How to Overcome Social Anxiety | Dr. Nick Epley

Social anxiety is something we really can help people with. Essentially, the strategy is very simple. If you are afraid of talking with a stranger or having a deep conversation, the way to get over that is not to simulate it or to imagine. It's not like you get up and you you give a pretend speech. That's what psychologists were doing for years. It doesn't work because it's still pretending. It has to be real. You send people out in the world and to do the thing for real. You're worried about getting rejected. Go out and start asking people for help and you'll learn that your fear is misplaced, that you get accepted more often than you might guess. Exposing people to that thing that they are anxious of. When the belief is misplaced and with social anxiety, it is usually wildly misplaced. That's what we find over and over again is a mistaken barrier to connecting with other people. That's how you you ease that social anxiety and get rid of it. Not because you do you dull your anxiety so much. It's because you change your beliefs about what other people are like. Welcome to the Hubberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Nick Epley. Dr. Nick Epley is a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago and an expert researcher on the science of social connection. What's different about today's conversation in the context of social connection is that it doesn't just center on improving relationships with friends or family or co-workers. We do talk about that, but we also talk about the smaller everyday conversations that we have with people that we don't know so well and the positive impact that that can have on mental and physical health. Now, I want to be clear. We're not talking about engaging in small talk for small talk's sake. We're talking about taking opportunities to connect with people once or several times per day and the tremendous benefits that can have for people's mental and physical health, including yours. We also talk a lot about the assumptions that we tend to make about other people, both in real life and online, and how those actually match up with reality. We also talk about Nick Epley himself because his life strongly has informed his research. We talk about his biological and his adopted children, raising a child with additional needs, and the incredible joy and growth those choices have brought him and his family by virtue of the sorts of social connections that they've brought. I must say, today's conversation went a lot of places that I did not anticipate. And it certainly inspired me to look differently at everyday interactions as far from trivial and in fact key to the fabric of social connection and our mental and physical health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Nick Epley. Dr. Nick Epley, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. We make a lot of assumptions about other people and in my case cuz I have a new puppy about animals. You know, we're always thinking that we know what other beings are thinking. Yeah. But as you've pointed out and as a colleague of mine in neurosciences, Dr. Carl Dyeroth has pointed out, most of the time we don't even know what we're thinking. Like there's stuff going on in there, but like we're we're not that good at thinking, oh, that last thought was a complete sentence that means blank. That's not how the human mind works. So, usually when we hear the word anthropomorphism, we're talking about humans making assumptions about other animals. M but humans are animals. We just happen to be the curators of the planet. So why and how do we anthropomorphize about other people and how does it hurt us and how does it help us? So I think the way to think about anthropomorphism is that what we are doing is we're trying to understand what's going on within another agent essentially. And so anything that acts independently, right? You got a ball rolling across the table. If something else bumps into it and it moves in perfect, you know, perfect deflection off of it, you don't need anything to explain why that ball moved as it did. But if this ball is coming across the table and another one hits it and it just keeps going or goes some other direction, well then it seems like there's something going inside that thing that might be driving it, right? And that in that thing that's inside that ball might be a mind, right? Might be a set of thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, some kind of psychology that's pushing it. At least that's the way we interpret what an independent agent might be doing. We do this when we think about other people, right? You're nodding your head now. I think you're thinking about something, right? You move this way or that. You wanted to do this thing or that thing. We do that same kind of mind readading, right? With non-human agents, animals, gods, sometimes the planet, even ourselves, right? We reflect on ourselves. We have experience at least with having certain mental states come to mind and we use that experience as a guide to what's going on in other people too. That kind of anthropomorphism, that kind of mind readading, right, where we infer others thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, that's helpful to us for at least two reasons. One is it gives me some sense of why you're doing what you're doing now. It allows me to understand what you're doing right now. Are you trying to be kind? You're trying to be uh aggressive? Are you trying to be friendly? But it also is pretty good at allowing me to predict what you're likely to do next. So if I think you feel hungry, well, you're going to go try to eat something. If I think you don't like me very well, you're going to behave a particular way towards me. So this kind of mental state inference, this kind of mind readading serves us pretty well for getting around in a social world. Um, don't always get it right, but in general, it's better than not doing it at all. So as we make assumptions about others and their intentions and their past choices in some cases, right? Like if somebody hits somebody else, we we make an assumption about the certain things might have led up to that. Yes. Right. Are we mainly paying attention to behavior and or are we paying attention to what they seem to be paying attention to? Soal theory of mind. Yeah. So it depends a lot on what kind of environment we're in. We think about the minds of others in lots and lots of different contexts. My wife right now is back home in Illinois. I can think about what she might want for dinner, right? Or what she's feeling at any given time. We can think about people when they're not present. We can think about strangers, people we know nothing about. I write a book. I'm trying to think about how will people understand this book. Right? These are all cases where there's not somebody in front of us at all. Right? And when we're doing that, particularly with strangers, people we know nothing about, things we know nothing about, then the one thing we have at our disposal is ourselves. We can use our own minds. Right? So, if I walk into a classroom and I think it's kind of cold in here, well, I can assume that other people will think it's cold, too. I'm using myself as a guide. Once I know a little more maybe about you, right? I learned that you are, you know, you're a PhD from Stanford. I learn that um, you know, somebody is a is an athlete or whatever. I learn something about you. You're you're a doctor or you're a lawyer. Then I can use that information, my beliefs about groups of people as a guide. That's stereotyping. And stereotypes contain a fair bit of accuracy to them. If I know that you're a Democrat or a Republican, I can make some reasonable inferences about other thoughts you might have, other beliefs you might have. Not perfect, but better than chance guessing. And then once I see you like what we're doing right now, if I can see you, then I'm watching your behavior. And then behavior dominates. Behavior though is tricky. I'm watching you, right? You could have two people kissing. They seem, you know, delightfully in love, right? They seem just so nice together. And you can you you can make one set of inferences. When you see that that happening based on that, you can infer what's going on behind that based on what you're seeing. And when we can see the behavior in front of us, that's then what we're paying most attention to. But each of these different mechanisms, egoentrism, stereotyping, and behaviorism, we might think about working backwards from your behavior. They all gain give us some accuracy, but they also create some error. Egoentrism creates egocentric biases. I assume that you think more like I do than you actually do. Stereotyping tends to create a different set of mistakes. I tend to think that groups are more distinct and different from each other than they actually are because stereotypes are about the defining features of groups which tends to exaggerate the differences between groups. And when it comes to behavior, I tend to assume a simpler, more simplistic um uh mind behind that behavior than exact actually exists. Psychologists refer to this as the correspondence bias. I tend to infer an intention or set of beliefs or attitudes that corresponds with your behavior as I see it. So if I see you hit somebody, I might assume you are an aggressive person. That's how I interpret right away. Had I known it was in self-defense, then I would interpret it very differently, right? But we tend to leap to mental states or intentions from behavior. Sometimes that can get us into trouble when the relationship between intentions or thoughts and behavior is a little complicated. So each of those gets us some accuracy, but each of them also creates some error. If you are willing, I'd like to return to the example you gave at the beginning of of a ball rolling on a table and another ball striking it or not. You know, in the second example you gave that the ball simply takes off on a different trajectory, you said that we're going to make some assumption that the ball has something like a mind, something controlling its decisions. What I'm about to say reflects a a a strong bias, which is that I've long been interested in the visual system of non-human and human primates because we are so visual and the eyes are two pieces of the brain. They're the only pieces of the brain in healthy individuals that are outside the cranial vault. And they give us a lot of information. And I think people know that, but I don't think they appreciate just how much information they give us. Not just pupil size and whether or not our gaze is is locked with theirs. All that's true, too. But if I could just alter your experiment for a second. Let's say that first ball had eyes. Oh, yeah. and it's rolling forward, but then the eyes shift to the left and then the ball goes to the left. Now I have additional information. I have a window literally into the brain where I can say what's over there that might have motivated that decision. And I think with humans, we do this, right? Like if somebody's going down the street just swinging their arms wildly and hitting people, we think this person's out of control, they're crazy. Whereas if they see somebody then they orient to their their gaze toward them. Now we we start making all sorts of assumptions about the operations of that mind. And in my worldview no pun intended the eyes are the best source of information about intent about goals etc. So limiting the conversation to conditions where we can see the other person and what they see. Are there any examples of our judgments about other people's thoughts and behavior and etc improving by virtue of Sure. Yeah. I mean so the eyes are do provide a lot valid information. Absolutely. The voice also contains an awful lot. So that's the other thing we spend a lot of time studying. But we we are the most socially sophisticated primate species on the planet. We have a brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others. And that means that we are hyper sensitive to certain things. The eyes are one of them. There's this great paper in 2008 on the cultural intelligence hypothesis. It's a science paper where they compared, you know, they try try to assess what is it that makes humans sort of unique on this planet. Um, and they compared a little over 100 two-year-old toddlers, right? Imagine running this experiment if you would. A little over 100year-old toddlers. This was done at the Max Blank Institute in Germany. one of the max blanks over a 100 chimpanzees and then just for good measure another 36 orangutans who apparently had nothing better to do. What a funny Yeah, it's crazy. Exhausting. Exactly. Men, I can't Yeah, I I would like to know the background of of details of this, how it was actually done and how long it took. But what they did essentially is ran each of these groups through two different kinds of IQ tests. you might think of them as one was an IQ test involving physical objects, right? So things like, you know, tracking where a reward was placed under a shell game or using a tool to to solve some kind of problem. Jane Goodall once, you know, psychologists once believed, biologists once believed that tool use was what made humans unique until Jane Goodall watched the chimpanzees using twigs to get termites out of a termite mount. Right? On the physical IQ test problems, the human toddlers, the adult chimps, and the orangutans performed equally well. There wasn't a difference. It's not reasoning about physical things in space that make us unique. The other group of IQ problems were social problems where it required reasoning about the mind of another person. And this involved doing things like tracking where someone's eyes are looking in order to monitor what somebody is thinking because we tend to look at things we're thinking thinking about and think about things we're looking at. If I want to know what's on your mind, what's governing your attention, I want to be really good at tracking your eyes. And we are amazing at this as human beings. I can tell whether you're looking at me right now or looking at my right ear from this far without any trouble. I can tell from 50 feet away, whether you're looking at me or looking at, you know, 10 feet above me. We're amazingly good at this. super sensitive this I couldn't calculate the angle on a roof if you gave me a month and an arm load of protractors to do it but I can detect the angle in your eyes in an instant also involve things like being able to understand somebody's intentions from their actions right so if I reach out to for this glass of water and I miss it you can infer I'm thirsty and I want a drink you could oh you could hand me the glass Nick right if if I wanted a drink and because that's you could read my mind essentially you could infer my thoughts when And they tested the two-year-old toddlers, the chimps, and the orangutans on in these social IQ tests. That's where the 2-year-old toddlers were shining. That's where we were crushing the competition on those social IQ problems. You can do this, you know, in front of a chimpanzeee all day long and they will do nothing for you, right? Nothing for you. I do that in front of you and you can hand me the glass of water super easily. So yes, the eyes give us a lot and we are extremely sensitive to all of those social cues that convey might convey what's on the mind of another person because it allows me to anticipate what you're doing before you do it. In today's financial landscape of constant market shifts and chaotic news, it's easy to feel uncertain about how to save and invest your money. Wealthfront is the solution that helps you take control of your money while managing risk. For nearly a decade, I've trusted Wealthfront to navigate this volatility. With the Wealthfront cash account, I can earn 3.3% annual percentage yield or APY on my cash from program banks. And I know my money is growing until I'm ready to spend it or invest it. One of the features I love about Wealthfront is that I have access to instant no fee withdrawals to eligible accounts 24/7. That means I can move my money where I need it without waiting. 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I don't know what your voice normally sounds like in this context, so I'm just operating off what I've got. So, what's in voice? what's not in voice and and what what are we aware of? What are we not aware of? Yeah. So, there are lots of things contained in the voice because it is very closely connected to your mind. You notice that your eyes are right. Your eyes are closed, but your your voice is also very closely connected to your online conscious experience. You are speaking while you are thinking. And as you're having thoughts, your voice can reflect authentically what's going on in your mind. So, when I speed up, you can tell I'm kind of excited about something. When my voice varies in pitch, you can tell if I'm enthusiastic or not or kind of sad about something. You can pick up a lot about what's actually going on in the mind by listening to a person's voice. And there are a couple of things that we've studied in in our research. One is voice just contains a lot of information that allows us to understand other people better. Right? So, if you compare typing to somebody versus talking to them, the voice allows you to to determine things like intentionality to to differentiate when you're telling a joke or being sarcastic than when you're not. Right? We'll type this email. This is so funny, right? We think when we're sending off an email to somebody, it seems funny to us because we know this is meant to be a joke. Person on the other end doesn't realize the comment about this person's aunt or brother or whatever was meant to be a joke and they're all offended, right? But if you say this in your voice, sarcasm is crystal clear. Interestingly, what we find, and this is because of egoentrism in part, we're not always so sensitive to how our own communication is interpreted by another person because we know what we're thinking when we're conveying something. We tend to think we'll be understood equally well whether we're typing or talking, but of course on the receiving end, it varies a lot. So voice contains a lot of information that allows us to understand what somebody's saying better. But what we also find which I think is at least from my perspective also interesting is that the voice also conveys the presence of mind. I don't have access to your thinking to your reasoning to to what's going on between your ears. I can only watch from the outside right and I get cues. I can see your visual gaze but I can also hear you. The voice contains a lot of cues to the presence of mind. When you're really thinking hard about something, your voice slows down and you deliberate. And that variability in the pace of your voice kind of tells me that your mind is alive. Just like I can tell that you're biologically alive because you're moving, your voice also moves. And it tells me you got a lively mind. It conveys the presence of emotion. It can pre convey the presence of thinking. So when we have partisans, for instance, we did this, this was with Juliana Schroeder, who was one of my amazing PhD students from years ago. She's now on the faculty at Berkeley at at HOS. We had people, this was on the eve of the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. We had people who were voting for Trump or Clinton say why they were voting for the candidate they were voting for and they gave a verbal pitch. And we could get a few different cues from this. We could get an audio recorded clip so we could see and hear the person. We could just get their voice and we could also strip out their voice and just see the content of their text, right? To see the words they were saying. They also wrote a pitch about an explanation for why they were voting for this particular candidate. Okay. What we then did is we had people watch and listen listen read the transcript or read the the written uh explanation and say essentially how mindful is this person? How thoughtful are they? How thoughtful, how intelligent, how rational, how capable of experiencing emotions are they? Essentially they're asking are you a mindful intelligent person or are you kind of just like a mindless idiot? are you humanlike or are you kind of not humanike like a more like a rock? And what we found was that when people could hear what the person had to say either while also seeing them or just with their voice, they rated the person particularly when they disagreed with them when there was person on the other side as more thoughtful, more intelligent, more rational. this tendency to dehumanize the other side to think of them as mindless idiots was dramatically reduced when you actually heard what the other person has to say. So I think the voice along with the eyes along with eyes ga eye gaze but the voice allows us gives us a lot of information allows us to understand what's on somebody's mind and it also allows us something deeper allows me to tell you that you've got a mind that you have one it's very interesting I the vision piece I'm familiar with for reasons I stated before the physical behavior piece makes a lot of sense the the voice piece as a reflection of an active mind is something I I really haven't considered you know we'll hear sometimes that the content of people's words is less informative than, you know, the tambber of their voice or something like that. I I don't know that I completely believe that. I I think that that's a I think that's a '9s that's like an 80s9s pop psychology. Absolutely. That is a highly stylized experimental result. Right. So, you will sometimes hear in this popsych world that 80% of what's communicated is communicated through paral linguistic. That obviously is not true. you're not going to I'm not going to be able to tell you about my book just by using the tone of my voice. Right. Right. So that is that certain words matter. The words certainly do matter. But above and beyond that, there are other things that matter in a person's voice that at least we find people aren't so sensitive to. So when we ask, for instance, when we ask our MBA students to give an elevator pitch, as Juliana and I did in in one of our one of our experiments, give an elevator pitch for their their their desired job, the job they want most, right? Why should this company hire you? They can give it with their voice. So, we do the audio and visual. Uh we do just the audio. We pull out the transcript, just get the words or they type their pitch. We then have people watch and listen listen or read these pitches and say, "How intelligent does this person seem to be? How hirable does this person seem to be?" And we've done this both with people who imagine working for companies and also with Fortune 500 recruiters, too. the person seems more intelligent, more rational, more thoughtful, more hirable when you hear what they have to say. And yet the MBA students themselves think they'll be judged equally on those two. They're not. And when we ask a separate separate group of people, if you wanted to communicate with somebody in a way that would make you seem most intelligent, overwhelmingly people say, I'd rather write. And the thinking behind that, I think, is that people think they can edit and such, but what they're missing is that the sound of your voice conveys a lot more. It conveys the fact that you have a mind because I can't see it and I can't read it in your dead text. Right? Your dead text has none of the paral linguistic cues or features. Really talented writers, novelists can do this. But mostly your text is dead. It doesn't have intonation. It doesn't change its pitch. It doesn't show me thinking while it's actually happening and people don't seem to realize that. What does this reveal to us about AI? Um because people are spending more and more time with AI on AI and what comes back is text. I mean there are versions of it and soon I imagine there will be elaborated versions of it with um avatars or even uh video AR. Are you generally enthusiastic about what that could bring in terms of better understanding other humans? Because I could imagine a world where, you know, I can't reach you, but I could go on AI and say, "Hey, Nick." I would just do it directly. Hey, Nick. Uh, I'm really curious. I'm going to the Midwest where you're from, and I'm I'm super interested in like culturally what's the best way that I could connect with someone around this, this, and this. given the content on the internet, the uh LLM should be able to have a video of you deliver to me what you would say or pretty close to it. Is that that can be better than than a bullet point list? It will. Yeah. So people will find it more believable. I think, right? But a lot of the things that people turn to AI for now are for facts, right? For actual information, for text. But I do think increasingly it's going to be used for social stuff. Yeah. People feel lonely, disconnected, they need a friend. And I'm friends with Liz Dunn who's a fabulous psychologist at the University of British Columbia. And she told me um that they're starting to do research about allowing people to to practice having conversations with AI before they actually have a conversation with another person like a conflict. I can see ways in which AI could be used to do to do lots of things. I can also see obvious problems with it. If I'm connecting with the AI and I'm not connecting with other humans, I can see problems with it. But I think in terms of the presence versus absence of of voice, um I do think voice will allow us to the extent that it's good and perfect, right? Sounds like a human voice. Our predict my prediction would be that you can trust it more when you hear what it has to say as long as it mimics really well a human voice because you'd anthropomorphize it just like you do another person. I don't want to spend too much time on politics, but I can't help but ask this next question. um way back when uh Bush was president, second one, um I recall there was a lot of discussion around um people who voted for him saying he's the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with. Right. Which I interpreted as there's something about his style of speech which was very everyday. Yes. And we don't have to talk about current candidates and politicians. Not to avoid it. I don't tap dance around on anything these days, but I think it nowadays we have a lot of access to people talking on video. They, you know, when you and I were growing up, I think we're more or less the same age. You know, there would be a pres presidential address or there'd be a campaign and you'd hear from people, but it was it was very limited. You didn't get so much exposure to people. So now we have more and more information about voice, about behavior, about decisionm um depending on the resolution, where their eyes are going. Um, do you think that we're getting better at assessing public figures or are we getting worse at assessing public figures? That's a good question. I think that'll take me too far out on a limb. I don't I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, there's so much information that we have now. Um, but the other thing too is that the way we evaluate other people, and this is this is central to a lot of our research, other people are ambiguous, right? They're not crystal clear. that same thing that I say to you that I mean to be a joke can sound really hostile or violent to another person, right? Can sound really awful and be taken as offensive. So I think that that's what make my makes my work as a psychologist so so interesting. In the early 1900s psychologist you know when social psychology my field in cognitive psychology started it came out of you know basically biology and vision sciences and and basic sensory perception thinking that we could understand human thinking and measure it measure our judgments about each other in the same way that we measure how people evaluate hot and cold and stuff like that. But it turns out that other people are very ambiguous. It's not always so crystal clear. And so two people with a different set of beliefs or attitudes or perspectives on the situation can look at the very same stimulus and see totally different things. Right? A lot of our judgment is not happening out there coming to us. It's happening in here interpreting what we're seeing. And in the world of politics, everyone who's listening to this podcast knows just how ambiguous things are. Somebody says something and the right will, you know, think interpret it this way, the left will interpret it that way. It's known as my side bias. Even the very same stimulus, right? So there is this sense that if we get more and more and more information, then we'll understand people better better. That's not necessarily true. If we come into these perceptions, into these viewing these things with very different starting points or very different perspectives to begin with. You've worked a lot on this notion of under socialization. If I may, I'd like to invert it for today's conversation and uh talk a little bit less through the lens of how bad it is if we're undersocialized and um explore instead how good it is if we do socialize. um not because I I have to make things positive, but because ultimately I think actions to socialize more are going to be useful. And um I'm tempted to set this up as an experiment. So as with the the example of the balls you gave before, in the most deprived condition, a human is in total isolation. Okay. So um another condition is they can let's just say text with somebody else, but they can't see them. They they've never seen them. And we can ratchet that up, right? They've seen them before. They can make a phone call. They can do video chat. They're in person. I can see a million excellent arguments for why why in-person interaction is good. But what is the evidence that the other forms of social interaction are good also? We hear so much about how they're bad, but we also hear about the isolation crisis. And so we've sort of I've lumped the more deprived versions of socialization in with isolation. And I'm not sure that I accept that. I'm not trying to counter your work. I don't know enough about to do it. I'm not qualified to anyway. But is texting with a friend healthy? As opposed to spending time alone? For sure. Okay. In person time clearly being the best. It's a little better. Although going from no contact to some contact is the big leap. Tell me more. So being isolated, so spending a day alone is pretty is pretty miserable. So when psychologists look at this, this comes from a from a famous uh uh paper by Danny Conorman and Angus Deon, both Nobel Prize winners in economics, neither of them economists, that looked at the Gallup daily uh well-being poll, right? And the they call they they call people up every day and they ask them how you're feeling today in a number of different ways. Were and they actually ask you about the day before. Yesterday, did did you enjoy yesterday? Did you feel enjoyment yesterday? Were did you smile yesterday? Did you experience sadness yesterday? Right? Did you experience stress yesterday? And they they so they ask about these different measures of well-being. They also ask about all kinds of other things like how much money you're making? Are you religious or not? Uh they know how much insurance you have, whether you're surveyed on a weekend or a weekday. They also ask you um did you spend yesterday entirely alone or not? And when they do that, you can compare the effects of things like social isolation, you know, being alone versus not against these other things. It turns out the difference between spending yesterday alone versus somebody else. The difference in your well-being on these other measures is about seven times bigger than being relatively high or low on their income measure, which is about a $60,000 difference between these two groups. That being alone is bad. That's a bad day. Okay. And having connections with other people improves it pretty dramatically. Above and beyond that, you know, it it does matter. It can be. It it's it's it is better those interactions, but now you're you're you're adding good things to what was already somewhat a good thing. Plus, we also need to we need to unpack a little bit what these different media do. They're good for different things. And we don't always use them for in the ways that are right. But I think, you know, in many ways we do. Like if I send you a text or I send my wife a text, right? She's she's back in Illinois today. We've been married for nearly 30. It'll be 30 years in August this year. We know a ton about each other. I can send her, you know, a heart when I'm feeling, you know, love and I want to send her to let her know that and she's going to feel that's going to lift her up a little bit. That's gonna feel good. We already have a relationship that's establishing just some some contact. Texting is great for that. It can allow us to stay in contact with somebody. It is not good for building a relationship necessarily over time. Like if we're going to spend a half hour typing to each other is not a good way to spend that half hour. I'd be much better at picking the phone and talking to you to help establish that relationship. But absolutely, the ability to reach out and connect with other people frequently as texting is used out in the world can allow us to stay connected. Now, if that's the only thing we're doing, if we're not actually spending time developing more meaningful relationships with people, that's not going to be as good as it as it could be. But you started this by asking about sociality more generally. And why is being social good for us? The fact of the matter is even with our imperfections and thinking about the minds of others, we are highly social. Just the ability to think in the level of sophistication that we do about the minds of other people shows how important sociality is for us. And you see the importance of sociality just almost everywhere you look. The way our brain is organized, right? So our neoortex is massive relative to the rest of our brain compared to our nearest primate relatives to the chimpanzees. A lot of that stuff is good for social stuff, right? For theory of mind use, for keeping track of who knows what and who you should trust and who you should avoid. Living in large social groups is complicated, right? And the size of our brain reflects a complication. If you look across primate species, the size of the neoortex relative to the rest of the brain is correlated with this is this is uh this is work on the social brain hypothesis, right? The size of the neoortex relative to the rest of the brain is correlated with the social complexity of the group the primate species lives in. Our brains are built to be social. Also, for most of human history, being alone and isolated is a death sentence, right? You can't live on your we depend on each other for survival. That also means that we have a neural architecture that is desperately trying to keep us connected with other people. And so when you spend a day alone, the reason why it feels like crap as my uh as my late colleague and friend John Casiopo who was at the uh University of Chicago studied loneliness really is the world was the world's expert on loneliness noted that that your neural architecture is screaming at you when you are feeling when you are alone to reach out and connect with other people. That's why loneliness feels bad, right? And that's why the opposite of loneliness feels so good. Like getting like getting a hug that feels good. Your brain is trying to tell you, get out there and connect with other people. So, when you're lonely, you get spikes in cortisol in your bloodstream that compromises your cardiovascular functioning, that compromises your immune system. That's why being lonely can make you sick and why it can shorten your life, right? You also see that the opposite of loneliness, connecting with other people, just feels darn good, right? That's your brain telling you, that's your body telling you, "Yeah, do this a little more often. This is really good." Right? So when you have that little conversation with a with a stranger like I did coming, you know, coming in, I had this amazing conversation. It was actually a very deep hard conversation with my Uber driver who was Iranian, uh had lost a son in a protest, shot in the neck years ago in Iran. Yeah. Very painful, but also very meaningful. Connected us to each other, felt a very strong bond with each other in the moment. That's your brain telling you that's the kind of thing that we're built for, right? Because living alone for most of human history was a bad bad thing. So we are hypersocial agents interested in connecting with other people. It doesn't always mean we know exactly how to do it or that we we get it right. But going from nothing to something is a huge leap for us. And texting can sometimes help us do that. One comment, one question. Um sometimes I like a day alone. Yeah, I don't get it, but that's because I I don't spend time around lots of people, but I spend a lot of time around certain set of people. I adore them, but you know, sometimes it's nice to get that space. But one thing that I've noticed because when I was a graduate student, I'd run these experiments often during the holidays because I worked on developmental neurobiology. I didn't have a choice if that, you know, if my experimental subjects were a certain postnatal age, I was working that day. It was my after all. Yes. And there's this kind of interesting idea that I'm not sure I subscribe to, but well that I do subscribe to, forgive me, that there's something about us as humans that we really like to create action at a distance, you know, and I don't know if there's a sex difference here, but I think it's like, you know, young boys like create like a rocket. It's a remote control car, you know, you have boys, you know, or see something happen over there um that you controlled in in a in a meaningful way. And it doesn't have to be violent, right? that we did rockets and guns, but it it could have could be something else. But this is somewhat philosophical more than it's scientific. But could it be that if we spend too much time alone, we've got all this stuff in our mind and it's very hard to create some sort of reverberation or a or action it at a distance that we know reflects us. And I wonder if our unconscious mind actually gets to the question like, do I even exist? Now, of course, we know we exist. we can touch our limbs, but the social isolation fear, you know, if I've got fridge full of food and I've got music and I've got audio books, that's all incoming. But at some point, you do get a little I know cuz I've spent days upon days doing experiments back when by myself. You you get a little weird. Your thoughts get a little distorted and and it's almost like you know there's stuff out there, but if you spend enough time away from it, it it kind of messes with your head a little bit. Yeah. And then of course we think of like the Ted Kazinski types and these extremes of people that have gone into isolation. There's that movie about the the true story that um the guy that goes into the wilderness. Oh yeah. Right. Um yeah. Eddie Veter wrote the soundtrack to that movie. Right. And I love into the wild. That's right. And um McCannis, right? Mckennus. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he wrote at the end, you know, the connection with people is the thing. you know, he had this romantic view of going out into the wilderness by himself or we think of, you know, Walden Pond and, you know, we romanticize this thing about being alone for long extended amounts of time. But I think it raises real questions about whether or not we're even there. It's sort of the the most existential version of like if a tree falls in the woods, you know, and no one's there, did it make a sound? It's sort of like if we have thoughts and emotions and experiences and there's no one else around to reflect those for them to have impact on. like do we even exist? And this might be some hard wiring here. I'm getting like almost Freudian and so forgive me. I'm not a psychologist, but I'm I'm curious what what your thoughts are about the relationship between the fear of isolation, our need for for our thoughts and desires and behaviors to to have some sort of reverberation out there, some responsiveness to us. Yeah. Some confirmation that we're actually here. I think the closest research to this to the extent that there is research on this is what happens to people prisoners who are put in solitary confinement. It is not good for their mental health. It's not good for their sense ofelves for who they are. They do lose a sense of themselves. There's not great research on this because you can't randomly assign people to be isolated for long periods of time. Right. Yes. Thank goodness. Yes. That that's why we have IRBs, right? But that experience I think is very real. What when you were talking about this, it made me think of um research in the early 1900s, these theories from sociologists um that the way we understand ourselves is through other people. The way I know who I am, what I'm like as a person, who Nick is is from talking with you, Andrew, and when we are in conversation, that's when I'm learning about myself. You're telling me about myself. I'm having thoughts that I'm sharing with you. And that's what gives me a sense of self, this looking glass self. and our sense of self-esteem in fact is highly highly tied am I a valuable person is highly tied to how well we're getting along with other people psychologists uh believe that it is a monitor in fact for how well you're getting along with people your very sense of selfworth and so when there is nobody out there I think you're absolutely right that's a that you can you can lose your sense of of who you are and people who go out to the woods I remember when I was a when I was a kid um I actually wrote this I I won an early career award from APA, which is a great honor for me. But in the in the bio that they asked you to write, I I wrote in that that uh about my childhood dream, my childhood before I was 9 years old, I believed I was going to be a mountain man. Like I grew up in the woods in Iowa, hunting and fishing, being outdoors. All my extended family were farmers, watching Grizzly Adams on TV. Like I thought that was a legit job. Like you could I could actually go do this, right? And I was about 9 years old when I don't remember quite how this happened, but I learned that this was not a real job. Like it was this was not a legit thing that I could do, right? But yes, I had romanticized it as well that this is going to be a wonderful thing to be able to do. But when people actually go out and do that, they mostly go insane for, you know, a wow. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. 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For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a week supply of AGZ, which is their sleep supplement, and a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your subscription. AGZ is something that I help design. It tastes great, and it's the only sleep supplement I take. It has a collection of different things in it that has dramatically improved my sleep, both my slowwave deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep, and I absolutely love it. Again, that's drinkagg.com/huberman to get a week supply of AGZ and a bottle of D3K2 with your subscription. Social media, which I spend a decent amount of time on because I teach there and I learn there. Um, you know, we know has healthy aspects and unhealthy aspects. Bunch of variables there. Age, what people are looking at, etc. how much time on it. Yeah. But social media offered people this opportunity to get out of aloneeness through a different form of connection. And so if we just kind of hypothesize that having our words or our thoughts have an a visible a known impact on somebody else's words or thoughts provide some sort of confirmation that we're there. It kind of explains why, you know, taking the most aggressive or out uh or outrageous thought and putting a comment and then somebody responds or other people dogpile or they respond and then you're like, I'm having an effect out there also safely behind a wall, right? There's no um I think we're critical of that safely behind a wall piece. you know that the the stereotype that you hear online is like you know um you know Apple 7689 in his mom's basement like you know trolling people you know and but that we forget like that person's alone in their basement why are they doing it like why is it so satisfying to them I don't actually believe that most of these people are evil some of them might be but probably they want to see their words and thoughts have an effect and the best way to do that is to poke or to say something outrageous and so I'm hoping that whoever runs these platforms will try to create incentives for um more positive interactions because I think what ultimately what most people want is the interaction to feel that their thoughts and their feelings matter out there. So if we can go to something even a little more concrete, if we just think about conversation, right, the back and forth. Why is it the conversation is often such a pleasant thing? It is because there is back and forth responsiveness in the conversation that allows me to detect that you're paying attention to me. Right now you're looking at me, right? You're nodding at me as I'm speaking and you'll give a mhm or a right or a yeah as I'm going along. And that allows me to recognize my thoughts are having an effect on you in a way that's having a positive effect in return on me. And so I think very much the that action action at a distance as you put it. Psychologists talk about that as responsiveness or being in synchrony with another person is part of what makes conversation feels so good. I have some friends who are recording artists and the only reason they still tour it is it's not for the money. leaving the money's in some cases is good, but it's not as good as money they can make doing other things. It's a huge hassle. Um takes them away from families. There's security issues. There's all this stuff. But they get to experience the apex of collective human action at a distance based on their their inflections, their things. You mentioned Eddie Veter, right? There's and then there stories of what whatever he like scaled the the at at some concert, right? He scaled up and like grabbed the microphone got stuck up above and then and then he actually I actually watched it. It was pretty dangerous and then he and then he actually repelled down on the microphone wire. Yeah. This was all spontaneous. So he's doing these things. I don't know how much he's conscious of the fact that he's, you know, exciting people and, you know, but but recording artists love to do this. They don't just love to sing. They love to see the response of of the people they sing to. And people go to concerts, right? I believe because whether they understand it or not, they're having an impact on what's happening up on stage. They understand that that reciprocity. So, I think we're just driven to do this. I I have to believe that that this is part of our core wiring. When when we're kids and we round up in preschool, like, all right, everyone round up. and everyone tries to sit still and the girls generally can and the boys generally can't for a little until a later age. There's a lot of learning to let others speak to kind of like hold things in. So as a human psychologist, if you were to play pimeatlogist for a moment and we are human oldw world primates, what are the sort of core components that social connection are built on? We talked about dialogue, we talked about vision, we talked about sharing. Is it, you know, but we don't get a whole lot of training in this if you really think about it. We we just kind of go through school. We learn to sit. We learn to listen. You're not supposed to hit people. You're not supposed to yell at people. You know, you run around at recess and and and so on and you do what other people do. But like what is the socialization in in human primates? What are the core features that make somebody able to function really well socially or not? I think the thing to keep in mind at least is the reason why we think social connection matters so much, why it's so important is that it allows us to coordinate with other people. And if I can coordinate with you, then you and I are better able to survive and to exist and pass along our genes. And if we can't coordinate with each other and that groups that are able to coordinate with each other collectively cooperate with each other in ways that are that are good for the common good, those groups outperform groups where people are just at each other's throat. Nobody's cooperating. Right? This is why corporations function effectively. You get a collection of individuals all operating as a single unit all oriented towards one common goal. And you can get a collection of people of individuals then doing things that are way more advanced and way bigger than any individual would do on their own. This is why the East Indian Trading Company was able to send ships all around the world because they had resources tied up in corporations so that they could send ships out into the world and if a one went down you wouldn't lose all of your all of your resources. You wouldn't lose all your riches as an investor. So all of social connection, at least evolutionarily speaking, this is the idea, is pushing us toward cooperation and coordination, particularly with non-kin. That's what makes us truly social on this planet is our ability to cooperate and to care for non-kin. You don't need coordination with family members. Uh you know, you don't need any any special evolutionary mechanism to get coordination with family members. They have your they have your genes, right? They have your genes. So that makes perfect sense. you're leaving genetic offspring, but you need something else to explain why I'm so friendly with you and why we coordinate so well out there in the world. We drive on the right side of the road where we befriend people uh who we're not related to. And that's where I think all of this that's what all that's what social connection is ultimately trying to serve is that coordination function. Do you think there are hardwired mechanisms that set us up for cooperation with our genetic offspring and siblings and so forth more so than with non- genetic? Uh I know you have adopted kids. Uh we have adopted kids in our family as well and and it's sort of weird to say this cuz it's kind of a duh, but for people that don't have adopted family members, like the notion that they're not like really part of your family is is insane. I for privacy reasons I don't want to disclose who these people are but I can tell you that um I have a younger family member who was adopted and I never ever ever think for a moment that she's not part of our family right lay down and traffic for her the same way I would for any other member of my family and I wasn't the one that raised her. Do you think there's something hardwired about our genetic offspring then? And the other stuff fortunately develops adopted children, uh, close friends, um, community members. I don't know the answer to that exactly. That's not what I study per se. What I what I can tell you though as a social psychologist is that what we study is the power of context and roles to drive behavior. And the thing that you are speaking to and the thing that we have experienced as parents, we have three adopted children. What really matters is the role you play, right? And that is magical. When we adopted our first two children um from Ethiopia, we made a decision to do this. And and when you adopt, there's there's a point where you move from this being hypothetical to being this being real. Okay? And the way this worked for us was that we were shown pictures of these children who we could adopt. And of course, once you're once you're in on it, like you're all in, you're not really making a choice. I'm not sure. They said, you know, we called we called up the agency. We said we were ready to go. And and they said, "How about these?" And they put a picture up for us. And when we first making this decision, it was hypothetical. And the pictures look different to us. These kids have come from our kids have come from very very hard places in life. You don't end up in an orphanage another part of the world unless you've come through hard places. They had come through very hard places. They were in the second and third percentile in the WHO heightened uh weight charts. They were in tough shape. As soon as Jen and I said, "Yeah, we can do this." I I so vividly remember this. They just looked better. They just they looked more. You just felt more love. They looked different the second we decided, yes, this is it. Here we go. We have committed. And then once you bring people into your family, anybody who's done this knows the huge effect is your dad or your mom. And that's what matters. We will sometimes I don't know if your family has done this but I will sometimes very gently note to people they will sometimes talk to me as a as another father of of my kids and not my kids right as if the biological and adopted children are different and I very try to gently say they are all our children and you don't you don't feel differently so I think what's interesting not as if there is there any subtle difference that's left is how almost completely imperceptible or completely imperceptible. It actually is. That's what makes us remarkable as human beings that we can do that. There is no other species we know of that does that kind of thing that loves beyond their kin in the way that we can. In fact, it's led to a a total reshaping in many ways of the field of economics. Even economists believe that humans are fundamentally self-interested. They only care about themselves. The only rub is when you actually look at the data, people are just a lot nicer to each other than standard models of economics would predict. We give money away to charity. We give away kidneys to random strangers. We care. Like if if if I give you $10 in an experiment and tell you you can divide it with another person however you want. You can keep all of it. Give uh you know give none of it or give it all away. The standard prediction from economic theory is you'll be purely self-interest. you won't care anything about this person you know nothing about. You'll give them nothing. That's not what real people do. They give something 30%, 50%, typically depending on the context that you're in. And that's the thing that I think is remarkable in this particular case. Not is there any any bit left of of the this this biological hard wiring, but how much of it is about the role that you play and how much our love for another, our ability to connect with another person is a function of the role that we play in their lives. Incredible example that the moment you made this decision, you and your wife made the decision that these were the children you were going to adopt, that they your visual perception of them changed. Different. Yeah. It's almost like two circuits merged in that moment and and I I can attest from a parallel experience. Um although I'm not the parent of this family member that it you never go there's it's a it's an instant and you never go back. There's never a reconsideration that you know and I think some people assume that like well in especially hard times you know it's actually it kind of just leaves the room that like the question it's a fascinating and reassuring aspect of of our brain wiring. Other people might imagine that you think this. It just doesn't. You just you're you're just a parent. That's it. Wild and very cool. It is very cool. And and and I think an underappreciated aspect of our sociality is how much we and and we often we kind of take it for granted. You know, people are mean to each other. Yeah. Yeah. People can be mean to each other, but we also love each other way beyond what we should in some way based on just pure, you know, kinship relationships and biological offspring would predict we would. And that's because we're highly social. We got to cooperate with each other in order to get along successfully in life. And so we got these really hard uh hardwired kind of circuitry to care and love and connect with each with each other when we try. what I'm about to describe might be different now. Um, but a good portion of my family is in South America. And I'll never forget when I was in my like late teens, early 20s, I went down there and I I went out with my cousins to a bar. It was like a club, right? Um, and it was so interesting because they spoke to their friends. We met up with their friends there. People danced, people drank, did all the things that we were also doing back in California, but there was no communication with other people at this club or this bar that they didn't already know. Oh, this may have changed, but the then and there the the culture was one where you go out with the people you already know and you have a really good time, but people weren't exchanging numbers, hitting on people, looking at other people, cross it was it's that there were these little pockets across the room. So it wasn't this idea that oh when you go out in public you go to a club or you drink or something you might meet somebody else that there wasn't a fear of other people that wasn't the reason you go out you go out to see your friends and the interesting thing also was that many of these friendships had been lifelong friendships. Oh yeah. So in some sense I wonder is this one version of how humans evolved because we always think about this village of like a hundred people you know um you know Bob Sapolski talks about this and you know we we evolved in these cultures of 100 or 200 folks and you knew everyone and everyone's in each other's business and that's how our our species evolved. At the same time we we have different examples of of sociology and that strangers weren't around as much was the idea. Yeah. It's it's hard to say. I don't know. Certainly today, if you look around the world, there is and always has been some anxiety about connecting with strangers. And it can vary depending on where you There's some places where there's more sociability than in others, but there's always been some anxiety about the other, the one you don't know, right? Because you don't know necessarily if I can trust you or not in this moment, whether that comes from our evolutionary heritage or not, or just unfamiliarity with anything, right? So, if you know, if you give me something to drink here, I don't know what's in it. I'm going to be a little nervous. I want to find out before I drink it. If I trust you, I'll drink it. But if I don't, you know, I'm not so sure. I'm going to want to see what's in there first. There's always some anxiety about the unknown or uncertainty. And it could be a lot of stuff about strangers, a reluctance to connect with other people, desire to keep with the folks we already know comes simply from that, right? Which which also would apply to non-human interactions too or non-human objects as well. We just like what's familiar because we know it. and and we trust it and we're comfortable with it as a result. Everything else by comparison is a little bit riskier. I can't say I'm particularly outgoing or not, but I was taught manners that had me ask how people's day was going. Like if I'm checking out the grocery store, it's like, "How's your day going?" And I'm interested like it's not just an icebreaker like how's your day going? You hold the door for people. You say please and thank you. I I think a lot of people assume that manners equates to small talk equates to superficial and that it's all a bunch of fluff that it's not about deep connection. But when I'm moving through the, you know, the checkout line at Whole Foods, I don't have a lot of options. Y if I say nothing, okay, these days no one would notice. They could be on their phone. No one no one would call that abnormal. If I say, "How's your day going?" and they go, "I'm pretty good." If I say, "What did you do before you got here?" That's that's getting a little bit further down the line, right? Um, if I say like, "What's the hardest thing that ever happened?" You know, they're going to look at me like I'm crazy, right? So, what I wonder is when we talk about manners and etiquette, which I believe there's been a real kind of erosion of at the level of kind of what is standard, right? Um, for whatever reason, we just don't have an etiquette everyone follows. All it used to be all men wore jackets and ties or at least ties to work. I mean now you show up and whatever, right? I do think that as manners have become less common or common manners have become less common that the opportunities for casual low-level exchange have evaporated. And so there's less of a stepping stone to deeper exchange. Yeah. So I would think about manners kind of as habits, right? That's kind of what they are. and and some sensibilities about about other people being kind and decent to other people but understanding how those manners might be affecting day-to-day behavior is a little bit tricky. So one of the things for instance we find like in in a lot of public spaces people are reluctant to engage with other people because they don't want to interrupt they don't want to be impolite. There's a version of that that is about manners, right? And we have some sometimes we're getting signals of that tech gives us signals that somebody doesn't want to be bothered perhaps like we put ear buds in or we look at our phone, right? And so some of that could be coming from what you might think of as as manners. In the UK, for instance, one of the reasons we we find just well just this true in the US too, but even a little more so in the UK, there's this norm of politeness that I it's not okay for me to get into your business. In Japan, it's even stronger. Right? I don't want to. And that's seen as being polite. Right? In those contexts, I am with you though that this general norm of saying hello or hi to people has gotten diminished a little bit in part because people I think are getting out of the habit because you got these you got these got these phones on you all the time. But I think I think it's a little trickier. It's a little harder to say maybe that manners have eroded because they're complicated out in the world. stuff that looks like could be a lack of manners in one context could in people's own minds be no I'm I'm being polite to you by not interrupting. It's tricky. Yeah. I mean I hear from a lot of podcast listeners that the challenges with, you know, finding a romantic partner nowadays center largely around people not wanting to be seen as creepy, but also people not wanting strangers to talk to them. So there's a little we're a little bit of an impass right now. I also hear from people who wonder why uh guys aren't asking them out just kind of randomly or asking them for a coffee or for a number or something like that. I think there's a lot of fear right now is what I hear. And that fear is probably well it certainly is on both sides. You know, you said you had an in-depth conversation with your Uber driver on the way over here. I mean I used to be that I would get into deep conversations on airplanes. It just seems like we're we're stuck in this cap. I did last night coming out to the only downside being sometimes uh if your neck is turned to one side, you couldn't get off that plane with a with a stiff neck. But in all seriousness, so are you one to just open up conversation with people at random? Yeah. In part because we got to we could go back a long way to start. I'll start at the beginning of our research, but I'll keep this simple. I've interpreted reaching out and connecting with other people differently. We find in our work that people underestimate how interested others are in engaging with them. So you're sitting next to somebody on a plane or on a train and people if you're not already talking, you assume this person doesn't want to talk to you, but that person is more likely to say they're interested in talking to you than you would guess. But if you got two people that aren't talking to each other, this gets back to our earlier conversation, how I can use somebody's behavior as a guide to their thoughts. in this case, making a mistake. I can infer you're not interested in talking to me if you're not. And you could be thinking, well, Nick's not talking to me. He's not interested in it either. We can both then sit there, both be interested in talking to each other, but nobody's saying a word because we misunderstand what silence is like, right? Or we assume that people don't want to have meaningful conversations when in fact, most people say that's actually what they want. So, I've adopted a different way to think about manners here in a way that I think attends more to both my own well-being and the person who I'm connecting with. I think about social connection as an opportunity or an invitation to connect with somebody. And to your point about fear, we find over and over again people are overly pessimistic, overly afraid about how positively other people will respond to them when you reach out to them in a positive way. So like with the Uber driver on the way here today, I just he was Iranian. I asked him, "How do you feel about the war? Can you can you tell me about it?" And it was clear that I was not wanting some superficial response. I cared. I was taking an interest in him and he recognized I was taking an interest in him and he responded by taking an interest then in me and feeling comfortable sharing. And he I mean he shared that his son died in a protest in Iran and that he had been imprisoned in Iran. And I mean it we were crying but together at the end of that at the end of that ride it's 23 minutes to get here. The fact that you're able to connect for a short while. I'm assuming you didn't exchange numbers. You're not going to be in touch. Yeah. So so the point is not to create a lasting relationship. The point is to connect to make that moment better. Yeah. I mean, and I think actually this is a really important way to rethink how you think about well-being. Well-being is not just about the intense, you know, the the really impactful moments in your life. Happiness and well-being is a little more like a leaky tire. Like you just got to keep pumping it up because you adapt to things, right? You you go on this amazing trip, you know, to out into the beautiful Sonoran desert or something, right? And that's great. You come back the next day and then you got traffic coming to work and that sucks, right? you're right back to where you were before. It doesn't last. I mean, nothing really lasts for that long. Obviously, relationships can last, but but moments come and go, right? And what that means, I think, for our well-being is that we want to start paying attention to creating good moments, right? Positive moments that can lift us up and the people around us as well. And you can take I could have gone 23 minutes here uh to talk with you today and had a perfectly boring ride or I could have heard one of the most amazing stories about somebody's life where he opens his heart up to me in this car ride in 23 minutes and made that 23 minutes way better and connect with another human being more deeply than than you might imagine would be possible in that short time and make that moment better. My day is better because that moment was better. And if you start thinking about happiness and connection in terms of moments rather than some sort of illusion of some lasting long-term impact, well then you start seeing opportunities to connect all over the place. Right? On my plane flight in last night did that, right? In the grocery store store check, you got an opportunity. You know, I now keep an eye out. I I just pay attention. I take an interest in other people. The research that I've done here on social connection has fundamentally changed the way that I live my life. I take an interest in other people. So, I notice stuff that I didn't used to notice. I'll throw out compliments. Any kind thought I will share with somebody. I just don't have anxiety about that. Keep moving on. If right, if if I'm passing, I'll shout out like this morning. I got breakfast at the hotel I was at. Guy's wearing a killer hat, right? I'm walking by. Hey man, I love your hat. That's awesome. Right? I'm walk by say I love it too. Right? And I just kept going. But that moment was a little brighter. Right? And what's a good day if not to string along a few good moments? And what's a good week if not to string along a few days that have some good moments in them? And what's a good month, a good year, a good life? It's about those moments. And we got lots of those moments. And if we start thinking about them in terms of opportunities to connect, to be decent to another person in a way that'll really use the skill we have to connect with other people instead of being held back by misplaced fear. changes the way you live your life. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives you insights into your heart health, your hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans. 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But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. A function membership is only a dollar a day, $365 a year. And if you think about the information it provides and the health challenges it helps you avoid and the proactive things that it can do for you to enhance your health, I truly look at it as a savings. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code hubberman for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. Yeah, I'm listening to you and I'm thinking uh some of the best moments of my life and I've had many many are really at this kind of level of in passing. You know, you mentioned like in my mind I was saying like never underestimate the the good feeling that comes from like a good fist bump with someone that you exchange no words with. You bet. And I live in a very crowded area and so I don't go out much but when I do occasionally you just pass someone on the sidewalk, you just like put out a fist and like and you feel a kinship. Yeah. Um the other day also um I have a very niche but uh very deep relationship to a certain genre of music. So just like walking down the the boardwalk and someone goes someone like shouted out I was wearing a minor threat shirt. I'm big Ian Mai fan minor threat fugazi and uh someone goes minor threat and I go minor threat. I don't even know where they were you know and so like and like they I mean you know it's a you know I'm dating myself here by by saying that but still amazing band right? No matter how old you are check it out. Um, but uh, you know, you feel a kinship to other members of your species that way. I don't know who these people are. It's interesting. It it's it's a whole other level of of human connection that I hadn't thought of. And as with manners and etiquette and that kind of superficial small talk piece, I kind of assumed that that this stuff didn't matter, that it was kind of like, ah, well, okay, that's like that's not nourishment. That that's not a that's not a nice like elk steak or beautiful vegetable spread. that that's the that's like a that's like a cracker, you know, but the comparison isn't fair because ultimately, like you said, our life is a series of moments and the feeling that our species has a kinship that isn't based on anything else. There was no exchange of money or opportunities or any of that is is pretty awesome. Sense we're connected. We're in this together in some way. There's a there's a a hypothesis that that many of my PhD students and postocs over the years have suggested and that we've talked about, but we have never figured out a way to actually test it. But some sense that when you interact with with a stranger, a member of a group of some kind, but a stranger is a good example. It doesn't just make you feel connected to that person. It kind of changes your sense of connection to like the entire group. Like you just feel a little better about humanity when you see that moment. Like you deliver a compliment to somebody. I was walking down the sidewalk um just a little bit ago on my way to the train there was a woman standing next to a car and she just had these awesome red glasses on. They just look fabulous. And I said to her while we're going by, I love those glasses. You are killing it today. and she took him off almost it didn't she wasn't going to cry but she she stopped and she said thank you so much for telling me that I really needed that today right I had met her in a moment where she had a bad day and my sense is she just felt uplifted just like by people in general by the world just had a more favorable view of what the world was like a different view of what human nature was like in that moment than you otherwise would have had yesterday on my train ride into University of Chicago before I got on a flight to come here to see you. Sit down next to a young man on the train. He's got his earbuds in looking at his phone, you know, easy stereotype young man, disconnected from the world. I sit down and I said I sat right next to him. I said, "Hi." I reached out. I'm Nick. I to shake a hand. He he came back with a fist bump rather than a handshake. But then he took out his right earbud and I started talking to him. I said, "You know what? What are you up to today? What you what are you what are you going to town for?" and he said, "Well, I'm I'm going to this culinary program downtown." And what was so crystal clear right away was how proud he was that he was doing this. He'd come from LA, actually, and he was just started getting into this training program, this trade school to get him into this culinary union where he was going to work as a chef for maybe for a hotel or a big restaurant. He pulled out his book, uh, his little three- ring binder that had his lessons for it. I actually took a picture of it. I have a I have a son who's entering a trade program right now. Uh, I've never seen him happier in his life than when he's doing this. And he was flipping through showing me what they were doing today. He was just so proud of what he was doing, so ready to talk with me about this. His name was Gustavo. Um, delightful young man. And I remember leaving that conversation just like feeling better about about my kids, just about kids in general. Like here's a kid who's really trying to make it. And that felt good. not just about this young man Gustavo who I felt fortunate to spend 30 minutes that made that 30 minutes much better but kind of uplifting about the entire category that he was from and what's interesting is how easy it is to your point about manners say to avoid that out of fear he doesn't…

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