How to Best Guide Your Life Decisions & Path | Dr. Jordan Peterson
Huberman Lab · 30 Dec 2024
Source: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/dr-jordan-peterson-how-to-best-guide-your-life-decisions-path
Transcript: https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/huberman-lab/how-to-best-guide-your-life-decisions-path-dr-jordan-peterson-bda8c5/ (via OpenNash Podcasts, machine-generated)

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Jordan Peterson. Dr. Jordan 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, 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 discussed 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 for moving forward in life towards one's best possible outcomes. And I'm certain that by the end of today's discussion, you'll be thinking about your own neural circuits, that is the connections in your brain that drive emotions, thoughts, and behavior, as well as your psychology, your different states of mind, and you are going to have a number of different tools and frameworks with which to apply all that knowledge toward the best possible outcomes.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has twenty eight grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar.

That's right, twenty eight grams of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein. These bars from David also taste amazing. My favorite flavor is chocolate chip cookie dough, but then again, I also like the chocolate fudge flavored one, and I also like the cake flavored one. Basically, I like all the flavors. They're incredibly delicious. For me personally, I strive to eat mostly whole foods. However, when I'm in a rush, or I'm away from home, or I'm just looking for a quick afternoon snack, I often find that I'm looking for a high-quality protein source.

With David, I'm able to get twenty eight grams of protein with the calories of a snack, which makes it very easy to hit my protein goals of one gram of protein per pound of body weight each day, and it allows me to do that without taking in excess calories. I typically eat a David bar in the early afternoon or even mid-afternoon if I want to bridge that gap between lunch and dinner. I like that it's a little bit sweet, so it tastes like a tasty snack, but it's also giving me that twenty eight grams of very high quality protein with just 150 calories.

If you would like to try David, you can go to Davidprotein dot com slash huberman. Again, the link is Davidprotein dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in both your short and long-term health is your body's ability to manage blood glucose or blood sugar.

To maintain energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose steady without big spikes or crashes. I first started using Levels about three years ago as a way to understand how different foods impacted my blood glucose levels, and it's proven incredibly informative for determining my food choices, when I eat specific foods, and how I time eating relative to things like my workouts, both weight training and cardiovascular training, things like running, and when to eat before I go to sleep to allow for the most stable blood sugar throughout the night.

Indeed, using levels has helped shape my entire schedule. So if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a c g m yourself, you can go to levels dot link slash huberman. Levels has just launched a new c g m sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than before. Right now, they're also offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's levels dot link, spelled l i n k slash huberman, to try the new sensor and two free months of membership.

And now for my discussion with doctor Jordan Peterson. Doctor Jordan Peterson, welcome. Thank you, sir. Delighted to have you here and want to talk about elements within your new book, 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 sort of 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, appetitive 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

Well, we should talk about animals. the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization, 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 I'd like to explore that with you because it's crucial.

Great. Well, 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 as a circuit that can say, and here I'm borrowing from a previous guest who's a neurosurgeon, it can say, shh, 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. So circuitry Yeah.

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 nurture, because of the immense neuroplasticity that occurs in the first twenty five years plus of life, but especially those first years of life. And then, of course, we have neuroplasticity, this incredible gift that humans have more of than any other species as far as we know, which is we can decide to make changes. Now the reason I lay out this framework as opposed to starting with a question is because there are so many amazing questions that you ask in this book.

You know, we who wrestle with God, I mean, trying to wrap our arms and minds around this huge set of questions, and it occurred to me to just step back from all of that and ask, is part of the reason that we have a concept of God, that there are multiple religions, is that the consequence of some humans at some point realizing, or perhaps God himself realizing, that what we are equipped with as humans, which we just described, is insufficient to allow us to evolve as a species and be the best version of ourselves.

I think this, for me, really is like the central question of at least my life, which is to what extent do I need to intervene with my default settings, rewire them, engage that prefrontal cortex, and, you know, push down on some appetitive 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 forty nine 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 Well, we to our best we kinda we kinda outcome.

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 twenty five year socialization window. And what that means is that we have to interact with other people and our traditions in order to set us right. And that's so complex it takes twenty five 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, uh, 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 Piaget, because Freud's model, superego, is really an inhibition model, and Freud was a neurologist.

Piaget's model is very different. He thought of the properly socialized person as someone who had integrated their lower order, 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 I'll give you an example from my own life. My son was quite a willful young child when Wonder where he was two.

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's 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 Piaget's point, and he's absolutely right about this, is that that's much better conceptualized as integration. And then with regard to the impulse, because I said I would return to that. I I spent a lot of time walking through the behavioral literature, right? And a lot of that was derived from animal experiments, and it was predicated on the idea that if you could explain something on the basis of a deterministic reflex, you should, and there's some there's something to be said for that hypothesis.

Don't make your theory any more complex than it needs to be. How far can you get with a theory of chained reflexes as 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 s the the psychoanalytic theory of religious endeavor. It's much better to think of those lower order motivational states as personalities. They're 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 two 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, superego regulation, 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 time out. Now, time out is an effective disciplinary strategy for social creatures because we don't like isolation, and so time out basically takes child, puts the child in isolation. That produces a pain-like response because social isolation produces It's pure inhibition, pain. 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 a human organism is comes into the world with with a a warring 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 amygdala 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 eighteen 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 two year old would be, because you have to take other people into account if you're going to be successful. So you and this is where the cortex comes in, as far as I'm concerned, this is what it's doing.

It's stretching the it's integrating the lower order, 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. Right. That's a crucial And right, and issue. 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? Any time a neurosurgeon is stimulated neurons in a little subarea of the hypothalamus, you get either rage or sexual appetite or, uh, mating with inanimate objects. I mean, this was done in both, uh, non-human primates and in Uncontrollable humans, uncontrollable thirst.

thirst, hunger, total suppression of hunger. I mean, all the basic drives are operating in Exploration. there, like switches. And prefrontal cortex has direct access to it, to the hypothalamus, and prefrontal cortex is context dependent learning, context dependent decision making. And I love that you brought in this notion of changing an impulse in the example that you gave in your son's impulse to be aggressive or wild in some way that was inappropriate for the home environment at that moment.

And two things that you said, 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 even thrive, right? It's right.

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 when you were two, especially if you're tilted a little in the aggressive direction, you will not make friends, and you will be isolated and alienated for the rest of your life. So that two year old impulsiveness that has its place.

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 you want to have friends. And so the reason you're s you're s 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 s 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, cause you no one like you otherwise. Well, what's the problem with that? Well, first of all, we're hyper 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, right?

Could you give me an example?

Well, the God of war, Mars, that's rage. That was a god that the Vikings in invoked before they went into battle. They would use Amanita Muscaria, and they imitated predators, right? From This is a an early age.

mus this is a acetylcholine, by the way, folks, as to general receptor sys systems, the nicotinic system, which is a stimulant, but also relaxes you. That's why people like nicotine, um, and then the muscarinic system, which, um, creates, uh, uh, changes in our, um, self perception and perception of the things around us. Um, it's not so much a stimulant as it, um, it's a hm, I would veer towards a almost like a psychedelic, or an it it has a a, um, uh, 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,

yeah, yeah, it's it's outside the the LSD, psilocybin, mescaline domain, but Some people would take there

this this as an agent, the Vikings, the Vikings would take this as an

it's a technology. agent before going into Sure, because what they were into 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 berserk. That means to wear the bear shirt, right? They transformed themselves, so to speak, into predators.

they would narrow the context within which they're, um, I'm calling them impulses, but you're giving a more sophisticated explanation for them. Th- within which they're the aggressive impulse, the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled. Right, given Because that what

full rein, given full rein, right? They were experts at to be able that.

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 for example.

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'd, uh, you you would give you nightmares to think about it deeply, Yeah, there's right?

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 postdoc, Da-Yu Lin, discovered a small, tiny, tiny collection of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus that when stimulated, would send these animals, these mice - you can find videos of this online - into a rage. Now, the interesting thing is, is it required the presence of another mouse?

And or

So it's still somewhat context

it somewhat context dependent. 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 calm. We can put a link to this in the show notes 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 of neurons and behaviors. And it and it speaks to, I think, some of the things that, uh, Freud and and others have talked

Oh, definitely.

about in terms of the But he did 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, uh, 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 too shall pass, the past, the present, and the future. It tends, uh autonomic activation, stress, panic, fear, anger, tend to make shrink. 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.

Yes, 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 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 95% 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 hi and it's hyper exploratory. Now that's a that's a very strange thing, whereas a cat with no brain is hyper exploratory. It's not what you think at all, but it 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 in 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, they're 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 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 o over a long period of time with other people, right? Well, you need more and more brain to calculate that, right? And so a huge part of what maturation is, is when we think about it as the capacity to forego gratification. Actually, what's happening is that as you mature and your cortex comes online, let's say, you're able to regulate your behavior with more and more other things taken into account, right, right?

And you know that there has to be some 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, and that is something like the tension between the individual and the group. You might say, that's how the Rousseauians or the Freudians would think about it.

So the weird thing about that is that it's not useful to a 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's 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 two 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 and they don't care about the the we, uh, which or the is or the future.

future. See, see, one this is one of the ways I caught on to this relationship was I would 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. 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 and betraying someone else. It's exactly the same mechanism.

Very much a toddler, toddler.

It's to it well, so here's something I learned in in Montreal. I worked with a man named Richard Trombley there, and Richard, I think Richard's lab used up one third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time. He 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 moved towards was that one observation was that if you take two year olds, if you take kids at different ages, you could imagine you made a group of two year olds, three year olds, group of four year olds, all the way up to fifteen.

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 onset antisocial behavior. Almost all of those kids are socialized by the age of four, right?

The remnant that aren't get alienated because they have no friends, and they're the ones who become juvenile delinquents, and then early onset criminals, and then repeat offenders, right? And so what it is is, imagine there's some kids whose default their rage circuits are a little bit more dominant than the typical kid. They they're often bigger physically.

Yeah, especially the bite, the biting. I d uh, forgive me for interrupting here. There's a very interesting paper, uh, 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 Oh, yeah, yeah, that that are specifically

makes perfect sense.

for aggressive biting. I mean, I hope people understand the significance of this, because what this means is there are dedicated circuits for aggressive biting in your hypothalamus. We all learn to suppress these, except probably under conditions where our life is endangered, in which case you'd probably bite like hell in order to try and get out of that circumstance. But we are all born with this circuit, we die with this circuit. Most of us, apparently not these kids, learn to suppress this circuit.

Right, right, or integrated.

A a an eight year old biter is a scary thing. A one year old biter is like a little bit of a worrisome thing. A two year old, like, okay, we need to work on this. An eight year old biter, people are starting to be concerned, I think. Even without knowledge of the psychopathology literature, one would be very concerned if their eight year old is biting other kids. Not just because of the damage induced, but it's so very different and Oh, it's so so much more primitive primal.

than than even hitting or spitting or something. Yeah, yeah, It's it's the indication yeah.

of a virtual absence of sophisticated socialization, They are truly right?

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 well, 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 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. Nietzsche said in the late eighteen hundreds that every drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit. Brilliant, brilliant observation. Far different than conceiving of the, say, hypothalamic drives as deterministic chains of only impulses. And and another thing to consider, too, with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation on perception, that mouse that you talked about, whose attack system is activated electronically.

See, when that glove is dropped, you can see that there's a relationship with perception, because if there's no target for attack that's biologically relevant in the environment, there's no impulse. So you could imagine that what happens is when you activate those neurons, is that there's a set of perceptual stimuli that are much more likely to be classified as a defeatable enemy. Now, even a glove will do it. Right, right? So you drop in a glove, and that's now perceived as defeatable enemy, or perhaps threat, because we don't know exactly what the perception would be.

But then you see, then it's the perception driving the behavior. That's not an impulse, right? That's more like a strategy, and that's v 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 Mircea Eliade, 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 Eliade 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 representations of of motivational states.

I I I'm gonna pause you there because I think this is extremely important. So, the God of war, uh

Or the God of love.

the Goddess of love, or the God of love, right?

exactly that.

So, the idea that the different gods are the, uh, reflective of different, well, let's just let's Motivate. just we'll just say it as as neuroscientists, as different hypothalamic and and related circuits, it's

Well, why wouldn't they be gods? You know? Beware of falling under their dominion, beware of becoming their playthings. And the other thing that's very interesting, you see, is that you 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 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 schools, like they're fantasizing under the influence of rage and resentment for thousands of hours.

That just takes control of them, and it's not it's not a simple 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 this circuit may run run in reverse. My colleague David Spiegel at, uh, who's our, um, 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, uh, 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. And this is a very different example because here you're, uh, presenting it in the context of rage, or and, uh, sociopathy, and the and these kids who, um, uh, 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 governed.

That the whole circuit starts to run from bottom up as opposed to top down.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And I think there's good neurological That's what happens evidence.

in addiction, right? But again, And 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, uh, 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 a cued craving will make itself manifest, like a friend they freebase with, and it's all of a

sudden, whoom, that monster is alive, and it just shuts everything else down, and it's got a personality. It can lie, you know, one of the hallmarks of addictive behavior is lying, and the lies are the rationalizations of that subcircuit, subpersonality for its own pathological behavior. And so, and that's all reinforced, too, by the dopaminergic hits.

It's like there's multiple people Deadly. in there, you know,

Yeah, definitely.

in in everyone. One of the most incredible Polytheistic things, and paganism. Yeah, polytheistic God.

that's the default condition, right, right? That's the condition of the two year old.

I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink with adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still take AG1, is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement. What that means is that AG1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health.

AG1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status, your metabolic health, your hormone health, and much more. So I've consistently found that when I take AG1 daily, my digestion is improved, my immune system is more robust, and my mood and mental focus are at their best. In fact, if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1.

If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drink AG1 dot com slash huberman to claim a special offer. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drink AG1 dot com slash huberman to claim a special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D three K two. Again, that's drink AG1 dot com slash huberman to claim that special offer. Today's episode is also brought to us by ROKA.

ROKA makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. I'm excited to share that Roka and I have teamed up to create a new style of red lens glasses. These red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening after the sun goes down. They filter out short wavelength light that comes from screens and from LED lights, the sorts of LED lights that are most commonly used as overhead and frankly, lamp lighting nowadays.

Now I want to emphasize, Roka Red Lens glasses are not traditional blue blockers. They're not designed to be worn during the day and to filter out blue light from screen light. They're designed to prevent the full range of wavelengths that suppress melatonin secretion at night and that can alter your sleep. So by wearing Roka Red Lens glasses, they help you calm down and they improve your transition to sleep. Most nights I stay up until about ten p.

m. or even midnight, and I wake up between five and seven a. m. depending on when I went to sleep. Now I put my Roka Red Lens glasses on as soon as it gets dark outside, and I've noticed a much easier transition to sleep, which makes sense based on everything we know about how filtering out short wavelengths of light can allow your brain to function correctly. Roka Red Lens glasses also look cool, frankly. You can wear them out to dinner or to concerts or out with friends.

So it turns out it is indeed possible to support your biology, to be scientific about it, and to remain social after all. If you'd like to try Roka, go to Roka dot com. That's R-O-K-A dot com and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's R-O-K-A dot com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. One of the most remarkable real life examples I've ever witnessed of the power of belief in God, I'm just gonna say it as it 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, crashed his truck at seven in the morning after getting intoxicated at six thirty in the morning, got out of that one, happened again and again, multiple rehab centers of the sort sort of standard treatment, etc. And then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that that his wife said, you know, this is it.

You you've got it solve this, or we just can't be with you. A 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.

I hope this works, but, like, I would say zero minus one confidence in his ability to get and stay sober. He just had not succeeded prior to this. He's been sober more than four years now. He got out of there and never looked back. And I wonder now, uh, whether something something must have changed in his brain by adopting what was essentially a a Different incentive like right, different structure. 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, w 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. There. 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 inve- evangelical Protestants are doing when they formulate a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That's exactly what they're doing. Now, on the addiction side, so I studied alcoholism for years. That was the ta- target of my dissertation and the first twenty 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 to be known for sixty 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's a pretty good 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 I I know

know it's irrelevant.

what you say. I've never done cocaine. I would be open about it if I had 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, um, 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 Of course, if you think

of course.

about it. You know, I mean, most people can't find the thing or get the thing they want in the absence of the resources to get it. But people who take hard drugs that really spike dopamine, somehow manage. Yeah, sure, sometimes Yeah, yeah, they they lie, cheat,

find a path. See, that's sometimes they lie, a very that's cheat and steal, lie, extremely, that's extremely

cheat and steal, but they'll do other things too, right? They'll socialize with people that have it, so they don't have to lie, cheat, and steal. It's it's it's incredible to see that drug and things like methamphetamine take over people's, uh, minds. And now I'm thinking

The 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 straitened circumstances, right?

And it's partly because you could think of our perceptual systems and our emotional systems, for that matter, as navigating tools, right? So now the addiction, the addicted brain, what the say, the aim is possessed by the substance of addiction, right? So now the highest God is cocaine, let's say, and so now all pathways in the world are pathways to cocaine. All objects in the world are markers on the pathway to cocaine, because it just dominates, but it's not it's not just an impulse.

It dominates the perceptual landscape as well. That's makes and the emotional landscape, and it comes with all these rationalizations. That's all those lies, right? The whole thing, it's 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.

It's 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, th- 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 Like an eating they're like an eating disorder. disorder. They're 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 has not been my thing, and and I don't struggle with it.

But but when I hear from these people, it's so clear that they're asking, is it the prevalence of pornography out there, or is it something really broken in them? Like, are they broken? But I don't know that I would say, after having the discussion we've had thus far, that they're broken. It seems to me that it's like the as you said, it's the manifestation of one part of their it's one personality within them.

Well, and it's being it's being 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 sec in s 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 very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks, and the reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies. So they don't like red dots at all. And so you could really enrage a stickleback with 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 stickleback. 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 susceptible 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 thirteen-year-old boy can see more hyper-attractive, super-stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived a hundred years ago would have ever seen in his whole life. Yeah, well, that's a like an evolutionary, ecological, radical ecological transformation. And the and it's worse because it's easily accessible, so 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 you know?

and the uh the analog in the food world would be highly palatable, Sugar highly processed food.

yeah, sugar, fat combination.

Yeah, you go into the other day I went into a gas station to use the restroom cause I was traveling home for Thanksgiving, and and I looked around an, and I, I thought, this isn't a convenience store, this is a pharmacy. Oh, 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 stimu- stimulants, and you've got nicotine

Energy drinks.

and and all, and these things on their own aren't necessarily bad, any one of these one elements in low low enough doses, in frequent use, et cetera, but maybe sugar being the one that that clearly, I think, uh, deserves, um, deeper investigation, right? Um, but it just occurred There's a to me that reason it's different that that

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, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as mild stimulant, didn't seem to cause them any trouble, but that's way different than cocaine, right? And sugar has the same, arguably, the same pathological properties.

Well, I didn't think we were gonna 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 think 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 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 that we Explain, explain avoid.

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, where we know the gut has neurons that signal through the vagus, up through a little relay called the nodose ganglion, if you wanna 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 signaling to the brain, Ah, I'm getting essential amino acids.

You should eat more of this thing. If those let's just say a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a candy bar and a, you know, a package of of skittles, which I'm guessing there's very few of them, if any. You're going to continue to forage for food because those neurons will also respond to sugar. Basically, it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids. In other words, there are two parallel tracks, one within Multiple our taste system, right?

pathways to satiation.

They're totally right, multiple pathways to satiation, one dependent on

Of course.

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. And it will keep you eating, and it will keep the appetite system revving until you get enough of those.

Now here's the issue, if you've ever done this, it's So that's probably an empty calories, so empty calories,

to speak, yeah. but what's Oh yeah.

so so in some ways, um, you know, this again is an analogue 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, I'm not there's no moral judgment there, that's just the reality. So, the the the situation with food is is the following. If we are eating without any gut-level understanding of what what's coming in, we will keep eating.

If you, uh, let me give you an example, you probably haven't h- 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, right? Even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those steaks, you're leucine, you know, uh, threshold, you've reached that, etcetera, all the that good stuff.

Why? Because blood glucose goes up, and then you desire more, because blood glucose elevations are linked directly to the dopaminergic system. So, what I'm basically trying to say here is that I do think that there are elements to our food, modern food, if you will, it seems like it's, you know, anything but modern in the sense 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, etcetera, 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 Right?

cause there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving, right? I mean, so with any basic appetitive pleasure, there's a dopaminergic kick, but with any novelty, there's also a dopaminergic kick. So, there's an optimized threshold for novelty and appetitive striving that plays out in pornography. So, um There's the direct effect of the stimulus as such, but the ve- 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. Right? You're Well, it's very dangerous, that's that's a very dangerous development.

right, and I would venture in a very different domain that if you were to eat your steak slathered in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks, going back to the way that you eat them now, which, by the way, this is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner last, which is that if you're gonna order a steak, order a Pittsburgh char. The char on the outside is incredibly tasty.

There we we we love that, um, the umami taste. Is that we should have a devoted taste receptors 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

Oh, certainly.

as good. But but the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in which the stuff that all the condiments, etcetera, 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, wh- 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 to to go out and find a real relationship, a real sexual relationship or a relationship of Well, any kind.

and it also i i 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 gonna play out that well in the real world, let's say.

So, And and there's also yeah,

a a learning of those biological systems in the brain to, um, evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating in it. Complete completely different. I so some of these, um,

Right, that's voyeur, right? You're basically learning to be a voyeur. Right, right.

and so you think about young brains that are highly plastic learning that. So, the returning

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 I wouldn't consider myself somebody that, like, looks at the stars and thinks, I wanna go, you know, I wanna go up there. I might if I given the opportunity, but 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, Targeted, we liked dirt dirt-clod wars, targeted impact right? Targeted

at a distance.

right, con- 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 cachet of action at a distance, that's unbelievably deeply embedded in us. That's why I made that throwing gesture. Like, human beings throw, that's our physiology, right? We can throw something at a distant target. Well, that's structured our our cognition. We're using our thoughts to hit distant targets, that's what we do. All the games that young men 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 the center of a target. There's targets everywhere, and we're unbelievably focused on bridging the gap between where we are and where we're going. Yeah, that's the whole perceptual landscape.

I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, function. I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.

Function not only provides testing of over a hundred biomarkers, key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from talk doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test. Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can

support glutathione production and detoxification, and worked to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast.

If you'd like to try function, go to functionhealth dot com slash huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth dot com slash huberman to get early access to function. So, this thing about action at a distance, to me, feels like so inherent to our progression as a species. Most technologies are about that. In fact, if you think about social media, you know, somebody tweets something, and, you know, and 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, like, 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. It's The ultimate just loop, it's just loop expression of it's just looped back into liberty. oneself.

It's a it's as if, and I and I I don't know what language there is for this in biology, but it's as if, like, all that dopaminergic 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 the language for it is 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 there are twelve-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, i i in their own reflex, but there's no action at a distance for them. This is the same thing I thi- 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 p- a certain age.

But I see so many of the problems that we face as failure to find a productive way to have action Well, that's at a distance a failure of at a distance.

adventure, I would say in in the terminology that I've been developing. So, for example, in this in this book, we who wrestle with God, I'm one of the stories I analyze is the story of Abraham, and it's a 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, and 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, uh, an ambitional sees you, and then you'll aim at fulfilling that ambition. But once the ambition is fulfilled, a new ambition makes itself manifest, which might be a greater ambition, let's say, if 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, uh, 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 consumerist utopia. You can look at it either way. And there's no reason for him to move forward. So, he doesn't.

He doesn't do anything till he's seventy-five, 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 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, uh, 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. It's a crucial, it'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 a 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 ima- imagine it manifests itself as an instinct to be something like the instinct to mature, right? To move forward, right, to leave your zone of comfort, right? And maybe there have been people like Csikszentmihalyi 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 no matter how good you are now, if you push yourself to the edge, you're gonna be better than you are. And that's a better win than merely being good like you are now. So, that would be participation in that transformative process, is a higher form of attainment than mere attainment of any specific goal.

Okay? So, that's the call to adventure, that's the call to a quest. That's what Gandalf offers Bilbo, for example, okay? God characterizes the consequences of that, and this is so cool, 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, right? 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. So, 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 import- you wanna 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 pathway of adventure, he'll be the father of nations. So, what that means is that he'll establish the pattern of paternal conduct that will maximally that will maximize the success of his offspring in the longest possible run.

So, that's so cool.

This is success at a distance and over time.

Ex- 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, and 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 por- 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? Insofar as God's the father in these ancient stories. So, think about this. So, when you see your son now, it's also true of your daughter, but I'll focus on sons for the moment. When you see your son, and you love your son, when you see your son pushing himself beyond his own limits in an adventurous manner, if you're a good father, you definitely encourage that, right?

And I would say, insofar as you encourage that, you are a good father. And that would mean that you're the embodiment of that spirit that calls to adventure. That's why Abraham is characterized, for example, in this story, as forging an alliance with the spirit of his ancestors, with the 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. And there's there's other it it complexifies, eh, 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, Batten 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 the that happened in the case of your friend, right?

So, he got a new personality, and that new personality had different incentive structure, and so that just superseded the addiction.

It's almost as if I mean, I I realize that for people listening, it might not seem like this, but to us, his friends who had seen him try so hard i 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, prob- not no doubt, I mean, not just perhaps, but no doubt, of who he could become.

That was worth it.

And and he had the adequate social support within this place. And so, there was reinforcement. But what's what's remarkable is that he was able to take that outside of this place. It was a it was a residential definitely. facility, uh, out of this place,

And carry it with him.

and and to this day, he is rock solid in that domain, Okay, so and I will say in in all the other domains of his life, too, extremely successful as an artist. I don't wanna, uh, 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 transplant.

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, right?

Very difficult to understand that, but you know we know, think about it this way. If you're possessed by rage, different phenomena have dopaminergic cachet to you than if you're possessed by, like, uh, sexual desire, like, obviously, right? 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 I it's no it may it may increase the probability that certain action patterns will make themselves manifest. That would be the kind of the compulsive LMNT, but fundamentally, what it's doing is changing the target. That rearranges the perceptual landscape, and it transforms the emotions. Because now, if your target is there, things that lead you there are dopaminergic 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 twelve-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 yeah

can be gamed by cocaine.

which is why it can be gamed by cocaine, or or most anything that can, you know, uh, you know, ferret 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 en route to that target. I'm I'm rephrasing what you said before, uh, you said it it wonderfully. I just wanna 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 in dopamine, the lower the probability that you'll engage in any other pattern of self. It's like it's almost or these or a 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 faster and faster. The 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 it li- 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, physi- 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 gaze, right?

And it's more than that. Not only do we infer aim from gaze, we mimic the psychophysiological state of the target that we're watching as a consequence of our 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.

No, 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 people wanna look it up, it's superior colliculus, it's also called the tectum in other species, it means roof, it's the roof of the midbrain, et cetera, that generate reflexive eye movements.

You stimulate in there, it's like a machine. In fact, uh, a colleague of mine who's now retired at Stanford, Eric Knudsen, who did some beautiful work on neuroplasticity, um, was describing an experiment where they take out the frontal cortex of these owls. Owls are because they, um, you know, they they don't have much, uh, eye 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, uh, 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 brain is hyper-exploratory, right? right, everything Ca- with only a is everything's with a a target. Everything's everything's a target, everything

a target, right? is a target, And there's no context-dependent learning, right? I love that you gave the example of the decerebrate cats. Um, they even can do fictive motion, they can walk on a treadmill, and it's like with no cortex, it's amazing, Yeah, right, it is it makes you amazing. rethink the cortex. Yeah, that's for Um, 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 f- a cortical area, a frontal cortical area devoted to controlling gaze and the context and control of gaze. 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? 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 seems super interested in, like, l- directing her gaze.

H- how are we inferring this? Sometimes it's body language, sometimes it's this, sometimes it 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 With the appropriate time. Exactly.

facial response.

So, humans have an ev- an ev- massively expanded notion of what gaze is and our ability to control gaze and understanding of gaze. I just so when you when you raise this in this idea, that when you raise this fact rather about gaze defining the target, it'll end that looking at others' gaze allows us to understand what they are defining as the target. We're 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, Yeah, yeah, and then like, turtle up turn and you and then look

turn w- you turn to the place where your stereoscopic audition has indicated that the noise emanated from, right? And so and that's automatic, that's the control of the eye gaze and and well, and and bodily posture by those

this is a superior col- yeah, underlying this is a superior colliculus sub that's has a map of of auditory world. So, when you hear something to your right, you turn to your right.

right, and you do that before you think, right? Okay, so that's an that's an activation of the eye fields, 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. Well, what does that mean? Well, you can think about it. It means to search out the North Star that navigates for you unerringly, 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 thing enter other enterprises that he was associated that that that he was pursuing in his life became more effective.

It's almost like and I I it is as if every goal was, like, elevated. And it's funny because for the first couple of months that I was interacting with him, I thought, oh, you know, 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. 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. 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. And it look it's been a a remarkable thing to observe Well, so because he was about as down in his addiction and had so much to lose, and had, um, essentially risked it over and over and over to the point where you know, I I didn't think he was

ever gonna 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 I can say this without revealing, cause 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. And it's fantastic. It's like, it's nothing short of spectacular.

Okay, so so let me let 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 strat- it's a meta-goal strategy. It's very practical, it's very, very practical, and it emerges out of the biblical tradition in a very grounded manner. It's a logical extension of the biblical ethical precursors. So, what Christ says to his followers, in the course of the Sermon on the Mount, is first, orient your eyes upward.

Okay, so, that's in alignment with the notion that the firstborn is to be consecrated to God. There's a meaning to that, and 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 wanna you wanna 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. Alright, 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 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 wanna solve is what your goals should be. But a much deeper problem would be, how do you conceptualize your goals in relationship to one another across the broadest span of time and person, so that every goal has the highest probability of succeeding? So, that would be like the pursuit of a meta-goal.

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 this particulars of what someone is afraid of, that turns out to be somewhat irrelevant. You teach people to voluntarily confront what they're avoiding, and that doesn't make them less afraid, it makes them more competent and braver, and that generalizes, right? And so, yeah, the religious pursuit is the pursuit of of meta-goals in relationship to positive and negative emotion.

That's a good way of thinking about it.

I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes sodium, magnesium, and potassium, in the correct ratios, but no sugar. We should all know that proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. In fact, even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance to a considerable degree. It's also important that you're not just hydrated, but that you get adequate amounts of electrolytes in the right ratios.

Drinking a packet of LMNT dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate amounts of hydration and electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of both, I dissolve one packet of LMNT in about sixteen to thirty-two ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I'll also drink a packet of LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes.

There are a bunch of different great-tasting flavors of LMNT. I like the watermelon, I like the raspberry, I like the citrus, basically, I like all of them. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drink LMNT dot com slash huberman lab to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drink LMNT dot com slash huberman lab to claim a free sample pack. I love this idea of looking upward and defining or at least having a sense that there's a, um, internalization of the greatest possible outcome.

And when I say greatest, eh, both for oneself, 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 wanna 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 pr- way that's solved, that works across time, that benefits your relationship in an upward manner.

And you have to make sure that you're not hijacked by that hypothalamic circuit or personality as You you you've described.

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 gonna list even though I think my wife is wrong, I'm gonna listen, and I'm gonna 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, cause 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 a it looks like you win, but if you forego 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 podcasts 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 foods, think anything that, you know, creates this bi- 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 into No reward caves and eat?

no reward without commensurate sacrifice. That's right, of That's okay. some sort, and and Yeah, yeah, and the other yep, yep, yep.

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 timescales or broader timescales. 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 cause that project went nowhere, and then you finished 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 timescales, short, medium, long timescales. 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, et cetera, they're very useful, but they train us, and I imagine they've trained the the young brains that were weaned on them cause I wasn't, but that were weaned on them for fast temporal r- uh, timescales. This Yeah, that's isn't like

a big problem.

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 four-day tournament.

Complete with intermittent random reinforcement, which is what happens when something goes viral unpredictably, right, right, it's really, yeah, yeah, and

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 a over, you know, some, you know, overnight fame type of 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 of 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 timescales do I derive reward?

Yeah, definitely.

You know, training for a marathon is a is a longer timescale of Well, that's also reward endeavor.

a hallmark of maturity. Yeah, yeah, school, Right? a degree, et Yeah.

cetera. Um, in business, the timescales 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 while maximizing my focus on the moment? Cause 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 i in an iterated 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, and 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 st stepping towards a goal, you get a dopamine kick. And the reason that's an entropy related to entropy is cause with each step, successful step you take towards a goal, you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit, which is manifested in that phenomenon 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 timescales, you need to be able to, i I love this entropy argument. It makes total sense that you want to be able to, uh, withstand the the periods of time when you don't know whether or not, you know, things are becoming more or less uncertain. And 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 corollaries of that. One is that the more valuable the goal towards which you're progressing, the higher the dopamine kick per unit of advancement. So what that means is you want an ultimate goal operating in the domain of each proximal sub-goal, and that's what happens with this upward orientation. It's like what you're trying to do is to make things as good as they could be, whatever that means, over the longest possible span of time, for the largest number of people you include.

Now, you're not gonna know exactly how to do that, but that can be your goal. Okay, now that's gonna inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway, but it's also gonna modify your reward system. Because now every proximal step forward is an indicator of entropy reduction in regard to that meta-goal. Well, there isn't any. By definition, there isn't anything you can do that's more exciting than that. See, that kinda 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, it's a pales in comparison, right, right, and

right? It's a rewriting of the reward contingency.

yeah, yeah, right, exactly. And and now you could 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. People can access what they want to see, they can keep foraging until they find it, 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 go out on a date, they might not want a second date. You know, well, and that's things could progress, all very you might think that you're on the path to one thing, and it turns out it doesn't work, or it's or it's you're not compatible.

You know, I and that's mean,

also extremely salutary. Because if you're being rejected, like, say, you're a foraging male and you're being rejected all the time, and you forego that for pornography. What you're 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, 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 arise.

It's worse than that, because it's more pornography in a degenerating game, cause, as you said, you have to chase that novelty edge. Otherwise, dopamine is driven So w

down further.

well, and that means what it's gonna get more and more extreme. Well, that that's not a good scenario, that's not a good s. 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 in in in the most pernicious possible manner, because sexuality 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. And we sometimes right, very see it with with common. 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. It's usually just a matter of time, and they they don't reach the mountain yes, well, top.

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 LMNT of the vision. It's so remarkable. I figured this out with my friend Jonathan Paggio.

So there's a vision in a sub vision in in the sequential dream of revelation of the scarlet beast and the whore of Babylon. And it's very relevant to our discussion on pornography, you'll understand it right away. So it's a vision of how society disintegrates. Okay, now imagine when society disintegrates, men disintegrate according to their pattern, and women disintegrate according to their pattern. That makes perfect sense, right? Because if society disintegrates, it's gonna be men and women who disintegrate.

There's no reason to assume that their pattern of disintegration would be identical. Okay, scarlet beast is is that's the scarlet beast of the state, that's Babylon, let's say, that's the degenerate tyrannical state. Has multiple heads. Why? Cause 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, scarlet, because that's that confusion, that disintegration is the precursor to the river of blood, right, the red sea, this the swamp of chaos.

So when the patriarchal state disintegrates, it loses its unity, and then it's multiple heads, right? And that's that's an that's the emblem of descent into diverse chaos. And gays is everywhere Exactly

with these multiple heads.

pre precisely, precisely, it's not integrated. Okay, now, that's the disintegration of the patriarchy, you might say. Atop that is the whore of Babylon. That's a beautiful woman 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 like, right?

I mean, I I guess I will just say it, uh, recently, there's been a number of posts on X of this woman who had sex with a hundred men in a day, um, and now, and now she's saying she's gonna have sex with a thousand men in a day.

well, she seems to be rethinking her plan, given the emotional consequences she had to her last success. Yeah, I, I must Her mother say is her finance officer, I'm speechless. Um, that's for sure.

I'm speechless. My my, um, response to the, uh, her kind of, um, post hundred men thing, um, was. It was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the the, uh, whatever The performance, probably perform, wha- whatever hard for her to it was, you know?

know, too.

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 peop- 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, Pushing the you know, just like envelope, seeing somebody murder somebody in cold blood, we we could talk about

that's right.

that recently, a video of a 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 And what's acceptable, many people, what's acceptable, more desirable, it's that's right, the threshold shifted,

that's for sure.

maybe 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 commoditizes, commoditizes 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 LMNT to it. The degenerate state offers the whore of Babylon as enticement for its degeneration. You can have everything you want on the sexual side. At the end of that sub story, the state, the beast kills the prostitute. And so what that means is that the long-term consequences of sacrificeless 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? It's about about the same in South Korea, right? The birth rates in those countries have plummeted, like they're way, way below replacement, and increasingly 50% of women in in the West are childless at 30. 50

and birth rates are way, Percent 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 re 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 g- uh, 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 explained to me, that's not what that was about. That was about the wildness of the of the 70s.

right, right, that promise, Yeah, that was about the the sort of op 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.

Y- you said that the that the patriarchy, the masculine fails before the Well, no, bef- before I wouldn't say the whore

that happened. of Babylon, No, no, I it happens wouldn't say that happens as parallel, in concert. Sure, yeah, in concert, sure, it's a feedback

so so it's not causal loop. one. It's you're right.

that 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 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 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 n there's no victory over one sex that's a victory of any sense at all. That's

Right, 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 it was a back and forth debate, a pseudo-political social debate. And then there were three words that, um, I'll just say that, uh, Mark Andreessen 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 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 are other I think that's generative achievements,

exactly the theme of the story of Abraham. It's like the most the highest form of potential. Satiation is risk, risky romantic adventure. It's not satiation, 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 8 years, independent of my professorial career, and th- those are large audiences. Um, you know, they must average about three or 4,000 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. You wanna listen to the audience, you wanna stay in that zone where no one's moving, right? Cause 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, cause 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 wanna have an adventure, cause 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, you're 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. And so, Can we operationalize this? So, in your first book, you talked about get your room in order. Uh, 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. 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 rit. 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 kinda hard to get oriented properly in the morning, you know? And if you take, like, I mo- 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 toolbox or whatever.

And then, 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 gonna 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 a near-infinite number of options in your phone, in the in your in your physical space, I think is so powerful because yeah, well, it's you're pick, you're an antidote to pick, you're picking a target, chaos. AB- absolutely, and it certainly it's a reduction isn't. To sinful

in entropy.

sorry, you le- and you know, it's not sin to clean your room or to organize your space or the or the garage. So you, so you start with it, so within the day, one can do that. In terms of, uh, I um, I really, uh, love the the stickiness, the positive stickiness of this idea that adventure and responsibility are the same well, well, let's let's thing. Yeah,

take that apart, because it's it's not immediately obvious. But look, when you go, let's say you go see an adventure movie, James Bond movie, you know, classic archetypal action adventure movie with some romance thrown in there. Um, what is he doing? All 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 LMNT 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 Sepulcher in Jerusalem, which is the first church that was the first Christian church that was established, and hypothetically, it was established on the location of the crucifixion, right? And so, at the center of the church is an altar, and at the center of the altar is the image of this crucifixion, right, which is a sacrificial image. Okay, crucifixion, sacrificial image, altar, church, then around the church is the community, and then that becomes the pattern for European towns, right?

And all the towns that everyone wants to go visit in Europe have that pattern. Okay, so why? Well, responsible sacrifice is at the core of the community. That's what's dramatized in all that, in that architecture, in that, in that sacred architecture, in the actual, in 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 insofar as you're not all about what you want right now, you're me 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 gonna 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 insofar as you're talking about Christian-oriented civilization for the last 2,000 years, without ever really noticing that we were dramatizing the proposition that sacrifice is at the center of the community. It's like, well, obviously,

Well, what are we to make of, you know, cities like San Francisco, which I grew up just south of? And it, uh, you know, by any standard, it's a beautiful city. I know people are gonna 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 it magnificent bridges. I mean, it's a it's a testament to what's possible in a city in terms of diverse landscapes, etcetera.

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 well, hours, let alone at night. So that at this point, you you wonder, like, the 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, well, you know, it's the question sad, it's, it's

is, well, I mean, so

tragic, it's tragic.

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? While th- 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 T. S. Eliot. 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 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, and they were right, and that's a devastating blow to the empiricists and the rationalists, cause 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 So

that r- 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. And to not and to not to only be infuse us to to informed by the facts, to not infuse a story, yeah, but 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 i in what would you say, unavoidably. So here, let me give you an example. So I read a book once that was written by an ex KGB agent who talked about a lab in the in the Soviet Union, where there had was a dreadful accident at one point that resulted in the death of about 500 people. They were trying to produce an amalgam of um, ebola and smallpox, 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, y- 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 tro 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's always lurking in the background, like, why are you conducting your investigation? Well, I wanna understand more about the human psyche. Well, why? Well, I wanna be of aid to the human enterprise. I wanna make things better. That's the story. I wanna 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, cause, 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. Cause his uh notion was, if we could just free ourselves from the superstitions of the past, everyone would become like a hybrid between, let's say, Newton and Bacon and Descartes.

It's like, no, it turns out that when you destabilize the underlying story, everybody becomes a narcissistic, immature psychopath, and they don't make good scientists. And, like, the evidence for that is kind of stark, because I'm sure you've observed, like I've observed, that over the last 20 years, the scientific enterprise has become a lot less reliable than it was.

well, for a number of reasons. I mean, one of the primary ones, in my opinion, 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 advisors were and so forth. It relates to funding, etcetera. And it used to be that the primary value with within and across lineages was to seek out new territory. I could tell a lot of stories that would take up hours about great advisors telling their students to move into new territories, which sounded like, get out of my field, I'm gonna demolish you.

But instead, what they were encouraging them to do was to go on, let's use your language, new adventures of responsibility. On a 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 at some day, someday, be investigated. The other consequence is that this debacle within the field of Alzheimer's and dementia, where one laboratory fudges data and ev, you kinda wonder if, I mean, that's not my subfield, but I.

You step back from that and go, how the hell did this progress for 15 years, where everyone was, you know, i like, it's the emperor has no clothes, like everyone agreeing that this is the stuff to work on, when, when, in fact, the data were falsified and people 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 but and no, they're yes, and a little bit right, right,

har- little bit, uh, intense on the career formulation side of things. Well, so

right, the careerist aspect, as opposed to the scientist well, well, aspect. Yeah, yeah, we well, that exists too, well, let's think that exists too.

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 gonna take a while, and it's not certain. It's not at all surprising that people would subvert an enterprise that difficult to the narrow demands of career enhancement.

It's exactly what you'd expect, unless there was a stunningly powerful countervailing force. W- 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, cause that's what a serious scientist does. And so it's not surprising that it would degenerate into something like dynasty and nepotism.

That's exactly what you'd expect. That's the historical norm. So then you might think, well, what are the preconditions that have to be in place as narrative foundation for there to be at least some people that are prioritizing the truth?

I think one needs to reward true adventure and novelty, taking on novel problems. And, uh, 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, etcetera. 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 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 university professor, I know, you know, in order to reach tenure, you need to re, you need to reduce the entropy as much as possible. In any event, I without going down that path too, uh, too far, I now, um, understand why you're saying that science in has to invoke story. That makes It has to be sense, that that makes embedded, it has sense, that makes sense.

to otherwise it well, it 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-valoration. Well, man, that's a very 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 the 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 lode, right? And you don't want to falsify your data because you wanna spend your whole life pursuing something that doesn't exist, cause 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 priori, 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 gonna follow the thread wherever it goes, and I'm gonna accept the outcome, and I'm gonna 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? Cause if I let go of my predetermined goal, I don't know what's going to happen, and that's exciting. That's right, cause you don't know well, that's the e- 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 gonna happen next. Well, why would you exchange that for, like, a kind of banal predictability? Well, to build your career, just, I mean, I understand why, but you're 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 on, 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. Like, how long, 5 years ago,

yeah, we we are about to hit the end of four years in a couple of weeks. We've been we launched in January 2021. No, no premonition could have seen this, or for I had no concept that it would become what it's become.

right? Okay, and so what? What's the existential consequence of that? Like, you know, I mean, everyone's life is rife with the possibility of suffering, and now you have something exciting and generative to do. Why is that working? I mean, existentially, why does that work?

You know, people will ask me, what's next? where are you headed? And I always 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 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, and okay, so and that's it.

why? okay, That that's what I, okay, so that's what. That's the great, great, 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, cause 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, right? Okay, so I, I, I delight, then

I delight in it. I, it's hard sometimes, I mean, it's it. 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, than you would find your deepest satisfaction in pursuing the course of action that integrates you psychologically and integrates other people socially?

Like, that would assume that there's a concordance between your deepest self-interest and the interest of your society, and it better be that way, because otherwise you couldn't thrive as an individual in society, so better be that way. And we've been doing this for a very long time as human 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 the once you see these issues through that light, they become, I think, painfully obvious.

So, because th- also because the contrary hypothesis is absurd. It's like, you're gonna find deep satisfaction, what, rejecting knowledge? And if you do happen to stumble across a nugget, you're gonna 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 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 r- the rings of the bull's eye out a little bit further. For people listening who are trying to figure out, like, w- w- where, where do they receive that calling? How how do they find th- their calling? That that, Like, where?

W- 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, t grab ahold of their responsibility? And and and then, as a consequence of doing that, e- engage in adventure and have an impact that is good for them and good for the world.

that that's that.

How how do? How 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 enthusiasm, 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 wanna have any problems. It's like, No, you've got some problems, you can tell that, cause 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, cause 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 their their living environment, every single bit of it is a catastrophic mess, 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, cause what'll happen is now you got a little 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, cause there's just chaos everywhere. It's like, it's okay, because the process is exponential, so even if you start nowhere, if you keep doubling, you're gonna get somewhere and faster than you think. And, well, the same thing applies when you're plummeting into Yeah, the the abyss, unfortunately. de- the degenerative stuff, But uh, a colleague of yeah,

mine, who's a he's a geneticist, said, you know, it takes many, many, many generations to evolve a species, it doesn't take very many to devolve a species. Mutation 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 You know,

an entropic 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 cause 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, and, uh, obviously, they weren't in their pajamas, but they come in in kind of like bath, you know, bathroom slippers, and they're like, they weren't slovenly, but they weren't taking care of themselves. Clearly, well, worse, worse than they didn't care what other people thought, right?

that's right. They didn't care, They were making a public display of their lack of care, right, right? Yeah, that's a exactly. And narcissistic aspect to that, too. Yeah, yeah, he's right about that,

yeah, and I thought at the time, like, he's being judgmental, I was a teen, right? He's being judgmental, etcetera. 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, it's kinda chaos out there now. I think it's wonderful that people can express themselves by wearing clothes that they feel represent them, etcetera. But this wasn't that. This was a lack of care.

This look, voluntary, is

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 wanna 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, uh, in terms of how we represent hold and represent order versus chaos. I mean, we were talking about some of the, uh, you know, this, uh, these social media posts recently, we just had a a public dis- a pu- public display of an assassination. Maybe, uh, 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 Mangione's last tweet was a podcast cover of of my episode with Jonathan Haidt, um, and some media outlets tried to make something of that. Uh, you know, but clearly he was very smart, clearly he had forethought to his actions. He th- 3D-printed this gun gun, it seems, it is all alleged now, but it seems to be pointing in that direction. He seems to not want the police to go investigate anybody else, you know, because he claims there's no one else acting with him, etcetera.

He, um, clearly was trying to make a statement, but the statement was it was a combination of statements about the the um, insurance system, um, sort of anti-establishment because of his affinity for, uh, Kaczynski Unabomber 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, I, I, you're, you're a trained clinician, do you think there's some schizotypal or sch- schizophrenic-type organization there in in his head, or lack of organization?

Uh, I mean, what are we to make of this? And we and we had to see think I think somebody assassinated it. If fr- shot in I, if the back, I had to hazard right, multiple a guess, I times.

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 disciplined striving in a highly intellectual atmosphere, for

Yeah, he was a valedictorian, example. Yeah, he went to, yeah, he was school, he graduated.

So I think more luciferian grandiosity, and the intellect is particularly prone to that. You know, the the archetypal representation of the intellect that overreaches is Lucifer, right? God's he God's highest angel gone most catastrophically wrong, which means that the best thing in its place is the worst thing on the top. That happens with sexuality, it can happen with aggression, it certainly happens with the intellect, and so I think he's a worshipper of his own intellect and believe that he was the guy who could make the decision, even of life and death, which means he took onto himself the role of ultimate judge.

And that's what the kid who shot up Columbine 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 role is because we, unlike, let's say, the people who run healthcare enterprises, we truly care for the sick and oppressed.

It's like, Do you now? do you now? There's so much moralizing in our culture, it's beyond, it's really beyond belief.

I was gonna say, all these CEOs now are gonna need personal security. That's hardly gonna, you know, cause them to adjust their, you know, premiums or something downward. I mean, it, I think, as people get more scared, they tend to, uh, Double you know, shore up down double, yeah, yeah, they tend to double down. I mean, it earlier, we we were talking about action at a distance. I mean, clearly, um, this Mangione guy had is, um, short-term well, action in route to high a in a distance.

status, so ignore it 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,

That's hard to do good things over long periods of time. It's it's it's not hard That requires to be good, it's just hard to do bi- 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, uh, but the rockets going, the idea of going to Mars, trying to, um, 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. Neuralink I mean, he's he's been, Neuralink. he's been insanely successful doing five impossible things simultaneously, right? That's not fluk right? Once, probably not fluk even once, but, you know, the probability that it's fluk once is higher five times. No, that's, that's a reputation, right? And so, and he's a he's a from first principle sort of guy. So, yeah, I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk. So, and that is independent of his political stance.

And is it difficult to do good things?

no, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard, it's hard to do long-term good things, cause they're long-term. That's what I was trying to say.

but it's also intensely. The thing is, it's also this is that back to that issue of the relationship between responsibility and adventure. It's like, if the aim is true, the voyage is worthwhile. And so, and that happens right away, like, you know, you're very successful with your podcast, but my suspicions are you've deeply enjoyed it since its onset. Well, so, th- so well, that means that some of your pleasure is satiation related. You've become successful, but if that was your aim, you would have failed as a podcaster, because Definitely a podcaster

not, I definitely would have oh, definitely, failed, right, right, right. Because it wasn't the pursuit of pleasure per se. It's sort of like the difference between, you know, is it e- 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 ten 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, cause 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 ten years are now proclaiming to everyone who will listen that they should have built their own, you know, alternative media apparatus, and they could have participated in

the one that exists now at any time, had they shown the least proclivity to do so. How it's not such an easy thing to build, because it wasn't something that 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 uh, 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, Th- there's a, there's a, um, there's some ethics in the comedy com community.

People can buy jokes, but you c- 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 comedy club.

So what did he do? He went home, he popped open his laptop, and he and Brian Redman and a few other folks started what eventually became the Joe Rogan podcast. It came out of a, 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,

Well, I need to be you know, down there in that. yeah. And and And more I think that that's power to him.

key. 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 He he the podcast.

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. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you said Well, Musk it that, yeah,

himself said, You know, when when I interviewed him, he talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was thirteen, fourteen, which is not atypical of, you know, outs 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 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 in you in your pursuits.

And you can see what, if impact that has on the public, you know, and we were. I was talking with one of your staff members before this podcast about your lectures, say, in Australia. And so you're in the weird position where 5,000 people come and listen to a biologist lecture spontaneously for what ninety 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 mat so much matter the direction as much as the commitment. Uh, a colleague of mine at Stanford who I, um, respect tremendously, Anna Lembke, 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, etcetera, leave us below baseline with our dopamine, and then people will engage in more of the behavior that 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 a inter- is 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 onto your front lawn and seeing if the leaves need to be raked.

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 And the in doing that, you present. start to hear the calling, and you find your purpose. And it, as you said, Or you don't it reveals itself it re it

to you, and this is the reveals, yeah, same thing. Yeah,

right. So I think, uh, you two would be enjoy a conversation at some well, well, point. I think you're this is an very aligned.

important thing to return to because people are often curious, wha- about what to do practically. It's like, okay, first, this is what Jacob does. Jacob in the Old Testament stories, he eventually becomes Israel, right? And so, uh, 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 wanna 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 at hand that I could fix that I would fix? It might be something low, cause, 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, cause 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 at hand.

And it's true, you know, it's like, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna about this. I know how difficult that is, but it is the case that the more mess at hand that you can see, the more opportunity that's there. Cause, 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 gonna happen? I in my class, I my Maps of Meaning class, I used to have students do this as a project.

And one of the projects was, find something around you in your neighborhood, wherever in your family that isn't set right, and see if you could set it right, and 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, it grew him up like mad, as you can imagine.

He ran into all sorts of weird resistances, right? Cause 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. It was obviously necessary, cause the alternative was that his family was gonna 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 mess.

Uh, 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 gonna happen, just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast. Why'd you start it?

I had a 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 Institutes of Mental Health. Not a single thing out there about, Hey, folks, if you're gonna be indoors this much, get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning, or else you're gonna 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, to help them regulate their circadian biology, because those wake 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 l- long-standing kind of a growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about neuroscience because it's so darn cool.

Right? Okay, so it's a large

And that was it, there was a organization. there was a lot of energy behind the the the mission.

Well, why?

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, etcetera, 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 w- why would I cloister it, uh, cloister with it at home?

That's like, what good is that? And so I just started blabbing on the internet. That's why.

Yeah, well, that's a that's a perfectly, you know, you can think, well, that's a logical extension of your subsidiary calling to be a teacher and a professor. You're already a researcher, you're already 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 technology's 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's 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. He's the originator of the phrase, the still small voice, right?

It's like that's a that the notion that your conscience is the voice of the divine, my God, there's there's there's virtually no disc 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 wanna hear. So how is that you?

I mean, you have to jerry-mander the definition of you for that to be you.

No, I absolutely believe that things come from outside of us, certainly for me, and, uh, you know, I I'm now very much a a devotee of prayer. I pray before this podcast.

What do you pray? Well, before this podcast, Yeah,

I prayed for, um, clarity of mind, to be able to, um, to learn from you and to help transmit that knowledge out to people in a way that would be useful to them. To, um, uh, for sustained focus, for, um, it, for the ability to also let go and and not try and control or or lead with

that's sacrifice. questions, right? And Yeah, yeah,

to, um, and to allow the the, um, uh, 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 each night. I've been doing this for about, um, for a little over a year. I always quietly,

Why? se- secretly Why did you decide to do that?

my coming to the whole notion of prayer and God, etcetera, um, was complicated in the backdrop, in the sense that I always secretly prayed, um, always secretly secretly prayed. And then a about a year, yeah, 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. Um, 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 me Yeah, proper prayer to

establishes aim. Yeah, that's right, Yeah, oh yeah.

that's right. Well, why wouldn't you Yeah,

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, aka breath work, can allow you to shift your state. Hypnosis is a tool that can allow you to solve a particular problem, cause it has some, you know, aspect of neuroplasticity can there. Um, non-sleep depress, which is a thing that was, you know, built out of this, uh, this practice called yoga nidra, where you go into a an awake but deeply relaxed state allows you to restore your vigor.

Meditation, to me, is a way of of enhancing one's ability to focus, you know, uh, third-eye meditation of considering your breath, etcetera. I mean, we know, based on the data, improves focus. Prayer to me is entirely different than all of those. There's some overlap. Th- they they s they look similar. Some of them look similar from the outside, but prayer is the the, uh, 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 for things, I pray for ability, I pray for other people. And I also have learned that a 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 still myself, that I wouldn't hear. And sometimes I'll go to sleep, and then the next morning, something will will come to mind. It's not always immediate.

Although 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've I've looked at it's historic, cause like, when did we start to think? That that's not so obvious, you know?

I mean, we started to think in words after we developed the ability to use language. What's that, 150,000 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 it 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 s. 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 of 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 neuroscience, and I think by now, in 2020, almost 2025, we have a fairly good understanding of what different brain areas do, how different circuits interact. 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 and 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, man, w- 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, uh, 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 and so on. So I like to say, you know, I have I haven't gotten my jersey yet, cause I don't deserve it, but I'm I'm putting in, I'm showing up to practice, you know, this kinda thing. So I'm just curious to what extent you see consistent themes across religions, Well, the 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 I wanna make clear, like, the there's I don't have any pushback on atheism. It's just that for me, adopting, uh, 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 gonna continue to do it. Um, why wouldn't I? But that's the question. To what extent do different the way that the 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 Paglia about this a few years ago. Maybe she's she's one of the world's foremost literary theorists, and she said something very interesting to me that was quite surprising. She said that had the academy turned to Eric Neumann, who was Jung's greatest student, by the way, instead of Foucault, the whole history of of the w- university and the intellectual enterprise over the last five decades would have been entirely different.

What happened with Foucault?

Well, Foucault is the most cited s cited scholar who ever lived, and Foucault believes that the story that we act out is one of power, and that's wrong. It, and it's not just wrong, it's like, perversely w- and dangerously wrong. I think it's technically wrong, as well as being ethically wrong, partly because power does not provide a stable basis for psychological integration or social unity. It's just it's not it. Power might be more effective adaptively than capitulation and 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 incontrovertible. And I outline that in the in in this book, We WRESTLE with God. Eric Neumann, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, a host of others outlined the patterns of religious thinking, and it took the most of the twentieth century to do that, and they found recurring themes that are profound. So what one example? The ancient Egyptians worshiped a god, H- Horus. Everyone knows the god Horus because the his emblem is the eye, the open eye.

Well, what does that mean? What 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 Christians. So they believed that the degenerate state had a spirit, and the antidote to the spirit of the degenerate state was the all-seeing, the all-seeing upward striving eye.

And that's right. It's like they nailed that, Yeah, it sounds they nailed like what you that. were saying Yeah, yeah, yeah. before, right, where Well, I you set your I sights, where you set Yes, exactly

your sights high and h- uh, to the to the heavens, and then to the most proximal thing that's gonna deliver you to the next right. Well, and rung.

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 eye 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 conceptual. There are consequences of that conceptually as well as historically. The the hero, 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 dime store romance is not as profound as a Dostoevsky 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 Jungian 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 Jaak Panksepp, they knew the the work of Eliada, for example.

Which of 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 Eliada, and also, um, Eric Neumann's book, uh, The Origins and History of Consciousness. That's a harder one because it's un unless you know the lingo of that school, it's hard to s it's hard to understand what he's aiming at. If you understand that he's aiming at, he's he's elaborating on the symbolism of the adventurous spirit. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's a technical analysis of the structure of heroic expansion of personality, but it's it's an easier way in is through Eliada, Sacred and the Profane, short book, you could y- you would read it now, knowing that the gods that Eliada described as warring 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 Eliada tracked 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 ma- 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 can think about the human beings acting out that war, just as you can think about the war, the abstraction reflecting the conflict on earth.

Well, there's a pattern to that conflict. That pattern is quite stable across cultures. It tilts towards a monotheistic unity insofar as the multiplicity of cultures unifies. Well, obviously, like, what are they gonna 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 Jung's school, and the academy just ignored that entirely, except for Camille Paglia, who understands this quite profoundly, and went in the direction of Foucault.

These are these lineages that we were talking about before. It's a it's hard for people to appreciate just how powerful these academic lineages are and scientific lineages are because they s 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 interests firmly in mind, told me to never talk about my interest in Jungian psychology. really. Sorry, Yeah, yeah, I'm laughing, cause yeah,

it's so preposterous.

yeah. Well, I t I I I 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 Yeah, I was for me.

gonna 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 Adlerian psychology. I'm I wasn't familiar with Adlerian psychology.

yeah, Adler's very practical.

The book talks about Adler as a as a counterpoint to Freud and Jung.

What's the book?

So, um, the book is called The Courage to Be Disliked, and I highly recommend it to everybody. It was actually written by a Japanese author, I think they're two Japanese authors. It didn't get quite so popular in this country, but it had a big following, 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, uh, essentially a philosopher ad of Adlerian 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 not supposed to discard with our thoughts about prior trauma and just figure out what are our tasks now. And I I like the practicality of it. Adler's very I, yeah, yeah, I like practical. Yeah, Adler that, and I was just curious was what your thoughts were about that.

They 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, uh, 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 past. And I think it might, it might, it might hit some people square upside the head when the when there's, I think one of the chapters opens, uh, 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, okay, what do I need to do now, regardless of what my parents Regardless did or didn't of my damaged do, my my right, regardless self. of my damn self. And I I must say, I really like the book. Well, I Um, the would say way I I should say, I sh- I really like, I should say, I really like the concept of embracing task while agonizing over the meaning of life and what one is to do.

Yes, well, Adler was the most practical of the small crowd that aggregated around Freud, and so Jung's take was that Freud focused on sex, and Adler focused on power, and Jung 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 Henri Ellenberger, who was the foremost exponent of existential psychology in the nineteen fifties.

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 Jung, and so his star didn't shine as brightly, but he's very practically oriented, and much of his thinking would what would you say fits quite nicely with a bottom with the same kind of bottom-up approach that a more behaviorally oriented psychotherapist would employ.

So, look, it's it's it's there are some people if you're if you're engaging in a therapeutic process with someone, there are people who are best engaged with at the level of concept. Those are people high in trait openness. Not everyone's like that, in fact, most people aren't like that. Jungian psychology works really well on highly creative people, and almost all Jung's clients were creative cause they wouldn't have come to him otherwise. And there's also people for whom sexual dysfunction and trauma are the primary what would you say?

The the primary preoccupation of their life and the past, and Freud serves them well. Adler's very practical, and if you're looking for a psychologist to help you figure out how you could advance from where you are now, he's he's he's got plenty of things to say that are good. He also wasn't as good a literary stylist as young Jung or Freud, and so that also put him off to the side to some degree. But anyways, a deeper investigation 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, primarily, 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 a Right? I that, that's mean, it's just a

not out there. I mean, there are 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, uh, a satisfactory book about the brain, the mind and psychology. There's no, it just doesn't exist.

yeah. The closest one I ever encountered probably is affective neuroscience. Panksepp's book.

he's, uh, I'm so I. I must say, um, you've mentioned Panksepp a few times, and and Jaak Panksepp, uh, as some of you may know, but perhaps most of you don't, as was such a gift to science. And the fact that I think the first time I heard you lecture in one of your YouTube lectures, you mentioned Jaak Panksepp. And I thought, okay, like, this guy knows this knows the good stuff, because he was the first one to talk about juvenile play as a way of exploring circuitry and social dynamics.

Su- such

And that fit, by the way, that fit perfectly with Piaget's observations i of childhood socialization. It's like I I came across Pansop and I thought, Oh, that's so cool. Now we have the psychophysiological basis for Piagetian developmental theory. It was perfect. Yeah, so that was, that was lovely concordance.

youngsep would have been, uh, uh, far more recognized had he bit. He was at Bowling Green University, I think, and so smaller university. Uh, perhaps, I don't know, I didn't ever hear a lecture, and 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 unerring 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 pilloried by sensible Republicans looking to trim government waste.

It's like, no, that was the heart of the matter, right? Rats organize their social hierarchy through play, not through force, right? That's a big discovery. Like, that's, I think he should have won a Nobel I do, Prize. Yeah, too. he, he should have won a NEL- 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 stunning. thing in kids, obviously.

And in 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, Foucault.

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, uh, 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 thirteen, 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, Panksepp showed, for example, that play wouldn't emerge among animals if they were possessed by any other motivational state. Things have to be set up very carefully before play will emerge. Your house is optimally structured if your children can play. Your marriage is optimally structured if you're playing house with your wife. And I think that that reality of the what would you say? The optimally superordinate nature of play, that makes itself manifest when you're watching someone who's a master at their task, and Musk is playing, and hopefully that will, you know, 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, uh, 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, Uh, forgive me, because I think the actor was quite good, um, but the show was Californication, uh, David Duchovny.

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 And I and I inversion.

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, you know, 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 this kind of worst of ways, um, by, you know, not treating each other with respect.

Um, occasionally, you'd see a a a discourse that 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 I like to think, you know, my podcast as well, Lex Friedman 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 it seems like it's 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. Th- th- that's not there's That's what n- there's nothing playful happens. 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 gotta be really discouraging. It's like you either dunk on somebody or get dunked well, you on.

know, I guess the optimistic riposte 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 extremely successful as podcasters, Constantine Kissin, Russell Brand, Dave Rubin, um, J- Crowder, Stephen Crowder, Theo Von. 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. Rubin was part of that. Ru- Rogan was part of that, if I remember correctly, I'm quite certain of it. I was part of that. Uh, Shapiro was part of that. This was a genuine invitation, which was extended many times in serious ways by people who were 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 could imagine that he would be on board with such a thing because he's not precisely your stereotypical Republican. No, he no, Well, not at all. Peop- right, um

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 yeah, it's that, what he really just it, that's underst- no, he was just not like, a

true at all.

no, that'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 can be. I mean, Rogan and his coterie, let's say, wiped out the legacy media. Well, so you can see what the spirit of playful adventure can do in a very short period of time. Now, there's technological reasons for that, too, but technological reasons or 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, uh, in a different direction.

yeah, well, that became stark, starkly obvious when Rogan interviewed Trump. That was the death knell of the legacy media.

It certainly elevated podcasts and their their impact and significance across the board.

Well, it, 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, and 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 Von. I mean, if you think about Yeah, I this, right, you

know, I know. think about, like, It's so funny. Uh, I'm I'm yet Good for Theo. to, I'm, It's so funny.

yeah, I'm yet to meet him. I I hear he's Oh, I a really nice

really like Theo. guy. That would Theo's so great because Theo is like, he's he's backwoods hit to the core, right? Seriously, underclass background, and it's real, and he's so bloody smart, and so it's such a fun combination because he's got this. It's pretty easy, if you're elitist to, you know, be be what derisive about Theo and his backwoodsy stick. But man, there's a sec, there's a first-rate mind lurking behind that, that it's not a persona, cause it's actually him too, you know?

I can relate to that to large degree, because, you know, I came from a very small town way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and so I have plenty in common with Theo. But it's it's very funny to watch. It's very funny to see him do this successfully. It's ridiculously and preposterously comical that he got to sit down with Trump. I mean, I just thought that was, that's so funny, and that it was successful and playful, you know, that's great.

And there's plenty of play in the Republican Renaissance at the moment, whatever that is. I mean, it Republican to call it that is like, that's whatever the hell's happening. It's not conceptualizable in terms of our normal political dichotomy, right? I mean, we're in uncharted water now, hopefully. This is why I hope the Democrats get their act together, cause every administration needs an opposition, and if the Democrats continue with this woke idiocy, they're not going to be able to serve as the proper corrective to the excesses that will definitely emerge in the Trump administration, especially if they face no credible opposition.

Yeah, or Cause that always before we sorry, happens.

I didn't mean to interrupt you and didn't mean to interrupt. Before we started, we were touching on this a little bit, and you said something which was that you're hoping for a really formidable, strong Democratic Party to counter the Republican Party. And you are, and you're saying it again now, you're concerned that if there isn't one, that power corrupts. might run amok.

Oh, yes, well, of course it will. It always does, you know, and that the Republicans themselves, who might wish well, this remarkable group of people that's aggregated around Trump, it's like they should hope for themselves that they have an effective opposition, because someone's gotta be telling you where you're stupid. And if the Democrats so, this is another public invitation to the Democrats, which is, like, must be the fiftieth one that I've issued. If you have something to say, you know, I'd be happy to talk, and so would many people who've expressed similar sentiment to me in the alternative media world.

And that offer has been on the table for for years. So I hope that I'm afraid that all the people with any real courage, or virtually all of them, be chased out of the Democratic Party. They're all afraid of being canceled, which is why they wouldn't appear on my podcast to begin with. It's like, Why does Peterson always interview conservatives? It's like, Well, how come? How about because they'll talk to me? You know, there's a simple explanation, and definitely a true one.

So maybe that can shift, and there's gotta be somebody in the Democrats who's got enough courage to forge a new direction. And if they want to continue with this same old pattern of woke idiocy, well, go right ahead. It's not gonna work. The tide's already turned in that regard.

I think that judging from some of the, um, article titles that I've, um, seen at, uh, New York Times and other venues, it seems like there might be some consideration about this. They're talking about a restructuring of the Democratic Party. There who's going to lead, who's going to be their, uh, Joe Rogan, which is, by the way, a silly question. That's just the silliest So it's question. He he such a is, he is, funny as we say in science, he's n of one.

Don't don't even try. Like, it's the well, also, whole point is to

you can't. create well, why Well, you also, would you? Yeah, why you also would you? Yeah, can't. Like

right, it's, it's impossible.

Joe didn't emerge by accident. Joe is very, very, very smart, very, and if you think and l- it's what it's like, Joe built this. It's like, not the way that a political party would build it. First of all, he didn't build it. Not, not, not that way, not through a priori planning so that the Democrats could have a voice.

It's just him being him. Yeah, and someone s uh, someone who is a self-declared Democrat will do that as well, but not by trying to be him. That's just not gonna happen.

No, they'll be they'll, they'll do that by trying to figure out what the opposition to this new peculiar band of Republicans should be, and what sort of vision could be put forward that would be attractive. You know, I read today some Democrat claiming that the Democrats are the true w- voice of the working class. It's like, I don't think so. I think that ship has sailed, and maybe the Democrats should be the true voice of the working class, but they're certainly not.

And the in principle, that would mean that there's an opportunity there on the Democrat side to forge a new path. I mean, Clinton managed that in the nineties. This this has happened many times, it could happen again, but there's a lot of learning that's gonna have to take place before that happens. So certainly learning about this new alternative media environment. If you can't sit down for three hours and say what you actually think, actually what you think, right, regardless of what might do to your reputation, let's say, you're not gonna be successful in the podcast world.

That's absolutely true. I podcasting is real. I even for I'll just say, i i per because perhaps it's of interest, or maybe even actionable for people. I mean, I I get a little frightened every podcast. Certainly, if I'm gonna talk about, like, I'm forming this relationship to prayer, or I'm exploring a. I mean, I'll talk about circuits in the brain all day long with with, uh, with no fear whatsoever. That's my wheelhouse, but anything that's new, uh, which is a a real exploration and evolution of of where I'm at, um, of course, is gonna evoke fear.

I also know that's where the growth is. I would hate for this podcast to look the way it did on episode one now. And, um, clearly, this this conversation is a is a new direction that I've not taken before in this podcast, and, um, but I'm delighted that it's happening. I wanna say that, and I think that some level of fear and anxiety about the unknown is is absolutely required, and I think that that's something that hopefully any, especially young people listening, need to know.

You you're not supposed to perform well at the outset, like in a in anything, you're you're

you can't. not, you're That's why not Jung said, The fool is the precursor to the redeemer. You have to accept the role of fool voluntarily before you can improve. Improve. Of course, when you start something new, you're gonna be an idiot, like, what do you know? So so that's the price of entry is to be a fool. Well, you can be a voluntary fool, and then you can. Then you have a bit of a sense of humor about yourself, and that takes the sting out of it, and maybe even makes you an attractive character, despite your ignorance.

People will people will make tremendous allowances for ignorance that's voluntarily admitted to.

I've certainly made mistakes publicly apologized for the ones that I felt I should apologize for. There's a slip of the tongue and make it said something went back and correct it was embarrassing, but, um, the ability to laugh at oneself is is tremendously powerful. Genuinely laugh, it's just thinking, like, Ah, God, where was I thinking? I understand. I said, Buh, buh, buh, you know, sometimes we we err, you know? I have a couple of questions about you.

Um, I know you're the you're the clinician, but, uh, and I'm not trying to play that role. When you wake up in the morning, is your mind in a good place typically, or are you tormented? Or are you? Wh- where does your wh- where does your mind land most mornings? First thing

well, I've I've suffered from a proclivity towards depression my whole life, I would say, and I would say the roughest part of the day for me is morning, although it's way better than it once was. Um, so when I get up, I have a shower and make my bed and do something useful, and then I'm pretty much I'm on my way, and you're into that that's

your tasks into your day.

and I. I still have quite a lot of pain from whatever happened to me a couple of years ago, and so that's annoying. Physical But pain. yeah, yeah, yeah, so, but psychologically, my life is ridiculously, it's absurdly interesting, it's crazily and absurdly interesting all the time, and so anyone with any sense would be like, open-mouthed in amazement and gratitude for that. It's preposterous. And I have this tour that's going well, it's been going for like six years, really, and Okay, Your it continues.

schedule is is superhuman. I have to say, having done some live shows, I mean, what you do with tours, and I've been to one of your shows, I highly recommend people attend. It was spectacular. I I don't want to give too much away, but it's not planned in the in the sense that there's a script or something. It's very open and and but a

It's a quest.

real a real, it's a quest. An intellectual quest, Yeah, it's a real experience right? And so and and men I'm wear your jacket and tie because everyone else there's going to be wearing at least a jacket. dress up, Yeah, exactly.

look, look, re look respectable. Exactly. It's it's quite Yeah, so

a sight. Yeah.

my wife and I are touring from January through June, and much of that's in the United States, and then two months in Europe, and so that's great because Europe is in trouble and going there to speak is a privilege and an honor, and so that's ridiculously exciting. And people can find more out about the tour at Jordan B Peterson dot com. The dates and so forth are all listed there. We launched Peterson Academy, we where we want you to teach, and that's going spectacularly well.

We This is a place have

where people can hear lectures in a given domain.

Yep, yep, yep. We have thirty five lectures online already, each of them, sweet, sequenced over six to eight hours, um, which compacts, I would say, the equivalent of a full university course into that span of time. We're pursuing accreditation, which I think is a high probability in the relatively not too distant future. So that's ridiculously exciting because we can take the best lectures in the world and we can make them available to everyone. And we built a social media LMNT into it.

We took the best of the social media networks and people are using it like mad and it's 100% positive. It's philosophically oriented, it's mutually encouraging. We threw four people off the platform out of 40,000. Well, three, cause we put one guy on probation cause he said he'd improve. And we established a positive culture. There's no bots, there's no trolls, no one's playing games, and we watch. And now, you know, the community has settled into a it's got an ethos already, and I think that'll be self-sustaining

So people are there to learn.

and to support each other learning. It it launched out of the gate better than we thought it would, even though we were optimistic. And I would say the quality of what we're offering exceeded it certainly exceeded my expectations. It's well, we we showed Michael Malice, Michael Malice did a course for us on totalitarianism, and he takes that rather personally given his family background. And he said that the trailer brought him to tears. And that's my now I can be easily brought to tears, so I don't know if I'm the best Same like like the best.

around certain topics. I've cried a few times on this podcast this year and a few others, so that was that was a uh a vulnerability I'd never expected, Yeah, well, but you know

it's good to know I'm no, not not alone

at all.

in that. I'm less susceptible now that I'm more healthy, but but I feel the same way about what we're producing because it's exactly if you were a professor and you wanted the best possible courses to be available to people and you saw these, you'd think target hit. And and that's ridiculously fun. And so, and I have a great relationship with my wife and my kids, and

You have some grandkids now too.

I do, and two more on Congratulations, the way. And so, congratulations. you know W and I have an endless field of stellar opportunity in front of me, so hopefully I have enough sense to appreciate that. And hope and I do. I do appreciate it. And I know it's unlikely. So

A long way from posting lectures on YouTube, which is where, uh, most people originally found you if they were listening about. That's certainly how I learned about you. I thought this guy's talking about really interesting things in the fields of psychology. He knows who Jock Panksap is, and, um, and he's posting on YouTube. Can I ask what inspired that move? W Was that from Well, I conscious? Was that calling or conscience? Or both?

it was probably mostly calling because the fundamental motivation was, and I think it is my fundamental motivation, is curiosity. You know, I watched YouTube and I thought, Hm, what the hell is this? Video on demand worldwide. What does that mean? It means the spoken word is now as permanent as the written word and more easily disseminated. I thought, Oh, that's a spectacular and world-altering revolution. That's what it looks like to me. This was like in 2010, you know, when it was mostly cat videos.

I thought might as well put my videos up there and see what happens. And so see what happens, right? That's an adventure. And so I did that for maybe s maybe seven years, somewhere between five and seven years before things exploded around me. And that was also extremely helpful because when I opposed the Trudeau government's attempt to compel my speech in the form of Bill C sixteen, I was immediately pilloried as a, you know, right-wing Nazi, even though I'd spent my whole career publicizing the horrors of the Nazi administration and teaching my students how not to fall prey to totalitarian temptation.

Like that was the core of my career. Um, I had like 200 hours of lectures up on YouTube already, so when all that negative attention was drawn to me, people started looking at the lectures. And the huge advantage there was that there wasn't a single really, there wasn't a single important word I'd said to students in the last twenty years that wasn't recorded. And the people who decided that, you know, I was a reprehensible character had every opportunity to go through everything I'd said with a fine-tooth comb, which you can be absolutely certain they did.

And they couldn't find one thing I ever said that led any credence whatsoever to their accusations. And so that was a breaking point in some ways for cancel culture, because there were very forceful attempts to cancel me. And so people went and checked me out, and they thought, huh, nothing he says falls into alignment with what he's being accused about. Well, you know that what would you say? That was part of the dam breaking with regards to the corruption of the legacy media.

So not only was what I was accused of a lie, it was exactly the opposite of the truth, which is the most profound kind of lie. So YouTube helped me out a lot there.

Well, you've certainly prevailed. And, uh, we're So all far well, I guess that that speaks to what I was going to say, which is that, um, I want to thank you for posting those videos on YouTube and for entering that adventure. Because it it certainly was the beginning of a long adventure that's still happening now, where you continue to take risks that are healthy risks in service to trying to understand the truth and share that. And I must say, never with the the stance that, you know, absolutely right for everybody, but certainly where you have felt you could share useful knowledge at the practical level, like really how to operationalize, like clean up your room, right?

You know? Um, do these things to try and discover your path. Get on your path, set your sights to the right level, um, and to make that a daily practice and a and a repeated lifelong practice is really spectacular, and it's obviously inspired millions of people, including myself. I'll also say that it's really wonderful that you are also continuing to do that yourself and making that visible to people. Your live events, of course, are an exploration in the moment where you're you raise a question and ask a question and address it.

It's not pre-planned. And I must say that your progression of books and podcasts and where things are going now, in particular that today you said, you are hopeful that the Democratic Party, I think most people assume that you're very s right-leaning. I'm not gonna assume one way or the other, but the fact that you are intentionally inviting and hoping for opposition so that power is checked and things continue in the right direction, I think that's really beautiful.

Because what you're asking for is more balance as opposed to more skewing of knowledge and power. And I think, um, that's a terrific example. And it's clear that you live right near the edge, uh, in order to inspire us to basically explore knowledge, explore ancient teachings, and merge them with where we are now.

Yeah, well, it's been unbelievably rewarding. I mean, part of the reason that my wife and I keep touring is because we meet all these people and they put their lives together. It's thousands and thousands of people. It's so gratifying. You know, wherever we go, the probability that someone will come up and say, thank you. But then when I ask, like, for what? What do you mean exactly? What changed? They tell me, and there isn't anything better that can happen to you than to travel around the world and have perfect strangers come up to you as friends and tell you that their lives are far better than they would have been because of their efforts and because of their encounter with

what you've been doing. Like, if you could pray for anything to happen to you, there's not a possibility that you could come up with a better wish than that. And so it's great. It's great. And it's fascinating to explore its continuation and to observe the consequences. And it's a privilege to be in that. It's an immense, what would you say? It's unspeakably immense privilege to be in that position. And it's so great to see people like you and Friedman and Chris Williamson and all these other podcasters who are pursuing the same vision and so successfully, and to see the massive effect that's having on people.

That's such a good deal. So, and I do believe it's the sort of thing that's in a deeply personalized way available to anyone who follows their calling and conscience.

Thank you for those words. I I also agree it's freely available by people being themselves and, as you said, following their curiosity and conscience. Thank you for coming here today and sharing with us where you're at now, your knowledge. And please come back again. I really enjoyed this.

Hey, anytime. I appreciate the invitation very much. And, uh, it's a pleasure watching your progress forward and seeing you propagate all the remarkable discoveries that have been made in in the field of neuroscience because it's quite the credible enterprise and people need to know the biology of motivation, let's say, and the biology of emotion. And and, uh, it's great to see you managing that in a sophisticated way with so many people. It's a good deal for everybody.

Thank you. It's a labor of love insp inspired in no small part by you and my other podcast colleagues, and in your case, my academic colleagues. So, thank you, Jordan. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Doctor Jordan Peterson. To find links to Doctor Peterson's work, his social media, his new book, We Who Wrestle With God, as well as a link to the Peterson Academy, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. Please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple, and on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube.

I do read all the comments. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than thirty years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.

The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook dot com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes everything from podcast summaries to what we call protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs that cover things like how to optimize your sleep, how to regulate your dopamine.

We also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure, get a lot of questions about that, deliberate heat exposure, and on and on. Again, all available at completely zero cost. You simply go to HubermanLab dot com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should mention that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Doctor Jordan Peterson.

And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.