Cultivating Awe & Emotional Connection in Daily Life | Dr. Dacher Keltner

We have people with long COVID, just a minute of all a day, reduced long COVID symptoms. It's

“good news, right? And there's so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors”

are starting to think like, I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music, through all, right, as a mechanism. Welcome to the human lab podcast where we discuss science, 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. Dacker Keltner. Dr. Dacker Keltner is a professor of psychology and the co-director of the Greater Good Science

Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Dacker is an expert in the science of emotions and their role in social dynamics and bonding. Today, we discuss his fascinating work on the science of emotions, including the role of teasing in social bonding, the role of embarrassment in social bonding, and his fascinating work on all and the things that lead to all. As he describes, all is not elusive. It happens when we shift our perception from a very small scale to a very large

scale or back again, such as when we suddenly reach a new horizon or visual vista. Today you'll understand what all of that really means and more importantly, how you can create this incredible

thing that we call awe in everyday life. We also talk about the critical aspect of human bonding

in groups and the things that both establish and inhibit deep human bonds. So today is a very practical as well as conceptual conversation that no doubt will change the way that you think about your life every day. And think about opportunities for all every day. As you'll soon see, Dacker Keltner is a truly special scientist known for his incredible rigor and creativity in the study of emotions, but also continually offering you the public ways to be and feel genuinely

better and to get more out of life. It was a true honor and pleasure to host him. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Dacker Keltner.

Dr. Dacker Keltner, welcome. Good to be with you, Andrew. awe. Yeah, we all intuitively know what it is and yet we also don't know how to articulate it. Yeah, I want to say the words overwhelmed, excited. I get the physical sensation of a lift. I don't think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed into a turtle position. That's right.

“Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that. But what got you into awe?”

Yeah, and I love the word lift. That's really interesting. Yeah, I was a young scholar in the science of emotion that really Paul Eckman was a pioneer in. And that fueled in the 90s and early 2000s was really focused on negative emotions. And you know the science, right? Anger, fear, fight or flight physiology and make duly cortisol discussed, you know, Paul Ross and John Hype. And thinking about emotions from that lens and it as a young scientist and given the

powerful tools of emotion science of Darwin and Ekman and how to just observe phenomena,

it didn't make contact with my life and my own experience. You know, I was raised as a wild child in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon. And you know, it was like music and social change and protest and, you know, in beauty and I was raised by a dad who's a visual artist and my mom taught Romanticism in Virginia Woolf and awe in the mind. And I was like, wow, there's all this stuff that our science, my science can't speak to music and visual patterns and dance and collective

movement and, you know, someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry, you know. And I remember feeling this and asking Paul Ekman, I was like, you know, what should I do with my career and he's like, study all, you know, and start like, got me going.

“If we could, maybe we could talk about the faces for a moment, you know, I think every psychology”

and neuroscience student sees these faces of disgust of pleasure Darwin talked about this. Yeah. Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults where they'll show a baby like, you know, re-coiling for something or, you know, wide-eyed and leaning in, you know,

there's always to be a motor component to this that maybe isn't as captured in those two

dimensional photographs. But what's the story about hard, wired facial emotions? And what are the

I've spent 30 years working on that very problem. Paul Ekman came in and, you know, as you

“suggested, right, he did this revolutionary work in New Guinea, you know, showed photos of six”

emotions, static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile. They kind of interpreted the faces like you or I would naming it using the right words to describe those faces. And that, you know, and this is how science occasionally works, which is just by accident that became the field. And there are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal are they in different cultures. Ekman really posited sort of a strong

universality that's been contested by Jim Russell Leaf, Leafs Development Barrett and others.

But since then, there are controversies around how hard-wired they are. Do they occur reliably in a child's development? Yes, and no, you know, young children showed disgusting

“expressions like social mammals do. They win sit bad smells, just like you or I would,”

anger is a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally. But then our lab and several labs around the world, you know, just Tracy, you'd be British Columbia, Disa Souter. And I want to talk about this computational work, started to expand the vocabulary of faces. And now, there's a lot of data that suggests there are 20 different facial expressions. Laughter, love, compassion, all, you know, woe embarrassment, shame, pain, you know, and that, in some sense, has broadened the

taxonomy of emotions. We used to think of six, now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind. And that's where the field is heading. It's to really start to think about physiological patterns, brain patterns of these distinct states. And I'll tell you, the hard-wiring question, I mean,

“it's hard science to do, right? Just to imagine videotaping people from five different countries”

getting their emotional expressions and then making sense of them. It used to take one hour to code the facial muscle movements of one minute, right? So this is slow science. And I would really encourage listeners and viewers to go to Alan Cowen.com. And I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowen who, you know, he's a computational genius and he looked at our old science and said, "We can use AI to code the face." And he did it with Google engineers. He coded

144, two million videos from 144 cultures and 16 facial expressions, 75% overlap across cultures in

how we show awe at fireworks, concentration on a test, you know, laugh at friends. So right now, I would say 50 to 60% is hard-wired as part of who we are in our evolutionary history. And then the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways. I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Juve. Juve makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast is the incredible

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here's what I'm thinking. The relationship between emotions and what we call motor patterns,

movement, is obviously very close. Discuss to recoil, explore, awe, anger, et cetera, and then there's this other node, which is language. So we have emotions, motor, language. Obviously, those can't be dissociated. But can we imagine somebody, let's just like hypothetical person, who can keep their body very still while they're angry, and be very articulate that includes not moving their hands, we'd probably think perhaps that person's like sociopathic, but that's

not the picture I'm trying to paint. Then on the other extreme, can imagine somebody who is very angry, and it's just articulating a lot, and we can immediately, yeah, that makes sense. And we could do this for any emotion. How should we think about emotion as an experience and how

“it's expressed along these three axes, which is motor, language, and then the emotion itself?”

I feel like without conceptualizing that, I, as a true novice of this, this isn't my area of understanding our expertise. I can't really understand what an emotion is. But if I understand who those are linked, maybe that's a portal into that. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a profound question, Andrew, and it's central to our field, which is, you know, and I appreciate it coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species, and there are these

motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world. When you see the child that's crying, right, you're going to bring it in close and harass and touch and have emotion. When you're, you know, when you're fighting a rival or when you're, you see rotten food, you're going to that motor pattern will be there. You know, that's part of our research that 75% of that is this motor pattern, a facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional

events of life. And then we have this massively complicated, you know, conceptual system that puts words to experience. And that's mainly what we study in psychological science is just it. Oh, I'm feeling anger, you're ashamed, you're embarrassed or love or compassion. And we know and your question points to this, like, very often they're disconnected, right, the motor pattern and the language we use and how I would interpret it in another person. On balance, they correlate

point two, so they're just weakly. They're kind of these streams of behavior that are just part of who we are, right, are motor patterns in language. And there are a lot of ways to think about it. You could think about cultures that value being calm, like a lot of East Asian cultures, become, don't disrupt things, don't blur it out, don't protest, right, and you'll see this disconnect. You could think about certain people who they just are more authentic and their motor patterns

come out and expressions and they will tell you how they feel. So it's a central problem that we grapple

with. And then I love your third part of this equation of emotion science, which is the feeling,

something. We think we can get it to it with words. I don't think so. You probably wouldn't either,

“right, studying the other species you've studied, right? It's some weird mixture of everything”

that's happening in your body. And ironically, the emotion or the feeling is still one of the uncharted territories of our field is why, as these complicated motor patterns take unfold and words are unfolding in images and memories and visual things that you study, how does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe? And we barely know, you know, we just, we don't know. Everyone's in a while, I'll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science,

like the Chakra or something. And it's kind of interesting, right? I mean, even if just,

if one looks at just purely as a western scientist, this idea, maybe there's a confluence of

nerves and vascular insurance stuff that makes you feel kind of like rooted at like, and calm, right, versus like up in your head. I've been watching this really interesting Instagram channel.

“It's a woman who does voices for cartoons. And she has the most incredible understanding of”

voice. And she's commenting a lot of the time on people and shows that I don't watch, but they have little excerpts of where, like, I guess there's this doctor on the, it's like an ER type show. It's like a revisiting of the show ER, but she talks about how, as he's matured from season to season in his role on the show. And he's mentoring how she literally talks about how his lairings and fairings are

how he's controlling those differently, as he matures. And then when he has a breakdown, how the

voice moves further up into his head and what, what that's about. And so I'll say about this, I'm like, you know, here's somebody, that's a very unique, you know, window into all of this, but we sort of know this intuitively. Like when we're excited, like there's this kind of rising from the bottom. And when we're relaxed, everything just kind of sinks down to a, the diaphragmatic breathing. As a scientist who studies emotion, how do you sort of decide what, what, which lens to look at

things through? Because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about might sound a little assoteric, but it's actually the stuff that's easiest to measure. Yeah. Presumably, you can quantitatively measure, like breaths per minute when somebody's looking at an awe-inspiring image versus like a trivial image. I love your reference to chakras. And, you know, the older I get, you know, I've been doing emotion science for 30, 4 years or 5 years. It's good to think about the other traditions.

You know, we wouldn't have thought about the breath, the power of the breath, without the contemplative meditation traditions that you've impart test to, than Richie Davidson and others. And low and behold, the breath, deep exhalation activates the vagus nerve calms us down. That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in your chest, which kind of sounds like the heart chakra and all the speculation around how your soul is in your heart.

Well, there's a neurophysiological correlate of that. I love the paintings of Alex Gray, this I could have like artists like, if you want an image of what our neurophysiology is, as it synchronizes in love, it's pretty close or it's interesting, right? So it's good to find inspiration in that. One of the great things about the science of emotion and, and I brought these tools into the study of all, you know, which is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion.

You know, you can measure it with facial muscles and gaze patterns and coloration of the face and breath patterns and, you know, different measures of vagal tone and immune system activation and activation in the gut and, of course, brain activation and the voice, which is one of my favorite modalities. I learned this in some sense from Darwin. Darwin's expression of emotion and man and animals is in my view and we're just publishing a paper on this on everything that he said

about human emotion. 53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior. I wrote it with Darwin's color, Frank Salaway, who knows everything about Darwin. And I choose how to study an emotion based on what's happening out in our lives and the phenomena out there, right? So if you're

“studying awe, you should get people around big trees or in musical concerts or in museums, right?”

If your, I studied embarrassment early in my career and modesty and I'm like, I got a study young man teasing each other because, you embarrass each other, you know, intentionally. Oh, you're going to see what you have to hear about that. Yeah, that work again.

It's not dreaded. It's the dreadful manosphere, you know, which people use very broadly, but I think now it's being, you know, allocated to the, the worst of the worst. But then there is this phenomenon among males where they'll ribby each other, you know, and there's a healthy version. Totally males interacting too. Yeah, you know. So we'll get back to that. I based it on what's the phenomenon of interest, right? That, that speaks to humanity and then

“what are our best measures that we can go after it? These days, if you want to”

measure awe, what's your favorite, all stimulus? First stop. And thank you for asking

you about measurement. Like it's interesting. Like people like, oh, you can't study awe. You know, you don't know how to measure it. It's, it's ineffable, it's mysterious, it's spiritual. We can measure awe really well, you know, the vocalization. Whoa, you know, the facial expression activation parts of the brain are deactivated. Vagal tone, the goose bumps is a good part of the awe response. As we started to study awe, we did two things. And one is typical, you know, science, which is

get your most cool awe videos, show them to people, you know, and I had some missteps in this science. I had a woman who was an honor student at Berkeley, who was coming back from burning man. And, you know, she's like, I'm a show engineer's fractal imagery and, you know, the engineer's like,

“who is this woman? I mean, there is the book I've never been to burning man, but there's the”

the post burning man glow that people come back with. That is for understandable reason, hard for most people to enter with them. Like, I keep coming back from summer camp. There's great visual imagery. You know, BBC Earth is awesome. And it makes people feel awesome. Slow motion guys. I don't know if you know these guys. They film wild things in slow motion, like, you know, dropping a wine glass. And it's this spectacular photography and just, you know,

like, so it opens up cool. We'll put a link to that. Yeah. I love super slow. Yeah. And that fits our definition, which is like, you don't understand what's happening. It's fast. It's mysterious. But what I'm really proud of Andrew is the work we did out in the field, right? So one of our first studies on the Berkeley campus that you frequented and got your master's degree at and headed into neuroscience was in our paleontology museum. There's a replica of a TREX skeleton.

When I was five years old and and I learned about dinosaurs, it changed my life. It was just in the L.A. Natural History Museum. Wow. So we studied people standing near the TREX skeleton and they became expansive and collective. We studied people near giant Eucalyptus trees. We studied people at Yosemite, you know, young by a student in my lab, stopped hundreds of travelers from all over the world. Right when you see Yosemite, and she said, how do you feel

about yourself right now? And they're like, I feel small and quiet, but part of something really large, right? Uh, subsequent to that, there are scientists who are studying mosh pits at concerts. And, you know, surfers and, you know, rock, I mean, it's, you know, backpackers and, you know, we studied one of my favorite studies later with Stacey Bear, who's a veteran who ran that

is amazing human being, an awe pioneer. We studied people rafting down the American river, you know,

veteran just like, whoa, we've studied people in art museums, Carnegie Hall, you know. So it's, you know, one of the joys is when science, you know, just in the spirit of your questions, it's like, what should I really do here, right? I could stay in the lab, but it's like, no, you know, we got to go do stuff, you know, that, that my dream study was to like have a participant come in and engage a conversation, the other participant is Shaquille O'Neill, right? And it's like seven

foot two, three hundred or fifty pounds, you feel like, whoa, but couldn't do that. So, so there, it's been fun. It's been a wild ride. And so many thoughts. First one, I'm lucky I didn't rotate through your lab,

because I would have never become a neuroscientist, but I'm unlawful.

Third glad you missed that offer. Like, I'm, but I'm unlawful because it would have been so much fun to, because I, while I loved the, the wet lab, as they call it, getting into these experiments

“or just be incredible, a couple things, the Shaquille O'Neill thing. I, um, you know, I think we're all moved”

by these, uh, I guess they used to call them make a wish foundation, things where a kid who sadly is dying gets some last wish. It's a tragic circumstance, but then you get to observe these kids and most importantly, they get to experience something that they never could have imagined happening,

And I think what we're witnessing in those moments has to be all. Like, they can't believe that this

“human or this event, whatever it is that they wish for is happening there. And so it sort of layers”

upon layers of, there's like a grief component for those of us watching. Well, but, but a huge aspect of the, of just how touching it is is the fact that, like, for those moments, they're not thinking about their mortality and no, it should have to think about their mortality, right? Even as I talk about, it's like, yeah, it's profound. Yeah, it's just, it's like, there's an overwhelming in the opposite direction, right? That's an, particularly complicated and an interesting case where you've got

two things colliding, right? Because I feel like awe is so life affirming. Yeah, it is. And, uh, anyway, that's just an observation, but horizons are something that fascinates me from time as a vision scientist, because when we see a horizon, our visual angle widens, that's cool. We become more parasympathetic. There's a whole, coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic night system. So we relax by virtue of coming off the, the focusing component, we'll focus in

through a tunnel. We, it's quite the opposite. Nice. But I feel like there's something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel, thinking about your 70 or in a bunch of trees, right? And then the horizon opens up. Yeah. There's this transformation of visual space. And those moments, at least for me, are the moments. So I mean, I can hike along the ridge line for a long time,

but like this is amazing, but there's something distinct, bigger in the experience of going from

“confinement to openness. Yeah. It could be brought to the lab, but do you think that's what's going”

on in, in your 70 or the Grand Canyon? Do people work in, you know, 70 in the Grand Canyon? Do they evaluate the, like, oh, yeah, like, another horizon? I don't know. You know, working with Rangers right now. And they, I think, I think the big, expansive forms of awe that those places provide as attenuated, but they're still finding it in subtle or ways. Yeah. That's really interesting. And, you know, it's, it's interesting. I've been privileged to, you know, peak doctor at Pixar for

15 years and worked on some of his films inside out and, inside out to you. And so you played a big role in that. Yeah. And through this science of emotion. And I was like, you know, one of our conversations, I was like, tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children's films.

The animated films. And you describe first just what you said. Like, you know, the film is narrow,

like a certain kind of attention, you know, sort of sympathetic, fearful, checking things. And then boom, it comes, it's suddenly you see the vastness of something. And it's true. It is awe inspiring. When you think about it in neuroscience, typically is a very basic form of awe, is shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception. And then it becomes metaphorical, right? It's like, God, I'm thinking about like, I love one of the wonders of life that that makes us feel awe is

big ideas in epiphanies. And very often people feel like, God, I've been working so hard at this, you know, working on a paper or something in technology or some part of my life. And then you suddenly realize it's part of something large, right? One of the musicians that I interviewed, Yumi Kendall in the book, in the chapter on musical, I said, you know, she's a jealous for the Philadelphia Symphony said, you know, I practiced for five hours a day. It's hard. And it's small and narrow. And

where's my finger? And then when I'm on stage, and I feel the notes go out into this space, the vastness you're talking about, I feel like a part of history, right? And I tear up and cry.

“So I think you're, I think you've got to send me those papers, Andrew, because I think it's”

fundamental, which is from small to vast. And in fact, we did this really cool study of Virginia's term at UC San Francisco Brain Health. Old people go out in an awak once a week for eight weeks, 75 years older, older, and all we asked them to do is to go from small to vast and how they looked at things. You know, look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them off, and less physical pain over eight weeks. And now we're finding six years later, better

brain health, right? So small to vast is a big part of it. I'm struck by the, by the awak. And I know this comes up in your book, and elsewhere, and you've done a lot of research on this. For those listening, what would an awak look like? And what are some of the health benefits? You just mentioned a few that have been observed both in the short and the long term. Yeah, thank you, you know, we we are a walking species, you know, it is just in our DNA to walk. We meandered from Africa,

almost sacred. It's a kind of consciousness. Like you're saying, like, whoa, I'm picking up a vast

review of what's around me. And I decided to just create this awak, you know, and I did it for a meditation group, or a mindful magazine, you just slow down. A lot of people walk, hundreds of, you know, tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States. It's good for you, you know, so we just added off. Like on your regular walk, once a week in our study, go somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go, go someplace that may surprise you. I walk around

Berkeley a lot and it's like, well, I'm going to go past the little playground that my daughter's played at when they were young and just feel that, you know, coordinates he's parked with the rock

“slide and the tunnel. Exactly. I love that place. And there's a secret, should we give this away?”

Yeah. There's a secret hiking trail through, it's actually through a private property's backyard, and they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash, and there's an

incredible waterfall in place to stand at the top. There's a beam there, you've been there.

Yeah, sure. We can look out over this. What is kind of like a trench of tree. It's a total transformation of one space to the next. If you look for it properly, I'm sure now it's on the internet. It's in kind of swinging gates, not locked, and so hard to find. And there's a little monastery, maybe nearby, and you might see me a couple years ago, you would have seen me and my dog, but you might see me eating a slice of pizza from the cheeseboard sitting on that log. I've

spent a lot of time there. I'm getting goosebumps. Henry, that is just pure Berkeley. Thank you. So, yeah, so in this study, all walk, go on your walk. Find a place that's going to be a little

surprising, or it may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder. And it's interesting,

no one's asked me this question, you know, your observation about small to vast, and we just said, slow down, deep in your breathing, sink it up with your walking, which you've studied empirically, the breath, and then go from small to vast. Look at clouds, look at the whole pattern of clouds, just slow it down. Look at trees, look at the light on the trees, and look at points of light, and then patterns of light. Look at, you know, I love walking past playgrounds. It's one of my favorite

“sources of awe. Listen to one laugh, and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids, right?”

That's all. And they walk through, they do that for half an hour, and what we find in that study is they become more vast in their consciousness. They're more aware in the photographs that they provide it of, what's around them. They feel more kindness over the eight weeks. They feel more awe over an eight week period. It rises. And then the finding that was, you know, important for people who are elderly as less physical pain, you know, your body starts to ache when you're 75,

you know, or earlier, and awe, I think through the inflammation process, you know, reducing it cost less pain. You know, this dovetails with other health benefits, awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID, just a minute of awe, a day, reduced long COVID symptoms. It's good news, right? And there's

“so much science on it that I just now, I think medical doctors are starting to think like,”

I'm going to prescribe nature, I'll prescribe music through all, right, as a mechanism. I have a lot of thoughts about this going from a small to large. Yeah, I'd love to hear them. But before I do, um, I have another question. I have another question. I think for a lot of people, including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of ourself, you see, like getting outside of ourselves. But I'm starting to think based on the way you're describing it, that it's

about being tethered to the larger picture, that it's not a, yes, it's getting out of our heads, quote unquote, but it's actually very much an embodied experience. It's very, it's almost like full body. And so now I'll answer your question. This is usually where people start putting in the comments like, you talk too much, let your, your desktop, but trying folks, he asked to me. Twice. So you asked me a question. I'm going to answer it. Anyone that knows me, you know,

if I, okay, so I've thought about this, this relationship between visual aperture and a time perception for a long time. This is my, my deepest obsession. And it gets a little bit into the book.

to the fear of my podcast crew, I actually am considering going back into the lab to do the, this experiment.

“So we know what, what do we know for certain? We know for certain that when your visual aperture”

is small, like looking through a soda straw view or watch, um, maker type aperture, or, um, you're in it. Let's just say, it could be a pleasant or unpleasant text communication. It's going back and forth, that your perception of time is different. You're fine slicing those dot dot dots coming through. Yeah, it's just like this. It feels like an eternity. Yeah. And it's bi-directional with your, let's just call it level of alertness. It doesn't even have to be stressed, but sympathetic

nervous system, right? So if I'm in line at the store and, and I have some place to be my visual aperture, shrinks, and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever. Yeah, because you're

in these little minds, right? When I'm relaxed, it feels like I'm, I'm slicing time differently.

Okay, when we see a horizon and, and our aperture opens up, as I mentioned, then we relax. But we also are taking fewer time bit snapshots. So people might think, oh, fewer, you're in slow motion, because there's no, you're, it's the opposite, right? Slow motion is high frame rate. The thing about video where you can catch slow motion, you need high frame rate. This is why when people experience, uh, like a car crash, they'll often say that things felt like they were slowing down,

“probably, it's more, more snapshot. That's cool. So when I think about this relationship”

between visual aperture and time, and it also exists in the auditory domain. So if I'm listening to a specific conversation in a party, I'm fine slicing my perception of auditory space.

Our friend Irv Hathker taught me this. When I listen to everything and I take it in, as a whole,

it's, it's a more relaxed experience. Yeah. But, okay, cool. So a long time ago, I was, because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and different things, and I came up with this meditation. It's, but it's not meditation at all. And some of my listeners will be familiar with it. I decided to call it for lack of a better term, space, time bridging. And the meditation's very simple. You close your eyes and you do three breaths, thinking about

your skin inward. So interrosception, you open your eyes and you look at your hand, you take three breaths. But you're creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe eight or ten feet away. You do the same. Then you find a horizon. And then you think about the sort of pale blue dot phenomenon. Like you're just on a planet floating in space and like every single one of these things is a form of meditation or a meme or whatever. And then you get

right back to yourself. And so what the idea here is that it helped me a lot, because I noticed that meditations were I was completely focused in, word made me more focused in word. Going for a run, I could get outside my head, but it, and I started to play with the idea that maybe it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se. But it's the like every great thing in biology or psychology. It's the process. It's not an event. It's the process of going from one aperture

to the next. And that's kind of what life is about. When this two shell pass is really about taking a broader time snapshot, like eventually this visual, which is visual. And so there's a long answer to your question, but this is why it's so important for me to see a horizon if I can in the morning. But it's also very important to go indoors and just like focus on what I'm working. Yeah. Like there is no place or event in a day or in life that's actually the right way to live.

Like you can go to big sur, and if you're lucky enough to go to insulin, like you're like this is it. But it's only it because you came from your office and then you go back again. Yeah. You figure this out. Like you, they're title of this paper, which you're the senior author, is a balanced mind. Off-osters equanimity by a temporal distancing. So it's about time.

“Yeah. Not about space. It is. That's how I think about this. Now, maybe you can tell us about”

this paper because I'm getting embarrassed about being going way too long. This is why we're in conversation, Andrew, which is, you know, you've studied the visual system. And we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. And I will just make one parenthetical note, which is I was interviewing Matthias Tonopovsky, who was at Berkeley ran and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony. It was a music director there and he said, I was like, and he was, he studies the great

and he's a conductor of symphonies. And I was like, what's this music's hard to understand scientifically? It is complicated. I was like, what's it? Why are and music? Why do we cry? Why do we get goose bumps? Why do I mean, profound? And he's like, time. It's all about what it does to our sense of time. And so I think there's a hypothesis there to explore what all does to the self. And I'm putting together a couple of your comments is, and Jane Goodall got it most right. And it's, you know,

review or say something. And she was, she felt that chimpanzees feel awed you too. I believe that.

So, it's a controversial issue. Chimps show in front of all alerted me to this who recently passed away. And I just want to pay reverence to him or homage to him. They're great primatologists. So, he said, you got to look at Jane Goodall and writing about chimps. And the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature. They sit quietly like around rivers like that waterfall. It Berkeley. They look at things. They get goose bumps. They touch things like we would out in nature.

They rock. And Jane Goodall said, why wouldn't they feel awed? Or the beginnings of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside of the self. So, with all, we have a sense of self

“interception and the like, and then we connect to vast things out there. And that's what our research”

documented as kind of a central mechanism of awe or transformation. It's like, when you're at your sanity or when you are standing next to that T-rex skeleton or when you, you know, when you thought about the passage of time that happens with life and their new meditations around that, you're like, wow, I am part of something vast. I'm part of evolution. I'm part of nature. I'm part of an ecosystem and it changes your whole mind. It changes the neurophysiology of the mind. Default mode networks starts to

quiet down, activates vagal tone. And you do feel like your tether, as you said, to like music or culture or a political movement or the team you love. And it's transcendent. And if you look at where we are today, we need more of that. You know, we need to get our young people to be connecting to big things. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since.

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with your subscription. I didn't expect that we would land here, at least not so early in the conversation, but there, you know, we we've had Christophcock on this podcast talking about consciousness,

you know, incredible neuroscientists, and it really thinker. I've watched his career of

all over the years, and he's continued to evolve his concepts of how to think about consciousness, and, you know, we'll hear nowadays about, oh, like maybe consciousness is outside the brain,

“and I think if nothing else, our brains are important components in it, maybe not, I don't know.”

I don't want to do the experiment on myself to find out. I was discerberated or something, which basically means having your cortex removed folks, sorry for the nerds speak. But the idea is connecting through time, like in our own lives, is a very unique form of awe. So, like if I hear a song, and it reminds me of when I was like 15, and then all of a sudden, all the, the, the magic library come, that's how the brain works, right? It's like,

it's like a Harry Potter, like you take out a book, you see this subject, and then all of a sudden, the library, the books around it change, and so I'm thinking about the time we did this, and the time we did that, and everyone has these notions, but there's very much link to them. That's one form of linking up through time. And then there's this other one where you feel something with someone else, you know you're connected in that moment, but there's this idea for giving

connected to their past and present future. And if you let yourself go there, no drugs required.

If you let yourself go there, you're like, oh, we're part of this together, and that there were sort of moving more now as as a conscious fleet than as individuals. I think that's a very real experience, even for people that are like very resistant to kind of like even the language of collective consciousness, and that's like that. And I think concerts are where we generally feel that because we're, it requires a sort of shared perceptual experience or emotional

experience. And so when you say getting young people connected that way, it's very different than

“like no to node. It's sort of like it's an openness that comes first you have to connect to your”

your past present in future, and then you're kind of open to it. I feel like then that that window opens. And then if there's one person there or a thousand people standing there, like, it's on. But if not, and you're just in your experience, you're the person at the party, wondering whether or not you have something between your teeth, which is the lamest way to be at a party, but we've all been there, right? Anyway, I'm getting a little outside the box here. But what do your thoughts about

individual experiences? Like on the walk versus a couple on an awalk versus connecting to a whole

mess of people, some of whom you've never met. I mean, you've highlighted, you know, this temporal

this dynamic that you're pointing to with respect to awe and the experience of awe. And we're so

“limited in how we measure experience. And I think you're right. I think that, you know, your first”

sense of like one of the most awesome qualities of awe is connecting in your mind through the layers of consciousness and experience that shifts out of the micro to this expansive narrative about your mind, right? And so I grew up around the UCLA campus because my mom got her PhD there at UCLA at UCLA in the late '60s and there were Eucalyptus trees and then I went to Northern California or there were not as many Eucalyptus trees. And I, first day as at UC Santa Barbara, it's an undergrad,

I smell the Eucalyptus and it was awe. It was just like, ah, all of these experiences through the old factory process. Yeah, I was awestruck by that smell, right? And that's through the connecting through time. I am very persuaded by the new literature on brain synchronization. Jet, we are, and I talk about this a bit and awe and there's just new science coming out.

We're always thinking up with other people. You know, when a nine-month-old listens to music,

they are syncing up to the sounds and rhythms of their culture's music and they're synced up physiologically with whomever is in their midst. When we go to a concert or we watch a sporting event, you know, if you're, if you like sports, your heart rate is syncing up, your brains are synchronizing that it's, and, and that, in some sense, is the materialistic account of collective consciousness,

“we're all sharing brain patterns and awareness. And I think that it's, it's part of some of”

our deepest forms of awe, you know, and music, now the current science of music is like, it is very hard to get people to think collectively in the same way, you know, when you teach a classroom, it's impossible. A music does it within milliseconds, right? When you talk to people who've been a Taylor Swift show, who are Swifties, it's serious, right? They are instantly bonded. Yeah, that's the United in like a moral cause, almost or a identity cause.

So that's profound. That's very hard work to do. And when Jonathan Heiden, I wrote about awe early in our careers, you know, we were like, we need these emotions to make us be part of collectives, because we are a very collective species. It was one of our signature strengths, is to fold into groups in a cooperate and share. It's hard work. It's vulnerable to exploitation and awe is one of the fastest pathways through what you're talking about, through

physical dancing together, chanting together, sporting events together, what email Durkhan called collective effervescence, right? Music, just syncing up with each other, feeling like we're part of this vast group, sharing a sense of humanity, a sense that we all suffer in the same way or exalt in the same way, and it's profound. You know, I don't think we'll ever get this with science, but I love, you know,

yeah, I've had all these conversations about awe and musical awe, I'm like,

Oh, I mean, there's some of the most important, not just memorable, but important experiences

of my entire life. So tell me about one or two. My sister listened to the grateful dead and cat Stevens and all that kind of stuff. From the first time I heard people immediately think,

“well, it bullet belt and mohoks, but I was a punk rock kid. I mean, I'll never forget,”

like my friend, who's now well known in the skateboard community, Jim Thibau. I know Jim. You know Jim? Yeah. Yeah. Close friend of mine. I take songs with you. Do you? Yeah. I text you with him this morning. We text each other every morning. The great Jim Thibau. He basically runs skateboard. He's the Dean of skateboard in the quiet. He goes friends with Tommy Guerrero. Good friends with Tommy Guerrero. Jim gave me my first cup of black coffee. He was the person who inspired

me to start journaling when I was 14. I was put on out of sympathy on to thunder trucks and he at the time. He was around the factory, which at that time was over in third street where all the hunters point on Yosemite. But anyway, Jim gave me a tape because back then it was tapes. Oh, a bank called crimp shrine, which is from Berkeley. And they were on lookout records, which eventually were first releases of green day. I wasn't so much for giving me. I like those

guys, you know, some of them. But I was super, I heard that tape. It was like, this is amazing.

Like this is amazing. Like I've never heard anything quite like it. Yeah. It was super raw. It was

and then I was like, I need more of this. It was like, it was like a drug. I was like, I need more of this. Whatever this is. Yeah. And so he gave me a stifle of fingers tape. And that was just it. And then it was stifle of fingers, operation IV, rancid. I mean, I could easily like do a whole literally a thesis on that whole kind of era and genre of punk rock. I'm huge Joe Strummer fan. Yeah. Yeah. Mescaleros and biggest rancid fan there ever was. I'm blessed to be

good friends with Tim Armstrong these days. But I'm not even better in life. And that's still freaks me out because we're close friends. But whenever I see him, it's still, I'm like, that's

Tim Armstrong because there's the fort talk about time travel. That's the 14 15 year old version of me.

Those guys are a bit older. They were like gods in the Bay Area for our skin. You know, and then when they made it, you know, and they're just still so good. Yeah. The show that changed everything for me was this would be somewhere between 93 and 94. A little club. It was either called the stage house or the stage coach in Santa Barbara. That was near the railroad tracks downtown. And it was rancid playing with sick of all, which was a East Coast hardcore band, which, you know, and my

now good friend Toby Moore's was there. And I remember going there and being kind of scared. I mean, I'm kind of like my way around. It was just like those guys were older. It was like had a kind of violent feel. Yeah. They were from Albany and West Oakland and some of some of, there was an edge there. And I remember thinking, this is exciting. I feel very much a part of this. I love the music.

“I know every lyric and a little bit frightened and I love it. And I think it was just, you know,”

the, I just got the adrenaline back. And there's a little bit of, you don't know what it is going to happen. And it feels a little dangerous. But it's mostly benevolent. And it's an irreplaceable feeling. And I think about some time, I think about a lot of the time. Yeah. And you know, thank you. And I, you know, when I was writing this book on all, some forms of all, you know, they're eight wonders that give us all, you know, some are, you kind of understand them. Nature is pretty straightforward,

spirituality, meditation, you know, and music, and your description of it exactly, exactly captures how rich it is and complicated, which is there is something about that sound. And the acoustic patterns that come through your, your drums and head into your auditory cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people and the insta friends like you said, for life, you know, brothers and sisters almost that, and you're like, this is what life's about.

And Susan Langer, a philosopher really got it right. She's like, music is this tonal language of emotion and identity. And all in music, very fitting with our conversation is when those sounds come into you, move you and connect you to something that is what you care about in life. You know,

“I remember, I grew up, I was very lucky to grow up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s, and there”

was more music there than I almost anywhere in human history, you know, from, you know, the

and the, you know, Bob Dylan was passing through and the bird is a joke, you know, it was everywhere

and it's wild just to think about how much incredible music was being created. Oh, man, you know,

right. The beach boys were, you know, I mean, weren't Fleetwood Mac back into in Topanga. Yeah, I mean, it was like, and I was eight and nine and just to, you know, to grow up on Bob Dylan. And when I saw about the recent film with Tim and Thichel, I mean, I start crying, you know, it's just like,

“this is life, you know, yeah. And so that's why we study all, you know, it, and, you know, music”

is one of our great technologies. There's now research showing it's good for chronic pain. I think it's a frontier in healthcare and, you know, just giving people a contemplative meditative approach as to music and, and, and all as part of the answer. And you and I share, yet another thing Andrew, you know, and I grew up in the photos of this airs as a teenager, Ted Nugin, and you know, as poor, you know, area of Ted Nugin, ACDC, and that's all fine.

And when I first heard the sex pistols in, I was lucky to be in England when never

mind the ballads came out. And I was in a working class fighting town. And I heard that. I was like, that's it. And then that led me to 80 pop who's one of my moral heroes. So, you know, amazing, who's really into Chigong apparently. I heard him like years ago on the radio. And it's almost asking, like, how does he stay in such a chair? And he's just tons of Chigong breathing. Yeah. Wild, wild, wild. You know, it's interesting because a lot of music has lyrics and a lot

doesn't, but there's something it feels kind of divorced from language about the experience we're talking about, even though there's lyrics tied in there. And what brings that to mind is there's a

really good book, one that I like anyway, call the fighters heart by a guy named Sam Shared and

“his wife actually wrote that movie Monster with Charlize Thurham, I think is the actress that”

played her. And, and I don't know Sam, but there's this description of all these different martial arts forms and he explores them all. And there's this great line in there because there's a little bit of boxing and and Sparta bit. I don't recommend it as a neuroscientist. How can I recommend it? Yeah, what were you doing? Yeah, I was, and that was actually in my thirties, but I was working some stuff out, but do not recommend the sport. Yeah, the training out, but you

don't want to get hit in the head, not good for your brain whatsoever. But he talks about how fighting with someone, sparring or fighting with someone is he said it's like a it's one of the most bonding experiences that you'll ever have because you're in this primitive non-language state. Yeah. I mean, he actually likens it to a one night stand. He says something like, you know, you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody that you barely know, but you

you feel connected, you know, so I don't know if that's the best, it's certainly not the most politically correct way to put it, but I understand what he's talking about. Yeah, you're, you're in this moment of you're both vulnerable. Yeah. In the case of the fighting, you're both vulnerable. You're trying to hurt each other. You're also obeying some rules. Yeah. Right. It's not not anything goes. And he talks about how it transcends language. Yeah. And that creates a forever bond.

And it's true. Yeah. Right. I didn't do a ton of sparring, but you, you have a, a respect. Yeah. You went through something hard together. Yeah. You went if it's only three, three minute rounds. Like that's it. It's real. But it's separate from language. And earlier we were talking about the experience of emotion as this kind of triad of the feeling, the motor component to it and language. But I do think that maybe the language piece can go. I'm with you in some sense,

Darwin wrote about the motor components, got a lot of it right. William James was about the body, you know, in the physiology and, you know, language is what we rely on in social scientists. But it,

“I think it's, as William James said, when you tried to describe his experience of transcendence,”

when he took laughing gas and it led him down the path to understand spirituality. He's like words or tattered fragments. They, they barely touch the real thing. Yeah. And I just want to dwell for a moment, you know, part of all. And I learned this like talking to veterans, you know, and I did work with Stacy Barrer and we did the Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers. And he's one of my heroes in the book of getting tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature.

You know, and these are guys with lost limbs and they're rock climbing, you know, and it's just like, like there's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life and there's violence and there's a lot

of the martial arts would say that's the point is that we can transcend death or violence by martial arts by performing them and, and putting them into a contemplative form for the body. One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie is raging bull, man, and Martin Scorsesey, like Jake Lamada and Sugar Ray have these epic battles. And they look at each other. You know, and one of the great scenes and they're just like, we're united. This is what we're

“way beyond the fight, you know, I think you're right. I think it's part of this transcendent moment”

that of people crash and into each other. Mosh pits. Yeah, are one of my favorite objects of study and on. Mosh pits have a law instead of laws to them. Yeah, people have studied like the the physics or the physics of it. Yeah, no, it's like, and you think you're crash and you are your bruising yourself, you know, but there's something transcendent there about what we find. I could be wrong, but I think, um, raging bull, I think that the soundtrack was

clash inspired. But there's something about it in the documentary, which I highly recommend called The Future is Unwritten, which is the Joe Strummer thing where some, there's some link up between the clash. I think Scorsesey says, you know, the clash inspired the soundtrack to raging bull or something like that. Really? Anyway, he's a big clash fan. So, um, or yeah,

“all right, do I get to ask you one more question? Yeah, yeah. So why is Joe Strummer a person of”

moral beauty to you? One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice. So why Joe Strummer? Oh, man, all right, I'm going to try and keep this

brief. Um, I mean, just to give you a sense of how what an impact he's had on me. I mean, I've always

worn these button down black shirts even before I was public facing because I saw him do a show, a mescalero show. I wasn't there, but he, by the way, Joe Strummer in the mescalero is actually thing is better than the clash. Clash was a short run. It was only five years. Yeah. And then five years pretty much and then they're done. So it's one of one of his clash and then, and then he came back with the mescaleros and just incredible, I mean, they're masterpieces. Yeah, produced

in part by my friend Tim Armstrong. He went to Hellcat Records. He went to a small label. He also sang songs with Johnny Cash for where with Rick Rubin actually know the story of that because I'm friends with Rick and I insist on him telling me the story, so sometimes I tell you that, but I mean, masterpieces laid in life and there was a show that that Strummer played where he was wearing his black button down soaking in sweat, like soaked in sweat. And he just wouldn't take the thing off.

Like he might have rolled up like one cuff. Yeah. And I was like, that's punk as fuck. I was like, that guy is so rad and he was in, he died at 50 where I'm 50 now died at 50. I go see the mural of him right off. Um, it's right off Tomkins Square Park in Alphabet City every time I'm in New York. Just go like see it. Right. And AVA or says future is unwritten and you can go there and pay your respects. I've talked a rick about this a lot. Like what was it about him? Yeah, because they were

close friends. I never met Strummer. But I think there's three reasons. One is he had that Bob Dylan

like ability to write lyrics that you're not, especially with mescaleros where you're not really sure what the song is about. But it makes sense, not just because it's beautiful, but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics are actually saying. Beyond language. Yeah. Like a great song for instance would be like on the road to rock and roll. Like it, that could be about being on tour or something. But it transcends something obvious. Nice.

The other thing is is the way he used his breath was like there's a his intonation is like unparalleled. Yeah. And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand. Because during the summer I go hang out with Rick whenever I can. And uh, winter too. Um, and we watched documentaries.

“I think flash documentaries. And I asked him I was like, what was it? Like why does he have this thing?”

Because he said these incredible things, you know, he would say things like, you know,

you got to bring him anity back into the center of the, and those are really beautiful quotes. But like a lot of people will give beautiful quotes. And Rick in very Rick Rubin style said, everything he said he brought his whole life experience into those statements. And I was like, just the statements like the quotes, you know, like the, you know, we got to bring the humanity back into the, and he goes, no, everything he said, it was like you got the sense that

he was bringing all of himself to it, even if he was being kind of quiet and I go, okay. So this

That's like half the things Rick says. It's like a riddle mixed up in a poem, you know, put out there. It's like, as a principal and you're just like, what the hell is that mean? But, but it

“feels true. And I think that, you know, and, and Rick's superpower is that Rick knows what a true”

feeling feels like. Yeah. And he knows what a false feeling feels like. And he's only interested in truth period. And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of as exactly that. It's like there are all these layers of meaning and representation. And, you know, and we try to figure out true moments of awe and with all of our measures. And, and it is this, like it's all coming together as a package that tells us, it's happened. So we can think about things that promote awe, the awak,

going small to large aperture maybe back then. Yeah. Like I guess we shouldn't assume that it's a uni-directional, you know, coming back into our home after something big is there's nothing like that, right? The dog, the kids, the spouse, the whatever, you know, like those little things that plants, you know, that, that, that, you know, so it runs both ways. It's no fun, but we should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe. Because as I step back from what we're talking

about today and I think okay, language, it can be part of it, but it can also, in molecular biology

or genetics, we call it a dominant negative. It's like a gene that basically suppresses a set of

functions. There's a joke around molecular labs in neuroscience lab that you'd be like that person's a dominant negative, you know? You don't have a new phrase. Oh yeah. Yeah, you don't want to be called a dominant negative. I call people that in my head a lot online. I got my own personal dominant negative. They're not contributing to the greater good. They're just like, so there's, you know, language can be that or be neutral repositive, it can definitely be that. And then there's something about being overidentified with self. You know,

so on the recommendation of Tim Armstrong, someone who wouldn't associate with the grateful dead, he was like, "God listen to the grateful dead." And I was like, "What? This Tim, the Tim Armstrong transplants, rancid, operation IV, telling me, I should listen to the grateful dead. He's a huge music fan of all sorts of things." I said, "Why?" And he said, "Dare punk rockers." And I said, "How when are you talking about?" And he said, "Yeah, they, they played a different show every night.

“That's how they're, I'm not going to keep doing it. I can do it pretty decent, Tim." But”

apparently, the people that followed them, that was a big part of it. It was all new, right? Every show was unique. It started getting really into listening to the grateful dead in the last couple of years. And then I started listening to documentaries by geographies of them.

And there's this amazing moment in one of them. I can't remember which, where somebody says,

"What killed it? What killed the collective of music, like that, that feeling?" And the answer, someone gave was cocaine. And then the question was, "Why cocaine?" And someone said, "Because cocaine is all about me. It's the me drug." So I was like, "Whoa, I'm a neuroscientist." So I can tack that to, you're talking about dopamine and adrenaline. And it's when dopamine and adrenaline are elevated, that's a very, I mean, infedemines, especially, but it becomes a me thing.

It's every idea that's mine. It's the thing that needs to happen. It's the important thing.

“If not out there, it needs to happen. Like, that's the only thing that matters.”

Very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics. Very different than just the sober experience, words kind of a downer. But then the non-intoxicated experience of just being with the music, no substances. So I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states and, but more broadly, how meanness self-interested states are a dominant negative for awe.

That was the best entrance into that question. I've ever encountered. It's amazing, Andrew.

I grew up for three years, formative years in Laurel Canyon, 68 to 70, and then we moved to the foothills of the Sierra's in northern California. It was peak Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell, and the birds, and the beach boys, and, you know, it was just Ellis. Yeah, it was actually a synopositive way. When my brother passed away, and he was my brother of all 14 months younger, and I was in this reflective period. I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon,

and they made the same point, which is kind of things shifted after we, you know, in the early 70s, and the historian said it's cocaine, that it moved from, you know, marijuana and mushrooms.

or Graham Nash, or whoever it is, and it's suddenly cocaine comes, and the whole spirit changed.

“Yeah, I think the great enemy of awe is meanness, is what Ralph Aldo Emerson,”

who is one of our great writers of awe, you know, he has this moment out of nature, cold day, and Massachusetts sees this forest in, you know, he's like standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by, by there, and uplifted into infinite space, and there's that uplift that you described earlier of awe, all mean egotism vanishes, and that's awe, you know, awe quiets the self. And when you look at where we are, you know, Gene Twangy, you know, longitudinal data,

we're more self-focused, you know, we're taking a quarter of the pictures that we take

are of the self. It's preposterous, it's half of the photos we take are of the self or

the self with another person or another thing. It's perverse, you know, the world has become more narcissistic, we're led by narcissists, it's been, you know, it's just taken as a default, and it's not a default, it's a, it's a corruption of our minds, because the mind, as you described earlier, is very good at looking at other people, at making eye contact, at seeing their beauty, adhering their words, at looking at a collective, discerning patterns of

nature, collectives, and all of that works against awe, right, that, you know, if I am focused on myself, I'll feel less awe, if I am worried about my striving in society, ear, my bottom line in my bank account, you know, or thinking about money, it countervails

“awe. So yeah, I think, you know, that's why awe is important for our times. We are in this”

for various reasons, this period of too much self-focused. It's costing young people, it makes them anxious, you know, and they got to, they got to go dance, they got to hear some music, they got to share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is, you know, and just to get out of yourself. I'd like to take a quick break and then acknowledge our sponsor function, function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot

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“important one, only because I think some people not me, but some people will, all right, I don't really”

want to go camping or backing. I do, I spend as much time in the assembly as I can. The dancing concert, you know, maybe that's not for them, I do think I'm not a big professional sports fan. I like a few things, but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on like when I see a game, one of our members of our podcast team that's not here today is just obsessively excited about professional football and Seattle Seahawk. I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite

team playing the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl, that it's not just about his relationship to him. It's about being a kid and everyone else there in a Seahawk jersey is like, they must feel a connection. Totally. Because they presumably, the Super fans know that the other Super fans know that history, you know how important this is, they know all the trials and tribulations of the team and on and on and so it's gosh, it's so different. I'm just realizing. It's the furthest thing

from like doing a PhD in the sciences. Folks doing a PhD in the sciences is a lot of fun. It's a hell of a lot of work and there's nothing else quite like it. It's a replaced spot. It is. I wouldn't redo it for any other way, but it is a very, it's a very solitary thing. It is. You don't even

like this big. Going to the Super Bowl to watch your favorite team play is you're going through that

“the tunnel with, you know, millions of people. One of the joys of all science, you know, we gather”

stories of all from 26 countries and it's one of my favorite parts of this research and this is like Indian Brazil and Poland and Chile and Mexico and Japan and Korea and South Korea and Russia and we everybody. We brought them in, got these stories. Hey, what is vast in mysterious? What gives you

goose bumps? What's amazing or awesome to you? And when you get stories from Brazil or Argentina,

they're going to write about it. They're going to tell you about football, you know, and, you know, when you get stories from parts of the United States, they're going to talk about, you know, American football and baseball, you get stories from Boston. There's going to be a Red Sox story. And we have not studied sports in my emotion science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes. They're picked last in grammar school. They're actually about sports and yet it's

super emotional and I will tell you a story that has science and personal wisdom. As I gather these stories like, "God, you know, part of collective effort of essence, just like Taylor Swift or

being in a punk mosh pit is also sports and just like it is awesome to follow a sports team and

be their live." And there's this great obscure sociology paper that said, being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion because you have your rituals, they have these towels, they sing around, you think of yourself as the steeler nation. They talk about God like experiences on the field. They have these spiritual moments where in freezing days they'll take off their clothes and cheer and cry together. And I was teaching this recently and there were two steeler fans in the

audience and it's exactly it, but I'll tell you more. Like everywhere you go, if you're a fan, a steeler fan, there are steeler bars that you can go to. And when the steelers play, they're going to be steelers fans and if you're a kid and the steelers lose, somebody's all will tell you,

“"I remember when we lost in 1983, we'll recover, we'll have this expansion of time."”

It was so rich to me, it was like we love sports. Sports, the Olympics are old. They're 3,000 years old.

The ball court games in the myand traditions are amazing ways to gather community and become

collective. So it was really eye-opening for me just to sense the awesomeness of sports. And one of my great joys of writing the book was to talk with Steve Kerr who was coaching the warriors at the time. He's a righteous guy. He's a person of truth and just getting a sense of like how awesome it is to I mean for him to coach a game and the warriors are in this amazing period and look up into the stands and 10,000 people are dancing because of your coaching you know, I was like, that's pretty good.

So he's really tapped in isn't he? He's a meditator and wild life experience and trauma early, you know, his dad lives in his dad and and that orienting him to what really matters. I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe but I'm also thinking about solutions. Yeah. You know it's spring to mind that you know it's it's funny. Sometimes I get tacked to like ice baths for some look folks that was whim right I mean that was whim. I mean sure

I've done some co-plunge as I like. I got it too the co-organ. Yeah it's fun. I mean you know it it's psychologically painful and you feel better afterwards and it'll make you it'll make you anyone mentally stronger because cold is a universal stressor but you know it gets kind of a bad rap because most of the kids people don't like doing it. Everyone loves the sauna. It's kind of funny. Everyone's cool with sauna and the fins love the sauna and it's a social thing for them and

“one thing I think has been overlooked and it's just spring to mind now so I overlooked it as well”

so you know there's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people but that we can also do in our own and when we do them on our own we we know other people are doing it on their own too and so it's kind of a it's a different version of what we've been talking about and you know the co-organ health and wellness community they take some heat like pillway I want to all about supplements or all about cold plunges you know and I've got like a like a particular finger I

hold up when I hear that but it's not about that. There's this deeper layer that's much more

breath where excellent good love excellent yeah amazing here incredible story historic and many

important things actually happened there that people don't even realize in terms of shifting world politics world peace that maybe some Russians in there for in for example to too and the Cold War yeah I mean and go over to yeah incredible right but you know so it used to be these isolated pockets but now you know people get together to sauna you get together to do breath work people get together to Cold Plunch and of course for thousands of years humans have been doing this

this is not a new thing and people look at that and they go this is wacky or it's about the marketing

“of this actually I think that there's a connection that's formed among people who want to take”

good care of their health they want to have some control over their state because otherwise

the world will take control of it for you yeah and meditating is a very solitary experience for most people so there's something pretty nice about going to a banja I love banja yeah yeah and then also doing the sauna on your own or co-plunch on your own and I think that what it builds is a community that is linked on social media so from now on when I see people doing things that I go oh cool like I like a bit of that I don't maybe do it every day or I do that every

day too get see my morning sunlight the notion that there's a community being built that was the original intention of such a media yeah and so I think social media can have this dominant

negative effect on awe and day-to-day resilience so a question is are there ways surely there

are but how how could we build more of a sense of like this communal feeling leveraging what people are already doing they're already on their phones and scrolling hopefully they're also doing things to benefit their health to make them feel less isolated because as Jonathan hey and others have pointed out quite correctly it can really fracture us into the me the ego version where it's but it's kind of the perfect venue to connect people so I don't expect you to come

up with any answers right on the on the fly but I feel like it's not going anywhere so how could we build or glean up more sense of a community through things that we're doing actually doing in

“our daily lives is I think a question that's worth exploring it's profoundly important you know”

the you know the preceding question is like what are the enemies of awe what gets in the way or the barriers and and you just nailed a couple is you know online life you know and I think Jonathan Hight is right that it's not only anxiety producing but we don't think about the opportunity costs of like it deprives me of all you know and in our study of 2600 people around the world what makes them feel awe no one ever said being on met our Facebook or you know or you know

or Instagram there are a couple of reasons worries I have about online life and I'm kind of working on this now you know and one is is the content itself which is you know it's been algorithmically designed I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms I was advising there were said in place of like making people hate each other and not demonstrate all of our all the wonderful things about human beings which are ample and then online life disrupts sharing and the technologies of today have

disrupted sharing so we don't share music like we used to share we used to listen to music together that's down going to movies is down 40% right that used to be a very important collective cultural experience did you see the latest course easy your picks are or whatever now it's streaming right so

“I really worry about that and I think the next challenge in in the technological world in the”

new the social media and the platforms is is like you said how do you enable the sharing of experience you are absolutely right a lot of what we do for our bodies in the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it for suddenly you're not you know meditating and breathing but you're also sharing your mind and your experience you're not you know listening in music you're sharing an understanding of the music together in its cultural history one of my

favorite examples is farmers markets they were non-existent in their 90s right and they used to be very common in American culture and now there are 9,000 farmers markets growing and yeah people go to buy kale and get the honey and you know the fresh bread or whatever but they're also going because it's community it's profound community and we derive a lot of benefits from that profound benefits ten years of life expectancy community ten years ten years my goodness there's so much

pole vaulting which most people aren't going to do sprinting gymnastics the stuff that involves

a lot of jumping and landing and fast twitch activity yeah i mean there are a bunch of other features there about like who's biased to go into those sports and whatnot but yeah i mean i think it's in keeping with this idea that like getting your heart rate way way up and moving quickly as you as quickly as you safely can like once a week at something is probably a good idea but the greatest benefit seen there is something like five to eight years yeah you're talking about

a ten years benefit and that's a meta analysis of 350,000 participants so that's that you can

“go to the bank with that like social community very good for the body i think it's the greatest”

challenge of our our social media and our our platforms and i've advised it Facebook 2010 to 2015

Google Pinterest little bit of apple and i keep telling them like you know this is the singular challenge and it so it's hard it's you know technologies are asynchronous you know hey i send you a text in 18 hours later i hear from you you're not making eye contact the visual connection is degraded you know Steve Pinker observed rightly so like when i'm on zoom i have to look at that down to see the camera or i look at the screen so my eye contact is going down i'm not

making eye contact like we are it's just the technology works against it and i think it's the hard problem of the social media platforms is can they do what you're aspirationally asking for which is like get us to feel connected you know marksucker berg the original statement about

“Facebook was open and connected and i think they failed and i think we got it we it's the challenge”

of our times i know mark a bit and i i know you know i trust he wants that i know i really do i know some people will will will push back on that statement but i actually know that he wants that and i know some of the folks in the leadership at instagram they want that i know like these people actually have very healthy personal lives they understand the value of connection both at the level of the family friendships but also at large they want that i think that

maybe i'm being optimistic here but maybe a i will offer an opportunity for that as opposed to divorcing us from gathering and seeing facial expressions and hearing voices together or observing other things you know i do think that right now the way that most social media experiences land is the exact opposite of all i will say that because and i can say that with a fair degree of certainty because i spend a good amount of time on social media teaching and looking for entertainment

trying not to get you know rage-bated or numbing out those are the two things i look out for rage-bading and numbing out well put there's a version of social media that's happening right now where we're going further and further into our silos yeah but i don't think it has to be that not at all i i don't i think it could be really leverage to connect people you know when i started advising a facebook 2010 it was like Arab spring and democracy was spreading and in many ways

we've had this great democratization of things of people sharing music you know instantaneously i can hear music from any part of the world which you know that's profound and visual art and knowledge and podcasts and we've got to be nuanced about this but we do need you know to think intentionally about design you know and that you know i really worry about the privileging of hate i forgot what you called it but that has been privileged and that's not human nature we we

are not all trolls and you know tracking people and you know and that is a degradation of who we are and i think science would guide us in in many ways to avoid that so i think it's we're in this big reflection period about how to redesign and i hope i hope they listen to the social science it has a lot of good things to say i've had this thought that the way social media is now yeah it's the direct

“opposite of all i'm following reason awe inspiring experiences you never forget them you never”

forget them i mean we could spend 15 hours talking about first concert second concert first love

first kiss you know first get it break up you know and which is its own form of all like yeah like if this can there's this flip side to this love thing right you know i mean there's all that i sometimes do the test of myself a you okay i spent i don't know how much time on social media

specific but there was tons of sensory input a fair amount of time i remember a damn thing

“and so that's scary it is because the only thing that resembles that yeah is drugs of abuse”

and i'm very fortunate that i don't have a drug thing i never i never felt drawn to them in a

way that i felt like i couldn't escape from them or same with alcohol easy easy easy clip for me to not drink i will say i really but my friends who have had real changes with alcohol and substances i'll tell you like it's this super compelling thing but then you don't have anything to say about it or for it it's just a space time disintegration and not the space time disintegration of psychedelics which may have some benefits we'll talk we'll talk

about that so to me that's the problem with social media it's nothing memorable about yesterday social media and i do think that the people who build it want it to be impactful on the day to day scale but also where say do want to be memorable yeah they should be some kids should be talking about like like like you're talking about laurel canyon yeah i know but i don't know if they're gonna feel that way well you know one of the things i'm really interested in right now

Andrew is is all a design right and you know working with gal architecture and copinhagen like how do you design cities for more awe it's not hard and it's good for people right a little bit of music a little bit of green space a little bit of art get people looking at

“each other and talking and buzzing right easy to do and i think you've just laid out you know and”

someone could write a manifesto like maybe my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe it's small awe's vast it's sped up awe slows things down it has a fragmentation to it awe integrates right it's about micro things awe's about systems like when you feel awe towards music it's like i get it all here right now it's content is is not inspiring very often and it could it all could be so sometimes it is i think that yeah that the space time aperture that we talked about before

i think the problem with social media is actually it's power to bring the whole space time into an aperture this big i actually think that it has to do crazy hypothesis happy to be wrong i actually think the whole problem with it has to do with the fact that it brings long time scales past present in future different app but different frame rates into one real world visual app right right because when i haven't been to the sphere in Las Vegas right

but friends of mine who are musicians who love live music who are producers who love live music

tell me it is incredible yeah and it's you know in some cases the live band is there

and in other cases they're not and so there's no reason why that technology should be awesome for again here we go no better word for no better word for all of the awesome so just gonna stick with it and roll that the there's there's no reason why digital can't be awe inspiring yeah it should and and we have to you know we just have to take a step back in these conversations right there's you know there's new work out about AI helping medical

doctors and it's you know in the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco it's like it's like having the best brain trust about medicine right with you all the time

“who wouldn't want that you know and i think let's remember that and yeah i think that's the”

challenge is to have these AI and the devices that it is manifest on get us to what's awesome and i will see you know i hope so i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor our place surprisingly toxic compounds such as p-fastes or forever chemicals are still found in 80% of non-stick pans as well as utensils appliances and countless other kitchen products as i've discussed before on this podcast these p-fastes or forever chemicals like teflon

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“embarrassment yeah and and my favorite of my other favorite of most of my career it was guys right”

guys specifically teasing one another i definitely experienced that and i definitely participated in it in a benevolent way but it the teasing that happens in groups of good male friends can be pretty brutal oh yeah but there's a pleasure in it most of the time yeah yeah what's that about i know well you know it it all begins really in like we and i started scientifically to depart from the actman cannon if you will of those six emotions we talked about earlier and i's

doing a project in his lab and we're startling people and studying the startle response

a seven muscle movement motor pattern built into the nervous system and i noticed people got embarrassed after they are startled unexpectedly you know the you blast them with a noise out of the blue and the lab and they look whoa i think i spit you know feed my pants or whatever they show this response and i took it to actman and it's the blush and people have heard their gaze and he look away and they hide their face you know and he's like that's a motor pattern of emotion

“you should go study it the night yet and and then i started to notice and there's a really rich”

literature on that that and Darwin wrote about this that a person's embarrassment is a sign of their commitment to the collective right like man you know called you by the wrong name or you know i farted in the yoga class or whatever it is and i'm embarrassed like i'm sorry man you know i apologize that really matters and when you see people get embarrassed you like them more and you trust them more and you give resources to them and you think they're a good group member and then i

like man you know like i've played a lot of pickup basketball in my life thousands of games and you're banging and there's just a lot of teasing and taunting and you know people i admire you know great athletes tease and taunt you know it's just part of what we do and we're

“banging into each other and i started to put it together like you know the right kind of teasing”

within a collective you're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group right and then the wrong kind of teasing which we documented in our labs like that's bullying and harassment and we can pinpoint like that's inappropriate you know you're trying to you're not keeping people

in the group you're excluding them or humiliating them so we did this study as one of my first

study we brought four fraternity we brought groups of fraternity for fraternity guys in each interaction from this fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin and we gave them each nicknames or we gave them each initials and we had them make up nicknames based on the initials so two two letters of nicknames were 80 and i'm not sure i can say what the nicknames were like but you know another drunk and it gets pretty profane and so we let him tease each other and they

start teasing each other and they are really like this is young men coming out of fraternity house teasing each other there are funny stories people got embarrassed the the stories and the teasing was kind of about like i'm going to accuse you of something that you shouldn't do in this group right like pass out drunk naked you know in the streets of Wisconsin don't do that right and then they get embarrassed and they say i'm not going to do that and what we found is the more

that they and got embarrassed the better they liked each other because it's it's turning to this motor pattern of like wow i'm showing you that i care about what you're accusing me of and i get embarrassed you see that in me we become closer the the guys who are better teasers and they were more playful and funny and made people aware of the norms that mattered to the group but not really humiliate people those guys were more popular in the group and that's been replicated right

just storytelling and and ribbing each other and and and and it was part of healthy group functioning is just embarrassing each other you think about roasts you know see end of your career you're going to get that someone's going to talk about your career you're going to get hammered and it's one i fear that yeah yeah and that's part of this phenomenon of like we we we we

teas each other like mad you know in the joke and they josh and they wrestle and they give each other

newbies and they have nicknames for each other again to like make sure everybody's aware of

“what matters and how not to violate those rules so it was it was fun research it was mental out time”

that i mean it grew up in a big big packs of boys i mean my street growing up and skateboarding thing and then science it was a little bit different actually when i came up there was more of that it changed over time for good i think for good reasons but um and then of course there's my podcast team and people keep telling me the reason i get teas a lot is because they because they like me but for example um i saw an interesting well two things a former guest on this podcast who's

a psychiatrist who's also very versed in eastern philosophy uh Dr. Kay as they call him so that embarrassment is important because it also signals that you're not a creep especially yeah he was referring to heterosexual relationships where you know a guy says something

trying to be you know trying to flirt basically or pick up on someone and then uh the woman

says something back and he like gets embarrassed he realized like he said the wrong thing if he doesn't show embarrassment he's creepy if he does it verifies that he has a certain degree of empathy in self reflection now so that was his point but it it feels relevant here so and he's right i mean you know uh Darwin early on wrote about the blush being a sign of your healthy character your moral virtue almost and in non-human species the facial redening is associated with physical robustness

and then in humans we think of it as moral robustness like yeah i care about stuff we did work early on bob night at Berkeley orbital frontal patients the orbital frontal cortex is in part where your ethical consideration takes place and if you have damage to that region of the brain through brain trauma you fall off a motorcycle or you know fall off a ladder you don't show embarrassment

“where you should and they feel creepy if you will or just like like hey they're not playing”

by the rules so it's it's a very subtle thing erving gothman wrote a lot about it the great sociologist like our embarrassment is telling people like i know what the rules are and i care about them i'm committed to them so your psychiatrist friend is right along the lines of of teasing uh someone i'm proud to call it friend who's also public facing jockel willink who's also turns out one of our were friends for a bunch of reasons but one of them is that he grew up really into east coast

hardcore music not a genre i i gravitate towards but there's some marginal overlap uh with the types of music i'm into we've gone to shows together and um he put something up you know everyone's a while on social media somebody post something that really lands in a ball or something jocco and he's a jocca's a man a few words so i'm gonna put more words to it than then he was able to

“but the quote was something like um you know if you want to understand and he's at former navy seal”

seal team operator most people know that but um if you want to understand males in groups and healthy masculine friendship guys are gonna tease each other relentlessly in front of each other but they'll

never tease behind somebody's back and they'll back the other person who they were just teasing

in person against the rest you know the buffer them against any kind of criticism so that's a very interesting kind of contrast there that i think is true yeah like you know it's not like you tease your friend behind his back it's that it's a teasing to his face that actually builds the bond yeah there's another piece of that which is that you know that that person would back you if you're out of the room and you know that a couple friends all my friends come to mind but a couple

people who who really think about and talk about this loyalty component jocco is talking about their lex freedman you know it's a it's a critical component to um i'm sure female friendship too although and we know my own experience so uh to male friendship which is that things say anything to your face even be harsh criticism but you know that if you're out of the room they're not gonna cut you down yeah they're gonna reserve that for when you're standing in front of them

thankfully we documented that in the fraternity study that you know when you when you tease somebody and you're like hey man do you see this guy's dance moves or you see this guy shoot free throw whatever it is you're just making light of human foil and and all the funny things that we do and there's there's there's just this really subtle repair work where they're saying like i'm teasing you but i know you got it you know and i'll support you and i agree i think that

and let's surface those norms in a lighthearted way and we know together and if and if you

“make mistakes you should be apologetic about it but part of it also is just uh this sort of i”

got your back repair work that they did um and it's profound it you know it's interesting i was kind of the shy kid i'm very small growing up and kind of the teasing often cross lines in high school just you know bullying and so forth and then i started to play basketball and you know uh and i really like a lot of it's just just men making sure they know the rules of the game you know and showing also in those moments of the joys of laughing together like i support you i'm with you

right uh what a sophisticated thing to do um compared to the the alternatives i have a sister so i was struck by the brothers in my neighborhood they're two in particular like i would hear screaming outside go outside it's older brother this name is Peter holding michael's face in the sprinklers his brother's just crying and crying screaming i mean relentless older brother torture some people hear this and probably be like oh call the cops you know i don't know what the reaction is not is i'll try not

to be generally generationally biased i don't know yeah he was he was abusing his younger brother and but if anyone said or tried to do anything to either one of them they would immediately pair up and fight anyone it was interesting right um for a guy who had an older sister and there's a very different experience right i mean she had her own form of older sister kind of uh hazing

to a younger brother but there really does seem to be something critical about kind of defining

the relationship with people one-on-one in groups versus when there's an outside threat yeah and not that we want outside threat but as long as we're talking about the sort of the the i don't want to say disintegration that's too pessimistic the sort of um gradual erosion of this collective feeling is there less just kind of grouping up together and doing things yeah you know i um ten years ago uh 15 years ago ten years ago um first there's the science of loneliness and isolation

john kasyopo uh and then those who followed like whoa we are fragmenting and we would spend much too much time alone isolated and then covid hit locked down et cetera and our surgeon general former surgeon general vvvic murhygota right like uh it's an epidemic of loneliness and i as a social psychologist you know interested in these social emotions and like you know you just look at the basic raw facts like picnics are down by half we don't go to movies like we used to we don't

we don't listen to music together we don't 30 the estimate is that 30% of meals in the United States people eat them by themselves you know i'd a lot of my meals by myself um we go on walks by ourselves we don't go to church church is way down um so the kind of the broad sociological

“trends are alarming on that fragmentation but i think the young generation is putting it back”

together in really interesting ways you know we know from survey data the 25 year old

third year olds are really just in game nights you know those are coming back they're interested

in living together quap cooperative living they are cooking more with each other value eyes they care more about community than my generation i was the great explosion of individualism and they're kind of like you know if i choose a job i want to make sure i'm working with other people i like i didn't i didn't think about that i don't know you know so i think it's coming back and and i love the signs of you know festivals or reappearing now the farmers market that i've

talked about the you know the dance groups that are now returning contact dance i mean these yoga studios one out of eight americans does yoga you know i do yoga two to three times so wild it's amazing fifteen years ago known would have predicted that also fifteen years ago known would have predicted

“that that the single it we're being told that one of the single most important health interventions”

that women and men should do is like lift weights they only people lifted weights when i was growing up we're like body builders and preseason football players is that new lifting weights is

i mean you never want to actually live this way but if you if you could only pick one form of

properly you probably get some cardiovascular benefit too but just in terms of brain health i mean obviously you want to both but resistance training is clearly has a longevity benefit but for the longest time i mean you just didn't see women and gyms very few skis now very few and if you did they was sort of they you know and are pushing them heavy for them or in some cases heavier than the guys are lifting but regardless that's that's a huge shift yeah so many

more people are in gyms and i wonder whether or not it contributes to some sort of feeling of

“it does i mean it's training hard around other people yeah that's cool i think”

Vivek Murthy in particular who are deeply admire and have worked with a bit you know he he got

our health world think about it surgeon general of the united states the first one to come out of

public health traditions did work in india right and he's like there's this social side that you've covered in your show like to health the physical health to the the telomerays of your yourself your DNA and the vagus nerve and so forth oxytocin cortisol it's social there's there are social dimensions to our nervous system and i think that's coming Andrew like we're starting to see why do i go to farmer's market because i feel a sense of community and why do i love yoga because

i'm doing these postures all synchronicic synchronize with people i don't know and i feel sense of awe and transcend it's why do i live weights right there's the banter and the discussion and the the history and the sense of you know of what this all means culturally i think that's coming i think the gyms are appealing to it in some sense right little bit more community active activity and i think it's good news you know i love the japanese onsen you go for the water

you know in the the springs and the heat and so forth but day and there wisdom of built entire community experiences around it where you you wash yourself and you bathe together and you eat together and you they're saying's up on the walls and you spend a little time with your kids there right

“so i hope we we learn because i think it's important yeah i'm thinking a lot now about how we can”

bridge between these incredible technologies yeah i am a fan and but also the the non-negotiable technology of our our nervous system and the and our biology and our psychology right lately because i have aquarium really into this thing called aquiscaping which is this japanese form of like plants and fresh water fish and just obsessed with it but and um and when the ecosystem is doing well i'm like i feel i've said it's a form of it's brought me some odd times when like the things

are going well and they're like wow it's just beautiful and um and i think there are things that i would

never do to my fish i would never isolate them from one another but i give them enough places to

hide from one another because there's a lot of dominance hierarchy stuff being worked out between these discus yeah um i make sure they're on a light cycle i make sure they're fed but not over fed or under fed right and um i wouldn't do most of the things that we do to ourselves to to my fish you know i wouldn't isolate them give them like little videos of other fish to look at like i know that wouldn't that wouldn't work um i know that they would die i i know that uh you know and so i

think we can learn a lot from more uh simpler organisms and and the sort of basic units of of care and community yeah they're very similar yeah we get played out differently but but they're very similar uh because obviously we we evolved a similar nervous systems little ones of similar needs

“i would like to talk about psychedelics if you're willing yeah i think there are two”

at least two of users psychedelics yeah with the caveat that this is not a call for people to

start taking them that you know these are powerful compounds that um people with psychosis or

bipolar conditions and their family really really need to be careful and yeah and on and on and just be careful i don't say that to protect myself i say that to protect whoever's listening watching really these are no no no small bump it's a whole thing so some people will say okay they just send you inward and that's the opposite of what we're talking about like getting all the awe inside like okay that's i mean that that's pretty extreme um other people will say that their

experiences with psychedelics allowed them to come out of that experience and really have a felt connection to people to plants to animals to life that is um profoundly positive for their feelings of connection yeah and seeing awe perhaps even in lots of things so how should we

talking about mdma which is not psychedelic it's an empathogen ketamine it's not psychedelic

“it's a socioeconomic I'm starting to do this now because people start to lump and it's actually”

causing issues that for the potential legalization so we need we need to be splitters not lumpers here so i'm talking about LSD psilocybin maybe dmt i wasca the the the the classic psychedelics yeah what are your thoughts on these i'm good friends with michael pollen and was you know kind of walk in the Berkeley Hills as he was producing that book and you know watched as we started a center for psychedelics at Berkeley and um and you know it's a revolution i mean it's psychedelic

use is up you know 40% since his book i mean it's incredible to watch and i i have a few thoughts

you know one is you know make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come those are spirit medicines in their community that are part of deep ethical traditions you know and to honor that with you know uh you know sharing of resources and knowledge and

“and the right kind of acknowledgement that's really important um i i think in some sense uh and”

you know david yate in it john's hopkins and others uh and some of the early role in Griffith's work spoke to this that they are about all um fundamentally you know they open up your mind and you see all life forms and time is different and your sense of self vanishes

robbing car her terrace you know and you're just connected to vast things ecosystems and

sense of humanity and i think in some sense and done when down in the right way that's good news you know moly crocket and her team at Princeton like you go to a festival and you have psychedelics a year later you're kinder uh through all right uh so i think that's important uh i think it's great news what it does for the hard problems of the mind you know death anxiety addiction trauma maybe veterans who are suffering twice three it's a PTSD they're drawn to this you know and

the VA is working on this so uh and the data look pretty good OCD right hard problems at the mind panic right that um i've impart dealt with that is good news um i worry about micro dosing

you know i think people are taking um these things like coffee and it's not coffee you know

that's not coffee i drink coffee and i might and i know a thing or two about psychedelics but experience and uh it's definitely not and the data speak speak to this and we've suddenly unleashed the use of it tens of millions of people are using it not in the way that Michael Paul describes of like putting it into a cultural container of inquiry knowledge and guidance and someone who knows what they're doing around you and it's so safety even safety yeah so we're

seeing that and i you know they changed my life i got to them early uh you know in my late teens 17 18 19 i was a very anxious obsessive kid and i think they opened up my mind in this perspective

“way we've been talking about i don't really do them now you know they gave me a lot that's why”

they're here you know it's it's funny you know Andrew like when i was doing them we were reading Castaneta who's been debunked you know and we we're reading the traditions and thinking about them spiritually and the doors of perception and all this good stuff right we were they were embedded in a culture of trying to find mysticism or whatever it is and i hope people are doing that you know if they're going to be doing on them make it a form of inquiry it's a complicated story like everything

like technology well they're a form of plant technology right plant which uh quick vignette on that we had someone here um Chris McCurdy who runs a lab out in Florida you studies a cradoman other compounds from plants the form of companies they buy a prospect they send people looking for plants that then they can find isolates and everything from aspirin to um cradoman to anesthetics like cocaine i'm not suggesting people use it as an anesthetic they come from plants

but they're isolated and then synthesized and and enriched and that's where the opiate they extreme opiate the extreme stimulant right now that's where it comes from but they all come from plant out many of them come from plant alkaloids which is interesting and it's own right but the i share your feelings about micro dosing uh the data robin cardot hair tells me and he's the real expert of course the data say there's no evidence of benefit from micro dosing at least on major

after right and on so i'm people here that yeah i hope they hear that um i had the opposite

experiences you um i actually regret having done psychedelics when i was younger um they were terrifying i didn't have a good experience i stopped didn't go anywhere near them and then later in a therapeutic setting um had a few experiences with them not many but that were immensely beneficial for me um so kind of the opposite direction there but what we're talking about now about kind of okay you know there's this problem with certain technologies there's the cultural culture wars there's the

political wars there's the actual war that's also going on right now a lot of ways this resembles like

“the 70s 80s so there's not that i mean i remember a time when you had yuppies and you had hippies”

and you had rockers and you watch a john Hughes film it was like the idea was it was like oh we're actually

similar right you know it's the extent to which those films like showed people hey like people were actually similar along certain dimensions as opposed to so different but you know i i wonder because i think about that they're not so recent and recent history of things everything from breath work co-opongious psychedelics um all music the collective consciousness i mean yeah it's gonna look different now the same way that it it looked different back then right like i'm

trying to get outside my gen x self these days and think like so what would it look like like i'm the old guy now so what would it look like if these technologies i just mentioned a few but all of them including social media what would it look like if those were all used to the greatest benefit like what would that look like can we be the open-minded parents of the 80s you know yeah um can we be the yeah like because i feel like i can scream all day or about what i think

“about the science of this and that to younger people but the only thing i actually have control over”

is like me how do we um the let's say 40 to 100 year olds it's really lean it on the 40 to 70 year olds okay how do we create the environment so that younger people can flourish with these technologies as opposed to being like the parents of the 70s and 80s they're like oh they got long hair and like what is it's like punk rock thing like i don't want to be that person that sucks i also don't want to be the and i see this a lot unfortunately people who are

part of those movements and then they they're just like towing the party line because they're like wholeheartedly adhering to one political group without thinking about whether or not there's any any hint of rational argument on the other side right the whole point is not to be against the whole ideas to be for what you believe is right and so i don't know how to do this you're older than i am by a little bit you're clearly wiser than i am seriously and you have more life experience so

what do we do like really like what what and how can we do because i don't like this you guys are all on your phone that doesn't feel good to me because they were telling us when we were younger like this is ridiculous like the older guys are like you know small wheels on skateboard they were right about the small wheels things turns out we the wheels got too small but the uh and Jim will

“understand that but what do we do i think we're in this moment you know with everything going on you”

know with AI and being online and polarization and climate crisis and you know the things that we were able to rise of white supremacy politics et cetera everybody's asking this question of like what how do we kind of move forward and you know in light of many of the things that we've talked about in this conversation i'm most focused on what Robert Putnam started to write about and other people started to write about like the just the breakdown of collective life and shared life

and i think that's the in a defining issue of our times as well as our relationship to the natural world and i find awe as do other people really refreshing it provides a roadmap which is you know and i'll give you a very concrete example i'm working with gale architecture

on a cities of awe initiative and they do amazing work hundreds of cities around the world

70% of human population is in cities most of our carbon emissions come out of cities and this is this is a place we can redesign and make it better right and awe is a wonderful lens so you can

ideation or what do you give to a veteran who's coming back and feeling alienated from the world

“you give them all right and what does that mean it's like well you give them a little nature”

and that's you rewild part of a city right you give them some public art we love art you know we love visual art you give them the opportunity to recognize the moral beauty you know you found it in Joe's drummer just get them to interact with other people from face to face you give them a little collective stuff right you hey we're gonna have the yoga class in the town square or the Mexican zokalo everybody walks together at a certain hour of the day and they suddenly feel peaceful right

you give them ideas about big ideas in and life you give them a little bit of opportunity for meditation and reflection um that's easy to do and when i you know was writing this book and just teaching social science for 30 years it's like man you know we used to do this really well and it used to be temples and church you know that's where it all was brought together and now

we don't go there 55% of Americans go to church you used to be 90 or temple I don't I never did you know

and I in some sense miss it you know I see my one of my best friends very religious he few them and they they have so much and we're recreating that right now right and we've got to do it in a coherent way if it's the place where people are lifting weights there should be music there there should be visual stuff there should be some art nature there should be some wisdom and some moral beauty right that's uh I love ironworks where I go climb because you go there and it's like people are climbing

but there's you you get to see that there's the art exhibit each month of a local artist there's

“some music going on you get to listen to music so this isn't that hard to do Andrew and I think the”

awe science gives us a roadmap to think about what we share I love that um I was not into CrossFit but um next girlfriend of mine when I met it was like really in the CrossFit and they would do barbecues and they cleaned the gym they would dress up in costumes and stuff and I remember this is when I moved to San Diego to start my lab down there before moved to Stanford and and I

remember thinking like this kind of crazy like I went to the gym growing up I always since I was in my

teens and I'm like really you guys like social and they had this awesome social community I know CrossFit is somewhat falling out of favor now I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation you may be uh pleased to hear I just thought of this I can't remember I can't believe that I didn't remember this earlier one of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after the clash because you know he went into the kind of void of like he was doing anything he he he he wondered

for a long time he went down to Spain oh he grew out of beard moved to Spain and um didn't tell anyone who he was and they they kind of realized who he was eventually he was really searching you know his life it he lost his brother to suicide I believe um he ran the uh the Paris marathon he's got a famous I think while smoking a cigarette people I say and I don't think he did any training one thing that he was very well known for until his death was he would do campfires yeah

in Manhattan he would take people down to the river and and he had some famous friends like Jim Jar motion and you know and uh well known people in that world uh but he would invite whoever and there were kids you got to see this documentary it's so good we'll put a link to it

“uh if you want to see it's so good um there were kids there were adults um and they stay out”

to like two or three in the morning playing music singing drumming people get up and talk and so he was constantly doing these campfires his entire life yeah knowing close friends of his it's like this actually what he did and he wasn't getting there they were able to film a few of these but that was not the point and he would bring out a radio because he thought like maybe you could like make it like a radio show of the thing and but it was not to record and distribute it was just

so I don't know I got this crazy idea in the back of my mind that maybe like I'm gonna start doing campfires I have to weigh in on some science okay oh my gonna destroy the environment no not at all okay I was afraid you were gonna tell me the fact I think this is a deep idea there's this new science of campfires and they're several hundred thousand years old and also you know when you study people in small scale societies they they gather at night around campfires and they tell

certain kinds of stories you know stories of how they're all connected and helping each other and watching out for what is dangerous in the dark and you know a lot of stuff happens it's

know that that we need to return when I go to the climbing gym we all take saunas you know I do probably force on as a week nice and you get your sweat and your heart rate goes up and so good for your your body but then it's like everybody sort of offhandedly notes like I love the conversations happen in the sauna you know and it's true and so yeah we've got to they're all these ways to get back to what we should be doing right now to bring us together and campfires will be

a good start I'll come to your first one awesome yeah campfire also great red light therapy

no joke long wavelength light only coming out of that fire and you know everyone's obsessed with like red light therapy you get from the sun and you don't want to get too much UV but yeah you get tons of long wavelength light exposure which is great from which is known to be great from mitochondria I mean don't get me I don't want to get going on this as too much of a tension we've had guests on here from university college London I mean the long wavelength light actually

goes all the way through your body even in light clothing and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria which actually improves mitochondrial function in every single every single

cell that has mitochondria so where do we get this light from typically it's from from sunlight

when it's low solar angle so it's low in the sky because of Rayleigh scattering you're getting

“rid of the UV that's why you can see the orange and red and it's not painful to look at the sun”

when it's low in the sky when it's overhead the UV index is high you're it's you know full spectrum and you have to be careful that you're also you got some color to you but like you something tells me your lineage was kind of like fair skin right oh yeah okay so um but everyone needs to be cautious about that but that long wavelength light you know people buy red light units and things and those can be beneficial they use them clinically now but good data on that but

campfires do it yeah and um and people love campfire and there is this thing if you were out front of a campfire at night and if you stay up very late you wake up feeling pretty darn good you know um so i'm calling it right now my team's gonna hate me for this but uh you know

campfire coming to your town yeah i've always dreamed of doing this i take in a year and just

getting a boss and just going from town to town and having science health discussions but mostly just listening to people and doing campfires and um we probably would film it just because it

“you should do i got a great content my dream was to take that bus and to go to all the basketball”

courts of the country that's your thing yeah pick up basketball's the same thing it's like people gathering bang and into each other would you do it would i figure out an experiment that goes with it well my knees are the but just to develop this way to regenerate cartilage and humans okay well then i'll look into it yeah i think it'd be i love the idea do you believe in life after death i don't ask every guess that but yeah do you're the only person i've ever asked it do you

believe that something happens after i do i do um yeah you know and i write about this in all i'm when my brother rolf passed away colon cancer uh 55 or so uh you know i watch the whole transition and you know his his battle against and his acceptance and then his leaving and i had this profound experience that night you know a transcendent experience and i'm like you you know and roots like neurons and statistics and cells and we can figure it all out and

characterize everything and i's like i saw space in a different way i saw something alive and him and in afterward i had a lot of people have this kind of grief experience of he was around his voice his hand was on my back and i just thought for several years and still to this day of you know um quantum reality and things beyond our three-dimensional four-dimensional of you of time and space and uh you know those basic laws uh and that there is uh you know consciousness maybe

patterns of you know magnetic magnetic waves around our minds and bodies that are syncing

“up with other people the transcend the Newtonian world of the brain and i believe that and we”

don't know how to study it uh i sense it in life i think a lot of other people do too and so that keeps me open to it and now i've moved from you know being as skeptical but open you know agnostic to like yeah there's something there that's beyond what we know so i believe it very cool i hope you're right i believe it too but i just hope you're right i sense you're right Dacker thank you so much for making the trip down here to talk with us today and and share

magnificent career you know it's it's really hard to do really good science and it's even harder to do really good science with a purpose uh and you're doing that and you continue to and you just

have a way about you that everyone now has uh been able to experience first hand that like you really

care that's clear you put a ton of thought into the work that you're doing you've raised 25 professors which is no small feat i'll tell you that's a monumental feat which means that the work will continue and um and you're still going and i'm grateful for your book and and that you're continuing to do this and um i hope you take that trip to uh maybe if you can't do it around

“the entire country you get you know hit some pickup basketball games uh because i think there's”

something to be learned there for sure i sense it and and thanks for inspiring me and and i know you've inspired a ton of other people so we'll put links to everything that you discussed in your book um but you've definitely inspired us to to think more deeply about basically what it is to be human and where to take all this technology that we have and this opportunity that we have and really do a real good with it so i'm very grateful to you thank you well thank you Andrew it's been

an incredible conversation let's do more definitely do it again yeah thank you thank you for joining

me for today's discussion with Dr. Dacker Keltner to learn more about his work and to find links to his books including his book on all please see the links in the show note captions. if you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us

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