Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner

0:00 Awe is good for reduced inflammation,

0:03 elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms.

0:07 We have people with long COVID,

0:09 just a minute of awe a day reduce long COVID symptoms.

0:14 It's good news, right?

0:15 And and there's so much science on it that I

0:17 just now I think medical doctors are starting to think like,

0:21 I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music through awe, right?

0:26 Um as a mechanism.

0:27 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

0:29 where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life.

0:36 [music] I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology

0:39 and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

0:42 My guest today is Dr.

0:43 Dacher Keltner.

0:45 Dr.

0:45 Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director

0:48 of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

0:52 Dacher is an expert in the science of emotions

0:55 and their role in social dynamics and bonding.

0:58 Today, we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions,

1:01 including the role of teasing in social bonding,

1:04 the role of embarrassment in social bonding,

1:06 and his fascinating work on awe and the things that lead to awe.

1:10 As he describes, awe is not elusive.

1:12 It happens when we shift our perception from a very

1:15 small scale to a very large scale or back again,

1:18 such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista.

1:22 Today, you'll understand what all of that really means, and more importantly,

1:25 how you can create this incredible thing that we call awe in everyday life.

1:29 We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding in groups

1:32 and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds.

1:36 So, today is a very practical as well

1:38 as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change

1:41 the way that you think about your life every

1:42 day and think about opportunities for awe every day.

1:46 As you'll soon see, Dacher Keltner is a truly special scientist

1:50 known for his incredible rigor and creativity in the study of emotions,

1:53 but also continually offering you, the public,

1:56 ways to be and feel genuinely better and to get more out of life.

2:00 It was a true honor and pleasure to host him.

2:03 Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

2:05 is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

2:08 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost

2:11 to consumer information about science

2:13 and science-related tools to the general public.

2:15 In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

2:19 And now for my discussion with Dr.

2:21 Dacher Keltner.

2:23 Dr.

2:23 Dacher Keltner, welcome.

2:25 Good to be with you, Andrew.

2:27 Awe.

2:28 Yeah, we all intuitively know what it is,

2:31 and yet we also don't know how to articulate it.

2:35 Yeah.

2:35 I want to say the words overwhelm, excited.

2:39 I get the physical sensation of a lift.

2:42 I don't think anyone ever said the word

2:43 awe and then collapsed into a turtle position.

2:47 Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that.

2:50 But what got you into awe?

2:52 Yeah, and I and I love the word lift.

2:54 That's really interesting.

2:55 Um yeah, I was uh a young scholar in the science

2:59 of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in, you know,

3:02 and and that field in the, you know,

3:06 '90s and early 2000s was uh really focused on negative emotions,

3:11 you know, and and you know this science, right?

3:13 Anger, fear, fight or flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol,

3:17 uh disgust, you know, Paul Rozin and John Haidt.

3:21 Um And thinking about emotions from that lens and and it as a young scientist uh

3:29 and given the powerful tools of emotion science

3:32 of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena,

3:36 uh it didn't make contact with my life in my own experience, you know?

3:41 I was raised as a wild child in the late '60s in Laurel Canyon and, you know,

3:46 it was like music and social change and protest and uh you know,

3:52 and beauty and I was raised by a dad who's a visual artist and my mom

3:57 taught romanticism and Virginia Woolf and awe and the mind and and I was like,

4:02 "Wow, there's all this stuff that our science, my science, can't speak to.

4:08 Music and visual patterns and dance and collective movement and you know,

4:15 someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry, you know?

4:19 And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman, I was like, "You know,

4:25 what should I do with my career?" And he's like,

4:27 "Study awe, you know?" And so that got me going.

4:31 If we could maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment.

4:35 You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student Yeah.

4:38 sees these faces of disgust, of of pleasure.

4:42 Uh Darwin talked about this.

4:44 Yeah.

4:44 Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures

4:48 of adults where they'll show a baby like,

4:50 you know, recoiling from something or, you know, wide-eyed and leaning in.

4:54 You know, there always seems to be a motor component

4:56 to this that maybe isn't as captured in those two-dimensional photographs.

4:59 But what's the story about sort of hardwired facial emotions?

5:04 And what are the revisions to that story that I I'm probably not aware of?

5:08 Yeah, thank you for asking that.

5:10 Um you know, I've spent 30 years working on that very problem.

5:14 Um Paul Ekman came in and you know, as as you've suggested, right?

5:19 He did this revolutionary work in New Guinea.

5:22 You know, showed photos of six emotions,

5:24 static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile.

5:30 They kind of interpreted the faces like you or I would,

5:34 uh naming it, using the right words to describe those faces.

5:39 And that you know, and this is how science occasionally works,

5:44 which is just by accident that became the field.

5:47 And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are,

5:52 how universal are they in different cultures.

5:55 Uh Ekman really positive, sort of a strong universality.

5:58 That's been contested by Jim Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and others.

6:03 Um but since then, there are controversies around how wire hardwired they are.

6:09 Do they occur reliably in a child's development?

6:13 Yes and no, you know,

6:15 young children show disgust expressions uh like social mammals do.

6:20 They wince at bad smells just like you or I would.

6:23 Uh anger is a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally.

6:27 But then, our lab and several labs around the world,

6:31 you know, Jess Tracy at UB British Columbia, Disa Sauter,

6:35 uh and I want to talk about this computational

6:37 work uh started to expand uh the vocabulary of faces.

6:42 And now, we there's a lot of data

6:44 that suggests there are 20 different facial expressions.

6:47 Laughter, love, compassion, awe, you know, whoa.

6:52 Uh embarrassment, shame, pain, uh you know,

6:56 and that uh in some sense has broadened the taxonomy of emotions.

7:03 We used to think of six, now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind.

7:08 And that's where the field is heading is

7:10 to really start to think about physiological patterns,

7:13 brain patterns of of these distinct states.

7:16 And and I'll tell you um the hardwiring question,

7:21 I mean, it's hard science to do, right?

7:23 Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries,

7:30 getting their emotional expressions, and then making sense of them.

7:33 Uh it used to take 1 hour to code

7:37 the facial muscle movements of one of 1 minute, right?

7:40 So, this is slow science.

7:42 And I would really encourage listeners and viewers to go to Alan Cowan.com.

7:48 And I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowan, who you know, [laughter]

7:55 he's a computational genius and he looked at our old science and said,

8:00 "We can use AI to code the face." And he did it with Google engineers.

8:05 He coded 144 2 million videos from 144 cultures and 16 facial expressions.

8:15 Uh 75% overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks,

8:22 concentration on a test, you know, laugh at friends.

8:25 So, right now I would say 50 to 60% is hardwired.

8:29 It's part of who we are in our evolutionary history.

8:32 And then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways.

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11:32 I'm going to ask you that may or may not be possible to answer.

11:36 Yeah.

11:37 But if anyone could, it would be you.

11:39 And it's not a test.

11:40 Here's what I'm thinking.

11:41 The relationship between emotions and what we call motor patterns,

11:46 movement, is obviously very close, right?

11:49 Disgust, a recoil, um we'll explore awe, um anger, etc.

11:54 And then there's this other node, which is language, right?

11:59 So we have like emotions, motor, language.

12:02 Right.

12:03 Obviously those can't be dissociated.

12:05 Yeah.

12:05 But can we imagine somebody, let's just like hypothetical person,

12:10 who can keep their body very still while they're angry and be very articulate.

12:19 That includes not moving their hands.

12:21 We'd probably think perhaps that person's like sociopathic,

12:24 but that's not the picture I'm trying to paint.

12:27 And then on the other extreme,

12:29 can imagine somebody who um is very angry and is

12:34 gesticulating a lot and moving like we can immediately say,

12:37 "Oh, yeah, that make that makes sense."

12:38 And we could do this for any emotion, right?

12:41 So how should we think about emotion as an experience

12:45 and how it's expressed along these three axes, right?

12:49 Which is motor, language, and then the emotion itself.

12:53 I feel like without um conceptualizing that, I as a true novice of this, right?

12:59 This isn't my area of of of understanding or expertise,

13:03 I can't really understand what an emotion is.

13:07 But if I can understand how those are linked,

13:09 may maybe that's a a portal into that.

13:11 Yeah, I know.

13:12 I mean, it's a profound question, Andrew,

13:14 and and it's central to our field, which is you know,

13:19 the and and I appreciate it coming out

13:21 of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other

13:25 species and and and there are these motor

13:28 patterns that you see in emotion around the world.

13:32 When you soothe a child that's crying, right?

13:34 You're going to bring it in close and caress

13:37 and touch and have emotion when you're you know,

13:39 when you're uh fighting a rival or when you're you see rotten food,

13:44 you're going to that motor pattern will be there.

13:47 You know, and that's part of our research that 75% of that is this motor pattern

13:51 of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles

13:55 and how we respond to the emotional events of life.

13:58 And then we have this massively complicated,

14:01 you know, conceptual system that puts words to experience.

14:05 And that's mainly what we study in psychological sciences.

14:09 Just a Oh, I'm feeling angry or ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion.

14:14 And we know and and your question points

14:18 to this, like very often they're disconnected, right?

14:21 The motor pattern and the language we use

14:24 and how I would interpret it in another person.

14:27 Uh on balance, they correlate point two,

14:30 so they're just weakly they're kind of these streams

14:32 of behavior that are just part of who we are, right?

14:37 Our motor patterns and language.

14:40 And there are a lot of ways to think about it.

14:42 You could think about cultures that value being calm,

14:45 like a lot of East Asian cultures.

14:48 Be calm.

14:48 Don't disrupt things.

14:49 Don't blurt out.

14:51 Don't protest, right?

14:52 And and you'll see this disconnect.

14:55 Um you can think about certain people who they just are more authentic

14:59 and their motor patterns come out in expressions

15:03 and they will tell you how they feel.

15:05 Uh so, it's a central problem that we grapple with.

15:09 And then I love your your third part of this equation of emotion science,

15:14 which is the feeling, the emotion.

15:17 Michael Pollan is right, you know,

15:18 his new book on consciousness, the conscious feeling of something.

15:23 We think we can get it to it with words.

15:25 I don't think so.

15:26 Mhm.

15:27 You probably wouldn't either, right?

15:29 Studying the other species you studied, right?

15:31 Uh it's some weird mixture of everything that's happening in your body.

15:36 And ironically, the emotion or the feeling is

15:39 still one of the uncharted territories of our field.

15:42 It's why as these complicated motor patterns take unfold and words

15:50 are unfolding and images and memories and visual things that you study,

15:55 how does it all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe?

16:00 And we barely know, you know, we just we don't know.

16:03 Every once in a while I'll try and think

16:05 about a concept from way outside of standard science.

16:08 Yeah.

16:08 Like the chakras or something.

16:10 Yeah.

16:10 And it's kind of interesting, right?

16:12 I mean, even if it just if one looks at just purely as a Western scientist,

16:16 this idea that maybe there is a confluence of of nerves and of vasculature

16:22 and stuff that makes you feel kind of like rooted at like Yeah.

16:26 and calm, right?

16:28 Versus like up in your head.

16:30 Uh I've been um watching this really interesting Instagram channel.

16:34 It's a woman who does voices for cartoons.

16:37 And she has the most incredible understanding of voice.

16:42 And she's commenting a lot of the time on people in shows that I don't watch,

16:46 but they have little excerpts of where like I guess there's

16:49 this doctor on the this It's like an ER type show.

16:52 It's like a revisiting of the the show ER,

16:54 but she talks about how as he's matured

16:57 from season to season in his role on the show.

17:00 And he's mentoring how she literally talks about how um his larynx

17:04 and pharynx are how he's controlling those differently as he matures.

17:08 And then when he has a breakdown,

17:10 how that the voice moves further up into his head and what what that's about.

17:14 And I And so sitting about this, and you know,

17:16 here's somebody that's a very unique,

17:18 uh, you know, window into all of this, but we sort of know this intuitively.

17:23 Like, when we're excited, like, there's this kind of rising from the bottom,

17:27 and when we're relaxed,

17:28 everything just kind of sinks down to a the diaphragmatic breathing and things.

17:33 Yeah.

17:33 As a scientist who studies emotion, how do you sort of decide what what,

17:38 uh, which lens to look at things through?

17:42 Um, because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about might sound a little esoteric,

17:44 but it's actually the stuff that's easiest to measure.

17:46 Yeah.

17:47 Presumably, you can quantitatively measure like breaths per minute when

17:52 somebody's looking at an awe-inspiring image versus like a trivial image.

17:56 I love your reference to chakras, and you know, the older I get,

18:00 you know, I've been doing emotion science for 34 years or 5 years.

18:04 It's good to think about the other traditions,

18:06 you know, we wouldn't have thought about the breath,

18:08 the power of the breath, uh,

18:10 without the contemplative meditation traditions that you've in part tested uh,

18:15 and Richie Davidson and others.

18:17 And lo and behold, the breath, deep exhalation,

18:21 activates the vagus nerve, calms us down.

18:23 That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest,

18:28 which kind of sounds like the heart chakra and all

18:30 the speculation around how your soul is in your heart.

18:35 Well, there's a neurophysiological correlate of that.

18:39 Uh, I love the paintings of Alex Grey, the psychedelic artist.

18:42 Like, if you want an image of what

18:44 our neurophysiology is as it synchronizes in love,

18:48 you could it's pretty close, or it's interesting, right?

18:50 So, it's good to find inspiration in that.

18:54 One of the great things about the science of emotion,

18:56 and and I brought these tools into the study of awe,

19:00 you know, which is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion.

19:04 You know, you can measure it with facial muscles and gaze

19:08 patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and, you know,

19:13 different measures of vagal tone and immune

19:16 system activation and activation in the gut

19:19 and of course brain activation and the voice

19:21 which is one of my favorite modalities.

19:24 I learned this in some sense from Darwin.

19:28 Darwin's expression of emotion in man and animals is in my view and we're

19:33 just publishing a paper on this on everything that he said about human emotion.

19:37 53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior.

19:42 I wrote it with Darwin scholar Frank Sulloway who

19:45 knows everything about Darwin and I choose how to study

19:49 an emotion based on what's what's happening out

19:53 in our lives and our the phenomena out there, right?

19:56 So if you're studying awe, you should get people around big trees

20:00 or in musical concerts or in museums, right?

20:05 If you're I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty and I'm like,

20:10 I got to study young men teasing each other cuz we embarrass each other,

20:14 you know, intentionally.

20:15 Oh my goodness, we have to hear about that that that work again.

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

20:20 of the I'll just call it what it is.

20:23 It's not dreaded, it's the dreadful manosphere, you know,

20:27 which people use very broadly but I think now it's being,

20:30 you know, allocated to the the the worst of the worst.

20:35 But then there is this phenomenon among males

20:37 where they'll rib each other and you know, and and there's a there's a healthy

20:40 healthy version of males interacting too, right?

20:42 You know, so we'll get back to that.

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

20:49 That that speaks to humanity and then what are

20:52 our best measures that we can go after it?

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

21:00 First up and thank you at for asking

21:02 you about measurement like it's interesting like people like,

21:04 oh, you can't study awe, you know, you don't know how to measure it.

21:07 It's it's ineffable.

21:09 It's mysterious.

21:10 It's spiritual.

21:11 We can measure awe really well.

21:13 You know, the vocalization, you know, the facial expression,

21:17 uh activation part parts of the brain are deactivated.

21:22 Uh vagal tone, the goosebumps is a good uh part of the awe response.

21:27 As we started to study awe, we did two things.

21:32 And one is typical what's you know, science,

21:35 which is get your most cool awe videos,

21:39 show them to people, you know, and I had some mis- missteps in this science.

21:45 I had a woman who was an honor student at Berkeley

21:47 who was coming back from Burning Man and you know,

21:50 she's like, "I'm going to show engineers fractal imagery." And you know,

21:53 and the engineers are like, "Who is this woman?" And [laughter]

21:57 I mean, there is the the I've never been to Burning Man,

21:59 but there's the the post-Burning Man glow that people come back with.

22:02 That is, for understandable reasons, hard for most people to enter with them.

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

22:08 There's great visual imagery.

22:09 You know, BBC Earth is awesome.

22:11 And it's it uh makes people feel awe.

22:15 Slow motion, guys.

22:16 I don't know if you know these guys.

22:18 They film wild things in slow motion, like, you know,

22:22 dropping a wine glass and it's this spectacular photography and just you know,

22:27 you're like, "So, it opens you up to Cool.

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

22:30 I I love super slow mo.

22:32 Yeah.

22:33 Um and that fits our definition,

22:34 which is like, you don't understand what's happening.

22:37 It's vast.

22:38 It's mysterious.

22:39 But what I'm really proud of, Andrew,

22:40 is the work we did out in the field, right?

22:44 So, one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got

22:49 your master's degree at and headed

22:50 into neuroscience was uh in our paleontology museum.

22:54 There's a replica of a T-Rex skeleton.

22:58 When I was 5 years old and and I learned about dinosaurs, it changed my life.

23:03 It was just in the LA Natural History Museum.

23:05 Like, "Wow!" So, we studied people standing near the T-Rex skeleton,

23:10 and they became expansive and collective.

23:13 We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees.

23:16 We studied people at Yosemite, you know, Yang Bai, a student in my lab,

23:21 stopped hundreds of travelers from all over

23:24 the world right when you see Yosemite,

23:27 and she said, "How do you feel about yourself right now?" And they're like,

23:30 "I feel small and quiet, but part of something really large,

23:34 right?" Uh subsequent to that, there are scientists who

23:37 are studying mosh pits at concerts and, you know,

23:42 surfers and, you know, rock cli- I mean, it's, you know,

23:46 backpackers and, you know,

23:48 we studied One of my favorite studies later with Stacy Bear,

23:52 who's a veteran who ran that who's amazing human being,

23:56 an Outward Bound pioneer.

23:57 We studied people rafting down the American River, you know, veterans just like,

24:01 "Whoa!" We've studied people in art museums,

24:04 Carnegie Hall, you know, so it's it you know,

24:07 one of the joys is when science you know, just in the spirit of your questions,

24:12 it's like, "Well, what should I really do here, right?

24:15 I could stay in the lab." But it's like, "No,

24:17 you know, we got to go do stuff, you know,

24:20 that that uh My dream study was to like

24:23 have a participant come in and and engage a conversation,

24:26 the other participant is Shaquille O'Neal, right?

24:29 And it's like, 7'2", 350 lbs, you'd be like, "Whoa!" But couldn't do that.

24:34 So, uh so there it's been fun.

24:36 It's been a wild ride.

24:37 And so many thoughts.

24:38 Uh first one, um I'm lucky I didn't rotate through your lab

24:42 because I uh would have never become a neuroscientist, but I'm unlucky

24:45 We're glad you you missed that opportunity.

24:47 But I'm But I'm unlucky because it would have been so much fun to cuz I well,

24:53 I loved the the wet lab, as they call it,

24:55 uh getting into these experiments would just be incredible.

24:58 Couple things uh the Shaquille O'Neal thing I um you

25:02 know I think we're all moved by these uh I

25:04 guess they used to call them Make-A-Wish Foundation things where

25:06 a kid who sadly is dying gets some last wish.

25:11 It's a tragic circumstance, but then you get to observe these kids

25:15 and most importantly they get to experience

25:17 something that they never could have imagined

25:19 happening like like a Shaquille O'Neal walking in.

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

25:24 And I think what we're witnessing in those moments has to be all.

25:27 Like they can't believe that this human or this event,

25:30 whatever it is that they they wish for is happening there.

25:32 And so it's sort of layers upon layers of there's

25:34 like a grief component for those of us watching,

25:37 but a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is

25:43 the fact that like for those moments they're not thinking about their mortality.

25:48 And no kid should have to think about their mortality, right?

25:51 I mean even as I talk about it it's like Yeah, it's profound.

25:53 Yeah, it's just it's like there's

25:55 an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?

25:58 That's an particularly uh complicated and and interesting

26:03 uh case where you've got two things colliding, right?

26:07 Because I feel like awe is so life-affirming.

26:09 Yeah, it is.

26:10 And uh anyway that's just a an obs- an observation,

26:13 but horizons are something that fascinated me for a long

26:16 time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon,

26:19 our visual um angle widens.

26:22 That's cool.

26:23 We become more parasympathetic.

26:24 There's a whole Is that right?

26:26 coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system.

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

26:32 When we focus in through a tunnel, we it's quite the opposite.

26:36 I feel like there's something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel,

26:40 thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees,

26:43 or and then the horizon opens up.

26:45 Yeah.

26:46 There's this transformation of visual space.

26:50 And those moments, at least for me, are the moments.

26:54 So, I mean, I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time and be like,

26:56 "This is amazing." But there's something distinctly Yeah.

26:59 bigger in the experience of going from confinement Yeah.

27:03 to openness.

27:04 Yeah.

27:05 It could be brought to the lab.

27:06 But do you think that's what's going on in in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon?

27:10 Right?

27:10 Do people working in Yosemite in the Grand Canyon, do [laughter] they attenuate?

27:14 They're like, "Oh, yeah, like another horizon." I don't know, you know,

27:16 working with rangers right now and they I think I think

27:20 the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated,

27:25 but I they're still finding it in subtler ways.

27:29 Yeah, that's really interesting.

27:31 And you know, it's as interesting as um I've been privileged to know

27:36 Pete Doctor at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films,

27:39 Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.

27:42 played a big role in that.

27:43 Yeah, and through the science of emotion.

27:46 And I was like, you know, in one of our conversations,

27:48 I was like, "Tell me about some

27:49 techniques for producing awe in children's films,

27:54 animated films." And and he described first just what you said,

27:56 like, you know, the film is narrow, like a certain kind of attention, you know,

28:01 sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then [snorts]

28:06 it comes it's suddenly you see the vastness of something and it's true,

28:10 it is awe-inspiring.

28:12 When you think about it neuroscientifically,

28:14 it's a very basic form of awe is shifting

28:17 from small to vast in terms of vision and perception.

28:21 And then it becomes metaphorical, right?

28:23 It's like, "God, I'm thinking about [clears

28:25 throat] like I love one of the wonders

28:26 of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies.

28:33 And very often people be like, "God,

28:34 I've been working so hard at this, you know, I'm working on a a paper,

28:38 something in technology or some part of my life."

28:41 And then you suddenly realize it's part of something large, right?

28:44 One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall,

28:48 in the book, in the chapter on musical awe, said,

28:51 "You know, she's a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony, said,

28:55 'You know, I I practice for 5 hours a day.

28:58 It's hard, man.

28:59 And it's small and narrow, and where's my finger?

29:02 And then when I'm on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space,

29:08 the vastness you're talking about, I feel like I'm part of history, right?

29:11 And I tear up and cry.' Um so,

29:14 I think you're I think I I you got to send me those papers,

29:18 Andrew, cuz I think it's fundamental, which is from small to vast.

29:21 And in fact, we did this really cool study

29:24 with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health.

29:28 Old people go out on an awe walk once a week for 8 weeks.

29:32 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go

29:35 from small to vast in how they looked at things.

29:38 You know, look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves.

29:43 It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over 8 weeks.

29:48 And now we're finding 6 years later better brain health, right?

29:51 So, small to vast is a big part of it.

29:54 I'm um struck by the by the awe walk,

29:56 um and and I know this comes up in your book and elsewhere,

29:59 and you've done a lot of research on this.

30:00 Uh for those listening, um what would an awe walk look like,

30:05 and um what are some of the health benefits you just mentioned a few

30:07 that have that have been observed both in the short and the long term?

30:10 Yeah, thank you.

30:11 You know, uh we we are a walking species,

30:17 you know, it is just in our DNA to walk.

30:20 We meandered from Africa all the way to all the continents.

30:23 A lot of people, Rebecca Solnit writes

30:25 about this, like walking is almost sacred.

30:27 It's a kind of consciousness.

30:29 Like you're saying, like, "Whoa,

30:31 I'm I'm picking up a vaster view of what's around me."

30:35 And I uh decided to just create this awe walk, you know?

30:41 And I did it for a meditation group or mindful magazine.

30:45 You just slow down.

30:47 It's a lot of people walk.

30:49 Hundreds of, you know,

30:50 tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States.

30:53 Uh it's good for you, you know, so we just add it all.

30:57 Like on your regular walk once a week in our study,

31:01 uh go somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go.

31:05 Go someplace that may surprise you.

31:08 Uh I walk around Berkeley a lot and I was like, "Well,

31:10 I'm going to go past the little playground that my daughters played

31:14 at when they were young and just feel that, you know, Cordenices Park."

31:18 Yeah, with the rock slide.

31:21 [laughter] And the tunnel.

31:21 Exactly.

31:21 I love that place.

31:22 Near the rose garden.

31:23 a secret, should we give this away?

31:27 Yeah.

31:26 There's a secret hiking trail through it's

31:31 actually through a private property's backyard and they

31:33 allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash.

31:37 And there's an incredible waterfall and place to stand at the top.

31:41 There's a beam there.

31:42 You've been there, I'm sure.

31:44 We can look out over this what is kind of like a trench

31:48 of tree It's it's a total transformation of one space to the next.

31:52 If you look for it properly, I'm sure now it's on the internet.

31:55 It's in kind of swinging gates, not locked.

31:59 And Still hard to find.

32:01 And there's a little monastery maybe nearby and and you might and you might see

32:05 me a couple years ago you would have seen me and me and my dog,

32:07 but you might see me eating a slice

32:09 of pizza from the cheese board sitting on that log.

32:11 I spend a lot of time there.

32:13 I'm getting goosebumps, Andrew.

32:14 That is just pure Berkeley.

32:16 Thank you.

32:17 So, yeah, so in this study, awewalk, go on your walk,

32:21 find a place that's going to be a little surprising where

32:24 it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder.

32:27 And it's interesting, no one's asked me this question, you know,

32:30 your observation about small to vast, and we just said,

32:34 "Slow down, deepen your breathing, sync it up with your your walking,

32:40 which you've studied empirically the breath.

32:43 And then um go from small to vast, you know, look at clouds,

32:49 look at the whole pattern of clouds, just slow it down.

32:52 Look at trees, look at the light on the trees,

32:54 and look at points of light and then patterns of light.

32:57 Look at you know, I love walking past playgrounds,

33:00 it's one of my favorite sources of awe.

33:03 Listen to one laugh and listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right?

33:07 That's all.

33:08 And they walk through uh they do that for half an hour,

33:12 and what we find in that study is

33:15 is they become more vast in their consciousness.

33:17 They're more aware in the photographs that they provided of what's around them.

33:22 They feel more kindness over the 8 weeks.

33:25 They feel more awe over an 8-week period.

33:28 It rises.

33:30 And then the the finding that was you know,

33:32 important for people who are elderly is less physical pain.

33:36 You know, your body starts to ache when you're 75, you know, uh or earlier,

33:41 and and awe I think through the inflammation process,

33:45 you know, and reducing it, caused less pain.

33:48 You know, this dovetails with other health benefits.

33:51 Awe is good for reduced inflammation,

33:55 elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms.

34:00 We have people with long COVID,

34:02 just a minute of awe a day reduces long COVID symptoms.

34:06 It's good news, right?

34:07 And and there's so much science on it that I

34:10 just Now I think medical doctors are starting to think like,

34:14 I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music through awe, right?

34:18 Um as a mechanism.

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

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

34:25 But before I [laughter] I do, um I have a I have another question.

34:30 I have another question.

34:31 I think for a lot of people, um, including myself,

34:35 we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of our self.

34:40 Like getting outside of ourselves.

34:42 But I'm starting to to think based on the way you're

34:45 describing it that it's about being tethered to the larger picture.

34:50 That it's not a Yes, it's getting out of our heads,

34:53 quote unquote, but it's actually very much an embodied experience.

34:57 It's very It's almost like full body.

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

35:03 Uh, this is usually where people start putting

35:05 in the comments like you talk too much,

35:07 let your your guest talk, but [laughter] I Try and folks, he asked me.

35:10 And twice.

35:10 So you asked me a question, I'm going to answer it.

35:12 Anyone that knows me, you know, if I Okay,

35:14 so I've thought about this this relationship between visual

35:17 aperture and a time perception for a long time.

35:21 This is my my deepest obsession and it

35:23 gets a little bit into the book I'm writing,

35:26 but it but it it's probably reserved for after there's some experiments.

35:30 And and I um, to the fear of my podcast crew,

35:33 I actually am considering going back into the lab to do the this experiment.

35:38 So we know what What do we know for certain?

35:40 We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small,

35:43 like looking through a soda straw view or watch um, maker type aperture or um,

35:49 you're in a let's just say a could be a pleasant or unpleasant

35:53 text communication going back and forth

35:55 that your perception of time is different.

35:58 You're fine slicing.

35:59 Those dot dot dots coming through?

36:01 Yeah, it's just like this.

36:02 like an eternity.

36:03 Yeah.

36:04 And it's bidirectional with your let's just call it level of alertness.

36:07 It doesn't even have to be stressed, but sympathetic nervous system, right?

36:10 So if I'm in line at the store and and I I have some place to be,

36:15 my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like

36:17 the person in front of me is taking forever.

36:19 Yeah, cuz you're in these little micro

36:21 I'm relaxed it feels like I'm I'm slicing time differently.

36:24 Okay, when we see a horizon and and our aperture

36:27 opens up as I mentioned then we relax.

36:30 But we also are taking fewer time bit snapshots.

36:35 So people might think oh fewer you're in slow motion

36:37 cuz they were no you're you're it's the opposite right?

36:39 Slow motion is high frame rate.

36:42 But the same by video where you can

36:43 catch slow motion you need a high frame rate.

36:45 This is why when people experience like a car crash

36:48 they'll often say that things felt like they were slowing down.

36:50 More snapshots.

36:51 That's cool.

36:52 So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture

36:56 and time and it also exists in the auditory domain.

36:59 So if I'm listening to a specific conversation

37:02 in a party I'm fine slicing my perception of auditory space.

37:06 Our friend Irv Hafter taught me this.

37:08 When I listen to everything and I take it

37:10 in as a whole it's it's a more relaxed experience but okay.

37:15 Cool.

37:16 So a long time ago I was because I was experiencing stress I started

37:22 reading about meditation types and different things

37:24 and and I came up with this meditation.

37:26 It's but it's not a meditation at all

37:28 and some of my listeners will be familiar with it.

37:30 I decided to call it for lack of a better term space-time bridging.

37:34 The meditation is very simple.

37:36 You close your eyes and you do three breaths thinking about your skin inward.

37:40 So interoception.

37:42 You open your eyes and you look at your hand you take three breaths.

37:45 But you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand.

37:48 Then you look some distance maybe 8 or 10 feet away you do the same.

37:51 Then you find a horizon and then you think about

37:54 the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon you're just on a planet

37:57 it's floating in space and like every single one of these things

38:00 is a form of meditation or a meme or or whatever.

38:03 And then you get right back to yourself.

38:04 And so what the idea here is that it helped me a lot because

38:08 I noticed that meditations where I was

38:10 completely focused inward made me more focused inward.

38:13 Going for a run I could get outside my head but it

38:15 and I started to play with the idea that maybe it's not

38:19 about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se but it's

38:23 the like every great thing in biology or psychology, it's the process.

38:27 It's not an event.

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

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

38:32 Yeah, absolutely.

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

38:38 Like eventually this thing visual as well.

38:41 visual.

38:41 And so this is a long answer to your question, but It's really interesting.

38:45 this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning.

38:49 Um but it's also very important to go indoors

38:51 and just like focus on what I'm working on.

38:53 Like there is no place or event in a day

38:57 or in life that that's actually the right way to live.

39:00 Like you can go to Big Sur,

39:02 and if you're lucky enough to go to Esalen, like you're like this is it.

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

39:09 And then you go back again.

39:10 Yeah.

39:10 You figure this out.

39:13 Like you the title of this paper, which for which you're the senior author,

39:17 is a balanced mind all fosters equanimity via temporal distancing.

39:22 Yeah, no, it's cool.

39:24 time, not about space.

39:25 It is.

39:26 That's fascinating.

39:26 Okay.

39:26 So that's that's how I think about this.

39:28 Now maybe you can tell us about this paper because

39:30 I'm getting embarrassed that I've been going way too long.

39:32 This is why we're in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know,

39:35 you study the visual system and and we need

39:38 more of that knowledge in the science of awe.

39:40 And I will just make one parenthetical note,

39:42 which is I was interviewing Matthias Tarnopolsky,

39:46 who was at Berkeley, ran and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony.

39:50 He was a music director there and he said I was like

39:52 and he was he studies the great and he's a conductor of symphonies.

39:57 And I was like what's the music's hard to understand scientifically.

40:02 It is complicated.

40:03 I was like what's the why awe and music?

40:05 Why do we cry?

40:07 Why do we get goosebumps?

40:08 Why do I mean profound and he's like time.

40:11 It's all about what it does to our sense of time.

40:14 And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore.

40:18 What awe does to the self, and I'm putting together a couple of your comments,

40:23 is and Jane Goodall got it most right, and and it's, you know,

40:29 it's so great to study things with science,

40:31 and then you see someone you really revere say something,

40:36 and she was she felt that chimpanzees feel awe.

40:39 I do, too.

40:40 Believe that.

40:41 So, compo- it's a controversial issue.

40:44 Uh chimps show, and Frans de Waal alerted me to this, who recently passed away,

40:50 and I just want to pay reverence to him or homage to him.

40:53 Um a great primatologist.

40:55 So, he said, "You got to look at Jane Goodall and writing about

40:58 chimps and the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature.

41:04 They sit quietly, like around rivers, like that waterfall in Berkeley.

41:09 They They look at things.

41:11 They get goosebumps.

41:12 They touch things, like we would out in nature.

41:16 Uh they rock, uh and they Jane Goodall said,

41:19 "Why wouldn't they feel awe?" Uh or big big the beginnings of spirituality,

41:24 which is really being amazed at things outside of the self.

41:30 So, with awe, we we have a sense of self, intersection,

41:33 and the like, and then we connect to vast things out there.

41:37 And that's what our research documented as kind

41:40 of a central mechanism of awe or transformation is

41:43 like when you're at Yosemite or when you are

41:47 standing next to that T-Rex skeleton or when you've,

41:50 you know, when you've thought about the passage

41:54 of time that happens with life, right?

41:57 And there are new meditations around that.

41:59 You're like, "Wow, I am part of something vast.

42:02 I'm part of evolution.

42:03 I'm part of nature.

42:05 I'm part of an ecosystem." Uh and it changes your whole mind, right?

42:12 It changes the neurophysiology of the mind,

42:15 default mode network starts to quiet down,

42:18 activates vagal tone, and you do feel like you're tethered,

42:22 as you said, to like music or a culture

42:27 or a political movement or the team you love, right?

42:30 And it's transcendent.

42:31 Um and if you look at where we are today, we need more of that.

42:35 You know, we need to to get our young people to be connecting to big things.

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44:04 I didn't expect that we would land here,

44:06 at least not so early in the conversation,

44:08 but there you know we we've had

44:11 Kristoff Koch on this podcast talking about consciousness,

44:15 you know, an incredible neuroscientist and a really thinker.

44:17 I mean I've watched his career evolve over the years and he's continued

44:21 to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness and and you know,

44:28 we'll hear nowadays about oh like maybe consciousness is outside the brain

44:31 and I think if nothing else our brains are important components in it.

44:35 May maybe not.

44:36 I don't know.

44:37 I don't want to do the experiment on myself to find out like

44:40 I was decerebrated or something which basically

44:42 means having your cortex removed for folks.

44:44 Sorry for the nerd speak,

44:45 but the idea is connecting through time like in our own

44:49 lives is is a very unique form of awe.

44:52 So like if I hear a song and it reminds me when I was like 15 and then all

44:57 of a sudden all the the ma I call it

44:59 like the magic library come that's how the brain works, right?

45:02 It's like it's like a Harry Potter like you take out a book

45:05 you see a subject and then all of a sudden the library

45:07 the books around it change and so I'm thinking about the time we

45:10 did this and the time we did that and everyone has these notions,

45:13 but they're very much linked to them.

45:15 That's one form of linking up through time.

45:18 And then there's this other one where you feel something

45:21 with someone else you know you're connected in that moment,

45:28 but there's this idea forgive me for getting squishy on here,

45:32 but there's this idea that maybe your past,

45:35 present and future is connected to their past and present and future.

45:38 And then you if you let yourself go there, no drugs required.

45:43 If you let yourself go there, you're like oh we're part of this together.

45:47 And that they're we're sort of moving more now

45:48 as as a as a a conscious fleet than as individuals.

45:53 I think that's a very real experience

45:54 even for people that are like very resistant

45:58 to kind of the like even the language

46:00 of of collective consciousness and things like that.

46:02 And I think concerts are where we generally feel that because

46:05 we're it requires a sort

46:07 of shared perceptual experience or emotional experience.

46:11 Yep.

46:11 And so when you say getting young people connected that way, Yeah.

46:14 it's very different than like node to node.

46:16 It's it's sort of like it's an openness that comes

46:19 First you have to connect to your your past, present, and future.

46:22 And then you're kind of open to it.

46:23 I feel like then that that window opens.

46:26 And then if there's one person there

46:28 or a thousand people standing there, like it's on.

46:31 Yeah.

46:33 [laughter] But if not, and you're just in your your experience,

46:36 you're the person at the party wondering whether

46:38 or not um you have something between your teeth,

46:41 which is the lamest way to be at a party, but we've all been there, right?

46:44 [laughter] Anyway, I'm getting a little outside the box here,

46:48 but what are your thoughts What

46:49 are your thoughts about individual uh experiences,

46:52 like on the awe walk versus a couple on an awe

46:55 walk versus connecting to a whole mess of people, some of whom you've never met?

47:01 I mean, you've highlighted, you know,

47:02 this this temporal this dynamic that you're pointing to uh

47:08 with respect to awe and the experience of awe.

47:10 And and we're so limited in how we measure experience,

47:12 and I uh I think you're right.

47:14 I think that you know, your first sense of like one of the most

47:18 awesome qualities of awe is connecting in your mind through

47:23 the layers of consciousness and experience that shifts out

47:27 of the micro to this expansive narrative about your mind, right?

47:31 And so I grew up around the UCLA campus cuz my mom

47:34 got her PhD there uh at UCLA at UCLA in the late '60s.

47:39 And there were eucalyptus trees, and and then I went to Northern California

47:43 where there were not as many eucalyptus trees.

47:45 And I First day I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergrad,

47:48 I smelled the eucalyptus, and I it was awe.

47:50 It was just like, "Ah." All of these experiences through the olfactory process,

47:56 you know, I was awestruck by that smell, right?

47:58 And that's through the connecting through time.

48:00 I am very persuaded by the new literature on brain synchronization.

48:06 Uh that we are and I talk about this a bit

48:09 in awe and and there's just new science coming out.

48:12 We're always syncing up with other people.

48:14 You know, when an 9-month-old listens to music,

48:17 they are syncing up to the sounds and rhythms of their culture's

48:21 music and they're synced up physiologically with whomever is in their midst.

48:26 When we go to a concert or we watch a sporting event, you know,

48:29 if you're if you like sports,

48:30 your heart rate is syncing up, your brains are synchronizing.

48:33 That it's And and that in some

48:36 sense is the materialistic account of collective consciousness.

48:40 We're all sharing brain patterns and awareness.

48:44 Um and I think that it's it's part of some of our deepest forms of awe,

48:50 you know, and music.

48:53 Now, the current science of music is like it is very

48:56 hard to get people to think collectively in the same way.

49:00 You know, when you teach a classroom, it's impossible.

49:02 But music does it within milliseconds, right?

49:05 When you talk to people who've been to Taylor Swift shows,

49:09 who are Swifties, it's serious, right?

49:14 They are instantly bonded.

49:17 That's that's the United in a like a moral cause almost or a identity cause.

49:22 So, that's profound.

49:24 That's very hard work to do.

49:26 And when Jonathan Haidt and I wrote about awe early in our careers, um you know,

49:33 we were like we need these emotions to make us

49:37 be part of collectives because we are a very collective species.

49:42 It was one of our signature strengths is

49:44 to fold into groups and to cooperate and share.

49:47 It's hard work.

49:48 It's vulnerable to exploitation.

49:51 And awe is one of the fastest pathways through

49:55 through what you're talking about through physical dancing together,

49:59 chanting together, sporting events together,

50:02 what Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence, right?

50:04 Music, just sinking sinking up with each other,

50:08 feeling like we're part of this vast group, sharing a sense of humanity,

50:14 a sense that we all suffer in the same way

50:17 or exalt in the same way and it's profound, you know?

50:21 I don't think we'll ever get this with science, but I love you know, you know,

50:26 I've had all these conversations about awe

50:28 and and musical awe and like when's the time, and I could ask you this question,

50:34 when being at a concert has changed your life?

50:38 Oh, I mean, they're some of the most important and not just memorable,

50:41 but important experiences of my entire life.

50:44 So, tell me about one or two.

50:45 My sister listened to the Grateful Dead

50:47 and Cat Stevens and all that kind of stuff.

50:49 Uh-huh.

50:49 And from the first time I heard

50:53 people immediately think bullet bullet belts and mohawks,

50:55 but I was I was a punk rock kid.

50:57 I mean, I'll never forget like uh my friend,

51:01 who's now well-known in the skateboard community, Jim Thiebaud.

51:04 I know Jim.

51:05 You know Jim?

51:05 Yeah.

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

51:06 I take saunas with Jim.

51:07 Do you?

51:08 Yeah.

51:08 I texted with him this morning.

51:09 hi.

51:09 We text each other every morning.

51:11 The great Jim Thiebaud.

51:12 He basically runs skateboard.

51:13 He's the dean of skateboard, the quiet dean of skateboard.

51:15 He's good friends with Tommy Guerrero.

51:16 Good friends with Tommy Guerrero.

51:17 Uh Jim gave me my first cup of black coffee.

51:22 He was the person who inspired me to uh to start journaling when I was 14.

51:27 I was put on out of sympathy onto uh Thunder

51:30 Trucks and he at the time he was around the factory,

51:33 which at that time was over in Third Street where all the uh Hunters Point.

51:38 Um on Yosemite.

51:39 But anyway, Jim gave me a tape, cuz back then it was tapes.

51:46 A a called Crimpshrine, which is from Berkeley.

51:48 Uh-huh.

51:48 Um and uh they were on Lookout Records,

51:51 which eventually were first releases of Green Day.

51:53 I wasn't so much Forgive me, I like those guys.

51:56 Um I know some of them, but I was super I heard that tape.

52:00 I was like, "This is amazing.

52:02 Like this is amazing.

52:03 Like I've never heard anything quite like it." It was super raw.

52:06 It was um And then I I was like,

52:11 "I need more of this." It was like It was like a drug.

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

52:15 Whatever this is." And so he gave me a Stik Lok Fingers tape.

52:18 And that was just it.

52:19 And then it was Stik Lok Fingers, Operation Ivy, Rancid.

52:23 I mean, I could easily like do a whole literally a thesis

52:27 on that whole kind of era and genre of punk rock.

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

52:32 Yeah.

52:33 Um Heck yeah.

52:33 Mescaleros and uh Yeah.

52:35 Biggest Rancid fan there ever was.

52:36 I'm blessed to be good friends with Tim Armstrong these days,

52:39 but I only met him later in life.

52:40 And that still freaks me out cuz we're close friends.

52:44 But whenever I see him, it's still I'm like,

52:46 "That's Tim Armstrong." because there's the four Talk about time travel.

52:50 That's the 14 15-year-old version of me.

52:53 Those guys are a bit older.

52:54 They were like gods in the Bay Area for our scene, you know?

52:57 And then when they made it, you know, and they're just still so good.

53:00 Yeah.

53:00 The show that changed everything for me was

53:03 This would be summer between '93 and '94.

53:06 Uh a little club It was either called the Stage House

53:09 or the Stagecoach in Santa Barbara that was near the railroad tracks downtown.

53:13 And it was um Rancid playing with Sick of It All,

53:17 which was a East Coast hardcore band,

53:19 which you know, and and my now good friend Toby Morse was there.

53:23 And I remember going there and being kind of scared.

53:27 I I mean, I'm I'm kind of like knew my way around.

53:29 Um It was just Like those guys were older.

53:32 It was like had a kind of violent feel.

53:35 They were from Albany and West Oakland and Some

53:38 of Some of Some of There was an edge there,

53:40 and I remember thinking, "This is exciting.

53:43 I feel very much a part of this.

53:45 I love the music.

53:46 I know every lyric.

53:48 And I'm a little bit frightened and I love it.

53:50 And I think it was just that you know, the I just got the adrenaline back.

53:54 And there's a little bit of you don't know what

53:57 it is going to happen and it feels a little dangerous.

54:01 But it's mostly benevolent.

54:03 And um it's an irreplaceable feeling and and I think

54:07 about sometime uh I think about a lot of the time.

54:10 Yeah, and you know, thank you.

54:12 And I you know, when I was writing this book on awe,

54:16 some forms of awe, you know, there are eight wonders that give us awe,

54:19 you know, some are you kind of understand them.

54:22 Nature's pretty straightforward, spirituality, medit- meditation, you know,

54:27 and music and your description of it exactly

54:31 exactly captures how rich it is and complicated,

54:35 which is there is something about that sound and the acoustic

54:41 patterns that come through your ear drums and head into your auditory

54:45 cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things

54:49 and bonding with people and insta friends like you said for life.

54:54 You know, brothers and sisters almost

54:55 that and you're like this is what life's about.

54:58 And Susan Langer uh a philosopher really got it right.

55:03 She's like music is this tonal language of emotion and identity.

55:08 And awe in music very fitting with our conversation

55:13 is when those sounds come into you,

55:16 move you, and connect you to something that is

55:19 what you care about in life, you know?

55:22 I remember I grew up I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon

55:27 in the late '60s and there was more

55:29 music there than I almost anywhere in human history, you know, from you know,

55:35 the Mamas and the and Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison was out there.

55:39 was living there and the Doors and the you know,

55:41 Bob Dylan was passing through and the Byrds is a joke,

55:44 you know, it was everywhere.

55:45 That's wild just to think about how much incredible music was being created.

55:50 Oh man, you know, the Beach Boys were you know,

55:53 at I mean, weren't Fleetwood Mac back in Topanga?

55:57 I mean, it was like and I was eight and nine and just a you know,

56:02 to grow up on Bob Dylan and when

56:04 I saw about the recent film with Timothy Chalamet,

56:07 I start crying, you know, I was just like this is life, you know.

56:10 Yeah, and so that's why we study awe, you know,

56:14 it it and and you know, music is one of our great technologies.

56:19 Uh there's now research showing it's good for chronic pain.

56:23 I think it's a frontier in healthcare and you know,

56:26 just giving people contemplative meditative approaches to music

56:30 and and and awe is part of the answer.

56:33 And you and I share yet another thing, Andrew.

56:37 You know, when I uh grew up in the foothills

56:40 of the Sierras as a teenager Ted Nugent and you know,

56:44 it was poor you know, area Ted Nugent AC/DC and that's all fine.

56:49 And when I first heard the Sex Pistols in I

56:54 was lucky to be in England when Never Mind the Bollocks

56:56 came out and I was in a working class fighting

57:00 town and I heard that, I was like that's it.

57:05 Yeah.

57:05 And then that led me to Iggy Pop who's one of my moral heroes.

57:08 So, you know, amazing Who's really into Qigong apparently.

57:12 I heard [laughter] him like years ago

57:13 on the radio and and someone was asking him like

57:16 how does he stay in such good shape and he just does a tons of Qigong breathing.

57:20 Wild wild wild.

57:21 You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't.

57:25 Yeah, but there's something that feels kind of um divorced from language about

57:30 the experience that we're talking about

57:32 even though there's lyrics tied in there.

57:34 And And what brings that to mind is there's a a really good book,

57:37 one that I like, anyway,

57:38 um called The Fighter's Heart by a guy named Sam Sheridan.

57:42 His wife actually wrote that movie Monster uh with Charlize Theron,

57:47 I think is uh the actress that played her.

57:49 And um And I don't know Sam,

57:51 but but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms,

57:54 and he explores them all, and um there's this great line in there,

57:58 cuz I've done a little bit of boxing and um and sparred a bit.

58:02 I don't recommend As a neuroscientist, how can I recommend it, right?

58:05 You get hit.

58:05 Oh, I was And that I was actually in my 30s,

58:08 but anyway, I was working some stuff out.

58:11 [laughter] But uh do not recommend uh the sport, yeah, the training,

58:14 yeah, but you don't want to get hit in the head.

58:16 Not good for your brain whatsoever.

58:18 But he talks about how um fighting with someone, sparring,

58:22 or fighting with someone is uh he said it's like

58:25 a it's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have,

58:29 because you're in this primitive, non-language state.

58:33 Yeah.

58:33 I mean, he actually likens it to a one-night stand.

58:35 He says something like, uh you know,

58:37 you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know,

58:39 but you you feel connected, you know?

58:41 So, I don't know if that's the best It's certainly

58:43 not the most politically correct uh way to put it,

58:45 but but I understand what he's talking about, right?

58:47 You You're You're in this moment of you're both vulnerable.

58:51 Yeah.

58:52 In the case of the fighting,

58:54 you're both vulnerable, you're trying to hurt each other.

58:58 You're also obeying some rules.

59:00 Yeah.

59:00 Right, it's not not anything goes.

59:02 And he talks about how it transcends language,

59:05 yeah, and that creates a forever bond.

59:09 And it's true, right?

59:10 Didn't do a ton of sparring, but you have a a respect.

59:12 Yep.

59:13 You went through something hard together,

59:15 even if it's only three three-minute rounds.

59:18 Like that's it it's real.

59:21 But it's separate from language.

59:23 And earlier we were talking about the exper- the experience

59:26 of emotion uh this kind of triad of the feeling,

59:31 the motor component to it, and language,

59:34 but I do think that maybe the language piece can go.

59:37 I'm with you in some sense.

59:39 Darwin wrote about the motor components, got a lot of it right.

59:42 William James was about the body, you know, and the physiology,

59:45 and you know, language is what we rely on as social scientists,

59:49 but it I think it's as William James

59:52 said when he tried to describe his experience

59:55 of transcendence when he took laughing gas and it

59:58 led him down the path to understand spirituality.

1:00:00 He's like, "Words are tattered fragments.

1:00:03 They They barely touch the real thing." Yeah,

1:00:07 and and I just want to dwell for a moment, you know, part of awe,

1:00:13 and I learned this like talking to veterans,

1:00:15 you know, and I I did work with Stacy Bear,

1:00:17 and we did this Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers,

1:00:20 and he's one of my heroes in the book of getting

1:00:24 tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature,

1:00:28 you know, and these are guys who've lost limbs and they're rock climbing,

1:00:31 you know, and it's just like like there's a lot

1:00:34 of awe when you're right at the edge of life,

1:00:36 and there's violence, and and there's a lot of horror,

1:00:39 carnage, etc., but there's awe.

1:00:41 And I love your idea,

1:00:43 and and I think any teacher of of the martial arts would say that's the point.

1:00:49 Is that we can transcend death or violence by martial arts, by performing them,

1:00:56 and and and putting them into a contemplative form for the body.

1:01:04 One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie, is Raging Bull,

1:01:09 man, and Martin Scorsese,

1:01:10 like Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray have these epic battles,

1:01:16 and they look at each other, you know,

1:01:18 in one of the great scenes, and they're just like, "We're united.

1:01:22 This is all we're way beyond the fight, you know?

1:01:25 I think you're right.

1:01:26 I think it's part of this transcendent

1:01:30 moment that of people crashing into each other.

1:01:34 Mosh pits.

1:01:35 [laughter] Yeah.

1:01:36 They are one of my favorite objects of study and awe

1:01:38 and mosh pits have a law a set of laws to them.

1:01:44 [laughter] Yeah, people will study like the the sort of the physics of it.

1:01:46 Yeah, I know.

1:01:47 It's like and you think you're crashing you are.

1:01:50 You're bruising yourself, you know?

1:01:52 But there's something transcendent there about what we find.

1:01:55 I could be wrong, but I think um Raging Bull,

1:01:58 I think that the soundtrack was Clash inspired.

1:02:00 There's something about it in the documentary which

1:02:02 I highly recommend uh called The Future Is

1:02:04 Unwritten which is about the Joe Strummer thing

1:02:07 where some there's some link up between The Clash.

1:02:10 I think Scorsese says, you know,

1:02:11 The Clash inspired the soundtrack to Raging Bull or something like that.

1:02:15 Anyway, he's a big Clash fan, so um or yeah.

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

1:02:19 Yeah, yeah.

1:02:20 So, why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you?

1:02:23 One of the sources of awe is we're amazed

1:02:26 by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice.

1:02:30 So, why Joe Strummer?

1:02:31 Oof, man.

1:02:33 [snorts] All right, I'm going to try and keep this brief.

1:02:35 Um I mean, just to give you a sense of how how what an impact he's had on me.

1:02:40 I mean, I've always worn these button-down black shirts even before I was

1:02:44 public facing um cuz I saw him do a show uh Mescaleros show.

1:02:51 I wasn't there, but he By the way,

1:02:54 Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros I actually think is better than The Clash.

1:02:57 Wow.

1:02:58 Clash was a short run.

1:02:59 It was only 5 years.

1:03:00 Yeah.

1:03:00 Only 5 years pretty much and then they're done.

1:03:03 So, it's one of the winners Clash and then and then

1:03:05 he came back with the Mescaleros and just incredible I mean,

1:03:08 they're masterpieces.

1:03:09 Yeah.

1:03:09 Produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong.

1:03:11 He won at Hellcat Records.

1:03:12 He went to a small label.

1:03:14 Um he also sang songs with Johnny Cash for where with Rick Rubin.

1:03:18 I actually know the story of that cuz I'm friends

1:03:20 with Rick and I insisted on him telling me the story.

1:03:21 So sometime I can tell you that, but I mean masterpieces late in life.

1:03:25 And there was a show that that Strummer played where he

1:03:29 was wearing his black button-down soaking in sweat like soaked in sweat.

1:03:35 And he just wouldn't take the thing off.

1:03:36 I think he might have rolled up like one cuff.

1:03:39 And I was like, that's punk as[ __] I was [laughter] like, that guy is so rad.

1:03:42 And he was in and he died at 50.

1:03:44 Where the I'm 50 now.

1:03:45 He died at 50.

1:03:46 I go see the mural of him right off It's right off

1:03:49 Tompkins Square Park in Alphabet City every time I'm in New York.

1:03:53 Just go like see it.

1:03:54 The aviator says future is unwritten.

1:03:56 You can go there pay your respects.

1:03:57 I've talked to Rick about this a lot.

1:03:59 Like what was it about him?

1:04:00 Yeah.

1:04:01 Cuz they were close friends.

1:04:02 I never met Strummer.

1:04:04 But I think there's three reasons.

1:04:06 One is he had that Bob Dylan-like ability to write lyrics that you're

1:04:12 not especially with Mescaleros where you're not

1:04:14 really sure what the song is about,

1:04:16 but it makes sense not just because it's beautiful,

1:04:19 but you feel like he's tapping into something

1:04:21 more fundamental than what the lyrics actually saying.

1:04:26 A great song for instance would be like on the road to rock and roll.

1:04:30 Like it that could be about being on tour or something,

1:04:33 but it transcends something obvious.

1:04:36 Nice.

1:04:36 The other thing is is the way he he used

1:04:40 his breath was um like there's a his intonation is like unparalleled.

1:04:47 Yeah.

1:04:47 And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand cuz

1:04:52 during the summer I go hang out with Rick whenever I can.

1:04:55 And uh winter too.

1:04:57 Um and we watch documentaries including Clash documentaries.

1:05:00 And I asked him I was like, what was it?

1:05:02 Like why does he have this thing?

1:05:04 Cuz he says these incredible things.

1:05:06 You know, he would say things like, you know,

1:05:07 you got to bring humanity back into the center

1:05:10 of the And those are really beautiful quotes,

1:05:12 but like a lot of people will give beautiful quotes.

1:05:14 And Rick, in very Rick Rubin style, said "Everything he said,

1:05:21 he brought his whole life experience into those statements." And I was like,

1:05:25 "Just the statements?

1:05:26 Like the quotes?

1:05:27 You know, like the you know,

1:05:28 we got to bring the humanity back into the And he goes, "No,

1:05:31 everything he said." It was like you got the sense

1:05:34 that he was bringing all of himself to it.

1:05:37 Even if he was being kind of quiet.

1:05:38 That's cool.

1:05:39 And I go, "Okay, so this is clearly on a plane of understanding

1:05:42 that I can't put language to, right?" What does that even mean?

1:05:45 That's like half the things Rick says.

1:05:47 It's like a riddle mixed up in a poem, you know, put out there as you know,

1:05:52 as like a as a principle and you're just like,

1:05:54 "What the hell is that mean?" But [laughter] but it feels true.

1:05:58 And I think that, you know,

1:05:59 in in Rick's superpower is that Rick knows what a true feeling feels like.

1:06:06 And he knows what a false feeling feels like.

1:06:09 And he's only interested in truths.

1:06:13 Period.

1:06:13 And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of is exactly that.

1:06:17 It's like there are all these layers of meaning and representation and you know,

1:06:21 and we try to figure out true moments of awe with all of our measures and and it

1:06:26 is this like it's all coming together

1:06:27 as a uh a package that tells us it's happened.

1:06:32 So, we can think about things that promote awe.

1:06:34 The awe walk.

1:06:35 Going small to large aperture, maybe back again.

1:06:38 You know, like I guess we shouldn't assume that it's a unidirectional.

1:06:41 You know, coming back into our home after

1:06:43 something big is there's nothing like that, right?

1:06:47 The dog, the kids, the the the spouse,

1:06:50 the whatever, you know, like the those little things,

1:06:52 like plants, you know, you know, the the the you know, so it runs both ways.

1:06:56 It's no fun, but we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe.

1:07:01 Because as I step back from what we're talking about today and I think,

1:07:03 "Okay, language." It can be part of it, but it can also in uh molecular biology

1:07:10 or genetics we call it a dominant negative.

1:07:12 It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions.

1:07:16 And there's a joke around molecular labs and neuroscience labs

1:07:19 that you'd be like that person's a dominant negative, you know.

1:07:23 [laughter] I now have a new phrase I can use.

1:07:24 Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be called a dominant negative.

1:07:27 I call people that in my head a lot online.

1:07:29 I go, "Oh man, that person's a dominant negative.

1:07:31 They're not contributing to the greater good.

1:07:32 They're just like" So, there's you know,

1:07:35 language can be that or be neutral or be positive,

1:07:39 but it can definitely be that.

1:07:40 And then there's something about being over-identified with self.

1:07:45 You know, I so on the recommendation of Tim Armstrong,

1:07:50 someone you wouldn't associate with the Grateful Dead, he was like,

1:07:53 "You got to listen to the Grateful Dead." And I was like,

1:07:55 "What What?" This is Tim the Tim Armstrong, Transplants, Rancid,

1:08:00 Operation Ivy telling me I should listen to Grateful Dead.

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

1:08:07 Yeah.

1:08:06 I said, "Why?" And he said, uh He said, "They're punk rockers." And I said,

1:08:14 "What are you talking about?" And he said He said, "Yeah,

1:08:16 they they played a different show every night." That's

1:08:21 how they're I'm not going to keep doing his I

1:08:23 can do a pretty decent Tim for those uh

1:08:25 but apparently they're the the people that followed them,

1:08:29 that was a big part of it.

1:08:30 It was all all all new, right?

1:08:33 Every show was unique.

1:08:34 Started getting really into listening to the Grateful

1:08:36 Dead in the last couple years,

1:08:37 and then I started listening to documentaries, biographies of them.

1:08:42 And there's this amazing moment in one of them,

1:08:43 I can't remember which, where somebody says, "What killed it?

1:08:48 What killed the collective of music?" Like that that feeling.

1:08:54 The answer someone gave was cocaine.

1:08:57 And then the question was, "Why cocaine?" Yep.

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

1:09:05 It's the me drug." Yeah.

1:09:08 So, I was like, "Whoa, I'm a neuroscientist,

1:09:10 so I can tack that to You're talking about dopamine and adrenaline.

1:09:15 And it's when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated,

1:09:18 that's a very I mean, amphetamines, especially, Yeah.

1:09:22 it's it becomes a me thing.

1:09:24 Every idea that's mine is the thing that needs to happen.

1:09:29 It's the important thing.

1:09:30 If not out there, it needs to happen like that's the only thing that matters.

1:09:34 Very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics,

1:09:36 very different than just the sober experience.

1:09:39 Where it's kind of a downer, but then the non-intoxicated experience of just

1:09:42 being with the music, no substances.

1:09:45 So, I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states,

1:09:51 and but more broadly, how meanness,

1:09:54 self-interested states, are a dominant negative for us.

1:09:58 That was the best entrance into that question I've ever encountered.

1:10:01 You know, it's amazing, Andrew.

1:10:04 You know, I grew up for 3 years, formative years, in Laurel Canyon,

1:10:10 '68 to '70, and then we moved

1:10:11 to the foothills of the Sierras in Northern California.

1:10:14 And it was peak Laurel Canyon,

1:10:16 Joni Mitchell and The Byrds and The Beach Boys and, you know, it was just

1:10:20 Jealous.

1:10:20 Yeah, it was incredible.

1:10:21 Envious in a positive way.

1:10:22 When my brother passed away and he was my brother of all,

1:10:26 you know, 14 months younger, and I was in this reflective period,

1:10:29 I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon,

1:10:32 and they made the same point, which is kind of things shifted after we,

1:10:37 you know, in the early '70s, and the historian said it's cocaine.

1:10:42 That it moved from, you know, marijuana and mushrooms and psychedelics a bit,

1:10:49 but really, you know, people playing music,

1:10:51 you know, Joni Mitchell or Graham Nash or whomever it is,

1:10:54 and then suddenly cocaine comes, and the the whole spirit changed.

1:10:58 Yeah, I think the great enemy of awe is meanness, is what Ralph Waldo Emerson,

1:11:06 who was one of our great writers of awe, you know,

1:11:09 he has this moment out in nature, cold day in Massachusetts,

1:11:13 sees this forest, and he, you know,

1:11:14 he's like, "Standing on the bare bare ground, my head bathed by by there,

1:11:18 and uplifted into infinite space." There's

1:11:21 that uplift that you described earlier of awe.

1:11:24 Uh all mean egotism vanishes.

1:11:29 And that's awe, you know, awe quiets the self.

1:11:35 And when you look at where we are,

1:11:37 you know, Jean Twenge, you know, longitudinal data,

1:11:41 we're more self-focused, you know,

1:11:43 we're taking a quarter of the pictures that we take are of the self.

1:11:46 It's a It's preposterous.

1:11:48 It's pretty crazy.

1:11:49 It's half of the photos we take are of the self

1:11:51 or the self with another person or another thing.

1:11:55 It's perverse, you know, uh the world has become more narcissistic.

1:12:00 We're led by narcissists.

1:12:02 It's been, you know, it's just taken as a default, and it's not a default.

1:12:07 It's a It's a corruption of of our minds.

1:12:10 Because the mind, as you described earlier,

1:12:11 is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact,

1:12:16 at seeing their beauty, at hearing their words,

1:12:18 at looking at collectives, discerning patterns of nature, collectives.

1:12:23 And all of that works against awe, right?

1:12:27 That, you know, if I uh am focused on myself, I'll feel less awe.

1:12:33 If I uh am worried about my striving in society

1:12:38 or my bottom line of my bank bank account,

1:12:41 you know, or thinking about money, it countervails awe.

1:12:43 So, yeah, I I think, you know, that's why awe is important for our times.

1:12:48 We are in this for various reasons this period of too much self-focus.

1:12:54 Uh it's costing young people.

1:12:55 It makes them anxious, you know?

1:12:58 And they got to they got to they got to go dance, they got to hear some music,

1:13:01 they got to share stuff, and go backpacking or whatever it is,

1:13:05 you know, and just to get out of the self.

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1:14:19 The example you gave of sports earlier, I think is is an important one,

1:14:23 um only because I think some people not me,

1:14:27 but some people will like, all right,

1:14:28 I don't really want to go camping or backpacking.

1:14:31 I do.

1:14:32 I spend as much time in Yosemite as I can.

1:14:34 The dancing, concert, you know, maybe that's not for them.

1:14:36 I do think I'm not a big professional sports fan.

1:14:39 Um I like a few things,

1:14:41 but but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on like when I see a game,

1:14:47 one of our members of our podcast team that's not here today

1:14:49 is like just obsessively excited about

1:14:53 professional football and uh Seattle Seahawks.

1:14:56 So, this is a good year for him.

1:14:57 And I have to believe that when he goes

1:15:00 to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl that it's

1:15:04 not just about his relationship to the team.

1:15:06 It's about It's about being a kid and and everyone else there

1:15:10 in a Seahawks jersey is like they have They must feel a connection.

1:15:16 They Because they presumably the super fans know

1:15:18 that the other super fans know the history.

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

1:15:22 They know all the trials and tribulations of the team and on and on.

1:15:25 And so, it's um gosh, it's so different.

1:15:29 I'm just realizing like it's the It's the furthest

1:15:32 thing from like doing a PhD in the sciences.

1:15:35 [laughter] Folks, doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun.

1:15:37 It's a hell of a lot of work.

1:15:39 And there's nothing else quite like it.

1:15:40 I It's irreplaceable.

1:15:41 I I wouldn't redo it for it any other way.

1:15:45 But it is a very like you're It's a very solitary thing.

1:15:48 Like you don't you don't even cross

1:15:49 You cross finish line and your advisor's there.

1:15:52 Your family comes, but it's It's like it is a tunnel like this big.

1:15:56 Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is

1:15:58 you're going through that the tunnel with you know, millions of people.

1:16:03 One of the joys of all science.

1:16:07 You know, we gathered stories of awe from 26 countries

1:16:10 and it's one of my favorite parts of this research.

1:16:13 And this is like India and Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico

1:16:17 and Japan and Korea and South Korea and Russia and we everybody.

1:16:20 We brought them in, got these stories.

1:16:23 And you know, like what is vast and mysterious?

1:16:25 What gives you goosebumps?

1:16:26 What's amazing or awesome to you?

1:16:28 And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina they're going

1:16:33 to write about They're They're going to tell you about football, you know.

1:16:36 And you know, when you get stories from parts of the United States,

1:16:41 they're going to talk about you know, American football and baseball.

1:16:45 You get stories from Boston, it's there's going to be a Red Sox story.

1:16:49 And we have not studied sports in my emotion

1:16:53 science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes.

1:16:57 They're picked last in grammar school.

1:16:59 They're grouchy about sports.

1:17:00 And yet it's super emotional.

1:17:02 And I will tell you a story that has science and uh personal wisdom.

1:17:07 Uh as I I gathered these stories,

1:17:09 I got you know, part of collective effervescence,

1:17:12 just like Taylor Swift or being in a punk mosh pit is also sports.

1:17:18 And and just like uh it is awesome to follow a sports team and be there live.

1:17:25 And there's this great obscure sociology paper that said,

1:17:29 "Being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion.

1:17:34 Because you have your rituals, they have these towels they they sing around.

1:17:38 You think of yourself as the Steeler Nation.

1:17:41 They talk about God-like experiences on the field.

1:17:45 They have these spiritual moments where in freezing days they'll take off

1:17:49 their clothes and cheer and cry together." Uh and I was teaching this recently,

1:17:55 and there were two Steeler fans in the audience.

1:17:57 And they're like, "That's exactly it.

1:17:59 But I'll tell you more.

1:18:00 Like everywhere you go, if you're a fan, a Steeler fan,

1:18:05 there are Steeler bars that you can go to.

1:18:09 [laughter] And when the Steelers play, there're going to be Steelers fans.

1:18:12 And if you're a kid and the Steelers lose, somebody who's old will tell you,

1:18:16 "I remember when we lost in 1983, and we'll recover.

1:18:19 We'll you know, I'll have this expansion of time." It was so rich to me,

1:18:24 you know, it was like we love sports.

1:18:26 You know, sports the Olympics are old, they're 3,000 years old.

1:18:31 The ball court games in the Maya, you know,

1:18:33 in the Mayan traditions are were amazing ways

1:18:38 to gather community and and become collective, right?

1:18:41 So, you know, uh it was really eye-opening

1:18:45 for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports.

1:18:48 And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr,

1:18:52 who was coaching the Warriors at the time.

1:18:54 He's a righteous guy, you know.

1:18:57 Uh he is a a person of truth and just getting

1:19:00 his sense of like how awesome it is to I mean,

1:19:04 for him to coach a game and the Warriors are in this amazing

1:19:07 period and look up into the stands and 10,000 people are dancing.

1:19:13 [laughter] Because of your coaching, you know.

1:19:15 I was like, that's pretty good.

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

1:19:18 He's a meditator and wildlife experience and um And trauma early, you know.

1:19:25 His dad losing his dad.

1:19:27 Yeah.

1:19:27 And and that orienting him to what really matters.

1:19:31 I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe,

1:19:32 but I'm also thinking about solutions.

1:19:36 Yeah.

1:19:36 You know, it sprang to mind that, you know, it's it's funny.

1:19:39 Sometimes I get tagged to like ice baths for some Look,

1:19:43 folks, that was a whim, right?

1:19:44 I mean, that was a whim.

1:19:45 I mean, sure, I've done some cold plunges.

1:19:46 I like the cold.

1:19:47 I do the cold.

1:19:48 Yeah, it's fun.

1:19:49 I mean, it you know,

1:19:49 it it's psychologically painful and you feel better afterwards and um it'll make

1:19:54 you it'll make you anyone mentally

1:19:56 stronger because cold is a universal stressor.

1:19:59 Um but you know, it it gets kind of a bad

1:20:03 rap cuz mostly cuz people don't like doing it.

1:20:05 Everyone loves the sauna.

1:20:06 It's kind of funny.

1:20:07 Everyone's cool with sauna.

1:20:08 Then the Finns love the sauna and it's a social thing for them.

1:20:11 And one thing that I think has been overlooked, and it just sprang to mind now,

1:20:15 so I overlooked it as well, is that you know,

1:20:17 there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences

1:20:20 that we can have with other people, but that we can also do on our own.

1:20:23 And when we do them on our own,

1:20:24 we we are know other people are doing it on their own, too.

1:20:28 And so, it's kind of a it's

1:20:30 a different version of what we've been talking about.

1:20:32 And you know, the quote unquote health and wellness community,

1:20:34 they take some heat.

1:20:36 Like people go, "Oh, it's all about supplements,

1:20:37 it's all about cold plunges." You know,

1:20:39 and I've got a like a like a particular finger I hold up when I hear that.

1:20:43 But it's not about that.

1:20:47 Yeah.

1:20:47 There's this deeper layer that's much

1:20:49 more important that's formed over the last, I would say, 5 to 10 years.

1:20:52 Cuz it used to be meditation, breathwork, Esalen great, love Esalen.

1:20:56 Amazing, incredible place.

1:20:58 A historic and many important things actually happened there that people

1:21:01 don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics and world peace.

1:21:05 Yeah.

1:21:05 That maybe the Russians in there.

1:21:07 For in for example, to to end the Cold War.

1:21:11 Yeah.

1:21:11 And Gorbachev, I know.

1:21:12 Yeah, incredible, right?

1:21:13 But you know, so it used to be these isolated pockets,

1:21:16 but now, you know, people get together to sauna.

1:21:18 People get together to do breathwork.

1:21:19 People get together to cold plunge.

1:21:21 And of course, for thousands of years, humans have been doing this.

1:21:24 This is not a new thing.

1:21:26 And people look at that and they go,

1:21:27 "This is wacky or it's about the marketing of this." Actually,

1:21:30 I I think that there's a connection that's formed among

1:21:33 people who want to take good care of their health.

1:21:35 They want to have some control over their state.

1:21:38 Um because otherwise, the world will take control of it for you.

1:21:42 Yep.

1:21:42 And meditating is a very solitary experience for most people.

1:21:45 So, there's something pretty nice about going to a banya.

1:21:48 I love banyas, Russian banyas.

1:21:49 And then also doing the sauna on your own or cold plunge on your own.

1:21:53 And I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media.

1:21:57 So, from now on, when I see people doing things that I go, "Oh, cool.

1:22:01 Like I like a bit of that." I don't maybe

1:22:03 do it every day or I do that every day, too, get see my morning sunlight.

1:22:06 The The notion that there's a community being

1:22:08 built that was the original intention of social media.

1:22:12 And so, I think social media can have

1:22:14 this dominant negative effect on and day-to-day experience.

1:22:18 So, the question is are there ways, surely there are,

1:22:21 but how how could we build more of a sense

1:22:24 of of like this communal feeling leveraging what people are already doing.

1:22:29 They're already on their phones and scrolling.

1:22:31 Hopefully they're also doing things to benefit their health.

1:22:34 To make them feel less isolated because as Jonathan

1:22:38 Haidt and others have pointed out quite correctly,

1:22:40 it can really fracture us into the Oh, yeah.

1:22:43 the the me, the ego version.

1:22:45 Where it's but it's kind of the perfect venue to connect people also.

1:22:51 So, I don't expect you to come up with any answers right on the on the fly,

1:22:54 but I feel like it's not going anywhere.

1:22:56 So, how how could we build or glean a more sense

1:23:01 of a community through things that we're

1:23:03 doing actually doing in our daily lives?

1:23:05 Is I think it a question that's worth exploring.

1:23:08 It's profoundly important, you know, um the you know,

1:23:12 and the preceding question is like, what are the enemies of awe?

1:23:16 What gets in the way or the the barriers?

1:23:17 And and you just nailed a couple as, you know, online life,

1:23:22 you know, and I think Jonathan Haidt

1:23:23 is right that it's not only anxiety-producing,

1:23:27 but we don't think about the opportunity costs

1:23:29 of like it deprives me of awe, you know?

1:23:33 And in our study of 2,600 people around the world, what makes them feel awe,

1:23:37 no one ever said being on Meta or Facebook or you know,

1:23:42 or uh you know, or Instagram.

1:23:46 There are a couple reason worries I have about

1:23:48 online life and I'm kind of working on this now.

1:23:52 You know, and one is is the content itself,

1:23:56 which is you know, it's been algorithmically designed.

1:24:00 I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms I

1:24:03 was advising there were set in place of like making

1:24:06 people hate each other and not demonstrate all of our all

1:24:11 the wonderful things about human beings, which are uh ample.

1:24:15 And then online life disrupts sharing.

1:24:18 And the technologies of today have disrupted sharing.

1:24:21 So, we don't share music like we used to share.

1:24:24 We used to listen to music together.

1:24:26 That's down.

1:24:27 Going to movies is down 40%, right?

1:24:30 That used to be a very important collective cultural experience.

1:24:34 Did you see the latest Scorsese or Pixar or whatever?

1:24:37 Now it's streaming, right?

1:24:38 So, I really worry about that.

1:24:41 And I think the next challenge in in the technological world

1:24:45 and the new the social media and the platforms is is like you said,

1:24:50 how do you enable the sharing of experience?

1:24:54 Um you are absolutely right.

1:24:57 A lot of what we do for our bodies

1:25:00 in the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it.

1:25:07 Where suddenly you're not you know, meditating and breathing,

1:25:12 but you're also sharing your mind and your experience.

1:25:15 You're not, you know, listening to music,

1:25:18 you're sharing an understanding of the music together and its cultural history.

1:25:22 One of my favorite examples is farmers markets.

1:25:24 They were non-existent in the '90s, right?

1:25:28 And they used to be very common in American culture.

1:25:30 And now there are 9,000 farmers markets growing.

1:25:34 And yeah, people go to buy kale and get the honey and, you know,

1:25:38 the fresh bread or whatever, but they're also going because it's community.

1:25:42 It's profound community.

1:25:44 Um and we derive a lot of benefits from that.

1:25:47 Profound benefits, 10 years of life expectancy.

1:25:49 Community.

1:25:50 10 years.

1:25:51 10 years.

1:25:52 My goodness, there's so much obsession these days

1:25:53 around what sport allows you to live the longest.

1:25:56 Turns out it's like pole vaulting, which most people aren't going to do.

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

1:26:03 Is that right?

1:26:03 And and fast twitch activity.

1:26:05 Yeah.

1:26:06 I mean, there are a bunch of other features there about like

1:26:07 who's biased to go into those sports and whatnot, but I mean,

1:26:10 I think it's in keeping with this idea that like

1:26:12 getting your heart rate way way up and moving quickly

1:26:15 as you as quickly as you safely can like once

1:26:17 a week at something cool is probably a good idea,

1:26:19 but the greatest benefit seen there is something like five to eight years.

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

1:26:26 that's a meta-analysis of 350,000 participants.

1:26:29 So, that's that you can go to the bank with that.

1:26:31 Like, social community very good for the body.

1:26:35 I think it's the greatest challenge

1:26:37 of our our social media and our our platforms.

1:26:41 And I've advised at Facebook 2010 to 2015,

1:26:45 Google, Pinterest, a little bit of Apple,

1:26:49 and I keep telling them like, you know, this is the singular challenge.

1:26:53 And it's so it's hard.

1:26:55 It's, you know, the technologies are asynchronous.

1:26:58 You know, hey, I send you a text and 18 hours later I hear from you.

1:27:04 Uh you're not making eye contact.

1:27:05 The visual connection is degraded.

1:27:07 You know, Steve Pinker observed rightly so, like, when I'm on Zoom,

1:27:13 I have to look at that down to see

1:27:15 the camera or whatever or I look at the screen, so my eye contact is going down.

1:27:19 I'm not making eye contact like we are.

1:27:22 Uh it's just the technology works against it

1:27:24 and I think it's the hard problem of the social

1:27:27 media platforms is can they do what you're aspirationally

1:27:32 asking for, which is like get us to feel connected.

1:27:35 Uh you know, Mark Zuckerberg,

1:27:37 the original statement about Facebook was open and connected.

1:27:42 Uh and I think they failed and I think we

1:27:44 got to we it's it's the challenge of our times.

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

1:27:54 I know.

1:27:55 I really do.

1:27:56 I know some people will will push back on on that statement,

1:27:59 but I actually know that he wants that.

1:28:02 And I know some of the folks

1:28:04 that in the leadership at Instagram, they want that.

1:28:07 Like, these people actually have very healthy personal lives.

1:28:11 They understand the value of connection both at the level of the family,

1:28:14 friendships, but also at large.

1:28:17 They they want that.

1:28:19 I think that maybe I'm being optimistic here,

1:28:21 but maybe AI will offer an opportunity

1:28:24 for that as opposed to divorcing us from um

1:28:27 gathering and and seeing facial expressions and hearing

1:28:32 of voices together or observing other things.

1:28:35 You know, I the I do think that right now the way

1:28:38 that most social media experiences land is the exact opposite of awe.

1:28:44 I will say that because and I can say that with a fair degree

1:28:47 of certainty because I spend a good amount of time on social media teaching,

1:28:51 learning, and looking for entertainment,

1:28:52 trying not to get uh you know, rage baited or numbing out.

1:28:56 Those are the two things I look out for.

1:28:58 Rage baiting and numbing out.

1:28:59 Well put.

1:29:00 There's a version of social media that's happening right

1:29:02 now where we're going further and further into our silos.

1:29:06 Yeah.

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

1:29:08 Not at all.

1:29:08 I I don't.

1:29:09 I think it could be really leveraged to connect people.

1:29:11 You know, when I started advising at Facebook 2010

1:29:14 to 20 it was like Arab Spring and democracy

1:29:18 was spreading and and in many ways we've had

1:29:21 this great democratization of things of people sharing music,

1:29:25 you know, instantaneously I can hear music

1:29:27 from any part of the world which you know,

1:29:31 that's profound and visual art and and knowledge and podcasts and we've

1:29:36 got to be nuanced about this, but we do need you know,

1:29:40 to think intentionally about design, you know, and that you know,

1:29:44 I really worry about the privileging of hate.

1:29:47 I forgot what you called it,

1:29:48 but that has been privileged uh and that's not human nature.

1:29:54 We we are not all trolls and you know, tracking people and and you know,

1:30:01 and that is a degradation of who we are and I

1:30:04 think science would guide us in in many ways to avoid that.

1:30:09 So, I think it's we're in this big reflection period about how to redesign.

1:30:14 And I hope I hope they listen to the social science.

1:30:17 It has a lot of good things to say.

1:30:19 I've had this thought that the way social media is now Yeah.

1:30:24 it's the direct opposite of all for the following reason.

1:30:28 All inspiring experiences you never forget them.

1:30:34 You never forget them.

1:30:35 I mean, we could spend 15 hours talking about first concert,

1:30:38 second concert, first love, first kiss, you know, first get break up,

1:30:43 you know, and which is its own form of all like[ __]

1:30:45 like if this can there's this flip side to this love thing, right?

1:30:48 You know, I mean, there's all that.

1:30:51 I sometimes do the test of myself.

1:30:53 I go, "Okay, I spent I don't know how much time on social media yesterday,

1:30:56 but do I remember anything specific?" I I don't think I do.

1:31:00 I don't think I remember anything specific.

1:31:04 But there was tons of sensory input.

1:31:07 A fair amount of time, and remember a damn thing.

1:31:10 And so, that's scary.

1:31:12 It is scary.

1:31:13 Cuz the only thing that resembles that Yeah.

1:31:17 is drugs of abuse.

1:31:18 And I'm very fortunate that I don't have a drug thing.

1:31:21 I never I never felt drawn to them in a way

1:31:24 that I felt like I couldn't escape from them or same with alcohol.

1:31:27 Um easy easy easy clip for me um to not drink um I will say.

1:31:32 I but my friends who had real challenges with alcohol

1:31:37 and substances they'll tell you like it's this super compelling thing,

1:31:42 but then you don't have anything to say about it or for it.

1:31:47 It's just a space-time disintegration.

1:31:52 And not the space-time disintegration of psychedelics,

1:31:54 which may have some benefits.

1:31:55 We'll talk We'll talk about that.

1:31:57 So, to me that's the problem with social media.

1:31:59 There's nothing memorable about yesterday's social media.

1:32:03 And I do think that the people who build

1:32:04 it want it to be impactful on the day-to-day scale,

1:32:09 but also Of course they'd want to be memorable.

1:32:12 Yeah.

1:32:13 They should Some kid should be talking about

1:32:15 like Laurel like you're talking about Laurel Canyon.

1:32:17 Yeah, I know.

1:32:18 But I don't know if they're going to feel that way.

1:32:20 Well, you know, one of the things I'm really interested in right now,

1:32:23 Andrew, is is awe design, right?

1:32:25 And you know, I'm working with Gale architecture in Copenhagen.

1:32:28 Like, how do you design cities for more awe?

1:32:31 It's not hard and it's good for people, right?

1:32:34 A little bit of music, a little bit of green space, a little bit of art.

1:32:37 Get people looking at each other and talking and buzzing, right?

1:32:40 Easy to do.

1:32:41 And I think you've just laid out, you know,

1:32:44 and someone could write a manifesto like maybe

1:32:48 my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe.

1:32:51 It's small, awe is vast.

1:32:53 It's sped up, awe slows things down.

1:32:56 It has a fragmentation to it, awe integrates, right?

1:33:00 It's about micro things, awe is about systems.

1:33:03 Like, when you feel awe towards music, it's like I get it all here right now.

1:33:08 Its content is is not inspiring very often.

1:33:11 And it could It all could be.

1:33:13 Sometimes it is.

1:33:14 I I think that the that the that the space-time

1:33:16 aperture that we talked about before,

1:33:18 I think the problem with social media is actually its

1:33:21 power to bring the whole space-time into an aperture this big.

1:33:25 I actually think that it has to do crazy hypothesis, happy to be wrong.

1:33:30 I actually think the whole problem with it has

1:33:33 to do with the fact that it brings long time scales, past, present, and future,

1:33:41 different different frame rates into one real-world visual aperture.

1:33:47 Right.

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

1:33:51 but friends of mine who are musicians, who love live music, who are producers,

1:33:54 who love live music, tell me it is incredible.

1:33:58 [snorts] Yeah.

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

1:34:02 and in other cases they're not.

1:34:05 And so, there's no reason why that technology

1:34:07 should be awesome for Again, here we go.

1:34:11 No better word for No better word for all than awesome,

1:34:13 so we're just going to stick with it.

1:34:14 We're going to roll with it.

1:34:15 The There's there's no reason why digital can't be awe-inspiring.

1:34:21 Yeah, it should.

1:34:22 And And I And we have to, you know,

1:34:24 we just have to take a step back in these conversations, right?

1:34:26 There's you know, there's new work out about AI helping medical doctors.

1:34:31 And it's, you know, and the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco

1:34:35 is like it's like having the best brain

1:34:38 trust about medicine right with you all the time.

1:34:41 Who wouldn't want that, you know?

1:34:42 And I think let's remember that.

1:34:44 And yeah, I think that's the challenge is to have these AI

1:34:49 and the devices that it is manifest on get us to what's awesome.

1:34:53 And uh we'll see, you know, I hope so.

1:34:57 I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place.

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1:36:11 Can we talk about embarrassment?

1:36:12 Yeah.

1:36:13 And [laughter] and uh My favorite My other favorite emotion.

1:36:16 Right at the beginning of my career.

1:36:17 it was guys, right?

1:36:18 Guys specifically uh teasing one another.

1:36:20 I definitely experienced that um and I definitely

1:36:25 participated in it uh in a benevolent way.

1:36:28 But it the teasing that happens in groups

1:36:31 of good male friends can be pretty brutal.

1:36:34 Oh, yeah.

1:36:35 But there's a pleasure in it.

1:36:37 Most of the time.

1:36:38 Yeah.

1:36:39 [laughter] Yeah.

1:36:40 So, what's that about?

1:36:40 I know.

1:36:41 Well, you know, it it all begins really in my like

1:36:46 when I started scientifically to depart from the Ekman canon,

1:36:51 if you will, of those six emotions we talked about earlier.

1:36:55 And I was doing a project in his lab

1:36:56 and we were startling people and studying the startle response,

1:37:00 a seven muscle movement motor pattern built into the nervous system.

1:37:05 And I noticed people got embarrassed after they were startled unexpectedly.

1:37:08 You know, they you blast them with a noise

1:37:10 out of the blue in the lab and they're like, "Whoa, I think I spit and you know,

1:37:15 peed my pants or whatever." And they show this response and I took it to Ekman

1:37:19 in his the blush and people avert their gaze

1:37:22 and they look away and they hide their face, you know.

1:37:25 And he's like, "That's a motor pattern of emotion.

1:37:27 You should go study it." And I did.

1:37:28 And and then I started to notice and there's

1:37:31 a really rich literature on that that and Darwin

1:37:34 wrote about this that a person's embarrassment is

1:37:37 a sign of their commitment to the collective, right?

1:37:41 Like, "Man, you know, called you by the wrong name or you know,

1:37:45 I farted in the yoga class or whatever it is, and I'm embarrassed.

1:37:48 Like, I'm sorry, man.

1:37:49 You know, I apologize.

1:37:51 That really matters.

1:37:52 And when you see people get embarrassed,

1:37:54 you like them more, and you trust them more,

1:37:55 and you give resources to them, and you think they're a good group member.

1:37:59 And then I was like, man, you know,

1:38:02 like I've played a lot of pick-up basketball in my life, thousands of games.

1:38:07 And you're banging into And there's just a lot of teasing and taunting,

1:38:10 and you know, people I admired, you know,

1:38:13 great athletes tease and taunt, you know,

1:38:16 it's just part of what we do when we're banging into each other.

1:38:20 And I started to put it together like,

1:38:23 you know, the right kind of teasing within a collective,

1:38:27 you're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group, right?

1:38:31 And then the wrong kind of teasing, which we documented in our labs,

1:38:35 like, that's bullying and harassment, and we can pinpoint like,

1:38:38 that's inappropriate, you know,

1:38:39 you're trying to you're not keeping people in the group,

1:38:42 you're excluding them or humiliating them.

1:38:45 So, we did this study, uh it was one of my first studies,

1:38:48 we brought four fraternity We brought

1:38:50 groups of fraternity four uh fraternity guys

1:38:54 in each interaction uh from this fraternity

1:38:58 house at the University of Wisconsin,

1:39:00 and we gave them each nicknames, or we gave them each initials,

1:39:05 and we had them make up nicknames based on the initials.

1:39:11 So, two two letters of a nick were A.D.

1:39:16 And I'm not sure I can say what the nicknames were like,

1:39:19 but it you know, another drunk, and it gets pretty profane.

1:39:24 And so, we let them tease each other.

1:39:26 And they start teasing each other, and they are really like,

1:39:31 this is young men coming out of a fraternity house, teasing each other.

1:39:35 There are funny stories.

1:39:37 People got embarrassed.

1:39:39 Uh the the stories and the teasing was kind of about like I'm

1:39:46 going to accuse you of something that you shouldn't do in this group, right?

1:39:50 Like pass out drunk naked, you know, in the streets of Wisconsin.

1:39:54 Don't do that, right?

1:39:56 And then they get embarrassed and they say, "I'm not going to do that." And what

1:40:00 we found is the more that they got embarrassed,

1:40:05 the better they liked each other.

1:40:06 Cuz it's it's turning to this motor pattern of like Wow,

1:40:10 I'm showing you that I care about what

1:40:12 you're accusing me of and I get embarrassed.

1:40:14 You see that in me, we become closer.

1:40:17 The the guys who are better teasers and that were more playful

1:40:22 and funny and made people aware of the norms that mattered to the group,

1:40:27 but not really humiliate people, those guys are more popular in the group.

1:40:32 And that's been replicated, right?

1:40:33 Just storytelling and and ribbing each other.

1:40:37 And and and it was part of healthy group functioning.

1:40:41 It's just embarrassing each other.

1:40:43 You think about roasts, you know, it's the end of your career.

1:40:48 You're going to get that someone's going to talk about your career.

1:40:50 You're going to get hammered.

1:40:52 [laughter] And it's wonderful.

1:40:53 I fear that day.

1:40:54 Yeah, yeah, and that's part of this phenomenon of like we

1:40:59 we we we make fun of the people we love the most.

1:41:02 Siblings are you big families with a lot

1:41:06 of siblings tease each other like mad, you know,

1:41:09 and they joke and they josh and they wrestle and they

1:41:12 give each other noogies and they have nicknames for each other.

1:41:14 Again, to like make sure everybody's aware of of what

1:41:18 matters and how not to violate those rules.

1:41:20 So, um it was it was fun research.

1:41:23 It was meant a lot to me.

1:41:25 I bet.

1:41:25 I mean, it grew up in a big big packs of boys.

1:41:28 I mean, on my street growing up and skateboarding

1:41:31 thing and then science it was a little bit different.

1:41:34 Actually, when I came up there was more of that.

1:41:37 It changed over time for good I think for good reasons, but um

1:41:41 And then of course there's my podcast team and people keep telling me the reason

1:41:44 I get teased a lot is cuz they cuz they like me, but you know Exactly.

1:41:49 I saw an a an interesting well, two things.

1:41:52 Uh a former guest on this podcast who's a psychiatrist

1:41:55 who's also very uh versed in Eastern philosophy, uh Dr.

1:41:58 K as they call him, um said that embarrassment is

1:42:02 important because it also signals that you're not a creep.

1:42:05 Yeah.

1:42:06 Especially he was referring to heterosexual relationships where, you know,

1:42:09 a guy says something trying to be uh you know,

1:42:13 trying to flirt basically or pick up on someone and then

1:42:16 uh the woman says something back and he like gets embarrassed.

1:42:20 He realizes like he said the wrong thing.

1:42:21 If he doesn't show embarrassment, he's creepy.

1:42:24 If he does, it verifies that he

1:42:26 has a certain degree of empathy and self-reflection.

1:42:29 Now, so that was his point, but it it feels relevant here.

1:42:31 So And he's right.

1:42:32 I mean, you know, uh Darwin early on wrote

1:42:36 about the blush being a sign of your healthy character,

1:42:40 your moral virtue almost.

1:42:41 And in non-human species,

1:42:44 the facial reddening is associated with physical robustness.

1:42:47 And then in humans, we think of it as moral robustness.

1:42:50 Like, yeah, I care about stuff.

1:42:53 We did work early on, Bob Knight at Berkeley, orbital frontal patients.

1:42:57 The orbital frontal cortex is in part

1:42:59 where your ethical consider- consideration takes place.

1:43:03 And if you have damage to that region of the brain through brain trauma,

1:43:07 you fall off a motorcycle or you know, fall off a ladder,

1:43:11 you don't show embarrassment where you should and they have

1:43:14 feel creepy if you will or just like like hey, they're not playing by the rules.

1:43:19 So it's it's a very subtle thing.

1:43:21 Erving Goffman wrote a lot about it,

1:43:23 the great sociologist like our embarrassment is telling people like,

1:43:27 I know what the rules are and I care about them.

1:43:29 I'm committed to them.

1:43:30 So your psychiatrist friend is right.

1:43:33 Along the lines of of teasing, Yeah.

1:43:37 uh someone I'm I'm proud to call

1:43:38 a friend who's also public facing, uh Jocko Willink,

1:43:41 who's also turns out one of our we're friends for a bunch of reasons,

1:43:45 but one of them is that he grew up really into East Coast hardcore music.

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

1:43:56 um uh with the types of music uh I'm into.

1:43:59 We've gone on a show together, and um he put something up.

1:44:02 You know, every once in a while on social media,

1:44:03 somebody posts something that really lands, Naval or Jocko,

1:44:07 and he's Jocko's a man of few words,

1:44:09 so I'm going to put more words to it than than he was able to.

1:44:12 Um but the quote was something like, um you know,

1:44:16 if you want to understand and he said former Navy SEAL SEAL Team operator,

1:44:20 most people know know that, but um if you want

1:44:22 to understand um males in groups and healthy uh masculine friendship,

1:44:30 uh guys are going to tease each other relentlessly in front of each other,

1:44:35 but they'll never tease behind somebody's back,

1:44:38 and they'll back the other person who they were just teasing in person Yeah.

1:44:42 against the rest, you know, they'll buffer them against any kind of criticism.

1:44:46 So, that's a very interesting um kind of uh contrast there that I think is true.

1:44:52 Yeah.

1:44:52 Like you you know, it's not like you tease your friend behind his back.

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

1:44:58 Yeah.

1:44:59 There's another piece of that, which is that you know

1:45:01 that that person would back you if you're out of the room.

1:45:03 And you know, I a couple friends, all my friends come to mind,

1:45:06 but a couple people who who really think about and talk

1:45:09 about this loyalty component uh Jocko was talking about there, Lex Friedman.

1:45:12 You know, it's a it's a critical component to um I'm sure female friendship,

1:45:17 too, although I only know my own experience, so uh to male friendship,

1:45:21 which is that they can say anything to your face, even be harsh criticism,

1:45:27 but you know that if you're out of the room, they're not going to cut you down.

1:45:31 They're going to reserve that for when

1:45:32 you're standing in front of them, thankfully.

1:45:33 We documented in the fraternity study that you know,

1:45:37 when you when you tease somebody and you're like hey man,

1:45:41 do you see this guy's dance moves or you

1:45:43 see this guy shoot free throw, whatever it is,

1:45:46 you're just making light of human foible

1:45:49 and and all the funny things that we do.

1:45:52 And there's there's there's just this really subtle

1:45:55 repair work where they're saying like I'm teasing you,

1:45:58 but I know you got it, you know, and I'll support you.

1:46:01 And I agree.

1:46:02 I think that you know, part of what teasing does is it says like

1:46:06 what do we as a collective really care about?

1:46:08 And let's surface those norms in a light-hearted way and we know together.

1:46:13 And if and if you make mistakes, you should be apologetic about it,

1:46:16 but part of it also is just uh this sort

1:46:20 of I got your back repair work that they did.

1:46:23 Um and it's profound.

1:46:26 It it You know, it's interesting I was kind of this shy kid.

1:46:30 I was very small growing up and kind

1:46:32 of the teasing often crossed lines in high school,

1:46:36 just you know, bullying and so forth.

1:46:39 And then I started to play basketball and you know,

1:46:43 uh and I realized like a lot of it's just just

1:46:47 men making sure they know that the rules of the game,

1:46:51 you know, and and showing also in those moments

1:46:53 of the joys of laughing together like I support you.

1:46:57 I'm with you, right?

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

1:47:03 I have a sister, so I was always struck by the brothers in my neighborhood.

1:47:06 Yeah.

1:47:07 There were two in particular, like I would hear screaming outside, go outside.

1:47:11 It's older brother, his name was Peter,

1:47:13 holding Michael's face in the sprinklers.

1:47:17 His brother's just crying and crying, screaming.

1:47:20 I mean, relentless older brother torture.

1:47:24 Some people hear this and probably be like, "Oh,

1:47:26 call the cops." You know, and I don't know what the reaction is nowadays.

1:47:28 I'll try not to be generally generationally biased.

1:47:31 I don't know.

1:47:32 Yeah, he was he was abusing his younger brother.

1:47:34 [laughter] And but if [clears throat] anyone said

1:47:38 or tried to do anything to either one of them,

1:47:41 they would immediately pair up and fight anyone.

1:47:44 It was interesting, right?

1:47:45 Um for a guy who had an older sister, it's a very different experience, right?

1:47:49 I mean, she had her own form of older

1:47:50 sister kind of hazing to her younger brother.

1:47:53 But there really does seem to be something critical about kind of defining

1:47:59 the relationship with people one-on-one in groups

1:48:03 versus when there's an outside threat.

1:48:04 And and not that we want outside threat,

1:48:07 but as long as we're talking about the sort

1:48:10 of the the I don't want to say disintegration, that's too pessimistic.

1:48:13 The sort of gradual erosion of this collective feeling.

1:48:17 It is there less just kind of grouping up together and and doing things?

1:48:23 Yeah, you know, I um 10 years ago uh 15 years ago,

1:48:30 10 years ago um first there was

1:48:34 the science of loneliness and isolation, John Cacioppo.

1:48:37 Uh and then those who followed like, "Whoa,

1:48:40 we are fragmenting." And we would spend much too much time alone, isolated.

1:48:46 And then COVID hit, lockdown, etc.

1:48:49 And our surgeon general, former surgeon general Vivek Murthy got it right,

1:48:53 like uh it's an epidemic of loneliness.

1:48:56 And I, as a social psychologist,

1:48:58 you know, I'm interested in these social emotions.

1:49:00 I'm like, you know, you just look at the basic raw facts,

1:49:04 like picnics are down by half.

1:49:08 We don't go to movies like we used to.

1:49:10 We don't um we don't listen to music together.

1:49:14 We don't 30 the estimate is that 30% of meals

1:49:18 in the United States people eat them by themselves.

1:49:21 You know, I eat a lot of my meals by myself.

1:49:23 Um we go on walks by ourselves.

1:49:25 We don't go to church.

1:49:26 Church is way down.

1:49:28 Um so the kind of the broad

1:49:30 sociological trends are alarming on that fragmentation.

1:49:35 But I think the young generation is

1:49:37 putting it back together in really interesting ways.

1:49:41 You know, we know from survey data the 25-year-olds,

1:49:46 30-year-olds are really interested in game nights.

1:49:48 You know, those are coming back.

1:49:50 They're interested in living together, co-op cooperative living.

1:49:53 They're cooking more with each other.

1:49:56 Value-wise, they care more about community than my generation.

1:50:00 I was the great explosion of individualism and they're kind of like you know,

1:50:05 if I I if I choose a job,

1:50:08 I want to make sure I'm working with other people I like.

1:50:10 I didn't even I didn't think about that.

1:50:11 I don't know if you know, uh so I think it's coming back.

1:50:15 And and I love the signs of you know, festivals are reappearing now.

1:50:22 The farmers market that I've talked about, the you know,

1:50:25 the dance groups that are now returning, contact dance.

1:50:30 I mean, these yoga studios.

1:50:33 One out of eight Americans does yoga.

1:50:36 You know, I do yoga two to three times That's so wild.

1:50:39 It's amazing.

1:50:40 15 years ago no one would have predicted that.

1:50:42 Also 15 years ago no one would have

1:50:44 predicted that that the single it we're being told

1:50:47 that one of the single most important health interventions

1:50:49 that women and men should do is like lift weights.

1:50:52 The only people who lifted weights when I was

1:50:54 growing up were like bodybuilders and preseason football players.

1:50:56 Yeah.

1:50:56 Is that true?

1:50:57 Lifting weights is I mean, you never want to actually live this way,

1:51:00 but if you if you could only pick one form of exercise to do once a week,

1:51:05 that's what you would do.

1:51:05 I mean, just in terms of bone health,

1:51:07 if it's done properly you probably get some cardiovascular benefit,

1:51:10 too, but just in terms of brain health.

1:51:12 I mean, obviously you want to do both,

1:51:14 but resistance training is clearly has a longevity benefit.

1:51:18 But for the longest time, I mean, you just didn't see women in gyms.

1:51:21 Very few, excuse me.

1:51:22 Very few.

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

1:51:25 women are are pushing them heavy for them

1:51:28 or in some cases heavier than the guys are lifting,

1:51:30 but regardless, that's that's a huge shift.

1:51:33 So, many more people are in gyms.

1:51:35 And I wonder whether or not it

1:51:36 contributes to some sort of feeling of collective.

1:51:39 I mean, you're training hard around other people.

1:51:42 So, that's cool.

1:51:43 I think Vivek Murthy in particular,

1:51:46 who I deeply admire and have worked with a bit,

1:51:49 you know, he he got our health world.

1:51:53 Think about it.

1:51:53 Surgeon General of the United States,

1:51:55 the first one to come out of public health traditions, did work in India, right?

1:51:59 And he's like, there's this social side that you've covered in your show,

1:52:03 like to health, to physical health, to the the telomeres of your your cells,

1:52:09 your DNA, and the vagus nerve, and so forth.

1:52:12 Oxytocin, cortisol, it's social.

1:52:14 Uh there's there are social dimensions to our nervous system.

1:52:18 And I think that's coming, Andrew.

1:52:21 Like, we're starting to see Why do I go to a farmers market?

1:52:25 Cuz I feel a sense of community.

1:52:26 And why do I love yoga?

1:52:28 Because I'm doing these postures all synchronized with people I don't know,

1:52:32 and I feel sense of awe and transcendence.

1:52:35 Why do I lift weights, right?

1:52:38 There's the banter and the discussion

1:52:40 and the the history and the sense of you know,

1:52:43 of what this all means culturally.

1:52:46 I think that's coming.

1:52:48 I think the gyms are appealing to it in some sense, right?

1:52:52 Little bit more community activ- act- activity.

1:52:55 And I think it's good news, you know.

1:52:57 I love the Japanese onsen.

1:52:59 Uh you go for the water, you know,

1:53:04 and the the springs and the heat and so forth,

1:53:07 But they in their wisdom have built entire community experiences around it.

1:53:11 Where you you wash yourself and you bathe

1:53:14 together and you eat together and you there's

1:53:16 sayings up on the walls and you spend a little time with your kids there, right?

1:53:22 So, I hope we we learn cuz I think it's important.

1:53:27 Yeah, I'm thinking a lot now about how we can

1:53:29 bridge between these incredible technologies cuz I am a fan

1:53:34 and but also the the non-negotiable technology of our nervous

1:53:39 system and and our biology and our psychology, right?

1:53:42 Lately because I have a query I'm really into this thing

1:53:45 called aquascaping which is this Japanese form of like plants

1:53:47 and and freshwater fish and just obsessed with it

1:53:51 but and and when the ecosystem is doing well I'm like oh

1:53:55 like I feel it's a form of it's brought me

1:53:57 some awe at times when like there things are going well

1:54:00 in there I'm like wow it's just beautiful and and I

1:54:03 think there things that I would never do to my fish.

1:54:07 I would never isolate them from one another

1:54:09 but I give them enough places to hide

1:54:11 from one another cuz there's a lot of dominance

1:54:13 hierarchy stuff being worked out between these discus.

1:54:15 I make sure they're on a light cycle.

1:54:18 I make sure they're fed but not overfed or underfed, right?

1:54:21 And um I wouldn't do most of the things that we do to ourselves to to my fish.

1:54:29 You know, I wouldn't isolate them and give them

1:54:31 like little videos of other fish to look at.

1:54:33 Like I know that wouldn't that wouldn't work.

1:54:36 I know that they would die.

1:54:37 I I know that you know, and so I think we can learn a lot from more simpler

1:54:43 organisms and and the sort of basic units of of care and community.

1:54:47 They're very similar.

1:54:49 Maybe it gets played out differently but but they're very similar

1:54:52 cuz obviously we we evolved similar nervous systems let alone similar needs.

1:55:00 I would like to talk about psychedelics if you're willing.

1:55:02 Yeah.

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

1:55:06 Yeah.

1:55:06 With the caveat that this is not a call

1:55:09 for people to start taking them that you know,

1:55:11 these are powerful compounds that um people with psychosis or bipolar conditions

1:55:16 in their family really really need to be careful and and on and on.

1:55:20 Just be careful.

1:55:20 I don't say that to protect myself.

1:55:21 I say that to protect whoever's listening and watching.

1:55:23 Really, this is no no small no small bump.

1:55:27 It's a whole thing.

1:55:28 So, some people will say, "Okay,

1:55:32 they just send you inward." And that's the opposite of what we're talking about.

1:55:37 Like getting all the awe inside.

1:55:39 Like, "Okay, that's I mean, that's pretty extreme.

1:55:44 Um other people will say that their experiences

1:55:47 with psychedelics allow them to come

1:55:48 out of that experience and really have a a felt connection to people,

1:55:55 to plants, to animals,

1:55:57 to life that is um profoundly positive for their feelings of connection.

1:56:02 Yeah.

1:56:03 And seeing awe perhaps even in lots of things.

1:56:06 So, how should we think about psychedelics?

1:56:09 And we should probably constrain the question a little bit.

1:56:10 Like, I'm not talking about MDMA, which is not a psychedelic.

1:56:13 It's an empathogen.

1:56:14 Ketamine is not a psychedelic.

1:56:16 It's a dissociative anesthetic.

1:56:17 I'm starting to do this now because people will start to lump,

1:56:20 and it's actually causing issues that for the potential legalization for So,

1:56:24 we need we need to be splitters, not lumpers, here.

1:56:27 So, I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin, maybe DMT,

1:56:30 ayahuasca, the the the the classic psychedelics.

1:56:34 Yeah, what are your thoughts on these?

1:56:36 I'm good friends with Michael Pollan and was, you know,

1:56:39 kind of walk in the Berkeley hills as he was producing that book and you know,

1:56:44 watched as we started a center for psychedelics uh

1:56:47 at Berkeley and um and you know, it's a revolution.

1:56:50 I mean, it's psychedelic use is up, you know, 40% since his book.

1:56:55 I mean, it's incredible to watch.

1:56:57 And I I have a few thoughts.

1:56:59 You know, one is you know,

1:57:01 make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come.

1:57:05 Uh those are spirit medicines in their community.

1:57:08 They're a part of deep ethical traditions.

1:57:11 Um you know, and to honor that with you know, uh you know,

1:57:16 uh sharing of resources and knowledge and and the right kind of acknowledgement.

1:57:20 That's really important.

1:57:22 Um I I think in some sense uh and you know,

1:57:28 David Yaden at Johns Hopkins and others uh and some of the early

1:57:33 Roland Griffiths work spoke to this that they are about awe um fundamentally.

1:57:39 You know, they open up your mind and you see all

1:57:42 life forms and time is different and your sense of self vanishes.

1:57:47 Robin Carhartt-Harris, you know, and you're just connected to vast things,

1:57:52 ecosystems, and sense of humanity.

1:57:55 And I think in some sense in done when done in the right way, that's good news.

1:58:00 You know, Molly Crockett and her team at Princeton

1:58:02 like you go to a festival and you have psychedelics,

1:58:05 a year later you're kinder uh through awe, right?

1:58:09 Uh so, I think that's important.

1:58:12 Uh I think it's great news what it does for the hard problems of the mind,

1:58:17 you know, death anxiety, addiction, trauma,

1:58:22 uh maybe veterans who are suffering twice through rates of PTSD.

1:58:27 They're drawn to this, you know, and the VA is working on this.

1:58:30 So, uh and the data look pretty good.

1:58:33 OCD, right?

1:58:34 Hard problems of the mind.

1:58:36 Panic, right?

1:58:37 That um I've in part dealt with.

1:58:41 That is good news.

1:58:43 Um I worry about microdosing.

1:58:46 You know, I think people are taking um

1:58:50 these things like coffee and it's not coffee, you know.

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

1:58:57 I drink coffee and I might and I know a thing

1:58:59 or two about psychedelics by experience and it's definitely not coffee.

1:59:04 speak speak to this and we've we've suddenly unleashed the use of it.

1:59:09 Tens of millions of people are using it not in the way that Michael Pollan

1:59:12 describes of like putting it into a cultural

1:59:16 container of inquiry and knowledge and guidance.

1:59:20 Uh and someone who knows what they're doing around you and so even.

1:59:24 Safety, yeah.

1:59:25 So, we're seeing that.

1:59:27 And I, you know, they changed my life.

1:59:29 I got to them early.

1:59:31 Uh you know, [laughter] in my late teens, 17, 18, 19,

1:59:36 I was a very anxious obsessive kid and I think they

1:59:40 opened up my mind in this perspective way we've been talking about.

1:59:44 I don't really do them now, you know, they gave me a lot.

1:59:47 That's why they're here.

1:59:48 You know, it's it's funny, you know, Andrew, like when I was doing them,

1:59:52 we were reading Castaneda who's been debunked, you know,

1:59:55 and we we're reading the traditions and thinking about them spiritually

2:00:00 in the doors of perception and all this good stuff, right?

2:00:03 We were they were embedded in a a culture of trying to find

2:00:08 mysticism or whatever it is and I hope people are doing that, you know,

2:00:11 if they're going to be doing on them.

2:00:13 Make it a form of inquiry.

2:00:15 It's a complicated story.

2:00:17 Like everything.

2:00:18 Like technology.

2:00:19 Well, they're a form of plant technology, right?

2:00:21 Plant which quick vignette on that, we had someone

2:00:24 here Chris McCurdy who runs a lab out in Florida.

2:00:27 He studies kratom and other compounds from plants.

2:00:30 The pharma companies, they bioprospect.

2:00:33 They send people looking for plants that then they can find

2:00:36 isolates and everything from aspirin to kratom to anesthetics like cocaine.

2:00:43 I'm not suggesting people use this as an anesthetic.

2:00:45 They come from plants,

2:00:46 but they're isolated and then synthesized and and enriched.

2:00:50 And that's where the opiate the extreme opiate the extreme stimulant, you know,

2:00:54 that's where it comes from, but they all come

2:00:55 from plant al- Many of them come from plant alkaloids,

2:00:57 which is interesting in its own right.

2:00:59 But, the I share your feelings about microdosing.

2:01:02 The data Robin Carhart-Harris tells me, and he's the real expert, of course,

2:01:07 the data say there's no uh evidence

2:01:10 of benefit from microdosing at least on major depression

2:01:12 as compared to like two rounds of psilocybin

2:01:15 with a guide therapy before, during, and after.

2:01:18 Right.

2:01:18 And on and on.

2:01:19 So, I hope people hear that.

2:01:21 Yeah, I hope they hear that.

2:01:22 Um I had the opposite experience as you.

2:01:24 Um I actually regret having done psychedelics when I was younger.

2:01:29 They were terrifying.

2:01:29 [clears throat] I didn't have a good experience.

2:01:31 I stopped didn't go anywhere near them.

2:01:33 And then later in a therapeutic setting um had a few experiences with them,

2:01:38 not many, but that were immensely beneficial for me.

2:01:42 Um so, kind of the opposite direction there.

2:01:44 But, what we're talking about now about kind of okay,

2:01:48 you know, there's this problem with certain technologies.

2:01:52 There's the cultural the culture wars.

2:01:55 There's the political wars.

2:01:57 There's the actual war that's also going on right now.

2:01:59 In a lot of ways this resembles like the '70s, '80s.

2:02:02 There's not that I mean, I remember a time when you had yuppies

2:02:04 and you had hippies and you had punk rockers.

2:02:06 And you watch a John Hughes film and it was like the idea was it was like,

2:02:09 "Oh, we're actually similar, right?" You know,

2:02:10 it's like the extent to which those films like showed people, "Hey,

2:02:13 like people were actually similar along

2:02:15 certain dimensions as opposed to so different.

2:02:17 But, you know, I I wonder cuz I think about

2:02:21 the the not so recent and recent history of things.

2:02:25 Everything from breath work, cold plunges,

2:02:26 psychedelics, um awe, music, the collective consciousness.

2:02:31 I mean, it's going to look different now.

2:02:34 The same way that it it looked different back then.

2:02:37 Right?

2:02:37 Like I'm I'm trying to get outside my Gen X self these days and think like,

2:02:44 "So, what would it look like?

2:02:45 Like I'm the old guy now.

2:02:47 So, what would it look like if these technologies

2:02:50 I just mentioned a few, but all of them, including social media,

2:02:54 what would it look like if those were all used to the greatest benefit?

2:02:57 Like what would that look like?

2:02:58 Can we be the open-minded parents of the '80s?

2:03:02 You know, um can we be the Yeah,

2:03:05 like because I feel like I can scream all day or about

2:03:09 what I think about the science of this and that to younger people,

2:03:14 but the only thing I actually have control over is like me.

2:03:18 How do we um the let's say 40

2:03:25 to 100-year-olds Let's really lean it on the 40-to-70-year-olds.

2:03:30 How do we create the environment so

2:03:33 that younger people can flourish with these technologies

2:03:40 as opposed to being like the parents of the '70s and '80s that are like,

2:03:44 "Oh, they got long hair and like what is this like

2:03:46 punk rock thing?" Like I don't want to be that person.

2:03:48 That sucks.

2:03:49 I also don't want to be the and I see this a lot, unfortunately,

2:03:53 people who are part of those movements and then they

2:03:56 they're just like towing the party line because they're like wholeheartedly

2:04:01 adhering to one political group without thinking about whether or not

2:04:04 there's any any hint of rational argument on the other side.

2:04:08 Right?

2:04:08 The whole point is not to be against the whole

2:04:10 idea is to be for what you believe is right.

2:04:13 And so, I don't know how to do this.

2:04:16 You're older than I am by a bit.

2:04:18 You're clearly wiser than I am, seriously, and you have more life experience.

2:04:23 So, what do we do?

2:04:25 Like really, like what what in the hell can we do

2:04:28 because I don't like this, you guys are all on your phones.

2:04:31 You know, like that doesn't feel good to me

2:04:33 cuz they were telling us when we were younger, like this is ridiculous.

2:04:36 Like the older guys are like, you know, small wheels on skateboard.

2:04:40 They were right about the small wheels things.

2:04:41 Turns out we wheels got too small.

2:04:43 But, the [laughter] Jim will understand that joke.

2:04:46 But, what do we do?

2:04:47 I think we're in this moment, you know, with everything going on, you know,

2:04:53 with AI and being online and polarization and climate crisis and uh you know,

2:05:00 the things that we worry about, the rise of white supremacy politics, etc.

2:05:05 Everybody's asking this question of like,

2:05:06 what how do we kind of move forward and and you know,

2:05:11 in light of many of the things that we've talked about in this conversation.

2:05:16 I'm most focused on um what Robert Putnam started

2:05:21 to write about and other people started to write about,

2:05:23 like the just the breakdown of collective life and shared life.

2:05:28 And I think that's that you know,

2:05:29 a defining issue of our times as well as our relationship to the natural world.

2:05:35 And I find awe uh as do other people, really refreshing.

2:05:43 It provides a roadmap, which is you know,

2:05:47 and I'll give you a very concrete example.

2:05:49 I'm I'm working with Gehl Architecture on a Cities

2:05:53 of Awe initiative and they do amazing work.

2:05:56 Hundreds of cities around the world.

2:05:58 70% of human population is in cities.

2:06:01 Most of our carbon emissions come out of cities.

2:06:04 And this is this is a place we can redesign and and make it better, right?

2:06:10 And awe is a wonderful lens.

2:06:12 So, you can ask and you could ask the same of like,

2:06:15 what do you give to a teenager who's suffering suicidal ideation?

2:06:19 Or what do you give to a veteran who

2:06:21 is coming back and feeling alienated from the world?

2:06:25 Uh you give them awe, right?

2:06:26 And what does that mean?

2:06:27 It's like, well, you give them a little nature

2:06:29 and that's you rewild part of a city, right?

2:06:32 You give them some public art.

2:06:34 We love art.

2:06:35 You know, we love visual art.

2:06:37 You give them uh the opportunity to recognize the moral beauty.

2:06:42 You know, you found it in Joe Strummer.

2:06:43 Just get them to interact with other people from face-to-face.

2:06:47 You give them uh a little collective stuff, right?

2:06:51 You Hey, we're going to have the yoga

2:06:53 class in the town square or the Mexican Zocalo.

2:06:56 Everybody walks together at a certain hour

2:06:58 of the day and they suddenly feel peaceful, right?

2:07:01 Uh you give them ideas about big ideas and and life.

2:07:05 You give them a little bit of opportunity for meditation and reflection.

2:07:10 Um that's easy to do.

2:07:12 And when I, you know,

2:07:15 was writing this book and just teaching social science for 30 years, it's like,

2:07:21 man, you know, we used to do this really

2:07:23 well and it used to be temples and church.

2:07:26 You know, that's where it all was brought together and now we don't go there.

2:07:30 55% of Americans go to church.

2:07:32 It used to be 90 or temple.

2:07:34 Um I don't.

2:07:35 I never did, you know, and I and I in some sense miss it.

2:07:41 You know, I see my one of my best friends very religious.

2:07:44 He views them and they they have so

2:07:46 much and we're recreating that right now, right?

2:07:50 And we've got to do it in a coherent way.

2:07:53 If it's the place where people are lifting weights, there should be music there.

2:07:58 There should be visual stuff.

2:07:59 There should be some art, nature.

2:08:01 There should be some wisdom and some moral beauty, right?

2:08:04 That's uh I love Iron Works where I go climb

2:08:09 because you go there and it's like people are climbing,

2:08:14 but there's you you get to see the there's

2:08:16 the art exhibit each month of a local artist.

2:08:20 There's some music going on.

2:08:21 You get to listen to music.

2:08:23 So, this isn't that hard to do, Andrew,

2:08:25 and I think the awe science gives us road map to think about what we share.

2:08:30 I love that.

2:08:31 Um I was not into CrossFit,

2:08:33 but um next girlfriend of mine when I met her was like really into CrossFit,

2:08:37 and they would do barbecues, and they'd clean the gym,

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

2:08:42 And remember this is when I moved to San Diego

2:08:44 to start my lab down there before I moved to Stanford.

2:08:46 And and I remember thinking like this is kind of crazy.

2:08:48 Like I went to the gym growing up.

2:08:50 I always since I was in my teens.

2:08:52 And I'm like really?

2:08:54 You guys like social And they had this awesome social community.

2:08:57 And now CrossFit has somewhat fallen out of favor now.

2:08:59 I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation.

2:09:02 You may be uh pleased to hear I I just thought of this.

2:09:07 I can't remember I can't believe that I didn't remember this earlier.

2:09:10 One of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after the Clash cuz you

2:09:15 know he went into the kind of void of like he he wasn't doing anything.

2:09:20 He he he wandered for a long time.

2:09:22 He went down to Spain.

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

2:09:25 And um Cool.

2:09:26 didn't tell anyone who he was,

2:09:27 and they they kind of realized who he was eventually.

2:09:29 He was really searching, you know,

2:09:30 his life had He lost his brother to suicide, I believe.

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

2:09:39 It's kind of famous.

2:09:39 I think while smoking a cigarette.

2:09:41 Uh people always say And I don't think he did any training.

2:09:44 One thing that he was very well known

2:09:45 for until his death was he would do campfires.

2:09:50 Yeah.

2:09:50 In Manhattan.

2:09:51 He would take people down to the river.

2:09:53 And and he had some famous friends like Jim Jarmusch and and uh you know,

2:09:57 and uh well-known people in in that world.

2:10:00 Uh but he would invite whoever.

2:10:03 And there were kids.

2:10:05 You got to see this documentary.

2:10:06 It's so good.

2:10:06 We'll put a link to it uh for if people want to see it.

2:10:08 It's so good.

2:10:09 Um there were kids.

2:10:11 There were adults.

2:10:12 Um and they stay out till like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning playing music.

2:10:16 Singing, drumming.

2:10:18 Uh people get up and talk.

2:10:19 And so he He constantly doing these campfires his entire life.

2:10:23 Yeah.

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

2:10:25 And he wasn't getting They were They were able to film

2:10:28 a few of these, but that was not the point.

2:10:31 And he would bring out a radio cuz he thought like maybe you could like make

2:10:33 it like a radio show of the thing and but it was not to record and distribute.

2:10:38 It was just So, I don't know.

2:10:39 I got this crazy idea in the back of my mind

2:10:41 that maybe like I'm going to start doing campfires.

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

2:10:45 Okay.

2:10:45 Am I going to destroy the environment?

2:10:47 No, not at all.

2:10:47 Okay.

2:10:47 I I was afraid you were going to tell me that.

2:10:50 I think this is a deep idea.

2:10:51 There's this new science of campfires

2:10:53 and they're several hundred thousand years old.

2:10:56 And also, you know, when you study people in small-scale societies,

2:11:01 they they gather at night around campfires

2:11:04 and they tell certain kinds of stories.

2:11:06 You know, stories of how they're all connected and helping each other

2:11:09 and watching out for what is dangerous in the dark and you know,

2:11:13 a lot of stuff happens that's fundamental to our humanity around campfires.

2:11:17 Um so, I think you're onto something really important,

2:11:21 you know, that that we need to return.

2:11:23 Uh When I go to the climbing gym, we all take saunas.

2:11:27 You know, I do probably four saunas a week.

2:11:30 Nice.

2:11:30 And you get your sweat and your heart rate

2:11:33 goes up and so good for your your body,

2:11:36 but then it's like everybody sort of offhandedly notes

2:11:39 like "I love the conversations that happen in the sauna,

2:11:42 you know?" And it's true and so, yeah,

2:11:45 we've got to there are all these ways to get back

2:11:48 to what we should be doing right now to bring us together.

2:11:52 And campfires would be a good start.

2:11:54 I'll come to your first one.

2:11:55 Awesome.

2:11:56 Uh campfire also great red light therapy, no joke.

2:11:59 Long wavelength light only coming out of that fire and you know,

2:12:01 everyone's obsessed with like red light therapy.

2:12:03 You can get it from the sun, but you don't want to get too much UV, but yeah,

2:12:05 you get tons of long wavelength light exposure,

2:12:08 which is great for which is known to be great for mitochondria.

2:12:10 I mean, don't get me I don't want to get going on this.

2:12:13 That's too much of attention.

2:12:14 We've had guests on here from University College London.

2:12:16 I mean, the long wavelength light actually goes all the way through your body

2:12:19 even in light clothing and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria,

2:12:23 which actually improves mitochondrial function in every

2:12:27 single every single cell that has mitochondria.

2:12:30 So, And where do we get this light from?

2:12:32 It's Typically it's from from sunlight when it's low solar angle,

2:12:35 so when it's low in the sky because

2:12:37 of Rayleigh scattering you're getting rid of the UV.

2:12:38 That's why you can see the orange and red and it's not

2:12:41 painful to look at the sun when it's low in the sky.

2:12:44 When it's overhead the UV index is high your it's you know

2:12:46 full spectrum and you have to be you know careful of that.

2:12:48 You're also you got some color to you but like you

2:12:51 something tells me your lineage was kind of like fair-skinned, right?

2:12:53 Okay, so um but everyone it needs to be

2:12:56 cautious about that but that long wavelength light,

2:12:58 you know, people buy red light units and things and those can be beneficial.

2:13:01 They use them clinically now but good data on that, but campfires do it.

2:13:05 Yeah.

2:13:06 And um And people love campfires.

2:13:08 And there is this thing if you were out in front of a campfire

2:13:11 at night even if you stay up very late you wake up feeling pretty darn good.

2:13:15 Yeah.

2:13:15 You know, um so I'm calling it right now.