Andrew Huberman: How Dopamine Quietly Drives Discipline

1. 0:00 – 2:41

   Intro

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      I'll tear up if I talk about it because things were going well in my life and then one day, just crack, everything came crashing down. And, um... And I've learned that friendship is super powerful. I had people descending on my home to be with me. You know, one day I just, like, look up and Lex is in the room, and they sat with me, picked me up, and they reminded me who I am, and, um, you know, I- I've just such immense gratitude for- for that. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a world-renowned neuroscientist, Stanford professor, and podcaster. Revolutionizing how we understand the brain.

   2. NANarrator0:45

      And how we can adopt change, break bad habits, and achieve peak performance.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman0:49

      Growing up, I was scared, depressed and confused. My parents split up. I was getting in multiple fights. I found myself locked up in this residential treatment program. And I realized that I need to take control of my life.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett1:00

      I'm so intrigued by that because so many people feel stuck in their lives. So how does someone even make those life-changing decisions?

   5. AHAndrew Huberman1:06

      Well, there are so many zero cost tools that can change your brain. We can go through all of them. So...

   6. SBSteven Bartlett1:12

      I want to talk about dopamine and this graph.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman1:14

      The dopamine is kind of like a wave pool. In every domain of life, whether or not it's food, exercise, for some people it's work or sex, if you push things to the max, you're going to feel depleted and under stimulated afterwards and you need so much more energy to get the same output, and when you're in that dopamine depleted state, typically what people do is they try and access things that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry and all it does is drive them further and further into that trough.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett1:41

      So how do you fix that?

   9. AHAndrew Huberman1:42

      So it's hard to exit, but start with-

   10. SBSteven Bartlett1:48

       This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. Um, we've just hit seven million subscribers on YouTube and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. Um, from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet, there's almost 50 people now behind The Diary of a CEO that worked to put this together. So from all of us, thank you so much. Um, we did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until seven million subscribers, and you guys loved that raffle so much that we're going to continue it. So every single month we're giving away money can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and a thousand pound gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to The Diary of a CEO. There's now more than seven million of you. So if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation.

2. 2:41 – 5:55

   What Is Your Mission In Life?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:41

      Andrew, at the very heart of what you do, at the very, very heart, if I, if I look to all that you've produced and I had to encapsulate it into just one or two sentences that encapsulates your mission statement, what would that be?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman2:56

      I want to share the beauty and utility of biology. I want people to understand how incredible the human body and brain are and how even a small understanding of the underlying mechanisms about how we interact with light or temperature, exercise, thoughts, emotions, et cetera, how that can impact our health in really powerful ways.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:21

      You have become a cultural phenomenon because of the information that you've shared. In your view, why and how has that happened? I- I guess maybe most importantly, why has that happened? What is it that you've kind of catered to that was absent in people's understanding of themselves?

   4. AHAndrew Huberman3:37

      Well, I think people are intensely curious about themselves, meaning our species, why we feel the way we feel, why other people feel and act the way they do, and I think most everybody, I like to think, is deeply interested in how to be the best version of themselves. And I think what I've done is I've provided a lens into all of that through biology, through neuroscience in particular, but also I'm a practitioner. So since I was pretty young, I've been actively involved in sports and psychology and interested in what one can do, in some cases take, things to avoid in order to be the best version of oneself. And so, um, I'm an academic, right? I have a laboratory and I'm a tenured faculty member at Stanford。 Although I should mention that I've shrunk my laboratory considerably in the last year or so. But I've done experiments on animal models, on humans and human clinical trials. So I have the understanding and expertise of a- of a research scientist, and at the same time I think very deeply about how to translate the information in these peer reviewed papers how to translate the information in the fields of science and medicine into actionable what we call protocols。And I do my best to, um, distill things down into, uh, you know, actionable things，um, but I'm not a big believer in dumbing things down。I decided to go the opposite way rather than give little snippets，um, 90-second videos, we include those, but rather I decided to go for full one to three hour, maybe even four hour lectures on a topic because I believe, and I'm not the first to say it, that people have, um, near infinite ability to learn if they are told things in a way that's clear。So I believe that people want to understand, they can understand, and it doesn't require decorating things in a lot of complicated language。Sometimes we need to include some complicated language just because that's the way science and medicine are，and that people are willing to learn that and carry that along， and once they understand how they work a little bit better, you arm them with a little bit of knowledge，then really they're just off to the races and the- the rest takes care of itself。

3. 5:55 – 29:06

   How Andrew Huberman Became The Expert We Know Today

   1. SBSteven Bartlett5:55

      I may, a couple of times today just ask you to explain something to me in more simpler terms because I don't have any...... fundamental understanding of, of science. So, um, much of my objective is just- i- if- is just to be completely honest if I don't understand something, because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening that also probably don't understand something. One of the things that was most surprising to me about you was your background. And I think, eh, the interesting thing about your background, and where you came from, and the, the struggles you faced, and in- in contrast to the man that sits in front of me today, is it, I think it speaks to one of the fundamental points of curiosity that I have about your work, which is, it's all well and good knowing protocols, but there's something else required to be able to pursue them.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman6:42

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett6:43

      Now, people s- say that this is discipline or motivation, or whatever it might be, but when I looked at your background and where you've come from, it wasn't a straight line.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman6:52

      (laughs) No.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett6:52

      There's a l- there's an element of transformation that's gone on there. There's- there's almost... Th- the early Andrew Huberman, who I never would have guessed would have been the man that is- is almost unrecognizable from the man sat in front of me today, and then there's the man sat in front of me today. And the reason I'm so fascinated by that is because if I can understand how you went from that Andrew Huberman to this one, it gives me, it liberates me from the excuses that I won't be able to pursue your protocols now.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman7:19

      Well, certainly, uh, there's been a lot of adventure and transformation. Certainly some hardship. And listen, I- I'll be the first to say, you know, my life has been easier than it has been for others, and harder than it has been for others, right? So I'm not trying to plant a flag as having had the hardest or the easiest life. I only know, um, what's my experience, right? So all I've got is my experience, my knowledge, and my words, uh, to convey that. But, yeah, it was not a linear path. I would say the kind of key milestones along the way and the- the- the relevant pieces are, for as long as I can remember, I've always had an intense curiosity and an intense desire for adventure. Um, so I wanna learn and I wanna learn firsthand. I also suppose I've always had an intensity. Like, I- I've, um, been told since I was a young kid, you know, I sort of like forward leaning a little bit. Uh, you know, forward center of mass, so to speak. Um, but, yeah, my childhood, on the one hand, was very conventional and, and very sweet in the sense that, you know, I had two parents. My dad's actually a scientist. He's a theoretical physicist by training. He's Argentine, uh, but then did his graduate training in the United States. My mother's, uh, a writer and she was a teacher. She didn't work a whole lot when we were kids. She was mostly focused on raising us. And my childhood, to my memory, was marked by, you know, dinners together at the table. I was very, very interested in all things biology, in particular fish, so all things aquaria, birds, anything, you know, tropical birds, I- I would learn all about them, learn about fish. I would then lecture about these things in class on Monday as a way to try... the teachers to try and get me to not talk to students around me because I'd be telling them about it otherwise. So I've been giving little lectures since I was a kid. And- and then, I suppose, as I matured, um, so to speak, um, you know, around adolescence, my parents split up. It was a very high conflict divorce. Um, and that sent me, uh, in the direction of more kind of a wilder foraging. (laughs) Let's call it that. I was a bit feral. Um, just the- the circumstance led to situation where I was seeking out sports and friends for which there wasn't any parental involvement. So for me, the immediate attraction was to skateboarding and punk rock culture. And so I was very fortunate that I was drawn into skateboarding and punk rock culture in the earl- late '80s, early '90s. I'm 49 now, or almost 49, and at that time, that was a very nascent culture. There was no X Games. There were no major sponsors, that sort of thing. And so there were all these, not parentless, but rather feral kids. Some were parentless. And I got to be exposed to some incredible skateboarding, and I was not a particularly good skateboarder, but I certainly had the drive to try and do it. I kept hurting myself, so that was actually an important event. I kept, you know, hurting my body trying to push myself to get really good. Friends of mine were getting sponsored. A close friend of mine got picked up as a pro while we were in high school. We were traveling, going to contests. What you probably may have noticed is there wasn't a lot of attending school, so I don't recommend this to young people. Stay in school.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett10:21

      (laughs)

   8. AHAndrew Huberman10:21

      At least at the early stage, get that basic education while your brain is still hyperplastic. But, you know, I was exposed to, and fortunately did not partake in, a lot of drugs and violence, but I saw that. I also saw a lot of incredible skateboarding. Some of these people went on to, um, start huge companies and do incredible things in the realm of action sports, so like DC. Um, I know the guys that started that. Danny Way, Colin McKay, you know, I, like, I knew... at that time, um, I knew of, I wasn't close with, but you know, Tony Hawk, watched his ascent, right? He was a few years ahead of me. Um, but I would attend contests, skating contests. So I was in this world where it was all DIY, it was all self-created. Now at some point, I got a girlfriend, and, um, got into other things, um, and kind of left skateboarding. Um, thought I might be a firefighter for a little while. I was always very physical.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett11:12

      What age is this?

   10. AHAndrew Huberman11:13

       Um, so I was 16 when I got my first girlfriend, and, um, I wasn't doing well in skateboarding. I kept breaking my foot. Um, people were moving on without me. That was just the nature of it. I was in love with her, wanted to spend time with her, and so I thought, "Well, I'm not really doing well in school. I'm not really attending school, and I'll need to work and take care of us." You know, I was really thinking kind of like an adult at that point in terms of what I would do, and so I thought I'd get into the fire service. So I started trying to strengthen my body. I started doing resistance training. Keep in mind back then, the only people that lifted weights were, you know, preseason American football players, people going to the military, and bodybuilders, and I wasn't interested in any of those three things. But I started doing resis- resistance training, um, and realized, "Wow, like, this is a really powerful tool. I can make my body stronger through work." I c- I couldn't do a single pull-up when I started. I was always pretty skinny. I, you know, shot up, uh, a full foot in height, but was very, very skinny, you know, at that point. And, um......within, you know, summer I could do pull-ups, I could do these things. I thought, "Wow, like, there's this re- remarkable relationship between doing physical effort and kind of ability or outcome." And then I also started running a lot for whatever reason. I ran cross-country my senior year of high school and also there, I felt like there was a direct relationship between effort and outcome. If I ran further, then the next time I could run even further. If my lungs burned on a hill run, well, then the next time I could do that hill without my lungs burning. Whereas in skateboarding, no matter how hard I seem to try, I just couldn't match the level of effort with the outcome. So it was from that point forward that I, you know, 16 years old forward that I made running and resistance training just part of my regular weekly schedule. Um, what ended up happening was she went off to college. I ended up just basically living in my car or her dorm room while she was off at college. She was a year ahead of me. And I realized I wanted to be near her, so I eventually I applied to college and somehow got in. By the end of my freshman year, I had been getting in multiple fights, so I was still had that kind of wildness from the world I was previously in. I was getting into physical altercations. I was never into drugs or alcohol. That was fortunate. I don't have a propensity to be addicted to those things, but my life really wasn't in order. And it was really, it was actually nearly 30 years ago to the day, it was July 4th, 1994, I went to a barbecue. I got into an altercation with a bunch of people that were robbing the house that we were at, um, and, and by the way, they're sort of a little tangent side story. One of my, um, friends in college, we weren't super close, but my girlfriend at the time had lived with the now wife of Jack Johnson, the musician.

   11. NANarrator14:01

       Mm-hmm.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman14:02

       So Jack recalls that party. Uh, we have other friends from that party. That was kind of a meaningful day for me because I got into this altercation. Everything turned out okay, um, in the sense that, you know, we got our belongings back. No one was badly hurt. But I remember going back to the place where I was staying at that time and thinking to myself, "Okay, this is bad," right? I'm, you know, 19 years old, or I guess it was just shy of, of, of 18. I am not doing well in school. My freshman year was a disaster where I went to college. I don't think I flunked out, but I just wasn't really attending class. I wasn't doing well. I'm getting in physical altercations and working at this little bagel shop delivering bagels, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not much of a future in it for me. Um, I didn't end up going to the fire service. I didn't end up a professional athlete. I thought like, "What am I gonna do with... Like, what am I gonna do?" Right? Because the story of whatever happened to me prior to that was kind of meaningless unless I made something of myself. So that day I actually wrote myself and my parents a letter saying that I was gonna turn my life around, and I actually still have this letter. My mother still has this letter. And what I decided to do was to take a leave of absence from university. I didn't drop out. A leave of absence allows you the option to go back. I moved home and I worked. So I was a busboy at a little restaurant in town where I grew up, and I still continue to run and do resistance training, you know, three times a week each or so. And I went to community college, which is, um, typically where kids who can't afford to go to university or it's that just stay back for whatever reason. It's a wonderful aspect of the, the, um, educational system in California still. And I made learning and filling my mind with formal rigorous coursework based knowledge my absolute mission. Now, I didn't care if I liked it, I just was like, "I'm going to trust my ability to learn," because I could tell you a lot about tropical fish, skateboarding, punk rock music, a fair amount about physical training. At that point, I sought out the right people. This has always been something I've been good at, is seeking out the right people with knowledge. So I got great knowledge from the late Mike Mentzer who had trained Dorian Yates. Um, I was reading every book I could on physical fitness and rehabilitation, trying to get my body strong. Um, never wanted to be big, you know. I was always interested in being strong and being able to run far and fast.

   13. NANarrator16:29

       (laughs)

   14. AHAndrew Huberman16:29

       That was always a goal, like a capability. I- I've not been one of the, um, people to, like, really care about, like, hypertrophy.

   15. NANarrator16:36

       Mm-hmm.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman16:36

       That wasn't something that mattered to me. If some came along as a consequence of training, great, but it was more about a, a capability to do things. So at that point, I just became a voracious learner. I took every bit of energy that I had applied to these other areas and put them into learning math, science, art history, English literature, whatever, you know, coursework was thrown at me. And then after a year of that, went back to university, lived alone in a studio apartment, and basically for the remaining portion of university, all I did was study, work out, hang out with my girlfriend, run, listen to, at that time, like early '90s punk rock music, which is still a wonderful genre. So mainly like Rancid, Operation Ivy, Bob Dylan. Always loved Bob Dylan. Classical music when I study, and that was it. I didn't do anything else. And at that point I started getting straight As. People didn't recognize me though, they're like, "Aren't you the guy from freshman year that was getting in all these fights?" I, I will admit that I wasn't, um, completely devoid of, of, uh, the typical college, um, phenotype. Once a month I would allow myself to go out to a party and I'd party once a month.

   17. NANarrator17:52

       Mm-hmm.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman17:52

       But stayed away from drugs. Was never, never my thing. And, um, so drank, which, you know, eventually I realized wasn't my thing either, but I was just completely committed. So I graduated university....with honors. I went to graduate school, did a master's up at, uh, UC Berkeley. Um, then did my PhD, did my postdoc at Stanford, and then eventually got a laboratory, um, uh, first at UC San Diego, excellent neuroscience program, eventually was recruited to Stanford, uh, with tenure, and all along maintaining physical fitness in the background, focusing very heavily on doing primary research, meaning making discoveries in neuroscience and publishing papers. And then in 2019, I decided to start posting science on Instagram, just really nerdy stuff. Um, no protocols, just telling people about sunlight and the relationship to the eye, dopamine, and ex- I just enjoyed talking about it, just like I did when I was a little kid telling people about tropical fish. And in 2020, my plan was to release a book. So I got a guy, a PR guy, his name is Rob Moore, he's now a close friend of mine, and we were talking about how we would, I don't know, maybe go on podcasts or do something of that sort when the book came out, and then the pandemic hit, and I said, "You know what, let's pause the book." And he said, "Why don't you just maybe go on podcasts?" So that year, 2020, I went on, I think, somewhere between 20 and 30 podcasts. No book, no website, no nothing, just, like, talking science and delighted in that, and then January 2021, I got a little place, um, in a little, uh, kinda canyon region of Los Angeles, a little sabbatical-like, uh, retreat, and, um, set up some cameras. Had my bulldog, Costello, there. Rob Moore became my podcast producer, and on January 1st, more or less, we launched the Huberman Lab Podcast, where now I still just blab about stuff that I find interesting and that I think can be useful to people. So that's the kind of, um, that's the arc, and as I tell all this, I also just wanna make sure that people know that it sounds like this magnificent arc, but along the way, there were absolutely times when I thought, "Oh, my, what am I gonna do?" Like, "This is working, but this isn't working," and my life at times became very lopsided. I focused mainly on work and research. Um, you know, I'm 49 years old now. I've had some wonderful relationships across my life, but I opted to delay on marriage and family as a way to, uh... well, it wasn't the intention, but as a way to really just continue to pour my energy into the things that I was most passionate about. So there's always sacrifice. There were, you know... sadly, I've lost a lot of friends along the way to, some to drugs and alcohol, suicide, depression, and so on, um, others to just, uh, unfortunate consequences or age. But the, um, I think the major themes have been, I just simply can't pull myself off a desire to learn and adventure through a particular space, and then once I learn things and as I learn things, I can't seem to help but just tell everybody about it, you know, provided there's somebody there to listen, then I'm eager to share what, what I learn.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett21:14

       It's funny in life how some of the most traumatic things that happen to us... and trauma is such a subjective thing, so what's trauma for me is not for Francis Ngannou, who I've heard his story and, you know, walking out of Africa and jumping over barbed wire and walking across the Sahara Desert in-

   20. AHAndrew Huberman21:28

       His is an amazing story.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett21:29

       I just can't com-

   22. AHAndrew Huberman21:30

       Yeah.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett21:30

       You know, it's like-

   24. AHAndrew Huberman21:31

       I hear he's a very nice guy as well.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett21:32

       He's exceptionally nice.

   26. AHAndrew Huberman21:33

       All right.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett21:33

       He's a wonderful individual. But I'm, I'm really interested in how our traumatic experiences end up, um, dragging us in whatever shape in life.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman21:41

       Mm-hmm.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett21:41

       Dragging us or making us driven, that it's almost two sides of the same coin sometimes. But I just wanted to zoom back in on when you were younger, um, 'cause I was reading about, at sort of 14, 15 years old, you were put into a residential treatment program?

   30. AHAndrew Huberman21:54

       I was. So one day in school, and by the way, I wasn't in school much, and if I was there, I was the kid with the hoodie on and his head on the table, you know, just kinda, like, sleeping or drawing or, um... I was not tuned in to what I should have been tuned into. Um, I was... looking back, I think I was depressed, I was sad, I was confused by the fracture of my family. And listen, um, divorce and family reorganization can take place without all that. It... unfortunately, this was a very complicated situation, um, and maybe it was also puberty-
4. 29:06 – 34:17

   Unlocking High Performance By Loving What You Do

   1. AHAndrew Huberman29:06

      and I always loved punk rock music and going to shows. I have no musical talent, and I- m- I didn't suck at skateboarding, but I wasn't gonna go anywhere with it, but the... what I saw was if you love something and you want to learn as much as possible about it and you love the culture around it, you do have to learn how to sort out the untoward elements. Don't get yourself into trouble. But you take that energy, and I just took it to academics. I remember realizing when I got to graduate school, I found a wonderful lab to work in with a wonderful woman named Barbara Chatman. Unfortunately, she passed away, and at the time, she said, "Listen, I'm gonna have a couple kids, but we have grants. You can..." uh, so she said, "I'm gonna have a couple kids, so I'm gonna be very busy, but we have grants, and here's the lab." She said, "Don't burn the lab down. Don't hurt yourself, but just do experiments. Have fun," and I realized... I was like, "This is the best," and I had so much energy, and I thought, "I never have to go home." So I lived there a lot of the time. Brush my teeth in the sink there, work out at the gym, go (laughs) shower, come back, and...I remember people saying, "You're gonna burn out. What are you doing?" And I'm like, "What are you talking about?" And I would work 80, sometimes 100 hours a week. I was so happy. And I realized, like, this is the exact same feeling, I'm just taking my interests and I'm just pouring myself into it. I did that when I was a graduate student, I did it when I was a post-doc. And actually, when I was a post-doc, I started writing some music, um, articles for Thrasher Magazine. I've always kept some little tie to the skateboarding industry that way, just to make some extra cash. And then when I was a junior professor, I had to really pour myself just into the laboratory, but it still worked out. And I guess the point is that, you know, e- earlier you and I were talking about if you have... and I'm borrowing in this phrase from one of my heroes, Martha Beck, um, who's a wonderful person and teacher with such wisdom, and she calls it a, um, interest-based attention system.

   2. NANarrator30:51

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman30:51

      Some people might call it ADHD, but have you ever noticed that even people... and we know this from the scientific literature, people, kids, adults with ADHD, when they're in, so-called ADHD, when they are doing something they really love, they're like a laser. They're not gonna peel off that. Their attention is like level 11 out of 10. So I took that energy that I've always had in me for fish, for tropical birds, skateboarding, punk rock music, eventually as biology, and I just went, "Okay, here are my chips. I'm all in." All in. But the goal has always been and remains to take what I learn and share it, because the real joy in doing anything, for me anyway, is the ability to share in that knowledge or in that experience. And so, um, those early years were really choppy and really dangerous, you know, frankly. But then when I started a laboratory and decided, "Hey, I'm gonna study human stress. Let's go get VR of stressful circumstances." And my friend Michael Muller, who's a very accomplished portrait photographer in Hollywood, and also takes photos of great white sharks out of cages, he said to me, "Oh, you know, your VR stimulus in your lab..." Um, here's what he told me. He- he's like, "It sucks." He said, "It sucks. It doesn't look real. It's all CGI. It's not scary at all. How about we, you know, go film some great white sharks down in Guadalupe Island and we leave the cage?" And, you know, the- the young Andrew was like, "Okay."

   4. NANarrator32:26

      (laughs)

   5. AHAndrew Huberman32:26

      So got dive certified, went and did it one year, stayed in the cage, went the next year, exited the cage. I'm not recommending people live this way. I'm not, because I had an air failure at depth the second year while I was in the cage. I bailed out, I made it, I lived, but it was super scary, and it was not an experience I want to repeat. And I realized, you know, that's the line. Like, I... Y- you know, the great Oliver Sacks, another hero of mine, British-trained neurologist and- and author. He wrote, uh, was basically what became the script for Awakenings and things like that. Um, there's a quote about him that resonates a lot, and the quote, I think, is, um, you know, uh, an early teacher of his said, "Oliver will go far provided he does not go too far."

   6. NANarrator33:10

      (laughs)

   7. AHAndrew Huberman33:10

      And so, you know, you have to be careful, right? These adventures, leaving school, doing... You can't be haphazard about it. So if you look at the broad arc, it's n- highly non-linear, but there's a common thread through all of it, which is this desire to learn, curiosity, desire to share, intensity. And when I'm involved in any one thing, and I recommend that if people are involved in any one thing, if it's podcasting or sport or video games or math or AI or program, whatever it is, skateboarding, whatever it is, that you can't be haphazard in that world, because forward progress, even if you change things over time, is the consequence of taking that inherent uniqueness that we each have and whatever level of intensity we have and making sure that you, you know, do take steps forward. And there are... What I've learned is, as a child, as an adolescent, and as an adult, there are all these traps along the way. There are all these shoots down to failure and destruction, and you have to be very, very thoughtful. And so you can't be reckless.

5. 34:17 – 38:35

   The Powerful Letter I Sent To My Parents

   1. AHAndrew Huberman34:17

   2. NANarrator34:17

      I'm really compelled as well by the letter you sent your parents.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman34:21

      Yeah. They- they must have been very surprised. That letter was written in a house on a little street in a little town called Isla Vista, ca- on Pasado Street, where I'd essentially been squatting for the summer with my ferret. That was the... I tell you that 'cause that was the picture. I had a ferret. Her name was Iris, that my first girlfriend who had left me by then 'cause she was smart, 'cause I had nothing going on. Um, we were... Me and Iris were living together. I didn't even have a bed in the place. I thought, "Well, why pay rent?" You know, like, no one in... Like, where I had grown up with all these, like- like, riffraff kids... Now, the town... To be clear, the town I grew up in, Palo Alto, now is known as like one of the wealthiest places. At that time, it was, like, kind of upper middle class. But when I say like riffraff kids, I mean, like, the people that congregated around skateboarding in the late '80s, early '90s were the kind of, like, parentless fer- feral types. So I learned a lot. I learned I can sleep mummy-style anywhere, in a car, in a van, in a corner. So, like, why pay rent? That summer, I'd have more money to keep and save if I just, like, got a pillow and a couple blankets and a sleeping bag. And this little place I was living there with my ferret, and I came back from that fight on July 4th, and I thought, "Okay, like, this is it." And I think it was by the end of the weekend, I'd written out this letter that said essentially the following. It said, "Look, I don't know why you guys decided to just fracture everything." I understood why my parents didn't want to be together. They were incompatible. Uh, by the way, they're both happily married now to wonderful people for many years, so the- there's a happy ending there. But at the time, I was very confused. It wasn't that I needed them to be together, but the level of friction in their separation was just like... I felt like a lot of it fell on me. And- and there are reasons for that, but...I basically forgave them. I basically said, "Listen, I forgive you. Um, I realize that I need to take control of my life." I was 18. So I'm a fall baby, so it was like... I was almost 19. "I'm, you know, 18 years old, 19 years old, and I need to do something with my life. And the only way I'm going to do that is by getting super focused and super organized." So I somehow had the- the idea to externalize this, and then I wrote essentially the same letter to myself. And then I just... As my girlfriend, who eventually got back together with me... That was interesting. As soon as I started working hard in school, I'll never forget what she said. We're still friendly. She's married with her own family and they have a- a beautiful family. But every once in a while, I'll hear from her, and I will never forget what she said to me about a year later when I was just absolutely rabid about learning. She said, um, you know, "Y- you've become a monster." And I was like, "A monster?" And she's like, "Yeah, a monster of learning and class and getting up early. (laughs) And you tuck your shirt in." Like, I got into this whole thing of, like, dressing the opposite of everyone else that lived in that little town. It's a little beach town. Everyone wore flip-flops, rode beach cruisers. Uh, at that time, it was like baggy shorts, long T-shirts. And I start tucking in my shirt, a belt. I would get, like, all, like, you know, like, cleaned up, and I'd, and I'd go to class, and people were like, "What is wrong with this guy?" I just wanted to go completely against the grain and just be as disciplined and organized as possible, and I basically was parenting myself. And I think that this is something that I learned how to do early on. I love my parents, but I learned how to mother and father myself, and that was powerful. It was like, as a young guy... Um, but let's face it. You know, at 19, you're young, but you're not that young in the sense that if you screw up, you know, if you, you know... I don't know. I had friends who got into drunk driving stuff. A friend of ours was killed in a drunk driving accident. Um, I wasn't real close with him, but I knew him real well. This guy, Phil Shau, great skateboarder, was killed because someone drove drunk. He wasn't driving drunk. Dead. Bunch of people dead or in jail. So you know, when you're 18 or older, like, the consequences go (whoosh) super-

   4. SBSteven Bartlett38:22

      Yeah. (laughs)

   5. AHAndrew Huberman38:22

      ... super linear, you know, shift, um, where small mistakes can lead to really bad outcomes. So yeah. I just kinda scruffed myself and was like, "Let's do this," and, you know, here I am.

6. 38:35 – 42:07

   What It Takes To Make A Big Life Change

   1. AHAndrew Huberman38:35

   2. SBSteven Bartlett38:35

      I'm so intrigued by that because in that moment, you have, I think, a moment in which a lot of people are searching for in their lives wh- where you have a, you have a decision to do it differently. And I've always wondered what it takes for someone to get there, and is it something that you can accelerate towards? Like, is there... If I am laying on the couch right now and I'm feeling that, is there something I can do to get me there or do I need more pain?

   3. AHAndrew Huberman38:57

      Fear.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett38:58

      Fear.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman38:59

      I'll tell you. Super scary being, like, l- almost 19 years old. Girlfriend left me. I'm not good at anything. I wasn't good at anything. Not skateboarding, couldn't play an instrument. Everyone in that town surfed. Um...

   6. SBSteven Bartlett39:16

      Family?

   7. AHAndrew Huberman39:17

      Family. I mean, I didn't... Yeah. I could've gone to the fire service, and that's a wonderful career path. Um, yeah. I didn't, I didn't have any s- like, marketable skills. I couldn't really do anything, except I knew my capacity to learn. I've always had a very good memory, and I've always enjoyed learning. So I thought, "Okay. School seems like a good option." They tell you what you need to know. In fact, at one point I realized... And I think it was Ryan Holiday that said that, you know, the people who should absolutely not drop out of college are the people who are not doing well, because the real world is a lot harder in many ways. It's a lot harder than college. In college, they tell, they tell you what to do. I remember taking a class in Greek mythology. You go there. If you sit near the front, you pay attention. You try not to pay attention to anyone else. You sit down. They tell you what you need to know. Now, sometimes it's complicated, you can't keep up, but then they have these things called office hours where you can ask.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett40:12

      Hmm.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman40:12

      They have teaching assistants. I mean, the whole thing is set up so that you almost can't fail if you do the required steps. Whereas with skateboarding, it's like, I was always getting broke off, as they say. You know, I was always rolling my left foot. (groans) Snapped again. Ugh. Nothing. Couldn't do it. Um, and there's so much uncertainty in other things. At least with a college education, for me, it was like, "Okay. I can, I can learn this stuff." And then what I found is when there's a desire to learn, and then you learn, and then you do well... And I started doing very well. Um, but there's that one class that I got a B+ in that I'm still pissed off about, (laughs) you know? My first year was this disaster, then it was all A's. And then there's this one class in neural development from Ben Reese, and I got a B+. And as a consequence, when I went to graduate school, I studied neural development. You know, it's the thing that you don't get. The- the place where you make an error that you forever carry that signal. "I need to get better at that." So I think a lot of it is just having the- the knowledge of self, right? What did the oracle say? "Know thyself." The knowledge of self to really think, "Okay, like, what are my strengths? Do I like to learn if I'm interested in something? Do I have a voracious appetite?" Maybe if you're a person with less energy, um, maybe, uh, you're more reflective or you like to journal or you need more time to process. I think turning what often appear as weaknesses into strengths is really possible. And then I do think that we are all each endowed with some unique gift. I really believe in this. Um, it's not mystical for me. I think that we all have some wiring of our brains that's very similar, and we all have some unique wiring based on our genetics and our experience. And I just thought, "I'm going to keep paying attention to what fills my body with energy."

7. 42:07 – 51:20

   Neuroplasticity: How To Change Your Brain At Any Age

   1. AHAndrew Huberman42:07

   2. SBSteven Bartlett42:07

      One of the most inspiring and I think liberating things that I've heard in your work is this idea of neuroplasticity, because if you're... If the brain can physiologically change-... based on what I'm doing. Then it means that who I am now, my identity, that sixt- that 19-year-old who's sleeping in the mummy thing with the ferret, isn't who I always have to be. I can literally change. Um, we've spoken a little bit around, like, what causes the motivation to actually change, but knowing that there's a... my brain will actually change-

   3. AHAndrew Huberman42:34

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett42:34

      ... those two things are really inspiring for me because it means that whatever rut I'm stuck in isn't necessarily a permanent one. Now, you said that the motivation to change comes from fear.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman42:44

      Well, in my case, it took a, a fear circumstance, fear of becoming a permanent failure-

   6. SBSteven Bartlett42:51

      Yeah.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman42:51

      ... to motivate immense change, and, um, uh, that was that circumstance. I s- I do believe, however, that the best work, our most creative and best work comes from a, a love of craft. But sometimes in order to find what you truly love, you have to be scared into setting off on a path to find it.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett43:11

      Mm-hmm.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman43:12

      And, um, yeah. And, and, and that goes for relationships too. Sometimes to find the right relationship, um, or relationships, it could be friendships, romantic relationships, et cetera, one has to be, like, deathly afraid of having to remain in the, the relationship that you're in enough to leave. So neuroplasticity is absolutely real. Um, it actually worked out that my scientific great-grandparents, two guys, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, won the Nobel Prize for no- for neuroplasticity. Now, they weren't the people who discovered it. It had actually been described for centuries. People understood that young kids can learn more easily than a- adults can. But David and Torsten won the Nobel Prize for essentially formalizing the... and discovering the principles of neuroplasticity, how it works. And then some years later, mainly one guy by the name of Mike Merzenich, but there were others that worked with him, discovered that neuroplasticity is actually a feature of the nervous system, the brain, throughout our entire lifespan. The rules change a little bit in terms of how you rewire your brain. But if the question is, can a person change? Can you learn new thing? Can you unlearn certain patterns? Can you overcome traumas at any age? The answer is absolutely, categorically, yes. How? Well, it's very clear that as a child, until about age 25, more or less, just passive experience will shape the brain, for better or worse. After about age 25, and again, these are not strict cutoffs, we can change our brain, but what's required is a marked shift in the neurochemical environment under which something happens. So one of the reasons why any traumatic event will forever be remembered, although, by the way, you can remove some of the emotional load of that, trauma does not have to be traumatic forever, is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature, there's the release of certain what we call neuromodulators, things like epinephrine, adrenaline, and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift in our bro- body and brain. And the nervous system recognizes this as unusual, and as a consequence, in the subsequent days, there's reordering of the connections so that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again. This is why we have what's called one-trial learning. You go to a certain location, something terrible happens there, you will forever associate that location with something terrible. But there are tools, therapy and other tools, that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm. No fear whatsoever. The good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment. This is why when we are very interested and focused on something, two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity, we have to be alert and we have to be focused. We can't learn passively as adults. We can't just play, um, you know, a, a, a lecture about AI and large language models or neuroscience in the room and then it just, the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis. But if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay attention, there's a shift in the neurochemicals associated with that attention, what we call the catecholamines. It's three molecules, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, all which cause an increase in alertness, all which cause an increase in focus, a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field. So, like, cones of attention is one way to think about it. And then it sets in motion a bunch of biological processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night, maybe the next night as well, there's reordering of neural connections so that that knowledge, that new experience is consolidated in your brain. You are forever changed as a consequence of that experience. So when we hear that the brain is constantly changing, everything that we encounter changes our brain, that's not true. Why would the brain change unless it needed to, right? As a child, the brain is basically a template for change. It's, it's trying to understand the environment and make predictions. And so that's true. Neuroplasticity is, is, uh, a cardinal feature of, of childhood and adolescence and the teen years. Just think about the music you listened to when you were a teen. No other music will ever have as much significance, and that's because as a teen, your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators that the amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense. That song meant so much and it's because of the neurochemical milieu it creates in you. But as an adult, it takes a stronger stimulus, as we say. And if you were to fall in love as an adult or see something, a, a painting that just strikes you as just so unbelievable, yes, then you are forever changed. But just going to see a bunch of paintings at the Met doesn't mean that every single one of those paintings is forever stamped into your brain. The, the nervous system is very, um, efficient in that way. It doesn't change unless it has to, and it-... always changes if it needs to in order to keep you safe. This is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear as opposed to, um, just interest in terms of what will shift our brain. But it's nice to know that love, and excitement, and appreciation are very strong stimuli for sh- changing the brain. And, um, you know, I can kind of draw to mind conversations I've had with my good friend, Rick Rubin. I'll get accused of name-dropping, but I'm very fortunate to be close friends with Rick. And Rick always talks about, you know, how when you just see and experience something and you just have this love for it, it changes the brain. He's not a neuroscientist. But in many ways, he's a neuroscientist.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett49:08

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman49:08

       So in any case, you absolutely can change your brain, but you have to pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into your brain. You have to be alert while you do that, and then you absolutely have to go get some rest. Because it's during sleep and during meditative states and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett49:29

       There's a phrase that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And I think as we get older and older, we become stubborn in part because we're very comfortable with the way things are and routine and whatever. But also, I think, we start to believe in this idea that we can't change.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman49:43

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett49:44

       And that in and- in and of itself makes it harder to change. Are you telling me that you can teach an old dog new tricks?

   15. AHAndrew Huberman49:50

       Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up. Um, let's just destroy that myth now. You absolutely can teach an old dog or human new tricks. We know this. In fact, there are studies, incredible studies, that were done down at the Salk Institute in San Diego showing that even in people who are very old, right?

   16. SBSteven Bartlett50:13

       Mm-hmm.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman50:13

       These are people in their 80s and 90s. You know, the human lifespan, probably maximum human lifespan as we understand it is probably about 120 years, more or less, but most people don't make it to 100, but... So 80 or 90 is pretty old.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett50:24

       Mm-hmm.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman50:26

       There's still the addition of new neurons occurring. These people who were unfortunately dying of terminal cancer, I believe, but other causes, agreed to take a- a dye that actually gets incorporated into new neurons. And then after they died, their brains were, um, uh, you know, looked at under the microscope, and there was the addition of new neurons even at late age. Now, I wanna be very clear that most of learning is not the addition of new neurons, at least not in humans. But from everything we know about neuroscience, it's clear that it doesn't matter if you're 90 years old, 70 years old, 50 years old, if you want to learn, you can learn. And that learning occurs through neuroplasticity, which is the reordering of neural connections, strengthening of certain connections, weakening of others, and in some rare cases, the addition of new neurons. But brain change is absolutely real at every stage of life.

8. 51:20 – 1:00:44

   How To Break A Bad Habit For Good

   1. AHAndrew Huberman51:20

   2. SBSteven Bartlett51:20

      I also wonder about habit formation. So you said there that some of the more sort of startling stimuluses like fear are great ways, and- and obsessive sort of deep focus are great ways to start forming these new behavior patterns. But if I wanna break a habit... 'Cause there's habits I've got in my life that I've kind of just told myself are who I am. And accordingly, I've just kind of accepted them.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman51:43

      Well, you've been very successful, so...

   4. SBSteven Bartlett51:45

      Yeah, but even with all... There's all thing... Thank you, but with... there's many things I'd still... I've just accepted it's part of who I am. Some of those come from my childhood. So one of them is that I grew up in a very disorganized home, where like the doors inside my house had holes in them. And our house, there was like some rooms that looked like a hoarder lived there. Just piles and piles of stuff to the roof. Um, house de- demolished in many respects, like the back of the garden was six-foot high. It was- it was a mess. So I've grown up with mess, and I'm therefore still pretty messy today. And it's something I've always wanted to defeat, but I just... Sometimes I tell myself, "Well, it... You know, it was hardwired into me when I was a kid, and it- it is just who I am." And a lot of people go around saying that. They've just-

   5. AHAndrew Huberman52:25

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett52:25

      ... kind of identified with and accepted a certain bad habit as part of who they are.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman52:31

      Well, I will say that some of the most brilliant people I know had terribly messy offices.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett52:37

      Okay.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman52:37

      And they were very internally organized people. It's kind of interesting. They were like a laser beam in their ability to kind of sort through mess. They didn't see the mess. In fact, my postdoc advisor, who also sadly passed away, uh, an incredible human by the name of Ben Barres. Used to walk into his office, and there'd just be piles of stuff everywhere. And I'd say, "Ben, I- I think we should clean your office." And he'd say, "Don't touch anything. Because if you move anything, I won't know where it is." And I said, "How could you possibly know where anything is right now?" And he said, "I know where everything is." And so I think some people also, by growing up in or being in that environment, also maintain an uncanny ability to find things. Whereas I'm the sort of person where I can't do any work until everything is cleared away. And so, um, I see myself as on the weaker side of this ability. Um, but to your question, I think stories are very powerful and very dangerous. Stories are the way that humans organize knowledge, by and large, right? We don't tend to organize things into lists. We have these narratives that we call stories, because from a young age, we learn things not just by hearing them and seeing them, but they are compartmentalized into narratives that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes they have a, uh, kind of a crescendo and then a relaxation. Just think about a childhood song of learning like the ABCs. They don't teach you the ABCs A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, right? They don't do that. What do they do? They give you a song, which is a story. Musicians will understand this inherently. Again, I'm not one, but when I started researching neuroscience of music and the brain, came to understand. So it's A, B, C, D, E, F, G... Right? The change in the inflections...... as one does the alphabet as a young kid, is the story of the alphabet. Now, people might say, "Okay, w- what is he talking about?" What's happening here is you create variation, in terms of batching of ideas, so that something has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So if you think, "Okay, I grew up in this house, and it was really messy, and now I have too much mess." And in order to undo that, there's this kind of, like, hardwired, right? Dangerous words. Hardwired neural circuitry in my brain that I would have to work really, really hard to undo, and I'd have to be scared into being a cleaner person or a, you know, or a more tidier person, whatever it is. That's very dangerous, because there's a beginning to that, a middle to that, and an end to that, and it has immense meaning as a consequence. One of the most powerful things is to understand that neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some component of it. What could the component be? Well, there's all this stuff like the Byron Katie work which says, you know, you- you take something that you believe as true, and you say, "Okay, like, uh, like, I'm an untidy person." And then you counter it. How do I know that? Well, okay, I have this experience. Okay, that's the story. And then you start running counter-narratives. You say, "I'm, uh, I'm, uh, actually a tidy person." And then people say, "Well, this is silly, you're just lying to yourself, right?" Or they say, "Is it always true that you're a messy person?" You start challenging the story from different sides. Now, I believe, as... because I'm a neuroscientist, I'm not, um, in... I'm not a psychologist or in the self-help world, that the brilliance, the kind of unconscious genius of that approach is actually that what one is doing is you're starting to create a new story. You're starting to kind of infuse different questions into the existing neural network. Now, the brain loves questions. Like, the- the brain... since w- we're young kids, we're asking questions. And so if you take an existing story and you start challenging it with questions, you're not saying, "Lie to yourself." You're not suddenly gonna say, "Okay, like, I'm super tidy." You're not g-... 'cause you're not gonna believe that. But if you start challenging why it's that way or, you know, you've been able to change so many other things, why you- would you be able to change that? When you say, "Well, it's just a habit, I can't do it," you say, "Well, what's a habit?" And you start poking and pushing and pushing. What you eventually arrive at is this kind of, "Huh, actually, there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy person, except this kind of fluency of a particular story," and what you've done is you've interrupted the fluency of that story. So then when you go to the behavior of, you know, do you set things down all over the place or do you put them in an orderly fashion? You start interrupting the habit, the fluency of your typical behavior. So I raise this as a- as a way, um, to kind of shine light on e- essentially what I do in my podcast career, which is, you know, we- I- I believe very strongly in the fields of psychology. I think self-help has some wonderful things to offer. We've got ancient wisdom that goes way back. And when you start to look at things through the lens of biology, you start to see that all of these things actually have merit, and they're just different paths to the same outcomes.

   10. NANarrator57:24

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman57:25

       So if you wanted to become a tidy person, I would encourage you, here would be one, let's just say, neuroscience-supported approach, would be to write out one page about what a tidy person you really are. You'll know that's a lie, right? And then to look at it and realize that, in many ways, if you just replace tidy with, you know, messy at any location, it'd probably be the exact same story.

   12. NANarrator57:52

       Mm-hmm.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman57:53

       And so what you're really talking about here is just a default that your nervous system is running, and if you were to just swap the words, would you feel differently or do differently? On the one hand, you'd say, "No, that's kind of trivial," but I bet you the practice of writing it out would forever interrupt your notion of, like, just going to set something down. You'd be like, "Ugh." Now you have something to kind of disrupt the habit, 'cause so much of habit disruption that you look like... Some people say, oh, you know, you flick a, a, you know, rubber band on your wrist or something like that.

   14. NANarrator58:20

       Mm-hmm.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman58:20

       There's nothing special about the rubber band. There's nothing special about the pain on your wrist or the... You put a sticky note. We know sticky notes work for about one day. Why don't sticky notes work? Why don't reminders on the mirror work? Because they don't have enough salience. They're not new. They're not different. The nervous system only changes if something is new and different. So anyway, we could talk a lot about habit formation, but fear works, but so does disrupting the story. How do you disrupt the story? You essentially give the opposite story, and you think, "Well, that's just lying to myself," but neurally, it makes sense, because the nervous system, again, likes to be very economical, likes to do everything with a minimum amount of, uh, energetic expenditure. And to change anything requires attention, and attention is expensive. Attention is expensive. And also, I would say, as I'm kind of rambling all this, things are going very well for you, so you actually don't have any reason to tidy your space.

   16. NANarrator59:15

       I have a PA now and another PA, and I have a cleaner, so it's... Do you know what I mean? The...

   17. AHAndrew Huberman59:19

       Yeah, you outsource it.

   18. NANarrator59:20

       Yeah.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman59:20

       Great. Well, there is incentive for all the folks that feel like they're not, um, tidy enough. You have two choices. You can either start to be tidy now, or you can be successful enough that you can hire some assistants. And I actually think a- I say this in- w- in all seriousness. I think that one has to ask, like, "Where is my attention and neural real estate best devoted?" I think about this every day. I- I mean, we are living in a war of attention. I wake up in the morning, and I can be a consumer or a creator. If I reach for my phone, I'm a consumer.

   20. NANarrator59:52

       Mm.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman59:52

       If I go to my journal, I'm a creator. My advice to anyone who wants to be successful in any domain is to do things away from where you broadcast and then take it to that broadcast. I mean, take your real life to Instagram and be very cautious about taking Instagram to your real life.

   22. NANarrator1:00:13

       Mm-hmm.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:14

       Does that make sense?

   24. NANarrator1:00:14

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:14

       If you look at successful people, they're doing things away from the platforms and putting them on the platforms.

   26. NANarrator1:00:19

       Yeah.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:19

       So I have to be very careful. Then I go into the kitchen. Obviously, I talk to people in my home. Um, but...... if I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call, it's like, "Is this call really about moving the needle forward, or is this just kind of like passive use of, of attention?" We have to be so careful nowadays. So, so careful. It's really challenging.

   28. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:43

       On that

9. 1:00:44 – 1:08:06

   Does Manifesting Actually Work?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:44

      point of focus and attention, and thinking back to when you were 19 years old, one of the things people ask me a lot, and I guess it's a bit of a debate in the self-help world, is from a neuroscience perspective, is manifestation and this idea of, like, visualization, visualizing who I want to become and, you know, where I'm going, is there any neuroscience to support that that works?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:03

      There is. Um, and I'm not trying to be negative, but I'll start with the negative counter-example for which there is evidence and it's less often discussed. So there's a wonderful researcher at New York University by the name of Emily Balcetis who talks about how for goal-setting and habit formation, fear-setting is often one of the best tools. You spend some time, maybe five minutes or so, thinking about all the terrible things that are going to happen if you don't actually accomplish your goals. Nobody likes to do this, but guess what? It turns out to be pretty darn effective.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:38

      Really?

   4. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:39

      I know. It's really frustrating that this is the case. But again, you know, that has a lot to do with the way that the human brain is, is wired and, and likes to rewire itself. Now, that said, it is important to envision goals. Visualizing goals in detail, um, writing them out, in some cases talking about them, although we can discuss that, um, why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance, um, can be very beneficial, because it's hard to conceive something that you can't imagine. But I think when people hear that visualizing goals or visualizing outcomes is critical, we sometimes forget that we don't always know what the end goal is. Sometimes we have to break this up into milestones. This is where I think, uh, Rick Rubin, even though he's not a formally trained scientist, um, has drawn a lot of interest for his work on creativity. Which is, you know, Rick is about largely, you know, sensing the kind of energetic pull of an idea and being able to explore that without too much, uh, self-judgment or filtering or thinking about how it's going to be received. In other words, that the metamorphosis that leads to great music, great poetry, great scientific discovery, podcasts, finance, companies that one is building, et cetera, is a series of iterations that occur on the time course of about a day, you know. And so we can't always imagine the end or the end product as the outcome. This is why I said university is easy compared to other goals, because the end is a degree.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:06

      Mm-hmm.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:07

      Right? Is that you pick up your diploma. Like, whereas, in other areas, it's far more mysterious often. Now, visualization, I think, can be very powerful, but perhaps what's more powerful is to learn the brain and body state that best serves the work you're going to do. So for instance, if I'm going to do some writing, and right now I'm working on a book, it's largely done but I'm writing some bonus chapters, unless I'm hyper-motivated to do that when I sit down, and hyper-focused, I'll spend two, three minutes just closing my eyes, focusing on my breathing. It's meditation of sorts, but what I tell myself is, "If I can't focus on my breathing for two or three minutes, how in the world am I gonna focus on writing for two or three hours?" That sort of thing. The other thing that I wanna make sure I don't forget is, I mentioned that telling people your goals oftentimes can be useful if it stimulates a little bit of fear, like you have some accountability, but we also know that because of the affiliative nature of people, in particular, people that support us, there is this danger. Uh, a friend of mine who's a cardiologist at UCSF taught me this. He said, "You know, be careful who you tell that you're going to start a podcast or write a book, because oftentimes, the response will be, 'Oh yeah, that's great. You absolutely should write a book or you should do a podcast,"" and people get a sort of reward from telling people about it, and then they never actually go do it. Whereas I can cite numerous examples of where people were told, "You're never gonna be able to do that. You're never gonna be able to be successful in that." And my goodness, those people dig their heels and they show that they can do it. Now, I get into debates about this with Rick from time to time, it's a, you know, it's unclear to me whether or not the energy around trying to prove oneself is detrimental to the outcome, and I sense it is, right? This kind of grinding against like, "I'll take that and take that," as opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft. I think about the way I felt about aquaria and fish as a kid, and it's just like pure delight. That's the word that comes to mind. Just delight. I want to learn more about it, I want to do it and tell people about it. That's the wonderful romantic picture of effort and progress and outcomes, but in reality, you probably need both. You need to be able to access some fear and sense of competition, but also delight in craft. You know, like Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One, as I recall, defines competition as anti-creativity in many ways, because y- through competition, you are, by definition, changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else or something else. And so you're morphing your creation in order to kind of overcome something.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:56

      Mm-hmm.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:56

      Whereas, if you're just purely thinking about something you want to grow and cultivate, there are none of those barriers. But in the worlds that I've been in, science, to a lesser extent, podcasting, and that's a wonderful feature of podcasting, but certainly in science, it is hyper-competitive, right? Two laboratories working on similar things, people are concerned that if one publishes first, the other will not be able to publish, certainly not in as high quality a journal, and jobs are created through these journal publications. Podcasting is actually a wonderful field, um, because...Let's say, you and I have the same guest on our podcast, all it does is raise it in the algorithm.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:35

      Yeah. (laughs)

   10. AHAndrew Huberman1:06:35

       It's not like... You know, and, and it's such a... And so I think there's a lot of, um, collegiality and camaraderie in the podcast field that, um, exists in little pockets in science. But, um, science is a brutally competitive field, which doesn't mean it's anti-creative, but in a dream world where there's infinite amount of money for scientific research, because that would better humanity-

   11. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:00

       Mm-hmm.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:00

       ... in my, in my view, um, and people didn't have to be competitive about grant dollars or publication, I think we would make far more progress as a species. So competition fosters outcomes. This is clear in markets, it's clear in a lot of domains. But pure love and delight of craft and creativity, that's definitely the way to go. But in most endeavors, you got to have both. If sitting next to someone in class and realizing, "Okay..." Because this was me back when I'm thinking, "Okay, I- I love this topic, but, gosh, I want that top mark. I want that top mark on the distribution." Like, that's... And, and, like, she and he are really, really good, and I'm gonna... We're gonna study together, but, my God, when it comes time for that exam, like, I'm going for it. A little bit of competition can, can bring out our, our best, I think-

   13. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:46

       Mm-hmm.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:46

       Um, certainly in sport. But when it comes to creative endeavors that are really about our own unique contribution... I mean, you could tell me more about this in business because you're, you're... I don't... You know-

   15. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:55

       Mm-hmm.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:56

       ... I have a company, but I'm not a businessperson. But I, I always feel like competition can bring out more energy, but not more creativity.

10. 1:08:06 – 1:14:19

    Can Competition Be Destructive To Your Growth?

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:06

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:06

       Yeah, and I think a big point I was thinking as you were talking was just about how much you let that new energy that comes from competition distract you.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:13

       Mm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:13

       And this... It's the distraction that can destroy you. Because if Apple are going this way and they're building this product without the keyboard and without the stylus, and that's... They've got their vision, and they see Samsung doing over there, something over there, and if they, if they divert from their own mission and their own first principles towards what someone else are doing, then that's when it can become destructive. But if it means that they see Samsung doing something and they speed up and invest more in their vision, then it's okay. I think that's... And it is this dichotomy between competition does drive better outcomes for everybody that's competing, but at the same time, um, yeah, it can harm you if it distracts you in a fundamental way. That's kind of how I think about it.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:50

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:50

       Even with podcasting, like, you know, um, as you were saying, there's so many podcasters doing so many amazing things. Like, I, I look at your podcast and I learn from it, but I know, in my core, and we all know, I'm never going to be Andrew Huberman.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:03

       And I'll never be you.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:04

       And I'll never be a Joe Rogan.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:05

       Yeah.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:05

        I'll never be a Lex.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:06

        And I admire your podcast very much, and Joe's and Lex's. I think it's... We each have our own unique style-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:11

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:11

        ... that we bring to it. Chris Williamson.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:13

        Yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:13

        You know? Um, it's been a lot of fun to see the unique flavors of podcasts crop up-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:22

        Yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:22

        ... and how similar that is to the world I grew up in, in skateboarding, the observations from the music industry that I saw firsthand or that, you know, Rick has passed along. You know, in the end, I think any creative endeavor is really about... And here, I don't want to sound mysterious or woo, it's about the energy that we bring. It's about taking our life history and bringing it to that thing in whatever form. We don't even need to tell people our life history. Taking our unique wiring and bringing it to that thing. And we can, again, look at things through the lens of biology and say, "Well, what are we talking, talking about when we're talking about energy? What is this energy thing that people are talking about?" Um, and I think it largely boils down to these catecholamines, the dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine cocktail that is setting the brain into a mode of attention, of motivation. We now know dopamine is more about motivation to seek rewards as opposed to feeling of pleasure or reward. There's a lot to be said about that. And keep in mind that these three neurochemicals, dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, have been the neurochemical cocktail by which humans and other mammals have set and pursued goals for hundreds of thousands of years. So we don't have like a unique system, a unique neurochemical system for seeking out of mates, versus food, versus creating shelter, versus creating technology and whole societies. And it's not just these three neurochemicals. Certainly, there are other things involved. Acetylcholine and, you know, a bunch of other things. Neuroplasticity, for that matter. But it's clearly the case that the currency that the brain has set around getting us into forward center of mass, as I say, to like envision something, explore. "Nope, not down there. This way. Ah, (sniffs) there's a scent here." And trade out an actual scent for, you know, "Oh, there's something interesting here. There's someone interesting here." And like exploring that... "No, that's a dead path too. Cul-de-sac. Turn around, go. Oh, here." And then connecting these nodes of progress. What's progress? "Ah, there's kind of another surge of these catecholamines which sets us in forward center of mass." You know, I don't want to oversimplify the biology, but when we talk about energy, for instance, taking time to rest at night, sleep, taking time to maybe meditate a few minutes or do this practice that I'm a huge fan of, non-sleep deep rest, which is kind of a body scan, deep relaxation, long exhales. It's a practice very similar to an ancient practice called Yoga Nidra, which has been practiced for thousands of years. It's a kind of pseudo sleep. And we know from a really nice study that NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, AKA Yoga Nidra, can increase the baseline levels of dopamine in a brain area called the basal ganglia, which is for action generation and also withholding action by about 60% from baseline. Just a, a short period of doing this practice can re... kind of re-up dopamine levels to a considerable extent. It's a remarkable study and there are others like it. So what does that mean? Well, it means that in rest, we build up this capacity to be forward center of mass when we-... emerge from rest. That's why I think we have to sleep every 24 hours. This is why practices where we deliberately calm ourselves and still ourselves allow us to be more forward center of mass mentally and physically afterwards. It's kind of a duh when we hear it. We kind of go, "Oh, duh, of course. Rest, action, rest, action." But there's a lot more to it. If you start exploring the layers, you start realizing that excitement for things, um, versus burnout. What's burnout? It's just trying to be forward center of mass for too long. It's, you know, misuse of our dopamine circuitry. It's, you know, ignoring the fact that these catecholamines and dopamine in particular, they are not infinite in their availability, right? There's a reservoir of them that can be depleted, but it can be replenished as well. And one of the best analogies for this, um, was actually explained to me by a guy named Dr. Kyle Gillett. He does some online work as a, as a, um, public-facing physician, endocrinology in particular. And he said, "With dopamine, it's kind of like a wave pool. You have this reservoir that can allow you to pursue things or scroll the internet or build businesses, whatever it is. If you are really forward center of mass very intensely, you start generating these waves. And if you get big waves of dopamine and they crash out of the pool, you start depleting the reservoir." So when I think about drugs of abuse like cocaine, which ha- leads to huge surges in dopamine, or amphetamines, huge surges in dopamine. What do we know about huge surges in dopamine? Well, after those huge surges, you drop below b- your initial baseline to a state in which the same thing doesn't feel as good anymore. You need so much more energy to get the same output.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:18

        That's what this

11. 1:14:19 – 1:20:13

    Understanding The Dopamine Loops In The Brain

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:19

       is, right?

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:19

       That's what this is. So-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:20

       I'll put this on the screen for anyone.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:21

       Yeah, so my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Anna Lembke, who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic and wrote the wonderful book, Dopamine Nation, described this best. You know, it's sort of like a seesaw, but what... whereby you get a big peak in dopamine-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:37

       Mm-hmm.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:14:37

       ... let's say from a drug of abuse like cocaine. People on cocaine, it's all about ideas and what's next. They're not like, "Hey, let's just kick back." It's all about what's... they... In fact, they have a million ideas per second. Most of them are terrible ideas, but they're very forward center of mass motivated, and then when the drug wears off, they feel very low and very depressed. The dopamine is actually depleted below baseline. People that work excessively, right? We all have different abilities to work out. But people that work excessively and abuse stimulants in order to do that achieve these peaks.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:08

       Is that like... So what would be the an- an everyday example of that, working excessively? Do you mean like a pre-workout or something? Or do you mean-

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:15

       Yeah, I'm not anti pre-workout.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:17

       Yeah.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:17

        Listen, I love to be well-rested, hydrated, have a nice pre-workout drink, maybe even a little shot of espresso, listen to some music, and have an incredible leg day workout. It's an amazing feeling, right? But if you do that every single time, you start stacking all these catecholamine release inducing drugs, okay? So you're getting adrenaline. You're getting epinephrine, which is adrenaline. Excuse me, you're getting adrenaline. You're getting noradrenaline, also called norepinephrine. You're getting dopamine release. You're highly motivated. You're in that state that everyone is seeking, and you try and do that seven days a week, you're not gonna do it. And then you wonder why in the afternoon you're just completely cooked and you can't do any cognitive work. Well, your dopamine and other things have crashed below baseline. So I think it's important to understand that being, as I'm calling it, forward center of mass, like really kind of m- motivated in pursuing goals is great, but most of the time we're probably best off just coming off the gas pedal just a little bit to maintain that ability to continue to be forward center of mass. The same thing is true for stress. We hear stress is bad. Well, stress is bad, but it also sharpens your ability to learn. It creates energy. It actually boosts your immune system in the short term. I say tolerate as much stress as you can, provided you still behave like a kind person, right? Don't say or do things that are unkind, and make sure that you still get great sleep at night. Most people stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, run around, and then they can't sleep at night, and then the next day they're depleted. But a little bit of stress is healthy. Life is stress. Things are stressful. But again, you're going to be in your best state of mind if you're calm and alert. Alert and calm is the, is the magic recipe, and the ability to sleep at night. If you want to take a bunch of pre-workout and you want to listen to some loud music and have a great crush-it workout, great. But you should probably also be able to train without all of that. If you're somebody who loves new goals and you, you know, you're very excited about travel and this and that, great, but do you have to layer in 50 things? And then you're sitting around at home and you're wondering why you're so bored when you're back home and why life is so depressing, and you need more travel, more stimulation? In every domain of life, we see whether or not it's food or exercise or stimulants or sex or media, if you push things to the max, you're going to feel depleted and under-stimulated afterwards. And this trough below baseline, as Anna Lembke taught us with Dopamine Nation, that trough is a state that can last a long time, and it's pro- how long? It's proportional to how high that peak in dopamine was. Not how long, but how high that peak in dopamine was. And when you're in that trough, that dopamine depleted state, typically what people do is they try and go out or access things that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry, and all it does is drive them further and further and longer and longer into that trough. What's needed is a period of waiting, of non-indulgence in any of these excesses that allows them to return to baseline. We know this from-... drugs of abuse, it takes more and more drug to try and get what turns out to be less and less of a high. Most all addiction, most all compulsive behavior can be cured, essentially, through a period of abstinence lasting somewhere between 30 and 60 days, which to somebody who's highly motivated to seek that thing or do that thing, sounds like a- an absolute horror. But that is highly effective. So for some people, it's work and stimulants, you know, a number of people taking Adderall and work, work, work, work, work. I hear from these people all the time, typically they are from the tech and finance world, and they're like, "Why am I burnt out?" Well, you've been blasting these catecholamine-regulated circuits for years, you need to just accept you're gonna feel a little low for a week, then you're gonna feel a little less low, then you're gonna come back to baseline, and then, and only then, can you really get back into, like, full forward center of mass. But at that point, you can introduce... You know, I- I do think there is a clinical use case for certain ADHD meds, which are amphetamine. There are certain people that need those meds. Other people have driven themselves into this dopamine trough, and so they're seeking out anything and everything to get them out of that trough when really what they need to do is stay away from all that stuff and just wait. Just wait. (laughs)

Episode duration: 4:01:56