Dopamine and Motivation Insights

Then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator, not just seeking dopamine rewards, that is infinite. And I can say with great certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company and sell it, how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it, how you're constantly seeking because seeking is the reward. Andrew Huberman, welcome to the show, man. It's great to be here. I should say Dr. Andrew Huberman, just so people know what they're about to get. Dude, it's awesome to have you back. Our first interview completely melted my brain. Researching you is one of my favorite things to do. The breadth of topics that you cover is incredible, none more so than the fact that we can get to our mind through our body, which I think is one of the most incredible things. Before we started rolling, though, I had this whole interview planned. I knew exactly where we were going to go. And then you made a comment, I was bringing up Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as I do because I'm obsessed. And you said, well, there's only one biological currency and that's dopamine. That's right. And I was like, well, now I know where we're starting. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So, you know, human beings have evolved tons of technologies and currencies. Bitcoin, Ethereum are not topics I know a lot about. But when you think about dollar, euro, Bitcoin, Ethereum, you think about wins and losses in sport, in life, in relationship, in anything. Something in your brain and body has to keep track of that. Did you win? Did you lose? What's a letdown? What's a celebration? And I think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that while the molecule dopamine is associated with reward, it's more about... Motivation and craving. There's a really classic experiment now that people use to demonstrate this. Take two rats and the rats independently, separate cages, can lever press for food or they can access food. There's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food. So we always thought that food, like many other rewards, like food, sex, warmth when you're cold, cool when you're too warm, is triggering the release of dopamine. But someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of those animals. And then what you find is that the animal without it. dopamine still enjoys food still enjoys other pleasures so dopamine's not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures it's involved in motivation because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's length believe it or not to get to that lever the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing it will work through some effort to go get the reward whereas the animal or it turns out the human without much dopamine can still experience pleasure they can sit on their couch and cram their face with pleasure-inducing calories or what have you, watch pleasure-inducing things on the television, but they have very little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure. So when I say dopamine is the universal currency of... Everything what I mean is it's driving the motivation to develop new currencies when somebody can sit back and say I'll just throw this number out. Let's say somebody has a hundred thousand bitcoins, which presumably now is worth Oh my god, certainly more than it was a few years ago The way they can register whether or not they are in a position of wealth or not Has everything to do with the the number they see on the screen or in their bitcoin wallet but that number is converted into a chemical signal that has everything to do with How much you had previously so that so we could talk about the so-called reward prediction error How good you feel with an experience has everything to do with how much you had previously? And dopamine itself is what's driving the human species to create these new technologies. And so while we think of currencies as the goal, it's actually what's really driven the forward evolution of our species has been the desire to go seek things beyond the confines of our skin. And when I say the common currency is dopamine, what I mean is the molecule dopamine, when secreted in the brain, makes us pursue things, build things, create things, makes us want new things that we don't currently already have. And so it has a lot of dimensions to it, but rather than think about dopamine as a signal for reward, like a dopamine hit, we classically think to talk about it. It's more accurate really to think about dopamine as driving motivation and craving to go seek rewards. That's the RAD experiment. And it's a way of tabulating where we are in our life. Are we doing well or are we doing poorly? And that happens on very short timescales. Like do you wake up feeling good or do you wake up feeling kind of low or on long timescales? If you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life, how are you doing? How do you gauge that? Well, it has everything to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years. So you're always comparing it and all of this is subconscious. But what's cool is that once you make these processes conscious, once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior, then you can actually work with it. So it's one of the instances where knowledge of knowledge actually turns out to be a really useful tool. Dude, that's crazy to me. So one of the things that I get hit up about all the time is people feel stuck. And as you like really push on them to figure out why they feel stuck, they'll be like, yeah, I want to do that. And, but I just, you know, I can't get out of bed or I don't have the energy to pursue it or whatever. And you get into this common thing that people say in mindset. And I really believe it, but I find it far more interesting when you're talking about it from a neurochemical standpoint, which is you just don't want it badly enough. And And when I think about my own life, I sometimes worry that I'm either more malleable than other people or that I have a greater ability to manipulate my dopamine release or whatever because I'm very good at building desire. And I like the way that desire feels. Now when you use the word hunger, I think people get confused because I actually don't enjoy being hungry for food. I find that totally unpleasurable. However, Being hungry for sex, I find incredibly, I feel alive, I feel focused, I feel energized, I feel aggressive. It's complex for sure, but I find that feeling, the act of wanting something in the future in that kind or in business and trying to build something. In fact, that's an interesting insight into my own self about I like to build. And do we know, so we... Dopamine is the neurochemistry of the pursuit of making sure that I have the energy to go. But do we know how we can spike that? Well, first of all, it's clear to me based on your description that you've tapped into these channels that release dopamine because craving and wanting, whether or not it's sex or money or connection or anything, all right, that's the primary trigger for dopamine release. Yep. Now. Sex and reproduction makes the most sense from the perspective of evolution. I mean, any species, every species tends to have two primary goals. One, protect its young. And second, make more of itself, usually in reverse order, right? So even for people that don't want children, I mean, you might not, or people, of course, not everyone is having sex just to reproduce. But at a primordial level, that's what those circuits are there for. So every species, in particular mammalian species, where there's a lot of parenting and caretaking of the young, tries to make more of itself. And everything that you see, like maternal aggression, which is a powerful circuit that gets activated after females of any species, in particular mammals, give birth, they will fight to the death and they gain superhuman strength in order to protect their young. There's a known circuit for that in the brain that gets activated once a female has offspring. And it's robust. Inside Tracker is offering our listeners 25% off their entire store, including InnerAge 2.0. Just visit insidetracker.com slash impact theory. All right, guys, check out Inside Tracker today. Take care and be legendary. That's so interesting, man. Like, have you read the book, The Female Brain? I have not. Oh, my God. So I just probably lost a lot of points. No, no, no, but one, it'll be super interesting because you'll know if she's on the right track from a neuroscience perspective. I remember reading the book. At the time, I thought I was going to have kids. And I remember thinking, whoa, like this book chronicles what happens to a woman's brain and how things change. And I was like, when you have kids, man, you are inviting a neurochemical change in your significant other that is going to play itself out in a very real way. And I'd be lying if I said that wasn't one of the things, one of the many things, but one of the things that I factored into not having kids. Interesting. And then the same with menopause, that it's this really dramatic sort of reorganizing might not be the right word, but that it has real implications in the way that the person moves, just as the decline of testosterone has in men. Well, on the positive side, during pregnancy, the woman's hippocampus, her brain area associated with memory and retention of information. It goes through a period in which it gets worse for certain types of information, but then achieves superior levels of working memory once the babies arrive because there are a lot of things to manage. So this makes sense. This is true in rodents. This is true in humans. And then in terms of the biology of the father, we now know that... Because typically parents have, you know, it does seem like one spouse always does more than the other. But even in the most evenly divided households, there's usually some co-parenting of some sort. But that the father has a big increase in the hormone prolactin when the mother is expecting. And the prolactin lays down body fat. It prepares for sleepless nights. For women, it sparks the circuitry for milk letdown for nursing. So the dad bod has a lot to do with prolactin. This is true in birds, in small mammals, and in humans. And there was a paper published in Nature on humans specifically about this. And when you think about the relationship between dopamine and prolactin, it's interesting and it takes us back to this motivation and craving that you were describing earlier, which is that dopamine and prolactin work in opposite fashion. So the most salient example of this is sex and reproduction, where anticipation of sex and reproduction. Dr. Greatly increases dopamine, but post-sex, it doesn't have to be for reproduction, there's a spike in prolactin in the male. And that spike in prolactin is actually what sets the refractory period during which he can't mate again. So it sets a period of quiescence to keep men... It's for pair bonding, for the exchange of chemicals through the nose, through the skin, and through the sweat, mainly through odor. We could talk about pheromones if you want, but that's a topic that's somewhat controversial. Actual identity of pheromones in humans has not been identified, but there are pheromone effects in humans. It's controversial in that people don't agree what's really happening? Well, okay, so there's this culture of biologists that have clearly identified pheromone effects in non-humans and non-human primates. But whether or not those are... The classic definition of a pheromone effect is that it's subconscious, that you can't actually detect the smell. However, we know that smells themselves, conscious detection of them can evoke... Very robust physiological responses. One example to just stay in this arena of thought is that a guy by the name of Noam Sobel, who's at the Weizmann Institute, he used to be at Berkeley. He has a lab over in Israel. His amazing lab works on olfaction, smell. And they discovered that the scent of women's tears causes a dramatic and significant reduction in testosterone in men. What? Absolutely. And this was published, if anyone wants to go look it up, it was published in Science Magazine. You know, it... You can smell tears? Yeah. We have, you know, the Super Bowl of publishing and science is science, nature, and self. Those are the three top journals. This is published in Science Magazine, very stringent. The smell of tears. Now, it's subconscious at some level. But the other thing that if we were going to kind of play around in this hormones and interactions between humans, there are some really interesting examples. So, for instance, men will rate the smell of a woman's skin or sweat or the perception of her face as more beautiful. during the pre-ovulatory phase of her menstrual cycle. That pre-ovulatory phase is associated with a number of different changes in hormones. Just that smell will increase testosterone in a male and oral contraception in the female. When women take oral contraception, it adjusts their hormones such that men no longer detect this change in how attractive women are. It doesn't mean they find them unattractive, but it means they don't find them increasingly attractive during this certain period of time. their menstrual cycle. So we are constantly signaling back and forth through hormones. In fact, we met over there and shook hands because we've been tested for COVID and the rest. We shook hands. And what happened and what happens... within 30 seconds of any human being contacting one another is they shake hands and then they wipe the chemicals of the other person on their face or body. Gnome's lab has also shown this. And so we are constantly signaling through chemical exchange. Sometimes it's subconscious, and those are the so-called pheromone effects. Sometimes it's low levels of odors that are beneath our conscious detection. And sometimes it's outright, wow, this person smells really, really good. Or they look particularly good today. Oftentimes that's tied to the period in which they're ovulating. in their menstrual cycle. So I want to plant a flag here about all the things that we do that are messing with these mechanisms like cologne or deodorant. Or oral contraception, of which I'm not saying is-Pornography, like all of this stuff. Yeah, and oral contraception has served a great role for certain people. Some people might say this is an ethical discussion. Is it good? Is it bad? But either way, it is- having an effect. So to remove, I only look at things through the lens of biology, not through the lens of whether or not we should or shouldn't do things. Facts. I love it. Okay, so we're planning that flag, we're coming back to it. But now I want to get to how do we spike intentionally? You've talked about we can spike testosterone, but I want to know, can we spike dopamine? Yeah. And you've done this. Your example of craving is Actually, what you crave, you crave the feeling of craving, is beautiful because what it means is that you don't allow yourself to go so far down the arc of the dopamine trajectory to get to the other source of motivation. So there are two sources of motivation as it relates to dopamine, and then we can think about tools that we could export from these that are nested in neurobiology. The first is to do what you do, which is to be able to sense the craving as its own form of pleasure. This has kind of remnants of Carol Dweck's growth mindset. you eventually develop a pleasure in the seeking and the striving has flavors of a David Goggins type approach where it seems like he gets pleasure from the friction itself. And so there are elements of that. You seem to have that as well. But if you can start to identify the craving as its own internally released drug, this thing dopamine, that is a source of motivation, then what you realize is that capturing the reward is wonderful, but But attaching dopamine to the reward is actually a little bit dangerous. Attaching. Yeah. Celebrating the win, celebrating the win more than the pursuit, it actually sets you up for failure in the future. And so this gets us right into something called dopamine reward prediction error. And reward prediction error is basically if you expect something to be really great and then it's not quite that great, your dopamine baseline lowers. And now understanding what we know about dopamine, that means that not only did you... You feel as if you lost because it wasn't as much a celebration as you thought it would be, but it also means that you're starting from a lower place, meaning you are less motivated. Now, the simpler way to conceptualize this is I have a colleague at Stanford. She runs the addiction dual diagnosis clinic. Her name is Dr. Anna Lemke. She has a book called Dopamine Nation that's out right now. And she's really described this pleasure-pain balance where anytime you have a bunch of dopamine and you're in pursuit, pursuit, pursuit, After you achieve a win, now this could be a business win, a relationship, a win of any kind, but inevitably there's going to be a tipping back of the scale on the pain side. And that pain side is always going to go a little bit higher than the dopamine side. So this is what you would feel if you pursued a goal like building a big company, here it comes, here it comes, the big sale, and then there's the, well, what now? You have the kind of letdown. Now, if you wait, if you simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while, the scale starts to reset. The problem is a lot of people immediately roll right into the next pursuit. And then what happens is that scale starts to get stuck on the pain side a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And pretty soon, no amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation. So what does this mean in terms of an actual tool? Well, first of all, If people can do what you do, they're going to be in a much better position in life. It doesn't matter if it's school, sport, relationship, any domain of life. If you can start to register, ah, that craving and that friction and that desire, that almost kind of low level of agitation, sometimes high level of agitation, that is that I'm trying to impose my will on the world in a benevolent way, we hope, that's dopamine. It's working with its close cousin, which is epinephrine. which is adrenaline. They are very close cousins. In fact, dopamine manufacturers epinephrine. A lot of people don't know this, but adrenaline is actually made from the molecule dopamine. Okay. So those two are hanging out together. It's like crave work, crave work, crave and work, crave and work, crave and work. And then you get the win. And some people allow the big peak in dopamine to be associated with the win. And smart people learn to adjust their celebration internally, right? This is all internal. You could throw the biggest party in the world, but as long as you're kind of laid back and looking at this, not letting yourself get manic crazy. you won't necessarily crash as hard. And pretty soon your system will reset. So you take the day, you clean up the dishes, you relax, you go, what now? I'm feeling a little low. Well, rather than going out and spiking your dopamine again, just wait, understand that the scale will reset. again. Give yourself a few days where you're going to feel a little kind of underwhelmed. Things aren't going to be as interesting. It's going to be hard to trigger that big release because you just had the peak. Well, if you adjust that, you relax, you understand there's always a little bit of a postpartum depression. We sometimes hear about postpartum depression. That's a clinical thing, but there's always that kind of, hmm, today's not as exciting as the previous days. What am I going to do with my life? But then if you let it start ratcheting up again, then what you realize is your capacity to do that is going to be a little bit more Capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator not just seeking dopamine rewards That is infinite and I can say with with great certainty that this is How you were able to build a big company and sell it how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it how you? Constantly seeking because seeking is the reward and I think for most people we think of the reward as the finish line And so the key is to get to the finish line step into the end zone, but no end zone dance. It's just like yep And now I'm going to go do it again. That's really the key. That's the key to doing it over and over. And when I see big athletes or academics or anyone or musicians and they rise and crash, it's clear they've lost the touch with the motivation evoked dopamine. And they've lost touch probably because it hasn't really been described by the neuroscience community until Anna has started talking about this stuff publicly. And I'm just kind of echoing what she's beautifully said. said much better than I am, which is that you should always expect that after a bunch of pleasure, there's going to be that low and then that craving. How do I get back to there again? And the key is you have to walk the staircase again. You don't get to do this as a square wave pull. You know, you don't get to just ascend, ascend, ascend. It's always up, down, up a little bit higher, down, up, you know, it's, that's the function. So I don't know if that resonates with your experience. I'm over here freaking out. So you've literally just explained what I will say is the single most important loop if you want to be successful. And you used words, attach, right? You had another one, which was about your, I forget the exact word, but you're taking, you're inserting yourself consciously into the process. Because what I learned very early on, and I'm so grateful in the same way that you are grateful that your upbringing wasn't. perfect, but it ended up giving you a frame of reference and insights that have propelled you forward. I'm very grateful that I spent a decade just trying to get rich. It was the stated mission, I would say it every day. Like, I'm here to get rich. I show up to work to get rich. This is about getting rich, rich, rich, rich, rich. And it didn't work. And so, and my wife pulls me aside, and she's like, you're now damaging the marriage. Like, you're just so fiendishly focused on the goal that there's nothing as integrated in your life. You're doing something you hate for an end state that may never come. And that was so profound and it shook me so deeply. And it suddenly became clear that from a neurological perspective, what I wanted was to feel alive. And once I put everything in the pursuit, I'm just interested in can I show up every day and sincerely pursue this thing, which I may never get. But I'm going to honor myself, celebrate myself, big up myself, as the Brits would say, for just showing up today. actually trying to make it happen. And one, that's way more sustainable. And then two, you don't, you don't get tricked into thinking that, oh, when I get this thing that I'll feel good, because it's the craving that makes me feel alive. So it's the state of wanting that is in and of itself the pleasurable act. That's right. And so I began to use the metaphor of I'm going to climb this mountain only to want the next mountain to climb. And once I knew that, well, then you have to be totally comfortable dropping back down and starting all over. Now, the interesting thing, and I don't know if I'm fooling myself or if I have so integrated that trick, but the comedown isn't hard for me. So I think my last day at Quest was a Monday. And Tuesday, I started Impact Theory. And so that went from I had 3,000 employees. Your position matters. You get a lot of deference. You've got a privileged parking space. You know what I mean? Like there's a lot of things that go into it. But I didn't, none of like my reward system was tied to that. So it was very easy for me to start the next day with there was only seven of us and no one had time for any deference of any kind. And I went from having an EA, which you can't imagine how amazing that is, to not and you're doing everything for yourself again. But that wasn't a painful thing because I was so focused on, all right, cool, this is step one again. And now can we repeat? Well, it helps if you can expect that there will be a little bit of a dip post-win or post-whatever. That's helpful. There's always a refractory period of any kind, so to speak. If you expect it, that's great because you eliminate the downside of the reward prediction error. Reward prediction error can also be conceptualized as I tell you we're going to go to this restaurant. I keep building up the food building. up the food, I actually raise the expectation and the requirement that that food be really spectacular. Better off, I just tell you it's going to be pretty good and then you're wowed by it, right? Because if your dopamine was higher in anticipation than the actual food evoked... Well, then it makes sense why you're always integrating over the dopamine release you had previously. Now, there are a couple of things that you said in there that I want to highlight, which I find so interesting. And we can get a little bit Eastern philosophy, mystical here, but tie it back to some real neuroscience, which is you said, you know, that's the juice. The motivation is the juice. You know that. If you look at Eastern philosophy and they talk about chi, you know, and this, you know, what is that? I wager that is dopamine. The desire to pursue things and to create more of oneself and as a species, whether or not you decide to have kids or not, those circuits all use the one universal currency, dopamine, of wanting more things that are outside the confines of your skin. And that's what's driven forward evolution of individuals and families and cultures and our species as a whole. And again. The circuitry has been there for many, many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. And so it's, and it's highly conserved. And so what that means is that it doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin or Ethereum. It doesn't matter if it's putting rockets on other planets. It doesn't matter if it's building the first automobile, it's the same currency. So understanding those cycles is really key. The other thing is the element of pain. I think that understanding that pain and pleasure in this really dynamic balance can also help us, which in the following way. Any pain that you feel, the longer day, the less sleep, the kind of agony that things aren't working, that power outlet doesn't work, or the internet is slow, whatever it is, the amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly related to how much pain you experience. So we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks and they would measure their response. And then they say, we're going to increase it. We're going to increase it. Eventually, they get to the point where a slight shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure. Now, you couldn't do these experiments anymore. These are not the experiments I do in my lab. These are older experiments. Dr. For instance, and this has been discussed in scientific research papers, giving somebody like a 10-minute ice bath, for instance, or even a 3-minute ice bath, or a 1-minute ice bath is quite painful. But there was a study from the University of Prague, a European Journal of Physiology showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus, the amount of dopamine release goes up for two and a half hours to 250% above baseline. And that's not because the ice bath Dr. Itself evokes dopamine release. A lot of people think, oh, cold water evokes dopamine release. No, pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over. Yesterday I tweaked my back because I do this stupid thing every few years, the same stupid thing and it's really painful. And then you just remember all the ways in which you can't move around. I was like standing up this morning, I'm like, ah, and just walking is so painful. As the pain has started to dissipate, you get a little bit of a high. Right? You get a little bit of a euphoria. That's dopamine because of the degree of pain you experienced previously predicts how much pleasure. So when you start a company down in the dregs and you're shoveling again, that's beautiful because that means that the win that you achieve is going to be as good or greater than the one you had previously, in your case with Quest. And so we go back to this example of the person that's not motivated, that can't get off the couch, that doesn't want to do anything. Well, this is the problem. Remember the rat experiment they are effectively the rat with no dopamine, but they can still achieve Some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories by consuming social media and look I'm not judging I do this stuff too, right? Scrolling social media if you've ever scrolled social media and you're like, I don't even know why I'm doing this It doesn't really feel that good And I can remember a time where you'd see something it was just so cool or you see something online I remember this when TED talks first came out. I was like, this is amazing There's some at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights. And then now that they're like a gazillion TED talks I remember spending a winter in my office at when I was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and Binging TED talks in the background thinking this is a good use of my time pretty soon. They all sucked to me I was like this isn't good. So what you need to do is stop watching TED talks for a while And then they become interesting again. And that's this pain-pleasure balance. And so for people that aren't feeling motivated, the problem is they're not motivated but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance. So they're getting the little mild hits of opiates. opioid system. And if you think about the opioid drugs, as opposed to dopaminergic drugs, dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything. You know, drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed, right? They hardly notice anything except what they want. more of, more, more, more, more, more. It's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward. It's very circular. Only the drug can give that much dopamine. Nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself. So there's that. And then there's the kind of opioid-like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving. And this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine in neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward. It's the buildup to the reward. And the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within. But when we can just sit there like the rat with no dopamine, gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, What you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits. And so there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything. And that's a pretty dark picture. So the keys are to pursue rewards, but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins. The celebration has to be less than the pursuit. And that's hard for some people to do. It's got to be that your celebration is slightly less dopaminergic. It can be very reflective. You can be in gratitude. Those are other neurotransmitter systems. But you don't want to be on that high as you celebrate the win. You want to be trickling out your dopamine regularly until you pursue things. And then just understand there will always be a crash of pain. And the more pain you experience, the more dopamine you can achieve if you get back on that. avenue of pursuit. Yeah, this gets into unintended consequences of modernity. And so we're living through this time where we, you know, going back to that flag that we planted of these unintended consequences of, oh, I can make myself smell good. Oh, I can, you know, watch the coolest video. Oh, like TikTok. Dude, I don't have an addictive personality. That's the first thing where I'll lose an hour and be like, what the fuck did I just do? Well, the problem is not pleasures. The problem is that. Pleasure experienced without prior requirement for pursuit is terrible for us. It's terrible for us as individuals. It's terrible for us as groups. And I have great confidence in the human species to work this out. But we are finding now, and we are going to increasingly find, that those who will be successful, young or old, are going to be those people who can create their own internal buffers. They're going to be able to control their relationship. to pleasures because the proximity to pleasures and the availability is the problem. If you look at the increase in use of drugs of abuse or prescription medication, which at least at the first pass deliver pleasure, pain relief, the whole issue with the opioid crisis and dopaminergic drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, there sometimes is a clinical need, but tons of people are taking those recreationally now or to study. Huge dopamine increases are what those cause. That is a problem. That's a serious problem because it creates a cycle where you need more of that specific thing. I would say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. God, that's such a good definition. And I don't like to comment too much on enlightenment because I don't really know what that is as a neurobiologist, but a good life, we could say, is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. And even better, a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and includes pleasure through motivation and hard work. And understanding this pain-pleasure balance whereby if you experience pain and you can continue to be in that friction and exert effort, the rewards are that much greater when they arrive. And so I think that if you look at any drug of abuse or any situation where somebody isn't motivated or thinks... Now, they may have clinically diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but a lot of what people think is ADHD, it turns out, is people just over-consuming dopamine from various sources. And then, and also the context within a TikTok feed is the context switch is insane. The brain has never seen, first of all, this is the first time in human evolution that we wrote with our thumbs, but that's a pretty benign shift. And then the other shift is normally you walk from one room to another or from a field into the trees or from a hut into or a house or whatever it is. But now you can get 10,000 context switches in that 30 minutes of scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. And so it's all about self-regulation. We are going to select for the people that can self-regulate. And so then people say, well, how do you self-regulate? How do kids self-regulate? Well, this is my hope. And one of the reasons I've gotten excited about public education and teaching neuroscience is that this is a place where knowledge of knowledge actually can allow oneself to intervene. When you think, I'm feeling low. I don't feel good. Nothing really feels good. Am I depressed? Maybe. But maybe you're just, you've saturated the dopamine circuits. You're now in the pain part of things. What do you do? Well, you have to stop. You need to replenish dopamine. You need to stop engaging with this behavior and then your pleasure for it will come back. But you have to constantly control the hinge. It's not just about being back and forth on the seesaw. You have to make sure the hinge doesn't get stuck in pain or in pleasure. So it's a dynamic process being a human being. It's not easy. And remember, these circuits didn't evolve for this purpose. They evolved primarily for making more of ourselves. That's why they're so closely tied to the reproductive circuits. And that's why it was interesting and very relevant that you said that your desire to have sex with your wife is one of the most powerful feelings. And it kind of, from a neurochemical perspective, it wicks out into all these other pursuits, right? Those other pursuits aren't about sex. Per se, but it's the same molecule. So the feeling is the same It's just that some people for some people the amplitude of that dopamine Signal for craving sex is very high for some people that's lower and it's higher for video games You know, whatever you lean into and and you think about often in These pursuits will start to reshape these circuits because these dopaminergic circuits are tied to everything You know, there are examples of people getting addicted to the most incredible things. They're also examples of people getting very good but not addicted to chess, for instance. It's all the same general set of mechanisms. Yeah. You talked earlier about the knowledge of knowledge. And that was the big breakthrough for me at the darkest period of my life. I happened to grab a book. We talked about this briefly in our first interview. I happened to grab a book that talked about neuroplasticity. And they were hypothesizing maybe this is a thing. And that... gave me hope because I could imagine what was going on in my brain. And once I can visualize it, then I feel like I can insert myself into it. It's why I've gotten so interested in health, why I'm so interested in neuroscience, is for me, if I were sliding towards depression, I would do exactly what you're saying. I would assess that and be like, okay, wait a second. I know that I can insert conscious control. I know that this is a biological experience. And I'm obsessed with that idea that you're having a biological experience. And To me, like there's some people that see the way the magic trick is done and it loses the magic. Then for other people, it's like you see that it's, this is somebody that spent 30,000 hours learning how to move their hands so that you don't notice that they just move the coin, you know, from this hand to this hand. It blows me away. I love magic. Before the pandemic, a friend took me up to the Magic Castle here in Hollywood and there's some incredible stuff going on. Magic is actually really cool. We could, just as a, from a neuroscience perspective, magic, it's all about Dr. Creating gaps in your perception, that's obvious, right? And when that happens, because the brain is so accustomed to the laws of physics, like objects fall down, not up, etc., when that happens, it clearly triggers the surprise circuitry. And that itself, that feeling of delight and surprise, is absolutely tied also to these dopamine circuits. It's interesting, though, that that doesn't send us into, like, terror. Like the people don't shriek and scream. It depends on the magic trick. When I went there, there was this crazy trick that the guy did. He took out cards and I was invited up to sit next to him. I signed my name on a card. I took the card. I took the card. I tore it up. I put it in my pocket. And at the end of the show, we went through a series of things. At the end of the show, he took off his shoe and presented the card to me with the signature intact and the card intact. And that was my signature. So he clearly created gaps of perception. But at some point as adults, I think as long as we know the context is right, then we can do this. One thing about dopamine that I just want to make sure I mention, and based on something you said earlier, is that one interesting question about the brain is just asking the question, you know, how do we segment time? How do we, how do you know that this podcast has obviously has a beginning and middle and end, but you know, how do we segment time? And so there've been some beautiful experiments done recently showing that, uh, for instance, if you're watching a sports game, regardless of whether or not your team scores, like let's say basketball goes down court, let's say they miss the three pointer. And then, you know, it's a close game. There's a little blip of dopamine. that says that was one segment of time. And so dopamine is a big way in which we segment time. The other way are blinks, believe it or not. Yeah, that every time we blink, there's a paper published in Current Biology, every time we blink, we reset our perception of time. That one I understand more, I guess, than the dopamine. Why would dopamine be involved in time? Perfect question. Turns out that the frequency of blinking is set by the baseline level of dopamine in the brain. Yes, so when people are wide-eyed with excitement and they're just they're not blinking very often, or someone is on a drug that kicks out a lot of dopamine, they hardly ever blink, their pupils are huge. They are actually not segmenting time in the normal fashion. And so much of your life in retrospect is segmented by those peaks in dopamine. Those mark key events in your life. When you met your wife, all the segments of your life are noted by peaks in dopamine or the way that you happen to conceptualize dopamine. And so also people who are depressed are often very focused on the past. Naturally, they default to ruminating on the past. When you adjust people's dopamine levels to healthy levels, they start becoming more forward thinking and more present. And so there's this relationship between blinking and time perception, dopamine and blinking. How you conceptualize time has a lot to do with these peaks in dopamine and when they occur. And this is a big deal because 2020 was a rough year for most people. 2021's. Feeling a little better, but we don't really know where we are in this whole arc of everything that's happening There's a lot of uncertainty Yeah the dopamine peaks and the frequency of those dopamine peaks have everything to do with how we carve up our Experience of time and anyone who spent a lot of time in deep meditation Starts to develop a kind of intuitive internal representation of the fact that time is very fluid in this way And we say time is fluid. What we mean is The secretion of dopamine in these pulses is very fluid. They are under control of what's happening externally, but also how you conceptualize your life. Like, where are you in your life? You know, hopefully, if David Sinclair has his way, and hopefully he will, we will all live to be more than 100 years old, hopefully in good vitality. So this is the more esoteric aspect of dopamine. Real fast, before we move off the time thing, let me ask you. So there was a period in my life, I'll peg it at about two years. Where for whatever reason, it could have been six hours since I last looked at a clock, I would be within three minutes of what time it was. And my wife found it hilarious. And so she'd be like, what time is it? And I'm like, oh, it's 4.58. She'd look at it. It was so weird that it made my radar is like, oh my God, I have this special power. And then it went away. And now I can probably get you within 15 minutes. But it was really eerie. Does that make a prediction? or around like a consistency of dopamine release or something? Yeah, you nailed it. It's the consistency. That's an internal, it's an interval timer, as we say. So when people's dopamine is low, they tend to overestimate. Okay. Okay. And when people's dopamine is high, they tend to underestimate time. Now, it is true that dopamine, when it's released, is a little bit of a stimulant in the system because of the way it works with epinephrine. How finely you slice time. is very dependent on dopamine and your internal level of autonomic arousal. A really good example would be you're really excited about something or you're really stressed about something. It doesn't matter. Dopamine is elevated in excitement, but norepinephrine and epinephrine tend to be elevated anytime we're agitated or excited. Just imagine you need to catch a flight. You're in line at the security and the person in front of you seems like they're going really, really slowly. Your frame rate is faster. You're just carving up time more finely. People who are in... car accidents and then they report everything being in slow motion, your frame rate is smaller. You're essentially getting, you're taking larger time bins. And this is why, let's say you wake up and you're really tired or you just, you're kind of out of it and you look and it's like text messages and emails and all this stuff. The world seems like it's going by really, really fast. Dopamine is what is the dynamic process by, dopamine release, I should say, is the dynamic process by which you adjust time perception. So if you had very keen perception of the passage of time right down to the minute or so that Suggests very regular intervals of dopamine release and that's probably tied to outside events that are below your conscious awareness but Dopamine releases I sort of not to make this PG 13 or R-rated But if we go back to the example of sex sex and sleep are the two times when space and time have a very fluid type relationship it's very Hard to conceive space and time in sleep. That's actually the nature of sleep is we do the long blink No joke, we close the shutters stop bringing in external information and in sleep space and time are very Fluid right things can happen very fast or very slow slow motion. You can be flying it There's a lot of you know, some of it is dreaming but space and time are very fluid in wakefulness Space and time are very anchored by physical events in the world But our perception of those is dynamically regulated by how much dopamine is in there our system. So it's beginning to sound like dopamine does everything, but it's really associated with motivation, craving, and time interval keeping. And so I would be willing to bet that your pulses of dopamine were very regular, just like drops. So interesting. So we do a lot of things. Who knows what I was doing at that period, if it had to do anything, just that I'm getting older. And so it starts to disrupt itself. Who knows? But what are some things? So one thing I've heard you talk about, which I find really interesting, when I think about all the things that we're doing that are disrupting things, all these unintended consequences of modern behavior, I am truly glad that Cell phones, the internet, and pornography did not exist when I was younger because I don't know if at 14 I could have been disciplined enough if I had access to that. And when you think about the things that we're doing right now that have maybe the most grand unintended consequences, where do you land? Yeah, on the timescale of 24 hours, one of the huge mistakes that we all make, and I've said this many times, People have heard me say this before, forgive me, but it turns out it's still true. Getting too much bright light exposure from the hours of 10 p.m. until 4 a.m., unless you have to work shift work, which is a unique case, that bright light exposure between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., even if you adjust the colors of the lights, you still need to get everything really, really dim because it actually blocks the release of dopamine through a pathway that involves a structure called the habenula. The habenula was a kind of cryptic... structure in the brain for a long time, but now we know there's a punishment signal in the brain. You get neurochemically punished for viewing bright light at those hours. How would that be wired in? We'd never be able to expose ourselves to bright light. Ah, so that's a great question. So firelight won't do that. Moonlight's fine. Candles, lights that are dim or low in your environment. So how would we develop that? So the pathway to the habenula and then to these dopamine reducing circuits are the pain pathway that we were referring to earlier. It's a... generic pathway through which lots of different types of signals and stimuli and events can punish us internally. Fuck, this is so good, dude. So I'm going to call this the rich kid effect. And you mentioned hard work earlier. There is a reason I think that children of wealthy parents end up imploding because there is an evolutionary, the punishment pathway. Evolutionary thing that's going on that says you didn't have to work hard for the things that you own. And because from I need you to go hunt and gather and face a saber tooth tiger, I have to reward you for doing hard things and punish you for not doing hard things. Right. Well, and in the case of the generic model of the spoiled rich kid, they actually can't access dopamine. Remember that movie from the 80s? There was a It was called like the toy or something with rich. I was like this motherfucker says toy. I'm gonna have a seizure Yes, I remember God Richard Pryor in that movie and that the kid has everything and he's the he's the epitome of the spoiled brat All the toys all the cars all the things now We see this with people who actually go from rags to riches and then bathe in all their the luxuries They didn't have as a child. These are often the athletes that don't go on to perform. Well again These are people that crash because of other dopamine seeking behaviors I'm not going to call out names, but there are far too many examples of these. And I don't call out names mostly because we are all capable of this. We all would like to think that, oh, if I had all that money or if I had all that success, I would really be a good human being and I wouldn't do those things. Anyone, any human being that is immersed in these dopamine circuits too much or who gets too much pleasure without having to pursue it first and really work and actually experience pain, pleasure, ratcheting back and forth along that. climb, because it wasn't just dopamine like this for you. It was probably pain, pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain, right? They're always proportional to one another. So anyone that does that, it has a tremendously hard time accessing pleasure. They can't do that. And we often think about the extremes of addiction, and those are really severe. But we also have to think about the more subtle forms of something we really love. but indulging in it just a little too often so that it no longer has that edge. There have been really good studies of people who jump out of airplanes with parachutes. I'm sure it's a lot of fun. It looks like a thrill, but people do it over and over and over again. often die doing other things. They often become drug addicts because it's a huge... Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot of that. Interesting. And there are a lot of examples of this. I mean, you can get addicted to anything. The key is to regulate that behavior. So you asked what should people do? Well, certainly I'm trying this now, and I have some good examples. Some young people I know and work with are taking breaks from not just social media, but no cell phone whatsoever. I'm actually trying an odd experiment, which is... for the first hour of every day, no phone. Mostly because I think-This is part of your 25 no-go's. Yes, I have a bunch of no-go. Right. So we have circuitry in the brain related to the so-called basal ganglia. And we have go sort of activating, you know, think gas pedal. And then there's a lot of no-go circuitry. And learning how to keep that no-go, don't circuitry, as we could call it, tuned up is very important. And so many times throughout the day, but I try and get 25 a day where I actively refrain from doing something that I impulsively want to do. I'd be looking at my phone, but it could be. it even be something trivial? Like I want to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water. So I'm actively engaging in self- In denial, not cognitive denial, probably that too, but how would I know? But in action-based denial. So restricting my behavior in some way as a way of keeping these dopamine circuits tuned up. Also not looking at my phone first thing in the morning for an hour, because knowing what we now know about the second phase of sleep and REM sleep being more predominant, the second wave of sleep and the fact that you're working through a lot of emotional and logistical contingencies. you're reshaping your brain in sleep. That's when neuroplasticity occurs during sleep. It's triggered in wakefulness, but it actually takes place in sleep, especially that second half of sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you are in a perfect position to what I call receive the download of all the work that your neural circuitry has been doing the night before. But if you immediately go to a sensory experience, especially a rich sensory experience of stuff scrolling by, you're actually missing the information that you processed at night. And even more importantly, that second half of the night during REM sleep is when the emotional weight of things becomes, let's say, you put it on the shelf properly. Things that are important to emotionally register get put in one shelf. Things that were like the comment you got on Twitter that was triggering doesn't seem like such a big deal after a good night's sleep. And that's because that second half of sleep is actually... When you re-experience these things, but your body can't secrete adrenaline, it's kind of an internal form of therapy or even trauma therapy. And that's why people who don't get that sleep are very, you know, they're easily agitated. They feel like the world is crushing down on them. So when I wake up in the morning, I want to receive ideas that I want to learn from my learning. And if you take in new information, you are not in a position to do that. And 60 minutes is a tough one. So I give myself two no-goes for the 60-minute block if I can do it. And I'll tell you, a lot of mornings I fail, Tom. I don't do it. Interesting. I found that shocking, but I heard you say that in another interview. Well, I mean, I'm human. You know, there are mornings where I get enticed or worse, worse, I find myself reflexively picking up the phone without having made the conscious decision. And that's when I realized that, you know, we are all deep in this process. And I think... We have to regulate it. The experiment I'd like to do, maybe you'll do this with me as a challenge because a challenge is always good, is in the new year I actually want to take every odd waking hour of the day off the phone. So even hours of the day, as long as it's waking, I'm willing to have it on and work with it. But odd hours, just turn it off no matter what. I don't know if this will destroy most of the relationships in my life. But just to see, can I do it on a rigidly externally imposed schedule? Because if you think about it, Most of the growth in life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them. But they are where we learn restraint. Dude, this is so important. I don't know if I hate them anymore. So people will often ask like how I do this, that or the other, whatever it is. Like, Tom, how do you, so I work 93 hours a week. That's like my average. That's your average. So Tom, why do you work 93 hours every week? And the answer is because 93 are joyful and 94 wouldn't. And When I start working more than that, it usually means that I'm juggling so many things that my brain seems to be using sleep as a way to track some of them or something. So I find myself waking up a lot. Now I have a trick that allows me to fall back asleep very fast, but it's still not as restful as just sleeping through the night. What's the trick if you don't mind me interrupting? I don't at all. I have two pairs of AirPod headphones, and I put them in, and I put them on a... fiction book. And I turn the volume down such that if I don't put a little bit of pressure on my ear, I can't make out what they're saying. So as soon as I drift off, the pressure releases, and I can still hear that noise is being made, but I can't track it. And so I'm usually out probably in about three minutes. That changed my life in terms of when I get stressed, I can still fall back asleep. Such a great skill. And just reflecting on what you use. That murmur in the background, this kind of low level, I can't quite detect it, is actually the way that your brain detects things as you're falling asleep. So I wonder if you've triggered your circuit to run in reverse, where you actually can send yourself back under. What it makes me think is that I can't process the problems and listen to a story at the same time. And so my brain clicks over into story mode and is like, oh, we're digesting this story. I'm getting input. So... Because I'm getting input because it's story my brain lets go if I have to solve problems and then that allows me to Fall right back asleep. That's great Such a great skill and waking up in the middle of the night from time to time to use the bathroom is actually quite normal And some people are really obsessed by the fact. Oh, no, I woke up and then they get triggered, but I learned this last year that the The peak in our alertness is actually about 90 minutes before our natural bedtime. And a lot of people, they reach the point in the evening where they're ready to go to sleep, and then they feel all this excitement and surge of energy, and they think, oh no, I'm not going to be able to fall asleep. But that's actually a natural surge that's followed by a dip. A lot of people also have the trouble of waking up in the middle of the night and wondering why they can't fall back asleep. This is dreadfully hard for a lot of people. I struggled that for years. Yeah. And one of the solutions is to go to bed earlier because it means that your melatonin is starting to get released early in the evening. And so we all have the natural ability to push to stay up later if we really need to. This is obvious adaptive. utility. But some people who should go to bed, quote unquote, should go to bed at 9 or 10 PM, they're pushing to 11 or 12, and then their melatonin signal is starting to drop off. Now they can't fall asleep or they're waking up at two or three in the morning and they're in trouble. But it sounds like you hit the right schedule. 93 hours is an impressive output. Yeah, that's a lot of years of making an obscene amount of mistakes. And to close the loop on, so people, how do you accomplish XYZ? And the answer is partly rules. So you have to be obsessed with your goal, right? So for me, that's all obsession, start with a goal. What do you want? Is that thing exciting and honorable? Assuming it's exciting and honorable, there's ways to like create feedback loops, which is largely what we've been talking about today, about attaching the dopaminergic response specifically to the pursuit of that thing rather than the having it. And because I'm so excited and because I so believe in the reality of my goals that I actually could have them and that having them would be awesome, I... can create rules in my life and then i really stick to those rules so once i'm very careful about what rules i put in place because i have to believe that they will actually lead me to this goal that's really exciting for me but if i believe it then i can put them in and then also part of my identity is that i'm the type of person that when i set a rule i follow it so i can create this loop of like feeling good about myself and the thing that i'm pursuing but it really works and i'm shocked how few people Have the kind of rule that you're talking about in the new year to say hey, I'm only gonna do odd hours. There's no phone Yeah, well and like I said, I'm not perfect. I'm not as disciplined as you are about my no-goes I try I actually find that tabulating is kind of fun. Mmm It's also fun to get really triggering comments and and to not close the dopamine loop for them I think if people understood the dopamine reward prediction error that we could end all the amplifying Comment battles online because what happens is if someone takes a jab at you of any kind, there's actually an open dopamine loop waiting for you to respond. And any response actually gives them that dopamine response of success. It's a little bit of a, it's like scoring. or three-pointer. And the no response actually drops their dopamine below baseline. And that's its own form of retaliation. And I have to be careful because I don't want to encourage people to retaliate. But anything that short-circuits the kind of madness of getting pulled into Some online battle that's totally meaningless. It's taking people away from other powerful good things that they could do in the world You know, we've been talking mainly about dopamine and its scheduling and about the fact that it can be attached to anything I think many people find it hard to subjectively attach dopamine to something. They don't want to do This is something that if we'd spoken a year ago I would have my answer would have been a little bit different to the question of how do you get motivated? Well one way to do that is if you are good at subjectively attached dopamine to the pursuit just knowing okay I really am hungry for this I'm just gonna tell myself that you know making you know making it 1% of the way is a success and I'm gonna keep going and I'm gonna keep ratcheting on and that's great if you can do that but for people that can't do that understanding this relationship with the pleasure pain balance can be more powerful just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience the greater the dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process of pursuing more dopamine. And then the other aspect of it is that anytime that we're leaning into action, you know, it has the possibility of being an amplifying process or a depleting process. And the key to that is making sure that you're balancing the dopamine and epinephrine systems. You know, epinephrine being this molecule of universal currency of energy output. It could be out of hate or it could be out of love. love. Epinephrine doesn't care. And actually, dopamine doesn't care. None of these systems care about us. They just work underneath our subconscious control. But when you start to understand that hitting the gas pedal is great, but hitting the gas pedal and then coming off the gas pedal a little bit, you can kind of sit in a more relaxed RPM, actually allows you to go much further. I think that people... Dr. Leaning into action is terrific. I always say you can either be back on your heels, flat-footed, or forward center of mass. The best situation is actually to be right upright, but just know that you can be forward center of mass at any point. And to take it back to sex and reproduction, because it's a salient example, the arc of sex is very interesting, because when you think about autonomic arousal, it turns out that the arousal stage of sex actually involves release of dopamine. But is what we call parasympathetic dominant. It's actually has to be relaxed enough in order to occur Okay, everyone can read between the lines on this Orgasm is actually a I don't want to say full-blown. It's a it's hey, it is a sympathetic Nervous system driven response. It's identical to the stress system. It's driven by the same neural circuits as stress And then what comes afterward? the parasympathetic system goes back up again. It's that deep relaxation. So why do I say this? Not to talk about sex to be, you know, to serve as a highlighter, but rather our species arrived here because of this dance between arousal and relaxation, arousal and relaxation. And one thing we can say for sure about every human being that's alive now is that their parents, at least once, mastered this dance of relaxed and excited, but not too excited. And then really excited and then relaxed. That dance was mastered by all of our parents and that's what delivered us here to some extent. And so what this means is that all the neural circuits from the ones that led to our conception to the ones that lead to us pursuing goals have this balance that's almost like a seesaw, right? There's activation and calm, activation and calm, and it's that dynamic. process that's important to master in every endeavor. So we use sex as an example, but in pursuit of goals, you have to learn how to pursue short-term goals and like the goals within the day, make a cup of coffee and goal and long-term goals. And when I said dopamine is what's setting the, your time perception, it's an interval timer. What you're saying is it's like the two marshmallow experiment done at Stanford, defer the dopamine. And actually, if you can turn the waiting into the dopamine. And then you can extend out the reward for waiting for the second marshmallow 15 minutes later, et cetera, et cetera. And there are many, many examples of this in the psychology and neuroscience literature. And I would say finally, in 2020, we finally as a field got a clear idea of how dopamine is really working. Because before it was all about work, dopamine hit, right? Sex gives you a dopamine hit. The internet gives you a dopamine hit. What we didn't realize is that repeated engagement with these things leads to dopamine depletion and that the pain and pleasure balance is always at work. Dude, that's so brilliant. Dude, one, the Huberman Lab is amazing on YouTube. People need to check that shit out. And your Instagram page is also amazing. Where do you want people to follow you at? Yeah, so, well, thanks for those kind words. I mean them so aggressively, I'll bite through the camera to let people know how seriously I mean that. Thank you. Yeah, so I have an Instagram page. It's Huberman Lab. And there I teach neuroscience in anywhere from one minute to five minute tidbits and a lot of actionable tools that relate to all sorts of things, sleep and motivation, et cetera. And then the Huberman Lab podcast is Apple, Spotify, and we have a YouTube channel for people who wanna watch and listen to it. And there, it's a little bit different than most podcasts. because I will do four episodes all on one general theme, like food and the brain. And these are long, hour to two hour long lectures where I just kind of blab on and on myself, but they're all timestamps so people can get information there. And it's tools and science. And then we have great guests on who are expert in their fields. People like Anna Lemke, luminaries in the field, Matt Walker, folks of that sort, Davidson-Robert Sapolsky, who I've been stalking for four years. He keeps turning me down. We can work on that. No, there's a trick.

It's great to be here. I should say Dr. Andrew Huberman, just so people know what they're about to get. Dude, it's awesome to have you back. Our first interview completely melted my brain.

Researching you is one of my favorite things to do. The breadth of topics that you cover is incredible, none more so than the fact that we can get to our mind through our body, which I think is one of the most incredible things. Before we started rolling, though, I had this whole interview planned. I knew exactly where we were going to go.

And then you made a comment, I was bringing up Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as I do because I'm obsessed. And you said, well, there's only one biological currency and that's dopamine. That's right. And I was like, well, now I know where we're starting. What do you mean by that?

Yeah. So, you know, human beings have evolved tons of technologies and currencies. Bitcoin, Ethereum are not topics I know a lot about. But when you think about dollar, euro, Bitcoin, Ethereum, you think about wins and losses in sport, in life, in relationship, in anything.

Something in your brain and body has to keep track of that. Did you win? Did you lose?

What's a letdown? What's a celebration? And I think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that while the molecule dopamine is associated with reward, it's more about... Motivation and craving.

There's a really classic experiment now that people use to demonstrate this. Take two rats and the rats independently, separate cages, can lever press for food or they can access food. There's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food. So we always thought that food, like many other rewards, like food, sex, warmth when you're cold, cool when you're too warm, is triggering the release of dopamine.

But someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of those animals. And then what you find is that the animal without it. dopamine still enjoys food still enjoys other pleasures so dopamine's not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures it's involved in motivation because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's length believe it or not to get to that lever the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing it will work through some effort to go get the reward whereas the animal or it turns out the human without much dopamine can still experience pleasure they can sit on their couch and cram their face with pleasure-inducing calories or what have you, watch pleasure-inducing things on the television, but they have very little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure. So when I say dopamine is the universal currency of... Everything what I mean is it's driving the motivation to develop new currencies when somebody can sit back and say I'll just throw this number out.

Let's say somebody has a hundred thousand bitcoins, which presumably now is worth Oh my god, certainly more than it was a few years ago The way they can register whether or not they are in a position of wealth or not Has everything to do with the the number they see on the screen or in their bitcoin wallet but that number is converted into a chemical signal that has everything to do with How much you had previously so that so we could talk about the so-called reward prediction error How good you feel with an experience has everything to do with how much you had previously? And dopamine itself is what's driving the human species to create these new technologies. And so while we think of currencies as the goal, it's actually what's really driven the forward evolution of our species has been the desire to go seek things beyond the confines of our skin.

And when I say the common currency is dopamine, what I mean is the molecule dopamine, when secreted in the brain, makes us pursue things, build things, create things, makes us want new things that we don't currently already have. And so it has a lot of dimensions to it, but rather than think about dopamine as a signal for reward, like a dopamine hit, we classically think to talk about it. It's more accurate really to think about dopamine as driving motivation and craving to go seek rewards.

That's the RAD experiment. And it's a way of tabulating where we are in our life. Are we doing well or are we doing poorly?

And that happens on very short timescales. Like do you wake up feeling good or do you wake up feeling kind of low or on long timescales? If you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life, how are you doing? How do you gauge that? Well, it has everything to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years.

So you're always comparing it and all of this is subconscious. But what's cool is that once you make these processes conscious, once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior, then you can actually work with it. So it's one of the instances where knowledge of knowledge actually turns out to be a really useful tool.

Dude, that's crazy to me. So one of the things that I get hit up about all the time is people feel stuck. And as you like really push on them to figure out why they feel stuck, they'll be like, yeah, I want to do that. And, but I just, you know, I can't get out of bed or I don't have the energy to pursue it or whatever.

And you get into this common thing that people say in mindset. And I really believe it, but I find it far more interesting when you're talking about it from a neurochemical standpoint, which is you just don't want it badly enough. And And when I think about my own life, I sometimes worry that I'm either more malleable than other people or that I have a greater ability to manipulate my dopamine release or whatever because I'm very good at building desire.

And I like the way that desire feels. Now when you use the word hunger, I think people get confused because I actually don't enjoy being hungry for food. I find that totally unpleasurable. However, Being hungry for sex, I find incredibly, I feel alive, I feel focused, I feel energized, I feel aggressive.

It's complex for sure, but I find that feeling, the act of wanting something in the future in that kind or in business and trying to build something. In fact, that's an interesting insight into my own self about I like to build. And do we know, so we...

Dopamine is the neurochemistry of the pursuit of making sure that I have the energy to go. But do we know how we can spike that? Well, first of all, it's clear to me based on your description that you've tapped into these channels that release dopamine because craving and wanting, whether or not it's sex or money or connection or anything, all right, that's the primary trigger for dopamine release. Yep.

Now. Sex and reproduction makes the most sense from the perspective of evolution. I mean, any species, every species tends to have two primary goals. One, protect its young. And second, make more of itself, usually in reverse order, right?

So even for people that don't want children, I mean, you might not, or people, of course, not everyone is having sex just to reproduce. But at a primordial level, that's what those circuits are there for. So every species, in particular mammalian species, where there's a lot of parenting and caretaking of the young, tries to make more of itself.

And everything that you see, like maternal aggression, which is a powerful circuit that gets activated after females of any species, in particular mammals, give birth, they will fight to the death and they gain superhuman strength in order to protect their young. There's a known circuit for that in the brain that gets activated once a female has offspring. And it's robust. Inside Tracker is offering our listeners 25% off their entire store, including InnerAge 2.0.

Just visit insidetracker.com slash impact theory. All right, guys, check out Inside Tracker today. Take care and be legendary.

That's so interesting, man. Like, have you read the book, The Female Brain? I have not.

Oh, my God. So I just probably lost a lot of points. No, no, no, but one, it'll be super interesting because you'll know if she's on the right track from a neuroscience perspective.

I remember reading the book. At the time, I thought I was going to have kids. And I remember thinking, whoa, like this book chronicles what happens to a woman's brain and how things change.

And I was like, when you have kids, man, you are inviting a neurochemical change in your significant other that is going to play itself out in a very real way. And I'd be lying if I said that wasn't one of the things, one of the many things, but one of the things that I factored into not having kids. Interesting. And then the same with menopause, that it's this really dramatic sort of reorganizing might not be the right word, but that it has real implications in the way that the person moves, just as the decline of testosterone has in men.

Well, on the positive side, during pregnancy, the woman's hippocampus, her brain area associated with memory and retention of information. It goes through a period in which it gets worse for certain types of information, but then achieves superior levels of working memory once the babies arrive because there are a lot of things to manage. So this makes sense.

This is true in rodents. This is true in humans. And then in terms of the biology of the father, we now know that... Because typically parents have, you know, it does seem like one spouse always does more than the other. But even in the most evenly divided households, there's usually some co-parenting of some sort.

But that the father has a big increase in the hormone prolactin when the mother is expecting. And the prolactin lays down body fat. It prepares for sleepless nights.

For women, it sparks the circuitry for milk letdown for nursing. So the dad bod has a lot to do with prolactin. This is true in birds, in small mammals, and in humans. And there was a paper published in Nature on humans specifically about this. And when you think about the relationship between dopamine and prolactin, it's interesting and it takes us back to this motivation and craving that you were describing earlier, which is that dopamine and prolactin work in opposite fashion.

So the most salient example of this is sex and reproduction, where anticipation of sex and reproduction. Dr. Greatly increases dopamine, but post-sex, it doesn't have to be for reproduction, there's a spike in prolactin in the male. And that spike in prolactin is actually what sets the refractory period during which he can't mate again.

So it sets a period of quiescence to keep men... It's for pair bonding, for the exchange of chemicals through the nose, through the skin, and through the sweat, mainly through odor. We could talk about pheromones if you want, but that's a topic that's somewhat controversial. Actual identity of pheromones in humans has not been identified, but there are pheromone effects in humans.

It's controversial in that people don't agree what's really happening? Well, okay, so there's this culture of biologists that have clearly identified pheromone effects in non-humans and non-human primates. But whether or not those are...

The classic definition of a pheromone effect is that it's subconscious, that you can't actually detect the smell. However, we know that smells themselves, conscious detection of them can evoke... Very robust physiological responses. One example to just stay in this arena of thought is that a guy by the name of Noam Sobel, who's at the Weizmann Institute, he used to be at Berkeley.

He has a lab over in Israel. His amazing lab works on olfaction, smell. And they discovered that the scent of women's tears causes a dramatic and significant reduction in testosterone in men. What? Absolutely.

And this was published, if anyone wants to go look it up, it was published in Science Magazine. You know, it... You can smell tears? Yeah. We have, you know, the Super Bowl of publishing and science is science, nature, and self.

Those are the three top journals. This is published in Science Magazine, very stringent. The smell of tears. Now, it's subconscious at some level.

But the other thing that if we were going to kind of play around in this hormones and interactions between humans, there are some really interesting examples. So, for instance, men will rate the smell of a woman's skin or sweat or the perception of her face as more beautiful. during the pre-ovulatory phase of her menstrual cycle. That pre-ovulatory phase is associated with a number of different changes in hormones. Just that smell will increase testosterone in a male and oral contraception in the female.

When women take oral contraception, it adjusts their hormones such that men no longer detect this change in how attractive women are. It doesn't mean they find them unattractive, but it means they don't find them increasingly attractive during this certain period of time. their menstrual cycle. So we are constantly signaling back and forth through hormones. In fact, we met over there and shook hands because we've been tested for COVID and the rest.

We shook hands. And what happened and what happens... within 30 seconds of any human being contacting one another is they shake hands and then they wipe the chemicals of the other person on their face or body.

Gnome's lab has also shown this. And so we are constantly signaling through chemical exchange. Sometimes it's subconscious, and those are the so-called pheromone effects. Sometimes it's low levels of odors that are beneath our conscious detection.

And sometimes it's outright, wow, this person smells really, really good. Or they look particularly good today. Oftentimes that's tied to the period in which they're ovulating.

in their menstrual cycle. So I want to plant a flag here about all the things that we do that are messing with these mechanisms like cologne or deodorant. Or oral contraception, of which I'm not saying is-Pornography, like all of this stuff. Yeah, and oral contraception has served a great role for certain people.

Some people might say this is an ethical discussion. Is it good? Is it bad?

But either way, it is- having an effect. So to remove, I only look at things through the lens of biology, not through the lens of whether or not we should or shouldn't do things. Facts.

I love it. Okay, so we're planning that flag, we're coming back to it. But now I want to get to how do we spike intentionally? You've talked about we can spike testosterone, but I want to know, can we spike dopamine? Yeah.

And you've done this. Your example of craving is Actually, what you crave, you crave the feeling of craving, is beautiful because what it means is that you don't allow yourself to go so far down the arc of the dopamine trajectory to get to the other source of motivation. So there are two sources of motivation as it relates to dopamine, and then we can think about tools that we could export from these that are nested in neurobiology. The first is to do what you do, which is to be able to sense the craving as its own form of pleasure.

This has kind of remnants of Carol Dweck's growth mindset. you eventually develop a pleasure in the seeking and the striving has flavors of a David Goggins type approach where it seems like he gets pleasure from the friction itself. And so there are elements of that. You seem to have that as well. But if you can start to identify the craving as its own internally released drug, this thing dopamine, that is a source of motivation, then what you realize is that capturing the reward is wonderful, but But attaching dopamine to the reward is actually a little bit dangerous.

Attaching. Yeah. Celebrating the win, celebrating the win more than the pursuit, it actually sets you up for failure in the future.

And so this gets us right into something called dopamine reward prediction error. And reward prediction error is basically if you expect something to be really great and then it's not quite that great, your dopamine baseline lowers. And now understanding what we know about dopamine, that means that not only did you...

You feel as if you lost because it wasn't as much a celebration as you thought it would be, but it also means that you're starting from a lower place, meaning you are less motivated. Now, the simpler way to conceptualize this is I have a colleague at Stanford. She runs the addiction dual diagnosis clinic. Her name is Dr. Anna Lemke.

She has a book called Dopamine Nation that's out right now. And she's really described this pleasure-pain balance where anytime you have a bunch of dopamine and you're in pursuit, pursuit, pursuit, After you achieve a win, now this could be a business win, a relationship, a win of any kind, but inevitably there's going to be a tipping back of the scale on the pain side. And that pain side is always going to go a little bit higher than the dopamine side. So this is what you would feel if you pursued a goal like building a big company, here it comes, here it comes, the big sale, and then there's the, well, what now?

You have the kind of letdown. Now, if you wait, if you simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while, the scale starts to reset. The problem is a lot of people immediately roll right into the next pursuit.

And then what happens is that scale starts to get stuck on the pain side a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And pretty soon, no amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation. So what does this mean in terms of an actual tool?

Well, first of all, If people can do what you do, they're going to be in a much better position in life. It doesn't matter if it's school, sport, relationship, any domain of life. If you can start to register, ah, that craving and that friction and that desire, that almost kind of low level of agitation, sometimes high level of agitation, that is that I'm trying to impose my will on the world in a benevolent way, we hope, that's dopamine. It's working with its close cousin, which is epinephrine. which is adrenaline.

They are very close cousins. In fact, dopamine manufacturers epinephrine. A lot of people don't know this, but adrenaline is actually made from the molecule dopamine.

Okay. So those two are hanging out together. It's like crave work, crave work, crave and work, crave and work, crave and work.

And then you get the win. And some people allow the big peak in dopamine to be associated with the win. And smart people learn to adjust their celebration internally, right?

This is all internal. You could throw the biggest party in the world, but as long as you're kind of laid back and looking at this, not letting yourself get manic crazy. you won't necessarily crash as hard. And pretty soon your system will reset.

So you take the day, you clean up the dishes, you relax, you go, what now? I'm feeling a little low. Well, rather than going out and spiking your dopamine again, just wait, understand that the scale will reset.

again. Give yourself a few days where you're going to feel a little kind of underwhelmed. Things aren't going to be as interesting.

It's going to be hard to trigger that big release because you just had the peak. Well, if you adjust that, you relax, you understand there's always a little bit of a postpartum depression. We sometimes hear about postpartum depression. That's a clinical thing, but there's always that kind of, hmm, today's not as exciting as the previous days. What am I going to do with my life?

But then if you let it start ratcheting up again, then what you realize is your capacity to do that is going to be a little bit more Capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator not just seeking dopamine rewards That is infinite and I can say with with great certainty that this is How you were able to build a big company and sell it how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it how you? Constantly seeking because seeking is the reward and I think for most people we think of the reward as the finish line And so the key is to get to the finish line step into the end zone, but no end zone dance. It's just like yep And now I'm going to go do it again.

That's really the key. That's the key to doing it over and over. And when I see big athletes or academics or anyone or musicians and they rise and crash, it's clear they've lost the touch with the motivation evoked dopamine.

And they've lost touch probably because it hasn't really been described by the neuroscience community until Anna has started talking about this stuff publicly. And I'm just kind of echoing what she's beautifully said. said much better than I am, which is that you should always expect that after a bunch of pleasure, there's going to be that low and then that craving.

How do I get back to there again? And the key is you have to walk the staircase again. You don't get to do this as a square wave pull. You know, you don't get to just ascend, ascend, ascend. It's always up, down, up a little bit higher, down, up, you know, it's, that's the function.

So I don't know if that resonates with your experience. I'm over here freaking out. So you've literally just explained what I will say is the single most important loop if you want to be successful.

And you used words, attach, right? You had another one, which was about your, I forget the exact word, but you're taking, you're inserting yourself consciously into the process. Because what I learned very early on, and I'm so grateful in the same way that you are grateful that your upbringing wasn't. perfect, but it ended up giving you a frame of reference and insights that have propelled you forward. I'm very grateful that I spent a decade just trying to get rich.

It was the stated mission, I would say it every day. Like, I'm here to get rich. I show up to work to get rich. This is about getting rich, rich, rich, rich, rich.

And it didn't work. And so, and my wife pulls me aside, and she's like, you're now damaging the marriage. Like, you're just so fiendishly focused on the goal that there's nothing as integrated in your life. You're doing something you hate for an end state that may never come. And that was so profound and it shook me so deeply.

And it suddenly became clear that from a neurological perspective, what I wanted was to feel alive. And once I put everything in the pursuit, I'm just interested in can I show up every day and sincerely pursue this thing, which I may never get. But I'm going to honor myself, celebrate myself, big up myself, as the Brits would say, for just showing up today.

actually trying to make it happen. And one, that's way more sustainable. And then two, you don't, you don't get tricked into thinking that, oh, when I get this thing that I'll feel good, because it's the craving that makes me feel alive. So it's the state of wanting that is in and of itself the pleasurable act. That's right.

And so I began to use the metaphor of I'm going to climb this mountain only to want the next mountain to climb. And once I knew that, well, then you have to be totally comfortable dropping back down and starting all over. Now, the interesting thing, and I don't know if I'm fooling myself or if I have so integrated that trick, but the comedown isn't hard for me. So I think my last day at Quest was a Monday. And Tuesday, I started Impact Theory.

And so that went from I had 3,000 employees. Your position matters. You get a lot of deference. You've got a privileged parking space. You know what I mean?

Like there's a lot of things that go into it. But I didn't, none of like my reward system was tied to that. So it was very easy for me to start the next day with there was only seven of us and no one had time for any deference of any kind.

And I went from having an EA, which you can't imagine how amazing that is, to not and you're doing everything for yourself again. But that wasn't a painful thing because I was so focused on, all right, cool, this is step one again. And now can we repeat?

Well, it helps if you can expect that there will be a little bit of a dip post-win or post-whatever. That's helpful. There's always a refractory period of any kind, so to speak.

If you expect it, that's great because you eliminate the downside of the reward prediction error. Reward prediction error can also be conceptualized as I tell you we're going to go to this restaurant. I keep building up the food building.

up the food, I actually raise the expectation and the requirement that that food be really spectacular. Better off, I just tell you it's going to be pretty good and then you're wowed by it, right? Because if your dopamine was higher in anticipation than the actual food evoked... Well, then it makes sense why you're always integrating over the dopamine release you had previously. Now, there are a couple of things that you said in there that I want to highlight, which I find so interesting.

And we can get a little bit Eastern philosophy, mystical here, but tie it back to some real neuroscience, which is you said, you know, that's the juice. The motivation is the juice. You know that. If you look at Eastern philosophy and they talk about chi, you know, and this, you know, what is that?

I wager that is dopamine. The desire to pursue things and to create more of oneself and as a species, whether or not you decide to have kids or not, those circuits all use the one universal currency, dopamine, of wanting more things that are outside the confines of your skin. And that's what's driven forward evolution of individuals and families and cultures and our species as a whole. And again.

The circuitry has been there for many, many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. And so it's, and it's highly conserved. And so what that means is that it doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin or Ethereum.

It doesn't matter if it's putting rockets on other planets. It doesn't matter if it's building the first automobile, it's the same currency. So understanding those cycles is really key.

The other thing is the element of pain. I think that understanding that pain and pleasure in this really dynamic balance can also help us, which in the following way. Any pain that you feel, the longer day, the less sleep, the kind of agony that things aren't working, that power outlet doesn't work, or the internet is slow, whatever it is, the amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly related to how much pain you experience.

So we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks and they would measure their response. And then they say, we're going to increase it. We're going to increase it.

Eventually, they get to the point where a slight shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure. Now, you couldn't do these experiments anymore. These are not the experiments I do in my lab.

These are older experiments. Dr. For instance, and this has been discussed in scientific research papers, giving somebody like a 10-minute ice bath, for instance, or even a 3-minute ice bath, or a 1-minute ice bath is quite painful. But there was a study from the University of Prague, a European Journal of Physiology showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus, the amount of dopamine release goes up for two and a half hours to 250% above baseline. And that's not because the ice bath Dr. Itself evokes dopamine release.

A lot of people think, oh, cold water evokes dopamine release. No, pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over. Yesterday I tweaked my back because I do this stupid thing every few years, the same stupid thing and it's really painful. And then you just remember all the ways in which you can't move around.

I was like standing up this morning, I'm like, ah, and just walking is so painful. As the pain has started to dissipate, you get a little bit of a high. Right? You get a little bit of a euphoria. That's dopamine because of the degree of pain you experienced previously predicts how much pleasure.

So when you start a company down in the dregs and you're shoveling again, that's beautiful because that means that the win that you achieve is going to be as good or greater than the one you had previously, in your case with Quest. And so we go back to this example of the person that's not motivated, that can't get off the couch, that doesn't want to do anything. Well, this is the problem. Remember the rat experiment they are effectively the rat with no dopamine, but they can still achieve Some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories by consuming social media and look I'm not judging I do this stuff too, right? Scrolling social media if you've ever scrolled social media and you're like, I don't even know why I'm doing this It doesn't really feel that good And I can remember a time where you'd see something it was just so cool or you see something online I remember this when TED talks first came out.

I was like, this is amazing There's some at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights. And then now that they're like a gazillion TED talks I remember spending a winter in my office at when I was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and Binging TED talks in the background thinking this is a good use of my time pretty soon. They all sucked to me I was like this isn't good.

So what you need to do is stop watching TED talks for a while And then they become interesting again. And that's this pain-pleasure balance. And so for people that aren't feeling motivated, the problem is they're not motivated but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance. So they're getting the little mild hits of opiates. opioid system.

And if you think about the opioid drugs, as opposed to dopaminergic drugs, dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything. You know, drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed, right? They hardly notice anything except what they want. more of, more, more, more, more, more.

It's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward. It's very circular. Only the drug can give that much dopamine. Nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself.

So there's that. And then there's the kind of opioid-like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving. And this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine in neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward.

It's the buildup to the reward. And the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within. But when we can just sit there like the rat with no dopamine, gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, What you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits. And so there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything.

And that's a pretty dark picture. So the keys are to pursue rewards, but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins. The celebration has to be less than the pursuit. And that's hard for some people to do.

It's got to be that your celebration is slightly less dopaminergic. It can be very reflective. You can be in gratitude. Those are other neurotransmitter systems.

But you don't want to be on that high as you celebrate the win. You want to be trickling out your dopamine regularly until you pursue things. And then just understand there will always be a crash of pain.

And the more pain you experience, the more dopamine you can achieve if you get back on that. avenue of pursuit. Yeah, this gets into unintended consequences of modernity. And so we're living through this time where we, you know, going back to that flag that we planted of these unintended consequences of, oh, I can make myself smell good. Oh, I can, you know, watch the coolest video.

Oh, like TikTok. Dude, I don't have an addictive personality. That's the first thing where I'll lose an hour and be like, what the fuck did I just do?

Well, the problem is not pleasures. The problem is that. Pleasure experienced without prior requirement for pursuit is terrible for us.

It's terrible for us as individuals. It's terrible for us as groups. And I have great confidence in the human species to work this out. But we are finding now, and we are going to increasingly find, that those who will be successful, young or old, are going to be those people who can create their own internal buffers.

They're going to be able to control their relationship. to pleasures because the proximity to pleasures and the availability is the problem. If you look at the increase in use of drugs of abuse or prescription medication, which at least at the first pass deliver pleasure, pain relief, the whole issue with the opioid crisis and dopaminergic drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, there sometimes is a clinical need, but tons of people are taking those recreationally now or to study.

Huge dopamine increases are what those cause. That is a problem. That's a serious problem because it creates a cycle where you need more of that specific thing. I would say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.

God, that's such a good definition. And I don't like to comment too much on enlightenment because I don't really know what that is as a neurobiologist, but a good life, we could say, is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. And even better, a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and includes pleasure through motivation and hard work.

And understanding this pain-pleasure balance whereby if you experience pain and you can continue to be in that friction and exert effort, the rewards are that much greater when they arrive. And so I think that if you look at any drug of abuse or any situation where somebody isn't motivated or thinks... Now, they may have clinically diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but a lot of what people think is ADHD, it turns out, is people just over-consuming dopamine from various sources.

And then, and also the context within a TikTok feed is the context switch is insane. The brain has never seen, first of all, this is the first time in human evolution that we wrote with our thumbs, but that's a pretty benign shift. And then the other shift is normally you walk from one room to another or from a field into the trees or from a hut into or a house or whatever it is. But now you can get 10,000 context switches in that 30 minutes of scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. And so it's all about self-regulation.

We are going to select for the people that can self-regulate. And so then people say, well, how do you self-regulate? How do kids self-regulate?

Well, this is my hope. And one of the reasons I've gotten excited about public education and teaching neuroscience is that this is a place where knowledge of knowledge actually can allow oneself to intervene. When you think, I'm feeling low. I don't feel good. Nothing really feels good.

Am I depressed? Maybe. But maybe you're just, you've saturated the dopamine circuits.

You're now in the pain part of things. What do you do? Well, you have to stop.

You need to replenish dopamine. You need to stop engaging with this behavior and then your pleasure for it will come back. But you have to constantly control the hinge.

It's not just about being back and forth on the seesaw. You have to make sure the hinge doesn't get stuck in pain or in pleasure. So it's a dynamic process being a human being. It's not easy. And remember, these circuits didn't evolve for this purpose.

They evolved primarily for making more of ourselves. That's why they're so closely tied to the reproductive circuits. And that's why it was interesting and very relevant that you said that your desire to have sex with your wife is one of the most powerful feelings.

And it kind of, from a neurochemical perspective, it wicks out into all these other pursuits, right? Those other pursuits aren't about sex. Per se, but it's the same molecule. So the feeling is the same It's just that some people for some people the amplitude of that dopamine Signal for craving sex is very high for some people that's lower and it's higher for video games You know, whatever you lean into and and you think about often in These pursuits will start to reshape these circuits because these dopaminergic circuits are tied to everything You know, there are examples of people getting addicted to the most incredible things.

They're also examples of people getting very good but not addicted to chess, for instance. It's all the same general set of mechanisms. Yeah.

You talked earlier about the knowledge of knowledge. And that was the big breakthrough for me at the darkest period of my life. I happened to grab a book.

We talked about this briefly in our first interview. I happened to grab a book that talked about neuroplasticity. And they were hypothesizing maybe this is a thing. And that...

gave me hope because I could imagine what was going on in my brain. And once I can visualize it, then I feel like I can insert myself into it. It's why I've gotten so interested in health, why I'm so interested in neuroscience, is for me, if I were sliding towards depression, I would do exactly what you're saying. I would assess that and be like, okay, wait a second.

I know that I can insert conscious control. I know that this is a biological experience. And I'm obsessed with that idea that you're having a biological experience.

And To me, like there's some people that see the way the magic trick is done and it loses the magic. Then for other people, it's like you see that it's, this is somebody that spent 30,000 hours learning how to move their hands so that you don't notice that they just move the coin, you know, from this hand to this hand. It blows me away.

I love magic. Before the pandemic, a friend took me up to the Magic Castle here in Hollywood and there's some incredible stuff going on. Magic is actually really cool. We could, just as a, from a neuroscience perspective, magic, it's all about Dr. Creating gaps in your perception, that's obvious, right?

And when that happens, because the brain is so accustomed to the laws of physics, like objects fall down, not up, etc., when that happens, it clearly triggers the surprise circuitry. And that itself, that feeling of delight and surprise, is absolutely tied also to these dopamine circuits. It's interesting, though, that that doesn't send us into, like, terror.

Like the people don't shriek and scream. It depends on the magic trick. When I went there, there was this crazy trick that the guy did. He took out cards and I was invited up to sit next to him.

I signed my name on a card. I took the card. I took the card. I tore it up. I put it in my pocket.

And at the end of the show, we went through a series of things. At the end of the show, he took off his shoe and presented the card to me with the signature intact and the card intact. And that was my signature. So he clearly created gaps of perception. But at some point as adults, I think as long as we know the context is right, then we can do this.

One thing about dopamine that I just want to make sure I mention, and based on something you said earlier, is that one interesting question about the brain is just asking the question, you know, how do we segment time? How do we, how do you know that this podcast has obviously has a beginning and middle and end, but you know, how do we segment time? And so there've been some beautiful experiments done recently showing that, uh, for instance, if you're watching a sports game, regardless of whether or not your team scores, like let's say basketball goes down court, let's say they miss the three pointer. And then, you know, it's a close game.

There's a little blip of dopamine. that says that was one segment of time. And so dopamine is a big way in which we segment time.

The other way are blinks, believe it or not. Yeah, that every time we blink, there's a paper published in Current Biology, every time we blink, we reset our perception of time. That one I understand more, I guess, than the dopamine.

Why would dopamine be involved in time? Perfect question. Turns out that the frequency of blinking is set by the baseline level of dopamine in the brain. Yes, so when people are wide-eyed with excitement and they're just they're not blinking very often, or someone is on a drug that kicks out a lot of dopamine, they hardly ever blink, their pupils are huge. They are actually not segmenting time in the normal fashion.

And so much of your life in retrospect is segmented by those peaks in dopamine. Those mark key events in your life. When you met your wife, all the segments of your life are noted by peaks in dopamine or the way that you happen to conceptualize dopamine. And so also people who are depressed are often very focused on the past. Naturally, they default to ruminating on the past.

When you adjust people's dopamine levels to healthy levels, they start becoming more forward thinking and more present. And so there's this relationship between blinking and time perception, dopamine and blinking. How you conceptualize time has a lot to do with these peaks in dopamine and when they occur.

And this is a big deal because 2020 was a rough year for most people. 2021's. Feeling a little better, but we don't really know where we are in this whole arc of everything that's happening There's a lot of uncertainty Yeah the dopamine peaks and the frequency of those dopamine peaks have everything to do with how we carve up our Experience of time and anyone who spent a lot of time in deep meditation Starts to develop a kind of intuitive internal representation of the fact that time is very fluid in this way And we say time is fluid.

What we mean is The secretion of dopamine in these pulses is very fluid. They are under control of what's happening externally, but also how you conceptualize your life. Like, where are you in your life? You know, hopefully, if David Sinclair has his way, and hopefully he will, we will all live to be more than 100 years old, hopefully in good vitality.

So this is the more esoteric aspect of dopamine. Real fast, before we move off the time thing, let me ask you. So there was a period in my life, I'll peg it at about two years.

Where for whatever reason, it could have been six hours since I last looked at a clock, I would be within three minutes of what time it was. And my wife found it hilarious. And so she'd be like, what time is it? And I'm like, oh, it's 4.58. She'd look at it.

It was so weird that it made my radar is like, oh my God, I have this special power. And then it went away. And now I can probably get you within 15 minutes.

But it was really eerie. Does that make a prediction? or around like a consistency of dopamine release or something?

Yeah, you nailed it. It's the consistency. That's an internal, it's an interval timer, as we say.

So when people's dopamine is low, they tend to overestimate. Okay. Okay.

And when people's dopamine is high, they tend to underestimate time. Now, it is true that dopamine, when it's released, is a little bit of a stimulant in the system because of the way it works with epinephrine. How finely you slice time.

is very dependent on dopamine and your internal level of autonomic arousal. A really good example would be you're really excited about something or you're really stressed about something. It doesn't matter.

Dopamine is elevated in excitement, but norepinephrine and epinephrine tend to be elevated anytime we're agitated or excited. Just imagine you need to catch a flight. You're in line at the security and the person in front of you seems like they're going really, really slowly.

Your frame rate is faster. You're just carving up time more finely. People who are in... car accidents and then they report everything being in slow motion, your frame rate is smaller.

You're essentially getting, you're taking larger time bins. And this is why, let's say you wake up and you're really tired or you just, you're kind of out of it and you look and it's like text messages and emails and all this stuff. The world seems like it's going by really, really fast.

Dopamine is what is the dynamic process by, dopamine release, I should say, is the dynamic process by which you adjust time perception. So if you had very keen perception of the passage of time right down to the minute or so that Suggests very regular intervals of dopamine release and that's probably tied to outside events that are below your conscious awareness but Dopamine releases I sort of not to make this PG 13 or R-rated But if we go back to the example of sex sex and sleep are the two times when space and time have a very fluid type relationship it's very Hard to conceive space and time in sleep. That's actually the nature of sleep is we do the long blink No joke, we close the shutters stop bringing in external information and in sleep space and time are very Fluid right things can happen very fast or very slow slow motion. You can be flying it There's a lot of you know, some of it is dreaming but space and time are very fluid in wakefulness Space and time are very anchored by physical events in the world But our perception of those is dynamically regulated by how much dopamine is in there our system. So it's beginning to sound like dopamine does everything, but it's really associated with motivation, craving, and time interval keeping.

And so I would be willing to bet that your pulses of dopamine were very regular, just like drops. So interesting. So we do a lot of things. Who knows what I was doing at that period, if it had to do anything, just that I'm getting older.

And so it starts to disrupt itself. Who knows? But what are some things? So one thing I've heard you talk about, which I find really interesting, when I think about all the things that we're doing that are disrupting things, all these unintended consequences of modern behavior, I am truly glad that Cell phones, the internet, and pornography did not exist when I was younger because I don't know if at 14 I could have been disciplined enough if I had access to that.

And when you think about the things that we're doing right now that have maybe the most grand unintended consequences, where do you land? Yeah, on the timescale of 24 hours, one of the huge mistakes that we all make, and I've said this many times, People have heard me say this before, forgive me, but it turns out it's still true. Getting too much bright light exposure from the hours of 10 p.m. until 4 a.m., unless you have to work shift work, which is a unique case, that bright light exposure between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., even if you adjust the colors of the lights, you still need to get everything really, really dim because it actually blocks the release of dopamine through a pathway that involves a structure called the habenula.

The habenula was a kind of cryptic... structure in the brain for a long time, but now we know there's a punishment signal in the brain. You get neurochemically punished for viewing bright light at those hours. How would that be wired in? We'd never be able to expose ourselves to bright light.

Ah, so that's a great question. So firelight won't do that. Moonlight's fine. Candles, lights that are dim or low in your environment.

So how would we develop that? So the pathway to the habenula and then to these dopamine reducing circuits are the pain pathway that we were referring to earlier. It's a...

generic pathway through which lots of different types of signals and stimuli and events can punish us internally. Fuck, this is so good, dude. So I'm going to call this the rich kid effect.

And you mentioned hard work earlier. There is a reason I think that children of wealthy parents end up imploding because there is an evolutionary, the punishment pathway. Evolutionary thing that's going on that says you didn't have to work hard for the things that you own.

And because from I need you to go hunt and gather and face a saber tooth tiger, I have to reward you for doing hard things and punish you for not doing hard things. Right. Well, and in the case of the generic model of the spoiled rich kid, they actually can't access dopamine. Remember that movie from the 80s? There was a It was called like the toy or something with rich.

I was like this motherfucker says toy. I'm gonna have a seizure Yes, I remember God Richard Pryor in that movie and that the kid has everything and he's the he's the epitome of the spoiled brat All the toys all the cars all the things now We see this with people who actually go from rags to riches and then bathe in all their the luxuries They didn't have as a child. These are often the athletes that don't go on to perform.

Well again These are people that crash because of other dopamine seeking behaviors I'm not going to call out names, but there are far too many examples of these. And I don't call out names mostly because we are all capable of this. We all would like to think that, oh, if I had all that money or if I had all that success, I would really be a good human being and I wouldn't do those things. Anyone, any human being that is immersed in these dopamine circuits too much or who gets too much pleasure without having to pursue it first and really work and actually experience pain, pleasure, ratcheting back and forth along that.

climb, because it wasn't just dopamine like this for you. It was probably pain, pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain, pleasure, pain, right? They're always proportional to one another.

So anyone that does that, it has a tremendously hard time accessing pleasure. They can't do that. And we often think about the extremes of addiction, and those are really severe.

But we also have to think about the more subtle forms of something we really love. but indulging in it just a little too often so that it no longer has that edge. There have been really good studies of people who jump out of airplanes with parachutes. I'm sure it's a lot of fun.

It looks like a thrill, but people do it over and over and over again. often die doing other things. They often become drug addicts because it's a huge...

Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot of that.

Interesting. And there are a lot of examples of this. I mean, you can get addicted to anything. The key is to regulate that behavior.

So you asked what should people do? Well, certainly I'm trying this now, and I have some good examples. Some young people I know and work with are taking breaks from not just social media, but no cell phone whatsoever. I'm actually trying an odd experiment, which is... for the first hour of every day, no phone.

Mostly because I think-This is part of your 25 no-go's. Yes, I have a bunch of no-go. Right.

So we have circuitry in the brain related to the so-called basal ganglia. And we have go sort of activating, you know, think gas pedal. And then there's a lot of no-go circuitry. And learning how to keep that no-go, don't circuitry, as we could call it, tuned up is very important.

And so many times throughout the day, but I try and get 25 a day where I actively refrain from doing something that I impulsively want to do. I'd be looking at my phone, but it could be. it even be something trivial? Like I want to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water. So I'm actively engaging in self- In denial, not cognitive denial, probably that too, but how would I know?

But in action-based denial. So restricting my behavior in some way as a way of keeping these dopamine circuits tuned up. Also not looking at my phone first thing in the morning for an hour, because knowing what we now know about the second phase of sleep and REM sleep being more predominant, the second wave of sleep and the fact that you're working through a lot of emotional and logistical contingencies. you're reshaping your brain in sleep. That's when neuroplasticity occurs during sleep.

It's triggered in wakefulness, but it actually takes place in sleep, especially that second half of sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you are in a perfect position to what I call receive the download of all the work that your neural circuitry has been doing the night before. But if you immediately go to a sensory experience, especially a rich sensory experience of stuff scrolling by, you're actually missing the information that you processed at night.

And even more importantly, that second half of the night during REM sleep is when the emotional weight of things becomes, let's say, you put it on the shelf properly. Things that are important to emotionally register get put in one shelf. Things that were like the comment you got on Twitter that was triggering doesn't seem like such a big deal after a good night's sleep.

And that's because that second half of sleep is actually... When you re-experience these things, but your body can't secrete adrenaline, it's kind of an internal form of therapy or even trauma therapy. And that's why people who don't get that sleep are very, you know, they're easily agitated.

They feel like the world is crushing down on them. So when I wake up in the morning, I want to receive ideas that I want to learn from my learning. And if you take in new information, you are not in a position to do that.

And 60 minutes is a tough one. So I give myself two no-goes for the 60-minute block if I can do it. And I'll tell you, a lot of mornings I fail, Tom.

I don't do it. Interesting. I found that shocking, but I heard you say that in another interview.

Well, I mean, I'm human. You know, there are mornings where I get enticed or worse, worse, I find myself reflexively picking up the phone without having made the conscious decision. And that's when I realized that, you know, we are all deep in this process.

And I think... We have to regulate it. The experiment I'd like to do, maybe you'll do this with me as a challenge because a challenge is always good, is in the new year I actually want to take every odd waking hour of the day off the phone.

So even hours of the day, as long as it's waking, I'm willing to have it on and work with it. But odd hours, just turn it off no matter what. I don't know if this will destroy most of the relationships in my life.

But just to see, can I do it on a rigidly externally imposed schedule? Because if you think about it, Most of the growth in life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them. But they are where we learn restraint. Dude, this is so important.

I don't know if I hate them anymore. So people will often ask like how I do this, that or the other, whatever it is. Like, Tom, how do you, so I work 93 hours a week.

That's like my average. That's your average. So Tom, why do you work 93 hours every week?

And the answer is because 93 are joyful and 94 wouldn't. And When I start working more than that, it usually means that I'm juggling so many things that my brain seems to be using sleep as a way to track some of them or something. So I find myself waking up a lot. Now I have a trick that allows me to fall back asleep very fast, but it's still not as restful as just sleeping through the night. What's the trick if you don't mind me interrupting?

I don't at all. I have two pairs of AirPod headphones, and I put them in, and I put them on a... fiction book. And I turn the volume down such that if I don't put a little bit of pressure on my ear, I can't make out what they're saying.

So as soon as I drift off, the pressure releases, and I can still hear that noise is being made, but I can't track it. And so I'm usually out probably in about three minutes. That changed my life in terms of when I get stressed, I can still fall back asleep. Such a great skill.

And just reflecting on what you use. That murmur in the background, this kind of low level, I can't quite detect it, is actually the way that your brain detects things as you're falling asleep. So I wonder if you've triggered your circuit to run in reverse, where you actually can send yourself back under. What it makes me think is that I can't process the problems and listen to a story at the same time.

And so my brain clicks over into story mode and is like, oh, we're digesting this story. I'm getting input. So...

Because I'm getting input because it's story my brain lets go if I have to solve problems and then that allows me to Fall right back asleep. That's great Such a great skill and waking up in the middle of the night from time to time to use the bathroom is actually quite normal And some people are really obsessed by the fact. Oh, no, I woke up and then they get triggered, but I learned this last year that the The peak in our alertness is actually about 90 minutes before our natural bedtime.

And a lot of people, they reach the point in the evening where they're ready to go to sleep, and then they feel all this excitement and surge of energy, and they think, oh no, I'm not going to be able to fall asleep. But that's actually a natural surge that's followed by a dip. A lot of people also have the trouble of waking up in the middle of the night and wondering why they can't fall back asleep. This is dreadfully hard for a lot of people. I struggled that for years.

Yeah. And one of the solutions is to go to bed earlier because it means that your melatonin is starting to get released early in the evening. And so we all have the natural ability to push to stay up later if we really need to.

This is obvious adaptive. utility. But some people who should go to bed, quote unquote, should go to bed at 9 or 10 PM, they're pushing to 11 or 12, and then their melatonin signal is starting to drop off.

Now they can't fall asleep or they're waking up at two or three in the morning and they're in trouble. But it sounds like you hit the right schedule. 93 hours is an impressive output.

Yeah, that's a lot of years of making an obscene amount of mistakes. And to close the loop on, so people, how do you accomplish XYZ? And the answer is partly rules. So you have to be obsessed with your goal, right?

So for me, that's all obsession, start with a goal. What do you want? Is that thing exciting and honorable? Assuming it's exciting and honorable, there's ways to like create feedback loops, which is largely what we've been talking about today, about attaching the dopaminergic response specifically to the pursuit of that thing rather than the having it.

And because I'm so excited and because I so believe in the reality of my goals that I actually could have them and that having them would be awesome, I... can create rules in my life and then i really stick to those rules so once i'm very careful about what rules i put in place because i have to believe that they will actually lead me to this goal that's really exciting for me but if i believe it then i can put them in and then also part of my identity is that i'm the type of person that when i set a rule i follow it so i can create this loop of like feeling good about myself and the thing that i'm pursuing but it really works and i'm shocked how few people Have the kind of rule that you're talking about in the new year to say hey, I'm only gonna do odd hours. There's no phone Yeah, well and like I said, I'm not perfect.

I'm not as disciplined as you are about my no-goes I try I actually find that tabulating is kind of fun. Mmm It's also fun to get really triggering comments and and to not close the dopamine loop for them I think if people understood the dopamine reward prediction error that we could end all the amplifying Comment battles online because what happens is if someone takes a jab at you of any kind, there's actually an open dopamine loop waiting for you to respond. And any response actually gives them that dopamine response of success.

It's a little bit of a, it's like scoring. or three-pointer. And the no response actually drops their dopamine below baseline.

And that's its own form of retaliation. And I have to be careful because I don't want to encourage people to retaliate. But anything that short-circuits the kind of madness of getting pulled into Some online battle that's totally meaningless.

It's taking people away from other powerful good things that they could do in the world You know, we've been talking mainly about dopamine and its scheduling and about the fact that it can be attached to anything I think many people find it hard to subjectively attach dopamine to something. They don't want to do This is something that if we'd spoken a year ago I would have my answer would have been a little bit different to the question of how do you get motivated? Well one way to do that is if you are good at subjectively attached dopamine to the pursuit just knowing okay I really am hungry for this I'm just gonna tell myself that you know making you know making it 1% of the way is a success and I'm gonna keep going and I'm gonna keep ratcheting on and that's great if you can do that but for people that can't do that understanding this relationship with the pleasure pain balance can be more powerful just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience the greater the dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process of pursuing more dopamine.

And then the other aspect of it is that anytime that we're leaning into action, you know, it has the possibility of being an amplifying process or a depleting process. And the key to that is making sure that you're balancing the dopamine and epinephrine systems. You know, epinephrine being this molecule of universal currency of energy output. It could be out of hate or it could be out of love. love.

Epinephrine doesn't care. And actually, dopamine doesn't care. None of these systems care about us.

They just work underneath our subconscious control. But when you start to understand that hitting the gas pedal is great, but hitting the gas pedal and then coming off the gas pedal a little bit, you can kind of sit in a more relaxed RPM, actually allows you to go much further. I think that people... Dr. Leaning into action is terrific.

I always say you can either be back on your heels, flat-footed, or forward center of mass. The best situation is actually to be right upright, but just know that you can be forward center of mass at any point. And to take it back to sex and reproduction, because it's a salient example, the arc of sex is very interesting, because when you think about autonomic arousal, it turns out that the arousal stage of sex actually involves release of dopamine.

But is what we call parasympathetic dominant. It's actually has to be relaxed enough in order to occur Okay, everyone can read between the lines on this Orgasm is actually a I don't want to say full-blown. It's a it's hey, it is a sympathetic Nervous system driven response.

It's identical to the stress system. It's driven by the same neural circuits as stress And then what comes afterward? the parasympathetic system goes back up again. It's that deep relaxation.

So why do I say this? Not to talk about sex to be, you know, to serve as a highlighter, but rather our species arrived here because of this dance between arousal and relaxation, arousal and relaxation. And one thing we can say for sure about every human being that's alive now is that their parents, at least once, mastered this dance of relaxed and excited, but not too excited. And then really excited and then relaxed. That dance was mastered by all of our parents and that's what delivered us here to some extent.

And so what this means is that all the neural circuits from the ones that led to our conception to the ones that lead to us pursuing goals have this balance that's almost like a seesaw, right? There's activation and calm, activation and calm, and it's that dynamic. process that's important to master in every endeavor.

So we use sex as an example, but in pursuit of goals, you have to learn how to pursue short-term goals and like the goals within the day, make a cup of coffee and goal and long-term goals. And when I said dopamine is what's setting the, your time perception, it's an interval timer. What you're saying is it's like the two marshmallow experiment done at Stanford, defer the dopamine.

And actually, if you can turn the waiting into the dopamine. And then you can extend out the reward for waiting for the second marshmallow 15 minutes later, et cetera, et cetera. And there are many, many examples of this in the psychology and neuroscience literature.

And I would say finally, in 2020, we finally as a field got a clear idea of how dopamine is really working. Because before it was all about work, dopamine hit, right? Sex gives you a dopamine hit.

The internet gives you a dopamine hit. What we didn't realize is that repeated engagement with these things leads to dopamine depletion and that the pain and pleasure balance is always at work. Dude, that's so brilliant.

Dude, one, the Huberman Lab is amazing on YouTube. People need to check that shit out. And your Instagram page is also amazing.

Where do you want people to follow you at? Yeah, so, well, thanks for those kind words. I mean them so aggressively, I'll bite through the camera to let people know how seriously I mean that.

Thank you. Yeah, so I have an Instagram page. It's Huberman Lab.

And there I teach neuroscience in anywhere from one minute to five minute tidbits and a lot of actionable tools that relate to all sorts of things, sleep and motivation, et cetera. And then the Huberman Lab podcast is Apple, Spotify, and we have a YouTube channel for people who wanna watch and listen to it. And there, it's a little bit different than most podcasts. because I will do four episodes all on one general theme, like food and the brain. And these are long, hour to two hour long lectures where I just kind of blab on and on myself, but they're all timestamps so people can get information there.

And it's tools and science. And then we have great guests on who are expert in their fields. People like Anna Lemke, luminaries in the field, Matt Walker, folks of that sort, Davidson-Robert Sapolsky, who I've been stalking for four years.

He keeps turning me down. We can work on that. No, there's a trick.

Transcript for:Dopamine and Motivation Insights

Transcript for:
Dopamine and Motivation Insights