How to Set & Achieve Long-Term Goals | Dr. Jordan Peterson & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I've been spouting off on social media and podcasts for a while now that any big inflection

00:00:09.780 | in dopamine that isn't preceded by a lot of effort to generate that dopamine inflection

00:00:14.980 | is very dangerous.

00:00:16.780 | Think drugs, think pornography, think highly processed foods, think anything that, you

00:00:21.580 | know, creates this big sense of indulgence and pleasure without any effort is running

00:00:26.100 | countercurrent to our evolutionary wiring.

00:00:28.780 | Now, you could say, well, okay, so what are we supposed to do, move into caves?

00:00:31.940 | No reward without commensurate sacrifice.

00:00:34.480 | That's right.

00:00:35.480 | Of some sort.

00:00:36.480 | Yep.

00:00:37.480 | Yep.

00:00:38.480 | Yep.

00:00:39.480 | And the other issue, and it's coming up again and again today, and I love that it is, is

00:00:41.140 | this notion of the temporal domain of rewards that exist over multiple timescales or broader

00:00:47.340 | timescales.

00:00:48.340 | One of the things that I feel truly lucky for is the fact that I went the path of science

00:00:52.900 | where we were chuckling about this earlier, you know, a project could take a year, then

00:00:58.500 | you have to restart because that project went nowhere.

00:01:01.260 | And then you finish the project, you submit a paper, the review, I mean, the reward schedule

00:01:05.660 | in science could take four years.

00:01:08.780 | It's not just about getting a degree, like getting papers through sometimes took a year,

00:01:12.100 | sometimes took two years, you know, sometimes things didn't go well and you had to publish

00:01:16.140 | in a journal that you wouldn't have wanted to, or sometimes you had to abandon projects

00:01:20.700 | altogether.

00:01:22.100 | So my reward system was trained up on lots of timescales, short, medium, long timescales.

00:01:28.980 | As I've moved into podcasting, the temporal loops are shorter, they're faster.

00:01:35.260 | But you know, nonetheless, you know, we do long form content.

00:01:39.380 | But you know, I think platforms like X I think are wonderful if used appropriately.

00:01:43.340 | I think it's especially great nowadays, frankly, and Instagram, et cetera, they're very useful.

00:01:48.420 | But they train us and I imagine they've trained the young brains that were weaned on them,

00:01:53.300 | because I wasn't, but that were weaned on them for fast temporal timescales.

00:01:59.540 | This isn't like playing a long poker game, this is like playing the slot machine over

00:02:02.580 | and over and over, right?

00:02:04.220 | It's not like a four-day tournament.

00:02:06.520 | - Complete with intermittent random reinforcement, which is what happens when something goes

00:02:10.100 | viral, unpredictably.

00:02:11.100 | - Right.

00:02:12.100 | - Right, right.

00:02:13.100 | It's really, yeah.

00:02:14.100 | - And then of course, we have this notion in this country that, you know, in any moment

00:02:17.380 | it could be a rags to riches or a, you know, some, you know, overnight fame type thing

00:02:21.780 | that exists as a possibility in our culture that in a way that it hadn't prior.

00:02:26.020 | So I think that one of the things that could be useful, just venturing a hypothesis here

00:02:30.880 | is that young and older people could take a look at their life and ask, you know, over

00:02:38.540 | what variation of timescales do I derive reward?

00:02:41.940 | - Yeah, definitely.

00:02:42.940 | - You know, training for a marathon is a longer timescale of reward and death.

00:02:46.540 | - Well, that's also a hallmark of maturity.

00:02:48.180 | - Yeah.

00:02:49.180 | - Right?

00:02:50.180 | - Yeah, school, a degree, et cetera.

00:02:51.620 | In business, the timescales are sometimes fast, sometimes short.

00:02:55.020 | - I think you can ask even a better question than that.

00:02:58.180 | The better question would be, and this is kind of what's referred to in the Sermon on

00:03:01.220 | the Mount is, how could I optimize my long-term view while maximizing my focus on the moment?

00:03:07.380 | 'Cause then you get both.

00:03:08.620 | That's a really, that's a really good deal, right?

00:03:11.300 | Because now you're conducting yourself in a manner that works in an iterated way that's

00:03:16.340 | socially productive, right, and maybe intergenerationally socially productive, that would be the best

00:03:22.900 | thing to establish, that's kind of what you're doing as a good father, but you're doing that

00:03:26.860 | in a manner that enables you to also derive maximal impact from each step you take forward

00:03:33.180 | in the present.

00:03:34.180 | So Carl Friston told me, we were talking about entropy and emotion, that I'd figured out

00:03:42.500 | a few years ago with a couple of my students that anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy,

00:03:48.500 | like technically, which I was really thrilled about because it gives emotion a physical

00:03:52.940 | grounding, like a real physical grounding.

00:03:55.180 | And Friston surprised me because he said he has a theory of positive emotion that's analogous.

00:04:01.160 | He also knew the negative emotion.

00:04:03.060 | He'd also been working in that domain.

00:04:05.340 | He said that you get a dopamine kick when you reduce the entropy in relationship to

00:04:09.140 | a goal.

00:04:10.140 | And I thought, oh my God, that's so cool because it means that uncertainty is entropy.

00:04:15.180 | When it emerges, you get anxious, but when you see yourself stepping towards a goal,

00:04:20.100 | you get a dopamine kick, and the reason that's related to entropy is because with each successful

00:04:27.340 | step you take towards a goal, you reduce the uncertainty of the pursuit, which is manifested

00:04:33.780 | in that phenomena you described, which is when you see the finish line, you start running

00:04:37.700 | faster.

00:04:38.700 | Right, so they're both related to entropy.

00:04:41.100 | - Well, to have goals at multiple timescales, you need to be able to, I love this entropy

00:04:46.660 | argument.

00:04:47.660 | It makes total sense that you want to be able to withstand the periods of time when you

00:04:56.060 | don't know whether or not things are becoming more or less uncertain.

00:04:59.900 | This is part of becoming an adult, if you will.

00:05:02.820 | - Okay, so that was exactly the thread.

00:05:04.740 | So there's two corollaries of that.

00:05:06.620 | One is that the more valuable the goal towards which you're progressing, the higher the dopamine

00:05:12.620 | kick per unit of advancement.

00:05:15.020 | So what that means is you want an ultimate goal operating in the domain of each proximal

00:05:21.680 | sub-goal, and that's what happens with this upward orientation.

00:05:25.180 | It's like what you're trying to do is to make things as good as they could be, whatever

00:05:30.060 | that means, over the longest possible span of time for the largest number of people,

00:05:34.680 | you included.

00:05:35.680 | You're not going to know exactly how to do that, but that could be your goal.

00:05:38.820 | Okay, now that's going to inform your perceptions and your perceptions of pathway, but it's

00:05:43.900 | also going to modify your reward system, because now every proximal step forward is an indicator

00:05:49.980 | of entropy reduction in regard to that meta-goal.

00:05:52.660 | Well, there isn't any, by definition, there isn't anything you can do that's more exciting

00:05:57.260 | than that.

00:05:58.260 | See, that kind of explains why your friend was able to pop out of his addictive frame,

00:06:02.900 | because now he's doing something that's so worthwhile that the temptation of alcohol,

00:06:08.460 | let's say, pales in comparison.

00:06:11.640 | It's a rewriting of the reward contingencies.

00:06:13.780 | Yeah, right, exactly.

00:06:15.580 | And now you can imagine a situation where a culture explores across time to find out

00:06:23.720 | how to characterize that goal such that if that goal is pursued, people integrate psychologically

00:06:30.800 | in a manner that integrates them socially across large spans of time.

00:06:34.800 | I think that's what happens when the monotheistic revelation emerges.

00:06:39.880 | That's what's happening from a biological perspective, is that we're starting to characterize

00:06:45.440 | the longest-term goal.

00:06:47.160 | Yeah, something like that.

00:06:48.480 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

How to Set & Achieve Long-Term Goals | Dr. Jordan Peterson & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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