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

0:00:04 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools
0:00:09 for everyday life.
0:00:14 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
0:00:15 School of Medicine.
0:00:17 My guest today is Dr. Jordan Peterson.
0:00:23 Dr. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist, an author, and one of the most influential public
0:00:25 intellectuals of our time.
0:00:27 Today we discuss the human animal.
0:00:32 What it means to be a human being at the level of psychology, at the level of neuroscience,
0:00:37 and indeed, at the level of expression of different personality types within us.
0:00:42 Most of us don’t think about having different personalities, however, as we discussed today,
0:00:46 due to the activity of specific brain circuitries, including the hypothalamus, the prefrontal
0:00:48 cortex, and others.
0:00:54 We each and all can adopt different states of mind that powerfully influence our emotions,
0:00:56 our thoughts, and our actions.
0:01:00 And in so doing, we are different people depending on those states of mind.
0:01:03 Today’s discussion is both an intellectual one and a practical one.
0:01:07 You will learn where and how to place your thoughts.
0:01:11 You will learn the relationship between the call to adventure and responsibility.
0:01:17 And as Dr. Peterson emphasizes in his new book, We Who Wrestle With God, he emphasizes
0:01:23 the use of story, in this case biblical stories, to understand oneself and to best guide one’s
0:01:26 emotions towards the most positive and generative outcomes.
0:01:32 We discuss the self, romantic relationships and commitments, the family, community, and
0:01:33 culture.
0:01:39 We also discuss the media, politics, cancel culture, things like social media and pornography,
0:01:43 shifting masculine and feminine roles, and the innate human drive to create action at
0:01:47 a distance, both in space and in time.
0:01:49 Today’s discussion is both intellectual and practical.
0:01:56 Dr. Peterson emphasizes how to use different sources of story, philosophy, psychology, and
0:02:00 neuroscience to understand and best guide one’s decision making process.
0:02:06 Indeed, he discusses the tight relationship between the call to adventure and responsibility
0:02:12 as a trustable framework for moving forward in life towards one’s best possible outcomes.
0:02:16 And I’m certain that by the end of today’s discussion, you’ll be thinking about your
0:02:20 own neural circuits, that is, the connections in your brain that drive emotions, thoughts,
0:02:25 and behavior, as well as your psychology, your different states of mind, and you’re
0:02:29 going to have a number of different tools and frameworks with which to apply all that
0:02:32 knowledge toward the best possible outcomes.
0:02:36 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching
0:02:38 and research roles at Stanford.
0:02:42 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information
0:02:45 about science and science-related tools to the general public.
0:02:49 In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast.
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0:05:19 And now for my discussion with Dr. Jordan Peterson.
0:05:22 Dr. Jordan Peterson, welcome.
0:05:23 Thank you, sir.
0:05:25 Delighted to have you here.
0:05:28 And want to talk about elements within your new book.
0:05:29 Yeah.
0:05:34 Also some elements within your previous books and within that mind of yours generally.
0:05:39 As a framework for that, I’m wondering if you would tolerate or permit a little bit
0:05:44 of a discussion about brain and psychology.
0:05:49 Just kind of lay the groundwork for where we might prod some of the themes that you bring
0:05:52 up related to the book.
0:05:57 So I view the brain as obviously a bunch of cells and parts, et cetera, but I distill
0:06:00 it down to some basic features.
0:06:01 First of all, we have an autonomic physiology.
0:06:06 I think we both agree on that, that regulates our sleepiness and wakefulness, our breathing,
0:06:09 our heart rate, stuff that runs in the background.
0:06:14 And then we have a lot of circuitry devoted to what I would call impulses, things that
0:06:17 we desire, we want to move toward, appetitive behaviors.
0:06:22 And we also have some impulses to avoid things that are putrid, painful, et cetera.
0:06:23 That’s all in there like it is in other animals.
0:06:27 You should talk about the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization.
0:06:28 Okay.
0:06:34 Because there’s an important, there’s an important point to be made on the, you pay
0:06:39 a price for characterizing that as impulse and I’d like to explore that with you because
0:06:40 it’s crucial.
0:06:41 Great.
0:06:42 We’ll circle black to impulse.
0:06:43 I’d like to do that.
0:06:45 And then we have a lot of circuitry.
0:06:51 People will hear about it as executive function, prefrontal circuitry, which does many things,
0:06:58 but I like to think of as a circuit that can say, and here I’m borrowing from a previous
0:07:03 guest who’s a neurosurgeon, it can say, shh, or exert what’s called top down suppression
0:07:05 on these, what I’m calling impulses.
0:07:10 It can, we should talk about that too, the suppression idea and the inhibition idea in
0:07:11 general.
0:07:12 Great.
0:07:16 Because there’s, I think there’s a parallel problem there to the notion of impulse that’s
0:07:18 very much worth delving into.
0:07:19 Great.
0:07:24 So circuitry that’s devoted to our ability to self inhibit the desire to reach for something
0:07:25 or to avoid something.
0:07:29 We can push ourselves into things that would otherwise be aversive.
0:07:36 We can avoid doing things that would otherwise drive us to quote unquote, just do it anyway.
0:07:43 And then we have what I think of as our default settings, kind of how we’re operating in the
0:07:51 world with respect to food, other people, ourselves, our thoughts, if we don’t intervene
0:07:52 with ourselves.
0:07:57 And these default settings are, of course, established by both nature, a genetic program
0:08:01 that wires up circuitry, but also nurture because of the immense neuroplasticity that
0:08:06 occurs in the first 25 years plus of life, but especially those first years of life.
0:08:11 And then of course we have neuroplasticity, this incredible gift that humans have more
0:08:16 of than any other species as far as we know, which is we can decide to make changes.
0:08:20 Now the reason I lay out this framework as opposed to starting with a question is because
0:08:26 there are so many amazing questions that you ask in this book, you know, we who wrestle
0:08:32 with God, I mean, trying to wrap our arms and minds around this huge set of questions.
0:08:37 And it occurred to me just step back from all of that and ask, is part of the reason
0:08:45 that we have a concept of God, that there are multiple religions, is that the consequence
0:08:53 of some humans at some point realizing, or perhaps God himself realizing that what we
0:09:00 are equipped with as humans, which we just described, is insufficient to allow us to
0:09:03 evolve as a species and be the best version of ourselves.
0:09:07 I think this for me really is like the central question of at least my life, which is, to
0:09:13 what extent do I need to intervene with my default settings, rewire them, engage that
0:09:18 prefrontal cortex and, you know, push down on some appetitive or aversive behaviors.
0:09:23 And to what extent can we do that maybe to what end, and to what end, and maybe we need
0:09:24 a rule book.
0:09:30 I, you know, I, I’m starting to believe, and I’m now 49 years old, that we need a rule
0:09:35 book, that the neural circuitry that’s encased within our skulls is not sufficient to allow
0:09:39 us to navigate through life to our best outcome.
0:09:44 We kind of know that we need a rule book, even you admitted that in some ways implicitly
0:09:49 when you discussed the fact that we have a 25 year socialization window.
0:09:54 And what that means is that we have to interact with other people and our traditions in order
0:09:56 to set us right.
0:09:59 And that’s so complex, it takes 25 years.
0:10:02 And so we’re learning something from that.
0:10:07 And that’s indication that our, let’s say, default biological settings are insufficient
0:10:10 to guide us into the future, right.
0:10:14 And so then the question is, well, what is it that you’re learning as a consequence of
0:10:19 that socialization process, and you can think about it, and people have thought about it
0:10:26 as a series of complex inhibitions of lower order motivational states, impulses.
0:10:31 But I’m not very happy with the inhibition model, because inhibition is unsophisticated
0:10:34 socialization.
0:10:36 Integration is sophisticated socialization.
0:10:41 So here’s a way of, I really learned this, I think, from contrasting Freud with Piaget.
0:10:47 Because Freud’s model, super ego, is really an inhibition model, and Freud was a neurologist.
0:10:50 Piaget’s model is very different.
0:10:56 He thought of the properly socialized person as someone who had integrated their lower
0:11:03 order, we’ll call them impulses for now, into a sustainable, voluntary structure that regulated
0:11:05 them and gave them all their proper place.
0:11:07 That’s very different than an inhibitory model.
0:11:10 So for example, I’ll give you an example from my own life.
0:11:16 My son was quite a willful, young child.
0:11:18 Wonder where he got it from.
0:11:19 Fair enough.
0:11:27 My father was a formidable character, and so my son liked to do what he liked to do,
0:11:32 and it took him quite a bit of tussling with him to help him.
0:11:36 I wouldn’t say inhibit that or regulate it, to integrate it.
0:11:39 And one of the consequences of that was he became a very good athlete.
0:11:41 And so why is that relevant?
0:11:46 Well, because it wasn’t like he stopped being assertive or even aggressive, it’s that he
0:11:51 learned how to put that aggression in its proper place in relationship to a goal that
0:11:56 was much more sophisticated than merely getting his own way moment to moment.
0:11:59 Okay, so integrations are better.
0:12:06 Like a very sophisticated athlete, a team athlete in particular, isn’t not aggressive,
0:12:09 and they’re not inhibiting their aggression on the playing field.
0:12:13 They may now and then, when they’re provoked, let’s say, but all things considered, what
0:12:19 they’ve done is subordinate their aggression to a higher-order goal that enables them to
0:12:24 be more successful, but also to be successful in a maximally social and sustainable way.
0:12:30 And Piaget’s point, and he’s absolutely right about this, is that that’s much better conceptualized
0:12:31 as integration.
0:12:35 And then with regard to impulse, because I said I would return to that, I spent a lot
0:12:39 of time walking through the behavioral literature, right?
0:12:43 And a lot of that was derived from animal experiments, and it was predicated on the
0:12:50 idea that if you could explain something on the basis of a deterministic reflex, you
0:12:51 should.
0:12:54 And there’s something to be said for that hypothesis.
0:12:58 Don’t make your theory any more complex than it needs to be.
0:13:02 How far can you get with a theory of chained reflexes, a deterministic theory?
0:13:03 The behavior’s got a long way.
0:13:08 They couldn’t get to the highest strata of human endeavor with a chained reflex theory,
0:13:11 but there was a lot of things they did that were very good.
0:13:16 But one of the things they made a big mistake about was to conceptualize motivational states,
0:13:20 let’s say, as impulses or drives.
0:13:26 That’s not sufficient, because it fails to take into account the effect of those states
0:13:28 on perception.
0:13:31 So it’s much better to think of a motivated state.
0:13:37 This is what helped me integrate behavioral theory with psychoanalytic theory, especially
0:13:40 the psychoanalytic theory of religious endeavor.
0:13:45 It’s much better to think of those lower-order motivational states as personalities.
0:13:47 They’re sub-personalities.
0:13:49 They have their perceptions.
0:13:51 They have their objects of perception.
0:13:56 They have their cognitive rationalizations.
0:13:58 You certainly see that in addiction, let’s say.
0:14:00 They have their emotions.
0:14:06 They are small personalities, unidimensional, very narrow-minded personalities.
0:14:07 But they’re personalities.
0:14:08 They’re not impulses.
0:14:14 So are they personalities within our, what most people would think of as our larger personality?
0:14:17 What I’m hearing is that, let’s say somebody’s an addict.
0:14:23 It depends on how integrated you are, because you could be nothing but a succession of dominion
0:14:24 of sub-personalities.
0:14:27 That’s what a two-year-old is.
0:14:33 And so you have to build an integrating personality on top of those sub-personalities, but not
0:14:34 in a manner that inhibits them.
0:14:39 That means your socialization is unsophisticated.
0:14:44 Even Freud knew this, because even though he had basically an inhibitory model of, say,
0:14:52 superego regulation, he believed that a healthy personality would have the impulse of aggression
0:14:59 and the impulse of sexuality to take two major lower-order motivational states into account,
0:15:03 but have them integrated into the functioning ego.
0:15:05 The issue is integration.
0:15:10 And so what you’re doing when you’re social, like, okay, when my son, for example, would
0:15:17 become willful in a manner that I regarded as counterproductive for him and the household.
0:15:22 And the rule would be, you can’t act that way, because if you act that way, people aren’t
0:15:26 going to approve of you, and that’s a bad plan.
0:15:30 So you have to control that, because it’s not going to work out well for you if you
0:15:31 don’t.
0:15:33 Okay, so I used time out.
0:15:37 Now time out is an effective disciplinary strategy for social creatures, because we
0:15:39 don’t like isolation.
0:15:43 And so time out basically takes a child, puts the child in isolation.
0:15:47 That produces a pain-like response, because social isolation produces pain.
0:15:48 It’s pure inhibition.
0:15:49 Right.
0:15:50 Well, that’s the question.
0:15:52 You see, that’s the question.
0:15:56 He had to inhibit his immediate desire, say, to run around, because he was going to sit
0:15:57 on the steps.
0:16:00 But, see, I put a rule in place there.
0:16:06 And the rule was, as soon as you get yourself under control, you can leave the stairs.
0:16:10 Okay, so now the question is, what does under control mean?
0:16:13 One interpretation is inhibition.
0:16:20 Another interpretation is, no, no, he’s developing a superordinate personality, probably courtically,
0:16:24 that has enough dominion so that those underlying motivational states can now be integrated and
0:16:27 placed properly into a hierarchy.
0:16:33 And when I’m insisting that he regulate his behavior, and I allow him to move off the
0:16:39 step when he is now able to be a social creature again, instead of falling prey to his whim,
0:16:45 I’m reinforcing the cortical integration of those underlying motivational states.
0:16:51 Now, you might think a human organism comes into the world with a warring battleground
0:16:53 of primordial motivational states.
0:16:55 That’s perfectly reasonable view.
0:16:59 We know a lot of that is mediated by the hypothalamus, for example, the amygdala and these lower
0:17:06 order biologically, what, pre-programmed, to some degree, pre-programmed systems.
0:17:12 Now, the specific manner in which those systems should find their expression, and the specific
0:17:17 way that they’re going to be hierarchically integrated, is going to depend to a tremendous
0:17:22 degree on the particulars of the society at that moment, which is why you need that 18-year
0:17:28 framework to hone the manner in which those systems make themselves manifest.
0:17:34 But I think the best way to conceptualize that is that it’s the hierarchical integration
0:17:39 of the motivational states within an overarching superordinate personality.
0:17:43 And that personality is not bound to the moment.
0:17:49 It takes the medium and long term into account, and it’s not self-serving, like a two-year-old
0:17:55 would be, because you have to take other people into account if you’re going to be successful.
0:17:57 And this is where the cortex comes in, as far as I’m concerned.
0:17:58 This is what it’s doing.
0:18:04 It’s stretching the, it’s integrating the lower order, temporarily bound motivational
0:18:11 states that are specifically self-serving to a much broader vision of the world that
0:18:15 takes the future into account and other people.
0:18:16 And that’s hard.
0:18:17 It’s very hard.
0:18:24 I love this, and I’ll tell you why, because the way that I think of the prefrontal cortex
0:18:27 is that its main job is context dependent strategy setting.
0:18:28 Right.
0:18:29 Context dependent.
0:18:30 Context dependent.
0:18:32 That’s a crucial issue.
0:18:36 When you mentioned hypothalamus, this, you know, it’s basically the size of two marbles
0:18:41 or so sitting above the roof of our mouth, tiny, tiny little brain area, it’s mostly
0:18:42 switches in there.
0:18:43 What do I mean by that?
0:18:47 Anytime a neurosurgeon has stimulated neurons in a little sub area of the hypothalamus, you
0:18:52 get either rage or sexual appetite or mating with inanimate objects.
0:18:55 I mean, this was done in both non-human primates and in humans.
0:18:56 Uncontrollable thirst.
0:18:59 Uncontrollable thirst, hunger, total suppression of hunger.
0:19:02 I mean, all the basic drives are operating in there.
0:19:03 Exploration.
0:19:10 And prefrontal cortex has direct access to it, to the hypothalamus, and prefrontal cortex
0:19:15 is context dependent learning, context dependent decision making.
0:19:21 And I love that you brought in this notion of changing an impulse in the example that
0:19:25 you gave in your son’s impulse to be aggressive or wild in some way that was inappropriate
0:19:28 for the home environment at that moment.
0:19:31 And two things that you said really resonate.
0:19:36 The prefrontal cortex, his prefrontal cortex had to learn that whatever he was feeling
0:19:41 for himself, his own desires needed to be placed in the context of other people’s wishes,
0:19:42 desires, and needs as well.
0:19:44 So there’s an even for him to thrive, right?
0:19:45 Right.
0:19:49 It’s not merely a sacrifice of his own desire for the sake of others.
0:19:55 It’s like, no, no, look, kid, if you’re, we know this, if you’re, if you have the same
0:20:01 orientation towards other people at four that you did when you were two, especially if you’re
0:20:05 tilted a little in the aggressive direction, you will not make friends and you’ll be isolated
0:20:08 and alienated for the rest of your life.
0:20:15 So that two year old impulsiveness that has its place to, it starts to modify radically
0:20:18 at three and it better be fixed by four.
0:20:23 And the reason for that is that you have to integrate yourself into the social world,
0:20:27 which means in the case of children, it means you want to have friends.
0:20:32 And so the reason you’re, you’re, you’re disciplining your child isn’t to teach them
0:20:38 that what they’re doing is bad, you know, in that simple, in that simple sense that you
0:20:39 might interpret punishment.
0:20:43 It’s like, no, you need to be more sophisticated.
0:20:44 Well, why?
0:20:46 Well, you have to be able to take turns.
0:20:47 Well, why?
0:20:49 Well, because no one liked you otherwise.
0:20:51 Well, what’s the problem with that?
0:20:56 Well, first of all, we’re hyper social, like you can punish psychopaths by putting them
0:20:58 in isolation.
0:20:59 That’s how social human beings are.
0:21:04 You take the most anti social human beings there are and you can punish them by making
0:21:05 them be alone.
0:21:06 Right.
0:21:07 So that’s how social we are.
0:21:16 So you want to, you, you’re, you’re modeling for your child a strategy of, of even satisfaction
0:21:23 for his own basic drives that takes context in the most sophisticated possible way into
0:21:24 account.
0:21:25 Right.
0:21:29 As soon as you understand that that’s the fostering of like a meta personality in the
0:21:34 child, which would really be the personality of that child, the integrated personality,
0:21:38 you start to understand how that might be related to religious thinking because religious
0:21:44 thinking is the attempt to formulate something approximating an ideal personality.
0:21:45 Right.
0:21:47 Now that’s attributed there.
0:21:51 That’s often attributed elements of the divine, but there’s reasons for that that we could
0:21:52 go into.
0:21:59 As soon as you know that the basic structure, even at the lower motivational level is personality,
0:22:02 well then that, that changes the way you view the brain.
0:22:07 Look, a lot of archaic deities are motivational systems.
0:22:08 Could you give me an example?
0:22:12 Well, the God of war, Mars, that’s rage.
0:22:16 That was a God that the Vikings invoked before they went into battle.
0:22:21 They would use amniotic muscaria and they imitated predators, right from an early age.
0:22:26 This is a, Cito Colleen, by the way, folks, as two general receptor systems, the nicotinic
0:22:28 system, which is a stimulant, but also relaxes you.
0:22:30 That’s why people like nicotine.
0:22:36 And then the muscarinic system, which creates changes in our self perception and perception
0:22:38 of the things around us.
0:22:45 It’s not so much a stimulant as it, it’s a, I would veer towards almost like a psychedelic
0:22:53 organ. It has a, an effect of making us less fearful and, and intrigued.
0:22:55 It’s a radically atypical psychedelic.
0:22:56 Yeah, it’s hard to describe.
0:22:57 Yeah, yeah.
0:22:58 Hard to describe.
0:23:03 It’s outside the LSD, psilocybin, mescaline domain, but people would take this, this as
0:23:04 an agent.
0:23:05 The Vikings.
0:23:07 The Vikings would take this as an agent before going into.
0:23:08 Sure.
0:23:13 Because what they were trying to do is make the personality of rage superordinate with
0:23:14 no pain.
0:23:15 Right.
0:23:16 And they practiced that from a very early age.
0:23:18 So the Vikings worked themselves up.
0:23:20 They went berserk.
0:23:22 That means to wear the bear shirt.
0:23:23 Right.
0:23:26 They transformed themselves, so to speak, into predators.
0:23:30 They would narrow the context within which they’re, I’m calling them impulses, but you’re
0:23:36 giving a more sophisticated explanation for them within which they’re the aggressive impulse,
0:23:38 the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled.
0:23:39 Right.
0:23:40 Because that full rain, given full rain, right?
0:23:41 They were experts at that.
0:23:45 They were able to decapitate people, eviscerate people, do whatever it was that they needed
0:23:48 to do in order to, and to suppress their own feelings of pain.
0:23:49 Yeah.
0:23:51 Well, then you could imagine in a way that what they were doing was bringing the full
0:23:57 resources of the cortex to, and placing them at the service of the rage circuits and the
0:23:58 hypothalamus.
0:24:00 Like we have no idea what that would be like.
0:24:02 No, there aren’t, we don’t do that.
0:24:07 We have no idea what a human being who does that is like if they’re expert at it.
0:24:11 You would give you nightmares to think about it deeply.
0:24:12 Right.
0:24:17 There’s an experiment, if I may, that might shed some light on what it would look like.
0:24:22 Former guest on this podcast, actually, David Anderson at Caltech has been studying hypothalamic
0:24:27 circuits, and he and his former postdoc, Diu Lin, discovered a small, tiny, tiny collection
0:24:32 of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus that, when stimulated, would send these animals,
0:24:35 these mice, you can find videos of this online, into a rage.
0:24:40 Now, the interesting thing is, is it required the presence of another mouse?
0:24:41 Right.
0:24:42 Right.
0:24:43 So it’s still somewhat context dependent.
0:24:44 It’s somewhat context dependent.
0:24:47 If they were alone in their cage, they wouldn’t attack themselves or the walls of the cage.
0:24:54 But if you put a air or water filled glove within the cage, they would absolutely attack
0:24:56 it to try and destroy it.
0:24:58 Then you turn off these neurons, the mouse is calm.
0:24:59 We can put a link to this in the show note caption.
0:25:00 Now, here’s what’s remarkable.
0:25:05 The ventromedial hypothalamus has these neurons, basically interspersed with other neurons
0:25:12 that when stimulated, suppress rage and activate copulation, incredible, right?
0:25:18 Within the same structure, you have these mutually exclusive sets of neurons and behaviors.
0:25:22 And it speaks to, I think, some of the things that Freud and others have talked about in
0:25:29 terms of the juxtaposition of these neurons, but that they mutually inhibit one another,
0:25:34 which lends itself to some really interesting questions about when aggression and sexuality
0:25:38 become combined in states of pathology.
0:25:46 But in any event, context dependent control over impulses, over the hypothalamus seems
0:25:47 to be the theme here.
0:25:52 And the other thing that you mentioned is the ability for your son in this case, but
0:25:57 presumably also the Vikings, to be able to broaden their temporal scope, to be able to
0:25:59 think about the time domain differently.
0:26:02 This is something I’m absolutely obsessed by.
0:26:05 The more we experience, what I brought up at the beginning was that we have this autonomic
0:26:13 arousal system, the more alert we are, the less we are able to take ourselves into notions
0:26:15 of this two shall pass.
0:26:17 The past, the present, the future.
0:26:23 Autonomic activation, stress, panic, fear, anger tend to make us lose sight.
0:26:27 We get blinders on lose sight of the fact that there was a past, there’s a present and there’s
0:26:28 a future.
0:26:33 That’s because they’re collapsing, they’re collapsing your domain of apprehension to
0:26:35 the moment, so you will act.
0:26:38 You have to collapse to the moment to act, right?
0:26:44 And so we should also point out for everyone that the other, you don’t want to underestimate
0:26:48 the sophistication of the hypothalamus, and this is partly why conceptualizing its various
0:26:50 states as subpersonalities is so useful.
0:26:53 I mean, it’s not unsophisticated.
0:26:57 You can take a female cat and take out its whole brain except for the hypothalamus.
0:27:02 Now it’s like 95% of its brain is gone, and in a relatively controlled environment, it’s
0:27:05 indistinguishable from a normal cat.
0:27:07 It can do cat things and live.
0:27:11 Now it’s hyper exploratory.
0:27:16 Now that’s a very strange thing, where as a cat with no brain is hyper exploratory.
0:27:20 It’s not what you think at all, but it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is.
0:27:27 It can run these programs, but they’re programs of personality because they have perceptions.
0:27:31 It can run them, and it can do that quite successfully.
0:27:37 Now all the higher order sub-cortical and cortical systems are, well, I think they are
0:27:43 to your point, they’re ways of expanding the apprehension of those fundamental motivational
0:27:48 systems across broader and broader spans of time, incorporating more and more people,
0:27:54 but also solving the problem of the conflict that emerges between those fundamental motivational
0:27:55 states.
0:27:59 It’s like, well, what do you do when you’re hungry and tired?
0:28:02 Well, you have to mediate between the states to some degree.
0:28:07 What do you do if you want to solve the problem of being hungry and tired over a long period
0:28:10 of time with other people?
0:28:13 Well, you need more and more brain to calculate that.
0:28:18 And so a huge part of what maturation is, is when we think about it as the capacity to
0:28:24 forego gratification, actually what’s happening is that as you mature and your cortex comes
0:28:29 on line, let’s say, you’re able to regulate your behavior with more and more other things
0:28:32 taken into account, right, right.
0:28:37 And there has to be some war there, which is why you’re wrestling with God, let’s say.
0:28:42 There has to be some war there, because it’s also the case that you do have to satiate
0:28:47 yourself in relationship to your basic biological needs, or you die.
0:28:49 And so there’s going to be tension.
0:28:52 That is something like the tension between the individual and the group, you might say.
0:28:55 That’s how the Russoians or the Freudians would think about it.
0:29:04 So the weird thing about that is that it’s not useful to identify your individuality
0:29:07 with the dominion of a whim.
0:29:10 And that’s what hedonists do, and that’s what immature people do.
0:29:14 They think, well, why shouldn’t I get what I want?
0:29:21 It’s like, I see, so your claim is that the you that superordinate is what you want.
0:29:26 That means you’re subjugated to these low-order personalities, and you might say, well, why
0:29:27 is that wrong?
0:29:30 It’s like, well, you’re a two-year-old.
0:29:32 It doesn’t work.
0:29:38 If it’s all about you and your immediate gratification, well, first of all, you’re rather psychopathic,
0:29:42 because you could think of psychopathy as the extension of immaturity into adulthood.
0:29:49 That’s a pretty good default way of conceptualizing, and it’s like it’s an unsophisticated strategy.
0:29:55 They want what they want now, and they don’t care about the we–
0:29:56 Or the future.
0:30:03 See, one of the ways I caught into this relationship was because I studied antisocial behavior
0:30:06 for a very long time.
0:30:11 Psychopaths in particular are notorious for their inability to learn from experience.
0:30:13 Okay, so what does that mean?
0:30:20 It means that if they do something impulsive that causes them trouble in the future, the
0:30:24 fact of that future trouble has no bearing on their continued behavior.
0:30:30 Well, what that means is that they are so non-communitarian that they’re willing to
0:30:34 even betray their own future selves.
0:30:36 There’s no difference between that and betraying someone else.
0:30:38 It’s exactly the same mechanism.
0:30:39 Very much a toddler.
0:30:43 Well, sir, here’s something I learned in Montreal.
0:30:48 I worked with a man named Richard Tromblay there, and Richard, I think Richard’s lab
0:30:52 used up one-third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time.
0:30:57 He was a radically successful researcher, and he was really interested in antisocial
0:31:01 behavior and was trying to get to the roots.
0:31:09 One of the conclusions that our lab enterprise moved towards was that one observation was
0:31:14 that if you take two-year-olds, if you take kids at different ages, you can imagine you
0:31:17 made a group of two-year-olds, three-year-olds, group of four-year-olds, all the way up to
0:31:18 15.
0:31:19 You just let them interact.
0:31:26 The two-year-olds are the most aggressive, but if you analyze the two-year-olds themselves,
0:31:32 you find that all the aggressive kids are boys, and it’s only a fraction of them, about
0:31:34 5%.
0:31:39 So if you group two-year-olds together, 5% of the boys will kick, steal, hit, and bite,
0:31:45 which was our definition of early-onset antisocial behavior.
0:31:49 Almost all of those kids are socialized by the age of four, right?
0:31:53 The remnant that aren’t get alienated because they have no friends, and they’re the ones
0:31:59 who become juvenile delinquents and then early-onset criminals, and then repeat offenders, right?
0:32:06 And so what it is is, imagine there are some kids whose default, their rage circuits are
0:32:08 a little bit more dominant than the typical kid.
0:32:10 They’re often bigger physically.
0:32:14 Yeah, especially the biting, forgive me for interrupting, but there’s a very interesting
0:32:20 paper published about two years ago showing that there’s a specific circuit from the hypothalamus
0:32:25 to the neurons that control jaw closure that are independent of the neurons that control
0:32:31 jaw closure for eating and for drinking that are specifically for aggressive biting.
0:32:35 I mean, I hope people understand the significance of this because what this means is there are
0:32:39 dedicated circuits for aggressive biting in your hypothalamus.
0:32:43 We all learn to suppress these, except probably under conditions where our life is endangered,
0:32:47 in which case you’d probably bite like hell in order to try and get out of that circumstance.
0:32:50 But we are all born with this circuit.
0:32:52 We die with this circuit.
0:32:57 Most of us, apparently not these kids, learn to suppress this circuit.
0:33:00 An eight-year-old biter is a scary thing.
0:33:03 A one-year-old biter is like a little bit of a worrisome thing.
0:33:05 A two-year-old like, okay, we need to work on this.
0:33:09 An eight-year-old biter, people are starting to be concerned, I think even without knowledge
0:33:13 of the psychopathology literature, one would be very concerned if their eight-year-old is
0:33:15 biting other kids.
0:33:20 Not just because of the damage induced, but it’s so very different and so much more primitive
0:33:23 than even hitting or spitting or something.
0:33:24 Exactly.
0:33:28 It’s the indication of virtual absence of sophisticated socialization.
0:33:30 They are truly in their hypothalamus.
0:33:31 Yeah, right.
0:33:32 Exactly.
0:33:36 And that’s, well, especially if you have a hypothalamus that’s tilted towards rage,
0:33:41 let’s say, and defensive or predatory aggression, that’s bad news.
0:33:47 So, what’s the upshot of that?
0:33:55 Well, the upshot is that there is a sub, that’s right, there’s a subset of kids whose default
0:33:59 reactions aren’t socialized and we associate that with psychopathy and long-term criminality.
0:34:05 There’s a really useful thing to understand that much of what we see as pathology, and
0:34:10 I would say the same thing about narcissism and certain forms of hedonism, essentially
0:34:13 what it is, is failure of socialization, right?
0:34:20 And this has very interesting political implications because it also implies that, imagine that
0:34:26 impulsive self-gratification is a personality, the desire for impulsive self-gratification
0:34:33 is a personality with its own political opinions, Nietzsche said in the late 1800s that every
0:34:41 drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit, brilliant, brilliant observation, far different
0:34:49 than conceiving of the, say, hypothalamic drives as deterministic chains of only impulses.
0:34:54 Another thing to consider too with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation
0:35:00 on perception, that mouse that you talked about whose attack system is activated electronically.
0:35:05 See, when that glove is dropped, you can see that there’s a relationship with perception
0:35:09 because if there’s no target for attack that’s biologically relevant in the environment,
0:35:11 there’s no impulse.
0:35:14 So you could imagine that what happens is when you activate those neurons is that there’s
0:35:21 a set of perceptual stimuli that are much more likely to be classified as a defeatable
0:35:22 enemy.
0:35:27 Now, even a glove will do it, right, right, so you drop in a glove and that’s now perceived
0:35:31 as defeatable enemy or perhaps threat because we don’t know exactly what the perception
0:35:32 would be.
0:35:36 But then you see, then it’s the perception driving the behavior.
0:35:41 That’s not an impulse, right, that’s more like a strategy.
0:35:47 And I really started to understand some of the literature on the evolution of religious
0:35:51 thinking when I started to understand motivational states as personalities because one of the
0:35:57 things that you see, this is so cool, something I tried to talk to Dawkins about, the greatest
0:36:02 historian of religions, whoever lived was Mircea Eliade and he wrote a sequence of brilliant
0:36:03 books.
0:36:07 The Sacred and the Profane is the best one to start with, very short book, very elegant
0:36:08 book.
0:36:16 And what Eliade documented across the world was the pattern by which polytheistic belief
0:36:19 systems turned into monotheistic belief systems.
0:36:23 That parallels maturation, it’s the same thing.
0:36:31 And so the polytheistic gods tend to be representations of motivational states.
0:36:36 I’m going to pause you there because I think this is extremely important.
0:36:38 So the God of War.
0:36:39 Or the God of Love.
0:36:40 The God of Love.
0:36:43 Exactly, exactly that.
0:36:50 So the idea that the different gods are the reflective of different, let’s just say as
0:36:53 neuroscientists as different hypothalamic and related circuits.
0:36:56 Why wouldn’t they be gods?
0:37:00 Beware of falling under their dominion, beware of becoming their playthings.
0:37:04 And the other thing that’s very interesting you see is that you also have to understand
0:37:08 that these don’t exist independently of historical context.
0:37:15 So let’s say rage, it’s like there’s a literature of rage, there’s a culture of rage, there
0:37:19 are patterns of rage that are played out in drama and literature.
0:37:24 Like it’s not only that the motivational impulse is a personality, it’s a personality
0:37:26 with a history and a philosophy.
0:37:31 And if you don’t think it can possess you, you don’t know very much about possession.
0:37:36 So like, for example, if you’re fighting with someone and you become enraged, as you said,
0:37:44 your temporal purview shrinks and your notion of what constitutes victory is radically transfigured.
0:37:47 So if you’re fighting with someone you love, you might want to defeat them or even hurt
0:37:51 them, independently of the fact that you actually love them.
0:37:54 Well then you think, well you’re gripped by these impulses.
0:37:58 No, no, you’re inhabited by the spirit of rage.
0:38:04 And if you’re a sophisticated person, there’s going to be an endless stream of sophisticated
0:38:07 intellectual rationalizations that come along with that possession, right?
0:38:14 It’s full-fledged personality and it’s one of the things you see with people who are
0:38:21 psychotic, who drift off into the landscape of their imagination, is that they dwell on
0:38:24 such states of possession.
0:38:31 So for example, these kids that shoot up high schools, like they’re fantasizing under the
0:38:39 influence of rage and resentment for thousands of hours, that just takes control of them.
0:38:42 And it’s not a simple impulse.
0:38:48 It’s like, no, you could think they’ve inverted the neurological order and the God of rage
0:38:53 is now the, what would you say, the leading personality of integration or the God of resentful
0:38:55 rage, even worse.
0:38:57 And this circuit may run in reverse.
0:39:01 My colleague, David Spiegel, who’s our vice chair of psychiatry at Stanford, has done
0:39:07 some beautiful experiments examining the relationship between prefrontal cortical areas and the insula,
0:39:11 a brain area that has a map of our internal body state, interoception, our ability to sense
0:39:13 our internal workings, et cetera.
0:39:18 In any event, there are certain conditions, including depression, where the direction
0:39:22 of flow between the prefrontal cortex and the insula literally reverses.
0:39:24 It’s like running against the typical traffic.
0:39:27 This is a very different example, because here you’re presenting in the context of rage
0:39:33 or sociopathy and these kids who shoot up schools.
0:39:38 But I do absolutely subscribe to what you just said, that if one drops into one of these
0:39:41 more primitive states and emotions and all the things that go with it for a very long
0:39:46 time, it’s almost as if the governor, which is the prefrontal cortex, starts to become
0:39:51 the governed, that the whole circuit starts to run from bottom up as opposed to top down.
0:39:53 And I think there’s good neurologic evidence.
0:39:55 That’s what happens in addiction.
0:40:01 So you hit that circuit that’s seeking the drug with repeated doses of dopamine.
0:40:03 People say they have a monkey on their back.
0:40:07 It’s like, no, they have a monster in their brain, and they grew it.
0:40:11 And it grows because it’s reinforced with dopaminergic hits.
0:40:15 And as it grows, its capacity to dominate increases.
0:40:19 And so when there’s a cue for the addiction, this is why people relapse when they get out
0:40:24 of a treatment center, they’ll go back to their normal environment after having dealt
0:40:29 with a physiological withdrawal, let’s say, and a cue craving will make itself manifest
0:40:31 like a friend they freebase with.
0:40:37 And it’s all of a sudden, that monster is alive and it just shuts everything else down.
0:40:39 And it’s got a personality.
0:40:40 It can lie.
0:40:44 One of the hallmarks of addictive behavior is lying.
0:40:49 And the lies are the rationalizations of that sub-circuit, sub-personality, for its own
0:40:51 pathological behavior.
0:40:54 And so, and that’s all reinforced too by the dopaminergic hits.
0:40:58 It’s like there’s multiple people in there, in everyone.
0:41:00 One of the most incredible.
0:41:01 Polytheistic paganism.
0:41:02 Polytheistic.
0:41:04 Yeah, that’s the default condition.
0:41:05 Right, right.
0:41:08 That’s the condition of the two-year-old.
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0:44:08 One of the most remarkable real life examples I’ve ever witnessed of the power of belief
0:44:15 in God, I’m just going to say it as it occurred, I have a good friend who for many years struggled
0:44:21 with alcohol and drug addiction of multiple kinds, incredibly kind person, incredibly
0:44:30 successful in his career, married two beautiful children, multiple relapses, crashed his truck
0:44:37 at seven in the morning after getting intoxicated at 6.30 in the morning, got out of that one,
0:44:42 happened again and again, multiple rehab centers of the sort of standard treatment, etc.
0:44:46 And then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that his wife
0:44:48 said, “You know, this is it.
0:44:51 You’ve got to solve this or we just can’t be with you.”
0:44:59 Very scary situation for everybody involved, including him, who absolutely adored his family.
0:45:05 He told us, his friends, that he was going to go to a center here in Los Angeles that
0:45:11 treats addiction with essentially religion, a belief in God.
0:45:16 He was already fairly religious, most Sundays he attended church and things of that sort.
0:45:24 And you can imagine we all fought, including myself, like, “Okay, dude, good luck.
0:45:25 I hope this works.”
0:45:31 But I would say zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober.
0:45:35 He just had not succeeded prior to this.
0:45:37 He’s been sober more than four years now.
0:45:40 He got out of there and never looked back.
0:45:49 And I wonder now whether something must have changed in his brain by adopting what was
0:45:54 essentially a different incentive structure, different incentive structure, but fear wasn’t
0:46:00 doing it before, fear of extreme consequences, which were on the table at that time when
0:46:02 he went in weren’t enough.
0:46:07 Something about going there and the work that he did there allowed him to then, it’s almost
0:46:12 like he got another prefrontal cortex, a more powerful prefrontal cortex.
0:46:13 So maybe we could talk about that.
0:46:18 Well, that’s not a bad way of thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when
0:46:22 they say pray.
0:46:29 So you can invite in spirits to possess you.
0:46:30 That’s a good way of thinking about it.
0:46:34 I know that’s odd terminology, but that’s what you do when you dwell on your rage.
0:46:35 Right.
0:46:36 Right.
0:46:40 Now, imagine that you’re doing that in the most positive possible direction.
0:46:46 So what you’re doing is you’re generating a hypothesis about the mode of conduct and
0:46:52 perception that would best typify you if you were ideal and then establishing a relationship
0:46:54 with that and inviting it in.
0:47:00 That’s what the evangelical Protestants are doing when they formulate a personal relationship
0:47:02 with Jesus Christ.
0:47:03 That’s exactly what they’re doing.
0:47:07 Now on the addiction side, so I studied alcoholism for years.
0:47:12 That was the target of my dissertation in the first 20 papers that I published.
0:47:17 I knew the alcoholism literature very well and the neurological end of it as well.
0:47:22 And it was known among alcohol researchers to be known for 60 years, more even, that
0:47:26 the most reliable treatment for alcoholism was religious transformation.
0:47:31 And this is well accepted among researchers in the field who have no religious affiliation
0:47:32 whatsoever.
0:47:37 And I do believe that a huge part of that is a consequence of incentive restructuring.
0:47:40 So you said, for example, with your friend that fear wouldn’t work.
0:47:46 Well, alcohol is a pretty good anxiolytic drug, but it’s also for people who are prone
0:47:51 to alcoholism, it’s a good incentive reward source like cocaine.
0:47:57 If you’re going to, you can’t get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment.
0:48:02 They have to be isolated in a cage before they’ll bar press to their own death for cocaine.
0:48:06 So one of the things you want to do when you treat addiction is you want to substitute
0:48:08 a new incentive structure, right?
0:48:14 Because the part of the addictive process is you fall into a false incentive pattern,
0:48:15 right?
0:48:21 Because cocaine makes you feel like you’re doing something useful in respect to an important
0:48:23 goal, even though you’re not.
0:48:24 It mimics that.
0:48:25 Even if you know you’re not.
0:48:26 Even if you know it’s irrelevant.
0:48:27 I’ve never done cocaine.
0:48:29 I would be open about it if I had.
0:48:35 I think I like dopaminergic states enough that I’ve been very scared of doing it.
0:48:38 Also, it wasn’t around much just because of when I went to college, it just wasn’t a
0:48:39 drug that was around much.
0:48:44 But it’s a remarkable drug in the sense that people who take cocaine seem to be excited
0:48:45 about everything.
0:48:50 There is high dopaminergic state and the brain becomes exceptionally good at finding cocaine
0:48:55 even in the absence of resources, which is pretty remarkable if you think about it.
0:48:59 Most people can’t find the thing or get the thing they want in the absence of the resources
0:49:00 to get it.
0:49:04 But people who take hard drugs that really spike dopamine somehow manage.
0:49:05 Yeah, sure.
0:49:06 Sometimes they find a path.
0:49:11 That’s extremely, that’s extremely interesting, but they’ll do other things too, right?
0:49:12 They’ll socialize with people that have it.
0:49:15 So they don’t have to lie, cheat and steal.
0:49:20 It’s incredible to see that drug and things like methamphetamine take over people’s minds.
0:49:21 And now I’m thinking.
0:49:25 The pathway appears when the aim is firmly in mind, right?
0:49:31 See, this is another insistence that’s derived from the religious literature.
0:49:37 So because the idea there is that if your aim is upward, the pathway forward to that
0:49:38 will make itself manifest.
0:49:39 And that’s true.
0:49:43 You just pointed out that it was true in relationship to addiction, right?
0:49:51 Is that if once you’re in that realm of possessed personality, the pathway forward will show
0:49:54 itself to you, even under straightened circumstances, right?
0:49:58 And it’s partly because you could think of our perceptual systems and our emotional systems
0:50:01 for that matter as navigating tools, right?
0:50:07 So now the addiction, the addicted brain, what they say, the aim is possessed by the substance
0:50:08 of addiction, right?
0:50:12 So now the highest God is cocaine, let’s say.
0:50:16 And so now all pathways in the world are pathways to cocaine.
0:50:21 All objects in the world are markers on the pathway to cocaine because it just dominates.
0:50:23 But it’s not just an impulse.
0:50:26 It dominates the perceptual landscape as well.
0:50:28 That makes it– and the emotional landscape.
0:50:31 And it comes with all these rationalizations.
0:50:33 That’s all those lies, right?
0:50:37 The whole thing, it’s a whole personality, yeah, brutal, brutal.
0:50:43 Nowadays, I get a lot of questions about pornography.
0:50:50 And the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation.
0:50:54 Well, let’s just talk about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive
0:51:00 drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus, which we were all born with, that clearly
0:51:04 some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reproduction.
0:51:05 Zero question about that.
0:51:09 Sexual behavior being linked to reproduction, not always, but certainly, we all agree on
0:51:10 that.
0:51:11 It’s a necessary precondition.
0:51:13 I hope we can still all agree on that.
0:51:15 But last time I checked, that’s still true.
0:51:19 A sperm and an egg met someplace in some context to create all of us.
0:51:23 OK, we’re still grounded in that.
0:51:31 Pornography is something that I hear quite a lot from typically young males, but sometimes
0:51:38 young females or even older females who say that they can see themselves trying to resist
0:51:40 the desire to go look at it.
0:51:42 And it almost doesn’t feel like a desire anymore.
0:51:49 They’re just in a compulsion that is almost unconscious, but they’re just aware of the
0:51:50 fact that they’re–
0:51:51 Like an eating disorder.
0:51:52 Like an eating disorder.
0:51:53 They’re doing it.
0:51:56 They know they shouldn’t be doing it, and they can’t help themselves.
0:51:58 And we could think about two ways to attack this.
0:52:03 If one believes it’s a real concern, and they certainly do, so I do.
0:52:05 I would be open if I had or do.
0:52:08 Pornography’s not been my thing, and I don’t struggle with it.
0:52:13 But when I hear from these people, it’s so clear that they’re asking, is it the prevalence
0:52:18 of pornography out there, or is it something really broken in them?
0:52:20 Like are they broken?
0:52:24 But I don’t know that I would say after having the discussion we’ve had thus far that they’re
0:52:25 broken.
0:52:29 It seems to me that it’s like the– as you said, it’s the manifestation of one part
0:52:33 of their– it’s one personality within them.
0:52:36 One is being compulsively rewarded.
0:52:43 So you know, when a– when you see yourself moving towards the culmination of a desired
0:52:47 goal, a dopamine– that’s accompanied by dopamine release, OK?
0:52:48 And so two things.
0:52:50 You know this, but everybody who’s listening might not.
0:52:53 There’s two elements to that dopamine release.
0:52:58 One is pleasure, but the other is that the dopamine– imagine that there are circuits
0:53:01 activated as you’re acting.
0:53:06 What the dopamine does is increase the probability that the circuits were– that were activated
0:53:09 just before the positive experience happened– grow.
0:53:18 OK, so now if you’re engaged with pornography and that culminates in successful sexual satiation,
0:53:23 which it can– that’s what masturbation does– then the whole personality that’s oriented
0:53:25 toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate.
0:53:34 It’s very much like an addiction, except it’s– you know, there has been work done with generally
0:53:38 simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli.
0:53:41 I think it’s stickleback fish where this was first observed.
0:53:46 So males– I hope I get this right, but I’ve got it approximately right– I believe it’s
0:53:52 male sticklebacks will– they’re very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks.
0:53:55 And the reason they’re aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot
0:53:59 on their bellies, so they don’t like red dots at all.
0:54:03 And so you can really enrage a stickleback with a red dot.
0:54:07 And if you use a red dot that’s a little bigger and a little brighter than the typical
0:54:09 red dot, you get a super stimulus.
0:54:12 It’s virtually irresistible to the stickleback.
0:54:17 And it’s weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn’t
0:54:18 see in nature.
0:54:20 It slightly exceeds them.
0:54:21 That’s exactly what pornography does.
0:54:23 It’s a super stimulus, right?
0:54:27 And it’s not surprising that young males in particular are susceptible to that, because
0:54:31 male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented, very.
0:54:35 And a lot of our brain is visual, way more than virtually every other animal, certainly
0:54:38 every other primate and every other mammal.
0:54:46 And so we have a situation where any 13-year-old boy can see more hyper-attractive, super-stimulus
0:54:52 women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived 100 years ago would have
0:54:53 ever seen in his whole life.
0:55:00 Yeah, well, that’s like an evolutionary, ecological, radical ecological transformation.
0:55:05 And it’s worse because it’s easily accessible, so it takes no work, right?
0:55:11 So not only is it a super stimulus, it’s one that’s at hand, so to speak.
0:55:18 And the analog in the food world would be highly palatable, highly processed food.
0:55:19 Yeah.
0:55:20 Sugar-fat combination.
0:55:23 The other day I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home
0:55:24 for Thanksgiving.
0:55:28 And I looked around and I thought, this isn’t a convenience store.
0:55:31 This is a pharmacy.
0:55:34 Everything that had chocolate also seemed to have caffeine and color.
0:55:39 Everything, every drink seemed to combine not just sugar, but also caffeine and some
0:55:43 other things that would provide stimulants, and you’ve got nicotine and these things
0:55:45 on their own aren’t necessarily bad.
0:55:49 Any one of these one elements in low enough doses and frequent use, et cetera.
0:55:56 But maybe sugar being the one that clearly I think deserves deeper investigation, right?
0:56:02 It’s much different than difference between manufacturing sugar and manufacturing cocaine.
0:56:08 I mean, you take something that’s available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations
0:56:09 and purify it.
0:56:13 I mean, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as mild stimulant didn’t seem
0:56:18 to cause them any trouble, but that’s way different than cocaine, right?
0:56:23 And sugar has the same arguably the same pathological properties.
0:56:26 Well I didn’t think we were going to go here, but I think it’s extremely appropriate and
0:56:27 important that we do.
0:56:31 So I know that you followed what is essentially an elimination diet for a number of years.
0:56:33 You eat meat, right?
0:56:39 I eat meat, vegetables, fruit, and some starches, unrefined starches in any event.
0:56:44 One thing that I is absolutely clear from following a clean diet, so to speak, of any
0:56:51 kind, but let’s say of the sort that you follow or I follow, is that you very soon learn the
0:56:59 relationship between taste of the food, volume of the food, macronutrient, so protein, fat,
0:57:05 or carbohydrate content, micronutrients, and satiation, which is if you think about it
0:57:09 sort of like a big plate of broccoli or a big steak or something, the brain learns and
0:57:14 the hypothalamus learns the association between the taste, the caloric content, what else
0:57:16 is in there and satiation.
0:57:20 If you think about highly processed food or even combinations of multiple ingredients,
0:57:22 it’s absolutely impossible to do.
0:57:26 The brain can’t parse what are the various things in here and how do they relate to my
0:57:28 feelings of satisfaction.
0:57:34 It’s the difference between a super drug and what I believe are the elements that we have
0:57:35 …
0:57:41 Explain why you think that link about satiation can’t be learned in the case of these processed
0:57:42 foods.
0:57:46 Yeah, because in the context of these processed foods, they’re activating multiple neuron
0:57:48 systems in the hypothalamus and gut.
0:57:53 We know that the gut has neurons that can respond to sugar, fatty acids, and amino acid
0:57:54 content.
0:57:58 There’s this prominent theory that one of the main reasons we eat is to forge for amino
0:58:02 acids that we’ll eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids.
0:58:07 We correlate that with taste, but that the gut has neurons … We know the gut has neurons
0:58:10 that signal through the vagus, up through a little relay called the no-dose ganglion,
0:58:15 if you want to look at it, fun name, and then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain,
0:58:20 which make us … Oh, when we eat something that has a high essential amino acid content,
0:58:25 like a steak, like a really tasty steak, the neurons in the gut in a way that is independent
0:58:29 of taste are signaling to the brain, “Ah, I’m getting essential amino acids.
0:58:31 You should eat more of this thing.”
0:58:34 If those … Let’s just say a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a
0:58:40 candy bar or in a package of Skittles, which I’ve been guessing there’s very few of them,
0:58:44 if any, you’re going to continue to forage for food because those neurons will also respond
0:58:45 to sugar.
0:58:48 Basically, it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids.
0:58:50 In other words, there are two parallel tracks.
0:58:53 One within our taste system … Multiple pathways to satiation.
0:58:54 Right.
0:58:55 Multiple pathways to satiation.
0:58:59 One dependent on taste, one dependent on actual nutrient content.
0:59:02 The mouth can only learn taste association.
0:59:04 The mouth can’t actually learn nutrient content.
0:59:06 The gut knows nutrient content.
0:59:11 The problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macronutrient or essential
0:59:12 amino acids or essential fatty acids.
0:59:14 After all, there are no essential carbohydrates.
0:59:18 There are only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids.
0:59:23 It will keep you eating and it will keep the appetite system revving until you get enough
0:59:24 of those.
0:59:25 Now, here’s the issue.
0:59:26 If you’ve ever done this, it’s probably been …
0:59:27 That’s empty calories.
0:59:28 Empty calories.
0:59:29 Oh, yeah.
0:59:36 In some ways, this again is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography, masturbation,
0:59:37 and reproduction.
0:59:41 I’m not saying that reproduction is the be all end all of sexual activity, but in the
0:59:43 evolutionary sense, it absolutely is.
0:59:45 There’s no question about that.
0:59:46 There’s no moral judgment there.
0:59:49 That’s just the reality.
0:59:52 The situation with food is the following.
0:59:58 We are eating without any gut level understanding of what’s coming in.
1:00:00 We will keep eating.
1:00:01 Let me give you an example.
1:00:04 You probably haven’t done this experiment in a while, but if you’ve ever just had ribeye
1:00:06 steak or two, it’s pretty satiating.
1:00:10 Maybe you also have a salad if you’re me or some broccoli or something like that.
1:00:16 If one takes, then even after you’ve eaten all that, one bite of pasta, one bite of pasta,
1:00:21 the next impulse is more, even though you already have enough essential amino acids
1:00:22 from those steaks.
1:00:27 You’re losing threshold, you’ve reached that, et cetera, all of that good stuff.
1:00:28 Why?
1:00:31 Because blood glucose goes up and then you desire more because blood glucose elevations
1:00:33 are linked directly to the dopaminergic system.
1:00:37 What I’m basically trying to say here is that I do think that there are elements to our
1:00:39 food, modern food, if you will.
1:00:42 It seems like it’s anything but modern in the sense that it’s worse for us than the
1:00:47 more primitive foods, but highly processed foods, pornography.
1:00:53 Any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically, like methamphetamine, for instance, any behavior
1:00:58 that spikes dopamine dramatically, that very quickly hijacks these circuits.
1:01:06 To me, the way to teach those circuits a calmer, more prudent version of themselves to enter
1:01:11 a different hypothalamic activation pattern is to start breaking the things down into
1:01:16 their essential elements, about the motivation, the pleasure, et cetera, to tamp all that
1:01:17 down.
1:01:22 We know that for pornography, if the pornography is very extreme, then less extreme pornography
1:01:23 doesn’t seem to work.
1:01:30 Well, that’s because there’s also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving.
1:01:38 With any basic, appetitive pleasure, there’s a dopaminergic kick, but with any novelty,
1:01:40 there’s also a dopaminergic kick.
1:01:50 There’s an optimized threshold for novelty in a petitive striving that plays out in pornography.
1:01:55 There’s the direct effect of the stimulus as such, but there’s variation in the stimulus
1:01:57 that’s also novel.
1:02:06 It’s a common pattern for pornographic usage to become more, what would you say, fetishistic.
1:02:09 That’s one way of thinking about it as it progresses, because that keeps the novelty
1:02:10 alive.
1:02:11 That’s very dangerous.
1:02:13 That’s a very dangerous development.
1:02:14 Right.
1:02:16 I would venture in a very different domain that if you were to eat your steak slathered
1:02:20 in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks, going back to the way that you eat them now, which
1:02:24 by the way, this is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught
1:02:28 me when we had dinner last, which is that if you’re going to order a steak, order a Pittsburgh
1:02:29 char.
1:02:32 The char on the outside is incredibly tasty.
1:02:37 We love that the umami taste, is that we should have a devoted taste receptor to that?
1:02:38 It’s complex.
1:02:40 If they don’t know what a Pittsburgh char is, then maybe you’re in the wrong restaurant
1:02:45 or you need to educate them, but incredibly satiating, delicious, right?
1:02:50 If you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while,
1:02:52 your plain steaks wouldn’t taste as good.
1:02:57 But the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time
1:03:01 in which the stuff, all the condiments, et cetera, would start to become aversive.
1:03:09 I do believe that when we return to the sort of most naturally satisfying mode of engaging
1:03:14 with these circuits, here we’re talking about food and sex and parallel, that they become
1:03:17 especially satiating.
1:03:22 I think that in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography, and they’re
1:03:25 not addicted like they’re telling me they love it, and they can’t stop, they’re telling
1:03:29 me it’s no longer working for them, that there’s this diminishment in the amount of dopamine
1:03:33 that they’re getting over time, and they feel trapped within it, and they have no sense
1:03:36 whatsoever because they haven’t been socialized to you to go out and find a real relationship,
1:03:38 a real sexual relationship, or a relationship-
1:03:45 Well, it’s also, there is some evidence suggesting too that if you’ve been socialized into pornography
1:03:50 sexuality, it’s actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an
1:03:51 actual partner.
1:03:55 Now, I would say to some degree that’s always been difficult because it’s a complex form
1:04:03 of behavior, but the introduction of pornography, well, it sets up a whole landscape of expectation,
1:04:06 for example, that’s not necessarily going to play out that well in the real world, let’s
1:04:07 say.
1:04:14 And there’s also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to evoke arousal by observing
1:04:19 sex as opposed to participating in it, completely different.
1:04:20 So some of these-
1:04:24 Right, that’s voyeur, right, you’re basically learning to be a voyeur, right, right.
1:04:29 And so you think about young brains that are highly plastic, learning that, so the returning-
1:04:33 Yeah, we have no idea what to make of that, especially for young men, because when they
1:04:42 hit puberty, sexuality becomes a very insistent force, and we have no idea what effect pornography
1:04:47 has on the development of male sexuality, none.
1:04:56 I’ve wondered for a while whether there’s something inherently rewarding about creating
1:04:59 impact or action at a distance.
1:05:00 Here’s why.
1:05:08 I’ve been watching these videos of Elon’s rockets and thinking like, “That is awesome.
1:05:09 That is awesome.”
1:05:10 We’re built on a throwing platform.
1:05:15 You know, yeah, just there’s one image of the rocket thrusters that just captivated
1:05:16 me.
1:05:20 I’m a spacecraft guy, I mean, I think it’s really cool, but I wouldn’t consider myself
1:05:24 somebody that looks at the stars and thinks I want to go up there.
1:05:27 I might, if I’ve given the opportunity, but that’s not been my thing, but I looked at
1:05:30 this and I thought, “What an awesome display of power.”
1:05:32 But then I was saying like, “What is power?”
1:05:34 It’s really about having impact or action at a distance.
1:05:35 When we were kids, we-
1:05:36 Targeted-
1:05:37 Dirt claw to wars, right.
1:05:38 Targeted-
1:05:39 Targeted, right.
1:05:43 What an incredible display of funneling the laws of physics and engineering into something
1:05:48 that can have enormous action at a distance and perhaps even take us into new galaxies.
1:05:50 Amazing, right?
1:05:56 The word “sin” in many languages means to miss the target, right.
1:06:03 It speaks to exactly what you’re describing, like that the cachet of action at a distance,
1:06:06 that’s unbelievably deeply embedded in us.
1:06:10 That’s why I made that throwing gesture, like human beings throw.
1:06:12 That’s our physiology, right?
1:06:14 We can throw something at a distant target.
1:06:18 Well, that’s structured our cognition.
1:06:21 We’re using our thoughts to hit distant targets.
1:06:22 That’s what we do.
1:06:26 All the games that young men play, so many of those games are target games.
1:06:32 All of the sports spectacles that people want to participate in vicariously, even vicariously,
1:06:34 they’re target-hitting games.
1:06:38 Our gaze specifies as the center of a target.
1:06:44 There’s targets everywhere, and we’re unbelievably focused on bridging the gap between where
1:06:45 we are and where we’re going.
1:06:49 Yeah, that’s the whole perceptual landscape.
1:06:53 I’d like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function.
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1:08:41 So, this thing about action at a distance to me feels like so inherent to our progression
1:08:42 as a species.
1:08:43 Most technologies are about that.
1:08:47 In fact, if you think about social media, somebody tweets something, and when people
1:08:52 react to it, maybe positively or negatively, the school shooter in a very dark example,
1:08:58 a sad, a tragic example, action at a distance, then you think about pornography and masturbation.
1:09:01 I’m not passing any moral judgment here.
1:09:07 The ultimate form of creating action at a distance would be to create a new human being
1:09:10 with somebody.
1:09:16 You’re propagating it in physical distance, creating a new being, and in time, incredible.
1:09:21 Then you think about masturbation, and you think about pornography, and there is no action
1:09:23 at a distance.
1:09:24 I’m not just punning here.
1:09:26 I mean, literally, there’s not much action at a distance.
1:09:30 It’s all up close to oneself, but there’s no impact on anybody.
1:09:36 It’s almost as if the energy that we’re born with, to be able to create positive things
1:09:42 to evolve our species through action at a distance, through creation of knowledge, technology,
1:09:51 children, communities, culture, is just looped back into oneself.
1:09:55 I don’t know what language there is for this in biology, but it’s as if all that dopaminergic
1:09:59 drive is just looped back into oneself, and it goes nowhere.
1:10:06 I think when I hear about the language for it, it’s only the diminished souls of these
1:10:12 people who are coming to me saying, “Help,” and I’m thinking, “Okay, listen, I’m a podcast
1:10:13 or I’m a scientist.
1:10:15 I know some things about the dopaminergic system,” but there are ways that they can
1:10:16 get help.
1:10:20 I think there are 12-step programs for this and so forth and other things.
1:10:29 I think what they’re saying is that they’re just dissolving in their own reflex, but there’s
1:10:31 no action at a distance for them.
1:10:35 This is the same thing I see with the failure to launch kids who are still living at home,
1:10:36 who are not having any action at a distance.
1:10:41 I think we were designed to disperse from our families and to create action at a distance
1:10:49 up until a certain age, but I see so many of the problems that we face as failure to
1:10:52 find a productive way to have action at a distance.
1:10:58 Well, that’s a failure adventure, I would say, in the terminology that I’ve been developing.
1:11:05 For example, in this book, We Who Wrestle with God, one of the stories I analyze is the story
1:11:09 of Abraham, and it’s a very interesting story psychologically.
1:11:14 I think it’s stunning, actually, and I’ll lay some of that out for you and tell me what
1:11:18 you think about it.
1:11:26 The divine is characterized in the classic stories of our culture as the ultimate up,
1:11:34 so you can think about the divine as the target as such rather than any particular target.
1:11:37 Here’s a way of thinking about it.
1:11:42 An ambition will seize you, and then you’ll aim at fulfilling that ambition, but once the
1:11:46 ambition is fulfilled, a new ambition makes itself manifest, which might be a greater
1:11:51 ambition, let’s say, if your personality is expansive, and then if you fulfill that, the
1:11:52 same thing will happen.
1:11:59 Then you could imagine that there’s a meta-ambition behind all proximal ambitions.
1:12:04 The divine characterization of the divine is a characterization of that meta-ambition.
1:12:06 That’s a good way of thinking about it.
1:12:10 It’s something that recedes as you approach it, but it’s also the thing that all ambitions
1:12:14 have in common, and we know there is such a thing because otherwise we wouldn’t have
1:12:21 a concept of ambition, which speaks to a commonality among ambitions.
1:12:28 In the story of Abraham, the divine is characterized in relationship to something like ambition,
1:12:37 so Abraham has the, he’s already immersed in a situation that’s akin in a way to the
1:12:43 scenario of wealthy and a person in the modern world who’s in a situation of abundance.
1:12:48 Abraham’s parents are wealthy, and they provide for him.
1:12:54 There’s nothing he needs to do, and in consequence, so he’s attained the socialist utopia or the
1:12:56 consumerist utopia.
1:13:03 You can look at it either way, and there’s no reason for him to move forward, so he doesn’t.
1:13:08 He doesn’t do anything till he’s 75, and then the voice comes to him, which is the voice
1:13:11 of adventure, and it’s God in this story.
1:13:14 That’s how God is defined, right?
1:13:23 And God says to Abraham, “You have to leave all this comfort,” which is a very interesting
1:13:27 proposition to begin with, so why the hell would you leave that when you have everything
1:13:28 you need?
1:13:33 Well, the implication is that you don’t have everything you need when you’re being delivered
1:13:34 everything you need.
1:13:35 That isn’t how life works.
1:13:42 Okay, so God says you have to leave your father’s tent, you have to leave your tribe,
1:13:47 you have to leave those who speak your language, you have to venture out into the world.
1:13:55 So God is conceptualized in this story as the impulse, the voice, that compels you out
1:13:58 into the world, and that encourages you to do so.
1:14:03 So that’s a hypothesis about what the ultimate up is, okay?
1:14:08 And Abraham agrees, and he does so in two ways.
1:14:15 He builds an altar, signifying his aim, that he’s going to abide by the command of this
1:14:21 voice or the invitation of this voice, and that he’ll make the appropriate sacrifices.
1:14:31 It’s a crucial point to understand because the process of transformation requires sacrifice.
1:14:35 To be more than you are means you have to let go of that which you were, you have to
1:14:36 make sacrifices.
1:14:45 Now, Abraham’s life is punctuated by a sequence of reaffirmations of his upward aim and declamations
1:14:46 of his willingness to sacrifice.
1:14:51 Every time he finishes an adventure, he reconstitutes the covenant, right?
1:14:57 So this is this agreement to follow the voice of adventure, okay?
1:14:59 God makes him a deal, that’s the covenant.
1:15:00 It’s a very interesting deal.
1:15:07 So now imagine, biologically speaking, that there is an instinct to integrate that operates
1:15:08 within us.
1:15:15 Okay, so now it’s not, it’s just as fundamental as the hypothalamic motivational states, let’s
1:15:19 say, but it’s more sophisticated, and what it’s trying to do is to integrate all the
1:15:25 motivational states across time and socially, right?
1:15:29 And then imagine it manifests itself as an instinct to be something like the instinct
1:15:31 to mature, right?
1:15:32 To move forward, right?
1:15:35 To leave your zone of comfort, right?
1:15:40 And maybe there have been people like Chick-Cent, Mahayu have characterized that as the attractiveness
1:15:47 of flow, and maybe it’s associated with the exploratory circuit in the hypothalamus that’s
1:15:49 mediated by dopamine, okay?
1:15:51 But it’s God, it’s character.
1:15:58 Now, the character of that instinct in this story is, the way it’s characterized is as
1:16:00 the voice of adventure.
1:16:05 So it’s the thing that asks you to move beyond your zone of comfort and go into the foreign
1:16:06 world.
1:16:12 Now, the advantage to that is that you fortify yourself and you develop, right?
1:16:16 So no matter how good you are now, if you push yourself to the edge, you’re going to
1:16:23 be better than you are, and that’s a better win than merely being good like you are now.
1:16:28 So that would be participation in that transformative process is a higher form of attainment than
1:16:32 mere attainment of any specific goal, okay?
1:16:36 So that’s the call to adventure, that’s the call to a quest.
1:16:41 That’s what Gandolf offers, Bilbo, for example, okay?
1:16:45 God characterizes the consequences of that, and this is so cool.
1:16:48 When I figured this out, it just flattened me, it’s so interesting.
1:16:55 God says, okay, if you, God is defined as that which says this, by the way.
1:17:00 If you push yourself beyond your zone of comfort, even if it’s functioning for you, that’s
1:17:04 Abraham’s situation, here’s what’ll happen.
1:17:07 You’ll become, you’ll live your life in a manner that’s a blessing to you.
1:17:09 So that’s a good deal, eh?
1:17:13 Because lots, the miserable people you’re talking about, the depressed people, the trapped
1:17:16 people, their life isn’t a blessing to themselves.
1:17:18 So what’s a pathway to blessing?
1:17:25 Well, it’s not satiation, not in this formulation, it’s voluntary, it’s the voluntary quest,
1:17:27 and it’s characterized by adventure.
1:17:31 So that’s deal number one, you’ll live in a life that’ll be a blessing to you, okay?
1:17:35 And then God says, that’s not all that’ll happen.
1:17:40 You’ll be a blessing to yourself in a manner that will make you renowned among other people
1:17:41 justly.
1:17:47 So that’s a good deal, because we know that people, men in particular, are very status
1:17:53 oriented, partly because their reproductive success is highly correlated with their social
1:17:59 status, and the psychopaths game that, but still it’s like, renowned is crucially important.
1:18:03 You want to be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates, you know?
1:18:09 So that’ll be the second thing that happens, and then the same voice says, that’s not all.
1:18:14 You’ll be a blessing to yourself and be renowned in a manner that will maximize the probability
1:18:17 that you will establish something of lasting value.
1:18:18 That’s a good deal.
1:18:24 So that’s stretching across time, multi-generationally, because God tells Abraham that if he follows
1:18:27 the pathway of adventure, he’ll be the father of nations.
1:18:31 So what that means is that he’ll establish the pattern of paternal conduct that will
1:18:41 maximize the success of his offspring in the longest possible run, because that’s so cool.
1:18:44 This is success at a distance and over time.
1:18:45 Right.
1:18:46 Exactly.
1:18:49 So what that means is you’ll do that in a way that’ll bring abundance to everyone else
1:18:50 too.
1:18:52 Now, so think about what that means biologically.
1:18:56 This is so cool, and I can’t see how it can be wrong.
1:19:01 It means that if you hearken to the voice that calls you out of your zone of comfort,
1:19:07 you do that voluntarily, so you put yourself on the edge of adventure, you will be following
1:19:12 the instinct that has already evolved to make your life a blessing to yourself, to make
1:19:17 you successful among other people, to maximize your probability of long-term success, and
1:19:20 to do that in a way that brings abundance to your community.
1:19:24 And then you think, look, let’s take the contrary hypothesis.
1:19:26 The contrary hypothesis would be twofold.
1:19:31 There is no compulsion to adventure, it’s like that seems highly improbable, or that
1:19:36 the compulsion to adventure isn’t aligned with psychological and social well-being.
1:19:43 Well, what’s the chance that the fundamental drive that would facilitate your transformation
1:19:48 across time would not be aligned with your psychological integrity and the success of
1:19:49 the community?
1:19:52 Like, we wouldn’t be social animals if that was the case.
1:19:56 So as far as I can tell, that has to be true.
1:20:01 Now that doesn’t mean you can get lost in false adventures.
1:20:02 That can happen.
1:20:06 That’s what an addiction is, or like, or that’s what pornography is.
1:20:07 It’s a false adventure, right?
1:20:10 It’s failure to hit the proper target, you might say.
1:20:17 But that central drive to integration across time and communally, why wouldn’t that be
1:20:18 an instinct?
1:20:23 And then we could cap that with an observation that I also think is self-evidently true once
1:20:25 you understand it.
1:20:27 So imagine that you’re a father.
1:20:32 Now this spirit of adventure is often characterized paternally, right?
1:20:35 Insofar as God’s the father in these ancient stories.
1:20:37 So think about this.
1:20:41 So when you see your son, now it’s also true of your daughter, but I’ll focus on sons for
1:20:47 the moment, when you see your son and you love your son, when you see your son pushing
1:20:54 himself beyond his own limits in an adventurous manner, if you’re a good father, you definitely
1:20:56 encourage that, right?
1:21:01 And I would say, insofar as you encourage that, you are a good father.
1:21:06 And that would mean that you’re the embodiment of that spirit that calls to adventure.
1:21:11 That’s why Abraham is characterized, for example, in this story as forging an alliance with
1:21:15 the spirit of his ancestors, with the deity of his ancestors.
1:21:21 He’s embodying the call to adventure and that’s what makes him the father whose reproductive
1:21:28 enterprise is successful across the broadest possible span of time, I think.
1:21:30 I just can’t see how that can be wrong.
1:21:33 And that’s a characterization of the divine.
1:21:39 There’s other, it complexifies it because what the stories are trying to do is to give
1:21:44 you an image of what that integrating personality might be like and it’s sophisticated.
1:21:47 So a single characterization is insufficient.
1:21:54 So in the story of Noah, God is, this personality is characterized quite differently.
1:21:59 So Noah is presented as a man who’s wise in his generations, which means that for his
1:22:04 time and place, he’s moral and reputable.
1:22:08 So he’s the sort of guy that people would go to for advice because he’s lived a life
1:22:11 that’s emblematic of his wisdom, let’s say.
1:22:12 Okay.
1:22:17 Now a voice comes to him and says, batten down the hatches, they’re made.
1:22:18 Trouble’s coming.
1:22:19 Okay.
1:22:21 So, so here’s the hypothesis.
1:22:25 The hypothesis is the voice that calls to the wise to prepare in times of trouble is
1:22:28 a manifestation of the divine.
1:22:33 And it’s the same as the voice that calls the unwilling to adventure.
1:22:34 That’s the monotheistic hypothesis.
1:22:40 And so you can see what the imagination is doing is agglomerating these different characterizations
1:22:46 of high aim, insisting that there’s an integrated unity behind them and then trying to conceptualize
1:22:49 that integrated unity across time.
1:22:54 And so, and I think that’s done, I think that’s done with radical success in the biblical
1:23:04 library that the culmination of the library of stories is the impressionistic representation
1:23:06 of this integrating pattern.
1:23:10 And I think that’s what people call on when they’re engaging in a religious enterprise
1:23:16 that is radically successful, like that happened in the case of your friend, right?
1:23:21 So he got a new personality and that new personality had different incentive structure.
1:23:23 And so that just superseded the addiction.
1:23:28 It’s almost as if, I mean, I realize that for people listening, it might not seem like
1:23:29 this.
1:23:34 But to us, his friends who had seen him try so hard in the context of people he truly
1:23:38 deeply cares about more than anybody in the world, his children, his wife.
1:23:41 It was almost like he got a brain transplant.
1:23:42 It was astonishing.
1:23:44 How does he account for it?
1:23:51 Like if you asked him like, okay, you had every reason to change and yet you didn’t.
1:23:53 And then all of a sudden you did.
1:23:55 Like how does he understand that?
1:24:02 He uses very Christian religious language.
1:24:09 He said that he felt Jesus’s love for him and he saw an image of who he could become.
1:24:17 This was important, perhaps, no doubt, just perhaps, but no doubt of who he could become.
1:24:22 And he had the adequate social support within this place.
1:24:25 And so there was reinforcement.
1:24:30 But what’s remarkable is that he was able to take that outside of this place.
1:24:31 Right, right.
1:24:39 It was a residential facility out of this place and to this day, he is rock solid in
1:24:40 that domain.
1:24:44 And I will say in all the other domains of his life too, extremely successful as an
1:24:45 artist.
1:24:51 I don’t want to out him, you know, extremely successful as a commercial artist and happy
1:24:57 and in service and just seems like he got a brain transplant.
1:24:58 Right.
1:25:00 So there’s a mystery there that’s kind of threefold.
1:25:05 One is what the hell did he mean that he realized that Jesus Christ loved him?
1:25:06 Right.
1:25:07 That’s okay.
1:25:08 What do you mean by that?
1:25:12 And then somehow that’s associated with the vision he developed of who he could be if
1:25:14 he was everything he could be.
1:25:16 There’s a relationship between those two things.
1:25:23 And then there’s this third mystery is the culmination of those two phenomena, freedom
1:25:27 of his addiction, even out of the context of the center.
1:25:28 That’s right.
1:25:29 Very difficult to understand that.
1:25:34 But you know, we know, think about it this way.
1:25:41 If you’re possessed by rage, different phenomena have dopaminergic cachet to you than if you’re
1:25:45 possessed by like sexual desire.
1:25:46 Like obviously, right?
1:25:47 Right.
1:25:54 So, so the idea that a given stimuli produces a given motivational response is incorrect
1:25:57 because that’s framework dependent, right?
1:26:02 And then most, so I think one of the best ways to understand a motivational drive is that
1:26:05 a motivational drive grips the target.
1:26:07 It establishes the target, right?
1:26:13 And it’s not, it may, it may increase the probability that certain action patterns will
1:26:14 make themselves manifest.
1:26:18 That would be the kind of a compulsive element, but fundamentally what it’s doing is changing
1:26:23 the target that rearranges the perceptual landscape and it transforms the emotions because
1:26:30 now if your target is there, things that lead you there are dopaminergically relevant.
1:26:34 If your target is there, things that lead you there are relevant.
1:26:39 Same underlying emotion, but the stimuli, so to speak, that give rise to the emotion
1:26:41 are radically different.
1:26:44 So now he has a different orientation and aim.
1:26:50 And so the incentive structure of his psyche is radically transformed.
1:26:54 Now we know that can happen because that happens to you when you move from one motivated state
1:26:55 to another.
1:27:00 I think in 12 step programs, they allow the steps to be milestones.
1:27:01 I mean, there’s clearly a dopaminergic component.
1:27:04 I hope people understand that dopamine is dumb.
1:27:06 In fact, dopamine isn’t dumb.
1:27:08 Dopamine has no intelligence at all.
1:27:12 It’s just a currency of motivation and reward.
1:27:14 Which is why it can be gained by cocaine.
1:27:19 Which is why it can be gained by cocaine or most anything that can ferret its way into
1:27:21 the hypothalamic system.
1:27:26 And I hope people picked up on what you said before because it’s so important that as one
1:27:32 moves toward a target, dopamine increases and root to that target.
1:27:34 I’m rephrasing what you said before.
1:27:36 You said it wonderfully.
1:27:41 I just want to make sure people understand that as that dopamine increases, the probability
1:27:47 that your perception will go to something other than the target decreases exponentially.
1:27:50 As you get closer and closer, you get more and more dopamine, the greater the elevation
1:27:55 dopamine, the lower the probability that you’ll engage in any other pattern of self.
1:27:59 It’s like it’s almost or these or personality type other than the one that you’re engaged
1:28:01 in in pursuit of this behavior will emerge.
1:28:07 Not least because as you approach successfully the probability of ultimate success is obviously
1:28:08 increasing.
1:28:11 So it makes perfect sense that you would narrow and focus.
1:28:14 You run faster as you see the finish line.
1:28:16 Faster and faster.
1:28:20 This concept of sin as missing the target or this definition of sin I think is incredibly
1:28:21 important.
1:28:25 Hamartia is the Greek word and it’s literally an archery term but it’s also the word for
1:28:29 sin in ancient Hebrew is also an archery term.
1:28:33 And there’s other languages where that’s the case but it’s really important to understand
1:28:42 that that notion is predicated on this target seeking psychophysiology and that that’s unbelievably
1:28:45 deeply built into us as you pointed out.
1:28:47 Our eyes are target established.
1:28:54 Well, it’s so important to us that we infer aim from gaze and it’s more than that.
1:29:01 Not only do we infer aim from gaze we mimic the psychophysiological state of the target
1:29:07 that we’re watching as a consequence of our inference of aim from gaze.
1:29:12 So if I can see what you’re looking at then I can occupy the same psychophysiological
1:29:16 state that you do and that’s the basis of my understanding.
1:29:20 This is so important and I’m there’s something that I’ve never talked about on this or any
1:29:26 other podcast which is that in humans we have a massive expansion of an area of the frontal
1:29:28 cortex called the frontal eye fields.
1:29:32 So there’s a circuitry deep in the brain if you want to look it up at superior colliculus
1:29:35 it’s also called the tectum in other species it means roof it’s the roof of the midbrain
1:29:38 etc that generate reflexive eye movements.
1:29:41 You stimulate in there it’s like a machine.
1:29:45 In fact a colleague of mine who’s now retired at Stanford Eric Knudsen who did some beautiful
1:29:49 work on neuroplasticity was describing an experiment where they take out the frontal
1:29:54 cortex of these owls, owls are because they don’t have much eye movements they move their
1:30:00 head almost all the way around right we’ve all seen that and they use this for homing
1:30:02 in on their targets.
1:30:08 The owl or a monkey or a human in the absence of a prefrontal cortex or suppression of prefrontal
1:30:13 cortex becomes like a machine you click here they look there, click here they look there.
1:30:17 Puppies are like this, kittens are like this, everything’s a stimulus why because there isn’t
1:30:20 that top-down inhibition of those reflexes.
1:30:26 In humans we have an area- That’s why a cat with no brain is hyper exploratory, right
1:30:30 with only a- Everything is a target, everything is a target, everything is a target.
1:30:32 And there’s no context dependent learning, right.
1:30:36 I love that you gave the example of the disarobite cats they even can do fictive motion they
1:30:41 can walk on a treadmill and it’s like it with no cortex it’s amazing, it makes you rethink
1:30:42 the cortex.
1:30:43 That’s for sure.
1:30:47 In humans have these frontal eye fields which are an evolved area the present in other species
1:30:50 too but they’re massively expanded in humans.
1:30:56 So this is a cortical area, a frontal cortical area devoted to controlling gays and the context
1:30:57 and control of gays.
1:31:02 So it no longer becomes just a reflex that you can suppress as in the case with an adult
1:31:05 cat versus a kitten or a dog versus a puppy.
1:31:10 The frontal eye fields actually regulate all sorts of context dependent like oh like he’s
1:31:14 looking at me directly is it aggressive yeah well then maybe I’ll activate my aggression
1:31:19 or maybe I’ll brace my defenses or wow we came to this party together but she seems
1:31:24 super interested in like directing her gays how are we inferring this sometimes it’s
1:31:27 body language sometimes it’s this sometimes he looked at her there are all these memes
1:31:32 about this right right the famous look over the shoulder meme that seems to have taken
1:31:36 over the internet from time to time with the appropriate facial response.
1:31:44 So humans have a massively expanded notion of what gays is and our ability to control
1:31:46 gays and understanding of gays.
1:31:51 So when you raise this idea that when you raise this fact rather about gays defining
1:31:58 the target it’ll end that looking at others gays allows us to understand what they are
1:32:01 defining as the target we start in to get into notions of theory of mind and things
1:32:02 of that sort.
1:32:07 Well so what that implies in keeping with our previous conversation is that as you mature
1:32:15 and your cortex integrates and you become cortically dominant the targets of your gays
1:32:22 become voluntary right this is a big deal because it means that you can concentrate on the distal
1:32:27 let’s say the temporary distal at the expense of the proximal.
1:32:33 So you know if if you’re walking down the street and you hear a loud and sudden noise
1:32:38 behind you you’ll do an antipredator crouch and then turn and you’ll do that essentially
1:32:39 automatically.
1:32:46 So it’s a curl up and then you turn to the place where your stereoscopic audition has
1:32:52 indicated that the noise emanated from right and so and that’s automatic that’s the control
1:32:56 of the eye gaze and well and bodily posture by those underlined.
1:33:00 Yeah this is a superior colloquial it has a map of auditory.
1:33:02 So when you hear something to your right you turn to your right.
1:33:03 Right.
1:33:04 And you do that before you think.
1:33:05 Absolutely.
1:33:12 Okay so that’s an activation of the eye fields let’s say by these underlying motivational
1:33:15 systems that have this personality like autonomy.
1:33:23 But you can orient your part of the religious enterprise is to orient your eyes heavenward.
1:33:24 Well what does that mean?
1:33:30 Well you can think about it it means to search out the north star that navigates for you unerringly
1:33:33 regardless of the situation at hand.
1:33:37 Imagine you could progress towards a target in a manner that made all the potential targets
1:33:40 that you could progress toward more likely.
1:33:42 It’s a meta-target.
1:33:45 You said that’s what happened to your friend right is not only did he dispense with his
1:33:51 addiction but all of the things enter other enterprises that he was associated that that
1:33:53 that he was pursuing in his life became more effective.
1:34:02 It’s almost like and it is as if every goal was like elevated right.
1:34:05 And it’s funny because for the first couple of months that I was interacting with him
1:34:12 I thought okay like he’s different and I thought you know like most people would you know perhaps
1:34:17 would think like all right let’s see see but this has been four years now he’s very he’s
1:34:21 very consistent with his with his program he you know he’s involved in a program that
1:34:28 keeps him on track but he’s elevated and he’s not talking above people it’s like he’s elevated
1:34:31 but he’s grounded when you talk to him he’s not kind of off some other place he’s actually
1:34:37 very very present yeah and even his text messages are very much of like what’s going on today
1:34:42 you know asking questions that are very much of the now yeah and it’s been a remarkable
1:34:49 thing to observe well because he was about as down in his addiction and had so much to
1:34:56 lose and had essentially risked it over and over and over to the point where you know
1:35:00 I didn’t think it was ever gonna right around and most and all of his friends thought the
1:35:06 same and right wife of course is delighted and his kids are delighted course and I could
1:35:09 say this without revealing because no one knows I’m godfather to his son and his son
1:35:13 is thriving which is wonderful to see and I just think of sometimes about how badly
1:35:18 it could have gone the other way yeah and it’s fantastic it’s like he’s nothing short
1:35:24 of spectacular okay so so let me let me put that into a context of let’s say an archetypal
1:35:30 story okay so I did a course for Peterson Academy on the Sermon on the Mount and the
1:35:37 Sermon on the Mount is a it’s a strut it’s a medical strategy it’s very practical it’s
1:35:41 very very practical and it emerges out of the biblical tradition in a very grounded
1:35:49 manner it’s a logical extension of the biblical ethical precursors so what Christ says to
1:35:57 his followers in the course of the Sermon on the Mount is first orient your eyes upward
1:36:03 okay so that’s in alignment with the notion that the firstborn is to be consecrated to
1:36:07 God there’s a meaning to that and the meaning is something like this imagine that your life
1:36:12 consists of a sequence of episodes okay an episode has a beginning and a middle and
1:36:17 an end the beginning sets the frame for the episode so at the beginning of an enterprise
1:36:23 you want to you want to lift your eyes heavenward so you establish the highest possible goal
1:36:28 so that that constitutes the frame of perception for that episode that’s the idea that’s why
1:36:34 the firstborn should be consecrated to God so for example to think about it prosaically
1:36:42 before we sat down for our podcast because we’ve done many podcasts we strive to inhabit
1:36:47 the framework that will make the podcast most radically successful now you could imagine
1:36:52 that that could be subordinated to either of our proximal desire for an increase in
1:36:57 short-term personal fame right or we could try to dominate each other in the conversation
1:37:03 or we could orient ourselves properly and we could do what we could to pursue the track
1:37:09 towards revelation so to speak and we could elevate our conversation in that manner okay
1:37:14 and that would set the frame for the conversation and the good podcasters always do that right
1:37:19 they’re not playing games or if they’re playing games it’s of the highest possible order it’s
1:37:25 a quest yeah okay quest for what enlightenment for truth right for mutual understanding and
1:37:31 then maybe for the education of those who are participating alright so Christ says first
1:37:36 orient your eyes upward right that’s to love God above all so whatever that upward divinity
1:37:41 is you establish an allegiance with that and you allow that to determine your perceptions
1:37:49 and your motivations next operate under the assumption that other people like you participate
1:37:58 in that nature of that utmost aim and treat them that way next concentrate on the moment
1:38:07 right right and that’s exactly right because it’s exactly right because when you specify
1:38:13 your aim the pathway makes itself manifest otherwise you could never use your senses
1:38:19 to orient you’d never get anywhere right so if you aim upward to the best of your ability
1:38:24 then the pathway upward is what will make itself manifest in front of you then you have
1:38:30 to attend to it and so then you get this weird perverse optimality which is you’re focused
1:38:38 on the longest temporal scale and the highest possible elevation and you can make most use
1:38:45 of what’s right in front of you and that the implication in the sermon on the mount is
1:38:51 that there’s no difference between that and participating in life eternal as it unfolds
1:38:56 in the moment and I think that’s that seems to me to be exactly right it’s exactly right
1:39:02 and so you know I was I was thinking of that because you said your friends all of your friends
1:39:08 endeavors had become elevated so imagine that one probably might want to solve is what your
1:39:14 goals should be but a much deeper problem would be how do you conceptualize your goals
1:39:20 in relationship to one another across the broadest span of time and person so that every
1:39:25 goal has the highest probability of succeeding so that would be like the pursuit of a medical
1:39:29 I would say that’s what defines the religious enterprise there’s another variant of that
1:39:37 for example so a variant of that would be not how do you solve the problem of any given
1:39:42 thing that terrifies you but how do you solve the problem of the class of things that terrify
1:39:49 you and the dragon fight mythology is the solution to that problem so the attitude
1:39:57 there is you adopt the stance of voluntary what a voluntary approach in the face of terror
1:40:02 because that’s the best metastrategy right and that’s the strategy that works to protect
1:40:09 you across the largest possible array of dangerous situations this is what we learned in as clinical
1:40:15 psychologists with exposure therapy right you find this particulars of what someone is
1:40:21 afraid of that turns out to be somewhat irrelevant you teach people to voluntarily confront what
1:40:25 they’re avoiding and that doesn’t make them less afraid it makes them more competent and
1:40:33 braver and that generalizes right and so yeah the religious pursuit is the pursuit of of
1:40:37 medicals in relationship to positive and negative emotion that’s a good way of thinking about
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1:41:57 that’s drink element comm slash huberman lab to claim a free sample pack I love this idea
1:42:04 of looking upward and defining or at least having a sense that there’s a internalization
1:42:10 of the greatest possible outcome and when I say greatest both for oneself but also for
1:42:15 the community right yeah that’s life more abundant or that’s that’s the symbolic terminology
1:42:20 or life in eternity both of those are the same thing so imagine you’re fighting with
1:42:27 your wife okay now you’re dominated by rage now the advantage to that is you’re ready
1:42:33 and but the disadvantages you’re going to strive for proximal victory okay now you don’t
1:42:39 want to be a pushover that’s a mistake so then what could you do instead you could pause
1:42:47 and you could remember okay if this could rectify itself in the best possible manner
1:42:52 what would that look like well it’s it’s complicated right you don’t want your wife to be defeated
1:42:57 and you don’t want to be defeated and you want to solve the problem but you don’t want to
1:43:02 sweep it under the rug you want to solve it in a way that solved that works across time
1:43:06 that benefits your relationship in an upward manner and you have to make sure that you’re
1:43:13 not hijacked by that hypothalamic circuit or personality as you you will be if you don’t
1:43:17 alter your aim you will be because you need to substitute you got to think I’d really
1:43:21 like to win this like I’d seriously like to win this battle it’s like no you need something
1:43:29 better than that victory and that would be the a victory that would deepen and enrich
1:43:33 your relationship and help it grow across time and then you can remember that’s like
1:43:38 I’m gonna listen even though I think my wife is wrong I’m gonna listen and I’m gonna see
1:43:43 if I can find a pathway in the argument that makes our relationship better and then you
1:43:47 think now you have to really want that because if you really want that if you if you got
1:43:52 that vision fleshed out properly you’ll want that more than you’ll want to win and and
1:43:57 then you might say well why it’s like because it’s a better deal so there’s one of Christ’s
1:44:03 parables where he talks about a pearl of great price which is the pearl that a rich man would
1:44:08 sell everything he owns to possess and it’s it’s something like a reference to that it’s
1:44:14 like why would you ever attain a proximal victory if you could attain an ultimate victory
1:44:21 that’s the battle let’s say between the salvation of the soul and the victory in sin that’s
1:44:26 how the religious language would portray it well you can win a local victory and it
1:44:32 looks like it looks like you win but if you forego the ultimate game that’s not a victory
1:44:37 that’s a defeat obviously it might even be a worse defeat than if you lost absolutely
1:44:43 I I’ve been spouting off on social media and podcasts for a while now that any big inflection
1:44:48 in dopamine that isn’t preceded by a lot of effort to generate that dopamine inflection
1:44:54 is very dangerous think drugs think pornography think highly processed foods think anything
1:44:59 that you know creates this big big sense of indulgence and pleasure without any effort
1:45:03 is running counter current to our evolutionary wiring now you could say well okay so what
1:45:07 are we supposed to do move into caves no reward no reward without commensurate sacrifice
1:45:12 that’s right that’s of some sort and yep yep and and the other issue and it’s coming up
1:45:18 again and again today and I love that it is is this notion of the temporal domain of rewards
1:45:22 that exist over multiple timescales or broader timescales one of the things that I feel truly
1:45:28 lucky for is the fact that I went the path of science where we were chuckling about this
1:45:33 earlier you know a project could take a year then you have to restart because that project
1:45:38 went nowhere and then you finish the project you submit a paper the review I mean the reward
1:45:43 schedule in science could take four years it’s not just about getting a degree like
1:45:48 getting papers through sometimes took a year sometimes took two years you know sometimes
1:45:51 things didn’t go well and you had to publish in a journal that you wouldn’t have wanted
1:45:58 to or sometimes you had to abandon projects altogether so my reward system was trained
1:46:03 up on lots of timescales short medium long timescales as I’ve moved into podcasting
1:46:10 that the temporal loops are shorter they’re faster but you know nonetheless you know we
1:46:16 we do long long form content and but you know I think platforms like X I think are wonderful
1:46:20 if used appropriately I think it’s especially great nowadays frankly and Instagram etc they’re
1:46:25 very useful but they train us and I imagine they’ve trained the the young brains that
1:46:31 were weaned on them because I wasn’t but that were weaned on them for fast temporal yeah
1:46:35 timescales isn’t like playing this isn’t like playing a long poker game this is like playing
1:46:40 the slot machine over and over and over right yes it’s not like a four-day tournament complete
1:46:44 with intermittent random reinforcement which is what happens when something goes viral
1:46:48 unpredictably right right right it’s really right yeah and then of course we have this
1:46:52 notion in this country that you know in any moment it could be a rags to riches or over
1:46:56 you know some you know overnight fame type thing that exists as a possibility in our
1:47:02 culture that in a way that it hadn’t prior so I think that one of the things that could
1:47:09 be useful just venturing a hypothesis here is that young and older people could take
1:47:16 a look at their life and ask you know over what variation of timescales do I derive reward
1:47:21 yeah you know training for a marathon is a longer timescale well that’s also a hallmark
1:47:26 of maturity yeah yeah school a degree etc in business the timescales are sometimes fast
1:47:32 sometimes short I think you can ask even a better question than that the better question
1:47:36 would be and this is kind of what’s referred to in the Sermon on the Mount is how could
1:47:41 I optimize my long-term view while maximizing my focus on the moment because then you get
1:47:46 both that’s a really that’s a really good deal right because now you’re conducting yourself
1:47:53 in a manner that works in an iterated way that’s socially productive right and and maybe
1:47:57 intergenerationally socially productive that would be the best thing to establish that’s
1:48:01 kind of what you’re doing as a good father but you’re doing that in a manner that enables
1:48:10 you to also derive maximal impact from each step you take forward in the present so Carl
1:48:16 Friston told me we were talking about entropy and and emotion I’d figured out a few years
1:48:22 ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy like technically
1:48:27 which I was really thrilled about because it it gives emotion a physical grounding like
1:48:32 a real physical grounding and Friston surprised me because he said he has a theory of positive
1:48:37 emotion that’s analogous he also knew the negative emotion he’d also been working in
1:48:42 that domain he said that you get a dopamine kick when you reduce the entropy in relationship
1:48:48 to a goal and I thought oh my god that’s so cool because it means that uncertainty is entropy
1:48:53 when it emerges you get anxious but when you see yourself stepping towards a goal you get
1:49:00 a dopamine kick and the reason that’s an entropy related to entropy is because with each step
1:49:06 successful step you take towards a goal you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit which
1:49:10 is manifested in that phenomena you described which is when you see the finish line you
1:49:16 start running faster right so they’re both related to entropy well to have goals at multiple
1:49:20 time scales yes you need to be able to read it in I I love this entropy argument it makes
1:49:30 total sense that you want to be able to withstand the the the periods of time when you don’t
1:49:33 know whether or not yes things are becoming more or less uncertain yes this is part of
1:49:38 becoming an adult yes okay okay so yeah that was exactly the thread so there’s there’s
1:49:45 two corollaries of that one is that the more valuable the goal towards which you’re progressing
1:49:50 the higher the dopamine kick per unit of advancement so what that means is you want an ultimate
1:49:57 goal operating in the domain of each proximal sub goal and that’s what happens with this
1:50:02 upward orientation it’s like what you’re trying to do is to make things as good as they could
1:50:08 be whatever that means over the longest possible span of time for the largest number of people
1:50:12 you include now you’re not going to know exactly how to do that but that can be your goal okay
1:50:17 now that’s going to inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway but it’s also
1:50:23 going to modify your reward system because now every proximal step forward is an indicator
1:50:28 of entropy reduction in regard to that meta goal well there isn’t any by definition there
1:50:33 isn’t anything you can do that’s more exciting than that see that kind of explains why your
1:50:37 friend was able to pop out of his addictive frame because now he’s doing something that’s
1:50:44 so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol let’s say pales in comparison right right
1:50:50 right and it’s a rewriting of the reward contingencies yeah yeah right exactly and now you could imagine
1:50:57 that you could imagine a situation where a culture explores across time to find out how
1:51:04 to characterize that goal such that if that goal is pursued people integrate psychologically
1:51:09 in a manner that integrates them socially across large spans of time I think that’s
1:51:15 what happens when the monotheistic revelation emerges that’s that’s what’s happening from
1:51:20 a from a biological perspective is that we’re starting to characterize the longest term goal
1:51:27 yeah something like that this is why I believe that pornography is potentially so poisonous
1:51:34 because the level of uncertainty is basically zero yeah people can access what they want
1:51:41 to see they can keep foraging until they find it yeah and that’s not the way that relationships
1:51:46 work the way relationships work is I asked somebody else they might say yes they might
1:51:50 say no go out on a date they might not want a second date well and that’s all things could
1:51:53 progress you might think that you’re on the path to one thing and it turns out it doesn’t
1:51:59 work or it’s or it’s you’re not compatible you know I mean that’s also extremely salutary
1:52:05 because if you’re being rejected like say you’re a foraging male and you’re being rejected
1:52:11 all the time and you forego that for pornography what you’re foregoing is the corrective that
1:52:15 all those women are offering you like they’re rejecting you because there is something wrong
1:52:20 like seriously there’s something wrong and now you escape from that you think well that’s
1:52:25 a relief because no more rejection it’s like yeah no more rejection no more learning no
1:52:32 more improvement and no possibility of of an actual life right no action at a distance
1:52:38 yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah no distal no distal accomplishment right yeah the only implication
1:52:43 of the pornography masturbation scenario is that is more pornography masturbation that’s
1:52:47 the only implication of it that’s it that’s all that possibly could arise it’s worse than
1:52:53 that yeah because it’s more pornography in a degenerating game because as you said you
1:52:58 have to chase that novelty edge otherwise so I mean is driven down well and that means
1:53:03 what it’s going to get more and more extreme well that that’s not a good scenario that’s
1:53:07 not a good like what do you mean more and more extreme exactly like where does that end well
1:53:12 you know a casual glance at online pornography can give you some real insight into where that
1:53:21 ends like there’s that’s a bottomless pit and in in the most pernicious possible manner
1:53:29 because sexuality can definitely twist itself into pathological forms that undermine psychological
1:53:33 integrity and demolish society you know we see this with people who are highly successful
1:53:39 who seem to have lots of areas of their life regulated and then you know they collapse
1:53:44 their lives and sometimes see it with with with drugs of abuse as well yeah although
1:53:51 unless those drugs of abuse are dopaminergic and people have them in a in check so to speak
1:53:56 which is exceedingly rare yes it’s usually just a matter of time and they they don’t
1:54:00 reach the mountain yes well time is the problem as we’ve been pointing out let me tell you
1:54:07 another story this is from revelation so revelation is a vision of the end of time okay now time
1:54:12 ends all the time like our adventures and our lives and our relationships and so the
1:54:21 end has a pattern okay revelation is a vision of the eternal pattern of the end so here’s
1:54:26 an element of the vision it’s so remarkable I figured this out with my friend Jonathan
1:54:34 Pazio so there’s a vision in a sub vision in in the sequential dream of revelation of
1:54:39 the scarlet beast and the whore of Babylon and it’s very relevant to our discussion
1:54:45 on pornography you’ll understand it right away so it’s a vision of how society disintegrates
1:54:51 okay now imagine when society disintegrates men disintegrate according to their pattern
1:54:56 and women disintegrate according to their pattern that makes perfect sense right because if
1:55:00 society disintegrates it’s gonna be men and women who disintegrate there’s no reason to
1:55:07 assume that their pattern of disintegration would be identical okay scarlet beast is is
1:55:12 that’s the scarlet beast of the state that’s Babylon let’s say that’s the degenerate tyrannical
1:55:18 state has multiple heads why because whatever united it has vanished that’s like the death
1:55:23 of God it’s vanished and so now it’s got heads in every direction so it’s confused and it’s
1:55:32 red scarlet because that’s that confusion that disintegration is the precursor to the river
1:55:39 of blood right the red sea this the swamp of chaos so when the patriarchal state disintegrates
1:55:45 it loses its unity and then it’s multiple heads right and that’s that’s that’s the emblem
1:55:51 of descent into diverse chaos and cases everywhere with these multiple heads precisely precisely
1:55:58 it’s not integrated okay now that’s the disintegration of the patriarchy you might say atop that
1:56:07 is the whore of Babylon that’s a beautiful woman whose subordinated her psyche to the
1:56:14 demands of sexuality she’s the mother of all prostitutes right so she’s extremely attractive
1:56:19 and she’s clad in gold and she holds a cup it’s very graphic imagery that has nothing
1:56:25 but the consequences of her fornication in it is this like I mean I guess I will just
1:56:29 say it recently there’s been a number of posts on X of this woman who had sex with a hundred
1:56:34 men in a day and now right now she’s saying she’s gonna have sex with a thousand men yeah
1:56:39 well she seems to be rethinking her plan given the emotional consequences she had to her last
1:56:47 success yeah I must say her mother is her finance officer I’m speechless that’s for
1:56:58 sure I’m speechless my my response to the her kind of post hundred men thing was it
1:57:05 was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the the performance probably whatever
1:57:09 it was you know so it was hard for me to discern what was really going on there I’m not a
1:57:18 psychologist yeah but anyone who saw that would say this is a pretty dark situation it’s way
1:57:24 darker than anybody who wanted to hold on to their sanity would possibly imagine what’s also
1:57:28 dark and I’m not saying this from a place of moral judgment I’m just saying this from a place of
1:57:36 just kind of like a wow like this woman obviously navigating life in this way her choice clearly
1:57:43 but the fact that so many people know about this the fact that so many people and here we’re
1:57:48 talking about it but I think in service to a greater good I certainly believe like like that
1:57:56 this is now out out there right it’s out there just like seeing somebody you know just like
1:58:01 seeing somebody murder somebody in cold blood we could talk about that recently a video of an
1:58:07 assassination that and those had been available before but those two things kind of leveled up
1:58:15 or leveled down you know one’s idea of of what humans are capable of by allowing and what’s
1:58:20 acceptable what’s acceptable desirable that’s right the threshold shifted that’s for sure maybe
1:58:25 that’s the what I’m looking for the threshold shift yeah yeah okay so that’s a great example that
1:58:32 that that young woman who’s betrayed herself in the deepest possible manner and all of the
1:58:37 people that are following her and all the young women who are influenced by her so you have this
1:58:46 figure on the back of the degenerate state that’s the degenerate feminine female sexuality
1:58:53 commoditize a commoditizes when the masculine state degenerates that’s a sign of the end of
1:58:58 things and that makes perfect sense because well why wouldn’t female sexuality commoditize
1:59:03 when the masculine is no longer reliable it’s exactly what you’d expect you know how the story
1:59:12 ends there’s another element to it the degenerate state offers the whore of Babylon as enticement
1:59:17 for its degeneration you can have everything you want on the sexual side at the end of that
1:59:26 sub-story the state the beast kills the prostitute and so what that means is that the long-term
1:59:36 consequences of sacrifice less sexual satiety is that sexuality itself is destroyed and I think
1:59:43 we’re seeing that in our society now 30% of Japanese under the age of 30 are virgins right
1:59:49 but about the same in South Korea right the birth rates in those countries have plummeted like
1:59:58 they’re way way below replacement and increasingly 50% of women in the West are childless at 30
2:00:06 birth rates are way way down and and going down as well 50% are childless half of them will never
2:00:12 have a child because 30 is already pushing it and 95% of them will regret it we’re already in a
2:00:17 situation in the West where one in four women will be involuntarily childless right and so it’s so
2:00:23 well that’s a good example as I said earlier of how these things are characterized in this
2:00:30 symbolic language that outlines the starkest you might say the starkest of biological realities
2:00:36 you said that there was a problem you know your sense was that there was a problem with effortless
2:00:41 gratification it’s like well the problem part of the problem with effortless gratification is
2:00:47 it destroys itself and it’s so interesting because the promise of the sexual revolution and the
2:00:57 pill was an unlimited horizon of sexual opportunity okay we know but the actual consequence of that
2:01:03 was appears to be that that’s that’s the pathway to the demise of sexuality itself this was if
2:01:09 you can’t be with the one you love love the one you’re with dig someone I know who was a in their
2:01:14 20s in the 1970s explained to me I always thought that song was about you know if you can’t be with
2:01:18 the the person that you love you know you find someone else you can love they explained to me
2:01:22 that’s not what that was about that was about the wildness of the 70s right right that promise
2:01:31 yeah that was about the sort of the just promiscuity had emerged as a theme of the 1970s yeah well
2:01:36 I mean in the aftermath of the birth control pill it was not surprising that people thought maybe
2:01:42 that was possible but that was wrong it was seriously wrong and we’re going to be dealing with
2:01:47 the consequences of that for a very long time you said that the that the patriarchy the masculine
2:01:54 fails before the well before the horrible happens parallel concert so it’s not causal one no no
2:02:01 right you can’t man and women degenerate at the same rate right I mean we’re involved in feedback
2:02:07 processes that are so tight that there’s no like there’s no oppressing women without oppressing men
2:02:11 there’s no oppressing men without oppressing women it’s like we’re we’re joined at the hip so to
2:02:19 speak and so you know these these these these cultures that that that cloak women and silence them
2:02:24 you might think well that leads to the domination of men it it just turns men into pathological
2:02:32 tyrants like there’s no victory over one sex that’s a victory of any sense at all that’s
2:02:40 anti-humanity of course of course of course there was a recent post on x that I that just held
2:02:48 my gaze my attention where it was a back and forth debate a pseudo political social debate and
2:02:55 then there were three words that I’ll just say that Mark Andreessen said you know it was it was
2:03:04 about restoring vigor pride and achievement and I thought wow like he’s not a political candidate
2:03:11 but that’s a beautiful trifecta vigor pride and achievement to celebrate those and I and I put
2:03:17 that next to you know that the deep pleasure in generative action at a distance a technological
2:03:23 development the rockets and there are other generative exactly the theme of the story of
2:03:34 Abraham it’s like the most the highest form of potential satiation is risk risky romantic adventure
2:03:40 it’s not satiation right that’s the wrong frame right and so one of the things I’ve noticed this
2:03:47 is such fun I’ve talked in front of I don’t know how many public audiences in the last eight years
2:03:55 independent of my professorial career and those are large audiences you know they must average
2:04:03 about three or four thousand people and there’s one place I go that always reduces the audience to
2:04:11 like dead silence the audiences are usually quiet in the events you know and that’s one of the ways
2:04:16 I’m sure you know this you want to listen to the audience you want to stay in that zone where no
2:04:22 one’s moving right because then you know you their attention is focused and you can hear that and
2:04:27 you can you can I wouldn’t say you can play with it not manipulatively but in the proper sense of
2:04:37 play I learned a long while ago that adventure let’s say is the highest form of reward that’s a
2:04:42 good way of thinking about it but there’s a corollary to that that conservatives need to learn
2:04:48 because they don’t know this conservatives talk about responsibility but they’re conscientious
2:04:54 and so for them responsibility is due to full orderly productivity it’s it’s conscientiousness
2:05:00 responsibility is a conscientious duty what they failed understand is that there’s no difference
2:05:06 between responsibility and adventure they’re the same thing and you can tell young men in
2:05:11 particular that say look you want to have an adventure because you definitely want an adventure
2:05:16 you’re like you’re built for that it will increase your status it will improve your life like it’ll
2:05:21 improve the probability that you’ll accomplish something you want an adventure every fiber of
2:05:27 your being is screaming for it where do you find it you find it in the voluntary adoption of
2:05:33 responsibility and that’s that’s like everyone needs to know that no young person has been taught
2:05:40 that for like five generations this is important can we operationalize this so in your first
2:05:44 book you talked about get your room in order yeah one of the first things I do when I wake up in
2:05:49 the morning I look around the kitchen I look around my room and I try and get things in order
2:05:54 yeah and I now I need that in order to be able to think clearly but it’s just a first order of
2:05:58 business well it’s also a great rich it’s a great morning ritual because it’s often the case
2:06:03 especially if you have a bit of a depressive tilt that it’s kind of hard to get oriented properly
2:06:11 in the morning you know and if you take like I moved into a new house a while back in in northern
2:06:16 Ontario and the garage wasn’t set up properly and the first thing I did in the morning was I went out
2:06:22 in the garage for 10 minutes and 10 minutes isn’t very long but I would like order one thing you
2:06:27 know part of the toolbox or whatever and like if you do that every day things fall into order
2:06:31 pretty quickly but it was a real relief to me in some way because I didn’t have to think about
2:06:36 what I was going to do when I woke up I made my bed and then I went and fixed the garage
2:06:41 for like 10 minutes and then get the brain into this into what I call linear operations like the
2:06:46 ability to carry out something linearly when there’s a near infinite number of options in your phone
2:06:50 in the in your in your physical space I think is so powerful because yeah well it’s an antidote to
2:06:55 chaos you’re picking a target absolutely and it certainly isn’t a sinful sorry you and you know
2:07:00 it’s not sin to clean your room or to organize your space or the garage yeah so you start with
2:07:10 it so within the day one can do that in terms of I really love the the stickiness the positive
2:07:15 stickiness of this idea that adventure and responsibility are the same well let’s let’s
2:07:21 take that apart because it’s it’s not immediately obvious but look when you go let’s say you go
2:07:28 see an adventure movie James Bond movie you know classic archetypal action adventure movie
2:07:35 with some romance thrown in there um what is he doing all difficult things he’s trying to solve
2:07:40 crimes he’s trying to catch bad guys yeah he’s trying to battle with the forces of chaos that
2:07:45 undermine the international order right I mean it’s it’s high order adventure and he’s putting
2:07:50 himself at substantive risk to do that that’s the sacrificial element to it but everybody’s
2:07:57 gripped by it well why because the stakes are high what does it mean for the stakes to be high it
2:08:04 means the outcome matters what does that mean it means it’s a life and death situation like none of
2:08:10 that makes itself present without the hoisting of a burden and here’s something else I figured out so
2:08:19 remarkable so I went to the church of the holy sepulture in Jerusalem which is the first church
2:08:23 that was the first christian church that was established and hypothetically it was established
2:08:31 on the location of the crucifixion right and so at the center of the church is an altar and at the
2:08:39 center of the altar is the image of this crucifixion right which is a sacrificial image okay crucifixion
2:08:45 sacrificial image altar church then around the church is the community and then that becomes
2:08:50 the pattern for european towns right and all the towns that everyone wants to go visit in europe
2:08:58 have that pattern okay so why well responsible sacrifices at the core of the community that’s
2:09:05 what’s dramatized in all that in that architecture in that in that sacred architecture in the actual
2:09:11 in in the in the structure of the community with its center well of course sacrifices the
2:09:17 center of the community obviously because community is a sacrificial gesture like
2:09:24 insofar as you’re not all about what you want right now you’re offering up a sacrifice of
2:09:30 what it is that you want right now to the future and the community clearly and that’s going to
2:09:34 integrate you psychologically it’s going to integrate this society and make it productive
2:09:40 and it’s so interesting that we acted that out for that proposition out for well the whole
2:09:45 at least insofar as you’re talking about christian oriented civilization for the last
2:09:51 two thousand years without ever really noticing that we were dramatizing the proposition that
2:09:56 sacrifices at the center of the community it’s like obviously well what are we to make of you
2:10:01 know cities like san francisco which i grew up just south of and it you know by any standard it’s a
2:10:05 beautiful city i know people like roll their some people roll their eyes i mean you have
2:10:10 the bay on one side you have the ocean on the other it has magnificent bridges i mean it’s a
2:10:16 it’s a testament to what’s possible in a city in terms of diverse landscapes etc but the downtown
2:10:27 the center of the city is just beyond anybody’s sense of of of indecency to walk down in the
2:10:34 in the afternoon hours let alone at night so that at this point you you wonder like is the
2:10:38 center really the center i mean you you literally have to avoid the center of the city in order
2:10:44 to get away from any of that and it’s very yeah well the question is it’s tragic it’s tragic you’re
2:10:51 asking a symbolic question in some ways like you’re asking what is the nature of the relationship
2:10:59 between the the state of society in general and the fact that the centers of cities have deteriorated
2:11:05 well those aren’t unrelated not in the least they’re very tightly related because the center
2:11:11 does not hold right what’s the famous poem from the 1920s the center is loosened right and mere
2:11:17 chaos is around mere chaos is set upon the world i haven’t got the quote precisely right that was
2:11:24 t.s. eliot he knew that when when the center pillar disintegrates then everything falls into chaos
2:11:30 that’s one of the oldest realizations of of humankind the question might be what has caused
2:11:38 the degeneration of this of the center well man you can think about that the whole culture war is
2:11:44 meditation on exactly that question you know there’s an insistence on the postmodern side
2:11:50 so the postmodernist they figured out that we see the world through a story they were right
2:11:55 and that’s a devastating blow to the empiricists and the rationalists because they were wrong
2:12:00 we do not build our knowledge in consequence of an aggregation of facts
2:12:06 that’s not how it works and a story is something like the prioritization of the world of facts
2:12:12 i heard recently that that religion teaches through story philosophy teaches through
2:12:20 language that is divorced of story and that science is designed to try and remove itself from
2:12:24 language almost entirely i mean you’d love to just present graphs and figures but you have
2:12:28 to explain what’s in those right there’s a discussion there’s some conclusions but
2:12:33 the idea is that as scientists we’re supposed to be objective and just interpret the data as they
2:12:39 stand yes and to not and to not only be informed by the fact to not infuse a story but but story is
2:12:46 the the the way that the brain works right i mean beginning middle end it’s also the thing is the
2:12:54 story creeps into science in what would you say unavoidably so here let me give you an example
2:13:02 so i read a book once that was written by an ex kgb agent who talked about a lab in the in the
2:13:07 soviet union where there had was a dreadful accident at one point that resulted in the death of
2:13:18 about 500 people they were trying to produce an amalgam of ebola and smallpox yikes and then to
2:13:24 aerosolize it oh goodness okay now look from a strictly scientific perspective
2:13:31 value-free there’s no difference between pursuing that branch of knowledge and pursuing any other
2:13:37 now you say well that’s preposterous it’s like yeah yes but it’s preposterous because we know
2:13:45 that you can have an evil scientist i mean jesus that’s the trope of how many movies is evil
2:13:54 scientist a trope uses evil scientist as a trope like the bad guy is almost always an evil scientist
2:13:59 right so it’s not like we don’t know this so that science itself which is the value-free pursuit of
2:14:05 facts can be an evil enterprise if you’re a good scientist the story is always lurking in the background
2:14:10 like why are you conducting your investigation well i want to understand more about the human
2:14:15 psyche well why well i want to be evaded to the human enterprise i want to make things better
2:14:22 that’s the story i want to pursue truth in a manner that makes things better that’s the story part
2:14:27 well you and you might say well that’s self-evidence like it’s only self-evident when it’s working
2:14:33 properly when it’s not working properly things get bad quick so there were scientists in unit
2:14:40 731 when the japanese invaded china and you cannot read about what they did without without traumatizing
2:14:48 yourself permanently for the rest of your life right what happened with unit 731 it’s the worst
2:14:55 human atrocity i’ve ever seen by a lot and that was the scientific enterprise gone astray let’s say
2:15:01 it has to be encapsulated within a value structure and the question is well what’s the
2:15:05 appropriate value structure we’re starting to figure that out because you know i talked to
2:15:09 richard dawkins about this a little bit one of the things that disheartens dawkins is that
2:15:16 as the humanistic enterprise has progressed and as the atheistic impulse has made itself
2:15:23 more manifest the assault on science and logic at the universities has intensified because his
2:15:28 notion was if we could just free ourselves from the superstitions of the past everyone would become
2:15:35 like a hybrid between let’s say newton and bacon and Descartes it’s like no it turns out that when
2:15:41 you destabilize the underlying story everybody becomes a narcissistic immature psychopath
2:15:46 and they don’t make good scientists and like the evidence for that is kind of stark because
2:15:53 i’m sure you’ve observed like i’ve observed that over the last 20 years the scientific enterprise
2:15:57 has become a lot less reliable than it was well for a number of reasons i mean one of the primary
2:16:02 ones in my opinion and i’m familiar with the scientific community is that that that a lot
2:16:07 of science is built on lineages and you know who your advisors were and so forth it relates to
2:16:14 funding etc and it used to be that the primary value with within and across lineages was to
2:16:18 seek out new territory i could tell a lot of stories that would take up hours about
2:16:22 great advisors telling their students to move into new territories which sounded like get out of my
2:16:27 field i’m gonna demolish you but instead what they were encouraging them to do was to go on
2:16:31 let’s use your language new adventures of responsibility on a new frontier but instead
2:16:37 what’s happened is that 95 of the scientists in a given subfield all work on similar problems
2:16:41 pin medals on each other validate each other fund each other and as a consequence there are a lot
2:16:47 of untouched problems that will hopefully at some day some day be investigated the other
2:16:52 consequences that this debacle within the field of alzheimer’s and dementia where one laboratory
2:16:58 fudges data and you kind of wonder if i mean that’s not my subfield but i you step back from
2:17:03 there you know how the hell this progressed for 15 years where everyone was you know like the
2:17:06 emperor has no clothes like everyone agreeing that this is the stuff to work on when when in fact
2:17:12 the data were falsified and people knew people knew so what that means is that it’s like it’s
2:17:17 like bad family values passed on through generations and these i do think these are well-meaning people
2:17:23 along the line but yeah yes and no yes and a little bit hard a little bit uh intense on the career
2:17:28 formulation side of things well so right the careerist aspect as opposed to the scientist
2:17:33 as well yeah well that exists too well let’s think about let’s think about that critically it’s like
2:17:41 science is a very weird endeavor because in order to actually be a scientist you have to put discovering
2:17:47 that you’re wrong before demonstrating that you’re right and that is hard on your career
2:17:53 in the short term like if you play that game and you’re good at it you can discover something real
2:17:58 but that’s going to take a while and it’s not certain right it’s not at all surprising that
2:18:05 people would subvert and enterprise that difficult to the narrow demands of career enhancement it’s
2:18:10 exactly what you’d expect unless there was a stunningly powerful countervailing force
2:18:16 and that force was powerful enough let’s say from 1550 to
2:18:25 1980 so that science worked but that’s a short period of time and it’s only happened once
2:18:30 and we don’t know what conditions had to be in place for people to actually like seriously
2:18:36 prioritize the truth seriously because that’s what a serious scientist does and so it’s not
2:18:41 surprising that it would degenerate into something like dynasty and nepotism that’s exactly what you’d
2:18:46 expect that’s the historical norm so then you might think well what are the preconditions that
2:18:51 have to be in place as narrative foundation for there are to be at least some people that are
2:18:57 prioritizing the truth I think one needs to reward true adventure and novelty taking on
2:19:02 novel problems and you know these days it’s so hard for a scientist to birth an entire new field
2:19:09 and yet there are huge huge sets of untapped problems the the challenge for them is it’s
2:19:12 difficult to get funding to take on things that are truly new you know there’s a lot of discussion
2:19:17 these days about challenges with the NIH etc I think that the biggest challenge regardless of
2:19:20 the size of the budget which is also you know an issue that needs to be dealt with and where it’s
2:19:25 spent is that we tend to reward science that’s already completed that fits with the current
2:19:31 narrative and it’s very incremental they reward incremental science whereas great science comes
2:19:36 through taking great risk and people like you said holding the truth above all else and being
2:19:41 willing to stake their careers on it and we need to actually reward failure if it involved effort
2:19:46 to solve things correctly in other words right give young scientists funding and encourage them to go
2:19:52 after novel problems and understand that most of them will fail and that doesn’t necessarily mean
2:19:57 that they have to be exited out of the university give them a new novel problem to tackle the problem
2:20:01 is there’s so much pressure and you know because you university professor I know you know in order
2:20:06 to reach tenure you need to you need to reduce the entropy as much as possible in any event I
2:20:12 without going down that path too too far I now understand why you’re saying that science in
2:20:18 has to invoke story that makes sense that makes sense otherwise it well it’s science is the
2:20:24 handmaiden of some story there’s no way around that because motivation is the handmaiden of some
2:20:30 story and so the motivational framework has to be put in place accurately and the motivational
2:20:37 framework for scientific inquiry is very stringent truth above all right so if you state your whole
2:20:43 goddamn career on a particular hypothesis and you run a critical study and it turns out that the
2:20:49 reason you’re famous is invalid you have to publish that why the hell would you do that
2:20:55 right and the answer has to be because you hold the truth in relationship to human flourishing
2:21:02 higher than the integrity of your own even your own self-valuation well man that’s a very
2:21:09 difficult that’s a very difficult thing to establish now you can do that with young scientists to
2:21:16 some degree because you can help them understand that as a medium to long-term game there’s nothing
2:21:24 better than pursuit of the truth and so that’s worth a risk it’s worth the risk because you can be
2:21:30 spectacularly successful if you pursue the truth it’s unlikely like it’s unlikely to be a successful
2:21:35 entrepreneur but if you get it right man you like you’ve hit the mother load right and
2:21:41 you don’t want to falsify your data because you want to spend your whole life pursuing
2:21:45 something that doesn’t exist because you will talk yourself into belief that your falsifications
2:21:51 are true and then you’ll warp the whole field as you said you illustrated that in relationship to
2:22:00 Alzheimer’s disease like you can instill love of the truth in in your students but you have to
2:22:05 believe that’s a story too you have to believe that the truth will set you free right and that’s
2:22:13 a religious presumption in the final analysis serve truth it’s the best long-term strategy
2:22:19 it’s the best adventure that’s a good thing to know too it’s the best adventure so I made a
2:22:25 triumvirate of truth responsibility and adventure saying they’re the same thing and I figured it
2:22:36 out with regard to truth too truth is an adventure because if you what would you say vow to follow
2:22:41 the path of the truth you have to let go of the predictability of the outcome right now if I wanted
2:22:48 to manipulate you in some way I would craft my strategy for this podcast a priori and then I
2:22:55 would tilt the podcast toward that end right and I could be more or less sophisticated at that
2:23:01 or I could just say we’re going to follow the thread wherever it goes and I’m going to accept
2:23:06 the outcome and I’m going to presume that the outcome is the best outcome that could possibly
2:23:14 have been even if I don’t see why okay why is that an adventure because if I let go of my
2:23:20 predetermined goal I don’t know what’s going to happen and that’s exciting that’s right because
2:23:25 you don’t know well that’s the that’s the essence of adventure it’s like you’re bounding over the
2:23:31 uncharted sea let’s say and you don’t know what’s going to happen next well why would you exchange
2:23:37 that for like a kind of banal predictability well to build your career just I mean I understand why
2:23:41 but you’re foregoing what’s truly valuable for something that’s second rate for something that’s
2:23:47 secure that’s what Abraham did it’s like you know it’s better to have the adventure why the
2:23:54 hell wouldn’t you want that so he left what was indulgent he had everything for what was truly
2:24:00 generative in service to something larger and dangerous and dangerous like he ends up as a
2:24:06 warrior at one point he has to raise an army to rescue his nephew from the hands of tyrants
2:24:12 it’s like you know all the adventures of life get thrown at him but it turns out that that’s
2:24:17 what he wants he wants all the adventures of life to be thrown at him and that is what everyone
2:24:24 wants and I think that is you know the idea that when you go watch the Lord of the Rings for example
2:24:30 or the Hobbit you’re seeing the characterization of human personality dramatized obviously right
2:24:36 that’s like a truism but you have to think about what that means it’s like the Hobbit is Abraham
2:24:43 it’s exactly the same story and that story is the story of the that’s the genuine identity of the
2:24:48 individual and the promise is is that if you aim up and you live in the spirit of the truth
2:24:54 you’ll have the redemptive adventure of your life and that’ll be of such significance that it’ll
2:25:00 justify the suffering that’s intrinsic to life and I think that’s right I mean when you look at your
2:25:08 own life I mean you’re on an adventure you have this podcast it’s ridiculously successful right
2:25:13 in a way that I’m sure you couldn’t have imagined how long five years ago yeah we are about to hit
2:25:19 the end of four years in a couple weeks we’ve been we launched in January 2021 no no premonition
2:25:24 could have seen this or for I had no concept that it would become what it’s become right okay and so
2:25:30 what what’s the existential consequence of that like you know I mean everyone’s life is rife with
2:25:36 the possibility of suffering and now you have something exciting and generative to do why is
2:25:41 that working I mean existentially why does that work you know people will ask me what’s next where
2:25:45 are you headed and I would just say you know like on well on Friday I’m talking to Jordan
2:25:51 Peterson and I’m focused on that all week long and next week I’m recording a solo podcast about
2:25:57 whatever it happens to be I just believe that’s setting my sights on the proximal yeah and I just
2:26:07 believe in I know my my deep deep deep love of finding organizing and disseminating information
2:26:13 that I hope will be useful to people okay so that’s it okay that’s what that’s what the driving force
2:26:18 behind all of it okay so great so so I would say I don’t think that that proclamation I don’t think
2:26:24 is any different any different from the notion of identity with the redeeming word that’s the same
2:26:31 idea because you said generated generating ideas right information and disseminating it right so
2:26:38 that’s like it’s valid inquiry and and dissemination of the consequences okay your claim is that that’s
2:26:44 highly intrinsically motivating oh yeah right okay so then I delight I delight in it I it’s hard
2:26:48 sometimes I mean it’s it I was trying to read a really difficult paper yesterday it’s hard
2:26:53 but it it feels so good okay so then we might say well what’s what what’s the basis for that
2:27:00 intrinsic pleasure we think about that biologically well you could imagine it as a manifestation of the
2:27:09 instinct that integrates right it integrates you cross time it integrates you with other people
2:27:15 across time right and there’s a marker for that why wouldn’t you find your how could it be otherwise
2:27:22 then you would find your deepest satisfaction in pursuing the course of action that integrates you
2:27:27 psychologically and integrates other people socially like that would assume that there’s a
2:27:32 concordance between your deepest self-interest and the interest of your society and it better be
2:27:39 that way because otherwise you couldn’t thrive as an individual in society so better be that way
2:27:43 and we’ve been doing this for a very long time as human beings so why we wouldn’t have an instinct
2:27:51 to mark that pathway and of course we’d find our deepest satisfaction in that I mean once you once
2:27:58 you see these issues through that light they become I think painfully obvious so because the also
2:28:03 because the contrary hypothesis is absurd it’s like you’re going to find deep satisfaction
2:28:08 in what rejecting knowledge and if you do happen to stumble across a nugget you’re going to
2:28:14 hoard it for yourself right well right right exactly it’s laughable it’s clearly laughable no
2:28:22 one believes that earlier we’re talking about operationalizing this the effort the calling to
2:28:30 move from potential chaos to order starts with organizing one’s physical space we were to you
2:28:36 know extend the the rings of the bull’s eye out a little bit further for people listening who are
2:28:42 trying to figure out like where where do they receive that calling how do they find that they’re
2:28:48 calling that like where so responsibility and adventure being perhaps the the compass through
2:28:52 which we can you know like navigate there so they think like well where can they
2:28:59 grab ahold of their responsibility and and and then as a consequence of doing that and
2:29:05 engage in adventure and have an impact that is good for them and good for the world that that’s
2:29:10 how do how they find that I think there’s there’s very practical answers to those questions so
2:29:18 two of the most two of the highest order characterizations of the divine in the biblical library
2:29:24 is calling and conscience and you could think about those you could think about those as
2:29:30 integrated manifestations of positive and negative emotion so imagine there’s a pathway
2:29:36 forward to your aim okay your negative emotion tells you when you deviate from the pathway
2:29:40 and your positive emotion tells you when you’re progressing along the pathway okay now imagine
2:29:45 that there’s a voice of your integrated positive emotion and there’s a voice of your integrated
2:29:51 negative emotion calling that’s what fills you with enthusiasm and that root word of that is
2:29:59 chaos right chaos that’s God calling conscience okay so now that beckons you forward so how do
2:30:06 you find that some things bother you those are your problems and you might think I don’t want
2:30:11 to have any problems like no you’ve got some problems you can tell that because those things
2:30:19 bug you that’s your conscience calling you to your destiny those problems okay calling there’s
2:30:24 some things that interest you right and you don’t get to pick them exactly they just sort of make
2:30:29 themselves manifest like the burning bush did to moses because that’s an example that’s the
2:30:34 symbolic representation of calling it’s the dynamism between calling and conscience that
2:30:40 orients people upwards right that’s the pillar of flame and the pillar of darkness that guides
2:30:47 the Israelites across the desert when they’re lost calling beckons conscience provides disciplinary
2:30:52 limitations that’s a good way of thinking about it so you can see that some things are good you
2:30:59 ask yourself what bothers me about me okay now you have a domain you think well man some of those
2:31:05 things I just I don’t know how to fix them fine don’t fix them fix some of the things you could fix
2:31:10 that’s that we talked about that or make your goddamn bed in the morning like you could do that
2:31:16 and it’s like you see people their lives are so chaotic like they’re they’re living environment
2:31:23 every single bit of it is a catastrophic mess sometimes multiple generations deep it’s just
2:31:29 chaos everywhere it’s like where do you start dealing with chaos wherever you can put something
2:31:34 in order buy your own standards of order and then see what happens because what’ll happen is
2:31:41 now you got a little let a little corner of order and now you’re a little more well situated and
2:31:46 then you’ll be able to see what the next what’s the next step and you might think well it looks
2:31:52 hopeless because there’s just chaos everywhere it’s like it’s okay because the process is exponential
2:31:59 so even if you start nowhere if you keep doubling you’re going to get somewhere and
2:32:04 faster than you think and well the same thing applies when you’re plummeting into the abyss
2:32:10 the degenerative stuff a colleague of mine who studies it he’s geneticist said you know it takes
2:32:15 many many many generations to evolve a species it doesn’t take very many to devolve a species
2:32:20 mutation negative mutations can build on another and crash a species very very fast
2:32:26 I think our psyche is similar in that way well that’s an entropic problem there’s way more ways
2:32:32 to make something complex worse than there are to make it better right that’s why it’s a straight
2:32:38 and narrow path my father came to this country from Argentina and he grew up in a lot of surrounded
2:32:41 by a lot of political chaos came to the country became a physicist probably because he likes
2:32:49 order he’s a very orderly guy and it was probably in the early 90s that we went I was born in 75 so
2:32:55 probably yeah early 90s that we went to a movie theater together see a movie and he said it as
2:33:00 we were walking in he said look and I said what he said this is the beginning of the end and I said
2:33:06 what do you mean he said we’re degenerating as a society and I said why and he said there are people
2:33:10 here in their pajamas right and obviously they weren’t in their pajamas but they come in and
2:33:16 kind of like bathroom you know bathroom slippers and they aren’t like they weren’t slovenly but
2:33:21 they weren’t taking care of themselves clearly worse they didn’t care what other people thought
2:33:25 right that’s right they were making a public display of their lack of care right right right
2:33:30 yeah that’s a narcissistic aspect to that too yeah yeah he’s right about that yeah and I thought at
2:33:36 the time like he’s being judgment I was a teen right he’s being judgmental etc and um but you
2:33:41 know I would say from 1990 until fairly recently hopefully things are shifting for the better now
2:33:46 but um there has seemed to be it’s kind of chaos out there now I think it’s wonderful that people
2:33:52 can express themselves by wearing clothes that they feel represent them etc but this wasn’t that
2:34:00 this was a lack of care look voluntary the what would you say the evocation of voluntary chaos
2:34:05 that’s one thing the degeneration into chaos through sloth let’s say that’s not an adventure
2:34:12 that’s carelessness in all things masquerading as an adventure I’m so cool I don’t care it’s like
2:34:19 you’re not cool you’re just useless and you’re covering your uselessness with a veneer of
2:34:25 revolutionary morality it’s like there’s nothing in that that’s up like if people want to deviate
2:34:30 in the manner they present themselves in dress and they’re doing that because they have a inspiration
2:34:38 or a purpose then that’s completely different than just being so cool you don’t care and that’s not
2:34:43 cool there’s nothing about that that’s cool and you know you might say I knew you had this sense
2:34:50 when you were a kid that your dad was overreacting it’s like yeah well if you look you can see things
2:34:57 before other people see them and he and he came from a place that had gone through a fair number
2:35:04 of very rough times and so he could have been perfectly accurate in what he saw highly likely
2:35:11 that’s another example of the center disintegrating right where do you think we are now in in the
2:35:19 united states I think right in terms of how we represent hold and represent order versus chaos
2:35:24 I mean we were talking about some of the you know this the social media posts recently we just had a
2:35:29 public a public display of an assassination maybe you know I hadn’t intended on going there but I
2:35:35 think it’s worth talking about it was weird I got pulled into this through tangential reasons this
2:35:44 Luigi Mancione’s last tweet was a podcast cover of my episode with Jonathan Haidt and some media
2:35:52 outlets tried to make something of that you know but clearly he was very smart clearly he had four
2:35:57 thought to his actions he 3d printed this gun it seems it is all alleged now but it seems to be
2:36:01 pointing in that direction he seems to not want the police to go investigate anybody else you know
2:36:07 because he claims there’s no one else acting with him etc he clearly was trying to make a statement
2:36:12 but the statement was it was a combination of statements about the the insurance system
2:36:19 sort of anti-establishment because of his affinity for uh Kaczynski unibom or bombings
2:36:24 but at the same time he he didn’t really seem to fall into kind of left-leaning or right-leaning
2:36:30 politics squarely he was kind of all over the place so you’re a trained clinician do you think
2:36:35 there’s some schizotypal or schizophrenic type organization there and in his head or lack of
2:36:41 organization I mean what are we to make of this and we and we had to see I think somebody assassinated
2:36:46 front shot in the back if I haven’t had a guess I would say the first thing I would be looking for
2:36:57 is pathological narcissism I disordered thought possibly but he was quite successful academically
2:37:03 like the typical pattern for something like schizophrenic dissolution is very very much
2:37:08 difficulty in maintaining so disciplines striving in a highly intellectual atmosphere
2:37:15 very valedictorian yeah yeah yeah so I’d think more luciferian grandiosity and the intellect is
2:37:22 particularly prone to that you know the the the the archetypal representation of the intellect
2:37:29 that overreaches is lucifer right God’s head God’s highest angel gone most catastrophically wrong
2:37:34 which means that the best thing in its place is the worst thing on the top that happens with
2:37:39 sexuality it can happen with aggression it certainly happens with the intellect and so
2:37:44 I think he’s a worshiper of his own intellect and believe that he was the guy who could make
2:37:50 the decision even of life and death which means he took on to himself the role of ultimate judge
2:37:55 and that’s what the kid who shot up columbine did too and said in his own writings he’s the judge
2:38:02 and that’s like narcissistic beyond comprehension and the fact that he’s being celebrated well
2:38:09 that’s an echo of that moralizing narcissism that’s deeply embedded in our culture deeply embedded
2:38:17 and so that’s a very ugly it’s very ugly I see so we’re going to what we’re now vigilantes
2:38:23 in relationship to the corporate world judge jury and executioner and the reason we’ve taken
2:38:29 on that role is because we unlike let’s say the people who run healthcare enterprises we truly
2:38:36 care for the sick and oppressed it’s like do you know do you know yeah there’s so much moralizing
2:38:40 in our culture it’s beyond it’s really beyond belief I was gonna say all these CEOs now are
2:38:45 going to need personal security that’s hardly gonna you know cause them to adjust their you know
2:38:50 premiums or something downward I mean I think as people get more scared they tend to you know
2:38:55 show up double yeah they tend to double down I mean earlier we were talking about action at a
2:39:06 distance I mean clearly this mangione guy has his action to high status so ignore it or notorious
2:39:13 there’s a hard choice for young men they’ll pick notorious many of them will and no wonder because
2:39:20 status is everything and it’s hard to do good things over long periods of time right it’s not
2:39:25 hard to be good it’s just hard to do it’s hard to do good things it’s hard to do big things I mean
2:39:30 I think that’s one reason why I’m very happy that Elon is being celebrated you don’t have to agree
2:39:37 with him politically but the rockets going the idea of going to Mars trying to make sure that our
2:39:43 species replaces itself I mean these are big important endeavors I mean I the reason he can
2:39:50 clearly do them I mean he’s neural link he’s been insanely successful doing five impossible things
2:39:58 simultaneously right that’s not fluke no right once probably not fluke even once but you know
2:40:06 the probability that its fluke once is higher five times no that’s that’s a reputation right
2:40:12 and so and he’s a he’s a from first principle sort of guy so yeah I wouldn’t bet against Elon Musk
2:40:20 so and that is independent of his political stance and is it difficult to do good things
2:40:26 well it’s hard it’s hard it’s hard to do long-term good things because it’s their long term that’s
2:40:32 what I was trying to write but it’s also intensely the thing is it’s also this is that back to that
2:40:39 issue of the relationship between responsibility and adventure it’s like if the aim is true the
2:40:46 voyage is worthwhile and so and that happens right away like you know you’re very successful
2:40:53 with your podcast but my suspicions are you’ve deeply enjoyed it since its onset well so so
2:41:01 well that means that some of your pleasure is satiation related you’ve become successful but
2:41:07 if that was your aim you would have failed as a podcaster because definitely I definitely would
2:41:11 have failed oh definitely right oh absolutely 100 because it wasn’t the pursuit of pleasure per se
2:41:17 it’s sort of like the difference between you know is it easier to be the class clown or the top of
2:41:22 the class it’s just much easier to be the class clown all you have to do is crack 10 jokes one
2:41:27 of them hits you know and you’re safe but you’re you’re actually dissolving as you go right right
2:41:33 right well that’s the prioritization of the short term over the long run I mean Rogan’s a
2:41:38 perfectly appropriate example because he’s sort of like the archetype of the successful podcaster
2:41:44 it’s like what’s Joe doing well he’s doing what he’s always done he sits down with his producer
2:41:49 one guy and he talks to people he wants to talk to about things he wants to talk to them about
2:41:56 that’s the whole thing the whole and it’s you know the left the lefties who refuse to talk to
2:42:01 people in the podcast world for 10 years are now proclaiming to everyone who listen that they
2:42:07 should have built their own you know alternative media apparatus and they could have participated
2:42:13 in the one that exists now at any time had they shown the least proclivity to do so
2:42:20 how it’s not such an easy thing to build because it wasn’t something that Joe built
2:42:26 it was something that happened around him in consequence of the nature of his pursuit
2:42:31 and that’s the case for virtually all the successful podcasters I think people forget how
2:42:38 Joe’s podcast started do you you might know this story I’ll keep it brief but he was a comedian at
2:42:42 the comedy store he had done some television and things of that sort but and people can find this
2:42:49 online the videos are on youtube where a comedian was stealing Ari Shafir’s jokes so Joe got up on
2:42:56 stage and said there’s a there’s a there’s some ethics in the comedy community people can buy
2:43:02 jokes but you don’t steal jokes apparently and there’s an etiquette as well so apparently he
2:43:08 confronted this guy in front of the audience and said you’re stealing his jokes and the guy
2:43:13 challenged him and Joe said no like Joe was stood up in the name of justice for a friend of his
2:43:18 and my understanding could be wrong about this but my understanding is that Joe was then banished
2:43:24 from that particular comedy club so what did he do he went home he popped open his laptop and he and
2:43:30 Brian Redman and a few other folks started what eventually became the Joe Rogan podcast it came
2:43:38 out of a an impulse to stand up for the truth which I think is an important thing for people to
2:43:46 understand because it helps you understand Joe yeah yeah and I think that that’s yeah and you
2:43:54 know he doesn’t claim to always be right but his his pursuit of the truth has been a driving force
2:44:00 for the podcast he claims consistently to not be sufficiently right that’s why he listens
2:44:06 and asks questions you don’t ask genuine questions if you believe that you already know everything
2:44:12 you only ask real questions if you don’t think that you know enough and Joe wouldn’t be perennially
2:44:18 attractive to his audiences if he wasn’t asking the same questions that the audience would like
2:44:25 to have answered right he’s genuinely curious absolutely well Musk himself said you know when
2:44:31 I interviewed him he talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was
2:44:37 13 14 which is not atypical of you know outs people with outstanding intellects let’s say
2:44:48 and he resolved that by recognizing that the quest is the source of meaning and so he took
2:44:54 it upon himself to confront difficult problems and try to solve them and he found that to be
2:45:00 sufficiently gratifying so his existential crisis resolved itself and that’s very much
2:45:08 the same pattern that Rogan is exemplifying in you in your pursuits and you can see what
2:45:13 impact that has on the public you know and we were I was talking with one of your staff members
2:45:19 before this broadcast about your lectures say in Australia and so you’re in the weird position where
2:45:27 5000 people come and listen to a biologist lecture spontaneously for what 90 minutes like what the
2:45:33 hell well that’s just an indication of how compelled people are by anything approximating a genuine
2:45:39 quest it doesn’t even matter the direction right it matters the commitment and that capacity to
2:45:48 explore and transmit and that is a manifestation of the word that redeems I love this idea
2:45:52 or what you just said that it doesn’t even so mat so much matter the direction as much as the
2:45:58 commitment a colleague of mine at Stanford who I respect tremendously Anna Lemke who wrote the
2:46:02 book dopamine nation she’s the head of our dual diagnosis addiction center she was the one who
2:46:07 really truly deserves credit for bringing dopamine into the public discussion over the
2:46:12 last few years she initiated that talking about how big inflections in dopamine that are very fast
2:46:17 that aren’t preceded by effort aka drugs of abuse behavioral addictions etc leave us below baseline
2:46:21 with our dopamine and then people will engage in more of the behavior it drives us further and
2:46:27 further and further that’s kind of the principle of it I was talking to her about how people get
2:46:33 sober and the conversation turned to how do young people find their purpose it was a
2:46:37 is very interesting she said let’s talk about finding purpose everyone nowadays
2:46:42 wants to know what their purpose is and she said the way you find your purpose is by going out
2:46:47 under your front lawn and seeing if the leaves need to be raped sounds familiar right you find
2:46:54 purpose by figuring out how you can be of use at progressively larger and larger spheres away from
2:47:00 yourself and in doing that and in doing that you start to hear the calling and you find your purpose
2:47:06 and it as you said it reveals itself it reveals the same thing yeah so I think you two would
2:47:11 enjoy a conversation at some point well this is an important thing to return to because people are
2:47:18 often curious about what to do practically it’s like okay first this is what Jacob does Jacob in
2:47:24 the Old Testament stories he eventually becomes Israel right and so that’s his name and Israel
2:47:31 means we who wrestle with God now Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts and he leaves his home
2:47:39 and the perverse influence of his mother and his criminal betraying past behind and he decides that
2:47:45 he’s going to aim up and that night he makes an altar and he makes a sacrifice and that night
2:47:49 he has a dream of a staircase that reaches up to heaven which is now what he’s walking up
2:48:02 right and so he finds his his purpose he finds his adventure as a consequence of his decision
2:48:07 to be better okay so now you want to find your purpose okay first thing you have to do
2:48:16 you have to review how wretched and miserable you actually are and you have to face that
2:48:22 and then you have to think I’d rather not have that and it has to be true and then you have to aim
2:48:27 up now you don’t know what that means because like you’re pretty scattered and dissolute but
2:48:33 at least you got the damn intent in mind and then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices
2:48:40 right along the way okay then what happens well then the pathway will reveal itself to you in
2:48:47 increments calling is there something around here that I could fix that I would fix that’s a great
2:48:53 question is there something at hand that I could fix that I would fix it might be something low
2:48:58 because especially when you first get going you’re not good for anything so you might have to start
2:49:02 with something pretty trivial but it doesn’t matter because you start getting better is there
2:49:07 something that bothers me that’s conscience that I could set right in some small way well that’s
2:49:14 there for everyone right in the midst of the most catastrophic mess that pathway you might even say
2:49:20 look the more mess around you the more unstructured possibility you have at hand and it’s true you
2:49:26 know it’s like I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna Anna about this I know how difficult that is but it
2:49:32 is the case that the more mess at hand that you can see the more opportunity that’s there because
2:49:40 well if you can see that it’s a mess then you can see the pathway to cleaning it up
2:49:47 well so do it do it see what happens that’s the adventure what’s going to happen in my class
2:49:54 I my maps of meaning class I used to have students do this as a project and one of the projects was
2:50:00 find something around you in your neighborhood wherever in your family that isn’t set right
2:50:06 and see if you could set it right just write down what happens well one student in particular
2:50:11 he decided his mother had died and the family kind of fragmented and so he decided he would take
2:50:18 try to take on the role of mother you know be responsible for the household operating well
2:50:23 it grew him up like mad as you can imagine he ran into all sorts of weird resistances right
2:50:29 because his family was upset that he was doing what mum used to do and like he just had a tremendously
2:50:36 complex adventure as a consequence of his willingness to pursue this it was obviously necessary
2:50:40 because the alternative was that his family was going to fall apart it’s like that’s there for
2:50:45 everyone you say well my circumstances are so difficult it’s like fair enough so are everybody
2:50:53 else’s by the way but that means there’s a lot of mess like fix it a bit and that’s ridiculously
2:50:58 entertaining and unpredictable and that in itself is a great deal you have no idea what’s
2:51:02 going to happen just like you didn’t know what happened when you started the podcast why’d you
2:51:10 start it I had it for me I felt a compulsion to share what I knew but because during the pandemic
2:51:18 everyone was so focused on vaccines and lockdowns that no one was talking about the reality that
2:51:25 everyone was facing including sorry Josh Gordon I know him through time our director of the
2:51:30 national institute of mental health not a single thing out there about hey folks if you’re going
2:51:33 to be indoors this much get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning or else you’re going to have
2:51:38 trouble sleeping trouble sleeping equates to mental health issues stress uncertainty my lab
2:51:44 was working on ways to regulate stress through deliberate breathing through other mechanisms
2:51:49 it was like well I want people to have tools zero cost tools to deal with their stress to help them
2:51:56 regulate their circadian biology because those wick out to countering the negative forces that
2:52:00 were on us which are social order was disrupted people are at home so it was a desire to give
2:52:07 people tools that I knew existed that I was knowledgeable about and I had a a long standing
2:52:12 kind of a growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about neuroscience because it’s so darn cool
2:52:16 right okay so it’s a lot that was it there was a lot of energy behind the the mission but then
2:52:20 there was a calling the calling was from hearing about people’s suffering it’s like well of course
2:52:24 you’re not sleeping well I mean not only are there a million things to worry about right now people
2:52:29 aren’t working etc but you’re not getting sunlight in your eyes you need to get outside you need to
2:52:33 you know and then there’s the whole socialization thing and look whatever people’s circumstances
2:52:38 there are things that they could do and so I felt that calling and my conscience told me that I have
2:52:43 the knowledge so why would why would I cloister a cloister with it at home that’s like what good
2:52:49 is that so I just started blabbing on the internet right right that’s why yeah well that’s a that’s
2:52:56 a perfectly you know you can think well that’s a logical extension of your subsidiary calling to be
2:53:00 a teacher and a professor you’re already a researcher you’re already a professor so you’re
2:53:05 investigating and transmitting knowledge like well looks like you could do that on a broader scale
2:53:11 and the technology is there why not explore that that’s a perfectly reasonable and you can see the
2:53:16 interplay of calling and conscience there that’s a lovely way of characterizing the voice of the
2:53:23 divine which is is how it’s characterized repeated Elijah Elijah’s the prophet who is appears with
2:53:29 Christ when he’s transfigured on the mount in the New Testament it’s Elijah and Moses Elijah is the
2:53:34 first person in human history who identifies the divine with conscience that’s his contribution
2:53:42 that’s a major psychological revolution right it’s an unheralded transformation in understanding
2:53:48 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
2:53:55 nature he’s the originator of the phrase the still small voice right like that’s a that the
2:54:00 notion that your conscience is the voice of the divine my god there’s there’s there’s virtually
2:54:07 no disc no discovery there’s no proposition more revolutionary than that and so that’s why Elijah
2:54:13 is a prophet of you know primary status and I just see no reason at all not to take that claim
2:54:19 seriously it’s like you come up with an explanation for your conscience it tells you things you don’t
2:54:26 want to hear so how is that you I mean you have to gerrymandered the definition of you
2:54:32 for that to be you no I absolutely believe that things come from outside of us certainly for me
2:54:39 and I you know I I’m now very much a devotee of prayer I pray before this podcast what do you pray
2:54:46 well before this podcast I prayed for clarity of mind to be able to to learn from you and to help
2:54:52 transmit that knowledge out to people in a way that would be useful to them yeah to for sustained
2:55:01 focus for for the ability to also let go and right and not try and control or or lead with
2:55:10 questions right and to and to allow the the a sense of randomness and serendipity to to make it
2:55:16 what it what it is in trusting that it’s in service to the listeners right well that’s very
2:55:22 that’s a very precise and properly formulated prayer yeah I pray before every podcast I pray
2:55:27 before going to sleep each and I’ve been doing this for about for a little over a year I always
2:55:32 quietly why why did you decide to do that my coming to the whole notion of prayer and God
2:55:41 etc was complicated in the backdrop in the sense that I always secretly prayed um always secretly
2:55:47 secretly prayed and then about a year and about a year and a half ago a guy that works on my security
2:55:54 team um started talking to me about the Bible we started talking about God and it made sense I
2:56:01 started reading the Bible I’m not through it yet um and I started praying and I had a number of
2:56:08 experiences as a consequence of praying clearly as a consequence of prayer that made me realize that
2:56:15 prayer doesn’t give me a capacity of any sort it just allows certain things that I believe are inside
2:56:22 of me to to uh to come out and for proper prayer establishes aim yeah that’s right oh yeah well why
2:56:27 wouldn’t you establish your aim like why wouldn’t you take a moment before you start your podcast to
2:56:33 remember what the hell you’re trying to accomplish and to have it firmly in mind yeah and it felt
2:56:36 different so I should say that you know I I have this little list that I sometimes you I’ll say you
2:56:42 know uh deliberate breathing a k breath work can allow you to shift your state hypnosis is a tool
2:56:48 that can allow you to solve a particular problem because it has some you know aspect of neuroplasticity
2:56:53 in there um non-sleep depress which is a thing that it was you know built out of this this practice
2:56:57 called yoga nidra where you go into a an awake but deeply relaxed state allows you to restore your
2:57:03 vigor meditation to me is a way of of enhancing one’s ability to focus you know a third eye meditation
2:57:08 of concentrating your breath etc I mean we know based on the data improves focus prayer to me is
2:57:14 entirely different than all of those there’s some overlap that they they they look similar
2:57:21 some of them look similar from the outside but prayers the the for me is the allowing of something
2:57:29 from truly outside me to come through me and bring out the best in me and that’s why I pray for
2:57:35 four things I pray for ability I pray for other people and I also have learned that a powerful
2:57:40 aspect of prayer is just listening because just stopping and listening and trying to
2:57:48 invite in or allow in messages that um if I didn’t steal myself that I wouldn’t hear
2:57:52 and sometimes I’ll go to sleep and then the next morning something will come to mind it’s not
2:57:57 always immediate I don’t think there’s any real difference between that and revelation so imagine
2:58:09 that what speaks to you in intuition is the voice of your aim now this this would be this would be
2:58:17 true if your thoughts and the images that appear to you are tools so to speak to orient you towards
2:58:23 your destination well obviously they have to be that because if your thoughts and your visions let’s
2:58:29 say didn’t orient you towards your destination they would be useless and you’d never get anywhere
2:58:35 okay so now you specify your aim and it is the voice of that aim that will make itself manifest
2:58:40 to you that is what a revelation is and one of these days when we have a podcast I’d like to
2:58:46 sit down and talk to you about the relationship the formal relationship between thought and prayer
2:58:52 because I think thought is secularized prayer I’ve looked at it’s historic because
2:59:00 when did we start to think that’s not so obvious you know I mean we started to think in words
2:59:05 after we developed the ability to use language what’s that 150 000 years maybe it’s longer than
2:59:11 that no one really knows but thought has its historical origins the probability that it
2:59:16 emerged from something like prayer as far as I can tell is 100 but I’d like to at some point
2:59:22 it’s complicated but I’d like to have a discussion with you about that so imagine that to have it in
2:59:31 to have an informative intuition means that you posit a question like and that’s a form of humility
2:59:37 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
2:59:43 it’s like so you set the stage well once you set the stage the probability that a creative idea will
2:59:49 enter the theater of your imagination is much enhanced that’s the first stage of revelation
2:59:54 then you have to assess that that’s discriminating the spirits you might say you’re separating the
2:59:59 wheat from the chaff that’s critical thinking but all of that as far as I can tell is something
3:00:08 approximating secularized prayer set your aim then observe the manifestation of that aim
3:00:15 not it’s not it’s not even magical it’s how your perception works now there’s a magic to it because
3:00:20 I suppose the magic is that you can think up something you never thought up before
3:00:25 look how the hell do you do that it’s more like you experience it right you set your aim you have
3:00:32 a question so you’re on your knees hoping for an answer the light bulb goes on well if that’s
3:00:39 not revelation then what the hell is it it’s the same thing having spent a good portion of my career
3:00:45 digging around in brains recording from neurons slicing up brain staining brains and from my
3:00:52 understanding of what of neuroscience and I think by now in 2020 almost 2025 we have a fairly good
3:00:59 understanding of what different brain areas do how different circuits interact I don’t see how anyone
3:01:09 who’s really interested in how humans work can not believe in God and I’m not being disparaging
3:01:15 of people that don’t I know people that are atheists I have some in my family and I just don’t
3:01:23 think that the human brain and mind is capable of understanding and managing itself as well as it
3:01:31 possibly could in the absence of a concept of God in prayer and I think there’s a lot of
3:01:36 historical evidence to support that statement meaning that this notion of God has been around
3:01:42 a very long time this is not a coincidence I mean humans have discarded many of the things that you
3:01:50 know other people perhaps came up with this has been a stable feature of being human for a very
3:01:54 long time of societies for a very long time and I’ve been wanting to ask you throughout today’s
3:02:00 conversation to what extent do you think the different religions and the way that they represent
3:02:09 God differently or in the case of Christianity God and Jesus Christ to what extent do you think
3:02:18 that the stories and the lessons and the teachings overlap at the level that we’re talking about today
3:02:23 which is really about a psychological and neuroscientific level seems to me that they all
3:02:29 converge on the same themes but I’m not you know I’m somewhat of a newbie to all to formal prayer
3:02:34 and to read the Bible and so on so I like to say you know I haven’t gotten my jersey yet because I
3:02:38 don’t deserve it but I’m putting in I’m showing up to practice you know this kind of thing so
3:02:45 I’m just curious to what extent you see consistent themes across religions and maybe even to atheism
3:02:50 too like atheism it’s been argued as its own form of religion perhaps right and for anyone listening
3:02:58 I mean I want to make clear like the there’s I don’t have any pushback on atheism it’s just that
3:03:05 for me adopting really coming to terms with a real belief in God and adopting a prayer practice
3:03:12 every single night and also during the day many times and always before a podcast has been just
3:03:18 tremendously beneficial to my life so that’s why I’m going to continue to do it why wouldn’t I
3:03:21 but that’s the question to what extent do different the way that the different religions
3:03:28 represent God you think across religions converge on common themes well I think they
3:03:35 converge substantively I mean I think the best I talked to Camille Paglia about this a few years ago
3:03:41 maybe she’s she’s one of the world’s foremost literary theorists and she said something very
3:03:47 interesting to me that was quite surprising she said that had the academy turned to Eric Neumann
3:03:55 who is Jung’s greatest student by the way instead of Foucault the whole history of of the university
3:03:58 and the intellectual enterprise over the last five decades would have been entirely different
3:04:04 what happened with Foucault well Foucault is the most cited cited scholar who ever lived
3:04:11 and Foucault believes that the story that we act out is one of power and that’s wrong
3:04:18 it and it’s not just wrong it’s like perversely and dangerously wrong I think it’s technically wrong
3:04:23 as well as being ethically wrong partly because power does not provide a stable basis for
3:04:31 psychological integration or social unity it’s just it’s not it power might be more effective
3:04:40 adaptively than capitulation and dependence but it’s not an optimized solution not by
3:04:46 any stretch of the imagination and I think the data demonstrating that I think it’s
3:04:51 incontrovertible and I outlined that in in in this book we wrestle with God
3:05:01 Eric Neumann, Carl Jung, Machia Eliata, a host of others outlined the patterns of religious thinking
3:05:06 and it took them most of the 20th century to do that and they found recurring themes that are
3:05:14 profound so what one example the ancient Egyptians worshiped a god Horus everyone knows the god Horus
3:05:22 because the his emblem is the eye the open eye well what does that mean but means in part that the
3:05:31 ancient Egyptians worshiped attention and they felt that the god of attention was the antidote
3:05:37 to the pathological state and they were right about that I mean they had a god of the pathological
3:05:46 state that was Seth the god Seth the name Seth became Satan through the Coptic through the
3:05:52 Coptic Christians so they believed that the degenerate state had a spirit and the antidote
3:06:01 to the spirit of the degenerate state was the all-seeing the all-seeing upward-striving eye
3:06:06 and that’s right it’s like they nailed that yeah sounds like what you were yeah yeah yeah well I
3:06:13 you set your sights where exactly high and to the to the heavens and then to the most proximal
3:06:17 thing that’s going to deliver you to the next right well and there’s a difference between
3:06:24 attention and thinking like attention is a quest if you’re paying attention you’re looking you’re
3:06:33 seeking you’re knocking you’re asking right and the eternal promise is that if you ask you’ll be
3:06:39 answered and if you seek you’ll find and it’s the the eye is the gateway to that and it’s the antidote
3:06:47 to the degenerate state because the degenerate state the totalitarian state insists and tyrannizes
3:06:52 and the open eye seeks well the Egyptians figured this out and they the Egyptian theology had a
3:06:58 walloping impact on Jewish theology I mean the Jews came out of Egypt like there are
3:07:04 concept that that’s a conception there are consequences of that conceptually as well as
3:07:11 historically that the the pattern of the hero’s journey that’s replicated I would say that’s the
3:07:18 central pattern of story per se and that makes itself manifest in perhaps all cultures that
3:07:26 have managed any unity and any progress whatsoever is there a hierarchy of religious truth yes
3:07:34 in just as there’s a hierarchy in literary depth we understand that a dime store romance
3:07:40 is not as profound as a Dostoevsky novel we know there’s a hierarchy of depth and you can arrange
3:07:48 religious apprehension in terms of a hierarchy of quality and I think the union school did that
3:07:54 brilliantly brilliantly and biologists should know it in far more depth the best neuroscientists
3:08:01 of emotion and motivation that I knew and that include Jacques Penksepp they knew the the the
3:08:05 work of Iliadah for example would you which of those readings would you recommend for somebody
3:08:09 who’s interested in psychology and neuroscience explained at that level I would start with the
3:08:19 sacred and the profane by Iliadah and also Eric Neumann’s book the origins and history of consciousness
3:08:25 that’s a harder one because it’s unless you know the lingo of that school it’s hard to
3:08:32 it’s hard to understand what he’s aiming at if you understand that he’s aiming at he’s he’s
3:08:38 elaborating on the symbolism of the adventurous spirit that’s a good way of thinking about it
3:08:45 it’s a technical analysis of the structure of heroic expansion of personality but it’s an easier
3:08:53 way in is through Iliadah sacred and the profane short book you could you would read it now knowing
3:09:01 that the gods that Iliadah describe as warring in the pagan world are in part manifestations of
3:09:07 the personality of motivational drive and the mapping of that war across times that’s the
3:09:12 war of the gods in heaven which is a very common mythological trope there’s a war that integrates
3:09:17 towards a monotheism and Iliadah attract that multiple cultures and that’s very it’s very much
3:09:27 worth knowing because it explains it explains the symbolism of the emergence of the integrated
3:09:34 literate human psyche across tens of thousands of years that’s captured in story so imagine this
3:09:41 here’s a way of thinking about it so tribe A tribe B tribe C now they all have their highest deity
3:09:48 or their panoply of deities now they unite okay so as they unite they fight they compete and they
3:09:53 cooperate they kill each other they cooperate and trade at the same time that’s happening there’s a
3:10:00 war in the space of ideas between their respective deities and you could think about the human beings
3:10:05 acting out that war just as you could think about the war the abstraction reflecting the
3:10:11 conflict on earth well there’s a pattern to that conflict that pattern is quite stable across cultures
3:10:19 it tilts towards a monotheistic unity insofar as the multiplicity of cultures unifies well obviously
3:10:24 like what are they going to unify with in the absence of conceptual unity I don’t think so
3:10:30 and why wouldn’t it be that the movement towards that conceptual unity which is the establishment
3:10:36 of a larger-scale civilization would involve the battle between ideas of the divine and their
3:10:42 integration into something resembling a unity like clearly well that’s part of the proclamation let’s
3:10:49 say of the analytic psychologists that were all part of Carl Jung’s school and the academy just
3:10:56 ignored that entirely except for Camille Pellia who understands this quite profoundly and went in
3:11:01 the direction of Foucault these are these lineages that we were talking about before it’s hard for
3:11:06 people to appreciate just how powerful these academic lineages are and scientific lineages
3:11:12 are because they set trajectories I’ve been and they define what’s forbidden like all my all the
3:11:18 people that advise me as a graduate student even those who had my best interest firmly in mind
3:11:23 told me to never talk about my interest in union psychology really yeah yeah I’m laughing because
3:11:30 it’s so preposterous yeah well I like it it it’s not surprising I mean I always did when I went for
3:11:37 job interviews and that definitely was part of what scuttled at me at some of the places I interviewed
3:11:45 now fortunately they hired me at Harvard and so I was what I was discussing was verboten
3:11:52 in many places but not there so you know that worked out quite nicely as you say clearly it
3:11:55 worked out yes I’ve been meaning to ask you I’ve been reading a really interesting book
3:12:02 recently that’s basically grounded in Adlerian psychology yeah I wasn’t familiar with Adlerian
3:12:08 psychology yeah Adler is very practical the book talks about Adler as a as a counterpoint
3:12:14 to Freud and Jung what’s the book the book is called the courage to be disliked and I highly
3:12:18 recommend it to everybody it was actually written by a Japanese author I think they’re two Japanese
3:12:24 authors it didn’t get quite so popular in this country but it had a big following in Japan
3:12:31 and I think in other places in Asia and the book is is set up as a conversation between
3:12:37 essentially a philosopher of Adlerian psychology and a student who’s challenging him so it’s a
3:12:42 conversation that raises all the all the challenges that one that would come to one’s mind if you were
3:12:46 to be presented with this idea of life tasks and that we’re not supposed to discard with our thoughts
3:12:53 about prior trauma and just figure out what are our tasks now right and I like the practicality of
3:12:57 it Adler is very practical yeah I like that I was just curious what your thoughts were about that
3:13:01 it seems to fit quite well with your your notions and what you’ve talked about in multiple books
3:13:07 including the most recent one the one that’s out now about getting really serious about what your
3:13:13 tasks are at this moment in time and embracing those tasks as a way to progress forward yes as
3:13:19 opposed to um floundering in notions about the past and I think it might it might hit some people
3:13:23 square up side the head when the when there’s I think one of the chapters opens with the words
3:13:28 there’s no such thing as trauma which is clearly not true but the whole idea is to prompt a different
3:13:35 way of thinking and to let people start to drill into like okay what do I need to do now regardless
3:13:41 of what my parents did or didn’t do my my right regardless of my damage self and I must say I
3:13:46 really like the book well I would say I should say I really like I should say I really like the
3:13:53 concept of embracing task while agonizing over the meaning of life and what one is to do yes
3:14:01 well Adler was the most practical of the small crowd that aggregated around Freud and so Jung’s
3:14:08 take was that Freud focused on sex and Adler focused on power and Jung focused on what transcended
3:14:14 both and I think that’s right now Adler is a good repost to Freud in exactly the way you describe
3:14:19 if you like that book and you’re interested in all three of them let’s say there’s a great
3:14:25 book called discovery of the unconscious which was written by a man named Henri Ellen Berger who was
3:14:32 the foremost exponent of existential psychology in the 1950s brilliant brilliant scholar and it is
3:14:37 the best analysis of Freud Jung and Adler that’s ever been written by a lot and it’s it’s a truly
3:14:45 great book he also traces the idea of the unconscious back 350 years before Freud so it’s a masterful
3:14:52 study but I liked Adler and he was much less charismatic than Freud in Jung and so his star
3:14:58 didn’t shine as brightly but he’s very practically oriented and much of his thinking would what would
3:15:03 you say fits quite nicely with a bottom with the same kind of bottom-up approach that a more
3:15:11 behaviorally oriented psychotherapist would employ so look it’s it’s it’s there are some people
3:15:20 if you’re if you’re engaging in a therapeutic process with someone there are people who are
3:15:25 best engaged with at the level of concept those are people are high in trait openness
3:15:31 not everyone’s like that in fact most people aren’t like that Jungian psychology works really
3:15:37 well on highly creative people and almost all Jung’s clients were creative because they wouldn’t
3:15:43 have come to him otherwise and there’s also people for whom sexual dysfunction and trauma are the
3:15:51 primary what would you say the the primary preoccupation of their life and the past and
3:15:59 Freud serves them well Adler is very practical and if you’re looking for a psychologist to help you
3:16:06 figure out how you could advance from where you are now he’s he’s he’s got plenty of things to say
3:16:12 that are good he also wasn’t as good a literary stylist as young Jung or Freud so that also put
3:16:17 him off to the side to some degree but anyways a deeper investigation can certainly be found in
3:16:22 discovery of the unconscious and it for anybody listening and watching who’s interested in
3:16:29 psychological ideas broadly and would like familiarity with the psychoanalytic tradition
3:16:34 Freud Jung and Adler let’s say primary there is not a better book than discovery of the unconscious
3:16:39 it’s really a work of genius you know what’s missing from the literature thank you for those
3:16:45 by the way is a really excellent up-to-date book on neuroscience and the mind and psychology
3:16:50 perhaps we write one together yeah yeah well that’s I mean there’s just not out there I mean
3:16:53 there are textbooks on neuroscience there’s some there’s a lot of discussion as you know about
3:16:58 free will lack of free will depending on which author you’re paying attention to but there isn’t
3:17:06 really a satisfactory book about the brain the mind and psychology this doesn’t exist yeah the
3:17:12 closest one I ever encountered probably is affective neuroscience Panksepp’s book yeah he’s uh I’m so
3:17:18 I must say you’ve mentioned Panksepp a few times and and yuck Panksepp uh as some of you may know
3:17:23 but perhaps most of you don’t know is was such a gift to science and the fact that I think the
3:17:27 first time I heard you lecture in one of your YouTube lectures you mentioned yuck Panksepp and
3:17:31 I thought okay like this guy knows knows the good stuff because he was the first one to talk about
3:17:37 juvenile play as a way of exploring circuitry and social dynamics such such and that fit by the way
3:17:43 that fit perfectly with Piaget’s observations of childhood socialization it’s like I came across
3:17:50 Panksepp and I thought oh that’s so cool now we have the psychophysiological basis for Piagetian
3:17:55 developmental theory it was perfect yeah so that was that was lovely concordance youngsepp would have
3:18:02 been uh far more recognized had he been he was at Bowling Green University I think and so smaller
3:18:07 university perhaps I don’t know I didn’t ever hear a lecture maybe not as charismatic as some of the
3:18:12 other luminaries of of neuroscience at that time but yeah I don’t know how he was as a lecturer
3:18:18 he’s a great writer and man he had an unerring eye for the right problems in in terms of psychological
3:18:25 investigation and very brave in that regard I mean he studied laughter in rats and you think oh if
3:18:30 all the absurd things to focus on it’s like no you just don’t understand where the goal is or play
3:18:35 among rats who cares that rats play well like that would be the sort of research proposal that would
3:18:41 be pillared by sensible republicans looking to trim government waste it’s like no that was the heart
3:18:48 of the matter right rats organize their social hierarchy through play not through force right
3:18:54 that’s a big discovery like that’s I think he should have won a Nobel prize I do too yeah he
3:18:58 he should have won a nail for a variety of his discoveries but that one in particular like rats
3:19:07 have an implicit morality that’s a that’s a major league and it’s based on play wow stunning
3:19:12 and we see the same thing in kids obviously and well we see the same thing in chimpanzees like
3:19:19 it’s pretty strange to understand that dominance hierarchies if they’re functional are often organized
3:19:28 in consequence of play not force like so much for uh fuco when you look out on the landscape of social
3:19:35 media um do you see elements of that as well that they’re sort of a playfulness among uh people
3:19:40 that’s establishing a hierarchy it seems like elon’s having a good time with his rockets and his
3:19:48 x and tesla I think I think that there is I think that the antithesis of of tyranny is play
3:19:54 it took me a long time to realize that like I’ve been studying evil intensely since I was about
3:20:03 13 and evil is easier to define than good it’s it’s it’s hard to find a category that integrates
3:20:12 all that’s good that’s that you can point to simply but it has the fact that play is the
3:20:17 antithesis of tyranny seems to be a pretty good summation like pancsep showed for example that
3:20:21 play wouldn’t emerge among animals if they were possessed by any other motivational state things
3:20:28 have to be set up very carefully before play will emerge your house is optimally structured if your
3:20:33 children can play your marriage is optimally structured if you’re playing house with your wife
3:20:42 and I think that that reality of the what would you say the optimally superordinate nature of play
3:20:48 that makes itself manifest when you’re watching someone who’s a master at their task and musk
3:20:53 is playing and hopefully that will you know and trump plays too it’s one of the things that made me
3:21:04 less uncertain about him he’s deadly funny now it’s rough he plays rough no doubt about it but
3:21:10 he’s ridiculously he’s got a ridiculously comic touch and that’s not something that’s generally
3:21:17 characteristic of you know psychopathic dictators hitler wasn’t known for his sense of humor let’s
3:21:24 talk about sense of humor if you don’t mind because I think it’s something that’s sorely lacking in a
3:21:32 lot of the discourse among adults so to speak and I think these days I think a lot about what young
3:21:40 people are observing a few years back I was watching this show I didn’t like it called forgive me
3:21:45 because I think the actor was quite good but the show is californication David Duchovny and I
3:21:50 realized this show is all about the adults acting like children and the children acting like oh yeah
3:21:57 that’s that’s a typical Hollywood and I and I thought um this is terrible um not because I’m
3:22:01 some sort of moral avenger or something but it just it was sort of like the question I’ve been
3:22:05 asking myself a lot over the last few years is like who are the adults in the room like who’s
3:22:11 actually regulating all this stuff that’s happening everyone’s in disagreement people are are misbehaving
3:22:18 in the kind of worst of ways um by you know not treating each other with respect um occasionally
3:22:25 you’d see in a discourse that felt like meaningful and structured or um it explorative in the real
3:22:29 sense like people were there to learn I think that’s been one of the successes of of your work and
3:22:34 of Rogan’s work and I like to think you know my podcast as well Lex Friedman certainly and others
3:22:40 right um sometimes people use comedy sometimes people use neuroscience as a as a as a pro but
3:22:49 in any case but you know I’ve been concerned that there there isn’t this kind of like enjoyment of
3:22:55 discourse between people that disagree in a way that includes forgiveness or like oh you got like
3:23:01 good one like you got me or you know and and um it seems like it it’s degenerate into things that
3:23:06 are so nasty and it’s sort of like people are entering the game if you could even call it that
3:23:12 with a refusal to shift like like that’s not a debate that’s that’s what there’s nothing playful
3:23:15 about it like you have to be willing to have a winner and a loser and you have to be willing to
3:23:23 be either one if you’re going to engage in real in real discourse in real play and to me um it it’s
3:23:29 like okay I can manage seeing all that or participate or not participate to the extent that I want but
3:23:34 for young people it’s got to be really discouraging it’s like you either dunk on somebody or get
3:23:40 dunked on you know I guess the optimistic repost to that would be the fact that the people that
3:23:47 you’re pointing to like Rogan who is a comedian like many of the people who’ve become extremely
3:23:57 successful as podcasters Constantine Kissen Russell Brand Dave Rubin um Crowder Stephen Crowder
3:24:04 Theo Vaughn that’s a lot of comedians so there’s a lot of play in the alternative media and a
3:24:10 lot of young people are being informed by the alternative media so I think there’s genuine
3:24:20 room for optimism there um and there’s plenty of play in those podcasts now a group of us
3:24:27 eight years ago seven years ago put out an offer to the democratic
3:24:35 powers that be to invite the democrats to come and talk to us Ruben was part of that
3:24:41 Rogan was part of that if I remember correctly quite certain of it I was part of that Shapiro
3:24:48 was part of that this was a genuine invitation which was extended many times in serious ways
3:24:54 by people who are very well connected among the democratic elite and that came to nothing
3:24:59 they want no part of it nope they’d speak to me for example privately never publicly virtually
3:25:06 never almost without exception all the while the alternative media was gaining more and more power
3:25:13 all the while we were telling them this isn’t optional your legacy media foothold is dying
3:25:18 wake up well Rogan for example you could imagine that he would be on board with such a thing because
3:25:26 he’s not precisely your stereotypical republican no well no not at all right people people will
3:25:32 people will call him that they tried and you know manusphere bro whatever it doesn’t it the reality
3:25:38 falls so far from yeah it’s just it’s just not true at all it’s not true yeah so so there is
3:25:44 plenty of play and and so I think we can be positive about that and and I think young people too have
3:25:53 seen how successful that could be I mean Rogan and his coterie let’s say wiped out the legacy media
3:25:59 well so you can see what the spirit of playful adventure can do in a very short period of time
3:26:06 now there’s technological reasons for that too but technological reasons are not it’s still a stunning
3:26:11 phenomenon and a stunning accomplishment and a very positive one as far as I’m concerned and
3:26:17 hopefully it will continue yeah the power pendulum has definitely swung in a different
3:26:25 direction well that became stark starkly obvious when Rogan interviewed Trump that was the death
3:26:30 now of the legacy media it certainly elevated podcasts and their their impact and significance
3:26:35 across the board well I think it demonstrated the fact that they had been elevated right it was
3:26:41 just it was it was evidence of that was that was so conclusive that there was no longer any way of
3:26:48 of questioning it even the cnn pundits and so forth who were very resistant to that as a
3:26:55 hypothesis changed their tune very rapidly well and it was interesting because Rogan’s conversation
3:27:02 with Trump was a serious one Theo’s conversation with Trump was a mixture of serious and less serious
3:27:12 and I mean I couldn’t help but smile big when at the inauguration the thanks went out to a
3:27:15 number of people including Theo Vaughn I mean if you think about this I know you think that’s so
3:27:21 funny good for Theo it’s so yeah I’m yet to meet him I hear he’s a really nice guy Theo’s so great
3:27:32 because Theo is like he’s he’s backwood’s hip to the core right seriously underclass background
3:27:39 and it’s real and he’s so bloody smart and so it’s such a fun combination because he’s got this
3:27:46 it’s pretty easy if you’re elitist to you know be be what derisive about Theo and his
3:27:56 backwardsy stick but man there’s a sec there’s a first rate mind lurking behind that that it’s not
3:28:01 a persona because it’s actually him too you know I can relate to that to large degree because you
3:28:06 know I came from a very small town way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and so I have plenty
3:28:12 in common with Theo but it’s it’s very funny to watch it’s very funny to see him do this successfully
3:28:18 it’s ridiculously and preposterously comical that he got to sit down with Trump I mean I just thought
3:28:25 that was that’s so funny and that it was successful and playful you know that’s great and there’s plenty
3:28:31 of play in the republican renaissance at the moment whatever that is I mean the republican to
3:28:37 call it that is like that’s whatever the hell’s happening it’s not conceptualizable in terms of
3:28:45 our normal political dichotomy right I mean we’re in uncharted water now hopefully this is why I hope
3:28:53 the democrats get their act together because every administration needs an opposition and if the
3:28:57 democrats continue with this woke idiocy they’re not going to be able to serve as the proper
3:29:03 corrective to the excesses that will definitely emerge in the Trump administration especially
3:29:07 if they face no credible opposition yeah or before we always happens sorry I didn’t mean to interrupt
3:29:13 yeah it didn’t mean to interrupt before we started we were touching on this a little bit
3:29:19 and you said something which was that you’re hoping for a really formidable strong democratic party
3:29:24 to counter the republican party and you are and you’re saying it again now you’re concerned
3:29:32 that if there isn’t one that power corrupts might run amok oh yes well of course it will it always
3:29:38 does you know and that the republicans themselves who might wish well this remarkable group of people
3:29:43 that’s aggregated around trumpets like they should hope for themselves that they have an
3:29:49 effective opposition because someone’s got to be telling you where you’re stupid and if the democrats
3:29:53 so this is another public invitation to the democrats which is like
3:30:00 must be the 50th one that I’ve issued if you have something to say you know I’d be happy to talk
3:30:06 and so would many people who’ve expressed similar sentiment to me in the alternative media world
3:30:15 and that offer has been on the table for for years so I hope that I’m afraid that all the people
3:30:19 with any real courage or virtually all of them be chased out of the democratic party they’re all
3:30:24 afraid of being cancelled which is why they wouldn’t appear on my podcast to begin with it’s like
3:30:29 why does Peterson always interview conservatives it’s like well how come how about because they’ll
3:30:37 talk to me you know there’s a simple explanation and definitely a true one so maybe that can shift
3:30:44 and there’s got to be somebody in the democrats who’s got enough courage to forge a new direction and
3:30:49 if they want to continue with this same old pattern of woke idiocy well go right ahead
3:30:55 it’s not going to work the tide’s already turned in that regard I think that judging from some of the
3:31:03 article titles that I’ve seen at New York Times and other venues it seems like there might be
3:31:07 some consideration about this they’re talking about a restructuring of the democratic party
3:31:12 they’re who’s going to lead who’s going to be their Joe Rogan which is by the way a silly question
3:31:18 that’s just the silliest question so he is he is as we say in science he’s n of one don’t don’t
3:31:25 even try like it’s the whole point is to create well why would you you also can’t yeah right
3:31:33 Joe didn’t emerge by accident Joe is very very very smart very and if you think and it’s what it’s
3:31:40 like Joe built this it’s like not the way that a political party would build it first of all he
3:31:47 didn’t build it not not not that way not through a priori planning so that the democrats could have
3:31:53 a voice it’s just him being him yes exactly yeah and someone someone who is a self-declared democrat
3:31:57 will do that as well but not by trying to be him that’s just not going to happen no they’ll be
3:32:03 they’ll they’ll do that by trying to figure out what the opposition to this new peculiar band
3:32:08 of republicans should be and what sort of vision could be put forward that would be attractive
3:32:13 you know i read today some democrat claiming that the democrats are the true voice of the working
3:32:20 class it’s like i don’t think so i think that ship is sailed and maybe the democrats should
3:32:27 be the true voice of the working class but they’re certainly not and in principle that would mean that
3:32:33 there’s an opportunity there on the democrat side to forge a new path i mean clinton managed that in
3:32:39 the nineties this this has happened many times it could happen again but there’s a lot of learning
3:32:45 that’s going to have to take place before that happens so certainly learning about this new
3:32:49 alternative media environment you can’t sit down for three hours and say what you actually think
3:32:57 actually what you think right regardless of what might do to your reputation let’s say
3:33:02 you’re not going to be successful in the podcast world that’s absolutely true right podcasting is
3:33:08 real i even for i’ll just say because perhaps it’s of interest or maybe even actionable for
3:33:13 people i mean i get a little frightened every podcast certainly if i’m going to talk about
3:33:18 like forming this relationship to prayer or i’m exploring i mean i’ll talk about circuits in the
3:33:23 brain all day long with with uh with no fear whatsoever that’s my wheelhouse but anything
3:33:30 that’s new uh which is a real exploration and evolution of of where i’m at of course is going
3:33:35 to evoke fear i also know that’s where the growth is i would hate for this podcast to look the way
3:33:42 it did on episode one now and um clearly this this conversation is is a new direction that i’ve not
3:33:48 taken before in this podcast and but i’m delighted that it’s happening i want to say that and i think
3:33:55 that some level of fear and anxiety about the unknown is is absolutely required and i think that
3:33:59 that’s something that hopefully any especially young people listening need to know you you’re not
3:34:04 supposed to perform well at the outset like in anything you’re not you’re not that’s why young
3:34:11 said the fool is the precursor to the redeemer you have to accept the role of fool voluntarily
3:34:15 before you can improve improve of course when you start something new you’re going to be an idiot
3:34:22 like what do you know so so that’s the price of entry is to be a fool well you can be a voluntary
3:34:26 fool and then you can then you have a bit of a sense of humor about yourself and that takes the
3:34:31 sting out of it and maybe even makes you an attractive character despite your ignorance
3:34:38 people will people will make tremendous allowances for ignorance that’s voluntarily admitted to
3:34:43 i’ve certainly made mistakes publicly apologized for the ones that i felt i should apologize for
3:34:48 there’s a slip of the tongue and make it said something went back and correct it was embarrassing
3:34:54 but um the ability to laugh at oneself is is tremendously powerful genuinely laugh it’s just
3:35:01 thinking like ah where was i thinking i understand i said buh buh you know sometimes we we air you
3:35:08 know i have a couple of questions about you oh i know you’re the you’re the clinician but uh and
3:35:15 i’m not trying to play that role when you wake up in the morning is your mind in a good place
3:35:22 typically or are you tormented or are you where does your where does your mind land most mornings
3:35:30 first thing well i’ve i’ve suffered from a proclivity towards depression my whole life
3:35:38 i would say and i would say the roughest part of the day for me is morning although it’s
3:35:45 way better than it once was um so when i get up i have a shower and make my bed and do something
3:35:52 useful and then i’m pretty much i’m on my way your interior tasks into the day and i i still
3:35:57 have quite a lot of pain from whatever happened to me a couple of years ago and so that’s annoying
3:36:08 physical pain yeah yeah yeah so but psychologically my life is ridiculously it’s absurdly interesting
3:36:16 it’s crazily and absurdly interesting all the time and so anyone with any sense would be like
3:36:26 open mouthed in amazement gratitude for that it’s preposterous and i have this tour that’s going
3:36:32 well it’s been going for like six years really your tour schedule is is superhuman i have to say
3:36:36 having done some live shows i mean what you do with tours and i’ve been to one of your shows
3:36:41 i highly recommend people attend it was spectacular i don’t want to give too much away but it’s
3:36:45 not planned in the in the sense that there’s a script or something it’s very
3:36:50 open and but it’s a quest a real it’s a quest an intellectual quest right it’s a real experience
3:36:54 and men wear your jacket in time because everyone else there’s going to be wearing a
3:37:00 at least a jacket look look real look respectable yeah so my wife and i are touring from january
3:37:07 through june and much of that’s in the united states and then two months in europe and so
3:37:14 that’s great because europe is in trouble and going there to speak is a privilege and an honor and
3:37:20 so that’s ridiculously exciting and people can find more out about the tour at jordanbypeterson.com
3:37:27 the dates and so forth they’re all listed there um we launched peterson academy we where we want you
3:37:33 to teach and that’s going spectacularly well this is a place where people can hear lectures in a given
3:37:42 domain yep yep yep we have 35 lectures online already each of them is sequenced over six to eight
3:37:48 hours um which compacts i would say the equivalent of a full university course into that span of time
3:37:54 we’re pursuing accreditation which i think is a high probability in the relatively not too distant
3:37:59 future so that’s ridiculously exciting because we can take the best lectures in the world and
3:38:04 we can make them available to everyone and we built a social media element into it we took
3:38:11 the best of the social media networks and people are using it like mad and it’s 100 positive
3:38:18 it’s philosophically oriented it’s mutually encouraging we threw four people off the platform
3:38:25 out of 40 000 well three because we put one guy on probation because he said he’d improve and we
3:38:31 established a positive culture there’s no bots there’s no trolls no one’s playing games and we
3:38:37 watch and now you know the community has settled into a it’s got an ethos already and i think that’ll
3:38:43 be self-sustaining so people are there to learn and to support each other learning got it it
3:38:48 launched out of the gate better than we thought it would even though we were optimistic and i would
3:38:53 say the quality of what we’re offering exceeded it certainly exceeded my expectations it’s
3:39:01 well we we showed michael malice michael malice did a course for us on totalitarianism and he
3:39:06 takes that rather personally given his family background and he said that the trailer brought
3:39:12 him to tears and that’s my now i can be easily brought to tears so i don’t know if i’m the best
3:39:16 same like around certain topics yeah i’ve cried a few times on this podcast this year and a few
3:39:21 others so that was that was a vulnerability i’d never expected but yeah well it’s good to know
3:39:27 i’m not alone in that i’m less susceptible now that i’m more healthy but but i feel the same way
3:39:33 about what we’re producing because it’s exactly if you were a professor and you wanted the best
3:39:42 possible courses to be available to people and you saw these you’d think target hit and and that’s
3:39:49 ridiculously fun and so and i have a great relationship with my wife and my kids and you
3:39:53 have some grandkids now too i do and two more on the way wow congratulations and so you know
3:40:02 and i have an endless field of stellar opportunity in front of me so hopefully i have enough sense
3:40:11 to appreciate that and oh and i do i do appreciate it and i know it’s unlikely so a long way from
3:40:17 posting lectures on youtube which is where most people originally found you if they were yeah
3:40:21 about that that’s certainly how i learned about you i thought this guy’s talking about really
3:40:26 interesting things in the fields of psychology he knows who jak panksep is and um and he’s posted
3:40:33 on youtube can i ask what inspired that move was that from well conscious was that calling or conscience
3:40:42 or um it was probably mostly calling because the fundamental motivation was and i think it is my
3:40:51 fundamental motivation is curiosity you know i watched youtube and i thought hmm what the hell is
3:41:02 this video on demand worldwide what does that mean it means the spoken word is now as permanent
3:41:10 as the written word and more easily disseminated i thought oh that’s a spectacular and world
3:41:16 altering revolution that’s what it looks like to me this was like in 2010 you know when it was
3:41:25 mostly cat videos i thought might as well put my videos up there and see what happens and so
3:41:32 see what happens right that’s an adventure and so i did that for
3:41:40 maybe maybe seven years somewhere between five and seven years before things exploded around me
3:41:47 and that was also extremely helpful because when i opposed the truto government’s attempt to
3:41:55 compel my speech in the form of bill c 16 i was immediately pilloried as a you know
3:42:01 right-wing nazi even though i’d spent my whole career publicizing the horrors of the nazi
3:42:07 administration and teaching my students how not to fall prey to totalitarian temptation
3:42:15 like that was the core of my career um i had like 200 hours of lectures up on youtube already so
3:42:20 when all that negative attention was drawn to me people started looking at the lectures and
3:42:26 the huge advantage there was that there wasn’t a single really there wasn’t a single important
3:42:32 word i’d said to students in the last 20 years that wasn’t recorded and the people who decided that
3:42:37 you know i was a reprehensible character had every opportunity to go through everything i’d said
3:42:43 with a fine-tooth comb which you can be absolutely certain they did and they couldn’t find one thing
3:42:49 i ever said that led any credence whatsoever to their accusations and so that was a breaking point
3:43:01 in some ways for cancel culture because there were very forceful attempts to cancel me and so
3:43:08 people went and checked me out and they thought huh nothing he says falls into alignment with what
3:43:20 he’s being accused about well you know that what would you say that was part of the dam breaking
3:43:27 with regards to the corruption of the legacy media so not only was what i was accused of a lie it was
3:43:34 exactly the opposite of the truth which is the most profound kind of lie so youtube helped me out a
3:43:44 lot there i’ve certainly prevailed and we’re all so far well i guess that that speaks to what i was
3:43:51 going to say which is that um i want to thank you for posting those videos on youtube and for
3:43:58 entering that adventure because it certainly was the beginning of a long adventure that’s still
3:44:05 happening now where you continue to take risks that are healthy risks in service to trying to
3:44:12 understand the truth and share that and i must say never with the the stance that you know absolutely
3:44:19 right for everybody but certainly where you have felt you could share useful knowledge at the practical
3:44:25 level like really how to operationalize like clean up your room right you know um do these things to
3:44:31 try and discover your path get on your path set your sights to the right level um and to make
3:44:37 that a daily practice and a repeated lifelong practice is really spectacular and it’s obviously
3:44:43 inspired millions of people including myself i’ll also say that it’s really wonderful that you are
3:44:49 also continuing to do that yourself and making that visible to people your live events of course
3:44:53 are an exploration in the moment where you’re raise a question and ask a question and address it it’s
3:44:58 not preplanned and i must say that your progression of books and podcasts and where things are going
3:45:06 now in particular that today you said you are hopeful that the democratic party i think most
3:45:10 people assume that you’re very right leaning i’m not going to assume one way or the other
3:45:16 but the fact that you are intentionally inviting and hoping for opposition so that power is checked
3:45:19 and things continue in the right direction i think that’s really beautiful because what you’re asking
3:45:26 for is more balance as opposed to more skewing of knowledge and power and i think that’s a
3:45:34 terrific example and it’s clear that you live right near the edge in order to inspire us to
3:45:39 basically explore knowledge explore ancient teachings and merge them with where we are now
3:45:43 you know it’s been unbelievably rewarding i mean part of the reason that my wife and i keep touring
3:45:50 is because we meet all these people and they put their lives together it’s thousands and
3:45:57 thousands of people it’s so gratifying you know wherever we go the probability that someone will
3:46:06 come up and say thank you but then when i ask like for what what do you mean exactly what changed
3:46:13 they tell me and there isn’t anything better that can happen to you than to travel around the world
3:46:23 and have perfect strangers come up to you as friends and tell you that their lives are far
3:46:28 better than they would have been because of their efforts and because of their encounter with what
3:46:36 you’ve been doing like if you could pray for anything to happen to you there’s not a possibility
3:46:44 that you could come up with a better wish than that and so it’s great it’s great and
3:46:55 it’s fascinating to explore its continuation and to observe the consequences and it’s a privilege
3:47:01 to be in that it’s an immense what would you say it’s unspeakably immense privilege to be in that
3:47:07 position and it’s so great to see people like you and Friedman and Chris Williamson and all these
3:47:16 other podcasters who are pursuing the same vision and so successfully and to see the massive effect
3:47:23 that’s having on people that’s such a good deal so and i do believe it’s the sort of thing that’s
3:47:31 in a deeply personalized way available to anyone who follows their calling and conscience
3:47:39 thank you for those words i i also agree it’s freely available by people being themselves and
3:47:45 as you said following their curiosity and conscience thank you for coming here today
3:47:50 and sharing with us where you’re at now your knowledge and please come back again i really
3:47:57 enjoyed this hey anytime i appreciate the invitation very much and it’s a pleasure watching your
3:48:04 progress forward and seeing you propagate all the remarkable discoveries that have been made in
3:48:11 in the field of neuroscience because it’s quite the credible enterprise and people need to know
3:48:17 the biology of motivation let’s say and the biology of emotion and and it’s great to see you
3:48:23 managing that in a sophisticated way with so many people it’s a good deal for everybody
3:48:29 thank you it’s a labor of love and inspired and no small part by you and my other podcast
3:48:35 colleagues and in your case my academic colleagues so thank you Jordan thank you for joining me for
3:48:41 today’s discussion with Dr. Jordan Peterson to find links to Dr. Peterson’s work his social media
3:48:46 his new book we who wrestle with God as well as a link to the Peterson Academy please see the
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3:49:48 I have a new book coming out it’s my very first book it’s entitled protocols an operating manual
3:49:52 for the human body this is a book that I’ve been working on for more than five years and that’s
3:49:57 based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything
3:50:05 from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I
3:50:10 provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now
3:50:16 available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick
3:50:21 the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body
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3:51:10 Jordan Peterson and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science