Huberman Lab

But it was really Freud who put his seminal works together in 1899 and then published it in 1901 called The Interpretation of Dreams.

And it's probably one of his, if not his most famous text.

And you can unfairly sum it up as, you know, if it's not one thing, it's your mother when it comes to Freud.

But in some ways, Freud with his interpretation attempt in my mind was 50% right and 100% wrong.

And Freud believed that he understood the decryption code to our dreams.

I know it's terrific because I've read it.

It is entitled Good Energy, the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health.

I've read your book and because I follow your work very closely the good news is that we each and all can take matters to some extent into our own hands collaborate with healthcare providers and repair metabolic dysfunction essentially make us metabolically functional.

I give scripts to literally talk to your doctor with because you are going to get pushed back often if you ask for a fasting insulin I would say probably I mean even though doctors are waking up a little bit like maybe 85 percent of people are going to have their doctors say they won't order that for them so I actually think there's a huge benefit I hate to say it but like going outside the system this is where I think innovation has been valuable there's a lot of like amazing companies doing direct to consumer lab testing so you can basically avoid the hassle and some of them are very affordable.

There's a wonderful book that is called The End of Cravings by Mark Shatzer he also wrote the dorito effect but he talks a little bit about what you're talking about which is ideal that processed food is actually the ultimate sort of food based variable reward so in the way that it like things that I mean I'm speaking expert here but things that the body can't predict what the outcome is going to be are going to kind of get you in that dopamine motivation pathway and that's actually what processed food is doing is it's every time we eat a different we think we're eating a tortilla but it's like completely different than all the other weird tortillas ultra processed tortillas on the shelf so every time we eat tortilla and our brain is this incredible prediction machine and as it's coming towards our mouth we're predicting what the load is going to be but we have no idea is it a coke zero is it a diet coke with aspartame is it a regular coke it all tastes the same but the nutrients that our gut are totally different so we end up actually triggering the motivation pathways because of processed food representing a variable reward whereas every time you eat a ribeye your body's pretty much getting a similar thing each time and so the prediction matching is going to be more conducive to getting off the motivation treadmill for more which I think is so fascinating.

He is also the author of an important and extremely useful new book entitled 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People.

The book is scheduled for release this summer, that is the summer of 2024, and we provided a link to the book in the show note captions.

Your book, 10 to 25 focuses heavily on social appraisal, self-appraisal, basically the idea that we want to be liked and we don't want to be disliked and it hurts when people say mean things about us or when we hear negative feedback, especially if it's provided publicly.

And I interviewed Chip and I was like Chip how do you sell the vision to these players who are 18 to 21 are newfound millionaires.

And he was like, the number one thing I have to do is build trust cause I can't critique a player shot and make them change it if they think they're gonna sacrifice more.

This is why, what's the point of War and Peace? War and Peace is really a theory of great leaders in the war.

There's any English PhDs, I'm sure they'll tell me that's oversimplified version of what Tulsa was doing, but you learn the theory in a narrative way.

So this is a classic idea throughout human history.

My joke, this is a lame laugh line but I'm a professor so that's the best I can do.

My laugh line was always I just live in fear that Pearson and other textbook companies are gonna sell wise feedback, post it notes say they can magically erase the achievement gap.

And I always said that as a joke and then two things happen.

One is a popular author, like I named Dan Coyle, literally called it magic feedback in his book didn't cite us but like.

But also like magic feedback.

Now, the layperson could draw a line between that and like the Zoon and Bing and other like failed products.

You know, that's I'll leave that to organizational scholars to decide if that's the story but at least the cautionary tale is like Boeing is another example where Calhoun when he came in as a CEO changed the incentive scheme at Boeing to be something called stack ranking which is where you fire the bottom 10% every six months or a year within your group.

So if your group might be higher performing on average than some other group but the bottom 10% of your group are getting fired.

Okay, and this goes back to GE it's a Jack Welch policy.

Anyway, so that happened two years ago and look what's happened in the last two years.

And I remember being in the airport and I picked up Jeffrey Sachs' end of poverty which is a popular book at the time and just thinking like here's a guy who like I don't know, was doing something pretty mundane macroeconomics but he was spending all his time talking world leaders in other countries out of crushing death that was causing poverty

and it's like taking whatever precocious skill he had and using it for others and I thought law is not my Jeff Sachs skill but what I do know how to do is motivate teenagers like that's how I spend all my time

So often it seems like we hear the stories of like the Steve Jobs, and I really enjoyed that book by Walter Isaacson and that story very impressed by his contributions, always complicated person as is often the case with people that make big contributions it seems.

But what I find compelling is a beautiful new book by Mary Murphy called Cultures of Growth who was trained at Stanford under Claude Steele.

Was also trained by Carol Dweck.

Just came out a week ago and it's getting tons of great press.

And in her work, what she finds is that fixed mindset can be a cultural variable like a more leadership variable not just in the mind of the individual.

And when that's the culture, then she finds people are more willing to try to make everyone else look like an idiot so that you don't get attacked.

Now, the layperson could draw a line between that and like the Zoon and Bing and other like failed products. You know, that's I'll leave that to organizational scholars to decide if that's the story but at least the cautionary tale is like Boeing is another example where Calhoun when he came in as a CEO changed the incentive scheme at Boeing to be something called stack ranking which is where you fire the bottom 10% every six months or a year within your group.

And the classic argument in going back to Plato and the Phaedrus, is that the rational acting part of the brain plans out what it wants, makes all these calculations and then has to tame the emotional part in order to make those goals into a reality.

And so the emotion, you know, the amygdala, the mesolymbic, that's this unruly horse that the charioteer has to harness, you know?

And I think that Carol argued, and I think other people have argued too. I've seen Adriana Galvan and Ron Dahl and others argue this, that the affective regions are often the teacher and the prefrontal is the student.

And what Carol argued is that Phaedra's had is totally wrong. It's not that the prefrontal charioteer is taming the emotional. It's really that the affective part is training the prefrontal to be better at pursuing the goals that matter in the social milieu that you have.

She has this great psych review paper that contradicts a lot of received wisdom about the prefrontal planning regions of the brain and the kind of amygdala in the hippocampus, the affective regions and the memory creation regions.

And the classic argument in going back to Plato and the Phaedrus, is that the rational acting part of the brain plans out what it wants, makes all these calculations and then has to tame the emotional part in order to make those goals into a reality.

And so the emotion, you know, the amygdala, the mesolymbic, that's this unruly horse that the charioteer has to harness, you know?

And I think that Carol argued, and I think other people have argued too. I've seen Adriana Galvan and Ron Dahl and others argue this, that the affective regions are often the teacher and the prefrontal is the student.

And what Carol argued is that Phaedra's had is totally wrong. It's not that the prefrontal charioteer is taming the emotional. It's really that the affective part is training the prefrontal to be better at pursuing the goals that matter in the social milieu that you have.

One of my favorite books that I read when I was when I was writing my book is this book called One of Us. And it's about the Norwegian mass shooter who shot all of those children at a summer camp, who was someone who was afflicted with terrible luck from the time he was a child.

James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits and one of the world's foremost experts on how to build rocksolid habits that better your physical and mental health, work, and relationships.

Looking back on, you know, now Atomic Habits sold 25 million copies.

All of Atomic Habits is an answer to that question.

Atomic Habits ... It's a super impressive book and it's done incredibly well for all the right reasons. It's one of the bestselling books of all time and the highestrated habits book of all time.

If you haven't already read Atomic Habits, you definitely should.