Dr. Dacher Keltner on Huberman Lab: Why awe walks ease pain

Dr. Dacher Keltner 0:00 Awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day reduce long COVID symptoms. It's good news, right? And, and there's so much science on it that I just f- now I think medical doctors are starting to think like, "I'm going to prescribe nature. I'll prescribe music through awe," right, um, as a mechanism.

Andrew Huberman 0:27 [on-hold music] Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Dacher Keltner. Dr. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Dacher is an expert in the science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding. Today, we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions, including the role of teasing in social bonding, the role of embarrassment in social bonding, and his fascinating work on awe and the things that lead to awe. As he describes, awe is not elusive. It happens when we shift our perception from a very small scale to a very large scale or back again, such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista. Today, you'll understand what all of that really means, and more importantly, how you can create this incredible thing that we call awe in everyday life. We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding in groups and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds. So today is a very practical as well as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change the way that you think about your life every day and think about opportunities for awe every day. As you'll soon see, Dacher Keltner is a truly special scientist, known for his incredible rigor and creativity in the study of emotions, but also continually

Andrew Huberman 1:55 offering you, the public, ways to be and feel genuinely better and to get more out of life. It was a true honor and pleasure to host him. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. Dr. Dacher Keltner, welcome.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:25 Good to be with you, Andrew.

Andrew Huberman 2:27 Awe.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:27 [chuckles] Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:29 We all intuitively know what it is, and yet we also don't know how to articulate it.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:35 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:35 I want to say the words overwhelmed, excited. I get the physical sensation of a lift.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:42 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:42 I don't think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:45 No. That's interesting

Andrew Huberman 2:45 ... into a turtle position.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:46 That's right.

Andrew Huberman 2:47 Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that. But what got you into awe?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:52 Yeah. And I, and I love the word lift. That's really interesting. Um, yeah, I was, uh, a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in, you know, and, and that field in the, you know, nineties and early 2000s was, uh, really focused on negative emotions, you know. And, and you know the science, right? Anger, fear, fight or flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol, uh, disgust, you know, Paul Rozin and John Hajt. Um, and thinking about emotions from that lens and, and it, as a young scientist, uh, and given the powerful tools of emotion science of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena, uh, it didn't make contact with my life and my own experience. You know, I was raised as a wild child in the late sixties in Laurel Canyon and, you know, it was like music and social change and protest and, uh, you know, and beauty. And I was raised by a dad who's a visual artist, and my mom taught romanticism and Virginia Woolf and awe and the mind and, and I was like, "Wow, there's all this stuff that our science, my science can't speak to, music and visual patterns and dance and collective movement, and, you know, someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry," you know. And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman, I was like, you know, "What should I do with my career?" And he's like, "Study awe," you know. And so that got me going.

Andrew Huberman 4:31 If we could, l- maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment. You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 4:38 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 4:38 ... sees these faces of-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 4:40 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 4:40 ... disgust, of, of pleasure. Uh, Darwin talked about this.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 4:43 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 4:44 Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 4:48 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 4:48 ... where they'll show a baby like, you know, recoiling from-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 4:51 Right

Andrew Huberman 4:51 ... something or, you know, wide-eyed and leaning in. You know, there's always seems to be a motor component to this that maybe isn't as captured in those two-dimensional photographs. But-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 4:59 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 4:59 ... what's the story about sort of hardwired facial emotions, and w- what are the revisions to that story that I, I'm probably not aware of?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 5:09 Yeah. Thank you for asking that. Um, you know, I've spent thirty years working on that very problem. Um, Paul Ekman came in and, you know, as, as you've suggested, right, he did this revolutionary work in New Guinea, you know, showed photos of six emotions, static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile. They kind of interpreted the faces like you or I would, uh, naming it, using the right words to describe those faces. And that, you know, and this is how science occasionally works, which is just by accident, that became the field. And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal are they in different cultures. Uh, Ekman really posited sort of a strong universality that's been contested by Jim Russell, Lee- Lisa Feldman Barrett, and others. Um, but since thenThere are controversies around how wire, hardwired they are. Do they occur reliably in a child's development? Yes and no. You know, young children show disgust expressions, uh, like social mammals do. They wince at bad smells just like you or I would. Uh, anger's a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally. But then our lab and several labs around the world, you know, Jess Tracy at UB, British Columbia, Disa Sauter, uh, and I wanna talk about this computational work, started to expand, uh, the vocabulary of faces. And now we-- there's a lot of data that suggests there are twenty different facial expressions: laughter, love, compassion, awe, you know, whoa, uh, embarrassment, shame, pain, uh, you know. And that, uh, in some sense has broadened the taxonomy of emotions. We used to think of six, now there are probably twenty distinct states in the mind, and that's where the field is heading, is to really start to think about physiological patterns, brain patterns of, of these distinct states. And, and I'll tell you, um, the hardwiring question, I mean, it's hard science to do, right? Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries, getting their emotional expressions, and then making sense of them. Uh, it used to take one hour to code the facial muscle movements of o- of one minute, right? So this is slow science, and I would really encourage listeners, uh, and viewers to go to alancowan.com. And I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowan, who, you know, [laughs] he's a computational genius, and he looked at our old science and said, "We can use AI to code the face." And he did it with Google engineers. He coded a hundred and forty-four... uh, two million videos from a hundred and forty-four

Dr. Dacher Keltner 8:11 cultures and sixteen facial expressions. Uh, seventy-five percent overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks, concentration on a test, you know, laugh at friends. So right now I would say fifty to sixty percent is hardwired as part of who we are in our evolutionary history, and then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways.

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Dr. Dacher Keltner 11:32 I'm gonna ask a question that may or may not be possible to answer.

Andrew Huberman 11:37 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Dacher Keltner 11:37 But if anyone could, it would be you. And it's not a test. Here's w- what I'm thinking. The relationship between emotions and what we call motor patterns, movement-

Andrew Huberman 11:47 Yeah

Dr. Dacher Keltner 11:47 ... is obviously very close, right? Disgust or recoil.

Andrew Huberman 11:50 Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 11:51 Um, we'll explore awe, um, anger, et cetera. And then there's this other node, which is language, right? So we have like emotions, motor, language.

Andrew Huberman 12:02 Right.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 12:03 Obviously, those can't be dissociated.

Andrew Huberman 12:05 Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 12:05 But can we imagine somebody, let's just like hypothetical person who can

Andrew Huberman 12:12 Keep their body very still while they're angry and be very articulate. That includes not moving their hands. We'd probably think perhaps that person's, like, sociopathic, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 12:24 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 12:24 ... that's not the picture I'm trying to paint. Then on the other extreme, you can imagine somebody who, um, is very angry and is gesticulating a lot and moving we... Like, we can immediately say, "Yeah, that make, that makes sense." And we could do this for any emotion.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 12:40 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 12:40 Right? So how should we think about emotion as an experience and how it's expressed along these three axes-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 12:48 Right

Andrew Huberman 12:48 ... right? Which is motor, language, and then the emotion itself.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 12:53 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 12:53 I feel like without, um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 12:55 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 12:55 ... conceptualizing that, I, as a true novice of this, right? This isn't my area of-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 13:00 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 13:01 ... of, of understanding or expertise. I can't really understand what an emotion is. But if I c- understand how those are linked, may- maybe that's a, a portal into that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 13:11 Yeah, no, I, I mean, it's a profound question, Andrew, and, and it's central to our field, which is, you know, the... And, and I appreciate it coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species and, and, and there are these motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world. When you soothe a child that's crying, right, you're gonna bring it in close and caress and touch and have emotion. When you're, you know, when you're, uh, fighting a rival or when you're, you see rotten food, you're gonna... That motor pattern will be there. You know, and that's part of our research, that seventy-five percent of that is this motor pattern of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional events of life. And then we have this massively complicated, you know, conceptual system that puts words to experience, and that's mainly what we study in psychological science is just, "Oh, I'm feeling angry or ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion." And we know, and, and your question points to this, like, very often they're disconnected, right? The motor pattern and the language we use and how I would interpret it in another person. Uh, on balance, they correlate point two, so they're just weakly. They're kinda these streams of behavior that pa- are just part of who we are, right? Our motor patterns and language. And there are a lot of ways to think about it. You could think about cultures that value being calm, like a lot of East Asian cultures. Be calm. Don't disrupt things. Don't blurt out. Don't protest, right? And, and you'll see this disconnect. Um, you could think about certain people who, they just are more authentic, and their motor patterns come out in expressions, and they will tell you how they feel. Uh, so it's a central problem that we grapple with. And then I love your, your third part of this equation of emotion science, which is the feeling, the emotion. Michael Pollan is right, you know, this new book on consciousness, the conscious feeling of something. We think we can get it to it with words. I don't think so.

Andrew Huberman 15:26 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 15:27 You probably wouldn't either, right? S- studying the other species you've studied, right? Uh, it's some weird mixture of everything that's happening in your body.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 15:36 And ironically, f- the emotion or the feeling is still one of the uncharted territories [chuckles] of our field is why, as these complicated motor patterns take, unfold and words are unfolding and images and memories and visual things that you study, how does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe? And we barely know. You know, we just, we don't know.

Andrew Huberman 16:03 Every once in a while, I'll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 16:08 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 16:08 Like the chakras or something.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 16:10 Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 16:11 And it's kind of interesting, right? I mean-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 16:13 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 16:13 ... even, even if just if one looks at it just purely as a Western scientist, this idea that maybe there's a confluence of, of nerves and of vasculature and stuff that makes you feel kinda, like, rooted at, like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 16:25 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 16:26 ... and, and calm, right? Versus, like, up in your head.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 16:30 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 16:30 Uh, I've been, um, watching this really interesting Instagram channel. It's a woman who does voices for cartoons.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 16:37 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 16:37 And she has the most incredible understanding of voice. And she's commenting a lot of the time on people in shows that I don't watch, but they have little excerpts of where, like, I guess there's this doctor on the, this... It's like an ER type show. It's like a revisiting of the, the show ER. But she talks about how as he's matured from season to season in his role on the show, and he's mentoring, how she literally talks about how, um, his larynx and pharynx are, how he's controlling those differently as he matures. And then when he has a breakdown, how the, the voice moves further up into his head and what, uh, what that's about. And I, and so I was thinking about this. I'm like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 17:16 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 17:16 ... you know, here's somebody that's a very unique, uh, you know, window into all of this. But we sort of know this intuitively. Like, when we're excited, like, there's this kinda rising from the bottom, and when we're relaxed, everything just kinda sinks down to a, the diaphragmatic breathing and things.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 17:32 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 17:33 As a scientist who studies emotion, how do you sort of decide what, what, uh, which lens to look at things through? Um, because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about might sound a little esoteric, but it's actually the stuff that's easiest to measure.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 17:46 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 17:47 Presumably, you can quantitatively measure, like, breaths per minute when somebody's looking at an awe-inspiring image versus, like, a trivial image.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 17:56 I love your reference to chakras and, you know, the older I get, uh, you know, I've been doing emotion science for thirty-four years or -five years. It's good to think about the other traditions. You know, we wouldn't have thought about the breath, the power of the breath, uh, without the contemplative meditation traditions that you've in part tested and Richie Davidson and others. And lo and behold, the breathDeep exhalation activates the vagus nerve, calms us down. That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest, which kind of sounds like the heart chakra and all the speculation around how your soul is in your heart. Well, there's a neurophysiological correlate of that. Uh, I love the paintings of Alex Gray, the psychedelic artist. Like, if you want an image of what our neurophysiology is as it synchronizes in love, you could... It's pretty close or it's interesting, right?

Andrew Huberman 18:50 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 18:51 So it's good to find inspiration in that. One of the great things about the science of emotion, and, and I brought these tools into the study of awe, you know, which is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion. You know, you can measure it with facial muscles and gaze patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and, you know, different measures of vagal tone, uh, and immune system activation and activation in the gut, and of course, brain activation and the voice, which is one of my favorite modalities. I learned this in some sense from Darwin. Darwin's expression of emotion in man and animals is in my view, and we're just publishing a paper on this, uh, on everything that he said about human emotion. Fifty-three emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior. I wrote it with, uh, Darwin scholar Frank Sulloway, who knows everything about Darwin. And I choose how to study an emotion based on what's, what's happening out in our lives, in our... the phenomena out there, right?

Andrew Huberman 19:56 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 19:56 So if you're studying awe, you should get people around big trees or in musical concerts or in museums, right? Uh, if you're-- I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty, and I'm like, "I gotta study young men teasing each other," 'cause we embarrass each other, you know, intentionally.

Andrew Huberman 20:15 Oh my goodness. We have to hear about that-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:16 Yeah. So-

Andrew Huberman 20:17 ... that, that work again.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:18 You know. [chuckles]

Andrew Huberman 20:18 It's become very relevant nowadays because of the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:20 Yes, it has

Andrew Huberman 20:20 ... because of the, uh, I'll just call it what it is. It's not dreaded. It's the dreadful manosphere-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:27 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 20:27 ... you know, which people use very broadly, but I think now it's being, you know, uh, allocated to the, the, the worst of the worst. But then there is this phenomenon among males where they'll rib each other and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:38 Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman 20:38 ... you know, and, and there's a, there's a healthy version-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:40 Totally

Andrew Huberman 20:41 ... of males interacting too.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:42 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 20:42 Right? You know.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:43 No.

Andrew Huberman 20:43 Uh, so we'll get back to that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:45 I base it on what's the phenomenon of interest, right?

Andrew Huberman 20:48 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 20:49 That, that speaks to humanity, and then what are our best measures that we can go after it?

Andrew Huberman 20:54 These days, if you want to measure awe, what's your favorite awe stimulus?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 21:00 First stop, and thank you a- for asking about measurement. Like, it's interesting, like, people are like, "Oh, you can't study awe. You, you know, you don't know how to measure it. It's, it's ineffable, it's mysterious, it's spiritual." We can measure awe really well, you know, the vocalization, whoa, you know, the facial expression, uh, activation part- parts of the brain are deactivated, uh, vagal tone. The goosebumps is a good r- uh, part of a- the awe response. As we started to study awe, we did two things, and one is typical west, you know, science, which is get your most cool awe videos, show them to people, you know, and I had some mis- missteps in this science. I had a woman who was an honor student at Berkeley who was coming back from Burning Man, and you know, she's like, "I'm gonna show engineers fractal imagery," and you know, and the engineers are like, "Who is this woman?" And [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 21:57 [laughs] I, I mean, there is the, the p- I've never been to Burning Man, but there's the, the post-Burning Man glow that people come back with that is, for understandable reasons, hard for most people to enter with them.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 22:06 Right.

Andrew Huberman 22:06 It's like a kid coming back from summer camp.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 22:08 There's great visual imagery. You know, BBC Earth is awesome.

Andrew Huberman 22:11 Mm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 22:11 And it's, it, uh, makes people feel awe. Slow motion guys, I don't know if you know these guys. They film wild things in slow motion, like, you know, dropping a wine glass, and it's this spectacular photography and just, you know, you're like... So it opens you up to-

Andrew Huberman 22:29 Cool. We'll put a link to that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 22:30 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:31 I l- I love super slow-mo.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 22:32 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 22:32 Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 22:33 Um, and that fits our definition, which is, like, you don't understand what's happening. It's vast. It's mysterious. But what I'm really proud of, Andrew, is the work we did out in the field, right? So one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got your master's degree at and headed into neuroscience was, uh, in our paleontology museum. There's a replica of a T-rex skeleton. When I was five years old and, and I learned about dinosaurs, it changed my life. It was just in the LA Natural History Museum. Like, wow. So we studied people standing near the T-rex skeleton, and they became expansive and collective. We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees. We studied people at Yosemite. You know, Yang Bai, a student in my lab, stopped hundreds of [laughs] travelers from all over the world right when you see Yosemite. And she said, "How do you feel about yourself right now?" And they're like, "I feel small and quiet, but part of something really large," right? Uh, subsequent to that, there are scientists who are studying mosh pits at concerts and, you know, [laughs] surfers and, you know, rock cli-- I mean, it's, you know, backpackers and, you know. We studied... One of my favorite studies later with Stacy Bayer, who's a veteran who ran the... Who's an amazing human being, an awe pioneer. We studied people rafting down the American River, you know, veterans just like, "Whoa." We've studied people in art museums, Carnegie Hall, you know. So it's, it, you know, one of the joys is when science,

Dr. Dacher Keltner 24:11 you know, just in the spirit of your questions, it's like, "Well, what should I really do here?" Right? I could stay in the lab, but it's like, no, you know, we gotta go do stuff, you know, that, that, uh... My dream study was to, like, have a participant come inAnd, and engage a conversation, the other participant is Shaquille O'Neal, right? And it's like seven foot two, three hundred and fifty pounds. You'd be like, "Whoa," but couldn't do that. So, uh, so there... It's been fun. It's been a wild ride.

Andrew Huberman 24:37 And so many thoughts. Uh, first one, um, I'm lucky I didn't rotate through your lab because I, uh, would have never become a neuroscientist, but I'm unlucky-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 24:45 We're glad you, you missed that opportunity.

Andrew Huberman 24:47 But I'm, but I'm unlucky because it would have been so much fun to... 'Cause I-- while I loved the, the wet lab, as they call it, getting into these experiments would just be incredible. Couple things. Uh, the Shaquille O'Neal thing. I-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:01 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:01 Um, you know, I think we're all moved by these, uh, I guess they used to call them Make a Wish Foundation things, where a kid who sadly is dying gets some last wish, and it's a tragic circumstance, but then you get to observe these kids and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:15 Oh, man

Andrew Huberman 25:15 ... most importantly, they get to experience something that they never could have imagined happening. Like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:20 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:20 Like a Shaquille O'Neal walking in.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:22 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:22 I feel like that's probably happened or something.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:24 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:24 And I think what we're witnessing in those moments has to be awe. Like, they can't believe that this human or this event, whatever it is that they, they wish for, is happening there. And so it's sort of layers upon layers of... There's like a grief component for those of us watching.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:36 Well put.

Andrew Huberman 25:37 But a huge aspect of the, of just how touching it is, is the fact that, like, for those moments, they're not thinking about their mortality. And no-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:48 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 25:48 ... kid should have to think about their mortality, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:51 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:51 I mean, even as I talk about it, it's like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:52 Yeah. It's profound.

Andrew Huberman 25:54 Yeah. It's just, it's like o- there's an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 25:57 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 25:58 That's an, uh, a particularly, uh, complicated and, and interesting, uh, case where you've got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life-affirming.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:09 Yeah, it is.

Andrew Huberman 26:11 And, uh, anyway, that's just a- an obser- an observation, but horizons are something that have fascinated me for a long time-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:16 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 26:16 ... as a vision scientist.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:17 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:17 Because when we see a horizon, our visual, um, angle widens.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:22 That's cool.

Andrew Huberman 26:23 We become more parasympathetic.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:24 Right.

Andrew Huberman 26:24 There's a whole-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:25 Is that right?

Andrew Huberman 26:26 Coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:28 I didn't know that.

Andrew Huberman 26:28 So we relax by virtue of coming off the, the focusing component.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:33 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:33 When we focus in through a tunnel, we... It's quite the opposite.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:36 Nice.

Andrew Huberman 26:36 But I feel like there's something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:43 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 26:43 ... or hi- and then the horizon opens up.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:45 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 26:46 There's this transformation-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:47 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 26:48 ... of visual space, and those moments, at least for me, are the moments. So I mean, I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time and be like, "This is amazing," but there's something distinctly-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 26:58 How? Yeah

Andrew Huberman 26:59 ... bigger in the experience of going from confinement-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 27:03 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 27:03 ... to openness.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 27:04 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 27:05 It could be brought to the lab, but do you think that's what's going on in, in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, right? Do people who work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 27:13 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 27:13 Do they attenuate? They're like, "Oh, yeah, like another horizon."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 27:16 I don't know. You know-

Andrew Huberman 27:16 Yeah

Dr. Dacher Keltner 27:16 ... I'm working with rangers right now, and they... I think, I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated, but I- they're still finding it, uh, in subtler ways. Yeah, that's really interesting and, you know, it's, it is interesting as, um, I've been privileged to know Pete Docter at Pixar for fifteen years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.

Andrew Huberman 27:42 Yeah, you played a big role in that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 27:43 Yeah, and through the science of emotion. And I was like, you know, in one of our conversations, I was like, "Tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children's films, animated films." And, and he described first just what you said, like, you know, the film is narrow, like a certain kind of attention, you know, sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then it comes, it's suddenly you, you see the vastness of something, and it's true. It is awe-inspiring. When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very s- basic form of awe, it's shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception, and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It's like, God, I'm thinking about... Like, I love one of the wonders of life that, uh, that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies, and very often people will be like, "God, I've been working so hard at this," you know, "I'm working on a, a paper," something in technology or some part of my life, and then you suddenly realize it's part of something large, right?

Andrew Huberman 28:44 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 28:44 One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book, in the chapter on musical awe said, you know, she's a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony, said, "You know, I, I practice for five hours a day. It's hard, man, and it's small and narrow, and where's my finger? And then when I'm on stage and I, and I feel the notes go out into this space," the vastness you're talking about, "I feel like I'm part of history," right?

Andrew Huberman 29:12 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 29:12 "And I tear up and cry." Um, so I think you're, I think I, I... You gotta send me those papers, Andrew, 'cause I think it's fundamental, which is from small to vast.

Andrew Huberman 29:21 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 29:22 And in fact, we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco, brain

Dr. Dacher Keltner 29:27 health. Old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, seventy-five years old or older, and all we ask them to do is to go from small to vast in how they looked at things. You know, look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain, uh, over eight weeks, and now we're finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.

Andrew Huberman 29:53 I'm, um, struck by the, by the awe walk, um, and, and I know this comes up in your book and elsewhere, and you've done a lot of research on this. Uh, for those listening, um, what would an awe walk look like, and, um, what are some of the health benefits? You just mentioned a few that have, that have been observed both in the short and the long term.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 30:10 Yeah. Thank you. You know, uh, we, we are a walking species. You know, it is just in our DNA to walk. We meandered from Africa all the wa- to all the continents. A lot of people, Rebecca Solnit writes about this, like walking is almost sacred. It's a kind of consciousness.Like you're saying, like, whoa, I'm, I'm picking up a vaster view of what's around me. And I, uh, decided to just create this awe walk, you know, and I did it for a meditation group, the, or Mindful Magazine. You just slow down. You-- A lot of people walk. Hundreds of, you know, tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States. Uh, it's good for you, you know. So we just add it all, like, on your regular walk once a week in our study, uh, go somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go. Go someplace that may surprise you. Uh, I walk around Berkeley a lot, and it's like, well, I'm gonna go past the little playground that my daughters played at when they were young and just feel that, you know, Codornices Park.

Andrew Huberman 31:18 Yeah. With the rock slide [laughing] and the tunnel.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 31:21 Exactly.

Andrew Huberman 31:22 I love that place.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 31:22 Near the rose garden.

Andrew Huberman 31:23 And there's a secret... Should we give this away?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 31:25 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 31:26 There's a secret hiking trail-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 31:28 [chuckles]

Andrew Huberman 31:29 ... through, it's actually through a private property's backyard.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 31:33 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 31:33 And they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash, and there's an incredible waterfall and place to stand at the top. There's a beam there. You've been there, I'm sure.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 31:44 Yeah. No, I know.

Andrew Huberman 31:44 We can look out over this, what is kind of like a trench of tree... It's, it's a total transformation of one space to the next.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 31:52 It is.

Andrew Huberman 31:52 If you look for it properly, I'm sure now it's on the internet, uh, it's in kind of swinging gates, not locked, and, uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 32:00 So hard to find

Andrew Huberman 32:01 ... l- and there's a little monastery maybe nearby.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 32:03 Yep. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 32:04 And, um, and you might, and you might see me. A couple years ago, you would've seen me and, me and my dog, but you might see me, uh, eating a slice of pizza from the cheese board sitting on that log. I spent a lot of time there.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 32:13 I'm getting goosebumps, Andrew. That is just pure Berkeley. Thank you.

Andrew Huberman 32:17 Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 32:17 So yeah. So in this study, awe walk, go on your walk, find a place that's gonna be a little surprising, where it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder. And it's interesting, no one's asked me this question, you know, your observation about small to vast, and we just said, "Slow down, deepen your breathing, sync it up with your, your walking," which you've studied empirically, the breath, and then, um, go from small to vast. You know, look at clouds. Look at the whole pattern of clouds. Just slow it down. Look at trees. Look at the light on the trees, and look at points of light, and then patterns of light. Look at... You know, I love walking past playgrounds. It's one of my favorite sources of awe. Listen to one laugh, and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right? That's all. And they walk through, uh, they do that for half an hour. And what we find in that study is, is they become more vast in their consciousness. They're more aware in the photographs that they provided of what's around them. They feel more kindness over the eight weeks. They feel more awe over an eight-week period. It rises. And then the, the finding that was, you know, important for people who are elderly is less physical pain. You know, your body starts to ache when you're seventy-five, you know, uh, or earlier. And, and awe, I think, through the inflammation process, you know, and reducing it, caused less pain. You know, this dovetails with other health benefits. Awe is good for

Dr. Dacher Keltner 33:53 reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day reduced long COVID symptoms. It's good news, right? And, and there's so much science on it that I just f- now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like, "I'm gonna prescribe nature. I'll prescribe music through awe," right? Um, as a mechanism.

Andrew Huberman 34:20 I have a lot of thoughts about, um, this going from, uh, small to large.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 34:24 Yeah, I'd love to hear them.

Andrew Huberman 34:25 But before [laughs] I do, um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 34:28 You've asked me twice. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 34:28 I have a, I have another question. I have another question. I think for a lot of people, um, including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of ourself.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 34:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 34:40 Like s-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 34:40 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 34:40 ... like getting outside of ourselves. But I'm starting to, to think based on the way you're describing it, that it's about being tethered to the larger picture.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 34:49 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 34:50 That it's not a, a g- yes, it's getting out of our heads, quote-unquote, but it's actually very much an embodied experience. It's very m- like it's almost like full body.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 35:00 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 35:00 And so now I'll answer your question.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 35:02 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 35:03 Uh, this is usually where people start putting in the comments like, "You talk too much. Let your, your guest talk." But I'm trying, folks. He asked me.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 35:10 Twice.

Andrew Huberman 35:10 So you asked me a question, I'm gonna answer it. Anyone that knows me, you know, if I... Okay, so I've thought about this, uh, this relationship between visual aperture and a time perception for a long time.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 35:21 Oh.

Andrew Huberman 35:21 This is my, my deepest-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 35:22 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 35:22 ... obsession, and it, uh, gets a little bit into the book I'm writing, but it, but it, it's probably reserved for after there's some experiments. And, and I, um, to the fear of my podcast crew, I actually am considering going back into the lab to do the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 35:36 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 35:36 ... this experiment. So we know what, what do we know for certain? We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small, like looking through a soda straw view or watch, um, maker type aperture, or, um, you're in a, let's just say a, it could be a pleasant or unpleasant text communication that's going back and forth, that your perception of time is different. You're fine slicing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 35:59 Nice.

Andrew Huberman 35:59 Those dot dot dots coming through.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 36:01 Yeah. It's just like this.

Andrew Huberman 36:02 It feels like an eternity.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 36:03 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 36:04 And it's bi-directional with your, let's just call it level of alertness. It doesn't even have to be stress, but sympathetic nervous system, right? So if I'm in line at the store and, and I, I have some place to be, uh, my visual aperture shrinks, and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 36:19 Yeah, 'cause you're in these little micro-

Andrew Huberman 36:21 When I'm relaxed, it feels like y- I'm f- I'm slicing time differently. Okay, when we see a horizon and, and our aperture opens up, as I mentioned, then we relax, but we also are takingfewer time snapshots. So people might think, oh, fewer, you're in slow motion because the word-- No, you're, you're, it's the opposite, right? Slow motion is high frame rate. This thing about video where you can catch slow motion, you need a high frame rate.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 36:45 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 36:45 This is why when people experience, uh, like a car crash, they'll often say that things felt like they were slowing down.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 36:50 Totally expand.

Andrew Huberman 36:51 More, more snapshots.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 36:51 That's cool.

Andrew Huberman 36:52 So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain. So if I'm listening to a specific conversation in a party, I'm fine-slicing my perception of auditory space. Our friend Irv Hafner taught me this.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 37:08 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 37:08 When I listen to everything and I take it in as a whole, it's, it's a more relaxed experience.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 37:14 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 37:14 But okay.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 37:15 Cool.

Andrew Huberman 37:16 So a long time ago, I was-- because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things, and, and I, I came up with this meditation. It's-- but it's not a meditation at all, and some of my listeners will be familiar with it. I decided to call it, for lack of a better term, space-time bridging. The meditation is very simple. You, um, close your eyes, and you do three breaths, thinking about your skin inward, so interoception. You open your eyes, and you look at your hand.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 37:44 Nice.

Andrew Huberman 37:44 You take three breaths, but you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe eight or ten feet away.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 37:50 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 37:50 You do the same. Then you find a horizon, and then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon, like you're just on a planet. It's floating in space, and like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or, or whatever. And then you get right back to yourself.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:04 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:04 And so what the, the idea here is that it helped me a lot because I noticed that meditations where I was completely focused inward made me more focused inward. Going for a run, I could get outside my head, but it, and I started to play with the idea that maybe it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:22 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:22 But it's the, like every great thing in biology or psychology, it's the process. It's not an event.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:28 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:28 It's the process of going from one aperture to the next.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:30 That's cool.

Andrew Huberman 38:31 And that's kind of what life is about.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:32 Yeah. Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman 38:33 Like when this too shall pass is really about taking a broader time snapshot.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:38 Like eventually this thing-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:40 Which is visual as well. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:40 Which is visual.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:41 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:41 And so this is a long answer to your question, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:43 No, it's really interesting

Andrew Huberman 38:44 ... but, um, this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning. Um, but it's also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I'm working on.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 38:53 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 38:53 Like there is no place or event in a day or in life that, that's actually the right way to live. Like you can go to Big Sur, and if you're lucky enough to go to Esalen, like you're like, "This is it."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:05 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 39:05 But it's only it because you came from your office, in my opinion.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:08 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 39:09 And then you go back again.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:10 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 39:11 You've figured this out. Like you, the title of this paper, which for, which you're the senior author, is A Balanced Mind: Awe Fosters Equanimity-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:20 Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 39:20 ... via Temporal Distancing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:22 Yeah. No.

Andrew Huberman 39:22 So it's, so it's about time-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:24 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 39:24 ... not about space.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:25 It is. That's fascinating.

Andrew Huberman 39:27 Okay. So that's, that's how I think about this. Now, maybe you can tell us about this paper because I'm getting embarrassed that I've been going way too long.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 39:32 This is why we're in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know, you've studied the visual system and, and, uh, we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Matthias Tarnopolsky, who was at Berkeley, ran, and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony and was a music director there. And he said... I was like... And he was, he studies the great, and he's a conductor of symphonies. And I was like, "What's the se--" Music's hard to understand scientifically. It is complicated. I was like, "What's the, why awe and music? Why do we cry? Why do we get goosebumps? Why do we..." I mean, profound. And he's like, "Time."

Andrew Huberman 40:11 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 40:11 It's all about what it does to our sense of time. And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore. What awe does to the self, and I'm putting together a couple of your comments, is, and Jane Goodall got it most right. And, and it's, you know, it's so great to study things with science, and then you see someone you really res- revere say something. And she was, she felt that chimpanzees feel awe. I do too-

Andrew Huberman 40:40 Mm-hmm

Dr. Dacher Keltner 40:40 ... believe that. So con- it's a controversial issue. Uh, chimps show, and Frans de Waal alerted me to this, who re-recently passed away, and I just wanna pay reverence to him or homage to him, um, the great primatologist. So he said, "You gotta look at Jane Goodall and writing about chimps and the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature. They sit quietly, like around rivers, like that waterfall in Berkeley. They abs-- they look at things, they get goosebumps, they touch things like we would out in nature. Uh, they rock, uh, and they..." Jane Goodall said, "Why wouldn't they feel awe, uh, or be-big, the beginnings of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside of the self?" So with awe, we, we have a sense of self, interoception, and the like, and then we connect to vast things out there. And that's what our research documented as kind of a central mechanism of awe or transformation. It's like when you're at Yosemite or when you are standing next to that T-Rex skeleton or when you've, you know, when you've thought about the passage of time that happens with life, right? And there are new meditations around that. You're like, "Wow, I am part of something vast. I'm part of evolution. I'm part of nature. I'm part of an ecosystem." Uh, and it changes your whole mind, right? It

Dr. Dacher Keltner 42:13 changes the neurophysiology of the mind, default mode network starts to quiet down, activates vagal tone, and you do feel like you're tethered, as you said, to like music or a culture or a political movement or the team you love, right? And it's transcendent. Um, and if you look at where we are today, we need more of that. You know, we need to, to get our young people to be connecting to big things.

Andrew Huberman 42:41 As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly fifteen years now. I discovered it way back in two thousand and twelve, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink, and it tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy, and it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition. Now, of course, everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods. I certainly do that every day. But I'm often asked, "If you could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be?" And my answer is always AG1, because it has just been oh-so-critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance. I know this from my own experience with AG1,

Andrew Huberman 43:37 and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. Again, that's drinkag1 with the numeral one .com/huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. I didn't expect that we would, uh, land here, at least not so early in the conversation. But there, you know, we, we've had Christof Koch on this, uh, podcast-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 44:14 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 44:14 ... talking about consciousness, you know, incredible neuroscientist and, and really thinker.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 44:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 44:18 I mean, I've watched his career evolve over the years and, and he's continued to evolve his concepts of-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 44:23 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 44:23 ... how to think about consciousness. And, um, and, you know, we'll hear nowadays about, oh, like maybe consciousness is outside the brain. And-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 44:31 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 44:32 ... I, I think if nothing else, our brains are important components in it. May-maybe not.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 44:36 Heck yeah.

Andrew Huberman 44:37 I don't know. I, I don't wanna do the experiment on myself to find out.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 44:39 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 44:39 Like if I was decerebrated [chuckles] or something, which basically means having your cortex removed, fo-folks. Sorry for the nerd speak. But the idea is connecting through time, like in our own lives-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 44:50 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 44:50 ... is a very unique form of awe. So, like, if I hear a song and it reminds me when I was, like, fifteen, and then all of a sudden all the, the, the ma- as I call it, like the magic library come... That, that's how the brain works, right? It's like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 45:03 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 45:03 ... it's like a Harry Potter, like you take out a book, you see a subject, and then all of a sudden the library r- the books around it change. And so I'm thinking about the time we did this and the time we did that, and everyone has these notions. But it's very much linked to them. That's one form of linking up through time.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 45:18 Well put.

Andrew Huberman 45:18 And then there's this other one where you feel something with someone else. You know you're connected in that moment, but there's this idea, forgive me for getting squishy on here, but there's this idea that maybe your past, present, and future is connected to their past and present-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 45:37 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 45:37 ... and future.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 45:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 45:38 And when you... If you let yourself go there, no drugs required, if you let yourself go there, you're like, "Oh, we're part of this together," and th-that we're sort of moving more now as, as a, as a, a conscious fleet than as individuals.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 45:53 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 45:53 I think that's a very real experience even for people that are, like, very resistant to kind of the, like, even the language of, of collective consciousness-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:01 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 46:02 ... and things like that. And I think concerts are where we've generally-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:04 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 46:04 ... feel that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:05 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 46:05 Because we're in... It requires a sort of shared perceptual experience or emotional experience.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:10 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 46:11 And so when you say getting young people connected that way-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:14 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 46:14 ... it's very different than, like, node to node. It's, it's sort of like it's an openness that come... First you have to connect to your p- your past, present, and future, and then you're kind of open to it. I feel like then that, that window opens, and then if there's one person there or a thousand people standing there, like, it's on.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:31 Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 46:32 But if not, and you're just in your-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:35 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 46:35 ... like your experience, you're the person at the party wondering whether or not, um, you have something between your teeth, which is the lamest way to be at a party, but we've all been there, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:45 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 46:45 Anyway, I'm getting a little outside the box here.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:48 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 46:48 But what are your thoughts-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:48 No, I love it

Andrew Huberman 46:49 ... what are your thoughts about individual awe experiences, like on the awe walk-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 46:54 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 46:54 ... versus a couple on an awe walk versus connecting to a whole mess of people, some of whom you've never met?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 47:01 I mean, you've highlighted, you know, this, this temporal, this dynamic that you're pointing to, uh, with respect to awe and the experience of awe and, and we're so limited in how we measure experience, and I, uh, I think you're right. I think that, you know, your first sense of, like, one of the most awesome qualities of awe is connecting in your mind through the layers of consciousness and experience that shifts out of the micro to this expansive narrative about your mind, right? And so I grew up around the UCLA campus 'cause my mom got her PhD there, uh, at UCLA, uh, at UCLA in the late '60s, and there were eucalyptus trees and, and then I went to Northern California where there were not as many eucalyptus trees. And I w- first day I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergrad, I smelled the eucalyptus and I... It was awe. It was just like, "Ah," all of these experiences through the olfactory process.

Andrew Huberman 47:55 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 47:56 Yeah, I was awestruck by that smell, right? And that's through the connecting through time. I am very persuaded by the new literature on brain synchronization, uh, that we are... And I talk about this a bit in Awe and, and there's just new science coming out. We're always syncing up with other people. You know, when a n- nine-month-old listens to music, they are syncing up to the sounds and rhythms of their culture's music, and they're synced up physiologically with whomever is in their midst. When we go to a concert or we watch a sporting event, you know, if you're-

Andrew Huberman 48:30 Mm-hmm

Dr. Dacher Keltner 48:30 ... if you like sports, your heart rate is syncing up, your brains are synchronizing. The- it's... And, and that in some sense is the materialistic a-account of collective consciousness. We're all sharing brain patterns and awareness. Um, and I think thatIt's, it's part of some of our deepest forms of awe, you know. And music, now the current science of music is like, it is very hard to get people to think collectively in the same way. You know, when you teach a classroom, it's impossible. But music does it within milliseconds, right? When you talk to people who've been to Taylor Swift shows, who are Swifties, [laughs] it's serious, right?

Andrew Huberman 49:14 They are instantly bonded.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 49:17 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 49:17 That's, that's the... Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 49:18 United in a, like a moral cause almost, or a, a identity cause. So that's profound. That's very hard work to do. And when Jonathan Haidt and I wrote about awe early in our careers, um, you know, we were like, "We need these emotions to make us be part of collectives," because we are a very collective species. It was one of our signature strengths, is to fold into groups and to cooperate and share. It's hard work. It's vulnerable to exploitation. And awe is one of the fastest pathways through... It's through what you're talking about, through physical dancing together, chanting together, sporting events together, what Émile Durkheim called collective effervescence,

Dr. Dacher Keltner 50:04 right? Music, just syncring, uh, syncing up with each other, feeling like we're part of this vast group, sharing a sense of humanity, a sense that we all suffer in the same way or exalt in the same way, and it's profound. You know, I don't think we'll ever get this with science, but I love, you know... You know, I've had all these conversations about awe and, and musical awe. I'm like, "When's a time," and I could ask you this question, "when being at a concert has changed your life?"

Andrew Huberman 50:38 Oh, I mean, they're some of the most important, not just memorable, but important experiences of my entire life.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 50:44 So tell me about one or two.

Andrew Huberman 50:45 My sister listened to the Grateful Dead and Cat Stevens and all that kind of stuff.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 50:49 Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman 50:49 And from the first time I heard... People will immediately think bullet, bullet belts and Mohawks, but I was, I was a punk rock kid. I mean, I'll never forget, like, uh, my friend who's now well-known in the skateboard community, Jim Thiebaud-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:04 I know Jim.

Andrew Huberman 51:05 You know Jim?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 51:05 He's a close friend of mine.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:06 I take saunas with Jim.

Andrew Huberman 51:07 Do you?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:08 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 51:08 I texted with him this morning.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:09 Say hi.

Andrew Huberman 51:09 We text each other every morning.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:11 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 51:11 The great Jim Thiebaud. He basically runs skateboarding. He's the dean of skateboarding, the quiet dean of-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:15 And good friends with Tommy Guerrero.

Andrew Huberman 51:16 Good friends with Tommy Guerrero. Uh, Jim gave me my first cup of black coffee.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:22 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 51:22 He was the person who inspired me to, uh, to start journaling when I was 14. I, I was put on out of sympathy onto, uh, Thunder Trucks, and he, at the time, he was around the, the factory-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:33 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 51:33 ... which at that time was over in Third Street, where all the, uh, Hunter's Point, um, on Yosemite. But anyway, Jim gave me a tape, 'cause back then it was tapes, of a band called Krimp Shrine-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:47 Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman 51:47 ... which is from Berkeley.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 51:48 Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman 51:49 Um, and, uh, they were on Lookout Records, which eventually... Were first releases of Green Day. I wasn't so much... Forgive me, I like those guys. Um, I know some of them, but, uh, I was sup... I heard that tape. It was like, "This is amazing."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:01 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 52:02 Like, "This is amazing." Like, "I've never heard anything quite like it."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:05 It was super raw. It was, um... And then I, I was like, "I need more of this."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:12 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:12 It was like, it was like a drug.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:13 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:13 I was like, "I need more of this."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:14 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:14 "Whatever this is."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:15 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:16 And so he gave me a Stiff Little Fingers tape.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:18 Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman 52:18 And that was just it. And then it was Stiff Little Fingers, Operation Ivy, Rancid. I mean, I could easily, like, do a whole, literally a thesis-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:27 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 52:28 ... on that whole kind of era and genre of punk rock.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:31 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:31 I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:32 Yeah. Heck yeah.

Andrew Huberman 52:33 Um, Mescaleros and, uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:34 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 52:35 ... biggest Rancid fan there ever was. I'm blessed to be good friends with Tim Armstrong these days.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:39 Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman 52:39 But I only met him later in life, and that still freaks me out, 'cause we're close friends. But whenever I see him, it's still g- I'm like, "That's Tim Armstrong." Because there's the four... Talk about time travel. That's the 14, 15-year-old version of me. Those guys are a bit older, and they were like gods in the Bay Area-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:56 Yeah. Heck yeah

Andrew Huberman 52:56 ... for our scene, you know? And then when they made it, you know-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 52:58 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 52:58 ... and they're just still so good.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 53:00 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 53:00 The show that changed everything for me was, this would be summer between '93 and '94, uh, a little club. It was either called The Stage House or The Stagecoach in Santa Barbara-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 53:11 Okay

Andrew Huberman 53:11 ... that was near the railroad tracks downtown. And it was, um, Rancid playing with Sick of It All, which was a East Coast hardcore band, which, you know, and, and my now good friend Toby Morse was there. And I remember going there and being s- kinda scared. I, I mean, I'm, I'm-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 53:28 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 53:28 ... kinda like my way around. Um, I... It was just, like, those guys were older. It was, it, like, had a kind of violent feel.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 53:35 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 53:35 They were from Albany and West Oakland and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 53:37 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 53:38 ... some of, some of, some of... There was an edge there, and I remember thinking, "This is exciting. I feel very much a part of this. I love the music."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 53:46 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 53:46 "I know every lyric, and I'm a little bit frightened, and I love it." And I think it was just, I, you know, the, I just got the adrenaline back. And there's a little bit of, you don't know what it is gonna happen, and it feels a little dangerous, but it's mostly benevolent. And, um, it's an irreplaceable feeling. And, and I think about it sometime, uh, I think about it a lot of the time.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 54:10 Yeah. And, you know, thank you. And I, you know, when I was writing this book on awe, some forms of awe, you know, there are eight wonders that give us awe, you know. Some are... You kind of understand them. Nature's pretty straightforward, spirituality, medi- meditation, you know. And music, and your description of it exactly, exactly captures how rich it is and complicated, which is, there is something about that sound, and the acoustic patterns that come through your t- eardrums and head into your auditory cortex, and you give it meaning, and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people and the Insta friends, like you said.For life. You know, brothers and sisters almost that, and you're like, "This is what life's about." And Susan Langer, uh, a philosopher, really got it right. She's like, "Music is this tonal language of emotion and identity." And awe in music, very fitting with our conversation, is when those sounds come into you, move you, and connect you to something that is what you care about in life. You know? I remember I grew up... I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon in the late '60s, and there was more music there than I, almost anywhere in human history, you know, from, you know, The Mamas & Papas and Frank Zappa and-

Andrew Huberman 55:38 Jim Morrison was out there

Dr. Dacher Keltner 55:38 ... Jim Morrison was living there, and The Doors and the, you know, Bob Dylan was passing through, and The Bird. It was a joke, you know. It was everywhere. And-

Andrew Huberman 55:46 That's wild, just to think about how much incredible music was being created.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 55:50 Oh, man. You know-

Andrew Huberman 55:51 Right

Dr. Dacher Keltner 55:51 ... the Beach Boys were, you know, at-

Andrew Huberman 55:54 I mean, weren't Fleetwood Mac back in T-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 55:56 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 55:56 ... in Topanga?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 55:57 Yeah. I mean, it was like... And I was eight and nine, and just to, you know, to grow up on Bob Dylan, and when I saw about the recent film with Timothée Chalamet, I started crying. You know, I was just like, "This is life," you know? Yeah, and so that's why we study awe, you know? It, it... And, and, you know, music is one of our great technologies. Uh, there's now research showing it's good for chronic pain. I think it's a frontier in healthcare and, you know, just giving people contemplative, meditative approaches to music and, and, and awe is part of the answer. And you and I share yet another thing, Andrew. You know, when I, uh, grew up in the foothills of the Sierras as a teenager, Ted Nugent and, you know, it was poor wha- you know, area, Ted Nugent, AC/DC, and that's all fine. And when I first heard the Sex Pistols in... I was lucky to be in England when s- "Never Mind the Bollocks" came out, and I was in a working class fighting town. And I heard that, I was like, "That's it." And then that led me to Iggy Pop, who's one of my moral heroes, so, you know, um-

Andrew Huberman 57:09 Amazing. Who's really into qigong, apparently.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:11 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 57:12 I heard him, like years ago, on the radio and he-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:14 Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 57:14 ... and someone was asking g- like, how does he stay in such good shape?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:17 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 57:17 And he's just does tons of qigong breathing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 57:20 Wild, wild, wild. You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:25 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 57:25 But there's something that feels kind of, um, divorced from language about-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:30 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 57:30 ... the experience-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:31 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 57:31 ... that we're talking about, even though there's lyrics tied in there. And what, and what brings that to mind is there's a, a really good book, one that I like anyway, um, called "The Fighter's Heart" by a guy named Sam Sheridan. His wife actually wrote that movie, "Monster," uh, with Charlize Theron-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:47 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 57:47 ... I think is, uh, the actress that played her. And, um, and I don't know Sam, but, but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms, and he-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:54 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 57:54 ... explores them all and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:55 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 57:56 ... um, there's this great line in there, 'cause I've done a little bit of boxing-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 57:59 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 58:00 ... um, and, and sparred a bit. I don't recommend it. As a neuroscientist, how can I recommend it, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:04 Yeah, what were you doing? [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 58:05 You get hit. Well, I was... And I, I was actually in my 30s, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:08 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 58:08 ... anyway, I was working some stuff out. But, uh, do not recommend. Uh, the sport, yeah, the training, yeah, but you don't wanna get hit in the head. Not good for your brain whatsoever. But he talks about how, um, fighting with someone, sparring-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:23 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 58:23 ... or fighting with someone is, uh, he said it's like a... It's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:29 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:29 Because you're in this primitive non-language state.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:33 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:33 I mean, he actually likens it to a one-night stand. He says something like, "Oh, you know, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know, but you, you feel connected," [laughs] you know?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:41 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:41 So I don't know if that's the best... It's certainly not the most politically correct, uh, way to put it, but I, but I understand what he's talking about, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:48 Definitely.

Andrew Huberman 58:48 You, you're, you're in this moment of you're both vulnerable.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 58:51 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 58:52 In the case of the fighting, you're both vulnerable. You're trying to hurt each other. You're also obeying some rules.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:00 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 59:00 Right? It's not, not an anything goes. And he talks about how it transcends language.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 59:06 And that creates a forever bond, and it's true.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:09 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 59:10 Right? I didn't do a ton of sparring, but you, you have a, a respect.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:12 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 59:13 You went through something hard together-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:15 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 59:15 ... even if it's only three three-minute rounds. Like, that's a... It's real, but it's separate from language. And earlier we were talking about the exper- the experience of emotion, uh, as this kind of triad of the feeling, the motor component to it-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:33 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 59:33 ... and language, but I do think that-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:35 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 59:35 ... maybe the language piece can go.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 59:37 I'm with you in some sense. Darwin wrote about the motor components, got a lot of it right. William James was about the body, you know, and the physiology and, you know, language is what we rely on as social scientists, but it... I think it's, as William James said, when he tried to describe his experience of transcendence, uh, when he took laughing gas and it led him down the path to understand spirituality, he's like, "Words are tattered fragments. They, they barely touch the real thing." Um, yeah, and, and I just wanna dwell for a moment, you know. Part of awe, and I learned this, like, talking to veterans, you know, and I, I did work with Stacy Bare, and we did this Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers, and he's one of my heroes in the book of getting tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature. You know, and these are guys who've lost limbs and they're rock climbing, you know, and it's just like, like, there's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life, and there's violence and, and there's a lot of horror, carnage, et cetera, but there's awe. Uh, and I love your idea, and, and I think any teacher of, of the martial arts would say that's the point, is that we can transcend death or, or violence by... martial arts by performing them and, and, uh, and putting them into, uh, a contemplative form for the body. One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie, is Raging Bull, man, and Martin Scorsese, like Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray have these epic battles, and they look at each other, you know, in one of the great scenes, and they're just like, "We're united. This is all... We're way beyond the fight," you know? I think you're right. I think it's part

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:01:28 of this transcendent moment that, uh, of people crashing into each other. Mosh pits. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:01:36 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:01:36 They are one of my favorite objects of study and awe, and mosh pits have a law, a set of laws to them. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:01:43 Yeah, people have studied, like, the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:01:45 The physics

Andrew Huberman 1:01:45 ... sort of the physics of it.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:01:46 Yeah, no.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:47 Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:01:47 It's like, and you think you're crash, and you are. You're bruising yourself, you know. But there's something transcendent there about what we find.

Andrew Huberman 1:01:55 I could be wrong, but I think, um, Raging Bull, I think the, the soundtrack was Clash inspired.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:00 Was it really?

Andrew Huberman 1:02:01 There's something about it in the documentary, which I highly recommend, uh, called The Future is Unwritten-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:05 Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman 1:02:05 ... which is the, the Joe Strummer thing where some, there's some link up between The Clash. I think Scorsese says, you know, The Clash inspired the soundtrack to Raging Bull or something like that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:14 Really?

Andrew Huberman 1:02:15 Anyway, he's a big Clash fan, so, um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:17 Nice.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:17 Or, yeah, so-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:18 All right, Andrew, I get to ask you one more question.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:19 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:20 So why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you? One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice, so why Joe Strummer?

Andrew Huberman 1:02:32 Oof, man. All right, I'm gonna try and keep this brief.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:35 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:02:35 Um, I mean, just to give you a sense of how, h- what an impact he's had on me, I mean, I've always worn these button-down black shirts even before I was public facing, um, 'cause I saw him do a show, um, a Mescalero show. I wasn't there, but he... I... And by the way, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros I actually think is better than The Clash.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:02:57 Right.

Andrew Huberman 1:02:58 Clash was a short run. It was only five years.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:00 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:01 Only five years-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:02 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:03:02 ... pretty much, and then they're done. So it's one of those where there's Clash and then, and then he came back with the Mescaleros and just incredible... I mean, they're masterpieces.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:09 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:09 Produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong. He owned Hellcat Records. He went to a small label. Um, he also sang songs with Johnny Cash for where, with Rick Rubin. I actually know the story of that 'cause I'm friends with Rick, and I insisted on him telling me the story. So-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:22 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:03:22 ... sometime I can tell you that. But, I mean, masterpieces late in life. And there was a show-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:26 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:03:27 ... that, that Strummer played where he was wearing his black button-down soaking in sweat, like soaked in sweat, and he just wouldn't take the thing off.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:37 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:37 I think he might've rolled up, like, one cuff.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:39 And I was like, "That's punk as fuck."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:41 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:03:41 I was like, "That guy is so rad," and he was in... And he died at 50, where the s- I'm 50 now.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:45 Oh, man.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:45 Died at 50. I go see the mural of him right off, um, it's right off Tompkins Square Park, uh, in Alphabet City every time I'm in New York.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:53 Nice.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:53 Just go, like, see it.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:03:54 Right on.

Andrew Huberman 1:03:54 It's an aviator. It says, "The future is unwritten." You can go there, pay your respects. I've talked to Rick about this a lot, like, what was it about him?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:00 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:01 'Cause they were close friends. I never met Strummer. But I think there's three reasons. One is, um, he had that Bob Dylan-like ability to write lyrics that you're not r- especially with Mescaleros, where you're not really sure what the song's about, but it makes sense, not just because it's beautiful, but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:23 Right

Andrew Huberman 1:04:23 ... are actually saying.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:24 Beyond language.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:25 Yeah, like a-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:26 The theme of our talk. Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:04:26 ... a great song, um, for instance, would be, like, "On the Road to Rock and Roll." Like, it, that could be about on, being on tour or something, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:33 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:04:34 ... it, it transcends something o- obvious.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:36 Nice.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:37 The other thing is, is the way he, he, uh, used his breath was, um, like, there was a... His intonation is, like, unparalleled.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:47 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:04:48 And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand 'cause, uh, during the summer, I go hang out with Rick whenever I can, in, uh, winter too. Um, and we watch documentaries-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:04:59 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:04:59 ... including Clash documentaries. And I asked him, I was like, "What was it? Like, w- why does he have this thing?" 'Cause he says these incredible things, you know?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:06 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:06 He would say things like, you know, "You gotta bring humanity back into the center of it," and those are really beautiful quotes. But, like, a lot of-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:12 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:05:12 ... people give beautiful quotes. And Rick, in very Rick Rubin style, said, "Everything he said, he brought his whole life experience into those statements." And I was like, "Just the statements, like the quotes?"

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:27 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:27 You know, like the, you know, "We gotta bring the humanity back into the ro- the..." And he goes, "No, everything he said." It was like you got the sense that he was bringing all of himself to it, even if he was being kinda quiet.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:38 That's cool.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:39 And I go, "Okay, so this is clearly on a plane of understanding that I can't put language to, right?"

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:44 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:05:44 What does that even mean? That's, like, half the things Rick says is it's like a riddle-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:48 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:05:49 ... mixed up in a poem, you know, put out there as, [laughs] you know-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:52 As a principle

Andrew Huberman 1:05:52 ... as, like, a, as a principle, and you're-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:54 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:05:54 ... just like, "Well, what the hell does that mean?"

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:05:55 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:05:55 But, but it feels true, and I think that, you know, and, and Rick's superpower-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:06:01 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:06:01 ... is that Rick knows

Andrew Huberman 1:06:04 what a true feeling feels like.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:06:06 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:06:06 And he knows what a false feeling feels like, and he's only interested in truths, period.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:06:13 And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of, is exactly that. It's like there are all these layers to meaning and representation, and, you know, and we try to figure out true moments of awe with all of our measures, and, and it is this, like, it's all coming together as a, uh, a package that tells us it's happened.

Andrew Huberman 1:06:32 So we can think about things that promote awe. The awe walk, going small to large aperture, maybe back again.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:06:38 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:06:38 You know, like, I guess we shouldn't assume that it's unidirectional. You know, coming back into our home after something big is-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:06:44 Ah.

Andrew Huberman 1:06:45 There's nothing like that, right? The dog, the kids, the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:06:48 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:06:49 ... the, the spouse, the whatever, you know? Like, the, those little things, the plants, even, you know, the, the, the, you know. So it runs both ways. It's no fun, but we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe.Because as I step back from what we're talking about today and I think, okay, language, it can be part of it, but it can also in, uh, molecular biology or genetics, we call it a dominant negative. It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions. [chuckles]

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:07:16 A ton of stuff, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:16 There's a joke around molecular labs and neuroscience labs that you'd be like, "That person's a dominant negative."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:07:21 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:07:21 You know? [laughs]

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:07:22 I now have a new phrase I can use.

Andrew Huberman 1:07:24 Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You don't wanna be called a dominant negative. Uh, I call people that in my head a lot online. I go, "Oh, man, that person's dominant negative. They're not contributing to the greater good. They're just like..." So there's, you know, language can be that, um, or be neutral, be positive. It can definitely be that. And then there's something about being over-identified with self. You know, I... So on the recommendation of Tim Armstrong, someone you wouldn't associate with the Grateful Dead, he was like, "You gotta listen to the Grateful Dead." And I was like, "What? I didn't... What?" Says Tim, the Tim Armstrong, transplants Rancid, Operation Ivy, telling me I should listen to Grateful Dead. He's a big-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:08:03 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:03 He's a huge music fan of all sorts of things.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:08:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:07 I said, "Why?" And he said, uh, he said, "They're punk rockers." And I said, "How? [chuckles] What are you talking about?" And he said, he said, "Yeah, they, they played a different show every night. That's how they're..." I'm not gonna keep doing his... I can do a pretty decent Tim for those. Uh, but apparently they're-- the, the people that followed them, that was a big part of it. It was all-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:08:31 Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:08:31 ... all, all new, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:08:33 Every show was unique.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:34 Started getting really into listening to Grateful Dead in the last couple years, and then I started listening to documentaries, biographies of them.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:08:42 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:42 And there's this amazing moment in one of them, I can't remember which, where somebody says, "What killed it? What killed the collective of music?"

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:08:51 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:08:51 Like that, that feeling. And, uh, the answer someone gave was cocaine. And then the question was-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:08:59 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:08:59 ... "Why cocaine?"

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:00 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:01 And someone said, " 'Cause cocaine's all about me."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:05 It's the me drug.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:07 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:08 So I was like, "Whoa, I'm a neuroscientist," so I can tack that to... You're talking about dopamine-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:13 Right

Andrew Huberman 1:09:13 ... and adrenaline, and it's when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated, that's a very... I mean, amphetamines-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:21 Right

Andrew Huberman 1:09:21 ... especially.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:22 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:22 But it's, it becomes a me thing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:24 Yeah, that's fascinating.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:25 Every idea that's-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:26 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:09:26 ... mine-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:27 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:09:27 ... is the thing that needs to happen.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:29 Right.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:29 It's the important thing. If not out there, it needs to happen. Like, that's the only thing that matters. Very different than cannabis.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:35 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:35 Very different than psychedelics.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:36 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:09:36 Very different than just the sober experience, where it's kind of a downer, but then the non-intoxicated experience of just being with the music, no substances. So I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states and, but more broadly, how me-ness, self-interested states are a dominant negative for awe.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:09:58 That was the best entrance into that question I've ever encountered. You know, it's amazing, Andrew. You know, I grew up for three years, formative years in Laurel Canyon, '68 to '70, and then we moved to the foothills of the Sierras in Northern California, and it was peak Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell and The Byrds and The Beach Boys and, you know, it was just-

Andrew Huberman 1:10:20 Jealous.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:10:20 Yeah, it was incredible.

Andrew Huberman 1:10:21 Envious in a positive way.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:10:22 When my brother passed away, and he, uh, it was my brother of awe, you know, 14 months younger, and I was in this reflective period. I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon, and they made the same point, which is kinda things shifted after we, you know, in the early '70s, and the historian said it's cocaine. That it moved from, you know, marijuana and mushrooms and psychedelics a bit, but really, you know, people playing music. You know, Joni Mitchell or Graham Nash or whomever it is, and then suddenly cocaine comes, and the f- the whole spirit changed. Yeah, I think the great enemy of awe is me-ness, is what Ralph Waldo Emerson, [smacks lips] who was one of our great writers of awe, you know, he has this moment out in nature, cold day in Massachusetts, sees this forest, and he, you know, he's like, "Standing on the b- bare ground, my head bathed by, by there and uplifted into infinite space." And there's that uplift that you described earlier of awe. Uh, all mean egotism vanishes, and that's awe. You know? Awe quiets the self. And when you look at where we are, you know, Jean Twenge, you know, longitudinal data, we're more self-focused. You know? We're taking... A quarter of the pictures that we take are of the self. It's a, it's preposterous.

Andrew Huberman 1:11:48 It's pretty crazy.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:11:49 It's half of the photos we take are of the self or the self with another person or another thing. It's perverse, you know. Uh, the world has become more narcissistic. We're led by narcissists. It's been... You know, it's just taken as a default, and it's not a default. It's a, it's a corruption of, of our minds. Because the mind, as you described earlier, is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact, at seeing their beauty, at hearing their words, at looking at a collective, discerning patterns of nature or collectives, and all of that works against awe, right? That, you know, if I, uh, am focused on myself, I'll feel less awe. If I, uh, am worried about my s- striving in society or my bottom line in my ba- bank account,

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:12:41 you know, or thinking about money, it countervails awe. So yeah, I, I think, you know, that's why awe is important for our times. We are in this, for various reasons, this period of too much self-focus. Uh, it's costing young people. It makes them anxious, you know. And they gotta, they gotta, they gotta go dance. They gotta hear some music. They gotta share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is, you know, and just to get out of the self.

Andrew Huberman 1:13:08 I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over one hundred and sixty advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives insights into your heart health, hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans. Function not only provides testing of over a hundred and sixty biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, it also analyzes these results and provides recommendations for improving your health from top doctors. For example, in a recent test with Function, I learned that some of my blood lipids were slightly out of range. As a result, I decided to start supplementing with nattokinase, which can naturally help reduce LDL cholesterol,

Andrew Huberman 1:13:52 and it did. In a follow-up test, I could confirm that this strategy worked. My blood lipids are now back where I want them, in range. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is so important for health. And while I've been doing it for years, it's always been overly complicated and expensive. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code Huberman for a fifty dollar credit towards your membership. The example you gave of sports earlier I think-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:14:21 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:14:22 ... is, is an important one, um, only because I think some people, not me, but some people will like, "Oh, I don't really wanna go camping or backpacking."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:14:31 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:14:31 I do. Uh, I spend as much time in Yosemite as I can. The dancing concert, you know, may- maybe that's not for them. I do think... I'm not a big professional sports fan.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:14:39 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:14:39 Um, I like a few things, but, but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on like when I see a game, one of our members of our podcast team that's not here today is, like, just obsessively excited about professional football-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:14:54 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:14:54 ... and, uh, Seattle Seahawks.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:14:56 Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:14:56 So this was a good year for him. [laughs] And I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl, that it's not just about his relationship to the team.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:15:06 It's transcendent.

Andrew Huberman 1:15:06 It's about, it's about being a kid and, and everyone else there in a Seahawks jersey is like, they have, they must feel a connection.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:15:16 Totally.

Andrew Huberman 1:15:17 Because they, presumably the super fans know that the other super fans know the history.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:15:21 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:15:21 They know how important this is.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:15:22 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:15:22 They know all the trials and tribulations of the team, and on and on. And so it's, um, gosh, it's so different. I'm just realizing, like, it's the, it's the furthest thing from, like, doing a PhD in the sciences.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:15:34 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:15:35 Folks, doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun. It's a hell of a lot of work, and there's nothing else quite like it. I- it's irreplaceable.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:15:42 It is.

Andrew Huberman 1:15:42 I wouldn't r- redo it for, any other way. But it is a very, like you're... it's a very solitary thing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:15:48 It is.

Andrew Huberman 1:15:48 Like you don't, you don't even cross, you cross the finish line, your advisor's there, your family comes, but it's, it's like it is a tunnel like this big. Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is, you're going through that, that tunnel with, you know, millions of people.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:16:03 One of the joys of awe science, you know, we gathered stories of awe from twenty-six countries, and it's one of my favorite parts of this research. And this is like India and Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico and Japan and Korea, South Korea and Russia. I mean, everybody. We brought them in, got these stories. You know, like what is vast and mysterious? What gives you goosebumps? What's amazing or awesome to you? And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina, they're gonna write about [laughs] they're, they're gonna tell you about football, you know. And, you know, when you get stories from parts of the United States, they're gonna talk about, you know, American football and baseball. You get stories from Boston, it's, there's gonna be a Red Sox story. And we have not studied sports in my emotion science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes. They're picked last in grammar school. They're grouchy about sports, and yet it's super emotional. And I will tell you a story that has science and, uh, personal wisdom. Uh, as I s- I gathered these stories, like, God, you know, part of collective effervescence, just like Taylor Swift or being in a punk mosh pit, is also sports. And, and just like, uh, it is awesome to follow a sports team and be there live. And there's this great obscure sociology paper that said, "Being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion because you have your rituals, they have these towels they f- they sing around. You think of yourself as the Steeler nation. They talk about godlike experiences on the field. They have these spiritual moments where in freezing days they'll take off their clothes and cheer and cry together." Uh, and I was teaching this recently, and there were two Steeler fans in the audience, and they're like, "That's exactly it, but I'll tell you more. Like, everywhere you go, if you're a fan, a Steeler fan, there are Steeler bars that you can go to. [laughs] And when the Steelers play, they're gonna be Steelers fans. And if you're a kid and the Steelers lose, somebody who's old will tell you, 'I remember when we lost in 1983, and we'll recover. We'll...'" You know, we'll have this expansion of time. It was so rich to me. You know, it was like, we love sports. You know, sports, the Olympics are old. They're three thousand years old. The ball court games in the Maya, you know, in the Mayan traditions are, were amazing ways to gather community and, and become collective, right? So, you know, uh, it was really eye-opening for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports. And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr, who was coaching the Warriors at the time. He's a righteous guy, you know. Uh, he is a, a person of truth, and just getting a sense of like how awesome

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:03 it is to... I mean, for him to coach a game, and the Warriors were in this amazing period, and look up into the stands and ten thousand people are dancing [laughs] because of your t- coaching, you know. I was likeThat's pretty good. So

Andrew Huberman 1:19:17 Yeah, he's really tapped in, isn't he?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:18 Yeah, he is.

Andrew Huberman 1:19:19 He's a meditator and wildlife experience and um

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:23 Yeah. And trauma early, you know.

Andrew Huberman 1:19:25 His dad.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:26 Losing his dad.

Andrew Huberman 1:19:26 Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:27 And, and that orienting him to what really matters.

Andrew Huberman 1:19:31 I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:33 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:19:33 ... but I'm also thinking about solutions.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:36 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:19:36 You know, it sprang to mind that, you know, uh, it's, it's funny. Sometimes I get tagged to, like, ice baths for some...

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:42 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:19:43 Look, look, folks, that was whim, right? I mean, that was whim. I mean, sure, I've done some cold plunges. I like to do the cold.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:47 I gotta do them. They sound good.

Andrew Huberman 1:19:48 Yeah, it's fun. I mean, you know, it, it's psychologically painful, and you feel better afterwards. And, um, it'll make you, it'll make anyone mentally stronger because cold is a-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:19:58 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:19:58 ... universal stressor. Um, but you know, it, it gets kind of a bad rap 'cause mostly 'cause people don't like doing it. Everyone loves the sauna. It's kind of funny. Everyone's cool with sauna.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:08 I love the sauna, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:08 And the Finns love the sauna.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:10 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:10 And it's a social thing for them. And one thing that I think has been overlooked, and it just sprang to mind now-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:15 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:20:15 ... um, so I overlooked it as well, is that, you know, there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people, but that we can also do on our own. And when we do them on our own, we s- we are-- no other people are doing it on their own too. And so it's kind of a d- it's a different version-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:31 That's cool

Andrew Huberman 1:20:31 ... of what we've been talking about. And, you know, the, quote-unquote, "health and wellness community," they take some heat, like people went, "Oh, it's all about supplements or all about cold plunges," you know, and I've got a, like a, like a particular finger I hold up when I hear that. But it's not about that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:47 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:47 There's this deeper layer-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:49 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:20:49 ... that's much more important that's formed over the last, I would say, five to 10 years. 'Cause it used to be meditation, breathwork.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:55 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:55 Eselin grit. Love Eselin.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:56 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:56 Amazing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:57 Same here.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:57 Incredible place.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:20:58 Historic.

Andrew Huberman 1:20:58 Historic, and many important things actually happened there that people don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:04 Oh my God

Andrew Huberman 1:21:04 ... and world peace.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:21:05 That maybe some-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:06 They brought the Russians in there. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:21:08 For in, for example, to, to end the Cold War.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:10 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:21:11 I mean-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:11 And Gorbachev. I know.

Andrew Huberman 1:21:12 Yeah. Incredible, right? But, you know, so it used to be these isolated pockets, but now, you know, people get together to sauna.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:21:18 People get together to do breathwork. People get together to cold plunge, and of course, for thousands of years, humans have been doing this. This is not a new thing. And people look at that, and they go, "This is wacky," or, "It's about the marketing of this." Actually, I, I think that there's a connection that's formed among people who wanna take good care of their health. They wanna have some control over their state, um, because otherwise the world will take control of it for you.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:42 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 1:21:42 And meditating is a very solitary experience for most people. So there's something pretty nice about going to a banya. I love banyas.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:21:49 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:21:49 Russian banyas. And then also d- doing the sauna on your own or cold plunge on your own. And I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media. So from now on, when I see people doing things that I go, "Oh, cool. Like, I like a bit of that. I don't maybe do it every day, or I do that every day too, get to see my morning sunlight." The, the notion that there's a community being built, that was the original intention of social media.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:22:11 I agree. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:22:12 And so I think social media can have this dominant negative effect-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:22:16 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:22:16 ... on awe and day-to-day experience.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:22:17 Profoundly. So.

Andrew Huberman 1:22:18 So a question is, are there ways, surely there are, but how, how could we build more of a sense of, of, like, this communal feeling, leveraging what people are already doing? They're already on their phones and scrolling. Hopefully, they're also doing things to benefit their health, to make them feel less isolated, because as Jonathan Haidt and others have pointed-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:22:39 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:22:39 ... out quite correctly, it can really fracture us into the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:22:42 Oh, yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:22:43 ... the, the me, the ego version, where it's... But it's kind of the perfect venue-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:22:49 It is

Andrew Huberman 1:22:49 ... to connect people also.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:22:50 I agree. I agree.

Andrew Huberman 1:22:51 So I don't expect you to come up with any answers right on the, on the fly, but I feel like it's not going anywhere. So how, how could we build or glean a more sense of a community through things that we're doing, actually doing in our daily lives, is I think a, a question that's worth exploring.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:23:08 It's profoundly important. You know, um, the, you know, the preceding question is like, what are the enemies of awe? What gets in the way or the, the barriers? And, and you just nailed a couple is, you know, online life. You know, and I think Jonathan Haidt is right that it's not only anxiety producing, but we don't think about the opportunity costs of like, it deprives me of awe, you know. And in our study of twenty-six hundred people around the world, what makes them feel awe, no one ever said being on Meta or Facebook or, you know, or, uh, you know, or Instagram. There are a couple reason, worries I have about online life, and I'm kinda working on this now, you know, and one is, is the content itself, which is, you know, it's been algorithmically designed. I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms I was advising there were set in place of like making people hate each other and not demonstrate all of our, all the wonderful things about human beings, which are, uh, ample. And then online life disrupts sharing, and the technologies of today have disrupted sharing. So we don't share music like we used to share. We used to listen to music together. That's down. Going to movies is down forty percent, right? That used to be a very important collective cultural experience. "Did you see the latest Scorsese or Pixar or whatever?" Now it's streaming, right? So I really worry about that. And I think the next challenge in, in the technological world and the new, the social media and the platforms is, is like you said, how do you enable the sharing of experience? Um, you are absolutely right. A lot of what we do for our bodies in the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it, where suddenly you're not, you know, meditating and breathing, but you're also sharing your mind and your experience. You're not, you know, listening to music. You're sharing an understanding of the music together and its cultural history. One of my favorite examples is farmers markets. They were nonexistent in the nineties, right? And they used to be very common in American culture, and now there are nine thousand farmers markets growing.And yeah, people go to buy kale and get the honey and, you know, the fresh bread or whatever, but they're also going [chuckles] because it's community. It's profound community. Um, and we derive a lot of benefits from that, profound benefits, 10 years of life expectancy, community.

Andrew Huberman 1:25:50 10 years?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:25:51 10 years.

Andrew Huberman 1:25:52 Oh my goodness, there's so much obsession these days around what sport allows you to live the longest. Turns out it's, like, pole vaulting, which most people aren't gonna do.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:25:58 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:25:59 Um, sprinting, uh, gymnastics, the stuff that involves a lot of jumping and landing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:03 Is that right?

Andrew Huberman 1:26:03 And, uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:03 Really?

Andrew Huberman 1:26:04 ... and fast twitch activity. Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:05 Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman 1:26:06 I mean, there are a bunch of other features there about, like, who's biased to go into those sports and whatnot, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:10 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:26:10 ... I mean, I think it's in keeping with this idea that, like, getting your heart rate way, way up and moving quickly, as you, as quickly as you safely can, like, once a week-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:17 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:26:17 ... at something [chuckles]

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:18 Cool

Andrew Huberman 1:26:18 ... is probably a good idea, but the greatest benefit seen there is something like f-five to eight years.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:24 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:26:24 So you're talking about a 10-year benefit.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:26:26 10 years, and that's a meta-analysis of 350,000 participants, so that's, that, you can go to the bank with that. Like, social community, very good for the body. I think it's the greatest challenge of our, our social media and our, our platforms, and I've advised at Facebook, 2010 to 2015, Google, Pinterest, little bit of Apple, and I keep telling them, like, you know, "This is the singular challenge," and it's so... It's hard. It's, you know... Uh, technologies are asynchronous. You know, "Hey, I send you a text," and 18 hours later I hear from you. You're not making eye contact. The visual connection is degraded. You know, Steve Pinker observed rightly so, like, when I'm on Zoom, [chuckles] I have to look at the down to see the camera or whatever, or I look at the screen, so my eye contact is going down.

Andrew Huberman 1:27:19 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:27:19 I'm not making eye contact-

Andrew Huberman 1:27:21 Mm-hmm

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:27:21 ... like we are. Uh, it's just the technology works against it, and I think it's the hard problem of the social media platforms is can they do what you're aspirationally asking for, which is, like, get us to feel connected. Uh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, the original statement about Facebook was open and connected, uh, and I think they failed, and I think we gotta... We... It's, it's the challenge of our times.

Andrew Huberman 1:27:48 I know Mark a bit, and I, I know, you know... I trust he wants that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:27:54 I know.

Andrew Huberman 1:27:55 I really do.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:27:56 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:27:56 I know some people will, will, will push back o-on that statement, but I actually know that he wants that, and I know some of the folks at, in the leadership at Instagram, they want that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:07 I know.

Andrew Huberman 1:28:07 Like, these people actually have very healthy-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:10 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:28:10 ... personal lives.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:11 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:28:11 They understand the value of connection, both at the level of the family, friendships, but also, um, at large. They, they want that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:28:19 I think that maybe, I'm being optimistic here, but maybe AI will offer an opportunity for that-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:25 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:28:25 ... as opposed to divorcing us from, um, gathering-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:28 Yep

Andrew Huberman 1:28:29 ... and, and seeing facial expressions and hearing-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:31 Right

Andrew Huberman 1:28:32 ... uh, voices together or observing other things. You know, I, the, I do think that right now the way that most social media experiences land is the exact opposite of awe.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:44 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:28:44 I will say that because-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:45 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:28:45 ... and I can say that with a fair degree of certainty because I spend a good amount of time on social media teaching-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:51 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:28:51 ... learning, and looking for entertainment, trying not to get-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:54 Right

Andrew Huberman 1:28:54 ... uh, you know, rage baited or-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:56 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:28:56 ... numbing out.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:56 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:28:56 Those are the two things I look out for, rage baiting and numbing out.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:28:59 Well put.

Andrew Huberman 1:29:00 There's a version of social media that's happening right now where we're going further and further into our silos.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:29:06 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:29:06 But I don't think it has to be that.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:29:08 Not at all.

Andrew Huberman 1:29:09 I, I don't. I think it could be really leverage to connect people.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:29:12 You know, when I started advising at Facebook 2010 to 20... It was like Arab Spring and democracy was spreading, and, and in many ways we've had this great democratization of things, of people sharing music. You know, instantaneously I can hear music from any part of the world, uh, which, you know, that's profound, and visual art and, and knowledge and podcasts, and we've gotta be nuanced about this. But we do need, you know, to think intentionally about design, you know, and that, you know, I really worry about the privileging of hate. I forgot what you called it, but that

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:29:51 has been privileged, uh, and that's not human nature. We, we are not all trolls and, you know, tracking people and, and, you know, and that is a degradation of who we are, and I think science would guide us in, in many ways to a-avoid that. So I think it's... We're in this big reflection period about how to redesign, and I hope, I hope they listen to the social science. It has a lot of good things to say.

Andrew Huberman 1:30:19 I've had this thought, uh, that the way social media is now-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:30:23 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:30:24 ... it's the direct opposite of awe-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:30:25 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:30:25 ... for the following reason.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:30:28 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:30:29 Awe-inspiring experiences, you never forget 'em. You never forget them. I mean, we could spend 15 hours talking about first concert, second concerts, first love, first kiss, you know, first get, breakup, you know, and which is its own form of awe, like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:30:45 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:30:45 ... shit, like if [chuckles] this can... There's this flip side to this love thing, right? You know, I mean, there's all that. I sometimes do the test of myself. I go, "Okay, I spent, I don't know how much time on social media yesterday, but do I remember anything specific?"

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:30:58 [laughs] No.

Andrew Huberman 1:30:59 I, I don't think I do. I don't think I remember anything specific.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:31:03 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:31:04 But there was tons of sensory input. A fair amount of time, I remember a damn thing. And so that's scary.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:31:12 It is scary.

Andrew Huberman 1:31:13 'Cause the only thing that resembles that-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:31:16 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:31:16 ... is drugs of abuse, and I, I'm very fortunate that I don't have a drug thing. I never, I never felt drawn to them in a way that I felt like I couldn't escape from them or same with alcohol. Um, easy, easy, easy clip for me, um, to not drink, um, I will say. I real- but my friends who have had real-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:31:35 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:31:35 ... challenges with alcohol and substances-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:31:39 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:31:39 ... they'll tell you, like-It's this super compelling thing, but then you don't have anything to say about it or for it. It's just a space-time disintegration and not the space-time disintegration of psychedelics, which may have some benefits. We'll talk, we'll talk about that. So to me, that's the problem with social media-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:31:59 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:31:59 ... is there's nothing memorable about yesterday's social media. And I do think that the people who build it want it to be impactful on the day-to-day, uh, scale, but also-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:32:10 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:32:10 ... of course they'd want it to be memorable.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:32:12 Yeah. [laughs] Let's hope.

Andrew Huberman 1:32:13 They should... Some kid should be talking about like Lor- like you're talking about Laurel Canyon.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:32:17 Yeah, I know.

Andrew Huberman 1:32:18 But I don't know if they're gonna feel that way.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:32:20 Well, you know, one of the things I'm really interested in right now, Andrew, is, is awe design, right? And, you know, I'm working with GEHL Architecture in Copenhagen. Like, how do you design cities for more awe? It's not hard, and it's good for people, right? A little bit of music, a little bit of green space, a little bit of art, get people looking at each other and talking and buzzing, right? Easy to do. And I think you've just laid out, you know, and someone could write a manifesto, like, maybe my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe. It's small. Awe is vast. It's sped up. Awe slows things down. It has a fragmentation to it. Awe integrates, right? It's about micro things. Awe is about systems. Like, when you feel awe towards music, it's like, "I get it all here right now." Its content is, is not inspiring very often, and it c- it all could be, so-

Andrew Huberman 1:33:13 Sometimes it is. I, I think that the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:33:15 Yeah, I agree

Andrew Huberman 1:33:15 ... that the, that the space-time aperture that we talked about before-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:33:18 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:33:18 ... I think the problem with social media is actually its power to bring the whole space time into an aperture this big. I actually think that it has to do, crazy hypothesis, happy to be wrong, I actually think the whole problem with it has to do with the fact that it brings long timescales, past, present, and future, different ap- uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:33:42 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:33:42 ... different frame rates into one v- real world visual aperture.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:33:47 Right. Right.

Andrew Huberman 1:33:48 Because when... I haven't been to the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:33:50 Right.

Andrew Huberman 1:33:51 But friends of mine who are musicians who love live music-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:33:54 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:33:54 ... who are producers who love live music tell me it is incredible.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:33:58 Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:33:59 And it's, you know, in some cases, the live band is there.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:34:02 It's the technology. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:34:03 And in other cases they're not. And so there's no reason why that technology should be awesome for, again, here we go, no better word for [laughs] no better word for awe than awesome, so we're just gonna stick with it. We're gonna roll with it. The-- There's, there's no reason why digital can't be awe-inspiring.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:34:21 Yeah, it should, and, and I, and we have to, you know, we just have to take a step back in these conversations, right? There's, you know, there's new work

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:34:29 out about AI helping medical doctors, and it's, you know, and the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco is like, "It's like having the best brain trust about medicine right with you all the time. Who wouldn't want that?" You know? And I think let's remember that, and yeah, I think that's the challenge is to have these AI and the devices that it is manifest on get us to what's awesome, and, uh, we'll see. You know, I hope so.

Andrew Huberman 1:34:57 I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PFAS or forever chemicals are still found in eighty percent of non-stick pans, as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products. As I've discussed before on this podcast, these PFAS or forever chemicals like Teflon have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems. So it's very important to avoid them. This is why I'm a huge fan of Our Place. Our Place products are made with the highest quality materials and are all PFAS and toxin-free. I particularly love their Titanium Always Pan Pro. It's the first non-stick pan made with zero chemicals and zero coating. Instead, it uses pure titanium. That means it has no harmful forever

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Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:13 Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:36:13 And, and, uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:14 My favorite e-

Andrew Huberman 1:36:15 And-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:15 My other favorite emotion-

Andrew Huberman 1:36:16 And, uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:16 ... where I began my career.

Andrew Huberman 1:36:17 It was guys, right? Guys-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:18 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:36:18 ... specifically, uh, teasing one another. I definitely experienced that, um, and I definitely participated in it, uh, in a benevolent way. But it... The teasing that happens in groups of good male friends can be pretty brutal.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:34 Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:36:35 But there's a pleasure in it most of the time.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:36:38 [laughs]

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:39 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:36:40 So what's that about?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:36:40 I know. Well, you know, it, it all begins really in m- like when I started scientifically to depart from the Ekman canon, if you will, of those six emotions we talked about earlier, and I was doing a project in his lab, and we were startling people and studying the startle response, a seven-muscle movement motor pattern built into the nervous system, and I noticed people got embarrassed after they were startled unexpectedly. You know, you blast them with a noise out of the blue in the lab, and they'd be like, "Whoa, I think I spit and, you know, peed my pants," or whatever. And they show this response, and I took it to Ekman, and it's the blush, and people avert their gaze, and they look away, and they hide their face, you know. And he's like, "That's a motor pattern of emotion. You should go study it," and I did. And, and then I started to notice, and there's a really rich literature on that, that, and Darwin wrote about this, that a person's embarrassment is a signOf their commitment to the collective, right? Like, man, you know, called you by the wrong name or, you know, I farted in the yoga class or whatever it is, and I'm embarrassed. Like, I'm sorry, man, you know, I apologize. That really matters. And when you see people get embarrassed, you like them more, and you trust them more, and you give resources to them, and you think they're a good group member. And then it's like, man, you know, like I've played a lot of pickup basketball in my life, thousands of games, and you're banging into... And there's just a lot of teasing and taunting and, you know, people I admire, you know, great athletes tease and taunt, you know. It's just part of what we do when we're banging into each other. And I started to put it together, like, you know, the right kind of teasing within a collective, you're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group, right? And then the wrong kind of teasing, which we documented in our labs, like that's bullying and harassment, and we can pinpoint, like that's inappropriate. You know, you're trying to... You're not keeping people in the group. You're excluding them or humiliating them. So we did this study, uh, it was one of my first studies. We brought four fraternity... We brought groups of frater- four, uh, fraternity guys in each interaction, uh, from this fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin, and we gave them each nicknames. Or we gave them each initials, and we had them make up nicknames based on the initials. So two, [chuckles] two letters of a nick were AD, and I'm not sure I can say what the nicknames were like, but it, you know, another drunk and it gets pretty profane. And so we let them tease each other, and they start teasing each other, and they are really... Like, this is young men coming out of a fraternity house teasing each other. There are funny stories. People got embarrassed. Uh, the, the stories and the teasing was kind of about like, I'm gonna accuse you of something that you shouldn't do in this group, right? Like pass out drunk naked, you know, in the streets of Wisconsin. Don't do that, right? And then they get embarrassed, and they say, "Ah, I'm not gonna do that." And what we found is the more that they em- got embarrassed, the better they liked each other 'cause it's, it's turning to this motor pattern of like, "Wow, I'm showing you that I care about what you're accusing me of, and I get embarrassed. You see that in me, we become closer." The, the guys who are better teasers and that were more playful and funny and made people aware of the norms that mattered to the group but not really humiliate people, those guys are more popular in the group, and that's been replicated, right? Just storytelling and, and ribbing each other and, and, and it was part of healthy group functioning. It's just embarrassing each other. You think about roasts, you know. It's the end of your career. You're gonna get the... Someone's gonna talk about your career. You're gonna get hammered. [laughs] And it's wonderful.

Andrew Huberman 1:40:53 I fear that day.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:40:54 Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of this phenomenon of like we, we, we, we make fun of the people we love the most. Siblings are... You have big families with a lot of siblings tease each other like mad, you know, and they joke and they josh and they wrestle and they give each other noogies and they have nicknames for each other, again, to like make sure everybody's aware of, of what matters and how not to violate those rules. So, um, it was, it was fun research. It was... Meant a lot to me.

Andrew Huberman 1:41:25 I bet. I mean, I grew up in a big, big packs of boys. I mean, on my street growing up-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:41:30 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:41:30 ... and the skateboarding thing, and then science, it was a little bit different.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:41:34 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:41:34 Actually, when I came up, there was more of that. It changed-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:41:37 I know

Andrew Huberman 1:41:37 ... over time for g-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:41:38 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:41:38 ... I think for good reasons.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:41:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:41:40 But, um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:41:41 Absolutely

Andrew Huberman 1:41:41 ... and then of course there's my podcast team, and people keep telling me the reason I get teased a lot is 'cause they, 'cause they like me, but you know.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:41:47 Exactly. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:41:49 Um, I saw an, a, an interesting... Well, two things. A, a former guest on this podcast who's a psychiatrist, who's also very, uh, versed in Eastern philosophy, uh, Dr. K, as they call him, um, said that embarrassment is important because it also signals that you're not a creep.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:42:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:42:06 Especially-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:42:07 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:42:07 ... he was referring to heterosexual relationships where, you know, a guy s-says something trying to be, uh, you know, trying to flirt basically or pick up on someone, and then, uh, the woman says something back and he, like gets embarrassed. He realized, like he said the wrong thing. If he doesn't show embarrassment, he's creepy. If he does, it verifies that he has a certain degree of empathy and self-reflection. Uh, so that was his point, but it, it feels relevant here. So-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:42:32 And he's right. I mean, you know, uh, Darwin early on wrote about the blush being a sign of your healthy character, your moral virtue almost. And in non-human species, the facial reddening is associated with physical robustness, and then in humans we think of it as moral robustness. Like, yeah, I care about stuff. We did work early on, Bob Knight at Berkeley, orbitofrontal patients. The orbitofrontal cortex is in part where your ethical consider- consideration takes place, and if you have damage to that region

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:43:05 of the brain through brain trauma, you fall off a motorcycle or, you know, fall off a ladder, you don't show embarrassment where you should. And they feel creepy, if you will, or just like, like, hey, they're not playing by the rules. So it's, it's a very subtle thing. Erving Goffman wrote a lot about it, the great sociologist. Like our embarrassment is telling people like, "I know what the rules are and I care about them. I'm committed to them." So your psychiatrist friend is right.

Andrew Huberman 1:43:33 Along the lines of, of teasing-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:43:35 Yeah. [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:43:37 ... um, uh, someone I'm, I'm proud to call a friend who's also public facing, uh, Jocko Willink, who's also, it turns out, one of our... We're friends for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is that he grew up really into East CoastHardcore music

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:43:50 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:43:50 Not, not a genre I, I gravitate towards, but there's some marginal overlap-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:43:56 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:43:56 ... um, uh, with the types of music. Uh, I mean, two-- we've gone to shows together and, um, he put something up, you know, every once in a while on social media, somebody posts something that-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:44:05 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:44:05 ... really lands, Naval or so- Jocko, and he's-- Jocko's a man of few words, so I'm gonna put more words to it than, than he was able to. Um, but the quote was something like, um, you know, "If you wanna understand..." And he's a former Navy SEAL.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:44:19 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:44:19 SEAL team operator, most people know, know that. But, um, "If you wanna understand, um, males in groups and healthy, uh, masculine friendship, uh, guys are gonna tease each other relentlessly in front of each other, but they'll never tease behind somebody's back, and they'll back the other person who they were just teasing in person-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:44:42 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:44:42 ... against the rest." You know, they'll buffer them against any kind of criticism. So that's a very interesting, um, kind of, uh, contrast there that I think is true.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:44:51 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:44:52 Like, y-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:44:52 Well put

Andrew Huberman 1:44:53 ... you know, it's not like you tease your friend behind his back.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:44:55 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:44:55 It's the, it's the teasing to his face that actually builds the bond.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:44:58 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:44:59 There's another piece of that, which is that you know that that person would back you if you're out of the room. And you know, a, a couple friends, all my friends come to mind, but a couple people who, who really think about and talk about this loyalty component, uh, Jocko was talking about there, Lex Fridman. You know, it's a, it's a critical component to, um, I'm sure female friendship too, although I only know my own experience, so, uh, to male friendship, which is that they can say anything to your face, even be h-harsh criticism, but you know that if you're out of the room, they're not gonna cut you down.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:45:30 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:45:31 They're gonna reserve that for when you're standing in front of them, thankfully.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:45:34 We documented that in the fraternity study that, you know, when you, when you tease somebody and you're like, "Hey man, do you see this guy's dance moves?" Or, "You see this guy shoot free throw," whatever it is, you're just making light of human foible and, and all the funny things that we do, and there's, there's, there's just this really subtle repair work where they're saying like, "I'm teasing you, but I know you got it, you know, and I'll support you." And I agree, I think that, you know, part of what teasing does is it says like, "What do we as a collective really care about?" And let's surface those norms in a light-hearted way, and we know together. And if, and if you make mistakes, you should be apologetic about it. But part of it also is just, uh, this sort of I got your back repair work that they did. Um, and it's profound. It, it... You know, it's interesting, I was kind of this shy kid. I was very small growing up, and kind of the teasing often crossed lines in high school, just, you know, bullying and so forth. And then I started to play basketball and, you know, uh, and I realized like a lot of it's just, just men making sure they know the, the rules of the game, you know, and, and showing also in those moments of the joys of laughing together, like, "I support you. I'm with you," right?

Andrew Huberman 1:46:58 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:46:59 Uh, what a sophisticated thing to do, um, compared to the, the alternatives.

Andrew Huberman 1:47:04 I have a sister, so I was always struck by the brothers in my neighborhood.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:47:06 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:47:07 There were two in particular, like I would hear screaming outside, go outside. This older brother, his name was Peter, holding Michael's face in the sprinklers.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:47:17 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:47:17 His brother's just crying-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:47:19 Okay

Andrew Huberman 1:47:19 ... and crying, screaming. I mean, relentless older brother torture. Some people hear this and probably be like, "Oh, call the cops," you know, and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:47:27 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:47:27 ... I don't know what the reaction is nowadays. I'll try not to be generally sh-generationally biased. I don't know. Yeah, he was, he was abusing his younger brother. [both laughing] And, but if anyone said or tried to do anything to either one of them, they would immediately pair up and fight anyone. It was interesting, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:47:45 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:47:45 Um, for a guy who had an older sister, and this is a very different experience, right? I mean, she

Andrew Huberman 1:47:50 had her own form of older sister kind of, uh, hazing to her younger brother. But there really does seem to be something critical about kind of defining the relationship with people one-on-one, in groups, versus when there's an outside threat.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:48:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:48:05 And, and not that we want outside threat, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:48:07 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:48:08 ... as long as we're talking about the sort of the, the, I don't wanna say disintegration, that's too pessimistic.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:48:13 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:48:13 The sort of, um, gradual erosion of this collective feeling. I- is there less just kind of grouping up together and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:48:21 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:48:21 ... and doing things?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:48:23 Yeah, you know, I, um, ten years ago, uh, fifteen years ago, ten years ago, um, first there was the science of loneliness and isolation, John Cacioppo, uh, and then those who followed like, whoa, we are fragmenting, and we would spend much too much time al-alone, isolated, and then COVID hit, lockdown, et cetera. And our surgeon general, former surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, got it right, like, uh, it's an epidemic of loneliness. And I, as a social psychologist, you know, interested in these social emotions, I'm like, you know, you just look at the basic raw facts, like picnics are down by half. We don't go to movies like we used to. We don't, um, we don't listen to music together. We don't... Thirty-- The estimate is that thirty percent of meals in the United States, people eat them by themselves. You know, I eat a lot of my meals by myself. Um, we go on walks by ourselves. We don't go to church. Church is way down. Um, so the kind of the broad sociological trends are alarming on that fragmentation. But I think the young generation is putting it back together in really interesting ways. You know, we know from survey data that twenty-five-year-olds, thirty-year-olds are really interested in game nights. You know, those are coming back. They're interested in living together, coop-cooperative living. They're cooking more with each other.Value-wise, they care more about community than my generation. I was the great explosion of individualism, and they're kinda like, "You know, if I, I, if I choose a job, I wanna make sure I'm working with other people I like." I didn't even... I didn't think about that. I don't know if, you know. Uh, so I think it's coming back, and, and I love the signs of, you know, festivals are appe- reappearing now. The farmers market that I've talked about, the, you know, the dance groups that are now returning, contact dance. I, I mean, these ... Yoga studios. One out of eight Americans does yoga, you know. I do yoga two to three times a week.

Andrew Huberman 1:50:38 That's so wild.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:50:39 It's amazing.

Andrew Huberman 1:50:40 15 years ago, no one would've predicted that. Also, 15 years ago, no one would've predicted that, that the single ... We're being told that one of the single most important health interventions that women and men should do is, like, lift weights. The only people who lifted weights when I was growing up were, like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:50:54 I know

Andrew Huberman 1:50:54 ... bodybuilders and preseason football players.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:50:56 Yeah. Is that true?

Andrew Huberman 1:50:57 And now-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:50:57 Lifting weights is-

Andrew Huberman 1:50:58 I mean, you never wanna actually live this way, but if you, if you could only pick one form of exercise-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:03 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:51:04 ... to do once a week, that's what you would do. I mean, just in terms of bone health. If it's done properly, you probably get some cardiovascular benefit too, but just in terms of brain health. I mean, obviously you wanna do both, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:15 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:51:15 ... resistance training is, clearly has a longevity benefit. But for the longest time, I mean, you just didn't see women in gyms.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:21 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:51:21 Very few, excuse me.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:22 And now it's-

Andrew Huberman 1:51:23 You saw very few

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:23 ... it's gone.

Andrew Huberman 1:51:23 And if you did, they were sort of, they, you know-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:25 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:51:25 ... women are, are pushing thems- heavy for them or in some cases heavier than the guys are lifting, but it... Regardless, it, that's a, that's a huge shift.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:33 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:51:33 So many more people are in gyms, and I wonder whether or not it contributes to some sort of feeling of, of-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:38 It does

Andrew Huberman 1:51:39 ... collective. I mean, it-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:40 And-

Andrew Huberman 1:51:40 ... you're training hard around other people.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:42 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:51:42 So that's cool.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:51:43 I think Vivek Murthy in particular, who I deeply admire and have worked with a bit, you know, he, he got our health world. Think about it. Surgeon General of the United States, the first one to come out of public health traditions, did work in India, right? And he's like, "There's this social side that you've covered in your show, like, to health, to physical health, to the, the telomerase of your, your cells, your DNA, and the vagus nerve, and so forth, oxytocin, cortisol. It's social. Uh, there's, there are social dimensions to our nervous system." And I think that's coming, Andrew. Like, we're starting to see why do I go to a farmers market? 'Cause I feel a sense of community. And why do I love yoga? Because I w- I'm doing these postures all sync- synchronized with people I don't know, and I feel a sense of awe and transcendence. Why do I lift weights, right? There's the banter and the discussion and the, the history and the sense of, you know, of what this all means culturally. I think that's coming. I think the gyms are appealing to it in some sense, right? Little bit more community activi- ac- activity, and I think it's good news, you know. I love the Japanese onsen. Uh, you go for the water, you know, and the, the springs and the heat and so forth, but they in their wisdom have built entire community experiences around it.

Andrew Huberman 1:53:11 Hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:11 Where you, you wash yourself and you bathe together and you eat together and you... There are sayings up on the walls, and you spend a little time with your kids there, right? So I hope we, we learn, um, 'cause I think it's important.

Andrew Huberman 1:53:27 Yeah. I'm thinking a lot now about how we can bridge between these incredible technologies-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:32 Yeah. Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:53:32 ... 'cause I, I am a fan. Um, and, but also, uh, the, the non-negotiable technology of our, our nervous system and the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:40 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:53:40 ... and our biology and our psychology, right? Lately, because I have aquarium, I'm really into this thing called aquascaping, which is this-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:46 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:53:46 ... Japanese form of, like, plants and, and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:48 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:53:48 ... freshwater fish, and, uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:50 Nice

Andrew Huberman 1:53:50 ... just obsessed with it. But, and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:52 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:53:52 ... um, and when the ecosystem is doing well, I'm like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:55 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:53:55 ... oh, like, I feel, I have s-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:53:56 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:53:56 It's a form of... It's brought me some awe at times when, like, the things are going well in there. I'm like, "Wow, this is beautiful." And, um, and I think there are things that I would never do to my fish.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:07 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:54:07 I would never isolate them from one another. But I give them enough places to hide from one another 'cause there's a lot of dominance hierarchy stuff being worked out between these discus.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:15 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:54:15 Um, I make sure they're on a light cycle. I make sure they're fed but not overfed or underfed, right? And, um, I wouldn't do most of the things that we do to ourselves to, to my fish.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:29 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:54:29 You know? I wouldn't isolate them and give them, like, little videos of other fish-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:32 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:54:32 ... to look at.

Andrew Huberman 1:54:33 Like, I know that wouldn't, that wouldn't work. Um, I know that they would die. I, I know that, uh, you know. And so I think we can learn a lot from m- m- more, uh, simpler organisms and, and the sort of basic units of, of care-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:47 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:54:47 ... and community.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:47 Yep.

Andrew Huberman 1:54:48 They're very similar.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:49 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:54:49 I mean, it gets played out differently, but-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:54:50 Yep. Well put

Andrew Huberman 1:54:51 ... but they're very similar, uh, 'cause, uh, obviously we, we evolved, uh, similar nervous systems, let alone sim- uh, similar needs. I would like to talk about psychedelics, if you're willing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:02 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:55:03 I think there are two, at least two views of psychedelics.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:06 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:55:06 With the caveat that this is not a call for people to just start taking them, that-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:10 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:55:11 ... you know, these are powerful compounds that, um, people with psychosis or bipolar c-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:16 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:55:16 ... conditions in their family really, really need to be careful, and-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:18 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:55:19 ... a- and on and on.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:20 Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman 1:55:20 Just be careful. I don't say that to protect myself. I say that to protect whoever's listening and watching, really. These are... It's no, no s- no small bump. It's a whole thing. So some people will say, okay, they just send you inward, and that's the opposite of what we're talking about. Like, getting-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:37 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:55:37 ... all the awe inside, like, okay, that's... I mean, that's pretty extreme. Um, other people will say that their experiences with psychedelics allow them to come out of that experience and really have a, a felt... connection to people, to-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:55:56 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:55:56 ... plants, to animals, to life that is, um, profoundly positive for their feelings of connection.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:03 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:56:03 And seeing awe perhaps-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:04 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:56:05 ... a bit even in lots of things. So how should we think about psychedelics? And we should probably constrain the question a little bit. Like I'm not talking about MDMA, which is not a psychedelic. It's an empathogen. Ketamine is not a psychedelic.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:16 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 1:56:16 It's a, a dissociative anesthetic.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:17 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:56:17 I'm starting to do this now because people start to lump, and it's actually causing issues for the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:22 Profoundly

Andrew Huberman 1:56:22 ... potential legalization for-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:24 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:56:24 ... so we need, we need to be splitters, not lumpers here. So I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin, maybe DMT-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:31 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:56:31 ... ayahuasca, the, the, the, the classic psychedelics. Yeah. What are your thoughts on these?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:56:36 I'm good friends with Michael Pollan and was, you know, kind of walking the Berkeley hills as he was producing that book and, you know, watched as we started a center for psychedelics, uh, at Berkeley and, um, and you know, it's a revolution. I mean, it's... Psychedelic use is up, you know, forty percent since his book. I mean, it's incredible to watch. And I, I have a few thoughts. You know, one is, you know, make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come. Uh, those are spirit medicines in their community that are part of deep ethical traditions, um, you know, and to honor that with, you know, uh, re- you know, uh, sharing of resources and knowledge and, and the right kind of acknowledgement. That's really important. Um, I, I think in some sense, uh, and you know, David Yaden at Johns Hopkins and others, uh, and some of the early Roland Griffiths work spoke to this, that they are about awe, um, fundamentally. You know, they open up your mind, and you see all life forms, and time is different, and your sense of self vanishes. Robin Carhart-Harris, you know, and you're just connected to vast things, ecosystems and sense of humanity. And I think in some sense, in done, when done in the right way, that's good news. You know, Molly Crockett and her team at Princeton, like you go to a festival and you have psychedelics, a year later you're kinder, uh, through awe, right? Uh, so I think that's important. Uh, I think it's great news what it does for the hard problems of the mind, you know, death anxiety, addiction, trauma, uh, maybe veterans who are suffering twice the rates of PTSD. They're drawn to this, you know, and the VA is working on this. So, uh, and the data look pretty good. OCD, right? Hard problems of the mind. Panic, right? That, um, [lip smack] I've in part dealt with. That is good news. Um, I worry about microdosing. You know? I think people are taking, um, these things like coffee, and it's not coffee, you know? [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:58:55 No, it's not coffee.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:58:56 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 1:58:57 I drink coffee and I might-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:58:58 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:58:58 ... and I know a thing or two about psychedelics-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:59:00 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 1:59:00 ... by experience, and, uh, it's definitely not coffee.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:59:03 And the data speak, speak to this, and we've, we've suddenly unleashed the use of it. Tens of millions of people are using it, not in the way that Michael Pollan describes of like putting it into a cultural container of inquiry and knowledge and guidance, uh, and someone who knows what they're doing around you. And so-

Andrew Huberman 1:59:23 That's pure safety even.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:59:24 Safety.

Andrew Huberman 1:59:25 Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 1:59:25 Yeah. So we're seeing that. And I... You know, they changed my life. I got to them early, uh, you know, [laughs] in my late teens, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. I was a very anxious, obsessive kid, and I think they opened up my mind in this perspective way we've been talking about. I don't really do them now, you know. They gave me a lot. That's why they're here. You know, it's, it's funny, you know, Andrew, like when I was doing them, we were reading Castaneda, who's been debunked, you know, and we, we're reading the traditions and s- thinking about them spiritually and the doors of perception and all this good stuff, right? We were... They were embedded in a, a culture of trying to find mysticism or whatever it is, and I hope people are doing that, you know, if they're gonna be doing on them, make it a form of inquiry. It's a complicated story.

Andrew Huberman 2:00:17 Yeah.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:00:17 Like everything. Like technology.

Andrew Huberman 2:00:19 Well, they're a form of plant technology.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:00:21 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:00:21 Right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:00:21 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:00:21 Plant... Which, uh, quick vignette on that, we had someone here, um, Chris McCurdy, who runs a lab out in Florida. He studies, uh, kratom and other compounds from plants. The pharma companies, they bioprospect. They send people looking for-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:00:34 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:00:35 ... plants that then they can, uh, find isolates and everything from aspirin to, um, kratom to anesthetics like cocaine. I'm not suggesting people use it as, as an anesthetic. They come from plants, but they're isolated and then synthesized and, and enriched, and that's where the opiate, the extreme opiate, the extreme stimulant-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:00:53 Right

Andrew Huberman 2:00:53 ... you know, that's where it comes from.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:00:55 Right.

Andrew Huberman 2:00:55 But they all come from plant alc... Many of them come from plant alkaloids, which is interesting in its own right.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:00:59 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:00:59 But the... I share your feelings about microdosing. Um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:02 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:01:02 ... the data, Robin Carhart-Harris tells me, and he's the real expert, of course, the data say there's no, uh, evidence of benefit from microdosing, at least on major depression, as compared to-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:13 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:01:13 ... like two rounds of psilocybin with a guide-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:16 Right

Andrew Huberman 2:01:16 ... therapy before, during, and after-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:18 Right. Wow

Andrew Huberman 2:01:18 ... and on and on. So, um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:20 I hope people hear that.

Andrew Huberman 2:01:21 Yeah, I hope they hear that. Um, I had the opposite experience as you. Um, I actually regret having done psychedelics when I was younger.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:28 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 2:01:29 Uh, they were terrifying.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:30 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:01:30 I didn't have a good experience. I stopped, d-didn't go anywhere near them, and then later f- in a therapeutic setting, um, had a few experiences with them, not many, but that were immensely beneficial for me. Um, so kind of the opposite direction there. But what we're talking about now, about kind of, okay, you know, there's this problem with certain technologies, there's the, the cultural, the culture wars, there's the political wars-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:01:57 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:01:57 ... there's the actual war that's also going on right now. In a lot of ways, this resembles, likeThe '70s, '80s. There's not that... I mean, I remember a time when you had yuppies, and you had hippies, and you had punk rockers.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:02:06 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:02:06 I mean, watch a John Hughes film, and it was like the idea was that it was like, "Oh, we're actually similar," right? You know?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:02:10 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:02:10 So the extent to which those films like showed people, hey, like people were actually similar along certain dimensions as opposed to so different. But, you know, I, I wonder because I think about the, the not so recent and recent history of things, everything from breathwork, cold plunges, psychedelics-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:02:29 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:02:29 ... um, awe-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:02:29 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:02:29 ... music, the collective consciousness. I mean-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:02:31 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:02:31 ... it's gonna look different now, the same way that it, it looked different back then, right? Like I'm, I'm trying to s- get outside my Gen X self these days and think like, so what would it look like? Like I'm the old guy now. So what would it look like if these technologies, I just mentioned a few-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:02:51 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:02:51 ... but all of them, including social media, what would it look like if those were all used to the greatest benefit? Like, what would that look like? Can we be the open-minded parents of the '80s, you know? [chuckles]

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:03:02 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:03:03 Um, can we be the... C- yeah, like, because I feel like I can scream all day or about what I think about the science of this and that to younger people, but the only thing I actually have control over is, like, me. How do we, um, the, let's say forty to one hundred year olds-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:03:28 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:03:28 Let's really lean it on the forty to seventy year olds.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:03:30 Okay.

Andrew Huberman 2:03:30 How do we create the environment so that younger people can flourish with these technologies as opposed to being like the parents of the '70s and '80s that are like, "Oh, they got long hair," and like, "What is this, like, punk rock thing?" Like, I don't wanna be that person. That sucks.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:03:49 [laughs] Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:03:50 I also don't wanna be the, and I see this a lot, unfortunately, people who are part of those movements, and then they, they're just, like, towing the party line because they're, like, wholeheartedly adhering to one political group without thinking about whether or not-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:05 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:04:05 ... there's any, any hint of rational-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:07 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:04:07 ... argument on the other side, right? The whole point is not to be against. The whole idea is to be for what you believe is right. And so I don't know how to do this. You're older than I am by a bit.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:18 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:04:18 You're clearly wiser than I am, seriously, and y- you have more life experience. So what do we do? Like, really, like, what, what in the-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:27 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:04:27 ... hell can we do? Because I don't like this, "You guys are all on your phones" right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:31 No, I know.

Andrew Huberman 2:04:32 Like, that doesn't feel good to me 'cause they were telling us when we were younger, like, "This is ridiculous."

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:37 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:04:37 Like, the older guys were like, you know, small wheels on skateboards. They were right about the small wheels things.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:41 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:04:41 Turns out we, the wheels got too small.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:43 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:04:43 But the, uh, Jim will understand that joke. But what do we do?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:04:47 I think we're in this moment, you know, with everything going on, you know, with AI and being online and polarization and climate crisis and, uh, you know, the things that we worry about, the rise of white supremacy, politics, et cetera. Everybody's asking this question of like, what... how do we kind of move forward? And, and, you know, in light of many of the things that we've talked about in this conversation, I'm most focused on, um, what Robert Putnam started to write about and other people started to write about, like the, just the breakdown of collective life and shared life. And I think that's the, in a defining issue of our times, as well as our relationship to the natural world. And I find awe, uh, as do other people, really refreshing. It, it provides a roadmap, which is, you know, and I'll give you a, a very concrete example. I'm, I'm working with Gehl Architecture on a Cities of Awe initiative, and they do amazing work, hundreds of cities around the world. Seventy percent of human population is in cities. Most of our carbon emissions come out of cities. And this is, this is a place we can redesign and, and make it better, right? And awe is a wonderful lens. So you can ask, and you could ask the same of like, what do you give to a teenager who's suffering suicidal ideation, or what do you give to a veteran who is coming back and feeling alienated from the world? Uh, you give them awe, right? And what does that mean? It's like, well, you give them a little nature, and that's, you rewild part of a city, right? You give them some public art. We love art. You know, we love visual art. You give them, uh, the opportunity to recognize the moral beauty. You know, you found it in Joe Strummer. Just get them to interact with other people from face to face. You give them, uh, a little collective stuff, right? You, "Hey, we're gonna have the yoga class in the town square," or the Mexican Zócalo, everybody walks together at a certain hour of the day, and they suddenly feel peaceful, right? Uh, you give them ideas about big ideas and, and life. You give them a little bit of opportunity for meditation and reflection.

Andrew Huberman 2:07:09 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:07:10 Um, that's easy to do. And when I, you know, was writing this book and just st- teaching social science for thirty years, it's like, man, you know, we used to do this really well, and it used to be temples and church. You know, that's where it all was brought together. And now we don't go there. Fifty-five percent of Americans go to church. It used to be ninety, or temple. Um, I don't. I never did. You know, and I, and I, in some sense, miss it. You know, I see my, one of my best friends, very religious. He... Few of them, and they, they have so much, and we're recreating that right now, right? And we've gotta do it in a coherent way. If it's the place where people are lifting weights, there should be music there. There should be visual stuff. There should be some art, nature. There should be some wisdom and some moral beauty, right? That's, uh, I love Ironworks, where I go climb, because you go there, and it's like-People are climbing, but there's, you s- you get to see the, there's the art exhibit each [chuckles] month of a local artist. There's some music going on. You get to listen to music. So this isn't that hard to do, Andrew, and I think the awe science gives us a roadmap to think about what we share.

Andrew Huberman 2:08:30 I love that. Um, I was not into CrossFit, but, um, an ex-girlfriend

Andrew Huberman 2:08:36 of mine when I met her was, like, really into CrossFit.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:08:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:08:38 And they would do barbecues, and they'd clean the gym.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:08:40 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:08:40 And they would dress up in costumes and stuff.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:08:42 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:08:42 And I remember this is when I moved to San Diego to start my lab down there before I moved to Stanford, and, and I remember thinking, like, this is kinda crazy. Like, I went to the gym growing up. I start, uh, always since I was in my teens, and I'm like, "Really? You guys like social?" And they had this awesome social community. I know CrossFit has somewhat fallen out of favor now. I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation. You may be, uh, pleased to hear, I, I just thought of this. I can't remember, uh, I can't believe that I didn't, uh, remember this earlier. Uh, one of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after The Clash, 'cause, you know, he went into the kind of void of, like-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:19 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:09:19 ... he, he wasn't doing anything. He, he, he wandered for a long time. He went down to Spain.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:23 Did he really?

Andrew Huberman 2:09:23 Oh, he grew out a beard, moved to Spain.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:25 Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman 2:09:25 And, um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:26 Cool

Andrew Huberman 2:09:26 ... didn't tell anyone who he was, and they-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:27 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:09:27 ... they kinda realized who he was eventually. He was really searching, you know, his life had... He lost his brother to suicide, I believe.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:33 Mm.

Andrew Huberman 2:09:34 Um, he ran the, uh, the Paris Marathon.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:39 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:09:39 It was kind of famous, I think while smoking a cigarette.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:41 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:09:42 Uh, people always say, and I don't think he did any training. One thing that he was very well known for until his death was he would do campfires.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:50 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:09:51 In Manhattan, he would take people down to the river, and, and he had some famous friends like Jim Jarmusch and, and, uh, you know, and, uh-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:58 Mm

Andrew Huberman 2:09:58 ... well-known people in-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:09:59 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:09:59 ... in that world. Uh, but he would invite whoever, and there were kids. You gotta see this documentary. It's so good. We'll put a link to it, uh, for-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:07 Good

Andrew Huberman 2:10:07 ... if people wanna see it. It's so good. Um, there were kids, there were adults, um, and they'd stay out till, like, 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:15 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:10:15 ... playing music, singing, drumming. Uh, people get up and talk, and so he was constantly doing these campfires-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:21 Nice

Andrew Huberman 2:10:21 ... his entire life.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:22 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:10:23 Knowing close friends of his, it's like, this is actually what he did.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:26 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:10:26 And he wasn't getting... There, they were able to film a few of these, but that was not the point. And he would bring out a radio 'cause he thought, like, maybe you could, like, make it, like, a radio show-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:35 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:10:35 ... of the thing and... But it was not to record and distribute.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:38 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:10:38 It was just... So I don't know. I got this crazy idea in the back of my mind that maybe, like, I'm gonna start doing campfires.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:43 I have to weigh in on some science.

Andrew Huberman 2:10:45 Okay. Oh, am I gonna k- destroy the environment?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:47 No, not at all.

Andrew Huberman 2:10:47 Okay. I was, I was afraid you were gonna tell me that, you know.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:10:49 In fact, I think this is a deep idea. There's this new science of campfires, and they're several hundred thousand years old. And also, you know, when you study people in small scale societies, they, they gather at night around campfires, and they tell certain kinds of stories. You know, stories of how they're all connected and helping each other and watching out for what is dangerous in the dark and, you know, a lot of stuff happens. It's fundamental to our humanity around campfires. Um, so I think you're onto something really important, you know, that, that we need to return. Uh, when I go to the climbing gym, we all take saunas. You know, I do probably four saunas a week.

Andrew Huberman 2:11:30 Nice.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:11:30 And you get your sweat, and your heart rate goes up, and so good for your, your body. But then it's like everybody sort of offhandedly notes, like, "I love the conversations that happen in the sauna," you know? And it's true. And so, yeah, we've gotta... There are all these ways to get back to what we should be doing right now to bring us together, and campfires would be a good start. I'll come to your first one.

Andrew Huberman 2:11:55 Awesome.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:11:56 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:11:56 Uh, campfire also great red light therapy. No joke. Long wavelength light only coming out of that fire. And you know, everyone's obsessed with, like, red light therapy. You can get it from the sun when you don't wanna get too much UV, but yeah, you get tons of long wavelength light exposure, which is great for-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:09 Really?

Andrew Huberman 2:12:09 ... which is known to be great for mitochondria. I mean, don't get me-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:12 Wow.

Andrew Huberman 2:12:12 I, I don't wanna get going on this as, as too much of a tangent. We've had guests on here from University College London. I mean, the long wavelength light actually goes all the way through your body, even in light clothing, and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria, which actually improves mitochondrial function-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:26 Got it

Andrew Huberman 2:12:27 ... in every single s- every single cell that has a mitochondria. So-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:31 And where do we get this light from? It's-

Andrew Huberman 2:12:32 Typically, it's from, from sunlight.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:34 Right.

Andrew Huberman 2:12:34 When it's low solar angle, so when it's low in the sky because of Rayleigh scattering, you're, you're getting rid of the UV. That's why you can see the orange and red.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:41 Right.

Andrew Huberman 2:12:41 And it's not painful to look at the sun when it's low in the sky. When it's overhead and the UV index is high, you're s- it's, you know, full spectrum, and you have to be-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:48 Right

Andrew Huberman 2:12:48 ... careful of that. You're also... You got some color to you, but, like, you-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:51 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:12:51 Something tells me your lineage was kind of, like, fair skinned, right?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:12:53 Oh, yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:12:54 Okay. So, um, but everyone, it needs to be cautious about that. But that long wavelength light, you know, people buy red light units and things.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:00 Right.

Andrew Huberman 2:13:00 And those can be beneficial. They use them clinically now, but good data on that. But campfires do it.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:13:06 And, um-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:07 And people love campfires.

Andrew Huberman 2:13:08 And there is this thing, if you are out in front of a campfire at night-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:11 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:13:12 ... even if you stay up very late, you wake up feeling pretty darn good.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:15 Yeah. That's cool.

Andrew Huberman 2:13:15 You know?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:16 [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:13:16 Um, so I'm calling it right now. My team's gonna hate me for this, but, uh, you know, uh, Camp Fire coming to your town.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:23 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:13:23 Um, I've always dreamed of doing this, like, taking a year and just getting a bus and just going from town to town and having science health discussions, but mostly just listening to people and doing campfires.

Andrew Huberman 2:13:34 And, um, we probably would film it just 'cause it-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:36 You should do it

Andrew Huberman 2:13:37 ... I gotta create content.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:38 My dream was to take that bus and to go to all the basketball courts of the country. Like, pick up-

Andrew Huberman 2:13:42 That's your thing.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:43 Yeah. Pickup basketball is the same thing. It's like people gathering, banging into each other, hugging it.

Andrew Huberman 2:13:48 Would you do it?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:49 Would I-

Andrew Huberman 2:13:49 You could probably figure out an experiment that goes with it.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:51 Well, my knees are the, the [laughs]

Andrew Huberman 2:13:53 But Stanford just developed this way to regenerate cartilage-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:56 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:13:57 ... in humans, so.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:13:57 Okay. Well, then I'll look into it. Yeah. I think it'd be... I, I love the idea.

Andrew Huberman 2:14:01 Do you believe in life after death? I don't ask every guest that, by the way.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:14:05 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:14:05 You're the only person I've ever asked that. Do you believe that something happens after all this?

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:14:09 I do. I do. Um, yeah, you know, and I write about this in Awe, when my brother Rolf passed awayColon cancer, uh, 55 or so, uh, you know, and I watched the whole transition and, you know, his, his battle against it and his acceptance and then his leaving, and I had this profound experience that night, you know, a, a transcendent experience. And I'm like you, you know, Andrew, it's like neurons and statistics and cells, and we can figure it all out and characterize everything, and it's like I saw space in a different way. I saw something alive in him. And then afterward, I had... A lot of people had this kind of grief experience of he was around, his voice, his hand was on my back. And I just thought for several years and still to this day of, you know, um, quantum reality and things beyond our three-dimensional, four-dimensional view of time and space and, uh, you know, those basic laws, uh, and that there is, uh, you know, consciousness may be patterns of, you know, magnetic, electromagnetic waves around our minds and bodies that are syncing up with other people that transcend the Newtonian world of the brain, and I believe that. And we d- I don't know how to study it. Uh, I sense it in life. I think a lot [chuckles] of other people do too, and so that keeps me open to it. And now I've moved from, you know, being as skeptical but open, you know, agnostic to like, yeah, there's something there that's beyond what we know, so I believe it.

Andrew Huberman 2:16:03 Very cool. I hope you're right. I believe it too, but I, I just hope you're right. I sense you're right. Dacher, thank you so much for making the trip down here to talk with us today and, and share what you've been up to for all these years. Uh, you've had and continue to have a magnificent career. You know, it's, it's really hard to do really good science, and it's even harder to do really good science with a purpose. Uh, and you're doing that, and you continue to, and you just have a way about you that everyone now has, uh, been able to experience firsthand that, like, you really care. That's clear. You put a ton of thought into the work that you're doing. Uh, you've raised 25 professors [chuckles] which is no small feat, I'll tell you. That's a monumental feat, which means that the work will continue. And, um, and you're still going. And [laughs] I'm grateful for your book and, and that you're continuing to do this, and, um, I hope you take that trip to, uh, may-maybe if you can't do it around the entire country, you get, you know, hit some pickup basketball games [laughs] uh, 'cause I think there's something to be learned there for sure.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:17:17 Yeah.

Andrew Huberman 2:17:17 I, I sense it. And, and thanks for inspiring

Andrew Huberman 2:17:19 me, and, and I know you've inspired a ton of other people. So we'll put links to everything that you discussed and to your book, um, but you've definitely inspired us to, to think more deeply about basically what it is to be human and where to take all this technology that we have-

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:17:34 Yeah

Andrew Huberman 2:17:34 ... and this opportunity that we have and really do, uh, real good with it. So I'm very grateful to you. Thank you.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:17:40 Well, thank you, Andrew. It's been an incredible conversation. Let's do more.

Andrew Huberman 2:17:44 Definitely do it again.

Dr. Dacher Keltner 2:17:45 Yeah. Thank you.

Andrew Huberman 2:17:46 Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. To learn more about his work and to find links to his books, including his book on awe, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than thirty years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one- to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. [outro music]