How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Jordan Peterson Dr Jordan Peterson is a psychologist an 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 psychology ology 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 circuitries 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 commitments 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 making process indeed he discusses the tight relationship between the Call to Adventure and responsibility as a trustable framework from 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 are going to have a number of different tools and Frameworks with which to apply all that knowledge toward 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 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 zero grams of sugar that's right 28 gram of 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quality protein with just 150 calories if you would like to try David you can go to david.com huberman again the link is davidpro docomo 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 3 years ago as a way to understand how different foods impacted my blood glucose levels and it's proven incredibly informative for determining my food choices when I eat specific foods and how I time eating relative to things like my workouts both weight training and cardiovascular training things like running and when to eat before I go to sleep to allow for the most stable blood sugar throughout the night indeed using levels has helped shape my entire schedule so if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a CGM yourself you can go to levels. link huberman 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. link spelled l i n k/ huberman to try the new sensor and two free months of membership and now for my discussion with Dr Jordan Peterson Dr Jordan Peterson 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 sort of brain and psychology um just kind of lay the groundwork for where we might um 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'd 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 repetitive behaviors and we also have some impulses to avoid things that are putrid painful Etc that's all in there like it is in other we should talk about the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization okay yeah 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 and I'd like to explore that with you because it's crucial great we'll Circle back to impulse 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 um as a circuit that can say and here I'm borrowing from a previous guest who's a neuro surgeon it can say sh or exert what's called top- down suppression on these what I'm calling impulses it can we should talk about that too the suppression idea and the inhibition idea in general great because there's I think there's a parallel problem there to the notion of impulse that's very much worth delving into great yeah 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 be aversive we can avoid doing things that would otherwise drive us to quote unquote just do 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 a genetic program that wires up circuitry but also Nur because of the immense neuroplasticity that occurs in the first 25 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 in 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 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 cortex and you know push down on some repetitive or aversive behaviors and to what extent can we do that maybe and to what end and to what end and maybe we need a rule book uh you know I 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 our best we kind of know that we need a rule book even you you admitted that in some ways implicitly when you discussed the fact that we have a 25 years 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 our 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 consequence of that socialization process and you can think about it and people have thought about it as a a series of complex inhibitions 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 here's a way of I really learned this I think from contrasting Freud with P because Freud's model super ego is really an inhibition model and Freud was a neurologist P's model was very different he thought of the properly socialized person as someone who had integrated their lower order we'll 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 an um willful young child wonder where he got it from yeah well fair enough and and my father was you know a 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 regulate 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 assertive 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 integration is a better like a a very sophisticated athlete a team athlete in 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 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 PJ's point and he's absolutely right about this is that that's much better conceptualized as integration and then with regard to impulse because I said I would return to that I 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 with a theory of chain reflexes a deterministic theory the behavior has gone 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 States as personalities their subpersonalities they have their perceptions they have their objects of perception they have their uh cognitive rationalizations you certainly see that in addiction let's say they have their emotions like they are small personalities unidimensional very narrow-minded personalities but they're 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 it depends on how integrated you are because you could be nothing but a succession of dominion of subpersonalities that's what a 2-year-old is right and so you have to build an integrating personality on top of those subpersonalities but not in a manner that inhibits them that means your socialization is in unsophisticated even Freud knew this because even though he had basically an inhibitory model of say super ego regulation um he believed that a healthy personality would have the impulse of aggression and the impulse of sexuality to take two major lower order motivational States into account would have them integrated into the functioning ego the the issue is integration and so what you're doing when you're social like okay when when my son for example would become willful in a manner that I regarded as counterproductive for him and the household and 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 produces pure inhibition right well well that's the question you see that's the question he had to inhibit his immediate desire 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 as 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 those 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 a Waring battleground of primordial motivational States that's per perfectly reasonable view we know a lot of that is mediated by the hypothalamus for example the AMD and these lower order biologically what pre-programmed to some degree pre-programmed systems now the specific manner in which those systems should find their expression and the specific way that they're going to be hierarchically integrated is going to depend to a tremendous degree on the particulars of the society at that moment which is why you need that 18-year 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 2-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 temporally 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 I love this and I'll tell you why um because the way that I think of the prefrontal cortex is that its main job is context dependent strategy setting right context dependent context dependent that's a crucial issue and you mentioned hypothalamus this you know it's basically the size of you know two uh marbles or 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 inanimate objects I mean this was done in both non-human primates and in hum uncontrollable thirst uncontrollable thirst hunger total ression of hunger I mean all the basic drives are operating in they like swies and prefrontal cortex has direct access to it to the hypo 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 uh 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 an 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 four that you did with you were twoo 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 2-year-old impulsiveness that has its place two it starts to modify radically at three and it better be fixed by four 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 well 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 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 well why well because you no one like you otherwise well what's the problem with that well first of all we're hyp social like you can punish Psychopaths by putting them in isolation that's how social human beings are you 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 you you're you're 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 personality right now that's attributed there that's often attributed elements of the Divine but there's reasons for that that we could go into but as soon as you know that the basic structure even at the lower motivational level is personality well then that that changes the way you view the brain look a lot of archaic deities are motivational systems could you give me an example the God of War Mars that's rage that was a God that the Vikings invoked before they went into battle they would use Ammon muscaria and they imitated Predators right from an early age this is a aceto Coline by the way folks has two general receptor systems the nicotinic system which is a stimulant but also relaxes you that's that's why people like nicotine um and then the muscarinic system which um creates uh uh changes in our self-perception and perception of the things around us um it's not so much a stimulant as it um it's a I would Veer towards almost like a psychedelic or an it has a a um an effect of making us less fearful and um and intrigued it's a radically atypical psychedelic yeah it's hard to describe hard to describe it's outside the the LSD cybin masculine domain so people would take this this as an agent the Vikings would take this as an agent going into sure because what they were trying to do is make the personality of Rage superordinate with no pain right and they practiced that from a very early age so the Vikings worked themselves up they went berser that means to wear the be shirt right they transformed themselves so to speak into Predators they would narrow the context within which their um I'm calling them impulses but you're giving a more sophisticated explanation for them within which their the aggressive impulse the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled right full rain give full rain right they were experts at that to be able to decapitate people eviscerate people do whatever it was that they needed to do in order to win 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 uh you it would give you nightmares to think about it deeply there there's an experiment if I may um that might shed some light on what it would look like uh um a former guest on this podcast actually um David Anderson at Caltech has been studying hypothalamic circuits and he and his former postto da Lynn discovered a small tiny tiny collection of neurons in the ventromedial hyp Thalamus 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 it's still somewhat context depend 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 is Cal we can put link to this in the show note 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 incredible right within the same structure you have these mutually exclusive sets of of neurons and behaviors and it and it speaks to I think some of the things that uh Freud and and others have talk about in terms of the the juxtaposition of of these neurons but um that they they mutually inhibit one another which lends itself to some really interesting questions about um when those two when uh aggression and sexuality become become combined in in states of pathology okay so but in any event um it so context dependent control over impulses over the hypothalamus seems to be the theme here and the other thing that that you mentioned 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 um Notions of this two shall pass the past the present and the future it tends autonomic activation stress Panic fear anger tend to make us lose sight we we get blinders on lose sight of the fact that there was a past there's a present and there's a future well that's because they're collapsing they're collapsing your domain of 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 it's not unsophisticated you can take a female cat and take out its whole brain except for the hypothalamus so it's like 990 5% of its brain is gone and in a relatively controlled environment it's indistinguishable from a normal cat it can in it can do cat things and live now it it's h and it's hyper exploratory now that's a that's a very strange thing where is a cat with no brain is hyp exploratory it's not what you'd think at all but it it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is it can run these programs but they're programs of Personality because they have perceptions it can run them and it 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 right it's 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 of 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 more and more other things taken into account right right and you know that there has to be some War there which is why you're wrestling with god let's say there has to be some War 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 Russians or the freudians 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 hedonists 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 superordinate is what you want that isn't that means you're subjugated to these low order personalities and you might say well why why is that wrong it's like well you're a 2-year-old it doesn't work you know if if it's all about you and your immediate gratification well first of all you're rather Psychopathic because you could think of psychopathy as the extension of immaturity into adulthood that's a pretty good default way of conceptualizing it it's like it's an unsophisticated strategy they want what they want now regardless and they don't care about the the we or the future fure see see one this is one of the ways I caught a to this relationship was I what 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 betraying someone else it's exactly the same mechanism very much a toddler toddler well so here's something I learned in Montreal I worked with a man named rishard Tromblay there and rishard I think Richard's lab used up one-third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time he was 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 mve 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 threey olds group of foury 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 5% so if you group two year olds together 5% of the boys will kick steal hit and bite which was our definition of early onet 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 of 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 kid they're often bigger physically yeah especially the bite the biting I uh 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 uh jaw closure that are independent of the neurons that control jaw jaw closure for eating and for drinking 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 the circuit right right or integr an 8-year-old B is a scary thing a one-year-old biter is like a a little bit of a worrisome thing a 2-year-old like okay we need to work on this an 8-year-old berer 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 not just because of the damage induced but it's so very different and so much more primitive than than even hitting or spitting or something exactly it's it's the indication of a virtual absence of sophisticated socialization they are truly in their hypothalamus yeah yeah right exactly and that's well especially if you have a hypothalamus that's tilted towards rage let's say and and defensive or predatory aggression that's bad news now so so so so what's the what's the upshot of that well the upshot is that there is a sub that's 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 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 nche said in the late 1800s that every Drive attempts to philosophies in its Spirit brilliant a brilliant observation far different than conceiving of the say hypothalamic drives as deterministic chains of only impulses and another thing to consider too with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation on perception that mouse that you talked about who's 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 glove will do it right right so you drop in a glove and that's now per ceed 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's un I 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 mer eliad and he wrote a sequence of brilliant books um the sacred and the profane is the best one to start with very short book very elegant book and what ilad documented across the world was the pattern by which polytheistic belief systems turned into monotheistic belief systems that parallels maturation it's the same thing and so the polytheistic Gods tend to be rep representations of of motivational States I I I'm going to pause you there because I think this is extremely important um so the god of war or the god of love the goddess of love or the god of love exactly exactly that um so the idea that the different gods are the uh reflective of different let's just let's just we'll just say it as as neuroscientists as different hypothalamic and and related circuits well why wouldn't they be Gods you know beware of falling under their minion beware of becoming their play things and the other thing that's very interesting you see is that you have 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 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 your 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 you're 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 School 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 impulse it's like no they've they've inverted 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 R run in reverse my colleague David Spiegel at who's our uh Vice chair of Psychiatry at Stanford has done some beautiful experiments examining the relationship between uh prefrontal cortical areas and the insula a brain area that has a map of our internal body State interoception you know our ability to sense our internal workings Etc in any event there are certain conditions including depression where the direction of flow between the prefrontal cortex and the insula literally reverses it's like running against the typical traffic this is a very different example because here you're presenting in the context of Rage or and sociopathy and and these kids who um 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 it's almost as if um the governor which is the prefrontal cortex starts to become the Govern that the whole circuit starts to run from bottom up as opposed to top down yeah yeah defin and I think there's good neurological that's what happens in addiction mhm right 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 hits and as it grows its capacity to dominate increases and so when there's a cue for the addiction this is why people relapse when they get out of a treatment center they'll go back to their normal environment after having dealt with the physiological withdrawal let's say and acute craving will make itself manifest like a friend they Freebase with and it's all of a sudden 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 adictive behavior is lying and the lies are the rationalizations of that subcircuit subpersonality for its own pathological behavior and so and that's all reinforced too by the dope and energic hits it's like there's multiple people in there in in everyone one of the most incredible polytheistic paganism polytheistic yeah that's the default condition right right that's the condition of the 2-year-old I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor ag1 ag1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink 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claim a special offer if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer today's episode is also brought To Us by Roa Roa makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality I'm excited to share that Roa and I have teamed up to create a new style of red lens glasses these red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening after the sun goes down they filter out short wavelength light that comes from screens and from LED lights the sorts of LED lights that are most commonly used as overhead and frankly lamp lighting nowadays I want to emphasize Roa red lens classes are not traditional blue blockers they're not designed to be worn during the day and to filter out blue light from screen light they're designed to prevent the full range of wavelengths that suppress melatonin secretion 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witnessed of the power of belief in God I'm just going to say it as as it occurred uh I have a good friend um 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 relapses yeah crashed his truck at 7 in the morning after getting intoxicated at 6:30 in the morning got out of that one happened again and again multiple rehab centers of the sort of standard treatment Etc and then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that his wife said you know this is it you've got to solve this or we just can't be with you very scary situation for everybody involved including him who absolutely adored his family he told us uh his friends that he was going to go to a a a center here in Los Angeles that treats addiction with essentially religion a belief in God he was already fairly religious um 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 a 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 uh 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 um when he went in weren't enough something about going there and the work that he did there 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 a that's not a bad way of thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when they say pray MH they 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 Direction 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 in Evangelical protest 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 that was the T Target of my dissertation in 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 been 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 an anxiolytic drug but it's also for people who are prone to alcoholism 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 one of 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 it's I've never done cocaine I would be open about it if I had I I I think I like dopaminergic States enough that I've been um very scared of doing it frankly 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 they're in this 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 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 manage yeah sure sometimes they Li and Ste extremely 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 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 relationship 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 straightened circumstances right and it's partly because you can think of our per ctual systems and our emotional systems for that matter as navigating tools right so now the addiction the addicted brain what they see 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 cocaine because it just dominates but it's not it's not just an Impulse it dominates the perceptual landscape as well that makes it and the emotional landscape and it comes with all these rationalizations that's all those lies right the whole thing it's a whole Personality yeah brutal brutal nowadays I get a lot of questions um about pornography and the the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation um 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 um clearly some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reproduction zero question about that sexual behavior being linked to reproduction not always but certainly we can all agree on that I a necessary precondition I hope we can still all agree on that but um last time I checked that's still true a sperm and an egg met someplace 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 um kind of a a compulsion that is that is almost unconscious but they're just aware of the fact that disorder like an disorder 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 um I don't I would be open if I if I had or do I pornography is 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 like the as you said it's the manifestation of one part of their it's one personality within them well and it's been it's been compulsively rewarded so you know when when a when you see yourself moving towards the culmination of a 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 and that culminates in SE in 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 it's you know there 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 I believe it's male sticklebacks will they're are very agressive 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 dotts at all and so you can really enrage a stickleback with a 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 stickle back and it's weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see in nature it slightly exceeds that's exactly what pornography does it's a super stimulus right and it's not surprising that young males in particular are acceptable to that because male sexuality in 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 ver 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 100 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 it takes no work right so not only is it a super stimulus it's one that's at hand so to speak and the uh and the uh the analog in the food world would bear highly palatable highly processed food yeah sugar fat combination you go into the other day I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and and I looked around I and I I thought this isn't a convenience store this is a pharmacy right everything that had chocolate also also seemed to have caffeine and color everything every drink seemed to combine not just sugar but also caffeine and some other things that would provide s stimulants then you've got nicotine and and these things on their own aren't necessarily bad any one of these one elements in low low enough doses in frequent use Etc but maybe sugar being the one that that clearly I think uh deserves um deeper investigation right um but it just occurred to me much different than 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 cocoa leaves the natives used cocoa 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 I know that you followed what is essentially an Elimination Diet for a number of years you eat meat right um I eat meat vegetables fruit and um some starches unrefined starches in any event one thing that I is absolutely clear from following a clean diet so to speak of any kind but let's say of the sort that you follow or I follow is that you very soon learn the relationship between Taste of the food volume of the food macronutrient so protein fat or 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 the elements that were explain explain why you think that's that link learned link about satiation can't be learned in the case of these processed foods yeah because in the context of these processed foods they're activating multiple neuron 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 this prominent theory that you know one of the main reasons we eat is to forage for amino amino acids that we'll eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids and and we correlate that with taste but that the gut has neurons we we know the gut has neurons that signal through the Vegas up through a little relay called the noo gangling if you want to look at it fun um fun name and then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain which make us oh when we eat something that has a high uh 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 signal in 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 in a you know a package of of Skittles which I'm 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 our system Pathways to satiation that totally right multiple Pathways to satiation one depending 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 macronutrient or essential amino acids or essential fatty acids after all there are no essential carbohydrates there are only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids right right 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 that's empty calories empty calories but so so in some ways um you know this again is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography masturbation and 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 that there's no moral judgment there that's just the reality so the the the the situation with food is is the following if we are eating without any gut Level under understanding of what 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 ribeye steak or two it's pretty satiating maybe you 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 one bite of pasta one bite of pasta the the next impulse is more yes right even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those steaks you're loosing you know uh threshold you've reached that Etc all the the 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 that it's worse for us than the 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 a calmer more um prudent version of themselves right to enter a different hypothalamic uh activation pattern is to start breaking the things down into their Essential Elements right about the motivation the pleasure Etc to Tamp all that down I mean we know that for pornography if the pornography is very extreme then less extreme pornography doesn't seem to work well that's because there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving right I mean so with any basic repetitive 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 repetitive striving that plays out in pornography so um 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 a 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 that keeps the novelty alive that'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 steaks 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 we love that the Umami taste is that we you have a devoted taste receptor that it'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 in a bunch of things I would suspect that after a while your plain steaks wouldn't taste as good but certain but the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in which the stuff the all the condiments Etc would start to become aversive I do believe that when we return to the the sort of most um naturally satisfying mode of engaging with these uh with these circuits here we're talking about food and sex in 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 telling 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 over time and they feel trapped within it and they have no sense whatsoever because they haven't been socialized you to go out and find a real relationship a real sexual relationship or a relationship of any well it also it's also there is some evidence suggesting too 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 necessarily going to play out that well in the real world let's say and and there's also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to um evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating complet completely different so some of these um right that's voer right you're basically learning to be a Voyer right right and so you think about young brains that are highly plastic yeah learning that so the returning yeah we have no idea what to make of that because especially for young men because when they hit puberty sexuality becomes a very uh 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 here's why I've been watching these videos of elon's rockets and thinking like that is awesome that is awesome we're built on a throwing platform you know yeah just there's one image of the of the the rocket thrusters that just captivated me I'm I'm not a spacecraft guy I mean I think it's really cool but I wouldn't consider myself somebody that like looks at the stars and thinks I want to go you I want to go up there I might if I give the opportunity that's not been my thing but I looked at this and I thought what an awesome Display of Power 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 like dirt claw Wars targeted right what 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 and it it speaks to exactly what you're describing like that that the cache 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 play so many of those games are Target games all of the sports spectacles that people want to participate in vicariously even vicariously they're Target hitting games like our gaze specifies as the center of a Target there's targets everywhere and we're unbelievably focused on Bridging the Gap between where we are and where we're going yeah that's the whole perceptual landscape I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood urine 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levels comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health and while I've been doing it for years I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive I've been so impressed by function both at the level of ease of use that is getting the test done as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are that I recently joined their Advisory Board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast if you'd like to try function go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight 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 at a distance to me feels like so inherent to our progression as a species most Technologies are about that in fact if you think about social media you know somebody tweets something and you know when people react to it maybe positively or negatively the school shooter in a very dark example a 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 you're 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 punning 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 we're born with to be able to create positive things to evolve our species through action at a distance through creation of knowledge technology children communities culture the ultimate expression it's just loop back into oneself it's it's as if and and I I don't know what language there is for this in biology but it's as if like all that dop energic Drive is just 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 own um in their own reflex but there's no action at a distance for them this is the same thing I see with the Failure to Launch kids who are still living at home who are 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 failure Venture I would say in in the ter techology that I've been developing so for example in this in this book and we who wrestle with God I'm one of the stories I analyze is the story of Abraham and it's very interesting story psychologically I mean I think it's it's it's stunning actually and I'll lay some of that out for you you can tell me what you think about it so so the Divine is characterized in the classic stories of our culture as um the ultimate up so you could 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 ambition will seize 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 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 so 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 the 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 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 cons humorist 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 it's like why the hell hell would you leave that when you have everything you need well the implication is 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 there a crucial there's a crucial it's a crucial point to 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 reaffirmations of his upward aim and declamations of his willingness to sacrifice every time he finishes an adventure he re 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 IM 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 chicks Mahi who'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 particip a 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's situation here's what'll happen you'll become you'll live your life in a manner that's a blessing to you so that's a good deal a because Lots the the miserable people you're talking about the depressed people the 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'll be a blessing to you okay and then God says that's not all that'll 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 Psychopaths game that but still it's like Renown is crucially important you want to be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates you know so that'll be the second thing that happens and then the same voice says 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 path 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 and over time exactly and then the the final offer is you'll do that in a way that'll bring abundance to everyone else too now so think about what that means biologically this is so cool and I 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 will 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 twofold 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 and 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 like or or that's what pornography is it's a false Adventure right it's 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 it so imagine that you're a father now this Spirit of Adventure is often characterized paternally right in so far 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 def definitely encourage that right and I would say in so far 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 deity of his ancestors he's embodying the Call to Adventure and that's what makes him the father whose reproductive 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 there's other it it complexifies a because what 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 batting down the hatches there mate trouble's coming okay 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 and 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 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 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 um uh Christian religious language he said that he felt Jesus's love for him and he saw an image of who he could become this was important perhaps no doubt not just perhaps but no doubt of who he could become that was worth it and he had the adequate social support within this place and so there was reinforcement yeah but what's what's remarkable is that he was able to take that outside of this place it it was a residential facility out of this place and carry it with him and to this day he is Rock Solid okay so in that domain and I will say in in all the other domains of his life too extremely successful as an artist I don't want to out him you know extremely successful as a as a commercial artist and happy and in service and um just seems like he got a brain trans right so there's a mystery there that's kind of threefold one is um 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 cache to you than if you're possessed by like uh sexual desire like obviously right absolutely right so so the idea that a given stimuli produces a given motivational response is incorrect because that's framework dependent right and then 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 the 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 dopaminergically 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 they allow the steps to be Milestones I mean there's clearly a dopaminergic component I hope people 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 which is why it can be gained by cocaine which is why it can be gained by cocaine or or most anything that can you know uh you know feret its way into the hypothalamic system and I I hope people picked up on what you said before because um it's so important that as one moves toward a Target dopamine increases and root to that Target I'm 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 p of self it's like it's almost or the or personality type other than the one that you're engaged in in pursuit of this Behavior will emerge 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 right you run faster as you as you see the Finish Line right faster and faster I this concept of sin as missing the Target or this definition of sin I think is incredibly important hamartia is the Greek word and L 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 that's the case but it it's really important to understand that that is that notion is predicated on this target seeking phys psychophysiology and that that's unbelievably deeply built into us as you pointed out you know our eyes are Target established well it's so important to us that we infer aim from gays right and it's more than that not only do we infer aim from gaze we mimic the psychophysiological state of the Target that we're 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 uh 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's circuitry deep in the brain if you want to look it up it's Superior culus it's also called the tectum in other species it means roof it's the roof of the midbrain Etc 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 Stanford Eric nudson who did some beautiful work on neuroplasticity um was describing experiment where they take out the frontal cortex of these owls owls are because they um you know they don't have much movements they move their head almost you know almost all the way around right we've all seen that get and they use this for for for homing in on their 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 there you click here they look there 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 an area that's why a a cat with no braid is hyp exploratory right everything's a Target everything's a targ everything is a Target and there's no context dependent learning right I love that you gave the example of the desate cats um they even can do fictive motion they can walk on a treadmill and it's like with no cortex it's amazing makes you rethink the cortex that's for sure and humans have these frontal eye fields which are an evolved area they're present in other species too but they're massively expanded in humans so this is a a cortical area a frontal cortical area devot oted to controlling Gaye and the context and control of Gaye 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 um well then maybe I'll activate my aggression or maybe I'll brace my defenses or wow she's uh we came to this party together but she seem 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 are all these memes about this right you know right the famous the famous look over the shoulder meme that seems to have taken over the internet from time to time with the appropriate facial response exactly so humans have an if massively expanded notion of what gaze is and our ability to control gaze and understanding of gaze I just so when when you raise this this idea that when you raise this fact rather about gays defining the target it'll end that looking at others' gaze allows us to understand what they are defining as the target we starting to get get into Notions of theory of mind and things of that sort well so 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 an anti-predator Crouch and then turn and you'll do that essentially automatically so so so curl up turt and and 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 gate gaze and and well and and bodily posture by those underly yeah this is a super has a map of of auditory world so when you hear something to right you turn to your right right right and you do that before you think right okay so that's a that's an activation of the eye felds let's 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 what does that mean well you can think about it it means to search out the north star that navigates for you uniring regardless 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 effective it's almost like and I 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 him I thought okay okay like like he's different and and I thought you know like most people would you know perhaps would think like all right let's see let's see but this has been four years now he's very he's very consistent with his um with his program he you know he's involved in a program that keeps him on track right um but he's he's elevated and he's not talking above people it's like he's elevated but he's grounded when you talk to him he's not 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's been a a remarkable thing to observe well because he was about as down in his addiction and had so much to lose and had um essentially risked it over and over over and over to the point where you know I I didn't think it was ever going to turn around and most and all of his friends thought the same and his wife of course is delighted and his kids are delighted of course and um I could say this without revealing because no one 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 it's nothing short of spectacular okay so so let me let me put that into a context of let's say an archetypal story okay 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 Str it's a metag 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 first born is to be consecrated to God there's a meaning to that and and the meaning is something like this imagine that your life consists of a sequence of episodes okay an 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 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-term 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 manner okay and that would set the frame for the conversation and the good podcasters always do that right they're 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 utmost 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's seems to me to be exactly right it's exactly right and so you know I I was I was thinking of that because you said your friends all of your friends Endeavors had become elevated so imagine that one problem you 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 that would be like the pursuit of a metagal 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 meta 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 as clinical psychologists with exposure therapy right you find the 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 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 metag goals in relationship to positive and negative emotion that's a good way of thinking about it I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium 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the watermelon I like the raspberry I like the Citrus basically I like all of them if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element.com huberman laab to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element.com huberman laab to claim a free sample P pack I love this idea of looking upward and defining or at least having a sense that there's a um internalization of the greatest possible outcome and when I say greatest both for ones but also for the community right yeah that's life more abundant 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 you're 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 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've you will be you 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'd seriously like to win this battle it's like no you need something better than that Victory and that would be the a 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 if you got that Vision fleshed out properly you'll want that more than you'll want to win and 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 a 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 it it looks like you win but if you forgo the ultimate game that's not a victory that's a defeat obviously it might even be a worse defeat than if you lost absolutely I I've been um spouting off on social media and podcast for a while now that any big inflection in dopamine that isn't preceded by a lot of effort to generate that dopamine inflection is very dangerous think drugs think pornography think highly processed food Foods think anything that you know creates this B big sense of indulgence and pleasure without any effort is running countercurrent to our evolutionary wiring now you could say well okay so what are we supposed to do move in C no reward no reward without commencer sacrifice that's right that's of some sort Y 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 exist over multiple time scales or broader time scales one of the things that I feel truly lucky for um is the fact that I went the path of science where we were uh chuckling about this earlier um 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 um 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 scales short medium longtime scales as I've moved into podcasting the the uh the temporal Loops are shorter they're faster um but you know nonetheless you know we we do long long form content and um but you know I think platforms like X I think are wonderful if used appropriately I think it's especially great nowadays frankly um and Instagram Etc they're very useful but they train us and I imagine they've trained the the young brains that were weaned on them cuz I wasn't but that were weaned on them for fast temporal yeah uh time scales this isn't like playing this isn't like playing a long poker game this is like playing the slot machine over and over and over right um it's not like a 4day tournament complete with intermittent random reinforcement which is what happens when something goes viral unpredictably right right it's really 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 that it hadn't prior so I think that one of the things that could be useful just venturing a hypothesis here is that young and older people could um take a look at their life and ask you know over what variation of time scales do I derive reward yeah defin you know training for a marathon is a is a longer time scale that's also a Hallmark of maturity yeah School degree Etc um in business the time skills are sometimes fast sometimes um short I think you can ask even a better question than that the 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 itrated 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 doing as 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 Carl friston told me we were talking about entropy and and emotion 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 emotion a physical grounding like a real physical grounding and friston surprised me because he said he has a theory of positive emotion that's analogous he also knew the negative emotion he 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 toward w 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 well to have goals at multiple time scales you need to be able to re in I I love this entropy argument it makes total sense that you want to be able to uh withstand the the the the periods of time when you don't know whether or not things are becoming more or less uncertain this is part of becoming um an adult if you will okay okay so yeah that was exactly the thread so there's there's two cories 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 subg goal and that's what happens with this upward orientation it's 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 included 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 indicator of entropy reduction in regard to that metag goal well there isn't any by definition there isn't 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 right and right it's a rewriting of the reward contingencies yeah yeah right exactly and and now you can imagine that you could imagine a situation where a culture explores 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 ex 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 relationships work is I ask somebody out they might say yes they might say no you got on a date they might not want a second date well things could progress you might think that you're on the path to one thing it turns out it doesn't work or it's it's you're not compatible you know I me 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 forgo that for pornography what you're foregoing is the corrective that all those women are offering you like they're rejecting 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 of an actual life right no action at a distance yeah yeah 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 that's all that possibly could AR worse than that because it's more pornography in a degenerating game because as you said you have to chase that novelty Edge otherwise dopamine is driven down further well 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 sexual it 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 I we sometimes see it with with drugs of abuse as well 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 they don't reach the mountain top yes while time is the problem 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 end our lives end our relationships end 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 pasio so there's a vision in a subvision in in the sequential dream of revelation of the Scarlet Beast and the 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 going to 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 has multiple heads why because whatever United it has vanished that's like the death of God it's vanished and so now it's got heads in every direction so it's confused and it's red scared 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 heads right and that's that's an that's the emblem of descent into diverse chaos and gazes everywhere with these multiple heads precisely precisely it's not integrated okay now that's the disintegration of the patriarchy you might say a top that is the of Babylon that's a beautiful woman who's 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 in gold and she holds a cup it's very graphic imagery that has nothing but the consequences of her fornication in it is this I mean I guess I will just say it recently there's been a number of posts on EX of this woman who had sex with 100 men in a day um and now and now she's saying she's going to have sex with a thousand men in a day yeah well she seems to be rethinking her plan given the emotional consequences she had to her last success yeah I I must say her mother is her finance officer speechless um that's for sure I'm speechless my my um response to the uh her kind of um Post 100 men thing um was it was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the the uh per whatever performance whatever it was you know so um it was hard for me to discern what was really going on there I'm not a psychologist um but anyone who saw that would say um this is a pretty dark situation it's 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 a wow like this woman obviously um navigating life in this way her choice clearly um but the fact that so many people know about this the fact that so many PE and here we're talking about it but I think in service to a greater good I certainly believe like like that this is now out out there right it's out there um just like seeing somebody just like seeing somebody murder somebody in Cold Blood we we talk about that recently a video of of an assassination that and those had been available before but um those two things kind of leveled up or leveled down you know um one's idea of of what humans are capable of by allowing so many acceptable what's acceptable or desirable that's right the threshold shifted that's for sure maybe that's the what I'm looking for the threshold shifted yeah okay so that's a great example that that 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 commoditize commoditized when the masculine State degenerates that's a sign of the end of things and that makes perfect sense because well 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 of Babylon as enticement for its degeneration you can have everything you want on the sexual side at the end of that substory the state the Beast kills the prostitute and so what that means is that the long-term consequences of sacrific less sexual satiety is that sexuality itself is destroyed and I think we're seeing that in our society now 30% of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins right about about the same in South Korea right the birth rates in those countries have plummeted like they're way way below replacement and and increasingly 50% of women in in the west are childless at 30 birth rates are way way down and and going down as well 50% are 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 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 but 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 the uh someone I know who was a uh in their 20s in the 1970s explained to me I always thought that song was about you know if you can't be with the the person that you you love you know you find someone else you can love they explain to me that's not what that was about that was about the wildness of the of the 70s right that promise yeah that was about the the sort of the um just uh promiscuity had emerged as a 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 that the patriarchy the masculine fails before the well no that happen no say that so it's not causal one no no you can't men and women degenerate at the same rate right I mean we're involved in feedback processes that are so tight that there's no like there's no oppressing women without oppressing men there's no oppressing men without oppressing women it's like we're we're joined at the hip so to speak and so you know these these these these cultures that that that cloak women and silence them you might think well that leads to the domination of men it it 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 that's it's anti-humanity of course of course of course there was a recent um post on X that I that just held my gaze my attention um where it was a back and forth debate a pseudo political social debate and then there were three words that um I'll just to say that uh Mark Andre said you know it was it was about restoring Vigor pride and achievement and I thought wow like he's not a political candidate but that's a beautiful Trifecta Vigor pride and achievement to celebrate those and I and I put that next to you know the the Deep pleasure in generative action at a distance a technological development the Rockets um and there other Genera 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 right that's the wrong frame right and 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 th those are large audiences um you know they must average about 3 or 4 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 you know and that's one of the ways I'm sure you know this is you want to listen to the audience you want to stay in that zone where no one's moving right cuz 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 manipulatively 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 they're conscientious and so for them responsibility is dutiful orderly productivity it's it's conscientiousness responsibility is a conscientious Duty what they fail to understand 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 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 your 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 I now I need that in order to be able to think clearly but it's just a first order of business well it's also a great R it's a great morning ritual because it's often the case especially if you have a bit of a depressive tilt that it's kind of hard to get oriented properly in the morning you know and if you take like I moved into a new house a while back in in Northern Ontario and the garage wasn't set up properly and 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 tool box or whatever and like if you do that every day 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 then 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 it's an antidote to chaos a Target absolutely certainly isn't a sinful Target you at Le and you know it's not sin to clean your room or to organize your space or or the garage so so you start with it so within the day one can do that in terms of I um I really uh love the the stickiness the positive stickiness of this idea that adventure and responsibility are the same thing well well let's let's take that apart because it's it's not immediately obvious but look when you go let's say say you go see an adventure movie James Bond movie you know classic archetypal action adventure movie with some romance thrown in there um what is he doing well difficult things he's 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 it's high order adventure and he's putting himself at substantive risk to do that 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 sepulture in Jerusalem which is the first church that was the first Christian Church that was establish lished 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 in Europe have that pattern okay so why well responsible sacrific 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 in the in the structure of the community with its Center well of course sacrifice is the center of the community obviously because Community is a sacrificial gesture like in so far 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 now 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 well the whole at least in so far 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 sacrifices at the center of the community it's like 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 their some people roll their eyes I mean you have the bay on one side you have 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's sense of of of De indecency to walk down in the in the afternoon hours let alone at night so that at this point you you wonder like is the center really the center I mean you you literally have to avoid the center of the city in order to get away from any of that and and it's very yeah the question is so you're you're asking a symbolic question 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 what's the famous poem from the 1920s the center is loosened right and mere chaos is around mere chaos is set upon the world I haven't got the quote precisely right that was TS Elliott he knew that when when the center pillar disintegrates then everything falls into chaos that's one of the oldest realizations of of humankind the question might be what has caused the degeneration of this of the center well man you could think about that the whole culture war is meditation on exactly that question you know there's an insistence on the postmodern side so the postmodernists they figured out that we see the world through a story they were right and and that's a devastating blow to the empiricists and the rationalists 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 that religion teaches through story philosophy teaches through um language that is divorced of story and that science is designed to try and remove itself from language almost entirely I mean 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 we're supposed to be objective and just interpret the data as they stand to not and to not only be informed by the fact to not INF a story but but story is the the the way that the brain works right I mean beginning middle end um it's also the thing is the story creeps into science in 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 X KGB agent who talked about a lab in the in the Soviet Union where there had was a dreadful accident at one point that resulted in the death of about 500 people they were trying to produce an amalgam of um Ebola and small pox yikes and then to aerosolize it oh 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 yeah 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 a 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 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 traumatizing yourself permanently for the rest of your life right what happened with Unit 731 it's the worst human atrocity I've 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 universities has intensified cuz his notion was if we could just free oursel from the superstitions of the past everyone would become like a hybrid between let's say Newton and bacon and dekart 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 um 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 advisers 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 advisers 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 New 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 fund each other and as a consequence there are a lot of untouched problems that will hopefully it somay someday be investigated the other consequence is that this debacle within the field of Alzheimer's in dementia where one laboratory fudges data and you kind of wonder if I mean that's not my subfield but I you step back from there you go how the hell this progress for 15 years where everyone was you know like 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 knew people knew 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 yes and no little a little bit uh intense on the career formulation side of things well so right the careerist aspect as opposed to the scientist aspect well well that exist too well let 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 right 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 counterveiling force and that force was powerful enough let's say from 1550 to 1980 so that 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 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 there are 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 new you know 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 also you know an issue that needs to be dealt with and where where it's 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 give 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 you're 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 I without going down that path too too far I now um understand why you're saying that science in has to invoke story that Mak has to be embedded that makes sense that makes sense otherwise well 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 inquiry is very stringent truth above all right so if you state your whole goddamn career on a particular hypothesis and you run a critical study and it turns out that the reason you're famous is invalid you have to publish that why 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 diff that's a very difficult thing to establish now you can do that with young scientists 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 a risk because you can be spectacularly 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 load 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 love of the truth in in your students but you have to believe that's a story too 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 too it's 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 what 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 at that or I could just say we're going to follow the thread wherever it goes and I'm going to accept the outcome and I'm going to presume that the outcome 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 cuz don't know well that's the that's the essence of Adventure it's like you're bounding over the Uncharted sea 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 banel predictability well to build your career to I mean I understand why but you're foregoing what's truly valuable for something that's second rate for something that's secure that's what Abraham did it's like you know it's 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 at 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 like obviously right that's like a truism but you have to think about what that means it's 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 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'll justify the suffering that's intrinsic to life and I think that's right I mean when when you look at your own life I mean you're 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 how long five years ago yeah we we are about to hit the end of four years in a couple 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 consequence of that like you know I mean everyone's life is rif 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 are you headed and I would just say you know like on well on Friday I'm talking to Jordan Peterson and I'm focused on that all week long and next week I'm recording a solo podcast C about whatever it happens to be I just believe that's setting my sights on the proximal and I just believe in um I know my my deep deep deep love of finding organizing and disseminating information that I hope will be useful to people okay so that's it that's that's what that's the driving force behind all of it really okay so great so 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 Word that's the same idea cuz 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 I 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 it feels so good okay so then we might say well what's what what's the basis for that intrinsic pleasure we think about that biologically well you could imagine it as a manifestation of the Instinct that integrates right it integrates you across 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 then 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 that way because otherwise you couldn't Thrive as an individual in society so it better be that way and we've been doing this for a very long time as human beings so why we wouldn't have an instinct to mark that pathway and of course we'd find our deepest satisfaction in that I mean once you once you see these issues through that light they become I think painfully obvious so because that also because the contrary hypothesis is absurd it's like you're going to find deep 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 were talking about operationalizing um this uh the effort the calling to move from potential chaos to order starts with organizing one's physical space if we were to you know extend the um the the rings of the bullseye out a little bit further for people listening who are trying to figure out like what where where do they receive that calling how how do they find their calling that like where so responsibility and Adventure being perhaps the um the the compass through which we can you know like navigate there so they think like well where can they um grab a hold of their responsibility and and then as a consequence of doing that engage in adventure and have an impact that is good for them and good for the world that that's how do how do they find that I think there's ve 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 enthusias iasm and that root word of that is Theos right deos that's God calling conscience okay so now that beckons you 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 it's like no you've got some problems you can tell that cuz 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 cuz that's an example that's the symbolic representation of calling it's the dynamism between calling and conscience that orients 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 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 some sometimes multiple Generations deep it's just chaos everywhere it's like where do you 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 like little corner of order and now you're a 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 it's okay hey 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 un degenerative stuff a colleague of mine who he's geneticist said you know it takes many many many generations to evolve a species it doesn't take very many to devolve a species mut negative mutations can build on another and crash a species very very fast I think our psyche is is similar in that way well that's an anthropic problem there's way more ways 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 uh surrounded by a lot of political chaos came to the country became a physicist probably because he likes order he's a very orderly Guy and um it was probably in the early 90s that we went I was born in 75 so probably yeah early 90s that we went to a movie theater uh together to see a movie and he said it as we were walking in he said look and I said what and he said this is the beginning of the end and I said what do you mean he said we're degenerating as a society and I said why and he said there are people here in their pajamas right right and obviously they weren't in their pajamas but they come in in 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 care what other people thought right that's right they were making a public display of their lack of care right exactly EXA that's a narcissistic aspect to that too yeah yeah he's right about that and I thought at the time like he's being judgmental I was a teen right he's being judgmental Etc and um but you know I would say from 1990 until fairly recently hopefully things are shifting for the better now but um there has seemed to be it's 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 look voluntary 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's cool 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 in what he saw highly likely that's another example of the center disintegrating right where do you think we are now in uh in the United States I think right in terms of how we represent hold and represent order versus chaos I mean we were talking about some of the you know this uh these social media posts recently we just had a a public public display of an assassination maybe you know I hadn't intended on going there but I think it's worth talking about um it was weird I got pulled into this through tangential reasons this Luigi manion's last tweet was a podcast cover of of my episode with Jonathan height um and some media Outlets tried 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 gun gun it seems is all alleged now but it seems to be pointing 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 Etc he um clearly was trying to make a statement but the statement was was a combination of statements about the the um Insurance system um sort of anti-establishment because of his affinity for uh kazinski unibomber bombings but at the same time he uh 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 you're a trained clinician you think there's some schizotypal or schizophrenic type organization there in his head or lack of organization I mean what are we to make of this and we and we had to see somebody assassinated shot in the back multi guess I would say the first thing I would be looking for is pathological narcissism I disordered thought possibly but he was quite successful academically like the typical pattern for something like schizophrenic dis dissolution is very very much difficulty in maintaining so discipline striving in a highly intellectual atmosphere for examp he a valedictorian he went to school graduated i' think more luciferian grandiosity and the intellect is particularly prone to that you know the the the the archetypal representation of the intellect that overreaches is Lucifer right God's 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 believed that he was the guy who could make the decision even of life and death which means he took onto himself the role of ultimate judge and that's what the kid who shot up Coline did too 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 yeah it's 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 rule is because we unlike let's say the people who run healthc care 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 it's really beyond belief I was going to say all these CEOs now are 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 uh you know up double yeah they tend to double down I mean earlier we were talking about action at a distance I mean clearly um this Manion guy has is aware High status so ignored or notorious there's a hard choice for young men they'll pick notorious many of them will and no wonder because status is everything it's hard to do good things over long periods time right it's not hard to be good it's just hard to do big 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 U make sure that our our species replaces itself I mean these are Big important Endeavors I mean I the reason well and he can clearly do them I mean he's he's been insanely successful doing five possible 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 a reputation right and so he's a he's a from first principal sort of guy so yeah I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk so and that is independent of his political stance and is it ult to do good things well it's hard it's hard it's hard it's hard to do long-term good things because they're longterm that's what I was trying to say right 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 suspicion are you've 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 definely podast I definitely would have failed oh definitely oh absolutely 100% because it wasn't the pursuit of pleasure per se it's sort of like the difference between you know is it easier to be the class clown or um the top of the class it's just much easier to be the class clown all you have to do is crack 10 jokes one of them hits you know and you're you're safe but you're 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 Rogan's a perfectly appropriate example because he's sort of like the archetype of the successful podcaster it's 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 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 refused to talk to people in the podcast world for 10 years are now proclaiming to everyone who 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 Joe built it was something that happened around him 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 you might know this story I'll keep it brief but um he was a comedian at The Comedy Store he had done some television and things of that sort but um and people can find this online the videos are on YouTube where a comedian was stealing Ari shaffir's jokes so Joe got up on stage and said there's a there's a um there's some ethics in the comedy community people can buy jokes but you 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 jokes and the guy challenged him and Joe said no like Joe was stood up in the name of justice 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 particular Comedy Club so what did he do he went home he popped open his laptop and he and Brian Redban and a few other folks started what eventually became the Joe Rogan podcast it came out of a um an Impulse to stand up for the truth which I think is an important thing for people to understand because it helps you understand Joe um need be uning in that yeah yeah and and I think yeah and you know he doesn't claim to always be right but his um his pursuit of the truth has um been a driving force for the podcast he 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 well musk himself said you know when when I interviewed him he talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was 13 14 which is not atypical of you know out people with outstanding intellects let's say um and he resolved that by recognizing that the quest is the source of meaning and so he took it upon himself self 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 Rogan is exemplifying and you in your Pursuits and you can see what impact it 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 by anything approximating a genuine Quest it doesn't even matter the direction right it matters the commitment and that capacity to explore and transmit 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 M so much matter the direction as much as the commitment a colleague of mine at Stanford who I um respect tremendously Anna lmy 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 in dopamine that are very fast that aren't preceded by effort AKA drugs of abuse behavioral addictions Etc leave us below Baseline with our dopamine and then people will engage in more of the behavior it drives us further and further and further that's kind of the the principle of it um I was talking to her about how people get sober and the conversation turned to how do young people find their purpose it was it was very interesting she said let's talk about finding purpose everyone nowadays wants to know what their purpose is and she said the way you find your purpose is by going out on your front lawn and seeing if the leaves need to be raped sounds familiar right you find purpose by um figuring out how you can be of use at progressively larger and larger spheres away from yourself and in doing that and the present and in doing that you start to hear the calling and you find your purpose and it as you said or it reveals itself to you the same thing right yeah so I think you two would be enjoy a conversation at some point important 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 Old Testament stories he eventually becomes Israel right and so that's his name and Israel means we who wrestle 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 altar and 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 something around here that I could fix that I would fix that's a great question is there something hand that I could fix that I would fix it might be something low cuz especially when you first get going you're not good for anything so you might have to start with something 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 you might even say look The More Mess Around you the more unstructured possibility you have it had and it's true you know it's like I'm not trying to be a poly an Ana 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 CU 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 I my maps of meeting 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 and 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 grew him up like mad as you can imagine he ran into all sorts of weird resistances right cuz 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 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 it's like fair enough so are everybody else's by the way but that means there's a lot of man yes I 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 happened when you started the podcast why' you start it I had it for me I felt a compulsion um 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 um our director of the National Institute sub 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 going to have trouble sleeping trouble 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 us to help them regulate their circadian biology because those Wick out to countering the negative forces that were on us which are 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 I had a a longstanding kind of and growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about Neuroscience because it's so darn cool right okay so it's a logical there there was a lot of energy behind the the the mission but 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 Etc 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 look whatever people's 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 it cloer with it at home that's like what good is that so I just started blabbing on the internet right right that's 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 a professor so you're investigating and transmitting knowledge it's like well looks like you could do that on a broader scale and the technolog 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 it's 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 identifies the Divine with conscience that's his contribution that's a major psychological Revolution right it's an 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 nature he's the originator of the phrase the still Small Voice right like that's a that the notion that you're conscience is the voice of the Divine my God there's there's there's virtually no dis no Discovery there's no proposition more revolutionary than that and so that's why Elijah is a prophet 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 I I mean you have to gerrymander the definition of you for that to be you no 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 um Clarity of mind to be able to um to learn from you and to help transmit that knowledge to people in a way that would be useful to them yeah to um for sustained Focus for um for the ability to also let go and and not try and control or or lead with questions and to um and to allow the the um a sense of of Randomness and Serendipity to to make it what it what it is in trusting that it's in service to the the listeners right well that's a very that's a very precise and properly formulated prayer yeah I pray before every podcast I pray before going to sleep Beach and I've been doing this for about um for a little over a year I always quietly SEC secret why why did you decide to do that my coming to the whole notion of prayer and God Etc um was complicated in the backdrop in the sense that I always secretly prayed um always secretly secretly prayed and then about a year about a year and a half ago a guy that works on my security team um 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 um 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 to uh to come out and for proper prayer establishes aim yeah that's right oh yeah 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 to have it firmly in mind yeah and and it felt different so I should say that you know I I have this little list that I sometimes do I'll say you know uh deliberate breathing AK breath work 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 we there um non-sleep deep rest which is a thing that was you know built out of this this practice called yoga nedro where you go into a an awake but deeply relaxed state allows you to restore your Vigor meditation to me is a way of of enhancing one's ability to focus you know a thirde eyye meditation of concentrating your breath Etc I mean we know based on the data improves Focus prayer to me is entirely different than all of those there's some overlap that they they they look similar some of them look similar from the outside prayer is the the for me is the allowing of something from TR truly outside me to come through me and bring out the best it in me and that's why I pray for four 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 um invite in or allow in messages that um if I didn't steal myself that I wouldn't here and sometimes I'll go to sleep and then the next morning something will will come to mind it's not always immediate well I don't think there's any real difference between that and Revelation so imagine that um what speaks to you in 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 manifest to 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'm I I we looked at it histo because like when did we start to think that's not so obvious you know I mean we started to think in words after we developed the ability to use language what's that 1 15,000 years maybe it's longer than that no one really knows but thought has its historical Origins the probability that it 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'd like to have a discussion with you about that so imagine that to have an in to have an informative intuition means that you posit 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 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're separating the wheat from the chaff that's critical thinking but all of that as far as I can tell is something approximating secularized prayer set your aim then observe the manifestation of that aim that 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 up 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 then 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 brains staining brains and from my understanding of what of neuros science 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 um I don't see how anyone who's really interested in how humans work can um 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 um 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 in prayer and I think there's a lot of uh 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 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 um 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 and neuroscientific 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 to formal prayer and and to reading the Bible and so on so I like to say you know I have I haven't gotten my jersey yet because I don't deserve it but I'm 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 too 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 push back on atheism it's just that for me adopting uh really coming to terms with a 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 um why I wouldn't I but that's the question to what extent do different the way that different religions represent God you think across religions Converge on common themes well I think they converge substantively I mean I think the best I talked to Camille pelia 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 nyman who is yung's greatest student by the way instead of Fuko the whole history of of the university and the intellectual Enterprise over the last five decades would have been entirely different what happened with Fuko well Fuko is the most cited cited scholar who ever lived and Fuko 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 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 dependence 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 and I outlin that in in in this book we who wrestle with God Eric neyman Carl Yung Mach eliat 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 worshiped a god Horus everyone knows the god Horus because the his emblem is the ie the Open Eye well what does that mean it means in part that the ancient Egyptians worshiped attention and they felt that the god of attention was the antidote to the pathological State and they were right about that I mean they had a god of the pathological state that was Seth the god Seth the name Seth became Satan through the Coptic through the Coptic Christian so they believed that the degenerate state had a spirit and the antidote to the spirit of the degenerate state was the allseeing the allseeing upward striving eye and that's right it's like they nailed that sounds like what you were saying before where you set your sights where you set high and to the to the heavens and then to the most proximal thing that's going to deliver you to the next rung 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 you're knocking you're asking right and the Eternal promise is that if you ask you'll be answered and if you seek you'll find and it's the the ey is the gateway to that and it's the antidote to the degenerate State because the degenerate State the totalitarian state insists and tyrannizes and the open eye seeks well the Egyptians figured this out and they the Egyptian theology had a walloping impact on Jewish theology I mean the Jews came out of Egypt like there are concept that's that's a conceptu there are consequences of that conceptually as well as historically the the her 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 and 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 a dimore romance is not as profound as a dovi novel we know there's a hierarchy of depth and you can arrange religious apprehension in terms of a hierarchy of quality and I think the Union school did that brilliantly brilliantly and biologists should know it in Far More depth the best neuroscientists of emotion and motivation that I knew and that include Yak PP they knew the the the work of ilad for example would you 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 by ilad and also um Eric neyman's book uh 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 it's an easier way in is through ilot sacred and the profane short book you could you would read it now knowing that the gods that ilad describe as Waring in the Pagan world are in part manifestations of the personality of motivational 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 ilot to trct that 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 so imagine this here's a way of thinking about it so tribe A Tribe B tribe C now they all have their highest deity or their panoply of deities 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 deities and you could think about the human beings acting out that war just as you could 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 psychologists that were all part of Carl school and the academy just ignored that entirely except for Camille Pia who understands this quite profoundly and went in the direction of Fuko these are these lineages that we were talking about before it's it's hard for people to appreciate just how powerful these academic lineages are and scientific lineages are because they they set trajectories I've been yeah and they Define what's forbidden like all my all the people that advised 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 really yeah sorry I'm laughing cuz it's so Preposterous yeah well I and and like it it it's not surprising I mean I always did when I went for job interviews and that definitely was part of what scuttled at 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 for I was going to say clearly it worked out I've been I've been meaning to ask you I've been reading a a really interesting book um recently that's uh Bas basically grounded in adarian Psychology yeah I'm I wasn't familiar with adarian psychology yeah Adler's very practical the book talks about Adler as a as a Counterpoint to Freud and Yung what's the book um the book is called the courage to be disliked and I highly recommend it to everybody it was actually written by Japanese author I think there are two Japanese authors it didn't get quite so popular in this country but it it had a big following um in Japan and I think in other places in uh in Asia and um the book is is set up as a conversation between essentially a philosopher at of adarian psychology and a student um 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 right and I I like the practicality of it Adler's very practical yeah I like that was just curious what your thoughts were about that the it seems to fit quite well with your your Notions and what you've talked about in multiple books including the most recent one um 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 forward as opposed to um floundering in Notions about the the past and I think it it might it might hit some people Square upside the head when when there's I think 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 to prompt a different way of thinking and to let people start to drill into like okay what do I need to do now regardless of what my parents did or didn't do right regardless of my damaged self and I I must say I really like the book well I would say I should say I I really like I should say I really like the concept 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 yung's take was that Freud focused on sex and Adler focused on Power and Yung focused on what transcended both and I think that's right now Adler is a good repost to Freud 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 hre elenberger who was the foremost exponent of existential psychology in the 1950s brilliant brilliant scholar and it is the best analysis of Freud Jung and Adler that's ever been written by a lot and it's it's a truly great book he also traces the idea of the unconscious back 350 years before Freud so it's a masterful study but I liked Adler and he was much less charismatic than Freud and Yung 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 yungi and psychology works really well on highly creative people and almost all yung'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 say the the primary preoccupation of their life and the past and Freud serves them well Adler is 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 he's got plenty of things to say that are good he also wasn't as good a literary stylist as young Yung or Freud so that also put him off to the side to some degree but anyways a deep deeper investigations can certainly be found in discovery of the unconscious and if for anybody listening and watching who's interested in psychological ideas broadly and would like familiarity with the psychoanalytic tradition Freud Jung and Adler 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 me it's just not out there I mean there 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 you're paying attention to but um there isn't really a satisfactory book about the brain the mind and psychology this just doesn't exist yeah the closest one I ever encountered probably is affective Neuroscience panp book he's uh I'm So I must say um you've mentioned pup a few times and and Yak Pang uh as some of you may know but perhaps most of you don't is 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 Yak Pang up and I thought okay like this guy knows knows the good stuff because he was the first one to talk about juvenile play as a way of exploring circuitry and social dynamics such such and that fit by the way that fit perfectly with PJ's observations of childhood socialization it's like I I came across panks up and I thought oh that's so cool now we have the psychophysiological basis for pan developmental theory was perfect yeah so that was that was lovely concordance YP would have been uh far more recognized had he bit he was at Bowling Green University I think and so smaller University perhaps I don't know I didn't ever hear a lecture maybe not as charismatic as some of the other luminaries of of neuroscience at that time but yeah I don't know how he was as a lecturer he's a great writer and man he had an uniring eye for the right problems in in terms of psychological investigation and very brave in that regard I mean he studied laughter in rats and you think oh of all the absurd things to focus on it's like no you just don't understand where the goal is or play among rats who cares that rats play well like that would be the sort of research proposal that would be pillared by sensible Republicans looking to trim government waste it's like no that was the heart of the matter right rats organized 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 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 disc and it's based on play WoW stunning and we see the same thing in kids obviously and then 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 uh Fuko when you look on out on the landscape of social media um do you see elements of that as well that there's sort of a playfulness among uh people that's establishing a hierarchy it seems like elon's having a good time with his rockets and his X and Tesla and 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 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 like pep 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 and Trump plays too it's 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 um because um I think it's something that's sorely lacking in a lot of the uh discourse among adults um so to speak and I think these days I think a lot about what young people are observing a few years back I I was watching this show I didn't like it um called forgive me because I think the actor was quite good um but the show was Californication with David dukovany and I realized this show is all about the adults acting like children and the children acting like adults oh yeah that's that's a typical Hollywood inversion and I thought um this is terrible um not because I'm some 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 like 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 the kind of worst of ways um by you know not treating each other with respect um occasionally you'd see a discourse that would felt like meaningful and structured or um explorative in the real sense like people were there to learn I think that's been one of the successes of of your work and of Rogan's work and I like to think you know my podcast as well Lex fredman certainly and others right um sometimes people use comedy sometimes people use Neuroscience as as a as a probe but in any case but you know I've been concerned that there there isn't this kind of like enjoyment of discourse between people that disagree in a way that includes forgiveness or like ah you got like good one like you got me or you know and and um it seems like it 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 like that's not a debate that's 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 if you're going to engage in real in in real discourse in real play and to me um it 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 dunked on 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've become become extremely successful as podcasters Constantine kissen Russell Brand Dave Rubin um Crowder Steven Crowder pH vaugh 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 um 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 I'm 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 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 can 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 will people will call him that they try and you know manosphere bro whatever that it doesn't it the reality Falls so far from when you not true at all it's not true yeah so so there is plenty of play and and I so I think we can be positive about that and and I think young people too have seen how successful that could be I mean Rogan and his codery 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 in a different direction well that became Stark starkly obvious when Rogan interviewed Trump that was the death nail 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 qu 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 um I mean I couldn't help but smile big when um at the inauguration the thanks went out to a number of people including Theo vau I mean if you think about this you think good for Theo so fun I'm yet to meet him I I hear he's I really like Theo is so great because Theo is like he's he's Backwoods hick 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 derisive about the in his back woodsy 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 too you know I can relate to that to a 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 comical 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 in the Republican Renaissance at the moment whatever that is I mean it's Republican to call it that is like that's whatever the hell's happening it's not conceptualized 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 cuz 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 always happens sorry I didn't mean to 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 a muck oh yes well of course it will it always does you know and that the Republicans themselves who might wish well this remarkable group of people that's aggregated around Trumpets like they should hope for themselves that they have an effective opposition because someone's got to be telling you where you're stupid and if the Democrats so this is another public invitation 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 for years so I hope that I'm afraid that all the people with any real courage or virtually all them be 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 Tide's already turned in that regard I think that judging from some of the um article titles that I've um seen at uh 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 their uh Joe Rogan which is by the way a silly question that's just the silliest question we say in science he's n of one don't don't even try like it's the whole point is to create why would you would can't yeah right 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 a political party would build it first of all he didn't build it not not not that way not through a prior planning so that the Democrats could have a voice it's just him being him yes exactly yeah 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 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 democrat claiming that the Democrats are the true voice of the working class it's like I don't think so I think that ship is 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 mean Clinton managed that 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 if 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 not going to be successful in the podcast world that's absolutely true right podcasting is real I even for I'll just say because perhaps it's of Interest or maybe even actionable for people I mean I I get a little frightened every podcast certainly if I'm going to talk about like I'm forming this relationship to or I'm exploring a I mean I'll talk about circuits in the brain all day long with with uh with no fear whatsoever that's my wheelhouse but anything that's new uh which is a a real exploration and evolution of of where I'm at um 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 um clearly this this conversation is a is a new direction that I've not taken before in this podcast and um but I'm delighted that it's happening want to say that and I think that some level of fear and anxiety about the unknown is is absolutely required and I think that that's something that hopefully any especially young people listening need to know you you're not supposed to perform well at the outset like in anything you're not can't that's why Yung said 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 what 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 to I've certainly made mistakes publicly apologize for the ones that I felt I should apologize for there's a slip of the tongue and make it said something went back and correct it was embarrassing but um the ability to laugh at oneself is is tremendously powerful genuinely laugh like just thinking like oh God where was I thing I understand this I you know sometimes we we air you know I have a couple of questions about you oh oh um I know you're the you're the clinician but uh and I'm not trying to play that role when you wake up in the morning is your mind in a good place typ Al or are you tormented or you where does your 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 um 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 MH and I 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 yeah yeah so but psychologically my life is ridiculously it's absurdly interesting it's crazily and absurdly interesting all the time and so anyone with any sense would be like open mouthed in amazement and gratitude for that it's Preposterous and I have this tour that's going well it's been going for like six years really and your tour schedule is is super human I have to say having done some live shows I mean what you do with tours and I've been to one of your shows I highly recommend people attend it was spectacular I 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 and but a real it's a quest an intellectual Quest right it's a real experience and men wear your jacket and tie because everyone else there going be wearing at least a jack up look look look respectable so my wife and I are touring from January through June and much of that's in 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 ridic ridiculously exciting and people can find more out about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com the dates and so forth are all listed there um we launched Peterson Academy we where we want you to teach and that's going spectacularly well we had a place where people can hear lectures in a given domain yep yep yep we have 35 lectures online already each of them is sequenced over 6 to8 hours um 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 media 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 three cuz we put one guy on probation cuz he said he'd improve 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 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 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 tear so I don't know if I'm the best like around certain topics I've cried a times on this podcast this year and a few others so that was that was a uh a vulnerability I'd never expected but yeah well it's good to know I'm not alone in that not alone I'm less susceptible 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 courses 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 too I do and two more on the way W congratulations you know with and I have an endless field of Stellar opportunity in front of me so hopefully I have enough sense to appreciate that and 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 uh most people originally found you if they wereing about that that's certainly how I learned about you I thought this guy's talking about really interesting things in the fields of psychology he knows who Yak PP is and um and he's posting on YouTube can I ask what inspired that move was that from well conscious was that calling or conscience or both um 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 H 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 [Music] for maybe maybe seven years somewhere between five and seven years before things exploded 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 pillared as a you know right-wing Nazi 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 um I had like 200 hours of lectures up on you 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 a 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 Ence whatsoever to their accusations and so that was a Breaking Point in some ways for cancel culture because there were 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 helped me out a lot there you've certainly prevailed and uh we're all so far well I guess that that speaks to what I was going to say which is that um 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's still happening now where you continue to take risks that are healthy risks in service to trying to understand the truth 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 um do these things to try and discover your path get on your path set your sights to the right level um and to make that a daily practice and a and a repeated lifelong practice is really spectacular and 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 that yourself and making that visible to people your Live Events of course are an exploration in the moment where you raise a question and ask a question and address it it's not pre-planned and I must say that your progression of books and podcasts and where things are going now in particular that today you said you are hopeful that the Democratic party I think most people 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 balance as opposed to more skewing of knowledge and power and I think um that's a terrific example and it's clear that you live right near the edge uh in order to inspire us to basically explore knowledge explore ancient teachings and merge them with where we are now yeah it'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 ask like for what what do you mean exactly what changed they tell me and there isn't anything better that can happen to you than 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's not a possibility that you could come up with a better wish than that and so it's great it's great and 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 fredman 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 well thank you for those words I 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 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 uh it's a pleasure watching your progress forward and seeing you propagate all the remarkable 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 and the biology of emotion and and uh 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 ins inspired in no small part by you and my other podcast colleagues and in your case my academic colleague so thank you Jordan thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Jordan Peterson 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 Peterson Academy please see the show note captions if you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments and if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook threads and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast again that's hubman lab on all social media platforms for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body and if you haven't already subscribe to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes everything from podcast summaries to what we call protocols in the form of brief 1 to three page PDFs that cover things like how to optimize your sleep how to regulate your dopamine we also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure get a lot of questions about that deliberate heat exposure and on and on again all available at completely zero cost you simply go to hubman lab.com go to the menu tab in the top right corner scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and I should mention that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Jordan Peterson and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]