Navigating Conflict, Finding Purpose & Maintaining Drive | Dr Lex Fridman

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 Dr Lex Friedman Dr Lex Friedman is an expert in electrical and computer engineering artificial intelligence and Robotics he is also the host of The Lex Friedman podcast which initially started as a podcast focus on technology and science of VAR kinds including computer science and physics but rapidly evolv to include guests and other topics as a matter of focus including sport for instance Dr Lex Friedman is a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and he's had numerous guests on who come from the fields of Brazilian jiu-jitsu both from the coaching side and from the competitor side he also has shown an active interest in topics such as chess and essentially anything that involves intense activation and engagement of the mind and or body in fact The Lex Freeman podcast has evolved to take on very difficult topics such as mental health he's had various psychiatrists and other guests on that relate to mental health and mental illness as well as guests focused on geopolitics and some of the more controversial issues that face our times he's had comedians he's had scientists he's had friends he's had enemies on his podcast Lex has a phenomenal I would say a one in an8 billion ability to find these people make them comfortable and in that Comfort both try to understand them and to confront them and to push them so that we all learn all of which is to say that Lex Freedman is no longer just an accomplished scientist he certainly is that but he has also become one of the more preeminent thought leaders on the planet and if there's anything that really captures the essence of Lex fredman it's his love of learning his desire to share with us The Human Experience and to broaden that experience so that we all may benefit in many ways our discussion during today's episode captures the many facets of Lex Freedman although no conversation of course could capture them all we sit down to the conversation just days after Lex returned from Ukraine where he deliberately placed himself into the tension of that environment in order to understand the geopolitics of the region and to understand exactly what was happening at the level of the ground and the people there you may notice that he carries quite a lot of both emotion and knowledge and understanding and yet in a very classic Lex Friedman way you'll notice that he's able to zoom out of his own experience around any number of different topics and view them through a variety of lenses so that first of all everyone feel included but most of all so that everyone learns something new that is to gain New Perspective our discussion also Ventures into the Waters of social media and how that landscape is changing the way that Science and Technology are communic ated we also get into the topics of motivation drive and purpose both finding it and executing on that drive and purpose I should mention that this is episode 100 of the hubman Lab podcast and I would be remiss if I did not tell you that there would be no hubman Lab podcast were it not for Lex Freedman I was a fan of the Lex Freedman podcast long before I was ever invited on to the podcast as a guest and after our first recording Lex was the one that suggested that I start a podcast he only gave me two pieces of advice the first piece of advice was start a podcast and the second piece of advice was that I not just make it me blabbing into the microphone and staring at the camera so I can safely say that I at least followed half of his advice and that I am ever grateful for Lex both as a friend a colleague in science and now fellow podcaster for making the suggestion that we start this podcast I already mentioned a few of the topics covered on today's podcast but I can assure you that there is far more to the person that many of us know as Lex fredman if you are somebody interested in artificial intelligence engineering or robotics today's discussion is most certainly for you and if you are not but you are somebody who's interested in World politics and more importantly The Human Experience both the individual and the collective Human Experience Lex shares what can only be described as incredible insights into what he views as The Human Experience and what is optimal in order to derive from our time on this planet before you 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 element element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium potassium and magnesium are in element in the correct ratios but that it has no sugar as I mentioned before on the podcast electrolytes are critical to the function of every cell in the body and especially the cells in your brain meaning the neurons or nerve cells indeed the ability for nerve cells to be active and communicate with one another critically depends on sodium potassium and magnesium you can get electrolytes from a variety of sources but it's often hard to get them in the proper ratios even from food so if you're somebody who's exercising a lot and sweating or if you're somebody following for instance a low carbohydrate or even a semi low carbohydrate diet that will cause you to excrete electrolytes I tend to have my element first thing in the morning when I wake up or within the first few hours of waking anytime while or after I'm exercising or I've sweat a lot such as exiting the sauna if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element that's LM nt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase again that's drink element LM nt.com huberman to CLA my free sample pack today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different Foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor now blood glucose or blood sugar is a critical aspect of your immediate and long-term health and indeed your feelings of vigor and mental Clarity and well-being at any moment one of the key things is to know how different foods and food combinations and timing of food intake is impacting blood glucose and with levels you're able to assess all of that in real time I tried levels and what it taught me for instance was that I can eat certain foods at certain times of day but if I eat them at other times a day I get a blood sugar crash it also taught me for instance how to space my exercise and my food intake turns out for me exercising fasted is far more beneficial that's something I learned using levels and it's completely transformed not just the spacing and timing of my diet and exercise but also use of things like the sauna and other activities it's been a tremendous learning for me that's really shaped an enormous number of factors in my life that have led to me feeling far more vigorous with far more mental focus and physical strength and endurance so if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself go to levels. link huberman again that's levels. link l n k/h huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've talked many times on this podcast about the critical relationship between sleep and body temperature that is in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep throughout the night our body temperature needs to drop by about 1 to 3° and conversely when we wake up in the morning that is in large part because of our body heating up by 1 to 3° now people have different core body temperatures and they tend to run colder or hotter throughout the night eight sleep allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment so that you have the optimal temperature that gets you the best night sleep I started sleeping on an eight8 Sleep mattress cover about 8 months ago and it has completely transformed my sleep I sleep so much deeper I wake up far less during the middle of the night if at all and I wake up feeling far better than I ever have even after the same amount of sleep if you want to try eights sleep you can go to eights sleep.com huberman to save up to $400 off their sleepfit holiday bundle which includes their new pod 3 cover eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada United Kingdom select countries in the EU and Australia again that's eight sleep.com huberman and now for my discussion with Dr Lex fredman welcome back it's good to be back in a bedroom this feels like a porn set I apologize to open that way I've never been in a porn set so I should admit this our studio is being renovated so here we are for the Monumental recording of episode 100 episode 100 of the hman Lab podcast which was inspired by The Lex Freedman podcast some people already know this story but I'll repeat it again for those that don't there would not be a Hu Lab podcast we're not for Lex Friedman because after recording as a guest on his podcast a few years ago he made the suggestion that I start a podcast and he explained to me how it works and he said you should start a podcast but just make sure that it's not you labbing the whole time Andrew and I only sort of followed the advice yeah well you surprised surprised me surprised the world that you're able to talk for hours and cite some of the best signs going on and be able to give people advice without many interruptions or edits or any of that I mean that takes an incredible amount of skill that you're probably born with and some of it is developed I mean the the whole science Community is is proud of you man Stanford is proud of you so yeah it's it's a beautiful thing it was really surprising because it's unclear how a scientist can do a great podcast that's not just shooting the about random stuff but really is giving very structured good advice that's uh boiling down the state of the art science into something that's actually useful for people so that that was impressive I like holy he actually pulled this off and doing it every week on a different topic that I mean you know I'm usually positive especially for people I love and support but damn I thought there's no way he's going to be able to pull this out week after week and it's been only getting better and better and better I had a whole rant on the recent podcast I forget with who of how awesome you are with uh r elcu she's a emotion recognition person AI person and then she didn't know uh who you were and I was like what the hell do you mean you and I just wanted this whole rant of how awesome you are was it's hilarious oh well I'm very gratified to hear this I'm uh it's a little uncomfortable for me to hear but listen I'm I'm just really happy if people are getting information that they like and can make actionable and it was inspired by you and look right back at you I um um I've followed a number of your structural formats uh attire I don't wear a tie I'm constantly reminded about this by my father who says what saw my podcast he was like why don't you dress properly like your friend Lex he literally said that um and uh it's a debate that goes back and forth but nonetheless um how does it feel episode 100 how does it feel you know I think can you imagine you're you're here you're here after so many episodes and done so much I mean the number of hours is just insane the amount of passion the amount of work you put into this what's it feel like um it feels great um and it feels very much like the The Horizon is still at the same distance in front of me you know every episode I just try and get information there and the process we talked about on your podcast so we won't go into it of um collecting information distilling it down to some simple notes walking around listening to music trying to you know um figure out what the motifs are and then as just like you I don't use a teleprompt or anything like that there's very minimal notes so feels great and I love it and again I'm just grateful to you uh for inspiring it and I just want to keep going and do more of it and I should say I am also relieved that we're sitting here because you recently went overseas to a very um intense war zone literally to the Ukraine and um the entire time that you were there uh I was genuinely cons conc ered um you know the world's a unpredictable place in general and uh we don't always get the only vote in what happens to us so first of all welcome back safely One Piece One Alive piece and um what was that like I mean at a at a broad level at a specific level um what Drew you there what surprised you and um how do you think it changed you in in coming back here I think there's a lot to say but first it is is really good to be back one of the things that when you go to a difficult part of the world or a part of the world that's going through something difficult you really appreciate how great it is to be an American everything the easy access to food despite what people think the uh stable reliable rule of law the lack of corruption in that you can trust that if you start a business or if you take on very ious Pursuits in life that there's not going to be at scale manipulation of your efforts such that you can't succeed so that this kind of uh you know capitalism in its in its um the ideal of capitalism is really still burning bright in this country and it really makes you appreciate those aspects and also just the uh ability to have a home for Generations ac across Generations so you can have a your grandfather live in I don't know Kentucky in a certain city and then uh his children live there and you live there and then you it just continues on and on that's the kind of thing you can have when you don't have War because War destroys entire communities it destroys histories Generations like life stories that stretch across the generations yeah I didn't even think about that until you said just now but photographs hard drives get destroyed or just abandoned right Library um I mean nowadays things exist in the cloud but there's still a lot of material Goods that have you know are irreplaceable right well even you know in rural parts of the United States they don't exist in the cloud right A lot of people still well even in towns they still love the physical photo album of your family a lot of people still store their photographs of families and the sto the VHS tapes and all that kind of stuff yeah but I think there's so many things I've learned and really felt the lessons one of which is nobody gives a dam when your photos are gone and all that kind of stuff your house is gone the thing time and time again I saw for people that lost everything is how happy they are for the people they love the the friends the family that are still alive that's the only thing they talk about that um in fact they don't mention actually with much dramatic uh sort of vigor about the trauma of losing your home they're just non-stop saying how lucky they are that person X person Y is still here and that makes you realize that when you lose everything it's still it makes you realize what really matters which is the people in your life I mean a lot of people kind of realize that later in life when you're facing mortality when you're facing your death or you know you get a cancer diagnosis that kind of stuff I think people here in America in California with with with the fires you uh you can still lose your home you realize like nah it doesn't really matter it's a pain in the ass but what matters is still uh the the family the people and so on I I think the most intense thing I talked to several hundred people some of which is recorded I've really been struggling to put that out cuz I have to edit it myself and so it's you're talking about 30 40 hours of footage and it is emotionally struggling emal struggles it's extremely difficult so I talked to a lot of politicians the number two in the country number three I'll be back there to talk to the president to do a three-hour conversation those are easy to edit you know they're um they're really heartfelt and thoughtful folks from from different perspectives on the geopolitics of the war but the ones that really hard to edit is like grandmas that are like in the middle of nowhere they lost everything they still have hope they still have and some of them have some of them many of them unfortunately have now hate in their heart so in February when uh Russia invaded Ukraine this is the thing I realized about war one of the most painful on lessons is that war creates generational hate it you know we sometimes think about war as a thing that kills people kills civilians kills soldiers takes away lives injures people but we don't directly think about the uh the secondary and tertiary effects of that which last decades which is anyone who's lost a father or a mother or a daughter or a son they now hate the not just the individual soldiers of the leaders that invaded their country but the entirety of the people so it's not that they hate uh Vladimir Putin or hate the Russian military they hate Russian people so that tears the fabric of a thing that for me you know my my half my family is from Ukraine half my family is from Russia but there's a I remember the pain the Triumph of World War II still resonates through my entire family tree and so you remember when the Russians and ukrainians fought together against this Nazi invasion you you remember a lot of that and now to see the fabric of this uh peoples torn apart completely with hate is very really really difficult for me just to realize that things will just never be the same on this particular cultural historical aspect but also there's so many painful ways in which things will never be the same which is we've seen that it's possible to have a major Hot War in the 21st century I think a lot of people are watching this China is watching this India is watching this United States is watching this and thinking we can actually have a large scale war and I think the lessons learned from that might be the kind that lead to a major World War II in the 21st century so like one of the things I realized watching the whole scene is that we don't know about what's going to happen in the 21st Cent century and it might we kind of have this intuition like surely there's not going to be another War we'll just Coast yeah yeah yeah pandemic back to normal back to normal whatever that is but you have to remember at the end of World War I you know as uh W Wilson called it the war to end all wars nobody in Ironically in a dark way it was also the the Waring 20s when people believe this there will never be another world war and 20 years after that the the rise of Nazi Germany uh a charismatic leader that captivated the minds of millions and built up a military that can take on the the whole world and so it makes you realize that this is still possible this is still possible and then the the tension you you see the this the media machine the propaganda machine that I've gotten to see every aspect of it's still fueling that division between America and China between Russia and India and then Africa has a complicated thing that's trying to figure out who are they with who are they against and just this tension is building and building and it it makes you realize like we might the thing that might Shake human civilization may not be so far off that that's a realization you get to really feel um I mean there's all kinds of other lessons and one of which is propaganda is I got to um I get a lot of letters emails and uh some of them are full of really intense language full of hate from every side toward me uh what well the hate is towards me as representing side x and x stands as a variable for every side so either I'm a zalinsky show or I'm a Putin show or I'm a NATO show or I'm an America uh America show American Empire show or I am a a democrat or a republican because it's already been in this country politicized I think there's a sense of Ukraine is this place that's full of corruption why are we sending money there I think that's kind of the messaging on the the Republican side on the Democratic side I'm not even keeping uh track track of the actual messaging and the conspiracy theories and and the narratives but they are the tension is there and I get to feel it directly and what you get to really experience is there's a large number of narratives that all are extremely confident themselves that they know the truth people are convinced first of all that they're not being lied to people in Russia think there's no propaganda they think that yes yes there's like State sponsor propaganda but we're all smart enough to ignore the the um the sort of lame propaganda that's everywhere they know that we can think on our own we we know the truth and everybody kind of speaks in this way everybody in the United States says well yes there's mainstream media they're full of messaging and propaganda but we we're smart we can think on our own of course we see through that every everybody says this and then the conclusion of their thought is often hatred towards some Group whatever that group is and the more you've lost the more intense the the feeling of hatred it's a really difficult um field to walk through calmly and with an open mind and try to understand what's really going on it's super intense those the only words that come to mind um as I hear this you mentioned something that it seems that hate generalizes you know it's against an entire group or an entire country uh why do you think it is that hate generalizes and that love may or may not generalize um I've had so one of as you can imagine the kind of question I asked is do you have love Or Hate in Your Heart it's a question I asked almost everybody and then I will dig into this exact question that you're asking I think some of the most beautiful things I've heard which is people that are full of hate are able to self- introspect about it they they know they shouldn't feel it but they can't help it it's not they know that ultimately the thing that helps them and helps everyone is to feel love for fellow man but they're they've they can't help it they know it's like a drug they say like hate um escalates it's like a vicious spiral you just can't help it and the question I also asked is do you think you'll ever be able to forgive Russia and after much thought almost it's uh it's split but most people will say no I will never be able to forgive and because of the generalization you talked about earlier that could even include all R not statement I mean all Russians because um because if you do nothing that's as bad or worse than uh than than being part of the army that invades so the the people that are just sitting there the good Germans the people that are just quietly going on with their lives you're just as bad if not worse is their perspective earlier you said that uh going over to the Ukraine as now uh allowed you to realize just so many of the positives of being here in the United States um I have a good friend we both know him I won't name him by name but we've communicated the three of us from tier1 Special Operations he spent years doing deployments really amazing individual and I remember when the pandemic hit he said on a text thread you know Americans aren't used to the government interfering with their plans you know around the world many people are familiar with governments dramatically interfering with their plans sometimes what even in seemingly random way here we were not raced for that there I mean you know there we get speeding tickets and there's uh you know lines to vote and things like that but uh I think the pandemic was one of the first times at least in my life that I can remember where it really seemed like the government was impeding what people naturally wanted to do and that was a shock for people here and um I have a um what might seem like a somewhat mundane question but it's something that I saw on social media a lot of people were asking me to ask you and um and I was curious about too uh what was a typical day like over there were you sleeping in a bed were you sleeping on the ground everyone seems to want to know what were you eating were you eating once a day were you eating your steak or were you were you in Fairly deprived conditions over there I saw a couple um photos that you posted with um out of doors in front of rubble um with pith helmet on in one case you know uh what what was a typical day like over there so there's there's two modes one of them I spent a lot of time in Kiev which is much safer than U it may be obvious to state but for people who don't know it's in the middle of the country and it's much safer than the actual front the the where the battle is happening so the much much safer than keev even is laviv which is the western part of the country so the times I spent in Kiev were fundamentally different than the time I spent at the front and I went to the hsan region which is where a lot of really heated battle was happening there's several areas so there har it's in the northeast of the country and then there's dbas region which is east of the country and then there's hsan region which uh but I'm not good at geography so uh is the southeast of the country and that's where at least when I was there was a lot of really heated fighting happening so when I was in the hsan region there's you know it's what you would imagine the place I stay in a hotel where all the lights have to St stay off so the entire town all the lights are off you have to kind of navigate through the darkness and use your phone to shine and so on this is terrible for the Circadian system yeah that's exactly how was this how can I do this where's my element and athletic greens how can I function no uh there's uh I think it was balanced by the Deep appreciation of being alive right no I mean this is the reason I asked this is the reason I asked is you know we we get used to all these Creature Comforts yes and um we don't need them but we often come to depend on them in a way that makes us feel like we need them yeah but very quickly there's something about the intensity of life that you see people's eyes because they're living through war that makes you forget all those Creature Comforts and it's it was actually um you know I'm somebody who hates traveling and so on I love the creature habits I love I love uh the comfort of the ritual right but all of that was forgotten very quickly just the the intensity of feeling the intensity of love that people have for each other that was that was obvious in terms of food so there's a curfew uh so depends on what part of the country but usually you basically have to scammer home at like 9:00 pm. p.m. so the hard curfew in a lot of places is 11:00 p.m. at night but by then you like you have to be home so uh in some places it's 10:00 so at 9:00 p.m. you start uh going home which for me was was kind of wonderful also because I get to spend um I get to be uh forced to spend time alone and think for many hours in wherever I'm staying which which is really nice and everybody there's a calmness and the quietness to the whole thing in terms of food once a day just uh the food is incredibly cheap and Incredibly delicious people are still one of the things they can still take pride in is um making the best possible food they can so meat but they do admire American meat so the meat is not as great as it could be in that country but I ate bourch every day you know all that kind of stuff mostly me so spend the entire day wake up in the morning with coffee spend the entire day talking to people which for for me is very difficult because of the intensity of the stories one after the other after the other we just talk to regular people talk to soldiers talk to politicians um all kinds of soldiers I talk to people there who are doing rescue missions so Americans I hung out with uh Tim Kennedy oh yeah the great Tim Kennedy the great Tim Kennedy who uh uh also him and many others revealed to me one of the many reasons I'm proud to be an American is how um trained and skilled and uh effective American soldiers are I guess for for listeners of this podcast maybe we should familiarize them with who Tim Kennedy is because I realized that a number of them will know how do you do that how do you try to summarize a man yeah right in in uh uh let's we can be accurate but not exhaustive as as any good uh uh good data are accurate but not exhaustive um very skilled and accomplish MMA fighter very skilled and accomplish spe former Special Operations remember um American Patriot and uh podcaster too right does he have his own podcast maybe okay maybe we know Andy stump has his own podcast yes it's amazing podcast yeah he's great yeah um clearing hot podcast withy St but also Tim Kennedy's like uh the embodiment of America to the to the most beautiful and the most ridiculous degree so he's like um would you imagine uh what is it Team America that like um I just imagine him like shirtless on a tank rolling into enemy territory just screaming at the top of his lungs that's just his personality but not posturing that's he actually he actually does the work as they say so this is the thing he really embodies that now some of that is just his personality and humor I'd like to sort of comment on the humor of things not just with him it's very one other interesting thing I've learned but uh also when he's actually helping people he's extremely good at what he does which is building teams that rescue that go into the most dangerous areas of Ukraine dangerous areas anywhere else and they get the job done and like one of the things I heard time and time again which which really interesting to me that you Ukrainian soldiers said that you know comparing Ukrainian Russian and American soldiers American soldiers are the bravest which was very interesting for me to hear given how high the morale is for the Ukrainian soldiers but that just reveals that training enables you to be brave so it's not just about how well trained they are and so on it's how intense and ferocious there are in the fighting and it makes you realize like this is American Army not just through the technology uh especially the special special force guys they still is one of the most effective and terrifying armies in the world and I'm listen just for context I'm somebody who is for the most part anti-war a pacifist but you get to see um you know some of the realities of War kind of wake you up to what needs to get done to protect um sovereignty to protect some of the values to protect civilians and homes and all that kind of stuff sometimes you know War has to happen and I should also mention on the Russian side because while I haven't gotten to experience the Russian side yet I do fully plan to travel to Russia as I've told everybody I was very upfront with everybody uh about this I I would like to hear the story of Russians but I do know from the Ukrainian side like the grandmas I love grandmas they told me stories that the Russians really the ones that entered their Villages they really really believe they're saving Ukraine from Nazis from Nazi occupation so they feel that there's the uh Ukraine is under control of Nazi organizations and they're they believe they're saving the country that's their brothers and sisters so I think I think propaganda and I think um truth is a very difficult thing to arrive it's in that in that war zone I think in the 21st century one of the things you realize that so much of War even more so than in the past is an information war and uh people that just use Twitter for their source of information might be surprised to to know how much misinformation there is on Twitter like real um narratives being sold and so it's really hard to know who to believe and through all of that you have to try to keep an open mind and ultimately ignore the powerful and listen to actual citizens actual people that's the other maybe obvious lesson is that um war is waged by powerful rich people and it's the poor people that suffer and that's just visible time and time again you mentioned the fact that people still enjoy food or the pleasure of cooking or there's occasional humor or maybe frequent humor know Joo willing has talked about this in in Warfare and the that the all the elements of the human spirit and conditions still emerge at various times find this amazing and you and I have had conversations about this before but the the apperture of the mind you know um you know that classic story that comes to mind is a you know the one of Victor Frankle or Nelson Mandela you know you put somebody into a small box of confinement and some people break under those conditions and other people find uh entire stories within a centimeter of concrete that can you know occupy them and real stories and richness or humor or love or Fascination and surprise and I find this so interesting that the mind is so adaptable you know we talked about Creature Comforts and then lack of Creature Comforts and the way that uh we can adapt and and yet humans are always striving it seems or one would hope for these better conditions to better their conditions so as you've come back and you've been here now back in the in the states for how long after your trip no it depends on this podcast release but it it uh felt like I've never left so uh practically speaking a couple months okay yeah and we won't be shy we recording this midt so um we actually recorded this several years ago so we're anticipating the future this is where we're going to start tell is this a simulation you and Joe I'm still trying to figure out what that actually means I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors athletic greens athletic greens now called ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic greens since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets to me the probiotics that I need for gut health our gut is very important it's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health and those probiotics and athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health in addition athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and it tastes great if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athletic greens.com huberman and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road in the car on the plane Etc and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's athletic greens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2 I know I speak for many people and I say that we are very happy that you're back we know that it's not going to be the first and last trip that there will be others um and that you'll be going to Russia as well and and presumably other places as well um in order to explore and I have to say as a podcaster and as your friend um I was really inspired that your sense of adventure um and your sense of not just Adventure but thoughtful respectful Adventure you understood what you were doing you weren't just going there to get some wartime footage or something this wasn't a kick or a thrill this was really serious and remained serious um so thank you for doing it and um please uh next time you go bring Tim Kennedy of again or I feel like I feel like Tim Kennedy gets you into we we'll take you cuz he really loves going to the most dangerous places and helping people so I think he'd get me into more trouble and his worth and I should mention that I I mean there's many reasons I went but it's definitely not something I take lightly or want to do again right so I'm doing things that I don't want to do I just feel like I have to you're compelled so I don't think there's now I'll definitely talk about it as we all should there's different areas of the world that are seeing a lot of suffering Yemen there there's so many atrocities going on in the world today but this one is just uh personal to me so I want to I feel like I'm qualified just because of the language so most of the talking by the way I've been I was doing it it was in Russian and so because of the language because of the my history I felt like I have to do this particular thing I think it's in many ways stupid and dangerous and that was made clear to me but I do many things of this nature because the heart says pulls um pulls towards that but also there's a there's a freedom to not you know I'm afraid of death but I think there's a freedom to uh it's almost like okay if I die I want to take full advantage of not having a family currently I feel like when you have a family there's a responsibility for others so you immediately become more conservative and careful I feel like I I want to take full advantage of this particular moment in my life when you can be a little bit more accepting a risk so well you should definitely reproduce at some point um maybe before next time you should just freeze some sperm I um really is is that what you do with the ice bath is that how that works you know what interesting here's there's always an opportunity to do some uh science protocols you know that there are products on the internet and there are actually a few decent manuscripts looking at how cold exposure can increase testosterone levels but it doesn't happen by the cold directly uh good scientists as the authors of those papers were and are realize that it's the Vaso constriction and then the um vasod dilation you know as as people warm up again there's increased blood flow to the testicles and in women it seems there's probably increased blood flow to the reproductive organs as well after people warm back up so that seems to cause some sort of um hyper nourishment of the the various cells the um serol and litic cells of the testes that lead to increased output of testosterone and in women um testosterone as well so uh the cold exposure in any case um is obviously a do you do the ice bath are you into that I've not done that as a Russian you probably consider that a a hot tub yeah exactly um yeah it's it's a nice thing to uh have fun with every once in a while uh to warm up no I haven't done it I've been kind of waiting to maybe do it together with you at some point great guide no we have one here it'll be straightforward for you I always say that the adrenaline comes in waves and so if you just think about it walls like you're going through a number of Walls of adrenaline as opposed to going for time becomes rather trivial with your Jiu-Jitsu background and what ey you'll immediately recognize the physiological sensation even though it's cold specifically it's the adrenaline that makes you want to hop out of the thing and uh you've seen Joe's uh so Joe set up a really nice uh man cave or it's it's not even a cave CU it's so big it's like a a network of man caves but it has a ice bath and a sauna next to each other so well we have one of those here ice bath and sauna so we'll have to get you in it when uh one of these days maybe tonight maybe tomorrow no although there is a a um I don't know the underlying physiological basis but there does seem to be a a trend toward truthtellah um some people would refer to them as truth barrels mine's a barrel sauna shaped like a barrel who knows why maybe under intense heat duress people just uh feel feel compelled to share they well I have a complicated relationship with saas because of all the weight cutting oh some some of the deepest suffering started interrupt I've done was in the sauna it's very it's I mean I've gone to some dark places in the sauna cuz I I I wrestle my whole life Judo Jiu-Jitsu and those weight cuts um can really test the mind so you you're truth telling yeah it's a certain kind of Truth telling because you're sitting there and the clock moves slower than it has ever moved in your life yeah so I usually for the most part I would try to you know have a bunch of sweats garbage bags and all that kind of stuff and run it's easier CU you can distract the mind in the sauna you can't distract the mind it's just you and all the excuses and all the the all the weaknesses in your mind just coming to the surface and you're just sitting there and sweating or not sweating that's the worst and talk about visual aperture you're in a small box so it also inspires some claustrophobia even if you're not claustrophobic um that's absolutely true and the desire to just get out of the thing is where the you get a pretty serious adrenaline Surge from from in the sauna as well it um now the sauna actually will it won't deplete testosterone but it kills sperm so for people that sperm are on a 60-day sperm cycle so if you're trying to donate sperm or because that's what got us on this or fertilize um an egg or eggs in whatever format dish or inv Vivo as we say in science that which means uh well you can look it up folks um uh the 60-day sperm cycle so if you go into a really hot sauna um or a hot bath or a hot tub your in 60 days those sperm are going to be um a significantly greater portion of them will be dead will be nonviable um so there's a simple solution people just put ice pack down there um or you know a jar not this jar but um a jar of cold fluid you know between their legs and just sit there and or they go back and forth between the ice and the sauna but you probably if you're going to go back over there um you should freeze sperm um we're going to do a couple episodes on fertility when it's relatively inexpensive and you're young so you should probably do it now because there is a uh association with autism as um males get older it's not a strong one it's significant but it's still a small contribution to the autism phenotype as you age don't sperm get wiser or no science did back that no but you know men can conceive healthy children in a considerable age but um in any case um but no they don't get wiser what happens is interesting age steak well it's a little bit like like the maturation of the brain in the sense that some of the sperm get much better at swimming and then many of them get get less good motility is a is a strong correlate of the DNA of the sperm this is probably a good time to announce that I'm selling my sperms and nfds to see how much that oh my goodness writing the uh well your children your future children and my future children are supposed to do Jiu-Jitsu together since I've only on the one Jiu-Jitsu class so um I'm strongly vested in uh you having children yes um but only in the friendly kind of way um well yes friendly competition kind of way yeah dominance of the clan yep for sure um so moving on to science but still with our minds in the Ukraine did you encounter any scientists or see any Universities or you know as we know in this country and in Europe and in elsewhere um you know science takes infrastructure you need buildings you need Laboratories you need robots you need a lot of equipment and you need um minus 80 freezers and you need incubators and you need money and you need technicians and typically it's been the wealthier countries that have been able to do more research for sake of research and development of of and productization certainly the Ukraine had some marvelous universities and marvelous scientists um uh what's going on with science and science scientists over there and um and gosh can we even calculate the loss of discovery that is occurring as a consequence of this conflict so science goes on the before the war Ukraine had a very vibrant Tech sector that which means engineering and all that kind of stuff um in Kiev has a lot of excellent universities and they still go on the the biggest hit I would say is not the infrastructure of the science but the fact because of the high morale everybody is joining the military so everybody's going to the front to fight including you know you Andrew huberman would be fighting and not because you have to but because you want to and everybody you know would be really proud that you're fighting even though everyone tries to convince you know Andrew huberman you have much better ways to contribute uh there's deep honor in fighting for your country yes but there's better ways to contribute to your country than just picking up a gun that you're not that trained with and going to the front still they do it the scientists engineers CEOs professors students actors men and women obviously primarily men but men and women like uh much more than you would see in other militaries women are everybody everybody wants to fight everybody's proud of fighting there's no discussion of um of kind of pacifism should we be fighting is this right is this you know it's everybody's really proud of fighting so that that's a so there's this kind of black hole that pulls everything all the resource into the war effort that's not just Financial but also uh psychological so it's like um if you're a scientist it feels like what it feels like um um almost like you're dishonoring Humanity by continuing to do things you were doing before there's a lot of people that converted to being soldiers they literally watch a YouTube video uh of how to shoot a particular gun how to arm a drone with a grenade you know if you're a tech person you know how to work with drones so you're going to use that use whatever skills you got figure out whatever skills you got and how to use them uh to help the effort on the front and so that's a big hit but that said that you know I've talked to a lot of folks in Kiev faculty primarily in the tech economics space so I didn't get a chance to interact with folks who are on the biology chemistry Neuroscience side of things but that that that still goes on so one of the really impressive things about Ukraine is that they're able to maintain infrastructure like Road food supply all that kind of stuff education while Wars going on especially in Kiev the war started where nobody knew whether Kev was going to be taken by the Russian forces he was surrounded and um a lot of experts from outside were convinced that Russia would take Kiev and and they didn't and one one of the really impressive things as a leader one of the things I really experienced is that a lot of people criticized zalinski before the war he only had about like 30% approval rate a lot of people didn't like zilinski but one of the great things he did as a leader which I'm not sure many leaders would be able to do is when Kiev was clearly being invaded he chose to stay his stay in the capital everybody all the um the American Military the intelligence agencies NATO his own staff advisors all told him to flee and he stayed and so that's I think that was a beacon a symbol for the rest for the universities for science for for the infrastructure that we're staying to and um that kept the whole thing going there's an interesting social experiment that happened I think for folks who are interested in sort of gun control in this country in particular is uh one of the decisions they made early on is to give guns to everybody uh semi-automatics early on in the war or early on in the war yeah so everybody got a gun uh they also released a bunch of prisoners from from prison because there was no staff to to to to uh um to keep the prisons running and so there's a very interesting psychological experiment of like how is this going to go everybody has a gun are they going to start robbing places are they going to start taking advantage of a chaotic situation and what happened is that crime went to zero so it turned out that this as an experiment worked wonderfully that's a case where love generalized yes or at least hate did not we don't know if it's love or it's sort of lack of initiative for self you know Common culture directed hate yeah I don't right it's I I I think that's very correct to say that it wasn't hate that was unifying people it was love of country love of community it's the probably the same thing that will happen to humans when like aliens invade it's we're all it's like it's uh the common effort everybody puts everything else uh to the side plus just the the sheer amount of guns it's similar to like Texas you realize like well there's going to be a self-correcting mechanism very quickly because the rule of law was also put aside right like um basically the police force lost a lot of power because everybody else has guns and they're kind of taking the Law into their own hands and that system at least in this particular case in this particular moment in human history worked it's an interesting lesson you know I it is I had an interesting contrast that I'll share with you I because you mentioned Texas so not so long ago I was in Austin I often visit you or others in Austin as you know and um many doors that I walked past including a school said um no firearms past this point you know as a sticker on the door uh you see this on hospitals sometimes I saw this at Baylor College of Medicine Etc um relatively common to see in Texas um not so common in California um and then I flew to the San Francisco Bay Area I was walking by an elementary school in my old neighborhood and saw a similar sticker and looked at it and it said um no peanuts or other allergy containing foods pass this point on the door of this elementary school so quite a different contrast like you know guns and peanuts um Now peanut allergies obviously are very serious for some people although there's great research out of Stan for showing that early exposure to peanuts um can prevent the allergies it's uh but don't start rubbing yourself in peanut butter folks if you have a peanut allergy that's not the best way to deal with it in any case the contrast of what's dangerous the contrast of um you know the familiarity with guns versus no familiarity you know in Israel and elsewhere you see machine guns in the airport in Germany frankurt you see machine guns in the airport not so common in the United States so again there's I feel like there's this aperture of vision there's this aperture of pleasures and cre versus Creature Comforts and lack of uh Creature Comforts and then there's this aperture of of danger right um people who are familiar with gums you know are familiar with people coming in and setting their firearm on the table and eating eating dinner you know but in if you're not accustomed to that it's jarring right I I should mention people know this throughout human history but the human ability to um get uh assimilated no uh get used to violence is incredible so like uh you could be living in a peaceful time like like we're here now and there will be one explosions like a 911 type of situation that' be a huge shock it terrifying everybody freaks out the second one is a huge drop off in how freaked out you get and with in a matter of days sometimes hours it becomes the the normal I've talked to so many people in uh harv which is one of the towns that's seen a lot of heated battle you ask him is it safe there in fact when I went to the uh closer and closer to the war zone you ask people is it safe and their answer is usually yeah it's pretty safe it's all signal to noise yeah it like nobody has told me except like Western reporters sitting in the west side of Ukraine it's really dangerous here everyone's like yeah you know it's good like uh my uncle just died yesterday like he was shot um but it's pretty you know it's pretty good like the the Farm's still running like they um how do I put it they focus on the positive that's one but it's there's a deeper truth there which is you just get used to difficult situations and the stuff that make you happy and the stuff that make you upset is relative to that new normal that you establish well I grew up in California and there were a lot of earthquakes I remember the ' 89 Quake I remember the embarked a freeway pancaking on top of people and cars I remember um I moved to Southern California there's a North Ridge Quake wherever I move there seem to be earthquakes I never worry about earthquakes ever I just don't in fact I don't like the destruction they cause but every once in a while an earthquake will roll through and it's kind of exciting it sounds like a train coming through it's like wow like the Earth is moving you know again I don't want anyone to get harmed but I I enjoy a good Rumble coming through nonetheless um it signal the noise but if I saw a tornado freak out people from the Midwest are probably comfortable with you know Dan Gable the great wrestler from the Midwest you know I've never met but I have great respect for he's probably you know see a tornado like ah yeah maybe yeah you know so so I think signal to noise is is real um before I neglect although I won't forget um speaking of signal to noise and environment you are returning to or have gone back to one of your original um natural habitats which is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is it's actually difficult to pronounce in full MIT right so you've been um spending some time there teaching um and doing other things tell us what you're up to with MIT recently well it's I'm I'm really glad that you being on on the west coast know the differen like Boston New York I feel like a lot of people think it's like the East Coast very different especially the bostonians and New Yorkers they get very aggressive yeah I I love it I get I gave um lectures there in front of a inperson crowd what were you talking about for the AI so different aspects of AI and uh you know robotics machine learning machine learning so for people who know the artificial intelligence field they usually don't use the term Ai and for people from outside use AI the biggest breakthroughs in the machine learning field was some discussion of Robotics and so on yeah it was in person it was it was wonderful I I'm a sucker for that I really avoided teaching ing or any kind of interaction during Co because uh people put a lot of emphasis on but also got comfortable with remote teaching and I think nobody enjoyed it except sort of there's a notion that it's much easier to Doh because you don't have to you know you don't have to travel you don't have to you can do it out in your pajamas kind of thing but when you actually get to do it you don't get the same kind of joy that you do when you're teaching as a student you don't get the same kind of joy of learning it's not as effective and all that kind of stuff so to be in person together with people to see their eyes to get their excitement to get the questions and all the interactions that was awesome and it's I'm still um uh a sucker and a believer in the the ideal of MIT of the University I think it's an incredible place there's something in the air uh still but it really hit uh the pandemic hit University's heart because and I can say this this is not you saying it this is me saying it uh that administrations as in all cases when people criticize institutions the pandemic has given more power to the administration and taken away power from the faculty and the students and that's a from everybody involved including the administration that's a concern because the university is about the teachers and the students that should be primary and whenever you have a pandemic There's an opportunity to increase the amount of rules like one of the things that really bothered me and I'll scream from the top of the um MIT Dome uh about this is they've instituted a new uh Tim ticket system which is if you're a visitor to the campus at MIT you have to register you have to first of all show that you're vaccinated but more importantly there's a process to visiting you you need to get permission to visit one of the reasons I loved MIT unlike some other institutions MIT just leaves the door open to anyone MH in classrooms you can roll in the ridiculous characters the students that are kind of like usually doing business stuff or economics can roll into a physics class and just you know you're kind of not allowed but it's a gray area so you you let that happen and that creates a flourishing of the community that was beautiful and I think adding extra rules um puts a squeeze on it limits some of the the flourishing um and I hope some of that dissipates over time as we kind of let go of um the risk aversion that was created by the pandemic CU we kind of enter the new the normal return back some of that flourishing can happen but when you're actually in there with the students yeah it was this magic I love it I love it well some of your earliest videos on your YouTube channel were were of you in the classroom right that's how this all started yep yeah it's all YouTube like putting stuff on uh on YouTube was was terrifying right like well especially at the time when you did it again you're a a Pioneer in that sense um you did that Jordan Peterson did that putting up lectures um is yeah I would H I teach still every every winter I teach um direct of course and I I'll be doing even more teaching going forward but um the idea of those videos being on the web is is uh yeah that spikes my cortisol a little bit yeah it's terrifying because you get to and everybody has a different experience like for me being a junior uh research scientist the the kind of natural concern is like who am I I mean when I was given this lecture it's like I don't deserve any of this that's your humility coming through and I actually think that humility on the part of an instructor is good because that those that think you know uh that they are entitled and who else who else could give this lecture then I worry more I think it's um I once heard I don't know if it's still true that the um at Caltech right The Great California Institute of Technology not far from here um that many of the faculty are actually afraid of the students uh not physically afraid but they're intellectually afraid because the students are so smart yeah and teaching there can be downright frightening I've heard but that's great keeps everybody on their toes and um I think uh and you know I I've been corrected in lecture before at Stanford and elsewhere you know when my lab was at UC San Diego where someone will say hey wait um you know last lecture you said this and now you said that or on the podcast you know and and I think it's that moment where you know you sometimes feel that that urge to defend you oh you're you're right and I think it depends on how one was trained my graduate adviser was wonderful at saying I don't know all the time and she went to uh Harvard Radcliffe um UCSF and Caltech brilliant woman um and had no problem saying like I don't know I don't have that problem so I usually have two guys that somebody speaks up grab them drag them out of the room never see him again so everybody is really supportive I don't you don't understand that the amount of love and support I get is especially when the last few students are there and everybody seems to be nodding as you're going no I think that um I'd love to sit in on one of your lectures I know very little about AI machine learning or robotics um but have you ever talked at MIT have you ever like uh given lectures oh yeah in um when I went on the job market for as a faculty member my final two choices were between mitp cower I had an onp paper offer wonderful Place wonderful place to do neuroscience and UC San Diego which is a um wonderful Neuroscience program in the end it made sense for me be on the west coast for personal reasons but um there's some amazing Neuroscience going on there goodness and uh that's always been true and it's going to continue it's been a long time since I've been invited back there oddly enough when I started doing more podcasting and uh I still run a lab but I I shrunk my lab considerably when I was doing as I've done more podcasting I've received fewer academic lecture invites which makes sense but now they're sort of coming back and so when people invite now I always say you know do you want me to uh talk about uh the vental thalamus and its role in uh anxiety and aggression or do you uh want me to talk about the podcast and my big fear is I'm going to go back to give a lecture about the retina or something and I'll start off with an athletic greens read or something like that just reflexively uh just kidding that wouldn't happen but um listen I think it's great to continue to keep a foot in both places I was so happy to hear that you're teaching at MIT because podcasting is one thing teaching is another and there's overlap there in the vend diagram but um listen the students that get to sit in on one of your lectures and you may see me sitting there in the audience soon I going to creep into your class um and sunglasses that's right wearing a red shirt um you won't recognize me um we are certainly um receiving a great gift i' I've watched your lectures on YouTube even the early ones and um listen uh I I know you to be a phenomenal teacher yeah there's something about so I'm also doing like I stayed up pretty late last night uh working for a deadline on a paper one of the things that I hope to do for hopefully the rest of my life is is to continue publishing and I think it's really important to do that even if uh you continue the podcast because you want to be just on your own intellectual and scientific Journey as you do podcasting cuz um at least for me and especially on the engineering side cuz I want to build stuff and I think that's like keeps your ego in check keeps you humble because I think if you talk too much on the microphone you start getting um you might lose track of um you know the grounding that comes from engineering and from science and the scientific process and the criticisms that you get all that kind of stuff and how slow and iterative it is we have two papers right now that are in the revision stage it's been a very long road and I was asked this because I met with my chairman he said do you want to continue run a lab or you just going to go full-time on the podcast and Stanford has been very supportive I must say as I know MIT has been a VI of view um and I said oh I absolutely want to continue to be involved in research and do research uh and we started talking about these papers and we're looking over my this was my yearly review and looking back like goodness these papers have been in play for a very long time so it's a long road but you know you learn more and more and the more time you spend you know myopically looking at at a bunch of data that the more you learn and the more you think I I totally agree you know talking into these devices for podcast is wonderful cuz um it's fun it relieves a certain itch that we both have and um hopefully it land some important information out there for people but doing research is is like the I you know I I guess if you know you know there's like the the you know the unpeeling of the onion knowing that there could be something there there's just nothing like it I mean you do especially with the pandemic and for me both Twitter and the podcast have made me much more impatient about the slowness of the review process because uh Twitter will do that the Twitter will but even with podcast you you have a cool you'll find something cool and then you have ideas and all and you'll just say them and they'll be out pretty quickly we do a post right now about something that we both found interesting and it's out in the world yeah and you can write up something like uh there is a culture and computer science of posting stuff on archives and uh pre-prints that don't get in your review and sometimes they don't even go to the review process proc ever because like people just start using them if it's code it's like what what's the point of this it works like the it's self evident that it works because people are using it and that that I think applies more to engineering Fields because it's an actual tool that works it doesn't matter if it you don't have to scientifically prove that it works it works it's using for a lot of people well Sergeant interrupt but I just said for point of reference the famous paper describing the double helix which earned Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize and um should have earned Roslin Franklin Nobel Prize 2o of course but they got it um for the structure of DNA of course that paper was never reviewed at nature they published it because its importance was self-evident or whatever uh they so like the editors it was that purely editorial decision I believe I mean that's what I was told by someone who's currently an editor at nature um if that turns out to not be correct someone will tell us in the comments for sure well I think that's pretty interesting right this perhaps the most significant Discovery in biology and bioengineering which leading to bioengineering as as well of course of the last century was not peer-reviewed yeah but so Eric Weinstein but many others have have talked about this which is I mean I don't think people understand how poor the peer review process is just the amount of cuz you think peer review means all the best peers get together and they review your stuff but it's unpaid work and it's usually a small number of people and it's a very they have a very select perspective so they might not be the best person especially if it's super novel work and it's who has time to do it I'm on a bunch of editorial boards still why I don't know but I enjoy the peer review process and sending papers out oftentimes the best scientists are very busy and don't have time to review yeah and often times uh the more Premier journals will select from a kind of a unique kit of very good scientists who are very close to the work sometimes the people are very far from the work it really depends and both have negatives right if you're very close to the work there's jealousy and all those basic human things very far from the work you might not appreciate the the Nuance contribution all that kind of stuff and there's psychology sorry to interrupt again but uh good friend of mine who's extremely successful neuroscientist Howard Hughes investigator Etc always told me that um they I won't even say whether or not uh who they are they select their reviewers on the basis of who has been um publishing very well recently they assume that that person is be more benevolent because they're they've been doing well so that the uh the love expands that's a good point to that actually uh but you know the the idea is that editors might actually be the best reviewers so that that was the traditional that's that's the thing I wanted to mention that Eric Weinstein talks about that back um several decades ago editors had much more power and there's something to be made for that cuz they editors are the ones who are responsible for crafting the journal like they really are inv Ed in this and so and they're also often experts right so it makes sense for an Editor to have a bit of power in this case like usually if an idea is truly novel you could see it and um so it's it makes sense for an Editor to have more power in that regard of course for me I I think peer review should be done the way tweets are done which is like um crowdsourced or Amazon reviews let the crowd decide let the crowd decide and let let the crowd add depth and breadth in in context for the contribution so um you know if the paper overstates the degree of contribution the crowd will check you on that um if there's not enough support or like the conclusions are not supported by the evidence the crowd will check you on that uh there should there could be of course a political bickering that enters the picture especially on very controversial topics but I think I trust the intelligence of human beings to figure that out and I think most of us are are trying to figure this whole process out I just wish it was happening much faster because on the important topics the review cycle could be could be faster and we learned that through covid that Twitter was actually pretty effective at doing science communication it was really interesting some some of the best scientists took to Twitter to communicate their own work and other people's work and always putting into sort of the caveats it's not be a reviewed and so on but it's it's all out there and the data just moves so fast and if you want stuff to move fast Twitter is the best medium of communication for that it's cool to see 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 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uh and initially it was just Instagram and I remember we you and I used to have these uh over over dinner drink conversations where I'd say I don't understand Twitter and you'd say I don't understand Instagram and of course we understand how it worked and how to work each respective platform but I think we were both trying to figure out you know what is driving the psychology of these different venues because they are quite distinct psychologies um for whatever reason I think I'm finally starting to understand Twitter and enjoy it a little bit uh initially I wasn't prepared for the level of kind of um reflexive scrutiny that it sounds a little bit oxymoronic but that people kind of like pick up on one small thing and then you know drive it down that that trajectory it didn't seem to be happening quite as much on Instagram but I love your tweets I I do have a question about your your your Twitter um account and how you do you have sort of internal filters of what you'll put up and won't put up um because sometimes you'll put up things that are about life and Reflections other times you'll put up um things like what you're excited about in AI or of course you know um point to various podcasts including your own but but others as well you know what do you how do you approach social media not not how do you regulate your behavior on there in terms of how much time Etc I know you've talked about that before but you know what's your mindset around social media when you go on there to either um post or forage or respond to information I think I try to add some not the sound cliche but some love out there into the world into as OJ Simpson calls it Twitter world uh I think there is this viral negativity that can take hold and I try to find the right language to add you know Good Vibes out there and it's actually really really tricky because it there's something about positivity that sounds fake and I'm not I can't quite put my finger on it but whenever I talk about love and and them positive and almost childlike in my curiosity and positivity people are start to think like surely he has like skeletons in the closet like there's dead bodies in his basement like this must be a fake attic it's the attic the attic I keep minding the basement that's the details I was referring to your attic I don't have an attic or a basement nor dead bodies I just want to be very clear yeah I do have uh an attic and um actually haven't been up maybe there is bodies up there but yes I I I prefer the basement colda down there I like it uh no but there's an assumption that this is not genuine or not um it's disingenuous in some kind of way and so I tried to find the right language for that kind of stuff how to how to be positive some of it I was really inspired by elon's approach to Twitter not all of it but the uh when he just is silly I found that uh illiness I think it's uh Herman Hess said um something to to paraphrase one of my favorite writers I think in steppen Wolf uh said uh learn uh what is to be taken seriously and uh laugh at the rest I think I try to be silly laugh at myself laugh at the absurdity of life and then in part when I'm serious try to just be positive uh just see a positive perspective but and also um as you said people pick out certain words and so on and they attack each other attack me over certain usage of words and in particular tweet I think the thing I try to do is think positively towards them like do not escalate so whenever somebody's criticizing me and so on I I just smile if there's a lesson to be learned I I learn it and then I just send Good Vibes their way don't respond and just hopefully sort of um through Karma and through kind of the ripple effect of uh positivity have like a you know an impact on on them and the rest of Twitter and what you find is like that builds your actions create the community so how I behave gets me surrounded by certain people but you know lately especially Ukraine is one topic like this I also thought about talking to somebody who reached out to me is Andrew Tate who's extremely controversial from the perspective a lot of people is a misogynist and I I've heard his name and I know that there's a lot of controversy around him maybe you could familiarize me um I've been pretty nosed down in podcast prep and I tried to do this vacation thing for about 3 4 weeks I've heard about that yeah and um it sort of worked I did get some time in the Colorado Wilderness by myself which was great um um I did get um some downtime but in any event it I mainly consist of reading and um nature uh reading and nature sauna ice bath working out um good food a little extra sleep these kinds of things I really felt I needed it but I am pretty naive when it comes to the kind of current controversies but I've heard his name and um I think he's been deplatformed on a couple of platforms do I have that right yeah been so I should also admit that while I might know more than you it's not by much so it's like it's like a 5-year-old talking to a four-year-old right now is he an athlete a podcaster so uh basic summary he used to be a fighter a kickboxer I believe was pretty successful and then as during that and after that I think it was in a reality show and he had all these programs that are basically like pickup artist advice he has this like community of people where he gives advice on how to pick up women how to how to be successful in relationships how to make a lot of money and there's like um it costs money to enter that those programs so a lot of the criticism that he gets is kind of uh it's like a pyramid scheme where you convince people to join so that they can make more money and then they convince others to join and that kind of stuff but that's not why I'm interested in talking to him him I'm I'm interested because one of the guests maybe I shouldn't mention who but like one of the female guests I had really a big scientist said that her uh two kids that are 13 and 12 really look up to Andrew uh uh male children female children male and I hear this time and time again so like he is somebody that a lot of teens young teens look up to so I haven't done serious research like I I usually try to avoid doing research until I like agree to talk and then I go deep but there is an aspect to the way he talks about women that while I understand and I understand certain Dynamics and relationships work for people and he's one of such person but I think him being really disrespectful towards women is not not what I uh it's not how I see what it means to be a good man so the conversation I want to have with him is about masculinity what does masculinity mean in the 21st century and so when I think about that kind of stuff and because we're talking about Twitter it's like going into a war zone I'm like a happy go-lucky person but you like send me to the Ukraine but I don't want to have this conversation on Twitter because it's it's it's a really really really tricky one because also as you know when you sit when you do a podcast like everybody wants you to um to win and like uh there's not a it's everything you do is positive maybe you'll say the wrong thing it's like an inaccurate thing and you can correct yourself with uh Andrew Tate with Donald Trump with folks like this you have to I mean it's a professional boxing like you have to push the person you have to be really eloquent you have to be also empathetic because you can't just do what journalists do which is talk down to the person the entire time that's easy the hard thing is to empathize with a person to understand them to steal man their case but also to make your own case so in that case about what it means to be a man to me a strong man is somebody who's respectful to women not out of weakness not out of social justice Warrior signaling and all that kind of stuff but out of that's what a a strong man does like they they don't need to be disrespectful to prove their position in life he is often now a lot of people say it's a character it's it's he's being misogynistic he's being a misogynist as a kind of for entertainment purposes so like an avatar yeah but to me that Avatar is has a lot of influence on Young Folks so the character has has um has impact oh I don't think you can separate the Avatar and the person um in terms of the impact as you said in fact there are a number of accounts on Twitter and Instagram and elsewhere which people have only revealed their first names or they give themself another name or they're using a cartoon image and part of that I believe and at least from some of these individuals who actually know who they are I understand as a an attempt to maintain their privacy which is important to many people uh and in some cases um so that they can be more inflammatory and then just pop up else where as something else without anyone knowing that it's the the same person some of the this is the dark stuff I've been reading a lot about Ukraine and Nazi Germany so the 30s and the 40s and so on and you get to see how much the uh absurdity turns to evil quickly one of the things I worry one of the things I really don't like to see on Twitter and the internet is how many statements end with LOL it's like um you think just because something is kind of funny or is funny or is legitimately funny it also doesn't have a deep effect on society so that's such a difficult gray area because some of the best comedy is dark and mean but it reveals some important truth that we need to consider but sometimes comedy is just covering up for um destructive ideology and you have to know the line between those two uh Hitler was seen as a joke joke in the late 20s and in the 30s the Nazi Germany until the joke became very serious you have to be careful to know the difference between the the joke and the reality and do all that I mean in a conversation I'm just such a big believer in conversation to be able to reveal something through conversation but I don't know one of the big you know you and I challenge ourselves all the time I don't know if I I have what it takes to have um good empathetic but adversarial conversation I need to um learn more about this Tate person or not learn about him yeah it sounds sounds like maybe it's something to skip I don't know because again I'm not familiar with the content but I was going to ask you um whether or not you've seeked out or whether or not you would ever consider having Donald Trump as a guest on your podcast yeah I I've talked to Joe a lot about this and um I I re I really believe I can have a good conversation with Donald Trump I but I haven't seen many good conversations with him so like um part of me thinks part of me believes it's possible but he often effectively runs over the interviewer yeah I can sit him down give him an element and athletic greens just you know that nice cool air conditioned uh Black Curtain Studio you've got and uh you know a different side might come out context is powerful well uh Joe's really good at this which is relaxing person you know like here I have a drink right smoke a joint or whatever it is but some this energy of just less relax and there's laughter and so on I don't think um as people know I'm just not good at that kind of stuff so I think the way I could have a good conversation with him is to really understand his worldview be able to steal man's worldview and those that support him which is I'm sorry to say for people who seem to hate Donald Trump is a very large percentage of the country and so you have to really empathize with those people you have to empathize with Donald Trump the human being and from that perspective ask him hard questions who who do you think is the is the Counterpoint if you're going to see you know seek balance in your guess if you're going to have Trump on then you have to have who on well that's interesting that's Anthony fouchy um seems to be a you know strongly associated with um sort of counter values at least in in the the eye of the public I think he's retiring soon but um I yeah he's retiring so that's really interesting Anthony fouchi uh yeah definitely but I don't think he's a counterbalance he's uh he's a complicated fascinating figure who seems to have attracted a lot of hate and distrust uh but also and love from some people and love from some people I mean I know people um not even necessarily scientists who have you know pro- fouchy shirts I've seen people with anti fouchy shirts excuse me but certainly but um who adore him there are people who adore him in the same way there are people that adore Trump it's it's so interesting that you know one species of animal it get such Divergent neural circuitry it's almost feels like it's by Design and every single topic we find tension and division it's it's fascinating to watch I mean I got to really witness it from zero to 100 in Ukraine where there's not huge significant uh division there was in certain parts of Ukraine but across Europe across the world there was not that much division between Russia and Ukraine and it was just born overnight this intense hatred so and you see the same kind of stuff with with fouchi over the pandemic at first we're all kind of Hud huddled in uncertainty kind of there is a togetherness with a pandemic of course there is more difficult cuz you're isolated but then you start to figure out like the the probably the politicians and the media try to figure out how can I take a side here and how can I now start reporting on this side or that side and say how the other side is wrong and so I think Anthony foui and is is a part of just being used as a scapegoat for certain things as part of that kind of narrative of of division but I think so Trump is a singular figure that to me represents something important in American history I'm not sure what that is but I I think you have to think you put on your historian hat go forward in time and think back like how will he remembered be remembered 20 30 40 50 years from now who is the opposite of that um you have to I I I would really have to think about that because because Trump was so singular I think ALC is an interesting one but she's so young it's unclear to know how what if she represents a legitimately uh large scale movement or not Bernie Sanders is an interesting option but I wish he would be 30 40 years younger like the young Bernie would be a good their scientists working on that yeah I think so um not him specifically what well yeah I it maybe him we we never know there is a big conspiracy theory that Putin is uh that is that's a body double it's no longer um Bernie is Putin that's I'm having a hard time mer that the conspiracy theories no no no that uh the P new see on camera today is a body double well one thing that um you know in in science and in particular in anatomy um there's a classification scheme for different types of anatomist which they either say you're a lumper or a splitter you know some people like to call a whole structure something not necessarily just for Simplicity but for a lot of reasons and then other people like to micro divide the nucleus into multiple names and of course people used to be able to name different brain structures after themselves so there'll be the the nucleus of Lex and then you know and the the the huberman fasiculus or whatever um less of that nowadays but um and by the way those structures don't actually exist just uh yet we haven't defined those yet that I was making those names up but um what's interesting is it seems like in the last five years there's been a lot of TR there's been a trend excuse me toward uh a requirement for lumping like you can't say it seems that it's not allowed if you will to say hey yeah you know um and here I'm not stating my I'm I will never reveal my preferences about pandemic related things for hopefully obvious reasons it you know it's some people will say vaccines yes but masks no or vaccines and masks yes but let people work and other people say no everyone stay home and then other people will say no you know no vaccines no masks let everybody work no one was saying no vaccines no masks and and stay home I don't think um so there's this sort of lumping right the the boundaries around uh ideology really did start to defy science I mean it wasn't scientific it was one part science sence is at times um and sometimes really hardcore science other times it was politics economics I mean we really saw the Confluence of all these different domains of society that use very different criteria to evaluate the world I mean I as a scientist you know I remember when the vaccines first came out and I I asked somebody you know one of the the early concerns I had that was actually um satisfied for me was how does this thing turn off you know if you start generating mRNA how does it actually get turned off so I asked a friend you know they know a lot about RNA biology and said um you how's it turned off they explained it to me and I was like okay um makes sense um ask some other questions uh so but most people aren't going to think about it at that level of detail necessarily but it did seem that there was a just kind of amorphous Blobs of ideology that they grabbed onto things and then there was this need for a Chasm between them there it was almost felt like it became illegal in some ways to want you know two of the things from that menu and one of the things from that menu I really felt like I was being constrained by a kind of like Bento Box model where I didn't get to Define what was in the Bento Box I could either have Bento Box a or Bento Box Z but nothing in between and I think on that topic and I think a lot of topics most people are in the Middle with humility on certainty and they're just kind of trying to figure it out and I think there is just the extremes defining um the nature of this division so I think it's the role of a lot of us in our individual lives and also if you're if you have a platform of any kind I I think you have to try to walk in the middle like with the empathy and humility and that's actually what science is about is the is the is the humility I'm still thinking about who's the opposite of trump I well maybe it is not I mean maybe fouchi is orthogonal to to Trump I mean I not everything has an opposite I mean it's you know uh maybe he's an N of one maybe he's in the minority of one because he was an outsider in from Washington who then made it there but it also I wonder you know you have to pick your battles because every battle you fight you should take very seriously and just the amount of hate I get I got and I still get for having sat down with the fizer co that was a very valuable lesson for me oh that one was got you a lot of heat yeah it still does because in you had some some pretty controversial guests on from time that one that one um is he still the fiser CEO I believe so CEO has turn over like crazy there's a thing I didn't realize you know in science if somebody moves institutions like a big deal most people don't have more than two moves in their in their career maybe but they often you know move to the next building is a big deal but it in biotech it's like I I have a former colleague of M from San Diego and he's been CEO here he's a CEO there he's he went back to a company who was a CEO at before you know he's probably back of the University we worked out for it for all I know it's amazing how much moving around there is it is a very itinerant profession yeah I think there in certain companies I guess in biotech would be the case the the co is more of like a the manager type so you can some was jumping around benefits your experience so you get become better and better being a manager there's some like leader revolutionary CEOs that stick around for longer because they're so critical to uh pivoting a company like the Microsoft Co currently uh s Pai is somebody like that obviously Elon Musk is somebody like that that is part of pivoting a company into new domains constantly but yeah in biotech there's a machine and for in in the eyes of a lot of people uh big Pharma is like big tobacco it's um it's the epitome of everything that is wrong with capitalism it's uh it's evil right and so I showed up in the conversation where I thought with a pretty open mind and really asked what I thought were difficult questions of him I don't think he's ever sat down to a grilling of that kind in fact I'm pretty sure they cut the interview short because of that and I thought you know literally was hot in the room and we're sweating and I I was asking tough questions for for somebody that like half the country or a large percent of the country believes he's alleviated a lot of he helped through the financial resources that that fizer has helped alleviate a lot of suffering in the world and so I thought for somebody like that I was asking pretty hard questions boy did I get to hear from the side usually one of the sides is more intense in um their anger so there's certain political topics like with uh with Andrew Tate for example I would I would hear from a very it would probably be the left far left that would write very angrily and so that's a group you'll hear from the fiser CEO I didn't get almost any messages from people saying why did you go so hard on on him uh you know he's a he's an incredible human incredible leader and CEO of a company that helped helped us with a vaccine that nobody thought would be possible to develop so quickly you did not get letters of that I did not I mean like here and there but the the Sea of people that said everything from me being weak that I wasn't able to call out this person how do you sit down how do you platform this evil person that how do you make him look human all that kind of stuff and that you have to deal with that you have to um of course it's great it's great because I I have to do some soul searching which is like did I like you have to ask some hard questions I love criticism something like that you you get to like you know I I hear some low points there's definitely some Despair and you start to wonder like was I too weak should I have talked to him what is true and you sit there alone and just like marinate in that and hopefully over time that makes you better but I still don't know what the right answer with that one is well I feel that um money plays a role here you know um when people think big Pharma they think big millions of dollars maybe even trillions of dollars really and uh certainly people who make a lot of money get scrutiny that others don't part of it is that they are often not always visible but uh I think that there is a natural and reflexive and I'm not justifying it um I certainly don't feel this because I do I know some people who are very U wealthy some people are very poor um I can't say it scales with happiness uh at all people are always shocked to to hear that but um it you know but that's what I've observed in very wealthy people um but that people who have a lot of money are often held to a different standard because um people resent that some people resent that and maybe um there are other reasons as well I mean among people who are very wealthy often times the wish is for uh status right not money you get a bunch of billionaires in a room and unless one of them is Elon who is also has immense status for his accomplishments uh typically if you put a Nobel Prize winner in a room with a bunch of billionaires they're all talking to that person right um and there many very interesting billionaires uh but status is um is something that is often but not always associated with money but is a much rarer form of um of uniqueness out there a positive uniqueness if one considers status positive cuz there's a downside too but um so I wonder whether or not the fiser CEO caught extra heat because people assume and I probably assume also that um his salary is quite immense yeah I so because I have a lot of data on this I can answer it's a very good hypothesis Let's test it scientifically he's about to tell me it's a great hypothesis but it's wrong I know the smir I know this smirk I honestly think it's wrong there is that effect is there for a lot of people but I think the distrust is not towards the CEO the distrust is towards the company one of the really difficult soul searching I had to do which is just having interact with fiser Folks at every level from Junior to to the CEO they're all really nice people they have a mission they talk about trying to really help people because that's the best way to make money is come up with uh medicine that helps a lot of people like the the mission is clear they're all good people a lot of really brilliant people phds so you can have a system where all the people are good including the CEO and by good I mean people that really are trying to do everything they dedicate their whole life to do good and yet you have to think that that system can uh deviate from a path that does good because you start to deceive yourself of what is good you turn it into a game where money does come into play from a company perspective where you convince yourself the more money you make the more good you'll be able to do and then you start to focus more and more and more on making more money and then you can really deviate and lose track of what is actually good I'm not saying necessarily fisa does that but I think companies could do that you can apply that criticism to social media companies to Big Pharma companies that one of the big lessons for me that's I don't know what the answer is but that all the people inside a company could be good people you would want to hang out with people you'd want to work with but as a company is doing evil and like that's a possibility so like the the distrust I don't think is towards the billionaire individual which I do see a lot of in this case I think it's it's like Wall Street distrust that the Machinery of this particular organization has has gone off track it's the generalization of hate again yeah and then good luck figuring out what is true this is the this is the tough stuff but I should say the individuals um like individual scientists at the NIH at in in uh fizer I just incredible people like they're they're really they're really brilliant people so the you know I never trust the administration or the business people no offense business people but the scientists are always good they they have the right motivator in life but again with they can have blinders on to focus on the science Nazi Germany has history of people just too focus on the science and then the politicians use the scientists to achieve whatever end they want but if you just look narrowly at the the Journey of a scientist it's a beautiful one because they ultimately in it for the Curiosity the moment of Discovery versus money vers I mean Prestige probably does come into play later later in life but especially young scientists they're after the the it's like they pulling at the threat of curiosity to try to discover something big they get excited by that kind of stuff and it's beautiful to see it is beautiful to see I have a former graduate student now a postto at Caltech and I don't even know if she had a cell phone she would come in the lab put her cell phone into the uh desk and she was tremendously productive but that that wasn't um why I brought it up um she was productive as a side effect of just being absolutely committed and obsessed to discover the answers to the questions she was asking as best she could and it was you could feel it you could just feel the intensity and um just incredibly low activation energy if there was an experiment to do should just go do it um you're teaching at MIT you are obviously traveling the world you're runting the podcast a lot of coverage of Chess recently which is interesting I I don't play chess but oh I have some scientific questions to you about that oh okay sure and then um let's get to those for sure and then you're not going to like it oh no okay and then and then also some some very um do I have to spell Massachusetts again um course the also you still seem to have a proclivity for finding guests that are controversial right you're thinking about Tate we're talking about Trump we're talking about the fizer CEO we're talking about fouchy these are these are in uh intense people and so what we're getting folks is a um we're not doing neuroimaging here in the traditional sense of putting someone into a scanner what we're doing here is we're using as uh the great Carl diero who was on your podcast um thank you for that thank you for connecting us he's an incredible person he's an incredible psychiatrist bioengineer and human being and and and writer and your conversation with him was phenomenal I I listened to it twice I actually have taken notes um we talk about it in this household we really do uh his uh his description of Love is uh not to be missed I'll just leave it at that because if I try and say it I won't capture it well but you know we're getting a a language-based um map of uh at least a portion of Lex fredman's brain here so um what else is going on these days in that brain as it relates to robotics AI our last conversation was a lot about robots and the potential for robot human interaction what even what is a robot Etc um are you still working on robots or focused on robots and you know where where is science showing up in your life besides the things we've already talked about so I think the last time we talked was before Ukraine yes before you were just about to leave yes so that I mean so that's why I went on I was like you know this might be the the last you said you want to come out here before or after I was like come out there before want to see you before you go but here you are in the flesh I think uh so a lot of um just a lot of my mind has been up occupied obviously with that part of the world but the the most of the difficult struggles that I'm still going through is that I haven't launched the company that I want to launch and the company has to do with AI I mean it's maybe a longer conversation but the ultimate dream is to put robots in every home but short term I see their possibility of launching a social media company and the it's a non-trivial explanation why that leads to robots in the home but it's basically the algorithms that fuel effective social robotics so robots that you can form a deep connection with and so I've been really yeah I've been building prototypes but struggling that I don't have maybe if I were to be critical the guts to to launch a company or the time well it's combined I think you've got the guts I mean it's clear if you'll do an interview with the fiser CEO and you're considering putting this tape fellow on your podcast and you've gone to the Ukraine uh that you you have the guts I don't it's also a um it means not doing quite a lot of other things that's what I mean but it it does takes the thing is as many people know when you fill your day and you're busy that business becomes an excuse that you use against doing the things that scare you a lot of people use family in this way you know uh my wife my kids I can't when in reality some of the most uccessful people have a wife and have kids and have families and they still do it and so a lot of times we can fill the day with busy work with uh like like yeah of course I have podcasts and all this kind of stuff and they make me happy and they're all they're wonderful and uh there's research there teaching and so on but all of that can just serve as an excuse from the thing that my heart says is the right thing to do and uh that's why I don't have the gut the gut to say no to basically everything and then to Focus all on because part of it is I'm unlikely to fail at anything in my life currently because I've already found a comfortable place with the with a startup it's mostly going to be most likely going to be a failure if not an embarrassing failure so um well the machine learning data that I'm aware of I don't know a lot about machine learning but the within the realm of Neuroscience say that a failure rate of about 15% is optimal for for you know neuroplasticity and growth whether or not that translates to all all kinds of practices isn't clear but getting trials right 85% of the time seems to be optimal for language learning seems to be optimal for mathematics and seems to be optimal for uh physical Pursuits on average right I'm sure I'm going to you know that you know you have more uh machine learning um geeks on that listen to your podcast then listen to this podcast but doesn't mean you have to fail on 15% of your weight sets folks I mean could be you know 16% no I'm just kidding but the uh it's um it's not exact but but it's a pretty good rule of thumb I think a lot of startup Founders would literally murder for 85% chance of success I think I think um given all the opportunities I have the the skill set the the funding all that kind of stuff my chances are relatively high for success but what relatively High means in the startup World Is Still Far Far Below 85 it's you're talking about single digit percentages most startups fail well I think it means you know the decision to focus on the company and not other things means the decision to close the hatch on dopamine retrieval from all these other things that are very predictable sources of dopamine um not that everything is dopamine but you know dopamine is I think the the primary chemical driver of motivation you know if you know that you can get some degree of satisfaction from scrolling social media or from uh that particular of coffee that's what you're going to do uh that's what you're going to consume unless um you somehow invert the algorithm and you um and you say you know it's actually my denial of myself drinking that coffee that's going to be the dopamine right interesting then you know and that's the beauty of having a forbrain is that you can make those decisions you know this is the essence I I do believe of what we see of David goggin there's much more there there's a a person that none of us know um and only he knows of course but the idea that the pain is the source of dopamine the the lyic friction as I sometimes like to call it is the source of dopamine that runs counter to how most nervous systems work but it was it's decision-based right it's not because his musculature is a certain way or his you know he had crisper or something it's because he decides that um and I I think that's amazing it it but what it means in terms of starting a company and changing priorities is a closing the hatch On All or many of the current sources of dopamine so that you can derive dopamine from the failures within this narrow context and this is a very reductionist View kind of neur neuro um Centric view of what we're talking about but I think about this a lot I mean the decision to choose one relationship versus another is a decision to close down other opportunities right so I think that the you know the decision order one thing off the menu versus others is his decision to close down those other hatches so I think that you absolutely can do it it's just a question of um can you flip the algorithm yeah remap the source of dopamine to something else that's right and maybe maybe go out there not to succeed but make the you know the journey is the Destination type thing but you know when you're financially vested and your time and as far as I know we only get one life at least on this planet and um you want to spend that wisely right and a lot of that the people that surround you the people are really important and I don't have people around me that say you should do a startup it's very difficult to find such people cuz is Austin big startup culture right now yeah it is it is but it doesn't make sense for me to do a startup this is what the people that love me my whole life have been telling me doesn't make sense what you're what you're doing right now just do the thing you were doing previously why do I get the sense that because they are saying this you're appt to go against actually was never that unfortunately unfortunately I need um I've talked to people I love my parents family and so on friends I'm one of those people that needs unconditional support for difficult things like I Know Myself coaching wise uh it's good to I like so here's how I get coached best let's say wrestling I like a coach that says U you want to win the Olympics they will not for like if I say I want to win the met at the Olympics and Freestyle Wrestling I I want a coach that doesn't blink once and hears me and believes that I can do it and then is viciously intense and cruel to me on the on on that Pursuit like if you want to do this let's do this right so but that's support that like that positivity I don't I'm never um you know I'm not energized nor do I see that as love a person saying like basically criticizing that like saying like you're uh you're too old to win the Olympic gold medal right you're like all the things you can come up with that's not helpful to me and I can't find a dopamine or I haven't yet a dopamine Source from the the haters like basically people that're criticizing you s trying to prove them wrong I it doesn't um it never got me off like it never uh um where some people seem to like that I mean David goggin always seems to come out he seems driven by many sources that he has access I do I don't know because I've never asked him but I I if I were to venture a guess I'd say that he probably has a lot of options inside his head as to how to push through challenge not just overcome pain not but but he'll post sometimes about the fact that you know people will say this or people will do this and you know it's and and talk about the push back approach he'll also talk about um the push back approach that's purely internal that doesn't involve anyone else great versatility there yeah there's a there's literally like a voice he yells at that represents some kind of uh like Devil that wants him to fail and he's you know he calls him and all kinds of things saying you know you I'm not I'm not he's there's always like an enemy and he's going against that enemy I mean I wish maybe that's something I mean it's really interesting maybe you can remap it this way so so that you can construct like that's a kind of obvious mechanism construct an amorphous blob that is a hater that wants you to fail right that's kind of the David Goin thing you're and that that that that blob says you're too weak you're too dumb you're you're too old you're too fat you're too whatever and getting you to want to quit and so on and then you start getting angry at that blob and maybe that's a good motivator I haven't personally really tried that well I've had external CH you know when um challenge when I was a postto uh very prominent laboratory several prominent Laboratories in fact were working on the same thing that I was and I was just a slowly post talk working on a project pretty independent from the lab I was in and um there was competition but there was plenty of room for everybody to win but in my head and frankly I won't disclose who this is and and because there was some legitimate competition there and a little bit of friction not too much healthy scientific friction um yeah I might have pushed a few extra hours or more a little bit I have to say it felt U metabolizing it felt catabolic right it didn't um I couldn't be sustained by it and I contrast that with the podcast or the work that my laboratory is doing now focus on stress and Human Performance Etc and it's pure love I just I want it's pure curiosity and love I mean they're hard days but I never there's no adversary in the picture um they're the Practical you know workings of life that that was the thing that Joe really inspired me on and people do create adversarial relationships in podcasting because you get like YouTubers do this they get you know they hate seeing somebody else be successful there's a feeling of like um um like jealousy and some people even see that as healthy like oo this like uh Mr Beast or somebody's some of these popular YouTubers how how do they get 100 million views and I only get 20 views Mr be's devoted his entire according to him his entire life he's been focused on becoming this massive YouTube channel yeah well that you know he's inspiring in many ways but like there's some people that get become famous for doing much less uh insane pursuit of uh of greatness than Mr Beast like this people become famous on you know on social media and so on and it's easy to be jealous of them I just one of the early things of learned from Joe just being a fan of his podcast is how much he celebrated everybody and I again I I maybe I ruined my whole dopamine thing but I don't get energized by people that are that become popular in the podcasting space and YouTube it doesn't it's awesome it's all of it is is awesome and I'm I'm inspired by that but the problem is that's not a good motivator inspiration is like oh cool humans can do this this is beautiful but it's not I'm looking I'm looking you know for for forcing function that's why I gave away the salary from MIT I was hoping my bank account had zero that would be a forcing function to be like oh and I W you know and you're not allowed to have a normal job so I wanted to launch and then the podcast becomes you know a source of income and so it's like God damn it yeah yeah well you know and here I I have to confess my biases you are um you are so good at what you do in the realm of podcast and you're excellent other things as well I just have less you know experience in those things um I know here I'm I'm taking the liberty of speaking for many many people and just saying I I I sure as hell hope you don't shut down the podcast but as your friend and as somebody who cares very deeply about your happiness and your your deeper satisfaction U if it's in your heart's heart to do a company well then damn it do the company and a lot of it I wouldn't even C categorize as happiness I don't know if you have things like that in your in your life but I'm probably the happiest I I could possibly be right now that's wonderful but the thing is that there's a longing for the startup that has nothing to do with happiness it's uh something else that's that itch that's that it I'm pretty sure I'll be less happy because it's a really tough process it's it's it's I mean to whatever degree you can extract happiness from struggle yes maybe but I don't see it I I think I'll have some very very low points there's a lot of people who found find companies found companies know about you're and I also want to be in a relationship I want to get married and sure as hell a startup is not going to increase the um the likelihood of that we could start up a family and start a company well that that's a I I'm a huge believer in that which is getting a relationship at a low point in your life which is sorry I'm not disputing your stance um nor am I agreeing with it it's just every once in a while there's a there's a Lex Friedman ISM that um that hits a particular circuit in my brain I had to just laugh out loud I just think that it's easy to have a relationship when everything is good the relationships that become strong and are tested quickly are the ones when when is going down well then there's hope for me yet um so uh you know before we sat down um I was having a conversation with a podcast producer who is a um I wouldn't say Avid rather he's a rabid consumer of podcast and finds these amazing podcast he's um small podcast and you know and and unique episodes anyway we were talking about um some stuff that he had seen and read in the business sector and he was talking about um the difference between you know job career and a calling right and I and I think he was extracting this from conversations of of uh CEOs and Founders Etc um I forget the specific Founders that uh that brought this to light for him but you know that this idea that if you focus on a job you know you can make an income and hopefully you enjoy your job or not hate it too much a career is is represents a sort of in my mind a kind of series of Evolutions that one can go through Junior Professor tenure Etc but a calling has a whole other um level of of of energetic pull to it because it includes career and job and it includes this concept of sort of like a life it's it's very hard to to draw the line between a calling in career and a calling in the other parts of your life so the question therefore is do you feel a calling to start this company or is it uh more of a compulsion that um irritates you is it like something you wish would go away or something that you that you hope will won't go away no I hope it won't go away it's a calling it's a calling it's like uh beautiful it's like uh when I see a robot when I first interacted with robots and it became even stronger the most sophisticated the robots I interacted with I see a magic there and you're like you look around does anyone else see this magic like it's it's kind of like maybe when you fall in love like that that feeling like does does anyone else notice this person that just walk in the room I feel that way about robots and I I can elaborate what that means but I'm not even sure I can convert it into words I just feel like the social integration of robots in society will create a really interesting world and uh our ability to anthropomorphize when we look at a robot and our ability to feel things when we look at a robot is something that most of us don't yet experience but I think everybody will experience in the next few decades and I I just want to be uh a part of that of exploring that because it hasn't been really thoroughly explored the best roboticists in the world are not currently working on that problem at all they they try to avoid human beings completely and nobody's really working on that problem in terms of when you look at the numbers all the big tech companies that are investing money the closest thing to that is Alexa and uh basically being a servant to help to tell you the weather or play music and so on it's not trying to form a deep connection and so I I sometimes you just notice the thing not not only do I notice the magic there's a gut feeling which I try not to speak to because there's no track record but I feel like I can be good at bringing that magic out of the robot and there's no data that says I would be good at that but there's a feeling it's just a feeling like I you know when I because I've done so many things I love doing like playing guitar all that kind of stuff uh Jiu-Jitsu I've never felt that feeling when I doing ji- jits I don't feel the the magic of the genius required to be extremely good at guitar I don't feel any of that but I've noticed it in others great musicians they will they they noticed the magic about the thing they do and they and they ran with it and I just always thought um I think it had a different form when I before I knew robots existed before AI existed the the form was um more about the magic between humans the like I I think of it as love but like the smile the two friends have towards each other when I was really young and people would be excited when they first know each other and see notice each other and there's that moment that they share that feeling together I I was like wow that's really interesting it it is really interesting that these two separate intelligent organisms are able to connect all of a sudden on this deep emotional level it's like huh it's it's like it's just beautiful to see and I noticed the magic of that and then when I started uh programming programming period but then program AI systems you realize oh that could be that's not just between humans and humans that could be humans and other entities dogs um cats and robots and that's so I for some reason it hit me the most intensely when I saw robots and so yeah it's it's like a calling but it's a calling that I I can just enjoy the um the vision of it the vision of a future world of an exciting future world that's full of cool stuff or I can be part of building that and part being part of building that means doing the hard work of capitalism which is like raising funds from people uh which for me right now is the easy part and then hiring a lot of people I don't know how much you know about hiring but hiring hiring excellent people excellent people yeah that will Define the trajectory of not only your company but your whole existence as a human being and and build it up not failing them because now they all depend on you and not failing the world with an opportunity to bring something something that brings joy to people and like all that pressure just non-stop fires that you have to put out the drama the having to work with people you've never worked with like lawyers and the human resources and supply chain and and um you know like because this is very comp compute heavy the infrastru the computer infrastructure managing security cyber security is because you're dealing with people's data so now you have to understand not only the uh the cyber security of data and the Privacy how to maintain privacy correctly with data but also the psychology of people trusting you with their data and what is how how you know if you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Jack dorsy and those folks they seem to be hated by a large number of people Jack seem I didn't you know I didn't much l I think I always think of Jack as a as a loved individual but um well you have a very positive view of the world I like Jack a lot and I I like his mind and I um someone close to him described him to me recently as he's an excellent listener that's what they said about Jack and that that's my experience of him too very private person so we we'll leave it at that but um uh listen I think Jack dorsy is um one of the one of the rates of our uh of the last 200 years and is just much quieter um about his stance on things than a lot of people but much of what we see in the world that's wonderful I think um we owe him aeb of gratitude I'm just voicing my stance here but um the person this is really important a wonderful person uh a brilliant person a good person but you still have to pay the price of making any kind of mistakes as the head of a company mhm you don't get any extra bonus points for being a good person but his willingness to go on Rogan and deal D directly and say I don't know an answer to that in some cases but to deal directly with some really challenging questions to me earned him tremendous respect yes as an individual he was still part of him is so you you've said your and I love Jack too and I interact with him often he's been on your podcast yes uh but he's also part of a system as we talked about and uh I would argue that Jack shouldn't have brought anyone else with him on that podcast if you go that's right he had a cadra of of oh he had I guess the the legal the head legal uh with him and also it requires a tremendous amount of skill to to go on a podcast like Joe Rogan and be able to win over the trust of people by being able to be transparent and communicate how the company really works because the more you reveal about how social media company works the more you open up for security the the vector of attacks increases also there's a lot of difficult decisions in terms of censorship and not that are made that if you make them transparent you're going to get an order of magnitude more hate so you have to make all those kinds of decisions and I think that's one of the things I have to realize is you have to take the um that Avalanche of potentially hate if you make mistakes well you you have a very clear picture of this architecture of what's required in order to create a company of course there's division of labor too I mean you don't have to do all of those things in detail but finding people that are excellent to do um the you know to run the critical segments are is obviously key I'll just say what I said earlier which is if it's in your heart's heart to start a company uh if that indeed is your calling and it sounds like it is then uh I can't wait does does a heart have a heart I don't know what's that expression even mean uh probably not um in my lab at one point early days we worked on cuddlefish and they have multiple hearts and they but they pump green blood believe it or not very fascinating animal um speaking of of hearts and um green blood earlier today before we sat down I solicited uh for questions uh on Instagram in a brief post so um you wna look at some of them yes let's take these in real time um my podcast team is always teasing me that I never have any charge on my phone I'm one of these people that likes to run in the uh run in the yellow or whatever it is phone yeah funny how always the iPhone people are out of battery I just got a new one I mean this one has plenty of battery I just got a new one so I've different numbers for different um things personal and work etc um I'm trying that no um all right get into the um I have a I have a chess thing too to mention to you oh yes please will I insult you if I if I look up these questions as you as me okay no no but I will insult you by asking you this question because I think it's hilarious so there's been a controversy about cheating where Hans Neiman who's a 2700 player oh yeah saw that clip on your clip's channel by the way I love your Clips Channel but I listen to your full channel the big accusation um is that he cheated by having I mean it's it's half joke but it's stared getting me to wonder whether um so that you can cheat by having vibrating anal beads so you can send messages to uh well let's rephrase that statement not you can but one can one can one can that was a personal attack yes but it made me realize I mean I'm just going to adjust myself in my seat here um I use it all the time for podcast need to send myself messages uh to remind me myself of notes uh but it's interesting I mean it um I'm not going to call you again yeah that's exactly where I keep my phone the the there it it did get me down this whole Rabbit Hole of well how would you be able to send communication um in order to cheat in different sports I mean that doesn't even have to do with um chess in particular but it's interesting in chess and poker that there's um there's mechanisms sort of modern day where you're streaming live the competition so people can watch it on TV if they can only send you a signal back uhh they you know it's it's just like a fun little thing to think about and if it's possible to pull off so I I wanted to get your scientific uh uh evaluation of that technique to cheat using some sort of interceptive device like yeah vibrating of some kind yeah well no no that's one way to send signals is like mors code basically yeah so there's a famous I believe there's a famous real world story of physics students I'm going to get some of this wrong so I'm saying this um in kind of a course form so that somebody will correct this but um I believe it was physics graduate students from UC Santa Cruz or somewhere else maybe it was Caltech bunch of universi so that no one you know Associates with any one University that went to Vegas and used some sort of tactile device for kind of um card counting um thing this was actually um demonstrated also not this particular incident I don't think in the movie Casino where there was they were they spotted a I remember Robert dairo who you you have a not so vague resemblance to by the way um in Taxi Driver um God I wish I had AO impression right now Travis Bickle um look it up folks Travis ble is you know um if Lex ever shaved his head into a mohawk I would so they he had a tapping device on his ankle that was signaling someone else was counting cards and then signaling to that person so yeah that could be done in the tactile way um it could be done obviously earpieces if it's deep earpiece I think that there are ways that they look for that um certainly any kind of vibrational device in whatever orice um provided someone could pay attention to that while still playing the game um yeah I think it's it's entirely possible now could it be done purely neurally you know could there be something that was um and listen it wouldn't have to even be below the skull this is where whenever people hear about neurolink or brain machine interface they always think oh you have to drill down below the skull and put a chip below into the skull think there are people walking around nowadays with um glucose monitoring devices like levels which I've used and it was very informative for me actually um as a kind of an experiment gave me a lot of interesting insights about my blood sugar regulation how it reacts to different foods Etc well you know you can implant a um tactile device below the skin with a simple incision actually one of the neurosurgeons at neuralink I I know well because he came up um at some point through my laboratory and was at Stanford and he actually has put in a radio receiver in his hand and his wife has it too and he can open locks and at of his house and things like that so he's under the skin under the skin you know you can go to how does that work so how do you use a piercer you go to a you know a a body piercer type person and they can just slide it under there and and it's got a battery life of something you know some fairly long duration how do you experience the tactile the the haptics of it oh no that's just allows him to open certain locks with just his hand but you could easily put some sort of tactile device in there um but does have to connect to the nerves or is it just like just vibration no just vibration and you know you can probably sense it even if it's under the skin I wonder and it can be by it can be Bluetooth linked I mean you know I've seen there's a a engineering laboratory at the University of Illinois champagne uh Urbana that's got an amazing device which is about the size of a Band-Aid it goes on the clavicles and it uses um sound waves pinged into the body to measure cavitation now think about the this for a moment this is being used in the military where let's say you're leading an operation or something people are getting shot shot at and on a laptop you can see where the bullet entry points are are people dead are they bleeding out you know entry exit points um you can get if take it out of the battlefield scenario you can get breathing body position 24 hours a day there's so much that you can do looking at cavitation so these same sorts of devices on 12-hour Bluetooth could be used to um send all sorts of May maybe every time um you're supposed to hold your hand I'm I'm not a good Gambler so I only play roulette when I go to Vegas because I just long boring and you know games but you get to you get some good mileage out of each out of each run usually but the um you know maybe every time uh you're supposed to hold the person gets sort of like a stomach cinching because this is you know stimulating the Vegas a little bit and they get a little bit of an so it doesn't have to be um mors code it can be yes no maybe yeah right it can be you know it can be uh green red yellow type signaling it doesn't have to be very sophisticated to give somebody a significant Advantage anyway I haven't thought about this in detail um before this conversation but oh yeah there's an an immense landcap there I don't know if you know uh poker player named Phil Ivy no I I don't follow the the gambling he's he's considered to be one of the greatest poker players of all time legitimately you know he's just incredibly good but he got um there was this big case where he was accused of cheating and proven and it's not really cheating which is what's really fascinating is it turns out uh so he plays poker Texas hold them mostly but all kinds of Poker it turns out that the the Grid on the back of the cards is often printed a little bit imperfectly and so you can uh use the asymmetry of the imperfections to try to figure out certain cards so if you play and you remember that a certain card is like I think the eight in that deck that he was accused of an eight and nine or slightly different symmetry wise so he can now uh ask the dealer actually to rotate it to check the symmetry so he would ask the dealer to rotate the card to see that there's to detect the asymmetry of the back of the card and now he know knows which cards are eights and nines and or likelier to be eights and nines and he was using that information to play to play poker and win a lot of money but it's just a slight advantage and his cases and in fact the judge found this that he's not actually cheating but it's not right you can't use this kind of extra information so that it it's fascinating you can discover these little holes in games if you pay close enough attention yeah it's it's fascinating and I think that um um you know I I did watch that clip about the potential of a cheating event in chess and and and the fact that a number of chess players admit to cheating at some point in their career and very very interesting online so online cheating is easier right when you're playing online cheating in a game where the machine is much better than the human it's very difficult to prove that you're human and that applies by the way another really big thing is in social media the Bots to if you're running a social media you have to deal with the Bots and they become one of the really exciting things in machine learning and artificial intelligence to me is the the very fast Improvement of language models so neural networks that generate text that interpret text that generate from text images and all that kind of stuff but that's you're now going to create incredible Bots that look awfully a lot like humans well at least they're not going to be those cryptobots that seem to populate my comment section when I post anything on in stagram I actually delete those even though they add to the comment uh roster and you know if just they bother me so much um I spend you know at least 10 15 minutes on each post just deleting those I don't know what they need to do but I'm not interested in um those uh whatever it is they're offering um speaking of non Bots I'm going to assume that all the questions are are not from Bots there are a lot of questions here more than 10,000 questions goodness um I'll just take a few working from top to bottom um what ideas have you been wrestling with lately and I think about the the company as one but as I scroll to the next what are what are some others well some of the things we've talked about which is um uh the uh ideas of how to understand what is true what is true about a human being how to reveal that how to reveal that through conversation how to challenge that properly that it leads to understanding not division so that that applies to everybody from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin um also another idea is there's a deep distrust of Science and trying to understand the growing distrust of science trying to understand what's the role of those of us that have a a foot in the scientific Community how to be to regain some of that trust um also there's uh as we talked about the um how to find and how to yeah how to how to find and how to maintain a good relationship I mean that's really been I've I've never felt quite as lonely as I have this year with Ukraine it's just like so many times I would just lay there and just feeling so deeply alone because I felt that my home not my home like literally cuz I'm an American I love I'm a proud American I'll die in American but my home in the sense of my generationally my family's home is now going is now has been changed forever there's no more being proud of being from the former Russia or Ukraine it's just it's now a political message to say if if you to show your pride and so it's been extremely lonely within that world if with all the things I'm pursuing how do you find a successful relationship that's been that's been tough but obviously and there's a huge number of technical ideas with a startup of like how the hell do you make this thing work well the the relationship topic is one we talked a little bit about in last time we we touched on I a little bit more detail um we're going to come back to that um so I've made a note here um what or who inspired Lex you to wear a suit every time you podcast that's a good question I don't know the answer to that so there's two two answers to that question one is a suit and two is a black suit and black tie CU I used to do I I used to have more variety which is like there was always a black suit but I would sometimes do a red tie and a blue tie um but that was mostly me trying to fit into society because like varieties you're supposed to have some variety what inspired me is the at first was a general culture that that doesn't take itself seriously in terms of how you present yourself to the world so in Academia in the tech world just at Google everybody was wearing like pajamas and they're very relaxed in the in the tech I don't know how it is in the science in the like chemistry biology and so on but in um computer science everybody was like very I mean very relaxed in terms of the stuff they wear so I wanted to try to really take myself seriously and take every single moment seriously and everything I do seriously and the suit made me feel that way I don't know how it looks but it made me feel that way and I think in terms of people I look up to that war suit that made me think of that is is probably Richard fan I see such a wonderful human being I see him as like the epitome of class and humor and Brilliance and you know obviously I I can never come close that kind of um you know be able to Simply explain really complicated ideas and to have humor and wit but definitely aspired to that and then there's just the you know Mad Men that whole era of the 50s the classiness of that there's something about a suit that both uh removes the importance of fashion from the character you see the person I think uh uh not to I forgot who said this might be like Coco Chanel or somebody like this is that you know you D you uh wear a Shabby dress and everyone sees the dress you wear uh a beautiful dress and everybody sees the woman so in that sense I I was uh hopefully I'm quoting that correctly but um sounds good I I think there's a sense in which a simple classy suit allows people to focus on your character and then do so like with the full responsibility of that like this is who I am yeah I love that and I I love what you said just prior to that you know my father who again is always asking me why I don't dress formally like you do uh always said to me growing up if you overdress slightly at least people know that you took them seriously so it's a sh a sign of respect for your audience too in my eyes um someone asked is there an AI equivalent of uh psychedelics and I I'm assuming they mean uh is there something that machines can do for themselves in order to alter their neural circuitry through unconventional activation patterns yes obviously well I don't know exactly how psychedelics work but you you can see that with uh all the diffusion models now with Dolly and stable diffusion that generates from text art and there's a is basically an a small injection of noise into a system that has a deep representation of visual information so is able to convert text to Art in introducing uncertainty into that uh noise into that that's kind of maybe I could see that as a parallel to the psychedelics and it's able to create some incredible things from a from a conceptual understanding of a thing it can create incredible art that no human I think could have at least easily created through a bit of introduction of Randomness Randomness does a lot of work in the machine learning world just enough there are a lot of um requests of you for relationship a lot of requests about statistics about you data about you specifically um flipping past those um what was the hardest belt to achieve in Jiu-Jitsu I would have assumed the black belt but is that actually true no I mean everybody has a different journey through Jiu-Jitsu as people know for me the black belt was the ceremonial belt which is not usually the case because I fought the wars like I train twice a day for I don't know how many years 7 eight years I competed Non-Stop up I competed against people much better than me I competed against many and beaten many black belts and brown belts I think for me personally the hardest belt was the the brown belt because for people who know Jiu-Jitsu the the size of tournament divisions for blue belts and purple belts is just humongous like worlds when I competed at Worlds it was like 140 people in a division which means you have to win I forget how many times but seven eight nine times in a row to to to medal and so I just had to put in a lot of work during that time and especially for competitors instructors usually really make you earn a belt so to to earn the purple belt was extremely difficult extremely difficult and then to earn the brown belt means I had to compete non-stop against other purple belts which are young you're talking about like the people that usually compete are like 23 24 25 year olds they're like shredded incredible cardio they can for some reason are in their life where they can no kids nothing they can dedicate everything to this Pursuit so they're training two three four times a day diet is on point you're going and for me because you know they're usually bigger and taller than me and just more aggressive actual good athletes yeah I had to go to through a lot of Wars to earn that brown belt I got to try this Jiu-Jitsu thing yeah you should but it's a different well I try you I did the one class but I I really want to embrace it as you know many Pursuit leg ji- jits are different if you do in your 20s and 30s and later it's like it's a different you can't you're not you know you can have a bit of an ego in your 20s you can have that fire under you but you should be sort of more Zen likee and wise and patient uh later in life well one would hope um that's the wisdom I think Rogan is still a meathead he still goes hard and crazy and he's still super competitive on that so some people can Jocko as somebody like that well whatever they're doing they're doing something right because they're still in it and uh that's super impressive there were uh far too many questions to to ask all of them but um several if not many asked a a highly appropriate question for where we are in the Arc of this discussion and this is is one um admittedly that you ask in your podcast um all the time but I get the great pleasure of being in the the question asker seat today um and so what is your advice to young people so I just gave a lecture at MIT and the amount of love I got there is incredible and so of course what you're who you're talking to is usually undergrads maybe young graduate students and so there one person did ask for advice uh as a question at the end I did a bunch of Q&A So my answer was uh that the world will tell you to find a work life balance to uh to sort of explore to try to uh try different fields to see what you really connect with you know um variety general education all that kind of stuff and I said in your 20s I think you should find one thing you're passionate about and work harder at that than you worked at anything else in your life and if it destroys you destroys you that's advice for in your 20s I don't know how universally true that advice is but I think at least give that a chance like sacrifice real sacrifice towards um a thing you really care about and work your ass off that said I've met so many people and I'm starting to think that advice is is best applied or best tried in the engineering disciplines especially programming I think there's a bunch of disciplines in which you can achieve success with much fewer hours and it's much more important to actually have a Clarity of thinking and great ideas and have an energetic mind like the grind in certain disciplines does not produce great work I just know that in computer science and programming it often does some of the best people ever that have built system have programed systems I usually like the John karmac kind of people that drink soda eat pizza and program you know 18 hours a day so I don't know actually I you you have to I think really go discipline specific so my advice applies to my own life which has been mostly spent behind a computer and for that uh you really really have to put in the hours and what that means is essentially it feels like a grind I do recommend that you should at least try it in your own that uh if you interview some of the most accomplished people ever I think if they're honest with you they're going to talk about their 20s as as um as a journey of a lot of pain and a lot of really hard work I think what really happens uh unfortunately is a lot of successful people later in life will will talk about work life balance they'll say you know what I learned from that process is that it's really important uh you know to get uh like sun in the morning to have health to have good relationships exactly but like I think you have forgot those people have forgotten the value of the journey they took to that lesson I think work life balance is best learned the hard way I my my my own perspective there's certain things you can only learn the hard way and so you should learn that the hard way yeah so that that's definitely advice and I should say that I admire people that work hard if you want to get on my good side I think are the people that give everything they got towards something it doesn't actually matter what it is but towards achieving um excellence in a thing I that's that's the uh highest um thing that we can reach for as human beings I think is Excellence at a thing I love it well speaking of Excellence at a thing whether or not it's teaching at MIT or the podcast or the the company that resides in the near future that you create I I once again I'm speaking for an enormous number of people that you know excellence and hard work certainly are woven through everything that you do every time I sit down with you I begin and finish with uh such an immense feeling of joy and appreciation and gratitude and uh it wouldn't be a Lex fredman podcast or an case of Lex Freedman being a guest on a podcast if the word love weren't mentioned at least 10 times so uh the feelings of gratitude for all the work you do for taking the time here today to to share with us what you're doing your thoughts your insights your um what you're perplexed about and and what drives you and and your callings can I read a poem yes please he was trying to cut me off folks I was getting a little long no no no no this is um I was thinking about this recently it's one of my favorite Robert Frost poems and I um because I wrote several essays on it as you do because I think it's a popular one that's read and so essay is being like trying to interpret poetry and it's one that's th with me in both its calm Beauty but in the seriousness of what it means because I ultimately think it's the um so Stopping by Woods and a Snowy Evening I think it's ultimately a human being a man asking the the old Copus the old kamu question of why I live I think this poem even though it doesn't seem like it is a question of a man contending with suicide and choosing to live who whose woods these are I think I know his house is in the village though he will not see me stopping here to watch his Woods fill up with snow my little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year he gives his hardness bells a shake to ask if there's some mistake the only other sounds The Sweep of easy wind and Downy flake the woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep the woods representing the darkness the comfort of the woods representing death and here's a man choosing to live yeah I think about that often especially my dark darker moments is um you have Promises to Keep thank you for having me Andrew you're a beautiful human being I love you brother I love you brother thank you for joining me today for my discussion with Dr Lex fredman and special thanks to Dr Lex Friedman for inspiring me to start this podcast if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and on Apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions or suggestions about topics and guests you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments in addition please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning of today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast during today's episode we did not discuss supplements but on many previous episodes of The hubman Lab podcast we do discuss supplements because while supplements aren't necessary for everybody many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like enhancing sleep and focus and hormone augmentation and so forth the uberman Lab podcast 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those sites I provide science and science related tools for mental health physical health and performance some of which overlap with information covered on the hubman Lab podcast but often which is distinct from information covered on the hubman Lab podcast so again that's hubman lab on Instagram Twitter and Facebook thank you again for joining me for the discussion with Dr Lex Friedman and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]