Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is dr. Jordan Peterson. Dr. Jordan Pederson is a psychologist and author and one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time today. We discuss the human animal. What it means to be a human being at the level of
G at the level of Neuroscience and indeed at the level of expression of different personality types within us. Most of us don't think about having different personalities. However, as we discuss today, due to the activity of specific brain, circuitry is including the hypothalamus, the prefrontal cortex and others, we each and all can adopt different states of mind. That powerfully influence, our emotions, our thoughts, and our actions and in. So doing we are different people, depending on those states of mind.
Today's discussion is both an intellectual one and a practical one. You will learn where and how to place your thoughts, you will learn the relationship between the Call to Adventure and responsibility and as dr. Peterson emphasizes in his new book, we who wrestle with God, he emphasizes the use of story, in this case, biblical stories to understand oneself and to best guide one's actions towards the most positive and generative outcomes. We discuss the self romantic relationships and
It's the family community and culture. We also discuss the media politics, cancel culture, things like social media, and pornography shifting masculine and feminine roles and the innate human drive to create action at a distance. Both in space. And in time, today's discussion is both intellectual and practical dr. Peterson emphasizes how to use different sources of story. Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience to understand and best guide one's decision.
Process. Indeed, he discusses the tight relationship between the Call to Adventure and responsibilities as a trusty bow framework for moving forward. In life, towards One's best possible outcomes and I'm certain that by the end of today's discussion, you will be thinking about your own neural circuits. That is the connections in your brain that drive emotions, thoughts, and behavior, as well as your psychology, your different states of mind and you're going to have a number of different tools and Frameworks with which to apply all that knowledge towards
Add the best possible outcomes before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is David David makes a protein bar. Unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150, calories, and 0, grams of sugar.
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The link is David protein.com hubermann. Today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health, by giving you real time feedback on your diet, using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in both your short and long-term health is your body's ability to manage blood glucose, or blood sugar to maintain energy and focus. Throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or crashes. I first started using levels about three years ago
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Levels has just launched a new CGM sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than before. Right now, they're also offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's levels dot link. Spelled link-16 huberman to try the new sensor and to free months of membership and now, for my discussion with dr. Jordan Peterson dr. Jordan Pederson. Welcome, thank you, sir, delighted to have you here and want to talk about elements within your new book. Yeah. Also some elements within your
previous books and within that mind of yours. Generally as a framework for that, I'm wondering if you would tolerate or permit a little bit of a discussion about. So we're bringing in Psychology just kind of lay the groundwork for where we might prod some of the themes that you bring up related to the book.
So I view the brain as obviously a bunch of cells and parts Etc, but I distill it down to some basic features. First of all, we have an autonomic physiology. I think we both agree on that, that regulates our sleepiness and wakefulness, our breathing, our heart rate stuff that runs in the background and then we have a lot of circuitry devoted to what I would call impulses things that we desire. We want to move toward appetitive behaviors and we also have some impulses to avoid things that are putrid painful.
Cetera, that's all in there. Like, it is another. We should talk about the idea of
impulse in relationship to that characterization. Okay? Because there's an important, there's an important point to be made on the
There you pay a price for characterizing that as impulse. And I'd like to explore that with you because it's
crucial great. We'll Circle black tin pulse. I'd like to do that. And then we have a lot of circuitry people will hear about it as executive function prefrontal circuitry which does many things but I like to think of as a circuit that can say and here I'm borrowing from a previous guest users a neurosurgeon, it can say or exert what's called top-down.
Session on these what? I'm calling impulses it can we should talk about that to this expression. Idea the inhibition idea in general great because there's I think there's a parallel problem there to the notion of the impulse. That's very much worth delving into great. So circuitry that's devoted to our ability to self inhibit, the desire to reach for something or to avoid something. We can push ourselves into things that would otherwise it's be aversive. We can avoid doing things, that would otherwise drive us to quote unquote. Just
It anyway. And then we have what I think of, as our default settings, kind of how we're operating in the world, with respect to food, other people ourselves, our thoughts. If we don't intervene with ourselves and these, default settings are, of course, established by both nature, but genetic program that wires up circuitry, but also nurture because of the immense, neuroplasticity that occurs in the first 25 years.
Years plus of life, but especially those first years of life. And then of course, we have neuroplasticity, this incredible gift that humans have more of than any other species as far as we know which is, we can decide to make changes. Now, the reason I lay out this framework as opposed to starting with a question, is because there are so many amazing questions that you ask in this book, you know, we who wrestle with God. I mean, trying to wrap our arms and Minds around this huge set of questions and it occurred to me just step
Back from all of that. And ask is part of the reason that we have a concept of God that there are multiple religions.
Is that the consequence of Some Humans at some point realizing or perhaps God himself realizing that what we are equipped with as humans which we just described is insufficient to allow us to evolve as a species and be the best version of ourselves. I think this for me really is like the central question of at least my life, which is to what extent do I need to intervene with my default, settings rewire them engage that prefrontal
X and push down on some appetitive or a verse of behaviors and to what extent can we do that? Maybe to what end and to what end it? Maybe we need a rule book. You know. I am starting to believe and I'm now 49 years old that we need a rule book that the neural circuitry that's encased within. Our skulls is not sufficient to allow us to navigate through
life through our best outcome. We kind of know that we need a rule book even you admitted that in some ways.
Italy when you discuss the fact that we have a 25-year socialization window. And what that means is that we have to interact with other people and our traditions in order to set us, right? And that's so complex, it takes 25 years and so we're learning something from that and that's indication that are let's say, default biological settings are insufficient to guide us into the future, right? And so, then the question is, well, what is it? That you're learning as a
Sequence of that socialization process and you can think about it and people have thought about it as a series of complex in Ambitions of lower order, motivational States impulses but I'm not very happy with the inhibition model because inhibition is unsophisticated socialization. Integration is sophisticated socialization. So here's a way of I really learned this, I think from contrasting, Freud with Piaget because Freud's model super-ego.
It's really an inhibition model and Freud was a neurologist. Piaget's model is very different. He thought of the properly, socialized person as someone who had integrated, their lower order will call them impulses for now into a sustainable voluntary structure, that regulated them, and gave them all their proper place. That's very different than an inhibitory model. So, for example, I'll give you an example from my own life. My son was quite on.
Willful young. Child wandering. Ready to knit from Hell? There are no and my father was you know what formidable character and so my son liked to do what he liked to do and it took him it took quite a bit of tussling with him to help him. I wouldn't say inhibit that or regulated to integrate it. And one of the consequences of that was, he became a very good athlete. And so why is that relevant? Well because it wasn't like he stopped being a
- or even aggressive. It's that he learned how to put that aggression in its proper place in relationship to a goal. That was much more sophisticated than merely getting his own way moment to moment. Okay. So Integrations are better like a very sophisticated athlete, a team athlete particular isn't not aggressive and they're not inhibiting. Their aggression on the playing field they may now and then when they're provoked let's say but all things considered what they've done.
One is subordinate their aggression to a higher order goal that enables them to be more successful but also to be successful in a, maximally social, and sustainable way and Piaget's point. And he's absolutely right about this is that that's much better conceptualized as integration and then with regard to the impulse because I said, I would return to that. I spent a lot of time walking through the behavioral literature, right? And a lot of that was derived from animal experiments and it was predicated on
The idea that if you could explain something on the basis of a deterministic, reflex you should and there's some there's something to be said for that hypothesis. Don't make your theory, any more complex than it needs to be, how far can you get with a theory of change? Reflexes a deterministic theory, the behavior is called a long way. They couldn't get to the highest strata of human endeavor with a chained reflex Theory but there was a lot of things they did that were very good but one of the things they made a big mistake about
Was to conceptualize motivational States. Let's say as impulses or drives, that's not sufficient, because it fails to take into account the effect of those States on perception. So it's much better to think of a motivated State. This is what helped me integrate behavioral Theory with psychoanalytic theory, especially the the psychoanalytic theory of religious Endeavor. It's much better to think of those lower order motivational.
It's as personalities, their sub personalities. They have their perceptions, they have their objects of perception. They have their cognitive rationalizations. You certainly see that in addiction. Let's say they have their emotions like they are small personalities, unit dimensional, very narrow-minded personalities, but their personalities. They're not impulses.
So are they personalities within our? What most people would think of as our larger personality
I mean, what I'm hearing is that let's say somebody's an addict
Manzano integrated, you are because you could be nothing, but a succession of dominion of subpersonalities, that's what a two-year-old is.
Right? And so you have to build an integrating personality on top of those sub personalities but not in a manner that inhibits them. That means your socialisation is in unsophisticated, even Freud knew this because even though he had basically an inhibitory model of say super-ego regulation, he believed that a healthy personality would have the impulse of aggression. And the impulse of sexuality to take two major lower.
Our motivational States into account would have them integrated into the functioning ego that the issue is integration. And so what you're doing when you're social like, okay, when my son for example would become willful in a manner that I regarded as counterproductive for him and the household and the rule would be, you can't act that way because if you act that way,
People aren't going to approve of you and that's a bad plan. So you have to you have to control that because it's not going to work out well for you if you don't. Okay so I use timeout. Now timeout is an effective disciplinary strategy for social creatures because we don't like isolation and so timeout. Basically takes child puts the child in isolation that produces a pain like response because social isolation. Pretty insecure and ambition. Well, well that's the question. You see? That's the question.
He had to inhibit his immediate desire to say to run around because he was going to sit on the steps. But see the I put a rule in place there and the rule was soon as you get yourself under control, you can leave the stairs. Okay? So now the question is, what does under control mean? One interpretation is inhibition. Another interpretation is no. No, he's developing a superordinate personality probably cortically that has enough Dominion, so that
Was underlying motivational states can now be integrated and placed properly into a hierarchy? And when I'm insisting, that he regulate his behavior, and I allow him to move off the step when he is now able to be a social creature again, instead of falling prey to his whim. I'm reinforcing the cortical integration of those underlying motivational States. Now, you might think the human organism is comes into the world with with a warring battleground of
I'm ordeal motivational States. That's perfectly reasonable view. We know a lot of that is mediated by the hypothalamus. For example, the amygdala on these lower order biologically, what pre-program to some degree program systems? Now, the specific manner in which those systems should find their expression. And the specific way that they're going to be hierarchical. Integrated is going to depend to a tremendous degree on the particulars of the society at that moment. Which is why you need that 8.
Near framework to, to hone the manner in which those systems make themselves manifest. But the, I think the best way to conceptualize that is that it's it's the hierarchical integration of the motivational States within an overarching superordinate personality and that personality is not bound to the moment. It takes the medium and long-term into account and it's not self-serving like a two-year-old would be, because you have to take other people.
Into account if you're going to be successful. So you, and this is where the cortex comes in. As far as I'm concerned, this is what it's doing. It's stretching the it's integrating the lower order temporarily Bound motivational states that are specifically self-serving to a much broader vision of the world that takes the future into account and other people. And and that's, that's hard, it's very hard.
I love this and I'll tell you why, because the
That I think of the prefrontal cortex is that its main job is context, dependent strategy setting,
right context to context dependent pets, and crucial
issue. And you mentioned hypothalamus this. You know, it's basically the size of, you know, two marbles are so sitting above the roof of our mouth, tiny tiny little brain area. It's mostly switches in there. What do I mean by that? Anytime a neurosurgeon is stimulated neurons in a little sub area of the hypothalamus. You get either Rage or sexual appetite or mating with an
dammit objects. I mean this was done in both non-human primates and humans rollable thirst. Uncontrollable thirst hunger, total suppression of hunger. I mean, all the basic drives are operating there like swishes and prefrontal cortex has direct access to it to the hypothalamus and prefrontal cortex is context. Dependent learning context, dependent decision-making. And I love that you brought in this notion of
Changing an Impulse in the example that you gave in your son's impulse to be aggressive, or wild in some way that was inappropriate for the home environment at that moment. And two things that you said really resonate the prefrontal cortex, his prefrontal cortex had to learn that whatever, he was feeling for himself, his own desires needed to be placed in the context of other people's wishes desires and needs as well. So there's even for him to thrive, right? It's not merely a sacrifice of his own desire.
For the sake of others, it's like no, no, look kid. If you're we know this, if you're, if you have the same orientation towards other people at for that, you did when you were too, especially if you're tilted a little in the aggressive Direction, you will not make friends and you will be isolated and alienated for the rest of your life. So that two-year-old impulsiveness that has its place to it starts to modify radically at 3 and it better be fixed by 4.
And the reason for that is that you have to integrate yourself into the social World which means in the case of children, it means you want to have friends. And so the reason you're you're you're disciplining your child isn't to teach them that what they're doing is bad. You know, in that simple in that, simple sense that you might interpret punishment. It's like, no, you need to be more sophisticated. Well, why? Well, you have to be able to take turns what why? Well, because you know what,
Unlike you otherwise. Well, what's the problem with that? Well, first of all were hyper social. Like you can punish Psychopaths by putting them in isolation. That's how social human beings are in. Take the most antisocial human beings there are and you can punish them by making them be alone, right? So that's how social we are. So you want to use your modeling for your child, a strategy of
Of even satisfaction for his own basic drives, that takes context in the most sophisticated possible way into account, right? And that is see, as soon as you understand that, that's the fostering of like a meta personality in the child, which would really be the personality of that child, the integrated personality. You start to understand how that might be related to religious thinking because religious thinking is the attempt to formulate something, approximating an ideal
Senility right now. That's attributed their that's often attributed, elements of the Divine, but there's reasons for that we could go into. But as soon as you know, that the basic structure even after lower motivational level is personality. Well then that that changes the way you view the brain, look a lot of archaic deity's our motivational systems. Could you give me any more the God of War? Mars, that's rage. That was a God that the Vikings he
Before they went into battle, they would use Amanita muscaria and they imitated Predators like from an early
age. This is a seagull calling, by the way, folks, as to General receptor systems, the nicotinic system which is a stimulant but also relaxes you. That's why people like nicotine and then the muscarinic system which creates changes in our self perception and perception of the things around us, it's not so much. A, stimulant as it it's a, I would Veer towards a
Almost like a psychedelic or an entire. It has a an effect of making us less fearful and, and intrigued. It's
radically a typical psychedelic. Yeah, it's hard to describe.
Yeah, heart disease. Yes,
it's outside. The LSD. Psilocybin mescaline
domain. By people would take this this as an inviting. The Vikings were take this as an agent before going into
sure because what they were trying to do is make the personality of Rage superordinate with no pain.
Right. And they practice that from a very early age. So the Vikings work themselves up. They went berserk. That means to where the bear shirt, right? They transform themselves so to speak and predators.
They would narrow the context within which there I'm calling them. Impulses, we were giving a more sophisticated explanation for them within which they're the aggressive impulse. The strategically aggressive, impulses could be channeled,
right? Because that full rein given full rein, right? They were experts
at to be able to decapitate people. Eviscerate people do
Whatever it was that they need to do in order to end and and to suppress their own feelings of pain.
Yeah. Well then you could imagine in a way that what they were doing was bringing the full resources of the cortex to and placing them at the service of the rage circuits in the hypothalamus. Like we have no idea what that would be like, no, there aren't we don't do that. We have no idea what a human being, who does that is. Like if they're expert at it, you you would give you nightmares to think about it.
Deeply, there's an experiment. If I may that might shed
Some light on what it would look like, a former guest on this podcast, actually. David Anderson at Caltech has been studying hypothalamic circuits and he and his former postdoc die. You'll in discovered a small tiny, tiny collection of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus that when stimulated would send these animals. These mice, you can find videos of this online into a rage. Now, the interesting thing is, is it required the presence of another
mouse, right? Right. And right, so were
somewhat contest, somewhat context-dependent, if
they were alone in their cage, they wouldn't attack themselves or the walls of the cage. But if you put a air or water filled glove within the cage, they would absolutely attack it to try and destroy it. Then, you turn off these neurons. The the mouse has come we can put a link to this in the show. No caption. Now, here's what's remarkable. The ventromedial hypothalamus has these neurons basically interspersed with other neurons that when stimulated suppress rage and activate copulation. Uh-huh. Incredible. Right within the same structure
These mutually exclusive sets of neurons and behaviors. Yeah. And it speaks to I think some of the things that Freud and others have talked about in terms of the ID that the juxtaposition of these neurons but that they mutually inhibit one, another which lends itself to some really interesting questions about when those two when aggression and sexuality become become combined in states of pathology, okay, so but in any event so context-dependent control over.
Impulses over the hypothalamus. Seems to be the theme here. And the other thing that that you mention is the ability for your son in this case. But presumably also the Vikings to be able to broaden their temporal scope to be able to think about the time domain differently. This is something I'm absolutely obsessed. By the more we experience. What I brought up at the beginning, was that we have this autonomic arousal system, the more alert we are
The less we are able to take ourselves into Notions of this too. Shall pass the past the present. Sure. Jay tense. Autonomic activation stress Panic. Fear anger. Tend to make us lose sight. We get we get blinders on lose sight of the fact that there was a past. There's a present and there's a few.
Yes. Well that's because they're collapsing. They're collapsing, your domain of apprehension to the moment. So you will act, you have to collapse to the moment to act, right? And
So we should also point out for everyone that the other. You don't want to underestimate the sophistication of the hypothalamus and this is partly. Why conceptualizing its various States. As subpersonalities is so useful. I mean it's not unsophisticated. You can take a female cat and take out its whole brain except for the hypothalamus. So it's like 95% of its brain is gone and in a relatively controlled environment, it's indistinguishable from a normal cat. It can, it can do cat things and live. Now, it it's high.
And it's hyper exploratory. Now that's a that's a very strange thing where he's a cat with no brain is hyper exploratory. It's not what you think at all but it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is. It can run these programs but their programs of Personality because they have perceptions, it can run them and it, it's and it can do that quite successfully. Now, all the higher-order subcortical and cortical systems are, well, I think they are to your point.
Their ways of expanding the apprehension of those fundamental motivational systems across broader and broader spans of time, incorporating more and more people. But also solving the problem of the conflict that emerges between those fundamental motivational states rights. Like well, what do you do when you're hungry and tired, right? Well, you have to mediate between the states to some degree. What do you do if you want to solve the problem of being hungry and tired over a long period of time?
With other people, right? Well, you need more and more brain to calculate that, right? And so a huge part of what maturation is is when we think about it, as the capacity to forego gratification, actually what's happening, is that as you mature and your cortex comes online, let's say you're able to regulate your behavior with more and more other things taken into account, right? Right. And you know, that there has to be some wore their that which is why you're wrestling with god. Let's say there has to be some wore
There because it's also the case that you do have to satiate yourself in relationship to your basic biological needs or you die. And so, there's going to be tension. That is something like the tension between the individual and the group, you might say that's how the Russo Ian's of the Freudian would think about it. So the weird thing about that is that it's not useful to to identify your individuality with the Dominion of a whim and that's what hedonist
It's do and that's what immature people do, they think well, why shouldn't I get what I want? It's like I see. So your claim is that the you that super ordinate is what you want? That isn't, that means your subjugated to these lower order personalities. And you might say, well, why is that wrong? It's like, well, you're a two-year-old, it doesn't work, you know, if it's all about you and your immediate gratification
Well, first of all, you rather Psychopathic because you could think of psychopathy as the extension of immaturity into adulthood, that's a pretty good default way of conceptualizing. And I just like, it's an unsophisticated strategy.
They want what they want now, regardless and they don't care about the Wii
or the future, where the CC 1. This is one of the ways I caught naught to this relationship was. I went because I studied antisocial behavior for a very long time.
Psychopaths in particular are notorious for their inability to learn from experience. Okay? So, what does that mean? It means that if they do something impulsive, that causes them trouble in the future, the fact of that future trouble has no bearing on their continued Behavior. Well, what that means is that they are so non communitarian that they're willing to even betray their own future selves, there's no difference between that be
betraying someone else. It's exactly the same
mechanism very much a toddler toddlers. It
started. Well sir, here's something I learned in Montreal. I worked with a man named Richard Trombley there. And Richard, I think Richard's lab used up one third of all social science funding for Quebec. At one time, he's radically successful researcher and he was really interested in antisocial behavior and and was trying to get to the roots and one of the
Conclusions. That our lab Enterprise move towards was. That one observation was that if you take two year olds, if you take kids at different ages, you could imagine you made a group of two year olds three-year-olds group 4 year olds all the way up to 15. You just let them interact. The two-year-olds are the most aggressive.
And but if you analyze the two-year-olds themselves, you find that all the aggressive kids are boys and it's only a fraction of them about five percent. So if you group 2 Euros together, five percent of the boys will kick steel hit and B, which was our definition of early onset. Antisocial Behavior, almost all of those kids are socialized by the age of four.
Right? The remnant that aren't get alienated because they have no friends and they're the ones who become juvenile delinquents and then early onset, criminals and then repeat offenders, right? And so what it is, is imagine there's some kids whose default
Their rage circuits are a little bit more dominant than the typical kit. They're often bigger physically.
Yes. Especially the B, the biting idea of forgive me for interrupting but there's a very interesting paper published about two years ago. Showing that there's a specific circuit from the hypothalamus to the neurons. That control jaw closure. That are independent of the neurons, that control jaw jaw closure for eating and for drunk. Yeah, that are specifically for aggressive biting. I mean, I hope people understand the significance of this.
Because what this means is, there are dedicated circuits for aggressive biting in your hypothalamus. We all learn to suppress these except probably under conditions where our life is endangered in which case you'd probably bite, like hell in order to try and get out of that circumstance. But we are all born with this circuit. We die with this circuit. Most of us. Apparently not these kids learn to suppress this circuit, right? Right. Or integrate an eight-year-old biter is a scary, right, right, right. A one-year-old. Biter is like a little bit of a worry, something a two-year-old. Like okay we need
Work on this. You have an eight-year-old biter people are starting to be concerned. I think, even without knowledge of the Psychopathology literature, one would be very concerned if their eight-year-old is biting other kids, right? Not just because of the damage induced, but it's so very different and I so much my primitive then, then even hitting or spitting, or something.
Yeah, it's indication of a virtual absence of sophisticated
socialization. They are really in their hypothalamus.
Yeah, right exactly. And that's well, especially if you have a
Thalamus, that's tilted towards rage. Let's say and defensive or predatory aggression, that's bad news now. So so
So well, so what's the, what's the upshot of that? Well, the upshot is that
there is a subsets, right? There's a subset of kids whose whose default reactions aren't socialized. And we associate that with psychopathy and long-term criminality. There's a really useful thing to understand that much of what we see as pathology. And I would say the same thing about narcissism and and certain forms of Hedonism essentially. What it is is failure of socialization, right? And this has very interesting political implications because it also implies that. Imagine that
Impulsive self gratification is a personality. The desire for impulsive self gratification is a personality with its own political opinions Nietzsche said in the late 1800s, that every Drive attempts to philosophize in its Spirit, brilliant, brilliant observation,
Far different than conceiving of the say hypothalamus drives as deterministic change of only impulses and and another thing to consider too, with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation on perception, that mouse that you talked about whose attack system is activated electronically. See when that glove is dropped, you can see that there's a relationship with perception because if there's no target for attack that's biologically relevant in the environment, there's no impulse
So you could imagine that what happens is when you activate those neurons, is that there's a set of perceptual stimuli that are much more likely to be classified as a defeatable enemy. Now even a global do it, right? Right. So you drop it a glove and that's now perceived as defeatable enemy or perhaps threat because we don't know exactly what the perception would be. But then you see, then it's the perception driving the behavior. That's not an Impulse, right, right? That's more like a strategy.
And that's it. So I'm gonna really started to understand some of the literature on the evolution of religious thinking. When I started to understand motivational States as personalities, because one of the things that you see, this is so cool. Something I tried to talk to Dawkins about the, the greatest historian of religions who ever lived was merch. Elliot and he wrote a sequence of brilliant books, The Sacred and the profane is the best one to start with, very short book, very elegant book and what Ellie added
Documented across the world was the pattern by which polytheistic beliefs systems turned into monotheistic, belief systems that parallels maturation. It's the same thing and so the polytheistic Gods tend to be representations of motivational
States. I am going to pause there because I think this is extremely important. So the god of war or the god of love, the goddess of love exotic Zach
We exactly that. So the idea that the different gods are the reflective of different persists. Let's just, we'll just say it as neuroscientist has different hypothalamic and and related circuits. It's why wouldn't they be Gods? You know, beware of falling under their Dominion, beware of becoming their playthings. And the other thing that's very interesting, you see, is that you off to also understand that these don't exist independently of historical context. So let's say rage. It's like
There's a, there's a, there's a literature of Rage, there's a culture of Rage, there are patterns of Rage that are played out in drama and literature. Like it's not only that, the motivational impulse is a personality, it's a personality with a history and a philosophy. And if you don't think it can possess you, you don't know very much about possession. So like, for example, if you're fighting with someone and you and you become enraged as you said, your temporal purview shrinks and you're
Notion of what constitutes Victory is radically transfigured. So if you're fighting with someone you love you might want to defeat them or even hurt them. Independently of the fact that you actually love them. Well then you think well you're you're gripped by these impulses. No. No, your inhabited by the spirit of rage and if you're a sophisticated person, there's going to be an endless stream of sophisticated intellectual. Rationalizations that come along with that possession, right? It's full-fledged personality. And it's
One of the things you see with people who are psychotic, you know who drift off into the landscape of their imagination is that they dwell on such states of possession. So for example, these kids that shoot up high schools like they're fantasizing under the influence of rage and resentment for thousands of hours that just takes control of them. And it's not it's not a simple.
Pulse. It's like, no, they've converted. The you could think they've inverted the neurological order and the god of rage is now the what would you say the leading personality of integration or the god of resentful rage even worse
and the circuit may run in? Reverse, my colleague, David Spiegel at, who is our vice chair of Psychiatry at Stanford has done. Some beautiful experiments examining. The relationship between prefrontal cortical areas and the insula a brain area that has a map of our internal body state interoception in our abilities.
Since our internal workings Etc, in any event, there are certain conditions including depression, where the direction of flow between the prefrontal cortex. In the insula literally reverses, it's like running against the typical traffic. There's a very different example because here you're presenting in the context of Rage or and sociopathy and these kids who shoot up schools. But I do absolutely subscribe to what you just said that if one drops into one of these more primitive States and emotions and all the things that go with it for a very long time.
NG time. It's almost as if the governor, which is the prefrontal cortex starts to become the governed that the whole circuit starts to run from bottom up as opposed to top down. And I think there's good neurological to dance in
addiction. Write it again. So you hit you hit that circuit that's seeking the drug with repeated doses of dopamine. You know, people say they have a monkey on their back, it's like, no. They have a monster in their brain and it's and they grew it and it grows because it's reinforced with dopaminergic hips. And
As it grows its capacity to dominate increases. And so when there's a queue for the addiction, this is why people relapse out. When they get out of the treatment center, they'll go back to their normal environment. After having dealt with the physiological withdrawal, let's say an acute. Craving will make itself manifest like a friend, they Freebase with. And it's all of a sudden womb that monster is alive, and it just shuts. Everything else down, and it's got a personality, it can lie, you know, one of the
Hallmarks of addictive behavior is lying and the lies are the rationalizations of that subcircuit, some personality for its own pathological behavior. And so in that Saul reinforced to buy the dopaminergic hits,
it's like there's multiple pedal in there, you know, in every one, one of the most incredible example stick
paganism polytheistic. Yeah, that's the default condition, right? Right. That's the condition of the two-year-old.
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ER, of belief in God, I'm just going to say it as a occurred. I have a good friend who for many years, struggled with alcohol and drug addiction of multiple kinds incredibly kind person incredibly successful in his career. Married two. Beautiful children. Multiple relapse has crashed his truck at 7:00 in the morning. After getting intoxicated at 6:30 in the morning.
Got out of that one happen again, and again, multiple rehab centers of the store sort of standard treatment, Etc. And then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that is wife said, you know, this is it. You've got it solve this or we just can't be with you. Very scary situation for everybody involved including him, right? Absolutely adored his family. He told us his friends that he was going to go to a center here in Los Angeles.
That treats addiction with essentially religion a belief in God, he was already fairly religious. Most most Sundays, he attended church and things of that sort. And you can imagine we all thought, including myself like okay dude, like good luck. Yeah, I hope this works but like, I would say zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober. He just had not succeeded prior to this.
He's been sober more than four years. Now, he got out of there and never looked back and I wonder now whether something something must have changed in his brain by adopting, what was essentially a different incentive structure, right? Different incentive structure, but fear wasn't doing it before. Fear of extreme consequences, which were on the table at that time. When he went in weren't enough. Something about going there and the work that he did there? Al?
Allowed him to then it's almost like he he got another prefrontal cortex, a more powerful prefrontal cortex. So maybe we could talk about that.
Well that's that's not a bad way of thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when they say pray they're so
You can invite in spirits to possess you. That's a good way of thinking about it. I know that's odd terminology, but that's what you do when you dwell on your rage.
Right right now. Imagine that you're doing that in the most positive possible directions. So what you're doing is you're generating a hypothesis about the mode of conduct and perception that would best typify you. If you were ideal and then establishing a relationship with that and inviting it in. That's what the invent Evangelical Protestants are doing when they formulate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That's exactly what they're doing. Now on the addiction side. So,
I studied alcoholism for years at that was the target of my dissertation. And the first 20 papers that I published, I knew the alcoholism literature very well and the neurological end of it as well. And it was known among alcohol. Researchers be known for 60 years more even that the most reliable treatment for alcoholism was religious transformation. That's, and this is, well, accepted among researchers in the field who have no religious affiliation whatsoever, and I do believe that a huge part of that is a
Consequence of incentive restructuring. So you said, for example, with your friend, that fear wouldn't work. Well, alcohol is a pretty good at it. Anxiety, lytic drug, but it's also for people who are prone to alcohols, and it's a good incentive, reward Source Like Cocaine, if you're going to, you can't get rats addicted to cocaine. If they live in a natural environment, they have to be isolated in a cage before they'll bar press to their own death for cocaine. So what are the things you want to do when you treat addiction?
Is you want to substitute a new incentive structure, right? Because the Part Of The Addictive process is
you fall into a false incentive pattern, right? Because cocaine makes you feel like you're doing something useful in respect to an important goal, even though you're not. It's it. Mimics that
even if you know, you're not, even if you know what I don't say. I've never done cocaine. I wouldn't be open about it. If I had, I think, I like dopaminergic States enough, that I've been very scared of doing it correctly. Also, it wasn't around much just because of when I went to college, it just wasn't a drug that was around much, but it's a remarkable drug, in the sense that
People who take cocaine seem to be excited about everything. There is high dopaminergic State and their brain becomes exceptionally good at finding cocaine even in the absence of resources, which is pretty remarkable if you think about it, you know, I mean, most people can't find the thing or get the thing they want in the absence of the resources to get it. But people who take hard drugs, that really Spike dopamine somehow managed. Yeah. Sure.
Sometimes they find like how she's as lie cheat and steal, extremely lie, cheat and steal but they'll do other
things too, right? They'll socialize with people,
That have it so they don't have to lie, cheat and steal. It's it's incredible to see that drug and things like methamphetamine. Take over people's minds. And now, I'm
thinking the pathway appears when the aim is firmly in mind, right? See this is another, this is another insistence, that's derived from the religious literature. So, because the idea there, is that if your aim is upward, the pathway forward to that will make itself manifest. And that's true. You just pointed out that it was true in.
To addiction, right? Is that if, once that, once you're in that realm of possessed personality, the pathway forward will show itself to you even under straitened circumstances, right? And it's partly because you could think of our
perceptual systems and our emotional systems for
that matter as navigating tools, right. So now the addiction the addicted brain about these say the aim is possessed by the substance of addiction, right? So now the highest God is cocaine. Let's say
And so now all Pathways in the world are Pathways to cocaine all objects in the world are markers on the pathway, to go k because it just dominates but it's not it's not just an Impulse, it dominates the perceptual landscape as well, that's makes and the emotional landscape and it comes with all these rationalizations, that's all those lies, right? The whole thing. It's whole Personality. Yeah, brutal. Brutal
nowadays, I get a lot of questions about pornography.
And that the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation. But let's just talk about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus which we were all born with that. Clearly, some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reproduction 0 question about that sexual behavior, being linked to reproduction, not always, but certainly we can all agree on that. I
said I'd ask to Siri
precondition, I hope we can still all
All agree on that. But last time I checked, that still true, a sperm and an egg met some place in some context to create all of us, okay? We're still grounded in that pornography is something that I hear quite a lot from typically young males, but sometimes young females or even older, females, who say that they can see themselves, trying to resist the desire to go, look at it and it almost doesn't feel like a desire anymore.
They're sort of just in a kind of a compulsion that is that is almost unconscious but they're just aware of the fact that they're like, you need to store, they're doing it. They know, they shouldn't be doing it and they can't help themselves and we could think about two ways to attack this if one believes it's a real concern and they certainly do. So I do I don't I would be open if I if I had or do I pornography has not been my thing and and I don't struggle with it but, but when I hear from these people it's so clear that they're asking.
Is it the prevalence of pornography out there or is it something really broken in them? Like are they broken? But I don't know that. I would say after having the discussion we've had thus far that they're broken. It seems to me that it's like the as you said is the manifestation of one part of their it's one personality within them
while and it's been it's been compulsively rewarded. So you know when a when you see yourself moving towards the culmination of
The desired goal a dopamine that's accompanied by dopamine release. Okay and so two things you know this but everybody who's listening might not there's two elements to that dopamine. Release one is pleasure, but the other is that the dopamine, imagine that there are circuits activated as you're acting. What the dopamine does is increase the probability that the circuits were that were activated just before the positive experience happened grow. Okay, so now if you're engaged with pornography,
Oh and that culminates in sections in successful, sexual satiation, which it can that's what masturbation does then the whole personality that's oriented toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate. It's very much like an addiction except it's you know there has been there's been work done with generally simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli. I think it's stickleback fish where this was first observed, so males.
I hope I get this right, but I've got it approximately right believe. It's male sticklebacks will there are very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks. And the reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies. So they don't like red dots at all. And so you could really enrage a stickleback with the Red Dot and if you use a red dot, that's a little bigger and a little brighter than the typical Red Dot, you get a super stimulus. It's virtually irresistible to the stickleback and it's
and because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see a nature. It's slightly exceeds. That's exactly what pornography does. This is super stimulus, right? And it's not surprising that young males in particular are susceptible to that because male sexuality and human beings is very visually oriented very and a lot of our brain is visual way more than virtually every other animal. Certainly every other primate and verse and every other mammal. And so we have a situation where any 13 year old boy.
Can see more hyper attractive, super stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived a hundred years ago would have ever seen in his whole life. Yeah. Well, that's a, like, an evolutionary ecological radical ecological transformation and the, and it's worse because it's easily accessible. So takes no work, right? So, not only, is it a super stimulus, it's one that's at hand so to
speak and the and the the
Log in the food. World would be show. Highly palatable, highly processed
food. Yeah. Sugar fat
cat, you go into the other day. I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and I looked around. I thought this isn't a convenience store. This is a pharmacy. All right. Everything that had chocolate. Also also seem to have caffeine and color everything. Every drink seemed to combine, not your sugar, but also caffeine and some other things that would provide stimulants. And you got Nick, energy drinks, and
And these things on their own aren't necessarily bad. Any one of these 1 elements in low enough, Doses and frequent use etcetera, but maybe sugar being the one that clearly I think deserves deeper investigation, right? But it
just occurred to me that the different, the difference between manufacturing sugar and Manufacturing cocaine. I mean, you take something that's available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it I mean coca leaves the natives used coca leaves forever as mild.
Stimulant didn't seem to cause them any trouble but that's way different than cocaine, right? And sugar has the same arguably. The same pathological
properties. Well, I didn't think we were going to go here, but I think it's extremely appropriate and important that we do. So I know that you followed, what is essentially an Elimination Diet for a number of years, you eat meat. All right, I meat vegetables, fruit and some starches unrefined starches in any event. One thing that I think is absolutely clear from following a
Lean
diet, so to speak of any kind. But let's say of the sort that you follow her, I follow. Is that you very soon. Learn the relationship between Taste of the food of volume of the food macronutrient. So, protein fat and carbohydrate content, micronutrients, and satiation. Which is, if you think about it, it's sort of like a big plate of broccoli or a big steak or something, the brain learns, and the hypothalamus learns the association between the taste.
The caloric content. What else is in there? And satiation, if you think about highly processed food or even combinations of multiple ingredients, that's absolutely impossible to do the brain, can't parse what are the various things in here? And how do they relate to my feelings of satisfaction? It's the difference between a super drug and what I believe are the elements that were that we have
explain. Why you think that's that feeling. Learn link about satiation, can't be learned in the case of these processed foods.
Yeah, because in the context
of
Is
processed foods. They're activating multiple neurons systems in the hypothalamus and gut. We know that the gut has neurons that can respond to Sugar fatty acids, and amino acid content. And there's a, you know, there's prominent theory that, you know, one of the main reasons we is to forage for Amina, amino acids that will eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids and sure and we correlate that with taste but that the gut has neurons what where we know that God has neurons that signal through the vagus up through a low relay called the NoDoz ganglion if you want to look at it fun, fun name.
And then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain, which make us. Oh, when we eat something that has a high essential, amino acid content, like a steak, like, a really tasty steak. The neurons in the gut in a way that is independent of taste are signaling to the brain. Ah, I'm getting essential amino acids. You should eat more of this thing. If those let's just say a small fraction of those, amino acids that are present in a candy bar or in a, you know, a package of Skittles which I'm guessing. There's very few of them. If any you're going to continue to forage for food,
Because those neurons will also respond to Sugar. Basically, it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids. In other words, there are two parallel tracks one within about a systems to see that you should totally write multiple Pathways Decision. One dependent on taste one dependent on actual nutrient content. The mouth can only learn taste Association. The mouth can't actually learn nutrient content. The gut knows nutrient content. The problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macro, nutrient or essential. Amino acids are essential fatty acids after all.
There are no essential carbohydrates. They're only essential amino acids and essential fatty acid, right? And it will keep you eating and it will keep the appetite system revving, until you get enough of those. Now here's the issue. If you've ever done this, it's guys, empty calories, empty calories. But what's so so in some ways you know this again is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography masturbation and reproduction. Right? I'm not saying that reproduction is the be-all end-all of sexual activity, but in the evolutionary sense, it absolutely.
Is right, there's no question about them that. There's no moral judgment there, that's just the reality. So that the the situation with food is, is the following. If we are eating without any gut level, understanding of what's coming in, we will keep eating. If you let me give an example, you probably haven't done this experiment in a while, but if you've ever just had you know, rib eye steak or two, it's pretty satiating maybe also have a salad if you're me or some broccoli or something like that. If one takes, then even after you've eaten all that,
that one bite of pasta, one bite of pasta, the next impulse is more yes, right. Even though you already have enough essential amino acids, from those takes your leucine, you know, threshold you reach that etcetera. All the that good stuff. Why? Because blood glucose goes up and then you desire more because blood glucose elevations are linked directly to the dopaminergic system. So, what I'm basically trying to say here is that I do think that there are elements to our food, modern food, if you will, it seems like it's, you know, anything, but modern in the sense, it's worse for us than
More primitive foods but highly processed foods, pornography any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically like methamphetamine for instance, any behavior that spikes, dopamine dramatically that. Very quickly hijacks these circuits and to me the way to to teach those circuits, a calmer more prudent version of themselves. Right. To enter a different hypothalamic activation pattern is to start breaking things down into their essential elements.
It's right about the motivation, the pleasure etcetera to Tamp all that down. I mean, we know that for pornography, if the pornography is very extreme than less extreme, pornography doesn't seem to work. Yeah that's because there's also a novelty kick and dopaminergic striving, right? I mean so with any
Basic appetitive, pleasure. There's a dopaminergic kick. But with any novelty, there's also a dopaminergic kick. So there's an optimized threshold for novelty and appetitive striving that plays out in pornography. So,
There's the direct effect of the stimulus as such but the there's variation in the stimulus that's also novel. And so you it's common pattern for pornographic usage to become more.
What would you say fetishistic? That's one way of thinking about it as it progresses because that keeps the novelty alive, right? Yeah, it's very dangerous. That's a very dangerous development,
right? And I would venture in a very different domain that if you were to eat your steak slathered in barbecue sauce, for a couple of weeks, going back to the way that you eat them now, which by the way, this is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner last. Which is that, if you're going to order a steak order, a Pittsburgh Char. The Char on the outside is incredibly tasty. They're right, we love that.
The Umami taste is right. We should have a devotee taste receptors, that's complex. Yeah. So and if they don't know what a Pittsburgh Char is, then maybe you're in the wrong restaurant, or you need to educate them but incredibly satiating delicious, right? But if you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while. You're playing Stakes, wouldn't taste his go but surely but the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in which the stuff that all the condiments Etc would start to become aversive. I do believe that when we return
To the sort of most naturally, satisfying mode of engaging with these, with these circuits here. We're talking about food and sex and parallel that they become especially satiating. And I think that, you know, in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography and they're not addicted. Like, they tell me they love it and they can't stop. They're telling me it's no longer working for them that the that there's this, you know, diminishment in the amount of dopamine that they're getting overtime and they feel trapped within it and they have no no sense, whatsoever.
Because they have been socialized, you to go out and find a real relationship, real sexual relationship, or a relationship of
well, it also, it's also, there is some evidence suggesting to that. If you've been socialized into pornography sexuality, it's actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner. Now, I would say to some degree. That's always been difficult because it's a complex form of behavior, but the introduction of pornography
Well, it sets up a whole landscape of expectation for example that's not history going to play out that well in the real world, let's say and and that also learning of those biological systems in the brain to evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed right? Participants right, completely different. So some of these that's voyeur, right? You're basically learning to be a voyeur, right? Right. And so you think about young brains that are highly plastic learning that. So the returning we
No idea what to make of that because, especially for young men, because when they hit puberty, sexuality, becomes a very insistent force. And we have no idea what effect pornography has on the development of male sexuality. None,
I've wondered for a while whether there's something inherently rewarding about creating impact or action at a distance.
Is why I've been watching these videos of elon's rockets and thinking like that is awesome. That is awesome. Built on a throwing platform, you know? Yeah, just there's one image of the rocket thrusters that just captivated me. I'm not a space craft guy. I mean, I think it's really cool but I wouldn't consider myself somebody that like looks at the stars and things. I want to go, I want to go up there. I might if I given the opportunity but that's not been my thing by looked at this, I thought what an awesome Display of Power.
Our, but then I was saying, like, what is power? It's really about having impact or action at a distance. When we were kids, we learned it dirt clod Wars, right? Targeted right, could what an incredible display of funneling, the laws of physics and Engineering into something that can have enormous action at a distance and perhaps even take us into new galaxies amazing, right?
The word sin in many languages means to miss the target.
Right and it speaks to exactly what you're describing like that that the cachet of action at a distance. That's unbelievably deeply embedded in us. That's why I made that throwing gesture like human beings throw. That's our physiology, right? We can throw something at a distant Target. Well that's structured our, our cognition, we're using our thoughts to hit distant targets. That's what we do. All the games that young men plays. So,
Many of those games are Target games, all of the sports spectacles, that people want to participate in vicariously, even vicariously their target hitting games. Like our gaze specifies is the center of a Target. There's targets everywhere and were unbelievably focused on Bridging the Gap between where we are and where we're going. Yeah, that's the whole perceptual
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Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering Early Access to huberman lab listeners. Again, that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function. So this thing about action and a distance to me feels like, so inherent our progression as a species most Technologies are about that. In fact, if you think about social media, you know, somebody tweet something and you know when people react to it may be positively or negatively, the school shooter in a very dark example, sad a tragic example, right?
Action at a distance then you think about pornography and masturbation and I'm not passing any moral judgment here. It's a the ultimate form of creating action at a distance would be to create a new human being with somebody right. I mean that's it's your propagating it in physical distance creating a new being and in time, right? I mean incredible and then you think about masturbation and you think about pornography and there is no action at a distance and I'm not just
In here. I mean literally there's not much action at a distance, it's all up close to oneself but there's there's no impact on anybody. It's almost as if the energy that were born with, to be able to create positive things to evolve, our species through action at a distance through creation of knowledge technology children, community's
culture Jia Liu and expressions just literally it just loop back into oneself.
It's as if and I don't know what language there is for this in biology but it is
Like all that dopaminergic drive is kind of looped back into oneself and it goes nowhere. And I think when I hear about the incredibly, like what the language for, it is only like the diminished Souls of these people who are coming to me saying, like, you know, like help. And I'm thinking, okay, listen, I'm a podcaster, I'm a scientist. I know some things about the dopaminergic system, but, you know, there are ways that they can get help. I think they're 12-step programs for this and so forth and other things. But, you know, I think what they're saying is that they're, they're just kind of dissolving in their
Our own in their own reflux but there's no action at a distance for them. This is the same thing I think see with the Failure to Launch kids who are still living at home or not having any action at a distance, I think we were designed to disperse from our families and to create action at a distance up until a certain age. But I see so many of the problems that we face as failure to find a productive way to have action that's available at a distance.
Sure. I would
In the terminology that I've been developing. So, for example, in this, in this book, we who wrestle with God. I'm one of the stories I analyzed is the story of Abraham and it's very interesting story psychologically. I mean, I think it's stunning actually and I'll lay some of that out for you and tell me what you think about it. So so the Divine is characterized in the classic stories of our culture as
the ultimate up. So you can think about the Divine as
The target as such rather than any particular Target. So here's a way of thinking about it, you know?
So an additional sees you and then you'll aim at fulfilling that ambition, but once the ambition is fulfilled, a new ambition makes itself manifest, which might be a greater ambition. Let's say if your personality is expansive and then if you fulfill that the same thing will happen. So then you could imagine that there's a meta ambition behind all proximal Ambitions, okay? Now the Divine characterization of the Divine is a characterization of that meta ambition. That's a good way of thinking about it.
It's something that recedes as you approach it, but it's also the thing that all Ambitions have in common. And we know there is such a thing because otherwise, we wouldn't have a concept of ambition, right? Which speaks to a commonality among Ambitions, okay? In this story of Abraham, the Divine is characterized in relationship to something like ambition, so Abraham has the he's already immersed in a situation that's Akin in a way to
The scenario of a wealthy and a person in the modern world, who's in a situation of abundance, Abraham's parents are wealthy. And they provide for him, there's nothing he needs to do.
And in consequence. So he's attained the Socialist Utopia or the consumerist Utopia you can look at it either way and
There's no reason for him to move forward so he doesn't, he doesn't do anything till he's 75 and then the voice comes to him which is the voice of Adventure and it's God in this story. That's how God is defined, right? And God says to Abraham,
You have to leave all this Comfort, which is a very interesting proposition to begin with. Like, why the hell would you leave that when you have everything you need? Well, the implication is that you don't have everything you need. When you're being delivered, everything you need, that isn't how life works. Okay? So God says, you have to leave your, your father's tent. You have to leave your tribe. You have to leave those who speak your language. You have to venture out into the world.
So God is conceptualized in this story as the impulse, the voice that compels you out into the world and that encourages you to do so. So that's a hypothesis about what the ultimate up is, okay. And Abraham agrees, and he does. So, in two ways, he, he builds an altar,
Signifying. His aim that he's going to abide by the command of this voice or the invitation of this voice and that he'll make the appropriate sacrifices. Was a crucial is a crucial. It's a crucial Point understand because
The process of transformation requires sacrifice to be more than you are means. You have to let go of that. Which you were, you have to make sacrifices now. Abraham's life is punctuated by a sequence of re affirmations of his upward, aim and declamations of his willingness to sacrifice every time he finishes an adventure jiri constitutes the Covenant, right? So this is this agreement to follow the voice of Adventure, okay?
God makes him a deal. That's the Covenant. It's very interesting deal. So now imagine biologically speaking that there is an instinct to integrate that operates within us. Okay, so now it's not it's just as fundamental as the hypothalamic motivational States let's say but it's more sophisticated and what it's trying to do is to integrate all the motivational States.
Across time and socially, right? And then imagine it manifests itself, as an instinct, to be something like the instinct to mature, right to move forward, right? To leave your zone of comfort, right? And maybe there have been people like csikszentmihalyi, you've characterized that as the attractiveness of flow and maybe it's associated with the exploratory circuit in the hypothalamus, that's mediated by dopamine. Okay? But it's it's got its character.
Now, the character of that instinct in this story is the way it's characterized is as the voice of Adventure. So it's the thing that asks, you to move beyond your zone of comfort and go into the foreign world. Now, the advantage to that is that you fortify yourself and you develop, right? So no matter how good you are. Now, if you push yourself to the edge, you're going to be better than you are. And that's a better.
Win than merely being good like you are now. So that would be participation in that transformative process is a higher form of attainment than mere attainment of any specific goal. Okay, so that's the Call to Adventure that's the call to a quest. That's what Gandalf offers Bilbo, for example. Okay.
God, characterizes the consequences of that. And this is so cool it when I figured this out it just flattened me, it's so interesting. God says, okay if you God is defined as that, which says this by the way, if you push yourself beyond your zone of comfort, even if it's functioning for you, that's Abraham situation, here's what will happen.
You'll become you live your life in a manner. That's a blessing to you. So that's a good deal. A because Lots, the miserable people. You're talking about the depressed, people, the trapped people, their life isn't a blessing to themselves. So what's a pathway to blessing? Well, it's not satiation, not in this formulation, it's voluntary. It's the voluntary Quest and it's characterized by Adventure. So that's deal. Number one, you'll live in a life that will be a blessing to you. Okay. And then God says, that's not all
all that will happen. You'll be a blessing to yourself in a manner that will make you renowned among other people justly, that's a good deal because we know that people men in particular, are very status oriented partly because their reproductive success is highly correlated with their social status and you know the psychopath game that but still it's like renowned is crucially important you want to be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates.
So that'll be the second thing that happens and then the same voice as and that's not all. You'll be a blessing to yourself and be renowned in a manner that will maximize the probability that you will establish something of lasting value. That's a good deal. So that's that's stretching across time multi-generationally. Because God tells Abraham that if he follows the pathway of Adventure, he'll be the father of Nations. So what that means is that he'll establish the pattern of paternal conduct that will maximally
That will maximize the success of his.
Offspring in the longest possible run.
That's so cool. This is Success at a distance, right? And over
time. Exactly. And then the final offer is you'll do that in a way that will bring abundance to everyone else to now. So, think about what that means biologically, this is so cool and I can't see how it can be wrong. It means that if you hearken to the voice that calls you out of your zone of comfort, you do that voluntarily. So you put yourself on the edge of Adventure.
You'll be following the Instinct that has already evolved to make your life. A blessing to yourself to make you successful among other people to maximize your probability of long-term success. And to do that in a way that brings abundance to your community. And then you think, look, let's take the contrary hypothesis. The contrary hypothesis would be too full, there is no compulsion to Adventure. It's like that seems highly improbable or that the compulsion to Adventure isn't aligned with psychological and
social well-being. Well, what's the, what's the chance that the fundamental drive that would facilitate your transformation across time? Would not be aligned with your psychological Integrity in the success of the community. Like we wouldn't be social animals if that was the case. So, as far as I can tell,
That has to be true. Now, that doesn't mean you can get lost in false Adventures, that can happen. That's what an addiction is. Or or or that's what pornography is, it's a false Adventure, right? Its failure to hit the proper Target. You might say, but that Central Drive to integration across time and communally, why wouldn't that be an instinct and then we could cap that with an observation that I also think is self-evidently true once you understand.
So, imagine that you're a father. Now, this Spirit of Adventure is often characterized paternally, right? Insofar as God's the father in these ancient stories. So, think about this. So when you see your son, now it's also true of your daughter, but I'll focus on Sons for the moment when you see your son and you love your son, when you see your son pushing himself Beyond his own limits in an adventurous manner. If you're a good father, you
Definitely encouraged out, right? And I would say insofar, as you encourage that, you are a good father and that would mean that you're the embodiment of that spirit that calls to Adventure. That's why Abraham is characterized. For example, in this story, as forging an alliance with the spirit of his ancestors with the date of his ancestors. He's embodying the Call to Adventure and that's what makes him the father, whose representative Enterprise is successful across the broadest.
Possible span of time, I think that's I just can't see how that can be wrong and that's a characterization of the Divine. There's other it complexify say because what the stories are trying to do is to
Give you an image of what that integrating personality might be like, and it's sophisticated. So a single characterization is insufficient, so in the story of Noah,
God is this personality is characterized quite differently. So Noah is presented as a man who's wise in his Generations, which means that for his time and place. He's moral and reputable. So he's the sort of guy that people would go to, for advice because he's lived a life that's emblematic of his wisdom. Let's say, okay now a voice comes to him and says batten down the hatches. They're made troubles coming. Okay. So so
So here's the hypothesis. The hypothesis is the voice that calls to the wise to prepare in times of trouble, is a manifestation of the Divine and it's the same as the voice. That calls the unwilling to Adventure. That's the monotheistic hypothesis and so you can see what the imagination is doing. Is agglomerating these different characterizations of high, aim insisting. That there's an integrated Unity behind them and then trying to conceptualize that integrated Unity across time
so, and I think that's done, I think that's done with radical success in the biblical library that the culmination of the
library of stories is the
Impressionistic representation of this integrating pattern, and I think that's what people call on when they're engaging in a religious Enterprise. That is radically successful like the that happened in the case of your friend, right? So he got a new personality and that new personality had different incentive structure. And so that just superseded the addiction,
it's almost as if. I mean, I realize that for people listening it might not seem like this, but to us his friends who had seen him try so hard.
In the context of people he truly deeply cares about more than anybody in the world. His children his wife. It was almost like he got a brain transplant. It was it was astonishing. Hmm. How does he account for it? Like if you asked him, like okay, you had every reason to change and yet you didn't and then all of a sudden you did like how does he understand that he uses very Christian.
Religious language. He said that he felt Jesus is Love for him and he saw an image of who he could become this was important. Perhaps not no doubt just perhaps but no doubt of who he could become not worth it and he had the adequate social support within this place and so there was reinforcement. Yeah. But what's remarkable is that he was able to take that outside of this place, right? Right.
Was it was a residential facility out of this place and carry. When and to this day, he is Rock Solid. Okay? So then that domain and I will say in all the other domains of his life to extremely successful as an artist, I don't want it, you know, extremely successful as a commercial artist and happy and in service and just seems
like he got a brain trite. So there's a mystery there and that's kind of threefold. One is
What the hell did he mean that he realized that Jesus Christ loved him. Right? That's okay. What do you mean by that? And then somehow that's associated with the vision, he developed of, who he could be, if he was everything, he could be, there's a relationship between those two things. And then there's this, third mystery is the culmination of those two phenomena freedom of his addiction, even out of the context of the center. That's right. Very difficult to understand that but you know,
We know, think about it, this way, if you're possessed by rage different phenomena have dopaminergic cachet to you than, if you're possessed by like sexual desire, like, obviously I absolutely right. So, so the idea that a given stimuli produces a given motivational response is incorrect, because that's framework dependent, right? And most. So I think one of the best ways to understand
A motivational Drive is that a motivational Drive grips? The target it establishes the Target, right? And it's not, it may, it may increase the probability that certain action patterns, will make themselves manifest. That would be the kind of a compulsive element. But fundamentally, what it's doing is changing the Target that rearranges the perceptual landscape and it transforms the emotions. Because now if your target, is there things that lead you there? Are dopaminergic Lee relevant, if your target is there,
Things that lead you. There are relevant, same underlying emotion but the the stimuli so to speak that give rise to the emotion are radically different. So now he has a different orientation and aim and so the incentive structure of his psyche is radically transformed. Now, we know that can happen because that happens to you. When you move from one motivated state to another,
I think, in 12-step programs, they allow the steps to be Milestones. I mean, there's clearly a dopamine
manager component. I hope you understand that dopamine is dumb. In fact, dopamine isn't Dumb. Dopamine has no intelligence at all. It's just a currency of motivation and reward. And what
is why it can be gained by cocaine, which is why it can be gained by
cocaine or most anything that can, you know, you know, ferret its way into the hypothalamic system and I hope people picked up on what you said before because it's so important that as one moves toward a Target dopamine increases Andrew.
To that Target. I'm rephrasing what you said before, you said it wonderfully, I just want to make sure people understand that as that dopamine increases the probability, that your perception will go to something other than the target decreases exponentially as you get closer and closer, you get more and more dopamine, the greater, the elevation dopamine, the lower, the probability that you'll engage in any other pattern of self, right? It's like it's almost or these or personality type other than the one that you're engaged in in pursuit of this Behavior will emerge
judge
not least because as you approach successfully the probability of ultimate success is obviously increasing. So it makes perfect sense that you would narrow and
focus you run faster. As you, as you see, the Finish Line, right faster? And faster, this concept of sin as missing the target, yeah, or this definition of sin, I think is incredibly
important. Marty is the Greek word and it lit. It's literally an archery term, but it's also the word for sin in ancient Hebrew is also an archery term and so and there's other languages where
Case. But it's really important to understand that that is that notion is predicated on this target-seeking, Physio psychophysiology and that that's unbelievably deeply built into us as you pointed out, you know, our eyes, our Target established. Well it's so important to us that we infer aim from gaze, right? And it's more than that. Not only do we infer aim from gaze, we mimic the psychophysiological state,
Of the Target that were watching as a consequence of her inference of aim from gaze. So if I can see what you're looking at, then I can occupy the same psychophysiological state that you do. And that's the basis of my understanding.
This is so important and I'm there's something that I've never talked about on this or any other podcast, which is that in humans. We have a massive expansion of an area of the frontal cortex called The frontal eye Fields. So, there are circuitry deep in the brain If you
Look it up, its Superior colliculus. It's also called the tectum in other species. It means roof is the roof of the midbrain etcetera that generate reflexive eye movements you stimulate in there. It's like a machine. In fact, a colleague of mine who's now retired at Sanford. Eric Knudsen, who did some beautiful work on? Neuroplasticity was describing experiment where they take out the frontal cortex of these owls owls are because they, you know, they don't have much, I movements, they move their head that almost you, almost all the way around, right? We've all seen that get and they use this for for for homing in on
Air targets the owl or a monkey or a human in the absence of a prefrontal cortex or suppression of prefrontal Cortex becomes like a machine. You click here. They look that right. Click here. They look their puppies are like this. Kittens are like this, everything's a stimulus. Why? Because there isn't that top-down inhibition of those reflexes in humans. We have in
Aaron's y, our cat with no brain is hyper exploratory,
right. Everything is Everything is the
target. Everything is hard. Everything is a
Target and there's no context.
And in learning. Yeah, right, I love that. You gave the example of the dussehra brick cats. They even can do fictive motion. They can walk on a treadmill and it's like it would know cortex. Yeah. Raising it is. It makes you rethink the cortex for sure. In humans have these frontal eye fields, which are an evolved area, the present in other species too, but they're massively expanded in humans. So this is a cortical area, a frontal, cortical area devoted to controlling gays and the context and control of gay. So it no longer becomes just a reflex that you can suppress.
As in the case with an adult cat versus a kitten, or a dog versus a puppy, the frontal eye Fields, actually regulate all sorts of context-dependent like, oh, like, he's looking at me directly. Is it aggressive? Yeah, well then maybe I'll activate my aggression or maybe I'll brace my defenses or wow. She's we came to this party together, but she seemed super interested in like, directing her gaze. How are we inferring this? Sometimes, it's body language. Sometimes, it's this. Sometimes he looked at her there. All these memes about this right, right, right, right? Yes, the famous, the famous look over the shoulder.
Older meme. That seems to have taken over the internet from time to
time appropriate. Facial response.
Exactly. So humans have massively expanded notion of what gaze is and our ability to control gays. And understanding of gays, I just so when you raise this, in this idea that when you raise this fact, rather about gays defining the target, it'll end that looking at others as gaze allows us to understand what they are defining as the target. We starting to get get into Notions of theory.
A of mind and things of that.
So now so what that implies in keeping with our previous conversation is that as you mature and your cortex integrates and you become cortically, dominant the targets of your gaze become voluntary, right? This is a big deal because it means that you can concentrate on the distal. Let's say the temporary temporally distal at the expense of the proximal. So you know if if you're
Walking down the street and you hear a loud and sudden noise behind you. You'll do it anti-predator, Crouch and then turn. And you'll do that essentially automatically. So
curl up. Yeah. And then turn it up and then you
turn you turn to the place where your stereoscopic audition has indicated that the noise emanated from right. And so and that's automatic, that's the control of the eye gaze and and well and bodily posture by those
underlying. Yeah, this is, the superior colliculus is a map of auditory. Yep. So when
Here, something to your right, you turn to your
right, right? And you do that before you think I'm right. Okay. So that's a, that's an activation of the eye fields that say, by these underlying motivational systems that have this personality, like autonomy, but you can, you can you can Orient your part of the religious Enterprise is to orient your eyes heavenward. Well what does that mean? Well, you can think about it. It means to search out the north star that navigates for you. Unerringly
Of the situation at hand. Imagine you could progress towards a Target in a manner that made all the potential targets that you could progress toward more likely. It's a meta Target. You said that's what happened to your friend, right? Is not only did he dispense with his addiction, but all of the things enter other Enterprises that he was associating that, that that he was pursuing in his life became more
effect. It's almost like an
It is as if every goal was like elevated, right? And it's funny because for the first couple of months that I was interacting with them. I thought. Okay. Like the he's different, you know? And, and I thought, you know, like most people would, you know, perhaps with things like. All right, let's see, let's see what this has been four years. Now he's very, he's very consistent with his with his program. He, you know, he's involved in a program that keeps him on track, right? But he's elevated. And here,
He's not talking above people, it's like he's elevated but he's grounded when you talk to him. He's not a kind of off some other place. He's actually very very present. Yeah. And even his text messages are very much of like what's going on today. You know, asking questions that are very much of the now. Yeah. And it it's been a remarkable thing to observe. Well, it's because he was about as down in his addiction and had so much to lose and had essentially risked over and over and over to the point where
You know, I didn't think it was ever going to write and around in most and all of his friends thought the same and great wife, of course, is delighted. And his kids are delighted course. And I can say this without revealing Cousineau knows I'm Godfather to his son and his son is thriving which is wonderful to see. And I just think of sometimes about how badly it could have gone the other way. Yeah. And it's fantastic. It's like he's nothing short of
spectacular, okay? So so let me let me put that into context of let's say at an archetypal story. Okay. So
So I did a course for Peterson Academy on The Sermon, on the Mount, And The Sermon on the Mount is a, it's a strat, it's a meta goal strategy, it's very practical. It's very, very practical and it emerges out of the biblical tradition in a very grounded manner. It's a logical extension of the biblical ethical precursors. So what Christ says to his followers in the course of The Sermon on the Mount is,
First Orient, your eyes upward, okay? So that's in alignment. With the notion that the firstborn is to be consecrated to God. There's a meaning to that. And the meaning is something like this. Imagine that your life consists of a sequence of episodes, okay? And episode has a beginning and a middle and an end, the beginning sets the frame for the episode. So, at the beginning of an Enterprise, you want to, you want to lift your eyes heavenward. So you establish the highest possible goal.
So that, that constitutes the frame of perception for that episode. That's the idea. That's why the firstborn should be consecrated to God. So for example, in to think about it, prosaically before we sat down for our podcast because we've done many podcasts we strive to inhabit, the framework that will make the podcast, most radically successful. Now, you could imagine that that could be subordinated to either of our proximal desire for an increase in short
ERM personal Fame, right? Or we could try to dominate each other in the conversation or we could Orient ourselves properly. And we could do what we could to pursue the track towards Revelation, so to speak and we could Elevate our conversation in that matter. Okay? And that would set the frame for the conversation and the good podcasters always do that right there, not playing games or if they're playing games, it's of the highest possible order. It's a quest. Yeah. Okay. Quest for what enlightenment for
Truth right for Mutual understanding, and then maybe for the education of those who are participating. All right, so Christ says first Orient, your eyes upward, right? That's to love. God above all. So whatever that upward Divinity is, you establish an allegiance with that and you allow that to determine your perceptions and your motivations next operate. Under the assumption that
Other people like you participate in that nature of that at most aim and treat them that way.
Next concentrate on the moment, right, right. And that's exactly right because it's exactly right because
When you specify your aim, the pathway makes itself manifest, otherwise you could never use your senses to orient. You'd never get anywhere, right? So if you aim upward to the best of your ability, then the pathway upward is what will make itself manifest in front of you. Then you have to attend to it. And so then you get this weird perverse optimality which is you're focused on the
longest temporal scale and the highest possible elevation and you can make most use of what's right in front of you and that the implication in The Sermon on the Mount is that there's no difference between that and participating in life eternal as it unfolds in the moment. And I think that's that seems to me to be exactly. Right. It's exactly right. And so, you know, I was, I was thinking of that because you said your friends all of your friends and
His had become elevated. So imagine that one probably might want to solve, is what your goals should be, but a much deeper problem would be, how do you conceptualize your goals in relationship to one another across the broadest span of time and person? So that every goal has the highest probability of succeeding. So that would be like the pursuit of a medical. I would say, that's what defines the religious Enterprise, there's another variant of that, for example. So,
A variant of that would be not, how do you solve the problem of Any Given thing that terrifies you? But how do you solve the problem of the class of things that terrify you and the dragon fight mythology, is the solution to that problem. So the attitude there is you adopt The Stance of voluntary. What a voluntary approach in the face of Terror because that's the best matter of strategy, right? And that's the strategy that
works to protect you across the largest possible array of dangerous situations. This is what we learned in this clinical psychologists with exposure therapy.
Right? You find this particulars of what? Someone is afraid of that. Turns out to be somewhat irrelevant. You teach people to voluntarily confront, what they're avoiding, and that doesn't make them less afraid. It makes them more competent and braver and that generalizes, right? And so yeah, the religious Pursuit is the pursuit of of meta goals in relationship to positive and negative emotion. That's a good way of thinking about it.
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Element.com huberman lab to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again. That's drink element.com / huberman lab to claim a free sample pack. I love this idea of looking upward and defining, or at least having a sense that there's a internalization of the greatest possible outcome. And when I say, greatest, both for oneself, but also for the community, right? Yeah,
that's life more.
Didn't or that's that's the symbolic terminology or life in eternity. Both of those are the same thing so imagine you're fighting with your wife. Okay, now your dominated by rage now, the advantage to that is you're ready and but the disadvantage is you're going to strive for proximal Victory, okay? Now you don't want to be a pushover, that's a mistake. So then what could you do? Instead, you could pause and you could remember, okay.
If this could rectify itself in the best possible manner, what would that look like? Well, it's complicated, right? You don't want your wife to be defeated and you don't want to be defeated and you want to solve the problem but you don't want to sweep it under the rug, you want to solve it in a way that solved that works across time, that benefits your relationship in an upward Manner,
and you have to make sure that you're not hijacked by that hypothalamic circuit or personality. As you,
you will be
If, if you don't alter your aim, you will be because you need to substitute. You got to think I'd really like to win this. Like, I seriously, like to win this battle. It's like, no, you need something better than that, Victory. And that would be the victory. That would
Deepen and enrich your relationship and help it grow across time. And then you can remember that. It's like I'm going to listen, even though I think my wife is wrong, I'm going to listen and I'm going to see if I can find a pathway in the argument that makes our relationship better. And then you think now you have to really want that because if you really want that, if you got that Vision fleshed out properly you'll want that more than you want to win. And then you might say, well why it's like because it's a better deal. So there's one of Christ's Parables where he talks about
Pearl of great price, which is the Pearl that a rich man would sell everything he owns to possess. And it's, it's something like a reference to that. It's like, why would you ever attain a proximal Victory? If you could attain an ultimate Victory? That's the battle. Let's say between the salvation of the soul and the victory in sin, that's how the religious language would portray it. Well, you can win a local Victory and it looks like a it looks like you win.
In. But if you forego the ultimate game, that's not a victory. That's a defeat. Obviously many be a worst defeat than if you
lost. Absolutely, I've been spouting off on social media and podcast for a while. Now that any big inflection in dopamine, that isn't appreciated by a lot of effort to generate that dopamine inflection is very dangerous. Think hard drugs, think? Pornography think highly processed foods, think anything that you do creates this big sense of Indulgence in pleasure without any
For is K running counter current to our evolutionary wiring. Now you could say well okay so what are we supposed to do moving the nose and
no reward without commensurate sacrifice. That's right, that's some sort
and yep and and the other issue and it's coming up again and again today and I love that it is, is this notion of the temporal domain of rewards that exists over multiple time scales or broader time scales. One of the things that I feel truly lucky for is the fact that I went the path of science where we chuckling
About this earlier, you know, a project could take a year. Then you have to restart because that project went nowhere and then you finish the project. You submit a paper, the review. I mean the reward schedule in science could take four years. It's not just about getting a degree like getting papers through, sometimes took a year, sometimes took two years, you know sometimes things didn't go well and you had to publish in a journal that you wouldn't have wanted to or sometimes you had to abandon projects altogether. So my reward system was trained up.
On lots of time scale, short medium, long time, scales as I've moved into podcasting that the temporal Loops are shorter there faster. But you know, nonetheless, you know, we do long long form content and but you know, I think platforms like X. I think are wonderful if used appropriately I think it's especially great nowadays, frankly, an Instagram Etc, they're very useful. But they train us and I imagine they've trained the young brains that were weaned on them because I wasn't but that were weaned on.
M24 fast. Temporal? Yeah, time scales. This isn't like playing. This isn't like playing along poker game. There's like playing the slot machine over and over and over, right? Yes. It's not like afford a
tournament plead with intermittent random reinforcement which is what happens when something goes viral unpredictably. Right. Right. Right. It's really right.
Yeah. And and then, of course, we have this notion in this country that, you know, in any moment, it could be a Rags to Riches or over, you know, some, you know, overnight, Fame type thing that exists as a possibility in our culture that in a way.
Hadn't prior. So I think that one of the things that could be useful just of entering a hypothesis here, is that young and older people could take a look at their life and ask you know over what variation of time scales. Do I derive reward? Yeah, there's no training for a marathon is a longer time scale
of about social hall, Mark of maturity. Yeah,
yes. School at degree Etc in business. The time scales are sometimes fast sometimes.
Short, I think you can ask even a better question than that. The better question would be. And this is kind of what's referred to in The Sermon, on the Mount is. How could I optimize my long-term view? Well, maximizing, my focus on the moment, because then you get both. That's a really that's a really good deal, right? Because now you're conducting yourself in a manner that works in an iterative way that's socially productive, right? And and maybe intergenerationally, socially productive, that would be the best thing to establish that's kind of what you're
he has a good father but you're doing that in a manner that enables you to also derive maximal impact from each step, you take forward in the present so
Colonel Tristan told me. We were talking about entropy and and emotion. Now I'd figured out a few years ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy like technically which I was really thrilled about because it it gives the emotion of physical grounding like a real physical grounding and Frist and surprised me because he said he has a theory, a positive emotion, that's analogous. He also knew the negative emotion. He'd also been working in that domain he said that
you get a dopamine kick when you reduce the entropy in relationship to a goal. And I thought, oh my God, that's so cool because it means that uncertainty is entropy when it emerges you get anxious. But when you see yourself stepping towards a goal, you get a dopamine kick. And the reason that's an entropy related to entropy is because
With each step successful, step you take towards a goal, you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit, which is manifested in that phenomena, you described, which is, when you see the Finish Line, you start running faster, right? So they're both related to entropy will to have goals at multiple time scales, you need to be able to read it in. I love this entropy argument. It makes total sense that you want to be able to withstand the the
Of time when you don't know whether or not your things are becoming more or less uncertain. Yes, this is part of becoming an
adult. Yeah, okay, okay. So the yeah, that was exactly the thread so there's two corollaries of that one is that the more valuable the goal towards which you're progressing the higher, the dopamine kick per unit of advancement. So what that means is you want an ultimate goal, operating in the domain of each, proximal sub goal. And that's what happens with this upward orientation. It's like,
Like what you're trying to do is to make things as good as they could be, whatever that means over the longest possible span of time. For the largest number of people, you include now, you're not going to know exactly how to do that but that can be your goal. Okay? Now that's going to inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway, but it's also going to modify your reward system because now every proximal step forward is an indicator of entropy production in regard to that meta goal. Well, there isn't any by definition there.
Not anything you can do, that's more exciting than that. See that kind of explains why your friend was able to pop out of his addictive frame because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol. Let's say pales in comparison, right? Right. And it's a rewriting of the reward contingencies. Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. And now, you can imagine that. You can imagine a situation where a culture,
Explorers across time to find out how to characterize that goal, such that if that goal is pursued people integrate psychologically, in a manner that integrates them socially across large spans of time. I think that's what happens when the monotheistic Revelation emerges that's that's what's happening from a, from a biological perspective is that we're starting to characterize the longest term goal. Yeah, something like that.
This is why I believe that pornography is potentially so poisonous because the level of uncertainty is basically zero. Yeah. People can access what they want to see. They can keep foraging until they find it. Yeah. And that's not the way that relationships work. The way we relationships work. Is somebody else. They might say yes, they might say no, go out on date. They might not want a second date. Yeah. Well, I know that's all very Progressive. You might think that you're on the path to one thing and
It turns out it doesn't work or it's you're not compatible. The, you know, that's also extremely salutary because if you're being rejected, like say you're a foraging male, and you're being rejected all the time and you forego that for pornography, what you're forgoing is the corrective that all those women are offering you. Like they're rejected you because there is something wrong. Like seriously there's something wrong and now you escape from that, you think? Well that's a relief because no more rejection. It's like yeah.
No more rejection, no more learning, no more Improvement and no possibility of an actual life
right? No action at a
distance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah no distal. No distal accomplishment, right? Yeah,
the only implication of the pornography masturbation scenario is that is more pornography masturbation. That's the only implication of it. That's it. That's all that possibly could arrest
worse than that, because it's more pornography in a degenerating game because as
You said, you have to chase that novelty Edge
otherwise. So Amin has driven down for
a while, and that means what it's going to get more and more extreme. Well, that that's not a good scenario. That's not a good. Like, what do you mean more and more extreme? Exactly, like, where does that end? Well, you know a casual glance at online pornography can give you some real insight into where that ends like there's that's a bottomless pit and and in the most pernicious possible manner because sexuality
He can definitely twist itself into pathological forms that undermine psychological integrity and demolish Society.
No, we see this with people who are highly successful who seem to have lots of areas of their life regulated. And then, you know, they collapse their lives, sometimes. See it with every comment with drugs of abuse as well. Yeah, although unless those drugs of abuse are dopaminergic and people have them in a, in check, so to speak, which is exceedingly
Rare. Yes, it's usually just a matter of time, and they don't reach the
mountain. Yes, while time is the problem time. As we've been pointing out, let me tell you another story. This is from Revelation. So, Revelation is a vision of the end of time. Okay. Now time ends all the time, like our adventures, and our lives, and our relationships. And so the end has a pattern. Okay. Revelation is a vision of the Eternal pattern of the end.
So here's an element of the vision it's so remarkable. I figured this out with my friend, Jonathan patio. So there's a vision in a subdivision in the sequential dream of revelation of the Scarlet Beast and the whore of Babylon and it's very relevant to our discussion on pornography, you'll understand it right away. So it's a vision of how Society, disintegrates? Okay. Now imagine when Society, disintegrates men disintegrate,
According to their pattern and women disintegrate, according to their pattern, that makes perfect sense, right? Because if Society, disintegrates it's gonna be men and women, who disintegrate? There's no reason to assume that their pattern of disintegration would be identical, okay? Scarlet Beast is, is that's the Scarlet beast of the state. That's Babylon. Let's say that's the degenerate. Tyrannical State as multiple heads, why? Because whatever United, it has vanished. That's like the death of God. It's vanished.
Act. And so now it's got heads in every direction. So it's confused and it's red Scarlet because that's that confusion that disintegration is the precursor to the river of blood, right? The Red Sea this, the swamp of chaos. So when the patriarchal state, disintegrates it loses its unity, and then it's multiple hats, right? And that's, that's, that's the emblem of descent into diverse
chaos and gazes everywhere with his nuts.
Cool heads precisely precisely. It's not integrated okay. Now that's the disintegration of the patriarchy. You might say atop that is the
Whore of Babylon. That's a beautiful woman, whose subordinated, her psyche, to the demands of sexuality. She's the mother of all prostitutes, right? So she's extremely attractive, and she's clad and gold and she holds a cop. It's very graphic imagery that has nothing but the consequences of her fornication in it.
Is this like, I mean, I guess I will just say it recently. There's been a number of posts on X of this woman who had sex with 100 men in a day.
Hmm. And now right now, she's saying she's gonna have sex with a thousand men and
yeah. Well, she seems to be rethinking her plan. Given the emotional consequences she had to her last success. Yeah, I must smother is her finance officer.
Speechless,
that's for sure.
I'm speechless. Might Mike response to the her kind of post. Hundred, men thing was, it was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the, the whatever performance probably heart, whatever it was, you know, so it was hard for me to discern what was really going on there. I'm not a psychologist and but anyone who saw that would say this is a pretty
Dark situation
its way darker than anybody who wanted to hold on to their sanity would possibly
imagine what's also dark. And I'm not saying this from a place of moral judgment. I'm just saying this from a place of just kind of like, wow. Like this woman, obviously navigating life in this way, her choice clearly, but the fact that so many people know about this, the fact that so many people and here we're talking about it, but I think in service to a greater good,
Good. I certainly believe like like that this is now out there, right? It's out there. Just like seeing somebody you shouldn't, you know? Just like saying somebody murder. Somebody in Cold Blood we talk about that right recently a video of an assassination that those had been available before but those two things kind of leveled up or level down. You no one's idea of what humans are capable of by allowing so much.
Acceptable, what's acceptable and desirable, that's right, the threshold shifted, that's for sure. Maybe that's the what I'm looking with the threshold
shift. Yeah, yeah, okay. So that's a great example. That young woman who's betrayed herself in the deepest possible Manner and all of the people that are following her and all the young women who are influenced by her. So you have this
Figure on the back of the degenerate State, that's the degenerate feminine.
Female sexuality commoditization commoditize has when the masculine State degenerates. That's a sign of the end of things. And that makes perfect sense. Because, why wouldn't female sexuality commoditize when the masculine is no longer reliable. It's exactly what you'd expect, you know, how the story ends. There's another element to it. The degenerate state offers the whore of Babylon as enticement for its degeneration, you can have everything
You want on the sexual side at the end of that sub-story, the state, the Beast kills the prostitute. And so what that means is that the long-term consequences of sacrifice list, sexual satiety, is that sexuality itself is destroyed and I think we're seeing that in our society. Now, thirty percent of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins rights brought about the
Same in South Korea, right? The birth rates in those countries, have plummeted. Like they're way way below replacement and increasingly 50% of women in the west are childless at. 3:30 are way way down and and going down as well, fifty percent or childless.
Half of them will never have a child because 30 is already pushing it and 95% of them will regret it. We're already in a situation in the west where one in Four Women will be involuntarily childless, right? And so it's so well, that's a good example. As I said earlier of how these things are characterized in this symbolic language that outlines the starkest, you might say the starkest of biological realities you said that there was a problem you know your sense was that there was a problem.
Oblem with effortless gratification it's like well the problem part of the problem with effortless gratification is it destroys itself and it's so interesting because the promise of the sexual Revolution and the pill was an unlimited Horizon of sexual opportunity, okay? We know about the actual consequence of that was appears to be that that that's that's the pathway to the demise of sexuality
itself. This was if you can't be with the one you love, Love the One You're With
Someone I know who was a in their 20s in the 1970s explain to me, I was taught that song was about, you know, if you can't be with the person that you love you know, you find someone else who can love they explained to me. That's not what that was about. That was about the wildness of the
seven. Right. Right. That
promise. Yeah, that was about the sort of the just promiscuity had emerged as a theme of the 1970s.
Yeah well I mean in the aftermath of the birth control pill it was not
Surprising that people thought maybe that was possible, but that was wrong, it was seriously wrong and we're going to be dealing with the consequences of that for a very long time.
You said that the the patriarchy, the masculine fails before the well known for the horrible happens. Happens parallel yes your concerts. So it's not causal one. It do
know that, right? You can't man and women degenerate at the same rate, right? I mean we're involved in feedback processes that are so tight that there's no
There's no oppressing women without a pressing, man. There's no oppressing man without oppressing women. It's like we're joined at the hip so to speak. And so, you know, these these these these cultures that cloak women and silence them, you might think well, that leads to the domination of men, it just turns men into pathological, tyrants. Like there's, there's no victory over one sex. That's a victory of any sense at all. Let me Santa Humanity, of course.
Of course, of
course, there was a recent post on X that I, that just held my gaze. My attention, where it was a back-and-forth debate, a pseudo, political social debate. And then the, there were three words that I'll just say that Marc Andreessen said, you know, it was, it was about restoring.
Vigor pride and achievement and I thought, wow, like he's not political candidate but that's a beautiful Trifecta, Vigor pride and achievement to celebrate those. And I put that next to you know that the Deep pleasure in generative action at a distance, a technological development, the rockets and their other think generate exactly the theme of the story of Abraham. It's like the most
The highest form of potential satiation is risk. Risky romantic adventure.
It's not satiation, like that's the wrong frame, right? And so one of the things I've noticed this is such fun. I've talked in front of, I don't know how many public audiences in the last eight years, independent of my professorial career, and those are large audiences. You know, they must average about three or four thousand people and there's one
Place. I go, that always reduces the audience to like dead silence. The audiences are usually
Quiet in the events in Owen, that's one of the ways. I'm sure you know this you want to listen to the audience, you want to stay in that zone where no one's moving right? Because then you know, you their attention is focused and you can hear that. And you can you can I wouldn't say you can play with it, not manipulative lie, but in the proper sense of play.
I learned a long while ago that Adventure let's say is the highest form of reward, that's a good way of thinking about it but there's a corollary to that that conservatives need to learn because they don't know this conservatives talk about responsibility but their conscientious. And so for them responsibility is dutiful orderly productivity. It's conscientiousness responsibility as a conscientious Duty, what they fail to
Stand, is that there's no difference between responsibility and Adventure. They're the same thing and you can tell young men in particular. That say, look you want to have an adventure because you definitely want an adventure. You're like you're built for that. It will increase your status, it will improve your life. Like it'll improve the probability that you'll accomplish something. You want an adventure, every fiber of your being is screaming for it. Where do you find it?
You find it in the voluntary, adoption of responsibility.
And that's that's like everyone needs to know that. No young person has been taught that for like,
Five generations.
This is important. Can we operationalize this? So in your first book, you talked about get your room in order. Yeah. One of the first things I do, when I wake up in the morning, I look around the kitchen. I look around my room and I try and get things in order. Yeah. And I now I need that in order to be able to think clearly, but it's just the first order of
business. Well, it's also a great Rich. It's a great morning ritual because it's often the case specially. If you have a bit of a depressive tilt that it's kind of hard to get oriented properly in the morning. You know,
No, and if you take like, I moved into a new house, a while back in Northern Ontario, and the garage wasn't set up properly. In the first thing, I did in the morning was, I went out in the garage for 10 minutes and 10 minutes isn't very long, but I would like order one thing, you know, part of the toolbox or whatever and they like, if you do that, Everyday Things fall into order pretty quickly, but it was a real relief to me in some way because I didn't have to think about what I was going to do. When I woke up, I made my bed and
I went and fixed the garage for like 10 minutes
and you get the brain into this into what I call linear operations. Like the ability to carry out something linearly when there's an near infinite number of options in your phone in the, in your, in your physical space. I think is so powerful because
we're making magic the chaos, you're picking a Target. Absolutely. Certainly isn't the simple
sorry you and you know it's not sin to clean your room or to organize your space or the or the garage. So you start with it. So within the day, one can do that in terms of either.
I really love the.
Stickiness, the positive stickiness of this idea that adventure and responsibility are the
same. Well, well, let's let's take that apart because it's not immediately obvious. But look, when you go, let's say, you go see an adventure movie, James Bond movie, you know, classic archetypal, action-adventure movie with some romance thrown in there. What is he doing? Well, difficult things.
We're trying to solve crimes. He's trying to catch bad,
guys. Yeah, he's trying to
Battle with the forces of chaos, that undermine the international order, right? I mean, it's high order adventure and he's putting himself at substantive risk to do that. That's the sacrificial element to it, but everybody's gripped by it. Well why? Because the stakes are high. What does it mean for the stakes to be high? It means the outcome matters. What does that mean? It means it's a life-and-death situation. Like none of that makes itself present without the hoisting of a burden.
And here's something else I figured out so remarkable.
So I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which is the first church. That was First Christian Church that was established and hypothetically. It was established on the location of the crucifixion. Right? And so at the center of the church is an altar and at the center of the altar is the image of this crucifixion, right? Which is a sacrificial image, okay? Crucifixion sacrificial image. Altar church, then around the church.
Is the community and then that becomes the pattern for European towns, right? And all the towns that everyone wants to go visit Europe. Have that pattern? Okay, so why? Well, responsible sacrifice is at the core of the community.
That's what's dramatized in all that in that architecture, in that in that sacred architecture in the actual.
In the, in the structure of the community with its Center. Well, of course, sacrifices the center of the community, obviously, because Community is a sacrificial gesture. Like insofar as you're not all about what you want right now, you're offering up a sacrifice of what it is that you want. Right now to the Future and the community clearly. And that's going to integrate you psychologically. It's going to integrate the society and make it productive. And it's so interesting that we acted
That out for that, proposition out for while the whole at least insofar as you're talking about Christian oriented civilization for the last 2,000 years. Without ever really noticing, that we were dramatizing the proposition. That sacrifice is at the center of the community. It's like, well,
obviously. Well, what are we to make of, you know, cities, like San Francisco, which I grew up just south of and it, you know, by any standard it's a beautiful city. I know people are going to like roll there, some people roll their eyes, I mean, you have the bay on one side
Of the ocean on the other. It has magnificent Bridges. I mean, it's a, it's a testament to what's possible in a city in terms of diverse Landscapes, Etc. But the downtown the center of the city is just beyond anybody sense of indecency to walk down in the in the afternoon hours, let alone at night. So that at this point you wonder like is the center really the center. I mean, you literally have to avoid
Void the center of the city in order to get away from any of that. And it's very yeah.
Well, the crap is it? In some ways? Like, you're asking, what is the nature of the relationship between the the state of society in general? And the fact that the centers of cities have deteriorated? Well those aren't unrelated not in the least. They're very tightly related because the center does not hold right.
Right. What's the famous poem from the 1920s? The center is loosened, right? And mere chaos is around mere chaos and set upon the world, I haven't got the quote precisely right. That was TS Eliot. He knew that when the center pillar, disintegrates that everything falls into chaos, that's one of the oldest realizations of humankind. The question might be, what has caused the degeneration of this of the center? Well,
Man, you can think about that.
The whole culture wars meditation on exactly. That question, you know, there's an insistence on the postmodern side.
It's the postmodernist. They figured out that we see the world through a story. They were right. And that's a devastating blow to the empiricists and the rationalist because they were wrong. We do not build our knowledge in consequence of an aggregation of facts. That's not how it works. And a story is something like the prioritization of the world of facts.
I heard recently that religion teaches through story philosophy teaches through language that is divorced of story.
Yeah. And that science is designed to try and remove itself from language, almost entirely. I mean that you'd love to just present graphs and figures, but you have to explain what's in those right. There's a discussion, there's some conclusions but the idea is that as scientists were supposed to be objective and just interpret the data as they stand. Yeah. Not and to not any more
informed by the fact
did not invent a story, but story is the, the, the way that the brain works, right? I mean, beginning middle end,
it's also the thing.
The story creeps into science it in. What would you say unavoidably? So here, let me give you an example.
So I read a book once that was written by an ex-kgb agent, who talked about a lab in the in the Soviet Union where there had was a dreadful accident at one point, it resulted in the death of about 500 people. They were trying to produce an amalgam of Ebola and smallpox likes and then to aerosolize it goodness. Okay. Now look from a strictly scientific perspective.
Value free. There's no difference between pursuing that branch of knowledge and pursuing any other. Now you say, well, that's preposterous. It's like yet. Yes. But it's Preposterous because we know that
You can have an evil scientist. I mean Jesus, that's the Trope of how many movies is evil scientist at uses evil scientist, as a Trope, like the bad guy is almost always an evil scientist, right? So it's not like, we don't know this. So that science itself which is the value free pursuit of facts can be an evil Enterprise. If you're a good scientist, the story is always lurking in the background. Like why are you conducting your investigation? Well, I want to understand more about
Out the human psyche. Well, why? Well, I want to be of Aid to the human Enterprise. I want to make things better. That's the story I want to pursue truth in a manner that makes things better. That's the story part. Well, you and you might say, well, that's self-evidence. Like, it's only self evident when it's working properly. When it's not working properly things. Get bad quick. So there were scientists in Unit, 731 when the Japanese invaded China. And you cannot read about what they did without without.
Out, traumatizing yourself permanently for the rest of your life, right? What happened with Unit 731? It's the worst human atrocity of ever seen by a lot and that was the scientific Enterprise gone astray. Let's say it has to be encapsulated within a value structure. And the question is, well, what's the appropriate value structure? We're starting to figure that out because, you know, I talked to Richard Dawkins about this a little bit. One of the things that disheartens Dawkins is that
as the humanistic Enterprise, has progressed, and as the atheistic impulse has made itself, more manifest, The Assault on science and logic at the University's has intensified because his notion was, if we could just free yourself from the superstitions of the past, everyone would become like a hybrid between, let's say, Newton and bacon and Descartes, it's like no, it turns out that when you destabilize the underlying story, everybody becomes a narcissistic
Immature psychopath and they don't make good scientists. And like the evidence for that is kind of Stark because I'm sure you've observed, like, I've observed that over the last 20 years, the scientific Enterprise has become a lot less reliable than it was
well, for a number of reasons. I mean, one of the primary ones in my opinion and I'm familiar with the scientific Community is that that that a lot of science is built on lineages and you know who your advisors were and so forth. It relates to funding Etc. And it used to be that
The primary value with within and across lineages was to seek out new territory. I could tell a lot of stories that would take up hours about great advisors telling their students to move into new territories, which sounded like get out of my field. I'm going to demolish you but instead what they were encouraging them to do was to go on let's use your language New Adventures of responsibility Frontier. But instead what's happened is that 95% of the scientists in a given subfield all work on similar problems pin. Medals on each other validate each other.
Find each other. And as a consequence, there are a lot of untouched problems that will hopefully, at Some Day Some Day, be investigated the other consequences that this debacle with in the field of Alzheimer's and Dementia. Where one laboratory fudges data and have you kind of wonder if I mean that's not my subfield. But I, you step back from that, you how the hell does progress for 15 years where everyone was, you know, like it's the emperor has no clothes like everyone agreeing that. This is the stuff to work on when, when in fact, the data were falsified and people new people.
New. So, what that means is that it's like, it's like, bad family values. Passed on through generations. And these I do think these are well-meaning, people along the line. But
yeah. But yes and no. Yes. And right, heart little bit intense on the career formulation side of things. Well
so right the career is to aspect as opposed to the scientist as well. Yeah well I don't exist to well let's
think about let's think about that critically. It's like science is a very weird Endeavor because in order to actually be a scientist you have to
Put discovering that you're wrong before demonstrating that you're right. And that is hard on your career. In the short term, like if you play that game and you're good at it, you can discover something real but that's going to take a while. And it's not certain it's not at all surprising that people would subvert an Enterprise that difficult to the narrow demands of career enhancement. It's exactly what you'd expect unless there was a stunningly powerful.
In force and that force was powerful enough. Let's say from
1552.
1980. So the science worked, but that's a short period of time, and it's only happened once, and we don't know what conditions had to be in place for people to actually, like, seriously, prioritize, the truth seriously, because that's what a serious scientist does. And so, it's not surprising that it would degenerate into something like Dynasty and nepotism. That's exactly what you'd expect. That's the historical Norm. So then you might think, well, what are the preconditions that have to be in place? As
Narrative foundation for there, to be at least some people that are prioritizing the
truth. I think one needs to reward true adventure and Novelty taking on novel problems. And you know, these days, it's so hard for a scientist to birth an entire New Field and yet they're huge, huge sets of untapped problems. The the challenge for them is it's difficult to get funding to take on things that are truly knew. There's a lot of discussion these days about challenges with the NIH Etc. I think that the biggest challenge regardless of the size of the budget which is
You know an issue that needs to be dealt with and where it spent is that we tend to reward science that's already completed that fits with the current narrative and it's very incremental they reward incremental science whereas great science comes through taking great risk and people like you said holding the truth Above All Else and being willing to stake their careers on it and we need to actually reward failure. If it involved effort to solve things correctly in other words, right? Give young scientists funding and encourage them to go after novel problems.
And understand that most of them will fail and that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be exited out of the University. Give them a new novel problem to tackle problem is there's so much pressure and you know because University Professor I know, you know in order to reach tenure you need to you need to reduce the entropy as much as possible in any event without going down that path to too far. I Now understand why you're saying that science in has to invoke story. That makes sense be embedded. That makes sense, that
makes otherwise it, well, it's science.
Is the handmaiden of some story. There's no way around that because motivation is the handmaiden of some story. And so the motivational framework has to be put in place accurately and the motivational framework for scientific inquiries. Very stringent, truth above, all right? So if you state your whole goddamn career on a particular hypothesis, and you run a critical Scotty, and it turns out that the reason you're famous, is invalid, you have to publish that white
The hell would you do that, right? And the answer has to be because you hold the truth in relationship to human flourishing, higher than the Integrity of your own. Even your own self valuation? Well, man, that's a very different. That's a very difficult thing to establish. Now you can do that with young scientist to some degree because you can help them understand that
as a medium to long-term game, there's nothing better than pursuit of the truth. And so that's worth a risk. It's worth the risk because you can be spectacular, Lee successful, if you pursue the truth, it's unlikely. Like it's unlikely to be a successful entrepreneur but if you get it right man, you like you've hit the mother lode, right? And you don't want to falsify your data because you want to spend your whole life pursuing something that doesn't exist because
You will talk yourself into belief that your falsifications are true. And then you'll warp the whole field. As you said, you Illustrated that in relationship to Alzheimer's disease. Like you can instill a love of the truth in in your students but
You have to believe that's a story to you have to believe that the truth will set you free, right? And that's a religious presumption in the final analysis. Serve truth. It's the best long-term strategy, it's the best adventure. That's a good thing to know to the best adventure. So I made a triumvirate of Truth responsibility and Adventure saying they're the same thing and I figured it out with regard to truth too.
Truth is an adventure.
because if you,
Would you say vow to follow the path of the truth? You have to let go of the predictability of the outcome, right now, if I wanted to manipulate you in some way, I would craft my strategy for this podcast a priority and then I would tilt the podcast toward that end, right? And I could be more or less sophisticated that that or I could just say we're going to follow the thread wherever it goes and I'm going to accept outcome and I'm going to presume that the
Is the best outcome that could possibly have been even if I don't see why. Okay, why is that an adventure? Because if I let go of my predetermined goal, I don't know what's going to happen.
And that's exciting. It's right because you don't know. Well, that's the that's the essence of Adventure. It's like you're bounding over the Uncharted see. Let's say and you don't know what's going to happen next. Well why would you exchange that for like a kind of banal predictability? Well, to build your career. Just, I mean, I understand why, but you're forgoing what's truly valuable for something that second rate for something that's secure, that's what Abraham did. It's like, you know, it better to have the adventure.
Why the hell wouldn't you want that? So he
left, what was indulgent? He had everything for what was truly generative in service to something larger and dangerous and dangerous. Like he ends up as a warrior one point, he has to raise an army to rescue his nephew from the hands of tyrants. It's like you know all the adventures of Life get thrown at him but it turns out that that's what he wants.
He wants all the adventures of life to be thrown at him and that is what everyone wants. And I think that is, you know, the idea that when you go watch the Lord of the Rings, for example, or The Hobbit you're seeing,
The characterization of human personality dramatized obviously. Right? That's like a truism but you have to think about what that means is like, The Hobbit is Abraham. It's exactly the same story and that story is the story of the, that's the genuine identity of the individual. And the promise is that if you aim up and you live in the spirit of the truth, you'll have the Redemptive adventure of your life and that'll be of such significance, that it will justify the suffering that sin.
Trinsic to life. And I think that's right. I mean when you look at your own life mean, you're on an adventure you have this podcast, it's ridiculously successful, right? In a way that I'm sure you couldn't have imagined. Well, how long five years ago?
Yeah, we are about to hit the end of four years, in a couple of weeks. We've been we launched in January 2021. No, no premonition. Could have seen this or for I had no concept that it would become what it's
become, right? Okay. And so, what what's the existential?
Want some of that like, you know, I mean everyone's life is Rife with the possibility of suffering and now you have something exciting and generative to do, why is that working? I mean existentially. Why does that work?
You know, people will ask me, what's next? Where you headed? And I was just say you don't like on well, on Friday. I'm talking to Jordan Peter. Yeah, and I'm focused on that all week long. And next week, I'm recording a solo podcast about whatever it happens to be. I just believe that setting my sights on the proxy. Yeah, and
And I just believe in. I know my my deep deep deep love of finding organizing and disseminating information that I hope will be useful to people, okay? So now I did that. That's what guide, that's what was the driving force behind all of it?
Okay, so great. So I would say, I don't think that that Proclamation, I don't think is any different any different from the notion of identity, with the redeeming work. That's the same idea because you said generated
Generating ideas, right information and disseminating it. Right. So that's like it's valid inquiry and and dissemination of the consequences, okay. Your claim is that, that's highly intrinsically motivating. Oh yeah, right. Okay. So
then my delight I Delight in it. I it's hard sometimes. I mean, it's I was trying to read a really difficult paper yesterday. It's hard, but it feels so
good. Okay, so then we might say, well, what's what's the basis for that? Intrinsic? Pleasure. We think about that biologically.
well, you can imagine it as a manifestation of the
Instinct that integrates, right? It integrates you cross time. It integrates you, with other people across time, right? And there's a marker for that, why wouldn't you find your, how could it be otherwise than you would find? Your deepest satisfaction in pursuing, the course of action that integrates you psychologically, and integrates other people socially? Like, that would assume that there's a concordance, between your deepest self interest and the interest of your society and it better be
Way. Because otherwise you couldn't Thrive as an individual in society. So better be that way. And we've been doing this for a very long time as human being. So why we wouldn't have an instinct to mark that pathway and of course we'd find our deepest satisfaction in that mean. Once the, once you see these issues through that light, they become, I think painfully obvious. So because the also, because the contrary hypothesis is observed, it's like you're going to find deep sky.
Satisfaction what rejecting knowledge. And if you do happen to stumble across a nugget, you're going to hoard it for yourself, right? Well, right, right, exactly, it's laughable, it's clearly laughable. No, One Believes
that earlier, we're talking about operationalizing, this, the effort the calling to move from potential chaos, to order starts with organizing ones physical space. We were to, you know, extend the rings of the bowl.
I out a little bit further for people listening who are trying to figure out like, where do they receive that calling? How do they find that? They're calling that they wear so responsibility and Adventure being perhaps the the compass through which we can you know, like navigate there. So they think like well where can they grab ahold of their responsibilities? And yeah, and then, as a consequence of doing that and engage in adventure and have an impact that is
Good for them and good for the world. That's not how do they find
that? I think there's there's very practical answers to those questions. So, two of the most
two of the highest order characterizations of the Divine in the biblical library is calling and conscience. And you could think about those, you could think about those as integrated manifestations of positive and negative emotion.
So imagine there's a pathway forward to your aim. Okay, your negative emotion tells you when you deviate from the pathway and your positive emotion tells you when you're progressing along the pathway, okay? Now imagine that there's a voice of your integrated positive emotion and there's a voice of your integrated negative emotion calling. That's what fills you with enthusiasm and that route were to, that is fails right, Dale's? That's God calling conscience. Okay, so now that beckons
Forward. So how do you find that some things bother you?
Those are your problems and you might think, I don't want to have any problems, like know, you've got some problems, you can tell that because those things bug you, that's your conscience. Calling you to your destiny. Those problems. Okay. Calling. There's some things that interest you.
Right? And you don't get to pick them. Exactly. They just sort of make themselves manifest like the burning bush did to Moses, because that's an example. That's the symbolic representation of calling. It's the dynamic ISM between calling and conscience that orient's people upwards, right? That's the pillar of flame and the pillar of Darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert when they're lost calling, beckons conscience provides disciplinary limitations. That's a good way of thinking about it so you can see that some things are good.
And you ask yourself what bothers me about me.
Okay. Now you have a domain, you think? Well man, some of those things I just, I don't know how to fix them. Fine, don't fix them. Fix some of the things you could fix. That's that. We talked about that or make your goddamn bed in the morning. Like you could do that and it's like you see people their lives are so chaotic like they're their living environment every single bit of it is a catastrophic mess sometimes, multiple Generations deep. It's just chaos everywhere. So like where do
Start dealing with chaos, wherever you can put something in order by your own standards of order, and then see what happens. Because what'll happen is now you got a little, let a little corner of order and now your little more, well, situated. And then you'll be able to see what the next, what's the next step? And you might think, well, it looks hopeless because there's just chaos everywhere. It's like, that's okay. Because the process is exponential. So, even if you start nowhere,
If you keep doubling, you're going to get somewhere and faster than you think. And well, the same thing applies, when you're plummeting into the
abyss of the degenerative stuff. A colleague of mine who says it, he's geneticist said, you know, it takes many, many, many generations to evolve a species. It doesn't take very many to devolve us. Yes, he's mutation - mutations can build on another in Crash. A species. Very, very fast. I think our psyche is similar in that
way. Well that's an intro pick problem. There's way more.
Is to make something complex worse than there are to make it better, right? That's why. It's a straight and narrow
path. My father came to this country from Argentina and he grew up in a lot of surrounded by a lot of political chaos. Came to the country became a physicist, probably because he likes order, he's very orderly guy and it was probably in the early 90s that we went. I was born in 75, so, probably early 90s that we went to a movie theater together. See a movie and he said it as we were walking in.
He said, look and I said what he said, this is the beginning of the end and I said, what do you me? And he said, we're degenerating as a society and I said why, and he said, there are people here in their pajamas, right? And obviously, they weren't in their pajamas, but they come in and kind of like bath, you know, bathroom slippers and they like, they weren't slovenly, but they weren't taking care of themselves. Clearly worse worse. They didn't care what other people thought rights, right? They were
making a public display of their lack of care, right? Right, right. Yeah exactly.
So narcissistic aspect to that too. Yeah yeah. He's right about that.
Yeah. I thought of the time like he's being judged. Yeah I was a teen, right? He's being judgmental Etc and but you know I would say from 1990 until fairly recently. Hopefully things are shifting for the better now but there has seemed to be its kind of chaos out there. Now I think it's wonderful that people can express themselves by wearing clothes that they feel represent them Etc, but this wasn't that this was a lack of care.
Listen, voluntary the
The what would you say? The evocation of voluntary chaos, that's one thing. The degeneration into chaos through sloth. Let's say that's not an adventure. That's carelessness in all things masquerading as an adventure. I'm so cool. I don't care. It's like you're not cool. You're just useless and you're covering your uselessness with a veneer of revolutionary morality. It's like there's nothing in that that's up, like, if people want to deviate in the manner, they
Present themselves in dress, and they're doing that because they have a inspiration or a purpose, then that's completely different than just being so cool, you don't care. And that's not cool. There's nothing about that, that school. And, you know, you might say and you had this sense when you were a kid that your dad was overreacting. It's like, yeah. Well.
If you look, you can see things before other people, see them. And he and he came from a place that had gone through a fair number of very rough times, and so he could have been perfectly accurate and what he saw, highly likely that's another example of the center disintegrating, right,
where do you think we are now in in the United States? I think in terms of how we represent hold and represent order versus
Chaos. I mean we were talking about some of the, you know, this the social media post recently, we just had a public discussion about public display of an assassination, maybe, you know, I hadn't intended on going there but I think it's worth talking about. It was weird. I got pulled into this through tangential reasons. This Luigi Mangione last tweet was a podcast cover of my episode with Jonathan haidt and some media Outlets try to make something of that, you know but clearly he was
Very smart. Clearly he had for thought to his actions. He 3D printed this gum gun. It seems, it is all alleged now, but it seems to be pointing in that direction. He seems to not want the police to go investigate. Anybody else, you know? Because he claims there's no one else acting with him. And Sarah, he clearly was trying to make a statement. But the statement was, it was a combination of statements about the, the insurance system, sort of anti-establishment because of his affinity for Kaczynski. The Unabomber bomb.
Things. But at the same time, he he didn't really seem to fall into kind of left-leaning or right-leaning politics squarely. He was kind of all over the place, so you're a trained clinician. You think there's some schizotypal or schizophrenic type organization there in his head or lack of organization. I've been what are we to make of this? And we and we had to see think somebody assassinated front shot in the back, he has multiple.
Yes I would be looking for is pathological narcissism
alright, disordered thought
Possibly, but he was quite successful. Academically, like the typical pattern for something like schizophrenic. Dissolution is very, very much difficulty in maintaining so disciplined striving in a highly intellectual
atmosphere, is a valedictory anyway. Yeah, school graduate. I
think more luciferian grandiosity and the intellect is particularly prone to that, you know, the the the, the archetypal representation of the intellect and overreach
Has is Lucifer, right? Gods had God's highest Angel gone, most catastrophically wrong, which means that the best thing in its place is the worst thing on the top. That happens with sexuality. It can happen with aggression. It certainly happens with the intellect. And so I think he's a worshipper of his own intellect and believe that he was the guy who could make the decision even of life and death, which means he took on to himself the role of ultimate judge. And that's what the kid who showed up Columbine.
To and said, in his own writings, he's the judge and that's like, narcissistic Beyond Comprehension and the fact that he's being celebrated. Well, that's an echo of that. Moralizing narcissism, that's deeply embedded in our culture, deeply embedded. And so it's in a very ugly, it's very ugly. I see. So, we're going to what? We're now vigilantes in relationship to the corporate world judge jury and executioner. And the reason
We've taken on that role as because we unlike let's say the people who Run Healthcare Enterprises, we truly care for the sick and oppressed it's like, do you know, do you know? Yeah, there's so much moralizing in our culture, it's beyond, its really beyond
belief and they say all these CEOs. Now, we're going to need personal security that's hardly going to, you know, cause them to adjust their, you know, premiums or something downward. I mean, I think as people get more scared, they tend to, you know, just or up double. Yeah. They tend to do.
All down. I mean earlier we were talking about action at a distance. I mean, clearly, this Mangione guy had is where action in that high status. So ignored her notorious, there's a hard choice for young man. They'll pick notorious many of them will and no wonder because
Status is everything
that's hard to do. Good things over long periods of time, right? It's hard to be good. It's just hard to do. It's hard to do. Good things. It's hard to do big things. I mean, I think that's one reason why I'm very happy that Elon is being celebrated. You don't have to agree with him politically, but the Rockets going the idea of going to Mars, trying to make sure that our species replaces itself. I mean these are Big important Endeavors. I mean, I, the reason
he can clearly do them.
Em. I mean he's
neural link.
Insanely successful doing five impossible, things simultaneously. Right? That's not fluke no right. Once.
Probably not fluke, even once but, you know, the probability that it's fluke, once is higher five times. No, that's that's the reputation, right? And so and he's a, he's a from first principles sort of guy. So yeah, I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk. So and that is independent of his political stance, and is it difficult to do good things?
It's hard. It's hard, it's hard. It's hard to do long-term good things because it's their long-term. That's what I was
trying to write, but it's also intensely. The thing is, it's also this is that back to that issue of
the relationship between responsibility
and Adventure. It's like if the aim is true, the voyage is worthwhile
And so and that happens right away. Like you know, you're very successful with your podcast but my suspicions, are you deeply enjoyed it since its onset. Well, so, so well, that means that some of your pleasure is satiation related, you've become successful, but if that was your aim, you would have failed as a podcaster
because definitely hard to definitely would have
failed definitely. Oh absolutely
100%. It wasn't the pursuit of pleasure per se. It's sort of
like the difference between, you know, is he easier to be the class clown or the top of the class. It's just much easier to be the class, clown. All you have to do is crack ten jokes. One of them hits, you know, and you're safe. But you're actually dissolving as you
go. Right. Right. Right. Well, that's the prioritization of the short term over the long run. I mean Rogen's are perfectly appropriate example because he's sort of like the archetype of the successful podcasters, like what's Joe doing? Well, he's doing what he's always done.
He sits down with his producer, one guy. And he talks to people, he wants to talk to you about things. He wants to talk to them about. That's the whole thing, the whole, and it's, you know, the left, the lefties, who refuse to talk to people in the podcast world for ten years are now, proclaiming to everyone who will listen that they should have built their own, you know, alternative, media apparatus, and they could have participated in the one that exists. Now, at any time had they shown the least
Proclivity to do. So how it's not such an easy thing to build because it wasn't something that you'll build. It was something that happened around them in consequence of the nature of his Pursuit and that's the case for virtually all the successful
podcasters, I think people forget how Joe's podcast started do, you might know this story, I'll keep it brief but he was a comedian at The Comedy Store. He had done some television and things of that sort but and
You can find this online. The videos are on YouTube where a comedian was stealing Ari, shaffir is chokes. So Joe got up on stage and said, there's a, there's a, there's some ethics in the comedy community. People can buy jokes, but you don't steal jokes apparently, and there's an etiquette as well. So apparently he confronted this guy in front of the audience and said, you're stealing his chokes and the guy challenged him and Joe said no, like Joe was stood up in the name of Justice.
Us for a friend of his and my understanding could be wrong about this. But my understanding is that Joe was then banished from that particular Comedy Club. So what did he do? He went home, he popped open his laptop and he and Brian Redman and a few other folks started what eventually became the Joe Rogan podcast. It came out of a an Impulse to stand up for the truth. Hmm. Which I think is an important thing for people to understand because it helps you understand Joe.
I need an area than that. Yeah,
yeah. And I think that that's cheap. Yeah. And you know, he doesn't claim to always be right. But his his pursuit of the truth has been a driving force for the Pod claims
consistently to not be sufficiently, right? That's why he listens and asks questions, you don't ask genuine questions if you believe that you already know everything, you only ask real questions. If you don't think that, you know, enough and Joe wouldn't
be perennially attractive to his audiences. If he wasn't asking the same questions that the audience would like to have answered,
right? He's genuinely curious.
Absolutely, I mean, you said musk himself said, you know, he wouldn't when I interviewed him. He talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was 13, 14, which is not a typical of, you know, outs people with outstanding. Intellects, let's say and he resolved that
By recognizing that the quest is the source of meaning. And so he took it upon himself to confront difficult problems and try to solve them and he found that to be sufficiently gratifying. So his existential crisis resolved itself and that's very much the same pattern that Rogen is exemplifying in you in your Pursuits and you can see what impact that has on the public, you know and
We were, I was talking with one of your staff members before this podcast about your lectures, say in Australia. And so you're in the weird position where 5,000 people come and listen to a biologist lecture spontaneously for what 90 minutes, like, what the hell? Well, that's just an indication of how compelled people are buy anything approximating. A genuine Quest doesn't even matter the direction, right? It matters the commitment and that capacity to explore.
And transmitted, and that is a manifestation of the word that redeems.
I love this idea or what you just said that, it doesn't even. So Matt so much matter, the direction as much as the commitment. A colleague of mine at Stanford who I respect, tremendously on a Lemke. Who wrote the book? Dopamine Nation. She's the head of our dual diagnosis Addiction Center. She was the one who really truly deserves credit for bringing, dopamine into the public discussion over the last few years, she initiated that talking about how big inflections and dopamine that are very fast that aren't preceded by effort. AKA drugs, of abuse behavioral addictions at
Leave us below Baseline with our dopamine and then people will engage in more of the behavior and drives us further, and further and further, that's kind of the principle of it. I was talking to her about how people get sober and the conversation turned to how do young people find their purpose. It was an inch is very interesting. She said, let's talk about finding purpose. Everyone nowadays wants to know what their purpose is. She said, the way you find your purpose is by going out on your front lawn and seeing if the leaves need to be raked sounds familiar, right?
Right, you find Purpose By figuring out how you can be of use at progressively larger and larger spheres away from yourself and in doing that present and in doing that, you start to hear the calling and you find your purpose and it as you said right now reveals itself it reveals
the same thing, right?
Yeah, so I think you two would be enjoy a conversation at some.
Well with this realignment thing to return to because people are often curious about what to do practically. It's like okay first
This is what Jacob does. Jacob in the Old Testament stories. He eventually becomes Israel, right? And so, that's his name. And Israel means we who wrestled with God. Now, Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts and he leaves his home and the perverse influence of his mother and his criminal betraying past behind. And he decides that he's going to aim up and that night,
He makes an alternate, he makes a sacrifice and that night, he has a dream of a staircase that reaches up to heaven, which is now what he's walking up, right? And so he finds his his purpose. He finds his Adventure as a consequence of his decision to be better. Okay, so now you want to find your purpose, okay? First thing you have to do you have to review, how wretched and miserable.
You actually are and you have to face that. And then you have to think, I'd rather not have that and it has to be true and then you have to aim up. Now, you don't know what that means because like, you're pretty scattered and dissolute but at least you got the damn intent in mind and then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices right along the way. Okay then what happens. Well, then the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments, calling is there
Around here that I could fix that. I would fix. That's a great question. Is there something at hand that I could fix that? I would fix it might be something low because especially when you first get going, you're not good for anything. So you might have to start with some pretty trivial, but it doesn't matter because you start getting better. Is there something that bothers me that's conscience that I could set right in some small way? Well, that's there for everyone, right in the midst of the most catastrophic mess that pathway.
And you might even say look The More Mess Around you, the more unstructured possibility you have it have and it's true. You know it's like I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this, I know how difficult that is, but it is the case that the more mess at hand that you can see the more opportunity that's there because well if you can see that, it's a mess.
Then you can see the pathway to, to cleaning it up. Well, so do it, do it. See what happens. That's the adventure. What's going to happen in my class? My maps of meaning class, I used to have students do this as a project and one of the projects was find something around you in your neighborhood wherever in your family that isn't set, right? And see if you could set it right? Just write down what happens. Well,
One student in particular, he decided his mother had died in the family, kind of fragmented. And so, he decided he would take try to take on the role of mother, you know, be responsible for the household operating. Well, it grew em up like mad as you can imagine, he ran into all sorts of weird resistances, right? Because his family was upset that he was doing what mom used to do and like he just had a tremendously complex Adventure as a consequence of his willingness to pursue. This was all
obviously necessary, because the alternative was that his family was going to fall apart. It's like, that's there for everyone. You say, well, my circumstances are so difficult like fair enough. So are everybody else's by the way, but that means there's a lot of mass fix it a bit, and that's ridiculously entertaining, and unpredictable, and that in itself is a great deal. You have no idea what's going to happen, just like you didn't know what happen when you started the podcast. Why did you start it?
I had add
For me, I felt a compulsion to share what I knew but because during the pandemic everyone was so focused on vaccines and lockdowns that no one was talking about the reality that everyone was facing including sorry Josh Gordon, I know him through time, our director of the National Institutes of mental health, not a single thing out there about. Hey folks, if you're going to be indoors this much, get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning or else you're gonna have trouble sleeping troubl.
I was sleeping equates to mental health issues stress uncertainty, my lab was working on ways to regulate stress through deliberate breathing through other mechanisms. It was like, well, I want people to have tools, zero-cost tools to deal with their stress, to help them regulate their circadian biology. Because those Wick out to countering the negative forces that were on us, which our social order was disrupted. People are at home. So it was a desire to give people tools that I knew existed that I was knowledgeable about, and
Had a long-standing kind of and growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about Neuroscience because it's so darn cool, right? Okay. So, it's a
lot of that was that there was, there was a lot of energy
behind that the mission was. Then there was a calling, the calling was from hearing about people suffering. It's like, well, of course, you're not sleeping. Well, I mean, not only are there a million things to worry about right now, people aren't working at cetera, but you're not getting sunlight in your eyes, you need to get outside, you need to, you know, and then there's the whole socialization thing. And whatever people circumstances, there are things that they could do.
And so, I felt that calling and my conscience told me that I have the knowledge. So, why would, why would I Cloister Cloister with it at home? That's like, what good is that? So I just started blabbing on the internet, right? Right. That's why.
Yeah. Well, that's a, that's a perfectly, you know, you can think, well, that's a logical extension of your subsidiary, calling to be a teacher and a professor, you're already a researcher, you're already Professor. So, you're investigating and transmitting knowledge. Slyke well, looks like you could do that.
A broader scale and the technology is there, why not explore that? That's a perfectly reasonable and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience there, that's a lovely way of characterizing. The voice of the Divine, which is, is how its characterized repeated Elijah. Elijah is the prophet who is appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount, in the New Testament. It's Elijah and Moses. Elijah is the first person in human history who identify as the Divine with conscience. That's his contribution. That's how
A major psychological Revolution, right? It's a unheralded transformation in understanding. It's like, it's not the storm, it's not the forest fire, it's not the earthquake. It's not the god of nature. He's the originator of the phrase, the still Small Voice rights. Like that's a that the notion that your conscience is the voice of the Divine. My God. There's there's there's virtually no disc do Discovery. There's no proposition more.
Evolutionary than that. And so that's why Allah, jie is a profit of, you know, primary status. And I just see no reason at all, not to take that claim, seriously. It's like you come up with an explanation for your conscience, it tells you things, you don't want to hear. So how is that? You mean, you have to gerrymander the definition of you for that to be?
You know, I absolutely believe that things come from outside of us. Certainly for me and I, you know, I I'm now very much.
A devotee of prayer. I pray before this podcast. What do you pray? Well, before this podcast, I prayed for clarity of mind to be able to, to learn from you and to help transmit that knowledge out to people in a way that would be useful to them. Yeah, two for sustained. Focus for for the ability to also let go and write and not, try and control or lead with questions for ya. And to, and to allow
How the the sense of Randomness and Serendipity to make it, what it what it is in trusting that it's in service to the the
listeners. Right? Well that's just very, that's a very precise and properly formulated
prayer. Yeah, I pray before every podcast, I pray before going to sleep eat. And I've been doing this for about for a little over a year, I always quietly why she why did you decide to do that? My coming to the whole notion of prayer and God Etc was
Complicated in the backdrop, in the sense that I always secretly prayed, always secretly secretly prayed and then about a year about a year and a half ago, a guy that works on my security team started talking to me about the Bible. We started talking about God and it made sense. I started reading the Bible. I'm not through it yet, and I started praying. And I had a number of experiences as a consequence of praying, clearly, as a consequence of
Of prayer that made me realize that prayer doesn't give me a capacity of any sort. It just allows certain things that I believe are inside of me to come out and for proper prayer. Establishes aim. Yeah, that's right. Oh yeah, that's right.
Well, why wouldn't you establish your aim? Like why wouldn't you take a moment before you start your podcast? To remember, what the hell you're trying to accomplish and they have it firmly in mind? Yeah. And it felt
different. So I should say that, you know,
no, I have this little list that I sometimes, you all say, you know, deliberate breathing, AK breathwork can allow you to shift your state. Hypnosis is a tool that can allow you to solve a particular problem because it has some, you know, aspect of neuroplasticity can their non sleep deep rest, which is a thing that it was, you know, built out of this. This practice called Yoga Nidra where you go into a, an awake but deeply relaxed state allows you to restore your Vigor meditation. To me is a way of enhancing one's ability to focus. You know, third eye meditation of considering it
That cetera. I mean we know based on the data improves Focus prayer to me is entirely different than all of those. There's some overlap they they look similar some of them look similar from the outside but prayers the the for me is the allowing of something from truly outside me to come through me and bring out the best in me. And that's why I pray for for things. I pray for Ability, I pray for other people, and I also have learned that
A powerful aspect of prayer is just listening because just stopping and listening and trying to invite in or allow in messages that if I didn't still myself that I wouldn't hear and sometimes I'll go to sleep. And then the next morning, something will right, right? It's not always immediate. I
don't know if there's any real difference between that Revelation. So imagine that.
What speaks to you and intuition is the voice of your aim.
Now this this would be this would be true if your thoughts and the images that appear to you are tools. So to speak to orient. You towards your destination? Well, obviously they have to be that because if your thoughts and your Visions, let's say didn't Orient you towards your destination, they would be useless and you'd never get anywhere. Okay, so now you specify your aim and it is the voice of that aim that will make itself.
That you that is what a revelation is. And one of these days when we have a podcast, I'd like to sit down and talk to you about the relationship. The formal relationship between thought and prayer because I think thought is secularized prayer. I mean, looked at its historic because like, when did we start to think that that's not so obvious, you know? I mean, we started to think in words after we develop the ability to use language, what's that 150,000 years? Maybe it's longer.
Now no one really knows but thought has its historical Origins. The probability that he emerged from something like prayer as far as I can tell is 100%. But I'd like to, at some point. It's complicated. But I like to have a discussion with you about that. So imagine that to have it in to have an informative. Intuition means that you pause it a question, like, and that's a form of humility. It's like, there's something I need to know that. I don't know that.
Ooh, I could know that. I'd like to know it's like, so you set the stage? Well, once you set the stage, the probability, that a creative idea, will enter the theater of your imagination is much enhanced, that's the first stage of Revelation. Then you have to assess that that's discriminating, the spirits, you might say you separating the wheat from the chaff that's critical thinking, but all of that is far as I can tell is something approximating secularized prayer.
Set your aim, then observe the manifestation of that aim not. It's not it's not even magical, it's how your perception works. Now, there's a magic to it because I suppose the magic is that you can think up something you never thought of before. How the hell do you do that? It's more like you experience it right? You set your aim, you have a question so you're on your knees hoping for an answer.
The light bulb goes on, well, if that's not Revelation, and what the hell is it? It's the same thing,
having spent a good portion of my career digging around in brains recording from neurons, slicing up brain staining brains and from my understanding of what of Neuroscience and I think by now in 2020, almost 2025, we have a fairly good understanding of what different brain areas do. How different circuits interact, I don't see how anyone who's really interested.
Rested in how humans work can not believe in God. And I'm not being disparaging of people that don't, I know people that are atheists, I have some in my family and I just don't think that the human brain and mind is capable of understanding and managing itself as well as it possibly could. In the absence of
A concept of God and prayer and I think there's a lot of historical evidence to support that statement, meaning that this notion of God has been around a very long time. This is not a coincidence, I mean, humans have discarded. Many of the things that you know, other people perhaps came up with this has been a stable feature of Being Human for a very long time of societies, for a very long time and I've been wanting to ask you throughout today's conversation to what extent do you think?
The different religions and the way that they represent God differently or in the case of Christianity, God and Jesus Christ.
To what extent do you think that the stories and the lessons and the teachings overlap at the level that we're talking about today, which is really about a psychological in neuro scientific level seems to me that they all Converge on the same themes. But I'm not, you know, I'm somewhat of a newbie to all to formal prayer and to reading the Bible and so on. So I like to say, you know, I have I haven't got my jersey yet because I don't deserve it, but I'm putting in I'm showing up to
Practice, you know, this kind of thing. So I'm just curious to what extent you see consistent themes, across religions and maybe even to atheism, to like atheism. It's been argued as its own form of religion, perhaps, right. And for anyone listening, I mean I want to make clear like the, there's I don't have any pushback on atheism, it's just that for me adopting. It really coming to terms with a real belief in God and adopting a prayer practice every single night.
And also during the day many times and always before a podcast has been just tremendously beneficial to my life. So that's why I'm going to continue to do it. Hmm, why wouldn't I? But that's the question to what extent do different the way different religions represent. God think across religions Converge on common themes.
Well I think they converge substantively I mean I think the best I talk to Camille Paglia about this a few years ago.
Maybe she's she's one of the world's foremost literary theorists. And she said something very interesting to me that was quite surprising. She said that had the academy turned to Eric Newman who is Young's greatest student. By the way, instead of Foucault, the whole history of the university and the intellectual Enterprise over the last five, decades would have been entirely different. What happened with Foucault? Well, Foucault is the most cited. Cited scholar who ever lived.
And Foucault believes that the story that we act out is one of power, and that's wrong it. And it's not just wrong, it's like perversely and dangerously wrong. I think it's technically wrong as well as being ethically wrong partly because power does not provide a stable basis for psychological integration or social Unity. It's just it's not. It power, might be more effective adaptively than capitulation and dependents.
But it's not an optimized solution, not by any stretch of the imagination. And I think the data demonstrating that, I think it's incontrovertible and I outline that in this book, we were wrestling with God, Eric Neumann Carl Jung Miceli. A de a host of others outlined the patterns of religious thinking, and it took the most of the 20th century to do that, and they found recurring themes.
That are profound. So what one example, the ancient Egyptians worshipped, the god Horus, everyone knows the god Horus because the his emblem is the I the Open Eye. Well, what does that mean? But means in part that the ancient Egyptians worshipped attention,
And they felt that the god of attention, was the antidote to the pathological state.
And they were right about that. They had a god of the pathological state. That was Seth, that God says the name. Seth became Satan through the Coptic, through the Coptic Christians. So they believe that the degenerate state had a spirit and the antidote to the spirit of the degenerate state was the all seeing
The All-Seeing upward striving I and that's right. It's like they nailed. That sounds like what you were. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well I've
set your sights where yes exactly high and to the to the heavens and then to the most proximal thing that's going to deliver you to the next,
right wrong. Well, and there's a difference between attention and thinking like attention is a quest, if you're paying attention, you're looking, you're seeking your knocking, you're asking right, and the
The Eternal promise is that if you ask you'll be answered and if you seek you'll find and it's the eye is the gateway to that and it's the antidote to the degenerate State. Because the degenerate State the totalitarian state insists and tyrannize has and the Open Eye seeks while the Egyptians figured this out and they Egyptian theology had a walloping impact on Jewish theology. I mean, the Jews came out of Egypt like there.
Our concept that that's a conception there are consequences of that conceptually as well as historically that the hair, the pattern of the hero's journey. That's replicated, I would say that's the central pattern of story per se and that makes itself manifest in perhaps all cultures that have managed any unity in any progress whatsoever is there a hierarchy of religious truth?
Yes, in just as there's a hierarchy in literary depth. We understand that a dime-store romance is not as profound as a Dostoyevsky novel. We know there's a hierarchy of depth and you can arrange religious apprehension in terms of hierarchy of quality and I think the union school did that brilliantly brilliantly and biologists should know it far more depth the best.
Neuroscientist of emotion and motivation that I knew and that include jaak panksepp. They knew the the work of a lie at it. For
example, which of those readings would you recommend for somebody who's interested in Psychology and Neuroscience explained at that
level? I would start with the sacred and the profane by Iliad and also
Eric northman's book, the origins and history of Consciousness. That's a harder one because it's unless, you know, the lingo of that school, it's hard to. It's hard to understand what he's aiming at. If you understand that he's aiming at, he's he's
Elaborating on the symbolism of The Adventurous Spirit. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's a technical analysis of the structure of heroic expansion of personality but it's an easier way in is through illiad sacred and the profane short book, you could, you would read it now knowing that the gods that Iliad he described as Waring in the Pagan world are in part manifestations of the personality of motivation.
Drive and the mapping of that war across times. That's the war of the Gods in heaven, which is a very common mythological Trope. There's a war that integrates towards a monotheism and Iliad attract out in multiple cultures and that's very it's very much worth knowing because it explains it explains the symbolism of the emergence of the integrated literate human psyche across tens of thousands of years. That's captured in story.
Why? So, imagine this, here's a way of thinking about it. So tribe A Tribe, be tribe. See now they all have their highest deity or their panoply of Daddy's. Now they unite, okay, so as they unite they fight, they compete and they cooperate, they kill each other, they cooperate and trade at the same time that's happening. There's a war in the space of ideas between their respective daddies
And you can think about the human beings acting out that war just as you can think about the war, the abstraction reflecting the conflict on Earth. Well, there's a pattern to that conflict. That pattern is quite stable across, cultures it tilts towards a monotheistic unity in so far as the multiplicity of cultures unifies. Well, obviously like what are they going to unify with in the absence of conceptual Unity? I don't think so. And why wouldn't it be that the movement towards that?
Conceptual Unity, which is the establishment of a larger scale civilization would involve the battle between ideas of the Divine and their integration into something resembling a Unity like clearly well that's part of the Proclamation. Let's say of the analytic psychologist that we're all part of Carl Jung school, and the academy just ignored that entirely except for Camille Paglia, who understands this quite profoundly and went in the direction of
Foucault. The
Are these lineages that we were talking about before? It's hard for people to appreciate just how powerful these academic lineages are and scientific. Lineages are because they set trajectories I've
been and they Define what's forbidden, all my all the people that advise me as a graduate student, even those who had my best interest firmly in mind told me to never talk about my interest in Union psychology and
really. Yeah, sorry I'm laughing because it's so
Preposterous. Yeah. Well, I like it it's not surprising. I mean,
and I always did when I went for job interviews and that definitely was part of what scheduled that me at some of the places. I interviewed. Now, fortunately, they hired me at Harvard and so,
I was what I was discussing was verboten in many places but not there. So you know, that worked out quite
nicely as they clearly it worked out. Yes. I've been meaning to ask you. I've been reading it. A really interesting book recently. That's basically grounded in adlerian Psychology. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that Larry and psychology. Yeah. Adler's very practical. The book talks about Adler as a, as a Counterpoint to Freud and Jung. What's the book? The book is called the courage to be
It's liked and I highly recommend it to everybody. It was actually written by a Japanese author. I think they're two Japanese authors, it didn't get quite so popular in this country. But it had a big following in Japan and I think in other places and in Asia and the book is, is set up as a conversation between essentially a philosopher at of adlerian psychology and a student who's challenging him. So it's a conversation that raises all the, all the challenges that one that would come to one's mind. If you were to
be presented with this idea of Life tasks and that we're supposed to discard with our thoughts about prior trauma and just figure out what are our tasks now, right? And I like the practicality of address very practical. Yeah, I like the house, just curious what your thoughts were about, that. It seems to fit quite well with your Notions, and what you've talked about in multiple books. Including the most recent one, the one that's out now about getting really serious about what your tasks are at this moment in time and embracing those tasks as a way to progress.
For yes, as opposed to floundering in Notions about the past and I think it might, it might hit some people Square upside the head. When the when there's I think that one of the chapters opens with the words, there's no such thing as trauma, which is clearly not true. But the whole idea is to prompt a different way of thinking and to let people start to drill into, okay, what do I need to do now? Regardless of what my parents did or didn't do myself, right regardless of my damn self and I must say, I really like the book
Well, I would say, well, I should say, I really like, I should say, I really like the concept of embracing task while agonizing over the meaning of life and what one is to do. Yes,
well Adler was the most practical of the small crowd that aggregated around Freud. And so Young's take was that Freud focused on sex and Adler focused on Power and young focused on what transcended both. And I think that's right now. Adler is a good repost
Right in exactly the way you described. If you like that book and you're interested in all three of them, let's say there's a great book called discovery of the unconscious which was written by a man named Henry Ellenberger. Who was the foremost exponent of existential psychology in the 1950s. Brilliant, brilliant scholar and it is the best analysis of Freud, Jung. Addler that's ever been written by a lot and it's a truly great book. He also traces the idea of the unconscious back
And fifty years before Freud, so it's a masterful study but I liked Adler and he was much less charismatic than Freud and Jung. And so his star didn't shine as brightly, but he's very practically oriented and much of his thinking. Would, what would you say fits quite nicely with a bottom with the same kind of bottom-up approach that a more behaviorally oriented psychotherapist, would employ? So, look, it's, it's, it's, there are some people
If you're, if you're engaging in a therapeutic process, with someone, there are people who are best engaged with at the level of concept. Those are people are high in trait, openness not, everyone's like that. In fact, most people aren't like that Union, psychology works really well on highly creative people. And almost all Young's clients were creative because they wouldn't have come to him, otherwise, and there's also people for whom sexual.
Dysfunction and Trauma are the primary.
What would you say the primary? Preoccupation of their life and the past and Freud serves them. Well Adler's very practical and if you're looking for a psychologist to help you,
Figure out how you could advance from where you are now. He's, he's got plenty of things to say that are good. He also wasn't as good, a literary stylist as young, you more Freud Nestle. That also put him off to the side, to some degree. But anyways, a deeper investigations can certainly be found in discovery of the unconscious and it for anybody listening and watching who's interested in psychological ideas, broadly, and would like familiarity with the psychoanalytic tradition, Freud, Jung. And, and
Let's say primary there is not a better book than discovery of the unconscious. It's really a work of Genius.
You know, what's missing from the literature. Thank you for those. By the way, is a really excellent up-to-date book on neuroscience and the mind and psychology, perhaps, we write one
together. Yeah, yeah. Well that's that's
when it's just not out there. I mean their textbooks on Neuroscience. There's some there's a lot of discussion as you know about Free Will lack of Free Will depending on which author your attention to. But there isn't really a satisfactory book about
About the brain, the mind and psychology is that it doesn't
exist. You have a closest one I ever encountered probably is a affective Neuroscience panksepp
book. He's I'm So I must say you've mentioned tanks up a few times and jaak panksepp. Some of you may know but perhaps most of you don't has was such a gift to science and the fact that I think the first time I heard you lecture in one of your YouTube lectures, you mentioned jaak panksepp when I thought, okay? Like this guy knows his nose, the good stuff because he was the first one.
Talk
about juvenile play as a way of exploring circuitry and social dynamics
such and that fit, by the way, that fit perfectly with Piaget's observations of childhood socialization is like I came across panksepp. And I thought, oh, that's so cool. Now, we have the psychophysiological basis for Piaget and developmental theory was perfect. So that was that was lovely. Concordance.
Young said, would have been far more recognized, howdy bit. He was at Bowling Green University. I
I think and so smaller University, perhaps, I don't know, I didn't ever hear a lecture and maybe not as charismatic as some of the other luminaries of neuroscience at that time. But yeah, I
don't know how it was is a lecturer. He's a great writer. And man, he had an unerring eye for the right problems in terms of psychological investigation, and very brave in that regard. I mean he studied laughter in rats and you think of all the observed things to focus on? It's like, no, you just don't understand where the gold is or play among rats. Who
Who cares that rats play well like that would be this sort of research proposal that would be pilloried by sensible. Republicans looking to trim government waste. It's like no that was the heart of the matter, right rats organize their social hierarchy through play not through Force. Right? That's a big Discovery like that's I think he should have won a Nobel Prize you too. Yeah, he should have won a nail for a variety of his discoveries but that one in particular like rats.
Have an implicit morality. That's a, that's a major league discuss and it's based on play. WoW,
stunning. And we see the same thing in kids,
obviously. And well, we see the same thing in chimpanzees, like, it's pretty strange to understand that dominance hierarchies. If they're functional are often organized in consequence of play, not force like so much for Foucault.
When you look out on the landscape of social media, do you see elements of that as well, that they're sort of a playfulness among people, that's establishing a hierarchy. It seems like elon's having a good time with his rockets and his X and
Tesla. I think, I think that there is, I think that the antithesis of of tyranny is play. It took me a long time to realize that like, I've been studying evil intensely since I was about 13 and
evil is easier to Define than good. It's it's hard to find a category that integrates all, that's good. That's that you can point to Simply but it has
The fact that play is the antithesis of tyranny seems to be a pretty good summation panksepp showed for example that play wouldn't emerge among animals. If they were possessed by any other motivational state things have to be set up very carefully. Before play will emerge. Your house is optimally. Structured, if your children can play your marriage is optimally structured. If you're playing house with your wife and I think that that reality of the, what would you say?
The optimally superordinate nature of play that makes itself manifest. When you're watching someone who's a master at their task, and musk is playing, and hopefully that will, you know, when Trump plays to. So, one of the things that made me less uncertain about him,
He's deadly funny now, it's rough. He plays rough no doubt about it but he's ridiculously, he's got a ridiculously comic touch and that's not something that's generally characteristic of, you know, Psychopathic dictators, Hitler wasn't known for his sense of humor. Let's talk about sense of humor, if you don't mind because I think it's something that's sorely. Lacking in a lot of the discourse among adults.
So to speak. And I think these days, I think a lot about what young people are observing a few years back. I was watching this show, I didn't like it called, forgive me, because I think the actor was quite good, but the show is Californication. David Duchovny. And I realized this show is all about the adults acting like children and the children acting like an oh, yeah. That's, that's a typical Hollywood. And I, and I thought this is terrible. Not because I'm some
A sort of moral Avenger or something, but it just, it was sort of like the question. I've been asking myself a lot over the last few years is healing, who are the adults in the room, like, who's actually regulating all this stuff that's happening? Everyone's in disagreement, people are are misbehaving in this. Kind of worst of ways. By you not treating each other. With respect, occasionally, you'd see a discourse that felt like meaningful and structured or explorative in the real sense like people were there to learn. I think that's been one of
Of the successes of your work and a Rogan's work. And I like to think, you know, my podcast as well, Lex Friedman, certainly and others, right? Sometimes people use comedy. Sometimes people use Neuroscience as a pro but in any case but you know, I've been concerned that there.
There isn't this like enjoyment of discourse between people that disagree in a way that includes forgiveness or like I you got like good one, like you got me or, you know, and it seems like it's degenerated into things that are so nasty and it's sort of like people are entering the game if you could even call it that with a refusal to shift. Like I like that's not a debate that's weird. There's nothing playful about it. Like you have to be willing to have a winner and a loser and you have to be willing to be either one.
One. If you're going to engage in real, in real discourse in real play and to me it's like, okay I can manage seeing all that or participate or not participate to the extent that I want. But for young people, it's got to be really discouraging. It's like you either dunk on somebody or get going? Well, you know, I guess the
optimistic repost to that would be the fact that the people that you're pointing to like Rogan who is a comedian like many of the people who
Who have become extremely successful as podcasters Constantine, kissing Russell Brand, Dave, Rubin Crowder, Steven Crowder feel Vaughn. That's a lot of comedians. So there's a lot of play in the alternative media. And a lot of young people are being informed by the alternative media. So I think there's genuine room for optimism there.
and there's plenty of play in those podcasts now,
A group of us, eight years ago, seven years ago, put out an offer to the Democratic.
Powers that be to invite the Democrats to come and talk to us. Ruben, was part of that Rogan was part of that. If I remember correctly quite certain of it, I was part of that Shapiro was part of that. This was a genuine invitation which was extended many times in serious Ways by people who are very well connected among the Democratic Elite and that came to
nothing. They want no part of
it. Nope, they'd speak to me for example, privately never publicly
Clean virtually, never almost without exception. All the, while the alternative media was gaining more and more power. All the while we were telling them this isn't optional, your Legacy Media, foothold is dying, wake up, well Rogan. For example, you could imagine that he would be on board with such a thing because he's not precisely your stereotypical Republican. No, well, no, not at. All right people people will call them that at a try and you know,
Man is fear bro. Whatever it doesn't. The reality fall so far, from Thailand is
not true at all. Yeah, so so there is plenty of play and and so I think we can be positive about that and and I think young people to have seen how successful that could be. I mean Rogan and is Coterie, let's say, wiped out the Legacy Media
Well, so you can see what the spirit of playful Adventure can do in a very short period of time. Now there's technological reasons for that too but
Technological reasons are not. It's still a stunning phenomenon and a stunning accomplishment, and a very positive one as far as I'm concerned, and hopefully, it will
continue. Yeah. The power pendulum has definitely swung. Yeah, in a different
direction. Well, that became Stark starkly obvious. When
Rogan interviewed trouble that was the death knell of the Legacy Media.
It certainly elevated podcasts and their, their impact and significance across the board.
Well, I think it demonstrated. The fact that they had been elevated, right? It was just, it was, it was evidence of that was that was so conclusive that, there was no longer any way of quite of, of questioning it even the CNN pundits and so forth who were very resistant to that as a hypothesis changed their tune, very
Rapidly. Well, it was interesting because Rogan's conversation with Trump was a serious, one Theo's. Conversation with Trump was a mixture of serious and less serious. And I mean, I couldn't help but smile big when at the inauguration. The thanks went out to a number of people including Theo. Von I mean, if you think about, I know anything about like me yet to meet him, I hear he's high
risk. I feel so great.
because steel is,
Like he's he's Backwoods hit to the core, right? Seriously underclass background and it's real. And he's so bloody smart. And so it's such a fun combination because he's got this, it's pretty easy. If you're elitist to, you know, be be what derisively about Theo and his Backwoods e stick. But man, there's a sec. There's a first-rate mind lurking behind that.
That it's not a Persona because it's actually him. Do you know? I can relate to that too. Large degree because, you know, I came from a very small town way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. And so, I have plenty in common with Theo, but it's, it's very funny to watch. It's very funny to see him do this successfully, it's ridiculously and preposterously carmical that he got to sit down with Trump. I mean, I just thought that was that's so funny and that it was successful and playful, you know, that's great.
And there's plenty of play and the Republican Renaissance at the moment. Whatever, did that is, I mean, it Republican to call it that is like, that's whatever the hell's happening. It's not conceptualize herbal, in terms of our normal political dichotomy, right? I mean, we're in Uncharted water now. Hopefully, this is why I hope the Democrats get their act together because every
Administration needs an opposition. And if the Democrats continue with this woke idiocy, they're not going to be able to serve as the proper corrective to the excesses. That will definitely emerge in the Trump Administration especially if they face no credible opposition
before we happens. Sorry, didn't mean to repeat him in, didn't mean to interrupt. Before we started we were touching on this a little bit and you said something, which was that you're hoping for a really formidable strong Democratic party to counter.
The Republican party and you are and you're saying it again. Now you're concerned that if there isn't one that power corrupts might run. Amok.
Oh yes. Well of course it will it always does. You know when that the Republicans themselves who might wish well this remarkable group of people that segregated around Trumpets like they should hope for themselves that they have an effective opposition because someone's going to be telling you where you're stupid. And if the Democrats so this is another public in
Vacation to the Democrats, which is, like must be the 50th one that I've issued. If you have something to say, you know, I'd be happy to talk and so, would many people who've expressed similar sentiment to me in the alternative media world, and that offer has been on the table for four years. So I hope that
I'm afraid that all the people with any real courage or virtually all the me chased out of the democratic party. They're all afraid of being cancelled, which is why they wouldn't appear on my podcast to begin with. It's like, why does Peterson always interview conservatives? It's like, well how come how about? Because they'll talk to me, you know, there's a simple explanation and definitely a true one. So maybe that can shift and there's got to be somebody in the Democrats.
Who's got enough courage to forge a new Direction and if they want to continue with this same old pattern of woke idiocy well go right ahead, it's not going to work the tides already turned in that regard. I
think that judging from some of the article titles that I've seen it New York Times and other venues it seems like there might be some consideration about this. They're talking about a restructuring of the democratic party there, who's going to lead, who's going to be there Joe
Joe Rogan, which is, by the way, a silly question. That's just the silliest question. So he is, he is, as we say in science, he's end of one. Don't don't even try. Like, it's the whole point is to create what, why would you can't write?
Joe, didn't emerge by accident. Joe is very very, very smart. Very and if you think and like, it's what it's like Joe built this. It's like not the way that political party would build it. First of all, he didn't
Build it. Not not. Not that way, not through a priori planning so that the Democrats could have a voice, that's just him being
him. Yes, exactly. And someone someone who is a self-declared Democrat, will do that as well, but not by trying to be him. That's just not going to
happen. No they'll be they'll do that by trying to figure out what the opposition to this new. Peculiar band of Republicans should be and what sort of vision could be put forward. That would be attractive. You know, I read today some
rat claiming that the Democrats are the true voice of the working class. It's like I don't think so I think that ship has sailed and maybe the Democrats should be the true voice of the working class but they're certainly not. And in principle, that would mean that there's an opportunity there on the Democrat side to forge, A New Path, Clinton managed out in the 90s. This, this has happened many times, it could happen again, but
there's a lot of learning that's going to have to take place before that happens. So certainly learning about this new alternative media environment. You can't sit down for three hours and say what you actually think. Actually, what you think, right? Regardless of what might do to your reputation, let's say you're going to be successful in the podcast world. That's absolutely. Try podcasting is real. Even for I'll just say because perhaps it's of Interest or maybe even actionable for
I
mean, I get a little frightened every podcast. Certainly, if I'm going to talk about like performing this relationship to prayer or I'm exploring a mean, I'll talk about circuits in the brain all day long with with with no fear whatsoever, that's my wheelhouse. But anything that's new which isn't a real exploration and evolution of where I'm at of course is going to evoke fear. I also know that's where the growth is. I would hate for this podcast to look the way it did on episode one now and
Clearly this, this conversation is a new direction that I've not taken before in this podcast and but I'm delighted that it's happening. I want to say that and I think that some level of fear and anxiety about the unknown is absolutely required. And I think that that's something that hopefully any especially young people listening need to know, you're not supposed to perform well at the outset let you in anything you're not you're
not the fool is the precursor to the Redeemer.
You have to accept the role of fool voluntarily before you can improve improve. Of course, when you start something new, you're going to be an idiot. Like why do you know? So, so that's the price of Entry is to be a fool. Well, you can be a voluntary fool, and then you can, then you have a bit of a sense of humor about yourself and that takes the sting out of it and maybe even makes you an attractive character. Despite your ignorance people will people will make tremendous allowances for ignorance. That's voluntarily admitted.
I've certainly made mistakes publicly apologized for the ones that I felt. I should apologize for. There's a slip of the tongue and make it said something when back and correct. It was embarrassing but the ability to laugh at oneself is tremendously powerful genuinely laughs, let's just thinking like oh my God, what was I thinking? I understand aside the blah blah blah. You know, sometimes we we are you know I have a couple of questions about you. Oh I know you're the you're the clinician but
But I know I'm not trying to play that role.
When you wake up in the morning, is your mind in a good place, typically, or you tormented or you,
where does he? Where does your
mind land? Most mornings first
thing?
Well I've I've suffered from a proclivity towards depression, my whole life. I would say and I would say the roughest part of the day for me is morning although it's way better than it once was. So when I get up I have a shower and make my bed and do something useful and then I'm pretty much
I'm on my
way, you're into your tasks into the day
and I still have quite a lot of pain from whatever happened to me a couple of years ago, and so that's annoying. Physical pain. Yeah. So, but psychologically,
My life is ridiculously, it's absurdly interesting, it's crazily, and observed, the interesting all the time. And so anyone with any sense would be like open-mouthed in amazement gratitude for that it's Preposterous and I have this tour that's going. Well it's be going for like six years really and
adhere to our schedule is is superhuman. I have to say having done
I'm live shows, I mean, what you do with two r's and I've been to one of your shows. I highly recommend people attend. It was spectacular. I don't want to give too much away, but it's not planned in the in the sense that there's a script or something. It's very open. And, but it's a rest a real. It's a question intellectual Quest, right? It's a real experience and men wear your jacket and tie because everyone else. They're right here and at least a
jacket. Yeah, look respectable. So, my wife and I are tutoring from January through June and
2000 the United States and then two months in Europe. And so that's great. Because Europe is in trouble. And going there to speak is a privilege and an honor. And so that's ridiculously exciting. And people can find more out about the tour at Jordan, be Peterson.com the dates and so forth, are all listed there. We launched Peterson Academy. We where we want you to teach and that's going spectacularly. Well,
we is a place where people can hear lectures in a given.
Domain.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have 35 lectures online already. Each of them sweet sequenced over 6 to 8 hours, which compacts I would say, the equivalent of a full University course into that span of time. We're pursuing accreditation, which I think is a high probability in the relatively not-too-distant future. So that's ridiculously exciting, because we can take the best lectures in the world and we can make them available to everyone and we built a social
Element into it. We took the best of the social media networks and people are using it like mad and it's 100% positive. It's philosophically oriented it's mutually encouraging. We threw four people off the platform out of 40,000. Well 3 because we put one guy on probation because he said he didn't prove and we established a positive culture, there's no Bots, there's no trolls, no one's playing games, and we watch. And now, you know,
The community has settled into a, it's got an ethos already and I think that'll be self-sustaining.
So people are there to learn
and to support each other learning, got it. It launched out of the gate better than we. Thought it would even though we were optimistic and I would say the quality of what we're offering exceeded it, certainly exceeded my expectations, it's
Well, we showed Michael malice. Michael malice did a course for us on totalitarianism, and he takes that rather personally given his family background. And he said that the trailer brought him to tears and that's my now, I can be easily brought to tears, so I don't know if I'm the best aim like around certain top. Yeah, I've tried a few times on this podcast this year and a few other. So that was, that was a vulnerability. I'd never expected. But yeah, well it's good to know. I'm not alone in that I'm less.
But now that I'm more healthy, but but I feel the same way about what we're producing because it's exactly if you were a professor and you wanted the best possible course, has to be available to people. And you saw these, you'd think target hit and and that's ridiculously fun. And so, and I have a great relationship with my wife and my kids, and you have some grandkids now. Tonight, I do and two more on the way. So, you know,
and I have an endless field of Stellar opportunity in front of me, so hopefully I have enough sense to appreciate that and I hope and I do, I do appreciate it and I know it's unlikely. So
a long way from posting lectures on YouTube, which is where most people
originally found you if they were. Yeah. But that's certainly how I learned about you. I thought this guy's talk about really interesting things in the fields of psychology, he knows who yuck panksepp is and he's posting on YouTube. Can I ask what inspired that moved was that from? Well conscious was that calling or conscience?
Or but it was probably mostly calling because the fundamental motivation was and I think it is my fundamental motivation is curiosity. You know I watched YouTube and I thought hmm.
What the hell is this?
Video on demand worldwide.
What does that mean? It means the spoken word is now, as permanent as the written word and more easily disseminated. I thought, oh, that's a spectacular, and world-altering Revolution. That's what it looks like to me. This was like in 2010, you know, when it was mostly cat videos, I thought,
Might as well put my videos up there and see what happens and so see what happens, right? That's an adventure. And so I did that for
Maybe maybe seven years somewhere between five and seven years before things explode around me and that was also extremely helpful because when I opposed the Trudeau government's attempt to compel my speech.
In the form of Bill c16, I was immediately pilloried as a, you know, right wing. Not see, even though I'd spent my whole career publicizing the horrors of the Nazi Administration, and teaching my students, how not to fall prey to totalitarian Temptation. Like that was the core of my career. I had like, 200 hours of lectures up on YouTube already. So when all that negative attention was drawn to me, people started looking at the lectures and
the huge Advantage there was that there wasn't a single really, there wasn't a single important word. I'd said to students in the last 20 years, that wasn't recorded. And the people who decided that, you know, I was reprehensible character had every opportunity to go through everything. I'd said with a fine-tooth comb, which you can be absolutely certain they did, and they couldn't find one thing. I ever said that led any Credence whatsoever to their accusations and so that was a Breaking Point in some ways.
for cancel culture, because
There were a very forceful attempts to counsel me and so people went and checked me out and they thought, huh? Nothing he says falls into alignment with what he's being accused about. Well, you know, that,
What would you say?
That was part of the dam breaking with regards to the corruption of the Legacy Media.
So Not only was what I was accused of a lie. It was exactly the opposite of the truth which is the most profound kind of lie. So YouTube help me out a lot there.
Well, you've
certainly prevailed and we're all
far.
Well, I guess that that speaks to what I was going to say which is that I want to thank you for posting those videos on YouTube and for entering that Adventure because it certainly was the beginning of a long adventure that still happening. Now, where you continue to take risks, that are healthy risks in service to try to understand the
Ruth and share that. And I must say never with the the stance that you know, absolutely right for everybody. But certainly where you have felt, you could share useful knowledge at the Practical level, like really, how to operationalize like clean up your room, right? You know, do these things to try and discover your path, get on your path set, your sights to the right level and to make that a daily practice and it repeated lifelong practice is really spectacular.
You learn. It's obviously inspired millions of people including myself. I'll also say that it's really wonderful that you are also continuing to do that yourself and making that visible to people your Live Events. Of course are an exploration in the moment where you're raised a question and ask a question and address it, it's not pre-planned. And I must say that your progression of books and podcast and where things are going. Now, in particular that today, you said, you are hopeful that the Democratic party, I think most
I'll assume that you're very right-leaning. I'm not going to assume one way or the other but the fact that you are intentionally inviting and hoping for opposition so that power is checked and things continue in the right direction. I think that's really beautiful because what you're asking for is more balanced as opposed to more skewing of knowledge and power and I think that's a terrific example and it's clear that you live right near the edge in order to inspire us to basically explore knowledge. Explore ancient.
Teachings and merge them with where we are now. You know what's been unbelievably rewarding. I mean part of the reason that my wife and I keep touring is because we meet all these people and they put their lives together, it's thousands and thousands of people. It's so gratifying, you know, wherever we go, the probability that someone will come up and say
Thank you but then when I asked like for what? What do you mean exactly what changed they? Tell me and there isn't anything better that can happen to you then to travel around the world and have perfect strangers come up to you.
As friends and tell you that their lives are far better than they would have been because of their efforts. And because of their encounter with what you've been doing. Like, if you could pray for anything to happen to you, there is not a possibility that you could come up with a better wish than that. And so,
It's great. It's great and it's fascinating to explore, its continuation and to observe the consequences and it's a privilege to be in that. It's an immense. What would you say? It's unspeakably immense privilege to be in that position, and it's so great to see people like you and Friedman and Chris Williamson. And all these other podcasters who are
Pursuing the same vision and so successfully and to see the massive effect that's having on people. That's such a good deal. So and I do believe it's the sort of thing that's
in a deeply personalized way available to anyone who follows their calling and conscience.
Thank you for those words. I also agree. It's freely available by people being themselves and as you said following their curiosity and conscience. Thank you for coming here today and sharing with us where you're at. Now your knowledge and please come back again. I really enjoyed this.
Hey, anytime I appreciate the invitation very much and it's pleasure watching your progress forward and seeing you propagate. All the remarkable
All discoveries that have been made in in the field of Neuroscience because it's quite the credible Enterprise, and people need to know the biology of motivation. Let's say, in the biology of emotion and and it's great to see you.
Managing that in a sophisticated way with so many people. It's a good deal for everybody.
Thank you. It's a labor of love and inspired in. No small part by you and my other podcast colleagues and in your case, my academic colleagues. So thank you, Jordan, thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr. Jordan Pederson to find links to dr. Peterson's work, his social media, his new book, we who wrestle with God, as well as a link to the Petersen Academy. Please see the show? No captions, if you're learning from Andorra.
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