recap/history/1775599688621-Tmw2dW0a9DY.json

{"id":"1775599688621-Tmw2dW0a9DY","videoId":"Tmw2dW0a9DY","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmw2dW0a9DY","title":"Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner","type":"youtube","topicCount":27,"segmentCount":398,"createdAt":"2026-04-07T22:08:08.621Z","uploadDate":"20260406","chunks":[{"title":"Introduction & Guest Overview","summary":"Andrew Huberman introduces Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology and expert in the science of emotions. They preview the episode's focus on awe, social bonding, and the science of human connection.","entries":[{"text":"Guest: Awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day reduced long COVID symptoms. It's good news, right? And, and there's so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like, I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music, through awe, right? Um as a mechanism.","offset":0,"duration":27},{"text":"Host (Andrew Huberman): Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Dacher Keltner.","offset":27,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Dr. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley. Dacher is an expert in the science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding.","offset":46,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions including the role of teasing in social bonding, the role of embarrassment in social bonding and his fascinating work on awe and the things that lead to awe. As he describes, awe is not elusive. It happens when we shift our perception from a very small scale to a very large scale or back again, such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista.","offset":63,"duration":31},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today you'll understand what all of that really means and more importantly, how you can create this incredible thing that we call awe in everyday life. We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding in groups and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds.","offset":94,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So today is a very practical as well as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change the way that you think about your life everyday and think about opportunities for awe everyday. As you’ll soon see, Dacher Keltner is a truly special scientist known for his incredible rigor and creativity in the study of emotion but also continually offering you, the public, ways to be and feel genuinely better and to get more out of life. It was a true honor and pleasure to host him.","offset":112,"duration":35},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.","offset":147,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And now for my discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. Dr. Dacher Keltner, welcome.","offset":166,"duration":5}],"startTime":0},{"title":"Shifting Focus to Awe","summary":"Dr. Keltner discusses his early career studying negative emotions and how his unconventional upbringing inspired him to pivot toward researching awe, beauty, and human connection.","entries":[{"text":"Guest (Dacher Keltner): Good to be with you, Andrew.","offset":171,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Awe. Yeah. I think we all intuitively know what it is and yet we also don’t know how to articulate it. Yeah. I want to say the words overwhelmed, excited, I get the physical sensation of a lift. I don’t think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed into a turtle position. Maybe we could explore that in your thoughts about that. But what got you into awe?","offset":173,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and, and I love the word lift. That’s really interesting. Uh, yeah, I was a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in, you know. And, and that field in the, you know, 90s and early 2000s was uh really focused on negative emotions, you know.","offset":202,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And and you know this science, right? Anger, fear, fight or flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol, uh disgust, you know, Paul Rozin and John Haidt. Um and thinking about emotions from that lens and and it as a young scientist um and given the powerful tools of emotion science of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena uh it didn’t make contact with my life and my own experience, you know.","offset":221,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I was raised as a wild child in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon and, you know, it was like music and social change and protest and uh you know and beauty and I was raised by a dad who’s a visual artist and my mom taught romanticism and Virginia Woolf and awe and the mind and and I was like wow there’s all this stuff that our science, my science, can’t speak to, music and visual patterns and dance and collective movement and, you know, someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry, you know.","offset":250,"duration":37},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman, I was like, you know what should I do with my career? and he’s like “study awe”, you know, and uh so that got me going.","offset":287,"duration":11}],"startTime":171},{"title":"Facial Expressions & Universal Emotions","summary":"The conversation shifts to Paul Ekman's pioneering work on facial expressions. Keltner explains how modern research, including AI analysis, has expanded the recognized spectrum of universal human emotions to around 20 distinct states.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: If we could let maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment. You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student sees these faces of disgust, of of pleasure, uh Darwin talked about this. Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults where they’ll show a baby like, you know, recoiling from something or you know wide-eyed and leaning in, you know.","offset":298,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: There always seems to be a motor component to this that maybe isn’t as captured in those two-dimensional photographs but what’s the story about kind of hard-wired facial emotions and what are the revisions to that story that I’m probably not aware of?","offset":327,"duration":17},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, thank you for asking that um, you know, I’ve spent 30 years working on that very problem. Um Paul Ekman came in and, you know, as as you suggested, right? He did this revolutionary work in New Guinea, you know, showed photos of six emotions, static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile.","offset":344,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: They kind of interpreted the faces like you or I would um naming it using the right words to describe those faces and that you know and this is how science occasionally works which is just by accident that became the field. And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal are they in different cultures.","offset":366,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Ekman really posited sort of a strong universality, that’s been contested by Jim Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and others. Um but since then there are controversies around how hard how hard-wired they are, do they occur reliably in a child’s development? Yes and no.","offset":390,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: You know, young children show disgust expressions uh like social mammals do, they wince at bad smells just like you or I would. Um anger’s a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally. But then our lab and several labs around the world, you know, Jess Tracy at UBC (British Columbia), Disa Sauter, uh and I want to talk about this computational work, started to expand the vocabulary of faces.","offset":411,"duration":27},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And now we there’s a lot of data that suggests there are 20 different facial expressions. Laughter, love, compassion, awe, you know “whoa”, um embarrassment, shame, pain um you know and that in some sense has broadened the taxonomy of emotions. We used to think of six, now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind.","offset":438,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And that’s where the field is heading is to really start to think about physiological patterns, brain patterns um of of these distinct states. And and I’ll tell you um the hard-wiring question, I mean it’s hard science to do, right? Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries, getting their emotional expressions, and then making sense of them.","offset":466,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: It used to take one hour to code the facial muscle movements of of one minute, right? So this is slow science. And I would really encourage listeners um and viewers to go to alancowan.com and I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowan, who you know he’s a computational genius and he looked at our old science and said, “we can use AI to code the face” and he did it with Google engineers.","offset":494,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: He coded 144 um two million videos from 144 cultures and 16 facial expressions, 75% overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks, concentration on a test, you know, laugh at friends. So right now I would say 50 to 60% is hard-wired as part of who we are in our evolutionary history and then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways.","offset":522,"duration":-28}],"startTime":298},{"title":"Sponsor Break: Joovv & Helix Sleep","summary":"Andrew Huberman reads sponsor messages for Joovv red light therapy devices and Helix Sleep mattresses.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Joovv. Joovv makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now if there’s one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now in addition to sunlight, which I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near-infrared, and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health.","offset":494,"duration":90},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays there are a lot of red light devices out there, but what sets Joovv lights apart and why they’re my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, near-infrared and infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations.","offset":584,"duration":27},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Personally I use the Joovv whole body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session, and I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you’d like to try Joovv, they’re offering up to $400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit joovv, spelled J-O-O-V-V.com/huberman. Again that’s J-O-O-V-V.com/huberman.","offset":611,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today’s episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now I’ve spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night’s sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren’t getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers, and when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly.","offset":639,"duration":27},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Now the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two minute quiz and it will ask you questions such as do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach, maybe you know maybe you don’t, do you tend to run hot or cold during the night, things of that sort.","offset":666,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You answer those questions and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me that turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K mattress. I’ve been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four years now and it’s been far and away the best sleep that I’ve ever had. If you’d like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that’s customized for you.","offset":688,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Right now Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with Truemed, which allows you to use your HSA FSA dollars to shop Helix’s award winning mattresses. Again that’s helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off.","offset":711,"duration":21}],"startTime":494},{"title":"Motor Patterns, Language, and Feeling","summary":"Huberman and Keltner explore how emotions are expressed through motor patterns, language, and physiological feeling, noting that conscious feeling remains one of the hardest aspects to study.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’m going to ask a question that may or may not be possible to answer, but if anyone could it would be you. And it’s not a test, but here’s what I’m thinking. The relationship between emotions and what we call motor patterns, movement, is obviously very close, right? Disgust a recoil, uh we’ll explore awe, um anger, etc.","offset":732,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And then there’s this other node which is language. Right? So we have like emotions, motor, language. Obviously those can’t be dissociated, but can we imagine somebody let’s just like hypothetical person who can keep their body very still while they’re angry and be very articulate, that includes not moving their hands, we’d probably think perhaps that person’s like sociopathic but that’s not the picture I’m trying to paint.","offset":758,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Then on the other extreme, can imagine somebody who um is very angry and is gesticulating a lot and moving around, you know we can immediately “yeah, that makes that makes sense.” And we could do this for any emotion. Yep. So how should we think about emotion as an experience and how it’s expressed along these three axes, right? Which is motor, language, and then the emotion itself.","offset":786,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I feel like without um conceptualizing that, I as a true novice of this, right? this isn’t my area of of understanding or expertise, I can’t really understand what an emotion is. But if I understand how those are linked, maybe maybe that’s a portal into that.","offset":810,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, no, I mean it’s a profound question, Andrew, and it and it’s central to our field, which is you know the and and I appreciate it coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species and and and there are these motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world.","offset":828,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you soothe a child that’s crying, right? you’re going to bring it in close and caress and touch and have emotion when you’re, you know, when you’re uh fighting a rival or when you you see rotten food, you’re going to that motor pattern will be there. You know, and that’s part of our research that 75% of that is this motor pattern of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional events of life.","offset":850,"duration":31},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And then we have this massively complicated, you know, conceptual system that puts words to experience and that’s mainly what we study in psychological sciences, just “oh, I’m feeling angry or ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion.”","offset":881,"duration":17},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And we know and your question points to this like very often they’re disconnected, right? the motor pattern and the language we use and how I would interpret it in another person. Um on balance they correlate .2, so they’re just weakly they’re kind of these streams of behavior that are part of who we are, right? Our motor patterns and language.","offset":898,"duration":23},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And there are a lot of ways to think about it. You could think about cultures that value being calm, like a lot of East Asian cultures. Be calm, don’t disrupt things, don’t blurt out, don’t protest, right? and and you’ll see this disconnect. Um you can think about certain people who they just are more authentic and their motor patterns come out in expressions and they will tell you how they feel.","offset":921,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Uh so it’s a central problem that we grapple with. And then I love your your third part of this equation of emotion science, which is the feeling. The emotion. Michael Pollan is right, you know, this new book on consciousness, the conscious feeling of something. We think we can get to it with words, I don’t think so. Um you probably wouldn’t either, right? studying the other species you’ve studied, right?","offset":946,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um it’s some weird mixture of everything that’s happening in your body. And ironically the emotion or the feeling is still one of the uncharted territories of our field as why as these complicated motor patterns take unfold and words are unfolding and images and memories and visual things that you study, how does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe? And we barely know, you know, we just we don’t know.","offset":975,"duration":32}],"startTime":732},{"title":"Physiology of Emotion & Vagal Tone","summary":"They discuss how esoteric concepts like chakras align with physiological realities like vagal tone and breath. Keltner explains how multiple bodily metrics are used to measure emotional responses.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Every once in a while I’ll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science, like the chakras or something. Yeah. And it’s kind of interesting, right? I mean even if just if one looks at it just purely as a Western scientist, this idea that maybe there is a confluence of of nerves and of vasculature and stuff that makes you feel kind of like rooted at like and and calm, right?","offset":1007,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Versus like up in your head, I uh I’ve been watching this really interesting Instagram channel, it’s a woman who does voices for cartoons and she has the most incredible understanding of voice. And she’s commenting a lot of the time on people in shows that I don’t watch but they have little excerpts of where like I guess there’s this doctor on the this it’s like an ER type show, it’s like a revisiting of the show ER but she talks about how as he’s matured from season to season in his role on the show and he’s mentoring how she literally talks about how uh his larynx and pharynx are how he’s controlling those differently as he matures and then when he has a breakdown how the voice moves further up into his head and what and what that’s about.","offset":1030,"duration":43},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I so I was thinking about this I’m like, you know, here’s somebody that’s a very unique, you know window into all of this, but we sort of know this intuitively. Like when we’re excited like there’s this kind of rising from the bottom and when we’re relaxed everything just kind of sinks down to a the diaphragmatic breathing and things.","offset":1073,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: As a scientist who studies emotion, how do you sort of decide what what uh which lens to look at things through um because a lot of the stuff I’m talking about might sound a little esoteric but it’s actually the stuff that’s easiest to measure. Yeah. Presumably you can quantitatively measure like breaths per minute when somebody’s looking at an awe inspiring image versus like a trivial image.","offset":1093,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I love your reference to chakras and you know the older I get, you know I’ve been doing emotion science for 34 years or five years, it’s good to think about the other traditions, you know. We wouldn’t have thought about the breath, the power of the breath uh without the contemplative meditation traditions that you’ve in part tested and Richie Davidson and others.","offset":1118,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And lo and behold the breath, deep exhalation, activates the vagus nerve, calms us down. That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest, which kind of sounds like the heart chakra and all the speculation around how your soul is in your heart. Well there’s a neurophysiological correlate of that. Um I love the paintings of Alex Grey, the psychedelic artist, like if you want an image of what our neurophysiology is as it synchronizes in love, you could it’s pretty close, or it’s interesting, right? So it’s good to find inspiration in that.","offset":1143,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the great things about the science of emotion and and I brought these tools into the study of awe, you know, which is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion. You know, you can measure it with facial muscles and gaze patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and you know different measures of vagal tone uh and immune system activation and activation in the gut and of course brain activation and the voice, which is one of my favorite modalities.","offset":1175,"duration":31},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I learned this in some sense from Darwin, Darwin’s “expression of emotion in man and animal” is in my view and we’re just publishing a paper on this uh on everything that he said about human emotion. 53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior. I wrote it with Darwin scholar Frank Sulloway, who knows everything about Darwin. And I choose how to study an emotion based on what’s what’s happening out in our lives and our the phenomena out there, right?","offset":1206,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: So if you’re studying awe you should get people around big trees or in musical concerts or in museums, right? Uh if you’re I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty and I’m like I gotta study young men teasing each other because we embarrass each other, you know intentionally.","offset":1238,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Oh my goodness, we have to hear about that that work again. It’s become very relevant nowadays because of the because of the I’ll just call it what it is, it’s not dread-it, it’s the dreadful man-o-sphere, you know, which people use very broadly but I think now it’s being you know allocated to the the worst of the worst.","offset":1256,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But then there is this phenomenon among males where they’ll rib each other and you know and there’s there’s a healthy version of males interacting too, right? you know uh so we’ll get back to that.","offset":1278,"duration":8},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I base it on what’s the phenomenon of interest, right? That that speaks to humanity and then what are our best measures that we can go after it.","offset":1286,"duration":9}],"startTime":1007},{"title":"Eliciting and Measuring Awe","summary":"Keltner details the field research methods his lab uses to study awe. They measure responses to vast natural stimuli, concerts, and life-changing experiences like river rafting.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: These days if you want to measure awe, what’s your favorite awe stimulus?","offset":1295,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: First off and thank you for asking about measurement, like it’s interesting like people are like “oh, you can’t study awe, you know you don’t know how to measure it, it’s ineffable, it’s mysterious, it’s spiritual.” We can measure awe really well, you know, the vocalization “whoa”, you know, the facial expression uh activation part parts of the brain are deactivated, uh vagal tone, the goosebumps is a good uh part of the awe response.","offset":1300,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: As we started to study awe, we did two things. And one is typical West you know science, which is get your most cool awe videos, show them to people, you know, and I had some missteps in this science. I had a woman who was an honors student at Berkeley who was coming back from Burning Man and you know she’s like “I’m going to show engineers fractal imagery” and you know and the engineers are like “who is this woman?”","offset":1329,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I mean there is the I’ve never been to Burning Man but there is the post Burning Man glow that people come back with that is for understandable reason hard for most people to enter with them. It’s like a kid coming back from summer camp.","offset":1358,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: There’s great visual imagery, you know BBC Earth is awesome and it it uh makes people feel awe. Slow motion guys, I don’t know if you know these guys, they film wild things in slow motion, like you know dropping a wine glass in this spectacular photography and just you know you’re like “whoa.”","offset":1370,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Cool, we’ll put a link to that. I I love super slow mo.","offset":1390,"duration":3},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah. Um and that fits our definition which is like you don’t understand what’s happening, it’s vast, it’s mysterious. But what I’m really proud of Andrew is the work we did out in the field, right? So one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got your Master’s degree at and headed into neuroscience was uh in our paleontology museum there’s a replica of a T-Rex skeleton.","offset":1393,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When I was five years old and and I learned about dinosaurs it changed my life. It was just in the LA Natural History Museum like “wow!” So we studied people standing near the T-Rex skeleton and they became expansive and collective. We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees. We studied people at Yosemite, you know, Yang Bai a student in my lab stopped hundreds of travelers from all over the world right when you see Yosemite and she said, “how do you feel about yourself right now?” And they’re like “I feel small and quiet but part of something really large”, right?","offset":1419,"duration":35},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um subsequent to that there are scientists who are studying mosh pits at concerts and, you know, surfers and, you know, rock clim- I mean it’s, you know, backpackers and, you know, we studied one of my favorite studies later with Stacy Bare, who’s a veteran who ran the who’s an amazing human being, an awe pioneer, we studied people rafting down the American River, you know, veterans just like “whoa.” We’ve studied people in art museums, Carnegie Hall, you know, so it’s it you know one of the joys is when science you know just in the spirit of your questions, it’s like “well what should I really do here, right? I could stay in the lab” it’s like “no, you know, we gotta go do stuff”, you know, that that uh my dream study was to like have a participant come in and in engage a conversation the other participant is Shaquille O’Neal, right? And it’s like 7’2”, 350 pounds, you’d be like “whoa!” but couldn’t do that. So uh so they it’s been fun. It’s been a wild ride.","offset":1454,"duration":64}],"startTime":1295},{"title":"Visual Aperture & Transitions to Vastness","summary":"Huberman describes how shifting from a narrow visual focus to a broad horizon alters the nervous system. Keltner confirms that transitioning from small to vast perception is a fundamental trigger for awe.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And so many thoughts uh first one um I’m lucky I didn’t rotate through your lab because I uh would have never become a neuroscientist but I’m unlucky because it would have been so much fun to because I while I loved the wet lab as they call it getting into these experiments would just be incredible.","offset":1518,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Couple things uh the Shaquille O’Neal thing I um, you know I think we’re all moved by these uh I guess they used to call them Make A Wish Foundation things where a kid who sadly is dying gets some last wish and it’s a tragic circumstance but then you get to observe these kids and most importantly they get to experience something that they never could have imagined happening like like a Shaquille O’Neal walking in, I feel like that’s probably happened or something.","offset":1539,"duration":31},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I think what we’re witnessing in those moments has to be awe. Like they can’t believe that this human or this event, whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it’s layers upon layers, there’s like a grief component for those of us watching.","offset":1570,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well put.","offset":1584,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is the fact that like for those moments they’re not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality right I mean even as I talk about it it’s like uh yeah it’s just it’s like uh there’s an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?","offset":1585,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That’s an in particularly uh complicated and and interesting uh case where you’ve got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. It is. And uh anyway that’s just an in observation but horizons are something that fascinate me for a long time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon our visual uh angle widens.","offset":1602,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":1624,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We become more parasympathetic. There’s a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system so we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel we it’s quite the opposite.","offset":1625,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Nice.","offset":1637,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I feel like there’s something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, I’m thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees or hike and then the horizon opens up. Yeah. There’s this transformation of visual space and those moments at least for me are the moments. Like I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time like “this is amazing” but there’s something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness.","offset":1638,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It could be brought to the lab but do you think that’s what’s going on in in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Right? Do people work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon do they attenuate? They’re like “oh, yeah, like another horizon.”","offset":1668,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I don’t know, you know, working with rangers right now and they I think I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated but I think they’re still finding it in subtler ways. Yeah, that’s really interesting and, you know, it’s interesting I was uh I’ve been privileged to know Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":1679,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":1704,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":1706,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":1735,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":1767,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":1796,"duration":39}],"startTime":1518},{"title":"Awe Walks & Health Benefits","summary":"Keltner outlines the practice of 'awe walks' and their profound health benefits. Regular exposure to awe is linked to reduced inflammation, less physical pain, and improved brain health.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’m um struck by the by the awe walk um and and I know this comes up in your book and elsewhere and you’ve done a lot of research on this. Um for those listening um what would an awe walk look like and um what are some of the health benefits? You just mentioned a few that that have been observed both in the short and the long term.","offset":1835,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, thank you, you know, uh we we are a walking species, you know, it is just in our DNA to walk. We meandered from Africa all to all the continents. A lot of people, Rebecca Solnit writes about this like “walking is almost sacred, it’s a kind of consciousness” like you’re saying like “whoa, I’m I’m picking up a vaster view of what’s around me.”","offset":1853,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And I uh decided to just create this awe walk, you know, and I did it for a meditation group the or Mindful Magazine. You just slow down, you a lot of people walk, hundreds of, you know, tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States. Uh it’s good for you, you know, so we just added awe.","offset":1878,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Like on your regular walk, once a week in our study, uh go somewhere you wouldn’t ordinarily go, go some place that may surprise you. Uh I walk around Berkeley a lot and I was like “well I’m going to go past the little playground that my daughters played at when they were young and just feel that”, you know, Cordornices Park.","offset":1897,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah. With the rock slide.","offset":1916,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And the tunnel.","offset":1918,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Exactly.","offset":1919,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I love that place.","offset":1920,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Near the rose garden.","offset":1921,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Exactly.","offset":1923,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And there’s a secret, should we give this away? Yeah. There’s a secret hiking trail through it’s actually through a private property’s backyard and they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash and there’s an incredible waterfall and place to stand at the top, there’s a beam there, you’ve been there I’m sure where you can look out over this what is kind of like a trench of tree- it’s a total transformation of one space to the next if you if you look for it properly, I’m sure now it’s on the internet. Um it’s in kind of swinging gates, not locked, and uh so hard to find.","offset":1924,"duration":37},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And and there’s a little monastery maybe nearby and uh and you might and you might see me a couple years ago you would have seen me and my dog, but you might see me uh eating a slice of pizza from the Cheese Board sitting on that log. I spent a lot of time there.","offset":1961,"duration":15},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’m getting goosebumps Andrew, that is just pure Berkeley, thank you. So yeah, so in this study awe walk go on your walk, find a place that’s going to be a little surprising where it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder.","offset":1976,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And it’s interesting, no one’s asked me this question, you know your observation about small to vast and we just said slow down, deepen your breathing, sync it up with your your walking, which you’ve studied empirically the breath. And then um go from small to vast, you know.","offset":1990,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Look at clouds, look at the whole pattern of clouds, just slow it down. Look at trees, look at the light on the trees and look at points of light and then patterns of light. Look at, you know I love walking past playgrounds as one of my favorite sources of awe, listen to one laugh and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right?","offset":2008,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s all. And they walk through uh they do that for half an hour and what we find in that study is is they become more vast in their consciousness. They’re more aware in the photographs that they provided of what’s around them. They feel more kindness over the eight weeks. They feel more awe over an eight week period, it rises.","offset":2030,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And then the the finding that was you know important for people who are elderly is less physical pain. You know, your body starts to ache when you’re 75, you know, uh or earlier and awe I think through the inflammation process, you know in reducing it, caused less pain.","offset":2050,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: You know this dovetails with other health benefits, awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day reduced long COVID symptoms. It’s good news, right?","offset":2071,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And and there’s so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like “I’m going to prescribe nature, I’ll prescribe music” through awe, right? Uh as a mechanism.","offset":2089,"duration":16}],"startTime":1835},{"title":"Visual Aperture, Time & Consciousness","summary":"Huberman shares his 'Space-Time Bridging' concept, linking visual aperture to time perception. They discuss how awe fosters equanimity by connecting us to longer time scales and shifting our perception from small to vast.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I have a lot of thoughts about um this going from uh small to large. Yeah, I’d love to hear them. But before I do, um I have an- I have another question. I think for a lot of people, um including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of ourselves. Like see- like getting outside of ourselves.","offset":2105,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I’m starting to think based on the way you’re describing it that it’s about being tethered to the larger picture. That it’s not a get- yes it’s getting out of our heads quote unquote, but it’s actually very much an embodied experience. It’s very like it’s almost like full body. Yeah, so now I’ll answer your question, this is usually where people start putting in the comments like “you talk too much, let your your guest talk” but trying folks, he asked me twice.","offset":2128,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So you asked me a question, I’m going to answer it. Anyone that knows me you know if I- Okay, so I’ve thought about this this relationship between visual aperture and uh time perception.","offset":2154,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Cool.","offset":2169,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This is my my deepest obsession and it uh gets a little bit into the book I’m writing but it but it’s probably reserved for after there’s some experiments. And and I um to the fear of my podcast crew, I actually am considering going back into the lab to do this experiment.","offset":2170,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Okay. So we know what do we know for certain? We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small, like looking through a soda straw view or watchmaker type aperture, or um you’re in a let’s just say a pleasant or unpleasant text communication that’s going back and forth, that your perception of time is different. You’re fine-slicing. Those dot-dot-dots coming through, yeah it’s just it feels like an eternity.","offset":2186,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, just it’s like.","offset":2212,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And it’s bidirectional with your let’s just call it level of alertness, it doesn’t even have to be stress but sympathetic nervous system, right? So if I’m in line at the store and and I have some place to be, my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever. Yeah because you’re in these little micro.","offset":2213,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: When I’m relaxed it feels like I’m I’m slicing time differently. Okay. When we see a horizon and and our aperture opens up as I mentioned then we relax, but we also are taking fewer time bin snapshots. So people might think “oh fewer you’re in slow motion” because the word “no”, you’re it’s the opposite, right? Slow motion is high frame rate.","offset":2229,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This thing about video where you can catch slow motion, you need high frame rate. This is why when people experience uh like a car crash they’ll often say that things felt like they were slowing down. More snapshots.","offset":2254,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":2266,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain. So if I’m listening to a specific conversation at a party, I’m fine-slicing my perception of auditory space. Our friend Erv Hafter taught me this.","offset":2267,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: When I listen to everything and I take it in as a whole, it’s it’s a more relaxed experience but okay. So a long time ago I was because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things and and I I came up with this meditation, but it’s not a meditation at all and some of my listeners will be familiar with it, I decided to call it for lack of a better term Space-Time Bridging.","offset":2283,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The meditation is very simple. You um close your eyes and you do three breaths thinking about your skin inward, so interoception. You open your eyes and you look at your hand and you take three breaths, but you’re creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe eight or 10 feet away, you do the same. Then you find a horizon, and then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon like you’re just on a planet floating in space and like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or or whatever.","offset":2306,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And then you get right back to yourself. And so what the idea here is that it helped me a lot because I noticed that meditations where I was completely focused inward made me more focused inward. Going for a run I could get outside my head but it and I started to play with the idea that maybe it’s not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se, yeah but it’s the like every great thing in biology or psychology, it’s the process, it’s not an event.","offset":2329,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It’s the process of going from one aperture to the next. And that’s kind of what life is about. That’s cool. Yeah. Absolutely. Like when “this too shall pass” is really about taking a broader time snapshot, like eventually this thing, which is visual as well.","offset":2355,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Which is visual as well.","offset":2371,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And so this is a long answer to your question, but um this is why it’s so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning um but it’s also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I’m working on. Like there is no place or event in a day or in life that that’s actually the right way to live. Like you can go to Big Sur and if you’re lucky enough to go to Esalen like you’re like “this is it” but it’s only it because you came from your office, in my opinion, and then you go back again.","offset":2372,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You’ve figured this out, like you have this- the title of this paper for which you’re the senior author is “A Balanced Mind: Awe Fosters Equanimity via Temporal Distancing.” So it’s so it’s about time, not about space.","offset":2402,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: It is. That’s fascinating.","offset":2417,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Okay, so that’s so that’s how I think about this. Now maybe you can tell us about this paper because I’m getting embarrassed that I’ve been going way too long.","offset":2419,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: This is why we’re in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know, you’ve studied the visual system and and we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":2424,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":2446,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":2448,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":2477,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":2509,"duration":30},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":2539,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I didn’t expect that we would land here, at least not so early in the conversation but you know we we’ve had Christoph Koch on this podcast talking about consciousness, you know, incredible neuroscientist and really thinker, I mean I’ve watched his career evolve over the years and and he’s continued to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness and uh and you’ll hear nowadays about “oh like maybe consciousness is outside the brain” and I think if nothing else our brains are important components in it, heck yeah I don’t want to do the experiment on myself to find out like if I was decerebrated or something, which basically means having your cortex removed, sorry for the nerd speak.","offset":2561,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But the idea is connecting through time like in our own lives is a very unique form of awe. So like if I hear a song and it reminds me of when I was like 15 and then all of a sudden all the the mat- as I call it video whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it’s layers upon layers, there’s like a grief component for those of us watching.","offset":2598,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well put.","offset":2617,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is the fact that like for those moments they’re not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality right I mean even as I talk about it it’s like uh yeah it’s just it’s like uh there’s an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?","offset":2618,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That’s an in particularly uh complicated and and interesting uh case where you’ve got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. It is. And uh anyway that’s just an in observation but horizons are something that fascinate me for a long time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon our visual uh angle widens.","offset":2635,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":2657,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We become more parasympathetic. There’s a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system so we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel we it’s quite the opposite.","offset":2658,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Nice.","offset":2671,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I feel like there’s something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, I’m thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees or hike and then the horizon opens up. Yeah. There’s this transformation of visual space and those moments at least for me are the moments. Like I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time like “this is amazing” but there’s something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness.","offset":2672,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It could be brought to the lab but do you think that’s what’s going on in in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Right? Do people work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon do they attenuate? They’re like “oh, yeah, like another horizon.”","offset":2701,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I don’t know, you know, working with rangers right now and they I think I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated but I think they’re still finding it in subtler ways. Yeah, that’s really interesting and, you know, it’s interesting I was uh I’ve been privileged to know Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":2712,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":2738,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":2740,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":2768,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":2800,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":2829,"duration":20}],"startTime":2105},{"title":"Sponsor Break: AG1","summary":"Andrew Huberman reads a sponsor message for the AG1 nutritional supplement.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: As many of you know, I’ve been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast and I’ve been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it is because AG1 is to my knowledge the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market.","offset":2849,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that’s easy to drink and it tastes great. It’s designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy and it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition. Now of course everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods, I certainly do that every day, but I’m often asked if you could take just one supplement what would that supplement be and my answer is always AG1 because it has just been oh so critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance.","offset":2873,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I know this from my own experience with AG1 and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkAG1, with the numeral one, .com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. Again that’s drinkAG1, with the numeral one, .com/huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription.","offset":2910,"duration":33}],"startTime":2849},{"title":"Awe, Time, and Consciousness (Continued)","summary":"Following the sponsor break, the discussion on consciousness continues, touching on how shifting perceptual boundaries and connecting to the past plays a key role in experiencing awe.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I didn’t expect that we would land here, at least not so early in the conversation but you know we we’ve had Christoph Koch on this podcast talking about consciousness, you know, incredible neuroscientist and really thinker, I mean I’ve watched his career evolve over the years and and he’s continued to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness and uh and you’ll hear nowadays about “oh like maybe consciousness is outside the brain” and I think if nothing else our brains are important components in it, heck yeah I don’t want to do the experiment on myself to find out like if I was decerebrated or something, which basically means having your cortex removed, sorry for the nerd speak.","offset":2943,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But the idea is connecting through time like in our own lives is a very unique form of awe. So like if I hear a song and it reminds me of when I was like 15 and then all of a sudden all the the mat- as I call it video whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it’s layers upon layers, there’s like a grief component for those of us watching.","offset":2980,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well put.","offset":2999,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is the fact that like for those moments they’re not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality right I mean even as I talk about it it’s like uh yeah it’s just it’s like uh there’s an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?","offset":3000,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That’s an in particularly uh complicated and and interesting uh case where you’ve got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. It is. And uh anyway that’s just an in observation but horizons are something that fascinate me for a long time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon our visual uh angle widens.","offset":3017,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":3037,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We become more parasympathetic. There’s a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system so we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel we it’s quite the opposite.","offset":3038,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Nice.","offset":3051,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I feel like there’s something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, I’m thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees or hike and then the horizon opens up. Yeah. There’s this transformation of visual space and those moments at least for me are the moments. Like I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time like “this is amazing” but there’s something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness.","offset":3052,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It could be brought to the lab but do you think that’s what’s going on in in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Right? Do people work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon do they attenuate? They’re like “oh, yeah, like another horizon.”","offset":3081,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I don’t know, you know, working with rangers right now and they I think I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated but I think they’re still finding it in subtler ways. Yeah, that’s really interesting and, you know, it’s interesting I was uh I’ve been privileged to know Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":3092,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":3118,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":3120,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":3148,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":3180,"duration":30},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":3210,"duration":21}],"startTime":2943},{"title":"Music as a Catalyst for Awe","summary":"Keltner reflects on growing up in Laurel Canyon surrounded by iconic musicians. They discuss how music serves as a tonal language of emotion and identity that connects people to something larger than themselves.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew: And I think it was just you know the I just got the adrenaline back. And there's a little bit of you don't know what it is going to happen and it feels a little dangerous, but it's mostly benevolent and um it's an irreplaceable feeling and and I think about it sometimes uh I think about a lot of the time.","offset":3231,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, and you know, thank you. And I, you know, when I was writing this book on awe, some forms of awe, you know there are eight wonders that give us awe, you know, some are you kind of understand them, nature's pretty straightforward, spirituality, meditation, you know. And music and your description of it exactly exactly captures how rich it is and complicated.","offset":3251,"duration":23},{"text":"Dacher: Which is there is something about that sound and the acoustic patterns that come through your eardrums and head into your auditory cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people and insta-friends, like you said, for life. You know, brothers and sisters almost that and you're like this is what life's about.","offset":3274,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: And Susanne Langer, a philosopher, really got it right. She's like music is this tonal language of emotion and identity. And awe in music, very fitting with our conversation, is when those sounds come into you, move you, and connect you to something that is what you care about in life. You know, I remember I grew up I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s and there was more music there than I almost anywhere in human history.","offset":3299,"duration":34},{"text":"Dacher: You know, from you know, the Mamas & the Papas and Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison was living there.","offset":3333,"duration":6},{"text":"Andrew: Jim Morrison was out there.","offset":3339,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: And the Doors, and the you know, Bob Dylan was passing through, and the Birds, it's a joke, you know. It was everywhere.","offset":3340,"duration":6},{"text":"Andrew: That's wild just to think about how much incredible music was being created.","offset":3346,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher: Oh man, you know, the Beach Boys were, you know, at I mean weren't Fleetwood Mac back in Topanga. Yeah. I mean it was like and I was eight and nine and just a you know, to grow up on Bob Dylan. And when I saw the recent film with Timothée Chalamet, I start crying, you know I was just like this is life, you know.","offset":3351,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, and so that's why we study awe, you know. It it and and you know music is one of our great technologies. Uh, there's now research showing it's good for chronic pain. I think it's a frontier in healthcare and, you know, just giving people contemplative meditative approaches to music and and awe is part of the answer.","offset":3371,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: And you and I shared yet another thing, Andrew. You know, when I uh grew up in the foothills of the Sierras as a teenager, Ted Nugent and you know this poor white you know area, Ted Nugent, AC/DC, and that's all fine. And when I first heard the Sex Pistols in I was lucky to be in England when Never Mind the Bollocks came out and I was in a working class fighting town and I heard that.","offset":3393,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher: I was like that's it. And then that led me to Iggy Pop, who's one of my moral heroes. So you know, um...","offset":3422,"duration":7},{"text":"Andrew: Amazing. Who's really into Qigong apparently. I heard him like years ago on the radio and and someone was asking him like how does he stay in such good shape and he's just does tons of Qigong breathing.","offset":3429,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":3439,"duration":1}],"startTime":3231},{"title":"Transcending Language Through Physicality","summary":"Huberman brings up martial arts and sparring as deeply bonding, non-verbal experiences. Keltner compares this to mosh pits, highlighting how intense physical encounters can create transcendent connections.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew: Wild, wild, wild. You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't. But there's something that feels kind of um divorced from language about the experience that we're talking about even though there's lyrics tied in there. And what brings that to mind is there's a really good book, one that I like anyway, um called A Fighter's Heart by a guy named Sam Sheridan.","offset":3440,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew: His wife actually wrote that movie Monster um with Charlize Theron, I think is uh the actress that played her. And uh and I don't know Sam but but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms and he explores them all and um there's this great line in there.","offset":3464,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew: Because I've done a little bit of boxing um and sparred a bit. I don't recommend as a neuroscientist how can I recommend it, right?","offset":3480,"duration":9},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, what were you doing?","offset":3489,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: You get hit. Oh, I was and that was actually in my 30s. But anyway, I was working some stuff out. But uh do not recommend uh the sport yeah, the training yeah, but you don't want to get hit in the head. Not good for your brain whatsoever. But he talks about how um fighting with someone, sparring or a fighting with someone is uh he said it's like a it's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have because you're in this primitive non-language state.","offset":3490,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah. I mean he actually likens it to a one-night stand. He says something like, oh you know you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know but you you feel connected you know. So I don't know if that's the best certainly not the most politically correct uh way of put it.","offset":3515,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: Definitely.","offset":3531,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: But I understand what he's talking about, right? You're you're in this moment of you're both vulnerable. In the case of the fighting, you're both vulnerable, you're both trying to hurt each other, you're also obeying some rules, right? It's not not an anything goes.","offset":3532,"duration":14},{"text":"Andrew: And he talks about how it transcends language. And that creates a forever bond. And it's true, right? I didn't do a ton of sparring but you have a respect. Yep. You went through something hard together even if it's only three three-minute rounds. Like that's a it's real. But it's separate from language. And earlier we were talking about the exper- the experience of emotion as this kind of triad of the feeling, the motor component to it, and language, but I do think that maybe the language piece can go.","offset":3546,"duration":33},{"text":"Dacher: I'm with you in some sense. Darwin wrote about the motor components, got a lot of it right, William James was about the body, you know, and the physiology, and you know, language is what we rely on as social scientists, but it I think it's as William James said when he tried to describe his experience of transcendence uh when he took laughing gas and it led him down the path to understand spirituality.","offset":3579,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: He's like words are tattered fragments. They they barely touch the real thing. Um, yeah, and and I just want to dwell for a moment, you know, part of awe and I learned this like talking to veterans, you know, and I I did work with Stacy Bare and we did this Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers.","offset":3605,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: And he's one of my heroes in the book of getting helping tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature, you know. And these are guys who've lost limbs and they're rock climbing, you know, and it's just like like there's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life and there's violence and and there's a lot of horror, carnage, etc. but there's awe.","offset":3624,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: Uh, and I love your idea and and I think any teacher of the of the martial arts would say that's the point, is that we can transcend death or violence by martial arts, by performing them and uh and putting them into a contemplative form for the body.","offset":3643,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie, is Raging Bull, man, and Martin Scorsese, like Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray have these epic battles and they look at each other, you know, in one of the great scenes, and they're just like we're united. This is all we're way beyond the fight, you know.","offset":3665,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher: I think you're right. I think it's part of this transcendent moment that of people crashing into each other. Mosh pits. They are one of my favorite objects of study in awe. And mosh pits have a law, a set of laws to them.","offset":3686,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, people have studied like the physics or the physics.","offset":3704,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, no, it's like and you think you're crashing and you are, you're bruising yourself, you know, but there's something transcendent there about what we find.","offset":3706,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew: I could be wrong, but I think um Raging Bull, I think the the soundtrack was Clash inspired. Was it? There's something about it in the documentary which I highly recommend, uh called The Future Is Unwritten, which is the Joe Strummer thing where some there's some link up between The Clash. I think Scorsese says, you know, The Clash inspired the soundtrack to Raging Bull or something like that.","offset":3716,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: Really?","offset":3735,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Anyway, he's a big Clash fan, so um or yeah. So...","offset":3736,"duration":3}],"startTime":3440},{"title":"Moral Beauty & Joe Strummer","summary":"Huberman explains why Joe Strummer of The Clash is one of his moral heroes. They explore how Strummer communicated profound, authentic emotion that transcended pure language.","entries":[{"text":"Dacher: All right, Andrew, I get to ask you one more question.","offset":3739,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, yeah.","offset":3741,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: So why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you? One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice. So why Joe Strummer?","offset":3742,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew: Oof, man. All right, I'm going to try and keep this brief. Um, I mean just to give you a sense of how what an impact he's had on me. I mean, I've always worn these button-down black shirts even before I was public-facing, uh because I saw him do a show, um a Mescaleros show. I wasn't there, but he and by the way, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros I actually think is better than The Clash.","offset":3752,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: Wow.","offset":3778,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Clash was a short run. It was only five years. Yep. Only five years, pretty much, and then they're done. So it was 101'ers, Clash and then and then he came back with the Mescaleros and just incredible. I mean, they're masterpieces. Yep. Produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong here on Hellcat Records.","offset":3780,"duration":14},{"text":"Andrew: He went to a small label. Um, he also sang songs with Johnny Cash for with Rick Rubin. I actually know the story of that because I'm friends with Rick and I insisted on him telling me the story. So sometime I tell you that. But I mean masterpieces late in life. And there was a show that that Strummer played where he was wearing his black button-down soaking in sweat, like soaked in sweat.","offset":3794,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew: And he just wouldn't take the thing off. I think he might have rolled up like one cuff. And I was like that's punk as fuck. I was like that guy is so rad and he was in his he died at 50, we're the same I'm 50 now. He died at 50. I go see the mural of him right off um it's right off Tompkins Square Park uh in Alphabet City every time I'm in New York just go like see it. Where the aviator says future is unwritten. You can go there pay your respects.","offset":3816,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew: I've talked to Rick about this a lot. Like what was it about him? Because they were close friends. And I never met Strummer. But I think there's three reasons. One is um he had that Bob Dylan-like ability to write lyrics that you're not especially with Mescaleros where you're not really sure what the song's about, but it makes sense, not just because it's beautiful but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics are actually saying.","offset":3839,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: Beyond language. The theme we're talking.","offset":3865,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, like a great song um for instance would be like On the Road to Rock 'n' Roll. Like that could be about on being on tour or something, but it it transcends something obvious.","offset":3867,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: Nice.","offset":3877,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: The other thing is is the way he he uh used his breath was um like there was a his intonation is like unparalleled. Yep. And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand, because during the summer I go hang out with Rick whenever I can. And winter too. Um, and we watch documentaries, including Clash documentaries.","offset":3878,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew: And I asked him I was like what was it? Like why does he have this thing? Because he said these incredible things, you know. He would say things like, you know, you got to bring humanity back into the center of the and those are really beautiful quotes. But like a lot of people give beautiful quotes.","offset":3900,"duration":15},{"text":"Andrew: And Rick in very Rick Rubin style said, everything he said he brought his whole life experience into those statements. And I was like just the statements like the quotes, you know like the you know we got to bring the humanity back into the the and he goes no everything he said. It was like you got the sense that he was bringing all of himself to it even if he was being kind of quiet.","offset":3915,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: That's cool.","offset":3939,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: And I go, okay, so this is clearly on a plane of understanding that I can't put language to, right? What does that even mean? That's like half the things Rick says, it's like a riddle mixed up in a poem, you know put out there as you know as a as like a as a principle and you're just like what the hell's that mean? But it feels true.","offset":3940,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: And I think that, you know, and and Rick's superpower,","offset":3958,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":3959,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: is that Rick knows what a true feeling feels like. Yeah. And he knows what a false feeling feels like. And he's only interested in truths, period.","offset":3960,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher: And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of is exactly that. It's like there are all these layers to meaning and representation and, you know, and we try to figure out true moments of awe with all of our measures and and it is this like it's all coming together as a uh a package that tells us it's happened.","offset":3973,"duration":19}],"startTime":3739},{"title":"Narcissism and the Enemies of Awe","summary":"The discussion turns to the inhibitors of awe, specifically self-focus, narcissism, and drugs like cocaine that promote ego. Keltner explains how modern society's obsession with the self undermines our ability to feel awe.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew: So we can think about things that promote awe, the awe walk, going small to large aperture maybe back again. Like I guess we shouldn't assume that it's unidirectional. You know, coming back into our home after something big is there's nothing like that, right?","offset":3992,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher: Ah!","offset":4006,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: The dog, the kids, the the spouse, the whatever, you know, like the those little thing, the plants even you know the the the you know, so it runs both ways. It's no fun, but we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe. Because as I step back from what we're talking about today and I think okay language, it can be part of it but it can also in molecular biology or genetics we call it a dominant negative.","offset":4007,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew: It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions. A ton of stuff. And there's a joke around molecular labs and neuroscience labs that you'd be like that person's a dominant negative, you know. I now have a new phrase I can use. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be called a dominant negative. Um, I call people that in my head a lot online.","offset":4031,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew: I go, oh man that person's a dominant negative, they're not contributing to the greater good, they're just like so there's, you know, language can be that, um or be neutral or be positive but can definitely be that. And then there's something about being over-identified with self.","offset":4048,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew: You know, I so on the recommendation of Tim Armstrong, someone you wouldn't associate with the Grateful Dead, he was like, \"You gotta listen to the Grateful Dead!\" and I was like, what? This is Tim, the Tim Armstrong Transplants, Rancid, Operation Ivy, telling me I should listen to the Grateful Dead. He's big great he's a huge music fan of all sorts of things.","offset":4068,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: I said why? And he said uh he said, \"They're punk rockers.\" And I said how what are you talking about? And he said he said, \"Yeah they they played a different show every night.\" That's how they're I'm not going to keep doing his I can do a pretty decent Tim for those...","offset":4086,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: Nice.","offset":4102,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: uh but apparently they're the the people that followed them, that was a big part of it. It was all all new, right? Every show was unique. Started getting really into listening to the Grateful Dead in the last couple years and then I started listening to documentaries, biographies of them. And there's this amazing moment in one of them, I can't remember which where somebody says what killed it?","offset":4103,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew: What killed the collective of music? Like that that feeling? And uh the answer someone gave was cocaine. And then the question was why cocaine? Yep. And someone said because cocaine's all about me. It's the me drug. So I was like, whoa, I'm a neuroscientist so I can tack that to you're talking about dopamine and adrenaline. And it's when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated that's a very I mean amphetamines especially but it it becomes a me thing.","offset":4131,"duration":35},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, that's true.","offset":4166,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Every idea that's mine is the thing that needs to happen. It's the important thing. If not out there, it needs to hap- like that's the only thing that matters. Very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics, very different than just the sober experience where it's kind of a downer, but then the non-intoxicated experience of just being with the music no substances.","offset":4167,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew: So I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states and but more broadly how me-ness self-interested states are a dominant negative for awe.","offset":4187,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher: That was the best entrance into that question I've ever encountered. You know, it's amazing Andrew. You know, I grew up for three years formative years in Laurel Canyon '68 to '70 and then we moved to the foothills of the Sierras in Northern California and it was peak Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell and the Birds and the Beach Boys and you know, it's just","offset":4198,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew: Jealous. Envious in a positive way.","offset":4219,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher: When my brother passed away and he was my brother of awe, you know 14 months younger and I was in this reflective period, I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon and they made the same point which is kind of things shifted after we, you know, in the early '70s. And the historian said it's cocaine.","offset":4221,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher: That it moved from, you know, marijuana and mushrooms and psychedelics a bit but really, you know, people playing music, you know, Joni Mitchell or Graham Nash or whomever it is. And then suddenly cocaine comes and the the whole spirit changed.","offset":4242,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, I think the great enemy of awe is me-ness is what Ralph Waldo Emerson who was one of our great writers of awe, you know, he has this moment out in nature cold day in Massachusetts sees this forest and he you know he's like standing on the bare ground my head bathed by blithe air and uplifted into infinite space.","offset":4257,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: And there's that uplift that you described earlier of awe. All mean egotism vanishes. And that's all, you know. Awe quiets the self. And when you look at where we are, you know, Jean Twenge, you know, longitudinal data, we're more self-focused, you know.","offset":4279,"duration":23},{"text":"Dacher: We're taking a quarter of the pictures that we take are of the self. It's preposterous! It's pretty crazy. It's half of the photos we take are of the self or the self with another person or another thing. It's perverse, you know. Uh, the world has become more narcissistic. We're led by narcissists.","offset":4302,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: It's been, you know, it's just taken as a default and it's not a default. It's a it's a corruption of of our minds. Because the mind, as you described earlier, is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact, at seeing their beauty, at hearing their words, at looking at collectives, discerning patterns of nature, collectives, and all of that works against awe, right?","offset":4321,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: That you know, if I am focused on myself I'll feel less awe, if I am worried about my striving in society or my bottom line in my bank account, you know, or thinking about money, it countervails awe. So yeah, I I think, you know, that's why awe's important for our times. We are in this for various reasons, this period of too much self-focus.","offset":4346,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher: Uh, it's costing young people, it makes them anxious, you know, and they got to they got to they got to go dance, they got to hear some music, they got to share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is, you know, and just to get out of the self.","offset":4374,"duration":14}],"startTime":3992},{"title":"Sponsor Break: Function","summary":"Andrew Huberman reads a sponsor message for Function lab testing.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives insights into your heart health, hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans.","offset":4388,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew: Function not only provides testing of over 160 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, it also analyzes these results and provides recommendations for improving your health from top doctors. For example, in a recent test with Function, I learned that some of my blood lipids were slightly out of range. As a result, I decided to start supplementing with nattokinase, which can naturally help reduce LDL cholesterol, and it did.","offset":4409,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew: In a follow-up test, I could confirm that this strategy worked, my blood lipids are now back where I want them in range. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, it's always been overly complicated and expensive. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code Huberman for a $50 credit towards your membership.","offset":4432,"duration":27}],"startTime":4388},{"title":"Sports as Collective Awe","summary":"Keltner and Huberman discuss the profound emotional and communal elements of sports fandom. Rooting for a team serves as a secular religion, providing fans with shared rituals and collective effervescence.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew: The example you gave of sports earlier I think is is an important one um only because I think some people not me, but some people will all right I don't really want to go camping or backpacking. I do. I spend as much time in Yosemite as I can. The dancing, concert, you you maybe that's not for them.","offset":4459,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew: I do think I'm not a big professional sports fan. Um, I like a few things, but but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on like when I see a game, one of our members of our podcast team that's not here today is like just obsessively excited about professional football and uh Seattle Seahawks.","offset":4476,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew: So this was a big year for him. And I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl that it's not just about his relationship to his team and it's about it's about being a kid and and everyone else there in a Seahawks jersey is like they have to they must feel a connection because they presumably the super fans know that the other super fans know the history, they know how important this is, they know all the trials and tribulations of the team and on and on.","offset":4496,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew: And so it's um gosh, it's so different. I'm just realized like it's the it's the furthest thing from like doing a PhD in the sciences. The folks doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun, it's a hell of a lot of work. And there's nothing else quite like it. I it's irreplaceable, I wouldn't redo it for in any other way. But it is a very like you're it's a very solitary thing.","offset":4526,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: It is.","offset":4548,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Like you don't even cross you cross finish line, your advisor's there, your family comes but it's like it is a tunnel like this big. Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is you're going through that tunnel with you know millions of people.","offset":4549,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: One of the joys of awe science, you know, we gathered stories of awe from 26 countries. And it's one of my favorite parts of this research. And this is like India and Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico and Japan and Korea and South Korea and Russia. And we everybody.","offset":4565,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: We brought them in, got these stories and you know like what is vast and mysterious? What gives you goosebumps? What's amazing or awesome to you? And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina, they're going to write about so they they're going to tell you about football, you know.","offset":4581,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: And, you know, when you get stories from parts of the United States they're going to talk about you know American football and baseball. You get stories from Boston it's there's going to be a Red Sox story.","offset":4597,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher: And we have not studied sports in my emotion science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes. They're picked last in grammar school. They're grouchy about sports. And yet it's super emotional.","offset":4609,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher: And I will tell you a story that has science and uh personal wisdom. Uh, as I I gathered these stories like God, you know, part of collective effervescence just like Taylor Swift or being in a punk mosh pit is also sports. And and just like uh it is awesome to follow a sports team and be there live.","offset":4622,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: And there's this great obscure sociology paper that said being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion. Because you have your rituals, they have these towels they they sing around, you think of yourself as the Steeler nation, they talk about godlike experiences on the field, they have these spiritual moments where in freezing days they'll take off their clothes and cheer and cry together.","offset":4648,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: Um, and I was teaching this recently and there were two Steeler fans in the audience. And they were like that's exactly it. But I'll tell you more like everywhere you go if you're a fan a Steeler fan there are Steeler bars that you can go to.","offset":4673,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: And when the Steelers play they're going to be Steelers fans and if you're a kid and the Steelers lose somebody who's old will tell you I remember when we lost in 1983 and we'll recover we'll you know have this expansion of time. It was so rich to me, you know.","offset":4689,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher: It's like we love sports, you know. Sports the Olympics are old, they're 3,000 years old. The ball court games in the Maya you know in the Mayan traditions are were amazing ways to gather community and and become collective, right? So, you know, uh it was really eye-opening for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports.","offset":4703,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr, who was coaching the Warriors at the time. He's a righteous guy, you know. Uh, he is a person of truth and just getting his sense of like how awesome it is to I mean for him to coach a game and the Warriors were in this amazing period and look up into the stands and 10,000 people are dancing because of your coaching, you know, I was like that's pretty good.","offset":4728,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, he's really tapped in, isn't he? He's a meditator and wildlife experience and...","offset":4756,"duration":7},{"text":"Dacher: And trauma early, you know, his dad losing his dad.","offset":4763,"duration":4},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah.","offset":4767,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: And and that orienting him to what really matters.","offset":4768,"duration":3}],"startTime":4459},{"title":"Community Health & The Social Media Dilemma","summary":"They explore how communal wellness practices like saunas combat the modern epidemic of loneliness. Keltner highlights the severe health costs of isolation and the challenge of designing social media platforms to foster true connection.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew: I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe, but I'm also thinking about solutions.","offset":4771,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":4776,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: You know, it's springing to mind that you know, uh it's it's funny sometimes I get tacked to like ice baths for some Well, folks, that was Wim, right? I mean, that was Wim. I mean, sure, I've done some cold plunges, I like I do the cold.","offset":4777,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: I gotta do them. It sounds good.","offset":4787,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, it's fun. I mean, you know, it it's psychologically painful and you feel better afterwards and um it'll make you it'll make anyone mentally stronger because cold is a universal stressor. Um, but you know, it it gets kind of a bad rap because mostly because people don't like doing it. Everyone loves the sauna. It's kind of funny.","offset":4789,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: Everyone's cool with sauna. And the Finns love the sauna, and it's a social thing for them. And one thing that I think has been overlooked and it just sprang to mind now. Um, so I overlooked it as well is that you know there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people, but that we can also do on our own and when we do them on our own we know other people are doing it on their own too.","offset":4807,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew: And so it's it's kind of a it's a different version of what we've been talking about. And you know, the quote-unquote health and wellness community they take some heat like people oh it's all about supplements, all about cold plunges, you know and I've got a like a like a particular finger I hold up when I hear that. But it's not about that.","offset":4830,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: There's this deeper layer that's much more important that's formed over the last I would say 5 to 10 years, because it used to be meditation, breathwork, Esalen, great love Esalen, like amazing but incredible place.","offset":4848,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher: Historic.","offset":4859,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Historic and many important things actually happened there that people don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics and world peace that maybe some","offset":4860,"duration":8},{"text":"Dacher: Oh my god, yeah! You brought the Russians in there for instance.","offset":4868,"duration":6},{"text":"Andrew: But you know so it used to be these isolated pockets, but now, you know, people get together to sauna, people get together to do breathwork, people get together to cold plunge. And of course for thousands of years humans have been doing this. This is not a new thing. And people look at that and they go this is wacky or it's about the marketing of this.","offset":4874,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew: Actually, I I think that there's a connection that's formed among people who want to take good care of their health, they want to have some control over their state, um because otherwise the world will take control of it for you. Yep. And meditating is a very solitary experience for most people. So there's something pretty nice about going to a banya. I love banyas, Russian banyas, and then also doing the sauna on your own or cold plunge on your own.","offset":4891,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew: And I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media. So from now on when I see people doing things that I go oh cool like I like a bit of that I don't maybe do it every day or I do that every day too get see my morning sunlight. The notion that there's a community being built. That was the original intention of social media.","offset":4916,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew: And so I think social media can have this dominant negative effect on awe and day-to-day experience. So a question is are there ways? Surely there are, but how how could we build more of a sense of of like this communal feeling leveraging what people are already doing? They're already on their phones and scrolling. Hopefully they're also doing things to benefit their health. To make them feel less isolated because as Jonathan Haidt and others have pointed out quite correctly, it can really fracture us into the the the me, the ego version where it's but it's kind of the perfect venue to connect people also.","offset":4932,"duration":39},{"text":"Dacher: It is. I agree.","offset":4971,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: So I don't expect you to come up with any answers right on the on the fly, but I feel like it's not going anywhere. So how how could we build or glean a more sense of a community through things that we're doing actually doing in our daily lives? Is I think a question that's worth exploring.","offset":4972,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: Profoundly important. You know, um the you know and the preceding question is like what are the enemies of awe? What gets in the way or the the barriers? And and you just nailed a couple is you know online life. You know and I think Jonathan Haidt is right that it's not only anxiety-producing but we don't think about the opportunity costs of like it deprives me of awe, you know.","offset":4988,"duration":27},{"text":"Dacher: And in our study of 2,600 people around the world of what makes them feel awe, no one ever said being on Meta or Facebook or, you know, or uh, you know, or Instagram. There are a couple reason worries I have about online life and I'm kind of working on this now. You know, and one is is the content itself, which is, you know, it's been algorithmically designed.","offset":5015,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher: I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms I was advising there were set in place of like making people hate each other and not demonstrate all of our all the wonderful things about human beings, which are um ample. And then online life disrupts sharing and the technologies of today have disrupted sharing. So we don't share music like we used to share. We used to listen to music together.","offset":5043,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: That's down. Going to movies is down 40%, right? That used to be a very important collective cultural experience. Did you see the latest Scorsese or Pixar or whatever? Now it's streaming, right? So I really worry about that. And I think the next challenge in in the technological world in the new the social media and the platforms is is like you said, how do you enable the sharing of experience? Um, you are absolutely right.","offset":5067,"duration":31},{"text":"Dacher: A lot of what we do for our bodies and the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it. where suddenly you're not, you know, meditating and breathing but you're also sharing your mind and your experience. You're not, you know, listening to music you're sharing an understanding of the music together and its cultural history.","offset":5098,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: One of my favorite examples is farmers' markets. They were nonexistent in the '90s, right? And they used to be very common in American culture and now there are 9,000 farmers' markets growing. And yeah, people go to buy kale and get the honey and you know the fresh bread or whatever, but they're also going because it's community. It's profound community. Uh, and we derive a lot of benefits from that. Profound benefits. 10 years of life expectancy, community.","offset":5122,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew: 10 years?","offset":5151,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: 10 years.","offset":5152,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: My goodness! There's so much obsession these days around what sport allows you to live the longest? Turns out it's like pole vaulting which most people aren't going to do. Um, sprinting, gymnastics. Stuff that involves a lot of jumping and landing.","offset":5153,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher: Is that right? Really?","offset":5164,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: And and fast twitch activity. Yeah. I mean there are a bunch of other features there about like who's biased to go into those sports and whatnot. But I mean I think it's in keeping with this idea that like getting your heart rate way way up and moving quickly as as quickly as you safely can like once a week at something is probably a good idea.","offset":5165,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher: Cool.","offset":5180,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: But the greatest benefit seen there is something like five to eight years. So you're talking about a 10-year benefit?","offset":5181,"duration":6},{"text":"Dacher: 10 years. And that's a meta-analysis of 350,000 participants. So that's that you can go to the bank with that. Like social community very good for the body. I think it's the greatest challenge of our our social media and our our platforms. And I've advised at Facebook 2010 to 2015, Google, Pinterest, a little bit of Apple, and I keep telling them like, you know, this is the singular challenge.","offset":5187,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: And it's so it's hard. It's, you know, a technologies are asynchronous. You know, \"Hey I send you a text\" and 18 hours later I hear from you. You're not making eye contact. The visual connection is degraded. You know, Steve Pinker observed rightly so, like when I'm on Zoom I have to look at the down to see the camera or whatever or I look at the screen, so my eye contact is going down.","offset":5211,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: I'm not making eye contact like we are. It's just the technology works against it. And I think it's the hard problem of the social media platforms is can they do what you're aspirationally asking for which is like get us to feel connected? Um, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's original statement about Facebook was open and connected. Um, and I think they failed. And I think we got to we it's it's the challenge of our times.","offset":5235,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew: I know Mark a bit and I think I know you know I trust he wants that.","offset":5269,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher: I know.","offset":5274,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: I really do. I know some people will will push back on that statement, but I actually know that he wants that. And I know some of the folks in the leadership at Instagram they want that. Like these people actually have very healthy personal lives. They understand the value of connection both at the level of the family, friendships, but also um at large. They they want that.","offset":5275,"duration":25}],"startTime":4771},{"title":"Awe Design in the Modern World","summary":"Keltner discusses his work with architects to build 'Cities of Awe' by incorporating nature, art, and communal spaces. They consider whether technology can be leveraged to expand our temporal and visual apertures.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew: I think that maybe I'm being optimistic here, but maybe AI will offer an opportunity for that as opposed to divorcing us from um gathering and and seeing facial expressions and hearing of voices together or observing other things. You know, the I do think that right now the way that most social media experiences land is the exact opposite of awe.","offset":5300,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew: I will say that. Because and I can say that with a fair degree of certainty because I spend a good amount of time on social media teaching, learning, and looking for entertainment, trying not to get uh, you know rage-baited or numbing out. Those are the two things I look out for. Rage-baiting and numbing out.","offset":5325,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher: Well put.","offset":5338,"duration":4},{"text":"Andrew: There's a version of social media that's happening right now where we're going further and further into our silos. Yep. But I don't think it has to be that. Not at all. I don't. I think it could be really leveraged to connect people.","offset":5342,"duration":9},{"text":"Dacher: You know, when I started advising at Facebook 2010 to 20 it was like Arab Spring and democracy was spreading and and in many ways we've had this great democratization of things of people sharing music, you know, instantaneously I can hear music from any part of the world, uh which you know that's profound and visual art and and knowledge and podcasts.","offset":5351,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher: And we've got to be nuanced about this. But we do need, you know, to think intentionally about design, you know. And that, you know, I really worry about the privileging of hate I forgot what you called it but that has been privileged. Uh, and that's not human nature. We we aren't all trolls and, you know, tracking people.","offset":5371,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher: Video title: Andrew: What an amazing talk.","offset":5400,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Thanks.","offset":5401,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: This really touched me and helped me think about some of the more practical ways of doing this. I really do hope that we can build some of those pathways through all this technology as opposed to getting more fractured.","offset":5402,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: Me too.","offset":5412,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Thank you for coming today.","offset":5413,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: It's an honor. Thank you.","offset":5414,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Appreciate it.","offset":5415,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":5416,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Joe Strummer would be proud.","offset":5417,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Amen.","offset":5418,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I've had this thought uh that the way social media is now...","offset":5420,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I sometimes do the test of myself. I go, \"Okay, I spent I don't know how much time on social media yesterday, but do I remember anything specific?\"","offset":5454,"duration":20},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: And so that's scary.","offset":5474,"duration":49},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: And I do think that the people who built it want it to be impactful on the day-to-day uh scale, but also...","offset":5523,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Well, you know, one of the things I'm really interested in right now, Andrew, is is awe design, right? And, you know, I'm working with Gehl Architects in Copenhagen. Like, how do you design cities for more awe? It's not hard, and it's good for people, right? A little bit of music, a little bit of green space, a little bit of art, get people looking at each other and talking and buzzing, right? Easy to do.","offset":5542,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I think you've just laid out, you know, and someone could write a manifesto, like, maybe my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe. It's small, awe's vast. It's sped up, awe slows things down. It has a fragmentation to it, awe integrates, right? It's about micro-things, awe's about systems. Like, when you feel awe towards music, it's like, \"I get it all here, right now.\" Its content is is not inspiring very often. And it could all be.","offset":5566,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Sometimes it is. I I think that that the space-time aperture that we talked about before, I think the problem with social media is actually its power to bring the whole space-time into an aperture this big. I actually think, crazy hypothesis, happy to be wrong, I actually think the whole problem with it has to do with the fact that it brings long time scales, past, present, and future, different aper - different frame rates into one real-world visual aperture. Because when I haven't been to the Sphere in Las Vegas, but friends of mine who are musicians who love live music, who are producers who love live music, tell me it is incredible.","offset":5602,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, it should and and I think and we have to, you know, we just have to take a step back and these conversations, right? There's, you know, there's new work out about AI helping medical doctors and it's, you know, and the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco's like, \"It's like having the best brain trust about medicine right with you all the time.\" Who wouldn't want that, you know? And I think let's remember that. And yeah, I think that's the challenge, is to have these AI and the devices that it is manifest on get us to what's awesome. And uh, we'll see, you know, I hope so.","offset":5662,"duration":34}],"startTime":5300},{"title":"Sponsor Break: Our Place","summary":"Andrew Huberman reads a sponsor message for Our Place cookware.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PFASs, or \"forever chemicals,\" are still found in 80% of non-stick pans, as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products. As I've discussed before on this podcast, these PFASs, or forever chemicals, like Teflon, have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems. So it's very important to avoid them.","offset":5696,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: This is why I'm a huge fan of Our Place. Our Place products are made with the highest quality materials and are all PFAS and toxin-free. I particularly love their Titanium Always Pan Pro. It's the first non-stick pan made with zero chemicals and zero coating. Instead, it uses pure titanium. That means it has no harmful forever chemicals and it does not degrade or lose its non-stick effect over time. I cook my eggs in my Titanium Always Pan Pro almost every morning. The design allows for the eggs to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan.","offset":5730,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Right now Our Place is having their biggest sale of the season. You can save up to 40% sitewide, now through April 12th. Just head to fromourplace.com/huberman. Again, that's fromourplace.com/huberman to save up to 40%.","offset":5758,"duration":20}],"startTime":5696},{"title":"The Social Value of Embarrassment & Teasing","summary":"Keltner shares his research on embarrassment and teasing, explaining how they function as social glue. Playful teasing and the ability to feel embarrassed signal a person's commitment to group norms.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Can we talk about embarrassment?","offset":5778,"duration":27},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I know. Well, you know, it it all begins really in my - like, when I started scientifically to depart from the Ekman canon, if you will, of those six emotions we talked about earlier. And I was doing a project in his lab and we were startling people and studying the startle response. A seven-muscle movement motor pattern built into the nervous system. And I noticed people got embarrassed after they were startled unexpectedly, you know, you'd blast 'em with a noise out of the blue in the lab and they'd be like, \"Whoa, I think I spit and, you know, peed my pants,\" or whatever. They'd show this response.","offset":5805,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I took it to Ekman and it's the blush, and people avert their gaze and they look away and they hide their face, you know? And he's like, \"That's a motor pattern of emotion, you should go study it.\" And I did. And and then I started to notice, and there's a really rich literature on that, that and Darwin wrote about this, that a person's embarrassment is a sign of their commitment to the collective, right? Like, man, you know, I called you by the wrong name, or I, you know, I farted in the yoga class, or whatever it is, and I'm embarrassed, like, \"I'm sorry, man,\" you know, \"I apologize.\"","offset":5843,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: That really matters. And when you see people get embarrassed, you like them more and you trust them more and you give resources to them and you think they're a good group member. And then I was like, man, you know, like I've played a lot of pickup basketball in my life, thousands of games, and you're banging into - and there's just a lot of teasing and taunting, and you know, people I admire, you know, great athletes tease and taunt, you know, it's just part of what we do when we're banging into each other.","offset":5876,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I started to put it together, like, you know, the right kind of teasing within a collective, you're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group, right? And then the wrong kind of teasing, which we documented in our lab's, like, that's bullying and harassment and we can pinpoint, like, \"That's inappropriate,\" you know? You're trying to you're not keeping people in the group, you're excluding them or humiliating them.","offset":5906,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: So we did this study, was one of my first studies, we brought four fraternity - we brought groups of fraternity - four fraternity guys in each interaction uh from this fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin. And we gave them each nicknames, or we gave them each initials, and we had them make up nicknames based on the initials. So two two letters of a nick - were \"A.D.\" And I'm not sure I can say what the nicknames were like, but it, you know, \"Another Drunk,\" and it gets pretty profane.","offset":5930,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And so we let 'em tease each other. And they start teasing each other and they are really, like, these young men coming out of a fraternity house teasing each other. There are funny stories, people got embarrassed. Uh the the stories and the teasing was kind of about, like, \"I'm gonna accuse you of something that you shouldn't do in this group,\" right? Like pass out drunk naked, you know, in the streets of Wisconsin. \"Don't do that,\" right?","offset":5967,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And then they get embarrassed and they say, \"I'm not gonna do that.\" And what we found is the more that they got embarrassed, the better they liked each other, because it's turning into this motor pattern of, like, \"Wow, I'm showing you that I care about what you're accusing me of and I'll get embarrassed, you see that in me, we become closer.\" The the guys who were better teasers and that were more playful and funny and made people aware of the norms that matter to the group but not really humiliate people, those guys were more popular in the group.","offset":5996,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And that's been replicated, right? Just storytelling and and ribbing each other and and it was part of healthy group functioning is just embarrassing each other. You think about roasts, you know, at the end of your career, you're gonna get that someone's gonna talk about your career, you're gonna get hammered. And it's wonderful.","offset":6033,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I bet. I mean, I grew up in a big big packs of boys, I mean on my street growing up...","offset":6085,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Uh a former guest on this podcast who's a psychiatrist who's also very versed in Eastern philosophy, Dr. K, as they call him, um said that embarrassment is important because it also signals that you're not a creep. Especially, he was referring to heterosexual relationships where, you know, a guy says something trying to be uh, you know, trying to flirt basically or pick up on someone, and then uh the woman says something back and he, like, gets embarrassed, he realizes, like, he said the wrong thing. If he doesn't show embarrassment, he's creepy. If he does, it verifies that he has a certain degree of empathy and self-reflection. No, so that was his point, but it it feels relevant here. So...","offset":6111,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And he's right. I mean, you know, uh Darwin early on wrote about the blush being a sign of your healthy character, your moral virtue almost. And in non-human species, the facial reddening is associated with physical robustness and then in humans we think of it as moral robustness like, \"Yeah, I care about stuff.\" We did work early on, Bob Knight at Berkeley, orbital frontal patients. The orbital frontal cortex is in part where your ethical consideration takes place. And if you have damage to that region of the brain through brain trauma - you fall off a motorcycle or, you know, fall off a ladder - you don't show embarrassment where you should. And they feel creepy, if you will, or just like, \"Hey, they're not playing by the rules.\" So it's a very subtle thing. Erving Goffman wrote a lot about it, the great sociologist, like, our embarrassment is telling people like, \"I know what the rules are and I care about them, I'm committed to them.\" So your psychiatrist friend is right.","offset":6151,"duration":63},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Along the lines of of teasing, um uh someone I'm I'm proud to call a friend who's also public facing uh Jocko Willink, who's also it turns out one of our - were friends for a bunch of reasons but one of them is that he grew up really into East Coast hardcore music. Not not a genre I I gravitated towards, but there's some marginal overlap um with the types of music um I'm into. We've gone to shows together and um, he put something up, you know, every once in a while on social media somebody posts something that that really lands, Naval or or Jocko and he's a Jocko's a man of few words, so I'm gonna put more words to it than than he was able to.","offset":6214,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Um but the quote was something like, um \"You know, if you want to understand,\" and he's a former Navy SEAL, SEAL team operator most people know know that, but \"If you want to understand uh males in groups and healthy uh masculine friendship, guys are going to tease each other relentlessly in front of each other, but they'll never tease behind somebody's back and they'll back the other person who they were just teasing in person against the rest,\" you know, \"They'll buffer them against any kind of criticism.\" So it's a very interesting um kind of uh contrast there that I think is true. Like, you you know, it's not like you tease your friend behind his back. It's the teasing to his face that actually builds the bond.","offset":6254,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, well put.","offset":6299,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: We documented that in the fraternity study, that, you know, when you when you tease somebody and you're like, \"Hey man, do you see this guy's dance moves?\" or \"You see this guy shoot free throw,\" whatever it is, you're just making light of human foible and and all the funny things that we do. And there's there's there's just this really subtle repair work where they're saying like, \"I'm teasing you, but I know you got it,\" you know, \"And I'll support you.\" And I agree, I think that, you know, part of what teasing does is it says like, \"What do we as a collective really care about?\" And let's surface those norms in a lighthearted way and we know 'em together. And and if you make mistakes, you should be apologetic about it, but part of it also is just uh this sort of \"I got your back\" repair work that they did. Um and it's profound.","offset":6335,"duration":51},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: It, you know, was interesting. I was kind of this shy kid and I was very small growing up and kind of the teasing often crossed lines in high school, just, you know, bullying and so forth. And then I started to play basketball and, you know, um and I realized, like, a lot of it's just just men making sure they know the rules of the game, you know, and showing also in those moments of the joys of laughing together like, \"I support you, I'm with you,\" right? Uh what a sophisticated thing to do um compared to the alternatives.","offset":6386,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I have a sister, so I was always struck by the brothers in my neighborhood. Yeah, there were two in particular, like, I would hear screaming outside, go outside, it was an older brother, his name was Peter, holding Michael's face in the sprinklers. His brother's just crying and crying, screaming, I mean relentless older brother torture. Some people hear this and probably be like, \"Oh, call the cops,\" you know, and I don't know what the reaction is nowadays, I'll try not to be genera - generationally biased, I don't know. Yeah, he was he was abusing his younger brother. And but if anyone said or tried to do anything to either one of them, they would immediately pair up and fight anyone. It was interesting, right? Uh for a guy who had an older sister, was a very different experience, right? I mean, she had her own form of older sister kind of hazing um to her younger brother.","offset":6424,"duration":49},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But there really does seem to be something critical about kind of defining the relationship with people one-on-one, in groups, versus when there's an outside threat. And and not that we want outside threat, but as long as we're talking about the sort of...I don't want to say disintegration, that's too pessimistic. The sort of gradual erosion of this collective feeling, is there less just kind of grouping up together and doing things?","offset":6473,"duration":30}],"startTime":5778},{"title":"Combating the Epidemic of Loneliness","summary":"Despite concerning trends of isolation and declining institutional participation, Keltner and Huberman see hope in younger generations recreating community through shared living, yoga, and group activities.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, you know, I um 10 years ago, uh 15 years ago, 10 years ago, uh first there was the science of loneliness and isolation, John Cacioppo uh and then those who followed, like, \"Whoa, we are fragmenting.\" And we spend much too much time alone, isolated. And then COVID hit, lockdown, etc. And our Surgeon General, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy got it right, like, it's an epidemic of loneliness. And I as a social psychologist, you know, interested in these social emotions am like, you know, you just look at the basic raw facts, like, picnics are down by half. We don't go to movies like we used to. We don't um we don't listen to music together. We don't...30 the estimate is that 30% of meals in the United States people eat them by themselves, you know? I eat a lot of my meals by myself. Uh we go on walks by ourselves, we don't go to church, church is way down. Um so the kind of the broad sociological trends are alarming on that fragmentation.","offset":6503,"duration":72},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: But I think the young generation is putting it back together in really interesting ways. You know, we know from survey data that 25-year-olds, 30-year-olds are really interested in game nights, you know, those are coming back. They're interested in living together, cooperative living. They're cooking more with each other. Value-wise they care more about community than my generation. I was the great explosion of individualism and they're kind of like, \"You know, if I if I choose a job, I want to make sure I'm working with other people I like.\" I didn't even I didn't think about that. I don't know if you, you know...uh so I think it's coming back.","offset":6575,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And and I love the signs of, you know, festivals are reappearing now, the farmer's market that I've talked about, the, you know, the dance groups that are now returning, contact dance. I see, I mean these yoga studios, one out of eight Americans does yoga. You know, I do yoga two to three times a week.","offset":6614,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Also 15 years ago, no one would have predicted that the single we're being told that one of the single most important health interventions that women and men should do is, like, lift weights. The only people lifted weights when I was growing up were bodybuilders and preseason football players.","offset":6643,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I think Vivek Murthy in particular, who I deeply admire and have worked with a bit, you know, he he got our health world - think about it. Surgeon General of the United States, the first one to come out of public health traditions. Did work in India, right? And he's like, \"There's this social side that you've covered in your show like to health, to physical health, to the telomeres of your cells, your DNA and the vagus nerve and so forth, oxytocin, cortisol. It's social.\" Uh there's there are social dimensions to our nervous system.","offset":6703,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I think that's coming, Andrew. Like, we're starting to see, \"Why do I go to a farmer's market?\" because I feel a sense of community. And \"Why do I love yoga?\" because I'm doing these postures all synchronized with people I don't know and I feel a sense of awe and transcendence. \"Why do I lift weights,\" right? There's the banter and the discussion and the the history and the sense of, you know, of what this all means culturally. I think that's coming. I think the gyms are appealing to it in some sense, right? A little bit more community activity and I think it's good news, you know?","offset":6741,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I love the Japanese onsen. Uh you go for the water, you know, and the the springs and the heat and so forth, but they in their wisdom have built entire community experiences around it. Where you you wash yourself and you bathe together and you eat together and there's sayings up on the walls and you spend a little time with your kids there, right? So I hope we we learn um because I think it's important.","offset":6778,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I'm thinking a lot now about how we can bridge between these incredible technologies, because I I am a fan, um and but also the non-negotiable technology of our our nervous system and our biology and our psychology, right? Lately, because I have a quarium, I'm really into this thing called aquascaping, which is this Japanese form of, like, plants and and freshwater fish and um just obsessed with it. But and and when the ecosystem is doing well, I'm like, \"Oh,\" like, I feel it's a form of it's brought me some awe at times when, like, things are going well in there, I'm like, \"Wow, it's just beautiful.\"","offset":6807,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: And um, and I think there are things that I would never do to my fish. I would never isolate them from one another. But I give them enough places to hide from one another because there's a lot of dominance hierarchy stuff being worked out between these discus. Um I make sure they're on a light cycle. I make sure they're fed, but not overfed or underfed, right? And um I wouldn't do most of the things that we do to ourselves to my fish. [Laughs] You know, I wouldn't isolate them and give them like little videos of other fish to look at, like, I know that wouldn't that wouldn't work. Um I know that they would die. I I know. The uh and so I think we can learn a lot from more uh simpler organisms and and the sort of basic units of of care and community. They're very similar. I mean, it gets played out differently, but but they're very similar uh because obviously we we evolved similar nervous systems, let alone similar needs.","offset":6841,"duration":59}],"startTime":6503},{"title":"Psychedelics & Awe","summary":"They discuss the resurgence of psychedelics, emphasizing their potential to dissolve the ego and generate awe when used therapeutically. Keltner shares his concerns about microdosing and stresses the importance of honoring indigenous traditions.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I would like to talk about psychedelics if you're willing.","offset":6900,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: So some people will say, \"Okay, they just send you inward.\" And that's the opposite of what we're talking about, like getting all the awe inside like, \"Okay, that's I mean that's pretty extreme.\" Um other people will say that their experiences with psychedelics allowed them to come out of that experience and really have a a felt connection to people, to plants, to animals, to life that is um profoundly positive for their feelings of connection and seeing awe perhaps even in lots of things.","offset":6929,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: So how should we think about psychedelics? And we should probably constrain the question a little bit, like, I'm not talking about MDMA, which is not a psychedelic, it's an empathogen. Ketamine's not a psychedelic, it's a dissociative anesthetic. I'm trying to do this now because people start to lump and it's actually causing issues for the potential legalization for...so we need to be splitters, not lumpers here. So I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin, maybe DMT, ayahuasca, the the classic psychedelics. Yeah, what are your thoughts on these?","offset":6967,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and I'm good friends with Michael Pollan and was, you know, kind of walking the Berkeley Hills as he was producing that book and, you know, watched as we started a center for psychedelics uh at Berkeley. And um and, you know, it's a revolution. I mean, it's psychedelic use is up, you know, 40% since his book. I mean, it's incredible to watch.","offset":6996,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I I have a few thoughts, you know, one is, you know, make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come. Uh those are spirit medicines in their communities that are part of deep ethical traditions um, you know, and to honor that with, you know, uh re - you know, uh sharing of resources and knowledge and and the right kind of acknowledgment. That's really important.","offset":7018,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Um I I think in some sense uh and, you know, David Yaden at Johns Hopkins and others uh and some of the early Roland Griffiths' work spoke to this, that they are about awe um fundamentally, you know? They open up your mind and you see all life forms and time is different and your sense of self vanishes, Robin Carhart-Harris, you know, and you're just connected to vast things, ecosystems and sense of humanity. And I think in some sense and done when done in the right way, that's good news.","offset":7044,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: You know, Molly Crockett and her team at Princeton like, you go to a festival and you have psychedelics, a year later you're kinder uh through awe, right? Uh so I think that's important. Uh I think it's great news what it does for the hard problems of the mind, you know? Death anxiety, addiction, trauma, uh maybe veterans who are suffering twice the rates of PTSD, they're drawn to this, you know, and the VA is working on this. So and the data look pretty good. OCD, right, hard problems of the mind. Panic, right, that um I've in part dealt with. That is good news.","offset":7079,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Um I worry about microdosing. You know, I think people are taking um these things like coffee, and it's not coffee, you know?","offset":7123,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I, you know, they changed my life. I I got to them early uh, you know, in my late teens, 17, 18, 19. I was a very anxious obsessive kid and I think they opened up my mind in this perspective way we've been talking about. I don't really do them now, you know, they gave me a lot and that's why they're here.","offset":7168,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: You know, it's funny, you know, Andrew, like when I was doing them, we were reading Castaneda who's been debunked, you know, and we're reading the traditions and thinking about them spiritually and the Doors of Perception and all this good stuff, right? We were they were embedded in a a culture of trying to find mysticism or whatever it is, and I hope people are doing that, you know, if they're going to be doing them, make it a form of inquiry. It's a complicated story, like everything, like technology.","offset":7189,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Well, they're a form of plant technologies, right? Plant - which uh quick vignette on that. We had someone here um Chris McCurdy, who runs a lab out in Florida, studies kratom and other compounds from plants. The pharma companies, they bioprospect. They send people looking for plants that then they can find isolates and everything from aspirin to uh kratom to anesthetics like cocaine - I'm not suggesting people use as an anesthetic - they come from plants. But they're isolated and then synthesized and and enriched and that's where the opiate the extreme opiate, the extreme stimulant, you know, that's where it comes from. But they all come from plant al- many of them come from plant alkaloids, which is interesting in its own right.","offset":7219,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But the I share your feelings about microdosing. Um the data Robin Carhart-Harris tells me, and he's the real expert of course, the data say there's no um evidence of benefit from microdosing, at least on major depression as compared to, like, two rounds of psilocybin with a guide, therapy before, during, and after and on and on.","offset":7259,"duration":23},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Um I had the opposite experience as you. Um I actually regret having done psychedelics when I was younger. They were terrifying, I didn't have a good experience. I stopped, didn't go anywhere near them. And then later in a therapeutic setting um had a few experiences with them, not many, but that were immensely beneficial for me. Um so kind of the opposite direction there.","offset":7282,"duration":27}],"startTime":6900},{"title":"Fostering Connection for Future Generations","summary":"Huberman asks how older generations can help younger people flourish amidst technological challenges. Keltner suggests prioritizing shared, collective experiences like campfires, public art, and communal spaces.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But what we're talking about now about kind of, \"Okay, you know, there's this problem with certain technologies, there's the the culture wars, there's the political wars, there's the actual war that's also going on right now.\" A lot of ways this resembles, like, the 70s, 80s. There's not that - I mean, I remember a time when you had yuppies and you had hippies and you had punk rockers. I mean, you watch a John Hughes film, it was like the idea was was like, \"Oh, we're actually similar,\" right? You know, the extent to which those films like showed people, \"Hey, like people were actually similar along certain dimensions as opposed to so different.\"","offset":7309,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But, you know, I I wonder because I think about the not-so-recent and recent history of things, everything from breathwork, cold plunges, psychedelics, um awe, music, the collective consciousness. I mean, it's gonna look different now, the same way that it it looked different back then, right? Like, I'm I'm trying to get outside my Gen X self these days and think like, \"So what would it look like?\" Like, I'm the old guy now. So what would it look like if these technologies, I just mentioned a few, but all of them including social media, what would it look like if those were all used to the greatest benefit? Like, what would that look like? Can we be the open-minded parents of the 80s? You know?","offset":7340,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Um can we be the can yeah, like because I feel like I can scream all day or about what I think about the science of this and that to younger people, but the only thing I actually have control over is, like, me. How do we um let's say 40 to 100-year-olds - let's really lean it on the 40 to 70. Okay. How do we create the environment so that younger people can flourish with these technologies as opposed to being like the parents of the 70s and 80s that are like, \"Oh, they got long hair and like what is this like punk rock thing?\" Like, I don't want to be that person. That sucks.","offset":7384,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I also don't want to be the and I see this a lot, unfortunately, people who were part of those movements and then they they're just like toeing the party line because oh they're like wholeheartedly adhering to one political group without thinking about whether or not there's any any hint of rational argument on the other side, right? The whole point is not to be against, the whole point is to be for what you believe is right. And so I don't know how to do this. You're older than I am by a bit, you're clearly wiser than I am, seriously, and you have more life experience. So what do we do? Like, really like what what on the help can we do? Because I don't like this, \"You guys are all on your phones, you're like,\" that doesn't feel good to me, because they were telling us when we were younger, like, \"This is ridiculous,\" like the older guys were like, you know, small wheels on skateb- they were right about the small wheels thing, turns out the wheels got too small. But Jim will understand that joke. But what do we do?","offset":7428,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I think we're in this moment, you know, with everything going on, you know, with AI and being online and polarization and climate crisis and um, you know, the things that we worry about, the rise of white supremacy politics, etc. Everybody's asking this question of, like, what how do we kind of move forward.","offset":7488,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And and, you know, in light of many of the things that we've talked in this conversation, I'm most focused on um what Robert Putnam started to write about and other people started to write about, like the just the breakdown of collective life and shared life. And I think that's the defining issue of our times, as well as our relationship to the natural world.","offset":7510,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I find awe, as do other people, really refreshing. It it provides a road map which is, you know, and I'll give you a very concrete example. I'm working with Gehl Architects on a \"Cities of Awe\" initiative. And they do amazing work, hundreds of cities around the world. 70% of human population is in cities, most of our carbon emissions come out of cities. And this is this is a place we can redesign and and make it better, right?","offset":7538,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And awe is a wonderful lens. So you can ask, and you could ask the same of like, \"What do you give to a teenager who's suffering suicidal ideation?\" or \"What do you give to a veteran who is coming back and feeling alienated from the world?\" You give them awe, right? And what does that mean? It's like, well, you give them a little nature. And that's you re-wild part of a city, right? You give them some public art. We love art, you know, we love visual art.","offset":7569,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: You give them uh the opportunity to recognize the moral beauty, you found it in Joe Strummer, just get them to interact with other people, some face-to-face. You give them uh a little collective stuff, right? You, \"Hey, we're gonna have the yoga class in the town square,\" or the Mexican Zocalo everybody walks together at a certain hour of the day and they suddenly feel peaceful, right?","offset":7599,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Uh you give them ideas about big ideas and and life. You give them a little bit of opportunity for meditation and reflection. Um that's easy to do. And when I, you know, was writing this book and just teaching social science for 30 years, it's like, \"Man, you know, we used to do this really well and it used to be temples and church. You know, that's where it all was brought together. And now we don't go there.\" 55% of Americans go to church. It used to be 90. Or temple. Um I don't, I never did, you know, and I and I in some sense miss it, you know? I see my one of my best friends very religious, he few of them and they they have so much.","offset":7625,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And we're recreating that right now, right? And we've got to do it in a coherent way. If it's the place where people are lifting weights, there should be music there, there should be visual stuff, there should be some art, nature, there should be some wisdom and some moral beauty, right? That's uh I love ironworks where I go climbing because you go there and it's like people are climbing but there's you get to see the there's the art exhibit each month of a local artist. There's some music going on, you get to listen to music.","offset":7670,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: So this isn't that hard to do, Andrew. And I think the awe science gives us a road map to think about what we share.","offset":7703,"duration":9},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Love that. Um I was not into CrossFit, but a next girlfriend of mine when I met her was, like, really into CrossFit and they would do barbecues and they'd clean the gym and they would dress up in costumes and stuff. I remember this is when I moved to San Diego to start my lab down there before moved to Stanford. And and I remember thinking, like, \"This kind of crazy,\" like I went to the gym growing up, I s- always since I was in my teens, and I'm like, \"Really? You guys are social?\" and they had this awesome social community. I know CrossFit is somewhat fallen out of favor now. Uh I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation.","offset":7712,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: You may be uh pleased to hear, I I just thought of this, I can't remember I can't believe that I didn't uh remember this earlier. Um one of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after the Clash, cuz you know he went into the kind of void of, like, he wasn't doing anything. He he wandered for a long time. He went to Spain, oh he grew out a beard, moved to Spain and um didn't tell anyone who he was and they they kind of realized who he was eventually. He was really searching, you know, his life had he lost his brother to suicide, I believe. Um he ran the um the Paris Marathon, this kind of famous, I think while smoking a cigarette. Um people always say and I don't think he did any training.","offset":7745,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: One thing that he was very well known for until his death was he would do campfires. In Manhattan, he would take people down to the river and and he had some famous friends like Jim Jarmusch and and, you know, and um well-known people in in that world. Um but he would invite whoever. And there were kids - you gotta see this documentary, it's so good. We'll put a link to it um for people want to see it, it's so good. Um there were kids, there were adults, um and they'd stay out to like two or three in the morning playing music, singing, drumming, uh people get up and talk. And so he was constantly doing these campfires his entire life.","offset":7784,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Knowing close friends of his, it's like, \"This actually what he did.\" And he wasn't getting - they they were able to film a few of these, but that was not the point. And he would bring out a radio cuz he thought, like, maybe you could, like, make it like a radio show of the thing. And but it was not to record and distribute, it was just...so I don't know, I got this crazy idea in the back of my mind that maybe, like, I'm gonna start doing campfires.","offset":7822,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I have to weigh in on some science. Okay.","offset":7843,"duration":43},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Um when I go to the climbing gym, we all take saunas. You know, I do probably four saunas a week.","offset":7886,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Awesome. Uh campfire also great red light therapy, no joke. Long wavelength light only coming out of that fire. And you know everyone's obsessed with, like, red light therapy. You can get from the sun when you don't want to get too much UV, but yeah, you get tons of long wavelength light exposure, which is great for which is known to be great for mitochondria. I mean, don't get me I don't want to get going on this as too much of a tangent. We've had guests on here from University College London. I mean, the long wavelength light actually goes all the way through your body, even in light clothing, and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria, which actually improves mitochondrial function in every single every single cell that has a mitochondria.","offset":7915,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And where do we get this light from?","offset":7951,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah. And people love campfires.","offset":7985,"duration":56}],"startTime":7309},{"title":"Perspectives on Life After Death","summary":"Huberman asks Keltner if he believes in life after death. Keltner shares a profound personal experience following his brother's passing that opened his mind to realities beyond standard physical laws.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Do you believe in life after death? I don't ask every guest that, by the way. You're the only person I've ever asked that. Do you believe that something happens after all this?","offset":8041,"duration":8},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I do. I do. Um yeah, you know, when I write about this in \"Awe,\" when my brother Rolf passed away, colon cancer, 55 or so, uh you know, and I watched the whole transition and, you know, his battle against it and his acceptance and then his leaving. And I had this profound experience that night, you know, a transcendent experience. And I'm like you, you know, Andrew, it's like neurons and statistics and cells and we can figure it all out and characterize everything. And I's like, I saw space in a different way, I saw something alive in him, and then afterward I had a lot of people have this kind of grief experience of, he was around, his voice, his hand was on my back. And...","offset":8049,"duration":51},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I’ve thought for several years, and still to this day, of, you know, quantum reality and things beyond our three-dimensional, four-dimensional view of time and space and, you know, those basic laws. And that there is, you know, consciousness, maybe patterns of, you know, electromagnetic waves around our minds and bodies that are syncing up with other people that transcend the Newtonian world of the brain. And I believe that. And I don’t know how to study it. I sense it in life. I think a lot of other people do, too. And so that keeps me open to it. And now I’ve moved from, you know, being a skeptical but open, you know, agnostic to like, yeah, there’s something there that’s beyond what we know. So I believe it.","offset":8100,"duration":63}],"startTime":8041},{"title":"Conclusion & Final Thoughts","summary":"Huberman thanks Keltner for his impactful work and career. He then provides closing remarks, promotes his upcoming book, and shares ways listeners can support the podcast.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Very cool. I hope you’re right. I believe it too, but I just hope you’re right. I sense you’re right. Dacher, thank you so much for making the trip down here to talk with us today and share what you’ve been up to for all these years. You’ve had and continue to have a magnificent career. You know, it’s really hard to do really good science, and it’s even harder to do really good science with a purpose. And you’re doing that, and you continue to, and you just have a way about you that everyone now has been able to experience first-hand. That, like, you really care, that’s clear. You put a ton of thought into the work that you’re doing. You’ve raised 25 professors, which is no small feat, I’ll tell you. That’s a monumental feat, which means that the work will continue. And you’re still going, and I’m grateful for your book and that you’re continuing to do this. And I hope you take that trip too, maybe if you can’t do it around the entire country, you know, hit some pick-up basketball games, because I think there’s something to be learned there for sure, I sense it. And thanks for inspiring me, and I know you’ve inspired a ton of other people. So we’ll put links to everything that you discussed and to your book. But you’ve definitely inspired us to think more deeply about basically what it is to be human and where to take all this technology that we have and this opportunity that we have and really do real good with it. So I’m very grateful to you. Thank you.","offset":8163,"duration":99},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well, thank you, Andrew. It’s been an incredible conversation. Let’s do more.","offset":8262,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Definitely do it again.","offset":8264,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, thank you.","offset":8265,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. To learn more about his work and to find links to his books, including his book on awe, please see the links in the show note captions. If you’re learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That’s a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today’s episode. That’s the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you’d like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.","offset":8266,"duration":46},{"text":"For those of you that haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out. It’s my very first book. It’s entitled \"Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.\" This is a book that I’ve been working on for more than five years, and that’s been based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors; you can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called \"Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.\"","offset":8312,"duration":39},{"text":"And if you’re not already following me on social media, I am @HubermanLab on all social media platforms. So that’s Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, it’s @HubermanLab on all social media platforms.","offset":8351,"duration":23},{"text":"And if you haven’t already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one- to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero-cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.","offset":8374,"duration":15}],"startTime":8163}],"entries":[{"text":"Guest: Awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day reduced long COVID symptoms. It's good news, right? And, and there's so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like, I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music, through awe, right? Um as a mechanism.","offset":0,"duration":27},{"text":"Host (Andrew Huberman): Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Dacher Keltner.","offset":27,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Dr. Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley. Dacher is an expert in the science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding.","offset":46,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions including the role of teasing in social bonding, the role of embarrassment in social bonding and his fascinating work on awe and the things that lead to awe. As he describes, awe is not elusive. It happens when we shift our perception from a very small scale to a very large scale or back again, such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista.","offset":63,"duration":31},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today you'll understand what all of that really means and more importantly, how you can create this incredible thing that we call awe in everyday life. We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding in groups and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds.","offset":94,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So today is a very practical as well as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change the way that you think about your life everyday and think about opportunities for awe everyday. As you’ll soon see, Dacher Keltner is a truly special scientist known for his incredible rigor and creativity in the study of emotion but also continually offering you, the public, ways to be and feel genuinely better and to get more out of life. It was a true honor and pleasure to host him.","offset":112,"duration":35},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.","offset":147,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And now for my discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. Dr. Dacher Keltner, welcome.","offset":166,"duration":5},{"text":"Guest (Dacher Keltner): Good to be with you, Andrew.","offset":171,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Awe. Yeah. I think we all intuitively know what it is and yet we also don’t know how to articulate it. Yeah. I want to say the words overwhelmed, excited, I get the physical sensation of a lift. I don’t think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed into a turtle position. Maybe we could explore that in your thoughts about that. But what got you into awe?","offset":173,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and, and I love the word lift. That’s really interesting. Uh, yeah, I was a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in, you know. And, and that field in the, you know, 90s and early 2000s was uh really focused on negative emotions, you know.","offset":202,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And and you know this science, right? Anger, fear, fight or flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol, uh disgust, you know, Paul Rozin and John Haidt. Um and thinking about emotions from that lens and and it as a young scientist um and given the powerful tools of emotion science of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena uh it didn’t make contact with my life and my own experience, you know.","offset":221,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I was raised as a wild child in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon and, you know, it was like music and social change and protest and uh you know and beauty and I was raised by a dad who’s a visual artist and my mom taught romanticism and Virginia Woolf and awe and the mind and and I was like wow there’s all this stuff that our science, my science, can’t speak to, music and visual patterns and dance and collective movement and, you know, someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry, you know.","offset":250,"duration":37},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman, I was like, you know what should I do with my career? and he’s like “study awe”, you know, and uh so that got me going.","offset":287,"duration":11},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: If we could let maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment. You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student sees these faces of disgust, of of pleasure, uh Darwin talked about this. Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults where they’ll show a baby like, you know, recoiling from something or you know wide-eyed and leaning in, you know.","offset":298,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: There always seems to be a motor component to this that maybe isn’t as captured in those two-dimensional photographs but what’s the story about kind of hard-wired facial emotions and what are the revisions to that story that I’m probably not aware of?","offset":327,"duration":17},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, thank you for asking that um, you know, I’ve spent 30 years working on that very problem. Um Paul Ekman came in and, you know, as as you suggested, right? He did this revolutionary work in New Guinea, you know, showed photos of six emotions, static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile.","offset":344,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: They kind of interpreted the faces like you or I would um naming it using the right words to describe those faces and that you know and this is how science occasionally works which is just by accident that became the field. And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal are they in different cultures.","offset":366,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Ekman really posited sort of a strong universality, that’s been contested by Jim Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and others. Um but since then there are controversies around how hard how hard-wired they are, do they occur reliably in a child’s development? Yes and no.","offset":390,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: You know, young children show disgust expressions uh like social mammals do, they wince at bad smells just like you or I would. Um anger’s a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally. But then our lab and several labs around the world, you know, Jess Tracy at UBC (British Columbia), Disa Sauter, uh and I want to talk about this computational work, started to expand the vocabulary of faces.","offset":411,"duration":27},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And now we there’s a lot of data that suggests there are 20 different facial expressions. Laughter, love, compassion, awe, you know “whoa”, um embarrassment, shame, pain um you know and that in some sense has broadened the taxonomy of emotions. We used to think of six, now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind.","offset":438,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And that’s where the field is heading is to really start to think about physiological patterns, brain patterns um of of these distinct states. And and I’ll tell you um the hard-wiring question, I mean it’s hard science to do, right? Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries, getting their emotional expressions, and then making sense of them.","offset":466,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: It used to take one hour to code the facial muscle movements of of one minute, right? So this is slow science. And I would really encourage listeners um and viewers to go to alancowan.com and I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowan, who you know he’s a computational genius and he looked at our old science and said, “we can use AI to code the face” and he did it with Google engineers.","offset":494,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: He coded 144 um two million videos from 144 cultures and 16 facial expressions, 75% overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks, concentration on a test, you know, laugh at friends. So right now I would say 50 to 60% is hard-wired as part of who we are in our evolutionary history and then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways.","offset":522,"duration":-28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Joovv. Joovv makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now if there’s one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast is the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now in addition to sunlight, which I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near-infrared, and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health.","offset":494,"duration":90},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays there are a lot of red light devices out there, but what sets Joovv lights apart and why they’re my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, near-infrared and infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations.","offset":584,"duration":27},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Personally I use the Joovv whole body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session, and I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you’d like to try Joovv, they’re offering up to $400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit joovv, spelled J-O-O-V-V.com/huberman. Again that’s J-O-O-V-V.com/huberman.","offset":611,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today’s episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now I’ve spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night’s sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren’t getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers, and when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly.","offset":639,"duration":27},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Now the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two minute quiz and it will ask you questions such as do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach, maybe you know maybe you don’t, do you tend to run hot or cold during the night, things of that sort.","offset":666,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You answer those questions and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me that turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K mattress. I’ve been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four years now and it’s been far and away the best sleep that I’ve ever had. If you’d like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that’s customized for you.","offset":688,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Right now Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with Truemed, which allows you to use your HSA FSA dollars to shop Helix’s award winning mattresses. Again that’s helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off.","offset":711,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’m going to ask a question that may or may not be possible to answer, but if anyone could it would be you. And it’s not a test, but here’s what I’m thinking. The relationship between emotions and what we call motor patterns, movement, is obviously very close, right? Disgust a recoil, uh we’ll explore awe, um anger, etc.","offset":732,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And then there’s this other node which is language. Right? So we have like emotions, motor, language. Obviously those can’t be dissociated, but can we imagine somebody let’s just like hypothetical person who can keep their body very still while they’re angry and be very articulate, that includes not moving their hands, we’d probably think perhaps that person’s like sociopathic but that’s not the picture I’m trying to paint.","offset":758,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Then on the other extreme, can imagine somebody who um is very angry and is gesticulating a lot and moving around, you know we can immediately “yeah, that makes that makes sense.” And we could do this for any emotion. Yep. So how should we think about emotion as an experience and how it’s expressed along these three axes, right? Which is motor, language, and then the emotion itself.","offset":786,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I feel like without um conceptualizing that, I as a true novice of this, right? this isn’t my area of of understanding or expertise, I can’t really understand what an emotion is. But if I understand how those are linked, maybe maybe that’s a portal into that.","offset":810,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, no, I mean it’s a profound question, Andrew, and it and it’s central to our field, which is you know the and and I appreciate it coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species and and and there are these motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world.","offset":828,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you soothe a child that’s crying, right? you’re going to bring it in close and caress and touch and have emotion when you’re, you know, when you’re uh fighting a rival or when you you see rotten food, you’re going to that motor pattern will be there. You know, and that’s part of our research that 75% of that is this motor pattern of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional events of life.","offset":850,"duration":31},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And then we have this massively complicated, you know, conceptual system that puts words to experience and that’s mainly what we study in psychological sciences, just “oh, I’m feeling angry or ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion.”","offset":881,"duration":17},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And we know and your question points to this like very often they’re disconnected, right? the motor pattern and the language we use and how I would interpret it in another person. Um on balance they correlate .2, so they’re just weakly they’re kind of these streams of behavior that are part of who we are, right? Our motor patterns and language.","offset":898,"duration":23},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And there are a lot of ways to think about it. You could think about cultures that value being calm, like a lot of East Asian cultures. Be calm, don’t disrupt things, don’t blurt out, don’t protest, right? and and you’ll see this disconnect. Um you can think about certain people who they just are more authentic and their motor patterns come out in expressions and they will tell you how they feel.","offset":921,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Uh so it’s a central problem that we grapple with. And then I love your your third part of this equation of emotion science, which is the feeling. The emotion. Michael Pollan is right, you know, this new book on consciousness, the conscious feeling of something. We think we can get to it with words, I don’t think so. Um you probably wouldn’t either, right? studying the other species you’ve studied, right?","offset":946,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um it’s some weird mixture of everything that’s happening in your body. And ironically the emotion or the feeling is still one of the uncharted territories of our field as why as these complicated motor patterns take unfold and words are unfolding and images and memories and visual things that you study, how does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe? And we barely know, you know, we just we don’t know.","offset":975,"duration":32},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Every once in a while I’ll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science, like the chakras or something. Yeah. And it’s kind of interesting, right? I mean even if just if one looks at it just purely as a Western scientist, this idea that maybe there is a confluence of of nerves and of vasculature and stuff that makes you feel kind of like rooted at like and and calm, right?","offset":1007,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Versus like up in your head, I uh I’ve been watching this really interesting Instagram channel, it’s a woman who does voices for cartoons and she has the most incredible understanding of voice. And she’s commenting a lot of the time on people in shows that I don’t watch but they have little excerpts of where like I guess there’s this doctor on the this it’s like an ER type show, it’s like a revisiting of the show ER but she talks about how as he’s matured from season to season in his role on the show and he’s mentoring how she literally talks about how uh his larynx and pharynx are how he’s controlling those differently as he matures and then when he has a breakdown how the voice moves further up into his head and what and what that’s about.","offset":1030,"duration":43},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I so I was thinking about this I’m like, you know, here’s somebody that’s a very unique, you know window into all of this, but we sort of know this intuitively. Like when we’re excited like there’s this kind of rising from the bottom and when we’re relaxed everything just kind of sinks down to a the diaphragmatic breathing and things.","offset":1073,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: As a scientist who studies emotion, how do you sort of decide what what uh which lens to look at things through um because a lot of the stuff I’m talking about might sound a little esoteric but it’s actually the stuff that’s easiest to measure. Yeah. Presumably you can quantitatively measure like breaths per minute when somebody’s looking at an awe inspiring image versus like a trivial image.","offset":1093,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I love your reference to chakras and you know the older I get, you know I’ve been doing emotion science for 34 years or five years, it’s good to think about the other traditions, you know. We wouldn’t have thought about the breath, the power of the breath uh without the contemplative meditation traditions that you’ve in part tested and Richie Davidson and others.","offset":1118,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And lo and behold the breath, deep exhalation, activates the vagus nerve, calms us down. That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest, which kind of sounds like the heart chakra and all the speculation around how your soul is in your heart. Well there’s a neurophysiological correlate of that. Um I love the paintings of Alex Grey, the psychedelic artist, like if you want an image of what our neurophysiology is as it synchronizes in love, you could it’s pretty close, or it’s interesting, right? So it’s good to find inspiration in that.","offset":1143,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the great things about the science of emotion and and I brought these tools into the study of awe, you know, which is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion. You know, you can measure it with facial muscles and gaze patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and you know different measures of vagal tone uh and immune system activation and activation in the gut and of course brain activation and the voice, which is one of my favorite modalities.","offset":1175,"duration":31},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I learned this in some sense from Darwin, Darwin’s “expression of emotion in man and animal” is in my view and we’re just publishing a paper on this uh on everything that he said about human emotion. 53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior. I wrote it with Darwin scholar Frank Sulloway, who knows everything about Darwin. And I choose how to study an emotion based on what’s what’s happening out in our lives and our the phenomena out there, right?","offset":1206,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: So if you’re studying awe you should get people around big trees or in musical concerts or in museums, right? Uh if you’re I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty and I’m like I gotta study young men teasing each other because we embarrass each other, you know intentionally.","offset":1238,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Oh my goodness, we have to hear about that that work again. It’s become very relevant nowadays because of the because of the I’ll just call it what it is, it’s not dread-it, it’s the dreadful man-o-sphere, you know, which people use very broadly but I think now it’s being you know allocated to the the worst of the worst.","offset":1256,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But then there is this phenomenon among males where they’ll rib each other and you know and there’s there’s a healthy version of males interacting too, right? you know uh so we’ll get back to that.","offset":1278,"duration":8},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I base it on what’s the phenomenon of interest, right? That that speaks to humanity and then what are our best measures that we can go after it.","offset":1286,"duration":9},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: These days if you want to measure awe, what’s your favorite awe stimulus?","offset":1295,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: First off and thank you for asking about measurement, like it’s interesting like people are like “oh, you can’t study awe, you know you don’t know how to measure it, it’s ineffable, it’s mysterious, it’s spiritual.” We can measure awe really well, you know, the vocalization “whoa”, you know, the facial expression uh activation part parts of the brain are deactivated, uh vagal tone, the goosebumps is a good uh part of the awe response.","offset":1300,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: As we started to study awe, we did two things. And one is typical West you know science, which is get your most cool awe videos, show them to people, you know, and I had some missteps in this science. I had a woman who was an honors student at Berkeley who was coming back from Burning Man and you know she’s like “I’m going to show engineers fractal imagery” and you know and the engineers are like “who is this woman?”","offset":1329,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I mean there is the I’ve never been to Burning Man but there is the post Burning Man glow that people come back with that is for understandable reason hard for most people to enter with them. It’s like a kid coming back from summer camp.","offset":1358,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: There’s great visual imagery, you know BBC Earth is awesome and it it uh makes people feel awe. Slow motion guys, I don’t know if you know these guys, they film wild things in slow motion, like you know dropping a wine glass in this spectacular photography and just you know you’re like “whoa.”","offset":1370,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Cool, we’ll put a link to that. I I love super slow mo.","offset":1390,"duration":3},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah. Um and that fits our definition which is like you don’t understand what’s happening, it’s vast, it’s mysterious. But what I’m really proud of Andrew is the work we did out in the field, right? So one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got your Master’s degree at and headed into neuroscience was uh in our paleontology museum there’s a replica of a T-Rex skeleton.","offset":1393,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When I was five years old and and I learned about dinosaurs it changed my life. It was just in the LA Natural History Museum like “wow!” So we studied people standing near the T-Rex skeleton and they became expansive and collective. We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees. We studied people at Yosemite, you know, Yang Bai a student in my lab stopped hundreds of travelers from all over the world right when you see Yosemite and she said, “how do you feel about yourself right now?” And they’re like “I feel small and quiet but part of something really large”, right?","offset":1419,"duration":35},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um subsequent to that there are scientists who are studying mosh pits at concerts and, you know, surfers and, you know, rock clim- I mean it’s, you know, backpackers and, you know, we studied one of my favorite studies later with Stacy Bare, who’s a veteran who ran the who’s an amazing human being, an awe pioneer, we studied people rafting down the American River, you know, veterans just like “whoa.” We’ve studied people in art museums, Carnegie Hall, you know, so it’s it you know one of the joys is when science you know just in the spirit of your questions, it’s like “well what should I really do here, right? I could stay in the lab” it’s like “no, you know, we gotta go do stuff”, you know, that that uh my dream study was to like have a participant come in and in engage a conversation the other participant is Shaquille O’Neal, right? And it’s like 7’2”, 350 pounds, you’d be like “whoa!” but couldn’t do that. So uh so they it’s been fun. It’s been a wild ride.","offset":1454,"duration":64},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And so many thoughts uh first one um I’m lucky I didn’t rotate through your lab because I uh would have never become a neuroscientist but I’m unlucky because it would have been so much fun to because I while I loved the wet lab as they call it getting into these experiments would just be incredible.","offset":1518,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Couple things uh the Shaquille O’Neal thing I um, you know I think we’re all moved by these uh I guess they used to call them Make A Wish Foundation things where a kid who sadly is dying gets some last wish and it’s a tragic circumstance but then you get to observe these kids and most importantly they get to experience something that they never could have imagined happening like like a Shaquille O’Neal walking in, I feel like that’s probably happened or something.","offset":1539,"duration":31},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I think what we’re witnessing in those moments has to be awe. Like they can’t believe that this human or this event, whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it’s layers upon layers, there’s like a grief component for those of us watching.","offset":1570,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well put.","offset":1584,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is the fact that like for those moments they’re not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality right I mean even as I talk about it it’s like uh yeah it’s just it’s like uh there’s an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?","offset":1585,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That’s an in particularly uh complicated and and interesting uh case where you’ve got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. It is. And uh anyway that’s just an in observation but horizons are something that fascinate me for a long time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon our visual uh angle widens.","offset":1602,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":1624,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We become more parasympathetic. There’s a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system so we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel we it’s quite the opposite.","offset":1625,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Nice.","offset":1637,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I feel like there’s something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, I’m thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees or hike and then the horizon opens up. Yeah. There’s this transformation of visual space and those moments at least for me are the moments. Like I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time like “this is amazing” but there’s something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness.","offset":1638,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It could be brought to the lab but do you think that’s what’s going on in in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Right? Do people work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon do they attenuate? They’re like “oh, yeah, like another horizon.”","offset":1668,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I don’t know, you know, working with rangers right now and they I think I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated but I think they’re still finding it in subtler ways. Yeah, that’s really interesting and, you know, it’s interesting I was uh I’ve been privileged to know Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":1679,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":1704,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":1706,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":1735,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":1767,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":1796,"duration":39},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’m um struck by the by the awe walk um and and I know this comes up in your book and elsewhere and you’ve done a lot of research on this. Um for those listening um what would an awe walk look like and um what are some of the health benefits? You just mentioned a few that that have been observed both in the short and the long term.","offset":1835,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, thank you, you know, uh we we are a walking species, you know, it is just in our DNA to walk. We meandered from Africa all to all the continents. A lot of people, Rebecca Solnit writes about this like “walking is almost sacred, it’s a kind of consciousness” like you’re saying like “whoa, I’m I’m picking up a vaster view of what’s around me.”","offset":1853,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And I uh decided to just create this awe walk, you know, and I did it for a meditation group the or Mindful Magazine. You just slow down, you a lot of people walk, hundreds of, you know, tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States. Uh it’s good for you, you know, so we just added awe.","offset":1878,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Like on your regular walk, once a week in our study, uh go somewhere you wouldn’t ordinarily go, go some place that may surprise you. Uh I walk around Berkeley a lot and I was like “well I’m going to go past the little playground that my daughters played at when they were young and just feel that”, you know, Cordornices Park.","offset":1897,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah. With the rock slide.","offset":1916,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And the tunnel.","offset":1918,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Exactly.","offset":1919,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I love that place.","offset":1920,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Near the rose garden.","offset":1921,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Exactly.","offset":1923,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And there’s a secret, should we give this away? Yeah. There’s a secret hiking trail through it’s actually through a private property’s backyard and they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash and there’s an incredible waterfall and place to stand at the top, there’s a beam there, you’ve been there I’m sure where you can look out over this what is kind of like a trench of tree- it’s a total transformation of one space to the next if you if you look for it properly, I’m sure now it’s on the internet. Um it’s in kind of swinging gates, not locked, and uh so hard to find.","offset":1924,"duration":37},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And and there’s a little monastery maybe nearby and uh and you might and you might see me a couple years ago you would have seen me and my dog, but you might see me uh eating a slice of pizza from the Cheese Board sitting on that log. I spent a lot of time there.","offset":1961,"duration":15},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’m getting goosebumps Andrew, that is just pure Berkeley, thank you. So yeah, so in this study awe walk go on your walk, find a place that’s going to be a little surprising where it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder.","offset":1976,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And it’s interesting, no one’s asked me this question, you know your observation about small to vast and we just said slow down, deepen your breathing, sync it up with your your walking, which you’ve studied empirically the breath. And then um go from small to vast, you know.","offset":1990,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Look at clouds, look at the whole pattern of clouds, just slow it down. Look at trees, look at the light on the trees and look at points of light and then patterns of light. Look at, you know I love walking past playgrounds as one of my favorite sources of awe, listen to one laugh and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right?","offset":2008,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s all. And they walk through uh they do that for half an hour and what we find in that study is is they become more vast in their consciousness. They’re more aware in the photographs that they provided of what’s around them. They feel more kindness over the eight weeks. They feel more awe over an eight week period, it rises.","offset":2030,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And then the the finding that was you know important for people who are elderly is less physical pain. You know, your body starts to ache when you’re 75, you know, uh or earlier and awe I think through the inflammation process, you know in reducing it, caused less pain.","offset":2050,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: You know this dovetails with other health benefits, awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe a day reduced long COVID symptoms. It’s good news, right?","offset":2071,"duration":18},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: And and there’s so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like “I’m going to prescribe nature, I’ll prescribe music” through awe, right? Uh as a mechanism.","offset":2089,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I have a lot of thoughts about um this going from uh small to large. Yeah, I’d love to hear them. But before I do, um I have an- I have another question. I think for a lot of people, um including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of ourselves. Like see- like getting outside of ourselves.","offset":2105,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I’m starting to think based on the way you’re describing it that it’s about being tethered to the larger picture. That it’s not a get- yes it’s getting out of our heads quote unquote, but it’s actually very much an embodied experience. It’s very like it’s almost like full body. Yeah, so now I’ll answer your question, this is usually where people start putting in the comments like “you talk too much, let your your guest talk” but trying folks, he asked me twice.","offset":2128,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So you asked me a question, I’m going to answer it. Anyone that knows me you know if I- Okay, so I’ve thought about this this relationship between visual aperture and uh time perception.","offset":2154,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Cool.","offset":2169,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This is my my deepest obsession and it uh gets a little bit into the book I’m writing but it but it’s probably reserved for after there’s some experiments. And and I um to the fear of my podcast crew, I actually am considering going back into the lab to do this experiment.","offset":2170,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Okay. So we know what do we know for certain? We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small, like looking through a soda straw view or watchmaker type aperture, or um you’re in a let’s just say a pleasant or unpleasant text communication that’s going back and forth, that your perception of time is different. You’re fine-slicing. Those dot-dot-dots coming through, yeah it’s just it feels like an eternity.","offset":2186,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, just it’s like.","offset":2212,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And it’s bidirectional with your let’s just call it level of alertness, it doesn’t even have to be stress but sympathetic nervous system, right? So if I’m in line at the store and and I have some place to be, my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever. Yeah because you’re in these little micro.","offset":2213,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: When I’m relaxed it feels like I’m I’m slicing time differently. Okay. When we see a horizon and and our aperture opens up as I mentioned then we relax, but we also are taking fewer time bin snapshots. So people might think “oh fewer you’re in slow motion” because the word “no”, you’re it’s the opposite, right? Slow motion is high frame rate.","offset":2229,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This thing about video where you can catch slow motion, you need high frame rate. This is why when people experience uh like a car crash they’ll often say that things felt like they were slowing down. More snapshots.","offset":2254,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":2266,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So when I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain. So if I’m listening to a specific conversation at a party, I’m fine-slicing my perception of auditory space. Our friend Erv Hafter taught me this.","offset":2267,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: When I listen to everything and I take it in as a whole, it’s it’s a more relaxed experience but okay. So a long time ago I was because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things and and I I came up with this meditation, but it’s not a meditation at all and some of my listeners will be familiar with it, I decided to call it for lack of a better term Space-Time Bridging.","offset":2283,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The meditation is very simple. You um close your eyes and you do three breaths thinking about your skin inward, so interoception. You open your eyes and you look at your hand and you take three breaths, but you’re creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe eight or 10 feet away, you do the same. Then you find a horizon, and then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon like you’re just on a planet floating in space and like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or or whatever.","offset":2306,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And then you get right back to yourself. And so what the idea here is that it helped me a lot because I noticed that meditations where I was completely focused inward made me more focused inward. Going for a run I could get outside my head but it and I started to play with the idea that maybe it’s not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se, yeah but it’s the like every great thing in biology or psychology, it’s the process, it’s not an event.","offset":2329,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It’s the process of going from one aperture to the next. And that’s kind of what life is about. That’s cool. Yeah. Absolutely. Like when “this too shall pass” is really about taking a broader time snapshot, like eventually this thing, which is visual as well.","offset":2355,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Which is visual as well.","offset":2371,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And so this is a long answer to your question, but um this is why it’s so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning um but it’s also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I’m working on. Like there is no place or event in a day or in life that that’s actually the right way to live. Like you can go to Big Sur and if you’re lucky enough to go to Esalen like you’re like “this is it” but it’s only it because you came from your office, in my opinion, and then you go back again.","offset":2372,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You’ve figured this out, like you have this- the title of this paper for which you’re the senior author is “A Balanced Mind: Awe Fosters Equanimity via Temporal Distancing.” So it’s so it’s about time, not about space.","offset":2402,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: It is. That’s fascinating.","offset":2417,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Okay, so that’s so that’s how I think about this. Now maybe you can tell us about this paper because I’m getting embarrassed that I’ve been going way too long.","offset":2419,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: This is why we’re in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know, you’ve studied the visual system and and we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":2424,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":2446,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":2448,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":2477,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":2509,"duration":30},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":2539,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I didn’t expect that we would land here, at least not so early in the conversation but you know we we’ve had Christoph Koch on this podcast talking about consciousness, you know, incredible neuroscientist and really thinker, I mean I’ve watched his career evolve over the years and and he’s continued to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness and uh and you’ll hear nowadays about “oh like maybe consciousness is outside the brain” and I think if nothing else our brains are important components in it, heck yeah I don’t want to do the experiment on myself to find out like if I was decerebrated or something, which basically means having your cortex removed, sorry for the nerd speak.","offset":2561,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But the idea is connecting through time like in our own lives is a very unique form of awe. So like if I hear a song and it reminds me of when I was like 15 and then all of a sudden all the the mat- as I call it video whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it’s layers upon layers, there’s like a grief component for those of us watching.","offset":2598,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well put.","offset":2617,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is the fact that like for those moments they’re not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality right I mean even as I talk about it it’s like uh yeah it’s just it’s like uh there’s an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?","offset":2618,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That’s an in particularly uh complicated and and interesting uh case where you’ve got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. It is. And uh anyway that’s just an in observation but horizons are something that fascinate me for a long time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon our visual uh angle widens.","offset":2635,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":2657,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We become more parasympathetic. There’s a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system so we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel we it’s quite the opposite.","offset":2658,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Nice.","offset":2671,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I feel like there’s something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, I’m thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees or hike and then the horizon opens up. Yeah. There’s this transformation of visual space and those moments at least for me are the moments. Like I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time like “this is amazing” but there’s something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness.","offset":2672,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It could be brought to the lab but do you think that’s what’s going on in in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Right? Do people work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon do they attenuate? They’re like “oh, yeah, like another horizon.”","offset":2701,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I don’t know, you know, working with rangers right now and they I think I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated but I think they’re still finding it in subtler ways. Yeah, that’s really interesting and, you know, it’s interesting I was uh I’ve been privileged to know Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":2712,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":2738,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":2740,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":2768,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":2800,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":2829,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: As many of you know, I’ve been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast and I’ve been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it is because AG1 is to my knowledge the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market.","offset":2849,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that’s easy to drink and it tastes great. It’s designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy and it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition. Now of course everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods, I certainly do that every day, but I’m often asked if you could take just one supplement what would that supplement be and my answer is always AG1 because it has just been oh so critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance.","offset":2873,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I know this from my own experience with AG1 and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkAG1, with the numeral one, .com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. Again that’s drinkAG1, with the numeral one, .com/huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription.","offset":2910,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I didn’t expect that we would land here, at least not so early in the conversation but you know we we’ve had Christoph Koch on this podcast talking about consciousness, you know, incredible neuroscientist and really thinker, I mean I’ve watched his career evolve over the years and and he’s continued to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness and uh and you’ll hear nowadays about “oh like maybe consciousness is outside the brain” and I think if nothing else our brains are important components in it, heck yeah I don’t want to do the experiment on myself to find out like if I was decerebrated or something, which basically means having your cortex removed, sorry for the nerd speak.","offset":2943,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But the idea is connecting through time like in our own lives is a very unique form of awe. So like if I hear a song and it reminds me of when I was like 15 and then all of a sudden all the the mat- as I call it video whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it’s layers upon layers, there’s like a grief component for those of us watching.","offset":2980,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well put.","offset":2999,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But a huge aspect of the of just how touching it is is the fact that like for those moments they’re not thinking about their mortality and no kid should have to think about their mortality right I mean even as I talk about it it’s like uh yeah it’s just it’s like uh there’s an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?","offset":3000,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That’s an in particularly uh complicated and and interesting uh case where you’ve got two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. It is. And uh anyway that’s just an in observation but horizons are something that fascinate me for a long time as a vision scientist because when we see a horizon our visual uh angle widens.","offset":3017,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: That’s cool.","offset":3037,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We become more parasympathetic. There’s a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system so we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel we it’s quite the opposite.","offset":3038,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Nice.","offset":3051,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I feel like there’s something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, I’m thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees or hike and then the horizon opens up. Yeah. There’s this transformation of visual space and those moments at least for me are the moments. Like I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time like “this is amazing” but there’s something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness.","offset":3052,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It could be brought to the lab but do you think that’s what’s going on in in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Right? Do people work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon do they attenuate? They’re like “oh, yeah, like another horizon.”","offset":3081,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I don’t know, you know, working with rangers right now and they I think I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated but I think they’re still finding it in subtler ways. Yeah, that’s really interesting and, you know, it’s interesting I was uh I’ve been privileged to know Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 and Soul.","offset":3092,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You played a big role in that.","offset":3118,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know in one of our conversations I was like “tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children’s films, animated films” and he described first just what you said like, you know, the film is narrow like a certain kind of attention, you know sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then boom it comes it suddenly you see the vastness of something and it’s true, it is awe inspiring.","offset":3120,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: When you think about it neuroscientifically as a very basic form of awe is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception and then it becomes metaphorical, right? It’s like “god I’m thinking about” like I love one of the wonders of life that uh that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies and very often people will be like “god I’ve been working so hard at this, you know working on a a paper, something in technology or some part of my life” and then you suddenly realize it’s part of something large, right?","offset":3148,"duration":32},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall, in the book in the chapter on musical awe said, “you know” she’s a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony said, “you know I practice for five hours a day, it’s hard man and it’s small and narrow and where’s my finger? and then when I’m on stage and I and I feel the notes go out into this space”, the vastness you’re talking about, “I feel like I’m part of history”, right? And I tear up and cry.","offset":3180,"duration":30},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Um so I think your I think I you gotta send me those papers Andrew because I think it’s fundamental which is from small to vast. And in fact we did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco Brain Health, old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things, you know. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain uh over eight weeks and now we’re finding six years later better brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it.","offset":3210,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew: And I think it was just you know the I just got the adrenaline back. And there's a little bit of you don't know what it is going to happen and it feels a little dangerous, but it's mostly benevolent and um it's an irreplaceable feeling and and I think about it sometimes uh I think about a lot of the time.","offset":3231,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, and you know, thank you. And I, you know, when I was writing this book on awe, some forms of awe, you know there are eight wonders that give us awe, you know, some are you kind of understand them, nature's pretty straightforward, spirituality, meditation, you know. And music and your description of it exactly exactly captures how rich it is and complicated.","offset":3251,"duration":23},{"text":"Dacher: Which is there is something about that sound and the acoustic patterns that come through your eardrums and head into your auditory cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people and insta-friends, like you said, for life. You know, brothers and sisters almost that and you're like this is what life's about.","offset":3274,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: And Susanne Langer, a philosopher, really got it right. She's like music is this tonal language of emotion and identity. And awe in music, very fitting with our conversation, is when those sounds come into you, move you, and connect you to something that is what you care about in life. You know, I remember I grew up I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s and there was more music there than I almost anywhere in human history.","offset":3299,"duration":34},{"text":"Dacher: You know, from you know, the Mamas & the Papas and Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison was living there.","offset":3333,"duration":6},{"text":"Andrew: Jim Morrison was out there.","offset":3339,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: And the Doors, and the you know, Bob Dylan was passing through, and the Birds, it's a joke, you know. It was everywhere.","offset":3340,"duration":6},{"text":"Andrew: That's wild just to think about how much incredible music was being created.","offset":3346,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher: Oh man, you know, the Beach Boys were, you know, at I mean weren't Fleetwood Mac back in Topanga. Yeah. I mean it was like and I was eight and nine and just a you know, to grow up on Bob Dylan. And when I saw the recent film with Timothée Chalamet, I start crying, you know I was just like this is life, you know.","offset":3351,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, and so that's why we study awe, you know. It it and and you know music is one of our great technologies. Uh, there's now research showing it's good for chronic pain. I think it's a frontier in healthcare and, you know, just giving people contemplative meditative approaches to music and and awe is part of the answer.","offset":3371,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: And you and I shared yet another thing, Andrew. You know, when I uh grew up in the foothills of the Sierras as a teenager, Ted Nugent and you know this poor white you know area, Ted Nugent, AC/DC, and that's all fine. And when I first heard the Sex Pistols in I was lucky to be in England when Never Mind the Bollocks came out and I was in a working class fighting town and I heard that.","offset":3393,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher: I was like that's it. And then that led me to Iggy Pop, who's one of my moral heroes. So you know, um...","offset":3422,"duration":7},{"text":"Andrew: Amazing. Who's really into Qigong apparently. I heard him like years ago on the radio and and someone was asking him like how does he stay in such good shape and he's just does tons of Qigong breathing.","offset":3429,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":3439,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Wild, wild, wild. You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't. But there's something that feels kind of um divorced from language about the experience that we're talking about even though there's lyrics tied in there. And what brings that to mind is there's a really good book, one that I like anyway, um called A Fighter's Heart by a guy named Sam Sheridan.","offset":3440,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew: His wife actually wrote that movie Monster um with Charlize Theron, I think is uh the actress that played her. And uh and I don't know Sam but but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms and he explores them all and um there's this great line in there.","offset":3464,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew: Because I've done a little bit of boxing um and sparred a bit. I don't recommend as a neuroscientist how can I recommend it, right?","offset":3480,"duration":9},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, what were you doing?","offset":3489,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: You get hit. Oh, I was and that was actually in my 30s. But anyway, I was working some stuff out. But uh do not recommend uh the sport yeah, the training yeah, but you don't want to get hit in the head. Not good for your brain whatsoever. But he talks about how um fighting with someone, sparring or a fighting with someone is uh he said it's like a it's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have because you're in this primitive non-language state.","offset":3490,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah. I mean he actually likens it to a one-night stand. He says something like, oh you know you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know but you you feel connected you know. So I don't know if that's the best certainly not the most politically correct uh way of put it.","offset":3515,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: Definitely.","offset":3531,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: But I understand what he's talking about, right? You're you're in this moment of you're both vulnerable. In the case of the fighting, you're both vulnerable, you're both trying to hurt each other, you're also obeying some rules, right? It's not not an anything goes.","offset":3532,"duration":14},{"text":"Andrew: And he talks about how it transcends language. And that creates a forever bond. And it's true, right? I didn't do a ton of sparring but you have a respect. Yep. You went through something hard together even if it's only three three-minute rounds. Like that's a it's real. But it's separate from language. And earlier we were talking about the exper- the experience of emotion as this kind of triad of the feeling, the motor component to it, and language, but I do think that maybe the language piece can go.","offset":3546,"duration":33},{"text":"Dacher: I'm with you in some sense. Darwin wrote about the motor components, got a lot of it right, William James was about the body, you know, and the physiology, and you know, language is what we rely on as social scientists, but it I think it's as William James said when he tried to describe his experience of transcendence uh when he took laughing gas and it led him down the path to understand spirituality.","offset":3579,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: He's like words are tattered fragments. They they barely touch the real thing. Um, yeah, and and I just want to dwell for a moment, you know, part of awe and I learned this like talking to veterans, you know, and I I did work with Stacy Bare and we did this Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers.","offset":3605,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: And he's one of my heroes in the book of getting helping tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature, you know. And these are guys who've lost limbs and they're rock climbing, you know, and it's just like like there's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life and there's violence and and there's a lot of horror, carnage, etc. but there's awe.","offset":3624,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: Uh, and I love your idea and and I think any teacher of the of the martial arts would say that's the point, is that we can transcend death or violence by martial arts, by performing them and uh and putting them into a contemplative form for the body.","offset":3643,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie, is Raging Bull, man, and Martin Scorsese, like Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray have these epic battles and they look at each other, you know, in one of the great scenes, and they're just like we're united. This is all we're way beyond the fight, you know.","offset":3665,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher: I think you're right. I think it's part of this transcendent moment that of people crashing into each other. Mosh pits. They are one of my favorite objects of study in awe. And mosh pits have a law, a set of laws to them.","offset":3686,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, people have studied like the physics or the physics.","offset":3704,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, no, it's like and you think you're crashing and you are, you're bruising yourself, you know, but there's something transcendent there about what we find.","offset":3706,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew: I could be wrong, but I think um Raging Bull, I think the the soundtrack was Clash inspired. Was it? There's something about it in the documentary which I highly recommend, uh called The Future Is Unwritten, which is the Joe Strummer thing where some there's some link up between The Clash. I think Scorsese says, you know, The Clash inspired the soundtrack to Raging Bull or something like that.","offset":3716,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: Really?","offset":3735,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Anyway, he's a big Clash fan, so um or yeah. So...","offset":3736,"duration":3},{"text":"Dacher: All right, Andrew, I get to ask you one more question.","offset":3739,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, yeah.","offset":3741,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: So why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you? One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice. So why Joe Strummer?","offset":3742,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew: Oof, man. All right, I'm going to try and keep this brief. Um, I mean just to give you a sense of how what an impact he's had on me. I mean, I've always worn these button-down black shirts even before I was public-facing, uh because I saw him do a show, um a Mescaleros show. I wasn't there, but he and by the way, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros I actually think is better than The Clash.","offset":3752,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: Wow.","offset":3778,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Clash was a short run. It was only five years. Yep. Only five years, pretty much, and then they're done. So it was 101'ers, Clash and then and then he came back with the Mescaleros and just incredible. I mean, they're masterpieces. Yep. Produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong here on Hellcat Records.","offset":3780,"duration":14},{"text":"Andrew: He went to a small label. Um, he also sang songs with Johnny Cash for with Rick Rubin. I actually know the story of that because I'm friends with Rick and I insisted on him telling me the story. So sometime I tell you that. But I mean masterpieces late in life. And there was a show that that Strummer played where he was wearing his black button-down soaking in sweat, like soaked in sweat.","offset":3794,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew: And he just wouldn't take the thing off. I think he might have rolled up like one cuff. And I was like that's punk as fuck. I was like that guy is so rad and he was in his he died at 50, we're the same I'm 50 now. He died at 50. I go see the mural of him right off um it's right off Tompkins Square Park uh in Alphabet City every time I'm in New York just go like see it. Where the aviator says future is unwritten. You can go there pay your respects.","offset":3816,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew: I've talked to Rick about this a lot. Like what was it about him? Because they were close friends. And I never met Strummer. But I think there's three reasons. One is um he had that Bob Dylan-like ability to write lyrics that you're not especially with Mescaleros where you're not really sure what the song's about, but it makes sense, not just because it's beautiful but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics are actually saying.","offset":3839,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: Beyond language. The theme we're talking.","offset":3865,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, like a great song um for instance would be like On the Road to Rock 'n' Roll. Like that could be about on being on tour or something, but it it transcends something obvious.","offset":3867,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: Nice.","offset":3877,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: The other thing is is the way he he uh used his breath was um like there was a his intonation is like unparalleled. Yep. And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand, because during the summer I go hang out with Rick whenever I can. And winter too. Um, and we watch documentaries, including Clash documentaries.","offset":3878,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew: And I asked him I was like what was it? Like why does he have this thing? Because he said these incredible things, you know. He would say things like, you know, you got to bring humanity back into the center of the and those are really beautiful quotes. But like a lot of people give beautiful quotes.","offset":3900,"duration":15},{"text":"Andrew: And Rick in very Rick Rubin style said, everything he said he brought his whole life experience into those statements. And I was like just the statements like the quotes, you know like the you know we got to bring the humanity back into the the and he goes no everything he said. It was like you got the sense that he was bringing all of himself to it even if he was being kind of quiet.","offset":3915,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: That's cool.","offset":3939,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: And I go, okay, so this is clearly on a plane of understanding that I can't put language to, right? What does that even mean? That's like half the things Rick says, it's like a riddle mixed up in a poem, you know put out there as you know as a as like a as a principle and you're just like what the hell's that mean? But it feels true.","offset":3940,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: And I think that, you know, and and Rick's superpower,","offset":3958,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":3959,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: is that Rick knows what a true feeling feels like. Yeah. And he knows what a false feeling feels like. And he's only interested in truths, period.","offset":3960,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher: And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of is exactly that. It's like there are all these layers to meaning and representation and, you know, and we try to figure out true moments of awe with all of our measures and and it is this like it's all coming together as a uh a package that tells us it's happened.","offset":3973,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew: So we can think about things that promote awe, the awe walk, going small to large aperture maybe back again. Like I guess we shouldn't assume that it's unidirectional. You know, coming back into our home after something big is there's nothing like that, right?","offset":3992,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher: Ah!","offset":4006,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: The dog, the kids, the the spouse, the whatever, you know, like the those little thing, the plants even you know the the the you know, so it runs both ways. It's no fun, but we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe. Because as I step back from what we're talking about today and I think okay language, it can be part of it but it can also in molecular biology or genetics we call it a dominant negative.","offset":4007,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew: It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions. A ton of stuff. And there's a joke around molecular labs and neuroscience labs that you'd be like that person's a dominant negative, you know. I now have a new phrase I can use. Yeah, yeah, you don't want to be called a dominant negative. Um, I call people that in my head a lot online.","offset":4031,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew: I go, oh man that person's a dominant negative, they're not contributing to the greater good, they're just like so there's, you know, language can be that, um or be neutral or be positive but can definitely be that. And then there's something about being over-identified with self.","offset":4048,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew: You know, I so on the recommendation of Tim Armstrong, someone you wouldn't associate with the Grateful Dead, he was like, \"You gotta listen to the Grateful Dead!\" and I was like, what? This is Tim, the Tim Armstrong Transplants, Rancid, Operation Ivy, telling me I should listen to the Grateful Dead. He's big great he's a huge music fan of all sorts of things.","offset":4068,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: I said why? And he said uh he said, \"They're punk rockers.\" And I said how what are you talking about? And he said he said, \"Yeah they they played a different show every night.\" That's how they're I'm not going to keep doing his I can do a pretty decent Tim for those...","offset":4086,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: Nice.","offset":4102,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: uh but apparently they're the the people that followed them, that was a big part of it. It was all all new, right? Every show was unique. Started getting really into listening to the Grateful Dead in the last couple years and then I started listening to documentaries, biographies of them. And there's this amazing moment in one of them, I can't remember which where somebody says what killed it?","offset":4103,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew: What killed the collective of music? Like that that feeling? And uh the answer someone gave was cocaine. And then the question was why cocaine? Yep. And someone said because cocaine's all about me. It's the me drug. So I was like, whoa, I'm a neuroscientist so I can tack that to you're talking about dopamine and adrenaline. And it's when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated that's a very I mean amphetamines especially but it it becomes a me thing.","offset":4131,"duration":35},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, that's true.","offset":4166,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Every idea that's mine is the thing that needs to happen. It's the important thing. If not out there, it needs to hap- like that's the only thing that matters. Very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics, very different than just the sober experience where it's kind of a downer, but then the non-intoxicated experience of just being with the music no substances.","offset":4167,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew: So I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states and but more broadly how me-ness self-interested states are a dominant negative for awe.","offset":4187,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher: That was the best entrance into that question I've ever encountered. You know, it's amazing Andrew. You know, I grew up for three years formative years in Laurel Canyon '68 to '70 and then we moved to the foothills of the Sierras in Northern California and it was peak Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell and the Birds and the Beach Boys and you know, it's just","offset":4198,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew: Jealous. Envious in a positive way.","offset":4219,"duration":2},{"text":"Dacher: When my brother passed away and he was my brother of awe, you know 14 months younger and I was in this reflective period, I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon and they made the same point which is kind of things shifted after we, you know, in the early '70s. And the historian said it's cocaine.","offset":4221,"duration":21},{"text":"Dacher: That it moved from, you know, marijuana and mushrooms and psychedelics a bit but really, you know, people playing music, you know, Joni Mitchell or Graham Nash or whomever it is. And then suddenly cocaine comes and the the whole spirit changed.","offset":4242,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah, I think the great enemy of awe is me-ness is what Ralph Waldo Emerson who was one of our great writers of awe, you know, he has this moment out in nature cold day in Massachusetts sees this forest and he you know he's like standing on the bare ground my head bathed by blithe air and uplifted into infinite space.","offset":4257,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: And there's that uplift that you described earlier of awe. All mean egotism vanishes. And that's all, you know. Awe quiets the self. And when you look at where we are, you know, Jean Twenge, you know, longitudinal data, we're more self-focused, you know.","offset":4279,"duration":23},{"text":"Dacher: We're taking a quarter of the pictures that we take are of the self. It's preposterous! It's pretty crazy. It's half of the photos we take are of the self or the self with another person or another thing. It's perverse, you know. Uh, the world has become more narcissistic. We're led by narcissists.","offset":4302,"duration":19},{"text":"Dacher: It's been, you know, it's just taken as a default and it's not a default. It's a it's a corruption of of our minds. Because the mind, as you described earlier, is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact, at seeing their beauty, at hearing their words, at looking at collectives, discerning patterns of nature, collectives, and all of that works against awe, right?","offset":4321,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: That you know, if I am focused on myself I'll feel less awe, if I am worried about my striving in society or my bottom line in my bank account, you know, or thinking about money, it countervails awe. So yeah, I I think, you know, that's why awe's important for our times. We are in this for various reasons, this period of too much self-focus.","offset":4346,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher: Uh, it's costing young people, it makes them anxious, you know, and they got to they got to they got to go dance, they got to hear some music, they got to share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is, you know, and just to get out of the self.","offset":4374,"duration":14},{"text":"Andrew: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives insights into your heart health, hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans.","offset":4388,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew: Function not only provides testing of over 160 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, it also analyzes these results and provides recommendations for improving your health from top doctors. For example, in a recent test with Function, I learned that some of my blood lipids were slightly out of range. As a result, I decided to start supplementing with nattokinase, which can naturally help reduce LDL cholesterol, and it did.","offset":4409,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew: In a follow-up test, I could confirm that this strategy worked, my blood lipids are now back where I want them in range. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, it's always been overly complicated and expensive. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code Huberman for a $50 credit towards your membership.","offset":4432,"duration":27},{"text":"Andrew: The example you gave of sports earlier I think is is an important one um only because I think some people not me, but some people will all right I don't really want to go camping or backpacking. I do. I spend as much time in Yosemite as I can. The dancing, concert, you you maybe that's not for them.","offset":4459,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew: I do think I'm not a big professional sports fan. Um, I like a few things, but but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on like when I see a game, one of our members of our podcast team that's not here today is like just obsessively excited about professional football and uh Seattle Seahawks.","offset":4476,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew: So this was a big year for him. And I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl that it's not just about his relationship to his team and it's about it's about being a kid and and everyone else there in a Seahawks jersey is like they have to they must feel a connection because they presumably the super fans know that the other super fans know the history, they know how important this is, they know all the trials and tribulations of the team and on and on.","offset":4496,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew: And so it's um gosh, it's so different. I'm just realized like it's the it's the furthest thing from like doing a PhD in the sciences. The folks doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun, it's a hell of a lot of work. And there's nothing else quite like it. I it's irreplaceable, I wouldn't redo it for in any other way. But it is a very like you're it's a very solitary thing.","offset":4526,"duration":22},{"text":"Dacher: It is.","offset":4548,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Like you don't even cross you cross finish line, your advisor's there, your family comes but it's like it is a tunnel like this big. Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is you're going through that tunnel with you know millions of people.","offset":4549,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: One of the joys of awe science, you know, we gathered stories of awe from 26 countries. And it's one of my favorite parts of this research. And this is like India and Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico and Japan and Korea and South Korea and Russia. And we everybody.","offset":4565,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: We brought them in, got these stories and you know like what is vast and mysterious? What gives you goosebumps? What's amazing or awesome to you? And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina, they're going to write about so they they're going to tell you about football, you know.","offset":4581,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: And, you know, when you get stories from parts of the United States they're going to talk about you know American football and baseball. You get stories from Boston it's there's going to be a Red Sox story.","offset":4597,"duration":12},{"text":"Dacher: And we have not studied sports in my emotion science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes. They're picked last in grammar school. They're grouchy about sports. And yet it's super emotional.","offset":4609,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher: And I will tell you a story that has science and uh personal wisdom. Uh, as I I gathered these stories like God, you know, part of collective effervescence just like Taylor Swift or being in a punk mosh pit is also sports. And and just like uh it is awesome to follow a sports team and be there live.","offset":4622,"duration":26},{"text":"Dacher: And there's this great obscure sociology paper that said being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion. Because you have your rituals, they have these towels they they sing around, you think of yourself as the Steeler nation, they talk about godlike experiences on the field, they have these spiritual moments where in freezing days they'll take off their clothes and cheer and cry together.","offset":4648,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: Um, and I was teaching this recently and there were two Steeler fans in the audience. And they were like that's exactly it. But I'll tell you more like everywhere you go if you're a fan a Steeler fan there are Steeler bars that you can go to.","offset":4673,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: And when the Steelers play they're going to be Steelers fans and if you're a kid and the Steelers lose somebody who's old will tell you I remember when we lost in 1983 and we'll recover we'll you know have this expansion of time. It was so rich to me, you know.","offset":4689,"duration":14},{"text":"Dacher: It's like we love sports, you know. Sports the Olympics are old, they're 3,000 years old. The ball court games in the Maya you know in the Mayan traditions are were amazing ways to gather community and and become collective, right? So, you know, uh it was really eye-opening for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports.","offset":4703,"duration":25},{"text":"Dacher: And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr, who was coaching the Warriors at the time. He's a righteous guy, you know. Uh, he is a person of truth and just getting his sense of like how awesome it is to I mean for him to coach a game and the Warriors were in this amazing period and look up into the stands and 10,000 people are dancing because of your coaching, you know, I was like that's pretty good.","offset":4728,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, he's really tapped in, isn't he? He's a meditator and wildlife experience and...","offset":4756,"duration":7},{"text":"Dacher: And trauma early, you know, his dad losing his dad.","offset":4763,"duration":4},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah.","offset":4767,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: And and that orienting him to what really matters.","offset":4768,"duration":3},{"text":"Andrew: I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe, but I'm also thinking about solutions.","offset":4771,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":4776,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: You know, it's springing to mind that you know, uh it's it's funny sometimes I get tacked to like ice baths for some Well, folks, that was Wim, right? I mean, that was Wim. I mean, sure, I've done some cold plunges, I like I do the cold.","offset":4777,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: I gotta do them. It sounds good.","offset":4787,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew: Yeah, it's fun. I mean, you know, it it's psychologically painful and you feel better afterwards and um it'll make you it'll make anyone mentally stronger because cold is a universal stressor. Um, but you know, it it gets kind of a bad rap because mostly because people don't like doing it. Everyone loves the sauna. It's kind of funny.","offset":4789,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: Everyone's cool with sauna. And the Finns love the sauna, and it's a social thing for them. And one thing that I think has been overlooked and it just sprang to mind now. Um, so I overlooked it as well is that you know there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people, but that we can also do on our own and when we do them on our own we know other people are doing it on their own too.","offset":4807,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew: And so it's it's kind of a it's a different version of what we've been talking about. And you know, the quote-unquote health and wellness community they take some heat like people oh it's all about supplements, all about cold plunges, you know and I've got a like a like a particular finger I hold up when I hear that. But it's not about that.","offset":4830,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew: There's this deeper layer that's much more important that's formed over the last I would say 5 to 10 years, because it used to be meditation, breathwork, Esalen, great love Esalen, like amazing but incredible place.","offset":4848,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher: Historic.","offset":4859,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Historic and many important things actually happened there that people don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics and world peace that maybe some","offset":4860,"duration":8},{"text":"Dacher: Oh my god, yeah! You brought the Russians in there for instance.","offset":4868,"duration":6},{"text":"Andrew: But you know so it used to be these isolated pockets, but now, you know, people get together to sauna, people get together to do breathwork, people get together to cold plunge. And of course for thousands of years humans have been doing this. This is not a new thing. And people look at that and they go this is wacky or it's about the marketing of this.","offset":4874,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew: Actually, I I think that there's a connection that's formed among people who want to take good care of their health, they want to have some control over their state, um because otherwise the world will take control of it for you. Yep. And meditating is a very solitary experience for most people. So there's something pretty nice about going to a banya. I love banyas, Russian banyas, and then also doing the sauna on your own or cold plunge on your own.","offset":4891,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew: And I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media. So from now on when I see people doing things that I go oh cool like I like a bit of that I don't maybe do it every day or I do that every day too get see my morning sunlight. The notion that there's a community being built. That was the original intention of social media.","offset":4916,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew: And so I think social media can have this dominant negative effect on awe and day-to-day experience. So a question is are there ways? Surely there are, but how how could we build more of a sense of of like this communal feeling leveraging what people are already doing? They're already on their phones and scrolling. Hopefully they're also doing things to benefit their health. To make them feel less isolated because as Jonathan Haidt and others have pointed out quite correctly, it can really fracture us into the the the me, the ego version where it's but it's kind of the perfect venue to connect people also.","offset":4932,"duration":39},{"text":"Dacher: It is. I agree.","offset":4971,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: So I don't expect you to come up with any answers right on the on the fly, but I feel like it's not going anywhere. So how how could we build or glean a more sense of a community through things that we're doing actually doing in our daily lives? Is I think a question that's worth exploring.","offset":4972,"duration":16},{"text":"Dacher: Profoundly important. You know, um the you know and the preceding question is like what are the enemies of awe? What gets in the way or the the barriers? And and you just nailed a couple is you know online life. You know and I think Jonathan Haidt is right that it's not only anxiety-producing but we don't think about the opportunity costs of like it deprives me of awe, you know.","offset":4988,"duration":27},{"text":"Dacher: And in our study of 2,600 people around the world of what makes them feel awe, no one ever said being on Meta or Facebook or, you know, or uh, you know, or Instagram. There are a couple reason worries I have about online life and I'm kind of working on this now. You know, and one is is the content itself, which is, you know, it's been algorithmically designed.","offset":5015,"duration":28},{"text":"Dacher: I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms I was advising there were set in place of like making people hate each other and not demonstrate all of our all the wonderful things about human beings, which are um ample. And then online life disrupts sharing and the technologies of today have disrupted sharing. So we don't share music like we used to share. We used to listen to music together.","offset":5043,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: That's down. Going to movies is down 40%, right? That used to be a very important collective cultural experience. Did you see the latest Scorsese or Pixar or whatever? Now it's streaming, right? So I really worry about that. And I think the next challenge in in the technological world in the new the social media and the platforms is is like you said, how do you enable the sharing of experience? Um, you are absolutely right.","offset":5067,"duration":31},{"text":"Dacher: A lot of what we do for our bodies and the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it. where suddenly you're not, you know, meditating and breathing but you're also sharing your mind and your experience. You're not, you know, listening to music you're sharing an understanding of the music together and its cultural history.","offset":5098,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: One of my favorite examples is farmers' markets. They were nonexistent in the '90s, right? And they used to be very common in American culture and now there are 9,000 farmers' markets growing. And yeah, people go to buy kale and get the honey and you know the fresh bread or whatever, but they're also going because it's community. It's profound community. Uh, and we derive a lot of benefits from that. Profound benefits. 10 years of life expectancy, community.","offset":5122,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew: 10 years?","offset":5151,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: 10 years.","offset":5152,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: My goodness! There's so much obsession these days around what sport allows you to live the longest? Turns out it's like pole vaulting which most people aren't going to do. Um, sprinting, gymnastics. Stuff that involves a lot of jumping and landing.","offset":5153,"duration":11},{"text":"Dacher: Is that right? Really?","offset":5164,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: And and fast twitch activity. Yeah. I mean there are a bunch of other features there about like who's biased to go into those sports and whatnot. But I mean I think it's in keeping with this idea that like getting your heart rate way way up and moving quickly as as quickly as you safely can like once a week at something is probably a good idea.","offset":5165,"duration":15},{"text":"Dacher: Cool.","offset":5180,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: But the greatest benefit seen there is something like five to eight years. So you're talking about a 10-year benefit?","offset":5181,"duration":6},{"text":"Dacher: 10 years. And that's a meta-analysis of 350,000 participants. So that's that you can go to the bank with that. Like social community very good for the body. I think it's the greatest challenge of our our social media and our our platforms. And I've advised at Facebook 2010 to 2015, Google, Pinterest, a little bit of Apple, and I keep telling them like, you know, this is the singular challenge.","offset":5187,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: And it's so it's hard. It's, you know, a technologies are asynchronous. You know, \"Hey I send you a text\" and 18 hours later I hear from you. You're not making eye contact. The visual connection is degraded. You know, Steve Pinker observed rightly so, like when I'm on Zoom I have to look at the down to see the camera or whatever or I look at the screen, so my eye contact is going down.","offset":5211,"duration":24},{"text":"Dacher: I'm not making eye contact like we are. It's just the technology works against it. And I think it's the hard problem of the social media platforms is can they do what you're aspirationally asking for which is like get us to feel connected? Um, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's original statement about Facebook was open and connected. Um, and I think they failed. And I think we got to we it's it's the challenge of our times.","offset":5235,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew: I know Mark a bit and I think I know you know I trust he wants that.","offset":5269,"duration":5},{"text":"Dacher: I know.","offset":5274,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: I really do. I know some people will will push back on that statement, but I actually know that he wants that. And I know some of the folks in the leadership at Instagram they want that. Like these people actually have very healthy personal lives. They understand the value of connection both at the level of the family, friendships, but also um at large. They they want that.","offset":5275,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew: I think that maybe I'm being optimistic here, but maybe AI will offer an opportunity for that as opposed to divorcing us from um gathering and and seeing facial expressions and hearing of voices together or observing other things. You know, the I do think that right now the way that most social media experiences land is the exact opposite of awe.","offset":5300,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew: I will say that. Because and I can say that with a fair degree of certainty because I spend a good amount of time on social media teaching, learning, and looking for entertainment, trying not to get uh, you know rage-baited or numbing out. Those are the two things I look out for. Rage-baiting and numbing out.","offset":5325,"duration":13},{"text":"Dacher: Well put.","offset":5338,"duration":4},{"text":"Andrew: There's a version of social media that's happening right now where we're going further and further into our silos. Yep. But I don't think it has to be that. Not at all. I don't. I think it could be really leveraged to connect people.","offset":5342,"duration":9},{"text":"Dacher: You know, when I started advising at Facebook 2010 to 20 it was like Arab Spring and democracy was spreading and and in many ways we've had this great democratization of things of people sharing music, you know, instantaneously I can hear music from any part of the world, uh which you know that's profound and visual art and and knowledge and podcasts.","offset":5351,"duration":20},{"text":"Dacher: And we've got to be nuanced about this. But we do need, you know, to think intentionally about design, you know. And that, you know, I really worry about the privileging of hate I forgot what you called it but that has been privileged. Uh, and that's not human nature. We we aren't all trolls and, you know, tracking people.","offset":5371,"duration":29},{"text":"Dacher: Video title: Andrew: What an amazing talk.","offset":5400,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Thanks.","offset":5401,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: This really touched me and helped me think about some of the more practical ways of doing this. I really do hope that we can build some of those pathways through all this technology as opposed to getting more fractured.","offset":5402,"duration":10},{"text":"Dacher: Me too.","offset":5412,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Thank you for coming today.","offset":5413,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: It's an honor. Thank you.","offset":5414,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Appreciate it.","offset":5415,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Yeah.","offset":5416,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew: Joe Strummer would be proud.","offset":5417,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher: Amen.","offset":5418,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I've had this thought uh that the way social media is now...","offset":5420,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I sometimes do the test of myself. I go, \"Okay, I spent I don't know how much time on social media yesterday, but do I remember anything specific?\"","offset":5454,"duration":20},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: And so that's scary.","offset":5474,"duration":49},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: And I do think that the people who built it want it to be impactful on the day-to-day uh scale, but also...","offset":5523,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Well, you know, one of the things I'm really interested in right now, Andrew, is is awe design, right? And, you know, I'm working with Gehl Architects in Copenhagen. Like, how do you design cities for more awe? It's not hard, and it's good for people, right? A little bit of music, a little bit of green space, a little bit of art, get people looking at each other and talking and buzzing, right? Easy to do.","offset":5542,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I think you've just laid out, you know, and someone could write a manifesto, like, maybe my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe. It's small, awe's vast. It's sped up, awe slows things down. It has a fragmentation to it, awe integrates, right? It's about micro-things, awe's about systems. Like, when you feel awe towards music, it's like, \"I get it all here, right now.\" Its content is is not inspiring very often. And it could all be.","offset":5566,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Sometimes it is. I I think that that the space-time aperture that we talked about before, I think the problem with social media is actually its power to bring the whole space-time into an aperture this big. I actually think, crazy hypothesis, happy to be wrong, I actually think the whole problem with it has to do with the fact that it brings long time scales, past, present, and future, different aper - different frame rates into one real-world visual aperture. Because when I haven't been to the Sphere in Las Vegas, but friends of mine who are musicians who love live music, who are producers who love live music, tell me it is incredible.","offset":5602,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, it should and and I think and we have to, you know, we just have to take a step back and these conversations, right? There's, you know, there's new work out about AI helping medical doctors and it's, you know, and the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco's like, \"It's like having the best brain trust about medicine right with you all the time.\" Who wouldn't want that, you know? And I think let's remember that. And yeah, I think that's the challenge, is to have these AI and the devices that it is manifest on get us to what's awesome. And uh, we'll see, you know, I hope so.","offset":5662,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PFASs, or \"forever chemicals,\" are still found in 80% of non-stick pans, as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products. As I've discussed before on this podcast, these PFASs, or forever chemicals, like Teflon, have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems. So it's very important to avoid them.","offset":5696,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: This is why I'm a huge fan of Our Place. Our Place products are made with the highest quality materials and are all PFAS and toxin-free. I particularly love their Titanium Always Pan Pro. It's the first non-stick pan made with zero chemicals and zero coating. Instead, it uses pure titanium. That means it has no harmful forever chemicals and it does not degrade or lose its non-stick effect over time. I cook my eggs in my Titanium Always Pan Pro almost every morning. The design allows for the eggs to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan.","offset":5730,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Right now Our Place is having their biggest sale of the season. You can save up to 40% sitewide, now through April 12th. Just head to fromourplace.com/huberman. Again, that's fromourplace.com/huberman to save up to 40%.","offset":5758,"duration":20},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Can we talk about embarrassment?","offset":5778,"duration":27},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I know. Well, you know, it it all begins really in my - like, when I started scientifically to depart from the Ekman canon, if you will, of those six emotions we talked about earlier. And I was doing a project in his lab and we were startling people and studying the startle response. A seven-muscle movement motor pattern built into the nervous system. And I noticed people got embarrassed after they were startled unexpectedly, you know, you'd blast 'em with a noise out of the blue in the lab and they'd be like, \"Whoa, I think I spit and, you know, peed my pants,\" or whatever. They'd show this response.","offset":5805,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I took it to Ekman and it's the blush, and people avert their gaze and they look away and they hide their face, you know? And he's like, \"That's a motor pattern of emotion, you should go study it.\" And I did. And and then I started to notice, and there's a really rich literature on that, that and Darwin wrote about this, that a person's embarrassment is a sign of their commitment to the collective, right? Like, man, you know, I called you by the wrong name, or I, you know, I farted in the yoga class, or whatever it is, and I'm embarrassed, like, \"I'm sorry, man,\" you know, \"I apologize.\"","offset":5843,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: That really matters. And when you see people get embarrassed, you like them more and you trust them more and you give resources to them and you think they're a good group member. And then I was like, man, you know, like I've played a lot of pickup basketball in my life, thousands of games, and you're banging into - and there's just a lot of teasing and taunting, and you know, people I admire, you know, great athletes tease and taunt, you know, it's just part of what we do when we're banging into each other.","offset":5876,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I started to put it together, like, you know, the right kind of teasing within a collective, you're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group, right? And then the wrong kind of teasing, which we documented in our lab's, like, that's bullying and harassment and we can pinpoint, like, \"That's inappropriate,\" you know? You're trying to you're not keeping people in the group, you're excluding them or humiliating them.","offset":5906,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: So we did this study, was one of my first studies, we brought four fraternity - we brought groups of fraternity - four fraternity guys in each interaction uh from this fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin. And we gave them each nicknames, or we gave them each initials, and we had them make up nicknames based on the initials. So two two letters of a nick - were \"A.D.\" And I'm not sure I can say what the nicknames were like, but it, you know, \"Another Drunk,\" and it gets pretty profane.","offset":5930,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And so we let 'em tease each other. And they start teasing each other and they are really, like, these young men coming out of a fraternity house teasing each other. There are funny stories, people got embarrassed. Uh the the stories and the teasing was kind of about, like, \"I'm gonna accuse you of something that you shouldn't do in this group,\" right? Like pass out drunk naked, you know, in the streets of Wisconsin. \"Don't do that,\" right?","offset":5967,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And then they get embarrassed and they say, \"I'm not gonna do that.\" And what we found is the more that they got embarrassed, the better they liked each other, because it's turning into this motor pattern of, like, \"Wow, I'm showing you that I care about what you're accusing me of and I'll get embarrassed, you see that in me, we become closer.\" The the guys who were better teasers and that were more playful and funny and made people aware of the norms that matter to the group but not really humiliate people, those guys were more popular in the group.","offset":5996,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And that's been replicated, right? Just storytelling and and ribbing each other and and it was part of healthy group functioning is just embarrassing each other. You think about roasts, you know, at the end of your career, you're gonna get that someone's gonna talk about your career, you're gonna get hammered. And it's wonderful.","offset":6033,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I bet. I mean, I grew up in a big big packs of boys, I mean on my street growing up...","offset":6085,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Uh a former guest on this podcast who's a psychiatrist who's also very versed in Eastern philosophy, Dr. K, as they call him, um said that embarrassment is important because it also signals that you're not a creep. Especially, he was referring to heterosexual relationships where, you know, a guy says something trying to be uh, you know, trying to flirt basically or pick up on someone, and then uh the woman says something back and he, like, gets embarrassed, he realizes, like, he said the wrong thing. If he doesn't show embarrassment, he's creepy. If he does, it verifies that he has a certain degree of empathy and self-reflection. No, so that was his point, but it it feels relevant here. So...","offset":6111,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And he's right. I mean, you know, uh Darwin early on wrote about the blush being a sign of your healthy character, your moral virtue almost. And in non-human species, the facial reddening is associated with physical robustness and then in humans we think of it as moral robustness like, \"Yeah, I care about stuff.\" We did work early on, Bob Knight at Berkeley, orbital frontal patients. The orbital frontal cortex is in part where your ethical consideration takes place. And if you have damage to that region of the brain through brain trauma - you fall off a motorcycle or, you know, fall off a ladder - you don't show embarrassment where you should. And they feel creepy, if you will, or just like, \"Hey, they're not playing by the rules.\" So it's a very subtle thing. Erving Goffman wrote a lot about it, the great sociologist, like, our embarrassment is telling people like, \"I know what the rules are and I care about them, I'm committed to them.\" So your psychiatrist friend is right.","offset":6151,"duration":63},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Along the lines of of teasing, um uh someone I'm I'm proud to call a friend who's also public facing uh Jocko Willink, who's also it turns out one of our - were friends for a bunch of reasons but one of them is that he grew up really into East Coast hardcore music. Not not a genre I I gravitated towards, but there's some marginal overlap um with the types of music um I'm into. We've gone to shows together and um, he put something up, you know, every once in a while on social media somebody posts something that that really lands, Naval or or Jocko and he's a Jocko's a man of few words, so I'm gonna put more words to it than than he was able to.","offset":6214,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Um but the quote was something like, um \"You know, if you want to understand,\" and he's a former Navy SEAL, SEAL team operator most people know know that, but \"If you want to understand uh males in groups and healthy uh masculine friendship, guys are going to tease each other relentlessly in front of each other, but they'll never tease behind somebody's back and they'll back the other person who they were just teasing in person against the rest,\" you know, \"They'll buffer them against any kind of criticism.\" So it's a very interesting um kind of uh contrast there that I think is true. Like, you you know, it's not like you tease your friend behind his back. It's the teasing to his face that actually builds the bond.","offset":6254,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, well put.","offset":6299,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: We documented that in the fraternity study, that, you know, when you when you tease somebody and you're like, \"Hey man, do you see this guy's dance moves?\" or \"You see this guy shoot free throw,\" whatever it is, you're just making light of human foible and and all the funny things that we do. And there's there's there's just this really subtle repair work where they're saying like, \"I'm teasing you, but I know you got it,\" you know, \"And I'll support you.\" And I agree, I think that, you know, part of what teasing does is it says like, \"What do we as a collective really care about?\" And let's surface those norms in a lighthearted way and we know 'em together. And and if you make mistakes, you should be apologetic about it, but part of it also is just uh this sort of \"I got your back\" repair work that they did. Um and it's profound.","offset":6335,"duration":51},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: It, you know, was interesting. I was kind of this shy kid and I was very small growing up and kind of the teasing often crossed lines in high school, just, you know, bullying and so forth. And then I started to play basketball and, you know, um and I realized, like, a lot of it's just just men making sure they know the rules of the game, you know, and showing also in those moments of the joys of laughing together like, \"I support you, I'm with you,\" right? Uh what a sophisticated thing to do um compared to the alternatives.","offset":6386,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I have a sister, so I was always struck by the brothers in my neighborhood. Yeah, there were two in particular, like, I would hear screaming outside, go outside, it was an older brother, his name was Peter, holding Michael's face in the sprinklers. His brother's just crying and crying, screaming, I mean relentless older brother torture. Some people hear this and probably be like, \"Oh, call the cops,\" you know, and I don't know what the reaction is nowadays, I'll try not to be genera - generationally biased, I don't know. Yeah, he was he was abusing his younger brother. And but if anyone said or tried to do anything to either one of them, they would immediately pair up and fight anyone. It was interesting, right? Uh for a guy who had an older sister, was a very different experience, right? I mean, she had her own form of older sister kind of hazing um to her younger brother.","offset":6424,"duration":49},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But there really does seem to be something critical about kind of defining the relationship with people one-on-one, in groups, versus when there's an outside threat. And and not that we want outside threat, but as long as we're talking about the sort of...I don't want to say disintegration, that's too pessimistic. The sort of gradual erosion of this collective feeling, is there less just kind of grouping up together and doing things?","offset":6473,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, you know, I um 10 years ago, uh 15 years ago, 10 years ago, uh first there was the science of loneliness and isolation, John Cacioppo uh and then those who followed, like, \"Whoa, we are fragmenting.\" And we spend much too much time alone, isolated. And then COVID hit, lockdown, etc. And our Surgeon General, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy got it right, like, it's an epidemic of loneliness. And I as a social psychologist, you know, interested in these social emotions am like, you know, you just look at the basic raw facts, like, picnics are down by half. We don't go to movies like we used to. We don't um we don't listen to music together. We don't...30 the estimate is that 30% of meals in the United States people eat them by themselves, you know? I eat a lot of my meals by myself. Uh we go on walks by ourselves, we don't go to church, church is way down. Um so the kind of the broad sociological trends are alarming on that fragmentation.","offset":6503,"duration":72},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: But I think the young generation is putting it back together in really interesting ways. You know, we know from survey data that 25-year-olds, 30-year-olds are really interested in game nights, you know, those are coming back. They're interested in living together, cooperative living. They're cooking more with each other. Value-wise they care more about community than my generation. I was the great explosion of individualism and they're kind of like, \"You know, if I if I choose a job, I want to make sure I'm working with other people I like.\" I didn't even I didn't think about that. I don't know if you, you know...uh so I think it's coming back.","offset":6575,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And and I love the signs of, you know, festivals are reappearing now, the farmer's market that I've talked about, the, you know, the dance groups that are now returning, contact dance. I see, I mean these yoga studios, one out of eight Americans does yoga. You know, I do yoga two to three times a week.","offset":6614,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Also 15 years ago, no one would have predicted that the single we're being told that one of the single most important health interventions that women and men should do is, like, lift weights. The only people lifted weights when I was growing up were bodybuilders and preseason football players.","offset":6643,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I think Vivek Murthy in particular, who I deeply admire and have worked with a bit, you know, he he got our health world - think about it. Surgeon General of the United States, the first one to come out of public health traditions. Did work in India, right? And he's like, \"There's this social side that you've covered in your show like to health, to physical health, to the telomeres of your cells, your DNA and the vagus nerve and so forth, oxytocin, cortisol. It's social.\" Uh there's there are social dimensions to our nervous system.","offset":6703,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I think that's coming, Andrew. Like, we're starting to see, \"Why do I go to a farmer's market?\" because I feel a sense of community. And \"Why do I love yoga?\" because I'm doing these postures all synchronized with people I don't know and I feel a sense of awe and transcendence. \"Why do I lift weights,\" right? There's the banter and the discussion and the the history and the sense of, you know, of what this all means culturally. I think that's coming. I think the gyms are appealing to it in some sense, right? A little bit more community activity and I think it's good news, you know?","offset":6741,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I love the Japanese onsen. Uh you go for the water, you know, and the the springs and the heat and so forth, but they in their wisdom have built entire community experiences around it. Where you you wash yourself and you bathe together and you eat together and there's sayings up on the walls and you spend a little time with your kids there, right? So I hope we we learn um because I think it's important.","offset":6778,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I'm thinking a lot now about how we can bridge between these incredible technologies, because I I am a fan, um and but also the non-negotiable technology of our our nervous system and our biology and our psychology, right? Lately, because I have a quarium, I'm really into this thing called aquascaping, which is this Japanese form of, like, plants and and freshwater fish and um just obsessed with it. But and and when the ecosystem is doing well, I'm like, \"Oh,\" like, I feel it's a form of it's brought me some awe at times when, like, things are going well in there, I'm like, \"Wow, it's just beautiful.\"","offset":6807,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: And um, and I think there are things that I would never do to my fish. I would never isolate them from one another. But I give them enough places to hide from one another because there's a lot of dominance hierarchy stuff being worked out between these discus. Um I make sure they're on a light cycle. I make sure they're fed, but not overfed or underfed, right? And um I wouldn't do most of the things that we do to ourselves to my fish. [Laughs] You know, I wouldn't isolate them and give them like little videos of other fish to look at, like, I know that wouldn't that wouldn't work. Um I know that they would die. I I know. The uh and so I think we can learn a lot from more uh simpler organisms and and the sort of basic units of of care and community. They're very similar. I mean, it gets played out differently, but but they're very similar uh because obviously we we evolved similar nervous systems, let alone similar needs.","offset":6841,"duration":59},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I would like to talk about psychedelics if you're willing.","offset":6900,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: So some people will say, \"Okay, they just send you inward.\" And that's the opposite of what we're talking about, like getting all the awe inside like, \"Okay, that's I mean that's pretty extreme.\" Um other people will say that their experiences with psychedelics allowed them to come out of that experience and really have a a felt connection to people, to plants, to animals, to life that is um profoundly positive for their feelings of connection and seeing awe perhaps even in lots of things.","offset":6929,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: So how should we think about psychedelics? And we should probably constrain the question a little bit, like, I'm not talking about MDMA, which is not a psychedelic, it's an empathogen. Ketamine's not a psychedelic, it's a dissociative anesthetic. I'm trying to do this now because people start to lump and it's actually causing issues for the potential legalization for...so we need to be splitters, not lumpers here. So I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin, maybe DMT, ayahuasca, the the classic psychedelics. Yeah, what are your thoughts on these?","offset":6967,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah, and I'm good friends with Michael Pollan and was, you know, kind of walking the Berkeley Hills as he was producing that book and, you know, watched as we started a center for psychedelics uh at Berkeley. And um and, you know, it's a revolution. I mean, it's psychedelic use is up, you know, 40% since his book. I mean, it's incredible to watch.","offset":6996,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I I have a few thoughts, you know, one is, you know, make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come. Uh those are spirit medicines in their communities that are part of deep ethical traditions um, you know, and to honor that with, you know, uh re - you know, uh sharing of resources and knowledge and and the right kind of acknowledgment. That's really important.","offset":7018,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Um I I think in some sense uh and, you know, David Yaden at Johns Hopkins and others uh and some of the early Roland Griffiths' work spoke to this, that they are about awe um fundamentally, you know? They open up your mind and you see all life forms and time is different and your sense of self vanishes, Robin Carhart-Harris, you know, and you're just connected to vast things, ecosystems and sense of humanity. And I think in some sense and done when done in the right way, that's good news.","offset":7044,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: You know, Molly Crockett and her team at Princeton like, you go to a festival and you have psychedelics, a year later you're kinder uh through awe, right? Uh so I think that's important. Uh I think it's great news what it does for the hard problems of the mind, you know? Death anxiety, addiction, trauma, uh maybe veterans who are suffering twice the rates of PTSD, they're drawn to this, you know, and the VA is working on this. So and the data look pretty good. OCD, right, hard problems of the mind. Panic, right, that um I've in part dealt with. That is good news.","offset":7079,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Um I worry about microdosing. You know, I think people are taking um these things like coffee, and it's not coffee, you know?","offset":7123,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I, you know, they changed my life. I I got to them early uh, you know, in my late teens, 17, 18, 19. I was a very anxious obsessive kid and I think they opened up my mind in this perspective way we've been talking about. I don't really do them now, you know, they gave me a lot and that's why they're here.","offset":7168,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: You know, it's funny, you know, Andrew, like when I was doing them, we were reading Castaneda who's been debunked, you know, and we're reading the traditions and thinking about them spiritually and the Doors of Perception and all this good stuff, right? We were they were embedded in a a culture of trying to find mysticism or whatever it is, and I hope people are doing that, you know, if they're going to be doing them, make it a form of inquiry. It's a complicated story, like everything, like technology.","offset":7189,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Well, they're a form of plant technologies, right? Plant - which uh quick vignette on that. We had someone here um Chris McCurdy, who runs a lab out in Florida, studies kratom and other compounds from plants. The pharma companies, they bioprospect. They send people looking for plants that then they can find isolates and everything from aspirin to uh kratom to anesthetics like cocaine - I'm not suggesting people use as an anesthetic - they come from plants. But they're isolated and then synthesized and and enriched and that's where the opiate the extreme opiate, the extreme stimulant, you know, that's where it comes from. But they all come from plant al- many of them come from plant alkaloids, which is interesting in its own right.","offset":7219,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But the I share your feelings about microdosing. Um the data Robin Carhart-Harris tells me, and he's the real expert of course, the data say there's no um evidence of benefit from microdosing, at least on major depression as compared to, like, two rounds of psilocybin with a guide, therapy before, during, and after and on and on.","offset":7259,"duration":23},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Um I had the opposite experience as you. Um I actually regret having done psychedelics when I was younger. They were terrifying, I didn't have a good experience. I stopped, didn't go anywhere near them. And then later in a therapeutic setting um had a few experiences with them, not many, but that were immensely beneficial for me. Um so kind of the opposite direction there.","offset":7282,"duration":27},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But what we're talking about now about kind of, \"Okay, you know, there's this problem with certain technologies, there's the the culture wars, there's the political wars, there's the actual war that's also going on right now.\" A lot of ways this resembles, like, the 70s, 80s. There's not that - I mean, I remember a time when you had yuppies and you had hippies and you had punk rockers. I mean, you watch a John Hughes film, it was like the idea was was like, \"Oh, we're actually similar,\" right? You know, the extent to which those films like showed people, \"Hey, like people were actually similar along certain dimensions as opposed to so different.\"","offset":7309,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: But, you know, I I wonder because I think about the not-so-recent and recent history of things, everything from breathwork, cold plunges, psychedelics, um awe, music, the collective consciousness. I mean, it's gonna look different now, the same way that it it looked different back then, right? Like, I'm I'm trying to get outside my Gen X self these days and think like, \"So what would it look like?\" Like, I'm the old guy now. So what would it look like if these technologies, I just mentioned a few, but all of them including social media, what would it look like if those were all used to the greatest benefit? Like, what would that look like? Can we be the open-minded parents of the 80s? You know?","offset":7340,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Um can we be the can yeah, like because I feel like I can scream all day or about what I think about the science of this and that to younger people, but the only thing I actually have control over is, like, me. How do we um let's say 40 to 100-year-olds - let's really lean it on the 40 to 70. Okay. How do we create the environment so that younger people can flourish with these technologies as opposed to being like the parents of the 70s and 80s that are like, \"Oh, they got long hair and like what is this like punk rock thing?\" Like, I don't want to be that person. That sucks.","offset":7384,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: I also don't want to be the and I see this a lot, unfortunately, people who were part of those movements and then they they're just like toeing the party line because oh they're like wholeheartedly adhering to one political group without thinking about whether or not there's any any hint of rational argument on the other side, right? The whole point is not to be against, the whole point is to be for what you believe is right. And so I don't know how to do this. You're older than I am by a bit, you're clearly wiser than I am, seriously, and you have more life experience. So what do we do? Like, really like what what on the help can we do? Because I don't like this, \"You guys are all on your phones, you're like,\" that doesn't feel good to me, because they were telling us when we were younger, like, \"This is ridiculous,\" like the older guys were like, you know, small wheels on skateb- they were right about the small wheels thing, turns out the wheels got too small. But Jim will understand that joke. But what do we do?","offset":7428,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I think we're in this moment, you know, with everything going on, you know, with AI and being online and polarization and climate crisis and um, you know, the things that we worry about, the rise of white supremacy politics, etc. Everybody's asking this question of, like, what how do we kind of move forward.","offset":7488,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And and, you know, in light of many of the things that we've talked in this conversation, I'm most focused on um what Robert Putnam started to write about and other people started to write about, like the just the breakdown of collective life and shared life. And I think that's the defining issue of our times, as well as our relationship to the natural world.","offset":7510,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And I find awe, as do other people, really refreshing. It it provides a road map which is, you know, and I'll give you a very concrete example. I'm working with Gehl Architects on a \"Cities of Awe\" initiative. And they do amazing work, hundreds of cities around the world. 70% of human population is in cities, most of our carbon emissions come out of cities. And this is this is a place we can redesign and and make it better, right?","offset":7538,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And awe is a wonderful lens. So you can ask, and you could ask the same of like, \"What do you give to a teenager who's suffering suicidal ideation?\" or \"What do you give to a veteran who is coming back and feeling alienated from the world?\" You give them awe, right? And what does that mean? It's like, well, you give them a little nature. And that's you re-wild part of a city, right? You give them some public art. We love art, you know, we love visual art.","offset":7569,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: You give them uh the opportunity to recognize the moral beauty, you found it in Joe Strummer, just get them to interact with other people, some face-to-face. You give them uh a little collective stuff, right? You, \"Hey, we're gonna have the yoga class in the town square,\" or the Mexican Zocalo everybody walks together at a certain hour of the day and they suddenly feel peaceful, right?","offset":7599,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Uh you give them ideas about big ideas and and life. You give them a little bit of opportunity for meditation and reflection. Um that's easy to do. And when I, you know, was writing this book and just teaching social science for 30 years, it's like, \"Man, you know, we used to do this really well and it used to be temples and church. You know, that's where it all was brought together. And now we don't go there.\" 55% of Americans go to church. It used to be 90. Or temple. Um I don't, I never did, you know, and I and I in some sense miss it, you know? I see my one of my best friends very religious, he few of them and they they have so much.","offset":7625,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And we're recreating that right now, right? And we've got to do it in a coherent way. If it's the place where people are lifting weights, there should be music there, there should be visual stuff, there should be some art, nature, there should be some wisdom and some moral beauty, right? That's uh I love ironworks where I go climbing because you go there and it's like people are climbing but there's you get to see the there's the art exhibit each month of a local artist. There's some music going on, you get to listen to music.","offset":7670,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: So this isn't that hard to do, Andrew. And I think the awe science gives us a road map to think about what we share.","offset":7703,"duration":9},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Love that. Um I was not into CrossFit, but a next girlfriend of mine when I met her was, like, really into CrossFit and they would do barbecues and they'd clean the gym and they would dress up in costumes and stuff. I remember this is when I moved to San Diego to start my lab down there before moved to Stanford. And and I remember thinking, like, \"This kind of crazy,\" like I went to the gym growing up, I s- always since I was in my teens, and I'm like, \"Really? You guys are social?\" and they had this awesome social community. I know CrossFit is somewhat fallen out of favor now. Uh I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation.","offset":7712,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: You may be uh pleased to hear, I I just thought of this, I can't remember I can't believe that I didn't uh remember this earlier. Um one of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after the Clash, cuz you know he went into the kind of void of, like, he wasn't doing anything. He he wandered for a long time. He went to Spain, oh he grew out a beard, moved to Spain and um didn't tell anyone who he was and they they kind of realized who he was eventually. He was really searching, you know, his life had he lost his brother to suicide, I believe. Um he ran the um the Paris Marathon, this kind of famous, I think while smoking a cigarette. Um people always say and I don't think he did any training.","offset":7745,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: One thing that he was very well known for until his death was he would do campfires. In Manhattan, he would take people down to the river and and he had some famous friends like Jim Jarmusch and and, you know, and um well-known people in in that world. Um but he would invite whoever. And there were kids - you gotta see this documentary, it's so good. We'll put a link to it um for people want to see it, it's so good. Um there were kids, there were adults, um and they'd stay out to like two or three in the morning playing music, singing, drumming, uh people get up and talk. And so he was constantly doing these campfires his entire life.","offset":7784,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Knowing close friends of his, it's like, \"This actually what he did.\" And he wasn't getting - they they were able to film a few of these, but that was not the point. And he would bring out a radio cuz he thought, like, maybe you could, like, make it like a radio show of the thing. And but it was not to record and distribute, it was just...so I don't know, I got this crazy idea in the back of my mind that maybe, like, I'm gonna start doing campfires.","offset":7822,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I have to weigh in on some science. Okay.","offset":7843,"duration":43},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Um when I go to the climbing gym, we all take saunas. You know, I do probably four saunas a week.","offset":7886,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Awesome. Uh campfire also great red light therapy, no joke. Long wavelength light only coming out of that fire. And you know everyone's obsessed with, like, red light therapy. You can get from the sun when you don't want to get too much UV, but yeah, you get tons of long wavelength light exposure, which is great for which is known to be great for mitochondria. I mean, don't get me I don't want to get going on this as too much of a tangent. We've had guests on here from University College London. I mean, the long wavelength light actually goes all the way through your body, even in light clothing, and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria, which actually improves mitochondrial function in every single every single cell that has a mitochondria.","offset":7915,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: And where do we get this light from?","offset":7951,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: Yeah. And people love campfires.","offset":7985,"duration":56},{"text":"Dr. Andrew Huberman: Do you believe in life after death? I don't ask every guest that, by the way. You're the only person I've ever asked that. Do you believe that something happens after all this?","offset":8041,"duration":8},{"text":"Dr. Dacher Keltner: I do. I do. Um yeah, you know, when I write about this in \"Awe,\" when my brother Rolf passed away, colon cancer, 55 or so, uh you know, and I watched the whole transition and, you know, his battle against it and his acceptance and then his leaving. And I had this profound experience that night, you know, a transcendent experience. And I'm like you, you know, Andrew, it's like neurons and statistics and cells and we can figure it all out and characterize everything. And I's like, I saw space in a different way, I saw something alive in him, and then afterward I had a lot of people have this kind of grief experience of, he was around, his voice, his hand was on my back. And...","offset":8049,"duration":51},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: I’ve thought for several years, and still to this day, of, you know, quantum reality and things beyond our three-dimensional, four-dimensional view of time and space and, you know, those basic laws. And that there is, you know, consciousness, maybe patterns of, you know, electromagnetic waves around our minds and bodies that are syncing up with other people that transcend the Newtonian world of the brain. And I believe that. And I don’t know how to study it. I sense it in life. I think a lot of other people do, too. And so that keeps me open to it. And now I’ve moved from, you know, being a skeptical but open, you know, agnostic to like, yeah, there’s something there that’s beyond what we know. So I believe it.","offset":8100,"duration":63},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Very cool. I hope you’re right. I believe it too, but I just hope you’re right. I sense you’re right. Dacher, thank you so much for making the trip down here to talk with us today and share what you’ve been up to for all these years. You’ve had and continue to have a magnificent career. You know, it’s really hard to do really good science, and it’s even harder to do really good science with a purpose. And you’re doing that, and you continue to, and you just have a way about you that everyone now has been able to experience first-hand. That, like, you really care, that’s clear. You put a ton of thought into the work that you’re doing. You’ve raised 25 professors, which is no small feat, I’ll tell you. That’s a monumental feat, which means that the work will continue. And you’re still going, and I’m grateful for your book and that you’re continuing to do this. And I hope you take that trip too, maybe if you can’t do it around the entire country, you know, hit some pick-up basketball games, because I think there’s something to be learned there for sure, I sense it. And thanks for inspiring me, and I know you’ve inspired a ton of other people. So we’ll put links to everything that you discussed and to your book. But you’ve definitely inspired us to think more deeply about basically what it is to be human and where to take all this technology that we have and this opportunity that we have and really do real good with it. So I’m very grateful to you. Thank you.","offset":8163,"duration":99},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Well, thank you, Andrew. It’s been an incredible conversation. Let’s do more.","offset":8262,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Definitely do it again.","offset":8264,"duration":1},{"text":"Dacher Keltner: Yeah, thank you.","offset":8265,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. To learn more about his work and to find links to his books, including his book on awe, please see the links in the show note captions. If you’re learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That’s a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today’s episode. That’s the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you’d like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.","offset":8266,"duration":46},{"text":"For those of you that haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out. It’s my very first book. It’s entitled \"Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.\" This is a book that I’ve been working on for more than five years, and that’s been based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors; you can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called \"Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.\"","offset":8312,"duration":39},{"text":"And if you’re not already following me on social media, I am @HubermanLab on all social media platforms. So that’s Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, it’s @HubermanLab on all social media platforms.","offset":8351,"duration":23},{"text":"And if you haven’t already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one- to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero-cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.","offset":8374,"duration":15}],"logs":[{"elapsed":"0.0","message":"Downloading audio from YouTube...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"0.0","message":"Trying download with browser cookies (ad-free)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"2.8","message":"⚠ Cookie download failed: WARNING: [youtube] [jsc] Error solving n challenge request using \"deno\" provider: Error running deno process (returncode: 1): \u001b[0m\u001b[1m\u001b[31merror\u001b[0m: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read prope","detail":null},{"elapsed":"2.8","message":"Retrying without cookies...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"67.8","message":"⚠ Downloaded without cookies — audio may contain ads","detail":null},{"elapsed":"67.8","message":"Audio downloaded (89.4 MB) in 67.8s","detail":"File size: 89.4 MB"},{"elapsed":"67.8","message":"Video title: Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner","detail":null},{"elapsed":"67.9","message":"Audio duration: 2:20:19 (140.3 min)","detail":null},{"elapsed":"67.9","message":"Large audio (140.3 min) — will use chunked transcription with gemini-3-flash-preview","detail":null},{"elapsed":"67.9","message":"Skipping full-file attempt — using chunked transcription for 140.3 min audio","detail":null},{"elapsed":"69.5","message":"Split audio into 4 chunks for transcription","detail":null},{"elapsed":"69.5","message":"Transcribing chunk 1/4 (starts at 0:00)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"69.5","message":"Uploading audio to Gemini File API...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"74.5","message":"Audio uploaded in 5.1s","detail":"File ref: files/k2bk455voeet"},{"elapsed":"74.5","message":"Audio processed in 0.0s. 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