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Dr. Bernardo Huberman: How to Use Curiosity & Focus to Create a Joyful & Meaningful Life
03:15:59
In this episode, my guest is Dr. Bernardo Huberman, Ph.D., a research physicist, expert on quantum networks, and vice president of CableLabs’ Next-Gen Systems.
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- [00:01]
Andrew Huberman
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where.
- [00:02]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
We discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
- [00:09]
Andrew Huberman
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Bernardo Huberman. Dr. Bernardo Huberman is the Vice President of NextGen Systems at Cable Labs. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Social Computing Laboratory at Hewlett Packard and he is, as his name suggests, my father. Today we discuss various topics in science, including relativity theory, chaos theory and quantum computing. But I'd like to assure you that even if you have zero background in physics, computer science or mathematics, that entire discussion will be clear to you as to what those things are and even some of how they work. During today's discussion, we also talk about a life of science. That is what it is to spend one's life in curiosity, in trying to understand the universe around us and how to understand ourselves. Indeed, today we also talk about neuroscience, how the brain works, and the different sorts of questions that I do believe everybody asks whether you're a scientist or not. Questions like, where do we come from? Is there a God? What is our use or purpose in the universe? And how is it that we can ponder these super high level abstract questions about how we got here and what our purpose is and how things work at the quantum level. Tiny, tiny bits of things that we can't even see. And at the same time, to lead an everyday life that is meaningful and joyful. We talk about this in the context of understanding oneself in relation to others, family, community, including scientific community, and what it is like to come from a different country. My father immigrated from South America. What it was like to do science in the United States then and now. Cultural differences. And of course, we touched on some of our relationship as well. How could we not? I must say, for me, it was an immense pleasure and privilege to have this conversation. Not just because Dr. Huberman is my father, but because I believe the knowledge and indeed some of the wisdom that he shares will be useful to everybody about what it is to carve one's own unique trajectory in terms of career and life, and at the same time, how to savor the simple, everyday things that make life so worth living. 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, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft that mattress is or how firm it is, how breathable it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. So if you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two minute quiz that asks you questions such as do you sleep on your back, your side or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress. D U S K I started sleeping on a dusk mattress about three and a half years ago and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. So much so that when I travel to hotels and Airbnbs I find I don't sleep as well. I can't wait to get back to my dusk mattress. So if you'd like to try, you can go to helixsleep.com huberman take that 2 minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for your unique sleep needs. Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.comhuberman to get up to 25% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in high school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise. Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can really trust and talk to about any and all issues that concern you. Second of all, great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support, but also directed guidance, the do's and the not to do's. And third, expert therapy can help you arrive at useful insights that you would not have arrived at. Otherwise, insights that allow you to do better not just in your emotional life, in your relationship life, but also the relationship to yourself and your professional life and to all sorts of career goals. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you can really resonate with and provide you with these three benefits that I described. Also, because BetterHelp is carried out entirely online, it's very time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. So if you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.comhuberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.comhuberman and now for my discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman.
- [05:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Dr. Bernardo Huberman, welcome.
- [05:11]
Dan Huberman
Thank you, Andrew.
- [05:12]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And also great to see you, Dan.
- [05:14]
Dan Huberman
Same here.
- [05:15]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I guess no premonition would have foreseen this one.
- [05:18]
Dan Huberman
No, absolutely not.
- [05:21]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And people might notice today I'm drinking out of a mate gourd, in part in honor of my father's father who drank out of his loose leaf mate every morning. My first sip of mate was taken sitting in his lap when I was maybe 4 years old. Yes, yes, in my Spider man pajamas. In any event, let's talk about science. You're born in Argentina, as I recall, because once we had a conversation about it, you had a teacher, maybe it was in high school, who turned you on to physics, which became your field of choice. But prior to that, were you interested in different subjects? I don't recall if you had an avid interest in academics or you just did it because you were supposed to prior to that teacher. Then we'll talk about him.
- [06:08]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes. I was always very interested in ideas and so on. Science at that time was a bit vague, but I read a lot of philosophy. I didn't understand much of what I read, but nevertheless, I kept reading it. I was interested in psychology. I was an avid reader. As a matter of fact, I embarrassed my father or actually made him disappointed for a birthday. I think I was 14 years old, I asked him to buy me the 12 volumes of Freud's writings. Really? And yeah, and he said, what for? So. But I was very impressed with it. Of course, I couldn't even understand half of what these books had in it in them. So I was very interested in many things. And I must say to you that my interest in science, in particular physics, doesn't come from the standard thing that you see here in the United States mostly. Namely, I was not a whiz kid in math, you know, I was not one of these people that can really do things very, very quickly and so on. But I was interested because I thought that physics was going to complem my attempt at understanding how the whole universe is put together. The philosophers were saying all sorts of things. I went to a very special school that I learned six years of Latin and so on, and I had to read things like Kant and cosmogonos and cosmogonies and so on. That really didn't mean much to me. But suddenly I started discovering that physics might be interesting. And I had a cousin, Hector, who was a physicist, a particle physicist already. I mean, he was living at that time in France. And so there was a little bit of other influence. My interest was in things that had to do with fairly abstract ideas. I cannot believe that at one point or the other I was very good in geometry class, being able to prove theorems. I mean, the teacher would just say, let's prove this. And I was somehow able to reason through and come to some proofs. So I think that I was very interested in ideas and not necessarily in the very concrete aspects of science at that time.
- [08:06]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Can I ask you a question about early schooling? So if I remember correctly, you were born naturally left handed.
- [08:13]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [08:14]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
They forced you to learn to write with your right hand, correct?
- [08:17]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [08:17]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You went to a very strict schools.
- [08:19]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [08:20]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Like military levels of strictness?
- [08:22]
Dan Huberman
Almost. Yes, yes. It's a very interesting type of education. They have it in France, it's called Elysees in France. And this is a very special school in Argentina. It was actually founded in the 1500s by the Jesuits. And my father went to that school, and so he wanted me to go there, and my brother went there too. And in six years of a very strict education, mostly humanistic, I learned Greek and learned Latin. I learned immense amounts of history, which I loved. And there were other courses in French and so on. In French, we had to memorize incredibly long poems that we had to recite.
- [08:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you still remember some of them? Because sometimes early memories are embedded so deeply.
- [09:00]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes. And my brother and I sometimes tell each other some of the pieces of these poems. Yes, yes.
- [09:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I'll just say something right now to foreshadow what will happened several times throughout today's discussion, which is anytime that my father is in the presence of his brother, my uncle Carlos, they start laughing about jokes that they've been telling over and over, back and forth with one another since they were a young kid. So just the mere mention of his brother will bring a bit of a smile and a chuckle to both of Our faces.
- [09:30]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes. So I learned a lot of French, and also my parents decided, my mother mostly, that I had to learn French and English. And I went to Alliance Francaise, where for five years I went there. I was essentially the only boy in the class, which was very nice in a way. And in order to graduate, essentially, you know, to be fluent in French, but a special school I went to, the discipline was very strict, very strict. You know, we were supposed to do things you don't do in the United States. The moment the teacher walks in, everybody stands up. And if you're late in standing up, you're just kicked out of the classroom and things of that sort. But it was a lovely experience in many ways, when I reflect on it, because it gave me a humanistic education that has been incredible, incredibly useful in my career. Most people don't realize that. I mean, I tend to think of things in a very broad context, and it's because of the education I had. Okay, so. And I loved History of Rome, and I'd learned to recite things in Latin. And so it was very, very. I enjoyed that very, very much. My brother didn't, actually. And so.
- [10:32]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, you two are very different. I have great, great adoration for Carlos, but you two are very different. And along those lines, I was just about to ask or mention, and some of our Argentine and South American listeners generally, and perhaps even European listeners, might be shocked and perhaps disappointed to learn that you're one of the few Argentines that I know who doesn't care much for the game of football. Soccer. It doesn't seem to concern you much at all.
- [11:00]
Dan Huberman
No, no. The reasons for that are sort of interesting. I think I've reflected on that, because my own wife likes to watch a soccer game. I mean, she's Danish. She likes European tournaments. I never liked MOB behav. I never liked this whole passionate involvement in these things. I don't know why I was never able to understand it to the point that I never went to a soccer game till the week before I left for the United States. My brother insisted that I had to go to a soccer game. And this is sort of embarrassing, but at one point or the other, someone there was a good goal, and so I stood up and said, this is great. And I turned out I was on the wrong side of the audience. People got very. Almost violent with me, you know, So I. Yeah, soccer, to me, is something that I watch, but I. I'm not passionate about. Right. Yeah, I. I never really felt that I was that interesting, although I, you know, I was in a rowing team. I. I learned boxing. I did a lot of sports, but I know I don't like that much of spectator sports, like tennis. I played tennis since I was a teenager.
- [12:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I'm not a spectator sport fan either. The other day, someone asked me what my favorite sports team is. You'll like this. And I. I said, the Harlem Globetrotters. Because they have. They're unde. They have the best record. And that was actually the 1 professional sports team game you took me to when I was a kid. We'd always go see the Globetrotters.
- [12:22]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [12:22]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
They're undefeated.
- [12:23]
Dan Huberman
Yes. Unbelievable. Yes. Yes. My father took me to see them too. They're fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [12:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I love it. So your father was not a scientist, your brother's not a scientist. And you were faded according to them, to join the family business. But then you had a teacher who exposed you to physics.
- [12:41]
Dan Huberman
To physics and to the notion of being authentic in what you want. There were two parts to it. He was a very interesting and tormented man, I felt. But it was very interesting. He would come into the class. Most of the students really didn't care what he was saying. And so I was fascinated not only by what he was saying, but his whole personality. But I need to say something here that is important. I also was rather irresponsible. You see, I grew up in a family, a well to do family, that I never thought how I was gonna make a living. So it was easy to be interested in science or anything, because, you know, it's what you do. You're interested in culture, you read books, you do things. But my father used to say, what are you gonna do once you graduate? You don't wanna start teaching in elementary schools or something of that sort. My brother used to say, if he does physics, I'll have to support him because he still says that.
- [13:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So scientists were considered poor.
- [13:36]
Dan Huberman
Poor, yeah, yeah. They couldn't get a job. I mean, science in Argentina. Argentina has a big tradition in medical sciences. I think two or three Nobel Prize, so on. But in physics, they produce some very good physicists. One of them lives in the United States. I mean, he's very, very famous, Maldacena. And I haven't met him, but I know he's one of the top people in the. In the field. But I, I just got into this because I was interested. It sound. Sounded, you know, fascinating and abstract and the ideas were so powerful and I think. And you know, I reflected a lot on this when you are psychologically in adolescent. Because my parents Made me jump two grades. So I was much younger than my classmates. And that created a lot of problems for me. I mean, at the time when you were developing and so on, all the boys were talking about girls and so on. I still wasn't really into understanding why the excitement and so on. I was very young, but it gave me a sense of order. Reading a book about physics and understanding that there are laws that tell you how things work gave me a tremendous sense of order and power. So, you know, everything else was a little bit in flow and the family and my own relationships with friends and girlfriends or whatever and going back to science, it was just a sense of. And I still remember those days. It was very, very soothing in a way.
- [14:53]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So it's like a touchstone.
- [14:54]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes, yes. And I teach.
- [14:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And what grade were you exposed? Like this teacher. Was this like middle school? High school?
- [15:00]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, no, yeah, high school. Yeah. I was 13 or 14 years old. Yeah, yeah. When I finally, I started listening to this and I said, wow, this is impressive. You know, it's powerful. There are ways to know what's true and what's not true. You know, you just don't speculate on things. So. But most of this stuff I didn't really understand then. I had this cousin of mine, Hector, who was already gone, but I would go to his parents house and there, there were his books, all these incredible books on quantum mechanics, relativity, and I would just take them home. And I didn't really comprehend a lot of the math, but somehow it seemed impressive. It was like looking into a mechanism or something. So. And I used to take them to school. And one of my teachers once said, you know, you seem to be interested in this, but you don't understand this, so you need to learn it. And he was the one who started pushing me into this. On the other hand, my family was saying, you should become a lawyer. Just, you know, my brother and father.
- [15:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And that never interested you?
- [16:00]
Dan Huberman
No. It's interesting because now I'm very interested in aspects of constitutional law and so on. When I hear about arguments against the Supreme Court and so on. I became very interested in law and economics later on. I mean, just to read about it. But what my father was talking about at the dining room table was all about strategies of, you know, getting something done half an hour before the opposition so you win a case. I mean, I was totally interested in that.
- [16:26]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I'm sensing a bit of a theme, which is that social dynamics and what other people do, regardless of whether or not they like it or it earns them a particular living didn't capture. You like the idea that people and their groups and their ways of thinking and behaving, while they may not bother you, it didn't captivate you the way that it sounds like physics made you think that there's something kind of bigger, that there's something more universal, which, indeed, physics is. Right. It explains most everything.
- [17:00]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [17:01]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Most everything.
- [17:02]
Dan Huberman
Yes. And I also think that I was a bit of a loner. It was very hard to find people that. I mean, children are young people that thought like me. So eventually I became part of a group. We were four or five guys that used to get together on Saturdays and, you know, go to the movies and so on, and then afterwards discuss, you know, whatever we were interested in and so on. I was only 16 years old, you know, and deciding what to do with my life. Of all four of us, we committed. They were. Some of them came from incredibly wealthy families. Two of them we committed to really be true to ourselves and pursue what we liked, but I was the only one. The other two ended up running the business of their parents. And one of them, essentially, I don't know what he did. I saw him years later.
- [17:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Money becomes a pretty bright beacon for a lot of people.
- [17:49]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [17:50]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. I'm grateful to you that you never pushed me to go in any particular direction.
- [17:56]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [17:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You pushed me to not go in particular directions, but never with respect to academic choices. In fact, I don't recall you telling me, or Laura, by the way, folks, that's my sister's name, that we had to do anything except attend our classes and do our best. But I never felt pushed to go into science.
- [18:18]
Dan Huberman
No, no. Although you had a little bit of a curiosity about it.
- [18:22]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Animals.
- [18:23]
Dan Huberman
Animals. And I remember I was going through a period in which I started getting convinced that there was very little to do in physics, and I wanted to change. And one day on a bike ride, I think I was carrying on the back of my bicycle, you were. You asked me, what. What is the unsolved problem? And I said, I don't think it's in physics, but it's the brain. And you said, okay, I'll go into that. You said, I'll never forget that.
- [18:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, it's interesting. I'm fascinated by human memory, as you know. I know you are as well. And I recall that story as well. I recall it slightly differently, but we're really closely aligned, which is. I remember you used to walk me to school in the morning, and you would drop me off at the cut through to the path behind Gunn High School, because that's. I would pick up Kristen Harnett across the street, and you told me it would be better if I picked her up by myself and walked her to the end of the street, which is where class was. You were teaching me chivalry. And I remember asking you what you do. I was probably five or six years. Let's see, first grade, so it'd probably be somewhere around six or seven years old. I asked you what you do, and you said, physics. And I said, well, what is that? And you said, well, let me tell you the feeling it gives me. Instead you said, you know, the night before your birthday? And I said, yeah. And he said, you know that feeling? And I said, yeah. And you said, well, that's how I feel every day when I go to work.
- [19:45]
Dan Huberman
Yeah.
- [19:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And I remember. I'll never forget that. And I said, what do you do? And you said, I'm a physicist.
- [19:50]
Dan Huberman
And I.
- [19:50]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And I said, well, then I'll be a physicist. And then I recall. So maybe we had the conversation twice, you saying, well, most of the big problems in physics are solved, so you should pick something perhaps a little less untread, like. And I said, like what? And you said, well, the brain is pretty interesting. And then I said, okay, I'll work on that.
- [20:09]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, no, that's true. This issue of feeling like before your birthday is something I remember saying to you. I don't recall feeling that way every day. I do recall feeling like this when I had an idea and finally worked out and we wrote a paper and so on, you know, it was an incredibly exciting time, you know. Well, you know about it. You've done it yourself now. And so I wanted to convey that to you. It was very, very interesting and important to me that you understood that. On the other hand, it made me feel very isolated as well. Not only with you, with everybody. I mean, it's a very esoteric field. You know, you used to walk into the study, look at me, you know, writing equations and so on. And would you say, what's that?
- [20:47]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, I was thinking about your study, which was just a door down from my childhood bedroom. I still remember the way that your study smelled. I can still smell it. I have an incredible sense of memory for certain things I can still remember. But I remember how your books were aligned, where your stereo was placed, your photos, your photo of Einstein, your photos of me and Laura and Mom. I remember. I remember all of it. And the sofa that was just off behind it because you're A nap taker, which I inherited from you. But I remember that. Yeah, you would spend a lot of time in that office and listening to classical music. Do you listen to music while you work or did you listen all the time?
- [21:28]
Dan Huberman
All the time, yeah. Classical music, for me, is something I discovered very young. Very young. My parents also loved classical music. My brother, too. And it's something that, to me has a tremendous emotional resonance with the way I feel. Sometimes it's background music, sometimes I really listen very carefully. It's something that I. Yes. I've always had in my life and still have it. I mean, it's very, very important to me.
- [21:53]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But not many music musicians in our family.
- [21:56]
Dan Huberman
No, unfortunately. Yeah. Although there is a very famous one.
- [21:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
We've all tried. We've all tried.
- [22:02]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah. You in particular. Yeah, yeah.
- [22:03]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
We all failed.
- [22:04]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a very famous Huberman, the great violinist Bronislav Huberman. I mean, there's a picture. I think I sent it to you here. Einstein. He was one of the greatest violinists in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. An incredibly interesting man. He's the founder of the Israel Philharmonic. And that's one of the reasons that the name Huberman is in some street in Israel, that. Because of him.
- [22:27]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But are we related to him?
- [22:28]
Dan Huberman
Unfortunately not.
- [22:31]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Which explains the lack of musical prowess in our. In our family, we all love music, but none of us are good musicians. Right, yes, except my cousin Diego.
- [22:40]
Dan Huberman
Diego. He has a perfect ear. So he can really do interesting things. Yes, yeah.
- [22:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So going back to your childhood, this teacher.
- [22:50]
Dan Huberman
Yes, right, yes.
- [22:51]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So, I mean, what was it? You already had sort of seeded an interest in finding order in things that made the world make sense. What was the political situation in Argentina at that time?
- [23:06]
Dan Huberman
Quite horrible. Parts of it. I mean, there was a dictatorship that lasted for a long time. This Peron thing and so on. It was. He was really a follower of Mussolini and people of that sort during World War II.
- [23:17]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So what did that mean? Like, out in the streets, like, you grew up in the heart of Buenos Aires, but, like, what did that mean in terms of. I mean, was there poverty everywhere? Were people.
- [23:24]
Dan Huberman
I mean.
- [23:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, was there violence? I mean, what does it spell out to you?
- [23:27]
Dan Huberman
Well, it was a very. It was a very oppressive regime. I mean, you had to be careful what you talked about. You know, in my. My family, like most of the social class, we had maids and a cook. And so you had to be very careful what you said, because they would.
- [23:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Run that information back.
- [23:42]
Dan Huberman
Absolutely. And people. And your grandfather, my Father, at one point was prevented from coming to visit me in the United States because he was classified as a communist because he did not join the Peronist party.
- [23:52]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Okay, for the record, we are not communists. We are both big believers in capitalism sitting here at this table.
- [24:02]
Dan Huberman
So it was terrible. It was a terrible time. It was a very oppressive time.
- [24:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But he wasn't a communist either?
- [24:07]
Dan Huberman
No, of course not. Of course, no, no. He was on the other side. But the idea at that time, it was to be classified as such. Eventually that information leaked to the. Obviously to the American authorities. So when he asked for a visa, they denied him. It was very complicated story. I don't think we should waste time to know how it got eventually resolved through a friend of mine who was a priest, a Jesuit, here in the United States. But the point being that during that time, it was a very. You had to be very careful, the way you spoke, the way you said things. There was a dictatorship that was very much like the fascist in Italy. And actually that dictatorship lasted until a few years ago because, as you know, perhaps you heard, the new president we have is one that actually ran against this whole ideology, Peronism and so on.
- [24:50]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Millet.
- [24:51]
Dan Huberman
Millet, yes. So I was never. I was not political at all, but you have to be careful. But it was a funny, funny time. And when he was overthrown through a military revolution, you know, my parents were, you know, delighted, and we. I remember the celebrations and so on, but that was considered the minority that was against him. You know, it was a social class movement. The working class was behind Peron and what he promised and what he gave them. So that. But that eventually died. So the real problem was that there was no real commitment to science as an investment that a country should make. Yes, it was nice to have Nobel Prizes, and it's culturally good, but they didn't have the pragmatic notions that we have here in the United States of doing science means solving concrete problems.
- [25:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And this was in the 1950s and 60s too.
- [25:44]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [25:44]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So this was the like. Like one of the biggest and fastest progressions of physics and its implementation in the U.S. yes. So were you hearing about that?
- [25:54]
Dan Huberman
Of course, I was following it all. And I wanted to, you know, I wanted to buy books about it and so on. I had some conflicts with my father about spending money on books that he thought they were not going to take me anywhere and so on. I mean, he was a very pragmatic lawyer. He didn't understand why I was doing these things. So. So yes, I was aware of Everything. And actually, the university was very good. I entered the university. You had to choose what you wanted to do. And after a tremendous crisis, personal crisis, I decided not to go into law or engineering, which was the alternative my father offered, and decided to study physics. And I didn't regret it at all. It was a very impressive time. I got a good education in physics, a little bit too abstract.
- [26:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So this was experimental physics or theoretical physics?
- [26:41]
Dan Huberman
Both. Physics. Both. Both in the lab. I was okay. I mean, I was better in classes on advanced. I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics and calculus and beyond that and, you know, complex analysis and so on. It was.
- [26:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So it turns out you were good at math after all.
- [26:58]
Dan Huberman
Good. Yes, I understand math. I'm not a whiz. I mean, like, many of my students have been. I have guys that can do incredible things, you know, that I can do them, but slowly. Okay, I understand. Yes, yes. So. But, yeah, physics, you know, is something that. I knew how to be intuitive about it. I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn't pan out, but. Yeah.
- [27:21]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So the teacher in high school.
- [27:24]
Dan Huberman
Yeah.
- [27:24]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Were they the one that told you that there was a. Like, a career in this thing?
- [27:28]
Dan Huberman
Yes. He said, you know, you should devote yourself to this if you really care about it. He was a man that obviously, he was sort of tormented on many levels and so on.
- [27:37]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You say that because of the way he carried himself physically.
- [27:40]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. He walked. He was troubled, and that was interesting. Intense man. I still remember his name was. He was a philosopher. His name in Eggersland, which is a German name. And he started talking about, you know, discovering, you know, Christianity and what it meant to him and what it is to be authentic and so on. So. And then I had a very large exposure to the great thinkers of the antiquity, you know, Roman and Greek. So it was all, to me, fascinating, interesting, you know, and it was good to have friends that I could discuss these things with.
- [28:14]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you think it's a disservice that nowadays in the United States, and even when I was growing up, but especially now that we don't force kids to be exposed to all these topics, like we try and track people into something early on? Actually, a recent guest told me that many schools are now just giving knowledge but not expecting kids to do problem sets, you know, teaching them about physical activity, but not expecting them to do physical activity. Seriously?
- [28:42]
Dan Huberman
Well, that sounds a little bit funny. Yeah.
- [28:44]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, no, but that's. I mean, that is the direction that education in this country has gone.
- [28:48]
Dan Huberman
I was a visiting professor in France, actually, you live there because of that, in Paris. And I discovered, you know, the French intellectual tradition is also very, very abstract compared to the American. I mean, the English and the Americans are the ones that took physics and the Russians too, into a very, very practical realm and make progress that are very, very concrete, almost engineering like.
- [29:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break.
- [29:11]
Andrew Huberman
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- [30:40]
Dan Huberman
When I came to the United States, I must tell you, I went to. I came as a graduate student, University of.
- [30:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, let's, let's talk about that. So how did you end up getting into the United States as a graduate student? You apply?
- [30:51]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, I was graduating and, you know, the future looked rather gloomy. I had a girlfriend whose father was very wealthy and she said, no problem, you're going to work for my dad. And you Know, he got a factory or whatever.
- [31:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you'll go for?
- [31:07]
Dan Huberman
No, no, not at all. Not at all.
- [31:09]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I've never known you to work for anyone except you. Yeah, in a way you're a bit the same.
- [31:14]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah. So. Yes, yes. Just the idea of, you know, running a business was not. I was truly idealistic and irresponsible too. But I had a cousin who was already, you know, got his PhD in theoretical physics at Columbia University, was a professor in France, then Sweden and so on. So I felt that perhaps I should go to the United States. And so I started applying to this. My father was saying, you know, I won't even help you with this. He didn't like my parents, didn't like it. You know, I was very close to my family in many ways and so I applied to many places. I remember being accepted at, I think it was Cornell. And I said, oh, New York, that's great. Till someone said to me, you have to take a plane to go to real New York. I mean, if you love New York City. So in any event, I got this very, very nice fellowship to go to University of Pennsylvania, which is.
- [32:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Who is the fellowship from?
- [32:07]
Dan Huberman
The Navy. The United States Navy. Yeah. I'm very grateful for that. And I actually wrote that in my PhD thesis. I was very grateful. I think it was incredible that they were support that kind of research.
- [32:19]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
They wanted to bring you to the US to build weapons?
- [32:21]
Dan Huberman
No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. I came to the United States working for a professor Bursting who just died at the age of 100. 101 and no. But I was supported by the United States Navy. It was a fellowship by the University of Pennsylvania. But I remember in my first interview with some of the teachers, Penn professors, there I am talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics and the guy says to me, let me give you an interesting problem. You have a ping pong ball, but instead of being a classical ping pong ball, it's a quantum one. Could you tell me at what heights will it bounce? I had no idea what to do. I had no sense that you could turn all this knowledge into something implementable, practical and so on. So it was quite a struggle the first year.
- [33:01]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So you had theoretical understanding?
- [33:04]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [33:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Not experimental understanding, Right, Right, yes.
- [33:06]
Dan Huberman
Or empirical and so on. I didn't know how to calculate things very well. Well, yeah.
- [33:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I didn't think you being good at math.
- [33:12]
Dan Huberman
I was good, yeah. Math understanding in math is a difference thing between understanding Implemented and, you know, creating things. Well, you learned that. I. I had four years of graduate school and got my PhD in physics, so obviously I learned how to do it. But what I'm saying is that I had this very, very vague theoretical understanding of what the world worked, but not really a practical. You know, I didn't have it at my fingertips. That's what you learn when you go to graduate school, as you know yourself. Okay, so that's.
- [33:40]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, it's one thing to about the brain as an undergraduate, but in graduate school is where I learned how to slice brains, stain brains, trace connections, record from neurons, and it's a whole other business to get your hands dirty in the thing.
- [33:51]
Dan Huberman
Absolutely, absolutely. And the same thing for me. Yeah, I. Taking courses and discovering what you like and dislike. I was a little bit bound to my professor because he was the one who gave me the fellowship. But I didn't like what he did, which was always very problematic.
- [34:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Did you have a good relationship?
- [34:05]
Dan Huberman
It was funny. He sort of became. Tried to become my surrogate father. But on the other hand, intellectually, I always felt that a guy was not quite there. I mean, he was very famous for.
- [34:16]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Some, but he's a member in the National Academy.
- [34:18]
Dan Huberman
He was not, but he was very famous. Very famous. But I always felt that there was a lack of depth into what we were doing. It was not just him, it was just a solid state physics. There was a very famous Marigel man who had total contempt for solid state physics. He used to call it squalid state physics.
- [34:37]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
For those who don't know, Mary Gell Mann. We'll get to Murray later because I had the interesting experience of meeting him as a child. But he, he discovered the quark. He won the Nobel Prize. In many ways is considered at least. At least as superb a physicist as Feynman, maybe better.
- [34:55]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Lesser known. But among physicists, you know, would evoke great fear in everybody. We'll get to Murray in a little bit. So did you enjoy graduate school?
- [35:05]
Dan Huberman
Yes, but it was incredibly hard. Very hard. The first year in Toba. And also personally, I was very lonely. You know, I say I transplanted into a whole different world. Philadelphia is not a city I would recommend to many people to live in. I escaped every weekend to New York and my professor was always upset about that.
- [35:23]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And you went from being pretty well off financially to basically having no money?
- [35:26]
Dan Huberman
I had no money. I lived on very little money, as a matter of fact, yes. My parents, my father felt that, okay, this is what you're going to do you're going to survive on this? They paid for a ticket once a year to go back to visit. And it was incredibly nice and soothing to be back and be taken care of and everything else. You know, the life in the family and then going back again to Philadelphia and the reality of just being a student, unlike many people that. And foreign students that were in with me and other places, I did not enjoy. I mean, it was quite a cultural adventure for me to meet people from all over the world to learn what they. I became very close to a Japanese postdoc, a very interesting man, But I was. I was quite miserable.
- [36:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And so this was in the mid-60s?
- [36:13]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes. Late-60s. Yes. Yeah. I did not like my life there at all. I mean, I lived for four years. I didn't have a single girlfriend or anything. You know, I dated and so on, but I just felt that I was transplanted into an environment that I didn't like. Okay. And that's. And on top of that, my conflict with my advisor were not serious because they were not overt, but they were there all the time.
- [36:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That can be tough for those listening. You know, the relationship to your graduate advisor is a potentially wonderful and potentially hazardous one because they. They exert enormous control over your future, not just through letters of recommendation, but opportunities. And I got lucky in that sense.
- [36:55]
Dan Huberman
You were very lucky. Yes. My. My advice was the kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him, he ordered for you. Are you kidding me? I'm not kidding. He was that kind of guy. He would take the whole group to a Chinese restaurant. And before you said, I don't like this, he just took. Once he took me for a whole weekend to his summer house to finish a paper. The guy couldn't finish a paper, and I was a mess. And he and his daughter was there. She was 16 or 17, and she said, are you two gonna talk physics? I was gonna say, no, let's go for a walk. He said, that's all we're gonna do. But the physics consisted in him regurgitating whatever we were doing. I mean, I remember I was so miserable looking at my watch, seeing, how the heck do I get out of here? I didn't have a car, so I was sort of his prisoner from Friday night. So it was. It was. It was hard for me. I never really felt that happy. On the other hand, I had no other options at that time. Okay. So. But then as soon as I graduated, I. I got out.
- [37:53]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was from mine. I, you know, I delighted in my advisor, as you know.
- [38:02]
Dan Huberman
She was amazing, fantastic people.
- [38:03]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, I got lucky and I. I got a lot of that from you. Which was to, for those who don't know, I left a program at Berkeley, which everyone thought I was insane. Insane to leave Berkeley to go to Davis. That was by choice. But I remember what you said. You said, how big is your incoming class at Davis?
- [38:20]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [38:21]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Because by all standard criteria, Berkeley is the better institution. Davis is great, but Berkeley's considered exceptionally strong. And I said, there are three of us. And he said, well, either you're making the best decision of your life or the worst mistake of your life. And then I think you asked me what was driving the decision. I said, well, there's this person there. Her name is Barbara Chapman, and she just seems to be working on things that if I don't work on these problems, I'm going to regret it. And I can't imagine working on anything else. And he said, go for it. Which I really appreciate, because any parent, if I were a parent and my kid said, I'm going to leave Berkeley and go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again, I think I probably would have balked.
- [39:04]
Dan Huberman
Well, Barbara also played a very, very nice, supportive, emotional role in your life. I mean, it was obvious that she had tremendous press difference for you. Yeah. You were like her son in many ways.
- [39:14]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I smile and well, up a little bit only because, well, she passed away young, but she's just an amazing person, so I feel very blessed for that. That wasn't your experience with your advisor. So during that time, I did want to ask about this. I asked about it being the mid to late 60s, because it was the counterculture movement.
- [39:34]
Dan Huberman
Yes. Right.
- [39:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And one thing that people should know about you, I'll just offer this up, is that in the entire time I've known you, which is a while now, you've been very clear, like, you never had any interest in recreational drugs.
- [39:50]
Dan Huberman
No.
- [39:51]
Andrew Huberman
Never did them?
- [39:52]
Dan Huberman
No.
- [39:52]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Even though that was super common then. I've never seen you have more than a glass of wine.
- [39:56]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [39:57]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You've never been drunk in your life?
- [39:59]
Dan Huberman
Never.
- [40:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And you don't like football. Despite being from Argentina. It occurred to me on the drive over, like, peer pressure is just not something that impacts you. You're not going to do something because people around you are doing it.
- [40:13]
Dan Huberman
Well, no, you're absolutely right. I always felt this sense of uniqueness or whatever, but I became very humble because of it. I'm not arrogant. It's not That I feel there are others. Others are worse and so on. But, yes, when I came to the United States, there was a decision I had to make, which is. I remember explicitly thinking about it. It was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the soul. Social environment in which I was in Argentina. So you could do whatever you wanted. And I was not the only one who came. There were three or four brilliant mathematicians and physicists that came with me. And I saw them within a year, just losing it all. One of them never graduated. They got into drugs. They got. They moved to the Village in New York, and they decided that that was the life they wanted to have. Problem is that, you know, 10 years on, you know, what are you doing? Right. I mean, you know, being a. Getting to be an old hippie is not that interesting. So I really. That notion at that time that I needed to be very disciplined and I had to internalize a set of values and to ask myself what I want and what I don't want. And so, yes, indeed, I used to go to parties, to me, was quite a surprise. You know, in New York, Philadelphia, you know, people smoking pot and all sorts of other incredible things, Getting drunk and so on. It was something that I, you know, I would say, no, thank you, and that was it. And I felt quite okay with it. Uh, and they. And I never felt the need to satisfy a group of people that were like this in order to be included.
- [41:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, there's only one person that I've ever met in my entire life now that I'm 49, I can say things like, now that I'm 49, who has never been drunk, never done drugs, basically, has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once. And that's Rick Rubin, my good friend, who's.
- [41:57]
Dan Huberman
I like your meaning.
- [41:57]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. By all standards, is, you know, probably the greatest music producer of all time across, you know, dozen. A dozen different genres.
- [42:05]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [42:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Not just rock and roll, but classical, country, all this. And I once asked Rick, you know, you worked in music at where, you know, drugs and alcohol are everywhere, or at least used to be. And he just said, yeah, it never really interested me. I could be around it, but not participate.
- [42:21]
Dan Huberman
Yeah.
- [42:22]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And so the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship to what's going on around you where you don't feel pulled into it.
- [42:32]
Dan Huberman
And also didn't understand, I mean, for instance, the role of drugs and alcohol in young people. I was a graduate student to a large Extent plays a role of relaxation and getting rid of stress and anxiety and so on. To me was very interesting that people would actually come sometimes to my place and ask, do you have something to smoke? Or why? Because I'm nervous or whatever. Deal with state of anxiety. But you don't have to drink in order to do that. And I was always a little bit also concerned about my brain. I mean, I was afraid that these things would just take me over the edge, off the rails. So I just. But I think I was also. I need to say this. I was also rather judgmental of people who did it at that time. And it was a way. By being judgmental, by saying, this is wrong, then I was able to stay on my track. Okay. Today I'm much more understanding. I mean, I hear people, and if that's what, you know, it works for them is fine. Although I still don't like it. And it was even worse when we came to California because that here everything was going on, not just drugs and everything else. So.
- [43:37]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, let's talk about that. But not that specifically right off the bat. So you finished your PhD.
- [43:42]
Dan Huberman
Yeah.
- [43:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You could have become. Done a postdoc. Become a professor.
- [43:45]
Dan Huberman
I was playing with that. I was playing with that I wanted to go to. My dream was to go to Cambridge University in England. Not only because the Cavendish Laboratory was fantastic. There was the whole thing on DNA. I mean, Crick was there and so on. So I thought that perhaps I would just start inhaling some of those vapors.
- [44:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You wanted to get into biology?
- [44:06]
Dan Huberman
Well, I was interested. I mean, because I read the famous book by Watson, the Double Helix, and I couldn't sleep. I mean, I read it one night and said, it's incredible what this guy did.
- [44:14]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Amazing book.
- [44:15]
Dan Huberman
Amazing book. Yes. So I said, oh, the whole thing is becoming like physics. It's no longer all these complicated names and so on.
- [44:21]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, it's crystallography, which is, you know. I mean, physics and chemistry are so interesting.
- [44:26]
Dan Huberman
Boring. Because it's like botany. You have to learn all these crystals.
- [44:30]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I'm just chuckling because the spaghetti model folks are, as we call them, the crystallographers are probably covering their eyes right now. But that's all right. They love what they do. And thank goodness for them.
- [44:41]
Dan Huberman
No, no, of course, because they design.
- [44:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Novel drug pockets and receptors. I mean, they're doing some cool stuff.
- [44:45]
Dan Huberman
So I thought that being in Cambridge was okay. I mean, you would suffer from not even heating in the rooms and so on. But then what happens was, I mean, you know, I met Your mother. And then, you know, she brought a little bit of reality into my life and said, you know. Well, she said, you know, it's time for you to graduate. Time. Because I was just staying there as a, you know, PhD student, you know, I was fine. You know, okay, the money was a problem, but I got to live like this.
- [45:12]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You met mom in New York.
- [45:13]
Dan Huberman
I met your mother in New York, yes. And she had her feet on the ground and said, you know, it's time for you to graduate, and so on. And she actually was right. And so I decided to look for a job. And my professor wasn't necessarily letting me go. He wanted me to stay as a postdoc with him.
- [45:30]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Which, you know, this is something people don't often understand, is that if a student or postdoc is very good, the advisors are deincentivized to move them along to their job.
- [45:42]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [45:42]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But it's a tricky game because you want the support of your advisor. But oftentimes your advisor, if you're very good, they want to keep.
- [45:48]
Dan Huberman
Yes, so. So there was also another aspect at that time. By then, I started thinking that I wanted to live a much more comfortable life. I mean, you know, I come from a family that lived a very comfortable life, and I wanted that very badly. And so I started, you know, looking for jobs and so on. My advisor was not too keen to, you know, tell me what to do. So instead of going, I. I could have gone for a postdoc to a couple of places, but I wanted to be a little more independent. And I discovered that there were research institutions like IBM and Xerox in the west coast and so on. There were, you know, people could do science, you know, good science, and, you know, Bell Labs was the most famous one of all that was on the East Coast. In the East Coast, I went to Bell Labs for an interview, and I felt that they were running that like a Russian internment camp almost. I mean, it was unbelievable. You were. They were. We were 10 of us. And, you know, they took us around and people were taking notes of what you were saying and asking and so on, telling us that was an elite place. It was an elite place.
- [46:44]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So East Coast.
- [46:45]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The east coast institutions. I mean, it makes sense to me now why, having been raised in the Bay Area, that East coast institutions and I are just never going to mix. Because there's. They love tradition, they love hierarchy, and they love history. Whereas the west coast, well, it's all about the startup, the IPO. What is about what happened in the last three years. And what's going to happen in the next 10 years?
- [47:10]
Dan Huberman
Right. Well, on the other hand, there is something nice to be said about the European model of universities in the sense that the biggest contrast. You see, I remember when you gave. When professors came with colloquium and son, they were wearing suit and tie at the University of Penn State of England and Ivy League school and so on. I came to Stanford, I went to the first colloquium and the students were coming in shores with their dogs into the auditorium. I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was such an incredible change. Cultural change in any way.
- [47:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Smart. Not smart.
- [47:40]
Dan Huberman
I mean, incredibly smart. Incredibly smart. No doubt about that. So in any event, I discovered something which historically became incredibly important, although I was married involved in it, which was Xerox Corporation had invented a copier, decided that they were going to get into the information age and they decided to establish a new research center in Palo Alto next to Stanford, where they would recruit people that would work on this whole thing. Computers and information and physics and so on. And I came in and the guys, you know, whoever interviewed me, they said, well, this is exactly the place for you. So that's what I did. And the interesting thing was that while I was there doing like what I thought was interesting things, there was a whole group of people, very small, that invented a personal computer. Steve Jobs saw it and built the first Mac out of this was.
- [48:27]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I had a classmate in high school, Becca Canara.
- [48:30]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [48:32]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I remember because she wrote a Vespa to school.
- [48:34]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Her mother was involved in that and.
- [48:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Her mom was involved in creating the. It was Adele.
- [48:39]
Dan Huberman
Adele, yes. Adele Goldberg.
- [48:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
In developing the ability to move what appeared to be pages on the screen.
- [48:46]
Dan Huberman
Object oriented languages. Yeah. I had no idea that was going on, I'll be honest with you. I mean, it was going on the second floor. They were all hippie like. I mean it was. It was a scandal of the life that they had there. It was the 70s and still the Bay Area is not. Was not what is now. I mean, everybody went to Risotti's, you know those. Take long lunches and there was a lot of stuff on drugs and so on.
- [49:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. Can I ask a question about that? So Xerox park is. Was this incredible place. I remember going there when I was a kid to your lab. Actually, one of my earliest recollections was you took me into your. And Jim Boyce's experimental lab. Yeah, You. You told me to pick a piece of fruit.
- [49:25]
Andrew Huberman
That was a bowl of fruit.
- [49:26]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I picked A banana. You took the banana, you peeled it, and you dipped it into liquid nitrogen. And then you told me to throw it on the ground and we shattered the banana. And I thought that was like, the coolest thing ever. I remember that. So that was happening. But the. You mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and that. Indeed.
- [49:45]
Andrew Huberman
Jesus.
- [49:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Jobs borrowed or stole, mostly because park didn't protect the intellectual property. Well, I mean, he didn't do it illegally. I mean, he saw it. They basically gave it away.
- [49:55]
Dan Huberman
Right?
- [49:55]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
They basically gave it away. Right.
- [49:56]
Dan Huberman
Xerox was thinking that, you know, copiers were the future and that's it.
- [50:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But I also recall, because I overheard the conversations between you and mom when I was a kid, perhaps, that there were. It was pretty wild at parc. Like, there was this whole, like the room with the bean bags, people were taking LSD and other drugs. That wasn't your scene, though.
- [50:15]
Dan Huberman
No, no, no, not at all. I was in the physics lab, and we can talk later a little bit about it, with Jim Boyce was a very, very interesting collaborator of mine and so on. We had a lot of fun, but not on that level. As a matter of fact, we were considered very square people, you know, doing what we were doing. I mean, this is a group of people that were truly the. I mean, books have been written on this whole class of people that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became. They were brilliant people trying to do new things. Adele, Alan K. There were many of them.
- [50:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Did you ever want to get involved in that stuff?
- [50:47]
Dan Huberman
I used to see them as. So I'll tell you how I got involved. The head of the group, Bob Taylor, a very charismatic man who was responsible for the development of the personal computing. He was the head of the computer science lab. He once heard that I played ping pong, so he started challenging me to ping pong. So who used to play ping pong? You know? And the conversations were so odd because I would say, oh, you do computer science? I have some mathematical problems. I would like some guys in your lab to help me. He said, we are not. We are not the kind of computer scientists you imagine, like at IBM, with a white coat, fixing machines and solving math. We want to revolutionize the world. We want to change the way you think. He used to say that to me, and I sort of understood a little bit of it, but quite frankly, it seemed totally out of whatever I was doing.
- [51:32]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
This is when Marc Andreessen, founder of netscape, et cetera, a16Z. Now, when he was sitting in the very seat you were sitting in here. He described as this notion of wild ducks. That at companies you have these people that are small groups of people that are really kind of wild and outrageous and really testing the outer limits of what's possible. Do you think they serve an important role?
- [51:54]
Dan Huberman
Tremendous. And I was a little bit of that in my field at that time. I was the first one to realize that once I saw these machines, I could use them for doing things even in physics that no one could do. And the kinds of fields that I chose to work on were totally out of what people were doing at Xerox or IBM and so on. I think that these people are essential. Now the question is, what does a company or a university, what do they do with those ideas and so on. Xerox lost it completely. I mean, they show them the stuff, and there's whole books that have been written about it.
- [52:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, one thing that I think I'm realizing now I inherited from you, consciously or unconsciously, is that. Well, I've been more of a risk taker with various aspects of my life than I probably should have been. But that I've always enjoyed being near people who are really pushing the boundary on something. Like my love of skateboarding. But not just skateboarding, but our friend Danny Wade jumping the Great Wall of China, building mega ramps in his yard. I knew I wasn't gonna do that. But there's something about being adjacent to people like that.
- [53:02]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [53:02]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That changes the way that you. That I've approached things that were more pedestrian to make them less pedestrian.
- [53:11]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [53:12]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, and maybe we'll return to this because, you know, I think that being around people who are real mavericks and real iconoclasts can be very beneficial. But it doesn't mean that you have to jump in and do what they're doing.
- [53:24]
Dan Huberman
Right. Well, I decided at one point to take huge risks. And as a matter of fact, my first piece of work after I got my job at Xerox parc, which was supposed to work on some solid state physics or whatever was. I had this notion, this fantasy of Einstein in the patent office. So I would start working on things that were crazy. There was this whole notion in physics, which is called tachyons. Particles that are faster than the speed of light.
- [53:49]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
How do you say it?
- [53:50]
Dan Huberman
Tachyons. Tachyons, from the word tachyos, which means fast. Swift means particles that are faster than the speed of light, which is impossible. But some physicists were playing with that idea. Okay. And I became very interested in that. As a matter of fact, my first Paper out of graduate school was on tachyon. And I had the pride of getting the paper accepted in the top physics journal.
- [54:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
It's Physics Review Letters.
- [54:14]
Dan Huberman
Physics Letters. Yes. Yeah. And I remember my cousin Hector sending me a note or something saying, well, now I see the road to perdition. He said, But I was so proud of it. I really thought that I was doing something incredible and it had nothing to do with the work I was doing a daily basis. And I published several papers on things that were very important to me.
- [54:36]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You have a lot of single author papers.
- [54:38]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes.
- [54:38]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
This is something that, like, is, is especially rare in biology, but you have a lot of single author papers.
- [54:45]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah, I, I, I was very proud of that. Yes. Yes.
- [54:49]
Andrew Huberman
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- [55:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I like the watermelon.
- [55:47]
Andrew Huberman
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- [57:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Can I ask you a question as a. As a slight departure, but it's something I've always wanted to ask you and feel free to say no if it's not like something that could be done in. In a couple of minutes. So many people hear Einstein's name, they think of the hair. They think of relativity, relativity. Is it possible to explain relativity in a way that the everyday person can get it a little bit better than they perhaps understand it now?
- [58:02]
Dan Huberman
Yes, I think, as a matter of fact, I learned not long ago that Einstein himself wrote a popular book on relativity that seems to be very, very accessible. Now, there are two aspects to relativity. I mean, there are two things that our brains were not made by evolution to understand intuitively. One is relativity, and the other one is quantum physics. We know, we have intuitions like, you know, an animal. For instance, if you see a lion running after a zebra and so on, the lion can actually calculate intuitively you know, the speed at which he can move and so on, we can do the same. But if you start thinking about what happens when you get to near the speed of light, we have no intuition whatsoever. Time almost stops. There are all sorts of complicated things. Length, contract. I mean, it's a very complicated set of things, and that's why it's very hard to understand. Although the math works. Then there is general relativity that is even worse because there is some kind of a warping of space time that is responsible for gravitation. But I'll go into that in a second. The other one is quantum physics. Our brains are not. Not only are they not wired to understand that near the speed of light, because no one moves near the speed of light. I mean, we move at speeds that are fairly, fairly small compared to the speed of light. And quantum mechanics is at such a microscope that is below basically the level of the molecules, molecules, atoms and inside the atom. So it's very, very hard to visualize or even understand some of the very counterintuitive ideas like entanglement. And also, you know, so relativity can be understood in the sense that you can explain certain things, but people say, well, how can it work like that? And then you have to get into the math. Okay, but I think that I took a course a few years ago on generativity, and I just. Yeah, yeah, I wanted to learn it finally. It's profound, deep, and it makes you feel that this man Einstein, he had help from a lot of people, but still, it's an incredible thing. I mean, you know, it's on a level of Beethoven's symphonies and Mozart's piano concertos. I mean, it's something that comes into your head and you're able to do, you know, through a lot of struggle. I mean, it took him years to do that. Okay, so. But it is profound. Now, when you say, can you explain? I mean, the point is, Einstein one day discovered that if the speed of light is the speed of light, no matter how fast you move with respect to a beam of light, you're still moving at the speed of light. That means that the notion of simultaneity between two events is relative. Now. So you. And I might say, yes, now is 110. But if you are moving very fast with respect to me, instead of 110, you'll say something else, okay? Just because time for you and I are not synchronized. And that leads to all sorts of very interesting effects and practical effects, too, because from there comes the idea that mass and energy are the Same from there. Nuclear weapons came out of that. All sorts of very interesting things, you know. And today, you know, we can even detect gravitational waves that are coming from almost the beginning of the universe. We can detect that because of those theories. They can calculate. So it's profound. Yes. I mean, Einstein, I think, stands on. I mean Newton too, by the way. I mean, you know, Newton and Einstein, I think they're top people, you know, but they talk to God in a way, as they say, we'll get back.
- [61:23]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
To God a little bit later. Yeah. It seems to me that even though it's very hard to grasp, it's worth asking for those of us that don't have an intuitive sense of relativity theory that is starting to peer into these things a little bit, trying to understand them? Do you think that it gives one's mind an ability to tap into forms of cognition that we don't normally think about when we're looking at macromechanics of the world around us, that objects fall down, not up, and a helium balloon goes up? Okay. And you can learn something about helium, but it's all pretty straightforward with just a few simple bullet points. Whereas when you get into quantum mechanics, it challenges the mind in a way that it really feels like for most people there's a cliff and we just kind of go, okay. And obviously there's trust there. But for people that are curious about understanding how the really tiny bits of the physical universe link up with the really big bits of the physical universe, where's the best place to start?
- [62:30]
Dan Huberman
Well, okay, you're asking a very, very interesting question, which is, is for most of us who are trained in physics, we learn how to calculate, we learn how to operate with these things. I just got a patent on using quantum mechanics for communication and so on. But still, the puzzle is, why does it work the way it works? So what I'm saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things. Operationally, I don't know what happens in your brain, because I have ideas that come out of intuitions, not just formulas and equations. And yet I don't necessarily think I understand deeply why these things are the way they are. They are where they are, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be like that. Our brains, as I said before, you know, they are essentially conformed to understand the macroscopic world, not high speeds and so on. So physicists who work in general relativity, I don't. Can do incredible calculations. Can you tell you what black hole collapsing into another hole. Black hole would do? And you Know, they're using generativity things. And so they, they can do it. Now, what it does to your brain that allows you to operationally work with these equations and solve it and have new ideas. It's something I don't understand. Namely, for instance, the example that I give about quantum mechanics, that's a very simple one because I talk to a lot of people nowadays that work on this is I can give you two dice, okay? You know, just dice. You can go to Mars and I stay here. The dice are. Let's assume they are quantum mechanically entangled. I throw my dice, I see three, you got three, and we don't communicate. They're entangled, they go. This is faster than the speed of light. I throw again, five, you get five. I do one, you get one. I mean, it's an amazing thing.
- [64:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
What is the origin of the entanglement?
- [64:12]
Dan Huberman
It's a property of quantum systems that they can get. Entangled. That's the word. And somehow what happens to your system affects mine, but doesn't affect it in the sense sends a signal, no signal. They're entangled. Now let me living. Now this becomes rather.
- [64:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
They're not entangled through other bits of the universe? No, no, they're totally independent.
- [64:32]
Dan Huberman
Totally independent. Yes. They are entangled in the sense that quantum mechanically, they started like this. Now, there are ways. I mean, there are trivial things. There's a famous example of the socks, okay? So you take a trip and you, you, you, you took a pair of socks. Let's assume they are blue socks, and so on. And then you open your bag and you. Oh, I, I forgot one sock. So this is my blue sock. So you know that there is a blue sock at home. So knowing that is a correlation. But that's trivial, right? I mean, you can do that with anything in quantum mechanics. Imagine that you look at the sock, but the sock is changing colors all the time. So now you observe it is red. The other one is red. I observe it, it's green, the other one is green. Okay? Randomly.
- [65:09]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So little bits of the universe are entangled.
- [65:12]
Dan Huberman
Well, some people and a friend of mine who's a Buddhist claims that there is a whole religious or Buddhist voice saying that everything was entangled. Yes, Originally, all atoms, all electrons, all elementary particles were entangled. Yes. Because the universe started very, very tiny and everything was entangled. Okay? So you could imagine that the universe is entangled. So what happens here affects others, but it gets. The entanglement gets lost when perturbations and noise appears and so on. So we Are not today entangled with. I don't know, I mean, we don't think that we are.
- [65:42]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Some people think that.
- [65:43]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes.
- [65:44]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
People are entangled.
- [65:44]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes, yes.
- [65:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, it gets to it.
- [65:46]
Dan Huberman
But that's a whole.
- [65:47]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, that's a whole thing. That's a.
- [65:49]
Dan Huberman
That's poetry.
- [65:50]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That's poetry, exactly. There's another example that brings us to a very salient aspect of my childhood, which is Chaos theory. Right. So I'll say it so you don't have to. You're one of the founders of chaos or certain aspects of chaos theory. We'll talk about that. But you know, for those of us that grew up in the 80s and 90s, I was born in 75. You know, who saw the movie Jurassic Park? You know, there's a moment in that movie where I think Jeff Goldblum is explaining, you know, what is it? Chaos theory. And maybe it was the butterfly flapping its wings in one location and impacting something someplace else. For the poets in the world, right? That was a very captivating example because I think the human brain can naturally understand that, you know, things around us, we can have an impact on them and they can have an impact on us. But that the notion that a small insect, you know, thousands of kilometers away can impact something that's going on more adjacent to us, it seems outrageous, sci fi, but you know, the notion that one thing impacts another, impacts another, that's pretty straightforward, right? There's just a dominoing of the physical world. Chaos theory is different.
- [67:12]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [67:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Okay, could you explain chaos?
- [67:16]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [67:16]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And I'll just add one more thing just for context for you to, you know, these sort of the paints in the palette. Around the same time, I remember the book Chaos coming out and where there was a lot of excitement around chaos and this was coming up. There was also a lot of discussion about fractals. The idea that when you zoom into things at a very, very small level, you start seeing some regularities. Now we know this about crystal structures, right? Like you put a drop of water under a high powered microscope, you see structure there, it's not random, the angles are very consistent, at least around certain nodes, et cetera. So I think people love this idea that we have repeating, you know, repeating patterns and numbers in nature, that things at a distance can impact us more closely. Like this is the kind of stuff that not the non physics brain can understand. And it does enchant, right. We sort of poked at poetry. I love poetry. You love poetry. But I think it enchants because I think humans are Naturally interested in how, you know, the randomness of life might not be as random as it appears. So what is chaos? Okay, where does it exist in our lives? Not emotional chaos, but. And what is the relationship between fractals and chaos, if any?
- [68:35]
Dan Huberman
Okay, let me say first of all about why chaos is what it is. And it's not quantum. And there is quantum stories. It's a quantum chaotic thing field. But I won't go into that. Chaos is a very interesting idea which is if lies against our intuitions since the times of Newton, we know that if you give me the position and the velocity of initial particle, I can use Newton's equations of motion to tell you where that particle is going to be. Anywhere with an incredible precision. When we launch a rocket, we want to go to the moon, we can calculate and predict exactly where that rocket is going to be after so many hours, after so many days and so on. Actually, we use the equation of motion to predict that trajectory. And it's a precise trajectory.
- [69:17]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
This is how Elon was able to capture the rocket with the chopsticks recently.
- [69:21]
Dan Huberman
Something of that sort. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah. Okay, now the idea of chaos is. So that, that's okay, it works. There are some cases where. Let's assume. Now I'm going to give you a simple example. So I take a ball, I put it on a billiard, a billiard ball on a billiard table, I send it out, and at the moment I can calculate, know exactly the position and velocity. I can tell you exactly where it's going to go. Chaos says that a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny difference in the initial position or velocity of that ball will take it very, very far from the other one, which is ridiculous. I mean, if I tell you that, you know, two cars start at exactly the same speed, you know, the same position, and one of them has a little more, you know, I, you know, they'll stay parallel to each other in some systems. And I'll tell you in a second that actually those two trajectories diverge completely, completely. So it's what we call sensitivity to initial conditions. Okay. That's what chaos is all about in classical mechanics. What is really weird about it is that it happens in systems that also undergo friction. Because let me give you an example that I used to, you know, I used to teach chaos at Stanford for many years. So imagine I give you a beaker full of molasses and you take a very big ball, stainless steel ball, and you just throw it into the thing. Well, after a while it will just drift with it. Thing is called Stokes law because, you know, friction slows it down, and it just goes. And now you throw another one from another altitude, and all of them are going to do exactly the same. Some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite. Even though there is friction, everything tends to just slow it down. They just keep going far apart from each other. Amazing, amazing thing. So that's chaos. Okay. And I can tell you a little bit why I got so involved in this and the work we did.
- [71:06]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Does chaos exist in every physical system?
- [71:09]
Dan Huberman
Mostly, yes. Yes.
- [71:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Maybe even in neurons of the brain?
- [71:12]
Dan Huberman
Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, this is why I don't want to go into a controversy here about issues of when we live a deterministic lives or not. But, you know, if things that are a little bit random and so on, or even just a tiny difference in initial conditions can take you to very different outcomes. But this, we're not talking about many particles. We're talking two. Okay, so that's one. Now, fractals is a different story. That comes out of a guy who I knew very well, Benoit Mandelbrot, a very funny guy, Brilliant too, but very strange, who discovered that certain things are so similar that if you look at the coast of Britain, he used to say that you look at the coast of Britain and you say, okay, tell me, how long is the coast of Britain? You go with a meter and you measure it. Now suppose that the meter that you're using now can measure up to an inch. Well, you're going to get a different distance, even though you are adding the same, because there are all these little things in the coast of Britain that are essentially self similar, that add a tremendous amount. That's what a fractal is all about. These are structures that are not just a simple line, but they have all these other things. Okay. He thought that it was a whole new geometry, as a matter of fact. And I tell you this because I knew Benoit very well. I met him through a talk that I gave on chaos. He used to hang out with chaos physicists. He was a mathematician, brilliant man in many ways. I was having dinner with him in Copenhagen in a restaurant. The very pretty waitress came to us and so on and served us. And, you know, we were talking. He's a French man. He spoke with a very heavy French accent. And so she says something. What are you doing here? He says, we're at a conference. But I'm not just at a conference. I'm a very special man. He said to her, and she said, how come? And he says, do you know who Euclid was? And she says, sort of. She said, well, he was a Greek man who invented geometry. And she said, oh, well, guess what? I am better than Euclid. I invented a different geometry.
- [72:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
He said that?
- [73:00]
Dan Huberman
Yes, he said that points to the.
- [73:01]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Waitress in Denmark that knew about Euclid.
- [73:04]
Dan Huberman
That was very funny.
- [73:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The Danes are smart.
- [73:05]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah, okay. That was very funny that he was. He would talk about it. So he would give a talk and he would say, my equations can generate anything. Indeed, he could generate any patterns. So he would say, you want a mountain, here goes a mountain, blah, blah, blah, you see a mountain, beautiful graphs and so on. So self similarity is a very powerful idea in physics because it allows you that if you know something at a certain scale, you can predict what it's going to be at a different other. And I use that. But chaos and fractals are not always the same, as he used to say, because he didn't like physicists, because we never liked his talks. We always said, okay, so you're telling us that, you know, things are. He used to say, I'm not interested in pulleys, I'm not interested in things that move things up and down. He used to say he's thinking about.
- [73:50]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Elementary physics class, something of that sort.
- [73:53]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah, so. But fractals are very interesting because these are self similar structures at all levels. They look the same. You look at them big, you look at small, they have the same type of geometric behavior. Chaos is all about dynamics, how things evolve in time and chaotic systems. They tend to diverge from each other for a long, long time. The man who invented the idea of the butterfly effect was a man called Ed Lorenz, who was a very famous meteorologist at mit. And he was solving the equations of the atmosphere, trying to predict the behavior of the weather. And he knew noticed in these very old computers and so on that sometimes he would get different behaviors. He thought there was something wrong about the computer. And he discovered that the only thing that was wrong was that the initial conditions that he was giving them was very, very tinily different. And he would get different things from there. He went into that and there's a very beautiful. I mean, there are ideas that are very beautiful, like strange attractors and so on. I mean, we don't have to go into that. But so chaos is really a field that essentially explains why things that seem to be simply, you know, explained by classical physics tend to diverge from each other and they give rise to random outcomes that's the important thing. You can use chaos in order to generate random numbers. You can use chaos to generate random patterns. I've done that. It's very simple.
- [75:14]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level.
- [75:17]
Dan Huberman
Okay. So I was working at some there and I don't think it's interesting how I got into this because was I was doing something else and suddenly I decided I was going to do this. And I really started going very fast at this. But then I had a very bright student, you met Dan Hogg. And we decided, let's see if we can see chaos in quantum mechanics. And we started doing it. And there were a couple of papers by the Russians actually showing that this was the case. And we discovered that it was not the case. We actually proved that quantum systems are not chaotic. There's some kind of interference between them and so on that makes them recur back and forth people periodically.
- [75:51]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Why do I find that reassuring? That if you get down to a small enough level that you can really predict what's going to happen as opposed to small perturbations leading to big differences in outcome.
- [76:01]
Dan Huberman
That was the whole point. We discovered that quantum mechanics, there are waves and interferences and so on that make the system recur. As a matter of fact, I had quite an exchange with Dick Feynman about it when I met him, which I went to give a talk at Caltech and I was in his office and he said, so what are you working? What are you going to talk about? Because I don't want to waste my time. And I said about chaos. He said, okay. I said, you know, some things that are very in particular in quantum mechanics. So I'm smiling because he was so, so sharp and so on. So he said, okay, give me the problem. He said, what is it? I said, well, okay, I give you an electron, you have it in a potential, and I give you a laser. And he says, the laser inside or outside the apparatus? Just like so I sit outside. So you turn on the laser. And I said, so what happens to the electron? And I knew he was going to give me the answer that was already in the literature. But he appeared to thinking. He stood up and walked around and was making lots of noises. And then suddenly he says, the energy grows linearly in time. I said, no, it doesn't. How do you know? I said, we measure it. I can show you. And so on. And you know, he was very impressed because that means that there is no chaos, actually. Then he said, oh, you know why I got it wrong? I said, no, because I wasn't thinking in colors, only black and white.
- [77:19]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Was he trying to be funny?
- [77:20]
Dan Huberman
Of course. He was always funny.
- [77:22]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Let's talk about Feynman and Gell, Mann and Mandelbrot and all the rest as a collection for a moment. One of the great gifts of my life has been that you would talk about scientists. It really enchants me. I'm so delighted when I hear it. I grew up hearing stories about these scientists, right? And not athletes, right? Which is great, like, but scientists. And it, it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist, you. You both revere the, the work they did. You see something unique about them. And something I learned very early on, and I've certainly internalized is. Forgive me, because I'm. I'm assuming here is. Is that there's a certain aspect of, like, their quirkiness or something about them, like, to take them seriously, but not too seriously. Like, I never learned to assume that because somebody was a Nobel Prize winner that they were perfect. For instance, like, you would tell me, you know, like, Einstein had, you know, he was amazing. Like, there was relativity, the patent office, all this stuff. And he had. He, like, had all these problems with women.
- [78:34]
Dan Huberman
Oh, yeah.
- [78:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Or, you know, and I read the books, right? Or, you know, or this person, I won't name names because these people are still alive. Silicon Valley, you know, like, actually, when you and I used to take walks when I was a postdoc, we used to see Jobs walking around, right? No feet, no shoes. He had feet, no shoes. And you would say, you know, I mean, like, he's amazing. Like, this guy's brilliant. But then we would chuckle about some of the job isms, you know. And so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people that these, these founders, the creators, they're just people. And they often have very challenging areas of their life, life as well. Like, they're not perfect, they're not gods. Some of them have almost godlike access to the universe and understanding it. But it seems to me that you hold people up for their contributions, but you never actually, thank goodness, put people on a pedestal to the point where you're like, this person is spectacular in every way. And I'm not saying you cut them down to size, but I learned very. And this has served me well in my life. And now public facing or on Twitter, like, if I make a mistake and so someone comes at me, it's somebody that I respect. I go, oh. But then I remember, like, this person has a lot of issues in Certain domains of their life. So, you know, to realize that, you know, like, we're all human. Like this notion of, like, like none of us, none of us are gods.
- [79:54]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [79:55]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And yet there are people like Feynman, like Gel man, like Einstein, who have almost supernatural levels of ability.
- [80:03]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [80:03]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. So what's that about? Like, how do you hold knowledge, insight and stature in your mind alongside like the humanness, like the inherent, flawed nature of all of us, you know?
- [80:19]
Dan Huberman
Well, okay, it's complicated. There are many ways to think about it. In some of these names, you know, for instance, these people are built into giants by the media too. I mean, you know, Feynman, I mean, if you go to Quora and so on, everybody's asking, you know, what did Feynman do? What was he wearing? And so on, as if he was a God. I mean, obviously what he did in physics, he. And I interrupt myself here because he really worked very hard. Very hard, according to Gilman in particular, to creating a myth about himself. He worked very hard. When I met him, I can even tell you the anecdotes. I only met him for an hour, but he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression with you.
- [81:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
R rated and X rated anecdotes.
- [81:02]
Dan Huberman
Exactly. But I remember the good one was that I was going to give the colloquium. He said, should I come? I said, I think you should come. And then he said, well, then I'm going to give you a piece of advice. Do not look at me, because if you look at me during your talk, you're going to get confused and so on, you know. And actually that's exactly what happened. I even started, you know, the colloquium at Caltech, you know, the marine boot camp of science. And there I am starting to talk and suddenly I said, instead of saying the next hour, I said something like in the next week or something or so, because there he was. And then he started saying, you know, like, look elsewhere. I was, you know, that kind of guy.
- [81:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, for anyone who hasn't lectured, there's a tendency sometimes when one is going fast to fill in without thinking. It's just something that one learns. I mean, I've had to learn it the hard way when it, we. We missed it in the recording and this kind of thing, it's a, it's a humbling moment. But yeah, I think that, well, Feynman would have been canceled by, by the standards.
- [81:54]
Dan Huberman
I took even my father once to a lecture he was giving in San Francisco and he was Giving a beautiful lecture to, I don't know, get some award for teaching and so on. And suddenly a bunch of women walked into the front, the big room, you know, and they started coming because it turns out that in one of his lectures, he said something like, you know, if you do it this way, you're as bad as a woman's driver. As a.
- [82:15]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, Feynman said that.
- [82:16]
Dan Huberman
Feynman said that. And then all these women were saying things, and then he said, I love women. They're all smart. He was very clever.
- [82:22]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The way he would have lost his job by the standards of recent years.
- [82:25]
Dan Huberman
Okay. But regardless of that, because I really want to go back to this issue. People like Mary Galman, I mean, it was. To me, he was the most intimidating person I've ever met. I mean. I mean, now, eventually I got to know him because he liked what I was doing. And as a matter of fact, he and I organized a workshop, an incredibly luxurious place in France, at the estate of Madame Schlumberger, one of the oil people. Actually, it was an incredible meeting that he and I organized. So I got to know him a little bit personally. And all he was complaining at that time is he couldn't get a date. He was a widow. And he wanted to. You know, women were intimidated by him.
- [83:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Too, as I recall, because I remember meeting him when I was a kid and we both shared a love of birds. But he was perhaps one of the world's most obnoxious people.
- [83:08]
Dan Huberman
Right?
- [83:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, he was.
- [83:09]
Dan Huberman
But you impressed him. As a matter of fact, I still. You know, I don't know if you want me to remind you of this, because we had two stories there. Your mother and I were taking a hike in Aspen and we saw a bird that looked incredibly complicated and so on. So we looked at the bird. The next day we went to him because he loved birds, as you know. And I said, I saw a most unusual bird. He said, describe it. So I. And he gave me the name in Latin of the bird. And then he said, that's the most common bird in the Bay Area of California. As a matter of fact, you should see it when you pick up the newspaper next time you're there. And indeed, two weeks later, I went to pick up the New York Times and there was the bird. But at the same time, I said, andrew likes birds. And he asked you, what is your favorite bird? And you said, the rainbow. Lower keyed.
- [83:52]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Still is.
- [83:53]
Dan Huberman
And he said, this kid knows. This kid knows. He said, I'll never know my birds.
- [83:58]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I know My birds.
- [83:59]
Dan Huberman
No, no. It's amazing. I never heard, you know, because if you could have said a parrot, he would have not been very interested. Okay, so. But he was intimidating, very intimidating. And he was nasty too when he wanted to be. So he enjoyed the power he had. I was on the, I was a member of the board of the directors of the Aspen Center. So we had to decide what programs we had every summer. And he would come to me and say, whom do you want me to insult today? He had all sorts of very funny names for all sorts of physicists and.
- [84:29]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So on the downside of people like that in science, because I've known some too. There's a very famous neuro scientist now in his 70s who has a Nobel Prize who also is known for generating anecdotes about himself like. And in recent years because of political correctness, wokeism and so forth, it tends to do that less because it was sort of a trucker's mouth. Brilliant guy. But he's kind of known for being outrageous and trying to create tales about themselves. This is something that scientists do.
- [85:01]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, right, right, right.
- [85:01]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
To in, in order to maintain their legacy.
- [85:04]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Or to also to feel good about themselves. I mean, by the way, I mean gel man, I mean I work with him. It was incredible. I mean, you know, and the way he would interrupt people and so on. And there are two things I can tell you that are interesting. Once he was announcing some new results, he was working on this whole thing on quarks and other things. And actually it was string theory and he announced a seminar and everybody goes into the guard. You know, the seminars are nice. I need to remind the audience perhaps here that the Aspen center for Music was right next to the tent. They were rehearsing. So the seminar was supposed to start at three. And there's Gilman comes with all his notes under his arm. He always had notes, walking, pacing and nothing happened. And suddenly they were rehearsing the Beethoven's 15:20 which just says ta ta, ta ta. And then you heard the sound. And then he started. I will now tell you about a new theory of how the universe works. That's the way he spoke.
- [85:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So what strikes me is these people take themselves very seriously.
- [86:02]
Dan Huberman
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [86:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you think that's important in life?
- [86:06]
Dan Huberman
I, I, I don't. I like to, I mean, as you know, I like to be, to have a good sense of humor about myself and be self deprecating. I think some people, you know, have issues and they, they do that. I mean, it's all depends on how, how do you, you know, see things?
- [86:20]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Matina. Matina makes Loose Leaf and Ready to Drink Yerba Mate. Now, I've often discussed Yerba Mate's benefits such as regulating blood sugar, its high antioxidant content, the ways it can improve digestion and its possible neuroprotective effects. It's for all those reasons that Yerba Mate is my preferred source of caffeine. I also drink Yerba Mate because I simply love the taste. And while there are a lot of different choices out there of Yerba Mate drinks, my personal favorite far and away is Matina. It's made of the highest quality ingredients which gives it a really rich but also a really clean taste. So none of that tan aftertaste. In fact, given how amazing Matina tastes and their commitment to quality, I decided to become a part owner in the company earlier this year. In particular, I love the taste of Mattina's canned zero sugar cold brew Yerba Mate, which I personally helped develop. I drink at least three cans of those a day. Now. I also love their Loose Leaf Matina, which I drink every morning from the gourd.
- [87:15]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So I add hot water and sip.
- [87:16]
Andrew Huberman
On that thing and I'll have some cold brews throughout the morning and early afternoon. I find it gives me terrific energy all, all day long and I'm able to fall asleep perfectly well at night, no problems. If you'd like to try Matina, you can go to drinkmatina.com huberman Right now, Matina is offering a free 1 pound bag of loose leaf Yerba Mate tea and free shipping with the purchase of two cases of their cold brew yerba mate. Again, that's drinkmatina.com huberman to get a free bag of Yerba Mate, loose leaf tea and free shipping.
- [87:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Let me ask you about the. So you know, further down my list of things I wanted to talk to you about is that, you know, you, you've always loved it. It's clear from a young age, like high level concepts, deep concepts, order in the universe, working on hard problems. You just filed another patent. Like you've, I mean, as long as I've known you, you've, you've been pursuing some new area of knowledge or implementation of knowledge. And yet you, like your father, you, I know you delight in everyday things. I mean, since I was a kid, you've taken a walk after dinner, you've biked to work if you can. You know, that day because of the weather You. You love, like, a really good espresso, a really good meal. Like the high and the low are checked off boxes for you.
- [88:33]
Dan Huberman
Yes, right.
- [88:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That's different, I think, than the way most people think about scientists, especially theoreticians, theorists. Excuse me, which one is it? Theoreticians or theorists?
- [88:45]
Dan Huberman
Theorists, they say.
- [88:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, theorists that, you know, we assume, like the academics that are always somewhere else. Like, they're up here, they're not grounded, they're not feet on the ground. But you like everyday things. You're very much like, where we're going to eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this, a conversation about relativity.
- [89:04]
Dan Huberman
Absolutely. I think that there is a myth that it sometimes gets perpetuated at universities. My first meeting with my advisor, when I got to University of Pennsylvania, he said, I want you to want to know one thing. You're going to live like a monk. I said, what does that mean? No fun, nothing. You're going to work. I want you to work. You're getting paid to do something. I was sort of scared. And then I told him that on weekends I had to escape to New York City to take a walk on Central park and look at nice things. And, you know, I always enjoyed the good things of life. And, you know, at that time, I couldn't afford them, but that doesn't mean that I didn't, you know, enjoy them. And I do believe that I inherited this from my father. A tremendous enjoyment of life in general. And, yes, I am very physical and tactile about things. I like to surround myself with things that are beautiful. I enjoy, as you said, good meals and the daily things about life. If I'm not just living in some stratosphere and not being able to, you know, enjoy a meal I'm having and so on. No, the opposite. And yes, in that sense, I am very much like that. And, you know, Mary's the same way, and so that's why we enjoyed that. Your wife. Yeah, my wife. Sorry. Yes. We really enjoy, you know, she in particular, being Danish. You know, they have this idea of slow eating and enjoying the good things of life. And I'm very much like that. Yes, very much. I. I don't feel guilty about it. I. You know, if I can afford certain.
- [90:31]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Nor should you.
- [90:32]
Dan Huberman
Huh?
- [90:32]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Nor should.
- [90:33]
Dan Huberman
Well, there. There is a certain aesthetic component to. To science and the. The idea that they sell you that, you know, Einstein didn't care about anything. Actually, if you look at the negotiations that Einstein had with the Institute for Advanced Studies for salaries, you'll see that he, he really cared a lot about these things too.
- [90:47]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Oh, so our notion of him is just kind of like it was just science and he had no interest in material things.
- [90:52]
Dan Huberman
Yes. I had an uncle, actually, Hector's father. You know, there was a branch of the family that was very much into culture. They had beautiful collections of paintings and so on. And once I was what, 14 or so, and I remember at a party, we had big social parties in my parents house and he was lecturing me that I should never care about anything but truth and concepts and so on. I was a little bit scared. I wanted to enjoy life as well. Okay, so it was a little bit complicated. No, no, I enjoy everything. Of course. I think I got out of my father mostly. Yes. My mother was a little more ascetic in a way, but. Yes, the tiny little things of life are what makes one's life.
- [91:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, I'm slowly starting to get that.
- [91:37]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes.
- [91:37]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I think I've been a little like rabid about my interests almost to an obsessive level, to the point where I've sometimes overlooked like, how many opportunities for just like lovely daily interactions. I have. I try, but I feel like I've just been chasing the carrot of knowledge. Like I love doing what I do. I've always done that, you know, but.
- [92:00]
Dan Huberman
Well, but you have to be careful. Indeed. I, you know, as you know, I meditate and for many years and so on and being in the present and being able to just, you know, be there and nothing else is the tremendous source of satisfaction and calms me down and so on. And I love.
- [92:15]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
When did you start that?
- [92:17]
Dan Huberman
Well, I started actually out of the discovery. I mean, a trivial thing that many people have. I discovered that every time my blood pressure was taken by the doctor, it was just going through the roof. You know, it's called the white coat phenomenon or something of that sort. And I got very, very upset about it because I tried to control it and it got worse and worse and worse and they told me, you know, to do. And so at one point or the other, I have a friend, a colleague, more than a friend, who's a, who's a Buddhist who started telling me about, you know, have you tried, first of all, biofeedback? That's a good one. I tried for a year. I did biofeedback and then he started telling me about meditation. So one day, actually he's a physicist as well, he was visiting me in my lab and I said, he said, let me, let's do it. I did a session with him in meditation. And I couldn't believe it. My hands suddenly were warm and, you know, it felt incredibly nice. So I decided that I really wanted to learn how to do it. And I started doing it at a time when I truly needed it because I realized that without being aware, I was anxious. Like for instance, I would see myself walking down the street holding my fists this way. That's not a very relaxed way of living. Okay. So I really started doing this meditation on a fairly continuous basis. And I really enjoy it. And it's very important, as you know, as a father, I say this to anybody one too, that you have to enjoy life. I mean the pursuing these things, you know, eventually, what, what, you know, the, the, the value is in the pursuit, not in achieving them anyhow. So you might as well pursue many things at the same time. I mean, a good meal eaten properly can be very, very nice too.
- [93:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, I love that about you. Something I'm working on. I remember when I along those lines. I remember when I was in graduate school, we, we published a paper and then we publish a second paper in Science. And I remember thinking like, this is like such a proud moment, a first author paper in the journal Science. And I told you, and you said, well, enjoy it and just be aware that by tomorrow you'll be worried that you'll never do it again.
- [94:24]
Dan Huberman
Exactly. Yeah.
- [94:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And fortunately we publish in Nature and a few other journals a bunch of times after that. But you also warned me about the post postpartum of post excitement, like something great happens. You know, at that time we as a field of neuroscience didn't really understand dopamine dynamics, but now we do. What you were describing is this trough in dopamine that we get a day or two after some big event.
- [94:48]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [94:49]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Typically postpartum is associated with the birth of a child, but it could be, you know, getting a degree or a great party or a paper in Science or Nature for softer paper. And, and you said a couple days from now you're going to feel low.
- [95:00]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [95:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And you just have to wait. And I'll never forget what you said. You said, just go back to what inspired the first project. Pick a different problem. It'll happen again.
- [95:10]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [95:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And the second time it happened I was like, he was right. It happened again.
- [95:13]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [95:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And again and again. I know I haven't had an infinite number of those papers in those journals, but I learned about the dopamine dynamics associated with pursuing a goal. And then you get the thing and you're very excited and then you feel the Drop.
- [95:27]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes. And that. I think that is something that even ancient philosophers knew about it. The Buddha, many, you know, the Greeks and so on. This idea that the things we pursue, they are ephemeral in a way, in the way the feelings that they elicit in us, you know, And I think that you're right. And there is also another tendency one has to try to avoid, which is you are successful in something and you continue doing exactly the same thing because, you know, by now, you know how to do it with your hands tight. And I always felt that I want to go elsewhere. And, you know, I have sort of a reputation for changing fields. And, you know, I don't do that in order for others to be puzzled by it. It's just that I'm curious and I want to have a feeling again that, like, falling in love, you know, the new thing, you know, is nice at the beginning, but eventually whatever you're doing, it becomes, you know, trite and so on.
- [96:18]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, let's talk about that. Because after chaos, which brought a lot of, you know, I remember we had reporters in our house, and there was like, TV and the book by Jim Glick, and then. And then you switched to something completely different.
- [96:32]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes.
- [96:32]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And you got into computer science.
- [96:34]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, well, computer science is computers. Computers. What happened was that a lot of the success that we had was because I was at parc. We had phenomenal computer facilities there. Things that we could visualize at a time very few people could do. And so. And one of them, actually, someone suggested I get a patent that is pattern for the chaos that sometimes people have in T shirts that actually we discovered for the first time with guys from UC Santa Cruz, with Jim Crutchfield and so on. You know, he was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so on. But that is. But when I. What happened was, okay, so we did this. We did quantum. And then one day I said, okay, so what do I do now? Okay, well, you can go and publish one paper after that in chaos. I mean, you can produce 10 PhDs with this. But then I said, why don't I do the opposite? I. Using computers to help me with the physics. Why don't I use the physics to study. Study computers? Well, that's an interesting idea, but, you know, I mean, this is. So how do you do that? So what happened to me? I was at a meeting on chaos in Copenhagen, and I couldn't sleep one night, and I had a book called the Computer Led Brain by John von Neumann. Perhaps someone that was a true genius. I don't know if you heard of him. He invented computers. He was a phenomenon at all levels. And he was part of the Manhattan Project. He was perhaps one of the most brilliant people ever existed, at least that we are aware of. I mean, he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies, von Neumann. There are all sorts of anecdotes about him. He had a photographic memory. You could give him a page of a phone book, he would look at it closer and then he would recite the phone numbers from bottom to top.
- [98:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Totally useless skill.
- [98:05]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, but he was a genius. A genius, true genius. He invented computers, he invented game theory in economics.
- [98:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, it was useful skill.
- [98:14]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, exactly. Okay. In any event, so he wrote a very little book called the Computer and the Brain. No equations, nothing. And one night, 4:00 in the morning, I cannot sleep, I get down, you know, it was summer, so the sun was still settled in Copenhagen. And I went there to read it. And I said, this is what I'm going to do. I don't know anything about brains, but I can imagine, you know, if the brain is like a computer, I could do something like that. But I also want to apply some of what I know to these things. And the first thing that occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we had at parc. These computers were communicating with each other as we nowadays we know it, as an incubator, Internet and so on. So there were many, many aspects of this. And I decided that because I was very influenced by one or two students that were very much into economics and libertarian ideas and so on. And one of them had taken two courses in econ at Caltech. So we decided to start looking at this as a market where computers essentially buy and sell programs to execute in their machines and so on. So we started really doing what we call the ecology of computation. It was a big effort which married economics with artificial intelligence and computer. But it became a big thing. And so I became, again, it's like falling in love again. It's a new field. I thought it was great.
- [99:27]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The discovery process of falling in love is half the fun.
- [99:30]
Dan Huberman
Absolutely, yeah. And I also was able to. I mean, there is a lot of formalism in economics and some of it is really, I mean, sort of academic. But there are some ideas that are very profound to the extent that some people consider me an economist sometimes, because I think in terms of utility rewards and risk and all this stuff. And as a matter of fact, a lot of the work I'm doing now on resource allocation in networks comes from ideas from economics.
- [99:54]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
When you go into a new field, do you. In order to learn about the field, is that mainly through talking to people in the field? Reading books?
- [100:05]
Dan Huberman
Both.
- [100:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Both. And it doesn't strike me that you have ever tried to ingratiate yourself into to any field. It's not like you're trying to be a member of the field like you go in it as a. As a. As an observer and a learner.
- [100:19]
Dan Huberman
Yes, I am. I need to say this. I don't think that many people have said that if I stayed in one field, I would have done much better in terms of reputation and so on. As a matter of fact, I can tell you an anecdote that is.
- [100:31]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You mean like awards and stuff?
- [100:32]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Like, for instance, not long ago I was already doing computers after chaos and so on. I won't name the person, but a very good physicist professor at Berkeley came into my office. He said, bernardo, we have an issue here. I said, what is it that your name for membership in the National Academy of Science is coming up. I said, oh, that's nice. He said, well, it's a problem. You're not writing papers in physics, you're writing papers in computer science. And, you know, we need a physicist because otherwise the chemist will get that job. You know, the physicists don't like that.
- [101:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Welcome to academia.
- [101:01]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. So I said, what do you want me to do? He said, well, can you perhaps write one or two more papers on this topic? We can show. I said, no, I cannot do that. I can't.
- [101:09]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, there's a. Isn't there a famous story about Feynman and being elected to the National Academy?
- [101:14]
Dan Huberman
He refused to. Yes, right.
- [101:16]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I think they told him he was in the National Academy. And then he said, well, what do I do? And they said, well, you elect in other members. And he said, I quit.
- [101:23]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, right. Well, yeah. So in any event, I never became a member of the National Academy.
- [101:27]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But you never sought prizes?
- [101:29]
Dan Huberman
No, I mean, I would have liked to get them. Why not? I mean, you know, I'm not. It's not that I say they are meaningless, but there was nothing that I could do about it. And I, since I was not, as you said, I was always a little bit of a. Always moving on to the next thing, never staying long enough, going to these meetings where by now you heard it all, you know, over and over and over again. So.
- [101:50]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I have to say that, you know, like, I mean, I. As you know, I still have my position at Stanford and teach. I'm involved in A little bit of research. But, you know, one of the great adventures, advantages I had is that all my advisors died or killed themselves. So I was orphaned in science. And so there was never an expectation from my advisors that I do the next thing because they were dead. So I thought about that and. But I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcasts, I remember you being a little bit concerned. You're like, you know, what are your colleagues going to think? And I think at that point, the, the way that science was going and the structure of academia relative to what my needs in life were, and just a passion to wanting to do something new. I put a lot of thought to the fact that you've changed fields many times, and I just felt absolutely compelled to get into science communication and there was no stopping that. But I have to thank you. A lot of the reason I was able to take the step to do the podcast, in addition to being supported by Lex Friedman's suggestions and a lot of help from others, um, Joe Rogan and others, but is that I was like, well, that's what you're supposed to do when you hit. When you hit it. When you hit a point where what you're doing isn't as compelling. You wait for the thing that draws you forward. Seems like you were always drawn forward. I was thinking of carrot and stick. It's not like you disliked where you were. It's that there was some carrot that you identified and you go towards the carrots.
- [103:19]
Dan Huberman
And also something very. The other day my wife was actually mentioning, I've been in a sense, an orphan. I never had mentors. It's very interesting.
- [103:27]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Except this, frankly, not terrific graduate advisor.
- [103:30]
Dan Huberman
He was not my mentor, really. I mean, he didn't even want me to do the things that I wanted to do. So I never had someone who was whispering, bernardo is the guy to you should be considering for this or that. I mean, I had the fortune to really get to the top of many of these fields and I interacting with the top people. I mean, we talk about Feynman, Gelman. There are many very famous people that I respect immensely that I met when I was in France. You know, as you know, I was teaching there, I met people that are brilliant and so on, and I felt treated with tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on, but I never had mentors in that sense. And also, as I said, I am a little bit restless. I am very curious about everything. And so, you know, sometimes I see something and I say, oh, there's an opportunity to do something interesting. I think that the issue of being curious is extremely important. And it's interesting because I reflect a lot on, say, my father. My father was an immensely curious person, but all about details. He never liked abstractions of any kind. He was very proud that he went to the same school I went. And the only course he flanked was philosophy because he said, it doesn't make any sense. Now. Perhaps he was right about that. You know, sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about. A couple of months ago in Denmark, we were invited, my wife and I, to a dinner with philosophers talking about artificial intelligence. I thought these people were. They didn't really know what was going on. But nevertheless, yes, I am curious. And sometimes I move on to things. And I feel that the reward, the internal reward you get from doing something new and interesting and exciting is much better than a recognition that someone will come and say, you know, whatever. I mean, don't mean to understand me. I will not say no to a recognition. And I. But it's not really that I do this in order to get that. And that's not me at all.
- [105:20]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, I mean, the, The. The whole thing, it sort of brings my thinking back to, like, the early discussions about, you know, other students are not interested in physics. You're interested in physics. Other people are, like, smoking a lot of weed and, and partying like. No, like. Like you said, you. You've not had mentors. That's one area in which you and I have been very different. I've always attached myself to mentors. Many of them. Many of them. I mean.
- [105:44]
Dan Huberman
Well, there might be a psychological reason too. Yeah, yeah. That you need this, you know, or needed at one point. They're these parental type figures. Yeah. Yeah, it might be. I wish I had them. Don't misunderstand me. I said, matter of fact. I mean, my influence on my students. I produce more than 15 PhDs. It's also strange because none of them stays in. Stayed in physics. Now, the department at Stanford was not too happy with that. It's not that I told them not to, but they all smelled that, you know, I was doing something else. I mean, you know, from computers. I became very aware of what was going on very early on with the Internet. As you know, I started doing all this stuff on social long before anyone was doing, and economics of attention and all that stuff. And many of the students. The other day I found one of them. I met one Lada Damage, who, you know, I think you.
- [106:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
She was early at Google.
- [106:29]
Dan Huberman
No, she went to Facebook and The other day she wrote me a note. I was so lucky that I met you. She was going to do a thesis and I don't know what. Solar collapse. Collecting Solar. Yeah.
- [106:38]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You've collected some pretty interesting students. They're like a pretty. We won't name names other than laws, but like some of them are very well known people in the tech industry now.
- [106:47]
Dan Huberman
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [106:48]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And I think that, yeah, it seemed like the people that would gravitate towards you. It's interesting. Your laboratory is off campus. So anyone that decides to be off campus is already making a choice toward like they don't want to be part of the standard culture.
- [106:58]
Dan Huberman
Which I thought was interesting.
- [106:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me, I want to get back to this issue of like Internet and Silicon Valley. I recall it was the early 90s, so it'd be like 89, 90, 91. Remember I had this, this girlfriend Gretchen, remember? And her dad was the editor of Guitar Player magazine. And I'll, I'll never forget he told me, he said, you know, it's, it's going to be all about multimedia. Remember that? No one talks about multimedia. He said, your, your television is going to be, your computer is going to be, your stereo is going. I mean he, he, he was right.
- [107:35]
Dan Huberman
Right. He was.
- [107:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Basically everything was going to be synthesized into common devices. And we now know that worn out to be true. But at what point did you decide that things like computers were mainly going to be a route to industry and not to academia? This is really important, I think, for people to understand because right now it's kind of happening in biomedical sciences. But you see this at Stanford. People get degrees in computer science, but not to become computer science professors sometimes, but really so that they can go into industry. So how do you see nowadays? Like for people that are interested in science or technology, do they need to go to graduate school? Like, is a PhD useful anymore?
- [108:14]
Dan Huberman
Peter Thiel says that you shouldn't even get a bachelor's. I think that's what he, you know.
- [108:18]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, I have great respect for Peter. Great respect for Peter. There are a lot of things that are easier to say when you're already a billionaire.
- [108:24]
Dan Huberman
No, no, no, I know. Like, you know, like Steve Jobs saying, you know, passion is everything.
- [108:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Right? I mean, necessary but not sufficient.
- [108:31]
Dan Huberman
Right, right, right.
- [108:32]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Necessary but not suff.
- [108:33]
Dan Huberman
That was happening today. I mean, technology, we are going through a technological revolution. There's no doubt about it. We used to learn about the printing press and now it's the same thing with computers. I still remember and I You know, we. This is amazing because, you know, today it's so, so obvious. I mean, people didn't know much what was going on. Park, everything. One night we were having for dinner, I remember, you know, Emmanuel Mignot, who.
- [108:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Was, you know, they discovered the Orexin hypocretin relationship. That's the cause of narcolepsy is a mutation.
- [109:01]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, it was a friend of ours and his wife. They were at home with our din. And I was telling them, I was telling them that you could go to a computer and go through the Louvre museum in Paris. And they say, what are you talking about? And so we finished dinner and we all drove to park at night. And I turned on my computer and there was a man. I still remember his name, something. Piotr was the last name. He had gone taking pictures of every painting at the Louvre and put them online so you could just navigate through the Louvre today. So obvious, trivial. At that time, they couldn't believe it. There you are in Palo Alto on an evening going through all the rooms of the Louvre. They just couldn't understand what was going on.
- [109:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
What year was this?
- [109:42]
Dan Huberman
I don't remember. But it was just like when the web started coming, you know, that was.
- [109:47]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, right before email in college, in the final year of 97. So it must have been somewhere around like 94, 97, something of that sort.
- [109:54]
Dan Huberman
Right before, right at the time Andreessen made the web available to everybody, basically, you know, Netscape, you know. So in any event. So it was an amazing thing. It was amazing. Now, all these developments were really done in companies, not necessarily in academia. Okay, that is an interesting point. And I think that today, an immense amount of the advances that we see in biotechnology, in computers, in everything, are essentially done, I would say, for profit by companies. Okay. I think social networks, they started. We started doing social networks at a time when no one even thought of doing it. I used to say, I do social science with a capitalist because sociologists used to study the behavior of five widows in some Norway, a Norwegian village, and write a paper. We could look at 150,000 people. How did they visit this site, on that site and predict how, you know, we were able to predict behaviors. Behaviors, you know, So I think that today everybody knows that that's the case. And it's, you know, the same thing with artificial intelligence.
- [110:54]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But for a kid in high school or kids in college, or kids in. I mean, is it worth getting a graduate education?
- [110:59]
Dan Huberman
Well, it all depends on what you want to do.
- [111:01]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean. I mean, law, med, you Need a. I mean, those are. You need the professional degree. I mean, these are ultimately professional degrees. So you need the training. I don't want a surgeon that didn't go to medical school.
- [111:11]
Dan Huberman
Okay, but the danger is you, and I remember a very, very bright guy I had in my team. You don't want to become a blue collar worker. See, what I'm saying is the following. Being a hacker or being able to deal with software, it was an incredibly profitable profession. Now you have these large language models that can actually program for you. You need to write a program, you go to chat gtp and he'll write it for you. So suddenly, you know, if you don't have a set of talents, a way of imagining things, of doing something, you become basically just someone that just hacks for, you know, for so many dollars an hour. Now, it's true that they can give you options. If the company does well, you get rich and so on, but I still believe that you need some contextual, cultural part of this. Okay? Now I personally believe that humanities and all sorts of other things are very important. And to understand where is your cultural environment, where are you coming from and where is this society going is important. But on the other hand, as you said, you can just finish high school and start hacking and, you know, become very good at it and doesn't require much more than that.
- [112:19]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you think the examples of, like Zuck, Elon, you know, and others, you know, going from, you know, essentially departing standard education to start companies, do you think they've served? I mean, certainly not talking about the companies, but do you think those examples are good examples for people to internalize or they just. Are they unicorns?
- [112:43]
Dan Huberman
Well, I think that they're unicorns. And you have to be very careful. We only talk about the success stories. We don't go and interview the guy that is loading a landscape because his startup didn't go anywhere. Okay, so it is a very. Our tendency to see these people as heroes and to try to imitate them is a very dangerous one, I think. Now that doesn't mean that you should not be working on the things you care and gamble, but these are the guys who played a lottery and won. Do you remember there were many other social websites before Facebook and they all died. And Facebook could have died too. I mean, Zuckerberg might disagree with me, but he could have died. Okay? And you know, all these things are like that Apple went almost under. They brought Steve Jobs again and the guy put them onto, you know, into the stratosphere and the same Thing with Elon Musk, he's a high tech risk taker and so far every time he flips the coin, he comes the right way. But to say, I want to be like him, you have to be very careful and to calculate the odds. Okay, so when, when you say this, how many of these kids really make it? I mean, it's a very complicated thing. So I think that to have a strong background in something will help you when suddenly the field switches from being a programmer and making a lot of money to suddenly programmers are a dime a dozen or becoming a technician, basically.
- [114:07]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, I had a perfectly thriving career as a lab scientist with grants and private funding and a bunch of other things, publishing regularly. And when I decided to switch to the. Were you worried?
- [114:19]
Dan Huberman
No, because I saw, Okay, I saw it as a. As a very slow departure from what you were doing. And I saw the success very early on. I mean, I. I realized that you were essentially satisfying two things that are very important to you. You like to explain things. You're incredibly good at explaining things since you were a little kid. Okay, you were always explaining everything to people. And you, you have a talent, let's face it. I mean, you know, I'm not saying this because I want to flatter you. I really believe, and everybody says, that the success of your podcast is a success at explaining things in ways that people understand. They don't have to go and buy a book on neuroanatomy to understand what you're saying. So I knew that this was a path. Now, I didn't realize how incredible the path was, and there was a lot of randomness in it. For instance, you started podcasting at a time when very few people were podcasting. If you start today, the story would be a very different one.
- [115:09]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The timing was the pandemic. People were home, they were listening to podcasts.
- [115:12]
Dan Huberman
And this brings to something to me that many times people have asked me about me, what makes me do what I do. I believe in the idea of walking on beaches with very few footprints. When you go into a crowded field, it's a mess. So many of the times that I move into something else is when I realize that there's a mob scene of scientists working at this, and the chances of doing something interesting are very, very small. Okay? The Internet has allowed the information to go everywhere. A guy in Zambia can actually read the same things that I read here. So it's very hard to compete against such a crowd. And many people are brilliant and many of them are smart. So you started something Very early on. And you were lucky that you chose a field that resonates with the needs of people. Okay. There are also other people who do a podcasting and go nowhere. So I think that I never worried. I actually was, you know, elated to see the trajectory of your podcast. And the only thing is, you have a tenure position, and that is a nice safety cushion if everything else works. Today, you're beyond the reach of justice, as I say, so no problem. You know, you don't need it, in a sense, unless you.
- [116:24]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
No one's beyond the reach of justice. But, yeah, I still maintain my tenured position. I spoke to my chairman in ophthalmology this morning, and I'll teach this spring or in the fall.
- [116:31]
Dan Huberman
And it's good for you, too, to really interact with young people and to hear what they care and so on. But I never worried in the sense that I thought that you have enough talent to do well, and you chose to do it. I mean, I remember during COVID at the beginning, we were at your sister's house, and you were drawing all these little diagrams.
- [116:49]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I showed you my drawings.
- [116:50]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah. And so I think you put them on Twitter or something of that sort, and it was the beginning of something much more interesting and important, and so I never worried about it. I think that all of us, the whole family and those who know you, are sort of impressed at the explosive success of this story here. You know, your podcast is amazing. I mean, I don't have to tell.
- [117:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You, that's what reflects a kind of an early compulsion more than anything, of learn and teach, learn and share.
- [117:16]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. But there's also. I need to say something. The other day, actually, we were watching your interview with Esther Perel, and regardless of the fact that I think it's a great interview, both my wife and I were reflecting on the fact that it's also an incredible tribute to the way you conduct an interview. Okay, so there is a talent there. I mean, not many people can take someone and talk for and make it interesting, let's put it that way. So you have that.
- [117:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I inherited your curiosity.
- [117:43]
Dan Huberman
No, but it's more than that. It's also a way of drawing people out and so on, which is also part of your practice. So I never had any doubts. The opposite. I mean, the issue is, you know, obviously you're taking it to many, many places long beyond what you started, which was essentially explaining to people how neuroscience works, Right? Yeah.
- [118:02]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
We've gone into a lot of health domains and other things, and I've also been Blessed with an amazing team. This is something that I think, while we share a lot of things in common, if I may, I mean, I've always been kind of a pack animal. If it was skateboarding, like draw friends together. If it's birds, I have my bird club with Eddie Chang, who now, as you know, is the chair of neurosurgery at ucsf. It's kind of wild to think about, but, yeah, I've rarely gone alone. Like, I'm just struck. I mean, I mean, we've had many conversations over the years, but I'm just struck at how you've been able to be. You've been a bit of a lone wolf with these different camps. You make friends, you have colleagues, you maintain long term relationships.
- [118:43]
Dan Huberman
I have groups of people who collaborate with me. I don't do this alone. The opposite.
- [118:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Right. But I haven't changed crowds very often. And it seems like you've had to go into economics and theoretical physics and all these things and. Yeah, that's, that's a, an interesting difference. And look.
- [119:00]
Dan Huberman
And it's daunting and thrilling at the same time. I. Sometimes when you start giving talks in a field that you've never done much before and you see this audience, you know, can be intimidating too. You know, I, even when I started doing chaos, I thought I was doing very well till I gave a talk at Berkeley and there was a mathematicians. I regard mathematicians as the top, top people in the world. And I was saying something and Guy, he's a very famous mathematician, he said, that's a lie. I said, what do you mean? He said, can you prove it? No, because, you know, physicists don't prove theorems. He said, well then it's a lie if you cannot prove it's a lie. It was quite a, you know, a cold shower.
- [119:37]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That happens to me on Twitter every now and again. Well, they'll find something where I misspoke and they do it and it's, it's super embarrassing. You correct yourself, you move on.
- [119:43]
Dan Huberman
No, no. And then you learn things too. You have a conversation with.
- [119:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You never forget those things. This is what I learned. Like, you never, never forget the errors you made. Like that on a qualifying exam. Most people will never take a qualifying exam, but they basically ask you questions until you get it. Something wrong. The moment you say, I don't know or you get something wrong, that's an important moment because it's also the thing that you go look up and you never forget.
- [120:04]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, right. And also the tiny humiliations can be very good Too, for you. I mean, this is very important.
- [120:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I have plenty of those. I've had plenty of them.
- [120:10]
Dan Huberman
I do, too. I mean, I think it's a very, very important part of growing up and discovering that you don't understand something. But I always, I need to say this. I mean, in spite of the fact that, you know, you paint me as a. As a lone wolf, I'm not. I'm very social and I interact. I love interacting with people. And I always been very lucky that I surround myself with groups of people, including today, that are brilliant and resonate with the kinds of things I want to do. And so it's very stimulating. I'm not the kind of person that sits in a corner and does theory and publish it by. I published papers on my own. That was my romantic period where I needed to be Einstein in the patent office. And not that I thought I was Einstein, but it was very important. I was the only author. Okay. I. Today, I don't mind putting my name, whatever, and I don't need it. I mean, I have hundreds of papers and lots, you know, more than enough patents and so on. So I like interacting with people. It's very, very important to me when I have an. I need to tell people about an.
- [121:07]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Idea so I can relate.
- [121:10]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes, yes. So that's very good. And I still see some of my old students and collaborators, like, you know, Tad and so on, and we take walks every once in a while and discuss things, you know, and so I learned a lot from him, too.
- [121:21]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Right now you're working, as I understand, on quantum Internet.
- [121:26]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [121:27]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
This is a mysterious term to most everybody.
- [121:29]
Dan Huberman
Yes, yes.
- [121:30]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You alluded to it earlier about quantum. Quantum entanglement or about entanglement.
- [121:34]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [121:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But my understanding is that foreign governments, countries, and our government and country are very interested in quantum Internet, that it might actually be at least as important as AI, maybe more important for security reasons, et cetera. Can you explain quantum Internet in a way that I can understand and the listeners can understand?
- [121:58]
Dan Huberman
I can explain. I mean, I'll tell you the. The original thing, quantum mechanics, was essentially finished in 1925. So we are not reinventing new physics here. Okay. There's the physics of the gravitation and quantum. But that's not really what we are talking about. What happens is the following. The basis of all secure interactions in the Internet on computers are based on the idea that there are certain mathematical equations or functions that are very hard to resolve. So when I send you something encoded, if someone is listening to that conversation, that is Encoded and tries to read it. It's very, very hard to do because in order to decode that code, it's some kind of symbols and so on. You need to, I don't know, months or years of a computer to do it. Okay? But it can be done. Computers get broken. Computer codes get broken all the time because the basis of these codes are mathematical functions. You have a mathematical function. You can create a computer program that will try to unravel it. And it can be unraveled, okay? So that's one thing. Now here comes quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics provides security that is not given by mathematics but by the laws of physics. So if you have a way of interacting, sending messages from one computer to the other, encrypted using quantum mechanisms, they cannot be broken.
- [123:20]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Can you give me an example of a quantum mechanism for encoding?
- [123:24]
Dan Huberman
Imagine that I'm sending you messages. Every message is encoded in binary, ones and zeros. Okay? So I'm sending a message which is a string of ones and zeros. That string of ones and zeros could be, hello, Andrew. Or it could also be something that is secretly encoded into something. If it's classical encryption, which is what we use today, a computer in principle can look at those symbols and unravel them. Now, let me show you how it works in quantum. In quantum, when I send you a quantum to message, the act of touching it, trying to look at it, destroys it. That's what happens in quantum, not in classical things. I can look at strings of ones and zeros, and I look at them and I can make a copy of it. And then I read them, I take them to my lab and I decrypt them. Okay? If I look at a string of qubits, quantum bits moving that are not ones and zeros, they are different things.
- [124:16]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
These are moving parts.
- [124:17]
Dan Huberman
They're moving parts. They are usually photons. They go on. You can use fiber optics. You can use.
- [124:21]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So these are like. I know what photons are. So they're little bouncing energy of light.
- [124:26]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, little bunches of light. Because photon, if they're going around, they're also, you know, the photon could be polarized up or down or whatever. But if it's in a quantum state, which is in the intermediate between the moment I look at it, the moment I capture it, I collapse it into one or the other and I destroy it.
- [124:42]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The interaction with it changes the measurement, destroys it.
- [124:45]
Dan Huberman
This is the mystery of quantum mechanics that the interact, the measurement collapses. We call the world, we call it. The world collapses into one state or the other. Before that, it was anything. We could be anything. So when I use quantum signals, I'm sending qubits, quantum bits that are called qubits. The act of observing the qubit renders into a classical 100 0. So then there's no way you cannot break it.
- [125:11]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So does that mean that the practical implementation of this.
- [125:14]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [125:16]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Equates to unbreakable code.
- [125:20]
Dan Huberman
Exactly.
- [125:20]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Now, which is why, of course, other governments. I mean, what I've been told is that in China, they're working very hard on this.
- [125:27]
Dan Huberman
Oh, absolutely.
- [125:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And that here we're working very hard.
- [125:29]
Dan Huberman
We are. I'm working too.
- [125:30]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And you're working very hard on us.
- [125:31]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, but wait, wait, but who's there?
- [125:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Has anyone gotten there yet?
- [125:35]
Dan Huberman
Okay, the problem is the following. In order to decrypt this, remember that I told you that you can use mathematics? Okay. Some of these functions are incredibly complex. It might take the age of the universe, perhaps to. To decode them mathematically. Let's not talk about quantum. But if you have a quantum computer, now we're talking about a quantum computer, it can do it in a couple of hours. A quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the ones used in encryption in hours. Whereas it would take the age of the universe for a monster computer, standard computer you can buy to do it.
- [126:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So in theory, whoever gets, gets this ability first can read essentially all the information that's being sent around the world.
- [126:15]
Dan Huberman
Not only that, and many people are doing. The Chinese, the Koreans, and we're doing. They are grabbing everything now that is encrypted. They cannot decrypt it. And they store it because someday they'll be able to decrypt it.
- [126:26]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But who knows if it will still be relevant.
- [126:29]
Dan Huberman
Oh, but it may be, and we don't know. Imagine, imagine if you can get. Remember when the Korean, North Korea hacked, what was it, Disney? One of the. And then they discovered all these emails where people, you know, like George Clooney and know who was complaining about this or that. So imagine.
- [126:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And worse and worse, we just didn't hear about that.
- [126:49]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So if you grab all this information, we cannot decrypt it today. But if quantum computers become available and there are people working on quantum computing, they'll be able to decrypt it. In the meantime, people are working on deploying these quantum networks. We are working on that too. Not to deploy them, but just to see whether or not it's feasible to do that. Okay. The Chinese are ahead of almost everybody. They have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these Qubits, So they. These are impossible to decrypt.
- [127:17]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Okay, wait, so they're sending the qubit. So you can already communicate in quantum.
- [127:21]
Dan Huberman
Oh, yeah, yeah, we communicate all the time. Yeah, yeah. I have a lab in Colorado that does that. Yeah, absolutely. Over 100 kilometers.
- [127:27]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, but that's not what standard Internet is.
- [127:29]
Dan Huberman
No, no, no, no. But eventually we will have a quantum Internet based on all this, because in order to talk to these quantum computers, you have to send qubits, not. Not just normal bits.
- [127:38]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So this is a race.
- [127:39]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, erase. We. We are not really. I mean, since we are not a. Yeah, yeah. And there are a lot of people. I need to tell you that a lot of people, including this government, that claim that this is not really that relevant or important. But in Europe, for instance, they're really putting a lot of money into that nature.
- [127:54]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Why would our government not think it's important?
- [127:56]
Dan Huberman
Because there is a sociological phenomenon here. Cryptography has always been the promise of the mathematicians because there are mathematical functions like discrete logarithms and so on. They believe the moment they heard about quantum computers, they said, oh, we can solve the problem. We can create algorithms, mathematical algorithms that are going to be even harder to break. They call that post quantum, but they don't know it's true. The United States government is following this post quantum because they think it's easier and so on. Already they published two of these very, very fancy. Two students with a laptop were able to decrypt it within a week. So obviously you cannot prove that. No one will ever decide. Cryptic things. Okay, so there is the cryptographers. They don't like physics, they don't work as physicists. So they say quantum key distribution, that's the name of this thing. It's esoteric, it's not important, and so on. And also it won't work. Well, they say it's going to work for short distances, about 10 to 20 kilometers. We just published a paper that got tremendous publicity and award and so on as best paper that we were able to send this stuff over Hans kilometers. Okay? So, I mean, and the Chinese are sending that from satellites. Okay, so impossible to decrypt. Military communications based on these kind of things are impossible to decrypt. So they're very important. But there is a whole group of people that are saying, no, post quantum is what we want. And so nist, the National Institute of I think Science and Technology, they are really pushing. The post quantum thing in Europe is the opposite. They're really embracing quantum. I mean, I was in Denmark for instance, is very far ahead into these things. NATO just gave them a pile of money to work on quantum and so on. So it all depends. You know, it's a complicated thing because the crypto people are all mathematical people, so they don't care about quantum.
- [129:48]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Is any of this going to be useful for trying to understand, I don't know, how the brain works well, or is it? I mean, you know, there's still debate as to whether or not the way that we're thinking about brain function is even in like the right way. We think about neurons, action potentials and chemicals and. But the physicists, whenever they like, poke their noses into this stuff, they tend to think about it a little bit differently or they start to think about, well, you know, state dependence. Like the brain that you have at 8am is very different than the brain you have at 2am or 4 in the afternoon. Like, maybe everything's happening differently and maybe some of this actually gets down to the quantum level. Like, we can't say, like this neuron talks to this neuron. And when they talk in the following way, you get a certain output. Like, is there relevance here?
- [130:35]
Dan Huberman
Okay, there are two things I want to say. Beware of physicists getting into brains in brain work. I mean, they always end up.
- [130:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
It's like the new thing now. Neuroscience swung the doors open.
- [130:44]
Dan Huberman
I was into neuroscience for a while.
- [130:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And I think recently neuroscience has made a good move of including people from psychology, computation, even philosophy, economics and biology, basically all levels of analysis.
- [130:57]
Dan Huberman
But the other thing you asked about, quantum and the brain, there is Roger Penrose, who just got the Nobel Prize in physics. He's one of the few people who have very esoteric ideas about the brain being totally quantum. And he's an incredibly brilliant man. He was the advisor of Hawking.
- [131:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, I heard him on Lex's podcast. And he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating, maybe as. As bound networks as opposed to independent.
- [131:24]
Dan Huberman
Entities, but no one, no one really follows it. And I don't, I'm not an expert in that. But. So Roger Penrose is the one that's pushing this. Many of the physicists go into brain science, are not very clever at doing brain science because, you know, I heard a story I think was Francis Crick or someone who told. I was at a conference and he was saying this, that a physicist came to him and said, I decided to go into brain science. And so he said, okay, what have you done? And the guy says, I measure the specific heat of the brain. What do I do? With it.
- [131:55]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Basically, I think it's good that computationally minded people have joined neuroscience because it was getting too modal, too descriptive. That said, I do think that math is so important, but it's often used to intimidate biologists into thinking that their ideas either might not be true or that there's better ideas out there. I will say that when computational neuroscience first started, it seemed like the attempts to model the brain were pretty feeble. And actually, I'll just say it, they were pretty lame. But now I think with AI and LLMs, oh, that's a whole different story. Like the biologists have had to step back and say, hey, you know, these math, physics, engineering, AI types, they have the potential to really evolve the field.
- [132:40]
Dan Huberman
Right, right.
- [132:40]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
At least that's my stance.
- [132:41]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. I was at conferences where people say things like, the brain is a massively parallel machine. And I say, wait, wait, are you sure of that?
- [132:49]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That's a meaningless access.
- [132:50]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. So I said, if I show you a row of trees and I say, tell me how many are they? Do you really take the whole thing? And you say 75. Or you have to go sequentially. It's not parallel, it's sequential, you know.
- [133:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But LLMs are pretty interesting, right?
- [133:02]
Dan Huberman
I mean, I'm working on them.
- [133:03]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You can take four or five large language models, essentially sort of pseudo brains, and have them work on the same problem. It's hard to work with five people in parallel in a way that's coherent. Right. You can all talk. You can only talk so much over one another.
- [133:16]
Dan Huberman
It's very interesting. That's exactly what we are doing now. Years ago with Jeff Frager, we wrote a paper on the idea of showing how programs collaborating with each other could solve problems very, very fast that human or others cannot do. And it's a basis of a lot of the work we want to do now. Yes. And there are people who are already thinking of putting many, many of these LLMs together and then see whether or not they do better than a single one or better than a human.
- [133:40]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you think AI is going to improve life for the typical citizen?
- [133:45]
Dan Huberman
Yes, because you can use these things in order to do things that were very hard to do before. I mean, I use them and it's amazing. I mean, we just published a paper on hallucinations in LLMs and so on, because they hallucinate everyone. They say anything. But yes. Yeah, they are very useful, Very useful. And I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that produce them, like OpenAI and so on. Yes, yeah, it's a very, very important field.
- [134:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But 10, 15 years ago, whenever I'd bring up AI, you would chuckle and say this stuff is like, well, the.
- [134:16]
Dan Huberman
Funny thing is that the other day, well, I don't want to name him. One of the managers at Xerox parc. When I was at parc, I started playing with the idea of using machine learning to see what they can do. And the AI people at that time said, that's nonsense. We need to think about logic. How does the brain think, how do we do cognitive psychology and so on? We were just doing neural nets. That's exactly it. And the other day I was meeting with some of these people and they were saying to me, we used to laugh at you doing this stuff because we could do only very little. And today is the rage. Now the difference between what I was doing, what is being done today is a scale. I mean, I don't know if you know that they are now using nuclear power reactors in order to power the data centers.
- [134:57]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I didn't know that.
- [134:57]
Dan Huberman
But it's an immense cost of computing. You have no idea the amount of work it takes to 1 trillion tokens in order to get of these things to work.
- [135:07]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
It strikes me you've always been very open minded and very willing to adopt new technologies, but it hasn't changed your daily life very much.
- [135:16]
Dan Huberman
No.
- [135:17]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Like it? Like, not much at all. I remember early on you said, you showed me the Internet and you said, be very careful. And I said, why? You said, it's like mental chewing gum. Absolutely. You chew and chew. Those were your words. You said, you chew and chew and at first it tastes good, then it doesn't taste very good at all, then you don't taste it at all. And then you realize there's no nutrition. And I always think about that in terms of phone usage or web foraging behavior. And you still bike to work, you take a walk in the afternoon or after eating. You've always been incredibly regular with your routine. Despite the evolution of all these technologies. You're not the guy in Silicon Valley who's like tricked out with all the gear.
- [136:01]
Dan Huberman
No, no, no. Well, there is another.
- [136:03]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Actually, I've never seen you at a cafe with a laptop.
- [136:05]
Dan Huberman
Well, sometimes, but. Well, there's another aspect to this. As you know, in the last up to five years ago, I spent four years working on the economics of attention. And why is it that people attend to things, and I really believe, and I'm not an expert, that there is a tremendous resonance between these machines and our human Brains, and they are addictive. The former CEO of Hewlett Packer, where I wasn't in the labs, Meg Wickman, she used to say, you know, I wake up in the middle of the night to look at my phone, and I know people who do that, and there are members of my family who do that more often that I would like to see them do that.
- [136:38]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You don't do that?
- [136:39]
Dan Huberman
No, I mean, I do it, but not. I don't have this compulsion to see what's going on. I had a student that. He said, I love spam because at least something is happening.
- [136:49]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Oh, my goodness.
- [136:50]
Dan Huberman
He said that he.
- [136:51]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Spam.
- [136:52]
Dan Huberman
Spam. He said, I get spam and I look at it because some. Something's happening. He used to say, he's now a very successful financial guy. Stop doing something. Brilliant fellow, brilliant fellow.
- [137:02]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But that's because maybe your internal world is rich enough that you don't.
- [137:05]
Dan Huberman
I mean, but I look at news. I like to look at things. I like, look at videos. Don't misunderstand me. It's not that I ignore it, but, yeah, I'm not. I'm not. I mean. I mean, I like the latest things and so on, especially if they are beautiful and so on. But, yeah, I'm not into whatever the latest is and so on. And I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free for. And gave them to you. I never use them once or twice.
- [137:29]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, I've used VR in my lab, but I don't want to spend time in VR.
- [137:34]
Dan Huberman
And also, as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed before this podcast, I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world. Okay, so, yeah, digital is interesting and it's fascinating in some ways, but I like things like mechanical watches, cameras that click when you press them, and so on, but not artificially. Okay? So I really like that. I like things that are very classical and so on in many ways, and I enjoy that. I like technology, don't misunderstand me. And I use it a lot, and I use it and I do new things with them, and I get patents and so on. But, yeah, I'm not a techie guy in the same sense. I like to have an analog life, not a digital life. Riding a bicycle is analog. Walking is analog. Analog. You know, sitting and meditating is analog. You know, I. Of course, you can also listen through the Internet to a good thing that helps you meditate or go to sleep. Don't misunderstand me, but I don't have this fascination with things and so on. I mean, some people do, but it.
- [138:38]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future. You seem very grounded in the present.
- [138:43]
Dan Huberman
I've never read a single book of science fiction. Most of the people I work with, and I admire them, they all come with ideas from books and science fiction. And they always say, did you read this or that? And I have no idea. I never liked it. I like to read about real people with real blood and real feelings. Science fiction to me is devoid of that. It's imagining, you know, droids doing this or that. I couldn't care less, you know, because.
- [139:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I always think that physicists must love.
- [139:10]
Dan Huberman
Science fiction because never, never, never read a single book or looked at it in a movie. Movie or science fiction, I couldn't care less. I don't relate to that. I don't think that these people display human, like, behavior anyhow. So, I mean, I'm not saying that it's not interesting to others. I mean, I.
- [139:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You're not a futurist?
- [139:27]
Dan Huberman
No, no. Even though they call me a futurist because I always anticipate things.
- [139:31]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Right, but you're not somebody who, like, thinks about what life is going to be like 100 years from now.
- [139:36]
Dan Huberman
No, no. I like to know life is now. Yes, yes. And I also, as Niels Bohr once said, it is hard to predict anything, especially the future. Okay? We all predict the past very well. I don't know what's going on. I mean, you know, we've seen things happening, indeed, unbelievable things. I mean, the technology that allows you to become such a worldwide known phenomenon is because of the technology. Imagine if you were just declaiming the Roman Senate centuries ago, very few people.
- [140:07]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Doing exactly what I'm doing now, but with no microphones or cameras.
- [140:09]
Dan Huberman
Right. Okay. So, yeah, I'm not a futurist. And that's it. People tell me I am because I anticipate things, but not because I imagine a world in which I couldn't care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though Elon Musk thinks it's very important.
- [140:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you think it's a cool project?
- [140:28]
Dan Huberman
I don't know. I want to ask him why. And then he tells me things like. He says things like, well, civilization is going to die here. We are going to asphyxiate. So, I don't know. I mean, let it, let it happen. I don't know. Just enjoy now, you know.
- [140:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You're not worried about the future in that sense?
- [140:46]
Dan Huberman
Oh, I'm an optimist. I believe that technology Will solve the global warming problem. Everything. It's obvious how to solve it. There's nothing very mysterious, you know, nuclear power is going to do it, you know. Absolutely.
- [140:57]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Once we get over our preconceived notions of nuclear power.
- [141:01]
Dan Huberman
Right. But, I mean, very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident, let's face it. Yeah.
- [141:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
They need to name it something else.
- [141:07]
Dan Huberman
Maybe. Yeah.
- [141:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Like many things that once were thought to be dangerous when renamed, we, you know, turn out to not be so dangerous that when renamed, people are willing to adopt.
- [141:19]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, I. I don't really, you know, I don't worry too much about the future. I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to steer away from the brink. Hopefully.
- [141:29]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You don't seem to worry too much. Generally, you're not a big worrier.
- [141:33]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Yeah.
- [141:35]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You and I are different that way. You and I are different that way.
- [141:37]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. You worry a lot. Yeah.
- [141:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Not if I keep busy.
- [141:42]
Dan Huberman
Oh, okay.
- [141:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
These days, a lot less. I think that. I think at the transition points between different circumstances and at the transition points between different career things, I think it makes sense to worry. It sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that, you know, you, you know, reach for the next rung and, And. And grab it.
- [142:03]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [142:03]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And not, you know, not miss. I mean, there's been. I mean, I think there's been elements of uncertainty in my life where I felt like, okay, I'm going to ground the things I can control, but, no, I don't stay up at night worrying about things.
- [142:16]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Also, I think meditation is profoundly effective at this. Suddenly, you're here, and that's the. Is the past. Is the past. You cannot do anything, and the future hasn't arrived, so what the heck, you know, I really believe that, and it has helped me immensely. I'm very. The few things. I'm very proud. I went for my medical checkup a year ago and the doctor says, I'd love to hear you breathe. I said, what's so wrong with my breath? He says, so slow and calm.
- [142:42]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So you got over the white coat syndrome?
- [142:44]
Dan Huberman
Yes, because of meditation.
- [142:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You send me your lab results this morning, so everything looks great. People always been regular about exercise. Not excessive.
- [142:55]
Dan Huberman
No.
- [142:55]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You're never one of the, like, the marathoners or the, you know, 5am in the pool people.
- [142:59]
Dan Huberman
But no, I tried runs to run a marathon, actually.
- [143:02]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So, yeah, I mean, it's very common in the area where, you know, in and around Stanford to be pretty extreme about athletics. That was never your thing.
- [143:10]
Dan Huberman
No.
- [143:11]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Steady, long distance running.
- [143:13]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, I told you that once. I'm not a sprinter. Yeah, some people are. And by the way, I admire them immensely.
- [143:18]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You mean in life, like we were speaking in general?
- [143:20]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. There are some people who really can do incredibly fast and they move from one thing to the other and so on. Yeah. I like people who reflect some wisdom. For instance, I have a. It's very strange for someone like me, but I see a Buddhist monk and I just suddenly I feel calmer by just seeing that person. You know, I don't know. There is something. It's not just the spirituality, the power they have to be here. Totally and absolutely. It's impressive to me. I mean, some people say, okay, he has funny robes or something, you know, I like that a lot. Not. It's not necessarily a way. I mean, my therapist used to stay to me and that to use meditation to move away from trouble and trouble traveling thoughts is not a good idea. So you have to embrace the world, too. But I use it so just to stay calm and to enjoy and to see things for what they are. And I think it's. Yeah, yeah. The future is the future and I don't know.
- [144:17]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, you can only control what you can control.
- [144:19]
Dan Huberman
Right. But there's some people that worry all the time about the future.
- [144:23]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Given your understanding of quantum mechanics, relativity and the real world, and perhaps just generally knowing what you know and experiencing what you've experienced, do you believe in some sort of higher power organized force or. Let's just be blunt. Do you believe in God?
- [144:45]
Dan Huberman
Well, okay. The word God has a lot of implications. Right? I mean, I don't necessarily. I don't believe in a God that keeps track of what you and I are doing at this point. There are too many people and so on. So I don't believe in this notion of, you know, of an agent there that is somehow knowing what everybody on this planet is doing or, you know, and so on. I do feel sometimes, and especially, especially because of the studies I have and actually from reading people who have been very, very deep, you know, in particular the thoughts of people like Einstein, Heisenberg and so on, that there seems to be at times a sense of an organizing principle in the universe and to learn those rules. So there is this notion, I mean, philosophically, it's called pantheism, that God is in nature already. Spinoza and all these people started this. That is very upheaval. The notion that there is something that this thing, if it's evolving, it's like an entity, but not an Entity that says, oh, tomorrow, you know, you'll die, or so on. I mean, you'll die, you die. There are lots of events that lead to death or to happiness and so on, but not because someone is out there checking. I mean, I don't believe that it's enough memory to store all this. Although today I saw you can buy sandisk memory terabytes that is this big. So I don't believe in that. But it's a matter of belief, not anything else. I mean, unfortunately, these beliefs are, you know, translate sometimes in complicated action. I do believe that there is a sense of mystery sometimes. I once heard. I don't know who said it, but it's a very good sentence that if you listen to Beethoven, say. I mean, the man struggled, but it's amazing he was able to create. On the other hand, Mozart seems to have been getting the messages from heavens, you know, on a daily basis, just floated down. So some people are given this connection to something much bigger and you have access to that through listening to that music. The experiences we have.
- [146:44]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
There is this idea out there that consciousness doesn't just exist within our brains, but as sort of a. Like a collective network. And things come through us, not just as individuals, but as humans.
- [146:54]
Dan Huberman
The Jungian thing is a lot of that. I'm very interested in the word spiritual and what it means, you know, to see that things transcend our particular needs at any point. But the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny. You know, if you look at any movie, you know, Braveheart or whatever, you see the one warrior, one group of warriors has a priest saying, God is with us, and the other one is about to engage. It says the same thing to the other group. That's a little bit funny, right?
- [147:22]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, only humans, and human brains in particular are amazing. Amazing what human brains can do. This computer in our heads is spectacular. And yet it also has limitations. And I think, well put differently. Does it make you nervous or worry you that I seem to have an increasing interest in God and religion?
- [147:45]
Dan Huberman
No, I think that is a beautiful journey in which you're in. There are two people, provided you don't start using this to somehow spout arguments why people shouldn't do this or that?
- [147:58]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
No, no, it's only my own exploration of my own.
- [148:01]
Dan Huberman
I respect that. I think it's a very important thing. There is an issue here that I read, reading Wilson, actually E. O. Wilson, which. He wrote this beautiful book on human nature and he claims that the religious instinct comes out of A submissive component in us that animals have. Dogs are submissive. And we believe that we need to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king, you know, some deity or something else. That's his theory.
- [148:26]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I certainly don't feel any compulsion to be submissive to other humans. I mean, I think in knowing the limitations of the human brain and cognition, I don't care how smart, I don't care how successful an individual or a group is, that it's very clear that the human brain is limited in parsing the unit universe that we're in. Otherwise, we wouldn't continue to have the same issues over and over. Although I do like to think that we're falling forward, we're evolving forward, as opposed to devolving as a species. But we tend to repeat a lot of the same mistakes over and over again.
- [148:55]
Dan Huberman
There's also a technical thing here. We sometimes confuse randomness with premonition or God doing something. I mean, dodging a bullet by turning your head, as our next president did, is an incredible thing. The probability is so, so, so small. But that doesn't mean that there was someone who said, turn ahead, do it, and so the bully will pass. I mean, we ascribe causality to something that was truly random. It could have also, in another scenario, the same turn of the head would have been to the other side and this person would be dead. So I. But sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences that we cannot explain, and we say, oh, must be God that made sure that you and I met, or that we thought the same thoughts, and so on.
- [149:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Although as a biologist who started off as a neurodevelopmental biologist, I think I just had to see. There are two things that changed my understanding of what might be possible. One was Barbara Chapman. My advisor once treated me to an experiment. It was kind of a funny thing. Typical Barbara. You knew how nerdy she was. She said, are you willing to stay up all night? And I was like, okay, yeah. And she took zebrafish eggs and fertilized them. And I sat for 11 hours with food. I got up to use the restroom, and I watched a zebrafish egg duplicate and become a fish. Like in real time, with my eyes, not some movie on YouTube, although that's impressive, too. People can look these up, but to just actually see life emerge from a set of cells through its own organizing principles, all of which can be explained by genes, transcription factors, the physics of the mitotic spindle, All. I mean, math and biology and chemistry can explain all of it. But there was something truly spectacular about it that seems so non random because it's not random. And then the other one is that, I mean, I guess I've had enough experiences with prayer and the consequences of prayer in my real life that I just. I sort of can't get my head around the idea that there's not a God or some sort of organizing force. I just. I can't accept it because there's. Yes, there's causality, reverse causality, correlation and mistaking correlation and causality. But somehow, like, I mean, I like to think I'm grounded in science and reality, but I don't think science can explain it all.
- [151:14]
Dan Huberman
Oh, no. And I think that this experience of this spirituality, for instance, I remember and still happens spending a night outdoors and looking at the sky. I mean, it's an incredible thing, the stars and you feel so small and yet there is order to all that. It's not just random stuff. I mean, they move according to laws that fortunately we humans were able to discover, which is an amazing thing when you think about it. Dogs did not discover gravity. You know, they're not.
- [151:40]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Costello.
- [151:41]
Dan Huberman
Okay.
- [151:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Costello was gravity.
- [151:42]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. So I really think that there is something to be said about these spiritual experiences. And I really believe that very importantly. And I listen to people talk. I recently I've been looking at some stuff that C.S. lewis, you know, he was a man who was studying the saga and the mythology of the Vikings and so on and eventually became a devout Christian, you know, thinking that this was the only answer to the. Because all religions have the same element. So I understand that. I respect it. I experienced that, you know, at times in my life. But when I think seriously about it, I think that the moment, you know, we have this computer and, you know, we can get glimpses of all this. But I don't believe that it's this notion. And no one can prove to me that there is someone there organizing my life minute by minute or second by second. I don't believe that. I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and randomness. Beautiful ones. Okay. And, you know, having you and Lara as children is a fantastic randomness in my life.
- [152:47]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Hopefully it wasn't too random.
- [152:49]
Dan Huberman
No, no. In the sense that, you know, children, you know, you know, children that come and healthy, whatever. I mean, you know, it's a very impressive thing.
- [152:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. The number of things that have to organize to create a healthy child is. It's truly a miracle.
- [153:02]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, true, true. Yeah. And I think. But a lot of it is random too, you know, I mean, the same set of parents can produce two different set of children too. Okay. I mean, that's a very, very important.
- [153:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
R and I are pretty different.
- [153:15]
Dan Huberman
Oh, absolutely. But in very beautiful ways too. So, I mean, neither of you does behave or conducts a life that, you know, I would be unhappy or your mother would be unhappy with. So. But going back to this, I believe that indeed spirituality is important. I have a lot of access to that through classical music. There are times that I really believe that is it. I mean, I can get very, very emotional listening to music, very emotional. You know, my wife always notices that when I do that. And I think that then you having access to something very different. Of course, it can be explained physiologically by all sorts of resonances and so on, but who cares?
- [153:52]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, you mentioned that you can peer into the future with ideas that you're working on, and yet you don't get too far ahead. Like you're not thinking like 100 years from now, what's it going to look like? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past?
- [154:08]
Dan Huberman
Sometimes. Sometimes there is a. I've always. Because I left, left my family when I was still very young, I always had a certain nostalgia for things. Okay. I became friend with a very impressive guy in France, Claude Jopark. I think he was the director of the Geophysics Institute. And both of us had very similar parents in different French and Argentina, but still similar educations. And I have some. A sudden nostalgia that is almost melancholy about the way we grew up and so on.
- [154:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Melancholy?
- [154:44]
Dan Huberman
A little bit about it.
- [154:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina. Like you would have 10, 15 cousins over for lunch every Sunday.
- [154:52]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah, it was very.
- [154:52]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That doesn't sound melancholy.
- [154:53]
Dan Huberman
No, no. But there were moments, moments of loneliness, moments of times where I felt very misunderstood. I had unfortunately, a very punishing mother, so that. But I still remember her and I think about her in ways that are not necessarily always very happy. I was looking at photos a while ago and there are pictures of her that is, you know, she's smiling, coming out of the Pacific Ocean in Carmel. She took a walk and so on. But I reflect back in the past in that sense. I mean, and sometimes, you know, I'm asked, you know, how did you grow up? My wife being Danish, she grew up in a very different way from, you know, upper middle class Argentines. So, you know, we reflect on that, you know, kinds of childhoods we had and so on, but not in the sense that, oh, I wish I had that now, no regrets. Well, not many. Not many. That's good. I mean, there is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else, which is, if I look at my family, my brother stayed, produced family, children, grandchildren and so on. I came here and I produce children, grandchildren. And they are going to be two divergent grandchildren of the family. Not just.
- [156:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
We still get together. We got together last year for your birthday.
- [156:07]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, No, I know. That's what is so important to me. Yes. But I think about it sometimes, and when I go back and I see the lives very similar to what I had or, you know, different perhaps there is a certain, you know, sense of thinking about the past. But I also realize that if I didn't take the steps I took, I would be as miserable as some of my old friends that are really struggling even to find meaning in what they do or even survive thriving economically. So I was really lucky.
- [156:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, so was I. Because I wouldn't have existed because you wouldn't have met.
- [156:37]
Dan Huberman
That's true, too. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
- [156:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, maybe you would have, but.
- [156:40]
Dan Huberman
No, no, no, no, no.
- [156:41]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But I'm grateful I didn't grow up in Buenos Aires. I love. I love the city. I love the country.
- [156:45]
Dan Huberman
I don't feel that I couldn't have.
- [156:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Done any of the things I've done in South America, given maybe, but the landscape was just completely.
- [156:51]
Dan Huberman
Oh, I go there and after a week, I want to come back. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
- [156:55]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you love this country?
- [156:56]
Dan Huberman
I love this country. I feel very much part of this country. I'm very grateful to what this country has done for me, for my family. And that includes you and your sister. Okay. And my wife.
- [157:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
When did you become a citizen?
- [157:05]
Dan Huberman
Oh, many, many years ago. And I really did it consciously. Not because, I mean. I mean, they were practical things. But. No, I really believe in it. I really believe it's an incredible country. I mean, gives incredible opportunities to people, as Elon says. Elon Musk. I'm also an immigrant. I'm very happy to be one. Yeah.
- [157:23]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You've always been a patriot.
- [157:24]
Dan Huberman
Absolutely. And on the other hand, as I said, Argentina is complicated. I go there and a lot of smells and things that, you know, bring memories that are amazing.
- [157:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The food's not bad.
- [157:35]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah. But it's also the whole. The whole atmosphere, and the first two, three days are an incredible experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on. But after a while, I also see a darker side to it. I must tell you that. On the other hand, my country in law, Denmark, is also a country that I like Immensely. These nice people. And pleasant. And soft. Very soft. Especially in summer.
- [158:00]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But the Danes are also strong people. Like the average Dane is so smart. I think the high school education there must be among the best in the world.
- [158:09]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. There is a notion of proficiency. I mean, people are proficient at what they do. Yeah. You go to a store, you have a problem, an airline or whatever, you'll get someone who really knows how to solve it. But there's also a very. It's a small society, very homogeneous, tremendous sense of humor, which I enjoy. And it's very soft. People, you know, enjoy life. They have notions like slow food movements and things of that sort. So I like it. I could not live there because it's, you know, it's a very homogeneous way of behaving. You know, the Lutheran ethic is there. They're not religious, but they're Lutherans. So I feel very comfortable in. In Europe and so on. But I like being here. Yes.
- [158:51]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. I feel like our family now includes so many different nationalities and religions and backgrounds and philosophies and political stances.
- [159:01]
Dan Huberman
That's good too, right?
- [159:02]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, it's great. It's starting to look like the UN with some extra.
- [159:05]
Dan Huberman
Well, I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity. It was incredible. Incredible.
- [159:09]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
That's good.
- [159:10]
Dan Huberman
You know, so that was also good to be as a child, to hear these arguments about politics and so on, you know. Yeah.
- [159:15]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I hear of few of those now, arguments about politics. We won't get into politics. One thing that I did want to say, however, is that I remember a long time ago, and I'm certain because I wrote it in my journal. You said politically incorrect views are often Right. Is that true still?
- [159:32]
Dan Huberman
Yes. Yes.
- [159:33]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
It's still true for you, I should say.
- [159:35]
Dan Huberman
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Because this has only to be judged in time. Okay. I think that the issue of political incorrectness is some kind of a mob behavior that says you should think like us, okay? We should be able to express our views with respecting others and so on, and we should be respected for that. I think that this whole notion that others are telling you what to think or not to think is a little bit complicated. And I must say something which I hope it doesn't get me in trouble with my Danish side of the family or friends. Societies like the Scandinavian societies that are extremely uniform in thinking the word should is used all the time. Yeah. You should do this. You shouldn't do that. Good that you did it. You know, it's a very. They enforced behavior in a very, very particular way. It's not a hurting instinct, but there is a very, very strict Lutheran tradition of telling you what you should and you shouldn't do. So I know very few people, and I've been going to Denmark for many, many years that really have iconoclastic ideas that are away from the mean and they're considered odd. Okay, very few, including the physicists. And they have fantastic school of physics there. Niels Bohr was there. So it's a society that conformity is the issue there. Right. So on the other hand, I think that it's good to think differently. And you know, there's a man, perhaps you heard of him. I know, I mean, I admire him. He died. Freeman Dyson, he was on a level with Feynman and, and Gel man, by the way. He used to have very strange ideas too. He used to say, global warming, what's wrong with it? The Sahara is going to be a garden. And yeah, you know, the Sahara desert will become a garden. People will be able to eat all that food.
- [161:20]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, I think people hear that, but then they counter it against these, you know, very heart wrenching pictures of like polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking, this kind of thing.
- [161:29]
Dan Huberman
There are more polar bears today than when Mr. Al Gore said that we're going to die.
- [161:32]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Listen, I'm not going to argue climate change with you because I, I have.
- [161:35]
Dan Huberman
No, no, they're giving.
- [161:37]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
No, no, no, no, I'm not countering. I'm just saying, you know, like, I mean, this, this is getting very intense on the Internet now because the arguments on both sides seem pretty strong, at least as they're presented. So who's right?
- [161:51]
Dan Huberman
No, the question is, what can we do about it? That's the issue. And I think that technology and wisdom are going to solve it. I think so. I really believe that very strongly. I'm an optimist when it comes to that. But what I'm talking about being politically incorrect is this idea of saying things that a group of people say you shouldn't be saying or thinking those thoughts. And the question is, can we debate those things rationally or nicely respecting people's beliefs? Okay. And yeah, I believe in that very strongly. And I think being politically incorrect is a way of saying you're sort of just smiling at them, but it's okay. Why not? Who said that we shouldn't be like that? I remember encountering the first libertarians when I was already, you know, working as a physicist. And they were saying to me, why should we? Why are we, why are we afraid of the Russians. I said, well, you know, well, you think they're going to invade the United States? Can you imagine Russia invading? I mean, if they invaded, how they're going to control us? You know, they had these arguments, they were very funny arguments. You know, why do we need an army? Why do we need taxes? And I really thought that was so provocative or so interesting.
- [162:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you consider yourself a libertarian?
- [162:58]
Dan Huberman
In many ways I like the idea of liberty. I believe very strongly in it. I mean, this country was founded on that. I think that our founding fathers really believed in it, and I admire them for that. I, you know, the, the reading Jefferson and so on is really inspiring to me. I think that some of the political movement is a little bit odd. They always end up with political, political candidates that go nowhere and so on.
- [163:21]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Why do you think that is? Why do you think that is? I think that they're so rational, they're often among the smartest, but they are.
- [163:27]
Dan Huberman
Not the most calc, they are not strategic, strategically smart. I met at times libertarians that think incredible thoughts and they live in Silicon Valley and they're poor. I mean, even though they are the ones who are supposed to.
- [163:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Some are poor, some are, some are not.
- [163:41]
Dan Huberman
But I'm saying it's very interesting. They choose presidential candidates no one ever heard of.
- [163:45]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I think many of them are, you know, they are on the spectrum in a way that doesn't allow them to get into the minds of other people in a way that would allow them to convince other people. How about their arguments? I mean, a lot of politics, as we know, is show business. I mean, in this recent election, it was all posturing. It was all about grabbing emotion. It was not about logic, it was about emotion.
- [164:08]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, I have several of my people that they put all their money to freeze themselves.
- [164:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You going to cry yourself?
- [164:14]
Dan Huberman
No.
- [164:15]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
My dad and I have had this running joke for a lot of years because someone we know very well and several people we know well have set aside significant amounts of money to have their heads or entire bodies frozen on the idea that they're going to be brought back later, Han Solo style. You've always laughed at this idea.
- [164:31]
Dan Huberman
No, but not only that, I, I. There's a colleague of mine at Stanford who accuses me of being friends with a guy that is like that. And I told this guy, I said, you know, he thinks that I, you're a bad influence on me. And the guy said, well, tell him that we are the ones who are going to come back and do what we believe he's going to be Gone.
- [164:47]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You don't. You're not interested in living to be 200.
- [164:50]
Dan Huberman
It's not an issue. These people are interested in living for another thousand years, so when they wake up, they see how the world looks. They read science fiction, so they are very interested to know what the world looks like once they wake up.
- [165:01]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So there are people in the health space that are trying to not die, you know, Brian Johnson and others.
- [165:06]
Dan Huberman
I mean, it's a different story.
- [165:07]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. I mean, what's your thought on trying to live to be 150 or something like that?
- [165:11]
Dan Huberman
Well, if you can live, the issue is not the age. It's the conditions of your body and mind. Okay? That's the issue. I had the misfortune and unfortunate of having two parents that live very long lives. One was incredibly. My father was incredibly lucid until the end. My mother had everything, you know, all. Every dementia and complications that came from, you know, being in anorexic all her life and so on. So my father enjoyed being lucid until the end, and so he, you know, he didn't take care of himself physically so well. So the idea is, if you live up to 100 or 150 or 200 and you can still do the things you enjoy in life is one thing. To be like my mother, who couldn't even comprehend what was in front of her. When you put a cup of tea, you know, then it's very sad. But it can happen at the age of 35, you know, so, yeah, I'm not into a race to live forever. I want to live healthily. I want to enjoy life. Enjoyment is the most important piece. What's the point of being, you know, tethered to cubes all over the place, you know, flat. Flat on a bed. And you say, oh, I made another year of my life. I mean, that's not really a life, at least for me.
- [166:22]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you worry about or.
- [166:24]
Dan Huberman
And.
- [166:24]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Or wish for anything for me? For Laura?
- [166:28]
Dan Huberman
Yes. To be super happy people. No, I don't want to use the word happy. I want to see you joyful. Joy. Joy is more important than happiness. Joy is a state of mind. Happiness is. Okay, Yeah. I set a list of things I want to have, and I have them, and I smile a lot. Joyfulness is this sense of being in yourself, and I would like that. I mean, you two are very different. Lara lives much more in the moment than you do for reasons. Okay. It's her view of.
- [166:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
It's her demeanor.
- [166:57]
Dan Huberman
It's her demeanor. It's very good.
- [166:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, Lara focused On what she's going to do this weekend.
- [167:01]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [167:01]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I'm focused on what I'm going to do this weekend, next week, the next month, and for three months.
- [167:04]
Dan Huberman
And I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend and that's it. And everything else gonna come to you, I believe. And, you know, now I'm speaking in a way that is more paternal than anything else. I've been. You. You had a charmed life and everything came to you since you were very little. And you. You exhibited, you know, behaviors and so on that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from the very beginning. I mean, it's not that you were a genius at chess or Rubik's Cube or anything. I know some kids that are like that. But there was something. Something in there. And so I think that, you know, learning to just relax and rest. But it's part of your behavior. Since you were little, you had these problems. Okay. I used to take. Put you on my lap and say, it's going to be fine, and say, well, what if I cannot do my homework? Okay, but you could.
- [167:53]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Or even my stuffed animals.
- [167:55]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [167:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The same that gave you organized and probably have. Remember I had the grunting tick.
- [168:01]
Dan Huberman
Yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that was. Yeah, I probably drove us nuts.
- [168:05]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, I probably have a little bit of an OCD type thing. I mean, not diagnostically, you know, significant, but. But when I bite down into something that I pursuing, it's very hard for me to think about anything else.
- [168:18]
Dan Huberman
Well, we talked about it when you were at Berkeley. Once you told me that you were starting to run, but you wanted to run like everybody else was running, I don't know how many miles.
- [168:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And instead of no, I heard there was a guy who had been in the department ran, Randy Nelson. He's now a professor in Ohio. Somebody just, like, off, you know, just in passing said, oh, yeah, you know, Randy worked, you know, like 80 hours a week or 90 hours a week. And I was like 95 hours.
- [168:39]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, I remember that.
- [168:40]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, but what's interesting is I'm not a naturally competitive person. It was just this idea. Like, I've tended to want to know how I've. And I've since stopped this. But there was a long time where I wanted to figure out what my body and mind were capable of. I just wanted to see, like, how high is that ceiling? And it was only when I almost suffocated on a scuba dive or when I was working to the point of exhaustion or, you know, or. And then I also Realized that, you know, I published a number of papers to get tenure. Like, I didn't need that many, but.
- [169:10]
Andrew Huberman
I enjoyed every one.
- [169:11]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
It's not like I'm not having fun. I'm having fun.
- [169:13]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. This idea of pushing oneself to limits. The question is why? I mean, I think there is so much to enjoy on a. On a regular life. And the things that we have already, we have to work to get them the way we want. But I. I don't think that worrying for the sake of worrying or, you know, just worrying.
- [169:30]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, yeah, I don't tend to worry. Well, you know, what changed that for me in a major way? I mean, I've had moments. I've had moments I think I can recall. Like, I have a favorite, best day of my life moment. I won't share it here. It's not. It's not relevant right now, but Costello helped bring me into the moment. Like, he would do these things that, like, I would delight in that were just so simple. Like, the way he would, like, like fall over or something, or, you know, that I think that, like, having another creature there that. That is very much in the moment brings you into the moment.
- [170:00]
Dan Huberman
Right. And you were very connected to it, too. I mean, I think that if you were connected to someone that has that property of bringing you down and so on, you would start enjoying it.
- [170:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I. Yeah, the people I've. I've had amazing partners as, you know, some less than amazing, but many amazing partners. And the. And they tended to be also kind of you into the future, like, focus on what's not quite there yet. But I must say, I think women in general do it better than men. That they're better at, like, grounding to the present.
- [170:27]
Dan Huberman
Well, it depends. I think that my wife tends to be more anxious than I am about the future.
- [170:31]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So maybe it's not general.
- [170:32]
Dan Huberman
I tend well in trying to sort of, you know, tell her that she shouldn't worry so much. I think that I also suddenly reflect, what am I doing here? And I try to also slow down myself. I think that, you know. Yeah, I think you're someone who's running from one thing to the other. I mean, to say colloquially, but it would be nice if you said, okay, I'm fine. You know, you have a podcast that is doing well. You don't have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years.
- [170:58]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
No, five years. I don't think out that far. I don't think about the career piece. I think that I. I mean, I often don't have a plan. I know what we're going to do this year. I don't know what we're going to do after that, but perfection, I think. Look, I think part of it was science. I mean, we're talking about a lot of things, but for many years, right from the time I, like, squared my life away and when I turned 19, it was like, okay, I'm going to get things right now. There's always been these milestones. You're going to finish your undergraduate degree. I did a master's, then you did the PhD, then the postdoc, then you need to get tenure. I think the academic system was a system of two to five year bursts, like, like sprinting marathons in many ways to try and, you know, grab the next thing to get to the next level. And there was a lot of uncertainty for a long time. You know, I think I'm finally now coming into a place of certainty, like feelings of like, oh, like things are. Things are good and they've gone great.
- [171:53]
Dan Huberman
But.
- [171:54]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, but it's, it's hard.
- [171:55]
Dan Huberman
Oh, of course it's hard. Especially if you have that kind of temperament. Yes. And I think you need to train yourself almost to. I, I just. Instead of saying the words that are. It's a matter of bringing elegance into your life, almost to live it in a way that is elegant, it's nice in itself. You know, that is important. One of the things I learned, I mean, you know, living with a Dane Danes don't like you to eat standing. They sit, they set a table and they light a candle. And, you know, it's very nice. It creates a pace.
- [172:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, the ritual.
- [172:29]
Dan Huberman
The ritual. Ritual are very important. And also the other thing that is very important and I discovered is to have something to look forward to. You cannot just wake up one day and say, and now what? There has to be something. Okay. That's important. I mean, you know, we all, we all have that.
- [172:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So Rogan talks about this thing about, you know, because he has a, you know, podcast. He does four, four episodes a week plus he's an announcer of the ufc. As his comedy career. He raised. He has three kids. He's in a happy marriage and, you know, he's really into working out and all this. And he. I heard something recently. It was actually the forward to a Cameron Haynes's book. I was listening to it and he. It was amazing. He said, you know, you have to approach your life, no, no matter how busy or how simple, as a kind of work of art, like you can't Just think of it as daily life. You have to have some macroscopic view of this so that you know where to put things. And that's a lot of what you're saying as well.
- [173:22]
Dan Huberman
Elegance. Yeah. Life has to have elegance. Otherwise it's just disjoint moments. And so sometimes it will be like that. And it can be very creative, too. But most of the idea is to really get into something. I mean, I personally think that when you describe me as being very steady or whatever, sounds very boring too, for that matter. Right. I mean.
- [173:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
No, no. I mean, there's a beauty in steadiness because from places of steadiness you can take good risks.
- [173:50]
Dan Huberman
Well, right. I. And I think that my mind is not, you know, in a steady, you know, state, but I don't have this notion I have to see things. Everybody's talking about something. I have to see it. I never felt like that. No, I mean, I'd like to see things. Don't misunderstand me. But it's very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I like them to do.
- [174:09]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. You don't seem to need to go on, like, jungle adventures or like. Or ice skate across Antarctica. Like you've never been one for, like, the kind of wild outing.
- [174:20]
Dan Huberman
No, the wild outing is here. That's my wild outing. Yeah. I can have very wild thoughts about things that I would like. You know, sometimes they're totally wrong and so on. But, yeah, in a funny way, I am a little bit of what the French call in armchair philosopher or whatever. There are these people who write articles about France and Africa without ever having left France or something of that sort. So I'm not like that. But I don't necessarily crave this physical adventure for the sake of adventure. I like beautiful things, and I don't mind repeating the same beautiful thing every year if necessary. Going vacation to the same places and so on.
- [174:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. You like to go back to the same places.
- [175:01]
Dan Huberman
Well, there is a difference between tourism, where you see new things and so on. I like that. There's also the idea of vacation where you just sit and enjoy what you have. You know, I've.
- [175:11]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I've. I confess I've. I've not ever done it. And you know this about me, I've never taken a vacation, you know, to.
- [175:19]
Dan Huberman
The summer house in Denmark. You can spend a week there just enjoying it. That's it. I know if I show you pictures, you know, from the window, they see the deer in the garden. You know, they just sit there. You know, it's nice. So there's nothing, you know, it's nice. It can be. You cannot spend life doing that. You know, I'm not a monk. Okay. I'm not a meditator that will spend hours on this. But, you know, it's nice to rest. You know, it's very important, I think.
- [175:44]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And the rituals are important to you?
- [175:45]
Dan Huberman
Very important, yes. Yeah. The rituals have a. Also are very reassuring because then, you know, it's predictable. Right. You don't want a totally unpredictable life all the time. That's what people create, rituals.
- [175:56]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, you early on taught me about etiquette. You know, it's. It's something that years later, I think it was probably in the mid-90s for some reason, we were at the movies together and we saw some people at the movies and they were wearing their bathroom slippers and more or less their pajamas to the movies. And I'll never forget you grabbed my arm. Like, you didn't grab it forcefully, but you grabbed. You said, you see that? And I said, yeah. And he said, people are coming to the movies their pajamas.
- [176:28]
Dan Huberman
I said, yeah.
- [176:29]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And you said, that's the beginning of the end to any society. And I thought you were joking, but, you know, it's. It's something I thought about a lot. You also said, and. And I'll never forget, you know, you're always better off being overdressed because then at least your class that you're speaking to or your hosts of etc, they know that you took them seriously.
- [176:51]
Dan Huberman
Right.
- [176:52]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And I don't think we really appreciate etiquette. We sort of like, as Americans especially, we've somehow confused freedom of choice with discarding etiquette.
- [177:04]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [177:04]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. Like, it's not something you hear discussed very much. But what about etiquette and what.
- [177:11]
Dan Huberman
Well, there are many components. I think the most important one is a societal one. I mean, one of the things that I like, for instance, if you go to England, how Polish polite people are. Politeness is a virtue. And politeness, the higher the social class, the higher the demand to be polite. It's behavior, it's being nice to people. It's understanding what they are. And associated with that. There are codes. Some of them are behavioral, some of them are dress codes. I had a brilliant economist, the Italian economist, working with me, and now he's in the east coast, who told me he went to a wedding in Italy after living in the United States, and he went to his cousin's wedding and his uncle said, you show no respect. You're not wearing Cufflinks. He said, well, but my shirt is all about, no, no, no, go home and get cufflinks. Because you're showing lack of respect for not dressing the proper way to this wedding. So I think that there are expectations that people have about certain kinds of behavior. I mean, if you look at, say, the pictures of what's going on now in Washington, and Swan, you notice that Mr. Elon Musk, who's always in a T shirt that says let's go to Mars, suddenly he's wearing a tuxedo. Because at least now he's part of a group of people that are behaving like government officials should behave. You don't go in sandals and shorts.
- [178:24]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
But Silicon Valley is famous for the flip flops and the hoodie.
- [178:27]
Dan Huberman
Right. Because the problem is that people confuse the style with the message. They think that because you wear a hoodie, because Mark Zuckerberg was wearing hoodies makes you brilliant. Okay. And I think that the issue of dress codes elicit a certain sense of behavior in people, as you said. I mean, you know, how would you feel if you went on a first date with someone that comes in and slippers and HIPAA say, let's go to the movies?
- [178:54]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
It's not happened yet.
- [178:56]
Dan Huberman
Well, okay, okay. So what I'm saying is you don't have to overdo it. That's another issue. And you have to also conform to the roles of the society. I noticed, for instance, that in the east coast, people dress much more properly than in the West Coast. You go to New York and you see men wearing suits and ties. Here, you don't see that here. Perhaps in la. Not in. Not in the Bay Area, ever.
- [179:18]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. One thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina, men keep their jackets and ties on the whole night. I've always kept my jacket and tie on the entire night in the United States. It's almost like moments after people arrive at any party in a suit, they start undressing.
- [179:34]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, right. Why did they dress up then? Yeah. Okay. So that's my view. So I am not necessarily someone that advocates wearing a tie when I go to work and so on. But I really believe that there are codes of conduct that sort of reflect many things. And you're also. You're projecting a message, Right. You're giving. I mean, the idea of a hoodie at one point or the other, first of all, was hurting behavior. Everybody had to wear one because, you know, then. Then you're cool or, you know, whatever. Okay. In adolescence, I understand it. I mean, that's what you do as another lesson. And you do what others do. But as you grow up, you can also signal whom you are by the way you dress and you behave.
- [180:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
What do you think about the discourse on platforms like X where you can see a mix including a lot of academics and high level thinkers acting kind of like teenagers?
- [180:21]
Dan Huberman
Well, okay, they want to be popular. That's all. They want to draw attention.
- [180:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
This is kind of a new thing. I won't name names, but some people who are considered some of the smartest people in the world like what they. Their discourse on social media is like. I mean, they wouldn't last two seconds on the schoolyard, so they get hit in the face. You know, they so weird. Like, like grown men acting kind of like teenagers.
- [180:46]
Dan Huberman
Okay, well, that's. They have a problem because they want to be thought of as young. That's a whole different story. Okay, that's a different story. Now, having said what I said, I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether or not the rules, the rules that reg. You know, that rule, you know, the rules that say how you should dress to do one thing or the other are not. Do not, you know, operate for you. And then you decide to be very different. You know, there are many people who are like that and like to be iconoclastic. I heard many stories about. We were talking about Richard Feynman who actually made a case. I mean, Mary Galman used to say that about him. To be so different that people will talk about it because he was very interested in people telling stories about it.
- [181:23]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Bongo drumming, naked on the roof.
- [181:25]
Dan Huberman
Exactly.
- [181:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Not brushing his teeth, exactly, all that.
- [181:27]
Dan Huberman
Okay, so. But he was very good at drawing attention. Okay, that's fine. You can also draw attention by dressing very nicely. You know, it's all a matter of. I mean, I was reflecting. You know, we go to the symphony in San Francisco regularly and we are donors and so on. Sometimes you go to a concert. It's an amazing thing what you see there. Some people nicely dressed, some people dressed as they just woke up, didn't have time to get rest and you know, got there, you know, and they're whatever and they.
- [181:54]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Do you think that going back to the initial, you know, ping of the question, do you think that we have societally gone, that we're sort of drifting towards like, for lack of a better word, chaos? So social interaction chaos?
- [182:09]
Dan Huberman
Well, you know, I think the pendulum will swing again. The other day I was talking to someone reading actually that suddenly, not only in New York, but in the Midwest Men are, are starting to wear jacket and ties, not just for work. Okay. They go on dates like that. So, you know, it's a pendulum. It goes back and forth, back and forth. I don't think we're going to end up at a time when, you know, you have to wear tails to have breakfast or something. I think only the aristocrats used to do that. But I think that, you know, it's an issue of how also how we perceive the world through the eyes of television and movies. Okay. If movies start showing you that everybody's dressed, whatever, you know, people are going do the same thing if movies start showing, you know, the trends that we see in movies are the trends that essentially society follows. Okay, Definitely. So I think that we, this is, I don't think we're going to chaos. It's going to revert. California is a particular place because it has always been a place where people, in order to feel free, they had to dress differently and who cares and all that stuff. But it's not everywhere.
- [183:08]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah, it's kind of interesting that now counterculture is conservatism. Right, right. We're back, we're back to that. The anti war group is the more conservative anyway.
- [183:17]
Dan Huberman
It's, I mean, also people like, you know, it's interesting how Americans are fascinated with English aristocracy and traditions. I've been to High Table dinner at King's College in Cambridge twice. You know, everybody dresses properly, they wear gowns and the fellows are sitting at a top table and everybody else and people love it. And we'd like to see that in the movie.
- [183:38]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, it's theater.
- [183:39]
Dan Huberman
Yeah.
- [183:39]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I mean, it's academic theater. A little bit of pomp and circumstance, but it's theater.
- [183:43]
Dan Huberman
Well, we have the same thing on commencement, you know, traditions and so on.
- [183:47]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Yeah. No parent wants to go to a graduation that's, you know, kind of a free for all. They want to see some order.
- [183:52]
Dan Huberman
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that, you know, there is a place for that and some people will, I mean, there are designers and so on, of clothing and so on that exploit this nostalgia for that kind of elegant world, you know, Ralph Lauren and so, and so always, you know, 1960s fancy, you know, club type clothing and so on.
- [184:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So do you plan to ever retire?
- [184:15]
Dan Huberman
I don't know what it means. I mean, if retired. No, no, because I, I'm not a postal worker. I, I'm not a cook at a restaurant that eventually says, okay, I I cooked it long enough that I, I collect my retirement and go home. I have a mind mind that it works. And I need an environment where that mind can thrive. And I need an environment where for one year, when I left Hewlett Packard, I was basically. I took a course in generativity and so on, but I was really a bit idle. So suddenly, I mean, in a context where people have problems and so on that I really like to listen to, there's a social component to work as, you know. So retirement. Retirement means what? You know, you're a postal work. One day you stop delivering mail and you stay home watching the paint dry. And that's not me, okay? So to me, I'm working and I enjoy it. And you know, the day that will come that I cannot enjoy it, I'll stop. And I think that, again, goes with this issue of getting bored with things that you don't like to do, you know, because you've done it for a long time. No, I enjoy my life, but I don't think in terms of. I'll say something. The CEO of my company said, Great guy. Phil McKinney said, Bernardo, I don't work for the money here. I said, I don't either. I mean, I like to get paid, but if I don't like it, I'll walk. And I can do that. So it's not that I'm doing this for the income. That's what I'm trying to say.
- [185:40]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Seems like you've never pursued money for its own sake.
- [185:42]
Dan Huberman
No, but.
- [185:43]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Nor did you ever encourage me to pursue money for its own sake.
- [185:45]
Dan Huberman
But as my cousin the physicist used to say, money doesn't bring happiness, but it points in the right direction.
- [185:51]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I would say money doesn't bring happiness, but it can buffer stress.
- [185:54]
Dan Huberman
Right. And it allows you to have the things you want to have and you don't have to. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think money is an important aspect of our lives. You know, having it and so on. I lived for many years as a graduate student with no money, and it was very painful, I'll tell you. Sometimes I didn't eat dinner because I didn't have any money. So I like having money to do the things that I like, but I don't work for money. Many people say, well, you know, I invented so many things, I could have started in some company and make a lot of money. I don't really. I don't regret that at all.
- [186:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
The ultra rich people that I know who are happy are still working every day.
- [186:33]
Dan Huberman
Right. Because beyond a certain amount of money, you still have to brush your teeth like everybody else. Okay. You can dream of having 150 toothbrushes, but so what?
- [186:42]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Right? And you can only eat so many steaks.
- [186:44]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that we all covered. The question is, what do you do with your life now? You want to travel? Well, you can travel. It's nice if you can travel, you know, in better ways than being a grad, you know, an undergrad with a backpack. Although can be adventurous.
- [186:57]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I had fun backpacking.
- [186:58]
Dan Huberman
Yeah.
- [186:59]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Okay. On a limited budget where, you know, part of. Part of the joy of traveling that way is you're. You're thrown into kind of street level interactions. I did youth hostels and things like that.
- [187:09]
Dan Huberman
I went through Europe like this.
- [187:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I wouldn't change that for anything.
- [187:11]
Dan Huberman
No. I went through Europe as a graduate student. I quit everything. I went to Europe in winter and it was quite an adventure.
- [187:16]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Winter.
- [187:17]
Dan Huberman
In the winter, it was horrendous. I had very little money. I stayed in places where the. In. In Paris, where the lady in the. In the little hotel would turn off the light if I turn it on in the middle of the night. It was awful.
- [187:28]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And yet to save energy.
- [187:30]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was very funny. But I met people that were interesting and I. I engaged, you know, it was. I still. I still, every once in a while I hear from one or two of those people I met years ago in trains. I went by train everywhere. I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter.
- [187:46]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
You know, everything seems to lead back to Denmark.
- [187:49]
Dan Huberman
Yeah, It's a nice country.
- [187:50]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, now you have a Danish wife, so. And have for a long time. And have for a long time.
- [187:54]
Dan Huberman
Many times. Yeah, yeah. No, I. Yeah, I like. It's a very different contrast to Europe. This central Europe and so on. You know, Denmark, Northern Europe, Denmark, Sweden, Norway is a very special kind of, you know, country and people. Yeah. I like them a lot. Life is very easy there.
- [188:10]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I like Scandinavia.
- [188:11]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Yeah. It's very nice. Yes.
- [188:13]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Good natured people.
- [188:15]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [188:16]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Good saunas.
- [188:17]
Dan Huberman
Yeah. Everything. Yes.
- [188:18]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
And sunshine. At least in the summer.
- [188:20]
Dan Huberman
In the summer only. Yeah.
- [188:23]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Any plans for the next couple of years? Anything that we should put on the calendar, make sure that we get in?
- [188:30]
Dan Huberman
No, because I cannot plan that. Well, I don't plan either.
- [188:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Maybe I inherited it.
- [188:35]
Dan Huberman
Well, I just move. I just move and intuitive. I'm very intuitive about these things. I suddenly see something, you know, this quantum stuff. I don't know. I started hearing about it. I talked to a brilliant guy who was in my lab. I said, hey, Jing, what do you think about this? He said, oh, sounds interesting. Let's do it. And we're doing it. I am lucky that I get paid to do that. But no, I don't have plans like that. I would like to. We would like. I mean, we would like to organize our life a little bit differently now that you know that we have a summer house in Denmark and so on. I still plan to travel there. I like Europe a lot, but I don't know if I can live there. I like Switzerland a lot. I want to go to Argentina every year. And I feel very close to my family. That's very important. We are all going for an event there. I hope that you can join us if you can. So those things are very important to me. But I. No, I don't have plans for anything. I don't know. I like to be surprised.
- [189:34]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, Dad, I want to extend a real sense of gratitude from me, from everyone listening and watching. Although you may argue that they're not going to be interested. This has been our back and forth over the last months as I've tried to convince you to do this podcast. I can assure you that they were. They are very interested. Your story is a really unique one. And I can say that both as your son, but also as somebody who's sat across from scientists from all different, you know, domains and backgrounds, not just neuroscientists. I also really appreciate your ability to explain complicated things in ways that at least we can start to get an understanding, because these are, these are hard concepts. Concepts. And, you know, I think what comes through so clearly is that somehow you've been able to grab these high level, really abstract concepts and work with them and try and understand them, but you've also been able to lead a life where you're really grounded in the day to day and in reality. And I have to say, your wish for me and for Laura and I assume for everyone else to be joyful. I'll work on that. And also, I must say, it just hit me like square in the face during this discussion that I get such peace and I can really focus on being joyful knowing that you're joyful. Like, it's so clear, like you have a joyful life at so many levels and that you've pursued what you wanted to do over and over. And, you know, some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were going to get into our issues and things like that. I'll just briefly say that, yeah, we've had our ups, we've had our downs, and we've certainly landed up and much, much higher. Than we ever would had we not had all of that. And as I told you last year around this time on your birthday, when we all got together to celebrate, like, we're not just good, we're beyond good. So anything that comes up around that, I want to just go on record saying that, like, that's water under the bridge. And I don't ever think about it. All I think about are the incredible gifts that you've given me about curiosity and pursuing my curiosity about putting new footprints on untread beaches, the early discussions around the excitement that science can bring. I mean, I remember all of it. I really remember all of it and in immense detail. And I love your stories about scientists, both how they soar and also how human they are and how they're fallible like the rest of us. So, you know, there's not a day that goes by where I don't thank God because I do believe in God, that you're my father, that you and mom created me and Laura, and that I've had the life that I have and that I continue to have the life that I have. So I just want to thank you for the example and the nurturing and for coming here. There aren't words.
- [192:36]
Dan Huberman
Well, thank you. You know how much I love you. I think that these words are the biggest gift that I get. And I. I think any father listening to that, to his son or daughter saying that would also feel the same way, or a mother for that matter. It is a very fulfilling feeling, you know, to have that notion that you feel that you owe so much to what you got and also the fact that you've done incredibly well and the kind of person you are. Yeah. So I wish you all the wisdom that you need in order to just go through life the way. But I think that it's nice to also. That we are sort of on the same wavelength and many things in you I see more of a reflection of what I always wanted to be as well. So that's easier in a way. Perhaps it's because fathers and sons have that.
- [193:25]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
So we certainly relate.
- [193:28]
Dan Huberman
Yes.
- [193:29]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
Well, thank you.
- [193:30]
Dan Huberman
Thank you.
- [193:30]
Dr. Bernardo Huberman
I love you.
- [193:31]
Dan Huberman
I love you too. You know that.
- [193:33]
Andrew Huberman
Thank you for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. To learn more about his work, please see the links in shownote captions. If you're learning from andor 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 on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple. You can leave us up to a five star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Human Berman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale@protographsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called An Operating Manual for the Human Body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. If you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, Our Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs. Those one to three page PDFs cover things like deliberate heat exposure, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol. We also have protocols for optimizing your sleep, dopamine, and much more. Again, all available completely zero cost. Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter and provide your email. We do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Bernard. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.