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

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday

[Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a

professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Jordan

Peterson Dr Jordan Peterson is a psychologist an author and one of the most influential public intellectuals of

our time today we discuss the human animal what it means to be a human being at the level of psychology ology at the

level of Neuroscience and indeed at the level of expression of different personality types within us most of us

don't think about having different personalities however as we discuss today due to the activity of specific

brain circuitries including the hypothalamus the prefrontal cortex and others we each and all can adopt

different states of mind that powerfully influence our emotions our thoughts and our actions and in so doing we are

different people depending on those states of mind today's discussion is both an intellectual one and a practical

one you will learn where and how to place your thoughts you will learn the relationship between the Call to

Adventure and responsibility and as Dr Peterson emphasizes in his new book we

who wrestle with God he emphasizes the use of story in this case biblical stories to understand oneself and to

best guide one's actions towards the most positive and generative outcomes we discuss the self romantic relationships

and commitments the family community and culture we also discuss the media politics cancel

culture things like social media and pornography shifting masculine and feminine roles and the innate human

drive to create action at a distance both in space and in time today's discussion is both intellectual and

practical Dr Peterson emphasizes how to use different sources of story

philosophy Psychology and Neuroscience to understand and best guide one's decision making process indeed he

discusses the tight relationship between the Call to Adventure and responsibility as a trustable framework from moving

forward in life towards One's best possible outcomes and I'm certain that by the end of today's discussion you

will be thinking about your own neural circuits that is the connections in your brain that drive emotions thoughts and

behavior as well as your psychology your different states of mind and you are going to have a number of different

tools and Frameworks with which to apply all that knowledge toward the best possible outcomes before we begin I'd

like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of

my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general

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sensor and two free months of membership and now for my discussion with Dr Jordan Peterson Dr Jordan Peterson welcome

thank you sir delighted to have you here and want to talk about elements within

your new book yeah also some elements within your previous books and within that mind of yours

generally as a framework for that I'm wondering if you would tolerate or permit a little bit of a discussion

about sort of brain and psychology um just kind of lay the groundwork for where we might um prod some of the

themes that you bring up related to the book so I view the brain as obviously a

bunch of cells and parts Etc but I distill it down to some basic features

first of all we have an autonomic physiology I think we'd both agree on that that regulates our sleepiness and wakefulness our breathing our heart rate

stuff that runs in the background and then we have a lot of circuitry devoted to what I would call

impulses things that we desire we want to move toward repetitive behaviors and

we also have some impulses to avoid things that are putrid painful Etc that's all in there like it is in other

we should talk about the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization okay yeah because there's an important

there's an important point to be made on the there you pay a price for

characterizing that as impulse and and I'd like to explore that with you because it's crucial great we'll Circle

back to impulse I'd like to do that and then we have a lot of circuitry people will hear about it as executive function

prefrontal circuitry which does many things but I like to think of um as a

circuit that can say and here I'm borrowing from a previous guest who's a neuro surgeon it can say sh or exert

what's called top- down suppression on these what I'm calling impulses it can we should talk about that too the

suppression idea and the inhibition idea in general great because there's I think there's a parallel problem there to the

notion of impulse that's very much worth delving into great yeah so circuitry that's devoted to our ability to self-

inhibit the desire to reach for something or to avoid something we can push ourselves into things that would otherwise be aversive we can avoid doing

things that would otherwise drive us to quote unquote just do it anyway and then we have what I think of

as our default settings kind of how we're operating in the world with respect to food other people ourselves

our thoughts if we don't intervene with ourselves and these

default settings are of course established by both nature a genetic program that wires up circuitry but also

Nur because of the immense neuroplasticity that occurs in the first 25 years plus of life but especially those first years

of life and then of course we have neuroplasticity this incredible gift that humans have more of than any other

species as far as we know which is we can decide to make changes now the reason I lay out this framework as

opposed to starting with a question is because there are so many amazing

questions that you ask in this book you know we who wrestle with God I mean trying to wrap our arms in Minds around

this huge set of questions and it occurred to me just step back from all of that and ask is part of the reason

that we have a concept of God that there are multiple

religions is that the consequence of Some Humans at some point realizing or

perhaps God himself realizing that what we are equipped with as humans which we just described is

insufficient to allow us to to evolve as a species and be the best version of ourselves I think this for me really is

like the central question of at least my life which is to what extent do I need to intervene with my default settings

rewire them engage that prefrontal cortex and you know push down on some repetitive or aversive

behaviors and to what extent can we do that maybe and to what end and to what

end and maybe we need a rule book uh you know I I am starting to believe and I'm

now 49 years old that we need a rule book that the neural circuitry that's encased within our

skulls is not sufficient to allow us to navigate through life our best we kind

of know that we need a rule book even you you admitted that in some ways implicitly when you discussed the fact

that we have a 25 years socialization window and what that means is that we

have to interact with other people and our traditions in order to set us right

and that's so complex it takes 25 years and so we're learning something from

that and that's indication that our let's say default biological settings are insufficient to guide us into the

future right and so then the question is well what is it that you're learning as a consequence of that socialization

process and you can think about it and people have thought about it as a a series of complex inhibitions of lower

order motivational States impulses but I'm not very happy with the inhibition

model because inhibition is unsophisticated socialization integration is

sophisticated socialization so here here's a way of I really learned this I think from contrasting Freud with P

because Freud's model super ego is really an inhibition model and Freud was a neurologist P's model was very different

he thought of the properly socialized person as someone who had integrated

their lower order we'll call them impulses for now into a sustainable

voluntary structure that regulated them and gave them all their proper place that's very different than an inhibitory

model so for example I'll give you an example from my own life my son was

quite an um willful young child wonder where he got

it from yeah well fair enough and and my father was you know a formidable character and so my son liked to do what

he liked to do and it took him it took quite a bit of tussling with him to help

him I wouldn't say inhibit that or regulate to integrate it and one of the consequences of that was he became a

very good athlete and so why is that relevant well because it wasn't like he stopped being assertive or even

aggressive it's that he learned how to put that aggression in its proper place

in relationship to a goal that was much more sophisticated than merely getting his own way moment to moment okay so

integration is a better like a a very sophisticated athlete a team athlete in

particular isn't not aggressive and they're not inhibiting their aggression on the playing field they may now and

then when they're provoked let's say but all things considered what they've done is subordinate their aggression to a

higher order goal that enables them to be more successful but also to be successful in a maximally social and

sustainable way and PJ's point and he's absolutely right about this is that that's much better conceptualized as

integration and then with regard to impulse because I said I would return to that I I spent a lot of time walking

through the behavioral literature right and a lot of that was derived from animal experiments and it was predicated

on the idea that if you could explain something on the basis of a

deterministic reflex you should and there's some there's something to be said for that hypothesis don't make your

theory any more complex than it needs to be how far can you get with with a theory of chain reflexes a deterministic

theory the behavior has gone a long way they couldn't get to the highest strata of human endeavor with a chained reflex

Theory but there was a lot of things they did that were very good but one of the things they made a big mistake about

was to conceptualize motivational States let's say as impulses or

drives that's not sufficient because it fails to take into account the effect of

those States on perception so it's much better to think of a motivated State this is what helped

me integrate behavioral Theory with psychoanalytic theory especially the the

psychoanalytic theory of religious Endeavor it's much better to think of those lower order motivational States as

personalities their subpersonalities they have their perceptions they have their objects of

perception they have their uh cognitive rationalizations you certainly see that

in addiction let's say they have their emotions like they are small

personalities unidimensional very narrow-minded personalities but they're personalities they're not impulses so

are they personalities within our what most people would think of as our larger personality I mean what I'm hearing is

that let's say somebody's an addict it depends on how integrated you are because you could be nothing but a

succession of dominion of subpersonalities that's what a 2-year-old is right and so you have to build an

integrating personality on top of those subpersonalities but not in a manner that inhibits them that means your

socialization is in unsophisticated even Freud knew this because even though he

had basically an inhibitory model of say super ego regulation um he believed that

a healthy personality would have the impulse of aggression and the impulse of sexuality to take two major lower order

motivational States into account would have them integrated into the functioning ego the the issue is

integration and so what you're doing when you're social like okay when when my son for example would become willful

in a manner that I regarded as counterproductive for him and the household and and the rule would be you

can't act that way because if you act that way people aren't going to approve of

you and that's a bad plan so you have to you have to control that because it's

not going to work out well for you if you don't okay so I use timeout now timeout is an effective disciplinary

strategy for social creatures because we don't like isolation and so timeout basically takes child puts the child in

isolation that produces a pain like response because social isolation produces pure inhibition right well well

that's the question you see that's the question he had to inhibit his immediate

desire say to run around because he was going to sit on the steps but see the I put a rule in place there and the rule

was as soon as you get yourself under control you can leave the stairs okay so

now the question is what does under control mean one interpretation is inhibition another interpretation is no

no he's developing a superordinate personality probably cortically that has

enough Dominion so that those underlying motivational states can now be integrated and placed properly into a

hierarchy and when I'm insisting that he regulate his behavior and I allow him to

move off the step when he is now able to be a social creature again instead of

falling prey to his whim I'm reinforcing the cortical integration of those

underlying motivational States now you might think the human organism is comes into the world with with a a Waring

battleground of primordial motivational States that's per perfectly reasonable view we know a lot of that is mediated

by the hypothalamus for example the AMD and these lower order

biologically what pre-programmed to some degree pre-programmed systems now the

specific manner in which those systems should find their expression and the specific way that they're going to be

hierarchically integrated is going to depend to a tremendous degree on the particulars of the society at that

moment which is why you need that 18-year framework to to hone the manner

in which those systems make themselves manifest but the I think the best way to conceptualize that is that it's it's the

hierarchical integration of the motivational States within an overarching superordinate personality

and that personality is not bound to the moment it takes the medium and long-term

into account and it's not self-serving like a 2-year-old would be because you

have to take other people into account if you're going to be successful so you and this is where the cortex comes in as

far as I'm concerned this is what it's doing it's stretching the it's integrating the

lower order temporally Bound motivational states that are specifically self-serving to a much

broader vision of the world that takes the future into account and other people

and and that's that's hard it's very hard I I love this and I'll tell you why

um because the way that I think of the prefrontal cortex is that its main job

is context dependent strategy setting right context dependent context dependent that's a crucial issue and you

mentioned hypothalamus this you know it's basically the size of you know two uh marbles or so sitting above the roof

of our mouth tiny tiny little brain area it's mostly switches in there what do I mean by that anytime a neurosurgeon is

stimulated neurons in a little sub area of the hypothalamus you get either Rage or sexual appetite or mating with

inanimate objects I mean this was done in both non-human primates and in hum uncontrollable thirst uncontrollable

thirst hunger total ression of hunger I mean all the basic drives are operating in they like swies and prefrontal cortex

has direct access to it to the hypo hypothalamus and prefrontal cortex is

context dependent learning context dependent decision- making and I love that you brought in this notion

of changing an Impulse in the example that you gave in your son's impulse to

be aggressive or wild in some way that was inappropriate for the home environment at that moment and two

things that you said uh really resonate the prefrontal cortex his prefrontal cortex had to learn that whatever he was

feeling for himself his own desires needed to be placed in the context of other people's wishes desires and needs

as well so there's an even for him to thrive right it's not merely a sacrifice of his own desire for the sake of others

it's like no no look kid if you're we know this if you're if you have the same

orientation towards other people at four that you did with you were twoo

especially if you're tilted a little in the aggressive Direction you will not make friends and you will be isolated

and alienated for the rest of your life so that 2-year-old impulsiveness that

has its place two it starts to modify radically at three and it better be

fixed by four and the reason for that is that you have to integrate yourself into the social World which means in the case

of children it means well you want to have friends and so the reason you're you're you're disciplining your child

isn't to teach them that what they're doing is bad you know in that

simple in in that simple sense that you might interpret punishment it's like no

you need to be more sophisticated well why well you have to be able to take turns well why well because you no one

like you otherwise well what's the problem with that well first of all we're hyp social like you can punish

Psychopaths by putting them in isolation that's how social human beings are you take the most antisocial human beings

there are and you can punish them by making them be alone right so that's how social we are so you want to you you're

you're modeling for your child a strategy of of even satisfaction for his

own basic drives that takes context in the most sophisticated possible way into

account right and that is see as soon as you understand that that's the fostering of like a meta personality in the child

which would really be the personality of that child the integrated personality you start to understand how that might

be related to religious thinking because religious thinking is the attempt to

formulate something approximating an ideal personality right now that's attributed there that's often attributed

elements of the Divine but there's reasons for that that we could go into but as soon as you know that the basic

structure even at the lower motivational level is personality well then that that

changes the way you view the brain look a lot of archaic deities are

motivational systems could you give me an example the God of War Mars that's

rage that was a God that the Vikings invoked before they went into battle

they would use Ammon muscaria and they imitated Predators right from an early age this is a aceto Coline by the way

folks has two general receptor systems the nicotinic system which is a stimulant but also relaxes you that's

that's why people like nicotine um and then the muscarinic system which um creates uh uh changes in our

self-perception and perception of the things around us um it's not so much a stimulant as it um it's a I would Veer

towards almost like a psychedelic or an it has a a um an effect of making us

less fearful and um and intrigued it's a radically atypical psychedelic yeah it's

hard to describe hard to describe it's outside the the LSD cybin masculine

domain so people would take this this as an agent the Vikings would take this as an agent going into sure because what

they were trying to do is make the personality of Rage superordinate with no pain right and

they practiced that from a very early age so the Vikings worked themselves up they went berser that means to wear the

be shirt right they transformed themselves so to speak into Predators

they would narrow the context within which their um I'm calling them impulses but you're giving a more sophisticated

explanation for them within which their the aggressive impulse the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled

right full rain give full rain right they were experts at that to be able to decapitate people eviscerate people do

whatever it was that they needed to do in order to win and and to suppress their own feelings of pain yeah well then you could imagine in a way that

what they were doing was bringing the full resources of the cortex to and placing them at the service of the rage

circuits in the hypothalamus like we have no idea what that would be like no there aren't we don't do that we have no

idea what a human being who does that is like if they're expert at it you uh you

it would give you nightmares to think about it deeply there there's an experiment if I may um that might shed

some light on what it would look like uh um a former guest on this podcast actually um David Anderson at Caltech

has been studying hypothalamic circuits and he and his former postto da Lynn discovered a small tiny tiny collection

of neurons in the ventromedial hyp Thalamus that when stimulated would send

these animals these mice you can find videos of this online into a rage now the interesting thing is is it required

the presence of another mouse right right and right so it's still somewhat context depend somewhat context

dependent if they were alone in their cage they wouldn't attack themselves or the walls of the cage but if you put a

air or water-filled glove within the cage they would absolutely attack it to

try and destroy it then you turn off these neurons the the mouse is Cal we can put link to this in the show note caption now here's what's remarkable the

ventromedial hypothalamus has these neurons basically interspersed with other neurons that when

stimulated suppress rage and activate copulation incredible right within the

same structure you have these mutually exclusive sets of of neurons and behaviors and it and it speaks to I

think some of the things that uh Freud and and others have talk about in terms of the the juxtaposition of of these

neurons but um that they they mutually inhibit one another which lends itself to some really interesting questions

about um when those two when uh aggression and sexuality become become combined in in states of pathology okay

so but in any event um it so context dependent control over impulses over the

hypothalamus seems to be the theme here and the other thing that that you mentioned is the ability for your son in

this case but presumably also the Vikings to be able to broaden their

temporal scope to be able to think about the time domain differently this is something I'm absolutely obsessed by the

more we experience what I brought up at the beginning was that we have this autonomic arousal system the more alert

we are the less we are able to take ourselves into um Notions of this two

shall pass the past the present and the future it tends autonomic activation

stress Panic fear anger tend to make us lose sight we we get blinders on lose

sight of the fact that there was a past there's a present and there's a future well that's because they're collapsing they're collapsing your domain of of

apprehension to the moment so you will act you have to collapse to the moment to act right and so we should also point

out for everyone that the other you don't want to underestimate the sophistication of the hypothalamus and

this is partly why conceptualizing its various States as subpersonalities is so useful I mean it's it's not

unsophisticated you can take a female cat and take out its whole brain except for the hypothalamus so it's like 990 5%

of its brain is gone and in a relatively controlled environment it's indistinguishable from a normal cat it

can in it can do cat things and live now it it's h and it's hyper exploratory now

that's a that's a very strange thing where is a cat with no brain is hyp exploratory it's not what you'd think at

all but it it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is it can run these programs but they're programs

of Personality because they have perceptions it can run them and it and it it's and it can do that quite

successfully now all the higher order subcortical and cortical systems are

well I think they are to your point their ways of expanding the apprehension of those fundamental motivational

systems across broader and broader spans of time incorporating more and more people but also solving the problem of

the conflict that emerges between those fundamental motivational States right it's like well what do you do when

you're hungry and tired right well you have to mediate between the states to some degree what do you do

if you want to solve the problem of being hungry and tired of over a long period of time with other people right

well you need more and more brain to calculate that right and so a huge part of what maturation is is when we think

about it as the capacity to forego gratification actually what's happening is that as you mature and your cortex

comes online let's say you're able to regulate your behavior with more more and more other things taken into account

right right and you know that there has to be some War there which is why you're wrestling with god let's say there has

to be some War there because it's also the case that you do have to satiate

yourself in relationship to your basic biological needs or you die and so there's going to be tension that is

something like the tension between the individual and the group you might say that's how the Russians or the freudians

would think about it so the weird thing about that is that

it's not useful to to identify your individuality with the Dominion of a

whim and that's what hedonists do and that's what immature people do they think well why shouldn't I get what I

want it's like I see so your claim is that the you that superordinate is what

you want that isn't that means you're subjugated to these low order

personalities and you might say well why why is that wrong it's like well you're a 2-year-old it doesn't work you know if

if it's all about you and your immediate gratification well first of all you're rather Psychopathic because you could

think of psychopathy as the extension of immaturity into adulthood that's a pretty good default way of

conceptualizing it it's like it's an unsophisticated strategy they want what

they want now regardless and they don't care about the the we or the future fure

see see one this is one of the ways I caught a to this relationship was I what

because I studied antisocial behavior for a very long time psychopaths in particular are

notorious for their inability to learn from experience okay so what does that mean it means that if they do something

impulsive that causes them trouble in the future the fact of that future trouble has no bearing on their

continued Behavior well what that means is that they are so non

communitarian that they're willing to even betray their own future selves

there's no difference between that betraying someone else it's exactly the same mechanism very much a toddler

toddler well so here's something I learned in Montreal I worked with a man named rishard Tromblay there and rishard

I think Richard's lab used up one-third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time he was radically successful

researcher and he was really interested in antisocial behavior and and was trying to get to the roots and one of

the conclusions that our lab Enterprise mve towards was that one

observation was that if you take two-year-olds if you take kids at different ages you could imagine you

made a group of two-year olds threey olds group of foury olds all the way up to 15 you just let them interact the

two-year-olds are the most aggressive and but if you analyze the

two-year-olds themselves you find that all the aggressive kids are boys and

it's only a fraction of them about 5% so if you group two year olds together 5% of the boys will kick steal hit and bite

which was our definition of early onet antisocial Behavior almost all of those kids are

socialized by the age of four right the remnant that aren't get alienated

because they have no friends and they're the ones who become juvenile delinquents and then early onset criminals and then

repeat of offenders right and so what it is is imagine there's some kids whose

default their rage circuits are a little bit more dominant than the typical kid they're often bigger physically yeah

especially the bite the biting I uh forgive me for interrupting but there's a very interesting paper published about

two years ago showing that there's a specific circuit from the hypothalamus to the neurons that control uh jaw

closure that are independent of the neurons that control jaw jaw closure for eating and for drinking that are

specifically for aggressive biting I mean I hope people understand the significance of this because what this means is there are dedicated circuits

for aggressive biting in your hypothalamus we all learn to suppress these except probably under conditions

where our life is endangered in which case you'd probably bite like hell in order to try and get out of that circumstance but we are all born with

this circuit we die with this circuit most of us apparently not these kids learn to suppress the circuit right

right or integr an 8-year-old B is a scary thing a one-year-old biter is

like a a little bit of a worrisome thing a 2-year-old like okay we need to work on this an 8-year-old berer people are

starting to be concerned I think even without knowledge of the Psychopathology literature one would be very concerned

if their eight-year-old is biting other kids not just because of the damage induced but it's so very different and

so much more primitive than than even hitting or spitting or something exactly it's it's the indication of a virtual

absence of sophisticated socialization they are truly in their hypothalamus yeah yeah right exactly and that's well

especially if you have a hypothalamus that's tilted towards rage let's say and and defensive or predatory aggression

that's bad news now so so so so what's the what's the upshot of

that well the upshot is that there is a sub that's right there's

a subset of kids whose whose default reactions aren't socialized and we associate that with psychopathy and

long-term criminality there's a really useful thing to understand that much of what we see as pathology and I would say

the same thing about narcissism and and and certain forms of Hedonism essentially what it is is

failure of socialization right and this has very interesting political implications because it also implies

that imagine that impulsive self-gratification is a

personality the desire for impulsive self-gratification is a personality with its own political opinions nche said in

the late 1800s that every Drive attempts to philosophies in its Spirit brilliant

a brilliant observation far different than conceiving of the say hypothalamic

drives as deterministic chains of only impulses and another thing to consider

too with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation on perception

that mouse that you talked about who's attack system is activated electronically see when that glove is

dropped you can see that there's a relationship with perception because if there's no target for attack that's

biologically relevant in the environment there's no impulse so you could imagine that what happens is when you activate

those neurons is that there's a set of perceptual stimuli that are much more

likely to be classified as a defeatable enemy now even a glove will do it right

right so you drop in a glove and that's now per ceed as defeatable enemy or perhaps threat because we don't know

exactly what the perception would be but then you see then it's the perception driving the behavior that's not an

Impulse right right that's more like a strategy and that's it's un I really

started to understand some of the literature on the evolution of religious thinking when I started to understand

motivational States as personalities because one of the things that you see this is so cool something I tried to

talk to Dawkins about the the greatest historian of religions who ever lived was mer eliad and he wrote a sequence of

brilliant books um the sacred and the profane is the best one to start with very short book very elegant book and

what ilad documented across the world was the pattern by which polytheistic belief

systems turned into monotheistic belief systems that parallels maturation it's

the same thing and so the polytheistic Gods tend to be rep representations of

of motivational States I I I'm going to pause you there because I think this is extremely important um so the god of

war or the god of love the goddess of love or the god of love exactly exactly that um so the idea that the different

gods are the uh reflective of different let's just let's just we'll just say it

as as neuroscientists as different hypothalamic and and related circuits well why wouldn't they be Gods you know

beware of falling under their minion beware of becoming their play things and

the other thing that's very interesting you see is that you have to also understand that these don't exist independently of historical context so

let's say rage it's like there's a there's a there's a literature of Rage

there's a culture of Rage there are patterns of Rage that are played out in drama and literature like it's not only

that the motivational impulse is a personality it's a personality with a history and a philosophy and if you

don't think think it can possess you you don't know very much about possession so like for example if you're fighting with

someone and you and you become enraged as you said your temporal purview shrinks and your notion of what

constitutes Victory is radically transfigured so if you're fighting with someone you love you might want to

defeat them or even hurt them independently of the fact that you actually love them well then you think

well you're you're gripped by these impulses no no you're inhabited by the spirit of Rage

and if you're a sophisticated person there's going to be an endless stream of

sophisticated intellectual rationalizations that come along with that possession right it's full-fledged

personality and it's one of the things you see with

people who are psychotic you know who drift off into the landscape of their

imagination is that they dwell on such states of possession so for example

these kids that shoot up High School like they're fantasizing under the

influence of rage and resentment for thousands of hours that just takes

control of them and it's not it's not a simple impulse it's like no they've

they've inverted the you could think they've inverted the neurological order and the god of rage is now the what

would you say the leading personality of integration or the god of resentful rage even worse and the circuit May R run in

reverse my colleague David Spiegel at who's our uh Vice chair of Psychiatry at Stanford has done some beautiful

experiments examining the relationship between uh prefrontal cortical areas and the insula a brain area that has a map

of our internal body State interoception you know our ability to sense our internal workings Etc in any event there

are certain conditions including depression where the direction of flow between the prefrontal cortex and the

insula literally reverses it's like running against the typical traffic this is a very different example because here

you're presenting in the context of Rage or and sociopathy and and these kids who

um shoot up schools but I do absolutely subscribe to what you just said that if

one drops into one of these more primitive States and emotions and all the things that go with it for a very long time it's almost as if um the

governor which is the prefrontal cortex starts to become the Govern that the whole circuit starts to run from bottom

up as opposed to top down yeah yeah defin and I think there's good neurological that's what happens in addiction mhm right so you hit you hit

that circuit that's seeking the drug with repeated doses of dopamine you know people say they have a monkey on their

back it's like no they have a monster in their brain and it's and they grew it

and it grows because it's reinforced with dopaminergic hits and as it grows its capacity to dominate increases and

so when there's a cue for the addiction this is why people relapse when they get out of a treatment center they'll go

back to their normal environment after having dealt with the physiological

withdrawal let's say and acute craving will make itself manifest like a friend they Freebase with and it's all of a

sudden that monster is alive and it just shuts everything else down and it's got a personality it can lie you know one of

the Hallmarks of adictive behavior is lying and the lies are the rationalizations of that subcircuit

subpersonality for its own pathological behavior and so and that's all reinforced too by the dope and energic

hits it's like there's multiple people in there in in everyone one of the most incredible

polytheistic paganism polytheistic yeah that's the default condition right right

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most remarkable real life examples I've ever witnessed of the power of belief in God

I'm just going to say it as as it occurred uh I have a good friend um who for many years struggled with alcohol

and drug addiction of multiple kinds incredibly kind person incredibly

successful in his career married two beautiful children multiple relapses

yeah crashed his truck at 7 in the morning after getting intoxicated at 6:30 in the morning got out of that one

happened again and again multiple rehab centers of the sort of standard treatment Etc and then ultimately enough

happened within that whole set of circumstances that his wife said you know this is it you've got to solve this

or we just can't be with you very scary situation for everybody involved

including him who absolutely adored his family he told us uh his friends that he

was going to go to a a a center here in Los Angeles that treats addiction with

essentially religion a belief in God he was already fairly religious um most

most Sundays he attended church and things of that sort and you can imagine we all thought including myself

like okay dude like good luck yeah I hope this works but like I would say a

zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober he just had not succeeded prior to

this he's been sober more than four years now he got out of there and never looked back and I wonder now uh whether

something something must have changed in his brain by adopting what was essentially a different incentive

structure right different incentive structure but fear wasn't doing it before fear of extreme consequences

which were on the table at that time um when he went in weren't enough something

about going there and the work that he did there allowed him to then it's almost like he he got another prefrontal

cortex a more powerful prefrontal cortex so maybe we could talk about that well that's a that's not a bad way of

thinking about what it is that people are trying to do when they say pray MH

they so you can invite in

spirits to possess you that's a good way of thinking about it I know that's odd terminology but that's what you do when

you dwell on your rage right right now imagine that you're doing that in the most positive possible

Direction so what you're doing is you're generating a hypothesis about the mode

of conduct and perception that would best typify you if you were ideal and

then establishing a relationship with that and inviting it in that's what the in Evangelical protest are doing when

they formulate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ that's exactly what they're doing now on the addiction side

so I studied alcoholism for years that was the T Target of my dissertation in

the first 20 papers that I published I knew the alcoholism literature very well and the neurological end of it as well

and it was known among alcohol researchers been known for 60 years more even that the most reliable treatment

for alcoholism was religious transformation that's and this is well accepted among researchers in the field

who have no religious affiliation whatsoever and I do believe that a huge

part of that is a consequence of incentive restructuring so you said for example with your friend that fear

wouldn't work well alcohol is a pretty good an anxiolytic drug but it's also

for people who are prone to alcoholism it's a good incentive reward Source Like Cocaine if you're going to you can't get

rats addicted to cocaine if they live in a natural environment they have to be isolated in a cage before they'll bar

press to their own death for cocaine so one of the things you want to do when you treat addiction is you want to

substitute a new incentive structure right because the Part Of The Addictive process

is you fall into a false incentive pattern right because cocaine makes you

feel like you're doing something useful in respect to an important goal even though you're not it's it mimics that

even if you know you're not even if you know it's I've never done cocaine I would be open about it if I had I I I

think I like dopaminergic States enough that I've been um very scared of doing

it frankly also it wasn't around much just because of when I went to college it just wasn't a drug that was around much but it's a remarkable drug in the

sense that people who take cocaine seem to be excited about everything they're in this High dopaminergic State and

their brain becomes exceptionally good at finding cocaine even in the absence of resources which is pretty remarkable

if you think about it you know I mean most people can't find the or get the thing they want in the absence of the resources to get it but people who take

hard drugs that really Spike dopamine somehow manage yeah sure sometimes they Li and Ste extremely steal but

they'll do other things too right they'll socialize with people that have it so they don't have to lie cheat and steal it's it's it's incredible to see

that drug and things like methamphetamine take over people's minds and now I'm thinking the pathway appears

when the aim is firmly in mind right see this is another this is another insistence that's derived from the

religious literature so because the idea there is that if your aim is upward the

pathway forward to that will make itself manifest and that's true you just pointed out that it was true in

relationship to addiction right is that if once that once you're in that realm

of possessed personality the pathway forward will show itself to you even under straightened circumstances right

and it's partly because you can think of our per ctual systems and our emotional systems for that matter as navigating

tools right so now the addiction the addicted brain what they see the aim is

possessed by the substance of addiction right so now the highest God is cocaine

let's say and so now all Pathways in the world are Pathways to cocaine all objects in the world are markers on the

pathway to cocaine because it just dominates but it's not it's not just an Impulse it dominates the perceptual

landscape as well that makes it and the emotional landscape and it comes with all these rationalizations that's all

those lies right the whole thing it's a whole Personality yeah brutal brutal

nowadays I get a lot of questions um about pornography and the the discussion

around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation um but let's just talk

about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus

which we were all born with that um clearly some of them are devoted to our

progression as a species through reproduction zero question about that sexual behavior being linked to reproduction not always but certainly we

can all agree on that I a necessary precondition I hope we can still all agree on that but um last time I checked

that's still true a sperm and an egg met someplace in some context to create all of us okay we're still grounded in

that pornography is something that I hear quite a lot from typically young

males but sometimes young females or even older females who say that they can

see themselves trying to resist the desire to go look at it and it almost

doesn't feel like a desire anymore they're sort of just in a um kind of a a

compulsion that is that is almost unconscious but they're just aware of the fact that disorder like an disorder

they're doing it they know they shouldn't be doing it and they can't help themselves and we could think about

two ways to attack this if one believes it's a real concern and they certainly do so I do um I don't I would be open if

I if I had or do I pornography is not been my thing and and I don't struggle with it but but when I hear from these

people it's so clear that they're asking is it the prevalence of pornography out

there or is it something really broken in them like are they broken but I don't

know that I would say after having the discussion we've had thus far that they're broken it seems to me that it's

like like the as you said it's the manifestation of one part of their it's one personality within them

well and it's been it's been compulsively rewarded so you know when when a when you see yourself moving

towards the culmination of a desired goal a dopamine that's accompanied by

dopamine release okay and so two things you know this but everybody who's listening might not there's two elements

to that dopamine release one is pleasure but the other is that the dopamine

imagine that there are circuits activated as you're acting what the dopamine does is increase the

probability that the circuits were that were activated just before the positive experience happened grow okay so now if

you're engaged with pornography and that culminates in SE in in successful sexual

satiation which it can that's what masturbation does then the whole personality that's oriented toward that

set of stimuli is going to come to dominate it's very much like an addiction except it's

it's you know there there has been there's been work done with generally

simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli I think it's stickleback fish where this was first

observed so males I hope I get this right but I've got it approximately right I believe

it's male sticklebacks will they're are very agressive towards other male sticklebacks and the reason they're

aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies so they don't like red dotts at

all and so you can really enrage a stickleback with a red dot and if you use a red dot that's a little bigger and

a little brighter than the typical Red Dot you get a super stimulus it's virtually irresistible to the stickle

back and it's weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see in nature it

slightly exceeds that's exactly what pornography does it's a super stimulus right and it's not surprising that young

males in particular are acceptable to that because male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented very

and a lot of our brain is visual way more than virtually every other animal certainly every other primate and ver

and every other mammal and so we have a situation where any 13-year-old boy can

see more hyper attractive super stimulus women in one day than the most

successful man who ever lived a 100 years ago would have ever seen in his whole life yeah well that's a like an

evolutionary ecological radical ecological transformation and the and

it's worse because it's easily accessible so it takes no work right so not only is it a super stimulus it's one

that's at hand so to speak and the uh and the uh the analog in the food world

would bear highly palatable highly processed food yeah sugar fat combination you go into the other day I

went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and and I looked around I and I I thought this isn't a

convenience store this is a pharmacy right everything that had chocolate also also seemed to have caffeine and color

everything every drink seemed to combine not just sugar but also caffeine and some other things that would provide s

stimulants then you've got nicotine and and these things on their own aren't necessarily bad any one of these one

elements in low low enough doses in frequent use Etc but maybe sugar being the one that that clearly I think uh

deserves um deeper investigation right um but it just occurred to me much

different than difference between manufacturing sugar and Manufacturing cocaine I mean you take something that's

available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it I mean cocoa leaves the natives used

cocoa leaves forever as mild stimulant didn't seem to cause them any trouble but that's way different than cocaine

right and sugar has the same arguably the same pathological properties well I

didn't think we were going to go here but I think it's extremely appropriate and important that we do so I I know that you followed what is essentially an

Elimination Diet for a number of years you eat meat right um I eat meat vegetables fruit and um some starches

unrefined starches in any event one thing that I is absolutely clear from

following a clean diet so to speak of any kind but let's say of the sort that

you follow or I follow is that you very soon learn the relationship between Taste of the food

volume of the food macronutrient so protein fat or carbohydrate content

micronutrients and satiation which is if you think about it it's sort of like a big plate of broccoli or a big steak or

something the brain learns and the hypothalamus learns the association between the taste the caloric content

what else is in there and satiation if you think about highly processed food or even combinations of multiple

ingredients that's absolutely impossible to do the brain can't parse what are the

various things in here and how do they relate to my feelings of satisfaction it's the difference between a super drug

and what I believe are the the elements that were explain explain why you think

that's that link learned link about satiation can't be learned in the case of these processed foods yeah because in

the context of these processed foods they're activating multiple neuron systems in the hypothalamus and gut we

know that the gut has neurons that can respond to Sugar fatty acids and amino acid content and there's a you know this

prominent theory that you know one of the main reasons we eat is to forage for amino amino acids that we'll eat until we get enough of the essential amino

acids and and we correlate that with taste but that the gut has neurons we we

know the gut has neurons that signal through the Vegas up through a little relay called the noo gangling if you want to look at it fun um fun name and

then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain which make us oh when we eat something that has a high uh essential

amino acid content like a steak like a really tasty steak the neurons in the gut in a way that is independent of

taste are signal in to the brain ah I'm getting essential amino acids you should eat more of this thing if those let's

just say a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a candy bar in a you know a package of of Skittles

which I'm I'm guessing there's very few of them if any you're going to continue to forage for food because those neurons

will also respond to Sugar basically it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids in other words there are two parallel tracks one

within our system Pathways to satiation that totally right multiple Pathways to satiation one depending on taste one

dependent on actual nutrient content the mouth can only learn taste Association

the mouth can't actually learn nutrient content the gut knows nutrient content the problem is you take a food that is

low in a micronutrient or macronutrient or essential amino acids or essential fatty acids after all there are no essential carbohydrates there are only

essential amino acids and essential fatty acids right right right and it will keep you eating and it will keep

the appetite system revving until you get enough of those now here's the issue if you've ever done this

that's empty calories empty calories but so so in some ways um you know this

again is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography masturbation and and reproduction right

I'm not saying that reproduction is the be all end all of sexual activity but in the evolutionary sense it absolutely is

right there's no question about that there's no moral judgment there that's just the reality so the the the the

situation with food is is the following if we are eating without any gut Level

under understanding of what what's coming in we will keep eating if you let me give an example you probably haven't

done this experiment in a while but if you've ever just had you know ribeye steak or two it's pretty satiating maybe you also have a salad if you're me or

some broccoli or something like that if one takes then even after you've eaten all that one bite of pasta one bite of

pasta the the next impulse is more yes right even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those

steaks you're loosing you know uh threshold you've reached that Etc all the the good stuff why because blood

glucose goes up and then you desire more because blood glucose elevations are linked directly to the dopaminergic

system so what I'm basically trying to say here is that I do think that there are elements to our food modern food if

you will it seems like it's you know anything but modern in the sense that it's worse for us than the more primitive foods but highly processed

foods pornography any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically like

methamphetamine for instance any behavior that spikes dopamine dramatically that

very quickly hijacks these circuits and to me the way to to teach those circuits

a a calmer more um prudent version of themselves right to enter a different

hypothalamic uh activation pattern is to start breaking the things down into their Essential Elements right about the

motivation the pleasure Etc to Tamp all that down I mean we know that for pornography if the pornography is very

extreme then less extreme pornography doesn't seem to work well that's because there's also a novelty kick in

dopaminergic striving right I mean so with

any basic repetitive pleasure there's a dopaminergic kick but with any novelty

there's also a dopaminergic kick so there's an optimized threshold for novelty and repetitive striving that

plays out in pornography so

um there's the direct effect of the stimulus as such but the there's

variation in the stimulus that's also novel and so you it's a common pattern for pornographic usage to become

more what would you say fetishistic that's one way of thinking about it as it progresses because that that keeps

the novelty alive that's very dangerous that's a very dangerous development right and I would venture in a very

different domain that if you were to eat your steaks slathered in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks going back to the way that you eat them now which by the

way this is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner last which

is that if you're going to order a steak order a Pittsburgh Char the Char on the outside is incredibly tasty they're we

love that the Umami taste is that we you have a devoted taste receptor that it's complex yeah so and if they don't know

what a Pittsburgh Char is then maybe you're in the wrong restaurant or you need to educate them but incredibly satiating delicious right but if you

were to slather those steaks in in a bunch of things I would suspect that after a while your plain steaks wouldn't

taste as good but certain but the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in

which the stuff the all the condiments Etc would start to become aversive I do believe that when we return to the the

sort of most um naturally satisfying mode of engaging with these uh with

these circuits here we're talking about food and sex in parallel that they become especially satiating and I think

that you know in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography and they're not addicted like they

telling me they love it and they can't stop they're telling me it's no longer working for them that the that there's this you know diminishment in the amount

of dopamine that they're getting over time and they feel trapped within it and they have no sense whatsoever because they haven't been socialized you to go

out and find a real relationship a real sexual relationship or a relationship of any well it also it's also there is some

evidence suggesting too that if you've been socialized into pornography sexuality it's actually quite difficult

to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner now I would say to some degree that's always been difficult

because it's a complex form of Behavior but the introduction of

pornography well it sets up a whole landscape of expectation for example that's not necessarily going to play out

that well in the real world let's say and and there's also a learning of those

biological systems in the brain to um evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating complet

completely different so some of these um right that's voer right you're basically learning to be a Voyer right right and

so you think about young brains that are highly plastic yeah learning that so the returning yeah we have no idea what to

make of that because especially for young men because when they hit puberty sexuality becomes a very uh insistent

force and we have no idea what effect pornography has on the development of

male sexuality none I've wondered for a while whether

there's something inherently rewarding about creating impact or

action at a distance here's why I've been watching these videos of elon's

rockets and thinking like that is awesome that is awesome we're built on a

throwing platform you know yeah just there's one image of the of the the rocket thrusters that just captivated me

I'm I'm not a spacecraft guy I mean I think it's really cool but I wouldn't consider myself somebody that like looks

at the stars and thinks I want to go you I want to go up there I might if I give the opportunity that's not been my thing

but I looked at this and I thought what an awesome Display of Power but then I was saying like what is power it's

really about having impact or action at a distance when we were kids we like dirt claw Wars targeted right what what

an incredible display of funneling the laws of physics and Engineering into something that can have enormous action

at a distance and perhaps even take us into new galaxies amazing right the word

sin in many languages means to miss the Target right and and it it speaks to

exactly what you're describing like that that the cache of action at a distance

that's unbelievably deeply embedded in us that's why I made that throwing gesture like human beings throw that's

our physiology right we can throw something at a distant Target well that's structured our our cognition

we're using our thoughts to hit distant targets that's what we do all the games

that young men play so many of those games are Target games all of the sports

spectacles that people want to participate in vicariously even vicariously they're Target hitting games

like our gaze specifies as the center of a Target there's targets everywhere and

we're unbelievably focused on Bridging the Gap between where we are and where we're going yeah that's the whole

perceptual landscape I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I

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so this thing about action at a distance to me feels like so inherent to our progression as a species most

Technologies are about that in fact if you think about social media you know somebody tweets something and you know when people react to it maybe positively

or negatively the school shooter in a very dark example a sad a tragic example

right action at a distance then you think about pornography and masturbation and I'm not passing any moral judgment here it's a the ultimate

form of creating action at a distance would be to create a new human being

with somebody right I mean that's it's you're propagating it in physical distance creating a new being and in

time right I mean incredible and then you think about masturbation and you think about pornography and there is no

action at a distance and I'm not just punning here I mean literally there's not much action at a distance it's all

up close to oneself but there's there's no impact on anybody it's almost as if the energy that we're born with to be

able to create positive things to evolve our species through action at a distance

through creation of knowledge technology children communities

culture the ultimate expression it's just loop back into oneself it's it's as

if and and I I don't know what language there is for this in biology but it's as if like all that dop energic Drive is

just kind of looped back into oneself and it goes nowhere and I think when I hear about the incredibly like what the

language for it is only like the diminished Souls of these people who are coming to me saying like you know like

help and I'm thinking okay listen I'm a podcaster I'm a scientist I know some things about the dopaminergic system but you know there are ways that they can

get help I think they're 12-step programs for this and so forth and other things but you know I think what they're

saying is that they're they're just kind of dissolving in their own um

in their own reflex but there's no action at a distance for them this is the same thing I see with the Failure to

Launch kids who are still living at home who are not having any action at a distance I think we were designed to disperse from our families and to create

action at a distance up until a certain age but I see so many of the problems

that we face as failure to find a productive way to have action failure

Venture I would say in in the ter techology that I've been developing so for example in this in this book and we

who wrestle with God I'm one of the stories I analyze is the story of

Abraham and it's very interesting story psychologically I mean I think it's it's it's stunning actually and I'll lay some

of that out for you you can tell me what you think about it so so the Divine is

characterized in the classic stories of our culture as um the ultimate up so you

could think about the Divine as the target as such rather than any

particular Target so here's a way of thinking about it you know so an ambition will seize you and

then you'll aim at fulfilling that ambition but once the ambition is fulfilled a new ambition makes itself

manifest which might be a greater ambition let's say if if your personality is expansive and then if you

fulfill that the same thing will happen so then you could imagine that there's a meta ambition

behind all proximal Ambitions okay now the Divine characterization of the

Divine is a characterization of that meta ambition that's a good way of thinking about it so it's something that

recedes as you approach it but it's also the thing that all Ambitions have in common and we know there is such a thing

because otherwise we wouldn't have a concept of ambition right which speaks to a commonality among Ambitions okay in

the story of Abraham the Divine is characterized in relationship to

something like ambition so Abraham has the he's already immersed in

a situation that's Akin in a way to the scenario of a wealthy and a a person in

the modern world who's in a situation of abundance Abraham's parents are wealthy and they provide for him there's

nothing he needs to do and in consequence so he's attained the Socialist Utopia or the cons humorist

Utopia you can look at it either way and there's no reason for him to move

forward so he doesn't he doesn't do anything till he's 75 and then the voice

comes to him which is the voice of Adventure and it's God in this story that's how God is defined right and God

says to Abraham you have to leave all this

Comfort which is a very interesting proposition to begin with it's like why the hell hell would you leave that when

you have everything you need well the implication is is that you don't have

everything you need when you're being delivered everything you need that isn't how life works okay so God says you have

to leave your your father's tent you have to leave your tribe you have to

leave those who speak your language you have to venture out into the world so God is conceptualized in this story as

the impulse the voice that compels you out into the world and that encourages

you to do so so that's a hypothesis about what the ultimate up is okay and

Abraham agrees and he does so in two ways he he builds an

altar signifying his aim that he's going to abide by the command of this voice or

the invitation of this voice and that he'll make the appropriate sacrifices

there a crucial there's a crucial it's a crucial point to understand

because the process of transformation requires sacrifice to be more than you are means you have to let go of that

which you were you have to make sacrifices now Abraham's life is punctuated by a sequence of

reaffirmations of his upward aim and declamations of his willingness to

sacrifice every time he finishes an adventure he re constitutes the Covenant

right so this is this agreement to follow the voice of Adventure okay God makes him a deal that's the

Covenant it's very interesting deal so now imagine biologically speaking that

there is an instinct to integrate that operates within us okay so now it's not

it's just as fundamental as the hypothalamic motivational States let's say but it's more sophisticated and what

it's trying to do is to integrate all the motivational States across time and

socially right and then IM imagine it manifests itself as an instinct to be something like the instinct to

mature right to move forward right to leave your zone of comfort right and

maybe there have been people like chicks Mahi who've characterized that as the attractiveness of flow and maybe it's

associated with the exploratory circuit in the hypothalamus that's mediated by

dopamine okay but it's it's got its character now the character of that

instinct in this story is the way it's characterized is as the voice of

Adventure so it's the thing that asks you to move beyond your zone of comfort and go into the foreign world now the

advantage to that is that you fortify yourself and you develop right so no

matter how good you are now if you push yourself to the edge you're going to be better than you are and that's a

better win than merely being good like you are now so that would be particip a

in that transformative process is a higher form of attainment than mere attainment of any specific goal okay so

that's the Call to Adventure that's the call to a quest that's what Gandalf offers Bilbo for example

okay God characterizes the consequences of that and this is so cool it when I

figured this out it just flattened me it's so interesting God says okay if you God is defined as that which says this

by the way if you push yourself beyond your zone of comfort even if it's functioning for you

that's Abraham's situation here's what'll happen you'll become you'll live your life in a manner that's a blessing to

you so that's a good deal a because Lots the the miserable people you're talking about the depressed people the the

trapped people their life isn't a blessing to themselves so what's a pathway to blessing well it's not

satiation not in this formulation it's voluntary it's the voluntary Quest

and it's characterized by Adventure so that's deal number one you'll live in a life that'll be a blessing to you okay

and then God says that's not all that'll happen you'll be a blessing to yourself

in a manner that will make you renowned among other people justly that's a good deal because we

know that people men in particular are very status oriented partly because

their reproductive success is highly correlated with their social status and you know the Psychopaths game that but

still it's like Renown is crucially important you want to be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates you

know so that'll be the second thing that happens and then the same voice says and that's not all you'll be a blessing to

yourself and be renowned in a manner that will maximize the probability that you will establish something of lasting

value that's a good deal so that's that's stretching across time multi-generationally because God tells

Abraham that if he follows the path of Adventure he'll be the father of Nations so what that means is that he'll

establish the pattern of paternal conduct that will maximally that will maximize the success

of his offspring in the longest possible run that's so cool this is Success at a

distance and over time exactly and then the the final offer is you'll do that in a way that'll bring abundance to

everyone else too now so think about what that means biologically this is so cool and I I can't see how it can be

wrong it means that if you hearken to the voice that calls you out of your

zone of comfort you do that voluntarily so you put yourself on the edge of Adventure you will be following the

Instinct that has already evolved to make your life a blessing to yourself to make you successful among other people

to maximize your probability of long-term success and to do that in a way that brings abundance to your

community and then you think look let's take the contrary hypothesis the contrary hypothesis would be twofold

there is no compulsion to Adventure it's like that seems highly improbable or that the compulsion to Adventure isn't

aligned with psychological and social well-being well what's the what's the chance that the fundamental drive that

would facilitate your transformation across time would not be aligned with

your psychological integrity and the success of the community like we wouldn't be social animals if that was

the case so as far as I can tell that has to be true now that doesn't

mean you can get lost in false Adventures that can happen that's what

an addiction is or like or or that's what pornography is it's a false Adventure right it's failure to hit the

proper Target you might say but that Central Drive to integration across time

and communally why wouldn't that be an instinct and then we could cap that with an observation that I also think is

self-evidently true once you understand it so imagine that you're a father now this

Spirit of Adventure is often characterized paternally right in so far as God's the father in these ancient

stories so think about this so when you see your son now it's also true of your

daughter but I'll focus on Sons for the moment when you see your son and you love your son when you see your son

pushing himself Beyond his own limits in an adventurous manner if you're a good

father you def definitely encourage that right and I would say in so far as you

encourage that you are a good father and that would mean that you're the embodiment of that spirit that calls to

Adventure that's why Abraham is characterized for example in this story as forging an alliance with the spirit

of his ancestors with the deity of his ancestors he's embodying the Call to

Adventure and that's what makes him the father whose reproductive Enterprise is successful across the broadest possible

span of time I think that's I just can't see how that can be wrong and that's a

characterization of the Divine there there's other it it complexifies a because what what the stories are trying

to do is to give you an image of what that integrating personality might be like

and it's sophisticated so a single characterization is insufficient so in the story of

Noah God is this personality is characterized quite differently so Noah

is presented as a man who's wise in his Generations which means that for his time and place he's moral and reputable

so he's the sort of guy that people would go to for advice because he's lived a life that's emblematic of his

wisdom let's say okay now a voice comes to him and says batting down the hatches

there mate trouble's coming okay so so here's the hypothesis the hypothesis is

the voice that calls to the wise to prepare in times of trouble is a manifestation of the Divine and it's the

same as the voice that calls the unwilling to Adventure that's the monotheistic hypothesis and so you can

see what the imagination is doing is agglomerating these different characterizations of high aim insisting

that there's an integrated Unity behind them and then trying to conceptualize that integrated Unity across time and so

and I think that's done I think that's done with radical success in the biblical library that the culmination of

the library of stories is the impressionistic representation of

this integrating pattern and I think that's what people call on when they're engaging in a religious Enterprise that

is radically successful like that happened in the case of your friend right so he got a new personality and

that new personality had different incentive structure and so that just superseded the addiction it's almost as

if I mean I realize that for people listening it might not seem like this but to us his friends who had seen him

try so hard in the context of people he truly deeply cares about more than anybody in the world his children his

wife it was almost like he got a brain transplant it was it was

astonishing how does he account for it like if you asked him like okay you had

every reason to change and yet you didn't and then all of a sudden you did

like how does he understand that he uses very um uh

Christian religious language he said that he felt Jesus's love for him and he

saw an image of who he could become this was important perhaps no doubt not just

perhaps but no doubt of who he could become that was worth it and he had the

adequate social support within this place and so there was reinforcement

yeah but what's what's remarkable is that he was able to take that outside of

this place it it was a residential facility out of this place and carry it with him and to this day he is Rock

Solid okay so in that domain and I will say in in all the other domains of his life too extremely successful as an

artist I don't want to out him you know extremely successful as a as a commercial artist and happy and in

service and um just seems like he got a brain trans right so

there's a mystery there that's kind of threefold one is um what the hell did he

mean that he realized that Jesus Christ loved him right that's okay what do you mean by that and then somehow that's

associated with the vision he developed of who he could be if he was everything he could be there's a relationship

between those two things and then there's this third mystery is the culmination of those two phenomena

freedom of his addiction even out of the context of the center that's right very

difficult to understand that but you know we know think about it this way if

you're possessed by rage different phenomena have dopaminergic cache to you than if you're

possessed by like uh sexual desire like obviously right absolutely right so so

the idea that a given stimuli produces a given motivational response is incorrect

because that's framework dependent right and then most so I think one of the best

ways to understand a motivational Drive is that a motivational Drive grips the target it establishes the Target right

and it's not it may it may increase the probability that certain action patterns

will make themselves manifest that would be the kind of the compulsive element but fundamentally what it's doing is

changing the Target that rearranges the perceptual landscape and it transforms the emotions because now if your target

is there things that lead you there are dopaminergically relevant if your target

is there things that lead you there are relevant same underlying emotion but the

the stimuli so to speak that give rise to the emotion are radically different

so now he has a different orientation and aim and so the incentive structure

of his psyche is radically transformed now we know that can happen because that happens to you when you move from one

motivated state to another I think in 12-step programs they they allow the steps to be Milestones I mean there's

clearly a dopaminergic component I hope people understand that dopamine is dumb in fact dopamine isn't Dumb dopamine has

no intelligence at all it's just a currency of motivation and reward and

what which is why it can be gained by cocaine which is why it can be gained by cocaine or or most anything that can you

know uh you know feret its way into the hypothalamic system and I I hope people

picked up on what you said before because um it's so important that as one moves

toward a Target dopamine increases and root to that Target I'm I'm rephrasing

what you said before you said it wonderfully I just want to make sure people understand that as that dopamine

increases the probability that your perception will go to something other than the target decreases exponentially

as you get closer and closer you get more and more dopamine the greater the elevation dopamine the lower the

probability that you'll engage in any other p of self it's like it's almost or the or personality type other than the

one that you're engaged in in pursuit of this Behavior will emerge not least because as you approach successfully the

probability of ultimate success is obviously increasing so it makes perfect sense that you would narrow and focus

right you run faster as you as you see the Finish Line right faster and faster I this concept of sin as missing the

Target or this definition of sin I think is incredibly important hamartia is the Greek word and L it's literally an

archery term but it's also the word for sin in ancient Hebrew is also an archery term and so and there's other languages

where that's the case but it it's really important to understand that that is that notion is predicated on this target

seeking phys psychophysiology and that that's unbelievably deeply built into us

as you pointed out you know our eyes are Target established well it's so important to us that we infer aim from

gays right and it's more than that not only do we infer aim from

gaze we mimic the psychophysiological state of the Target that we're watching

as a consequence of her inference of aim from gaze so if I can see what you're looking at then I can occupy the same

psychophysiological state that you do and that's the basis of my understanding this is so important and I'm uh there's

something that I've never talked about on this or any other podcast which is that in humans we have a massive

expansion of an area of the frontal cortex called The frontal eye Fields so there's circuitry deep in the brain if

you want to look it up it's Superior culus it's also called the tectum in other species it means roof it's the roof of the midbrain Etc that generate

reflexive eye movements you stimulate in there it's like a machine in fact a colleague of mine who's now retired at

Stanford Eric nudson who did some beautiful work on neuroplasticity um was describing experiment where they take out the

frontal cortex of these owls owls are because they um you know they don't have much movements they move their head

almost you know almost all the way around right we've all seen that get and they use this for for for homing in on

their targets the owl or a monkey or a human in the absence of a prefrontal

cortex or suppression of prefrontal Cortex becomes like a machine you click here they look there you click here they look there puppies are like this kittens

are like this everything's a stimulus why because there isn't that top- down inhibition of those reflexes in humans

we have an area that's why a a cat with no braid is hyp exploratory right

everything's a Target everything's a targ everything is a Target and there's no context dependent learning right I

love that you gave the example of the desate cats um they even can do fictive motion they can walk on a treadmill and

it's like with no cortex it's amazing makes you rethink the cortex that's for sure and humans have these frontal eye

fields which are an evolved area they're present in other species too but they're massively expanded in humans so this is

a a cortical area a frontal cortical area devot oted to controlling Gaye and

the context and control of Gaye so it no longer becomes just a reflex that you can suppress as in the case with an

adult cat versus a kitten or a dog versus a puppy the frontal eye Fields actually

regulate all sorts of context dependent like oh like he's looking at me directly is it aggressive yeah um well then maybe

I'll activate my aggression or maybe I'll brace my defenses or wow she's uh we came to this party together but she

seem super interested in like directing her gaze how are we inferring this sometimes it's body language sometimes

it's this sometimes he looked at her there are all these memes about this right you know right the famous the famous look over the shoulder meme that

seems to have taken over the internet from time to time with the appropriate facial response exactly so humans

have an if massively expanded notion of what gaze is and our ability to control

gaze and understanding of gaze I just so when when you raise this this idea that when you raise this fact rather about

gays defining the target it'll end that looking at others' gaze allows us to

understand what they are defining as the target we starting to get get into Notions of theory of mind and things of

that sort well so so what that implies in keeping with our previous conversation is that as you mature and

your cortex integrates and you become cortically dominant the targets of your

gaze become voluntary right this is a big deal because it means that you can

concentrate on the distal let's say the temporary temporally distal at the

expense of the proximal so you know if if you're walking down the street and

you hear a loud and sudden noise behind you you'll do an anti-predator Crouch and then turn and you'll do that

essentially automatically so so so curl up turt and and you turn you turn to the

place where your stereoscopic audition has indicated that the noise emanated from right and so and that's automatic

that's the control of the eye gate gaze and and well and and bodily posture by those underly yeah this is a super has a

map of of auditory world so when you hear something to right you turn to your right right right and you do that before

you think right okay so that's a that's an activation of the eye felds let's say

by these underlying motivational systems that have this personality like autonomy

but you can you can you can Orient your part of the religious Enterprise is to

orient your eyes heavenward what does that mean well you can think about it it means to search out the

north star that navigates for you uniring regardless of the situation at

hand imagine you could progress towards a Target in a manner that made all the potential targets that you could

progress toward more likely it's a meta Target you said that's what happened to your friend right is not only did he

dispense with his addiction but all of the things enter other Enterprises that he was associating that that that he was

pursuing in his life became more effective it's almost like and I it is as if every goal was like

elevated right and it's funny because for the first couple of months that I was interacting with him I thought okay

okay like like he's different and and I thought you know like most people would you know perhaps would think like all

right let's see let's see but this has been four years now he's very he's very consistent with his um with his program

he you know he's involved in a program that keeps him on track right um but he's he's elevated and he's not talking

above people it's like he's elevated but he's grounded when you talk to him he's not kind of off some other place he's actually very very present yeah and even

his text messages are very much of like what's going on today you know asking questions that are very much of the now

yeah and it's been a a remarkable thing to observe well because he was about as

down in his addiction and had so much to lose and had um essentially risked it

over and over over and over to the point where you know I I didn't think it was

ever going to turn around and most and all of his friends thought the same and his wife of course is delighted and his

kids are delighted of course and um I could say this without revealing because no one knows I'm Godfather to his son

and his son is thriving which is wonderful to see and I just think of sometimes about how badly it could have gone the other way yeah and it's

fantastic it's like it's nothing short of spectacular okay so so let me let me put that into a context of let's say an

archetypal story okay so I did a course for Peterson Academy on The Sermon on the Mount And The Sermon on the Mount is

a it's a Str it's a metag goal strategy it's very practical it's very very

practical and it emerges out of the biblical tradition in a very grounded manner it's a logical extension of the

biblical ethical precursors so what Christ says to his followers in the

course of The Sermon on the Mount is first Orient your eyes upward okay so

that's in alignment with the notion that the first born is to be consecrated to God there's a meaning to that and and

the meaning is something like this imagine that your life consists of a sequence of episodes okay an episode has

a beginning and a middle and an end the beginning sets the frame for the episode

so at the beginning of an Enterprise you want to you want to lift your eyes heavenward so you establish the highest

possible goal so that that constitutes the frame of perception for that episode

that's the idea that's why the firstborn should be consecrated to God so for example in to think about it prosaically

before we sat down for our podcast because we've done many

podcasts we we strive to inhabit the framework that will make the podcast

most radically successful now you could imagine that that could be subordinated to either of our proximal desire for an

increase in short-term personal Fame right or we could try to dominate each other in the conversation or we could

Orient ourselves properly and we could do what we could to pursue the track

towards Revelation so to speak and we could Elevate our conversation in that manner okay and that would set the frame

for the conversation and the good podcasters always do that right they're not playing games or if they're playing

games it's of the highest possible order it's a quest yeah okay quest for what

enlightenment for truth right for Mutual understanding and then maybe for the education of those who are participating

all right so Christ says first Orient your eyes upward right that's to love

God above all so whatever that upward Divinity is you establish an allegiance with that and you allow that to

determine your perceptions and your motivations next operate under the assumption

that other people like you participate in that nature of that utmost aim

and treat them that way next concentrate on the moment right

right and that's exactly right because it's exactly right because when you specify your aim the

pathway makes itself manifest otherwise you could never use your senses to orient you'd never get anywhere right so

if you aim upward to the best of your ability then the pathway upward is what will make itself manifest in front of

you then you have to attend to it and so then you get this weird perverse optimality which is you're focused on

the longest temporal scale and the highest possible elevation and you can

make most use of what's right in front of you and that the implication in The

Sermon on the Mount is that there's no difference between that and participating in life eternal as it

unfolds in the moment and I think that's that's seems to me to be exactly right it's exactly right and so you know I I

was I was thinking of that because you said your friends all of your friends Endeavors had become elevated so imagine

that one problem you might want to solve is what your goals should be but a much

deeper problem would be how do you conceptualize your goals in relationship to one another across the broadest span

of time and person so that every goal has the highest probability of succeeding that would be like the

pursuit of a metagal I would say that's what defines the religious Enterprise there's another variant of that for

example so a variant of that would be not how do you solve the problem of Any

Given thing that terrifies you but how do you solve the problem of the class of things that terrify you and the dragon

fight mythology is the solution to that problem so the attitude there is you

adopt The Stance of voluntary what a voluntary approach in the face of

Terror because that's the best meta strategy right and that's the strategy that works to protect you across the

largest possible array of dangerous situations this is what we learned in as

clinical psychologists with exposure therapy right you find the particulars

of what someone is afraid of that turns out to be somewhat irrelevant you teach people to voluntarily confront what

they're avoiding and that doesn't make them them less afraid it makes them more competent and braver and that

generalizes right and so yeah the religious Pursuit is the pursuit of of

metag goals in relationship to positive and negative emotion that's a good way of thinking about it I'd like to take a quick break and

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laab to claim a free sample P pack I love this idea of looking upward

and defining or at least having a sense that there's a um internalization of the

greatest possible outcome and when I say greatest both for ones but also for the

community right yeah that's life more abundant or that's that's the symbolic terminology or life in eternity both of

those are the same thing so imagine you're fighting with your wife okay now you're dominated by rage now the

advantage to that is you're ready and but the disadvantage is you're

going to strive for proximal Victory okay now you don't want to be a pushover

that's a mistake so then what could you do instead you could pause and you could

remember okay if this could rectify itself in the best possible manner what

would that look like well it's it's complicated right you don't want your wife to be defeated and you don't want

to be defeated and you want to solve the problem but you don't want to sweep it under the rug you want to solve it in a

way that solved that works across time that benefits your relationship in an

upward Manner and you have to make sure that you're not hijacked by that hypothalamic circuit or personality as

you've you will be you if if you don't alter your aim you will be because you

need to substitute you got to think I'd really like to win this like I'd seriously like to win this battle it's

like no you need something better than that Victory and that would be the a victory that would deepen and

enrich your relationship and help it grow across time and then you can remember that it's like I'm going to listen even though I think my wife is

wrong I'm going to listen and I'm going to see if I can find a pathway in the argument that makes our relationship

better and then you think now you have to really want that because if you really want that if you if you got that

Vision fleshed out properly you'll want that more than you'll want to win and and then you might say well why it's

like because it's a better deal so there's one of Christ's Parables where he talks about a pearl of great price

which is the Pearl that a rich man would sell everything he owns to possess and

it's it's something like a reference to that it's like why would you ever attain

a proximal Victory if you could attain an ultimate Victory that's the battle let's say between the salvation of the

soul and the victory in sin that's how the religious language would portray it

well you can win a local Victory and it looks like it it looks like you win but

if you forgo the ultimate game that's not a victory that's a defeat obviously

it might even be a worse defeat than if you lost absolutely I I've been um spouting off on social media and podcast

for a while now that any big inflection in dopamine that isn't preceded by a lot of effort to generate that dopamine

inflection is very dangerous think drugs think pornography think highly processed food Foods think anything that you know

creates this B big sense of indulgence and pleasure without any effort is running countercurrent to our

evolutionary wiring now you could say well okay so what are we supposed to do move in C no reward no reward without

commencer sacrifice that's right that's of some sort Y and the other issue and

it's coming up again and again today and I love that it is is this notion of the temporal domain of rewards that exist

over multiple time scales or broader time scales one of the things that I feel truly lucky for um is the fact that

I went the path of science where we were uh chuckling about this earlier um you know a project could take a year then

you have to restart because that project went nowhere and then you finish the project you submit a paper the review I

mean the reward schedule in science could take four years it's not just about getting a degree like getting

papers through sometimes took a year sometimes took two years you know um sometimes things didn't go well and you

had to publish in a journal that you wouldn't have wanted to or sometimes you had to abandon projects altogether so my

reward system was trained up on lots of time scales short medium longtime scales

as I've moved into podcasting the the uh the temporal Loops are shorter they're faster um but you know nonetheless you

know we we do long long form content and um but you know I think platforms like X

I think are wonderful if used appropriately I think it's especially great nowadays frankly um and Instagram Etc they're very useful but they train

us and I imagine they've trained the the young brains that were weaned on them cuz I wasn't but that were weaned on

them for fast temporal yeah uh time scales this isn't like playing this isn't like playing a long poker game

this is like playing the slot machine over and over and over right um it's not like a 4day tournament complete with

intermittent random reinforcement which is what happens when something goes viral unpredictably right right it's

really yeah and and then of course we have this notion in this country that you know in any moment it could be a

Rags to Riches or over you know some you know overnight Fame type thing that exists as a possibility in our culture

that in a way that it hadn't prior so I think that one of the things that could be useful just venturing a hypothesis

here is that young and older people could um take a look at their life and

ask you know over what variation of time scales do I derive reward yeah defin you

know training for a marathon is a is a longer time scale that's also a Hallmark of maturity yeah School degree Etc um in

business the time skills are sometimes fast sometimes um short I think you can ask even a better question than that the

the better question would be and this is kind of what's referred to in The Sermon on the Mount is how could I optimize my

long-term view well maximizing my focus on the moment because then you get both that's a really that's a really good

deal right because now you're conducting yourself in a manner that works in an itrated way that's socially

productive right and and maybe intergenerationally socially productive that would be the best thing to

establish that's kind of what you're doing as a good father but you're doing that in a manner that enables you to

also derive maximal impact from each step you take forward in the present

so Carl friston told me we were talking about entropy and and emotion I'd

figured out a few years ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy like

technically which I was really thrilled about because it it gives emotion a physical grounding like a real physical

grounding and friston surprised me because he said he has a theory of positive emotion that's analogous he

also knew the negative emotion he he'd also been working in that domain he said that you get a dopamine kick when you

reduce the entropy in relationship to a goal and I thought oh my God that's so cool because it means that uncertainty

is entropy when it emerges you get anxious but when you see yourself stepping toward w a goal you get a

dopamine kick and the reason that's an entropy related to entropy is because with each step successful step

you take towards a goal you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit which is

manifested in that phenomena you described which is when you see the Finish Line you start running faster

right so they're both related to entropy well to have goals at multiple time scales you need to be able to re in I I

love this entropy argument it makes total sense that you want to be able to uh withstand the

the the the periods of time when you don't know whether or not things are becoming more or less uncertain this is

part of becoming um an adult if you will okay okay so yeah that was exactly the thread so there's there's two cories of

that one is that the more valuable the goal towards which you're progressing

the higher the dopamine kick per unit of advancement so what that means is you want an ultimate goal operating

in the domain of each proximal subg goal and that's what happens with this upward orientation it's like what you're trying

to do is to make things as good as they could be whatever that means over the longest possible span of time for the

largest number of people you included now you're not going to know exactly how to do that but that can be your goal

okay now that's going to inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway but it's also going to modify

your reward system because now every proximal step forward is indicator of

entropy reduction in regard to that metag goal well there isn't any by definition there isn't anything you can

do that's more exciting than that see that kind of explains why your friend was able to pop out of his addictive

frame because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of

alcohol let's say pales in comparison right right right and right it's a rewriting of the reward contingencies

yeah yeah right exactly and and now you can imagine that you could imagine a situation where a

culture explores across time to find out how to characterize that goal such that

if that goal is pursued people integrate psychologically in a manner that integrates them socially across large

spans of time I think that's what happens when the monotheistic Revelation emerges that's

ex that's what's happening from a from a biological perspective is that we're starting to characterize the longest

term goal yeah something like that this is why I believe that pornography is

potentially so poisonous because the level of uncertainty is basically zero

yeah people can access what they want to see they can keep foraging until they find it yeah and that's not the way that

relationships work the way relationships work is I ask somebody out they might

say yes they might say no you got on a date they might not want a second date well things could progress you might

think that you're on the path to one thing it turns out it doesn't work or it's it's you're not compatible you know

I me that's also extremely salutary because if you're being rejected like

say you're a foraging male and you're being rejected all the time and you

forgo that for pornography what you're foregoing is the corrective that all those women are offering you like

they're rejecting you because there is something wrong like seriously there's something wrong and now you escape from

that you think well that's a relief because no more rejection it's like yeah no more rejection no more learning no

more Improvement and no possibility of of an actual life right no action at a

distance yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah no distal no distal accomplishment right

yeah the only implication of the pornography masturbation scenario is that is more pornography masturbation

that's the only implication of it that's that's all that possibly could AR worse than that because it's more pornography

in a degenerating game because as you said you have to chase that novelty Edge

otherwise dopamine is driven down further well and that means what it's going to get more and more extreme well that that's not a good

scenario that's not a good like what do you mean more and more extreme exactly like where does that end well you know a

casual glance at online pornography can give you some real insight into where that ends like there's that's a

bottomless pit and and in the most pernicious possible manner because

sexual it can definitely twist itself into pathological forms that undermine

psychological integrity and demolish Society no we see this with people who are highly successful who seem to have

lots of areas of their life regulated and then you know they collapse their lives I we sometimes see it with with

drugs of abuse as well although unless those drugs of abuse are dopaminergic

and people have them in a in check so to speak which is exceedingly rare yes it's

usually just a matter of time and they they don't reach the mountain top yes while time is the problem as we've been

pointing out let me tell you another story this is from Revelation so Revelation is a vision of the end of

time okay now time ends all the time like our adventures end our lives end

our relationships end so the end has a pattern okay Revelation is a vision of

the Eternal pattern of the end so here's an element of the Vision it's so

remarkable I figured this out with my friend Jonathan pasio so there's a vision in a subvision in in the

sequential dream of revelation of the Scarlet Beast and the of Babylon

and it's very relevant to our discussion on pornography you'll understand it right away so it's a vision of how

Society disintegrates okay now imagine when Society disintegrates men

disintegrate according to their pattern and women disintegrate according to their pattern that makes perfect sense

right because if Society disintegrates it's going to be men and women who disintegrate there's no reason to assume

that their pattern of disintegration would be identical okay Scarlet Beast is

is that's the Scarlet beast of the state that's Babylon let's say that's the degenerate tyrannical state has multiple

heads why because whatever United it has vanished that's like the death of God

it's vanished and so now it's got heads in every direction so it's confused and it's red scared because that's that

confusion that disintegration is the precursor to the river of blood right

the Red Sea this the swamp of chaos so when the patriarchal state disintegrates it loses

its unity and then it's multiple heads right and that's that's an that's the

emblem of descent into diverse chaos and gazes everywhere with these multiple heads precisely precisely it's not

integrated okay now that's the disintegration of the patriarchy you might say a top that is

the of Babylon that's a beautiful woman who's subordinated her psyche to

the demands of sexuality she's the mother of all prostitutes right so she's extremely

attractive and she's clad in gold and she holds a cup it's very graphic imagery that has nothing but the

consequences of her fornication in it is this I mean I guess I will just say it

recently there's been a number of posts on EX of this woman who had sex with 100 men in a day um and now and now she's

saying she's going to have sex with a thousand men in a day yeah well she seems to be rethinking her plan given

the emotional consequences she had to her last success yeah I I must say her mother is her finance

officer speechless um that's for sure I'm speechless my my um response to the

uh her kind of um Post 100 men thing um

was it was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the the uh per

whatever performance whatever it was you know so um it was hard for me to discern

what was really going on there I'm not a psychologist um but anyone who saw that

would say um this is a pretty dark situation it's way darker than anybody

who wanted to hold on to their sanity would possibly imagine what's also dark

and I'm not saying this from a place of moral judgment I'm just saying this from a place of just kind of like a wow like

this woman obviously um navigating life in this way her choice clearly um but

the fact that so many people know about this the fact that so many PE and here we're talking about it but I think in

service to a greater good I certainly believe like like that this is now out

out there right it's out there um just like seeing somebody just like seeing somebody murder somebody in Cold Blood

we we talk about that recently a video of of an assassination that and those

had been available before but um those two things kind of leveled up or leveled

down you know um one's idea of of what humans are capable of by allowing so

many acceptable what's acceptable or desirable that's right the threshold shifted that's for sure maybe that's the

what I'm looking for the threshold shifted yeah okay so that's a great example that that that young woman who's

betrayed herself in the deepest possible Manner and all of the people that are following her and all the young women

who are influenced by her so you have this figure on the back of the

degenerate State that's the degenerate feminine female sexuality commoditize

commoditized when the masculine State degenerates that's a sign of the end of

things and that makes perfect sense because well why wouldn't female sexuality commoditize when the masculine

is no longer reliable it's exactly what you'd expect you know how the story

ends there's another element to it the degenerate state offers the of

Babylon as enticement for its degeneration you can have everything you want on the sexual side at the end of

that substory the state the Beast kills the prostitute and so what that means is

that the long-term consequences of

sacrific less sexual satiety is that sexuality itself is destroyed and I

think we're seeing that in our society now 30% of Japanese under the age of 30

are virgins right about about the same in South Korea right the birth rates in

those countries have plummeted like they're way way below replacement and and

increasingly 50% of women in in the west are childless at 30 birth rates are way

way down and and going down as well 50% are childless half of them will never have a

child because 30 is already pushing it and 95% of them will regret it we're already in a situation in the west where

one in Four Women will be involuntarily childless right and so it's so well

that's a good example as I said earlier of how these things are characterized in this symbolic language that outlines the

starkest you might say the starkest of biological realities you said that there was a problem you know your sense was

that there was a problem with effortless gratification it's like well the problem part of the problem with effortless

gratification is it destroys itself and it's so interesting because the promise

of the sexual Revolution and the pill was an unlimited Horizon of sexual

opportunity okay we know but the actual consequence of that

was appears to be that that that's that's the pathway to the demise of sexuality itself this was if you can't

be with the one you love Love the One You're With the uh someone I know who was a uh in their 20s in the 1970s

explained to me I always thought that song was about you know if you can't be with the the person that you you love

you know you find someone else you can love they explain to me that's not what that was about that was about the wildness of the of the 70s right that

promise yeah that was about the the sort of the um just uh promiscuity had

emerged as a as a theme of the 1970s yeah well I mean in the aftermath of the

birth control pill it was not surprising that people thought maybe that was possible but that was wrong it was

seriously wrong and we're going to be dealing with the consequences of that for a very long time you said that the

that the patriarchy the masculine fails before the well no that happen no say

that so it's not causal one no no you can't

men and women degenerate at the same rate right I mean we're involved in feedback processes that are so tight

that there's no like there's no oppressing women without oppressing men there's no oppressing men without

oppressing women it's like we're we're joined at the hip so to speak and so you know these these these these cultures

that that that cloak women and silence them you might think well that leads to

the domination of men it it it just turns men into pathological tyrants like

there's there's no victory over one sex that's a victory of any sense at all

that's it's anti-humanity of course of course of course there was a recent um post on X

that I that just held my gaze my attention um where it was a back and

forth debate a pseudo political social debate and then there were three words that um I'll just to say that uh Mark

Andre said you know it was it was about restoring Vigor pride and achievement

and I thought wow like he's not a political candidate but that's a beautiful Trifecta Vigor pride and

achievement to celebrate those and I and I put that next to you know the the Deep

pleasure in generative action at a distance a technological development the Rockets um and there other Genera the

theme of the story of Abraham it's like the most the highest form of potential

satiation is risk risky romantic adventure it's not satiation right

that's the wrong frame right and and so one of the things I've noticed this is such fun I've talked in front of I don't

know how many public audiences in the last eight years independent of my

professorial career and th those are large audiences um you know they must average about 3 or 4 thousand people and

there's one place I go that always reduces the audience to like dead silence the

audiences are usually quiet in the events you know and

that's one of the ways I'm sure you know this is you want to listen to the audience you want to stay in that zone

where no one's moving right cuz then you know you their attention is focused and you can hear that and you can you can I

wouldn't say you can play with it not manipulatively but in the proper sense of

play I learned a long while ago that Adventure let's say is the highest form

of reward that's a good way of thinking about it but there's a corollary to that

that conservatives need to learn because they don't know this conservatives talk

about responsibility but they're conscientious and so for them responsibility is dutiful orderly

productivity it's it's conscientiousness responsibility is a conscientious Duty

what they fail to understand is that there's no difference between responsibility and Adventure they're the

same thing and you can tell young men in particular that say look you want to

have an adventure because you definitely want an adventure you're you're like you're built for that it will increase

your status it will improve your life like it'll improve the probability that you'll accomplish something you want an

adventure your every fiber of your being is screaming for it where do you find it

you find it in the voluntary adoption of responsibility and that's that's like

everyone needs to know that no young person has been taught that for like five generations this is important can

we operationalize this so in your first book you talked about get your room in order yeah one of the first things I do

when I wake up in the morning I look around the kitchen I look around my room and I try and get things in order yeah

and I I now I need that in order to be able to think clearly but it's just a first order of business well it's also a

great R it's a great morning ritual because it's often the case especially if you have a bit of a depressive tilt

that it's kind of hard to get oriented properly in the morning you know and if you take like I moved into a new house a

while back in in Northern Ontario and the garage wasn't set up properly and

the first thing I did in the morning was I went out in the garage for 10 minutes and 10 minutes isn't very long but I

would like order one thing you know part of the tool box or whatever and like if you do that every day Things fall into

order pretty quickly but it was a real relief to me in some way because I didn't have to think about what I was going to do when I woke up I made my bed

and then I went and fixed the garage for like 10 minutes and you get the brain into this into what I call linear

operations like the ability to carry out something linearly when there's an near infinite number of options in your phone

in the in your in your physical space I think is so powerful because it's an antidote to chaos a Target absolutely

certainly isn't a sinful Target you at Le and you know it's not sin to clean your room or to organize your space or

or the garage so so you start with it so within the day one can do that in terms of I um I really uh love

the the stickiness the positive stickiness of this idea that adventure

and responsibility are the same thing well well let's let's take that apart because it's it's not immediately obvious but look when you go let's say

say you go see an adventure movie James Bond movie you know classic archetypal

action adventure movie with some romance thrown in there um what is he doing well

difficult things he's trying to solve crimes he's trying to catch bad guys yeah he's trying to battle with the

forces of chaos that undermine the international order right I mean it's it's high order adventure and he's

putting himself at substantive risk to do that that that's the sacrificial element to it but everybody's gripped by

it well why because the stakes are high what does it mean for the stakes to be

high it means the outcome matters what does that mean it means it's a life and death situation like none of that makes

itself present without the hoisting of a burden and here's something else I figured out so

remarkable so I went to the Church of the Holy sepulture in Jerusalem which is

the first church that was the first Christian Church that was establish lished and hypothetically it was established on the location of the

crucifixion right and so at the center of the church is an altar and at the

center of the altar is the image of this crucifixion right which is a sacrificial image okay crucifixion sacrificial image

altar church then around the church is the community and then that becomes the

pattern for European towns right and all the towns that everyone wants to go visit in Europe have that pattern

okay so why well responsible sacrific is at the core of the

community that's what's dramatized in all that in that architecture in that in

that sacred architecture in the actual in in the in the structure of the

community with its Center well of course sacrifice is the center of the community obviously because Community is a

sacrificial gesture like in so far as you're not all about what you want right

now you're offering up a sacrifice of what it is that you want right now to

the Future and the community clearly and now that's going to integrate you psychologically it's going to integrate

the society and make it productive and it's so interesting that we acted that out for that proposition out for well

the whole at least in so far as you're talking about Christian oriented civilization for the last 2,000 years

without ever really noticing that we were dramatizing the proposition that

sacrifices at the center of the community it's like obviously well what are we to make of you know cities like

San Francisco which I grew up just south of and it you know by any standard it's a beautiful city I know people are going

to like roll their some people roll their eyes I mean you have the bay on one side you have the ocean on the other it has magnificent Bridges I mean it's a

it's a testament to what's possible in a city in terms of diverse Landscapes Etc

but the downtown the center of the city is just Beyond anybody's sense of of of

De indecency to walk down in the in the afternoon hours let alone at night so

that at this point you you wonder like is the center really the center I mean

you you literally have to avoid the center of the city in order to get away from any of that and and it's very yeah

the question is so you're you're asking a symbolic question in some ways like you're asking what is the nature of the

relationship between the the state of society in general and the fact that the centers of

cities have deteriorated well those aren't unrelated not in the least they're very tightly related because the

center does not hold right what's the famous poem from the 1920s the center is

loosened right and mere chaos is around mere chaos is set upon the world I haven't got the quote precisely right

that was TS Elliott he knew that when when the center pillar disintegrates then everything falls into

chaos that's one of the oldest realizations of of humankind the question might be what has caused the

degeneration of this of the center well man you could think about

that the whole culture war is meditation on exactly that question you know

there's an insistence on the postmodern side so the postmodernists they figured

out that we see the world through a story they were right and and that's a devastating blow to the empiricists and

the rationalists because they were wrong we do not build our knowledge in consequence of an aggregation of facts

that's not how it works and a story is something like the prioritization of the

world of facts I heard recently that that religion teaches through story

philosophy teaches through um language that is divorced of story and that

science is designed to try and remove itself from language almost entirely I

mean you'd love to just present graphs and figures but you have to explain what's in those right there's a discussion there's some conclusions but

the idea is that as scientists we're supposed to be objective and just interpret the data as they stand to not

and to not only be informed by the fact to not INF a story but but story is the

the the way that the brain works right I mean beginning middle end um it's also

the thing is the story creeps into science in in what would you say

unavoidably so here let me give you an example so I read a book once that was

written by an X KGB agent who talked about a lab in the in the Soviet Union

where there had was a dreadful accident at one point that resulted in the death of about 500 people they

were trying to produce an amalgam of um

Ebola and small pox yikes and then to aerosolize it oh goodness okay now look

from a strictly scientific perspective value free there's no

difference between pursuing that branch of knowledge and pursuing any other now you say well that's preposterous it's

like yeah yes but it's Preposterous because we know that you can have an evil scientist I

mean Jesus that's the Trope of how many movies is evil scientist a uses evil

scientist as a Trope like the bad guy is almost always an evil scientist right so

it's not like we don't know this so that science itself which is the value free pursuit of facts can be an evil

Enterprise if you're a good scientist the story is always lurking in the background like why are you conducting

your investigation well I want to understand more about the human psyche well why well I want to be of Aid to the

human Enterprise I want to make things better that's the story I want to pursue truth in a manner that makes things

better that's the story part well you and you might say well that's self-evidence like it's only

self-evident when it's working properly when it's not working properly things get bad quick so there were scientists

in Unit 731 when the Japanese invaded China and you cannot read about what

they did without without traumatizing yourself permanently for the rest of your life right what happened with Unit

731 it's the worst human atrocity I've ever seen by a lot and that was the

scientific Enterprise gone astray let's say it has to be encapsulated within a

value structure and the question is well what's the appropriate value structure we're starting to figure that out

because you know I talked to Richard Dawkins about this a little bit one of the things that disheartens Dawkins is

that as the humanistic Enterprise has progressed and as the atheistic impulse

has made itself more manifest The Assault on science and

logic at the universities has intensified cuz his notion was if we could just free oursel from the

superstitions of the past everyone would become like a hybrid between let's say

Newton and bacon and dekart it's like no it turns out that when you destabilize

the underlying story everybody becomes a narcissistic immature psychopath and

they don't make good scientists and like the evidence for that is kind of Stark because I'm sure you've observed like

I've observed that over the last 20 years the scientific Enterprise has

become a lot less reliable than it was well for a number of reasons I mean one of the primary ones in my opinion um and

I'm familiar with the scientific Community is that that that a lot of science is built on lineages and you

know who your advisers were and so forth it relates to funding Etc and it used to be that the primary value with within

and across lineages was to seek out new territory I could tell a lot of stories that would take up hours about great

advisers telling their students to move into new territories which sounded like get out of my field I'm going to

demolish you but instead what they were encouraging them to do was to go on let's use your language New Adventures of responsibility New Frontier but

instead what's happened is that 95% of the scientists in a given subfield all

work on similar problems pin medals on each other validate each other fund each other and as a consequence there are a

lot of untouched problems that will hopefully it somay someday be investigated the other consequence is

that this debacle within the field of Alzheimer's in dementia where one laboratory fudges data and you kind of

wonder if I mean that's not my subfield but I you step back from there you go how the hell this progress for 15 years

where everyone was you know like the emperor has no clothes like everyone agreeing that this is the stuff to work

on when when in fact the data were falsified and people knew people knew so

what that means is that it's like it's like bad family values passed on through generations and these I do think these are well-meaning people along the line

but yeah yes and no little a little bit uh intense on the career formulation

side of things well so right the careerist aspect as opposed to the scientist aspect well well that exist

too well let let's think about let's think about that critically it's like science is a very weird Endeavor because

in order to actually be a scientist you have to put discovering that you're

wrong before demonstrating that you're right and that is hard on your career in

the short term like if you play that game and you're good at it you can discover something real but that's going

to take a while and it's not certain right it's not at all surprising that

people would subvert an Enterprise that difficult to the narrow demands of career enhancement it's exactly what

you'd expect unless there was a stunningly powerful counterveiling force

and that force was powerful enough let's say from 1550

to 1980 so that science worked but that's a short period of time and it's only

happened once and we don't know what conditions had to be in place for people to actually like seriously prioritize

the truth seriously because that's what a serious scientist does and so it's not

surprising that it would degenerate into something like Dynasty and nepotism that's exactly what you'd expect that's

the historical Norm so then you might think well what are the preconditions that have to be in place as narrative

foundation for there to be at least some some people that are prioritizing the truth I think one needs to reward true

adventure and Novelty taking on novel problems and you know these days it's so

hard for a scientist to birth an entire New Field and yet there are huge huge sets of untapped problems the the

challenge for them is it's difficult to get funding to take on things that are truly new you know there's a lot of discussion these days about challenges

with the NIH Etc I think that the biggest challenge regardless of the size of the budget which is also you know an

issue that needs to be dealt with and where where it's spent is that we tend to reward science that's already

completed that fits with the current narrative and it's very incremental they reward incremental science whereas great

science comes through taking great risk and people like you said holding the truth Above All Else and being willing

to stake their careers on it and we need to actually reward failure if it involved effort to solve things

correctly in other words give give young scientists funding and encourage them to go after novel problems and understand

that most of them will fail and that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be exited out of the University

give them a new novel problem to tackle problem is there's so much pressure and you know because you're University

Professor I know you know in order to reach tenure you need to you need to reduce the entropy as much as possible

in any event I without going down that path too too far I now um understand why you're saying that science in has to

invoke story that Mak has to be embedded that makes sense that makes sense otherwise well science is the handmaiden

of some story there's no way around that because motivation is the handmaiden of some story and so the motivational

framework has to be put in place accurately and the motivational framework for scientific inquiry is very

stringent truth above all right so if you state your whole goddamn career on a

particular hypothesis and you run a critical study and it turns out that the reason you're famous is invalid you have

to publish that why the hell would you do that right and the answer has to be

because you hold the truth in relationship to human flourishing higher than the Integrity of your own even your

own self valuation well man that's a very diff that's a very difficult thing

to establish now you can do that with young scientists to some degree because you

can help them understand that as a medium to long-term game

there's nothing better than pursuit of the truth and so that's worth a risk

it's worth a risk because you can be spectacularly successful if you pursue the truth it's unlikely like it's

unlikely to be a successful entrepreneur but if you get it right man you like you've hit the mother load right and you

don't want to falsify your data because you want to spend your whole life pursuing something that doesn't exist

because you will talk yourself into belief that your falsifications are true and then you'll warp the whole field as

you said you Illustrated that in relationship to Alzheimer's disease like you can instill love of the truth in in

your students but you have to believe that's a story

too you have to believe that the truth will set you free right and that's a religious presumption in the final

analysis serve truth it's the best long-term strategy it's the best

adventure that's a good thing to know too it's the best adventure so I made a

triumvirate of Truth responsibility and Adventure saying they're the same thing

and I figured it out with regard to truth too truth is an adventure because if

you what would you say vow to follow the path of the truth you have to let go of

the predictability of the outcome right now if I wanted to manipulate you in some way I would craft my strategy for

this podcast a priority and then I would tilt the podcast toward that end right

and I could be more or less sophisticated at that or I could just say we're going to follow the thread

wherever it goes and I'm going to accept the outcome and I'm going to presume that the outcome is the best outcome

that could possibly have been even if I don't see why okay why is that an

adventure because if I let go of my predetermined goal I don't know what's going to

happen and that's exciting it's right cuz don't know well that's the that's

the essence of Adventure it's like you're bounding over the Uncharted sea let's say and you don't know what's

going to happen next well why would you exchange that for like a kind of banel

predictability well to build your career to I mean I understand why but you're foregoing what's truly valuable for

something that's second rate for something that's secure that's what Abraham did it's like you know it's

better to have the adventure why the hell wouldn't you want that so he left

what was indulgent he had everything for what was truly generative in service to

something larger and dangerous and dangerous like he ends up as a warrior

at one point he has to raise an army to rescue his nephew from the hands of tyrants it's like you know all the

adventures of Life get thrown at him but it turns out that that's what he wants

he wants all the adventures of life to be thrown at him and that is what everyone wants and I think that is you

know the idea that when you go watch the Lord of the Rings for example or The Hobbit you're

seeing the characterization of human personality dramatized like obviously

right that's like a truism but you have to think about what that means it's like The Hobbit is Abraham it's exactly the

same story and that story is the story of the that's the genuine identity of the

individual and the promise is is that if you aim up and you live in the spirit of the truth you'll have the Redemptive

adventure of your life and that'll be of such significance that it'll justify the

suffering that's intrinsic to life and I think that's right I mean when when you look at your own life I

mean you're you're on an adventure you have this podcast it's ridiculously successful right in a way that I'm sure

you couldn't have imagined how long five years ago yeah we we are about to hit the end of four years in a couple weeks

we've been we launched in January 2021 no no premonition could have seen this

or for I had no concept that it would become what it's become right okay and so what what's the existential

consequence of that like you know I mean everyone's life is rif with the possibility of suffering and now you

have something exciting and generative to do why is that working I mean

existentially why does that work you know people will ask me what's next where are you headed and I would just say you know like on well on Friday I'm

talking to Jordan Peterson and I'm focused on that all week long and next week I'm recording a solo podcast C

about whatever it happens to be I just believe that's setting my sights on the proximal and I just believe in um I know

my my deep deep deep love of finding

organizing and disseminating information that I hope will be useful to people

okay so that's it that's that's what that's the driving force behind all of it really okay so great so so I would

say I don't think that that Proclamation I don't think is any different any different from the notion of identity

with the Redeeming Word that's the same idea cuz you said generated generating

ideas right information and disseminating it right so that's like it's valid inquiry and and dissemination

of the consequences okay your claim is that that's highly intrinsically motivating oh yeah right okay so then I

Delight I Delight in it I it's hard sometimes I mean it's I was trying to read a really difficult paper yesterday

it's hard but it it feels so good okay so then we might say well what's what what's the basis for that intrinsic

pleasure we think about that biologically well you could imagine it as a manifestation of

the Instinct that integrates right it integrates you across time it integrates you with other

people across time right and there's a marker for that why wouldn't you find your how could it be otherwise then you

would find your deepest satisfaction in pursuing the course of action that integrates you

psychologically and integrates other people socially like that would assume that there's a concordance between your

deepest self-interest and the interest of your society and it better be that way because otherwise you couldn't

Thrive as an individual in society so it better be that way and we've been doing this for a very long time as human

beings so why we wouldn't have an instinct to mark that pathway and of course we'd find our deepest

satisfaction in that I mean once you once you see these issues through that

light they become I think painfully obvious so because that also because the

contrary hypothesis is absurd it's like you're going to find deep satisfaction what rejecting knowledge and if you do

happen to stumble across a nugget you're going to hoard it for yourself right

well right right exactly it's laughable it's clearly laughable No One Believes that earlier we were talking about

operationalizing um this uh the effort the calling to move from potential chaos

to order starts with organizing one's physical space if we were to you know

extend the um the the rings of the bullseye out a little bit further for people listening who are trying to

figure out like what where where do they receive that calling how how do they find their calling that like where so

responsibility and Adventure being perhaps the um the the compass through which we can you know like navigate

there so they think like well where can they um grab a hold of their responsibility

and and then as a consequence of doing that engage in adventure and have an

impact that is good for them and good for the world that that's how do how do they find that I think there's ve

there's very practical answers to those questions so two of the

most two of the highest order characterizations of the Divine in the biblical library is calling and

conscience and you could think about those you could think about those as integrated manifestations of positive

and negative emotion so imagine there's a pathway forward to your aim okay your

negative emotion tells you when you deviate from the pathway and your positive emotion tells you when you're progressing along the pathway okay now

imagine that there's a voice of your integrated positive emotion and there's a voice of your integrated negative

emotion calling that's what fills you with enthusias iasm and that root word

of that is Theos right deos that's God calling conscience okay so now that

beckons you forward so how do you find that some things bother you those are your problems and you

might think I don't want to have any problems it's like no you've got some problems you can tell that cuz those

things bug you that's your conscience calling you to your destiny those problems okay calling there's some

things that interest you right and you don't get to pick them exactly they just sort of make themselves manifest like

the burning bush did to Moses cuz that's an example that's the symbolic representation of calling it's the

dynamism between calling and conscience that orients people upwards right that's

the pillar of flame and the pillar of Darkness that guides the Israelites across the desert when they're lost

calling beckons conscience provides disciplinary limitations that's a good way of thinking about it so you can see

that some things are good you ask yourself what bothers me about me okay now you have a domain you think

well man some of those things I just I don't know how to fix them fine don't fix them fix some of the things you

could fix that's that we talked about that or make your goddamn bed in the morning like you could do that and it's

like you see people their lives are so chaotic like they're their living environment every single bit of it is a

catastrophic mess some sometimes multiple Generations deep it's just

chaos everywhere it's like where do you start dealing with chaos wherever you can put something in order by your own

standards of order and then see what happens because what'll happen is now you got a little like little corner of order and

now you're a little more well situated and then you'll be able to see what the next what's the next step and you might

think well it looks hopeless because there's just chaos everywhere it's like it's okay hey because the process is

exponential so even if you start nowhere if you keep doubling you're

going to get somewhere and faster than you think and well the same thing applies when you're plummeting into the

abyss un degenerative stuff a colleague of mine who he's geneticist said you

know it takes many many many generations to evolve a species it doesn't take very many to devolve a species mut negative

mutations can build on another and crash a species very very fast I think our psyche is is similar in that

way well that's an anthropic problem there's way more ways to make something complex worse than there are to make it

better right that's why it's a straight and narrow path my father came to this

country from Argentina and he grew up in a lot of uh surrounded by a lot of political chaos came to the country

became a physicist probably because he likes order he's a very orderly Guy and um it was probably in the early 90s that

we went I was born in 75 so probably yeah early 90s that we went to a movie theater uh together to see a movie and

he said it as we were walking in he said look and I said what and he said this is

the beginning of the end and I said what do you mean he said we're degenerating as a society and I said why and he said

there are people here in their pajamas right right and obviously they weren't in their pajamas but they come in in

kind of like bath you know bathroom slippers and they like they weren't slovenly but they weren't taking care of

themselves clearly worse worse care what other people thought right that's right they were making a public display of

their lack of care right exactly EXA that's a narcissistic aspect to that too

yeah yeah he's right about that and I thought at the time like he's being judgmental I was a teen right he's being judgmental Etc and um but you know I

would say from 1990 until fairly recently hopefully things are shifting for the better now but um there has

seemed to be it's kind of chaos out there now I think it's wonderful that people can express themselves by wearing

clothes that they feel represent them Etc but this wasn't that this was a lack of care look voluntary the what would

you say the evocation of voluntary chaos that's one thing the degeneration into

chaos through sloth let's say that's not an adventure that's carelessness in all

things masquerading as an adventure I'm so cool I don't care it's like you're

not cool you're just useless and you're covering your uselessness with a veneer

of revolutionary morality it's like there's nothing in that that's up like if people want to deviate in the manner

they present themselves in dress and they're doing that because they have a inspiration or a purpose then that's

completely different than just being so cool you don't care and that's not cool

there's nothing about that that's cool and you know you might say and you had this sense when you were a kid that your

dad was overreacting it's like yeah well if you look you can see things

before other people see them and he and he came from a place that had gone through a fair number of very rough

times and so he could have been perfectly accurate in what he saw highly likely that's another example

of the center disintegrating right where do you think we are now in uh in the United States I

think right in terms of how we represent hold and represent order versus chaos I

mean we were talking about some of the you know this uh these social media posts recently we just had a a public

public display of an assassination maybe you know I hadn't intended on going there but I think it's worth talking

about um it was weird I got pulled into this through tangential reasons this Luigi manion's last tweet was a podcast

cover of of my episode with Jonathan height um and some media Outlets tried

to make something of that you know but clearly he was very smart

clearly he had for thought to his actions he 3D printed this gun gun it seems is all alleged now but it seems to

be pointing that direction he seems to not want the police to go investigate anybody else you know because he claims there's no one else acting with him Etc

he um clearly was trying to make a statement but the statement was was a combination of statements about the the

um Insurance system um sort of anti-establishment because of his affinity for uh kazinski unibomber

bombings but at the same time he uh he didn't really seem to fall into kind of left leaning or right leaning politics

squarely he was kind of all over the place so you're you're a trained clinician you think there's some

schizotypal or schizophrenic type organization there in his head or lack of organization I mean what are we to

make of this and we and we had to see somebody assassinated shot in the back

multi guess I would say the first thing I would be looking for is pathological

narcissism I disordered thought possibly but he was quite

successful academically like the typical pattern for something like schizophrenic dis dissolution is very very much

difficulty in maintaining so discipline striving in a highly intellectual atmosphere for examp he a valedictorian

he went to school graduated i' think more luciferian grandiosity and the intellect is

particularly prone to that you know the the the the archetypal representation of

the intellect that overreaches is Lucifer right God's God's highest Angel

gone most catastrophically wrong which means that the best thing in its place is the worst thing on the top that

happens with sexuality it can happen with aggression it certainly happens with the intellect and so I think he's a

worshipper of his own intellect and believed that he was the guy who could make the decision even of life and death

which means he took onto himself the role of ultimate judge and that's what the kid who shot up Coline did too and

said in his own writings he's the judge and that's like narcissistic Beyond

Comprehension and the fact that he's being celebrated well that's an echo of that moralizing narcissism that's deeply

embedded in our culture deeply embedded and so yeah it's a very ugly it's very

ugly I see so we're going to what we're now vigilantes in relationship to the

corporate World judge jury and executioner and the reason we've taken on that rule is because we unlike let's

say the people who run healthc care Enterprises we truly care for the sick and oppressed it's like do you know do

you know yeah there's so much moralizing in our culture it's beyond it's really beyond belief I was going to say all

these CEOs now are going to need personal security that's hardly going to you know cause them to adjust their you

know premiums or something downward I mean I think as people get more scared they tend to uh you know up double yeah

they tend to double down I mean earlier we were talking about action at a distance I mean clearly um this Manion

guy has is aware High status so ignored

or notorious there's a hard choice for young men they'll pick notorious many of

them will and no wonder because status is everything it's hard

to do good things over long periods time right it's not hard to be good it's just hard to do big it's hard to do good

things it's hard to do big things I mean I think that's one reason why I'm very happy that Elon is being celebrated you

don't have to agree with him politically but the Rockets going the idea of going to Mars trying to U make sure that our

our species replaces itself I mean these are Big important Endeavors I mean I the

reason well and he can clearly do them I mean he's he's been insanely successful

doing five possible things simultaneously right that's not fluke no

right once probably not fluke even once but you know the probability that it's fluke

once is higher five times no that's that's a reputation right and so he's a he's a

from first principal sort of guy so yeah I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk so and

that is independent of his political stance and is it ult to do good

things well it's hard it's hard it's hard it's hard to do long-term good things because they're longterm that's

what I was trying to say right but it's also intensely the thing is it's also this is that back to that issue of the

relationship between responsibility and Adventure it's like if the aim is true

the voyage is worthwhile and so and that happens right away like you know you're very

successful with your podcast but my suspicion are you've deeply enjoyed it since its onset well so so well that

means that some of your pleasure is satiation related you've become

successful but if that was your aim you would have failed as a podcaster because

definely podast I definitely would have failed oh definitely oh absolutely 100% because it wasn't the pursuit of pleasure per se it's sort of like the

difference between you know is it easier to be the class clown or um the top of the class it's just much easier to be

the class clown all you have to do is crack 10 jokes one of them hits you know and you're you're safe but you're you're

actually dissolving as you go right right right well that's the prioritization of the short term over the long run I mean Rogan's a perfectly

appropriate example because he's sort of like the archetype of the successful podcaster it's like what's Joe doing

well he's doing what he's always done he sits down with his producer one guy and he talks to people he wants to talk to

about things he wants to talk to them about that's the whole thing the whole and it's you know the left the lefties

who refused to talk to people in the podcast world for 10 years are now

proclaiming to everyone who listen that they should have built their own you know alternative media apparatus and

they could have participated in the one that exists now at any time had they shown the least proclivity to do

so how it's not such an easy thing to build because it wasn't something that

Joe built it was something that happened around him in consequence of the nature

of his Pursuit and that's the case for virtually all the successful podcasters

I think people forget how Joe's podcast started do you you might know this story I'll keep it brief but um he was a

comedian at The Comedy Store he had done some television and things of that sort but um and people can find this online

the videos are on YouTube where a comedian was stealing Ari shaffir's jokes so Joe got up on stage and said

there's a there's a um there's some ethics in the comedy community people

can buy jokes but you you don't steal jokes apparently and there's an etiquette as well so apparently he

confronted this guy in front of the audience and said you're stealing his jokes and the guy challenged him and Joe

said no like Joe was stood up in the name of justice for a friend of his and my understanding could be wrong about

this but my understanding is that Joe was then banished from that particular particular Comedy Club so what did he do

he went home he popped open his laptop and he and Brian Redban and a few other folks started what eventually became the

Joe Rogan podcast it came out of a um an Impulse to stand up for the

truth which I think is an important thing for people to understand because it helps you understand Joe um need be

uning in that yeah yeah and and I think yeah and you know he doesn't claim to always be right but his um his pursuit

of the truth has um been a driving force for the podcast he claims consistently

to not be sufficiently right that's why he listens and asks questions you don't

ask genuine questions if you believe that you already know everything you

only ask real questions if you don't think that you know enough and Joe wouldn't be perennially attractive to

his audiences if he wasn't asking the same questions that the audience would like to have answered right he's

genuinely curious absolutely well musk himself said you know when when I

interviewed him he talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was 13 14 which is not atypical

of you know out people with outstanding intellects let's say um and he resolved

that by recognizing that the quest is

the source of meaning and so he took it upon himself self to confront difficult

problems and try to solve them and he found that to be sufficiently gratifying so his existential crisis resolved

itself and that's very much the same pattern that Rogan is exemplifying and

you in your Pursuits and you can see what impact it has on the public you

know and we were I was talking with one of your staff members before this podcast about your lectures say in

Australia and so you're in the weird position where 5,000 people come and listen to a biologist lecture

spontaneously for what 90 minutes like what the hell well that's just an

indication of how compelled people are by anything approximating a genuine Quest it doesn't even matter the

direction right it matters the commitment and that capacity to explore

and transmit and that is a manifestation of the word that redeems I love this idea or what you

just said that it doesn't even so M so much matter the direction as much as the commitment a colleague of mine at

Stanford who I um respect tremendously Anna lmy who wrote the book dopamine Nation she's the head of our dual

diagnosis Addiction Center she was the one who really truly deserves credit for bringing dopamine into the public

discussion over the last few years she initiated that talking about how big inflections in dopamine that are very

fast that aren't preceded by effort AKA drugs of abuse behavioral addictions Etc leave us below Baseline with our

dopamine and then people will engage in more of the behavior it drives us further and further and further that's kind of the the principle of it um I was

talking to her about how people get sober and the conversation turned to how

do young people find their purpose it was it was very interesting she said let's talk about finding purpose

everyone nowadays wants to know what their purpose is and she said the way you find your purpose is by going out on

your front lawn and seeing if the leaves need to be raped sounds familiar right you find purpose by um figuring out how

you can be of use at progressively larger and larger spheres away from

yourself and in doing that and the present and in doing that you start to hear the calling and you find your

purpose and it as you said or it reveals itself to you the same thing right yeah

so I think you two would be enjoy a conversation at some point important thing to return to because people are

often curious about what to do practically it's like okay first this is

what Jacob does Jacob in Old Testament stories he eventually becomes Israel right and so that's his name and Israel

means we who wrestle with God now Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts and

he leaves his home and the perverse influence of his mother and his criminal

betraying past behind and he decides that he's going to aim up and that night

he makes an altar and he makes a sacrifice and that night he has a dream of a staircase that reaches up to heaven

which is now what he's walking up right and so he finds his his

purpose he finds his Adventure as a consequence of his decision to be better

okay so now you want to find your purpose okay first thing you have to do you have to review how wretched and

miserable you actually are and you have to face that and then you have to think

I'd rather not have that and it has to be true and then you have to aim up now

you don't know what that means because like you're pretty scattered and dissolute but at least you got the damn

intent in mind and then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices right along the way okay then

what happens well then the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments

calling is there something around here that I could fix that I would fix that's

a great question is there something hand that I could fix that I would fix it

might be something low cuz especially when you first get going you're not good for anything so you might have to start

with something pretty trivial but it doesn't matter because you start getting better is there something that bothers

me that's conscience that I could set right in some small way well that's there for everyone right in the midst of

the most catastrophic mess that pathway you might even say look The More Mess

Around you the more unstructured possibility you have it had and it's true you know it's like I'm not

trying to be a poly an Ana about this I know how difficult that is but it is the

case that the more mess at hand that you can see the more opportunity that's

there CU well if you can see that it's a mess then you can see the pathway to to

cleaning it up well so do it do it see what happens that's the adventure what's

going to happen in my class I my maps of meeting class I used to have students do

this as a project and one of the projects was find something around you in your neighborhood wherever in your

family that isn't set right and see if you could set it right just write down what happens well one student in

particular he decided his mother had died and the family kind of fragmented and so he decided he would take try to

take on the role of mother you know be responsible for the household operating

well grew him up like mad as you can imagine he ran into all sorts of weird resistances right cuz his family was

upset that he was doing what mom used to do and like he just had a tremendously complex Adventure as a consequence of

his willingness to pursue this was obviously necessary because the alternative was that his family was

going to fall apart it's like that's there for everyone you say well my circumstances are so difficult it's like

fair enough so are everybody else's by the way but that means there's a lot of man yes I fix it a bit and that's

ridiculously entertaining and unpredictable and that in itself is a great deal you have no idea what's going

to happen just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast why' you start it I had it for me I felt

a compulsion um to share what I knew but because during the pandemic everyone was

so focused on vaccines and lockdowns that no one was talking about the reality that everyone was facing

including sorry Josh Gordon I know him through time um our director of the

National Institute sub mental health not a single thing out there about hey folks if you're going to be indoors this much

get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning or else you're going to have trouble sleeping trouble sleeping equates to mental health issues stress

uncertainty my lab was working on ways to regulate stress through deliberate

breathing through other mechanisms it was like well I want people to have tools zero cost tools to deal with their

stress us to help them regulate their circadian biology because those Wick out to countering the negative forces that

were on us which are social order was disrupted people are at home so it was a desire to give people tools that I knew

existed that I was knowledgeable about and I had a a longstanding kind of and

growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about Neuroscience because it's so darn cool right okay so it's a logical there

there was a lot of energy behind the the the mission but then there was a calling the calling was from hearing about people suffering it's like well of

course you're not sleeping well I mean not only are there a million things to worry about right now people aren't working Etc but you're not getting

sunlight in your eyes you need to get outside you need to you know and then there's the whole socialization thing and look whatever people's circumstances

there are things that they could do and so I felt that calling and my conscience told me that I have the knowledge so why

would why would I Cloister it cloer with it at home that's like what good is that so I just started blabbing on the

internet right right that's yeah well that's a that's a perfectly

you know you can think well that's a logical extension of your subsidiary calling to be a teacher and a professor

you're already a researcher you're already a professor so you're investigating and transmitting knowledge it's like well looks like you could do

that on a broader scale and the technolog is there why not explore that

that's a perfectly reasonable and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience there that's a lovely way of

characterizing the voice of the Divine which is is how it's characterized repeated Elijah Elijah is the prophet

who is appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount in the New Testament it's Elijah and Moses Elijah

is the first person in human history who identifies the Divine with conscience that's his contribution that's a major

psychological Revolution right it's an unheralded transformation in

understanding it's like it's not the storm it's not the forest fire it's not the earthquake it's not the god of

nature nature he's the originator of the phrase the still Small Voice right like

that's a that the notion that you're conscience is the voice of the Divine my God there's there's there's virtually no

dis no Discovery there's no proposition more revolutionary than that and so

that's why Elijah is a prophet of you know primary status and I just see no

reason at all not to take that claim seriously it's like you come up with an explanation for your conscience it tells

you things you don't want to hear so how is that you I I mean you have to

gerrymander the definition of you for that to be you no I absolutely believe

that things come from outside of us certainly for me and I you know I I'm now very much a devotee of prayer I pray

before this podcast what do you pray well before this podcast I prayed for um

Clarity of mind to be able to um to learn from you and to help transmit that

knowledge to people in a way that would be useful to them yeah to um for sustained Focus for um for the ability

to also let go and and not try and control or or lead with questions and to

um and to allow the the um a sense of of Randomness and

Serendipity to to make it what it what it is in trusting that it's in service to the the listeners right well that's a

very that's a very precise and properly formulated prayer yeah I pray before every podcast I pray before going to

sleep Beach and I've been doing this for about um for a little over a year I always quietly SEC secret why why did

you decide to do that my coming to the whole notion of prayer and God Etc um

was complicated in the backdrop in the sense that I always secretly prayed um

always secretly secretly prayed and then about a year about a year and a half ago

a guy that works on my security team um started talking to me about the Bible we started talking about God and it made

sense I started reading the Bible I'm not through it yet um and I started praying and I had a number of

experiences as a consequence of praying clearly as a consequence of of prayer that made me realize that prayer

doesn't give me a capacity of any sort it just allows certain things that I believe are inside of me to to uh to

come out and for proper prayer establishes aim yeah that's right oh yeah well why wouldn't you establish

your aim like why wouldn't you take a moment before you start your podcast to remember what the hell you're trying to

accomplish and to have it firmly in mind yeah and and it felt different so I should say that you know I I have this

little list that I sometimes do I'll say you know uh deliberate breathing AK breath work can allow you to shift your

state hypnosis is a tool that can allow you to solve a particular problem because it has some you know aspect of

neuroplasticity we there um non-sleep deep rest which is a thing that was you know built out of this this practice

called yoga nedro where you go into a an awake but deeply relaxed state allows you to restore your Vigor meditation to

me is a way of of enhancing one's ability to focus you know a thirde eyye meditation of concentrating your breath

Etc I mean we know based on the data improves Focus prayer to me is entirely different than all of those there's some

overlap that they they they look similar some of them look similar from the outside prayer is the the

for me is the allowing of something from TR truly outside me to come through me

and bring out the best it in me and that's why I pray for four things I pray

for Ability I pray for other people and I also have learned that a powerful

aspect of prayer is just listening because just stopping and listening and trying to um invite in or allow in

messages that um if I didn't steal myself that I wouldn't here and sometimes I'll go to sleep and then the

next morning something will will come to mind it's not always immediate well I don't think there's any real difference

between that and Revelation so imagine that

um what speaks to you in intuition is the voice of your aim now this this would

be this would be true if your thoughts and the images that appear to you are

tools so to speak to orient you towards your destination well obviously they have to be that

because if your thoughts and your Visions let's say didn't Orient you towards your destination they would be

useless and you'd never get anywhere okay so now you specify your aim and it

is the voice of that aim that will make itself manifest to you that is what a revelation is and one of these days when

we have a podcast I'd like to sit down and talk to you about the relationship the formal relationship between thought

and prayer because I think thought is secularized prayer I'm I I we looked at

it histo because like when did we start to think that's not so obvious you know

I mean we started to think in words after we developed the ability to use language what's that 1 15,000 years

maybe it's longer than that no one really knows but thought has its historical Origins the probability that

it emerged from something like prayer as far as I can tell is 100% but I'd like to at some point it's complicated but

I'd like to have a discussion with you about that so imagine that to have an in

to have an informative intuition means that you posit a

question like and that's a form of humility it's like there's something I

need to know that I don't know that I could know that I'd like to know it's like so you set the stage well once you

set the stage the probability that a creative idea will enter the theater of your imagination is much enhanced that's

the first stage of Revelation then you have to assess that that's discriminating the spirits you might say

you're separating the wheat from the chaff that's critical thinking but all of that as far as I can tell is

something approximating secularized prayer set your aim then observe the manifestation of

that aim that it's not it's not even magical it's how your perception works

now there's a magic to it because I suppose the magic is that you can think up something you never thought

up before how the hell do you do that it's more like you experience it right you set your aim you have a question so

you're on your knees hoping for an answer the light bulb goes on well if

that's not Revelation then what the hell is it it's the same thing having spent a good portion of my

career digging around in brains recording from neurons slicing up brains staining brains and from my

understanding of what of neuros science and I think by now in 2020 almost 2025

we have a fairly good understanding of what different brain areas do how different circuits interact um I don't

see how anyone who's really interested in how humans work can um not

believe in God and I'm not being disparaging of people that don't I know people that are atheists I have some in

my family um and I just don't think that the human brain and mind is capable of

understanding and managing itself as well as it possibly could in the absence

of a concept of God in prayer and I think there's a lot of uh historical

evidence to support that statement meaning that this notion of God has been around a very long time this is not a

coincidence I mean humans have discarded many of the things that you know other people perhaps came up with this has

been a a stable feature of Being Human for a very long time of societies for a very long time and I've

been wanting to ask you um throughout today's conversation to what extent do you think the different religions and

the way that they represent God differently or in the case of Christianity God and Jesus

Christ to what extent do you think that the stories and the lessons and the

teachings overlap at the level that we're talking about today which is really about a psychological and

neuroscientific level seems to me that they all Converge on the same themes but I'm not you know I'm somewhat of a

newbie to all to to formal prayer and and to reading the Bible and so on so I like to say you know I have I haven't

gotten my jersey yet because I don't deserve it but I'm I'm putting in I'm showing up to practice you know this kind of thing so I'm just curious to

what extent you see consistent themes across religions and maybe even to atheism too like atheism it's been

argued as its own form of religion perhaps right and for anyone listening I mean I want to make clear like

the there's I don't have any push back on atheism it's just that for me

adopting uh really coming to terms with a a real belief in God and adopting a prayer practice every single night and

also during the day many times and always before a podcast has been just tremendously beneficial to my life so

that's why I'm going to continue to do it um why I wouldn't I but that's the question to what extent do different the

way that different religions represent God you think across religions Converge

on common themes well I think they converge substantively I mean I think the best I talked to Camille pelia about

this a few years ago maybe she's she's one of the world's foremost literary

theorists and she said something very interesting to me that was quite surprising she said that had the academy

turned to Eric nyman who is yung's greatest student by the way instead of

Fuko the whole history of of the university and the intellectual Enterprise over the last five decades

would have been entirely different what happened with Fuko well Fuko is the most cited cited scholar who ever

lived and Fuko believes that the story that we act out is one of power and

that's wrong it and it's not just wrong it's like perversely and dangerously wrong I think it's technically wrong

wrong as well as being ethically wrong partly because power does not provide a

stable basis for psychological integration or social Unity it's just it's not it power might be more

effective adaptively than capitulation and

dependence but it's not an optimized solution not by any stretch of the imagination and I think the

data demonstrating that I think it's and I outlin that in in in this book we

who wrestle with God Eric neyman Carl Yung Mach eliat a

host of others outlined the patterns of religious thinking and it took the most

of the 20th century to do that and they found recurring themes that are profound so what one example the ancient

Egyptians worshiped a god Horus everyone knows the god Horus because the his

emblem is the ie the Open Eye well what does that mean it means in part that the

ancient Egyptians worshiped attention and they felt that the god of

attention was the antidote to the pathological State and they were right about that I

mean they had a god of the pathological state that was Seth the god Seth the

name Seth became Satan through the Coptic through the Coptic Christian

so they believed that the degenerate state had a spirit and the antidote to the spirit of the degenerate state was

the allseeing the allseeing upward striving

eye and that's right it's like they nailed that sounds like what you were saying before where you set your sights

where you set high and to the to the heavens and then to the most proximal

thing that's going to deliver you to the next rung well and there's a difference between attention and thinking like

attention is a quest if you're paying attention you're looking you're seeking you're knocking you're asking right and

the Eternal promise is that if you ask you'll be answered and if you seek

you'll find and it's the the ey is the gateway to that and it's the antidote to

the degenerate State because the degenerate State the totalitarian state

insists and tyrannizes and the open eye seeks well the Egyptians figured this

out and they the Egyptian theology had a walloping impact on Jewish theology I

mean the Jews came out of Egypt like there are concept that's that's a

conceptu there are consequences of that conceptually as well as historically the

the her the pattern of the hero's journey that's replicated I would say that's the central pattern of story per

se and that makes itself manifest in perhaps all cultures that have managed any unity and any progress

whatsoever is there a hierarchy of religious truth yes in just as there's a hierarchy

in literary depth we understand that a a dimore romance is not as profound as a

dovi novel we know there's a hierarchy of depth and you can arrange religious apprehension in terms of a

hierarchy of quality and I think the Union school did that brilliantly brilliantly and biologists should know

it in Far More depth the best neuroscientists of emotion and motivation that I knew and that include

Yak PP they knew the the the work of ilad for example would you which of

those readings would you recommend for somebody who's interested in Psychology and Neuroscience explained at that level

I would start with the sacred and the profane by by ilad and also

um Eric neyman's book uh the Origins and history of Consciousness that's a harder

one because it's unless you know the lingo of that school it's hard to it's

hard to understand what he's aiming at if you understand that he's aiming at he's

he's elaborating on the symbolism of The Adventurous Spirit that's a good way of thinking about it it's a technical

analysis of the structure of heroic expansion of personality but it it's an

easier way in is through ilot sacred and the profane short book you

could you would read it now knowing that the gods that ilad describe as Waring in

the Pagan world are in part manifestations of the personality of

motivational drive and the mapping of that war across times that's the war of the Gods in heaven which is a very

common mythological Trope there's a war that integrates towards a monotheism and ilot to trct that in multiple cultures

and that's very it's very much worth knowing because it explains it explains

the symbolism of the emergence of the integrated literate human psyche across

tens of thousands of years that's captured in story so imagine this here's

a way of thinking about it so tribe A Tribe B tribe C now they all have their

highest deity or their panoply of deities now they unite okay so as they

unite they fight they compete and they cooperate they kill each other they cooperate and trade at the same time

that's happening there's a war in the space of ideas between their respective deities and you could think about the

human beings acting out that war just as you could think about the war the abstraction reflecting the conflict on

Earth well there's a pattern to that conflict that pattern is quite stable across cultures it tilts towards a

monotheistic unity in so far as the multiplicity of cultures unifies well

obviously like what are they going to unify with in the absence of conceptual Unity I don't think so and why wouldn't

it be that the movement towards that conceptual Unity which is the establishment of a larger scale

civilization would involve the battle between ideas of the Divine and their

integration into something resembling a Unity like clearly well that's part of the Proclamation let's say of the

analytic psychologists that were all part of Carl school and the academy just

ignored that entirely except for Camille Pia who understands this quite profoundly and went in the direction of

Fuko these are these lineages that we were talking about before it's it's hard for people to appreciate just how

powerful these academic lineages are and scientific lineages are because they they set trajectories I've been yeah and

they Define what's forbidden like all my all the people that advised me as a

graduate student even those who had my best interest firmly in mind told me to never talk about my interest in Union

psychology really yeah sorry I'm laughing cuz it's so Preposterous yeah well I and and like it it it's not

surprising I mean I always did when I went for job interviews and that

definitely was part of what scuttled at me at some of the places I interviewed

now fortunately they hired me at Harvard and so I was what I was discussing was

verboten in many places but not there so you know that worked out quite nicely

for I was going to say clearly it worked out I've been I've been meaning to ask you I've been reading a a really interesting book um recently that's uh

Bas basically grounded in adarian Psychology yeah I'm I wasn't familiar with adarian psychology yeah Adler's

very practical the book talks about Adler as a as a Counterpoint to Freud and Yung what's the book um the book is

called the courage to be disliked and I highly recommend it to everybody it was

actually written by Japanese author I think there are two Japanese authors it didn't get quite so popular in this country but it it had a big following um

in Japan and I think in other places in uh in Asia and um the book is is set up

as a conversation between essentially a philosopher at of adarian psychology and a student um who's challenging him so

it's a conversation that raises all the all the challenges that one that would come to one's mind if you were to be

presented with this idea of Life tasks and that we're supposed to discard with our thoughts about prior trauma and just

figure out what are our tasks now right right and I I like the practicality of

it Adler's very practical yeah I like that was just curious what your thoughts were about that the it seems to fit

quite well with your your Notions and what you've talked about in multiple books including the most recent one um

the one that's out now about getting really serious about what your tasks are

at this moment in time and embracing those tasks as a way to progress forward as opposed to um floundering in Notions

about the the past and I think it it might it might hit some people Square upside the head when when there's I think one of the chapters opens with the

words there's no such thing as trauma which is clearly not true but the whole idea is to to prompt a different way of

thinking and to let people start to drill into like okay what do I need to

do now regardless of what my parents did or didn't do right regardless of my

damaged self and I I must say I really like the book well I would say I should say I I really like I should say I

really like the concept embracing task while agonizing over the meaning of life

and what one is to do yes well Adler was the most practical of the small crowd

that aggregated around Freud and so yung's take was that Freud focused on

sex and Adler focused on Power and Yung focused on what transcended both and I

think that's right now Adler is a good repost to Freud in exactly the way you described if you like that book and

you're interested in all three of them let's say there's a great book called discovery of the unconscious which was

written by a man named hre elenberger who was the foremost exponent of existential psychology in the 1950s

brilliant brilliant scholar and it is the best analysis of Freud Jung and Adler that's ever been written by a lot

and it's it's a truly great book he also traces the idea of the unconscious back

350 years before Freud so it's a masterful study but I liked Adler and he

was much less charismatic than Freud and Yung and so his star didn't shine as brightly but he's very practically

oriented and much of his thinking would what would you say fits quite nicely

with a bottom with the same kind of bottom up approach that a more behaviorally oriented psychotherapist

would employ so look it's it's it's there are some

people if you're if you're engaging in a therapeutic process with someone there

are people who are best engaged with at the level of concept those are people

are high in trait openness not everyone's like that in fact most people aren't like that yungi

and psychology works really well on highly creative people and almost all yung's clients were creative because

they wouldn't have come to him otherwise and there's also people for whom sexual

dysfunction and Trauma are the primary what would you say say the the

primary preoccupation of their life and the past and Freud serves them well

Adler is very practical and if you're looking for a psychologist to help

you figure out how you could advance from where you are now he's he's he's

got plenty of things to say that are good he also wasn't as good a literary stylist as young Yung or Freud so that

also put him off to the side to some degree but anyways a deep deeper investigations can certainly be found in

discovery of the unconscious and if for anybody listening and watching who's interested in psychological ideas

broadly and would like familiarity with the psychoanalytic tradition Freud Jung

and Adler let's say primary there is not a better book than discovery of the unconscious it's really a work of Genius

you know what's missing from the literature thank you for those by the way is a really excellent up-to-date

book on neuroscience and the mind and psychology perhaps we write one together

yeah yeah well that's that's me it's just not out there I mean there textbooks on Neuroscience there's some there's a lot of discussion as you know

about Free Will lack of Free Will depending on which author you're paying attention to but um there isn't really a

satisfactory book about the brain the mind and psychology this just doesn't

exist yeah the closest one I ever encountered probably is affective Neuroscience panp book he's uh I'm So I

must say um you've mentioned pup a few times and and Yak Pang uh as some of you may know but perhaps

most of you don't is was such a gift to science and the fact that I think the first time I heard you lecture in one of

your YouTube lectures you mentioned Yak Pang up and I thought okay like this guy knows knows the good stuff because he

was the first one to talk about juvenile play as a way of exploring circuitry and social dynamics such such and that fit

by the way that fit perfectly with PJ's observations of childhood socialization

it's like I I came across panks up and I thought oh that's so cool now we have the psychophysiological basis for pan

developmental theory was perfect yeah so that was that was lovely concordance YP

would have been uh far more recognized had he bit he was at Bowling Green University I think and so smaller

University perhaps I don't know I didn't ever hear a lecture maybe not as charismatic as some of the other luminaries of of neuroscience at that

time but yeah I don't know how he was as a lecturer he's a great writer and man he had an uniring eye for the right

problems in in terms of psychological investigation and very brave in that regard I mean he studied laughter in

rats and you think oh of all the absurd things to focus on it's like no you just

don't understand where the goal is or play among rats who cares that rats play well like that would be the sort of

research proposal that would be pillared by sensible Republicans looking to trim government waste it's like no that was

the heart of the matter right rats organized their social hierarchy through play not through Force right that's a

big Discovery like that's I think he should have won a Nobel Prize you too yeah he he should have won a nail for a

variety of his discoveries but that one in particular like rats have an implicit

morality that's a that's a major league disc and it's based on play WoW stunning

and we see the same thing in kids obviously and then well we see the same thing in chimpanzees like it's pretty

strange to understand that dominance hierarchies if they're functional are often organized in consequence of play

not force like so much for uh Fuko when you look on out on the

landscape of social media um do you see elements of that as well that there's

sort of a playfulness among uh people that's establishing a hierarchy it seems like elon's having a good time with his

rockets and his X and Tesla and I think I think that there is I think that the

antithesis of of tyranny is play it took me a long time to realize that like I've

been studying evil intensely since I was about 13 and evil is easier to Define

than good it's it's it's hard to find a category that integrates all that's good

that's that you can point to Simply but it

has the fact that play is the antithesis of tyranny seems to be a pretty good summation like pep showed for example

that play wouldn't emerge among animals if they were possessed by any other motivational state things have to be set

up very carefully before play will emerge your house is optimally structured if your children

can play your marriage is optimally structured if you're playing house with your wife and I think that that reality

of the what would you say the optimally superordinate nature

of play that makes itself manifest when you're watching someone who's a master at their task and musk is playing and

hopefully that will you know and Trump plays too it's one of the things that made me less uncertain about

him he's deadly funny now it's rough he

plays rough no doubt about it but he's ridiculously he's got a ridiculously

comic touch and that's not something that's generally characteristic of you

know Psychopathic dictators Hitler wasn't known for his sense of humor let's talk about sense of humor if you

don't mind um because um I think it's something that's sorely lacking in a lot

of the uh discourse among adults um so to speak and I think these days I think

a lot about what young people are observing a few years back I I was watching this show I didn't like it um

called forgive me because I think the actor was quite good um but the show was Californication with David dukovany and

I realized this show is all about the adults acting like children and the children acting like adults oh yeah

that's that's a typical Hollywood inversion and I thought um this is terrible um not because I'm some sort of

moral Avenger or something but it just it was sort of like the question I've been asking myself a lot over the last

few years is like who are the adults in the room like who's actually regulating all this stuff that's happening

everyone's in disagreement people are are misbehaving in the kind of worst of ways um by you know not treating each

other with respect um occasionally you'd see a discourse that would felt like meaningful and structured or um

explorative in the real sense like people were there to learn I think that's been one of the successes of of your work and of Rogan's work and I like

to think you know my podcast as well Lex fredman certainly and others right um

sometimes people use comedy sometimes people use Neuroscience as as a as a probe but in any case but you know I've

been concerned that there there isn't this kind of like enjoyment

of discourse between people that disagree in a way that includes forgiveness or like ah you got like good

one like you got me or you know and and um it seems like it it's degenerated

into things that are so nasty and it's sort of like people are entering the game if you could even call it that with

a refusal to shift like like that's not a debate that's there's nothing playful

about it like you have to be willing to have a winner and a loser and you have to be willing to be either one if you're going to engage in real in in real

discourse in real play and to me um it it's like okay I can manage seeing all

that or participate or not participate to the extent that I want but for young people it's got to be really discouraging it's like you either dunk

on somebody or get dunked on well you know I guess the optimistic repost to

that would be the fact that the people that you're pointing to like Rogan who is a comedian like many of the people

who've become become extremely successful as podcasters Constantine kissen Russell Brand Dave

Rubin um Crowder Steven Crowder pH vaugh

that's a lot of comedians so there's a lot of play in the alternative media and a lot of young people are being informed

by the alternative media so I think there's genuine room for optimism there

um and there's plenty of play in those podcasts now a group of us eight years ago seven

years ago put out an offer to the Democratic powers that be to invite the

Democrats to come and talk to us Ruben was part of that Rogan was part of that if I remember correctly I'm quite

certain of it I was part of that Shapiro was part of that this was a genuine invitation which was extended many times

in serious Ways by people who are very well connected among the Democratic Elite and that came to nothing they want

no part of it nope they'd speak to me for example privately never publicly virtually never almost without exception

all the while the alternative media was gaining more and more power all the while we were telling them this isn't

optional your Legacy Media foothold is dying wake up well Rogan for example you

can could imagine that he would be on board with such a thing because he's not precisely your stereotypical Republican

no well no not at all right people will people will call him that they try and you know manosphere bro whatever that it

doesn't it the reality Falls so far from when you not true at all it's not true

yeah so so there is plenty of play and and I so I think we can be positive about that and and I think young people

too have seen how successful that could be I mean Rogan and his codery let's say

wiped out the Legacy Media well so you can see what the spirit of playful Adventure can do in a

very short period of time now there's technological reasons for that too but technological reasons are not it's

still a stunning phenomenon and a stunning accomplishment and a very positive one as far as I'm concerned and

hopefully it will continue yeah the power pendulum has definitely swung in a different direction well that became

Stark starkly obvious when Rogan interviewed Trump that was

the death nail of the Legacy Media it certainly elevated podcasts and their their impact and significance across the

board well I think it demonstrated the fact that they had been elevated right it was just it was it was evidence of

that was that was so conclusive that there was no longer any way of qu of of

questioning it even the CNN pundits and so forth who were very resistant to that

as a hypothesis changed their tune very rapidly well it was interesting because

Rogan's conversation with Trump was a serious one Theo's conversation with Trump was a mixture of serious and less

serious and um I mean I couldn't help but smile big when um at the

inauguration the thanks went out to a number of people including Theo vau I mean if you think about this you think

good for Theo so fun I'm yet to meet him I I hear he's I really like Theo is so great because Theo

is like he's he's Backwoods hick to the core right seriously underclass

background and it's real and he's so bloody smart and so it's such a fun

combination because he's got this it's pretty easy if you're elitist to you

know be be what derisive about the in his back woodsy stick but man there's a

sec there's a First Rate mind lurking behind that that it's not a Persona

because it's actually him too you know I can relate to that to a large degree because you know I came from a very

small town way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and so I have plenty in common with Theo but it's it's very

funny to watch it's very funny to see him do this successfully it's ridiculously and preposterously comical