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.
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 will be thinking about your own neural circuits.
That is the connections in your brain that drive emotions, thoughts, and behavior, as well as your psychology, your different states of mind. And you are going to have a number of different tools and frameworks with which to apply all that knowledge toward the best. possible outcomes before we begin i'd like to emphasize that this podcast
is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar.
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two free months of membership. Again, that's levels.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 Dr. Jordan Peterson. Dr. Jordan Peterson, welcome. Thank you, sir. Delighted to have you here and want to talk about elements within your new book. Yeah. Also some elements within your previous books and within that mind of yours generally. As a framework for that.
I'm wondering if you would tolerate or permit a little bit of a discussion about sort of brain and psychology, just kind of lay the groundwork for where we might... prod some of the themes that you bring up related to the book. So I view the brain as obviously a bunch of cells and parts, et cetera, 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 animals. We should talk about the idea of impulse in relationship to that characterization. Okay. Because there's an important point to be made on the... You pay a price for characterizing that as impulse. And I'd like to explore that with you because it's crucial. Great. We'll circle 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 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 25 years plus of life, but especially those first years of life. And then, of course, we have neuroplasticity, this incredible gift that humans have more of than any other species as far as we know, which is...
we can decide to make changes. Now, the reason I lay out this framework as opposed to starting with a question is because there are so many amazing questions that you ask in this book. You know, we who wrestle with God, I've been trying to wrap our... arms and minds around this huge set of questions. And it occurred to me to 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 push down on some appetitive or aversive behaviors? And to what extent can we do that? And to what end? And to what end? And maybe we need a rule book. I'm starting to believe, and I'm now 49 years old, that we need a rule book, that the neural circuitry that's encased within our skulls is not sufficient to allow us to navigate through life to our best outcome. We kind of know that we need a rule book, even...
You admitted that in some ways implicitly when you discussed the fact that we have a 25-year socialization window. And what that means is that... We have to interact with other people and our traditions in order to set us right. And that's so complex it takes 25 years. And so we're learning something from that. And that's indication that our...
let's say, default biological settings, are insufficient to guide us into the future, right? And so then the question is, well, what is it that you're learning as a consequence of that socialization process? And you can think about it.
And people have thought about it as a 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'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 was very different. He thought of the properly socialized person as someone who had integrated their lower order. we'll call them impulses for now, into a sustainable voluntary structure that regulated them and gave them all their proper place. That's very different than an inhibitory model. So, for example, I'll give you an example from my own life. My son was quite a willful young...
I wonder where he got it from. Yeah, well, fair enough. 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 it to integrate it and one of the consequences of that was he became a very good athlete and so why is that relevant well because it wasn't like he stopped being
assertive or even aggressive it's that he learned how to put that aggression in its proper place in relationship to a goal that was much more sophisticated than merely getting his own way moment to moment okay so
integration is a better, like a 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 impulse, because I said I would return to that, I spent a lot of time walking through the behavioral literature. 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, 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
because it fails to take into account the effect of those states on perception. So it's much better to think of a motivated state. This is what helped me integrate behavioral theory with psychoanalytic theory. especially the psychoanalytic theory of religious endeavor. It's much better to think of those lower order motivational states as personalities. They're sub-personalities.
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 sub personalities that's what a two-year-old is
Right. And so you have to build an integrating personality on top of those sub personalities, but not in a manner that inhibits them. That means your socialization is unsophisticated. Even Freud knew this because even though he had basically an inhibitory model of, say, super ego regulation, he believed that a healthy personality would have the... impulse of aggression and the impulse of sexuality to take two major lower order motivational states into account would have them integrated into
the functioning ego that the issue is integration and so what you're doing when you're social like okay when 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 a child. puts the child in isolation, that produces a pain-like response because social isolation produces pain. It's pure inhibition. 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, 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
Now able to be a social creature again instead of falling prey to his whim. I'm reinforcing the cortical integration of those underlying motivational states now You might think the human organism comes into the world with... with a warring battleground of primordial motivational states that's 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 18-year framework to to hone the manner in which those systems
make themselves manifest but the i think the best way to conceptualize that is that it's it's the hierarchical integration of the motivational states within an overarching superordinate personality and that personality 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 that's hard. It's very hard. I love this, and I'll tell you why. Because... The way that I think of the prefrontal cortex is that its main job is context dependent strategy setting.
Right, context-dependent. Context-dependent. That's a crucial issue. And you mentioned hypothalamus, this, you know, it's basically the size of, you know, two marbles or so sitting above the roof of our mouth, tiny, tiny little brain area. It's mostly switches in there. What do I mean by that? Anytime a neurosurgeon has stimulated neurons in a little sub area of the hypothalamus, you get...
either rage or sexual appetite or mating with inanimate objects. I mean, this was done in both non-human primates and in humans. Uncontrollable thirst? Uncontrollable thirst, hunger. total suppression of hunger. I mean, all the basic drives are operating in 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 really resonate. The prefrontal cortex, his prefrontal cortex had to learn that whatever he was feeling for himself, his own desires.
Needed to be placed in the context of other people's wishes desires and needs as well So there's an even for him to thrive, right? It's not merely a sacrifice of his own desire for the sake of others It's like no no look kid if you're we know this If you 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...
You're disciplining your child isn't to teach them that what they're doing is bad, you know, in that simple. in that simple sense that you might interpret punishment. It's like, no, you need to be more sophisticated. Well, why? Well, you have to be able to take turns. Well, why? Well, because 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 anti-social 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're modeling for your child. a strategy 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. Religious thinking is the attempt to formulate something approximating an ideal personality.
Now, that's often attributed elements of the divine, but there's reasons for that that we could go into. But as soon as you know that the basic structure, even at the lower motivational level, is personality, well then that... That changes the way you view the brain. Look, a lot of archaic deities are motivational systems. Could you give me an example? The god of war, Mars, that's rage. That was a god that the Vikings...
invoked before they went into battle. They would use Amanita muscaria, and they imitated predators from an early age. This is acetylcholine, by the way, folks. It has two general receptor systems, the nicotinic system, which is a stimulant but also relax. that's why people like nicotine. And then the muscarinic system, which creates changes in our self-perception and perception of the things around us. It's not so much a stimulant as it, it's a, I would.
veer towards almost like a psychedelic or it has an effect of making us less fearful and intrigued. It's a radically atypical psychedelic. Yeah, it's hard to describe. Yeah, yeah. It's outside the LSD. psilocybin, mescaline domain. So people would take this as an agent? The Vikings. The Vikings would take this as an agent before going into... Sure, because what they were trying to do is make the personality of rage superordinate with no pain.
Right, and they 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 their... I'm calling them impulses, but you're giving a more sophisticated explanation for them within which the aggressive impulse...
the strategically aggressive impulse could be channeled. Right. And give them full reign. Right. They were experts at that. To be able to decapitate people, eviscerate people, do whatever it was that they needed to do in order to win. And to suppress their own feelings of pain. Yeah, well, then you could imagine in a way that...
what they were doing was bringing the full resources of the cortex to and placing them at the service of the rage circuits in the hypothalamus like we have no idea what that would be like no there aren't we don't do that we have no idea what a human being who does that is like if they're expert at it. It would give you nightmares to think about it deeply. There's an experiment, if I may, that might shed some light on what it would look like.
a former guest on this podcast actually david anderson at caltech has been studying hypothalamic circuits and he and his former postdoc dayu 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. Right, right. So it's still somewhat context-dependent. Somewhat context-dependent. If they were alone in their cage, they wouldn't attack themselves or the walls of the cage. But if you put a...
air or water filled glove within the cage. They would absolutely attack it to try and destroy it. Then you turn off these neurons, the mouse is calm. We can put a link to this in the show note caption. Now here's what's remarkable. The ventromedial hypothalum. 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 neurons and behaviors. And it speaks to, I think, some of the things that Freud and others have talked about in terms of the juxtaposition of these neurons. that they mutually inhibit one another, which lends itself to some really interesting questions about when aggression and sexuality become combined in states of pathology. But in any event, so...
Context-dependent control over impulses, over the hypothalamus seems to be the theme here. And the other thing 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 notions of this too shall pass. The past, the present, and the future. Autonomic activation, stress, panic, fear, anger, tend to make us lose sight. We get blinders on, lose sight of the fact that there was a past, there's a present.
And there's a future. Well, that's because they're collapsing. They're collapsing your domain of apprehension to the moment. So you will act. You have to collapse to the moment to act. Right. And so we should also point out for everyone that. The other, you don't want to underestimate the sophistication of the hypothalamus, and this is partly why conceptualizing its various states as sub-personalities is so useful. I mean, it's not unsophisticated.
You can take a female cat and take out its whole brain except for the hypothalamus. So it's like 95% of its brain is gone. And in a relatively controlled environment, it's indistinguishable from... a normal cat it can in it can do cat things and live now it it's high and it's hyper exploratory now that's
That's a very strange thing. A cat with no brain is hyper exploratory. It's not what you'd think at all, but it shows you how sophisticated the hypothalamus is. It can run these programs, but they're... programs of personality because they have perceptions. It can run them and it 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 have to mediate between the states to some degree.
What do you do if you want to solve the problem of being hungry and tired over a long period of time? With other people, right? Well, you need more and more brain to calculate that, right? And so A huge part of what maturation is, is when we think about it as the capacity to forego gratification.
Actually, what's happening is that as you mature and your cortex comes online Let's say you're able to regulate your behavior with more and more other things taken into account Right, right and you know that there has to be some 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... 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 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 an unsophisticated strategy. They want what they want now. Regardless. And they don't care about the we. Or the future. Or the future. See, see, one of the ways I caught on to this relationship was I...
because I studied antisocial behavior for a very long time. Psychopaths in particular are notorious for their inability to learn from experience. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that if they do something... impulsive that causes them trouble in the future the fact of that future trouble has no bearing on their continued behavior well what that means is that they are so
non-communitarian, that they're willing to even betray their own future selves. There's no difference between that and betraying someone else. It's exactly the same mechanism. Very much a toddler. Sir, here's something I learned in Montreal. I worked with a man named Richard Trombley there and Richard
I think Richard's lab used up one-third of all social science funding for Quebec at one time. He was a radically successful researcher, and he was really interested in antisocial behavior and was trying to get to the roots. And one of the... conclusions that our lab enterprise move towards was that one observation was that if you take two-year-olds if you take kids at different
ages you could imagine you made a group of two-year-olds three-year-olds group four-year-olds all the way up to 15 you just let them interact the two-year-olds are the most aggressive and but if you analyze the two-year-olds themselves you find that
All the aggressive kids are boys, and it's only a fraction of them, about 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're often bigger physically. Yeah, especially the biting. Forgive me for interrupting, but there's a very interesting paper published about two years ago showing that there's a specific circuit.
from the hypothalamus to the neurons that control jaw closure that are independent of the neurons that control jaw closure for eating and for drinking, that are specifically for aggressive biting. I mean, I hope people understand the significance of this because what this means is there are dedicated circuits for aggressive biting in your hypothalamus.
We all learn to suppress these, except probably under conditions where our life is endangered, in which case you'd probably bite like hell in order to try and get out of that circumstance. But we are all born with this circuit. We die with this circuit. Most of us.
apparently not these kids, learn to suppress the circuit. Right, right. Or integrate. An eight-year-old biter is a scary thing. Right, right, right. 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. Yeah. 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 so much more primitive than even hitting or spitting or something. Exactly. It's the indication of...
of virtual absence of sophisticated socialization. They are truly in their hypothalamus. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. And that's, well, especially if you have a hypothalamus that's tilted towards rage, let's say, and 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 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 1800s that every drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit. Brilliant, a brilliant observation. Far different than conceiving of the, say, hypothalamic drives as... deterministic chains of only impulses and another thing to consider too with regards to the effect of hypothalamic motivation on perception that mouse that you talked about 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.
Right. That's more like a strategy. And 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 greatest historian of religions who ever lived was Mircea Eliade, and he wrote a sequence of brilliant books. The Sacred and the Profane is the best one to start with. Very short book, very elegant book. And what 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 motivational states. I'm going to pause you there because I think this is extremely important. So the god of war. Or the god of love. The goddess of love. Exactly. Exactly that. So the idea that the different gods are the reflective of different... Let's just say it as neuroscientists, it's different hypothalamic and related circuits. Well, why wouldn't they be gods? 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 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.
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 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 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 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 a simple impulse. It's like, no, they've... They've inverted the you could think they've inverted the neurological order and the god of rage is now the
what would you say, the leading personality of integration or the god of resentful rage, even worse. And the circuit may run in reverse. My colleague, David Spiegel, who's our vice chair of psychiatry at Stanford, has done some beautiful experiments examining the relationship between
uh prefrontal cortical areas and the insula a brain area that has a map of our internal body state interoception you know our ability to sense our internal workings etc in any event there are certain conditions including depression where the direction of flow between
and the prefrontal cortex and the insula literally reverses. It's like running against the typical traffic. This is a very different example because here you're presenting in the context of rage and sociopathy and these kids who... shoot up schools, but I do...
absolutely subscribe to what you just said, that if one drops into one of these more primitive states and emotions and all the things that go with it for a very long time, it's almost as if the governor, which is the prefrontal cortex, starts to become the governed. That the whole circuit starts to run from bottom up as opposed to top down. And I think there's good neurologic evidence. That's what happens in addiction.
Right, and so you hit that circuit that's seeking the drug with repeated doses of dopamine. You know, people say they have a monkey on their back. It's like, no, they have a monster in their brain, and it's... and they grew it and it grows because it's reinforced with dopaminergic hits and as it grows its capacity to dominate
increases and so when there's a cue for the addiction this is why people relapse when they get out of a treatment center they'll go back to their normal environment after having dealt with the physiological withdrawal, let's say, an acute craving will make itself manifest like a friend they freebase with, and it's all of a sudden, whoo!
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 sub-circuit, sub-personality, for its own pathological behavior. And so, and that's all reinforced too by the dopaminergic hits. It's like there's multiple people in there.
Yeah, definitely. In everyone. One of the most incredible examples. Polytheistic paganism. Polytheistic paganism. Yeah, 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.
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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... occurred i have a good friend who for many years struggled with alcohol and drug addiction of multiple kinds incredibly kind person incredibly successful in his career married two beautiful children, multiple relapses. Crashed his truck at seven in the morning after getting intoxicated at 6.30 in the morning.
Got out of that one, happened again. And again, multiple rehab centers of the sort of standard treatment, et cetera. And then ultimately enough happened within that whole set of circumstances that his wife said, you know, this is it. You've got it. solve this or we just can't be with you a very scary situation for everybody involved including him right who absolutely adored his family he told us his friends that he was going to go to uh
a center here in Los Angeles that treats addiction with essentially religion, a belief in God. He was already fairly religious. Most Sundays he attended church and things of that sort. You can imagine we all fought, 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... whether something must have changed in his brain by adopting what was essentially a...
Different incentive structure. Right. Different incentive structure. But fear wasn't doing it before. Fear of extreme consequences, which were on the table at that time when he went in, weren't enough. Something about going there.
and the work that he did there 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 they're So you can invite in spirits to possess you. That's a good way of thinking about it. I know that's odd terminology, but that's what you do when you dwell on your rage. Right.
Right. Now imagine that you're doing that in the most positive possible 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 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 target of my dissertation in the first... 20 papers that I published, I knew the alcoholism literature very well and the neurological end of it as well. And it was known among alcohol researchers, it's been known for 60 years, more even, that the most reliable treatment for alcoholism was religious transformation.
And this is well accepted among researchers in the field who have no religious affiliation whatsoever. And I do believe that... A huge part of that is a consequence of incentive restructuring. So you said, for example, with your friend that fear wouldn't work. Well, alcohol is a pretty good edit.
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 mimics that. Even if you know you're not. Even if you know it's irrelevant. I've never done cocaine. I would be open about it if I had. I think I like dopaminergic states enough that I've been very...
scared of doing it, frankly. Also, it wasn't around much just because of when I went to college. It just wasn't a drug that was around much. But it's a remarkable drug in the sense that people who take cocaine seem to be excited about everything. They're in this high dopaminergic state.
and their brain becomes exceptionally good at finding cocaine even in the absence of resources which is pretty remarkable if you think about it you know i mean most people can't find the 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 they lie, cheat, and steal. Lie, cheat, and steal. But they'll do other things too, right? They'll socialize with people that have it so they don't have to lie, cheat, and steal. It's incredible to see that drug and things like methamphetamine take over people's minds. And now I'm thinking... The pathway appears when the aim is firmly in mind.
right see this is another this is another insistence that's derived from the religious literature so because the idea there is that if your aim is upward the pathway forward to that will make itself manifest and that's true you just pointed out that it was true in relationship to addiction right is that if once that once you're in that realm of
Possessed personality the pathway forward will show itself to you even under 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, let me see, the aim is possessed by the substance of addiction, right? So now the highest God is...
Cocaine, let's say. And so now all pathways in the world are pathways to cocaine. All objects in the world are markers on the pathway to cocaine because it just dominates. But it's not just an impulse. It dominates the perceptual. landscape as well. 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 about pornography. And the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation. 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.
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. Last time I checked, that's still true. A sperm and an egg met someplace in some context to create all of us, okay? We're still grounded in that. Pornography is something that I hear quite a lot.
from typically young males, but sometimes young females or even older females who say that they can see themselves trying to resist. the desire to go look at it. And it almost doesn't feel like a desire anymore. They're sort of just in a kind of a compulsion that is... almost unconscious, but they're just aware of the fact that they're- Like an eating disorder. Like an eating disorder. They're doing it, they know they shouldn't be doing it, and they can't help themselves.
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 been compulsively rewarded. So, you know, 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.
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 successful sexual satiation, which it can, that's what masturbation does, then the whole personality that's oriented toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate.
It's very much like an addiction, except it's, you know, there has been 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
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
Males in particular are susceptible to that because male sexuality and human beings is very visually oriented very and a lot of our brain is visual way more than Virtually every other animal certainly every other primate and vert and every other mammal and so We have a situation where any 13 year old boy.
can see more hyper attractive super stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived a hundred years ago would have ever seen in his whole life yeah well that's a like an evolutionary ecological radical ecological transformation and the and it's worse because it's easily accessible so it takes no work right so not only is it a super stimulus it's one that's at hand so to speak and the uh and the uh
The analog in the food world would be highly palatable, highly processed food. Yeah, sugar, fat combination. The other day I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and I looked around and I... I thought this isn't a convenience store, this is a pharmacy.
Right. Everything that had chocolate 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 stimulants. And you've got nicotine. Energy drinks. And these things on their own. aren't necessarily bad, any one of these one elements in low enough doses, in frequent use, et cetera, but maybe sugar being the one that clearly, I think, deserves deeper investigation, right? But...
It just occurred to me that... There isn't much difference between manufacturing sugar and manufacturing cocaine. I mean, you take something that's available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it. I mean, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as mild stimulant, didn't seem to cause them any trouble, but that's way different than cocaine, right? And sugar has the same...
arguably, the same pathological properties. Well, I didn't think we were going to go here, but I think it's extremely appropriate and important that we do. So I know that you followed what is essentially an elimination diet for a number of years. You eat meat, right? meat, vegetables, fruit, and 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 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 have explain why you think that's that link learned link about satiation
can't be learned in the case of these processed foods. Yeah, because in the context of these processed foods, they're activating multiple neuron systems in the hypothalamus and gut. We know that the gut has neurons that can respond to sugar.
fatty acids, and amino acid content. And there's this prominent theory that one of the main reasons we eat is to forage for amino acids, that we'll eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids. 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 no-dose ganglion, if you want to look at it, fun name, and then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain, which make us, oh, when we eat something that has a high...
essential amino acid content, like a steak, like a really tasty steak, the neurons in the gut in a way that is independent of taste are signaling to the brain, ah, I'm getting essential amino acids. You should eat more of this thing. If those... let's just say a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a candy bar or in a
you know, a package of Skittles, which I'm guessing there's very few of them, if any, you're going to continue to forage for food because those neurons will also respond to sugar. Basically, it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids. In other words, there are two parallel tracks.
One within our taste system. Multiple pathways to satiation. Totally right. Multiple pathways to satiation. One dependent on taste, one dependent on actual nutrient content. The mouth can only learn taste association.
The mouth can't actually learn nutrient content. The gut knows nutrient content. The problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or 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. So that's empty calories. Empty calories. So in some ways, you know, this, again, is an analog to the whole. discussion around pornography masturbation and and reproduction right i'm not saying that reproduction is the be-all end-all of sexual activity but in the evolutionary sense it absolutely is right there's no question about that there's no moral judgment there that's just the reality so the the
The situation with food is the following. If we are eating without any gut level understanding of what... what's coming in, we will keep eating. If you, let me give an example, you probably haven't done this experiment in a while, but if you've ever just had, you know, ribeye steak or two, it's pretty satiating. Maybe you also have a salad if you're me or some broccoli or something like that. If one takes then, even after you've eaten all that, one bite of pasta.
One bite of pasta, the next impulse is more, right? Even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those steaks, your leucine threshold, you've reached that, et cetera, all 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
calmer, more prudent version of themselves, right, to enter a different hypothalamic activation pattern is to start breaking the things down into their essential elements. about the motivation, the pleasure, et cetera, to tamp all that down. I mean, we know that for pornography, if the pornography is very extreme, then less extreme pornography doesn't seem to work. Well, that's because there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic strife. 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 repetitive striving that plays out in pornography. There's the direct effect of the stimulus as such, but there's variation in the stimulus that's also novel. And so 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 keeps the novelty alive. That's very dangerous. That's a very dangerous development. right and i would venture in a very different domain that if you were to eat your steak slathered in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks going back to the way that you eat them now which by the way this is a great opportunity to
educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner last which is that if you're going to order a steak order a pittsburgh char the char on the outside is incredibly tasty there right we love that um the umami taste is that we should have a devoted taste receptors that's
Yeah. And if they don't know what a Pittsburgh char is, then maybe you're in the wrong restaurant or you need to educate them. But incredibly satiating, delicious, right? But if you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while...
your plain steaks wouldn't taste as good but certainly but the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in which the stuff that all the condiments etc would start to become aversive i do believe that when we return to the the sort of most um naturally satisfying mode of engaging with these uh with these circuits here we're talking about food and sex in parallel that they become especially satiating and i think that
You know, in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography, and they're not addicted like they're telling me they love it. and they can't stop. They're telling me it's no longer working for them, 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 go out and find a real relationship, a real sexual relationship.
Well, there is also some evidence suggesting too that if you've been socialized into pornography, sexuality, it's actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner. now i would say to some degree that's always been difficult because it's a complex form of behavior but the introduction of pornography well it sets up a whole landscape of expectation for example that's not necessarily going to play out that well in the real world let's say.
And there's also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating. Completely different.
so some of these 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. Yeah, just there's one image of the rocket thrusters that just captivated me. I'm not a spacecraft guy. I mean, I think it's really cool, but I wouldn't consider myself somebody that like...
looks at the stars and thinks i want to go you know i want to 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 we like
Dirt clod wars, right. Targeted, right. What an incredible display of funneling the laws of physics and engineering into something that can have enormous action at a distance and perhaps even take us into new galaxies. Amazing, right? The word sin in many languages means to miss the target. Right. And it speaks to exactly what you're describing, like that 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 as the center of a target. There's targets everywhere. And we're... unbelievably focused on bridging the gap between where we are and where we're going. Yeah, that's the whole perceptual landscape. I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing.
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So this thing about action in a distance to me feels like so inherent to our progression as a species. Most technologies are about that. In fact, if you think about social media, you know, somebody tweets something and, you know, when people react to it, maybe positively or negatively.
the school shooter in a very dark example, a sad, a tragic example, right? Action at a distance. Then you think about pornography and masturbation, and I'm not passing any moral judgment here. It's the ultimate form of Creating action at a distance would be to create a new human being with somebody, right? I mean, you're propagating in physical distance, creating a new being, and in time.
Right. I mean, incredible. And then you think about masturbation and you think about pornography and there is no action at a distance. And I'm not just. punning here i mean literally there's not much action at a distance it's all up close to oneself but there's there's no impact on anybody it's almost as if the energy that we're born with to be able to create
positive things to evolve our species through action at a distance, through creation of knowledge, technology, children, communities, culture. The ultimate expression of sterility. It's just looped back into oneself.
It's as if, and 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, The language for it is only like the diminished souls of these people who are coming to me saying like, you know, like help.
And I'm thinking, OK, listen, I'm a podcaster. I'm a scientist. I know some things about the dopaminergic system. But there are ways that they can get help. I think there are 12-step programs for this and so forth and other things. But I think what they're saying is that they're just... kind of dissolving in their own in their own
but there's no action at a distance for them. This is the same thing I see with the failure to launch kids who are still living at home, who are not having any action at a distance. I think we were designed to disperse from our families and to create action at a distance up until a certain age. But I see so many of the problems that we face as failure to find a...
productive way to have action. That's a failure of adventure, I would say, in the terminology that I've been developing. So, for example, 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 stunning, actually, and I'll lay some of that out for you. You can tell me what you think about it.
The divine is characterized in the classic stories of our culture as the ultimate up. So you can think about the divine as the target as such. Rather than any particular target. So here's a way of thinking about it, you know. So an ambition will seize you. And then you'll aim at fulfilling that ambition.
Once the ambition is fulfilled, a new ambition makes itself manifest, which might be a greater ambition, let's say, if your personality is expansive. And then if you fulfill that, the same thing will happen. So then you could imagine that there's a meta ambition. behind all proximal ambitions. Okay, now the divine characterization of the divine is a characterization of that meta ambition.
That's a good way of thinking about it. So it's something that recedes as you approach it. But it's also the thing that all ambitions have in common. And we know there is such a thing because otherwise we wouldn't have a concept of ambition, right, which speaks to a... commonality among ambitions. Okay. In the story of Abraham, the divine is characterized in relationship to something like ambition. So Abraham has the...
He's already immersed in a situation that's akin, in a way, to the scenario of a wealthy and a person in the modern world who's in a situation of abundance. Abraham's parents are wealthy. and they provide for him there's nothing he needs to do and in consequence so he's attained the socialist utopia or the consumerist utopia you can look at it either way and
There's no reason for him to move forward so he doesn't he doesn't do anything till he's 75 and then the voice comes to him Which is the voice of adventure and it's God in this story. That's how God is defined right and
God says to Abraham, you have to leave all this comfort, which is a very interesting proposition to begin with. 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 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 was a crucial... there's a crucial it's a crucial point to understand because the process of transformation requires sacrifice to be more than you are means you have to let go of that which you were
You have to make sacrifices. Now, Abraham's life is punctuated by a sequence of reaffirmations of his upward aim and declamations of his willingness to sacrifice. Every time he finishes an adventure, he re... constitutes the covenant. Right. So this is this agreement to follow the voice of adventure. Okay. God makes him a deal. That's the covenant. It's 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 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.
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 got its character. Now, the character of that instinct in this story is
The way it's characterized is as the voice of adventure. So it's the thing that asks you to move beyond your zone of comfort and go into the foreign world. Now, the advantage to that is that you fortify yourself and you develop. Right? So no matter how good you are now, if you push yourself to the edge, you're going to be better than you are. And that's a better win than merely being good like you are now.
So that would be participation in that transformative process is a higher form of attainment than mere attainment of any specific goal. Okay, so that's the call to adventure. That's the call to a quest. That's what Gandalf offers. Bilbo, for example. Okay. God characterizes the consequences of that. And this is so cool. 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, eh? Because lots, the miserable people you're talking about, the depressed people, the trapped people, their life isn't a blessing to themselves. So what's a pathway to blessing? Well, it's not satiation, not in this formulation. it's voluntary it's the voluntary quest and it's characterized by adventure so that's deal number one you'll live in a life that'll be a blessing to you okay and then god says that's not all that'll happen you'll
Be a blessing to yourself in a manner that will make you renowned among other people justly. That's a good deal because we know that people, men in particular, are very status... oriented partly because their reproductive success is highly correlated with their social status and you know the psychopaths game that but still it's like
renown is crucially important. You want to be the quarterback on the shoulders of your teammates, you know, so that'll be the second thing that happens and then the same voice says, and that's not all. You'll be a blessing to yourself and be renowned in a manner that will maximize the probability that you will establish something of lasting value That's a good deal. So that's that's stretching across time multi-generationally because
God tells Abraham that if he follows the pathway of adventure, he'll be the father of nations. So what that means is that he'll establish the pattern of paternal conduct that will maximally, that will maximize the success of his offspring in the longest possible run. That's so cool. This is success at a distance and over time. Exactly. And then 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 can't see how it can be wrong. It means that If you hearken to the voice that calls you out of your zone of comfort, you do that voluntarily. So you put yourself on the edge of adventure.
You will be following the instinct that has already evolved to make your life a blessing to yourself, to make you successful among other people, to maximize your probability of long-term success, and to do that in a way that... brings abundance to your community and then you think look let's take the contrary hypothesis
The contrary hypothesis would be twofold. There is no compulsion to adventure. It's like that seems highly improbable. Or that the compulsion to adventure isn't aligned with psychological and social well-being. well what's the what's the chance that the fundamental drive that would facilitate your transformation across time would not be aligned with your psychological integrity and the success of the community
Like we wouldn't be social animals if that was the case. So as far as I can tell, that has to be true. Now that doesn't mean you can get lost in false adventures.
That can happen. That's what an addiction is. Or that's what pornography is. It's a false adventure. 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. I just can't see how that can be wrong. And that's a characterization of the divine. There's other, it complexifies it because what the stories are trying to do is to...
Give you an image of what that integrating personality might be like and it's sophisticated So a single characterization is insufficient. So in the story of Noah God is This personality is characterized quite differently. So Noah is presented as a man who's wise in his generations, which means that for his time and place, he's moral and reputable. So he's the sort of guy that people would go to for advice because he's
Lived a life that's emblematic of his wisdom. Let's say okay now a voice comes to him and says Batten down the hatches there mate troubles 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 I think that's done with radical success in the biblical library, that the culmination of the library of stories is the...
impressionistic representation of this integrating pattern. And I think that's what people call on when they're engaging in a religious enterprise that is radically successful like that happened in the case of your friend. Right. So he got a new personality and that new personality had different incentive structure. And so that just superseded the addiction. It's almost as if I mean.
I realize that for people listening, it might not seem like this, but to us, his friends who had seen him try so hard in the context of people he truly, deeply cares about, more than anybody in the world, his children, his wife. It was almost like he got a brain transplant. It was 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 Christian religious language. He said that he felt... Jesus' love for him, and he saw an image of who he could become. This was important, perhaps, no doubt, not just perhaps, but no doubt, of who he could become. And that was worth it.
And he had the adequate social support within this place. And so there was reinforcement. Yeah. But what's remarkable is that he was able to take that outside of. Right, right. It was a residential facility out of this place. And carry it with them. To this day, he is rock solid. In that domain, and I will say in all the other domains of his life too, extremely successful as an artist. I don't want to out him. Extremely successful as a commercial artist.
happy and in service and just seems like he got a brain transplant. Right. So there's a mystery there that's kind of threefold. One is... What the hell did he mean that he realized that Jesus Christ loved him, right? That's okay. What do you mean by that? And then somehow that's associated with the vision he developed of who he could be if he was everything he could be. There's a relationship between those two things.
And then there's this third mystery is the culmination of those two phenomena, freedom of his addiction, even out of the context of the center. That's right. Very difficult to understand that. But, you know... We know think about it this way if you're possessed by rage Different phenomena have dopaminergic cachet to you than if you're possessed by like sexual desire
Like, obviously, right? Absolutely. Right. So the idea that a given stimuli produces a given motivational response is incorrect because that's framework dependent, right? So I think... one of the best ways to understand a motivational drive is that a motivational drive grips the target. It establishes the target, right? And it may...
Increase the probability that certain action patterns will make themselves manifest that would be the kind of a compulsive element But fundamentally what it's doing is changing the target that rearranges the perceptual landscape and it transforms the emotions because now If your target is there, things that lead you there are dopaminergically relevant. If your target is there, things that lead you there are relevant. Same underlying emotion, but the stimuli.
so to speak that give rise to the emotion are radically different so now he has a different orientation and aim and so the incentive structure of his psyche is radically transformed. Now we know that can happen because that happens to you when you move from one motivated state to another. I think in 12-step programs they allow the steps to be milestones.
I mean, there's clearly a 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. Which is why it can be gamed by cocaine. why it can be gained by cocaine or most anything that can ferret its way into the hypothalamic system. And I hope people picked up on what you said before because it's so important that as one moves toward a target...
dopamine increases en route to that target. I'm rephrasing what you said before. You said it wonderfully. I just want to make sure people understand that as that dopamine increases, the probability that your perception will
go to something other than the target decreases exponentially. As you get closer and closer, you get more and more dopamine, the greater the elevation of dopamine, the lower the probability that you'll engage in any other pattern of self. It's like, it's almost, or these, or personality. type other than the one that you're engaged in in pursuit of this behavior will emerge. No, at least because as you...
approach successfully, the probability of ultimate success is obviously increasing. So it makes perfect sense that you would narrow and focus. You run faster as you see the finish line. Right. Faster and faster. This concept of sin as missing...
target where this definition of sin I think is incredibly important. Hamartia is the Greek word and 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 notion is predicated on this target seeking.
psychophysiology, and 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. This is so important, and 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 is circuitry deep in the brain. If you want to 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, a colleague of mine who's now retired at Stanford, Eric Knudsen, who did some beautiful work on neuroplasticity, was describing an experiment where they take out the frontal cortex of these owls. Owls are because they... You know, they don't have much eye movements. They move their head almost all the way around, right? We've all seen that. And they use this 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 cat with no brain is hyperexploratory, right? Everything's a target.
Everything is a target. Everything is a target. And there's no context-dependent learning. Yeah. Right. I love that you gave the example of the decerebrate cats. They even can do fictive motion. They can walk on a treadmill and it's like with no cortex. It's amazing. It makes you rethink the cortex. Yeah, that's for sure. And humans have these frontal eye fields, which are an evolved area. They're present in other species too, but they're massively expanded in humans. So this is a...
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? Yeah. Well, then maybe I'll activate my aggression or maybe I'll brace my defenses or wow, she's we came to this party together, but she seems. Super interested in like –
directing her gaze. How are we inferring this? Sometimes it's body language. Sometimes it's this. Sometimes he looked at her. There are all these memes about this, right? Right, right, right. The famous look over the shoulder meme that seems to have taken over the internet from time to time. With the appropriate facial response. Exactly. So humans have an ev...
massively expanded notion of what gaze is and our ability to control gaze and understanding of gaze. So when you raise this idea, 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 into notions of theory of mind and things of that sort. 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 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 curl up, like turtle up, and then look. And you turn to the place where your stereoscopic audition has indicated that the noise emanated from, right? And that's automatic. That's the control. of the eye.
gaze and, well, and bodily posture by those underlying... Yeah, this is a superior colloquial. It has a map of auditory world. So when you hear something to your right, you turn to your right. Right, right. And you do that before you think. Absolutely. Right, okay. So that's an activation of the... I feels, let's say, by these underlying motivational systems that have this personality-like autonomy. But 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. That'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 other enterprises that he was pursuing in his life became more effective. It's almost like... It is as if... Every goal was like elevated. Right. And it's funny because for the first couple of. months that I was interacting with him I thought okay like like he's different yeah and and I thought you know like most people would you know perhaps would think like all right let's see
See, but this has been four years now. He's very consistent with his program. You know, he's involved in a program that keeps him on track. Right, right, right. But 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's been a remarkable thing to observe because he was about as down in his addiction and had so much to lose and had... essentially risked it over and over and over to the point where, you know, I didn't think it was ever going to turn around. And all of his friends thought the same. And his wife, of course, is delighted and his kids are delighted. Of course. And...
I could say this without revealing because no one knows. I'm godfather to his son, and his son is thriving, which is wonderful to see. And I just think of sometimes about how badly it could have gone the other way. Yeah. And it's fantastic. It's nothing short of spectacular. Okay. So 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 medical 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 it.
in alignment with the notion that the firstborn is to be consecrated to God. There's a meaning to that and the meaning is something like this. Imagine that your life consists of a sequence of episodes. An episode has a beginning and a middle and an end. The beginning sets the frame for the episode. So at the beginning of an enterprise, you want to...
You want to lift your eyes heavenward so you establish the highest possible goal so that that constitutes the frame of perception for that episode. That's the idea. That's why the firstborn should be consecrated to God. So, for example,
to think about it prosaically. Before we sat down for our podcast, because we've done many podcasts, we... we strive to inhabit the framework that will make the podcast most radically successful now you could imagine that that could be subordinated to either of our Proximal desire for an increase in short-term personal fame right or we could try to dominate each other in the conversation Or we could orient ourselves properly and we could do what we could to pursue
the track towards revelation, so to speak, and we could elevate our conversation in that manner. Okay, and that would set the frame for the conversation. And the good podcasters always do that, right? They're not playing games. Or if they're playing games, it's of the highest possible order. It's a quest.
yeah okay quest for what enlightenment for truth right for mutual understanding and then maybe for the education of those who are participating all right so christ says first orient your eyes upward right that's to love god above all so whatever that upward divinity is you establish an allegiance with that and you allow that to determine your perceptions and your motivations next operate under the assumption that
Other people like you participate in that nature of that utmost aim and treat them that way. Next, concentrate on the moment. Right. Right. And that's exactly right because it's exactly right because when you specify your aim, the pathway makes itself manifest. Otherwise, you could never use your senses to orient. You'd never get anywhere.
Right. So if you aim upward to the best of your ability, then the pathway upward is what will make itself manifest in front of you. Then you have to attend to it. And so then you get this weird perverse optimality, which is. you're focused on the longest temporal scale and the highest possible elevation and you can make most use of what's right in front of you and that the implication in the
Sermon on the Mount is that there's no difference between that and participating in life eternal as it unfolds in the moment. And I think that seems to me to be exactly right. It's exactly right. And so, you know, I was thinking of that because you said your friends, all of your friends' endeavors had become elevated. So imagine that one problem you might want to solve is what your goals should be.
But a much deeper problem would be, how do you conceptualize your goals in relationship to one another across the broadest span of time and person so that every goal has the highest probability of succeeding?
So that would be like the pursuit of a medical. I would say that's what defines the religious enterprise. There's another variant of that, for example. So a variant of that would be not how do you solve the problem of any given thing that terrifies you but how do you solve the problem of the class of things that terrify you and the dragon fight mythology is the solution to that problem so the attitude there is
you adopt the stance of voluntary what a voluntary approach in the face of terror because that's the best 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 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 metagoals in relationship to positive and negative emotion that's a good way of thinking about it
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I dissolve one packet of Element in about 16 to 32 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 Element 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 Element. I like the watermelon. I like the raspberry. I like the citrus. Basically, I like all of them. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman Lab to claim a... free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.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 an internalization of the greatest possible outcome. And when I say greatest, both for oneself but also for the community.
Yeah, that's life more abundant. That's the symbolic terminology. Or life in eternity. Both of those are the same thing. So imagine you're fighting with your wife. Now you're dominated by rage. Now, the advantage to that is... you're ready and but the disadvantage is you're going to strive for proximal victory okay now you don't want to be a pushover that's a mistake so then what could you do instead you could pause
you could remember okay if this could rectify itself in the best possible manner what would that look like well it's complicated right you don't want your wife to be defeated and you don't want to be defeated, and you want to solve the problem, but you don't want to sweep it under the rug. You want to solve it in a way that'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've described it. You will be. If you don't alter your aim, you will be.
Because you need to substitute. You've 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 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 listen 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 got that vision fleshed out properly, you'll want that more than you'll want to win. And then you might say, well, why? It's like, because it's a better deal. So there's one of Christ's parables where he talks about a pearl of great price, which is the pearl that a rich man would sell everything he owns to possess.
And 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 you win, but if you forgo the ultimate game.
That's not a victory. That's a defeat. Obviously, it might even be a worse defeat than if you lost. Absolutely. I've been 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 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 caves? No reward without commensurate sacrifice. That's right. Of some sort. Yep, yep, yep. And the other issue, and it's coming up again and again today, and I love that it is, is this notion of the temporal domain.
Rewards that exist over multiple timescales or broader timescales. One of the things that I feel truly lucky for is the fact that I went the path of science where we were chuckling about this earlier. You know, a project could take a year. Then you have to restart because that project went nowhere. And then you finish the project, you submit a paper, the review. I mean, the reward schedule in science.
could take four years. It's not just about getting a degree, like getting papers through sometimes took a year, sometimes took two years. You know, sometimes things didn't go well and you had to publish in a journal that you wouldn't have wanted to, or sometimes you had to abandon projects altogether. So my reward system was trained up on lots of timescales, short, medium, long timescales. As I've moved into podcasting, the temporal loops are shorter. They're faster.
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. And Instagram, et cetera, they're very useful. But they train us, and I imagine they've trained the young brains that were weaned on them, because I wasn't, but that were weaned on them.
for fast temporal time scales. This isn't like playing a long poker game. This is like playing the slot machine over and over and over, right? It's not like a four-day... Tournament. Complete with intermittent random reinforcement, which is what happens when something goes viral unpredictably. Right. Right, right. It's really. Right. Yeah. And then, of course, we have this notion in this country that, you know, in any moment it could be a rags to riches or over, you know, some.
you know, overnight fame type thing that exists as a possibility in our culture that in a way that it hadn't prior. So I think that one of the things that could be useful, just venturing a hypothesis here, is that young and older people could 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 longer timescale. Well, that's also a hallmark of maturity.
Yes, school, a degree, et cetera. In business, the time scales are sometimes fast, sometimes short. I think you can ask even a better question than that. The better question would be, and this is kind of what's referred to in the Sermon on the Mount, is how could I optimize my long-term view while maximizing my focus on the moment?
Because then you get both. That's a really good deal, right? Because now you're conducting yourself in a manner that works in an iterated way that's socially productive. 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 emotion. I'd figured out a few years ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy. like technically which i was really thrilled about because it it gives emotion a physical grounding like a real physical grounding and friston surprised me because he said he has a theory a positive emotion that's
analogous. He also knew the negative emotion. He'd also been working in that domain. He said that you get a dopamine kick when you reduce the entropy in relationship to a goal. And I thought, oh my God, that's so cool because it means that... uncertainty is entropy when it emerges you get anxious but when you see yourself stepping towards a goal you get a dopamine kick and the reason that's an entropy related to entropy is because with each step
successful step you take towards a goal you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit which is manifested in that phenomena you described which is when you see the finish line you start running faster right so they're both related to entropy well to have goals at multiple timescales yes you need to be able to read it in i i love this entropy argument it makes total sense that You want to be able to withstand the...
the periods of time when you don't know whether or not your things are becoming more or less uncertain yeah yes this is part of becoming um an adult yes 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 included. Now, you're not going to know exactly how to do that, but that can be your goal. Okay, now that's going to inform... your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway but it's also going to modify your reward system because now
Every proximal step forward is 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 kind of explains why your friend... was able to pop out of his addictive frame because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol, let's say, pales in comparison.
Right, right. It's a rewriting of the reward contingencies. Yeah, right, exactly. And now you can 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 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... ask somebody else they might say yes they might say no you got on a date they might not want a second date well and that's all things could progress you might think that you're on the path to one thing and it turns out it doesn't work or it's you're not compatible you know that's also extremely salutary Because if you're being rejected, like say you're a foraging male and you're being rejected all the time.
and you forego that for pornography, what you're foregoing is the corrective that all those women are offering you. Like, they're rejecting you because there is something wrong. Like, seriously. There's something wrong. And now you escape from that. You think, well, that's a relief because no more rejection. It's like, yeah, no more rejection, no more learning, no more improvement, and no possibility of...
of an actual life. Right. No action at a distance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 all that possibly could arise. It's worse than that because it's more pornography in a degenerating game because as you said, you have to chase that novelty edge.
Otherwise, dopamine is driven down further. Well, and that means what? It's going to get more and more extreme? Well, that's not a good scenario. That's not a good... Like, what do you mean more and more extreme exactly? Like, where does that end? Well... you know a casual glance at online pornography can give you some real insight into where that ends like there's that's a bottomless pit and and in the most pernicious possible manner because
Sexuality can definitely twist itself into pathological forms that undermine psychological integrity and demolish society. You know, we see this with people who are highly successful, who seem to have lots of areas of their life regulated. And then, you know. they collapse their lives. I mean, we sometimes see it with drugs of abuse as well. Although, unless those drugs of abuse are dopaminergic and people have them... in Czech, so to speak, which is exceedingly rare. Yes.
It's usually just a matter of time, and they don't reach the mountaintop. Yes, well, 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. Revelation is a vision of the eternal pattern of the end.
Here's an element of the vision. It's so remarkable. I figured this out with my friend Jonathan Pagiot. So there's a vision, a sub-vision 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 going to be men and women who disintegrate. There's no reason to assume that their pattern of disintegration would be identical. Okay. Scarlet beast, that's the scarlet beast of the state. That's Babylon, let's say. That's the degenerate tyrannical state. It has multiple heads.
Why? Because whatever united it has vanished. That's like the death of God. It's vanished. And so now it's got heads in every direction. So it's confused. And it's red scarlet because that's that confusion. That disintegration is the precursor to the river of blood, right? The Red Sea, the swamp of chaos. So when the patriarchal... state disintegrates, it loses its unity, and then it's multiple heads, right? And that's an...
That's the emblem of descent into diverse chaos. And gazes everywhere with these multiple heads. Precisely, precisely. It's not integrated. Okay. Now, that's the disintegration of the patriarchy, you might say. 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, I mean, I guess I... We'll just say it. Recently, there's been a number of posts on X of this woman who had sex with 100 men in a day. And now she's saying she's going to have sex with 1,000 men in a day. Yeah, well, she seems to be rethinking her plan given the emotional consequences she had.
to her last success. Yeah, I must say... Her mother is her finance officer. I'm speechless. That's for sure. I'm speechless. My response to her... kind of post-100 Men thing, it was hard for me to know to what extent that was part of the performance. Whatever. Performance. Whatever it was, you know. So it was hard for me to discern what was really going on there. I'm not a psychologist. But anyone who saw that would say, 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 navigating life in this way, her choice, clearly. But the fact that so many people know about this, the fact that so many...
And here we're talking about it, but I think in service to a greater good, I certainly believe, that this is now out there. right it's out there um just like seeing somebody pushing the envelope just like seeing somebody murder somebody in cold blood we we could talk about that recently a video of an assassination that and those had been available before but
Those two things kind of leveled up or leveled down, you know, one's idea of what humans are capable of by allowing so many people. And what's acceptable. What's acceptable. More desirable. That's right. The threshold shifted. That's for sure. Maybe that's what I'm looking for. The threshold shifted. Yeah. Okay. So that's a great example. That young woman who's...
Betrayed herself in the deepest possible manner and all of the people that are following her and all the young women who are influenced by her so you have this Figure on the back of the degenerate state. That's the degenerate feminine female sexuality commoditize a 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 element to it. The degenerate state offers the Whore of Babylon as enticement for its degeneration. You can have everything you want on the sexual side. At the end of that substory, 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 the same in South Korea, right? The birth rates in those countries have plummeted. Like, they're way, way below replacement.
Increasingly, 50% of women in the West are childless at 30. And birth rates are way, way down. And going down as well. 50% are childless. Half of them will never have a child. Because 30 is already pushing it, and 95% of them will regret it. We're already in a situation in the West where one in four women will be involuntarily childless. Right, and so it's so, well, that's a good example.
as I said earlier, of how these things are characterized in this symbolic language that outlines the starkest, you might say, the starkest of biological... realities. You said that there was a problem, you know, your sense was that there was a problem with effortless gratification. It's like, well, the problem, part of the problem with effortless gratification is it destroys itself.
And it's so interesting because the promise of the sexual revolution and the pill was an unlimited horizon of sexual opportunity. Okay, we know, but the actual consequence of that was... appears to be, that that's the pathway to the demise of sexuality itself. This was if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. Someone I know who was a... in their 20s in the 1970s 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 seven right right that promise yeah that was about the the sort of the um just uh promiscuity had emerged as a theme of the 1970s. Yeah, well, I mean, in the aftermath of the birth control pill, it was not surprising that people thought maybe that was possible. But that was wrong. It was seriously wrong.
we're going to be dealing with the consequences of that for a very long time. You said that the patriarchy, the masculine fails before the... Well, no, I would say that happens in concert. Yeah, in concert. So it's not causal. No, no. You can't men and women degenerate at the same rate, right? I mean, we're involved in feedback processes that are so tight that there's no...
Like there's no oppressing women without oppressing men. There's no oppressing men without oppressing women. It's like we're joined at the hip, so to speak. And so, you know, these cultures that cloak women and silence them. you might think, well, that leads to the domination of men. It just turns men into pathological tyrants. There's no victory over one sex that's a victory of any sense at all. It's anti-humanity.
Of course, of course, of course. There was a recent post on X that just held my gaze, my attention, where... It was a back and forth debate, a pseudo-political social debate. And then there were three words that I'll just say that Marc Andreessen said, you know, it was about restoring vigor. pride and achievement and i thought wow like he's not a political candidate but that's a beautiful trifecta vigor pride and achievement to celebrate those and i and i put that next to you know
The deep pleasure in generative action at a distance, a technological development, the rockets. And there are other generative achievements. I think that's 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 eight years independent of my professorial career and those are large audiences you know they must average about three or four thousand people and there's one place I go that always reduces the audience to like
Dead silence. The audiences are usually quiet in the events. That's one of the ways, I'm sure you know this, you want to listen to the audience. You want to stay in that zone where no one's moving.
because then you know their attention is focused, and you can hear that, and you can, I wouldn't say, you can play with it, not manipulatively, but in the proper sense of play. I learned a long while ago that... adventure let's say is the highest form of reward that's a good way of thinking about it but there's a corollary to that that conservatives need to learn because they don't know this
Conservatives talk about responsibility, but they're conscientious. And so for them, responsibility is dutiful, orderly productivity. It's conscientiousness. Responsibility is a conscientious duty. What they fail to understand is that there's no difference between responsibility and adventure. They're the same thing. And you can tell young men in particular that.
say look you want to have an adventure because you definitely want an adventure you're like you're built for that it will increase your status it will improve your life like it'll Improve the probability that you'll accomplish something. You want an adventure. Every fiber of your being is screaming for it. Where do you find it? You find it in the voluntary adoption of responsibility. And that's like...
Everyone needs to know that. No young person has been taught that for like five generations. This is important. Can we operationalize this? So in your first book, you talked about get your room in order. Yeah. One of the first things I do when I wake up in the morning. I look around the kitchen, I look around my room, and I try and get things in order. Yeah. And I...
Now I need that in order to be able to think clearly. But it's just a first order of business. Well, it's also a great morning ritual because it's often the case, especially if you have a bit of a depressive tilt, that it's kind of hard to get. oriented properly in the morning you know and if you take like i moved into a new house a while back in in northern ontario and the garage wasn't set up properly and the first thing i did in the morning was i went out in the garage for 10 minutes
And 10 minutes isn't very long, but I would like order one thing, you know, part of the toolbox or whatever. And like, if you do that every day, things fall into order pretty quickly. But it was a real relief to me in some way because I didn't have to think about what I was going to do when I woke up. I made my bed.
And then I went and fixed the garage for like 10 minutes. And you get the brain into this, into what I call linear operations. Like the ability to carry out something linearly when there's a near infinite number of options in your phone, in your physical space, I think is so... powerful because you're picking a target.
Absolutely. And it certainly isn't a sinful, sorry. And you know it's not sin to clean your room or to organize your space or the garage. So you start with it. So within the day, one can do that. In terms of, I really... love the stickiness, the positive stickiness of this idea that adventure and responsibility are the same thing. Well, let's take that apart because it's not immediately obvious. But look, when you go...
Let's say you go see an adventure movie, James Bond movie, you know, classic archetypal action adventure movie with some romance thrown in there. What is he doing? Well, difficult things. 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's the sacrificial element to it. But everybody's gripped by it. Well, why? Because the stakes are high. What does it mean for the stakes to be high? 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 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 sacred architecture, in the actual... 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. Insofar as you're not all about what you want right now, you're offering up a sacrifice of what it is that you want right now to the future and the community.
Clearly, and now that's going to integrate you psychologically. It's going to integrate the society and make it productive. And it's so interesting that we acted that out for that proposition out for, well, the whole. at least 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, obviously. Well, what are we to make of cities like San Francisco, which I grew up just south of, and by any standard, it's a beautiful city. I know people are going to like roll their, some people roll their eyes. I mean, you have the bay on one side, you have the ocean on the other. It has magnificent bridges. I mean, it's a testament to what's possible in a city in terms of diverse landscapes, et cetera.
But the downtown, the center of the city, is just beyond anybody's sense of indecency to walk down in the... in the afternoon hours let alone at night so that at this point you you wonder like Is the center really the center? I mean, you literally have to avoid the center of the city in order to get away from any of that. And it's very sad. It's tragic. So you're asking a symbolic question in some ways. Like you're asking...
What is the nature of the relationship between the state of society in general and the fact that the centers of cities have deteriorated? Well, those aren't unrelated. Not in the least. They're very tightly related because the center does not hold, right? What's the famous poem from the 1920s? The center is loosened, right? And mere chaos is set upon the world.
I haven't got the quote precisely right. That was T.S. Eliot. He knew that when the center pillar disintegrates, then everything falls into chaos. That's one of the oldest realizations of humankind, the question might be. What has caused the degeneration of the center? Well, man, you can 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, because they were wrong. We do not build our knowledge in consequence of an aggregation of facts. That's not how it works. And a story is something like...
the prioritization of the world of facts. I heard recently that religion teaches through story. Philosophy teaches through language that is divorced of story. 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. Yes, to only be informed by the facts. To not infuse a story. But story is the way that the brain works, right? I mean, beginning, middle, end. It's also, the thing is, the story creeps into science.
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 in the Soviet Union, where there was a dreadful accident at one point that resulted in the death of about 500 people. They were trying to produce an amalgam of Ebola. And smallpox. Yikes. And then to aerosolize it. Oh, goodness. Okay, now look. From a strictly scientific perspective, value-free.
There's no difference between pursuing that branch of knowledge and pursuing any other. Now you say, well, that's preposterous. It's like, 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 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 want to understand more about the human psyche. Well, why? Well, I want to be of aid to the human enterprise. I want to make things better. That's the story. I want to pursue truth.
in a manner that makes things better. That's the story part. 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. You cannot read about what they did without traumatizing yourself permanently for the rest of your life, right? What happened with Unit 731? It's the worst human atrocity I've ever seen by a lot.
And that was the scientific enterprise gone astray, let's say. It has to be encapsulated within a value structure. And the question is, well, what's the appropriate value structure? We're starting to figure that out because, you know, I talked to Richard Dawkins about this a little bit. One of the things that disheartens Dawkins is that...
As the humanistic enterprise has progressed and as the atheistic impulse has made itself more manifest, the assault on science and logic at the universities has intensified. Because his 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. The evidence for that is kind of stark because I'm sure you've observed, like I've observed, that over the last 20 years, the scientific enterprise has become a lot less reliable than it was. Well, for a number of reasons. I mean, one of the primary ones, in my opinion.
and I'm familiar with the scientific community, is that a lot of science is built on lineages and who your advisors were and so forth. It relates to funding, et cetera. And it used to be that the primary value with...
within and across lineages was to seek out new territory. I could tell a lot of stories that would take up hours about great advisors telling their students to move into new territories, which sounded like, get out of my field. I'm going to demolish you. But instead, what they were encouraging them to do. was to go on let's use your language new adventures of responsibility 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 someday be investigated. The other consequence is that this debacle within the field of Alzheimer's and dementia, where one laboratory fudges data, and you kind of wonder if... I mean, that's not my subfield, but you step back from there, you go, how the hell does this progress for 15 years where everyone was, you know, like the emperor has no clothes, like everyone agreeing that this is the stuff to work on when in fact the data were falsified and people knew, people knew.
So what that means is that it's like bad family values passed on through generations. And I do think these are well-meaning people along the line. Yeah, yes and no. They're a little bit intense on the career formulation. side of things. Right, the careerist aspect as opposed to the scientist aspect. Well, let's think about that critically. It's like science is a very weird endeavor because in order to actually be a scientist...
You have to put discovering that you're wrong before demonstrating that you're right. And that is hard on your career in the short term. Like, if you play that game and you're good at it, you can discover something real. But that's going to take a while, and it's not certain. It's not at all surprising that people would subvert an enterprise that difficult to the narrow...
demands of career enhancement. It's exactly what you'd expect, unless there was a stunningly powerful countervailing force. And that force was powerful enough, let's say from 1550 to... 1980 so that science worked but that's a short period of time and it's only happened once and we don't know what conditions had to be in place for people to actually like seriously prioritize the truth Seriously, because that's what a serious scientist does.
And so it's not surprising that it would degenerate into something like dynasty and nepotism. That's exactly what you'd expect. That's the historical norm. So then you might think, well, what are the preconditions that have to be in place? as narrative foundation for there to be at least some people that are prioritizing the truth. I think one needs to reward true adventure and novelty, taking on novel problems.
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 challenge for them is... It's difficult to get funding to take on things that are truly new. There's a lot of discussion these days about challenges with the NIH, et cetera. I think that the biggest challenge, regardless of the size of the budget, which is also 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. 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 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.
The problem is there's so much pressure, and you know because you're a university professor, I know in order to reach tenure, you need to reduce the entropy as much as possible. In any event, without going down that path too far, I now understand why you're saying that.
science has to invoke story. That makes sense. It has to be embedded. That makes sense. Otherwise, well, science is the handmaiden of some story. There's no way around that because motivation is the handmaiden of some story. And so... the motivational framework has to be put in place accurately and the motivational framework for scientific inquiry is very stringent truth above all
Right. So if you state your whole goddamn career on a particular hypothesis and you run a critical study and it turns out that the reason you're famous is invalid, you have to publish that. Why the hell would you do that? Right and the answer has to be because you hold the truth in relationship to human flourishing higher than The integrity of your own even your own self valuation
Well, man, that's a very difficult thing to establish. Now, you can do that with young scientists to some degree because you can help them understand that as a medium to long-term game. There's nothing better than pursuit of the truth. And so that's worth a risk. It's worth a risk because you can be spectacularly successful if you pursue the truth. It's unlikely. like it's unlikely to be a successful entrepreneur but if you get it right man you like you've hit the mother load right and
You don't want to falsify your data because you want to spend your whole life pursuing something that doesn't exist. Because you will talk yourself into belief that your falsifications are true. And then you'll warp the whole field, as you said. You illustrated that in relationship to Alzheimer's disease. You can instill love of the truth 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 going to follow the thread wherever it goes and I'm going to accept the outcome and I'm going to presume that the outcome is the best outcome that could possibly have been even if I don't
See why. Okay, why is that an adventure? Because if I let go of my predetermined goal, I don't know what's going to happen. And that's exciting. That's right, because you don't know. Well, that's the essence of adventure. It's like you're bounding over the uncharted sea, let's say, and you don't know what's going to happen next. Well, why would you exchange that for like a kind of 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, yeah, 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. 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 all the adventures of life get thrown at him. But it turns out that that's what he wants. He wants all the adventures of life to be thrown at him. And that is what everyone wants. And I think that is, you know, the idea that...
When you go watch the Lord of the Rings, for example, or the Hobbit, you're seeing the characterization of human personality dramatized. Obviously, right? That's like a truism. But you have to think about what that means. 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 you look at your own life, I mean... You're on an adventure. You have this podcast. It's ridiculously successful, right? In a way that I'm sure you couldn't have imagined. How long? Five years ago? Yeah, we are about to hit the end of four years in a couple of weeks. We launched in January 2021. No.
Premonition could have seen this. I had no concept that it would become what it's become. Right, okay. And so 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 proxy. 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 that's it. That's the driving force behind all of it. Okay, so great. So I would say... i don't think that that proclamation i don't think is any different any different from the notion of identity with the redeeming word that's the same idea because you said generated generating ideas right information and disseminating it right so that's like it's valid inquiry and and
dissemination of the consequences okay your claim is that that's highly intrinsically motivating Oh, yeah. I delight in it. It's hard sometimes. I mean, I was trying to read a really difficult paper yesterday. It's hard, but it feels so good. okay so then we might say well what's what what's the basis for that intrinsic pleasure we think about that biologically well you could imagine it as a manifestation of the
instinct that integrates, right? It integrates you across time. It integrates you with other people across time, right? And there's a marker for that. Why wouldn't you find your, how could it be otherwise then? you would find your deepest satisfaction in pursuing the course of action that integrates you psychologically and integrates other people socially.
Like, that would assume that there's a concordance between your deepest self-interest and the interest of your society, and it better be that way because otherwise... You couldn't thrive as an individual in society. So it better be that way. And we've been doing this for a very long time as human beings. So why we wouldn't have an instinct to mark that pathway. And of course, we'd find our deepest satisfaction in that.
I mean, once you see these issues through that light, they become, I think, painfully obvious. Also because the contrary hypothesis is absurd. it's like you're going to find deep satisfaction what rejecting knowledge and if you do happen to stumble across a nugget you're going to hoard it for yourself right well right right exactly it's laughable it's clearly laughable no one believes that
Earlier, we were talking about operationalizing the effort, the calling to move from potential chaos to order. It starts with organizing one's physical space. If we were to... you know extend the um the rings of the bullseye out a little bit further for people listening who are trying to figure out like where where do they receive that calling how do they find
their calling. So responsibility and adventure being perhaps the compass through which we can navigate there. So they think like, well, where can they...
grab a hold of their responsibility and then as a consequence of doing that, engage in adventure and have an impact that is good for them and good for the world. How do they find that? I think 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 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? Deus, that's God. Calling, conscience. Okay, so now that beckons you forward. So how do you find that? Some things bother you. Those are your problems. And you might think, I don't want to have any problems. It's like, no, you've got some problems. You can tell that because those things bug you. That's your conscience calling you to your destiny. Those problems, okay? Calling.
There's some things that interest you, right? And you don't get to pick them exactly. They just sort of make themselves manifest like the burning bush did to Moses because that's an example. That's the symbolic representation of calling. It's the 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 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. Because what will happen is now you've got a little corner of order.
And now you're a little more well situated and then you'll be able to see what the next, what's the next step. And you might think, well, it looks hopeless because there's just chaos everywhere. It's like, it's okay because the process is exponential. So even if you start nowhere, if you keep doubling, you're going to get somewhere and faster than you think. And well, the same thing applies when you're...
plummeting into the abyss, unfortunately. The degenerative stuff. A colleague of mine who'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. Negative mutations can build on another. other than crash a species very, very fast. I think our psyche is similar in that way. Well, that's 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. Grew up surrounded by a lot of political chaos. Came to the country, became a physicist, probably because he likes order. He's a very orderly guy. And it was probably in the early 90s that we went. I was born in 75, so probably early 90s, that we went to a movie theater together 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? And he said, we're degenerating as a society. And I said, why? And he said, there are people here in their pajamas right right and obviously they weren't in their pajamas but they come in and kind of like bath you know bathroom slippers. They weren't slovenly, but they weren't taking care of themselves. They didn't care what other people thought.
Right. That's right. They were making a public display of their lack of care. Right. Right. Exactly. That's a narcissistic aspect to that too. Yeah. Yeah. He's right about that. Yeah. And I thought at the time, like he's being judged. I was a teen, right? He's being judgmental, et cetera. And, um, but.
You know, I would say from 1990 until fairly recently, hopefully things are shifting for the better now, but there has seemed to be, it's kind of chaos out there. Now, I think it's wonderful that people can express themselves by wearing clothes that they feel. represent them, et cetera. But this wasn't that. This was a lack of care. Look, voluntary, the, what would you say? The evocation of voluntary chaos, that's one thing. The degeneration into chaos through sloth, let's say.
that's not an adventure that's carelessness in all things masquerading as an adventure i'm so cool i don't care it's like you're not cool you're just useless And you're covering your uselessness with a veneer of revolutionary morality. It's like there's nothing in that that's up. Like if people want to deviate in the manner they present themselves, in dress, and they're doing that because they have a...
inspiration or a purpose, then that's completely different than just being so cool you don't care. And that's not cool. There's nothing about that that's cool. and you know you might say and you had this sense when you were a kid that your dad was overreacting it's like yeah well if you look you can see things before other people see them
And he 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 the United States? I think in terms of how we hold and represent
order versus chaos. I mean, we were talking about some of the social media posts recently. We just had a public display of an assassination. I hadn't intended on going there, but I think it's worth talking about. It was weird. I got pulled into this through tangential reasons. This Luigi Mancione last tweet was a podcast cover of my episode with Jonathan Haidt. And some media outlets tried to make something of that. You know, but clearly he was very smart. Clearly he had...
forethought to his actions. He 3D printed this gun, it seems. It is all alleged now, but it seems to be pointing that direction. He seems to not want the police to go investigate anybody else, you know, because he claims there's no one else acting with him, etc. He clearly was trying to make a statement. But the statement was a combination of statements about the insurance system, sort of anti-establishment because of his affinity for Kaczynski unibomber bombings. But at the same time...
He didn't really seem to fall into kind of left-leaning or right-leaning politics squarely. He was kind of all over the place. So you're a trained clinician. Do you think there's some schizotypal or schizophrenic type organization there in his head or lack of organization? I mean, what are we to make of this? And we had to see.
Somebody assassinated, shot in the back multiple times. If I had a hazard to guess, I would say the first thing I would be looking for is pathological narcissism. Disordered thought? Possibly. But he was quite successful academically, like the typical pattern for something like schizophrenic dissolution is very, very much difficulty in maintaining.
So discipline, striving in a highly intellectual atmosphere, for example. Yeah, he was a valedictorian. He went to an Ivy League school and graduated. I think more Luciferian grandiosity. And the intellect is particularly prone to that. The archetypal representation of the intellect that overreaches is Lucifer, right? God's head. 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 worshiper of his own intellect and believed that he was the guy who could make the decision, even of life and death, which means he took on to 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 really beyond belief. I was going to say all these CEOs now are going to need personal security. That's hardly going to cause them to adjust their premiums or something downward. I mean, I think as people get more scared, they tend to...
you know, shore up. Double down? Yeah, they tend to double down. I mean, earlier we were talking about action at a distance. I mean, clearly this Mangione guy is aware of action at a distance. Short-term route to high status. So ignored or notorious, there's a hard choice for young men. They'll pick notorious. Many of them will. And no wonder, because status is everything. That's hard to do.
good things over long periods of time. It's not hard to be good. It's just hard to do good things. It's hard to do big things. I mean, I think that's one reason why I'm very happy that Elon is being celebrated. You don't have to agree with him politically. But the rockets, the idea of going to Mars, trying to make sure that our species replaces itself, I mean, these are big, important endeavors. Well, and he can clearly do them.
I mean, he's been insanely successful doing five impossible things simultaneously. Right. That's not fluke. No. Right. Once, probably not fluke even once, but you know. The probability that it's fluke once is higher. Five times? No, that's a reputation. Right. And so he's a from first principles sort of guy. So, yeah, I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk. 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 to do long-term good things because they're long-term. That's what I was trying to say. Right, but it's also intensely... The thing is, it's also... This is back to that issue of the relationship between responsibility and adventure. It's like... If the aim is true, the voyage is worthwhile. 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, 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. Definitely. I definitely would have failed. Oh, definitely. Oh, absolutely. Because it wasn't the pursuit of pleasure per se. It's sort of like the difference between, you know, is it easier to be the class clown?
or the top of the class. It's just... much easier to be the class clown all you have to do is crack 10 jokes one of them hits you know and you're safe but you're you're actually dissolving as you go right right right well that's the prioritization of the short term over the long run i mean rogan's a
perfectly appropriate example because he's sort of like the archetype of the successful podcaster. It's like, what's Joe doing? Well, he's doing what he's always done. He sits down with his producer, one guy, and he...
talks to people he wants to talk to about things he wants to talk to them about. That's the whole thing. And it's, you know, the lefties who refused to talk to people in the podcast world for 10 years are now... proclaiming to everyone who listened 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.
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. You might know this story. I'll keep it brief. But he was a comedian.
at the comedy store he had done some television and things of that sort but um and people can find this online the videos are on youtube where a comedian was stealing ari shaffir's jokes so joe got up on stage and said there's a there's a um
There's some ethics in the comedy community. People can buy jokes, but you 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 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. I need to be down airing in that. Yeah.
Yeah, and I think that that's... More power to him. Yeah, and he doesn't claim to always be right, but his pursuit of the truth... has been a driving force he claims consistently to not be sufficiently right that's why he listens and asks questions you don't ask genuine questions if you believe that you already know everything
You only ask real questions if you don't think that you know enough. And Joe wouldn't be perennially attractive to his audiences if he wasn't asking the same questions that the audience would like to have answered. Right. He's genuinely curious. Absolutely. Musk himself said, you know, when I interviewed him, he talked about a terrible existential crisis that he had when he was 13, 14, which is not atypical of.
you know out people with outstanding intellects let's say um and he resolved that by recognizing that the quest is the source of meaning And so he took it upon himself to confront difficult problems and try to solve them. And he found that to be sufficiently gratifying, so his existential crisis resolved itself. And that's very much the same.
pattern that Rogan is exemplifying and you in your pursuits and you can see what impact that has on the public you know and we were I was talking with one of your staff members before this podcast about your lectures say in Australia. And so you're in the weird position where 5,000 people come and listen to a biologist lecture spontaneously for what?
90 minutes? Like, what the hell? Well, that's just an indication of how compelled people are 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...
It doesn't even so much matter the direction as much as the commitment. A colleague of mine at Stanford who I respect tremendously, Anna Lemke, who wrote the book Dopamine Nation, she's the head of our dual diagnosis addiction center. She was the one who really truly... deserves credit for bringing dopamine into the public discussion over the last few years. She initiated that, talking about how big inflections in dopamine that are very fast that aren't preceded by effort.
aka drugs of abuse, behavioral addictions, et cetera, leave us below baseline with our dopamine, and then people will engage in more of the behavior. It drives us further and further and further. That's kind of the principle of it. I was talking to her about how people get sober. And the conversation turned to how do young people find their purpose? It was 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 under your front lawn and seeing if the leaves need to be raked. Sounds familiar, right? You find purpose by...
figuring out how you can be of use at progressively larger and larger spheres away from yourself. And in doing that- And the present. And in doing that, you start to hear the calling and you find your purpose. And as you said- Or it reveals- itself to you it reveals the same thing right yeah so I think you two would be enjoy a conversation at some well well this is an important thing to return to because people are often curious about what to do practically it's like okay first
This is what Jacob does. Jacob in the Old Testament stories, he eventually becomes Israel, right? And so that's his name. And Israel means we who wrestle with God. Now, Jacob is a bad guy when the story starts. 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 purpose. He finds his adventure as a consequence of his decision to be better. Okay, so now you want to find your purpose. Okay, first thing you have to do, you have to review how... Wretched and miserable you actually are and you have to face that
And then you have to think, I'd rather not have that. And it has to be true. And then you have to aim up. Now, you don't know what that means because, like, you're pretty scattered and dissolute. But at least you got the damn intent in mind. And then you have to be willing to make the sacrifices. Right, along the way. Okay, then what happens? Well, then the pathway will reveal itself to you in increments. Calling.
Is there something around here that I could fix, that I would fix? That's a great question. Is there something at hand that I could fix? that i would fix it might be something low because especially when you first get going you're not good for anything so you might have to start with something pretty trivial but it doesn't matter because you start getting better
Is there something that bothers me? That's conscience that I could set right in some small way. Well, that's there for everyone, right? In the midst of the most catastrophic mess, that pathway, you might even say, look, the more mess around you, the more... unstructured possibility you have 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. Because, well, if you can see that it's a mess, then you can see the pathway to cleaning it up. So do it. Do it. See what happens. That's the adventure.
What's going to happen? In my class, my Maps of Meaning class, I used to have students do this as a project. And one of the projects was, find something around you, in your neighborhood, wherever, in your family that isn't... set right and see if you could set it right just write down what happens well one student in particular he decided his mother had died 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 because his family was upset that he was doing what mom used to do and like He just had a tremendously complex adventure as a consequence of his willingness to pursue this. It was obviously necessary because the alternative was that his family was going to fall apart. It's like that's there for everyone.
You say, well, my circumstances are so difficult. It's like, fair enough. So are everybody else's, by the way. But that means there's a lot of mess. Fix it a bit. And that's ridiculously entertaining. and unpredictable. And that in itself is a great deal. You have no idea what's going to happen. Just like you didn't know what happened when you started the podcast. Why'd you start it? I had a...
For me, I felt a compulsion to share what I knew, but because during the pandemic, everyone was so focused on vaccines and lockdowns, that no one was talking about the reality that everyone was facing, including, sorry, Josh Gordon, I know him through time, our director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. Not a single...
thing out there about, hey folks, if you're going to be indoors this much, get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning or else you're going to have trouble sleeping. Trouble sleeping equates to mental health issues, stress, uncertainty. My lab was working on ways to regulate stress through...
deliberate breathing through other mechanisms. It was like, well, I want people to have tools, zero cost tools to deal with their stress, to help them regulate their circadian biology, because those wick out to...
countering the negative forces that were on us, which are social order was disrupted, people are at home. So it was a desire to give people tools that I knew existed, that I was knowledgeable about. And I had a... long-standing kind of growing compulsion that I wanted to talk about neuroscience because it's so darn cool.
Right. Okay. So it's a logical extension. That was it. There was a lot of energy behind the mission, but then there was a calling. The calling was from hearing about people suffering. It's like, well, of course you're not sleeping well. I mean, not only are there a million things to worry about right now, people aren't working, et cetera, but...
you're not getting sunlight in your eyes. You need to get outside. You need to, you know, and then there's the whole socialization thing and whatever people's circumstances, there are things that they could do. And so I felt that calling and. My conscience told me that I have the knowledge, so why would I cloister with it at home? Like, what good is that? So I just started blabbing on the internet. Right, right. That's why. Yeah, well, 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. Well, looks like you could do that on a broader scale. And the technology is there. Why not explore that? That's a perfectly reasonable, and you can see the interplay of calling and conscience there. That's a lovely way of characterizing the voice of the divine.
is how it's characterized, repeated. Elijah, Elijah is the prophet who is... Appears with Christ when he's transfigured on the mount in the New Testament. It's Elijah and Moses Elijah is the first person in human history who identifies the divine with conscience That's his contribution. That's a major psychological revolution
Right? It's an unheralded transformation in understanding. It's like it's not the storm. It's not the forest fire. It's not the earthquake. It's not the god of nature. He's the... originator of the phrase the still small voice right 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 primary status. And I just see no reason at all not to take that claim seriously. It's like you come up with an explanation for your conscience. It tells you things you don't want to hear. So how is that you? I mean, you have to gerrymander the definition of you for that to be you.
No, I absolutely believe that things come from outside of us, certainly for me. And, you know, I'm now very much a devotee of prayer. I pray before this. What do you pray? Well, before this podcast, I prayed for clarity of mind to be able to learn from you and to help... transmit that knowledge out to people in a way that would be useful to them for sustained focus, for the ability to also let go.
and not try and control or lead with questions. That's sacrifice. And to allow a sense of randomness and serendipity to make it what it is. trusting that it's in service to the listeners. Right. Well, 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...
For a little over a year, I always quietly secretly- Why? Why did you decide to do that? My coming to the whole notion of prayer and God, et cetera, was complicated in the backdrop in the sense that I always secretly prayed. Always secretly prayed. And then about a year and a half ago, a guy that works on my security team started talking to me about the Bible. We started talking about God.
It made sense. I started reading the Bible. I'm not through it yet. And I started praying. And I had a number of experiences as a consequence of praying, clearly as a consequence of prayer, that made me realize that... Prayer doesn't give me a capacity of any sort. It just allows certain things that I believe are inside of me to come out. Yeah, proper prayer establishes aim.
Yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah. That's right. Well, why wouldn't you establish your aim? Like, why wouldn't you take a moment before you start your podcast to remember what the hell you're trying to accomplish and to have it firmly in mind? Yeah, and it felt...
Different. So I should say that, you know, I have this little list that I sometimes do. I'll say, you know, 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 because it has some...
you know, aspect of neuroplasticity there. Non-sleep deep rest, which is a thing that was, you know, built out of this practice called yoga nidra, where you go into 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, third eye meditation of concentrating your breath, et cetera. I mean, we know based on the data improves focus. Prayer to me is entirely different than all of those. There's some overlap.
They look similar. Some of them look similar from the outside. But prayer for me is the allowing of something from truly outside me to come through me and bring out the best in me. And that's why I pray for four things. I pray for ability. I pray for other people. And I also have learned that a powerful aspect of prayer is just listening. Because just stopping and listening and trying to...
invite in or allow in messages that if I didn't steal 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. I don't think there's any real difference between that and Revelation. So imagine that what speaks to you in intuition is the voice of your aim. Now, 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. When did we start to think? That's not so obvious. 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 an informative intuition means that you posit a question. 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. It's not even magical. It's how your perception works. Now there's a magic to it because... I suppose the magic is that you can think up something you never thought up before. How the hell do you do that? It's more like you experience it, right? You set your aim, you have a question, so you're on your knees hoping for an answer.
The light bulb goes on. Well, if that's not revelation, then what the hell is it? It's the same thing. Having spent a good portion of my career digging around in brains, recording from neurons, slicing up brains, staining brains. From my understanding of neuroscience, and I think by now in almost 2025, we have a fairly good understanding of what different brain areas do, how different circuits interact.
I don't see how anyone who's really interested in how humans work can not believe in... god and i'm not being disparaging of people that don't i know people that are atheists i have some in my family um and i just don't think that the human brain and mind is capable of understanding and managing itself as well as it possibly could in the absence of a concept of God in prayer. And I think there's a lot of historical evidence to support that statement, meaning that...
This notion of God has been around a very long time. This is not a coincidence. I mean, humans have discarded many of the things that, you know, other people perhaps came up with. This has been a stable feature of... being human for a very long time of societies for a very long time and i've been wanting to ask you throughout today's conversation to what extent do you think the different religions and the way that they represent god differently
or in the case of Christianity, God and Jesus Christ. To what extent do you think that the stories and the lessons and the teachings overlap? at the level that we're talking about today, which is really about a psychological 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 formal prayer and to reading the Bible and so on. So I like to say, you know, I haven't gotten my jersey yet because I don't deserve it, but I'm putting in, I'm showing up to practice, you know, this kind of thing.
I'm just curious to what extent you see consistent themes across religions, and maybe even to atheism too. Like atheism, it's been argued as its own form of religion, perhaps, right? And for anyone listening, I mean, I want to make clear, like the... I don't have any pushback on atheism. It's just that for me, really coming to terms with a real belief in God and adopting a prayer practice every single night.
also during the day many times and always before a podcast, has been just tremendously beneficial to my life. So that's why I'm going to continue to do it. Why wouldn't I? But that's the question. To what extent do the way that different religions represent God, you think, across religions converge on common themes? Well, I think they converge substantively. I mean, I think the best...
I talked to Camille Paglia about this a few years ago. Maybe 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 is Jung's greatest student, by the way, instead of Foucault, the whole history of the university and the intellectual enterprise over the last five decades would have been entirely different. What happened with Foucault?
Well, Foucault is the most cited scholar who ever lived. And Foucault believes that the story that we act out is one of power. And that's wrong. And it's not just wrong, it's like perversely and dangerously wrong. I think it's technically wrong as well as being ethically wrong, partly because power does not provide a stable basis for psychological integration or social unity. 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 this book, We Who Wrestle With God. Eric Neumann, Carl Jung, Machia Eliade, a host of others, outlined the patterns of religious thinking. and it took them most of the 20th century to do that and they found recurring themes that are profound so what one example the ancient egyptians worshipped a god horus everyone knows the god horus because the
His emblem is the eye, the open eye. Well, what does that mean? It means in part that the ancient Egyptians worshipped attention, and they felt that the god of attention... was the antidote to the pathological state. And they were right about that. I mean, they had a god of the pathological state. That was Seth. The god Seth, the name Seth, became Satan.
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. That sounds like what you were saying before. Where you set your sights. Yes, exactly. High and to the...
To the heavens and then to the most proximal thing that's going to deliver you to the next rung. Well, and there's a difference between attention and thinking. Like, attention is a quest. if you're paying attention you're looking you're seeking you're knocking you're asking right and the eternal promise is that if you ask you'll be answered. And if you seek, you'll find. And the I 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 the Egyptian theology had a walloping impact on Jewish theology. I mean, the Jews came out of Egypt. there are concept that's that's a conception there are consequences of that conceptually as well as historically that 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 in any progress whatsoever. Is there a hierarchy of religious truth? Yes.
Just as there's a hierarchy in literary depth, we understand that 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 Union School did that brilliantly brilliantly and biologists should know it in far more depth the best neuroscientists of emotion and motivation that I knew, and that include Jock Panksepp, they knew the...
The work of Iliata, for example. Which of those readings would you recommend for somebody who's interested in psychology and neuroscience explained at that level? I would start with The Sacred and the Profane by Iliata. And also... Eric Neumann's book, Origins and History of Consciousness, that's a harder one because unless you know the lingo of that school, 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 an easier way in is through Iliadah, Sacred and the Profane. Short book.
You could you would read it now knowing that the gods that Iliad 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 iliad attract that in multiple cultures and that's
It's very much worth knowing because it explains the symbolism of the emergence of the integrated literate human psyche across tens of thousands of years. That's captured in story. So imagine this. Here's a way of thinking about it. So tribe A, tribe B, tribe C. Now they all have their highest deity or their panoply of deities. Now they unite.
Okay, so as they unite they fight they compete and they cooperate they kill each other They cooperate and trade at the same time that's happening. There's a war in the space of ideas between their respective deities And you could think about the human beings acting out that war just as you could think about the war, the abstraction reflecting the conflict on Earth. Well, there's a pattern to that conflict.
That pattern is quite stable across cultures. It tilts towards a monotheistic unity insofar as the multiplicity of cultures unifies. Well, obviously. Like, what are they going to unify 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 Pallia, who understands this quite profoundly.
went in the direction of Foucault. These are these lineages that we were talking about before. It's hard for people to appreciate just how powerful these academic lineages are and scientific lineages are because they set trajectories. And they define what's forbidden. like all my all the people that advised me as a graduate student
even those who had my best interest firmly in mind, told me to never talk about my interest in union psychology. Really? Sorry, I'm laughing because it's so preposterous. Yeah, well, 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. What I was discussing was verboten in many places, but not there.
So, you know, that worked out quite nicely for me. Yeah, I was going to say, clearly it worked out. Yes, yes. I've been meaning to ask you, I've been reading a really interesting book recently that's based... basically grounded in Adlerian psychology. Yeah. I wasn't familiar with Adlerian psychology. Yeah, Adler's very practical. The book talks about Adler as a counterpoint to Freud and Jung. What's the book? 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 there are two Japanese authors. It didn't get quite so popular in this country, but it had a big... following in Japan and I think in other places in Asia. And the book is set up as a conversation between essentially a philosopher of Adlerian psychology and a student.
who's challenging him. So it's a conversation that raises all the challenges that would come to one's mind if you were to be presented with this idea of life tasks and that we're supposed to discard with our thoughts about prior trauma and just figure out what...
are our tasks now right right and i i like the practicality of it adler's very practical yeah i like that i was just curious what your thoughts were about that it seems to fit quite well with your your notions and what you've talked about in multiple books including the most recent one the one that's out now, about getting really serious about what your tasks are at this moment in time and embracing those tasks as a way to progress forward. As opposed to...
floundering in notions about the past. And I think it might hit some people square upside the head when there's, I think, one of the chapters opens with the words, there's no such thing as trauma, which is clearly not true. But the whole idea is to prompt a different way of thinking. And to let people start to drill into, okay, what do I need to do now, regardless of what my parents did or didn't do? Regardless of my damaged self. Right, regardless of my damaged self.
I must say I really like the book. Well, I would say... 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 describe.
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 1950s. brilliant brilliant scholar and it is the best analysis of freud jung and adler that's ever been written by a lot and it's 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. what would you say, fits quite nicely with the same kind of bottom-up approach that a more behaviorally oriented psychotherapist would employ. So, look, there are some people...
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 who are 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 because They wouldn't have come to him otherwise. And there's also people for whom sexual dysfunction and trauma are the primary
what would you say, the primary preoccupation of their life and the past. And Freud serves them well. Adler's very practical. And if you're looking for a psychologist to help you. figure out how you could advance from where you are now, he's got plenty of things to say that are good. He also wasn't as good a literary stylist as Jung or Freud, so that also put him off to the side to some degree.
Anyways, a deeper investigation can certainly be found in discovery of the unconscious. And for anybody listening and watching who's interested in psychological ideas broadly and would like familiarity with the psychoanalytic tradition. freud jung and adler let's say primary there is not a better book than discovery of the unconscious it's really a work of genius you know what's missing from the literature thank you for those by the way is a really excellent up-to-date book on neuroscience and
the mind and psychology perhaps we write one together yeah yeah well that's that's i mean it's just 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 a satisfactory book about the brain, the mind, and psychology.
It just doesn't exist. Yeah, the closest one I ever encountered probably is Affective Neuroscience, Panksepp's book. I must say, you've mentioned Panksepp a few times, and Yach Panksepp. as some of you may know, but perhaps most of you don't, 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 Yakupang Sap, and I thought, okay, like this guy knows the good stuff because he was the first one to talk about.
juvenile play as a way of exploring circuitry and social dynamics. And that fit, by the way, that fit perfectly with Piaget's observations of childhood socialization. It's like I came across Panksepp and I thought, Oh, that's so cool. Now we have the psychophysiological basis for Piagetian developmental theory. It was perfect. So that was lovely concordance.
far more recognized had he been he was at bowling green university i think and so smaller university perhaps i don't know i didn't ever hear a lecture and maybe not as charismatic as some of the other luminaries of of neuroscience at that time but yeah i don't know how he was a lecturer he's a great writer and man he had an unerring eye for the right problems in terms of psychological investigation and very brave in that regard I mean he studied
laughter in rats and you think of all the absurd things to focus on it's like no you just don't understand where the gold is or play among rats who cares that rats play well like that would be this sort of research proposal that would be pilloried sensible Republicans looking to trim government waste it's like no that was the heart of the matter right rats organize their social hierarchy through play not through force right that's a big discovery
Like that's, I think he should have won a Nobel Prize. I do too. Yeah, he should have won a Nobel Prize 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, and it's based on play. Wow. Stunning. And we see the same thing in kids, obviously. Well, we see the same thing in chimpanzees. It's pretty strange to understand the dominance hierarchies.
if they're functional, are often organized in consequence of play, not force. So much for Foucault. When you look out on the landscape of social media... Do you see elements of that as well, that there's sort of a playfulness among people that's establishing a hierarchy? It seems like Elon's having a good time with his rockets and his... X and Tesla. I think that there is, I think that the antithesis of tyranny is play. It took me a long time to realize that. Like, I've been studying evil.
intensely since I was about 13. And evil is easier to define than good. It's hard to find a category that integrates all that's good that you can point to. simply but it has The fact that play is the antithesis of tyranny seems to be a pretty good summation. Panksepp showed, for example, that play wouldn't emerge among animals if they were possessed by any other motivational state. Things have to be set up very carefully before play will emerge.
Your house is optimally structured if your children can play. Your marriage is optimally structured if you're playing house with your wife. And I think that 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, because...
I think it's something that's sorely lacking in a lot of the discourse among adults, so to speak. And I think these days, I think a lot about what young people are observing. A few years back... I was watching this show. I didn't like it. Forgive me, because I think the actor was quite good. But the show was Californication with 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 a typical Hollywood inversion. And I thought, this is terrible. 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, who are the adults in the room? Who's actually regulating all this stuff that's happening? Everyone's in disagreement. People are misbehaving in the worst of ways.
not treating each other with respect. Occasionally you'd see a discourse that felt like meaningful and structured or... explorative in the real sense, like people were there to learn. I think that's been one of the successes of your work and of Rogan's work. And I like to think, you know, my podcast as well, Lex Friedman, certainly, and others, right?
Sometimes people use comedy, sometimes people use neuroscience as a pro, but in any case. But, you know, I've been concerned that there isn't this kind of like... enjoyment of discourse between people that disagree in a way that includes forgiveness or like, oh, you got like good one, like you got me or, you know, and it seems like it's.
degenerate 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, that's not a debate. There's nothing playful about it. Like you have to be willing to have a winner and a loser and you have to be willing to be either one if you're going to engage in real discourse, in real play. And to me, it's like...
okay, I can manage seeing all that or participate or not participate to the extent that I want. But for young people, it's got to be really discouraging. It's like you either dunk on somebody or get dunked on. Well, you know, I guess the optimistic... repost to that would be the fact that the people that you're pointing to, like Rogan, who is a comedian, like many of the people who've become extremely successful as podcasters, Constantine Kissin, Russell Brand.
Dave Rubin, Crowder, Steven Crowder, Theo Vaughn. That's a lot of comedians. So there's a lot of play. in the alternative media and a lot of young people are being informed by the alternative media so i think there's genuine room for optimism there And there's plenty of play in those podcasts. Now, a group of us eight years ago, seven years ago, put out an offer to the Democratic...
Powers that be to invite the Democrats to come and talk to us Rubin was part of that Rogan was part of that if I remember correctly quite certain of it i was part of that shapiro was part of that this was a genuine invitation which was extended many times in serious ways by people who are very well connected among the democratic elite
And that came to nothing. They wanted 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, not at all. Right. People will call him that. Manosphere, bro, whatever. It doesn't... the reality falls so far from there. It's just not true at all. Yeah. So, so there is plenty of play. And, and I, so I think we can be positive about that. And, and I think young people too have seen.
how successful that could be i mean rogan and his 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 in a different direction. 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 impact and significance across the board. Well, I think it demonstrated the fact that they had been elevated.
It was evidence that was so conclusive that there was no longer any way of questioning it. Even the... CNN pundits and so forth, who were very resistant to that as a hypothesis, changed their tune very rapidly. Well, it was interesting because Rogan's conversation with Trump was a serious one. Theo's conversation with Trump was a mixture of serious and less serious. And I mean, I couldn't help but smile big when at the inauguration, the thanks went out to.
a number of people, including Theo Vaughn. I mean, if you think about this. I know. It's so funny. Good for Theo. It's so funny. I'm yet to meet him. I hear he's a very nice guy. Theo's so great because Theo is... Like, he's... Backwoods hip 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 be derisive about Theo and his backwoodsy stick. But man, there's a first-rate mind lurking behind that. that it's not a persona because it's actually him too, you know. I can relate to that to a large degree because, you know, I came from a very small town way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. And so I have plenty in common with Theo. But it's... It's very funny to watch. It's very funny to see him do this successfully. It's ridiculously...
and preposterously comical that he got to sit down with Trump. I mean, I just thought that was, that's so funny. And that it was successful and playful. You know, that's great. And there's plenty of play. The Republican renaissance at the moment, whatever that is, I mean, 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 because every administration needs an opposition and if the Democrats continue with this woke idiocy they're not going to be able to serve as the proper corrective to the excesses that will definitely emerge in the Trump administration especially if they face no credible opposition.
Because that always happens. Sorry, I 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. corrupt might run amok. Oh, yes. Well, of course it will. It always does. You know, and the Republicans themselves.
whom i 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 got to be telling you where you're stupid and if the democrats So this is another public invitation to the Democrats, which is like must be the 50th one that I've issued.
If you have something to say, you know, I'd be happy to talk. And so would many people who've expressed similar sentiment to me in the alternative media world. And that offer has been on the table for 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 about because they'll talk to me? You know, there's a simple explanation and definitely a true one. So maybe that can shift and there's got to be somebody in the Democrats.
who's got enough courage to forge a new direction. And if they want to continue with this same old pattern of woke idiocy, well, go right ahead. It's not going to work. The tide's already turned in that regard. Judging from some of the article titles that I've seen at 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. Who's going to lead? Who's going to be their Joe Rogan? Which is, by the way, a silly question. That's just the silliest question. He is, as we say in science, he's N of 1. Don't even try. The whole point is to create. Why would you? You also can't. Joe didn't emerge by accident. Joe is very, very, very smart. Very.
And if you think, and 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 that way, not through a priori planning so that. The Democrats could have a voice. It's just him being him. Yes, exactly. Yeah, and someone who is a self-declared Democrat will do that as well, but not by trying to be him. That's just not going to happen. No, they'll do that by trying to figure out.
what the opposition to this new peculiar band of Republicans should be. what sort of vision could be put forward that would be attractive you know I read today some Democrat claiming that the Democrats are the true voice of the working class it's like I don't think so I think that ship has sailed, and maybe the Democrats should be the true voice of the working class, but they're certainly not. And in principle, that would mean that...
there's an opportunity there on the Democrat side to forge a new path. I mean, Clinton managed that in the 90s. This has happened many times. It could happen again. But there's a lot of learning that's going to have to take place before that happens. So certainly learning about this new alternative media environment, if you can't sit down for three hours and say what you actually think, actually what you think, right?
regardless of what might do to your reputation, let's say, you're not going to be successful in the podcast world. That's absolutely true. Podcasting is real. I'll just say... because perhaps it's of interest or maybe even actionable for people. I mean, I get a little frightened every podcast, certainly if I'm going to talk about like...
I'm forming this relationship to prayer or I'm exploring. I mean, I'll talk about circuits in the brain all day long with no fear whatsoever. That's my wheelhouse. But anything that's new, which isn't. A real exploration and evolution of where I'm at, of course, is going to evoke fear. I also know that's where the growth is. I would hate for this podcast to look.
the way it did on episode one now. And clearly this conversation is a new direction that I've not taken before in this podcast, but I'm delighted that it's happening. I want to say that. And I think that... Some level of fear and anxiety about the unknown is absolutely required. And I think that that's something that hopefully any, especially young people listening need to know. You're not supposed to perform well at the outset.
In anything. You're not. That's why Jung said the fool is the precursor to the redeemer. You have to accept the role of fool. voluntarily before you can improve. Of course, when you start something new, you're going to be an idiot. Like, what do you know? 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 said something, went back and correct. It was embarrassing, but... the ability to laugh at oneself is is tremendously powerful genuinely laugh it's just thinking like oh god where was i thinking i understand this you know sometimes we we air you know i have a couple of questions about you
Uh-oh. I know you're the clinician, 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... Where does your... Where does your mind land most mornings? First thing. Well, I've suffered from a proclivity towards depression my whole life, I would say.
I would say the roughest part of the day for me is morning, although it's way better than it once was. So when I get up, I have a shower and make my bed and do something useful, and then I'm pretty much... I'm on my way. You're into your tasks into the day. And I still have quite a lot of pain from whatever happened to me a couple of years ago. And so that's annoying. Physical pain. Yeah, 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. Your tour schedule 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 don't want to give too much away, but it's...
Not planned in the sense that there's a script or something. It's very open. It's a quest. It's a quest. It's an intellectual quest. It's a real experience. And men, wear your jacket and tie because everyone else there is going to be wearing at least a jacket. look respectable yeah so my wife and I are touring from January through June and much of that's in the United States and then two months in Europe and so that's great because Europe is in trouble.
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 jordanbpeterson.com. The dates and so forth are all listed there. We launched Peterson Academy, where we want you to teach, and that's going spectacularly well. This is a place where people can hear lectures in a given domain? Yep, yep, yep. We have 35 lectures online already.
Each of them is sequenced over six to eight hours, which compacts, I would say, the equivalent of a full university course into that span of time. We're pursuing accreditation, which I think is a high probability in the relatively... not too distant future. So that's ridiculously exciting because we can take the best lectures in the world and we can make them available to everyone. And we built a social media element into it. We took the best of the social media networks.
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, because we put one guy on probation because he said he'd improve. And we established a positive culture. There's no bots. There's no trolls.
No one's playing games and we watch. And now, you know, the community has settled into a, it's got an ethos already. And I think that'll be self-sustaining. So people are there to learn. And to support each other learning. Got it.
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. Well, we showed Michael Malice. Michael Malice did a... course for us on totalitarianism and he takes that rather personally given his family background and he said that the trailer brought him to tears and that's my
Now, I can be easily brought to tears, so I don't know if I'm the best. Around certain topics. I've cried a few times on this podcast this year and a few others, so that was a...
a vulnerability I'd never expected. Yeah, well, it's good to know I'm not alone in that. I'm less susceptible now that I'm more healthy. 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. You have some grandkids now, too. I do, and two more on the way. Congratulations. And so, you know, and I have an endless field of stellar opportunity in front of me. So hopefully I have enough sense to appreciate that. And I do. I do appreciate it. And I know it's unlikely. A long way from posting.
lectures on YouTube, which is where most people originally found you if they were listening about that. That's certainly how I learned about you. I thought this guy's... Talk about really interesting things in the fields of psychology. He knows who Yak Panksepp is, and he's posting on YouTube. Can I ask what inspired that move? Was that from 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, hmm. What the hell is this? Video on demand worldwide What does that mean? It means The spoken word is now as permanent as the written word and more easily disseminated. I thought, oh, that's a spectacular and world-altering revolution.
That's what it looks like to me. This was like in 2010, 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 seven years, somewhere between five and seven years before things exploded around me. And that was also extremely helpful because when I opposed the Trudeau government's attempt to... compel my speech in the form of bill c16 i was immediately 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
I had like 200 hours of lectures up on YouTube already. So when all that negative attention was drawn to me, people started looking at the lectures. And the huge advantage there was that there wasn't a single...
Really, there wasn't a single important word I'd said to students in the last 20 years that wasn't recorded. And the people who decided that you know, I was 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 accusation. 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. You've certainly prevailed. So far.
I guess that speaks to what I was going to say, which is that I want to thank you for posting those videos on YouTube and for entering that adventure. Because it certainly was the beginning of a... long adventure that'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 stance that you know absolutely right for everybody, but certainly where you...
have felt you could share useful knowledge at the practical level, like really how to operationalize, like clean up your room, right? You know, do these things to try and discover your path. Get on your path, set your sights to the right level.
and to make that a daily practice and 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 raise a question and ask a question and address it it's not pre-planned
And I must say that your progression of books and podcasts and where things are going now, in particular that today you said you are hopeful that the Democratic Party, I think most people assume that you're very right-leaning. I'm not going to. assume one way or the other but the fact that you are intentionally inviting and hoping for opposition so that power is checked and things continue in the right direction i think that's really beautiful because what you're asking for is more balance
as opposed to more skewing of knowledge and power. And I think that's a terrific example. And it's clear that you live right near the edge in order to inspire us to... basically explore knowledge, explore ancient teachings and merge them with where we are now. You know, 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 asked like for what what do you mean exactly what changed they tell me and There isn't anything better that can happen to you 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 it. It's an immense...
What would you say it's unspeakably immense privilege to be in that position? And it's so great to see people like you and Friedman and Chris Williamson and all these other podcasters who are pursuing the same vision. and so successfully and to see the massive effect that's having on people that's such a good deal so and i do believe it's the sort of thing that's
in a deeply personalized way, available to anyone who follows their calling and conscience. Thank you for those words. I also agree it's freely available by people being themselves. as you said, following their curiosity and conscience. Thank you for coming here today and sharing with us where you're at now, your knowledge.
And please come back again. I really enjoyed this. Hey, anytime. I appreciate the invitation very much. And it's a pleasure watching your progress forward and seeing you propagate. all the remarkable discoveries that have been made 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 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 inspired in no small part by you and my other podcast colleagues, and in your case, my academic colleagues. So thank you, Jordan. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Jordan Peterson. To find links to Dr. Peterson's work, his social media, his new book, We Who Wrestle With God, as well as a link to the Peterson Academy.
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