 Boom, what's up everyone, welcome to Simulation, I'm your host Alan Sakyan. Very excited to be talking about a topic that we just did a live event on, we just did a live event on social media and the attention economy, the neuroscience of well-being, the future of mental health, and now our guest who was on the panel that evening is joining us for a one-on-one conversation, I'm very excited to have Dr. Joseph Villegas joining us. Thank you for coming onto the show. My pleasure. Really appreciate it, very excited to be talking to you in depth one-on-one about all of this and your background has led you to a very cool place now being nested in this craziness of civilization figuring out how to use technology and how it affects our brains and so yeah you did lots of work, you did a PhD in psychology, and that was at University of Wisconsin Madison and Center for Healthy Minds as well, the graduate work there, and that was also in Wisconsin, that was eight and a half years, that's a long time. Yeah so I did, I was in doing graduate training for seven years, I did my clinical internship for another year, that's like a year of full-time training in psychotherapy and treatment and assessment and so then yeah so then you put that all together eight years, it's a long time. A long time. Learn how to do science, learn how to do treatment and mental health, work in mental health settings, you gotta have patience. And it's been a long evolution you were teaching us about this, about how it went from sitting here on two couches to listening to what somebody had to say about their state of life, to now we have digital therapists, digital doctors, AI doctors, this is nuts balls in some ways. I think that, yeah that's what we're going to talk about some of it, it's just how much even since the time I started school just how much the field has changed already and is going to continue changing, which I think is maybe the real interesting thing to be thinking about looking at it towards. Yeah and that's crazy that you say that because that's only just for you starting, so then we're not even talking about the kids that are starting now and okay but before we get to the awesomeness of today's times, let's go to child Joe, how did child Joe pick up neuroscience, psychology, behavioral sciences, like how did you get into well-being meditation? You know to make a long story short, it's interesting, I didn't start out immediately, I might be interested in psychology or well definitely not, I'm actually the first kind of things I was interested in were natural sciences, so astronomy, physics, I loved doing math as a kid and I was really interested in like cosmology, like these big questions about where does all come from which you probably relate to and so I just would read books by Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan and those kind of things and then but there's one thing that's left out of that, that whole picture which is an amazingly beautiful picture, incredible accomplishment of human civilization, right, all these models of physics are missing the mind, right, it creeps in like in quantum mechanics systems behave differently whether they've been observed or not, right and so that implies an observer and there's something interesting there, right, there's some hint of it but it's not really, it's kind of missing, right and so pretty much at a certain age I started getting interested kind of in high school when a lot of kids get philosophical I guess, you know I started thinking about this and getting really curious about it and it seemed to me really like the one piece that really wasn't well understood too, the more I started reading about it I thought well compared to how well we seem to understand electromagnetism we have no idea what's going on with our minds and then simultaneously I was also getting to an age where I was gaining awareness of just the state of the world I guess you can say and even just what I saw around me and starting to realize that materially we can have every possible material need fulfilled certainly I was lucky enough to grow up in a pretty nice area where people have more than enough material and yet I saw all kinds of unhappiness and misery around me and so that really impressed on me that the answer to human happiness is not going to be a smaller transistor going down to 5 nanometer transistors or something that's not going to get us out of the mess we're in in a certain way and if you look at most of the big problems when I started thinking about it most of the big problems on the planet right now come down to human behavior and human psychology you know and so if we're going to solve any of those problems we have to make some kind of headway there and simultaneously we have no you know barely any idea how our minds work and then and then if you fast forward a few years you know we also have the neuroscience piece come in I wasn't at ourselves objectively in the mirror oh yeah we I mean we yeah now none of us want we don't want to do that you know we're not built to do it honestly we're not they were not designed for that actually it's so we're like going against the grain when we try to take an honest look at ourselves so I didn't even get involved in like as we as you know like I didn't I worked in tech for a while I didn't actually get involved in research for quite a while you were doing software development for like eight years yeah I worked for climate science I was like science so I worked for a climate research center I worked I did like some I like out of college I worked on like some just engineering for like like sonar systems all kinds of stuff and then I also was interested in what it was like to work in the private sector so I worked for a company called Amplify now and in New York and they do educational technology so I like the mission it seemed like a positive mission and a great group of people so I got a little bit of an idea of what it was like to do you know to be in that you know in this startup world that we're surrounded by here yeah and I was really interested in I was almost considered staying there but I really really wanted to be working with human behavior and psychology and at ten years ago it was hard to find a way to do that which is really funny now because it's like you know that's all we're talking about right it's all the social and psychological aspects of all this technology but it's like 2008 it was a different world right so I went into graduate school to do my PhD do clinical psychology because clinical psychology is about changing behavior and it's about well-being like that's that's the core of what we do in the mission of the field is especially using using behavior using reflection and insight and things like that right not necessarily so much of a focus on drugs or so those kind of things right but really how can we actually work with our own minds to to make them healthier and how does the person that that desires a better life a better well-being how do they gain insight themselves through maybe someone else that can help them find that yeah and then act on it right and then put that insight into practice so you actually see change in your life right that's and so that is what clinical psychologists specialize in and and then simultaneously being a techie and being a geek like I just inevitably fell into the neuroscience side of things because there's this whole explosion going on and in studying the brain and it really brings together the physical side of things the natural science side of things with kind of the question these kind of really heady questions of consciousness and mind and philosophy and those kind of things yeah you're totally in this put this group of of of thinkers that go to this cosmic perspective and then they understand oh my god but we know nothing about our own minds and then you went super you know inward to neuroscience and psychology and so I love that group that group those types of thinkers because they get the they get the the most the craziest thing which is consciousness and then they also get the insanity of the vastness of the cosmos and the big picture and the small picture microcosms so I really like how you you know placed yourself there so can you tell us about your your dissertation and you know that was that in meditation yeah yeah yeah please so so the Center for Healthy Minds is is a center that focuses on on cultivating well-being psychological well-being and that has taken a number of forms one of the specialties is the neuroscience of emotion so that's been a big focus of my graduate training and my research understanding what is the neural basis of emotion and what are the what's the neural basis of emotion regulation and how to how do we take advantage of those mechanisms train them how do we take advantage of neuroplasticity the ability of our brain to change and rewire itself over the course of our lives to really bring ourselves to a state of better well-being psychologically and a big piece of that has been mindfulness meditation research so part of what our center is really well known for is a lot of groundbreaking studies that really opened the way for rigorous scientific research on mindfulness meditation so starting with studies of Tibetan monks which you may probably you might have seen like magazine covers and things like that from you know like the mid 2000s of that stuff right so we had Tibetan monks coming through the lab and we were talking about this we were talking about this too beforehand about how funny it is that this has been around thousands of years and now we're bringing the monks into the labs to get the hard scientific evidence that yeah oh look at how beneficial it is so well and interesting it's going both ways you know because there are exchange programs where the monks are coming to the West to learn about biology chemistry and physics right they have the equivalent of like a PhD in you know in the very very rich philosophy and psychology of Buddhism and yet like their training in all some areas where we are really advanced here is totally AI and you have by a molecular right and of those kind of things too even more so right so so there's a kind of a I think what's happening maybe you could say all over the world right now is this exchange of information where different cultures different groups of people have expertise the West really needs mindfulness and we have the ability and there's I mean you can just see by the uptake right how populace has gotten when I started meditating which was in high school in the 1990s like people looked at me like I was an alien like when I talked about meditation or like a cult like I was in the hard Krishna's or something especially where I grew up which was suburban outside DC suburban Maryland like nobody was meditating it was not a thing it was like it was really weird it was or it was like a thing from the 60s like you had your hippie you know yeah like your hippie person who like they kind of moved out to the woods and they never came back you know and that kind of thing so the attitude was like so different and you have a friend that you could talk to about it I had like really like my one best friend and I got interested in this together and it was like literally just us and the funny thing is like we literally we looked up Zen in the phone book like in the yellow the old yellow pages that's how I went to my first meditation center oh my gosh like there was no Google yeah and then we like you know we went to this tiny little place a handful of people it was like so under the radar whoa yeah so but you're right there's this hunger for it and it's been amazing to me to just watch it completely explode yeah since then yeah and now like I can't you know I can't turn around without seeing mindfulness somewhere like we're and even even in the settings I'm going into right these very kind of almost square you know hospitals even like the VA hospitals are saying I do training right like they are putting there's there's mindfulness training mindfulness based therapies are like everywhere now and it's it's really infusing things and with an amazing pace you had a you had actually you were going to teach us about some of the what you were doing in your in your dissertation well we got and I actually have some of the some of the you know intensive meditation practices linked to slower respiration rate you know and then also I just want to just quickly bring up how this was so cool we'll get to this more in depth but this is so interesting how it all starts with me now in the middle is like this new idea yeah but yeah yeah and I'll just yeah so we just mentioned we were just talking about this is from the Department of Veteran Affairs website yeah and I do I like I have done this work with veterans where I'm actually but since I'm talking about this I need to be super clear I'm not representing the views of the Department of Veteran Affairs in our talk right that's just a disclaimer I you know have to make but but in my personal like in my work there I've had this incredible pleasure like teaching I'm teaching mindfulness meditation I mean these are like military veterans these are the guys have been over in Iraq and Afghanistan Vietnam vets yeah like this is these are not you know hippie you know like these are not woo woo hippie new age type guys and but the VA has bought into this and and working with them and there and they they get an amazing amount of out of these practices and so it's like incredible for me to see this thing that you know that I was doing and and like feeling like I was way out on the fringes with now kind of be so thoroughly thoroughly integrated yeah and you can you know we'll get to more yes and how this fits into where the future of mental health and where it's all going so to talk a little bit about my research I would I've been interested in mechanisms since I started graduate school and that's taken a few different forms in particular I've been really interested in the way that mind and body come together in emotion so one of the key things about yeah so right so extended mindfulness training is not just training one's cognitive processes but it also appears to be training and retraining the body as well in ways we're just beginning to understand so the interesting thing about emotion particularly is that it's it's emotion is so encompassing so any change people argue endlessly about definitions of emotion but one of the ways I think of it is actually is a coordinated change of state across the entire body and mind that's oriented towards a particular goal or a particular type of response to your environment so like when you get afraid it's like you perceive a threat in your environment something that you probably can't fight or eliminate and you need to get away from or protect yourself from and every single part of your body and every single part of your brain is involved in that fear response so your heart rate changes your circulation changes your muscles activate even your body posture changes you know to be more protective then and if we look at brain activation one of the interesting things is people be used to look for like a fear circuit or an anger circuit in the brain or a region that would be associated specifically with and and every attempt to do that has resulted in the conclusion that you cannot limit it to one region of the brain instead what you get is a big role people yeah so people think of like oh the amygdala is the fear part of your brain but that's not true at all that's a total misconception but it plays a large role it is very involved but really because the more than anything else the amygdala is like a salience detector it detects what is important in your environment to tune into and that can be that that you can see how that's obviously involved in the process you know a risk of a fear response but it's only one little piece and there so they're every part of the brain do that tuning into what salient to when it's a executive functioning okay what it's doing is it signaling what we call it bottom up yeah attention so yeah so the amygdala is kind of saying hey hey hey you better pay attention to this yeah yeah right and then you can say no no no I know you're saying that but actually I need to be you know I'm supposed to be writing right now you know yeah yeah but sometimes you you know you you your glance moves and then you think oh oh yeah you know I'm I do need to so it's kind of like a nudge right and our motion our emotional responses are designed to be quick and automatic so sometimes that emotion response goes along with that bottom up tension there's a whole physiological change the key is that this is across your entire brain pretty much your whole brain is involved in processing the information and in the fear in the response and then your whole body is involved at the same time to and their feedback moves going back and forth your immune system is involved your endocrine system your hormones they're involved all of it is actually happening at the same time by complicated complex ways yet by training when you do mindfulness training meditation training you're repatterning the entirety the endocrine system you're talking yeah respiratory system we're talking right the full body repatterning not just as you as we may have thought oh I'm when I am afraid I'm just training to just work with becoming better at when I'm afraid yeah if we try to work with it all up here we miss we leave out so much right and so I was really interested in that from the start I actually did a little bit of research on looking at different body postures and I found that this isn't something I ever I've ever published but I but the what I found was actually looking at when people take different fearful body postures or open body postures it changes their response to startle which is something that we look at in our field a lot as a marker of actually that amygdala regular regulation of of fear responding so like when your amygdala is on high alert then like something like a loud sound will provoke a big startle and when it's not then then that same sound will provoke a smaller response and we can measure it using electrodes like that pick up subtle muscle movements around your eye so I was actually looking at how when people change your body posture do we see basically amygdala acting and like a knob that's turning up and down people's fear response and interestingly what I found is when you crouch like this it actually turns that knob down when you crouch down yeah instead of up like this you might think right when there's a threat but only when there's a threat present right so so when you're responding to your environment right and then that response is then feeding back into your brain and changing how you respond so we've got all these coordinated systems so the research on respiration really was about okay so mindfulness training has all these effects and I was interested in how much of it is happening psychologically how much of it is even happening physiologically and interesting mindfulness meditation is not a relaxation practice right it's not about just picturing yourself on a sunny beach it's about gaining greater awareness but then over time with advanced practice it potentially does lead to states of calm mental calm and so over the long term you know this is important for our research too because people's breathing affects so many other things we want to know if when we're looking at say heart rate variability which is another measure of your emotional state so your heart rate variability drops when you're under stress or when you're kind of having like a fear response or an adrenaline response when you relax variability drops when you're relaxed a certain component of it drops so so it so it heart so heart rate kind of is it when your heart rate yeah your heart rate is has a steady rhythm but then there are small variations in the beat yes yeah and so steady or the rhythm the more stress you know that that's what I was saying yeah basically in a sense yeah to right that there's a kind of variability that we see in the hot that is my that is controlled by your nervous system and that is responsive to whether you're stressed or relaxed and the greater the variability the more relaxed yeah yeah sometimes it's yeah one term is RSA or respiratory sinus arrhythmia that's a technical term for it RSA yeah so so you'll see the more yeah yeah so yeah so we look at that even when we're doing grain imaging right when people when people breathe right the electrocardiograms and stuff this is new sort of ways to measure we've had we've actually had these measures for a long time two couple things are changed one is we've had the we've had the maybe like say in the last 10 to 20 years we've had enough computing power and cheap enough equipment and all that to just be routinely recording huge amounts of this data processing it quickly and efficiently and all those kind of things and then the thing that's really interesting that change is now you know you can get like a Garmin fan for running or you can even right and so these things can actually track some of these measures just in real time so that's that's another interesting front here like to talk about yeah but so we want to know how much you know how much of a physiological component is there going on as well along with the psychological component because we're really thinking about well-being as something that is a function of your mind and your body together yeah so I'm telling you I'm taking forever to tell you about my dissertation work but but I then another way that I've been doing that is looking at physical pain which you might not immediately connect with the neuroscience of emotion what is that pain seems very physical but actually all the regions and all the brain networks that are involved in processing pain and in your experience of pain are the same ones that are involved in processing emotions regulating emotions and and fundamentally the actual the experience of pain is a part of it is the physical signal that comes through specialized pain fibers in you know that that innervate your whole body right but when they reach your central nervous system then in order for you to actually have the experience of pain they actually need to be processed through these emotional regions and that's part of that's what makes pain unpleasant right otherwise it would just be a sensation like seeing the color red or the color green interesting so the the processing of pain goes through areas of the central nervous system which are emotion the same key yeah so the insula the cingulate cortex front areas of the prefrontal cortex so which is you know kind of these where these a lot of this integration is happening so the insula is a place that integrates sensory information from all over your body and especially internal we call interoceptive information and then there's an area called the orbit of frontal cortex it's called that because it's near the orbits of your eyes it's right kind of in your behind your forehead here and that is a place where you kind of assign the values is this like when something's in your environment is this a good thing or it's a bad thing yeah I'm in the cingulate cortex that is some people call it like an emotional motor region so it's it's about deciding choosing responses assigning responses and ACC ACC anterior cingulate cortex we're a lot of our we can go top down processing through right and so yeah so then that's what we call top down processing which would mean directing your attention or modulating things so you think you know I'm overreacting I should calm down right and then you how am I going to calm myself down that that kind of process that when you do that you're doing some top down regulation right like this thing happened like somebody cut me off in traffic all of a sudden feeling really worked up about it right that's the bottom-up process and the top-down process is like you know what I'm gonna rethink this I'm gonna reframe it maybe they're in a hurry maybe they're their wife's on their way to the hospital I don't even know there's no reason for me to get angry I'm gonna get where I'm going that's the top down piece yeah yeah so then we have you know we have these prefrontal regions dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a region that is known to be important in executive executive function and regulating these responses yeah yeah so all these regions are key in shaping your response to pain so what I did was I looked at people in a mindfulness-based stretch direction course it's like an eight-week training for people who are brand new to meditation and we also had a control intervention right we've talked we've been chatting a little bit about the importance of like sorting out not only wife you know first what works but also why things work think you know things don't always work for the reasons we think they do and in particular that's like with controls yeah if you study pain we particularly we know about the power placebo effects which are really the power of expectation isn't that a way to say that right we want to know if we're looking at mindfulness intervention is it really just a matter that everybody's excited about mindfulness everyone thinks it's gonna work so of course like when you think something you could say that about almost anything right so if I think my lucky rabbit charm is gonna you know make my pain less severe it will it will because it'll influence that emotional process right I'm wearing it versus I'm not wearing it oh yeah so we want to know if if mindfulness meditation training is doing anything distinctive or you know or is it really just indistinguishable from the placebo or from a control intervention that has all the other shared components of MBSR but without the without the mindfulness training and there's a reason why places like the VA are embodying this as a central theme for helping with mental health and well-being because it can works right at works and they so there's a lot of research now on mindfulness meditation and mindfulness based interventions that really establishes that it is helpful for a wide variety of conditions not every health condition by any means but for certain kinds of conditions so we're getting into your present yeah we'll get yeah yeah so maybe before we get into that then I'll just say you know with with pain to stay with pain for a second what I did was I looked at neural biomarkers that have been developed using machine learning techniques to really track at a neural level the subjective experience of pain I know biomarkers there they're like you could think of them as like a map of activation across the whole brain that is a particular pattern it's kind of like like it's it's like a kind of a lock and key thing like it's designed to fit a particular pattern of activation across multiple regions and circuits that will only it'll only match up it'll only line up when somebody's experiencing pain when people are experiencing other things that might be unpleasant like I don't know like social rejection or you know disappointment or something like that would be a distinct then yeah the same regions might be evolved but the pattern won't line up right okay so you won't so you won't see a response in this biomarker and then you were then able to say that this is the architecture that lights up when pain is yeah what happens and I and then there's another complimentary signature that goes with it that is about that really is designed to track when modulation of pain is happening so it captures when people are regulating their pain experience in some way or another using the independent of what they're actually perceiving what what's actually coming in in a sensory way right so in this case it was like heat like a little hot plate that there that's against their skin right so we can track the first marker tracks very closely with what's on someone's skin and then the second one tracks really well with what's independent of that so even given the same temperature in my skin everything being the same in the environment my pain experience is different and why right because I had some different expectation or because I was regulating it intentionally things like that so I looked at both of these markers together and I looked at mindfulness based stress reduction and I looked at a the control intervention and what I was looking for were differences in the responses between the two interventions as well as differences in the response you know in people self-reported responses so how much do their the brain responses that we see track with the behavior responses and do they tell us anything different they tell us a little bit about the mechanisms involved in mindfulness training as as they relate to pain particularly which is one important area where mindfulness based interventions have been used for a long time going back like 30 years so very all the way to John Kabat-Zinn who developed MBSR in the 1980s the very first thing he used it for was people who had chronic health conditions who are severe health conditions and were coping with a lot of pain so let's go to presents we have so much more to still oh yeah you're right yeah yeah yeah and thanks yeah yeah so much more I'll go into so much detail so yeah so so so bringing that to the president so I've been really interested in the mechanisms and also we have this big world of different treatments so another question you can ask is what treatments work for who so another or you can ask how do we get the right treatment to the right person at the right time yeah right so nowadays nowadays we have we have mindfulness based interventions we have like psychotherapy you know I do cognitive behavioral therapy as well we have psychopharmaceuticals and as we're as we're interested in talking about we even have now this new world of we have like new novel pharmaceuticals whatever you know there are a lot of different terms around psychedelic psychedelics psychotherapy shout out to maps we love you yeah maps absolutely right doing really interesting work that's getting a lot of attention and there's ketamine is another substance that's being used in treatment of depression now and they're also now I didn't hear about the ketamine oh yeah depression yet MDMA PTSD yeah about a third of people who have treatment resistant depression respond very strongly to ketamine it's a temporary effect it lasts about three weeks but it's very powerful so essentially you have a lot of ketamine clinics opening up all their own the country now and a lot of research on ketamine the use of ketamine and the mechanism right right there's a real question again is it seems to really work very powerfully but we're not quite sure how and we're talking about mindfulness based interventions kind of behavioral therapy and then so many and then we have a class of treatments that work by stimulating the brain directly so we have transcranial magnetic stimulation right so you use a magnetic field to actually induce some neural activity in specific parts of your brain and targeted ways and you have deep brain stimulation very fruitful it's results have been very fruitful yeah so we need better understanding we have now all these different treatments and the thing is like most of them work but none of them work a hundred percent of the time a hundred percent of the way that's right that's been like a big sticking point in mental health and psychiatry both for a long time is has been like these treatments that are like pretty effective you know a lot of them they do better than placebo at least to some extent but they they still leave a lot you know they still leave a lot to be desired so one of the one of the ways to maybe move forward is to really get a better understanding of of the brain and of how these treatments are working in the brain so then we can actually target individual processes with individual treatments matching people the treatments right yes like with with psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that is not necessarily going to be the right fit for everybody at all times and it's a pretty powerful experience and so it's something you want to be thoughtful about how and when you recommend it right when in my clinical work I do a lot of treatment planning right or care coordination right those are the things that we think about nowadays like that graphic we had a before you're literally writing a prescription for mindfulness right that's so cool that's basically it yeah and in fact we don't want to just write one prescription we want to put together a whole plant yeah you know like that graphic we had a before that had all those different pieces on it now they have all this yeah so wearables yeah yeah so we have so much more data so so here's what I do clinically right we can we can flip back to the lab in a second right what we're doing is we're trying to put together a comprehensive treatment plan where we are thinking about what's your environment like what's your physical health like are there relaxation practices you can be doing you know spiritually what's your nutrition sleep so this is completely look at how many categories you have to pull yeah ask and learn about in order to make this care plan right to get to know them like you're their best friend so yeah yeah exactly so we really it really involves getting to know people in detail and it involves having a great team working into an interdisciplinary way so it used to be that mental health psychology psychotherapy was very siloed like psychotherapists would work like out of their living room right and and they would you they might never talk to it you have you have like a nutritionist right when I go yeah when I go into the clinic side work in yeah we have nutritionist nurses psychiatrists like those psychologists social workers who do you know like if you don't have housing very Bay Area issue yeah you know we know that you are not your mental health is never going to be good unless you have stable housing you like people who cannot you don't have a roof over their head and don't have safety shelter from the elements or if they have a substance use problem the chances of them being able to stay sober or almost no right but as soon as they have a roof over their head that totally changes the game so we can't treat mental health without social workers right we need all of these pieces together so we're taking this much more integrated piece and looking like all the tools we have in our arsenal right could you be running can you be getting exercise could you be eating better could you be sleeping better and then also right do we need to be thinking you know what kind of medications might help you what kind of psychotherapy might help you are there practices you can do to train your mind like mindfulness meditation or like doing yoga and can we put this together into a step-by-step plan that all your providers are going to be working on so that you can cultivate the optimal well-being for yourself and this is currently what you're doing as a postdoc at stand yes so this is like then the clinical side of what I do yeah this is this is how I work and it's mostly with VA so yeah in yeah like right now the clinical work that I do is through the VA hospital yeah one of the VA hospitals in the Bay Area yeah and so the a lot of what you're seeing right now is the emotional states the mental health and well-being of veterans is needs attention and the attention can be like you said so interdisciplinary with the different teams of people that are coordinating getting to know them and then and then again we're writing this right hair plan yeah and so this is happening how many people do you see then does like your team your interdisciplinary team how many people does it work with let's say every couple of days every month or how so I can tell you this morning I went to like the team report and we had about I don't know between 15 and 20 people around the table just checking in on all of the patients that we're working in with in common across all these disciplines 15 20 people yeah team on my team just for that one clinic and for one clinic and then the clinic sees how many it would vary I mean so this is so in this particular clinic it's like we're doing more intensive treatment so we might be like maybe at a time like 40 or 50 patients but we're you know tracking all of them everybody kind of has a care over so I would be like the coordinator of care for one person and I'm my job is to really have this 360 degree picture for them for them yeah and you have like one or a couple of those right now that you're watching over exactly interesting interesting yeah and then there's like a strict privacy with each person's life that you then keep people that that work in in making these care plans keep a very strict privacy oh yeah yeah we take the privacy very very seriously confidentiality right absolutely like that that is like the kind of the starting point of everything when you're in a medical setting yeah yeah yeah this is a private particularly with anything to do with mental health particularly with mental health yeah yeah interesting now thank you Ron this good it's good I wanted to make sure to get to prepare to die yeah wow the spaceships are flying I thought I'd won the you know the daily bonus the daily double and the daily double is yeah mindfulness meaning my mindfulness for 500 whatever fruit loops I just want to Ron Vagus where I mean maybe might be segling into technology I just want to mention that the the number one downloaded app that the VA puts the VA develops on their own apps thing and the number one app on the VA is called mindfulness coach mindfulness coach yeah yeah and that's kind of like the insight timer the column or head spaces it's a whole bunch of tools for yeah practicing mindfulness meditation awesome yeah yeah so it's like yeah headspace is a really good one that I also recommend to people yeah yeah okay let's do this there's a lot to talk about with what we kind of talked about a couple weeks yeah two weeks ago or so yeah all right so what's going on with the current state of the way that we use technology and our behavior with it because from the perspective of someone that is literally studying neuroscience of mental health and well-being like what's going on and how the hell do we figure this out and someone who's totally struggling with my own addiction and all that so yeah the way I see this is essentially that we've got something new in our society in our culture that we haven't figured out how to form a healthy relationship with partly because the thing itself is kind of such a moving target right now right smartphones themselves are just changing all the time and what they do is changing but but even even that just the whole thing is so brand new and if you look back in history you know anytime there was a new technology introduced it created huge amount of social change and social disruption and some you know often people are excited about it because of the things they can't anticipate that are really good right but then there's always unanticipated consequences too like if you look at the introduction of the car it made it possible for us to all move out to the suburbs we right and then we thought okay now we're gonna it's gonna be paradise right it turns out not that didn't quite work out the way we thought right now all of a sudden we're all isolated from each other in our you know 2500 square foot houses yeah right we never see each other we don't need and instead we're spending an hour day in the car and we're not getting we're not walking anymore and we're getting out of shape and yeah all kind you know and so all of a sudden there's this whole new class of problems that nobody I don't think anticipated when they when you know this was all first happening totally and it takes society a few decades to really even catch up with what was happening put a name to it and then start to try to figure out and then all of a sudden you see fitness clubs everywhere right now that we drive everywhere we got to have a gym to work out in I love Joe's perspective on on the evolution of humanity he's like humans go like paradise paradise paradise and then we get there and we're like fuck all these problems we made and then yeah and then you'd like go back and like have to like backtrack and try to fix things yeah yeah absolutely and so it's just it looks the way it looks to me is like we're going through the exact same thing with smartphones right now where I mean my smartphone has been life-changing for me in positive ways right like I'm a can be an absent-minded person like being able to have my calendar on my phone in my pocket all the time is like amazing right and things like that are so great mom on video whenever yeah yeah absolutely right yeah like when you when you have family around right the potential to connect people is so great yeah but then but then all these things we haven't anticipated are happening in particular the the big thing that you know that we're everyone's really noticing now is just the effect on our attention yeah and that's because it's such a device that's so well optimized to capture our attention and there's so much on there and then of course as we've talked about to you like the plans the world of technology right has really being able to kind of get a hand a hold on human psychology right and really optimize these apps to tune into it so so as we talked about right this metaphor it's just like alcohol right also you know to a great extent like most of us in our daily lives are able to walk through a world where alcohol is on sale at every corner is on offer at every restaurant right and and there are people who do have problems with this and I don't want to minimize that at all it's like it is a real issue right but actually to a great extent most of us are actually able to go through our life without just you know sitting down in the corner and binge drinking over 90 percent yeah right and and then the question is why are we able to do that so one of the reasons it's the opposite with smartphones though over 90% of us are addicted right and so so when you look at and and if you look at societies that didn't have alcohol historically when it was introduced they were huge problems because what do they not have so they didn't have a good understanding of familiarity of it and they didn't have good social norms right yeah right yeah in terms of how and when you engage with whatever this potentially problematic thing is who's shouting from the rooftops today turn all your notifications off focus on your creative endeavoring right yeah yeah exactly yeah right and so what you see is already perhaps you know very quickly people are immediately starting to think of okay how what are the ways that we can actually manage this better right claim our minds and there's a systemic piece to it too right so like to take another you know with alcohol or you know to take like cigarettes is another example but you know alcohols may be better because it's one that we a lot of us do want to enjoy right and we do want to be able to enjoy a nice glass of wine right have a place in our lives yeah so what does it take to be able to create that situation and we do regulate the marketing advertising of alcohol right we regulate where it can and when it can be saw sold right like there has to be systematic at restaurants or planes anymore yeah can't sell alcohol to under 21 right you can't market cigarettes to children you can't market alcohol to children right same thing happening marijuana now right yeah you know about that's what's for expanding the minds of 12 year old I have to say you know I have to say like I'm not like a war on drugs person but the research on the effect of cannabis on adolescent brain development is actually like pretty alarming when you read it like it really is something come on I turned out fine they don't know what they talk same thing with alcohol on the Russian yeah our brains are not Germans they're giving the young yeah yeah they're still developing into our mid 20s and they're very they're sensitive to a lot of things at those times so so it's it's you know it's worth keeping in mind it would be interesting to see what the effects of LSD or psilocybin or DMT are on maybe 18 21 year olds and how that potentially well yeah but I think this gets into you know I certainly for another yeah for another time for sure from the kind of work I do I mean the absolute first imperative is to be doing no harm right yes putting people at risk and should never be encouraging people to put themselves at risk so that's that's where I you know that's where I come from in this conversation yeah so so the question is yeah how do we develop a similarly healthy relationship with phones yes need to be there needs to be institutional action there needs to be action level so yeah absolutely please teach us what your solutions at from an institutional level would be well I'm not an ex this isn't like the area that I put in yeah when we were talking last you know on the panel I mean that really the the thing I think that might make the most sense is to really think of these things in the same way as we would think of any you know for mental health the same way we think of how a product affects your physical health if if we think that like a food or drink or substance might be affecting people's health we want to do the research we want to figure out if that's really the case and then if it is the case that we need to put in place policies that that acknowledge that and that if possible change the product to you know to make it a healthier product or if not we put you know we kind of make sure that we're we're not drawing people into unhealthy relationships with it we're putting you know putting enough checks that people don't get into you know that we're not yeah that let's see if I can get this right so it would be then we go and do the research starting immediately as much as possible on what the mental health and well being effects are right now of being addicted to to social media and then what we do after that is we obviously figure out that there are some negative effects of our behaviors of technology and then we say things like okay Instagram you if someone's browsing through the newsfeed for three or five minutes straight you are now you have to forcibly in your code have to send them a notification that says do you want to continue browsing your newsfeed or would you like to take a break mm-hmm something like that yeah and and there are people and again there are people who are working you know doing lots and work on all of the strategy Harris Max Dossel the Center for Emetech civility all these yeah we and yeah we're very grateful for them huge shout out to the ethical tech and design ethics teams yeah so the idea being basically you know if you're presuming something safe their business plans which is the hard thing it's yeah so that's this is where it's important right so if you think about I like to you know look at Philip Morris as a company look at where they are now right the it's not in your long-term best interest as a company to be creating a product that is that damages the health of your customers right people are going to realize that they're going to want to get away from the product and ultimately also you're going to be maybe liable right there's all kinds of wow downsides to it so I actually would argue turn into that that's so interesting you know and and that didn't happen on you know they didn't just change that on their own right so it took a lot of public huge public policy effort hundreds of millions of people will be transitioning away from using social media because they themselves will discover the unhealthy relationship already happening right yeah everybody who talks about Facebook is talking about yeah you know I don't really want to be on there but I I feel like I have to right is that what you want to be as a product no like I feel like I'm pretty sure Facebook's bad for me but I haven't figured out how to quit yet damn that sounds exactly like smoking yeah you're right right wow so yeah that's very that what kind of a horrible you better transition quick as a social media company if you want to use a social company could be at the it could be the biggest they could have the biggest impact on civilization if they themselves were to change their platform away from that and then they could they could be greatly praised in many ways right so for the people inside tech that's the carrot right and then from the people who are you know as citizens right what we can do is keep the pressure on yeah through policy you know through in particular right requiring that the research be done like if you if you're gonna if you're gonna do if you're gonna develop a product at this kind of scale right where you have millions or hundreds of millions or a billion users then then you really should be doing research you need to be doing research and making the results public or somebody should be doing research maybe even outside your company right the same way we don't bring drugs on the market without some without some confidence that they're safe or we don't bring medical devices on the market right yeah that's right unless you know that's right there's either a presumption of safety or there's a presumption that there's some risk and if we think there's a risk maybe we should be requiring some kind of research and requiring the product be designed so that if it mitigates the impacts that it find the research now do you think taxpayers should be paying for the research or do you think the company should be paying for the research so that's an interesting point and I don't know that I would have I'm not maybe the person to answer that question because they're they're trade-ups either way right so you either have to have the funding if they pay for it then there's the potential conflict of interest but in terms of pharmaceutical research the ways this tends to work is it is that the drug companies that do pay for the research with a lot of scrutiny and oversight exactly and that doesn't solve every problem every problem yeah but it does it does to some extent work right to a certain party that's not involved whatsoever has no monetary ties whatsoever it creates some accountability yes so you have independent the research is done often externally yeah and then you have oversight from the FDA oversight from NIH and so on Joe there's still so much to talk about yeah I feel like you know we've only scratched the surface with mental health and well-being and what you know what you're working on and also what society is going through right now with this transition like you said you're you know eight years that you went through and boom all of a sudden you're done with your PhD and there's a whole like the younger the people that are only starting are now going through a completely different technology landscape and how that is affecting mental health and well-being it's just and how we can actually use it as you were indicating as a tool for good as well just couple just quick questions on the on the way out I like to ask these questions on the show do you think we're alone in the cosmos it's a really you know I have to say I'm I can't I can't imagine that in of the entire observable universe we're alone no I don't think we are yeah and what do you think is out there then who knows yeah yeah you have a big imagination though yeah I think I think that we definitely have a lot of growing up to do here on earth we have a lot of before we go off trying to find it I think that that that's my that's I used to be really excited about you know eat extraterrestrials and now I'm kind of like better get our acting yeah just mind your business and be a good boy let's get our house in order first and then go you know and then and then go off on vacation we were we were talking about it right before we started I'm surprised that we didn't come up in conversation but I was like you know if we ascribed an age to civilization in terms of maturity you know maybe we'd get 10 years old or so and Joe is like you're less than a year old yeah yeah we're like the flailing infant stage flailing infant stage yeah yeah how about do you think we're in a simulation no I'm I don't think so you think this is base reality I think that that that idea is really biased by the time and place we live and we just invented the ability to like simulate computers and we all watch the matrix that's right so like that's where our mind goes immediately just like when people are just invented clocks and watches they thought the universe was clockwork oh that was also something that we got biased towards huh yeah watches and clocks and then we thought everything was like deterministic yeah exactly right interesting because that was like the dominant metaphor the most advanced technology was the zeitgeist of the age yeah that's so interesting yeah so we have a we have a recency bias towards simulation very well but because we just came up with these devices that are made magnificent at running simulations yeah interesting interesting cool cool I like that that's first time we've heard that recency bias towards the towards it and then last question is what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world hmm wow hmm I think the most beautiful thing in the world is actually any moment when you are fully present and fully accepting and fully I mean I want to say at peace it's kind of cliche but but what I really mean is that you're not trying to change anything in that moment you're just completely you're completely there with it what do you feel when you feel that I feel the most beautiful thing in the world you do yeah that's so good that's so well said it's some we really urge everyone to do their best to do what Joe just said as often as possible that's that was so awesome that's in the heart of mindfulness training yeah yeah so yeah yeah beautiful episode beautiful conversations I feel so blessed that we are friends ending sequence music commencing that there we go thank you thank you so much for coming on show yeah it's such a pleasure yeah we I really appreciate you and what you care about what you're building so keep it up keep up the good work we have lots of cool people to connect you to and connect us to and let's keep featuring content like this yeah with smart people like you yeah thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it give us your thoughts in the comments below we'd love to hear from you we'd love to hear about how you yourselves are working on mindfulness on meditation on ethical tech and your relations with it teach us about it let us know in the comments below also huge thank you Ron for producing and directing much love again everyone go and manifest your destiny into the world build the future we love you all we'll talk to you soon peace