Awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms.
We have people with long COVID.
Just a minute of awe a day reduce long COVID symptoms.
It's good news, right.
And there's so much science on it that now I think medical doctors are starting to think like I'm gonna prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music through, all right.
As a mechanism.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr. Dacher Keltner.
Dr Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dacher is an expert in the science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding.
Today we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions, including the role of teasing in social bonding, the role of embarrassment in social bonding, and his fascinating work on awe and the things that lead to awe.
As he describes, awe is not elusive.
It happens when we shift our perception from a very small scale to a very large scale or back again, such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista.
Today, you'll understand what all of that really means and, more importantly, how you can create this incredible thing that we call awe in everyday life.
We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding in groups and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds.
So today is a very practical as well as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change the way that you think about your life every day and think about opportunities for all every day.
As you'll soon see, Decker Keltner is a truly special scientist, known for his incredible rigor and creativity in the study of emotions, but also continually offering you the public ways to be and feel genuinely better and to get more out of life.
It was a true honor and pleasure to host him.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.
And now for my discussion with Dr. Dacher Keltner.
Dr. Dacher Keltner, welcome.
Good to be with you, Andrew.
Awe.
Yeah.
We all intuitively know what it is, and yet we also don't know how to articulate it.
Yeah.
I want to say the words overwhelm, excited...
I get the physical sensation of a lift.
I don't think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed into a turtle position.
That's right.
Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that.
But what got you into awe?
Yeah, and I love the word lift.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, I was a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Ekman was a pioneer in.
And that field in the 90s and early 2000s was really focused on negative emotions.
And you know the science, right?
Anger fear, fight or flight physiology amygdala, cortisol discussed, you know, Paul Ross and John Haidt, and thinking about emotions from that lens, and it as a young scientist and given the powerful tools of emotion, science of Darwin and Ekman, and how to just observe phenomena,
It didn't make contact with my life and my own experience.
I was raised as a wild child in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon.
And it was like music and social change and protest and beauty.
And I was raised by a dad who's a visual artist.
And my mom taught... romanticism and Virginia Wolf and on the mind.
And and I was like wow, there's all this stuff that our science, my science, can't speak to music and visual patterns and dance and collective movement, and someone like Martin Luther King, and why he makes me cry.
And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman, I was like, what should I do with my career?
And he's like, study all.
And so that got me going.
If we could, maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment.
You know, I think every psychology and neuroscience student sees these faces of disgust, of pleasure.
Darwin talked about this.
Yeah, babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults where they'll show a baby, like you know, recoiling from something or, you know, wide-eyed and leaning in.
You know, there's always seems to be a motor component to this that maybe isn't as captured in those two-dimensional photographs.
But what's the story about hardwired facial emotions?
And what are the revisions to that story that I'm probably not aware of?
Yeah, thank you for asking that.
I've spent 30 years working on that very problem.
Paul Ekman came in and, as you've suggested, he did this revolutionary work in New Guinea, showed photos of six emotions static photographs of anger fear sadness disgust, surprise and a smile.
They kind of interpreted the faces.
Like you or I would naming it, using the right words to describe those faces.
And that...
You know and this is how science occasionally works which is just by accident that became the field.
And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal are they in different cultures?
Ekman really posited sort of a strong universality.
That's been contested by Jim Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and others.
But since then, there are controversies around how hardwired they are.
Do they occur reliably in a child's development?
Yes and no.
You know, young children showed disgust expressions like social mammals do.
They wince at bad smells just like you or I would.
Anger is a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally.
But then our lab and several labs around the world.
You know Jess Tracy at UB British Columbia, Adisa Souder.
And I want to talk about this computational work that started to expand the vocabulary of faces.
And now there's a lot of data that suggests there are 20 different facial expressions.
Laughter, love, compassion, awe, you know, whoa.
Embarrassment shame pain, you know, and that in some sense has broadened the taxonomy of emotions.
We used to think of six, now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind.
And that's where the field is heading is to really start to think about physiological patterns, brain patterns of these distinct states.
And I'll tell you the hardwiring question, I mean, it's hard science to do, right?
Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries getting their emotional expressions and then making sense of them.
It used to take one hour to code the facial muscle movements of one minute right.
So this is slow science.
And I would really encourage listeners and viewers to go to alancowen.com.
And I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowen, who, you know...
He's a computational genius.
And he looked at our old science and said, we can use AI to code the face.
And he did it with Google engineers.
He coded 144, 2 million videos from 144 cultures and 16 facial expressions.
75 overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks.
Concentration on a test you know, laugh at friends.
So right now, I would say 50 to 60% is hardwired as part of who we are in our evolutionary history.
And then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways.
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I'm going to ask a question that may or may not be possible to answer.
Yeah.
But if anyone could, it would be you.
And it's not a test.
Here's what I'm thinking.
The relationship between emotions and... what we call motor patterns.
Movement is obviously very close, right?
Disgust or recoil, explore awe, anger, et cetera.
And then there's this other... node, which is language, right?
So we have like emotions, motor, language.
Right.
Obviously, those can't be dissociated.
Yeah.
But can we imagine somebody let's just like hypothetical person who can keep their body very still while they're angry?
Be very articulate.
That includes not moving their hands.
We'd probably think perhaps that person's like sociopathic, but that's not the picture I'm trying to paint.
And then, on the other extreme, you can imagine somebody who is – very angry, and it's gesticulating a lot and moving, like we can immediately say yeah, that makes sense.
And we could do this for any emotion, right?
So how should we think about emotion as an experience and how it's expressed along these three axes?
Right
Which is motor, language, and then the emotion itself.
I feel like, without conceptualizing, that I, as a true novice of this right, this isn't my area of understanding or expertise.
I can't really understand what an emotion is.
But if I understand how those are linked, maybe that's a portal into that.
Yeah no, I mean, it's a profound question Andrew, and it's central to our field, which is, you know and I appreciate it, coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species.
And there are these motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world.
When you sue the child that's crying, you're going to bring it in close and caress, and touch and have emotion.
When you're fighting a rival or when you see rotten food, that motor pattern will be there.
And that's part of our research, that 75 of that is this motor pattern of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional events of life.
And then we have this massively complicated conceptual system that puts words to experience.
And that's mainly what we study in psychological science is just...
Oh, I'm feeling angry or ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion.
And we know, and your question points to this, like very often they're disconnected, right?
The motor pattern and the language we use and how I would interpret it in another person.
On balance, they correlate 0.2, so they're just weekly.
They're kind of these streams of behavior that... just part of who we are, right?
Our motor patterns and language.
And there are a lot of ways to think about it.
You could think about cultures that value being calm, like a lot of East Asian cultures.
Be calm, don't disrupt things, don't... blurred out, don't protest, right?
And you'll see this disconnect.
You can think about certain people who They just are more authentic and their motor patterns come out in expressions and they will tell you how they feel.
So it's a central problem that we grapple with.
And then I love your third part of this equation of emotion science, which is the feeling, the emotion.
Michael Pollan is right.
You know, this new book on consciousness, the conscious feeling of something.
We think we can get to it with words.
I don't think so.
You probably wouldn't either, right?
Studying the other species you've studied, right?
It's some weird mixture of everything that's happening in your body.
And ironically...
The emotion or the feeling, is still one of the uncharted territories of our field, is why, as these complicated motor patterns take, unfold and words are unfolding in images and memories and visual things that you study, how does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe?
And we barely know.
We don't know.
Every once in a while I'll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science, like the chakras or something.
And it's kind of interesting, right?
I mean, even if one looks at it just purely as a Western scientist, this idea that maybe there is a confluence of of nerves and vasculature and stuff, that makes you feel kind of like rooted and calm right,
Versus, like, up in your head.
I've been watching this really interesting Instagram channel.
It's a woman who does voices for cartoons, and she has the most incredible understanding of...
Voice.
And she's commenting a lot of the time on people in shows that I don't watch, but they have little excerpts of where like – I guess there's this doctor on the – it's like an ER type show.
It's like a revisiting of the show ER.
But she talks about how, as he's matured from season to season in his role on the show and he's mentoring how – she literally talks about how –.
His larynx and pharynx are how he's controlling those differently as he matures.
And then, when he has a breakdown, how the voice moves further up into his head and what that's about.
And so I was thinking about this.
I'm like you know, here's somebody that's a very unique window into all of this, but We sort of know this intuitively.
Like when we're excited, like there's this kind of rising from the bottom.
And when we're relaxed, everything just kind of sinks down to the diaphragmatic breathing.
Yeah.
As a scientist who studies emotion, how do you sort of decide what –
Which lens to look at things through, because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about might sound a little esoteric, but it's actually the stuff that's easiest to measure.
Yeah.
Presumably you can quantitatively measure like breaths per minute when somebody is looking at an awe inspiring image versus like a trivial image.
I love your reference to chakras and the older I get, I've been doing emotion science for 34 years or five years.
It's good to think about the other traditions.
We wouldn't have thought about the breath, the power of the breath, without the contemplative meditation traditions that you've in part tested, and Richie Davidson and others.
And lo and behold the breath.
Deep exhalation activates the vagus nerve, calms us down.
That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest which kind of sounds like the heart chakra and all the speculation around how your soul is in your heart.
Well, there's a neurophysiological correlate of that.
I love the paintings of Alex Gray, the psychedelic artist.
Like, if you want an image of what our neurophysiology is, is it synchronizes in love?
It's pretty close or it's interesting, right.
So it's good to find inspiration in that.
One of the great things about the science of emotion, and I brought these tools into the study of awe, you know, which is
We have learned a lot about how to measure emotion.
You can measure it with facial muscles and gaze patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and different measures of vagal tone and immune system activation and activation in the gut and, of course, brain activation and the voice, which is one of my favorite modalities.
I learned this in some sense from Darwin.
Darwin's expression of emotion in man and animals is, in my view and we're just publishing a paper on this, on everything that he said about human emotion.
53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior.
I wrote it with Darwin scholar Frank Soloway, who knows everything about Darwin.
And I choose how to study an emotion differently, based on what's happening out in our lives and the phenomena out there right.
So if you're studying awe, you should get people around big trees or in musical concerts or in museums, right?
I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty.
And I'm like I got to study young men teasing each other because we embarrass each other.
You know intentionally.
Oh my goodness.
We have to hear about that work again.
It's become very relevant nowadays because of the, I'll just call it what it is.
It's not dreaded.
It's the dreadful manosphere you know which people use very broadly, but I think now it's being allocated to the worst of the worst.
But then there is this phenomenon among males, where they'll rib each other, and there's a healthy version of males interacting too.
So we'll get back to that.
I base it on what's the phenomenon of interest that speaks to humanity, and then What are our best measures that we can go after it.
These days, if you want to measure awe, what's your favorite awe stimulus?
First off, and thank you for asking about measurement.
Like, it's interesting, like people are like, oh, you can't study awe.
You know, you don't know how to measure it.
It's ineffable.
It's mysterious.
It's spiritual.
We can measure awe really well.
You know the vocalization, the facial expression activation.
Parts of the brain are deactivated, vagal tone, the goosebumps is a good part of the awe response.
As we started to study awe, we did two things.
And one is typical science, which is, Get your most cool awe videos, show them to people.
And I had some missteps in this science.
I had a woman who was an honor student at Berkeley, who was coming back from Burning Man, and she's like I'm going to show engineers fractal imagery.
And the engineers are like, who is this woman?
Yeah.
I mean, I've never been to Burning Man, but there's the post-Burning Man glow that people come back with.
That is, for understandable reasons, hard for most people to enter with them.
It's like a kid coming back from summer camp.
There's great visual imagery.
You know, BBC Earth is awesome.
And it makes people feel awesome.
Slow motion guys.
I don't know if you know these guys.
They film wild things in slow motion, like, you know, dropping a wine glass.
And it's this spectacular photography and just...
So it opens you up to... Cool.
We'll put a link to that.
Yeah.
I love super slow-mo.
Yeah.
And that fits our definition, which is like, you don't understand what's happening.
It's fast.
It's mysterious.
But what I'm really proud of, Andrew, is the work we did out in the field, right?
So one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got your master's degree at, and headed into neuroscience was in our paleontology museum.
There's a replica of a T-Rex skeleton.
When I was five years old and I learned about dinosaurs, it changed my life.
It was just in the L.A.
Natural History Museum.
I'm like, wow.
So we studied people standing near the T. rex skeleton and they became expansive and collective.
We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees.
We studied people at Yosemite.
Yang Bai, a student in my lab, stopped hundreds of travelers from all over the world.
Right when you see Yosemite.
And she said, how do you feel about yourself right now?
And they're like, I feel small and quiet, but part of something really large, right?
Subsequent to that, there are scientists who are studying mosh pits at concerts and, you know, surfers and, you know, rock, I mean, it's, you know, backpackers and, you know, we studied one of my favorite studies later with Stacy Bear, who's a veteran who ran that, who's an amazing human being, an awe pioneer.
We studied people rafting down the American River, you know, veterans, just like, whoa.
We've studied people in art museums, Carnegie Hall, you know.
So it's you know.
One of the joys is when science you know, just in the spirit of your questions, it's like well, what should I really do here, right?
I could stay in the lab but it's like no, you know we got to go do stuff.
You know that my dream study was to like have a participant come in and engage a conversation.
The other participant is Shaquille O'Neal, right?
And it's like seven foot two, 350 pounds.
You'd be like, whoa, but couldn't do that.
So it's been fun.
It's been a wild ride.
So many thoughts.
First one I'm lucky.
I didn't rotate through your lab because I would have never become a neuroscientist.
But I'm unlucky.
We're glad you missed that opportunity.
But I'm unlucky, because it would have been so much fun to – because I – well, I loved the – the wet lab as they call it.
Getting into these experiments would just be incredible.
A couple of things, the Shaquille O'Neal thing.
I think we're all moved by these.
I guess they used to call them make a wish, foundation things where a kid who sadly, is dying, gets some last wish.
It's a tragic circumstance, but then you get to observe these kids and, most importantly, they get to experience something that they never could have imagined happening.
Like a Shaquille O'Neal walking in.
I feel like that's probably happened or something.
And I think what we're witnessing in those moments has to be awe.
Like they can't believe that this human or this event, whatever it is that they wish for, is happening there.
And so it's sort of layers upon layers.
There's like a grief component for those of us watching.
But a huge aspect of the, of just how touching it is, is the fact that, like for those moments, they're not thinking about their mortality, and no kid should have to think about their mortality, right.
I mean, even as I talk about it, it's like- Yeah, it's profound.
Yeah, it's like there's an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right?
That's a particularly complicated and interesting... where you've got two things colliding, right?
Because I feel like awe is so life-affirming.
Yeah, it is.
And anyway, that's just an observation.
But horizons are something that fascinated me for a long time as a vision scientist, because when we see a horizon, our visual angle widens.
That's cool.
We become more parasympathetic.
There's a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system.
So we relax by virtue of coming off the... the focusing component.
When we focus in through a tunnel, it's quite the opposite.
Nice.
But I feel like there's something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel thinking about Yosemite, or in a bunch of trees, and then the horizon opens up.
Yeah.
There's this transformation of visual...
And those moments, at least for me, are the moments.
So, I mean, I can hike along a ridgeline for a long time and be like, this is amazing.
But there's something distinctly bigger in the experience of going from confinement to openness.
It could be brought to the lab.
But do you think that's what's going on in-
Yosemite or the Grand Canyon?
Do people who work in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, do they attenuate?
They're like, oh yeah, like another horizon.
I don't know.
You know, I'm working with rangers right now and they, I think, I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide is attenuated, but they're still finding it in subtler ways.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
And you know it is interesting, as I've been privileged to.
I know Pete Docter at Pixar for 15 years and worked on some of his films Inside Out and Inside Out 2.
Yeah, you played a big role in that.
Yeah, and through the science of emotion.
And I was like – in one of our conversations, I was like tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children's films, animated films.
And he described first just what you said like – you know, the film is narrow, like a certain kind of attention, you know, sort of sympathetic fearful, checking things, and then It comes – suddenly you see the vastness of something, and it's true.
It is awe-inspiring.
When you think about it neuroscientifically, it's a very basic form of awe.
It's shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception.
And then it becomes metaphorical, right?
It's like God I'm thinking about – like I love.
One of the wonders of life that makes us feel awe is big ideas and epiphanies.
And very often people will be like God.
I've been working so hard at this.
You know I'm working on a paper, something in technology or some part of my life.
And then you suddenly realize it's part of something large, right?
One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall in the book in the chapter on musical awe, said you know she's a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony.
Said you know I practice for five hours a day.
It's hard, man.
And it's small and narrow.
And where's my finger?
And then when I'm on stage and I feel the notes go out into this space, the vastness you're talking about I feel like I'm part of history, right.
And I tear up and cry.
So I think you've got to send me those papers Andrew, because I think it's fundamental, which is from small to vast.
And in fact...
We did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco, brain health.
Old people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older.
And all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things.
Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves.
It brought them awe. and less physical pain over eight weeks.
And now we're finding six years later, better brain health, right?
Small to vast is a big part of it.
I'm struck by the all walk.
And I know this comes up in your book and elsewhere.
And you've done a lot of research on this.
For those listening, what would an all walk look like?
And what are some of the health benefits?
You just mentioned a few that have been observed both in the short and the long term.
Yeah, thank you.
You know, we are a walking species.
You know, it is just in our DNA to walk.
We meandered from Africa to all the continents.
A lot of people, Rebecca Solnit writes about this, like walking is almost sacred.
It's a kind of consciousness.
Like you're saying, like, whoa, I'm picking up a vaster view of what's around me.
And I decided to just create this Zawalk, you know, and I did it for a meditation group or a mindful magazine.
You just slow down.
A lot of people walk.
Hundreds of, you know, tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States.
It's good for you.
You know, so we just add it all.
Like on your regular walk once a week in our study, go somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go.
Go someplace that may surprise you.
I walk around Berkeley a lot and I was like well, I'm going to go past the little playground that my daughters played at when they were young and just feel that you know Courtney's Park.
Yeah, with the rock slide and the tunnel.
Exactly.
I love that place.
You're the Rose Garden.
And there's a secret.
Should we give this away?
Yeah.
There's a secret hiking trail through – it's actually through a private property's backyard.
And they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash.
And there's an incredible waterfall in place to stand at the top.
There's a beam there.
You've been there, I'm sure.
Yeah, I know.
We can look out over this what is kind of like a – trench of tree it's.
It's a total transformation of one space to the next.
It is, if you look for it properly, i'm sure now it's on the internet.
Uh, it's in Kind of swinging gates not locked.
So hard to find.
And there's a little monastery maybe nearby.
And you might see me a couple years ago.
You would have seen me and my dog.
But you might see me eating a slice of pizza from the cheese board sitting on that log.
I spent a lot of time there.
I'm getting goosebumps, Henry.
That is just pure Berkeley.
Thank you.
So yeah.
So in this study I'll walk, go on your walk, find a place that's gonna be a little surprising, where it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder.
And it's interesting, no one's asked me this question your observation about small to vast, and we just said Slow down, deepen your breathing, sync it up with your walking, which you've studied empirically the breath.
And then, go from small to vast.
Look at clouds, look at the whole pattern of clouds, just slow it down.
Look at trees, look at the light on the trees and look at points of light and then patterns of light.
I love walking past playgrounds, it's one of my favorite sources of awe.
Listen to one laugh and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right?
That's all.
And they walk through, they do that for half an hour.
And what we find in that study is they become more vast in their consciousness.
They're more aware in the photographs that they provided, of what's around them.
They feel more kindness over the eight weeks.
They feel more awe.
Over an eight-week period.
It rises.
And then the finding that was important for people who are elderly is less physical pain.
You know, your body starts to ache when you're 75 or earlier and awe.
I think through the inflammation process and reducing it caused less pain.
This dovetails with other health benefits.
Awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms.
We have people with long COVID.
Just a minute of awe a day reduce long COVID symptoms.
It's good news, right.
And there's so much science on it that now I think medical doctors are starting to think like I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music through all right as a mechanism.
I have a lot of thoughts about this going from small to large.
Yeah, I'd love to hear them.
But before I do, I have another question.
I have another question.
I think for a lot of people, including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of ourself like getting outside of ourselves.
But I'm starting to think, based on the way you're describing it, that it's about being tethered to the larger picture.
That it's not a yes.
It's getting out of our heads quote unquote, but it's actually very much an embodied experience.
It's almost like full body.
And so now I'll answer your question.
This is usually where people start putting in the comments, like, you talk too much.
Let your guest talk.
But try it, folks.
He asked me.
Twice.
So you ask me a question, I'm going to answer it.
Anyone that knows me, you know if I Okay.
So I've thought about this relationship between visual aperture and a time perception for a long time.
This is my, my deepest obsession.
And it gets a little bit into the book I'm writing.
But it but it.
It's probably reserved for after there's some experiments.
And and I Um to the fear of my podcast crew, I actually am considering going back into the lab to do this experiment.
So we know what, what do we know for certain?
We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small, like looking through a maker type aperture, or you're in a let's just say it could be a pleasant or unpleasant text communication.
That's going back and forth, that your perception of time is different.
You're fine slicing.
Those dot, dot, dots coming through.
Yeah, it's just like this.
It feels like an eternity.
Yeah.
And it's bi-directional with your, let's just call it level of alertness.
It doesn't even have to be stress, but sympathetic nervous system, right?
So if I'm in line at the store and I have someplace to be, my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever.
Yeah, because you're in these little micro.
When I'm relaxed, it feels like I'm slicing time differently.
Okay, when we see a horizon and our aperture opens up, as I mentioned, then we relax.
But we also are taking...
Fewer time snapshots.
So people might think, oh, fewer, you're in slow motion?
Because no, it's the opposite, right?
Slow motion is high frame rate.
This thing about video where you can catch slow motion, you need a high frame rate.
This is why, when people experience like a car crash, they'll often say that things felt like they were slowing down.
More snapshots.
That's cool.
So-
When I think about this relationship between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain.
So if I'm listening to a specific conversation in a party, I'm fine slicing my perception of auditory space.
Our friend Irv Hafter taught me this.
When I listen to everything and I take it in as a whole, it's a more relaxed experience.
But okay.
Cool.
So a long time ago, because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things.
And I came up with this meditation.
But it's not meditation at all.
And some of my listeners will be familiar with it.
I decided to call it, for lack of a better term, space-time bridging.
The meditation is very simple.
You close your eyes and you do three breaths, thinking about your skin inward.
So interoception.
You open your eyes and you look at your hand.
You take three breaths.
But you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand.
Then you look some distance, maybe eight or ten feet away.
You do the same.
Then you find a horizon.
And then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon.
Like you're just on a planet.
It's floating in space.
And like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or whatever.
And then you get right back to yourself.
And so the idea here is that it helped me a lot, because I noticed that meditations where I was completely focused inward made me more focused inward.
Going for a run.
I could get outside my head and I started to play with the idea that maybe it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se, but it's the like every great thing in biology or psychology it's the process.
It's not an event.
It's the process of going from one aperture to the next.
That's cool.
And that's kind of what life is about.
Yeah.
Like when this too shall pass, is really about taking a broader time frame snapshot like eventually, this thing which is visual.
And so there's a long answer to your question, but this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon, if I can in the morning.
But it's also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I'm working on.
Like there is no place or event in a day or in life that that's actually the right way to live.
Like you can go to Big Sur and if you're lucky enough to go to Esalen, like you're, like this, is it?
But it's only it because you came from your office, in my opinion.
And then you go back again. figure this out.
The title of this paper, which you're the senior author, is A Balanced Mind.
All Fosters Equanimity Via Temporal Distancing.
So it's about time, not about space.
It is.
That's fascinating.
So that's how I think about this.
Now maybe you can tell us about this paper, because I'm getting embarrassed that I've been going way too long.
This is why we're in conversation Andrew, which is, you know, you've studied the visual system and we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe.
And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Matthias Tarnopovsky, who was at Berkeley and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony.
I was a music director there and he said – I was like – and he was – he studies the great – and he's a conductor of symphonies.
And I was like, what's this – music is hard to understand scientifically.
It is complicated.
I was like, what's – why awe and music?
Why do we cry?
Why do we get goosebumps?
Why do – I mean profound.
And he's like, time.
It's all about what it does to our sense of time.
And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore.
What awe does to the self, and I'm putting together a couple of your comments.
Is Jane Goodall got it most right?
And it's so great to study things with science and then you see someone you really revere say something and she was.
She felt that chimpanzees feel awe.
I do, too believe that, so it's a controversial issue.
Uh, chimps show and france duvall alerted me to this, who recently passed away, and i just want to pay reverence to him or homage to him.
They're great primatologists.
So he said you got to look at Jane Goodall and writing about chimps and the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature.
They sit quietly like around rivers, like that waterfall in Berkeley.
They look at things, they get goosebumps, they touch things like we would out in nature.
They rock.
And Jane Goodall said, why wouldn't they feel awe? or the beginnings of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside of the self.
So with awe we have a sense of self interception and the like, and then we connect to vast things out there.
And that's what our research documented as kind of a central mechanism of our transformation.
It's like when you're at Yosemite or when you are standing next to that T-Rex skeleton or when you've, you know, when you've thought about the passage of time that happens with life, right?
And there are new meditations around that.
You're like, wow, I am part of something vast.
I'm part of evolution.
I'm part of nature.
I'm part of an ecosystem.
And it changes your whole mind right, changes the neurophysiology of the mind.
Default mode network, starts to quiet down, activates vagal tone and you do feel like you're tethered, as you said, to like music or culture or political movement, the team you love, right.
And it's transcendent.
And if you look at where we are today, we need more of that.
You know, we need to get our young people to be connecting to big things.
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I didn't expect that we would land here, at least not so early in the conversation.
But there, you know.
We've had Christoph Koch on this podcast talking about consciousness incredible neuroscientist and really thinker.
I've watched his career evolve over the years and he's continue to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness.
And, you know, we'll hear nowadays about, oh, like maybe consciousness is outside the brain.
And I think if nothing else, our brains are important components in it.
Maybe not.
I don't know.
I don't want to do the experiment on myself to find out.
Like, I was decerebrated or something, which basically means having your cortex removed, folks.
Sorry for the nerd speak.
But the idea is connecting through time, like in our own lives, is a very unique form of awe.
So like if I hear a song...
And it reminds me of when I was like 15.
And then all of a sudden, all the, as I call it, like the magic library.
That's how the brain works, right?
It's like a Harry Potter.
Like.
You take out a book, you see a subject and then all of a sudden, the library, the books around it change.
And so I'm thinking about the time we did this and the time we did that.
And everyone has these notions, but there's very much linked to them.
That's one form of linking up through time.
Well put.
And then there's this other one where you feel something with someone else.
You know you're connected in that moment.
But there's this idea forgive me for getting squishy on here, but there's this idea that maybe your past, present and future is connected to their past and present and future.
If you let yourself go there, no drugs required.
If you let yourself go there, you're like, oh, we're part of this together.
And we're sort of moving more now as a conscious fleet than as individuals.
I think that's a very real experience, even for people that are like, very resistant to even the language of collective consciousness and things like that.
And I think concerts are where we generally feel that, because it requires a sort of shared perceptual experience or emotional experience.
And so when you say getting young people connected that way, It's very different than like node to node.
It's sort of like it's an openness that comes.
First, you have to connect to your past, present, and future.
And then you're kind of open to it.
I feel like then that window opens.
And then if there's one person there or 1,000 people standing there, like it's on.
Yeah.
But if not and you're just in your experience you're the person at the party wondering whether or not you have something between your teeth, which is the lamest way to be at a party.
But we've all been there, right?
Anyway, I'm getting a little outside the box here.
No, I love it.
What are your thoughts about individual awe experiences, like on the awe walk, versus a couple on an awe walk versus connecting to a whole mess of people, some of whom you've never met?
I mean you've highlighted this temporal, this dynamic that you're pointing to with respect to awe and the experience of awe.
And we're so limited in how we measure experience.
And I think you're right.
I think that your first sense of like, one of the most awesome qualities of awe, is connecting in your mind through the layers of consciousness and experience.
That shifts out of the micro to this expansive narrative about your mind, right.
And so I grew up around the UCLA campus because my mom got her PhD there at UCLA in the late 60s.
And there were eucalyptus trees.
And then I went to Northern California where there were not as many eucalyptus trees.
And the first day I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergrad.
I smelled the eucalyptus and it was awe.
It was just like awe, all of these experiences through the olfactory process.
I was awestruck by that smell.
And that's through the connecting through time.
I am very persuaded by the new literature on brain synchronization.
And I talk about this a bit in awe and there's just new science coming out.
We're always syncing up with other people.
When a nine-month-old listens to music, they are syncing up to the sounds and rhythms of their culture's music and they're synced up physiologically with whomever is in their midst when we go to a concert or we watch a sporting event.
If you like sports, your heart rate is syncing up, your brains are synchronizing.
And that in some sense is the materialistic account of collective consciousness.
We're all sharing brain patterns and awareness.
And I think that, It's part of some of our deepest forms of awe.
And music.
Now the current science of music is like it is very hard to get people to think collectively in the same way.
When you teach a classroom, it's impossible, but music does it within milliseconds, right?
When you talk to people who've been to Taylor Swift shows who are Swifties, it's serious, right?
They are instantly bonded.
Yeah.
Yeah.
United in like a moral cause almost or identity cause.
So that's profound.
That's very hard work to do.
And when Jonathan Haidt and I wrote about awe early in our careers, you know we were like.
We need these emotions to make us be part of collectives, because we are a very collective species.
It was one of our signature strengths is to fold into groups and to cooperate and share.
It's hard work.
It's vulnerable to exploitation.
And awe is one of the fastest pathways, as through what you're talking about, through physical dancing together, chanting together, sporting events together, what Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence, right.
Music, just syncing up with each other, feeling like we're part of this vast group, sharing a sense of humanity, a sense that we all suffer in the same way or exalt in the same way.
And it's profound.
I don't think we'll ever get this with science, but I love you know I've had all these conversations about awe and musical awe.
I'm like, when's a time, and I could ask you this question, when...
Being at a concert has changed your life.
Oh, I mean, there's some of the most important not just memorable but important experiences of my entire life.
So tell me about one or two.
My sister listened to the Grateful Dead and Cat Stevens and all that kind of stuff.
And from the first time I heard people immediately think Bullet, Belt and Mohawks, but I was a punk rock kid.
I mean, I'll never forget.
My friend who's now well-known in the skateboard community, Jim Thiebaud.
I know Jim.
You know Jim?
Yeah.
He's a close friend of mine.
I take saunas with Jim.
Do you?
Yeah.
I texted with him this morning.
Say hi.
We text each other every morning.
The great Jim Thiebaud.
He basically runs skateboarding.
He's the dean of skateboarding, the quiet dean.
And good friends with Tommy Guerrero.
Good friends with Tommy Gray.
Jim gave me my first cup of black coffee.
He was the person who inspired me to start journaling when I was 14.
I was put on out of sympathy onto Thunder Trucks and at the time he was around the factory which at that time was over in—.
Third Street where all the – Hunter's Point on Yosemite.
But anyway, Jim gave me a tape because back then it was tapes.
A band called Crimpshrine, which is from Berklee.
And they were on Lookout Records, which eventually were first releases of Green Day.
I wasn't so much.
Forgive me.
I like those guys.
I know some of them.
But I heard that tape.
It was like, this is amazing.
Like, this is amazing.
Like, I've never heard anything quite like it.
It was super raw.
It was – and then I was like, I need more of this.
It was like a drug.
I was like, I need more of this, whatever this is.
And so he gave me a Stiff Little Fingers tape, and that was just it.
And then it was Stiff Little Fingers –
Operation Ivy, Rancid.
I mean I could easily like do a whole, literally a thesis on that whole kind of era and genre of punk rock.
I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan.
Yeah.
Mescaleros and... biggest Rancid fan there ever was.
I'm blessed to be good friends with Tim Armstrong these days, but I only met him later in life.
And that still freaks me out because we're close friends.
But whenever I see them, it's still – I'm like that's Tim Armstrong, because there's the – talk about time travel.
That's the 14-, 15-year-old version of me.
Those guys are a bit older.
They were like gods in the Bay Area for our scene.
And then when they made it, they're just still so good.
The show that changed everything for me was – this would be a summer between 93 and 94 –
A little club.
It was either called the Stagehouse or the Stagecoach in Santa Barbara.
That was near the railroad tracks downtown.
And it was Rancid playing with Sick of It All, which was an East Coast hardcore band which you know, and my now good friend Toby Moores was there.
And I remember going there and being kind of scared.
I mean, I kind of like moved my way around it.
It was just like those guys were older.
It had a kind of violent feel.
They were from Albany and West Oakland.
And there was an edge there.
And I remember thinking, this is exciting.
I feel very much a part of this.
I love the music.
I know every lyric.
And I'm a little bit frightened, and I love it.
And I think it was just, you know, I just got the adrenaline back.
And there's a little bit of you don't know what is going to happen and it feels a little dangerous, but it's mostly benevolent.
And... it's an irreplaceable feeling.
And, and I think about it sometime.
I think about a lot of the time.
Yeah.
And, you know, thank you.
And I, you know, when I was writing this book on awe, some forms of awe.
You know there are eight wonders that give us awe.
You know some.
Are You kind of understand them?
Nature is pretty straightforward.
Spirituality, meditation, you know.
And music and your description of it exactly captures how rich it is and complicated, which is.
There is something about that sound and the acoustic patterns that come through your eardrums and head into your auditory cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people and the Insta friends.
Like you said, for life you know brothers and sisters almost, and you're like this is what life's about.
And Susan Langer, a philosopher, really got it right.
She's like, music is this tonal language of emotion and identity.
And awe in music.
Very fitting with our conversation is when those sounds come into you, move you and connect you to something that is what you care about in life.
You know, I remember I grew up, I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon in the late sixties.
And there was more music there than I almost anywhere in human history.
You know from.
You know the mamas and papas and Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison was out there.
Jim Morrison was living there and the doors and, you know, Bob Dylan was passing through and the bird.
It was a joke, you know.
It was everywhere.
That's wild just to think about how much incredible music was being created.
Oh, man.
You know, the Beach Boys were, you know...
I mean, weren't Fleetwood Mac back in Topanga?
Yeah.
I mean, it was like and I was eight and nine and just to, you know, to grow up on Bob Dylan.
And when I saw about the recent film with Timothee Chalamet, I start crying.
You know, I was just like, this is life, you know.
Yeah, and so that's why we study awe, you know.
And, you know, music is one of our great technologies.
There's now research showing it's good for chronic pain.
I think it's a frontier in healthcare and you know, just giving people contemplative, meditative approaches to music.
And awe is part of the answer.
And you and I shared yet another thing, Andrew.
You know when I grew up in the foothills of the Sears as a teenager Ted Nugent and you know this poor area, Ted Nugent, ACDC and that's all fine.
And.
When I first heard the Sex Pistols in, I was lucky to be in England when, Nevermind the Bollocks came out and I was in a working class fighting town.
And I heard that, I was like, that's it.
And then that led me to Iggy Pop, who's one of my moral heroes.
Amazing.
Who's really into Qigong, apparently.
I heard him years ago on the radio.
And someone was asking him, like, how does he stay in such good shape?
And he's just tons of Qigong breathing.
Yeah.
Wild, wild, wild.
You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't.
But there's something that feels kind of divorced from language, about the experience that we're talking about, even though there's lyrics tied in there.
And what brings that to mind is there's a really good book, one that I like anyway, called A Fighter's Heart, by a guy named Sam Sheridan.
His wife actually wrote that movie Monster with Charlize Theron I think is the actress that played her.
And I don't know Sam, but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms and he explores them all.
And there's this great line in there, because I've done a little bit of boxing and sparred a bit.
I don't recommend it.
As a neuroscientist, how can I recommend it?
Yeah, what were you doing?
You get hit.
I was actually in my 30s.
But anyway, I was working some stuff out.
But do not recommend the sport.
Yeah, the training, yeah.
But you don't want to get hit in the head.
Not good for your brain whatsoever.
But he talks about how fighting with someone, sparring or fighting with someone is – he said it's like a – it's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have, because you're in this primitive, non-language state.
I mean, he actually likens it to a one night stand.
He says something like oh, you know, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know, but you feel connected.
So I don't know if that's the best.
It's certainly not the most politically correct way to put it.
But I understand what he's talking about.
Definitely.
You're in this moment of you're both vulnerable.
Yeah.
In the case of the fighting, you're both vulnerable.
You're trying to hurt each other.
You're also obeying some rules.
Yeah.
Right.
It's not, not anything goes.
And he talks about how it transcends language.
Yeah.
And that creates a forever bond.
And it's true.
Yeah.
Right.
I didn't do a ton of sparring, but you have a respect.
Yep.
You went through something hard together.
Yeah.
Even if it's only three, three minute rounds.
Like, it's real, but it's separate from language.
And earlier we were talking about the experience of emotion as this kind of triad of the feeling, the motor component to it, and language.
But I do think that maybe the language piece can go.
I'm with you in some sense.
Darwin wrote about the motor components, got a lot of it right.
William James was about the body and the physiology.
Language is what we rely on as social scientists, but I think it's as William James said when he tried to describe his experience of transcendence when he took laughing gas and it led him down the path to understand spirituality it's like words are tattered fragments.
They barely touch. the real thing.
Yeah, and I just want to dwell for a moment.
You know part of awe And I learned this like talking to veterans.
You know, and I did work with Stacey Bear and we did this Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers.
And he's one of my heroes in the book of getting tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature.
You know, and these are guys who have lost limbs and they're rock climbing, you know, and it's just like
Like there's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life and there's violence and there's a lot of horror, carnage et cetera, but there's awe.
And I love your idea.
And I think any teacher of the martial arts would say that's the point is that we can transcend death or violence by violence, martial arts, by performing them and putting them into a contemplative form for the body.
One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie is Raging Bull, man.
And Martin Scorsese, like Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray, have these epic battles and they look at each other in one of the great scenes and they're just like we're united.
We're way beyond the fight.
I think you're right.
I think it's part of this transcendent moment of people crashing into each other.
Mosh pits.
They are one of my favorite objects of study in awe.
And mosh pits have a law, a set of laws to them.
Yeah, people have studied like the sort of the physics of it.
Yeah no, it's like, and you think you're crashing and you are, you're bruising yourself, you know, but there's something transcendent there about what we find.
I could be wrong, but I think Raging Bull, I think that the soundtrack was Clash inspired.
There's something about it in the documentary which I highly recommend, called The Future is Unwritten, which is the Joe Strummer thing, where there's some link up between the Clash.
I think Scorsese says, you know, the Clash inspired the soundtrack to Raging Bull or something like that.
Really?
Anyway, he's a big Clash fan.
Nice.
Yeah.
All right, Andrew, I get to ask you one more question.
Yeah, yeah.
So why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you?
One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice.
So why Joe Strummer?
Man.
All right, I'm going to try and keep this brief.
I mean, just to give you a sense of what an impact he's had on me.
I mean, I've always worn these button-down black shirts, even before I was public-facing, because I saw him do a show.
Mescalero show.
I wasn't there, but he, and by the way, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, I actually think is better than the Clash.
Clash was a short run.
It was only five years.
Only five years, pretty much.
And then they're done.
So it was one-on-one with Clash and then he came back with the Mescaleros and just incredible.
I mean, they're masterpieces.
Yeah. produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong.
He went to Hellcat Records.
He went to a small label.
He also sang songs with Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin.
I actually know the story of that because I'm friends with Rick and I insisted on him telling me the story.
So sometime I can tell you that.
But I mean, masterpieces late in life.
And there was a show that strummer played where he was wearing his black button down soaking in sweat, like soaked in sweat, and he just wouldn't take the thing off.
I think he might have rolled up like one cough yeah, and i was like that's punk as fuck.
I was like that guy is so rad and he was in.
He died at 50 where the i'm 50 now died at 50.
I go see the mural of him right off um, It's right off Tompkins Square Park in Alphabet City.
Every time I'm in New York, just go, like, see it.
Xavier says, future is unwritten.
You can go there, pay your respects.
I've talked to Rick about this a lot.
Like, what was it about him?
Yeah.
Because they were close friends.
I never met Strummer.
But I think...
There's three reasons.
One is he had that Bob Dylan-like ability to write lyrics that you're not, especially with Mescaleros, where you're not really sure what the song's about.
But it makes sense, not just because it's beautiful, but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics are actually saying.
Beyond language, the theme of our talk.
A great song, for instance, would be like On the Road to Rock and Roll.
That could be about being on tour or something, but it transcends something obvious.
Nice.
The other thing is the way he used his breath was...
His intonation is unparalleled.
And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand.
Because during the summer, I go hang out with Rick whenever I can.
And winter, too.
And we watch documentaries, including Clash documentaries.
And I asked him, I was like, what was it?
Like, why does he have this thing?
Because he said these incredible things.
You know he would say things like you know you got to bring humanity back into the center.
And those are really beautiful quotes, but like a lot of people will give beautiful quotes.
And Rick, in very Rick Rubin style, said Everything he said.
He brought his whole life experience into those statements.
And I was like just the statements, like the quotes.
You know, like you know, we got to bring the humanity back into the room.
And he goes.
No, everything he said it was like you got the sense that he was bringing all of himself to it, even if he was being kind of quiet.
That's cool.
And I go, okay, so this is clearly on a plane of understanding that I can't put language to, right?
What does that even mean?
That's like half the things Rick says.
It's like a riddle mixed up in a poem, you know, put out there as a principle.
And you're just like, well, what the hell does that mean?
But it feels true.
And I think that Rick's superpower is that Rick knows what a true feeling feels like.
And he knows what a false feeling feels like.
And he's only interested in truths.
Period.
And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of is exactly that.
It's like there are all these layers of meaning and representation.
And, you know, and we try to figure out true moments of awe with all of our measures.
And it is this like it's all coming together as a package that tells us it's happened.
So we can think about things that promote awe the awe walk, going small to large aperture, maybe back again.
I guess we shouldn't assume that it's unidirectional.
Coming back into our home after something big is, there's nothing like that, right?
The dog, the kids, the spouse, the whatever you know, like those little things, the plants you know.
So it runs both ways.
It's no fun, but we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe.
Because, as I step back from what we're talking about today and I think, okay language, It can be part of it, but it can also in molecular biology or genetics, we call it a dominant negative.
It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions.
A ton of stuff, yeah.
There's a joke around molecular labs and neuroscience labs that you'd be like that person's a dominant negative.
I now have a new phrase I can use.
Yeah, you don't want to be called a dominant negative.
I call people that in my head a lot online.
I go, man, that person's a dominant negative.
They're not contributing to the greater good.
They're just like... So there's...
You know, language can be that or be neutral or be positive, but it can definitely be that.
And then there's something about being over-identified with self.
You know, so...
On the recommendation of Tim Armstrong, someone you wouldn't associate with the Grateful Dead.
He was like you got to listen to the Grateful Dead.
And I was like, what?
What?
This Tim, the Tim Armstrong, transplants rancid Operation Ivy telling me I should listen to the Grateful Dead.
He's a huge music fan of all sorts of things.
I said, why?
And he said, he said, they're punk rockers.
And I said, what are you talking about?
And he said, yeah, they played a different show every night.
That's how they're – I'm not going to keep doing his – I can do a pretty decent Tim.
But –
Apparently, the people that followed them, that was a big part of it.
It was all new, right?
Every show was unique.
I started getting really into listening to The Grateful Dead in the last couple of years.
And then I started listening to documentaries, biographies of them.
And there's this amazing moment in one of them I can't remember which where somebody says what killed it.
What killed the collective of music, that feeling?
And the answer someone gave was cocaine.
And then the question was, why cocaine?
And someone said, because cocaine is all about me.
It's the me drug.
So I was like whoa, I'm a neuroscientist so I can tack that to.
You're talking about dopamine and adrenaline.
And when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated, that's a very I mean amphetamines especially it becomes a me thing.
It's every idea that's mine is the thing that needs to happen.
It's the important thing.
If not out there, it needs to happen.
Like that's the only thing that matters.
Very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics, very different than just the sober experience where it's kind of a downer, but then the non-intoxicated experience of just being with the music, no substances.
So I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states, but more broadly how meanness, self-interested states, are a dominant negative for awe.
That was the best entrance into that question I've ever encountered.
You know, it's amazing, Andrew.
You know, I grew up for three years, formative years in Laurel Canyon, 68 to 70.
And then we moved to the foothills of the Sierras in Northern California.
And it was peak Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell and the birds and the beach boys.
Jealous.
Envious in a positive way.
When my brother passed away and he was my brother of 14 months younger and I was in this reflective period I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon.
And they made the same point, which is kind of things shifted after we, you know, in the early 70s.
And the historian said it's cocaine, that it moved from...
You know, marijuana and mushrooms and psychedelics a bit.
But really you know people playing music.
You know Joni Mitchell or Graham Nash or whomever it is.
And then suddenly cocaine comes and the whole spirit changed.
Yeah, I think the great enemy of awe is meanness is what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, who was one of our great writers of awe.
You know he has this moment out in nature.
Cold day in Massachusetts sees this forest and you know he's like standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by there and uplifted into infinite space.
There's that uplift that you described earlier of awe.
All mean egotism vanishes.
And that's awe, awe quiets the self.
And when you look at where we are, Gene Twenge, longitudinal data, We're more self-focused.
We're taking a quarter of the pictures that we take are of the self.
It's preposterous.
It's pretty crazy.
It's half of the photos we take are of the self or the self with another person or another thing.
It's perverse.
The world has become more narcissistic.
We're led by narcissists.
It's just taken as a default, and it's not a default.
It's a corruption of our minds, because the mind, as you described earlier, is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact, at seeing their beauty, at hearing their words, at looking at collectives, discerning patterns of nature, collectives.
And all of that works against awe, right?
That, you know, if I... am focused on myself, I'll feel less awe.
If I am worried about my striving in society or my bottom line in my bank account, you know, or thinking about money, it countervails awe.
So yeah, I think, you know, that's why awe is important for our times.
We are in this for various reasons.
This period of too much self-focus.
It's costing young people.
It makes them anxious, you know, and they gotta go dance, they gotta hear some music, they gotta share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is, you know, and just to get out of the self.
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The example you gave of sports earlier I think is an important one.
Only because I think some people not me, but some people will like I don't really want to go camping or backpacking.
I do.
I spend as much time in Yosemite as I can.
The dancing concert, you know, maybe that's not for them.
I do think – I'm not a big professional sports fan.
I like a few things.
But it is kind of interesting to put this lens on like when I see a game.
One of our members of our podcast team that's not here today is like just – obsessively excited about professional football and Seattle Seahawks.
So this was a good year for him.
And I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl, that it's not just about his relationship to the team.
It's about being a kid, and everyone else there in a Seahawks jersey is like they must feel a connection.
Totally.
Because they presumably, the super fans, know that the other super fans know the history.
They know how important this is.
They know all the trials and tribulations of the team and on and on.
And so it's...
Gosh, it's so different.
I'm just realizing like it's the furthest thing from like doing a PhD in the sciences.
Folks, doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun.
It's a hell of a lot of work.
And there's nothing else quite like it.
It's irreplaceable.
It is.
I wouldn't redo it for any other way.
But it is a very solitary thing.
It is.
You don't even cross the finish line.
Your advisors are there.
Your family comes.
But it's like it is a tunnel like this big.
Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is you're going through that tunnel with.
You know, millions of people.
One of the joys of all science.
You know, we gathered stories of all from 26 countries.
And it's one of my favorite parts of this research.
And this is like India and Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico and Japan and Korea, South Korea and Russia.
I mean, everybody.
We brought them in, got these stories.
You know, like what is vast and mysterious?
What gives you goosebumps?
What's amazing or awesome to you?
And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina, they're going to tell you about football.
And when you get stories from parts of the United States, they're going to talk about football.
You know American football and baseball.
You get stories from Boston.
There's going to be a Red Sox story.
And we have not studied sports in my emotion science, because most emotion scientists are not good athletes.
They're picked last in grammar school.
They're grouchy about sports, and yet it's super emotional.
And I will tell you a story that has science and personal wisdom.
As I gathered these stories, I was, like God you know, part of collective effervescence, just like Taylor Swift or being in a punk mosh pit is also sports.
And just like it is awesome to follow a sports team and be there live.
And there's this great, obscure sociology paper that said Being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion, because you have your rituals.
They have these towels they sing around.
You think of yourself as the Steeler Nation.
They talk about godlike experiences on the field.
They have these spiritual moments where in freezing days they'll take off their clothes and –
Cheer and cry together.
And I was teaching this recently and there were two Steeler fans in the audience.
And they're like, that's exactly it.
But I'll tell you more.
Like everywhere you go, if you're a fan, a Steeler fan, there are Steeler bars that you can go to.
And when the Steelers play, they're gonna be Steelers fans.
And if you're a kid and the Steelers lose, somebody who's old will tell you I remember when we lost in 1983 and we'll recover.
We'll have this expansion of time.
It was so rich to me.
It was like, we love sports.
Sports, the Olympics are old.
They're 3,000 years old.
The ball court games in the Mayan traditions are were amazing ways to gather community and become collective.
Right.
So, you know, it was really eye opening for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports.
And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr, who was coaching the Warriors at the time.
He's a righteous guy.
He is a person of truth and just getting his sense of like, how awesome it is to I mean for him to coach a game and the Warriors were in this amazing period and look up into the stands and 10000 people are dancing.
Because of your coaching, you know.
I was like, that's pretty good.
He's really tapped in, isn't he?
He's a meditator and wildlife experience.
And trauma early, you know.
His dad.
Losing his dad.
Yeah.
And that orienting him to what really matters.
I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe, but I'm also thinking about...
Yeah.
You know, it sprang to mind that, you know, it's funny.
Sometimes I get tacked to, like, ice baths for some.
Look, folks, that was a whim, right?
I mean, that was a whim.
I mean, sure, I've done some cold plunges.
I like them.
Yeah, it's fun.
I mean, you know it, it's psychologically painful and you feel better afterwards and it'll make you, it'll make anyone mentally stronger, because cold is a universal stressor.
But, you know, it, it gets kind of a bad rap because mostly because people don't like doing it.
Everyone loves the sauna.
It's kind of funny.
Everyone's cool with sauna and the Finns love the sauna and it's a social thing for them.
And one thing that I think has been overlooked and it just sprang to mind now, so I overlooked it as well is that you know, there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people, but that we can also do on our own.
And when we do them on our own, we know other people are doing it on their own too.
And so it's kind of a – it's a different version of what we've been talking about.
And, you know, the quote-unquote health and wellness community, they take some heat.
Like people go, oh, it's all about supplements or all about cold plunges.
You know, and I've got like a particular finger I hold up when I hear that.
But it's not – about that.
There's this deeper layer that's much more important, that's formed over the last, I would say, five to 10 years.
Because it used to be meditation, breath work, love Esalen.
Amazing, incredible place.
Historic.
Historic.
And many important things actually happened there that people don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics and world peace.
Yeah.
They brought the Russians in there. for example, to end the Cold War.
Yeah, and Gorbachev.
Yeah, incredible, right?
But, you know, so it used to be these isolated pockets.
But now, you know, people get together to sauna.
People get together to do breath work.
People get together to cold plunge.
And, of course, for thousands of years, humans have been doing this.
This is not a new thing.
And people look at that and they go, this is wacky or it's about the marketing of this.
Actually, I think that there's a connection that's formed among people who want to take good care of their health.
They want to have some control over their state, because otherwise the world will take control of it for you.
And meditating is a very solitary experience for most people.
So there's something pretty nice about going to a banya.
I love banyas.
Russian banyas.
And then also doing the sauna on your own or cold plunge on your own.
And I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media.
So from now on, when I see people doing things that I go, oh, cool, like I like a bit of that.
I don't. maybe do it every day, or I do that every day too, see my morning sunlight.
The notion that there's a community being built, that was the original intention of social media.
And so I think social media can have this dominant negative effect on awe and day-to-day experience.
So a question is, are there ways?
Surely there are.
But how could we build more of a sense of this communal feeling, leveraging what people are already doing?
They're already on their phones and scrolling.
Hopefully they're also doing things to benefit their health, to make them feel less isolated.
Because, as Jonathan Haidt and others have pointed out quite correctly, it can really fracture us into the me, the ego version.
But it's kind of the perfect venue to connect people also.
I agree.
So I don't expect you to come up with any answers right on the fly, but I feel like it's not going anywhere.
So how could we build or glean more sense of a community through things that we're doing actually doing in our daily lives is, I think, a question that's worth exploring.
It's profoundly important.
You know the you know.
The preceding question is like what are the enemies of all?
What gets in the way or the barriers and you just nailed a couple is, you know, online life.
You know and I think Jonathan Haidt is right that it's not only anxiety producing, but we don't think about the opportunity costs of like it deprives me of awe.
And in our study of 2600 people around the world, what makes them feel awe?
No one ever said being on Meta or Facebook or Instagram.
There are a couple of worries I have about online life and I'm kind of working on this now you know and one is the content itself, which is
It's been algorithmically designed.
I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms I was advising there were set in place of making people hate each other and not demonstrate all the wonderful things about human beings, which are uh, ample.
And then online life disrupts sharing and the technologies of today have disrupted sharing, so we don't share music like we used to share.
We used to listen to music together.
That's down.
Going to movies is down 40%, right?
That used to be a very important collective cultural experience.
Did you see the latest Scorsese or Pixar or whatever?
Now it's streaming, right?
So I really worry about that.
And I think the next challenge in the technological world and the social media and the platforms is, like you said, how do you enable the sharing of experience?
You are absolutely right.
A lot of what we do is for our bodies in the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it.
Where suddenly you're not meditating and breathing, but you're also sharing your mind and your experience.
You're not listening to music.
You're sharing an understanding of the music together and its cultural history.
One of my favorite examples is farmers markets. non-existent in their 90s, right?
And they used to be very common in American culture.
And now there are 9000 farmers markets growing And yeah, people go to buy kale and get the honey and you know, the fresh bread or whatever, but they're also going because it's community.
It's profound community.
And we derive a lot of benefits from that profound benefits 10 years of life expectancy community.
10 years.
10 years.
Oh, my goodness.
There's so much obsession these days around what sport allows you to live the longest.
Turns out it's like pole vaulting, which most people aren't going to do.
Sprinting, gymnastics, the stuff that involves a lot of jumping and landing.
Is that right?
Really?
And fast twitch activity.
I mean there are a bunch of other features there about who's biased to go into those sports and whatnot.
But I mean, I think it's in keeping with this idea that getting your heart rate way, way up and moving as quickly as you safely can once a week at something is probably a good idea.
But the greatest benefit seen there is something like... five to eight years.
So you're talking about a 10 year benefit.
And that's a meta analysis of 350,000 participants.
So that's that you can go to the bank with that, like social community, very good for the body.
I think it's the greatest challenge of our social media and our platforms.
And I've advised at Facebook 2010 to 2015, Google, Pinterest, a little bit of Apple.
And I keep telling them, like, you know, this is the singular challenge.
And it's so...
It's hard.
It's, you know, technologies are asynchronous.
You know, hey, I send you a text and 18 hours later I hear from you.
You're not making eye contact.
The visual connection is degraded.
You know, Steve Pinker observed rightly so.
Like when I'm on Zoom...
I have to look at that down to see the camera or I look at the screen.
So my eye contact is going down.
I'm not making eye contact like we are.
It's just the technology works against it.
And I think it's the hard problem of the social media platforms is can they do what you're aspirationally asking for, which is like get us to feel connected?
You know, Mark Zuckerberg, the original statement about Facebook was open and connected.
And I think they failed.
And I think we got to, we, it's, it's the challenge of our times.
I know Mark a bit and I, I know, you know, I trust he wants that.
I know.
I really do.
I know some people will push back on that statement, but I actually know that he wants that.
And I know... some of the folks in the leadership at Instagram, they want that.
I know.
Like these people actually have very healthy personal lives.
They understand the value of connection, both at the level of the family friendships, but also at large.
They want that.
I think that maybe – I'm being optimistic here – but maybe AI will offer an opportunity for that, as opposed to divorcing us from gathering and seeing facial expressions and hearing voices together or observing other things.
You know, I do think that right now the way that most social media experiences –
Land is the exact opposite of awe.
I will say that because and I can say that with a fair degree of certainty, because I spend a good amount of time on social media teaching, learning and looking for entertainment, trying not to get, you know rage, baited or numbing out.
Those are the two things I look out for.
Rage baiting and numbing out.
Well put.
There's a version of social media that's happening right now where we're going further and further into our silos.
Yeah.
But I don't think it has to be that.
Not at all.
I don't.
I think it could be really leveraged to connect people.
You know, when I started advising at Facebook 2010, it was like Arab Spring and democracy was spreading.
And in many ways, we've had this great democratization of things.
People sharing music.
You know, instantaneously I can hear music from any part of the world which you know, that's profound and visual art and and knowledge and podcasts.
And we've got to be nuanced about this, but we do need, you know, to think intentionally about design, you know, and that you know.
I really worry about the privileging of hate.
I forgot what you called it, but that has been privileged And that's not human nature.
We are not all trolls, and you know, tracking people, and you know, and that is a degradation of who we are.
And I think science would guide us in many ways to avoid that.
So I think we're in this big reflection period about how to redesign science.
And I hope they listen to the social science.
It has a lot of good things to say.
I've had this thought that the way social media is now, it's the direct opposite of awe, for the following reason
Awe-inspiring experiences, you never forget them.
You never forget them.
I mean, we could spend 15 hours talking about first concert, second concerts, first love, first kiss, you know, first break up.
You know which is its own form of awe like shit.
There's this flip side to this love thing, right?
You know, I mean, there's all that.
I sometimes do the test of myself.
I go.
Okay, I spent I don't know how much time on social media yesterday, but do I remember anything specific?
I don't think I do.
I don't think I remember anything specific.
But there was tons of sensory input, a fair amount of time, I remember a damn thing.
And so that's scary.
It is scary.
Because the only thing that resembles that- is drugs of abuse.
And I'm very fortunate that I don't have a drug thing.
I never felt drawn to them in a way that I felt like I couldn't escape from them or same with alcohol.
Easy clip for me to not drink, I will say.
But my friends who have had real challenges with alcohol and substances They'll tell you like it's this super compelling thing, but then you don't have anything to say about it or for it.
It's just a space-time disintegration and not the space-time disintegration of psychedelics, which may have some benefits.
We'll talk about that.
So to me, that's the problem with social media.
There's nothing memorable about yesterday's social media.
And I do think that the people who build it want it to be impactful on the day-to-day scale, but also
Of course they'd want to be memorable.
Yeah.
Let's hope.
Some kids should be talking about like you're talking about Laurel Canyon.
Yeah, I know.
But I don't know if they're going to feel that way.
Well, you know, one of the things I'm really interested in right now, Andrew, is awe design, right?
I'm working with Gale Architecture in Copenhagen.
How do you design cities for more awe?
It's not hard and it's good for people, right?
A little bit of music, a little bit of green space, a little bit of art.
Get people looking at each other and talking and buzzing, right?
Easy to do.
And I think you've just laid out.
You know, and someone could write a manifesto like Maybe my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe.
It's small, awe is vast.
It's sped up, awe slows things down.
It has a fragmentation to it, awe integrates, right?
It's about micro things, awe is about systems.
Like when you feel awe towards music, it's like...
I get it all here right now.
Its content is not inspiring very often.
And it all could be.
Sometimes it is.
I think that the space-time aperture that we talked about before, I think the problem with social media is actually its power to bring the whole space-time into an aperture this big.
I actually think that it has to do – crazy hypothesis, happy to be wrong.
I actually think the whole problem with it has to do with the fact that it brings – long time scales past, present and future different frame rates into one real world visual aperture.
Right, right.
Because when, I haven't been to the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Right.
But friends of mine who are musicians who love live music, who are producers who love live music, tell me it is incredible.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's, you know, in some cases the live band is there and in other cases they're not.
And so there's no reason why that technology should be Awesome for, again, here we go.
No better word for awe than awesome.
So we're just going to stick with it and roll with it.
There's no reason why digital can't be awe-inspiring.
Yeah, it should.
And we have to, you know, we just have to take a step back in these conversations, right?
There's...
There's new work out about AI helping medical doctors.
And the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco, is like.
It's like having the best brain trust about medicine right with you all the time.
Who wouldn't want that?
And I think let's remember that.
And, yeah, I think that's the challenge is to have these –
AI and the devices that it is manifest on get us to what's awesome.
And we'll see.
You know, I hope so.
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Can we talk about embarrassment?
Yeah, my other favorite emotion when I began my career.
It was guys, right?
Guys specifically teasing one another.
I definitely experienced that and I definitely participated in it. in a benevolent way.
But the teasing that happens in groups of good male friends can be pretty brutal.
Oh, yeah.
But there's a pleasure in it most of the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what's that about?
I know.
Well, you know, it all begins really in like when I started scientifically to – depart from the Ekman canon, if you will, of those six emotions we talked about earlier.
And I was doing a project in his lab and we were startling people and studying the startle response a seven muscle movement motor pattern built into the nervous system.
And I noticed people got embarrassed after they were startled unexpectedly.
You'd blast them with a noise out of the blue in the lab and they'd be like whoa, I think I spit, you know, peed my pants or whatever.
They show this response and I took it to Ekman and it's the blush and people avert their gaze and they look away and they hide their face.
You know.
And he's like, that's a motor pattern of emotion.
You should go study it.
And I did.
And then I started to notice and there's a really rich literature on that that, And Darwin wrote about this that a person's embarrassment is a sign of their commitment to the collective right.
Like man.
You know I called you by the wrong name or you know I farted in the yoga class or whatever it is, and I'm embarrassed.
Like, I'm sorry, man.
You know, I apologize.
That really matters.
And when you see people get embarrassed, you like them more and you trust them more and you give resources to them and you think they're a good group member.
And then I was like man, you know like I've played a lot of pickup basketball in my life, thousands of games.
And you're banging into and there's just a lot of teasing and taunting.
And you know people I admire, you know great athletes tease and taunt.
You know it's just part of what we do and we're banging into each other.
And I started to put it together, like.
You know the right kind of teasing within a collective.
You're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group.
Right.
And then the wrong kind of teasing which we documented in our labs, like that's bullying and harassment.
And we can pinpoint like that's inappropriate.
You know, you're trying to you're not keeping people in the group.
You're excluding them or humiliating them.
So we did this study.
It was one of my first studies.
We brought groups of four fraternity guys in each interaction.
Uh, from this fraternity house at the university of Wisconsin.
And we gave them each nicknames, or we gave them each initials and we had them make up nicknames based on the initials.
So two, two letters of a Nick where ad.
And I'm not sure I can say what the nicknames were like, but you know, another drunk and it gets pretty profane.
And so we let them tease each other and they start teasing each other.
And they are really like, this is young men coming out of a fraternity house, teasing each other.
There are funny stories.
People got embarrassed.
The stories and the teasing was kind of about like I'm going to accuse you of something that you shouldn't do in this group, right.
Like pass out drunk naked, you know, in the streets of Wisconsin.
Don't do that, right?
And then they get embarrassed and they say, I'm not going to do that.
And what we found is the more that they got embarrassed, the better they liked each other.
Because it's turning to this motor pattern of like wow, I'm showing you that I care about what you're accusing me of and I get embarrassed.
You see that in me, we become closer.
The guys who are better teasers and that were more playful and funny and made people aware of the norms that matter to the group but not really humiliate people.
Those guys are more popular in the group.
And that's been replicated, right?
Just storytelling and ribbing each other.
And...
It was part of healthy group functioning is just embarrassing each other.
You think about roasts, you know, it's the end of your career.
You're going to get that someone's going to talk about your career.
You're going to get hammered.
And it's wonderful.
I fear that day.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's part of this phenomenon of like, We make fun of the people we love the most.
Siblings are big families.
A lot of siblings tease each other like mad, you know, and they joke and they josh and they wrestle and they give each other noogies and they have nicknames for each other.
Again, to like make sure everybody's aware of what matters and how not to.
Violate those rules.
So it was fun research.
It meant a lot to me.
I bet.
I mean, I grew up in a big, big packs of boys.
I mean, on my street growing up, skateboarding thing.
And then science, it was a little bit different.
Actually, when I came up, there was more of that.
It changed over time, I think for good reasons.
And then, of course, there's my podcast team.
And people keep telling me the reason I get teased a lot is because they like me.
Exactly.
I saw an article.
An interesting – well, two things.
A former guest on this podcast, who's a psychiatrist, who's also very versed in Eastern philosophy Dr K, as they call him said that embarrassment is important because it also signals that you're not a creep.
Especially he was referring to heterosexual relationships, where you know a guy says something trying to be, you know, trying to flirt basically, or pick up on someone.
And then the woman says something back and he gets embarrassed.
He realized like he said the wrong thing.
If he doesn't show embarrassment.
He's creepy.
If he does, it verifies that he has a certain degree of empathy and self-reflection.
So that was his point, but it feels relevant here.
And he's right.
I mean, you know, Darwin early on wrote about the blush being a sign of your healthy character, your moral virtue, almost.
And in non-human species the facial reddening is associated with physical robustness, and then in humans we think of it as moral robustness, like yeah, I care about stuff.
We did work early on Bob Knight at Berkeley orbital frontal patients.
The overall frontal cortex is in part where your ethical consideration takes place.
And if you have damage to that region of the brain through brain trauma, you fall off a motorcycle or fall off a ladder, you don't show embarrassment where you should.
And they feel...
Creepy, if you will, or just like, hey, they're not playing by the rules.
So it's a very subtle thing.
Irving Goffman wrote a lot about it, the great sociologist.
Our embarrassment is telling people, like, I know what the rules are and I care about them.
I'm committed to them.
Your psychiatrist friend is right.
Along the lines of teasing.
Yeah, someone I'm proud to call a friend who's also public, facing Jocko Willink, who's also, it turns out, one of our.
We're friends for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is that he grew up really into East Coast hardcore music.
Not a genre I gravitate towards, but there's some marginal overlap with the types of music.
I mean, too, we've gone to shows together.
And he put something up.
You know, every once in a while on social media somebody posts something that.
It really lands Naval or Jocko, and Jocko's a man of few words, so I'm going to put more words to it than he was able to.
But the quote was something like you know, if you want to understand, and he's a former Navy SEAL SEAL team operator
Most people know that, but...
If you want to understand males in groups and healthy masculine friendship.
Guys are going to tease each other relentlessly in front of each other, but they'll never tease behind somebody's back.
And they'll back the other person who they were just teasing in person against the rest.
You know, they'll buffer them against any kind of criticism.
So that's a very interesting... kind of contrast there that I think is true.
Yeah.
Like, you know, it's not like you tease your friend behind his back.
It's the teasing to his face that actually builds the bond.
Yeah.
There's another piece of that, which is that you know that that person would back you if you're out of the room.
And you know, a couple of friends all my friends come to mind but a couple of people who really think about and talk about this loyalty component Jocko was talking about there, Lex Friedman.
You know, it's a critical component to, I'm sure, female friendship too, although I only know my own experience.
So to male friendship, which is that they can say anything to your face.
Even be harsh criticism.
But you know that if you're out of the room, they're not going to cut you down.
They're going to reserve that for when you're standing in front of them, thankfully.
We documented that in the fraternity study that you know, when you tease somebody and you're like, hey man, do you see this guy's dance moves?
Or you see this guy shoot free throw, whatever it is.
You're just making light of human foible and all the funny things that we do.
And there's just this really subtle repair work where they're saying like I'm teasing you, but I know you got it, you know, and I'll support you.
And I agree.
I think that you know part of what teasing does is it says like what do we as a collective really care about?
And let's surface those norms in a lighthearted way.
And we know together.
And if you make mistakes, you should be apologetic about it.
But part of it also is just gratitude.
This sort of I got your back repair work that they did.
And it's profound.
You know, it's interesting.
I was kind of this shy kid.
I was very small, growing up and kind of the teasing often crossed lines in high school.
Just you know bullying and so forth.
And then I started to play basketball and you know, and I realized like a lot of it's just men making sure they know the rules of the game.
You know, and showing also in those moments of The joys of laughing together, like I support you, I'm with you, right.
What a sophisticated thing to do compared to the alternatives.
I have a sister, so I was always struck by the brothers in my neighborhood.
There are two in particular, like I would hear screaming outside, go outside.
His older brother, his name was Peter, holding Michael's face in the sprinklers.
His brother's just crying and crying, screaming.
I mean, relentless older brother torture.
Some people hear this and probably be like, oh, call the cops.
You know, I don't know what the reaction is nowadays.
I'll try not to be generationally biased.
I don't know.
Yeah, he was abusing his younger brother.
But if anyone said or tried to do anything to either one of them, they would immediately pair up and fight anyone.
It was interesting, right?
For a guy who had an older sister, this is a very different experience, right?
I mean, she had her own form of older sister kind of hazing to her younger brother.
But there really does seem to be something critical about kind of defining the relationship with people one-on-one in groups versus when there's an outside threat.
And not that we want outside threat, but as long as we're talking about the sort of the I don't want to say disintegration, that's too pessimistic the sort of gradual erosion of this collective feeling.
Is there less just kind of grouping up together and doing things?
Yeah, you know I, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago.
First there's the science of loneliness and isolation John Cassioppo and then those who followed, like whoa.
We are fragmenting and we will spend much too much time alone isolated, and then COVID hit lockdown, etc.
And our Surgeon General, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, got it right like It's an epidemic of loneliness.
And I, as a social psychologist, you know, interested in these social emotions.
I'm like you know.
You just look at the basic, raw facts.
Like picnics are down by half.
We don't go to movies like we used to.
We don't listen to music together.
The estimate is that 30% of meals in the United States, people eat them by themselves.
I eat a lot of my meals by myself.
We go on walks by ourselves.
We don't go to church.
Church is way down.
So kind of the broad sociological trends are alarming on that fragmentation.
But I think the young generation is putting it back together in really interesting ways.
We know from survey data that The 25-year-olds, 30-year-olds are really interested in game nights.
You know, those are coming back.
They're interested in living together, cooperative living.
They're cooking more with each other.
Value-wise, they care more about community than my generation.
I was the great explosion of individualism.
And they're kind of like...
You know, if I choose a job, I want to make sure I'm working with other people I like.
I didn't think about that.
I don't know, you know.
So I think it's coming back.
And I love the signs of...
You know, festivals are reappearing now.
The farmer's market that I've talked about.
You know the dance groups that are now returning contact dance.
I mean, these yoga studios, one out of eight Americans does yoga.
You know, I do yoga two to three times.
That's so wild.
It's amazing.
15 years ago, no one would have predicted that.
Also, 15 years ago no one would have predicted that the single.
We're being told that one of the single most important health interventions that women and men should do is like lift weights.
The only people who lifted weights when I was growing up were like bodybuilders and preseason football players.
Yeah.
Is that true?
Lifting weights is... I mean, you never want to actually live this way.
But if you could only pick one form of exercise to do once a week, that's what you would do.
I mean just in terms of bone health.
If it's done properly, you probably get some cardiovascular benefit too.
But just in terms of brain health, I mean, obviously you want to do both.
But resistance training clearly has a longevity benefit.
But for the longest time, I mean, you just didn't see women in gyms.
Very few, excuse me, very few.
And if you did, they were sort of.
You know women are pushing heavy for them or, in some cases, heavier than the guys are lifting.
But regardless, that's a huge shift.
So many more people are in gyms.
And I wonder whether or not it contributes to some sort of feeling of It does.
I mean, you're training hard around other people.
So that's cool.
I think Vivek Murthy in particular, who I deeply admire and have worked with a bit.
You know he got our health world.
Think about it surgeon general of the United States, the first one to come out of public health traditions, did work in India right.
And he's like there's this social side that you've covered in your show.
Like to health, to physical health, to the, the telomerase of your cells, your DNA and the vagus nerve and so forth oxytocin, cortisol it's social.
There are social dimensions to our nervous system.
And I think that's coming, Andrew.
Like we're starting to see, why do I go to a farmer's market?
Because I feel a sense of community.
And why do I love yoga?
Because I'm doing these postures all synchronized with people I don't know.
And I feel a sense of awe and transcendence.
Why do I lift weights, right?
There's the banter and the discussion and the history, in the sense of what this all means culturally.
I think that's coming.
I think the gyms are appealing to it in some sense, right?
A little bit more community activity.
And I think it's good news.
I love the Japanese onsen.
You go for the water and the springs and the heat and so forth, but they, in their wisdom, have built entire community experiences around it, where you wash yourself and you bathe together and you eat together and there are sayings up on the walls and you spend a little time with your kids there, right?
So I hope we learn because I think it's important.
Yeah, I'm thinking a lot now about how we can bridge between these incredible technologies because I am a fan but also the non-negotiable technology of our nervous system and our biology and our psychology right.
Lately because I have Aquaria.
I'm really into this thing called aquascaping, which is this Japanese form of like plants and freshwater fish, and just obsessed with it.
And when the ecosystem is doing well, I'm like, oh like.
I feel It's a form of.
It's brought me some awe at times when like, things are going well in there.
I'm like, wow, it's just beautiful.
And I think there are...
Things that I would never do to my fish.
I would never isolate them from one another.
But I give them enough places to hide from one another, because there's a lot of dominance hierarchy stuff being worked out between these discus.
I make sure they're on a light cycle.
I make sure they're fed but not overfed or underfed, right?
And I wouldn't do most of the things – that we do to ourselves to my fish.
I wouldn't isolate them, give them little videos of other fish to look at.
I know that wouldn't work.
I know that they would die.
I know that, you know.
And so I think we can learn a lot from more simpler organisms and the sort of basic units of care and community.
They're very similar.
I mean it gets played out differently but they're very similar because obviously we evolved similar nervous systems, let alone similar needs.
I would like to talk about psychedelics, if you're willing.
I think there are two, at least two views of psychedelics.
With the caveat that this is not a call for people to just start taking them, that these are powerful compounds, that people with psychosis or bipolar conditions in their family really, really need to be careful.
And on and on.
Just be careful.
I don't say that to protect myself.
I say that to protect whoever's listening and watching, really.
No small bump.
It's a whole thing.
So some people will say, okay, they just send you inward.
And that's the opposite of what we're talking about.
Like getting all the awe inside, like, okay, that's...
I mean, that's pretty extreme.
Other people will say that their experiences with psychedelics allowed them to come out of that experience and really have a felt connection to people, to plants, to animals, to life.
That is profoundly positive for their feelings of connection and seeing awe, perhaps even in lots of things.
How should we think about psychedelics?
And we should probably constrain the question a little bit.
Like I'm not talking about MDMA, which is not psychedelic.
It's an empathogen.
Ketamine is not psychedelic.
It's a dissociative anesthetic.
I'm starting to do this now because people start to lump And it's actually causing issues for the potential legalization.
Yeah.
So we need to be splitters, not lumpers here.
So I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin, maybe DMT, ayahuasca, the classic psychedelics.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts on these?
I'm good friends with Michael Pollan and was, you know kind of walking the Berkeley Hills as he was producing that book and, you know, watched as we started a center for psychedelics at Berkeley.
And and, you know, it's a revolution.
I mean, it's psychedelic use is up, you know, 40 percent since his book.
I mean, it's.
Incredible to watch.
And I have a few thoughts.
One is make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come.
Those are spirit medicines in their community that are part of deep ethical traditions you know, and to honor that with you know, you know sharing of resources and knowledge and and the right kind of acknowledgement.
That's really important.
I think in some sense and you know David Yadin at Johns Hopkins and others and some of the early Roland Griffith's work spoke to this that they are about awe fundamentally.
You know, they...
Open up your mind and you see all life forms and time is different and your sense of self vanishes.
Robin Carhart Harris.
You know and you're just connected to vast things ecosystems, sense of humanity.
And I think in some sense, when done in the right way, that's good news.
You know Molly Crockett and her team at Princeton.
Like you go to a festival and you have psychedelics, a year later you're kinder through, all right.
So I think that's important.
I think it's great news what it does for the hard problems of the mind.
You know death anxiety addiction trauma, maybe veterans who are suffering twice the rates of PTSD.
They're drawn to this and the VA is working on this and the data look pretty good.
OCD, hard problems of the mind, panic that I've in part dealt with.
That is good news.
I worry about micro dosing.
I think people are taking these things like coffee and it's not coffee.
No, it's not coffee.
I drink coffee and I know a thing or two about psychedelics by experience, and it's definitely not coffee.
And the data speak to this and we've suddenly unleashed the use of it.
Tens of millions of people are using it, not in the way that Michael Pollan describes of like putting it into a cultural container of inquiry and knowledge and guidance.
And someone who knows what they're doing around you.
For safety even.
Safety, yeah.
So we're seeing that.
And I, you know, they changed my life.
I got to them early.
You know, in my late teens 17 18, 19 I was a very anxious kid, obsessive kid, and I think they opened up my mind in this perspective way we've been talking about.
I don't really do them now.
You know, they gave me a lot.
That's why they're here.
You know, it's funny.
You know Andrea, like when I was doing them, We were reading Castaneda who's been debunked, you know and we were reading the traditions and thinking about them spiritually, and the doors of perception, and all this good stuff.
Right.
We were they were embedded in a culture of trying to find mysticism or whatever it is.
And I hope people are doing that.
You know if they're going to be doing on them.
Make it a form of inquiry.
It's a complicated story, like everything, like technology.
Well, they're a form of plant technology, right?
Which, quick vignette on that, we had someone here, Chris McCurdy, who runs a lab out in Florida.
He studies kratom and other compounds from plants.
The pharma companies, they bioprospect.
They send people looking for plants that then they can find isolates and everything from aspirin to kratom to anesthetics like cocaine.
I'm not suggesting people use it as an anesthetic.
They come from plants, but they're isolated and then synthesized and enriched.
That's where the extreme opiate, the extreme stimulant, that's where it comes from.
But they all come from plant – many of them come from plant alkaloids, which is interesting in its own right.
But I share your feelings about microdosing.
The data Robin Carter at Harris tells me, and he's the real expert, of course.
The data say there's no – evidence of benefit from microdosing, at least on major depression, as compared to like two rounds of psilocybin with a guide therapy before, during and after, and on and on.
I hope people hear that.
Yeah, I hope they hear that.
I had the opposite experience as you.
I actually regret having done psychedelics when I was younger.
They were terrifying.
I didn't have a good experience.
I stopped. didn't go anywhere near them.
And then later in a therapeutic setting, had a few experiences with them, not many, but that were immensely beneficial for me.
So kind of the opposite direction there.
But what we're talking about now, about kind of okay, you know, there's this problem with certain technologies, there's the cultural, the culture wars, there's the political wars, there's the actual war that's also going on right now.
A lot of ways this resembles like the 70s, 80s.
There's not that I mean.
I remember a time when you had yuppies and you had hippies and you had punk rockers.
I mean, you watch a John Hughes film and it was like the idea was, it was like oh, we're actually similar, right?
You know the extent to which those films like showed people.
Hey like, people were actually similar along certain dimensions as opposed to so different.
But...
You know, I wonder because I think about the not so recent and recent history of things, everything from breathwork, cold plunges psychedelics awe music, the collective consciousness.
I mean, it's going to look different now.
The same way that it... it looked different back then, right?
Like I'm trying to get outside my Gen X self these days and think like, so what would it look like?
Like I'm the old guy now.
So what would it look like if these technologies I just mentioned a few, but all of them, including social media what would it look like if those were all used to the greatest benefit?
Like, what would that look like?
Can we be the open-minded parents of the 80s, you know?
Can we be the...
Yeah, because I feel like I can scream all day about what I think about the science of this and that to younger people.
But the only thing I actually have control over is me.
How do we...
Let's say 40 to 100-year-olds.
Let's really lean it on the 40 to 70-year-olds.
How do we create the environment so that younger people can – flourish with these technologies, as opposed to being like the parents of the 70s and 80s that are like oh, they got long hair and like what is this like punk rock thing?
Like, I don't want to be that person.
That sucks.
I also don't want to be the and I see this a lot unfortunately, people who are part of those movements.
And then they're just like towing the party line because they're.
They're like wholeheartedly adhering to one political group without thinking about whether or not there's any hint of rational argument on the other side, right?
The whole point is not to be against.
The whole idea is to be for what you believe is right.
And so I don't know how to do this.
You're older than I am by a bit.
You're clearly wiser than I am, seriously.
And you have more life experience.
So what do we do?
Like, really, like, what in the hell can we do?
Because I don't like this, you guys are all on your phones.
Like, that doesn't feel good to me.
Because they were telling us when we were younger, like, this is ridiculous.
Like, the older guys were like...
Small wheels on skateboard.
They were right about the small wheels things.
Turns out the wheels got too small.
But Jim will understand that joke.
But what do we do?
I think we're in this moment.
You know, with everything going on, you know with AI and being online and polarization and climate crisis, and you know the things that we worry about the rise of white supremacy politics, etc.
Everybody's asking this question of like, what, how do we kind of move forward?
And you know, in light of many of the things that we've talked about in this conversation, I'm most focused on what Robert Putnam started to write about and other people started to write about, like just the breakdown of collective life and shared life.
And I think that's a defining issue of our times, as well as our relationship to the natural world.
I find awe, as do other people, really refreshing.
It provides a roadmap, which is, and I'll give you a very concrete example.
I'm working with Gale Architecture on a Cities of Awe initiative and they do amazing work.
Hundreds of cities around the world.
70% of human population is in cities.
Most of our carbon emissions come out of cities.
And this is a place we can redesign and make it better, right?
And awe is a wonderful lens.
So you can ask, and you could ask the same of like what do you give to a teenager who's suffering suicidal ideation?
Or what do you give to a veteran who is coming back and feeling alienated from the world?
You give them awe, right?
And what does that mean?
It's like, well, you give them a little nature and that's you rewild part of a city, right?
You give them some public art.
We love art.
We love visual art.
You give them the opportunity to recognize the moral beauty.
You know, you found it in Joe Strummer.
Just get them to interact with other people from face to face.
You give them a little collective stuff, right?
You.
Hey, we're going to have the yoga class in the town square or the Mexican Zocalo.
Everybody walks together at a certain hour of the day and they suddenly feel peaceful, right.
You give them ideas about big ideas and life.
You give them a little bit of opportunity for meditation and reflection.
That's easy to do.
And when I was writing this book and just teaching social science for 30 years, It's like man.
We used to do this really well.
And it used to be temples and church.
That's where it all was brought together.
And now we don't go there.
55% of Americans go to church.
It used to be 90 or temple.
I don't.
I never did.
And I, in some sense...
You know, I see one of my best friends, very religious.
He viewed them and they have so much and we're recreating that right now, right.
And we've got to do it in a coherent way.
If it's the place where people are lifting weights, There should be music there.
There should be visual stuff.
There should be some art, nature.
There should be some wisdom and some moral beauty, right?
I love ironworks where I go climb, because you go there and it's like People are climbing but you get to see that there's the art exhibit each month of a local artist.
There's some music going on.
You get to listen to music.
So this isn't that hard to do, Andrew.
And I think the awe science gives us a roadmap to think about what we share.
I love that.
Um, I was not into CrossFit but um, an ex girlfriend of mine when I met her was like really into CrossFit and they would do barbecues and they clean the gym and they would dress up in costumes and stuff.
And I remember this is when I moved to San Diego to start my lab down there, before I moved to Stanford.
And I, I remember thinking, like, this is kind of crazy.
Like, I went to the gym growing up, always since I was in my teens.
And I'm like, really?
You guys like social?
And they had this awesome social community.
I know CrossFit has somewhat fallen out of favor now.
I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation.
You may be pleased to hear, I just thought of this.
I can't remember it.
I can't believe that I didn't remember this earlier.
One of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after the clash, because you know he went into the kind of void of like he wasn't doing anything.
He wandered for a long time.
He went down to Spain.
Oh, he grew out a beard, moved to Spain and didn't tell anyone who he was.
And they kind of realized who he was eventually.
He was really searching.
You know, his life had... He lost his brother to suicide, I believe.
He ran the...
The Paris Marathon is kind of famous.
I think while smoking a cigarette.
People always say, and I don't think he did any training.
One thing that he was very well known for until his death was he would do campfires.
Yeah.
In Manhattan, he would take people down to the river.
And he had some famous friends like Jim Jarmusch and well-known people in that world.
But he would invite whoever.
And there were kids.
You got to see this documentary.
It's so good.
We'll put a link to it for people who want to see it.
It's so good.
There were kids.
There were adults.
And they'd stay out till like 2 or 3 in the morning playing music singing, drumming.
People get up and talk.
And so he was constantly doing these campfires his entire life.
Knowing close friends of his, it's like, this is actually what he did.
And he wasn't getting, they were able to film a few of these, but that was not the point.
And he would bring out a radio because he thought like maybe you could like make it like a radio show, of the thing.
But it was not to record and distribute.
It was just, so I don't know.
I got this crazy idea in the back of my mind that maybe, like I'm going to start doing, campfires have to weigh in on some science.
Okay, am I going to destroy the environment?
No, not at all.
Okay, I was afraid you were going to tell me that.
In fact, I think this is a deep idea.
There's this new science of campfires, and they're several hundred thousand years old.
And also you know, when you study people in small-scale societies.
They gather at night around campfires and they tell certain kinds of stories.
You know stories of how they're all connected and helping each other and watching out for what is dangerous in the dark.
And, you know, a lot of stuff happens that's fundamental to our humanity around campfires.
So I think you're on to something.
Really important, you know, that we need to return.
When I go to the climbing gym, we all take saunas.
You know, I do probably four saunas a week.
Nice.
And you get your sweat and your heart rate goes up and so good for your body.
But then it's like everybody sort of offhandedly notes like I love the conversations that happen in the sauna, you know, and it's true.
And so yeah, we've got to.
There are all these ways to get back to what we should be doing right now to bring us together.
And campfires would be a good start.
I'll come to your first one.
Awesome.
Campfire, also great red light therapy.
No joke.
Long wavelength light only coming out of that fire.
Everyone's obsessed with like red light therapy.
You can get it from the sun and you don't want to get too much UV.
But yeah, you get tons of long wavelength light exposure, which is known to be great for mitochondria.
I mean...
I don't want to get going on this, it's too much of a tangent.
We've got guests on here from University College London.
I mean the long wavelength light actually goes all the way through your body, even in light clothing, and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria, which actually improves mitochondrial function in every single cell that has mitochondria.
And where do we get this light from?
Typically, it's from sunlight when it's low solar angle.
So when it's low in the sky, because of Rayleigh scattering, you're getting rid of the UV.
That's why you can see the orange and red.
And it's not painful to look at the sun when it's low in the sky.
When it's overhead and the UV index is high, it's, you know, full spectrum and you have to be careful of that.
You're also.
You got some color to you but, like you, something tells me your lineage was kind of like fair skin, right?
Oh yeah.
Okay.
So, but everyone, it needs to be cautious about that.
But that long wavelength light.
You know people buy red light units and things and those can be beneficial.
They use them clinically now, but good data on that.
But, Campfires do it.
Yeah.
And people love campfires.
And there is this thing if you were out in front of a campfire at night even if you stay up very late, you wake up feeling pretty darn good.
Yeah, that's right.
So I'm calling it right now.
My team's going to hate me for this, but, you know, campfire coming to your town.
Yeah.
I've always dreamed of doing this, like taking a year and just getting a boss and just going from town to town and having science, health discussions, but mostly just listening to people and doing campfires.
And we probably would film it just because it –
You should do it.
I got to create content.
My dream was to take that bus and to go to all the basketball courts of the country.
That's your thing.
Yeah.
Pick up basketball is the same thing.
It's like people gathering, banging into each other.
Would you do it?
You can probably figure out an experiment that goes with it.
Well, my knees are the – But Stanford just developed this way to regenerate cartilage in humans.
Okay.
Well, then I'll look into it.
Yeah, I think it'd be – I love the idea.
Do you believe in life after death?
I don't ask every guest that, by the way.
Yeah.
You're the only person I've ever asked that.
Do you believe that something happens after all this?
I do.
I do.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know when I write about this in awe.
When my brother Rolf passed away colon cancer, 55 or so you know I watched the whole transition and you know his battle against it and his acceptance and then his leaving and I had this profound experience that night.
You know, a transcendent experience.
And I'm like you.
You know Andrew, it's like neurons and statistics and cells, and we can figure it all out and characterize everything.
And it's like, I saw space in a different way.
I saw something alive in him.
And then afterward I had a lot of people have this kind of grief experience of he was around, his voice, his hand was on my back.
And I just thought for several years and still to this day, of you know Quantum reality and things beyond our three-dimensional, four-dimensional view of time and space.
And you know those basic and that there is consciousness, maybe patterns of electromagnetic waves around our minds and bodies that are syncing up with other people, that transcend the Newtonian world of the brain.
And I believe that.
And I don't know how to study it.
I sense it in life.
I think a lot of other people do too.
And so that keeps me open to it.
And now I've moved from, You know, being as skeptical but open, you know agnostic, to like yeah, there's something there that's beyond what we know.
So I believe it.
Very cool.
I hope you're right.
I believe it too, but I just hope you're right.
I sense you're right.
Dakar, thank you so much for making the trip down here to talk with us today and share what you've been up to for all these years.
You've had and continue to have a magnificent career.
It's really hard to do really good science, and it's even harder to do really good science with a purpose.
And you're doing that and you continue to.
And you just have a way about you that everyone now has been able to experience firsthand that you really care.
That's clear.
You put a ton of thought into the work that you're doing.
You've raised $25,000. professors, which is no small feat.
I'll tell you, that's a monumental feat, which means that the work will continue.
And you're still going.
And I'm grateful for your book and that you're continuing to do this.
And I hope you take that trip to...
Maybe, if you can't do it, around the entire country, you know, hit some pickup basketball games, because I think there's something to be learned there for sure.
I sense it.
And thanks for inspiring me.
And I know you've inspired a ton of other people.
So we'll put links to everything that you discussed into your book.
But you've definitely inspired us to think more deeply about basically what it is to be human and where to take all this technology that we have and this opportunity that we have and really do real good with it.
So I'm very grateful to you.
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Andrew.
It's been an incredible conversation.
Let's do more.
Definitely do it again.
Yeah.
Thank you.
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