[0:00]I grew up in a very disorganized home where like the doors inside my house had holes in them and our house, there was like some rooms that looked like a hoarder lived there, just piles and piles of stuff to the roof. Um, house demolished in many respects. Like the back of the garden was six foot high. It was, it was a mess. So I've grown up with mess. And I'm therefore still pretty messy today. And it's something I've always wanted to defeat, but I just sometimes I tell myself, well it, you know, it was hard wired into me when I was a kid and it, it is just who I am. And a lot of people go around saying that. They've just kind of identified with and accepted a certain bad habit as part of who they are. Well, I will say that some of the most brilliant people I know had terribly messy offices and they were very internally organized people. It was kind of interesting. They were like a laser beam in their ability to kind of sort through mess. They didn't see the mess. In fact, my post-doc advisor, who also sadly passed away, but an incredible human by the name of Ben Barus, used to walk into his office and there'd just be piles of stuff everywhere. And I'd say, Ben, I think we should clean your office and he'd say, don't touch anything because if you move anything, I won't know where it is. And I said, how could you possibly know where anything is right now? And he said, I know where everything is. And so I think some people also, by growing up in or being in that environment, also maintained an uncanny ability to find things. Whereas I'm the sort of person where I can't do any work until everything is cleared away. And so, um, I see myself as on the weaker side of disability. Um, but to your question, I think stories are very powerful and very dangerous. Stories are the way that humans organize knowledge by and large, right? We don't tend to organize things into lists. We have these narratives that we call stories, because from a young age, we learn things not just by hearing them and seeing them, but they are compartmentalized into narratives that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes they have a kind of a crescendo and then a relaxation. Just think about a childhood song of learning like the ABC's. They don't teach you the ABC's, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, right? They don't do that. What do they do? They give you a song, which is a story. Musicians will understand this inherently. Again, I'm not one, but when I started researching neuroscience of music and the brain, came to understand, so it's A, B, C, D, E, F, G, right? The change in the inflections as one does the alphabet as a young kid is the story of the alphabet. Now people might say, okay, what is he talking about? What's happening here is you create variation in terms of batching of ideas so that something has a beginning, a middle and an end. So if you think, okay, I grew up in this house and it was really messy and now I have too much mess, and in order to undo that, there's this kind of like hardwired, right, dangerous words. Hardwired neural circuitry in my brain that I would have to work really, really hard to undo and I'd have to be scared into being a cleaner person, or I'd have to be more tidy a person, whatever it is, that's very dangerous because there's a beginning to that, a middle to that, and an end to that, and it has immense meaning as a consequence. One of the most powerful things is to understand that neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some component of it. What could the component be? Well, there's all this stuff like the Byron Katie work, which says, you know, you you take something that you believe as true and you say, okay, like, uh, like I'm an untidy person. And then you counter it. How do I know that? Well, okay, I have this experience. Okay, that's the story. And then you start running counter narratives. You say, I'm uh, I'm uh, actually a tidy person. And then people say, well, this is silly, you're just lying to yourself, right? Or they say, is it always true that you're a messy person? You start challenging this story from different sides. Now, I believe as because I'm a neuroscientist. I'm not, um, in, I'm not a psychologist or in the self-help world, that the brilliance, the kind of unconscious genius of that approach is actually that what one is doing is you're starting to create a new story. You're starting to kind of infuse different questions into the existing neural network. Now, the brain loves questions. Like the, since we're young kids, we're asking questions. And so if you take an existing story and you start challenging it with questions, you're not saying lie to yourself. You're not suddenly gonna say, okay, I'm super tidy, you're not, because you're not gonna believe that. But if you start challenging why it's that way, or, you know, you've been able to change so many other things, why wouldn't you be able to change that? You say, well, it's just a habit. I can't do it. You say, well, what's a habit? And you start poking and pushing and pushing. What you eventually arrive at is this kind of, huh, actually there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy person, except this kind of fluency of a particular story. And what you've done is you've interrupted the fluency of that story. So then when you go to the behavior of, you know, do you set things down all over the place or do you put them in an orderly fashion, you start interrupting the habit, the fluency of your typical behavior. So, I raise this as a, as a way, um, to kind of shine light on essentially what I do in my podcast career, which is, you know, we, I, I believe very strongly in the fields of psychology. I think self-help has some wonderful things to offer. We've got ancient wisdom that goes way back. And when you start to look at things through the lens of biology, you start to see that all of these things actually have merit and they're just different paths to the same outcomes. So if you wanted to become a tidy person, I would encourage you, here would be one, let's just say neuroscience supported approach, would be to write out one page about what a tidy person you really are. You'll know that's a lie, right? And then to look at it and realize that in many ways if you just replace tidy with, you know, messy, at any location, it'd probably be the exact same story. And so what you're really talking about here is just a default that your nervous system is running, and if you were to just swap the words, would you feel differently or do differently? On the one hand you'd say, no, that's kind of trivial, but I bet you the practice of writing it out would forever interrupt your notion of like just going to set something down. You'll be like, ah, now you have something to kind of disrupt the habit because so much of habit disruption that you'll look like some people say, oh, you flick a, uh, you know, a rubber band on your wrist or something like that. There's nothing special about the rubber band. There's nothing special about the pain on your wrist or you put a sticky note. We know sticky notes work for about one day. Why don't sticky notes work? Why don't reminders on the mirror work? Because they don't have enough salience. They're not new, they're not different. The nervous system only changes if something is new and different. So anyway, we could talk a lot about habit formation, but fear works, but so does disrupting the story. How do you disrupt the story? You essentially give the opposite story. And you think, well, that's just lying to myself, but neurally, it makes sense because the nervous system, again, likes to be very economical, likes to do everything with the minimum amount of energetic expenditure. And to change anything requires attention and attention is expensive. Attention is expensive. And also I would say, as I'm kind of rambling all this, things are going very well for you, so you actually don't have any reason to tidy your space. PA now and another PA and I have a cleaner. So do you know what I mean? The Yeah, you outsource it. Great. Well, there is incentive for all the folks that feel like they're not tidy enough. You have two choices. You can either start to be tidy now, or you can be successful enough that you can hire some assistance. And I actually think, and I say this in with in all seriousness, I think that one has to ask like, where is my attention and neural real estate best devoted? I think about this every day. I mean, we are living in a war of attention. I wake up in the morning and I can be a consumer or a creator. If I reach for my phone, I'm a consumer. If I go to my journal, I'm a creator.
[9:20]My advice to anyone who wants to be successful in any domain is to do things away from where you broadcast and then take it to that broadcast. I mean, take your real life to Instagram and be very cautious about taking Instagram to your real life. Does that make sense? If you look at successful people, they're doing things away from the platforms and putting them on the platforms. So I have to be very careful, then I go into the kitchen, obviously, I talk to people in my home, um, but if I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call, it's like, is this call really about moving the needle forward or is this just kind of like passive use of, of attention? We have to be so careful nowadays, so, so careful. It's really challenging. On that point of focus and attention, and thinking back to when you were 19 years old, one of the things people ask me a lot, and I guess it's a bit of a debate in the self-help world, is from a neuroscience perspective, is manifestation and this idea of like visualization. Visualizing who I want to become and, you know, where I'm going, is there any neuroscience to support that that works? There is. Um, and I'm not trying to be negative, but I'll start with the negative counter example for which there is evidence, and it's less often discussed. So there's a wonderful researcher at New York University by the name of Emily Balchetis, who talks about how for goal setting and habit formation, fear setting is often one of the best tools. You spend some time, maybe five minutes or so thinking about all the terrible things that are going to happen if you don't actually accomplish your goals. Nobody likes to do this, but guess what? It turns out to be pretty darn effective. I know. It's really frustrating that this is the case. But again, you know that has a lot to do with the way that the human brain is, is wired and and likes to rewire itself. Now, that said, it is important to envision goals. Visualizing goals in detail, um, writing them out. In some cases talking about them, although we can discuss that, um, why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance, um, can be very beneficial because it's hard to conceive something that you can't imagine. But I think when people hear that visualizing goals or visualizing outcomes is critical, we sometimes forget that we don't always know what the end goal is. Sometimes we have to break this up into milestones. This is where I think Rick Rubin, even though he's not a formally trained scientist, um, has drawn a lot of interest for his work on creativity. Which is, you know, Rick is about largely, you know, sensing the kind of energetic pull of an idea and being able to explore that without too much self-judgment or filtering or thinking about how it's going to be received. In other words, that the metamorphosis that leads to great music, great poetry, great scientific discovery, podcasts, finance, companies, that one is building, etcetera, is a series of iterations that occur on the time course of about a day. You know, and so we can't always imagine the end or the end product as the outcome. This is why I said university is easy compared to other goals, because the end is a degree, right? If then you pick up your diploma. Like, whereas in other areas, it's far more mysterious to often. Now, visualization, I think could be very powerful, but perhaps what's more powerful is to learn the brain and body state that best serves the work you're going to do. So for instance, if I'm going to do some writing and right now I'm working on a book, it's largely done, but I'm writing some bonus chapters, unless I'm hyper motivated to do that when I sit down and hyperfocused, I'll spend two, three minutes just closing my eyes, focusing on my breathing. It's meditation of sorts, but what I tell myself is if I can't focus on my breathing for two or three minutes, how in the world am I going to focus on writing for two or three hours? That sort of thing. The other thing that I want to make sure I don't forget is I mentioned that telling people your goals often times can be useful if it stimulates a little bit of fear, like you have some accountability. But we also know that because of the affiliative nature of people, in particular people that support us, there is this danger. Uh, a friend of mine, who's a cardiologist at UCSF taught me this. He said, you know, be careful who you tell that you're going to start a podcast or write a book, because oftentimes the response will be, oh yeah, that's great. You absolutely should write a book or you should do a podcast. And people get a sort of reward from telling people about it, and then they never actually go do it. Whereas I can cite numerous examples of where people were told, you're never going to be able to do that. You're never going to be able to be successful in that. And my goodness, those people dig their heels and they show that they can do it. Now, I get into debates about this with Rick from time to time. It's a, you know, it's unclear to me whether or not the energy around trying to prove oneself is detrimental to the outcome. And I sense it is, right? This kind of grinding against like, oh, take that and take that, as opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft. I think about the way I felt about aquaria and fish as a kid and it's just like pure delight. That's the word that comes to mind, just delight. I want to learn more about it. I want to do it and tell people about it. That's the wonderful romantic picture of effort, progress and outcomes. But in reality, you probably need both. You need to be able to access some fear and sense of competition, but also delight in craft. You know, like Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, as I recall, defines competition as anti-creativity in many ways because through competition, you are by definition changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else or something else. And so you're morphing your creation in order to kind of overcome something. Whereas if you're just purely thinking about something you want to grow and cultivate, there are none of those barriers. But in the worlds that I've been in, science, to a lesser extent podcasting, and that's a wonderful feature of podcasting, but certainly in science, it is hyper competitive, right? Two laboratories working on similar things, people are concerned that if one publishes first, the other will not be able to publish, certainly not in as high quality a journal, and jobs are created through these journal publications. Podcasting is actually a wonderful field, um, because let's say you and I have the same guest on our podcast, all it does is raise it in the algorithm. It's not like, you know, and, and it's such a, and so I think there's a lot of, um, collegiality and camaraderie in the podcast field that, um, exists in little pockets in science, but, um, science is a brutally competitive field. Which doesn't mean it's anti-creative, but in a dream world where there's infinite amount of money for scientific research, because that would better humanity in my, in my view. Um, and people didn't have to be competitive about grant dollars or publication, I think we would make far more progress as a species. So competition fosters outcome, this is clear in markets, it's clear in a lot of domains, but pure love and delight of craft and creativity, that's definitely the way to go. But in most endeavors, you got to have both. If sitting next to someone in class and realizing, okay, because this was me back when, I'm thinking, okay, I, I love this topic, but gosh, I want that top mark. I want that top mark on the distribution. Like that's kind of and, and like she and he are really, really good and I'm gonna, we're going to study together, but my God, when it comes time for that exam, like I'm going for it. A little bit of competition can, can bring out our, our best, I think. Um, certainly in sport. But when it comes to creative endeavors that are really about our own unique contribution, I mean, you could tell me more about this in business, because you're, you're, I don't, you know, I have a company, but I'm not a business person. But I, I always feel like competition can bring out more energy, but not more creativity. Yeah, and I think a big point I was thinking of as you were talking was just about how much you let that new energy that comes from competition distract you. And this is, it's the distraction that can destroy you because if Apple are going this way and they're building this product without the keyboard and without the stylus, and that's they've got their vision. And then they see Samsung doing something over there, something over there. And if they, if they divert from their own mission and their own first principles towards what someone else are doing, then that's when it can become destructive. But if it means that they see Samsung doing something and they speed up and invest more in their vision, then it's okay. I think that's, and it is this dichotomy between competition does drive better outcomes for everybody that's competing, but at the same time, um, yeah, it can harm you if it distracts you in a fundamental way. It's kind of how I think about it. Even with podcasting, like, you know, um, as you were saying, there's so many podcasts doing so many amazing things. Like I, I look at your podcast and I learn from it, but I know in my core and we all know, I'm never gonna be Andrew Huberman. And I'll never be you. And I'll never be you. I'm never be Lex, and I admire your podcast very much. And Joe's and Lex's. I think it's, we each have our own unique style that we bring to it. Chris Williamson, you know, um, it's been a lot of fun to see the unique flavors of podcasts crop up and how similar that is to the world I grew up in in skateboarding.
[28:08]I've been in these loops before, they're hard to exit, but once you exit them, you look back on them and you, what was I thinking? Well, you were in a different state. You're kind of a different animal when you're in pursuit. If you love the Dr. Vesia brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor, become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel get, the bigger the guests.
