How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

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. Michael Platt.
Dr. Michael Platt is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
His laboratory focuses on decision-making, more specifically how we make decisions and the impact of power dynamics, such as hierarchies in a given organization or group, as well as hormones on decision-making. We also discuss valuation, that is how we place value on things, on people.
And what you'll find is that there are many factors that impact whether or not we think something is good, very good, bad, or very bad, that operate below our conscious awareness. In fact, today's discussion will teach you how you make decisions, how to make better decisions in the context of everything from picking out a watch or a pair of shoes, all the way up to something as important as picking a life mate.
Indeed, hormones, hierarchies, and specific things that are operating within you and adjacent to nearby the things that you're evaluating, whether or not those things are people or objects, are powerfully shaping the neural circuits that lead you to make specific decisions. So today you're going to learn how all of that works and, as I mentioned, how to make better decisions.
Dr. Platt also explains how we are evaluating the hormone levels of other people, both same sex and opposite sex, and the implications that has for relationships of all kinds.
It's an incredibly interesting and unique conversation, certainly unique among the conversations I've had with any of my neuroscience colleagues over the decades. And I know that the information you're going to learn today is going to be both fascinating to you, it certainly was to me, and that it will impact the way that you think about all decisions at every level in everyday life.
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, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr.
Michael Platt. Dr.
Michael Platt, welcome. Thanks, it's awesome to be here.
I've been following your work since I was a graduate student and it's really interesting. You're an anthropologist by training, turned neuroscientist, turned practical applications of neuroscience and related fields to everybody as it relates to business, decision-making, social interactions, hormones.
You've worked on a lot of different things. The first question I have is, let's all agree we're old world primates.
Yes. Right? Most people don't even think of us as old world primates, but we are all old world primates.
And we share many similarities in terms of the neural circuits that we have in our skulls with some of the other old world primates, like macaque monkeys, for instance. When you step back and look at a process like decision-making or marketing out in the world or how people interact with one another and gauge value of objects, relationships, or even their own value, if I may, how much of what you see in human old world primates do you think is reflected by the interactions of old world primates like rhesus macaque monkeys and vice versa? I mean, in other words, how primitive are we and or how sophisticated are the other old world primates? That's a great way of putting it because I think it's both.
I always like to say there's a little monkey in all of us, right? And I believe that going in, you know, having spent actually my formative years, you know, just watching monkeys. And I worked at the Cleveland Zoo, you know, when I was in college, and I took every opportunity I could get to go, you know, I went to the field, you know, I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico.
And I think we all get that. But over the course of my career, I'm astonished at how deep that goes.
And basically, for every behavioral, cognitive, emotional phenomenon that we've trained our lens on, it looks almost exactly the same in people and monkeys. Now, obviously, we're not just monkeys, and we can talk, and we're doing this, and that's a big, big difference.
But all the things that you talked about, decision-making, social interaction, the way that we explore the world, the fountain of creativity, not only the neural circuits, but the actual expression is so, so similar. We have monkeys and people do the exact same things in the lab.
And if I didn't label the videos, the outputs of like the avatars and whatnot in games, you couldn't tell the difference. What's striking about what you just said is that I recall, I guess at that time it was called a tweet, and I think it was from Elon, that said that we're basically a species that got a supercomputer placed on top of a monkey brain.
So in thinking about it the other way, what aspects of being human, this old world primate that we are, I think is distinctly different than say a macaque monkey, aside from language? I don't know that anything really is. I mean, so actually it's an interesting time to have you ask me that question because the spring semester, I teach a seminar for the psychology department at Penn called Being Human.
And the whole idea of that, each week we tackle an aspect of who we are that has at one point or another been considered to be uniquely human or close to, right? And that could be something like art and creativity or theory of mind, right? Or, you know, economics and markets and things like that. And when you take a look at these things through the lenses of neuroscience and anthropology, this is how we do it, economics, psychology, neurology, and on and on and on, you start to really see that there's a lot more continuity than discontinuity.
And that's kind of pretty shocking. And I want to go back to that Elon tweet, if I may, because I think that's where we go a little bit astray to in thinking about the brain as a computer, right? So it's, well, obviously it's not built on silicon, right's it's made of meat and fat and it's subject to all of the constraints that that go along that go along with that.
And what I think instead is a better metaphor is that we've got a 30 million year old Swiss army knife in our heads. Right.
So, yes, you can learn how to do all kinds of different things, but you've got a brain that's got essentially specific tools in it. You know, it's like having a knife and a corkscrew, which is the most important one, you know, nail file, saw, et cetera.
And the monkey's got those too. Now, ours might be a little bigger, you know, and sharper, but they look pretty similar and they do the job in a very similar way.

And I think once we appreciate that, then that opens up a lot of territory for applications. Not just trying to understand how some of the tools might get broken or dull as a result of illness or injury or disorders, etc.
but also how we can measure them and how we can develop them better because some of those are, you know, we use all the time, say in business. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place.
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For more information, see the episode description. So if we were to start at what us neuroscientists would call kind of more low-level functioning, even though it's pretty high level, with something like attention, you know, we are very visual creatures for those of us that are sighted.
Most humans are sighted. We rely on vision to assess the world around us, to assess emotions of others, et cetera.
And so are the other old world primates. How do we allocate attention? Like what grabs our attention? And maybe in this discussion we could also touch on, because I know you've worked on this, what underlies some deficits in attention? So yeah, if we could just explore this from the perspective of, okay, you go into an environment, let's say it's a familiar environment, you wake up in the room, you wake up in each day.
What grabs your attention? What keeps your attention? And if we do in fact have control over our attention, which we do to some extent, why is it so difficult for many of us to decide, you know what, I'm just going to put everything away and I'm just going to focus on this task for the next hour. Why is that so challenging for so many people, regardless of whether they have a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Okay.
There's a lot in that question, many questions in there. And let's talk about what attention is, right? It is a prioritization, right, or an amplification of what you're focusing on, right? And we do that by where we point our eyes, right? And then that gets turned up in the brain with a lot of consequences.
And really, why do we have attention? Because you can't do everything at once, right? So it's in the name of efficiency. What we attend to is a product of two things.
It's what we're looking for and what the world looks like, right? And that kind of what the world looks like part is importantly shaped by what our ancestors experienced and also what we experienced when we were developing, when we were growing up. So things that are bright or shiny or moving fast, right, or loud or whatever, that grabs our attention.
Things that stand out, that are different. And for us as primates, one thing that's super important and kind of really deeply baked in is other people.

So if there are faces, if there are people in the environment doing something, then that naturally just grabs our attention unless we happen to be an individual who's sort of wired a little bit differently, like folks on the autism spectrum disorder or, you know, schizophrenia, things like that, where that prioritization is not quite the same. So that's kind of how our experience as primates, you know, and just the design principles of the way our brains work to overcome some of these limitations in the name of efficiency come about.
And then, as you mentioned, what we can control our attention to a certain degree. And that's super important for a lot of, I think, overcoming a lot of the challenges that we have.
And we can talk about that, like in decision making, for example, or learning because you can't control what you're attending to. That gets turned up in the brain, right? And that affects what we choose and it affects what we learn and it affects what we remember as well.
So now I'm trying to kind of go back to like then the end part of your question. Oh, so that had to do with multitasking or just things in the environment.

And that gets at this question or topic of, in my view, of foraging, right? And so I think that attention, this is the argument we've made, operates according to essentially the same rules and principles that our bodies do when we are searching the environment

for resources. So all mobile animals search for food, search for maids, search for water,

you know, for the resources that they need to survive and to reproduce. And as it turns out,

that kind of decision that the clash made very memorable, should I stay or should I go, that's the key thing. So when you encounter something, the question is like, do I take it, do I stick with it, even though it might be depleting, getting worse, or should I take a risk and invest time and energy and go look for something else? All animals have to do that.
It turns out there's an optimal solution to that, which was written out by one of the great mathematical ecologists, Eric Charnoff, in a paper in 1976. And so he wrote this out.
And what's cool about it is it's very simple. It's basically you leave, you abandon the thing that you're harvesting when what you're getting from it falls below the average for the environment.
That just makes sense. The marginal returns, right? This could be a social interaction.
Could be a social interaction. It could be food, could be water, could be the money that you're making in the moment, could be the information that you're getting from a book or from a website or whatnot.

So. The money that you're making in the moment could be the information that you're getting from a book or from a website or whatnot.
So, and we, from studies done over the last whatever that is now, 50 years, have shown that every animal that's ever been observed behaves as if they're performing that computation. Could you give an example in the context of, let's say, social media? And as we were walking into record today, we were comparing and contrasting X as a platform versus Instagram.
And it occurred to me now, based on what you said a few moments ago, that Instagram is very visual. So you see faces.
Many accounts on X, either the icon is so small or people even just have cartoons or whatever, There are avatars there that aren't really faces in many cases. And it does seem that on X, there's a kind of a elevated level of emotionality to what people write.
That's what tends to grab attention. And I wonder whether or not that's because of the absence of faces.
I mean, when somebody is on an Instagram post and they're kind of ranting a bit, in fact, I saw this yesterday, Tim Ferriss, another podcaster, had the investor Chris Saka on, and Chris was talking about environmentalism and the fires, and he had opinions about AI. He's a very, very smart, very opinionated guy, but people were commenting, I don't know how he felt, how could I? But people were commenting, he's so angry.
He's so angry. And

he was just being passionate and emphatic. Maybe he was angry.
I don't know. But he was clearly very, very, very alert, leaning forward into the camera.
And people were paying, most of their comments were paying attention to the emotion behind what he was saying. And whereas on X, I feel like if you just took the text of what he was saying and you put it there, would be kind of below the average emotionality on X.

And so when you say that we are drawn to faces or that faces are – we naturally forge towards faces versus other things, that feels very true. And do you feel like elevated levels of emotion in faces are what harness the most attention? And by parallel, if you get a bunch of monkeys together and one of them is really upset, do they all look at that monkey? Speculating a little bit here.
Yeah. I've not thought about it in the context of, say, X versus Instagram.
But I think you're right on. I mean, I think that's spot on.
You're just combining, like you're turning, the volume gets turned up because there are faces there. And if they're more emotional, they're just going to be much more salient.
You grab your attention. And that's something that's really important to pay attention to because somebody who's very aroused, right, that's activation, that's, you know, that's sort of pre-activation before they do something.
Like they might attack you or they might take something from you. Who knows, right? Something could happen there.
I want to take this back a little bit. I'm older than you.
And I want to take this idea of different sources, like where you could place your attention, take it back a little bit more in time. Because what's been shown, and it's interesting, computer science picked up on this marginal value theorem from mathematical ecology around 2000 or so, and began to investigate how people search the web.
And it turned out people would leave a website the moment their information intake rate fell below the average for sort of all the websites that they were encountering. The average is determined by your behavior in what, the preceding bin of time, like 10 minutes, until you arrive at a site or within site.
So that's less well known, but we're now learning that it is pretty short term, right? So it seems to be driven by reinforcement learning processes that kind of are telling you how rich that environment is. And so one of the things about the marginal value theorem I think is really, really profound for understanding our current predicament is that it says that if you're in a really poor environment, like you, let's say you forage for apples, right? And there's one apple tree for the next 10 miles.
You stay in that apple tree until you picked every apple, rotten or not rotten, not ripe, right? Before you move on. If you were in an orchard with apple trees everywhere, you just pick the ones that are easiest to get and then you move on.
So now think about it in the context of web surfing, web, like when you were – if you're coming up when I did, I was in graduate school or as an undergraduate, the way I accessed the internet was through a dial-up modem. So it was very slow.
It was a very poor environment. You're sitting there waiting for the information to load up, right? And it might take 30 seconds or longer.
You don't abandon that. You read the whole thing.
You might print it out, put it in your file cabinet, right? Now you get like super high speed internet. Yeah, you can have 12 tabs open, 50 tabs open.
And you're like, you just so you spend like, you know, half a second or a couple of seconds on anyone. You certainly don't scroll down beneath the fold, right?

So it totally makes sense.

Now think about all the devices you might have in.

It could be tabs.

It could be most people are sitting around with a TV on, their phone, a tablet, a laptop, whatnot.

Yeah, I'm guilty of having –

And so what do you do?

I have three phones and a laptop.

Yeah, so you're just cycling.

You are doing exactly what you're designed to do, right?

Which is to move between these resources quickly and easily because it's so easy. So in some of that's going back to your question about like why is it so hard? It's going to be really, really deliberate.
You have to either reduce, you know, make it a harder environment, I guess, is the idea. You would have to actually put things

away or make the return rate that you're getting from any of them much worse. Like, for example, if you turn your phone monochrome, which we know works, right? It helps you to stop checking your phone and spend less time on it because it's just not as good of a source.
Yeah, the information feels really depleted. You reposted a paper result recently, and I did as well after I saw it on your X account, that if you look at working memory, the ability to keep information online in real time and work with it, it seems that working memory is worse when your phone is right next to you.
If it's somewhere else in the room that you're working, then we're trying to do real work of some sort. Your performance is slightly better than if it's right next to you.
But if the phone is completely outside of the room, improvements in working memory are statistically significant. In other words, get the phone completely out of the room.
It's not sufficient to have it next to you turned face down, or even in your backpack behind you, it needs to be in a completely separate environment in order to maximize this effect. Yeah.
I mean, it's completely consistent with what we're saying here with regard to foraging. But if I take my phone and I put it, I don't have my phone here under the chair, but let's say I did.
This result suggests that some component of our neural circuitry is operating in the background thinking, well, I guess something could be on there. Maybe I got a text or maybe there's a tweet I should look at or an Instagram post.
It suggests that we are multitasking even when we think we are not multitasking. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
It's beneath our awareness, right? And that's where I think the kind of comparative psychology, comparative neurobiology is really important here because I don't necessarily impute conscious awareness to all these critters that are out they doing these things, behaving exactly the same way we are. And so to me, that just indicates that all that hardware, those same routines are just running under the hood, running under the surface, and we're not aware of it.
So when your phone is somewhere within the sphere that could be accessed.

Brain's aware of that, and it's including that in the calculations about what to do next. And it actually reminds me now of...
There's actually a couple of papers that we published some time ago on foraging. And one of the things that's really interesting about it is that as you are considering your options and you're experiencing sort of these depleting rewards or whatnot, you see this urgency signal kind of building up in a part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex that we know is important for moving on, for switching, for searching for something new.
and it does, you know, I don't know what the emotional component of that is. We never explored that.
But it seems reasonable to imagine that that's tied to, you know, the sense of like, I really want to turn my phone over and check what's going on there. Are there any data that suggest that just being able to maintain a thought train independent of visual input can help us get better at maintaining attention? So for instance, this morning I woke up very early, unusually early for me, because I went to bed unusually early for me.
And I decided to try something, which is something that actually our colleague in neuroscience, Carl Diceroth, had mentioned he does. And a previous guest on this podcast, Josh Waitzkin, who is a former chess grandmaster champion, has described something like this.
I decided to try it, which was to keep my eyes closed and just try and think in complete sentences, not let my mind drift off topic for a while. Have a conversation with myself in my head.
But with the constant redirect of trying to stay in a thought train. And it's actually much more difficult than I thought it would be, right? There's no other input.
My eyes are closed. I was comfortable at the temperature the room was, et cetera.
I was well-rested, no phone, no input.

And, you know, you get one sentence of thought out, then the next.

It's a bit like writing, except here, no visual input.

So I would have thought it's a lot easier because you don't have, you know, a set of tabs across the top or even a Word doc with a, like, do you want to change it to bold,

et cetera.

Like no other input competing for one's attention. And I found that after about 10 minutes, it became pretty easy, but it took me about 10 minutes to get into this redirect of focus.
And then at one point I thought I better stop this because it's seeming kind of weird, but that was very different, I would say, than sitting down to say meditate and think about my breath, which is a physical phenomenon

that's tangible at the level of feeling one's breath. So how do you feel about practices that teach us to maintain attention and redirect our attention that are very deprived of visual input as a kind of training ground for being able to harness and maintain visual input when we need to get work done, work on problem sets, write, do like what I call real work or Cal Newport would call deep work? So I've never tried that.
And it sounds fascinating. And I'm going to try to give it a shot, you know, tomorrow morning.
At first, I was thinking this sounds a lot like meditation, right?

But there are a whole variety – I'm no expert on meditation – but there are a whole variety of different kinds of meditation. Some, as you mentioned, you're focusing on breathwork, physical stimulus.
But there are others that are not and that are much more kind of cognitively focused. So, for example, like loving-kindness meditation is one where you're kind of cognitively focused.
So for example, like loving kindness meditation is one where you're kind of thinking about a particular person, you're imagining them, and you're imagining something really good happening to them, right? So it's sort of one of these self-transcendent types of meditation, which are not, I don't think, really tied to any external input coming out, although it's an internal input, right, that's based on your memory, or awe-based meditation. So maybe it's more similar to those, but I...
But it's like thematically anchored. Exactly, exactly.
As opposed to visually anchored, like staring at a flame or concentrating on one's breath. Staring at flame flame.
Yeah, I didn't have a – it was like free – in terms of putting in language of foraging, it was like I didn't have a plan.

I wasn't writing a paragraph.

It was just can I stay in a conversation with myself that's – where there's no moment that some external voice or input or thought about something else in the room, you know, just can I just kind of stay in there? Can I just stay in there? That was really the question. Yeah, I think that that makes complete sense because it's kind of like you're foraging for apples in that tree that's, you know, in the middle of the Serengeti somewhere, right? And there's nothing anywhere around you.
And so you're going to stick with that and just keep mining it until there's nothing left. One of the reasons that I brought up this example was I noticed that anything that has to do with attention, whether or not it's visual attention or, you know, you need to write or cognitive attention and redirecting attention, unless there's some high level of, as you call it, arousal or emotionality.
I find there's always a kind of warmup period required and that this isn't taught to us in school. And that so many people who think that they have a hard time maintaining attention, I have this hypothesis that they are training non-attention or brief attention by, you know, scrolling through movies on a, you know, social media platform is basically training, redirecting your attention every couple seconds or maybe every few minutes.
So you get good at that. You get good at scrolling.
You get good at what you do. But also I think it was always the case that sitting down to do something difficult or learn or write or pay careful auditory attention, maybe even to a podcast, that there's a kind of a warming up period.
What is the evidence that neural circuits in the brain are kind of, here I'm using very top contour language in front of another card carrying neuroscientist, but that neural circuits are kind of more dispersed in their activation patterns, but that over time we kind of drop into a trench, not just of attention, but then the signal to noise of that circuit required for attention and the other components of the task gets much greater compared to the background noise. Is there evidence for that? In the same way that warming up to work out, no one expects to walk in and train with their work weight or to run at the speed that they would in mile three, right, you know, that you warm up.
It's like, but this notion of warming up the brain for specific cognitive activities doesn't seem as abundant out there. And I think part of the reason might be, and I'd like your thoughts on this, that we are all familiar with something super exciting or scary grabbing our attention in this.
But then I would say, well, you can sprint into the street to save your kid from getting hit by a car. You didn't warm up for that.
But that's not how you exercise because there isn't the same level of urgency. That's a deep question.
I think, um, and I, you know, it's funny to me too, because it, it, I don't warm up often before I work out and that's like, so. You seem to be in great shape.
No, but it's like, it's funny. You know, I've been in CrossFit for like 17 years.
Oh, wow. And you're still uninjured? You're one of the few.
Oh, no, I've got plenty of injuries. I injuries.
I've had a couple hernias, surgeries, and maybe just like five or six minutes of mobility work. We have a lot of episodes on this with experts.
No, the mobility is really good. And I actually, what I have, periodically, it's like take many months off to do just purely mobility and PT because and like I did Pilates intensively for a year and a half after one injury and I loved it.
And it's cool to see what it does to your body because it totally refashioned it. I was, cause I've always been like big guy up here.
And then you do Pilates for, or yoga for a long time. Went through yoga period too.
And suddenly it's all core, you know, you become like a very different, very different human. Yeah, so this issue of warming up, you don't like warming up, which explains your injuries.
No, no, I like warming up. It's more a question of time.
And that's why I got into CrossFit in the first place was because I could do a workout in 10 minutes or under that left me dead on the floor. I'm telling you.
Super awesome. I'm telling you, 100 jumping jacks, just like in PE class, is still the best warmup I'm aware of.
It's amazing. People laugh at me.
It's so old school, but you do 100 jumping jacks before you do any kind of cardiovascular resistance training. And I haven't run a study on this, but you greatly diminish your chance of injury, probably because of just raising core body temperature.
So the question is, okay, well then let's pose it in this parallel fashion. What is the equivalent of the 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work, right? For me, it's like internally going like, what's wrong with you, Andrew? Why is it so hard for you to like punch out these 10 paragraphs? But if someone on my team says, hey, we need this in eight minutes, I could do that anywhere.
Unless I'm actually driving a vehicle, I can work anywhere, anytime. But I would say we don't have the equivalent of 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work, but we need it.
We need that. I think people need that and they need the understanding that it can help them get into that trench of attention.
I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this. Please.
So one would be the converse of that, which you kind of alluded to earlier, which is the not warming up but the opposite of warming up, like the distraction. So there have been some really interesting studies done in sort of more business-y settings, management settings, that looked at foraging.
And think of it this way. It's more like a measure of creativity.
Your proclivity to explore, to try new things, to be the opposite of focused. And you can measure that, for example, like an anagram task.
So you get a bunch of letters, make as many words as you can. At some point, you decide to dump them and get new letters.
And so that's sort of, you're taking a risk and you're exploring and you're getting a new set. You don't know what's going to happen.
And really cool studies showed that if you precede that task with a task where people are foraging for points on a screen, there's hidden, it's like a visual kind of thing and you're just looking for stuff. If the points are really dispersed and spread out, then people, we don't know how long that kind of after effect lasts, but then people are way more kind of hyper explorers.
With the words. With the word thing later.
And if they're doing, if they have to like decide, if they're playing virtual fishing and the number of, you know, the rate at which you catch fish in a pond is declining and you can press a button and take a time out to travel to another pond, people are much more willing to move on, okay, when they do that. Whereas if you put all the points kind of together, which is essentially related to what you're saying, cognitively warming up by focusing, literally instead of having your filter, your aperture, your lens like this, it's now like this, even though it's a different task that you're going to do.
Oh, I love this. Then you're much more focused on that.
Okay. I've sat here and done many, many podcasts and I have to say it's rare that I say I love this.
It's probably the first time. I absolutely love this because as a person who's worked on a variety of topics in neuroscience, but visual neuroscience has really been my first home and continues to be the way that I think about a lot of this.
There are a couple of really interesting papers that have led to some practices mainly in China where students focus on a fixation point before they sit down to do cognitive work. And it improves their attention and performance on cognitive work.
And it sounds so silly to people.

People think, oh, okay, I'm going to stare at a dot,

and then you're going to, like, stare at a dot at the given distance

that I'm going to do my work.

How lame is that?

Well, I think it's incredible because what you just said fully supports this idea

that we're – well, we all agree here, and there's two of us,

that we're mainly visual, even those of us that like to listen to music and things like that. And we're very somatic or, you know, very visual creatures.
And that where we place our visual attention and the size of the aperture of that attention, whether or not we're looking at a small box or a big box, not metaphorically, but literally, determines the aperture of our attention going forward. In other words, I think this is such an important thing because when we look at a horizon or we walk through a city, there's information flowing past us and all kinds of, without us placing our eyes on any one particular point.
And that people don't notice until they do this and they hear this, but that's very relaxing. We look at a horizon, it relaxes us.
And that's because panoramic vision, non-foviated vision, it's associated with a decrease in autonomic arousal. So has this been leveraged toward teaching kids and adults how to attend better? Because I think this is immensely valuable.
I mean, this is behaviorally driven pharmacology, as I like to call it, because clearly there's a change in our chemistry when we do this sort of thing. I mean, other than what you just said about the work that's done and what they're doing in China, which is entirely consistent with what I just said, I'm unaware of any utilization.
And I think it could be. I mean, I love that phrase that you just used, right? Which is, when we understand the underlying neurochemistry, let's say, that's great, but you're not going to go in and directly manipulate people's neurochemistry.
But if you can change the environment they're in, or you can change the state that they're in, behavioral state, cognitive state, emotional state, then that's an effective, potentially effective, practical, ethical way of having this kind of same or similar impact. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1.
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Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim this special offer. Yeah, I think that so many people, including myself, think, okay, what's a way that I can increase my level of alertness and attention? Well, I have this gallery of caffeine.
Actually, the middle one's water. For those that are just listening, I've got a mate gourd here, plenty of caffeine in there.
I had a cold brew mate, plenty of caffeine in there. I had several actually, and then water in the center.
But caffeine raises our level of alertness and thereby attentional capabilities. But I think that most people are not familiar with using behavior as a way to increase their endogenous release of the neurochemicals that increase arousal and attention.
And we just tend to over rely on pharmacology and I'm not against that. I use it obviously.
But what do you think it is? I mean now I'm asking you to be a bit of a cultural anthropologist. What do you think it is that has led people in the

United States and Europe to mainly focus on this idea that if you can't attend easily, that it's a

pharmacologic issue, that behavioral tools are not as useful? Because the experiment you described

is so cool, right? Look at dots that are close together. Then cognitive space becomes kind of

Thank you. tools are not as useful because what the experiment you described is so cool, right? Look at dots that are close together.
Your then cognitive space becomes kind of more bundled into a tighter bundle. Look at dots that are more dispersed and you tend to, you know, kind of disperse your cognition.
It becomes almost like more of a creative exploration, right? Maybe this is why my friend Rick Rubin, whose name is sort of synonymous with creativity, because he wrote that amazing book, The Creative Act, is so into sky and clouds and sunsets and space, open space. Rarely have I ever heard Rick say, you should stare into a little soda straw.
I'd love for you to just kind of riff on what you think some of the better tools are for improving attention and focus, and whether or not you think we're really as challenged in that as many people assume? Well, I don't think we're that challenged. I think, as I mentioned earlier, our brains are just performing the computations that they have been endowed with by millions of years of evolution, which is to allocate attention, to allocate behavior, to allocate focus according to how rich, I'll call it rich, or poor the environment is, how many different sources are there.
And so those are the rules your brain lives by. And you're not really going to change those.
I mean, you could kind of modulate up and down a little bit, whether that's through neurochemistry or other kinds of things. But ultimately, it's, in this case, the brain in the environment that it's in.
So from my perspective, the best thing you can do is just change the environment. Put those devices away to enable you to focus, right? And so, I don't know if I had that much more to say on that topic.
No, I think what's great about this is you're essentially pointing to the fact that we have control. We're not somehow deficient or messed up if we find ourselves having a hard time directing our attention because we've been training ourselves to scroll.
We've been training ourselves to redirect our attention constantly to new things. I mean, as you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of intervening in that process so that one has the ability to drop into focused work.
I do feel as if progress in life scales fairly directly with the ability to focus on one thing for some period of time for sake of, you know, learning in school, for sake of sport, for sake of relationships, the ability to have like a real connection to somebody, you know, and we're going to get into a discussion about social interactions in a bit. But when it comes to foraging, do you find that people fall out into different kind of clusters of how they forage for information? And what are some of the themes of that or kind of signatures of the different groups? Yeah, that's a great question.
We haven't really approached it with the idea that there are clusters, but rather that there's, let's say, a continuum and of being either, you know, most people are somewhere in the middle, of course, but some folks hyper-focused, right? And you might just metaphorically imagine them at the extreme, like obsessive-compulsive almost, right? You can't get unstuck from a routine. And at the other end would be folks who explore too readily, right? So folks who we would say have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
And so folks fall somewhere along that distribution. Now, we've seen that there are differences between species in terms of where they are on that.

Differences is a function of age in humans.

So you kind of move from being more hyper-exploratory toward more focused as you get older. Oh, good.
And that also one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that that variation where you are on that continuum might make you more or less suited to different types of careers, different types of jobs. It's not to say that people can't change, but think of it this way.
You've got a dial that goes from super focused to a major explorer, and creativity goes along with that. One person might come with their dial set at 3, another person at 7, and you could help that person at a 3 maybe turn theirs to 5, but probably not to 10, right? The person who's at 7, you could turn them up to 9, right? So through various kinds of practices.
So I think it's really important to just recognize that people do vary. And that variation we pick up on in the sort of neurological context of like issues, problems that people, you know, experience like with focus in school, et cetera, like that.
People are no doubt wondering, well, if I am good at dropping into a trench and focusing my attention for long periods of time, maybe it's more obvious what types of careers that person would be better at. Maybe it's programming or writing or who knows, painting.
But when you have somebody whose attention tends to flip between different things, what sorts of professions do they align well with? Yeah, that aligns with creative professions. And also being entrepreneurs.
Actually, if you look at the data on entrepreneurs, the rate of attention problems is 2, 3, 4x. the general population.
You also see that it's often comorbid

with other issues related to anxiety, bipolar, etc. So they kind of like all cluster there with a real issue on that sort of focus.
And we work with a team out in Berkeley, actually, that provides support to entrepreneurs so that they can do their best, do their thing, which is to be like wildly creative, right, and innovative, I should say, but when they need that focus so they can have it. And we have a big research project going on right now looking at entrepreneurs in California and also MBA students at Wharton to just kind of try to identify, you know, the prevalence of these issues and then to potentially provide support for them.
And that support could take any number of different forms. It could be true psychiatric support in the sense of like maybe attention-focusing pharmaceuticals, drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, which can be used appropriately, but that doesn't rob those individuals of their mojo.
But in other cases, it's going to be more like changing their, you know, providing an ecosystem, right? So where they can learn focusing practices, as we've already talked about, where when they build their teams, they can build complementary strengths in the people that surround them so that they're much more likely to be successful. And our economy depends on those people being successful, right? So that's where the vast majority of economic activity is coming from is people who start small businesses, who are entrepreneurs and who are innovators.
So it makes all the sense in the world to do that. I think we've been neglecting all this.
Now, actually, the thing I wanted to kind of say earlier about this and that where I think neuroscience gives us a new tool to approach a lot of these business questions.

Is that, let's imagine you're hiring, right?

And you're hiring, you know, we need a creative type.

Okay, so you put an ad out and you get, you know, resumes and responses and people come in for interviews.

How do you measure that creativity typically?

You're going to say, oh, how creative are you? And you're like, you really want the job. So you're like, yeah, I'm super creative.
Or you give them a personality test, for example, or like Myers-Briggs or something like that. And those are not particularly accurate.
And self-report can be not only inaccurate, but biased and biased by the context. Why am I here? Who's asking me a question? How is that question asked? Whereas the neuroscience gives us tools to kind of measure those things directly.
And in some cases, you could measure it directly from the brain. And we do that.
But that's not going to be practical, not going to be scalable, right? Not going to be something a lot of people want to, you know, embrace, let's say, as applicants. But find ways to interrogate the brain that are not asking people to assess themselves.
For instance, what would a small number of questions be that- this? Well, not even questions. One of the things that we've done is develop games, like brief, little, very engaging games, that are based on specific tasks that we know interrogate specific circuits in the brain, like foraging, for example, where people are literally harvesting berries, let's say, and they're going along, and the goal is to kind of get as many as you can.
And from their behavior, we can figure out exactly where they are on that continuum mathematically and say, okay, well, in the dashboard that we create, like, okay, you are pitched a bit more toward being an innovator and creative type, explorer, and less, so less likely to be, say, a good manager who would need to be, you know, sort of have a higher degree of focus. And we do that for a number of different aspects of, you know, of cognitive emotional performance.
And so things like, like for in number of different aspects of cognitive and emotional performance. So things like in terms of social competence, for example.
And so we have actually a little game that mimics soccer. And we've had monkeys play it, humans play it.
We know exactly what it kind of elicits from the brain and what circuits it relies on. And that allows us to numerically, you know, identify like your strategic planning abilities or your something like theory of mind, getting in the head of an opponent.
And those games we found, it's really been very gratifying to demonstrate that those predict performance in, number of different jobs, in high-performance jobs, like actual soccer players, but also in the military, in cyber operations. And so we're now exploring, and we've helped to stand up a startup company in Philadelphia The idea of that is actually, you know, that's their mission is to go out and try to use those tools to see if they can do better than basically a whole bunch of questions.
Yeah, it certainly goes way beyond kind of typical Myers-Briggs or Enneagram type personality tests, which I think has certain value. If nothing else, they, you know, people like to know about themselves.
And I do think categorizing oneself a little bit, according to it, like, are you a three on the Enneagram or a four or an eight, you know, what certainly gives you a frame of reference, but yeah, it doesn't seem very useful for the kinds of work environments that you're describing, whereas what you're describing sounds much more sophisticated. You mentioned theory of mind.
We should talk about theory of mind because here we are back to visual neuroscience, but I have the understanding, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, that as old world primates, one of the more impressive features that we've developed is the ability to attend to a location with our eyes, but pay

attention to something else in the periphery. People used to refer to this as the other cocktail party effect.
The cocktail party effect is the ability to pay attention to a conversation while there's stuff in the background, but this is the other cocktail party effect that sort of sometimes chuckles gets described as, you know, you're out to

dinner with somebody and you're listening to them and you're paying attention to them,

but you're also paying attention to the conversation next to you or maybe someone else at the bar.

You know, you can fill in the blanks there.

This is an amazing ability, regardless of what it's used for, that a lot of other primate species don't have. I mean, as far as I know, no other species have.
So this is, this seems to be, we know macaques can do this, for example, and humans do this routinely. We assume all apes do this.
And the adaptive explanation is, I think, exactly what you're alluding to, which is the fact that when you live in a complex, multi-level society with differentiated relationships, where the things that matter to you are like your family, your rank, your status, your friends, your enemies, all those kinds of things,

that then creates a really complex environment for, as you said, devoting your attention. Because where we look is the focus of our, typically, that's the focus of your attention and what's turned up.
And other brains know that. And so now let's imagine you're a baboonoon right and you're you're not the highest ranking baboon and the high ranking you know the alpha is over there and so you train your gaze on that alpha baboon but there's a really attractive female over here that you want to know where she's heading because you know that's a good mating opportunity later so it's that ability to kind of split attention from your overt attention, what your gaze is pointed at, and covertly what you're amplifying and tracking in the environment.
And to tie this back to theory of mind, I think it's reasonable and consistent with some of the data that theory of mind, which is a sense of being able to infer what somebody else knows, what they can see, what they want, their state of mind, which might be different from yours, that it develops through the way that as infants and young children,

our experience of first gazing at a caregiver, maintaining attention with them, and then learning to follow their gaze when they look somewhere and they say, hey, that's an apple or whatever, that you do the same thing and that gaze following then is a precursor to joint attention and joint attention being really important for the development of this uh of the theory of mind which is our our sense of being able to understand make predictions make inferences about what's going on in somebody else's head i feel like the the uh overlap of covert attention and theory of mind as you described, comes from this assumption that I have, which is that we have effectively two spotlights of attention and that we can merge them. So I can place all my attention on you and what we're talking about in your face, et cetera.
I can split my attention between you and something over there in the corner. or i can take that second spotlight of attention and place it on myself.
Like, oh, you know, like I need to move to the side because I've got a little, you know, you know, maybe an itch on my thigh or something like that. But I don't think we have three spotlights that we can work with very easily anyway.
Maybe we could train that up, but that we don't naturally have more than two spotlights of attention. We can merge these two spotlights of attention.
And I feel like, and I've done some practice at this just because I'm a neuroscientist and I like to try things of ramping up my level of focus, just trying to really like, like I'm doing it right now, I'm looking at you and like the contour of your shape against the background. Like I can really decide to emphasize those borders.
I'm not really doing anything behaviorally. That's different than I was a few moments ago.
But then I could also bring that spotlight of attention kind of down a little bit in an intensity. So I feel like we have two spotlights of attention that we can ramp up in intensity.
And we don't normally do this so consciously. Normally we're more in stimulus response.
And I think about this a lot nowadays because, and forgive me for referencing previous podcasts, but we had this brilliant, absolutely brilliant 84-year-old psychoanalyst, Jungian analyst named James Hollis on the podcast. And he talked about, you know, what it is to be human and to create a life.
And it boiled down basically to two things, which was to acknowledge that we're in stimulus response a lot of the day and how to be functional in that domain was a lot of that conversation. But that there's this essential aspect to life, which is to get out of stimulus response and bring that those spotlights of attention inward and to think and to reflect and then go back into stimulus response.
And when we just sleep, wake up and go into stimulus response all day, or if we go meditate all day and are not in stimulus response, neither is good. So it's that balance.
And so this notion of two spotlights of attention, I'd love for you to tell me this is like complete BS or that it works. I don't need to be validated here.
I'm more putting it out there as a hypothesis because it feels true to me, but that's obviously just a feeling. Well, I think that feeling, as far as I know, is consistent with what we understand about how attention can, you know, how it amplifies the visual signals or other signals that are coming into our brains and the ways in which we can kind of, I don't know if it's divided purely or if it sort of bleeds over,

you know, what that really exactly looks like. But the landscape, let's imagine it's a landscape of neural activity and you can kind of raise up two humps or just one hump and it doesn't feel like you can go beyond that.
That's really, really hard to measure. And I think, you know, Our best data on that comes from, you know, recording the activity of neurons in macaques and monkeys while they are doing attention, you know, these sort of visual discrimination tasks.
And I think that'd be really, really hard to like actually elicit that kind of behavior from them. Well, we both agree, I know because we were talking before we started recording, that certain types of stimuli really grab our attention and influence our decisions and our valuation of things out there in the world.
So talk to me about monkey porn. Okay.
We never called it monkey porn, but a lot of people have said that, you know, essentially, you know, no matter what else I do in my career, that's going to be on my tombstone. This man worked on monkey.
This man unpacked the neurobiology of monkey porn. Okay.
So let's go back in the way back machine, you know, and so back when I was an anthropologist and I'm going out, I'm watching monkeys. And it's very clear that there are certain things in the world that are important to them that they prioritize.
And those are very similar, the same things that we do. So they pay attention to each other, to their faces, but also to other cues.
And these cues seem to make adaptive significance, right? That they're relevant for your ability to survive and reproduce, which is the name of the game for evolution. That's all that really counts.
Okay. And what are those things? Well, they're cues to status.
Like, so who's dominant? Who's subordinate, who can take my stuff, who do I gotta watch out for, who can I dominate and take stuff from? And cues to how, you know, to sort of mate quality mating opportunities. And if you look at non-human primates, they display those things very conspicuously, right? So males have these big canines and they have sort of, you know, physical dominant features, very square jaw, all that kind of stuff.
And females, for example, in macaques display their state, their hormonal state, how receptive they are to mating and likelihood of ovulating at that time through the sort of the swelling and coloration on their perineum. Here's a good word for your listeners, perineum, which we introduced, I think, into the neuroscience literature.
And that's just the sort of anogenital region. So that's where they're putting a lot of taint.
Someone else on here. Signaling taint.
Listen, another card-carrying researcher, Dr. Shana Swan, came on here to talk about phthalates and

microplastics and endocrine disruptors. She spent a career working on this.
She's a serious scientist.

And she talked about how taint sizes are diminishing in males by virtue of endocrine

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

And actually, even you can just see the physical size of their testes is a pretty good proxy in a cue.

And in rhesus macaques, there's also kind of these signals around the eyes that get a little bit darker.

The theory is that humans...

So for a long time, people said,

oh, humans don't display anything about their hormonal biological state to promote monogamy and all kinds of stuff like that, even though it seems that monogamy is not the... Monogamy in terms of mating does not seem to be the dominant strategy in humans.
Let's call it that. Yeah.
But just to make sure that I'm clear on this, it used to be said, you are saying that it used to be said that humans don't signal their hormonal status. And the reason people were saying that is because it was a promotion of monogamous behavior, which is actually not true in humans?

Well, so this goes back to Darwin, really, who sort of theorized that humans, during human evolution, that as monogamy became more adaptive for whatever reason, it's all speculation, right? that these sort of cues were hidden

so that males couldn't, you wouldn't be encouraged to find other mating opportunities outside your monogamous relationship. And so it would kind of keep the focus to get back to that on your partner.
but all the data that's out there, both from when societies were encountered by Western scientists, like whether polygyny was practiced or not, to just what we understand about extra pair matings like an offspring, et cetera, that strict monogamy does not seem to be the dominant, you know, to have been the dominant strategy. Now that's also consistent with the observation that, you know, we are a sexually dimorphic species.
So if, you know, when you look at the animal kingdom or in primates in particular, those that are obligate, pair-bond bonded, monogamous primates, males and females don't really differ much. Like we look at marmosets or tamarins.
In terms of body size. Body size, coloration, conspicuous sexual characteristics.
Brain structure as well. That's another interesting point which we can circle back to.
But even if you just look at, well, even if you just look at brain size, relative brain, brain size relative to body size, that is smallest in pair bonded monogamous species. The difference in brain size between males and females? Not between males and females, but just overall.
And it sort of scales up with group size and group complexity. It's slightly different, but there's a point there, which is that, well, pair-bonded monogamous species look very, very different, right? It's...
Different? I'm sorry, I'm different than us. It's very unusual.
Let's just say this. So it's very unusual, right? In mammals overall, it's very unusual in primates.
There's only a few.

Monogamous primates. Monogamous, obligate, pair bonded primates.
And in general, their behavior is not as complicated or complex as individuals that live in societies where there's a lot more going on in terms of strategizing strategizing to attain mating opportunities through, you know, either through sort of physical challenge or through, you know, being sneaky or, you know, or making friends, etc., etc. There's this sort of proliferation of different strategies that requires a lot more mental calculation apparently that goes hand in hand with an increase in brain size, cortex size.
Which makes sense from the standpoint of like more prefrontal cortex, more context-dependent strategy setting and decision-making. And it could be based on...
It seems that with more prefrontal cortex, one can, a species can incorporate

different valuations of mates.

It can be about hormonal status,

and I want to make sure we get back to that,

how humans signal hormonal status.

But it could also be about reproductive potential

as it relates to resource allocation

or whether or not there'll be a good caretaker. I mean, a lot of additional factors can be incorporated in and working with more variables flexibly requires more neural real estate, mostly in prefrontal cortex, right? Absolutely.
Although I will, based on a paper we published last year in Nature, I would say that our notions of sort of the breakdowns of like where stuff is in the brain and how it's encoded, I think is going to change a lot. And there are a number of other studies that have come out in the last year or so that echo this.
And so this was a paper in which we did something unthinkable, I think, in the sort of history of neuroscience, which is all about reduction. Let's make the experiment as simple as possible.
Only very one thing, right? And we're gonna find where that one thing is in the brain. And that's the tradition going back to Hubel and Weasel, right? Hubel and Weasel folks, my scientific great grandparents, no, we were bound to do it sooner or later.
They won the Nobel prize for their understanding, for their parsing of the neural basis of vision, neuroplasticity, et cetera. Torsten's still alive.
I think he's like a hundred now. Last time I saw him, he was 96 and he was still jogging and doing art.
David passed away. Amazing.
You can look it up. H and W, we call him Hewitt Weasel.
They're among our, they're on the Mount Rushmore of neuroscience and we'll get back to this. So please, yeah, explain to us what this paper showed.
And then we will then talk about how humans signal their hormonal status. And we'll go all the way back to monkey porn, I hope, because it's really near and dear to my heart.
We won't leave monkey porn in the past. So near and dear to my heart.
Okay, so human weasel, you know, we're going to really simplify because that's how we figure out exactly how it works. But it's not what our brains do.
That's not the environment our brains are in. I mean, when you're out there in the world, you've got this well-term, this just incredibly complex visual environment, social environment.
And what you do in any moment depends on what you experienced recently, what you think might happen next, what might have happened last week in a similar circumstance. It's super complicated.
And it reflects all these different competing interests and values. And that's true for monkeys too.
Okay. And so we did the dream, my dream experiment from back when I was an anthropologist, which was to get rid of the lab.
Okay. And instead, we recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in the brain in prefrontal cortex, which you mentioned, and we tend to think of as being important for decision making and kind of setting goals and context.
And also the sort of high level visual area in the temporal lobe that's important for sensing objects and maybe faces and things like that. So seemingly, you know, one at like an input level and one at like a higher order level.
We did this mostly because of some of technological limitations, but it turned out to be really like a good thing in the end because it told us something really unusual. So what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other.
Okay. So we'd have a male with his female friend or alone with a female friend on the other side of a, you know, a sort of plexiglass divider.
And then there could be other monkeys present, like as observers, like who are like watching what they're doing or not and then we also introduced challenges to them like so basically my graduate student would come in and like you know threaten one of the monkeys and this elicits a lot of agitation uh and arousal we're gonna have to say how you threaten monkeys you know look we're just like big kind of not as hairy monkeys um to them and and that makes to threaten. You look at them and you...
Yeah, so if you go to the zoo, folks, and you look directly at a monkey and you smile, that's a threat. If you want to be friendly with the monkeys, lip smack.
It's an affiliation thing. It almost looked like we were blowing kisses at one another.
You know, so we both looked away. Probably where it comes from.
That's right. That's probably where it comes from that's right yeah so this so you got a naturalistic so a natural experiment and so rather than having one you know varying one thing these monkeys engaged in like 27 28 different kinds of behaviors okay they you know they would forge it scratch they groom each other they threaten they mount they do everything that monkeys do right and then we also you know, we were varying the context as well.
And so that's like blows the lid off of the complexity in a typical experiment. And what did we find? We found that neurons in both these areas, they were indistinguishable, were modulated.
They were affected. Their firing rates, their activity was affected by the behaviors that the animals engaged

in and what the other animals engage in too. Also, who's around? Who's watching me? Is it like male, you know, X or female Y? And that, and what was really surprising, so first of all, you see these signals, they're basically the same.
These two parts of the brain are supposed to be very, very different. And the average neuron cared about something like seven things rather than one or two.
Like a grandmother cell, which was kind of one idea for how the brain encoded things. There's one neuron and it only responds to your grandmother, right? Something like that.
Jennifer Aniston cells. Jennifer Aniston cells, a famous.
Barack Obama cells. Barack Obama cells.
And now there's this question about whether or not they're in a relationship. So that's why I brought it.
But that was actually in the paper. There were neurons in the cortex that responded to Jennifer Aniston specifically.
Jennifer Aniston cells. Barack Obama specifically.
I'm guessing there are Donald Trump neurons. There's probably quite a few.
Right. And I'm guessing there were Biden neurons.
So- Maybe. Maybe.
So you're saying that two very distinct brain areas can respond very similarly to the same things. So that's one interesting finding.
And the second interesting finding, as I understand, is that neurons are paying attention, not just to what you're looking at, or the monkey is looking at, but also who's looking at them, who else is around, what the goal is. So individual neurons are multitasking.
They're multitasking. Got it.
Or as we say, multiplexing, but it's really the same thing as multitasking. And that raises a lot of really interesting questions.
Why? Why are these signals all over the place? Which it seems to be the case, right? And one idea that's out there is that because, you know, let's say it's a visual area, those visual neurons might need to know the context in which something is happening in order to appropriately, like, encode that stimulus, right? Because it matters. The meaning of that stimulus is another monkey.
Like, when I'm looking at you, it matters that we're in this setting here in California and I flew out here yesterday and all that stuff.

It might be really, really important for what my brain does with that information, like how I encode it, what I put into memory, et cetera. So that's sort of one hypothesis that I think that we're all entertaining.
because it would be, I mean, it would be heresy to say that, like,

actually, it's more like another name drop. Carl Lashley kind of view of the brain that it's just one big mush.
Yeah, so in 30 seconds, Carl Lashley ran a really critical experiment where it was the equal potentiality of cortex experiment, where basically there'd been decades of experiments with people lesioning a given area of the brain and seeing some deficit in behavior. Lashley decided to do the same experiment and found that regardless of which area of the cortex, this is important that it was the cortex specifically that he scooped out, lesioned, got rid of, set it in a dish next to the, his case, I think it was rats.
He didn't observe deficits in that behavior, at least that persisted. But you see this in the monkey and human data.
You can lesion a brain area, see a huge deficit. I know I'm telling you what you already know, Michael, but I think most people don't realize this.
A brain lesion can lead to a huge deficit in behavior that is recovered later over time through plasticity, unless you start digging into the deeper stuff of the brain where lesions lead to permanent deficits unless some intervention is provided. Yeah, the cortex seems to be maybe a little bit, I don't wanna say equipotential, but it's very plastic.
It's very flexible and very adaptive. So this was a really cool finding, I thought.
And we could decode from the population of neurons exactly what each of the animals was doing and who was around and who was watching, right? I mean, which, I mean, to me, it was very gratifying. But the thing that was most exciting to me, the most exciting, I think that finding is really cool for neuroscientists.
But for the primatologist, the anthropologist in me, the finding that was most exciting was that we discovered the account, the mental account for our social relationships. Okay, so for monkeys, a large fraction of the way that they build and maintain relationships is through grooming each other.
So when they go and they pick through each other's fur, and that's how you make friends, okay, that's how you make allies. And what has been observed going back to when monkeys were first being watched is that they tend to be really equitable, right? They're like, if I invest two minutes in you, you will eventually invest two minutes back in me.
It might not happen right away, but we're going to balance out. It's going to come even.
And that raised the idea, which most people thought was like ridiculous that, well, they're actually tracking and keeping notes on all this. They've got a ledger for their investments and withdrawals in this social relationship.
So to make it more salient for the listeners, like think of it as like when you're texting and you text a friend and they text you back and then you text them and you text them again and you text them again and you're like, am I getting ghosted? What the heck's going on here? Why are you not texting? You start to feel that sense of like urgency, betrayal, like, oh, I'm not going to text you now. I'm going to wait.
I'm going to wait until you text me back. It's the same kind of thing.
We have this sense of, and in fact, when we think about now all the stuff that's going on sociopolitically, you know, in terms of equitable relationships, I think that this bears on that. So we did something that had never been done before, which is we tracked every single grooming interaction that ever happened between these monkeys over months, because we could.
We had cameras on them and we used computer vision to do all that tracking. And yeah, they were perfectly equitable.
But sometimes it, you know, sometimes it would take minutes to balance it. Sometimes it took weeks.
Like you owe me, you owe me. And then it would come back.
What we found is that in the brain, the brain in these two, both of these brain areas, we're carrying that mental account that precisely tracked who owed whom what. How much grooming they, you know, that blew, I mean, that blew my mind.
It's like, cause we all feel that, right? It's like one of the most salient things there is in our lives. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp.
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Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. This explains, occasionally I'll get a text from a friend that says, nice conversation, which means they texted me a bunch before and I didn't respond.
And part of that has to do with, for me, the way that texts are archived, they can kind of drift down and then they're hard to find. And I'm a known long latency response person, but then I barrage, not intentionally.
I'll get on a plane and be like, oh, that's right. I'm going to get to these texts from a couple of weeks ago and respond to them or a couple of days ago.
And i find voice memos to be a good solution to this i have a couple of people in my life that with whom i mainly communicate through voice memo but it is very interesting that you know my my team here we we have a what feels like a very consistent cadence and um balance of accounts like the like the even the text duration like you know like i'm fine fine with a one word or even one letter text and I'm fine with an essay, like, but certain relationships, you just don't do that. So what is this, just because I can't help myself, what is the brain area that's tracking this account or is it a network? It's a network.
Okay, great. Then we don't have to- We don't have to.
Lock people down with people's, with brain areas. Well, this is amazing.
I mean, I think that rather than, you know, people talk about love languages, right? Like, is it physical touch? Is it acts of service? I think, you know, there are some of your words of affirmation. I'm guessing that some people are tracking these very carefully too in humans and balancing the account.
And that kind of love language idea seems like like our our five acts of of uh support or or a five physical uh contact uh events whatever you want to call it i know i'm really sounding like a scientist um a nerd um are those equivalent to you know five sentences of affirmation i i what i'm gathering is that the brain is probably calculating these things on an individual basis. And so it's not like five sentences equals five acts of service.
But that maybe it is, that there's some like internal valuation that is like very mathematical.

You're trying to balance the checkbook. I think it is very mathematical, but I think I want to

point out that in the pairs of monkeys, we've now expanded this to multiple monkeys in a big

open field, but they're equal kind of partners, right? So it made sense that that balance was

sort of one for one. And we know that studies of, you know, wild monkeys, wild primates,

that the sort of conversion, you know, like of conversion, like dollars to pesos or whatever, is not one-to-one if there's something else in that relationship. So if there's a power differential, it's like if you're beta male and you're grooming alpha male, it might be hundred minutes of grooming that alpha male that you get like one groom back.
Or more importantly, you groom that alpha male for months and years on end. And then he comes and saves your life when you are in an aggressive encounter with another individual.
So you see how that there is this, I think that's what you're getting at with me, with the love languages, which is that there is this underlying currency, but the value of that currency for each individual varies depending on what they, I don't know where that variation comes from, but depending on what's most important what's most

salient for them and then also probably what that relationship uh is like and if there's a power differential if there's any other kind of differential as well the math of power dynamics online is really interesting to observe uh on x where people tend to be a bit more combative at times not everybody but i've noticed this like you know this notion of like don't feed the trolls right like someone says something that's insulting and you know you don't honor them with a response you just let it go by that that would be somehow completing some sort of reward circuitry because what they really want is not to harm your reputation but to be acknowledged that their opinion matters and social media as, as long as people have access to an account, effectively levels the field. Although then there's this prioritization of like high follower accounts and what used to be that when blue checks became purchasable, right? That a lot of people were upset because it was essentially like, you know, equaling the status playing field somewhat, right? But it's very interesting to see how this stuff plays out.
You know, like, do you honor somebody with a response or like ignoring somebody's insult, the classic Mad Men Don Draper response, you know, in the elevator that has turned into a meme that, well, I don't think of you, I don't think about you at all, being the ultimate sort of display of his power that in terms of, you know, not even allowing his neural circuits to keep track of an account. It's like zero for you, is essentially what he was saying.
So is it the case that power dynamics are tracked across for conflict, for collaboration? We talked about love languages, which is a collaboration. Some people do seem in life to be very transactional, is the word we assign to it.
They're tracking like what you did this and I did this. No, you paid last time, I paid this, this kind of thing.
Or they're elevated by the idea that, oh yeah, they did this and this, therefore the relationship must be much tighter than perhaps the other person in the relationship thinks it is. These are complex features, but the idea that we are old world primates and that there's a brain network tracking this stuff to me makes really good sense.
And I think it's wonderful that you've identified a physiological anatomical substrate for it. I think it's, it's lends a lot of support to like thousands of years of observations.
Well, thanks. No, I, I, I think you're, you're spot on there in the, in the sense that, and at some point it's, it's all really transactional in the calculus of evolution, right so So ultimately, if your calculations do the right thing so that you get resources and mating opportunities and translate that into offspring, and that they do that into offspring as well, then whatever the biological substrate was that did that is going to proliferate and potentially become honed and really specialized for doing that job.
And that's actually the argument, one other argument for why, you know, we study primates because we're so closely related to them. We share all these features of our biology and our behavior.
But also because, and this is where I think, for example, personally, I find it much more compelling to study animals like rhesus macaques as opposed to say marmosets, which we've talked about a little bit, in the sense that if we're thinking about the forces that have made us who we are, right? Which as we just talked about, you see it displayed on X every day, like attending to all these things, tracking all these different relationships, deciding whether or not to give somebody your attention, you know, the purest form of generosity, as it was said. That's what monkeys have to do too.
this this argument from um what we call neuroethology and ethology being the science of basically trying to understand behavior as a product of of evolution right that it it it um that it's it's designed just like physical features just like like the wing of a bird, right, that our mental processes and the underlying mechanisms are designed to serve very specific functions. And so if we want to understand how we got to be the way that we are, we should look toward animals that seem to be doing the same kind of things, facing the same kinds of pressures in the environment, in particular the social environment, which seems to be the one that's most important for us.
How do humans signal their hormone status? This is on a very different end of the spectrum. Yeah.
But, you know, everything we're talking about, which is fairly high level and in the brain, exists, as I like to think about it, on a kind of a water level or a tide that's set by our levels of autonomic arousal, like thinking, feeling, action changes when levels of autonomic arousal are very high, aka stress, alertness versus when we're sleepy. And hormones certainly influence autonomic arousal and a bunch of other things too.
Hormones is a broad category, but let's just stay with the ones that most people are familiar with. So what are the data on how females signal, let's just say, you know, testosterone, estrogen, and other, you know, relevant hormones, and for males as well? What are the external signals or behavioral signals? Yeah, so that's a really important point that you made because they both, you know, those things go together.
So it's been most controversial for females, but, you know, in my view, the data is pretty clear and, you know, aligns, I think, with our own intuitions just from daily life, which is – well, some things are apparently not consciously perceptible. It's like hard to report.
But through studies where you just ask males for like, okay, this is – you know, how attractive is this woman or et cetera, that there are changes in the face, for example, and that's been one argument, is that, this is going to sound funny, but that the signals that in non-human primates are in the rear, because we're walking upright, you can't see that really, so now it's kind of in the face, and so these changes that happen, that the ovulatory cycle is reflected in the turgidity, how tight the skin is in the face, because it gets a little plumper and a little bit redder. And we may not be consciously aware of that, but that it's there, right? And it shows up in sort of preference data when you ask heterosexual males, you know, how attractive is this woman, et cetera.
So that, that seems to be the case. And also behavioral, you know, so, so sort of flirtatious behavior.
Increases around the time of ovulation. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. There's, there's a classic study that, that exotic dancers, strippers would actually get bigger tips, more tips when they were ovulating than when they're not ovulating.
Interesting. So there may be- And it could be by virtue of their behavior, but it could be the way they dance proximity to the, I guess the observers, clients, whatever you call them.
I don't recall that being quantified, but it suggests that there's a latent signal there. And that men are unconsciously processing this.
They're not saying, oh, her cheeks are particularly plump and red right now. But that if you measure their ratings or scores of attractiveness, when she's ovulating, it's these features that might be drawing out that response.
Correct. We can take this back to the monkey porn studies, which was our first real foray into trying to quantify the value of various kinds of social information for guiding decisions.
And we already came into this with a sense that, yeah, things like status, physical prowess, mating status, you look like a good mate, bad mate, are you in mating condition, you know, you, et cetera. And so when, you know, you think about that, like, how do you ask a monkey that question? You could ask them, they're not going to tell you because they can't talk, but you have to develop a behavioral way to elicit that.
And so what we did, I think it was pretty clever, was to riff on the studies that, you know, I had already done looking at varying the expected value of two options. So this was the work I did as a postdoc with Paul Glimcher, where we revealed economic signals in the brain, in the parietal cortex, an area between where visual signals come in and where you make a choice to make a behavioral response.
And we varied, like in this case, monkeys don't work for money, though they work for juice. Actually, it's really fun.
You spend a lot of time figuring out what juice they really love best. And then economically, you would vary the the size of the juice reward that each of the two offered or its probability while maintaining size constant.
When you combine those, you multiply those together, you get expected value. That's the first model of economic decision-making that was really ever developed, right? You compute the expected value, different options, you choose the one that has the highest value.
It doesn't work all the time, but it's sort of a rough proxy. And we showed that, yeah, neurons in the parallel cortex signal that.
Monkeys are good economists. They choose the one that has a higher expected value.
Okay, so now take that experiment. I'm going to have monkeys choosing between two options that vary in how much juice they pay out.
But I'm also going to pop up a picture when they choose one of them. And they don't know what picture is coming up, but the picture is going to be, it could be a nothing burger, just like some gray square.
It doesn't mean anything. Or it could be the perineum of a female, if it were males that we were studying.
We did this with males, sorry, females making choices eventually as well. Could be face of a dominant male, face of a subordinate male, face of female, et cetera.
What's the equivalent of the swollen taint of a female monkey for, if you reverse the experiment and it's the female monkey who's making a choice about male monkeys, what do they find really attractive in a male monkey? Yeah, so it's the taint of the male monkey because it's providing a signal about how much- Monkeys looking at taints of other monkeys. Yeah, how much testosterone is circulating, you know, that they've got on board basically, which is a good predictor of their status.
It's a good predictor of their, you know, fighting ability, all that kind of stuff. And if you're a female, that's a reasonable kind of choice to make because if you have male offspring and females are predisposed to choose that, then your male offspring are going to do pretty well.
So that's what we did. And we varied how much juice.
So sometimes monkeys would get paid. They'd have to give up juice to see the pictures.
Sometimes they'd get paid more to see the pictures. And what we did then is we construct a choice curve and we use the differential.
If it's not 50-50, if it slides one way or the other, it tells us that monkeys are paying X amount to see certain kinds of pictures or you have to overpay them, right? And so what did we find? It was really, I think, scientifically revealing but it's pretty fun. People got it immediately.
They will pay. Juice.

Juice, they will give up juice.

They will pay it to see pictures of the perineum,

the hind quarters of females.

This was a original study, it was in male monkeys.

They will pay to see the faces of dominant males

and you had to pay them to see the faces

of subordinate males, okay?

So females will give up juice to see the taints of testosterone rich male monkeys, and male monkeys will pay juice to see the swollen taints of female monkeys that are, because of the swelling, indicates a better reproductive competence. Yes, better, you know, the time is ripe, okay, to mate.
But it's just in general, it's a signal that is like, what we would say is it's important, it has value. Monkey porn.
It's something you should track. And in fact, yeah, they're paying for it.
So, you know, it just blew up on the internet. Even back then, it was like suddenly millions.

Every website was like, oh, you proved monkey porn, blah, blah, blah. It was kind of a fun ride.
It was a New York Times idea of the year in 2005, which was, again, kind of shocking. You know, there's like a little word on that.
But people, it makes sense. And the thing I want to point out is that we ran this same experiment in people, not with unclothed humans.
So we used, and we used only, well, no, it was, and we had to create our own stimulus set because all the stimulus sets that were out there for visual studies of humans were like a bunch of German people looking very dour. They were very well controlled and we wanted something that was more natural.
So we downloaded thousands of photos from this website, hotornot.com. I don't know if you recall that, but it was a website where you could upload pictures and people would rate you.
I mean, now that probably wouldn't be allowed now. I remember, I remember rate my pet.
Rate my professor i think which is still around we're saying rate rate yes rate rate with a t my pet yeah but this was hot or not.com so you get all these really natural looking and then we had this was really funny though too um so we had uh a group of separate groups of raters from the people who we actually tested in the experiment. So we had a group of males, heterosexual males, rating the female photos and vice versa.
And that was interesting in its own right. So we were just trying to establish, like, we're not saying why they're attracted or anything like that.
Just like let's measure it.

Okay.

And it was really fun because, you know, by the, it took, it was hard work.

You have to do one every three seconds and it took like an hour.

And the you know, when the women were done rating, they're like, okay, I'm glad that's over.

The hour's over and our male raters were like, did you have any more?

You know, can I, I'd be happy to sit here and rate more photographs for you.

Interesting.

So women got sort of like, they got tired of rating males for attractiveness. Yes.
Males did not tire of rating females for attractiveness. They did not at all, which that's anecdotal, but it's still, I think it's revealing.
Then we ran the pay-per-view experiment, just like in Monkees on humans. Pay-per-view.
And we also ran a couple of other standard economic tasks. One would be, how long are you willing to wait? So that's a delayed discounting.
And generally, you will wait longer for a bigger reward, a smaller reward. And also, how hard would you work?

And the work was like you had to alternate pressing two keys on a keyboard.

It was really just menial, laborious, et cetera.

So they're too interesting.

Just sociologically, it's interesting what comes out of this.

Our female subjects basically wouldn't give up money. They were working for money.
They were hearing the sound of coins coming out of a slot machine, which was proportional to how much money they actually got. Real money.
Real money. If you ignored the pictures, you'd go home with like $17 extra compared to if you were influenced by them.
And the females did really well economically. So they pretty much kind of ignored the pictures of the males, even though they were rated, even the ones that were super hot, they were not very concerned with that.
For the males, it was the exact opposite. So the males are giving up essentially, they're paying, and they had thousands of trials, they're paying somewhere between a half and three quarters of a cent to see images of women who were rated in the top like third of attractiveness.
They also would wait significantly longer and they would work really hard. It's like rats pressing for cocaine quite literally to keep those pictures up on the screen.
Okay so that's the setting. We've established in monkeys and in people similar economic principles that are guiding social, you'd call it attention, social evaluation, whatever.
So we're like, okay, let's go look in the brain. So we did an MRI experiment, fMRI experiment, measured blood flow to, you know, different parts of the brain.
And we only tested males because they were the ones who displayed differential preferences there. And what we found is that kind of parts of the visual system that are involved in encoding faces, but then the reward system was activated and tracked linearly how much money these guys were paying to see images.
There's basically the trade-off value, the currency, the translation of pictures into money. Then in monkeys, we studied all the same areas, but now we could record from individual neurons in those areas rather than looking at blood flow, which is a crude proxy.
and we found exactly the same thing, which is that neurons in the reward system were spontaneously and strongly activated by those pictures, you know, that made sense, right? So the pictures of the peroneia of females by dominant male faces. And that correspondence I thought was pretty compelling.
So these are brain areas that are involved in value-based decision-making. Not unlike the value-based decision-making of tracking how many grooming events, grooming events one received versus needs to give, or texts one has received or gives, or acts of service one trades for some other love language.
I mean, here I'm extrapolating to a lot of different themes, but I mean, talk about transactional. I mean, this implies that our neural circuitry, while flexible, we can, you know, trade two of those for one of those, or we can decide, you know, I'm just going to be a selfless giver, that that's a decision.
and that altruism, well, it certainly exists.

I mean, we fortunately see acts of altruism a lot,

probably not as much as humanity would be served by,

but it exists altruism exists uh but nonetheless there's a formula that's maintained in the brain like I'm going to do all this for nothing and the the circuit kind of understands that versus I'm going to do this, but there's an expectation, maybe with a long latency, that at some point it's going to be paid back. I expect to be paid back.

The idea of altruism has been very controversial within kind of evolutionary biology for a long time, because it's kind of hard to imagine a scenario in which being purely selfless could persist if there was a genetic part of that, right? If it were heritable. So that's why we have ideas of like kin selection, like I will give up my life for eight of my cousins, for example.
Well, right. And I was saying in parenting and taking care of young, like we give selflessly, but there's this like unconscious or semi-conscious backdrop, which is you want your own offspring to proliferate, to survive and flourish.
And so it's not quote unquote, really selfless, although in the short term it can appear selfless. That's I guess, I suppose the real evolutionary biology argument.
I would say that in terms of just pure acts of giving where we don't expect anything in return, I think most people that do that say, certainly I've had this experience, right? It feels good. So there is a return on investment.
It's just that the return doesn't come from somebody else doing something to reciprocate in the same domain, but it feels good. You know, there's nothing more impressive than an anonymous donor, right? You know, actually, I don't want to take us too far off track, but there's this idea in a lot of Europe that if somebody donates a lot of money to a cause that, you know, they're doing philanthropy, that they're like trying to hide something.
Whereas in this country, that tends to be not the case, although it's sort of growing this idea that, oh, if somebody is giving a lot of money to a university, they want their name on the side of a building, they're really looking to kind of either hide other features of their life and or they want respect, right? They want fame. So it's kind of interesting.
I like to believe in pure altruism. It feels good to me to believe in true altruism.
So I don't think this is settled. And I think this is where there's another feature of human and maybe human evolution, humans and human evolution, that's relevant here, which is that we may be one of the only organisms in which something called group selection might happen.
And that's this idea that like groups are competing with each other in addition to individuals competing and and and collaborating and competing and so that an individual evolution might favor groups in which there are certain individuals who are in a sense wired to be selfless and um there's one of my colleagues at um pen a guy named duncan watts has done these really interesting experiments where he'll he had he ran these massive online like prisoner's dilemma games where you know people are having to decide whether to um you know to either support you know their their partner or or um defect essentially and uh but what was unusual about these games is he let people play them over and over again hundreds and hundreds of times what typically happens is once you've experienced the fact that like if you cooperate you're going to get screwed eventually then everybody just says i'm just gonna i'm just screwing the other guy from here on out.

But he identified that there's a population of like 20% of people, I think, something like that, who are persistent cooperators, who cooperate no matter what their experience. And that is resonant with this idea kind of from group selection that groups that had individuals who were cooperators, who were selfless no matter what, might out-compete other groups, right? And I think that's a really interesting idea.
I want to circle back to what you were saying about the feel good, like when you give. There's a real substrate to that.
If we can engage in a little reverse inference, is that and this and this was um shown actually a couple decades ago by by a neuro economist named bill harbaugh for the first time which is that um when you give to uh like a charity that you love you see activation of reward circuitry that looks just like if you got the reward yourself right so it's So it i give to whatever march of dimes or something on that and that's what i love then it in essence feels good to me and that reward system activation right is the thing that uh through dopamine reinforces behavior so when you have that warm glow it makes you more likely to do that again in the future. It's a self-reinforcing signal.
I love that those sorts of circuits exist because they seem to serve the greater good. And I'm not trying to rub away our more, I don't know, harsher features of primate brain wiring, but they're all in there.
So speaking of which, are there external signals besides muscularity, jaw shape, et cetera, that relate to levels of testosterone in male humans that are transient? The male hormones don't cycle as robustly as female hormones because of the lack of a menstrual cycle. They might change with age, et cetera.
But is there anything that signals testosterone or free testosterone level? Certainly stress hormone level is signaled, quaking of hands, that kind of thing. But what about testosterone signaling that is independent of the kind of like vigor display stuff that we normally hear about? It's a good question.
I think it's important, as you pointed out, that it doesn't vary too much over, you know, weeks or months or anything like that. It's pretty stable.
But, well, one thing we can think about is work done by my colleague, Giddy Nave, who's in the marketing department at Wharton, and working with Colin Kammerer, actually, out here at Caltech. They did a number of studies, not where they are measuring testosterone, but doing very well-controlled placebo, you know, trials of applying testosterone gel versus something that you didn't know which arm you were getting.
So testosterone versus placebo. Versus placebo, yeah.
And measuring things like desire for conspicuous consumption. So buying, you know, luxury cars or things like that, or other things are their cognitive reflection, like they're really bad at, you know, they start to fail on things that require not just giving the simple answer.
They become more risk-taking. So there's a number of features that we kind of, I think, collectively, anecdotally think of as being like hyper-masculine associated with testosterone.
Like you want a signal, like you're a big guy, you take more risks. And you're less reflective.
You just play more and you're less reflective. So that, you know, and I'm going to screw it up right now if I actually tried to give you the question.

You know, but it's like, you know, a bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. You know, I'm going to screw it up.
And then you're going to say, well, you know, you lack cognitive reflection. Let's just leave that aside.
But then they're much more likely to give the wrong answer. Go to the jump to the conclusion, which seems obvious, but it's wrong.
So higher testosterone, more impulsive with responses, less reflective.

Yes. But more confident.
But more confident. More risk-taking, that kind of thing.
That's kind of a, okay, fully expected one. And I guess the purchasing items that signal wealth or status.

It's a display. So think of it as like the chimpanzee.
So when researchers first went out to study chimpanzees in Africa and then they had like generators or whatnot around and they had these big gasoline cans or whatever, and the male chimps, one of the male chimps, you know, discovered that he could take these cans and run around the group banging them together and getting a lot of attention. You know, which is similar.
You see them up in a tree. Vigor display.
Vigor display, displaying that, you know, just grabbing, I think, so much of its attention. Just look at me, look at me, look at me.
And I think that's what you've got going on with this sort of, you know, buying a Jaguar or whatever. You know, it's like, it's- Or people are trying to signal what they don't have, actually have, right? I mean, it's tricky because we, now you can buy things on credit.
Like, you know, there are a bunch of jokes about Los Angeles that can be made here. You know, my, my, I grew up in the Bay Area and there are areas of the, of the Bay Area where there's a tremendous amount of wealth.
My dad used to always say, you know, you know, appear like wealth is really kind of hidden back in, in the trees, literally. You know, you go to LA and there's all this display through stuff.
It depends on where you are in LA. But it's largely true.
You see, let me put it this way. You see a lot more yellow Lamborghinis here than you do in Portola Valley, but I'll be willing to bet that there's far more money in Portola Valley than there is in all of Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles.
If you really just looked at actual net worth, Not an experiment I want to run, but I'd be willing to bet one entire limb of somebody's choice to run that experiment. And so there is this kind of strange thing where the display of vigor is so flexible in humans.
right like um right it's like uh you know nowadays there's a lot of discussion about

billionaires signaling more traditional or primitive forms of vigor, like fighting ability or muscle versus, you know, like it's almost like, and I think part of the reason for that is that the concept of a billion dollars is very hard for most people to conceptualize as like an operational thing, like what they would do with it and how it would impact their level of happiness, which is probably actually very little, et cetera. But we can assess physical qualities so readily.
And so anyway, I guess that this is really just my way of taking us back to this idea of valuation, like how we place value on a potential mate or a friend or a coworker. It sounds so transactional, but clearly the brain is performing these operations all the time.
And it's highly variable depending on who you are, the social context you live in. And yet these hormones, especially testosterone and estrogen, seem to really be playing with the volume or the gain on all of this stuff.
Yep, that's exactly how, and in fact, that's how I think about all, we can think about oxytocin the same way as like a volume knob for pro-social interactions in general and testosterone. So I think that works.
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Again, that's function health.com slash Huberman to get early access to function. Let's talk about oxytocin.
We hear about it as the love hormone, the affiliative hormone folks, it's a neuro hormone. So it somewhere in between a neuromodulator and a hormone.
Let's set all that aside, all the mechanistic stuff. And I'd love to know your knowledge about like what changing levels of oxytocin does to perception, to behavior, humans.
So yeah, oxytocin, I mean, we've been interested in it for a long time because, as you said, it seems to be a dial that can turn up or turn down certain aspects of social behavior and other aspects of mental and emotional function. It's important to point out that oxytocin and its sister neurohormone vasopressin, arginine vasopressin, which is sort of maybe a little more important in males than in females, and females oxytocin a little more important.
But they're in both. And they've been around a long time.
They've actually, you know, there's a very early in vertebrate evolution. In mammals, oxytocin has the primary role, right, of helping to build bonds between mom and baby so um oxytocin is released during childbirth it's released when mom is nursing and it seems that in humans and some other social you know really really social creatures it's now been co-opted to kind of have a similar kind of role in the relationships you have with other people who are not your offspring or your your pair mate right so because oxytocin for example is released you know when you orgasm and so then that's you know thought to be why that sort of pillow talk afterward is you know it's like it's a little more engaging and you know people feel things at that time that they might that they're different from what they would have felt It fosters attachment.
Fosters attachment. That's a good way of putting it.

So. You know, people feel things at that time that they might have, that they're different from what they would have felt.
It fosters attachment.

It fosters attachment. That's a good way of putting it.
So oxytocin levels are hard to measure, right? You can measure at a distance in the periphery in the blood, but it's not exactly like one-to-one correlated with what's going on in the brain. and in general we don don't want to put like a, you know, a pump or a little thing in your brain that we could measure how much is in there.
So we can look at instead, what is often done is to look at what happens if you introduce oxytocin, more oxytocin than you normally have like into the brain. You can't inject it or anything like that.
And the way that it's typically applied is to squirt it up your nose or inhale it intranasally. So it then is taken up by the nerves that are in your sinuses and whatnot, and then goes into the brain.
That was what it was thought to. I think that we were the first to show that that's actually how it works.
We did all the work in monkeys where it's all these things are just sort of easier to do and the behavior is a little bit less complex. So our readouts are, I think, a bit more straightforward.
In the human studies, there's a lot of variation. It's controversial because there's a lot of like, there's some crap studies and there's just a lot of variability in the effects across studies.
I think some of that's just because you ask people to squirt it up their own noses. And so there's a lot of, that introduces variation in just how good they were at getting it in the right place.
With the monkeys, what we did instead is we used what's called a nebulizer or aerosolizer. I had noticed when my kid had pneumonia and I took him to the ER, they put this mask on him and they missed this albuterol, which opened up his airways.
Oh, we could do that with oxytocin too. So that's what we do with the monkeys.
It makes sure they get like a really good dose. And then we show that that gets right into the brain.
Okay, now that puts us in a position to ask questions of what does it do. One of the first things that oxytocin does is it relaxes you.
So just overall, you know, you were talking about autonomic function, it's a relaxer, it's an anxiolytic. So it, and in monkeys, what that does is it reduces their vigilance to sort of any threats.
So they're just a lot more chill. So that's sort of a primary thing.
And then we've looked at how it affects their behavior in males and females separately. Because as I said before, they sort of...
First of all, males and females have different strategies and behaviors and the expression of where oxytocin receptors are in the brain, etc. And vasopressin receptors are a little bit different.
And in male monkeys, it's super interesting. Because, you know, we've been talking about how, you know, dominance and they're really, like, recent macaques, this really steep hierarchy.
And one of the things we found right away is that you give oxytocin and it just flattens the hierarchy. So the dominant male monkeys become super chill and friendly and the subordinate ones become a bit bolder, perhaps because, you know, if I dose my own or I've dosed you with oxytocin and changed your behavior, which would change my behavior.
So it reverberates across individuals. So it flattens the hierarchy.
They spend more time making eye contact. They pay more attention to the other individual.
And we've shown that- It's Burning Man. Yeah, it's true.
I've never been to Burning Man. I've never either.
But this is what I hear. No, I think that's the right point.
And I'll circle back to that, because we also showed that in a task-based situation where a monkey can choose, we gave monkeys choices of whether they could give a reward to themselves, to another monkey, to a bottle that could collect reward, you know, in case they just like to see juice dripping out. And they would become more pro-social.
So they're much more likely to give a reward to another monkey. They're more altruistic, as you, you know, as we talked about earlier.
So that's like, it looks like a real pro-social kind of thing, right? Which I think is super interesting. In females, it's a little bit different.
Females become kind of nicer to each other, and we see the greater eye contact, etc. But they become more aggressive toward males.
And we speculate, I think, it's the hypothesis that because oxytocin is released when you've got an infant, basically, for females, males are a bigger threat then. Because in many primate societies and other mammals, males sometimes can be infanticidal because if they kill off a female's infant, then that will bring that female into receptivity for mating much more quickly.
And so that's sort of the evolutionary... Yeah, it is brutal, the evolutionary rationale behind that.
So that's kind of our supposition. The other thing that I thought is really interesting as well is we find a greater or an increase in the synchronization of behavior.
So when I do, you know, this idea of mirroring, which has been talked about in business context for a long time, you know, it's a real thing. And it's a marker of a good relationship, a strong relationship.
If you have good rapport with somebody, you tend to adopt the similar movements and postures. And if you do those things...
Shirts. Shirts.
Exactly. We didn't coordinate here.
Yeah, similar clothes. Yeah.
You just happen to be a great dresser. Oh, well, you know, same here.
So when you have that, you know, actually, if you do those things, if I subtly mirror you, and I'm in a job interview, I'm more likely to get the job, I'm going to get a higher salary, same here. So when you have that, you know, actually if you do those things, if I subtly mirror you and I'm in a job interview, I'm more likely to get the job, going to get a higher salary, et cetera.
Really? All those sort of good things. So oxytocin turns up behavioral synchrony.
And one of the things, this is like something I've been fascinated in for the last decade and we and a lot of other people have been working on is that this synchrony, the behavioral and neural level, physiological synchrony, is kind of, it's this black magic of social behavior. It's the glue that allows us to live and work together.
So the observation is that if you and I, we have a good rapport here, let's say, if we were measuring activity in our brains right now, we'd see that they were coming into alignment. So they might have been very disparate when I arrived here and you arrived here today.
And as we've grown closer and we've discovered things that are similar about us, that our mindsets and our emotional sets are more overlapping. So we see this world more similarly.
We feel more similarly about it. We're more likely to take similar decisions.
And then the coolest thing is this reverberates down to your body. So if our brains begin to align, our hearts actually begin to beat together, even if we have different resting heart rates.
You begin to breathe together and you start to move together. You start to look at the same things in the environment.
We've talked about attention. When you look at something, the same thing, you're getting the same data, and that feedback loop, which I think now you can see that that is a way to coordinate behavior.
And that is the essence of sort of, that's our secret sauce as a species, which is

that we can collaborate and do things together. And it seems to like oxytocin, vasopressin are involved in this as a way of kind of turning up the dial on synchrony.
It seemed to turn up the so-called social brain network. And then that synchrony is the glue and it's a biomarker, a biological marker of a close relationship that predicts better communication, increased trust, better teamwork, you know, whether your marriage is going to last.
I mean, the things that it predicts, you know, group decision-making, so we showed that in a business context. Committees that are more in sync with each other, that their hearts are beating together, are more likely to reach the right decision in a really difficult problem than committees that are not.
The cool thing is that now that you have a biomarker, you can hack that, right, in the sense that now we can start looking at all those trust-building exercises or anything else that, you know, is supposed to turn things up, turn up the dial on teamwork or communication, and we have a readout. And we could say, yeah, that's working.
That's actually doing the thing. It's not BS, right? You should invest your time and energy in that rather than something else.
And there's like now we've been working through this list as well as. And it's a whole host of things that seem to actually turn up synchrony.
And that's a shortcut to team chemistry. So interesting.
I'm sure you're familiar with the molecule MDMA, AKA ecstasy. Never taken it.
I have. High on my list.
Yeah, I have. It's an illegal drug, but if you are part of a clinical trial exploring MDMA, then you can do it legally.
If you're not, you're breaking the law. Right.
So methylene dioxymethamphetamine, it's very interesting because it dramatically increases dopamine, but not nearly as much as it increases serotonin. And it also leads to enormous increases in oxytocin.
And it's not really a classic psychedelic, it's an empathogen. And it has unique properties in that it raises dopamine and serotonin simultaneously.
That's unusual among compounds like amphetamine, dopamine, epinephrine, psilocybin, serotonin, broadly speaking. There's a really nice experiment that was done trying to isolate the effects of dopamine versus serotonin versus oxytocin on the empathogenic effect.
And by administering different drugs, and in the case of oxytocin, oxytocin directly, what they basically concluded was that oxytocin has very little, if anything, to do with the pathogenic aspects of MDMA. But if I recall correctly, and I have to go back and look at this, but if I recall correctly had a profound impact on as you pointed out the um reducing anxiety and that reduction in anxiety brings us back to this idea that you know as we change the tide of autonomic arousal things become more or less available to us in terms of emotions and behavior so i i find oxytocin to just be like spectacularly interesting compound for so many reasons, but perhaps for that reason more than all the others, that it's like it's our own affiliative, as you said, angsiliotic.
Is that how I pronounce that correctly? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. To, I never actually said that word out loud.
I've written it many, many times. It's kind of, when I said it, I was worried that like, maybe I'm saying the opposite.
Or anxiolytic, anyway, reduces anxiety, folks. Chills you out.
Chills you out. And I think that's so interesting that oxytocin can be evoked by all these different types of stimuli.
Yeah. So as you mentioned, it's like post-coital or post-orgasmic, but it can be elicited by non-sexual affiliative touch.
There's actually really interesting evidence that, and this led to this question about whether or not cesarean sections versus, you know, traditional vaginal births are, you know, are they truly equal in terms of their effect on the fetus? And it does seem to be, at least in rodent models, that the passage through the vaginal canal during birth helps stimulate oxytocin, that it has a bidirectional effect on the mother-infant relationship. Is there any evidence of that in primates as well? I know the evidence that you're talking about.
I don't know of evidence in primates for that. But I think I'd like to circle back to what you talked about in terms of social touch, which I think is a really, especially right now today, I think is a very important topic to consider.
So we, like other primates, we have these, they're actually unspecialized sensors in our skin, the hairy parts of our skin, like your arm, whatever. And they provide input essentially to a system that releases oxytocin directly.
And that's basically all they do. They're really bad at telling you exactly where or how, you know, what's being done or how much pressure.
But they operate best at body temperature. So you're being touched with a body temperature stimulus.
And in a way that's what we would consider to be very pleasant like getting tickies you know yeah grooming like it's the same thing as grooming in in monkeys and so it tells us that this is an ancient part of our heritage to building relationships which is actually through social touch right and it's been and I think reasonably, that we're living through an epidemic of the loss of social touch for a lot of good reasons, right? Because of raising awareness of inappropriate touch, et cetera. But now it's almost as if we've swung the pendulum too hard in one direction which is that we're being robbed of

this very natural intrinsic signaling mechanism for building bonds that humans would normally you know normally would you know in the past have benefited greatly from and it's you know it's not clear how we move forward in terms of like replacing that but i do think it's possibly part of the constellation of forces of losses that is is making us very sick as a species and as a society you you know, namely the loneliness epidemic, the sort of antisocial century, which with concomitant, you know, with basically all these fall-ons in terms of anxiety and depression and- Despair. Despair, exactly.
Yeah, what a- Despair, it's such a great word. Yeah, it captures so much.
A couple of reflections about this, I guess I think about this a lot. I'll never forget when I was traveling overseas in 2019.
So this is like pre lockdowns and all that. You would see in certain areas of the world, men walking, holding hands.
Right. And, you know, I didn't know their sexual orientation, but my assumption was that they

were heterosexual men holding hands because it was just very much part of the culture over there. The other thing was if you, and I have gone to South America, you'll see school kids walking home, all holding hands, boys and girls just walking, holding hands.
It's very casual, you-romantic hand holding. A lot more hugging, a lot of like, I wouldn't say long firm embrace, but I'd say like vigorous embrace upon meeting kind of thing.
And I grew up in the era of fist bumps and side hugs. That was like a thing over here.
And as you pointed out, I think that the lack of physical touch of that sort, meaning just whatever is culturally acceptable, consensual, casual physical touch, definitely according to the literature that I'm aware of, signals to the rest of the nervous system and body isolation, even if we're surrounded by people. And I watched that chimp empire series on Netflix where they talk about this allopathic grooming, this collaborative grooming, like I'll trade, you know, five, you know, pick your back for a while, you pick mine mine and when they decide that they're going to ostracize a given member of their troop for whatever reason sometimes it's because that the the chimp misbehaved other times it's more diabolical than that they're trying to really get rid of they're trying to adjust the power balance in the troop um for other reasons uh they basically just leave that chimp to try and groom itself and then the parasites start to eat away at it.
It develops these immune issues and then they often just go off on their own and die. It's an incredibly hard thing to watch and what the underlying reasons are in each case are not made completely clear.
But I think about this whole thing of like deaths of despair. And, you know, not long ago you were talking about group selection.
I feel like these two themes might be related. I feel like right now politically and culturally in this country and now starting in Europe as well, it really is – it has become an us versus them kind of scenario.
There doesn't seem to be a middle at all. It's like a big trough.
Yeah. And even the suggestion that somebody could kind of switch between groups is kind of like a no.
Because they believe and have said and done this, no, because they believe and have said and done this. And very strong opinions from both sides.
um I don't think we're in a just hug it out kind of uh landscape right now and um so I'm curious what forms of non-physical affiliative behavior exist out there there are social media accounts out there like upworthy which you know just consistently puts out out positive content. There are people who are very positive in their, you know, in their online behavior, but, and there's encouragement, exists online, but it seems to be swamped by these like high salience, like attacks, like what's the deal? What can we do? Yeah.
I mean, this is a fundamental question for our age, I think. And we're on a trajectory toward, well, I mean, I don't want to give the impression that I'm a complete pessimist, but I was about to say toward oblivion between, like, the despair that has been driving people to either commit suicide or to develop severe mental illness

or physical health issues, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc.,

that are, I think, a consequence of being, in some cases,

a consequence of being isolated because you are not interacting.

That's part of who we are as a species, and we don't thrive.

I mean, the work is very clear that being isolated, being being alone is worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I mean, it's just really, really bad.
And it scales, it's almost linear to how many contacts you have, you know, per week or per month. So that's all really bad.
And I do believe that's also driving, that's a big driver for not just the deaths of despair, but like the lack of coupling and the lack, you know, and crashing rates of fertility, which is also a real thing and is happening. And if we don't counter it, it's going to be bad.
Getting back to synchrony, one of the most effective ways to get in sync with somebody that you're out of sync with or that you don't know, right, who's different from you, is through conversation, but deep conversation, okay? And there's a couple parts to this. You have to make the time and the space to do this.
You have to have an intentional mindset. And we and other scientists have worked with, there are these structured sets of questions that have been developed.
There's one called Fast Friends developed by the Arons in the late 1990s. There's commercially available decks online that you can get.
And they're cool because each question, you can kind of take it at a superficial level or a deep level, but they're designed to kind of like break the ice and then get you really fast into like really deep questions. Is this like 100 questions to fall in love type thing that was published in the New York Times?

Yeah, it's very similar to that.

But in this case, it's about connecting,

like deep connection.

I think it's more about deep connection

than sort of romance part of this.

And what happens during that,

and my good friend and colleague,

Emily Falk at the Annenberg School, had a really nice paper recently that showed that by measuring brain activity itself in people who don't know each other as they work through these questions and their brain, you know, one brain is in this space, another brain is in this space and they over time come into really close alignment and that's associated with all this good stuff like I I like you more, I feel closer to you, I value you more, et cetera, et cetera. And once you're in that kind of alignment, now you're set to sort of do things together.
And now I think that gets back to your question, like we can't hug it out, but we have to somehow create space. And when I say space, like give people the space to do that.

Like I'm going to talk to somebody from the other political party or from the whatever.

That's not a bad thing, right?

In fact, that's what we need to do.

But instead we're, especially online, reinforcing and making the barriers harder to have those conversations,

which are the necessary thing, I think, to establish the glue that keeps us together. Yeah.
I feel like unless there's a organized effort to try and create a bridge, it ain't going to happen. I just feel like there's, I don't want to take us too far off course, but maybe this is a good segue into the neuroscience of decision-making and value-based making which is so much of the work that you've done but i feel like there's this property of the human brain that there's evidence for i have seen a beautiful neuron paper showing that like confirmation of our beliefs leads to a reward-based activation of a reward-based mechanism basically we're getting a little bit of dopamine for confirming our biases essentially about others.
And then of course, if we then experience more affiliative behavior from our group, we feel more protected. And then there's a tendency to do more of that.
And I feel like with the knowledge that we have about dopamine incentive schemes, group selection behavior, there ought to be a program that could be established that isn't hug it out, but that is designed to, again, that word exploit is so loaded, to leverage the same neural circuits that led to the divide to try and bridge this divide. And, you know, what, what it has to do though, is it has to break with the value system of, of both groups.
I mean, let's just be frank. We're talking about the left and the right here.
I don't want to like, I don't want to dance around the margins, you know, and, and somehow acknowledge that there's good and bad within both of those groups which itself as i say is like a heretical statement like people are going to i mean there's just so many assumptions made just on the basis of that but create a new uh value-based system that is self-rewarding and allows for group selection to you know fill in in the gap gap or at least come up with a third option, if not politically, then in terms of sociology. Yeah.
So the solution is Independence Day, that movie. So we need an alien invasion.
So there's an out group that we can all identify with each other as, okay, we have to come together to fight. Because I think that's really at the root of this, which is that because of group selection, humans are sort of very tribal by nature.
We are wired to connect, to glue together with the people who are in our tribe. But that means almost by definition there's another tribe, right? So that we're over here and we're defending ourselves against them.
Now, it's not like complete, right? People have been engaging in long distance trade for, you know, 100,000 years plus. You know, there is interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans.
so there's you know some flexibility in those rules but in general yeah i mean uh to have an in group that means you have to have um an out group and if we want to take the left and right and put them together in some ways it's like the easiest way to do that is if we had a third out group that we needed to unite against such as drones from from over new jersey or or you know aliens or uh you know who knows what but well these go back to classic psychology experiments right as i recall where you know the best way to build affiliations have a common common goal uh or and or enemy yeah like that's it unfortunately being under attack when two opposing groups are are both under attack, they form alliances. So it's the classic minimal group experiments of Zion in the 60s, which I love and I teach on this all the time because it's relevant for all these tribal biases.
And so what he did was like, you take the random people off the street and you go like, okay, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team. Okay, in five minutes, you're going to have to compete against the other team.
And immediately the people on the red team are like, I don't like the people on the blue team. They're stupid and they're ugly.
And you don't know anything about them, right? But you end up immediately forming a tribe, even though you might not have had anything in common. And what I think is really interesting and relevant here is that any number of different biases that are sort of superficial based on race or ethnic group or whatnot, which have been shown to, you know, even though people say like, oh, I feel, you know, if I see you in pain, like you're getting stuck with a needle, like, oh, I feel the same for anyone.
It doesn't matter. But it tends to be selective for your own tribe when you measure the brain activity.
But if you now put the emphasis on team, like literally you do that science experiment, that minimal group experiment, and I put you in a red or like we're both wearing black T-shirts. So you're going to work with the other people with black T-shirts.
It doesn't matter who you are. That, and I think the way it does this is through attention, is put my attention on what's shared rather than what's different.
So now we're on the same team. And now that kind of recovers, restores that, that the empathy that I didn't feel toward you before.
And that's interesting when you think about, say, in the US, the first places, the first groups that became integrated were like military and sports, right? And what's common amongst those? They wear uniforms, right? So the uniforms say we're on a team that takes your attention away from the things that are different. And the Stanford Prisoner, famous Zimbardo experiment, where assigning people to prisoner versus guard, and that led where it led.
Exactly. That occurred not but a short distance from where my lab was.
So we have this anxiety-lowering pro-affiliative oxytocin thing, activated by touch affiliation. And it's bi-directional, like it promotes more touch, which promotes more feelings of safety, which lowers anxiety further.
And then we have testosterone, which signals certain things about others and seems to play a role in the hierarchy. And you mentioned that when oxytocin is given, that it kind of flattens the hierarchy.
And my understanding of testosterone from Robert Sapolsky and others is that testosterone tends to exacerbate existing traits in people. It doesn't turn nice people into jerks or jerks into nice people, but rather it turns jerks into super jerks and nice people into super nice people, which fits well with my idea that testosterone makes effort feel good.
And what type of effort feels good depends on a lot of complex features within us as humans, like too many things to explain by molecules. So I feel like the primate literature and the human literature map so well to one another.
And I think this is a good segue to take us into value-based decision-making because I do recall a paper published, I think it was in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, I should point that out, there are other proceedings in other countries, that showed that, you know, if day traders or people on the stock market floor took testosterone or they tended to be more aggressive and impulsive in their decision-making, or if you just looked at performance and then you measured testosterone, that it tended to fall out on a pretty nice correlation between higher testosterone and basically more aggressive decision-making, more risk-taking. So is that all still true? I mean, that's my read of literature.
That is still true. And it does raise, I think, a worrying specter of, you know, because, like, I don't know how much of a phenomenon it is now, but it was the case maybe a decade ago or so that, like, you know, a lot of guys who were traitors who were feeling like they were losing their mojo after they, you know, after 40 or whatnot, you know, declining testosterone.
So they decide they're going to start juicing, put some Androgel on. And if that's like taking you above typical levels, then what might that do in terms of markets if like enough people are actually...
Or even if they're juicing just for physical performance, right? And they're engaged in, you know, in trading. That could have a lot of bad effects, right? As it cascaded through the market.
Yeah, I would say that probably the dominant effect of exogenous androgens and all this TRT nowadays is it's very clear that it allows people to maintain moderate to high testosterone levels even if they're not sleeping as much. It enhances recovery.
So if people have their behaviors right, their nutrition, their sleep, etc., it really does give them a significant advantage. If they don't have their behaviors right, it gives them the significant advantage of not having to deal with the normal fluctuations caused by minimal sleep, etc.
But the decision-making process, like to say yes, no, maybe, or maybe later, is reliant on things like good sleep, being rested, things other than testosterone. Like this is the idea of a committee as opposed to one individual, you know, recklessly driving decision based on state of mind or androgens.
So if we could zoom out and in for a moment on some of the work that you did with Paul Glimsher when you were a postdoc in his lab, but also in your own laboratory. When I sit down and make a decision, should I do something? Should I not do

something? Let's say I have some general sense of what the potential payoff is within a range,

the potential payoff of not doing it within a range. And I always think of like some kind of

tension or pressure as it relates to time. Like for instance, I've been considering buying a house.
I really like the house. It's a bit of a reach for me for a number of reasons.
And I'm trying to make this decision, right? And I'm trying to gauge whether or not other people are looking at this house also. What do we know about how we start to establish an internal representation of that? And I give that example as just one example.
This could really translate to any number of different scenarios about whether or not to get married or not, whether or not to stay in a relationship or not, whether or not to move, whether or not to have another kid, and on and on and on. What are the core mechanics of value-based decision-making as it relates to outcomes and time? Yeah, so I think we understand this system pretty well at this point.
So the last 25, 30 years have been enormously productive. So we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this.
And essentially what happens is you're confronting a situation. And it doesn't really matter whether, it seems to be the same process, no matter whether you're trying to decide between eating a donut or an apple or buying this house versus renting an apartment or marrying this person, you know, proposing or not.
It's sort of all the same system. And what happens is you come to the situation and your brain takes in evidence about the alternatives.
What are the options that are available to me? What do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from maybe prior encounters or just other information? And it takes that evidence and it weighs it against stored information about things you'd done in the past, other decisions you'd made, and then begins to assign value, computes the expected value of those different options in terms of what it will return to you. And then essentially that is the basis along which that decision gets made.
So it's a soft max function, as we say, so it's not like a hard deterministic one. So there's some statistical noise in there.
For some, we could talk about what that reason might be. You make a choice, and whenever you make a choice in any behavior that you're engaging in, your brain is making a forecast of what's going to happen next as a result of that.
And your brain then determines, computes, that things go exactly as predicted, right? Is it better than predicted or is it worse than predicted? And then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs that job better in the future, right? So like, oh, actually, it went way better than expected. You should assign that a higher value and do that thing.
Again, this process of weighing up the evidence takes time. And that's why we have this speed accuracy trade-off in decision-making, where we observe that the faster you go, the more mistakes you tend to make.
Been there. Exactly.
We've all made split-second decisions that we regretted later. Oh, yeah.
Or slightly sleep-deprived. Sleep-deprived, exactly.
The more time you take, the more evidence you can accumulate. And when you have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment is noisy, right? It's not perfect.
It's noisy because of the environment. It's noisy because the wetware of the brain is statistical and biological.
So you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal. And that happens when you go too quickly, right? And one of the things that's, so there's a good mantra from that, you know, which is if you want to make really good decisions, or if it's really important, you kind of have to decide ahead of time, like, do I need to be accurate or do I need to be fast? And if accuracy is important, you need to slow down, take your time, take as much time as needed to get, you know, the most information that you can.
And even in the moment that doing like simple strategies like breathing or having a mantra that says like, you know, it's not what matters. Every little decision does not what counts, but it's the long run.
That helps to turn, we've talked about arousal a lot here, and that turns down arousal.

One of the things you think of arousal as doing, when you keep talking about volume knobs,

it's like a volume knob for the stuff that's coming into your brain that could be signal or noise.

So it can turn up noise too.

So you could count as evidence toward the value of an option, something that is not actually, you know, evidence, and then you make the wrong decision. So by turning down arousal, slowing down, you're relying more on evidence than on noise.
Does increasing arousal increase the likelihood of false positives, that is thinking something's there that's not, generally speaking, as well as false negatives, you know, thinking that something's absent when actually it's present? I haven't thought about it that way before, but it seems to me like that's a, yeah, that seems consistent with my understanding. Just by way of example, one of the things that's been really different for me in the last

few years is how quickly you move to publication when you podcast or when you're um when you're doing social media um you just click say it's out in the world uh versus you know the way i was weaned was you know spend two three four years on a project maybe it doesn't go anywhere maybe it It does, goes to multiple papers, gets reviewed.

So by the time it comes out, you know, it's been proofread and you've read the proof. So it's been vetted by a number of hopefully expert sources, usually really good sources of feedback, as opposed to nowadays where you can just kind of move immediately to publication.
And I used to have this saying,

which was in the lab,

because sometimes you have two months

to do a revision or something.

It's never really two months.

It always takes five times as long.

I used to say, I go as fast as I carefully can.

And I used to tell my students in postdocs,

we go as fast as we carefully can,

because the moment you start going fast,

you start making mistakes.

You start making mistakes, you definitely pay for it later. And the mistakes that I've made podcasting were a product of going fast and or fatigue.
And the two things kind of relate to one another. Or occasionally somebody will highlight conflicting evidence.
And then nowadays you can go back and repair things with AI. You can, you know, you put things in.
But I feel like so much of life in terms of decision-making is trying to make decisions when most of the time we think we don't have more time. But most of the time we do have more time, unless somebody's hemorrhaging, we usually have more time.
But then there are some real things where we don't always have more time. I mean, we are biological aging machines, and there is such a thing as too late.
Yeah. Yeah.
So how do you think these systems change as a function of, you know, playing a game for some money in the lab, or we can get caught up in it, but there's this like tremendous backdrop of context. You know, $100 might be fun for for one person might be the difference between making rent and not making rent for another person you know the decision to stay in a relationship or leave a relationship when you're in your teens or 20s is fundamentally different than when somebody's for instance at the um near the transition zone of of having versus losing their fertility.
I mean, these are like, yeah, and those change all sorts of, these pressures are so real. And yet if we only have one system in the brain that handles this similarly to the reward system, it seems like we ought to learn in school how to like work with and update our decision-making process with and update our decision-making process based on immediate term, short term, like all the different time scales.
To be able to do that seems really important. Are there any ways to train that up? Yeah, I think it's a, so there's a few things in here that I think are worth unpacking.
I mean, one is what you brought up about fatigue, which I think is really critical. And we did some work with the wrestling team at Penn.
Coach came to us, and I had had a few of the wrestlers working in my lab. And he said, you know, we're having this problem, which is that, and I don't know if you've ever wrestled.
I wrestled my middle son. One match.
It's the worst six minutes of your life. Well, I didn't quit because I lost that match.
And I did lose that match. It was just seventh grade.
I quit because my dad gave me a choice. I could either continue to wrestle or I could play this other sport that I really wanted to play.
He said, you can't do both because it was going to impact my grades negatively. And so I opted for the other sport.
What was the other sport? Soccer. Okay.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. And I love soccer.
Yeah. But losing that one wrestling match was informative.
The guy just dead fished on me the whole time and he deserved to win. It was a really good strategy.
He just like dead fished on me. Plopped on top of you.
Yeah. And I couldn't gum be out of there.
But it is the worst six minutes of your life. You're exhausted within like 30 seconds.
It's incredibly grueling. And what the coach observed was that their guys, it was the men's wrestling team, was they were performing very well in the first two periods.
And they got to the third period and they started making really dumb mistakes, bad decisions. And so we, so he said, what's going on? I said, well, it's about the speed accuracy trade-off, but we have to investigate how it's related to fatigue.
So what we did, this was a really fun experiment. So we go to the wrestling room and we wire these guys up.
They got wearable EEG, heart rate monitors, the whole nine yards. And what we do, we gave them like this simple little decision-making slash impulse control task.
It's just like a controlled response task. It's a, you know, a trade-off.
If you go too fast and you make mistakes, okay? So it's like there's, it's like a go, no go. And so they do it.
Then we run them through two minutes of CrossFit exercises, really brutal. Then they come back off and they have to do the same thing again.
And we do that three times and then they have to wrestle each other. Oh, so it's cognitive and physical.
Yeah. Cognitive and physical.
Not on like chess boxing, which is not a sport I recommend. Have you seen this? I have.
Where they play around, they play some chess and then they literally fight and then they, it's crazy. It's like switching between these two different states of mind.
Yeah, it's insane, but also somehow really appealing, you know? Well, I think for the neuroscientist in you and me, and I think we're all neuroscientists, to some extent, we want to understand the brain and ourselves. This notion of very disparate behaviors, boxing and playing chess, being associated with very disparate types of arousal and how those map onto one another, I think is interesting.
I think the, the, the confluence of chess boxing is fencing, which is very much like chess. My, my youngest son fenced for a number of years.
And so mentally it's like that, but it has the physicality. Or jujitsu, my friend, you do Brazilian jujitsuitsu, tell me that it's like there's an infinite number of options that become constrained in certain dynamics.
Yeah, very similar. So this was really cool because what we found was that speed accuracy trade-off, the more fatigue they got, the more calories they spent, the faster they would slide down to emphasizing speed over accuracy.

They just started like, just got to get done.

I don't know what they were feeling, but they were just not deliberating,

not really being focused.

They just lost the capability of doing that.

And aside from, you know, you could say, well, we could help you guys.

You could become more physically fit. Maybe when fatigue is fast, but they're about as fit as they could be.
They said, well, why don't we do this? Why don't we offload the decision in the third period to the coach? As soon as you, in the third period, you're going to just look at the coach at, you know, some cadence or whenever he's going to yell at you to look and you do what what the coach tells you. And I think this is really interesting because you think about it in other contexts, like in a business context or something, when if somebody is really fatigued or your unit's fatigued, maybe you have an external person then who takes over making the decision that you just execute in a sense, right? The other thing I wanted to say about this all too, which it gets to your point about, well, in the lab, it's like, you know, it's one thing, you're, you're, you got an undergraduate gambling for 10 bucks over an hour.
And that's how does, how well does that map onto the real world where there are all these other things going on? And I think that that's the challenge. All the, you know, when I teach business school and, you know, in classes, MBA students or executives and through exec ed, they all want to know, like, give me the five-step formula.
And it's like that's supposed to apply. How do I take into all? And it's like, well, we mostly know about one, this dimension or that dimension or that dimension and not how in the real world you know in a real complex environment to put that all together so that is a I think that's a gap that's a and one that we're trying to fill which is to study decision making whether it's individual or collective decision making in real world environments right to where

all of these um factors you know context and the various priorities that are coming in are more you know more natural they're not controlled and how then i mean we think we know how that works but we haven't really proven it yet so often we think that we know how feel about something, but some of the work that you've done in monkeys and in humans has really highlighted the extent to which we base our valuation of other things and people based on things that are in proximity to those things and people. Could you tell us about this experiment? And I swore I wasn't going to say the words highly processed foods during this episode, but I think we got to talk about monkeys and Doritos.
Ah, all right. I thought this could have gone, there's a number of different, and I will, I do want to bring up one study that I think people find interesting that gets at this difference between what we think we know and feel and what our brains are actually telling us.
So we talked about how monkeys and people, their brains are, I don't want to say hardwired, but they're tuned, tuned to value social information, in particular kinds of social information, like information about high-status individuals, right, and information about sexy individuals, attractive individuals, right? And it's baked into the same circuitry, or attention circuitry, or reward circuitry. And that, once we observed that, of course, it led me to wonder, well, okay, there's this really weird phenomenon in humans that in marketing, right, that we use celebrity, you know, status, celebrity and sex to sell to people.
Like, why should they ever care about, you know, Brad Pitt likes this thing or Jennifer Aniston likes smart water? What in the world? You're never going to meet them.

Do they really know a lot about water or whatever? What's the point of all that? George Clooney selling espresso. Yeah, who cares, right? But now when you think about it in the context of like, oh, our brains are wired tuned to attend to and process more deeply and value information about others

that are essentially high status, celebrity, sexy, whereas like George Clooney's all of

those things put together.

Now that starts to make some sense.

And so we thought, well, given that monkeys are humans, monkeys and humans are so alike in this regard, I bet we could run an advertising campaign on monkeys that's based on sex and celebrity.

So that's what we did.

We just basically had monkeys, you know, they were just sitting there in their home colony,

and we had a, you know, television monitor, computer monitor in there that would display, like, you know,

the Doritos logo next to, you know, high-stat A and maybe the Cheetos logo next to low status monkey B or, you know, Coke next to like sexy monkey butt and, you know, Pepsi next to, you know, the front end of, you know, or backside of monkey that's not so sexy. Okay.
So you just do that you just do that, just pairing. And so it's just association, simple association.
And then what we did is we then gave the monkeys choices between brand logos that had either been endorsed by, you know, essentially celebrity monkeys, sexy monkeys, or peon monkeys, right? And they got the same reward no matter what.

No matter what they chose, they always got the same banana pellet. But the monkeys favored the brands that had been paired with celebrity and sexy monkeys, just like you see in people.
You know, I just keep saying this. There's a little monkey in all of us.
I'm shaking my head because it says a couple of things to me. But one of the things that it says to me as a neuroscientist is that it's almost like the bins, like the map of valuation in the brain.
There's overlap of, I'm going to get into lingo here for a second, and then I'll of the receptive fields so like you mentioned hubel and wiesel h and w and i mean they basically won the nobel prize for a couple of things but not the least of which was the identification of like what are the specific qualities and positions of light and shapes of light that activate a given neuron which eventually led to the jennifer an, Barack Obama cells. By the way, their coexistence in the same sentence does not mean that I have knowledge of their dating.
I have no knowledge. And that paper was, that study was done a long time ago.
Right, right. But it speaks to the same principle, which is that when we see two things next to one another, sometimes there's a merging of those in our cognitive space or our memory when in fact there's no overlap conceptually, right? You know where you see this very dramatically is that if there's a podcast with a male and a female guest host pairing, I guarantee that 25% of the comments are theories about their dating and or sleeping together.
It's just, it's incredible. It's like people see male and female together.
Right. And they just like start doing this thing of like, oh, they're dating or they're, you know, they see flirtation where it may or may not have existed.
You know, it's just wild. And so that when I hear about this experiment that you do pairing products with sexy monkey or non-sexy monkey or high status or low status monkey, I can't help but feel that the area of the brain that's involved in valuation is just taking visual images, conceptual images, because it'd be visual, it could be any number of things.
And that there's just overlap in the maps of these in the brain. And then that the effect is born out of that overlap.
That's one interpretation. The other interpretation, I suppose, and they're not mutually exclusive, is that we want to go up the hierarchy.
And that's kind of an assumption that maybe we could just like poke at, like a couple of nerd academics for a second. Because like, I like my life very, very much.
There are people that live near me that have far more resources than I do. And I never for a nanosecond wish for their home or my home.
I've tried to make it a point in life to either have the life I want or be aspiring to the life I want. You know, have the things I want or aspire to the things I want.
But I've never found myself in a mode of like, oh, I want to be working on that experiment or I want to be living in that house. If I see a beautiful house or a beautiful thing or some feature of someone's life, it inspires me to want to go try and create something similar.
And so it's not that I'm without competitive spirit in me. I am like anyone else, but I feel like that's so far and away different than the notion of a hierarchy where for me to move up, someone else has to move down.
And for somebody to be above me in any domain, that means that, you know, I'm quote unquote below. So can we talk about hierarchies as they exist in old world primates like the tax versus us? Sure.
Because I don't want to map map this on anything political but oftentimes this will get mapped onto the political some people live through the lens of abundance there's plenty to go around some people live through the lens of scarcity their win is my loss their loss is my win that kind of thing do you see this too? Again, it's really hard. You can ask the monkey, but he won't necessarily tell you because he doesn't know what you're asking them.
But I think it is, well, first of all, across primate species, there's different degrees of the steepness of hierarchy. So in rhesus macaques, they're really despotic.
They have a very steep hierarchy. In like Barbary macaques, which live in North Africa and in Gibraltar, very relaxed society.
Even though they're macaques, they're all the same genus. So why that's so, we don't really know.
The general idea is it has something to do with how rich the environment is, the resources that are available and how monopolizable they are. So if you can monopolize resources, then that can help to create a steeper hierarchy.
If they're not – like let's imagine you eat grass for a living. You know, you're like a cow or whatever, and there are some monkeys that do that, eat grass.
Like, I can't hoard all the grass to myself. It's just everywhere.
And so everybody can just spread out and kind of eat grass. It's a very boring life, and you spend all your time digesting and fermenting in this extended gut, which is kind of a gross thing to do.
It's an aside. But I think you can see that like that spans a continuum of what you're saying from abundance to scarcity and has a lot more to do with whether it's sort of monopolizable.
And does that make sense? So if you can monopolize something, then you have something that other monkeys need, right? And you're creating that scarcity. Yeah.
So let's drill into this because I think this is – everybody is operating from a certain frame in this context. And so for instance, there are billionaires, hundreds of – some people like Elon has hundreds of billions of dollars.
Doesn't seem to care much about money for money's sake or I think he sold all his homes or whatever. You know, he's motivated by clearly other things as well if money at all.
And then there are people who are destitute property. I think many people will say, why does anyone need that much money kind They'll say this about billionaires.
What's been interesting is one of the more prominent themes in pop psychology that is supported by research is this idea that past a certain level of income, your happiness doesn't scale upwards linearly with the increase in income or maybe at all. And the number that's thrown around is like past $75,000 a year, you know, your happiness doesn't grow.
I would argue that indeed money can't buy happiness, but it absolutely can buffer stress or certain kinds of stress. Let's just give an example of a single mother with three, raising three kids on her own versus a single mother raising three kids with three night nurses when they're infants and nannies.
Different level of output required. Like you just can't argue between those two.
Now, whether or not one is happier than the other is a discussion, different discussion altogether, excuse me. But I think the cow example makes a lot of sense.
The hierarchies within primate troops make sense. But as humans, I think that I observe tremendous variation as to whether or not people say, oh, wow, this person is a millionaire or billionaire, but I'm good with what I've got.
or this person has so much more and I resent them for it.

And I guess we don't really think about

there being a limited amount of money in the same way that we think of as like grass or resources. Now, if we were to talk about mates and that, that's a whole other thing.
But you just have to go to a bar with a particular bias towards having more men or women.

And then, you know, like that starts to play out immediately, right? But let's keep it simpler. Do you think that this whole stance about abundance versus scarcity is dynamic? Like if you're surrounded by people that make more or less the same amount of money as you, do you feel better than if you're surrounded by billionaires that have yachts? I think the fundamental drive is to climb the hierarchy is more or less kind of baked in, again, with a lot of variation across individuals and probably across cultures, which I'll get to in a moment.
Going back to that 75,000 being kind of like where it's just asymptotes, there's a number of papers that came out from colleagues at Penn and Wharton. So a guy named Matt Killingsworth showed in a famous paper five or six years ago that in fact, it actually continues, like happiness just keeps going up with income.
And then there was a back and forth with Danny Kahn about that. And then they worked on a paper together.
And what it looks like is this. It kind of goes up, flattens out for a while, and then like above another level, wow, happiness really goes up when you got a lot, a lot of money.
Ah, so that study isn't discussed as much. So that's new.
Well, it's new. It's like in the last year or two.
So being very, very wealthy does increase your level of happiness. I think it, yeah.
I mean, for a variety of reasons, right? So, you know, sure, it's a buffer of stress, but it also allows you access to lots and lots of different things. It can make your life just easier, right? So that's, I think, part of it.
But the other part, and I think this gets back to that question of what makes us human, is that we can intentionally, just like you said about yourself, it's like, well, I'm just going to chill. I'm happy with what I've got.
And there's lots of, you know, ascetic traditions in a variety of cultures, especially, you know, Eastern cultures that have taken that approach, or even in the West, like, you know, early Christianity, cetera. And I'm trying to remember the name of the book that was recommended to me.
I haven't read it yet. But that, for example, in India, in amongst some of the most extreme poverty in the world, you have people who are kind of ecstatically happy.
And they're very, very happy with being alive and being alive where they are, when they are, and with the people that they're happy with. How does that happen? I don't know, but here's my guess, or part of my guess, I guess, which gets back to what we talked about in terms of attention.
So what you attend to is being turned up in the brain and what you're not attending to is being turned down. It's kind of like glass half full, glass half empty.
And if you're paying attention to the sort of good things, then those are getting kind of priority of access to your brain. So you're kind of getting like, oh, it's magnifying.
Every little small positive surprise is amplified in your brain, and you get a bigger dopamine hit for that rather than the sort of small negative surprises. And I'll put that into another context, which is we've done a number of studies on loss aversion, right? And loss aversion is this observation that if I give you a 50-50 gamble, like win some money, lose some money.
In general, for most people, I have to offer them a lot more to win than to lose for them to take the gamble, which doesn't make any sense, you know, rationally and economically. It should be, it's even chances.
So people are loss averse. There's been a lot of theories about why.
Danny Kahneman famously, you know, thought that people feel the pain of loss more than the pleasure of winning. And I think that's true.
We investigated that using a combination of modeling, computational modeling. And we looked at people's behavior.
We did eye tracking because we're measuring where people attend. Your average person, most people attend to what they might lose rather than what they might win.
And the longer they focus on what they might lose, the more loss averse they are. And that tends to be associated with people who have like negative affects.
So if you're anxious or you're depressed, you're in a negative state, then you're looking more for what you could lose than what you could win. So that sets up a really interesting test, causal test, which we're like, well, you know, where you look is a function of what you're looking for.
They're looking for what might hurt them and also what the world looks like. So let's just manipulate the visual display.
We made the wins bigger font or brighter than the losses. Okay.
When you do that, that attracts people's attention. They look at the wins, what they could could the good things they could get rather than the bad things just by changing the font just by changing the font size or the brightness they look at it more this gets turned up in the brain and now they're not loss averse anymore now they're willing to take the gamble so that's what i'm talking about in terms of like what you focus on so if and that's a way to.
I mean, obviously that you could take advantage of people by doing that, but with their consent. So for example, we started that work on behalf of a financial services company who was saying, we're having trouble with our customers, older customers to get them to take good risks, like that could really pay off for them because they're too afraid.
And so we did some basic work and then we tested that we could actually causally change that. We could shift that.
So with their consent, yeah, if we amplify, we just put what you could win instead of what you could lose in a, make it more obvious. People pay more attention to that and then that will subtly shift the decisions that they make wow we are so malleable when it comes to changing the context and thereby the variables that shape our decision making but i'm always struck by the way that it comes in below our conscious detection.
This might be, this is the appropriate time to ask about meme coins. Because we all grow up learning about the US dollar or euro or whatever backed by something, right? Backed by the Fed, but also,

you know, backed by real world physical objects of gold. That's what we're told anyway, right? You know, and this is, you know, why just printing more money is never the solution, right? Because meme coins born out of the kind of larger theme of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are an interesting kind of derivative of cryptocurrency whereby you're pairing reputation of a person, or in some cases a Shibu-Uno dog, right, with a currency that has no intrinsic value except for the person's reputation, plus whatever backing, whatever value backing it's obtained when people decide to purchase that coin.
So I don't know how many listeners track cryptocurrency, and I am by no means an expert on this, but one thing that people get excited about is how much money is flowing into

a coin, not just the value of the coin on a given day. So essentially how much has been invested in that coin as something of potential value.
So when we hear about Hak tua girl coin, the Hak tua coin, or there's a Trump coin now, I think.

There's a Melania coin.

There's a Doge coin that was developed long before the idea of a department of government um doge um the shibu no coin um is this all just exploiting again there comes that word leveraging this proximity between reputation and value?

So I think that's partially it, but it may be even simpler than that, which is it's leveraging, it's harnessing our wiring to attend to what other people are doing and what they're getting or losing. So we care a lot about, you know, when we're in a group, the behaviors of other people.
So let's think about how we learn something, the value of something. If you're a simple animal, you learn from direct experience, and that's reinforcement learning driven, the dopamine system, etc.
You can also learn from what you didn't choose, counterfactual, effective learning. And then in groups, you have this rich source of of information what other people are doing like i could watch you try that food and if you die from eating it then i won't eat it right so that that's that's we're deeply wired to pay attention to the decisions that other people are making and if they look good or if they you know then we start to copy what they're.
And you see this in – it's not just these meme coins but like meme stocks like GameStop. This is very similar to the FTX phenomenon slash debacle where celebrities joined in and people had trust in these celebrities, admiration of these celebrities and invested a lot of money in what turned out to be you know in the end a failure so how often is this happening in advertising like if we really step back and we go like is the bmw really the better choice compared to the um you know compared to the range rover like like are we really basing our decisions on the thing that we're purchasing as much as we think? No, I don't think so at all.
And there's a few things we could kind of unpack there. I think in terms of meme coins, meme stocks, there's probably two things, a confluence of two things going on.
So one is this sort of celebrity endorser. And we have studied that also as well.
We talked about the monkey stuff, but we looked at, we did eye tracking studies of people making choices amongst products and brands that had been endorsed either by celebrities or not, just paired with them, right? And one of the things we found is that when people chose a product or brand that was sort of unfamiliar to them, if it had been endorsed by a celebrity that their pupils didn't dilate. Normally they would dilate because that's like overcoming your default and mental effort and arousal goes up because it's sort of surprising.
And so the pupil staying silent is an indicator of kind of enhanced confidence and trust, if you will, that I'm not making a mistake. I'm putting a lot of words here, but like, you know, that was the impact in a very subliminal way of that celebrity endorser.
So I think that could be going on as well as this other process I was talking about in terms of what we pay attention what other people are doing which seems to be a major driver of bubbles in stock markets like that goes all the way back to like isaac newton losing his fortune in you know the south seas trading market you know he famously said like you know i you know i can i can divine the mechanics of the the planets in the heavens but i can't understand the minds of men or something like that. He just couldn't help himself.
He got out first and then he got back in when he saw his friends were continuing to make money and then he got wiped out. So we were like super interested in this.
And we ran experiment with MBA students at Wharton and they were playing a stock market game. Actually, it turns out it's a stock market we developed for monkeys.
We had monkeys play the exact same stock market. They're buying, selling.
They've got a portfolio that they can trade in for juice. Humans get money for this.
This was based on some studies that Colin Kammer and his colleagues and Benedetto DiMartino did a while ago. In the MBA students, we used a standard psychometric scalar, you know, a questionnaire that's used to test people for sort of social impairments, okay? And then what we did is we looked at how their likelihood of getting caught in a bubble market related to social sensitivity, how attuned they were to other people.
And basically, the more dialed in you were to other people, the higher your likelihood of losing everything in a bubble. And it was those people who were like socially impaired who did the best.
They never got sucked into bubbles. Now, what was cool is we found the same thing in monkeys.
Okay, so monkeys in the same stock market, okay, if they're playing alone, they're making pretty good decisions. Okay, as soon as you put another monkey in the market that they can see, they watch what that monkey did.
That monkey buys GameStop or whatever. Then I buy GameStop.
And he sees me do that. And then he does the same thing.
And he just goes back and forth, back and forth. They create this bubble, and then you get this crash.
It was, like, really phenomenal. And we found that the brain circuit that is essentially involved in theory of mind, but is about controlling your attention to others and registering what they're doing, is driving that.
And it was really funny. It was like the bigger the portfolio imbalance between what I've got and what you got, the higher the signal in this area.
The monkeys are like, I don't know if I can say that. You can say whatever you want on here.
Well, fuck, fuck. I'm losing relative to you, so I'm paying even more attention to what you're doing

and what you've got in your portfolio,

and I'm going to be much more likely to copy you and do what you're doing.

So, again, like there's a little monkey in all of us.

I see very little difference between what people are doing, you know,

with GameStop and what monkeys are doing in that market. So when we hear about these, for lack of a better phrase, pump and dump type things where, like I'll never forget in 2017, a friend who's a spectacularly successful investor said, you should put 2% of your investable earnings into Bitcoin.
And I was like, well, you know, I don't know about that.

And then not long after that, there were some press releases about who was buying Bitcoin and the price shot up. And then I said, went back to them and said, I have to be really careful here, and said, you were right.
and I said yeah you know but you know

whenever you read about who's buying Bitcoin, it's not clear when they bought that. You know, a lot of those purchases were likely made a long time ago.
So there are ways that people, you know, kind of like build some hydraulic pressure through social interaction on these things, right? Yeah. He's not a, you know, it's very different than like someone picking up the phone and, you know, the whole like notion of like insider trading, right? Very different.
You know, if people kind of create a swell around something, this is great, or that let's make it real estate. It's a little more tangible for people.
Like that neighborhood is really terrific. We're all going to move there.
And then, you know, people like, you know, start moving there. And then you realize that they've actually owned that very inexpensive property for a long time.
And they're actually the seller. You get a very different impression of the advice that you got.
So, and I'm not a finance guy, but, you know, I think about things in terms of the neuroscience and the human psychology. I mean, it just, again, I'm just struck by how our notion of valuation is adjusted in the short term by virtue of proximity, probably also in the longterm, but that how we kind of lose ourselves in these things, that we just become less than rational based on things like arousal, the relationship between hormones and arousal.
What I love about what we're doing today is, in case people haven't caught on already, is that we've got multiple mechanisms and themes here that are starting to converge. As arousal goes too high, it's mostly what we're exploring, you start making, you start speeding up, you start misjudging information, you think noise is signal, and you start correlating things that are like not correlated in reality.
And then you can quickly find yourself down the path of bad decisions. I think one of the best advice I ever got was,

if somebody ever wants you to make a decision very, very quickly,

and it's not clearly an emergency, like you don't see them hemorrhaging,

chances are it's a scam.

Like if anyone, you know, this is the best thing to tell anyone that's older, let's say,

because they'll get these calls from people.

And it's like, this is urgent, this is...

The urgency usually is suggestive of it being false. Like using time pressure on people.
Like, I need this money now. I'm going to miss my bus and my kid's going to be waiting for me.
This kind of thing. I mean, and like pulls on you, right? You don't want some kid waiting out in the middle of nowhere.
But if this is somebody you don't know, then you could say, well, maybe five bucks,

I'm willing to lose it.

Maybe that's probably the calculation I would do.

I'm willing to lose it.

I don't, if they're lying, okay.

If they're telling the truth, great.

But when it starts getting higher stakes,

it gets kind of scary.

I think we should address the word rational,

rational rationality that he used, which is like, oh, we're being irrational. It seems like we lose our rationality.
That's a word that's bandied about a lot, right? And especially in economics and that kind of makes the assumption that we are essentially a computer and we just kind of weigh things up dispassionately. And we have complete access to all information here and now and into the future.
There are other concepts here. One is called bounded rationality, which this guy Gerd Gigerenzer kind of came up with, which is the idea that there are constraints, there are brain constraints that are built in.
We've got energetic constraints, which actually limit how much information we can process, which is why we fall prey to choice fatigue and decoy effects and things like that, why we see visual illusions in some ways. And then there's another concept of ecological rationality, which takes that bounded rationality and it puts it into what you might call the environment of evolutionary adaptation, which kind of we've talked about before.
Like what's the environment our brains are designed for? And it's not the one we're in right now. So our brains are designed for, I mean, probably one 30 million years ago, but let's say 200,000 years ago, our species, right? Homo sapiens.
And what was that environment like? Well, we lived in small groups with face-to-face contact of somewhere between probably 20 and no more than 100 people. You knew all of them, you know, you talk to them every day.
Things didn't really move faster as an antelope or change faster than the seasons. Okay.
There was very little wealth inequality. Okay.
People are physically active all day long and they ate natural food. And so what are we like now? We're in these so-called weird environments, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.
But we're in these industrialized societies. We have money.
We're in markets. We're interacting with thousands of people, perhaps millions of people.
Their behaviors, their thoughts, everything are impinging on us. Stuff is changing super, super fast, right? We sit on our butts all day long.
We're not active, right? It's like you have to be intentional and have enough resources to be active and we eat garbage. And for those reasons, I think that's the source of like a lot of the misery that we have is that now, now I'm not saying we should go back to being subsistence, you know, hunter gatherers or horticulturalists.
Maybe we should, it'll be a painful process to get there. And we may end up getting there given some of the trajectories that are, you know, we're, we're on, but people who live in those environments seem to generally be, you know, healthier and happier.
For example, you know, like, uh, studies of, um, you know, brain and body in subsistence, hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists. People who are in their 70s look like people, you know, Westerners in their 30s or younger.
They're like incredibly fit, lean, no evidence of cardiovascular disease, no evidence of anything like, you know, dementias, major cognitive decline. And we're always trying to hack that.
We're trying to hack it. We're trying to do zones and then people say, well, it's the diet.
No, it's the wine. By the way, it's not the wine.
It's not the wine. Now, finally, after years, I'm not going to say I told you so, but alcohol is not good.
A little bit maybe every once in a while, but not more than a little bit. I'll respond to that.
Yeah. But the social component seems critical.
What are your thoughts on the longevity movement, if you will? Like I always assumed if I do well, that I'll probably live to be somewhere between 85 and 102. And my hope is that my last five years, I like the Peter Atiyah thing, like what is the quality of your final decade will be at least as vigorous as my dad's.
My dad's 80, gosh, he's 81 and he's doing great mentally, physically. He was a guest on this podcast actually.
He's a scientist. Yeah, it was.
And so, but he's always been very, very moderate about his drinking. He'll have like a half a glass of wine now and again.
He just never ate too much. He never exercised too much.
He worked nine to five, nine to six, just consistently, but he never was a, you know, like burn the midnight oil type, but he's just, his consistency is what's so impressive. So I think that might have something to do with it.
But what are your thoughts on the economics of decision-making as it relates to live fast, die young versus be more monastic and try and live a very long time? Well, that's a personal preference, isn't it? So I, you know, and that kind of, that's interesting because it maps on to concepts in ecology that typically we use to describe different species, which are like R selected and K selected. I don't know if you've heard of this before, but R selected are species that are limited just by their pure reproductive rate.
Think about weeds or rabbits, you know, something like that. And K selectedselected are like oak trees and, you know, I don't know.
Whales. Whales.
And humans are sort of like this mix, right? And so that's where we are very plastic and flexible. So in some environments, you can be more R-selected, like especially if conditions are really not very favorable toward investing in the long term, then it's kind of like kicking up your reproductive output.
But if conditions can be favorable, right, that investment is worthwhile, then you can do that and be more like the whale or the oak tree or something like that. Now, yeah, you're, you're right.
I think that does map onto economics in a certain way because, you know, certain people by virtue of what they know and what they have can invest in trying to live the longest, healthiest life. And other people who may not either have the wherewithal or the knowledge are going going to be invested in surviving until the next day.
And so humans are sort of, you know, exist in that whole space in between. My dad died at 55, so I outlived him by two years.
So for me, every day is like gravy. But I also don't have this sense of a long time horizon, which is, you know, just being a little weirdly self, you know, just introspective may be, you know, part of my drive to like work a lot.
And it might have served you well. I mean, I've read and listened to Steve Jobs' biographies by Walter Isaacson several times, in part because I grew up seeing that stuff happening as I was born and raised in the South Bay.
And then Steve used to come into the toy store slash skateboard shop that I worked at to get new roller blade wheels. And so like, I would like see him around and see him at this little shop called Shady Lane, which is like little trinkets.
Like he was around town a lot. And so then of course he became Steve Jobs, right? And, or he was Steve Jobs and he stayed Steve Jobs.
But in that book he talked about, where it was talked about him, that he, humans knowledge that we are going to die someday can be the ultimate motivator. I mean, I think I look at some of the mistakes I made with, you know, bringing myself

to places of physical risk in my life. And it's not like I thought I was immortal, but I didn't really have a good sense of time.
And I think as I get older, I'm 49 now, so I can finally say that, I think my sense of the passage of time and mortality is much more visible to me in my psychology. So yeah, this is the ultimate time scale over which one has to make decisions.
So actually, let's talk about this. So if your dad died two years younger than you are now, do you have the assumption that you'll make it to a given age or are you just trying to maximize on the day, the week, the month? What's your unit of time scale? So I think I did not anticipate – like 55 was a magic number for me, the double nickel, you know, like Michael Jordan.
I didn't know what I would do or think about when I – if I got past that. And I got past it and I was like, okay, I got past it.
But now I'm kind of, I'm, I'm, I'm confused, I guess. I mean, physically I showed no evidence of like rapid decline.
No, you seem, you appear very, you appear very healthy. Yeah.
Not just for your age, but you like very very physically fit. You're cognitively fit, clearly.
So that started to, you know, I think that I'm opening up and I'm trying to look at some wisdom that's out there about like, hey, yeah, you know, probably got a lot of life ahead of me. And if I keep doing what I'm doing, what do I want to do? That's another part of it.
Because probably because of the focusing on that 55 and I'm like, oh, God. Everything that's come my way, every opportunity that's come my way, I've taken it and I just keep adding.
I don't subtract. We could talk about this.
I keep adding more and more things. You can look at the diversity of papers that I've published or the other things that I'm doing, and it's just getting wider and wider.
And I keep taking more things on and reluctant to give anything up. But at some point, I think that's not the recipe for success.
Like there's going to have to be some winnowing. And I, you know, okay, 57.
So when's that going to happen? I don't know, 62, 65. I mean, you know, I don't plan on retiring, although, you know, also that was like, wow, people in my family never got the chance to retire because they didn't live long enough.
But that's the short way to death though, I think too, and decline is like retiring if you don't do something else. Yeah.
So I might have a solution for you. Okay, good.
Give it up. I've thought about this a ton.
Give it up. And I think about time perception constantly and people can laugh because I'm always late, but that's because I'm really enveloped in whatever I was doing previously.
Like I'll be thinking about this conversation tonight and tomorrow morning when I wake up for sure. Right.
Okay. A couple of reflections and then ideas about this.
So previous guest on this podcast, Josh Waitzkin, grandmaster chess champion at a very young age, then realized at some point, started asking the question of whether or not his love for the game was gone or whether or

not i was taken away from him was it the fame was it the because a lot of things came to him young when that around chess and he spent two years asking himself that question and then cut ties with chess forever never picked up a chess piece again but pivoted into martial arts investing now fo you know, this like, yeah. But then had a near death experience.
He had a drowning event, survived fine, decided then to move his family down to Costa Rica where he now spends four and a half hours a day or more foiling, raising his sons. I, you know, that struck such a chord with me.
I've been involved in a number of things. I don't want to make this about me, but early on it was like fish.
I was obsessed with fish and birds and skateboarding and firefighting. Then eventually it was like neuroscience.
And then now I do this. And so I would say I've read a lot about people who need something to bite down into they can't retire and it seems to me

my informal read of this is that the ones that are happiest who don't die young or in their 50s

like steve jobs did um tend to be for lack of a better way to describe it kind of serial monogamous as it relates to their pursuits, which is the way I would describe myself. Like I'm, you know, like super into whatever it is professionally.
And then after about anywhere from five to 15 years, it's like done and kind of move forward some of the elements and the learnings from that into the next thing. But Josh Waitzkin is the ultimate example of this, of achieved like world champion status in multiple things.
And then now seems very, very much to achieve world champion status at like family life. And he's got his, you know, economic and professional life intact from the previous stuff, but also he's still involved.
He's, you know, like he coaches for the Celtics and he's not the head coach, but he coached and so on. So I feel like the serial monogamy version of this is the ultimate.
And then the question is when to cut and pivot into the next thing. But I'm not telling you not to go with Brent.
But I was looking over your CV and your papers. I was like, this is going to be a really interesting conversation because you have worked on a tremendous number of different things.

Adding in more isn't the thing.

But then again, maybe some of us are just designed to be involved in a ton of different stuff.

And your vigor is undeniable, right?

Like you're super fit mentally and physically.

So I don't know.

I'm not going to tell you what to do.

I offer Josh as an example of one extreme.

You're sort of at the other extreme, I suppose. And I suppose I'm kind of in the middle.
So I think, well, I've done a bit of that over my career. And the way that has happened is through external leadership opportunities, not really opportunities.
I was like, you need to do this. Like, you know.
So as you kind of, you know, broad portfolios getting bigger and then somebody says, I want you to direct this thing. And then I would say, well, then I have to cut some of this out and then go back and narrow again.
And then the problem is then I start to do this again. And then, OK, then I moved to, wharton and i got to narrow again but now it's bigger than it ever has been so the question is like at some point does that just fall apart or can i i think intentionally you know at some point and maybe some of those decisions you know the other thing the other thing one can do is just allow the universe to make some of those decisions for you, right? It might be the case that some of the research I do will not be fundable at some point, right? And then that decision is made for me.
I know I have lots of other things I can do. You know, we have, you know, for, for example, if like outside of the pure neuroscience, basic and clinical and technology development, you know, we've got all this corporate facing work, funded work through Wharton, which is a totally new space, a new opportunity.
So if, you know, if one, you know, I don't want it to be taken away, but if it is, then, you know, there's, there's plenty left to do. Well, you're clearly one of the few people that I'm aware of that is, you know, a true card-carrying research neuroscientist, highly respected in the domain of real neuroscience, who's also involved in like business school type stuff.

And, you know, people on both sides of that take you really seriously because there's real rigor there.

And the vigor perhaps goes along with it.

It's hard to know what's called. you know, people on both sides of that take you really seriously because there's real rigor there.

And the vigor perhaps goes along with it. It's hard to know what's causal there.

Which comes first.

Yeah, which comes first. But in any event, maybe we parse this over a coffee sometime.

Apple and Samsung.

Ooh, Apple and Samsung.

I'm an Apple guy.

Me too.

But I heard that the camera's on the Samsung phone. How much do you love your iPhone? What's your loyalty? What's your brand loyalty for Apple? I grew up near the original Apple store.
It was in a different location. Gosh, I love Apple products.
I don't like that they keep changing the ports. Yeah, I know.
That's annoying. That's super annoying.
But they seem to be like hovering on USB-C, you know? I love the ease and simplicity. And yeah, I have a bit of a kind of like a historical South Bay relationship to it.
So yeah, I would say, could you get me to use a Samsung phone? Nah. Yeah.
So, I mean, this is the interesting observation, like loyalty for, let's just talk about smartphones and Apple and Samsung are the dominant players in the US market. They're basically the same device.
I mean, they're both handheld computers that can do a million things and amazing stuff. And yet the loyalty amongst the Apple users is through the roof.
It's near 100% year in, year out. And that's not true for Samsung.
Despite Steve Jobs passing away. Yeah, despite, I mean, it's a legacy, right? But I think that reflects a lot of the design and the emphasis, I think, that he put into the product, but also like trying to understand it through the lens of the customer, right? So that's like an empathy.
I mean, it really is empathy. This was one of the first questions I got when I, you know, when I came to business school, I was like, what the hell accounts for empathy for a brand? It's not a person or this connection.
Like, why do I have loyalty to a thing that's not a human being? You know, a product and a brand, a company, right? What in the world is that all about? Doesn't make sense. And there's this idea in marketing that actually, and it makes sense, is that we're, what's happening is we're applying or we're getting leveraged the hardware in our brains that's used to connect to people.
And now it's connecting to brands and to the brand community. And you could see that kind of in like the words we use to talk about brands, for example, that's a rugged brand, the creative brand.
You know, we use personality words to talk about them. Say, I love my brand.
I hate that brand, whatever. And Steve understood this.
He talked about the Apple icon needing to look a certain way that it was like friendly, but technically right. But, you know, balanced.
And this is the idea that objects or images could look friendly when they weren't objects or images of faces or bodies is a very interesting concept. Yeah.
Yeah. So, so we decided to test this idea.
So we brought people in lab, we've done now like, I don't know, 10 studies on this. We brought people in who are Apple or Samsung users.
And the first experiment we did was a brain imaging experiment. And first we just asked all the standard marketing questions.
How long have you had the product? How much do you love it? What's your loyalty? What's your identification with it? You know, et cetera. And it was equivalent, Apple and Samsung.
They said the same things about their brands. Okay, so now we bring them into the lab, put them in the MRI machine, and we're going to expose them to news bits about each of the two brands, like something good happened to Apple, something bad happened to Apple, or Samsung, et cetera.
And we ask them to rate it. How do you feel? Good, neutral, bad about that.
And so we go through the whole thing. We scan their brains, take pictures of what's going on in their brains.
And it was really interesting because what we found is that behaviorally, in terms of their responses, they both expressed empathy for their brands, which hadn't been really measured before. I feel good for good news about my brand, bad for bad news about my brand.
And for Apple customers, they said, yeah, that's really true for Apple, but I don't feel so much about Samsung. Samsung customers said, yeah, I feel really strongly about my brand.
Oh, and they had reverse empathy or schadenfreude for Apple, which was part of the story. So they felt really good when something bad happened to Apple, and they felt really bad when something good happened to Apple.
Talk about tribalism. That's tribalism right there.
When you look at their brains, it's totally different. So in Apple, Apple customers show empathy in their brains for Apple.
You get activation of areas that are active for reward for myself, reward for my kid winning spelling bee for good news, and the extended pain network, pain for me, pain for my loved one, for things that happen to Apple. If I'm an Apple customer, it's silent for Samsung.
You look at Samsung customers, and if you're the CMO of Samsung, you should

be worried because they show absolutely nothing, no feelings towards anything that happened

to Samsung. The only thing you see is this schadenfreude, this reverse empathy.
So you

see pain for good news about Apple and joy for bad news about Apple. So the first take-home

I'm going to go part of something bigger. And I'll get to that in a second.
And Samsung users choose Samsung because they hate Apple, right? So that's sort of that. Or they hate winners.
They hate winners, whatever. There's a whole thing.
They don't want to be part of the community. They don't want something bigger than themselves.
There is something in our data that essentially Apple is kind of like a cult. You could say it's a family.
I would say it's the dominant culture now, though. They're not the niche thing.
Samsung is the niche thing, right? Yeah. Well, what's really fascinating now is that um and this is by virtue of things that apple smart things apple has done to reinforce this sense of in group be part of that community like the um the you know the green text bubble thing so now it's like 91 of teenagers are choosing apple over samsung because they don't want to be left out they don't want to be ostracized.
Now, we talked about synchrony before, and synchrony is this marker of community and closeness, and we're all on the same team. So we used EEG to measure brainwaves in people while they're in number conditions, while they're getting news about Apple and Samsung, also while they're watching the commercials.
You remember that spectacular Apple commercial where they crushed all those beautiful instruments and whatnot and turned into an iPad or whatever, and then there was the Samsung response to that. So we measured EEG activity, and what we found is that Apple people are all in sync with each other.
Their brains are humming along at the exact same rhythm. Two news of the world, two ads about Apple, and each Samsung person is like an island unto themselves.
They're just not in sync at all. These are like the incels of technology.
You said it. I didn't say it.
Probably going to catch a lot of lack for this. But look, the data is the data.
And so Apple's this sort of extended family, and they're all in sync with each other, right? They're like a real team, and you don't see that in Samsung. So Apple people are seeing the world through similar eyes, right, and feeling similar things.
And beyond that, I said, well, if this is all true, So maybe, is it, it's a question of now, like, are Apple people wired that way, you know, at birth, in a sense, you know, or how much, what's the balance of, like, what, who they are versus what Apple has done, you know, through their marketing and design activities? I can't, we can't do that experiment. It's really hard.
But when we looked at the structural MRI data, we found something really interesting, which is the parts of the brain that are really intimately involved in social, managing our social relationships. So the parts that are like involved in theory of mind and empathy.
So those are physically larger in Apple people than in Samsung people.

They're physically larger.

In monkeys, monkeys who have more friends, those same brain areas are bigger than monkeys who have fewer friends.

Please tell me you've run this on politically leaning left versus politically leaning right. So we started to do that experiment and then the pandemic hit.

So we haven't gotten that back off.

Nice excuse, clap.

It is, I know, it's an excuse. We haven't gotten that back off.
I'm just kidding. No, it's true.
I would be too afraid to run that experiment and then the pandemic hit so we haven't gotten nice excuse it is i know it's an excuse we haven't gotten that i'm just kidding no it's true i would be too afraid to run that experiment not because i'd be concerned about the the result or what people would say if i share the result but here's why i feel like um when i was growing up it was like if you were a rebel you were associated with anything like indie music rock, like you were associated with like hip hop, anything that was kind of outside the mainstream, which at the time, this was like the eighties and nineties. We had a mix of Republican and Democrat governments at that time, you know, depending on which four year segment we're talking about.
But there was this idea that like, if you liked anything about the government, you know, you're, this is kind of the carryover I think from the post – from the Vietnam era and the post Vietnam era, that if you liked anything associated with government, that you were a conformist. Yeah.
And if you didn't, you were an iconoclast. Yeah.
Right? Yeah. Now I feel like it's become very issue specific, right? Like who's in power basically that the party – like politics has, it was always split into two.
It used to be you agree with the establishment or you don't agree with the establishment. Now it's like, depending on who's in power, people say, well, they're the establishment.
So it's like the game has changed. It sort of subdivided itself and changed.
And so if one were to run the experiment of kind of like affiliation, I would assume, my prediction would be that within the right, there's a lot of affiliation. Within the left, there's a lot of affiliation.
But that you wouldn't necessarily see a difference in terms of activation of affiliative neural circuitry. It depends on with whom they're sitting.
Absolutely. Which is very different than the phone situation that the Samsung versus Apple thing is a lot more like when I was growing up.
And it's complicated because what used to be niche and rebellious inevitably becomes mainstream. Like I remember the movie, Revenge of the Nerds.
Of course. Which of course was about like the nerds being marginalized and then, you know, and then being like the Yeah.
And on and on. Everything was like a John Hughes film.
Jocks versus rockers versus nerds. Things really blended together for 20 years or so.
And then now it's very divided along the lines of politics. Yeah.
Whereas before it was politics versus nonconformists. Yeah, right like, depends on which can't like literally what color you're wearing.
Well, everybody's divided. It's like gang warfare.
It is. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like blues, it's blues versus reds.
Jets and sharks. Jets and sharks.
So it feels very like the experiment, that's why I'd be afraid to run the experiment. I wouldn't know how to design the experiment.
Yeah. I mean, I think, well, it would be interesting just at the outset to demonstrate that like a very easy way to elicit these sort of empathy signals is like just create a video that's fake is what something a former postdoc of mine did in some studies.
you just like a fake needle stick to the cheek. And you get, you know, generally, this sort of activation of empathy signals in the brain.
But it tends to be tribal specific or ethnic group specific, which is like, even though people say, I feel just as much pain for these two different people, the brain signals, which we know are what actually predicts what you'll do next. You know, it predicts your behavior.
The brain signals are specific to within your group. So I think that's what, that was in fact the experiment we were gonna do, which is like people are gonna be, you know, we'll have these videos of like a proud Republican or proud Democrat, whatever you want to say on the hat, and then they're getting stuck with a needle.
And then we ask you what you feel and then we measure your brain activity. And I think it would be obviously very highly specific.
You might say you feel pain for that person who's from the other political party. Maybe you wouldn't now anymore.
Maybe you'd be like, yay. You see a lot of, gosh, you see a lot of people take enjoyment in other people's suffering when the person's suffering is sort of perceived by a lot of others as a winner.
Yeah. We saw that with the fires, with rich people's houses burning down and a lot of people piling on.
Oh, yeah, you know. Right.
Well, the media was very skewed there like we're like we were hearing about people's you know first of three homes burning and that's hard for people that have very little right to um at the same time you know for anyone experiencing loss it's loss yeah that's a it's a tough one it's tough it's a tough one yeah, this conversation has given me a ton more to think about, which means it's a great conversation. I have to say, you know, in our business of research science, there's that term, you know, he or she is a serious scientist.
I feel like there are very, very few serious scientists doing experiments in the real world or trying to map to the real world. I probably just offended about 300 scientists, but hey, listen, we only have a limited number of guests we can bring on here anyways.
I know I'm just kidding. There are others certainly, but I have to just applaud you for the range of things that you've embraced and taken on at the level of neural, anthropologic, sociologic, psychology, endocrinology.
This is a big field that you're trying to get your arms around, a big set of questions. And yet it's clear you are a serious scientist.
You do like real experiments with isolating variables and all the necessary controls that are required to really tease out mechanism and larger themes. So whereas a few minutes ago, we were talking about maybe you taking on less.
I would say, first of all, who am I to tell you what to do? Second of all, and I'm not, hope I didn't give that impression. And second of all, like what a service to the world you're doing, because certainly in researching for this podcast and even with guests, you know, oftentimes it's really a struggle to try and figure out how to talk to someone who's really down at the level of mechanism, who's not working on small animal models, or even if they are, how to map that to everyday experience.
And today, you know, we've been talking about potential mate valuation, meme coins, politics, hierarchies, decision-making, time scales. I mean, all through the lens of real serious science.
So first of all, thank you so much for coming here and spending these hours with us, educating us. And right alongside that, thank you for doing the work that you're doing.
It's really spectacular. I knew we were going to get into a number of these things, but I didn't really anticipate just how much it was going to geyser out of this in terms of changing my way of thinking.
And I'm certain

that's changing the way that other people are thinking now and are going to think about their decisions and just themselves and the world. I'd be very grateful if you'd come back again and talk to us about the next round of amazing experiments before too long.
Well, I would love that. And thanks for having me.
And this has been a really stimulating conversation. I've enjoyed it.
there is a lot more that we could cover, which would be super fun. Surely.
And your endurance is something to behold. Thank you.
Please do come back again. Thank you for the work that you're doing.
We will provide links to all the resources and places to find out more about your book, the work that you're doing, and some of these tests that you were talking about earlier where they go beyond like standard personality tests so that people can answer those critical questions about where they are perhaps best placed in the landscape between creativity and strategy implementation in a different way. So thanks so much.
This was a real thrill for me. Thank you.
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