with an eye and an ear toward understanding the Practical tools that any and all of us can use in order to access the creative process we also spend some time talking about Rick's new book which is all about creativity and ways to access creativity the title of the book is the creative act a way of being by Rick Rubin this is a book that I've now read three times from cover to cover and I'm now reading a fourth time because it is so rich with wisdom and information that I'm applying in multiple domains of my life not just my work but my everyday life I cannot recommend it highly enough Rick has an incredible ability to translate his understanding of the creative process in a way that is Meaningful for anybody so if you're in music if you're a musician it will certainly be meaningful for you but it is not about music it is about the creative process and so whether or not you consider yourself somebody creative or not or whether or not you seek to be more creative Rick's book in today's conversation sheds light on what I believe to be the fundamental features of what makes us human beings that is what allows us unlike other animals to look out on the landscape around us to examine our inner landscape and to come up with truly novel ideas that thrill us entertain us entertain other people scare us make us laugh make us cry all the things that make life Rich are essentially contained in the creative process and to be able to sit down and learn from the Rick Rubin how the creative process emerges in him and his observations about how it can best emerge in others is and was truly a gift so I'm excited to share his knowledge with you today one thing that you'll quickly come to notice about today conversation is that Rick is incredibly generous with his knowledge about the creative process in fact he very graciously and spontaneously I should add offered to answer your questions about creativity so if you have questions about the creative process for Rick please put those in the comment section on YouTube and in order to make those questions a bit easier for me to find please put question for Rick Rubin in capitals then colon or Dash whichever you choose and then put your question there I do ask that you keep the questions relatively short so that I can ask Rick as many of those questions as possible we will record that conversation and we will post it as a clip on the huberman lab Clips channel 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 I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Maui newie which I can confidently say is the most nutrient dense and delicious ious red meat available Maui Nei spent nearly a decade building a USDA certified wild harvesting system to help balance invasive deer populations on the island of Maui I've talked before on this podcast and we've had guests on this podcast that have emphasized 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huberman and now for my discussion with Rick Rubin great to have you here today Rick thank you for having me it's a pleasure so of all the topics in science and in particular in Neuroscience I confess that creativity is the most difficult one to capture because um you can find papers scientific studies that is on convergent thinking versus Divergent thinking and their definitions to these and they take on different forms but in a strict definition form it seems that creativity has something to do with either rearranging existing elements El or coming up with new elements but as I went into your book which I've done twice I've read it twice and by the way I feel so blessed and honored to have gotten an early copy from you um or a final copy early that is but having gone through it twice I'm now convinced that there may not actually be an internal source of creativity that exists on its own right and the example that you give that for me really is serving as an anchor and tell me if I'm wrong here is this idea that ideas and creativity are a little bit like a cloud if you look at it at one moment you might think that it looks like one thing where it has a certain shape and texture but then you look at it a moment later it could be quite a bit different and if you look at an hour later it very well could be gone and the the reason I think that serves as such a powerful hook for me to think about creativity and why I think neuroscientists and scientists in general have never actually captured a way to even talk about creativity uh stems from somebody that you knew in person but that as you know I greatly admire I don't have many Heroes but I would put Joe Strummer among the short list of Heroes that I have and I remember once an interview with him fairly disjointed uh he was sort of uh you know off in different tangents that I couldn't follow but at one point he just kind of blurted out out that if you have an idea you have to write it down and you may end up throwing it away but if you wait it will be gone and I remember that and as a consequence I have a whole system that I use to try and capture ideas but what are your thoughts on what Joe said This Cloud idea that comes up um in one form in one area of the book but then I think is thread throughout the book in different ways you know how did that come to you and um and how does it serve you and trying to ex I don't want to say extract but trying to access creativity I think the best way to think about it is like a dream it's like if you think about your dreams they don't they don't necessarily make sense when you wake up you'll you might remember part but not the whole thing then if you start writing them down they'll they they'll come back and they may not make sense to you there there there'll be um a series of abstract images and may you know maybe someday in the future you'll be able to look back and understand what they mean and maybe not and that's sort of how this the art making uh process works it's like we're making things and we're looking for a feeling in ourselves and it's it could be a feeling of excitement or enthusiasm a feeling of interest uh feeling of curiosity I want to know more um feeling of Leaning forward and we we're following that energy in our body when we feel the this there's something here there's something here I want to know more I want to know more I want to know more and um but it's not it's I'll say it's not an intellectual process it's a different thing that's why it's it's hard even to talk about it because it's so uh elusive you know recently I was listening to a podcast by our friend um Lex fredman yeah I think it was an episode with bology seran where this with bology who's a investor type guy thinker type guy um this is like an eight hour episode he says something at the beginning that I'd love your thoughts on he said look you know we can train a rat to lever press every other time or to expect reward on every even number press or every odd number press or even every fifth number press but a human and a rat can't do that for like prime number presses you can't actually train that and then you think about the reward systems and the way that we follow life from when we get up until we go to sleep and what he said is the fact that we can't do that means that we may not actually be in touch with the best schedules of doing things like every time I'm thirsty I take a sip I assume that's the right way to do it but it might not be optimal right optim for whatever purpose when I was reading your book I was thinking about there's a there's a there's a set of things to follow things to pay attention to you talk about this things to access that none of the creative process comes from just within us it can but it's always being fed by things outside of it and so what I started to do is the second time I read through the book was think about it through the lens of what bology was saying was that there may not even be a language for this thing that we call accessing creativity I mean there's a process but that language in the form of words is a little bit like um trying to use even numbers to try and access prime numbers yes like the the math becomes so convoluted that we end up in a conversation like this where I'm confident we can get to the kernels of it because in the what's remarkable about the book is that you do you you show and inform the process but there may not be a English or any other language for saying do this then this then this then this and you'll have something of creative value yeah does that capture it yes I think language is insufficent insufficient to to drill down on creativity it's more um it's closer to Magic than it is uh science so when kids come into the world um do you think that they have better access to this creative process than we do as adults because we start to impart role plays and books like will it get likes will people like it but also um like all the things that are available to us that we're not paying attention to like the texture of this table right they we're discarding things it systematically we get quote unquote set in our ways do you think kids are more are just by definition and by Design more creative than adults yes K kids are they're open and they have no baggage they don't have any belief system they don't know how things are supposed to work um they just see what is and if we pay attention to what is we learn we learn much more than if we uh most of us select from an endless number of data points available to us to well as as a species to make sure that we don't die and to procreate and to feed ourselves are probably the primary functions first and then and then we learn things about what's right and what's wrong and we learn things about uh how to do certain things or we're inspired by someone who makes something we love and we want to do it the way they do it and all of those things undermine the purity of the creative process they can be um tools to build your skill set to be able to do it yourself like if you're a a a singer you might imitate a singer you really like for a while to get good at it and then eventually come to find your own voice it doesn't always it doesn't always start with your own voice but if you're three years old or five year years old and you try singing you're not singing like anyone else you're you're singing with your own your own voice and when you make something you're making it based on not not knowing and I I think um I had the advantage early in my career of starting making music without any experience which was helpful because I didn't know what rules I was breaking and so it wasn't intentional breaking of rules I just did what seemed right to me um but I didn't realize that I was doing things that other people wouldn't do I mean there is this idea that there are no new ideas you know I sort of disagree because every once in a while I'll see or hear something that at least seems different enough um I think it's a a a com a combination of a new combination of existing ideas presented in a new way I think that's I think that's how it works I don't know um but I will say it does seem like the things that are most interesting to me have a series of familiar elements joined together in a way that it's creating something that I've never seen before you mentioned that it's um that when you are close to or you see hints of creativity that is of real value that you can Fe that it's a feeling and I also believe that the body is a great source of information I mean which um you know once people realize that the brain of course is in the skull but the nervous system extends everywhere in the body the whole Mind Body thing just Falls away you know philosophers have argued about this forever but it's a silly argument it's also true that you know God forbid I were to amputate all my limbs have them amputated I'd fundamentally still be me right the same is not true if we took out big enough chunk of my brain and I still survived I would be fundamentally different human being uh still have the same name identity and social security number but I would behave very differently um who knows maybe better uh the signals from the body we know or at least we assume are pretty generic like I can think of 50 different ways or aund ways that we could talk about creativity today and we could Define it and redefine it and carve it up and serve it up like sushi in a bunch of different ways but the body s send signals that most of us are um we have a kind of coarse understanding of it's like oh my stomach hurts or my stomach feels good or I'm not sensing my stomach or um oh that feels good it feels warm it feels cold like most of us aren't trained in understanding how to interpret those signals so it's almost like you have a few vowels a few syllables and there isn't a lot more where whereas when we talk about our thoughts and our experiences depending on how hyperverbal somebody is and how much emphasis they put on different sounds it it's kind of near infinite right um not infinite but near infinite so for you personally when you know that you're on the on the the end of a thread of creativity maybe you're listening to an artist or you're or you're hearing something and you're like there and the the your antenna start to deflect in a certain way right do you feel that in your body as a recognizable sensation or is it a thought and a sensation it's a it's a feeling in my body is it LO is it localized no it's it's a it's a feeling of um I would say it's like a surge of energy do you remember the first time you experienced that probably you know hearing the Beatles when I was three or four years old three or four years old yeah wow yeah is there something wrong with me that the Beatles have never done it for me no maybe you just weren't exposed at the right time in the right way it's there's no no right or wrong way and and everyone um I can love the Beatles and you cannot and we're both right you know there's not I'm glad we can still be friends I was a little concerned I was a little scared to ask you that question I know my taste in music is a little bit obscure but um and and kind of fragmentary but um okay good I've always felt like gosh there must be something wrong with me I like their songs yeah but they don't there's no juice for me there I think maybe we'll watch um there was a an eight part series called The Beatles Anthology which is out of print but I I can try to find it somewhere and we can watch that together and maybe that'll make the case for The Beatles okay yeah I mean nothing against them it's just and I'm always bothering you for story but like Ramon I saw that and I was like wow like jeans aviators everyone had to change their last name to Ramone um a lot of them hated each other there's so much drama in there and and three chords and just but to me it just was like wow like kids from New York that energy so I think different things for different people right absolutely so that brings me to a question of when when something feels creatively right and you're sensing it and um and you're there let's say in the studio or maybe even you're listening to something that somebody sent you how do how do you translate that given the absence of of language how how do you translate that into a conversation with the artist and again this could be about writing or comedy or you know science or podcasting for that matter how do you say that keep going that way when they might not even recognize that they did it and I'm guessing a lot of times they don't yeah sometimes they don't it depends when we're in the I I'll try to be in a in a setting where as we're talking about it we can engage with it in that moment so it's not much good um let's say I was producing your new record and you played me something and I had some thoughts about it it wouldn't be so helpful for me to tell you what those were it'd be better for us to wait till we were in a place where we could try things and see where it goes um so the first thing is I wouldn't rely on language to do it it would be more of a making a suggestion of something that's actionable we try it and then we have more data and either we're moving in a good direction or we're moving away from from we're moving towards it or away from it and we never know and so it's always an experiment and maybe a simple way to talk about it would be like um if I gave you two dishes of food and ask you to taste them and tell me which one you like better it's pretty usually it's pretty straightforward you know when you have two choices which you like better and I think most creativity can be boiled down to that that's very different than I wonder how this is going to perform on certain social media platforms that's different than what is it when I'm tasting these two things which is the one I want to finish eating and and if I were to say m I like this one better but it needs a little salt and then put a little salt on it's like maybe I put too much salt and you and you know when you taste it it's like it's it's that simple um being in tune enough with ourselves to really know how we feel in the face of knowing that other people might feel very differently which is part of the challenge it's like um if everyone tells you a a a a a a a and you listen and you're like that's b um as an artist it's important to be able to say to me it's B and that's a it's a disconnect because so much of you know when we go to school it's to get us to follow the rules and in art it's different because the the rules are there as a scaffolding to be um chipped away as need be sometimes they're helpful sometimes they're not and sometimes we'll even impose our own rules to give something it's shape so we can decide to make a um we're going to make a painting but we're only going to use uh green and red are the only colors we're we're allowed to use we decide that in advance and then how do we solve the problem knowing all we have is green and red um it it can because otherwise if there's an infinite number of choices anything can be anything you know it's like it's it's um sometimes more choices is not better so limiting your pallet to something manageable forces you to solve problems in a different way now in our um in our digital age um music wise you can make anything um digitally there's no like in in there was a time when if you didn't have a guitar in the studio you couldn't record guitar or if you didn't if you couldn't hire an orchestra there couldn't be Orchestra on your recording now you can just call any of those things up so there's infinite choices and infinite choices don't necessarily lead to better uh better compositions or better final uh final Works understanding how how you feel in the face of other voices without second guessing yourself is probably the single most important um thing to practice as as an artist or skill set to develop as an artist is to know how you feel and own your feelings and and the key to that is not I know so I know what's right for you it doesn't work that way it's just I know for me and the reason I chose to be an artist is to demonstrate this is how I see it if I'm if I'm undermining my taste for some commercial IDE idea or uh it it defeats the whole purpose of doing this this is not that's not what this process is about this process is I'm doing me and I'm showing you who I am and you can like it or not but either way this is still how I see it I love that because um in science you know having trained graduate students having been a graduate student I was very blessed to have mentors one of who is a real iconic class he's dead now um actually all my advisors are dead um suicide cancer cancer the joke is you don't want me to work for you so they were all had a morbid sense of humor so they're laughing about this someplace right now um I thought you were gonna say they all ate the poison mushrooms no but the last one uh said to me you're the common denominator Andrew and I thought oh my goodness and he said kind of just kidding but not really so it's a little bit yri but in any case um he he always said said his name was Ben he always said there the one thing I can't teach is taste and the one predictor I have of the people who will never develop it are the ones who are perfectionists because they're filtering their perf perfectionists that filter their perfection through the feedback of others he was always looking for the person that was putting up a little bit of a middle finger to feedback not so much that they would get things wrong because you can be badly wrong in science you can be for the right reasons but you can also be for the wrong reasons but people that just had almost a compulsion to do it their way or to believe in what they were doing and I I'm hearing some of that um or I'm hearing that in what you're describing I I also think that there's something about the human empathic process or the emotional process where when we see somebody doing something and they seem to really not be paying attention to what anyone else is doing me I guess said the crazy person on the stre is one version of it where we go they're just in their experience it's just crazy but when somebody seems to be enjoying themselves or the emotion seems to be real I think there are a good fraction of people who feel a kind of gravitational pull they go yeah that and the best example I have of this is I remember growing up in the skateboard thing we were the first we were the first start doing the baggy like sagging the clothes thing and we got teased endlessly one year in school then there was a bunch of hip-hop that came out and guys were wearing sagging their their jeans or their shorts next year we come back and the very same people who were making fun of us we're all doing it and that's when the it clicked for me I was like most people don't actually know what they like no they like what they like because of the certainty of the people that they like and um so the question then is in this um landscape of creative stuff what's real what's not real um you know these are it's almost like whoever can create the most convincing story at least captures a good number of of a good fraction of audiences but that's not what the creative artist needs to do they need to actually depart from that do I have that right well they're just two different things like uh coming up with a story with the purpose of pleasing someone else is a skill set but it's more of a com it's more of a commercial Endeavor than an artistic Endeavor it's like tactical yeah yeah yeah yeah I was seeing in your book you describe again when you're thinking about the creative process as a the cloud for me again it serves as such a powerful anchor and then I think about the the biology the neurobiology of like strategy formation or strategy implementation and then almost by sheer luck or miraculously I turn a few pages later into the book and there's a description of how how animals that are trying to accomplish something eat mate find water you know accomplish their their the requirements of living it requires a narrow visual Focus this is something my lab is kind of obsessed with and I've been obsessed with and in that more narrow visual Focus we know that the The Playbook becomes more narrow the rule set is more narrow now at some point in order to come up with a new creative idea that means broadening vision is essential in some way or broadening thinking well it could either be a broadening or a narrowing but it's changing the aperture from the standard the reason we do this is to present something new that maybe you already knew but didn't know you knew it and for that to be the case you have to be looking at it it's not unlike what a comedian does you know comedian makes you laugh usually what they're saying it's outrageous but you know that it's right you know just no one says it that way or no one has said it that way before but it's always the truth in it that makes it funny it's it's like that it's the same it's the same idea as recognizing something that seems really obvious once you see it but seems like nobody else sees it or no one else points it out and I feel like science is like that too because how much of science when Once the uh you know the the light flashes over your head it's like I got it of it just seems like well I we knew that forever no one knew it but do you know what I'm saying it's like it's so obvious absolutely it's so obvious and I think another superpower of artists is is this accepting we don't know anything when we think we know things also limits our our world we think we know it's only like this this is all that's possible where mice in this little box but in reality who's to say that's that's the case who's to say any of the we could take all of the uh what we believe in science now and decide to throw all of that away and start from scratch and we'd probably create a different a whole different one I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor athletic greens athletic greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains digestive enzymes and adaptogens I started taking athletic Greens Way back in 2012 so that's 10 years now of taking athletic greens every single day so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens is that it covers all of my foundational nutritional needs so whether or not I'm eating well or enough or not I'm sure that I'm covering all of my needs for vitamins minerals probiotics products adaptogens to combat stress and the digestive enzymes really help my digestion I just feel much better when I'm drinking athletic greens if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athletic greens.com huberman and for the month of January they have a special offer where they'll give you 10 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 vitamin D3 and K2 are vital for immune function metabolic function Hormone Health but also calcium regulation and heart health again that's athletic greens.com huberman to claim their special offer in the month of January of 10 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 in a offline conversation um one time you asked a good friend of mine who's been a guest on this podcast Eddie Chang who's chair of neurosurgery and one I I would Place him in the top top 1% of neuroscientists you know he's pulling speech out of people who are completely paralyzed with locked in syndrome Etc and you asked him uh what percentage of what's contained in medical textbooks and training today today yeah if you went to medical school today right and you learned what was in the textbook what percentage of that information is accurate and what percentage is not and he said maybe half right and you asked and what is the consequence of that and he said incalculable and I I completely agree and um and I asked him a second time and he still came up with the same answer so that's a good sign um reliability from experiment to the next is good yeah I think that the there is this idea that we really know things um in science I mean you've seen we've observed amazing discoveries from chance we've observed Amazing Discoveries um from incredible bouts of hard work in both cases people were spending a lot of time in the lab like no one walked into the lab saw something one day and had a Nobel prize winning Discovery or fundamental Discovery they were all hanging out in lab a lot just some of them um came up with something that they didn't expect others were were drilling toward an answer and in all those cases when the breakthroughs happen I'm guessing I don't know this that considering we we assume this information then this discovery is true based on everything that came before it but if everything that came before it is wrong then the discoveries are probably built on a do you know what I'm saying it's like the the the context everything that happens takes into account that the context that it's sitting in it fits in that context maybe that context isn't right who knows we don't know so I'm saying we're too we're too close to most things and thinking when we know when we think we know things where there are a lot of assumptions that go into it and that any new discoveries are essentially built on top of these beliefs you know but they're beliefs well I remember um you know learn of course I listen to the BC Voice growing up who didn't I was a child of the 90s and they were in the you know sabotage was you know sort of an outgrowth of a skateboarding movie like Spike Jones and like the girl movies and those Worlds the beast boys and skateboarding were were really closely interwoven for a while some people know that some people don't and Spike sort of formed the bridge and then Spike went off and started making more TR bigger movies um that more people watched but let's just use them as an example I heard you say once before that you know you guys were kind of joking around like BC boys like you know these guys doing hip-hop but it was kind of like the hardcore scene in New York and punk rock scene and it was sort of a joke there were a lot of inside jokes when you were working together was there the thought that people might love it might hate it or you just weren't paying attention at all weren't paying attention at all never considered it they would know um at that point in time when we were making licens to Ill hip-hop music was a tiny underground thing and there was no one making hip-hop at that time thought it would ever mean anything it was it was not a realistic thought so we were making it really for our crazy friends and that's it so do you think nowadays the fact that one can create something and quote unquote release it quickly I can put it something out onto Twitter or Instagram now I could do it in 10 seconds from now and I will get immediate feedback that which is external feedback of course but then I can iterate on the basis of that feedback do you think that's problematic for the larger opportunity for creativity in other words if we were to go back 20 years or even 15 years when the opportunity create to create was certainly still there but you really didn't know what the how it was going to land until you quote unquote released it there was it seems to me there was more opportunity to stay in that magical uh rainforest that is the the the creativity itself I don't think it's wrong or right it's just it's more information that you can use or not use and use it in a useful way and you know you can make something and put it out and people can not like it and you're like they still don't get it you're I'm going to I got to go harder you know like I got to go harder in that direction not do you know what I'm saying it's like not um to react away from information can be helpful it can be helpful when um there could be different stories that happen at the same time where you're making something and you have an idea of what it is and then other people engage with it and they have a different idea of what it is is and they like it for a different reason than you did or dislike it for a reason different than the reason you like it we can't control any of those things you know the only part of it that we can control is how we relate to the thing that we make and any external information that undermines the clarity of that connection is probably bad for the art is my is my guess and and again I I'm only saying this from my experience like I try to make things all I've ever tried to make were was something I like or something that I felt like was missing as a fan that I wanted and I nobody was making it so I I'll make it you know but it wasn't um it was always in the service of I love this thing I want something like this no one else is making one I have to make one yeah it's uh it's beautiful because I the word that keeps coming to mind is this it's almost like a compulsion like there there are other options of ways to be and to behave and to function and work in life but there's if something's a compulsion it Yanks us away from those other opportunities just enough that we have to get back to it you've talked before about and you talk in the book this notion of the source and uh to me uh again I can't help but put my neuroscientist lens on this I think of um the source as not one brain area but some function within the brain where we we are in touch with our B bodily signals like what feels right what doesn't of like tasting the two Foods I love that example and that it's a it's a Playbook that is far more vast than the the short-term adaptive Playbook like this how I'm going to get from point A to point B and yet when I listen to an album or a song I mean I have to assume that there at some point it becomes not strategy development or creativity but strategy implementation like there needs to be like the songs are going to come in this order and like I don't know much about music my musician friends are always you know I don't either it's not so much about music well um right well well put um but the ordering of the sequence of The Melodies Etc so at what point do does one decide okay like Now's the Time to get into that more narrow focus of of effort like we've got it let's run with this because there is a component of the creative process that involves packaging and finishing and um is that part less satisfying to you or is it just all part of the same larger Arc it's all part of the same it's it's nice there's a good feeling it's usually a good feeling when something is done on the one hand it's um it's a commitment because up until the time that you say it's done you can keep experimenting and changing it you know if if you think well maybe tomorrow I can make it better then it's not finished and you keep thinking that for a long time you can do that forever and never never put out anything so getting to the point where you're ready to sign off is a good feeling um and it allows you one of the things I talk about in the book is um because it is a difficult thing to do because it's fun to play and it's fun to maybe it's not the best it could be yet you know um to use whatever the next project is going to be as motivation to finish the one you're working on now like I'm working on this I'm spending all of my time on this thing it's really good I believe it can be better but there's this other thing that I really want to make and if I keep tinkering with this one I'll never get to make the other one so using other projects as a impetus to finish something and release it into the world it's a good one and you said the your description of of source as something within us um I I don't know if I would accurate if I would say that was accurate it's definitely in a too but it's not only in us and it's um I think of source as the organizing principle of everything and it's how everything exists how the trees grow and why there are mountains and anything that we can see in the outside world and and every Discovery and every piece of art and every uh new design and every machine are all outgrowths of this Source energy our part of it is the antenna that like connects to it and and maybe where the um where the the vehicle for source to allow things to happen in the world and thank you for that because I I did indeed mispe because I recall very distinctly in the book you described how you know the physical world is constrained by the laws of physics and certain things the imagination is unconstrained and you I think I have this right that you said you know the work sit somewhere between those it's neither of one nor the other but that ultimately what feeds into all of that our imagination and the way indeed that our our brain is a physical entity the nature in the outside world provides at least what appears to be near infinite if not infinite options and I I love the example of the color palette that if we restrict me to whatever sorts of paints or medium I have then um it's restricted but in nature there's a an infinite number of Shades and tones and combinations and even on one you know if you pick up a rock and look at the color of the Rock and tried to find a paint to match that rock it would never match there's too much there there are too many variations in nature Within a a single color Rock um for us to get close there's there's too much information we we scratch the surface we're only scratching the surface and we love when we are able to peer in at different scales spatial scales time scales too but spatial scales the Delight that comes from that you know like these nature pictures seem like there were more of these in the 80s like where you'd see a drop of oil shot at high very high resolution there's Beauty in a drop of oil and then you'd see that the earth and the Galaxy there's Beauty in that too right these extremes um and of course our daily perception is mostly through the filter of these kinds of interactions walls and sometimes Outdoors there's a um a brilliant neuroscientists and um not surprisingly he has a Nobel his name is Richard Axel he's at Columbia University um he's outrageous personality um choose Nicorette nonstop um you guys would get along great not because of the Nicorette but but because um his perspective on things is is very abstract for a guy who's solved uh he won the Nobel for solving um a great problem within how we smell um perception of odors and taste and he says you know that everything that the brain does is an abstraction like I could take a photograph of your face and show it to you and say yeah that's me or let's say for the moment I call myself an abstract artist let's just play a game because I've never been accused of being an artist but and I do Three Dots and a squiggly line and I say that's you and you say well that doesn't look like me and I say but that's my abstraction of you yeah okay well the brain essentially does that because or something in between that because there's no actual photograph of you in my brain it's just a bunch of neurons playing what we call an ensemble like a different keys on a piano and we go Rick I recognize you Rick Rubin and so everything is an abstraction and it's only once we start tinkering with the parts and this is the essence of science to remove an ad and manipulate and the best example I can come up with would be Rothco and I only come up with this example because I started off in vision science and maybe this will make the most sense to everyone except the folks who've been blind since birth and they can swap something in here the if I show you a Rothco and I don't tell you it's a Rothco you may or may not actually think it's that impressive it depends on your taste and art but what Rothco did which was amazing even if you don't like rothos and I happen to is that he removed all the white and High contrasty stuff and when you do that you alter color space and so the colors look very different some people saw that dress a few years ago is it orange or is it gold or whatever that was a little bit of the same phenomenon I doubt in fact I'd be willing to bet my left arm that rotho knew nothing about the Neuroscience of color perception but somehow got to this place where if there was no canvas showing and no high contrast and the paintings were large enough and on the appropriate wall you saw them a certain way that tapped into something fundamental and this is where I think Art and Science really converge is that every once in a while we see something that feels amazing to enough people and not just like the baggy pants phenomenon not just because other people think it's cool but there's something there and again this defies language and I have to imagine that in your um years of of life and music and other creative Endeavors that you've that every once in a while do you have you ever encountered something where like something fundamental keeps showing up in different form or there's something like a like a almost like a rule or a principle does it ever come about because in science we think of this as like this is reveals something about our limitation to abstract the world I hope I made that clear um not exactly but I have a thought uh you talked earlier about the um the drop of oil the photograph of the drop of oil and the photograph or we could use the on the other side like Hubble Telescope images of these these vast things and high high definition what we see every day is as impressive as those things but we're numb to them because we see them all the time and if we were to look at drops of oil every day in in a microscope uh a month from now we would not we would not find Wonder in that image so it's sometimes it's the novelty of not seeing it from that perspective before that's really thrilling you could and I could imagine and this probably relates to the rotho idea that you could see something from a particular angle and have this magical experience and then walk three feet to the side and see it from a different way and it just evaporates it only works the it only triggers this thing in us um when we look at it just the right way um there was a paint a an experiment I just heard about heard about the other day that that sounds fascinating that um a painting teacher recommended where instead of painting you know having a model in the room and painting the model that you have the model in the next room and you go into the next room without your equipment you don't have your equipment and you can study the model for as long as you want and then you go into a different room where you can't see the model and paint the model instead of and it's it changes your relationship where it's not we're not just painting the lines we're painting what is interesting enough about what I saw what are the data points that stuck in my mind and when I String those together what do I get and and what do I how do I form it to get as close to whatever that the experience of that person was which the close the closest of of getting to the experience of that person in the painting might not look like a photograph you know it might look more different than more the same to really see what you see this if we think about um the Picasso paintings that were inspired by African art where the eyes are on different different levels they may give us more information than a photograph would give us um I'm thinking about the um when you were describing the the the sensation of when something takes your breath away and we all have that when we see a dramatic Sunset anyone you know when there's a really dramatic sunset or if there's a whale and if anyone's on the beach and there's a whale everybody's really interested that there's a whale it it's do you know what I'm saying these feelings of wonder we get to experience them depending on where we are or you know a dragonfly or a bird flies into your space these things happen and when they happen it's like we're we're uh confronted with the The Mystery of the world when we change the perspective normally we don't think of whales in our backyard or birds in our house you know flying freely uh but but they do happen these things do happen and they they like break us out of our trance when these things happen like oh yeah there are birds like this everywhere I'm just not paying attention this guy's coming in to like tap me on the shoulder like remember me here I am you know so I would say that that the whale example and what you're describing is it's revealing to us how in a delightful way how deficient our perceptual filters normally are yes it's a little bit like the Roth go is revealing how I've never thought about it this way until this moment is revealing to us how color normally looks is actually first of all not the only way it looks those colors we think are one way but all of color this gets into the biology of color vision is all about contrast what something is next to dictates what it looks like and that's the origin of that dress meme or whatever you call it I still can't figure out exactly what a meme is someone will eventually tell me the in the same way when you see a whale and it's delightful I think it's revealing to us the extent to which those whales are the ocean is vast there's a whole universe there and we are blind to it all the time and I think the misperception or the misconception excuse me is that we're delighted because we see the whale we might be just as delighted because we're getting hit with the contrast of how little we recognize all the time and in that way it reminds me a little bit about comedy where and I've I've been watching more comedy lately and um sometimes it's the shock sometimes it's the the absolute truth that's revealed and then other times what I've noticed and I saw Rogan do comedy at the Vulcan Club in Austin which he does every once in a while and it was small club and and he was leading out this story during his routine or bit I think right this bit he's lead and everyone knew where it was going we all knew and then when he finally told us it was exactly where we thought it was going and it was hilarious and it felt good and it felt amazing and I and I thought in in that moment I was like wait a second how did he pull that off that was masterful because normally it's this thing like you create one story there's like a scripting out almost like a courtroom lawyer and then they kind of pull the curtain and it's something different it's the and and if you look at the the science the neuroscience and brain Imaging of of laughter and humor which I've looked into to be honest and no disrespect to the people in that field it's pretty lame it's lame because it's always the the jarring nature of a surprise but what he led us to was something that oh no he's actually going there oh wait he's really going there and it was this anticipation with a with a beautiful delivery at the end and so I'm convinced that based on what we're talking about here that there's something about when we see something we think it's about that but that the Delight that we feel could be about all the other experiences that now become in a subconscious way kind of like ha it's almost like laughing at this perceptual deficit that we have it's almost like laughing at how little we actually know which is what you've said yeah it could it could be that it also could be the sense of community of when you think it's going to go a particular way and it goes that way it's like reinforcement of you you know so it's like yeah we he's saying it but in a way we're saying it together I'm listening he's saying it but we're in this together and that's a good feeling to think about that for a second I was trying to think about why certain music um still can evoke such powerful emotions in me and and there does seem to be something special about the music we listen to when we are teenagers you know from about you know 14 until about 25 it seems to get routed into our nervous system in some way maybe because that phase of our life is is really one of identity crisis I mean you don't find too many 40y olds some who are wondering like who they are yeah occasionally but almost every young teenager pre-teen and it's kind of like who am I you're defining personality so I always likened it to that but leaving out the sort of critical period biology stuff what do you think it is about the music that we hear at that time are we that much more emotionally tuned have we not shut down our sensors quite as much because there the songs and the artists don't matter because they're very individual to me other for other people it'll be the Beatles or something um now I just really wish the Beatles did it for me too but um do you think that's important because I could see how it's really terrific I could also see how it sets up one of these what I'll just use nerdy language called a like a semi- deprived filter because if I'm only looking for the way way that like a stiff little fingers track made me feel the first time I listened to when I was 15 the feeling is worthwhile but if I'm looking for that I'm missing all the other stuff I'm missing the Beatles I'm missing Fleetwood Mac which never did it for me either I'm like I'm missing all this stuff that you know people I love and respect really love so um I've never worried about it because there's kind of a infinite um Treasure Trove of other things that I do love but I do sometimes wonder whether or not my life experiences diminish because I'm not allowing um kind of range and you've obviously worked in a huge number of different genres of music Punk is one thing hip hop is I mean Neil Diamond too right Eminem too Slayer too right and in some senses I list these off I mean just think about how much in high school maybe nowadays less so but even in college and as an adult we societally were sort of asked to con train ourselves to one of these groups like I didn't know it was okay to Love Bob Dylan and love punk rock as much as I do until I heard Tim Armstrong said he love Bob Dylan yeah and I was like and recently he told me he loves the Grateful Dead and I was like whoa yeah but to it I remember when you had to pick both the Ramones and The Clash Love The Beatles so we could I've got work to do no we'll do it together we'll do it together it'll be so I have a feeling part of it is the reason it gets in at that age is it's a a time when we're defining who we are and the music is part of the definition of how we see ourselves so it's the like the music that we hear before that might be the music that's on the radio or our parents music or our older brother or sister's music and then when you're 14 or 15 and you start choosing what you're you're listening to it's like now it's finally mine and my parents might not like it and my older brothers and sisters may or may not like it but this one is mine and it always has it always has that um impression in us that this is this is ours it's my that's my thought of of why it it why it continues to last you know how do you wipe the Slate clean then like so for instance if you're going to go in and work with somebody new and again as people are hearing this I hope that they're transplanting this to whatever it is that they do because in the realm of Science and podcasting communication it's not music but um there's a contour and a way you know hopefully this podcast will look nothing like it does in five years that's my hope is it will still have the core features of the beauty and utility of biology coming through but I hope it doesn't look anything like episode two yeah and I think it'll evolve as you evolve it's just the truer it is to what interests you and if you're not interested in biology in the same way in 5 years I would hope it's not the same I'll be doing psychoanalysis in real time here therapy we'll all be lying down on couch whatever it is whatever it is yeah we probably won't be on psychedelics but we might be levitating you know I'd like to take a brief break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test the problem with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there however is that you get data back about metabolic factors lipids and hormones and so forth but you don't know what to do with those data inside tracker solves that problem and makes it very easy for you to understand what sorts of nutritional behavioral maybe even supplementation based interventions you might want to take on in order to adjust the numbers of those metabolic factors hormone lipids and other things that impact your immediate and long-term Health to bring those numbers into the ranges that are appropriate and indeed optimal for you if you'd like to try insid tracker you can visit insider.com huberman and get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans that's insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off so H how do you let's talk a little bit if you would uh because I know I'm very interested in you your process right I'll spare you the daily routine uh question it's very cliche but you and I are both lovers of sunlight of Horizons and not as a trivial source as an amazing um gift of energy right um and and there aren't words for it really um aside from your daily routines um when it comes to you know somebody you're going from Project to project and and you know you're going to be doing work with somebody could be your own work and we'll talk about the writing of this book uh and its structure which is very unique I've never encountered a book with this kind of structure before and it's it's the most fasile read ever and yet every single page I underline took note starred and like as You' notice it's very worn have very very worn already and only more so over time do you have a process for you know removing the functions of the day and that what you were doing last week and what's going on and um in order to get more access to the this um I'm going to think of it now more as as a receiver inside of you right almost like tuning a radio and then it comes in like the beginning of like a Strummer Clash thing right you love the radio Joe love the radio right like and then it comes in clear and there it is how do you clear the static what what are some of the operational steps that you think might be more um generalizable to regardless of where some somebody in you know um Africa is listening to this say when I'm when I engage in a particular project whatever it is I I dedicate all of myself for that period of time whatever it is whether it be 20 minutes or whether it be 5 hours whatever it is um total focus and and no um outside distraction whatsoever and when I leave that process I do my best not to think about it when I'm away from it I don't bring any materials with me I don't leave the studio with Works in progress and spend time listening to them during the day or looking for ideas I I stay as far away from it when I'm not D directly engaging in it as possible and in the best of situations I have something else to totally engage myself in in between so instead of working on Project a for 5 hours and then leaving and doing nothing I'm hoping to engage in a project b or b c and d with all of myself before going back to project a again which might be the next day let's say so this um relates to an amazing uh chapter and series of writings of your book that I'm not going to describe because I want people to find it for themselves about disengaging about disengaging from the process one question I had as I read that chapter and as you're saying this now is even though you're disengaged do you believe that your subconscious is working it through that I believe so I believe so and I think in general to Stew over a problem is not the way to solve a problem I think to hold the problems lightly and and if and when I say a problem you know when we're when we're starting a project there's usually this feeling of um there's a question mark at the beginning of every project I I I'm always anxious when I start a new project because I have no idea what's going to happen I never know I never I never uh I may have in some cases a potential backup plan if you know if nothing works but I really try not even to have that it's I prefer not to have that I prefer to go in maybe to calm myself down enough to be able to show up there'll be an idea of like nothing works maybe we could try something like this but that would only be for my own anxiety that would it wouldn't be for actual practical use um but there's always a sense of anxiety because I know whatever's going to happen is completely out of my control something's going to something either interestes or not will appear and then we're going to follow that wherever it goes and until something appears for us to follow I have a lot of anxiety even though I know even though it has never not come you know it has come every time but there's something about it because I also feel like there might be expectation on me that I'm going to make it happen and I know that's not happening that's not how it works it's um I show up ready for it to happen and am open to whatever we have to do to find that first thread and once we find the thread then it's like okay we have a and it that thread may lead us to anything you know could lead us to in a million different directions but something about having that glimmer that it's not a BL we're not looking at a blank page you know we're looking at okay we have a we have uh the beginnings of um I would say a map but it's a map that we don't know where it takes us and it's just the beginning it's just like it's just a start you know you are here was it if you have a map and it says you are here even if you can't see the directions knowing where we are feels okay um and once we get and usually again usually in the first day first couple of days it happens um but up until then it's it's really an anxiety producing uh situation and then I can't I can't remember the original question like that was the beginning of of something completely different but I do you remember what you asked I don't remember yeah well we were talking about disengaging and as your subconscious into it and you and then we we're talking about you know so I love this so like what are what is your process of of waiting into this thing and and you're revealing that now I mean I I think of anxiety as Readiness you know I mean think about the characteristic um features of anxiety it tends to be a bit of a constriction of the the visual field into more of a narrow Vision that's appropriate because you want to shed the what's going on elsewhere and then you know even when people talk about the shakes or this like not feeling okay still you anxiety was designed to mobilize us and not always to run away this is one of the I could you know rarely do I talk about the work in my own laboratory but one of the things that frankly I didn't discover but it was done in my laboratory but this brilliant graduate student Lindsay Cay who's now at Caltech was that we can often observe animals or humans in very high states of anxiety as they move forward toward a goal and we always think of moving forward as like this calm thing you know we these Heroes you know Rosa Parks telling people like f you like I'm not getting off the back I'm not leaving the the giving up my seat on the bus or Muhammad Ali I bet you they were experiencing tremendous anxiety but it was in the forward tilt and so I think anxiety is least um comfortable when we are forcing ourselves to stand still so it's a it's an activating energy and you know that brings up a word that you know I have written in my notebook as an extraction of a lot of themes from within the book that you and I have talked about before which is and here I'm going to sound very West Coast uh woo but I mean it as seriously as it can be stated that I feel like everything is energetic right we can do things from a place of anger we can do things from a place of Joy uh we can do things from a place of delight I'm uh I like to think maturing into the idea that joy and delight and love is kind of the ultimate reservoir of energy but you know a lot of the music that I liked from when I was younger was because of the anger that was thread into it or um or the sadness but if you think of your relationship to that music it's a relationship of love you didn't listen to that to get angry no you listen to it because you loved it yeah and I felt loved by it because it matched where I was at at the time it was true to who you were and where you were I know that collaboration there's a wonderful chapter on collaboration but it's collaboration as you mentioned before with the universe not with others but in terms of the especially the kind of work that you've done and do when it comes to working with artists um I do wonder and here I'm not looking for any gossip or stories it's I've never been interested in Gossip I love stories but I'm not interested in gossip but once you see that thread kind of dangling there and you're GNA are going to go after this and or you grab onto it and you okay now you have a little bit of a map and an orientation within that map I often wonder you know scientists are complicated people people think they're very boring but they're actually very complicated because they're often living in one limited rule set of the prefrontal cortex that's how you get good at getting degrees is by understanding the rules of Academia and playing by those rules yes um people Tinker with the rules you get your Richard Axel who are very playful in how they go about it but they are systematic he's known for rigor rigor rigor right when I think of creative artists and musical artists I think of a bit more zany or loose or you watch the documentary about the Ramones and you're like wow there's all this chaos how because so many of the brilliant artists musical artists that are out there seem to have some chaos inside them or their lives aren't always structured oftentimes and science too by the way there are substance abuse issues and personal life issues how since you don't have 100% control they need to play the instruments sing Etc how do you work with people who have it in them but are getting in their own way right um and do you think that that kind of the internal chaos that a lot of artists seem to have do you think that sometimes is actually an essential piece of the creativity picture that you can't disentangle it yeah I don't think it's an essential pie in general but certain artists that's their that's how they do it um I would say I rarely get to see the chaotic part of artists for whatever reason they they rarely show it to me and most of them like like most comedians I know are much more serious about what they're doing than what it looks like from if you see them on stage there's much more to it and there's much more um focus on Craft going on and digging deep than would necessarily be obvious seeing him jump around on stage yeah um I'm a fan of boxing track and field and boxing the sports nobody really cares about now that UFC is so popular and and track and field is a it's a little bit like wrestling when you go the people that there are there because they really love it um we'll talk about wrestling in a little bit uh professional wrestling um but you know Floyd Mayweather is a obviously a colorful character and one of the best records in boxing of all time and a few years back I got into watching his stuff and and it what one sees is the the cars and the money they call literally call themselves The Money Team you know and the spending and the and and there's all the outrageous stuff but I know someone who was in his in Camp with him um who actually was a sparring partner for him and the lore has it they have very closed door sparring um or camps but the lore is that he would do you know because nowadays it's 12 three minute rounds right with a minute in between used to be 15 but now neuroscientists stepped in and it turns out a lot of deaths were occurring when it was more than 12 rounds for whatever reason you cut off at 12 really seemed to truncate the death there are other things too if the dad is apparently a corner man we have someone else here at the podcast who knows more about this than me fascinating yeah the kid not wanting to disappoint the parent correlated with death there's I'll get some of this wrong and then and this they can come after me um but in any case this guy who was in Floyd's Camp said that he would do 30 to 60 Minutes of sparring bringing in fresh sparring partners with no rest that he would run three or four times per 24-hour cycle despite all the critical need for sleep that his training was unbelievably intense to the point where he would just just chew out chew up and destroy all training partners and yet the perception that we see is it's kind of it's playful for for him so it sounds very similar like what we see is often not what goes into it that people are intensely rigorous yeah and I think in a way from a psychological perspective if you knew you were fighting someone who wasn't taking it seriously that would give you some confidence and that would not be a good thing if you're if the person was actually um working really hard outworking you do you know what I'm saying like it's from a psychological perspective if that makes sense to me so what I keep coming back to is that I'm imagining in my mind have two ends of the Continuum one that is about fairly narrow focus training training strategy implementation cultivating craft building craft and then the other side is this the cloud it's very nebulous right and it um there's this uh word that I learned from a colleague of mine when I was down at the sulk Institute when my lab was there because he studies this there's this phenomenon um that I don't want to mispronounce because then it sounds like something else but the correct pronunciation is peridia and peridia is our tendency to look at an a morphous shape like a cloud or a tree and think that it looks like something else an ice cream cone yeah the Man in the Moon Y and that again reveals the extent to which the brain wants to place symbolic filters on things and we need this right because I see you walk in the door and Rick I I recognize you in fact we have a brain area called the fusor face gyrus that literally is a face recognition area and you could be at any orientation or I could just see your eyes and know that it's you uh there's a phenomenon called propos agnosia where people can see faces they can describe everything in the face but they don't know for instance that it's JFK or Madonna or Lex Friedman it's quite the list quite the list there you go Lex um run for office Lex just kidding it's hard enough to get you to respond to my text as it is um so we have these filters and so we're taking this cloud and we're we're deciding what things are yes and what I want to go drill into your process a little bit um more deeply when you approach a project so everyone's meets each other shakes hand here are the engineers we're going to sit down where're everyone knows what they're doing because you work with professionals and you start going going are you trying to be with the cloud or in the implementation like where are you in that Continuum and forgive me if I'm like trying to um surgically go into your process in a way that would disrupt it in any way but I trust you've been doing this for a while and there's no there's no threat I'm not at I'm I'm in the cloud with the exception of I'm aware of what could go wrong on a technical side and I might like if something good is happening I might look over and make sure that we're rolling um so that's a leap over to here momentarily but then back maybe I I maybe if I if I feel like if I was in the moment I would be in the cloud and if something good starts happening it would trigger something in me like uh oh I hope this is I hope we're really doing this because I don't know if we could ever do this again that'll that would be a thought of when the first time the real world would come into the picture would be something good is happening let's not lose it and when that happens do you never been in a in a studio besides a podcast Studio do you say hey guys that sounded good uh more of that or do you wait you let them continue because obviously you don't want to break their their flow we never want to break any flow once it's happening yeah once something's happen happening just kind of sit back and watch and do you think there's resonance like the the team of Engineers and other people know when it quote unquote is happening if everyone's paying attention yes when everyone's paying attention it's usually pretty obvious sometimes the threat will be something different than expected and maybe not everybody would pick up on it and that might be a particular that might be particular based on my taste or an artist taste or um someone involved might say that was let's listen back to that I think that was better than than we thought that can happen I you you said several things and um it was like you said enough for there to be several conversations I tend to do that sorry especially with you I don't get to see you as nearly as often as I would like and so when I do I confess that I'm a little bit of a kid in a candy shop I wrote down the brain tells us stories so you talked about um I walk in certain data points you recognize me but it's a real like looking at a cloud shorthand we go through we go through our lives doing this all day with everything we see and the Shand in the case of me you know me the shorthand turns out to be right it it checks out um if it's something we don't know and something we're not familiar with something happens we we we experience something on the street something happens and it doesn't make sense something out of the ordinary happens first thing is is this doesn't make sense then what we do is again sub subconscious unconsciously I don't know if it's unconscious or subconsciously without thinking we create a story that explains what just happened a hypothetical that makes it okay that what just happened happened and oh maybe he's running because his dog ran away and he's chasing his dog maybe that's why he's running and as soon as we have that thought of what it might be we relax because now it's not just a guy running and this is weird but it's a guy running oh he's probably running after his dog and now we register that story that we just made up without even knowing were making it up as what happened and then later in the day if someone says yeah do you see that guy running out of box like yeah he was chasing his dog I saw that and you you won't even realize that it was the maybe hypothetical story that was the first possible explanation that allowed you to continue walking do you know what I'm saying that's our whole lives we our whole lives are reacting to things making up a story of what we think may have happened without realizing that's what we're doing and then living the rest of our lives as if that thing that we made up really happened and we never know I completely agree we confabulate from birth until death there's this uh well-observed phenomenon um in people who have memory deficits you know so there's the sad example this and then there's the everyday typical not who knows sad or not sad example so for instance if somebody has a slight memory deficit where someone has Alzheimer's dementia they'll find themselves in the the hallway at night they say what are you doing here and they'll say oh you know I was going to get a glass of water but they're walking away from the direction that would make sense yeah um people who alcoholics who drink enough Dev develop something called corsac off syndrome where a certain brain area gets messed up and you'll ask them a question like oh what are you doing here and they will come up with Incredible stories sometimes interesting stories that have no bearing on reality you ask them who they're name is but do they believe they believe that's what happened with 100% certainty and this actually relates to a lot of the um now better understood controversy around repressed memories you know you can especially from young people you can pull memories from them that of things that never happen this has been demonstrated over and over again so courtrooms know to be very cautious now about this whole notion of repressed memories that's good to know yeah very very uh uh complicated area of the law as you can imagine um because we want we tend to want to trust victims for understandable reasons but in terms of accuracy of details two people have very different accounts of the same of the same experiences and this has been shown over and over again and yes that you can do well in the laboratory it's pretty interesting so again because of these selective filtering and storytelling and we are I think it was solman rushy who said we are the storytelling species he probably wow I was going to say we're storytelling machines but that's great yeah I think you know we are the story I would say that the big five if I had to pick up a brain function is we are very limited filters the mantis shrimp sees 67 shades of red for every one that we see yeah so they have access to things we don't have access to yes they're not as far as I know you know releasing albums of the you know Red Hot Chili Peppers caliber but who knows maybe down there they are I did see something by the way as a relevant tangent recently and I don't know if it's look it even if it's crazy it's super cool if you take a device that amplifies the electrical signals coming from Cactus and you just translate that into a simple rule of conversion to two or three pitches of sound the music that comes out of it is beautiful W that's nothing short of beautiful and when I saw that the the teenager in me thought you know when we hear whale song we think it's so beautiful like what if they're just like cursing at each other the whole time right I mean maybe they're in there like a like a Rogan episode when he invites all his comedian friends in there who knows maybe it's a psycho antic conversation about their childhood traumas I don't know yes but we decide whale song is Beautiful yes we decide Cactus are just plants and it's beautiful to us and and we're right that it is beautiful to us but we don't it doesn't mean we know anything about it that's right yeah so we have these filters perceptual filters we only can see and hear smell and taste what we can and then the brain likes to work in symbols we tend to like to match that person who shoes are messed up must be homeless um I've had a couple instances in life where I saw what I thought was a homeless vagrant inside a building at an academics institution it turned out it was the most um accomplished person in the field that's always cool um yes that happened at Berkeley then the other thing that we do is we tend to put you know symbol rep so we said perception symbol representation and then our memories are entirely confabulated based on already deficient symbol and perceptual representation yes and so I never like the statement that we don't know how the brain works I think we do know how the brain works but that it works through very limited filters yes okay so knowing that and accepting it and um it seems to me that this idea of looking to Nature looking outside US is so critical and in fact I I hope you won't mind me sharing this but a few years back I had sent you something by text and I was kind of in disbelief about something i' had seen in the media I was like they got it all wrong and I knew the person involved and it was it was not a good situation for them and I was like they got it all wrong and you wrote back and you said it's all lies Back To Nature the only truth wow and that's wild and I wrote that down I put it over my desk wow and I still you know I'd uh tattoo it on my forehead if I didn't already have it well well committed to memory but I think I know that's true right nature we can look at and it's but when when I say it's all lies you just talked about our ability to how limited our facility to see and understand what we see yes yes so based on that that leads us to we can't know much do you know what I'm saying our resolution is so low on everything that we're we're really just like we're grasping at straws we have no idea we have no idea and there's great power in knowing that because if you think you know what's going on chances are you're being deceived not because somebody's deceiving you but because they're telling you what they see and they don't know it's all do you know what I'm saying it's all made up everything that we everything we know is made up maybe maybe it's true it's this brings us to pro wrestling it's it's it's the reason that pro wrestling is closer to reality than anything else we can watch or any other content it's we know it's made up we know that it's a performance it's storytelling and that's how everything is except we think wrestling's fake and the world is real wrestling's real and the world's fake you talk about in the book we're definitely going this direction uh in the book you talk about the op this notion of entertaining the idea of the opposite being true as it and and there are not only emerging but established fields of psychology that are making great ground I think into the human psyche Byron Katie's were and others where you take a statement and you start playing with that statement for you poke at its authenticity yeah and when I first heard that I thought this is kind of hokey right it's just words and then I realized how foolish I was being because she's really on to something and there are others too of course but in science that's exactly what you do you don't really ask questions in science you are forced to raise hypothesis and try and say true or false now there are limitations to that approach certainly I mean pure observational Studies have been incredible um in terms of what they've revealed to us especially in medicine you know a patient that has a bullet hole through a certain area of the brain you don't go in and say oh I hypothesize that person will have a deficit in seeing faces No you the person wandered into the clinic and they go this person cannot see sees faces but can't make sense of them and then you you uh reverse you you forensically arrive at an understanding so but in general we we go about things in this way and considering that the opposite might be true well that's a little bit I I suppose of like seeing the whale at the surface of the water it's like well the opposite of my experience which is all above water for the most part is maybe not the complete experience of life you start seeing the inverse all the time so I want to cons consider the inverse all the time and it it really relates to the way that you you described how we see colors is based on contrast so maybe Blue's only blue in relation to Yellow so if blue is our choice if we're not considering yellow blue doesn't exist do you know what I'm saying it's like we talk about night it's only night because there's day if there was no day there is no night in in all of our cases like it's like the yinyang you know it's like it's we there's the the light and the shadow always there's always another side for everything and we we focus on one aspect but if we look at the other aspect chances are we'll learn something too the the nervous system is not just able to do this it's the way it does everything two experiments I'll just briefly describe my scientific great grand parents David Hubble and torr of weasel showed that if you force a person to look at something for a long period of time without moving their eyes there's a way that you can do this the image disappears because normally your eyes are making little micro cods and you're comparing what you're seeing to what's right next to it pixel by pixel pixel by pixel pixel if we don't even have to use the example of pressing on the arm we're sitting in chairs right now and until I said you know what's going on at the level of sensation on the backs of your thighs you were unaware of it because if you experience a pressure or a smell in a room you never walk the smell is either good or not good pry soon the smell disappears The neurons are still firing like sledgehammers on a on a bell but we become blind and deaf to it because the nervous system likes to habituate the value of that signal when it's there often and it's only the stuff that goes comes through signal the noise that kind of jolts us into you know attention and awareness and I want to return to attention awareness which are um prominent themes in the book and I think it in important way not just oh attention awareness is important but you also give insight into how to pay better attention how to pay awareness with the understanding that people are going to go about it differently but I do want to ask you about wrestling because when I was growing up I was not I liveed south of the Cow Palace and there was some wrestling going on there I think back then it was WWF there was a short stin to my childhood where I paid attention to in particular um was it Coco beware the guy that had a maau I was obsessed with tropical birds and he would come in he put his tropical bird on the thing and then who's George The Animal steel the guy that would eat the ring yeah okay so um and I believe he was a professor serious seriously seriously was he in real life amazing he was a professor but he played Georg animal steel as a wrestler and I loved the movie The Wrestler um uh the wrestler Darren aronowski movie it was um yeah one of the reasons I liked it is I once visited um Ashbury Park um isn't that where that was filmed there's a there's a vacant uh he goes to visit his daughter there's a vacant uh amusement park or abandoned amusement park scene there that was really eerie still kind of haunts me a little bit there's something about the east coast in in kind of fall all the places that people normally go for just for the summer that we don't have out here in the west coast um people in the east coast are just tougher than than we are it still haunts me um great movie but I remember watching wrestling and it was at that age I think I was probably about 12 13 maybe 11 12 13 where um you know you're kind of entering puberty so and I I you know puberty is a fundamental landmark of of development it's the most rapid period of Aging it's also when we start to change our rule set like certain people and certain kinds of interactions take on profoundly different meaning right it's not just a reproductive competence time and when kids change their bodies change the rule book changes fundamentally yeah our understanding of the world changes in that moment oh yeah I mean the moment that a child understands really what sex is yeah and kind of how they got there and that a lot of the stuff that we see in the world is is kind of passively or not so passively being sent through that filter it's like it's it's something it changes the the rule the rule book of perception I view this age uh from about 11 to 13 at least for me was a unique transition point where the gap between what I perceived as reality and fiction was kind of blurry this is captured pretty well in that movie Stand by me where they're hanging around the campfire at night and the kid says who do you think would win in a fight between Superman and Mighty Mouse and the other kid says like you idiot like Mighty Mouse is a cartoon of course Superman would win right and like to me that's being 11 and a half or 12 years old where your understanding of reality as you know it is changing but it's not completely crystallized into an adult form reality that sounds like a really healthy place to be to me like that not letting it crystallize I think that's the uh there's where the downfall happens so I have questions specifically about wrestling but it's really about process yeah I want to know whether or not you watch wrestling because it allows you to access the energy state in your body and mind and that kind of mode of thinking in which reality as one conceives it is somewhat blurry or is it for a number of other reasons which is fine is that the energy you're trying to export and bring to the creative process elsewhere to life is it that anything is possible or that we're dealing with archetypes because it doesn't matter if it's Coco beware or Randy Macho Man Savage or George The Animal steel and the lovely Elizabeth I guess I did watch a little bit of wrestling they're they are archetypes much like the Greek myths or the Bible or you know no disrespect to the Bible or to Greek myth or to wrestling for that matter archetypes are are a powerful filter for humans but we know that they're a very limited filter too because people aren't built like Square wave functions we have curves and Contours and complexity so what is the deal with your relationship to wrestling uh I think it it maintains that kind of playfulness anything is possible we expect the unexpected all the time in wrestling and it's um and it's a way to have kind of a feeling of the energy of a sport with with no competition it's everyone is working together to put on the best show they can so it's more like a ballet than it is like a a sporting event and and there's great skill involved it's one of the few things that I can watch and really feel relaxed it relaxes me I don't feel like I have to think about it I could just relax and enjoy it this brings up a a topic that is very near and dear to my heart which is this notion of dopamine schedules I never want to reduce everything to dopamine but dopamine is the universal currency of delight pleasure motivation seeking there are other chemicals involved too but there's a beautiful experiment and a couple of examples that I'll use as a foundation to more questions about wrestling and why it's powerful and why other people may want to use wrestling or some other um Endeavor as a way to access Creative Energy and Source earlier we talked about you know you can train an animal to press a lever three times and then get reward and it will learn three is the magic number for reward and then it can switch it takes a little bit of training and then they can switch but they can't do prime numbers they can't do high abstraction schedules humans either were not very good at figuring out the rule set for optimal foraging we do it well enough to persist as a species at least for now but it's very likely that we are not tapping into that system as well as we could and how would we know if we don't know it's one of those you don't know why you don't knows there's a beautiful experiment that explored when dopamine is released in the context of watching sport or watching comedy believe it or not and with the comedy stuff it was every time there was a surprise it was kind of that jarring like haa and they' measure people dopamine people's dopamine output they were also brain Imaging in the game of basketball it's a beautiful opportunity experimentally because every time one team gets the ball or shooting free throws or something they're going down Court and it's either going to end up in the basket or it's not might end up on the free throw line but it's end up not so what they found is that the schedule of anticipation was every time there was a switch of which team got it so you're waiting waiting and then it's ah you're waiting waiting yes waiting waiting three-pointer oh awesome and if something happened where it looked like they were going to make the three-pointer but then somebody basically swatted the ball away and then went for a half court shot like you don't expect that very often bigger dopamine release okay so that's kind of how the thing works when you describe wrestling I wonder if because you don't know the script it's not one team gets it then the other team gets it you don't know who's going to win anything could happen is what you said yes the availability of that dopamine surge or drip which is a powerful thing is completely it's completely out of your reach in terms of anticipation you don't know when it's going to come but it must arrive often enough that you return to it 11 hours a week of watching in many ways the way I'm starting to conceptualize the creative process is a little bit the same you don't know where those nuggets of gold and those loose threads are but you have enough experience and in this case I am referring to you specifically to know that they are in there the people walking in this room have a certain level of ability and talent to to create that the map will form itself as we are going through the voyage and those nuggets of here I'm calling them dopamine but they're they are out there and that knowledge is enough to get you to come back again and again to trust the process so I actually think the way you describe um wrestling as you know it's the energy of the sport it's not the whether or not it's this move or that move or who wins or who loses it's the energy and I'm guessing it's the energy that it creates in you as an observer yes it's the energy creates in me and the reality that it's honest in what it is in a world where seemingly nothing is honest at what it is and again not not not because people are lying all the time we have little data we make up a story to explain it and then we say that's what happened and and we have uh Trust trusted sources who do exactly what I just described and who pass this down as Gospel of what what we teach and we're and maybe it's true and maybe it's not with wrestling we know maybe it's true maybe it's not we lean towards it not being true but what's really interesting about wrestling and maybe one of the most fun things about it is that sometimes real life Works its way into the story like uh WR two wrestlers get married now in real life well we don't know it's like that you never know it's like in the storyline they're getting married or getting divorced or best friends turn on each other and it could be part of the story and it could really be happening because they do right someone gets someone breaks their leg so they're out because they're leg is broken did they break their leg we don't know they're out do you know what I'm saying the we're told they broke their leg so there's always just like I wonder what's true you know I I wonder where the line is we know that it's scripted or and or predetermined that's how they say it's predetermined but we don't know where reality is and isn't and in some ways that's our real experience of the world is this we don't really know where reality is and isn't we have an idea maybe I think in some ways wrestling is more honest or legitimate because we start with the idea that it's uh that it's fixed when we go to a boxing match we don't go to a boxing match thinking it's fixed yet it might be and historically it's happened you know or there was just something in baseball where uh was it baseball I don't follow baseball I should know there was just there was just a big uh Sports uh oh one one of the teams that the plays basically the was it the call signals of the of the catcher yes yeah that they were they were you're not supposed to deprogram the or deconstruct the call the call signals of the other team and I guess maybe some a team got caught doing that yes and the team that won whatever the uh you know world series was so it's like with wrestling you know that that wouldn't be a scandal do you know what I'm saying it's like cuz almost anything goes anything goes and that's what the world is really like so in some ways it's comforting and there's still this mystery of like w I wonder if that's true or not because we never really know someone gets hurt did they really break their back or are they just going on vacation we don't know we'll never know it's fascinating it is fascinating and I feel feel like there are certain people who show up in a way that is surprising in in Not Just One Direction but in all directions like it's one thing for a celebrity to come out and make a statement that can be interesting or not interesting depending on the celebrity and the statement and the delivery but and I'm probably going to get this wrong because I'm terrible at Pop Culture things um most of them anyway but as I recall you know Lady Gaga showed up to some event wearing a outfit made of meat and I can't tell you for the life me whether or not that was a statement against meat or for meat maybe it was a statement for the carnivore diet maybe it was a statement for veganism I don't know either way maybe or maybe neither or maybe neither but it was definitely a statement in that it broke with the norm and it said to me okay she creates different rules for herself or so breaks boundaries that um other people had I never heard of anyone doing that before um which doesn't mean they hadn't but I never heard of anyone doing before but we do tend to associate outside the current Playbook with quote unquote creativity unless it crosses a line in which case it becomes something else it becomes almost theater for sake of theater but what you're telling me is that within the realm of wrestling theater is the goal at some level and everybody knows it who goes into those Arenas who watches it yes everybody yes and everyone agrees to kind of suspend outside reality and say this is reality yes and they boo for the bad guys and cheer for the good guys knowing that backstage they're probably friends except for the kids that are 11 who think it's really real I don't know I don't even know if they know I'm not sure the only other person I know who um has vocalized their love of of wrest professional wrestling um to the extent that you have is um Lis Frederickson the rhythm guitar player rans it who like loves wrestling but his statement and forgive me LS if I'm getting this wrong um is that because he grew up in a area of the South Bay where like there were no teams like now there's the San Jose Earthquakes but there was no football team in San Jose he's from Campbell but there were there were no like good teams no sports teams but they had wrestling and he had it where on the television set and so if you didn't have a like I didn't grow up with any organized Sports thing the 49ers were up the road but for me it was skateboarding and I love it for the same reason you actually never really know what's going to happen there is no rule book the rule book is made up but they are very uh it's a unique sport in that surfing is a bit like this too in that they are absolutely maniacal about making things look a certain way it's not about just doing it it's about doing it and making it look good yeah smooth catching it with the front foot you know and this the trends change Style Style it's a Style style is and then that style is this like nebulous thing of like you know in fashion or in sport right whereas with a football there's some amazing catches there's even like the catch which I happen to know is a is a 49 the catch during the Super Bowl but in general it's like the goal is get in the end zone win the game and I'm sure football players are like cringing as I say this but doesn't matter if you run ugly if you run fastest and skateboarding that would never fly in fact you'll basically be um ridiculed out of the sport um in wrestling is it the same are there is their style to wrestling it's all it's all performance it's all the Charisma of the people involved there's the the physical ability the ability to talk and tell a story and the uh how charismatic the performers are whether you want to watch them whether you want to see them win whether you want to see them lose and whether you're interested in cheering or booing for them I was gonna say it reminds me of Opera but Opera get released over and over again you know the story and How It Ends when you walk in if you've listened to it before so wrestling does seem to be unique in that way it's real time iteration at least from the perspective of the and and it's realtime iteration based on because people get hurt all the time they're doing really crazy physical stuff so if someone gets hurt the story has to change because in real life they can't show up next week and do what was planned in the script so it's it's very alive and there's a a lot of [Music] um something interesting and unexpected is always happening well in a much more um uh calm form um I'll share with you something I just like your perspective on it for years I I used a tool in order to try and access ideas um since I was a little kid actually um because I I have a little bit of OCD a little bit of a Tourette when I get tired I'll do that like very like um strategy implementation oriented I had to when I was a little little kid I needed all my stuffed animals arranged in a certain way Lego is how to be you know little neurotic yeah or a lot um and then science is very much about you have to do things with a lot of precision and I discovered that the Ultimate Reset for me when I was in graduate school or a postto if I couldn't make it to a really good like Agnostic Front show or like chaos like the chaos of a punk rock show for me was kind of this reset I was like ah could like release all this thing and I got energy from it first time I saw transplants play and you know it's was like Wow because you don't know what's going to happen and it was scary and I loved it the other thing that I used over time to kind of reset this ability to to think in a structured way without it feeling like it was overcoming me maybe even access the same thing in some ways that you're accessing with wrestling was I like to stare at Aquaria like I like to go to aquariums or I'd build aquariums and I would just sit there because you never know which way the fish are going to go you think it's going that way but then all of a sudden they'll turn and go the other way it's completely unpredictable and I love Aquaria because of the tranquility and had them in my lab for a long time I just adore aquariums because of the nonlinearity of it it's not ABC it's a z z q you know and I think this is what some people try and access through psychedelics but that didn't seem to me like a very good way to do it on a regular basis whereas with Aquaria you just the tanks are there so in your book you talk about something that um I also share a love for which is it how you know the ocean and aspects of nature like clouds and ocean they have a predictability to them we know where they are and where to find them fortunately the sun rises and sets every day at least for now and we can count on them with 100% reliability and yet they are from the perspective of like what physicists would say they're very chaotic they you can't look at a wave and know exactly how the foam is going to roll out you know it's going to roll in and roll out we have the tides but when I hear about wrestling I think about my love of Aquaria when I think about my love of punk rock music uh for instance or I think about the ocean I think in that way that we actually have a need to Source from things that have both a combination of structure and no structure I think it's interesting that there are some places that don't change and some places that change a lot and I can remember thinking about this I was walking there's a beach that I walk on in in Hawaii that I walk on every morning when I'm there and if you walk on the same beach every day you kind of get a sense of what it's like and I remember I was in Hawaii walked on the beach every day for a year however long it was and then I left for 6 months and I came back and the next time I walked on the beach it was an entirely different Beach entirely different and and I remember thinking in that moment like this is an unusual place because I pictured um the house that I didn't even grow up in the house I was uh I lived in maybe for the first seven years of my life and I think about what the backyard looked like and I think think about a particular old tree that was there and I don't know this for sure but my sense is if I were to go back to where I grew up and go to that place and look in that yard it would probably look pretty similar yet here was this beach that I was walking on in Hawaii that in the course of 6 months completely changed its face and just how interesting both of those things are and that depending on the project we're working on to be able to go to a place that we know has the potential to change a lot and what that would do to our um to our uh connection with the earth when we're when we're experiencing that versus go to go going to a place that has very little change and you can kind of count on it being the way it's always been that both of those are interesting things to be able to draw upon on depending on what we want to open in our in our psyche I have an almost um unhealthy fascination with New York in the mid 80s and 90s and um uh didn't live there though no but I since I was a kid I went there when I was a little kid and I was fascinated by it there's also a very interesting migration of East Coast to West Coast creatives including yourself that was it played an important part of my life just seeing things and hearing things that were meaningful to me but I like for instance I love the movie I haven't seen the documentary but the one about Jean Michelle Basia Basia because of the characters that are in it and the huge number of people in that like Parker posie Dennis Hopper and Christopher wal and on and on that those images of New York at that time were so exciting and what was happening um I wish I could transplant myself to that if I had a time machine that's where I'd land first um I hear a lot of people say you know New York isn't what it used to be San Francisco isn't what it used to be whatever La is there does seem to be something that feels a little bit disruptive to people about cities changing in but the idea that natural landscapes change is actually we even accept like hey fires sweep through places and assuming they weren't started by humans we accept that that change and the reordering of Landscapes is normal and healthy and I always tell myself they have the kids growing up in New York or San Francisco or Chicago now they only know it that way so to them it's as cooler as uncool as it's ever going to be yeah right they either want to get out or they're loving every piece of it and this happened for all people that came before us so um my question is a very basic one do you miss the New York that you came up in are you somebody who is attached to the Past I'm not attached at all I'm not attached to anything in the past I don't look back at all you don't think about like oh in my dorm room at myu Beasty Boys this like I miss no your your Optics are forward present and forward only only present and forward is there a process to that or it just happens to be where you default to I don't know I'm not sure but that's that's how I do it Nostalgia is not you don't in Rick rubin's brain no oh lucky you man no I say that with with with genuine like admiration um so you can hear a song that maybe you had a a role in producing or not something from the past and you're accessing a state presumably but you're not pining for wishing how it was never I'm no psychologist but I'm going to venture to say that I think that's a very unique quality I think a lot of people wish for or wish that things did not happen the way they did that there's a lot of living in the past there's a lot of this notion of like people future trip yeah I don't actually think that's the default state of the brain I think a lot of people live in emotional anchors to the Past good and bad yeah I none and watching wrestling is one way that you cleanse the pallet yeah like true when you go to a meal and you they pass around this that don't do this anymore but pass around a little bit of sorbet to cleanse the pallet turns out there's a a biological reason for that there's a kind of neutralization of The Taste receptors between Savory and sweet Etc so wrestling is your pallet neutralizing I know that if I watch wrestling before I go to sleep it's going to be a good night's sleep do you dream about wrestling no never speak but it's but it's it's just relaxing it's uh it's just relaxing do you anticipate when you watch it like here comes the dopamine hit sometimes sometimes when it happens going pointer yeah sometimes it's exciting uhuh but do you enjoy but even then it's like the stakes are low it's like I don't really care what happens which feels good you know that um I'm just being entertained do they actually get hurt some sometimes you said they do a lot often they're doing I mean they're basically stunt men so imagine stunt men getting hurt doing a crazy stunt happens all the time well in the movie The Wrestler I remember he got staples stapled into him and I thought that's pretty intense I once went and saw um I guess they called it Mexican wrestling I don't know if they call it that anymore where the guys dip their yeah they dip their hands in glass this was in Sacramento and I went saw I honestly didn't have a stomach for it I really didn't I couldn't believe it was legal it might not have been legal yeah but I thought there's crazy stuff in wrestling sometimes wow so before sleep is that typically when you watch wrestling yes do you think it's useful for people to have some activity that allows them to kind of um clear their mind in a in a and create peace before heading off to sleep I think so and I think yoga nras would be a good like it's like Yoga Nidra pro wrestling any of the yeah any of those type things yeah not watching the Dalmer thing I won't watch that I I um I don't watch any horror any anything or I don't like violent things yeah I know it exists I know horrible things happen in the world but I certainly don't want to do that before sleep I think these linal States before and emerging from sleep are very powerful um when you wake up in the morning um are your thoughts immediately structured or do you enjoy the kind of clearing of the clouds it's a it's a slow process for me to wake up and I like that I like not engaging too much too soon I also um another I usually fall asleep listening to a lecture or uh something speaking because I if I'm if I don't I can get caught in my own thoughts and listening to something is enough of a focus point that it stops me from talking to myself yeah I do the same my grandfather listened to the radio uh to um Sports on the radio and he would fall asleep often times he was a smoker with a cigarette in his mouth his wife's responsibility was to stay up later than he did and make sure they didn't burn everything down um and then when you wake up you said it's a slow process is it an hour or two before you feel like you're I would say probably an hour I usually wake up and try to get in the Sun as soon as I possibly can and hope to spend hope to spend about an hour and then I'll usually go for a walk on the beach um for another hour 90 minutes depending um are you with family members and other people at that time no I'm usually focused by myself phone I'll be listening to something I don't look at the phone but I listen I listen to again a lecture a podcast or Audi book I like audiobooks a lot yeah I do too if an idea comes to mind you write it down I may it depends I I like to I I usually uh haven't would do a note in my phone I don't usually carry pen and paper with me when I when I'm walking yeah I do the same I do a long Sunday hike or Jog and I I will audio script into my phone um people sometimes give me funny looks because I'm talking to myself and I that's a nice way to do it though I I I'd like to learn more of the audio methods of doing it instead of the typing methods right now I type and I don't think it's the best way the voice memos function in um uh the iPhone and other phones is really good and they're now um companies like rev.com that will turn those into word doc scripts that are fairly well um corrected great um fairly inexpensive no they're not a sponsor of the podcast I just happen to use it it's great um actually learned that trick from Richard Axel the Nicorette chewing Wildman Nobel Prize winner um he writes manuscripts and by walking around his office pacing and talking into his phone I always think of the Woody Allen movie where the um uh Allan Al the character is with you know talking about yeah he's he's speaking comedy ideas into the phone it's really pretentious yeah I liked that movie about Harvey Milk that Shawn pen played Harvey Milk because that all took place before I was alive mostly in the Bay Area but there's this these beautiful scenes of him as I recall sitting there at his kitchen table talking into a tape recorder at night talking about how he predicted that he would be possibly assassinated Etc and this goes back to the Strummer thing about writing things down I REM you know I think that a lot of people including myself feel a little bit of like egotistical guilt around like who am I to think that my ideas could be worthwhile or something but um you know I think over time I've come to realize that the ideas about experiments or health questions I have about health or the um they they don't always but often times can lead to real you know seeds that grow into trees it's something that's interesting to you it's it's it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks you know like uh most of my notes are not for anyone else's right you know for anyone else's use like I I hear about something that's interesting to me and I think about okay I want to learn more about this whatever it is and then sometimes those things work their way into things I'm doing because the universe seems to work in that way but I rarely am learning something with the idea of using it I learn things with the idea of this is what I want to know this is what's interesting to me and then often those things that are interesting to me can find their way into other projects just because they do yeah it's almost like col or kindling but the moment that you think of it that way it it sort of it sounds so extractive right but if you so you you take this walk and you're and you're um writing down the occasional idea perhaps and then um what is the next sort of the way that I'm here I less than do this than this than that I'm interested in like where does your mind shift to does it become more structured as the day goes on does your thinking become um more structured around projects and plans I try to um deal with things that need dealing with after that and in preparation for going to work and then when I go to work it's more like free this free thing where I'm again hoping something good comes uh welcoming something good paying attention and uh maybe trying to will it to happen but never uh but knowing I I don't have the ability to make it happen I can just be present for it and be ready if it does arrive some of the um more surprising and I I found really uh interesting and useful features of the book were about um so dancing with structure and lack of structure so when I think of structure I think of like deadlines so when you are in the process of creating something um obviously deadlines are relevant time of day right there's only so many hours in the day where one can stay in the groove or this like Readiness to receive um have you ever found yourself in that mode where you're kind of grinding like ah like here we are like okay I'm not coming home for dinner tonight it's the next you we're going to push like put on the coffee pot kind of thing a lot a lot in the over the course of my life a lot not as much now um and one of the things that I discovered through working on the book was the phases of work we're not required to treat the different phases of work in the same way whereas before I did before everything was in this state of play everything had an a wide open time schedule it happens when it happens and if it takes two years or 3 years it doesn't matter it's not about that it's only about this thing has to be great and what I came to realize in working on the book is that there there are different phases and the first phase is this seed collecting phase which is kind of an ongoing part of life in general I do that I do that always whether I'm whether I'm working on something or not I'm always in the seed collecting phase and there's no deadline or uh just anything that interests me that I think I want to learn more about or has potential to be something anything something I hear something think H I'd like to read more about that or I wonder if I wonder if there's a movie about that is there a movie about that if not maybe there's a movie to be made you know like again I want this is something I want in my life let's see if it exists if it doesn't exist then maybe that's something interesting to pursue um but I know that the desire is there because I have it um so in the seed phase there's no deadlines it's just a wide open part and then the next phase is called the experimentation phase where you where you start experimenting to see what the seeds want to do you're involved but you're more of a um you're not really dictating the action you're you're setting the stage for something to happen but it's not about you yet so it'd be like the equivalent of you'd plant the seed you would water it you would make sure it was in the Sun and you'd wait um so you're involved but you can't make it grow you know and then when it sprouts and it grows and or if it turns into a plant then you can look at the plants like okay how does this plant what's the potential of this plant and then you and then that the third phase is the crafting phase where it's like okay I have this plant maybe I'm going to trim it or maybe I'm going to uh combine it with these other plants to make some something else with it now it's like material that you have and then finally is the the completion or or finishing phase which is which is the final edit G getting to the version of it the version of it that's the one that you can share with the world if if that's something you're going to do and I've come to realize that by the time you're going into the completion phase you can have a deadline and it won't hurt the project in fact it might help the project and I didn't know that before so I've worked on projects that have gone longer than they necessarily needed to and maybe not in the best interest of the project because I didn't know that I didn't understand that that the timing of that because I because I am so aware of the necessity in the experimental phase to not have a deadline that I assume that that held through the whole project and and they're not it's not a clear phase one finishes and then you start phase two phase two finishes and you start phase three you move back and forth between them I'm collecting seeds all the time I'm always in phase one and then probably to some degree there's always some version of experimentation going on maybe not now but if something's on a list of things I want to look at hopefully I'll get get to the list and give them some experimentation and see what they can turn into and then if they do turn into something then they get to the crafting phase where it's more okay now now I have this thing what do what do I know about this kind of thing what can I match this with what can I use this for how can I be involved as a Craftsman and by the end of the crafting phase or deep into the crafting phase you can start seeing the end you know you can start seeing an end and then you can even dictate an end but I recommend if you do just dictate it for you not for anyone else because if something comes up where you learn if you uh set a deadline a public deadline and then a new discovery happens along the way and you realize oh this could actually be much better than I thought but I need more time it's harder to do that if you set the deadline so I would say have an internal deadline to get to finish it that said if an unusual situation comes up and it's better for everything not to meet that deadline it's a it's one of those rules that you set the rule to break it if it's what's best for the project um but that that was a new thing for me and it it it helped me a lot when did you realize that in collecting the material for the book and thinking about it when I when I realized that it was phases I didn't I didn't know any of this when when I started writing the book I didn't know any hardly any of the things in the book they're more um most of it would be reverse engineer ering something that I had experience a successful experience uh using these methods without knowing they were methods just following my instincts got me to something good and then I would look back at why did I want to do that and is there a a principle at play that could be of use outside of this case and how do I explain that and that's what the book is is these reverse engineered principles that have led to uh good decision making and trying to make things the chapter on self-doubt was really interesting to me as where tell me what it says because I can't remember well you know I'll read the first sentence of it um which is that self-doubt lives in all of us and while we may wish it was gone it is there to serve us uh and it goes on to describe how to um dance with self-doubt um in not so many words I think you know there's a saying that um is actually from the landscape of psychology um which it which is uh generally discussed in um in a kind of pathological context which is um if nothing matters anything goes this is usually the phrase used to describe people who feel as if like there's no use in living so just go crazy often to self-destruct but there's a light version of this I realize where in some sense the creative process seems to have something to do with you know if you're not paying attention to what outcomes are like who likes it who doesn't like it and you're just doing it for you you you make the the rule play I want to Delight myself well then anything goes and you have an infinite rule set there to to extract from at least initially so as one gets better at their craft you could imagine self-doubt goes down I think that's the perception of a lot of people right you get better at what you're doing you know you can uh land more three free throws as a basketball player you can hit more home runs as a baseball player you can produce more you know platinum albums as a as an artist you you know self-confidence goes up self-doubt goes down but I think you and I both know a number of people who are successful enough to know that oftentimes there's a mirror image to that where people feel pressure because they did it once now they got to do it again yes or that you think you're so good at it that it it comes easily and you don't have to apply yourself arrogance yeah so self-doubt is a it's like a um it's a check on yourself it can either be really helpful or it can undermind you so it's something we all have and if we let it under undermine us then we don't make anything and that's not good um but when used as a a balancing tool in our lives it serves a great function where we really do it's okay to have all the confidence in the world and still second guess is this the best it can be it it it you can doubt I think the the phras is in the book you can doubt your way to a great work you know to a masterpiece um sometimes that questioning allows you to push further than just accepting I made it so it's good yeah I've encountered more people that seem to be driven by um self-doubt and the need to constantly perform and perform again then I have real arrogance just that's been my experience fortunately I've met some arrogant people in my life but um and of course we never as a psychiatrist uh who I admire a lot and bioengineer who was a guest on this podcast Carl diero said you know we we never really know how other people feel I mean most of the time we don't even know how we feel again language is a very deprived format for explaining feeling so we think somebody feels one way but we can obser and it could be another but we observe their behavior so in in the sense of returning to the work you know just always returning to process sounds like your routine is fairly scripted at least now um but the things that you are getting in touch with wrestling sleep and dreaming um the ocean there's a predictability of them because you can access them in a predictable way but they seem to have a lot of unpredictability in them the ocean is completely unpredictable I I also listen to a lot of music that I don't know so I listen to a lot of classical music and uh less so but some ja asz and a lot of old music that I never heard before and I like I like being surprised by music um and sometimes it really catches me off guard like I'm I Shazam a lot you know when when I hear something I like have you ever encountered music that really works well live but just does not work in a recording or that is that much better live but the recording is sort of meh you don't have to name names yeah I don't think so I feel like maybe there's some artists who are great live who've never captured it well on record example would probably be the Grateful Dead's a good example of a band where I feel like their albums are not their strong point but there if you hear live recordings they're really interesting and really different from each other and that's kind of part of what makes the Grateful Dead interesting is their unpredictability I confess I I sister who listened to Greatful Dead and I got taken to a few shows when I was younger and they would do that what is it called space it was like these drum solos that would go on for hours and hours this is like the antithesis of punk rock shows where songs are like 90 to 120 seconds and like you know and I remember thinking like what is this what is this but people I know who love the Grateful Dead love that uncertainty about where the that drum thing I think they do call it space forgive me dead heads I'm not enough of one to get it right um but they're looking for something and sometimes they find it and if you're there when they find it it feels exciting because it's not just uh it's not just following a script it's like something is really happening it's a it's a real moment it's uh something that I I aim for in the studio is to create real moments that when you hear them they don't necessarily sound perfect they sound like something that really happened and in that moment something happened and it's a special moment and you you can feel that if they were to Play It Again it wouldn't be like that there's something really exciting about that it's it's really what it's how jazz jazz works as well and um I think some of bringing some of that jazz mentality into other types of music is is really interesting makes for compelling things because when you hear them there's a certain amount of um you you you really have to pay attention to do it when you're doing it you're really paying attention like I don't really know there's no music there's no you know there's no uh there's no map to follow and now we're working together to make something do I play or not play when do I play and you're really paying attention then can I add or you go to start adding something and someone else added something like oh I can't do that and it's like everyone's just in this thing in this moment experiencing this thing at once that you can feel as a listener and we get to we get to hear their excitement of finding it and it's thrilling when it happens so I I I like that experience I feel like that's kind of what the dead do live they'll play songs in different ways um and again I don't know very much about the dead and it's sort of a newer uh it's newer for me to listen to the dead growing up I never listen to the dead but probably because I heard songs on their albums and thought this doesn't really speak to me but I think that the albums don't really reflect what's special about them I think a lot of their shows were recorded right or videotaped yes but by by fans which they um supported they supported that everybody come everybody tape everybody you know trade tapes it made sense for who that band was they redefined or they defined excuse me the notion of followers I mean people literally gave up their lives or spent much of their lives literally driving from City to City to follow them because it's not like going from City to City to watch a movie over over because it's not a movie it's different every night it's changing pretty incredible phenomenon I don't know if anything else quite like it except Cults and and those often don't end well I think a guy that mixed the punch at for the Jonestown Maser went to my high school that was the is that true I think so amazing my sister is really good at all this kind of like 70s 80s like um like dark psychology trivia yeah she's a very light person but did you read uh Season of the Witch no it's about San Francisco in the 60s it's great you love it one great book I to check it out the way you describe um experiences going by in time and or or things emerging in time and the creative process being a way of sort of grabbing catching capturing those moments maybe rearranging maybe watering Etc um I thought was beautifully captured in the in the analogy you gave about a kind of a conve a conveyor belt going by of things right that we think of the creative process like it's going to land in us or we're going to enter it or that we're going to sit there in a chair and like grid our teeth you know there's like a some Hemingway quote um where you just sit there and stare at the page until the beads of blood form on your forehead or something maybe it was him maybe it was I sounds like Bukowski or something anyway I'm gonna get this wrong people tell me in the comments um maybe no one said it it was a dream but I love this conveyor belt thing the that reminds me of being in laboratory doing experiments thinking I was trying to solve one thing and then seeing something else and then having to make the decision like is that really cool enough to drop everything and go that direction or to kind of spend a night or a week or a career going that way I mean these are kind of big decisions given that at least as far as we know we're we're going to live 100 years or less and but this idea that we have you know thoughts and experiences in our past and we can draw draw on and like trying to make good decisions do we do we like grab these things off the conveyor or not I hearing you and I'm starting to realize that being attached to the Past might be the worst thing that one could do in terms of being able to make good decisions in this context because we have a kind of a Playbook of what's worked and what hasn't worked but you actually talk about this there's a passage in the book you know that um I'll just read it um to be aware of the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because it's the way you've done it before I sat with this page for almost 10 full minutes which is not something I do very often maybe you could elaborate on this a little bit I mean we want to have you know mechanisms and routines we can trust yeah but this is a I think an important warning yeah when when something works it's easy to be fooled into believing that's the way to do it or that's the right way it's just a way and it's just a way that happened to work that time and this plays into when you get uh advice from people who have more experience than you you explain your situation they tell you their advice the advice that they're giving you is not based on your life or your experience it's based on their life and their experience and the stories that they're telling are based on experiences they've had that are that have very different data points than yours so maybe they're giving you good advice but maybe they're giving you good advice for them and not giving you good advice for you and it's it's easy when we try something and have a result a positive result thinking this is everybody can do this you know the way I I uh was vegan for a long time 22 years and then I started eating um I started eating animal protein and then eventually change my change my diet a few times to the point where I lost a lot of weight the way that I did it worked for me be right before that happened I did uh something that I was told that everyone else who did what you did they all lost weight for whatever reason I didn't so the idea that we know what's right for someone else I I think it's hard enough to even figure out what's right for ourselves and if we do somehow Crack the Code of what's right for us be happy we have it and then still know I wonder if that's the only way maybe there's an even better way that we're not considering you know like uh not to get comfortable with thinking we know how it works just because we get the outcome we want I was raised in science with a principle it was literally dictated to me as a principle almost like a rule of religion which was that the brain is plastic it can change and learn until you're about 25 and then the critical periods end and that's it and this was a rule essentially was dictated a Nobel Prize which was very deserved given to my scientific great-grandparents they deserve it um but I was told there was no changing of brain structure function in any meaningful way after age 25 or so turns out that's completely wrong sorry David and Torsten but they knew it was wrong wow that's interesting yeah it was actively suppressed because of the competitive nature of prizes and discoveries at that time and a guy named Mike merenik and his student um Greg Reen Zone were showing that adult plasticity exists and only now is this really starting to emerge as a theme right just crazy like there were so many reasons and the textbook said it we were all told it and it changed our Behavior now we know this to be completely false there's plasticity throughout the lifespan there's limits to it here and there but like it's just Far and Away a different story so why would that be the the only time that ever happened right exactly and and but the field was run by a very small cabal of people at that time all fields are run by a very small cabal of people who have an investment in things being the way they are now because they're in charge and one of the great things about getting older is that um well fortunately everyone eventually ages and I I hope that you know David unfortunately passed away he was lovely torsten's lovely he's still alive and they would say I think toron would say yeah we should have been a little more open or kind in in allowing these other ideas but I think that but just think about all the years that were wasted with this misunderstanding absolutely absolutely and and it went beyond that and there were BBC specials that helped propagate this and you know one of the goals of the podcast has been to try and shed shine light on ideas that at first seemed crazy like I know you and I are both um semi obsessed with the health benefits of light and you hear about this stuff like negative I Ona therapy sounds crazy right sounds like something you would only hear about at esselin or in Big Sir turns out negative ionization therapy for sleep and mood is based on really amazing work out of Columbia by guy named Michael Turman the Nobel Prize I think it was in 1916 was given for phototherapy for the treatment of lus like this idea that certain wavelengths of light can help treat medical conditions is not a new idea but somehow we see a red light we're not used to seeing red lights except in sunsets and on stop lights and somehow it bothers people or it makes them feel like well it undermines a um a business model that doesn't take red light into consideration right until it does and then it was and then it it's co-opted there and the place what I Look to is acupuncture you know for a lot of years people said well acupuncture this is like no mechanism no mechanism no mechanism there's a a lab at Harvard guy named chuu ma who I know reasonably well whose laboratory is dedicated to trying to figure out the biological mechanisms of acupuncture and they're discovering what everyone has known for thousands of years which is that incredible effects on anti-inflammation we got microbiome so uh I have a friend who was having a ter back problem and I suggested that he see an acupuncturist and he went to the acupuncturist that I suggested and his back problem completely healed almost instantaneously and I asked him you know have you been keeping up because he had another another flare up he's like no I I I can't go back there because acupuncture doesn't work I said well it you saw it work for you he's like yeah but there's no signs wow yeah oh he got it there is now there's good science and published in Premier journals it you know what's interesting is there is a little bit of science editorial but since we like to exchange information about health and things of that sort the editorial staff of a journal dictates what gets ex publish and what doesn't and the premier journals have a an outsized effect on what the media covers and so the beautiful thing is the journal staff now is of the age that they grew up hearing about acupuncture hypnosis has a powerful clinical effect if it's done right um Yoga Nidra and similar practices and so the tides are changing but I sometimes like to take a step back and think what are we confronted with now that seems crazy that in 10 years the kids that will be the because to me their kids will be Journal editors like oh yeah absolutely um you know I'm making this up but putting tuning Forks against your head or something like that like sound sound wave therapy um I think when one adopts a stance of like we we have to filter everything through the limitations of our biology but also through the the soci sociology of a like the way culture goes it becomes a different story how do you deal with that not just in terms of of Health but in terms of um thinking about anything sounds like you don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about what people are going to think is cool or not no you're you're punk rocker at heart yes you still are there got you I I can't I I I just know what I like and what I don't I know what works for me and what doesn't you know I try things and I'm constantly looking for new better solutions to anything and wherever they come from doesn't matter it could come from it could come from Stanford or it could come from the guy uh talking to himself on the street if it works I'm good you know it doesn't really matter to me at all I I I don't hold um I don't hold any of it tightly well fortunately there's now a division of the National Institutes of Health called um complimentary Health complimentary and Alternative Health and it's a it's amazing ncci is run by a woman who has published on this is interesting the uh some of the anti-cancer effects of things like acupuncture um not that acupuncture can cure all cancer but but real you know real data yeah um that I think for a lot of people you know certainly the generation above us you know they just are like not interested it it sheds new light on the um Andrew Wilds the Paul Stan mites um you know the Wild Ones um ozone therapy or there's so many there's so many we can look at I mean for a long time nutrition was just thought of as something that doesn't doesn't matter what you eat it's it's what medicine you take and what you know it's like the food is everything food food is a powerful powerful variable in the landscape of of online nutrition it be it's sort of one of the third rails for uh anyone like myself who's out there on social media you do a very good job of putting out posts on Twitter and Instagram but each day you take it down you put up a new one and I don't talk about any I only talk about IDE you know I talk about creative ideas I don't talk about anything specific related to um anything other than you know maybe something like don't believe what you hear right exactly um well in the landscape of nutrition sometimes I I now place it through the filter of of professional wrestling you've got your your vegans and your omnivores and your um your carnivore MD and you've got liver king and you got everything in between right so you could translate that to any number of different areas fashion probably has its people I'm just not aware of who they music has theirs and um Sports has theirs and science has theirs characters like so are we all just pro wrestling like characters in these different domains and we're taking each ourselves and each other way too seriously yeah it's all we we don't know anything it's all if someone has an idea and it sounds interesting to you try it and if it doesn't work it's okay and try something else it's like you're an empiricist yeah whatever works whatever works and if something seems interesting to you and you're excited by it why not try it it's I you know I try very fringy things I like in some ways the more um unrealistic it seems the more interesting it is to me because I feel like that's getting closer to something that um somebody doesn't want me to know you know but you're not a big drug guy like the big psychedelic craze that's happening now and that happened some years I'm not I'm not against it it just has never been something that I've done yeah yeah that's it's an interesting area that's definitely making it Headway inside of standard academic science and medicine now um so that I'm interested in non phological approaches to things whatever they are well I'm a big believer that also that behavioral dos and don'ts first are the they're the most fun to explore because in general unless it's something like you know um jumping between U buildings doing parkour or something most of the time you're not going to injure or harm yourself there's more room for iteration than there is with a pillar a potion um although you know certainly pharmacology has its place so you've had creative Works certainly within the realm of Music also comedy and producing ing film and other things for somebody out there who of whatever age they they maybe they're creating maybe they they they're they know they have this creative antenni not the source is outside um what was it that Strummer said I actually wrote this on the wall of my laboratory no input no output wow that's strummer's law it's written in my laboratory the people in my lab were so like what's going on here I think one guy under knew what that was but it was a picture of him picture my bulldog and you know no input no output I don't think I can just stay in a room with four walls and a ceiling and nothing else and and create I mean I know that there's certain number of things in here but I I do think accessing the world is important and the world is giving us Clues all the time if we paying attention that's another part of it like if you're paying attention the thing that you are looking for is being either whispered or screamed at you in the outside world world if you're paying attention well and I uh I forget the exact title of the chapter but um there's a chapter about staying open to clues or or being on the lookout for Clues yeah now I feel tempted to look for the exact title of that chapter but probably look for Clues look for Clues sounds like it sounds right and since you wrote it I'm I'm guessing that's right something so do you think they're clues in in every everywhere yes I think there are Clues everywhere for if we pay attention we'll hear a phrase it'll trigger a a thought we'll see something unexpected um in the if someone recommends something to you maybe it's a coincidence if three people recommend the same thing to you maybe it's not you know who knows who knows I do believe the universe is on the side of creativity and the universe is supporting things to happen and they could happen through you or they could happen through someone else so if you're paying attention maybe it'll happen through you we had a guest on the podcast named Justin sonenberg he's an expert in the gut microbiome and he applied something that without knowing he applied the opposite principle the opposite is true principle uh we were talking about these trillions of gut microbiota that clearly are doing amazing things to create neurotransmitters and govern our brain and even decisionmaking how much sugar is in our system driving appetite Etc and he said you know we think of them as cargo but like maybe we're just vehicles and they're in charge yeah that all of our interactions like every time we shake hands or touch our eyes we're exchanging gut microbiota and we think of elligence as a as thinking and intelligence and he's a a microbiologist and in in all seriousness he said maybe we're the ones being manipulated we're the house cats and we think here we are we're falling in love and kissing and shaking hands and washing hands and uh doing all sorts of things to isolate or or connect with one another and maybe the gut microbiota are really trying to optimize their survival that's what um lar Hamilton said that one point in the sauna that when when you're in the Sun and it's really hot the feeling that you have of wanting to get out could be the bad Critters in your body that can't handle it like let's get out of here are trying to convince you from the inside to get out maybe that's where they that feeling of being compelled to get out comes from so Elon getting us all to Mars might be a bit of um maybe they just want to get to Mars and so they're uh maybe I'm starting to feel like I'm channeling Lex fredman here for a moment no I think this considering the opposite is really key and while it might sound mystical to people or a little bit like we're just playing with ideas that's exactly what you do in science someone walks in with a result and says I found this this is true and you say but what if it's all something else a good example might be here I'm pulling from podcast episodes of that we've had but Aaliyah crumb um is this amazing psychologist who works on belief effects your know strongly shapes the physiological outcome and she had this amazing graduate thesis where she said what if all of exercise is Placebo all of it yeah it burns some calories and does some things turns out this isn't the case but it turns out a lot of the effects of exercise positive effects lowering blood pressure relieving stress positive are Placebo and but nobody thinks of it like that because we're so attached to calories burned Etc I think that's a big point that the belief part of it is a huge part of the conversation about everything you know what we believe has power if we believe we can make something great the chances of us making something great are better than if we don't believe we can so uh I I would say any ability to harness your belief on your behalf is a really healthy thing to do and one thing that you make very clear is that while our own abilities may come into question from time to time you absolutely believe that the elements from which to create are out there absolutely all all the elements are are are here everything is here we get to pick and choose we get to the conveyor belts going by with little the little gifts and we can first first we have to notice there's a conveyor belt then we notice the gifts and then that's the starting point and then we may even feel uh uh empowered enough to grab one of the gifts and open it up and see what's inside and then maybe that's the start of something really beautiful that we wouldn't have we wouldn't have done everything everything that that I make or have made has always been based on something that I see or hear that allows me to see something that I didn't see before so I was going to ask you whether or not it's important to be happy in order to create but certainly a lot of people that were unhappy were still able to create but the more I listen to you it seems that it's really about an ability to pay attention yes so if I'm unhappy or if I'm happy may not be as relevant as whether or not I'm able to stay undistracted yes I would say that's I would say being able to stay present in the work is probably the most most important part of it and how you feel is less of an issue unless how you feel gets in the way of you feeling how the work makes you feel do you know what I'm saying if you're in a lot of pain and you're looking at a piece of art it may be hard to know how that art makes you feel because you're the big signal in your body is the physical pain I'm sure there are some people who can do that too who can even through the physical pain can feel it there's this idea of transmutation of taking one emotion and contorting it and co-opting it into another action in an Adaptive way but this idea of distraction being a problem I I this really resonates I think um when I think of times of great productivity is when I was able to be undistracted that I could also see how success can be its own distraction this is often discussed in the context of fighting Sports where someone starts making a lot of money and pretty soon their focus becomes all the things they can access with their success as opposed to the thing that got them there in the first place um keeping an underdog mentality yeah yeah before we conclude I do want to ask you about one other aspect of process which is meditation um meditation is interesting to me because when we close our eyes as most meditations are done and we focus on our brain our brain has no sensation like if we I wouldn't say we focus on our brain oh or we focus on something other than our normal experience is that how would you define meditation well it's different there are different types of meditation usually either way we we I would say there's no form of meditation where we're focused on our brain okay good I'm glad we disagree yeah no I would say here are the things that happen we either are engaging in a mantra which would be a version of a almost like a creating a trance for ourselves not unlike listening to something when we go to sleep that would distract our conscious mind from participating we would be overriding our uh the the talking mind with just a sound that we're generating or a word or a phrase series of phrases Meta Meta meditation is um a loving kindness meditation with phrases could be that uh or it could be focused on the breath but the purpose of being focused on the breath is to not hear the selft talk that we normally have it's a it's a single pointed Focus exercise in those that I describ the other version is an awareness meditation where you're closing your eyes and you're being with whatever is and noticing so if we were to do it now and and you could do it eyes open or eyes closed with an awareness practice but the first thing that I would do is I would feel um I feel a little ringing in my ears might be from the electronic equipment around us and I don't mean that I hear the sound it's like a a vibration I hear cars passing in the distance see what else comes up I can feel a feeling in my chest I can feel um this part of my face not sure why feels like it's related to my jaw more car sounds I'm aware of a little feeling of warmth so now I would say the room the room feels a bit warm I wasn't aware of that before when I wasn't just being with what's happening feel a little itch on my left shoulder so and know that that would be an awareness practice which is another kind of meditation where you just paying attention to what's going on there's no story there's no this means this none of those things just like an inventory almost of everything that comes up when it comes up and you do that for a period of time but in in all of those cases in in the example of doing the awareness meditation or doing a mantra meditation or focusing on the breath in none of them am I thinking and in none of them am I concentrating on on I'm I'm I'm being aware of the of sense Perceptions in the awareness one or in the other meditations I'm doing a practice so that I'm not aware of thinking about anything else when did you start meditating and how often do you meditate now I learned when I was 14 and I I started with TM and that's probably the the meditation that I've done the most in my my life and I come back to although I try many different kinds um and also different physical forms of meditation taichi things like that I meditated for five or six years and then I stopped when I went to school to to University and then I started again several years later and when I started again I realized how profound it was in in me that I had done it when I did it so I usually have some sort of a some sort of a practice in some ways the beach walks could be a form of meditation um but the for me typically I would wake up it'd be the first thing I would do during that sort of in between time maybe go out in the sun close my eyes and meditate before starting my day um if I'm doing it twice a day the second time would probably be right before dinner if I'm doing it on a regular schedule then if uh if I find myself on an airplane I might meditate for an hour or for the I've can remember one time meditating the entire flight from New York to LA just was a great opportunity to do a a deep dive um and time passes you lose track of time you know you don't even know it's like going to sleep and waking up you don't feel like that was eight hours you know it's just time stops um not always but when it does it's a great feeling yeah you've sent me some meditations including the one that you did on that transatlantic or transcontinental flight and and um I've been trying to get do longer and longer meditations but um I've always meditated a little bit but your meditation practice is one that I'm starting to adopt if um maybe we could convince you to give us a suggestions of one or two and we can link out to them for listeners I'm sure they'd appreciate that and there's also um meditation like practices to do that involve um like there's there's something called the um the surgical series from the Monroe Institute which I used when I had a surgery you listen to this recording and it both allows your body to heal much faster and uh remove some of the trauma that goes on when you know getting cut open it's traumatic um but just through listening to certain things you can um can have a really powerful effect heal much faster I remember um I was uh about to be put under for a surgery and um my eyes were closed and I wasn't um communicating with anyone there because I was going inside and um and my wife was with me and they came in and they said oh um so they already gave Rick Rick the sedative because he's ready to G in she's like I give him anything he's like but look at his numbers like yeah I love it yeah it's a it's a it's an amazingly powerful practice that I like because anyone can cultivate there's no absolutely absolutely there's and there's no good or bad version it really is just if you learn technique and show up and do it it works well I love that you're so willing to share what you do and your process and Len I just want to say thank you for a number of things I want to thank you for the music you've created and that you are to create because we want to be still ongoing certainly for your time today and sharing your thought process and a bit of what goes into this incredible creative process and I want to thank you for writing the book you know I don't talk about her feature many books on the podcast it's just not something we typically do but um I've seen a little bit of the evolution of it and then I've SE seen it now and read through it in its final form twice as I mentioned I'm going to continue to read through it again it is one of those books where it is so filled with gems like every chapter like I take notes on this and take notes on this and it's assembled in a very digestible way that allows people to extract the the meaningful Parts in every chapter and there's so many in in a way that's very straightforward so um I love the book so thank you for doing it because you certainly didn't have to write a book um but I'm so happy that you did and I know that I've already benefited I know so many people are going to benefit it's an amazing book and I couldn't help but put my Neuroscience lens on it but I also about halfway through I learn to discard my pre-existing lens a bit and start to see things what I through what I think is a different perspective so I just want to thank you for being such an incredible portal and also for being an amazing friend thank you I love you I'm so happy to be here with you and anytime I get to see you it's a good day likewise thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Rick Rubin all about creativity and the creative process please also be sure to check out his new book the creative act a way of being by Rick Rubin as I mentioned earlier it's an incredible book and such a wealth of knowledge for you creative types out there for those of you that seek to be more creative or to understand the creative process generally and as I mentioned at the beginning of today's episode Rick has very generously offered to answer your questions about creativity so if you have questions for Rick Rubin about creativity or the creative process or anything else for that matter please put those in the comment section on YouTube by writing in capital letters question for Rick Rubin and then please put the question there that will make it easier for me to find those questions I will record the conversation where I ask Rick those those questions and of course we will post his answers to those questions on our huberman lab Clips Channel if you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for us or comments or topics that you'd like me to cover or guess that you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and 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are huberman lab on Instagram Twitter LinkedIn and Facebook and all of those places I talk about science and science related tools some some of which overlap with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content of the hubman Lab podcast again it's hubman lab on all social media handles all platforms Instagram Twitter Facebook and Linkedin if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter that's a monthly newsletter it's completely zero cost and includes summaries of podcast episodes as well as toolkits for things like enhancing your sleep enhancing your focus and ability to learn hormone support Fitness and on and on you simply go to hubman lab.com go to the menu click on the menu and scroll down to newsletter provide your email and you can start receiving our monthly neural network newsletter thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Rick Rubin all about creativity and the creative process and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]