Andrew Huberman, Ph.D.

Tetragrammaton. I was born at Stanford Hospital and I was raised in Palo Alto. And then I was a postdoc at Stanford from 2005 to 2010. A postdoc is after your Ph.D. It's more or less like a residency in medicine. What was your Ph.D. in? Neuroscience. And then I was a professor at UC San Diego for five years. And then I was recruited back to Stanford in 2016. And I'm still a 10-year faculty member at Stanford now. Are you young to be 10-year?

I was 10-year at 40, so that's young. For reasons that we could get into. Tell me. I don't know anything about that. I don't really even know what 10-year is. So 10-year, I know it's something you want. Right, a lot of people mistakenly think that 10-year means a job for life. That is not true. People can lose 10-year for scientific fraud, for doing egregious things that they shouldn't do.

But technically 10-year is about academic freedom. So technically. So when you get hired as a professor, you are what's called assistant professor. And the name is misnomer because you're not an assistant to anybody. It just means that you don't have 10-year yet. And then typically depending on the place, it's five to eight years in which you produce original research.

And then you go up for 10-year. You are evaluated for 10-year. And it's a process of internal review. And usually at a place like Stanford, there are going to be 20 outside letters of recommendation will be solicited from experts in your field. And they'll evaluate you compared to others in your field. And then you either get 10-year or you don't get 10-year.

And at the point where somebody gets 10-year, they have academic freedom. They can pivot and start working on something completely different if they like. Whereas prior to 10-year, you know, you're expected to do more or less what you said you were going to do. And do you say what you're going to do before you come in? How does it work? How does that get decided?

Yeah. So if we back up to the education leading to that, it will make a little bit more sense. So in college, you know, I studied biology and psychology, there was no formal field of neuroscience at that time. So I went to college from 93 to 98. I was a five-year undergrad because I took a little vacation that we can talk about. My first year was a total flop. The next four years were strong. Then I got a masters in behavioral neuroscience, then my PhD in neuroscience.

Then I did my postdoc for five years. So you know, I had about 20 years of formal training before I was an assistant professor. When you get hired as an assistant professor, the process is you put out applications to various schools that happen to be hiring for a neuroscience faculty position. And you propose what your lab will do. The simplest way to describe it is you come up with a set of ideas about what your lab will be about. And it has to be unique from what other labs are about.

So the Hubertman lab I proposed in my application would focus on particular aspects of nervous system development, nervous system regeneration, nervous system function. And what you're really selling when you go on the faculty job market is your unique vision of what your lab is going to be.

And it's very different than any other kind of job process or prior portion of the science education because what you're telling them is that you have a vision of what you're going to do that's distinct from other people. It's a little bit like a startup company like you're pitching your startup. And then when you get the faculty position, it's wild. You know that my advisor at the time right when I got the job, I had several jobs to pick from it was either go to UC San Diego or MIT.

And by the way, when I decided to go to San UC San Diego, which is an excellent neuroscience program, the person in charge of MIT looked me in the eye and said, you're crazy. If you go to San Diego and not MIT and I said, why? You know, San Diego was a great program and they said, yeah, but it's not MIT. Four years later, I'm sitting in my office at UC San Diego and that same person was applying for a job at UC San Diego. Unbelievable.

And actually she wasn't on my schedule, but I requested that she be on my schedule. Yes. And I said, do you remember you telling me that I was crazy for picking UC San Diego over MIT. And she said, I do. And I said, why did you say that? She said, my job was to recruit you. And I learned something really important in that moment, which is that the person recruiting or the person trying to convince you of something will say almost anything. They're not necessarily on your side.

They are not on your side because, and this gets into the intricacies of academic. And you would think, I mean, naively, I would think if the person is trying to get me to come there, it's because they're on my side too. Like it's wearing this together. It's not bad. Yeah. Well, and I'm happy to say this. The Boston academic system is notoriously cutthroat. I mean, Stanford's a plus, plus institution as is MIT, as is Harvard. But the ethos is a little bit different on the East and West coast.

Stanford by virtue of being in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley having so many very young leaders is very attuned to the future in what's next. The East Coast academic institutions are as well, but they're a little more steeped in tradition. For instance, I had the experience of being at Stanford when my downstairs neighbor, Roger Cornberg, won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of RNA. His father, Arthur Cornberg, discovered RNA.

So this is, you know, he's got a brother who's a scientist too, and I think another one who's a composer. So this family is interesting in its own right. I remember being so excited, like Stanford got a Nobel and it's my downstairs neighbor. And I like Roger a lot, and I worked next door to his lab. And we could talk, had some funny interactions with him that we're amusing, because he's just quirky and brilliant as so many scientists are.

But the point was that I remember telling an undergraduate that was working for me at the time. Hey, the guy next door won a Nobel Prize, and you know what his reaction was? Does he have an app? Which I think just beautifully captures the West Coast phenomenon of it's all about what are you going to do with it? Yeah. People want to know what are you going to do with that? Yeah.

On the East Coast, it's a bit different. They're very attuned to technology and companies, but I think the reason why you don't have a true replica of Silicon Valley in Boston, or even in New York, or even in Austin for that matter, where now there are incredible companies have moved to Austin and are spawned in Austin, is that there's something about the West that even in this modern time of highly interconnected people by way of the Internet.

There's something about the West representing the future and not steeped in its past. So you would be hard pressed to find the list of Nobel Prize winners on the wall of Stanford School of Medicine, and yet we have, I believe, nine or more of them. And I know where that set of plaques sits, but most people don't. And Stanford isn't walking around talking about it. Why? Because they're interested in what's happening next.

So eventually the opportunity to move to Stanford was one that I certainly wasn't going to pass up for a lot of reasons. But anyway, going back to the hiring process, I learned during the hiring process that, you know, once they make you an offer, they can't make an offer to anyone else.

And if they don't fill that offer, it's embarrassing for them. And so what she was doing was she was trying to make sure that she didn't have to go back to the dean and say we failed to recruit this guy and he went to this other place. And why did you make the choice? Well, it was all gut. In fact, I had an experience from in 2005 where I made the decision to go to Harvard to be a postdoc. And I was going to work for this guy whose research interests were very aligned with what I wanted to do.

And I moved there and I remember calling my sister that night, I'm like, oh shit, I'm screwed. I got a leaf here. I don't know how I'm going to do. I don't know what to do. So what ended up happening was I ended up leaving. So I came back and I worked for a guy named Ben Barris, who's dead now. All three of my advisors are dead for different reasons. As one of them pointed out, I'm the common denominator. But let's just separate correlation and causation.

But and so I was at Stanford from 2005 to 2010 as a postdoc. Last place I ever wanted to be because I grew up there had a lot of developmental history there that it was a really uncomfortable thing for me to be back in the Bay Area. I was super unhappy. I had about a major depression. Yeah, when you had the chance to go to the East Coast to MIT, you chose to stay on the West Coast. Right. So what happened was after that postdoc working for Ben, who was an amazing person.

And we could talk about him for hours, but was an amazing person. I remember looking at my job options and I had a bunch of them, but it boiled down to MIT versus UC San Diego. There was a Texas offer as well at Baylor that financially was really strong, but I didn't want to be down there. Also for personal reasons. I like Texas a lot. And I went to Ben and I said, what do I do? And now Ben had gone to MIT and his experience there was not a good one.

But he said, listen, I'm going to separate that out. But as your advisor, he said, you're a West Coast kid. You grew up in Palo Alto and the South Bay San Francisco skateboarding. At the time, while as a postdoc I was writing for Thrasher. I wrote music column for Thrasher, covered bands under a different name. I think you can find these on the internet. Some of them are a little reverent, but anyway they're out there.

But I did for extra cash and I also like going to shows. And he said, you know, you do this music thing. You're in the skateboarding thing. You grew up here. I think if you go to these coasts, you're going to hate it. And you already had that one bad interaction with the guy at Harvard. Just go to San Diego. It's a great place and enjoy it. So I went to San Diego and to be honest, I liked that the weather was good.

I had very few friends there. I was extremely isolated. I had my bulldog that I raised there. My lab thrived there. But it was not a place I wanted to stay and I knew that from day one. And that went back to when I was a young teenager. When I was 14, I went to a trade show, a skateboarding action sports trade show. Because I was really in the skateboard community. I probably skipped school to go to that.

I can't imagine I would have gotten permission to go. And I had only bad experiences in San Diego. I got into a physical altercation with a cab driver. We had a bunch of stuff stolen from us. I was getting into a trouble back then. So I had only, there's this phenomenon in neuroscience called conditioned place preference where if something good happens to you, some place you just feel good when you're there. And then there's also conditioned place aversion.

And animals show it, you know, give an animal shock in one corner of a cage, you don't want to go back to that corner. So I had like a conditioned place of weightens or aversion to San Diego. But I had my lab there and then when the job opportunity came up at Stanford, I applied. I was like both hands up. And I took it. But even then, I thought about going to NYU because I've always wanted to live in New York.

I love New York City. I went there when I was five years old with my family. And I remember thinking this is the most incredible place in the world. It's the most incredible place. And this is when Times Square was CD. I was born in 75. So this would be 1980. It was grimy. But I remember thinking I can't believe it exists. And to me, I've done a little bit of snorkeling and scuba diving.

I think of New York City as a tropical reef. Everywhere you look, there's life. Look down in alley, there's life. Look over there. Go downstairs, there's life. Whereas to me, the west coast always seemed a bit more sparse. The life exists on a different scale. If you go scuba diving or snorkeling in the Monterey Bay, which I have, it's all just big kelp beds. And every once in a while, a big fish goes by. So there was always a bit of a depressive tone for me in beautiful places like big swan.

Beautiful places like big surre Monterey Bay. They did not feel warming to me. But I remember, and I've always been obsessed with like the caroac thing and all these east coast academics and creatives. You're a good example of this, who come from the east coast, get to the west coast. And they just like bask in it. They're like, whoa, this is amazing.

But I grew up on the west coast. So it's always had this kind of mix for me of feeling like home, but never quite right. And then the east coast love visiting New York City, but not quite right. So in 2015, I was exploring NYU versus Stanford. And I loved the lab. They were going to give me an NYU. It's right off Washington Square. It had like exposed beams. The architecture was beautiful.

And I thought, well, where am I going to live? There was a little place on Eldridge Street that I fell in love with that I couldn't afford. But I'm like, somehow I'm going to live there. And my girlfriend at the time, she lived in New York, loved New York. We were just like New York, New York, New York, New York.

The whole, we're going, we're moving, we're getting out of San Diego, because I had met her in San Diego. And then I was back in San Diego. I had to make the decision. And I was doing work on the speed bag. I'd started boxing in San Diego. That's how the deprived I felt that I literally was sparring every Wednesday night getting hit.

Because I'd fought when I was younger, some Thai boxing, and I'm sparring again totally unnecessary. I mean, but I just don't recommend it. You're getting hit in the head. I'm not making money. And I'm working on the speed bag, and I'm going into this what I call wordlessness, where I'm trying to not think, just get into listening and rhythm. I do this when I run sometimes, and out of nowhere. Boom. I don't want to go to an NYU. Why? They expect me to work on primates.

I'd done a little bit of primate work. I'm an animal lover. We could talk about the primate work and why I'd gotten into it. But I was like, you know what? I don't want to work on primates. And that's what they want me to do. And I don't want to work on mice. In fact, I don't want to work on animals at all. Now, I'm a meat eater. I'm omnivore, but I eat meat. I try and get ethically raised, you know, meat and that kind of thing. But I just think like, I don't want to do it.

I see myself in New York working on monkeys, Marmos sets, these little monkeys. I don't want to do it anymore. And I don't know how it's going to work out. But I know if I go to Stanford, I can start a lab to work on humans. I can phase out my animal work. And there's something about going to Stanford that even though I don't want to be back in Palo Alto, I have all this condition, place aversion to that, growing up there.

And I went through a lot there more than some less than others, but it was a hard place for me to be. If I go back and I go to Stanford, something good will happen. And if I go to NYU, it's just like going down the wrong path. So it was just in a state of wordlessness that it just came to me. And it came to all at once. And it was clear. And you'd never second-guessed it after that.

Right, it was absolute agony to get to that point. In fact, my then girlfriend will tell you it was agony. She wanted to go to New York. I wanted to go to New York. I became the definition of neurotic around this decision. Talking it this way, talking it that way, thinking about this, thinking about that, getting opinions, pros and conless,

meditation, like I would have done electric shock therapy to come up with the solution. I was so miserable trying to come up with the right answer. This gets offers that, but that offers this. But then the apartment in New York, and then there's the hierarchy in New York that did the Stanford, oh my God, I was making myself sick.

And frankly, I'm amazed she stuck with me through that because I was becoming incredibly difficult to be around. And everyone was like, no more discussion about this decision. Just make a decision, flip a coin. And in that moment, it just came to me. So I guess the way to put it is that I can agonize over a decision, seek input from anyone who will listen about the issue. But once I see the truth and feel it, there's no going back.

And so I love that it happened by yourself in a quiet moment. It didn't happen because somebody made a recommendation, didn't happen that way. First you did all of the research, you had all of these conflicting ideas. And then in a quiet moment, it bubbled up.

Yeah, it just geysered out of my subconscious. You had clarity 100% clarity. It just and the first person I told wasn't my girlfriend because she was really my family at that time. We met shortly after I moved to San Diego. She had a dog. I had a dog. We raised a dog. We were a family of two with the dogs. And it was a hard relationship. And I brought a lot of the difficulties to that relationship for sure. But I was isolated in San Diego, except for her and the dogs.

And I had a few friends, but so the logical thing would have been to call her and tell her, but I'd been working with a with a coach, not a therapist. I'd also been working with a therapist. But I've been working with a coach. This was a woman who at the time was the wife of a seal team guy lived out on Coronado Island. And I'd been working with her for a few years, and he was Wendy.

And I would go see her and we would just talk in a completely non therapeutic way. Like she was licensed to do coaching and this kind of thing. But she was like, it's all about getting into these wordless states. It's all about wordlessness. So maybe you should run or maybe you should swim or you should just do something that gets you into these wordless states. So I started the boxing thing.

And that brought up a lot for me because one of the reasons why I'm terrible at boxing. I mean, I actually fought some fights. I had my boxing license and I loved the training and I won some fights. I never got knocked down, never got knocked out. But when I'd hit the other guy, I'd feel kind of bad. I don't want to hurt other people.

And I understand that the ritual of boxing and I got I'd gotten a lot of fights when I was younger. So I used to have to do this psych up for myself before we'd spa or I fought some fights where you're trying to knock the other guy out. And I think I would make up these stories that you know that the guy had raped my sister, for instance. And now I'm trying to like channel this like false aggression. And occasionally you know you sink one through the guard.

Yeah, you know, and it feels for the moment you're like, God, I'm you see his head snap back. But then I didn't feel good. I felt like this is not good. Okay. So she eventually said, listen, you seem to like the training that the fighting seems to be drawing up a lot of old narratives and stuff that doesn't feel good.

And I feel good because when I got in fights when I was younger, I didn't like it either. It came from a place of pain. You know this about anyone. It's rooted in pain. There's a great book actually by Sam Sheridan called a fighter's heart where he talks about all the different forms of fighting and martial arts and while I have great reverence for it. And so to Sam.

At the end, he talks about you know, life is about building things up, not about breaking them down. And in cultures like Thailand where people fight, they think it's insane that people who don't have to fight for a living would choose to fight.

So, you know, here I am as a, you know, I got my system professorship when I was 35. I'm almost 40. I'm boxing. When's the night I'm sparring. I'm fighting once every three months or so, you know, doing the whole thing. And then I enjoyed that to some extent. I like the relationship to my coach, love the training. But I don't want to hurt anybody.

So I get really into the training and in that moment it just comes out like hitting the the speed bag. And I went and called Wendy and I said, I made my decision. And she said, great. And I said, I'm going to Stanford. And she said, great. And I said, but what's wild is how I came up with the decision. I was hitting the speed bag. And I got into a rhythm around that and all of a sudden it was, I don't want to go to NYU and harm monkeys. Boom. And she goes, love it.

Like, it's a hurt. It didn't really matter. I could have told her that I had picked up a blue pebble on the beach and the blue pebble talked to me. I mean, it wouldn't made any difference whatsoever. The point was that it was about getting into a state of wordlessness. It's also interesting that you got there through a physical means. So you're doing something physical that took focus intention and a lot of energy.

And the speed bag is interesting because if anyone who knows how to speed bag will tell you there are a million different ways to hit the speed bag. You hit it with the side of your hand, you can come. But the rhythm of it, you're listening to, and some guys will tap their foot while they do it. Some guys pivot their hips. There are a million different ways to do the speed bag.

But the harder you hit the speed bag, the less proficient you're going to be. It's about being smooth. It's about staying loose. It's about keeping your elbows loose. People tell you, it's like, no, it's going to count. It's like doing all sorts of things. But it's a rhythm where... When you see Floyd Mayweather looking at the camera while he's speedbagging, it's all through the ears.

Now, I'm not a very auditory driven person. I'm hyper-visual. And I study the visual system. But with the speed bag, I learned how to connect my bodily rhythms to auditory rhythms in the way that probably a drummer does in some ways. And I think it just tapped into a different part of my nervous system. And even as I'm sitting here now making the motion, I can feel it in my legs.

Because proper speed bagging comes from the floor up. It's not just about the hands. You're trying to pull from the floor when you punch. You know, this kind of thing. And there it was. Just hit me. And I've had the same experience while running. I like to run for me an hour or an hour and a half at least once a week. And those runs are as much about clearing out the clutter as they are about exercise as it is about just seeing what guisers up.

And as a neuroscientist, I have theories about this that we're trying to shut down a certain amount of our predictive brain. You know, big part of our brain is dedicated to trying to anticipate what's going to happen next.

And that part of our brain is remarkable. And it is what allows us to strategize. But it is also a problem because that very same part of the brain is responsible for the shh to the rest of your brain, which is the deeper recesses of the brain, the subconscious and your limbic system and not just the limbic system, but other systems.

So what you do, I believe, when you run or you get into some sort of rhythmic repeated movement, is you get into a state of wordlessness, the narratives become fractured and then they start to disappear. And then subconscious ideas and narratives start to geyser up. And some people get this while swimming, some people get it while running. I happen to get it while speed bagging or while running. I've tried to get it in meditation, but I haven't managed to do that.

I think we can reach our subconscious through sleep and dreaming. That's not an original idea. Young talk about this. This has been known for thousands of years. Young just articulated it. I've just been listening to Man and his symbols again. And the book starts talking about that. But the decision of whether or not to go to NYU or Stanford is probably one of the most important decisions of my entire career and life.

And it was clearly the right one for me. And not just because Stanford is an amazing university, but also because of what happened after I got back. And it came through a state of physical action and wordlessness. You think it could happen through a breathing technique? You said you've never got there through meditation. But I'm wondering if meditation isn't a physical enough act. Yeah, that's a great question. So in 2015, I heard about this guy, Wim Hof. I got a plane ticket, went to Spain.

I had contacted him and his family before. I met him in the Pyrenees and did some mountaineering with Wim, some wild stuff that was a little too wild. A beaning, it almost got me killed at one point. I almost got my leg ripped off. I came back with a pretty major injury. Jumping off a bridge backwards, women I did a sling off a suspension bridge that we rigged up.

And I had the rope between my legs and it cut down to the tendons on one side. And then I was lowered into the water afterwards and something got in there and got a bad infection. It was pretty ugly. I shouldn't have done that. But during that trip, I did get the opportunity to do three or four rounds of true Wim Hof cyclic hyperventilation type breathing each day with extensive breath holds.

Nowadays, it's become a little bit more controversial because people have done this near water in water and it's gotten hurt. When I was there, they were very clear to only do it on land. So we were going hard with the breathing. And I did get into some states of altered consciousness. I don't know that I had any ideas there.

But I learned a lot about what breath work can do. And then when I returned, I dedicated a good arm of my lab to studying respiration, which we recently published a clinical trial. It's a very psychedelic experience that the Wim Hof breathing. Yeah. And I think that critics of Wim will say, oh, it's just like tumor breathing or cyclic hyperventilation.

I get a little amused by the claims that different forms of breathing mimic one another, or we publish this clinical trial comparing cyclic hyperventilation, which looks a lot like Wim Hof breathing versus cyclic sign, which looks a little bit more like pranayama breathing. The idea that anyone could be the owner of breathing is just, it's the most hysterical idea to me anyway. I certainly don't claim to be. I don't think Wim does either.

But I agree. I think that the breath work is powerful. And it did shift my state. But I didn't come to cognitive clarity about something or decision clarity.

It taught me how to sense my body more. And as my colleague David Spiegel, who's a world expert in hypnosis, clinical hypnosis says breathing represents a bridge between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind because it's the one aspect of our physiology that is always operating in the background, but that we can take conscious control over.

And when we do that, it shifts our state of mind. You could say that about walking like when you walk, you don't think about it, but then you could decide to step with mindfulness. But the shift in your mindset when you do that is not as profound as when you just change your breathing. So the breathing really is the a bridge, a powerful accessible bridge between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind.

But to me, this getting into these states of wordlessness on a weekly basis, if not more, is just it's clear that it's a powerful thing to do. So when your in-mise wordless states and epiphany happens, do you immediately write it down? What's your way of capturing them?

Oddly, and I say oddly because I'm pretty verbal and I also write things down all the time. Last night we were watching the documentary about the clash and I got my phone out and I remember thinking, I hope Rick doesn't think I'm not paying attention to the documentary, but I was writing down songs that I had forgotten about quotes from strommer, like notes because it was just such a great documentary.

But when I've arrived at decisions or clarity in these wordless states, it shows up like a bold faced word in one shot. There's no way I could forget. You know, I had a dream three weeks ago, I'd been working through some hard stuff and I had this very complicated dream. At the end of the dream, this word just popped up.

Devotion. You saw the word in writing? I saw the word in writing. Devotion. And I went, oh my god, and I woke up and I called our mutual friend Paul Conti. I texted him, I have to talk to you about this dream. And we ended up talking about the dream. He said, it's unusual for something to come through so clearly as a word. I want to say I've never seen a word in a dream in my life.

I felt what devotion. And in this case, it was someone else's devotion to me and then my sense of devotion and how critical devotion is as a concept and a feeling to me, not a concept, but as a feeling. And it was like inescapable at that point. So I could write it down. I certainly don't need to tattoo it on my body. I will never forget the speedbag experience and what came to me.

I will never forget the that dream. I will never forget standing on Sans Beach at UC Santa Barbara, where I was a student and praying at that point of my life for some sense of clarity around some extremely hard circumstances and feeling it. Hit me. Boom. I'll never forget. I'll just never forget. It comes through in like a single word or concept.

And I have some experience now with the various psychedelics and plant medicines. I'm not a real psychonaut. I've done some clinical trials. So I've done hydrocylocybin once. I've done MDMA again in a clinical setting four times each time.

There's been at least from MDMA. It's been one concept, one word, which for a guy like me who's not known for being succinct since I was little. I had my family's half Argentine. So they call that instead of calling it pacifiers, the chupete, the chupete was always on the side of my mouth is and I could talk with the chupete in.

And they said I basically came out talking, you know, and never stopped according to my sister and many people around me. So for me, wordlessness is such a foreign idea, but it's also where the gems lie, especially when I've got a problem that's like really vexing. I mean, I almost got buried in some of these choices. Like they're just agonizing. Like, oh my god. And I couldn't get myself out of the tangle.

Because they're both good choices. And depending on which one you pick, you're going to have an entirely different life. Yes. And to me, that was overwhelming. Yeah. And it's reasonable for that to be the case. And I'm not somebody who struggles with decision making, despite what some people close to me might argue. I don't. I love what I love. When I was a kid, I love tropical fish. I could walk into the store and I'm like, that tiger barb, that one.

None of that one. That plant. You know, I got really into birds after that. And then it was like, of all the birds, it was like that one. It was the great sheet dwarf part. That's the bird. And you know, I can just, I home right in on it. And I've been that way mostly in my life choices. But when it comes to certain choices where there's a more complex constellation of features like income location, what your partner wants, what the days are going to be like, you know, opportunities.

I think that that NYU Stanford decision was really about trying to portal into the future of where it was all going to lead. Because even though at the time I had no concept of a podcast, I had no concept of doing anything public facing. I was, I know social media where if I had it, it was just as a placeholder.

I, like, must have known my, in my subconscious, I must have known I want to become a public science educator. I must have known. And I must have known how could I don't believe that our brain just learns things as we go forward. I think we have an understanding of where we could end up. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy using one of squares space's best in class templates.

So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with fluid engines, a highly intuitive drag and drop editor. No coding or technical experience is required. Understand your site's performance with in-depth website analytics tools. Squarespace has everything you need to succeed online. Read a blog, monetize a newsletter, make a marketing portfolio, launch an online store.

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But my dad is a theoretical physicist. He was an experimentalist. So he's from Argentina, from Buenos Aires. He came to the US on a naval scholarship. It was a student at UPEN. When he finished his PhD, he had met my mother in New York. They moved to California and he worked for Xerox Park, which was a think tank. Ish kind of placed down the road from Stanford, up the road from what would eventually become Apple and those companies.

And he did that because my dad hated academia. He told me from a young age, it's peasantry. You don't make any money. Everyone tells you that it's really cool what you do and your life is hard. You're always trying to raise money. So he went to a company where they would fund his research. And he did stuff related to computer science and some theoretical physics stuff.

He was involved in chaos. If the book chaos by Jim Glick as a chapter about him, my dad was so when we were kids, my mother didn't work at the time growing up. His housewife eventually became a teacher. But we would go during the summer to the Aspen Center for Physics. We weren't wealthy. We weren't poor, but we weren't wealthy.

But we went there because Murray Gellman was a Nobel Prize winner physics. He was head of the Santa Fe Institute for a long time. He had decided to hold this Physics Institute in Aspen. So we go there during the summer and I was a kid obsessed with birds and fish, fishing and nature. And so I always liked biology. And I was surrounded by all these greats in physics. I remember meeting Gellman. I went bird watching with Gellman. I remember hearing stories about Richard Feynman.

My dad knew Richard Feynman. In fact, recently I gifted a book that Richard Feynman had written on physics that he signed for my dad. I gifted it to our friend Peter Rittia because he's a Feynman collector. So I grew up hearing about physics. We had graduate student star house. My dad had an association with Stanford. And so he had graduate students and postdocs. And I kind of heard about that stuff.

And I knew what a scientist was and I asked my dad if he liked doing science and he said it's like every day is your birthday. And I remember thinking every day, he said, yeah, and I said, well, what do you do? And he said physics. And I said, well, then I'll do physics. When I was a little kid, we had this conversation. I remember that I was six. And he said, no, don't do physics. Most of the big questions are already resolved.

And I said, well, what's the work on it? He said, work on the brain. I said, oh, I work on the brain. So I remember declaring that when I was a kid, six years old standing at the entryway. So really your dad suggested your path. That's right. That's amazing. And you didn't, as punk rockers, you are. You didn't rebel against it.

Yeah, he said, this is the best job. And we don't know much about how the brain works. And I loved the Guinness Book of World's records. And I loved the encyclopedia. And through elementary school, I used to spend weekends reading about medieval weapons or about biology in the Monday days.

And I used to come into class and I would ask if I could give a lecture about what I had learned. So I was like a little mini professor. So much so that they had me see a psychologist. They were a little worried. And here's what's also strange. I now know the biological reason for this. My voice was always the way it is now. So I was a little kid with the exact same voice I have now. We have some recordings. They called me froggy, like the kid from the little rascals.

I was like this little man talking about all these ideas, but I was a little kid. I also had hair on my Adam's apple from the time I was really young. So it turned me want to share the information. I couldn't help but share the information. I got obsessed with fish for a little while. My mom told me about these carnivals that she took me and my friends. They were giving away goldfish where you throw the ping pong ball in.

And I realized that all these goldfish were going to die because people didn't know about the declarinization process. So I went out and bought a bunch of declar. She bought it. And then I would give it away at fairs if you listen to my lecture about how to take care of fish. That was the price you had to pay.

And do you think that you learned the things that you learned because you were purely interested in them for yourself or you learned things you learned because you thought these are the things I want to teach. Always because I was purely interested in them. So it always starts with your hunger for information. Absolutely. To this day because the podcast is about researching stuff and then sharing it with the world. It's about finding the gems.

Like I'll never forget seeing tropical fish for the first time. And thinking the saltwater tanks look artificial. That doesn't look like snorkeling. I've gone snorkeling. The fresh water tanks are amazing. They're these little ecosystems and I could tell that the fish were happy for whatever reason. And then I'd want to learn everything I could about it. And then I couldn't help but tell people about it.

Like I just couldn't. It was like this is so cool. Like if anyone hasn't seen Takashi Amano's work. This is a guy who died unfortunately in pneumonia about 15 years ago. This Japanese guy developed aquascaping which is all about the plants maybe occasionally a fish. When I first saw Takashi Amano aquascaping. I thought I had seen. Okay because it was before puberty. This was like cooler than sex because I didn't know what sex really was.

I mean I had a concept from a young age but cooler than an amusement park. It was cooler than cartoons. It was like holy shit. This is the coolest thing. I need to tell everybody about how cool it is. You know. And so for me it was always like. So you were always sharing what you were enthusiastic about. And to this day yes. And that's because something turns on in you that's exciting and positive and you want other people to feel it.

My limbs start to float a little bit. This is the sensation in my body. My limbs start to float a little bit. But I'll see something like a go on PubMed and I'll be around researching something about whatever topic. You know sleep and dream or something and then you'll find a reference to review and then you go to review and there's like okay like this is kind of cool like that. And then you'll find a book and you look at that book and on the third chapter you see and it's like oh my god.

And research and science is the same way you're slicing through a brain or you're staining a brain you're down the microscope and you see beautiful neurons everywhere and they're there and they're standing in every once in a while you see something. Oh my god. This has meaning. And I don't always know what the meaning is but I know it means something.

And so my nervous system from a very young age was tuned to mostly biology later psychology but to somehow certain aspects of biology just dazzle but not just because they're beautiful like they they have meaning it's communicating something to me and I want to communicate that to other people. I just want to pass it along. I'm not even sure that I want to. It really is a compulsion. Now when I was eight or nine I had a grunting tick.

It shows up still now if I get fatigued. I'll start a little bit of a grunting tick. A lot of young boys in particular have these circuits that get activated and have a hard time getting shut down and it can be a little bit Tourette's like it you know some kids will blink hard some kids have full blown Tourette's.

I've always felt like physical energy builds up inside me and it needs to be released and learning and teaching is the most adaptive form of that release I eventually came to see that I also I learned that and I don't recommend doing this but I used to get rid of that.

It's like a motor anxiety that can be released I used to shake I'll just do it right now because I still do it every once in a while in secret this is an audio but I'll just shake my head from side to side really fast and it feels like it makes me calm again. But when I see something I'm excited about it's like it it's a whole body energy and it doesn't feel like it needs to be extruded like it's not something I want to get out of me in fact by teaching it I always learn.

And I know this from teaching at Stanford and elsewhere is that the best teachers have mastery of the material but they're also presenting the material as a novice they're looking at it like with the light and I think that's the word that really captures it is the light this is exactly the same feeling I experienced when you know growing up I listen to you see DC Led Zeppelin I heard some cool music my sister listen to the grateful dead they were from our hometown.

On everyone's into like deaf leopard or whatever it was and a guy named Jim Thiebo who runs a bunch of skateboard companies now gave me a tape because that tape and it was stiff little fingers and I'm probably 12 years old at that point put that in and flammable material and I was just like oh my God that's for you.

Oh my God and I wasn't angry yet so you know I think words spoken language is incredibly varied and quote unquote sophisticated but I think at at a core level the nervous system has some very fundamental and not terribly varied sets of feelings you know or states of mind and body and for me is this feeling of discovery the light. And excitement like oh my God there's more of this even if I only listen to that song.

Like a million times at that moment when I'm realizing is now that I know this exists. It's like it's available something's available I can listen to this again and I can feel this again and I'm not somebody who attenuates to the things I love this is one of the reasons why I don't know that much different music because I'm so excited about the things I love.

So stiff little fingers did it and then skateboarding did it because in my town everyone played tennis or swam or played soccer and I did some of that but then getting back to the science pieces that when I was 13 roughly 14 my parents split and it was a super high conflict of worse. I have love and respect for my parents but it's like they took the list of all the things not to do in a divorce and did all of them repeatedly.

And so my dad moved out my sister was off at college my mom was really struggling and I was just I think I was at first depressed and then I you know it's hitting puberty too. So from really 13 to 19 I basically blew off school and focused entirely on skateboarding I was what was your relationship with your dad like. Very complicated very high very high. Have it been the whole time or had it been only from the time you started then.

My dad and I were always close in the sense that we talk about things when he'd go the lab at night and I go with him. I was close with my mom to my mom held poetry club for us in the summers my mom is a real do go to so we'd see a homeless person on the street and she pull over and that person would be in a hotel that night and we had the people living in our garage that she would take in she's real do go to.

She really fell into a spiral with my parents split my dad would see me once a week and it was really hard to connect with him because my life sucked at home it really sucked it was super dark. I went from having a family to like nothing my mom was in a real spiral I did you blame him at first yes because he would tell me you know like this is good for us I'm like this sucks this sucks like I wasn't so upset that they had split.

As much as like everything was falling apart I remember like there wasn't food for dinner my mom would get food but then she was I'd hear her crying all the time you know I think her concept of family was that family stick together no matter what I was just so distraught and then you know what led to that they're breakup.

They're both older siblings and there was a little power struggle no I don't know I don't think it was any one thing I think they had very different ideas of how to live life and value they've been married 20 years yeah I so I think values wise it was really really different my dad was wanted a kind of I think you wanted kids but I don't know that he wanted young kids and all that goes with young kids.

My mom loved all the family stuff but it was volatile I mean I remember growing up I'd hear screaming matches and my dad would try and passify things but yeah they weren't getting along and and they were pretty good at hiding the dynamics of what was leading to the problems like I don't know really I eventually came to learn that there were some you know friction that is typical adult friction but when they said they were getting divorced I wasn't surprised.

I don't even know that I was that upset but then what the way things played out was was really really life changed in a way that was not great the house was dark now I have to confess I mean I've got two loving parents they love my sister and I they they're very loving but they're both still live they're both still live yeah both still live my dad's going to turn 80 this year I still active as a scientist my my mom is his few years behind him.

I'm a few years behind him but it's both remarried my dad divorced again you know reunion pending we don't know where that's going to go.

You know at that time my dad and I would meet once a week and he tell me you know that things were okay I'm like things are pretty fucking far from okay and my anger towards him was growing and then the big thing really and he and I've worked this out but was that I asked to live with him I'm like I got to get out of here so I switched high schools and I was working

a skateboard shop downtown Palo Alto at that time and I had a girlfriend on the other side town the other high school so I want to be there and I was supposed to move in with them and then we have a differing versions of this he and I so I want to be respectful of that but then he said I've got a girlfriend and she's going to live with me and I said okay

and met her and she was cool eventually became his wife but then he said so you're not and at that point it was like putting gasoline on fire and you know I was like fuck that you know as a 14 year old and I was like this is not good so I started really acting out stop going to school getting

into fights I wasn't doing drugs wasn't drinking that wasn't part of the skateboard scene in the late 80s early 90s it was late 80s but I was getting into so much trouble and so true and that eventually I got taken away I got locked up so I got called into the office one day with office yeah at school I showed up they're like and this is public school yeah is public school right over the fence from my high school

and like we need to talk to you school counselor and there's this guy sitting in the room and after about 10 minutes I realize I'm like they're going to take me away so they took me to a detention center up the peninsula I had no choice so do they get permission from your parents yeah my mom green lighted it wow and she couldn't control me I wasn't on a school wasn't doing anything really

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so you're not taking drugs you're just not going to school and you're taking the seven F bus to San Francisco a bunch of kids are congregating in Justin Herman Plaza so called Embarkadero the EMB I'm not a good skateboarder so here's the thing my I hit puberty right on you feel like this is like your new family sort of they were

absolutely my family guys like Jim Thiebo these older guys who were around at the time there was amazing skateboarding happening Mike Carroll Henry Sanchez all these guys Javonte Turner I'm seeing like amazing skateboarding sky Greg Carroll was kind of a dad to everybody even though he's what by 18 at that time I will do you 14 14 so I start going to the city

San Francisco was our city taking the seven F bus or because I didn't have money we would take the cal train and we would lie down coffin style on the top so they couldn't see us and then like jump the turn styles and run in you know I learned how to do a lot of that from we had a kid who went to our school it was a foster kid named Aaron Curry his real name was Aaron King he was a foster by the Curry family he

actually became a graffiti artist orphan or FN and he came up through the foster system so he knew how to steal he knew how to like hide on trains you know how to do all of that so I was hanging around with him a lot and I started hanging out in Barca Dero and I loved it I saw amazing skateboarding all these kids also not going to school it was like everyone had the same idea all either

love lists or parentless families are just no control in fact I'll never forget Mike Carroll said to me you don't have to go to school I was like why not he's like eventually they just give up and I was like okay now he became a pro skateboarder and this is an important point which is that

even though I hit puberty on time I was skinny and I kept getting hurt my body wasn't strong yet I shot up I grew like a foot during one summer between eighth grade and ninth grade so I was like six feet tall or six foot one and like 149 pounds and I would get breaking my damn foot and I wasn't strong my body couldn't do it yet had no pop and I had no future in skateboarding and it was super frustrated you're still going home every night to sleep not necessarily some

guys slept it in Barca Dero they would just drink or hang out I wasn't into that I slept a few nights there but mostly just stayed up skateboarding I had a friend named Ray Meyer older guy who lived with his parents in the city he was a computer programmer lived in their attic and I lived there for a while with him weekends or Fridays or whatever and it was and would you tell your mom you're doing this or now sometimes and that's

eventually why they pulled me out of school she was like I was so worried about you know you know you know I was just how many people in the group of kids so the Embarcador the so called EMB crowd because now it's legendary could be as many as a couple hundred on a sundown probably about 50 core guys I was not one of the core guys but I always

had good optics like I knew like there was a guy they call James Keltch who was concerned the mayor if he was drinking you had to pay him or beat you up that's a fact but he liked me and he was cool to me and so like I think I knew how to slide in I always got along well with

guys like I knew I was grumping a big pack of kids down at the end of my street before they played water polo we'd all hang out together then I went the way the skateboard thing so even though I wasn't a good skateboarder they kind of let me hang out and be part of it

and I was smart enough to not get into the criminal side of it because it was as much about the comradery and community as it was about skateboarding it was a place to go yeah and it was a group of I'll say like minded people that's right who want to

get away from something else that's right and I was seeing amazing skateboarding and Jim Thiebo would roll in every once in a while he had started real skateboards he that thunder trucks and which by the way this is one of the most amazing heists and all of skateboarding is you know people you

like the different companies and skateboarding real thunder spitfire you know that one guy owned all of it they were all those were all poured at the same factory or Macgo in Hunter's point but they came up with this genius idea of call it for different

companies and then they would like put them back then they would pick the companies against one another whichever you bought it was all going to the same place Faustovatella was a genius in that way but it was very San Francisco based there was a Southern California thing but

yeah that was where I hung out and I learned you know I stayed out of the stealing a lot they would rob tourists and stuff like if you saw that movie kids an equivalent thing was happening in Washington Square Park in the early 90s actually some good friends of mine love armic bride Nick Lockman

bunch of guys were in that movie kids and it was a mimic of kind of what was happening in the market arrow and it was probably happening in a lot of places so love park Philadelphia eventually came along and then Barcelona became a big spot but yeah it was an amazing time I remember loving the crowd

feeling like you have a family show up it was all you know get the daps get the hugs say what's up like there's my friend Carl Watson who I still know lives in Oakland works for a D to skateboarding he would show up he and this other guy Nick Lockman

the greeting committee and they chop and back what's up and then like you know like someone happy to see me that's actually all I really needed to be also I just realized that now that you know I'd come home and there was no happiness there but no one was happy to see me either

my dad didn't want me living with him or was conflicted about that for whatever reason so my school I went to this high school called gun high school is one of the most academically proficient high schools in the country it also is the high school that is the highest suicide rate in the country

they don't like it when I say this because they actually got it wiped from their Wikipedia but kids there you know at the suicide rates outrageous not when I went but it's been an issue this was written up people can find that hopefully they have a military that problem but I went to the school where everyone is it's white from Wikipedia we can talk about Wikipedia I'm happy to talk about that you know it was like my high school was all about every kid was obsessed with

early admission to Ivy League school X or Y or Z or homecoming you know me and my friends started becoming bad kids right I started going back to Palo Alto and thinking this is romper room that's where interesting stuff is happening now the cool thing was I stayed out of what drugs I didn't get into drinking but I wasn't good at skateboarding

and that was frustrating wasn't good at anything and my friend Steve Ruggie or Steve Ruggie then who was a few years older than me put me on the flow team for thunder and spitfire just out of frankly at a sympathy so I get a little product here in there you know and I try and then I went to some of the big contest the Reno Nationals I go out there I'd skate I'd get like last place but I was trying I was in it and I look back and I remember

thinking there are no parents here I'm at the Reno fairgrounds when I should be at school and I'm getting a little bit of money to eat from team manager or something or I don't know from working the skateboard shop so I was free I mean the one thing I was was was free and this is from 14 to how old so I did that from about 14 to 16 and then what happened was I hurt my foot again I broke it a third or maybe a fourth time

and I was so depressed and I remember so a condition of being let out of youth detention was I had to go to therapy no one went to therapy back then if they did they didn't talk about it so I started working with this guy who really helped me and tell me what what was detention like oh man so I'll say this like the first night when they lock the door you're like oh shit

and I'll never forget it was a co-ed hallway my roommate was a guy he looked like Richard Ramirez the night stalker tall long hair

he looked like that guy and I remember in the same room same room I remember being terrified I'm thinking like and I'm like I'm like I'm gonna have to fight you know I'm not big and strong but I'm like I'm not like I didn't know if he was gonna rape me I know he's gonna kill me I know what he was gonna try and do turned out he was like the nicest dude he was like the best dude but the first night I remember being terrified and we guys same age yeah but he was a lot bigger than I was I was tall and skinned

he must have been like six four mean wow yeah he's big kid and then the other kids in there we're dealing with different things some drug some abuse and I'll never forget the next morning they gather us up they sit us around and like the group therapy and they say how many in the group I'm trying to try about 18 20 maybe and I remember they said listen there's this holding chamber down the way of kids that are 14 and younger

and then they're the adults in the other wing now the kids the really young kids they're crazy and the older people the 19 and up they're crazy but you guys you're not crazy and I remember thinking that's exactly what they're telling the people in the other places I remember thinking like how stupid do you think I am yeah I'm like so I thought to myself okay either I'm crazy or I'm just a bad kid

and for the first 72 hours or so I just sat there didn't say a word I was so pissed and I got the phone call you get your phone call I called Steve Ruggie Shrugie Shrugie they locked me up and he goes braw he was a stoner back then not anywhere he goes pro he's like why are you calling me and I'm like I need help and he goes you're the most normal guy I know I don't know how to help myself

and I that's when I was like okay this is bad yeah so after about 72 hours I remember talking to one of the counselors they would come in three times a night check us they would do frisk search the whole thing how were they do you feel like their intentions were good people yeah they were really good people and looking back I realized they must have made like nothing they're trying to get clinical hours the orderlies were kind of scary

because like the is a link in the old movies they come in the white suits and they're like checking you and it wasn't a mental hospital it was just youth detention they had a girls wing and a boys wing and then they mix us for therapy and in the sessions they were you know other kids are talking about drugs sexual abuse and all sorts of stuff and I'm not speaking so they were convinced the counselors were convinced that I must have experienced the exact same things because I'm hanging my

head and not listening and I remember I'm like no I'm not saying anything because what he's saying is absolutely gnarly yeah you know and I'm not going to claim that yeah and they're like well why you hear and I'm like I don't know why I'm here honestly I don't know I'm great they started kind of pulling the threads and I realized just how dark and depressing my life was at home and how I basically had not been in school or engaging in any typical youth stuff

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and that was my lifeline even though I sort of sucked at it you see your mom anytime during that so they come up and yeah they could gather apart together and my sister too and that was it just made everything worse yeah it was just they were at each other's yep and it was just so bad and so after a little while I start talking to the counselors and realizing like what's the program how do I get out of here yes

and so they're like listen you get out of here by being really honest and I'm like well I'm not lying and they're like but you're also not saying anything which for me is unusual so I start talking like I start talking about what's been going on and the things I've been doing it was just it was mayhem and it was fun and exciting on the one hand but it was also dangerous and scary on the other and kind of like a punk rock show you're not sure how to feel about that you know

but at some point I think I realized I was like okay I don't like being scared from my life so I started working the program eventually I got out but the condition was I had to go to therapy

so once a week now I'm back in Palo Alto I'm going to classes which was totally foreign to me and also people in my school knew that I got locked up so now like people are my friends are like he's crazy he's a criminal and I say this I do want people to know that when you treat someone that way they become that way like when Mike Tyson talks about how he became an animal because people are always telling him what an animal he is I have a small understanding of what that's like

so I'm going to therapy the guys awesome he's like hey listen like you seem to have a big drive and you're very interested in things and and he's like you should stay away from drugs and you know trying to you should take care of your physical body maybe you should make your body stronger so I start swimming I started running I used to hide it because for skateboarders this is like the 80s and 90s like it was jox didn't hang out with skateboarders like a John Hughes film so I was doing all that and I was like oh I really love the feeling of running

actually there was a football coach at our school I didn't play football his name was Bob Peters he taught me I lift weights and I was like wow my body is getting stronger I couldn't do one pull up I was so skinny

so I was like this is cool I'm starting to feel some control I started reading a little bit but then I got my first girlfriend she was a year older than me first real girlfriend and I learned that her former boyfriend had been some big like buff football players and now I really start hitting the weights right I was like this is geeky kid and my mom is still totally checked out so I was like okay I need to take care of her she's going off to college like I need to be a grown up so I'll join the

fire service I like hanging out with dudes I like working out everyone likes firefighters so I started taking fire science courses down at mission college and studying a little bit going to class a little bit now what's funny is I completely changed my physical look before that I

like died black hair super spiky and I was skateboard kid I went back to school and I was like I'm going to play this game started combing my hair side were flannel is the 90s I'm wearing flannel I'm going to like tone down the the aggression of it and I start hanging out with her so I was like a little adult and I learned how to do that from the Embarcadero and those guys great Carol but I stopped skateboarding I was just into that and her and we had a

fair it and all that so what ended up happening is that she went off to college she went to UC Santa Barbara and she was my family so what did I do I got my car I drove down there I lived in the parking lot outside her dorm she's one year older one year older right and I was just terrified that we were going to split so I decide to apply to college so I could be down there so I applied I write a college entrance essay about my life

and what had been happening I was very honest and that I wanted to join the fire service and that I heard that getting having a bachelor's degree would help me maybe move up in the command there and I got in got denied from every other school I got into that one don't

ask me how so I go to UC Santa Barbara and I'm like this is like a playground this is crazy and so what ended up happening was July 4th 1994 and our mutual friend Jack Johnson can attest to the story was you know my girlfriend at the time was roommates with Jack's now wife they

were summer roommates and Jack and a bunch of people had a party I was living in a squat with my fair working at a bagel cafe I had essentially flunked all my classes the first year I got kicked out of the dorms on the last day and it was forbidden from going within 200 yards of the

dorms we're coming back from the store we picked up stakes for a barbecue and it was clear that some guys were ripping off the house and the guys I was with were like let's get them so we go over verify that they're stealing a hit a guy hell breaks loose he's with a bunch of other guys

all my friends scatter they were kind of there or at least weren't willing to engage police show up it was it was nuts and I'll never forget the police said to me they're like good job and I'm lucky I didn't get arrested but I remember feeling like good job like this sucks this

absolutely sucks like I'm either going to kill someone or they're going to kill me nothing good comes from fighting nothing you know if you have to do to protect your family fine but nothing good so I remember walking back to the place where I live and I thought okay I finally got to college the girlfriend had left for the summer I'm living in a squat with my fair and I'm getting in fights I'm like officially a loser I'm not good at skateboarding I love music but I can't

play music I'm officially a loser so that day I wrote out and I still have the journal page that I'm like this is it I'm not going to drink or do any drugs I'm not going to get into fights I'm done I'm going to just go home and figured out so I took a leave of absence I didn't drop

out I took a leave absence I moved home and I went to Fahill College Community College and I worked at a little cafe in palo took called Hobbies and I just went to the gym and studied and I started taking classes and I took a psychology class I was

like that's cool I took a biopsychology class I was like that's cool and I was like this is good I'm good at this like I can memorize stuff I can learn now at that point I'm still not in touch with my dad and I was living at home my sister had moved home after college and I would take her to the gym with me and I just thought to myself like okay this is it like this is it this is survival this is it and then I started to realize I love learning and it was the same thing as when I was a

kid with the fish or the whatever I love learning and so I'm going to do this so I moved back to Santa Barbara I lived in a studio apartment just me the girlfriend and I were still kind of like working it out but I'd allow myself to go out once a month out party but I kept it on in check and I would work out and study and at that point then I started getting straight A's and I started working in the laboratory of a guy named Harry Carlisle start doing

experiments and he drove a black truck he smoked cigarettes in the fume hood drank coffee and I was like he's he's punk as fuck I like this guy and his wife is beautiful he seems really happy and he's like it's great your whole life as a tenured professor is learning and I thought my dad is going to be so happy if I succeed and I don't want to give him the satisfaction I thought but I'm an idiot if I don't take this opportunity so I just got into science and I just from that

point I you know I ended up graduating with high honors blah blah blah I got into Berkeley did my master's at the university went up to Davis did my PhD Davis went to Stanford did my postdoc when you see Sandy

so at 19 it was like I'm done being a screw up made a hard left in the academic science and in some ways reunited with the pre puberty childhood delight in nature and animals and learning and you know there's a bunch of stuff that happened in in my the course of my science career not all of

me in fact a lot of hard stuff but yeah it's from night I've been working my ass off from 19 on but I don't even like to say that because it's been pure pleasure right learn teach research you found what you love reconnected with it yeah yeah all the aggression all the like you know I was never a

heateness like I never thought oh I'm going to party because it feels good and I'm going to fight because it was good it was just you know I think I was like most of the guys back then that I hung out with we were all terrified if you had any sense any real prowess in anything skateboarding with girls or anything you were afraid like that it was going to get taken away from you and also we were all raising

ourselves this is what's so crazy I mean like the most adult person I knew was Greg Carroll who still a lot of people but he was a kid you know he was a kid working out his own stuff and so we didn't have

like dads and moms to you know tell us hey this is what you do and this and that and and I eventually reconnected with my dad really it wasn't until I was a postdoc but actually we went to therapy together because there was so much stuff over the years and I got to learn his experience of why he got to understand what had really gone on with the decision around me moving in not moving in but I will say this you know at 19 I realize like no one's coming to save me and so I had to figure it out.

When you did get to reconnect with your dad do you have greater understanding of what was going on is it different than what you thought totally different than what I thought and I totally understand what was going on and you know sometimes I'll say you know I only wish that they had split up sooner I don't I think you know I know for my own struggles in relationship that like we're all doing the best we can with what we've got at the

time the best advice can be coming from the best people that we trust the utmost in our life and attachment is so complicated because we can love and get attached to people that aren't good for us and they can get attached to us and oftentimes we're not good for them either so it's taken a lot of years and I've continued to struggle in in terms of relationship and both you know in terms of making good choices

and also in terms of showing upright you know I mean I've really you know I've got a million problems with myself around how I've shown up in those prior relationships and that's what I've tried to focus on as opposed to focusing on how other people were wrong but yeah I think I came to some clarity around what what was really going on for him and for my mom too and look now we've done and we do thanks giving as a group

once my sister had a kid then it made sense for everyone to work it out so we we do it you know it's tense and weird how much do you think the 14 through 19 experience impacted who you are now incalculable and I wouldn't trade it for anything it was like what is drummer saying that a documentary

yesterday when they asked him about sand and he said like it was a magnificent thing you know is what he said and then he said you know I wouldn't change it for anything he goes and that's after a lot of soul searching you know I mean I couldn't tell you in words what it felt like to show up to a scene with all these kids and some of my new history was happening this is the thing when I saw skateboarding I'd never been part of the early wave of anything

it was the kind of the second wave it wasn't the bones brigade wave it was that second wave of the late 80s 90s but I knew something special was happening I was just frustrated I couldn't be more a part of it

like I couldn't be one of the as sugar told me back then he said you're never going to be one of the big guys he said that I remember being crushed but it was also a gift because I didn't try and do that I wouldn't trade that for anything because even now like with podcasting I got to see the

and I still see the similarities between podcasting and the early days of skateboarding it's the rules are still unwritten you know and so we're figuring it out and it's so cool and now I get to be part of like at least early-ish cohort I've never hit something on time

with science I got into neuroscience right as it was emerging and I think it was easier to break into it then than it is now there were fewer people in it and there are a lot of other reasons and I love doing science I mean when I started working in my PhD lab I lived in the lab saved money

I used the money for other things you just had a cot in the room yeah then the microscope room and I shower in the monkey cage washer room and I go to the gym and I long did you do that for a month at a time until you know and then I did rent for a little bit and I'd live with a girlfriend and then I moved back into the lab when I was a junior faculty member in San Diego I had a home for the first time a bulldog I didn't know what a mortgage was but I was I'd been effective in science

and I got hired and they gave me a little bit of money for a house nice little house and then I was commuting so much I was like this is stupid brought my fish tanks and my bulldog and my couch into the office I just lived in my office my students thought I was crazy

have you noticed that stores that sell aquarium equipment fish it feels like a whole other world like when you go to those shops it's so unlike anything else in the world I love the sound like the sounds the colors in the place it's like your underwater yeah it's like your underwater you have to check out these Takashi Amano things he's he was brilliant there's a museum that he has in Japan it's like being underwater I brought my tanks to my office

I brushed my teeth in the sink there and then when I moved to Stanford I was living with my girlfriend in a basement apartment in Oakland because look the salaries for academics aren't great in the area was super expensive at the time and I was saving up so I could buy us a house and then when we split up I lived with friends for a while and I just moved into my office and I remember they told me the administrators at Stanford said you can't do this it sends the wrong message

I was like well what message is that you can't afford a place to live and I'm like I can't afford a place to live you know so you know and I was like and Costello my bulldog you like he thought I was cool you know like shower with the gym and and then on the weekends I could stay in a hotel so we're staying with friends and you know eventually I did Bailo House I was fortunate to buy a little house in Oakland and I put what it makes sense because you were dedicating your life to this thing

and you might as well live in the place where it's happening because that's all you were doing anyway exactly and I didn't have kids total focus and I'd still go to shows I've always gone to shows when I was a graduate student I'd go up to the colonial theater in Sacramento go to shows

saw the transplants play there saw a mary and the disasters play there like always gotten energy from going out and seeing punk rock shows now when I was in San Diego I did it the beginning and then I stopped and that was one of the biggest mistakes I made

and then when I started again it's like I get energy by seeing that creative energy and I've always stayed in touch with the skateboard scene either through communication with people or now that I have the podcast a number of people come back around Jim Thiebo and I are friends

through some weird twist of fate I truly never had it in mind to be come friends with Tim Armstrong but I'm a huge rancid fan I got the tattoo for God's sake band tattoo nobody gets band tattoos who knows what they're doing I got one on purpose right off their little micro label and then I got to be friends with Tim and so I go hang out with Tim at his studio because to me being around punk rock or skateboarding is the energy that we're trying to create in the podcast when we get together

like we're it's so different it's not music it's not skateboarding but it's like let's just mash up this stuff that we know is really cool you know this this is your history too right with music and you know Mike Blayback the photographer for the podcast is a guy that I helped get sober and get fit back in 2019 because I have a lot of connections to the sobriety community we talk about that but when it came time to like how do we brand this thing how do we get photos

top cards of like skateboarders how are we gonna film it skateboarders poached to guys from DC skateboarding and we got a couple other guys on our team who are not from the skateboarding thing but they're full DIY like we're not gonna do it through some big thing

because then they're gonna tell us what to do and it's all about not being told what to do yeah it's about doing the thing that feels right because you guys just know it's really cool and that's the thing about skateboarders is that style matters how you do it matters

in fact if you do it the cool thing but in an uncool way it's worse than if you didn't do it at all they will torment you I mean the hazing process that I went up came up through and skateboarding was so brutal like I hear about these fraternity hazings and like how they kill them with alcohol

that's like terrible in that dimension but what I went through I was a physically afraid I was like socially afraid of being tormented but it gives you a thick skin so you know and so the podcast thing to me just feels like it feels just like skateboarding

just like punk rock I look at who the the kind of tribal leaders are in it you know Rogan Lex your podcast is amazing rich role Tim Ferris you know they're bunch more right but these are all people that I think are awesome and they're doing great stuff and it's not they get something and I don't

it's all like rising tide raises all boats and that was skateboarding if somebody did something awesome you weren't like oh I wanted to do it it inspired you to go harder so to me it's like it's the same energy in all the different things Tell me your understanding of the DIY world

so yeah that the do it yourself DIY world to me is it starts with an understanding that this can be done you know that there's a there's a almost like unconscious confidence in it like we're just gonna do this we're not asking for permission right we're just gonna do it like there like why wouldn't we do it yeah why wouldn't we do it yeah but it's just it definitely when people hear DIY I think they they sometimes mistakenly think it means do it yourself alone

uh uh it's do it yourself but always there's the component of pooling together the people that are right to make it happen yeah finding the right people with that right sensibility of the same kind of people who feel like we can do it regardless of what anyone says that's right so you're not asking

permission you are also not looking for examples of how it's been done you know like with the podcast it was okay I want to do a podcast Lex Friedman suggested I do a podcast I was like why would I do a podcast and he said well you seem really attuned to teaching and lecturing why wouldn't you

and I was like oh you're right and then he said but just make sure it's not just you blabbing so I do that half the time not all the time who's Lex the first professor to do a podcast he's technically not a professor and I don't say that to diminish his his academic

accomplishments but he'll get on me if I don't catch that one he's a doctor Lex Friedman his a PhD first formally trained scientist to do an independent podcast teach or did he not teach yes yes he's been an instructor at MIT since 2015 okay yeah that's a difference between an

instructor and a professor I don't know what the he didn't want his own research group at MIT so I have a research laboratory and I teach so and in the British system instructor and lecture are different things it varies by country a bit but he has a formal affiliation MIT and yeah he was first

first person to do that and I remember thinking this is way cool I loved his podcast when I discovered his podcast I like oh shit I want to know that guy well what the first podcast you listen to Tim Ferris podcast when I was a

junior professor in San Diego I was interested in health and productivity yep and I was concerned about my health because when I was a postdoc my health went south my mental health went south because starting in high school when I learned about lifting weights and running and I was always

reading about nutrition I'd spend hours in the the bookstacks at tower books you know I paid Mike Menser for a phone consult to learn how to weight train I got really into health and fitness basically when I turned 16 and I learned how to you know get stronger add muscle learn how to run I ran across country my senior year just for the experience and to run I love running but I was always reading about supplements I started taking supplements in high school some

protein supplements and some amino acid supplements it wasn't much around then was always learning and then by time I was a postdoc I wasn't working out as much I wasn't getting my sunlight I was staying up late going to shows and I my

health was really dwindling and I got things back on track when I moved to San Diego and in part that was because I read Tim's book The Four Hour Body I started listening to his podcast it was a great book I love that great book I still go back to the Four Hour Body and Gleene important information

first place I learned about cold you know a lot of things Tim seems to always be five to ten years ahead of the curve it's remarkable on so many things you know investing in all of that's an area that I did not get into but he's just you know and I'm sure there are failures in his portfolio

but he he has an amazing success rate because I think he's he's a forager he's systematic and he's brave you know I've become friends with him and I you know he's a wide guy for sure he seems to do a lot of it alone even though he has friends and connections he seems a bit more of a lone wolf

I'm not a lone wolf those years in San Diego we're dreadful for me I need that pack that non biological family was my fucking life line you know and it still makes me choke up because it's still my life line while I've been here with you I like I'll just be honest

I've been out here with you and it's just amazing but I have to be careful because to this day I still go visit families I'm out here with your family I visit friends that are families and I start feeling like oh like will they adopt me I know it seems crazy but I you know I was

a as a professor when my girlfriend I split I went lived with a family in Santa Cruz that I'm friends with it's taken a lot from me to learn how to like set up a home for myself and do that because it's not my default and you know my podcast team you know Rob Mike and Ian

and they're a bunch of other important people there too but that's like the core for that's like I at times like we'll be hanging out we'll be working and I'm like man I love this so much and sometimes it'll make me kind of like

a little anxious like oh my god what if something happens to to one of them like what will I do like it so I think my brain didn't I didn't touch to my family the same way or I did but then I detached and I I've got this idea in mind that I always need to have some place to go

and it's it's not a sob story it's just how I'm wired and so like I couldn't do what Tim does yeah you're trying to create the family that you didn't have when you were a child that's what it is and I have 100% love and trust for

my friendships yes you know and I'm blessed with incredible male friendships like incredible and yes I've prioritized that over pretty much everything because that was something that to this day I could just like really count on like I it just could really count that was the skater community

that was the skateboard community and then now you know I mean the people I talk to most are you a Tia playback Paul Conti you know Rob Ian you know and there are others like Tim spend a lot of time with Tim lately you know and there are others I've got other

friends but like it's it's like it's my feeling of safety if I were to wake up and even just conceive of like not having that that community it's just so it's just terrifying it would be like it's existential dread for me so anyway the DIY thing is about for me is about then you get

so you don't ask permission and you gather the right people so for the podcast it was Mike he's a world class photographer but he's also just the best dude so Lexi just to do it Lexi just started Lexi just I went to rob more who was representing me for PR because in 2020 I started going on podcasts wasn't selling a book I was just going on podcast and he was booking helping me book those and I was paying him for it. And did you like the experience of going on podcasts?

loved it great I loved it I felt useful I was like you know the whole thing was in 2019 I started posting a little bit on Instagram just for fun and talking science in 2020 the pandemic hit and Rob was going to represent me for my book

but he was like look you know the book thing is kind of slowing down now and but people are going on podcasts they're going remotely some people are still having them in person they just go so I was like all right cool so I started going on podcasts and I was like really excited about it because

at the time the world was kind of fallen apart psychologically and I thought you know I'm not going to get into this whole vaccine thing that's a barbed wire and also by the way I was forbidden from talking about it there were rules that Stanford put forth

and also it's not my expertise but what I do know about because my lab worked on as anxiety tools to overcome anxiety sleep circadian rhythm how to get your sleep right exercise physical health mental health I'm like okay I can be a value and go on these podcasts and just teach and share

and I felt great doing it and I didn't I wasn't selling anything I had no go to do ever teach in a classroom environment at any point I did so in when as soon as I got my job at UC San Diego I started teaching I actually taught more than I was required to I started a course called

Neural Circuits and Health and Disease and it looked it looked a lot like the podcast and it started with 50 students the first year and it ended with 450 students and it was taught at night I like to use it fun I loved it I loved it I absolutely loved it and I'd bring Costello my bulldog

and he loved it because he'd have this herm of people like petting him and giving him salami and stuff and we'd I love teaching at night because I always find that the students are more relaxed at night and we would explore papers and it was a bit more free form

and I never thought it would become a podcast but even as a graduate student I took opportunities to teach and I taught a summer course as a postdoc and as a junior faculty member at Coltspring Harbor in Long Island just summer camp for scientists I ran a course on visual neuroscience

it seems like you were meant to do this like you're hard wired to do this job to learn and teach yeah yeah there's so many people who teach but it's not their strength maybe they're connected to the subject they're teaching but you seem to really be connected to the act of teaching

I love teaching I love learning and teaching for me the podcast is pure delight because it's go learn stuff talk to experts in the field look at the literature form my own opinions to learn it and teach it and the world gets it for free if they have an internet connection and yes we have sponsors sure but they get paid if people want to buy this stuff and you don't have to it's like the perfect ecosystem so to me the DIY thing made sense you know Lex is like start a podcast

Bob and said I want to start a podcast and he was already doing a podcast called the fight with Teddy Hattles Rob's interesting guy he was working in PR in New York but he's always liked sports spectator sports but he liked boxing and MMA and he had this thing for Teddy Hattles

the old old school guy who's a commentator who come up he used to work in Tyson's camp years ago and he's got big scar on his face he's from Staten Island and he pulled Teddy out of retirement basically and they started the fight with Teddy Hattles podcast

which is the interview fighters before fights and they talk about the fights that happened last weekend it's like pure heart for him you know is the interesting guy Rob he runs Iron Man's and all this stuff but I'd worked with him for about a year and I said what do we need to do a podcast

he said well here are the cameras you need here the recording stuff so I went and got it I went and bought it and then I moved to Topanga Canyon I was teaching remotely moved to Topanga Canyon because everyone was teaching remotely at that time everything was remote yeah and I loved Topanga

I moved to Topanga because all of her sacks who was a neurologist and a writer wrote about the brain lived in Topanga so I was like cool I didn't know that that's cool and he was really into weightlifting and fitness wow and he died in 2015 but I've always admired him

and so I was like cool I'm gonna move there and there was a street called Vision Drive and I worked on the visual system so I'm like it's fate so I moved into the old Fleetwood Mac house it was like a barn and I put a gym in the main bedroom my bulldog and we started the podcast in a closet

literally a closet and Rob lived up the road and then Mike Blayback who did the branding for you know photos for DC skateboarding, LeCai, GirlScape Boards, DGK done a lot with Supreme, you know, was Bill Strobick and those guys he was my friend I was like hey we need a top card

we do this so he took some photos and I told Rob I was like we should bring this guy in to just so that the photos are the same on every top card and Rob at first said yeah I don't know is that like really important like do we need it and I'm like trust me this guy

the branding like there's the look like even just the fonts and he kind of knew what I was talking about but that wasn't me I'm like it's got to look right yeah and I don't care if anyone else notices and then I said I want a song at the beginning in the bumper up front

and my favorite song is Burning Lights by Joe Strummer and we try to get the rights to Burning Lights it's too expensive so talk to Mike and he was like oh skateboarders have a solution for this like you can change a certain number of cords

and then I hope I don't sink myself with the copy right on this one but anyway the um no because you changed the way we had a guy play it change a few of the cords put that up front and I was like yes is a strumber song at the beginning it's got pictures of my favorite science memorabilia

it's a strumber like song it's a strumber like song at the beginning strumber inspired strumber inspired strumber tribute strumber tribute exactly love him never met him but I know him through you thankfully so many questions about him whenever I see him okay so it was just pull the guys together

and then we needed to do a bunch of stuff like upload into RSS feeds and all this stuff like I don't know about and so I knew this kid at Stanford Media Ian Mackie it was like let's hire Ian and Rob was like I don't know do we really want to bring inside boom once the four of us got together

perfect chemistry and we just released in January 21 and the first you know six months it literally felt like it was just like pouring out of me because I've been carrying all this stuff for a long time and I've gone on podcasts but the moment I sat down

and was just like all right let's learn about sleep and circadian rhythms let's learn about dreaming let's learn about testosterone and estrogen because I'd worked on endocrine stuff I'd worked on thermal regulation so hormone stuff cold neuroscience stuff I mean it all been in here

and I just like that kid with a grunt with the Tourette thing and I was like just and I don't even remember feeling like it was ever work it's never felt how much research does it take to put together an episode depends on the topic so if it's a topic about say visual system or brain development

you know I know it so maybe four or five hours to kind of piece together maybe two hours even if it's a different topic like the one that we did on hair and hair growth or fertility which we did I wanted to have one comprehensive video that any couple could watch

if they were thinking about having a child and thinking about fertility or egg freezing or embryos that was 11 hours of recording and probably a hundred hours of prep so it varies widely and I'm fortunate also to have a really really deep roster of experts in my life that I can just text or call

so like as you know if someone has a question about eye stuff I get the chair of Stanford on the phone now I have a question about endocrine stuff urology Michael Eisenberg our head of urology reproductive health at Stanford you know a psychiatrist we can conty so I'm very fortunate to have this

community of people that not all of them are likely to go on podcaster if they do they might go on one or two there are exceptions to that of course but one of the things that I feel very lucky to be able to bring forward is the voices of experts either through my words

or by putting them on as guests because let's face it there's tremendous range of knowledge and quality out there in terms of academics and clinicians and most of what the general public gets to see and who they have access to is pretty meager you're in a very interesting position

because you have access to these experts at a time when it seems like most people are questioning the information coming from experts more than ever before even though you're coming from Stanford you have credibility in spite of your credentials yeah I think that what I like to think I'm good at

is vetting the information getting to the right people for the particular question getting to the right information because like especially in the landscape of health or what to do I mean there's so much garbage out there and sometimes the garbage isn't quote-unquote false information

or misinformation sometimes it's just like muddled like we just had this episode with Dr. Reenomolik who's a urologist talks about reproductive health sexual health and like the questions were very straightforward like what are the different causes of female sexual dysfunction are they hormonal

are they pelvic floor are they vascular okay depends what about male sexual dysfunction what about bicycle seats what should people do okay here are the five things that they should do bicycle seats turn out to be bad if you're on them for a certain amount of time blah blah doesn't

depend on whether or not you have a prostate it's that the blood supply the perinium gets cut off people get yeah okay so you know it's straight forward if you get a person like Reena in the seat across from you she'll just tell you about anything but like those conversations weren't like salacious

it was just questions and straight forward answers based on extensive clinical experience and actionable takeaways and the problem now is that you go on there like let's say somebody God forbid has Alzheimer's or somebody in their family has Alzheimer's what have they heard okay Alzheimer's might be

diabetes of the brains should they do the keto diet I don't know there's no clinical trials but what about this drug what about the fact that the drug doesn't the last five drugs didn't seem to work or that the whole theory of Alzheimer's got flipped on its head from a data fabrication last year

you're terrified and no one's telling you what to do so you go to a neurologist and they tell you whether or not you can do you can take this prescription you can take that prescription no like no discussion about how it works or why it works why is mechanism important to understand

because if you understand that has something to do with acetylcholine well then you can think about other ways to increase acetylcholine because guess what there are other ways and so I benefited a lot from the fact that my third advisor who was an MD and a PhD Ben Barris

sadly died of pancreatic cancer but prior to that we hung out a lot and he had absolutely no reverence for the standard system zero minus one reverence he believed in certain prescription drugs of course and he also believed that there was a ton of garbage in the literature and he also understood

that there was a lot of financial interests that were problematic and he also understood that nutrition counts supplementation can count whether or not people you know that's a tricky thing for people but it's true I went to the hospital and found out he had a diabetic problem

and the hospital gave him his new diet for when he left the hospital and he for example was restricted to only eating two slices of white bread a day white bread is basically sugar yeah which for a diabetic is it a bad idea it couldn't be more poisonous and if you went to the hospital today

that's what they did well I can tell you that there are some healthy doctors but there are many many very unhealthy doctors and I know this because I grew up in a community of doctors and scientists I would say the same thing occasionally you'll get like a health nut scientist

but you and I were talking about this earlier I think one of the issues is that in western medicine and western science we are trained to be ultra specialist you asked how we get our laboratory the way we get our laboratory I said was you define a very specific vision for your lab

my lab is going to do blank and you become the world expert in that thing that's how you define yourself in the American system and in the northern European system it's all about the independent investigator there's very little opportunity for integrating things from other other side

you have a sample of you're the expert hammer manufacturer so you're looking for the nail to hammer exactly well and when I moved to Stanford in 2016 I started studying respiration, deliberate breath work as a means to I was testing can it be an effective intervention for anxiety and stress

it turns out the answer is yes even just you know double inhale through the nose long exhale can reduce anxiety quickly done repeatedly for a few cycles you can improve night time sleep overall mood and not just while doing the breath work and immediately after okay that's what we discovered

and so on in the 1970s and 1980s a small collection of students proposed that respiration and maybe meditation could be useful for mental health at Stanford they were not escorted off campus they were forced off campus and a couple of them moved down to this place called Esselin wow

fast forward to 2020 studies of psychedelics like Silicibin, LSD and MDMA MDMA is more of an empathogen than a psychedelic but are now going full bore with government support donor support and legal permission and these are all things that were vilified in the past I could list off

five to ten Harvard professors that were fired for suggesting the mere idea so meditation made it through the shoot breathwork came later but even when I was looking at this stuff in 2016 it was considered kind of wacky breathwork now breath works through the shoot

the idea that changing your patterns of breathing deliberately could change your state of mind and body for the better everyone's on board that you don't have to do it but most people are like okay cool make sense in fact there's a lot of mechanism to explain it the idea that mindfulness meditation

might be a good thing maybe even kids should do it make sense maybe psychedelics with the appropriate you know controls and support for some people not all could be helpful people are on board but each one of those things separately was considered a absolute violation of code of conduct of ethics

it was illegal and like in many ways it was quote unquote illegal in academics academics is not about respiration or breathwork people you might as well as said you want to study levitation or you want to study how genies come out of bottles and so now when somebody comes forward and says

yeah I'm curious about like acupuncture a lot of people disacupuncture but Chufu Ma's lab at Harvard Med thank goodness is publishing papers in top tier journals showing that when needles are introduced to particular places in the body particular glands respond to the release of immune molecules

or molecules that stimulate molecules of the immune system that defend against infection and on and on it's like and it's been known for three thousand years it's been known forever but so I have nothing against academic science or my colleagues some of them are very open-minded

it's the system of funding for it just constrains people to this like single track hypothesis thing look science needs that too but you know I it's also not a single track hypothesis for the public good it's a single track hypothesis where there's probably some upside

yes and the upside is rarely financial for scientists I must say this I feel in fairness to the academic community maybe not for scientists but for somebody for somebody very few scientists get rich some do but very few scientists get rich scientists are interested in discovering things

and yes they are human they are interested in career advancement they are interested in career advancement in fact the system whether or not you have ten year or not demands career advancement so I'm not cynical but I know how the game has played from the inside I was on an NIH panel

for as a standing member for four years until just recently where I stepped down because my term was up they didn't ask me leave early I understand how the funding game has played I understand philanthropy I understand how that game has played I understand about patents

I understand how certain things make it to clinical trials and how certain things go from clinical trials to productization and companies I can also tell you about major biotech companies in the Bay Area that are founded on discoveries that everyone in the lab knew was complete and total bullshit

and yet those companies will thrive because they'll just pivot to a new drug and a new drug and you know I'm not in the business of outing people or writing exposés but if you think that you know everything is right angles and people just trying to get the answer right I'll tell you right now

there's some amazing scientists who are absolutely committed to the truth and there are a lot of them who are committed to their careers and they're not lying but you're not hearing about the stuff that didn't work and you're also hearing about things through a particular like

tunnel of understanding and focus and I don't claim to have the full 360 degree picture but that's why I like to talk to people who are practitioners clinicians, I like to talk to people who are just like 10 degrees off from that that the people you know like nurse practitioners

often know things that doctors don't because they're down there in the weeds I like talking to people who for which there's no degree and I'm interested in prescription drug supplementation, behavioral tools, Eastern medicine, Western medicine, whatever the hell you want to call it

I'm interested in all of it whatever works whatever works and I have my taste and that's what I you know can't help but inject into what I choose and what I choose to communicate about but if people are wondering how we got ourselves into this massive lack of trust

of experts it's because we are not broad enough about who we consider an expert we're too narrow in terms of who we consider an expert at least that's my belief if you could rewrite the way the whole system works what would you change?

well I think for any patient who has a unknown condition like there isn't it they don't know what's going on with them they would see in my ideal world they would see four or five different people each with very different perspectives then those four or five people would communicate

and they'd come up with a plan of action that's foremost so let's say it's a psychiatric issue like depression I think they should talk to you know I could imagine a quick meeting with four people a clinical psychologist a psychiatrist who's more on the neurochemical prescription writing

side or orientation somebody who maybe is very somatic in their orientation and then somebody who's really about lifestyle interventions if they talk and they're a team they're a squad that has good chemistry I think that patient's going to walk out of there with three or four things to do

and a bunch of questions that need answering in some tests and they're going to arrive at a solution much faster and I would have at least the greatest degree of confidence that they're going to do well right now they'll see any one of those people and it'll be X number of years

of either success or failures before they arrive where they need to go that would be the first thing so there's got to be communication across the lens to prospectrum from experts from different modalities I believe in panels not individuals in fact you know I'll say this about the pandemic

one of the things that always perplexed me was why isn't there a panel why is it individuals now I'm sure behind any individual there's a panel there may be but when a patient or a citizen hears from a panel it's different and also nowadays everything is about getting diversity of opinion

you can't get diversity with an individual by definition so you want panels the panels don't have to be hundred people I think three or four is a good number and it's totally workable and you know I think anyone who is in the fortunate position of having the finances to get real medical workups

even if they have a primary doctor nowadays that primary doctor nine times out of ten is having them talk to behavioral interventionist physical therapist you know an immunologist is the case maybe I mean for someone diagnosed with cancer or a kid with depression or somebody who just wants to

improve their health overall like you have to go to ten different people or have a doctor who has an extensive network of experts in their clinic and so it's no surprise to me that people get very attached to the one thing that feels like it worked until it doesn't

and then the one thing that feels like it worked might work for one person and not another absolutely and so with a panel that's willing to that has a good chemistry that is willing to pivot quickly I think we could get much further much faster I mean I've got a friend

he's down San Diego he said I've you know I've got vertigo in my ear hurts and I said if you've been checked out for an ear infection no why not well I went and the doctor said it's the vertigo and I said well the vertigo will be the consequence of the ear thing he said well

okay so do I need antibiotics I said I don't know you need to like clear you need to talk to an ear nose and throat person a primary care physician is not going to be able to solve this this guy is really suffering he's just so it's you know we should but one example of somebody that is

probably going to you know pinball around in the system for a couple weeks until it resolves or it doesn't but to me it's like it's not rocket science we have the expertise they're just not arranged in the right categories into the right collections of people you mentioned earlier

journaling when you were nineteen when did start journaling I started journaling when I was about fourteen Jim Thibault this guy who runs the skateboard company is amazing guy by the way he's a very humble he takes care of a lot of people in skateboarding and he's known still as one of the most

giving and supportive people in that community he had a couple of books one called loose change and another one called do the distance and these were short stories in poetry that he wrote and I think they were published by high speed press which was thrasher but I still have them he gave me a couple

copies or maybe I bought them and I'll remember but I remember thinking like he's writing about some heart stuff here in his life and it really helped me I carried you know this chokes me up too because like I carried do the distance with me when I got locked up I carried it to college I still have

that book on my shelf that little grade book was like like my life line you know and so I started writing early on and I still have all my journals I don't know what I can read them it's always pen on paper these days I might voice dictate something into the phone to

capture something and then I bring it anytime but usually in the morning if I'm feeling especially if I'm struggling you know on planes I get a lot of writing done on planes because you just detached you typically do it every day most every day most every day and I

definitely take notes in my phone every day the phone is pretty convenient because it dates it you know there are a bunch of things about the computer and I'm really happy to have a computer that's really helpful and actually on the on the flight over here I spend some time

looking through my notes across the last two years I also have a folder on my computer that blocks my life by years and each inside of those are some word documents with what happened during those years what might a typical journal entry be like yes so this morning I went out by the

pool and I was just walking tend to get my ideas in the morning and I wrote I go oh shit I'm really focused on other people stuff right now and I don't know if it's a defense against thinking about what's really going on with me or if that's what's really going on with me

is I'm focused on other people right so it's just kind of like mind chatter and then I wrote the important thing to me or the important thing is to never look down on anyone or look up to anyone too and I can be like on level ground with people to understand them but I also am really

keenly aware of how I can get pulled into other people's stories and stories about them and I wish I was more like Rick that's what I wrote I show you it's interesting the process of writing something down that you're not really planning on going back to and somehow is the

process of writing it a way of locking it into yourself Yes, yes so on my computer for instance I have a couple of stickies you know those like sticky function and mac and those yellow tabs and I'll put stuff in there and then I'll delete those out if they don't

seem to matter over time but I'll read those every once in a while and like in the top left corner I think I say something like completing something feels really good because I have this feeling sometimes like mid-morning my productivity energy will start flowing and if I don't

capture that I won't feel so good but if I do something I finish it and I'm like I have energy it's like you know sort of like a really good workout can give you energy I was just like whoa and so it's that's sort of a reminder type thing so I do go back and read that

certain things just hang out forever because it matters and it works but most of the time when I write it's either to clear out clutter or to stamp down something and you know it's funny I also have these lists these word docs that I made in the years 2011 to 2015 when I was a junior professor

really hard years for me I was in a really self-destructive time in my life even though my lab was flourishing I was really not doing well and I would write at that time at these little lists and it was like I would write it's so funny I was like half embarrassed to say this but not really

I just chuckled out it said this list I can show you it's a Jim Thieboh Mike Menser Tim Armstrong I didn't know Tim at that time I had met Jim hadn't talked to him in years new Mike before he died I'd like David Berson he's a scientist Jonathan Horton Joe Strummer like lists of people

like that I respect and look up to I would go to that document and just look at it and be like be more like them like I was just like so I have I've created this committee of mentors for myself I never really sought them out directly but these are people who I've always looked up to

inspirational figures yeah and but like to embody to try and embody some component like I'm not a singing play guitar like Tim or Strummer like hell no that's not my thing I'm not going to run a skateboard company so that's not my thing I mean that's the necessity of something that is something

I feel like we can you know the energy that he embodies and things you know is what I'm interested in and of course like he has flaws like everybody else but that's not what I'm accessing right I'm not you know I'm not trying to make people perfect or iconic but to me they are they're because I already said I'll be more like, like you're on my list, I have this list, playback's on my list, you're on my list, conties on my list, a T is on my list. You know, there's a list of barber chapments.

Clearly for different reasons. Definitely for different reasons. But you know what, it makes me feel safe. Yes. You know, it makes me feel crude up inside. Cause it's one thing to like look out and be like, man, like my friends are doing amazing things and like I trust them and they're cool people when they're running their relationships and their businesses with like the utmost, like drive and integrity, all that. But that's looking out at them.

But this is about being like crude up on the inside. And yeah, maybe it's from a kid who didn't, I don't think I attached right to my parents. I definitely didn't, you know, I love them and I know they love me back. I'm super attached to my sister. I love her. I'd do anything within the bounds of ethics for her. But like, I don't think I attached to family, my own family the same way that most people attach. I think I attached to this like community of dudes that are doing stuff.

And so whether or not they're with me or not or whether or not we're in communication or not, like I'm trying to like, I'm trying to make them proud by being myself. And in the ways that being myself is not gonna make them proud, I'm definitely where I'm like, don't go there. So you know, a lot of people like, I want to make my family proud.

It's like, yeah, I guess I could get into that mindset, but for me, it's like, I want to do a good job on the podcast for me and for the listeners, but it's also like my team. Like, they're my family. Do you feel a sense of competition? Not with any of the people I'm talking about, not with any other podcasters. No, with any one at all about anything. I'm not a competitive person. You know, I love what I love so much, but I'm not accustomed to anyone trying to take it away.

Yeah. So like, if someone was like, I'm gonna, no, no, like, no, like if, if, no. Cause what you're into is personal, so it can't really compare to what anyone else. No one can do what I can do, and I can't do what they can do. Exactly. And in my scientific career, I never once had the experience of going to a meeting and thinking, oh, I wish I was working on that. I was always working on the thing that interested me the most at that time. And then with the podcast, like I love other podcasts.

I genuinely listened to your podcast, Lex's podcast, and Joe's podcast, and Tim's podcast. And I listened to some others also. Chris Womson is doing amazing stuff. Now and again, I'll see it and be like, yeah. I like some of the comedian podcasts, the Saguira, Khrysher thing, Andrew, Andrew Sholes. You know, like I love that stuff, but I've got my core stuff, but I never, ever think like, oh, I should be doing that. Like, ever, it would never occur to me.

Yeah. No. What's it like speaking in front of people? Well, we do these lives that have like 3,500 people or something like the beacon. Well, I came up teaching in the classroom, so it's a lot like that. The rooms above, you come out and like, world goes quiet and that's just your voice. I like it. I like teaching. What's different is that then doing it to a camera? Very different. When I do the solo episodes, it's just Rob in the room.

It's only ever been Rob, and when my bulldog was alive, he was there too. How do you talk in a robber? You're talking to the audience. Talking to the camera. I'm talking to the audience. I'm looking at that little box and I'm like, are you picturing anything? So I have about three to five pages of bullet point notes. And then as I'm talking about it, I can think about the next thing I need to see and I sort of see it in my head and my mind's eye.

I've always had a little bit of a capacity for visual memory. I'm not photographing. What's going on is in your head, you're not picturing a person listening. No. You're focusing on what you're saying and making sure the information is correct. Yes, actually these days I'm listening to come out. That's what makes me calm. I'm listening to how it's coming out and I'm trying to see if it sounds right for the point I'm trying to make. Sounds right, meaning makes sense.

Is clear and concise as possible and where there needs to be an inflection on a particular point or point in a sentence? I'm doing that. I think to imagine that there's an audience out there would just freak me out because then I'm thinking about how it's gonna land. So when you're in front of an audience, is it the same or are you considering the people in the room? I know they're there.

Yeah. So I'm acknowledging their collective presence but I'm not thinking about, oh, the guy in the back or the person in the front room. You're still probably doing a similar process of looking in and like, what's the next thing I'm gonna say? I come off stage from the lives. Like the last one we did at the beacon was to me. I think the best of the four we've done only because I came off stage and I was like, I have no idea what just happened. Yeah, you were just in the zone. I have no idea.

It happened. It happened. I spent the entire day listening to strumber talk. I have this collection of clips of him and that's what worked then. I think it texts you about this and I'm like, I'm not gonna use this at the next one. But I kept walking up and down the pier and I remember there's this interview with him where he's like, music is not the point. He was like, you know, and it's like, it's his like intention and like when I listen to him, I'm not paying attention to the words.

It's like he'll say something and he'll pull it from the bottom of his gut. He has this breath. It might as well be, hold on. It's like a tribal leader going, oh, oh, oh, and you get it. And so what I was experiencing is like, I wanna just channel that. I mean, I know I make a lot of strumber from like it. But to me, it was like he was really tapped in. Not all the time I'm guessing, but he was super tapped in.

He understood that there's like all this stuff that could like funnel through him and come out. I really think he got it. I like, or I get it from him and I don't do it nearly as well, but like I could tell he could pull energy together in some sort of coherent framework. But I think what he was trying to say over and over again, is it's not the framework. It's like the message is a felt thing. Yeah. And when I do the lives, it's like, what I want people to understand is irrelevant.

What I want them to feel is just the beauty and utility of biology. And the beauty and utility of ongoing inquiry. They're inquiry, not mine, theirs. Beautiful. You mentioned Wikipedia earlier. How do you verify information? If you do in research, how do you know what to believe? Yeah, we talk about Wikipedia, but PubMed, Library, Congress, peer-reviewed research is my bread and butter. That's where I've published my whole career. You publish the journals, then the stuff goes there.

If there are corrections to those journals, entries or papers are retracted, that's gonna show up there. So does it mean that all papers are created equal? No. Is there a lot of lying in papers? Yes. Most of the lying in scientific papers is by omission. Where people throw out things that didn't fit. So you never get to see it. It's the unknown that we'll never know. Outright data for abocation is more rare. It does happen. Now with... Just happened recently, no, with Stanford.

Yes, our former president of Stanford, who was a neurobiologist, is a neurobiologist, was either left voluntarily or was forced to leave because of issues in prior publications of his. Those were discovered through... There's an online site called PubPier, where people who see errors in journal papers like or duplications of figures that could only be either human error or intentional are called to attention and then authors have the opportunity to respond.

Now AI is used to forage digital images and all these papers and it's finding lots and lots of errors and outright fabrications in different papers. There's a woman... Are those being shared or those being hidden? Yeah, there's a woman on Twitter named Elizabeth Bick, B-I-K, who tweets out about some of these and often with the author responses. Sometimes the author responses are absolutely hilarious.

Like, there was one yesterday where clearly there were a bunch of cells duplicated in a brain tissue slice from a control subject versus Alzheimer's subject. Same cells put to different locations in the two. There's no way the same cells could exist in two different brains. I mean, these are clearly the same cells. And the author's response that she put up was something like, we cannot explain why the images show up in both sides.

Clearly it's an error, but then they didn't say that they like intentionally did it, but you can't imagine any way it could have been unintentional. So sometimes it's just silly responses. Other times it, you know, it will open up in entire investigations. People will lose jobs. More often than not when there's an error, it's traceable to one author. This is the big debate now. If it's traceable to one author and it's not the head of lab was the head of lab responsible for knowing about it.

Sometimes labs are really big. I always ran a relatively small lab. So when labs get really big, it's harder to control everything coming out of there. I tend to trust collections of papers from different laboratories that arrive at the same general sets of conclusions. What I call the center of mass of data. Because otherwise you're relying on a one-off and you know, having worked in big labs and coming up.

I mean, I've got stories and everyone in those labs has stories about people getting the data to please the head of lab. I mean, that's probably the most common problem in science that's not talked about enough, which is, if career advancement, like getting a job, going to the pros, getting an income, taking care of your family is dependent on publishing and publishing in high-tier journals gets you better jobs and career advancement.

Well, then the incentives are obvious and in a lab where there's, you know, 10 postdocs and research is hard and it doesn't often work. There will be people, not all, but there will be people who will try to figure out what the head of lab wants.

Because they know that if they give them that, give mommy or daddy that, they are going to be the person who's pushed forward and promoted and that head of lab is going to be on the phone to top universities saying, you've got to hire this postdoc, am I? They're amazing. I benefited from working on things very different than my advisors.

As a graduate student, I also benefited from working for a woman, Barbara Chapman, who said early on, be comfortable publishing papers in not the highest tier journals. So my lab, I'm proud to say, and I've, you know, coming up over the years, yes, we have some papers in nature and science, these are the apex journals.

But we also publish papers in journal neuroscience, journal of comparative neurology, journals that are considered archival and solid, but they're not the kind of journals that are going to get you promoted. But guess what? Not every discovery we made was worthy of the highest tier journals. So you learn to trust things based on the center of mass, also certain laboratories get reputations for being excellent, so you can trust stuff from there better.

When it comes to what's out there on the internet, that's a lot tougher. You know, I still have an affection for kind of odd theories and interesting things, because I don't think there are terribly many new ideas. There's better tools that can reveal those ideas in new ways. But look, if we're going to get really just direct about this, I believe that there are certain compounds, not all of which are prescription medication compounds that are of value for human health.

The data on some of these is relatively thin, and yet I know from my own experience and from the experience of others that a lot of these things are quite safe and quite effective and quite cost efficient. So I talk about some of that on the podcast. I just make it clear what my sources are. I'll say, you know, there's only a couple of mouth studies in one human study and there weren't that many subjects, but it's pretty interesting what they saw, and guess what I tried it, and it worked for me.

I don't know if it's going to work for you, but you know, or things like Ashawagandha, where you know, it's very controversial, but a big issue is that people take it for high doses for periods of time that are too long. It should be psyched if it's going to be used at high dosages or it shouldn't be used at all.

You know, I think there's a lot of individual variability, and then I see about the podcast as I have an opportunity to talk about all the caveats, whereas in your typical clinical trial, it's like the export from it is going to be suppressed.

People should take 20 milligrams of blank and blank, but when you talk to a psychiatrist and they tell you how medication is prescribed, it's like this, person comes in, many of symptoms, if they meet eight out of 10 of them, they're quote unquote depressed, and that psychiatrist is literally told, pick a medication off the list, doesn't matter which, prescribe it, see how it goes. Now, that to me is almost pseudo random. So, well, it is random, not pseudo. Right, exactly.

And so I think that there's a batch of psychiatrists, you know, Paul Conti among them that believe in medications, but also believe in other approaches. There are, and are thinking about this in a far more nuanced way.

I think that when it comes to cancer and oncology, you know, this became clear to me when my graduate advisor died of breast cancer at 50, and my postdoc advisor died of pancreatic cancer at roughly 60, and bearist, the second guy told me, he said, he took an immunotherapy treatment. He said, this made it worse. And I said, well, why'd you do it? And he said, well, I had read this clinical trial and one of our colleagues suggested it to me, and I'm like, are you sure you mean it?

Or he's like, I'm absolutely sure. Now, Ben was a data junkie, and he was absolutely sure. Then he was doing different diets that helped, but eventually he succumbed to it. And I remember asking him, because I interviewed him the entire year until he died. I have it on audio, I haven't released it yet. And he said, this is 2017, so I didn't have a podcast. I just recorded it, because I loved him. And I, he was my friend, and he was really quirky, but I also loved his irreverence for things.

And he said, he's like 90% of what we do in medicine. Now, keep in mind, he's an MD. He's like, is complete and utter nonsense. He's like, it's just sifting deck chairs on the Titanic. And I said, well, what's the solution, Ben? And he's like, it's more research, but also we just have to know that we're really flying blind in a lot of areas. What are you most excited about for the future going forward for you? For me, I'm very focused on the next podcast.

I'm interviewing the surgeon general in a couple of weeks. That'll be great. Which is a trip. And I intend to ask him some hard questions. Like, how come now we're talking about all this mental health and isolation crisis, but during the pandemic, no one was talking about it. I was talking about it because no one else was talking about it. I kept waiting. It didn't happen. Why are we still in the 1985 model of mental health? There's some things that are just baffling to me.

I'm imagining some good answers that are based on some really serious practical considerations, but I want to know what those are. I also want to know about what's possible. So I'm excited about the next episode always. I'm excited about what I don't know is going to come. I don't know. I mean, being friends with you is taught me. Like, I don't know what's next. I'm focused on trying to do the best job I can on the sunscreen episode.

I'm excited about the episode we did with Dr. Reno Mollick on sexual urologic and reproductive health, because finally, she gave straight answers for a lot of things, not everything, but a lot of things. I'm excited about getting information out there. But I'm not thinking like what happens after the podcast. I'll podcast it until it doesn't make sense to podcast anymore. What's the first time someone approached you since doing the podcast and let you know they like it?

It's making a difference in their life. I don't remember the first time. I'm always, you know, obviously happy when people do that. I don't get the like a dopamine hit off of it. Look, if I could be anonymous and do the podcast, I would. I know I'm not very extroverted. I love being among close friends, but I think that the most satisfying feedback is when people say, hey, I'm sleeping much better. Or, you know, I always wanted to quit drinking alcohol, but you give me a really good excuse.

Or, you know what, I heard your episode on alcohol, and I'm not going to pay attention to the advice, but I really appreciate it. I got that a bunch. Or, you know, this helped, because we have somebody in our family with a needy disorder or that kind of direct feedback, but maybe the best feedback is just when people say, I can't believe this is free. That feels the most gratifying to me.

Because those years at Embarket Arrow, or like we were all like struggling, and I got to see in those years things and people and get really close to environments that I would have never gotten close to. There's a lot of suffering out there. And one of the things that always bothered me was, like depending on the pure chance of the parents you're born to and where you live, you either have access to great information or not, and I think that's changed now.

And sure, certain things, medical care, et cetera, cost things, but a lot of what I focus on are behavioral tools that are accessible to anybody. And I always say optimization is about optimizing for your environment that you happen to be in.

And so the idea that, you know, the information can get out to some, you know, kid in Malaysia or somebody who has no means whatsoever, but they can do a few things like viewing morning sunlight and, you know, dim in the lights at night, taking a cold shower, you know, there's a reason to save money, turn off the heat. You know, these kinds of things, that's very gratifying. Like I want to help people, I think trying to do good in the world is important.

And the tools to do that should not be the exclusive domain of the wealthy or those that are on a university campus. Yeah, I love that you're sharing what feels like protected information with everyone for free. We all get the benefit of what you're interested in learning about. I just want to thank you for sharing the wisdom. Thanks. I really appreciate that. I'm very gratified by the fact that people seem to like the material and hopefully benefit from it.

And just like me talking about fish or, you know, God knows what when I was a little kid, like I couldn't help myself anyway. Yeah, it's so unique. The fact that it's coming from you with so much heart and soul is felt. I think the reason it connects is much because of the way you feel it as the information itself. Thank you. Well, I definitely feel it from go like when I discovered, like this is how something might work or could work or does work. It's exciting. Like it's so exciting.

It just is like, wow. How could I not tell everybody? Cool. Well, thanks for doing this. Well, thanks for having me. You've been a huge influence on my life as, by way of example, in the way you've led your career as a writer, a producer, things that I'm not involved in. But the way you approach things is amazing. And your friendship has been amazing. I've grown so much as a person as a consequence. So thank you. Thanks for watching that video. You