Hey, everybody. Welcome to the What is Money show. I am thrilled to be sitting down today with

author David Eagleman, who's also a neuroscientist at Stanford and a New York Times bestselling author, I should mention,

of eight books, including The Brain.

The book The Brain is the one Preston Pish and I did a long-form series on.

So very excited to be speaking with you today, David, about that.

Welcome to the show.

Great, great to be here. Thanks for coming on and doing this. What I thought we do is just, I've highlighted a few excerpts from your book

that I really liked that I thought could spark some conversation. So if you don't mind, I'll read an

excerpt. You wrote that don't mind, I'll read an excerpt.

You wrote that in a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows

in your brain, but because of what is removed. Very interesting.

So does that mean we come with some presets that then get carved back by nurture, something

like that? Sort of. So great. What happens is I said that statement in reference to the fact that when you start

off life, you've got all the neurons that you're going to have. In fact, you have slightly more than

you're going to have later. But they're not very well connected. So neurons are the cells of the

brain and they communicate with each other. but they're not very densely connected.

And what happens is they become more and more densely connected like an overgrown jungle during your first two years.

And then after that, everything is about trimming things back.

And so what I meant is, you know, you've got this network that's full of all

these ways that signals could go. But depending on your environment, your culture, and your family,

you're going to get refined to exactly who you are. So, you know, if you were born in a different

country, you would speak a

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