How to Overcome Social Anxiety | Dr. Nick Epley | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews behavioral scientist Dr Nick Epley on the science of social connection and overcoming social anxiety

Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Nick Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago.

Summary

Dr. Nick Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago who studies social connection and how people understand the minds of others, joins Andrew Huberman to explore how humans read the minds of others through egocentrism, stereotyping, and behavioral observation — each mechanism providing some accuracy while generating characteristic errors such as egocentric bias, exaggerated group differences, and the correspondence bias. He discusses the cultural intelligence hypothesis, illustrated by a Max Planck Institute study showing that two-year-old toddlers vastly outperform chimpanzees and orangutans on social IQ tasks while performing equally on physical ones — evidence that sophisticated social cognition is humanity's defining trait.

He argues that people are systematically too pessimistic about how positively strangers will respond to them when they reach out — a misperception that causes people to miss countless opportunities for meaningful connection throughout their daily lives. He presents research showing that even brief exchanges with strangers significantly improve well-being, and that acting more extroverted reliably lifts mood regardless of where someone falls on the introversion-extroversion spectrum.

He also shares a deeply personal story involving the adoption of a child with Down syndrome, explaining how his own research data gave him the courage to say yes — and how that decision proved to be, as he puts it, a blessing in every sense. The conversation covers social anxiety, exposure therapy, the role of voice and eye gaze in human connection, and the importance of small everyday habits in modeling good social behavior.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Mind Reading, Anthropomorphism, and How We Understand Other People

Andrew Huberman: Dr Nick Epley, welcome.

Dr Nick Epley: Thank you so much for having me.

Andrew Huberman: We make a lot of assumptions about other people — and in my case, because I have a new puppy, about animals. We're always thinking that we know what other beings are thinking. But as you've pointed out, and as a colleague of mine in neuroscience, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, has pointed out, most of the time we don't even know what we're thinking. There's stuff going on in there, but we're not that good at thinking, "Oh, that last thought was a complete sentence that means blank." That's not how the human mind works. Usually when we hear the word anthropomorphism, we're talking about humans making assumptions about other animals. But humans are animals — we just happen to be the curators of the planet. So why and how do we anthropomorphize about other people, and how does it hurt us and how does it help us?

Dr Nick Epley: The way to think about anthropomorphism is that what we are doing is trying to understand what's going on within another agent. Anything that acts independently — you've got a ball rolling across the table, if something else bumps into it and it moves in perfect deflection, you don't need anything to explain why that ball moved as it did. But if this ball is coming across the table and another one hits it and it just keeps going or goes in some other direction, well then it seems like there's something going on inside that thing that might be driving it. And that thing inside that ball might be a mind — a set of thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, some kind of psychology that's pushing it. At least that's the way we interpret what an independent agent might be doing.

We do this when we think about other people. You're nodding your head now — I think you're thinking about something. You move this way or that, you wanted to do this thing or that thing. We do that same kind of mind reading with non-human agents, animals, gods, sometimes the planet, even ourselves. We reflect on ourselves. We have experience of having certain mental states come to mind and we use that experience as a guide to what's going on in other people too.

That kind of anthropomorphism, that kind of mind reading where we infer others' thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, is helpful to us for at least two reasons. One is it gives me some sense of why you're doing what you're doing now — it allows me to understand whether you're trying to be kind, aggressive, or friendly. But it also is pretty good at allowing me to predict what you're likely to do next. If I think you feel hungry, you're going to go try to eat something. If I think you don't like me very well, you're going to behave a particular way towards me. So this kind of mental state inference, this kind of mind reading, serves us pretty well for getting around in a social world. We don't always get it right, but in general it's better than not doing it at all.

Andrew Huberman: As we make assumptions about others and their intentions and their past choices — if somebody hits somebody else, we make an assumption that certain things might have led up to that. Are we mainly paying attention to behavior, or are we paying attention to what they seem to be paying attention to? Social theory of mind?

Dr Nick Epley: It depends a lot on what kind of environment we're in. We think about the minds of others in lots and lots of different contexts. My wife right now is back home in Illinois. I can think about what she might want for dinner, or what she's feeling at any given time. We can think about people when they're not present. We can think about strangers, people we know nothing about. I write a book and I'm trying to think about how will people understand this book. These are all cases where there's not somebody in front of us at all.

When we're doing that, particularly with strangers and people we know nothing about, the one thing we have at our disposal is ourselves. We can use our own minds. If I walk into a classroom and I think it's kind of cold in here, I can assume that other people will think it's cold too. I'm using myself as a guide. Once I know a little more about you — that you're a PhD from Stanford, that somebody is an athlete, a doctor, a lawyer — I can use that information, my beliefs about groups of people, as a guide. That's stereotyping. And stereotypes contain a fair bit of accuracy. If I know that you're a Democrat or a Republican, I can make some reasonable inferences about other thoughts you might have. Not perfect, but better than chance guessing.

And then once I can see you, like what we're doing right now, behavior dominates. Behavior is tricky though. You could have two people kissing — they seem delightfully in love — and you make one set of inferences. When we can see the behavior in front of us, that's what we're paying most attention to.

But each of these different mechanisms — egocentrism, stereotyping, and behaviorism — give us some accuracy while also creating some error. Egocentrism creates egocentric biases: I assume that you think more like I do than you actually do. Stereotyping tends to create a different set of mistakes: I tend to think that groups are more distinct and different from each other than they actually are, because stereotypes are about the defining features of groups, which tends to exaggerate the differences between groups. And when it comes to behavior, I tend to assume a simpler, more simplistic mind behind that behavior than actually exists. Psychologists refer to this as the correspondence bias. I tend to infer an intention or set of beliefs or attitudes that corresponds with your behavior as I see it. If I see you hit somebody, I might assume you are an aggressive person. Had I known it was in self-defense, I would interpret it very differently. But we tend to leap to mental states or intentions from behavior, and sometimes that can get us into trouble when the relationship between intentions and behavior is a little complicated.

The Role of Eye Gaze and the Social Brain

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to return to the example you gave of a ball rolling on a table and another ball striking it. In the second example, the ball simply takes off on a different trajectory and you said we're going to make some assumption that the ball has something like a mind controlling its decisions. What I'm about to say reflects a strong bias, which is that I've long been interested in the visual system of non-human and human primates because we are so visual, and the eyes are two pieces of the brain — the only pieces of the brain in healthy individuals that are outside the cranial vault. They give us a lot of information. I don't think people appreciate just how much information they give us — not just pupil size and whether or not our gaze is locked with theirs.

If I could just alter your experiment for a second: let's say that first ball had eyes, and it's rolling forward, but then the eyes shift to the left and then the ball goes to the left. Now I have additional information. I have a window literally into the brain where I can say what's over there that might have motivated that decision. With humans, if somebody's going down the street swinging their arms wildly and hitting people, we think this person's out of control. Whereas if they see somebody and orient their gaze toward them, we start making all sorts of assumptions about the operations of that mind. In my worldview, the eyes are the best source of information about intent, about goals. So limiting the conversation to conditions where we can see the other person and what they see — are there examples of our judgments about other people's thoughts and behavior improving by virtue of that?

Dr Nick Epley: The eyes do provide a lot of valid information. Absolutely. The voice also contains an awful lot — that's the other thing we spend a lot of time studying. But we are the most socially sophisticated primate species on the planet. We have a brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others, and that means we are hypersensitive to certain things. The eyes are one of them.

There's a great paper from 2008 on the cultural intelligence hypothesis, a Science paper, where they tried to assess what makes humans unique on this planet. They compared a little over 100 two-year-old toddlers — this was done at the Max Planck Institute in Germany — over 100 chimpanzees, and then just for good measure another 36 orangutans who apparently had nothing better to do.

Andrew Huberman: What a funny — exhausting.

Dr Nick Epley: Exactly. I would like to know the background details of how it was actually done and how long it took. But essentially they ran each of these groups through two different kinds of IQ tests. One was an IQ test involving physical objects — things like tracking where a reward was placed under a shell game, or using a tool to solve some kind of problem. Jane Goodall once — biologists once believed that tool use was what made humans unique, until Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees using twigs to get termites out of a termite mound. On the physical IQ test problems, the human toddlers, the adult chimps, and the orangutans performed equally well. There wasn't a difference. It's not reasoning about physical things in space that makes us unique.

The other group of IQ problems were social problems that required reasoning about the mind of another person. This involved things like tracking where someone's eyes are looking in order to monitor what somebody is thinking, because we tend to look at things we're thinking about and think about things we're looking at. If I want to know what's on your mind, what's governing your attention, I want to be really good at tracking your eyes. And we are amazing at this as human beings. I can tell whether you're looking at me right now or looking at my right ear from this far without any trouble. I can tell from 50 feet away whether you're looking at me or looking at 10 feet above me. We're amazingly good at this — super sensitive. I couldn't calculate the angle on a roof if you gave me a month and an armload of protractors to do it, but I can detect the angle in your eyes in an instant.

It also involved things like being able to understand somebody's intentions from their actions. If I reach out for this glass of water and I miss it, you can infer I'm thirsty and I want a drink — you could hand me the glass. You could read my mind essentially, infer my thoughts. And they tested the two-year-old toddlers, the chimps, and the orangutans on these social IQ tests. That's where the two-year-old toddlers were shining. That's where we were crushing the competition. You can do this in front of a chimpanzee all day long and they will do nothing for you. I do that in front of you and you can hand me the glass of water super easily. So yes, the eyes give us a lot, and we are extremely sensitive to all those social cues that convey what's on the mind of another person, because it allows me to anticipate what you're doing before you do it.

What the Voice Reveals About the Mind

Andrew Huberman: You mentioned voice. I'm going to make an assumption — I'm sure it's wrong, or at least partially wrong — that voice offers a lot of information about autonomic tone, how stressed or how relaxed somebody is. I'd be curious to know if that's true, what else it conveys, and also how much prior exposure to voice matters. Today's the first time I've met you. I don't know what your voice normally sounds like in this context, so I'm just operating off what I've got. What's in voice, what's not in voice, and what are we aware of or not aware of?

Dr Nick Epley: There are lots of things contained in the voice because it is very closely connected to your mind. Your voice is also very closely connected to your online conscious experience — you are speaking while you are thinking. As you're having thoughts, your voice can reflect authentically what's going on in your mind. When I speed up, you can tell I'm kind of excited about something. When my voice varies in pitch, you can tell if I'm enthusiastic or sad. You can pick up a lot about what's actually going on in the mind by listening to a person's voice.

One thing we've studied is that voice just contains a lot of information that allows us to understand other people better. If you compare typing to somebody versus talking to them, the voice allows you to determine things like intentionality — to differentiate when you're telling a joke or being sarcastic from when you're not. We'll type this email: "This is so funny." We think when we're sending it off that it seems funny to us because we know it's meant to be a joke. The person on the other end doesn't realize the comment was meant to be a joke and they're all offended. But if you say it in your voice, sarcasm is crystal clear.

Interestingly, because of egocentrism in part, we're not always so sensitive to how our own communication is interpreted by another person, because we know what we're thinking when we're conveying something. We tend to think we'll be understood equally well whether we're typing or talking, but of course on the receiving end it varies a lot.

But what we also find — and I think this is also interesting — is that the voice conveys the presence of mind. I don't have access to your thinking, to your reasoning, to what's going on between your ears. I can only watch from the outside and I get cues. The voice contains a lot of cues to the presence of mind. When you're really thinking hard about something, your voice slows down and you deliberate. That variability in the pace of your voice tells me that your mind is alive. Just like I can tell that you're biologically alive because you're moving, your voice also moves, and it tells me you've got a lively mind. It conveys the presence of emotion. It can convey the presence of thinking.

So when we have partisans — we did this with Juliana Schroeder, who was one of my amazing PhD students from years ago, she's now on the faculty at Berkeley at Haas — we had people on the eve of the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton say why they were voting for the candidate they were voting for, and they gave a verbal pitch. We could get an audio-recorded clip where you could see and hear the person, we could get just their voice, and we could also strip out their voice and just see the content of their text — the words they were saying. They also wrote a pitch explaining why they were voting for that particular candidate.

What we then did is have people watch and listen, listen only, or read the transcript or written explanation, and say essentially: how mindful is this person? How thoughtful, how intelligent, how rational, how capable of experiencing emotions are they? Essentially: are you a mindful, intelligent person or are you kind of a mindless idiot? Are you human-like or more like a rock?

What we found was that when people could hear what the person had to say — either while also seeing them or just with their voice — they rated the person, particularly when they disagreed with them, as more thoughtful, more intelligent, more rational. This tendency to dehumanize the other side, to think of them as mindless idiots, was dramatically reduced when you actually heard what the other person had to say.

So the voice, along with the eyes and eye gaze, gives us a lot of information that allows us to understand what's on somebody's mind. And it also allows us something deeper — it allows me to tell you that you've got a mind, that you have one.

Andrew Huberman: That's very interesting. The vision piece I'm familiar with for reasons I stated before. The physical behavior piece makes a lot of sense. The voice piece as a reflection of an active mind is something I really haven't considered. We'll sometimes hear that the content of people's words is less informative than the timbre of their voice or something like that. I don't know that I completely believe that. I think that's like an '80s or '90s pop psychology thing.

Dr Nick Epley: Absolutely. That is a highly stylized experimental result.

Andrew Huberman: You will sometimes hear in this pop-psych world that 80% of what's communicated is communicated through paralinguistic cues. That obviously is not true — I'm not going to be able to tell you about my book just by using the tone of my voice.

Dr Nick Epley: Right. The words certainly do matter. But above and beyond that, there are other things that matter in a person's voice that people aren't so sensitive to. When we ask our MBA students to give an elevator pitch for their desired job — why should this company hire you? — they can give it with their voice, so we do audio and visual, we do just audio, we pull out the transcript and just get the words, or they type their pitch. We then have people watch and listen, listen only, or read these pitches and say: how intelligent does this person seem? How hirable? We've done this both with people who imagine working for companies and also with Fortune 500 recruiters.

The person seems more intelligent, more rational, more thoughtful, more hirable when you hear what they have to say. And yet the MBA students themselves think they'll be judged equally on those two. They're not. When we ask a separate group of people, "If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a way that would make you seem most intelligent, what would you do?" — overwhelmingly people say they'd rather write. The thinking behind that is that people believe they can edit and refine, but what they're missing is that the sound of your voice conveys a lot more. It conveys the fact that you have a mind, because I can't see it and I can't read it in your dead text. Your dead text has none of the paralinguistic cues or features. Really talented writers and novelists can do this, but mostly your text is dead. It doesn't have intonation. It doesn't change its pitch. It doesn't show me thinking while it's actually happening, and people don't seem to realize that.

AI, Voice, and the Future of Social Connection

Andrew Huberman: What does this reveal to us about AI? People are spending more and more time with AI, and what comes back is text. There are versions of it, and soon I imagine there will be elaborated versions with avatars or even video AR. Are you generally enthusiastic about what that could bring in terms of better understanding other humans? I could imagine a world where I can't reach you, but I could go on AI and say, "Hey, Nick" — and given the content on the internet, the LLM should be able to have a video of you deliver to me what you would say, or pretty close to it. Is that better than a bullet point list?

Dr Nick Epley: It will be. People will find it more believable. A lot of the things people turn to AI for now are for facts, for actual information, for text. But I do think increasingly it's going to be used for social stuff. People feel lonely, disconnected, they need a friend. I'm friends with Liz Dunn, who's a fabulous psychologist at the University of British Columbia, and she told me they're starting to do research about allowing people to practice having conversations with AI before they actually have a conversation with another person — like a conflict.

I can see ways in which AI could be used to do lots of things. I can also see obvious problems with it. If I'm connecting with the AI and I'm not connecting with other humans, I can see problems with it. But in terms of the presence versus absence of voice, I do think voice will allow us — to the extent that it's good and sounds like a human voice — to trust it more when you hear what it has to say, because you'd anthropomorphize it just like you do another person.

Andrew Huberman: I don't want to spend too much time on politics, but I can't help but ask this. Way back when Bush was president — the second one — I recall there was a lot of discussion around people who voted for him saying he's the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with. Which I interpreted as there's something about his style of speech, which was very everyday. Nowadays we have a lot of access to people talking on video. When you and I were growing up, there would be a presidential address or a campaign and you'd hear from people, but it was very limited. Now we have more and more information about voice, about behavior, about decision-making. Do you think we're getting better at assessing public figures or worse?

Dr Nick Epley: That's a good question. I think that'll take me too far out on a limb. I don't know the answer to that. There's so much information that we have now. But the other thing too is that the way we evaluate other people — and this is central to a lot of our research — other people are ambiguous. They're not crystal clear. That same thing that I say to you that I mean to be a joke can sound really hostile or violent to another person. That's what makes my work as a psychologist so interesting.

In the early 1900s, when social psychology and cognitive psychology started, it came out of basically biology and vision sciences and basic sensory perception, thinking that we could understand human thinking and measure our judgments about each other in the same way that we measure how people evaluate hot and cold. But it turns out that other people are very ambiguous. Two people with a different set of beliefs or attitudes or perspectives can look at the very same stimulus and see totally different things. A lot of our judgment is not happening out there coming to us — it's happening in here, interpreting what we're seeing. In the world of politics, everyone who's listening to this podcast knows just how ambiguous things are. Somebody says something and the right will interpret it this way, the left will interpret it that way. It's known as my-side bias. So there is this sense that if we get more and more information, we'll understand people better. That's not necessarily true if we come into these perceptions with very different starting points to begin with.

The Science of Social Connection and Well-Being

Andrew Huberman: You've worked a lot on this notion of under-socialization. If I may, I'd like to invert it for today's conversation and talk a little less through the lens of how bad it is if we're under-socialized, and explore instead how good it is if we do socialize. Not because I have to make things positive, but because ultimately I think actions to socialize more are going to be useful.

In the most deprived condition, a human is in total isolation. Another condition is they can text with somebody else but they've never seen them. We can ratchet that up — they've seen them before, they can make a phone call, they can do video chat, they're in person. I can see a million excellent arguments for why in-person interaction is good. But what is the evidence that the other forms of social interaction are good also? We hear so much about how they're bad, but we also hear about the isolation crisis. Is texting with a friend healthy as opposed to spending time alone?

Dr Nick Epley: Yes.

Andrew Huberman: In-person time clearly being the best?

Dr Nick Epley: It's a little better. Although going from no contact to some contact is the big leap.

Andrew Huberman: Tell me more.

Dr Nick Epley: Being isolated, spending a day alone, is pretty miserable. When psychologists look at this, it comes from a famous paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton — both Nobel Prize winners in economics, neither of them economists — that looked at the Gallup daily well-being poll. They call people up every day and ask them how they're feeling in a number of different ways. They ask about the day before: did you enjoy yesterday? Did you smile? Did you experience sadness? Did you experience stress? They ask about these different measures of well-being, and they also ask about all kinds of other things like how much money you're making, whether you're religious, how much insurance you have, whether you're surveyed on a weekend or a weekday. They also ask: did you spend yesterday entirely alone or not?

When they do that, you can compare the effects of things like social isolation against these other things. It turns out the difference between spending yesterday alone versus with somebody else — the difference in your well-being — is about seven times bigger than being relatively high or low on their income measure, which is about a $60,000 difference between those two groups. Being alone is bad. That's a bad day. Having connections with other people improves it pretty dramatically.

We also need to unpack a little bit what these different media do — they're good for different things. If I send my wife a text — we've been married for nearly 30 years, it'll be 30 years in August — we know a ton about each other. I can send her a heart when I'm feeling love and she's going to feel that. That's going to lift her up a little bit. Texting is great for that. It can allow us to stay in contact with somebody. It is not good for building a relationship necessarily over time. If we're going to spend a half hour typing to each other, that's not a good way to spend that half hour. I'd be much better off picking up the phone and talking to help establish that relationship. But absolutely, the ability to reach out and connect with other people frequently, as texting is used out in the world, can allow us to stay connected. If that's the only thing we're doing and we're not actually spending time developing more meaningful relationships, that's not going to be as good as it could be.

But you started this by asking about sociality more generally, and why being social is good for us. Even with our imperfections in thinking about the minds of others, we are highly social. Just the ability to think with the level of sophistication that we do about the minds of other people shows how important sociality is for us. You see the importance of sociality almost everywhere you look.

The way our brain is organized — our neocortex is massive relative to the rest of our brain compared to our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees. A lot of that is good for social stuff: for theory of mind use, for keeping track of who knows what and who you should trust and who you should avoid. Living in large social groups is complicated, and the size of our brain reflects that complication. If you look across primate species, the size of the neocortex relative to the rest of the brain is correlated — this is work on the social brain hypothesis — with the social complexity of the group the primate species lives in. Our brains are built to be social.

Also, for most of human history, being alone and isolated is a death sentence. You can't live on your own. We depend on each other for survival. That also means we have a neural architecture that is desperately trying to keep us connected with other people. When you spend a day alone, the reason why it feels like crap — as my late colleague and friend John Cacioppo, who was at the University of Chicago and was the world's expert on loneliness, noted — is that your neural architecture is screaming at you when you are alone to reach out and connect with other people. That's why loneliness feels bad, and that's why the opposite of loneliness feels so good. Getting a hug feels good. Your brain is trying to tell you: get out there and connect with other people.

When you're lonely, you get spikes in cortisol in your bloodstream that compromise your cardiovascular functioning and your immune system. That's why being lonely can make you sick and shorten your life. And you see that the opposite of loneliness — connecting with other people — just feels darn good. That's your body telling you: do this a little more often. This is really good.

When you have that little conversation with a stranger — like I did coming in, I had this amazing conversation, actually a very deep, hard conversation with my Uber driver who was Iranian, had lost a son in a protest, shot in the neck years ago in Iran. Very painful, but also very meaningful. It connected us to each other. I felt a very strong bond with each other in the moment. That's your brain telling you that's the kind of thing we're built for, because living alone for most of human history was a bad, bad thing. So we are hypersocial agents interested in connecting with other people. It doesn't always mean we know exactly how to do it or that we get it right. But going from nothing to something is a huge leap for us, and texting can sometimes help us do that.

This is somewhat philosophical more than scientific, but could it be that if we spend too much time alone, we've got all this stuff in our mind and it's very hard to create some sort of reverberation or action at a distance that we know reflects us? I wonder if our unconscious mind actually gets to the question: do I even exist? Of course we know we exist — we can touch our limbs — but the social isolation fear, if I've got a fridge full of food and I've got music and audiobooks, that's all incoming. But at some point you do get a little weird. Your thoughts get a little distorted. And then of course we think of the Ted Kaczynski types and these extremes of people that have gone into isolation. There's that movie about the true story — the guy that goes into the wilderness.

Dr Nick Epley: Oh yeah. Into the Wild.

Andrew Huberman: That's right. And McCandless, right?

Dr Nick Epley: Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: And Eddie Vedder wrote the soundtrack to that movie. I love Into the Wild. And I think McCandless wrote at the end that the connection with people is the thing. He had this romantic view of going out into the wilderness by himself. We think of Walden Pond and we romanticize being alone for long extended amounts of time. But I think it raises real questions about whether or not we're even there. It's sort of the most existential version of: if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there, did it make a sound? It's sort of like: if we have thoughts and emotions and experiences and there's no one else around to reflect those, for them to have impact on — do we even exist? I'm curious what your thoughts are about the relationship between the fear of isolation and our need for our thoughts and desires and behaviors to have some sort of reverberation out there, some responsiveness to us.

Dr Nick Epley: The closest research to this, to the extent that there is research on this, is what happens to prisoners who are put in solitary confinement. It is not good for their mental health. It's not good for their sense of self, for who they are. They do lose a sense of themselves. There's not great research on this because you can't randomly assign people to be isolated for long periods of time.

But that experience I think is very real. When you were talking about this, it made me think of research in the early 1900s, these theories from sociologists that the way we understand ourselves is through other people. The way I know who I am, what I'm like as a person, who Nick is — is from talking with you, Andrew. When we are in conversation, that's when I'm learning about myself. You're telling me about myself. I'm having thoughts that I'm sharing with you. And that's what gives me a sense of self — this looking glass self.

Our sense of self-esteem in fact is highly tied to how well we're getting along with other people. Psychologists believe it is a monitor for how well you're getting along with people — your very sense of self-worth. And so when there is nobody out there, I think you're absolutely right that you can lose your sense of who you are.

People who go out to the woods — I remember when I was a kid, I actually wrote this in a bio for an early career award from the APA, which was a great honor for me. I wrote in that bio about my childhood dream: before I was 9 years old, I believed I was going to be a mountain man. I grew up in the woods in Iowa, hunting and fishing, being outdoors. All my extended family were farmers. I was watching Grizzly Adams on TV. I thought that was a legit job — I could actually go do this. I was about 9 years old when I learned that this was not a real job. But yes, I had romanticized it as well. When people actually go out and do that, they mostly go insane after a while.

Social Media, Action at a Distance, and the Need for Responsiveness

Andrew Huberman: Social media, which I spend a decent amount of time on because I teach there and I learn there — we know it has healthy aspects and unhealthy aspects. But social media offered people this opportunity to get out of aloneness through a different form of connection. If we just hypothesize that having our words or our thoughts have a visible, known impact on somebody else's words or thoughts provides some sort of confirmation that we're there, it kind of explains why taking the most aggressive or outrageous thought and putting a comment — and then somebody responds, or other people dogpile — you're like, I'm having an effect out there. Also safely behind a wall, right? There's no — I think we're critical of that "safely behind a wall" piece. The stereotype you hear online is like some anonymous person in his mom's basement trolling people. But we forget: that person's alone in their basement. Why are they doing it? Why is it so satisfying to them? I don't actually believe that most of these people are evil. Probably they want to see their words and thoughts have an effect, and the best way to do that is to poke or say something outrageous.

So if we can go to something even a little more concrete — if we just think about conversation, the back and forth. Why is conversation often such a pleasant thing?

Dr Nick Epley: It is because there is back and forth responsiveness in the conversation that allows me to detect that you're paying attention to me. Right now you're looking at me, you're nodding as I'm speaking, and you'll give a "mm-hmm" or a "right" or a "yeah" as I'm going along. And that allows me to recognize my thoughts are having an effect on you in a way that's having a positive effect in return on me. That action at a distance as you put it — psychologists talk about that as responsiveness, or being in synchrony with another person — is part of what makes conversation feel so good.

Andrew Huberman: I have some friends who are recording artists and the only reason they still tour is not for the money. The money's in some cases good, but it's not as good as money they can make doing other things. It's a huge hassle, takes them away from families, there are security issues. But they get to experience the apex of collective human action at a distance based on their inflections, their things. You mentioned Eddie Vedder — there are stories of what he did at some concert, right? He scaled up and grabbed a microphone that got stuck up above, and then he actually repelled down on the microphone wire. This was all spontaneous. Recording artists love to do this. They don't just love to sing — they love to see the response of the people they sing to. And people go to concerts, I believe, because whether they understand it or not, they're having an impact on what's happening up on stage. They understand that reciprocity. I have to believe that this is part of our core wiring.

When we're kids and we round up in preschool — everyone tries to sit still, and the girls generally can and the boys generally can't until a later age — there's a lot of learning to let others speak, to kind of hold things in. As a human psychologist, if you were to play primatologist for a moment — what are the core components that social connection is built on? We talked about dialogue, we talked about vision, we talked about sharing. We don't get a whole lot of training in this if you really think about it. We just kind of go through school. We learn to sit, we learn to listen, you're not supposed to hit people, you're not supposed to yell at people. What is the socialization in human primates? What are the core features that make somebody able to function really well socially or not?

Dr Nick Epley: The thing to keep in mind is the reason why we think social connection matters so much — why it's so important — is that it allows us to coordinate with other people. If I can coordinate with you, then you and I are better able to survive and to exist and pass along our genes. And groups that are able to coordinate with each other, collectively cooperate in ways that are good for the common good — those groups outperform groups where people are just at each other's throats and nobody's cooperating. This is why corporations function effectively. You get a collection of individuals all operating as a single unit, all oriented towards one common goal, and you can get a collection of people doing things that are way more advanced and way bigger than any individual would do on their own. This is why the East India Trading Company was able to send ships all around the world — because they had resources tied up in corporations so that if one ship went down, you wouldn't lose all your resources as an investor.

So all of social connection, at least evolutionarily speaking, is pushing us toward cooperation and coordination, particularly with non-kin. That's what makes us truly social on this planet — our ability to cooperate and to care for non-kin. You don't need any special evolutionary mechanism to get coordination with family members. They have your genes. But you need something else to explain why I'm so friendly with you and why we coordinate so well out there in the world. We drive on the right side of the road. We befriend people we're not related to. That's what social connection is ultimately trying to serve — that coordination function.

Andrew Huberman: Do you think there are hardwired mechanisms that set us up for cooperation with our genetic offspring and siblings more so than with non-genetic relatives? I know you have adopted kids. We have adopted kids in our family as well, and it's sort of weird to say this because it's kind of a "duh," but for people that don't have adopted family members, the notion that they're not really part of your family is insane. I have a younger family member who was adopted and I never ever think for a moment that she's not part of our family. I'd lay down in traffic for her the same way I would for any other member of my family, and I wasn't the one that raised her. Do you think there's something hardwired about our genetic offspring, and the other stuff fortunately develops — adopted children, close friends, community members?

Dr Nick Epley: I don't know the answer to that exactly — that's not what I study per se. What I can tell you as a social psychologist is that what we study is the power of context and roles to drive behavior. And the thing you are speaking to, and the thing that we have experienced as parents — we have three adopted children — is that what really matters is the role you play. And that is magical.

When we adopted our first two children from Ethiopia, we made a decision to do this. And when you adopt, there's a point where you move from this being hypothetical to being real. The way this worked for us was that we were shown pictures of these children who we could adopt. And of course, once you're in on it, you're all in. They said, "We called up the agency, we said we were ready to go." And they said, "How about these?" and put a picture up for us.

When we were first making this decision, it was hypothetical. And the pictures looked different to us. These kids had come from very, very hard places in life. You don't end up in an orphanage in another part of the world unless you've come through hard places. They had come through very hard places. They were in the second and third percentile in the WHO height and weight charts. They were in tough shape. As soon as Jen and I said, "Yeah, we can do this" — I so vividly remember this — they just looked better. They just looked more. You just felt more love. They looked different the second we decided: yes, this is it, here we go, we have committed.

And then once you bring people into your family, anybody who's done this knows the huge effect is: you're their dad or their mom. And that's what matters. I will sometimes very gently note to people — they will sometimes talk to me as another father of my kids, not my kids, as if the biological and adopted children are different — and I try to gently say: they are all our children. And you don't feel differently. So I think what's interesting is how almost completely imperceptible that actually is. That's what makes us remarkable as human beings — that we can do that. There is no other species we know of that loves beyond their kin in the way that we can.

In fact, it's led to a total reshaping in many ways of the field of economics. Even economists believed that humans are fundamentally self-interested. The only rub is that when you actually look at the data, people are just a lot nicer to each other than standard models of economics would predict. We give money away to charity. We give away kidneys to random strangers. If I give you $10 in an experiment and tell you you can divide it with another person however you want, the standard prediction from economic theory is you'll be purely self-interested and give them nothing. That's not what real people do. They give something — 30%, 50%, typically, depending on the context. And that's the thing that I think is remarkable: not whether there's any bit left of this biological hard wiring, but how much of it is about the role that you play, and how much our love for another, our ability to connect with another person, is a function of the role that we play in their lives.

Andrew Huberman: Incredible example — that the moment you and your wife made the decision that these were the children you were going to adopt, your visual perception of them changed.

Dr Nick Epley: Different. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman: It's almost like two circuits merged in that moment. And I can attest from a parallel experience — although I'm not the parent of this family member — that it's an instant and you never go back. There's never a reconsideration. And I think some people assume that in especially hard times you think this. It just doesn't. The question just leaves the room. It's a fascinating and reassuring aspect of our brain wiring.

Dr Nick Epley: Wild and very cool. And I think an underappreciated aspect of our sociality is how much we take it for granted. People can be mean to each other, yeah. But we also love each other way beyond what we should, based on pure kinship relationships and biological offspring. And that's because we're highly social. We've got to cooperate with each other in order to get along successfully in life. And so we've got this really hardwired circuitry to care and love and connect with each other when we try.

Cultural Differences in Socializing with Strangers

Andrew Huberman: What I'm about to describe might be different now, but a good portion of my family is in South America. I'll never forget when I was in my late teens, early 20s, I went down there and went out with my cousins to a bar, a club. It was so interesting because they spoke to their friends, we met up with their friends there, people danced, people drank, did all the things we were also doing back in California — but there was no communication with other people at this club or bar that they didn't already know. The culture was one where you go out with the people you already know and you have a really good time, but people weren't exchanging numbers, hitting on people, looking at other people across the room. There were these little pockets across the room. It wasn't this idea that when you go out in public you might meet somebody else. And the interesting thing also was that many of these friendships had been lifelong friendships. I wonder — is this one version of how humans evolved? We always think about this village of like a hundred people. Bob Sapolsky talks about this — we evolved in these cultures of 100 or 200 folks and you knew everyone and everyone's in each other's business.

Dr Nick Epley: It's hard to say. Certainly today, if you look around the world, there is and always has been some anxiety about connecting with strangers, and it can vary depending on where you are. There are some places where there's more sociability than in others, but there's always been some anxiety about the other — the one you don't know — because you don't know necessarily if you can trust them in this moment. Whether that comes from our evolutionary heritage or just unfamiliarity with anything — if you give me something to drink here, I don't know what's in it. I'm going to be a little nervous. I want to find out before I drink it. If I trust you, I'll drink it. But if I don't, I'm not so sure.

There's always some anxiety about the unknown or uncertainty. A lot of stuff about strangers, a reluctance to connect with other people, a desire to keep with the folks we already know, comes simply from that. Which would also apply to non-human objects as well. We just like what's familiar because we know it, and we trust it and we're comfortable with it as a result. Everything else by comparison is a little bit riskier.

Manners, Etiquette, and Everyday Social Exchange

Andrew Huberman: I can't say I'm particularly outgoing or not, but I was taught manners that had me ask how people's day was going. If I'm checking out at the grocery store, it's like, "How's your day going?" And I'm interested — it's not just an icebreaker. You hold the door for people. You say please and thank you. I think a lot of people assume that manners equates to small talk equates to superficial, and that it's all a bunch of fluff that's not about deep connection. But when I'm moving through the checkout line at Whole Foods, I don't have a lot of options. If I say nothing, these days no one would notice — they could be on their phone, no one would call that abnormal. If I say, "How's your day going?" and they go, "Pretty good." If I say, "What did you do before you got here?" — that's getting a little further down the line. If I say, "What's the hardest thing that ever happened?" — they're going to look at me like I'm crazy.

I wonder: when we talk about manners and etiquette, which I believe there's been a real erosion of at the level of what is standard — all men used to wear jackets and ties or at least ties to work, now you show up in whatever — I do think that as common manners have become less common, the opportunities for casual low-level exchange have evaporated. And so there's less of a stepping stone to deeper exchange.

Dr Nick Epley: I would think about manners as habits — that's kind of what they are — and some sensibilities about being kind and decent to other people. But understanding how those manners might be affecting day-to-day behavior is a little bit tricky. One of the things we find, for instance, is that in a lot of public spaces people are reluctant to engage with other people because they don't want to interrupt, they don't want to be impolite. There's a version of that that is about manners. And we sometimes get signals from technology that somebody doesn't want to be bothered — we put earbuds in or we look at our phone.

In the UK, for instance, there's this norm of politeness that it's not okay for me to get into your business. In Japan, it's even stronger. And that's seen as being polite. I am with you though that this general norm of saying hello or hi to people has gotten diminished a little bit, in part because people are getting out of the habit because they've got these phones on them all the time. But it's a little trickier to say that manners have eroded, because they're complicated out in the world. Stuff that looks like a lack of manners in one context could, in people's own minds, be: "No, I'm being polite to you by not interrupting." It's tricky.

Andrew Huberman: I hear from a lot of podcast listeners that the challenges with finding a romantic partner nowadays center largely around people not wanting to be seen as creepy, but also people not wanting strangers to talk to them. So we're a little bit at an impasse right now. I also hear from people who wonder why guys aren't asking them out just kind of randomly, or asking them for a coffee or for a number. I think there's a lot of fear right now. And that fear is probably on both sides. You said you had an in-depth conversation with your Uber driver on the way over here. Are you one to just open up conversation with people at random?

Dr Nick Epley: Yeah. In part because we could go back a long way to start, but I'll keep this simple. I've interpreted reaching out and connecting with other people differently. We find in our work that people underestimate how interested others are in engaging with them. You're sitting next to somebody on a plane or on a train and if you're not already talking, you assume this person doesn't want to talk to you. But that person is more likely to say they're interested in talking to you than you would guess. But if you've got two people that aren't talking to each other — this gets back to our earlier conversation about how I can use somebody's behavior as a guide to their thoughts — in this case, making a mistake. I can infer you're not interested in talking to me if you're not. And you could be thinking, well, Nick's not talking to me, he's not interested either. We can both then sit there, both be interested in talking to each other, but nobody's saying a word because we misunderstand what silence is like.

So I've adopted a different way to think about manners here, in a way that I think attends more to both my own well-being and the person I'm connecting with. I think about social connection as an opportunity or an invitation to connect with somebody. And to your point about fear, we find over and over again that people are overly pessimistic, overly afraid about how positively other people will respond to them when you reach out in a positive way.

With the Uber driver on the way here today, I just — he was Iranian, I asked him, "How do you feel about the war? Can you tell me about it?" And it was clear that I was not wanting some superficial response. I cared. I was taking an interest in him, and he recognized I was taking an interest in him, and he responded by taking an interest in me and feeling comfortable sharing. He shared that his son died in a protest in Iran and that he had been imprisoned in Iran. We were crying together at the end of that ride. It's 23 minutes to get here.

Andrew Huberman: The fact that you're able to connect for a short while — I'm assuming you didn't exchange numbers, you're not going to be in touch. So the point is not to create a lasting relationship. The point is to connect, to make that moment better.

Dr Nick Epley: Yeah. And I think actually this is a really important way to rethink how you think about well-being. Well-being is not just about the really impactful moments in your life. Happiness and well-being is a little more like a leaky tire — you just got to keep pumping it up because you adapt to things. You go on this amazing trip out into the beautiful Sonoran Desert or something, and that's great. You come back the next day and then you've got traffic coming to work and that sucks. You're right back to where you were before. It doesn't last. Nothing really lasts for that long. Obviously relationships can last, but moments come and go.

What that means for our well-being, I think, is that we want to start paying attention to creating good moments — positive moments that can lift us up and the people around us as well. I could have gone 23 minutes here to talk with you today and had a perfectly boring ride, or I could have heard one of the most amazing stories about somebody's life where he opens his heart up to me in this car ride in 23 minutes, and made that 23 minutes way better and connected with another human being more deeply than you might imagine would be possible in that short time.

My day is better because that moment was better. And if you start thinking about happiness and connection in terms of moments rather than some sort of illusion of some lasting long-term impact, well then you start seeing opportunities to connect all over the place. On my plane flight in last night I did that. In the grocery store checkout, you've got an opportunity. I now keep an eye out. I take an interest in other people. The research that I've done here on social connection has fundamentally changed the way that I live my life.

I notice stuff that I didn't used to notice. I'll throw out compliments. Any kind thought I will share with somebody. I just don't have anxiety about that. If I'm passing somebody, I'll shout out — like this morning, I got breakfast at the hotel I was at. A guy's wearing a killer hat. I'm walking by: "Hey man, I love your hat. That's awesome." I just kept going. But that moment was a little brighter. And what's a good day if not to string along a few good moments? And what's a good week if not to string along a few days that have some good moments in them? And what's a good month, a good year, a good life? It's about those moments. And we've got lots of those moments. And if we start thinking about them in terms of opportunities to connect, to be decent to another person in a way that'll really use the skill we have to connect with other people instead of being held back by misplaced fear — it changes the way you live your life.

Andrew Huberman: I'm listening to you and I'm thinking some of the best moments of my life — and I've had many many — are really at this kind of level, in passing. Never underestimate the good feeling that comes from a good fist bump with someone that you exchange no words with. I live in a very crowded area and so I don't go out much, but when I do occasionally, you just pass someone on the sidewalk and you just put out a fist and you feel a kinship. The other day I was wearing a Minor Threat shirt — I'm a big Ian MacKaye fan, Minor Threat, Fugazi — and someone shouted out "Minor Threat!" and I go "Minor Threat!" I don't even know where they were. You feel a kinship to other members of your species that way. It's a whole other level of human connection that I hadn't thought of. And as with manners and etiquette and that kind of superficial small talk piece, I kind of assumed that this stuff didn't matter, that it was like a cracker rather than a real meal. But the comparison isn't fair, because ultimately, like you said, our life is a series of moments, and the feeling that our species has a kinship that isn't based on anything else — there was no exchange of money or opportunities or any of that — is pretty awesome.

Dr Nick Epley: A sense that we're connected, we're in this together in some way. There's a hypothesis that many of my PhD students and postdocs over the years have suggested and that we've talked about, but we've never figured out a way to actually test it. But some sense that when you interact with a stranger, it doesn't just make you feel connected to that person — it kind of changes your sense of connection to the entire group. Like you just feel a little better about humanity when you see that moment.

I was walking down the sidewalk just a little bit ago on my way to the train. There was a woman standing next to a car and she just had these awesome red glasses on. They just looked fabulous. And I said to her while going by, "I love those glasses. You are killing it today." And she took them off — she wasn't going to cry, but she stopped and she said, "Thank you so much for telling me that. I really needed that today." I had met her in a moment where she had a bad day, and my sense is she just felt uplifted by people in general, by the world — just had a more favorable view of what the world was like, a different view of what human nature was like in that moment.

Yesterday on my train ride into the University of Chicago before I got on a flight to come here to see you, I sat down next to a young man on the train. He's got his earbuds in, looking at his phone — easy stereotype, young man, disconnected from the world. I sat right next to him and said, "Hi." I reached out my hand to shake his. He came back with a fist bump rather than a handshake. But then he took out his right earbud and I started talking to him. I said, "What are you up to today? What are you going to town for?" And he said, "Well, I'm going to this culinary program downtown." And what was so crystal clear right away was how proud he was that he was doing this. He'd come from LA and he was just starting this training program, this trade school to get him into the culinary union where he was going to work as a chef for maybe a hotel or a big restaurant. He pulled out his little three-ring binder that had his lessons for it. I actually took a picture of it. I have a son who's entering a trade program right now — I've never seen him happier in his life than when he's doing this. And this young man was flipping through showing me what they were doing that day. He was just so proud of what he was doing, so ready to talk with me about this. His name was Gustavo. Delightful young man.

And I remember leaving that conversation just feeling better about my kids, just about kids in general. Here's a kid who's really trying to make it. And that felt good — not just about this young man Gustavo, but kind of uplifting about the entire category that he was from. And what's interesting is how easy it is — to your point about manners — to avoid that out of fear. He doesn't want to talk to me. He's not interested in having a meaningful conversation. He doesn't want to go there. But in fact, that's the thing we're all dying for.

Andrew Huberman: It's super interesting. I never thought about this aspect of social dynamics. Manners and kindness — people hear those words and they think it's fake, but it's not. It's part of the social fabric. Not that I'm the data point that matters, but I assure anyone who aspires to be a public-facing person: the thing you give up when you're a public-facing person is this. That disappears — not with everyone, but it disappears. And so as you're saying this, I actually realize I have a little bit of nostalgia about just being able to go out and interact with people. Sometimes it happens, but a lot of times things revert back to the podcast or things, which I really love. I love it when people roll up and have questions — I'll give a podcast right there. If someone has a question, I'm going to give an answer.

Dr Nick Epley: Sit down for two hours.

Andrew Huberman: Well, I'm always genuinely interested in them. I'll be like, "Where are you from? What's your name?" I'm genuinely interested. I'm not asking it to deflect. But the anonymous brief exchange that reinforces our understanding — it's not like a belief, it's like an understanding, it's a feeling that we're part of the same species — that is an incredibly powerful and reinforcing thing. I can imagine, and I'll just table this possibility, that there are some people who are not as affiliative. I know one or two people whose names I won't mention who don't really — it's not that they dislike people, but unless it's their family, they're not really interested in other people. They're just not. And I can't say that they're unhappy. They like their family, they like their books, they like their movies. We could say they would be better off if they were different, but they don't seem to really like other people. They don't dislike them, but they've got their people and then there's everyone else.

Dr Nick Epley: You can find situations where everybody seems to act that way — like on my train coming into Chicago every morning where nobody's talking, looks like nobody cares about other people. In those kinds of situations, when you ask people to connect with somebody else, everybody kind of gets lifted up.

If you look across introversion and extroversion, a common hypothesis is that extroverts get their energy and their enjoyment from connecting with other people, whereas folks who are more introverted get their energy and enjoyment from keeping to themselves. The data just don't support that. Extraversion is correlated with well-being, with happiness. Going back to 1980, one of the very first studies that ever tested whether personality is related to well-being — an easy hypothesis is no, it can't be, because people get what they want out of their lives. Extroverts connect with other people, introverts have other preferences, but everybody's getting what they want, so theoretically there should be no correlation at all between personality and well-being. And that just isn't true. The correlation between happiness, positive affect day-to-day, and extraversion is .5. That is huge. That's like the correlation between the heights of fathers and sons. It's a little weaker with things like satisfaction with life — more like .3 — but that correlation is big and it shows up around the world.

In 1996, Ed Diener, one of the founding figures in the science of happiness or well-being, stated that the foundational result in personality science is that extroversion is correlated with well-being or happiness. The more outgoing and extroverted you are, the more you connect with others, the happier you are. Lots of reasons why that could be. Maybe extroverts are just happier than introverts to begin with. But it raises the question: maybe it's something about the choices they're making, the habits they're developing, how they're actually behaving. And so that makes an easy prediction: what happens if we just ask people to reach out and connect more with other people, to act a little more extroverted? Does it affect their well-being? Could this be a well-being intervention?

It turns out it is. Wil Fleeson, a psychologist at Wake Forest University, was one of the very first people to do this — a half-hour lab study asking people to act more extroverted or more introverted. When people acted more extroverted, they reported feeling more positive in that experiment. When you ask people to act more introverted, they felt less positive, regardless of where they fell on the personality scale to begin with.

Over the course of a person's day, extroverts and introverts report feeling better alike when they're spending time with other people than when they're alone. You ask both to spend more time connecting with other people, being extroverted over the course of a day, a week or more — Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at UC Riverside, has done some of the best research on this. Over the course of two weeks, you shift the positive affect meter up across the entire extroversion scale when people are connecting with others compared to when they're acting introverted.

I think what differs between the folks who don't seem to get along well with others and folks who do are the habits that they have developed. A little like exercise, I think, is the way to think about it. Some of us choose to exercise a lot. I don't choose to exercise as much as I should now, but we all would feel better if we exercised a little more regardless of what our habits are. So what the data on this suggests is that if people open themselves up a little bit more to other people, try to reach out and connect in positive ways, the porcupines in our lives are not making themselves happier by keeping their quills out and keeping to themselves. They're not living quite as good a life as they could live if they chose to live a little differently. Whether they choose to or not — whether you exercise or not — is not necessarily a moral virtue. But if you wanted to lift your life up a little bit, reach out and engage a little more often is what the data suggests, regardless of where you are on that spectrum.

Social Anxiety and Exposure Therapy

Andrew Huberman: I realize it's not your specific area of work, but what about for people with social anxiety?

Dr Nick Epley: My first impulse is to say, as long as you have the resources and the time, get a dog. I'm not a big fan of dog parks for all sorts of health reasons, but when I lived in San Diego I would take my bulldog mastiff puppy to the dog park. I made lots of friends. He made friends. And a dog is better than bumming a cigarette, which nobody does anymore. What's interesting about that is that it creates an excuse to have a conversation. In the old days you would ask for a cigarette, and you would then smoke side by side with somebody and you'd talk. Sometimes there was a romantic interest, sometimes it was just a friendly interest, but you shared a brief experience. You got some nicotine in your system, and they gave something to you — they shared resources with you, so there's trust being established.

Those tokens — the dog or the cigarette — are serving to work our way around our anxiety a little bit. I don't think they're necessary, but they do help to get around that anxiety.

For people who have social anxiety, it's a painful thing and it's hard. We all have it to some extent — we're nervous about reaching out and engaging with other people in varying degrees. When I was in graduate school, for instance, I was terrified of public speaking. Before my first job interview in my fourth year of graduate school at Princeton, I was terrified.

Andrew Huberman: You seem so facile with it now.

Dr Nick Epley: Now I am. This is 25 years of practice and experience and exposure. And if you have social anxiety disorder and you want to take care of that, this is something psychologist clinicians can really help with. There are lots of things that a psychologist can't really deal with behaviorally, but social anxiety is something we really can help people with.

For this book, A Little More Social, that I just wrote, I had a conversation with the guy who is responsible for really developing exposure therapy to treat anxiety disorder. Stefan Hofmann is his name. And essentially the strategy is very simple. If you are afraid of talking with a stranger or having a deep conversation, the way to get over that is not to simulate it or to imagine it. It's not like you get up and give a pretend speech. That's what psychologists were doing for years. It doesn't work because it's still pretending — you're not a real audience. It has to be real. And that was Stefan Hofmann's real innovation: you send people out in the world to do the thing for real. You're worried about getting rejected? Go out and start asking people for help, and you'll learn that your fear is misplaced, that you get accepted more often than you might guess.

Exposing people to that thing that they are anxious of — when the belief is misplaced, and with social anxiety it is usually wildly misplaced — that's what we find over and over again. It's a mistaken barrier to connecting with other people. That's how you ease that social anxiety and get rid of it. Now, exposure therapy doesn't work for everything. If you're afraid of bullets, repeated exposure to being shot is not going to make you less afraid. That's going to be one-trial learning and that's going to be the end of it. But when your fears are misplaced, like they are with social stuff, exposure is what takes care of it. Not because you dull your anxiety so much. It's because you change your beliefs about what other people are like. You learn: oh wait, other people are nicer than I think. When I say hi to somebody, they tend to say hi back. When I take an interest in somebody, they tend to take an interest in me. It changes your beliefs. That's why exposure therapy works.

Andrew Huberman: That's really interesting and a bit surprising. I completely believe it as you say it, but that exposure therapy doesn't reduce your anxiety per se — it changes your beliefs about how other people are going to react, which indirectly feeds back and changes how you feel.

Dr Nick Epley: Let me give you a story about somebody I got connected to a little bit while I was writing this book. Jia Jiang is his name. He lives up in the Bay Area, at least he did at the time. He was an aspiring entrepreneur, but he was afraid of rejection, and he decided he was going to cure himself of this fear of rejection by subjecting himself to exposure therapy. He'd heard of this — you do this for a month, the Stefan Hofmann work — he was going to try to make some outlandish request every day for a month and get rejected every day. But because his anxiety was so bad, he needed more than a month. He needed 100 days. So 100 days in a row he was going to ask somebody some ludicrous request so that he would get rejected, and then he was going to develop thick skin, become immune to rejection, toughen himself up, desensitize himself.

First day he goes up to a security guard outside a bank and asks him, "Can I borrow $100 from you?" And the security guard says, "That's not how this works, buddy." So he walks away. Success — I got rejected. But then he says, "Actually, it wasn't that bad." He thought the rejection was going to be harsh — middle fingers blazing, swear words, somebody punch him in the face. It wasn't that bad.

By the third day, he starts to fail. He goes into a Krispy Kreme Doughnut store in Atlanta, goes up to the desk. A woman named Jackie Braun is managing the shift there that day. He comes to the counter and says, "Can I get Krispy Kreme donuts in the shape of the Olympic rings?" Shape and color of the Olympic rings. He's thinking they're going to say, "We don't do that here." Instead, Jackie sits down, gets in her thinking pose, and starts drawing on a piece of paper what the Olympic rings are. What colors are they? They're trying to figure this out. Just wait a minute. Jia goes and sits down. Fifteen minutes later, she comes out with a box of donuts — a little sheepishly because she thought she could have done better — and there are these Olympic rings that are amazing. The voiceover on his video is something to the effect of: "And this is why humanity is worth saving."

Over the course of his 100 days, he doubles up a few days and ends up with about 106 requests. We Don Lyons, who was my lab manager at the time, went through and evaluated all of those requests that he posted and we just asked: how often was he actually rejected? He walks up to a house in Texas and asks the guy, "Would you take a picture of me playing soccer in your backyard?" Yes. There he is playing soccer. He walks up to a Southwest Airlines gate, says, "Can I do the security briefing at the beginning?" They say, "Well, you can't do that, but you can address the entire plane if you want." So there he is standing in front of the entire plane addressing everyone. He goes to another airport, a private airport, never flown a plane in his life. He asks, "Can I co-pilot a plane?" Yeah, he gets it done. He walks up to a woman's house with a potted pink rose. "Can I plant this in your front yard?" "Oh, I love roses. You bet. Put it right there."

He actually is rejected less often than he is accepted. We coded the videos for how negative they are — mostly not negative at all. Only about seven out of those hundred times is there any negativity whatsoever, and if anything it's just slight. He's accepted 51 times if I remember right, and rejected 48 times, and then there are a few that are ambiguous where he can't do the thing he asked for but they do something else. Out of all those, only a few times is there any negativity.

When I was talking to him about this, he said, "I went into this thinking I was going to develop thicker skin. I lost my fear of rejection, but it was because I changed how I think about other people. Other people are way kinder than I expect." And he talked about this belief he now has as being a kind of superpower, because he realizes that if you ask people for help, they are much more interested in trying to help you than you'd imagine. And that's why exposure to mistaken beliefs like our social anxiety works — because you learn that your beliefs are wrong. But if you never test them, you never find out you were wrong.

Andrew Huberman: How persistent was he? For instance, if he asked a question and the person said no outright, would he push?

Dr Nick Epley: He wasn't that persistent in these things. And Jia's experience is very consistent with what we find in the research literature as well. There's a phenomenon Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bohns — Frank is at Stanford, Vanessa's at Cornell, both fabulous researchers — documented, known as the underestimation of compliance effect. You ask people to predict what percentage of people will agree to some request, and the very robust tendency is that they overestimate how many people they'll have to ask in order to get some number to agree. People are just much more likely to agree than you think.

We find in our research that not only are they more willing to agree to the request, they also feel much better when they agree to help you than you would guess. You ask somebody to take a picture of you down along the boardwalk in LA — you think you're pestering somebody, you're being a burden to them. They're usually happier to have helped you, because we are happier when we are being kind to other people.

In his videos, he was not that persistent, but he would often accept other alternatives. He goes into Costco one time, goes up to the manager, says, "I love Costco. It's just my favorite store. Can I go on the intercom and tell the entire store how much I love Costco and how fabulous I think you all are?" The manager says, "Well, I can't let you do that, but we can go get lunch over here at the pizza shop that's in Costco and spend some time talking." So he comps him a lunch. On the Southwest Airlines thing, he couldn't do the security briefing but he could just address the whole plane, which is what he did. He would accept those alternatives. If he got a no, he said thank you and that was it.

Andrew Huberman: I don't want to discourage anyone from doing what you just described, because it's a really both entertaining and beautiful example of the goodness of humanity being a fundamental feature of most people. He thought he'd be rejected 100 days in a row.

Dr Nick Epley: He wasn't.

Andrew Huberman: You have data. I just have an anecdote. So the fact that I'm going to tell you that a piece of that anecdote comes from a neurologist does not mean it has any more validity — maybe even less. That was a joke against my neurology. I have great jokes about neurologists. By the way, I could do an entire podcast about the jokes against the different divisions of medicine.

I had a postdoc adviser — unfortunately he passed, but that's not the point here. He was a neurologist and an extremely friendly person. His name was Ben Barres. He used to walk down the hall, say hi to the janitors, he was always very good about bringing things to the admins up front. You and I both know they're underpaid at all universities. He was just an extremely kind, very outgoing person. But he was a neurologist in addition to being a scientist, and he pointed something out: there would be some people who he would interact with on campus — we were adjacent to the hospital, so this plays in — who he'd be friendly to, like "Hey, how's it going?" and they'd say, "Hey, what do you do here?" and he'd say, "Oh, well, we work on neuron-glial interactions, activity-dependent development of myelination," and they'd go, "Oh cool, what's that?" and you'd have a little exchange and then move on. Great, healthy — they're learning, they realize academics aren't just trying to hide their information. No matter how busy they are, somebody taking time out of their busy pace to stop and have an interaction with you. This is something I grew up observing in my mom, and it's something I just naturally do and enjoy. It's a lot of what you described before.

But I'll never forget Ben once telling me, "See this guy coming down the hall? He's sticky." And I said, "What's sticky?" And he said, "That's neurologist speak for the person that takes that kind of casual exchange and makes the assumption that you're a lot closer than you actually are."

As somebody with a sister, you grow up hearing stories of like, some good-looking guy asked for a number, excited about that, but some other guy was pretty persistent and wouldn't go away. I'm not talking about full stalker situations, but I think a lot of social anxiety comes from some people just not knowing where the line is between normal, healthy, casual social exchange and being too sticky.

Dr Nick Epley: Yeah. And this takes us back to the eyes. I'll never forget freshman year of college — I had a roommate, and feedback from people around us was, "What's wrong with your roommate?" I'm like, "What do you mean? He's a perfectly nice guy." And they're like, "No, he stares at people." And I thought, "Oh." He was very, very tall, and so I started noticing when we would stand in groups, he would just beam people. And so I pulled him aside and I said, "Hey, listen, Dave. You can't stare at people." He goes, "I'm just looking at them." And I'm like, "I know, but you're creeping people out." And he goes, "Okay, where should I look?" Now, he might have been a little bit on the spectrum — we didn't have that language or understanding about spectrum back then. But I explained to him: just keep your gaze moving. And we all loved him and he became part of our social circle. But in those first weeks, he was giving people an uneasy feeling.

So I think for a lot of people who have social anxiety, their concern is that they're going to be perceived as kind of creepy or sticky, and no one wants to be that person. It is an art — learning to understand that a fist bump is one thing, but just because you see that person again the next day, you remember their name, you're not best friends and you're not even really friends. You're being friendly. A lot of people don't know how to develop this skill as a honed skill and they're really afraid. And I think a lot of it always seems to immediately deflect to men doing this to women. I can tell you a lot of women do this too. It's independent of sex. If somebody doesn't respond a third time and it was a first-time meeting, regardless of what the exchange was — translation: they don't want to continue the exchange for whatever reason.

So how do you reconcile that when giving advice for people to be more outgoing? I guess there's another way to think about it too: a lot of sensitivity or concern about social anxiety is about running into sticky people. And there probably is a gender difference — a sex difference — in that women are likely to be more nervous about men misinterpreting something in a way that might become problematic or threatening for them, because of physical danger.

Andrew Huberman: Exactly.

Dr Nick Epley: And so I'm super sensitive to that, and our data don't suggest that you should be ignoring risks or your senses about what's risky. But our data suggests that your sense about risk is off a little bit, and there are times where you might want to test some of those beliefs and you might find some places where you're mistaken.

The important thing from my perspective is that if you're really pessimistic about other people, it never gets corrected. You never get to find the great people to have a conversation with. But it does also mean that you will sometimes run into the people who aren't so great to have a conversation with, and you need to learn how to move on from those people. We're not friends with everybody. Certainly that is true.

But the other thing you mentioned was the importance of this being a skill. It is something that you learn to do as you practice. I have become a better conversationalist. I become a better public speaker. I become better at doing this because I do it for a living, and I choose to try to do it and try to become better. And I try to be sensitive to how others respond when I'm interacting with them.

Our data don't suggest that you should be reaching out to other people in order to make yourself feel good. Our data suggests that what feels good is when you take an interest in other people and you open them up to you in a way that you would have avoided or missed before. And you'll just have a lot more positive experiences that way. But it does mean being sensitive to how they respond. And you do learn to do this over time with practice.

For folks who are concerned about starting or trying, my suggestion is just like when you're starting anything that you're nervous about — you've never exercised, the prescription is always to start small. Pick a little thing that's easy and safe. You know that person in the office who you've seen for years but you don't know their name? Just go and say hi to them. Just see how that goes. And then try that with somebody else. Those are easy. Those are safe. And you'll get better at this over time, including figuring out how to end conversations with somebody who's too sticky, or to move along, or to recognize the person that's sticky and manage that a little bit differently. Those are skills you develop by approaching. You don't develop them by avoiding. And you miss a lot of people who are wonderful. My Uber driver, the young man Gustavo on my train ride yesterday morning, Brian on my flight here. You miss a lot of great people. And just like Jia found, he missed opportunities to get help from other people and even to allow people to feel better for helping him, because he was too afraid to ask.

Community Gatherings, Loneliness, and the Return to Social Spaces

Andrew Huberman: The data I've seen suggests that more and more people are going to church, attending other religious gatherings. It seems that in recent —

Dr Nick Epley: Oh yeah. It's really on the upswing. And my guess is there are a number of reasons for that. People want to meet people with a certain set of values. Maybe they are drinking less. I think a component of those types of gatherings is that people generally are pretty friendly, pretty inviting.

Andrew Huberman: People still go to festivals too. Coachella was recently. People tend to be in a good mood at festivals. I was at TED last week. We could pepper with different examples. I think it is important to do so. I didn't want to imply it was just churches, but these kinds of common gatherings where people are there for their own reasons but also to interact with others, including strangers. And I think this can be pretty well explained by the fact that people were indoors during the pandemic, and everyone's on their phones more and devices. So attending venues where there's clearly an impulse towards interacting with strangers. Sauna gatherings are really big in major cities — people not just sitting in a sauna facing out like bleachers, but in a circle, doing breathwork and so on. I think people really crave this.

Lindsay: A Personal Story About Down Syndrome and Social Connection

Andrew Huberman: Earlier you talked a little bit about your family and adoption, and I've heard you say in a previous podcast that you have a child or children who are particularly outgoing. Would you share a little bit about that? It's a very interesting and important example into differences among humans, and sometimes we think of differences as good or bad. In this case it was clearly an example of how some people, by virtue of being more outgoing and having less fear, actually afford themselves and others a uniquely wonderful experience of life.

Dr Nick Epley: Yes. So our youngest daughter, Lindsay, has Down syndrome. Lindsay is adopted — we adopted Lindsay from China. The research that I've been doing over the last 15 or so years with my collaborators, where we're finding over and over again how overly pessimistic we are about how other people respond to us when we reach out to connect with them, has really changed the way I live my life. It is sometimes hard to take behavioral science research and apply it to individual lives. But in my own life, I've seen ways to do this over and over again by testing some of these barriers and just being more open to reaching out and connecting, realizing it's going to be more positive than I might imagine.

About 10 years ago, my wife — this is how this all got us to Lindsay in the end, and it came right through our research. We were three months into a pregnancy. We had already named our daughter Sophie. At that point, we had had four kids. We were open to more life, and Jen was open. Three months into the pregnancy, we learned our daughter had Down syndrome. And my response to that was to be very pessimistic. It was uncertain. I didn't think we'd be raising a child in our 40s with Down syndrome. This was going to be hard.

I know though how easy it is to misunderstand how you'd respond in a situation you're not in. And so my wife and I — and I'm not speaking for my wife's thoughts, my wife Jen is an angel, she's an amazing human being. As my college football coach said when he learned I was going to ask her to marry me when I was a junior in college: "Nick, you're marrying up." And he was absolutely right. But for me, I was nervous about this.

We started calling families who were raising kids with Down syndrome, every one of those families, trying to get their perspective, to learn what it would be like to be in the situation we weren't in. To a person, those families referred to their children with Down syndrome as a blessing. It was almost like they were reading off a script. It was amazing to hear their stories about how their children, who did not have much social anxiety, were very open and loving and were like magnets in their family that everybody flocked around. They just brought joy and love and a broader view of what humanity could do with each other than they'd ever imagined before. Just enriched their lives, broadened their worldview in ways they couldn't have anticipated. A blessing.

Six months into our pregnancy, Sophie died. Children with Down syndrome face a much higher risk of miscarriage or stillbirth. Six months was a stillbirth. July 11th, 2016, our daughter died. It was horrible. It was the worst experience in our marriage we had ever had. We mourned that loss for a good long stretch — about a year.

One morning, I went into the sunroom. My wife was sitting there in the chair where she always sits. And I said, "You know, honey, we were ready to have another baby. We could do this again. There are children out there who need parents. We've adopted before. We know how this goes. We can do this again. We were ready. We were in the starting blocks." And she turned to me and she said, "Would you be open to adopting a child with Down syndrome?"

It had not even occurred to me that that was something we could do. I hadn't thought about it. My head was not there. All over again, I was back where I was three months before, thinking: I don't know that we can do this. This is going to be super hard. And then, you know, if you're a researcher, you do think about your data all the time. I started thinking again about where we were three months ago, calling all these families who talked about their kids as blessings. All this data — thousands and thousands of data points. By this point, as I'm talking to you now, we've run over 30,000 people in over 120 experiments, people reaching out to others, documenting ways in which they're underestimating how positively others will respond. They're making the choice to hold back too often rather than reaching out and engaging and connecting with other people. And here we had this choice right in front of us. My wife was offering it. Do we reach out and bring this child into our lives — the stranger — or not? And I was full of doubt. All the same kind of doubt. How would she respond to us?

Our data though gave me some courage here. Like data-driven courage: Nick, you are in the same position that all of your participants are in over and over again. And it gave me courage to go where my wife was and to say, "Yeah, we can do this, honey. You and I can do this together." Now, Jen and I are in a position that's different from lots of other families. We have resources. She's a fabulous human being. We have a strong marriage. We could do this. Raising a child with an intellectual disability is challenging, but we could do this. And my data really made me feel comfortable that it wouldn't just be good — it would be surprisingly good.

About a year after that, Jen and I boarded a flight with our four other kids — we're like a traveling circus show — on our way to China to adopt Lindsay. Two years old. She was abandoned in China by a woman who we will never meet, whose thoughts about how hard this might have been or how little support she had to raise a child like Lindsay — we don't know. Lindsay had beautiful brown eyes, a relentless smile despite a really, really hard start in life. And that was how that started.

And she has been amazing. Flat-out amazing. Not without difficulty — raising a child with an intellectual disability is really, really hard. At the same time, she has been what every other family has said: raising a child with Down syndrome would be a blessing to us in so many ways. And to watch her go around the world — she gets frustrated and she's stubborn and she gets angry at people, but she also lives without the same kind of social anxiety that many of us have. She has no filter on her hello. Taking her grocery shopping is super fun. She goes up and down the aisles and says hello to everybody. Everybody. And it's just like with my friend Tibo, who I flipped the switch on his back and he gave this big hello to me — she flips the switch on so many people's backs. Their faces light up when she says hello to them. And she walks around the world this way. Open hello to everybody. It's amazing.

And I think about how close I could have been to saying, "I don't think I can do this," because we failed to appreciate just how well things would go when we reached out to love someone, bring them into our lives when we could. And she's amazing.

Andrew Huberman: What an incredible story. If you don't mind me asking, what is the relationship between your youngest daughter and the other children in your family?

Dr Nick Epley: She is the magnet in the family. She is the baby. Everybody just — if you are in a family with a youngest sibling, you all glom around that youngest one. She is like that too for the siblings. Now it's also hard — they need some time alone. But when you come home and Lindsay is there, I get a "Hi, Dad!" at a volume that every dad should hear when they come home. It is wonderful. The sisters and the brothers all get that too. She is very connected to everybody in a way that I think even the other siblings aren't potentially. They get older, they go their own ways, but everybody loves Lindsay.

Andrew Huberman: Is it the case that children with Down syndrome are given up for adoption more?

Dr Nick Epley: You can adopt a child with Down syndrome today in the United States and there's a waiting list for these kids in most places. The other thing that happens though is what could have happened to us at three months — and I think this is more common now — is genetic testing allows you to tell whether your child has any number of different genetic differences. And look, there are some conditions that are just very, very hard to manage or that aren't conducive to life. Down syndrome is just not one of those. But many families at that three-month period, because they're skeptical or pessimistic about how well they can handle this — they don't know the supports that are available, they don't realize the strength that they have, or the amount of love that they will feel for this child once it becomes yours, hardships notwithstanding — will end those pregnancies when, like us, they might have found it to be a massive blessing in their lives. I don't know what to tell people to do with that other than telling our own story.

I think people have strength that they might not realize. There are lots of very challenging conditions. Down syndrome is one that is not as challenging as you might imagine. These kids are amazing. And even like you know, across as we were talking earlier, whether your kids have come into your life however they've come in — once they're your kids, the fact that she has Down syndrome is something that is always kind of on our minds because it governs lots of things we do, but it also fades very quickly. Lindsay is just Lindsay. She's got her own personality, she does her own things. The intellectual disability kind of becomes almost a background thing. It is not what defines her.

She loves playing with dolls and Disney characters. She loves listening to stories. She loves reading books with you. She loves playing on the trampoline and playing in her outdoor kitchen. She loves playing with the neighbor kids, Demi and Delilah — they are her closest friends. She loves all those things. She has a huge personality, and that's what defines her in our lives day-to-day, not the diagnosis.

Andrew Huberman: I only known you a short while and I'm in no position to psychoanalyze you, but I have to assume that something very powerful about you — and I'm also assuming about your wife Jen — is your very clear, complete lack of shame about the fact that she has Down syndrome. That has to be a positive force here. I don't want to darken the conversation with a contrast story, but I will say there's a very famous neuroscientist — I won't reveal who this person is — who it was pretty well known had a son who had epileptic seizures. What's the shame in that, right? But he was ashamed of his son. He wouldn't bring him to events. I remember hearing this and thinking: that's nuts. I have a good friend on the positive side, my good friend Eddie Chang, who's the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF and he works on epilepsy. When parents have shame about a child's condition, that has to impact the way that the child moves in the world. I think it's really awesome that there is zero shame detected. I hear only glowing things and pride. And I also don't detect any hints of "we're doing this really hard thing and therefore we're amazing." Like you said, she's just your daughter and you're just living life.

Dr Nick Epley: Not to be clear — it's been a struggle for me too. I don't want to paint myself as not having concerns about this or being worried about what people will think about us, or even our other kids when they're going through difficult stretches in their lives. They're not doing the kinds of things that maybe I did. I have to make myself okay with that and come to accept that.

I have another son who we just love absolutely dearly for whom college just wasn't the right path. I'm a third-generation PhD — on my mom's side and my dad is a PhD as well — and college is just the route. I've been in academic life my whole life. But it just wasn't for him. It just wasn't engaging with it. And I kept — and I'm saying this with some shame myself right now — we kind of kept him in this path thinking this is the right way to go, when it would have been clear to an outsider that this isn't what he wants to be doing. He finally came to us very clearly and said, "Dad, this is just not what I want to keep doing." And when we finally let go of that and just let him do what he wanted to do — which is now he's in a trade school — I've never seen him happier. We're just so proud of him now. Like Gustavo, who I met on the train yesterday morning taking this culinary class, he was so proud of what he was doing. Just made me feel so good about him and also about my son.

Every parent struggles with loving their kids for who they are, and that takes some practice too, and also some deliberate careful thought and attention. It's worth challenging yourself to do, because of course it makes the world of difference for them. And we all struggle to do that somewhat.

With Lindsay, she's a ray of sunshine. We refer to her sometimes as a unicorn because there aren't too many out there. We learned a little while ago — I don't know how true this is, I don't know who comes up with these things — but it turns out a collection of unicorns, do you know what it is ostensibly called?

Andrew Huberman: What?

Dr Nick Epley: A blessing.

Andrew Huberman: Really?

Dr Nick Epley: Really.

Andrew Huberman: That's awesome.

Dr Nick Epley: Who'd have guessed? That is what they're apparently called — a blessing. And that certainly has been what she's been for us.

Navigating Interactions with People Who Have Atypical Behaviors

Andrew Huberman: There are a lot of lessons in there and a lot of things for people to think about in terms of who they are and how they relate to people. If you don't mind, I'd just like to peel back another layer on relationships with — and I'll use the example of children, but it could be with other family members — where that person is not typical of the average population. You describe Lindsay in this beautiful way. And I think when I'm out and about and I see a parent or parents with a kid who has some sort of atypical behavior — the way you describe her is very delightful. Sometimes the behavior of children with these challenges is disruptive. It's hard to not feel the shame of the parent, you know, if a kid's being really loud or throwing a tantrum and this isn't a small child, or saying things that clearly don't make sense. I don't expect you to be the ambassador for all these people, but I think we as well-meaning people around them don't quite know how to react. Do you want to say, "Gosh, I'm so sorry"? No, of course not — that's their life, who are you? You also don't want to perhaps ignore them, but you also don't want people to feel like you're calling attention to them. Do you have any ideas or suggestions?

Dr Nick Epley: I think a good analog to this is stuttering. And I think we all know how to deal with stuttering — somebody who has a stutter, you wait patiently. You don't call attention to it. You just wait patiently for them to express what they want to express and then you carry on. And maybe sometime if you get to know somebody, you can ask more specifically: "How would you like me to help in this particular case? Is there anything I can do to be of assistance? How would you like me to respond?" We can ask people that directly. And often a caretaker will be able to tell you that. But patience is, I think, the way to deal with it — just wait until whatever they're trying to do becomes clear. I think we can all do that with stuttering. I think that's kind of understood. And maybe that's the way I would think about it. But yes, some differences are harder than others, for sure.

Fulfillment, Trade Schools, and Letting Kids Find Their Own Path

Andrew Huberman: Having grown up in Palo Alto where there are many many professors and high-achieving parents, I could list off a dozen or more examples where the kids either didn't follow the traditional track. I think it's so cool by the way that your son is in trades. I've had friends from all walks of life, and fulfillment is —

Dr Nick Epley: I've never seen our son happier.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. We're two academics. My dad's an academic, and I can say that I actually think I would have been happy doing any number of things. At one point I wanted to join the fire service. My dad will sometimes say, "Oh, I don't think that would have been fulfilling." I think it would have been awesome. I love serving others. I'm friends with the local fire department when they come through. I certainly don't know what it is to do that profession, but I think fulfillment can be found in a number of ways.

Dr Nick Epley: Fulfillment is about engagement. And people like firefighters — being a cop is a little tricky because some people like you and some people hate you, and the job is much more unpredictable from moment to moment. I think one thing that we can do — and I haven't always been great at this in my family, I told you it took me a while with my son — is to encourage kids more down their own path. I think kids will often feel like they are not following the right path and won't feel good about the path they're going down, and that's where parents can really be helpful.

Right outside my office window is the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which is a very elite private high school that goes all the way down to preschool, and the kids come out of there with a very clear expectation about what the right path is for them. A lot of kids struggle with that. I just had a faculty member in my office yesterday before I left to get on a flight describing how their children are struggling with expectations for what they ought to be doing that just don't fit with who they are. And I think that's where parents can be really helpful — loving them for who they are and helping them find what's going to make them the happiest, and making sure the kids know that any path is okay. You want to be a carpenter? Great. You want to get a PhD? Fabulous. Trying to encourage kids with their passions and encouraging them to feel like it's okay — that's important.

Hunting, the Outdoors, and Social Connection in Nature

Andrew Huberman: You have another side of you that most people aren't aware of, which is that you enjoy as much time as possible in the outdoors. You're a hunter and a fisherman, an outdoorsman. You wanted to be Grizzly Adams when you were a kid, and in some sense you play him from time to time — but not out on your own. You and your sons and daughters get out into the wilderness.

Dr Nick Epley: Yeah. I grew up in rural Iowa out in the country. My dad and I went hunting and fishing all the time when I was a kid. I was four years old the first time I went deer hunting with my dad.

Andrew Huberman: Four. Yeah.

Dr Nick Epley: I walked along because I was shorter than the rifle. I remember years where the snow would feel like it was up to my hips hunting deer in Iowa in early December. I wouldn't carry a gun until I was 12, or a bow — I started bow hunting when I was 12. But before then you would push the deer, walk through the woods with other guys, with my dad or with friends. It was a real community of people. I mean, the social connection there was great. We used to go hunting with a guy when I was a kid, Lane McDow, who was friends with my dad. He was a football player for the University of Iowa and he played for the Detroit Lions — just this big monster of a man, fabulous guy. And his son Thad, who was also my same age. We played football together against each other in high school.

As I've gotten older, I've stayed connected to the outdoors. I love being in the woods. I love doing conservation work. There's an element of caring for other people that also extends to caring for the woodlands. I do a lot of invasive species removal. We have enrolled 40 acres in the Conservation Reserve Program, planted 9,000 trees on it. And I see a lot of opportunities to connect with people in places that other people wouldn't. I see the outdoors, hunting and fishing — you almost never do that truly alone. I always have somebody with me when I'm fishing. I always go out with the kids when I'm turkey hunting or hunting deer. And it's that social element that is really so important.

There was an element of this that felt like it came right out of my research, and it happened last fall in Oregon. My son, my oldest son Ben, is a third-year PhD student at Oregon State. And bless his heart, last spring he asked his dad to do the thing that made me just the happiest he could have done. He said, "Dad, would you like to come out here and go elk hunting with me?" I grew up in rural Iowa — the idea that we'd be out in the mountains actually doing this just never occurred to me. But he asked if we could do it, and I was so excited. We would get a week together out in the remote wilderness of Oregon, just the two of us. It doesn't matter if you get one or not, whatever — that's not what it's about. It's about being out there and seeing what you see and being together.

So last fall, this was October or November, we went into northeast Oregon, out in the woods, miles away from the nearest road. We hiked in. It's really hard. It's cold. There's snow on the ground. We're not really prepared for this — first time we've ever done this. We don't have any chairs with us or anything. We've got backpacking tents, freezing our butts off. And the first day we go out to scout, we don't know what we're doing at all. We're just going to see where the elk are.

We go down into this valley and we're not there for more than 20 minutes when our time alone suddenly becomes a little more social than it would have been otherwise. We look behind us — about three-quarters of a mile up the valley, there's this group of guys coming in camo down the way. And my son Ben was a little nervous about this, a little anxiety about reaching out and connecting with other people. Here we're out in the wilderness and we've got this group of hunters — it's like a gang of men coming down the valley towards us, all in camo. Ben's like, "Let's move on, Dad. Let's get going." And I said, "No, let's stay and talk with these guys."

They come down and we start talking. It turns out these guys have been hunting in this valley, in this area, for years, for decades. The older guy, Dennis, had been going with another older guy — I think they'd gotten connected through their church. The other older guy had passed away recently, but they now had another guy, Corey, who they'd gotten connected to, and the kids were all with them, Eric. There were five of them at the time. And we just started talking, and then they started telling us how to do this and where we could go and how we could coordinate with each other to make sure we both had the best time that we could. They told us, "There's a blind up here where you could hunt, and you could go down there and hunt in this other spot." We just started working together, and they were delightful.

They invited us to their tent for dinner. They've got this huge, amazing wall tent. They've got a camp stove. They've got a spring where they get fresh water. They've got a bathroom. We walk into their tent — it's heated, we're freezing our tukases off in the snow. The first thing they say to us: "Would you like red or white?" They've got wine in their cabin, miles from anywhere. These guys were fabulous.

And it turned an event that was great for Ben and me into an even better event because we connected with these men. Just yesterday, Corey sent me a text message saying, "It's time to apply for your elk tags. This is when we're going to go, and we're going to come out in case you want to do this with us again."

In fact, Corey got an elk the first day — he filled his bull tag. We were coming back from hunting. Ben and I had seen one but weren't able to get a shot at it — still amazing to see one. And we're walking back, and the young kid Eric says, "Get on down there and show Corey how to bone out that elk." I've boned out many, many deer. The only red meat we eat is the venison that I get. And so I know how to butcher these animals and prepare them to eat. They had just been hauling out these big quarters of animals — like a 100-pound rib cage. So I got to go down and help Corey and show him how to bone out the backstrap and the loins and all the meat that you actually eat, and leave the bones there for the cougars and stuff to get later. It was fabulous.

And the courage that I had to talk with them, to connect with them out there — again, I felt it came straight from our research. How easy it is to underestimate how positively other people respond when you reach out to them. It would have been easy for us to be competitive or to avoid this. And it was such a blessing to have connected with them. We've stayed connected since, and I hope we see them again in the fall out there in the woods. Wonderful men.

Andrew Huberman: That's awesome. And thanks for putting in a strong, clear ethical picture of hunters. I think a lot of people have a picture of hunters that is very different from what you just described. My friend Cam Hanes is serious about preserving wildlands and he's a very serious bow hunter. There are really shining examples. There are bad apples out there too. But I think people often have a certain stereotype of hunters, and yet most of those people also buy store-bought meat from factory farms. So there's a lot more to explore there. I appreciate not just the description of the beautiful social interaction and what grew from it, but also the context.

Dr Nick Epley: There's a level of caring. I care about the woodlands and I try to protect them as best I can. It turns out that deer are kind of a threat — a lot of ecological damage that they cause in the woodlands in the Midwest because there are just a lot of them. And so harvesting responsibly and respectfully — I only hunt with a crossbow now, for instance, because I can be much more accurate with it, and so I can take an animal ethically and humanely and quickly. That's why I do that. Most of the hunters that I've ever met are that way. They care about being outdoors. They like being with each other. Getting an animal is part of it, but it's not the main thing. And folks who don't hunt, I think, don't appreciate that care that outdoorsmen have for the outdoors.

Modeling Good Social Behavior for the Next Generation

Andrew Huberman: What a great lesson for your son. He's lucky to have you as a dad. I was reflecting on a couple of things, which leads me to probably what is the final question. I was just sort of chuckling inside at one moment because you're describing this and I'm thinking: my dad was a theoretical physicist, so bringing me to work was a little different. He realized that showing me a bunch of equations on a whiteboard wasn't going to cut it. So I'll never forget — he started off as an experimentalist, and my first "go to work with dad" day, he took me to the lab and they had all these fruits and a big tank of liquid nitrogen. We spent the day dipping bananas into liquid nitrogen and smashing them on walls, which for a six-year-old kid was pure delight. I went back to school telling all my friends I could shatter bananas. I have fishermen on my mom's side, and my girlfriend's family has a long line of hunters and farmers, so I think they're going to put me to the test soon.

Dr Nick Epley: Well, here's to parents doing great things with their kids.

Andrew Huberman: And that's the question I was going to ask. Not to trivialize it — to do the opposite. The other thing I was thinking during your story is that this is how social dynamics and learning occurs in our species. Like that series on Netflix, the Chimp Empire series — did you watch it?

Dr Nick Epley: I've not seen that.

Andrew Huberman: Oh, wow. Fascinating, because it's all about social dynamics in chimps — everything from covert gazes, and they're brutal to each other, they ostracize. It's very intense, and there's also a lot of beauty. But it makes you think about our species. And I'm raising a puppy right now, and I was telling my girlfriend — she's not raised a puppy before, she's already better at it than I am — I said, you know, the fastest way to train Strummer, our little bulldog mastiff, would be to get an older dog. Here we are like teaching at these human cues and trying to, but we really need to get into the mindset of a dog. And only a dog can really do that. They're so nose-led, they're great at sensing literally the autonomic tone of people around them, they're sensitive to space. Here we are saying "sit" and "stay" — they hear it, but we're bringing them into our world. It'll be like us trying to learn how to use our noses to navigate.

It is a fact that within every species, the older members of that species teach the younger members how to socialize. While on the one hand until now I feel like we've been talking to the young listeners and the parents of kids or the to-be parents of kids, I firmly believe based on everything we've talked about today that modeling really good social interactions is every bit as critical as the person getting out there and pushing themselves past their anxiety to do the right things. We need to model better everyday social interactions. It's clear you did that in this example and others. So any ideas off the top of your head as to what the 40-and-up crowd can do? It's kind of on us to model really good social interactions. A lot of kids don't have that — maybe they have a single parent, or they're away from their parents, or maybe mom or dad was kind of a nasty or unhappy person. What do you recommend people do to model really good social interaction?

Dr Nick Epley: Pay attention to your habits. That's the most important thing. It's those little moments. And you know where I screw up — I'm prone to a quick temper, and I still have the college football player inside me.

Andrew Huberman: You like to hit things with your head.

Dr Nick Epley: Well, I want to fix something. And so if something's not going my way, I'll try to fix it in some way. I still have that inside me from time to time, and I have to actively try to create habits that don't do that. So getting out of a situation if I'm getting frustrated rather than trying to respond and correct it in that moment. But those little habits — that's where it shows up. People are watching. People are watching you in those moments. Those little things that you think aren't that important are what folks are paying attention to.

In our research, when I think about how you apply the stuff we're learning in our experiments about people being overly pessimistic about how others will respond to them, the way you apply that in your own life isn't that you learn how to behave differently from learning this — it's that you take that and you try to develop a little habit that then makes that something you do routinely over and over again.

For instance, one little thing that I have started doing with this routine little habit in mind: I've made a habit when I get into my office — and it's now expanded kind of beyond that, but I started at the office. I was realizing one day that when I get to the office, where the door is to get into the building, I've got maybe 150 yards of walk through the atrium in the middle of the building to the elevators, up to the fourth floor, down my hall to my office. And I was usually making that walk with my head down, focused on getting to work as quickly as I could. And I was passing all these people by without saying hello or hi or whatever. And I was missing all these opportunities just to brighten my mood a little bit.

And so I started doing a little happiness walk, a little hello walk, when I'd go from the door to my office. I now keep my head up and I smile and say hello to almost everybody I pass if I can. This last quarter, Nigel's been sitting right here to my right when I walk in at the table. And Keith, who's got the biggest smile in the building — one of our custodial staff — is delightful. Mario is usually somewhere around the second floor. I can give him a shout out on the way in. And Zia is often around the elevator when I walk in. Eric, Virginia, Jane, Emma, Joe — my colleagues when I walk in, I give them a shout out hello when I walk by their offices. And that whole thing just makes me a little brighter when I get to my office. And it's also created a habit that I now just do without thinking.

Those little moments that become part of who you are — that's what people see. And I think as a parent, if you can think about how you can cultivate those habits to do these things routinely, because your kids are watching all the time, that's what's going to matter.

I had a colleague one time — I thought this was very wise. He realized that he was sometimes swearing in class, and I'm sometimes guilty of that too. But I had one colleague who was adamant, and this is really what got me started thinking about this years ago: you never slip up in class, because when you do that, people see that and they think that's who you are and what's appropriate in that context. And that's just not the way you want to be. So he made a habit of never doing that anywhere in any part of his life, so that he also doesn't do it in class.

Andrew Huberman: I like the notion of classroom rules. It's actually one of the only ways I've survived social media. I don't get into exchanges that I wouldn't get into in a classroom. I also don't honor the presence of comments that attack each other. People can say what they want about me to a point, but when they start attacking each other, I always think: if we were back in an undergraduate or graduate or medical school classroom, I would never let this exchange occur. And this is my website. So blocked. People think, "Oh, you're blocking things, you're deleting." It's not to avoid criticism — it's to keep a tone of education and respect. It can be heated, but I fully appreciate what you just said.

Dr Nick Epley: And I think the key to that is that it's not a huge thing. It's a small thing that you do routinely, over and over again. Those small habits are important to keep in mind.

Andrew Huberman: I've been told by some of the people who are regular commenters that they feel safe to comment there, which tells me they feel unsafe to comment elsewhere. I'm not trying to use any particular language about that — I just think: who wants to go online just for people to be nasty? So there's a lot of goodness to be had by keeping classroom rules.

Dr Nick Epley: Correct.

Andrew Huberman: Well, Nick, thank you so much for coming here today and sharing. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule, and I also really appreciate the work you do. Thank you for writing the book, A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection, which comes out very soon. I'm excited to read it. And I have to say, of all the guests we've ever had on this podcast, I think you represent the kind of extreme example of somebody whose work has informed their life and life has informed their work. That's somewhat straightforward to do when it always makes for the easier, better, obvious choice — like, "I did research and discovered this style of cardiovascular exercise is better than that one, I'm going to do that one." But as you pointed out, it's brought many, many more rewards than challenges. In your case, your sensitivity to the theme of your work — which is that there's goodness and untapped beauty to be had in the spaces that we don't reflexively step into, and that maybe even we initially are a little averse to — that's where the real magic often lies. And you apply it in your own life in the realest of ways, and you benefit too. And that's the whole point. So thank you for being both a scholar and a shining example of what you've taught us today.

Dr Nick Epley: Thank you so much, Andrew. It's been wonderful being here. I really appreciate it.

Andrew Huberman: We'll have you come back again.

Dr Nick Epley: Thank you. I would love to.