How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

28:15Right. So this sort of one of these, you know, self transcendent types of meditation, which are not, I don't think, really tied to any external input coming out, although it's an internal input, right. That's based on your on your memory or or all based meditation. So maybe it's more similar to those, but I, but it's like thematically anchored exactly, exactly. It's supposed to visually anchored like staring at a flame or concentrating on one's breath. Yeah, I didn't have a, it was like free in terms of putting in language of foraging. It's like, I didn't have a plan. I wasn't writing a paragraph.

28:52It was just, can I stay in a conversation with myself that's where there's no moment that some external voice or input or thought about something else in the room. You know, just can I just kind of stay in there? Can I just stay in there? That that was really the question. Yeah, I think that that makes complete sense because it's kind of like your foraging for apples in that tree that's, you know, on the middle of the serengeti somewhere, right. And there's nothing anywhere around you. And so you're going to stick with that and just keep mining until there's nothing left. One of the reasons that I brought up this example was I noticed that anything that has to do with attention, whether or not it's visual attention or, you know, need to write or or cognitive attention and redirecting attention, unless there's some high level of, as you call it, arousal or emotionality.

29:48I find there's always a kind of warm up period required and that this isn't taught to us in school and that so many people who think that they have a hard time maintaining attention. I have this hypothesis that they are training non attention or brief attention by, you know, scrolling through movies on a, you know, social media platform is basically training, redirecting your attention every couple seconds or maybe every few minutes. So you get good at that, you get good at scrolling, you get good at what you do. But also I think it was always the case that sitting down to do something difficult or learn or write or careful auditory attention, maybe even to a podcast that there's a kind of a warming up period.

30:34What is the evidence that neural circuits in the brain are kind of, you know, I'm using very top contour language in front of a, you know, another card carrying neuroscientist, but that that neural circuits are kind of more dispersed in their, in their activation patterns, but that over time we can drop into a trench not just of attention, but that then the signal to noise of that circuit required for attention and the other components of the task gets much greater compared to the background noise. Is there evidence for that in the same way that warming up to work out, no one expects to walk in and train with their work way to run at the speed that they would in mile three.

31:12Right, you know that you warm up. It's like it's a, but this notion of warming up the brain for specific cognitive activities doesn't seem as abundant out there. And I think part of the reason might be, and I'd like your thoughts on this, that we are all familiar with something super exciting or scary. Grabbing our attention in this, but then I would say, well, you can sprint into the street to save your kid from getting hit by a car. You didn't warm up for that, but that's not how you exercise because there isn't the same level of urgency. That's a deep question. I think, and I, you know, it's funny to me too, because it, I don't warm up often before I work out.

31:54And that's like so. You seem to be great. No, but it's like, it's funny. I've been in CrossFit for like 17 years. Oh wow. And you're still un -injured. You're one of the fun. I've got plenty of injuries. I've had a couple of herniose surgeries and maybe just like, I was just a minute of mobility work. We have a lot of other episodes on this. That's pretty good. I actually, what I have periodically, it's like take like many months off to do just purely mobility, because I did Pilates intensively for a year and a half after one injury. And I loved it. It's cool to see what it does to your body, because it totally refashioned it.

32:32I've always been like the guy up here, and then you do Pilates for a yoga for a long time, went through yoga period two. And suddenly it's all core. You become like a very different, very different human. Yeah, so this issue of warming up, you don't like warming up, which explains your injury. It's more question of time. The reason why, and that's why I heard CrossFit in the first place, was because I could do workout in 10 minutes or under that left me dead on the floor. I'm telling you. I'm telling you 100 jumping jacks, just like in PE class, is still the best warm up on the world. It's amazing.

33:07People laugh at me, and it's like it's so old school, but you do 100 jumping jacks before you do any kind of cardiovascular resistance training. And I don't, I haven't run a study on this, but you greatly diminish your chance of injury, probably because of just raising core body temperature. So the question is, what, okay, well then let's pose it in this parallel fashion. What is the equivalent of the 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work? Right, for me, it's like internally, I mean, like what's wrong with you? Andrew, why is it so hard for you to like punch out these 10 paragraphs? But if someone on my team says, hey, we need this in eight minutes, I could do that anywhere.

33:45Unless I'm actually driving a vehicle, I can work anywhere, anytime. But I would say we don't have the equivalent of 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work, but we need it. We need that. I think people need that, and they need the understanding that it can help them get into that trench of attention. I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this. Police. So one would be the converse of that, which is the, which you kind of alluded to earlier, which is the not warming up, but the opposite warming up, like the distraction. So there have been some really interesting studies done in sort of more business settings, management settings, about that looked at foraging.

34:29And I think of this way, it's more like a measure of creativity. Your, your proclivity to explore to try new things to go to, you know, to be the opposite of focused. Okay, so, and you can measure that, for example, like an anagram task. So you get a bunch of letters, make his muddy words as you can. At some point, you've got to, you decide to dump them and get new letters. Right. And so that's sort of an, you know, you're taking a risk and you're exploring and you're, you're getting a new, a new set. You don't know what's going to happen, right. And really cool studies showed that if you proceed that task with a task where people are foraging for points on a screen, there's, there's hidden, it's like a visual kind of thing and you're, you're looking for stuff.

35:12If the, if the points are really dispersed and spread out, then people, we don't know how long that kind of after effect lasts, but then people are way more kind of hyper explorers with the words and. And with the word thing later, and if they're doing a, if they have to like decide if they're playing virtual fishing and the number of, you know, the rate at which you catch fish and a pond is declining. And you can press a button and take a time out to travel to another pond. People are much more willing to move on. Okay, when, when they do that, whereas if you put all the points kind of together, which is essentially related to what you're saying, cognitively warming up by focusing.

35:53Literally, instead of having your, your filter, you know, your aperture, your lens like this, it's now like this. Even though it's a different task that you're going to do. Oh, I love this. Then you, you're much more focused on that. Okay, I, I've sat here and done many, many podcasts and I have to say it's rare that I say I love this probably the first time. I absolutely love this because as a person who's worked on a variety of topics in neuroscience, but visual neurosciences really been my first home and continues to be the way that I think about a lot of this. There are a couple of really interesting papers that have led to some practices mainly in China, where students focus on a fixation point before they sit down to do cognitive work.

36:40And it improves their attention and performance on cognitive work. And it sounds so silly to people people think, oh, okay, I'm going to stare at a dot. And then you're going to like stare at a dot at the given distance. I'm going to do my work. How lame is that? Well, I think it, it's incredible because what you just said fully supports this idea that we're, well, we all agree here. There's two of us that were mainly visual, even those ones that like to listen to music and things like that. We're very somatic, or you know, very visual creatures. And that where we place our visual attention and the size of the aperture of that attention, whether or not we're looking at a small box or a big box, not metaphorically, but literally determines the aperture of our attention going forward.

37:23In other words, I think this is such an important thing because when we look at a horizon or we walk through a city, you know, there's information flowing past us, you know, in all kinds of, you know, without us placing our eyes on any one particular point. And that people don't notice until they do this and they hear this, but that's very relaxing. We look at a horizon, it relaxes us. And that's because panoramic vision, non -phoviated vision is, it's associated with a decrease in autonomic arousal. So has this been leveraged toward teaching kids and adults how to attend better? Because I think this is immensely valuable.

38:01I mean, this is behavioral behaviorally driven pharmacology, as I like to call it, because clearly there's a change in our chemistry when we do this sort of thing. I mean, other than what you just said about the work is done and what they're doing in China, which is entirely consistent with what I just said, I'm unaware of any utilization. And I think it could be. I mean, I love that phrase that you just use, right, which is when we understand the underlying neurochemistry, let's say, that's great, but you're not going to go in and directly manipulate people's neurochemistry. No, but if you can change the environment therein or you can change the state that they're in, behavioral state, cognitive state, emotion state, then that's an effective, potentially effective practical ethical, right, way of having this kind of same or similar impact.

38:57I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1, AG1 is an all -in -one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still take AG1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement. What that means is that AG1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health. AG1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome.

39:32Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status, your metabolic health, your hormone health, and much more. So I've consistently found that when I take AG1 daily, my digestion is improved, my immune system is more robust, and my mood and mental focus are at their best. In fact, if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2 with your order of AG1.

40:07Again, go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim this special offer. I think that so many people, including myself, think, okay, what's a way that I can increase my level of alertness and attention? Well, I have this gallery of caffeine. Actually, the middle ones water, for those that are just listening, I've got a mate gourd here, plenty of caffeine in there. I had a cold brew mate, plenty of caffeine in there. I had several actually, and then water in the center. But caffeine raises our level of alertness and thereby attentional capabilities. But I think that most people are not familiar with using behavior as a way to increase their endogenous release of the neurochemicals that increase arousal and attention.

40:49And we just tend to over rely on pharmacology, and I'm not against that. I use it, obviously. But what do you think it is? I mean, now I'm asking you to be a bit of a cultural anthropologist. What do you think it is that has led people in the United States and Europe to mainly focus on this idea that if you can't attend easily, that it's a pharmacologic issue that behavioral tools are not as useful. Because what you experiment you described is so cool, right? Look at dots that are close together. You're then cognitive space becomes kind of more bundled into a tighter bundle. Look at dots that are more dispersed and you tend to kind of disperse your cognition.

41:38It becomes almost like more of a creative exploration. Maybe this is why my friend Rick Rubin, whose name is sort of synonymous with creativity because he wrote that amazing book that creative act is so into sky and clouds and sunsets and space open space rarely have ever heard ricks I hail and I should stare into a little soda straw. I'd love to for you to just kind of riff on what you think some of the better tools are for improving attention and focus. And whether or not you think we're really as challenged in that as many people assume. Well, I don't think we're that challenged. I think as I mentioned earlier, our brains are just performing the computations that they have been endowed with by millions of years of evolution, which is to allocate attention to allocate behavior to allocate focus according to how rich, I call it rich, or poor, the environment is how many different sources are there.

42:37And so that's those are the rules your brain lives by and you're not really going to change those I mean you could kind of modulate up and down a little bit whether that's through chemistry or other kinds of things, but ultimately it's in this case, the brain in the environment that it's in. So from my perspective, the best thing you could do is just change the environment, put those devices to enable you to focus. Right. And so I don't know if I had that much more. Yeah, I think I think what's great about this is you're essentially pointing to the fact that we have control. We're not somehow deficient or messed up.

43:20If we find ourselves having a hard time directing our attention because we've been training ourselves to to scroll. We've been training ourselves to redirect our attention constantly to new things. I mean, as you can probably tell them a big fan of intervening in that process so that one has the ability to drop into focused work. I do feel as if progress in life, you know, scales fairly directly with the ability to focus on one thing for some period of time. For sake of learning in school, for sake of sport, for sake of relationships, the ability to have like a real connection to somebody. And we're going to get into a discussion about the social interactions in a bit.

44:06But when it comes to foraging, do you find that people fall out into different kind of clusters of how they forage for information? And what are some of the themes of that or kind of signatures of the different groups? Yeah, that's a great question. We haven't really approached it with the idea that there are clusters, but rather that there's let's say a continuum. And of being either, you know, most people are somewhere in the middle, of course. But some folks hyper focused, right? And you might just metaphorically imagine them at the extreme and like the like obsessive compulsive almost, right?

44:44You can't get unstuck from a routine. And at the other end, it would be folks who explore too readily, right? So folks who we would say have attention, deficit hyperactivity disorder. And so folks fall somewhere along that distribution. Now we've seen that there are differences between species in terms of where they are on that. And that differences of function of age in humans. So you kind of move from being more hyper exploratory toward more focused as you get older. Oh, good. And that also one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that that variation where you are on that continuum, you can continue on might make you more or less suited to different types of careers, different types of jobs.

45:35It's not to say that people can't change. But think of it this way. For you've got a dial that goes from super focused to a major explorer and creativity goes along with that. One person might come with their dial set at three, another person at seven. And you could help that person at a three, maybe turn theirs to five, but it's probably not to 10, right? The person is a seven, you can turn them up to nine, right? So through through various kinds of practices. Because I think it's really important to just recognize that people do vary. And that variation we pick up on in the sort of neurological context of like issues, problems that people experience like with focus in school, etc.

46:22People are no doubt wondering, well, if I am good at dropping into a trench and focusing my attention for long periods of time, maybe it's more obvious what types of careers would let that person would be better at, you know, maybe it's programming or writing or who knows painting. But when you have somebody whose attention tends to flip between different things, what sorts of professions do they align well with? Yeah, that aligns with creative professions. So and also being entrepreneurs, actually, if you look at the data on entrepreneurs, the rate of attention problems is two, three, four, X, the general population, you also see that it's often comorbid with other issues related to anxiety, bipolar, etc.

47:11So they kind of like all cluster there with a real issue on that sort of focus. And we work with with the team out in Berkeley, actually, that provides support to entrepreneurs so that so so that they can do their best, do their thing, which is to be like wildly creative, right? And to innovate, I should say. But when they need that focus so they can have it. And we have we have a big research project going on right now, looking at entrepreneurs in California and also MBA students at Wharton to just kind of try to identify, you know, the prevalence of these issues and then to potentially provide support for them.

47:58And that support could take any number of different forms. It could be true psychiatric support in a sense of like maybe attention focusing pharmaceuticals drugs like like Ridley and Adderall, which can be used appropriately. But that doesn't rob those individuals of their mojo, but in other cases, it's going to be more like changing their providing ecosystem, right? So where they can learn focusing practices, as we've already talked about. And where when they build their teams, they can build complimentary strengths in the people that surround them so that they're much more likely to be successful.

48:38And our economy depends on those people being successful, right? So that's where the vast majority of economic activity is coming from is people who start small businesses, who are entrepreneurs and who are innovators. So it makes all the sense in the world. And to do that, I think we've been neglecting all this now. Actually, the thing I wanted to say earlier about this and then where I think neuroscience gives us a new tool to approach a lot of these business questions is that let's imagine you're hiring, right? And you're hiring, you know, we need a creative type. Okay, so you put an ad out and you get, you know, resumes and responses and people who come in for interviews.

49:22How do you measure that creativity typically? And you say, how creative are you? And you're like, you really want the job. So you're like, yeah, I'm super creative. Or like, where you give them a personality test, for example, or, you know, like Myers -Briggs or something like that. And we know those are not particularly accurate. And self -report can be not only inaccurate, but biased and biased by the context. Why am I here? Who's asking me a question? How is that question asked? Whereas the neuroscience gives us tools to kind of measure those things directly. And in some cases, you could measure it directly from the brain.

50:01And we do that. But that's not going to be practical, not going to be scalable, right? Not going to be something a lot of people want to embrace, let's say, as applicants. But find ways to interrogate the brain that are not asking people to assess themselves. For instance, what would a small number of questions be that? Not even questions. One of the things that we've done is develop games, like brief little varying -gating games that are based on specific tasks that we know interrogate specific circuits in the brain, like foraging, for example, where people are literally harvesting berries, let's say, okay, and they're going along.

50:49And the goal is to kind of get as many as you can. And from their behavior, we can figure out exactly where they are on that continuum, mathematically, and say, okay, well, in the dashboard that we create, you are pitched a bit more toward being an innovator and creative type, explore, and less likely to be a good manager who would need to be sort of have a higher degree of focus. And we do that for a number of different aspects of cognitive emotional performance, so things like, in terms of social competence, for example, and so we have a little game of it's mimics soccer, and we've had monkeys play a humans play it, we know exactly what it kind of elicits from the brain and what circuits it relies on.

51:42And that allows us to numerically identify your strategic planning abilities, or something like theory of mind, getting in the head of an opponent. And those games we've found, it's really been very gratifying to demonstrate that there's predict performance in a number of different jobs, in high performance jobs, like actual soccer players, but also in the military, in cyber operations. And so we're now exploring, and we're helping, we've helped to stand up a startup company. In Philadelphia, that's their mission is to go out and try to use those tools to see if they can do better than basically a whole bunch of questions.

52:34Yeah, it certainly goes way beyond typical Myers -Briggs or any Graham type personality test, which I think has certain value. If nothing else, people like to know about themselves, and I do think categorizing oneself a little bit, going to like, are you a three on the any Graham or a four or an eight, you know what, certainly gives you a frame of reference. But yeah, it doesn't seem very useful for the kinds of work environments that you're describing, where you're describing sounds much more sophisticated. You mentioned theory of mind. We should talk about theory of mind, because here we are back to visual neuroscience, but I have the understanding, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, that as old world primates, one of the more impressive features that we've developed is the ability to attend to a location with our eyes.

53:26But pay attention to something else in the periphery. People used to refer to this as the other cocktail party effect. The cocktail party effect is the ability to pay attention to a conversation while there's stuff in the background, but this is the other cocktail party effect that sort of with sometimes chuckles gets described as, you know, you're out to dinner with somebody and you're listening to them and you're paying attention to them, but you're also paying attention to the conversation next to you. Or maybe someone else at the bar, you know, you can fill in the blanks there. This is an amazing ability, regardless of what it's used for, that a lot of other primate species don't have.

54:09I mean, as far as I know, no other species have. So this seems to be about, we know Macax can do this, for example, and humans do this routinely. We assume all apes do this. And the adaptive explanation is, is I think exactly what you're alluding to, which is the fact that like when you live in a complex, multi -level society with differentiated relationships where the things that matter to you are like your family, your rank, your status, right, your friends, your enemies, all those kinds of things, that then creates a really complex environment. And for, as you said, devoting your attention because, you know, where we look, right, is the focus of our typically, that's the focus of your attention and what's turned up.

54:59And other brains know that, right. And so now let's imagine you are a baboon, right. And you're, you're not the highest ranking baboon. And the high ranking, you know, the alpha is over there. And so you train your gaze on that alpha baboon, but there's a really attractive female over here that you want to know where she's heading. And so that's a good, a good thing because that's a good mating opportunity later. So it's that ability to kind of split attention from your overt attention, what your gaze is pointed at, and covertly what you're amplifying and tracking in the environment. And there's this, you know, to tie this back to theory of mind, there's, I think it's reasonable and consistent with some of the data that theory of mind, which is a sense of being able to infer what somebody else knows what they can see, right, what they want their state of mind, which might be different from yours, that it develops through the way that as, as infinite.

56:10And so that's a good thing to have, you know, that's a good thing to do, and that's a good thing to do, and that's a good thing to do. And make predictions, make inferences about what's going on in somebody else's head. I feel like the overlap of covert attention and theory of mind, as you described, comes from this assumption that I have, which is that we have effectively two spotlights of attention, and that we can merge them. So I can place all my attention on you and what we're talking about in your face, et cetera, I can split my attention between you and, you know, something over there in the corner.

57:03Or I can take that second spotlight of attention and place it on myself, like, oh, you know, like, I need to move to the side because I've got a little, you know, maybe an inch on my thigh or something like that. But I don't think we have three spotlights that we can work with very easily anyway. Maybe we could train that up, but that we don't naturally have more than two spotlights of attention. We can merge these two spotlights of attention, and I feel like, and I've done some practice at this, just because I'm a neuroscientist, and I like to try things, of ramping up my level of focus, just trying to really like, like I'm doing it right now, I'm looking at you, and like the contour of your shape against the background.

57:41Like I can really decide to emphasize those borders. I'm not really doing anything behaviorally. That's different than I was a few moments ago. But then I could also bring that spotlight of attention kind of down a little bit in an intensity. So I feel like we have two spotlights of attention that we can ramp up in intensity, and we don't normally do this so consciously. Normally, we're more in stimulus response. And I think about this a lot nowadays because, and forgive me for referencing previous podcasts, but we had this brilliant, absolutely brilliant 84 year old psycho analyst, Jungian analyst named James Hollis on the podcast.

58:16And he talked about, you know, what it is to be human and to create a life, and it boiled down basically the two things, which was to acknowledge that we're in stimulus response a lot of the day, and how to be functional in that domain was a lot of that conversation, but that there's this essential aspect to life, which is to get out of stimulus response and bring that those spotlights of attention inward and to think and to reflect and then go back into stimulus response. And when we just sleep wake up and go into stimulus response all day, or if we go meditate all day and are not in stimulus response neither is good.

58:48So it's that balance. And so this notion of two spotlights of attention, I love for you to tell me this is like complete BS or that it works. I don't need to be validated here. I was more putting it out there as a hypothesis because it feels true to me, but that's obviously just a feeling. Well, I think that feeling is as far as I know is consistent with what we understand about how attention can, you know, how it amplifies the visual signals or other signals that are coming into our brains and the ways in which we can kind of. I don't know if it's divided purely or if it sort of bleeds over, you know, what that really exactly looks like, but the landscape, it's a landscape of neural activity and you can kind of raise up to homes or just one home.

59:35And it doesn't feel like you can go beyond that. That's really, really hard to measure. And I think, you know, our best data on that comes from, you know, recording the activity of neurons in Macax and monkeys while they are doing attention, you know, these sort of visual discrimination tasks. And I think I'd be really, really hard to like actually elicit that kind of behavior from them. Well, we both agree. I know because we were talking before we started recording that certain types of stimuli really grab our attention and influence our decisions and our valuation of things out there in the world.

1:00:20So talk to me about monkey porn. Okay, we never called it monkey porn, but a lot of people have said that, you know, they said, you know, no matter what else I do in my career, that's going to be on my tombstone. This man worked on this man unpacked the neurobiological monkey porn. Okay, so let's go back in the way back machine, you know, and so back when I was an anthropologist and I'm going on, I'm watching monkeys and it's very clear that there are certain things in the world. That are important to them, that they prioritize and those, they're very similar the same things that we do. So they pay attention to each other to their faces, but also to other cues and these cues seem to make adaptive significance, right, that they're relevant for your ability to survive and reproduce, which is the name of the game for evolution.

1:01:17That's all that that really counts. Okay, and what are those things? Well, they're cues to status, like so who's dominant, who's subordinate, who can take my stuff, who do I got to watch out for, who can I, you know, dominate and take stuff from and cues to how, you know, to sort of mate quality mating opportunities. And if you look at non -human primates, they display those things very caspicuously, right, so, you know, males have these big canines and they have sort of, you know, physical dominant features, very square jaw, all that kind of stuff. And, and, and females, for example, in macaques display their state, their, their hormonal state, how receptive they are to mating and, and likelihood of, of ovulating at that time through the sort of the swelling and coloration on the body.

1:02:06And they're perineum, here's a good, here's a good word for your listeners perineum, which we, we introduced, I think, into the nerves literature. And that's just the, the sort of a no genital region. So that's where they're putting a lot of someone else on here signaling, listen, another, another card carrying researcher. Yeah. Dr. Shana, Shana Swann, excuse me, came on here to talk about Thalates and microplastics and endocrine disruptors. She spent a career working on this. She's a serious scientist. And she talked about how tense ties are diminishing in males by virtue of endocrine disruptors accessing the fetus during pregnancy.

1:02:46This is a statistically very robust effect. I know we're going to get into a discussion about fertility later, because he worked on this issue as well. So we can say the perineum taint, and now everyone knows what we're talking about. So the females display their perineum region differently when they're ovulating. Yeah. So it becomes redder, fuller, et cetera. So if you could, you know, go to the zoo and you just, you could say, you see the monkeys with the red butt, big red butts. They're the ones who are the females who are. It turns out the males do that too. So males signal kind of, they're circulating testosterone levels by how red their taint is.

1:03:26And actually, even you can just see the physical size of their testes is is a pretty good proxy and a cue. And then in in Reese's McCax, there's also kind of these signals around the eyes that get a little bit darker. The theory is that humans, so for a long time, people said, oh, humans don't display their anything about their, you know, their hormonal biological state, you know, to promote monogamy and all kinds of stuff like that. Even though it seems that monogamy is not the, monogamy does not seem monogamy in terms of mating does not seem to be the dominant strategy in humans. Let's, let's call it that.

1:04:07Yeah, but just to make sure that I'm clear on this, it used to be said, you are saying that it used to be said that humans don't signal their hormonal status. And the reason people were saying that is because it was a promotion of monogamous behavior, which is actually not true in humans. Well, so this goes back to Darwin really, who, who, who sort of theorized that humans during human evolution, that as monogamy became more adaptive for whatever reason, there's a solid speculation, right, that, that these sort of cues were hidden so that, you know, you wouldn't be encouraged to find other meaning opportunities outside your monogamous relationship.

1:04:57And so we kind of keep the focus to get back to that, you know, on, on your partner, but, you know, all the data that's out there both from, you know, like when societies were encountered by Western scientists, like whether polygene was practiced or not, to just what we understand about extra, you know, extra, repair, matings, like an offspring, et cetera, that, you know, strict monogamy does not seem to be the, you know, to have been the dominant strategy. Now, that's also consistent with the observation that, you know, we are, we are sexually dimorphic species. So if, you know, when you look at the animal kingdom, your primates in particular, those that are obligate, parabonded monogamous primates, males and females don't really differ much.

1:05:50Like we look at marmosets or tamarinds. In terms of body size. Body size, coloration, you know, conspicuous sexual characteristics. Brain structure as well. That's another interesting point, which we can circle back to, but even if you just look at, well, we can, even if you just look at brain size, relative brain, brain size, relative to the body size, that is smallest in parabonded monogamous species. The difference in brain size between males and females was just overall, and it sort of scales up with, with group size and group complexity. It's slightly different, but there's a point there, which is that, well, parabonded monogamous species look very, very different, right?

1:06:34It's different, I'm sorry, I'm a different, let's just say this. So it's, it's very unusual, right? In mammals overall, it's very unusual in primates. There's only a few, you know, monogamous primates, monogamous obligate parabonded primates. And in general, their behavior is not as complicated or complex as individuals that live in societies where there's a lot more going on in terms of strategizing to attain mating opportunities through, you know, either through physical challenge or through, you know, being sneaky or, you know, or making friends, et cetera, et cetera. There's a, there's this sort of proliferation of different strategies that require a lot more mental calculation, apparently, that, that goes hand in hand with an increase in brain size, cortex size, which makes sense from the standpoint of like more prefrontal cortex, more context dependent strategy setting and decision making and it could be based on, it seems that with more prefrontal cortex, one can, a species can incorporate different valuations of mates.

1:07:50It can be about hormonal status, and I want to make sure we get back to that how human signal hormonal status. But it could also be about, you know, reproductive potential as it relates to resource allocation or whether or not there'll be a good caretaker. I mean, a lot of additional factors can be incorporated in and working with more variables, flexibly requires more neural real estate, mostly in prefrontal cortex, right? Absolutely, although I will, I will, based on a paper we published last year in nature, I would say that our notions of sort of the breakdowns of like where stuff is in the brain and how it's encoded, I think is going to change a lot.

1:08:33And there are a number of other studies that have come out in the last year or so that echo this. And so this was a paper in which we did something unthinkable, I think, you know, in the history of neuroscience, which is all about reduction. Let's make the experiment as simple as possible, only very one thing, right? And we're going to find where that one thing is in the brain. And that's the tradition going back to Hewbom Weasel, right? Hewbom Weasel folks, my scientific great grandparents know we were bound to do it sooner or later. They won the Nobel Prize for their understanding for their parsing of the of the neural basis of vision, neuroplasticity, et cetera.

1:09:12Torchston still alive. I think he's like 100 now. Last time I saw him, he was 96 and he was still jogging and doing art. David passed away. Amazing. You can look it up. H &W we call him Hewbom Weasel there. They're among our they're on the Mount Rushmore of neuroscience and we'll get back to this. So please, yeah, explain to us what this paper showed. And then we will then talk about how human signal their hormonal status. So all the way back to monkey porn. I hope because we won't really want to leave monkey porn in the past so near and dear to my heart. Okay, so you won Weasel, you know, let's, we're going to really simplify because you know that's that's how we figure out exactly how works.

1:10:00But it's not what our brains do. That's not the environment our brains are in. I mean, when you're out there in the world, you got this welter. This is just just incredibly complex visual environment, social environment, what you do in any moment depends on what you experienced recently, what you think might happen next. What might have happened last week in a similar circumstance. It's super complicated. And it reflects all these different competing interests and values. And that's true for monkeys too. Okay, and so we did the dream, my dream experiment from back when I was an anthropologist, which was to get rid of the lab.

1:10:36Okay, and instead we recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in the brain in prefrontal cortex, which you mentioned and we tend to think of as being important for decision making and considering goals and context. And also the sort of high level visual area in the temporal lobe that's important for sensing objects and, and you know, maybe faces and things like that. So seemingly, you know, one at like an input level, one of like a higher order level. We did this mostly because of some of technological limitations, but it turned out to be really like a good thing because it told us something really unusual.

1:11:22So what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other. Okay, so we'd have a male with his female friend or alone with a female friend on the other side of a sort of plexiglass divider. And then there could be other monkeys present like as observers, like who are like watching what they're doing or not. And then we also introduced challenges to them, like so basically my graduate student would come in and like, you know, threaten one of the monkeys and this elicits a lot of agitation and arousal. We're going to have to say how you threaten a monkey. Yeah, so if you go to the zoo, folks, and you looked directly at a monkey and you smile, that's a threat.

1:12:12If you want to be friendly with the monkeys, lip smack. That's an affiliation thing. Almost look like we're blown because there's one another. You notice we both looked to where it comes from. So this, so you got a naturalistic experiment. And so rather than having one, you know, varying one thing, these monkeys engaged in like 27, 28 different kinds of behaviors. Okay, they would each, you know, they would forage it, scratch, they groom each other, they threaten, they'd mount, they do everything that monkeys do. Right. And then we also, you know, as we were varying the context as well. And so that's like blows the lid off of the typical, the complexity and the typical experiment.

1:12:52And what do we find? We found that neurons in both these areas, they were indistinguishable. They were modulated, they were affected, their firing rates, their activity was affected by the behaviors that the animals engaged in. And what the other animals engage in too. Also, who's around? Who's watching me? Is it like male, you know, X or female Y? And that, and what was really surprising. So first of all, you see these signals, they're basically the same. These two parts of the brain supposed to be very, very different. And the average neuron cared about, you know, something like seven things, rather than, you know, like one or two.

1:13:33Okay, like a grandmother cell, you know, which was kind of one idea for how the brain encoded things like there's one neuron and only response to your grandmother, right? Something like that. Jennifer Aniston. Jennifer Aniston cells, very famous. Barack Obama cells. And now there's this question about whether or not they're in a relationship. So that's why I brought it. But that was actually in the paper. There were neurons in cortex that responded to Jennifer Aniston specifically. Jennifer Aniston cells. Barack Obama specifically, I'm guessing there are Donald Trump neurons. There's probably quite a few, right?

1:14:09And I'm guessing there were Biden neurons. So maybe, maybe. So it's, you're saying that two very distinct brain areas can respond very similarly to the same things. And that, so that's one interesting, interesting finding. And the second interesting finding, as I understand, is that neurons are paying attention, not just to what you're looking at, or the monkey is looking at, but also who's looking at them. Who else is around what the goal is? So individual neurons are multitasking. They're multitasking, and, or was we say, multiplexing, but it's really the same thing as multitasking. And that raises a lot of really interesting question.

1:14:53Why? Why are these signals all over the place, which it seems to be the case, right? And one idea that's out there is that because the, you know, if you, let's say it's a visual area, those visual neurons might be in the same place. It might need to know the context in which something is happening in order to appropriately, like, encode that stimulus, right? Because it matters. The meaning of that stimulus is another monkey, like, when I'm looking at you, it matters that we're in this setting here in California, and I flew out here yesterday and all that stuff. It might be really, really important for what my brain does with that information, like, how I encode it, what I put into memory, et cetera.

1:15:36So that's sort of one hypothesis that I think that we're all entertaining, because it would be, I mean, it would be heresy to say that, like, actually, it's a more like another name drop, Carl Lashley kind of view of the brain that it's just one big mush. So in 30 seconds, Carl Lashley ran a really critical experiment where it was the equal potentiality of cortex experiment, where basically there'd been a decades of experiments with people lesioning a given area of the brain and seeing it some deficit and behavior. Lashley decided to do the same experiment and found that regardless of which area of the cortex, this is important that it was the cortex specifically that he scooped out lesion got rid of, set it in addition next to the, in that his case, I think it was rats.

1:16:26He didn't observe deficits in that behavior, at least that persisted. But you see this in the monkey and human data. You can lesion a brain area, see a huge deficit, I know I'm telling you what you already know, Michael, but I think most people don't realize this a brain lesion can lead to a huge deficit and behavior that is recovered later over time through plasticity. Unless you start digging into the deeper stuff of the brain, where lesions lead to permanent deficits, unless some intervention is provided. Yeah, the cortex seems to be maybe a little bit, I don't want to say, equi potential, but it's very plastic, it's very flexible and very adaptive.

1:17:05So this was a really cool finding, I thought, and we could decode from the population of neurons exactly what each of the animals was doing and who was around and who's watching, right? I mean, which, I mean to me, it was very gratifying. But the thing that was most exciting to me, the most exciting find, I think that finding is really cool for neuroscientists, but for the primatologist, the anthropologist and me, the finding that was most exciting was that we discovered the account, the mental account for our social relationships. Okay, so for monkeys, this a large fraction of their way that they build and maintain relationships is through grooming each other.

1:17:56So when they go and they pick through each other's fur, and that's how you make friends. That's how you make allies. And the, what has been observed going back to when monkeys were first being watched is that they tend to be really equitable. Right, they're like, if I invest two minutes in you, you will eventually invest two minutes back in me. It might not happen right away, but we're going to balance out. It's going to come even. And that raised the idea, which most people thought was like ridiculous that wow, they're actually tracking and keeping notes on all this. They've got a ledger for their investments and withdrawals in this social relationship.

1:18:38So to make it more, more salient for the listeners, like think of it as like when you're texting, you text a friend and they text you back and then you text them and you text them again and you text them again. And you're like, am I getting ghosted? What the heck's going on here? Why you know, you start to feel that sense of like urgency betrayal, like, and I'm not going to text you now. I'm going to wait until you text me back. It's the same kind of thing we have this sense of, and in fact, when we think about now all the stuff that's going on, socio politically, you know, in terms of equitable relationships, I think that this bears on that.

1:19:15So we did something I've never been done before, which is we tracked every single grooming interaction that ever happened between these monkeys over months, because we could. We had cameras on them and we used computer vision to do all that tracking. And yeah, they were perfectly equitable. But sometimes it, you know, sometimes we take minutes to balance it. Sometimes it took weeks like you owe me you owe me. And then it would come back. We found is that in the brain, brain in these two, both of these brain areas, we're carrying that mental account that precisely tracked who owed whom what? Amazing.

1:19:54How much grooming they, you know, that blue, I mean, that blew my mind. It's like, because we all feel that right? It's like one of the most silly and things there is in our lives. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor better help better help offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years. Initially I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school, but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to ones overall health.

1:20:25There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. Better help makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and that can provide you those three benefits that come from effective therapy. Also, because better help allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule.

1:20:56There's no commuting to a therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room, no traffic, no parking issues, etc. If you'd like to try better help, you can go to betterhelp .com slash huberman to get 10 % off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp .com slash huberman. This explains occasionally I'll get a text from a friend that says, nice conversation, which means they texted me a bunch before and I didn't respond. Part of that has to do with the eye for me the way that texts are archived. They can kind of drift down and then they're hard to find and you know, and I'm a known long latency response person.

1:21:35But then I barrage not unintentionally about like get on a plane and be like, oh, that's right. I'm going to get to these texts from a couple weeks ago and respond to them a couple days ago. I find voice memos to be a good solution to this. I have a couple of people in my life with whom I mainly communicate through voice memo. But it is very interesting that my team here, we have a, what feels like a very consistent cadence and balance of accounts. Like that, like that even the text duration, like, you know, like I'm fine with a one word or even one letter text and I'm fine with an essay. Like, but certain relationships, you just don't do that.

1:22:11So what is this just because I can't help myself. What is the brain area that's tracking this account or is it a network? It's a network. Okay. Great. Then we don't have to have to down with people with brain areas. Well, this is amazing. I mean, I think that rather than you know, people talk about love languages, right? Like, are you people? Is it physical touch? Is it acts of service? I think that, you know, there are some of your words of affirmation. I'm guessing that some people are tracking these very carefully too in humans and balancing the account. And that kind of love language idea seems like like our five acts of support or or a five physical contact events, whatever you want to call it.

1:22:52I know I'm really sounding like a scientist and nerd. Are those equivalent to, you know, five sentences of affirmation? What I'm gathering is that the brain is probably calculating these things on an individual basis. So it's not like five sentences equals five acts of service. So, but that maybe it is that there's something like internal valuation that is like very mathematical. You're trying to balance the chat. I think it is very mathematical. But I think I want to point out that in in the pairs of monkeys, we've now expanded this to multiple monkeys in a big open field. But they're equal kind of partners.

1:23:34Right? So it made sense that that balance was was sort of one for one. And we know that studies of, you know, wild monkeys, wild primates that the sort of conversion, you know, like, you know, dollars to pesos or whatever is not one to one. And if the, if there's something else in that relationship. So if there's a power differential is like if you're beta male and you're grooming alpha male, right? It might be a hundred minutes of grooming that alpha male that you get like one groom back or more importantly, you groomed that alpha male for months and years on end. And then he comes and saves your life when you are in an aggressive encounter with with another individual.

1:24:24So you see how that there is this. I think that's what you're getting at with me with the love languages, which is that there's there's there is this underlying currency, but the value of that currency for each individual like varies depending on what they. I don't know where that variation comes from, but depending on what's most important, what's most salient for them. And then also probably what that relationship is like. And if there's a power differential, if there's any other kind of differentials, well, the math of power dynamics online is really interesting to observe on X where people tend to be a bit more combative at times, not everybody.

1:25:04But I've noticed this like, you know, this notion of like don't feed the trolls, right? Like someone says something that's insulting and you know, you don't honor them with a response. You just let it go by that that would be somehow completing some sort of reward circuitry because what they really want is not to harm your reputation, but to be acknowledged that their opinion matters and social media. As long as people have access to an account effectively levels the field, although then there's this prioritization of like high follower accounts and what used to be that when blue checks became purchasable.

1:25:37Right, that a lot of people were upset because it was essentially like, you know, equaling the status playing field somewhat, right? But it's very interesting to see how this stuff plays out. You know, like do you honor somebody with a response or like ignoring somebody's insult that the classic madman don draper response, you know, in the elevator that has turned into a meme that well, I don't think of you. I don't think about you at all being the ultimate sort of display of his power that in in terms of a, you know, not even allowing his neural circuits to keep track of an account. It's like zero for zero for you, you know, is essentially what are you saying?

1:26:15So is it, is it the case that power dynamics are tracked across for conflict for collaboration? We talked about love languages, which is a collaboration. You know, some people do seem in life to be very transactional, is the word we assigned to it. They're tracking like what you did this and I did this. No, you know, you paid last time. I paid this, this kind of thing. Or they're elevated by the idea that, oh, yeah, you know, they did this in this. Therefore, the relationship must be much, much tighter than perhaps the other person in the relationship thinks it is. These are complex features, but the idea that we are old world primates and that there's a brain network tracking this stuff to me makes really good sense.

1:27:00And I think it's wonderful that you've identified a physiological anatomical substrate for it. I think it's, it's, it's lends a lot of support to like thousands of years of observation. I think you're spot on there in the, in the sense that, and at some point, it's, it's all really transactional in the calculus of evolution. Right. So in ultimately, it's, if your calculations do the right thing so that you get resources and making opportunities and translate that into offspring. And that they do that into offspring as well. Then those, whatever the biological substrate was that did that is going to proliferate and potentially become honed and, and really specialized for doing the job.

1:27:53And that's actually the argument one other argument for white. You know, we study primates because we're so closely related to them, we share all these features of our, our biology and our behavior. But also because, and, and this is where I think, for example, personally, I find it much more compelling to study animals like Reese's Maccax as opposed to say, Marmos sets, which we've talked a little bit in the sense that. But if we're thinking about the forces that have made us who we are, right, which we just talked about, you see it displayed on X every day, like attending to all these things, tracking all these different relationships, deciding whether or not to give somebody your attention, you know, the purest form of generosity, as it was said.

1:28:43That's what monkeys have to do too. And so this, this argument from what we call neuroethology and ethylogy being the science of basically trying to understand behavior as a product of evolution, right, that it, it, it, that it's designed just like physical features, just like the wing of a bird, right, that are mental processes. And the underlying mechanisms are designed to serve very specific functions. And so if we want to understand how we got to be the way that we are, we should look toward animals that had, you know, seem to be doing the same kind of things, facing the same kinds of pressures in the environment, in particular, the social environment, which seems to be the one that's most important for us.

1:29:35How do humans signal their hormone status? Is that on a very different end to the spectrum? Yeah. But, you know, everything we're talking about, which is fairly high level, and in the brain exists, as I like to think about it on a, on a kind of water level or a tide that's set by our levels of autonomic arousal, like thinking, feeling action changes when levels of autonomic arousal are very high, aka stress, alertness versus when we're talking about the brain. And we're sleepy. And hormones certainly influence autonomic arousal and a bunch of other things too. Hormones is a broad category, but let's just stay with the ones that most people are familiar with.

1:30:12So what are the data on how females signal, let's just say, you know, testosterone estrogen and other, you know, relevant hormones and for males as well. What are the external signals or behavior or behavioral signals? Yeah. So that's a really important point that you made because they both, you know, those things go together. So it's been most controversial for females, but, you know, in my view, the data is pretty clear on it, you know, lines, I think, with our own intuitions just from from daily life, which is, well, some things are apparently not consciously perceptible. It's like hard to report.

1:30:55But, but through studies where you just ask males for like, okay, is this, you know, how attractive is this woman, or et cetera. That there are changes in the face, for example, and that's been one argument is that this is going to sound funny, but that the signals that in non human primates are in the rear are net because we're walking upright, you can't see that really. So now it's kind of in the face. And so these changes that happen that the ovulatory cycle is reflected in the rigidity, how tight the skin is in the face because it gets a little plumber and a little bit redder. And we may not be consciously aware of that, but that it's there, right?

1:31:37And it shows up in sort of preference data when you ask heterosexual males, you know, do you know how attractive is this woman, et cetera. So that that seems to be the case. And also behavioral, you know, so sort of flirtatious behavior increases around the time of obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a classic study that exotic dancers, strippers, would actually get bigger tips, more tips when they were ovulating, though when they're not ovulating. Interesting. So there may be, and it could be by virtue of their physical behavior, their day, but it could be the way they dance proximity to the, what I guess the observers clients, whatever you call them.

1:32:23I don't recall that being quantified, but it suggests that there's, there's a latent signal there. And that men are unconsciously processing this. They're not saying, oh, her cheeks are particularly plump and red right now there, that, but that if you measure their ratings or scores of attractiveness, when she's ovulating, it's these features that are that might be drawing out that response. Correct. We can take this back to the monkey porn studies, which is was our first real for a into trying to quantify the value of various kinds of social information for guiding decisions. And we already came into this with a sense that like, yeah, things like status, physical prowess, mating status.

1:33:22You know, are you, are you, you look like a good mate, made, are you in, in mating condition, you know, you, et cetera. And so when, you know, you think about that, like, how do you ask a monkey that question? You could ask him, I mean, you're not going to tell you because they can't talk, but you have to develop a behavioral way to elicit that. And so we didn't, I think it was pretty clever, was to riff on the studies that, you know, I had already done looking at varying the expected data. And so this was the work I did as a postdoc with Paul Glimchur, where we revealed economic signals in the brain in the, in the pride of Cortex, an area between where visual signals come in and where you make a choice to, to make a behavioral response.

1:34:10And we varied like, in this case, monkeys don't work for money, they'll, they'll work for juice. Okay, it's been actually, it's really fun. You spend a lot of time figuring out what juice they really love best. And to, then economically, you would vary like the size of the juice reward that each of the two offered or its probability while maintaining size constant that when you combine those, you multiply those together, you get expected value. That's the first model of economic decision making that was really ever developed right you compute the expected value different options you choose the one has the highest value.

1:34:42It, you know, it doesn't work all the time, but it's sort of a rough proxy and we showed that, yeah, neurons in parallel Cortex signal that monkeys are good economists, they choose the one that has a higher expected value. Okay, so now take that experiment. I'm going to have monkeys choosing between two options that vary in how much juice they pay out. But I'm also going to pop up a picture when they choose one of them. Okay, and they don't know what pictures coming up, but the picture is going to be, it could be, it could be a nothing burger, just like some gray square doesn't mean anything. Or it could be the, the, the perineum or of a female fit were males that we were studying we did this with males sorry females making choices eventually as well.

1:35:22Could be face of a dominant male face of a spornet male face female. What's the equivalent of the swollen taint of a female monkey? For if you reverse the experiment and it's the female monkey who's making a choice about male monkeys, what are they, what are they find really attractive in a male monkey? Yeah, so it's the taint of the male monkey because it's providing a signal that how much monkeys looking at taint. How much testosterone is circular, you know, that they've got on board basically, which is a good predictor of their status. It's a good predictive of their, you know, fighting ability, all that kind of stuff.

1:35:57And if you're female and you, that's a reasonable kind of choice to make, because if you have male offspring and females are predisposed to choose that the meal, your male offspring are going to be pretty well. So that's what we did. And we varied how much juice. So sometimes monkeys would get paid, they'd have to give up juice to see the pictures. Sometimes they get paid more to see the pictures. And what we did then is we, we, we constructed choice curve and we use the differential if that if it's not 50, 50, if it slides one way or the other, it tells us that monkeys are paying X amount to see certain kinds of pictures or you have to overpay them.

1:36:35Right. And so what did we find it was really, I think scientifically revealing, but it's pretty fun. People got it immediately. They will pay to juice, they will give up juice. They will pay it to see pictures of the perineum, the hindquarters of females, which was original study was in male monkeys. They will pay to see the faces of dominant males and you had to pay them to see the faces of subordinate males. Okay. So, so, so females will give up juice to see the taints of testosterone rich male monkeys and male monkeys will pay juice to see the swollen taints of female monkeys that are because of the swelling indicates a better reproductive competence.

1:37:28Yes, better, you know, doused time, the time is ripe. Okay. To, to, to mate, it's just in general to signal that is like what we would say is it's important has value. Monkey, something you should try. And in fact, yeah, they're paying for it. So, you know, just blew up on the internet, even back then it was like suddenly mill every website was like, oh, you proved monkey porn, blah, blah. It was kind of a fun ride. It did. It was a New York Times idea of the year in 2005, which was again kind of shocking, you know, I think it's on that, but, but people, it makes sense. And the thing I want to point out is that we ran this same experiment in people, not with uh, unclothed humans.

1:38:13So we used, and we used only, well, not it was, it was, and we had to create our own stimulus set because all the stimulus sets that were out there for visual studies of humans were like a bunch of, you know, German people looking very dower, they were very well controlled. And we want something that's more natural. So we downloaded thousands of photos from this website, hot or not, calm. I don't know if you recall that, but it was a website where you could upload pictures and people would rate you. I mean, now that's like probably wouldn't be allowed now. I remember rate my pet rate my pet rate my professor, I think, which is still around.

1:38:49We're saying rate rate rate rate with a T my pet. Yeah, but this was hot or not calm. So you get all these really natural looking. And then we had this is really funny though too. So we had a group of separate groups of raiders from the people who we actually test in the experiment. So we had, you know, a group of male male heterosexual males rating the female photos and vice versa. And that was interesting in its own right. So we were just trying to establish like we're not saying why they're attracting like that. Just like let's measure it. Okay. And it was really fun because, you know, by the, it took it was hard work.

1:39:29You have to do one every three seconds. And it took like an hour. And the, you know, when the women are done rating, they're like, okay, glad that's over. The hours over and our male raiders were like, did you have any more? You know, can I, I'd be happy to sit here and rate more photographs for you. Interesting. So women got sort of like they got tired of rating males for attractiveness. Yes. Males did not tire of rating females for. They did not at all, which is that's anecdotal, but it's still. I think it's revealing. Then we ran the pay -per -view experiment just like in monkeys on humans.

1:40:08And we also ran a couple of other economic, you know, economic standard economic tasks. One would be how long are you willing to wait. So that's the delayed discounting like in general, you, you will wait longer for a bigger reward. And also how hard would you work? And we, the work was like you had to alternate pressing two keys on a keyboard. It was really just, just, me, no laborious, you know, et cetera. So, the two interesting, just sociologically is interesting, what comes out of this. Our female subjects basically wouldn't give up money. They were working for money. They were hearing the sound of coins coming out of a slot machine, which was proportional how much money they actually got.

1:40:52Real money. If you ignored the pictures, you'd go home with like $17 extra compared to if you were influenced by them. And the females did really well economically. So they pretty much kind of ignored the pictures of the males, even though they were rated, even the ones that were super hot. They were not very concerned with that for the males, it was exact opposite. So the males are giving up essentially they're paying and they had thousands of trials. They're paying somewhere between a half and three quarters of a cent to see images of women who were rated in the top, like third of of attractiveness.

1:41:30They also would wait significantly longer. And they would work really hard as like rats pressing for cocaine quite literally to keep those pictures up on the screen. Okay, so that's the setting. We've established in monkeys and in people similar economic principles that are guiding social, you call attention, social valuation, whatever. So we're like, okay, let's go look in the brain. So we did an MRI experiment, FMI experiment, measure, measure blood flow to different parts of the brain. In, we only tested males because they were the ones who displayed differential preferences there. And what we found is that kind of parts of the visual system that are involved in encoding faces, but then the reward system was activated and tracked linearly.

1:42:21So we found out that the frequency, how much money these guys were paying to see images, to basically the trade off value, the currency, the translation of pictures into money. Okay. Then in monkeys, we studied all the same areas, but now we could record from individual neurons in those areas rather than looking at blood flow, which is a crude proxy. And we found exactly the same thing, which is that neurons in the reward system were spontaneously and strongly activated by those pictures, you know, that, that made sense. Right. So the pictures on the perine of females by dominant male, which is a lot of the same.

1:43:03But there were a lot of different cases. And that correspondence, I thought, was pretty compelling. Right. So these are brain areas that are involved in value based decision making. Not unlike the value based decision making of tracking how many grooms, grooming events, one received versus needs to give or texts, one has received or gives or acts of service, one trades for some other love language. Which I mean, I'm extrapolating to a lot of different themes, but I mean, talk about transactional. I mean, this implies that our neural circuitry, while flexible, we can, you know, trade two of those for one of those or we can decide, you know, I'm just going to be a selfless giver.

1:43:55That that's a decision. And that altruism, well, it certainly exists. I mean, we fortunately see acts of altruism a lot, probably not as much as, you know, humanity would be served by, but it exists altruism exists. But nonetheless, there's a formula that's maintained in the brain. Like, I'm going to do all this for nothing. And the circuit kind of understands that versus I'm going to do this, but there's an expectation, maybe with a long latency that at some point, it's going to be payback. I expect to be paid back. The idea of altruism has been very controversial within kind of evolutionary biology for a long time, because it's kind of hard to imagine a, a scenario in which being purely selfless.

1:44:48Could persist if there was a genetic, you know, part of that, right, if it were heritable. So that's why we have ideas like kin selection, like, I will give up my life for, you know, eight of my cousins, for example. Well, right, I was saying in parenting and taking care of young, like we give selflessly, but there's this like unconscious or semi conscious backdrop, which is you want your own offspring to proliferate to survive and flourish. And so it's not, quote, unquote, really selfless, although in the short term, it can appear selfless. I guess, I suppose the real evolutionary biology argument, I would say that in terms of just pure acts of giving where we don't expect anything in return.

1:45:27I think most people that do that, say, certainly have had this experience, right, it feels good. So there is a return on investment. It's just that the return doesn't come from somebody else doing something to reciprocate in the same domain, but it feels good. You know, there's nothing more impressive than an anonymous donor. Right, you know, actually, I don't want to take us too far off track, but there's this idea in a lot of Europe that if somebody donates a lot of money to a cause that, you know, they're doing philanthropy that they're like trying to hide something. Whereas in this country, that tends to be not the case, although it's sort of growing this idea that, oh, if somebody's giving a lot of money to a university, they want their name on the side of a building, they're really looking to kind of either hide other features of their life and or they want respect.

1:46:14Right, they want they want no fame. So it's kind of interesting. I like to believe in pure altruism. I just I just feel it feels good to me to believe in true altruism. So I, you know, I don't think this is settled. And I think this is where there's another feature of human and maybe human evolution that humans and human evolution. That's relevant here, which is that we may be one of the only organisms in which something called group selection might happen. Right, and that's this idea that like groups are competing with each other in addition to individuals competing and and collaborating and competing.

1:46:52And so that an individual evolution might favor groups in which there are certain individuals who are in a sense wired to be selfless. And there's one of my colleagues at Penn, I named Duncan Watts has done these really interesting experiments where he'll he had he ran these massive online like prisoners dilemma games where you know people are having to decide whether to, you know, to either support, you know, their partner or or defect essentially. And but what was unusual about these games is he let people play them over and over again hundreds of hundreds of times what typically happens is once you've experienced the fact that like if you cooperate, you're going to get screwed eventually.

1:47:39And then everybody just says, I'm just going to I'm just growing the other guy from here on out, but he identified that there's a population of like 20 % of people, I think something like that who are persistent cooperators who cooperate no matter what their experience. And that is resonant with this idea kind of from group selection that groups that had individuals who were cooperators who were selfless, no matter what might out compete other groups right and that I think that's a really interesting idea. I want to circle back to what you're saying about the feel good like when you give there's a real substrate to that if we can engage in a little reverse inference, which is that and this and this was shown actually couple decades ago by by a neuro economist named Bill Harbaugh for the first time, which is that when you give to like a charity that you love, you see activation of reward circuitry that looks just like if you got to reward yourself.

1:48:45So it's like if I give to whatever march of dimes or something on that and that's what I love then it in essence feels good to me and that reward system activation right is the thing that through dopamine reinforces behavior. So when you have that warm glow it makes you more likely to do that again in the future. It's a self reinforcing signal. I love that those sorts of circuits exist because they seem to serve the greater good and I'm not trying to, you know, rub away our more, I don't know, harsher features of primate brain wiring, but they're all in there. So speaking of which are there external signals besides muscularity, jaw shape, et cetera that relate to levels of testosterone in male humans that are transient, you know, the male hormones don't cycle as robustly as female hormones because the lack of a menstrual cycle.

1:49:49They might change with age, et cetera, but is there anything that signals testosterone or free testosterone level certainly stress hormone level is signaled quaking of hands, that kind of thing. But what about testosterone signaling that is independent of the kind of like vigor display stuff that we normally hear about. It's a good question. I think it's important as you point out that it doesn't vary too much over, you know, weeks or months or anything like that. It's pretty stable. But while one thing we can think about is work done by my colleague, Gidee, Nave, who's who's in the marketing department at Wharton and working with Colin camera actually out here at Caltech.

1:50:37I think the number of studies not where they are measuring testosterone, but doing very well controlled placebo, you know, trials of applying testosterone gel versus, you know, something that, you know, people, you know, you didn't know which which arm you were getting. So testosterone versus placebo versus placebo. Yeah, and measuring things like desire for, you know, conspicuous consumption. So buying, you know, luxury cars or things like that or other things are their cognitive reflection, like they really bad. They start to fail on things that require not just giving the simple answer. They become more risk taking.

1:51:23So there's a number of features that we kind of I think collectively anecdotally think of as being like hyper masculine associated with testosterone, like you want to signal that you're a big guy, you take more risks. And you're less reflective, you just said more and you're less reflective so that, you know, that I'm going to screw it up right now if I actually tried to give you the question, you know, but it's like, you know, a bat in the ball cost a dollar 10 together, you know, that I'm going to screw it up and then you're going to say, well, you know, you lack cognitive reflection, let's just leave that aside.

1:51:54But then they're much more likely to give the wrong answer go to the jump to the conclusion, which seems obvious, but it's wrong. So higher testosterone more impulsive with responses less reflective, yes, tend to be wrong more often. Yes. But more confident, but more confident. More risk taking that kind of taking that's kind of a kind of a okay, fully expected one. And I guess the purchasing, you know, items that signal wealth or status, it's a display. So, you know, I think it is like the chimpanzee. So when when when researchers first went out to study chimpanzees, you know, in Africa, and then they they had like generators or whatnot around, they had these gasoline cans or whatever.

1:52:44And the male chimps, one of the male chimps, you know, discovered that he could take these cans and run around the group banging them together and getting a lot of attention. You know, which is similar, you see them up in a tree, bigger display display displaying that yeah, just grabbing. I think so much of its attention. Just look at me, look at me, look at me. And I think that's what you've got going on with this sort of, you know, buying a Jaguar or whatever, you know, it's like. Or people are trying to signal what they don't have actually have, right? I mean, it's tricky because we now you can buy things on credit, like, you know, the bunch of jokes about Los Angeles that can be made here, you know, my I grew up in the Bay Area.

1:53:28And there are areas of the Bay Area where there's a tremendous amount of wealth. My dad used to always say, you know, you know, Pierre like wealth is really kind of hidden back in the trees literally, you know, you go to LA and there's all this display through stuff. It depends on where you are in LA. But it's largely true. You see, let me put this way. You see a lot more yellow Lamborghinis here than you do in Portola Valley. But I'll be willing to bet that there's far more money in Portola Valley than there is in all of Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. If you really just looked at actual net worth not an experiment, I want to run.

1:54:07Right. But I'd be willing to bet one entire limb of somebody's choice to run that experiment. And so there is this kind of strange thing where the display of vigor is is so flexible in humans. Right. Like, it's like, you know, nowadays there's a lot of discussion about billionaire signaling more traditional or primitive forms of vigor, like fighting ability or muscle versus, you know, like it's almost like. And I think part of the reason for that is that the concept of a billion dollars is very hard for most people to conceptualize as like an operational thing. Like what they would do with it and how it would impact their level of happiness, which is probably actually very little, et cetera.

1:54:55But we can assess physical quality so readily. Like, and so anyway, I guess that this is really just my way of taking us back to this idea of valuation. Like how we place value on a potential mate or a friend or a coworker. It sounds so transactional, but clearly the brain is performing these operations all the time. And it's highly variable depending on who you are, the social context you live in. And yet these hormones, especially testosterone and estrogen, seem to really be playing with the volume or the gain on all of this stuff. Yep, that's exactly how, and in fact, that's how I think about all all, you know, we can think about oxytocin the same way as like a volume knob for pro social interactions in general and testosterone.

1:55:44So, so I think that works. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors function. Last year I became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics and tests for PFASs or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers, Keide, or physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas.

1:56:28For example, in one of my first tests with function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that, but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, I've been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcystine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say, by taking a second function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There are so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test.

1:57:02The problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by function simplicity and, at the level of cost, it is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, you can go to functionhealth .com slash huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250 ,000 people, but they're offering early access to huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth .com slash huberman to get early access to function. Let's talk about oxytocin.

1:57:37We hear about it as the love hormone, the affiliative hormone. Folks, it's a neurohormone, so it's somewhere in between a neuromodulator and a hormone. Let's set all that aside, all the mechanistic stuff. I'd love to know your knowledge about what changing levels of oxytocin does to perception, to behavior, humans. Oxytocin, we've been interested in it for a long time because, as you said, it seems to be a dial that can turn up or turn down certain aspects of social -even other aspects of mental and emotional function. It's important to point out that oxytocin and its sister neuromodormone, vasopressin, arginine vasopressin, which is sort of maybe a little more important in males than in females and females.

1:58:29Oxytocin is a little more important, but they're in both. They've been around a long time. They've actually, there's a very early in vertebrate evolution. In mammals, oxytocin has the primary role of helping to build bonds between mom and babies. Oxytocin is released during childbirth, it's released when mom is nursing. It seems that in humans and some other social, really, really social creatures, it's now been co -opted to have this similar role in the relationships you have with other people who are not your offspring or your paramate. Oxytocin, for example, is released when you orgasm. That's thought to be why that sort of pillow talk afterward is more engaging.

1:59:20People feel things at that time that they were different from what they would have felt. It fosters attachment. That's a good way of putting it. Oxytocin levels are hard to measure. You can measure at a distance in the periphery, in the blood, but it's not exactly like one -to -one correlated with what's going on. In the brain, in general, we don't want to put a pump or a little thing in your brain that we could measure how much is in there. We can look at, instead, what is often done is to look at what happens if you introduce oxytocin, more oxytocin than you normally have into the brain. You can't inject it or anything like that.

2:00:04The way that it's typically applied is to squirt up your nose or inhale it intranasally. It then is taken up by the nerves that are in your sinuses and then goes into the brain. That was what it was thought to. I think that we were the first to show that that's actually how it works. We did all the work in monkeys where all these things are easier to do and the behavior is a little bit less complex. Our readouts are, I think, a bit more straightforward. In the human studies, there's a lot of variate. It's controversial because there's a lot of like some crap studies and there's just a lot of variability in the effects across studies.

2:00:43I think some of that's just because you ask people to squirt it up their own noses. There's a lot of that introduces variation in just how good they were getting it in the right place. The monkeys we did instead is we used what's called an nebulizer or aerosolizer. I noticed when my kid had pneumonia and I took him to the ER, they put this mask on him and they missed this elbuterol, which opened up his airways. We could do the relaxy tosen too. That's what we do with monkeys. It makes sure they get a really good dose and then we show that that gets right into the brain. Now that puts us in a position to ask questions of what does it do.

2:01:18One of the first things that oxytocin does is it relaxes you. Just overall, you were talking about an ovec function. It's a relaxer. It's an anxiolytic. In monkeys, what that does is it reduces their vigilance to any threats. They're just a lot more chill. That's primary thing. We've looked at how it affects their behavior in males and females separately. First of all, males and females have different strategies and behaviors and the expression of where oxytocin receptors are in the brain, etc. and vasopressin receptors are a little bit different. In male monkeys, it's super interesting because we've been talking about how dominance and that really recent macaques, it's really steep hierarchy.

2:02:12One of the things we found right away is that you give oxytocin and it just flattens the hierarchy. The dominant male monkeys become super chill and friendly and the subordinate ones become a bit bolder, perhaps because if I dosed my own or I dosed you with oxytocin and changed your behavior, which would change my behavior, so it reverberates across individuals. It flattens the hierarchy. They spend more time making eye contact. They pay more attention to the other individual and we've shown that. It's burning, man. I've never been to burning men. This is what I hear. No, I think that's the right point and I'll circle back to that because we also showed that in a task -based situation or a monkey can choose, we gave monkeys choices whether they could give a reward to themselves, to another monkey, to a bottle, a collect reward, in case they just like to see juice dripping out.

2:03:09And they would become more pro -social, so they're much more likely to give a reward to another monkey. They're more altruistic as we talked about earlier. It looks like a real pro -social kind of thing, which I think is super interesting. In females it's a little bit different. They, females become kind of nicer to each other and we see the greater eye contact, etc. But they become more aggressive toward males. And we speculate, I think it's the hypothesis, that because oxytocin is released when you've got an infant, basically, for females, males are a bigger threat than because in many primate societies, other mammals, males sometimes can be infant -as -sidle because if they kill off a female's infant, then that will bring that female into receptivity for mating much more quickly.

2:04:15And so that's sort of the evolution, yeah, it is brutal, the evolutionary rationale. So that's kind of our supposition. The other thing I thought it was really interesting as well is we find a greater or an increase in the synchronization of behavior. So when I do, you know this idea of mirroring, which has been talked about in business context for a long time, you know, it's a real thing. And it's a marker of a good relationship, a strong relationship. If you have good rapport with somebody, you tend to adopt similar movements and postures. And if you do those things, we didn't coordinate with it.

2:04:58You just happen to be a great dresser. So when you have that, you know, actually, if you do those things, if I subtly mirror, and I'm in a job interview, I'm more likely to get the job, going to get a higher salary, etc. So Oxytocin turns up behavioral synchrony. And one of the things, this is like something I've been fascinated in for the last decade. And then we and a lot of other people have been working on is that this synchrony, the behavioral and neural level, physiological synchrony, is kind of, it's this black magic of social behavior. It's the glue that allows us to live and work together.

2:05:38So the observation is that if you and I, we have a good rapport here, let's say, if we're measuring activity in our brains right now, we'd see that they were coming into alignment. So they might have been very disparate when I arrived here and you arrived here today. And as we've grown closer and we discovered things that are similar about us, that the, you know, our mindsets and our emotional sets are more overlapping. So we see this world more similarly, we feel more similarly about it. We're more likely to take similar decisions. And, and then that rever, if the coolest thing is this reverberates down to your body.

2:06:15So if I, if our brains begin to line, our heart is actually begin to beat together, you know, if we have different resting heart rates, you've been to breathe together and you start to move together, you start to look at the same things the environment, we've talked about attention. When you look at something, the same thing, you're getting the same data and that a feedback loop, which I think now you can see that that is a way to coordinate behavior. And that is the essence of sort of, that's our secret sauce as a species, which is that we can collaborate and do things together. And it seems to like oxytocin, vasopressin are involved in this as a way of kind of turning up the dial on synchrony.

2:06:55It seems to turn up the so -called social brain network. And then that synchrony is, is the glue and it's a biomarker, a biological marker, or of a close relationship that predicts better communication, increased trust, better teamwork. You know, whether your marriage is going to last, I mean, the things that it predicts, you know, group decision making, so we showed that in like in a business context, committees that are more in sync with each other, their hearts are beating together, are more likely to reach the right decision in a really difficult problem than committees that are not. The cool thing is that now that you have a biomarker, you can hack that, right, in the sense that, now we can start looking at all those trust building exercises or anything else that, you know, is supposed to turn things up, turn up the dial on teamwork or communication.

2:07:50And we have a readout. And we could say, yeah, that's working. That's actually doing the thing. It's not BS, right? You should invest your time and energy in that rather than something else. And there's like, now we've been working through this list as well as others. There's a whole host of things that seem to actually turn up synchrony. And that's a shortcut to team chemistry. So interesting. I'm sure you're familiar with the molecule MDMA, aka ecstasy. Never taken. I have. I have. Hi on my list. Yeah, I have. It's an illegal drug, but if you are part of a clinical trial exploring MDMA, then you can do it legally.

2:08:33If you're not, you're breaking the law, right? So, methylene dioxy, methamphetamine is, it's very interesting because it dramatically increases dopamine, but not nearly as much as it increases serotonin. And it also leads to enormous increases in oxytocin. And it's not really a classic psychedelic. It's an empathogen. And it has unique properties in that it raises dopamine and serotonin simultaneously. That's unusual among compounds, like fetamine, dopamine, epinephrine, you know, the cellus I've been serotonin, you know, they are broadly speaking. There's a really nice experiment that was done trying to isolate the effects of dopamine versus serotonin versus oxytocin on the empathogenic effect.

2:09:25And by administering different drugs, and in the case of oxytocin, oxytocin directly, what they basically concluded was that oxytocin has very little, if anything, to do with the empathogenic aspects of MDMA. But if I recall correctly, and I have to go back and look at this, but if I recall correctly, it had a profound impact on, as you pointed out, the reducing anxiety. And that reduction in anxiety brings us back to this idea that, you know, as we change the tide of autonomic arousal, things become more or less available to us in terms of emotions and behavior. So I find oxytocin would just be like spectacularly interesting compound for so many reasons.

2:10:09But perhaps for that reason, more than all the others, that it's like it's our own affiliative, as you said, angsiliotic. Is that type of pronounced correctly? Yeah, yeah. To, I never actually said that word out loud. I've written it many, many times. But when I said it, I was worried that like, maybe I'm saying the opposite. Or angsiliotic, or angsil, anyway, reduces anxiety. Yeah. Chills you out. Chills you out. And I think that's so interesting that oxytocin can be evoked by all these different types of stimuli. So as you mentioned, it's like post -coidol or post -organismic. It's, but it can be elicited by non -sexual affiliative touch.

2:10:51By, there's actually really interesting evidence that, and this led to this question about whether or not there are in sections versus, you know, traditional, vaginal births are, are, you know, are, are they truly equal in terms of their effect on the fetus? And it does seem to be at least in rodent models that the passage through the vaginal canal during birth helps stimulate oxytocin that it has a bidirectional effect on the mother infant relationship. Well, is there any evidence of that in primates as well? I know the evidence that you're talking about. I don't know of evidence in primates for that.

2:11:33But I think I'd like to circle back to what you talked about in terms of social touch, which I think is a really, especially right now today. I think it's a very important topic to consider. So we, like other primates, we have these, they're actually unspecialized sensors in our skin, the hairy parts of our skin, like your arm, whatever you're right. And they provide input essentially to a system that released the system that releases oxytocin directly. And that's basically all they do. They're really bad at telling you exactly where, how, you know, what's being done or how much pressure. But they operate best at body temperature.

2:12:19So you're being touched with a body temperature stimulus. And in a way that's very what we would consider to be very pleasant, like getting tick -y, you know, like grooming. Yeah. Yeah. Like the same thing is grooming in monkeys. And so it tells us that this is an ancient part of our heritage to building relationships, which is actually through social touch. Right. And it's been said, and I think reasonably, that we're living through an epidemic of the loss of social touch for a lot of good reasons, right, because of raising awareness of inappropriate touch, etc. But now it's almost as if we've won the pendulum too hard in one direction, which is that we're being robbed of this very natural intrinsic signaling mechanism for building bonds that humans would normally, you know, normally, you know, in the past, have benefited greatly from.

2:13:20And it's, you know, it's not clear how we move forward in terms of like replacing that. But I do think it's possibly part of the constellation of forces of losses that is making us very sick as a species and as a society, you know, namely the loneliness epidemic, the, the sort of anti -social century. Which with concomitant, you know, with basically all these follow -ons in terms of anxiety and depression and despair, despair, exactly. And what about despair? It's such a heavy word. Yeah, it captures so much. A couple of reflections about this, I think about this a lot. I never forget when I was traveling overseas in 2019.

2:14:12So this is like pre lockdowns and all that. You would see in certain areas of the world, men walking holding hands. And, you know, I didn't know their sexual orientation, but my assumption was that they were heterosexual men holding hands because it was like just very much part of the culture over there. The other thing was if you and I have gone to South America, you'll see a school kids walking home, all holding hands, boys and girls just walking holding hands. Right. It's very, you know, casual, you know, non -romantic hand holding. Right. A lot more hugging, rather like, like, like, I wouldn't say long -fermin' brace, but I'd say like, like vigorous embrace, a long -meeting kind of thing.

2:14:56And I grew up in the era of, you know, like fist bombs and side hugs, you know, that was like a thing over here. And as you point out, I think that the lack of physical touch of that sort, meaning just whatever is culturally acceptable, consensual, casual physical touch, definitely according to the literature that I'm aware of, signals to the rest of the nervous system and body isolation, even if we're surrounded by people. And I watched that Chimp Empire series on Netflix where they talk about this alopathic grooming, this collaborative grooming, like I'll trade, you know, five, you know, pick your back for a while, you pick mine.

2:15:45And when they decide that they're going to ostracize a given member of their troop for whatever reason, sometimes because the Chimp misbehaved other times it's more diabolical than that, they're trying to really get rid of, they're trying to adjust the power balance in the troop for other reasons. They basically just leave that Chimp to try and groom itself and then the parasites start to eat away at it, it develops these immune issues, and then they often just go off on their own and die. It's an incredibly hard thing to watch. And what the underlying reasons are in each case are not made completely clear, but I think about this whole thing of like deaths of despair and, you know, not long ago, you were talking about group selection.

2:16:33I feel like these two themes might be related. I feel like right now, politically and culturally in this country, and now starting in Europe as well, it really is, it has become an us versus them kind of scenario. There doesn't seem to be a middle at all. It's like a big trough. And even the suggestion that somebody could kind of switch between groups is kind of like a no, because they believe and have said and done this, no, because they believe and have done this, a very strong opinions from both sides. So I don't think we're in a just hug it out kind of landscape right now. And so I'm curious what forms of non physical affiliate of behavior exist out there.

2:17:19There are social media accounts out there like upworthy, which you know just consistently puts out positive content. There's there are people who are very positive in their, you know, in their online behavior, but and there's encouragement is exists online, but it seems to be swamped by these like high salience, like attacks. Like what's the deal? What can we do? Yeah, I mean, this is a fundamental question for age, I think, and we're on a trajectory toward, I mean, I don't want to give the pressure and I'm a complete pessimist, but I could, I was about to say toward oblivion. Between like the despair that's drive has been driving people to, to either commit suicide or to, you know, develop severe mental illness or physical health issues, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, et cetera, that are, I think, a consequence of being in some cases, a consequence of being isolated because you were not interact that that's part of who we are.

2:18:21Yeah, as a species and we don't thrive. I mean, the work is very clear that like being isolated, being alone is worse for your health and smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I mean, it's just really, really bad and it's, it scales. It's almost linear to how many contexts you have, you know, per week or per month. And so that's all really bad and I do believe that's also driving that's a big driver for not just the deaths of despair, but like the lack of coupling and the lack, you know, and crashing rates of fertility, which is also a real thing and it is happening. And if we don't counter it's it's going to be bad.

2:18:57Getting back to synchroding one of the most effective ways to get in sync with somebody that you're out of sync with or that you don't know, right. It was different from you is through conversation, but deep conversation. Okay, and there's a couple of parts this you have to make the time and the space to do this, you have to have an intentional mindset. And we and other scientists have worked with there are there are these structured sets of questions that have been developed. There were there's one called fast friends developed by the errands in the late 1990s. There's commercially available decks online that you can get.

2:19:29And they're cool because they each question, you know, you can kind of take at a superficial level or a deep level, but they're designed to kind of like break the ice and then get you really fast into like really deep questions. It's very similar to that. But in this case, it's about connecting like deep connection. I think it's more about deep connection than sort of romance part of this. And what happens during that and my good friend and colleague Emily Falk at the Annabberg school had a really nice paper recently that showed that by measuring brain activity itself in people who don't know each other as they work through these questions and their brain, you know, one brain is in this space, another brain is this space and they over time come into really close alignment.

2:20:23And that's associated with all these good stuff like I like you more, I feel closer to you, I value you more, etc, etc. And once you're in that kind of alignment, now you're set to sort of do things together. And now I think that gets back to your question like we can't hug it out. But we have to somehow create space and when I say space, like give people the space to do that, like I'm going to talk to you know somebody from the other political party or from the whatever, that's not a bad thing. Right, in fact, that's what we need to do. But instead we're especially online reinforcing and making the barriers harder to have those conversations, which are the necessary thing, I think, to establish the glue that keeps us together.

2:21:10Yeah, I feel like unless there's a organized effort to try and create a bridge, it ain't going to happen. I just feel like there's, I don't want to take us too far off course, but me is a good segue into the neuroscience of decision making and value based decision making, which is so much of the work that you've done. But I feel like there's this property of the human brain that there's evidence for I've seen a beautiful neuron paper showing that like confirmation of our beliefs leads to a reward based activation of a reward based mechanism. Basically, we're getting a little bit of dopamine for confirming our biases essentially about others.

2:21:49And then of course, if we then experience more affiliate of behavior from our group, we feel more protected. And then there's a tendency to do more of that. And I feel like with the knowledge that we have about dopamine incentive schemes, group group selection behavior, there ought to be a program that could be established that isn't hug it out, but that is designed to, again, that word exploit us so loaded to leverage the same neural circuits that led to the divide to try and bridge it. And you know, what what it has to do though is it has to break with the value system of of both groups. I mean, let's just be frank, we're talking about the left and the right here.

2:22:38I don't want to like, I don't want to dance around the margin. And, and somehow acknowledge that there's good and bad within both of those groups, which itself, as I say, is like a heretical statement like people are going to be, I mean, there's just so many assumptions made just on the basis of that. But create a new value based system that is self -rewarding and allows for group selection to, you know, fill in in the gap or at least come up with a third option. If not politically, then in terms of sociology. Yeah, so the solution is Independence Day, you know, that movie. So we need an alien invasion.

2:23:19So there's an out group that we can all, you know, identify with each other as, okay, we have to come together to fight, you know, because I think that's really at the root of this, which is that because of group selection, humans are sort of very tribal by nature. We are wired to connect to glue together with the people who are in our tribe, but that means almost by definition there's another tribe. So, so that we are over here and we are defending ourselves against them. Now it's not like complete, right? People have been engaging in long distance trade for, you know, 100 ,000 years plus, you know, there is interbreeding between homo sapiens and the antitals and Denisovins.

2:24:02So there's, you know, some flexibility in those rules, but in general, yeah, I mean, to have an in group, that means you have to have an out group. And if we want to take the left and right and put them together in some ways, it's like the easiest way to do that is if we had a third out group that we needed to unite against, such as drones from over New Jersey or, you know, aliens or, you know, who knows what? But these go back to classic psychology experiments, right? As I recall, where, you know, the best way to build affiliations have a common common goal or and or enemy. Yeah, like unfortunate, unfortunately, being under attack when two opposing groups are both under attack, they form alliance.

2:24:47So it's the classic minimal group experiments of science in the 60s, which I love and I teach on this all the time because it's relevant for all these tribal biases. And so what he did was like you take the random people off the street and go like, okay, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team. Okay, in five minutes, you're going to have to compete against the other team. And immediately the people in the red team are like, I don't like the people on the blue team, they're stupid and they're ugly. And you know anything about them, right?

2:25:15But you end up immediately forming a tribe, even though you might not have had anything in common. And what I think is really interesting and relevant here is that any number of different biases that are sort of superficial based on race or ethnic group or whatnot, which have been shown to, you know, even though people say like, oh, I feel, you know, if I see you in pain, like you're getting stuck with the needle. I feel like, I feel the same for anyone, doesn't matter. But it tends to be selective for your own tribe when you measure the brain activity. But if you now put the emphasis on team, like literally you do that science experiment, the minimal group experiment.

2:25:56And I put you in a red, or like we're both wearing black t -shirts. I say you're going to work with the other people, black t -shirts. It doesn't matter who you are, that, and I think the way it does this is through attention, is put my attention on what's shared rather than what's different. So now we're on the same team. And now that kind of recovers, restores that, that the empathy that I didn't feel toward you before. And that's interesting. When you think about, say in the US, the first places, the first groups that became integrated were like military and sports. And what's common amongst those, they wear uniforms.

2:26:39So the uniforms say we're on a team that takes your attention away from the things that are different. And the Stanford Prisoner famous Zimbardo experiment, we're signing people to Prisoner versus Guard. And that led where it led. Exactly. That occurred not what a short distance from where my lab was. So we have this anxiety lowering proaffiliative oxytocin thing, active via by touch affiliation. And it's bidirectional, like it promotes more touch, which promotes more feelings of safety, which lowers anxiety further. And then we have testosterone, which signals certain things about others, and seems to play a role in the hierarchy.

2:27:20And you mentioned that when oxytocin is given, that it kind of flattens the hierarchy. And my understanding of testosterone from Robert Sapolsky and others is that testosterone tends to exacerbate existing traits in people. It doesn't turn nice people into jerks or jerks into nice people. But rather it turns jerks into super jerks and nice people into super nice people. Which fits well with my idea that testosterone makes effort feel good. And what type of effort feels good depends on a lot of complex features within us as humans. Like too many things to explain by molecules. Yeah. So I feel like the primate literature and the human literature map so well to one another.

2:28:13And I think this is a good segue to take us into value based decision making because I do recall a paper published. I think it was in proscenes in the National Academy of Sciences, USA. I should point that out. There are other proceedings in other countries that show that, you know, if day traders or people on the stock market floor, they're took testosterone or they tended to be more aggressive in their, an impulsive in their decision making. Or if you just looked at performance and then you measured testosterone that it tended to fall out on a pretty nice correlation between higher testosterone and basically more aggressive decision making, more risk taking.

2:28:55So is that all still true? That's it. I mean, that's my read of literature that's still true. And it does raise I think a worrying specter of, you know, because like, I don't know how much of a phenomenon it is now, but it was the case maybe a decade ago or so that like, you know, a lot of guys who were traders who were feeling like they were losing their mojo after they, you know, after 40 or whatnot, you know, declining testosterone. So they decide they're going to start, you know, juicing, okay, put some Andrew gel on. And if that is then have, you know, that's like taking you above typical, you know, levels, then what might that do in terms of markets, if like enough people are actually, or even if they're juicing just for physical performance, right, and they're engaged in, you know, in trading, that could have a lot of, a lot of bad effects, right, as a cascaded through the market.

2:29:56Yeah, I would say that probably the dominant effect of exogenous androgens and all this TRT nowadays is, it's very clear that it allows people to maintain moderate to high testosterone levels, even if they're not sleeping as much. It enhances recovery. So if people have their behaviors right, their nutrition, their sleep, et cetera, it really does give them a, you know, significant advantage. If they don't have their behaviors right, it gives them the significant advantage of not having to deal with the normal fluctuations caused by minimal sleep, et cetera. But the decision making process, like to say yes, no, maybe, or maybe later, is reliant on things like good sleep being rested things other than testosterone, like this is the idea of a committee as opposed to one individual, you know, and recklessly driving decision based on state of mind or androgens.

2:30:51So if we could zoom out and in for a moment on some of the work that you did with Paul Glimscher when you were post -doc in his lab, but also in your own laboratory, when I sit down to make a decision, should I do something, should I not do something. Let's say I have some general sense of what the potential payoff is within a range, the potential payoff of not doing it within a range. And I always think of like some kind of tension or pressure as it relates to time. Like for instance, I've been considering buying a house. I really like the house. It's a bit of a reach for me for a number of reasons.

2:31:31And I'm trying to make this decision, right? And I'm trying to gauge whether or not other people are looking at this house also. What do we know about how we start to establish an internal representation of that? And I give that example as just one example. This could really translate to any number of different scenarios about whether or not to get married or not, whether or not to stay in a relationship or not, whether or not to move, whether or not to have another kid and on and on and on. What are the core mechanics of value -based decision -making as it relates to outcomes and time? Yeah, so I think we understand this system pretty well at this point.

2:32:13So the last 25, 30 years have been enormously productive. So we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this. And essentially what happens is you're confronting a situation. And it doesn't really matter whether it seems to be the same process, no matter whether you're trying to decide between eating a donut or an apple or buying this house versus renting an apartment or marrying this person, you know, proposing or not. It's sort of all the same system. And what happens is you come to the situation and your brain takes in evidence about the alternatives. What are the options that are available to me?

2:32:50What do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from, you know, maybe prior encounters or just other information? And it takes that evidence and it weighs it against stored information about things you're done in the past, other decisions you've made. And then begins to assign value, computes the expected value on those different options in terms of what it will return to you. And then essentially that is the basis along which that decision gets made. So it's, you know, it's a soft max function as we say. So it's not like a hard deterministic one. So there's some statistical noise in there for some, you know, we can talk about what that reason might be.

2:33:34And you make a choice. And whenever you make a choice and any behavior that you're engaging in, your brain is making a forecast of what's going to happen next as a result of that. And your brain then determines, computes, that things go exactly as predicted, right? Is it better than predicted or is it worse than predicted? And then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs that job better in the future. Right? So like, oh, actually, that was a way better than expected. You should assign that a higher value and do that thing. Again, this process of weighing up the evidence takes time.

2:34:14And that's why we have this speed accuracy trade off in decision making where we observe that the faster you go, the more mistakes you tend to make been there. Exactly. We've all made split second decisions that we regretted later. Oh, yeah, or sleep or slightly sleep deprived, sleep deprived, exactly. The more time you take the more evidence you can accumulate. And when you, you have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment is noisy. Right? It's not perfect. It's noisy because of the environment. It's noisy because the wet wear of the brain is statistical and biological.

2:34:54So you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal. And that happens when you go too quickly. Right? And one of the things that's so, so there's a good mantra from that, you know, which is if you want to make really good decisions or if it's really important, you kind of have to decide ahead of time. Like, do I need to be accurate or do I need to be fast? And if accuracy is important, you need to slow down. Take your time, take as much time as needed to get it, you know, the most information that you can. And even in the moment that doing like simple strategies like breathing or having a, you know, a mantra that says like, you know, it's not what matters.

2:35:37You know, every little decision does not what counts, but it's long run. That helps to turn it. We talked about a rousal a lot here. And that turns down a rousal. One of the things you think of a rousal is doing. We keep talking about volume knobs. It's like a volume knob for the stuff that's coming into your brain that could be signal or noise. So it can turn up noise too. So you could count as evidence toward the value of an option, something that is not actually, you know, evidence. And then you make the wrong decision. So by turning down a rousal, slowing down, you're lying more on evidence than, than on noise.

2:36:18Does increasing a rousal increase the likelihood of false positives that is thinking something is there that's not generally speaking as well as false negatives, you know, thinking that something is absent when actually it's present. I haven't thought about it that way before, but it seems to me like that's a, yeah, that seems consistent with my understanding. Just by way of example, one of the things that's been really different for me in the last few years is how quickly you move to publication when you podcast or when you're when you're doing social media, you just click. It's out in the world.

2:36:58Versus, you know, the way I was weaned was, you know, spend two, three, four years on a project. Maybe it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it does goes to multiple papers gets reviewed. So by time it comes out, you know, it's been proofread and you've read the proof. So it's been vetted by a number of hopefully expert sources, usually really good sources of feedback as opposed to nowadays where you can just kind of move immediately to publication. And I used to have this saying, which was in the lab because sometimes you know, you have two months to do a revision or something. It's never really two months.

2:37:32It always takes five times as long. I used to say, I go as fast as I carefully can. I used to tell my students and post I said, we go as fast as we carefully can because the moment you start going fast, you start making mistakes, you start making mistakes, you definitely pay for it later. And the mistakes that I've made podcasting were a product of going fast and or fatigue and the two things kind of relate to one another. Or occasionally somebody will highlight conflicting evidence. And then nowadays you can go back and repair things with AI. You can, you know, you put things in. But, but I feel like so much of life in terms of decision making is trying to make decisions when most of the time we think we don't have more time.

2:38:13But most of the time we do have more time unless somebody is hemorrhaging, we usually have more time. But then there are some real things where we don't always have more time. I mean, we are biological aging machines and there is such a thing as too late. Yeah, so how do you think these systems change as a function of, you know, playing a game for some money in the lab, we can or we can get caught up in it. But there's this like tremendous backdrop of context, you know, $100 might be fun for one person might be the difference between making rent and not making rent for another person. You know, the decision to stay in a relationship or leave a relationship when you're in your teens or 20s is fundamentally different than when somebody's for instance at the near the transition zone of having versus losing their fertility.

2:39:06I mean, these are like, yeah, and those change all sorts of these pressures are so real. And yet if we only have one system in the brain that handles this similarly to the reward system. It seems like we ought to learn in school how to work with and update our decision making process based on immediate term, short term, like all the different timescales to be able to do that seems really important. Are there any ways to train that up? Yeah, I think it's a so there's a few things in here that I think are worth unpacking. I mean, one is what you brought up about fatigue, which I think is really critical.

2:39:49We did some work with the wrestling team at Penn. Coach came to us and I had had a few of the wrestlers working in my lab and he said, you know, we're having this problem, which is that, I don't know if you've ever wrestled my middle son and one match. It's worse than I did because I lost that match and I did lose that much. It's just seventh grade. I quit because my dad gave me a choice. I could either continue to wrestle or I could play this other sport that I really wanted to play. He said he can't do both because it was going to impact my grades negatively. And so I opted for the other sport.

2:40:25What was the other soccer? Yeah, I love soccer. But losing that one wrestling match was informative. The guy just dead fished on me the whole time and he deserved to win. He was a really good strategy. He just like dead fished on me and I couldn't gum be out of there. But it is the worst six minutes of your life. You're exhausted within like 30 seconds. It's incredibly grueling. And what the coach observed was that there guys, there was the men's wrestling team, was they were performing very well in the first two periods. They got to the third period and they started making really dumbest dex bad decisions.

2:41:06And so he said what's going on? I said well it's about the speed accuracy trade up. But we have to investigate how it's related to fatigue. So what we did, this was a really fun experiment. So we go to the wrestling room and we wire these guys up. They got wearable EEG, heart rate monitors, the whole nine yards. And what we gave them like this simple little decision making slash impulse control task. It's just like a controlled response task. It is a trade off. If you go too fast and you make mistakes. So it's like there's like a go -no go. And so they do it. Then we run them through two minutes of cross fit exercises.

2:41:43Really brutal. Then they come back off and they have to do the same thing again. We do that three times and then they have to wrestle each other. So it's cognitive and physical. Not unlike chess boxing, which is not a sport I recommend. Have you seen this? Where they play around. They play some chess and then they literally fight and then they crazy like switching between these different states of mind. But also somehow really appealing. You know, it's like for the neuroscientist in you and me. And I think we're all neuroscientists. To some extent we want to understand the brain in ourselves. This notion of very disparate behaviors, boxing and playing chess.

2:42:17Being associated with very disparate types of arousal. And how those map on one another I think is interesting. I think the the confluence of chess boxing is fencing, which is very much like chess. My youngest son fenced for a number of years. And so mentally it's like that. But it has the physicality or jujitsu much jujitsu. You do Brazil. You tell me that it's like there's an infinite number of options that become constrained in certain dynamics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very similar. So this was really cool because what we found was that speed accuracy trade off the more fatigue they got, the more calories they spent.

2:43:01The faster they would slide down to emphasizing speed over accuracy. They just started like just like just going just got to get done. Just got to get I don't know what they're feeling, but that they are just not deliberating, not really being focused. They just lost the capability of doing that. And aside from the way you say, well, we could help you guys. Because you could become more physically fit. Maybe when fatigue is fast, but they're about as fit as they could be. They said, well, why don't we do this? Why don't we offload the decision in the third period to the coach. As soon as you in the third period, you're going to just look at the coach.

2:43:41At you know, some Kate answer whenever it's he's going to yell at you to look and you do it with the coach tells you. So I think this is really interesting because you think about it in like other contexts, like in a business context or something. When if somebody's really fatigued or your units fatigued, maybe you have an external person then who takes over making the decision that you are just you just execute in a sense. Right. The other thing I wanted to say about this all too, which I think it's to your point about well in the lab, it's like, you know, it's one thing you're you're you're you're you're you got an undergraduate gambling for 10 bucks.

2:44:17Over an hour and that's how does how well does that map on to the real world where there are all these other things going on and I think that. That's the challenge all the you know when I teach business school and you know classes MBA students or executives and through exec ed. They all want to know like give me the five step formula. And it's like that's supposed to plot how do I take into all and it's like well we mostly know about one this dimension or that dimension and that dimension and not how in the real world, you know, and a real complex environment to put that all together. So that is a I think that's a gap that's a and one that we're trying to fill which is to study decision making whether it's individual or collective decision making in real world environments right to where all of these factors, you know context and the various priorities that are coming in are more, you know, more natural they're not controlled and how then I mean we think we know how that works.

2:45:19But we haven't really proven it yet. So often we think that we know how we feel about something but some of the work that you've done in monkeys and in humans has really highlighted the extent to which we base our valuation of other things and people based on things that are in proximity to those things and people. Could you tell us about this experiment and I swore I wasn't going to say the words highly processed foods during this episode but I think we got to talk about monkeys and Doritos. Ah, right. I thought this could have gone there's a number of different and I will I do want to bring up one study that I think people find interesting that gets at this difference between what we think we know and feel and what our brain what our brains are actually telling us.

2:46:08So we talked about how monkeys and people their brains are I don't want to say hardwired but they're tuned tuned to value social information in particular kinds of social information like information about high status individuals right and information about sexy individuals attractive individuals right and it's baked into the same circuitry or attention circuitry or reward circuitry. And that once we observe that of course it led me to wonder well okay this is really weird phenomenon in humans that in marketing right that we use celebrity you know status celebrity and sex to sell to people like why should they ever care about you know Brad Pitt likes this thing or Jennifer Aniston like smart water when the world you never going to meet them are they do they do they do that.

2:47:06They really know a lot about you know water or whatever you know like what what's the point of all that and George Clooney selling espresso yeah who cares right but now when you think about in the context of like oh our brains are wired tuned to attend to and process more deeply and value information about others that are essentially high status celebrity sexy you know whereas like George Clooney's all those things put together. Now that starts to make some sense and so we thought well given that monkeys are humans monkeys and humans are so alike in this regard I bet we could run an advertising campaign on monkeys it's based on sex and celebrity so that's what we did we just basically had monkeys you know they're just sitting there in their own colony and we had a you know television monitor computer monitor in there that would display like you know the Doritos logo next to you know high status monkey a and maybe the Cheetos logo next to low status monkey B or you know Coke next to like sexy monkey but and you know Pepsi next to you know the front end of you know or backside of monkey that's not so sexy okay so you just do that just do it just pairing and so it's just just association simple association now we did as we then gave the monkeys choices between brand logos that had either been endorsed by you know essentially celebrity monkeys sexy monkeys or peon monkeys right and they got the same reward no matter what no matter what they chose they always got the same banana pellet but the monkeys favored the brands that had been paired with celebrity and sexy monkeys just like you see in people you know I just keep saying this there's a little monkey in all of us I'm shaking my head because it says a couple of things to me but one of the things says it says to me as a neuroscientist is that it's almost like the bins like the map of valuation in this in the brain there's overlap of I'm going to get into lingo here for a second and then I'll explain of the receptive fields so like you mentioned you won't the visual H &W and I mean they basically won the Nobel Prize for a couple of things but not the least of which was the identification of like what are the specific qualities and positions of light and shapes of light that activate a given neuron which eventually led to the Jennifer Aniston Barack Obama sells by the way their coexistence in the same sentence does not mean that they that I have knowledge of their dating I have paper was that study was done a long time right but it but it speaks to the same principle which is that when we see two things next to one another sometimes there's a there's emerging of those in our cognitive space or our memory when in fact there's no overlap conceptually right in fact you know you where you see this very dramatically is that if there's a podcast with a male and a female guest host and pairing I guarantee that 25 % of the comments are theories about their dating and they're sleeping together right it's just it's incredible it's like people see male and female together right and they just like start doing this thing of like oh they're dating or they're that with you know they see flirtation where may or may not have existed you know it's just wild and so that when I hear about this experiment that you do pairing products yeah with sexy monkey or non sexy monkey or high status or low status monkey I can't help but feel that the area of the brain that's involved in valuation is just taking visual images at conceptual images because they be visual it could be any number of things and that there's just overlap in the maps of these in the brain and then that the effect is born out of that overlap that's one interpretation the other interpretation I suppose and they're not mutually exclusive is that we want to go up the hierarchy and that's kind of an assumption that maybe we could just like poke at like a couple of nerd academics for a second because like I like my life very very much.

2:51:23There are people that live near me that have far more resources than I do and I never for a nanosecond wish for their home or my home I tried to make it a point in life to either have the life I want or be aspiring to the life I want you know have the things I want or aspire to the things I want but I've never found myself in a mode of like oh I want to be working on that experiment or I want to be living in that house if I see a beautiful house or beautiful thing or some. Feature someone's life it inspires me to want to go try and create something similar and so I I'm not it's not that I'm without competitive spirit in me I am like anyone else but I feel like that so far away different than the notion of a hierarchy where for me to move up someone else has to move down and for somebody to be above me in any domain that means that you know I'm quote unquote below so that so can we talk about hierarchies as they exist in old world primates like your tax versus us.

2:52:22Because I don't want to map this on anything political but oftentimes this will get mapped onto the political some people live through the lens of abundance. There's plenty to go around some people live through the lens of scarcity their win is my loss. Their loss is my win that kind of thing do you see this in monkeys to again it's really hard you know you can ask the monkey buddy want to certainly tell you because he just want your asking them but I you know I I think it is well first of all across primate species there's different degrees of the steepness of hierarchy so in recess macaques they're really despotic they have a very steep hierarchy in like Barbary macaques which live in in North Africa and in Gibraltar very relaxed society even though they're macaques they're all they're all the same genus.

2:53:18So why that's so we don't really know the general idea is it has something to do with how rich the environment as the resources that are available on how monopolizable they are so if if you can monopolize resources then that can help to create a steeper hierarchy if they're not monop like let's imagine you you eat grass for a living you know you're like a cow or whatever and there there are some monkeys that do that e -grass like I can't hoard all the grass to myself it's just everywhere and so everybody can just spread out and kind of e -grass it's a very boring life and you spend all your time digesting and fermenting in your you know in this extended gut which is kind of a gross thing to do it's a side but I think you can see that like that that that spans a continuum for what you're saying from abundance to scarcity and has a lot more to do with whether it's sort of monopolizable and is that makes sense so if you can monopolize something then you then you have something other people other monkeys need right and you're creating that scarcity.

2:54:33Yeah so let's drill into this because I think this is everybody is operating from a certain frame in this context and so for instance there are billionaires hundreds of some people like Elon as hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't seem to care much about money for money sake or I think he sold all his homes or whatever you know he's motivated by clearly other things as well if money at all and then there are people who are destitute property I think many people will say why does anyone need that much money kind of you know they'll say this about billionaires what's been interesting is one of the more prominent themes in psychology pop psychology that is supported by research is this idea that past a certain level of income you're happiness doesn't scale upwards linearly with the increase in income or maybe at all and that the number that's thrown around is like past 75 thousand dollars a year you know your happiness doesn't grow I would argue that indeed money can't buy happiness but it absolutely can buffer stress or certain kinds of stress yeah let's just give an example of a single mother with three raising three kids on her own versus a single mother raising three kids with three night nurses when their infants and man he's a different different level of output required like you can just can't argue between those two now whether or not one is happier than the other is in discussion different discussion all together excuse me but I think that you know the cow example makes a lot of sense the hierarchies within primate troops make sense but as humans I think that you I observed tremendous variation as to whether or not people say oh wow this person is a millionaire or billionaire but I'm good with what I've got or this person has so much more and I resent them for it and I guess we don't really think about there being a limited amount of money in the same way that we think of as like grass or resources now if we were to talk about mates and that that's very let's a whole other thing but you just have to go to a bar with a with a particular bias towards having more men or women and then you know like that starts to play out immediately right but let's keep it simpler do you think that this whole stance about abundance versus scarcity is dynamic me like if you're surrounded by people that make more or less the same amount of money as you do you feel better than if you're surrounded by billionaires that have yachts and I think the fundamental drive is to to climb the hierarchies more or less kind of baked in again with a lot of variation across individuals and probably across cultures which I'll get to in a moment going back to that 75 ,000 being kind of like where you know it just the asymptotes there's a lot of respect for the more people that are not going to the market or you know the market A number of papers that came out from colleagues at Penn and Wharton, so got named Matt Killings was showed in a famous paper five or six years ago.

2:57:34Then in fact, it actually continues, like happiness just keeps going up with income. And then there was a back and forth with Danny Com and about that. And then they worked on a paper together and what it looks like is this. It kind of goes up, flattens out for a while. And then like above another level, wow happiness really goes up when you got a lot, a lot of money. So that study is in disgust as much. So that's knit well, it's knit, it's like in the last year or two. So being very, very wealthy does increase your health. I think it, yeah, I mean, for a variety of reasons, right? So, you know, it's sure, it's a buffer of stress, but it also allows you access to lots and lots of different things.

2:58:11It can make your life just easier, right? So that's, that's, I think part of it. But the other part I think that gets back to that question of what makes us human is that we can intentionally, just like you said about yourself, it's like, well, I'm just going to chill. I'm happy with what I've got. And there's lots of, you know, ascetic traditions in a variety of cultures, especially, you know, in the Eastern cultures that have taken that approach or even in the West, like, you know, early Christianity, etc. And I'm trying to remember the name of the book that was recommended, I haven't read it yet.

2:58:51But that in, for example, in India, in, you know, in amongst some of the most extreme poverty in the world, you have people who are kind of ecstatically happy and they're very, very happy with, with being alive and being alive where they are when they are and with the people that they're happy with. How does that happen? I don't know, but here's my guess, or part of my guess, I guess, which is, gets back to what we talked about in terms of attention. So what you attend to is being turned up in the brain and what you're not attending to is being turned down. It's kind of like glass half full glass half empty.

2:59:33And if you're paying attention to the sort of good things, then those are getting kind of priority of access to your brain. So you're kind of getting like, oh, every, it's magnifying. Every little small positive surprise is amplified in your brain. You get a bigger dopamine hit for that, rather than the sort of small negative surprises. Now I'll put that into another context, which is we've done a number of studies on loss aversion, right? And loss aversion is this observation that if I give you a 50 -50 gamble, like win some money, lose some money. In general, for most people, I have to offer them a lot more to win than to lose for them to take the gamble, which doesn't make any sense, you know, rationally and economically.

3:00:13It should be, it's even chances. So people are loss averse. There's been a lot of theories about why, like Danny Coniman famously thought that people feel the pain of loss more than the pleasure of winning, right? So, and I think that's true. We investigated that using combination of modeling, computational modeling, and we looked at people's behavior and we did eye tracking, because we're measuring where people attend. Your average person, most people, attend to what they might lose rather than what they might win. And the longer they focus on what they might lose, the more loss averse they are, and that tends to be associated with people who have like negative effects.

3:00:52So if you're anxious or you're depressed, you're in a negative state, then you're looking more for what you could lose than what you could win. So that sets up a really interesting test, causal test, which you're like, well, you know, where you look is a function of what you're looking for. They're looking for what might hurt them and also what the world looks like. So let's just manipulate the visual display. We made the wins bigger font or brighter than the losses. Okay, when you do that, that attracts people's attention. They look at the wins, what they could, the good things they could get rather than the bad things just by changing the form.

3:01:30Just by changing the font size or the brightness, they look at it more. This gets turned up in the brain and now they're not lost averse anymore. Now they're willing to take the gamble. So that's what I'm talking about in terms of like what you focus on. So if, and that's a way to do it, I mean, obviously that you could take advantage of people by doing that. But with their consent, so for example, we started that work on behalf of a financial services company who is saying, we're having trouble with our customers, older customers, to get them to take good risks, like that could really pay off for them because they're too afraid.

3:02:05And so we did some basic work and then we tested that we could actually causally change that. We could shift that. So with their consent, yeah, if we amplify, we just make, just put the, put what you could win instead of what you could lose in a, make it more obvious. People pay more attention to that and then that will subtly shift the decisions that they make. Wow. We are so malleable when it comes to changing the context and thereby the variables that shape our decision making. But I'm always struck by the way that it comes in below our conscious detection. This might be, this is the appropriate time to ask about meme coins.

3:02:53Right. Because we all grow up learning about the US dollar or euro or whatever backed by something. Backed by the Fed, but also backed by real world physical objects of gold. That's what we're told anyway. And this is why just printing more money is never the solution. Right. Because meme coins, born out of the kind of larger theme of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, are an interesting kind of derivative of cryptocurrency whereby you're pairing reputation of a person or in some cases a shibu no dog. Right. With a currency that has no intrinsic value except for the person's reputation plus whatever backing, whatever value backing, it's obtained when people and decide to purchase that coin.

3:03:55So I don't know how many listeners track cryptocurrency and I am by no means an expert on this. But one thing that people get excited about is how much money is flowing into a coin, not just the value of the coin on a given day. So essentially how much has been invested in that coin is something of potential value. So when we hear about Hakuya girl coin, the Hakuya coin or there's a Trump coin now. I think there's a Melania coin. There's a doge coin that was developed long before the idea of a Department of Government doge, the shibu no coin. Is this all just exploiting? Again, there comes that word, leveraging this proximity between reputation and value.

3:04:49So I think that's partially it, but it may be even simpler than that, which is it's leveraging, it's harnessing our wiring to attend to what other people are doing and what getting or losing. So we care a lot about when we're in a group, the behaviors of other people. So let's think about how we learn something, the value of something. If you're a simple animal, you learn it from direct experience and that's reinforcement living, reinforcement learning driven, with the dopamine system, et cetera. You can also learn from what you didn't choose, counterfactual, effective learning. And then in groups, you have this rich source of information, what other people are doing.

3:05:29Like I could watch you try that food and if you die from meeting it, then I won't eat it. So we're deeply wired to pay attention to the decisions that other people are making. And if they look good, or if they, you know, then we start to copy what they're doing. And you see this in, it's not just these meme coins, but like meme stocks, you know, like GameStop. This is very similar to the FTX phenomenon slash debacle, where celebrities joined in and people had trust in these celebrities, admiration of these celebrities and invested a lot of money and what turned out to be, you know, in the end, a failure.

3:06:08So how often is this happening in advertising? Like if we really step back and we go, like, is the BMW really the better choice compared to the, you know, compared to the Range Rover? Like, like, are we really basing our decisions on the thing that we're purchasing as much as we think? No, I don't think so at all. There's a few things we could kind of unpack there. I think in terms of meme coins, meme stocks, there's probably two things, a confluence of two things going on. So one is this sort of celebrity endorser. And we have studied that also as well. We talked about the monkey stuff, but we looked at, we did eye tracking studies of people making choices amongst products and brands that had been endorsed either by celebrities or not, just paired with them, right?

3:06:57And one of the things we found is that when people chose a product or brand that was sort of unfamiliar to them, if it had been endorsed by celebrity that pupils, their pupils didn't dilate. Normally, they would dilate because that's like an overcoming your default and mental effort and so a rousal goes up because it's sort of surprising. And so the pupils staying silent is an indicator of kind of enhanced confidence and trust, if you will, that I'm not making a mistake. I'm putting a lot of words here, but like, you know, you're that that that was the impact in a very subliminal way of that celebrity endorser.

3:07:38So I think that could be going on as well as the the this other process I was talking about in terms of what we pay attention to what other people are doing, which seems to be a major driver of bubbles in stock markets. Like that goes all the way back to like Isaac Newton losing his fortune in the South Sea's trading market. You know, he famously said like, you know, I can I can divine the mechanics of the planets and the heavens, but I can't understand the minds of men or something like that. He just couldn't help himself. He got out first and then he got back in when he saw his friends were making continuing to make money and then he got wiped out.

3:08:15So we were like super -entrogenous and we ran experiment with MBA students at Wharton and they were playing a stock market game. Actually, it turns out it's a stock market we developed from monkeys. We have monkeys played the exact same stock market. They're buying, selling, they, you know, they've got a portfolio that they can they can trade in for juice. The humans get money for this, okay. This was based on some some studies that Colin Cameron and his colleagues had and and Benedict O'Demartino did a while ago. In the MBA students, we used a standard psychometric scalar, you know, a questionnaire that's used to test people for sort of social impairments, okay.

3:09:00And then what we did is we looked at how their likelihood of getting caught in a bubble market related to social sensitivity, how attuned they were to other people. And basically the more dialed in you were to other people, the higher your likelihood of losing everything. In a bubble and it was those people who were like, you know, socially impaired, who did the best. They never got sucked into bubbles. Now, it was cool as we found the same thing in monkeys, okay. So monkeys in the same stock market, okay. If they're playing alone, they're making pretty good decisions, okay. So, did you put another monkey in the market that they can see?

3:09:36They see what they watch what that monkey did. That monkey buys game stop or whatever. Then I buy game stop. And you see me do that. And then he does the same thing. And he just goes back and forth, back and forth. They create this bubble. And then you get this crash. It was like really phenomenal. And we found that the brain circuit that is essentially involved in theory of mind, that but is about controlling your attention to others and registering what they're doing is driving that, okay. And it was really funny. It was like the bigger the portfolio imbalance between what I've got and what you got, the higher the signal in this area.

3:10:18The monkeys are like, I don't know if I can say that, but you can say whatever you want. Okay. Well, fuck, I'm losing relative to you. So I'm going to I'm paying even more attention to what you're doing and what you've got in your portfolio. And I'm going to be much more likely to to copy you and do what you're doing. So again, like there's a little monkey in all of us. I see very little difference between what people are doing, you know, with GameStop and what monkeys are doing in that market. So when we hear about these for lack of a better phrase, pump and dump type things where like I'll never forget in 2017 a friend who's a spectacularly successful investor said you should put 2 % of your investible earnings into Bitcoin.

3:11:03And I was like, well, you know, I don't know about that. And then not long after that, there was some press releases about who was buying Bitcoin and the price shut up. And then I said went back to them and said, I have to be really careful here and said, you were right. They said, yeah, you know, but you know, whenever you read about who's buying Bitcoin, it's not clear when they bought that. You know, a lot of those purchases were likely made a long time ago. So there are ways that people, you know, kind of kind of like build some hydraulic pressure through social interaction on these things.

3:11:47Right. Yeah. He's not, you know, it's very different than like someone picking up the phone and you know, the whole like notion of like insider trading, right? Very different. Yeah. You know, if people kind of create a swell around something, this is great or that let's make it real estate. It's a little more tangible for people. Like that neighborhood is really terrific. We're all going to move there. And then you know, people start moving there. And then you realize that they've actually owned that very inexpensive property for a long time. Right. And they're actually the seller. Right. You get a very different impression of the advice that you got.

3:12:21So, um, and I'm not finance guy, but you know, I think about these things in terms of the neuroscience and the human psychology. I mean, it just again, I'm just struck by how our notion of valuation is adjusted in the short term by virtue of proximity, probably also in the long term, but that how we kind of lose ourselves in these things that we, we just become less than rational. Based on things like a rousal, the relationship between hormones and rousal, what I love about what we're doing today is, in case people haven't caught on or raised it, we got multiple mechanisms and themes here that are starting to converge.

3:13:01You know, as a rousal goes too high, it's mostly what we're exploring, you start making, you start speeding up, you start misjudging information, you think noise is signal, and you start correlating things that are like not correlated in reality. And then you can quickly find yourself down the path of bad decisions. I think one of the best advice I ever got was if somebody ever wants you to make a decision very, very quickly, and it's not clearly an emergency, like you don't see them hemorrhaging, chances are it's a scam. Like if anyone, you know, this is the best thing to tell anyone that's older, let's say, because they'll get these calls from people and it's like, this is urgent, this is the urgency, usually is suggestive of it being false, like using time pressure on people.

3:13:53I need this money now. I'm going to miss my bus, my kids going to be waiting for me. This kind of thing, I mean, like pulls on you, right? You don't want some kid waiting out in the middle of nowhere, but if this is somebody you don't know, then you could say, well, maybe five bucks, I'm willing to lose it. Maybe that's probably the calculation I would do, I'm willing to lose it. If they're lying, okay, if they're telling the truth, great. But when it starts getting higher stakes, gets kind of scary. I think we should address the word rational rationality that you used, which is like, oh, we're being irrational, it seems like we lose our rationality.

3:14:31That's a word that's bandied about a lot, especially in economics, and that makes the assumption that we are essentially a computer and just kind of weigh things up dispassionately. We have complete access to all information here and now and into the future. There are other concepts here. One is called bounded rationality, which this guy, Gird Gigerens, kind of came up with, which is the idea that there are constraints, their brain constraints that are built in. We've got energetic constraints, which actually limit how much information we can process, which is why we fall prey to choice fatigue and deco effects and things like that, why we see visual illusions in some ways.

3:15:18Then there's another concept of ecological rationality, which takes that bounded rationality and it puts it into, what you might call the environment of evolutionary adaptation, which we've talked about before. What's the environment our brains are designed for? It's not the one we're in right now. So our brains are designed for, probably 130 million years ago, but let's say 200 ,000 years ago, our species, homo sapiens. What was that environment like? Well, we lived in small groups with face -to -face contact somewhere between probably 20 and no more than 100 people. You knew all of them. You talk to them every day.

3:15:59Things didn't really move faster than an antelope or change faster than the seasons. There was very little wealth inequality. People are physically active all day long, and they ate natural food. What are we like now? We're in this so -called weird environments, Western educated industrialized rich democratic. But you're in these industrialized societies. We have money. When markets were interacting with thousands of people, perhaps millions of people, their behaviors, their thoughts, everything are impinging on us. Stuff is changing super, super fast. We sit on our butts all day long. We're not active.

3:16:48It's like you have to be intentional having resources to be active and we eat garbage. For those reasons, I think that's the source of a lot of the misery that we have. I'm not saying we should go back to being subsistence 100 gatherers or or culturalists. Maybe we should. It'll be a painful process to get there. We may end up getting there given some of the trajectories that we're on. But people who live in those environments seem to generally be healthier and happier. For example, studies of brain and body in subsistence 100 gatherers or culturalists. People who are in their 70s look like people, Westerners in their 30s or younger.

3:17:35They're incredibly fit. Lean. No evidence of cardiovascular disease. No evidence of anything like dementia's major cognitive decline. We're always trying to hack that. We're trying to hack your zones and then people say, what's the diet? No, it's the wine. By the way, it's not the wine. It's not the wine. Now, finally, after years, I'm not going to say I told you so, but alcohol is not good. A little bit maybe everyone's a while, but not more than a little bit. I'll respond to that. Yeah. But the social component seems critical. What are your thoughts on the longevity movement, if you will? I always assumed if I do well, that I'll probably live to be somewhere between 85 and 102.

3:18:20My hope is that my last five years, I like the Peter Atia thing. What is the quality of your final decade? Right. It will be at least as vigorous as my dad's, my dad's 80, gosh, he's 81 and he's doing great mentally, physically. He was a guest on this podcast, actually. He's a scientist. Yeah, it was. He's always been very, very moderate about his drinking. They'll have like a half glass of wine. No, and again, he just never ate too much. He never exercised too much. He worked nine to five, nine to six just consistently. He never was a, you know, like burn them in night oil type, but his consistency is what's so impressive.

3:19:02So, I think that might have something to do with it. But what are your thoughts on the economics of decision making as it relates to live fast, die young versus be more monastic and try and live a very long time? Well, that's a personal preference, isn't it? So, I, you know, that kind of, it's interesting because it maps on to concepts in ecology. Typically, we use to describe different species, which are like are selected in case selected. I don't know if you've heard of this before, but are selected are species that are limited just by their pure reproductive rate. Think about weeds or rabbits, you know, something like that.

3:19:44And case selected are like oak trees and, you know, I don't know, whales. And humans are sort of like this mix, right? And so, that's where we are very plastic and flexible. So, in some environments, you can be more are selected, like, especially if conditions are really not very favorable toward investing in the long term, then it's kind of like kicking up your reproductive output. But if conditions can be favorable, right, that investment is worthwhile, then you, you know, then you can do that and be more like the whale or the oak tree or something like that. Now, you know, yeah, you're right.

3:20:25I think that does map on to economics in a certain way, because, you know, certain people by virtue of what they know and what they have can invest in trying to live the longest healthiest life and other people who may not either have the wherewithal or the knowledge are going to be invested in surviving until the next day. Right? And so, in humans are sort of, you know, exist in that whole space in between. My dad died at 55, so I lived him by two years. You know, so for me, every day is like gravy, but I also don't have this sense of a long time horizon, which is, you know, just being a little weirdly self, you know, just introspective may be a part of my drive to like work a lot.

3:21:17And it might have served you well. I mean, I've read, at listen to Steve Jobs' biographies by Walter Isaacson several times, in part because I grew up seeing that stuff happening, because I was born and raised in the South Bay and then Steve used to come into the toy store slash skateboard shop that I worked at to get new roller blade wheels. And so, like, I would like see him around and see him at this little shop called Shady Lane, which is like little trinkets. Like he was around town a lot. And so then of course he came Steve Jobs, right? And he was Steve Jobs and he stayed Steve Jobs. But in that book he talked about, where he was talked about him, that he humans knowledge that we are going to die someday can be the ultimate motivator.

3:22:01I mean, I think I look at some of the mistakes I made with, you know, bringing myself to places of physical risk in my life. And it's not like I thought I was immortal, but I didn't really have a good sense of time. And I think as I get older, I'm 49 now, so I can finally say that. I think my sense of the passage of time and mortality is much more visible to me in my psychology. Yeah. So, yeah, this is the ultimate time scale over which one has to make decision and make decisions. So, actually, let's talk about this. So if your dad died two years younger than you are now, do you have the assumption that you'll make it to a given age or you're just trying to maximize on the day, the week, the month?

3:22:44What's your unit of time scale? So I think I did not anticipate, like, 55 was a magic number for me. The double nickel, you know? I think Michael Jordan. I didn't know what I would do or think about when I, if I got past that. And I got past it. And I was like, okay, I got past it. But now I'm kind of, I'm confused, I guess. I mean, physically, I showed no evidence of, like, rapid decline. No, you see anything. You appear very, you're very healthy. Yeah. Not just for your age, but you're very physically fit, you're cognitively fit, clearly. So that started to, you know, I think that I'm opening up and I'm trying to look at some wisdom that's out there about like, hey, yeah, you know, probably got a lot of life ahead of me.

3:23:41And if I keep doing what I'm doing, what do I want to do? That's another part of it because probably because of the focusing on that 55. And I'm like, oh, God, everything that's come my way, every opportunity that's come my way, I've taken it. And I just keep adding. I've never, I don't subtract. We could talk about that. I keep adding more and more things. You can look at the diversity of papers that I've published or the other things that I'm doing. And it's just getting wider and wider. And I keep taking more things on and reluctant to give anything up. But at some point, I think that's not the recipe for success.

3:24:23Like, there's going to have to be some winnowing. And I, you know, okay, 57. So when's that going to happen? I don't know, 62, 65. I mean, I don't plan on retiring, although, you know, also that was like, wow, people in my family never got the chance to retire. But that's a short way to death, though, I think, too. And decline is like retiring. If you don't do something else, yeah. So I might have a solution for it. Okay, good. Give it a thought about this. It's a ton. Give it a thought. And I think about time perception. Yeah. Constantly. And people can laugh because I'm always late. But that's because I'm really involved in whatever I was doing previously.

3:25:00Yeah. I'll be thinking about this conversation tonight and tomorrow morning when I wake up for sure. Right. Okay. Couple of reflections and then ideas about this. So previous guest on this podcast, Josh Wateskin, grandmaster chess champion at a very young age, then realized at some point, started asking the question of whether or not his love for the game was gone or whether or not I was taken away from him. Was it the fame? Was it because a lot of things came to him young when that around chess and he spent two years asking himself that question and then cut ties with chess forever and never picked up a chess piece again.

3:25:39But pivoted into martial arts, investing, now foiling, you know, this slide. Yeah. Then had a near death experience. He had a drowning event, survived fine, decided then to move his family down to Costa Rica where he now spends four and a half hours a day or more foiling, raising his sons.

3:26:05I, you know, that struck such a chord with me. I've been involved in a number of things. I don't want to make this about me. But like, you know, early on it was like fish. I was obsessed with fish and birds and skateboarding and then firefighting. Then eventually it was like neuroscience. And then now I do this. And so I would say I've read a lot about people who need something to bite down into. They can't retire. And it seems to me by informal read of this is that the ones that are happiest who don't die young or in their 50s like Steve Jobs did tend to be for lack of a better way to describe it kind of serial monogamous as it relates to their pursuits.

3:26:47Which is the way I would describe myself. Like I'm, you know, like super into whatever it is professionally. And then after about anywhere from five to 15 years, it's like done and kind of move forward some of the elements and the learnings from that into the next thing. But Josh Wateskin is the ultimate example of this of it of achieved like world champion status in multiple things. And then now seems very very much to achieve world champion status at like family life. And he's got his, his, his, you know, economic and professional life intact from the previous stuff. But also he's still involved.

3:27:23He's, you know, like he coaches for the Celtics and he's not the head coach, but he coached and so on. So I feel like the serial monogamy version of this is the ultimate. And then the question is when to, when to cut and pivot into the next thing. But I'm not telling you not to go with breath. But I was looking over your CV and your paper sounds like, this is going to be a really interesting conversation because you have worked on a tremendous number of different things. Adding in more isn't the thing. But then again, maybe some of us are just designed to be involved in a ton of different stuff.

3:27:53And your vigor is undeniable. Right. Like like your super fit mentally and physically. So I don't know. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I just, I get, I offered Josh as an example of one extreme. You're sort of at the other extreme, I suppose. And then, um, and I suppose I'm kind of in the middle. So I think well, I've done a bit of that over my career. And the way that has happened is through external leadership opportunities, not really opportunities. I was like, you need to do this. Like, you know, so is you kind of, you know, broad and portfolio is getting bigger. And then somebody says, I want you to direct this thing.

3:28:34And then I would say, well, then I have to, I have to cut some of this out and then go back and narrow again. And then the problem is then I start to do this again. And then, okay, then I moved to, you know, Penn and Wharton. And I got to narrow again. But now it's bigger than it ever has been. So the question is like at some point, does that just fall apart? Or can I, I think intentionally, you know, at some point? And maybe, maybe some of those decisions, you know, the other thing, well, the other thing one can do is just allow the universe to make some of those decisions for you. Right? It might be the case that some of the research I do will not be fundable at some point.

3:29:18Right? And then that decision is made for me. I know I have lots of other things I can do. You know, we have, you know, for, for example, if like outside of the pure neuroscience, basic and clinical and technology development, you know, we've got all this corporate facing work, funded work through Wharton, which is a totally new space, a new opportunity. So if, you know, if one, you know, I don't want it to be taken away, but if it is, then, you know, there's plenty left to do. Well, you're clearly one of the few people that I'm aware of that is, you know, a true card caring research neuroscientist highly respected in the domain of like real neuroscience, who's also involved in like business school type stuff and, you know, people on both sides of that take you really seriously because there's real rigor there and the vigor perhaps goes along with it's hard to know what's causal.

3:30:10Which comes first, but any of that maybe we parse this over a coffee sometime. Apple and Samsung. Oh, Apple and Samsung. I'm an Apple guy. Me too. But I heard that the cameras on the Samsung phone. How much do you love your iPhone? How what's your loyalty? What's your brand loyalty for Apple? I grew up near the original Apple store. It was in a different location. Gosh, I love Apple products. I don't like that they keep changing the the books. I know that's a lot of it. That's super annoying. But they seem to be like hovering on USB -C. Yeah. Yeah. I love the ease and simplicity. And yeah, I have a bit of a, historical South Bay relationship to it.

3:31:01So yeah, I would say, could you get me to use a Samsung phone? Yeah. So I mean, this is the interesting observation. Like loyalty for, let's just talk about smartphones and Apple and Samsung are the dominant players in the US market. They're basically the same device. You know, I mean, they're both the handhold computers that can do a million things and amazing stuff. And yet the loyalty amongst the Apple users is through the roof. It's near 100 % year in year out. And that's not true for Samsung. Despite Steve Jobs passing away. Yeah, despite, I mean, it's a legacy, right? But I think that reflects a lot of the design and the emphasis, I think, that he put into the product, but also like trying to understand it through the lens of the customer.

3:31:48Right. So that's like an empathy. I mean, there's really is empathy. This is one of the first questions I got when I, you know, when I came to business schools, like what the hell accounts for empathy for brand? It's not a person or this connection. Like, why don't I have loyalty to a thing that's not a human being? You know, a product and a brand accompany, right? What in the world is that? All about doesn't make sense. And there's this idea and marketing that actually, and it makes sense is that we're, what's happening is we're applying or we're getting leveraged. The hardware and our brains that's used to connect to people and now it's connecting to brands and to the brand community.

3:32:25And you can see that kind of in like the words we used to talk about brands, for example, that's a rugged brand, the creative brand, you know, we use personality words to talk about them, say, I love my brand. I hate that brand, whatever. And Steve understood this. He talked about the Apple icon needing to look a certain way that it was like friendly, but technically right, but, you know, balance. And this is the idea that objects or images could look friendly when they weren't objects or images of faces or bodies is a very interesting concept. Yeah. Yeah. So we decided to test this idea. So we brought people in lab.

3:32:58We've done now like, I don't know, 10 studies on this. There are people in who are Apple or Samsung users. And the first experiment we did was a brain imaging experiment. And first we just asked all the standard marketing questions. How, how, how many, how long have you had the product? How much do you love it? What's your loyalty? What's your identification with it, you know, et cetera. And there's equivalent apples. They said the same things about their brands. Okay. So now we bring them into the lab, put them in the MRI machine, and we're going to expose them to news bits about each of the two brands, like something good happen apples, something bad happen apple or Samsung, et cetera.

3:33:39And we asked them to rate it. How do you feel? Good, neutral bad about that. And then we go through the whole thing and we scan their brains, take pictures of what's going on their brains. And it was really interesting, because what we found is that behaviorally, in terms of their responses, they both expressed empathy for their brands, which hadn't been really measured before. I feel good for good news about my brand bad for bad news about my brand. And for Apple customers, they said, yeah, that's really true for Apple, but I don't feel so much about Samsung. Samsung customers said, yeah, I feel really strongly about my brand.

3:34:07Oh, and they had reverse empathy or shot and for Apple, which was part of the story. So they felt really good when something bad happened Apple and they felt really bad when something good happened Apple, talking about tribalism. That's tribalism right there. When you look at their brains, it's totally different. So in Apple customers show empathy in their brains for Apple. You get activation of areas that are active for reward for myself, reward for my kid winning the spelling bee for good news, and the extended pain network, pain for me, pain for my loved one, for things that happen Apple, if I'm an Apple customer, silent for Samsung, you look at Samsung user, you know, customers, and if you're the CMOS Samsung, you should be worried because they should absolutely nothing.

3:34:52No feelings towards anything that happened to Samsung. The only thing you see is this shot in Freud, or this reverse empathy. So you see like pain for good news about Apple and enjoy for bad news about Apple. So the first take on message is it's all about Apple. Like Apple customers choose Apple because they love Apple and they want to be part of something bigger. And I'll get to that in a second. And Samsung users choose Samsung because they don't they hate Apple. Right. So that's that's sort of that where they hate winners. They hate winners, whatever. There's a whole thing. They don't want to be part of the community.

3:35:26They don't want something bigger than themselves. There is something to in our data that essentially Apple is like kind of like a cult. You could say it's a family. I would say it's the dominant culture now, though. Yeah, they're not the niche like thing. Samsung's the niche thing. Yeah, right. There. Yeah. Well, what's happened with what's really fascinating now is that and this is by virtue of things that Apple smart things Apple has done to reinforce this sense of in group be part of that community. Like the you know, the green text bubble thing. So now it's like 91 % of teenagers are choosing Apple over Samsung because they don't want to be left out.

3:36:03They don't want to be ostracized. Now we talked about synchrony before in synchronies is marker of community and closeness and we're all on the same team. So we use the eG to measure brain waves in people while they're in a number of conditions while they're reading getting news about Apple and Samsung also while they're watching the commercials. You remember that spectacular Apple commercial where they crushed all those beautiful instruments and whatnot and turned into a iPad or whatever and then there was the Samsung response to that. So we measured eG activity and what we found is that Apple people are all in sync with each other.

3:36:42Their brains are humming along at the exact same rhythm. To news of the world, to ads about Apple and Samsung, each Samsung person is like an island unto themselves. They're just not in sync at all. These are like the in cells of technology. You said it. I didn't say it. Probably going to catch a lot of like for this but but they look the data is the data. And so Apple's this sort of extended family and they're all in sync with each other. Right? They're like they're like a real team and you don't see that in in Samsung. So Apple people seeing the world through similar eyes right and feeling similar things and beyond that.

3:37:24I said, well this is all true. Maybe is it it's a question of now like are Apple people wired that way you know at birth in essence? You know or how much what's the balance of like what who they are versus what Apple has done you know through their marketing and design activities. I can't we can't do that experiments really hard. But when we looked at the structural MRI data, we found something really interesting which is the parts of the brain that are really intimately involved in social managing our social relationships. So the parts that are like involved in theory of mind and empathy. Sure.

3:38:00Exactly. So those are physically larger and Apple people than in Samsung people. They're physically larger. In monkeys, monkeys who have more friends, those same brain areas are bigger than monkeys who have fewer friends. Please tell me you've run this on politically leaning left versus politically leaning right. So we started to do that experiment and then the pandemic hit. So we haven't gotten nice excuse. It is. No, it's excuse. We haven't gotten that. I just kidding. No, it's true. I would be too afraid to run that experiment. Not because I'd be concerned about the the result or what people would say if I share the result.

3:38:34But here's why.

3:38:38I was growing up. It was like if you were a rebel, you were associated with anything like indie music, punk rock, like you were associated with hip hop, anything was kind of outside the mainstream, which at the time. So it was like the 80s and now we had a mix of Republican and Democrat governments at that time, depending on which four -year segment we're talking about. But there was this idea that like if you liked anything about the government, you know, you're this is kind of the phenomena mirror and the most via nommier that if you liked anything associated with government that you were a conformist.

3:39:13Yeah. And if you didn't, you were an iconoclast. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Now I feel like it's become very issue specific. Right. Like who's in power? Basically that the party like politics has was always split into two. It used to be you agree with the establishment or you don't agree with the establishment. Now it's like depending on who's in power, people say, well, they're the establishment. So the it's like the game has changed. It's sort of subdivided itself and changed. And so if one were to run the experiment of kind of like affiliation, I would assume my prediction would be that within the right there's a lot of affiliation.

3:39:52Within the left there's a lot of affiliation. But that you wouldn't necessarily see a difference in terms of activation of affiliative neural circuitry. It depends on with with whom they're sitting. Absolutely. Which is very different than the phone situation that the Samsung versus Apple thing is a lot more like when I was growing up. And it's complicated because what used to be niche and rebellious inevitably becomes mainstream. Like I remember the movie Revenge of the Nerds. Of course. Which of course was about like the nerds being marginalized and then you know and then being like the popular ones.

3:40:25And on and on. Everything was like a John Hughes film, Jocks versus Rockers versus Nerds versus things really blended together for 20 years or so. And then now it's very divided along the lines of politics. Whereas before it was politics of versus non -conformance. Now it's like depends on which can't literally color your way. It's like gang warfare. It is. Yeah. Yeah. It's like blues. It's blues versus reds. And so it jets and sharks. Jets and sharks. So it feels very like the experiment. That's why I'd be afraid to run the experiment. I wouldn't know how to design the experiment. Yeah. I mean, I think while it would be interesting just at the outset to demonstrate that like well very easy way to elicit these sort of empathy signals is like just create a video that's fake is what something at forum postdoc mine did in some studies.

3:41:23You just like a fake needle stick to the cheek. And you get you know generally this sort of activation of empathy signals in the brain. But it tends to be tribals specific or ethnic group specific which is like even though people say I feel just as much pain for these two different people the brain signals which we know are what actually predicts what you'll do next. You know it predicts your behavior. The brain signals are specific to within your group. So I think that's what that was a fact the experiment we were going to do which is like people are going to be you know they have these videos of like a proud Republican or proud Democrat or whatever you want to say on the hat.

3:42:02And then they're getting stuck with a needle. And then we met we ask you what you feel and we measure your your brain activity. And you know I think it would be obviously very highly specific. You might say you feel pain for that person who's from the other political party. Maybe you wouldn't know anymore. Maybe you'd be like yay. You see a lot of yeah gosh you see a lot of people take enjoyment and other people suffering when the person suffering is sort of perceived by a lot of others as a winner. Yeah. We saw that with the wires with with rich people's houses burning down and a lot of people piling on.

3:42:40Oh yeah you know right. Well the media was very skewed there like we're like we were hearing about people's you know first of three homes burning and that's hard for people that have very little right at the same time you know for anyone experiencing loss it's loss yeah. It's a it's a tough one. It's tough it's a tough one. Yeah man this conversation has given me a ton more to think about which means it's a great conversation. I have to say you know in our business of research science there's that term you know he or she is a serious a scientist. I feel like there are very very few serious scientists doing experiments in the real world or trying to map to the real world.

3:43:31I probably just offended about 300 scientists but hey listen we only have a limited number guess we can bring on here anyways. I know I'm just kidding. There are other certainly but I have to just applaud you for the range of things that you've embraced and and taken on at the level of neural anthropologic sociologic psychology like you know endocrinology this is this is a big field that you're trying to get your arms around a big set of questions and yet it's clear you are a serious scientist you do like real experiments with isolating variables and all the necessary controls that are required to really tease out mechanism and larger themes so whereas a few minutes ago we were talking about maybe you taking it on the last I'm not I would say first of all who am I to tell you what to do second of all and I'm not I'm not hoping to give that impression and second of all like what a service to the world you're doing because certainly in researching for this podcast and even with guests you know oftentimes it's really a struggle to try and figure out how to talk to someone who's really down at the level of mechanism who's not working on small animal models or even if they are how to map that to everyday experience and today you know we've been talking about potential mate valuation mean coins politics hierarchies decision -making time scales I mean all through the lens of a real serious science so first of all thank you so much for coming here and spending these hours with us educating us and right alongside that thank you for doing the work that you're doing it's it's really spectacular I I knew we were gonna get into a number of these things but I didn't really anticipate just how much was gonna guys are out of this in terms of changing my way of thinking and I'm certain that's changing the way that other people are thinking now and they're going to think about their decisions and just kind of themselves in the world you know I'd be very grateful if you'd come back again and talk to us about the next round of amazing experiments before too long well I would love that and thanks for having me and this has been a really stimulating conversation I've enjoyed it there is a lot more that we can cover which would be super fun surely and your endurance is something to be hold thank you please do come back again thank you for the work that you're doing we will provide links to all the resources and places to find out more about your book the work that you're doing and some of these tests that you were talking about earlier yeah where that go beyond like standard personality tests so that people can answer those critical questions about where they are you perhaps best placed in the landscape between creativity and you know strategy implementation in a different way so thanks so much this this was a real thrill for me thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr.

3:46:25Michael plat to learn more about dr. plat's work and to find links to his books please see 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 click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five star review if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guess for topics you'd like me to consider for the huberman lab podcast please put those in the comments section on youtube I do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast 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 and operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 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 protocols book dot com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols and operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's instagram x formerly known as twitter facebook linkedin and threads 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 content on the huberman lab podcast again that's huberman lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zero -cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page pdf's 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 huberman lab .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.

3:48:42Michael plat and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science