Andrew Huberman interviews psychologist Dr Dachner Keltner on the science of awe, emotion, and human connection
Andrew Huberman speaks with UC Berkeley professor Dr Dachner Keltner about the science of awe and emotional bonding.
Summary
Andrew Huberman hosts Dr Dachner Keltner, professor of psychology and co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, for a wide-ranging conversation on the science of emotions — particularly awe, embarrassment, and teasing — and their roles in human bonding and health. Keltner argues that awe is not elusive or rare but is reliably triggered by a perceptual shift from small to vast, whether visual, temporal, or conceptual, and that this shift has measurable physiological benefits including reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, and even reduced long COVID symptoms. The conversation covers the breakdown of collective life in modern society, the dominant-negative effects of narcissism and social media on awe, and the potential of intentional design — in cities, gyms, and daily routines — to restore communal experience. Keltner also shares his personal experience of grief following his brother's death, which has led him to believe in some form of consciousness beyond the physical.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The origins of emotion science and why Keltner turned to awe
Andrew Huberman: Awe. We all intuitively know what it is and yet we also don't know how to articulate it. I want to say the words overwhelm, excited. I get the physical sensation of a lift. I don't think anyone ever said the word awe and then collapsed into a turtle position. Maybe we could explore that and your thoughts about that. But what got you into awe?
Dr Dachner Keltner: I love the word lift. That's really interesting. I was a young scholar in the science of emotion — Paul Ekman was a pioneer in that field. In the '90s and early 2000s, it was really focused on negative emotions. You know this science: anger, fear, fight-or-flight physiology, amygdala, cortisol, disgust. Paul Rozin and Jonathan Haidt were thinking about emotions from that lens. As a young scientist, given the powerful tools of emotion science — Darwin, Ekman, how to just observe phenomena — it didn't make contact with my life and my own experience. I was raised as a wild child in the late '60s in Laurel Canyon. It was music and social change and protest and beauty. I had a dad who's a visual artist and my mom taught Romanticism and Virginia Woolf — awe and the mind. And I was like, wow, there's all this stuff that my science can't speak to: music, visual patterns, dance, collective movement, someone like Martin Luther King and why he makes me cry. I remember asking Paul Ekman what I should do with my career and he said, "Study awe." So that got me going.
The evolution of facial expression science — from six emotions to twenty
Andrew Huberman: If we could talk about the faces for a moment. Every psychology and neuroscience student sees these faces of disgust, of pleasure. Darwin talked about this. Babies are often presented in parallel with those pictures of adults where they'll show a baby recoiling from something or wide-eyed and leaning in. There always seems to be a motor component to this that maybe isn't as captured in those two-dimensional photographs. What's the story about hardwired facial emotions and what are the revisions to that story?
Dr Dachner Keltner: I've spent 30 years working on that very problem. Paul Ekman did this revolutionary work in New Guinea — showed photos of six emotions, static photographs of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and a smile. People interpreted the faces like you or I would, naming them using the right words. And this is how science occasionally works, which is just by accident — that became the field. There are a lot of debates about how reliable those faces are, how universal they are in different cultures. Ekman really posited a strong universality that's been contested by Jim Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and others. There are controversies around how hardwired they are, whether they occur reliably in a child's development. Young children show disgust expressions like social mammals do — they wince at bad smells just like you or I would. Anger is a little bit trickier to pin down developmentally.
Our lab and several labs around the world — Jess Tracy at UBC, Disa Sauter — started to expand the vocabulary of faces. Now there's a lot of data suggesting there are 20 different facial expressions: laughter, love, compassion, awe, embarrassment, shame, pain, and more. That has broadened the taxonomy of emotions. We used to think of six; now there are probably 20 distinct states in the mind. The field is heading toward really thinking about physiological patterns and brain patterns of these distinct states.
The hardwiring question is hard science to do. Just imagine videotaping people from five different countries, getting their emotional expressions, and then making sense of them. It used to take one hour to code the facial muscle movements of one minute. I had a grad student at Berkeley, Alan Cowan, who is a computational genius. He looked at our old science and said we can use AI to code the face. He did it with Google engineers — he coded two million videos from 144 cultures and found 16 facial expressions with 75% overlap across cultures in how we show awe at fireworks, concentration on a test, laughing with friends. Right now I would say 50 to 60% is hardwired as part of who we are in our evolutionary history, and the rest is subject to variation in interesting ways.
The relationship between emotion, motor patterns, and language
Andrew Huberman: I want to ask a question that may or may not be possible to answer. The relationship between emotions and what we call motor patterns — movement — is obviously very close. Disgust, a recoil. Anger. And then there's this other node, which is language. So we have emotions, motor, language. Obviously those can't be dissociated. But can we imagine somebody — a hypothetical person — who can keep their body very still while they're angry and be very articulate? We'd probably think that person is perhaps sociopathic. Then on the other extreme, you can imagine somebody who is very angry and is just gesticulating a lot. We could do this for any emotion. So how should we think about emotion as an experience and how it's expressed along these three axes — motor, language, and the emotion itself?
Dr Dachner Keltner: It's a profound question, and it's central to our field. Coming out of your scientific background of studying other mammals and other species, there are these motor patterns that you see in emotion around the world. When you soothe a child that's crying, you're going to bring it in close and caress and touch. When you're fighting a rival or you see rotten food, that motor pattern will be there. Our research shows that 75% of that is this motor pattern of facial musculature and body and skeletal muscles and how we respond to the emotional events of life.
Then we have this massively complicated conceptual system that puts words to experience. That's mainly what we study in psychological science — "I'm feeling angry or ashamed or embarrassed or love or compassion." And very often they're disconnected — the motor pattern and the language we use. On balance they correlate at about point two. So they're just weakly linked — these streams of behavior that are part of who we are. You can think about cultures that value being calm, like a lot of East Asian cultures: be calm, don't disrupt things, don't blurt out, don't protest. And you'll see this disconnect. You can think about certain people who are more authentic and their motor patterns come out in expressions and they will tell you how they feel.
Then there's the feeling itself — the emotion. Michael Pollan is right in his new book on consciousness. The conscious feeling of something — we think we can get at it with words. I don't think so. It's some weird mixture of everything that's happening in your body. Ironically, the emotion or the feeling is still one of the uncharted territories of our field. How do these complicated motor patterns unfold, and words are unfolding, and images and memories and visual things — how does that all come together in my feeling of compassion or awe? We barely know.
Visual aperture, time perception, and the neuroscience of awe
Andrew Huberman: Every once in a while I'll try and think about a concept from way outside of standard science — like the chakras. Even if one looks at it purely as a Western scientist, this idea that maybe there's a confluence of nerves and vasculature that makes you feel rooted and calm versus up in your head. As a scientist who studies emotion, how do you decide which lens to look at things through? Because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about might sound a little esoteric, but it's actually the stuff that's easiest to measure. Presumably you can quantitatively measure breaths per minute when somebody's looking at an awe-inspiring image versus a trivial image.
Dr Dachner Keltner: I love your reference to chakras. The older I get, it's good to think about the other traditions. We wouldn't have thought about the power of the breath without the contemplative meditation traditions that you and Richie Davidson and others have helped bring forward. And lo and behold, deep exhalation activates the vagus nerve, calms us down. That activation of the vagus nerve gives people a sense of warmth in the chest, which kind of sounds like the heart chakra. All the speculation around how your soul is in your heart — well, there's a neurophysiological correlate of that.
One of the great things about the science of emotion is we have learned a lot about how to measure emotion. You can measure it with facial muscles, gaze patterns, coloration of the face, breath patterns, different measures of vagal tone, immune system activation, activation in the gut, brain activation, and the voice — which is one of my favorite modalities. I learned this in some sense from Darwin. Darwin's Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals is, in my view, extraordinary. We're just publishing a paper on everything that he said about human emotion — 53 emotions annotated with eight modalities of expressive behavior. I wrote it with Darwin scholar Frank Sulloway.
I choose how to study an emotion based on what's happening out in our lives, the phenomena out there. If you're studying awe, you should get people around big trees or in musical concerts or in museums. If you're studying embarrassment and modesty, you study young men teasing each other, because we embarrass each other intentionally.
Andrew Huberman: These days, if you want to measure awe, what's your favorite awe stimulus?
Dr Dachner Keltner: People are like, "Oh, you can't study awe — you don't know how to measure it, it's ineffable, it's mysterious, it's spiritual." We can measure awe really well. The vocalization — "Oh." The facial expression. Parts of the brain are activated, parts are deactivated. Vagal tone. Goosebumps is a good part of the awe response.
As we started to study awe, we did two things. One is typical Western science — get your most compelling awe videos, show them to people. BBC Earth is awesome. There are these guys called the Slow Mo Guys — they film wild things in slow motion, like dropping a wine glass, and it's spectacular photography. That fits our definition: you don't understand what's happening, it's vast, it's mysterious.
What I'm really proud of is the work we did out in the field. One of our first studies on the Berkeley campus was in our paleontology museum. There's a replica of a T-Rex skeleton — when I was five years old I learned about dinosaurs in the LA Natural History Museum and it changed my life. So we studied people standing near the T-Rex skeleton and they became expansive and collective. We studied people near giant eucalyptus trees. We studied people at Yosemite — a student in my lab stopped hundreds of travelers from all over the world right when they arrived and asked, "How do you feel about yourself right now?" And they said, "I feel small and quiet, but part of something really large."
Subsequently there are scientists studying mosh pits at concerts, surfers, rock climbers, backpackers. We studied people rafting down the American River — veterans, just like, whoa. We've studied people in art museums, Carnegie Hall. One of my favorite studies was with Stacy Bare, a veteran who ran that program and is an amazing human being and an awe pioneer. My dream study was to have a participant come in and engage a conversation where the other participant is Shaquille O'Neal — 7 foot 2, 350 pounds. You'd be like, whoa. But we couldn't do that.
The perceptual shift from small to vast
Andrew Huberman: Horizons are something that fascinated me for a long time as a vision scientist. When we see a horizon, our visual angle widens. We become more parasympathetic. There's a whole coming off the accelerator of the sympathetic nervous system. So we relax by virtue of coming off the focusing component. When we focus in through a tunnel, it's quite the opposite. But I feel like there's something unique to this experience of being in a tunnel and then the horizon opens up. There's this transformation of visual space. Do you think that's what's going on in Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? Do people who work there attenuate — like, "Oh yeah, another horizon"?
Dr Dachner Keltner: I'm working with rangers right now, and I think the big expansive forms of awe that those places provide are attenuated, but they're still finding it in subtler ways. I was working with Pete Docter at Pixar — you played a big role in Inside Out and Inside Out 2 — and in one of our conversations I was like, tell me about some techniques for producing awe in children's animated films. He described exactly what you said: the film is narrow, a certain kind of attention, sympathetic, fearful, checking things, and then suddenly you see the vastness of something. It is awe-inspiring when you think about it neuroscientifically — as a very basic form of awe, it's shifting from small to vast in terms of vision and perception. And then it becomes metaphorical. You know, I've been working so hard at this paper or this part of my life, and then you suddenly realize it's part of something large.
One of the musicians I interviewed for my book, Yumi Kendall, a cellist for the Philadelphia Symphony, said, "I practice for five hours a day. It's hard, and it's small and narrow — where's my finger? And then when I'm on stage and I feel the notes go out into this space, the vastness, I feel like I'm part of history." And she tears up and cries.
We did this really cool study with Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco — older people go out on an awe walk once a week for eight weeks, 75 years old or older. All we asked them to do was to go from small to vast in how they looked at things. Look at a tree, look at a leaf, go out to the pattern of leaves. It brought them awe and less physical pain over eight weeks, and now we're finding six years later, better brain health.
The awe walk — practice and health benefits
Andrew Huberman: For those listening, what would an awe walk look like, and what are some of the health benefits that have been observed both in the short and long term?
Dr Dachner Keltner: We are a walking species. It is just in our DNA to walk. We meandered from Africa all the way to all the continents. A lot of people — Rebecca Solnit writes about this — walking is almost sacred. Tens of millions of people have regular walks in the United States. It's good for you. So we just add awe to it.
On your regular walk, once a week in our study, go somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go, go someplace that may surprise you. I walk around Berkeley a lot and I was like, I'm going to go past the little playground that my daughters played at when they were young and just feel that — Codornices Park.
Andrew Huberman: With the rock slide and the tunnel. Near the rose garden. And there's a secret — should we give this away? There's a secret hiking trail through what's actually a private property's backyard, and they allow you to go through if you are quiet and you pick up your trash. And there's an incredible waterfall and a place to stand at the top where you can look out over what is kind of like a trench of trees. It's a total transformation of one space to the next if you look for it properly. There's a little swinging gate — it's not locked. And there's a little monastery nearby. A couple years ago you might have seen me and my dog, or you might see me eating a slice of pizza from the Cheeseboard sitting on that log. I spent a lot of time there.
Dr Dachner Keltner: I'm getting goosebumps. That is just pure Berkeley. Thank you.
So in this study — awe walk, go on your walk, find a place that's going to be a little surprising, that may make you feel a little bit of childlike wonder. Slow down, deepen your breathing, sync it up with your walking. Then go from small to vast. Look at clouds. Look at the whole pattern of clouds. Look at trees. Look at the light on the trees and look at points of light and then patterns of light. I love walking past playgrounds — it's one of my favorite sources of awe. Listen to one laugh and then listen to the whole symphony of laughter of kids. That's awe. They walk through that for half an hour.
What we find is they become more vast in their consciousness. They're more aware of what's around them. They feel more kindness over the eight weeks. They feel more awe over an eight-week period — it rises. And then the finding that was important for people who are elderly is less physical pain. Your body starts to ache when you're 75 or earlier, and awe, I think through the inflammation process and reducing it, caused less pain. This dovetails with other health benefits. Awe is good for reduced inflammation, elevated vagal tone, reduced long COVID symptoms. We have people with long COVID — just a minute of awe a day reduced long COVID symptoms. And there's so much science on it that now I think medical doctors are starting to think, "I'm going to prescribe nature. I'll prescribe music through awe as a mechanism."
Spacetime bridging — visual aperture and time perception
Andrew Huberman: I have a lot of thoughts about this going from small to large. For a lot of people, including myself, we assume that awe is this kind of forgetting of our self — getting outside of ourselves. But I'm starting to think based on the way you're describing it that it's about being tethered to the larger picture. It's not just getting out of our heads — it's actually very much an embodied experience. It's almost full body.
I've thought about this relationship between visual aperture and time perception for a long time. We know for certain that when your visual aperture is small — like looking through a soda straw view, or you're in a text communication going back and forth — your perception of time is different. You're fine-slicing those dot dot dots coming through. It feels like an eternity. And it's bidirectional with your level of alertness. If I'm in line at the store and I have somewhere to be, my visual aperture shrinks and then it feels like the person in front of me is taking forever. When I'm relaxed, I'm slicing time differently.
When we see a horizon and our aperture opens up, we relax. But we're also taking fewer time-bit snapshots. People might think, "Oh, fewer — you're in slow motion." No, it's the opposite. Slow motion is high frame rate. This is why when people experience a car crash, they'll often say things felt like they were slowing down — more snapshots.
So a long time ago, because I was experiencing stress, I started reading about meditation types and I came up with this practice. I decided to call it, for lack of a better term, spacetime bridging. The practice is very simple. You close your eyes and do three breaths, thinking about your skin inward — interoception. You open your eyes and look at your hand. You take three breaths, creating a visual tether between you and your hand. Then you look some distance, maybe eight or ten feet away. You do the same. Then you find a horizon. And then you think about the pale blue dot phenomenon — you're just on a planet floating in space. And then you get right back to yourself.
The idea is that it's not about having a small aperture or a big aperture per se, but — like every great thing in biology or psychology — it's the process. It's not an event. It's the process of going from one aperture to the next. And that's kind of what life is about.
Dr Dachner Keltner: Absolutely. And you know, you've studied the visual system and we need more of that knowledge in the science of awe. I was interviewing Matías Tarnopolsky, who was at Berkeley and then went to the Philadelphia Symphony as music director. I asked him what's the secret — why awe and music? Why do we cry? Why do we get goosebumps? And he said, "Time. It's all about what it does to our sense of time."
And Jane Goodall got it most right. She felt that chimpanzees feel awe — I do too. Frans de Waal, the great primatologist who recently passed away and to whom I want to pay homage, alerted me to this. He said you've got to look at Jane Goodall's writing about chimps and the waterfall display they show when they are around vast nature. They sit quietly around rivers. They look at things, they get goosebumps, they touch things like we would out in nature. They rock. And Jane Goodall said, "Why wouldn't they feel awe?" — or experience the beginnings of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside of the self.
With awe, we have a sense of self and interoception, and then we connect to vast things out there. That's what our research documented as a central mechanism of awe — when you're at Yosemite, or when you're standing next to that T-Rex skeleton, or when you've thought about the passage of time that happens with life, you're like, "Wow, I am part of something vast. I'm part of evolution. I'm part of nature. I'm part of an ecosystem." It changes your whole mind. The default mode network starts to quiet down, it activates vagal tone, and you do feel tethered to music or a culture or a political movement or the team you love. It's transcendent. And if you look at where we are today, we need more of that. We need to get our young people connecting to big things.
Connecting through time — music, concerts, and collective consciousness
Andrew Huberman: The idea of connecting through time in our own lives is a very unique form of awe. If I hear a song and it reminds me of when I was 15, all of a sudden the magic library comes — that's how the brain works. You take out a book, you see a subject, and then all of a sudden the books around it change. That's one form of linking up through time. Then there's this other one where you feel something with someone else. You're connected in that moment, but there's this idea that maybe your past, present, and future is connected to their past and present and future. And if you let yourself go there — no drugs required — you're like, "Oh, we're part of this together." We're sort of moving more as a conscious fleet than as individuals. I think concerts are where we generally feel that, because it requires a shared perceptual or emotional experience.
What are your thoughts about individual awe experiences like on the awe walk versus a couple on an awe walk versus connecting to a whole mess of people, some of whom you've never met?
Dr Dachner Keltner: You've highlighted this dynamic with respect to awe and the experience of awe, and we're so limited in how we measure experience. I think you're right that one of the most awesome qualities of awe is connecting in your mind through the layers of consciousness and experience that shifts out of the micro to this expansive narrative about your mind. I grew up around the UCLA campus because my mom got her PhD there in the late '60s. There were eucalyptus trees. Then I went to Northern California where there were not as many. The first day I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergrad, I smelled the eucalyptus and it was awe — all of these experiences through the olfactory process.
I am very persuaded by the new literature on brain synchronization. We are always syncing up with other people. When a nine-month-old listens to music, they are syncing up to the sounds and rhythms of their culture's music and they're synced up physiologically with whomever is in their midst. When we go to a concert or watch a sporting event, your heart rate is syncing up, your brains are synchronizing. That in some sense is the materialistic account of collective consciousness — we're all sharing brain patterns and awareness.
Music is very hard to get people to think collectively in the same way. When you teach a classroom, it's impossible. But music does it within milliseconds. When you talk to people who've been to Taylor Swift shows, they are instantly bonded — united in like a moral cause or identity cause. That's very hard work to do. When Jonathan Haidt and I wrote about awe early in our careers, we were like, we need these emotions to make us be part of collectives, because we are a very collective species. It was one of our signature strengths to fold into groups and to cooperate and share. It's hard work. It's vulnerable to exploitation. And awe is one of the fastest pathways through — through physical dancing together, chanting together, sporting events together, what Émile Durkheim called collective effervescence. Music, syncing up with each other, feeling like we're part of this vast group, sharing a sense of humanity, a sense that we all suffer in the same way or exalt in the same way. It's profound.
Music and awe — punk rock, concerts, and life-changing experiences
Andrew Huberman: When has being at a concert changed your life?
They're some of the most important — not just memorable, but important — experiences of my entire life. My friend Jim Thiebaud — you know Jim?
Dr Dachner Keltner: I text with Jim. I texted with him this morning. We text each other every morning. The great Jim Thiebaud. He basically runs skateboarding. He's the dean of skateboarding.
Andrew Huberman: Good friends with Tommy Guerrero. Jim gave me my first cup of black coffee. He was the person who inspired me to start journaling when I was 14. He gave me a tape — back then it was tapes — of a band called Crimpshrine, which is from Berkeley. They were on Lookout Records, which eventually put out the first releases of Green Day. I heard that tape and was like, this is amazing. I've never heard anything quite like it. It was super raw. And then he gave me a Stiff Little Fingers tape, and that was just it. Then it was Stiff Little Fingers, Operation Ivy, Rancid. I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan. I'm blessed to be good friends with Tim Armstrong these days, but I only met him later in life and that still freaks me out because we're close friends. Whenever I see him, it's still like — that's Tim Armstrong. There's the 14, 15-year-old version of me. Those guys were like gods in the Bay Area for our scene.
The show that changed everything for me was somewhere between '93 and '94. A little club — it was either called the Stage House or the Stagecoach in Santa Barbara, near the railroad tracks downtown. It was Rancid playing with Sick of It All, which was an East Coast hardcore band. My now good friend Toby Morse was there. I remember going there and being kind of scared. Those guys were older. It had a kind of violent feel. They were from Albany and West Oakland and there was an edge there. I remember thinking, this is exciting. I feel very much a part of this. I love the music. I know every lyric. And I'm a little bit frightened and I love it. It was just the adrenaline, and there's a little bit of you don't know what's going to happen and it feels a little dangerous, but it's mostly benevolent. It's an irreplaceable feeling.
Dr Dachner Keltner: Thank you. When I was writing this book on awe, some forms of awe you kind of understand — nature is pretty straightforward, spirituality, meditation. But music, and your description of it, exactly captures how rich and complicated it is. There is something about that sound and the acoustic patterns that come through your eardrums and into your auditory cortex and you give it meaning and suddenly you're remembering things and bonding with people — instant friends, like you said, for life. Brothers and sisters almost. And you're like, this is what life's about.
Susan Langer, a philosopher, really got it right. She said music is this tonal language of emotion and identity. And awe in music — very fitting with our conversation — is when those sounds come into you, move you, and connect you to something that is what you care about in life.
I grew up in Laurel Canyon in the late '60s and there was more music there than almost anywhere in human history — the Mamas and the Papas, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison was living there, the Doors, Bob Dylan was passing through, the Byrds. It was everywhere. And when I saw the recent film about Bob Dylan with Timothée Chalamet, I started crying. I was just like, this is life. And that's why we study awe. Music is one of our great technologies. There's now research showing it's good for chronic pain. I think it's a frontier in healthcare.
When I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra as a teenager, it was Ted Nugent and AC/DC. And when I first heard the Sex Pistols — I was lucky to be in England when Never Mind the Bollocks came out, in a working-class fighting town — I heard that and was like, that's it. And then that led me to Iggy Pop, who's one of my moral heroes.
Andrew Huberman: A lot of music has lyrics and a lot doesn't, but there's something that feels kind of divorced from language about the experience we're talking about, even though there are lyrics tied in there. There's a really good book called A Fighter's Heart by a guy named Sam Sheridan — his wife actually wrote the movie Monster with Charlize Theron. There's this description of all these different martial arts forms, and he talks about how fighting with someone, sparring with someone, is one of the most bonding experiences you'll ever have because you're in this primitive non-language state. He actually likens it to a one-night stand — you're sharing bodily fluids with somebody you barely know, but you feel connected. You're both vulnerable. You're trying to hurt each other. You're also obeying some rules. And he talks about how it transcends language and creates a forever bond.
Dr Dachner Keltner: Darwin wrote about the motor components and got a lot of it right. William James was about the body and the physiology. Language is what we rely on as social scientists, but as William James said when he tried to describe his experience of transcendence when he took laughing gas — which led him down the path to understand spirituality — he said, "Words are tattered fragments. They barely touch the real thing."
I want to dwell for a moment on part of awe that I learned from talking to veterans. I did work with Stacy Bare and we did this Sierra Club research getting veterans out on the rivers. He's one of my heroes — he's gotten tens of thousands of veterans to find their awe in nature. These are guys who've lost limbs and they're rock climbing. There's a lot of awe when you're right at the edge of life and there's violence. And I love your idea that any teacher of the martial arts would say that's the point — we can transcend death or violence by performing them and putting them into a contemplative form for the body.
One of my favorite movies, if not my favorite movie, is Raging Bull. Scorsese, Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray have these epic battles and they look at each other — one of the great scenes — and they're just like, we're united. We're way beyond the fight. I think it's part of this transcendent moment of people crashing into each other. Mosh pits are one of my favorite objects of study in awe, and mosh pits have a set of laws to them.
Joe Strummer and moral beauty as a source of awe
Dr Dachner Keltner: Why is Joe Strummer a person of moral beauty to you? One of the sources of awe is we're amazed by people's courage and strength and kindness and justice. So why Joe Strummer?
Andrew Huberman: I've always worn these button-down black shirts even before I was public-facing, because I saw him do a show — a Mescaleros show. And by the way, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros I actually think is better than the Clash. The Clash was a short run — only five years, pretty much. And then he came back with the Mescaleros and just incredible masterpieces. Produced in part by my friend Tim Armstrong. He went to Hellcat Records, a small label. He also sang songs with Johnny Cash for Rick Rubin. I know the story of that because I'm friends with Rick and I insisted on him telling me.
There was a show that Strummer played where he was wearing his black button-down soaking in sweat — just soaked in sweat — and he just wouldn't take the thing off. I think he might have rolled up one cuff. And I was like, that's punk as hell. That guy is so rad.
He died at 50. I'm 50 now. I go see the mural of him right off Tompkins Square Park in Alphabet City every time I'm in New York. Just go see it, pay your respects. The mural says "Future Is Unwritten." I've talked to Rick about this a lot — what was it about him? Because they were close friends. I never met Strummer.
I think there are three reasons. One is he had that Bob Dylan-like ability to write lyrics where you're not really sure what the song's about, but it makes sense — not just because it's beautiful, but you feel like he's tapping into something more fundamental than what the lyrics are actually saying. Beyond language. A great song like "On the Road to Rock and Roll" — that could be about being on tour or something, but it transcends something obvious.
The other thing is the way he used his breath — his intonation is unparalleled. And then Rick was the one who really helped me understand. During the summer I go hang out with Rick whenever I can, and we watch documentaries including Clash documentaries. I asked him, "What was it like? Why does he have this thing?" Because he says these incredible things — "You've got to bring humanity back into the center." And Rick in very Rick Rubin style said, "Everything he said, he brought his whole life experience into those statements." And I was like, just the statements, the quotes — "We've got to bring the humanity back into the room." And Rick goes, "No — everything he said, it was like you got the sense that he was bringing all of himself to it, even if he was being kind of quiet."
And Rick's superpower is that Rick knows what a true feeling feels like. And he knows what a false feeling feels like. And he's only interested in truths. Period. And that's the challenge of the science that I'm part of — exactly that. There are all these layers of meaning and representation, and we try to figure out true moments of awe with all of our measures.
Inhibitors of awe — self-focus, narcissism, and social media
Andrew Huberman: We should probably talk about some of the inhibitors of awe. Language can be a dominant negative — a gene that basically suppresses a set of functions. And then there's something about being overidentified with self. On the recommendation of Tim Armstrong — someone you wouldn't associate with the Grateful Dead — he was like, "You got to listen to the Grateful Dead." And he said, "They're punk rockers." And I said, "What are you talking about?" And he said they played a different show every night. Every show was unique.
I started getting really into listening to the Grateful Dead in the last couple of years. And there's this amazing moment in one of the documentaries where somebody says, "What killed it? What killed the collective feeling of music?" And the answer someone gave was cocaine. And the question was, "Why cocaine?" And someone said, "Because cocaine's all about me. It's the me drug."
As a neuroscientist, I can tack that to dopamine and adrenaline. When dopamine and adrenaline are elevated — amphetamines especially — it becomes a me thing. Every idea that's mine is the thing that needs to happen. Very different than cannabis, very different than psychedelics, very different than just the sober experience of being with the music.
So I'd love your thoughts on how certain chemical states, and more broadly how meanness and self-interested states, are a dominant negative for entrance into awe.
Dr Dachner Keltner: It's amazing. I grew up for three years in Laurel Canyon, '68 to '70, and then we moved to the foothills of the Sierras. When my brother passed away — he was my brother of awe, 14 months younger — I was in this reflective period and I started reading a lot about Laurel Canyon. They made the same point: things shifted in the early '70s. The historian said it's cocaine — it moved from marijuana and mushrooms and psychedelics, but really people playing music together, Joni Mitchell or Graham Nash or whoever, and then suddenly cocaine comes and the whole spirit changed.
I think the great enemy of awe is meanness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our great writers of awe, has this moment out in nature — cold day in Massachusetts, sees this forest — and he says he's standing on the bare ground, his head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space. There's that uplift you described earlier. "All mean egotism vanishes." And that's awe — awe quiets the self.
When you look at where we are, Jean Twenge's longitudinal data shows we're more self-focused. A quarter of the pictures we take are of the self. Half of the photos we take are of the self or the self with another person or another thing. The world has become more narcissistic. We're led by narcissists. It's been taken as a default, and it's not a default — it's a corruption of our minds. Because the mind is very good at looking at other people, making eye contact, seeing their beauty, hearing their words, looking at collectives, discerning patterns of nature. All of that works against awe. If I'm focused on myself, I'll feel less awe. If I'm worried about my striving in society or my bank account, thinking about money, it countervails awe.
That's why awe is important for our times. We are in this period of too much self-focus. It's costing young people. It makes them anxious. They've got to go dance. They've got to hear some music. They've got to share stuff and go backpacking or whatever it is — just to get out of the self.
Sports, collective effervescence, and the Steeler Nation
Andrew Huberman: The example you gave of sports earlier is an important one. I'm not a big professional sports fan, but it is kind of interesting to put this lens on when I see a game. One of our members of our podcast team is just obsessively excited about professional football and the Seattle Seahawks. And I have to believe that when he goes to see his favorite team play in the Super Bowl and win, it's not just about his relationship to the team — it's about being a kid, and everyone else there in a Seahawks jersey must feel a connection. Because they presumably know that the other super fans know the history, they know how important this is, they know all the trials and tribulations of the team.
Dr Dachner Keltner: One of the joys of awe science — we gathered stories of awe from 26 countries. India, Brazil, Poland, Chile, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Russia. We asked: what is vast and mysterious? What gives you goosebumps? What's amazing or awesome to you? When you get stories from Brazil or Argentina, they're going to tell you about football. When you get stories from parts of the United States, they're going to talk about American football and baseball. Stories from Boston — there's going to be a Red Sox story.
We have not studied sports in my emotion science because most emotion scientists are not good athletes. They were picked last in grammar school. They're grouchy about sports. And yet it's super emotional.
There's this great obscure sociology paper that said being a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is like being in a religion — you have your rituals, they have these towels they wave, you think of yourself as the Steeler Nation, they talk about godlike experiences on the field, they have these spiritual moments where in freezing weather they'll take off their clothes and cheer and cry together. I was teaching this recently and there were two Steeler fans in the audience and they were like, "That's exactly it."
Everywhere you go as a Steeler fan, there are Steeler bars. And if you're a kid and the Steelers lose, somebody who's old will tell you, "I remember when we lost in 1983, and we'll recover." It was so rich to me. Sports, the Olympics, are old — 3,000 years old. The ball court games in the Mayan traditions were amazing ways to gather community and become collective.
One of my great joys of writing the book was talking with Steve Kerr, who was coaching the Warriors at the time. He's a righteous guy, a person of truth. Getting his sense of how awesome it is to coach a game — the Warriors were in this amazing period — and look up into the stands and 10,000 people are dancing because of your coaching. I was like, that's pretty good.
The breakdown of collective life and the epidemic of loneliness
Andrew Huberman: I'm thinking about the things that inhibit awe, but I'm also thinking about solutions. There's this thing that's wonderful about experiences that we can have with other people but that we can also do on our own, and when we do them on our own we know other people are doing it on their own too. The so-called health and wellness community takes some heat. But there's this deeper layer that's much more important that's formed over the last five to ten years. People get together to sauna. People get together to do breath work. People get together to cold plunge. And of course, for thousands of years, humans have been doing this. I think there's a connection that's formed among people who want to take good care of their health, who want to have some control over their state. Because otherwise the world will take control of it for you.
So how could we build or glean a greater sense of community through things that people are already doing in their daily lives?
Dr Dachner Keltner: It's profoundly important. Online life — Jonathan Haidt is right that it's not only anxiety-producing, but we don't think about the opportunity costs. It deprives me of awe. In our study of 2,600 people around the world, what makes them feel awe — no one ever said being on Facebook or Instagram.
There are a couple of worries I have about online life. One is the content itself, which has been algorithmically designed — I was at Facebook when some of those algorithms were set in place — of making people hate each other and not demonstrating all the wonderful things about human beings. And then online life disrupts sharing. We don't share music like we used to. We used to listen to music together — that's down. Going to movies is down 40%. That used to be a very important collective cultural experience. Now it's streaming.
And I think the next challenge in the technological world is like you said — how do you enable the sharing of experience? A lot of what we do for our bodies in the wellness space has a massively important community basis to it. You're not just meditating and breathing — you're also sharing your mind and your experience. You're not just listening to music — you're sharing an understanding of the music together and its cultural history.
One of my favorite examples is farmers markets. They were non-existent in the '90s, and now there are 9,000 farmers markets growing. People go to buy kale and get the honey and the fresh bread, but they're also going because it's community. Profound community. Ten years of life expectancy — community.
Andrew Huberman: Ten years. Oh my goodness. There's so much obsession these days around what sport allows you to live the longest. The greatest benefit seen there is something like five to eight years. So you're talking about a ten-year benefit from community — and that's a meta-analysis of 350,000 participants. You can go to the bank with that.
Dr Dachner Keltner: I've advised at Facebook 2010 to 2015, Google, Pinterest, a little bit of Apple. And I keep telling them this is the singular challenge. Technologies are asynchronous — I send you a text and 18 hours later I hear from you. You're not making eye contact. The visual connection is degraded. Steve Pinker observed rightly that when I'm on Zoom, I have to look down to see the camera, so my eye contact is going down. The technology works against it. And I think it's the hard problem of the social media platforms — can they get us to feel connected? Mark Zuckerberg's original statement about Facebook was "open and connected," and I think they failed. It's the challenge of our times.
Andrew Huberman: I know Mark a bit, and I trust he wants that. I really do. I know some people will push back on that statement, but I actually know that he wants that. I know some of the folks in the leadership at Instagram — they want that. These people actually have very healthy personal lives. They understand the value of connection at the level of family, friendships, but also at large.
I do think that right now the way that most social media experiences land is the exact opposite of awe. Awe-inspiring experiences — you never forget them. I sometimes do the test on myself: I don't know how much time I spent on social media yesterday, but do I remember anything specific? I don't think I do. There was tons of sensory input, a fair amount of time, and I don't remember a damn thing. And the only thing that resembles that is drugs of abuse. To me, that's the problem with social media — there's nothing memorable about yesterday's social media.
Dr Dachner Keltner: One of the things I'm really interested in right now is awe design. I'm working with Gehl Architecture in Copenhagen — how do you design cities for more awe? It's not hard and it's good for people. A little bit of music, a little bit of green space, a little bit of art, get people looking at each other and talking and buzzing. Easy to do.
You've just laid out a manifesto: my life on the smartphone is the antithesis of awe. It's small — awe is vast. It's sped up — awe slows things down. It has a fragmentation to it — awe integrates. It's about micro things — awe is about systems. When you feel awe towards music, it's like, I get it all here right now.
Andrew Huberman: I think the problem with social media has to do with the fact that it brings long time scales — past, present, and future, different frame rates — into one real-world visual aperture. I haven't been to the Sphere in Las Vegas, but friends of mine who love live music tell me it is incredible. There's no reason why digital can't be awe-inspiring. There's no reason why that technology should be anything less than awesome.
Dr Dachner Keltner: There's new work out about AI helping medical doctors, and the writer of this book coming out of UC San Francisco is like, it's like having the best brain trust about medicine right with you all the time. Who wouldn't want that? I think that's the challenge — to have AI and the devices it's manifest on get us to what's awesome.
The science of embarrassment and teasing in group bonding
Andrew Huberman: Can we talk about embarrassment?
Dr Dachner Keltner: My other favorite emotion when I began my career. It was guys, right? Guys specifically teasing one another.
Andrew Huberman: I definitely experienced that. And I definitely participated in it in a benevolent way. But the teasing that happens in groups of good male friends can be pretty brutal. But there's a pleasure in it most of the time. So what's that about?
Dr Dachner Keltner: It all begins when I started scientifically to depart from the Ekman canon of those six emotions. I was doing a project in his lab and we were startling people and studying the startle response — a seven-muscle-movement motor pattern built into the nervous system. And I noticed people got embarrassed after they were startled unexpectedly. You blast them with a noise out of the blue in the lab and they show this response — the blush, people avert their gaze, they look away, they hide their face. I took it to Ekman and he said, "That's a motor pattern of emotion. You should go study it." And I did.
Then I started to notice — and there's a really rich literature on this, and Darwin wrote about it — that a person's embarrassment is a sign of their commitment to the collective. I called you by the wrong name, or I farted in the yoga class, or whatever it is, and I'm embarrassed — I'm sorry, I apologize, that really matters. And when you see people get embarrassed, you like them more and you trust them more and you give resources to them and you think they're a good group member.
Then I was like, I've played a lot of pickup basketball in my life, thousands of games, and there's just a lot of teasing and taunting. I started to put it together — the right kind of teasing within a collective, you're kind of provoking people to see if they care about the group. And then the wrong kind of teasing — that's bullying and harassment. We can pinpoint: that's inappropriate. You're not keeping people in the group, you're excluding them or humiliating them.
So we did this study. We brought groups of four fraternity guys in each interaction from a fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin. We gave them each initials and had them make up nicknames based on the initials. And we let them tease each other. They are really going at it — young men coming out of a fraternity house teasing each other. There are funny stories. People got embarrassed. The teasing was kind of about, "I'm going to accuse you of something you shouldn't do in this group" — like pass out drunk naked in the streets of Wisconsin. Don't do that. And then they get embarrassed and they say, "Ah, I'm not going to do that." What we found is the more that they got embarrassed, the better they liked each other, because it's turning to this motor pattern of, "Wow, I'm showing you that I care about what you're accusing me of, and I'll get embarrassed, you see that in me, we become closer."
The guys who were better teasers — more playful and funny, making people aware of the norms that mattered to the group but not really humiliating people — those guys were more popular in the group. That's been replicated. Just storytelling and ribbing each other was part of healthy group functioning. You think about roasts — it's the end of your career, you're going to get hammered. And that's part of this phenomenon of, we make fun of the people we love the most. Siblings in big families tease each other like mad, they joke and josh and wrestle and give each other noogies and have nicknames for each other — to make sure everybody's aware of what matters and how not to violate those rules.
Andrew Huberman: A former guest on this podcast, Dr. K — a psychiatrist who's also very versed in Eastern philosophy — said that embarrassment is important because it also signals that you're not a creep. He was referring to heterosexual relationships where a guy says something trying to flirt, and the woman says something back and he gets embarrassed — he realizes he said the wrong thing. If he doesn't show embarrassment, he's creepy. If he does, it verifies that he has a certain degree of empathy and self-reflection.
Dr Dachner Keltner: He's right. Darwin early on wrote about the blush being a sign of your healthy character, your moral virtue almost. In nonhuman species, facial reddening is associated with physical robustness. In humans, we think of it as moral robustness — yeah, I care about stuff. We did work early on with Bob Knight at Berkeley on orbital frontal patients. The orbital frontal cortex is in part where your ethical consideration takes place, and if you have damage to that region through brain trauma — you fall off a motorcycle or a ladder — you don't show embarrassment where you should, and they feel creepy, like they're not playing by the rules. Erving Goffman wrote a lot about it — our embarrassment is telling people, "I know what the rules are and I care about them. I'm committed to them."
Loyalty, teasing, and the code of male friendship
Andrew Huberman: Jocko Willink put something up on social media that really landed. He's a former Navy SEAL team operator. The quote was something like: if you want to understand males in groups and healthy masculine friendship, guys are going to tease each other relentlessly in front of each other, but they'll never tease behind somebody's back, and they'll back the other person — who they were just teasing in person — against the rest. They'll buffer them against any kind of criticism. So it's the teasing to his face that actually builds the bond.
Dr Dachner Keltner: We documented that in the fraternity study. When you tease somebody — "Hey man, do you see this guy's dance moves?" — you're making light of human foible and all the funny things that we do. And there's this really subtle repair work where they're saying, "I'm teasing you, but I know you got it, and I'll support you." Part of what teasing does is surface what we as a collective really care about, in a lighthearted way, and we know together that if you make mistakes you should be apologetic about it. But part of it is also this "I got your back" repair work. It's profound. I was kind of a shy kid, very small growing up, and the teasing often crossed lines in high school — bullying and so forth. And then I started to play basketball and I realized a lot of it is just men making sure they know the rules of the game, and showing in those moments the joy of laughing together: I support you, I'm with you. What a sophisticated thing to do.
Andrew Huberman: I have a sister, so I was always struck by the brothers in my neighborhood. Two in particular — I would hear screaming outside, go outside, and his older brother Peter was holding Michael's face in the sprinklers, his brother just crying and screaming. Relentless older brother torture. But if anyone said or tried to do anything to either one of them, they would immediately pair up and fight anyone. There really does seem to be something critical about defining the relationship with people one-on-one in groups versus when there's an outside threat.
Is there less grouping up and doing things? Is there a gradual erosion of this collective feeling?
Dr Dachner Keltner: Ten to fifteen years ago, first there was the science of loneliness and isolation — John Cacioppo and then those who followed. We are fragmenting and we spend much too much time alone and isolated. Then COVID hit, lockdown, et cetera. Our former surgeon general Vivek Murthy got it right — it's an epidemic of loneliness.
You just look at the basic raw facts: picnics are down by half. We don't go to movies like we used to. We don't listen to music together. The estimate is that 30% of meals in the United States people eat by themselves. We go on walks by ourselves. We don't go to church — church is way down. The broad sociological trends are alarming on that fragmentation.
But I think the young generation is putting it back together in really interesting ways. Survey data shows that 25- and 30-year-olds are really interested in game nights — those are coming back. They're interested in cooperative living. They're cooking more with each other. Value-wise, they care more about community than my generation. I was the great explosion of individualism. And they're like, if I choose a job, I want to make sure I'm working with other people I like. I didn't even think about that.
Festivals are reappearing. The farmers market. Dance groups are returning. Contact dance. Yoga studios — one out of eight Americans does yoga.
Andrew Huberman: That's so wild. Also, 15 years ago, no one would have predicted that one of the single most important health interventions that women and men should do is lift weights. The only people who lifted weights when I was growing up were bodybuilders and preseason football players. Resistance training clearly has a longevity benefit. And so many more people are in gyms now. I wonder whether it contributes to some sort of feeling of collective — they're training hard around other people.
Dr Dachner Keltner: Vivek Murthy, who I deeply admire, got our health world to think about the social side — to physical health, to the tie of your cells, your DNA, the vagus nerve, oxytocin, cortisol. There are social dimensions to our nervous system. Why do I go to a farmers market? Because I feel a sense of community. Why do I love yoga? Because I'm doing these postures synchronized with people I don't know and I feel a sense of awe and transcendence. Why do I lift weights? There's the banter and the discussion and the history and the sense of what this all means culturally.
I love the Japanese onsen. You go for the water, the springs and the heat, but in their wisdom they've built entire community experiences around it — you wash yourself and bathe together and eat together and their sayings are up on the walls and you spend time with your kids there. I hope we learn from that because I think it's important.
Psychedelics, awe, and the importance of cultural containers
Andrew Huberman: I would like to talk about psychedelics if you're willing. There are at least two views. Some people will say they just send you inward and that's the opposite of what we're talking about. Other people will say that their experiences with psychedelics allowed them to come out of that experience and really have a felt connection to people, to plants, to animals, to life that is profoundly positive for their feelings of connection. I'm constraining the question to the classic psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin, maybe DMT, ayahuasca — not MDMA, which is an empathogen, or ketamine, which is a dissociative anesthetic.
Dr Dachner Keltner: I'm good friends with Michael Pollan and was kind of walking the Berkeley Hills as he was producing that book, and watched as we started a center for psychedelics at Berkeley. It's a revolution — psychedelic use is up 40% since his book.
One is, make sure to honor the indigenous traditions out of which they come. Those are spirit medicines in their community that are part of deep ethical traditions. To honor that with sharing of resources and knowledge and the right kind of acknowledgement is really important.
I think in some sense — and David Yaden at Johns Hopkins and others, and some of the early Roland Griffiths work spoke to this — they are about awe fundamentally. They open up your mind and you see all life forms and time is different and your sense of self vanishes — Robin Carhart-Harris, you know — and you're just connected to vast things, ecosystems, and a sense of humanity. When done in the right way, that's good news. Molly Crockett and her team at Princeton found that if you go to a festival and have psychedelics, a year later you're kinder — through awe.
I think it's great news what it does for the hard problems of the mind: death anxiety, addiction, trauma, veterans suffering twice the rates of PTSD. The VA is working on this. The data look pretty good. OCD, panic — hard problems of the mind. That is good news.
I worry about microdosing. I think people are taking these things like coffee, and it's not coffee. The data speak to this — we've suddenly unleashed the use of it. Tens of millions of people are using it, not in the way that Michael Pollan describes, of putting it into a cultural container of inquiry and knowledge and guidance and someone who knows what they're doing around you. Safety is a real concern.
They changed my life. I got to them early, in my late teens — 17, 18, 19. I was a very anxious, obsessive kid and I think they opened up my mind in this perspective way we've been talking about. I don't really do them now. They gave me a lot. When I was doing them, we were reading Castaneda — who's been debunked — and reading the traditions and thinking about them spiritually, the doors of perception and all this good stuff. They were embedded in a culture of trying to find mysticism. I hope people are doing that if they're going to be doing them — make it a form of inquiry.
Andrew Huberman: I had the opposite experience. I actually regret having done psychedelics when I was younger — they were terrifying. I didn't have a good experience. I stopped, didn't go anywhere near them, and then later in a therapeutic setting had a few experiences with them that were immensely beneficial for me.
The data — Robin Carhart-Harris tells me, and he's the real expert — the data say there's no evidence of benefit from microdosing, at least on major depression, as compared to two rounds of psilocybin with a guide, therapy before, during, and after. I hope people hear that.
Rebuilding collective life — cities, campfires, and awe design
Andrew Huberman: I wonder, because I think about the not-so-recent and recent history of things — everything from breath work, cold plunges, psychedelics, awe, music, the collective consciousness — it's going to look different now the same way it looked different back then. I'm trying to get outside my Gen X self and think: what would it look like if these technologies — including social media — were all used to the greatest benefit? How do we create the environment so that younger people can flourish with these technologies, as opposed to being like the parents of the '70s and '80s who were like, "Oh, they've got long hair, what is this punk rock thing?" I don't want to be that person. But I also don't want to be the person who's just toeing a party line without thinking about whether there's any rational argument on the other side. The whole point is not to be against — the whole idea is to be for what you believe is right.
Dr Dachner Keltner: I think we're in this moment, with everything going on — AI, being online, polarization, climate crisis, the rise of white supremacy, politics — everybody's asking how do we move forward? In light of many of the things we've talked about, I'm most focused on what Robert Putnam started to write about: the breakdown of collective life and shared life. I think that's a defining issue of our times, as well as our relationship to the natural world.
I find awe really refreshing. It provides a road map. I'm working with Gehl Architecture on a cities of awe initiative. They do amazing work — hundreds of cities around the world. 70% of the human population is in cities. Most of our carbon emissions come out of cities. This is a place we can redesign and make it better.
What do you give to a teenager who's suffering suicidal ideation, or a veteran who is coming back and feeling alienated from the world? You give them awe. And what does that mean? You give them a little nature — you rewild part of a city. You give them some public art. You give them the opportunity to recognize moral beauty. You get them to interact with other people face to face. You give them a little collective stuff — hey, we're going to have the yoga class in the town square. You give them ideas about big ideas in life. You give them a little opportunity for meditation and reflection.
That's easy to do. And when I was writing this book and teaching social science for 30 years, it's like, we used to do this really well. It used to be temples and churches — that's where it was all brought together. And now we don't go there. 55% of Americans go to church or temple — it used to be 90%. I never did, and in some sense I miss it. I see one of my best friends who's very religious, and they have so much. And we're recreating that right now. We've got to do it in a coherent way. If it's the place where people are lifting weights, there should be music there. There should be visual stuff, some art and nature, some wisdom and some moral beauty. I love the climbing gym where I go because you go there and there's an art exhibit each month of a local artist, there's some music going on. This isn't that hard to do.
Andrew Huberman: I was not into CrossFit, but an ex-girlfriend of mine when I met her was really into CrossFit. They would do barbecues and clean the gym and dress up in costumes. And I remember thinking, this is kind of crazy — I went to the gym growing up, I'm like, really, you guys are social? And they had this awesome social community. I know CrossFit has somewhat fallen out of favor now. I think the pandemic brought us into our isolation.
One of the things that Joe Strummer was famous for after the Clash — he went into a kind of void, wandered for a long time, went down to Spain, grew out a beard, moved to Spain, didn't tell anyone who he was. He lost his brother to suicide, I believe. He ran the Paris Marathon — famously, people say while smoking a cigarette, with no training. One thing he was very well known for until his death was he would do campfires. In Manhattan. He would take people down to the river — he had some famous friends like Jim Jarmusch — but he would invite whoever. There were kids, there were adults. They'd stay out till 2 or 3 in the morning playing music, singing, drumming. People would get up and talk. He was constantly doing these campfires his entire life. And he would bring out a radio because he thought maybe you could make it like a radio show. But it was not to record and distribute. I've got this crazy idea in the back of my mind that maybe I'm going to start doing campfires.
Dr Dachner Keltner: I have to weigh in on some science. This is a deep idea. There's this new science of campfires — they're several hundred thousand years old. When you study people in small-scale societies, they gather at night around campfires and tell certain kinds of stories — stories of how they're all connected and helping each other and watching out for what is dangerous in the dark. A lot of stuff happens that's fundamental to our humanity around campfires.
When I go to the climbing gym, we all take saunas — I do probably four saunas a week. You get your sweat and your heart rate goes up, so good for your body. But then it's like everybody off-handedly notes, "I love the conversations that happen in the sauna." And it's true. We've got to get back to what we should be doing right now to bring us together. Campfires would be a good start. I'll come to your first one.
Andrew Huberman: Campfire also great red light therapy — no joke. Long wavelength light only coming out of that fire. The long wavelength light actually goes all the way through your body, even in light clothing, and is absorbed by the water in your mitochondria, which improves mitochondrial function in every single cell that has mitochondria. We get this light from sunlight when it's low solar angle — when it's low in the sky, because of ray scattering you're getting rid of the UV, that's why you can see the orange and red and it's not painful to look at the sun when it's low in the sky. But campfires do it. And there is this thing — if you're out in front of a campfire at night, even if you stay up very late, you wake up feeling pretty darn good.
My team's going to hate me for this, but campfire, coming to your town. I've always dreamed of taking a bus and going from town to town, having science and health discussions, but mostly just listening to people and doing campfires.
Dr Dachner Keltner: My dream was to take that bus and go to all the basketball courts of the country. Pickup basketball is the same thing — people gathering, banging into each other.
Life after death — consciousness, grief, and what lies beyond
Andrew Huberman: Do you believe in life after death?
Dr Dachner Keltner: I do. When I write about this in Awe — when my brother Ralph passed away, colon cancer, 55 or so — I watched the whole transition, his battle against it and his acceptance and then his leaving. I had this profound experience that night, a transcendent experience. And I'm like you, Andrew — it's neurons and statistics and cells and we can figure it all out and characterize everything. And it's like I saw space in a different way. I saw something alive in him. And then afterward I had — a lot of people have this kind of grief experience — he was around, his voice, his hand was on my back.
And I thought for several years, and still to this day, about quantum reality and things beyond our three-dimensional, four-dimensional view of time and space, and those basic laws. Consciousness may be patterns of electromagnetic waves around our minds and bodies that are syncing up with other people, that transcend the Newtonian world of the brain. I believe that, and I don't know how to study it. I sense it in life. I think a lot of other people do too. And so that keeps me open to it. I've moved from being a skeptical but open agnostic to, yeah, there's something there that's beyond what we know. So I believe it.
Andrew Huberman: Very cool. I hope you're right. I believe it too. But I just hope you're right. I sense you're right, Dacher. Thank you so much for making the trip down here to talk with us today and share what you've been up to for all these years. You've had and continue to have a magnificent career. It's really hard to do really good science, and it's even harder to do really good science with a purpose. And you're doing that and you continue to. You've raised 25 professors, which is no small feat — that's a monumental feat, which means that the work will continue. And I'm grateful for your book and that you're continuing to do this. You've definitely inspired us to think more deeply about basically what it is to be human and where to take all this technology that we have and this opportunity that we have and really do real good with it. So I'm very grateful to you. Thank you.
Dr Dachner Keltner: Thank you, Andrew. It's been an incredible conversation. Let's do more.
Andrew Huberman: Definitely do it again.