Sleep Paralysis, Out of Body Experiences and Meaning of Dreams | DSH #253

All these things explain why the dream world is bizarre.

There's a neurochemistry to it.

Let me give you a great example.

So you had that dream shot where you're running and you can't get away.

There's this monster chasing you and your legs are so

bloody heavy, right?

It turns out that monster represents your fear, the emotional part of the brain.

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And here's the episode.

Welcome back to the show, guys.

I'm your host, as always, Sean Kelly.

Got with me a dream expert on the show today, Dr.

Baland Jalal.

How's it going?

Is it going very well?

How are you, Sean?

I'm good.

I'm very excited for this episode.

I think dreams have a lot of meaning, and you can learn a lot from them.

So thanks for coming.

Oh, thanks for inviting me.

Absolutely.

Happy to be here.

So how did you get involved with studying dreams?

It's a good question.

So when I was a teenager back in Copenhagen, you know, one morning

I was sleeping and I realized I feel like something is pressing on my chest, you know, while I was sleeping.

And then I realized I can actually open my eyes right now.

And I could sort of see my surroundings.

But I was asleep at the same time, so I was paralyzed.

So I had this paralysis from head to toe, and then suddenly I felt there was a ghost in the room with me.

And it was sort of, I saw my legs flying up and down, and it was this crazy thing.

And from there, I woke up the next day, but I felt it was very real.

So I had this condition called sleep paralysis, this terrifying condition that occurs during one of the stages of sleep called REM sleep, the stage where you have vivid and lifelike dreams.

And so I actually had a dream with my eyes open, so to speak.

And from there, I sort of did research on on this condition.

And I got fascinated with dreams and the world of dreams.

Wow.

I actually had sleep paralysis once, one of the scariest things that's ever happened to me.

Yeah.

I was getting choked out by, I thought it was like a demon or a ghost or something.

Oh, wow, yeah.

Yeah, well, it is definitely crazy, you know.

It is this state where you are trapped between the craziness of dreams.

And think about it.

I mean, during dreams, everything can happen.

Everything is weird.

Like, the whole

reality is messed up.

Time, places, people

are warped.

And then you have wakefulness colliding with the dream world during this condition of sleep paralysis.

and you have all these demons and things like that you know leaking from the dream world into your your your bedroom so to speak right yeah so what exactly causes sleep paralysis what causes sleep paralysis well all of us Sean are paralyzed during REM sleep so during this stage of sleep where we have

lifelike and crisp dreams

our body is clever it says look buddy let me paralyze you so you can't act out these dreams and hurt yourself and your sleeping partner so your your your brain stem the lower part of your brain, paralyzes your entire body.

Now, so

during this paralysis, there's a clever trick that

the brain uses.

But occasionally what occurs is that the frontal or the frontal part of the brain, so this part of the brain up here, is different from the paralysis centers in the back.

And occasionally you can have

premature awakening occur, so you start waking up.

So these centers become active, even though you're still physiologically trapped in REM sleep.

So you have all the

physiological remnants of REM sleep, the paralysis and all that, but you're waking up at the same time.

So you have this collision of these two worlds.

And then, of course, because of the REM physiology and the dream world, which is part of the whole REM thing, you may start to hallucinate.

Wow.

Fascinating.

And in terms of dreams, have you found out why we are dreaming?

Why we are dreaming.

It's a great question.

So

first of all,

as I said, there's this REM stage of sleep.

So each night we sort of cycle through different stages of sleep.

And

initially we just, our body temperature drops,

our heart rates become slower, and then we hit something called deep sleep, which is a stage where our brain sort of does house keeping chores.

It cleans our cells.

We even have sort of something called diplomphatic systems where cerebral spinal fluid, this fluid in the brain that cleans your brain, you have all all that going on.

But then you hit this interesting dream stage, right?

And then the question is, why do we spend, so we spend approximately one-third of the night in this REM stage, right?

So

it's very important, this REM stage, because you have these lifelike dreams.

And the question is,

why would

your body go through all this to sort of

you know, be in the state of dreaming all night instead of cleaning your cells or something like that?

It shows you it's very important.

Like the actual reason for why why we dream is unknown, but possibly it could be that it enhances creativity.

That's one possibility.

Another possibility is that when you are dreaming in REM sleep, think about it.

You are in this world and you are sort of testing all these concepts, right?

So you see yourself, you know, Sean and the moon, having tea with the queen, you know, wearing a suit, you know, and then you're wrestling with an alligator at the same time.

So all these strange people and concepts and time, everything is warped.

So it's almost like your brain is testing various scenarios that are unrelated and sort of seeing how you react to them and how you might sort of incorporate

some of these new ideas into your life.

So it's kind of like testing new ideas and things that would be impossible in real life.

So

that's one possibility.

Second, just from survival reasons, I mean seeing yourself sort of running in a forest and jumping and

sort of,

you know, you see yourself being chased by a tiger or something like that.

And it sort of reinforces or strengthens those neural circuits.

So there are circuits in your brain that's involved in those kind of things become strengthened.

It's almost like you have a dress rehearsal for real life.

You're practicing, but you don't have to practice by going and being chased by a monster.

Your brain thinks it's real.

And the reason for that is there's a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a fancy name for a cluster of neurons up here that makes it so that you do not know that you're dreaming when you're dreaming.

You lose your sense of agency.

And so it feels much more real.

And so it allows you to be very immersed in these scenarios.

And

you have all this dress rehearsal going on for real life.

Makes you survive.

More likely to survive in the future.

That makes sense.

And I know people that are able to lucid dream can kind of shut that off, right?

They can realize they're in a dream and start controlling things.

Yeah.

So

lucid dreams in a sense are similar in the sense that

think about this frontal part of the brain.

It has to do with a sense of agency and being aware of yourself and sense of logic, right?

Like I have this sense of being me, Balant.

I'm here in the wind with you, Sean.

I'm wearing this clothes, there's a roof.

I have these concepts that I put together in a very cohesive, logical, and sort of straightforward way.

Now that a part of the brain that's responsible for building this cohesive reality sort of shots down during the dream world, during the REM stage of sleep and during the dream world.

And so that's why we lose that sense.

Now occasionally during these lucid dreams, you start gaining a sense of awareness and that part of the brain shots, you know, gets active.

and you start

realizing, oh my god, I'm actually awake, I'm aware of myself.

And the only reason is that the part of the brain that has to do with wakefulness prematurely becomes activated.

And so you have this, you know, you find yourself knowing that you're dreaming.

Yeah, it's fun.

I've had it a few times.

Have you had it?

Yeah, I've had it a few times.

Yeah, I've had it a few times, you know, just meeting people and

people you would not otherwise meet.

And, you know, you do a lot of fun stuff, flying.

Yeah.

Yeah, I flew.

Did you fly?

I flew.

I went through walls.

I talked to people.

Yeah, it was fun.

Yeah, yeah, it's great fun, you know, with flying.

And yeah, these days, you know, people even try to see if they can induce these lucid dreams.

So what they do is that they may have you wear like glasses.

I wear these for my eyes.

My eyes are photosensitive for your viewers.

You know, I'm not a mobster.

Okay.

But

so you may wear goggles like this.

and they and you're told like if in your dream if you see lights flashing three times that means that this is a dream be aware that you are dreaming right that you are trapped in

a dream right now.

And so you might actually have infiltration if you dream in that way.

So you're running around in your dream, this crazy scenario, and then suddenly you see this light in the air, and then you go, Okay, this is a, you know, so you activate the neural circuits that has to do with you knowing that now you're supposed to know that this is a dream.

Wow.

Yeah, I want to try that out.

Have you done any studies on the spiritual side of dreaming in terms of the soul, astral projection, any of that?

Yeah, it's an interesting question.

So

I think sleep paralysis itself,

it's a condition that sort of borders on the whole sort of spiritual, because you find yourself in a state and I've had more sleep paralysis than the first episode.

And sometimes you may see a copy of yourself hovering over you.

So that's very common.

People see it.

They have an out-of-body experience.

You may have that.

And you may also have, like, people talk about angelic figures or demonic figures and things like that.

So the question is, what's going on in the brain and what does it mean?

Is it spiritual or not?

And for me personally,

for sleep paralysis, I know that if I take an electrical current and I stimulate a part of the brain up here, that's called a temporal parietal junction, a fancy name for a cluster of cells here.

I you know, stimulate that part of the brain, I disrupt it, and you will literally feel like you're hovering over yourself or you have an out-of-body experience.

So you might see a ghost even.

So we can mimic some of these things in the laboratory.

But does that mean that there is no spiritual reality or that spirituality is not real?

No, I mean personally I am a spiritual person even as a scientist.

Wow that's rare.

Yeah that's rare and so I cannot negate the spiritual world and

we shouldn't.

But at the same time

we should also not be afraid of tackling these things with science because it's a tool for us to understand the brain and it doesn't it doesn't mean that the spiritual part is not real.

That makes sense.

Yeah, no, that's very interesting because there's always been that divide with science and spiritual stuff because there's no proof, right?

Scientists are all about evidence.

Yeah, exactly.

Are you spiritual?

I would say I am, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I agree.

I mean, it's

one of those things that I've always sort of...

I've thought about a lot as a scientist.

When I had my first sleep paralysis episode, I was like, you know, this has to be a ghost.

I mean, this has to be spiritual.

Like, it was so real.

It felt so intensely real.

But at the same time, you know, science, thus, you know, you can explain certain things in science.

And I think, you know, we should explain it using science when we can.

And then there are certain things we can never know fully.

And that doesn't mean they don't exist.

And

it's very valid for me, I mean, as a spiritual person myself.

Yeah, that's cool.

Do you believe dreams have meanings and symbolism within the actual dream?

Do dreams have meaning or symbolism?

It's a great question.

So,

all right, so during dreams,

you notice during dreams, everything is crazy, right?

As we talked about,

people, time, places, everything is mixed, everything is sort of blended.

And one reason for this is that there's a certain neurotransmitter, a chemical in the brain that's called noradrenaline.

which is sort of helps you focus on the world and see the world in a very sort of focused and logical, but also sort of focused way.

When that part of that neurons, the neurons that produce that chemicals stop working during

the dream state, and so they sort of, you know, recharge, so to speak, and that's why things are spacey and crazy and all that, right?

And then at the same time, you have other chemicals that have to do with serotonin.

Have you heard about serotonin?

It's the chemical that has to do with mood.

So that is a very

inhibitory chemical, serotonin.

And what it does is that the part of the brain, I'm not too technical, am I Sean?

No, I agree.

Okay, good.

All right, so that part of the brain up here,

it's sort of the brakes on the brain.

It sort of keeps everything in check, right?

It makes sure that you don't, when you have emotions in real life, you go about, you know, you see a woman you find attractive.

You don't just say, oh my God, I love you, I'm in love or something.

You sort of stay calm and you sort of collect yourself.

And that has to do with the inhibitory nature of that part of the brain.

Now,

to make it short,

that chemical is also not active during that dream stage.

And so that's why emotions are so crazy.

I mean, emotions are all over the place.

Things are ecstatic, or things are terrifying, and there's emotions everywhere.

That's because the emotional part of the brain is not kept in check.

So what I'm trying to get at is that you can sort of by looking at the brain and looking at the fact that you are less focused and things are spacey because of the neurochemistry, well that can explain why things are so mixed mixed up.

The part of the brain that has to do with a sense of having a body and feeling like I am embodied.

I feel like I'm Baland and I occupy this body.

I don't occupy Sean's body over there.

It's actually a part of the brain.

If I zap that,

if I zap it with an electrical current, I will feel like I'm merging with you.

I'll lose that sense of personal identity and personhood in that way.

Wow.

And

sense of body image.

Now, because of that, occasionally you can embody somebody else in your dream.

You can embody

Elvis Presley's body, that's fitting here in Vegas, right?

So you can have his body, or you can be in a bird's body, or you can be in a, you know,

you could take on different forms.

Or you can see yourself outside yourself like a Netflix movie.

So the point is that, again, neurochemistry, that part of the brain is not working, and therefore the dreams are as they are.

And so what I'm getting at here is that all these things explain why the dream world is bizarre.

There's a neurochemistry to it and so you know when you dream your brain sort of has to make a cohesive story out of this.

You know all these neurons firing, right?

And then it cannot use the same structures that it normally would.

It can inhibit the emotions.

Let me give you a great example.

So have you had that dream, Sean, where you're running and you can't get away?

There's this monster chasing you and your legs are so

bloody heavy, right?

So what's going on in the brain?

Well, it turns out that monster represents your fear and the emotional part of the brain.

So the emotional part of the brain is hyperactive, but there's no inhibition from that part that's missing that chemical.

And so you can't get away.

You know, you feel like

you want to run, but you can't.

Even the part of the brain that has to do with movement is also not getting the fuel from that chemical.

And so you feel like you're trapped.

You can't run, but all the emotions are flaring up.

So all the symbolism is going on, and it has to do with how the brain is structured.

But now you can say, you can be even more meta and say, well, it doesn't matter.

It can still have a deeper spiritual significance.

Just because of my neurochemistry doesn't mean that

it doesn't have a meaning.

So you can always project meaning into that if you want to.

But I'm getting at there's also

a certain

brain principles to explain this.

Does this make sense?

Or am I too...

No, it does.

I've had reoccurring dreams like the one where I can't run or I'm naked and I've looked up meanings and it's pretty interesting.

Is that your subconscious mind kind of kicking in there?

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Yeah, it's kind of it kind of is.

I mean think about it.

I mean even during dreams you can think of the REM stage of sleep and that dream world as a dream where you update the sense of self, like a software update for your computer, just for your sense of self.

Think about it, like your dreams, you often interact with other people.

So it has a great social component.

There's a disproportionate amount of people in your dreams.

And you tend to interact with them in various ways, typically emotional, but it's often negative.

So it's more negative than positive.

And the reason is that you're sort of practicing and training for real life because being able to interact with people in a good way and learning social skills in that way

will enhance your survival in the future.

So it has that component.

So it's all about the self and the self being updated.

And even with sleep paralysis, which is also a type of a dream,

the demon,

when it comes, it's interested in your soul.

It's not interested in your Rolex.

or your you know your bank account or anything.

It wants your soul.

And so it shows you that about the self and the self being sort of recharged and reconf you know, reconfigured and sort of

it you know, it's part of that whole whole dream world.

So it's it's a big theme and usually, as I said, negative.

So if you because it it's better for your survival chances if you sleep you if you see yourself like being chased by monsters or interacting with you know witches or something like that, well, you may interact, you know, you encounter similar negative things in life that you have to learn how to deal with and strengthen your brain for those situations.

You know, that's

interesting.

What about people that say they don't remember their dreams or they don't dream?

Is it possible for people not to dream at all?

It's a great question.

So, no, we all dream.

We all dream and we dream during the whole whole night.

in the REM stage, of course, which is only a part of it, so one-third or something like that.

But it's not the so in that part of the

cycle of sleep,

we all have the dreaming going on.

So, for several hours, you are

definitely dreaming.

So, the question is: what's going on?

Why do some people don't remember their dreams?

In fact, most of us only remember a fragment of the final portion of the dream.

So, Sean might go, What's going on?

How come?

And one answer might be that dreams are just too overwhelming.

That you are using a type of circuitry in the brain that

is it's it's sort of a what I would call the cosmic circuitry in the brain.

It's sort of everything is on steroids, right?

Everything is flirting with everything.

Everything is hyper

powerful.

And it has so much personal meaning that you want to just go share that kind of stuff with your dreams with people.

You want to go and say, I saw this dream and it's like a great visual

poetry, you saw the moon and the sun in your bedroom and all that going on, right?

But but for your brain, it might just be too much for you to remember the whole thing.

So it seems to have this inhibitory mechanism, a mechanism whereby it sort of shuts down your ability to remember the dreams and and and being able to sort of not to be overwhelmed by them.

So that is a a reason this you know that that we have that.

And in fact

and some people, you f to answer your question, some people

remember dreams more and and they may have just be able to

maybe they have more fragmented REM sleep, so they go out in or out of REM more.

Let me give you an example.

So, if you want to remember your dreams for sure, take a big glass of water and drink it before you go to bed.

And so, your dreams, you'll be less sort of more likely to wake up during REM and remember your dreams during the dream stage of sleep.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, dreams are dreams are insanely crazy and may even explain something like deja vu people have.

Do you have deja vu vu?

I've definitely had it before, yeah.

Yeah, so for deja vu is this experience, you go, you know, go somewhere and then you see this castle for the first time and you go, my god, I mean, I've seen this before.

I've been here even though I haven't been to the city or something, you know?

And one possibility is that you're

accidentally activating some some of those areas in the brain that is the dream circuitry of the of the of the dream world.

You're actually you're activating that in wakefulness.

So

that's what's going on pretty much.

Interesting.

That makes sense.

So what about blind people?

Do they dream?

Oh,

that's a great question.

So blind people, it depends on

if they were born blind.

So if you're born blind, that means sort of, you know, your visual cortex, for example, may not be completely working.

Visual cortex just means there's an area of the brain, which is the part of your brain.

That part of the brain processes seeing things, vision.

And so if you're born with no

visual cortex with without able to being able to see anything in that way, then you won't dream visually.

So you'll have feelings, you feel things in your dreams, like hallucinatory sense of what you might call somatosensory hallucinations in your dream or feelings.

That's scary.

Yeah, you have that or you hear things, but you don't actually see things.

But if you were if you were born being able to see the world, then

you can still, even if you become blind later, you will still be able to see.

Interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

So do you still experience sleep process, or did you sort of find ways to prevent getting it?

It's a great question.

So I do still get it.

Once in a while, I will have sleep paralysis and it will be scary.

I did develop a therapy for it, and

it seems to be a promising for treating it.

And it's sort of based on this idea that when you're lying there in sleep paralysis, you have a few minutes of you know seconds to minutes of conscious awareness so you can almost like manipulate your mental and emotional state.

So I try to do that, do those tricks that I've developed and it helps me overcome the experience.

But yeah, I do have it once in a while and I'm able to

use it.

Wow.

Yeah, do you do you have it also once in a while?

No, I had it once when I was like in high school and I haven't had it since, but I know there's some people that get it all the time.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah.

Some people have it chronically.

So I have it like

three or four times

a week.

Once a day.

I can't imagine.

I felt like I was dying when I had it.

Yeah.

People will say that.

So in our research, I mean, we find that

in certain cultures, for example,

people will say that they feel like they're dying and there's a demon and that they're being possessed by a demon and things like that.

So there's this whole scary thing around it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know you studied the Egyptians, right?

And you mentioned they experienced sleep paralysis a lot.

Oh, you've done your homework.

How do you have?

You've done your homework.

Cool, Sean.

No, so yeah, definitely.

So

in our research in various countries, so I got interested in this when I was sort of, so after I had my own sleep paralysis, I went to Egypt and I lived there for a while.

So I was a student there.

I was doing research while I was a student, being a student, and then I saw, I thought, well, hold on, Egyptians believe in like the genies from Aladdin.

Right.

So maybe they think sleep paralysis is caused by that.

So I did some research, did some studies, I actually published this and work later on, and it turned out, yeah, they feel like it's the genie.

And in Italy, I did research, and it turns out

it's something like a great, like, this, like, evil witch or giant cats that attack you.

Interesting.

Yeah, and in South Africa, it's like the small demons called the tokolosha demons.

We discovered that.

And in Turkey, we

found a similar

that's called the Karabasan.

So all over the world

there are these explanations for sleep paralysis and so I was wondering

if you live in a country like Egypt for example right and you believe it's a ghost, right?

It's a switch, it comes at night, it attacks you, it might do all these things to you, right?

Does it change the experience itself?

Like does it have an impact on the experiencer versus somebody in Copenhagen who thinks, no, this is the brain, it's just stress, it's anxiety.

I grew up in Copenhagen, that's where I had my first experience.

I know the culture very well, and I know people there.

I'm Danish myself with Kurdish roots, but nonetheless, I know the culture.

And so

I thought, okay, let me compare these two cultures.

So

let me compare people in Denmark who have sleep paralysis, a person over here, and a person in Egypt.

And it turned out, in Egypt, people have much more fear from sleep paralysis.

First of all, they say this is this genie, this evil

thing that comes at night.

That's the first thing.

Second, they say the episodes last much longer.

So they have this subjective experience of the whole thing being so long, so long and the paralysis is horrible.

And they develop this great fear from it.

So it's almost like the whole thing has become

amplified.

It's just more than a normal experience.

You can call it ultra-normal.

And then what's going on then, what happens is that later on they may even develop anxiety and trauma, it seems.

And we found similar things, by the way, in Italy, where people think

it's a witch.

And so, yeah, you know,

it's scary stuff.

People may even develop

trauma from this.

PTSD as if you were in war, just from sleeping.

I mean, if I dealt with that once a week, I think I would be traumatized.

I mean, think about it.

If you are sleeping, right, and you actually really think that there is this ghost coming, you know, attacking you and doing all these kind of things to you,

you may, you know, if you really think it's real, you know, one of my colleagues out at Harvard that I work with,

he did a great study.

So, you know, a portion of the American population believes that there's something

similar to sleep paralysis, although we believe it is sleep paralysis, that is sort of space aliens coming down and sort of probing you and doing things to you and stuff like that.

You've seen that, right?

You've seen that.

Okay, cool.

So now, it turns out that these people who have sleep paralysis that they explain as space alien abduction,

when they listen to the audio tapes, the audio recording of their own explanation of sleep paralysis, what occurs is that their physiological reactions to that audio script of themselves saying I was paralyzed and the the thing came down and all that, you know,

they their heart rate, their sweating and everything, everything, is comparable to somebody with post-traumatic stress disorder, with trauma.

Like literally, there's no difference if the person had sleep paralysis, okay, or went to war.

They have similar comparable physiological reactions.

And that's why I usually say to my students when I'm lecturing or anything, I mean, this might be one of the most fascinating things in the entirety of medicine, if not science.

I mean, you're sleeping in your bed and you're encountering space aliens, which is, you know, seeing a duplicate of yourself hovering over you.

I've had a copy of Baland hovering over me.

Great conversations.

And usually the conversation is, who's the real me?

Is that the Balan up down here?

That

agency and identity is being sort of hijacked.

And you're sort of fighting for your own selfhood.

Whole dream thing again, right?

So, yeah, so that...

that is definitely something about sleep paralysis.

Yeah, no, my first

episode just got me hooked.

Yeah.

So how many times have you had it?

Oh man, I've had sleep paralysis a few times.

I mean, few by few, I mean,

no, a lot of times.

So I would say overall, maybe a hundred times, 50.

I've had it a lot, and I've seen different things, and people have, you know, there's an underlying structure to it.

There's an underlying

certain themes that people, you know, for example, they may hear footsteps.

That's one of the things that's so creepy.

So hearing footsteps or hearing like, you know, your name being like, balancing,

whispering your name, yeah, it's crazy.

And yeah, and so, but yeah, no, some of the people that I've seen, some of the patients that I've worked with, you know, I remember this chap in the UK

who used to have sleep paralysis where

I think it was himself or his sister.

So it runs in the family, it's a genetic component.

I think it might have been his sister who had the creepy one where she was sleeping and then there was a mirror up up above her and then she was looking at it and saw her limbs being altered.

Oh my gosh.

Imagine that.

It's terrifying.

It's terrifying, yeah.

And um yeah.

So I didn't know it was genetic then.

Yeah, it runs in family, so it's another thing, it's genetic.

It there seems to be um a genetic component and it has to do with the um genes that regulate regulate your sleep-wake cycle.

Meaning that we all as human beings tend to sleep on a certain uh in a certain way depending on the sun.

So, when the sun is telling our brain when to feel sleepy and go to bed and all that.

And so, if that gene is sort of out of whack, it's not working as it should, then you're more likely to have sleep paralysis.

Wow.

Because you sort of, you can't, you know, think about it.

It's like sleep paralysis is all about REM sleep, the stage of sleep where you're paralyzed to protect yourself from acting out your dreams, right?

That's the whole idea.

So, you're paralyzed from head to toe.

But if there's a certain gene that makes you more likely to wake up prematurely mentally during that stage,

then you have sleep paralysis.

Or if you even if you drink alcohol, if you're stressed college students, actually

stressed college students have some of the highest rates of sleep paralysis because of their insomnia, alcohol, stress, exams.

So they tend to wake up during that stage called REM, stage of sleep called REM, as you know, and then have the episode.

Interesting.

So that's what it's what it's about.

Wow.

Dr.

Jalal, it's been a pleasure.

I've learned a lot.

Anything you want to close off with or promote?

No, I mean it's it's been great coming out here to Vegas

to visit you.

And

if you want to learn about my work, I'm on Instagram and I'm on Facebook and on YouTube, on Dr.

Velangelal and all my platforms.

So I don't use social media too much.

Yeah, I got to call you from now on.

All right.

Well, I look forward to it.

You also teach your class at Harvard, right?

I do.

I do research out at Harvard and occasionally lecture.

And yeah.

Cool.

Well, thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you very much.

My pleasure, yeah, thanks for watching, guys.

I'll see you next time.